Jewish Paideia: Education and Identity in the Hellenistic Diaspora

By Jason M. Zurawski

Jewish Paideia investigates diverse self-reflections on what it meant to be Jewish in Hellenistic and early Roman Diaspora communities by examining depictions of ideal Jewish education, or paideia, in the literature of the period. Education offers a unique and unexplored vantage point for understanding the internal constructing of Jewish identity in progress, as it provides key insight into the most determinative constituents of Jewish ethics and culture and into how questions of "Jewishness" were reimagined under dynamic and varied cultural and political circumstances. Within the elite intellectual circles of the ancient Mediterranean world, individual and communal identity, not unlike today, was inextricably bound to education. Depictions of ideal Jewish education become for us windows into a discourse of identity as it happened. By exploring how Jewish writers utilized paideia as a means of forming, reshaping, and deploying unique portraits of Jewish identity, this volume fills a significant lacuna in the study of ancient Judaism and the Jewish people. It also provides meaningful comparanda for Classicists and necessary background for later developments of Late Antique Jewish and Christian pedagogy. The diverse ways in which education was construed directly reflect how authors sought to internally understand and externally portray the Jewish community. Education offers keen insight into how the ancestral past became a contested site, how "the other" was utilized as a foil for reinforcing the image of the in-group, how empire and colonization impacted understandings of the Jewish people within broader society, and how Jewish law functioned to connect community members across space and time. Paideia, therefore, provides the researcher unparalleled access to Jewish self-reflections during this important period of history and to questions that have been central to developing a greater understanding of the Jewish people within the ancient Mediterranean world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Release date: Oct 10, 2023
• ISBN: 9781506481784

Book preview

Praise for Jewish Paideia

Jewish Paideia makes a major contribution to our understanding of one of the most significant fields of ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern education. Through case studies of four influential authors or texts, Jason Zurawski reveals both the diversity of Hellenistic Jewish education and its coherences while also revealing how education responded to evolving Jewish identities in a formative period and helped to shape them. Scholars and students alike will benefit from the book’s incisive scholarship and fresh insights.

—Teresa Morgan, Yale Divinity School

In this elegantly written book, Jason Zurawski explores the multifaceted concept of paideia as it was adopted by Greek-speaking Jews in the Hellenistic and Roman periods. He shows how distinctively Jewish understandings of paideia are based on the usage of this term in the Septuagint as a translation for Hebrew musar, discipline. He examines the shifting relationships between paideia and identity formation in the Letter of Aristeas, the works of Philo of Alexandria, the Wisdom of Solomon, and 4 Maccabees. This is a very accessible study of a complex and crucial concept in the study of ancient Judaism.

—Karina Martin Hogan, Fordham University

Read this book. It teaches that paying attention to ancient Jewish discourses about education is a way to discern how texts articulate Jewish ethics, culture, and identity. This is an important insight, and the book is a rich and erudite volume. Reading it can be formative for your own paideia.

—Matthew Goff, Florida State University

This book contributes significantly to a longstanding and important debate on the relationship between Hellenism and Judaism in Second Temple Jewish writings. Jason Zurawski brings a novel approach to the subject by seeing it through the lens of education (paideia), thus injecting fresh insights into the discussion. His extensive analysis of four key works combines a fine philological investigation with a well-honed literary, rhetorical, and philosophical argument, making the case for a fundamental compatibility between Jewish and Hellenic conceptualizations. Zurawski’s careful and insightful analysis draws out the universal rather than the parochial or the ethnocentric principles advanced by Jewish intellectuals.

—Erich Gruen, University of California Berkeley

JEWISH PAIDEIA

Education and Identity in the Hellenistic Diaspora

Copyright © 2023 Fortress Press, an imprint of 1517 Media. All rights reserved.

Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher.

Email [e-mail] or write to Permissions, Fortress Press, 1517 Media, PO Box 1209, Minneapolis, MN 55440-1209.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023933453 (print)

Cover image: Encampment at Beer and the Miraculous Well, Wall Painting from the Dura Europos c.245. Alamy Stock Photo/Zev Radovan/BibleLandPictures Cover design: Kristin Miller

Print ISBN: 978-1-5064-8177-7

eBook ISBN: 978-1-5064-8178-4

For my parents

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Discussing Education

1. The Septuagint

Expansion through the Lens of Translation

2. The Letter of Aristeas

Paideia as Dialogue

3. Philo of Alexandria

Education in the Natural Order of the Universe

4. The Wisdom of Solomon

Suffering, Death, and the Divine Paideia of Humankind

5. The Fourth Book of Maccabees

Jewish Law as Paideia and Askēsis for the Agōn of the Soul

Conclusion

Shaping Identity

Notes

Bibliography

Ancient Sources Index

Modern Authors Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I HAVE AMASSED a great deal of debt over the course of bringing this book to publication, debt I will never adequately be able to repay but that I am very pleased to have the opportunity to acknowledge here. At the outset, I must thank the wonderful team at Fortress Press, all of whom made what should be an arduous, grueling process actually quite pleasant and painless. In particular I would like to single out the hard work of Carey Newman and Marissa Wold Uhrina. They helped to improve the final product immeasurably. The errors that surely remain are my responsibility alone.

The impetus for this volume and many of the ideas contained herein originated already during my doctoral studies at the University of Michigan. I am grateful to my colleagues there in Near Eastern Studies, Classics, and History, including Ben Acosta-Hughes, Sara Ahbel-Rappe, Netta Berlin, Ray Van Dam, Traianos Gagos, Ellen Muehlberger, Eric Reymond, Brian Schmidt, Stephanie Bolz, Rodney Caruthers, Jason Von Ehrenkrook, Harold Ellens, Deborah Forger, Noah Gardiner, Anne Kreps, Isaac Oliver, and James Waddell. I am especially grateful to my advisor, Gabriele Boccaccini, and the many conversations we have had about the topic of Jewish paideia. His guidance and insights helped to hone the arguments in this book without question.

From Ann Arbor I took this project with me to the Netherlands and the Qumran Institute at the University of Groningen, which provided an ideal place to not only continue work on the volume but also a venue and group of colleagues to share new, often inchoate ideas in an open, friendly environment. I am especially grateful for the collaboration of Steve Mason, Mladen Popović, Jacques Van Ruiten, Stefania Travagnin, Ayhan Aksu, Luisa Lesage Gárriga, Gemma Hayes, Drew Longacre, and Myles Schoonover.

A year at the Frankel Institute’s Advanced Jewish Studies seminar, Translating Jewish Cultures, was invaluable to the development of the Septuagint chapter and the overall ways I have come to think about translation. The amount I learned and benefitted from this wonderful group of colleagues cannot be overestimated. I will single out here only the chairs of the seminar, Maya Barzilai and Adriana Jacobs, though I am extremely grateful to the entire group of fellows. It was a transformative experience.

I would like to thank the Wisdom and Apocalypticism group at the Society of Biblical Literature, particularly Matthew Goff, Karina Martin Hogan, Liv Ingeborg Lied, Emma Wasserman, and Larry Wills, for allowing me opportunities to present some of this research at an early stage. The participants of the Enoch Seminar Nangeroni Meeting I organized in Naples, Italy, "Second Temple Jewish Paideia in Its Ancient Near Eastern and Hellenistic Contexts, and the 9th Enoch Seminar in beautiful Camaldoli, From tôrāh to Torah: Variegated Notions of Torah from the First Temple Period to Late Antiquity," taught me that a true, comprehensive picture of Second Temple education necessitates interdisciplinary collaboration.

Financial support from the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies, the Enoch Seminar, the Alessandro Nangeroni Foundation, the Michigan Center for Early Christian Studies, and the Ubbo Emmius Funds provided the time and space necessary for research and writing and ample opportunity to travel throughout Europe, Israel, and the United States for conferences and research.

Throughout the past several years, I have been fortunate to have groups of colleagues and friends who, through various ways, have helped guide me in the development of the ideas found in this book. In addition to those already mentioned, I single out Florentina Badalanova Geller, Al Baumgarten, Kelley Coblenz Bautch, Andrea Berlin, George Brooke, Calum Carmichael, Randy Chesnutt, Lorenzo DiTommaso, Sandra Gambetti, Gabriella Gelardini, Matthias Henze, Luca Mazzinghi, Hindy Najman, Anders Klostergaard Petersen, Patrick Pouchelle, Bill Schniedewind, Shayna Sheinfeld, Michael Stone, Loren Stuckenbruck, and Ben Wright. I express my eternal gratitude for the continual and much-needed friendship of Yale Cunningham, Andy Green, Brandi Green, and Jun Park. This project would never have been completed without my friend and writing buddy, Nancy Linthicum. Finally, I would like to thank my brother, Nick, and my parents, Dean and Barbara, to whom this book is dedicated.

INTRODUCTION

Discussing Education

IN THE OPENING pages of Philo of Alexandria’s two-volume biography of Moses, the first-century Jewish philosopher depicts in some detail the upbringing and childhood of the future lawgiver. In particular, he is interested in describing the young Moses’s education, his paideia. It would shock no one to learn that Moses was a special child, unique in his talents and innate abilities from birth. Even as an infant Moses displayed an advanced and intellectual nature, weaning himself off milk at an unusually early age, a not-so-subtle clue to those in the know of his future philosophical prowess. Growing up in Pharaoh’s palace, Moses had all of the advantages and educational opportunities available to those of the highest status. The best teachers and philosophers from all around the world were brought in to teach the child the wisdom not only of Egypt but also of other great ancient civilizations such as Greece and Mesopotamia. He had lessons in music, math, science, and all those branches of study that would later come to be known as the artes liberales, as well as advanced training in philosophy, rhetoric, and dialectic.

Moses was a serious student, diligent and mature, never given over to the typical frivolities of youth. He was so advanced for his age, in fact, that he regularly surpassed his teachers, anticipating their lessons in advance and going beyond their own teaching ability. Yes, Moses was a bit of a know-it-all. This was not, however, because the child bore any ill intent or a desire to show off or to humiliate his teachers. He had a gift; it was as if he had all this knowledge already etched on his mind and he only had to remember it instead of learning it anew.

A serious boy became a serious man. As Moses grew up, he never forgot the lessons of his youth and continually displayed his education in his everyday routine, practicing philosophy by living a disciplined life devoted entirely to the mind and to the betterment of the soul, never giving in to the temptations of the body and the flesh. This young man had everything going for him, the wealth and power and privilege that came from his station in life, but also the temperament to not abuse this position. But, as he grew older and wiser, Moses began to feel as though something were missing, some aspect of his education that had never quite been satisfied, even with all those teachers from around the world. He desperately longed for the education of his people, to learn the wisdom and philosophy of his ancestors. Eventually, Moses would find the teacher he was after, who would provide him with this unique education. God himself would take on Moses as his student and give him lessons unlike any other, a perfect education in all wisdom human and divine, in how to live a life in ideal harmony with the cosmos and with nature. Moses absorbed these lessons just as he had as a young man, and he passed on this knowledge he learned from God to his people in Egypt and to all future generations. Moses would become the teacher. And the Torah would become his textbook.

This portrait of a young Moses comes not from Philo’s typical source of information or inspiration, his allegorical reading of the Jewish law, but rather from his vague claim to have learned these things through reading the law and from listening to his elders. Perhaps Philo did piece together tidbits of information he learned from some unnamed sources. More likely, the portrait as it stands is Philo’s own creation, developed for his own purposes. In order to craft this image, Philo likely drew on his own experiences and surroundings, with Moses’s education better resembling that of Philo’s own elite Roman Egypt rather than Moses’s Pharaonic Egypt. Perhaps he is even describing in some ways his own educational journey, Philo himself being a part of a prominent, wealthy family in the Roman Empire, someone who would have had every educational opportunity available. Perhaps, like his Moses, Philo too, though trained from an early age in Greek literature and philosophy, longed for the education of his ancestors, the education he would find in what he would come to call the Jews’ patria philosophia, their ancestral philosophy, that is, the teachings that Moses himself passed on through the law.

If this portrayal of Moses the pupil is Philo’s creation, what, then, was its purpose? On the surface, such a depiction of course adds to the splendor and uniqueness of the Jewish lawgiver. Philo wants to demonstrate that Moses was the greatest philosopher and teacher the world has ever known. And an exceptional teacher must first be an exceptional student. But there’s more to it than simple encomium, motivations that get to the heart not only of Philo’s own project but of the project of this study and what we will be exploring in this book.

As in so many other ways, Philo’s Moses here is made to be an exemplar for the Jewish people. Moses’s education is Philo’s view of ideal Jewish education, his view of Jewish paideia, an education that embraced and did not shun foreign wisdom, philosophy, and the liberal arts, but one that held a privileged position for the learning that came from the Jewish law. Like Moses, the Jewish people were not to reject education in and by other cultures, but they were also not to reject their own ancestral traditions and the wisdom derived from them. From the example of Moses, Philo is able to demonstrate his paradigm not just of Jewish education but of what it meant to be a(n elite, wealthy) Jew living in the Mediterranean Diaspora. Through Philo’s depiction of Jewish paideia, we come to a better understanding of Philo’s view of Jewish identity. Such is the power of paideia.

This Greek term, paideia, while long set apart as a defining concept in the intellectual, cultural, and social histories of ancient Greece and Rome, is notoriously difficult to translate. It might refer at once to the process of education or pedagogy, the content of education or curriculum, and to the result of that education or culture, what the Greeks would call kalokagathia, that quality of being a noble and virtuous citizen. In this study, unless there is a clear reason to not do so, I will try to consistently translate the term simply with education, an English term that, too, is deceptively simple yet filled with many different layers and possibilities of meaning.

A critical study of education, of paideia, is necessary in order to understand better not only the social and cultural lives of a people but also the complex relationships between different communities. Classicists have highlighted the centrality of paideia from classical antiquity through to the Hellenistic and Roman periods, both as an idealized concept and in all the ways it would surface on the ground. Scholars of early Christianity have pointed to the integral role of Greek paideia in the development and history of the early church. In addition, Greek encyclical paideia, those artes liberales, is commonly understood as the basis of modern, Western education, the influence of Greek paideia being mediated through late antiquity and medieval Christianity.

The study of education can tell us far more about a group of people than issues pertaining solely to their schooling. Concepts or theories of education reveal comprehensive value systems that influence and illuminate a shared view of the self and the world. By studying education, we study those things most highly prized in a community and the way in which that community views itself with respect to the surrounding world. Educational theory, in particular, is uniquely illuminative, and though there is a clear dichotomy between idealized theory and the ways in which education actually surfaces on the ground, the former can be just as instructive in understanding these larger questions.

In the literature of the Second Temple period, we find many examples where discussions pertaining to education can be used as windows into more expansive issues of worldview and identity formation, particularly in the texts of Greek-speaking diaspora communities, in Hellenistic cities where paideia was a topic of continual and central importance. In what follows, we will explore how idealized discussions of proper Jewish paideia reflect not only the actual educational systems or theories from which these conversations sprang, but, more importantly, the process of contemplating and shaping the self and collective Jewish identity within the wider Mediterranean world.

I have chosen four authors for this survey who share much in common but also possess distinctive views of ethics, culture, community, and identity, which results in unique depictions of education, both in the forms it should take and the benefits it offers. The authors of the Letter of Aristeas and the Wisdom of Solomon, together with Philo, all lived in that major center of Greek learning, Alexandria, while 4 Maccabees was likely composed in the eastern Mediterranean, perhaps Antioch. They are all roughly contemporaneous, with Aristeas coming from the later Ptolemaic period and the other three from the early Roman era. All of these authors received an elite Hellenistic education, as evinced by their command of Greek language and literature. And they all used and revered the Greek Septuagint as the sacred, received Scriptures. Yet, despite these superficial commonalities, these Jewish thinkers developed their own distinct notions of education, some irreconcilable with the others. Therefore, these authors are an ideal group from which to begin to understand the diversity of educational concepts of the time and the ways in which paideia could be deployed as a means of contemplating Jewish identity and the formation of the self.

The models of Jewish education each of these authors developed all attest to a creative amalgam of ancestral traditions and contemporary Greek and Roman philosophical theory. This conceptual hybridity was facilitated above all by the Scriptures of the diaspora communities, the Greek Septuagint, in particular by the fortuitous and consistent rendering of the Hebrew mûsār with the Greek paideia throughout the translations. The Septuagint was received and used as a textbook and a teacher, a singular educational resource for the Greek-speaking Jews of the late Second Temple period. The Septuagint also acted as a lens through which later Jewish thinkers could reimagine, merge, and morph received traditions with contemporary Platonic and Stoic philosophy in the creation of new and innovative paideutic concepts. With their textbook in hand, these authors could discuss and debate the proper means of education in their Hellenistic urban centers and its value and role within the life of the individual and the community at large. However, the discussions we find in the literature of the period extend beyond simple issues of pedagogy or curricula, well beyond what one might reasonably expect to surface on the ground. The supremely elevated nature of and deference to paideia made it the perfect surrogate that could reach any and all facets determinative in the construction of the self. Paideia, then, becomes the mechanism by which the most highly valued constituents of Jewish ethics, culture, and identity could be formed and employed.

In his influential 2001 monograph, Tim Whitmarsh explores the role paideia played in defining the cultural category of Greekness during the Second Sophistic. According to Whitmarsh:

Paideia, then, was not simply a form of social practice (though, of course, it was that too): at a more abstract level, it was also a means of constructing and reifying idealized identities for Greek and Roman, a privileged space of complex cultural interaction (or contact zone) between Roman ideology and Greek identity, a foundation upon which both peoples constructed their own sense of their place in the world.¹

We find a similar phenomenon among Second Temple Jewish authors. The concern of Philo or of the author of 4 Maccabees is, of course, not with Greek identity or Greekness but with Jewishness and the place of the Jewish people within society and the world.

Telling of the unique, developing, and at times divisive worldviews of the Second Temple writers or communities is the means proposed for the education of the Jewish people, the pedagogical tools and methods, whether the curricula of Greek preliminary education, philosophy, and/or the Jewish laws, customs, and traditions properly interpreted. But the way in which a particular community or author imagined the ideal education of the Jews speaks to historical questions far larger than such details. It can tell us how the author or community envisioned the place and role of the Jewish people within the world. Were the Jews to be part of the world or separate from it? Could they partake in the cultural and intellectual offerings of the time while still maintaining their own unique identity? These are questions that still resonate today within many traditional religious communities, not to mention migrant, minority, and/or any other marginalized groups. This research has far-reaching implications in what it illumines concerning not only the adoption of Greek and Roman curricula into the wider education of the Jews but also how this adoption could coexist alongside ancestral traditions, native customs, and the Mosaic law, all reworked and reinterpreted in light of a real or imagined pedagogic intention through the lens of the Greek Septuagint translations.

As the four authors under discussion all used the Greek Septuagint translations as the basis from which to build their unique concepts of Jewish paideia, this study begins from the Septuagint itself, in particular with the decisive, fortuitous translation of the Hebrew mûsār with the Greek paideia. Jewish thinkers in the Hellenistic diaspora came to conceive of ideal educational programs in ways absent from and even irreconcilable with ideas found in the ancient Hebrew texts themselves, developing them neither from their ancestral traditions alone nor solely from their Greek and Roman cultural milieux. Instead, these authors, writing with unique audiences and aims in mind, merged and morphed choice aspects of both in order to create theories of educational knowledge production that could incorporate the best of both Greek and Jewish aspects of education and that were ideally suited to their own particular cultural and social contexts and purposes. This amalgamation of two—at times seemingly incompatible—circles of thought was made possible by our first known examples of Jewish Hellenistic literature, the Greek translations of the Hebrew Scriptures. The Septuagint came to serve as the ultimate textbook and teacher in those Greek-speaking communities, and it acted, too, as a lens through which later Jewish thinkers viewed and reimagined their ancestral customs with contemporary philosophy in the creation of innovative notions of Jewish paideia.

In chapter 1, I compare the usage of mûsār/ysr with paideia/paideuō, noting the many points of overlap but also the significant differences, such as the common use of the Hebrew terminology to describe a pedagogical process based on verbal rebuke and physical punishment, a notion not inherent to the Greek terms. The Greek paideia instead is often idealized and connected to lofty notions such as virtue, citizenship, and the fate of the immortal soul. Paideia, particularly in the Hellenistic and Roman periods, came to take on a universalizing function, whereby proper education was determinative in one’s membership in a politeia rather than one’s family or even ethnos.

Given the unique semantic ranges of the terms, the choice of paideia as a translation for mûsār had the potential to significantly affect the understanding of the texts as they came to be used in those very environments that held such lofty, idealized visions of paideia. Therefore, I next compare the Septuagint translations with the Hebrew Vorlage. The ways in which scholars have read and understood the Septuagint have often been based, directly or indirectly, on the perceived origins of the Greek texts and the translators’ initial intended purpose for those texts. As opposed to basing my understanding of the Greek texts on the translators’ purposes, I focus on the texts themselves and, in the analyses to follow, examine the Hebrew and Greek texts individually as if separate, autonomous documents in order to best understand how the Greek text would have been read in the Hellenistic settings where it came to be studied. The goal here will be to attempt to read the Greek texts as a Jew in the Hellenistic diaspora might have read them, as Philo would have read them, not as translation texts but simply as texts, worthy of inquiry on their own without recourse to a mythic Urtext.

The initial and then consistent move to translate mûsār with paideia had profound repercussions in the centuries to follow, as the Greek-speaking Jews were handed a textbook of their own imbued with notions of paideia, just as the Greeks and Romans had in their own texts. Had the translators chosen a term with a closer range of meaning but less cultural significance—such as noutheteia or elenchos—Jews like Philo would not have had the tangible means necessary to reshape and merge their ancestral customs with contemporary paideutic theory in the creation of new conceptions of education.

Once having established a chronologically situated and culturally concordant reading of the relevant Septuagint texts, the following chapters explore each author’s unique discussion of paideia, highlighting the role of the Septuagint as both the textbook/teacher and the tool that facilitated the incorporation of Greek philosophy and educational ideals with Jewish traditions and law in the total education of the individual. Our look at the pseudonymous Letter of Aristeas to Philocrates fittingly follows the discussion of the Septuagint, as this text—neither an actual letter nor written by a Ptolemaic courtier named Aristeas—offers one of the earliest reflections on the initial translation of the Hebrew Torah into Greek. While there is likely little historical data about the translation, which took place a century or more earlier than the composition of the Letter, the story of the translation as told by Aristeas offers a great deal of information about the Alexandrian Jewish community in the late second century BCE. The story of the translation’s origins and completion acts almost as an allegory for some of the larger themes of the text: the need for cooperation and mutual understanding not only between the Jews and Greeks of the Ptolemaic capital but also between the Jews of the diaspora and those of Judea, the commonality and shared values of the Jews and the educated Greeks, and paideia as the key to that necessary open dialogue and respect for diverse customs and traditions. The image of paideia in the Letter of Aristeas paints a Jewish identity most comfortable, most at home, in the Alexandrian intellectual community of all of the texts to be discussed in the following chapters.

Chapter 3 explores the extensive views on paideia found in Philo of Alexandria’s corpus, including the various forms of education and the essential value of paideia in the life and development of the individual. In Philo’s overall educational theory, we find Greek encyclical paideia, the study of native and foreign philosophy, and the use of the laws of Moses as trainers or teachers, educating the individual in the unwritten law of nature and combating the irrational passions of the soul, as all crucially vital for each individual. Philo symbolizes paideia in several ways to make explicit its necessity and value, including paideia as the rod, not the stick the pedagogue uses to beat misbehaving children but the tool that quells the passions and desires of the soul. Philo also discusses the academic family, where orthos logos is the father and encyclical paideia is the mother, and the best children obey both parents, the divine education of the father and the worldly teachings of the mother, an idea that highlights Philo’s insistence on balance between the active and contemplative lives. Philo, throughout his work, is often consumed with issues of paideia, the component essential for keeping bodily desire at bay, the attainment of virtue and wisdom, and the realization of the immortal life of the soul. With Philo, we find an encompassing view of education and culture that allows for the cautious inclusion of non-Jewish instruction and wisdom while stridently maintaining the unique customs and traditions of the Jewish people. In this, Philo served as the model for those earliest Christians who hoped to incorporate Greek paideia within traditional, Christian education.

In chapter 4 we move on to an Alexandrian text roughly contemporaneous to Philo: the Wisdom of Solomon. As with Philo’s writings, we find here a text permeated with the language and thought of paideia and a world-view that considered paideia the essential ingredient in attaining the true immortal life of the soul in nearness to the divine. However, the means of education, the pedagogy, envisioned in the Wisdom of Solomon is at times drastically different from Philo’s. While the pseudonymous author of the Wisdom of Solomon likely would have viewed the propaideumata and the Jewish law as beneficial educational resources, he also understood God’s violent testing as necessary paideia and determinative in the fate of the soul, as divine, pedagogical discipline that could include even corporeal death. The world, from the author’s perspective, is an agōn, a divine contest set up to determine those worthy of the true life of the soul, separated from the somatic prison. This is an idea made possible by the author’s Platonic influences and the extended range of meaning attached to paideia found in the Septuagint prophetic literature, particularly Isaiah. This rather harsh view of the world is nevertheless decidedly inclusive in scope, where the testing is applied to all of humankind universally and where all are encouraged to be educated and gain immortality.

The final view of paideia under discussion, in chapter 5, is that found in 4 Maccabees. Fourth Maccabees is a finely crafted, rhetorically sophisticated philosophical discourse, which sets out and then proves a thesis central to much Hellenistic philosophical ethics, that reason (logismos) has the power to overcome all emotion, passion, and desire. This universal question takes on a more particular dimension with the focus on the Jewish people, who provide ready exempla of the power of reason over emotion, and the Jewish law, which provides the people with the education and training necessary to cultivate the cardinal virtues, wisdom, and reason. The culmination of the text’s proof comes with the story of nine Jewish martyrs who are brutally tortured and murdered by the Seleucid tyrant Antiochus Epiphanes for refusing to violate their ancestral law. The text deftly depicts encounters that pit the martyrs as supreme examples of virtue, wisdom, and philosophy, gained through their education in the law, against the beastly tyrant as the epitome of ignorance and false philosophy, which lead to his being undone by his own emotions. This strong portrayal has led many to view 4 Maccabees as one of the more openly hostile, anti-Hellenistic texts written from the Mediterranean diaspora. However, through a focused look at the portrayal of ideal paideia in the text, both as explicitly discussed and as demonstrated through the writing itself, and by recognizing how paideia serves as a means of renegotiating Jewish identity, we discover a text not nearly so particular and antagonistic. It is a text where, yes, the Jewish law is portrayed as an ideal educational tool, but in service to shared philosophical ends, an attempt at commonality rather than superiority or dissonance. In 4 Maccabees, there is room—perhaps even need—for the Jewish law and Greek intellectual culture. In this light, the text falls more in line with the other texts discussed here, though not without its own unique views, motivations, and focal points.

From the examples here explored, we find a more inclusive approach to education than has often been envisioned and one that would have been undermined had we begun from an assumed Judaism-Hellenism opposition. All of the authors discussed envision paideia playing the same role for Jews and non-Jews alike, and all are offered at least the possibility of proper education and the benefits that come with it. But for the Wisdom of Solomon, which rarely if ever refers explicitly to the Mosaic law, all of the authors do indeed have a special place for the law of Moses within the education of the Jewish people. However, this prominent position neither undermines Greek education nor excludes non-Jews from achieving those goals to which the law, as paideia, led.

In all this, my aim is not to locate a unified theory or depiction of a normative, universal Jewish education during the Second Temple period. Instead, in order to comprehend and elucidate the complexity of views on Jewish education and identity formation within the multiform Jewish communities of the period, the diversity of Jewish paideia, in all its articulations, must be allowed to stand, without flattening it into a simplified, yet historically untenable concept. Such a teleological conceptualization would be counterproductive and inimical to a genuine understanding of the period. This research on Jewish paideia begins and ends with this plurality firmly entrenched. By avoiding preconceived, anachronistic models of education and by not transposing one theory over the others, we are able to see just how powerful the concept of paideia could be as a means of shaping ethics, culture, and identity.

1

THE SEPTUAGINT

Expansion through the Lens of Translation

THE DECISION TO translate the Hebrew term mûsār with the Greek paideia had profound implications, intended or not, on the development of Jewish education and culture in the Mediterranean diaspora communities that came to revere the Septuagint as the holy and received Scriptures. When contemplating meaningful Septuagint translation choices, it is natural perhaps to recall first the oft-discussed move to translate tôrâ with the Greek nomos. In fact, this move is not unrelated to the semantic realm of mûsār and paideia. In many ways, however, the mûsār-to-paideia move will demonstrate almost an inverse result to that of tôrâ to nomos, at least as it has often been understood in scholarship—an expansion of potential meaning as opposed to a contraction.

It was commonplace in early scholarship to argue that the Greek translators had either completely misunderstood the Hebrew or purposefully misrepresented the text when they translated tôrâ with nomos.¹ Though modern studies tend to offer a more nuanced reading of the translations, pointing out both the differences and those places where the Hebrew concept fit well with the Greek, the underlying assumption—as with most discussions of translation generally, so not unfairly—is one of error, erasure, or of loss.² It will become clear throughout this book that the translation of paideia for mûsār instead did not result in a loss of meaning but rather a gain, an opening up of new possibilities through an expanded semantic field and through intercultural dialogue facilitated by the translation choice.

In much ancient Hebrew literature, tôrâ has more in common with the Greek paideia than does mûsār, having the shared notion of instruction, most often as the content, distinguishing it from—and helping us to understand the connection to—mûsār, as the pedagogy, as the means to instilling tôrâ. Speaking strictly along semantic lines, one could make an argument that paideia would have been the more natural choice to translate tôrâ, whereas the translators could have chosen something along the lines of askēsis or nouthetēma for mûsār. One could easily lose oneself following the thought-experiment rabbit hole of contemplating the massive ramifications such an alternative history might produce based on paideia and not nomos for tôrâ.

The point here, however, is that paideia is not the most obvious choice to translate mûsār, but it was a fortuitous one. The translation was a progressive, bold choice, not because the Greek and Hebrew terms are in no way related. There is a great deal of overlap in their respective ranges of meaning. The differences, however, are significant, and paideia for mûsār would not necessarily have been the most natural, instinctive choice. While both refer to some type of instruction or education, mûsār most often designates the pedagogy, the means of instilling said instruction, typically via some sort of reproof, reproach, or punishment. Paideia, instead, more often denotes the content or the result of the educational process, not inherently dependent on any sort of corrective punishment.

The Greek term held a vital place in the Hellenistic world of thought. The role of paideia in the development of the cultured citizen, and then that citizen’s adherence to the nomoi of the state and of nature, were topics regularly discussed in the philosophical circles of cities such as Alexandria. Therefore, not only did the translation choice introduce new ideas into the texts, at times significantly diverging from the Hebrew sources, but it also allowed those later Jewish intellectuals to enter fully into the meaningful discussions taking place in the diaspora as to the role of law, philosophy, and education in the life of the citizenry. It afforded these Jewish thinkers a means of becoming part of the wider intellectual dialogue and culture. The central position that paideia held in Hellenistic thought, more than any semantic divergence, is responsible for an expansion of potential meaning in the diaspora communities that came to take the Greek Septuagint as Scripture.

The Septuagint translation came to ultimately play the role of the Jews’ textbook and teacher, and in this way it proved the perfect lens through which later Jewish intellectuals living and working in major Hellenistic centers could interpret their ancient, ancestral customs in light of their current surroundings and the Platonic and Stoic philosophical milieux so prevalent. This facilitated the development of new and unique models of education, which at least in the ideal could serve as an equalizing force and one determinative to the soul’s ultimate fate in this world and the next. While the tôrâ-to-nomos translation has long been a topic of scholarly discussion, the mûsār-to-paideia shift has gone largely unremarked on.³ Therefore, the focus in this chapter will be on mûsār and paideia, first examining their traditional semantic ranges, then looking at the effects of the translation in the Septuagint.

An important caveat should be noted here from the start. The purpose of this project is not to identify or speculate on the original intentions of the Septuagint translators, as those intentions do not have any clear and determinative bearing on how the Greek text came to be understood and used. For this book’s purposes, these are not translation texts. They are simply texts, read on their own terms without recourse to an underlying Hebrew. If we are to try to understand how a Jew such as Philo read the Septuagint, we cannot begin from any other premise. In the authors and texts to be discussed in the following chapters, we of course will find acknowledgment that the Septuagint was a translation from the Hebrew. However, we will find no attempts to delve into translation problems. Philo does not question why the Hebrew was translated in a particular way and whether x was the most accurate rendering of y. For Philo and the other authors explored here, the Greek translation was as perfect as the Hebrew and in no need of explication. In fact, we often find the authors here going to great lengths to understand the sometimes strange nuances of the Greek text, as if Moses had received and written the law in Greek, the oddity of the language due to the lawgiver’s intent and not a translator’s error. Therefore, we must here try to understand these texts as their ancient readers did and not as they are typically used in scholarship today, as text-critical tools for attempting to better grasp their source texts. Philo did not have both a Greek Pentateuch and a Hebrew Torah at his desk, and so we too cannot use the Hebrew to help explicate the Greek. The Greek should be allowed to stand on its own, and we must try to make sense of it on its own terms.

By focusing on the Greek text in this way, we are better able to appreciate how the Septuagint came to function for the authors to follow as a lens that served in the creation of new ideas and meaning—expansion, not loss. This is not to suggest that the translation of paideia for mûsār led to some sort of universal conceptual shift, a semantic revolution, so to speak, but rather a possibility of new meanings.⁴ This expanded range of meaning proved critical in the development not of a unified concept of paideia in the Hellenistic diaspora but of a multiplicity of diverse educational theories.

Mûsār

The most natural, common context for the Hebrew mûsār is within the sphere of instructional or pedagogical discipline. Its verbal root, ysr (יסר), means to discipline, instruct, chasten, or admonish, often with a view toward correcting the recipient’s wayward behavior, constructive and not destructive punishment.⁵ This corrective discipline is commonly given from a parent to child:

יַסֵּר בִּנְךָ וִינִיחֶךָ וְיִתֵּן מַעֲדַנִּים לְנַפְשֶׁךָ

Discipline your son, and he will comfort you, and he will bring delight to your soul. (Prov 29:17; see also Prov 19:18)

As a father disciplines his son, so Yahweh disciplines humankind:

הֲיסֵֹר גּוֹיִם הֲלֹא יוֹכִיחַ הַמְלַמֵּד אָדָם דָּעַת׃

אַשְׁרֵי הַגֶּבֶר אֲשֶׁר־תְּיַסְּרֶנּוּ יָּהּ וּמִתּוֹרָתְךָ תְלַמְּדֶנּוּ׃

He who disciplines the nations and teaches humanity knowledge, does he not rebuke?

Happy is the man whom you discipline, O Lord, and whom you teach from your tôrâ. (Ps 94:10, 12)

Children who do not learn from their parents’ corrective discipline will face sometimes terrible punishments, including public humiliation and even death:

כִּי־יִהְיֶה לְאִישׁ בֵּן סוֹרֵר וּמוֹרֶה אֵינֶנּוּ שׁמֵֹעַ בְּקוֹל אָבִיו וּבְקוֹל אִמּוֹ וְיסְּרוּ אתֹוֹ

וְלֹא יִשְׁמַע אֲלֵיהֶם׃

וְתָפְשׂוּ בוֹ אָבִיו וְאִמּוֹ וְהוֹצִיאוּ אתֹוֹ אֶל־זִקְנֵי עִירוֹ וְאֶל־שַׁעַר מְקמֹוֹ׃

וְאָמְרוּ אֶל־זִקְנֵי עִירוֹ בְּנֵנוּ זֶה סוֹרֵר וּמרֶֹה אֵינֶנּוּ שׁמֵֹעַ בְּקלֵֹנוּ זוֹלֵל וְסבֵֹא׃

וּרְגָמֻהוּ כָּל־אַנְשֵׁי עִירוֹ בָאֲבָנִים וָמֵת וּבִעַרְתָּ הָרָע מִקִּרְבֶּךָ וְכָל־יִשְׂרָאֵל יִשְׁמְעוּ

וְיִרָאוּ׃

If a man has a stubborn and rebellious son who will not obey the voice of his father or his mother, and, when they discipline him, he will not listen to them, then his father and his mother shall take hold of him and bring him out to the elders of his city and to the gate of his place. And, they shall say to the elders of his city, This son of ours is stubborn and rebellious. He will not obey our voice. He is a glutton and a drunk. Then all of the men of his city shall stone him to death. And so you shall purge the evil from your midst, and all Israel shall hear of it and be afraid. (Deut 21:18–21)

Similarly, for those who disregard Yahweh’s instructive chastening, horrific punishments await:

וְאִם־עַד־אֵלֶּה לֹא תִשְׁמְעוּ לִי וְיָסַפְתִּי לְיַסְּרָה אֶתְכֶם שֶׁבַע עַל־חַטּאֹתֵיכֶם

And if in spite of this you will not obey me, I will continue to punish you sevenfold for your sins. (Lev 26:18)

The translation of punish instead of discipline is well earned. Yahweh’s education of the people here in the Holiness Code involves terror, consumption, and fear (26:16), wild animals that will kill their children and livestock (26:22), and a hunger so great they must eat their own children (26:29). While the correction often goes unheeded and appears futile in these cases, there is often an intended, underlying lesson. Here, Yahweh is attempting to correct the people’s behavior, force them to learn from this instruction, and therefore stop them from breaking the covenant and return to obeying the commandments previously set forth.

In some cases, the verb seems to have lost entirely the instructional or remedial context and refers only to the punishment, without the possibility or goal of correcting the recipient’s behavior:

וְעַתָּה אָבִי הֶעְמִיס עֲלֵיכֶם עלֹ כָּבֵד וַאֲנִי אוֹסִיף עַל־עֻלְּכֶם אָבִי יִסַּר אֶתְכֶם

בַּשּׁוֹטִים וַאֲנִי אֲיַסֵּר אֶתְכֶם בָּעַקְרַבִּים

Now, whereas my father laid upon you a heavy yoke, I will add to your yoke. My father disciplined you with whips, but I will discipline you with scorpions. (1 Kgs 12:11 // 2 Chr 10:11; see also Deut 22:18, 1 Kgs 12:14 // 2 Chr 10:14, Hos 7:12, 10:10)⁶

The noun form largely falls in line with its verbal root’s range of meaning. Mûsār most often is connected to the process through which instruction is given, but it can refer to the educational content or to a body of knowledge to be received:

שִׁמְעוּ בָנִים מוּסַר אָב