Lindsey Davidson, *Scribal Culture in Ben Sira*. Leiden: Brill, 2018.

This monograph explores the concept of scribal culture as a lens for analyzing the characteristics of textual referencing in the Book of Ben Sira (c.198-175 BCE), offering fresh perspectives on how Ben Sira crafted his wisdom literature. While the term "scribe" is frequently attributed to Ben Sira, this label brings with it certain interpretive difficulties. By employing comparative analysis, this study situates the sage’s writing style within various historical, literary, and socio-cultural contexts. It illuminates aspects of Ben Sira’s text and the early Jewish practice of textual reuse. Utilizing both physical and material evidence related to reading and writing, this book uncovers the skill and intricacy involved in Ben Sira’s ongoing textual reuse. Consequently, Ben Sira’s work exemplifies outstanding writing that resonates with an appreciative audience.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Hello, welcome to the Dialogues in Judaic Studies podcast. I am your host, Ari Barbalat. Today it is my privilege to engage in a dialogue with Lindsay Davidson. She is a lecturer in Jewish Studies in the Department of Religion and Theology at the University of Bristol. She is the author of the book we will be discussing today, which she has published under her former previous name before her marriage. Lindsay Askin, her previous name, is the author of Stribal Culture in Mensira, published in Leiden, Netherlands by Brill 2018. This study delves into stribal culture as a framework for analyzing the aspects of textual referencing found in the book of Menseira, unveiling new understandings of how Bensira crafted his wisdom literature. Even though the title of scribe is commonly associated with Ben Sira, this designation brings forth certain interpretive challenges. Through a comparative analysis, this study contextualizes the sage's writing style within historical, literary, and socio-cultural dimensions. Fresh insights are provided into Ben Surah's text and the early Jewish practice of textual reuse by drawing on physical and material evidence related to reading and writing. This study reveals the skill and intricacy of Benserah's sustained textual reuse. Therefore, Bensera's accomplishment exemplifies excellent writing for an appreciative audience. Lindsay, it is my honor to be in dialogue with you today.

SPEAKER_03 2:18

Thank you so much, Ari, for inviting me onto your show and giving me the chance to talk about my favorite book of mine, also my only so far book of mine. The topic is very close to my heart, about a topic that's very close to my heart about Ben Sera and scribal culture.

SPEAKER_00 2:40

Thank you. To begin, can you kindly tell us about yourself? Can you tell us about your autobiography and why is the topic of Ben Sira so close to your heart?

SPEAKER_03 2:54

So I've been a lecturer at Bristol now for nearly seven years, with some breaks for maternity leave in the past. And I have in that time never seemed to grow tired of scribal culture in particular, and because Ben Sira is such an exemplary text for scribal composition in ancient Jewish culture, it's it's always I've always come back to Ben Sirah over and over for different things that I'm doing at present, which are mainly to do with scribal culture and and ancient and the ancient history of Judaism. And for myself, I had so I've born and bred in New England, Boston and then Connecticut. And when I went to applied to university, I applied to University of Edinburgh in Scotland for some strange reason, originally to study archaeology. And I happened to take a optional module in the School of Divinity, which was on it was an I think it was introduction to the Hebrew Bible and Old Testament. And then I switched courses. It spoke to everything that I was already interested in, and which was the ancient history of the Middle East and of Israel in particular, and stuck along that route. Did a master's at Jerome and Biblical Studies and then my PhD at Cambridge, Queen's College, studying with the late Professor Jim Aitken about doing Pansira with him. Once I graduated and published, I think the book was on its way to publication. I found my role at Bristol around around a similar period, or maybe a year or two later, after after Cambridge.

SPEAKER_00 5:18

What discoveries and findings surprised you most in your research and preparation process?

SPEAKER_03 5:28

That's an interesting question. So one of one of the reasons why Ben Sira was so attractive to me in the beginning. I was already, I already knew that I was interested in Second Late Second Temple Judaism. I was interested in the Dead Sea Scrolls. I had even been able to study Dead Sea Scrolls in my undergraduate. And the way texts were composed interested me. So when I learned about Bensera, it seemed like a really natural fit to go further with that and to be able to explore scribal culture studies and explain and explore late, late Second Temple Jewish wisdom literature, which I found interesting because it's not narrative. It is poetic, it's in the verse and some Hebrew verse. But Jewish wisdom literature of this period is often, doesn't often follow maybe what we think of as a logical narrative flow and structure. You know, there are small pockets of sayings, there's short poems, there's collections of sayings that are side by side with each other on what's usually described as miscellaneous orders of topics. So that can raise a lot of questions about the author's sources. So one of the things that surprised me the most when I was doing my research on Bancira and scribal culture of this period and culture was partly the way scholars tended to describe the handling of multiple sources by an author, how they got around what can be a pretty thorny problem of if Bansira, for example, quotes from two different biblical sources, how does he do that? Does he have it in his head? Does he have it in front of him? So there was this huge area which seemed like it needed fleshing out. And the way that I approached that was by making more of an emphasis on the material and physical sides of scrabble culture, on how people read and wrote in antiquity. There was so it's not it wasn't always that scholarship had a particular idea, is that often it was sometimes it was a gap of really not really sure how this multiple source handling occurred, how these quotations occurred. But scholars tended to be pretty good at identifying them at least. And that was something that was very a step in the right direction. Because compared to a lot of other Jewish authors of the time, he's a very heavy, he's Oscar Wildean in how how concentrated many of the quotations are. And that leads to the second kind of most surprising element of what I was finding with with this book was that there was a very undecided question, question mark underneath the area of Ben Sera's originality and creativity. Because on the one hand, there's what we think of as being original and creative, which is often the opposite of what we see in Ben Sera, who is not heavy on quotations, but his language is peppered with phrases and allusions and sources. So not always these kind of lifting phrases. They tend to be a bit more subtly worked into his own language. And there tends to be a bit of a difficulty in our ability to remove ourselves and our own ideas of what of what the value of originality in composition is, and what the value of creativity is. And from Vancouver's perspective, it seems as if he values more the tradition, the sort of not just co-opting tradition, but of working it into himself. And I think this cahes well with the fact that he is writing in a genre which is based around tradition in a sense, wisdom literature, because as you go with what's tested and true, what works, what will lead you for what will lead you towards a happy life, for example. So that there's the originality and creativity, and then there's this third kind of problem that we have as modern readers of Van Cyr to think about how much, therefore, Van Cyr was creative and original, and then how much he absorbed through memorization, and how how it then comes out in his own composition. So that that balance between in past scholarship described of a scale between imitation and originality. That was a lot of fun to explore, and I still don't think I have every sense of what Ben Sira intended, how original he, if he would have thought of it as a compliment to be to have his book thought of as original and creative, I'm not still not sure on that one.

SPEAKER_00 12:01

As a follow-up question, if you don't mind me asking, what can the book of Sirac teach us about creativity? In what ways is the author an example of creativity? In what ways do you use the term creativity in your study? And how can the book of Cirac shed light on definitions of and for creativity?

SPEAKER_03 12:34

So that's a wonderful question. Thank you for thank you for asking it. I I'm reminded of if you're familiar with the American Californian author Anne Lamotte, she's an American novelist still with us and living. Not 2,000 years old, obviously. So Anne Lamont has a book on writing, and and she's done many, many lectures on the writing process. And so this was interesting for me to hear in one of her kind of lectures. I think it was one of those, or an interview that was kind of put on YouTube. And to heard the way she explained this, I thought that makes a lot of sense for this balance between memory and imitation on one side, and then creativity and originality. So turning a phrase the way no one on in history has ever turned it before. And what Anne Lamotte said was that when you have when you have writer's block, it's often not because you need to power through, but because you need to go back to the well and fill yourself up again. So in order, in other words, in order for us to be more creative and be able to write more, and so be more creative in a lot of cases, you still need the clay, the molding clay, and enough energy, materials to work with. And the only way that you'll get that is often by experience. She says she recommends you go get more experiences in this case to fill yourself up so you can get through it because you need more material. You don't need more sessions staring at the blank piece of paper. So, in order to create be creative, then I take away from that that we need to not devalue memorization as much as it might be done in present society sometimes, that you you do need materials and a foundation, a reservoir of stuff that's already within you in order to make that work. But you also, and this is the other side of it, where we can think about uh Homer and think about actually being completely original and creative in all senses of the world isn't going to be intelligible most of the time either. So a lot of creativity doesn't necessarily have to be completely original and creative from ex nihilo ex nihilo from nothing all the time. But it can work with what you already have. So maybe being innovative would be a better description of what it means to be truly creative. Because you build on something. You don't need to like turn a phrase in a completely original, never been done before way, which is the sort of trite way that's often thought of when you explain what does it mean to be creative, it means to be totally novel. So I think that's that's helpful because when we look at Homer, much of what makes Homer memorable, and this is how ancient poets were memorize, and how Homer composed by memory, this is Lord and Perry, we're talking about, was by co-opting conventional formulaic expressions so that you're not thinking about every single word. Because if every single word is totally unique and creative, it won't be memorized, it won't be remembered, you won't think about it in the middle of the night when you wake up and think, oh, that book that I just read, it was wonderful. So you need this balance between convention and formula as a vehicle to kind of transport really creative ideas.

SPEAKER_00 17:09

What were the most fulfilling, exciting, and inspiring aspects of your research and preparation and compilation process?

SPEAKER_03 17:21

I think it was this process of trying to escape my own mindset. And when I was most excited, it was because I found something that broke free of a paradigm of past past debates. If I was able to step outside myself and my own assumptions about the text or about methods of ancient composition, if I was able to prove my preconceived notions about how writing and reading occurred in antiquity wrong, that was more exciting for me than anything else. Because that felt like real research. And that could be very propelling and motivating to keep the project going and finish the chapter or whatever I was, what stage I was at. If I was just doing straightforward philology and excavating different quotations of from here and there of what Granciera was referring to, that was not as rewarding or expired rewarding or exciting for inspiring for me. So that means that the majority of the PhD when I worked on this book was it didn't get exciting until the end. I could give him the attention he deserved in the way that he probably would have preferred, looking at his own text and looking at his own ideas, his practical ethics. And when I looked a bit closer, I just kind of thought he isn't actually as elitist as the sort of phrase which is thrown about a lot in biblical studies. An elite scribe tends to give the impression one will only touch certain topics. And he does write in a very erudite way, he's very articulate, he's very learned, as we said, but his wisdom itself and his ethics tend to be very pragmatic and very accessible. His sayings are often very memorable too. And this is something that's wonderful as well. And I don't get a hint of elitism. Not that I mean, I'm not hope I don't give you the impression, I think that we should all just take that elite scrabble circle literally that the scholars are implying that they're elitists. I don't think that is the case. But as an impressionable student, I had this impression that it might be okay, they're from an upper echelon, so some things will be different. But then this kind of avoids or circumcircumvents the issue of popular morality, folk wisdom, and what ordinary people will find useful as wisdom. So finding that Benciro was actually very practically minded as an ethicist was very heartening.

SPEAKER_00 21:42

What does the term scribal culture mean? Can you explain, define, and contextualize it?

SPEAKER_03 21:51

I like to explain and define scribal culture as it's very similar to material culture. But scribal culture in particular is the evidence of reading and writing, which is left behind by scribes. So it's left behind by the material culture of inscriptions and manuscripts. It's also left through textual data, so things have been copied over over time. So histories of transmission, so it can be textual rather than just looking at a manuscript. So that helps you distinguish it, at least it helps me distinguish it in my mind from codecology to describe it in this way. So it's the evidence of reading and writing left behind by texts and by material culture. As long as it relates to scribes, to societies with a manuscript tradition, that that is what the core of scribal culture is. And it keeps it, as I say, it keeps, tries to keep it distinct from codecology and from paleography for that matter. And textual criticism too. And there's a distinction as well, because when we in English, the word culture and other languages too, sometimes when we think about a word of a culture, this we may think perhaps scribal culture is about the culture of the scribes, as in the way they thought, their ideology, the themes that they thought was concerned them. But I try to intentionally avoid that definition of scribal culture because I think that it creates a temptation to avoid and go further and further away from the actual material and written evidence of scribes. And if you're only talking about scribal culture as essentially scribal ideology, then you're almost never referring back to the manuscripts or the inscriptions or scribal's education systems. So I think it that that helps keep you on track with keeping scribal culture in its very physical and material, but also intellectual contexts of its period.

SPEAKER_02 24:33

You're only asking a follow-up question.

SPEAKER_00 24:35

In your scholarly opinion, should the book of Sirac be considered a work of literature, a work of philosophy, a collection of proverbs or something else?

SPEAKER_03 24:52

I'll try not to do this the overly professorial answer of saying, oh, it should be all of those things. I think it works well as a collection of proverbs best. Even more than a work of philosophy, although I can think of Greek nomic literature and Egyptian, well, wisdom. I think I get that, I guess that's why we use the word wisdom for those types of collections rather than philosophy. The philosophy is very simple with Cirach. It's the fear of the Lord is wisdom, and that's the core. What you may debate exactly what there may be add-ons to that. It's been that's also a debate in Ben Cera studies, the precise theme of it. But a a good core main theme of it, the philosophy underlying it, is very biblical in the sense it's the fear of the Lord is wisdom. That underpins most of Ben Sira's philosophy as a Jew. And it's where I then be because of how different and kind of process focus Greek philosophy tends to be of working out why do I think this follow the steps in a very Aristotelian, for example, kind of way. That's where I would say it's probably not philosophy in in that sense, whereas someone much later, like Maimonides, I'd feel more comfortable saying that's Jewish philosophy. But for its time period, I'd say this is closer to a collection of wisdom sayings. And some of them are like poems, some of them a bit longer, some a bit shorter, and some of them are seem a bit more slightly miscellaneous, but I think there's a bit more of a there's there is often a logical structure to why he arranges the sayings in the way that he does. But I hope I hope this also helps keep him in his genre of this time so he's a bit closer to the biblical book of Proverbs and to Kellet and Manicsen's as well. Although it's very fragmentary and small, one wishes one could see the whole of the 4Q instruction as another good example of wisdom literature in this period.

SPEAKER_00 27:31

What misconceptions about the book of Sirac does your research attempt to correct? Why do these misconceptions exist and persist?

SPEAKER_03 27:43

There's two main misconceptions about Cirac. The primary one is kind of a an image in your head that just a visual image that won't go away. And this is the idea of the medieval saint at his desk toiling away with with a you know a quill and stacks of books in front of him. And that this medieval saint image is often projected back onto antiquity, onto whether it's the biblical authors, or in particular, Ben Syrah seems to be a recipient of this implied visual image of this is how it happened. He works at this desk, he's toiling away, he's quoting scripture, all the scripture is right in front of him. And my research tried to correct this by going back to what was what was the material and physical evidence of how reading and writing occurred. And I think because of modern conceptions as well, we tended to assume in scholarship that, and maybe this is because of the way that academic research writing often occurs, that reading and writing occur often very close together in the same in the same sitting. And side by side, you do a little, you read a little bit, you note take, you do a bit of writing, they're very close together. But that you're constantly pulling from reading as you write in order to write, that it doesn't sort of like come out of one's genius and head like Virgil or Emily Dickinson, that there's this constant required accessing of sources. And so that's one of the primary misconceptions about Siracus that okay, he accesses these different sorts, he handles different materials, he handles sometimes two different biblical allusions or phrases in sometimes in the same saying or sentence. So, how does that occur? Well, it must occur with this quite, he must have them right in front of him. So some of the fun areas that I looked at in trying to get at what the materiality of reading and writing was was to look at desks and furniture in the ancient world and how what positions scribes would write in. And speaking of uh Yemenite scribes, I have a wonderful old picture that I really love to show when I talk about this topic, which is a Yemenite scribe with his family. They're a family of Torah scribes, and they're all sitting on the ground in their beautifully lit, sunlit house, and their tools and books and things are all around them, but this is a floor-based culture here, so they're not sitting at these grand medieval European oak desks and tables, but it's actually down on the floor, and that kind of so that kind of area I was looking at the materiality of reading and writing. That's what I mean by that. There was a second kind of misconception, which I already talked a bit about, which was the the sort of giving Ban Sera's identity almost like a casual introduction of him as well. Bancira is an ancient scribe, and he's quite an elite ancient scribe at that because he's achieved very high standards of literacy and learnedness with all of his very it's very clear that how much he read knew. And I wanted to qualify what was meant by that. What so what was that actually mean to be very learned in antiquity? What was what does that mean? Because on the one hand, you can put Lots Pepper wisdom book with lots of quotations, but on the other hand, hopefully your readers understand your references. So Oscar Wilde, all over again, that if you're pulling out quotes from Shakespeare or so on to use an English example, hopefully they land, they stick, you know, and and like with one's jokes, you want your jokes to land and have an audience and for your audience to understand them. So, yes, on the one hand, he kind of speaks in often biblical style phrasing. He's not completely archaic in his expression, but he is fairly intelligible and accessible on somewhere on that scale. But he isn't so elitist that nobody knows he's what he's talking about, like Hermann Hesse as an author, where is totally removed from intelligibility. He's still very accessible. And so I wanted to qualify what was meant by an elite scribe. Pay more attention to the actual text itself and the content of Ben Sira's writing. And my supervisor Jim would always say, try to start with the primary text itself, or else everything will go circular. So you'll you'll create a circular circular loop of proving Ben Sera's elite status, because that's usually how it's phrased, so an elite or likely aristocratic status, and then you would refer back to other studies of elite Israelite and early Jewish scribes for that evidence, then apply it to Ben Sera, and then you would return the implications back to this tells us about the elite positions of scribes and Jews in general. So he said, please avoid, for heaven's sake, that that circularity and just look at the text and see what he's trying to trying to say and who he's trying to speak to and who his audience might be. So it's not always who we assume. And there is a an irresistible area of Ban Sera scholarship, which one of those things that Ban Cera studies will often like to attempt to do because of occasional occurrences of the first person in CIRAC is to look for some autobiographical information or self-positioning. So this whole question of Bansira's status and identity is one that will probably never go away in CIRAC studies because he tells us who he is. He's written a fantastic book, but on the other hand, the actual concrete knowledge that we have about his social position is very limited. So those are those are the two main misconceptions that I wanted to address in that work, right?

SPEAKER_00 35:41

I'm gonna What is the physicality of scribal culture? Can you explain?

SPEAKER_03 35:51

So when I'm talking about the physicality of it, I'm often talking about the positions that the body will take when a scribe is working when they're writing or copying or reading. So that kind of photo, archival photo of Yemenite scribes was a good example to think about the physicality of scribal culture is constrained by the limitations of physical positions and tools and furniture that the scribe may be using or have access to. So this can change the nature of composition and drafting. So that olds the misconception that we were just talking about of thinking of the medieval monk or scribe or saint writing at their desk is predicated on being on that on that physical nature of the scribe sitting at a big table or desk, able to have out those books immediately accessible visually and physically right in front of them. And that definitely changes the compositional process and the assumptions that we bring to the composition of an ancient text or any text that's being composed. And so drafting and composition in the ancient world needs to factor in the tools and the physical constraints and habits of ancient scribes in order to understand how this how this text come about. And the same can also apply to elements of scribal copying. And we have much greater and broader evidence of copying practices, habits, and manuscript copying practices of scribes. Those two areas of composition and copying can complement each other in some ways, but not others. In other ways, they are distinct. In terms of intellectual processes, they're very distinct. But nevertheless, this doesn't mean that we can still impose anachronistic assumptions on the process of writing, of composition, without factoring in the sort of physical and material side is as tools, as media, that's surfaces, as scrolls. And to weigh all these things together. We'll never have a complete picture, but we'll get a little bit closer if we try to put ourselves literally in their shoes, if they're wearing sandals, you know, to bring ourselves a little bit closer to how they worked. It has implications for those other debates about education, memorization of texts. So is your has he already memorized the text or or are they in front of him? And that can adjust quite a bit of our analysis of the text as a whole.

SPEAKER_00 39:33

What is your book's relationship to previous scholarship?

SPEAKER_03 39:41

So there are two fields, two main fields that I was entering into the boxing ring with, in a sense. There's the world of Ben Sira scholarship, which has a large recurring series of different themes on Ben Sera's background and identity, on his handling of sources, so his quotations and allusions, his relationship to previous literature. One of the other kind of themes that pops up with Ben Sira, which we might touch on later, is his relationship to non-Jewish cultures as well, to Greek culture in particular. And those are all the conversations that have been happening in Ben Sira studies for or Sirach studies for a long time now. The second field was scribal culture scholarship in biblical studies. Around the time of my masters, I came across some of the earlier, now earlier works that have been real cornerstones in this field of works by David Carr and Carel Vandator and Manuel Tove. No order of priority there on scribal culture in biblical studies in particular, much of it connected with experience in textual criticism and pentateuchal criticism in a lot of cases, and scholars were asking how texts were composed, what was the relationship between what a scribe had ideally, as you know, in a biblical text, which we'll say about a scribe's education, learnedness, and how much they commit to memory. So, how does that how does the scribe's brain relate to when they act as an author and compose their own text, not just copy a text? So this was a growing field of scholarship at the time, long-standing in other fields already in different senses, and in Dead Sea Scrolls, through more through manuscript studies and paleography and scribal habits, with work of Manuel Tog in particular, in that in that last category. And it seemed like because Ben Sera has a poem in praise of the scribe, that might be a natural fit for those for having a work that would try and approach both both fields, both subjects. So Ben Sera as a scribe, as a sage, and as an author, and then how this other question of how do how do we approach scribal culture in general in ancient Jewish studies as a whole? And as far as what if you could characterize the relationship my book has to those fields of scholarship. I'm a simple person. I like simple language, like Hemingway, and a lot of the times I felt like the way which I was trying to connect and relate to that scholarship was to try and sit with the words and debates and vocabulary that they were often using. I already talked about, for example, whether or not it's okay to use the word elite scribe or scribal circles, for example. So I would take any vocabulary or vocab or debate, sorry, in either of those fields and kind of say, is this plain and simple enough for me to understand it? Because I would kind of like to rephrase it in my own words. And break it down even further to kind of some of the very practically, I need to see things in detail and I need to see things how things work. Like I was saying, I was I'm interested in how in sitting with a scribe on the floor in their sandals, and how does this work? I'm interested in processes a lot of the time when I do ancient history, whether it's scribes or other things that I'm interested, like economic history, for example, and I want to see how things work. So I need to be able to break things down a little bit more. And so, for an example of how I tried to relate them to these fields of scholarship, I came up with my very strict definition of scribal culture, which we were talking about, you know, as material evidence of material and textual evidence of reading and writing. Another example I can think of is the spheres of operation. So further breaking down not just ah, this is his his literary process, but what do we mean by that? So he's he's operating in different spheres at different times. Sometimes the way he's getting his ideas or his phrasing is reflective of the socio-cultural environment, so sociocultural sphere of operation. Sometimes it's reflective of the actual text that he has direct contact with, so his textual reuse, and I called that the textual sphere of operation, so it reflects his reading and so on, what made an impression on him. And then there was a third category which I called scribo-cultural sphere of operation, and those were things that were more strategies of composition itself, so employing an acrostic or wordplay, so things that were a bit more compositional or reflect the educational tools and strategies of the time. So that's that's kind of where I saw the relationship of my work to to previous scholarship there.

SPEAKER_00 46:34

What like does your research set on the book of Cyrac's representation of the afterlife?

SPEAKER_03 46:41

Um he's done his poem on death. That was one of my favorite chapters to write, as morbid as it as it was. And what was interesting for how Sirach represents the afterlife, it's he's much closer to Hebrew Bible's rather limited, not very descriptive way of describing what happens to us when we die, where we have a murky kind of afterlife of Sheol, and there isn't a great amount of detail. There are ways that you can so it's not as as um as uh imaginative as later Jewish imaginings of of the afterlife or of paths to a good afterlife or a bad afterlife. And so Bensera tends to resist talking about what happens to us when we die because he seems more concerned, and he certainly is in this main poem. He does have another miniature poem on death earlier in 40. But in his main poem on death in chapter 41, he kind of steers the question away from what happens to us after we die and back towards reminding us that it's much more important to leave a good name and reputation because very little happens to us in the afterlife. Which does say a lot, but it also kind of suggests that he is saying, well, focus on focus on virtue, focus on ethics, on fear of the Lord, and becoming wise. And if you're wise, you will understand these are your priorities and not anything else. I think it's reflective of his overall outlook on things to be rather practically minded in terms of wisdom. It's very close to Proverbs in terms of the number of times he agrees with Proverbs vastly outweighs the number of times he disagrees with Proverbs. One of the good exceptions of when he disagrees with the biblical book of Proverbs is actually his uh attitudes towards drinking, but that's another topic. So with Ben Sira, that's uh it it fits well with how he tends to be very restrained a lot of the time. He's careful with his words, he steers the narrative back on track to what's what's the priority from a wisdom perspective, and from his from his wisdom perspective in particular. Yeah, that's uh that's Ben Sira and death. It is one of the things that can provide one of those temptations for scholars of Ben Sera to speculate about his background. So one of one of the theories about Ben Sira's social background is that he could have come from an aristocratic and then bi-aristocratic. There's a sort of, if you peel back the layer of why do we think he's an aristocrat, is because there's this minimalism towards afterlife and towards biblical interpretation in Ben Sira that resonates with the Sadducean philosophy of yeah, this the Sadducees. So there is this question if he and then and then other ways that more recent scholarship will kind of avoid saying, well, he was a Sadducee, is by saying he's he's a could have come from an aristocratic background and may have likely come from a priestly background. So the phrasing may not explicitly, therefore, put itself, expose itself by saying there is a positive connection to Sadducean and therefore can have bring other implications, like particularly the representation of the afterlife. But it still kind of leans in that direction.

SPEAKER_00 51:34

What is your book's contribution to the study of the Hellenistic Near East?

SPEAKER_03 51:41

So Ben Cyrus' relationship to Hellenism is one of the largest and most frustrating debates in CEROC studies. Elias Bickerman wrote a great deal on Ben Cyr's relationship with Hellenism in the 1980s, for example, Jews in the Greek Age, 1988. And this was a pattern of scholarship of those decades. And it kind of built off the back of other trends within biblical scholarship. I can think of Helet scholarship, for example, to see to what extent early Jewish authors and then Sera in this very much so, but he was because he was a bit of an outlier of his period of being Hellenistic, but writing in Hebrew, he poses this automatic question of, well, yes, he's writing in Hebrew, he's promoting good Jewish values of the time, you know, fear of the Lord is wisdom and all that. But at the same time, does he actually interact with this Greek world, which is becoming more and more important? And because of his proximity a couple of generations later to the Maccabean revolt, this is where he gets caught in the crossfire of his what is Ben Sira's actual relationship to the Hellenistic period of the Near East, of this question of Greek cultural influence of on early Judaism and wider cultures of the ancient Near East. Now, some so Beckerman ended up more on the side of Ben Sera has quite an anti-Hellenism agenda. He was quite focused on Elias Bickerman was on connecting references and illusions that he and other scholars saw or thought they saw of allusions or veiled references often to Greek society. For example, in one in the and in in talking about the trades and crafts in 38 verse 27, Bikerman argued that there's a veiled reference to the Greek art of the cameo of you know this, you know, kind of work of work of art. And it elsewhere he connects more generally as a kind of more holistic impression of Ben Sira's influence, his views on women, his negative view of the trades and artisanship overall as reflecting Greek views of the time. Other scholars have taken very different views, usually whether or not we can connect Ciroch in some way, or why we shouldn't connect C Iraq in some way to one or another form of Greek philosophical tradition. So Greek nomic wisdom, like Heraclitus and others, or Stoicism. So Sharon Matilla has a wonderful article from 2000 in JBL about why we shouldn't connect Ben Sira too closely to Greek Stoicism. Even though there are some similarities, they are superficial. There has been other works on connecting whether or not we should connect Ben Sira's concerns to Epicurean philosophy as well. So those are the philosophical overlaps. And that that makes me think back to your previous question about how you would characterize the book of Sirach as a work of philosophy or a book or a collection of wisdom or a work of literature. Because I think because of the fact that they are many of these Greek philosophical traditions are contemporaneous with Ben Sira, there's a good and good a good probability. It could be if he is a learned man. You could think also, okay, well, he's learned, he he he reads a lot. Could it be he knew Greek? And so some of the work of Benjamin Wright will comment on this in particular is the likelihood of okay, if was he educated enough to know Greek, how much Greek did he know? And if he knew Greek, what would he be what would he have on his bedside table? And what would he be reading? He'd probably be reading Aristotle. But then there's a further layer to this, which is it may have been the case, yes. And this is a good connection with New Testament authors as well, particularly Luke, to think they may have known these works, yes. But there's right placism too. So the question of whether Lenciera knew Greek philosophy is one question or Greek literature if he read Homer, and that I'll come on to that in a sec. But then does he let it turn up in his work of Hebrew wisdom? That's a conscious decision that he may have said, I know a lot of Greek philosophy, but perhaps I won't talk about it. So I do like to stress that there is a distinction. So the probability of reading ancient Greek philosophy, we won't, there's still a layer, an extra layer to prove in whether or not Bansira kind of allows it to turn up as a recognizable recognizable reference in his own work? Or does he minimize it? Does he underplay it? Does he remove it? Does he consciously avoid things that may overlap in a in a in perspective? Or would he summarize? Would he consciously avoid a quote from Greek philosophy because he is doing more kind of sacred work for lack of a better term of writing Jewish wisdom literature in Greek and in the in Hebrew? Sorry. So these are questions that are very difficult to disentangle. So there's a there's the last question I think I was going to steer towards, which was the question of whether he knew Homer, for example. So would a Jewish scribe like Ben Syrah have known a bit of Homer? Again, the probability is probably high. And I remember doing the research and writing for this book, reading a lot about Greek papyrology and the number of Homer scrolls that have been found for the ancient world compared with the number of uh Stoic or Epicurean philosophy scrolls, for example, with the exception of the uh Herculaneum Villa de Papyri, which obviously has a lot of philosophy scrolls. But what typically gets found across the Hellenistic Near East? What books, if any, teachers or people who had other people who had books, what would they likely to have in their possession? And so that that then fed into these studies that I was reading about what's the like what what was the kind of circulation level of Homer? And Homer was obviously very, very widely read. Whereas some of the stoic or Epicurean wouldn't compare it to Homer. You know, everybody would have a scroll of Homer. There's even a joke I can't remember off the top of my head. I think it was a critique of somebody in Greek tragedy. Perhaps I'll completely get this wrong, but somebody's saying of this, to this poor country teacher doesn't even own a single scroll of Homer. And this is like a real criticism against this teacher. And I hope that one of the ways I explained this in the book, was that when even if you do find a quotation, if it's a Homer quotation, it's still not a hundred percent certain that it could have come directly from having a book of Homer right in front of you. It could because of Homer's absolute embeddedness in all levels of society, it's a little bit like how Shakespearean phrases may enter popular speech. So just because someone on the street says pulls a Shakespearean phrase or turn a phrase out of thin air, it's because it may be because it has entered popular speech rather than that they were last night reading Macbeth. So I hope that that opened up ways that we can we can account for quotations and illusions that may occur in the way. So therefore, if he does also have, if Ben Sierra does also have a stoic idea, this can also, there's not one single way only that that can occur, i.e., by reading Stoicism. Can it also be the case that Stoicism borrowed that idea from contemporary morality of the time, which is the idea of Teresa Morgan's book on Greek popular morality, so folk wisdom and so on? So there's many ways that ideas can enter into an author's own composition.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:46

What was your guiding principle in conducting this research?

SPEAKER_03 1:02:58

My guiding principle. So this was so by I would have a little alert that would go off in my head and sort of say, okay, well, how can I break that idea down in more plain vocabulary? So this becomes my guiding principle then to conduct the research and source, and then does the text itself also evidence this? So always returning to the text of Ben Sira to prevent our modern imaginations from running wild. I'm not saying that my imagination doesn't also run wild, it's just that when it comes down to what we can prove through the research itself and the writing, we can stick to stick to the primary source evidence a bit more.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:30

Would you like to express gratitude publicly to anyone who was helpful in your writing, research, editing, or preparation process?

SPEAKER_03 1:04:42

So there's so many yeah, thank you. There are so many parts of this book and many of the many of the sort of mechanisms that I used and some of some of the analysis itself, but also the like the guiding principles that I was just talking about, trying to break something down and and to be cynical in effect. And the this this is entirely entirely because of the supervision of my my my PhD mentor, Jim Aitken. Jim Jim started as a as a Bensera scholar in in some respects. He but had classics training. He was always kind of between the world of Septuagint and Banciera, and then I think I was his first and only Ben Sera PhD student, and all the rest were general second temple, one student at the same time as me. Dan Ryan, who worked on Hasmana and Coins, but then all of his work, and therefore all of his other PhD students. Students were in Septuagint studies. And I think this kind of outsider position in some respects really suited Jim in a lot of ways. And he was famously very non-plussed, non-impressed, and often very not negatively cynical, but had a healthy and often very humorous skepticism of a lot of research. And but at the same time was fantastic and gracious and humorous and was always focusing us back onto the text. Gave me so much advice in so many ways that were was applicable to this book. So sticking to the primary sources, for example, and then a conference presentation version of that advice, which was to Jim would say to start preparing for a conference talk by preparing the handout and just listing the primary sources that you're going to talk about, and then build your presentation from there and your paper from there. So always start with the text, with the evidence, if you're doing more epigraphy and manuscripts. And so I can express so much gratitude for Jim's teaching. I am so sad. He passed away in 2023 from his second heart attack. His first heart attack he had maybe around 10 years earlier when I was in the second beginning of second year of my PhD with him. He took some time off, but he he recovered. He was up on the research. He also recommended the first chapter. He advised me that it would be great if people could refer to a one chapter that had most of the interesting stuff that you found on Scribal Culture. And so that became chapter one. So chapter one originally was not there. It was a totally new, totally new writing that I did just for the publication of the book and transforming it from thesis to and from thesis to book. So I have him to thank for that chapter one, especially that that current shape of it. So I think I'd I'd like to. So I work in a very interdisciplinary environment these days, and Bristol's School of Humanities is becoming more and more porous. And we're talking to each other all the time now. And departments meaning slightly less and less these days, and similar in a few other places as well. But the way we work at Bristol, I talk to a lot of medievalists and classicists all the time, which is is wonderful. It it makes me less mournful of the loss of the Cambridge College environment where you could sit at lunch or dinner and talk to people who are from completely different worlds from you all the time. And this would always really have a beneficial effect on your own perspective and the accessibility of your own work and the crossovers that you have with people in other fields, not even just humanities, but things you might have in common with mathematicians, for example. And there's so many fields of humanities and religious studies that have manuscript traditions studies of some sort, and so talk about scribes just to many extents. And so medieval studies is a big one. So I think that there's plenty that this type of research on scribal culture, on Ban Sira as an author, even though he's within the Hebrew and early Jewish tradition, has a lot of applicability to other similar research questions that other scholars may have and researchers and students about books that and texts or poems that vary from culture to culture, but what they may often have is because they are a religious text, scripture, or poetry, for example. They may have this kind of learnedness about them, they may have different literary techniques, uh, rhythm and rhyme and allusions to things that are lost in the modern world often, or using archaic expressions, all these kinds of things. So these are the kind of universalities that you find in scribal culture studies. So all of those things I think have wide applicability. We don't always find many of those answers in literary studies or even manuscript studies alone. That we kind of have to combine forces when we're looking at all of the different ways that scribes operate all the time. So only some of which are manuscript-based, only some of which are language questions, only some of which are textual and literary. So to can kind of combine them, you can kind of build this more complementary picture of the different spheres of operation of an ancient author. Yeah, I think that that pretty much covers some of the uh some of the crossovers that I I could offer to to someone in another field. And I've I've had many fruitful and wonderful conversations with with colleagues and students and other other researchers at Bristol and elsewhere about all the things that we do have in common with what we're what we're dealing with when we're dealing with manuscripts, with a world where every book has kind of come through a manuscript tradition, copying traditions, or a pre-printing environment, and the kind of emptying of oneself and modern kind of expectations that that come with those kind of that with that field of study.

SPEAKER_00 1:13:42

How much is known about Jewish physicians from the Greco-Roman period? How does the book of Sirach contextualize such a now?

SPEAKER_03 1:13:54

This was a this was a this was an interesting topic that I then built on a few in the years that followed after this book, when I looked more at ancient Jewish medicine in depth, it was the topic of Jewish physicians was it's similar in some respects to the study of ancient Jewish magic, where uh because we don't have surviving Jewish medical texts from the period, from the Greco-Roman period, it becomes a real annoyance because we don't know quite how to cope with that, with with having the leap of faith that we may have had quite sophisticated medical knowledge, but there may not have been a written tradition to accompany it. In a similar way to ancient Jewish magic, where the Greco-Roman period, we can compare uh magical spell texts from Greco-Roman Egypt and elsewhere, Mesopotamian spell texts as well, and but nothing from ancient Israel that can really shed light on it in the way that we would prefer. So it's humbling. It's clear that there were Jewish physicians. What we know of their remedies or their surgical competence, for example, is extremely limited. Ben Sira has this, he does have this poem, and and when I searched around into the reference works and so on, and the commentaries on the physician, on Ben Sira's poem on the physician, I was finding that Ben Sira's name was coming up a lot because it would often be said that, you know, he's the first, the first uh sort of positive reference to medicine within the Jewish tradition and the great long tradition of Jews' relationship to medicine in the medical profession that was due to follow. Um, but the pensier was the first of this that we can actually identify. And what comes with this is they often, those scholars of the past would often contrast this with what they saw as a real problem. And and because of the the sort of dark, dark ages of Jewish medicine, Bensera then appears as a sort of first positive appraisal, and that everything before was it was either neutral or not there, but can be construed on that basis to be, therefore, a negative view of medicine, and to then build on that assumptions about religious uh attitudes to healing, about attributing all healing to God. And so I tried to look afresh at this poem in 30 in chapter 38 to kind of see is he is he correcting a prevailing view of overall negativity towards medicine and skepticism towards physicians, whether they're Jewish physicians or foreign foreign physicians, or is he, as he does elsewhere actually, trying to steer us back towards the sort of appropriate position that coheres with his overall themes of wisdom and fear of the Lord. So if he opens up and says, honor the physician before you have need of him, because God also made him, and because the physician became wise because of God, this is how he expresses it, and because God brings forth medicine, so he's steering the conversation back away from the physician deserves respect and honor on the basis of his extensive knowledge of medicine, pure and simple. He's saying, Well, he knows those things because of God. And then if you compare that to plenty other expressions like it that Ben Sira has throughout his book, this is a very common theme that he presents. So the the degree of humility of remembering God does it with the attitude towards death, he does it with attitudes towards relationships and dealing with snooty people, doing it dealing with foolish people, is to kind of stick to the path of the fear of the Lord. So I don't think he is correcting a prevailing negative view of medicine where ancient Jews were mistrustful of medicine and that therefore there weren't really any uh Jewish physicians at the time. But I I do think that like many others of the present day in time, sometimes your doctor gets it right, sometimes they get it wrong. And a healthy skepticism of medicine is not quite the same as a negative view overall of medicine. You have plenty of Greek and Roman anecdotes about the usefulness and inefficacy of medicine at various points. You have plenty of examples of charlatans. So again, another crossover with magical experts, too, because it's it's clear that lots of Jews also turn to magicians, too. But some ancient Jews like Philo, for example, were seriously critical of magic. But we can't derive from that an entire society worldview on how all Jews of that period thought about medicine or magic. So we can't create an argument from silence, which isn't the answer that we want, but we have to be humble like the biblical figure of Job sometimes, and just sort of accept the mystery that we will just never know sometimes. But there, that being said, there are there are still plenty of things that we can learn about the nature of ancient Jewish medicine, despite the fact that we have no surviving medical texts.

SPEAKER_00 1:21:16

In that of what you've just shared, have both a comment and a question as follow-up as a comment. In the book of Tobit, doctors fail in curing the blindness of Tobit. And in the book of Chronicles, King Asa seeks the help of physicians and is rebuked by the text for doing so. So it would be interesting to think about what Sirax says about doctors of other references to doctors in parallel texts that express skepticism about what doctors do.

SPEAKER_02 1:22:08

Yes.

SPEAKER_03 1:22:13

Yes, yeah, both of those are really good examples. So Tobit and King Asa in Chronicles, his name means healing as well. He's eponymous, as you know. Now, with Tobit and with King Asa, actually. So focus on King Asa. So he it can be construed as a critique of medicine in general. At the same time, I think this was a as Ben Tir reminds us, he says, you can go to the physician, but don't go only to the physician. And I think that this is his subtle kind of gentle steering us back to not relying solely like hopeless fools on just God will heal me magically without any kind of any kind of myself doing anything for myself. You still have to stand on your own two feet and you still have to seek the physician's help. But the physician, he reminds us, gets his wisdom from the Lord. And when you are ill, this is the second half of the poem, it says, when you're ill, don't go only to seek medicine exclusively, but also pray and make sure that you have purity of heart. That's quite a strong theme. So he says, do both. He says, cover your cover all of your bases, both the religious side of how you can be healed, but also the medical side of how you can be healed. But what Asa does by contrast, he only goes to the physicians and he does not also go to, there's no mention of him praying or seeking forgiveness for anything. And this is very Mesopotamian because the Mesopotamian system of illness and the problem of evil was never removed the possibility that one could become ill because of one's bad previous deeds and sins. So you you couldn't extricate themselves as as firmly as you see a bit later in Hippocratic Greek medicine, where it's not so obvious that people believe that they become ill because they've been wicked or sinful. They have more physiological reasons for most diseases, but this is a very different world still for Ben Syrah. And you can see this as well in the Dead Sea Scrolls, in the exorcistic text, the many of the demons who cause illnesses and diseases and wickedness. So they kind of invade the world in a variety of ways, and you see this also in the New Testament as well. So it's a world that where illness and disease are very much wrapped up in both a medical, physiological, and not strictly religious, but also philosophical and conscious, one's conscience as well. You you need to treat both sides. So it's a very kind of holistic style of medicine, perhaps.

SPEAKER_00 1:25:46

If you don't want me asking this to follow up, are there any implications of chapter 38 of the book of Sirach for bioethics?

SPEAKER_03 1:25:58

I I think so. I think that treating treating the body in a purely scientific and non-ethical, not ethical, but a ethical, kind of like removing ethics and mental health and well-being from the picture, from the picture of healing, is not always sufficient for for healing in medicine to satisfy people whose worlds may be completely shattered by illness all around them. So I think it has plenty of plenty of um applicability to to bioethics to help medicine be more sympathetic and a bit more holistic to consider the whole person and not just the physiological symptoms.

SPEAKER_00 1:26:56

As we bring our dialogue today to a close, can you kindly tell us about where you've devoted your attention since completing this project?

SPEAKER_03 1:27:08

Yeah, it's been a wonderful conversation. Thank you again so much for for having me on your your podcast. Where I've turned since Scarbo Culture in Ben Sira as a as the book. I've had a number of different articles and and chapters, some of which have been on medicine, if you can't can't tell, on ancient Jewish medicine. And I keep coming back to Ben Sira. I have broadened my net in terms of looking at different aspects of ancient Israelite and early Jewish scribal culture. I've had one or two pieces on Greek Jewish funerary epigraphy, and looking more at inscriptions, I'm looking more at Aramaic magic balls in a more holistic sense of scribal. culture and where I've been going with this over the last few years trying to build into a a second book which is more about how you can interpret and analyze ancient Jewish scribal culture evidence historically and it's on its own terms rather than seeing how for example ancient Hebrew inscriptions can tell us more about the Bible. So to reorient the question of how of paying attention to inscriptions, paying attention to manuscripts, paying attention in particular to the documentary and non-literary documents, or many of the documents we have from the Dead Sea Scrolls broadly speaking, not just the caves, but across the Judean desert, to look at all of these documentary and non-literary texts of their own on their own terms. And I want that to be I want that to be the spotlight of ancient Jewish scribal culture studies to sort of place and position the period of scribal culture that I work on really rather than saying well how does this also inform us about the way that the Bible was written? I want to get away from the composition of the Bible question so much. I would love for it to be an incidental finding to have an implication for the composition of the Hebrew Bible and related early Jewish texts but I don't want that to be the constraining focus of why we choose to look at fragmentary documents, why we choose to look at inscriptions. So I've been having a a great deal of enjoyment and pleasure by widening the net and looking at earlier Hebrew inscriptions and epigraphy, Greco-Roman Jewish epigraphy, and even going a little bit later into late antique Jewish scribal materials and including incantation bowls and amulets in that too to kind of get a more a cross section across a wider period to kind of help tell ancient Jewish history on its own terms rather than feeding it always and only towards or maybe as being selective with what things you draw away from it of just what what does what implications does this have for the composition of the Bible which has been the prevailing concern and maybe a guiding principle even of a lot of early Jewish scriberculture studies whether that's because those studies were looking at the actual composition of the Bible but then as it as it broadened and as they sort of looked at other early Jewish texts so Ben Sira a good example you know it's incidental. It's how how was how was Sirach composed not how was the Hebrew Bible composed it should be a secondary sort of implication perhaps do you have a favorite proverb in the book of Sirach? Something that has guided you something that you find morally profound something that has helped you in life yes I do have a favorite verse I have many favorite verses of Sirach but one of the top top five so one of one of the top five might be the mind of a fool is like a broken jar. It cannot hold knowledge or be taught I think so that's um chapter 21 verse 14 and I absolutely love the visual of comparing the mind of a fool to being a broken jar. It's just broken and that it cannot hold knowledge and and I find this with so much of biblical book of proverbs also Kohelet and Ben Sira is that they have these absolutely universal and time-defying sayings like that and that the mind of a fool is like a broken jar it cannot hold knowledge it we shall not hold any wisdom this is absolutely it it it's in terms of scrabble techniques and composition techniques is wonderful it's implying metaphor but it's also absolutely true about human nature and like so many of Bensera's sayings about fools you what do you well you say you you can't teach stupid right so there's so many versions of this saying and it's always going to be true and it's a good reminder and and it makes you humble as we end today I'd like to emphasize how grateful I feel for your generosity and erudition throughout the course of this conversation I was overjoyed to be in your presence well thank you it has been a real pleasure you've listened you're such a wonderful listener and this has been a really positive experience as a as an interview and getting the chance to to talk about this research and about the joys and wisdom of of Bansira. So thank you very much for having me on thank you this was my hallowed honor.

SPEAKER_00 1:33:59

As we end today I'm signing off as Ari Barbalat, your host on the Dialogues in Judaic Studies podcast. Today it has been my privilege to engage in a conversation with Lindsay Davidson who is a lecturer in Jewish studies in the Department of Religion and Theology at the University of Bristol. She is the author of the book we've discussed today which she published under her former previous name before her marriage as Lindsay Askin Scribal Culture in Ben Sira published in Leiden Netherlands by Bril 2018. This study delves into scribal culture as a framework for analyzing the aspects of textual referencing found in the book of Ben Sira, unveiling new understandings of how Ben Sira crafted his wisdom literature even though the title of scribe is commonly associated with Bensera, this designation brings forth certain interpretive challenges through a comparative analysis this study contextualizes the sage's writing style within historical literal historical literary and sociocultural dimensions fresh insights are provided into Bensera's text and the early Jewish practice of textual reuse. By drawing on physical and material evidence related to reading and writing this study reveals the skill and intricacy of Bensera's sustained textual reuse. Therefore Bensera's accomplishment exemplifies excellent writing for an appreciative audience. Thank you wholeheartedly