Marcus,
I have to reserve comment on your article on Atkinson 1959
until I find your article to see what you say. On other points
see below.
I wrote:
If the Kittim of pNah 3-4 i 3 are the Romans, then would not the
Kittim of pHab be also, by definition? I see these two texts as
very closely similar, parallel, and contemporary texts, and the
Kittim would be the same between these two texts. At
You replied:
Why 'by definition'? Surely an a priori assumption such as this is
inherently
dangerous. Both our areas of research have indicated that other similar
terms
have different meanings and applications in different texts. So your own
example
of Ephraim which we both accept is a simple reference to the Northern
kingdom in
Testimonia. Likewise Lebanon undergoes a range of different meanings in
both the
scrolls and targumim (Vermes has an excellent article on the latter). Why
should
Kittim be the same across different texts?
As will become clear in a chapter in my pNah I don't
think there is *any* use of 'Ephraim' in the pesharim
or CD, etc. that means anything other than Samaria as
biblically, although it may be a shorthand way of speaking
of 'non-Judea Israel' of the Hasmonean era, in much the
same way Americans would speak of 'Russia' as the
other half of the world opposed to the West (when
Russia is actually only one republic among many of the
USSR). Both speakers and hearers in the discourse of
the schematic two-superpower world consisting of
'America versus Russia' fully understand there are
'lesser' nations even though they don't get mentioned.
Now on 'Lebanon', here I believe you are confusing something.
You and Vermes are talking about differences in how 'Lebanon'
in quotations get interpreted. That is not at all what I am talking
about. I am talking about how the authors of these texts themselves
use these terms. To my knowledge, no author of a pesharim text
uses 'Lebanon' in any way other than to quote it and then
offer an allegorical-kind of interpretation on it. The interpretations
of elements of quotations do vary from text to text, and there is
no dispute on that. But there is no shift in meaning by these authors
of 'Lebanon' (since I do not recognize any attested use of
'Lebanon' by any of these authors in their own composition of
their own sentences to start a database), nor do I accept that
'Ephraim' shows any change of meaning or referent across
different Qumran texts. In the absence of demonstrable examples
of changed referents or meanings of these sobriquet-like
names or titles or terms, I strongly question the presumption that
this is a common phenomenon. Again, I am not talking about
what pesherists do in interpreting words from quotations
(which does vary and cannot be presumed consistent between
texts).
Personally I understand pNah to come
from a later time period to pHab (perhaps the Next Generation so to
speak...),
Here there is a difference that affects the Kittim question. If your
understanding could be shown to be the case, then to me that
would render a change of meaning of Kittim (or other related
kinds of term) much more plausible. But the final chapter of my
pNah study will make my argument that these texts are contemporary,
I think perhaps to the same months. Different authors, but pNah
and pHab are operating from the same contextual worlds, and
same literary context, and the presumption would be the 'Kittim'
between the two texts will be identical. (But I realize this follows
in part from the prior arguments I have just outlined which
you and others have not yet seen--and which I do not want to
go into here prior to publication.)
I wrote:
As for the Roman identity of the Kittim of pHab, the reasons
that convinced me that is correct are the worship of the
weapons and the Republican-era Roman coins from the Atkinson
1959 article argument; parallels with Roman description in
I Macc. 8 and Kittim of pHab; being the world power;
'isles of the west'; and the parallel with pNah, and also
other reasons for supposing these texts to come from
mid-1st BCE. As I read it, the text (pHab) implies an
existing power, an existing Kittim, not a future or
eschatological Kittim.
You answered:
easiest first! 'isles of the west' amounts to no more than reference to
the Deut
prophecy that the Kittim will come from the isles of the sea (also the
origin of
the eagle in pHab).
OK, this point granted, although the allusion is not entirely
devoid of information, as I see it. Would the authors of the
pesharim use this language of the Kittim if they were Parthians
from the north? I do not think so. Therefore although this allusion
does not say who the Kittim are, it has some usefulness in saying
who the Kittim are not (in pHab).
In any case, as I say I do think that the Kittim in pHab are Romans - the
existing power as you rightly point out - I just apply caution in adopting
this
identification since I can find no cast-iron reasons for why the
