B.'s doctoral monograph focuses on Sibylline Oracles Book 3, the foundations of this collection of Greek hexameter oracles, composed and updated by Jews and then edited, expanded and recompiled by Christians over several centuries from the second century bce onwards, but always attributed to the ancient figure of the Sibyl. The majority of Book 3 is here analysed as Hellenistic Jewish writing that reflects the authors’ ‘organic’ culturally hybrid identity and their engagement with the intricacies of Ptolemaic succession.
The reason for the Jewish authors’ choice of the female Sibyl to voice these prophecies is the key question of B.'s study, and the one she answers best, with reference to Hellenistic politics and literature. B. makes clear how her novel accent on the Sibyl's gender pays off in reading the work as an example of Jewish creativity in the adaptation of Greek genres. Analysis of the contexts required to approach the topic and to understand the implications of B.'s answer spans the introduction and the first three chapters. The final two chapters offer case studies in application of those contexts to particular details in the Sibylline accounts of non-Jewish topics: a description of Homer's writing and a striking version of the Titanomachy myth.
In its focus and approach, this book makes a distinctive contribution to the burgeoning scholarship by both theologians and Classicists on Greek-Jewish literature, whose genres have recently been surveyed afresh in S. Adams's Greek Genres and Jewish Authors (2020). Studies on the Sibylline Oracles in particular have been stimulated again by J. Lightfoot's landmark commentary on Sibylline Oracles 1–2 (2007). The book under review takes up questions about the Sibyl that were not pursued in the introduction to that commentary. B.'s focus complements the literary approach of O. Stewart Lester to Sibylline Oracles 4 and 5 in her book Prophetic Rivalry, Gender and Economics (2018). For B. is, as E. Gruen highlights in the foreword, fundamentally a historian. She is strong in outlining details of periods, dynasties and politics, and offers a clear introduction to Book 3 of the Sibylline Oracles as a Hellenistic product. The book's clarity about its aims and contribution stems from B.'s academic background in both theology and Classics. Surveying many different fields, she articulates well how fields of scholarship have become stuck on certain questions.
B. describes her approach as a ‘hermeneutic of suspicion’: the majority of surviving texts represent the views of the historical victor, but can be approached as testaments to one side of a dialogue that may hold the shadow of its counterpart. This works well as a means of foregrounding as real issues the primary questions about the choice and presentation of the Sibylline persona that B. tackles in Chapters 2 and 3. She nicely dismantles ideas of the uniqueness of the Sibyl as a prophetic voice, pointing out the availability of Bacis (pp. 57–62), and characterises well Jewish and Roman Sibylline literature as different branches of a fluid tradition (pp. 62–5). Outlining the differences between the Sibyl-figure of Sibylline Oracles 3 and the other extant Greek and Roman sibyls (which deal only in doom and gloom), B. persuasively argues for the creativity of the Jewish Sibylline collection in combining the power of male Hebrew prophets, and their messages of hope and redemption, with various Hellenistic contexts for the ascription of authority to a female figure. I particularly liked B.'s emphasis on the inadequacy of ‘paraphrase’ (p. 113 and elsewhere) as a description of the Sibylline response to Isaiah. It should be noted, however, that B.'s distinctive emphasis on the strength of the Sibylline Oracles’ engagement with Ptolemaic politics makes her more willing than many scholars, including Gruen, to try to pin down the allusions in obscurely expressed prophecies, for example a historic referent of the famous ‘seventh king’ prophecy of Sibylline Oracles 3 (B. argues that the prophecy referred to Neos Philopator).
In Chapter 4 B. first draws out parallels between Hellenistic literature as commentary on archaic literature and the exegetical purposes of Second Temple Jewish literature. She then approaches the Sibylline portrait of Homer, with sensitivity to overtones in the traces of different traditions put together by the Jewish Sibyllist. B. argues (pp. 142–5) for specific reference to the Homeric Hymn to Apollo as lying behind the Jewish Sibylline description of Homer as a writer who will ‘call himself a Chian’ and its contestation of Homeric truth (Sib. Or. 3.419–24). I am not sure that it is necessary to posit a single text as the target here: the point also holds if one compares Sibylline traditions to wider Homeric biographical traditions whose starting point rests in that Hymn, since both these legendary figures were ‘claimed’ by many cities, as the Sibyl's signature to Book 3 acknowledges. On this latter passage B. plausibly suggests (pp. 134–5) reading as a reference to Odysseus the rumour about the Sibyl's father as gnostos or agnostos. A useful reminder of Homer's contemporary veneration in art and cult (pp. 146–9, with Appendix 2) adds fuel for the Sibylline take-down of Homer's status; citation of the Sibyl's emphatic brotos in 3.419 would have further supported the point.
The final chapter reads the Euhemeristic version of the Titanomachy in Sibylline Oracles 3 as a ‘multi-layered commentary’ on Greek mythological and cultic traditions, focusing on novel details such as the assertion that Rhea secretly sent the baby Zeus to Phrygia (rather than Crete) – this feature in the Sibylline account is explained as acknowledging the rise of Rome (the new Troy) as a Mediterranean power. The quantity of historical facts in this chapter (e.g. regarding Judaean settlements on Crete) make for sometimes quite dense reading, and there is a tendency to give long quotations from other scholars, not all of which are germane to the argument. It is also sometimes frustrating in that the summaries of points made revert to the language of the first level of analysis. However, the blend of linguistic, historical and material cultural approaches to the Sibylline Oracles modelled in these last two chapters is genuinely stimulating of other thoughts along those lines.
This monograph succeeds in conveying the confidence and dexterity of Sibylline Oracles 3 as Jewish Greek literature. Among B.'s strengths are an impressively interdisciplinary awareness and ability to offer helpful explanations of preferred and less-preferred scholarly labels. Her wide knowledge enables her to draw out the implications of Sibylline choices (e.g. to focus on Noah, pp. 92–9), as well as being clear-eyed on assumptions in reviewing scholarship on numerous issues. The book is pitched ultimately towards Theologians rather than Classicists, with some terms of the former remaining unexplained, while basic contents of classical myths are summarised (e.g. Prometheus, p. 171). I think too that there has been more progress in modern scholarship on cultural hybridity in Hellenistic poetry than is acknowledged by the surveys of scholarship in the footnotes, whose long lists might sometimes have been condensed to allow the relevance for analysis of the Sibylline Oracles to be brought out more immediately. Among several small errors in references to classical texts there are two occasions where the Greek cited does not match the translation used for analysis (pp. 89–90). Still, it is rare for a thesis-book to be so accessible to newcomers in more than one field, and this monograph deserves to become a reference point in interdisciplinary conversations about Sibylline discourses. Useful appendices provide an overview of the contents of Sibylline Oracles 3 and present the Apotheosis of Homer marble relief; there are indexes of primary sources and subjects treated.
