Sibyls and Sibylline oracles. 3. The Sibylline oracles

1. Sibyls | 2. Sibylline books | 3. Sibylline oracles | 4. The Renaissance

As we saw in Part 2, some fragments of the Sibylline books were in public circulation in pagan Rome. Cicero and Dionysios of Halikarnassos accurately describe some aspects of the surviving fragments. There were also imitators.

Vergil at work: illustration before Eclogue 4 in cod. Vat. lat. 3867, fol. 9r (image source: Vatican Library)

Vergil’s fourth Eclogue is a relatively loose example. It’s framed as a ‘prophecy’ linked to the Cumaean Sibyl, though it doesn’t try to replicate the style or imagery of the Sibylline books. Vergil doesn’t give instructions for rituals, and there are no acrostics: as Parke puts it, it’s ‘a transposition of Sibylline motifs into a pastoral key’. Vergil foretells a glorious future golden age surrounding a child who is to be born in the consulship of Asinius Pollio (40 BCE). It’s hard to avoid thinking that aspect may have been partly inspired by the childbirth mentioned in the surviving Sibylline books quotation.

Parke 1988: 145. Pollio’s consulship: Eclogue 4.3, 4.11–12. Birth of a male child: 4.8 onwards. Acrostics: a few Vergil scholars have noted that the first letters of Eclogue 4.47–52 spell out cacata ‘shitty’, but nearly all scholars regard it as an accident. If Vergil had really wanted to do an acrostic, he was perfectly capable of doing something comparable to the Sibylline books, rather than putting an isolated word of doubtful implication at a random point in mid-poem.

The Sibylline oracles are closer imitations. These are a group of eleven poems and eight fragments, mostly Jewish, with an assortment of Christian additions, in Greek hexameter verse. They range in date from the 2nd century BCE to the 7th century CE. Several of the poems list off dynasties of kings and emperors, framing them as though they’re predictions. In some poems the timeline reaches all the way from the Creation (as in Genesis) up to the end times and the Last Judgement (as in Enoch or Revelation).

A sample

Here’s an excerpt: Sibylline oracles 4, lines 125–139, about various disasters ‘predicted’ to occur in the 1st century CE (trans. John Collins).

(125) A leader of Rome will come to Syria who will burn
the Temple of Jerusalem with fire, at the same time slaughter
many men and destroy the great land of the Jews with its broad roads.
Then indeed an earthquake will destroy at once Salamis and Paphos
when the dark water overwhelms Cyprus, which is washed by many waves.

(130) But when a firebrand, turned away from a cleft in the earth
in the land of Italy, reaches to broad heaven,
it will burn many cities and destroy men.
Much smoking ashes will fill the great sky,
and showers will fall from heaven like red earth.
(135) Know then the wrath of the heavenly God,
because they will destroy the blameless tribe of the pious.
Then the strife of war being aroused will come to the west,
and the fugitive from Rome will also come, brandishing a great spear,
having crossed the Euphrates with many myriads.

This covers Titus’ assault and the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE; an earthquake on Cyprus; the eruption of Vesuvius in 79; and the coming of one of the various false Neros, coming westward with Parthian support (probably the one mentioned in Dion Cassius 66.19.3, who came west as far as the Euphrates at some point in 79–81).

After this point S.O. 4 stops predicting ‘history’ and moves on to the end times. The references above are detailed enough that the poem should be understood to have been written not long after 81 CE.

Opening of Sibylline oracles 1 in the edition of Geffcken (1902: 6)

How many poems?

Yes yes, I know, lots of online sources say ‘fourteen’. They’re wrong. Modern editions assign the poems numbers up to 14. But the actal number of poems is eleven — or thirteen, or fifteen, depending on how you count: fourteen is the only count that’s definitely wrong.

The confusion is because the Oracles were transmitted in two overlapping collections.

The first collection, S.O. 1 to 8, has never been lost, and has been in print since the 1500s. Poems 1 and 2 are actually a single poem, but the first modern editor, Sixt Birck (a.k.a. Betuleius), decided to count them separately for no good reason, and unfortunately the numbering is now pretty much set in stone. There are indications that there was once a further poem in between S.O. 2 and 3 — the opening section of S.O. 3 is clearly from a separate poem —; also, as we’ll see below, that Lactantius had a copy of this collection, and that his copy had nine poems. So this collection can be counted as seven, eight, or nine poems.

The second collection was discovered in the 1800s. The first editor carried on the numbering from eight, and there are seven poems, so they’re numbers 9 to 15. But three of them — S.O. 9, 10, and 15 — duplicate material from the first collection. So modern editions only ever print the new ones, poems 11 to 14. (Poem 12 is a continuation of poem 11, but they were composed at different times and should be counted separately.)

So the full modern collection is S.O. 1/2; a missing poem of which fragments survive; S.O. 3 to 8; and 11 to 14. Eleven poems — or fifteen if you use Betuleius’ count, and count the duplications in S.O. 9, 10, and 15. Between them, they come to over 4,000 lines of hexameter.

You’re right to be confused. Some recent commentaries on Sibylline oracles 1/2 and 3 assume you’re already familiar with at least parts of this. It’s explained in the introduction to the standard critical edition, by Johannes Geffcken, but if you can’t read Geffcken’s German, things are going to be bewildering. A much friendlier guide is one given by John Collins in The Old Testament pseudepigrapha, volume 1. Collins gives an excellent introduction to each poem; a full English translation; and detailed notes. At the time of writing, Collins’ translation is the only good English translation of the Oracles.

Critical edition: Geffcken 1902. English edition: Collins 1983. Commentary on S.O. 1/2: Lightfoot 2007. Commentary on S.O. 3: Buitenwerf 2003. On the opening section of S.O. 3 being a fragment from a separate poem, see Buitenwerf 2003: 79–94; Collins 1983: 359–360. (Note that Buitenwerf and Collins have opposing views on whether S.O. frs. 1–3 should be assigned to S.O. 3 or to another lost poem).

The contents of the Oracles

Here’s an overview. The dates are those assigned by Collins (but note that some of the dates aren’t universally agreed).

First collection (φ and ψ manuscript groups; first ed. Betuleius, 1545):

Poem	Date	Origin and contents
1/2	before 150 CE	Phrygian Jewish original. Timeline from Creation to Last Judgement; some phases removed and replaced by a Christian section on Christ and the fall of Jerusalem (1.323–400).
3.1–92	in phases, II BCE–I CE?	Fragment. Jewish (with Christian elements?). Hymn to God; rule of Rome; destruction of Temple; return of Nero, called ‘Beliar’. (93–96 = a further fragment.)
3.97–829	II BCE	Egyptian Jewish. Miscellany: Tower of Babel, Titanomachy, Exodus, Exile, oracles against foreign nations, ethics, eschatology.
4	late I CE	Jewish. Timeline of empires from Assyrian empire to fall of Jerusalem (600s BCE to 70 CE); end times.
5	late I CE	Egyptian Jewish. Timeline, 30 BCE–70 CE: fall of Ptolemies to fall of Jerusalem.
6	unclear	Christian. Short hymn (28 lines).
7	II–III CE	Christian. Historical snippets; the Flood; coming of Christ; end times.
8	II–III CE	Jewish (1–216) and Christian (217–428) sections. Religious perspective on world history. Christian acrostic at 217–250.

Second collection (Ω manuscript group; first ed. Mai, 1825):

Poem	Date	Origin and contents
9		Duplicate: = S.O. 6.1–28 + 7.1 + 8.218–428.
10		Duplicate: = S.O. 4.
11	early I CE?	Jewish. Timeline from the Flood up to the death of Cleopatra (to 30 BCE).
12	ca. 235 CE	Jewish; later continuation of S.O. 11. Some duplication: S.O. 12.1–11 = S.O. 5.1–11. Timeline, 30 BCE–235 CE, Augustus to Alexander Severus.
13	ca. 265 CE	Jewish (with one Christian line added). Historical: ca. 240–265 CE, new Palmyrene kingdom under Odaenathus, and Parthians under Mareades.
14	VII CE	Alexandrian Jewish. Jumble of references: later Roman emperors, Egypt, Rashidun conquest of Syria/Egypt.
15		Duplicate: = S.O. 8.1–9.

Why ‘Sibylline’?

These poems weren’t designed for a pre-existing collection of Sibylline material: they were composed separately from one another, over a period of centuries. So why do we refer to them as ‘sibylline’? Three reasons.

First: at the end of S.O. 3, the narrator explicitly claims to be one (or two) of the Sibyls. Lines 809–818 (trans. Collins, my emphasis):

(I say) these things to you, having left
(810) the long Babylonian walls of Assyria, frenzied, a fire sent to Greece,
prophesying the disclosures of God to all mortals,
so that I prophesy divine riddles to men.
Throughout Greece mortals will say that I am of another country,
a shameless one, born of Erythrae. Some will say that
(815) I am Sibylla born of Circe as mother and Gnostos as father,
a crazy liar. But when everything comes to pass,
then you will remember me and no longer will anyone
say that I am crazy, I who am a prophetess of the great God.

This doubles up as a claim to be both the Chaldaian Sibyl (from Babylon) and the Erythraian Sibyl. When ancient Christian writers quote from this poem, they ascribe it to the Erythraian Sibyl.

Second: there’s an acrostic in S.O. 8.217–250, mostly duplicated in S.O. 9. The first letters of each line spell out

Ἰησοῦς Χρειστὸς θεοῦ υἱὸς σωτὴρ σταυρός

Jesus Chreist, Son of God, Saviour, Cross

Incidentally there’s nothing surprising about the spelling ‘Chreist’: Koine Greek in the 2nd century CE uses ει, η, or ι to represent the sound [i], swapping between them freely.

Unlike the acrostics in Phlegon’s quotation (see Part 2), this acrostic isn’t a hexameter. Still, acrostics are a feature that was known to be associated with the Sibylline books. S.O. 9 reproduces most of the acrostic: that poem duplicates parts of S.O. 6, 7, and 8. But weirdly, it omits the first line of the acrostic, the one that provides the ι of ‘Jesus’. The preceding line (= S.O. 7.1) starts with an ω, so the acrostic is definitely incomplete. This shows, first, that S.O. 9 is a secondary version; and second, it suggests the compiler of S.O. 9 was unaware that there was an acrostic there.

S.O. 9 duplicates material from S.O. 6, 7, and 8. In this damaged manuscript, cod. Vat. gr. 1120, fol. 348v, we see the transition between them: the end of S.O. 6; one line from S.O. 7; then S.O. 8 starting at the second line of the acrostic. This MS is the oldest extant copy of the second collection (14th century; Q in Geffcken’s sigla). (Base image: Vatican Library; my annotations)

Third: ancient testimony casts the poems as ‘sibylline’. Alexander Polyhistor (mid-1st century BCE) shows an acquaintance with the earliest poem, S.O. 3, when he refers to the Tower of Babel in connection with the Babylonian Flood myth and the Sibyl (FGrHist 273 F 79).

From around 100 CE onwards, Christian writers refer to the Sibyls as authors of prophetic visions, though not yet explicitly citing the poems that we know (Shepherd of Hermas 8). The earliest citations are to S.O. 3 — which is to be expected, since that’s the only poem that makes an explicit claim to be sibylline.

Possibly the earliest citation is in Justin Martyr. Around 155 CE he refers to a prophecy that the world will be dissolved in fire. This may be from multiple sources: Justin is probably mainly thinking of Stoic ekpyrosis, but he explicitly refers to Sibylla (or a Sibyl), as well as the legendary Zoroastrian figure Hystaspes.

A couple of decades later we start to get more clearcut citations, starting with Athenagoras (170s) and Tertullian (190s). They quote verbatim from S.O. 3, and explicitly cite ‘the Sibyl’.

Justin, First apology 20, possibly alluding to S.O. 3.53–54. Athenagoras, Plea for the Christians 30; Tertullian, To the nations 2.12, both quoting S.O. 3.108–113 (in Latin in Tertullian’s case). For fuller documentation of ancient Christian citations of the Sibyls and the Sibylline oracles, see Parke 1988: 152–173.

But Lactantius is the most influential case. His works contain around 40 quotations from Sibylline oracles 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8. And one passage has an especially condensed cluster of sibylline references. In Divine institutes 1.6, Lactantius

• (1.6.7–12) reports Varro’s canon of ten Sibyls (see Part 1);
• (1.6.10–11) tells the fable of how the Sibylline books were sold to king Tarquin (see Part 2);
• (1.6.13) claims that each of the poems was written by one of Varro’s Sibyls, except that there is no poem by the Cumaean Sibyl because the Romans keep her books secret;
• (1.6.13) paraphrases S.O. 3.808–813;
• (1.6.15) quotes the Greek text of S.O. fr. 1.7, fr. 3.3–5, and fr. 1.15–16, apparently implying that they are also from the Erythraian Sibyl (i.e. they were originally part of S.O. 3);
• (1.6.16) quotes S.O. 8.377, stating that it’s from a separate poem.

From this, we know Lactantius’ copy contained nine poems: he attributes the poems he knows to the Sibyls in Varro’s canon of ten, except for the Cumaean Sibyl. We also know it contained S.O. 3 through 8, so if it wasn’t an exemplar of the first collection described above, it was closely related to it. So it seems likely that Lactantius’ copy consisted of S.O. 1 to 8 (that is, seven poems) plus two further lost poems; that it had a fuller text of S.O. 3; and that one of the extra poems in his copy was the source of the fragment in S.O. 3.1–92.

See note above on the relation of fragments 1–3 to S.O. 3. Collins thinks fragments 1–3 come from a poem that once existed between S.O. 2 and 3, Buitenwerf things they come from S.O. 3: it depends on how you read the phrasing when Lactantius quotes from them. Collins thinks Lactantius may also have known S.O. 2, and that Div. inst. 7.15.10 paraphrases S.O. 2.21–22.

So Lactantius is the most powerful and direct reason that the collections came to be known as ‘sibylline’.

He’s also the first victim of a clump of misperceptions that have affected many people since then — the idea that the Sibylline oracles poems are genuinely related to Varro’s Sibyls; the idea that they’re derived from or related to the Roman Sibylline books. That confusion sets the tone for a lot of what we’ll see in Part 4, on developments in the Renaissance.

In recent scholarship, though — or most of it — it’s understood that the links between these things are only apparent links. The Sibylline oracles are first and foremost Jewish-Christian apocalyptic literature. They draw some motifs from pagan sibylline traditions, but their roots lie much more in 3rd–2nd century BCE Jewish apocalyptic literature, like Daniel and Enoch, than in the Roman Sibylline books.

References

• Buitenwerf, R. 2003. Book III of the Sibylline oracles and its social setting. Leiden.
• Collins, J. J. 1983. ‘Sibylline oracles.’ In: Charlesworth, J. H. (ed.) The Old Testament pseudepigrapha, vol. 1. New York. 317–472. [Internet Archive]
• Geffcken, J. 1902. Die Oracula Sibyllina. Die griechischen christlichen Schriftsteller. Leipzig. [Internet Archive]
• Lightfoot, J. L. 2007. The Sibylline oracles. With introduction, translation, and commentary on the first and second books. Oxford.
• Parke, H. W. 1988. Sibyls and sibylline prophecy in classical antiquity. London/New York.

Sibyls and Sibylline oracles. 2. The Sibylline books

1. Sibyls | 2. Sibylline books | 3. Sibylline oracles | 4. The Renaissance

Once upon a time, in early Rome, a mysterious old woman came to king Tarquin to sell him a collection of books.

By the 1st century BCE the woman in the story was identified as the Cumaean Sibyl. We don’t know if that was always the case. But, based on that identification, the books were called the Sibyllini libri (Sibylline books) or Sibyllina oracula (Sibylline oracles). For clarity I’ll consistently call them the ‘Sibylline books’, as I explained in Part 1.

19th century illustration of the Capitoline and temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus in the Republican period. (Source: Friedrich Polack, Geschichtsbilder aus der allgemeinen und vaterländischen Geschichte, 1903 edition, fig. 61)

The story is a fable, but the books were real. Dionysios says they were held in a stone chest in the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus and curated by a body of priests — the decemviri sacris faciundis, ‘ten men appointed for sacred rites’.

There was a fire in 83 BCE, and the books were destroyed. A new temple was built. The Romans had new books made, and Sulla expanded the priests to fifteen — the quindecimviri. In 28 BCE the replacement books were rehoused in the newly built temple of Palatine Apollo. They continued to be used for several more centuries.

The Sibylline books weren’t primarily books of predictions: they were instructions for rituals, which also mentioned predictions in passing. The idea seems to have been that, when required, priests might choose a ritual from the books, then perform that ritual, to ensure purity, or ward off evil. Some extracts were made public, but a complete text wasn’t widely known.

The sale of the books

The most famous thing about the books is the story of how they were sold. Every version of the fable goes back to Varro’s book Antiquitates rerum divinarum, ‘Ancient matters concerning the gods’, written between 63 and 49 BCE (see Part 1).

Varro’s book is lost, but the story appears in Dionysios of Halikarnassos, who came to Rome around 30 BCE, and Dionysios attributes the story to Varro. Somewhat different versions appear in Aulus Gellius, Lactantius, and shorter allusions elsewhere.

Dionysios of Halikarnassos 4.62 (citing Varro); Aulus Gellius 1.19; Lactantius, Institutiones divinae 1.6. Further references: Varro, Antiquitates rerum divinarum frs. 56–60 ed. Cardauns; Cicero, On divination 2.(54).110–112; Pliny, Natural history 13.(27).88; Phlegon of Tralles, FGrHist 257 F 36.10; Servius, commentary on Aeneid 6.72.

Here’s the gist, skipping over some variations.

An old woman comes to visit king Tarquin, carrying nine books of oracular instructions. But she asks for an incredible price, 300 gold philippics, so Tarquin just laughs. She promptly burns three of the books, and offers the remaining six at the same price. Tarquin laughs even harder, so she burns another three, and offers the last three again, still at the same exorbitant price. This time Tarquin realises it’s no joke, and he agrees to the sale. The old woman departs and is never seen again.

How much of this is real? Well, Tarquin was a real 6th century BCE king — though the sources vary on whether it’s Tarquinius Priscus or Tarquinius Superbus — but no real records from that period ever existed. The books were real, but they weren’t anything like as old as that. And the Sibyl is purely mythical.

Just in case you’re tempted to think there’s something to the story, bear in mind: the price the old woman asks for is in 4th century BCE Macedonian coinage. 6th century Rome didn’t have coinage.

After the original Sibylline books were burned in 83 BCE, the Romans had replacements made. Allegedly these were pieced together from many places, including cities in Italy, but especially from Erythrai in Anatolia.

The beginning of the sole surviving fragment of the Sibylline books, in cod. Heidelberg. Palat. gr. 398, fol. 226r (image source: Universität Heidelberg library)

The surviving quotations

Later sources tell us that the Sibylline books were written in Greek hexameter verse, and they had acrostics: the first letters of each line also spell out hexameter verses. That’s what Cicero and Dionysios describe, and it’s also what we see in the surviving extracts.

An excerpt of Phlegon of Tralles’ On marvels (2nd century CE) quotes seventy lines from the Sibylline books. Phlegon doesn’t explain how the quotation came to be public knowledge. He treats it as a single quotation, but it’s clear that it’s actually two separate quotations, of 29 and 41 lines. The Greek text is most easily found in Jacoby’s Fragmente der griechischen Historiker.

FGrHist 257 F 36.10 = Hansen 1996: 40–43 (translation), 126–137 (commentary) = cod. Heidelberg. Palatinus. gr. 398 fols. 226r–227r.

The first quotation (lines 1–29) gives instructions for rites to honour Demeter and Persephone. A public coin collection is to be made to fund a ritual sacrifice performed by women, with roles grouped by age (girls, married women, and old women). No alcohol is to be involved in the ritual. The duty of the married women is to carry torches, suggesting that the ritual is supposed to take place at night. The girls sacrifice bulls to Demeter and cows to Persephone, and the old women place the offerings in a fire.

The second quotation (30–70) describes further rituals, this time an expiatory rite to avert evil: an ox to be sacrificed to Demeter, Persephone, and Hades; a goat to Apollo; and a cow to Hera. Again, the text specifies that the ritual must not involve alcohol. The second half of this quotation is an ex eventu ‘prediction’ of the Greek colonisation of Cumae, and the arrival of Trojans in Italy — suggesting that the speaker should be understood as either the Cumaean or Cimmerian Sibyl.

The temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus as depicted in the TV series Rome (2005–2007)

The acrostics

The text has acrostics embedded in the first letter of each line, just as Cicero and Dionysios describe. Each acrostic spells out more hexameter verse. Some letters are missing in the acrostics, implying that the quotations have some lines missing. The first acrostic, in lines 1–29, goes:

<μ>οῖραν ὀπισθομα<θῶν, τίν’ ἔ>φυ πᾶς εἰς τόπον ἐλθ<εῖν>

Everyone learns too late their fate, the place they’re destined to go

This line doesn’t appear in the text Phlegon quotes: he starts with the line corresponding to the ο of <μ>οῖραν. Traditionally scholars have thought the acrostic should be understood as line 1, so that μοῖραν provides its own first letter (Hansen 1996: 129–130). It’s grammatically possible for the acrostic to act as line 1, but I have doubts: it isn’t how Cicero describes the acrostics (On divination 2.(54).112), and it isn’t what we see in the second quotation.

There, the first letters of each line are provided by lines that Phlegon quotes (though there are letters missing elsewhere):

ἵππωι ἀγαλλόμενος, πάλιν αὖ <κα>κὸν εἰς νέον ἥξει
αὐτά<ρ>. . .

Exulting in his horse, he will come back to a new evil,
then . . .

Lines 59 and 60 have to be swapped around to make the νε of νέον.

For now, at least, I’ll entertain the possibility that there’s a line missing for the μ of <μ>οῖραν. So the quoted text and the missing lines are as follows, using Jacoby’s line numbers (and my additions in parentheses). Quotation 1:

• line 1a: the first acrostic
• (line 1b: a missing line corresponding to μ in the first acrostic?)
• 1–13, as quoted by Phlegon
• 13a–g: seven lines missing, corresponding to the missing -θωντινε- in the first acrostic
• 14–29, as quoted
• 29a–c: three lines missing, corresponding to -ειν in the first acrostic

And quotation 2:

• (lines 29d–e: the second acrostic; Jacoby prints it only in the critical apparatus)
• lines 30–52, as quoted
• 52a–b: two lines missing, corresponding to κα- in the second acrostic
• 53–70, as quoted
• an unknown number of lines missing, starting with the ρ of αὐτά<ρ>

Which Sibylline books?

Phlegon says the quotation comes from an occasion in 125 BCE when the senate commanded the hieromnēmones — ‘rite officials’, presumably the decemviri — to consult the Sibylline books on the occasion of the birth of an intersex baby (androgynos). If that’s right, the quotation is from the pre-83 BCE books.

Modern scholars have taken Phlegon at his word. But their focus has been on showing that the quotation is close to 125 BCE because it’s much later than the Roman regal period. It used to need argument to show that it’s Hellenistic. That isn’t a matter for debate these days.

Diels 1890: 77–103; Parke 1988: 137–138; Hansen 1996: 126–127; McInerney 2016.

But I don’t know that there’s been any consideration of the possibility that the quotations are from the replacement books that were compiled after 83 BCE. On balance I don’t think a post-83 date is compelling. But there are good reasons to take it seriously:

• When we’re told that the books were in hexameter, that they contained acrostics, and that they were in Greek, all of that information comes from post-Varro sources.
• No source other than Phlegon claims to describe the pre-83 BCE books.
• Dionysios — who cites Varro — explicitly states that the acrostics are a feature of the replacement books, and that acrostics are a sign that a passage isn’t an ‘interpolation’.
• When Dionysios describes the compilation of the replacement books, he doesn’t claim that they replicated the originals, or that replication was even the goal.
• The quotations are very clearly not from the 6th century BCE. That’s been obvious since Diels, who dated both of them to the last decade of the 200s BCE, based on language, historical context, and metrical features. Some modern studies have considered dates as late as 83.

Just to emphasise: there are no sources telling us what the original books looked like, and there’s no real reason to assume that they looked anything like the replacement books that Varro talked about. It’s perfectly imaginable that Phlegon linked them to an incident of an intersex baby born in 125 BCE solely because lines 4–5 refer to an intersex baby.

The profile of metrical irregularities points to a date no earlier than the 200s BCE:

• 8 cases of ‘Attic’ correption (short syllable before a mute + liquid), 5× word-internal: 10 ἀθροίσας, 34 πάτραι, 44 ἴδρις, 51 πατρίοισι, 56 πατρίοισι; 3× at word-boundary: 48 Παιήονα κρᾶτα, 54 Κυμαίδα πρόφρονες, 68 ὔμμι χρόνος
• 1 violation of Meyer’s First Law (avoidance of a word starting in beats 1–2 and ending in beat 4a or 4b): 33
• 7 violations of Meyer’s Second Law (avoidance of a word with the rhythm ⏑ – in beats 4b–5): 29, 40, 52, 54, 56, 63, 65
• 5 violations of Meyer’s Third Law (avoidance of a word/phrase with the rhythm ⏕ – ⏕ – in beats 6–9): 1a, 27, 36, 41, 66
• 2 violations of Hermann’s Bridge (avoidance of a word/phrase with the rhythm ⏑ – ⏕ – × at line-end, i.e. in beats 8b–12): 41, 51
• 1 violation of Varro’s Bridge (avoidance of a word ending in beat 6 unless it is a monosyllable – or disyllable ⏑⏑): 32
• 1 violation of Tiedke-Meyer’s Law (avoidance of a word/phrase with the rhythm – ⏕ – in beats 7–9): 44
• (no violations of Wernicke’s Law)

I omit irregularities involving a word boundary preceded by a monosyllable, and those involving a word boundary followed by an enclitic.

A closer look at Attic correption shows that the rate of lengthening before mute + liquid consonant clusters is relatively high at word boundaries (16.7%), but considerably lower than most other poets within a word (50.0%). I haven’t been able to track down figures for hexameter poets, but among elegiac poets the closest fit is Mnasalkes (3rd century BCE).

For figures on the incidence of word-initial and word-internal Attic correption in elegiac poets see Slings 1993.

This profile of metrical irregularities would be as unsurprising in a 1st century BCE poet as in the 3rd century. So I think a more compelling fact pointing to a slightly earlier date is the use of iota adscript. I don’t mean iota subscripts in the Phlegon manuscript — that’s 9th century CE — but in the acrostics: the second acrostic depends on iota adscript for its first word, ἵππωι.

That still isn’t conclusive, but it does create a weak presumption in favour of a pre-83 BCE date. Prior to 200 BCE, extant papyri are consistent about including the iota in ωι, ηι, and ᾱι; later, they start to be irregular. So Phlegon’s quotation looks like something dating to the 3rd or 2nd century BCE.

The evidence is compatible with a post-83 BCE date, but I don’t see an orthographic or metrical reason to prefer a post-83 BCE date. For the record I’d quite like to assign a later date! But the evidence isn’t enough to overturn Phlegon’s statement that the quotations were used in 125 BCE.

References

• Cardauns, B. 1976. M. Terentius Varro. Antiquitates rerum divinarum. Teil I: die Fragmente. Wiesbaden.
• Diels, H. 1890. Sibyllinische Blätter. Berlin. [Internet Archive]
• Hansen, W. 1996. Phlegon of Tralles’ Book of marvels. Exeter.
• McInerney, J. 2016. ‘Phlegon of Tralles (257).’ In: Worthington, I. (ed.) New Jacoby. BNJ 257.
• Parke, H. W. 1988. Sibyls and sibylline prophecy in classical antiquity. London/New York.
• Slings, S. R. 1993. ‘Hermesianax and the Tattoo Elegy (P.Brux. inv. E 8934 and P.Sorb. inv. 2254).’ Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 98: 29-37. [JSTOR]

Sibyls and Sibylline oracles. 1. The Sibyls

1. Sibyls | 2. Sibylline books | 3. Sibylline oracles | 4. The Renaissance

The Sistine Chapel ceiling at the Vatican has paintings of seven ancient Hebrew prophets, but also of five Sibyls — non-Christian prophetic figures. How and why did pagan prophets come to have such a place of honour in the centre of western Christianity?

Central part of the Sistine Chapel ceiling (Michelangelo, 1508–1512)

The full answer is surprisingly long. We have to consider genres of ancient Greek poetry; Roman myth and ritual; ancient Jewish and Christian poems about the end of the world; and also music by a 16th century Dutch composer.

The short answer

An answer that focuses just on the Sistine Chapel looks like this. A 4th century Christian writer, Lactantius, wrote about a canon of ten Sibyls: ancient seers lost in the mists of time. They were pagan, Lactantius says, but they accurately predicted the coming of Christ, so you could say they were ‘virtuous pagans’.

Lactantius’ virtuous Sibyls became influential in 15th century Italy, the so-called Quattrocento, around the time of the introduction of the printing press. They appeared in many artworks and books: they’re a major feature of the floor decorations in Siena Cathedral, for example (1480s). They were a well established motif by the time Michelangelo came to his own fresco painting in the first decade of the 1500s. This is why he included Sibyls alongside Hebrew prophets: they were all considered to be pre-Christian prophets of Christ.

And if that’s all you came here for, great! You’re done now. But there’s a lot more to it ...

The start of a longer answer

We have to distinguish four distinct meanings of ‘Sibyls’. A difficulty with Sibylline things is that when people talk about any of these four meanings, they tend to mix them up. One is just a list of names; one refers to a group of texts that is now lost; two of them refer to real texts that still exist today.

1. The Sibyls themselves: originally there was one mythical woman named Sibylla, but more Sibyls appeared as time went on. In the 1st century BCE Varro drew up a canon of ten Sibyls: the Erythraian Sibyl, the Persian Sibyl, the Cumaean Sibyl, and so on.
2. The Sibylline books. These were real sacred texts in pagan Rome, but are now lost except for two long quotations. They were used for rituals by an important body of priests, the decemviri, or later the quindecimviri.
3. The Sibylline oracles. These texts still exist today, but they’re not pagan. They’re two collections of Jewish and Christian poems, ranging from the 1st century BCE to the 7th century CE, on a range of religious themes, in ancient Greek hexameter verse.
4. The prophetiae Sibyllarum (‘prophecies of the Sibyls’). This is a set of twelve neo-Latin epigrams written in the Sibyls’ wave of popularity in the Quattrocento, possibly for a theatrical production. They’d be forgotten today if not for a stunning musical setting by Roland de Lassus, for an unaccompanied four-part choir (ca. 1558).

There’s some overlap, so for clarity I’ll consistently use the labels in bold.

Lactantius mixed up the first three meanings. He had a copy of nine of the Sibylline oracles (the Jewish and Christian poems); he thought they must be the same thing as the Sibylline books (the Roman ritual texts); and he attributed each poem to one of the Sibyls in Varro’s canon. This is how he came to the conclusion that the ‘real’ Sibyls genuinely foretold the coming of Christ.

Modern scholars sometimes make similar mistakes. But in terms of origins, these four meanings are quite distinct.

The Erythraian Sibyl as she appears on the pavimento of Siena Cathedral (ca. 1480)

1. The ten Sibyls (or one, or three, or eleven)

Once upon a time, in sixth century BCE Greece, there was a genre of oracular poems that dealt with things like directions on performing rituals, enigmatic animal imagery, and foretelling the future. These are the so-called ‘oracle collectors’, or chresmologoi (χρησμολόγοι).

The poems were real, but the oracle collectors were fictional personas. Real poets would adopt a persona, ‘becoming’ Abaris or Orpheus or Epimenides, and incorporate the character and their fictional biography into real poems. Think of them as stage acts, a bit like Ziggy Stardust or Slim Shady. Except a persona wasn’t the personal property of a specific real poet: different poets in different periods could ‘be’ Orpheus or Linos. We hear of one poet, Onomakritos, getting into trouble for adopting the persona of Mousaios. The personas were both men and women — men like Bakis, Epimenides, and Euklos; women like Phemonoe, Boio, and Sibylla.

Herodotos 7.6. Herodotos doesn’t understand that Onomakritos is taking on the role of Mousaios: he represents him as adding an interpolation into the text of Mousaios.

That is, ‘Sibylla’ started out as a specific person. A fictional person, but still, a single individual. References to Sibylla — as a name, not ‘the’ Sibyl — appear in Herakleitos (500s BCE), Aristophanes (400s), and Plato (300s).

But a few decades after Plato, Philitas of Kos wrote that there were three Sibyls: one from Delphi (central Greece), one from Erythrai (East Ionia, in Anatolia), and one from Sardeis (Lydia).

There were three Sibyls. One of them was Apollo’s sister, as she says in her own poem. The second was the Erythraian. The third was from Sardeis. In the same way there were three Bakises: one from Eleon in Boiotia, one Athenian, and one Arkadian.

From this point on, Sibylla was no longer a specific person. Instead, Sibyls were a class of prophetic women.

Herakleitos, 22 B 92 Diels-Kranz (= Plutarch, Moralia 397a); Aristophanes, Knights 61, Peace 1095, 1115–1116; Plato, Phaidros 244b; (pseudo-?)Plato, Theages 124d; Philitas of Kos reported in schol. Aristophanes, Birds 962 (cited as ‘Philetas of Ephesos’).

The next we hear of Sibyls is in the 1st century BCE. At some point between 64 and 49 BCE, the great Roman scholar Varro wrote a book called Ancient matters concerning the gods (Antiquitates rerum divinarum). The text is lost, but a few hundred fragments survive.

Edition: Cardauns 1976. For the date: Varro dedicated the book to Julius Caesar as pontifex maximus: so it is later than Caesar’s appointment to that role in 64 BCE, and most likely before his appointment as dictator and the outbreak of civil war in 49 BCE.

Fragments 56a–60 deal with a canon of ten Sibyls, distinguished by where they were based. Varro’s interest wasn’t purely antiquarian: he was writing not long after the loss of the so-called ‘Sibylline books’ in a fire in 83 BCE — we’ll come back to them in Part 2 — and the Romans farmed out the job of replacing the burnt books to a number of oracular institutions all over the place.

In that context, it makes sense that a canon of Sibyls would be quite important to real religious practice. It also explains why Varro’s canon is organised by where each Sibyl was based. Varro cited his sources too — though the sources are all lost, just like Varro’s own book, and our source doesn’t repeat all of Varro’s citations.

The fact that he cited a different source for each Sibyl indicates that they each had a distinct backstory — they started out as independent characters. They weren’t all named ‘Sibylla’: Varro reports personal names for several of them, and we hear of other names elsewhere. So Varro says the Cumaean Sibyl was named either Amaltheia, Herophile, or Demophile; another list of the ten calls her Taraxandra, Vergil calls her Deiphobe, pseudo-Aristotle calls her Melankraira. Take your pick.

Several later sources report Varro’s canon of ten Sibyls. The following is a synopsis.

1. Persian Sibyl (or Chaldaian, or in two lists, Hebrew); recorded by Nikanor (= FGrHist 146 F 1b). Most reports (not Lactantius) give her name as Sambethe.
2. Libyan Sibyl; mentioned in the prologue of Euripides’ play Lamia (= play description w/o no. ed. Kannicht). In this usage, ‘Libya’ refers to the whole of the Maghreb from Morocco to modern Libya.
3. Delphic Sibyl; recorded by the Stoic philosopher Chrysippos in his book On Divination (= Stoicorum veterum fragmenta ii.1216).
4. Cimmerian Sibyl (in Italy); recorded in Naevius’ Punic War (= fr. 17 ed. Warmington) and Calpurnius Piso’s Annals (= FRomHist 9 F 2). ‘Cimmerian’ in this context means a priestly group attached to the nekyomanteion of Lake Avernus in Campania, near Cumae. We don’t know whether Varro imagined this to imply a connection to the Cumaean Sibyl. The Cimmerian Sibyl is stated to be the mother of Evander in two lists.
5. Erythraian Sibyl (in Asia Minor); recorded by Apollodoros of Erythrai (= FGrHist 422 F 1).
6. Samian Sibyl; named Phoito (spelled Phyto in most sources, but Phoito is the older spelling: see Tibullus 2.5.68. Note that these spellings were homophonous by the 1st century BCE); recorded by Eratosthenes (= FGrHist 241 F 26a).
7. Cumaean Sibyl (in Italy); named either Amaltheia (or Amalthia), Herophile (or Hierophile), Demophile (only in Lactantius), or Taraxandra; alternatively Deiphobe (Vergil) or Melankraira (ps.-Aristotle). This is reputedly the Sibyl that sold the Sibylline books to the king of Rome (see Part 2).
8. Hellespontian Sibyl (or Gergithian); recorded by Herakleides of Pontos (= fr. 131a ed. Wehrli). She allegedly lived at the time of Solon and Cyrus.
9. Phrygian Sibyl.
10. Tiburtine Sibyl (at Tibur, now Tivoli, in Italy); named Albunea or Abounaia.

The lists: Lactantius, Institutiones divinae 1.6.7–12 (= Varro, Antiquitates rerum divinarum fr. 56a ed. Cardauns); Souda σ.361; Sibylline oracles prolegomena 32–50 ed. Geffcken; schol. Plato Phaidros 244b; Theosophia 3.A.1.3 ed. Beatrice (≈ Tubingensis epitome 75–77 ed. Erbse); John Lydus, De mensibus 4.47.3 (Lydus adds an eleventh Judaean Sibyl, named Chaldis). Various Souda articles deal with individual Sibyls or alternative lists: β.354 (Delphic and Chaldaian); γ.355 (Erythraian, Sicilian, Leukanian, Sardinian, Gergithian, Rhodian, Libyan, and Samian); ε.357 (Kolophonian, apparently identified with Herophile in Pausanias 10.12.5); ζ.358 (Thessalian, named Manto, another famous chresmologic persona); η.359 (Phrygian, named Sarysis, Kassandra, or Taraxandra); and θ.360 (Cumaean and Thesprotian). Cf. also Clement of Alexandria, Stromateis 1.21.108.1–3, referring to Phrygian/Delphic, Erythraian, Egyptian, and Italian Sibyls (the first two = Herakleides of Pontos fr. 130 ed. Wehrli); and 1.21.132.3, with a list of nine: Samian Sibyl, Kolophonian Sibyl, Cumaean Sibyl, Erythraian Sibyl, Phyto, Taraxandra, Macedonian Sibyl, Thessalian Sibyl, Thesprotian Sibyl. Pseudo-Aristotle, Mirabilia 838a,5–10, states that Sibylla (or ‘the’ Sibyl?) was a chresmologos at Cumae, and that she was also called Melankraira; pseudo-Aristotle, Problemata 954a,34–38 refers to ‘Bakises’ and ‘Sibyls’ collectively.

If you read all of the note in the textbox above, you’ll see that there’s a mass of material: it isn’t very consistent, and over time there were major shifts in how people described the Sibyls.

One important thing to emphasise is that there are no stories or myths about the Sibyls collectively. A couple of them have stories about them. The Cumaean Sibyl is important in the origin story of the Sibylline books (see Part 2); some like Phoito have an independent existence to an extent.

The confusion of names probably comes from attempts to harmonise multiple disparate traditions. The separate listing of the Cimmerian and Cumaean Sibyls is always going to be a bit puzzling, given that they’re both based at Cumae.

One source, Pausanias (10.12.1–6), tries to resolve some of the multiplicity of Sibyls by identifying Herophile as the Sibyl, and saying that she moved around — from Samos to Kolophon, Delos, Delphi, and the Troad — and that Erythrai also laid claim to her. As a result, in Pausanias, Herophile accounts for at least four of Varro’s Sibyls (Samian, Delphic, Hellespontian or Phrygian, and Erythraian).

The only ones that seem to have an irresolvably separate existence are the Persian, Libyan, and Tiburtine Sibyls — and there are probably sources out there that I haven’t found who identify them with someone else. The Tiburtine Sibyl seems to be the safest: her name looks suspiciously Latin — Abunaea or Albunea or something of the sort — which tends to shield her from the harmonising we see in Greek-language sources.

In Part 2 we’ll turn to the Sibylline books, and what’s known about them. In the meantime, for further reading on chresmologoi and the Sibyls, Parke’s (1988) book on Sibyls is excellent (if a bit overwhelming).

References

• Beatrice, P. F. 2001. Anonymi monophysitae Theosophia. An attempt at reconstruction. Leiden.
• Cardauns, B. 1976. M. Terentius Varro. Antiquitates rerum divinarum. Teil I: die Fragmente. Wiesbaden.
• Diels, H.; Kranz, W. 1960 [1903]. Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (6th ed.), 3 vols. Berlin. [Internet Archive]
• Geffcken, J. 1902. Die oracula Sibyllina. Leipzig. [Internet Archive]
• Parke, H. W. 1988. Sibyls and sibylline prophecy in classical antiquity. London/New York.
• Warmington, E. H. 1936. Remains of old Latin, vol. 2. Cambridge (MA). [Internet Archive]
• Wehrli, F. 1953. Die Schule von Aristoteles. Texte und Kommentar. Herakleides Pontikos. Basel.

Gospel citations of scripture

A catalogue of citations of scripture in the canonical Christian gospels, by way of a note to myself. Some caveats, terms, and conditions:

1. The gospels don’t quote the Hebrew Bible. They quote Greek texts. They don’t exactly quote the Septuagint either, because there were multiple ‘Septuagint’ recensions, but we can call it ‘Septuagint’ so long as we’re clear that it’s a Septuagint and not the Septuagint.
2. There was no Bible at the time. Just lots of texts. Some of them were considered sacred or sacred-ish, but there was no canon. That’s why New Testament authors are happy to quote texts like Enoch, 1 Maccabees, and the Psalms of Solomon, which are omitted in some modern canons.
3. Only citations, not echoes. You can’t enumerate or quantify echoes of every kind: I’m only listing places where the texts directly quote older texts, or where they explicitly state that they’re citing an older text.

An illustration, to show why we can’t catalogue or count inexplicit echoes. In Luke 2.22–24, Joseph and Mary present Jesus at the Temple. The narrator makes it sound like this is a well established unified custom, but it’s nothing of the kind. In fact it’s a mash-up. The author grabs three unrelated scriptural passages, and presses the purée button. The sources are: Hannah dedicating Samuel (1 Samuel 1.22–28); the offering of two turtle-doves as part of a ritual purification (Leviticus 12.2–8); and the consecration of first-born animals and children (Exodus 13.11–14). Is this one citation or three citations? None, of course: the passage doesn’t mention any of these three passages, it just echoes them.

That’s why we’re not counting echoes. The list below is just the explicit citations.

Key:

• LXX : Septuagint
• Bold type : passage with direct quotation or explicit citation
• ^Q : quotation, either verbatim or approximate
• ^Q_M : misquotation with major divergence from source
• ^C : citation of named source
• ^C_M : misattributed citation — a source is named, but incorrectly
• ^G : generic citation of unnamed ‘prophet’ or ‘writings’
• small italics : no LXX citation/quotation, but parallel to another gospel which does have a citation
• MT : Masoretic Text (Hebrew Bible), where different from LXX

LXX passage cited	Matthew	Mark	Luke	John
Isaiah 7.14	1.22–23QG		2.1–7
Micah 5.1 + 2 Kingdoms 5.2 (MT 2 Samuel 5.2)	2.5–6QMG		2.8–20
Hosea 11.1	2.15QG
?Judges 16.17 ?Isaiah 4.3	2.23G		2.39–40
Exodus 13.12 (≈ Exodus 13.2)			2.23G (2.24 goes on to allude to Lev 5.11, 12.8)
Malachi 3.1	11.10QG	1.2QCM (joined to following)	7.27QG
Isaiah 40.3–5	3.3QC	1.3QC	3.4–6QC
Deuteronomy 8.3	4.4QG		4.4QG
Psalm 90.11–12 (MT 91.11–12)	4.5–6QG		4.9–11QG
Deuteronomy 6.16	4.7QG		4.12QG
Deuteronomy 6.13	4.10QG		4.8QG
Isaiah 8.23–9.1	4.13–16QC	1.14	4.14	4.43
Isaiah 61.1 + 58.6 + 61.2			4.17–21QC
Isaiah 53.4	8.17QC (MT only)	1.32–34	4.40–41
Isaiah 42.1–4	12.17–21QC	3.7–12	6.17–19
‘it is written’ (≈ MT Psalm 78.24, Exodus 16.4–5)				6.31G
Isaiah 54.13				6.45QG
Deuteronomy 19.15				6.45QG
Isaiah 6.9–10	13.14–15QC	4.10–12Q		12.39–41QC
Psalm 77.2 (MT 78.2)	13.35QG	4.34
Isaiah 29.13		7.6–7QC (LXX only)
‘as it is written’	11.14	9.13G
unnamed ‘prophets’	20.17–19	10.32–34	18.31G
Isaiah 53.12		15.28 (spurious verse)	22.37G
Isaiah 62.11 + Zechariah 9.9	21.4–5QMG (LXX only)	11.1–7	19.29–35	12.14–15QG
Psalm of Solomon 7.1 (≈ Psalm 34.19, 68.5 / MT 35.19, 69.5)				15.24–25QG
Isaiah 56.7 + Jeremiah 7.11	21.13QG	11.17QG	19.46QG
Psalm 8.3	21.16QG (LXX only)
unnamed ‘writings’ (e.g. Enoch 104.4–6)	22.29–30G
Daniel 9.27 and/or 1 Maccabees 1.54	24.15–16QC (Daniel)	13.14Q	21.20
Hosea 9.7 (cf. Isaiah 63.4, Jeremiah 5.29)			21.22QG
Zechariah 13.7	26.31QMG	14.27QMG
unnamed ‘writings’	26.56G	14.49G	22.47–53	18.2–12
Zechariah 11.12–13	27.5–10QCM
Psalm 68.22 (MT 69.21)	27.34Q (one word)	15.23		19.28–29QG (one word)
Psalm 21.2 / MT 22.1	27.46Q (Aramaic only)	15.34Q (Aramaic only)
Psalm 30.6 (MT 31.5)	27.50	15.37	23.46Q (LXX only)	19.30
unnamed prophets, psalms			24.44G
?Hosea 6.2			24.46–47QG

Notes

1. Matthew cites scripture and names his sources more than the other gospels. There are 25 quotations/citations in Matthew, almost twice as many as in the runner-up, Luke. Perhaps that’s one reason why Papias thought Matthew was originally written in Hebrew (it wasn’t), and why Matthew was imagined in antiquity to be the earliest of the canonical gospels (it isn’t). The nativity story is especially densely packed with quotations; also notable is the string of unattributed quotations from Psalm 90 and Deuteronomy 6–8 in Satan’s testing of Jesus in Matthew 4 (largely copied in Luke 4).

2. Isaiah is the only scriptural source regularly mentioned by name. Isaiah is cited by name 6× in Matthew, 2× Mark, 2× Luke, 1× John. Two other sources get isolated citations: (1) A reference to Daniel in Matthew 24.15; but the text is a little odd (see the next point). (2) Two references to Jeremiah in Matthew 2.17 and 27.9; of these, the latter is a misattribution — the quotation is actually Zechariah.

3. The citation of Daniel in Matthew 24.15. The source for this quotation would be ambiguous, if not for the explicit citation of Daniel. The form used, βδέλυγμα τῆς ἐρημώσεως (‘sacrilege of desolation’), matches 1 Maccabees 1.54; Daniel uses the plural ἐρημώσεων (‘sacrilege of desolations’). And it turns out textual support for the citation of Daniel is less consistent than we might prefer. The modern text διὰ Δανιὴλ τοῦ προφήτου is the reading in the codex Vaticanus (δανιηλ) and the codex Bezae (δανιηλου), and the Latin version of Origen’s Commentary on Matthew includes the Daniel reference. However, the Sinaiticus instead has διὰ ιηλ τοῦ προφήτου, ‘through the prophet (of) Israel’, a fact omitted in the Nestle-Aland apparatus: δαν appears as a supplement above the line in a second hand. The part of Matthew 24.15 that cites Daniel is not extant in any ancient papyri, the codex Alexandrinus, or the Ephrem palimpsest.

Some factors make me hesitate over the Daniel attribution: (1) ιηλ in the Sinaiticus; (2) the fact that the wording is that of 1 Maccabees; (3) the fact that the gospels do not usually cite sources other than Isaiah by name.

LXX Daniel’s plural ἐρημώσεων is presumably intended to convery the MT reading šiqqūṣîm mešōmêm, a plural noun with a singular participle. The Sinaiticus reading ιηλ would most normally be read as a nomen sacrum for Ἰσραήλ (‘the prophet (of) Israel’). I wonder if it could be meant to invoke the anonymous author of 1 Maccabees. The Hebrew title of 1 Maccabees is not certainly known; Eusebius gives it as Σαρβηθ Σαβαναιελ (Ecclesiastical history 6.25).

By itself this isn’t enough to overturn the combined testimony of the Vaticanus and the Bezae. At the same time, the Sinaiticus reading ιηλ doesn’t look like a mistake. There’s something odd going on behind the scenes here.

4. Spliced quotations. In some quotations the gospels combine passages from multiple sources as if they’re a single quotation.

Sources (LXX, my translation)	Gospel (NRSVue)
Micah 5.1 (MT Micah 5.2) And you, Bethlehem, house of Ephratha: you are the least that is to be among the throngs of Judah; from you shall come forth for me someone who is to be ruler in Israel: their exoduses are of old, from ancient days. 2 Kingdoms 5.2 (MT 2 Samuel 5.2) And once upon a time, when Saul was king over us, you were the one who led Israel out and led in Israel, and the Lord said to you, ‘You shall shepherd my people Israel, and you are to be leader over Israel.’	Matthew 2.5–6 5 They told him, ‘In Bethlehem of Judea, for so it has been written by the prophet: 6 “And you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, are by no means least among the rulers of Judah; for from you shall come a ruler who is to shepherd my people Israel.”’
Malachi 3.1 See, I am sending out my messenger, and he will attend to a way ahead of me, and the Lord whom you seek will suddenly arrive in his temple, and the messenger of the covenant whom you desire. See, he is coming, says the Lord Almighty. Isaiah 40.3 A voice of one crying out in the desert: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make straight the paths of our God.’	Mark 1.2–3 As it is written in the prophet Isaiah, ‘See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way, 3 the voice of one crying out in the wilderness: “Prepare the way of the Lord; make his paths straight” ’...
Isaiah 62.11 For see, the Lord made it to be heard to the end of the earth: ‘Tell the daughter of Sion, Look, the saviour is at hand for you. He has received his payment, and his work is in his past.’ Zechariah 9.9 Rejoice greatly, daughter of Sion! Announce it, daughter of Jerusalem! Look, your king is coming to you, just and rescuing, humble and mounted on a donkey and on a young colt.	Matthew 21.4–5 This took place to fulfill what had been spoken through the prophet: 5 ‘Tell the daughter of Zion, Look, your king is coming to you, humble and mounted on a donkey, and on a colt, the foal of a donkey.’

Each of these is an egregious misquotation, even aside from the splicing. Matthew 2.6 adds in a ‘not’ that reverses the meaning of Micah 5.1 (you are by no means the least); Mark 1.2 changes the identity of the one coming behind the messenger (I am sending my messenger ahead of you).

The third is the most notorious. The Septuagint has an erroneous ‘and’ added into the text, with the result that Matthew has Jesus riding on two animals simultaneously. The Hebrew text reads:

Behold: your king is coming to you, a just savior is he, humble, and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.

Zechariah 9.9 (NABRE)

In the Hebrew, the ‘donkey’ and the ‘colt’ are a case of parallelism: one animal is mentioned twice, phrased differently. This is a standard Hebrew poetic device. But the Septuagint (and so also Matthew) misunderstands that, and treats them as two separate animals.

Mark 11.1–7, Luke 19.29–35, and John 12.12–15 have Jesus riding a single colt (and John quotes a version of Zechariah 9.9, more correctly than Matthew’s version), so the oddity here comes solely from the Greek text used by Matthew. (The Marcionic Evangelion omitted this episode altogether.)

5. Quotations of Isaiah 40.3. This is one of the handful of scriptural passages that get quoted in all three synoptic gospels. As noted above, Mark joins it to Malachi 3.1 and attributes the whole thing to Isaiah. Matthew and Luke do use the Malachi quotation as well, but in completely separate contexts: evidently they corrected Mark, aware that the attribution to Isaiah was wrong.

(For reference, the scriptural passages that do appear in all three synoptics are: Malachi 3.1; Isaiah 40.3; Isaiah 56.7 + Jeremiah 7.11. Also notable is Isaiah 6.9–10, which appears in Mark, Matthew and John, but not Luke.)

Luke goes further, though, and provides a longer Isaiah quotation. Here’s how it lines up against the LXX text that we have today; the highlighting indicates places where the match is exact.

LXX Isaiah 40.3–5	Luke 3.4–6
3 φωνὴ βοῶντος ἐν τῇ ἐρήμῳ ῾Ετοιμάσατε τὴν ὁδὸν κυρίου, εὐθείας ποιεῖτε τὰς τρίβους τοῦ θεοῦ ἡμῶν·	4 ὡς γέγραπται ἐν βίβλῳ λόγων Ἡσαΐου τοῦ προφήτου· φωνὴ βοῶντος ἐν τῇ ἐρήμῳ ἑτοιμάσατε τὴν ὁδὸν κυρίου, εὐθείας ποιεῖτε τὰς τρίβους αὐτοῦ.
4 πᾶσα φάραγξ πληρωθήσεται καὶ πᾶν ὄρος καὶ βουνὸς ταπεινωθήσεται, καὶ ἔσται πάντα τὰ σκολιὰ εἰς εὐθεῖαν καὶ ἡ τραχεῖα εἰς πεδία·	5 πᾶσα φάραγξ πληρωθήσεται καὶ πᾶν ὄρος καὶ βουνὸς ταπεινωθήσεται· καὶ ἔσται τὰ σκολιὰ εἰς εὐθείαν καὶ αἱ τραχεῖαι εἰς ὁδοὺς λείας·
5 καὶ ὀφθήσεται ἡ δόξα κυρίου, καὶ ὄψεται πᾶσα σὰρξ τὸ σωτήριον τοῦ θεοῦ· ὅτι κύριος ἐλάλησεν.	6 καὶ ὄψεται πᾶσα σὰρξ τὸ σωτήριον τοῦ θεοῦ.

Notably, Luke 3.4 preserves αὐτοῦ from Mark 1.3: that word doesn’t appear in our LXX text of Isaiah 40.3.

6. Luke and the Evangelion. How many of Luke’s citations appeared in the Evangelion, the gospel that appeared in Marcion’s canon?

Background: the Evangelion and Luke are variant recensions of one another. The Evangelion was lost in antiquity, but is moderately well-attested because of its inclusion in Marcion’s canon. Marcion made the earliest effort to compile a canon of Christian texts in the early second century, and included ten Pauline letters and the Evangelion. Later anti-Marcionite writers claimed polemically that Marcion concocted the Evangelion by trimming bits out of Luke. However, we now know that Marcion compiled the texts, he didn’t write them; and in recent years it’s become standard to conclude that it was exactly the other way round — the Evangelion was the older recension (but not necessarily the ‘original’), and Luke is a later expanded form.

Remarkably, we know that most of Luke’s quotations/citations were not present in the Evangelion. Here’s a tabulation, primarily based on the work of Dieter T. Roth (2015: 49–78): this means some inconsistency with other recent work on the Evangelion, but Roth’s presentation of the evidence is by far the clearest currently available.

Luke	Source	Present in Evangelion?	Testimony
2.23	Exod 13.12	not present	Tertullian, Epiphanius, Origen
3.4–6	Isa 40.3–5	probably not present	Tertullian, Epiphanius
4.4, 4.8, 4.9–11, 4.12	Deut 8.3, 6.13; Ps 90.11–12; Deut 6.16	not present	Tertullian
4.17–21	Isa 61.1 + 58.6 + 61.2	unknown
7.27	Mal 3.1	present	Tertullian, Epiphanius, Adamantius Dialogue
18.31	(generic)	not present	Tertullian, Epiphanius
19.46	Isa 56.7 + Jer 7.11	not present	Tertullian, Epiphanius
21.22	Hos 9.7	not present	Tertullian, Epiphanius
22.37	Isa 62.11 + Zech 9.9	not present	Tertullian, Epiphanius
23.46	Ps 30.6	present	Tertullian, Epiphanius
24.44	generic	unknown
24.46–47	Hos 6.2	46 unknown, 47 present	Tertullian

A couple of notes on this tabulation:

• 3.4–6: see Roth 2015: 76 n. 69; Klinghardt 2021: 519–520. Roth thinks Tertullian’s comments on John the Baptist’s arrival, Against Marcion 4.11.4, implies the absence of the Johannine narrative in Luke 3; Klinghardt thinks Epiphanius’ statement, Panarion 42.11.4–6, that the genealogy and the baptism were absent implies the absence of the whole of Luke 3.1b onwards. A given scholar’s verdict on this point is likely to be linked to their view on whether the Evangelion was pre-Mark or post-Mark. If it were post-Mark, and 3.4–6 were absent, then we would have to suppose that the Evangelion copied Mark but excised the quotation, then later on Luke restored it. Conversely, my opinion is that the timeline Evangelion > Mark > Luke involves some crazy textual acrobatics; then again, no one has to take my opinion seriously.
• 22.37: it is striking that, although Luke 22.37 was definitely not present in the Evangelion, it was considered important enough to copy it and interpolate it into the text of Mark (the spurious verse Mark 15.28).

7. Matthew and John. Some of John’s citations/quotations are striking for the fact that they have counterparts in Matthew: Mt 13.14–15 ≈ Jn 12.39–41 (both adding an explicit citation not present in Mark); Mt 21.4–5 ≈ Jn 12.14–15; Mt 27.34 ≈ Jn. 19.28–29 (both quoting just a single word). I find this supports the case that John knew Matthew.

Matthew and John are uneven in how faithfully they reproduce the older texts.

• Matthew 13.14–15 ≈ John 12.39–41. Matthew quotes the Septuagint text very exactly; John has only a few keywords in common. Both of them explicitly cite Isaiah. Mark echoes Isaiah, but only faintly, and doesn’t name the source.
• Matthew 21.4–5 ≈ John 12.14–15. This is the ‘riding on a donkey and a colt’ passage that we looked at above, where the Septuagint and Matthew distort the meaning. Mark, Luke, and John have Jesus riding on a single animal, as in the Hebrew text. Only Matthew and John include a citation of Isaiah alongside the quotation.
• Matthew 27.34 ≈ John 19.28–29. Offering a drink to Jesus on the cross: wine, bile, myrrh, and/or vinegar? This one needs some explanation.

On the last item: Mark, Matthew, and John all take different approaches to interpreting the Septuagint text of the relevant passage. In the Masoretic Text, Psalm 69.21 reads (NABRE):

they gave me poison [rōš] for my food; and for my thirst they gave me vinegar [ḥōmeṣ].

The Septuagint changes this to (my translation):

For food they gave me bile [χολή], and for my thirst they watered me with vinegar [ὄξος].

Devouring bile makes no sense, of course. That’s probably why Mark 15.23 removes ‘bile’ altogether, and replaces it with ‘wine mixed with myrrh’. That disconnects the passage from the Psalm altogether (my catalogue at the start doesn’t count Mark 15.23 as a quotation/citation).

Note. Why does Mark choose myrrh? Difficult to say. Certainly not as a painkiller, as the Oxford Annotated Bible weirdly alleges. In ancient sources wine perfumed with myrrh is normally a symbol of luxuriousness. Another possibility is to do with the medicinal use of myrrh to aid digestion and stimulate bile production.

Matthew abandons Mark’s invention and brings it back a bit closer to the Psalm: ‘wine mixed with bile [χολή]’. Bible translations traditionally obfuscate this by using ‘gall’, an archaic word for bile.

John instead fixes the problem by going back to the other unpleasant foodstuff, the ὄξος ‘vinegar’. Modern translations usually mistranslate this word, probably self-consciously, as ‘sour wine’ (e.g. ESV, NRSV, NASB) or ‘cheap wine’ (GNB; NABRE: ‘common wine’). This is very strange, given that the same translations have no hesitation in translating Psalm 69.21 ḥōmeṣ/ὄξος as ‘vinegar’. A corrected translation of John 19.21 reads:

A jar full of vinegar [ὄξος] was standing there. So they put a sponge full of the vinegar [ὄξος] on a branch of hyssop and held it to his mouth.

When the chain of mistranslations and paraphrases is already hard to work out, modern Bible translations do us no favours by actively obfuscating the relationships between the texts with inconsistent or archaic translation choices. This is one of those rare cases where the NIV (‘wine vinegar’) is more accurate than the NRSV!

References

• Klinghardt, M. 2021. The oldest gospel and the formation of the canonical gospels (2 vols.). Leuven/Paris/Bristol (CT).
• Roth, D. T. 2015. The text of Marcion’s gospel. Leiden/Boston.

Did Hesiod influence the book of Daniel?

Hesiod has races of gold, silver, bronze, heroes, and iron. The biblical book of Daniel has a statue where gold, silver, bronze, iron, and mixed iron and clay represent kingdoms.

Coincidence? I think not!

Does this mean the author(s) of Daniel knew their Hesiod? Well ... maybe.

The Seleucid king Antiochos IV, r. 175–164 BCE. Left: bust of Antiochos, Altes Museum Berlin; right: tetradrachm of Antiochos. The book of Daniel alludes to the contemporary ruler using Babylonian kings as masked language. (Sources: Wikimedia, Apollo Numismatics)

Daniel 2

King Nebuchadnezzar II has a strange dream, and only the Jewish prophet Daniel can explain it. The setting is the Babylonian Exile, in the distant past, centuries before Daniel was written. The episode is loosely modelled on Joseph and Pharaoh in Genesis 41.

You were looking, O king, and there appeared a great statue. That statue was huge, its brilliance extraordinary; it was standing before you, and its appearance was frightening. The head of that statue was of fine gold, its chest and arms of silver, its midsection and thighs of bronze, its legs of iron, its feet partly of iron and partly of clay.

Daniel 2.31–33 (NRSVue)

Then a stone strikes the statue’s feet, breaking the whole thing, and the stone grows into a mountain that fills the world.

Daniel goes on to explain that the dream predicts the rise and fall of future empires. (‘Future’ for characters in the time of the Exile, that is.) The author doesn’t name names, but they must be something like

1. gold — Babylonian empire (Nebuchadnezzar’s empire)
2. silver — Median dynasty
3. bronze — Achaemenid dynasty
4. iron — Alexander
5. iron and clay — ‘divided kingdom’ of the Ptolemies and Seleucids
6. (stone — independent Judaean kingdom — actual future, from the author’s perspective)

The original audience understood that they were living in the last phase, the ‘iron and clay’ of the divided kingdoms of the Diadochoi, and that the ‘stone’ symbolised a Jewish revolt against Seleucid rule.

Note: date of composition. Daniel consists of several discrete episodes, arranged differently in different recensions, in three languages: Aramaic (2.4–7.28), Hebrew (1.1–2.4, 8.1–12.13), and Greek (all of the above plus three further episodes corresponding to 2.24–90 and 13.1–14.42 in the Roman recension). Chapters 10–12 are securely dated to the Maccabaean revolt against Antiochos IV in the 160s BCE; Daniel scholars tend to infer that the Aramaic episodes are earlier, some time between 323 and 170 BCE. However, different episodes were certainly written at different times. The ‘stone’ destroying the kingdoms of the Diadochoi is certainly programmatic for a Judaean revolt. Therefore, like chapters 10–12, it should be dated to the 160s. For a general overview on the date and setting see Collins 1992; in more detail, essays in Collins and Flint 2001; on the Greek recensions, Munnich 2021; on the relationship between the various recensions, Bledsoe 2015; Portier-Young 2017. Scholarship on the date of the dream episode, specifically, is scarce: the essays in Collins and Flint 2001 tend to treat it as a mere appendage to the ‘four beasts’ episode in chapter 7. Portier-Young’s hypothesis for a possible relationship between versions of Daniel (adapted from Portier-Young 2017: 147).

Nebuchadnezzar’s dream envisages history as a succession of empires. The same conception reappears in several other ancient sources. This includes a roughly contemporary Jewish apocalyptic work, Sibylline oracles 3, a Greek poem usually thought to have been composed in Ptolemaic Egypt in the 2nd century BCE.

Daniel scholars call this a ‘four kingdoms’ scheme. That’s a problematic label, obviously: the dream has a succession of five materials — six, if we include the stone — which the Old Greek recension of Daniel interprets as five kingdoms. The name ‘four kingdoms’ comes from the interpretation in the Aramaic version, which mentions only four empires (2.37–43); the ‘four beasts = four kingdoms’ prophecy in Daniel 7; and a ‘four trees = four kingdoms’ prophecy in a text found at Qumran.

Elsewhere the number ‘four’ isn’t so important. I mentioned the Old Greek version, which has five kingdoms. Sibylline oracles 4, a Christian apocalyptic poem, adds the Romans as a fifth empire. Some ancient Christian interpreters of Daniel have a succession of kings, rather than empires: Tertullian describes a direct line of succession from the Achaemenid king Darius II to the Roman emperor Vespasian.

None of these parallels has the ‘succession of metals’ motif that we see in Nebuchadnezzar’s dream. For that, we need to look elsewhere.

Note. Succession of empires: Sibylline oracles 3.156–161. ‘Four kingdoms’ text: 4Q552, 4Q553, 4Q553a. Five kingdoms: Sibylline oracles 4.49–151. Tertullian’s succession of kings: Against the Jews 8. On the ‘four kingdoms’ trope see generally the essays in Perrin and Stuckenbruck 2021; on the five kingdoms in the Old Greek version of Daniel 2, see Young 2021. On Sibylline oracles 3, see Bacchi 2020: 13–20.

The setting of Daniel: reconstruction of the Ishtar Gate, Babylon, Iraq. The original (now in the Pergamonmuseum, Berlin) was restored and renovated by the historical Nebuchadnezzar in the 6th century BCE. Antipatros of Sidon counted Nebuchadnezzar’s wall among the ‘seven wonders’ of the world (Palatine anthology 9.58, 2nd/1st century BCE). (Source: Wikimedia)

Hesiod and the ‘myth of the races’

One of the oldest surviving Greek poems, the Hesiodic Works and days (ca. 700–650 BCE), lines 106–201, describes earlier races of mortals as a succession of metals. Well, mostly.

1. Race of gold: they lived ‘without cares’ or ‘wretched old age’; death came to them like sleep; the earth gave them food abundantly; they were loved by the gods.
2. Race of silver: benevolent spirits; they spent a hundred years as toddlers, then immediately became elderly; they didn’t worship the gods properly.
3. Race of bronze: strong and violent, with hands growing straight out of their shoulders; bronze weapons and armour; they were wiped out by their own violence.
4. Race of heroes: demigods (hēmitheoi) who fought wars at Thebes and Troy; they now dwell in the isles of the blessed.
5. Race of iron: they have no rest from labour and suffering; this race will come to an end when they have grey hair even at birth, when there is hatred among loved ones, and when there is no justice or respect.

Just like in Daniel, the audience know they are living in the fifth phase. The poem signals it explicitly: ‘would that I were not among the fifth men ... now is a race of iron’ (174–176). Hesiod comes across as a grouchy geezer who would say ‘get off my lawn’ as soon as look at you.

The myth of the races was influential. Successions of metallic races appear in later Greco-Roman literature in the Hellenistic poet Aratos (Phainomena 100–136, 3rd century BCE) and the Roman poet Ovid (Metamorphoses 1.89–150, 1st century BCE), with several briefer and looser imitations in other ancient authors.

The Works and days was extremely popular throughout antiquity — much more than the Hesiodic Theogony (though not as popular as the Catalogue). Aratos borrows from it heavily: not just the myth of the races, but also the concept of including a collection of lore about weather and astronomy.

So it’s perfectly feasible that the Works and days could have influenced another Hellenistic-era work, a 2nd century BCE book written in Judaea. There are catches, to be sure. The episode in Daniel is in Aramaic, not Greek.

That isn’t necessarily a problem. Many Judaeans under Seleucid rule knew Greek, and there was a thriving Greek-language Jewish literary tradition in Alexandria by the 200s BCE. More important is: are there any competing theories? — any other possible sources of influence?

Note. On the Hesiodic ‘myth of the races’ see West 1978: 172–177; Ercolani 2010: 160–166. For surveys of other Greco-Roman ‘myths of the races’ see Most 1997; Van Noorden 2015. All of these mention Daniel 2 as a comparandum.

The ‘succession of metals’ trope

The ‘succession of metals’ trope didn’t originate with Hesiod. For one thing, the race of ‘heroes’ has always stuck out like a sore thumb, wedged in among the metals. Was there an older form of the trope without that interruption?

The Works and days has many literary influences from Near Eastern poetry. It is in large part a Greek take on the genre of wisdom literature, associated with Mesopotamia, the Levant, and Anatolia. And the ‘myth of the races’ is an import too. M. L. West documents the parallels in his discussions of Anatolian and Near Eastern influences on early Greek literature (1978: 172–177; 1997: 312–319).

One bare-bones precursor appears in Babylonian god lists of the 2nd millennium BCE. The An = Anum god list (ca. 13th century BCE?) equates gods with metals:

silver = Anu
gold = Enlil
copper = Ea
tin = Ninane(?)

An = Anum, appendix F.3–6 Lambert-Winters

Note. Translation by Livingstone 1986: 182, adapted. Livingstone reads the name in the fourth line as ‘Ninazal’, but the interpretation is unclear (Lambert and Winters 2023: 338–339).

A longer list is published by Alasdair Livingstone, which also includes lead, other minerals, and plants (1986: 175–187). It seems the idea is to link the most important metals to the most important gods, and then fill in other gods by analogy, as Livingstone points out.

Ea and attendant gods: Sumerian cylinder seal, black serpentine, 32.5 x 19.5 mm, 2340–2150 BCE, and impression. (Source: Morgan Library and Museum)

Bare-bones, as I said. These lists don’t include the associated descriptions that we see in Hesiod, and they aren’t encapsulated — there’s no canon of four or five materials.

Here’s one that goes a bit deeper. First, look at Hesiod’s silver race —

In both body and mind [the silver race] were unlike the gold.
For a hundred years a child would be raised
by his dear mother, a great big toddler playing in the house ...

Works and days 129–131 (my translation)

— and then compare this snippet from the opening of the Lagash king list (18th century BCE?):

In those days a child spent a hundred years in [?nappies?],
spent a hundred years in his rearing.
He was not made to perform (any) assigned tasks.
He was small, he was feeble/stupid, he was [with] his mother.

(translation by J. A. Black, quoted by West 1997: 316)

A much later parallel — related more closely to Daniel and the Qumran ‘four kingdoms’ text than to Hesiod — is in a Zoroastrian apocalyptic work, the Bahman yašt (ca. 6th cent. CE). Zoroaster dreams of a tree, and Ahura Mazda explains it as a vision of a succession of future kingdoms:

That root of a tree which thou sawest, and those four branches, are the four periods which will come. That of gold is when I and thou converse, and King Vistâsp shall accept the religion ... And that of silver is the reign of Ardakhshir the Kayân king, and that of steel is the reign of the glorified Khûsrô son of Kêvâd, and that which was mixed with iron is the evil sovereignty of the demons with dishevelled hair of the race of Wrath ...

Bahman yašt 1 (E. W. West 1880: 192–193)

M. L. West also cites some looser parallels in the Indian Laws of Manu and the Mahābhārata.

Hesiod is the earliest source to give a full, encapsulated sequence of metals, but there’s enough to infer that the Hesiodic ‘myth’ of the races is no myth. It’s a literary device. The ‘myth of the races’ isn’t a framework for Greek myth, it’s a motif designed for apocalyptic literature.

The sequence of metals is borrowed from Near Eastern models. So there’s no particular need to imagine that Hesiod influenced the dream episode in Daniel. It’s perfectly possible that Daniel drew on other models that were still floating around the Levant in the 2nd century BCE.

Possible, but not certain. It’s also perfectly possible that the Works and days, a centrepiece of the Greek literary canon, was indeed known in 2nd century Judaea. Jewish people living in Alexandria, at least, could scarcely have avoided classic Greek literature.

The details of how Daniel was compiled is a subject of ongoing research. The most information comes from the Dead Sea scrolls, going back to the 2nd century BCE, not long after some episodes in Daniel were originally written. There are no Greek copies of Daniel among the Dead Sea scrolls. But Greek manuscripts were in circulation: the finds at Qumran Cave 7 consist entirely of Greek manuscripts, including a Hasmonean-era copy of Exodus; Nahal Hever Cave 8 had Greek copies of the minor prophets alongside Hebrew copies of other parts of the Bible. As well as that, the Old Greek recension of Daniel is thought to be early — possibly as early as the late 2nd century BCE.

It isn’t necessary to posit Hesiodic influence on the composition of Daniel 2. The rest of Daniel isn’t exactly bubbling with influence from Greek literature. But it can’t be ruled out either. After all, it isn’t as if we know of any other Aramaic- or Hebrew-language models for the ‘succession of metals’ trope. If there was Greek influence — and it’s a big ‘if’ — we can at least say it’s from Hesiod, not Aratos: Aratos’ version has no iron race.

References

• Bacchi, A. L. 2020. Uncovering Jewish creativity in Book III of the Sibylline oracles. Leiden/Boston.
• Bledsoe, A. M. D. 2015. ‘The relationship of the different editions of Daniel: a history of scholarship.’ Currents in biblical research 13: 175–190. [LMU München]
• Collins, J. J. 1992. ‘Daniel, book of.’ In: Freedman, D. N. (ed.) The Anchor Bible dictionary, vol. 2 (D–G). New York, etc. 29–37. [Internet Archive]
• Collins, J. J.; Flint, P. W. (eds.) 2001. The book of Daniel. Composition and reception, 2 vols. Leiden/Boston/Köln.
• Ercolani, A. 2010. Esiodo. Opere e giorni. Roma.
• Lambert, W. G.; Winters, R. D. 2023. An = Anum and related lists. Tübingen.
• Livingstone, A. 1986. Mystical and mythological explanatory works of Assyrian and Babylonian scholars. Oxford.
• Most, G. W. 1997. ‘Hesiod’s myth of the five (or four or three) races.’ Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society 43: 104–127. [JSTOR]
• Munnich, O. 2021. ‘Daniel, Susanna, Bel and the dragon. Old Greek and Theodotion.’ In: Salvesen, A. G.; Law, T. M. (eds.) The Oxford handbook of the Septuagint. Oxford. 291–305.
• Perrin, A.; Stuckenbruck, L. (eds.) 2021. The four kingdoms motif before and beyond the book of Daniel. Leiden/Boston. [JSTOR (open access)]
• Portier-Young, A. 2017. ‘Three books of Daniel: plurality and fluidity among the ancient versions.’ Interpretation: a journal of Bible and theology 7: 143–153. [Academia.edu]
• Van Noorden, H. 2015. Playing Hesiod. The ‘myth of the races’ in classical antiquity. Cambridge.
• West, E. W. 1880. Pahlavi texts, vol. 1. Oxford. [Internet Archive]
• West, M. L. 1978. Hesiod. Works & days. Oxford.
• —— 1997. The east face of Helicon. West Asiatic elements in Greek poetry and myth. Oxford. [Internet Archive]
• Young, I. 2021. ‘Five kingdoms, and talking beasts: some Old Greek variants in relation to Daniel’s four kingdoms.’ In: Perrin and Stuckenbruck 2021: 39–55. [JSTOR (open access)]