John C. Reeves
John C. Reeves
Blumenthal Professor of Judaic Studies and Professor of Religious Studies, Department of Religious Studies

  • Home
  • Course Materials
    • LBST 2212 Literature and Culture
      • Course Syllabus
    • RELS 1120: Bible and its Interpreters
      • Course Syllabus
    • RELS 1502 Comparative Mythology
      • Course syllabus
    • RELS 2000: Topics Courses in Religious Studies
      • Alternative Messiahs
        • Course syllabus for Alternative Messiahs
      • Bible and Qur’an
        • Course Syllabus: Bible and Qur’an
      • Building Bible
        • Course Syllabus for Building Bible
      • Course Syllabus: Elementary Biblical Hebrew I (Fall 2019)
      • Course Syllabus: Elementary Biblical Hebrew II (Spring 2019)
      • Out of This World
        • Course Syllabus: Out of This World
      • Rewriting the Book of Genesis
        • 2000 Syllabus
      • The Biblical Dark Arts
        • Biblical Dark Arts Course Syllabus
    • RELS 2104: Hebrew Scriptures/Old Testament
      • General Principles For Interpretation Of The Tanakh
      • RELS 2104: Syllabus
      • Sennacherib’s Third Campaign: The Siege of Jerusalem
      • Translation Of 1Q Genesis Apocryphon II-XXII
      • Bereshit Rabbati on Shemhazai & Azael
      • Eutychius (Sa’id b. al-Bitriq) on Genesis 6:1-4
      • Moabite Stone (KAI 181)
    • RELS 2600 Orientation to the Study of Religion
      • Course syllabus for RELS 2600
    • RELS 3000: Special Topics Courses
      • Angels and Demons in Biblical Folklore
        • Course Syllabus
        • Some Adam/Satan/Iblīs materials
      • Bible and Its Monsters
        • Course syllabus
      • Bible to Qur’ān
        • Course Syllabus: Bible to Qur’an
      • Pentateuch/Torah
        • Course Syllabus: Pentateuch/Torah
      • Rewriting the Book of Genesis
        • Course Syllabus: Rewriting the Book of Genesis
      • The Biblical Black Arts
        • Course Syllabus
      • Wrestling with Angels & Demons
        • Course syllabus for Wrestling with Angels & Demons
    • RELS 3090: Readings in Primary Texts
      • After One Year of Classical Hebrew …
      • Course Syllabi: Advanced Biblical Hebrew I
        • Syllabus Fall 2006
        • Syllabus Fall 2008
        • Syllabus Fall 2010
      • Course Syllabi: Advanced Biblical Hebrew II
        • Syllabus Spring 2007
        • Syllabus Spring 2009
        • Syllabus Spring 2011
      • Course Syllabus: Elementary Biblical Hebrew I
      • Course Syllabus: Elementary Biblical Hebrew II
    • RELS 3104: Prophecy and Prophetic Literature in Ancient Israel
      • RELS 3104: Course Syllabus
    • RELS 3107: Psalms and Wisdom Literature of Israel
      • RELS 3107: Course Syllabus
    • RELS 3122 Esoteric Traditions: Gnosis and Gnosticism
      • Course Syllabus for Gnosis and Gnosticism
    • RELS 3122 Esoteric Traditions: Jewish Secret Traditions
      • Course syllabus
    • RELS 3122 Esoteric Traditions: Thinking About Angels and Demons
      • Course syllabus for Thinking About Angels and Demons
    • RELS 4000/5000 Advanced Biblical Hebrew
    • RELS 4000/5000 Blood, Guts, and Gore
    • RELS 4000/5000 Contextualizing the Qur’an
      • Course Syllabus
    • RELS 4000/5000 Early Mythologies of Evil
      • Course Syllabus
    • RELS 4000/5000 Jewish Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha
      • Course Syllabus
    • RELS 4000/5000 Jewish Fantasy Literature
      • Course syllabus for Jewish Fantasy
    • RELS 4000/5000 Jewish Mystical Literature
      • Course Syllabus
    • RELS 4010/5010: James G. Frazer and William Robertson Smith
    • RELS 4107: Early Judaism
      • A Brief Introduction to Rabbinic Exegesis of the Bible
      • Bavli Menahot 109b
      • Midrash Tanhuma, Noah §3
      • RELS 4107: Course Syllabus
      • The Essene Hypothesis
      • Types of Midrashic Texts
      • Who Wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls?
    • RELS 4108: Medieval Judaism
      • RELS 4108: Course Syllabus
    • RELS 6000: Pluriform Multilingual Zechariah
      • Various Zechariah Legends
        • Bordeaux Pilgrim (333 CE) on the Temple Mount
        • Cave of Treasures 47.12-17
        • Mas’udi, Muruj al-dhahab
        • Protevangelium Jacobi (Syriac) 22-24
    • RELS 6000: Readings in Jewish Aramaic
      • Course syllabus for Jewish Aramaic
    • RELS 6000: Readings in Rabbinic Hebrew
      • Course Syllabus (2006-07)
      • Course Syllabus (2009-10)
    • RELS 6000: Readings in Syriac
    • RELS 6000: Readings in Ugaritic
    • RELS 6602: Seminar in the Religion of Ancient Israel
      • Course Syllabus (Spring 2009)
    • RELS 6603 Seminar in Early Judaism
      • Course Syllabus (Fall 2005)
      • Course Syllabus (Spring 2006)
      • Course Syllabus (Spring 2008)
    • RELS 6611: Qumran and its Literature
    • RELS 6615: Seminar in the Religions of Late Antiquity
      • Course Syllabus (2008)
      • Course syllabus (Spring 2015)
    • RELS 6631: Seminar in Islamic Studies
    • RELS 6651: Seminar in the History of Religions
  • Publications
    • Books
    • Articles
    • Book Reviews
    • Unpublished Lectures and Fragmenta
      • Assorted Near Eastern Apocalypses
      • Shahrastānī on Mani and Manichaeism
      • Theodore bar Konai on Mani and Manichaeism
      • Who Wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls?
      • Ya`qūbī, Ta’rīkh
  • Research Projects
    • Cave of Treasures: A New Translation and Commentary
    • Enoch from Antiquity to the Middle Ages
    • Illuminating the Afterlife of Ancient Apocryphal Jewish Literature
    • Medieval Jewish Pseudepigrapha
      • Jellinek’s Sefer Noah
      • Son of Samael
      • The Chronicles of Moses Our Teacher
    • Sefer ‘Uzza wa-‘Aza(z)el: Exploring Early Jewish Mythologies of Evil
    • Shades of Light and Darkness: Chaldean Dualism, Gnosis, and the Islamicate Milieu
    • Shahrastani’s Kitab al-Milal wa’l-Nihal On the Dualists
    • Trajectories in Near Eastern Apocalyptic
      • ’Otot ha-Mašiah (Signs of the Messiah)
      • ’Otot of R. Shimon b. Yohai
      • Aggadat ha-Mašiah
      • Aggadat R. Ishmael
      • Eldad ha-Dani beney Mosheh texts
      • Midrash Wa-yosha` (end)
      • Nistarot (Secrets of) R. Shimon b. Yohai
      • Pirqe de-R. Eliezer §30 (end)
      • Pirqe Mašiah
      • Prophecy of Zardusht
      • Pseudo-Ephrem (Syriac)
      • Responsum of Hai Gaon on Redemption
      • Sefer Elijah
      • Sefer Zerubbabel
      • Tefillat (Prayer of) R. Shimon b. Yohai
      • Ten Further Things About the Messianic Days
      • Ten Signs
      • Testament of Adam
  • Links
  • Cuneiform Studies Laboratory
    • Law Code for the Scribal Archive
Research Projects » Illuminating the Afterlife of Ancient Apocryphal Jewish Literature

Illuminating the Afterlife of Ancient Apocryphal Jewish Literature

Description of the project

Since the nineteenth century, scholars have remarked on the unexpected existence within medieval Jewish manuscripts of Semitic language versions of old biblically affiliated apocryphal tales of Jewish origin such as Tobit, Judith, and Bel and the Dragon, works previously thought to exist only in Greek and later Christian language editions.  The initial years of research devoted to exploring the remains of the Cairo Genizah, a manuscript hoard of Jewish documents first recovered from a medieval Egyptian synagogue during the 1890s, witnessed the astonishing discovery of several Second Temple era (515 BCE-70 CE) Jewish literary products such as portions of Hebrew Ben Sira, the remains of an apparent Aramaic language predecessor of the Greek Testament of Levi, and the controversial ‘Zadokite Fragments’ or so-called Damascus Document, a work eventually recognized as having originated among the Jewish sectarian community famous for their first century deposit of what are now known as the Dead Sea Scrolls.  Citations from written works attributed to biblical characters like Adam, Seth, and Enoch occur among the literary productions of the third-century Mesopotamian prophetic religion founded by the infamous Christian heretic Mani, including one work—the Book of Giants—whose Middle Iranian and Old Turkic versions are demonstrably indebted to a much older Aramaic composition discovered among the Dead Sea Scrolls.  Analogous hints to the likely existence of written works associated with antediluvian biblical characters are also extant in Mandaean and other Aramaic-language gnostic writings emanating in late antiquity amidst the Syro-Mesopotamian cultural sphere.  Syriac language compilations of biblical legends and interpretative expansions often attest the continued vitality among eastern Christian communities of older Jewish motifs, themes, and narrative cycles drawn from Second Temple era Jewish writings such as 1 Enoch, Jubilees, and the apocryphal Davidic psalms.  Assemblages of so-called Isrā’īliyyāt; i.e., ‘Israelite lore’ within Muslim ḥadīth, tafsīr, and ‘tales of the prophets’ (qiṣaṣ al-anbiyā’) collections often exhibit distinct cognizance of, and in certain cases a direct relationship to, the vocabulary, motifs, and themes found in early Jewish and Christian apocrypha and non-canonical legendry.  Finally, certain medieval Jewish literary compilations and testimonia produced in Western Europe, North Africa, and Byzantium arguably attest to the importation, circulation, and continuing promulgation of a wide variety of exegetical and speculative traditions from the East.

The study of ancient Jewish apocryphal literature has attracted significant attention during the past sixty years, a focus that has produced a plethora of annotated anthologies, new western language translations, critical textual editions, and a series of analytical studies which probe the import of this material for reconstructing the intellectual history of early Judaism and nascent Christianity.  New manuscript discoveries, such as that of the Dead Sea Scrolls, have been mainly responsible for the explosion of interest in apocryphal or ‘lost’ writings among both scholars and the general public.  Relatively little attention to date however has been devoted to exploring the afterlife of these apocryphal works among literate circles within the Islamicate cultural sphere wherein Jewish, Christian, Muslim, and other scriptural communities were active contributors and interlocutors.  Shining light on the shadows which obscure these textual exchanges, and unraveling the tangled web produced by the intercultural sharing of extracanonical textual lore, are urgent desiderata.

My project concentrates upon tracing the history of the literary transmission of ancient Jewish extracanonical texts and non-biblical lore among the Near Eastern religious communities of late antiquity and the early medieval period, and then tracking their peregrinations from literate circles in the East to Jewish communities located in the West.  Several plausible scenarios are emerging for explaining how such knowledge was communicated, the most promising of which seem to involve the migration or relocation of community leaders and teachers from Islamicate realms in the East and on the Mediterranean shores to the Byzantine orbit and to Christian Europe.  Critical assessment of these (and other) models demands careful comparative study of both manuscript and print resources in a variety of languages, such as Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, Latin, Syriac, Arabic, and Persian.  Happily the rapid growth in digital resources made available by libraries, museums, research institutes, and commercial database vendors renders this a less daunting task than it would have been in the past.  The Dead Sea Scrolls are now completely accessible in an electronic format, and the Friedberg Genizah Project provides web-based access to tens of thousands of images of manuscripts gleaned from the Cairo Genizah.  Many academic libraries and special collections possess newly realized capabilities for producing inexpensive electronic versions of individual manuscript holdings.  Several websites are dedicated to making rare specialist imprints of Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, and Arabic literature freely available for download and consultation.  Thus a number of the primary resources crucial for the prosecution of my project are now conveniently available in an unparalleled way.

My project blends several trajectories of research which I have pursued throughout my professional career.  Its ultimate goal is the preparation and production of a monographic study devoted to identifying and illuminating the complex cultural processes that govern the survival and adaptation of ancient apocryphal Jewish lore in late antique and medieval Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, and Arabic language compositions.  One important facet of my project will involve close scrutiny of the diverse traditions about prominent biblical figures that were allegedly introduced into early Islamic literature by shadowy teachers like Ka‘b al-Aḥbār (d. 652/53 CE?) and Wahb b. Munabbih (d. 728-32 CE?), infamous traditionists renowned as exponents of Jewish learning.  Non-canonical lore attached to certain biblical characters was likewise prominent within Manichaeism, and I suspect the latter religion has a largely underappreciated role in the preservation, promulgation, and reformulation of older Jewish literary themes (e.g., the Enochic myth of the rebel angels and their earthly depredations) among later Near Eastern and European religious communities.  A final aspect of my project will involve identifying and amplifying the most likely mechanisms by which this ancient apocryphal Jewish lore eventually migrated to the West and contributed to the development of interpretative and speculative thought in medieval Europe.

The prosecution of this project has lately been facilitated by the award of a fellowship for 2015-16 by the American Council of Learned Societies.

Skip to toolbar
  • Log In