84 CHAPTER TWOical response had the advantage of admitting cosmological schemes into the
ideological center of Judaism—as well as associated behavior (see below)—
that were at odds with the covenantal ideology but mitigated its deficiencies.
Or, to put it differently, like the broad conception of Torah (which allowed
for the legitimation of all sorts of non-Pentateuchal law), incorporating into
the system a mythology that, a logician might say, contradicted the covenant
but was nevertheless claimed as Jewish by the mediators of Temple and Torah,
made possible the cooptation of the (threatening) elements of the mythology.
And the same process gave these mediators the opportunity to claim control
over the myth.
It may be helpful at this point to discuss in more detail what I have hitherto
taken for granted. I am suggesting that a significant popular expression of the
mythology—and an important source of its appeal, and probably of many of
the details of its literary exposition—was the conviction that minor deities are
responsible for suffering, illness, and other types of misfortune and mischief,
and that these deities can be controlled and their power in some cases de-
flected.^87 Though this point is important for my argument, it must remain a
suggestion. Evidence for Jewish magical practice before the fourth century
C.E., when amulets, magical papyri, and so on start to be common, is too poor
to enable us to be specific about its relationship to apocalyptic mythology: the
apocalyptic books are entirely speculative and descriptive. For a full amalgam-
ation of apocalyptic cosmology and magical prescription, we must wait for the
late antique Hekhalot books and theSefer HaRazim.
However, evidence about earlier times is not wholly nonexistent: Josephus
reports that he witnessed a successful performance by a Jewish exorcist who
dependedonspellscomposedbyKingSolomon(Ant8.45–49)—animportant
illustration of the convergence of scribal expertise in “ancient” writings, wis-
dom, and knowledge of/mastery over the demonic world, a mixture typical
also of some of the apocalyptic books. The apostle Paul, a contemporary of
Josephus’s magician, displayed a similar combination of skills, in addition to
eth, whom Whybray and Bickerman (see last note) characterized as a disillusioned but detached
aristocrat—probably because he pretended to be a king but probably also because detachment
per se seems aristocratic, in contrast especially to the “bourgeois” dutifulness of Ben Sira. But
both Bickerman and Whybray were thinking in terms derived from pre–World War I Europe.
Perhaps a more productive approach would be to examine the writers’ attitude to money and
trade. Cf. Kurke,Coins, Bodies, Games, and Gold, for a sophisticated analysis of Herodotus,
among others, in these terms. As usual, Jewish studies lags. In the meantime see J. Kugel, “Qo-
helet and Money,”CBQ51 (1989): 32–49, which is at least a start)
(^87) There may be other ways in which the myth reflected, and influenced, popular religiosity,
e.g., in its strong interest in astrology and its near worship of the sun, on which see M. Smith,
“Helios in Palestine,”EI16 (1982): 199–214. Smith argues that worship of the sun, traces of
which he detects in the Enoch material (207), among the Dead Sea sect and the Essenes, and
among the general Jewish population of Palestine in the first century (209) and later (210), was
justified as adoration of a powerful angel.