Migrating Tales by Richard Kalmin

Author:Richard Kalmin
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520277250
Publisher: University of California Press

FIVE

Zechariah and the Bubbling Blood

AN ANCIENT TRADITION IN JEWISH, CHRISTIAN, AND MUSLIM LITERATURE

THIS CHAPTER EXAMINES JEWISH, CHRISTIAN, and Muslim traditions about a murder in the Temple of Jerusalem and the fate of the victim’s blood after death. The accounts examined here range chronologically and geographically from the first century C.E. in Syria to the thirteenth century in what is modern-day Iraq. We will argue that the story’s meaning changed over time, and that the “original” story1 was a nonrabbinic, probably Christian Hebrew tale that reflected the view that God had rejected the Israelites and had compassion for a prophet they had murdered, and that the rabbis incorporated this story into their literature, adding an Aramaic phrase that transformed it into a story about God’s enduring compassion for the Israelites and a meditation on the problems involved in the effectuation of that compassion in a world without prophets. In addition, we will attempt to contribute to the ongoing scholarly analysis of the relationship between rabbinic literature on the one hand and Syriac, Arabic, and Ethiopic literature on the other.2 In the process, we will reevaluate the relationship between ancient and early medieval Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. We will find surprising parallels between late antique rabbinic literature and Ethiopian Christian commentaries on the New Testament, and commonalities between rabbinic literature, particularly the Bavli, and Syriac and Arabic literature composed in Persia, Mesopotamia, and Syria in the seventh to thirteenth centuries C.E., which served as a crucial link between Ethiopian Christian literature and the literature of the ancient world.

We will argue that the story, consisting of a Hebrew core to which several Aramaic phrases were added, was originally a nonrabbinic story incorporated into Palestinian rabbinic compilations,3 and from there into the Bavli. The nonrabbinic character of the Hebrew core will be shown by its anomalous character within rabbinic literature and confirmed by parallels in Christian sources. As noted, rabbinic receptivity to nonrabbinic materials has been observed before, but the Bavli has been particularly prominent in these discussions,4 and it is significant that we find such receptivity in Palestinian rabbinic corpora.

Examination of the numerous versions of this tradition reveals that it traveled from the Roman East to Mesopotamia in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, like all of the other traditions examined in this study, since the earliest versions of the Zechariah tradition derived from the eastern Roman provinces and traveled from there to Mesopotamia and to Muslim Baghdad. We do not encounter the by now familiar phenomenon of traditions reaching the Bavli from nonrabbinic sources in the Roman East, however, since the Bavli clearly drew the tradition from Palestinian rabbinic literature.

The version of the tradition that most concerns us in the present study depicts the murder in the Temple of a priest named Zechariah. Several scholars speak of the Christian appropriation of the Jewish story of the murder of Zechariah ben Jehoida and its transformation into a story of the murder of Zechariah, the father of John the Baptist.5 Others speak of

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