Passion, Persecution, and Epiphany in Early Jewish Literature by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, History, World History, Ancient History
ISBN: 9781000767322
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2020-04-08T04:00:00+00:00

2 The food of foreigners

“In different contexts,” Goldingay remarks, “the people of God acknowledges other cultural patterns without being significantly affected by them, or confronts other cultural patterns that seem destructive and threatening, or lets them influence it, both to its enrichment and to its debasement.”26 The exile, however, is a “fruit of that debasement,” which unsurprisingly gives power to a purist movement in which the distinguishing characteristics of Israel’s culture, including food laws, are stressed.

In Tobit 1:10–12, the title character states that “when I was carried away captive to Nineveh, all my brethren and my relatives ate the food of the Gentiles; but I kept myself from eating it because I remembered God with all my heart.”27 Similar to other texts, which will be examined further on in this contribution, in Tobit, “passionate loyalty to Jewish religious customs is demanded even without the promise of reward,” as John Barton remarks. Vindication “for the faithful Jew arrives,” however, “as we expect it to, in the end.”28

In another narrative of persecution, in the book of Judith, the Jews are encircled, at the point of being cut off from their surroundings.29 Judith (12:1–4) carried not only her own food but also her own utensils into the camp of Holophernes and refused what he offered her, “lest it be an offense.” Barton notes that Judith is remarkably meticulous about “matters of diet, and even when going to deliver her people by killing Holfernes she is careful not to eat his defiled food, but takes with her her own supplies, odd as this seems for someone invited to a banquet.”30

However, this text makes sense because from a Jewish perspective, it is accepted that any food presented by Gentiles either is or could be impure. In the Maccabean crisis, dating from more or less the same time, “many in Israel stood firm and were resolved in their hearts not to eat unclean food. They chose to die rather than to be defiled by food” (1 Macc 1:61–62). “In this case,” John Collins indicates, “the defiled food was probably specifically forbidden by the Torah; but Jub 22:16 expresses a more general ideal: ‘Keep yourself separate from the nations, and do not eat with them; do not imitate their works nor associate yourself with them, for their works are unclean and all their ways polluted.’ ”31

Food, and especially the food of foreigners, also features prominently in the books of Esther and Daniel. There are a number of correspondences between the stories of Esther and Daniel, which can be ascribed to their common location to a large degree, as well as their dating from a more or less similar time. Mordecai, as Collins notes, similar to Daniel, serves in the court of a foreign king. “The feast with which the Book of Esther begins has many points of resemblance to Belshazzar’s feast in Daniel 5” and “both books refer to the immutability of the laws of ‘the Medes and the Persians.’ ”32

The genre of Near Eastern court tales also fits

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