Introduction
Comparison of the Hebrew Bible and ancient Greek literature is experiencing a renaissance. Over the past two decades, historical-critical scholars have increasingly discussed Greece alongside more dominant Near Eastern comparanda (e.g., Mesopotamia and Egypt).Footnote 1 Yet there is one Greek corpus that is notably underrepresented in this trend: the philosophy of the classical period (fifth and fourth centuries BCE)—chiefly that of Plato and Aristotle, who authored most of what survives. Classical philosophy and the Hebrew Bible have long been juxtaposed as the “twin pillars of Western civilization,” icons for the fundamental, timeless, and opposed principles of “reason” and “revelation.” This is typically framed in terms of Tertullian’s famous question: “What, then, has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” (Praescr. 7:9).Footnote 2 In light of this paradigm, one might assume that classical philosophy would be central to historical-critical comparison of Israel and Greece. Instead, some important exceptions notwithstanding, it is conspicuously marginal. No explanation for this has been offered. In fact, it is barely acknowledged.
This article fills that lacuna. I begin with a methodological and intellectual-historical discussion of the fraught place of classical philosophy in comparative biblical studies. Although “Athens and Jerusalem” seems to recommend comparing the Hebrew Bible and classical philosophy, I argue that it is likely the very reason that historical-critical scholars largely avoid doing so. Reducing these corpora to immutable, opposed principles is essentialist—i.e., it claims that they possess absolute difference, what Jonathan Z. Smith called a “unique differentium,” over against each other and everything else.Footnote 3 In so doing, “Athens and Jerusalem” runs afoul of the fundamental postulate of historical-critical comparison: ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean societies existed along a spectrum of cultural continuity. Suspicion of “Athens and Jerusalem” on these grounds is justified. However, we must not let that suspicion exclude classical philosophy from legitimate comparison altogether. If we take the postulate of cultural continuity seriously, then we should treat classical philosophy just like other ancient Mediterranean literature—and therefore be open to the possibility that it too may illuminate the Hebrew Bible in a historically responsible manner.
With this framework in place, the remainder of the article models this approach to historical-critical comparison of the Hebrew Bible and classical philosophy. Through case studies in the biblical prophetic books and Plato’s dialogues, I show how the comparison may contribute on two levels: first-order comparison, in which classical philosophy furnishes new data for understanding the Hebrew Bible in its ancient context; and second-order comparison, in which scholarship on classical philosophy invites metacritical reflection on how we study the Hebrew Bible in the first place. These case studies are preliminary; they do not exhaust the potential of comparing these particular texts, let alone the Bible and classical philosophy overall. Rather, they serve to gather the threads of previous work and to issue a programmatic call for integrating classical philosophy into the comparative study of the Hebrew Bible and the ancient Near East. Such an effort follows naturally from a commitment to historical-critical comparison—and stands to enrich it.
Comparison, Cultural Continuity, and the Challenge of Classical Philosophy
In order to investigate the place of classical philosophy in the comparative study of the Hebrew Bible and the ancient Near East, it will be helpful to consider the place of cross-cultural comparison itself in the field as a whole. This story begins with the controversy surrounding Friedrich Delitzsch’s 1902–1904 “Babel und Bibel” lectures.Footnote 4 “A keen invigorating air and a flood of light from the Orient pervades and irradiates the hoary book,” Delitzsch declared. “Hebrew antiquity is linked together from beginning to end with Babylonia and Assyria.”Footnote 5 Understanding the Bible depended on understanding other Near Eastern literature, for the Bible itself depended on that literature—and, in many cases, was aesthetically or morally inferior to it. Although people were initially scandalized, the remainder of the century saw a remarkably thoroughgoing normalization of Delitzsch’s approach.Footnote 6 Today, historical-critical scholars overwhelmingly concur that Israel must be understood in its Near Eastern context. To paraphrase Meir Malul, the question is no longer whether to compare this literature but how best to do so.Footnote 7
Why did comparison triumph so decisively? A hint may be found in a lecture from about eighty years after Delitzsch’s, in which one famed comparativist, Frank Moore Cross, spoke in memory of another: his teacher, William Foxwell Albright. Analogizing cross-cultural comparison to paleographic dating, Cross asked rhetorically,
Are we not to expect the breaking in of the sui generis, the radically new, in poetry, in religious ideas, in philosophical speculation? I do not think so. I believe it is as illegitimate methodologically to resort to the category of the sui generis in explaining historical sequences as it is contrary to scientific method to resort to the category of miracles in explaining natural occurrences.Footnote 8
Cross was not suggesting that difference is impossible or that similarity entails identity, fallacies that Samuel Sandmel famously termed “parallelomania.”Footnote 9 Rather, he was positing basic cultural continuity within a given society and across multiple geographically, linguistically, and temporally proximate societies. Difference emerges from an underlying bed of similarity that precludes essentialism.
By Cross’s time, this principle of cultural continuity had become the theoretical foundation for historical criticism.Footnote 10 The primacy of comparison follows automatically: if Israel was culturally continuous with its surroundings, then we cannot understand its literature without the context that comparanda provide. As one Cross student, Jon D. Levenson, has put it, “The contextualization of biblical documents in the cultures in which they were written is not only the hallmark of historical criticism; it is also inevitable,” for “there is no communication that is altogether outside of culture. . . and no culture that is outside of history.”Footnote 11 More recently, Martti Nissinen has emphasized that such contextualization “does not need to be addicted to the question of influence and causality.” Instead, the feature that makes comparison properly historical-critical is its attention to comparanda from a specific, historically delimited cultural spectrum: “what I do assume,” Nissinen clarifies, “is the cultural connectedness of different parts of the ancient Eastern Mediterranean world.”Footnote 12 If we read the Bible without being mindful of this connectedness, we risk uncritically importing our own cultural assumptions.
No culture occupies a more complicated place in this story than Greece. Before the twentieth century, the Classics were the chief comparandum for the Hebrew Bible. After all, they were the foundation of elite Western education and the only other significant extant corpus from Israel’s world.Footnote 13 Everything changed, however, with the decipherment of cuneiform and hieroglyphics and the ensuing archeological fervor in the nineteenth century. Next to Mesopotamia, Egypt, Anatolia, Persia, and the Levant, Greece suddenly seemed remote—as Delitzsch himself noted.Footnote 14 The guild pivoted accordingly, with Assyriology, Egyptology, Hittitology, and Northwest Semitics displacing the Classics as the primary allied fields.Footnote 15 Today, after a century of Near Eastern predominance, another shift is underway: biblicists are returning to the Classics. However, this return does not represent neglect of the Near East or rejection of the principle of cultural continuity. Instead, it is an extension of both. Scholars increasingly recognize that the Levantine and Aegean worlds participated in an interconnected Mediterranean culture beyond the Near East as conventionally delimited.Footnote 16 This has been further energized by classicists’ interrogation of their own entrenched separation of Greece from the broader region, which has more to do with modern European identity than with antiquity.Footnote 17 If Greece existed along the same cultural spectrum as the Near East, then comparison of the Hebrew Bible and ancient Greek literature is both possible and necessary.
This comparison has featured some engagement with classical philosophy. Otto Kaiser compared biblical and Platonic approaches to several foundational topics, including divinity, politics, and ethics.Footnote 18 Eckart Otto has focused on legal themes, offering, among several studies, a two-part comparison of Deuteronomy and Plato’s Laws.Footnote 19 Several scholars have brought classical philosophy to bear on biblical wisdom literature. Michael C. Legaspi has traced commonalities in how biblical and classical philosophical texts imagine wisdom as the effort to understand the cosmos in order to live well.Footnote 20 Michael V. Fox argued that Socrates is the strongest ancient analogue for the underlying ethics and epistemology (if not the specific content) of Proverbs.Footnote 21 Christopher B. Ansberry and Arthur Jan Keefer have proposed that Proverbs also has affinities with Aristotle, while Patricia Vesely has done the same for Job.Footnote 22 Adjacent to biblical studies, Marc Van De Mieroop has compared classical philosophy with Babylonian scribal culture, arguing that cuneiform reflects an implicit philosophical framework far older than Plato and Aristotle.Footnote 23
Such studies might suggest that classical philosophy has been a straightforward part of biblicists’ broader return to the Classics. However, the full picture is more complicated: an unusually large proportion of comparative work with classical philosophy—relative to work with other comparanda, that is—does not operate within the theoretical and methodological framework of historical-critical comparison. This goes back to Thorleif Boman’s 1952 monograph Hebrew Thought Compared with Greek, which argued that Israelite thought was dynamic and temporal while Greek philosophy was static and spatial.Footnote 24 This thesis and the mode of analysis that produced it have largely been rejected by historical critics. According to James Barr, for instance, Boman’s project “is not really comparative, since he does not adduce the material of other languages to compare with Hebrew.”Footnote 25 In other words, he implicitly premises the comparison of the Bible and classical philosophy on an unjustifiable separation of the former from Near Eastern cultural continuity.
Much of the recent work on this comparison replicates Boman’s problem, placing it at odds with the historical-critical mainstream. Some scholars trace direct influence between the corpora. Russell Gmirkin and Phillipe Wajdenbaum argue that the biblical authors borrowed from Plato, while Evangelia G. Dafni suggests the reverse.Footnote 26 Such theories have met with intense skepticism. The weight they assign to classical parallels depends upon an unsubstantiated dismissal of Near Eastern ones.Footnote 27 James A. Arieti has been more cautious in positing influence, instead broadly comparing ideas.Footnote 28 However, he has received similar criticism. In addition to sidelining the Near East, he conflates ancient Israel and ancient Judaism.Footnote 29 Another approach sees the Bible as an Israelite version of classical philosophy: reasoned reflection on core human questions, only narrational rather than propositional. Important exemplars include Yoram Hazony, who presents the Bible as a work of political thought on par with Plato and Aristotle; Dru Johnson, who articulates a distinctively “Hebraic” philosophy; and Shira Weiss, who reads morally ambiguous biblical narratives as a mode of ethical reasoning.Footnote 30 These scholars too have faced harsh objections from historical critics. They detach the Bible from the Near East and align it with classical philosophy in order to shoehorn it into their own intellectual ideals—a move that also conveniently dodges questions of composition history.Footnote 31
Despite some important exceptions, it is fair to say that in the study of the Hebrew Bible, classical philosophy stands anomalously outside the prevailing spectrum of ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean cultural continuity. The more that Bible scholars are grounded in historical-critical comparison, the less likely they are to work with classical philosophy (and vice versa). How do we explain this? The issue might appear to be chronological. The Greek era corresponding to the conventional Iron Age II dating of much of the Hebrew Bible is the archaic period (eighth to sixth centuries BCE), whence the most frequent Greek comparanda (e.g., Homer and Hesiod). By contrast, Plato and Aristotle lived several centuries later. It therefore seems reasonable to assume that their absence is just one manifestation of a general disregard for the classical period, which is too late to be culturally continuous with Israel. However, the literature reflects no such disregard. Historical-critical scholars have compared the Bible to classical historiography, drama, and poetry.Footnote 32 In fairness, some of them date biblical composition to the Persian and Hellenistic periods, making comparison with classical Greece more natural.Footnote 33 Yet even they do not address classical philosophy as frequently as other classical corpora. One poignant example is the collection Did Moses Speak Attic? Jewish Historiography and Scripture in the Hellenistic Period.Footnote 34 The title alludes to an adage attributed to Numenius of Apamea (second century CE): “What is Plato if not Moses speaking Attic?”Footnote 35 Plato is not cited once in the entire volume.
If the issue is not chronological, then perhaps it is generic. While Plato and Aristotle are the most famous Greek philosophers, they were neither the first nor the last. They followed the so-called Presocratic philosophers (e.g., Thales and Parmenides) and preceded the Hellenistic philosophers (e.g., the Stoics and Epicureans).Footnote 36 If historical-critical comparativists excluded these figures too, it would suggest that they have disregarded classical philosophy not because it is classical but because it is philosophical. This would fit a pattern of historical-critical suspicion that philosophy itself is foreign to biblical studies.Footnote 37 Once again, however, the literature does not bear out this absence. Many scholars have compared the Hebrew Bible to the Presocratics, situating the latter along the same spectrum of cultural continuity as other Near Eastern and Mediterranean discourses.Footnote 38 Meanwhile, there has been robust comparison of late biblical texts (especially Ecclesiastes) with Hellenistic philosophy.Footnote 39 The fact that these Greek writings are philosophical has not prevented comparison.
Neither chronology nor genre explains the underrepresentation of classical philosophy in historical-critical comparison. To do so, I instead propose that we look outside of the scholarship, to a cultural phenomenon that casts a long shadow over it: the tradition of juxtaposing these corpora as the sources of “reason” and “revelation”—i.e., the tension purportedly at the heart of Western civilization. As mentioned above, this is often traced to Tertullian’s famous question about “Athens and Jerusalem.” However, its crystallization into a full-blown paradigm is a modern phenomenon. In the mid-nineteenth century, Matthew Arnold spoke of “Hebraism and Hellenism,” declaring, “Between these two points of influence moves our world.”Footnote 40 A century later, Leo Strauss urged that the conflict between Athens and Jerusalem exacerbated the “crisis” of the modern West but also held the secret to its vitality.Footnote 41 Karl Jaspers presented them as exponents of the “Axial Age,” an alleged intellectual revolution in antiquity.Footnote 42 The examples could be multiplied.Footnote 43 What unifies them is that they are essentialist in the manner that, as we have seen, violates the historical-critical postulate of cultural continuity. “Athens and Jerusalem” reduces the Hebrew Bible and classical philosophy to stable, singular principles at polar ends of a binary—in opposition to each other and to their respective cultures. It presents them as radical breaks with everything before them and around them.
Here, then, is our situation. We have an ancient corpus, classical philosophy, that is anomalously marginal to historical-critical comparison with the Hebrew Bible. This corpus is precisely the one that Western culture routinely pairs with the Bible in an essentialist manner that contravenes the grounding principle of historical criticism. Meanwhile, many of the scholars who do pursue this comparison also embrace that essentialism, often through rejecting historical-critical efforts to situate the Bible in continuity with the Near East. Together, these data recommend the following inference: “Athens and Jerusalem,” the very idea that figures to make comparison of the Hebrew Bible and classical philosophy an obvious direction, is actually the unspoken reason why most historical-critical Bible scholars have not pursued this direction even as the broader comparison of Israel and Greece flourishes. There appears to be a concern that it is difficult, if not impossible, to compare the corpora at the heart of “Athens and Jerusalem” without implicitly reifying the essentialist binary or participating in its polemics—both of which are incompatible with historical criticism. What Carolina López-Ruiz notes of ancient Greece in general is especially true of classical philosophy: its place in biblical studies must be understood in terms of its “role. . . in the construction of modern western identities and ideologies.”Footnote 44 We may reasonably conclude that most mainstream comparativists’ reluctance to treat classical philosophy as a legitimate comparandum is a manifestation of the suspicion of tradition that, as Levenson has discussed, animates historical-critical biblical studies overall.Footnote 45 They have sidestepped this comparison not despite its obviousness but because of it.
In the shadow of “Athens and Jerusalem,” the marginalization of classical philosophy in the comparative study of the Hebrew Bible and the ancient Near East is sociologically understandable. However, it is methodologically unsound for two reasons. First, just because this comparison has been deployed toward questionable ends does not mean that it must be deployed that way. Several of the scholars discussed above model what responsible historical-critical comparison of these corpora might look like. We should also remember that in the twentieth century, cross-cultural comparison itself was often intertwined with religious apologetics.Footnote 46 That has not rendered the entire approach radioactive—and rightly so. Second, avoiding classical philosophy represents an ironic betrayal of the very principle of continuity that these scholars are ostensibly trying to protect. Excluding Plato and Aristotle from comparison that includes other Greek writers reifies a break between classical philosophy and its cultural environment—the very break on which “Athens and Jerusalem” turns. Put differently, too much anxiety about how the West deems this philosophy “special” risks affirming that specialness from the other direction. Instead, we should treat Plato and Aristotle as continuous with the rest of classical Greece—and because the rest of classical Greece is a legitimate comparandum for the Hebrew Bible, there is no good reason that Plato and Aristotle should not be as well. We can and must ask the same question of classical philosophy as we do of all Near Eastern and Mediterranean comparanda: How may its similarities with and differences from the Hebrew Bible enrich our understanding of the latter in its cultural context? The remainder of this article models this approach through preliminary case studies in the biblical prophets and Plato.
Case Study #1: First-Order Comparison of Content
Comparison of the Hebrew Bible and the ancient Near East is primarily what we might call first-order analysis: it addresses the content of the ancient records, documenting similarities and differences that illuminate how various features of the Bible—e.g., concepts, institutions, or literary forms—reflect their cultural milieu. Accordingly, the basic task of historical-critical comparison with classical philosophy is identifying generative points of contact. Minimally, the philosophers may furnish general information about Mediterranean culture through their practice of drawing on it to ground complex concepts in familiar topics.Footnote 47 Maximally, they may offer substantive analogies with specific biblical texts through their orienting philosophical goals.
One promising topic for first-order comparison between the prophetic literature and Plato’s dialogues is social critique. The prophets frequently voice YHWH’s condemnations of various forms of authority that flout or misconstrue his demands. In some cases, this authority is broad and societal: popular understandings of worship (e.g., Isa 1:10–17; Amos 5:21–24), Israel’s covenant (e.g., Jer 7; Ezek 33:23–29), or conventional wisdom (e.g., Jer 31:29–30; Ezek 18). In other cases, it is centralized and institutional: the monarchy (e.g., Jer 38; Amos 7:10–17) or the priesthood (e.g., Ezek 22:26; Mal 2:1–9). As Michael Walzer has discussed, this rhetoric constitutes social critique because it condemns a society by subversively appealing to the society’s own professed values.Footnote 48 Although social critique hardly exhausts the concerns of biblical prophecy, it is sufficiently prominent to justify Joseph Blenkinsopp’s characterization of the prophets as “dissident intellectuals” who “collaborated. . . in the emergence of a coherent vision of a moral universe over against current assumptions cherished and propagated by the contemporary state apparatus.”Footnote 49
Prophetic social critique has been a thorn in the side of comparison between biblical prophecy and Near Eastern divination, especially as attested at Old Babylonian Mari and Neo-Assyrian Nineveh. In general, the similarities between biblical and Mesopotamian prophecy are overwhelming. However, social critique is an exception: while the Mesopotamian texts feature some social critique, they do not prominently thematize it or substantively develop its connection with the prophetic task.Footnote 50 Some interpreters have seized on these divergences to present prophetic social critique as distinctly Israelite.Footnote 51 Such essentialism, of course, violates the historical-critical principle of cultural continuity. Accordingly, comparativists have responded that the biblical prophets’ social critique is so minimal that its absence from the extrabiblical prophets is insignificant.Footnote 52 However, this too is problematic, for it misrepresents the data: as Blenkinsopp noted, prophetic social critique does appear with some regularity in the Bible.
This problem is one of comparativists’ own making. The seeming anomalousness of the biblical prophets’ social critique is an illusion resulting from the restriction of comparison to Near Eastern divination. Scholars who have considered other corpora from the region have noted promising parallels.Footnote 53 If we are willing to include classical philosophy, Socrates immediately presents himself as an additional candidate.Footnote 54 Throughout Plato’s dialogues, Socrates philosophizes in a manner that constitutes social critique in Walzer’s definition: as he probes human knowledge and urges a more thoughtful life, he challenges his interlocutors’ ideals and values—and, by implication, those of Athens itself. As Gregory Vlastos put it, “He is telling his fellow-citizens that their political life is such a jungle of lawlessness and injustice that a just man who gets into it determined to fight for justice is virtually signing his own death warrant.”Footnote 55 This has clear affinities with Blenkinsopp’s account of the biblical prophets as “dissident intellectuals” who offered “a coherent vision of a moral universe over against current assumptions cherished and propagated by the contemporary state apparatus.”Footnote 56 The fact that this may easily be mistaken for a description of Socrates—but not of most Mesopotamian prophets—suggests that this comparison is worth pursuing. Doing so does not necessarily mean categorizing Socrates as a prophet—although, as we will see, his relationship with Apollo could well recommend that label. The issue, rather, is how Socrates’s challenges to Athens offer illuminating similarities to (and differences from) the prophets’ challenges to Israel and Judah. In the following pages, I explore this question through two passages in the book of Amos, which is replete with social critique targeting Israel’s socioeconomic injustice.Footnote 57 This analysis models how first-order comparison with classical philosophy may complement the contextualization of the Bible in its Near Eastern environment.
A. Critiques of Popular Ideas
Many biblical prophets direct social critique against prevailing conceptions of worship. In one famous example, Amos conveys YHWH’s response to celebrants who pursue elaborate worship in order to effectuate an allegedly salvific “day of YHWH” (Amos 5:18).Footnote 58 Contrary to their expectations, the deity bellows,
I hate, I despise your festivals,
And I take no pleasure in your assemblies!
Even if you offer up burnt offerings or grain offerings,
I won’t accept them;
I won’t even look
At your offerings of fatlings.
Get the noise of your songs away from me;
I’m not listening to the music of your harps.
But let justice 
roll down like water,
Righteousness (וצדקה) like a mighty stream! (Amos 5:21–24)
Amos’s audience lavishes YHWH with worship while neglecting or directly exploiting society’s vulnerable (cf. Amos 4:1–5). This implies a transactional conception of cult: extravagance may win YHWH’s favor regardless of the worshipers’ conduct. YHWH angrily rejects this idea. Worship cannot exempt Israel from YHWH’s fundamental expectation of socioeconomic justice. What remains unspecified is whether this simply demotes worship or rather divests it of any value whatsoever. This has long been the central preoccupation with this type of prophetic social critique. The debate is unsettled, in large part because it is so intertwined with Jewish-Christian polemic.Footnote 59 As Meir Weiss has noted, scholars’ readings are inevitably vulnerable to suspicion of religious bias.Footnote 60
The Mesopotamian prophets provide little help. While they sometimes lambaste inadequate worship, they do not challenge its basic framework.Footnote 61 However, Socrates’s engagement with Athenian religion does feature this challenge. The classic example is Plato’s Euthyphro, where Socrates questions the eponymous interlocutor concerning the definition of piety (εὐσέβεια). Echoing popular Greek religion, Euthyphro proposes, “If a man knows how to say and do what is pleasing to the gods at prayer and sacrifice, those are pious actions” (Euthyph. 14b).Footnote 62 This, Socrates responds, would make piety a “trading skill” (ἐμπορική)—a matter of giving the gods what they want in exchange for what the worshiper wants (14e). For Socrates, this is unacceptable because piety cannot simply be whatever the gods want (10a–11b). Rather, he insists that the gods must agree on what is good because it is good—and no amount of “trading skill” could sway them otherwise (6a–c). Socrates says that Euthyphro was closer to the answer a moment earlier, when he defined piety as service (ὑπηρετική) that human beings render the gods so that the gods may complete some “excellent aim (πάγκαλον ἔργον)” (13e). If Euthyphro can specify that aim, he will have successfully defined piety. Unfortunately, he cannot, leading the dialogue to a seemingly aporetic conclusion. However, several scholars have shown that Socrates’s line of inquiry implies one best candidate for a task that befits the gods yet necessitates human involvement: creation of a good, just world.Footnote 63 Although the gods agree on what goodness is, they cannot effect it unless human beings cultivate it in themselves. For Socrates, one does so through the self-examination that he urges Euthyphro to undertake—i.e., philosophy.Footnote 64 This, not the “trading skill” of worship, turns out to be true piety, as Socrates proclaims at his trial (Ap. 23a–b) and maintains on his deathbed (Phaed. 69c–e).Footnote 65
Comparison of Amos and Socrates shows that both express the fundamental importance of justice by promoting it over traditional worship in a manner unlike the Mesopotamian prophets. Their social critique involves asserting that the truest worship is something other than the cult—something pertaining to the worshiper’s conduct. To suggest otherwise is to misunderstand the divine. This similarity has interpretive consequences. As with Amos and other biblical prophets, scholars debate whether Socrates relativizes the cult or rejects it. Mark L. McPherran, for instance, argues that Socratic philosophy is compatible with conventional Greek religion, while Vlastos claims the opposite.Footnote 66 In this way, the comparandum provides historical evidence that this ambiguity in the prophets might be less about their postbiblical reception than about the rhetoric of ancient Mediterranean social critique itself. We should ask how this ambiguity emerges and what it accomplishes.
The comparison also reveals important differences between prophetic and Socratic critique of worship. The most obvious concerns what justice entails: for Amos, combating socioeconomic exploitation; for Socrates, cultivating virtue through self-examination. Interestingly, these views correspond to divergences in socioeconomic setting: eighth-century Israel and classical Athens both experienced significant economic growth—but while in Israel this exacerbated inequality, in Athens it did not (among citizens, at least).Footnote 67 Historical-critical comparison of these texts invites us to explore how socioeconomic context shaped ancient conceptions (and critiques) of cult. A subtler difference concerns how the two figures express their social critique. While Amos poses his challenge in public, through passionate proclamations, Socrates does so in private, through friendly conversation; while Amos directly challenges the cult, Socrates does so indirectly. Both issue social critique on the same topic, but the different discourses in which they do so—prophecy and philosophy—shape how they voice it.Footnote 68 In this way, the comparison offers a promising point of contact between recent work on voice and speech in both biblical and classical studies.Footnote 69
B. Critiques of Institutional Power
Alongside condemnations of societal ideas, prophetic social critique also targets institutional power. A potent example is Amos’s confrontation with Amaziah, priest of Bethel (Amos 7:10–17). This narrative is likely a later addition to the oracles, unconnected to the historical Amos (if he existed).Footnote 70 Nevertheless, it assumes and develops the social critique in the Amos tradition.Footnote 71 Amaziah worries that Amos has “conspired” 
against the king and that his subversive prophecies threaten Israel’s social order (Amos 7:10–11).Footnote 72 He therefore implores the prophet to return to his native Judah: “Make a living there; prophesy there 
” (Amos 7:12). Amos defiantly replies,
I am no prophet (נביא); nor am I a prophet’s disciple (בן־נביא). Rather, I herd cattle; I pick figs. But YHWH took me away from the flock and said to me, “Go prophesy (הנבא) to my people Israel.” So, listen now to the word of YHWH. You say, “Don’t prophesy (לא תנבא) against Israel; don’t spout (ולא תטיף) against the house of Isaac.” And yet just so says YHWH: “Your wife will be a harlot in the city, your sons and daughters will fall by the sword, and your land will be divided up with a cord. And you—upon impure land will you die, and Israel will be exiled from their land.” (Amos 7:14–17)
Contrary to Amaziah’s suggestion that prophecy is a chosen livelihood, Amos denies that he has any agency or receives any benefit. He issues his destabilizing words because YHWH commands him so (cf. Amos 3:8).Footnote 73 This declaration is itself social critique. Although it does not condemn a societal problem (e.g., exploitative worship) and demand corresponding action (e.g., socioeconomic justice), it sets Amos radically outside the safeguards of institutional power structures and thereby authorizes him to say what, from a human perspective, cannot and must not be said.Footnote 74 Put differently, it provides the phenomenological ground of prophetic social critique, dramatizing a “mission statement” for prophecy.Footnote 75
As before, Mesopotamian analogues are lacking. Although prophetic sedition features obliquely at Mari and Nineveh, it is not prominent.Footnote 76 Mesopotamian prophets typically appear alongside the establishment, not opposite it.Footnote 77 However, the situation is different in Plato’s Apology, where Socrates stands trial for impiety and corrupting youth. He opens by asserting that his philosophical questioning was initially driven by his effort to understand Apollo’s declaration, delivered through Delphi, that none was wiser than he (Ap. 20e–23b). Later, he explains the significance of these origins:
I am far from making a defense now on my own behalf, as might be thought, but on yours, to prevent you from wrongdoing by mistreating the god’s gift to you by condemning me.. . . I was attached to this city by the god—though it seems a ridiculous thing to say—as upon a great and noble horse which was somewhat sluggish because of its size and needed to be stirred up by a kind of gadfly. It is to fulfill some such function that I believe the god has placed me in the city. I never cease to rouse and persuade and reproach each and every one of you all day long and everywhere I find myself in your company.. . . Now if I profited from this by charging a fee for my advice, there would be some sense to [the accusations], but you can see for yourselves that. . . my accusers have not been able in their impudence to bring forward a witness to say that I have ever received a fee or ever asked for one. (Ap. 30d–31c)
In prodding Socrates to interrogate his own putative wisdom, Apollo was sending him to Athens so that he might prod them the same way.Footnote 78 His questions actualize the Delphic imperative to “know yourself.”Footnote 79 If Athens rejects him, they will be rejecting what is good for them and what Apollo wants for them.
Socrates’s explanation of his philosophical mission to his accusers is strikingly similar to Amos’s explanation of his prophetic mission to Amaziah. Both challenge their societies by appealing to a higher ideal: for Amos, covenantal faithfulness; for Socrates, the examined life. Both do so amid political disruption, when such challenges would have been especially subversive: Amos, during Neo-Assyrian encroachment; Socrates, following Athens’s defeat in the Peloponnesian War.Footnote 80 Both are dispatched by major gods and deny inherent qualifications: Amos, YHWH’s representative, is a farmer; Socrates, Apollo’s messenger, maintains that he is not wise. Both insist that they are not pursuing their activities for profit: Amos rebuffs Amaziah’s plea to earn his living in Judah; Socrates reminds the jury that he has never charged fees. Both are unflinchingly devoted to their mission: Amos is unmoved by Amaziah’s threats; Socrates accepts his condemnation (and eventual execution). The similarities speak to complex questions concerning the dynamics of authority, the relationship between divine and human speech, and the impact of political upheaval on intra-group conflict.Footnote 81 The comparison therefore points beyond the narrow matter of whether social critique is essentially “prophetic.” Instead, it helps us to ask what conceptual work these biblical texts are doing in presenting social critique as an expression of prophecy.
Mobilizing Socrates as a comparandum for the biblical prophets’ social critique does not mean facilely equating them. Nor does it mean denying the affinities between the biblical and Mesopotamian prophets. Instead, it means acknowledging social critique as one important connection between the prophets and Socrates within a larger web of such connections across the region.Footnote 82 This is true even if the biblical prophets and Socrates do not otherwise fit a single category, and even if the biblical prophets are less like Socrates than other Near Eastern prophets in every other respect. Their social critique is similar in ways that historical-critical comparativists routinely mobilize. Socrates therefore provides an anchor for studying prophetic social critique in terms that are historically appropriate to the ancient Mediterranean. Far from endorsing the essentialism of “Athens and Jerusalem,” this comparison reveals further continuity between the Bible and its surroundings.
Case Study #2: Second-Order Comparison of Scholarly Approaches
Comparison of the Hebrew Bible and the ancient Near East is primarily about enlarging the pool of data. However, it may also address how we study that data. This is what we might call second-order comparison: its object is not just the comparandum but also the scholarship on the comparandum. By comparing how scholars approach different material, we may gain the perspective to ask different questions.Footnote 83 While this is applicable to any subfield of ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean studies, it has special relevance for classical philosophy precisely because scholars of this material and scholars of the Hebrew Bible have had relatively limited interaction. Where we have faced similar problems, there is a greater chance that we have arrived at different solutions. These differences invite comparison in a metacritical key, offering the opportunity to sharpen the frameworks that we bring to our respective corpora.
A fundamental question in biblical studies that may benefit from such comparison is the future of historical criticism itself. For most of the twentieth century, the historical-critical effort to reconstruct the history behind the biblical text was the epistemological framework of the field.Footnote 84 However, this dominance has eroded amid the rise of postmodern approaches, which prioritize the reader’s positional subjectivity and question our ability to reconstruct the objective past. Today, historical criticism is widely subject to accusations of epistemological naivete and cultural bias.Footnote 85 In response to this rupture, some scholars have incorporated the postmodern critique into historical criticism itself: they treat biblical claims as historical data about their authors’ ideas, regardless of their historicity. Jacqueline Vayntrub’s recent work on biblical poetry is illustrative.Footnote 86 Challenging longstanding interest in tracing poetry to oral origins, she treats orality as a “literary trope in the written texts, a perspective that attends to how characters. . . perform certain kinds of speech.”Footnote 87 Biblical poetry implicitly constructs ideas about orality—what Vayntrub calls “native theories”—that might not correspond to historical realities. Nevertheless, these ideas are themselves products of history and must be understood accordingly. This approach reflects and benefits from new understandings of ancient Near Eastern scribal composition as a collective process of successively configuring meaning. Each redactional stratum is a site of fictive construction in which scribes conveyed ideas by incorporating and refiguring earlier strata.Footnote 88 The historical context of these ideas is that of the compositional act that produced them.
Our earlier examples from Amos showcase the promises of this reoriented historical criticism. In the twentieth century, the prophetic literature was especially inviting of reconstructive historical criticism because of its connection with named individuals.Footnote 89 Scholars focused on extracting the prophet’s own words (ipsissima verba) from later redactional augmentation. For instance, one might have determined Amos’s critique of worship to be “authentic” and the Amaziah story “inauthentic”—or even drawn such distinctions within the story itself.Footnote 90 In keeping with newer scribal models, however, many scholars now view the shaping of prophetic texts not as mere augmentation but rather as thoroughgoing transformation that recontextualized and modified earlier strata.Footnote 91 Although Amos 7:10–17 is likely an interpolation, the scribes responsible for it did not merely juxtapose an old composition with their own new one. Rather, they “authored” a single composition consisting of old and new material. We may ask how and why this composition constructs a picture of prophecy without affirming the accuracy of that picture.Footnote 92 Its historical context—and therefore the context for historical-critical analysis—is not the earlier era when the prophet purportedly lived but rather the later era when the scribes lived.Footnote 93
Yet if newer models of scribal composition seem to encourage historical-critical investigation of biblical claims, they simultaneously call the viability of this approach into question. Can there really be fictive construction in literary development that is subject to no single mind? Does this assume a degree of conceptual coherence, or even authorial purpose, that scribal literature is unable to bear? In practice, this approach might simply sidestep historical development.Footnote 94 Moreover, given the Bible’s ongoing cultural significance, attempts to take biblical claims seriously on their own terms might look like surreptitious attempts to reinscribe those claims.Footnote 95 Once again, our examples from Amos showcase the issues. While studies of scribal culture do suggest a collectivized picture, the material realities of prophetic texts cast doubt on whether those scribes shared our contemporary conceptions of literary coherence.Footnote 96 Given the postbiblical impact and cultural currency of the prophetic literature, the stakes are high for determining which ideas of prophecy are historically native to which stages of scribal configuration (if any). The question, in effect, is whether literary constructs may really be the object of historical-critical inquiry. For biblicists who affirm as much, evidence of historical-critical scholars doing this work with other ancient literature would help.
Plato studies furnishes such evidence. For a long time, historians of classical philosophy were preoccupied with what became known as the “Socratic problem”: given that Socrates wrote nothing himself, how do we distinguish the historical Socrates from Plato’s literary embellishments—as well as those in Xenophon’s philosophical writings (which also revere Socrates) and Aristophanes’s Clouds (which lampoons him)?Footnote 97 Eventually, the field decided that Plato’s early dialogues were “Socratic,” depicting Socrates more accurately, while his later dialogues were “Platonic,” constructing a fictional Socrates to voice Plato’s own concepts.Footnote 98 (Meanwhile, Xenophon and Aristophanes were often dismissed as historically irrelevant.) The historical-critical study of Plato therefore shares with biblical studies a legacy of treating the gap between history and literature as a problem; searching Plato for Socrates’s ipsissima verba corresponds to searching the book of Amos for Amos’s ipsissima verba. Yet whereas Bible scholars are still in the relatively early stages of articulating alternatives, Plato scholars have already done so. They have mostly moved past the Socratic problem, rejecting its premise as positivistic. Instead, they now tend to approach all of Plato’s dialogues—including the early ones—as fictive literature that presents Plato’s own version of his teacher. Charles H. Kahn has put it bluntly: “As far as we are concerned, the Socrates of [Plato’s] dialogues is the historical Socrates. He is certainly the only one who counts for the history of philosophy.”Footnote 99
This approach might sound ahistorical and purely literary. However, it was in fact prompted by a historical consideration of Plato’s place in fourth-century Greek culture: his dialogues are exemplars of a broad discourse of “Socratic conversations” (Σωκρατικοὶ λόγοι) that were, as Kahn emphasizes, “imaginative and essentially fictional.”Footnote 100 Socratic authors such as Plato and Xenophon (as well as others whose writings were lost) wrote dramatic expressions of their own understandings of Socrates, not accurate biographies. Probing these texts for the historical Socrates misconstrues the genre. The question instead should be how different authors used this character. This question is both historical and literary. As Rachana Kamtekar explains, “Historians of philosophy aim to understand what historical philosophers thought about various topics of philosophical interest.” This involves “reconstruct[ing] the intellectual context in which Plato has his characters say what they say, including assumptions that we would not accept.”Footnote 101 Plato scholars still read Plato within his ancient context—i.e., through historical criticism. What has shifted is the object of their analysis: the Socrates of Plato’s literarily constructed world in the fourth century, not the Socrates of the historical world in the fifth century.
Plato was an author in the strict sense, not an avatar for the type of collective scribal composition that produced the biblical prophetic literature. However, situating his writing within the culture of “Socratic conversations” complicates this distinction. As a member of what Kahn calls “a literary community of Socratic authors reacting to one another’s work,” Plato wrote dialogues that mediated a tradition neither entirely of his own making nor ultimately under his own control.Footnote 102 To a significant extent, he refigured preexistent material—e.g., Socrates’s trial (the Apology) or his attendance at a banquet (the Symposium), both of which Xenophon also appropriated for his own purposes.Footnote 103 This may loosely be regarded as “redaction” of an inherited Socratic tradition. Like the prophetic scribes, Plato was concerned with establishing his view of a contested figure. Scholarly recognition of this dynamic did not vitiate historical-critical investigation of Plato’s constructed claims. On the contrary, it encouraged it. Provided that we acknowledge the differences between scribalism and authorship, this shift may apply to biblical studies. As scribal refiguration carried a prophetic text further from whatever historical reality might once have attached to its protagonist, its meaning became intertwined with the views of its redactor-author. Those views—as products of their own (later) historical context—are the object of this reoriented historical criticism, just as in Plato studies.
Second-order comparison of the Hebrew Bible and classical philosophy moves beyond content, looking at how scholars in these fields approach that content. The example here compares how we conceptualize the processes of composition that shaped the content. Biblical scribalism and Platonic authorship are not perfect parallels. Nevertheless, both involve transformation of preexistent material in service to new compositional ends—i.e., to constructive claims that need not reflect reality. Recent Plato scholarship shows that attending to these claims remains critical so long as it aims to describe, not to inscribe, them—and remains historical so long as it interprets these claims in their historical context. This is one way that incorporating classical philosophy into comparison of the Hebrew Bible and the ancient Near East may contribute to metacriticism in this moment of methodological uncertainty.
Conclusion
A major obstacle to the historical-critical study of the Hebrew Bible is that Western society has received it through traditions that preemptively shape our understanding of it. Cross-cultural comparison is important because other ancient Near Eastern literature does not share this hermeneutical baggage; it has not been anyone’s direct heritage for millennia. We may therefore read it with a more open mind. Set alongside the Bible, this literature amplifies echoes of meaning that tradition has muffled. Brevard S. Childs once declared, “A corpus of religious writings which has been transmitted within a community for over a thousand years cannot properly be compared to inert shreds [sic] which have lain in the ground for centuries.”Footnote 104 Although he intended this as justification for his “canonical approach,” he accidentally made a succinct case for historical-critical comparison. That which has lain in the ground for centuries might well reveal things that over a thousand years of communal transmission have obscured.
In this article, I have argued that comparison of the Hebrew Bible and classical philosophy is fraught because “Athens and Jerusalem” is itself a culturally dominant tradition. If we read between the lines of the scholarship, we find an implicit concern that this binary will inevitably shape the discussion, warping comparison into a surreptitious affirmation of Western assumptions about the Bible rather than an effort to understand it historically. My purpose here has been to contest that alleged inevitability. Scholars may compare the Hebrew Bible and classical philosophy in accordance with the historical-critical axiom of cultural continuity. Doing so means recognizing that the similarities and differences between them are not qualitatively distinct from the similarities and differences between the Hebrew Bible and other Greek literature—or, for that matter, between the Hebrew Bible and Mesopotamian literature. Rather, they are precisely the sorts of similarities and differences that comparativists regularly draw upon to situate the Bible in its historical context. When pursued responsibly, comparison with classical philosophy may therefore do the very opposite of what many biblicists seem to fear: it may productively destabilize inherited Western categories by treating these corpora simply as two ancient literatures.
The preliminary case studies considered here are just two of many possible avenues for this endeavor. In the first-order mode, another comparison with Plato could address how biblical authors imagined healing in relation to categories such as religion, magic, and medicine. Comparativists have drawn on ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean healing cultures, including from Greece, to challenge our anachronistic assumptions on the topic.Footnote 105 Plato’s observations on the matter (e.g., Crat. 405a–b; Resp. 564b–c) are valuable because medicine does important conceptual work for him as a model “craft” (τέχνη)—i.e., a concrete skill that may be mastered and taught.Footnote 106 Shifting to Aristotle, we might compare his treatment of slavery (esp. Pol. 1253b–1255b) with biblical material on the topic.Footnote 107 A potentially generative contrast is Aristotle’s focus on inborn nature versus the biblical focus on socioeconomic circumstances. One could also explore how slavery functions in Aristotle’s account of politics and in some biblical accounts of Israel’s covenant (e.g., Lev 25:55).
As for second-order comparison, Plato studies has the potential to shed light on whether it is historically sound to read across different biblical corpora or compositional strata. May we draw on multiple sources to create a composite picture of, say, a deity or institution, or must we treat each instantiation as a self-sufficient construct?Footnote 108 Plato scholars have debated this question vis-à-vis the character of Socrates, with some arguing that the dialogues reflect complete characterological consistency and others that each dialogue is fictively distinct.Footnote 109 Finally, Aristotle offers a second-order comparandum on the question of how extracanonical Second Temple literature should inform our understanding of the canonical books. Is the privileged status of the latter a reflection of their ancient role or an accident of preservation?Footnote 110 Aristotle scholars have grappled with a version of this problem because his surviving corpus is incomplete—and perhaps, if Cicero is to be believed, not even his best work (Acad. pr. II.38.119).Footnote 111
The integration of classical philosophy into comparison of the Hebrew Bible and the ancient Near East represents the logical and, indeed, necessary next step in the thriving integration of Greece as a whole into that comparison. I fully appreciate why the specter of essentialism might make some scholars hesitant to pursue this course. However, I also believe that this hesitancy ultimately does more to exacerbate the problem than to solve it. It is imperative that we move beyond “Athens and Jerusalem”—but we cannot do so by going around it. We must go through it. What awaits us on the other side is an enrichment of what historical-critical comparison is all about: understanding the Hebrew Bible in the fullness of its interconnections with the ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean world that produced it.
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