The Programmatic Function of Or. Sib. III.93–96
(2011) Program for the Ancient World — Location: Oxford (12.January.2011)
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- The Third Sibylline Oracle is, confusingly, the earliest of the Sibylline Oracles, by which we mean not the oracles supposedly acquired by Tarquinius and then preserved for Roman state consultation in the Temple of Jupiter Capitolinus, but rather the extended poetic production of a Greek-writing Jew, likely living in Egypt in the mid-2nd century BCE.i There are some difficult textual questions regarding the poem’s beginning, questions whose answer may impact how we view the Sibyl’s self-presentation. This paper makes a case for the inclusion of lines 93 96 in the poem as a multiple-entendre, simultaneously pointing to the poem’s three major time-scales: a) the Noahide flood that comes to an end with the return of the sun, b) the movement of the Noahide Sibyl, like the sun, from East to West, and her superiority to the “lightless” Homer, and c) the future coming of the “king from the sun” who will fix the future metaphoric cataclysm of human affairs and bring peace to the world and Ptolemaic prosperity to the Jews. Through this issue we will come round-about to questions of the Sibyl’s self-presentation as a Jewish prophetess combining the traditions of Greek poetry(Homer, Hesiod, and others) with Jewish prophetic traditions.
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Kachuck, A. (2011). The Programmatic Function of Or. Sib. III.93–96. Program for the Ancient World, Oxford. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/101114