Moshe Blidstein

Tiresias: The Ancient Mediterranean Religions Source Database provides access to references to ancient texts according to topic, mostly on religion, c. -800 BCE to 800 CE in the Mediterranean area. In some cases, direct access to full text is also available. Topic tagging is based on existing subject indices from scholarly books, allowing highly detailed topic resolution. The site is in development, and currently includes 27,016,381 references keyed to 209,546 subjects.
The construction of the database is based on the following method. Many research volumes in ancient history are published with two indices: one for subjects, topics or terms, and one for ancient text references (the latter is also known as an index locorum). Using these indices, each page of the indexed book can be identified as relating to specific subjects as well as specific ancient texts, indicating with a certain probability that these text references can be tagged as related to these subjects. In order to bring this probability closer to 100%, we assess the overlap from a number of books of this connection between text reference and subject. These tags are combined to create a general database of subjects of ancient texts. The database is thus based on existing expert-made indices, unified and assisted by digital means.
There are types of searches: for validated results, where the reference is tagged with the subject in more than one book; and for non-validated results, where the reference is tagged with the subject only once, in one book.

Any feedback is welcome.
Attached is an example of a database search with the keyword "honey".

In this article, I will examine the functions of oaths in narratives of encounter, confrontation and polemic between religious communities in late antiquity, especially Jews and Christians. Through an analysis of these narratives, I hope to show that oaths had several functions: specific oath formulae were strongly associated with specific religious identities, and as such could be used to highlight distance between religious groups. However, oaths could be used to demonstrate the permeability of religious boundaries, or even be deployed cunningly to conceal one’s identity or subvert expectations of its performance.

The fires of the Jerusalem temple altar were said to be perpetual. Various writers from the fourth century BCE to the third century CE added explanations and perspectives to this practice: the argument that the fire came from heaven, that it continued even during the destruction of the temple, or that it remained lit only when the high priest was righteous. Though these texts are well known, they were never examined in a comparative context: how special were these practices and discourses in their Mediterranean and Persian contexts? Maintaining a perpetual fire on the altar or lamps was a known practice in Mediterranean sanctuaries. The discourses surrounding these fires, developed especially by Greek and Roman writers of the first century BCE and the first century CE, are in many ways similar to those in the Jewish texts. I will consider in detail the differences and similarities and their significance.

Mapping fields using co-citation information is a common endeavour in many disciplines but has rarely been performed in the humanities. In this article, I use data from 417 back-of-book source indices to map the field of ancient Mediterranean religion on three levels: sub-discipline, ancient work, and references in ancient works. The method innovatively makes use of primary text references, rather than research articles, to construct the co-citation network. After mapping the overall relationships between sub-disciplines, I show how the data can be used to identify two types of ancient works that bridge these sub-disciplines: works which are central for the whole network, and works which are not central overall but cited more often with specific sub-disciplines. The article provides an understanding of the structure of the field of ancient Mediterranean religions, and more generally of the challenges and advantages of methods to map scholarship in historical disciplines. La cartographie des domaines à l'aide d'informations de co-citation est une entreprise courante dans de nombreuses disciplines, mais elle a rarement été réalisée dans les sciences humaines. Dans cet article, j'utilise les données de 417 index de sources de livres pour cartographier le domaine de la religion méditerranéenne ancienne à trois niveaux : la sous-discipline, l'ouvrage ancien et les références dans les ouvrages anciens. La méthode utilise de manière innovante des références de textes primaires, plutôt que des articles de recherche, pour construire le réseau de co-citation. Après avoir cartographié les relations globales entre les sous-disciplines, je montre comment les données peuvent être utilisées pour identifier deux types d'oeuvres anciennes qui font le lien entre ces sousdisciplines : les oeuvres qui sont centrales pour l'ensemble du réseau, et les oeuvres qui ne sont pas centrales dans l'ensemble mais qui sont citées plus souvent avec des sous-disciplines spécifiques. L'article permet de comprendre la structure du domaine des religions méditerranéennes anciennes et, plus généralement, les défis et les avantages des méthodes de cartographie de l'érudition dans les disciplines historiques. Digital Studies/Le champ numérique is a peer-reviewed open access journal published by the Open Library of Humanities.

Tiresias (https://tiresias.haifa.ac.il/) is a free database designed and constructed as an efficient tool to access and understand ancient texts for research purposes. It uniquely associates end-of-book subject indices with the index locorum. Based on indices of about 460 scholarly books in fields such as history, religion, biblical studies and more, Tiresias is multilingual, contains about 140,000 subject tags and about 16.4 million references to ancient primary sources, including non-digitized sources. It is especially helpful for comparative research between areas, cultures or languages, or for scholars working on long-term trends, who are therefore less familiar with sources which are not in their area of specialization. The paper describes three usage scenarios employing this newly available resource as an integral part of historical research and study. Tiresias provides inspiration for the construction of other databases making use of multiple book indices in various areas of the humanities and social sciences.

Many early Christian and late Second Temple texts describe deceit as impurity. In this article, I delineate the development of this discourse and argue that it derived its power from several characteristics: mixing deceit impurity with other types of moral impurity; an implicit link between the structures of defilement/purity and falsehood/truth; localization of impurity in specific body loci; demonization; and a connection with Greek discourses on sophists and magicians. Some of these features are present already in the earliest texts such as the Hebrew Bible, but others developed only in the Hellenistic period

Perjury – swearing to a false statement or not fulfilling a promissory oath – attracted universal condemnation in Antiquity, as well as promises of harsh divine retribution. Human responses to perjury, however, varied among the ancient cultures of the Mediterranean. This article surveys these responses, locates their cultural contexts, and explains them by examining perjury as an affront to honour. Legal penalties, expiation rituals, and other social responses highlight the various ways that society reifies, performs, and transforms the changing social status of the perjurer.

This article examines Roman-era oaths invoking nondeities, especially persons. It argues that rather than invoking quasi-deities or persons to be punished by the gods in case of perjury, as usually understood in the past, these invocations could have two concurrent functions: honoring the invoked persons and affirming a statement. Though such invocations had limited legal power, they were commonly practiced throughout the period, as demonstrated in various textual genres, including Latin poetry and rhetoric, texts of the Second Sophistic, Jewish rabbinical writings, and 5th-century Christian sermons. Furthermore, nondivine invocations were frequently combined and mingled with divine invocations, with only theologically inclined authors attempting to define them clearly as a separate category. This interpretation has significance for understanding some equivocal oaths, such as the oath by the emperor, as well as for our perception of oaths in general as a speech act with functions go...

In this article I analyze Van Gennep’s understanding of purity, impurity, and purification and its relationship with ancient Christian texts discussing these subjects. Through this comparison, I show how modern and ancient theories of ritual can illuminate each other, and more specifically, how purification was a problematic and ambivalent concept for both ancient Christian writers and for Van Gennep, making it a fruitful one for investigating the thought of both.

The article examines a tradition in late antique Christian writings and exegesis, according to which even in the period between the sin of the golden calf and the coming of Jesus the Jews were not truly obligated to perform the law, despite the voluminous scriptural evidence stating otherwise. This is adduced from actions of patriarchs and prophets, which can be seen as going against Torah laws, interpreted as intentional subversions of the law, intended to show that it is not in fact obligatory. Some of these arguments can already be found in Marcion, in the second century, but despite his castigation as a heretic, they resurface in “orthodox” Christian writings of the third to the seventh centuries. This tradition exemplifies the greater weight given in Christian exegesis to the actions of core biblical figures over the actual laws ordained by God, with one genre of scripture is pitted directly against another. The choices made in these strategies have repercussions for other religious dimensions, such as conceptions of history and the role of the saint or patriarch.

The rise of scriptures as the main source of authority was a major shift in the religious culture of the ancient Mediterranean. I examine this shift from the 2nd century BCE to the 6th century CE through a study of the relationship between scriptures and oaths, a competing mode of religious authorization. The traditional perspective, expressed both in Jewish Second Temple literature and in contemporary Greek culture, saw the covenant (defined as oaths which create adherence to a group) as the foundation of a group’s law and/or scripture, and did not differentiate clearly between oath and covenant. After the 1st cent. BCE, however, Jewish and Christian writers frequently saw private oaths as challenging the group’s covenants, scriptures and laws and competing with them. I demonstrate two ways in which this perception was manifested: in the concern of Jewish and Christian writers about private “criminal oaths,” which subvert authorized scriptures; and in the innovation in both communities (of the 3rd-4th cent. CE) of the gesture of swearing on scriptures, physically expressing the foundation of private oaths in universal law. This innovation, though a uniquely Judaeo-Christian phenomenon, may have been part of a general trend in the Roman Empire towards the subordination of private oaths to universal law, as expressed in an earlier innovation: the swearing of all legal and official oaths by the name of the Emperor or his tyche.

Vows, dedications and promissory oaths were an important category of language for people in the ancient Mediterranean. Using various formulae, people promised the gods (in the case of vows and dedications), or each other (in the case of oaths), that they would perform certain acts in the future, giving more than usual force to their words. The purpose of this article is to investigate the mechanics and hermeneutics of promises backed by divine power in the ancient Mediterranean.

Purity rules and discourses are present in all three Abrahamic religions, serving as a medium in structuring their moral, social and ritual worlds and in constructing the holiness of the religious community, religious spaces and the individual body. Purity and defilement govern the management of the individual body versus the community: in eating, defecation, illness, sexual relations, birth and death, in attitudes towards foreigners and heretics, and in the understanding of the demonic. However, ritual and moral purity were used in different ways by the various traditions. Thus while in Judaism and Islam ritual purity is the main medium, in Christianity ritual purity is typically overlaid by moral purity discourse

Ancient temples – whether Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Israelite, or of other cultures – typically operated around spatial axes or foci of sacredness, defined by cult statues, altars, sacred ways or paths and the structures, walls or fences around them. One typical arrangement (well-known from Egyptian temples and the Jerusalem temple) is a direct, ascending axis, going from courtyards to the ‘holy’ to the ‘holy of holies’; Greek and Roman temples had different arrangements, but here too we find a pronaos, cella/naos and adyton. However, relatively little attention is paid to the back rooms and to areas directly behind the ‘holy of holies’/adyton (sometimes known as opisthodomos in Greek temples). If in fact there is a “sacred axis” to the temple, what happens in the ambiguous spaces which are just beyond it – but yet inside the temple precincts? Who was allowed into these spaces? What was done there? How did they fit into the general structure and function of the temple?
A survey reveals that these spaces served two opposite functions. Most commonly, they served as areas or rooms for specialist temple functions (such as treasuries) or for accessory services for priests or other temple personnel. In these cases, the activity in the space beyond the temple reinforced the authority and hierarchy of the temple personnel. In other cases, however, such spaces allowed non-priests to glimpse or eavesdrop (even if not to enter) the holiest parts of the site, circumventing the usual sacred axis and hierarchy, and creating an alternative means to approach the gods. A comparison of temples from different periods and cultures may provide indications to the factors controlling these different scenarios.

The bible’s distinction between the pure and impure animals of Noah’s ark posed exegetical and theological problems for both Christian and Jewish writers in late antiquity: Why was impurity present in this primeval environment, in which the dietary laws of Leviticus were not yet known? The varied solutions proposed to this problem through the centuries provide a unique perspective on late ancient conceptions of animal nature, human nature and primeval law, and their relationship to dietary law. Dietary laws prohibiting the consumption of certain animals were seen as deriving from essential characteristics of these animals, from natural human disgust, or, alternatively, simply from divine commandment. Each of these options was deployed in various ways, with implications for the ritual theory, theology and polemical strategies of Jews, Christians and Muslims.

It has long been recognized that Early Christianity created a revolution in ancient conceptions of death defilement. While Pagan and Jewish cultures of the period generally prohibited contact between the dead and the sacred, in Christianity the cult of the saints was based upon intense contact between the dead, the sacred and the living. However, questions of death defilement were also part of a much wider Jewish-Christian polemic on the meaning of purity and impurity, as demonstrated by a reading of sources from the third century, a period in which the cult of the saints was not yet central. This polemic, found throughout the early contra Judaeos literature, was motivated by concerns of constructing Christian identity opposed to Jewish identity through the creation of a Christian alternative to Jewish purity laws. The paper further proposes possible explanations for the relative lack of interest in death defilement issues in third-century Christian texts.

This lecture examined possible conceptual frameworks for the history of oath practice in the first six centuries CE in the Mediterranean. Though oaths come in many colors and sizes, and always did, they include certain identifiable elements, which can be compared across periods and places. Oaths are therefore potentially sensitive instruments for examining social, religious and linguistic change.
Two hypotheses were proposed. First, that the main function of the oath is to enhance the swearer’s power, and that this power is at times (but not always) used to create trust in a social situation. Oaths create power by drawing upon assets of the swearer which are not currently present. Second, that changes in religious and social realities in this period would be reflected in changes in oath practice and discourse.
I examined several dimensions of changes and continuities in oath practice: the deities invoked, gestures, the role of the Roman Emperor in oaths, discourse and arguments about oaths, the concept of sacrament and exorcism. Relating to the first hypothesis, I argued that for certain dimensions a perspective on the oath as an instrument for creating power was found more helpful, while in others trust appeared more central. Relating to the second, I found more continuity than change in oath practice, and posed the question of why this is so.

According to both textual and archeological sources, death defilement practices and beliefs were widespread in first-century Judaism and were also prevalent in contemporary Greco-Roman culture. In the first three centuries of Christianity, however, little evidence exists for such beliefs and practices. Moreover, as opposed to other dimensions of ritual defilement concerning which we find vigorous anti-Jewish polemic, discussions of death defilement are muted and abstract, and do not appear to be a response to actual practices of Early Christian communities. To explain this phenomenon, I propose that a framework of sacred space is more crucial for death defilement than for other types of defilement, and therefore shifts in perceptions of space in the first three centuries, prior to the rise of the cult of the saints, may be the key to understanding the place of death defilement among Christians in this period.

It has long been recognized that Early Christianity created a revolution in ancient conceptions of death defilement. While Pagan and Jewish cultures of the period generally prohibited contact between the dead and the sacred, in Christianity the cult of the saints was based upon intense contact between the dead, the sacred and the living. Analyses of this clash have usually focused upon Christian-Pagan disputes concerning the cult of the saints in the late fourth and fifth centuries, represented by figures such as Julian, John Chrysostom and Jerome. However, questions of death defilement also featured in a much wider Jewish-Christian polemic on the meaning of purity and impurity, as demonstrated by a reading of sources from the third century, a period in which the cult of the saints was not yet central. This polemic, found throughout the early contra Judaeos literature, was motivated by concerns of constructing Christian identity opposed to Jewish identity through the creation of a Christian alternative to Jewish purity laws and food prohibitions. In a reading of the portions of the Didascalia Apostolorum discussing impurity and through a comparison with a later expansion of the text included in the Apostolic Constitutions, I demonstrate how the disputes with Judaism on death defilement provided a foundation for the future development of the cult of the saints.

In the first centuries CE, Christian writers developed a new understanding of ritual purity, constructed in opposition to perceived Jewish conceptions. A prime site for the formulation of this new understanding was the dietary laws appearing in both the Old and New Testaments, as they were discussed in Christian exegetical and polemical texts. The Christian argument differentiated between a supposed Jewish view of "natural", inherent impurity, and a Christian view of impurity based on the human conscience. A close reading of the texts through a comparison of Christian interpretation of Jewish and Christian dietary laws, reveals that this differentiation had both social and theoretical dimensions. It accentuated the division between Jewish and Christian groups, and reified "Christianity" as opposed to "Judaism"; furthermore, the idea of ritual purity was associated with the position that bodily matter can acquire a positive or negative spiritual status, as opposed to the orthodox position that "everything God created is good".
This Christian discernment between natural impurity and impurity rooted in the human conscience called for an exegesis of the biblical texts, which inserted human moral agency into passages ostensibly dealing with ritual (non-moral) status. Allegorisation of the biblical texts, which dismissed altogether the dietary laws' implications for ritual purity, was one of the common methods used. However, writers also employed ascetic and demonological explanations, which integrated the dietary laws into the Christian worldview and gave them a significant role in Christian ritual life.

As a rule, priests in the Roman Empire were not circumscribed by life-long obligations of purity which differentiated them from the rest of society; rather, purity regulations were directed at the temple-frequenting population as a whole. In light of this reality, the innovative visions of priestly purity put forth by Porphyry (in On Abstinence from Animals) and Julian (in Letter to a Priest) are to be understood in the context of their different projects for the formation of a religious elite.