Table Of ContentThe Sibylline
Oracles
With Introduction, Translation, and
Commentary on the First and Second Books
By J. L. LIGHTFOOT
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Preface
Tre Sibylline Oracles are still a relatively unexplored area. For one thing,
there are so many uncertainties about them. For another, they seem to fall
between two stools. They are just that bit too classical for students of the
Jewish or Christian apocrypha to feel really comfortable handling them. For
classicists, on the other hand, their origins in the byways of intertestamental
Jewish or early Christian culture may serve to counteract the familiarity of
their classical literary form. And yet the training of classicists ought to equip
them, more than anyone, for the study of this material—literature that
observes elaborate conventions, is highly stylised, and which, moreover, is all
about interpretations and reinterpretations of earlier written sources. There is
certainly a need for philological expertise from many subject backgrounds,
since so many of the apocrypha and pseudepigrapha to which the Sibylline
oracles belong—especially texts not extant in Greek or Latin versions—
remain in antiquated and/or inadequate editions. And everyone who has
worked on the Sibylline Oracles agrees how interesting they are.
There are two keys to writing on the Sibylline Oracles. The first is to be
clear what the most important questions about them are, and what questions
about them are answerable: these are not necessarily the same thing. The
second is to recognise that the Sibylline tradition is a story of constant
invention and reinvention.
In the beginning of that tradition, there was only a single Sibyl. Over time,
though, as different communities laid claim to them, and Hellenistic writers
tried to systematise them, Sibyls multiplied until Varro produced a catalogue
of ten, and this became the definitive number until a further two Sibyls were
added in the Middle Ages to balance the twelve prophets.' The Hellenistic
Jews who first produced Sibyllina in imitation of the pagan oracles were an
early stage of this proliferation, and a highly idiosyncratic one. They may have
incorporated snatches of earlier, pagan, prophecies into their verses to season
them with an authentically Sibylline flavour, and may also have wanted to
appropriate and update oracles which had continued relevance—oracles
which predicted natural disaster, or foreboded the overthrow of empires. But,
' On the development of the Sibylline tradition: Parke 1988; Potter 1990, ch. 3, esp. 102~25;
Suarez de la Torre 1994, esp. 200-5; Buitenwerf 2003, 92-123; }.-M. Roessli, ‘Catalogues de
sibylies, recueil(s) de Libri Sibyllini et corpus des Oracula Sibyllina’, in E. Norelli (ed.), Recueils
normatifs et canons dans l’Antiquité (Lausanne, 2004), 47-68 (especially 48-56 for catalogues
of Sibyls and 60-5 for the corpus of Greek oracles).
viüi Preface
to the themes and mannerisms of pagan Sibylline prophecy and Near Eastern
apocalyptic, they added their own notion of prophecy based on biblical
scripture and its ongoing interpretation.
The Jewish oracles were then taken over by Christians. They underwent the
same process as a very large body of pre-Rabbinic Jewish material, especially
in the Greek language, which seemed valuable enough to early Christians for
them to want not only to preserve it, but also sometimes to add to it.’ This
material includes the works of Philo and Josephus, and a large number of
texts on apocalyptic themes. So far from being a perversely difficult,
unrepresentative, or marginal text, the Sibylline oracles are classic examples
of this type of literature, for which ‘Judaeo-Christian’ is an entirely appro-
priate label. Not only is oracular literature a tralatician genre per se, but
this particular corpus has been transmitted via channels to which interven-
tion and rewriting are fundamental.’ The Sibyllina are among the texts in
which Christians made the deepest inroads. Robert Kraft, who has written
eloquently on this literature, makes the basic point that, since Jewish and
Christian interests might so largely coincide, it can be very difficult to discern
the Christian accretions to the original texts unless they contain something
that only a Christian could have written—and of course not all Christian
writing is necessarily like that. That is a particularly important lesson for
certain books of the Sibyl: they should not be read on the presumption that, a
few superficial Christian accretions having been stripped out, an intact Jewish
substructure will stand revealed underneath.‘ On the other hand, if one takes
the collection as a whole, one can, I think, trace some broad developments
between the Jewish and the Christian Sibyllina, further transformations of the
basic understanding of what prophecy was for. It may be hard or impossible,
in individual cases, to determine whether a particular line is Jewish or
Christian, but if one considers sections or books at a time, it is quite possible
to see that prophecy is being made to serve different purposes according as its
function was conceived in the culture that produced it.
? Kraft 1975; id. ‘Setting the Stage and Framing Some Central Questions’, 5] 32 (2001),
371-95. This approach is also that of de Jonge 2003; see the methodology on 30-8, with more
bibliography. It is not the case, therefore, that the corpus ‘reléve d’une rare convergence
d'intéréts entre les Juifs et les Chrétiens’ (Crippa 1999, 97; my italics).
ὁ In Kraft’s words, this type of literature was not ‘“authored” in any normal sense of the word
but evolved in stages over the years’ (1975, 185).
* See Kraft 1975, 75 (quoted in de Jonge 2003, 35-6): ‘From my perspective, “the Christianity
of the Pseudepigrapha” is not the hidden ingredient that needs to be hunted out and exposed
in contrast to a supposed native Jewish pre-Christian setting. On the contrary, when the
evidence is clear that only Christians preserved the material, the Christianity of it is the given, it
is the setting, it is the starting-point for delving more deeply into this literature to determine
what, if anything, may be safely identified as originally Jewish.’
Preface ix
In late antiquity, apparently in or after the end of the fifth century, a certain
compiler, who tells us about himself in the prologue of the extant collection,
collected together the Sibylline oracles available to him for the general edifica-
tion of his Christian readers, who would verify the excellence of the Sibyl’s
doctrines on the Holy Trinity, Incarnation, and her confirmation of the
Prophets. But it was not in this form that the oracles were transmitted to
the Middle Ages. Knowledge came principally through the passages cited by
Augustine and Lactantius, and, in the course of this transmission of a limited
amount of highly selective material, the image of the Sibyl was modified still
further. It was only in 1545 that the editio princeps of the oracles, or rather,
of the first eight books, was published. Many good surveys are available of
the contents of the corpus,” but it may be useful here to register some basic
things about it. It consists of fourteen books which derive from two separate
collections. The first consists of books 1-8, extant in two classes of manu-
script, and seeming to date from a collection made by an ancient redactor in
or after the late fifth century ap: it was a manuscript of this type on which
the editio princeps was based. The second collection, which only came to light
at the beginning of the nineteenth century, consisted of seven texts numbered
nine to fifteen, but of these only books 11-14 offered material that was
independent of the earlier collection. That is why, in modern editions, books
9 and 10 are absent.
The first and second books, the core of the present study, are a review of
world history from the creation to the last judgement, with long stops on the
way at the flood and the coming of Christ. The third book, generally agreed
to be the earliest in the collection (second century Bc?), and certainly the
longest, contains a mixture of mythical prehistory and Jewish origins;
oracles against foreign nations; and intermingled ethical exhortation and
eschatology. The jumble that it may present on an initial reading is only
apparent. The sixth book is much the shortest: it is a hymn to Christ in only
twenty-eight lines. All the other books (four, five, seven, and eight) reflect an
expectation that Sibylline prophecy should concern itself with world history
(sometimes periodised by ages, generations, or empires) and eschatology,
whose bewilderingly inconstant scenarios include the return of Nero, the
coming of a Messiah, and the fiery destruction of the universe. The study
of how Sibylline traditions were formed and reformed in these oracles lies
beyond the scope of the present work, but there is still much to be discovered,
especially about their implied understandings of Sibylline prophecy, about
the apocalyptic understanding of history, and about the eschatological hopes
* eg. J. J. Collins, ‘The Sibylline Oracles’, in Stone 1984a, 357-81; id. 1987; Potter 1990a,
95-102,
x Preface
and fears contained therein. Books 11-14 form a more or less coherent
sequence of material of a very different character: ethics and eschatology give
way to a much less darkly coloured historical review, with the emphasis on
dynasties and Roman emperors. This second collection, which is of less inter-
est to the present book, seems to have been assembled after the final Arab
conquest of Egypt in 646.
For the most part, though, dates, places, and contexts are not to be had
from Sibylline oracles, or only with great uncertainty and controversy. Dating
often relies on the interpretation of detail cast with deliberate, oracular
vagueness. Place is particularly hard to determine in texts that reflect the
internationalism of the Hellenistic period, or whose dependence on scripture
gives no clues as to their origin. As for context, it is very difficult to get the
Sibyl, as with the extant Judaeo-Christian literature in general, to marry up
with the accounts of intertestamental Judaism as described by Philo and
Josephus.* One might toy with the idea of production in, and for, a particular
community, but it is essentially uncontrolled speculation in the absence of
hard evidence which we lack, and which there is no immediate prospect of
acquiring. In the light of all this, it seemed to me necessary to adopt a literary
approach towards the oracles; but here, too, progress is only possible after
acknowledging some serious difficulties. Because of the tralatician character
of oracles, the material often seems, at least at first, to be incoherent, to
present a mish-mash of different elements which do not sort well together. In
the light of this, should one try to use source criticism to separate out the
several strata in an oracle; or should one prefer a sort of redaction criticism,
to see what sense the oracle makes as a whole? If one prefers the latter, it may
prove very testing for our ideas of genre when a work appears to be a medley
of very disparate material which does not hold together. This is particularly
the case with the third book.
Once one adjusts one’s expectations, though, literary criticism of the
Sibylline oracles can be a rewarding undertaking. First, there is the question
of the literary portrayal of Sibyls and the conventions of pagan Sibyllina
which were inherited by the Hellenistic Jews, the Sibyl’s place among the
various species of classical mantis, and the various sorts of tension that inhere
in the characterisation of Sibyls (are they mad or sane? human or divine? oral
or bookish?). These are the subjects of my first chapter. Second, there is
the notion of prophecy, of the literary characterisation of a prophet, and the
expectations concerning a prophetic book, that the oracles were being
adjusted to. Internally within Judaism, the understanding of prophets and
6 Kraft 1975, 190.
