Temporality and Identity in the Jewish Sibylline Oracles

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The Sibylline Oracles are a hexametric corpus of Jewish (and Christian) prophecies, composed and (re-)edited from the Hellenistic period to Late Antiquity. Their cultural hybridity makes them a particularly rich literary expression of Jewish identity.I propose to examine the Jewish corpus' temporality-its construction of time. My central approach will be comparative and cultural: what does it mean for 'Hellenised' Jews to negotiate between Jewish, Greek, and Roman temporal discourses? Is there a distinct 'Greco-Jewish literary temporality'? I shall contribute to increasingly nuanced debates about Jews and 'Hellenisation' 1 by viewing temporality as an expression of identity and ideology My project will widen recent scholarship's embrace of temporality in classical literature both formally, analysing oracles rather than narrative (especially epic), and culturally, going beyond recent focuses on Late-Antique temporality and its Christian background.The recent boom in scholarship on the Sibylline Oracles still focuses on small selections5 and individual themes of the corpus By centring temporality, my project engages expansively with the entire collection of Jewish Oracles (Books 3-5, 8.1-216, 11-14). Does a coherent theory of temporality unite different aspects of the corpus (e.g., intertextuality, religious eschatology)? How does the corpus adapt its temporal discourses as it develops?Fundamentally, my research will compare the Oracles' temporality to their direct literary models (oracles, hexameter poetry, Jewish prophecy). I shall also contextualise the Oracles within wider discursive frameworks: Greco-Roman literary prophecy Jewish literature's temporality political/ideological constructions of time; identity in Greco-Jewish literature.To prepare for this PhD, I designed my MPhil around Greco-Jewish literature and wider theoretical frameworks of identity, and have begun learning Biblical Hebrew through a summer school at Oxford. Cambridge is uniquely well disposed for my project. There is exciting scholarship on my key frameworks of identity and temporality (e.g., Tim Whitmarsh, Simon Goldhill) and a large community engaged in Greco-Jewish material (Tim Whitmarsh, Simon Goldhill, Helen Van Noorden, etc.).