The Oracle of Delphi and the Jews

In the foothills of Mount Parnassus in Greece there lies the original 'naval of the world' ('omphalos') in the form of the ancient Delphic sanctuary to the god Apollo - although Gaia was the first deity worshiped at the site before Apollo moved in - that was one of the major centres (and quite often the centre) of archaic and classical paganism. The fame of the oracle of Apollo - and the Pythia who was the willing vessel of the god (although her prophecies had more to do with volcanic gases than divine inspiration) - (1) was widespread indeed and the Greek Poleis, Etruscans and the Romans are known to have widely patronized Delphi and sought the Pythia's responses to their questions on the weighty matters of the day.

Now the oracle of Delphi is significantly different to the oracles claimed in the Hebrew Bible: since in the paganism of any stripe. The gods are not omniscient impartial judges, but rather are partial and fickle instigators and partisans to the struggles that occur in this veil of tears. (2)

This explains why the oracles of Yahweh in the Tanakh could be easily exposed for the nonsense that they were (and are), because they were alleged to have been made by a omniscient, omnipresent creator of the universe (and usually didn't come true unless you were writing with the benefit of hindsight): those made by the Pythia could be intended to mislead the individual (such as that given to Crassus before his invasion of the Parthian Empire) as well as put them on the right path because of the partisan and whimsical nature of Apollo. An obvious example of this occurs early in the Iliad when Zeus sends a lying dream to Agamemnon so that he will get the Greeks immediately under arms and unwisely attack Troy: thus leading to a military disaster for the Greek army.

The difference between the Yahweh projected in the Tanakh and the ancient/classical pagan gods is highlighted nicely by this and it is worth briefly recounting - as is the purpose of this article - the two responses of the Pythia made in relation to the jews.

These are:

'A Hebrew boy, a god who rules among the blessed,

Bids me leave this house forward and go back to Hades.

So in silence go from my altars.' (3)

And:

'Go tell the king the wondrous hall is fallen to the ground.

Now Phoebus has a cell no more, no laurel that foretells,

No talking spring; the water that once spoke is heard no more.' (4)

Now clearly the first is a later Christian forgery created with the purpose of discrediting the Greek gods out of their own mouths - especially as it was allegedly given in response to the Emperor Augustus' query as to why the oracle of Delphi had fallen silent (thus improbably dating it to Jesus' boyhood at the latest [well before he was born at the earliest]) - (5) and this is but one of several known examples of this. (6)

The second is a bit more complicated as while it could be a Christian forgery as many scholars have suspected: (7) there is a ring of truth in the oracle as it doesn't directly refer to jews or Christianity, but rather is taken - by Philostorgius' quotation of it - to mean as such. There is a strong likelihood however that the passages concerned is actually a real response by the Pythia in relation to it being a veiled request to the Emperor/the authorities for a restoration of Delphi (which was suffering badly from a lack of funds) by the priesthood there. (8)

This then means that the latter is probably not a reference to (the supremacy and the truth of the beliefs of) jews and/or Christians at all (which is what Philostorgius claimed it was), but rather a (probably deliberate) misquote from a Christian author desperate to throw anything available - even if he had to do a little 'creative editing' to make it fit - at a dangerous religious rival to Christianity.

What we can draw from this is the relative non-importance of the jews to the senior Greek and Roman priesthood from a religious - as opposed to a political - perspective (hence the political but not religious threat to the Roman empire posed by the 'god-fearers' and what I have termed the 'Ancient Israel Lobby' embodied in the brutal conflict between jews and pagans in Alexandria and Cyrene) and that this only changed with the rise of Christianity as both a religious and a political threat (due to being a mass movement) at the same time (which caused pagan intellectuals - such as Porphyry of Tyre and Celsus - to finally begin to inspect, dissect and ridicule jewish myths).

After all if the jews had been a true religious (as they - and some Christian - authors like to make out) - as opposed to just a politically subversive - threat to the Greek and Roman religious elite then we should expect the oracle of Delphi to have given instructions to the pagans to cleanse the empire of them (as the Pythia frequently prophesied death and occasionally advocated murder from what responses we have and the jews were annoying the Greeks and Romans during the heyday of the oracle).

It is so often - although happily it is increasingly a common view among scholars - forgotten that the jews as a people are (broadly speaking) a historical irrelevance and only begin to matter as a kind of sideshow to other greater civilizations after Alexander the Great's death and the rise of the Seleucids (when Palestine became borderland between three large empires and thus the jews were routinely butchered by one side or another [with the jews behaving like religious terrorists]).

Not exactly the 'powerful empire' and 'central role' claimed for the jews in the Tanakh: is it?

References

(1) http://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/ancient-cultures/daily-life-and-practice/the-oracle-of-delphi%E2%80%94was-she-really-stoned/

(2) Hugh Bowden, 2005, 'Classical Athens and the Delphic Oracle: Divination and Democracy', 1st Edition, Cambridge University Press: New York, p. 4-5

(3) Joseph Fontenrose, 1978, 'The Delphic Oracle: Its Responses and Operations', 1st Edition, University of California Press: Berkeley, p. 349

(4) Philost. Ecc. Hist. 7:1C

(5) Fontenrose, Op. Cit., p. 349

(6) Beatrice Caseau, 2011, 'Late Antique Paganism: Adaptation under Duress', p. 125 in Luke Lavan, Michael Mulryan (Eds.), 2011, 'The Archaeology of Late Antique 'Paganism'', 1st Edition, Brill: Leiden

(7) Fontenrose, Op. Cit., pp. 56; 353

(8) Caseau, Op. Cit., pp. 125-127