526 - Tours of Hell: An Apocalyptic Form in Jewish and Christian Literature

Tours of Hell: An Apocalyptic Form
in Jewish and Christian Literature
By Martha Himmelfarb
Philadelphia, Fortress, 1985. 198 pp. $12.95.

Accenting the negative has enjoyed a long history as a prod to ethical conduct. If one reads in some of the ancient Near Eastern treaty texts, such as the Sefire Inscriptions or Deuteronomy 27-28, one soon finds that the authors -elaborated the curses for non-compliance at far greater length than the blessings for obedience. In a similar way, writers of some Jewish and Christian apocalyptic works devoted much more space (and enthusiasm) to detailing the horrors of hell than to praising the wonders of heaven. In Tours of Hell, Martha Himmelfarb, now of Princeton University, studies seventeen of these ancient travelogues of hell, not to discover why the subject intrigued so many ancient authors, but to examine the texts and trace the literary development of the form they embody.

It is clear that tours of places for punishment, some of which are located in heavens, were not a prominent feature of the earliest apocalypses. They appeared much more frequently in the early centuries of the Common Era and continued to enjoy popularity into the Middle Ages. After a short introduction to the subject, Himmelfarb devotes the first chapter to a description of the rather unfamiliar texts and parts of texts that are the basis for her work. Important among them are the Apocalypse of Peter, the Apocalypse of Paul (from which, she shows, a family of texts is descended), the Apocalypse of Zephaniah, the Apocalypse of Ezra, the Vision of Ezra, and the Gedulat Moshe. She thinks there are various sorts of relationships between these tours and attempts to argue and nuance her case in the remainder of the book.

Her procedure is to treat questions of form first and then those of content. Formally, the primary feature in all of the tours of hell is what she calls "demonstrative explanations" of the sundry phenomena which the seers observe and about which they often ask their angelic tour guide. This formal trait is first attested in the third-century B.C.E. Book

527 - Tours of Hell: An Apocalyptic Form in Jewish and Christian Literature

of the Watchers (chaps. 1-36 of I Enoch), especially chapters 17-36. There is, however, some similarity with Ezekiel 40-48 and Zechariah 1-8. Finding such Jewish ancestors for the form is an important part of Himmelfarb's case, because A. Dieterich in his influential book, Nekyia, had maintained that the Apocalypse of Peter, which stands near the beginning of the tour tradition, was firmly based on ancient Greek accounts of descents to Hades.

In her treatment of the contents of the tours, she discusses the evidence in the texts for "Sins and Measure-for-Measure Punishments" (chap. 3). These are widely attested, with hanging by various offending limbs and organs and tantalizing tortures being the most popular. Chapter 4 centers on what she calls "Environmental Punishments" (fire, smoke, worms) that are depicted in the tours. The chapter also includes a special study of the sins and punishments in the Apocalypse of Paul and the texts which show the greatest similarity to it in order to determine the nature of the relationships between the documents.

The final chapter contains Himmelfarb's conclusions about the development of the tradition. She takes issue with S. Lieberman's reconstruction and argues that, of the extant texts, the Apocalypse of Peter and the Apocalypse of Zephaniah are relatively early, but their authors drew on still more ancient works that are no longer available. These apocalypses, in their respective ways, bad an influence on the writer of the Apocalypse of Paul and thus on its literary offspring. The Vision of Ezra did not escape this line of influence, though it, with the Apocalypse of Ezra, drew more directly on an "Ur-Ezra" apocalypse that is also not extant. A separate literary development is charted for the Jewish texts that were likewise dependent on lost sources. It appears that the story in the Palestinian Talmud of the pious man of Ashkelon (p. Hagigah 2.2; p. Sanhedrin 6.6) was another source that left its mark on later Jewish tours.

Himmelfarb argues her case clearly, concisely, and often in an engaging way-which is no small achievement when one considers the state of the texts which are studied. It is valuable to have the Jewish antecedents of the form highlighted to correct an undue emphasis on the Greek background of the tours of bell, although by the time these texts and fragments were written it is often difficult to disentangle what is Jewish and what is Greek. She is also fully aware of the fact that claiming influence from one document or tradition to another can mean a variety of relations, not merely direct copying or paraphrasing. It is, of course, risky to posit that the writers of the extant texts drew on ones that have not survived, but she may be correct in concluding that several lost works gave rise to the tours of hell that have been preserved.

James C. Vander Kam
North Carolina State University
Raleigh, North Carolina