Similarities of Homeric and biblical exeg

 Interesting piece just published in the Bryn Mawr Classical Review:

Maren Niehoff, Jewish Exegesis and Homeric Scholarship in Alexandria.  Cambridge/New York:  Cambridge University Press, 2011.  Pp. xiv, 222.  ISBN 9781107000728.  $85.00.  

Full text here:

http://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2011/2011-10-43.html

You can find a substantial Google preview of the whole book here:

http://tinyurl.com/4xa6drj

One of the theoretical views that is central to my own cross-cultural studies of commentary traditions, and those as well written with John B. Henderson (the Sinologist) and Michael Witzel, has revolved around the cultural similarities found in exegetical approaches to canonical texts. Similar views underlie the philological work of another member of our List, Luis Gonzalez-Reimann, this time focusing primarily on India epic traditions.

Put at its simplest, there are only so many ways that the brain has available to it to harmonize contradictions, whether those contradictions show up in "authoritative" texts or elsewhere. As a result, when we study commentarial attempts to reconcile discordant texts cross-culturally, we find many of the same exegetical methods applied iteratively to that task in layer after layer of traditions globally. The transformations that arise from these iterative use of similar methods in turn helps explain striking structural similarities that we find developing roughly in sync in so-called scholastic traditions world wide. 

It doesn't much matter whether the base texts underlying those traditions were Confucian, Daoist, Buddhist, Platonic, Aristotelian, Brahmanical, Islamic, or, as is increasingly true by medieval times throughout Eurasia, complex syncretic mixtures of many traditions.

The result is that study of a topic that even puts most philologists to sleep -- the use of formal exegetical methods in commentarial traditions -- in many ways is the key to understanding how "high" textual traditions, including those involving major world traditions, assumed their canonical forms.

Niehoff apparently deals at least with similarities in Homeric and biblical exegesis, as suggested here:

> She explores the similarities between Demetrius' concern with contradictions 
> between various biblical passages and similar concerns regarding a desire
> for Homeric non-contradiction, particular in Aristotle's influential Aporemata 
> Homerica. Both Aristotle and Demetrius employ similar methods to resolve 
> such contradictions and Niehoff suggests that Demetrius' questions "could 
> equally have been raised by Aristotle, had he come across the Jewish 
> Scriptures".

Or if "Aristotle" (as it were) had run across the Vedas or Chinese classics, for that matter?

I'm not sure how far Niehoff takes these parallels, but this paragraph in the review is enough to convince me to give it a close read. 

The Aporemata Homerica, I should add, only exists in fragments today. Niehoff as I take it discusses a number of previous untranslated scholia involving this and other early Western exegetical texts.

Best,
Steve