From Adam to Abraham:
Malalas and Euhemeristic Historiography
William Adler

Abstract The essay examines Malalas’ account of world history from Adam to Abraham in
the context of developments in the genre of the universal chronicle after Eusebius. The most
distinctive feature of Malalas’ treatment of this period is his ample use of Euhemerism, an
interpretive technique that enabled him to demythologize and integrate figures from Greek
mythology into his narrative of universal history The theory underlies his use and adaptation of
older sources, most notably the Book of Jubilees, a Jewish work from the Second Temple Period.
For Malalas, Jubilees’ narrative of events from Serug to Terah enabled him to explain the histori-
cal circumstances of what he calls “Hellenism”, that is the false belief in the divinity of deceased
kings and culture heroes. At the conclusion of the paper, the case is made for understanding
Malalas’ chronicle as a late antique representative of the ideals and principles of Hellenistic
historiography.
For a long time, received wisdom held that, by the 4th century, the genre of the Chris-
tians universal chronicle had “already passed its creative stage”.1 This notion, an un-
fortunate legacy of the days of Scaliger, should be put to rest once and for all. When
Malalas was writing his chronicle, vital questions, many of them identified by Eusebius
himself, remained unresolved. For the long stretch of time from Adam to Abraham,
the problems proved to be so intractable that Eusebius, with good reason, ultimately
elected to consign it to the domain of “pre-history”.
Eusebius may have been the proximate cause for the confusion. But the problems
went much deeper, rooted in the primary sources themselves. In both size and sub-
stance, the first eleven chapters of Genesis - more than 3000 years according to the
Septuagint chronology - read more like a historical preamble than history itself. The
little that Genesis did have to say about this age had the aroma of myth: a man and a
woman lived lives of idyllic innocence in a garden; a serpent walked upright and was
able to carry on a conversation; biblical patriarchs lived to an improbably old age, up-
wards of 1000 years; and fallen angels later had sexual intercourse with women, from
whose mixing a race of giants were born. From a handful of one-off notices in Genesis
about the technological achievements of Cain and his offspring and the migration of
peoples after the flood, chroniclers teased out whatever information they could about

See Momigliano (1963), p. 84.