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William Adler

3. Malalas’Jewish Sources: Josephus, the Book of Jubilees,
and the Origins of Religious Error
Although Malalas’ early culture heroes are names mostly familiar from Hesiod and
Homer, he does not slight the contributions of early biblical patriarchs to the advance-
ment of learning and civilization. Adam’s third son Seth assigned names to the stars
and five planets and formulated the letters of the Hebrew alphabet. After the flood,
Noah’s grandson Cainan composed a treatise on astronomy originating in astronom-
ical learning carved on a stone tablet by Seth’s offspring.29 Not all of the innovations
of biblical patriarchs were so constructive, however. Serug and Abraham’s own father
Terah are held to account for introducing and propagating idolatrous practices on the
eve of Abraham’s reforms.30 While Genesis says nothing about this, students of the lit-
erature of Second Temple Judaism will detect in these extra-biblical traditions echoes
of two works well-known to Byzantine chroniclers: Flavius Josephus’ Antiquities and
the Book of Jubilees. But like Malalas’ other sources, they have been refitted, sometimes
radically, to the norms of euhemeristic historiography.
Both Jubilees and Josephus reflect, albeit from sharply different angles, the dy-
namics of the culturally competitive Hellenistic age. In the transnational contest for
preeminence in the arts and sciences, Jewish apologists and historians began exploring
a question on which Genesis was mostly silent: the contribution of their own nation
to the enrichment of world civilization. Figures of biblical history - most notably
Seth, Enoch, Abraham, and Moses - are now made over into sages, innovators and,
above all, critical links in the transfer of high culture to the Babylonians, Egyptians,
and other nations of acknowledged antiquity and wisdom. Despite their reputation in
astronomy and arithmetic, the Egyptians, Josephus writes, knew nothing about these
sciences before receiving instruction from Abraham, a highly regarded Chaldean sage.
From Egypt, his teachings were then conveyed to the Greeks.31 Even the Babylo-
nians, in whose culture Abraham was educated, could not claim primacy in astronomy.
That distinction belonged to the ante-diluvian line of Seth, Adam’s third son. Seth’s
descendants, a virtuous line if ever there was one, had not only mastered the science
of astronomy; they also had the presence of mind to record their findings for later
generations. Warned by Adam about an impending world-wide calamity either of
water or fire, they recorded their learning on monuments of stone and brick. The stone
monument, the only one to survive the universal flood, was still standing in S eiris, a
remote location to the East.32
For the cosmopolitan and Hellenized Josephus, there was nothing inherently ob-
jectionable about the successes of Greece and the more ancient civilizations of Egypt
29 Malalas, Chronographia I 5 (pp. 7,3-8,17 Thurn). See further below, in this section.
30 Malalas, Chronographia II18 (pp. 38,7-10; 39,31-34 Thurn).
31 Flavius loscphus, AzzzTyz/zzV/zVv ludaicae 1166-168; on Abraham as Chaldean sage, see also Flavius lose-
phws, Antiquitates ludaicae 1158.
32 Flavius loscphus, AzzzTyz/zzV/zVv ludaicae I 68-71. On the two tablets tradition in early Judaism and Chris-
tianity, see Orlov (2001).