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William Adler

family were themselves willing accomplices. Serug was an idolater who instructed
his son Nahor in the Chaldean arts of divination and augury.39 And Abraham’s father
Terah made a comfortable living fashioning dumb and lifeless idols for the citizens of
Ur. Only a man of Abraham’s divinely-revealed wisdom knowledge was able to restore
the world to a true knowledge of God, even if in doing so he risked estrangement from
his father. After a tense confrontation with Terah, Abraham burns the temple of idols
in the city, an act of religious zealotry leading to the death of his brother Haran in the
conflagration.40
In Byzantine chronicles, Jubilees account of the widening corruption of the world
before Abraham’s reforms turns up repeatedly, and in various permutations. Malalas’
own account of the division of the world among Noah’s three sons, Cainan’s discovery
of pre-flood stelae, the moral decay in the time of Serug, Abraham’s clash with his
father over idols, and his subsequent migration from Ur all bear some connection,
however attenuated, with that work. In every case, however, he has reshaped this cycle
of legends according to a set of assumptions different from, and even fundamentally at
odds with, the source from which they ultimately originate.
Malalas’ conflation of the /zzA’/m-bascd story of ante-diluvian rock carvings with
the parallel version in Josephus is illustrative. The continuous recycling of Josephus’
notice in Byzantine universal chroniclers is not difficult to explain.41 How and when
people first learned to measure time accurately according to the stars were subjects of
understandable interest to them. The story also explained the means by which a record
of the first breakthroughs in astronomy managed to survive a world-wide catastrophe.
But in the interest of conforming it to their own requirements, chroniclers, Malalas
among them, had to take liberties with the received tradition. According to Josephus,
the descendants of Seth, not Seth himself, made the first breakthroughs in astronomy.
For Malalas, however, individuals, not groups, are ordinarily the engines of cultural
progress. Seth alone, not his offspring, is thus solely responsible for the discovery. And
if Seth’s descendants were able to record their discoveries on stone and brick monu-
ments, it only followed that they must have been literate. But how, in such an early
moment in history, did they learn to read and write, and in what language? Malalas
knew the answer. Seth had formulated a system of seven vowels patterned after the
five planets and the two luminaries. And the script he and his children used was He-
brew. None of this is explicitly stated in Josephus, nor does Malalas claim that he did;
he received this information from an otherwise unknown Roman chronicler named
Fortunus.42 But for any historian committed to telling the full story of the origins of
civilization, it flowed naturally from Josephus’ testimony.
39 Liber Jubilaeorum n, 7-8.
40 Liber Jubilaeorum 12,1-14. On Abraham in the Book of Jubilees, see most recently van Ruiten (2012), esp.
pp. 19-64.
41 For other versions of Josephus’ report, see, for example, Georgius Monachus, Chronicon p. 10, 5-24 de
Boor; Symeon Logothetes, Chronicon p. 24, 6-8 (pp. 26, 24-27, 39 Wahlgren); Michael Glycas, Aww/«
p. 243,1-22 Bekker.
42 Malalals, Chronographia 11 (p. 4,18-22 Th urn).