John R. Levison The Greek Life of Adam and Eve Commentaries on Early Jewish Literature (CEJL) Edited by Loren T. Stuckenbruck and Pieter W. van der Horst · Hermann Lichtenberger Doron Mendels · James R. Mueller De Gruyter John R. Levison The Greek Life of Adam and Eve De Gruyter ISBN 978-3-11-075588-6 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-075644-9 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-075652-4 ISSN 1861-6003 Library of Congress Control Number: 2021953273 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2023 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Typesetting: Dörlemann Satz GmbH & Co. KG, Lemförde Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com To Priscilla my lifelong love in prayer and in service Table of Contents Acknowledgements ...................................... IX Abbreviations .......................................... XV INTRODUCTION Chapter 1: The Greek Life of Adam and Eve as Literature ........ 3 Chapter 2: Manuscripts, Greek Text Forms, and Versions ........ 31 Chapter 3: Origin of the Greek Life of Adam and Eve . . . . . . . . . . . 85 Chapter 4: Translation ................................... 155 COMMENTARY – TEXT, TRANSLATION, AND NOTES Excursus: Significant Additions and Revisions in Translation ...... 173 GLAE 1 ............................................... 175 GLAE 2.1–3.1 .......................................... 211 GLAE 3.2–4.2 .......................................... 250 GLAE 5–6 ............................................. 281 GLAE 7–8 ............................................. 312 GLAE 9 ............................................... 362 GLAE 10–12 ........................................... 387 GLAE 13 .............................................. 435 GLAE 14 .............................................. 459 GLAE 15 .............................................. 478 GLAE 16 .............................................. 493 GLAE 17 .............................................. 511 GLAE 18–19 ........................................... 533 GLAE 20 .............................................. 569 GLAE 21 .............................................. 588 GLAE 22 .............................................. 612 GLAE 23 .............................................. 639 GLAE 24 .............................................. 652 GLAE 25 .............................................. 668 VIII Table of Contents GLAE 26 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 685 GLAE 27 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 703 GLAE 28 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 722 GLAE 29 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 739 GLAE 30 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 763 GLAE 31 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 768 GLAE 32 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 787 GLAE 33 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 805 GLAE 34 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 840 GLAE 35 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 849 GLAE 36 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 865 GLAE 37 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 881 GLAE 38 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 909 GLAE 39 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 934 GLAE 40 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 952 GLAE 41 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 999 GLAE 42 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1006 GLAE 43 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1049 Translations of Ancient Sources Used in This Commentary . . . . . . . 1069 Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1072 Index of References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1089 Index of Names and Subjects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1208 Acknowledgements When I hold this commentary in my hands, Priscilla and I will have cele- brated our fortieth wedding anniversary. I am cowed by the realization that I’ve spent half of my married life with the obligation—for many years it proved more obligation than opportunity—to write this commentary. Dur- ing that time, I’ve garnered so many debts, and amassed so many acknowl- edgments, that I had better get down to it. My first yearlong stretch of research devoted to this commentary began in 2000, in the bucolic confines of the National Humanities Center, tucked into the loblolly pines a few miles from Duke University, where I had been teaching at the time. In a lovely office with a view to the forest and in the company of intellectually alert colleagues, including my delightful next- door neighbor, Kate Lowe, my walking-partner, Dennis Romano, and an affable senior colleague, Tom Laqueur, I set out to write—not quite this commentary, but a few articles that would feed it, such as one on funerals in the writings of Josephus. That year, I also published Texts in Transition: The Greek Life of Adam and Eve, a sort of prolegomenon to the commen- tary. I continued to write articles and give papers on the Life of Adam and Eve, but I proved prodigal: much of my passion for the next two decades lay with ancient pneumatology. When I finally directed more of my atten- tion to the Greek Life, it was with extensive support, not least from Dean Craig Hill, who authorized my research leave in 2018–19, and the generous funding of the W. J. A. Power Chair of Old Testament Interpretation and Biblical Hebrew at Perkins School of Theology, Southern Methodist Uni- versity, which I have been privileged to hold since 2015. The Power Chair has funded a steady flow of stellar doctoral students, each of whom has worked efficiently, carefully, and reliably: William Glass, Andrew Klumpp, Lane Davis, and Kelsey Spinnato. Each has done the unimaginably delicate, detailed, and difficult work of indexing, proofing, organizing, collating, searching ancient indexes and databases, and, in the case of Kelsey, wrestling an edited book, The Pursuit of Life: The Promise and Challenge of Palliative Care, into publishable form. Kelsey worked tirelessly to the end—an act of sheer collegiality and friendship—during our last afternoon together, before sending the final proofs and indexes to https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110756449-201 X Acknowledgements De Gruyter. I have said dozens of times that the greatest asset of the Power Chair is the opportunity it has given me to work with a succession of stun- ning SMU doctoral students. The Power Chair has also afforded me the opportunity to view original manuscripts of the Greek Life of Adam and Eve. In 2016, I travelled to Greece. In Athens, I visited the Ethnikē Bibliothēkē tēs Hellados. On the island of Andros, I visited Monē tēs Hagias. Our visit to Andros demands more than a mere mention; it was quite the adventure. It began right here in Dallas, on the Southern Methodist University campus, with our colleague in the Lyle School of Engineering, Panagiotis (Panos) Papamichalis. Panos used family connections in Greece to connect us with the remote and nearly inaccessible Monē tēs Hagias; I sat in Panos’ office as he negotiated, I think, in Greek. With the connection ably made, we travelled to Athens and took the ferry from the mainland to Andros off-season in high winds—so high that the return ferry trip had to be postponed. We rented a small Fiat in the quiet but blustery port. The next morning, we jolted and puttered up the mountainside to a monastery, where we were warmly welcomed. Inside the doorway stood a young woman, Vicky Vasilikipetsas, donning a University of British Columbia sweatshirt. Vicky translated for us the entire time. The monastery had only two sisters left, who embodied the quintessence of hospitality. We visited relics, the chapel, and then we were invited into their homey dining room for a considerable lunch. When it was time to look at the manuscript, octogenarian Sister Parthenia energetically fetched it from a back room in a Ziploc bag. We sat elbow to elbow at the dining room table, as Sister Parthenia turned every page, reading through the Greek Life of Adam and Eve line by line. What a treasure—yes, the manuscript, but even more the chance to sit with lovely people in a warm dining room at the crest of a mountain in a remote monastery on a Greek island. I tell this story because it is one thing to acknowledge the generous funding that made it possible and quite another to describe the adventure we had thanks to that funding. Early the next summer, in 2017, thanks again to the Power Chair, I viewed manuscripts in Italy in magnificent libraries: in Venice, the Bibli- oteca Nazionale Marciana; in Milan, the Biblioteca Ambrosiana; in the Vatican City, the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana; and in Brescia, the Bibli- oteca Queriniana, which was actually a gorgeous public library accessible to anyone who cared to visit. I left that library in possession of a beautiful book of library holdings; this book, a gift from the warm and generous librarians, still graces our home. The summer of 2018 found Priscilla and me in Oxford. Thanks to a Sam Taylor Award, I was able to do essential research in the spectacular