The "Belly-Myther" of Endor: Interpretations of 1 Kingdoms 28 in the Early Church (review)

Displaying texts and translations in facing-page format, this delightfully thorough and judicious jewel of scholarship provides a practically exhaustive, chronologically ordered anthology of contributions to Christian debates from the second to the fourth centuries over the meaning of Saul's recourse to necromancy in 1 Samuel 28. The tenth-century manuscript Monacensis graecus 331 preserves the texts forming the core of this collection: Origen's fifth homily on 1 Samuel, Eustathius of Antioch's treatise against that homily, and Gregory of Nyssa's letter to Theodosius on the scriptural episode in question. Selections from Justin's Dialogue with Trypho, Tertullian's De anima, and the Martyrdom of Pionius show clearly the earlier roots of these fourth-century discussions. Catena fragments from Apollinaris of Laodicea and Diodore of Tarsus help contextualize Gregory's continuation of the debate.

The translators might have added Ambrosiaster's Question 27 from his Quaestiones veteris et novi testamenti, and one can regret that they did not use Marcovich's 1997 edition of Justin's Dialogue instead of Archambault's 1909 text. But the translations are solid and readable, with very few slips or infelicities. The accompanying notes explain well the usual textual and translation difficulties, provide helpful bibliography, and guide the reader back to apposite passages in earlier selections or in the learned essays that form the first half of the book.

Following the Nautins and Simonetti, Greer's essay ably demonstrates that various attempts to hold bodily resurrection together with the immortality of the soul provide much of the urgency behind the opposing exegetical options represented in the book: the deceased Samuel actually came up from the nether regions in 1 Samuel 28, or the text depicts a demonic fraud. Greer also shows effectively that other doctrinal concerns—for example, whether the just submit to demonic authority in the netherworld after their death or how 1 Samuel 28 confirms the Bible's prohibition of necromancy—help to shape the differing interpretive choices. With masterful concision, clarity, and reasoned caution, he contextualizes the positions in the translated selections themselves through references to other texts by their authors. However, does Eustathius's preference for attributing the words of the belly-myther (a term impressively justified as a replacement for the traditional "witch" in the book's preface) to her character rather than to the divine author of the Bible significantly leave "room for the human aspect of scriptural authors and narrators" (lxiv, n. 53)? Distinguishing a character in biblical narration from the divine narrator says nothing about the role of the human biblical writers.

Mitchell's essay on the Origen and Eustathius texts, a revision of her 2005 article in the Journal of Religion, starts out with an excellent overview of recent studies in the role of rhetoric in patristic exegesis. Armed with numerous references to antique literature on rhetoric, she builds an overwhelming case for her contention that the adversarial rhetorical culture of many early Christian exegetes led them to conceive of their interpretations in terms of a winner-take-all contest between literal and allegorical readings. Her essay helps the reader to see that this approach often led the authors represented in this volume to gloss over important exegetical issues, the handling of which could blur the sharp lines they wished to draw, and even to distort "enemy" interpretive positions if rhetorical effectiveness demanded it. Mitchell's "compositional analysis" provides a detailed outline of Origen's and Eustathius's texts that enables the reader to assess the value and slipperiness of their rhetorical arguments. But Origen's case for Samuel's really coming up to visit Saul seems to rely less on the collapsing of "the distinction between simple narrative and the creation of dialogue set in characters' mouths" (xcix, n. 46) than on underlining the divine authorship of the...