Jonites och Nimod i Jerahme'els hebreiska krönika

Authors

• Witold Witakowski Uppsala University

DOI: https://doi.org/10.30752/nj.69580

Keywords:

Middle Ages, Nimrod (Biblical figure), Chronicles of Jerahmeel, Middle Ages -- Historiography, Historians, Jewish

Abstract

The medieval Hebrew Chronicle of Yerahme’el contains a story of the meeting of Nimrod and Yonites, the (fourth) son of Noah, attributed to Strabo of Cyprus. Yonites is unknown in Jewish tradition, but can be found in a similar context as in Yerahme’el in Syriac Christian literature – for the first time in the Cave of Treasures (5th cent.). Yerahme’el could not however know the Cave, and therefore one has to look for intermediary pages. One of them is the Syriac Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodios (the end of the 7th cent.) directed against the Muslims, which became very popular among the Syrians and was soon translated into Greek and Latin. The Latin translation as used by Petrus Comestor (d. 1179) in his Historia Scholastica. Since its author lived in Troyes in northern France where contacts are attested between Christian and Jewish exegetes in the 12th cent., one may assume that Yerahme’el’s work came into being in this region and epoch.