Anyone who investigates an artefact from ancient Egypt will soon discover a human dimension; the fingerprint of a potter impressed on a bowl, or a correction made by an accountant on a sheet of papyrus. It is exciting to discover that people who lived millennia ago seem to have been like ‘us’. Yet the funerary beliefs of the ancient Egyptians, the gigantic pyramids of Giza, and the god-like pharaohs remain enigmatic, and it is the recognition that people imagined the world differently in the past that fascinates most people today. This book explores the gulf between pots and pyramids, between shared human experience and what sets Egypt apart from other societies.

In 1946, the Egyptian architect Hassan Fathy (1900–1989) designed a new village for the inhabitants of Qurna, just a few kilometres to the west of their old village on the West Bank at Thebes. New Qurna, later renamed Fathy Village, was a state initiative for the protection of ancient Egyptian rock tombs, upon which the villagers had built their homes. Most of the villagers resisted having to leave, and the project came to an end uncompleted in 1952. Fifty years later, after violent conflicts including about landholding rights, the villagers were eventually resettled. New Qurna was an innovative project insofar as it employed traditional building technology. For instance, Fathy built the houses from sun-dried mud bricks instead of fired bricks or concrete. The bricks were locally available, comparatively cheap, and were proven to maintain a good climate in a house throughout the year. Fathy became known worldwide for his ‛architecture for the poor’.

The Stoic philosopher Posidonius is said to have enumerated three different ways that the divine could communicate with humans in dreams.

Since divination concerns communication between divine and human realms, in order for this communication to take place there must be some way in which the divine and human realms can connect and interact. In the mythical world of epic, gods and humans could more or less straightforwardly appear to each other and talk, but in the systems of the philosophers these interactions needed to be worked out in ways that fitted into their cosmological and anthropological frameworks. The quote from Posidonius outlines three ways in which these connections could be made, which Cicero expands beyond dreams to include other moments of divine inspiration.

In what follows, I will sketch a general picture of various ways in which divi-natory signs and messages were thought to be able to traverse the gap between human and divine in the ancient world, before examining how Paul’s statements about divine knowledge fit within these possibilities. Scholars have long recog-nised that Paul’s letters demonstrate a certain facility in the philosophical terms and concepts of his day.Attention has often focused on the affinities he shares with ancient rhetoric and moral philosophy.More recently however scholars have directed energy towards understanding the philosophical contours of Paul’s physics, which includes his cosmology and anthropology.

Stowers, in particular, has sought to locate Paul with some precision in the intellectual climate of the late Roman Republic and early Empire.Before the first century BCE, Hellenistic philosophy had been characterised by the rival schools of Stoicism, Epicureanism, and the sceptical Academy. But after the closing of the Academy in Athens in 86 BCE, philosophy was no longer centralised in Athens and witnessed a renewed interest in interpreting the texts of Plato and Aristotle, and recovering the doctrines of Pythagoras.

The last chapter examined the phenomenon of prophetic speech in Paul’s letters. Prophetic speech was not always spontaneous but sometimes drew on oracles that had been delivered previously and stored up in tradition or in writing. When Paul explicitly quotes speech from a divine being, his largest source by far is the various texts that make up the Jewish sacred writings, which he says preserve the “oracles of God” (Rom 3:2; cf. 11:4). Written oracle collections were a common feature of the ancient world, where they were generally understood to be the written records of oracles previously uttered under inspiration, either by the priest at an official oracle sanctuary, such as Delphi or Dodona, or by independent inspired figures of the legendary past, such as Bacis, Musaeus, or the Sibyl.This chapter further examines Paul’s use of sacred texts both as a part of his own divinatory repertoire, and as part of the divinatory use of texts in the ancient world.

Scholars have generally resisted seeing any analogy between Paul’s use of scripture and such oracle collections of the ancient world, more often viewing “scripture” as a uniquely Jewish category, with Paul as a uniquely Christian interpreter of it.Recently, however, those who have applied the term “divination” to Paul have made “textual divination” a matter of first importance in comparing Paul with his environment. Wendt and Eyl have both recontex-tualised Paul’s textual practices within the divinatory use of texts such as Homer, Orphic literature, or the Chaldean Oracles.Eyl notes that divinatory interpretations of texts exist on a sliding scale, with bibliomancy on one end: “the practice of opening (or unrolling) a text, pointing to a random passage, and imagining that it delivers a prophetic message to or about an inquirer.”On the other end of the scale are interpretations that employ “a greater cognitive investment through intellectual concepts such as metaphor, allegory, theories about the cosmos and gods, complex textual interpretations, and even more complex reinterpretations.”Both Eyl and Wendt draw on the work of Struck to posit allegory, understood in a broad sense, as the basic hermeneutical stance underwriting all such divinatory practice in Paul and his wider context.The basic presupposition is that such texts are repositories of hidden truth, possessing deeper meaning than what is apparent on the surface.

At the conference ‘Urbanization and Cultural Development in the Ancient Near East’, held in 1958, John Wilson provocatively claimed that ‘Egypt through the New Kingdom’ was ‘a civilization without cities’.1 More than six decades later, most archaeologists would reject his statement, given the evidence for Egyptian cities and other larger settlements in the New Kingdom, but is the same true of the Old and Middle Kingdoms? The question would be simple to answer if the task was simply to compare the excavated remains reviewed in Chapter 4 with settlements unequivocally defined as cities. But such an approach risks treating settlements as discrete units of analysis, dissociated from broader social and cultural patterns.

The landscape of north-east Africa is spectacular. Inhospitable deserts abruptly meet the lush, pulsatile floodplain of the Nile River (Figure 3.1). To the west of the Nile Valley and Delta, wide sand dunes extend into the Sahara, interrupted by scattered rock formations. Five large and a series of smaller oases offer opportunities for life in the Western Desert, while the Fayum depression has been connected to the Nile Valley since the early second millennium. To the east of the Nile Valley lie the Eastern Desert and the Sinai Peninsula, which are rocky. Each of these habitats was occupied by a variety of groups, each with their distinctive lifestyles.

In a beautifully written cultural history of mortal remains, Thomas Laqueur enquires into ‘how and why the dead make civilization’. Death for him is the fundamental ‘other’, in the face of which humans constitute their lives and civilise their behaviour. Unlike Philippe Ariès in his outline of a history of death in Europe, Laqueur sees more continuities than ruptures across periods and cultures. For Egyptologists who study such extraordinary expressions as pyramids, mummies, and Coffin Texts, it can be helpful to be reminded that Egyptian funerary culture is but one of humankind’s attempts at coping with death. Yet Laqueur moves blithely from the Upper Palaeolithic to Greek philosophy. His neglect of Egypt is a tacit rebuttal of the commonly held opinion that Egyptian funerary culture, with its wealth of splendid tombs, is unique. In fact, tombs and burials constitute a huge amount of archaeological evidence for the Old and Middle Kingdoms (Figure 7.1). They provide rich information on society and culture, and despite many blind spots and biases in the record they are an extremely dense source of evidence for the study of the pyramid age.

Throughout his letters, Paul claims to convey the words and will of his God, and of that God’s Messiah, Jesus. This observation is painfully obvious, but has not generally received the attention it deserves in Pauline scholarship. For those studying his letters from a confessional perspective such an observation may be taken for granted or treated at the level of the general inspiration of scripture. For many lay readers of Paul the passages that need more explanation are those in which he claims not to be speaking directly for God (such as 1 Cor 7:12). For critical scholarship, the truth value of such claims is appropriately bracketed, and attention instead focuses on the development of his ideas within his cultural and religious milieu. Within this cultural and religious milieu, though, we may still ask the question: if Paul claims to convey the words and will of a deity, how does he believe he has received such knowledge? His letters suggest a variety of means through which he discerns the divine will: he has visions and revelations of the risen Jesus, he receives prophetic words and wisdom transmitted by holy pneuma, he interprets Jewish sacred texts and, more generally, he reads signs of divine activity in the human and natural world around him.

The aim of this study is twofold: to provide a category through which these various methods of hearing from the divine can be conceptualised in Paul’s first-century context and, second, to provide a reading of Paul’s letters that attends to how these various methods function in relation to each other in Paul’s broader worldview. Many of these aspects of Paul’s letters have been extensively studied in their own right, but Pauline scholarship has so far lacked an adequate analytical category through which to account for all of these methods of divine communication in Paul’s historical context. The most common categories that might accomplish such a task are “revelation” or “prophecy,” but both of these are limited in the evidence they allow for consideration and in the way they relate Paul to his historical and philosophical context.

I began this study by showing how previous scholarly categories have not been able to present a full picture of Paul’s access to divine knowledge which situates him convincingly in his historical context. While Paul’s letters evince diverse means of access to divine communication, categories such as “prophecy” or “revelation” account for only portions of the evidence, and neither of those categories has been able to situate Paul’s full range of divinatory methods in the first-century culture of a Jew living in the Hellenistic Roman Empire. Under the rubric of “divination” I have analysed Paul’s various means of divine communication under the subheadings of “visions,” “speech,” “texts,” and “signs,” elucidating their role in Paul’s letters with reference to the contemporary divinatory practices of the Graeco-Roman world. I have also considered how Paul presents the mechanics of divination in conversation with contemporary philosophical reflections on the same topic.

Rather than summarise each chapter in turn, I organise my conclusions below thematically and synthetically, drawing together various strands that have emerged from the cumulative analysis of this study. Part one functions as something of a summary of Chapters 2 to 5 and focuses on the different types of knowledge each divinatory method provides. Part two considers the implications of this for how to situate the question of “revelation” in Paul’s historical context. Parts three and four take up again the question of the mechanics of divination from Chapter 1, presenting some more nuanced conclusions about divination in relation to Paul’s anthropology, cosmology, and theology that the ensuing chapters have made possible.

Methods of Divination in Paul

As ancient people turned to the gods for advice and information on a broad range of matters, so, too, Paul’s methods of divination uncover a large range of information: from smaller scale signs and revelations that direct various aspects of everyday life, to expansive insights about cosmology and eschatology. Within this range certain methods and certain types of signs lend themselves most readily to certain types of information.

Non-verbal signs are perhaps the most limited in scope as they generally only convey divine approval or disapproval.

By the early Old Kingdom, steep social hierarchies had developed in Egypt. A small group of individuals at the top seemed to hold the fate of the country in their hands, as only the ‛ruling classes’, to use Marxist-inspired terminology, commanded the resources to express their ideas and practices. In durable materials and at places favourable for preservation, the texts, inscriptions, paintings, sculpture, and monumental architecture commissioned by the elite shaped modern perceptions of ancient Egypt. Other types of evidence, such as the workmen’s huts, simple graves, and local community shrines discussed in this book seem merely to fill the gaps and are hardly ever used to develop alternative approaches to the traditional narrative.

The basic unit of divination is the sign, “something that represents something else,” which is then “taken as the basis for a process of inference.”This is most obvious for so-called artificial means of divination, in which the flight of a bird or the shape of a liver represents success in battle or something similar, but it also applies to inspired visions and prophecy. Anne Marie Kitz breaks down the process of divination in general into three defining characteristics: first, the divine manipulation of earthly material (ranging from stones used for lot-casting to animals to human mediums), second, the sign (the way the lots fall, the particular flight of the birds, the vision seen or the words uttered in prophecy), and third, the interpretation of the sign.This is a useful model with which to see the structural similarities across different methods of divination and highlights how, in all methods, there remains a sign that needs to be interpreted. This is no less true for visions or prophecy than it is for the interpretation of texts.

In each of the preceding chapters, I have shown how these various forms of divination either interact with signs in the external world, or can themselves function as signs that need interpreting. In this chapter, I turn more focused attention to signs and omens in Paul’s letters, those things in the world from which he draws inferences about divine activity and disposition. The first half of the chapter will survey the various ways signs could be interpreted in the ancient world and how Paul’s appeals to signs and omens fit within this context. The second half will be devoted to analysing the role of divine signs in Rom 1–3. These opening chapters of Romans show a sustained engagement with the question of how certain things have been revealed, and also contain what many scholars have taken to be Paul’s central and defining comments on the topic of “revelation.”

Interpreting Signs and Omens

Varieties of Signs and Interpretations

A great variety of things could be read as signs, and different signs could be interpreted with various levels of sophistication. On the one hand, certain objects acquired, through convention, specific semiotic value, such as the flight of birds, or the liver or entrails of an animal.