Beware the Evil Eye: The Evil Eye in the Bible and the Ancient World, vol. 3, The Bible and Related Sources by John H. Elliott

Abstract

Reviewed by: Beware the Evil Eye: The Evil Eye in the Bible and the Ancient World, vol. 3, The Bible and Related Sources by John H. Elliott Zeba Crook john h. elliott, Beware the Evil Eye: The Evil Eye in the Bible and the Ancient World vol. 3, The Bible and Related Sources ( Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2016). Pp. xxx + 348. Paper $42. John H. Elliott has produced a four-volume piece on evil eye beliefs and practices. The four volumes treat material from Mesopotamian/Egyptian, Greek/Roman, biblical, and rabbinic/postbiblical sources, respectively. The present review treats the third volume, on the biblical period and sources. This series of books marks the completion of a very long process for E. He first wrote about the evil eye nearly thirty years ago (John H. Elliott, "The Fear of the Leer: The Evil Eye from the Bible to Li'l Abner," Forum 4.4 [1988] 42-71). The time elapsed and the scope of these volumes represent E.'s discovery of how prevalent the evil eye is in world cultures, past and present. In chap. 1, E. looks at how evil eye beliefs and practices are reflected in the Hebrew Bible, the LXX, the Pseudepigrapha, the Dead Sea Scrolls, Philo, and Josephus. Because these sources were written in the culture and were not a description of that culture, it must be acknowledged that sometimes evil eye beliefs and practices (not to mention any cultural practice or value) will sometimes be echoed rather than named in writing. In other words, one should not assume that a phenomenon is present in a passage only where the technical terminology or vocabulary of that phenomenon is present. E. shows how sometimes the dynamics of an exchange described in a passage can be explained by evil eye beliefs and practices even though they are not named. Nonetheless, part of E's agenda is to call scholars to see evil eye beliefs and practices behind many of the mistranslations of popular Bibles over the centuries. There is a vast vocabulary of evil eye beliefs and practices, but too often it is lost in translations that are unfamiliar with or insensitive to the pertinent data. The Hebrew and Greek vocabulary is laid out in this chapter. In addition, this first chapter explains how evil eye beliefs and practices are connected to the ancient understanding of how the eyes function and their connection to the heart or personal disposition. The eye was thought to see by emitting light, but because of this feature it could also emit emotion, particularly and most corrosively envy, but also stinginess, mockery, fear, hatred, and suspicion. In this world, one needed to be wary of the potential of being evil-eyed, so much of the data concerning evil eye beliefs and practices relates to gestures and material artifacts used to repel the evil eye. Israelite and Judean beliefs and practices are of a piece with Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Greek, and Roman ones but are not identical to these other beliefs. For instance, Elliott notes that, unlike their neighbors, Israelites never attributed envy or the evil eye to their god or to demons. For ancient Israelites, as for Christians after them, the evil eye was a distinctly human characteristic. The second chapter, covering NT references to, allusions to, and backgrounds of evil eye beliefs and practices, is substantially longer than the first chapter. Explicit references are found in (and limited to) the Gospels and the letters of Paul, with very few implicit NT references. As in chap. 1, E. is concerned to show how translation so commonly obfuscates evil eye beliefs and practices. E.'s readings of the Gospel pericopae are close and detailed, and in them he not only makes clear that evil eye beliefs and practices are part of the language of each passage, but in addition he illustrates what is gained by accounting for the evil eye in one's interpretation of the passage. But none of these treatments is more robust or thorough than his fifty-page section on Gal 3:1. E. shows that it is no accident that such [End Page 339] an explicit verb (baskainō) related to evil eye beliefs...