Academic literature on the topic 'Giants tombs'

This chapter tackles the longest and most articulated exorcism narrative in the Gospels, Mk 5:1–20. Mark and the other Gospel traditions inherited from the earliest groups of Jesus followers a conceptualization of the Otherness of the “spirits” rooted in the cultural idioms of Enochic traditions. The identity of these “spirits” as “unclean” is widespread in Second Temple Judaism and indexes the mytheme of the partial survival of the primeval giants, the ill-fated offspring of the union between angels and women. However, Mark combines such a mythological representation with pan-Mediterranean ideas about the return of certain classes of troubled dead, which are well attested in antiquity. The chapter moves from these initial observations to a more detailed analysis of Mk 5:1–20, in which the foreignness of the possessing “spirit” is further compounded by the insertion of an anti-Roman political theme. By reading the narrative of Mk 5 as a reflection on and a refraction of a ritual of exorcism, the chapter shows that an interpretation informed by the insights of anthropological literature can understand the exorcism not simply as an inverted imitation of Roman imperialism but as a means to reshape imaginatively the local structure of ethnic identities in Gerasa, a locale in which Jewish and Gentile identities had to cohabit in flux and in contrast up to the catastrophic events of the first Jewish war.

There are no diaries or log-books of sea captains from the twelfth century, but there are vivid accounts of crossing the Mediterranean written by Jewish and Muslim pilgrims journeying from Spain to the East. Benjamin of Tudela was a rabbi from a town in Navarre, and he set out on his travels around 1160. The aim of his diary was to describe the lands of the Mediterranean, large areas of Europe, and Asia as far as China, in Hebrew for a Jewish audience, and he carefully noted the number of Jews in each town he visited. His book reports genuine travels across the Mediterranean, through Constantinople and down the coast of Syria, though his descriptions of more remote areas beyond the Mediterranean are clearly based on report and rumour, which became more fantastic the further his imagination ventured. He evidently did go to Jerusalem, though, and expressed his wonderment at the supposed tomb of King David on Mount Zion. As Christian passions about the Holy Land became more intense, the attention of Jewish pilgrims was also directed there, under the influence of the crusaders whom they scorned. Benjamin’s route took him down from Navarre through the kingdom of Aragon and along the river Ebro to Tarragona, where the massive ancient fortifications built by ‘giants and Greeks’ impressed him. From there he moved to Barcelona, ‘a small city and beautiful’, full of wise rabbis and of merchants from every land, including Greece, Pisa, Genoa, Sicily, Alexandria, the Holy Land and Africa. Benjamin provides precious and precocious evidence that Barcelona was beginning to develop contacts across the Mediterranean. Another place that attracted merchants from all over the world, even, he says, from England, was Montpellier; ‘people of all nations are found there doing business through the medium of the Genoese and Pisans’. It took four days to reach Genoa by sea from Marseilles. Genoa, he wrote, ‘is surrounded by a wall, and the inhabitants are not governed by any king, but by judges whom they appoint at their pleasure’. He also insisted that ‘they have command of the sea’.