Kramer


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Hellenistic Visuality and Jewish Textuality 
in Ezekiel’s Exagoge 

M. J. Kramer 

N HELLENISTIC literary culture,” Simon Goldhill argues, 
“there is … a distinctive way of looking at things,”1 and the 
way in which Hellenistic poets looked at and described ob-

jects has recently been the subject of detailed study.2 Central to 
the distinctiveness of such Hellenistic visuality is its appetite for 
the new and unexpected,3 its staging of the subjective process of 
viewing itself, and its concern for the ways in which viewing is 
related to interpretation.4 Hellenistic authors repeatedly depict 
such scenes of viewing in their works. Moreover, their own 
awareness of the scene of viewing as a Hellenistic topos is demon-
strated by their construction of epigram sequences which self-
consciously revolve around this scene,5 and their use of such 

 
1 Simon Goldhill, “The Naive and Knowing Eye: Ecphrasis and the 

Culture of Viewing in the Hellenistic World,” in Art and Text in Ancient Greek 
Culture (Cambridge 1994) 197–223, at 198. 

2 Irmgard Männlein-Robert, Stimme, Schrift und Bild: Zum Verhältnis der Künste 
in der hellenistischen Dichtung (Heidelberg 2007); Évelyne Prioux, Regards alexan-
drins: Histoire et théorie des arts dans l’épigramme hellénistique (Leuven 2007). For 
earlier bibliography see Graham Zanker, Modes of Viewing in Hellenistic Poetry 
and Art (Madison 2004) 201 ff.; Michael Squire, “Making Myron’s Cow Moo? 
Ecphrastic Epigram and the Poetics of Simulation,” AJP 131 (2010) 589–634, 
at 591 n.10. 

3 Zanker, Modes of Viewing 124 ff. 
4 Zanker, Modes of Viewing 72 ff., describes this as “Reader or Viewer Sup-

plementation.”  
5 See for instance Anth.Pal. 7.421 ff. and the lengthy series on Myron’s cow 

(9.713–744, 793–798). 

I 



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scenes as the basis for humour and irony.6 Yet few Hellenistic 
poets were as daring as Ezekiel the tragedian in his Exagoge, who 
not only stages a scene of Hellenistic viewing, but deliberately 
overturns the convention inherent in such scenes that successful 
viewing can be a means of acquiring significant understanding. 

The Exagoge’s relationship with Hellenistic poetic treatments of 
visuality has already been noted by Jane Heath. She argues con-
vincingly that Ezekiel’s description of the Phoenix in fr.17 is 
influenced by the Hellenistic poetic portrayal of such scenes of 
viewing. For Heath, Ezekiel simply subconsciously assimilates 
Hellenistic cultural and poetic approaches to the visual “seam-
lessly in the course of social interaction” with Greek culture. The 
result is that the Exagoge displays a distinctively “Hellenistic” 
attitude to visuality.7 However, a close investigation of the 
Exagoge’s presentation of Moses’ encounter with the burning 
bush demonstrates that, on the contrary, Ezekiel was highly self-
aware in his use and manipulation of this poetic tradition. 
Indeed, rather than adopting a Hellenistic approach to visuality, 
he deliberately challenges some of its underlying epistemological 
assumptions.  

To make this case, I first show how Ezekiel remodels the 
opening of the Biblical burning bush scene to give it the ap-
pearance of a typical Hellenistic ekphrastic scene. Yet, rather 
than following through on this Hellenistic opening, he delib-
erately interrupts it. God himself denies the possibility of gaining 
divine knowledge through the virtuosic interpretation of an 
image, by pointedly rejecting Moses’ vocabulary of sight and sig-
nification. In its place, God presents a theological epistemology 
that is grounded solely in the oral/aural transmission of λόγοι 
(“words”).  

In presenting this opposition, Ezekiel recasts the rivalry 
 

6 Theoc. Id. 15 (see Goldhill, in Art and Text 217–218) and Herod. 4 with 
Thomas Gelzer, “Mimus und kunsttheorie bei Herondas, Mimiambus 4,” in 
C. Schäublin (ed.), Catalepton: Festschrift für Bernhard Wyss (Basel 1985) 96–116. 

7 Jane Heath, “Ezekiel Tragicus and Hellenistic Visuality: The Phoenix at 
Elim,” JThS 57 (2006) 23–41, at 41.  



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between the visual and the (verbal) poetic arts inherent in 
ekphrastic poetry to suggest a broader cultural contrast between 
Hellenistic and Jewish approaches to knowledge of the divine. 
While Hellenistic religion and philosophy were saturated with 
visual language and practices, contemporary Jewish literature 
and religious practice also often focused on texts, read and 
heard, as loci of divine revelation. In his presentation of the 
burning bush, therefore, Ezekiel uses the Greek poetic tradition 
against itself. He remodels the Hellenistic ekphrasis to construct 
and articulate a distinction between Greek and Jewish religion 
based on differing sensory hierarchies. This sophisticated and 
oppositional interaction with Greek culture and poetics has 
profound implications for how we understand Ezekiel’s literary 
project, and his own self-understanding as an author who was 
Jewish but/and chose to write in a Greek form. 
1. Background  

Ezekiel’s Exagoge recasts the narrative of Exodus 1–14 in the 
metrical and stylistic forms of a Greek tragedy.8 The 269 lines of 
the play that remain, quoted in Alexander Polyhistor’s On the 
Jews, and then preserved in excerpts from that work transmitted 
in Eusebius PE 9, provide the only reliable information we have 
about the author. The fact that the Exagoge draws heavily on the 
Septuagint translation of Exodus indicates that the earliest date 
for the text is the latter part of the third century BCE. The latest 
possible date is given by Polyhistor’s work in the mid-first cen-
tury CE.9 

Ezekiel’s home is even harder to identify. Nevertheless, his 
familiarity with the Septuagint, his advanced level of knowledge 
 

8 The two major recent commentaries on Ezekiel are Howard Jacobson, 
The Exagoge of Ezekiel (Cambridge 1983), and Pierluigi Lanfranchi, L’Exagōgē 
d’Ezéchiel le Tragique (Leiden 2006). For a short overview of Ezekiel’s work and 
its context and interpretation see, most recently, Pierluigi Lanfranchi, “The 
Exagōgē of Ezekiel the Tragedian,” in Vayos Liapis et al. (eds), Greek Tragedy 
after the Fifth Century (Cambridge 2018) 125–146.  

9 See Jacobson, The Exagoge 5–13, and Lanfranchi, L’Exagōgē 10, for further 
discussion. 



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of Greek literature, and his ability to produce sophisticated 
Greek poetry make Egypt a likely candidate.10 

If he was writing in Egypt, Ezekiel was also writing in a 
location that would have provided him with an educated and 
sophisticated audience for his work. The text’s Jewish story, its 
celebration of the power of the Jewish God, its detailed account 
of the Passover rituals, and its frequent engagement with matters 
of Biblical exegesis suggest that Jews were Ezekiel’s key audi-
ence.11 As Jacobson has pointed out, however, some details in 
the text may have been designed to appeal to a non-Jewish 
Greek audience as well.12 Whatever the broader audience, it is 
clear that those who would have been able to appreciate the text 
the best would have been individuals with a similar background 
to the author. These Jews, educated both in Jewish and in Hel-
lenistic culture, would have been able to appreciate fully the skill 
with which Ezekiel handles the metrical and stylistic demands of 
tragedy, the creative way in which he engages with the Biblical 
text, and his frequent and sophisticated interactions with the 
Bible, Jewish exegetical traditions, and many works of non-
Jewish Greek literature.13  

For such members of Ezekiel’s audience, the Exagoge’s burning 
bush scene represented a tour de force of the author’s ability to 
present and recast Greek poetic form and the Biblical text in 
creative ways that not only engage with, but also challenge, 
Greek cultural conventions. 
2. Moses as a Hellenistic viewer 

A comparison of the first lines of the burning bush scene in 
Ezekiel and in his Septuagintal source demonstrates the ways in 
which the tragedian has reshaped the opening of the scene to 
resemble a Hellenistic scene of viewing. 

 
10 See Jacobson, The Exagoge 13–17, and Lanfranchi, L’Exagōgē 11–13. 
11 See Lanfranchi, L’Exagōgē 3–7. 
12 Jacobson, The Exagoge 17–20. 
13 See M. J. Kramer, “Ezekiel’s Exagoge and the Drama of Intertextuality,” 

JSP 32 (2022) 147–166, at 166. 



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Exagoge 90–95: 
ΜΩΣ. ἔα· τί µοι σηµεῖον ἐκ βάτου τόδε, 
τεράστιόν τε καὶ βροτοῖς ἀπιστία; 
ἄφνω βάτος µὲν καίεται πολλῷ πυρί,  
αὐτοῦ δὲ χλωρὸν πᾶν µένει τὸ βλαστάνον. 
τί δή; προελθὼν ὄψοµαι τεράστιον 
µέγιστον· οὐ γὰρ πίστιν ἀνθρώποις φέρει. 
MOSES: Look! What is this sign from the bush? It is wonderous 
and unbelievable for mortals! Suddenly the bush burns with much 
fire, but all its foliage remains green. What then? I will go up to it 
and see this very great wonder; for this is something that it’s hard 
for humans to believe. 

LXX Exod 3:2–3: 
ὤφθη δὲ αὐτῷ ἄγγελος κυρίου ἐν φλογὶ πυρὸς ἐκ τοῦ βάτου, καὶ 
ὁρᾷ ὅτι ὁ βάτος καίεται πυρί, ὁ δὲ βάτος οὐ κατεκαίετο. εἶπεν δὲ 
Μωυσῆς Παρελθὼν ὄψοµαι τὸ ὅραµα τὸ µέγα τοῦτο, τί ὅτι οὐ 
κατακαίεται ὁ βάτος.  
The angel of the Lord appeared to him in the flame of fire from 
the bush, and [Moses] saw that the bush burned in the fire, but 
the bush was not consumed by the fire. And Moses said, “I will 
turn aside and see this great sight, why the bush is not consumed.”  

2.1. Viewing stimulated by paradox 
The linguistic similarities between the two passages reflect the 

fact that throughout the Exagoge Ezekiel makes heavy use of the 
language of the Septuagint.14 In both, the apparition emerges ἐκ 
(τοῦ) βάτου, the burning of the bush is described in similar 
vocabulary (ἄφνω βάτος µὲν καίεται πολλῷ πυρί ~ ὁ βάτος καίεται 
πυρί), and Moses’ approach is described in very similar terms 
(προελθὼν ὄψοµαι τεράστιον µέγιστον ~ Παρελθὼν ὄψοµαι τὸ ὅραµα 
τὸ µέγα). However, this comparison also reveals the distinctive-
ness of Ezekiel’s account. Firstly, while Exodus does describe the 
bush as a “great sight” (ὅραµα … µέγα), Ezekiel develops con-
siderably the emphasis placed on the surprising and enigmatic 
nature of what Moses sees. Before even describing what is in 
front of him, Moses calls his vision “wondrous” (τεράστιον) and 
“beyond belief” (βροτοῖς ἀπιστία). His description of the sight 
 

14 Jacobson, The Exagoge 40. 



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then adds a further element of visual paradox to the Septuagint’s 
account by noting that the burning bush not only is “not 
destroyed,” but remains a verdant green amongst the flames, 
counter to the usual effect of fire on a plant. Finally, after his 
description of the sight, Moses returns once again to remarking 
on its spectacular nature with the language of wonder (τεράστιον 
µέγιστον, note the superlative) and the incredible (οὐ γὰρ πίστιν 
ἀνθρώποις φέρει). Unlike the relative restraint of the Biblical ac-
count, Ezekiel makes explicit and emphatic the wondrous and 
paradoxical nature of what Moses sees.15  

Ezekiel’s emphasis on the paradoxical in this scene is in line 
with his interest in the unusual in his description of the Phoenix, 
noted by Heath.16 As she points out concerning that later scene, 
this emphasis on the paradoxical represents a link between 
Ezekiel’s work and that of his Hellenistic poetic and scholarly 
contemporaries whose “eye for the new is well known.”17 

Testimony to the interest of Hellenistic readers and writers in 
the paradoxical is found in the emergence of paradoxographical 
collections in this period. The first of which we are aware is the 
Collection of Marvels from Every Land arranged according to Places by 
Callimachus. Production of such works continues to flourish into 
the Roman era.18 Their interest in the strange and the decon-
textualized nature of their descriptions of individual “wonders” 
is also mirrored in the epigram collections that became popular 
in this period.19 In particular, as George Walsh pointed out,20 in 
Hellenistic poetic representations of viewing it is often the 
strange or paradoxical nature of what is viewed that represents 
the stimulus for the act of investigation and description. One of 
 

15 Cf. Jacobson, The Exagoge 98. 
16 Heath, JThS 57 (2006) 35. 
17 JThS 57 (2006) 39. For a recent study in this area see Jessica Lightfoot, 

Wonder and the Marvellous from Homer to the Hellenistic World (Cambridge 2021). 
18 Lightfoot, Wonder and the Marvellous 46–52. 
19 Lightfoot, Wonder and the Marvellous 78–79, cf. 52–57. 
20 George B. Walsh, “Callimachean Passages: The Rhetoric of Epitaph in 

Epigram,” Arethusa 24 (1991) 77–105, at 92–97. 



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Meleager’s epigrams begins with the speaker puzzling over the 
fact that a statue of Eros seems to be dressed in the wrong clothes 
(Anth.Pal. 7.421): 

Πτανέ, τί σοι σιβύνας, τί δὲ καὶ συὸς εὔαδε δέρµα;  
Winged one, why does the spear, why does the boar skin please 
you? 

This wonder leads him to further description and decryption. 
Likewise, the speaker of an epigram of Antipater (Anth.Pal. 7.424) 
is led to ponder the meaning of the carvings on Lysidice’s funeral 
stele because the objects depicted (reins, a muzzle, and a bird 
associated with war) seem inappropriate on the tomb of a 
woman (οὐχ ἅδεν οὐδ’ ἐπέοικεν ὑπωροφίαισι γυναιξίν, “these do 
not please or befit women who live indoors”). In a more scientific 
mode, the speaker in one of Posidippus’ epigrams is drawn to 
describe a double-magnet because of its qualities that are 
“amazing” (θαυµάσιον) and “wondrous” (τέρας).21 Finally, An-
tipater’s instruction to the viewer, “do not be amazed” (µὴ 
θάµβει) at seeing a whip, an owl, a bow, a goose, and a dog de-
picted on Myro’s tomb, suggests that amazement is the natural 
initial reaction (7.424). 

As these examples demonstrate, the affinities between Moses 
and the viewers presented in Hellenistic poetry are not limited 
to a shared interest in the paradoxical, but also extend to the 
linguistic ways in which the aura of the paradoxical and 
mysterious is expressed in such poetic scenes. Most obviously, 
Ezekiel and Posidippus share the vocabulary of wonder 
(τεράστιον/τέρας) to describe what they have seen. In more 
dramatic terms, the startled direct question with which Moses’ 
speech opens reflects a Hellenistic poetic way of marking the 
intriguing and puzzling quality of what follows, as in Meleager’s 
epigram above, or in Leonidas’ epigram on Peisistratus’ tomb 
(Anth.Pal. 7.422):  

 
21 C. Austin and G. Bastianini, Posidippi Pellaei quae supersunt omnia (Milan 

2002), no. 17. See Peter Bing, The Scroll and the Marble: Studies in Reading and 
Reception in Hellenistic Poetry (Ann Arbor 2009) 264–266. 



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τί στοχασώµεθά σου, Πεισίστρατε, χῖον ὁρῶντες 
   γλυπτὸν ὑπὲρ τύµβου κείµενον ἀστράγαλον; 
What are we to guess about you Peisistratus, seeing a Chian die 
carved on your tomb? 

By starting with this conventional stylistic evocation of a para-
doxical vision scene, Ezekiel begins his description of Moses’ 
encounter with the bush in a way which encourages his audience 
to see his treatment of this incident as an example of a familiar 
topos: a Hellenistic scene of viewing. 
2.2. Focalisation through the viewer 

A second aspect of the scene strengthens this connection. The 
language of the scene is carefully chosen to draw the audience 
into Moses’ own act of viewing.22 The brief Biblical description 
does focalize part of the scene through Moses. The fact that the 
bush is burning but is not consumed is not described directly by 
the narrator, but is presented through Moses’ observation (“he 
saw that … the bush was not consumed”). Ezekiel, however, 
heightens the dramatization of Moses’ process of viewing. The 
interjection (ἔα) and the dative of interest (µοι),23 combined with 
the explicit expression of the desire to view the object (προελθὼν 
ὄψοµαι), together with the use of the direct question and the 
demonstrative τόδε,24 all draw attention to Moses’ role as viewer 
of the bush. 

Once again, both this presentation of a poetic description 
 

22 Graham Zanker, Herodas: Mimiambs (Oxford 2009) 125: “A heightened 
form of audience-inclusion … is a pronounced feature of Hellenistic poetry.” 
For the importance of the presentation of the act of viewing in Hellenistic 
poetry see Doris Meyer, “The Act of Reading and the Act of Writing in 
Hellenistic Epigram,” in P. Bing et al. (eds.), Brill’s Companion to Hellenistic 
Epigram (Leiden 2007) 185–210. Cf. Zanker, Modes of Viewing 109–123. 

23 Smyth, Greek Grammar (New York 1920) 1486: “the personal pronouns of 
the first and second person are often used to denote the interest of the speaker 
… in an action or statement.” 

24 I. Männlein-Robert notes that the frequent use of demonstrative 
pronouns in such poems to “create the fiction of direct sense perception” is 
“stereotypical”: “Epigrams on Art: Voice and Voicelessness in Hellenistic 
Epigram,” in Brill’s Companion 251–271, at 253. 



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through the lens of a viewing persona and the linguistic formulae 
in which this is evoked find close parallels in ekphrastic verse. As 
Walsh memorably puts it, in Hellenistic ekphrases we are often 
viewing objects or reading inscriptions by “looking over [the 
viewer’s] shoulder, or peering through a window at the back of 
his skull.”25 This evocation of the viewing subject is often effected 
by questions which the viewer poses to him/herself to suggest an 
internalised dialogue (called a dialogue transposé by Prioux),26 as a 
substitute for the actual dialogue between viewer and object 
found in other poems. To take just one example, the opening of 
an epigram of Antipater of Sidon uses the same combination of 
interjection, explicit expression of viewing purpose, and question 
as found in Ezekiel to highlight the role of the speaker as a viewer 
of the tomb (Anth.Pal. 7.427): 

ἁ στάλα, φέρ᾽ ἴδω, τίν᾽ ἔχει νέκυν. 
Come let me see what body this stone holds. 

2.3. Viewing as interpretation 
This visual interest, sparked by the paradoxical nature of what 

is seen, and leading to a highlighting of the role of an ‘internal 
viewer’ within the text, leads us to the most significant similarity 
between the opening of Ezekiel’s burning bush scene and the 
viewing scenes of his Hellenistic contemporaries: the importance 
that is placed on interpreting what is seen. As Simon Goldhill 
puts it, in analysing a number of Hellenistic viewing epigrams, 
“in each poem what is dramatized is the moment of looking as 
interpreting.”27 Elsewhere Goldhill identifies the insistence on a 
moment of interpretation as the key distinction between Hel-
lenistic and epic ekphrasis.28 This interest in interpretation is also 
present in the opening lines of Ezekiel’s account of the burning 

 
25 Walsh, Arethusa 24 (1991) 103. Cf. Prioux, Regards alexandrins 283. 
26 Prioux, Regards alexandrins 140 n.17. 
27 Goldhill, in Art and Text 204. Cf. Männlein-Robert, in Brill’s Companion 

253. 
28 Simon Goldhill, Preposterous Poetics: The Politics and Aesthetics of Form in Late 

Antiquity (Cambridge 2020) 24. 



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bush. In the LXX the bush is described as a ὅραµα (simply, “that 
which is seen,” LSJ) but in Ezekiel it is called a σηµεῖον. The ad-
jective τεράστιον in the next line suggests that the use of σηµεῖον 
is partly motivated by the repeated Septuagintal phrase σηµεῖα 
καὶ τέρατα, found elsewhere in Exodus.29 Nevertheless, the 
choice of σηµεῖον also suggests that Ezekiel’s Moses views the 
bush as a signifier,30 as an object that he must not only see but 
interpret to uncover its significance. As the viewers in Hellenistic 
poetry sought to apply their intellect to uncover the meaning of 
what they saw, so Moses regards the burning bush as an object 
that requires just such Hellenistic decryption. Unlike the Sep-
tuagint, where Moses’ interest in the bush is limited to the 
question of “why it is not being consumed by the flames,” in the 
Exagoge Moses is concerned to uncover in more general terms 
what the burning bush means: “what is this sign from the bush 
… what is it?” (τί µοι σηµεῖον ἐκ βάτου τόδε … τί δή;). 

This interpretative concern is also suggested by a further 
deviation from the Biblical text. The word used for Moses’ 
approach to the bush in the Exagoge suggests a rather stronger 
desire to get close to the bush than that used in Exodus itself. 
The significance of the prefix in Exodus’ παρελθών seems to be 
that Moses went “aside” from his path, that he changed direction 
from his original course. Ezekiel’s προελθών places much more 
emphasis on the approach to the bush itself. Given that Ezekiel 
often follows the wording of the LXX and that the two words 
are metrically equivalent, it seems that Ezekiel’s choice of prefix 
is deliberate. From a theatrical perspective, Lanfranchi suggests 
that the reason for such a change is to provide an implicit stage 
direction for the actor.31 If so, however, such a physical move-
ment would only underscore the significance of this changed 
prefix. It stresses the purposeful nature of Moses’ approach. The 
 

29 E.g. Exod 7:3. See Lanfranchi, L’Exagōgē 260. 
30 The term is used in this sense only a few verses later in the LXX itself: 

τοῦτό σοι τὸ σηµεῖον ὅτι ἐγώ σε ἐξαποστέλλω (“this is the sign for you that I am 
sending you,” Exod 3:12). 

31 Lanfranchi, L’Exagōgē 206. 



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emphasis is not on the fact that he deviates from his path, but 
that he deliberately goes up close to this “wonder” to inspect and 
interpret it further. 

By his remodeling of the Biblical incident, therefore, Ezekiel 
presents Moses as preparing to interpret the bush in the manner 
of one of the viewers presented in Hellenistic poetry, whose art-
ful methods of observation “reveal and articulate the concealed 
significance of the object of [their] gaze.”32 Indeed, the possi-
bility of the visual encounter developing in this interpretative 
way in a Jewish-Hellenistic text like the Exagoge is shown by the 
fact that this is indeed how Philo later presents this scene in his 
Life of Moses.  
2.4. Comparison with Philo’s burning bush scene 

Philo’s description imaginatively surveys the different aspects 
of the bush’s appearance, interpreting each of them symbolically 
in turn, in a manner strikingly similar to Hellenistic poetry’s 
interpretative descriptions, such as that found in Posidippus’ 
much-studied epigram on the statue of Kairos.33 
Philo Vit.Mos. 1.67–69:  

For the burning bramble was a symbol of the oppressed, and the 
burning fire of the oppressors. The fact that that which was burning 
was not burnt up was a sign that the oppressed would not be de-
stroyed by their aggressors … The angel represents the providence 
of God, which silently brings relief in the greatest dangers, exceeding 
the hopes of all. The details of the comparison must be considered. 
The bramble, as I have said, is a very weak plant, but it is also prickly 
and will wound if one touches it. Again, though fire is naturally de-
structive, the bramble was not devoured thereby, but on the contrary 
was guarded by it, and remained just as it was before it took fire, lost 
nothing at all but gained an additional brightness. All this is a de-
scription of the nation’s condition as it then stood, and we may think 

 
32 Goldhill, in Art and Text 206. 
33 Philo seems to have been aware of at least one such non-Jewish poetic 

interpretative ekphrasis. For, as Prioux notes (Regards alexandrins 190 n.4), 
Philo’s allegorical interpretation of the image of Apollo of Delos in Leg. 95 
seems to draw on Callimachus’ ekphrasis of the wooden image of Apollo in 
Aet. 3 fr.114b Pf.  



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of it as a voice proclaiming to the sufferers: “Do not lose heart; your 
weakness is your strength, which can prick, and thousands will suffer 
from its wounds.”34 

Posidippus no. 19:  
Who and from where is the sculptor? – From Sicyon. – And his 
name? – Lysippus. – And who are you? – Kairos the all-subduer. – 
Why do you stand on tip-toe? – I am always running. – Why do you 
have a pair of wings on your feet? – I fly with the wind. – Why do 
you hold a razor in your right hand? – As a sign to men that I am 
sharper than any edge. – And why is there hair over your face? – For 
the one who meets me to grasp at, by Zeus. – And why is the back 
of your head bald? – Because none whom I have once raced by on 
my winged feet will now, though he wishes it, take hold of me from 
behind. – Why did the artist fashion you? – For your sake, stranger, 
and he set me up in the portico as a lesson.35  
The similarity between Philo and Posidippus consists not only 

in the similar method of interpretation, in which attributes are 
singled out and then interpreted, but also in the fact that both 
the silent statue and the silent bush are imagined in some sense 
to speak out their own interpretation. Indeed, Männlein-
Robert’s comment on Posidippus’ poem could apply equally to 
Philo’s interpretative description of the burning bush: “through 
its striking attributes, the statue makes an oblique reference to 
something beyond its mere appearance; it is an allegory to be 
interpreted.”36 For a Jewish-Hellenistic writer like Philo, such 
visual decryption, popular with the Hellenistic poets, was one 
way to elaborate and understand this critical Biblical encounter. 
Were Ezekiel simply to have been influenced by Hellenistic 
approaches to visuality, as Heath suggests,37 we might have ex-

 
34 Transl. following F. H. Colson, Philo VI (Cambridge [Mass.] 1935) 311–

313. 
35 Transl. Austin and Bastianini, Posidippi Pellaei. For discussions see Prioux, 

Regards alexandrins 187–243; Männlein-Robert, in Brill’s Companion 260–263; 
and Goldhill, Preposterous Poetics 27–29, which also includes a brief summary 
of other views. 

36 Männlein-Robert, in Brill’s Companion 261. 
37 Heath, in JThS 57 (2006) 41. 



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pected him to develop the burning bush scene in a similar way 
himself. 

The opening of Ezekiel’s burning bush scene, therefore, shares 
several thematic and stylistic affinities with poetic scenes of 
interpretative viewing found in the work of his non-Jewish con-
temporaries. Such similarities, if noticed by a literate audience, 
would naturally have generated the expectation that in the later 
part of the scene Ezekiel would present a visual interpretation of 
the bush, as we find in Philo. The opening lines prepare the 
audience for a scene in which, by looking closely and intel-
ligently, Moses will indeed be able to discover for himself what 
it is that is signified by this paradoxical “sign.” 
3. Hellenistic viewing disrupted 

The expectation Ezekiel raises that Moses will perform as a 
Hellenistic viewer, however, only makes what happens next 
more striking. For rather than allowing itself to be viewed and 
interpreted, the bush ‘speaks’ to cut Moses off, before he even 
has time to begin interpreting its symbolism (Exagoge 96–97): 

ἐπίσχες, ὦ φέριστε, µὴ προσεγγίσῃς, 
Μωσῆ, πρὶν ἢ τῶν σῶν ποδῶν λῦσαι δέσιν· 
Stay back, noble Moses, do not draw near, before you have re-
moved your footwear. 

Compare LXX Exod 3:4–5: 
ὡς δὲ εἶδεν κύριος ὅτι προσάγει ἰδεῖν, ἐκάλεσεν αὐτὸν κύριος ἐκ 
τοῦ βάτου λέγων Μωυσῆ, Μωυσῆ. ὁ δὲ εἶπεν Τί ἐστιν; καὶ εἶπεν 
Μὴ ἐγγίσῃς ὧδε· λῦσαι τὸ ὑπόδηµα ἐκ τῶν ποδῶν σου· ὁ γὰρ 
τόπος, ἐν ᾧ σὺ ἕστηκας, γῆ ἁγία ἐστίν. 
But when the Lord saw that he came near to see, the Lord called 
to him from the bush, “Moses, Moses.” He replied, “What is it?” 
And the Lord said, “do not come closer; take your shoes off your 
feet, for the place where you stand is holy ground.” 
Once again, the ways in which Ezekiel has developed the 

Biblical narrative are noteworthy. The command to “come no 
closer” in Exod 3:4 is far less abrupt than that in Ezekiel, as it 
comes as part of a conversation which begins with God calling 
out Moses’ name, perhaps encouraging him to draw a little 



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nearer. In the Exagoge, on the other hand, it is Moses’ own in-
terest in the bush that leads him to make the approach, and 
God’s first word in the whole scene is a blunt imperative, ἐπίσχες, 
“stay back,” which gives his whole utterance an oppositional 
tone. Rather than being part of the same process, Moses’ ap-
proach to the bush and God’s instructions that follow are 
presented as being in conflict. Unlike the objects in Hellenistic 
poetry which imaginatively cooperate in their own visual inter-
pretation like the Kairos statue of Posidippus,38 Ezekiel’s bush 
seems hostile to Moses’ visual approach. 
3.1. Words, not vision, bring understanding 

The nature of the divine objection to the use of vision to 
discern the meaning of what is taking place is made explicit in 
what follows (Exagoge 100–103): 

θάρσησον, ὦ παῖ, καὶ λόγων ἄκου’ ἐµῶν· 
ἰδεῖν γὰρ ὄψιν39 τὴν ἐµὴν ἀµήχανον 
θνητὸν γεγῶτα, τῶν λόγων δ’ ἔξεστί σοι 
ἐµῶν ἀκούειν, τῶν ἕκατ’ ἐλήλυθα.  
Take courage, my child, and hear my words; for it is impossible 
to see my appearance, as you are a mortal, but you are able to 
hear my words; this is why I have come.  

Again, Ezekiel’s account represents a significant departure from 
the Septuagint. As Jacobson notes, in Ezekiel “God declares that 
Moses may not behold him, whereas God says no such thing in 
the Biblical bush scene.”40 Indeed, several verses later, God 
commands Moses to say to the elders of Israel, Κύριος ὁ θεὸς τῶν 

 
38 Cf. Prioux’s comment on the response of a statue of Hermes to an 

interpretation of his erection by a viewer in Callim. Iamb. 9: “Devenu son 
propre exégète, l’Hermès rend compte de son iconographie au moyen d’une 
étiologie religieuse” (Regards alexandrins 149). 

39 Ezekiel’s choice of vocabulary here seems to be deliberate, playing on 
the double meaning of ὄψις (both “face” and “sight”). ὄψις-face suggests an 
allusion to Exod 33:20, while ὄψις-sight fits into the immediate context which 
contrasts visual and auditory means of perception, suggested by the balanced 
infinitives ἰδεῖν “see” and ἀκούειν “hear.” 

40 Jacobson, The Exagoge 98. 



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πατέρων ὑµῶν ὦπταί µοι, “The Lord, the God of your fathers, has 
been seen by me.”41 The categorical opposition between sight and 
speech is Ezekiel’s development of the Biblical scene,42 and he 
deliberately emphasises this contrast by the chiastic word order 
ἰδεῖν … ἀµήχανον and ἔξεστί … ἀκούειν. Likewise, the negative 
imperative (ἐπίσχες), which puts an end to Moses’ visual ap-
proach, is balanced with a positive imperative to “listen” (ἄκου’). 
God halts the search for an understanding through vision, which 
appealed so much to Ezekiel’s Hellenistic poetic contemporaries 
(and to Jews like Philo), replacing it with an assertion that under-
standing comes solely through his “words” (λόγοι).43 The priority 
of the latter is sealed with the totalising comment of line 103: τῶν 
ἕκατ’ ἐλήλυθα, “this is why I have come.” In the Biblical account, 
the motivation of God’s revelation to Moses remains implicit.44 
In Ezekiel it is simply this: to create an opportunity for Moses to 
hear God’s authoritative words.  

As the speech progresses, God’s rejection of the visual ap-
proach in favour of the auditory continues. While Moses seemed 
to think that the σηµεῖον of the bush could be interpreted 
through closer vision (ὄψοµαι), God’s response indicates that the 
knowledge he has received and can pass on cannot be obtained 
through vision (ἰδεῖν … ὄψιν τὴν ἐµὴν ἀµήχανον), but is purely 
verbal (Exagoge 109–111): 
 

41 Exod 3:16; the point is repeated at 4:1, 3. 
42 While the assertion of the universal impossibility of seeing the divine may 

be Ezekiel’s innovation (see Howard Jacobson, “Mysticism and Apocalyptic 
in Ezekiel’s Exagoge,” ICS 6 [1981] 272–293, at 287), it is likely that he 
articulates this by developing auditory epiphanies in Greek tragedy where a 
stage character is unable to see a god (see especially Eur. Hipp. 84–86 and 1391–
1445), and the general, if not universal, practice of Zeus not figuring as a 
dramatic character in Greek tragedy (Jacobson, The Exagoge 99). 

43 Cf. Jacobson, ICS 6 (1981) 282: “Moses is permitted audition, but not 
sight.” 

44 Exodus 3 suggests that it might include expressing sympathy (3:7–9), 
commissioning Moses for his task (10–12), revealing his sacred name (14–15), 
and prophesying the future (19–22), as well as delivering words to be passed 
on (16–18). 



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ἀλλ’ ἕρπε καὶ σήµαινε τοῖς ἐµοῖς λόγοις 
πρῶτον µὲν αὐτοῖς πᾶσιν Ἑβραίοις ὁµοῦ, 
ἔπειτα βασιλεῖ τὰ ὑπ’ ἐµοῦ τεταγµένα. 
But go and explain in my words that which I command, first to all 
the Hebrews together and then to Pharaoh. 

God picks up on Moses’ vocabulary of sight (ὄψοµαι/ὄψιν) and 
signification (σηµεῖον/σηµαίνειν) only to reverse it. The assump-
tion inherent in Hellenistic ekphrastic verse, that visual signs can 
signify important meaning,45 is rejected by God, who insists that 
here meaning will be imparted through the transmission of 
words, not interpretative vision. This insistence on the primacy 
of verbal communication is reinforced by the accumulation of 
verbs of speech in the following lines, emphasised by the sound 
repetitions in λα/λε (116–119): 

Ἀάρωνα πέµψω σὸν κασίγνητον ταχύ, 
ᾧ πάντα λέξεις τἀξ ἐµοῦ λελεγµένα, 
καὶ αὐτὸς λαλήσει βασιλέως ἐναντίον, 
σὺ µὲν πρὸς ἡµᾶς, ὁ δὲ λαβὼν σέθεν πάρα. 
I will quickly send your brother Aaron, to whom you will say that 
which has been said by me, and he will speak it in the presence of 
Pharaoh. You will take it from me, and he will take it from you. 

3.2. Sight as a mere metaphor 
The primacy of speech over sight as a medium for divine 

communication is asserted in a more sophisticated way in the 
line of God’s speech which has attracted the most scholarly com-
ment. In addressing Moses, God declares (Exagoge 99–100): 

ὁ δ’ ἐκ βάτου σοι θεῖος ἐκλάµπει λόγος. 
θάρσησον, ὦ παῖ, καὶ λόγων ἄκου’ ἐµῶν· 
The divine speech shines out to you from the bush. Take courage, 
child, and hear my words. 

The paradox of a word visibly “shining out” from the bush, to-
gether with the adjective “divine” has led some commentators 
to interpret the words θεῖος λόγος (“divine speech/word”) as 

 
45 For the same vocabulary see Anth.Pal. 7.421.11–12: ναὶ µὲν δὴ Μελέαγρον 

ὁµώνυµον Οἰνέος υἱῷ / σύµβολα σηµαίνει ταῦτα συοκτασίας, “Yes, these sym-
bols of boar-killing refer to his name-sake, Meleager the son of Oeneus.”  



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being a “specialized and significant term that is familiar from 
Philo, namely the notion of a personification or hypostatization 
of God, an intermediary between God and the world.”46 How-
ever, as Jacobson points out (282), “this scene is filled with 
λόγος/λέγειν words referring [simply] to speech,” and the use of 
the term in other Jewish writers, including Philo himself, sup-
ports the view that θεῖος λόγος refers to nothing more spectacular 
than the speech of God (280–282). If this is the case, then the 
clash of senses expressed by the divine speech “shining out” from 
the bush is particularly striking—more so, in fact, than if the line 
refers to some kind of appearance of a hypostasis.  

It is certainly true that part of the reason for this particular 
choice of vocabulary is that the notion of words being seen con-
nects the passage with the delivery of the ten commandments in 
Exod 20:18, where the people “see the voice” of God (ἑώρα τὴν 
φωνήν).47 However, this striking image has a further function 
when read in the context of the conventions of Hellenistic poetic 
ekphrasis to which this scene alludes. 

Like God’s promotion of words over sight in the chiasmus of 
lines 101–103, the phrase θεῖος ἐκλάµπει λόγος demotes the sig-
nificance of vision for gaining knowledge to the status of a mere 
image for the verbal exchange, which is actually the medium in 
which divine knowledge is transmitted. What really shines out of 
the bush, according to God, is not flames, the striking sight that 
first caught Moses’ attention, but speech. The metaphor subor-
dinates the visual to the auditory sense. What can be seen, 
however impressive, is merely an image to describe the brilliance 
and the centrality of the delivery of the λόγος that is God’s central 
concern. 

The significance of this claim can only be fully understood 
when we realise that the relationship between the language of 
sight and speech in this line is a reversal of that found in ek-
phrastic poetry. In such poems the hierarchy of the metaphor is 

 
46 Jacobson, ICS 6 (1981) 279. 
47 Jacobson, ICS 6 (1981) 283. 



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the opposite to that found in Ezekiel. As Prioux notes, in the 
epigrams Anth.Pal. 7.421–42948 the language of oral communi-
cation is frequently used metaphorically to describe visual sig-
nification.49 Thus the image of a jay “will tell” (φάσει, 423.2) that 
the deceased loved to talk; the carving of reins “will cry out” 
(αὐδάσει, 424.8) that “I directed my house”; a palm branch does 
not “declare” (ἐνέπει, 428.13) a victory; a carving of a muzzle 
“will sing” (ἀείσεται, 424.9) that “I was not fond of many words”; 
and a viewer wonders what a carving of dice “announces” 
(ἀγγέλλοντι, 427.7). 

As is implicit in some of these examples, the use of the 
vocabulary of speech for visual signification was sufficiently 
recognised as a typical feature of this topos as to be material for 
poetic playfulness. For several of these visual ‘speaking’ signs 
signify something to do with the deceased’s attitude to speech 
itself. At its most elaborate, λόγος (“speech”) itself is frozen as a 
silent visual icon: ἀλλ’ ἄρα, ναί, δοκέω γάρ, ὁ γᾶς ὑπένερθε 
σοφιστὰς / ἐστί, σὺ δ’ ὁ πτερόεις τοὔνοµα τοῦδε, λόγος (“Ah yes, now 
I get it, the man beneath the earth was a sophist, and you are the 
winged word which made his name,” Anth.Pal. 7.421.7–8), and 
the power of silent visual signification is presented as the most 
effective form of communication: ὡς εὖ τὸν φθίµενον νέον ἄκριτα 
καὶ τὸ κυβευθὲν / πνεῦµα δι’ ἀφθέγκτων εἶπέ τις ἀστραγάλων (“how 
well someone told of the young man dead by ill fortune and the 
life gambled away through unspeaking dice,” 7.427.13–14).50  

These Hellenistic ekphrastic poems thus not only use the 
metaphor of speech to express the communicative power of 
sight, but also make explicit claims about the ability of the visual 
to communicate without words. Once again, a Jewish analogue 
to this Hellenistic approach is in Philo, who declares explicitly 
that in the burning bush, “with a silence clearer than speech, 

 
48 Goldhill, Art and Text 204, identifies this important Anth.Pal. sequence as 

“exemplary” for the Hellenistic treatment of the visual. 
49 Prioux, Regards alexandrins 254–256.  
50 For the ironies inherent in the use of such metaphors, see §4.1 below. 



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[the angel] employed the miracle of vision to announce future 
events,” τὰ µέλλοντα γενήσεσθαι διήγγελλε τρανοτέρᾳ φωνῆς ἡσυ-
χίᾳ διὰ τῆς µεγαλουργηθείσης ὄψεως (Vit.Mos. 1.66).  

Both Ezekiel’s explicit statements about divine communica-
tion and his use of auditory metaphor, therefore, are the reverse 
of those found in the Hellenistic viewing scenes he initially 
evokes. In Ezekiel, we find a visual metaphor for words, rather 
than the conventional auditory metaphor for sights, and an 
assertion of the significance of speech without sight, in the place 
of the celebration of the power of sight without speech found in 
the ekphrastic poems and Philo. 
3.3. Summary 

Philo’s treatment of the story of the burning bush indicates 
that it would have been possible for Ezekiel, had he wished, to 
present the Biblical scene in a manner which followed more 
closely the conventions of other Hellenistic scenes of viewing. 
Indeed, had he taken such an approach, this would have 
counted as further evidence for Jane Heath’s assertion that 
Ezekiel simply adopts the Hellenistic attitude to the visual. 
However, a close reading of this scene in the Exagoge suggests 
that Ezekiel re-writes the Biblical narrative in a way which 
actually interrupts, challenges, and even inverts the conventions 
of the Hellenistic viewing scenes that he initially evokes. 

As Moses approaches the bush, the emphasis on paradox, the 
interest in the focalisation of the act of viewing, and the initial 
interpretative intent of Moses, prepare us to read this scene as a 
typical scene from Hellenistic poetry—a description of the skillful 
interpretation of a visual image. Yet, the character of God, no 
less, puts a stop to this approach. In his speech, God strongly 
contrasts vision and hearing, and claims that speech, not sight, 
is the only medium through which he communicates. In a re-
versal of a pervasive ekphrastic metaphor, sight is only an image 
for the transmission of speech, and God’s explicit statement that 
he communicates through words not visions inverts ekphrastic 
statements that celebrate the power of visual objects to com-
municate without words. 



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Moses may, therefore, initially appear to be a model Hel-
lenistic viewer. However, by the end of the passage, with its 
sharp opposition between speech and sight as vehicles of knowl-
edge, Ezekiel seems to be distancing God’s own epistemology 
from that of the Hellenistic form to which he initially alludes. In 
order to understand the reason for Ezekiel’s departure from 
these conventions we must explore more closely both the poetics 
of Hellenistic ekphrasis and the religious context in which 
Ezekiel is writing. 
4. Ezekiel and the poetics of Hellenistic ekphrasis 
4.1. The verbal and the visual in Hellenistic ekphrasis 

While the categorical nature of Ezekiel’s promotion of verbal 
over visual methods of communication represents a departure 
from ekphrastic tradition, the tension between verbal and visual 
means of signification was already a feature of Hellenistic 
ekphrasis. For, as Männlein-Robert has argued,51 Hellenistic ek-
phrastic poetry often contained a competitive dimension. While 
poems that interpret objects on the surface seem to celebrate the 
power of visual art to convey meaning through acts of virtuosic 
interpretation, they also often reflect on the limitations of the 
visual medium. This tension can be seen even in early examples 
of such poems and is so pervasive that it seems essential to the 
ongoing vitality of the genre. In what Männlein-Robert has 
called “putatively the first ‘ecphrastic’ epigram,”52 Erinna de-
scribes an image of a young woman (Anth.Pal. 6.352): 

Ἐξ ἁπαλᾶν χειρῶν τάδε γράµµατα· λῷστε Προµαθεῦ, 
   ἔντι καὶ ἄνθρωποι τὶν ὁµαλοὶ σοφίαν.  
ταύταν γοῦν ἐτύµως τὰν παρθένον ὅστις ἔγραψεν, 
   αἰ καὐδὰν ποτέθηκ᾿, ἦς κ᾿ Ἀγαθαρχὶς ὅλα. 
This picture is the work of delicate hands. Good Prometheus, 
there are men whose skill is equal to yours. At least if whoever 
drew this girl so truly had added also her voice, you would be the 
complete Agatharchis. (transl. Männlein-Robert, after Paton) 

 
51 Männlein-Robert, Stimme, Schrift und Bild 261–307. 
52 Männlein-Robert, in Brill’s Companion 255. 



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While the human artist is praised, one significant omission is 
highlighted. The artwork has no voice, and without a voice the 
image cannot present “the whole Agatharchis.”53 This inability 
of the visual arts to endow their products with voice is a repeated 
theme of such works. Thus, Posidippus’ apparent aside in an 
epigram that a bronze of the poet Philitas “seems to speak” 
(Posidippus 63) only draws attention to the inadequacy of visual 
art to capture the talents of a poet.54 Likewise, in Theocritus Idyll 
1.27–56 the ekphrasis of the shepherd’s cup evokes not only its 
beauty but also its static and fragile qualities, in sharp contrast 
to the work of a poet which cannot only capture action but also 
flourishes, rather than fades, with reuse.55 Finally, while The-
ocritus Idyll 15 celebrates the beauty of an embroidered tapestry, 
the poem’s attention to the tapestry is relatively short in com-
parison to the hymn to Adonis that follows. As Männlein-Robert 
concludes, “die Ekphrasis des Wandteppichs lediglich als frag-
mentarische Hinführung, Präludium oder als Rahmen für das 
eigentliche Adonisbild dient, das im Medium des Liedes bildhaft 
beschreiben wird.” Thus, while evoking the beauty of visual art, 
ekphrastic poetry is also keen to assert the superiority of the 
written form, presenting its readership with an “agon of the arts” 
(Agon der Künste).56 

This agonistic quality of ekphrastic verse is also implicitly 
present in many of the epigrams explored in this paper. For 
instance, while the pervasive metaphorical use of oral language 
to describe visual signification in Anth.Pal. 7.421–429 on one 
level celebrates the communicative power of visual signs, it also 
serves as an implicit and ironic reminder of the actual silence of 
the visible object, which is only conjured into communication by 
the words of the poet. 

In presenting a contrast between verbal and visual communi-

 
53 Brill’s Companion 256. 
54 Brill’s Companion 259 
55 Männlein-Robert, Stimme, Schrift und Bild 306. 
56 Stimme, Schrift und Bild 293, 291. 



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cation, therefore, Ezekiel is drawing on a theme that is already 
inherent in the Hellenistic ekphrastic form. What is original 
about his ekphrastically-inspired scene is not the conflict be-
tween verbal and visual ways of communication itself, but rather 
the way in which he remodels and redirects this tension for 
religious ends. 
4.2. Ezekiel’s adaptation of the Hellenistic “agon of the arts” 

In the burning bush scene, Ezekiel refashions the ekphrastic 
“agon of the arts” in three significant and related ways. 

Firstly, the supremacy of words over visions as the means of 
the transmission and propagation of divine knowledge is made 
absolute. While many Hellenistic poems explicitly or implicitly 
do express the superiority of the verbal over the visual, the 
vitality of these works turns on such a an artistic agon being a 
close-run thing. Erinna, for example, may assert that without a 
voice a statue cannot be “the complete Agatharchis” (Anth.Pal. 
6.352), but equally the lack of a voice is presented as the only 
deficiency in the visual artwork. In the Hellenistic poems we 
have been exploring, art and poetry constantly jostle for pre-
eminence, and function as close competitors for supremacy, 
even if poetry is ultimately vindicated as victorious. Indeed, one 
of the most impressive features of such poetry is its ability to 
evoke the impact of a visual object on a viewer, even if ulti-
mately, one way or another, the poem itself is seen as the greater 
work of art. 

In Ezekiel, by contrast, there is no ongoing interplay between 
visual and verbal communication. Unlike Posidippus’ Kairos or 
Hermes in Callimachus’ Iamb. 9, God does not refine, assist, or 
correct Moses’ visual interpretation of the bush. Rather, he puts 
a stop to his visual approach altogether. The ongoing tension 
between visual and verbal signification that ekphrastic poetry 
plays out is forestalled by God’s command to Moses to “come 
no closer.” Moses’ initial visual approach is simply replaced by 
God’s insistence on verbal communication. Indeed, this in-
sistence means that the ekphrastic character of the scene cannot 
continue any further. In place of the expected moment of 



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virtuosic interpretation, Moses is reduced to taking dictation in 
a series of lines that emphasise the importance of listening to and 
faithfully reproducing words. 

Secondly, the categorical nature of the promotion of verbal 
over visual communication is reinforced by the unequal power 
dynamics of this scene. The relationship between viewer and 
viewed in the Hellenistic poems is presented as one of relative 
equality, even when one of the interlocutors is divine. Where 
conversations are imagined, the two parties engage in discursive 
questions and answers. Here, by contrast, God not only inter-
rupts Moses’ initial approach, but engages with him principally 
through imperatives: “stay back, do not approach, be bold, 
listen, go, tell.” This power dynamic strengthens the categorical 
supremacy of verbal over visual communication, as the visual 
approach is associated with the weaker character of Moses, while 
the verbal approach is associated with the supremely authori-
tative character of God. 

That this categorical assertion of the superiority of verbal com-
munication is placed in the mouth of God also has the effect of 
grounding the conflict between the verbal and the visual in the 
religious, rather than the artistic sphere. The ironies and asides 
of Hellenistic ekphrastic poems suggest that different forms of 
representation are to be valued based on their intrinsic com-
municative power. Here, however, God’s command overrides 
such artistic judgments. His power to communicate through 
words alone is based not on any inherent artistic power of the 
verbal, but on the very particular nature of the God of Israel, 
whose invisibility is accompanied by a purely verbal form of 
communication. The preference for verbal over visual significa-
tion in this scene is a religious, not an aesthetic, judgment. 

Finally, unlike the Hellenistic “agon of the arts,” Ezekiel’s 
assertion of the superiority of verbal rather than visual com-
munication is limited in its scope. Unlike the poems which assert 
the supremacy of the verbal over the visual as a matter of general 
principle, in Ezekiel this supremacy is associated solely with the 
way in which God communicates with mortals. This is made 



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apparent by the way in which the assertion of the categorical 
superiority of verbal communication coexists with a heavy em-
phasis on visual spectacle elsewhere in the play. 
4.3. A verbal deity and the spectacular in the Exagoge 

Ezekiel’s interest in the spectacular has long been recog-
nised.57 Indeed, the elaborate nature of some of his stage effects 
has led some scholars to doubt whether the play could ever have 
been conceived for performance at all, an argument which is 
rejected by Jacobson and Lanfranchi.58 In addition to the im-
pressive sight of the burning bush itself, the same scene goes on 
to show the audience Moses’ leprous hand and, perhaps most 
impressively of all, his staff in some sense turning into a snake. 
The astonishing appearance of the latter is marked by God’s use 
of the language of wonder and amazement (δράκων γὰρ ἔσται 
φοβερός, ὥστε θαυµάσαι, the staff “will become a terrifying snake, 
so that you will be amazed,” Exagoge 123), a familiar aspect of 
Hellenistic visual description (as discussed above), and the ex-
clamations and highly emotional reaction of Moses (124–126): 

ἰδοὺ βέβληται· δέσποθ᾽, ἵλεως γενοῦ· 
ὡς φοβερός, ὡς πέλωρος· οἴκτειρον σύ µε· 
πέφρικ᾽ ἰδών, µέλη δὲ σώµατος τρέµει. 
Look, I’ve thrown it down. Lord, have mercy! How terrifying, 
how monstrous! Have pity on me! I tremble to look at it! My 
body’s limbs are shaking! 
This interest in the spectacular is also evident in the evocative 

descriptions of sights off-stage that are reported by the charac-
 

57 Lanfranchi, in Greek Tragedy after the Fifth Century 130–131, makes the 
significant point that Alexander Polyhistor’s own interest in the paradoxical 
makes it likely that he deliberately excerpted the most strange and unusual 
parts of the play. This important qualification means that we should not 
assume that the focus on wonders found in our fragments would also have 
been found throughout the lost parts of the work. Nevertheless, the extant 
material alone contains enough emphasis on the wonderous to identify visual 
spectacle as a significant feature of the play overall. 

58 Howard Jacobson, “Two Studies on Ezekiel the Tragedian,” GRBS 22 
(1981) 167–178, at 167–175; Lanfranchi, in Greek Tragedy after the Fifth Century 
142–143. 



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ters. These include the description of the Phoenix (254–269), a 
“marvelous display of descriptive prowess,”59 the idyllic descrip-
tion of the oasis at Elim (243–253), and the vivid one of the 
opposing Egyptian and Israelite forces at the Red Sea (193–219), 
which substantially develops the visual aspects of the Biblical 
narrative. 

These impressive visual effects, both staged and reported, 
indicate that Ezekiel is able and willing to produce a dramatic 
spectacle which satisfies the visual expectations both of classical 
tragedy60 and indeed of later tragedy, which may well have 
placed greater emphasis on dramatic visual effects.61 

The heavy interest in the spectacular in Ezekiel’s play indi-
cates that his promotion of the verbal over the visual in this scene 
was not a matter of general artistic principle or preference. 
Rather this promotion is unusual within Ezekiel’s own work. 
Indeed, the sharp contrast between the priority attached to the 
verbal here and the celebration of visual spectacle elsewhere in 
the play serves to emphasise the distinctively religious motivation 
of Ezekiel’s departure from ekphrastic precedent at this key 
moment, when the character of God himself ‘appears’ for the 
first time. While Hellenistic attitudes to visual spectacle may be 
acceptable for much of his drama, the representation of the God 
of Israel demands a break with Hellenistic poetic and cultural 
convention. 

One scene that may seem initially to challenge this reading is 
the throne vision and its interpretation (lines 68–89). Here 

 
59 Tim Whitmarsh, Beyond the Second Sophistic: Adventures in Greek Postclassicism 

(Berkeley 2013) 226. 
60 For a brief overview of the importance of spectacle to Attic tragedy see 

Froma Zeitlin, “The Artful Eye: Vision, Ecphrasis and Spectacle in Euripi-
dean Theatre,” in Art and Text 138–196. Indeed, coincidentally or otherwise, 
the word that Ezekiel uses to refer to what God cannot provide on stage, ὄψις 
(“vision”), is the same word that Aristotle uses to assert the necessary, if not the 
most poetically valuable, visual aspect of a Greek tragedy (Poet. 6.5).  

61 See Simon Hornblower, “Hellenistic Tragedy and Satyr-Drama; Lyco-
phron’s Alexandra,” in Greek Tragedy after the Fifth Century 90–124, at 93–94. 



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Moses does indeed speak of the appearance of a “noble mortal” 
(φῶτα γενναῖον, 70) enthroned on the top of Sinai, and describes 
a vision that includes the cosmos and the procession of the stars. 
This vision is then interpreted by Raguel in language remi-
niscent of the opening of the burning bush scene. The vision 
“signifies” (ἐσήµηνε⟨ν⟩, 83) good for Moses. The enthronement 
signifies his future kingship and his superior knowledge, which is 
described in the language of sight, “you will see (ὄψει) that which 
is, that which was before, and that which shall come after” (89). 
However, while the lack of context around this scene makes it 
difficult to interpret, what is noteworthy are the several ways in 
which the scene distances itself from a full endorsement of the 
use of the visual to make contact with and learn about God. 

Most obviously, the entire vision of Moses is presented as a 
frightening dream, rather than as existing within the world of 
the play.62 Secondly, despite the heavenly location on the top of 
Sinai, not only is no clear mention made of a divine appearance, 
but the character on the throne in Ezekiel is explicitly described 
as a “mortal,” despite his enormous stature and despite the 
scene’s parallels with other Jewish texts that do suggest a divine 
encounter.63 Finally, and most significantly, the visual interpre-
tation of the dream is given by a non-Jewish character. Indeed, 
as Jo-Ann Brant has argued, Ezekiel presents Raguel as a char-
acter who wrongly draws on Hellenistic, rather than Jewish, 
interpretative traditions, which leads him to an erroneous under-
standing of Moses’ future.64 
4.4. Summary 

God’s response to Moses in the burning bush scene represents 
both a dramatic departure from the usual form of a Hellenistic 
viewing scene and also an original development of one of the 
pervasive themes of ekphrastic poetry. God’s command to 
 

62 Jacobson, ICS 6 (1981) 277–279. 
63 Jacobson, The Exagoge 91–92. 
64 Jo-Ann A. Brant, “Mimesis and Dramatic Art in Ezekiel the Tragedian’s 

Exagoge,” in Ancient Fiction: The Matrix of Early Christian and Jewish Narrative 
(Leiden 2005) 129–147, at 139–141, 145. 



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“stop” prevents Moses’ early observations developing into the 
kind of virtuosic interpretation a learned audience might have 
expected in this poetic context. In its place, God’s assertion of 
the supremacy of verbal communication alone draws on a 
tension between visual and verbal art forms that is repeatedly 
explored in Hellenistic verse. However, Ezekiel has developed 
this “agon of the arts” in a number of distinctive ways. Unlike the 
closely-matched contests of ekphrastic poetry, where poetry 
outstrips art, but only just, and in which the expressive power of 
the visual is also celebrated, here the victory of the verbal is 
absolute. Furthermore, the superiority of verbal over visual 
expression is associated not with the relative merits of different 
forms of representation per se, but with specific religious con-
victions about the particular and distinctive nature of the God of 
Israel. This is borne out by the fact that other parts of the play 
show an interest in visual spectacle as strong as that found in 
non-Jewish Hellenistic literature. 

Moses’ approach to the bush leads the audience to expect a 
moment of visual interpretation. God’s explicit rejection of this 
approach replaces the ekphrastic interplay of visual and verbal 
communication with the assertion of a strong disjunction be-
tween these forms of knowing, and with the assertion that 
knowledge of the Jewish God is to be obtained through the oral/ 
aural sense alone. This literary move, which draws on ekphrastic 
form and themes only to disrupt and, ultimately, undermine 
them, represents a sophisticated poetic means of articulating the 
distinctive religious position of a Jewish author writing a religious 
play in a Hellenistic context. For in promoting the verbal over 
the visual, Ezekiel here is constructing from Hellenistic poetic 
forms a distinctive hierarchy of the senses which challenges that 
found in non-Jewish writings about the divine.  
5. The visual and the verbal in Hellenistic and Jewish culture 
5.1. The visual sense in Hellenistic religion 

Ezekiel’s reshaping of the ekphrastic form to emphasise his 
downgrading of the importance of the sense of sight in this scene 
of divine encounter has profound religious connotations in his 



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Hellenistic context. In Greek religion, ‘seeing’ was central to 
contact with the divine in a very wide range of contexts. At its 
most intense, direct divine contact with human beings was often 
cast in visual terms. For, as Verity Platt has noted, while in a few 
cases “epiphanies can be sonic (and even olfactory) as well as 
visual … the visual sense tends to predominate in Greek epi-
phanic discourse.”65 The importance of the visual is also found 
in the “epiphanic and emotional heights”66 of the ἐποπτεία67 
(itself a word with visual connotations) of the mysteries. Vision 
was also key to the more everyday practice of visiting a temple, 
in which “the most insistent, direct, and powerful means of ex-
periencing divine encounter, was by viewing a physical image 
that served as the object of cult, usually a statue displayed in a 
prominent position.”68 In the words of Lucian, it is in this 
moment of seeing that the god seems to come alive, and a living 
connection is established (Syr.D. 32): 

καὶ ἄλλο θωυµαστόν ἐστιν ἐν τῷ ξοάνῳ. ἢν ἑστεὼς ἀντίος 
ἐσορέῃς, ἐς σὲ ὁρῇ καὶ µεταβαίνοντι τὸ βλέµµα ἀκολουθέει· 
There is another wondrous feature in the statue. If you stand 
opposite and look directly at it, it looks back at you and as you 
move its glance follows.69  
This visual aspect of worship was portrayed in tragedy as early 

as the fifth century BCE. In Euripides’ Andromache, for example, a 
group of pilgrims spend three days in viewing the sanctuary 
before making offerings (1086–1088). Likewise, in Ion, the 
chorus’ approach to the temple is marked by their enthusiastic 
viewing of the temple sculptures, which seem to come alive in 

 
65 Verity Platt, Facing the Gods: Epiphany and Representation in Graeco-Roman Art, 

Literature and Religion (Cambridge 2011) 10–11. 
66 J. Elsner, “Image and Ritual: Reflections on the Religious Appreciation 

of Classical Art,” CQ 46 (1996) 515–531, at 518. 
67 See Ian Rutherford, “Theoria and Darśan: Pilgrimage and Vision in 

Greece and India,” CQ 50 (2000) 133–146, at 139. 
68 Platt, Facing the Gods 77; cf. J. Elsner, Roman Eyes: Visuality and Subjectivity 

in Art and Text (Princeton 2007) 22–24. 
69 Cf. Elsner, Roman Eyes 19. 



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their vivid descriptions (184–218).70 Furthermore, as Alexia 
Petsalis-Diomidis points out, the viewing of religious artefacts in 
shrines often involved just the same kind of interpretative 
processes that we have seen at play in poetic depictions of vision: 
“the display of exegetical inscriptions next to thank-offerings in 
the sanctuaries invited viewers to read narratives into images 
with the guidance of the texts. Priests and guides may also have 
helped pilgrims to interpret the thank-offerings.”71 

It is unsurprising, therefore, that sight also provides the dom-
inant language for the philosophical contemplation of the divine. 
For Aristotle, “sight of God” is the summum bonum which is the 
criterion which governs the worth of all decisions: ἥτις οὖν 
αἵρεσις … ποιήσει µάλιστα τὴν τοῦ θεοῦ θεωρίαν … αὕτη ἀρίστη 
(“therefore, whichever method of choosing leads to the greatest 
vision of God, that is the best,” Eth.Eud. 8.3.16, 1249B.16–20). 
Likewise, in Plato’s Symposium, Diotima’s description of the 
ascent of the soul repeatedly makes use of the language of sight 
(210C–E):72 

ἵνα ἀναγκασθῇ αὖ θεάσασθαι τὸ ἐν τοῖς ἐπιτηδεύµασι καὶ τοῖς 
νόµοις καλὸν καὶ τοῦτ᾿ ἰδεῖν ὅτι πᾶν αὐτὸ αὑτῷ συγγενές ἐστιν 
… ἵνα ἴδῃ αὖ ἐπιστηµῶν κάλλος … βλέπων πρὸς πολὺ … ἐπὶ τὸ 
πολὺ πέλαγος τετραµµένος τοῦ καλοῦ καὶ θεωρῶν … ἕως ἂν 
… κατίδῃ τινὰ ἐπιστήµην µίαν τοιαύτην, ἥ ἐστι καλοῦ τοιοῦδε. 
So that he may be made to observe the beauty in practices and laws, 
and see that this beauty is all akin … so that he may indeed see the 
beauty of areas of study … gazing at beauty in many forms … 

 
70 Cf. Rutherford, CQ 50 (2000) 138; Zeitlin, in Art and Text 147–152. For 

connections between this scene and later Hellenistic viewing scenes see 
Männlein-Robert, Stimme, Schrift und Bild 261–264. 

71 Alexia Petsalis-Diomidis, “The Body in Space: Visual Dynamics in 
Graeco-Roman Healing Pilgrimage,” in J. Elsner et al. (eds.), Pilgrimage in 
Graeco-Roman and Early Christian Antiquity: Seeing the Gods (Oxford 2007) 183–
218, at 207. 

72 For the argument that theoria provides a justification for the entire philo-
sophical project see Andrea Wilson Nightingale, “The Philosopher at the 
Festival: Plato’s Transformation of Traditional Theōria,” in Pilgrimage in Graeco-
Roman and Early Christian Antiquity 151–182. 



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turning to and looking at the whole sea of beauty … until he catch 
sight of one such study, which is the study of such a beauty [as I 
shall go on to describe]. 

The central importance of this connection between vision and 
the divine in Greek thought and practice is summed up in the 
“false (but telling) etymology by which theoria and theates (spec-
tator) were related to theos (god).”73 

In the Hellenistic age the notion that one could engage with a 
god through the visual sense provided the stimulus for much 
poetic creativity. As Verity Platt has explored in an extended 
study of this theme in Callimachus’ Hymn to Athena and in Hel-
lenistic epigrams related to images of Aphrodite,74 a range of 
poems explored the link between the viewing of a cult image and 
a vision of the goddess herself (175, 190–192, 201), the dangers 
and taboos inherent in these visual encounters (11), the link 
between viewing and eroticism (183–186), and the limitations of 
and frustrations caused by such forms of viewing (193–199, 203–
211). The very volume of this material, and the repeated thema-
tization of the possibilities and problematics involved in the 
viewing of a divine image, demonstrates not only the central 
importance of the visual sense in Hellenistic religion, but also its 
significance as a popular topic for exploration by Ezekiel’s non-
Jewish poetic contemporaries. 

In this Greek context, in which the visual approach to the 
divine was a key component of religious practice and philo-
sophical writing, and the subject of considerable poetic fascina-
tion,75 the complete subordination of the visual to the verbal in 
Ezekiel’s scene, which goes far beyond his Biblical source, is a 
striking poetic contribution to this discourse.  

In place of the centrality of the visual in Hellenistic religious 
practice, philosophical speculation, and ekphrastic poetry, 
 

73 Platt, Facing the Gods 11. 
74 Facing the Gods 170–211. 
75 For the “careful ambiguity between cult statue and living deity” that 

features in a number of Greek stories of contact with the divine, see Platt, 
Facing the Gods 11–12 with nn.43–44. 



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Ezekiel proposes a distinctively verbal theological epistemology. 
Knowing God, Ezekiel claims in this scene, relies not on a form 
of visual apprehension, or even interpretative ability, but on the 
faithful transmission of words from God to Moses to Aaron to 
Pharaoh and the Israelites, and, as the expression θεῖος λόγος 
perhaps implicitly suggests, to the Scriptures and Ezekiel’s 
Jewish contemporaries.76 It is an alternative epistemology that 
has its roots in aspects of early Jewish literature and religious 
practice. 
5.2. The significance of the verbal in ancient Judaism 

Philo’s visual interpretation of the burning bush is related to 
his confidence in the spiritual and epistemological value of the 
visual sense that is very similar to that found in the non-Jewish 
Greek texts we have just explored. In De Abrahamo Philo states 
that sight is “the most beautiful” (57) and the “the truest” (60) of 
the senses.77 In particular, it is superior to “untrustworthy and 
unsound hearing” (60). Furthermore, as in Plato and Aristotle, 
sight of God is to be identified as the highest form of blessedness 
(58): 

ὅτῳ δὲ µὴ µόνον ἐξεγένετο τἄλλα ὅσα ἐν τῇ φύσει δι᾿ ἐπιστήµης 
καταλαµβάνειν, ἀλλὰ καὶ τὸν πατέρα καὶ ποιητὴν τῶν συµ-
πάντων ὁρᾶν, ἐπ᾿ ἄκρον εὐδαιµονίας ἴστω προεληλυθώς· οὐδὲν 
γὰρ ἀνωτέρω θεοῦ, πρὸς ὃν εἴ τις τὸ τῆς ψυχῆς ὄµµα τεί-
νας ἔφθακε, µονὴν εὐχέσθω καὶ στάσιν. 
But whoever is not only able to apprehend by knowledge all that 
is in nature, but also able to see the father and creator of all, may 
he know that he has come to the peak of blessedness. For nothing 
is higher than God. If anyone has already managed to extend the 
eye of his soul to him, let him pray simply to remain and abide in 
that state. 

Philo’s emphasis here on the supremacy of sight over speech, 
however, was not necessarily a view shared by all Hellenistic 
Jews. The reverence for the “word,” the λόγος, in spoken and 
written texts, as a medium for the reception and communication 
 

76 For the use of θεῖος λόγος to refer to the Scriptures see Philo Somn. 1.190. 
77 For a similar formulation see Arist. Metaph. 980a. 



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of divine knowledge is expressed in a range of Second Temple 
Jewish writings. Time and again in the book of Jubilees, for in-
stance, “revelation happens through an ideal figure’s encounter 
with a written text, a text that must be written again (with divine 
aid) and passed down.”78 Enoch, Abraham, Jacob, Levi, and 
Moses, in Jubilees (if not in the Pentateuch) all write texts to com-
municate knowledge of the divine. In Jubilees this written knowl-
edge is fully compatible with visions of the divine. However, as 
Mroczek points out (99), this scribal presentation of ancient 
figures serves to legitimise the contemporary practice of textual 
transmission, a practice which could replace direct vision as a 
source of revelatory insight: 

The enthronement of the scribe as an ideal, divinely inspired 
figure, and the elevation of scribal activity to Sinai, shows that a 
text-centred tradition does not imply that revelation has ceased. 
Rather, transcribing, collecting, and presenting revelation is itself 
revelatory. 
The importance of spoken words and written texts to the 

Jewish understanding of divine revelation was not limited to a 
highly literate scribal elite, but was also deeply embedded in the 
religious experience of ordinary diaspora Jews through the in-
stitution of the synagogue in Ezekiel’s own religious context.  

If the consensus that locates Ezekiel in Egypt is correct, the 
author inhabited a land which gives us the earliest reliable 
evidence for synagogue worship. As Gruen points out, an in-
scription in Arsinoe-Crocodilopolis attests a synagogue (proseuche) 
as early as the reign of Ptolemy III (246–221 BCE),79 and a 
papyrus attests the existence of another in Alexandrou Nesos by 
218 BCE.80 By the early first century CE Philo could present the 

 
78 Eva Mroczek, “Moses, David and Scribal Revelation: Preservation and 

Renewal in Second Temple Jewish Textual Traditions,” in George J. Brooke 
et al. (eds.), The Significance of Sinai: Traditions about Sinai and Divine Revelation in 
Judaism and Christianity (Leiden 2008) 91–115, at 99. 

79 I.Jud.Egypt 117. 
80 CPJ I 129. See Erich S. Gruen, Diaspora: Jews amidst Greek and Romans 

 



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proseuche as an essential component of life in Jewish communities 
throughout Egypt.81  

The range of activity taking place in a synagogue seems to 
have been rather diverse. However, there seems little reason to 
doubt Philo’s assertion that the reading of sacred texts and their 
interpretation was at the centre of their sacral function,82 along 
with a multitude of spoken prayers. For any practicing Jew in 
Egypt, therefore, the worship of the synagogue itself (whatever 
its exact form) may have reinforced the sense we find in literary 
works like Jubilees that Jewish contact with the divine had a 
strong verbal dimension. 

In the Letter of Aristeas, a work of a similar date and geographi-
cal and cultural provenance to Ezekiel, the Septuagint text itself 
is explicitly presented in ways that in the Hellenistic world are 
more commonly associated with visual divine images and rites. 
Following the translation, for instance, the reading of the text 
takes centre-stage in a public gathering of the Jewish community 
(308–310),83 and provokes awe in King Ptolemy when he hears 
it (λίαν ἐξεθαύµασε, 312),84 leading him to make a prostration.85 
The books themselves are to be protected and treated with holy 
care (317–318, cf. 177),86 and any who profane the text can 

 
(London 2002) 106–107, and Lee I. Levine, The Ancient Synagogue: The First 
Thousand Years (New Haven 2005) 75–82. 

81 Philo In Flacc. 48–49; cf. Gruen, Diaspora 68 with n.109.  
82 Philo Vit.Mos. 2.216; cf. Gruen, Diaspora 116. 
83 Cf. the centrality of statues to public festivals in the Greek world, and 

the increased interest in the carrying of divine statues in processions in the 
Ptolemaic context: Angelos Chaniotis, “The Life of Statues of Gods in the 
Greek World,” Kernos 30 (2017) 91–112, at 94–95.  

84 Cf. the ability of cult statues to provoke thauma: Platt, Facing the Gods 106–
108, cf. 90.  

85 On the gesture see Chaniotis, Kernos 30 (2017) 100–101, 106–107. Cf. 
Ps-Luc. Amores 16. 

86 Statues so treated, Chaniotis, Kernos 30 (2017) 94–95, 100–101, 106–107. 



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expect divine punishment (314–316).87 
5.3. Summary 

Ezekiel’s use of a categorical opposition between the visual 
and the verbal to construct a distinction between Jewish and 
non-Jewish attitudes to the divine, therefore, has a background 
in the differing religious cultures of Ezekiel’s Greek and Jewish 
contemporaries.  

Philo’s commitment to the superiority of sight, and Greek 
interest in non-visual forms of epiphany, prevent an over-
simplistic schematic association of Hellenism with visuality and 
Judaism with textuality. Nevertheless, the importance given to 
words as a locus of revelation alongside, or, in some cases, in place 
of visual objects, in at least some aspects of Jewish life, and the 
importance given to seeing in Greek religion, provide Ezekiel 
with the cultural raw materials out of which he constructs the 
sensory opposition of this scene.  

Moses initially appears in the guise of a conventional Hel-
lenistic viewer. He approaches the bush expecting to be able to 
interpret what he sees to decode the message the bush brings. 
This visual approach is rebuffed by the character of God himself, 
who insists on the use of verbal communication alone, a sensory 
hierarchy which has a background in Jewish, rather than Greek, 
attitudes to the relationship between the senses and the divine. 

The dichotomy this scene creates between visual and verbal 
ways of knowing is explicitly linked to the distinctive nature of 
this particular God, and is the reason why the ekphrasis sug-
gested in the opening lines of the scene cannot proceed to its 

 
87 For the parallels with the profanation of the Greek mysteries see 

Benjamin G. Wright III, The Letter of Aristeas (Berlin 2015) 447. Compare the 
well-known story of a young man who committed suicide after attempting 
intercourse with the Aphrodite of Knidos (Ps-Luc. Amores 15–17). A parallel 
with the Theodektes who was punished for using material from the scriptural 
text in his play (Letter 316) is Aeschylus, who was accused of profaning the 
Eleusinian mysteries in his tragedies. For the story of Aeschylus and its 
sources see Renaud Gagné, “Mystery Inquisitors: Performance, Authority, 
and Sacrilege at Eleusis, ClAnt 28 (2009) 211–247, at 220. 



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conventional interpretative conclusion. If the vitality of ekphrasis 
turns on the ongoing rivalry between visual and verbal modes of 
signification, the categorical supremacy of the verbal in this 
passage marks an end to the Hellenistic possibility of a divine 
ekphrasis. The interplay of the visual and the verbal, essential to 
ekphrastic verse, is replaced by a heavy emphasis on the im-
portance of the transmission of words alone. 
5.4. Comparison with Palladas 

Ezekiel’s manipulation of the poetics of ekphrasis to explore 
his religious distinctiveness as an author can be better under-
stood by a comparison with a much later poet, for whom ek-
phrastic encounters with the divine are used to articulate his own 
sense of religious difference from his surroundings. 

A series of poems by the fourth-century CE Palladas, written 
in the voice of a “non-Christian … schoolteacher,” reflect on the 
significance of the statues of his gods which have been defaced 
or dishonourably relocated by “Christian zealots.”88 One poem 
presents the transformation of a statue of Eros into a frying pan 
as appropriate, “since that also burns you” (Anth.Pal. 9.773); a 
statue of Tyche now installed in a pub represents only too 
powerfully the fickleness of fortune for which the goddess stands 
(9.180–183; Bing 331–333); and a statue of Heracles pulled to 
the ground is interpreted by the god himself in a dream as repre-
senting his ability “though a God [to] serve the times” (9.441; 
Bing 330). 

Bing focusses on the “witty” and “rueful” (330) nature of these 
poems. It is also possible, however, to see a significant degree of 
religious defiance and assertiveness in these verses. The very fact 
that the statues in their humiliated state can still convey signifi-
cant meaning visually, and can still be virtuosically interpreted 
in a coherent way in the style of Hellenistic ekphrasis, suggests 
they have an ongoing power. The fact that Eros has been turned 

 
88 Peter Bing, “Ecphrasis and Iconoclasm: Palladas’ Epigrams on Statues,” 

in M. Kanellou et al. (eds), Greek Epigram from the Hellenistic to the Early Byzantine 
Era (Oxford 2019) 324–338, at 324 and 328. 



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into the form of a frying pan—when well interpreted—serves as 
a reminder that Eros is still powerful: he still burns! For Palladas, 
the very act of ekphrasis, the act of making sense from these dis-
figured statues, is a sophisticated way of acknowledging the 
power of the Greek gods who continue to communicate through 
their traditional visual means of signification, even as they come 
under attack. 

The poems of Palladas, therefore, share Ezekiel’s move of 
reframing the artistic agon of Hellenistic ekphrasis to explore 
religious difference, but to the opposite effect. In Palladas the 
ongoing signifying power of the visual, celebrated in ekphrastic 
verse, vindicates the ongoing power of the visually-oriented 
Greek deities and their statues. In Ezekiel, by contrast, the 
emphatic impossibility of interpretative ekphrasis in the burning 
bush scene, the denial of signifying power to the visual sense, 
articulates the distinctive sensory hierarchy which marks the 
distinctiveness of the God of Israel from the Greek deities. An 
ironic appropriation of the language of Greek theophany em-
phasises Ezekiel’s point. While in epiphanies in the Homeric 
Hymns, a visible light or beauty may flash forth (ἀπολάµπω) from 
the deity,89 in Ezekiel the related verb ἐκλάµπω is used not of 
something visual but of the divine speech itself, a verbal form of 
revelation which is accessible not only to Moses, but, as the 
divine imperative to pass the words on suggests, to Aaron, the 
Israelites, and the readers of the Scriptures themselves.  
6. Conclusion 

Jane Heath’s argument that Ezekiel was aware of Hellenistic 
modes of visuality is strengthened when his presentation of the 
burning bush, as well as the Phoenix, is taken into account. 
However, Heath’s conclusion, that Ezekiel’s indebtedness to 
Hellenistic visuality “[arose] seamlessly in the course of social 
interaction, when one pattern [came] to animate another,”90 is 

 
89 See Platt, Facing the Gods 65, who quotes Hymn.Hom.Dem. 278–279, Aph. 

174–175.  
90 Heath, JThS 57 (2006) 41. 



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incorrect. While such a conclusion might be justifiable in respect 
of the passages from Philo this paper has explored, the episode 
of the burning bush suggests that Ezekiel interacted with this 
aspect of Hellenistic culture in a much more deliberate and self-
conscious way.  

Rather than simply being inspired by Hellenistic poetry’s 
attitude to the visual, Ezekiel deliberately adapts the agonistic 
character of ekphrastic verse to stage the conflict not between 
two art forms but between two different approaches to divine 
revelation. The contest between the visual arts and poetry 
presented in Hellenistic ekphrasis is remodeled into a contest 
between visual and verbal ways of encountering and knowing 
the divine, a contest in which, in this scene at least, God himself 
asserts the supremacy of words over visions.  

This reshaping of the ekphrastic form draws on aspects of 
ancient Jewish belief and practice, and demonstrates the degree 
to which Ezekiel is not simply influenced by his Hellenistic 
surroundings, but able to manipulate and challenge their poetic 
and ideological conventions in order to present a culturally 
distinctive and original work. He is every bit as capable of 
staging viewing as Posidippus, Leonidas, or Theocritus. Yet, 
even as he asserts his ability to write as a Hellene, Ezekiel in-
dicates his lack of desire to do so in the words of no less an 
authority than God himself: ἐπίσχες, ὦ φέριστε. To write Jewish 
literature, for Ezekiel, means not only being able to match the 
Hellenistic writers but also to be able carefully to differentiate 
one’s work from theirs. 
7. Implications for Ezekiel’s relationship with Greek culture 

On a superficial level, Ezekiel’s decision to re-present the story 
of the Exodus in the Greek form of a tragedy would appear to 
be an act of assimilation. Whether scholars understand the work 
to be directed towards a Greek audience to increase their sym-
pathy for their Jewish neighbours,91 or towards the Jews them-

 
91 Jacobson, The Exagoge 18. 



288 HELLENISTIC VISUALITY AND JEWISH TEXTUALITY 

————— 
Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 64 (2024) 251–288 

 
 
 
 

selves,92 Ezekiel’s use of Greek poetic form appears at first to be 
designed to suggest and encourage a closeness between Jewish 
and Greek culture. However, when we explore the burning bush 
scene in detail, a different, and more subversive, picture 
emerges. For while we do find a shared poetic topos in the scene 
of viewing, this topos is carefully manipulated and redirected to 
construct and articulate a distinction between Jewish and 
Hellenistic approaches to the divine. 

Ezekiel’s use of one of the conventions of Greek literature 
serves to highlight what he suggests is a difference—rather than 
a similarity—between Greek culture and Judaism. A Hellenistic 
viewing scene is introduced, but then broken off to conclude with 
a discourse on the importance of verbal revelation alone. In this 
instance we see Ezekiel not so much moulding his Jewish story 
into Hellenistic forms, but deliberately breaking open and re-
fashioning prestigious Hellenistic poetic forms to accommodate 
the distinctiveness of a Jewish God. Perhaps, for this ancient 
Jewish author at least, and for the highly literate Hellenistic 
Jewish audience that might have understood his poetic subtlety, 
the master’s house can indeed be dismantled by the master’s 
own tools.93 

 
February, 2024 Keble College 

 Oxford 
 Max.kramer@keble.ox.ac.uk 

 
92 Erich S. Gruen, Heritage and Hellenism: The Reinvention of Jewish Tradition 

(Berkeley 1998) 135. 
93 I would like to express my thanks to the editors and the anonymous 

reviewer of this piece for their helpful insights, advice, and assistance.