The Oniad Sibyl

The Oniad community was a mercenary and priestly Jewish settlement in Greco-Roman Egypt. This community recognized an exiled high priest of the Jerusalem Temple as its founder and met its end after a Mediterranean-wide uprising that shook the foundations of the Roman Empire. This monograph attributes a group of rather puzzling prophetic narratives—filled with coded language, reused lines from Greek and Jewish literature, and confused historical references—to the Oniads. The thesis of this study is that each prophetic treatise responds to crises experienced by the Oniad settlement and, as a result, evidences its unfolding historical consciousness and hybrid literary culture in distinct phases of its existence.