Can nature be interpreted like a book? The expression “book of nature” appears first in Augustine’s writing and develops in the Middle Ages into a theology of the readability of nature. Augustine himself uses the metaphor in a rather nonchalant way, but not as a standing expression. He speaks of “the book of created nature (magnus liber ipsa species creaturae). Look carefully at it top and bottom, observe it, read it. God did not make letters of ink for you to recognize him in; he set before your eyes all these things he has made.”1 Augustine then goes on to tell Faustus, a Manichean, that he “should first look at the whole of creation as if reading a certain great book about the nature of things (quasi legens magnum quendam librum naturae rerum).”2 Although Augustine uses the metaphor only twice throughout his vast work, the concept seems to underlie his exegetical practice, as can be gleaned from his exegesis of the creation story and his theology of the Trinity.3 Similar tendencies are also found in earlier Christian writers.4 Rabbinic scholars saw the Torah as the blueprint for creation.5 The correlation between the divine realm and nature, the understanding of creation through the biblical text and vice-versa, emerges thus not only as a common theme, but as a common sense in Late Antiquity, which left distinct marks on the period’s knowledge production. Especially the marvels of the earth, of creation, are understood as permanent signs that reflect and point to higher truths which God hid in his creation.6 In this logic, God was a “signifying creator,” as Michael D. Swartz has pointed out: “the idea that God embedded signs in the world that could be read by human beings with the proper knowledge and consciousness.”7 Thus, the late antique interest in creation was largely concerned with discovering, identifying, contextualizing, and explaining divine signs, miracles, and secrets; terms that correlate in Late Antiquity.8 The articles collected in this special thematic section draw attention to the ways in which miracles, and especially nature miracles described by ancient Greek periegetic writers and often collected in lists (‘paradoxographies’), have been used to explain ‘signs’ identified in Scripture, such as ambiguous and unknown words, but also how Scripture was used to explain these wonders. Both Jews and Christians used the miracle—pagan or biblical—to explore uncharted territories of knowledge in Late Antiquity, and both communities continued the paradoxographic tradition and composed lists of biblical miracles or of miraculous deeds by Saints.9

The importance of signs is reflected in the sophisticated and extensive vocabulary the period used to describe them, such as Greek ἔργον, σημεῖον, τέρας, θαῦμα, δύνᾰμις; Latin virtus, signum, prodigium, miraculum, potentia; or Mishnaic Hebrew גבורות, מעשה, פלא, נס, סימן, אות.

In Late Antiquity, terms reflecting divine intervention but also describing properties of things, such as δύνᾰμις, potentia, and גבורות replaced earlier terminology of divine intervention (τέρας and מופת), while γνώρισμα (originally “token of identification or recognition”) and נס (originally “landmark”) were newly introduced to refer to places where miracles occurred.10 Much of this vocabulary is characterized by the sensual reaction of the human body to a “miracle act,” the physical and intellectual response to the bewilderment caused by the sensory perception, usually through sight, of the unexpected.11 In spite of the rich vocabulary, the modern distinction between miracles as things that happen beyond nature and are hence attributed to a divine power, and marvels as inexplicable but natural events, was not absolute in Antiquity and did not bear on the terminology.12

Late antique scholars and exegetes who sought to systematically decipher creation, understand the biblical text, and map out God’s plan for the past and the future often relied on the knowledge compiled in paradoxographies, collections of natural wonders. Under a creationist lens, this ancient natural history with its emphasis on wonder, described the extraordinary features of creation such as huge or peculiar fauna and flora, rivers, springs or lands with special qualities, astonishing races were read as signs and examples of the deep primordial past and the distant messianic future.

The genre name paradoxography is an old neologism, first used in the sense of “paradoxographer” by the Byzantine scholar John Tzetzes (1110–1180 CE).13 Beyond the controversies of whether the lists constituted a genre or not, paradoxographies offer modern scholars a way to understand ancient and medieval concepts of the miraculous and paradoxical, for the collections are attempts at category-making.14 Their telling titles such as On Wondrous Things; Wondrous Stories; A Collection of Wondrous Things; Inquiry on the Paradox; or A Collection of Inquiries on the Paradox point to the existence of fairly stable notions of what classifies as “wonder.” 15 The formation of the category seems to have originated in the Hellenistic period, enabled by the Alexandrinian bibliographical project and the spread of libraries.16

The anonymous late antique Christian work Physiologus is a good example of how this knowledge was put to use. The Physiologus mined paradoxographical knowledge for particular characteristics of undomesticated animals to explain Scripture. The analogy between biblical text and creaturely behavior also explained the purpose of the latter reciprocally. Since the work’s content has often been described as “fabulous” or “fantastic” by modern scholars, the Physiologus’ reliance on the natural history of its day cannot be stressed enough.17 Suggestions for the Physiologus’ time of origin range between the mid-second century and the second half of the fourth century CE. The work’s vivid content seems to have had an immediate impacted on art, and it was already translated in Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages from Greek to “Ethiopic, Armenian, Georgian, Syriac, Coptic, Arabic, Romanian, Old Church Slavonic, and Latin.”18 The beauty of nature wonders, which by definition escape and exceed habitual knowledge patterns, is that they invite many different interpretations. At the same time, there is no end to nature wonders. Copies and translations of the Physiologus therefore often enrich the text with more examples or add different interpretations.19 It was also not long before the text was stripped of its biblical allegories by some redactors, as for example in the alphabetical Glossary of Ansileubus.20

Based on a cursory comparison of two recensions, the paragraph on a giant fish (kētos/κῆτος) called aspidochelonēs (ἀσπιδοχελώνη ) may serve to paradigmatically illustrates the interpretative potential of the wonder.21 Two natures (φύσεις) of this giant sea creature are interpreted allegorically in this paragraph: its habit to dive if mistaken by sailors for an island, and the fragrant breath with which it lures food into its mouth.22 The Greek recension A begins the respective paragraph with the fragrant breath and interprets it with Proverbs 5:3-5, “For the lips of the adulterous woman drip honey, and her speech is smoother than oil;… .” Recension B, on the other hand, sees the characteristic as an allegory of 2 Cor. 2:11, “… For we are not unaware of his [Satan’s] schemes.”23 In total, the passage cites or alludes to seven different biblical verses, followed by biblical and hagiographical examples of people who escaped malevolent humans. On the other nature of the fish, we read:

The text is interpreted allegorically as referring to a man who puts his hope in the devil and will be taken with the latter down to Gehenna, the place of future punishment (γέενναν).

A Syriac book of natural history, possibly translated from Greek, contains the exact same facts in an entry on the kētos-creature, yet without the biblical allegories.25 It is tempting to see this text as the source of the nature wonders in the Physiologus, but as we have already seen, the reverse is also possible. The back and forth between reference works and literary texts shows that the hard facts, such as the two natures of the aspidochelonēs, were taken seriously. These facts were eventually woven into texts that appear to modern scholars to be completely fictional, but which were the product of serious research and served as a form of “edutainment” or even “scientific imagination” for people in Late Antiquity.26

While the Physiologus described the fact that a certain fish was mistaken for an island as one of its characteristics, other authors switched to the perspective of seafaring adventurers, often interweaving several wonders of the sea into a gripping and informative first-person account, a kind of a paradoxical periplus (a description of coastal landmarks and the surrounding waters). Of course, exploratory expeditions always yield surprising finds and new experiences, but many of the ancient periploi were clearly not written by seafarers themselves, and the authors took poetic license. One of the earliest periploi describes the voyage of the Carthagian explorer Hanno, who ventured beyond the rocks of Gibraltar and Maroc—the pillars of Heracles—which symbolized the end of the world to the Greeks. The further south Hanno traveled, the more the vegetation changed, and the crew saw things they had never seen before.27 As a literary text, the Periplus of Hanno was still read in Roman times, as were other periploi such as the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea. Though the latter maintains a factual style, it often digresses into political and mercantile issues, which would not be necessary if the goal were truly coastal orientation, but from the beginning the genre seems to have been intended to inform a broader audience about distant lands in an engaging way.28

The “fish that looks like an island” certainly had great potential to be engaged with in various ways. For example, the pseudepigraphic letter attributed to Alexander the Great addressed to his teacher Aristotle describes how Alexander and his army nearly drowned on his expedition to India because they mistook a fish for an island.29 The same fish also appears in the travelogues of the Talmudic sage Rabbah bar bar Hanah, and in the early medieval stories of The Seven Voyages of Sinbad the Sailor or The Voyage of Saint Brendan the Abbot.30 Even the Avesta and later Middle Persian literature refer to a dragon mistaken for a picnic place.31

The search for parallel motifs is easy and quickly fruitful. In the past, this has led to overly simplistic and hasty classifications of certain motifs as derivative and ‘popular,’ resulting in the classification of the respective stories as fictional entertainment drawn from common lore. However, the proliferation of certain paradoxographic knowledge in Late Antiquity does not necessarily indicate a culture of imitation based on borrowing and adapting plots but may instead point to a common intellectual quest to contextualize, use, and make sense of the nature wonder as part of creation and still significantly distinct from it. Indeed, while the time under question catalogued miracles, a hymn by Isaac Watts from 1715 lets the congregation sing: “Lord, how thy wonders are displayed wherever I turn my eye.”32 If everything is a wonder, however, nothing is significant anymore.

In a forthcoming article, Philip Thibodeau observes that ancient empiricism includes not only to direct observations in nature, but also to observations in books. This explains well what we have observed so far, namely that the phrase ‘book of nature’ seems to refer to books about nature, and especially the knowledge collected in paradoxographies, rather than being a metaphor for actual nature, i.e., creation. Augustine actually asks for someone to write a book specifically on the fauna, flora, and mineralia of the Bible and their properties for exegetical purposes.33 His “field glasses” take the form of books.

In a program explaining which secular books monks should study to “obtain knowledge of this world,” the sixth-century CE Christian scholar Cassiodorus suggests that the monks read certain geographical works.34 Interestingly, he emphasizes the very visual images that these texts, accompanying illustrations and maps, create, and how they allow for mental travel.

In such mental journeys, even the edges of the inhabited world, the oikoumenē could be visited, just as Ptolemy had, in a sense, ‘mapped them within reach.’36 Already in Homer, the most remote borders of the world—ta eschata in Greek geographical vocabulary—became intertwined with distant time, the past Golden Age, when gods mingled with humans.37 In the monotheisms of Late Antiquity, these places were aligned with the future in which everything will be different, and in which extremely good and bad things will happen, just as in the most faraway places.38 Terra incognita and mare incognitum both become sites of utopian speculation.39

Yet, a utopia does not have to be far removed in a geographical sense. The rabbinic sages consistently imagine the Land of Israel as a place of megafauna and megaflora based on the biblical testimony, such as a description of the people in Canaan as giants (Anakites) and a grape cluster that has to be carried by two people (Numbers 13:21-28). But also verses like Psalm 72:16: ‘Let abundant grain be in the land, to the tops of the mountains’ were interpreted under the same premise.40 Even though some Babylonian rabbis have seen at least parts of the Land of Israel, they evaluated it through the biblical filter.

Paradise, or, more precisely, the garden of Eden, is another concept that was associated with both a distant time and a distant place in Late Antiquity. The different associations, however, depended on the language in which people studied Genesis 2:8: “Now the Lord God had planted a garden in the east, in Eden; and there he put the man he had formed.” The Hebrew word qedem, translated here as “east,” can also mean “before” in a temporal sense. Readers and listeners of the biblical text in Hebrew have tended to understand it in the temporal sense, and the Aramaic Targums translate it accordingly.41 Several rabbinic texts therefore include the garden of Eden into their lists of things that God had created before the beginning of the seven days of creation.42 The LXX, on the other hand, translates the Hebrew qedem as “east,” causing Greek speaking Jews and especially late antique Christians to struggle with the precise location of this earthly paradise. Some thinkers place it on the other side of the Ōkeanos, with the four rivers that emerge from it (the Euphrates, Tigris, Gihon and Pishon) and that flow beneath the waters of the Ōkeanos into the oikoumenē; others imagine it as a more or less hidden place in the far East.43 Northern India was an area traditionally associated with many wonders.44 For example, in the Life of Makarios the Roman Theophilos and his companions encounter people of the dog-headed race, the Cynocephali that Ctesias had located in India, only about twenty miles away from Paradise.45

The interest in this distant and time-transcending place caused a paradigm shift. The Orient, actually the geographical periphery from a European perspective, gradually moves to the center and becomes the focal point of orientation on early Christian T-O maps, with Asia being twice as large as Europe or Africa. European Christians moved themselves to the periphery on their material and, hence, on their mental maps. The Hereford mappa mundi, created in England around the year 1300 and an elaborate version of the basic T-O scheme has Jerusalem in the center, the Garden of Eden at the top with Christ on his throne just above it (but outside the oikoumenē), while England occupies a very small place in the lower left corner.

Another divide in the theorization of nature miracles caused by the language in which the biblical text was read concerns the already mentioned idea of pre-creation. As Felix Böhl has shown, the concept goes back to Genesis 2:2, which, in the Hebrew Bible reads: ‘On the seventh day God finished the work that had been undertaken.’46 This implies that the first Sabbath was not entirely without work. Midrash Bereshit Rabbah 10:9 connects this fact to the difficult question of exactly when the Sabbath begins during twilight. While this is a difficult question for humans, God knows. That is why he could finish some work during this time without working on the first Sabbath. Although several lists exist of things that were created in the twilight of the first Shabbat (like the mentioned garden of Eden), Böhl has shown that seven items show up on every list and it is likely that they constituted the very first list.47 All these items are described by the biblical text as acts of God: the rainbow, the manna, script, incision (of writing), and tablets (of the ten commandments); the mouth of Balaam’s donkey; and the mouth of the earth (that swallowed Korah and his kin).48 The list were expanded to accommodate more and even non-biblical items, like the first tong with which other tongs could be made or the enigmatic shamir that helped Solomon build the temple without producing noise, but the gist is clear: nature wonders have been part of the creational process.49 Thus, obvious changes to the order of creation in the biblical narrative that are only indirectly attributed to God are explained by decrees that God imposed on certain elements during the six days of creation and that commanded them to behave differently at a given point in time (e.g., the opening of the Red Sea, the feeding of Elijah by ravens, the standing still of sun and moon on Joshua’s command).50 This latter explanation also resonated with readers of the LXX, whose text read at Genesis 2:2: ‘And God finished on the sixth day his works which he made,’ and thus did not have the challenge or, rather, the possibility of reckoning with the creational wonder-working power of the first twilight.51 Jewish and Christian readers of the Septuagint, such as Augustine, had to solve two puzzles: how creation can renew itself daily even though the work of creation ended after seven days, and the place of divine miracles, such as seemingly spontaneous creations, in creation. Augustine correlated both with the second creation narrative (Gen 2), in which the ground brings forth the trees, and saw the reason for repeated and seemingly spontaneous creation in a seed-like predisposition. He concludes that creation “is endowed with a dual potentiality, one that allows for the natural development” of creation “and another that allows for the miraculous development” of creation.”52

The late ancient natural history clearly developed in tandem with the Bible and the books of nature. The already encountered aspidochelonēs was introduced as a kētos-creature in the Physiologus; these creatures were created on the fourth day of creation together with all the other life in the sea according to Gen 1:21, and from the information given there, other characteristics of the animal could be inferred. In his homilies on the six days of creation, the Hexaemeron, Basil of Caesarea, while relying on the already mentioned characteristic island-like size and shape of the animal, places the kētos into the deep and inaccessible waters of the Ōkeanos, the stream encircling the three known continents Europe, Asia, and Africa:

Quite explicitly, at least for his readers, Basil moves the kētos to the ends of the world, the Atlantic, the sea beyond the pillars of Hercules, the western outermost end and border of the inhabited world, oikoumenē. Like the last things at the end of time, the “last” and distant spaces exist to frighten humankind in order to educate them and to instill a sense of respect for the Creator, the original meaning of thauma.55 Jacob of Serugh’s sixth century Hexaemeron fully returns to the image of the Ōkeanos as the deep, encircling, serpentine primordial sea.56 In Jacob’s view, the leviathan (Ps 74:14; Isa 27:1; Job 41) also belongs to the category of primordial sea monsters (Greek: kētē/Hebrew: tannin). Moreover, the creature is synonymous with the primordial deep waters, tehom (Gen. 1:2).

The command demanded the little waters (to produce) small, creeping, living beings and the abundant waters (to produce) large fish and stout, creeping, living beings. The unlimited bottomless abyss (tehum) it demanded to make sea serpents grow as itself. … Behold, in the boundless abyss there is a leviathan which is large as the sea, and which is as boundless.57

Paradoxographies do not explain miracles, they list them in prose. By way of organization, they create a web of possible connections.58 For the biblically oriented religions of Late Antiquity, they served as an initiation into the miracles of creation.59 Knowledge of the particulars of nature and their correlations with the biblical text was sufficient—no additional explanation of the miracle was needed. This self-sufficiency of paradoxographies has long troubled modern scholars, who interpreted the lack of explanation as sloppy scholarship, a mere exercise in antiquarianism and compilation techniques.60 More recently, it has been pointed out that existing explanations were not thoroughly removed, and that the sense of wonder did not hinge on these explanations.61 Moreover, in some cases, “the explanation itself may be the marvel.”62 The fact that paradoxographies are still scrutinized in ways other peri-texts are not (compilations of knowledge on (Greek peri, περι) something), shows how difficult it is for the modern mind to acknowledge the miracle as a fact in its own right.

The trope of ancient knowledge of nature being flawed, incomplete, and increasingly blurred at the edges is stubbornly persisting. Yet, to acknowledge that there is something unknown, that there are mysteries and wonders, is not a concession to ignorance, but sound knowledge in itself. No ancient map, for example, shows any awareness that its edges were “jagged and often imprecise.”63 Rather, there existed clear concepts of the extension of the Ōkeanos or the inhabitable zones beyond the torrid zone. The roots of the verdict of imprecision simply lie in the juxtaposition of old maps with modern ones. The ancients themselves did not have a sense that their knowledge was deficient.64 It is not a sign of lack of knowledge, for example, that natural wonders are generally located at the ends of the world, but reflects the fact that the inhabited world, as conceived by the Greeks and Romans, is centered on the Mediterranean and its adjacent regions. Because of its temperate climate, the region is home to much less exciting fauna and flora than the tropical zones of Central Africa or India, or the spectacular natural phenomena of the polar zone. In the end, paradoxographies, like any other handbook, were sources of knowledge. And like any other such source, they were regularly contested and modified.

Few concepts have undergone such fundamental changes in meaning since Antiquity as the notion of wonder or miracle. Used and abused by secular and clerical leaders alike to implement their political agendas, miracles, whether perceived as the result of divine intervention or a “whim of nature,” were discredited during the processes that led to the so-called “scientific revolution” of the 16th and 17th centuries.65 Ultimately, a mechanistic and totalizing conception of nature, governed by rules that could be written into mathematical formulas, triumphed over more modest views that “suspend absolute judgments in favor of conditional ones ... and thrive as long as ambiguity and paradox were seen as productive and not considered either dangerous or ineffective.”66 Thus, miracles became the stuff of ignorance, the “beliefs” of the uneducated. At the same time, a dematerialized version of belief became the ideal, with the result that belief in matter and its potency was considered idolatry.67 The burden of proof was now on those who believed in miracles.68 However, proving a miracle on the basis of the current paradigm was and is impossible, because it places the miracle or paradox outside of law-governed nature. Yet, since the miracle is not subject to the laws of nature, it cannot be claimed to have actually occurred.69 The Western concept of science and the construction of a nature that is supposed to function according to laws thus moved the miracle and the paradox of nature to the margins of knowledge production.

These views have profoundly influenced the way in which miracles have historically been studied by modern scholars. For example, while miracles attributed to divine intervention have been studied with great attention in theology, the wonders of nature suffered neglect. Typically, scholarly research questions about miracles revolve around credibility, the degree of skepticism applied by ancient authors, belief versus fact, emotion, or imagination.70 The creative palette of possible research questions is obviously limited by our own cultural understanding of the miraculous, which sees little or no use for miracle stories. The view can be roughly described as follows: monsters are for children, inexplicable healings for the religious, and to philosophize is to see the miracle in the everyday.

The days when ancient miracle collections were called the “tabloids” of Antiquity are luckily behind us.71 But the need to compare their content with that of “more serious” genres remains, and the recent postmodern attempts to rehabilitate the miraculous through the emotion-curiosity-knowledge symbiosis does not contribute as much as it promises. Based on the work of Stephen Greenblatt or Ralf Neer, for example, the “aesthetic and emotional resonance” of thauma (wonder) in Antiquity or its usefulness as a theoretical concept “in the practice of cultural poetics” can be analyzed fruitfully.72 But while miracles can evoke emotions (good or bad) and arouse curiosity, both of which are prerequisites for the production of knowledge, the ancient engagement with miracles was not only emotional, and thus somewhat haphazard, but very systematic.73

Paradoxographies should therefore be taken seriously and on a par with other systematic projects of knowledge organization of the time, such as aetiologies, aretologies, historiographies, and ethnographies. Sometimes paradoxes are embedded in a “rhetoric of the marvelous;” at other times they may be encountered without special emphasis, simply as an established part of nature.74

Recent studies of the ancient concept of nature have nuanced its particularities if compared to the modern one. For example, ancient “nature” includes regular and paradoxical animals (e.g., unicorns, dragons, sea monsters, mythical creatures); humans and god(s); demons and angels.75 Moreover, animate beings were not placed in strict hierarchical relationships to one another, but, rather, in a hierarchical order with considerable overlap between animals and demons; animals, angels, demons, and humans; or god(s) and humans.76 Because of this lack of a concept comparable to modern dichotomies such as “natural/preternatural” or “immanence/transcendence,” it is important to analyze the miraculous in the imperial period and Late Antiquity (or generally in premodern societies) along emic categories, and along the emic laws believed to govern the regular and the irregular, as well as emic conceptions of matter.

How a culture defines the possibilities and limits of matter largely determines what is considered possible and what is not. The mathematical, law-driven conception of nature that dominates modern scientific inquiry is the result of long negotiations about the potential of matter: is there or is there not a Cartesian divide between mind and body? Is matter pneumatic or inert? Is it independent, even capricious, or subject to laws?77 Obviously, it makes a big difference to the notion of what is considered possible if nature is seen as matter filled with effective properties (dynamis/virtus), useful for various purposes, but only moderately controllable.78

The present thematic section is intended to stimulate further research that takes paradoxography and the ancient engagement with it to have been a serious scholarly pursuit that not only shaped but also advanced imperial period and late antique knowledge. The political and calendrical dimensions of miracles are discussed by Maureen Attali79 in her paper on Scroll of Fasts (Megillat Taanit). The scroll lists 34 auspicious days on which fasting is forbidden because “miracles (nissim) have occurred for Israel” (Palestinian Talmud Taanit 2.13 and Megillah 1.8). The list served the Maccabees, the Hasmoneans, and finally the rabbinic sages to legitimize their authority. The alignment of Megillat Taanit with contemporary paradoxographical and aretological projects offers many new angles for understanding its purpose and meaning. Robyn Walsh80 shows that the Gospel writers participated in the systematizing paradoxographic projects of their Roman contemporaries. In presenting Jesus as a miracle (thauma), the evangelists draw on content and literary topoi familiar from paradoxographies such as the eyewitness account and combine them with faith (pistis). It is precisely by adopting the aesthetically successful literary modes of their time, which obviously included paradoxographies, that the Gospels achieved acceptance and circulation: they met the literary expectations of the audience. Monika Amsler’s paper81 then shows how the miscellaneous format of the genre allowed paradoxographies to be easily dissected and mined for individual paradoxes by other authors. These were then used to supplement the geographical scenery of narrative worlds or as philosophically and theologically productive objects to “think with.” Even the Babylonian Talmud uses paradoxical material from Greek and Roman cognates, but the miracles were thoroughly “rabbinicized,” that is, embedded in the hermeneutical world of the rabbinic sages and adapted to the discursive nature of the Talmud. The late antique hagiography Life of Makarios the Roman similarly uses paradoxographical material to overcome epistemological barriers and to imagine God’s “unfathomable power and glory,” as Julie Van Pelt82 observes. This glory is easily demonstrated through the wonders of God’s creation. Written in the genre of a travelogue to the ends of the world, the text is well designed to take the reader or listener from one extraordinary creature to an even more amazing one. Thereby, the Life dips into what Pelt terms the “paradoxographical mode.” The result is a paradoxography woven into the Life of a saint which is shown to be the greatest marvel of all. The images of the synagogue in Dura Europos have already been analyzed from different perspective, but Barbara Crostini83 is the first to apply to them the “lens of paradoxography.” This allows her to explain why the panels depicting scenes from the life of the prophet Elijah do not follow the biblical narrative's chronological sequence. The panels clearly emphasize certain miracles, particularly the most dramatic ones. Indeed, many details in the drawings that seem to depart from the biblical text can either be explained as theater props or as being based on the scripts by the Jewish playwright Ezekiel the Tragedian. Painted masks also suggest that the space was used for theater performances. Thaumata were indeed the stuff of plays, and the word itself synonymously used for puppet show, toy theater, juggler’s booth, menagerie, or mechanical devices.84