White of Complexion and Delicate Fingered: Notes on Sarah’s Beauty in 1QGenAp 20:2-8

While scholars have long recognized that the praise to Sarah in 1QGenAp XX 2-8 belongs to the descriptive-poem genre attested in ancient Egyptian sources and Canticles, Shaye Cohen has recently argued that this text has “Hellenized” the Near Eastern literary type by introducing a classical rhetoric style into it. This paper seeks to trace the influence of ancient descriptive songs and Hellenistic literature/concepts on the ideal of feminine beauty presented in the Genesis Apocryphon. Sarah’s “white complexion” (l.4)—probably a reference to her breasts—is paralleled, for example, in a love poem preserved in one of the Chester Beatty papyri (ChB I, Collection I). White complexion—in particular breasts—is also a mark of feminine beauty in Greek poems (e.g., the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite [h. Hom. 6] and Dioscorides’epigram [App. Anth. 56]). Likewise, while the descriptive song in Chester Beatty I compares the beloved’s fingers to lotuses, the portrayal of Sarah’s fingers as delicate and long;אריכן וקטינן] l.5] exhibits closer affinities with Greek and Latin sources. Although this terminology most directly parallels physiognomic writings, the erotic content more precisely corresponds to Ovid’s Art of Love, which counsels men to praise the elegant fingers of the women they desire (1.622) and women to conceal their “fat fingers” (3.276).