From the Old Testament to Josephus: The Cannibalism of Mary of Bethezuba and the Implications of Her Monstrous Gesture

The Holy Scriptures represent in several texts, such as Deuteronomy 28, Lam 2 and 4, and 2 Kgs 6, maternal cannibalism. Also, the Jewish tradition contains descriptions of mothers who ate their children. The Jewish historian Flavius Josephus also made use of cannibalism in his description of the Jewish War against the Romans, in which he portrayed the opponents as bloodthirsty monsters “who eat the raw flesh and gulp down the warm blood of the very citizens they claim to protect” (Jewish War 6.201-19). In keeping with the classical tradition, in the Jewish and Christian tradition, the mother finds her realization within her family as an exemplary model of virtue, as uxor et mater fortiter et suaviter, ready to convey to her children, a gift of God, the basis of the Torah or Christian doctrine and raise them in virtue. Keeping in mind such a context, how to explain their gesture? In later Greco-Roman authors, such as Thucydides, Cicero, Seneca and Plutarch, employed cannibalism as invective to point out immorality not only in terms of mere decline or degeneration, but rather by the figure of inversion, a form of mundus inversus. Taking into account the classical literary tradition, the article will demonstrate how the portraits of such cannibal mothers in Jewish and Christian culture lead to reflect on theological reasons for human suffering and evil. The breaking of the covenant with God and the lack of faith lead to apostasy, internal disorder, and terrible gestures.