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The Sibylline Oracles in their existing form are a chaotic medley. They consist of 12 books (or 14) of various authorship, date, and religious conception. The final arrangement, thought to be due to an unknown editor of the 6th century AD (Alexandre), does not determine identity of authorship, time, or religious belief; many of the books are merely arbitrary groupings of unrelated fragments.
Some supposedly genuine Sibylline verses are preserved in the Book of Marvels or Memorabilia of Phlegon of Tralles (2nd century AD). These represent an oracle, or a combination of two oracles, of seventy hexameters in all. They report the birth of an androgyne, and prescribe a long list of rituals and offerings to the gods.
In the Spanish Golden Age theater play Life is a Dream by Calderon de la Barca, an oracle drives the plot. A prophecy reveals that king's infant son, Segismundo , will disgrace Poland and one day kill his father, but the king grants his son a chance to prove the oracle wrong.
The word oracle comes from the Latin verb ōrāre, "to speak" and properly refers to the priest or priestess uttering the prediction. In extended use, oracle may also refer to the site of the oracle, and the oracular utterances themselves, are called khrēsmoí (χρησμοί) in Greek.
Diogenes Laërtius recorded that when Zeno of Citium "consulted the oracle, as to what he ought to do to live in the most excellent manner, the God answered him that he ought to become of the same complexion as the dead, on which he inferred that he ought to apply himself to the reading of the books of the ancients.
In Judaism, bible hermeneutics notably uses midrash, a Jewish method of interpreting the Hebrew Bible and the rules which structure the Jewish laws. [1] The early allegorizing trait in the interpretation of the Hebrew Bible figures prominently in the massive oeuvre of a prominent Hellenized Jew of Alexandria, Philo Judaeus, whose allegorical reading of the Septuagint synthesized the ...
Bibliomancy compares with rhapsodomancy (from rhapsode ' poem, song, ode ') "divination by reading a random passage from a poem". A historical precedent was the ancient Roman practice of sortes (' sortilege , divination by drawing lots') which specialized into sortes Homericae , sortes Virgilianae , and sortes Sanctorum , using the texts of ...
Lastly, there has been a certain amount of editing so that some verses of most books are omitted. Sometimes the omission is simply an introduction to a book; sometimes more substantial material has been excluded, but the overall intention, that of allowing, say, the substance of a biblical writer's thoughts to be read and heard in church, has ...