Text in Context: Essays by Members of the Society for Old Testament Study

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TEXT IN CONTEXT

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Text in Context Essays by Members of the Society for Old Testament Study

edited by A. D, H. M A Y E S

OXPORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

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OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Great Clarendon Street. Oxford OX2 6DP

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford, It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary1 Italy Japan South Korea Poland Portugal Singapore Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam

Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © Oxford University Press 2000 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) Reprinted 200? All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You most not circulate this book: in any other binding or cover And you must impose this same condition on any acquirer ISBN 978-0-19-826391-3

Preface I am grateful to the Society for Old Testament Study for its invitation to edit this volume of essays. The tradition represented in earlier volumes of the series: The People and the Book (edited by A. S, Peake, 1925), Record and Revelation (edited by H. Wheeler Robinson, 1938), The Old Testament and Modern Study (edited by H. H. Rowley, 1951), Tradition and Interpretation (edited by G, W. Anderson, 1979), and The World of Ancient Israel (edited by R, E, Clements, 1989), imposes also a responsibility which could be discharged only with advice and assistance. The planning of the volume was facilitated by the willingness of several members of the Society to comment on earlier proposals for its arrangement and content. My chief debt of gratitude is, of course, to the contributors: their co-operation made the task of detailed editorial work a relatively light burden. At the risk of slight inconsistency in relation to the use of Hebrew and Greek script rather than transliteration, I have maintained the preference of the various authors in this regard. The one essay which makes extensive use of Hebrew script, that by Professor Talmon, would lose much of its effectiveness (without making it any easier for the reader without Hebrew) if transliteration were used. Finally, thanks are due to Dr Peter Addinall for his assistance in the translation of the essay by Professor Kaiser. A. D. H. Mat/es

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Contents Contributors Abbreviations Introduction I The Old Testament and the Reader 1. The Reader and the Text R. P. CARROLL 2. The Bible in Qumran and Early Judaism P. S. A L E X A N D E R 3. Canonical Criticism and Old Testament Theology M. G, BRETT 4. Feminist Study of the Old Testament J. C H E R Y L EXUM 5. Old Testament Ethics

ix xi xv

3 35 63 86 116

J. W. R O G E R S O N

II The Text of the Old Testament 6. Textual Criticism: The Ancient Versions S. TALMON 7. The Hebrew Language J, A. EMERTON 8. Canons of the Old Testament J. BARTON 9. Hebrew Narrative D. M. GUNN 10. Hebrew Poetry W. G, E, WATSON III The Old Testament and its Authors 11. The Pentateuch and the Deuteronomistic History O. KAISER 12. Prophecy and the Prophetic Books J, BLENKINSOPP 13. Wisdom in Israel K. DELL 14. The History of Israel: Foundations of Israel. K. W. WHITELAM

141 171 200 223 253

289 323 348 376

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CONTENTS

15. The History of Israel: The Persian and Hellenistic Periods L. L. G R A B B E 16, The Religion of Israel J. DAY

403

Index of Biblical References Author Index General Index

455 466 475

428

Contributors P. S. A L E X A N D E R , M.A., D.Phil., Professor of Post-Biblical Jewish Literature, University of Manchester. J. BARTON, M.A., D.Phil., D.Litt, Oriel & Laing Professor of the Interpretation of Holy Scripture, University of Oxford. J. B L E N K I N S O P P , L.S.S., S.T.L., D.Phil., John A. O'Brien Professor of Biblical Studies, University of Notre Dame. M. G. BRETT, B.A., M.Div., Ph.D., Professor of Old Testament, Whitley College, Melbourne. R. P. C A R R O L L , M.A., Ph.D., Professor of Hebrew Bible and Semitic Studies, University of Glasgow. J. DAY, M.A., Ph.D., Reader in Biblical Studies, University of Oxford. K. J. DELL, M.A., D.Phil., Lecturer in Old Testament Studies, University of Cambridge. J. A. EMERTON, M.A., D.D., F.B.A., Emeritus Regius Professor of Hebrew, University of Cambridge. J. CHERYL EXUM, M.A., M.Phil., Ph.D., Professor of Biblical Studies, University of Sheffield. L. L. G R A B B E , M.A., Ph.D., D.D., Professor of Hebrew Bible and Early Judaism, University of Hull. D. M. GUNN, M.A., B.D., Ph.D., A. A. Bradford Professor of Religion, Texas Christian University, Fort Worth, Texas. O. KAISER, Dr.theol., Dres.theol. h.c,, Professor Emeritus of Old Testament Studies, Philipps-University, Marburg. A. D. H. MAYES, M.A., Ph.D., LittD., M.R.I.A., Erasmus Smith's Professor of Hebrew, University of Dublin. J. W. ROGERSON, M.A., D.D., D.D.h.c, Emeritus Professor of Biblical Studies, University of Sheffield. S. TALMON, M.A., Ph.D., J. L. Magnes Professor Emeritus of Bible Studies, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. W. G. E. WATSON, Ph.D., Visiting Fellow, Department of Religious Studies, University of Newcastle upon Tyne. K. W. W H I T E L A M , B.D., Ph.D., Professor of Religious Studies, University of Stirling.

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Abbreviations AASF AASOR AAT AB ABD AGAJU

Annales Academiae Scientarum Fennicae Annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research Agypten und Altes Testament Anchor Bible Anchor Bible Dictionary Arbeiten zur Geschichte des antiken Judentums und des Urchristentums

AJS Review Association of Jewish Studies Review AnBib AO AOAT ARM AST! AID AThANT ATSAT BA BASOR BBB BEThL BevT(h) BiW) BMnt BKAT BN BO BR BSOAS BTB BthSt BWANT BZ BZAW CBOTS CBQ CPf DBI

Analecta Biblica Acta Orientalia Alter Orient und Altes Testament Archives royales de Mari Annual of the Swedish Theological Institute Das Alte Testament Deutsch Abhandlungen zur Theologie des Alten und Neuen Testaments Arbeiten zu Text und Sprache im Alten Testament Biblical Archaeologist Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research Bonner biblische Beitrage Bibliotheca ephemeridum theologicarum lovaniensium Beitrage zur evangelischen Theologie Biblica Biblical Interpretation Biblischer Kommentar: Altes Testament Biblische Notizen Bibliotheca Orientalis Biblical Research Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies Biblical Theology Bulletin Biblisch-theologische Studien Beitrage zur Wissenschaft vom Alten und Neuen Testament Biblische Zeitschrift Beihefte zur Z A W Coniectanea Biblica Old Testament Series Catholic Biblical Quarterly Corpus Papyrorum Judaicarum A Dictionary of Biblical Interpretation

xii

D/D DSD DtrG EAJT EdF EHS El EM ExpT ET ET(h)L FAT FKDG FOTL FRLANT GthA HALOT HAT HCOT HdA HSM HT.R HilCA ICC IE} Int JAAR JANES(CU) }AOS JBL JBTh JCS JFSR JJS JNES JNSL JQR JSNTS JSOTS JSOT

ABBREVIATIONS Discoveries in the fudean Desert Dead Sea Discoveries Deuteronomistic History East Asia Journal of Theology Ertrage der Forschung Einleitung in die Heilige Schrift Eretz Israel Encyclopedia Miqra'it Expository Times English Translation Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanienses Forschungen zum Alten Testament Forschungen zur Kirchen und Dogmengeschichte Forms of Old Testament Literature Forschungen zur Religion und. Literatur des Alten und Neuen Testaments Gottinger theologische Arbeiten The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament Handbuch zum Alten Testament Historical Commentary on the Old Testament Handbuch der Archaologie Harvard Semitic Monographs Harvard Theological Review Hebrew Union College Annual International Critical Commentary Israel Exploration Journal Interpretation Journal of the A merical Academy of Religion Journal of the Ancient Near Eastern Society of Columbia. University Journal of the American Oriental Society Journal of Biblical Literature Jahrbuch fur Biblische Theologie Journal of Cuneiform Studies Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion Journal of Jewish Studies Journal of Near Eastern Studies Journal of Northwest Semitic 'Languages Jewish Quarterly Review Journal for the Study of the New Testament Supplement Series Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement Series Journal for the Study of the Old Testament

ABBREVIATIONS JSP JSS JTS KJV KStBTh KTU LCL MoBi MThSt NCB(C) NEB

Journal for the Study of the Psettdepigrapha Journal of Semitic Studies Journal of Theological Studies King James Version Kohlhammer Studienbiicher Theologie Keilalphabetischen Texte aus Ugarit Loeb Classical Library Le Monde de la Bible Marburger Theologische Studien New Century Bible (Commentary) Neue Echter Bibel

NICOT

New International Commentary on the Old Testament

NTT OBO OLP OTG OIL OTS QD RB RelSRev RevQ RTR SAA SBAB SBL SBLDS SBLMS SBS SBT SFEG SHAW.PH

Nederlands Theologisch Tijdschrift Orbis biblicus et orientalis Orientalia lovaniensia periodica Old Testament Guides Old Testament Library Oudtestamentische Studien Quaestiones disputatae Revue biblique Religious Studies Review Revue de Qumran The Reformed Theological Review State Archives of Assyria Stuttgarter Biblische Aufsatzbande Society of Biblical Literature Society of Biblical Literature Dissertation Series Society of Biblical Literature Monograph Series Stuttgarter Bibelstudien Studies in Biblical Theology Schriften der Finnischen Exegetischen Gesellschaft Sitzungsberichte der Heidelberger Akadernie der Wissenschaften. Phil.-hist.Klasse Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament Scottish Journal of Theology Society for Old Testament Study Monograph Series Stadia Semitica Neerlandica Stadia Biblica Stadia biblica et theologica Supplements to Vetus Testamentum The Social World of Biblical Antiquity Series Tel Aviv Theologische Bucherei Theologische Rundschau

SJOT SJT SOTSMS SS.N StB StBTh SVT SWBAS TA ThB ThR

xiii

xiv

ThSt TRE TynBul TZ UBL UCOP LIF VT VWGTh WBC WMANT WUNT ZABR 'LA W ZBK.AT ZNW ZThK

ABBREVIATIONS Theologische Studien Theologische Realenzyklopadie Tyndale Bulletin Theologische Zeitschrift Ugaritisch-Biblische Literatur University of Cambridge Oriental Publications Ugarit-Forschungen Vetus Testamentum Veroffentlichungen der Wissenschaftlichen Gesellschaft fiir Theologie Word Biblical Commentary Wissenschaftliche Monographien zum Alten und Neuen Testament Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament Zeitschrift fiir altorientaiische und biblische Rechtsgeschichte Zeitschrift fiir die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft Ztircher Bibelkommentar. Altes Testament Zeitschrift fiir die neutestamentliche. Wissenschaft Zeitschrift fiir Theologie und Kirche

Introduction Every age has its own concerns, and what were the assured results of one may be the fundamental uncertainties of another. It was the wish of the Society for Old Testament Study that the present volume should give appropriate emphasis to literary study of the Old Testament and the history of Israel, two areas which have witnessed remarkable developments since the last volume of essays by members of the Society, Literary studies have embraced both the study of the text and the sociology of the context within which biblical study is now done; historical study has been transformed by new archaeological approaches, perspectives and models drawn from anthropology and sociology, as well as by different approaches to the text of the Old Testament. These concerns of the present have, however, also involved a radical questioning of the validity of what former generations had come to accept. At the risk of over-simplification, one might suggest that the scholarly study of the Old Testament in a former generation accepted as self-evident that the exegesis of the text was chiefly concerned to mark out the history of the growth of the text with a view to discovering its earliest form and the meaning which the original author intended to convey, and that the reconstruction of Israelite history was intimately bound up with the success of this activity, and, so far as the 'historical books' are concerned, was dependent on reaching back to the oldest stages which were assumed to have some direct relationship to events in the external world. All of this is now widely questioned. Literary criticism has brought to Old Testament study an appreciation of the independence of the text as a work with no easy relationship of correspondence to external realities. Reader response criticism has illuminated the complex and dynamic relationship between the reader and the text, and has made evident the significance of the fact that the academic community engaged in Old Testament study is now much more pluralistic than before. A single objective scholarly methodology can no longer be assumed. The interpretation of the text takes place in the interaction between the text and the interpretative community, a community which may or may not have religious commitments, or may be characterized by different political or ethical concerns. If the world of the reader is not to be ignored, neither is the world of the text. The recognition that the text is not simply a vehicle for information but a creative work of the imagination is both an invitation to a close scrutiny of the literary techniques involved in its formation and also a warning against a too facile attempt to relate it to the events of Israelite history. Much has been done in recent decades not only in traditional

xvi

INTRODUCTION

textual criticism but also in the study of Old Testament narrative and poetry. The enrichment which this has brought to Old Testament study has also raised methodological and substantive issues which ha¥e had to be confronted by both historical critics and historians. Yet major developments in historical criticism, particularly of the Pentateuch and the Deuteronomistic History, have taken place in the years since Tradition and Interpretation (edited by G, W. Anderson, 1979), developments which, even within the framework of the traditional scholarly approaches, have seriously questioned older positions. As far as the reconstruction of Israelite history is concerned, most of the methodological issues seem to be concentrated at this point. The possibility of any positive role for the Old Testament is often questioned: its Israel is seen as little more than an ideological creation of a late period, leaving archaeology, informed by sociological and anthropological theory, as the foundation for any reliable results. The wide diversity of concerns and approaches which now characterizes Old Testament study may in large part be directly traced to the plurality which now characterizes the academic community. A framework of coherence is required, in a way which was not necessary for earlier volumes in this series, if that diversity is not to become confusion. For this reason, this volume is divided into three major sections under the headings: reader, text, author. The first includes essays which deal with the Old Testament and the interpretative community, including early and later religious communities, as well as feminist and ethical readings. The second section covers textual and linguistic studies, including the ancient versions, and the process from textual plurality to canonical text, together with literary study of Old Testament narrative and poetry. The third section covers recent developments in many of the more traditional historical concerns of Old Testament study, but with an appropriate emphasis on theoretical issues. Such a framework is, however, simply a way of organizing the various essays into broad categories; it cannot disguise the fact that real and significant methodological differences now characterize the academic study of the Old Testament, If the scholarly study of the Old Testament is no longer uniform in its approach and concerns, but rather is characterized by methodological and substantive diversity and conflict, it is important that something of this variety should be reflected in a volume such as the present. A number of considerations have, therefore, led to the selection and arrangement of essays published here. In particular, it is intended to strike a balance which recognizes both the significance of the more recent approaches and the continued vitality of the more traditional issues. On a practical level, the chief problem is that in order to provide adequately for approaches and topics that have not featured in earlier volumes some expected topics have had to be sacrificed. It is not difficult to see what areas are not given

INTRODUCTION

xvii

dedicated treatment. There are, for example, no essays devoted specifically to the psalms and Israelite worship, apocalyptic, archaeology, though these topics are, of course, discussed in other contexts. Old Testament study is a varied and wide-ranging field; what is provided in this volume will, it is hoped, provide an orientation on developments in its major areas in recent decades.

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PART I The Old Testament and the Reader

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1

The Reader and the Text R. P. C A R R O L L So Philip ran . . . and heard him reading the prophet Isaiah. He asked, 'Do you understand what you are reading?' He replied, 'How can 1, unless someone guides me?' The Acts of the Apostles 8: 30-31 (NRSV)

THE question posed by Philip to the unnamed Ethiopian official remains one of the great paradigmatic questions about any act of reading: 'Do you understand what you are reading?' The Ethiopian's answer succinctly expressed a common failure of the reading process and contributed to laying the foundation stone of any subsequent hermeneuties. Without somebody or something to guide the reader texts, in this case the prophetic scroll, are likely to remain obscure and beyond comprehension. There was no textual avenue into meaning for the Ethiopian reader in this story, but there was a desperate need for the kind of guided reading which would construct understanding for the reader of the obscure text. For the Ethiopian the page was dark, but for Philip, who knew what he expected, the scroll could be read because he already possessed a hermeneutic of reading which would construe the scroll (see Wallace Stevens's poem 'Phosphor Reading by His Own Light'). Here then is a paradigm for reading the Bible (or any text): text (scroll), reader, interpreter constituted a triad. As a leading question it allowed Philip, as a reader with a reading hermeneutic (or theory of reading), to read the text in accordance with his own prior hermeneutic. As a member of a reading community which had provided him with a hermeneutic for understanding such obscure texts, Philip was able to read the text to his own and the Ethiopian's satisfaction. A communal reading framework recontextualized his reading of Isaiah and grounded his interpretation in concrete specificity. Philip's reading of Isaiah made such sense to the Ethiopian that it persuaded him to act upon Ms new found understanding of Isaiah (and other unspecified texts) by being baptized when they came to a pool of water. In this delightful exchange between two non-European readers of a text, which is now part of the Bible, may be found a paradigm of hermeneutic praxis. From such a story a theory of reading may perhaps be extrapolated, not to mention

4

R. P. CAR R O L L

an example of the use of Scripture as propaganda, which will have to serve both as an introduction to the complexities of reading the Bible and to this volume on the contextualization of text and reader of the Bible. The Social Context of Reading Any account of reading the Bible at the end of the twentieth century must include some consideration of a complex set of multitudinous, multivariate readings by many different readers of an ancient text which has been transmitted through, history into a modern setting. Written in ancient languages and in cultures far removed from modernity and recontextualized constantly by translation, by canonization, by time, by history, by society and by modernity itself, reading the Bible today is a grand adventure of making new narratives from old metaphors—-a process easily detected within the Bible itself, but now utterly transformed by paradigm shifts in knowledge and theory. In this essay I shall highlight certain features of the map of the new landscape of Bible readings and describe some of the contours of that territory as a way of plotting a reading itinerary of a certain focused kind. The most important features of this journey will consist of the text itself, in its very many translated forms (the importance of treating the Bible as a work in translation cannot be over-emphasized), the reading communities which, have transmitted such a multivariate set of interpretations of the text(s) through time and the contemporary world of modernity (or postmodernity for readers who would insist on a distinction between postmodernity and modernity) in which those biblical texts are now read by members of so many different collectivities. Notions of text, reader, situation constitute a rather simplistic map, but shaped by many dimensions of sociocultural, time-laden theories and practices and frequently disrupted by ever-changing patterns of living and thinking, the processes of Bible reading are constantly changing. So although the text may be translated from ancient manuscripts copied by long-forgotten scribes and copyists, it exists in modern languages and is read by modern readers in contemporary cultures where different situations make for very different readings. In one sense, every encounter is a first-time experience of the text because, while the text in some sense may be said to remain 'the same'—a much disputed point given the stability or instability of translations of the text and the text as signifier—the readers react differently each time they encounter the text. Different readers, different situations, different reasons for reading the text, all yield, different readings. It may be true to say that as the century ends we are moving away from many of the older and old-fashioned ways of reading the Bible into a new world of changing ideological, sociocultural, strategic readings of the Bible, but the old ways of reading will, no doubt, continue to be

THE R E A D E R AND THE TEXT

5

practised for some time to come. Traditional Jewish, Christian and postEnlightenment modes of reading the Bible will survive, but always in terms shaped by modernity—whether reactively or positively is an open question. Yet major changes brought about by and in the twentieth century are making their presence felt and helping to change reading habits. Whereas scholarly Bible readers will continue to acquire reading skills in Aramaic, Greek and Hebrew in order to read the Bible in the original languages of the books of the Bible, because the Bible has always been read in translation by most readers, since the production of the Septuagint, ordinary readers will go on reading it in their own vernacular languages. Apart from a cursory recognizing of the existence of many different religious groups of people where men, women and. children read the Bible for themselves for religious purposes, a state of affairs which has prevailed for at least some two centuries now, I shall concentrate on the more academic side of things because that is where the greatest changes are taking place. One of the key elements in reviewing the history of the interpretation of the Bible is that of canon. The text as we now possess it—whatever its origins or original senses may have been—is constituted by arrangements into distinctive canons (Jewish and Christian—Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant) which represent transformations of original writings into highly structured forms by people other than the writers of the texts constituting each canon. The imposition of canon on a collection of writings inevitably interferes with, transforms and deforms meaning and signification by imposing on the gathered texts counter-textual signification.1 Canon is counter-textual, so any account of the long history of the reading of the Bible, especially in relation to post-Enlightenment historical-critical readings of the text, will have to operate with a conflictual mode of representation involving canonizers versus 'plain' text readers.2 Theological retrieval lies in the domain of the canonical where ecclesiastical readings are imposed on the text, whereas the larger 'open' canon of academic readings (Bible, Qumran, Mishna, Talmuds and/or pre- and post-biblical texts, commentaries) is much more text-orientated without any necessary privileging of specific aspects of the reception history of the text (other than a predilection for methodologies constrained by the Enlightenment insistence on the primacy of reason). The religious groups will continue to maintain or claim monopolistic designs on the use of the Bible, but even among such gatherings there have been, and. will continue to be, major changes. For example, where once among Jewish and Christian groups male voices and readers dominated, now female voices and readers are also to be heard. So traditional modes need to be modernized in order to recognize the newer cultural 1 2

On this see Halbertal (1997); cf. Barton (1997); Blenkinsopp (1977); Bruns (1984). Cf. Carroll (1997a), 315-21.

6

R. P. CAR ROLL

realities prevailing in the larger world of reading strategies. Change governs the social reception of the Bible in contemporary society and everything is in flux now. Alongside traditional, conservative and conventional readings of the biblical text among Jewish, Christian, post-Enlightenment and fundamentalistic groups are to be found quite radically new appropriations of the Bible for and on behalf of different and discrete communities and pressure groups. Gay and lesbian people now demand that their readings of the Bible be respected in a plurality of readings in modern democratic society.3 Yet many ecclesiastical groups refuse to bow to such modernistic pressures and persist with old-fashioned hermeneutics seeking to control the readings of the Bible judged to be permissible. But in a time of multiculturalism and a plurality of communities authoritarian monopolies can no longer impose their fiats on others not of their flock. In approaching the Bible as readers it is no longer considered adequate just to ask what a text means in terms of philology or local community tradition. The philological type of question may remain at some level of basic enquiry, but to such second-order questions have been added demands for investigation into the text's reception history and understanding through time, examination of the current dynamics of sociocultural, political life as lived today and questions about the relevance of such texts in contemporary social contexts. Since the Enlightenment and with the emergence of postmodernist beliefs and practices the Bible has become a free-floating book belonging to everybody and to nobody. It temporarily belongs to whoever and whichever groups can take and use it. In a sense it is out of copyright. While it never was in copyright in the technical sense of that word, ecclesiastical communities would want to put forward, the claim that they own the Bible, in some sense for having created it in the first place and thereafter preserved it, and that for readers, especially non-believing biblical scholars, to claim to be able to understand the Bible without themselves belonging to such ecclesiastical groups is nonsense. It is, as it were, the crime or malpractice of 'reading other people's mail'.4 In my judgement, however, part of the real achievement of the Enlightenment has been the making available of the Bible to all readers, irrespective of sectarian commitment. Under the conditions of modernity the Bible may be freely used by all-comers, its meanings and significations negotiated under a thousand different reading schemes and available to whatever groups wish to use it. Traditionalist ecclesiastical groups (not to mention Jewish groups for the Hebrew Bible) will dispute some of these claims, preferring to think of the Bible as their own property and rejecting the Enlightenment project of reading the Bible in the light of reason alone. Space will not permit an 3

Cf. Brawley 0996); Raiser (1998). Cf. Jones and Buckley (1998), 223. The phrase is Paul van Buren's but I owe my appropriation, of it to Kathryn Greene-McCreight's discussion in Jones & Buckley (1998), 213-24. 4

THE R E A D E R AND THE TEXT

7

examination of the conflicts such Christian supersessionist claims may give rise to or of the highly charged current debates among and between Jews, Christians and secular critics over competing interpretations of the Bible,5 Such constructions of meaning arise from and flow out of so many different communal (and some individual) reading strategies that no community's reading processes, however antique or venerable, can claim pole position in a hierarchy of readings. On the theological and ecclesiastical side of things there are of course many voices which demand the right to reclaim the Bible for the churches as if in modern culture older ecclesiastical monopolies could still insist on privileged powers of copyright.6 So the changes do not necessarily entail uniformity but seem inevitably to engender conflict. Many voices making different and competing claims reading the 'same' collection of writings, not to mention cultural factors of a secular nature, make for a very confusing, conflictual scene of biblical interpretation at the end of the second millennium. Worlds of Bible Readers There are, at least, three major areas and commitments for those who take the Bible seriously and read it intently: Jewish groups, Christian groups and all those who read the Bible but without commitment to either of the religious systems which own the Bible as originating myth or as part of their foundational myths. This third group may be divided into religious and cultural. That is, members of other religions may read the Bible religiously or to find out about a neighbouring religion—as Jews, Christians or secularists might read the Qur'an for similar purposes. Then there are the secularists7 who read, the Bible at schools, in the universities (especially in departments of English and Comparative Literature) and generally in cultures where it is recognized as being part of the shaping influences of modern culture in the West. While I shall not attempt to provide an adequate account of these different approaches, or their respected traditions, throughout this chapter I do want the distinctions to be recognized and held as a necessary background, contextualization of all Bible reading in the modern world. There is no unitary way of reading the Bible and 5

See Levenson (1990). See Braatan and Jenson (1996); Watson (1994); (1997); cf. Levenson (1990). Some of the discussions in the above listed works are quite bad-tempered and the swingeing attacks on secular criticism (e.g., Levenson (1990) and McGrath in Braaten & Jenson (1996), 63-88) remind one of all the bad old medieval ways so effectively critiqued by the Enlightenment Such authoritarian bad tempers should have no place in a genuinely critical and rational discussion of the matter. See Houlden (1995) for a discussion of recent Catholic promulgations about the interpretation of the Bible, 7 1 really do not know a better term for describing this third group because it contains such a discrete and disparate collection of people which, while lacking a common outlook, would accept the basic principles of the Enlightenment and would profess to follow current forms of rational enquiry. They would be typified by many readers of the Bible from Baruclt Spinoza and Thomas Paine to Gabriel Josipovici and George Steiner. 6

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R. P. C A R R O L L

even a glance at all the receiving communities, including those in the secular world, would demonstrate the necessity of a plurality of viewpoints and reading strategies. Such a pluralistic approach will be respected throughout this chapter, Two of the great systems of reading the Bible which may be said to have constituted the kinds of reading of the Bible inherited as background but also challenged by the Enlightenment have been the millennia-long Jewish and Christian readings of the Bible. In spite of sharing 'in some sense' the same collection of books—the addition of the New Testament to the Hebrew Bible (in translated form) very seriously transforms the Jewish Scriptures into a quite different book—Jews and Christians have always had very different relations to and readings of their 'shared' book. Given their origins among Jewish society subsequent Christian communities have chosen neither to escape those origins by refusing to incorporate Jewish Scriptures into their Christian Bible nor to challenge the very notion of'Scripture' itself.8 Yet the entanglement of Christian communities in the retention of the sacred Scriptures of other communities, not to mention their production of further sacred Scriptures of their own, represents a very strange situation because there appear to be no other major world religions which share their sacred writings with rival or oppositional groups. But then historically Christian communities were a very strange admixture of Jewish and heathen {non-Jewish} beliefs and practices and traces of those origins remain inscribed in all subsequent developments of the churches. The languages of Jewish and. Christian Scriptures are of course different: Jews inherited writings in Hebrew and Aramaic, translated into Greek as their Scriptures (Septuagint), with subsequent Aramaic translations (Targums), whereas Christians started with those Greek translations of Scriptures (the Septuagint) and the Greek writings known as the New Testament. With time those Christian Scriptures were translated into Latin and, in the West, the great Bible of Western Christendom has been the variety of versions of Jerome's Latin translation known as The Vulgate (the authorized edition of which was not fixed until the Council of Trent in the mid-sixteenth century). In the East, of course, Greek continued to be the language of worship, life and the Bible for Christians. Jews and Christians read their different Bibles differently. Jewish worlds of reading

For Jews the Hebrew Bible (Torah or Tanak) told the story of their own past and how they had come to be where and how they were. Other writings filled the gap between the past of the Bible and the present of Jewish communities (especially the Babylonian and Jerusalem Talmud s). The meganarrative of the Jewish Bible, Genesis-Chronicles, told the story of 8

Cf. Evans (1971), 21-36.

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the past from the creation of the world by God to the commandment to rebuild the temple given by the Persian emperor Cyrus, So the story of Jewish life from creation to Cyrus pro¥ided Jews with their overarching myth of origins (functioning as a kind of metanarrative perhaps). Subsequent developments after the various destructions of Jerusalem allowed for the construction of home life, and the presence of synagogues in the community provided pious Jews with the means for continuing the life they had always practised. The Torah had been given to Moses from heaven by God. on Mount Sinai—in Harold Bloom's wonderful trope 'picnic on Sinai'9—and its continuous updating was governed by the oral traditions which had come down from Moses on Sinai. To this reading of the Bible has been added a messianic consciousness which characterized the communities as living in expectation of a corning messiah and reading the Scriptures accordingly. Beyond these developments room should be allowed for further rabbinic refinements and kabbalistic readings of Jewish texts. The brevity of that summary should not conceal the complex transformations introduced into Jewish communities by the halachic readings of biblical texts metamorphosed by different cultural developments in Hellenistic and Roman times. Space does not permit to tell of Akiba and Hillel, of Maimonides and Ibn Ezra, of Rashi and Qimhi or of the great Talmudic scrutinies of Scripture which have made the overarching biblical hermeneutics and halachic rulings so constitutive of orthodox Judaism. A further book could be written tracing these reading techniques to the development of such complex skeins of rabbinic argumentative writings into the roots of modern literary theory, especially in its postmodernist and Derridean forms.10 In modern literary analysis of the Bible Jewish writers have been to the fore in the treatment of biblical poetics (e.g., Robert Alter, Adele Berlin, Herbert Brichto, Harold Fisch; cf. Meir Weiss for a somewhat different approach) and beyond poetics to a consideration of the dynamics of biblical narrative (David Damrosch). It would be impossible to overlook the huge contribution made to modern biblical studies by such a wideranging group of Jewish writers who have produced some very sophisticated readings of the Bible (e.g., Michael Fishbane, Gabriel Josipovici, Ernanuel Levinas, Regina Schwartz, George Steiner, Meir Sternberg, and others too numerous to name). A galaxy of first-class writers have kept the scrutiny and its vision alive in our time. Beyond all these writers, whose literary approaches to the Bible have yielded such a magnificant harvest, there is also the more sombre engagement with the Bible in the light of the post-Shoah experience of Jewish reading.11 How is this ancient text to be read in the light of the fires of Auschwitz? What about Rachel's children, the children of Job—to use Emil Fackenheim's biblical tropes— and all the children of the shtetls? Jeremiah's lament about Rachel weep9

McConnell (1986), 35.

10

Cf. Handelman (1982).

" Cf, Fackenheim (1990).

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ing for her children (Jer. 31: 15) is recontextualized in the twentieth century and becomes 'a word in season' and 'a word from the past' applied to a terrifying reality. The ancient trope feeds into a new narrative because the children of the camps 'are not'. While the eminent Jewish philosopher Fackenheim's answer may raise questions of its own when he writes 'Hope, murdered at Auschwitz, was resurrected in Jerusalem',12 I shall not raise them here. The children of Auschwitz are beyond criticism, but the task of reading the Bible after Auschwitz remains for all readers—be they Jewish, Christian, secularist or of any other religious persuasion. Christian worlds of reading Christian understandings of the Bible have been very different from Jewish readings of it. Much more given to reading the Hebrew Bible, in its Greek translation, as the Old Testament of a two-testament volume and as being predictive of the coming of the messiah, a messiah identified with Jesus of Nazareth, Christians have seen in the Jewish biblical story (meganarrative) the foundation and beginning of their own story, but a story now taken over from the Jews who had themselves been abandoned by God for their repeated rejection of the divine invitation to conform to Torah (a view which, helped to form part of a Christian metanarrative). The churches came to regard themselves as being the replacement of the Jews as the people of God (supersessionism). One of the least edifying consequences of this belief in being a replacement for the Jews in the purposes of God has been the development of a most cruel and catastrophic treatment of the Jews by Christian authorities wherever Jews found themselves under the power of Christian polities. The long history of antiJudaism (one form of anti-Semitism) from a Christian perspective started in the New Testament with the development of an anti-Jewish rhetoric which was transformed into practice when Christians came to power and then was consolidated throughout Christian history. The reinterpretation of the Jewish Bible from the point of view of the New Testament provided Christian communities with a biblical meganarrative and the beginnings of a grand narrative of its own (see Luke and the Acts of the Apostles). The long history of Jewish—Christian controversies and conflicts provides a number of windows into the history of the interpretation of Scripture in the differing communities, raising important questions about reading strategies and the practices which are legitimated by them. It is characteristic of the problematic of Jewish-Christian relations that my first attempt at summarizing the Christian reading of Scripture should be taken up with a focus on the Christian maltreatment of Jews.13 Beyond such a reading of Christian history there is of course a much richer history of Christian readings of the Bible, far too rich and multi-layered to be 12 Faekenheim (1990), 99. » Cf. Carroll (1997b), 89-116.

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summarized succinctly here. Within, the New Testament is to be found a very deep and fascinating reading of the Greek Jewish Scriptures.14 Subsequently there is a great line of Scripture readers stretching from Origen and Augustine through Aquinas and Dante, Luther, and Calvin to Karl Earth, Rudolf Bultmann, Walther Eichrodt, Gerhard von Rad, and the many other Christian readers of the twentieth century which has put at the disposal of modern readers a reception history of the Bible beyond their powers to master it.15 The Enlightenment The Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment critical readings

Between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment the Western world was changed fundamentally by discoveries of new lands, the emergence of print culture, early capitalism and the scientific revolution. Such sociocultural and geophysical changes radicalized the ways in which the Bible came to be read.16 There emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the Enlightenment approach to the Bible which insisted on reason, without benefit of clergy or dogma, as the only way to read the biblical text. As Spinoza says: As I pondered over the facts that the light of reason is not only despised, but by many even execrated as a source of impiety, that human commentaries are accepted as divine records, and that credulity is extolled as faith; as I marked the fierce controversies of philosophers raging in Church and State, the source of bitter hatred and dissension, the ready instruments of sedition and other ills innumerable, I determined to examine the Bible afresh in a careful, impartial, and unfettered spirit, making no assumptions concerning it, and attributing to it no doctrines, which I do not find clearly therein set down.17

It is characteristic of so many of the readers of the Bible in terms of the critical rationality which is so much the mark of the Enlightenment that the warring factions of previous dogmatic reading communities should have been eschewed in favour of a fresh start. Somewhat later than Spinoza Thomas Paine had also remarked on the competing interpretations which had rendered the reading of the Bible so unclear: It has been the practise of all Christian commentators on the Bible, and of all Christian priests and preachers, to impose the Bible on the world as a mass of truth and as the Word, of God; they have disputed and wrangled, and anathematized each other about the supposeable meaning of particular parts and passages therein; one has said and insisted that such a passage meant such a thing; another 14

Q, Hays (1989); Josipovki (1988), 210-94. Much of the story of the Christian reception of the Bible may be found in the threevolume Cambridge History of the Bible (see Ackroyd and Evans, Larnpe, Greenslade). 16 17 Cf. Hill 0993); Scholder (1990); Reventlow (1984). Spinoza (1.951), 8. 13

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that it meant directly the contrary; and a third, that it meant neither one nor the other, but something different from both; and this they called understanding the Bible.18

History became the great focus of reading the Bible: interpreting the Bible came to mean whatever the text was judged to have meant when the words were first uttered or written down. The legacy of the Enlightenment was the historical-critical approach to reading the Bible, with a strong emphasis on the historical: Thus we may say that by making the dogmatic unity of the Bible highly problematical and by destroying the rationalistic-dogmatic assumption of a scriptural 'doctrine', the criticism that historical-scriptural studies have exercised on the canon has set the theological task of recognizing biblical history as history.™

These new ways of reading such ancient documents became quite destructive of traditional dogmatic approaches to the Bible, undermining the historic Christian attachment of dogmas to the reading of the Bible. All traditional notions of the supernatural were rejected in favour of a radically different rational, historical approach to reading the text. Thus there came into being a third distinctive way of reading the Bible quite different from the traditional Jewish and Christian modes of reading which had been determined by pious traditions of biblical exegesis. Out of these new7 ways of reading came what we know now as the historicalcritical method, a series of ways of reading which stressed the historical as the original sense of the Bible. Over two centuries these approaches to the Bible helped to forge a radical critique of more traditional pious readings, creating a new critical approach, which continued to prove inimical to conventional piety. If the Enlightenment approaches of Spinoza, Kant, Paine, and others to reading the Bible radically altered and transformed traditional reading modes, it would, have to be said too that after all the catastrophic wars and conflicts of the twentieth century there has been in recent years a considerable moving away from the critical approach to reading the Bible producing in these postmodern times a retreat from reason, criticality, and history. The Enlightenment's prejudice against all prejudices except reason has been itself criticized for being a prejudice: 'The overcoming of all prejudices, this global demand of the Enlightenment, will itself prove to be a prejudice.'20 So postmodernity has enabled theological systems to reinstate prejudice (following Gadamer's rehabilitation of prejudice [Vorurteilung]) and tradition and the postmodern turn has made everything once more available for traditional religious bodies to return to a nostalgia for the past and even has legitimated fundamentalism as a form of postmodern religion.21 18 20

Paine (1969), 517-18. Ibid., 276.

w 21

Gadamer (1995), 523. Cf. Bauman (1997), 165-85.

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Whether the Enlightenment project has failed or is still capable of being made to work may be an open question for readers to determine the answer for themselves, but much of the work now being done on the Bible is postmodern in the sense that it has rejected the Enlightenment's stress on reason and critique. Now it is possible to find the open advocacy of fundamentalism and the maintenance of the relative merit of ever}? point of view, with absolutely no point of view being regarded, as inferior to another. Every viewpoint is now available for incorporation, though there is a tendency among some postmodernist critics22 to rule out of court the conventional post-Enlightenment point of view known as the historicalcritical method.23 Now some white male critics berate themselves in public, in the best Maoist fashion of self-criticism, bemoaning their sinfulness for being male and white,24 demanding that white males develop an androcritical approach to the Bible rather than a historical-critical point of view. Whether this latest form of masochistic self-criticism will find favour with Western males remains to be seen, but it seems to argue a deep sense of self-deception and false consciousness among white males as if they were constituted as a species by such bad attitudes. If writers genuinely feel and think this way about themselves and their work it would be more honest and less rhetorical if they simply resigned their posts and thereby saved their students from being subjected to the kind of oppression white males alone apparently seem to bring to the study of the Bible. At the time of writing it is too early to be able to say whether this culture of blame, so characteristic of postmodernist breast-beating, will succeed or whether postmodernism has a big or small future in the discipline of biblical studies. Beyond Kritik (critique) and Kerygtna (confessionalisrn) there may well be a bright future for postmodern readings of the Bible, but to this observer standing on the edge of the abyss of the future such developments look more like a return to an imagined medievalism than a serious (postmodern) repristination of the Enlightenment project of liberation through reason and critique.25 What is patently obvious about these developments in biblical scholarship is the overtly political nature of the agendas. In the past where biblical scholarship was concerned political programmes have tended to be concealed or not admitted to, whereas in this postmodernist time all such political agendas are deemed to be legitimated by being brought out into n

23

See Castelli (1995).

In spite of the excellent introductions to postmodern methodologies for reading the Bible to be found in this book, there are many criticisms which can be made of it (cf. Carroll (1998)). See Barton (1996), 198-236 for a discussion of some of the methodologies usually associated with postmodern approaches to the Bible. 24 Cf. Patte (1995). 25 I am sceptical about Patte's demand for an androcritical approach to reading the Bible because I think it is a form of reverse racism (the stereotyping of white male readers) and because 1 think that every approach to reading the Bible needs to be critically reflective of what it is doing.

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the open. One may be openly fascistic and vicious, but one may not be covertly anything. The openness is to be welcomed, but I am not convinced that the practice of the principle 'anything goes' is a necessary good. Nor am I persuaded that any point of view is necessarily as good as any other point of view. No wonder Marxist critics denounce postmodernism as one more manifestation of the corruptions brought about by late capitalism.26 I prefer a much more nuanced account of personal hermeneutics in which the personal and the political are represented but in terms of individual and collective allegiances and where there is a proper provision for the ethical in reading texts. We are all a multivariate amalgam of different relationships, values, allegiances and opinions. There is no agreed calculus for producing a grid map of these connections, so it becomes very difficult for readers to guess or to work out what may be the determinants of readers and their specific reading of texts. Mew Reading Strategies Ideological criticism

One of the spectres currently haunting the guild of biblical studies is that of ideological criticism, (Ideologiekritik) as applied to the Bible.27 Whether texts have ideologies or not is an interesting but disputed question28 because ideology itself is as open to as many different definitions as is meaning in relation to texts. For some readers texts have meanings and possess ideologies, for other readers texts have neither meaning nor ideology. Readers construct meaning for or assign ideology to texts—so it is said. So the first decision to be made in this matter is about the kind of reader one imagines oneself to be or the reading community to which one belongs or with which one wishes to identify oneself. Then there are the ideological aspects of the traditions, communities and groups which read the Bible. For example, if the Bible is read by white Afrikaner groups committed to a separatist, deuteronomistic reading in support of an ideology of separation or apartheid, then that group is going to read the Bible very differently from one of Gerald West's contextual theology groups of poor black South Africans reading the Bible for and on behalf of the poor.29 While everybody might favour reading with and on behalf of the poor against the powerful white Boers, in other countries and cultures the poor may be 'poor white trash' of a decidedly separatist, fascist spirit. No point of view or special interest group can be privileged in such approaches to reading the Bible because every position can be deconstructed or undermined by critical analysis. 'You shall not be partial to the poor in your reading of Scripture' (a faux or revised reading of Exod. 23: 3). Such con26 2S

See Harvey (1990); Jameson (1991). Cf. Fowl (1995).

2?

Cf. Jobling and Pippin (1992); Zizek (1989), » Cf, Deist (1994); West (1993).

2

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trasts could go on being made forever in a very wide-ranging analysis of the thousands of different and differing groups, communities, traditions and religions reading the Bible, Reading groups informed by Marxist, liberatory or post-colonial ideologies will read the Bible rather differently from groups in support of Tory politics or white separatist politics. Even individual politicians will have very different readings of the Bible: for example the English politicians Margaret Thatcher (Conservative) and Tony Benn (Labour) have in their time given theopolitical sermons based on their own readings of the Bible.30 All the same, it is to the eternal credit of the Enlightenment that it introduced the notion of critique into the study of the Bible, even if it did problematize religious readings of the text. As Kant put the matter: Our age is, in especial degree, the age of criticism, and to criticism everything must submit. Religion through its sanctity, and law-giving, through its majesty, may seek to exempt themselves from it. But they then awaken just suspicion, and cannot claim the sincere respect which reason accords only to that which has been able to sustain the test of free and open examination.31

Before the emergence of such a radical rethinking of all traditional forces, the followers of the Bible reigned supreme over life and death among those who lacked the power to resist them.32 From Socrates and Montaigne there is a line through the Enlightenment (especially with Spinoza, Hume and Kant) to modern historical-critical readings of the Bible.33 Of course traditional theologies of biblical thought have suffered greatly at the hands of the post-Enlightenment critical scrutiny of the Bible and in these postmodern times there has been a very strong fight back from ecclesiastical and fundamentalist sources, Postmodernity has restored to the premoderns their entitlement to challenge the Enlightenment project and its scrutiny of traditional modes of thought and to reject the critique on the egalitarian grounds of equal opportunities for the representation of every point of view, The postmodern Bible An excellent example of how the Bible can and should be read from postmodern perspectives is the volume by The Bible and Culture Collective entitled The Postmodern Bible,*4 This volume represents all the strengths 30 Cf. Benn (1995); Raban (1989). The text of Margaret Thatcher's famous sermon can be found in Raban (1989); for a discussion of her 'Sermon on the Mound' see Carrol! (1994). 31 Kant (1929), 9. Kant appears to be a major bete noire for postmodernist biblical scholars; for a more positive assessment of Kant's potential contribution to biblical studies see Addinall (1991), esp. 217-96. On a Kantian, view of the place and role of theology in the academy see Kant (1979). 32 Cf. Ginzburg (1980); Trevor-Roper (1969). 33 On the ways in which biblical interpretation responded to the Enlightenment see Frei 34 (1974). Castelli (1995).

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and weaknesses of postmodernism as a way of interpreting the Bible. Postmodernism is essentially an umbrella term for clusters of contemporary literary and cultural theories applied to texts or developed as strategies for reading texts. It gathers together a wide range of discrete and cognate theories about texts, reading techniques, sociocultural and political commitments allied to a commitment to ideologies of egalitarianism, race, and gender. Defining the postmodern in modern biblical studies is not an easy task because there are as many definitions of postmodernism as there are proponents of postmodernist practices. However, 1 shall settle for the following two defining accounts of the phenomenon of postmodernism: . . . as an artistic, philosophical, and social phenomenon, postmodernism veers toward open, playful, optative, provisional (open in time as well as in structure or space), disjunctive, or indeterminate forms, a discourse of ironies and fragments, a 'white ideology' of absences and fractures, a desire of diffractions, an invocation of complex, articulate silences.39

To Ihab Hassan's highly nuanced account of the matter I would add Zygmunt Bauman's measured sociological assessment of it: Postmodernity may be conceived of as modernity conscious of its true nature— modernity for itself. The most conspicuous features of the postmodern condition; institutionalized pluralism, variety, contingency and ambivalence—have been all turned out by modern society in ever increasing volumes; yet they were seen as signs of failure rather than success, as evidence of the unsufficiency of efforts so far, at a time when the institutions of modernity, faithfully replicated by the modern mentality, struggled for universality, homogeneity, monotony and clarity. The postmodern condition can be therefore described, on the one hand, as modernity emancipated from false consciousness; on the other, as a new type of social condition marked by the overt institutionalization of the characteristics which modernity—in its designs axid managerial, practices—set about to eliminate and, failing that, tried to conceal.36

Of course the term postmodern may be given different emphases in the sense of the prefix post: either as after modernism (a chronological sense, that which comes after modernism) or as that which incorporates and transcends modernism. My own preferred sense of the term incorporates Hassan's definition of it as 'a discourse of ironies and fragments . . . of absences and fractures' and Bauman's sense of 'modernity conscious of its true nature'. But a close reading of The Postmodern Bible will provide much less of an impression of irony and fragmentariness and much more of a political scheme for taking power in the guild (of biblical studies) from the central group of positivistic historical-critical scholars in the mainstream academies of the West. Unfortunately this political programme is 35

Hassan (1987), 93-4.

3lS

Bauman (1992), 187-8.

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itself fragmented by too many ironies to have any hope of being successful (for example, a group of privileged white academics, mostly male, denounce privileged white (male) academic study of the Bible!). Postmodernism in biblical studies is much more likely to polarize the guild into warring factions of centrists, radical leftists, and fundamentalists. Fundamentalists will be empowered by postmodern theory to dismiss the Enlightenment and return to premodern points of view in defence of antique ecclesiastical beliefs about the Bible.37 More radical groups will find themselves fragmented by conflicting loyalties (e.g., white women against black women (womanist writers)38) or by imagining that somehow an ideology of egalitarianism must mean the same thing to different groups and that therefore different loyalties can be overcome on the grounds of having a common enemy in the white male establishment. Feminist readings

Within that cluster of ideologies bound together under the umbrella of postmodernism are to be found various forms of feminism,39 One of the strongest reception-forms of biblical interpretation in the second half of the twentieth century has been the emergence of feminist voices as biblical scholars. The range is far too wide to describe adequately here* and among the different and differing feminisms available to women readers only some are appropriate for reading the Bible. Radical feminisms of the kind typified by Mary Daly and Andrea Dworkin are completely inappropriate for doing biblical studies, whereas feminisms of the kind characterized by the work of Alice Bach, Mieke Bal, Athalya Brenner, Cheryl Exurn (and others too numerous to name here) have worked the Bible brilliantly for and on behalf of women readers. There is a huge subcategory of feminists and their male sympathizers who have put on the agenda of biblical studies the necessity of reading the text from feminist points of view. They raise many different issues about culture and sexual politics, both of the ancient times which produced the Bible and of contemporary institutions where the Bible is studied in collectivities once dominated by men. Questions about authority and textual constructions in the reading strategies of the community need to be asked: who reads this text and under what circumstances? What happens when women read these texts? The 37 Cf. Steinmetz (1980). I must admit to having been stunned by the over-simplistic critique of Steinmetz's approach to historical-critical readings of the Bible: only Jowett is instanced as the paradigm of such critical readings, while many different and discrete medieval exegetes are summoned to demonstrate the superiority and wealth of such medieval readings. 38 CasteUi (1995), 237-44. 3 " Ibid., 225-71. 40 See Bach (1993); Brenner (1991); Brenner and Fontaine (1997); Brenner and van DijkHemmes(1993).

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hostility towards women which may be apparent in the texts and more especially in the reading communities raises questions about how metaphor, metonym, trope, and representation are used in the biblical text and then appropriated by reading communities. The prophetic penchant for denouncing Israel as a whore, a faithless wife or a promiscuous bawd (e.g. Ezekiel 16,23; cf. Hosea 1,3) can no longer be tolerated in silence or internalized as a biblical value, but must be challenged, deconstructed, and opposed by modern readers and readings. The emergence of women scholars in the academies will guarantee the fulfilment of this prediction, but the fenunization of the guild of biblical studies will not necessarily prove to be the entirely beneficial development which so many feminists would like to imagine it will be. On the contrary, it will add to the warring factions within the guild not only because of the multiplicity of distinctive feminisms which have been developed, in the West but because many of these feminist approaches to reading the Bible are in opposition to one another. For example, the white middle-class women who have been the beneficiaries of so much liberalization in the twentieth century belong to the bourgeoisie, often spoken against by many of the ideologies embraced under the umbrella of postmodernism, and are in conflict with womanist (that is, black women) approaches and. the peasants of the non-Western world. The white Western bourgeois woman with her solitary token child has little in common with the illiterate non-Western mother of six or more children, who spends most of her day finding water, preparing food and avoiding predatory males. Class and race factors dominate this situation and gender politics is unable to overcome the problems of class and ethnicity. More radical solutions are called for than the Western feministic colonization of the rest of the world in the name of bourgeois egalitarianism.41 Ethnicity

A fundamentally important factor in contemporary biblical interpretation is the notion of ethnicity because every ethnic group has a different story and brings to the biblical text different ways of reading it.42 Here is where contextual theology has it over liberation theology in that the kind of Marxist liberation theology which attempts to impose a Western nineteenth-century bourgeois ideology constructed by Marx, Engels and their followers on cultures which have not themselves been through the kinds of social and intellectual evolution which created Western postEnlightenment thought (of which Marx is such an exemplar) violates the integrity of such native cultures. Ethnicity is a complicating factor in "" See the writings of Renita Weenis. 42 Cf. Brett (1996); Donaldson (1996); Felder (1991); Smith-Christopher (1995); Sugirtharajah (1991).

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current biblical interpretation because it is not always obvious what role it may have as a reading strategy. What does the notion of ethnicity contribute to any reading of the Bible? For example, as an Irishman, with mixed roots in the Protestant and Catholic communities of Dublin, I am tempted to read the Bible from the viewpoint of a political republicanism but with aspects of a liberal, historical-critical academic training informing my interpretation. Now the Bible will not yield much to this kind of reading, but as a republican I do find all those traditional biblical discourses about kings and. kingdoms, leaders and messiahs, whether applied to peoples or gods, less than appetizing and definitely open to serious critique. That may be an anachronistic point of view but only the historical-critical approach allows me to pigeonhole the historical aspects of the Bible without blinding me to its literary merits. Personally I find all modern approaches to reading the Bible which make no allowance for the historical and antique dimensions of the Bible to be fairly useless because they confuse modernistic readings with wishful thinking and impose their own ideological holdings on the text while fondly imagining that they are doing nothing more than reading the text innocently. I am however aware that religious communities invariably read the Bible as if it were timeless and addressed to themselves and therefore the historicalcritical scrutiny is regarded as being not only unnecessary but intrusive and wrongheaded. Between these two poles I imagine most Bible readers may well find themselves. At this point the issue of ethnicity, along with various post-colonial interpretative approaches, may contribute something useful to the ways in which the Bible may be read. Theoretically speaking, as a republican Irishman I must be deemed, (or certainly would deem myself) to have more in common with all those (post)colonial countries and cultures which have known in the past the tramp of the imperialist boot—whether that imperium has been English, German, French, Muslim, or even American—than perhaps do those exegetes who represent the imperial culture(s) now in this post-imperial period.43 On the other hand, Englishspeaking voices which bow to Queen and. Country will be much more at home in those bits of the Bible which present messianic, royal, God-asKing motifs. Anti-imperialist, post-colonized elements will appreciate those parts of the Bible which speak out against kings and privileges, overlords and the powerful (mostly the prophets). But in relation to individual Bible readers there may be no necessary connection between ethnicity, tribal past, and personal allegiances. There are sufficient strands of contrary and contradictory motifs and values in the Bible to fund most contemporary points of view. The canons of Scripture are like that tree which represented Nebuchadnezzar in the book of Daniel (4: 19-22), an entity under which 'the beasts of the field found shade, and in whose 43

See Prior (1997).

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branches the birds of the air dwelt' (v, 21). As such, every possible point of view is to be found there. What may differentiate between points of view and what may grade them into a hierarchical order of value or preference are the reading communities within which individual readers find themselves or to which they commit themselves. Communal habits of reading prioritize and privilege selective readings and a selection of preferred texts from the Bible in conjunction with specific readings of them. Hence reading communities may insist on reading the Bible in conjunction with their own creeds, councils, confessions, and catechisms which determine the meaning of texts, just as Philip the evangelist's reading of Isaiah 53 determined the Ethiopian official's understanding of Tsaiah. To these approaches I would want to add all the further modern contextualizing categories of race, gender, ethnicity, class, and politics whereby people learn to find their way around maps of reading the Bible, Without such prior reading contexts the text may make no sense to the reader, but within such familiar reading contexts the biblical text may suddenly be illuminated for readers. Fundamentalism

One of the few areas which current biblical scholarship tends to ignore or to avoid is that of fundamentalism.**4 Such caution is well justified because modern forms of religious fundamentalism tend to embody those very dogmatic approaches to religion which were ruled out of court by the Enlightenment, so fundamentalism and post-Enlightenment scholarship are inevitably inimical to one another. Fundamentalism probably represents the most widespread and. popular mode of reading the Bible among traditional Christian communities in the world today and when it is combined with its overlapping evangelical constituencies then such approaches of a somewhat literalistic, fixed-term post-eighteenth-century reading of the Bible, allied to political and evangelistic lobbying movements and programmes, constitute the most formidable of political religious forces of reaction in contemporary society. Faced with the most universal and popular forms of reading the Bible academic scholarship on the Bible has tended to retreat into intellectualism or to become confrontational and argumentative. Biblical scholarship has not completely ignored fundamentalism,45 but such readings of the Bible are not generally regarded, as having sufficient scholarly or intellectual respectability and are themselves so preformed by selective readings of tradition and the text and. are so predictable as not to represent intellectually coherent, interesting or challenging readings of the Bible from an academic point of view. Yet 44 How I understand fundamentalism may be clarified by consulting Atnmertnan (1987); Barr (1981); Boone (1990); Boyer (1992); Lawrence (1990); Marty & Appleby (1991); Percy (1996); (1998); Strozier (1994). *5 Cf. Barr (1981),

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they are what most pious Christian reading communities favour as approaches to reading the Bible. Fundamentalistic readings of the Bible in which so many different approaches participate (especially, it seems to me, some aspects of liberation theology readings) are quite inimical to academic and historicalcritical readings and have tended to be kept isolated from one another. One could posit a spectrum of readings which might be described as having post-Enlightenment critical readings at one end and all types of fundamentalistic uncritical readings at the other end of the spectrum. Somewhere along this imagined spectrum would then be found every other view, with critical readings on one half of the spectrum and pious uncritical readings on, the other half of that spectrum. Many of these viewpoints will blend into one another somewhere towards the centre of the spectrum, but the spectrum ends will be very distinct and quite different. We might also view the critical half of the spectrum as participating in a hermeneutics of suspicion and the other half as tending towards a hermeneutics of trust.46 But both halves of the spectrum would represent serious readings of the Bible and at a literary level the critical end of the spectrum would take the text very much, more seriously than the uncritical end. The uncritical end might take more seriously some of the reception material, persisting in more traditional readings of the text, whereas the critical half would prioritize the post-Enlightenment readings of the Bible. Some of these readings might transcend the critical in order to pursue what Paul Ricoeur has called 'the second naivete', that is a postcritical reading of the text which returns to the text incorporating a critical analysis.47 This is a very complex area of highly disputed readings and of oppositional interpretative communities which seldom get together in order to exchange readings. While much of fundamentalism appears to be incapable of exchange, dialogue, and argument because it is committed to fixed traditional readings rather than exploratory readings, the future may well hold promise of a better integration of opposing and opposed readings of the biblical text if the academic, the critical, and the imaginative can somehow be combined and integrated into new readings in dialogue with other readers and their readings of the Bible, But given the hostility of so many critics towards one another, especially the postmodernists against the historical-critical academics, that future will desperately need to develop, what Daniel Boyarin has called for, 'a hermeneutics of critical generosity',48 that is, reading and interpretative ** This is very rough brushstroke differentiation between two radically different approaches, but I think it has some analytical mileage to it. See Ricoeur (1970), 32-6, for the notion of a hermeneutics of suspicion and Hays (1997) for the alternative practice of a hermeneutics of trust An equally useful approach would be Moshe Halbertal's 'charitable' and 'uncharitable' readings of the canon (Halbertal (1997), 27-44). 47 Ricoeur (1967), 351. 48 In Aidiele and Phillips (1995), 293-7.

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approaches that are both critical and generous to opposing voices and points of view. I do not wish to over-emphasize that hoary old conflict of the Academy versus the Ecclesia, with its many mediating positions between these two institutional holding bodies on the interpretation of the Bible, but among the competing positions today in the interpretation of the Bible I do feel that these two old warhorses are still battling it out.49 But we must also recognize the ecclesiastical loyalties of so many in the Academy, with dual citizenship for the majority of biblical scholars, so that it is not entirely a conflict between discrete sets of institutions. At the same time it must be recognized that there are many important voices in biblical studies which owe nothing to the readings of the Bible by multivarious Christian communities. Many academics belong to the civic universities without having any necessary church or religious affiliations. Also there are Jewish and Israeli biblical scholars who relate to Jewish religious traditions or to independent Jewish readings of the Bible. I also have in mind what may be called the Tel Aviv and Indiana voices among which are to be counted some of the most dynamic readers of the biblical text today (e.g., Alter, Nohrnberg, Sternberg, etc)—not to mention such gifted individual readers of the Bible as Harold Bloom, Gabriel Josipovici, Regina Schwartz, George Steiner. Each one of these writer-readers approaches the text with respect (Steiner's cortesia),50 and reads it in the light of their own reading skills and in relation to comparative literature, providing first-class readings of the text. There is here a huge range of interpretations, traditional and innovative, which, complicate the landscape of Bible readings much more than one might imagine and whose analysis is well beyond the scope of this chapter.51 I should also recognize a large number of individual writers who cross the spectrum of religious and non-religious commitments and who are producing first-class readings of the biblical text as we enter the twentyfirst century. For guidance purposes I would instance individual works by the following: Alice Bach (1997), Mieke Bal (1988), Timothy Beal (1997), Hugh Pyper (1996), David Rutledge (1996), Regina Schwartz (1997), Yvonne Sherwood (1996), Hugh White (1991) which would inform and delight readers. My criteria for choosing examples of these writers' work are determined by the quality of their skilful readings of the text, their fully integrated uses of theory and text for the readings, and some sense of the necessity for the employment of an ethics of reading. However, there are also numerous areas of methodological approaches to reading 49 Cf. Jones and Buckley (1998); Braaten and Jensen (1996); Watson (1994); (1997), for one side of the controversy; cf. Davies (1995) for the other side, 511 A reference to Steiner's Real Presences book is obligatory today among theologians writing about the Bible, so I follow suit here by endorsing Steiner's demand for cortesia in the treatment of texts (cf. Steiner (1989), 146-65). 51 Cf. for example, Miskotte (1967); Schneidau (1976).

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the Bible for which there is space only for a brief mentioning: the intertextual, reception history approaches,52 the political readings of Norman Gottwald, South African readings, approaches to biblical poetics,53 Bakhtinian dialogical readings,54 canon,55 cultural studies and the Bible,56 and theological readings,'""7 post-colonial analyses58 and the new historiographical approaches to reading the Bible as history,59 If all these approaches were combined into a set of imagined 'ideal' readings and approaches to the Bible, then readers would have no time for reading the Bible itself because mastering the approach routes would cut off the possibility of their getting to the Bible in the first place,60 Every one of these approaches is intrinsically interesting and potentially dialogical in its contribution to any redrawing of the map of reading the Bible in our time, Conclusion Modern readers are therefore faced with a plethora of reading strategies, of hermeneutic possibilities and conflicting communicative systems in relation to communities of Bible reading, which embarrass them with the riches of what is on offer. What must also perplex modern readers however is the range of choice and the competing claims for attention and commitment. How is any one group to determine which strategies they should employ and which communities they should join? Of course many people are born into communities which have their own strategies, or may actively choose communities by conversion or persuasion to join one specific group, but many others are not so privileged by birth or decisionmaking eventualities. To the ordinary modern cultured despisers of organized religion, yet who value the Bible for many discrete and often unstatable reasons, what shall we say by way of recommending a reading strategy, if not a reading community? In conformity with the postEnlightenment values of plurality, choice and ethical commitment, seasoned with a dash of postmodernist irony and fragmentedness, all I can say is 'shop around' and choose carefully how you read and, although 52

C1. Fewell (1992); Boyarin (1990); Sawyer (1996). Berlin (1983); Brichto (1992); Fisch (1988). 54 Reed (1993). 55 Altieri (1990); Barton (1996); (1997); Brett (1991); Childs (1979); (1984); (1985); (1992); Halbertal (1997). * Beal and Gunn (1997); Exurn and Moore (1998). 57 Barr (1993); Brueggemann (1993); (1997); Frei (1974); (1986); (1992); Goldingay (1987); Hays (1989); (1997); Perdue (1994); Preuss (1995); (1996); Watson (1994); 0997); Wolterstorff (1995). •w Donaldson (1996); Prior (1997); Segovia and Tolbert (1995); Sugirtharajah (1991). 59 Davies (1992); (1995); Dever (1995); Grabbe (1997); Provan (1995); (1997); Thompson (1994); Whitektn (1996). See Moore (1997) for an introduction to New Hlstoricism and the Bible (cf. Carroll (1997a); (1998), 52-7). *" I have alluded to this possibility in an assay at writing on reception history of the Bible (Carroll (1992)). In a recent novel John Updike includes a section on the story of Mark and how he decided to write his Gospel (Updike (1997), 122-34). 53

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you will need help from others, always go for a plurality of readings. It" such a plurality of readings can be allied to a politics of liberation anchored to a democratic base of collective bargaining, then all the better (my reading prejudices uncloaked!). After the twentieth century, after Auschwitz, after the Gulag, after apartheid and Sharpeville, after too many Bloody Sundays, after Jonestown, and Waco, let no one infringe your liberty by oppressive readings. Let no one, wielding an ideology of 'the Bible says', tyrannize anybody's readings. I would however not want to advocate too strongly a reader-response ideology for all reading strategies. Texts deserve greater distance, more respect and engagement than reader-response approaches would allow. Without some oppositions) element provided by texts over against the reading self the text will be swamped by the overwhelming subjectivities of readers. There must be space for the text to contribute something to the hermeneutic process. The experience of being pulled, up short by the text'61 is something which can undermine the self-confidence of the reader-response approach, making readers attend to the text, and yet it is one of the most salutary experiences available to any reader. If only the reader's response constructions of meaning can be imposed on texts, then there will be no more such moments of 'being pulled up short by the text'. No readers will retreat from, or advance towards texts which have arrested them or stopped them in their tracks. That would be a most substantial loss to the reading enterprise and not one which competent readers would want to envisage. The words of literature, including biblical literature, 'are the words which will not pass away'62 and canonic literature insists on having attention paid to it: In my view we do not want dialogue with texts; we want to encounter the full force of what the author imagined, in the terms in which the author chose to present it. We want to see how strongly it asserts claims on us, both as a model of behavior and as a possible audience figure in an ideal community.63

It is Ricoeur's second naivete6*1 in which the text has restored to it 'its ability to project itself outside itself in the representation of a world that I could inhabit'65 and Grafton's sense of the 'continued power of texts . . . to inspire challenges to intellectual and political authority'.66 Such a subversive reading of literature is liable to upset many conventional applecarts and disturb traditional reading communities, especially in relation to the communities which have for so long cherished reading the Bible, so I recommend it here with trepidation.67 To anticipate a future of such read« Gadamer (1995), 268. « Schneidau (1976), 305. M *3 Aitieri (1990), 46. (1967), 351. 65 Ricoeur (1991), 18. <* Graftom, Shelfoid and Siraisi (1992), 255. *' In Carroll (1997b) I have tried to represent some of the problematics of reading the Bible, and in Carroll and Prickett (1997), 321-441 I have practised what some would regard as a subversive reading of the whole Bible as a series of potential meganarratives.

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ing where not only will the biblical text be a subversive force for readers but where every woman will read according to what is right in her own eyes I shall leave the last words on the matter to a woman's voice expatiating on the subject of reading the Bible: We should read the Bible one more time. To interpret it, of course, but also to let it carve out a space for our own fantasies and interpretive delirium.68

Bibliography ACKROYD, PETER R. and EVANS, CHRISTOPHER F. (1970) (eds.)/ The Cambridge History of the Bible 1: From the Beginnings to Jerome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). ADDINALL, PETER (1991), Philosophy and Biblical Interpretation: A Study in Nineteenth-century Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). AXCHELE, GEORGE (1997), Sign, Text, Scripture: Semiotics and the Bible (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press). AICHELE, GEORGE and PHILLIPS, GARY A. (1995) (eds.), Intertextuality and the Bible (Semeia 69/70; Atlanta: Scholars Press). ALTER, ROBERT (1981), The Art of Biblical Narrative (London: George Allen & Unwin). — (1985), The Art of Biblical Poetry (New York: Basic Books). — (1989), The Pleasures of Reading in an Ideological Age (New York: Simon & Schuster; Norton pb edition 1996; New York and London: W. W. Norton). — (1992), UK World of Biblical Literature (London: SPCK). ALTER, ROBERT and KERMODE, FRANK (1987) (eds.), The Literary Guide to the Bible (Glasgow: Collins). ALTIERI, CHARLES (1990), 'An Idea and Ideal of Literary Canon', in Altieri, Canons and Consequences: Reflections on the Ethical Fora* of Imaginative Ideals (Evanston: Northwestern University Press), 21-47. AMMERMAN, NANCY TATOM (1987), Bible Believers: Fundamentalists in the Modern World (New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press). BACH, ALICE (1993), 'Reading Allowed: Feminist Biblical Criticism Approaching the Millennium', Currents in Research: Biblical Studies 1:191-215. — (1997), Women, Seduction, and Betrayal in Biblical Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). BACH, ALICE (1990) (ed.). The Pleasure of Her Text: Feminist Readings of Biblical and Historical Texts (Philadelphia: Trinity Press International). BAL, MIEKE (1985), Nnrratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative (Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press). —1987, Lethal Love: Feminist Literary Readings of Biblical Love Stories (Indiana Studies in Biblical Literature; Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press). — (1988), Murder and Difference: Gender, Genre, and Scholarship on Sisera's Death (Indiana Studies in Biblical Literature; Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press). 68

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BAL, Mi EKE (1991), Reading 'Rembrandt': Beyond the Word-Image Opposition (The Northrop Frye Lectures in Literary Theory; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). BARE, JAMES (1967), 'Appendix: A Note on Fundamentalism', in Barr, Old and New in Interpretation; A Study of the Two Testaments (London: SCM Press), 201-6. — (1973), The Bible in the Modem World (London: SCM Press). (1981), Fundamentalism (2nd edn. London: SCM Press). — (1983), Holy Scripture: Canon, Authority, Criticism (Oxford: Clarendon Press). — (1993), Biblical Faith and Natural Theology: The Gifford Lectures for 1991 Delivered in the University of Edinburgh (Oxford: Clarendon Press). BARTON, JOHN (1996), Reading the Old Testament: Method in Biblical Study (2nd edn, London: Darton, Longman, Todd). — (1997), The Spirit and the Letter. Studies in the Biblical Canon (London: SPCK). BAUMAJN, ZYGMUNT (1992), Intimations of Postmodernity (London and New York: Routledge). — (1997), Poshnodernily and Its Discontents (Oxford: Polity Press). BEAL, TIMOTHY K. (1997), The Book of Hiding: Gender, Ethnicity, Annihilation and Esther (Biblical Limits; London and New York: Routledge). BEAL, TIMOTHY K. and GDNN, DAVID M. (1997) (eds.), Reading 'Bibles, Writing Bodies: Identity and The Book (Biblical Limits; London and New York: Routledge). BENN, TONY (1995), TJie Power of the Bible Today (Occasional Papers; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press). BERLIN, A DELE (1983), Poetics and the Interpretation of Biblical Narrative (Sheffield: The Almond Press). BLENKINSOPP, JOSEPH (1977), Prophecy and Canon: A Contribution to the Study of Jewish Origins (University of Notre Dame Center for the Study of Judaism and Christianity in Antiquity 3; Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press). BLOOM, HAROLD (1986), 'From J to K, or The Uncanniness of the Yahwisf, in McConnell 1986:19-35. — (1990), The Book of J (translated by David Rosenberg, interpreted by Harold Bloom) (London: Faber & Faber). BOER, ROLAND (1997), Novel Histories: The Fiction of Biblical Criticism (Playing the Texts 2; Sheffield: Sheffield. Academic Press). BOONE, KATHLEEN C. (1990), The Bible Tells Them So: The Discourse of Protestant fundamentalism (London: SCM Press). BOYARIN, DANIEL (1990), Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash (Indiana Studies in Biblical Literature; Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press). — (1995), 'Issues for Further Discussion: A Response', in Aichele & Phillips 1995: 293-7. BOYER, PAUL (1992), When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture (Cambridge, Mass, and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press). BOZAK, BARBRA A. (1991), Life 'Anew': A Literary-Theological Study of Jer. 30-31 (Analecta Biblica 122; Rome: Editrice Pontifico Istituto Biblico). BRAATEN, CARL E. and JENSON, ROBERT W, (1996) (eds.), Reclaiming the Bible for the Church (Edinburgh: T. & T, Clark). BRAWLEY, ROBERT L. (1996) (ed.), Biblical Ethics & Homosexuality: Listening to Scripture (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press).

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BRENNER, ATITALYA (1997), The Intercourse of Knowledge: On Gendering Desire and 'Sexuality' in the Hebrew Bible (Biblical Interpretation Series 26; Leiden: E. J. Brill). BRENNER, ATHALYA (1991) (ed.), The Feminist Companion to the Bible (10 volumes; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press), 1991 ff. BRENNER, ATHALYA and VAN DIJK-HEMMES, FOKKEUBN (1993), On Gendering Texts: Female and Male Voices in the Hebrew Bible (Biblical Interpretation Series 1; Leiden: E, J. Brill). BRENNER, ATHALYA and FONTAINE, CAROLE (1997) (eds.), A Feminist Companion to Reading the Bible: Approaches, Methods and Strategies (The Feminist Companion to the Bible 11; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press). BRETT, MARK G. (1991), Biblical Criticism in Crisis? The Impact of the Canonical Approach on Old Testament Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). BRETT, MARK G. (1996) (ed,), Ethnicity and the Bible (Biblical Interpretation Series 19; Leiden: E, J. Brill). BRICHTO, HERBERT CHAN AN (1992), Toward a Grammar of Biblical Poetics: Tales of the Prophets (NewYork and Oxford: Oxford University Press). BRUEGGEMANN, WALTER (1993), The Bible and Postmodern Imagination: Texts under Negotiation (London: SCM Press). — (1997), Theology of the Old Testament': Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy (Minneapolis: Fortress Press). BRUNS, GERALD L. (1984), 'Canon and Power in the Hebrew Scriptures', Critical Inquiry 10:462-80. CARROLL, ROBERT P. (1992), 'The Discotnbobulations of Time and the Diversities of Text: Notes on the Rezeptionsgeschichte of the Bible', in Text as Pretext: Essays in Honour of Robert Davidson, ed. Robert P. Carroll (JSOTS 138; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press), 61-85. — (1994), 'Of Prophets and Prime Ministers: Temple-Mound Sermon and the Sermon on the Mound', in Carroll and Hunter 1994: 25-40. •—(1995), 'An infinity of traces: On making an inventory of our ideological holdings. An introduction to Ideologiekritik in Biblical Studies', Journal of Northwest Semitic Languages 21/2: 25-43. (1997a), 'Clio and Canons: In Search of a Cultural Poetics of the Hebrew Bible', Biblnt 5/4: 300-23. — (1997b), Wolf in the Sheepfbld: The Bible as Problematic for Theology (London: SCM Press). — (1998), 'Poststructuralist approaches: New Historicism and postmodernism', in The Cambridge Companion to Biblical Interpretation, ed. J. Barton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 50-66. CARROLL, ROBERT P. and HUNTER, ALASTAIR G. (1994) (eds.), Words at Work: Using the Bible in the Academy, the Community and the Churches. Essays in Honour of Robert Davidson (Glasgow: Trinity St Mungo Press). CARROLL, ROBERT and PRICKETT, STEPHEN (1997) (eds.), The Bible: Authorized King fames Version (The World's Classics; Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press). CASTELLI, ELIZABETH A. and others (1995) (eds.), The Postmodern Bible by The Bible and Culture Collective (New Haven and London: Yale University Press). GUILDS, BRBVARD S. (1979), Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture (London: SCM Press).

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GUILDS, BREVARD S. (1984), The New Testament as Canon: An Introduction (London: SCM Press). — (1985), Old Testament Theology in a Canonical Context (London: SCM Press). •— (1992), Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testaments: Theological Reflections on the Christian Bible (London: SCM Press). CHINES, DAVID J. A. (1997), The Bible and the Modern World (The Biblical Seminar 51; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press). — (1998), 'The Postmodern Adventure in Biblical Studies/ in Clines and Moore, 276-91. CLINES, DAVID J. A. and MOORE, STEPHEN D. (1998) (eds.). Auguries: The Jubilee Volume of the Sheffield Department of Biblical Studies (JSOTS 269; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press). DAMROSCH, DAVID (1987), The Narrative Covenant: Transformations of Genre in the Growth of Biblical Literature (San Francisco: Harper & Row). DAVIES, PHILIP R. (1992), In Search of 'Ancient Israel' (JSOTS 148; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press). — (1995), Whose Bible is it Anyway? (JSOTS 204; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press). DEIST, FERDINAND E. (1994), 'The Dangers of Deuteronomy: A page from the reception history of the book', in Studies in Deuteronomy in Honour of C, /. Labuschagne on the Occasion of his 65th Birthday (SVT 53; Leiden: E. J. Brill), 13-29. DEVEM, WILLIAM G. (1995), '"Will the Real Israel Please Stand Up?" Archaeology and Israelite Historiography: Part I', BASOR 297: 61-80; '"Will the Real Israel Please Stand Up?" Part II: Archaeology and the Religions of Ancient Israel', BASOR 298:37-58. DONALDSON, LAURA E. (1996) (ed.)/ Postcolonialism and Scriptural Reading (Semeia 75; Atlanta: Scholars Press). EVANS, CHRISTOPHER F. (1971), Is "Holy Scripture" Christian?', in Evans, Is 'Holy Scripture' Christian? and Other Questions (London: SCM Press), 21-36. EXUM, J. CHERYL (1992), Tragedy and Biblical Narrative: Arrows of the Almighty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). •—(1993), Fragmented Women: Feminist (Subversions of Biblical Narratives (JSOTS 163; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press). — (1996), Plotted, Shot, and Painted: Cultural Representations of Biblical Women (JSOTS 215/Gender, Culture, Theory 3; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press). — (1998), 'Developing Strategies of Feminist Criticism/Developing Strategies for Commentating the Song of Songs', in Clines and Moore: 206-49. EXUM, J. CHERYL and MOORE, STEPHEN D. (1998) (eds.), Biblical Studies/Cultural Studies: The Third Sheffield Colloquium (JSOTS 266/Gender, Culture, Theory 7; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press). FACKENHEIM, EMIL L. (1990), The Jewish Bible after the Holocaust: A Re-reading (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press). FELDER, CAIN HOPE (1991) (ed.), Stony the Road We Trod: African American Biblical Interpretation (Minneapolis: Fortress Press). FEWELL, DANNA NOLAN (1992) (ed.), Reading Between Texts: Intertextuality and the Hebrew Bible (Literary Currents in Biblical Interpretation; Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press).

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FISCH, HAROLD (1988), Poetry with a Purpose: Biblical Poetics and Interpretation (Indiana Studies in Biblical Literature; Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press), FISHBANE, MICHAEL (1985), Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel (Oxford: Clarendon Press). — (1989), The Garments ofTorah: Essays in Biblical Hermeneutics (Indiana Studies in Biblical Literature; Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press). Fowt, STEPHEN (1995), 'Texts Don't Have Ideologies', Biblical Interpretation 3/1: 15-34. FOWL, STEPHEN E. (1997) (ed.), The Theological Interpretation of Scripture: Classic and Contemporary Readings (Cambridge, Mass, and Oxford: Blackwell). FR.EI, HANS W. (1974), The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics (New Haven and London: Yale University Press). ——(1986), 'The "Literal Reading" of Biblical Narrative in the Christian Tradition: Does It Stretch or Will It Break?', in McConnell 1986:36-77. -—(1992), Types of Christian Theology, ed. George Hunsinger and William C. Placher (New Haven and London: Yale University Press). FRYE, NORTHROP C. (1982), The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (London, Melbourne and Henley: RouHedge & Kegan Paul). — (1990), Words with Power: Being a Second Study of the Bible and Literature (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich). GADAMBR, HANS-GEORG (1995), Truth and Method (2nd edn. New York: Continuum). GALAMBUSCH, JULIE (1992), Jerusalem in the Book of Ezekiel: The City as YaJnoeh's Wife (SBL Dissertation series 130; Atlanta: Scholars Press). GEI.LER, STEPHEN A. (1996), Sacred Enigmas: Literary Religion in the Hebrew Bible (London and New York: Routledge). GINZBERG, Louis (1992), Legends of the Bible (Philadelphia and Jerusalem: The Jewish Publication Society). GINZBURG, CARLO (1980), The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a SixteenthCentury Miller (London and Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul), GOLDINGAY, JOHN (1987), Theological Diversity and the Authority of the Old Testament (Exeter: The Paternoster Press). GOTTWALD, NORMAN K. (1979), The Tribes of Yalnveh: A Sociology of the Religion of Liberated Israel 1250-1050 B.C.E. (London: SCM Press). — (1985), The Hebrew Bible: A Socio-Literary Introduction (Philadelphia: Fortress Press). — (1993), The Hebrew Bible in its Social World and in Ours (SBL Semeia Studies; Atlanta: Scholars Press). GOTTWALD, NORMAN K. and HOKSLEY, RICHARD A. (1993) (eds.). The Bible and Liberation: Political and Social Hermeneutics (New York and London: Orbis Books and SPCK). GRABBE, LESTER L. (1997) (ed.), Can a 'History of Israel' Be Written? (JSOTS 245/ European Seminar in Historical Methodology 1; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press). GKAFTON, ANTHONY, with SHELFOJRD, APRIL, and SIRAISI, NANCY (1992), New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery (Cambridge, Mass, and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press).

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GKBENB-McCRBiGHT, KATHRYN (1998), '"We are Companions of the Patriarchs" or Scripture Absorbs Calvin's World', Modern Theology 14/2: 213-24, GREENSLADE, S. L, (1963) (ed.), The Cambridge History of the Bible 3; The West from, the Reformation to the Present Day (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (paperback edn, 1975}), GUNN, D. M, and FEWELL, D, N. (1993), Narrative in the Hebrew Bible (Oxford: Oxford University Press). HALBERTAL, MOSHE (1997), People of the Book: Canon, Meaning, and Authority (Cambridge, Mass, and London: Harvard University Press). HALL, BASIL (1963), 'Biblical Scholarship: Editions and Commentaries', in The Cambridge History of the Bible 3: 38-93. HANDEIMAN, SUSAN A, (1982), The Slayers of Moses: The Emergence of Rabbinic Interpretation in Modern Literary Theory (Albany: State University of New York Press). HARBISON, ROBERT (1988), 'Earliest Selves: Gilgamesh, Genesis', in Harbison, Pharaoh's Dream: The Secret Life of Stories (London: Seeker & Warburg), 26-39. HARRISVILLE, ROY A. and SUNDBERG, WALTER (1995), lite Bible in Modern Culture: Theology and Historical-Critical Method from Spinoza to Kasemann (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans). HARTMAN, GEOFFREY H, and BUDICK, SANFORD (1986) (eds.), Midrash and Literature (New Haven and London: Yale University Press). HARVEY, DAVID (1990), Tlie Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Cambridge, Mass, and Oxford: Blackwell). HASSAN, IITAB (1987), 'Toward a Concept of Postmodernism', in Hassan, The Postmodern Turn: Essays in Postmodern Theory and Culture (Columbus: Ohio State University Press), 84-96. HAYS, RICHARD B. (1989), Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul (New Haven and London: Yale University Press). (1997), 'Salvation by trust? Reading the Bible faithfully', The Christian Century 114/7:218-23, HILL, CHRISTOPHER (1993), Tlie English Bible and the Seventeenth-Century Revolution (Harmondsworth: Allen Lane (Penguin Books, 1994)). HOULDEN, J. LESLIE (1995) (ed.), The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church (London: SCM Press). JACOBSON, DAN (1982), The Story of the Stories: The Chosen People and Its God (London: Seeker & Warburg). JAMESON, FREDRIC (1991), Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London and New York: Verso), JEANROND, WERNER (1991), Theological Hermeneutics: Development and Significance (London: Macmillan(pb SCM Press, 1994)). JEFFREY, DAVID LYLE (1996), People of the Book: Christian Identity and Literary Culture (Grand Rapids and Cambridge: Eerdmans and The Institute for Advanced Christian Studies). JOBLING, DAVID and PIPPIN, TINA (1992) (eds,), Ideological Criticism of Biblical Texts (Semeia 59; Atlanta: Scholars Press). JONES L. GREGORY and BUCKLEY, JAMES J. (1998) (eds,), 'Theology and Scriptural Imagination', Special Issue of Modern Tiieology 14/2. JOSIPOVICI, GABRIEL (1988), Tlie Book of God: A Response to the Bible (New Haven and London: Yale University Press).

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MOSALA, ITUMELENG J. (1989), Biblical Hermeneutics and Black Theology in South Africa (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans). NOBLE, PAUL R. (1995), The Canonical Approach: A Critical Reconstruction of the Hermeneutics of Brevard S, Childs (Biblical Interpretation Series 1.6; Leiden: E. J. Brill). NOHRNBERG, JAMES (1995), Like Unto Moses: The Constituting of an Interruption (Indiana Studies in Biblical Literature; Bloornington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press). O'NEILL, JOHN C. (1991), The Bible's Authority: A Portrait Gallery of Thinkers from Lessing to Bultmann (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark). OSTRIKER, ALICIA SUSKIN (1993), Feminist Revision and the Bible (The Bucknel! Lectures in Literary Theory; Oxford and Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell). PAINE, THOMAS (1969), The Age of Reason, Part II in The Complete. Writings of Thomas Paine, vol. 1, ed, Philip S, Foner (New York: The Citadel Press), PATTE, DANIEL (1995), Ethics of Biblical Interpretation: A. Reevaluation (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press). PERCY, MARTYN (1996), Words, Wonders and Power: Understanding Contemporary Christian Fundamentalism and Revivalism (London: SPCK). — (1998), Power and the Church: Ecclesiotogy in an Age of Transition (London and Washington: Cassell). PERDUE, LEO G. (1994), Tiie Collapse of History: Reconstructing Old Testament Theology (Overtures to Biblical Theology; Minneapolis: Fortress Press). PREUSS, HORST DIETRICH (1995), Old Testament Theology, vol. 1. (Edinburgh: T. &T. Clark). — (1996), Old Testament Theology, vol. 2 (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press). PRBWITT, TERRY J. (1990), The Elusive Covenant: A Structural-Semiotic Reading of Genesis (Advances in Semiotics; Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press). PBICKETT, STEPHEN (1986), Words and The Word: language, Poetics and Biblical Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). PRIOR, MICHAEL (1997), The Bible and Colonialism: A Moral Critique (The Biblical Seminar 48; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press). PROVAN, IAIN W. (1995), 'Ideologies, Literary and Critical: Reflections on Recent Writing on the History of Israel', JBL 114: 585-606. — (1997), The End of (Israel's) History? K. W. Whitelam's The Invention of Ancient Israel', JSS 42/2: 283-300. PYPER, HUGH S. (1996), David as Reader: 2 Samuel 12: 1-15 and the Poetics of Fatherhood (Biblical Interpretation Series 23; Leiden: E. J. Brill). RABAN, JONATHAN (1989), God, Man and Mrs Thatcher (CounterBlasts 1; London: Chatto & Windus). RAISER, KONRAD (1998) (ed.), 'Homosexuality: Some Elements for an Ecumenical Discussion', Special edn. of The Ecumenical Review 50/1:1-85. REED, WALTER L. (1993), Dialogues of the Word: The 'Bible as Literature According to Bakhtin (Oxford: Oxford University Press), REVENTLOW, HENNING GRAF (1984), Hie Authority of the Bible and the Rise of the Modern World (London: SCM Press). RICOEUR, PAUL (1967), The Symbolism of Evil (Boston: Beacon Press).

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— (1970), Freud and Philosophy. An Essay on Interpretation (The Terry Lectures; New Haven and London: Yale University Press). — (1981), Essays on Biblical Interpretation (London: SPCK). •—(1991), From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics, II (London: The Athlone Press). ROGERSON, JOHN (1984), Old Testament Criticism in the Nineteenth Century; England and Germany (London: SPCK). ROSENBLATT, JASON P. and SITTERSON, JOSEPH C. JR. (1991) (eds.), "Not in Heaven": Coherence and Complexity in Biblical Narrative (Indiana Studies in Biblical Literature; Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press). RUTL.EDGE, DAVID (1996), Reading Marginally: Feminism, Deconstruction and the Bible (Biblical Interpretation Series 21; Leiden: E. J. Brill). SAWYER, JOHN F. A. (1996), The Fifth Gospel: Isaiah in the History of Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). SCHQLDER, KLAUS (1990), The Birth of Modern Critical Theology: Origins and Problems of Biblical Criticism in the Seventeenth Century (London and Philadelphia: SCM Press and Trinity Press International). SCHNEIDAU, HERBERT N. (1976), Sacred Discontent: The Bible and Western Tradition (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press). — (1986), 'Biblical Narrative and Modern Consciousness', in McConnell 1986: 132-50. SCHWARTZ, REGINA M. (1997), The Curse of Cain: The Violent Legacy of Monotheism (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press). SCHWARTZ, REGINA M. (1990) (ed.), The Book and the Text: The Bible and Literary Theory (Cambridge, Mass, and Oxford: Blackwell). SEGOVIA, FERNANDO F. and TOLBERT, MARY ANN (1995) (eds.), Reading from this Place: Social Location and Biblical Interpretation in the United States (2 vols; Minneapolis: Fortress Press). SHERWOOD, YVONNE (1996), The Prostitute and the Prophet: Hosea's Marriage in Literary-Theoretical Perspective (JSOTS 212/ Gender, Culture, Theory 2; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press). SMALLEY, BERYL (1983), The Study of The Bible in the Middle Ages (3rd edn., Oxford: Basil Blackwell). SMITH-CHRISTOPHER, DANIEL (1995) (ed.), Text and Experience: Towards a Cultural Exegesis of the Bible (The Biblical Seminar 35; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press). SPINOZA, BENEDICT DE (1951), Tlieologico-Political Treatise in Spinoza, Tlie Chief Works of Benedict de Spinoza (New York/London: Dover Publications/Constable). STEINER, GEORGE (1975), After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (London, Oxford: Oxford University Press (2nd edition 1992)). — (1979), '"Critic"/"Reader"', New Literary History 10: 423-52 (= George Steiner: A Reader (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1984), 67-98). — (1989), Real Presences: Is There Anything in What we Say? (London: Faber & Faber). — (1996), 'A Preface to the Hebrew Bible', in Steiner, No Passion Spent: Essays 1978-1996 (London: Faber & Faber), 40-87, STEINMETZ, DAVID C. (1980), 'The Superiority of Pre-Critical Exegesis', neology Today 37/1: 27-38 (= Fowl 1997: 26-38).

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STEKNBERG, MEIR (1987), The Poetics of Biblical Narrative: Ideological. Literature and the Drama of Reading (Indiana Studies in Biblical Literature; Bloomington: Indiana University Press). STEVENS, WALLACE (1984), 'Phosphor Reading by His Own Light', in Stevens, The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (London and Boston: Faber & Faber). STROZIER, CHARLES B. (1994), Apocalyjtse: On the Psychology of Fundamentalism in America (Boston: Beacon Press). SUGIRTHARAJAH, R. S, (1991) (ed.). Voices from the Margin: Interpreting the Bible in the Third World (London/Maryknoll; SPCK/Orbis Books), THOMPSON, THOMAS L. (1994), Early History of the Israelite People: From the Written and ArcJtaeological Sources (Studies in the History of the Ancient Near East 4; Leiden: E, J. Brill). TREVOR-ROPER, HUGH (1969), The European Witch-Craze of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books). TRIBLE, PHYLLIS (1978), God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality (Overtures to Biblical Theology; Philadelphia: Fortress Press). — (1984), Texts of Terror; Literary-Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives (Overtures to Biblical Theology; Philadelphia: Fortress Press). UPDIKE, JOHN (1997), Toward the End of Time (London: Hamish Hamilton). WATSON, FRANCIS (1994), Text, Church and World: Biblical Interpretation in Theological Perspective (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans). •—(1997), Text and Truth: Redefining Biblical Theology (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark). WATSON, FRANCIS (1993) (ed.), The Open Text: New Directions for Biblical Studies? (London: SCM Press). WEEMS, RENITA (1989), 'Gomer: Victim of Violence or Victim of Metaphor?', in Interpretation for Liberation, ed. Katie Geneva Cannon and Elisabeth Schiissler Fiorenza (Semeia 47; Atlanta: Scholars Press), 87-104. — (1995), Battered Love: Marriage, Sex, and Violence in the Hebrew Prophets (Overtures to Biblical Theology; Philadelphia: Fortress Press). WEINGREEN, JACOB (1976), From Bible to Mishna: The Continuity of Tradition (Manchester: Manchester University Press). WEISS, MEIR (1984), The Bible From Within: The Method of Total Interpretation (Jerusalem: The Magnes Press). WEST, GERALD (1993), Contextual Bible Study (Pietermaritzburg: Cluster Publications). WEST, GERALD, DUBE, MUSA W. and BIRD, PHYLLIS A. (1996) (eds.), "Reading

With": An Exploration of the Interface between Critical and Ordinary Readings of the Bible (African Overtures (Semeia 73) Atlanta: Scholars Press). WHITE, HUGH C. (1991), Narration and Discourse in the Book of Genesis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). WHITELAM, KEITH W. (1996), The Invention of Ancient Israel: The Silencing of Palestinian History (London: Routledge). WOLTERSTORFF, NICHOLAS (1995), Divine Discourse: Philosophical Reflections on the Claim that God Speaks (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). ZIZEK, SLAVOJ (1989), Tlie Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso).

2

The Bible in Qumran and Early Judaism P. S, ALEXANDER The rediscovery of Midrash SINCE 1961, when Geza Vermes published Scripture and Tradition in Judaism, there has been a profound revolution in our understanding of the role of Scripture in the development of early Judaism. The emergence at the turn of the eras of a widely accepted corpus of authoritative literature, and the sharpening focus on that corpus as central to religious life, mark a crucial turning point in the history of Judaism. Almost the whole literary output of early Judaism can now be seen as having been created in dialogue with sacred Scripture, as forming a kind of commentary, or 'Midrash', upon itThe sects, parties and movements of late Second Temple and Talmudic times expressed their world views largely in terms of their exegesis of canonic texts. Exploring their use of Scripture is, therefore, a way of defining their theologies and their relationships to each other. The importance of Midrash can hardly be exaggerated. To borrow Vermes's memorable phrase, Midrash is the 'thread of Ariadne' which will lead us through the labyrinth of early Judaism.1 The revolution came about for a number of reasons. New manuscript discoveries played a part. The Dead Sea Scrolls, found between 1947 and 1956, showed that Bible commentary existed as a literary genre already in the Second Temple period, and opened up the possibility of a genuine history of Midrash. The chance find in 1953 in the Vatican Library of Codex Neofiti 1, the first full text of the Palestinian Targum, stimulated interest not only in the Targum, but also in the whole range of early exegesis of Scripture. This new interest bore some of its earliest fruit in the field of New Testament. The conviction grew that the New Testament could only be understood against the background of early Jewish tradition. No reader of the New Testament can be in any doubt that it is in constant dialogue 1

Vermes (1975), 88. Vermes actually speaks of the 'literary labyrinth of Targum, Midrash and Talmud', but the higher claim made above can also be defended.

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with the Old. What became crystal clear from the study of Midrash was that the early Christians were reading the Old Testament in a manner typical of their time, and. in doing so were often taking for granted postbiblical tradition. They were not responding to the Old Testament in an unmediated way, 'face to face'. Rather they were viewing it through the veil of contemporary Jewish exegesis. More recently it has been shown that the processes at work in Midrash. can throw light on the formation of the Old Testament as well.2 Midrash is not exclusively a post-biblical phenomenon, but was operative even in the biblical period. It can, for example, illuminate the relationship between the books of Chronicles on the one hand, and the books of Samuel and Kings on the other, or between divergent formulations of the same law within the Pentateuch, Midrash is coming to be seen as a mode of scribal hermeneutics which may be as old as scribalism itself. The monographs and articles on Midrash that have appeared in the last thirty years would fill a small library. Most deal with specific texts, or specific problems. Many are devoted to describing the precise hermeneutical techniques of Midrash. Of the scholars who have attempted to produce more comprehensive approaches to the subject three deserve particular mention—Geza Vermes, Jacob Neusner, and Arnold Goldberg.3 Building on the pioneering work of Renee Bloch, Vermes has formulated a tradition-historical approach, to the analysis of Midrash. He traces the treatment of various biblical verses and themes through the post-biblical commentary literature, determining the phases in the internal evolution of the tradition, and, wherever possible, dating these by external criteria and linking them to historical events and circumstances. Vermes works with small midrashic units and argues that these can only be understood by comparing them first with Scripture, the fixed starting-point of the exegetical trajectory, and then with each other. Only if one knows what went before in the tradition, and what comes after, can one fully understand the meaning of a given Midrash. Where Vermes's approach to the midrashic literature is atomistic, Neusner's is holistic. For Vermes the meaning of a midrashic unit is primarily determined by its context within post-biblical tradition as a whole. For Neusner, its meaning is determined by its context within the document in which it is now found. Neusner, whose analysis has concentrated on the classic rabbinic Bible commentaries, holds that these are not loose compilations which can be meaningfully deconstructed into discrete units of sense, but tightly argued, 'authored' works with a strong, overarching formal plan and theological programme. Each is defined by a distinctive rhetoric, logic and topic. He plays down the role of Scripture in Midrash, •' Fishbane (1986). Fishbane was by no means the first to suggest this, but the detail of his argument was new. 3 For the writings of Vermes, Neusner and Goldberg see the appended bibliography.

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and so discounts the value of analysing in detail any given Midrash against its biblical base. Though Scripture contributes much to Midrash it dictates nothing. It is the plan and programme of the author of the Midrash. that dictates everything and determines what Scripture contributes to Midrash. Neusner does recognize that there was development, but only at the canonic level of the whole document: he attempts to show how later documents within an evolving literary canon react intertextually to the theological programme of earlier documents. Goldberg holds a mediating position. He regards the Midrashim as being composed of small, discrete units whose formal structure he analyses with great rigour. He also attempts to describe how these basic units were built into larger structures and the larger structures combined into the documents which we now have in our hands. He agrees with Vermes that the basic units do have a recoverable message (Aussage), but he also recognizes that that message may be different from the meaning (Bedeutung) which the unit acquires when it becomes part of a larger composition. He defines literary texts as 'supra-summary (ttbersummative) Gestalten'. The whole of the literary artefact is always more than the sum of its constituents. A completely new entity emerges once the parts are joined, without having to change the parts as such. The parts, however, continue to exist as identifiable literary entities and can be understood in isolation. Midrash is a highly complex phenomenon, which is not easily described. There has been a lively debate over terminology, especially over the appropriateness of the term Midrash itself. The word Midrash was initially borrowed from rabbinic literature, where it denotes the specifically rabbinic tradition of Bible exegesis, but it is now commonly applied to the whole of the post-biblical commentary tradition from Second Temple times down to the end of the Talmudic era.4 This can create problems if it encourages scholars to homogenize this tradition and to ignore important differences between, for example, the rabbinic and the Qumranian styles of exegesis. But the usage is probably here to stay and no great harm will be done by it, provided the differences between the various schools are clearly spelled out.5 It is important to note, however, that the term Midrash is fundamentally ambiguous even within its narrower rabbinic usage, since it denotes both a hermeneurical method and a concrete text which exemplifies that method and is cast in the literary form of lemma plus comment. Texts, such as the Targumim, may 4 The next phase of Jewish Bible commentary, dating roughly from the rise of Qaraism, is often referred to as Parshanut. In the Middle Ages midrashic compilations of older material continued to be made (e.g. Midrash ha-Gadol and Yalqut Shim'oni), but Midrash can no longer be seen as an active process. 5 In this looser usage, to call a piece of text a 'Midrash' characterizes it no more precisely than calling it an example of early Jewish Bible interpretation. Problems only arise if scholars think that, by using the term, they are doing more than this.

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display the midrashic method but not the midrashic form. It is generally agreed that texts, such as Genesis Rabba or the Mekhilta of Rabbi Ishmael, which display not only the midrashic method but also the midrashic form have a higher claim to the title Midrash. Midrash in its broadest sense can be modelled as a text-linguistic process that creates out of the raw material of Scripture a textual artefact which can be presented in a variety of textual forms and serve a variety of functions. As a text-linguistic process Midrash is a disciplined activity which requires 'pegs' in the biblical text (such as narrative lacunae, or unusual linguistic features) on which to hang its interpretations. The process presupposes certain axioms about the unique nature of Scripture as divine speech, and thus points to the existence of an authoritatively defined canon of Scripture. Though elements of the process may be found in commentaries on non-biblical texts (such as the Gemara's commentary on the Mishnah6), and, indeed, may be shared with Graeco-Roman hermeneutics,7 the whole package of measures seems to be applied only to Scripture. It is a reasonable deduction, therefore, that any text subjected to this process is regarded by the commentator as Scripture, Midrash, again taking the term in its broadest sense, produced textual artefacts in a variety of literary forms. A fourfold classification of these forms is possible. First, there are text-forms which mimic the form of the original biblical text. Within this category three sub-types can be distinguished: (a) 'Rewritten Bible' texts (such as Genesis Apocryphon) which retell the biblical narratives with changes, omissions and additions; (b) codifications (such as the Temple Scroll) which restate the legal portions of the Bible, often harmonizing them and integrating them with non-biblical law; and (c) translations (such as the Aramaic Targumim), which represent the whole of the biblical material in another language, often with explanatory additions. Because they mimic the form of the Bible, commentaries of this type can seem to be replacing Scripture (this is particularly true of codification), but this conclusion should not be too quickly drawn. The form itself is not decisive. We have clear examples from later in Jewish history of law codes which were certainly not meant to replace Scripture. Second, there are text-forms in the classic commentary form of lemma plus comment (for example the Qumran Pesharim, Genesis Rabba and some of the commentaries of Philo such as the Legiim Allegoriae). Third, there are anthologies (such as the Qumran Horilegia) in which the element of commentary depends entirely, or almost entirely, on the selection and juxtaposition of verses from Scripture. Finally, there is prooftext, a sort of reverse commentary, in which Scripture is introduced, highlighted through the use of citation formulae, into another text which has its own agenda and argument. The degree to which Scripture dictates the agenda 6 7 Weiss Halivni (1986), 93-104. Alexander (1990), 101-24.

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differs from one form of commentary to the other. Targum is the form most closely bound to Scripture, the one in which Scripture's agenda is most strongly felt. At the other end of the spectrum stands prooftext, in which the agenda of Scripture is totally subordinated to the agenda of the quoting text. Discussion of the functions of Midrash should distinguish sharply between 'internal' and 'external' accounts. Viewed externally, Midrash serves both as exegesis (the drawing out of the sense of Scripture and its application to contemporary society), and as eisegesis (the validation of non-biblical ideas, practices and institutions from Scripture). Internally, however, that is from within the tradition, eisegesis is hardly ever recognized as such. Even when it is clearly present, it is usually dressed up as exegesis, as the discovery of meaning that is objectively latent in Scripture. Scripture played an important role in inter-sectarian politics in early Judaism.The stakes were high. If Torah was the central religious authority, then whoever decided the meaning of Torah wielded considerable influence within Jewish society. Torah provided common ground which in principle made dialogue and. argument possible. But each of the early Jewish sects was convinced that it, and it alone, had the key to Torah. The sects seem quickly to have come to the realistic conclusion that they would never convince each other of this by 'objective' argument and proof. They resorted, therefore, to the 'improper' argument of simply asserting, in a variety of ways, that their interpretations were inspired, and had, somewhat paradoxically, the same status as Scripture itself. Exegesis, therefore, despite appearances, is more often aimed at an internal audience: its primary purpose was to elaborate the sect's worldview in scriptural language, and to assure insiders of the truth of the sect's claims. Torah, as a national symbol, like a national flag, was a force for unity in early Judaism. The interpretation of Torah became a force for schism and. disunity. In order to give some substance to these generalizations, which characterize the midrashic tradition as a whole, we shall now consider the use of Scripture within four clearly defined early Jewish communities of Scripture readers—the Dead Sea Sect, the rabbis, Alexandrian Judaism, and Christianity. We begin with the Dead Sea Scrolls, which provide us with our best primary evidence for early Judaism. Scripture and the Dead Sea sect The Qumran sect8 was a literate community, in whose intellectual and religious life the written word played a major part. The scrolls from the caves represent the community's library, which had accumulated, to 8 I do not use the term 'sect' in a pejorative sense, nor do I imply that there was a clearly defined 'orthodoxy' in the Second Temple period from which the Qumranians diverged.

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judge by palaeography, over a period of some two hundred years. By no means all of the eight hundred or so works which survive in whole or hi part are distinctive sectarian compositions. Some, such as Jubilees and Enoch, are pre- or non-Qumranian, but were clearly held by the community in high regard. Many works, however, are sectarian in character, and express a distinctive worldview in distinctive theological language. It is also generally agreed that by no means all of the Scrolls were copied at Qumran, but it is highly probable that many were, and that one can speak of a Qumran scriptorium, both in the sense of a place where texts were copied, and in the sense of a distinctive set of scribal practices. This library functioned within a context of study, which was a central communal activity. The community can be seen as a tertiary level educational institution, made up only of adult males, who had presumably acquired their basic education, and their ability to read, if not to write, elsewhere. Study was an important religious duty: And wherever ten men are present, there shall never lack a man among them who shall study the Torah (miro ann ETS) continually, day and night, concerning the right conduct (?) of a man with his companion. And the Congregation shall watch in community for a third of every night of the year, to read the Scroll and to determine law (BSBC vrrrfr) and to pray together. (1QS VI6-8)

The volumes in the library were all, presumably, regarded as useful, and to a degree authoritative, but they were not all on the same footing. Sorting out the relative authority of the various texts in the Qumran library is no easier than it would be in any other scholastic library.9 However, three categories of authoritative text should probably be distinguished. First, there was divinely inspired, prophetic Scripture. The scrolls presuppose a doctrine of Holy Scripture, Certain texts were inspired: they were written by prophets and represent direct revelation from God. These include not just the Torah of Moses, the supreme prophet, whom the Qumranians would doubtless have regarded as the real 'founder' of the school, and the writings of acknowledged prophets such as Isaiah, Jeremiah and. Habbakuk, but also the writings of David.10 Second, there was a body of tradition which the community believed it had received Rather, 'secf reflects the Qumranians' perception of themselves as an embattled minority in dispute with the religious establishment of their day. See 4QMMT C, 7-8; CD VIII, 16. Josephus also, famously, divides the Judaism of his day into 'sects' (War II, 119; cf. Antiquities XIII, 171; XVIII, 11, 23)'That the term could have pejorative overtones is clear from Acts 24: 5. The term 'way' seems to have been used, in early Judaism to denote the beliefs and practices of a particular Jewish sect. v For a careful discussion of this question, see Brooke (1997), 242—66. 10 HQPsalms" XXVII, 2-11 ('all these [psalms] he [David] spoke through prophecy which was given him from before the Most High'). The closest we come to a formal statement of the sect's canon is the so-called Halakhic Letter: '[And] we have [written] to you so that you may understand the Book of Moses, and the Books of the Prophets, and {the writings of) David [and the enactments of) each generation' (4QMMT C, 10-11). This clearly reflects in a broad way the later tripartite division of the Synagogue canon.

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from antiquity, and to which it accorded great respect, but which it probably did not regard as Scripture in the full sense of the term. To this category may belong the Enochic literature and Jubilees. Though this literature on the face of it claims to be revelation, its general ethos is postbiblical and post-prophetic. It implicitly defers to Scripture and attempts to validate certain non-biblical traditions from it. It is pseudepigraphic, a phenomenon which is hard to explain, unless its authors believed they were living in a post-prophetic age. Finally, there is a body of law, regulations, and doctrine which was generated within the community. This is also post-biblical and post-prophetic, since it is commonly presented in the form of commentary on Scripture. To this category belong not only the Pesharim, but probably the Temple Scroll as well. In this category we should also probably place the various community rules (serakhim), which, though of great practical importance and authority within the community, were not regarded as Scripture. The boundaries between Scripture and non-Scripture at Qumran may be hard for us now to draw, but that they existed, and would have been clearly recognized within the community, is highly probable. What determines that a text is Scripture at Qumran is not simply its presence within the community library, nor its actual importance in communal life, but rather its theological status. The text will often claim for itself prophetic inspiration, and from the way in which it is spoken of and deferred to in the validation of the sect's practices and in the formulation of the sect's doctrine, there will be grounds for thinking that that claim was accepted. Thus, although the Community Rule (Serekh ha-Yahad) was probably a crucially authoritative text, it does not claim inspiration, nor is there evidence that inspiration was attributed to it, nor is it subjected to pesherstyle exegesis—a clear sign that a text is being treated, as Scripture. On the face of it there was not a standardized text of Scripture at Qumran. The various copies of the biblical books often differ, not only from the masoretic text, but also from each other. It is hard to know what to make of this fact. We should not jump too readily to the conclusion that it proves that the text of Scripture was still completely fluid at Qumran, and that the sect did not have a textus receptus. Proto-masoretic texts, in fact, predominate.11 The status of the non-masoretic texts is unclear. They may have been copies brought in from outside. It is also possible that, within certain limits, the Qumran exegetes would have accepted pluriformity in the text of Torah, and seen all versions of it, which had any kind, of pedigree, as being authoritative. The use of variant readings for exegetical purposes is attested in the Pesharim.12 This attitude may not 11 Toy (1992), 115-16, classifies 60 per cent of the Qumran biblical texts as 'protoMasoretic'; 'pre-Samaritan' and 'Septuagintal' together constitute 5 per cent; the remainder are 'non-aligned'. 12 Brooke (1987), 85-101.

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differ fundamentally from that which lies behind the later rabbinic exegetical device of 'al-ticjrei. Six genres of Bible interpretation are found at Qumran. (1) Pesher (e.g. Pesher Habakkuk). Pesher is cast in the literary form of lemma plus comment, and involves a mantological exegesis in which the text of Scripture is seen as directly foretelling the history of the community in the last days. Strictly speaking Pesher can only be applied to prophetic texts which already speak of the future. There are cases, however, of pseudo-Pesher, in which ordinary, non-mantological exegesis uses Pesher terminology.13 (2) Rewritten Bible (e.g. the Aramaic Genesis Apocryphon). Rewritten Bible mimics the form of the original text, but weaves into it additional, explanatory material. It is basically a genre that applies only to aggadah. It reproduces the biblical text selectively, and is used to integrate legend and tradition into the biblical narrative. (3) Targum (e.g. the Targum of Job and the fragments of the Targums to the Pentateuch). Targum, which, as translation, also mimics the form of the original text, fundamentally involves interpretation, because the act of translation is automatically an act of interpretation. The setting of the Aramaic translations at Qumran is unclear. The community was learned in Hebrew, which was probably its language of study and teaching. Even assuming that Aramaic was the vernacular of the members of the sect, they would hardly have needed a translation into Aramaic, These translations, consequently, must have served some other purpose.14 (4) Codification. The Temple Scroll, the classic code from Qumran, attempts to restate the law systematically, harmonizing the various Pentateuchal formulations of it, and reordering the material according to a new, more systematic agenda, A code such as llQTemple should not be confused with the community's codifications of its own rules and regulations (a genre known technically within the community as a SereMi), though there are some signs of the blurring of this distinction in the version of the community Penal Code in the Damascus Document, which integrates biblical and community law. As we have noted, codification is the most ambivalent of the text-forms. It can look like a re-edition of the Torah. HQTemple may have been intended as such; it may have been meant as inspired Scripture, but not necessarily so. (5) Anthology (e.g. 4Q174 (Florilegium) and 4Q175 (Testimonia)). Anthology is by definition selective and thematic, the act of selection and juxtaposition of verses being in itself an act of interpretation. Two pure sub-types can be readily distinguished.. First, a series of passages from " See, e.g., 4Q252 IV, 5. 14 It is possible that all the Aramaic texts from Qumran are non-sectarian in origin.

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different parts of Scripture, without comment (so basically 4Q175); and second, a series of passages from different parts of Scripture, where comment is supplied (so basically 4Q175). Such comment is normally in the Pesher style,15 so that the anthology could also be classified, as a kind of Pesher. However, we have reserved the term Pesher for a commentary in which the order of the lemmata is determined by Scripture. In the Pesherstyle anthology it is determined by the compiler and by his thematic agenda. (6) Prooftext. Prooftext does not play as prominent a role in the Scrolls as it does in early Christian and rabbinic literature. However, it is found, particularly in the Damascus Document (e.g. CD XIX—XX). The prooftext is highlighted within the quoting text by a variety of citation formulae (e.g.iDK ~i3O, 'as He/it says'). On close inspection the quotations sometimes turn out to be inexact. They may involve the harmonization of two similar verses from the Bible, or subtle changes in wording to accommodate the quotation to its new context. Thus even at the micro-level, within the quotation, interpretative processess may be at work. The Scrolls do not fully articulate their doctrine of Scripture nor make explicit all their hermeneutical principles and procedures, but some points are clear and others can be deduced with reasonable certainty. Like the other early Jewish sects, the Qumran group subscribed to a very high doctrine of the inspiration of Scripture, which effectively discounted the human element in revelation. The writers of Scripture were 'prophets', who conveyed a message directly from God under the influence of the 'holy spirit',16 which sanctified them and made them channels of divine communication. Time and again in the Scrolls we find, a biblical quotation introduced by the formula, 'as God said, by the hand of . . ,'.17 The voice that is heard in Scripture is always the voice of God. The alternative model was to see the prophets as amanuenses, writing to divine dictation (IQpHab VII1). Intriguing is the implication of the Habakkuk Pesher that the prophets did not always know the meaning of the messages which they conveyed (IQpHab VII1-2). Nothing could express more vividly the belief that the message transcended the messenger. It was divine speech, and as such not only authoritative, but sui generis. Originating in the unfathomable depths of God's mind, it was fraught with potential and with hidden meanings. It is noticeable that the Qumran exegetes, like Philo and the later rabbis, treat the legal portions of Scripture somewhat differently from the nonlegal. The legal texts are on the whole handled soberly, in the way that 15

Note the odd use of midrash at4Q174,1-3 i!4, TOB ewirsan ~pn si1? -ORiS'sn "iraw srno. -p-tc ~D nlo-t -Jain. On this see Lim (1997b), 280-92. 16 See, e.g., 1QS VIII, 16, 'as the prophets revealed through His holy spirit'. 17 E.g. CD IV, 13-14, "as God spoke through the hand of Isaiah, the prophet, son of Anioz, sayingT..', followed by a quotation of Isa. 24:17. Cf CD XIX, 12; ]QS I, 2-3.

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lawyers would. The exegesis is such as would be jurisprudentially acceptable and stand up in a court of law. The term midrash in the Scrolls seems to be applied technically to this type of legal interpretation (1QS VIII15; CD XX 6; 1QS VI 24; 1QS VI 8)", The text of the non-legal portions of Scripture, particularly prophetic texts, such as Habakkuk and Isaiah, are treated in a more manipulative fashion, apparently involving at times highly invasive exegetical techniques. The technical term for this style of exegesis at Qumran appears to have been pester. The term pesher itself is very revealing. There seems to be little doubt that it was borrowed from dream interpretation, and that it posits an analogy between the text of Scripture and the text of a dream. Thus it relates this style of biblical exegesis to the tradition of oneirocritica in the ancient Near East, which saw the dream-text as a code which had to be broken by the use of techniques such as word-play, notariqon and gematria,18 Such devices are evident in the Qumran pesharim. Just as dreams foretell the future, so the words of the prophets are full of 'mysteries (c'n)', hidden messages as to what was going to happen at the end of time. There is a 'hidden' (ino:) meaning within Scripture, both in its 'prophetic' and its 'legal' sections, which has to be revealed,19 Access to the hidden sense of Scripture was privileged. It was achieved by the Teacher of Righteousness, the founder of the sect, though others also applied and extended his techniques. The Teacher of Righteousness received help from God, who 'gave him knowledge of the mysteries of His servants the prophets' (IQpHab VII4-5). He is 'the priest in [whose heart] God put [understanding, so that he should interpret the words of His servants the prophets, [by] whose hand God recounted all that would befall His people and [His land]' (IQpHab II8-10). Though the language of 'prophecy' and of 'the holy spirit' is not, strictly speaking, used of him, the Teacher and his interpretation are inspired in all but name. This is at first sight paradoxical since it seems to call into question the idea of a fixed, closed canon of inspired Scripture at Qumran. The problem is not confined to Qumran, but is acutely felt, as we shall see, also in later rabbinic Judaism. There is, however, a clear difference between the text generated by the Teacher of Righteousness and the text of Scripture. The former is !s

See Alexander (1995), 236 f. The concept of 'mystery' (raz) seems to correlate closely with the Pesher style of exegesis. A raz is not any mystery, but specifically a mystery relating to the end of days, which is disclosed by Pesher, Cf. the use of fMxmjptoi' in 1 Cor. 15: 51. The legal portions of Scripture also have their 'hidden things' (n-ra), which must be revealed (CD III, 12-16; cf 1QS VIII, 11). However, unlike the rabbinic categories of sod and peshat, the 'hidden' (ires) and the 'revealed' (rfta) or the 'found' (ness,), at Qumran are not simultaneously valid levels of meaning within the text. The rffs /N-S; is the one and only true meaning of the text, which happens not to be obvious. Thus there is no implication that the text is polysemk. In addition to the terms midrash and pesher, the Scrolls also use perush to denote exposition of Scripture (see, e.g., CD IV, 8; cf. 4Q266 (4QD") 11,18). It is possible that perush is the generic term ('exposition'), of which midrash and pesher are sub-categories. H

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not a new direct, prophetic revelation from God. It is an inspired interpretation of an inspired, prophetic text. The distinction is not academic: it is functionally important, and it betrays the sense that the activity of the Teacher is subordinate to Scripture, It is post-prophetic and post-biblical.20 Despite the apparent confusion between 'biblical' and 'non-biblical' at Qumrart, the thrust of our analysis suggests that the community did have a clear doctrine of Scripture and a more or less fixed scriptural canon. However, as we have earlier noted, in addition to that canon of Scripture, they appear to have acknowledged certain traditions as being of great antiquity and authority. That their view in these matters may have been somewhat similar to the later rabbinic doctrine of the two Torahs, and just as paradoxical, is suggested by the book of Jubilees, which, though not itself a sectarian composition, was clearly much respected at Qumran. Jubilees distinguishes between two Torahs given to Moses on Sinai-—one written by God or by the Angel of the Presence, and the other by Moses himself. The former was, presumably, the text of the Pentateuch, while the latter was the body of non-biblical tradition which the author of Jubilees had integrated with the biblical narrative in his retelling of Genesis. This is broadly comparable to the rabbinic doctrine of the two Torahs (on which more below), save that the rabbinic doctrine insists that the second Torah was passed down orally from Sinai (though finally it was, at least partially, committed to writing), whereas Jubilees seems to envisage the second Torah as being written down right from the start.21 Qumran was a scholastic community and Scripture was central to its activities. Scripture served two main functions for the sect. First, it provided the basis for community law. However, like all legal texts, the Torah required extension and application to new circumstances. This was done through a process of interpretation known as midrash, through appeal, possibly, to sanctified tradition and through the evolution of caselaw within the community's law-courts. Secondly, Scripture provided the sect with a grand, historical narrative, into which it could integrate its own experiences, and in terms of which it could fashion its own identity and define its role in salvation history. This narrative too needed elaboration and extension. This was achieved through retelling the biblical story and through integrating into it elements from early non-biblical tradition which chimed in with its theological perspective. Thus the sect's great 20 It is implied in 1 QS VIII, 15-16 that the revelation of the secrets of Torah is a continuous process which happens 'from time to time'. It cannot, therefore, be a once-for-all revelation to the Teacher of Righteousness. It seems likely that the terms CTTWTI and B"i~,nisr; in the Damascus Document refer either to early and later authorities in this ongoing process of interpretation of the Torah (cf. the use of the same terms in the same sense in later Hebrew), or to earlier and later stages in the process of interpretation (CD IV, 8; XX, 8-9, 31). srnn irnsn rninn (4Q 266 [4QDa] 11,20-21; 4Q270 |4QDe] 7, ii 15) probably means 'the latest interpretation of the Torah' , rather than 'the final interpretation of the Torah' (so, correctly, J. Baumgarten, DJD XVIII, 16, n. 43). 21 See Jubilees 1:1-4; 6: 2, with the discussion in Alexander (1988), 100.

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interest in traditions regarding Noah and the Flood probably stemmed from the fact that they saw an analogy between the antediluvian period and their own times. They believed that, like the antediluvians, they were living under the threat of imminent, cataclysmic divine judgement, and that they had much to learn from the righteous antediluvians such as Noah and Enoch. But the grand narrative of Scripture could also be extended by the pesher method of interpretation, which saw Scripture as foretelling precise events in the history of the sect, and its role in the last days. Thus the community could be comforted by the thought that what was happening to it was all within the purposes of God, The rabbis and Scripture Our analysis of the use of Scripture at Qumran provides us with a template to apply to the analysis of the use of Scripture among other Jewish groups in late antiquity. We turn now to consider the case of the rabbis. The rabbis of the late first and of the following centuries CE were the spiritual heirs of the pre-seventy Pharisees, against whom the Qumranians polemicized as 'the seekers after smooth things'.22 They constituted an elite, or would-be elite class of scholars, governed by their own distinctive rules of etiquette, who by the third century CE seem to have been recognized by the majority of Jews in Palestine as their religious leaders and mentors, and who had already begun to extend their influence beyond Palestine to Babylonia and. possibly also to elsewhere. The institutional power-base of the rabbis within the community was the rabbinic school or Bet Midrash, which formed the tertiary level of the educational pyramid within Palestinian Jewish society. The rabbinic schools were initially simple affairs: disciple-circles in which students gathered round a single teacher, often meeting in public places, with no dedicated building for their use. When the teacher died, the students usually scattered, some joining other circles, others probably returning to ordinary life, while one or two may have set up as teachers in their own right. Some schools were larger and maintained an identity over a number of generations, but these were probably the exception rather than the rule. Small though they were, the rabbinic schools were not lacking in intellectual vigour. They generated a vast body of literature which was embodied in the Mishnah, the Tosefta, the Talmuds and the early rabbinic Midrashim. The schools were religious institutions. They probably became places of prayer at the set times of prayer, but their chief rite was the study of the Torah, which was seen as a religious duty. They may also 12 It is commonly held that the phrase np'rnn "e~n ('seekers after smooth things') in 4QpNah 17 is a pun on rrcfein trm ('expounders of halakhot'). Such polemical puns are well known from later texts: cf. the deformation of evay-yefuov into rt; 'it* or rre pi- in b.Shabb. 116a, However, for a dissenting opinion see Grabbe (1997), 58-60.

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have functioned as communal law courts, since the teachers and scholars who belonged to them were experts in the law and competent to act as judges and adjudicators. There was also another institution within rabbinic society in which the Bible played a major role, namely the synagogue, where Torah was publicly read according to a fixed lectionary cycle, and where sermons on it were preached. The synagogue was not in origin a rabbinic institution, but from the mid-second century CE onwards in Palestine it seems to have broadly accepted rabbinic spiritual leadership. The early rabbinic Midrashim embody material which probably comes from synagogue preaching. The Petihah form probably originated in synagogue, and the fact that it is widespread in the early rabbinic Midrashim suggests that there was an interchange of exegetical traditions between the synagogue and the Bet Midrash, where the major Midrashim were compiled.23 The Bet Midrash and the synagogue shared the same canon of sacred Scripture, which was the same as the Tanakh of Judaism today.24 There is no clear evidence that the rabbinic canon was finally closed at Yavneh. The status of the Song of Songs and of Qohelet remained in some doubt till well into the second century CE. But the rabbinic canon was effectively closed by the time of Yavneh, with only the status of some peripheral texts remaining undecided.25 The puzzling practical criterion for the canonicity of a text, namely whether or not it 'defiles the hands', has occasioned much debate. There seems to be little doubt that it was the scroll of the Pentateuch which was first, for whatever reason, invested with this quality, so to raise the question of whether or not a non-Pentateuchal text defiles the hands was to ask, in effect, whether or not it has the same status as a Pentateuchal scroll.26 Within the canon, however, the highestauthority was undoubtedly accorded to the Torah of Moses. It is unclear to what extent the text of canonic Scripture was fixed within rabbinic Judaism in the talmudic period. Certainly from the abundant quotations of Scripture in Talmud and Midrash it is safe to say that a proto-masoretic text-type predominated in the rabbinic schools and in the rabbinieally dominated synagogues. However, it is unwise simply to assume that the text of Scripture would have already achieved in the 23

On the problem of the Sitz im Leben of the Petihah see Stemberger (1996), 243-6. The classic discussion of that canon is to be found in b.BB, 14a-15b. 23 See m.Yad 3:5. It is a statement of Rabbi Simeon ben. Azzai recorded in this passage that forms the basis of the common claim that the rabbinic canon of Scripture was finally closed at Yavneh: 'Rabbi Simeon ben Azzai said: 1 have heard a tradition from the seventy-two elders; "On the day on which they seated Rabbi Eleazar ben Azariah in the academy, [it was decided! that the Song of Songs and Bcclesiastes render the hands unclean."' This apparently links the decision to canonize these two books with the deposition of Rabban Gamaliel as head of the school at Yavneh, and the installation of Rabbi Eleazar ben. Azariah in his place, an event which would have to be dated around 100 CE. But the 'on that day' traditions are very problematic and the historicity of the statement is dubious. JA LYad 2:14 makes it clear that only a text which was 'composed through the holy spirit' can render the hands unclean. 24

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talmudic period the high degree of fixity which it later achieved in the Middle Ages as a result of the work of the Masoretes. There are traditions suggesting that variant readings in the Bible were not unknown within the rabbinic schools.27 It is hard to say how the rabbis would have coped with these variants. It is not certain that they would have insisted that only one of the forms of the text could be the true word of God. The texts enclosed within the rabbinic canon were seen as special: they are 'holy writings' (Blip I~D). The rabbis have a clear doctrine of inspiration. The inspiration of the Torah is unique, a claim implicit within the Scriptures themselves, and much elaborated upon in rabbinic aggadah. The Torah's mediator Moses enjoyed a unique kind of prophecy. He spoke to God 'face to face' or 'mouth to mouth',28 The most comprehensive term for inspired Scripture was 'prophecy', which was basically defined as speaking under the influence of the 'holy spirit' or the 'spirit of prophecy'(t.Yad 2:14; b.Meg.7a). It is fundamental to the rabbinic position that prophecy came to an end at a certain point in time, usually fixed chronologically in the late Persian period.29 The history of revelation was thus divided into two great eras—the prophetic and. the post-prophetic, the biblical and the post-biblical. Chronology was used as an important criterion of canonicity. No text, however valuable and appreciated, could, by definition, be part of the canon of inspired Scripture if it was composed after prophecy had ceased.30 From the fundamental premise that Scripture is divine speech and originated in the mind of God, the rabbis seem to have drawn a number of conclusions. The first, and most important, was that the text of Scripture is polysemic. That is to say, from a human standpoint it has a multiplicity of meanings, and not one single sense. All truth is latent in Scripture, and can be teased out of it, if the correct procedures are applied. The rabbis even appear to hold that two contradictory conclusions derived from Scripture by proper methods should both be allowed to stand, as 'words of the living God',31 presumably because the contradiction exists only at 27

Note, e.g., the famous statement that Rabbi Meir's Torah scroll read ~m rero rather than -TO rare in Gen. 3: 21 (Genesis Rabba XX 12). Even after the efforts of the Masoretes, and the creation of the great master codices of Aleppo and St Petersburg, many variants remained, as Christian David Ginsburg was to discover. 2(1 The locus classicus for the uniqueness of Moses' prophecy is N u m . } 2:6-8. v b.Sanh. 11 a: 'When the last prophets, Haggai, Zechariah and Maladti died, prophecy departed from Israel'. Cf tSot. 13:2; b.Yom.9b; b.Sot.48b. The Seder Olam Rabba 30 states that prophecy ceased in Israel in the time of Alexander the Great. Josephus, Against Apion I, 40 (., carries down the succession of the prophets to the time of Artaxerxes I (465-423), 4 Ezra 14: 44-7, in claiming that Ezra was responsible for finally dosing the canon, implies that prophetic inspiration came to an end with him. See further Urbach (1946), On the ideological nature of the rabbinic claim that prophecy had ceased see Alexander (1995), 414-34. m Ben Sira was held. in. high esteem by the rabbis and is actually quoted in b.BQ 92b as if it were part of Scripture, but in t.Yad.2:13 it is formally excluded from the canon, because it was written too late: 'the books of Bert Sira and all books that were written from then onwards do not defile the hands/ 31 See, e.g., Nurn.R. XIII 15-16; Cant.R, to Cant 2:4. The various meanings of Torah are

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the lower level of human perception, but not within, the mind of God. Since Scripture is divine speech it also follows that it is merrant, coherent, and consistent. They show a marked reluctance to admit that there is any redundancy in Scripture. Repetitions are often nuanced, so that they do not say precisely the same thing, or one occurrence of a statement is applied to 'this world' and the other to 'the world to come', or the repetition is seen as creating a necessary emphasis. Behind this attitude may lie the thought that pure repetition in speech is a human failing which cannot be attributed to God, but it also serves the useful purpose of maximizing the potential of Scripture. The rabbis rejected the idea that revelation, especially the revelation at Sinai, could ever be abrogated. The rejection of the principle of abrogation, however, tends to be stressed in apologetic settings, and was probably originally intended to defend Judaism against the claims of Christianity, and then later of Islam. In non-polemical or non-apologetic settings abrogation may be admitted at least de fact.o,32And in an eschatological perspective some were even prepared to admit that a new Torah would be promulgated in the messianic age. The idea was taken further by the medieval mystics, with their doctrine of a series of different ages, each with its own Torah.33 It is fundamental to rabbinic tradition that inspired Scripture consists of the consonantal text, and of it alone. Scripture is identical to the written text as it was contained in the Scroll of the Torah in the Synagogue, which does not have punctuation or accentuation. The punctuation and accents belong not to the Written, but to the Oral Torah. This opens up the possibility of vocalizing the consonantal text in a variety of ways. These various vocalizations were in principle seen as all equally valid. The formula used was, 'do not read Cnpn *?K) such and such but such and such'. The technique of "pn "/R also occasionally involved varying the consonantal text. A similar sounding word, but with slightly different consonants, can be read in place of the word in the text. The potentiality of the text was thus seen to include not only alternative vocalizations of any given word, but its homophones as well.34 known as its 'faces' (panim). The idea that Scripture is polysemic, i.e. that it contains a multiplicity of simultaneously valid meanings, is most clearly articulated, in the rabbinic tradition. ft is not certain that the idea of polysemy, in this strict sense, is found in the Scrolls. 32 An interesting case of de facto abrogation is the law regarding the suspected adultress, the Sotah (Num. 5: 11—31). See t.Sot.14: 2, 9, which seems to imply that not only were the bitter waters no longer administered, but that there had been an active decision to suspend the practice, 'Suspension' may not technically be the same as 'abrogation', but the rabbis show little concern to revive the laws of Sotah, and with good reason. Trial by ordeal is a primitive mode of adjudication and runs counter to the deepest instincts of rabbinic jurisprudence. 33 Lev.R.XIlI 3. The classic statement of the doctrine of successive ages (shemittot), each governed by its own Torah, is the thirteenth century Sefer ha-Temunah. See further note 49 below. 34 b.Ber,64a provides an oft-quoted example of an "al tiqrei, which involves the revocalization of batiayikh ('your sons') in Isa. 54:13 as boiwyikh ('your builders').

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In the exegesis of Torah a distinction is drawn in practice between halakhah (i.e. the legal portions of Scripture), and aggadah (i.e. the nonlegal, narrative portions). The former, on the whole are treated soberly; the reasoning is careful, the arguments are framed so as to convince jurisprudents. The latter may, however, be subjected to extremely manipulative procedures, in which the text of Scripture is treated almost as a series of symbols to be decoded by the interpreter as he will. The rabbis were very conscious of the dangers of manipulation and tried to restrict it in various ways. Certain highly invasive techniques were regarded as of limited applicability. While it was admitted that various levels of meaning could be found in Scripture, these levels stood in a hierarchical relationship to each other. The standard contrast was between the simple sense (BOB) and the homiletical or midrashic sense fe*n). Primacy was accorded to the simple sense, from which, it was asserted, Scripture could never depart (b.Shabb.63a; b.Sanh.34a). If the tradition recorded by the Masoretes in the Middle Ages, on the basis of long-standing practice, is reliable, then Scripture was read and accented in synagogue according to its simple sense. The simple sense was the base-line from which all other types of reading were to start, and it was always possible to insist on a return to the base, if interpretation appeared to be running too free. Halakhah was also accorded a controlling primacy. According to some authorities it was forbidden to disclose in Scripture meanings which were not in accordance with halakhah (m.Pirqei "Avot 3:12). Within the schools attempts were made to draw up lists of hermeneutical principles (rrno). There are three such lists: the Seven Middot of Hillel, the Thirteen of Rabbi Ishmael, and the Thirty-two of Rabbi Eliezer ben Yose ha-Gelili. These lists are typically scholastic creations, which show some attempt to reflect upon the hermeneutical process and to systematize it. But they are by no means complete, since they do not include many principles widely operative in rabbinic Midrash, and they appear to muddle a prescriptive and a descriptive approach in a manner characteristic of much early textual scholarship.*' Of the literary genres of Bible exegesis that emerged from the rabbinic schools two predominate—codification and commentary. Codification is exemplified by the Mishnah, which follows its own topical agenda and expresses it own theological worldview. What strikes the reader at first sight about Mishnah is its extreme independence of Scripture. Codification, as we have already noted, is the most free-standing of all the literary genres, the one which conceals most successfully its debt to Scripture. Yet Mishnah stands in a close and unbreakable relationship to Scripture. It incorporates wholesale biblical law, usually restated and interpreted, and it combines this in a seamless whole with, non-biblical custom and. tradi•5 For a discussion of this problem, and of the Middot in general, see Alexander (1984), 97-125.

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tion. Scripture also conies directly into the Mishnah, both in the form of proof texts introduced by citation formulae such as issxs, and quoted in order to validate or support a specific statement, and. in the form of short Midrashim incorporated whole into the text. Commentary is exemplified by the great classic rabbinic Midrashim, which have the basic structure of biblical lemma plus comment. The scholastic nature of these Midrashim is very obvious: they cite named authorities and divergent interpretations, and often make explicit their exegetical reasoning. They address a highly learned audience in a compressed and allusive style. One can hear, without difficulty, behind them the cut and thrust of argument within the schools. Two broad types of rabbinic Midrash have been preserved: the exegetical and the homiletic. In the case of the former a continuous section of Scripture is expounded, verse by verse, following the biblical order (e.g. Genesis as in Genesis Rabba). In the latter the order of the biblical lemmata is determined, not by the order of Scripture, but by some extraneous organizing principle, such. as the lectionary for the major festivals of the liturgical year (as, e.g., in Pesiqta deRav Kahana). Midrash in the form of lemma plus comment came to dominate all other forms of Bible commentary in rabbinic Judaism, apart from codification, and even in the case of the latter, there are reasons for thinking that at least part of the agenda of the classic rabbinic Midrashim was to restate the Mishnah in the form of direct commentary on Scripture and to demonstrate its links with Scripture. The Midrashim are complex literary entities which incorporate different exegetical genres. In the aggadic parts of Scripture they contain elements of Rewritten Bible. For example, narrative lacunae will be filled in, and the text dramatized by the invention of dialogue between the principal characters. They also contain elements of Anthology, lists of verses of Scripture which are linked by some common theme. These lists may once have circulated as independent units before being placed in their present contexts. There are also elements of Pesher in the Petirah, in which Scripture is applied to a specific historical situation.36 We have already noted that the Petihah, ubiquitous in the Midrashim, probably originated in a sermon-style used in synagogue. Finally, we also find prooftexts from other parts of Scripture quoted within the Midrash, and introduced, as in the Mishnah, by the formula 10*00. The only other independent literary genre of commentary that circulated within early rabbinic Judaism was translation. The most notable of the translations are the Aramaic Targumim. The Targum did not originate as a specifically rabbinic institution. Its origins may, in fact, lie in the Bet Sefer, the primary school, in which children were taught to read the Hebrew Bible through a one-to-one translation into Aramaic. From there it may have been taken over into the synagogue, to render the Hebrew 36

See Alexander (1992), 24.2,

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reading into the vernacular for the benefit of the congregation. The rabbis later attempted to regulate its use and its content as part of their programme to control the service of the synagogue and to make it rabbinically acceptable. The Aramaic Targumim were commentaries, not only in the sense that every translation involves a reading and an interpretation of the original, but also in the sense that they were more than literal translations. They all embody to a greater or lesser degree much interpretative paraphrase. They have certain similarities to the Rewritten Bible genre (both expand, and. retell the narrative, both integrate Scripture and non-Scriptural tradition), but they differ from Rewritten Bible, in that they incorporate the whole of the biblical text in the correct biblical sequence, whereas Rewritten Bible is usually selective, and may rearrange the order of the biblical text. The quantity of literature which emanated from the rabbinic schools hi the first three centuries of the current era bears eloquent testimony to the vigour of the rabbis' hermeneutical enterprise. But like the other early Jewish sects they faced a fundamental crisis of authority. In the marketplace of early Jewish Bible interpretation, how could they assert the correctness of their reading of Scripture? Exegesis played, a role in promoting their claims, but it was a relatively minor one. Exegesis functioned primarily in infra-sectarian discourse to help the rabbis elaborate their worldview, and to provide reassurance that that worldview was grounded in Scripture. In inter-sectarian disputes, they tended, like the other sects, simply to affirm the inspiration of their own interpretation. The primary instrument by which they did this was the doctrine of the Oral Torah. Put simply this doctrine asserted that Torah was given to Moses on Sinai in two forms—a Written Torah, found, now in the written text of Scripture, and an Oral Torah, containing the true interpretation of the Written Torah, which was passed down from Moses through a chain of tradents to the rabbis' own days, and which is embodied in the teaching within their schools. They were the heirs of this true tradition of interpretation. Only someone who had studied within their schools, with the right teachers, in an unbroken tradition of teaching going back to 'Moses our Teacher' could interpret Scripture aright. The doctrine is essentially a polemical construct, of little significance to discourse within the schools. That is why it remains vague and not clearly articulated till the Middle Ages. The inspiration of the rabbis as Bible interpreters was asserted in a variety of ways. According to one formulation, 'prophecy was taken from the prophets and given to the Sages' (b.BB 12a). The common view appears to have been that the holy spirit was present not in the individual scholar, as it had been in the individual prophet, but in the college of the Sages as a whole. When the Sages met to deliberate on the Torah, they were divinely empowered to discover its true meaning, which, was determined, by consensus and by majority vote. Their views could not be overridden by

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miracle or even by a voice from heaven (b.BM 59a-b). When the Sages deliberated, the Divine Presence (the Shekhinah) was in their midst. This suggested not only the idea that study was a sacred act, but conveyed as well the assurance that they would reach the truth.37 In some traditions even an individualistic emphasis emerges. The ordination of the rabbi in its original form, involving the rite of laying on of hands, seems to imply the sacramental transfer of some grace or power from teacher to student, in a kind of apostolic succession.38 And there are traditions which assert the presence of the Shekhinah not only among the Sages as a whole, but also with the individual scholar who engages with the words of Torah (m.Pirqei "Avot 3:6). However, as at Qumran, this inspiration is postbiblical in character, that is to say, the scholars are inspired to discover the truth within the Torah. They are not inspired to proclaim new, direct revelation from God, The Torah was the axis round which the rabbinic intellectual universe revolved. It was the supreme authority, the ultimate court of appeal on all matters of belief and practice. From an external perspective, rabbinic use of the Torah involves both exegesis, the drawing out of the sense of Scripture and its application to everyday life, and eisegesis, the grounding in Scripture of non-biblical ideas and customs which the rabbis wanted to be grounded there. Internally, however, the rabbis maintain the 'fiction' that the ideas or practices are always latent in Scripture and are being discovered there by interpretation. The doctrine of Oral Torah eases the pressure on the exegete to root every custom in Scripture. It can be seen simply as part of the Oral Law, and that is authority enough for it. Rabbinic texts distinguish between practices that are Kryw; (Scriptural) and those that are prm (rabbinic), but this distinction does not imply any real difference in authority, since those that are p:m belong to the Oral Torah, and are thus also authoritative.39 So too with custom Ons): custom was treated with great respect by the rabbis, but they recognized that it was in many cases simply the established practice of the people. Their answer to this problem, was, in a sense, simply to extend inspiration to the people as a whole. What the people did in their collective wisdom, was also, in a sense Torah, for 'even though they are not prophets, they are sons of prophets'.40 37 For the connection between the Shekhinah and prophecy, see Mekhilta deRabbi Ishmael, Pisha 1; Deut, R. XI: 3. 38 Cf. Num. 27:18. Rabbinic opinion was later to deny that ordination (semikhah) had been effected by the literal laying on of hands, and to claim that the only occasion when this occurred was when Moses ordained Joshua (Maimonides, Hilkliot Sanhedrin 4:2). But this denial seems to be motivated by the desire to avoid the parallelism with Christian ordination. 39 For a discussion of the categories wi-van and 'jyn see Elon (1994), 207-17. * b.Pes.66a: 'Said they to him [Hille!], "Master, what if a man forgot and did not bring a knife on the eve of Sabbath". "I have heard this law", he answered, "but have forgotten it. But leave it to Israel: if they are not prophets, yet they are the sons of prophets," On the

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Scripture in the Alexandrian schools and among the early Christians We turn now to consider the use of Scripture in the Alexandrian Jewish community and among the early Christians.41 Our treatment must be brief: we have space only to hint at how a full analysis might be developed and to suggest how these two 'schools' fit into the patterns which we have uncovered. It is evident from their impressive literary remains that the Jews of Alexandria possessed a vigorous intellectual life, which was wide open to influence from the surrounding Greek culture. At least some of them must have attended Greek schools or been taught by good Greek tutors. The greatest surviving representative of this tradition is Philo, whose works are cast largely in the form of commentaries on the Scripture, Philo was not an innovator. His muvre marks the culmination of two centuries of an intense exegetical enterprise, to which he alludes when he refers to traditions received from 'the elders of the nation'.42 His writings may have been intended primarily for pedagogical use within his own school. The 'holy books', particularly the Law of Moses, 'the chief of the prophets', are central to Philo's worldview and were deemed by him to have been given under divine inspiration. The canon of Scripture which he acknowledges in his quotations seems to be more or less co-extensive with that accepted later by the synagogue, though he concentrates Ms attention overwhelmingly on the Pentateuch. Philo seems to have known little or no Hebrew, but this was of small consequence to him, because he regarded the Greek translation of the Bible which he used as being inspired like the Hebrew original.43 He feels free, therefore, to treat its linguistic minutiae in the same way as the Qumran sect and the rabbis treat the minutiae of the Hebrew. Philo's great hermeneutical programme was to produce a reading of the Jewish Scriptures which would accord with the philosophy of 'most holy Plato'. For him Plato was a major religious authority, second only to Moses the Lawgiver. In effect he treats Plato as if he were a divine prophet (Quod omnis probus 13). This is less surprising than at first sight it may seem: from time to time Jewish tradition has recognized the possibility of prophecy among the gentiles. Maimonides morrow, he whose Passover was a lamb stuck it [the knife] in its wool; he whose Passover was a goat stuck it between the horns. He saw the incident and recollected the halakhah and said, "Thus have I received the tradition from the mouths of Shemaiah and Abtalyon",' 41 One other early community of Bible readers, to whose exegesis we have some access, is the Samaritans. They too would conform tolerably well to the patterns which we have discovered. See Lowy (1977), "K Vita Musi's 14, 'I tell the story of Moses as 1 have learned it, both from the sacred, books, the wonderful monuments of his wisdom which he has left behind him, and from some of the elders of the nation; for I always interwove what I was told with what I read' (trans. Colson, LCD. And so frequently elsewhere. * Vita Mosis II 37: the Septuagint translators 'became as it were possessed, and, under inspiration, wrote, not each several scribe* something different, but the same word for word, as though dictated by some invisible prompter' (trans. Colson, LCD.

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was later to accord Aristotle a somewhat similar position. To reconcile the thought of Moses and of Plato, Philo applied to the reading of the Torah the allegorical methods which Hellenistic scholars had devised to produce a philosophically and morally acceptable interpretation of Homer. He recognizes two levels of meaning, the literal and the philosophical, but he is aware of the dangers of an unregulated allegorical approach. Allegory should not be allowed in the legal portions of the Torah to negate the literal meaning: Philo insists on obeying the letter of the Law, and regards himself as a loyal, Torah-observant Jew. It is clear that Philo's views were seen by some as controversial,44 but he strongly believes that they are right, and hints that they were achieved by superhuman, aid.45 The early Christians are the most radical of the groups which we will consider, yet they too conform reasonably well to the scholastic model. Scripture played a central role in their life and thought, and they quote it constantly, using standard scholastic citation formulae, in order to validate their teachings. Judging by the texts cited in this way in the New Testament, their canon was more or less identical to that of the later synagogue. Those Scriptures were authoritative for them because they were divine speech: some of the most succinct and precise formulations of the early Jewish doctrine of the inspiration of Scripture are to be found in the New Testament.46 It is impossible to say for certain what text constituted inspired Scripture for the early Christians. One assumes that they would have regarded the Hebrew as inspired, but it is possible that they would, like many Alexandrians, have believed that the Septuagint was inspired as well. The Septuagint was certainly held in very high regard by Greekspeaking Christians, and in some cases their exegeses depend upon its, probably faulty, renderings.47 We cannot say whether the text of the Old Testament in use among the early Christians was fixed. It is again possible that, like the Qumran group, they would not have been unduly worried by variations in the wording of their copies of Scripture, but would have seen the variant readings as all belonging to the Word of God. The history of the Christian sect falls into two phases: the period of Jesus' life, and the period after his death. Jesus of Nazareth, the founder of 44 It should be borne in mind that there was also a school of literalists in Alexandria: see Shroyer (1936); Siegert (1996), 189-97. 45 See the remarkable passage in Cher, 27: 'But there is a higher thought than these. It comes from a voice in my own soul, which oftentimes is god-possessed and divines where it does not know. This thought I record in words if I can' (trans. Coison and Whitaker, LCL). '** Note especially 2 Pet. 1: 21, 'For no prophecy ever came by the will of man: but men spoke front God, being moved by the holy spirit'. Cf. 2 Tim. 3:14—17. 47 Notoriously its translation of ntfw in Isa. 7: 14 by ™p#cfVos (cf. Matt. 1: 23). Aquila, Symmachus and Theodotion all have «d*«. Early Christian writers developed the Aristeas legend in such a way as to make clear that the Septuagint translation was divinely inspired (Pseudo-Justin, Cohortatio ad Graecos 13; Epiphanius, De mensuris et ponderibus 3-11; see further, Mtiller (1996), 68-78.

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the sect, is consistently portrayed in the Gospels as an. itinerant teacher, who went about preaching his message, accompanied by a band of devoted students. Central to Jesus' teaching was a proclamation of the imminent coming of the kingdom of God, Hand in hand with this eschatological emphasis went an eschatological radicalism. He spoke as a prophet, on his own authority, directly from God. The Torah of Moses and the other Scriptures were important to him, and he quotes them readily. He is depicted as getting involved in the halakhic debates of his day—on Sabbath law, on divorce, on purity and on the issue of what is the 'great principle' of the Law.48 He takes a consistent line which involves intensifying and internalizing religious norms. Yet there was a profound ambivalence towards the Torah among his followers which may go back to Jesus himself: he may have proclaimed a partial abrogation of the Law of Moses. There might, in principle, have been been nothing new in this. Jesus might have been following a line of Jewish thought which expected the promulgation of a new Torah in the messianic age.49 The period immediately after Jesus' crucifixion was one of intense 'searching of the Scriptures' (Acts 17: 11) among his followers. This exegetical enterprise probably saved the sect from disintegration and oblivion. Its purpose was twofold: first, to develop the teaching which Jesus had left, but secondly, and perhaps more importantly, to integrate the life and death of Jesus into the sacred history. As with the Qumran sect, the Scriptures provided for the Christians the grand narrative which could be used to make sense of their own history and to relate it to the purposes of God. Much energy was expended in finding in the Scriptures foretellings of events in the life of Jesus, but Scripture was also mined for types and models from which to construct a Christology and a doctrine of the Church. A decisive phase in this hermeneutical enterprise seems to have occurred in Jerusalem, after the death of Jesus, in a 'college' of the apostles.50 As we hinted earlier, non-biblical tradition played its part in Christian Bible interpretation. The early Christians read the Scriptures through the lens of the Jewish tradition of their day, and shared with the other sects many assumptions and styles of exegesis. The commonest forms of Midrash among the early Christians were paraphrase of biblical narrative, particularly of the salvation history * Sabbath law: Mark 2: 23-8; divorce: Mark 10:1-10; purity: Mark 7:1-14; 'the great principle of the Torah': Mark 12: 28-34. For Jesus as a radical halakhist see Alexander (1997). ** No one seems to have expected a total abrogation or repudiation of the old Torah (to have done so would have come close to heresy), but rather the modification of the old Torah to meet the conditions of the new age. The evidence is complex and ambiguous. For a judicious survey see Davies (1952). See further note 33 above. 50 This thesis, developed notably by Gerhardsson, 1961, remains very attractive, and helps to explain why Christian exegesis is already so well formed and mature in the writings of the New Testament, Problems arose when a highly gifted new interpreter of Scripture appeared, Saul of Tarsus, who did not belong to the collegium, and who was prepared to challenge its exclusive authority.

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(which can be seen as a kind of Rewritten Bible)31 and Prooftext. The latter often involves Pesher-type exegesis, in that it relates Scripture to events in the interpreter's own day.52 Anthology also seems to have played a role. The suggestion, made many years ago, that the early Christians compiled testimony books in which they listed the verses of Scripture most useful to their case, has received support from the discovery of Florilegia and Testimonia at Qumran,*3 Once again the radicalism of the Christian group is apparent: Prooftext and Anthology are the two forms of Midrash least bound to the biblical text, since in them the agenda of Scripture is most thoroughly subordinated to the agenda of the commentator. It was not until well into the patristic period that Christian scholars began to produce systematic commentaries and to complete the Christian colonization of the Old Testament. The Christian sect, like the other early Jewish sects, had to face the problem of authority. It believed that it had a message for all Israel, but how could it convince Israel, and especially its opponents within Israel, that its message was true? Appeal to Scripture played a part, but as with the other sects, there seems to have been a realization that exegetical argument on its own was not enough. It was necessary also to claim inspiration. The claim to inspiration by the early Christian teachers was direct. Jesus was portrayed, as a prophet, and prophecy, accompanied by charismatic phenomena (such as glossolalia), was rife in the post-Easter Church. These phenomena, which probably broke out spontaneously, were linked by the early Christians with the promise of an outpouring of the Spirit in the last days, and seen by them as an irrefutable sign that their message was true. And even after it proved necessary, in the interests of Church order, to curtail the charismata and to ground doctrine more thoroughly in the exegesis of Scripture, it was still felt necessary to assert that that exegesis was Spirit-led, and therefore true.54 The emergence of Judaism and Christianity as 'Religions of the Book' Brief though it has been, our survey has demonstrated a strong similarity between the profiles of the four early Jewish groups which we have considered, and their use of Scripture. All four—including Christianity— prove to have a remarkably scholastic configuration; all are literate -l Note, for example, the speeches of Peter (2: 14-36) and Stephen (7:1-53) in Acts. The centra! section of the Epistle of Jude (vv. 5-19) offers a striking example of early Christian exegesis, which perhaps reflects the style of Bible interpretation developed in the 'apostolic college' in Jerusalem after the death of Jesus (see Ellis (1978); refined, by Bauckham (1983), 42 ff.). But the most sustained and sophisticated exegesis of the Old Testament in the New is to be found in the Epistle to the Hebrew's. 53 The classic statement of this view was by Harris (1916-20). See further, Lindars (1990); Lim (1997a), 149-60. 54 See, e.g., 1 Cor. 2: 6-16; Eph. 3: 3-5. The revelations of the Spirit referred to in these verses should not be divorced from the Spirit-inspired Scriptures. 52

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communities within which texts function much as they would within a school. All acknowledge a canon of sacred Scripture, the inspiration of which they define in similar terms. Their canons overlap to a high degree and are nearly co-extensive with the canon which was later to be definitively adopted by the synagogue. All acknowledge the centrality of the Torah of Moses within that canon. Yet all are engaged in an intense hermeneutical enterprise designed to stretch the canon so that it applies to new situations, and to justify their teachings from it. All place a high premium on hearing and. teaching the Word. All claim an exalted status for their own interpretations, and see them as in some sense inspired. All were inclined to extend the core canon by attaching to it new works that embodied their own traditions and that would not have been universally recognized. All desired to influence the wider Jewish world and, in claiming to have privileged access to Torah and to the will of God, were bidding, however obliquely, for political power. All belong to the same broad intellectual tradition of early Judaism, and in some cases are known to have polemicized directly against each other. This pattern was not peculiar to Judaism in late antiquity. It can be broadly paralleled within the Graeco-Roman world in the great school traditions of law, of medicine, of philosophy and even of technical subjects such as engineering. Perhaps the closest parallels are with those schools of philosophy which saw themselves as having a role in society at large, in purifying popular religion and in promoting higher forms of spirituality. Within these Graeco-Roman schools, canonic texts and tradition function in ways highly reminiscent of how they function within the Jewish groups which we have considered. From a Graeco-Roman perspective, as Josephus acutely saw,55 the various parties that made up Judaism in late antiquity—the Pharisees (and their spiritual heirs the rabbis), the Sadducees, the Essenes, the Christians and Alexandrian Judaism (as represented by Philo)—can be readily classified as 'sects' within the 'School of Moses'. The emergence of these scholastic sects within Judaism in late Second Temple times is a defining moment in the history of Judaism. Their stress on the primacy of the Written Word was new. That emphasis was further accentuated by the destruction of the temple in 70 CE, but it begins well before that event. Two of those sects—the first followers of Jesus and the rabbis—became the dominant authorities within two major world religions and stamped indelibly upon them a scholastic, 'bookish' character. Christianity and Judaism as we know them today emerged from the clash of sects and schools of thought within Palestinian Jewish society at the turn of the eras. It was from this intellectual milieu that they derived their essential nature as 'religions of the Book'. 55

War II, 119.

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Bibliography ALEXANDER, P. S, (1984), The Rabbinic Herrneiteutical Rules and the Problem of the Definition of Midrash', Proceedings of the Irish Biblical Association 8:97-125. — (1988), 'Retelling the Old Testament', in If is Written: Scripture Citing Scripture. Essays in Honour of Barnabas lindars, ed. D. A. Carson and H. G. M. Williamson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 99-121. •—(1990), 'Quid Athenis et Hierosolymis? Rabbinic Midrash and Hermeneutics in the Graeco-Roman World', in A Tribute to Gcza Vernies, ed. P. R. Davies and R. T. White (JSOTS 100; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press). — (1992), 'Pre-emptive Exegesis: Genesis Rabba's Reading of the Story of Creation', ]JS 43; 230-45. — (1995a),' "A Sixtieth Part of Prophecy": The Problem of Continuing Revelation in Judaism', in Words Remembered, Texts Renewed: Essays in Honour of J. F, A, Sawyer, ed. J, Davies, G. Harvey and W. G, E. Watson (JSOTS 195; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press), 414-34. — (1995b), 'Bavli Berakhot 55a-57b: The Talmudic Dreambook in Context', //S 46, 230-48. — (1997), 'Jesus and the Golden Rule', in HUM and Jesus: Comparisons of Two Major Religious Leaders, ed, J, H. Charlesworth and L. L. Johns (Minneapolis: Fortress Press), 363-88, AMIR, Y. (1988), 'Authority and Interpretation of Scripture in the Writings of Philo', in Mftra: Text, Translation, Reading and Interpretation of the Hebrew Bible in Ancient Judaism, and Early Christianity, ed. M. J. Mulder (Assen/Maastricht: van Gorcum; Philadelphia: Fortress Press), 421-54. BAUCKHAM, R. J. (1983), Jude, 2 Peter (Waco, Texas: Word Books). BERNSTEIN, M. (1994), 'Introductory Formulas for Citation and Re-citation of Biblical Verses in Qumran Pesharim', DSD 1: 30-70. BREWER, D. I. (1992), Techniques and Assumptions in Jewish Exegesis before 70 C.E. (Tubingen: Mohr). BROOKE, G. J. (1981), 'Qumran Pesher: Towards the Redefinition of a Genre', RevQ 40:483-503. •—(1985), Exegesis at Qumran: 4QFlorilegium in its Jewish Context (JSOTS 29; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press). — (1987), 'The Biblical Texts in the Qumran Commentaries: Scribal Errors or Exegetical Variants', in Early Jewish and Christian Exegesis: Studies in Memory of William Hugh Brownlee, ed, C. A. Evans axid W. F, Stinespring (Atlanta: Scholars Press), 85-101. (1997)' "The Canon within the Canon" at Qumran and in the New Testament', in S. E. Porter and C. A. Evans (eds.), 242-66. BOYARIN, D. (1990), Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash (Bloomington: Indiana University Press). CAMPBELL, J. G. (1995), The Use of Scripture in the Damascus Document 1-8,19-20 (BZAW 228; Berlin: de Gruyter). DAVIBS, W, D. (1952), Torah in the Messianic Age and/or the Age to Come (Philadelphia: Society of Biblical Literature). ELLIS, E. E. (1978), 'Prophecy and Hermeneutic in Jude', in Ellis, Prophecy and Henneneutic in Early Christianity: New Testament Essays (Tubingen: J. C, B. Mohr), 221-36.

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ELLIS, B. E. (1991), The Old Testament in Early Christianity: Canon and Interpretation in the Light of Modem Research (Tubingen: Mohr). ELON, M, (1994), Jewish Law: History, Sources, Principles, Vols i-iv, (Philadelphia/ Jerusalem: Jewish Publication Society). FAUR, J, (1986), Golden Doves with Silver Dots: Semiotics and Texluaiity in Rabbinic Tradition (Bloomington: Indiana University Press). FISHBANE, M. (1986), Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel (Oxford: Clarendon Press). — (1989), The Garments of Torah: Essays in Biblical Hermeneutics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press). GERHARDSSON, B. (1961), Memory and Manuscript: Oral Tradition and Written Transmission in Rabbinical Judaism and Early Christianity (Lund: Gleerup). — (1964), Tradition and Transmission in Early Christianity (Lund: Gleerup). GOLDBBKG, A. (1977), 'Entwurf einer formanalytischen Methode fur die Exegese der rabbinischen Traditionsliteratur', Frankfurter fudaistisdie Beitrage 5:1-41. — (1980), 'Versuch uber die hermeneutische Presupposition der Struktur der Petiha', Frankfurter Judaistische Beitrage 8:1-59, (1982), 'Die funktionale Form Midrasch', Frankfurter Judaistische Beitrage 10: 1-45. — (1984), 'Distributive und kompositive Formen: Vorschlage fur die descriptive Terminologie der Formanalyse rabbinischer Texte', Frankfurter Judaistische Beitrage 12:147-53. — (1986), 'Form-Analysis of Midrashic Literature as a Method of Description', }}$ 37:139-52. GRABBE, L. L, (1997), 'The Current State of the Dead Sea Scrolls." Are there more Answers than Questions?' in S. E. Porter and C. A. Evans (eds.), 54-67. GREEK, R. and KUGEL, J. L, (1986), Early Biblical Interpretation (Philadelphia: Westminster). HANDELMAN, S. A. (1982), The Slayers of Moses: The Emergence of Rabbinic Interpretation in Modern Literary Theory (Albany; State University of New York Press). HARRIS, J. M. (1995), Hatv do we know this? Midrash and the Fragmentation of Modern Judaism (Albany: State University of New York Press). HARRIS, J. R. (1916-20), Testimonies I-II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). HARTMAN, G. H. and BUDICK, S. (1986) (eds.), Midrash and Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press). HAYS, R. B, (1989), Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul (New Haven: Yale University Press). JACOBS, 1. (1995), The Midrashic Process; Tradition and. Interpretation in Rabbinic Judaism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). LIM, T, (1990) 'Eschatological Orientation and the Alteration of Scripture in the Habakkuk Pesher', JNES 49:185-94. — (1997a), Holy Scripture in the Qumran Commentaries and Pauline Letters (Oxford: Clarendon Press). — (1997b), 'Midrash Pesher in the Pauline Letters', in S. E. Porter and C. A. Evans (eds.), 280-292. LINDARS, B. (1961), Neio Testament Apologetic; The Doctrinal Significance of Old Testament Quotations (London: SCM Press).

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— (1990), Testimonial in R. J. Coggins and J. L. Houlden (eds.), A Dictionary of Biblical Interpretation (London: SCM Press), 675-7. LONGENECKER, R. (1975), Biblical Exegesis in the Apostolic Period (Grand Rapids: Berdmans). LOWY, S., Principles of Samaritan Exegesis (Leiden: E. J, Brill, 1977), MCCARTHY, C. (1981), The Tiqqune Sopherim and other Theological Corrections in the Masoretic Text of the Old Testament (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht). MULDER, M. J. (1988) (ed,), Mikra: Text, Translation, Reading and Interpretation of the Hebrew Bible in Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity (Assen/Maastricht: van Gorcum; Philadelphia: Fortress Press), MUU..ER, M. (1996), The First Bible of the Church: A Plea for the Sepfuagint (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press). NEUSNER, J. (1983), Midrash in Context: Exegesis in Formative Judaism (Philadelphia: Fortress Press), — (1985), The Integrity of Leviticus Kabbah: The Problem of the Autonomy of a Rabbinic Document (Chico: Scholars Press). — (1986a), Comparative Midrash; TJie Plan and Program of Genesis and 'Leviticus Kabbah (Chico: Scholars Press). — (1986b), Ancient Judaism and Modern Category-Formation; 'Judaism', 'Midrash', 'Messianism', and Canon in the Past Quarter-Century (Lanham: University Press of America), •—(1987a), From Tradition to Imitation: The Plan and Program of Pesiqla Rabbat and Pesiqta deRab Kahana (Chico: Scholars Press). — (1987b), What is Midrash? (Philadelphia: Fortress Press). PORTER, S. E. and EVANS, C. A. (1997) (eds.), The Scrolls and the Scriptures: Qumran Fifty Years After (Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha, Supplement Series 26; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press). RUNIA, D. (1991), Exegesis and Philosophy: Studies on Philo of Alexandria (Aldershot: Variorum). S/EB0, M. (1996) (ed.), Hebrew Bible/Old Testament: The History of its Interpretation, vol. i.l (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht). SAMELY, A. (1992), The Interpretation of Speech in the Pentateuch Targums (Tubingen: J. C, B. Mohr). — (1992), 'Scripture's Implicature: the Midrashic Assumptions of Relevance and Consistency', JSS 37:167-205. — (1995), 'Stressing Scripture's Words: Semantic Contrast as a Midrashic Technique in the Mishnah', JJS 46:196-229. SHROYER, M, J. (1936), 'Alexandrian Jewish Literalists', JBL 55,261-84. SIEGERT, F, (1996), 'Early Jewish Interpretation in a Hellenistic Style', in Hebrew Bible/Old Testament; Tlie History of its Interpretation, vol. i. 1, ed. M. Saaba (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht), 130-98. STANLEY, C. D. (1992), Paul and the Language of Scripture; Citation Technique in the Pauline Epistles and Contemporary Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). STEMBBRGER, G. (1996), Introduction to Talmud and Midrash (ET by M. Bockrnuehl, 2nd rev. edit., Edinburgh: T, & T.Clark), TOMSON, P. J. (1990), Paul and the Jewish Law: Halakha in the Letters of the Apostle to the Gentiles (Assen: van Gorcum).

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Tov, E. (1992), Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible (Minneapolis: Fortress Press/ Assen and Maastricht: Van Gorcum). URBACH, B. E. (1946), 'When did Prophecy Cease?', Taririz 17,1-11 (Hebrew), VERMES, G. (1970), 'Bible and Midrash', in The Cambridge History of the Bible, vol. \, From the Beginnings to Jerome, ed. P. R, Ackroyd and C. F. Evans (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 199-231. — (1973), Scripture and Tradition in Judaism (Leiden: E. J. Brill (1st edn. 1961)). — (1975), Post-Biblical Jewish Studies (Leiden: E. J. Brill). WEISS HALIVNI, D. (1991), Pcshat and Derash: Plain and Applied Meaning in Rabbinic Exegesis (New York and Oxford, 1991). •—(1986), Midrash, Mislmah and Centura: The Jewish Predilection for Justified Law (Cambridge: Harvard University Press).

3

Canonical Criticism and Old Testament Theology M, G. BRETT C A N O N I C A L criticism can be understood as a relatively recent proposal for reordering exegetical priorities, while 'Old Testament theology' is usually seen as a summarizing discipline as old as modernity itself. The two areas of research could be treated separately, but the juxtaposition is instructive: both are in some sense orientated towards the readers of biblical texts, both have been charged with under-valuing historical research, both are involved in seemingly intractable arguments about the relationship between descriptive and normative claims in biblical studies, and both are implicated in debates about the role of biblical research within the larger religious traditions of Christianity and Judaism. The following discussion will highlight only the most important issues addressed in these overlapping programmes of research. The relevant scholarly literature is immense, and there are a number of survey works already available which aspire to comprehensiveness. In the area of Old Testament theology, the strength of survey works such as Reventlow (1985) and Hasel (1991) is that they provide extensive bibliographies, but unfortunately they often sacrifice analytical depth in order to cover the relevant literature. Perdue (1994) strikes a more effective balance between survey and critique. The present chapter sets out to provide only an orientation to the key issues in current research. Canonical criticism There is no unified school of canonical studies, and indeed, there is some dispute about the conceptual coherence of its practitioners.1 The term 'canonical criticism' has been favoured by James Sanders as a way of capturing an interpretative focus on the relationship between religious communities and the growth of the biblical canon. Sanders began his work on the development of the canon with research on the Psalms scrolls ' See Barr (1983); Oeming (1985); Brett (1991); Noble (1996).

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found at Qumran, which included non-biblical psalms and an ordering of the material quite different from that found in the Masoretic tradition,2 The diverse evidence at Qumran reopened, a number of questions concerning the stabilization and closure of the Hebrew canon: exactly which canon shaped what community? How did the three sections of the canon 'close' and in what periods? What can be gleaned, from the ancient versions,3 and from redactional theories/1 to build hypotheses concerning the growth and adaptability of Scripture? One could argue that this set of questions simply enriches the historical disciplines of text criticism, redactional analysis, and Israelite religion. Sanders himself sees no great watershed in the closure of the biblical canons within Jewish, Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant traditions; there is one great 'canonical process' which extends from the first repetitions of sacred oral tradition through to the communal hermeneutics that render a stabilized canon adaptable to each new situation? Thus, Sanders has radically expanded the usage of the term 'canon': first, he has undermined a widely-held distinction between Scripture as the developing religious literature of the biblical period and canon as a definitive and closed list of scriptural books: the principle of fluidity inherent in the notion of Scripture is maintained in the hermeneutics that preserve canonized texts. Secondly, while not denying the differences between orality and literacy, Sanders has even identified a commonality between oral and written tradition: he uses the concept of canonical process to describe the creative interaction between a defined religious repertoire and its interpretative performance. Sanders could be charged with over-extending the term 'canon', but historians of religion have made some similar proposals. With respect to the interaction of cultural repertoire and interpretative performance, there is a sense in which the differences between oral and literary materials have been over-estimated. Indeed, Jonathan Z. Smith concludes that, cross-culturally, the relationship between canon and hermeneute is perhaps best illustrated by practices of divination: the genius of the diviner lies in matching the relatively fixed 'canon' of divinatory objects to the client's particular situation. Comparative hermeneutics is thus linked to canonical studies, and the relationship between the two is identified by Smith as an important area of research for historians of religion.6 John Barton has rightly argued that canonical studies have been greatly hampered by conceptual and definitional confusions. Yet one may still doubt the value of attempts to construct a neat distinction between Scripture and canon. Barton, for example, suggests that 'to speak of 2

Sanders (1968); cf. Flint (1993).

3 See Barthelemy (1991). 4 5 6

See Sheppard (1980); Fishbane (1985), Sanders (1995). Smith, J. Z (1982); cf. Smith, W. C. (1993); Graham (1987).

C A N O N I C A L C R I T I C I S M AMD OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY 65 'scripture' is to say that there is a group of books such that at least those books have an authoritative status (however that is defined); but to speak of a 'canon' is to say that at most this particular group of books has authoritative status,'7 Barton shows how the lack of agreement about such definitions helps to explain why different scholars come to different conclusions about the history of the biblical canons. But the distinction above seems overly burdened with Protestant bias. If we were to adopt Barton's definitions, we would be compelled to say that, in the light of the authority granted to rabbinic tradition, Judaism has a Scripture but not a canon. It may be simpler just to say that a canon (at least in the field of biblical studies) is a relatively closed collection of authoritative Scriptures; to add a notion of exclusive authority seems to raise more problems than it solves. Barton suggests, for example, that the Torah might qualify as a canon at the time of Jesus,8 yet he himself shows how the Prophetic literature and the Psalms carried a great deal of authority both within Judaism and early Christianity. Hence, the Torah could not have been an exclusive authority. One could still argue, however, that Barton has made one of the most significant historical contributions to 'canonical studies' insofar as he has illuminated the nuances of interaction between an authoritative religious repertoire and its interpretative performances.9 In particular, he has shown how several different genres within Scripture were read 'as prophecy' in the Second Temple period. (Thus, for example, John 19: 24 takes Ps. 22: 18 to be prophecy, even though it is a psalm of lament and v. 18 refers to the past.10) At the hands of Barton, 'canonical' research becomes part of the history of Scripture's reception. The work of Brevard. Childs, on the other hand, cannot be easily absorbed into historical paradigms of research. While he has tried, to do justice to historical criticism, and to the shaping of Scripture in its various stages, his conception of a canonical approach has emphasized the 'final form' of the Hebrew Scriptures as the controlling context for both exegesis and biblical theology.11 On his view, historical research—whether focused on the earlier layers of tradition or on the later history of the Bible's reception—plays an ancillary role in illuminating the final shape of the text. Childs has long been convinced that the drive of historical criticism to reconstruct events behind the text, and to relocate particular traditions to their socio-historical origins, was contributing to a hermeneutical 7

Barton (1986), 56. Ibid., 57,81. See also Barton (1997). 10 A theological question arising from this example is whether John's Gospel should now be regarded as having committed an interpretative error, or whether John 19: 24 is a case of 'divinely appropriated human discourse' (see the philosophical discussion in Wolterstorff (1995)). The hermeneutical question is not answered by the fact that such examples were commonplace in the first century. " Childs (1974); (1985); (1993). 8

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impasse: the drive to differentiate the disparate layers of biblical tradition had the effect of reversing a creative process of canonical synthesis which shaped the inherited, traditions precisely so as to prevent them being moored in the past. The canonical process, on this account, is an historically-extended dialogue about the reality of God in the life of Israel, and the final form (here meaning the Masoretic tradition) bears witness to the normative results of that dialogue. Childs suggests that, paradoxically, the influence of historicism produced a style of biblical research which freezes the particular contributions to the biblical dialogue into discrete moments and relativizes the enduring claims of the text. Whatever one might think about Childs' work, there can be little doubt that it has inspired a fresh emphasis on the ordering and redaction of normative biblical traditions.12 This fresh wave of canonical studies provides clear evidence that biblical scholarship has moved away from its older tendency to privilege early layers of tradition, a tendency shaped partly by the romantic historicism of the nineteenth century.13 While it is clear that Childs is not solely responsible for this shift, his work has played an important role in it, especially in Anglophone scholarship. In the homeland of romantic historicism, German scholars have generally been less receptive to the canonical approach. But some 'final-form' studies have begun to appear, for example Frank Criisemann's study of the final edition of Genesis in the Persian period.14 Rolf Rendtorff has been a notable exception in warmly receiving Childs' work. Rendtorff has also emphasized that the making of the final form has been driven by theological intent, through a process which has detached traditions from their origins and rendered them available for reception by later audiences.15 For example, leaving aside the question of sources, he has suggested16 that the primeval history in Genesis 1—11 has a parallel structure to the Sinai story in Exodus 19-34: in both cases, a gift of God (creation/ covenant) has been endangered by human sin, and in both cases, God's mind is changed by one person (Noah/Moses). God promises not to bring destruction again (on humanity/on Israel) and confirms this promise by establishing a covenant (bent). Such observations focus on the theological patterns and themes of the canonical texts, regardless of any theories about underlying sources or about the socio-historical matrixes that have shaped the sources. The details of particular exegetical debates need not concern us in this context, and indeed the most important exegetical disputes usually turn on prior methodological commitments. Childs' work has been widely criticized for joining together what historically-minded critics have character!3

E.g., Blenkinsopp (1977); Clements (1978); Sheppard (1980); Wilson (1985). " Brett (1991), 82-100, On this version of historicism see especially %'gers (1968) and Meinecke (1972). 14 1!i v (19%a). Rendtorff (1985); (1993). ' Rendtorff (1993), 125-34.

C A N O N I C A L C R I T I C I S M AMD OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY 67 istically put asunder: (1) he has tried to join 'Scripture' and 'canon', and (2) he has conflated descriptive research with normative theological claims. These two main issues are so interrelated in Childs' work that it is difficult to separate them, but it seems to me that it is only the second issue that is genuinely problematic. Although Childs is guilty of equivocation in his use of the terras 'canon' and 'canonical', our discussion above suggests that attempts to draw a sharp distinction between Scripture and canon are of limited value. On the other hand, Childs' conflation of descriptive research and. continuing normativity does present a more complex problem. There is no question that historians have thought it proper to describe the normative functions of biblical literature within the biblical period. Exemplary in this connection would be Michael Fishbane's account of the legal, aggadic and mantological 'exegesis' that can be found in the Hebrew Bible itself.17 These three modes of interacting with earlier layers of Scripture imply three different kinds of normativity. But there is no direct transfer from these kinds of normativity to the modes in which the Bible might be authoritative in Jewish and Christian communities today, Childs' stress on the continuing normativity of 'the' canonical shape is best read as a proposal which needs to be evaluated along with the range of other models that seek to describe how the Bible may be used in theology.18 Childs' emphasis on the final form of the Hebrew text might also need to be taken as evidence of Protestant prejudice (although there are other Protestants, like Harmut Gese, who argue that the continuity between the Testaments is founded on the Septuagint). While Childs clearly recognizes that the LXX tradition is used frequently in the New Testament, and that the larger Catholic canon dominated Christian tradition before the Reformation, nevertheless he regards the Hebrew canon as normative. His main concern is not so much historical as theological: the Old Testament is best seen as a discrete witness to Jesus Christ precisely in its pre-Christian form, and the ongoing dialogue between church and synagogue is better served by the Hebrew text.19 Rendtorff has also been well known for his emphasis on Jewish-Christian dialogue and hence on the common ground afforded by the Masoretic text. Worth noting in this context is the view of Jon Levenson, a Jewish scholar who has been generally supportive of Childs' work: 'a biblical canon is always either Jewish or Samaritan or Eastern Orthodox or Roman Catholic or Protestant—but never generic, never universal. Its very existence reminds biblical scholars that the object of their study cannot, in the last analysis, be detached from specific religious communities and from traditions that are postbiblical.'20 17

(1985). '•* Cf. Kelsy (1975); Goldingay (1987). 19 Childs (1985), 8-10; contrast, however, the ambiguity of (1993), 67. 20 Levenson (1993a), 122.

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This comment suggests that the canonical approach needs to be more pluralist and not simply reduced to the Masoretic text.21 On the other hand, Levenson agrees that attempts to bracket out the later reception of Scripture—here including the canons of the various traditions—is likely to be reductive in another way. The wider implications of Levenson's argument concerning readerly commitments will be taken up in the next section. Old Testament theology and readers' commitments In his famous inaugural address of 1787, Johann Phillip Gabler distinguished between 'true' and 'pure' biblical theology.22 True' biblical theology was envisaged as providing an historical account of the diversity of biblical material. The second task, 'pure' biblical theology, was to sift the historical results for universal ideas and purify them of historical accidents. Only this second task could provide the stable foundation for 'dogmatic' theology. Dogmatic theology, for Gabler, was not a prefabricated set of doctrines; on the contrary, dogmatics was to build on the foundations laid by pure biblical theology in a manner that suited the changing needs of the 'times, age, place, sect, school, and other similar factors'.23 Thus, Gabler's address envisaged three interdependent tasks, two of which were the business of biblical scholars. This eirenic scholarly vision was still shaped by a key assumption of the Enlightenment, namely, that the diversities of biblical history could be distilled down to a fundamental, rational deposit of eternal truths; all reasonable readers should be able to arrive at the same conclusions about these core materials. With the rise of historicism, many biblical scholars came to doubt that there were such things as eternal truths which could be purified of the historical accidents. Nevertheless, it was commonly thought that careful and objective scholarship produced assured results which could then be passed on to systematic theologians to do with what they will. On this understanding of impartiality, the particular identity of the scholar was something that should be eclipsed by the proper objectivity of historical reason. Historical criticism created, or attempted to create, a neutral space between scholars of different religious traditions. John J. Collins continues to see this neutrality as a virtue, although he recognizes that historical criticism does not possess the kind of objectivity that has often been associated with it. It is distinguished, however, by a tradition of selfcriticism and by stringent attempts to be impartial. Collins argues that historical criticism is also the indispensable framework for biblical theology: it provides the broadest basis for discussing 'the meaning and func21 22 23

Cf. Ibid., 172. Translation in Sandys-Wunsch and Eldredge (1980). Ibid,, 137,144.

C A N O N I C A L C R I T I C I S M AMD OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY 69 tion of God-language', and it is the most widely accepted medium of exchange between scholars of different religious traditions.24 Jon Levenson has argued, to the contrary, that insofar as Jewish and Christian biblical scholars bracket their religious commitments in the cause of neutrality, the dialogue between them cannot count as JewishChristian dialogue.25 In attempting to privatize religious commitments, we discover not only that hidden assumptions have been smuggled, in under the cover of objectivity, but also that the resulting conversation about the past has little significance for a dialogue between Christians and Jews whose identities are formed, by a great number of posf-biblieal traditions. Walther Eichrodt, for example, adopted the formulaic intention to 'avoid all schemes which derive from Christian dogma tics' but, in the very same chapter, was able to speak of the 'torso-like appearance of Judaism in separation from Christianity'.26 Claims on objectivity are clearly not evidence of objectivity. When Eichrodt went on to make 'covenant' his single organizing principle—rhetorically emphasizing that this arises from the text itself rather than from dogmatic schemes—he was as much influenced by the New Testament as he was by the Hebrew Bible. What, then, are the alternatives to obscuring the particularities of scholarly identity? Levenson has made a good case for making theological commitments clear in advance, thus inviting the reader to evaluate the relationship between an argument and the bias that may lie behind it. He is not averse to historical research; the critique is only directed against a purely descriptive objectivism which has been characteristic of historical criticism. His own contribution to Jewish-Christian dialogue in The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son is a fine example of how questions about the relationship between the Testaments have shaped historical study, and the historical work has, in turn, provoked genuinely ecumenical theological reflection.27 There are many different ways in which scholarly identities and commitments might be expressed. For example, some methodological studies in the social sciences have argued that cross-cultural understanding necessarily entails, at decisive points, comparisons and contrasts with the interpreter's own culture. Perspicuous comparisons and contrasts need not become ethnocentric imposition, distorting the process of understanding. On the contrary, disciplined cultural contrasts may be necessary, lest 24 Collins (1990), 14-15. Similarly, responding to Childs' confessional claim (1993), 591, that Jesus Christ is 'the ultimate criterion of truth for both Testaments', Isaac Kalimi (1997), 107, suggests that such a claim leaves little room for collective research with Jewish colleagues, whereas the study of Israelite religion offers more promising possibilities for diaH logue. (1993a), 26 (1961), 26,33. 27 This book must be judged as far more valuable than Hans Kiing's four pages on the question 'Does God need the sacrifice of his own Son?' (1992), 386-9, and the contrast with Levenson serves to point up the limits of Kiing's ambitious attempt to evaluate the Bible and the history of Judaism in a single volume. See below, n. 50.

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unexamined assumptions be unconsciously imported into the interpretative task.28 Similarly, in line with Levenson's stance, the 'new historicist' movement in literary criticism suggests (in contrast to the objectivism of the older historicism) that a critic's representation of the past will inevitably entail a normative dimension. In particular, new historidsts often provide an implicit, or explicit, critique of dominant cultures in critical attempts to recover voices rendered marginal by cultural elites.29 Furthermore, the older historicist idea that 'all cultures are equally valuable' can be seen as implicitly ethnocentric insofar as, in advance of any actual dialogue, it presumes that one already has the values to make such a judgement.30 In short, some ethical judgements may be appropriate, and a purely neutral stance in scholarship may be dubious on ethical grounds, especially in cases like Eichrodt's Old Testament Theology where normative interests have been masked. This kind of point has also been made, in a different way, in feminist scholarship. While their interpretative methods and results are diverse, feminist critics are united, in a normative attitude which has been neatly summarized by Phyllis Trible: feminism 'opposes the paradigm of domination and subordination in all forms, most particularly male over female'.31 Marie-Therese Wacker32 speaks of gender equality as the 'fundamental conviction' of feminist research, whether it is historical or literary, and she defends the scholarly validity of a consciously biased decision to focus on women's experience. Such a 'confessional' stance in no way invalidates feminist contributions within the university as a whole, nor within biblical study in particular. In principle at least, there may be nothing inherently wrong with evaluative perspectives within biblical studies, whether these are ethical or theological. However, while many biblical scholars, including Levenson, would be willing to set theological tasks within a pluralistic context of biblical studies, Francis Watson has formulated a trenchant case for fusing exegetical and theological interests and resisting non-theological approaches to the Bible. His approach presents a more extreme claim on normativity, arguing that religious interests are the only responsible ones to bring to Scriptures which constitute the inspired testimony to divine self2S

Taylor (1985); Craffert (1996). Greenblatt and Gunn (1992). Rainer Albertz's two volume history of Israelite religion has affinities with the new historicist quest to illuminate the marginal voices displaced by the dominant culture, especially insofar as he differentiates between popular piety and official religion. Albertz has ignited a fresh round of debates on the normative value of Israelite religion by arguing that it is 'more theological' than Old Testament theologies (1995), 23, See the discussion in the Jahrbuch fiir Bihlische Theologie 10 (1995). 30 Taylor (1992). 31 (1989), 28. OUenburger (1995), 99, calls this a confessional stance, and the language is not simply metaphorical. Trible (1989), 281, says that 'Theologically, the rule of male over M female constitutes sin'. Wacker (1995), 140. ig

C A N O N I C A L C R I T I C I S M AMD OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY 71 disclosure. As he has recently made clear,33 his position is in many ways the polar opposite of Philip Da vies,34 who wishes to rid universities of any explicit theological commitment. But Watson is equally critical of pluralists who would allow theological commitments to exist side by side with other approaches, without direct confrontation. Although Watson argues that pluralistic accounts of biblical studies should be rejected, he nevertheless resists the idea that his blending of exegesis and theology is an uncritical enterprise. He does say that if the concept of Holy Scripture is to retain any sense at all, then Christian appropriations of the Bible must take some norms from within the Bible itself. On the other hand, he provides detailed accounts of how contemporary studies of ideology need to be incorporated into biblical theology. For example, he provides an incisive reading of the Joseph story illustrating how the language of divine providence in the mouth of Joseph should be understood as a rhetoric of oppression. Gen. 50: 20 is not to be taken as straightforward evidence of a 'doctrine of providence'. Joseph's actions, according to the narrative of Genesis 47, reduce the entire land of Egypt to servitude, and this can only make the reader suspicious of his words.3s Religious leaders, the Joseph story seems to imply, are not always infallible interpreters of God's actions in the world. Thus, even Watson's attempt to import theological reflection into biblical studies hardly provides an example of prefabricated, doctrines being imposed upon the biblical material. The dispute between Davies and. Watson is instructive, if only because they define the outer limits of a debate about the place of biblical studies within the university. Most scholars would inhabit positions somewhere between the two. Davies, much like John Collins, has attacked confessional or 'insider' discourse within the academy on the grounds that it cannot communicate within a public institution like the university, which must broker conversation between several religions;36 confessional language is best placed within religious communities like the church. Davies links this argument to a technical distinction between 'emic' discourse (the 'insider' or 'native point of view') and 'etic' discourse (the language of the 'outsider', social scientist or critic, who wishes to provide an explanatory account of the insiders' discourse). The university, on Davies' account, should trade only in etic discourse, because confessional or emic discourse is apparently sealed off within particular religious traditions. This argument overlooks the fact that the emic/etic distinction was created by anthropologists precisely because they had to deal with both kinds of discourse.37 Indeed, a number of 'theological' studies written in recent years have purported to describe Israelite views of God and the 33

Watson (1996). « Davies (1995). 3lS Watson (1994), 60-78. Davies (1995), 50-52. Davies (1995), 33, manages to overlook this fact even though he cites a recent review of the anthropological debates in Headland, Pike and Harris (1990). 35 3/

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world, scrupulously leaving open the question of whether contemporary Jews or Christians need to believe anything they might find in the Hebrew Bible. Preuss, for example, is apparently concerned only with emic studies of ancient Israel; he leaves modern confessional language to the disciplines of theological hermeneutics and fundamental theology.38 Only by ignoring these distinctions is Davies able to formulate his attack on Old Testament theology within the university. If the confessional language of Israel was declared inappropriate in universities, it is hard to see how even etic biblical studies would survive; what would be the object of study? All that would be left would be the material remains of ancient Palestine, excluding inscriptions with any religious language. Palestinian archaeology would survive, but not biblical studies. Leaving aside Davies' confused use of the emic/etic distinction, Whose Bible is it Anyway? amounts to the view that impartial scholarly discourse should not be polluted by an interpreter's theological commitments. Insofar as this view functions as a warning against simplistic accounts of biblical authority, Davies has a point. But he has over-stated his case. As indicated above, we now have a number of different models of how scholarly identity may be reflected in the normative stance of biblical theologians, and I would suggest that their arguments should be assessed premise by premise, not summarily dismissed because they have shown their confessional hand. Moreover, theological interests have been combined with a diversity of methodologies. Trible, Quids, and Watson focus their research on the final form, but in ways which express quite different theological orientations. Levenson and Gunneweg, on the other hand, illustrate a more historical approach, peppering their works with normative theological claims.39 One could also mention in this context historical monographs like Theodore Hiebert's work on the Yahwist, which provides a dialogue with ecological theology in the final chapter.40 Even Robert Gnuse's recent historical study, which sees early Israel, as far more polytheistic than the canonical texts seem to indicate, has a chapter in dialogue with process theology.41 Against Davies, it seems that there is no good reason to remove normative and theological claims from biblical studies in the uni» Preuss (1995), 1-2. •^ A. H. J. Gunneweg makes his Christian stance plainly evident while arguing that a theology of the Old Testament can only be undertaken as a historical discipline (1993), 34, a point which is emphasized in the subtitle of his book—Eine Rdigionsgeschichte Israels in biblisch-theologischer Sicht. However, in my view, Gunneweg's theological judgements are often pre-emptive, e.g., when he comments on the uses of Gen. 15: 6 in Rom. 4 and Gal. 3. 'Thus, the boundaries of the traditions were broken within universal Pauline theology, which also leaves behind the concreteness of land and progeny'. This not only begs the questions articulated by political and ecological theology, it also recycles an uncritical view of the meaning of universalism (see Levenson (1996)). « Hiebert (1996). '" GnuseO.997).

C A N O N I C A L C R I T I C I S M AMD OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY 73 versify. The substantive question is whether a normative stance has been well argued or not. Scholars are becoming increasingly aware, for example, that any normative claims have to pass through the fires of ideology criticism.42 Definitions of ideology are much disputed, but most biblical scholars would resist a purely negative concept of ideology as 'false consciousness'. Norman Habel provides a simple summary of this methodological issue in his outstanding contribution to the Overtures to Biblical Theology series, The Land is Mine: Six Biblical Land Ideologies. He distinguishes between theology as a set of doctrines or discourses about God and ideology as a wider complex of contested ideas, values, and symbols which shape and legitimate the social, economic, and political interests of a particular social group.43 An ideology may uphold the position of a dominant group, but it may also seek to counter the dominant group, or indeed other groups; it is the factor of socially-embodied contestation that is a characteristic feature of studies in ideology. The added dimension of ideology gives Habel's book a depth which is lacking in other treatments of land theologies, such as one finds in Preuss.44 The difference lies not simply in the fact that Preuss is constrained, to treat this particular topic within very few pages. Rather, he treats this topic like most others, providing only semantic notes and historical-critical summaries. He does not attempt to reconstruct the social location of biblical ideas, nor does he raise any hermeneutical questions. One should note, however, that even Habel directs his leading questions43 primarily at the biblical texts themselves; he wants to focus on the 'social force' of the canonical texts, rather than the historical realities behind the texts.46 Whether such a distinction between ideology and social history can be maintained, and whether it is theologically significant, must be considered a matter for further debate. One of the key issues in future research will, no doubt, be the relationship between theology, ideology, and history. A number of questions are at stake here: for example, can a theologically-motivated ideology criticism consistently restrict itself, as Watson suggests, to the 'final form' of the Bible and to its political history of effects? Is it possible, as Habel suggests, to study an ideology, and the group it serves, without committing oneself to a particular reconstruction of Israelite history? 42

In addition to Watson, see also Gottwald (1993); Chapman (1995). (1995), 10-13. 44 (1995), 117-28. 45 Among these questions are, (1) What are the dominant images of land? (2) Where is God located? (3) Whose interests are being served by the text under scrutiny? In the citybased vision of Deut. 4-11, for example, the land is seen as an undeserved gift or grant, God is a universal monarch, and the Levites have controlling interests. By contrast, the agrarian ideology of Lev. 25-27 envisages land as the extended sanctuary of Yhwh, God as a local landowner (rather than an absentee ruler in heaven), and the controlling interests lie with peasant farmers and priests. * Habel (1995), 5,15. 43

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If biblical scholars have been labouring under the assumption that systematic theologians will only be interested in theology in the narrow sense (explicit biblical discourse about God), it is time to put this assumption to rest. Schubert Ogden, for instance, begins his recent discussion of theology and biblical interpretation by noting that many scholars would distinguish between religion as a first-order activity of adverting to God (in worship, for example) and theology as critical reflection on a particular religion. Thus, 'Old Testament theology' might be conceived as critical reflection on the history of Israelite religion. Yet Ogden wants to be more inclusive than this: he wants to say that theology is not simply critical reflection on a 'religion', it also engages with other so-called secular forms of praxis and culture. Thus, Christian theology reflects upon the explicit expressions of biblical faith, but it may also include critical reflection on the social and cultural frameworks within which that faith is expressed.47 On his view, ideological criticism becomes part of theology itself, not a deeper and wider context for a narrowly conceived, and canonically regulated, depositum fidei. Many systematic theologians are therefore interested in ideology,48 not simply in theology in the narrow sense. Indeed, one might go further and concede that there may well be no theological claims which can be grasped independently of ideology— although a text passed down by tradition may be far removed from the ideological context of its production.49 While affirming the relative integrity of both biblical studies and systematics, Werner Jeanrond calls for a mutually-critical dialogue between the disciplines, explicitly welcoming the critique of ideology as an interpretative practice indispensable to systematic theology.50 The theological enterprise is not threatened by the question of ideology, partly because biblical scholars are no longer expected to provide the foundations of systematics.31 Although both 47

Ogden (1996), 175. * Note, however, the differences between Miibank (1990) and Chapman (1995). 49 See Schneiders (1989); Brett (1991), 135-67. Schneiders suggests that precisely because the biblical text has a 'surplus of meaning' (Ricoeur (1976), which makes it susceptible to multiple interpretations beyond those imagined by its authors, the text is able to elude the grasp of the social prejudices which produced it Even if it is true, for example, that creation theology in ancient Israel characteristically suited the interests of the powerful, today the situation is different: ecological theology is inimical to the interests of transnational capital, 3 " (1996). On the whole Hebrew Bible scholars have been wary of engaging in any sustained way with systematic theology, the outstanding exception being Childs (1993). The reverse is also true: while systematic theologians regularly make ad hoc use of Scripture, von Balthasar (1991) represents a rare, full-length study on an Old Testament theme. The demands and risks of interdisciplinary work are usually, and probably rightly, considered too great for one individual. The solution, however, is not to avoid the challenge of interdisciplinary research; we need actual dialogue, not just interdisciplinary monographs by individual scholars. 51 Cf. Ritschl (1986), who criticizes Claus Westermann for still assuming, as Gabler did, that biblical studies can provide such foundations.

C A N O N I C A L C R I T I C I S M AMD OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY 7t> Preuss and Childs tend to construe Old Testament theology as primarily concerned with explicit biblical discourse about God, systematic theologians are not necessarily so restricted in their focus. Even in contemporary hermeneutical theology, where David Tracy32 and George Lindbeck53 have fostered perhaps the most important debates, the Bible is hardly given an unquestioned foundational role. Tracy represents the schools of 'mediating' or 'correlational' theology in which there is a mutually-critical dialogue between classic texts and contemporary experience. Lindbeck's 'intratextual' theology, on the other hand, has often been understood as less dialogical: he construes doctrine as a kind of grammar of Scripture and suggests that Scripture should 'absorb the world', rather than the other way around. This gives a clear priority to biblical conceptualities, but Lindbeck insists that these may be supplanted or displaced 'for the sake of greater faithfulness, intelligibility or efficaciousness'.54 The biblical tolerance of slavery is a paradigm case where critique is necessary. Even where Lindbeck advocates the logical priority of the biblical narrative, as in his argument for ecclesiology as Israelology',55 he does not assume that the Bible is straightforwardly applicable today. He finds it necessary to argue carefully for the applicability of this biblical model, comparing and contrasting it with traditional Christian ecclesiologies, and identifying the features of our contemporary context that make it newly appropriate. In particular, in arguing that Christians see themselves as part of Israel's story, he is careful to avoid any implications of supercessionism. While some would see an affinity between 'intratextual' theology and the canonical approach,56 it is important to see this affinity in a wider context: there is as much diversity amongst systematic theologians as there is amongst biblical scholars, and different styles of biblical criticism will be suited to different theological projects.57 Some of the recent historical works on Israelite religion may be as valuable for systematic theology as works which carry in their title 'Old Testament theology' or 'biblical theology'. If theological discourse is seen as part of a social process, always responding to new contexts, then a history of religion may well be regarded as an appropriate illustration of that process.*8 Similarly, if Old Testament theology incorporates the study of ideology, then the case for blending theological reflection with the history of religion is greatly strengthened, as is the case for the disciplined use of the social sciences.39 If, on the other hand, a theologian regards the biblical narratives as constitutive of contemporary religious identity, then narrative criticism may be 52

53 (1981). (1984). ss Ibid,, 182. (1989). 56 Brett (1991), 156-64. 57 See Kelsey (1975); Ollenburger (1995). 58 Cf. Gnuse (1997). 5 » Cf. Mayes (1989); Milbank (1990); Chapman (1995). 54

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more informative.60 In this respect, the dispute in biblical studies over the significance of 'history' has its parallel also in systematic theology.61 Whatever one makes of the differences between historical and narratological modes of systematic theology, David Tracy62 has rightly stressed the importance of literary form as central to current theological debates. Even if narrative theologians have been guilty of focusing too much on only one form of literature (especially 'realistic narrative'}, Tracy suggests that they have rightly resisted the modernist model of theological reflection as a process of abstracting doctrinal concepts from the diverse literary forms of the biblical literature. Where the modernists regarded abstract concepts the most appropriate means for articulating theology (biblical language about God being reduced to more fundamental rational categories like 'the Absolute' or 'the Infinite'}, postmodern theologians are apt to regard the preference for abstract propositions as a predilection for one kind, of literary form. Tracy's argument for a recovery of literary diversity in naming God offers fresh promise for theological reflection on the significance of biblical form criticism. Within biblical studies, form criticism has usually been linked to historical quests—such as the tracing of traditions and the identification of Sitze im Leben—but with the advent of postmodern theology the question of literary form reappears with renewed theological significance. Ironically, the so-called Biblical Theology Movement shared a weakness with modernist theology insofar as this movement within biblical studies can also be charged with a kind of insensitivity to the diversity of literary forms. While many biblical scholars of the 1940s and 1950s opposed the abstractions of dogmatic theology to the concreteness and particularity of God's mighty acts in history, the focus on history tended to exclude the theological relevance of the diversity of biblical genres.63 Innumerable studies have now highlighted the theological value of a range of forms, for example, blessings,64 wisdom,65 law,66 myth,67 creation narratives and poems,68 metaphor,69 psalms,70 and narrative representations of God.71 Indeed, it is a sign of the changing winds within biblical studies that one of the most important accounts of the genre of historiography has been provided by a literary critic.72 The time has long passed when the theological value of a biblical text was seen to reside almost *° Frei (1974); Perdue (1994), 231-42. 61 Thus, for example, Milbank (1990), 385-6, charges intratextual theology with being ahistorical: the biblical materials are seen as too diverse to be reduced to a few, Invariant 'grammatical' rules. See further, Brett (1998). 62 (1994); following especially Ricoeur 0980). 63 See Reventlow (1985); Barr (1985); Perdue (1994). 6* Westermann<1978). 65 ( Clements (1992). * Crusemann (19%b). 67 Rogerson (1974). «* Anderson (1994); Levenson (1987). 69 70 Trible (1978). Brueggemann (1995); Lindstrom (1994). 71 72 Patrick (1981). Sternberg (1985); cf. Watson (1997), 41-69.

C A N O N I C A L C R I T I C I S M AMD OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY 77 exclusively in its historicity. Such historical reductionism is no more defensible than modernist theological abstractions. Accordingly, Walter Brueggemann's recent major work is selfconfessedly postmodern in its resistance to abstract reductionism and 'universalizing closure'.73 But Brueggemann also emphasizes that readers have no access to the events behind the text; nothing more historical or ontological is available, only the biblical witnesses.74 His dominant metaphor for biblical theology is the language of the court: the Hebrew Bible is conceived as a series of competing voices or testimonies about God's action and absence. Thus, apart from Israel's 'core' testimony about Yahweh's transforming power and faithfulness, Israel's 'countertestimony'75 points to the hiddenness and dark side of God.76 These plural testimonies, Brueggemann argues, constitute the 'profound conflict and disputation through which Israel arrives at its truth claims'.77 Yet in spite of his theoretical gestures towards postmodernism and the details of his exegetical observations, Brueggemann frequently reduces heterogeneous material to recurring themes, condensing Ms interpretations without regard to the diversity of traditions from which they are drawn. Thus, in a moving poetic summary, he can say: 'The God who delivers (ys', pdh, 'lh, gl) is the God who can disrupt any circumstance of social bondage and exploitation, overthrow ruthless orderings of public life, and authorize new circumstances of dancing freedom, dignity, and justice.'78 We should not lose sight of the fact that such a conclusion cannot be reached without considerable powers of abstraction. But unlike some of Brueggemann's claims,79 every word in this summary can been related to specific texts which use the Hebrew verbs indicated. Even though the range of texts includes various genres (in all three sections of the canon: Torah, Prophets, and Writings) the scale of abstraction in this case is comparatively modest. There has been no attempt to summarize a whole section of the canon, still less the canon as a whole. Nor has the material been organized under the conventional doctrinal categories of Soteriology, Anthropology, and Theology. But this is biblical soteriology 73 (1997), si-2. 74 Ibid., 121, 206. 75 The language of 'counter-testimony' is derived from Emil Fackenheim (1989), 11. In the light of Levenson's important argument explaining Jewish reservations concerning biblical theology {(1993a), 33-61; cf. Goshen-Gottstein (1987); Kalimi (1997)), it is intriguing to notice how much Brueggemann's work exhibits Jewish influence in his emphasis on biblical diversity (e.g. (1997), 80-83,325-32). See also Jochen Motte's illuminating argument showing how both Walter Zimmerli and Emil Brunner were decisively influenced by Martin Buber's philosophy of personal address, which rejected prepositional models of divine revelation (Motte (1995), 112-18). 76 On which see also Terrien (1978); Balentine (1983); Crenshaw (1984). 77 (1997), xvi. 78 Ibid., 208. 79 See, for example, his desire to reduce Old Testament theology to bipolar tensions (in Brueggemann. (1985) and (1992), 95-110).

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nonetheless. The most important question is not whether Brueggemann's readerly interests have been defined by an external category borrowed from systematic theology; rather, the question should be whether, by defining his readerly interest as one semantic field, Brueggemann has fairly summarized the relevant texts. Unfortunately, the quest for grander abstractions is still alive, even though there are no rigorous criteria for evaluating them. Thus, we find largely fruitless debates over whether the broadest theological framework governing the Hebrew Bible is election or creation. And the quest for the 'centre' of the Hebrew Bible continues,80 even amongst scholars who define their methods as thoroughly historical. Thus, to take two recent German examples, Preuss81 defines the centre of Old Testament faith as 'YHWH's historical activity of electing Israel for communion with his world and the obedient activity required of this people (and the nations).' Otto Kaiser similarly asserts that the Torah is the secret centre of the Hebrew Bible, stressing that obedience is not the foundation, but rather, the preservation of Israel's existence as the people of God. Moreover, he takes a poetic step towards universalizing this centre, suggesting that the connection between election and obligation is the 'fundamental structure of human existence in general, because every life in every moment is simultaneously gift and task'.82 However illuminating we find these insights from Preuss and Kaiser it is strikingly evident that they both fall within Brueggemann's category of 'core testimony', and they leave the darkness of counter-testimony significantly unspoken. With the advent of reader-oriented criticism and postmodernism, it has become increasingly clear that biblical interpretation is a dialogue which is at least in part determined by readers' questions. But some questions can be answered more responsibly than others, and some are just badly formulated. Why scholars should be asking about the 'centre' of the Hebrew Bible is surely one of the questions which should be dropped. The discipline has been dominated by an assumption that a theology must be comprehensive,83 and in its most extreme form, this desire for comprehensiveness is reflected in the quest for a 'centre'. Moreover, the discipline seems to have inherited Gabler's assumption that a theology with lasting significance would need to be articulated in abstract form, purified of diversity. Given that these assumptions are no longer valid, it comes as no surprise to find that there is a vast range of 'theological' studies with goals which are more modest. The discipline may, in due course, turn out to be more comfortable with partial perspectives, whether focused, on a particu80

See the literature reviews in Base! (1991); Reventlow (1985). (1995), 25. 82 Kaiser 0993), 351. 83 Krtierirn (1995), 2-7, criticizes the holistic pretensions both of canonical approaches and tradition history. 81

C A N O N I C A L C R I T I C I S M AMD OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY 79 lar book84 or on particular themes. Space prohibits mentioning more than a few examples:85 James Barr, whose incisive critical mind has enriched biblical studies both in the areas of semantics and theology, has recently published innovative work on the issues of resurrection and immortality86 and of natural theology.87 Donald Gowan has provided an illuminating study of eschatology from a 'final form' point of view.88 Paul Hanson and Samuel Terrien have provided, helpful studies, encompassing both Testaments, which have focused more historically on the theme of community89 and gender.**0 Terence Fretheim's work on the suffering of God (1984) provides a valuable biblical account of a major theme in recent systematic theology. Given these, and many other studies, one might be forgiven for thinking that the days when we expect the theology of the Old Testament to fit within two covers, or even within two volumes, have passed. Should the recent major works, like Childs (1992) and Brueggemann (1997), then be dismissed as anachronisms, reflecting a modernist desire for completeness? In my view, such a conclusion would be too swift. Even if such works are overly grand in their scope, and even if we find much with which to disagree, Childs and Brueggemann have rendered valuable service to the discipline. While readers may be entirely justified in choosing their angle of vision on the biblical literature,91 one can still ask how the various parts of the canon, or aspects of Israelite tradition, relate to each other and to the religious traditions which preserve them. Some of Brueggemann's thinking reaches a level of critical theological reflection which is difficult to find, in other work. When, for example, he describes human obedience as a proper response to Yhwh's sovereignty, glory, and self-regard, he gives an accurate, and one-sided, description of biblical tradition. When he says that God enters into a pathos-filled relationship with Israel, risking solidarity in a way 'which seems regularly to qualify, if not subvert, Yahweh's sovereignty and self-regard', Brueggemann has captured another part of biblical tradition.92 But when he goes on to say that a mature humanity also needs the courage of selfregard and self-assertion,93 as well as the confidence to yield to the divine partner, this fresh idiom provides a valuable reframing of the other 84

Exemplary would be Moberly on Genesis (1992) and Olson on Deuteronomy (1994). For a judicious collection of topical essays from major contributors in the field see Ollenburger el fil (1992). » (1992); cf. Ollenburger (1993). 87 m 8 (1993). (1986). " Hanson (1986), *" Terrien 0985). 91 Indeed, the discipline would be enriched by engaging more with questions generated by contemporary practical concerns. Even though it bears on very few biblical texts, some of the recent research on homosexuality is exemplary (e.g. in Brawley (1996)), Similarly, Habel (1995) is explicitly motivated by a contemporary political issue: the land rights of Aboriginal Australians. In this respect, Mabel's book conforms to the paradigm of liberation theology, discussed, by Perdue (1994), 69-109; cf. Gottwald (1993). See also Lohfrnk (1982) for engagen ment with a range of contemporary concerns. (1997), 296. 93 Brueggeman's phrase the 'courage to assert7 echoes Robert Davidson's title The Courage to Doubt (1983), Of relevance here are the traditions such as Job's complaints, the psalms of lament, and Jeremiah's confessions, within which we find vigorous arguments with God. ss

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perspectives, A knowledge of classical Christian tradition then becomes essential to his theological evaluation of this set of issues: as a result of the tradition's failure to grasp the pathos and vulnerability of Yhwh's fidelity, 'the dominant Christian tradition has not fully appreciated the way in which the dialectic of assertion and abandonment in the human person is a counterpart to the unsettled interiority of Yahweh's sovereignty and fidelity. It seems to me that the classical Christian tradition must relearn this aspect of the interaction of God and human persons from its Jewish counterpart."*4 Here the Hebrew Bible scholar steps out of the safety of descriptive discourse and invites the widest range of ecumenical critique. While a smaller focus on particular themes is indisputably valuable, Brueggemann's larger scope will be necessary when one seeks some account of the tensions and interactions, both within the Bible itself and within post-biblical traditions. Once one begins to encompass the wider canvas of biblical texts and post-biblical traditions, all the questions of contemporary hermeneutics return. If Old Testament theology is to include critical reflection on Israelite and Christian religion in all its diversity, then the scope of the task is inherently inter-disciplinary and dialogical. Even Brueggemann has narrowed his task somewhat—in implicit agreement with Childs— insofar as he regards the history of Israelite religion as largely irrelevant to his theological task; the diversity of the biblical testimonies is Brueggemann's overriding concern.*' Scholars such as Albertz and Gnuse would not agree with this canonical framing of the task, and they would have Schubert Ogden's view of theological reflection to support them. However, insofar as we have a discipline called Old Testament Theology (or 'Theology of the Hebrew Bible'), it would seem that the biblical texts will be the focus of the task. Whether this is a theologically valuable task is a question practitioners in the field will need to debate not only with historians of religion, but also with Jewish philosophers and Christian theologians. The question probably cannot be answered in general terms; it will depend on the particular issues at stake and on the context of dialogue. 94

Brueggemann (1997), 459. »5 Ibid., 123,264.

C A N O N I C A L C R I T I C I S M AMD OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY 81 Bibliography ALBERTZ, R. (1995), 'Religionsgeschichte Israels statt Theologie des Alien Testaments', JBTh 10,3-24, ANDERSON, B. W, (1994), From Creation to Neto Creation (Minneapolis: Fortress Press). BALENTINE, S. (1983), The Hidden God: The Hiding of the Face of God in the Old Testament (Oxford: Oxford. University Press). BALTHASAR, H. U. von (1991), The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, vol. 6: Theology—The Old Covenant (Edinburgh: T & T Clark). BARR, ]. (1983), Holy Scripture: Canon, Authority, Criticism (Oxford: Clarendon Press). — (1985), The Theological Case Against Biblical Theology', in Cation, Theology and OT Interpretation, ed, G. M, Tucker et at, (Philadelphia: Fortress Press), 3-19. -—(1992), The Garden of Eden and the Hope of Immortality (London: SCM Press). — (1993), Biblical Faith and Natural Theology (Oxford: Clarendon Press). BARTHELEMY, D. (1991), 'La Critique Canonique', Revue de LTnstitut Catholique de Paris 36,191-218. BARTON, J, (1986), Oracles of God: Perceptions of Ancient Prophecy in Israel after the Exile (London: Darfon, Longman & Todd). •—(1997), The Spirit and the Letter: Studies in the Biblical Canon (London: SPCK). BLENKTNSOPP, J. (1977), Prophecy and Canon (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press). BRAWLEY, R. L. (1996) (ed.), Biblical Ethics and Homosexuality (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press). BRETT, M. G. (1991), Biblical Criticism in Crisis? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). — (1998), 'Biblical Studies and Theology: Negotiating the Intersections', Biblnt 6: 131-41. BRUEGGBMANN, W. (1978), The Prophetic Imagination (Philadelphia: Fortress Press). (1985), 'A Shape for Old Testament Theology, I: Structure Legitimation; II: The Embrace of Pain', CBQ 47, 28-46; 395-415. — (1992), Old Testament neology: Essays on Structure, Theme and Text (Minneapolis: Fortress Press). (1995), The Psalms and the Life of faith (Minneapolis: Fortress Press). — (1997), Old Testament neology: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy (Minneapolis: Fortress Press). CHAPMAN, M. (1995), 'Ideology, Theology and Sociology: From Kautsky to Meeks', in The Bible in Ethics, ed. J. W. Rogerson et al (JSOTS 207; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press), 41-65. CHILDS, B. S. (1974), Exodus: A Commentary (London: SCM Press). (1985), Old Testament Theology in a Canonical Context (London: SCM Press). •—(1993), Biblical neology of the Old and New Testaments: Theological Reflections on the Christian Bible (Minneapolis: Fortress Press). CLEMENTS, R. E. (1978), Old Testament Theology: A fresh Approach (London: Marshall, Morgan & Scott). — (1992), Wisdom in Theology (Carlisle: Paternoster Press).

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COLLINS, J. J. (1990), 'Is a Critical Biblical Theology Possible?' in The Hebrew Bible and Its Interpreters, ed. W. Propp ei al. (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns), 1-17. CRAFFERT, P. (1996), 'On New Testament Interpretation and Ethnocentrism', in Ethnicity and the Bible, ed. M. G. Brett (Leiden: E, J. Brill), 449-68. CRENSHAW, J. L. (1984), A Whirlpool, of Torment: Israelite Traditions of God as an Oppressive Presence (Philadelphia: Fortress Press). CRUSEMANN, F. (1996a), 'Human Solidarity and Ethnic Identity: Israel's Selfdefinition in the Genealogical System of Genesis', in Ethnicity and the Bible, ed. M. G. Brett (Leiden: E. J. Brill), 57-76. — (1996b), Tlie Torah; Theology and Social History of Old Testament Law (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark). Trans, of Die Torah: Theologie and Sozialgesdiiehte des alttestamentliche Gesetzes (Munich: Kaiser, 1992). DAVIDSON, R. (1983), The Courage to Doubt (London: SCM Press). DAVIBS, P. R, (1995), Wlwse Bible is it Anyway? (JSOTS 204; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press). EICHRODT, W. (1961), Theology of the Old Testament Vol.1 (London: SCM Press). Trans, of Theologie des Alien Testaments, Teil I (Stuttgart: Klotz, 6th edn. 1959). FACKENHEIM, E. (1989), To Mend the World: Foundations of Post-Holocaust Thought (New York: Schocken). FISHBANE, M. (1985), Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel (Oxford: Clarendon Press). FLINT, P. (1993), The Psalters at Qutnran and the Book of Psalms (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press). FOWL, S, E. (1996) (ed.), The Theological Interpretation of Scripture: Classic and Contemporary Readings (Oxford: Blackwell). PREI, H. (1974), The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative (New Haven: Yale University Press). FRETHEIM, T. (1984), The Suffering of God: an Old Testament Perspective (Philadelphia: Fortress Press). GBSE, H. (1981), Essays on Biblical Theology (Minneapolis: Augsburg). Trans, of Zur MMischen Theologie: Alttesfanentliche Vortriige (Munich: Kaiser, 1977). GNUSE, R. (1997), No Other Gods: Emergent Monotheism in Israel (JSOTS 241; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press). GOLDBERG, M. (1981), Theology and Narrative (Nashville: Abingdon Press). GOLDINGAY, J. (1987), Theological Diversity and the Authority of the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans). GosHEN-GoTTSTKiN, M. (1987), 'Tanakh Theology', in Ancient Israelite Religion, ed. P. D. Miller et al. (Philadelphia: Fortress Press), 617-44. GOTTWALD, N. (1993), The Hebrew 'Bible in its Social World and in Ours (Atlanta: Scholars Press). GOWAN, D, (1986), Eschatology in the Old Testament (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark). GRAHAM, W. A. (1987), Beyond the Written Word: Oral Aspects of Scripture in the History of Religions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). GREENBLATT, S. and GUNNT, G. (1992) (eds.), Redrawing the Boundaries: The Transformation of English and American Literary Studies (New York: Modern Language Association). GUNNEWEG, A. H. J. (1993), Biblische Theologie des Alten Testaments (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer).

C A N O N I C A L C R I T I C I S M AMD OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY 83 HABEL, N. (1995), The Land is Mine: Six Biblical Land Ideologies (Minneapolis: Augsburg). HANSON, P, (1986), The People Called; Tlie Growth of Community in the Bible (San Francisco: Harper & Row). HASEL, G. (1991), Old Testament Theology: Basic Issues in the Current Debate (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 4th edn.). HEADLAND, T. N., PIKE, K. L. and HARRIS, M. (1990), Ernies and Etics: Tlie Insider/ Outsider Debate (Newbury Park: Sage). HIBBERT, T. (1996), The Yahwist's Landscape: Nature and Religion in Early Israel (Oxford: Oxford University Press). IGGERS, G. (1968), The German Conception of History (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press). JEANROND, W. (1996), 'Criteria for New Biblical Theologies', Journal of Religion 76: 233-49, KAISER, O. (1993), Der Gott des Allen Testaments: Theologie des Allen Testaments, Teil 1 (Gdttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht). KALIMI, I. (1997), 'History of Israelite Religion or Old Testament "Theology? Jewish Interest in Biblical Theology', S/OT 11:110-23. KELSBY, D. (1975), The Uses of Scripture in Recent neology (London: SCM Press). KNIERIM, R, (1995), The Task of Old Testament Theology: Method and Cases (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans). RUNG, H. (1992), Judaism: The Religious Situation of our Time (London: SCM Press). Trans, of Die Religiose Situation tier Zeit: Das Judenlum (Munich: Piper, 1991). LEVENSON, J, (1987), Creation and (he Persistence of Evil: Tlie Jewish Drama of Divine Omnipotence (New York: Harper & Row). — (1993a), The Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament and Historical Criticism (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press). — (1993b), The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son: The Transformation of Child Sacrifice in Judaism and Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press). — (1996), 'The Universal Horizon of Biblical Particularism', in Ethnicity and the Bible, ed. M. G. Brett (Leiden: E. J. Brill), 143-69. LINDBECK, G. (1984), Tlie Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (London: SPCK). — (1989), 'The Church', in Keeping the Faith, ed. G. Wainright (London: SPCK), 179-201. LINDSTROM, F. (1994), Suffering and Sin: Interpretation of Illness in the Individual Complaint Psalms (Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell). LOHFINK, N. (1982), Great Themes from the Old Testament (Edinburgh: T, & T, Clark). Trans, of Unsere Grossen Worter: Das Alte Testament zu Themen dieserjahre (Freiburg: Herder, 1977). MAYBS, A. (1989), The Old Testament in Sociological Perspective (London: Marshall Pickering). MEINECKE, F. (1972), Historism (London, Routledge & Kegan Paul). MILBANK, J. (1990), Theology and Social Theory (Oxford: Blackwell). MOBERLY, W. (1992), The Old Testament of the Old Testament (Minneapolis: Fortress Press). MOTTE, J. (1995), Biblische Theologie nach Waltfier Zimmerli (Frankfurt: Peter Lang). NOBLE, P. (1996), The Canonical Approach (Leiden: E. J. Brill).

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OEMING, M. (1985), Gesarnibiblische Theologien der Cegenwart (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer). OGDEN, S. (1996), Theology and Biblical Interpretation', Journal of Religion 76:17288. OLLENBURGER, B. C, (1993), 'If Mortals Die, Will They Live Again? The Old Testament and Resurrection', Ex Auditu 9: 29-44,. — (1995), 'Old Testament Theology: A Discourse on Method', in Biblical Theology: Problems and Perspectives, ed. S. J, Kraftchick el al (Nashville: Abingdon), 81-103. OLLENBURCEK, B. C. et al. (1992) (eds.), The Flowering of Old Testament Tlteology (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns). OLSON, D. (1994), Deuteronomy and the Death of Moses (Minneapolis: Fortress Press). PATRICK, D. (1981), The Rendering of God in the Old Testament (Philadelphia: Fortress Press). PERDUE, L. (1994), The Collapse of History; Reconstructing Old Testament Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press). PREUSS, H. D. (1995, 1996), Old Testament Theology 2 vols (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark). Trans, of Theologie des Alien Testaments (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1991, 1992). RENDTORFF, R, (1985), The Old Testament: An Introduction (London: SCM Press). Trans, of Das Alte Testament; Eine Einfiihrung (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1983). — (1993), Canon and Theology: Overtures to an Old Testament Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press). Trans, of Kanon und Theologie: Vorarbeiten zu enter Theologie des Alten Testaments (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1991). REVENTLOW, H. G. (1985), Problems of Old Testament Theology in the Twentieth Century (London: SCM Press). Trans, of Hauptprobleine der alttestmnenllichen Theologie irn 20, jahrhundert (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1982). RICOEUR, P. (1976), Interpretation neon/: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University). — (1980), 'Toward a Hermeneutk of the Idea of Revelation', in Ricoeur, Essays on Biblical Interpretation, ed. Lewis S. Mudge (Philadelphia: Fortress Press), 73-118. RITSCHL, D. (1986), '"Wahre", "reine" oder "neue" Biblische Theologie?', JBTh I: 135-50 ROGERSON, ], (1974), Myth in Old Testament Interpretation (Berlin: de Gruyter). SANDERS, J. (1968), 'Cave 11 Surprises and the Question of Canon', McCormick Quarterly Review 32: 284-98. — (1984), Canon and Community (Philadelphia: Fortress Press). — (1987), From Sacred Story to Sacred Text (Minneapolis: Fortress Press). •—(1995), 'Scripture as Canon for Post-Modern Times', BTB 25: 56-63. SANDYS-WUNSCH, J. and ELDRBDGE, L. (1980), 'J. P. Gabler and the Distinction between Biblical and Dogmatic Theology: Translation, Commentary, and Discussion of His Originality', S/T 33:133-58. SCHNEIDERS, S. (1989), 'Feminist Ideology Criticism and Biblical Hermeneutics', BTB 19: 3-10. SHEPPARD, G. (1980), Wisdom as a Hermeneutical Construct (Berlin: de Gruyter). SMITH, J. Z. (1982), 'Sacred Persistence: Toward, a Redescription of Canon', in Smith, Imagining Religion (Chicago: Chicago University Press), 36-52.

C A N O N I C A L C R I T I C I S M AMD OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY 85 SMITH, W. C. (1993), What is Scripture? (Minneapolis: Fortress Press). STBRNTORG, M. (1985), The Poetics of Biblical Narrative (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), TAYLOR, C. (1985), 'Understanding and Ethnocentrism', in Taylor, Philosophy and the Human Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 116-33. — (1992), The Politics of Recognition', in Multicultumlism and 'The Politics of Recognition', ed. A. Gutman (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 25-73. TBRRIEN, S. (1978), The Elusive Presence: Toward a New Biblical Theology (New York: Harper & Row). — (1985), Till the Heart Sings: A Biblical Theology of Manhood and Womanhood (Philadelphia: Fortress Press). TRACY, D. (1981), The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism (New York: Crossroad). —— (1994), 'Literary Theory and the Return of the Forms for Naming and Thinking God in Theology', Journal of Religion 74; 302-19. TRTBLE, P. (1978), God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality (Philadelphia: Fortress Press). (1989), 'Five Loaves and Two Fishes: Feminist Hermeneutics and Biblical Theology', Tlieological Studies 50: 279-95. WACKER, M.-T. (1995), ' "Religionsgeschichte Israels" oder "Theologie des Alien Testaments"^(k)eine Alternative?', JBTh 10:129-55. WATSON, F. (1994), Text, Church and World: Biblical Interpretation in Theological Perspective (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark). -— (1996), 'Bible, Theology and University', /SOT 71:3-16. — (1997), Text and Truth: Redefining Biblical Theology (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark). WESTERMANN, C. (1978), Blessing in the Bible and in the Life of the Church (Philadelphia: Fortress Press). Trans, of Der Segen in der Bibel mid im Handeln der Kirche (Munich: Kaiser, 1968). (1982), Elements of Old Testament Theology (Atlanta: John Knox). Trans, of Theologie des Allen Testaments in Grundziigen (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1978). WILSON, G. H. (1985), The Editing of the Hebrew Psalter (Chico: Scholars Press). WOLTERSTOREF, N, (1995), Drome Discourse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). ZIMMERLI, W. (1978), Old Testament Theology in Outline (Atlanta: John Knox). Trans, of Grundriss der alttestamentlichen Theologie (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1972).

4

Feminist Study of the Old Testament ]. CHERYL EXUM IT is a commonplace to begin survey articles such as this one with a disclaimer about the impossibility of surveying the field adequately and categorizing the material suitably; were this not especially true in the case of feminist study of the Hebrew Bible, I would not mention it. Feminist biblical criticism is neither a discipline nor a method, but rather an approach, or, better, a multiplicity of approaches, informed not so much by the biblical texts themselves but rather by the interests and concerns of feminism as a worldview and as a political enterprise. There is a danger in trying to classify an ever increasing body of scholarly literature that rejects notions of methodological unity and principles of univocality and that is constantly slipping across disciplinary boundaries in the hope of disrupting them, if not breaking them down altogether. Feminist criticism is one of the most significant intellectual developments in this century. Mieke Bal has identified its systematic emphasis on the ideological position of the scholar as its most valuable contribution.1 Mary Ann Tolbert described this situation well in one of the early collections of feminist studies of biblical texts: I suggest that the fiction of an objective reading of a text asserts itself when the biases guiding the interpreter match closely the biases undergirding the evaluating group. Subjective interpretations, then, are ones which deviate from those views. Thus, the objective/subjective polemic is revealed to be a form of ideological pressure to concur with the dominant perspective. While few biblical scholars are so out of touch with modern philosophical positions on these issues as to claim pure objectivity as a goal, the hint that one's work is really eisegesis rather than exegesis remains the most damning of criticisms. Hence, feminist hertneneutics is not the deviant, subjective position to be contrasted to hermeneutics (no adjective), the objective, value-neutral position of the group in power. No value-neutral position exists nor ever has.2 ! 2

(1989). Tolbert (1983), 118.

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Interpretation is not disinterested. Any particular interpretation is the result of the kind of questions the scholar asks of the material, and those questions are determined by the scholar's interests, acknowledged or not. Feminist critics are more likely than most to admit their ideological presuppositions. The fundamental recognition of the constructedness of history, of gender, and even of the self that feminist criticism shares with other postmodern approaches (for which it has been a stimulus and by which it is informed) is what makes its challenge to the dominant paradigms of so-called 'objective' biblical scholarship so compelling and its contributions so important for revitalizing the discipline.3 Feminist work on the Hebrew Bible is vast and growing not simply in quantity but in analytical rigour and critical sophistication as well. Pluralism—the recognition that there is no single 'correct' way to read a text or to assess the historical evidence—and interdisciplinarity are the hallmarks of the best of the recent spate of books and articles. In this volume written by members of a British professional society primarily for an academic readership, I shall focus on recent developments in the academic study of the Hebrew Bible, but I ask the reader to keep in mind that feminist study of the Hebrew Bible is not isolatable from feminist hermeneutics, and thus feminist theology,4 or from feminist study of the New Testament,5 of the Greco-Roman world,6 or of the ancient Near East7 There has long been fruitful cross-fertilization among these areas. Examples of feminist criticism can be found in all areas that we classify under the rubric of biblical studies; it has been applied to all parts of the canon as well as to extra-canonical literature; feminist critical articles and reviews appear in all the major journals in the field (they are more in evidence in journals that feature contemporary approaches, such as the Journal for the Study of the Old Testament, Semeia, and Biblical Interpretation), yet feminist study of the Bible is still marginalized in some quarters. Feminist biblical criticism is not widely practised in the UK (feminist theology fares better); there was, however, a session on feminist criticism at the summer meeting of the Society for Old Testament Study in Edinburgh in 1994. Much feminist biblical criticism to date comes out of North America, which is not surprising since more women hold academic positions in North America than elsewhere. Important work is currently being done by German feminists, but ecclesiastical-political factors play a role in determining their freedom to explore new avenues of investigation, Israeli and Dutch feminist biblical criticism is represented in Athalya Brenner's 3 The postmodern approaches I have in mind here include the work of Foucault, Jameson, Lacan, Kristeva, and Derrida. 4 For a useful overview up to 1991, see Thistelthwaite and Eugene (1991); see also Camp (1993). 5 Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza's work, in particular, has been especially influential. 6 See, e.g., Kraemer (1983a) and (1983W; Brooten (1982); Levine 0994); and the articles in Levine (1991) (ed.) and Schussler Fiorenza (1994) (ed.). 7 E.g., Lesko (1989) (ed.); Fontaine (1990).

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outstanding ten-volume Feminist Companion to the Bible, The revolutionary contributions of French feminism (e.g., Irigaray, Cixous) are not much in evidence in biblical studies,8 though the work of Julia Kristeva on the abominations of Leviticus has become something of a classic in biblical studies and her work has influenced that of biblical scholars (a particularly fine example is Landy).9 Feminist study of the Bible has mainly been conducted by women. This is not surprising since, as a group that has been systematically excluded both from the historical record and from the process of interpreting that record (see below), women have more at stake. Nevertheless, the fact that masculinity is as much a social construction as femininity means that men have an interest as well in investigating the effect of a society's gender roles and expectations on people's lives from ancient times to the present. In criticizing David Jobling's prescriptions for the feminist agenda,10 Alice Bach suggests that male critics may be well advised to discover the beam in their own eye rather than debate the mote in ours (the metaphorical reference is mine). Why, she asks, is there 'an absence of male critics' concern with cultural concepts of masculinity'?11 Some male critics are now dealing specifically with cultural concepts of masculinity, and 1 will return to them in discussing gender studies below. In general, men have understandably entered the feminist debate with caution, and this survey will also not deal with scholars such as David Clines,12 David Gunn in collaboration with Danna Fewell,13 Norman Gottwald,14 and Francis Landy,15 whose work is influenced by feminist criticism but who are not setting the feminist agenda. A question faced by the feminist biblical critic is, what, if anything, can be learned about women in antiquity from an admittedly patriarchal text like the Bible? Although historically women have shared equally with men in the building of civilization and in the preservation and transmission of culture, women's contributions and concerns do not receive equal treatment in the historical record. Women have also been excluded from the vital process of interpreting that record, the process of assigning meaning to the past. Symbolic production, the creation of symbol systems and the interpretation of culture, has been controlled by men.16 The exclusion and marginalization of women that we find in the biblical literature is repeated in the history of biblical interpretation, where men have traditionally set the agenda. Men pursued formal study of the Bible, and they decided what sorts of questions should be addressed to the text and what sort of answers were legitimate'.17 Only recently have women been in s 11

14

See Prevost (1995) (ed.). Bach (1993c), 192.

'' See also Beal (1994). (1990).

u

10

Jobling (1991). ™ Gunn and Fewell (1993),

15 16 (1985), (1995). See Lerner (1986), 4-6,199-211. '" This is not to deny women's engagement with the Bible; I am speaking not of individual use of the Bible but about public use and the institutions'—such as the academy, the synagogue, or the church—that 'authorize' interpretation. With regard to 'legitimacy',

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positions to challenge established doctrines and to influence the course of biblical interpretation. Before taming to recent trends and developments in feminist study of the Hebrew Bible, I would like to draw the reader's attention to additional resources that give a sense of the development of feminist biblical study in general and that attest to its diversity. For those interested in historical background, there are what Bach called, with some exaggeration, 'the annual roundups' assessing feminist contributions. Reading through them, one can see both how the key issues have shifted over the years and how the body of literature is growing. The early surveys of Sakenfeld18 focus on issues of theological hermeneutics from a Protestant Christian feminist perspective, the dominant perspective of the time; thus the question of biblical authority looms rather large, while the bibliography is rather small. Tolbert, who shares Sakenfeld's stance within the Christian tradition, examines hermeneutical issues with precision and breadth, placing them within a wider academic context.19 In her 1990 article, she applies Elaine Showalter's three stages in the development of literary criticism to feminist biblical study, both literary and historical. Hackett offers a five-stage development model of women and history against which she sets feminist study of the Hebrew Bible.20 Milne21 and Fewell22 both focus on feminist interpretation of Genesis 2-3, which has been a key site for feminist critique and debate;23 they also provide more general assessments.24 The overviews by Anderson25 and Bach26 are excellent and highly recommended for their critical responses to recent developments. Anderson surveys 'the American scene' and discusses three influential critics, Phyllis Trible, Elisabeth Schiissler Fiorenza, and Mieke Bal. Bach offers a lively and. trenchant critique of recent feminist criticism, with a strong emphasis on work in Hebrew Bible, and a substantial, useful bibliography that includes feminist theory and feminist work in classics. In addition to these survey articles, there are some fine collected volumes of feminist biblical criticism. The collections of Tolbert,27 Russell,28 Collins,29 and Bach* all contain essays on the Hebrew Bible. Of these, Drorah Setel's article remains relevant for the current debate on prophetic Jonathan Culler (1982), 61, observes that the criticism of a patriarchal culture is likely to display "a great concern about which meanings were legitimate and which illegitimate (since the paternal author's role in the generation of meanings can only be inferred); and that criticism would expend great efforts to develop principles for, on the one hand, determining which meanings were truly the author's own progeny, and on the other hand, controlling intercourse with texts so as to prevent the proliferation of illegitimate interpretations'. 1(4 (1982); (1985); (1989). >9 Tolbert (1983); (1990). 2) Hackett (1987). 21 2 (1989). - (1993). 23 See especially Trible (1978); Meyers (1988); Lanser (1988); Bal (1987a); and now Kimelman(1996)." 24 Fewell (1987); Milne (1992). 25 K (1991). (1993c). " (1983) (ed.). 28 2 x (1985) (ed.). » (1983) (ed.). (1990) (ed.).

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pornography (see below), and Esther Fuchs's study of biblical motherhood has become a classic text. The collection edited by Day31 deals solely with the Hebrew Bible, which the contributors approach through a variety of historical, sociological, and literary methods. A range of contemporary approaches can be found in the Festschrift for Fokkelien van Dijk-Hemmes edited by Becking and Dijkstra. A recent issue of Biblical Interpretation (1997) takes up issues of gender and reading, and two issues of Setneia have been devoted specifically to feminist study of the Hebrew Bible. The essays in Semeia 4232 examine the role gender plays in biblical and ancient Near Eastern stories of women's deception and trickery; those in Semeia 6133 explore the complex relationships of metaphorical language and imagery to social reality in texts about women and war. An extensive overview of German feminist biblical scholarship can be found in Schottroff, Schroer, and Wacker's jointly authored Feministische Exegcse, Forschungsertrcige zur Bibel aus tier Perspektive von Pmuen. Wacker discusses historical, hermeneutical and methodological issues, and Schroer and Schottroff deal with feminist reconstruction of the history of Israel and early Christianity respectively. Two important recent collections are Schottroff and Wacker's Von der Wurzel getragen, mentioned above, and Feministische Hermeneutik und Erstes Testament, produced by members of the Hedwig-Jahnow-Forscbungsprojekt in Marburg. The volume, honouring the memory of Hedwig Jahnow, a Protestant Hebrew Bible scholar who died in the concentration camp in Theresienstadt, contains a reprint of her 'Die Frau im Alten Testament' (1914), eight essays on Hebrew Bible texts by members of the project, and a group-authored hermeneutical introduction. Mention should be made here of The Women's Bible Commentary34 for signalling the presence in 1992 of enough women in the field to treat all the biblical books (with some multiple entries), though, as the title suggests, it is a women's commentary, not a feminists' one. It provides a useful overview of places where women appear throughout the Bible, helpful discussions of literary portrayals of women and of women's position in patriarchal society, and informative entries on 'Everyday Life'. More descriptive than critical, and occasionally apologetic, most contributions rarely question, let alone unsettle, the gender politics that motivates the biblical portrayals of women.35 With few exceptions, the deity remains privileged, as if this biblical character alone transcended the androcentric interests of the biblical writers. Some contributors consider the possibility of women being responsible for some biblical traditions (e.g., in Genesis, Exodus, Psalms, Song of Songs), but they do not show how we can recog31

33 (1989) fed.), Exum and Bos (1988) (ed.). M » Camp and Fontaine (1993) (ed.). Newsom and Ringe (1992) (ed.). 35 Important exceptions are the entries by Judith Sanderson and Jane Schaberg, the Commentary's most resistant readers, though other contributors, like Carol Newsom and Amy-Jill Levine, undermine traditional gender assumptions.

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nize genuine female voices as opposed to those of women characters created by male authors. Though of limited interest to those concerned strictly with the study of the Hebrew Bible, Schiissler Fiorenza's ambitious project, Searching the Scriptures, deserves mention for the contributions of a large number of distinguished feminist critics. Volume 1, dealing with social context, hermeneutics, and methods, was mentioned above; volume 2 contains studies of individual, mainly extra-biblical, texts and is commendable for its insistence on breaking down canonical boundaries as part of the feminist enterprise. An indispensable resource for Hebrew Bible scholars is Brenner's ten-volume series. All the volumes in the series deal with books or groups of books of the Hebrew Bible except vol. 10, which treats The Hebrew Bible in the Neiv Testament. The volumes contain reprints of important previously published studies, new work representing current trends and suggesting directions for future research, and helpful introductions by the editor. No one, and certainly none of the scholars listed above, seriously disputes that the Bible is androcentric and the product of patriarchal culture. Since as long as we remain within the patriarchal thought world of the Hebrew Bible we can do no more than describe ancient men's views of women, it is easy to see why feminist study of the Bible does not take the biblical text itself as its starting point. Characteristic of most recent feminist criticism is its recognition of the need to step outside the ideology of the biblical texts and raise questions not simply about what the text says about women but also about what it does not say—questions about its underlying assumptions about gender roles (the roles society assigns to men and women on the basis of their sex),36 about its motivation for portraying women in a particular way (conscious and unconscious), and about what it conceals and unintentionally reveals about women's lives and the different and changing circumstances affecting women's status and roles (depending on place and time) in ancient Israel. In approaching the Bible on their terms rather than on its terms, feminist biblical scholars have tended to look either to anthropology and sociology or to literary criticism for their methodological point of departure. In the application of the insights of these other disciplines to the biblical and extra-biblical evidence, however, there is much overlap, and the gap between historical and literary concerns characteristic of earlier studies is being narrowed, so that I would place the important trends and developments discussed below on a continuum between historical and literary analysis. Increasingly the recognition of 'the historicity of texts and textuality of history', to use Louis Montrose's now famous phrase,37 is shaping the way we view our data. 36 The distinction between 'gender' as something culturally created and 'sex' as a biological given, though perhaps useful, is arbitrary and artificial; see, e.g. Laqueur (1990); 3? Sedg\vkk (1992); Butler (1990); (1993). (1986), 8.

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In any interdisciplinary context, historian Gerda Lerner's The Creation of Patriarchy deserves mention. Impressive in its scope and breadth, it begins with the origins of civilization and traces the development of patriarchy (as social system and as ideology) and women's complicity in it through the biblical and classical Greek periods. Biblical feminists have turned to it less for the light it sheds on the biblical and ancient Near Eastern materials than for its rich insights and overall argument. Two books that deal specifically with gender—human and divine—against the ancient Near Eastern background are Judith Ochshorn's The Female Experience and the Nature of the Divine and Tikva Frymer-Kensky's In the Wake of the Goddesses. Both are concerned, as was Lerner, with the shift from polytheism, to monotheism, and its effect on ideas about divinity and gender,38 If Ochshorn overstates the case for the goddesses, Frymer-Kensky moves in the opposite direction, privileging Israel's god (who as male by gender, not by sex, does not 'model sexuality') and taking a monolithic view of the goddess(es). Neither takes adequate account of the complexity of gender construction: for Ochshorn gender bias against women comes into the fore with monotheism; Frymer-Kensky projects it forward into Hellenistic times. For ancient Israel in particular, it was Carol Meyers's interdisciplinary Discovering Eve in 1988 that heralded the use of social anthropological and archaeological methods in the study of 'ordinary' women's lives. Meyers's Eve is 'Every woman' and her focus is on the lives of women in rural villages in pre-monarchic Israel. Recognizing that the Bible, as the product of urban elite literate males, cannot tell us much about ordinary women's lives, Meyers uses anthropological models and archaeological data to reconstruct a picture of family organization, household structure and functions, and female status and roles in biblical Israel. The privatepublic dichotomy sometimes invoked to explain women's roles, she demonstrates, is 'inappropriate for considering the dynamics of gender behavior in archaic societies dominated by household production, in which the household and the workplace are virtually identical'.39 Using the sociological distinction between power and authority (socially legitimated, hierarchically organized power) that has now become standard in feminist study, Meyers was able to show that women in ancient Israel were not powerless, and, indeed, 'may have had a predominant role, at least within the broad parameters of household life'.40 This distinction is also profitably used by Jo Ann Hackett, who, in her work on Judges and Samuel, investigates sources of power available to women and factors that influenced the status of women in Israelite society, such as class or urbanization. 3S On feminine imagery and the image of God, see also Schungel-Straumann (1996a); (19%b). w • Citation from (1993), 111, though the point is made in Discovering Eve, *' (1988),176.

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Though idealistic in the picture it gives of the egalitarian 'origins' of Israelite society, Discovering Eve was instrumental in bringing to the fore such issues as the effect of environment (including higher female mortality rate and widespread epidemic disease) and societal needs and resources on family size, and the effect of economic structure on family life and on the behaviour and status of women. Meyers's ongoing work, with its concept of the family as a 'cultural construction',41 continues to add to our knowledge of women's lives and culture. Her interest in male and female household complementarity is also evidenced in her studies of the 'mother's house' (i.e., household) as a social unit equivalent to the 'father's house', and the benefits of multidisciplinarity are perhaps nowhere more evident than in her study of 'Miriam, the Musician', in which she draws on cross-cultural anthropology, ethnomusicology, and archaeological evidence to suggest a highly regarded socially recognized tradition of a women's performance that probably existed throughout the East Med iterra nean. Another scholar who has contributed significantly to our knowledge about the lives of women in ancient Israel is Phyllis Bird. Bird's work on the 'harlot' as social status and religious metaphor is essential reading on the subject. Her carefully documented conclusion that neither the verb zana nor the noun zfinfi refers to cultic activity has implications for her wider investigation of Israelite women's religion, and the question 'Where then does the cultic interpretation arise, and under what conditions?'42 continues to occupy her. In the 1989 publication from a 1987 conference, Bird describes her larger project as 'to reconceive and reconstruct the religion of ancient Israel as a comprehensive system of belief and practice inclusive of female as well as male activity, private as well as public devotion, and heterodox as well as orthodox expression'.43 More recently, in raising questions about the nature of the enterprise and its presuppositions, she refocuses the questions of definitions and boundaries. Bringing anthropological gender studies to bear on the biblical evidence of women's religious practice, Bird stresses the need 'to reexamine the boundaries of the religion we have reconstructed, and to make room for more differentiated forms of piety than we have hitherto imagined— with attention given to hierarchies of power in a gender-differentiated system of roles and offices'.44 'Religion defined in male terms or according to male models has difficulty placing women and assessing their piety, whether it imitates men's, in which case it rarely achieves parity, or assumes distinctive female forms, which may either go unacknowledged or be identified with foreign or heterodox cults.'43 Susan Ackerman's work on 'popular religion', in which she supplements the biblical picture with archaeological and ancient Near Eastern 41 44

(1993), 112. Bird (1991), 108.

« Bird (1989a), 79. '* Ibid., 107.

« Bird (1989c), 283.

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evidence, is also helpful in establishing a broader, more syncretistic and less 'orthodox' context than the polemical biblical texts provide, in which to view women's and men's religious activity—a context that includes the worship of Asherah. As Meyers showed, social anthropology sheds helpful light on household structure and economics. Using a household economics approach, Naomi Steinberg examines kinship and marriage patterns in the ancestral stories of Genesis, arguing that marriage functions to establish descent and inheritance rather than to form alliances between groups. She sees the emphasis on endogamy in these narratives as reflecting the interests of the postexilic period. Another study that deals with descent patterns in Genesis is Nancy Jay's "Throughout Your Generations Forever. Jay examines the different ways J, E, and P deal with the tension between patrilineal and matrilineal descent. Her larger thesis, which has wide-ranging implications for our understanding of the ideological nature and function of the ancestral stories, concerns the widespread exclusion of childbearing women from sacrificial rites in various cultures. On the basis of crosscultural study of societies that have practised blood, sacrifice, Jay proposes that the institution of sacrifice serves as a means for men in patrilineal descent groups to affirm their kinship bonds. When membership in patrilineal descent groups Is identified by rights of participation in sacrifices, evidence of 'paternity' is created which is as certain as evidence of maternity, but far more flexible. Kinship relations can be restructured, individuals adopted, and even subsidiary lineages incorporated into a descent group by participation in sacrifice. Conversely, it is extremely important to exclude improper persons because partaking may constitute recognized alliance by descent.46

The social and ideological conflict between different ways of reckoning descent has also been emphasized by Mieke Bal in her study of Judges, where, unlike the ancestral stories, mothers are notably absent. The violent events of Judges, Bal argues, are rooted in the shift from patrilocal marriage, where the husband moves into the clan of his wife without any position of power, to virilocal marriage, where the husband, takes his wife to his clan.47 The house is the 'shifter where residence and descendance meet'.48 The struggle is between men, with women as the victims, as usually happens in cases of male conflict. * Jay (1992), 54-5. This is not to suggest that there are no problems with the application of Jay's theory to the biblical material. Samson's mother, for example, participates in a sacrifice. 47 That Samson's marriage falls into the former category, an essential part of Bat's argument, is questionable. Samson leaves the wedding feast in a fury; the woman's father understands Ms action as signalling divorce and the woman is married off to another. It is hard to see how the situation can be described as any kind of marriage. Samson returns later with a gift, but since he is denied access to the woman it is impossible to know what kind of marriage arrangement, if any, the narrator wished to suggest. But the fact remains, Samson 48 does not bring a woman, back to his house. Bal (1988b), 85.

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Our general knowledge of women's social status in ancient Israel is also furthered by studies of women's legal status. In a series of studies, Tikva Frymer-Kensky examines how biblical law controls sexuality by situating and regulating it within the family. While such laws function to preserve the social order, they also reveal the threat sexuality poses to the social order. In her study of the status and roles of women as reflected in the family laws of Deuteronomy 12-26, Carolyn Pressler rejects the views that these laws display a more humanistic attitude toward women than earlier collections and that they mark an advance or improvement in women's domestic and legal status. Women's social status obviously changed in subtle and complex ways over time, and so investigation of women's roles and images of the feminine against the social background in particular historical periods is called for, as Claudia Camp and Christ! Maier have done for Proverbs, and Tamara Eskenazi for Ezra-Nehemiah.49 While some scholars were looking at how to get beyond the admittedly androcentric biblical texts to actual women's experiences, others were looking at the portrayals of women in those texts and asking how to get beyond the male views of women they represent to discover traces of women's voices or perspectives. Esther Fuchs was the first to insist categorically that because 'female characters reveal more about the wishful thinking, fears, aspirations, and prejudices of their male creators than about women's authentic lives', a feminist critique requires stepping outside the ideology of the text.50 Whereas Meyers, using social anthropology, was explaining how the biblical emphasis upon large families and its promotion of motherhood were the result of environmental and social conditions, Fuchs was investigating the way these objectives were inscribed in texts. By projecting onto woman what man desires most, the biblical narrative creates a powerful role model for women. The image of the childless woman (barren wife or widow) who evolves from vulnerability and emptiness to security and pride by giving birth to sons offers a lesson for all women. It should, be ascribed to the imaginative and artistic ingenuity of the biblical narrator that one of the most vital patriarchal concerns is repeatedly presented not as an imposition on woman but as something she herself desires more than anything else.51

Exposing patriarchal bias and the way it shapes representation has been the dominant theme of Fuchs's work. It is not the case that positive portrayals are non-patriarchal and negative portrayals patriarchal. As a cultural product, the Bible reflects the patriarchal world view of its time.52 49

5n 51 See also Brenner (1985); Engelken (1990). (1985a),118. Ibid., 130. 52 while recognizing that the term 'patriarchal' is problematic, I find It useful for describing both a social system and an ideology in which women are subordinate to men and younger men to older men (similarly, Lerner, Fuchs, Bal, among others). Even if some of the biblical authors were women (see below), it Is the male worldview that finds expression in the biblical literature, for it was the worldview shared by women and men alike.

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Interpretative strategies are therefore called for that (1) investigate the ideology and interests that motivate biblical representations of women, both positive and. negative, and. (2) reveal traces of the problematic of maintaining patriarchy that the Bible shares with all patriarchal literature. It is here, in the seams—the traces, the aporia, the displacements, the countercoherence—that feminist literary critique can be most effective in showing, as anthropological models do for historical reconstruction, that women are not powerless. Perhaps no one has had. as much influence intellectually on feminist study of the Hebrew Bible as Mieke Bal.33 Historically speaking, mention should be made of Phyllis Trible, whose groundbreaking early work inspired a generation of feminist biblical scholars, Trible's work, however, was mainly descriptive (in God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality she described positive female imagery and positive portrayals of women and applauded them; in Texts of Terror she described, negative portrayals and lamented them), and it remains so, for her method, rhetorical criticism, does not allow her to step outside the ideology of the text to interrogate it.54 This is where Bal's transdisciplinary approach and insistence on reading according to a multiplicity of codes is so important. Codes are disciplinary conventions, the discourse of a discipline that makes interpretation possible and. controls it. In Murder and Difference, Bal shows how reading through different disciplinary codes (historical, anthropological, theological, literary) leads to different interpretations of Judges 4 and 5, and how the transdisciplinary thematic and gender codes reveal divergences between the 'masculine' prose account of Judges 4 and the 'feminine' song of Judges 5. Bal accuses Fuchs of idealizing the present, Trible of idealizing the past, and both of them of a-historicism,55 She treats the biblical text not as a window on some ancient reality but rather 'as a figuration of the reality that brought it forth and to which it responded'.56 So understood, these ancient texts can be used as sources for understanding the history of gender ideology. In Lethal Love, the first of three books she wrote about the Bible (a revised version of Femmes imaginaires),'Bal sets up a confrontation between biblical 'love stories' about wicked and/or tricky women, modern rewritings of them, and narrative theory. In Death and Dissymmetry, she establishes a countercoherence in which she focuses on what is overlooked by traditional readings of Judges that foreground the military and the political: 'Since men are said to lead the game, I will start with the women; since conquest is said to be the issue, 1 will start with loss; since strength is said to be the major asset of the characters, I will start with the victims.'37 53 It is perhaps no accident that both Fuchs and Bal came to biblical studies by way of literary studies. 54 s E.g. Trible (1995). Bal (1989), 87, but also elsewhere in her work. 56 S7 Bal. (1988b), 3. Ibid., 17.

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'The countercoheren.ee starts where the traditional readings try to exclude or reduce the impact of women on the history of the people', she observes, and, further: 'While refusing the assumption that the major issue of the book as history is political, I also reject the assumption that the place of women in that history can only be found in the margins left by political coherence,'58 Bal is interested in the social and political functions of narrative. The central dynamic she highlights in Judges as the source of its gender-bound violence is the shift from patrilocal to virilocal marriage. Daughters who are the victims of male violence (Jephthah's daughter, Samson's wife, and the Levite's wife—called Bath, Kallah, and Beth) are avenged by Jael, the Woman-with-the-Millstone (called Pelah), and Delilah, symbolizing the displaced mother. Another literary scholar, liana Pardes, uses an interdisciplinary approach that draws on feminist theory, literary criticism, and psychoanalysis to examine constructions of gender in a selection of texts, in which she looks for 'countertraditions' (in spite of the claim of drawing on biblical scholarship, there is actually little engagement with the secondary literature of biblical studies, and inexplicably the KJV is used for citations), Pardes finds submerged, and suppressed voices of women—'antipatriarchal perspectives [that] have been partially preserved, against all odds, in the canon'59—in the stories of Eve, Rachel and Leah, Zipporah, Ruth and Naomi, Miriam, and Job's wife. Her insightful discussion of the book of Ruth as a rereading of the story of Rachel and Leah shows the advantages of adopting an intertextual reading strategy (see below). In Fragmented Women, I draw on contemporary feminist theory, including Bal's work, to explore the gender ideology that informs selected biblical narratives. I am interested in the way patriarchal texts undermine themselves and I try to show this by bringing to the surface and problematizing what is suppressed, distorted, and fragmented. My approach is multidisciplinary; I combine literary and anthropological models, for example, in investigating the role of the matriarchs in the stories of Israel's origins, and then turn to psychoanalytic literary theory to elucidate the repeated 'wife-sister' stories in Genesis 12, 20, and 26.w Applying a variety of reading strategies to other biblical stories of women, I endeavour both to expose the difficulty the Bible has in justifying women's subjugation and. to uncover traces of women's experience and women's resistance to patriarchal constraints. For example, the Samson story sets up an opposition between the ideal woman as mother (Samson's mother) and woman as the seductive and dangerous other (the 'foreign' women). This and other binary oppositions related to it are undermined by the presence of women in positively valued (Israelite, S!

w Ibid., 17-18. Pardes 0992), 2. For a psychoanalytic approach to these and other stories in Genesis, see Rashkow (1993). 60

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circumcized, own kind, male, good woman) and negatively valued (Philistine, uncircumcized, foreign, female, evil woman) categories and by the narratorial desire to see one set of oppositions, Philistia as oppressor and Israel as oppressed, reversed (if one opposition is 'wrong', why not others?).61 The scholar who has taken Bal's insights furthest is Alice Bach. In a study of Genesis 39, Bach adopts Bal's intertextual approach and sets out to reclaim Mut-em-enet's story by using post-biblical and rabbinic midrashic versions, among them the Testament of Joseph and Joseph and Aseneth, 'to produce a new text, a new story, one that breaks through the biblical frame-up'.62 Reconstructing Mut-em-enet's focalization and giving both a name and a voice to the unnamed biblical character who is silenced in both the biblical and later versions is the strategy of a reader intent on resisting 'the seduction of the reader into the writer's world, where women are defined in relation to men, that is, by their sexual identity'. A similar resistant-cum-subversive strategy is evident in 'Good to the Last Drop', in which, finding that traditional interpretations of the Sotah disturbingly reinscribe the biblical author's sense of suspicion about women, Bach reads the bizarre text with the intention of 'stirfring] up a new brew, where men's attempts to control women's bodies are reread as male vulnerability'.63 Women, Seduction, and Betrayal in 'Biblical Narrative, in which she challenges assumptions about gender and genre by applying gender criticism, theories of character, psychoanalysis, film theory, and cultural criticism to selected biblical narratives about women, represents Bach's most sustained argument for reading through the lens of multiple codes and for transgressing disciplinary boundaries in order to create women's stories in narratives constructed by men. A promising strategy for getting at women's perspectives in androcentric texts is to look for the alternative, competing discourses within the text. This strategy, which to date has proved especially useful in dealing with the hortatory discourse of Proverbs or the prophets, involves looking for places where attempts to silence or suppress the woman's rival discourse, a discourse that threatens to subvert the dominant patriarchal discourse, are not completely successful. In 'Woman and the Discourse of Patriarchal Wisdom', Carol Newsorn examines the conflicting discourses in Proverbs 1-9 and the threat that woman as 'other' poses to the paternalistic, authoritarian, male symbolic order. The strange woman represents a competition that is the cause of the father's speech, the incentive for its very existence. The strange woman figures the irreducible difference that prevents any discourse from estab61 In Was sagt das Richterbuch den Frauen? I investigate the stories in Judges in which women play a central role, asking, as J did in Fragmented Women, what patriarchal interests these stories promote. *2 Bach U993a), 319. « Bach (1993b), 27.

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lishing itself unproblematically. That is to say, she is not simply the speech of actual women, but she is the symbolic figure of a variety of marginal discourses. She is the contradiction, the dissonance that forces a dominant discourse to articulate itself and at the same time threatens to subvert it. Those dissonances can no more be eliminated than can sexual difference itself.64

Some scholars, such as Fokkelien van Dijk-Hemmes, Pete Diamond and Kathleen O'Connor, and Mary Shields, look for traces of the woman's point of view in prophetic invective against the personified nation Israel for 'her' apostasy ('harlotry'). For example, Jer. 2: 31 ('We are free; we will come no more to you') could be read as the woman's claim to autonomy in response to a domineering, possessive, jealous husband; or Jer. 13: 22 ('Why have these things come upon me?') as her unwillingness to accept blame. Because the wronged 'husband' in these texts is God, ancient listeners (males would have been the primary audience) and readers, male and female, are expected to sympathize with the divine point of view and adopt it against the female-identified nation. The female reader needs to resist this rhetorical strategy if she is to avoid reading against her own interests and accepting an ideology that holds women solely responsible for keeping the marriage relationship intact and that understands chastisement, in the form of sexual abuse, as instructional, and even as leading to reconciliation. Van Dijk-Hemmes notes how in Ezekiel 23 the audience is 'seduced into viewing women or girls as responsible for and even guilty of their own violation',65 and Diamond and O'Connor ask regarding Jeremiah 2-3, 'What would happen if female Israel told the story?' Such studies raise the issue of prophetic 'pornography' and the problem of contemporary interpretation and use of this material, about which there has recently been serious debate.66 In Jer. 3:1-4:4, Shields observes that whereas female harlotry is used to describe sin, a shift occurs to male imagery (faithful sons) when reconciliation is envisioned. Julie Galambush's study of Ezekiel documents a similar shift in imagery, where threatening female elements are excluded from Ezekiel's vision of restoration, and the city as God's unfaithful wife becomes the faithful city no longer personified as a wife. The prophetic rhetoric is based upon harmful gender stereotypes. The depiction of Yahweh expunging his own shame by punishing (including shaming) the unfaithful Jerusalem thus serves to reinterpret the destruction of the city as a positive event, one that reestablishes the honor and potency of Yahweh. 64 65

Newsom (1989), 149. Brenner and van Dijk-Hemmes (1993), 173. '* See Brenner and van Dijk-Hemmes (1993), 167-95; Carroll (1995); Brenner (1996); Exum (1996), 101-28; Brenner (1997), 153-74. Bird's conclusion, 'Prophetic concern for the "poor" should be understood essentially as concern for a poor man, and more particularly a "brother"', points to another disturbing area of gender bias in the prophetic literature (1996), 49.

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This metaphoric refurbishment of Yahweh's honor not only would have allowed Ezekiel's readers to avoid the shame of acknowledging their god's humiliation and defeat, but also would have allowed male Judeans to expunge their own shame by transferring it to the personified, woman, Jerusalem. As men in solidarity with a divine, punishing husband, male Judeans could, at least momentarily, have seen Jerusalem (and her shame) as 'other/ a woman justly shamed. The humiliation of personified Jerusalem would thus paradoxically serve to recapture a sense of power axid control for the militarily humiliated male residents of the city,67

Looking for alternative discourses is one of the many strategies of deconstruction. A sustained deconstructive reading of Hosea 1-3 is offered by Yvonne Sherwood, who shows how the text contradicts its main thesis and subverts the very distinctions it makes between such 'violent hierarchies' as innocence and deviance, Yhwh and Baal, love and hate, and how it 'simultaneously pursues one kind of action (blessing, reconciliation) and its opposite (denunciation, violence, imprisonment and curse)'.68 God's argument that Israel loved him and betrayed him is subverted by a metaphor in which the wife is already a harlot at the point of marriage. The nakedness of the woman/land is simultaneously both infant purity, the innocence of beginning, and punishment, titillation, cruelty, and pornography. It is never purely one or the other. Like those who search for the suppressed woman's competing discourse, Sherwood asks why, if God is such a good husband and provider, would his wife seek another? The fact that she leaves him suggests some lack or inadequacy in his own character. He is, moreover, tainted by and implicated in the very portrait of Baal that he so vehemently opposes. The text's argument depends on the premise that Yhwh is original, in both senses of the word-—he is Israel's 'first husband' and he can be clearly distinguished from his rival—yet far from emphasizing Yhwh's autonomy and individuality, the text remakes him in the image of Baal. Baal is perceived by the woman as lover and provider, and to reclaim her affections, Yhwh describes himself in precisely the same terms. He depicts himself as giver of grain, wine and oil (precisely the same items attributed to Baal) and pledges to 'seduce' the woman and to become, effectively, no longer stern husband but rival lover .. . The text rejects Baal's name but not his function: in 2.14 Yhwh pledges to lay waste her lovers' vines and fig trees, and in 2.17 he promises to give her his own. Ironically, before he can give, Yhwh must clear the ground of the previous giving, and the god who claims he is original promises to repeat Baal's act of provision under a different name.69

Julia O'Brien offers a deconstructive reading of Malachi that highlights not only the shifting gender of Judah in the prophetic diatribe but that of the deity as well, making the prophetic marriage metaphor extremely problematic. And, to return to Proverbs, Claudia Camp's incisive reading of personified Wisdom and the Strange Woman in terms of trickster 67

Galambush (1992), 161.

<* Sherwood (1996), 252.

"9 Ibid., 224.

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imagery deconstructs the binary opposition Proverbs seeks to maintain between good and evil as represented by female figures and highlights their paradoxical unity,70 If traces of women's discourses can be found in biblical texts, what about the possibility of female authorship? In On Gendering Texts, Athalya Brenner and Fokkelien van Dijk-Hemmes look for women's texts embedded in men's texts and framed by men's scribal and editing activity. Rather than assume that the biblical texts were written exclusively by men for a mainly male audience, they shift the issue, and with it the whole discussion, from that of authorship (see Goitein) to that of voice. This methodological move is accompanied by a concentration on authority rather than authorship, on, gender positions in the text, and on textual voices as F (feminine/female) or M (masculine/male). Van Dijk-Hemmes judiciously establishes criteria, but the problem remains how the critic, from a prior position within a gendered discourse with established notions of masculine and feminine, can decide what constitutes F and M without reinscribing those very generalizations in the text. Since ancient women would have shared the dominant androcentric worldview (as Brenner's analysis of Proverbs shows), how does one separate an F voice from its androcentric context? The enterprise is nevertheless strategically and heuristically valuable. Why not challenge fundamental assumptions? Taking a view different from that of Newsom discussed above and Camp (1985), for example, Brenner asks what happens if Proverbs 1-9 is read as a text in which a mother's voice rather than a father's occupies the position of the speaking subject. In a comment that acknowledges the difficulty in differentiating F and M texts, the authors draw attention to another important factor, the gendered nature of reading: ... we allow that many biblical texts are potentially dual-gendered. F readers will listen to F voices emanating from those texts; M readers will hear themselves echoed in them. This is to say that, in many cases, two parallel readings are possible. In such cases, we feel, a presentation of both parallel readings is preferable to privileging any one of the two more than the other.71

Such an approach would appear promising for the Song of Songs, where we have a female speaker(s) who may, however, be the creation of a male author(s). A different approach is taken here: van Dijk-Hemmes finds evidence of F love lyrics in the Song, while Brenner offers extensive analysis of M love lyrics (in particular, Eccles. 3: 1-9, but with other examples as well, including the Song). Their conclusions when viewed side by side, says Brenner in the Introduction, illuminate textualized gender positions by revealing their mutual oppositions, 70 71

Camp (1988). Brenner and van Dijk-Hemmes (1993), 9.

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Brenner continues the project in The Intercourse of Knowledge, where she investigates how, by what means and to what extent human love, desire and sex, possibly even 'sexuality' (the sexual characteristics or impulse, as experienced by an individual or group of either gender), are gendered in the Hebrew Bible (HB). In other words, how are sex (biological, anatomical, physical) differences and similarities conceived of, and converted into, gender (social, functional) differences and similarities between women and men in HB language and various literary genres.72

After considering the linguistic and semantic data—terms for love, desire, and sexual activity-—she turns to the construction of male and female sexuality in language and ideologies. Her discussion ranges intelligently over procreation, contraception, and deviations from socially established boundaries (incest, adultery, 'rape', homosexuality, prostitution, etc,), making this book an indispensable resource for anyone interested in studying sexuality and gender relations in the Bible. In keeping with feminist criticism's aim to disrupt traditional ways of looking at the biblical texts, some scholars are giving increasing attention to intertextuality and theories of inter/textual reading.73 One way of reading intertextually is by tracing the development of a topos within the biblical corpus, as, for example, Judith McKinlay does in Gendering Wisdom the Host. McKinlay examines biblical invitations to eat and drink hi Proverbs, Ben Sira, and John, and investigates possible motivations for and implications of the shifting gender of the host from female Wisdom to Wisdom/Sophia to the male Jesus. Intertextuality does not operate in one direction only: 'if a later text draws at least some of its authority from its male framework, there is the question whether traces of that gendered framework stay in the minds of readers when they return to the earlier texts, where maleness is not a factor',74 Another way of reading intertextually is through juxtaposition. In Klara Butting's view, the books of Ruth, Esther, Qoheleth, and Song of Songs, where the rights of women and possibilities open to them are an issue, provide a critique of the mainstream (androcentric) biblical tradition (problematic, however, is her assumption that Ruth and Canticles are 'von Frauen produzierte Literatur'75), Her goal in bringing these books into conversation with traditions in Genesis and about the monarchy is theological: 'innerbiblische Kritik als Wegweisung feministischer Hermeneulik' (interbiblical criticism as a model for feminist hermeneutics). By establishing an interbiblical dialogue, Butting is resisting the way the canon tells us to read in a certain order and to privilege certain texts over n

Brenner (1997), 1-2. For a helpful introduction as well as an insightful application to the Ruth and Tamar stories, see van Wolde (1997). 74 McKinlay (1996), 12. '5 Butting (1993), 13. 73

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others. I also disrupt canonical ordering in Fragmented Women, where I read stories unrelated in terms of sources and dates against each other, though the juxtaposition is not for theological reasons but for purposes of comparing textual strategies for controlling women on the level of the plot with similar strategies at the narratorial level. Thus I read a murder that takes place within a story (Jephthah's daughter) against one that takes place by means of the story (Michal in 2 Samuel 6) and a recounted rape (the Levite's wife in Judges 19) against a semiotic one (Bathsheba)—the story functioning in the cases of Michal and Bathsheba as the murder weapon or the instrument of rape. Alice Bach has been a strong advocate of breaking free of the biblical canon and reading cross-culturally. In Women, Seduction, and "Betrayal in Biblical Narrative, she reads the biblical material both within its larger periMediterranean context and also within a broader cultural context. Focusing on stories of 'wicked' women in biblical narratives—women who dared to look at men—she brings together rabbinic and classical materials, ancient Greek novels and Hellenistic Jewish romances, forging links between biblical characters and. noncanonical literary Igures. In an exemplary multidisciplinary final chapter, she follows the trail of Salome through expansions of her role in post-biblical literature and her varied portrayals by Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley, and Hollywood directors. This is intertextuality in its fullest sense, taking us into the area of cultural studies, where the Bible's status as cultural icon and cultural commodity becomes the object of study. Bal had already opened the door for cultural criticism in Lethal Love, using children's Bibles and popular commentary as the point of departure for a psychoanalytic reading of the story of Samson and Delilah, and reading Ruth in relation to Victor Hugo's poem 'Booz endormi' (see also Myth A la lettre), Brenner reads pornographic portions of Jeremiah against the Story of O,76 Already in 1986, Nehama Aschkenasy was tracing images of women across a range of Hebrew literature, from the Bible, through the Midrash, to modern Hebrew literature. Regina Schwartz's The Curse of Cain deserves mention here for its reading of the Bible from the perspective of its influence on culture, and especially the connections it draws between possession of women and possession of the land. In Plotted, Shot, and Painted, I examine cultural representations of biblical women in literature, music, and particularly in the visual arts of painting and film, asking: How are these women's 'stories' altered, expanded, or invented—and to what ends? How is the gender ideology of the biblical text both reinscribed in and challenged by its cultural appropriations? How does what we think we know about biblical women, our preconceptions and assumptions shaped by our encounters 76

Brenner and van Dijk-Hemmes (1993).

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with, their cultural personae, affect the way we read their stories? . . . Can women ever win, either in the biblical text or in its literary, musical, or visual afterlives? If not, why not? If so, how?77

Plotted, Shot, and Painted has a dual focus on representation and interpretation, both scholarly and popular. I argue that greater attention needs to be given to the way assumptions about sex and sexual difference, ideas about gender roles, and contemporary gender expectations affect the way both biblical scholars and also readers in general respond to the ancient text. With regard to the influence of gender on reading, it is especially clear in texts where sexuality is foregrounded that the answer to the question, Do male and female readers read these texts differently?, is, Yes. This can be seen in the case of scholarly interpretation of pornographic prophetic texts, where, with one exception/8 every major commentator I consulted (they are all men) reinscribed the text's harmful gender ideology, whereas the women who wrote on these texts in The Women's Bible Commentary at the very least all wrestled with the problem. As for 'ordinary' readers, because readers will appropriate texts as they see fit, especially biblical texts, Bible stories enter into the popular culture all the time with new meanings attached to them. In discussing the book of Ruth, I seek not only to illustrate this process but also to address both its limitations and its value—namely that we readers have a stake in our cultural heritage and that, if the only way we can lay claim to that heritage is to reinterpret or even misread it, then that is what we will do. It is not the case that gender bias in interpretation has been ignored by feminist critics; most of the studies I have mentioned above have had to grapple with it on some level, from critical resistance to the privileging of men's lives in sociological and anthropological studies to the Auseinandersetzungen Bal, Brenner, and Bach self-consciously engage in with critics who read through androcentric lenses. But grappling with it and studying it are different matters, and this leads me to yet another area where feminist study has important contributions to make: metacommentary. The investigation of gender bias in the biblical texts has perhaps a threshold, considering how much has been done already. Examining gender bias and its effects in the history of interpretation seems to offer an ever extending, if not entirely new, horizon. Bal's work, once again, provides a model. The books that make up her biblical trilogy can all be considered examples of metacommentary. In Murder and Difference especially, in examining the various codes through which Judges 4-5 has been read, Bal reveals how commentators read sexual stereotypes and their own gender biases into the biblical literature. Another example is Sherwood's critical engagement with commentary on Hosea's marriage and its prob77 78

Exum (1996), 8. Carroll (1986),

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lematic nature, where she shows how the solutions proposed actually point to a refusal on the part of commentators to accept the text's claim that God commanded his prophet to marry a harlot. Until recently it has been left to feminists to analyse masculinity as a construct, and most feminist analyses address the subject, at least indirectly, since it is inseparable from discussion of femininity as a construct (for an excellent treatment, see Glancy), Gender studies, well established in some disciplines, is beginning to have an impact on biblical studies. I would like to see a sustained critical dialogue between male and female readers on the subject of gender construction, with male scholars both adopting some of the various approaches and strategies of feminist analysis discussed here and debating the resultant constructions of masculinity found in feminist work. For example, some feminist studies (e.g. Bal, Bach, Exum, Glancy) attribute particular constructions of biblical women to the fear and. desire that women, and especially female sexuality, arouse in men and to the resultant need of patriarchy to control women and women's sexuality. Will male readers see things differently? And different in what ways? One scholar, among others, who has begun to investigate constructions of masculinity in the Hebrew Bible is David Clines, who points out similarities and differences between constructions of masculinity in biblical times, using the David story as an example, and in contemporary Western culture. In unpublished conference papers, he extends the analysis to include constructions of masculinity in Psalms and Job (forthcoming). Stephen Moore, in God's Gym, examines the representation of God's gigantic (and grotesque) body from its early development in the Hebrew Bible to its incredible proportions in the Shi' ur Qomah and other Jewish writings and the New Testament. In the Hebrew Bible, where anthropomorphisms abound in spite of the insistence on divine incorporeality and unrepresentability, God's body is 'for the most part, corporeal, "perfect", and male'.79 Moore draws on Howard Eilberg-Schwartz's extensive analyses of the implicit contradictions in the image of a sexless father god. Though outside the immediate boundaries of biblical studies, the work of Eilberg-Schwartz and of Daniel Boyarin raises issues about the relationship between masculinity, religion and the construction of divinity that are relevant for biblical interpretation as well (note the second, part of the title of Eilberg-Schwartz's second book, 'other problems for men and monotheism'). Harold Washington combines gender studies with the New Historicism's dual focus on the social context in which texts were originally produced and on the contemporary uses interpreters make of their versions of the past. Analysis of texts that deal with warfare, the sacred, and rape leads him to see violence against a feminine object as central to the con79

Moore (1996), xii.

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solidation of masculine identity in the Hebrew Bible—a conclusion that has radical implications for future study of these texts. Many readers regard the Deuteronomic war laws as salutary attempts to curb violence or to protect people from its effects, 1 propose rather that the laws are productive of violence: they render intelligible and acceptable both warfare (20:1-20) and an institutionalized form of rape (21:10-14), These laws valorize violent acts, construe them as essential to male agency, and define licit conditions for their exercise. 1 interpret the laws therefore as a discourse of male power. Grounding male subjectivity in the violent relation to a female object, these laws create a field of power where social relations based on a violent masculine prerogative come to appear inevitable. As foundational texts of Western culture, these laws authenticate the role of violence in the cultural construction of gender up to the present day.80

Washington's discussions of ancient Israel as a 'rape culture' (note: 'it is necessary to discern the complex connections between the construction of gender in ancient Israel and the fact that biblical Hebrew typically is incapable of saying "rape"') and of biblical women who kill men as simply sustaining rather than disrupting the gender status quo C[t]he victories of these women . . . can be celebrated only if we admire the male heroes whose code of violence they usurp') are equally trenchant and their implications equally far-reaching. Lest anyone think on the basis of this brief discussion of men's contributions that gender studies is the study of men by men while feminist studies is women's work, I stress that gender studies deals, as the name indicates, with both men and women as gendered subjects. Maleness and femaleness are constructed each in terms of, in relation to, and over against the other. Some will continue to use the term 'feminist studies' to stress their feminist agenda, but we all have an interest in studying the cultural constructions of 'male' and 'female', for we are all affected. Feminist/gender studies of the Hebrew Bible continues to expand and develop methodologically, and—in conjunction with critical studies of ethnicity, race, class, and other factors that influence both representation and interpretation—is changing the face of the field.81 80

Washington (1997), 344. This study was completed in August 1997, and does not include works published since then, apart from forthcoming studies that I was aware of at the time of writing. m

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Bibliography ACKERMAN, SUSAN (1992), Under Even/ Green Tree; Popular Religion in Sixth-Century Judah (Atlanta: Scholars Press). — (1993), The Queen Mother and the Cult In Ancient Israel', JBL 112: 385-401. ANDERSON, JANICE CAPEI (1991), 'Mapping Feminist Biblical Criticism: The American Scene, 1983-1990', Critical Review of Books in Religion, 21-44. ASCHKENASY, NEHAMA (1986), Eve's Journey: Feminine Images in Hebraic Literary Tradition (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press). BACH, ALICE (1993a), 'Breaking Free of the Biblical Frame-Up: Uncovering the Woman in Genesis 39', in Brenner 1993b: 318-42. — (1993b), 'Good to the Last Drop: Viewing the Sotah (Numbers 5.11-31) as the Glass Half Empty and Wondering How to View It Half Full', in The New Literary Criticism and the Hebrew Bible, ed. J. C. Exum and D. J. A. Clines (JSOTS 143; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press), 26-54. -—(1993c), 'Reading Allowed: Feminist Biblical Criticism Approaching the Millennium', Currents in Research: Biblical Studies 1: 191-215. — (1997), Women, Seduction, and Betrayal in Biblical Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). — (1998), 'Rereading the Body Politic: Women and Violence in Judges 21', Biblnt 6:1-19. BACH, ALICE (1990) (ed.), The Pleasure of Her Text: Feminist Readings of Biblical and Historical Texts (Philadelphia: Trinity Press International). BAL, MIEKE (1987a), Lethal Love: Feminist Literary Readings of Biblical Love Stories (Bloomiiigton: Indiana University Press). •— (1987b), 'Myth a la lettre: Freud, Mann, Genesis and Rembrandt, and the Story of the Son', in Discourse in Psychoanalysis and Literature, ed. S. Rimmon-Kenan (New York: Methuen), 57-89.' (1988a), Murder and Difference: Gender, Genre, and Scholarship on Sisera's Death (Bloomington: Indiana University Press). — (1988b), Death and Dissymmetry: The Politics of Coherence in the Book of Judges (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). •—(1989), 'Reading as Empowerment: The Bible from a Feminist Perspective', in Approaches to Teaching the Hebrew Bible as Literature in Translation, ed, B. N. Olshen and Y. S. Feldman (New York: Modern Language Association of America), 87-92. — (1991), Reading "Rembrandt": Beyond the Word-Image Opposition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). (1993), The Elders and Susanna', Biblnt 1:1-19. •— (1994), 'Head Hunting: "Judith" on the Cutting Edge of Knowledge', JSOT 63: 3-34. (1996), Double Exposures: The Subject of Cultural Analysis (New York: Routledge). BEAL, TIMOTHY K. (1994), The System and the Speaking Subject in the Hebrew Bible: Reading for Divine Abjection', Biblnt 2,171-89. BECKING, BOB and DIJKSTRA, MEINDERT (1996) (eds.), On Reading Prophetic Texts: Gender-Specific and Related Studies in Memory of Fokkelien van Dijk-tlemmes (Leiden: E. J. Brill).

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BIRD, PHYLLIS (1987), The Place of Women in the Israelite Cultus', in Ancient Israelite Religion, ed. P. D. Miller, P, D. Hanson, and S. D. McBride (FS Frank Moore Cross; Philadelphia: Fortress Press), 397-419. •—(1989a), "To Play the Harlot": An Inquiry into an Old Testament Metaphor', in Day 1989: 75-94. — (1989b), The Harlot as Heroine: Narrative Art and Social Presupposition in Three Old Testament Texts', Semeia 46:119-39. — (1989c), 'Women's Religion in Ancient Israel', in Lesko 1989:283-98. — (1991), 'Israelite Religion and the Faith of Israel's Daughters: Reflections on Gender and Religious Definition', in Jobling et al. 1991: 97-108. •— (1996), 'Poor Man or Poor Woman: Gendering the Poor in Prophetic Texts', in Becking and Dijkstra 1996:37-51. BOYARIN, DANTEL (1993), Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Taltnudic Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press). BRENNER, ATHALYA (1985), The Israelite Woman; Social Role and Literary Type in Biblical Narrative (Sheffield: JSOT Press). (1994), 'Who's Afraid of Feminist Criticism? Who's Afraid of Biblical Humour? The Case of the Obtuse Foreign Ruler in the Hebrew Bible', JSOT 63: 38-55. — (1996), 'Pornoprophetics Revisited: Some Additional Reflections', JSOT 70: 63-86. — (1997), The Intercourse of Knowledge: On Gendering Desire and 'Sexuality' in the Hebrew Bible (Leiden: Brill). BRENNER, ATHALYA (ed.) (1993a), A Feminist Companion to the Song of Songs (The Feminist Companion to the Bible, 1; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press). — (1993b), A Feminist Companion to Genesis (The Feminist Companion to the Bible, 2; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press). — (1993c), A Feminist Companion to Ruth (The Feminist Companion to the Bible, 3; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press). •— (1993d), A Feminist Companion to fudges (The Feminist Companion to the Bible, 4; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press). — (1994a), A Feminist Companion to Samuel and Kings (The Feminist Companion to the Bible, 5; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press). •—(1994b), A Feminist Companion to Exodus to Deuteronomy (The Feminist Companion to the Bible, 6; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press). — (1995a), A Feminist Companion to Esther, Judith and Susanna (The Feminist Companion to the Bible, 7; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press). — (1995b), A Feminist Companion to the Latter Prophets (The Feminist Companion to the Bible, 8; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press). — (1995c), A Feminist Companion to Wisdom Literature (The Feminist Companion to the Bible, 9; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press). — (1996), A Feminist Companion to the Hebrew Bible in the New Testament (The Feminist Companion to the Bible, 10; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press). BRENNER, ATHALYA and VAN DIJK-HEMMES, FOKKELIEN (1993), On Gendering Texts: Female and Male Voices in the Hebrew Bible (Leiden: E. J. Brill). BROOKE, GEORGE J. (1992) (ed.), Women in the Biblical Tradition (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press). BROOTBN, BERNADETTE (1982), Women Leaders in the Ancient Synagogue (Chico, CA: Scholars Press).

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BUTLER, JUDITH (1990), Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge). — (1993), Bodies that Matter; On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (New York; Routledge). BUTTING, KLARA (1993), Die Buchstaben werden sich noch wundern: innerbiblische Kritik als Wegiveisung feministischer Hermeneutik (Berlin: Alektor-Verlag). CAMP, CLAUDIA V, (1985), Wisdom and the Feminine in the Book of Proverbs (Sheffield: Almond Press). — (1988), 'Wise and Strange: An Interpretation of the Female Imagery in Proverbs in Light of Trickster Mythology', in Exum and Bos 1988:14-36. •—(1991), 'What's So Strange about the Strange Woman?', in Jobling et al. 1991: 17-32. — (1.993), 'Feminist Theological Hermeneutics: Canon and Christian Identity', in Schiissler Fiorenza 1993:154-71. CAMP, CLAUDIA V. and FONTAINE, CAROLE R. (1993) (eds.), Women, War, and Metaphor: Language and Society in the Study of the Hebrew Bible (Semeia 61; Atlanta: Scholars Press). CANNON, KATIE GENEVA and SCHUSSLER FIORENZA, ELISABETH (1989) (eds.), Interpretation for Liberation (Semeia 47; Atlanta: Scholars Press). CARROLL, ROBERT P. (1986), Jeremiah (Philadelphia: Fortress Press). (1995), 'Desire under the Terebinths: On Pornographic Representation in the Prophets—A Response', in Brenner 1995b: 275-307. CHUNG, HYUN KYUNG (1990), Struggle to Be the Sun Again: Introducing Asian Women's Theology (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis). CLINES, DAVID J. A. (1990), What Does Eve Do to Help? and Other Readerly Questions to the Old Testament (Sheffield: Sheffield. Academic Press). — (1995), 'David the Man: The Construction of Masculinity in the Hebrew Bible', in Interested Parties: The Ideology of Writers and Readers of the Hebrew Bible (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press), 212-43. — (Forthcoming), Play the Man: Constructions of Masculinity in the Hebrew Bible (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press). COLLINS, ADELA YARBRO (1985) (ed.), Feminist Perspectives on Biblical Scholarship (Chico, CA: Scholars Press). CULLER, JONATHAN (1982), On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul). DAY, PEGGY L. (1989) (ed.), Gender and Difference in Ancient Israel (Minneapolis: Fortress Press). DIAMOND, A. R. PETE and. O'CONNOR, KATHLEEN M. (1.996), 'Unfaithful Passions: Coding Women Coding Men in Jeremiah 2-3 (4:2)', BMnt 4: 288-310. ErtBERG-ScHWARTZ, HOWARD (1990), The Savage in Judaism: An Anthropology of Israelite Religion and Ancient Judaism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press). — (1994), God's Phallus and Other Problems for Men and Monotheism (Boston: Beacon Press). ENGELJKEN, KAREN (1990), Frauen int Alien Israel: Eine begriffsgeschichtliche und sozialrechtliche Studie zur Stellung der Frau im Alien Testament (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer Verlag). ESKENAZI, TAMARA C. (1992), 'Out from the Shadows: Biblical Women in the Postexilic Era', /SOT 54: 25-43.

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EXUM, f. CHERYL (19935, Fragmented Women: Feminist (Subversions of Biblical Narratives (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press/Valley Forge, PA: Trinity Press International), •—(1996), Plotted, Shot, and Painted: Cultural Representations of Biblical Women (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press), — (1997), Was sagt das Richterbuch den Frauen? (Stuttgart: Katholisches Bibelwerk). EXUM, J. CHERYL and Bos, JOHANNA W.H. (1988) (eds.), Reasoning with the Foxes: Female Wit in a World of Male Power (Semeia 42; Atlanta: Scholars Press). FABELLA, VIRGINIA and Ai, LEE SUN (1990) (eds,), We Dare to Dream: Doing Theology as Asian Women (Mary-knoll, NY: Orbis), FABELLA, VIRGINIA and ODUYOYE, MERCY AMBA (1988) (eds.), With Passion and Compassion: Third "World "Women Doing Theology (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis). FEWEI.L, DAMN A NOLAN (1987), 'Feminist Reading of the Hebrew Bible: Affirmation, Resistance and Transformation', /SOT 39: 77-87, — (1993), 'Reading the Bible Ideologically: Feminist Criticism', in To Each Its Own Meaning, ed. S. R. Haynes and S. L. McKenzie (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press), 237-51. FEWELL, DANNA NOLAN and GUNN, DAVID MILLER (1993), Gender, Power, and Promise: The Subject of the Bible's First Story (Nashville: Abingdon Press). FISCHER, IRMTRAUD (1994), Die Erzeltern Israels, Feministisch-theologische Studiem. zu Gen 12-36 (Berlin: de Grayter), FONTAINE, CAROLE R. (1990), 'A Heifer from Thy Stable: On Goddesses and the Status of Women in the Ancient Near East', in Bach 1990: 69-95. FRYMER-KENSKY, TIKVA (1981), 'Patriarchal Family Relationships and Near Eastern Law', BA 44: 209-14. — (1983), 'Pollution, Purification, and Purgation in Biblical Israel', in The Word of the Lord Shall Go Forth: Essays in Honor of David Noel Freedman, ed. C. Meyers and M. O'Connor (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns), 399-414, •—(1984), The Strange Case of the Suspected Sotah (Num V 11-31)', VT 34: 11-26, — (1989), 'Law and Philosophy: The Case of Sex in the Bible', Semeia 45: 89-102. (1992), In the Wake of the Goddesses: Women, Culture, and the Biblical Transformation of Pagan Myth. (New York: Free Press). FUCHS, ESTHER (1985a), 'The Literary Characterization of Mothers and Sexual Politics in the Hebrew Bible', in Collins 1985:117-36. (1985b), 'Who Is Hiding the Truth? Deceptive Women and Biblical Androcentrism', in Collins 1985:137-44. — (1987), 'Structure and Patriarchal Functions in the Biblical Betrothal TypeScene', JFSR 3: 7-14. •— (1988), '"For I Have the Way of Women": Deception, Gender, and Ideology in Biblical Narrative', in Exum and Bos 1988: 68-83. (1989), 'Marginalization, Ambiguity, Silencing: The Story of Jephthah's Daughter', JFSR 5: 35-45. — (1990), 'Contemporary Biblical Literary Criticism: The Objective Phallacy', in Mappings of the Biblical Terrain: The Bible as Text, ed. V. L. Tollers and J. Maier (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press). GALAMBUSH, JULIE (1992), Jerusalem in the Book of Ezekiel: The City as Yahweh's Wife (Atlanta: Scholars Press).

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CLANCY, JENNIFER (1994), 'Unveiling Masculinity: The Construction of Gender in Mark 6:17-29', Biblnt 2: 34-50, GOITEIN, S. D. (1988), 'Women as Creators of Biblical Genres', Pwoftexts 8:1-33. GOTTWALD, NORMAN K. (1985), The Hebrew Bible: A Socio-Literary Introduction (Philadelphia: Fortress Press), GRANT, JACQUELYN (1989), White 'Women's Christ and Black Women's Jesus: Feminist Christology and Womanist Response (Atlanta: Scholars Press). GUNN, DAVID and FEWELL, DANNA (1993), Narrative in the Hebrew 'Bible (Oxford: Oxford University Press). HACKETT, Jo ANN (1985), 'In the Days of Jael: Reclaiming the History of Women in Ancient Israel', in Immaculate and Powerful: Tlie Female in Sacred Image and Social Reality, ed. C. W. Atkinson, C. H. Buchanan, and M. R. Miles (Boston: Beacon Press), 15-38. ——(1987), 'Women's Studies and the Hebrew Bible', in The Future of Biblical Studies; TJie Hebrew Scriptures, ed. R. E. Friedman and H. G. M. Williamson (Atlanta: Scholars Press), 141-64. (1992), '1 and 2 Samuel', in Newsom and Ringe 1992: 85-95. ISASi-DiAz, ADA MARIA (1993), 'La Palabra de Dios en Nosotras—The Word of God in Us', in Schussler Fiorenza 1993: 86-97. JAHNOW, HEDWIG, et al, (1994), Feministische Hennenentik und Erstes Testament (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer). JAY, NANCY (1992), Throughout Your Generations Forever: Sacrifice, Religion, and Paternity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). JOBLING, DAVID (1991), 'Feminism and "Mode of Production" in Ancient Israel: Search for a Method', in Jobling et al. 1991: 239-51. JOBUNG, DAVID, DAY, PEGGY L. and SHBPPARD, GERALD T. (1991) (eds.), The Bible and the Politics of Exegesis (FS Norman K, Gottwald; Cleveland: Pilgrim Press). KIMELMAN, REUVEN (1996), The Seduction of Eve and the Exegetical Politics of Gender', Biblnt 4:1-39. KRAEMER, Ross S. (1983a), Maenads, Martrys, Matrons, Monastics: A Saurcetwok on Women's Religions in the Greco-Roman World (Philadelphia: Fortress Press). (1983b), 'Women in the Religions of the Greco-Roman World', RelSRev 9; 127-39. KRISTBVA, JULIA (1982), 'Semiotics of Biblical Abomination', in Powers of Horror (trans, L. S. Roudiez) (New York: Columbia University Press), 90-112. KWOK, PUI-LAN (1993), 'Racism and Ethnocentrism in Feminist Biblical Interpretation', in Schussler Fiorenza 1993:101-16, LANDY, FRANCIS (1995a), 'In the Wilderness of Speech: Problems of Metaphor in Hosea', Biblnt 3:35-59. •—(1995b), Hosea (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press). LANSER, SUSAN S, (1988), '(Feminist) Criticism in the Garden: Inferring Genesis 2-3', Semeia 41: 67-84. LAQUER, THOMAS (1990), Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge: Harvard University Press). LERNER, GERDA (1986), The Creation of Patriarchy (New York: Oxford University Press). LESKO, BARBARA S. (1989) (ed.), Women's Earliest Records: From Ancient Egypt and Western Asia (Atlanta: Scholars Press).

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LEVINE, AMY-JILL (1994), 'Second Temple Judaism, Jesus, and Women: Yeast of Eden', BiMnt 2: 8-33. (1995), '"Hemmed in on Every Side": Jews and Women in the Book of Susanna', in Brenner 1995a: 303-23. LEVINE, AMY-|TLL (1991) (ed.), 'Women Like This': New Perspectives on Jewish Women in the Greco-Roman World (Atlanta: Scholars Press). McKiNLAY, JUDITH (1996), Gendering Wisdom the Host: Biblical Invitations to Eat and Drink (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press). MAIER, CHRISTL (1995), Die 'fretnde Fran' in Proverbien 1-9. Eine exegctisehe und sozialgesichichtliche Studie (Freiburg and Gottingen: Universitatsverlag/Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht). — (1996), 'Im Vorzimmer der Unterwelt. Die Warnung vor der "fremden Frau" in Prov 7 in ihrem historischen Kontext', in Schottroff and Wacker 1996: 179-98. — (1997), '"Begehre nicht ihre Schonheit in deinem Herzen" (Prov 6,25): Eine Aktualisierung des Ehcbruchsverbots aus persischer Zeit', Bihlnt 5: 46-63. MEYERS, CAROL (1988), Discovering Eve: Ancient Israelite Women in Context (New York: Oxford University Press). — (1991), "To Her Mother's House": Considering a Counterpart to the Israelite Bet 'aV, in Jobling et at, 1991: 39-51. (1993), 'Returning Home: Ruth 1.8 and the Gendering of the Book of Ruth', in Brenner 1993c: 85-114. — (1994), 'Miriam the Musician', in Brenner 1994b: 207-30. — (1996), 'The Hannah Narrative in Feminist Perspective', in 'Go to the Land I Will Show You': Studies in Honor of Dwight W. Young, ed. J. E. Coleson and V. H. Matthews (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns), 117-26. MILNE, PAMELA], (1989), 'The Patriarchal Stamp of Scripture: The Implications of Structuralist Analyses for Feminist Hermeneutics', JFSR 5:17-34. •— (1992), 'Feminist Impressions of the Bible: Then and Now', Bible Review 8.5: 38-43,52-5. MONTROSE, Louis (1.986), 'Renaissance Literary Studies and the Subject of History', English Literary Renaissance 16: 5-12. MOORE, STEPHEN D, (1996), God's Gym: Divine Male Bodies of the Bible (New York: Routledge). NBWSOM, CAROL A. (1989), 'Woman and the Discourse of Patriarchal Wisdom: A Study of Proverbs 1-9', in Day 1989:142-60. NEWSOM, CAROL A. and RINGE, SHARON H. (1992) (eds.). The Women's Bible Commentary (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press). NIDITCH, SUSAN (1987), Underdogs and Tricksters; A Prelude to Biblical Folklore (San Francisco: Harper & Row). — (1995), 'Short Stories: The Book of Esther and the Theme of Woman as a Civilizing Force', in Old Testament Interpretation Past, Present and future: Essays in Honor of Gene M. Tucker, ed. J. L, Mays, D. L. Petersen, and K. H. Richards (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark), 195-209. O'BRIEN, JULIA M.. (1996), 'Judah as Wife and Husband: Deconstructing Gender in Malachi', /BL 115: 241-50. OCHSHORN, JUDITH (1981), The Female Experience and the Nature of the Divine (Bloomington: Indiana University Press).

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ODUYOYE, MERCY AMBA (1995), 'Biblical Interpretation and the Social Location of the Interpreter: African Women's Reading of the Bible', in Segovia and Tolbert 1995:33-51. OIILER, ANNEMARIE (1989), 'Der Mann im Hohenlied', in Der Weg zunt Menschen. Zur philosophisehen und theologischen Anthropologie, ed. R. Mosis and L, Ruppert (Freiburg: Herder), 183-200. OKURE, TERESA (1993), 'Feminist Interpretations in Africa', in Schiissler Fiorenza 1993:76-85. FAROES, ILANA (1992), Countertraditions in the Bible: A Feminist Approach (Cambridge: Harvard University Press), PLASKOW, JUDITH (1990), Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Perspective (San Francisco: Harper & Row). — (1993), 'Anti-Judaism, in Feminist Christian Interpretation', in Schiissler Fiorenza 1993:117-29. POBEE, JOHN S. and BARBEL VON WAJRTENBERG-POTTER (1986) (eds.). New Eyes for Reading: Biblical and "Theological Reflections In/ Women from the Third World (Geneva: World Council of Churches). PRESSLER, CAROLYN (1993), Tlie View of Women Found in the Dentewnomic Family Lams (Berlin: de Gruyter). PREVOST, JEAN-PIERRE (1995) (ed.), Des femmes aussi faisaknt route avec lui. Perspectives femhiistes sur la Bible (Sciences bibliques/etudes 1; Montreal: Mediaspaul). PYPER, HUGH (1994), 'Speaking Silence: Male Readers, Women's Readings and the Biblical Text', Literature and Theology 8: 296-310. RASHKOW, ILONA N. (1993), The Phnllacy of Genesis: A Feminist-Psychoanalytic Approach (Louisville: Westminster/John Kiiox). RUSSELL, LETTY M. (1985) (ed.), Feminist Interpretation of the Bible (Philadelphia: Westminster Press). SAKENFELD, KATHARINE DOOB (1982), 'Old Testament Perspectives: Methodological Issues',/SOT 22:13-20. — (1985), 'Feminist Uses of Biblical Materials', in Russell 1985: 55-64. — (1989), 'Feminist Biblical Interpretation', neology Today 46:154-68. SCHOTTROFF, LUISE, SILVIA ScHROER and MARIE-THERES WACKER (1995) (eds.), Feministische Exegese. Forschungsertrflge zur Bibel aus der Persjxktive von Frauen (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft). SCHOTTROFF, LUISE and MARIE-THERES WACKER (1996) (eds.), Von der Wurzel gefmgen. ChristHch-feministische Exegese in Auseinandersetzung mil Antijudaismus (Leiden: E. J. Brill). — (1.998), Kompendiiim ferninistische Bibelauslegung (Giitersloh: Kaiser). SCHULTE, HANNELIS (1995), Dermoch gingen sie aufrecht, Frauengestalten des Allen Israel (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag). SCHUNGEL-STRAUMANN, HELEN (1996a), Denn Gott bin ich, und kein Mann. Gottesbileler im Ersten Testament-feministisch betrachtet (Mainz: Grunewald). — (1996b), 'Ruahund Gender-Frage am Beispiel der Visionen beim Propheten Ezechiel', in Becking and Dijkstra 1996:201-15. SCHUSSLER FIORENZA, ELISABETH (1983), In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins (New York: Crossroad). •—(1992), But SHE Said: Feminist Practices of Biblical Interpretation (Boston: Beacon Press).

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ScuossLEK FIORENZA, ELISABETH (ed.) (1993), Searching the Scriptures, Vol. 1, A Feminist Introduction (New York: Crossroad). — (1994), Searching the Scriptures, Vol. 2, A Feminist Commentary (New York: Crossroad). SCHWARTZ, REGINA M. (1997), The Curse of Cain: The Violent Legacy of Monotheism (Chicago; University of Chicago Press). SEDGWICK, EVE K. (1992), 'Gender Criticism', in Redrawing the Boundaries, ed. S. Greenblatt and G. Gunn (New York: Modern Language Association of America), 271-302. SEGOVIA, FERNANDO F. and MARY ANN TOLBERT (1995) (eds.), Reading from TJiis Place: Social Location and Biblical Interpretation in Global Perspective (Minneapolis: Fortress Press). SETET,, T. DRORAH (1985), 'Prophets and Pornography: Female Sexual Imagery in Hosea', in Russell 1985: 86-95. SHERWOOD, YVONNE (1996), The Prostitute and the Prophet: Hosea's Marriage in Literary-Theoretical Perspective (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press). SHIELDS, MARY E. (1995), 'Circumcision of the Prostitute: Gender, Sexuality and the Call to Repentance in Jer. 3.1-4.4', Biblnt 3: 61-74. — (1998), 'Multiple Exposures: Body Rhetoric and Gender Characterization in Ezekiel 16'JFSJ? 14: 5-18. — (Forthcoming), Circumscribing the Prostitute: TJie Rhetorics of Intertextuality, Metaphor, and Gender in Jeremiah 3.2-4.4 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press). STEINBERG, NAOMI (1993), Kinship and Marriage in Genesis: A Household Economics Approach (Minneapolis: Fortress Press). TAMEZ, ELSA (1986), Bible of the Oppressed (Maryknoll: Orbis). (1991), 'Women's Rereading of the Bible', in Voices from the Margins: Interpreting the Bible in the Third World, ed, R. S. Sugirtharajah (Maryknoll: Orbis), 61-70. •— (1989), Through Her Eyes: Women's neology from Latin America (Maryknoll: Orbis). THISTLETHWAITE, SUSAN B, and TOINETTE M. EUGENE (1991), 'A Survey of Contemporary Global Feminist, Womanist, and Mujerista Theologies', Critical Review of Books in Religion, 1-20. TOLBERT, MARY ANN (1983), 'Defining the Problem: The Bible and Feminist Hermeneutics', in Tolbert 1983:113-26. — (1990), 'Protestant Feminists and the Bible: On the Horns of a Dilemma', in Bach 1990: 5-23. TOLBERT, MARY ANN (1983) (ed.), The Bible and Feminist Hermeneutics (Semeia 28; Chico: Scholars Press). TRIBLE, PHYLLIS (1978), God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality (Philadelphia: Fortress Press). (1984), Texts of Terror: Literary-Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives (Philadelphia: Fortress Press). — (1995), 'Exegesis for Storytellers and Other Strangers', JBL 114: 3-19. VAN WOLDE, ELLEN (1997), 'Texts in Dialogue with Texts: Intertextuality in the Ruth and Tamar Narratives', Biblnt 5:1-28. WACKER, MARIE-THERES (1996), Figurationeti des Weiblichen hn Hosea-Buch (Freiburg: Herder).

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— (1996), 'Gendering Hosea 13', in Becking and Dijkstra 1996: 265-S2. WACKER, MARIE-THERES (1987) (ed.), Der Goit tier Manner und die Frauen (Dusseldorf; Patmos). WASHINGTON, HAROLD C. (1997), 'Violence and the Construction of Gender in the Hebrew Bible', Biblnt 5: 324-63. — (Forthcoming), Violence and the Construction of Gender in the Hebrew Bible (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press). WEEMS, RENITA J. (1991), 'Reading Her Way through the Struggle: AfricanAmerican Women and the Bible', in Stony the Road We Trod: African American Biblical Interpretation, ed. C. H. Felder (Minneapolis: Fortress Press), 57-77. •— (1992), 'The Hebrew Women Are Not like the Egyptian Women: The Ideology of Race, Gender and Sexual Reproduction in Exodus I', Semeia 59: 25—34.

5

Old Testament Ethics J. W.

ROGERSON

I

WHY should anyone be interested in. the ethical content or teaching of the Old Testament? At least four possible answers can be given. From a confessional standpoint it could be maintained that the Old Testament in some sense contains the revealed will of God and that its ethical teaching therefore makes a claim upon Jews and Christians if not upon all humanity. A second answer could spring from the conviction that the confessional position is mistaken and that it is the duty of scholarship to expose the crudities of Old Testament morality in order to prevent humankind from being subjected to its claims. A third answer might be that the study of Old Testament ethics is a valid subject in its own right, as is the study of the ethics of the Greeks or of the historical background to the Old Testament. A fourth response might go further than this and say that because the Old Testament is a 'classic' text, what it has to say on ethical matters is of interest to ethicists. Obviously, generalizations such as these run the danger of oversimplifying matters, of arbitrarily separating out approaches that have much in common, and of lumping together positions that are, in fact, very different. Thus, to take the first answer as an example, there are fundamental differences between the confessional approaches of Walter Kaiser and Bruce Birch.1 For Kaiser, the authority of the Old Testament is propositional and some of its ethical teachings, especially in the legal sections, are binding today. Birch writes from a canonical perspective and concentrates on narratives rather than laws, the purpose of the narratives being to shape and inform the community of faith that gave the Old Testament its final form. A different perspective is found in the writings of Christopher Wright who, while being theologically close to the position of Kaiser, is more interested in the social and ethical shape of Israel as a challenge and resource for believers today.2 Again, the German approach to Old Testament ethics, classically stated in Eckart Otto's recent book, proceeds historically-critically and seeks to elicit high points in ancient 1 2 Kaiser (1983); Birch (1991). Wright (1995), 162-7.

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Israel's ethical development which constitute challenges for today's readers.3 However, the risk of over-simplifying and of mis-classifying is one that must be taken, not because the subject of Old Testament ethics is necessarily complicated in itself, but because it prompts and conceals many interests, the exposure of which is necessary if the subject is to be approached seriously. For the sake of completeness, examples of other answers given to the question posed, at the outset are as follows. Exposes of the crudities of Old Testament morality and the uses to which it has been put can be found, in What the Bible Really Says and in Cheryl Exum's contribution to the colloquium The Bible in Ethics, while the contribution to the Semeia symposium by Peter Paris indicates an ethicisf s interest in Old Testament ethics.4 A recent example of a 'disinterested' description, of Old Testament ethics can be found in Rudolf Smend's article in the Theolog ische Realenzyklopadie? Having summarized, possible reasons for people being interested in Old Testament ethics, it will be useful to discuss certain strategies employed in the above approaches. This will introduce some sophistication into the answers already given, and prepare the way for the approach to the subject that this essay will adopt. In his 'An Ethicisf s Concerns about Biblical Ethics' Peter Paris argues that it is preferable to ask 'premodern' questions when examining Old, Testament ethics than to use principles and investigative methods that may harm the subject matter.6 He criticizes John Barton for using the term 'natural law' and feels happiest with the contributions of Frank Criisemann, Frank Frick, Douglas Knight, Niels Peter Lemche and Hannelis Schulte to the Semeia symposium because they provide information about the moral life of the Israelites.7 Lemche in particular is praised for adhering to premodern categories in exploring the usefulness of the notion of patronage in the ancient world for understanding the relationship between kings and their subjects in ancient Israel. 3

Otto (1994); see also the monograph by Christoph Bultmann (1992). Smith and Hoffman (eds.) (1989); Exum (1995); Paris (1995). See also Barton (1995), 66-76, esp. 76 'One gets from her [Nussbaum's] writing a sense that great texts matter, because they ask what is good for humankind, and never rest till they have found an answer'. 5 Smend (1982). Cp. his remarks on the dangers of imposing modern theological categories on to Old Testament ethics, on p. 424. There is frequently, moreover, the danger that the material will be used eclectically and unhistorically. The same holds for some partly quite respectable attempts to obtain direct instructions from the Old Testament for the present day, and particularly for the attacks on the Old Testament with regard to matters that do not measure up to today's ethical notions (retribution mentality, narrow nationalism, slavery, polygamy etc).' ('Dabei droht haufig die Gefahr, den Stoff allzu ektektisch und ungeschichtlich zu verwcnden. Das gleiche gilt von mancherlei z.T. nicht unbeachtiichen Versuchen, aus dem Alten Testament unmittelbar Weisungen fur die jeweilige Gegenwart zu gewinnen, und erst recht von den Angriffen auf das Alte Testament unter Hinweis auf Tatbestande, die heutigen ethischen Vorstellungen nicht entsprechen (Vergeltungsdenken, rationale Beschrankung, Sklaverei, Polygamie usw.)'.) * (1995), 173-9. 7 Criisemann (1995); Frick (1995); Knight (1995); Lemche (1995); Schulte (1995). 4

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I think that Paris is right to question the usefulness of the term 'natural law' and in my own writings I have preferred the term 'natural morality'.8 Further, there is no doubt in my mind that Lemche's essay is an important contribution. However, one of the problems with some of the other essays that Paris approves of is that they are arguably based upon inadequate sociological models. Knight, for instance, writes of monarchic Israel as a centralized state, and while allowing that 'there never was a time when power was fully and equally diffused throughout the population' nevertheless maintains that 'the presence of royalty and the machine of state had an unrelenting, inexorable impact on the populace'.9 Is Knight guilty here of reading a modern idea of the nation state back into monarchic Israel with the result that the plight of the 'populace' is exaggerated? Anthony Giddens points out that whereas modern nation states have boundaries which mark the extent and limits of their sovereignty, traditional states have frontiers marked by frontier settlements. While these may mark the extent of the claim of sovereignty, they do not necessarily imply any great degree of political control within the territory 'enclosed' by the frontier settlements. Giddens states that Traditional states depend upon the generating of authoritative axid allocative resources, made possible by the intersecting relations between city and countryside. The development of surveillance capability is the basis of the administrative power created by states as organisations. Traditional states are, however, fundamentally segmental in character, with only limited sustained administrative authority of the state apparatus. The fact that such states have frontiers, including secondary settlement frontiers, rather than boundaries is indicative of their relatively weak level of system integration. It is essential to emphasize how different, as 'social systems', traditional states are from modern ones.10

Giddens's generalizations appear to receive confirmation as applicable to monarchic Israel in Hermann Niemann's recent study.11 Niemann argues that the political influence of (northern) Israelite monarchs was confined to relatively small areas about frontier and strategic settlements or towns, and that considerable areas lacked any centre that could organize royal political control. His map on p. 149 which shades the areas with and without centres for royal political control is illuminating, and in part of his commentary on the map he states that apart from Megiddo (and Taanach) there was no internal administrative centre other than the royal capital [Samaria] itself . . . The large areas that were free of royal administrative centres show that the northern, kingdom apparently possessed no organizational structures through which power was exercised. Only two moves in that direction can be determined; the attempt to connect the local and ruling elite of the area immediately around Samaria with the royal power in Samaria, as indicated by the Samaria ostraca of the first half of the eighth century 8

Rogerson (1982). I took the term 'natural morality' from Robinson (1971), 31-6. 10 * Knight (1995), 100. Giddens (1985), 52. " Niemann (1993).

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BCE; and an apparent network of four military areas (mdynwt) for which, however, the evidence is significantly restricted to the time of the Omrides.12

If these observations about the exercise of political power in monarchic (northern) Israel, are correct and if it can be maintained that Knight has overestimated the amount of central political control that could be exercised,13 the result is that Paris's ideal of Old Testament scholars providing raw material for ethicists by producing accounts of moral or political development in ancient Israel based on 'premodern' questions, is more difficult than he realizes. Questions can, similarly, be asked of Schulte's characterization of the problems supposedly faced by the 'common people' who lived under the Ornrides. He writes that 'The problems of the common people could only have been solved or at least alleviated by a king who would have confronted his own state apparatus, the officers and tax-collectors, the large landowners and leading merchants, as an advocate for the poor, one who sought equity and justice/14 Because the Omrides could not do this, the poor relied on violence, and on another king to topple the Omrides and to be more concerned with the economic welfare of the people as a whole. This argument implies that there was a 'state apparatus' in Omride Israel and that numerous agencies existed that laid heavy burdens upon the poor; also, that it could reasonably have been hoped that the overthrow of the Omrides would bring to power a monarch more sympathetic to the poor. But if Niemann is correct there was no such 'state apparatus', and with regard to expectations as to what kings could be expected to achieve, Lemche's essay on patronage is a safer way into the subject. The relevance of all this for Old Testament ethics is that any attempt to approach the subject historically involves sociological issues and raises the question whether the social reconstructions that underpin the ethical conclusions are adequate, or whether we are even in a position to know enough about ancient Israelite society to tackle the subject this way at all.l5 A further point that must be made is that attempts to describe Old u Ibid., 148. ('abgesehen von Megiddo (und Taanadh) neben der Residenz selbst (i.e. Samaria] kein binnenlandischer Funktionalort existiert (Mahanajim als Funktionalort ist unsicher)! Die grossen, von kdniglichen Funktionalorten freier Flachen (Karte 4) zeigen, dass das Nordreidi anscheinend keine organisatorische Strukturierung als Herrschaftsmittel kannte. Lediglich zwei Ansatze sind festzustcUen; Der tnit dem unmittelbaren Umland Samarias beginnende Versuch des Kdnigtums zur Anbindung der dortigen lokalen und regionalen Elite an die Herrschaft in Samaria, wie cr sich in der l.H.des 8Jh.v.Chr. in den Samaria-Ostraca zeigt und eine verrnutliche weitmaachigpunktuelle Einrichtung von evtl.4 Militarbezirken (mdymat), bezeichnenderweise (nur) unten den Omriden (bezeugt)'.) 15 To be fair to Knight, his is a carefully presented position, based upon political anthropology and sensitive to the different levels of political power. Nevertheless, he uses the term 'centralized' to designate a level of government 'that seems to control the whole region politically, economically, and ideologically'. My question is whether such 'centralization' ever existed in ancient Israel or Judah. See Knight (1995), 99-100. 14 Schulte (1995), 146. 15 See the reservations expressed by Cogging (1987-88), 11-14; Carroll (1992), 31-44.

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Testament ethical concerns or ethical development are often heavily influenced by the ethical priorities that are high on today's agenda. One indication of this is the number of treatments of the poor and their oppression and Old Testament attitudes to this. Violence and power are other common themes, while increasing attention is paid to animals and to environmental issues,16 What this means is that we must be aware of a particular 'hermeneutical circle', I do not want to create the impression that I am opposed or indifferent to these issues; the opposite is the case. My purpose is to try to clarify matters. II

If one looks back in the history of interpretation it will become apparent that differing agendas have shaped approaches to Old Testament ethics in earlier periods. Thus, whereas ancient Israelite monarchy and its supposed exercise of absolute power are an embarrassment to some writers on Old Testament ethics today, the Reformation in England was justified by appeal to Old Testament kings such as Hezekiah and Josiah who had used their power to effect religious reforms. Again, in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England, when the overthrow of the house of Stuart in 1688 was being actively challenged by Prince Charles Edward in 1745, the question of rebellion and of the legitimate overthrow of royal dynasties was keenly debated on the basis of the Old Testament.17 In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Britain, the influence of evolutionistic thinking caused Old Testament ethics to be studied, as a history of ancient Israel's ethical advancement from more primitive to more enlightened, ethical values.18 All this is to illustrate the obvious, but easily overlooked, point that attempts to describe Old Testament ethics from 'within' depend upon the perspectives of today's (Western) world, today's (Western) understanding of the nature and functioning of societies past and present, and today's (Western) ethical concerns. Thus, while the view that inappropriate 'modern' categories should not be imposed upon studies of Old Testament ethics is commendable and defensible, it does involve a hermeneutical circularity. A question that is difficult to get to grips with is how confessional writers view the religious authority of the Old Testament as a source for ethics. It ought to be easy to see how writers deal with the matter '* For concern with the poor, violence, and power it is sufficient to note that all the contributions to the Semeia symposium in the section 'Political Ethics in Ancient Israel' deal with these issues. For animals and environmental matters see the discussion and references in Rogerson (1991). 17 See the chapter 'Welcoming King Josiah, 1546-9', in MacCulloch (1996), esp. 364-5. For the eighteenth century see Reventlow (1980), 535-45 (ET (1984), 327-34). Rogerson (1992), 217-28. '" A classical example is Mozley (1900).

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who are openly 'evangelical'; but this is not necessarily the case. Kaiser, for example, carefully reviews and criticizes a number of contemporary approaches, but does not, as far as I can see, take us explicitly beyond the view that the Old Testament contains some universal moral principles. He commends Childs's canonical approach, for example, but feels that what it offers is simply information about the experiences of believers in ancient Israel—their witness to what God did for them or they for him. 'The questions of claim and authority have not, as yet, been fully addressed here. What is the authority status of the Old Testament? In what sense(s) is it to be equated with the divine will?'19 These are fair questions, yet when Kaiser sets out some 'Principles for Moral Interpretation of the Old Testament' they are mostly methods of getting at universal moral statements implicit in their particular embeddedness in Hebrew language and culture. Presumably one could apply the same methods to extracting universal moral principles from the laws of Hammurabi and the question is thus raised of the precise nature of the divine or revelatory elements in the Old Testament passages that the 'Principles' disclose. In practice, Kaiser seems to hold to a propositional view of biblical revelation, and the final part of his book is at pains to refute traditional objections to Old Testament morality. These objections can be divided into those that impugn the character of God, and those that impugn the character of leading persons in the Old Testament, and laws and sanctions that are morally offensive. Charges against God include the allegation that he is fickle (Gen. 6:6), hateful (Mai. 1: 2-3), deceptive (1 Kgs. 22; 2-23) and wrathful; that he orders human sacrifice (Gen. 22), approves deceiving (Exod. 3: 18-20), and commands genocide (Deut. 7: 1-5). Charges against leading characters include lying (Abraham at Gen. 12: 10—20), adultery (David at 2 Sam. 11: 2-5), murder (Ehud at Judg. 3: 15-26 and Jael at Judg. 4: 17-20) and cursing (Elisha at 2 Kgs. 2: 23-4).20 The morally offensive laws and sanctions include the view and treatment of women, slavery, imprecations (especially against enemies in the Psalms), the death penalty and eudaemonism (the view that ethical virtue will be materially rewarded).21 These charges are extremely varied, and are dealt with in many ways. For example, David is exonerated as a king 'after God's own heart' (cp. 1 Sam. 13: 14) by using the traditional distinction between a person's office and a person's private moral conduct. Elisha's 'cursing' of those who called him 'bald head' is explained as an invoking of Lev. 26: 21-2— a divine threat to send wild animals against those who refuse to listen to God's voice. 'Murderers' such as Ehud and Jael are vindicated from the perspective of the wars in which their actions were carried out. The value of Kaiser's discussions, whether or not one agrees with their aims and conclusions, is to show that it is unwise to make hasty decisions w 20 2l Kaiser (1983), 53. Ibid., 24.7-83. Ibid., 284-304.

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about moral crudities in the Old Testament. Offensive passages need to be considered carefully, not only from the technical exegetical point of view, but from the point of view of traditional moral teaching. Who can deny, for example, that repulsive as war is, no 'civilized' nation today would treat any of its citizens who killed an 'enemy' in the legitimate defence of the nation in the context of war, as murderers? Yet ultimately, Kaiser's approach puts the Old Testament above moral criticism. If the character of God appears to be offensive in some regards this is because of 'a deficiency in our view of things and our ability to properly define terms or grasp the whole of the subject'.22 And yet, paradoxically, Kaiser is open to the use of moral criticism in that his extensive apologetic is an attempt to show that the Old Testament is not offensive to modern moral sensitivities, A quite different approach from an 'evangelical' perspective is found in Christopher Wright's thoughtful work. Interestingly and perhaps surprisingly, he expresses admiration for the work of dispensationalists and theonomists in their attempt to safeguard the ethical authority of the Old Testament, while disagreeing profoundly with their results.23 On the face of it his is a very traditional 'evangelical' stance. He writes that The biblical authority . . . for our ethics in a world of moral relativism, is based on its twin affirmation of creation and history: creation as the fundamental order, that shapes our existence in history, and which is destined for restoration in the new creation of the kingdom of God; and history as the stage on which we observe the acts of God whom we are commanded, to imitate by 'walking in his ways'.

However, in practice Wright appears to be much closer to 'liberal' writers in his concern for broader, social, ethical issues and in his sensitivity to how one situates Old Testament ethical use into contemporary cultures. A key notion for Wright is that of paradigm: Israel is God's paradigm of what a nation ought ideally to be, and was therefore chosen to disclose God's wider purposes to the rest of humanity. This enables Wright to accept fully the particular cultural and historical conditions in which ancient Israel existed and, indeed, to argue that these specificities sharpen the universal relevance of Old Testament ethics; for behind and within these particularities Wright sees the moral consistency of God. However, the application of Old Testament ethics to today's world is seen as a sophisticated operation. Any particular law must be understood in its Old Testament context and with a view to discovering its primary object. Once this has been found, an appropriate modern context and formulation need to be sought. Further, Wright appreciates that in both ancient Israel 22

Kaiser 0983), 269. » Wright (1995), 97-106 discusses Gcisler (1989), Rushdoony (1973) and Bahnsen (1977), among others. He criticizes dispensationalism for separating the Old from the New Testament and theonomy for excluding public, social issues from applying the Bible to contemporary society.

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and in modern contexts, moral decisions often have to be made not in morally neutral circumstances but where there may be a choice between two evils. This, at any rate, is what I take to be implied in his rhetorical questions 'What is the balance of creation ideals and fallen realities, of justice and compassion, in this law?'24 In his sociological account of Israel's history and therefore of Israel as a paradigm Wright draws particularly on the work of Norman Gottwald and quotes with approval the following passage from The Tribes of Yahweh, in which Gottwald articulates the difference that 'Canaanites' would have perceived, between themselves and Israel in social material rather than idealistic terms: A socially conscious version of what her contemporaries 'noticed' about Israel would go something like this; 'We notice that Israel is a total community that confronts and challenges us to join its way of living. To do this we have to relinquish voluntarily or involuntarily the old forms of socio-political domination, including the old religious ideologies. Israel calls us to a new form of social relations which destroys class privileges.'25

Wright's approach has the virtue of seeking to hold firmly to God's moral character as revealed in the Bible while being flexible about how the implications of this are applied to contemporary society. Yet he has to pay a price for this, and he leaves himself vulnerable to the charges that were made above against Douglas Knight and others. The price paid is that Wright has partly shifted the locus of authority for Old Testament ethics away from the biblical text to the Israelite society that is reconstructed by means of the text and modern sociological and anthropological theories, not to mention contemporary social issues. This immediately puts the whole project at the mercy of disputes about the nature of ancient Israelite society. Wright expresses strong reservations about aspects of Gottwald's work,26 yet he nevertheless asserts that 'Israel was selfconsciously distinctive from surrounding nations, and especially the Canaanites, not just religiously but in their total social system. This distinctiveness was deliberate as part of what it was to be "Israel".'27 This affirmation and the implications that go with it raise a number of basic questions. What is meant here by 'Israel' and how was its distinctiveness 'organized'? Who were the Canaanites? Were they city-state dwellers or non-'Israelite' villagers living in proximity to Israelites? If the sociological theory of Anthony Giddens is followed, it is best not to talk of 'society' but of subcultures interacting at various levels, in which case both 'Israel' and 'Canaanites' should be conceptualized as made up of interacting sub-groups, so that at some levels 'Israelites' and 'Canaanites' could have 24 25 26 27

Wright (1995), 145. Gottwald (1980), 596, quoted by Wright (1995), 177-8. Wright (1995), 147-8,161. Ibid., 161.

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interacted quite differently compared with their interaction at other levels,28 It seems to me that Wright's cause would be better served by regarding the laws and passages that he discusses as ideals that may or may not have been realized, and as ideals which, if realized, would probably have depended upon such coercive and legislative power as existed in ancient Israel or Judah. Bruce Birch's approach to Old Testament ethics, in a confessional work which he disclaims as either a book on Old Testament ethics or an attempt to write the ethics of the Old Testament,29 is alert to the points just made. Any given text, he notes, 'may be representative of a broad popular morality in Israel, or it may be a visionary moral witness branded unacceptable in its own time (e.g. Jeremiah).'30 He stresses the moral and social diversity in ancient Israel, and that their reconstruction may not be possible. However, the Old Testament's value as a moral resource is not dependent on historical or sociological reconstructions. Rather, it is the product of a faith community which has, at each stage of the canonical process, chosen to include that material which best articulates the community's understanding of the moral shape and character which God demands of it and which in turn reflects God's character.31 Birch acknowledges that some of the material chosen reflects ancient Israel's participation in social practices that are unacceptable today, such as slavery, patriarchy and intolerant nationalism, but this difficulty is overcome by the fact that the Old Testament does not provide precepts that are to be followed today but rather, illustrates a process of moral discrimination at work in the community of faith. It is this process that is a resource for those who confessionally accept the Old Testament as authoritative today. In practice, Birch concentrates not on Old Testament laws but on narratives, in line with his view that narratives form and express the character of the faith community. However, one can be excused for feeling that the method promises more than it delivers. The greater part of the book reads more like an introduction to the literature of the Old Testament against its historical and social setting than an approach to ethics. Birch, has attempted, in theory at any rate, to move the arena of concern back to the biblical text as opposed to reconstructions of ancient Israelite society. However, this move is itself dependent on a reconstruction for which the evidence is in my opinion at best uncertain. Do we know that there was a canonical process or processes at work in a faith community? What, if anything, do we know about the faith community, and how does it relate to the various strains of Judaism of the Inter-Testa mental period? Is the notion of faith community sociologically credible? Birch writes that the 'Hebrew canon is also part of the Christian canon'32 but this only points up another difficulty. The Bible of the early Church was not the K

See generally, Giddens (1984). M " Birch (1991), 19. Ibid., 36.

2

3I

Ibid.,40-41.

32

Ibid., 46.

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Hebrew canon and it was not until the Reformation that some churches decided for the Hebrew rather than the Greek canon.33 Birch makes the point well that some Old Testament narratives can be read in ways that make them morally challenging (he instances Phyllis Trible's handling of the book of Ruth),34 but this is a different position from the canonical one. This review of three recent large-scale confessional attempts to deal with Old Testament ethics indicates that the only thing that they have in common is some sort of commitment to the Old Testament as a source of moral authority. How this is worked out is different in each case. Kaiser's approach is prepositional, Wright's is paradigmatic, and Birch's is canonical. However, it is difficult to escape the feeling that the main object of the enterprise is to rescue the Old Testament from oblivion or obloquy by showing that it can be read or used morally in ways that can be justified according to present moral standards. in

In what follows 1 shall attempt three things, not to justify the Old Testament but to illustrate how different results can follow if different approaches are made. I shall discuss evidence of moral and ethical sensitivity within the biblical text, discourse ethics, and the need for a plurality of methods and approaches. It has long been recognized that some texts contain moral dilemmas that need to be justified by anyone holding to a prepositional view of biblical authority. In the present essay it will be asked what such passages tell us about the ethical sensitivities of the presumed writers and audiences of the texts. Genesis 12:10-20, 20:1-18, 26: 6-11 The attempts of Abraham and Isaac to pass off their wives as their sisters, occurring as they do in three narratives, provide a unique opportunity to study ethical sensitivities. In each case, the Israelite ancestor is considered to be in the wrong and is interrogated by the injured party. In Gen. 12:18-19 the Pharaoh, demands 'Why did you not tell me that she was your wife? Why did you say, "She is my sister", so that I took her for my wife?' The ancestor has to justify himself in each, case, explaining the fear of being killed if it were known that the woman was his wife. In Gen. 20: 12 Abraham adds that Sarah is indeed his half-sister—an excuse not open to Isaac's deception in the case of Rebekah. The response of God in the three passages varies. In Gen. 12 he sends plagues on the Egyptians because Sarai has been taken into Pharaoh's house. In Gen. 20 he closes the wombs of Abimelech's house and warns Abimelech in a dream about Sarah's true status. In Gen. 26 there is no 33 34

Mtiller (1996). Birch (1991), 58, referring to Trible (1978), 166-99.

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mention of God at all. It is tempting to posit a development here, in which God is progressively distanced from justifying an action that all three accounts regard, as wrong.35 At the very least, the three accounts taken together exhibit three standpoints regarding God's justification of a wrong act, ranging from complete through partial support to no support. It is also noteworthy that the accounts recognize that moral absolutes ha¥e to be applied to situations where a choice is made between lesser evils. Are the lives of Abraham/Isaac and Sarah/Rebekah more important than the moral imperative of truthfulness? Is the risking of Sarah's/Rebekah's sexual integrity a price worth paying to preserve the life of Abraham/ Isaac? The moral dilemmas explored in these stories must have been credible to the presumed authors and readers, and the stories therefore provide information about ethical reflection in ancient Israel. Genesis 18: 22-33 Two important points emerge from Abraham's intercession with God concerning the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. The first is that a notion of what is 'right' that is perceived independently of God, is urged by Abraham upon God; 'Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?' (Gen. 13: 25). Second, the possibility is allowed that in what, in the story, is a foreign city with an evil reputation (cp. Gen. 18: 20-1), there may be righteous people whose death would be so unjust that the preservation of the city with all its wickedness would be morally preferable. Although the possibility is theoretical, and ch. 19 functions to indicate the degree of wickedness of Sodom, the story is evidence for a struggle with a moral dilemma—is the just punishment of a majority more important than the unjust punishment of a minority? The implicit answer, on the basis of a 'natural morality', appears to be no; and it can be argued that ch. 19 is needed to justify the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah in the light of this moral conclusion. Exodus 1: 15-20 Two moral dilemmas are implicit in the story of the midwives and the Pharaoh: should the unjust orders of someone in authority be carried out, and is it legitimate to lie in order to justify noncompliance with such orders? The biblical writer cryptically informs readers that the reason for non-compliance was that the midwives 'feared God'. This could mean several things: that they were obeying what they believed to be a divine command that it was wrong to kill, or that it was God's will that Hebrew babies should be preserved. The moral dilemmas are sharpened if the enigmatic phrase lameyalldoth ha'ivriyyot is taken to mean that the midwives were not themselves Hebrews but Egyptian midwives to Hebrew women.36 In this case, Egyptian women disobey a command from their own ruler that they believe to be unjust. 35

Such a development is partly suggested by van Seters (1975), 167-83. •* See the discussion in Schmidt (1974—), 19-20. Schmidt inclines to the view that they are Egyptian.

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1 Samuel 20:1-34 In this story Jonathan defies his father Saul and both he and David lie about the reason for David's non-attendance at Saul's new-moon festival. Both know that Saul will attempt to kill David if he attends the feast. Thus, a lesser evil—lying—is preferred to the very real risk of being killed. That the lie is perceived as a necessary wrong is indicated by the fact that Jonathan is only to tell it if challenged by Saul. He is not to volunteer it. 2 Samuel 14:1-11 The woman of Tekoa's made-up story whose purpose is to get David to restore the banished Absalom to court, is based upon the moral dilemma of the tension between justice and mercy. The woman's story is that one of her two sons has killed his brother, and that the family is now demanding that the murderer be put to death. If this happens, however, since she will then be a widow with no male offspring, her husband's name will not be continued. The dilemma is thus one of justice versus mercy. Should the murderer he punished and the husband's line be extinguished, or is the latter more important than strictly upholding justice? In the story, David opts for mercy. We do not know, of course, whether this kind of dilemma was an actual, or even frequent reality; but we must assume that the presumed author was describing a possibility that presumed readers would accept as plausible. 2 Kings 8: 7-15 The incident of Elisha's encounter with Hazael involves regicide and deception; and there is also evidence that the massoretic textual tradition was uncomfortable about the deception, if not the regicide! The MT Kethiv of verse 10 must be translated: 'Go, say [to Ben-hadad] "You will surely not live"; because the Lord has shown me that he will surely die.' This is consistent. But the Qr§, followed by all the versions and modern translations is: '"You shall certainly recover"; but the Lord has shown me that he shall certainly die.' Thus Elisha is portrayed as encouraging deceit and regicide, and although regicide was not a moral dilemma faced personally by many Israelites, it was certainly an issue, as its condemnation in 2 Sam. 1:11-16 indicates (cp. also Hos. 1: 4). These examples, deliberately taken not from laws but from narratives which can be assumed to have life situations that were plausible to the presumed readers, indicate that Israelites were familiar with moral dilemmas. They appreciated that moral decisions had to be taken in circumstances where there was only a choice between two evils; they were familiar with the conflict between justice and mercy, and they had a certain embarrassment about using the will of God to justify what they perceived, to be wrong actions. On the other hand, a movement can be discerned which sought to bring originally secular moral precepts into the divine sphere. This has been well described by Otto,37 and can best be seen in the collections of laws 37

See most recently, Otto (1995).

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that he has studied. There is a continuous process of revising laws so that they express more and more adequately the solidarity of God with humankind, especially the poor and. oppressed,38 The same process can be accepted for the oracles against the nations, as John Barton has shown.39 Here, we can suppose that norms regarding just behaviour between peoples drawn from 'natural morality' have been backed by divine sanctions. Part of the process by which natural morality was drawn into the divine sphere was by the operation of powerful narratives and their motive clauses. The story of the exodus in particular constantly supplied a motive clause in something like the form 'you shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and. the Lord your God redeemed you; therefore I command you this today' (Deut. 15:15). But this process seems to have done more than just incorporate the secular into the divine sphere. It seems to have operated to create ethical ideals that were grounded in the compassion of God. The best known of these are the Jubilee laws of Leviticus 25 at the basis of which is an acknowledgement that accident or misfortune can lead to a loss of human independence and dignity. Periodically, these distortions, whose victims are human beings, must be corrected. But there are many scraps of laws in which the process can, be seen in no less striking a fashion. The laws contained in Exod. 23: 9-12 are noteworthy because they extend the notion of compassion arising from the exodus story to domesticated animals, wild, beasts, the poor, servants, and the land. The land, and vineyards and olive orchards must be allowed to rest in the seventh year—not, as we know, an agricultural necessity made into a theological virtue—the domesticated animals must not be worked on the sabbath, and the poor and wild animals must benefit from any 'wild' produce of the sabbatical year.40 That the natural order as represented by the land, olive trees and vineyards, wild beasts and domesticated animals should be brought under the domain of human compassion in imitation of divine compassion, is striking. It is often said, rightly or wrongly, that the fertility religions of the ancient Near East which imitated nature and thus placed stress upon power and procreation—the bull being an appropriate symbol for both— fostered social systems that favoured power and aggression. The Old. 3S See also Otto (1994), 90: 'In the Book of the Covenent the individual is addressed directly and confronted with JHWH as the compassionate one ... it is necessary to show solidarity with [fellow human beings] not because the king requires it but because God shows solidarity with human beings,' dm Bundesbuch wird der einzelne Mensch direkt angesprochen und mit JHWH als dern Barmherzigen konfrontiert... Nicht also well der Konig es gebietet, soil der Mensch solidarisch sein, sondern well Gott solidarisch mit dem Mensch 1st'.) :1H Barton (1980), 40 On the fact that the fallowing of fields had to take place much more often than every seventh, year see Hopkins (1985), 192-203.

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Testament strand which understood nature as needing to be brought into the sphere of compassion, is striking by contrast From a modern standpoint, 'instrumental reason' (the view that the humanity of humankind is developed by the mastery and domination of nature) is a product of the Enlightenment,41 and the Old Testament 'personalizing' of nature as needing compassion is a striking attitude when set against 'instrumental reason'. It can also be claimed that the Old Testament laws that require compassionate treatment of nature are a valuable contribution to understanding the Old Testament idea of creation. God, as creator, cares for what is created by requiring the paradigm nation Israel to treat compassionately, what is created. Depending on the interests of users of the Old Testament today, this particular movement of bringing laws inclusively and then creatively into the divine sphere may or may not be illuminating. There is, however, another aspect of this process which is interesting in a different way, from a modern standpoint. It is commonly accepted that a process can be discerned in Proverbs whereby the mainly 'secular' proverbs of chs. 10-31 are brought into the divine sphere by chs. 1—9, and the personification of Wisdom as God's assistant in creation at 8: 22—36. This coincides with an understanding of creation as order (cp. Genesis 1, and passages such as Job 38: 4-33) and with the view that the world is a moral order whose principles can be discerned rationally. Late or, as some prefer to call it, postmodernity has drawn attention to the problems inherent in the Enlightenment view of rationality and order. As well as producing emancipation it has produced the exploitation of nature and the degradation of humans. This has led some 'postmodern' theorists to argue that morality is non-rational, if by rational is meant the ability to be based upon absolute or universal principles. Zygmunt Bauman writes that Human reality is messy and ambiguous—and so moral decisions, unlike abstract ethical principles, are ambivalent. It is in this sort of world that we must live; and yet, as if defying the worried philosophers who cannot conceive of an 'unprincipled' morality, a morality without foundations, we demonstrate day by day that we can live, or learn to live, or manage to live in such a world, though few of us would be ready to spell out, if asked, what the principles that guide us are, and fewer still would have heard about the 'foundations' which we allegedly cannot do without to be good and kind to each other.42

Bauman holds that releasing morality from artificially-constructed ethical codes means to re-personalize it. This puts moral responsibility squarely upon individuals in their dealings with others. 'We realise now—with a mixture of apprehension and hope—that unless moral responsibility 41 42

See, for example, Taylor (1989), 185-207. Bauman (1993), 32. '

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was 'from the start', somehow rooted in the very way we humans are— it would never be conjured up at a later stage by no matter how highminded or high-handed an effort.'43 While the dangers of anachronistically reading back 'postmodern' views into the Old Testament must be fully recognized, it is nonetheless arguable that material can be found in its pages that illustrates points made by modern attacks upon rationality, and the ethical implications that can be drawn. First, it has been pointed out above that the Old Testament contains narratives which recognize the ambivalence of moral decision making. Are lying, deception, and putting wives at risk an acceptable price to pay for preserving the life of the male centres of God's promises? Second, a crisis regarding the order/rationality moral view of the world implied in Proverbs can be found in Job and Ecclesiastes. The arguments of Job's 'comforters' are eminently rational given belief in an ordered, moral universe. Unfortunately, the}? do nothing to meet Job's actual situation, and certainly do not convince Job intellectually. It may also be significant that Job is never addressed directly by the 'comforters' until Elihu arrives on the scene in ch. 32; in other words, the text can be read as though the insistence of the three 'comforters' on ethical and religious principles leads them to disregard Job as a person. When God speaks to Job he introduces an element of 'irrationality', in that the behaviour of creatures such as the ostrich and the hawk is not according to human wisdom (cp. Job 39: 26). The attack on the rationality of the moral order in Ecclesiastes is more direct than in Job, and is based upon many examples that the author has observed from life. There are the oppressed for whom there is no help against their oppressors (Eccles. 4: 1), there is wickedness in the place where justice should be administered (3: 16), there are people who accumulate wealth and honour but who do not live to enjoy them (6: 2), there is a poor wise man whose wisdom delivers a city but whose deed is forgotten (9; 14-16). Above all, there are wicked people who succeed in life and righteous ones who do not (7:15). Two conclusions can be drawn from these attacks upon rationality. First, the ethical move in the Old Testament which seeks to bring the whole of moral experience into the divine sphere, at least in the way envisaged in Proverbs, is perceived within the Old Testament to be problematical. To that extent 1 do not entirely agree with Otto that such bringing of morality into the divine sphere as opposed to the secularizing tendency of modern thought is a contribution that Old Testament ethics can make to today's world.44 The second is that the distinction between morality and ethics as made by writers such as Bauman is important for getting to the heart of the Old. Testament. If morality is understood in the first instance as the claim made upon us 43 44 Bauman (1993), 34™5. Otto (1995), 165.

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by what Bauman, following Levinas, calls the 'Other',45 this is what the Old Testament is most concerned with. The demand that others (including animals and the lands, etc.) should be treated with compassion— which demand is based not upon abstract ethical principles, or even upon 'creation', but upon a narrative describing God's compassion for an enslaved and oppressed people—has several features. It is open-ended and demandingly creative rather than legally circumscribed. The 'laws' about releasing a slave in Deuteronomy 15 do not prescribe how much he should, be given by his master. 'You shall furnish him liberally out of your flock' commands the legislator; 'as the Lord your God has blessed you, you shall give to him. You shall remember that you were a slave in Egypt . . .' (Deut, 15: 14-15). Second, it makes possible the movement from morality to ethics rather than vice versa that Bauman commends. Does this mean that universal moral principles are abandoned in favour of merely individual responses to 'Others'? Not at all, if the discourse ethics of Jurgen Habermas are brought in at this point. Discourse ethics, as I have pointed out elsewhere,46 is an attempt to re-establish the importance of rationality in ethics while allowing that absolutes have to be situated in particular situations and while allowing ethics to change because they have an inadequate base in inter-subjectivity or information available. Based upon the principle that the better argument should always prevail and that we can therefore be convinced that we should do something that is against our particular interest, discourse ethics defines a right action as one which can be accepted without compulsion by all parties who have a genuine interest in the outcome, on the basis of the best information available. It follows that better information or the discovery of individuals or groups whose interest had. not previously been considered could bring a different outcome. In terms of what this essay has been considering in the last few paragraphs, discourse ethics begins from people in relationship and in their situatedness and moves from there to ethical principles. It aims to combine universality with open-endedness; but it also recognizes that there will be groups or individuals who are voiceless and who need to be spoken for, I have tried to argue that, whereas the Old Testament is thought of primarily as providing apodictic, categorical laws as in the Ten Commandments, there is more discourse on ethical matters in the Old. Testament than one realizes, once books such as Job and the Psalms are included, and the prophets are seen as speaking on behalf of the voiceless. Discourse ethics also adds another dimension which is pertinent to the Old Testament. It implies, counter-factually, that ideal speech situations exist, undistorted by power relationships, alienation, prejudice, greed, or selfishness. But of course all these things, and. many more, are factors in 45

Bauman (1993), 47-53, citing Levinas (1991). '«' Rogerson (1995), 17-26,

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the specific situations in which moral decisions have to be taken. If ideal speech situations existed there would be no need for works of supererogation or for sacrifice; but these are needed, and. the Old Testament has much to say about the experience of self-sacrifice in defence of or on behalf of wronged or oppressed groups. Bauman, coming from a different perspective writes, in a passage that sounds more like theology than sociology, 'Saints are saints because they do not hide behind the Law's broad shoulders. They know, or they feel, or they act as if they felt, that no law, however generous and humane, may exhaust their moral duty, trace the consequences of "being for" to their radical end, to the ultimate choice of life and death.'47 IV

This brings me to a conclusion. People who write about Old Testament ethics have consciously or unconsciously taken, so it seems to me, a number of decisions that it is necessary for an essay such as this to try to spell out. The most fundamental decision is the confessional one. Does a person write about Old Testament ethics because of a belief that its revelatory content is somehow applicable to today's world? It may also be possible to put this rhetorical question another way without wanting or trying to be cynical. Does a person write about Old Testament ethics not so much out of the conviction that its ethical content can be applied to today's world, but as part of an agenda to rescue or preserve the Old. Testament as Scripture or canon or as part of the Bible? In both cases, a question has to be asked about the strategies employed. What do strategies imply about a writer's understanding of societies in general and ancient Israel in particular, and of the hermeneutical problem of moving from texts produced in an ancient, traditional society to situations in today's industrialized world? The most fundamental decision here affects non-confessionalists as well as confessionalists, and it concerns 'essentialism'. Is there something essential or permanent about humanity and its social organization such that terms and concepts can be transferred from one time and culture to another without distortion, misrepresentation or straightforward error? The most transparent 'yes' to this question must come from anyone who maintains that the Old Testament contains laws about social organization that are categorical, that is, applicable in all societies at all times, and because of being God's revealed will Kaiser, for example, uses all the resource of biblical scholarship to argue that God's will for all sexual relationships is monogamous heterosexual marriage (Gen. 2: 24).48 He denies the view of 'Christian anthropologists, sociologists, and theologians . . . that the prohibition of polygamy based 47

Bauman (1993), 81.

'K Kaiser (1983), 181-208.

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on Scripture is on extremely shaky grounds'49 and regards anything other than the view that 'Homosexuality must be listed as a sexual perversion ... and an abomination in God's eyes' as 'a form of specious reasoning',50 Clearly, this is an issue where certain confessional stances will take a final stand against pluralistic interpretations of anthropological or sociological data. However, there are other forms of 'essentialism' alongside confessional versions. With reference to categories such as 'the poor', 'oppression', 'patriarchy', and 'nationalism', can we be sure that what we understand by these terms (in the prosperous one-third world) is the same as what they meant in ancient Israel? The answer to this will partly depend upon how the terms are understood in today's world. Three contributions to the Sheffield colloquium, by Danny Carroll, Gerald West and Mark Brett are important here.51 Carroll writes about the evangelical and ecumenical Maya Protestants of Guatemala, where he worked for many years. He shows how it is impossible to generalize about them: 'cultural identity is inevitably and fundamentally local, and in each place race, color, stature, occupations, customs, language, dress, education, concepts of origins and religion come together in particular and unique ways.'52 This affects how the Bible is responded to and how that response is worked out in terms of traditional cultural beliefs, or the experience of becoming the unsolicited theatre of warfare between government and guerrilla forces, to name but two, but extreme, factors, Carroll is able to point out that 'an "essentialist" perspective on culture—which locks on to a particular configuration of that culture as timeless, pristine, and coherent . . . is yielding to a more dynamic comprehension of cultural identity/53 West draws attention to James Scott's book Domination and the Arts of Resistance in which it is argued that the social analysis of relations between the powerful and the weak mostly concentrates on what he calls the public transcript,3* What is neglected, is the hidden transcript— rumours, gossip, folk tales, gestures, jokes, the theatre of the poor and marginalized. This neglect leads to the distortion that strategies of resistance among 'powerless' groups are overlooked and the resultant synthesis describing power relationships will be inaccurate. West himself uses Scott's work to devise strategies that will help readers in marginalized groups to recognize and utilize 'hidden transcripts' in the Bible. He cites as an example Genesis 27, which, he suggests, is originally a trickster tale about the cleverness and guile of Rebekah told among women and 49

Ibid., 188. •° Ibid., 196-7. 51 Brett (1995); West (1995); Carroll (1995). 52 Carroll (1995), 206. 53 Ibid., 205. 54 Scott (1990).

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celebrated as an example of the power that could be exerted through cunning and guile by a 'powerless' woman in a male society. For present purposes, West's essay is a warning against assuming, in an 'essentialisf way, that it is possible to generalize about power, patriarchy, and the oppressed when dealing with an ancient society known chiefly through an official transcript, Brett discusses the problems inherent in applying the notion of nationalism to the Old Testament, noting the divergent voices in texts such as Deuteronomy and Isaiah, and arguing that they can be appropriated 'only through a critical dialogue with other elements of biblical and subsequent tradition'.3-'' What this adds up to is a need for as much pluralism as possible in studying Old Testament ethics. There is nothing wrong with syntheses; but they need to be supplemented and corrected by special studies and divergent voices. If the prophets are thought to be the main source of ethical insight in the Old Testament36 then the comment of Philip Davies needs to be heard regarding the prophets: It is precisely where many biblical scholars see the high ethical watermark of the OT that I fail to see coherence, foundational principles, or ethical reflection. One finds Zion theology, the holiness of the god, the hatred of the god, the marital status of the god, the vengeance or inscrutability of the god, his monopoly, authority and much else being used as a reason for doing what the prophet says; much religion, little ethics and not a lot of consistency.57

Again, it is necessary to hear Cheryl Exum's protest against 'prophetic pornography'—prophetic texts in which readers are expected to identify with a male God against an Israel described in female terms as unfaithful wife, harlot and so on, as well as the things that God will do to her to punish or restore her.58 Even the strictures in this essay against 'essentialism' need to be complemented by the fact that, as has also been argued, Old. Testament narratives can be cited which feature characters facing moral dilemmas which appear to be basically the same kind of dilemmas faced today. The most essential task, it seems to me, is for study of ancient Israelite society that is based upon sociological theory with the most powerful explanatory potential. This needs to bring out the diversity and complexity of interactive subgroups within Israel as a traditional society, and what this meant in terms of power (however defined) and the functioning of institutions and integrating social mechanisms. In this field, Old. Testament study is only at the beginning of its task. Old Testament ethics impinges upon many areas of study: archaeology, sociology, history, philosophy, history of interpretation, theology. It 55 56 57 S!

Brett (1995), 159. Note the reservations about this in Barton (1978), 44-6. Da vies (1995), 172. Exum (1995).

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deeply affects the personal commitments of scholars, whether confessional or not. It asks disturbing questions, such as whether, and to what extent, writers on the subject are themselves practically committed to the ethical ideals that they commend in the Old Testament, or whether they actively oppose the abuses which they believe that the Old Testament or its interpretation have fostered. Although often the Cinderella of Old Testament study, its ethics could be said to be its heart; which is why it demands and deserves as many contributions as possible from the most divergent standpoints. Bibliography BAHNSEJM, G. (1977), Theonomy and Christian Ethics (Phillipsburg: Presbyterian and Reformed). BARTON, j, (1978), 'Understanding Old Testament Ethics', JSOT 9, 44-64. •—(1980), Amos'$ Oracles against the Nations. A Study of Amos 1.3-2.5 (SOTSMS6; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). — (1986), The Oracles of God: Perceptions of Ancient Prophecy in Israel after the Exile (London: Darton, Longman & Todd). •—(1995), 'Reading for Life: The Use of the Bible in Ethics and the Work of Martha C. Nussbaum', in The Bible in Ethics, ed. Rogerson et al, 66-76. — (1997), The Spirit and the Letter; Studies in the Biblical Canon (London: SPCK). BAUMAN, Z. (1993), Postmodern Ethics (Oxford: Blackwell). BIRCH, BRUCE, C. (1991), Let Justice Roll Down. The Old Testament, Ethics, and Christian Life (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press). BRETT, M. G. (1995), 'Nationalism and the Hebrew Bible', in The Bible in Ethics, ed, Rogerson et al., 136-63. BULTMANTN, CHRISTOPH (1992), Der Fremde im antiken Juda. Eine Untersuchung zum sozialen Typeribegriff 'ger' und seinem Bedeutungswandel in der alttestamentlichen

Geseizgebiing (FRLANT 153; Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht). CARROLL R., M. D. (1992), Contexts for Amos. Prophetic Poetics in Latin American Perspective (JSOTS 132; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press). (1995), 'The Bible and the Religious Identity of the Maya of Guatemala at the Conquest and Today: Considerations and Challenges for the Nonindigenous', in The Bible in Ethics, ed. Rogerson et al, 193-212. COGGINS, RICHARD (1987-88), The Old Testament and the Poor', ExpT99,11-14. CRUSEMANN, F. (1995), 'Domination, Guilt, and Reconciliation: The Contribution of the Jacob Narrative in Genesis to Political Ethics', Semeia 66,67-78. DA VIES, P. R. (1995), 'Ethics and the Old Testament', in The Bible in Ethics, ed. Rogerson et al. (JSOTS 207; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press), 164-73. EISSFELDT, O. (1965), The Old Testament: an Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell). EXUM, J. C. (1995), 'The Ethics of Biblical Violence Against Women', in The Bible in Ethics, ed. Rogerson et al, 248-71. FRICK, F. S. (1995), 'Cui Bono?—History in the Sendee of Political Nationalism: The Deuteronomistic History as Political Propaganda', Semeia 66, 79-92. GEISLER, N. L. (1989), 'Dispensationalism and Ethics', Transformation 6, 7-14.

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GIDDENS, A. (1984), The Constitution of Society. Outline oj the Theory of Structuralion (Cambridge: Polity Press). — (1985), The Nation-State and Violence, Volume Two of A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism (Cambridge: Polity Press). GOTTWALD, N. K, (1980), The Tribes ofYalmeh. A Sociology of the Religion of Liberated Israel, 1250-1050 B.C.E. (London: SCM Press). HOPKINS, D. C. (1985), The Highlands of Caiman. Agricultural Life in the Early Iron Age (SWBAS 3; Sheffield: Almond Press). KAISER, WALTER C., JR. (1983), Toward Old Testament Ethics (Grand Rapids: Academie Books). KNIGHT, D. A. (1995), 'Political Rights and Powers in Monarchic Israel', Semeia 66, 93-118. LEMCHB, N. P. (1995), 'Kings and Clients: On Loyalty between the Ruler and the Ruled in Ancient "Israel"', Semeia 66,119-32. LEVIJNAS, E. (1991), Entre nous. Essais sur le penser-a-l'autre (Paris: Grasset). MAC&JLLOCH, D. (1996), Thomas Cranmer. A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press). MOZLEY, J. B. (1900), Riding Ideas in Early Ages (London: Longmans). MULLER, M. (1996), The First Bible of the Church: A Plea for the Septuagint (JSOTS 206; Copenhagen International Seminar 1; Sheffield; Sheffield Academic Press). NIEMANN, H. M. (1993), Herrschaft, Kanigtum und Stoat. Skizzen zur soziohdturelle?i Entiuicklung itn monarctiischen Israel (FAT 6; Tubingen: J. C. B. Mohr). OTTO, ECKART (1994), Theologische Ethik des Allen Testaments (Theologische Wissenschaft, 3/2; Stuttgart: Kohlhammer). (1995), 'Of Aims and Methods in Hebrew Bible Ethics', in Semeia 66,161-72. PARIS, P. J. (1995), 'An Ettiicist's Concerns about Biblical Ethics', Semeia 66,173-9, REVENTLOW, HENNING GRAF (1980), Bibelautoritat und Geist tier Moderne. Die Bedeutung des Bibelverstandnisses fiir die geistesgeschichtliche und politische Entloickhmg in England von der 'Reformation Ins zur Aufldarung (FKDG 30; Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht), ET (1984) The Authority of the Bible and the Rise of the Modern World (London: SCM Press). ROBINSON, N. H. G. (1971), The Groundwork of Christian Ethics (London: Collins). ROGEESON, J. (1982), The Old Testament and Social and Moral Questions', Modem Churchman 25, 28-35. (1991), Genesis 1-11 (Old Testament Guides; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press). — (1992), 'Writing the History of Israel in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries', in The Scriptures and the Scrolls. Studies in Honour of A, S. van der WoM.de on the Occasion of the 65th Birthday, ed. F. G. Martinez et al. (SVT 49; Leiden: E. J. Brill), 217-28. — (1995), 'Discourse Ethics and Biblical Ethics', in The Bible in Ethics: The Second Sheffield Colloquium, ed. Rogerson et. al,, 17-26. ROGERSON, J. W., et al. (1995) (eds.), The Bible in Ethics: The Second Sheffield Colloquium (JSOTS 207; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press). RUSHDOONY, R. (1973), Institutes of Biblical Law (Phillipsburg: Presyterian and Reformed). SCHMIDT, W. H. (1974-), Exodus (BKAT II; Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag).

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SCHULTE, H. (1995), The End of the Omride Dynasty: Social-Ethical Observations on the Subject of Power and Violence', Serneia 66,133-48. SCOTT, J, C. (1990), Domination and the Arts of Resistance; Hidden Transcripts (New Haven and London: Yale University Press). SMEND, R. (1981), Die Entstehung ties Alien Testaments (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer). — (1982), 'Ethik III', TRE Band'x, 423-35. SMITH, M. and R. J. HOFFMAN (1989) (eds.), Wliat the Bible Really Says (Buffalo: Prometheus Books). TAYLOR, C. (1989), Sources of the Self. The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). TRIBLE, P. (1978), God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality (Philadelphia: Fortress Press). VAN SETERS J. (1975), Abraham in History and Tradition (New Haven: Yale University Press). WEST, G. (1995), 'And the Dumb do Speak: Articulating Incipient Readings of the Bible in Marginalized Communities', in The Bible in Ethics, ed. Rogerson et al., 174-92. WRIGHT, CHRISTOPHER J. H, (1995), Walking in the Ways of the Lord. The Ethical Authority of the Old Testament (Leicester: Apollos).

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PART II

The Text of the Old Testament

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6

Textual Criticism: The Ancient Versions S, TALMON I No other ancient or modern text seems to be witnessed to by so many diverse sources in a variety of languages and the transmission history of which is so difficult to elucidate as the text of the Hebrew Bible. Having been handed down for over two millennia the text of Scripture has suffered from the shortcomings of tradents and scribes. All textual traditions as we know them differ in many details from the codified masoretic version (MT), and also from one another. Even the witnesses to any one tradition, whether in Hebrew or in translation, are often at variance. All are contaminated to differing degrees by scribal errors, mistaken interpretation of abbreviations, expansions, paraphrases, and emendations which accumulated in the long process of transmission. The great majority of variants in Hebrew witnesses to the biblical text and a smaller number in translational versions, which often derive from the translator's Hebrew Vorlage, resulted from the interchange of several letters in the Palaeo-Hebrew script, for example aleph and taw, yod and sade, and in the square alphabet, dalet and resh, hefh and kap and peh, etc., because of their graphic resemblance, or from the phonetic similarity of consonants such as gutturals and laryngeals. Others are of a semantic or grammatical nature often caused by the unpremeditated impact of linguistic peculiarities of successive generations of copyists or deliberate adjustment to changing linguistic and stylistic norms. Only a comparatively small part of variants may be laid at the doorstep of ideologically or theologically motivated transmitters and translators who intentionally excised 'offending' statements or infused into the text 'improvements' so as to make it tally with their conceptual universe. For these reasons the biblical writings must be subjected to textual criticism like any other ancient literary document. Ideally the critical analysis aims at recovering the original wording of the sacred writings. However, in actuality the target cannot be

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attained because of the unavailability of reliable ancient sources from a time close to the creation of a biblical book. Scholarly analysis can only attempt to recapture primary formulations underlying the current major Hebrew and translational versions, but cannot achieve the reconstitution of one primary text from which they derive, much less the biblical authors' ipsissima verba. In this essay I offer a necessarily restricted survey of the early transmission history of the biblical text in manuscript form up to the crystallization of an incipient unified Hebrew text, and the appearance of translations of the Hebrew original into other Semitic and non-Semitic languages between c. 200 BCE-300 CE. Later, invariably secondary translations will not be brought under consideration. Attention focuses on the early stages of the written transmission of the consonantal text with emphasis on a concise review of the information on its history which can be obtained from two quite dissimilar groups of manuscript remains in respect to chronology and socio-religious provenance: a) the assemblage of biblical scrolls and scroll fragments brought to light since 1947 which the dissident 'Community of the Renewed Covenant' had. deposited in caves near a site known by the modern Arabic name Qumran; b) fragments found since the fifties at other sites in the Judaean Desert—Masada, Wadi Murabba'at, Nahal Se'elim (Wadi Seiyal) and Nahal Hever,1 which represent the textual tradition of 'normative Judaism'. Prior to the discoveries the transmission history of the scriptural text could be investigated only on the basis of medieval codices of the masoretic text (MT), the Samaritan Hebrew version of the Pentateuch (Samaritanus) and the ancient translations into Greek and Latin, Aramaic and Syriac, primarily the Septuagint (LXX). These manuscripts postdate the stabilization process to which those traditions were subjected. Therefore, they can only offer information pertaining to the first and early second millennium CE, and in reference to MT, also to the concomitant emergence of systems of vocalization, interpunctuation, internal text divisions, cantillation and explanatory notations of the Masoretes which accompany the consonantal text in medieval manuscripts.2 These later developments will not be brought under review since the new materials bear on them only to a very limited extent. A synoptic assessment of the Qumran manuscripts and the indeed much smaller corpus of biblical fragments from the above mentioned other sites provides means for investigating hitherto inaccessible stages of the early history of the consonantal text. The biblical fragments from Masada, Murabba'at, etc. exhibit the unified text propagated by the pharisaic mainstream in the first centuries CE, whereas the variegated Qumran finds open up ways for elucidating the genesis of types of variants and specific deviant readings in ancient versions. It should, however, be 1 2

For a full list of the manuscript finds in the Judaean Desert, see Tov and Pfann (1993). Cf. Roberts (1979); Tov (1992), 21-79.

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stressed that there is next to nothing in the make-up of the biblical scrolls from Qumran and in the majority of their deviations from MT as from other versions which would show their text to be 'non-conformist'. Rather, most biblical manuscripts found at Qumran were part of the literary Gemeingut of Judaism at the height of the Second Temple period. The impression of dissent which they seemingly confer derives from the fact that in the wake of a socio-religious rift in Second Commonwealth Judaism they were preserved by the non-conforming 'Community of the Renewed Covenant', whereas the 'normative' mainstream discarded them and the variant readings which they contained. II

What makes the combined evidence of the biblical manuscripts from the Judaean Desert especially valuable is that in their totality they present to the scholar in a temporally and spatially restricted framework practically all the variegated synchronous and diachronous issues which attach to the inquiry into the geographically much wider and temporally more comprehensive question of the relation of MT and the versions. The now available information prompts a revaluation of major theories pertaining to the textual transmission of the Bible which were put forward in outline already in the eighteenth century but were more fully developed in the nineteenth and twentieth. Prior to the eighteenth century the investigation of the transmission history of the biblical text was to a large extent determined by theological considerations. Textual criticism aimed at proving that the wording of the Greek Bible was the exclusively legitimate verbalization of the divine message. The Greek tradition was deemed, most valuable for purging the Old Testament of anti-Christian falsifications allegedly introduced by the Jewish Sages into the forerunner of the masoretic text. This trend was intensified in the wake of Pietro della Valle's rediscovery in 1616 of the Samaritan Hebrew version of the Pentateuch, which soon became accessible to scholars through the Paris Polyglot published in 1632. The concurrence of Samaritanus with. LXX in about one third of its textual deviations from MT, later estimated at c. 6000, was construed as mutually enhancing the reliability of both over against MT. One speculated that the Samaritans' dissent from Judaism at some time in the Second Commonwealth and the ensuing seclusion of their community over almost two millennia had saved their version of the Pentateuch from being subjected to the biased revision of the rabbis in the early centuries CE and of the Jewish tradents in the Middle Ages. MT, the hallowed text of Judaism was relegated to an inferior status, The attitude changed when the Reformation accorded to the Hebrew version a place of honour in biblical studies. While conceding that the

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current MT bore the imprint of redactional interventions of Jewish tradents and scribes since the beginning of the Common Era and throughout the Middle Ages it was yet argued that their close supervision had guarded the Hebrew text against the corroding impact of insufficiently controlled copying which had affected the texts of the versions in the long process of their transmission, A close scrutiny of variants collated by Kennicott and de Rossi at the end of the eighteenth century led to the conclusion that differences between MT codices in the consonantal text resulted almost exclusively from lapsus calami and that in essence all exhibit one and the same text to the extent of meticulously preserving anomalies like the puncta extmordinaria, unconventional spellings and even obvious mistakes. In the light of these findings Rosenmuller resolved that the known codices of MT do not reflect the original text of the biblical books but derive from a single basic recension. Therefore they must be regarded as one composite witness to the archetype of the masoretic tradition.3 Other scholars reasoned or presumed tacitly that the archetypal manuscript stemmed from the temple of Jerusalem or was based upon an exemplar of the entire Bible which had been kept there prior to the fall of the city to the Romans in 70 CE, although it may have taken on its final form only somewhat later.4 This hypothesis appears to echo a report in rabbinic sources that a Torah scroll with the approved text was deposited in the temple precincts and served scribes as prototype for the production of new copies (y. San, 2.20c; cf. m. Kelim 15:6} and. that correctors of biblical manuscripts were paid out of the temple funds (b. Ketub. 106a). Rosenmiiller's rather balanced 'one recension' hypothesis was soon overshadowed by de Lagarde's sweeping Urtext theory. De Lagarde and scholars who subscribed to his views asserted that all copies of the Hebrew text derive from a fixed text to which the Jewish Sages had accorded 'official' recognition at the Synod of Jabneh/Jamnia in the second century CE, concomitantly banning all deviating copies of the biblical books. That Urtext which already then contained numerous deviations from the original wording of the biblical books was faithfully reproduced by later scribes and tradents with all its imperfections.* However, the claim that there existed in those days a Jewish council that took formal decisions regarding the biblical text cannot be substantiated by historical or literary evidence.6 This notion may well have been conceived in the image of Church councils and synods that passed such decrees in respect to the composition and the text of the New Testament. De Lagarde similarly reasoned that all Greek manuscripts derive from three basic recensions by Origen, Hesychios and Lucian which on their part could be traced back to the original Septuagint whose text differed 3 5

RosenmiiUer (1797). De Lagarde (1863).

4 6

Somnter (1846); Olshausen (1853), 15-17. See Schafer (1975); Leiman (1976), 120-4.

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from the then current Hebrew version. All extant LXX manuscripts belong to one family. Although an unsatisfactory translation of the original the Greek version exhibits a textual tradition which can help going behind the archetype which underlies MT.7 De Lagarde maintained that an exhaustive and thoroughgoing analysis and comparison of MT, LXX and Samaritanus would ultimately open the way for reconstituting their original common Hebrew basis. The overwhelming acclaim of the Urtext hypothesis was highlighted by Buhl at the end of the century: Of the style and manner in which this authorized text was constructed we unfortunately know nothing definitely. This much only is plain, that the very conception of such an authorized form of text implies the existence of a definite standardized manuscript, which was pronounced the only reliable one . . . the relatively recent, but already widespread theory, that all extant manuscripts point back to one single archetype, is decidedly correct.8

However, in the ensuing decades the validity of the Urtext and the less rigorous 'one recension' hypotheses was put in doubt by Aptowitzer's collation of biblical quotations in the rabbinic literature which diverge from MT and are sometimes reflected in versional variants.' How could their persistence be explained, it was asked, if the text of that hypothetical archetype had indeed ousted all others, as the de Lagarde school claimed? Soon other methods were proposed for explaining the coexistence of divergent text traditions in Hebrew and in translations already in antiquity. Diametrically opposed to the 'archteype' hypothesis is Kahle's 'textus receptus and vulgar texts' theory: whereas de Lagarde posited a development of the biblical text from 'primary uniformity' to 'pluriformity', followed by 'secondary uniformity', Kahle saw a 'primary pluriformity' being hammered into 'uniformity' through an ongoing process of revision. De Lagarde's uniform 'archetype' may be likened to a riverhead running off into numerous rivulets in diverse stages of bifurcation all of which can be retraced to the original source. In contrast, Kahle viewed the unified versions of MT, Samaritanus and LXX as confluences of varying pristine traditions which Judaism, Christianity, and the Samaritan community had severally channelled into one fixed and closely circumscribed text form. The 'received texts' propagated by these communities do not reflect primary stages which preceded discrete processes of revision, as asserted by the Urtext theory. Rather, they constitute the end results of such procedures and cannot be reduced to a common archetype. Notwithstanding the control applied to the text in the course of its transmission, none of the three pertinent communities succeeded in fully suppressing non-revised 'vulgar', at times older and purer versions. Readings in biblical manuscripts or quotations which differ from the 'received' texts may 7 8 9

For a summary of de Lagarde's views see Rahlfs (1928), 75-82. Buhl (1892), 256. Aptowitzer (1970).

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be 'true variants', that is to say remains of ancient text traditions which escaped the levelling impact of official redactions.10 It is to Kahle's merit that he essayed to trace the beginning of the transmission process to before the first century CE which his predecessors considered the terminus non ante quern for any investigation of the history of the text. Moreover, without explicitly saying so, he correctly viewed the text of the Bible as a socio-religious phenomenon of the first magnitude and endeavoured to define its role in the communal life of Judaism, Christianity, and Samaritanism respectively, the three communities that alone of all factions and movements of the waning Second Temple period survived the cataclysmic events of the first century CE. Kahle further brought into clear focus the contemporaneous currency and transmission of uncontrolled 'vulgar' or 'popular' traditions alongside the 'received' text. However, his conclusion that the consolidation of the 'received' Hebrew text, the forerunner of the masoretic textus receptus, was achieved, through the concerted efforts of the Sages at the Synod of Jabneh/Jamnia and that its exclusivity was safeguarded by the concomitant rejection of all diverging manuscripts, suffers from the same misconceptions which led the proponents of the Urtext or Ur-recension hypotheses to postulate such an academic procedure. Rather, the stabilized text emerged in a protracted process which culminated in its acceptance by pharisaic Judaism as the exclusively legitimate wording of the Hebrew Bible. The bewildering multiformity of the 'vulgar' texts triggered opposition to Kahle's thesis and scholars soon set out to enclose their disturbing diversity in a methodical conceptual framework. While starting out from Kahle's premises Sperber threw doubt upon the presumed originality of the vulgar texts by tracing both Hebrew and translational versions with all their variants to two basic traditions, one deriving from the southern kingdom of Judah, the other from northern Ephraim. One is represented by MT, the other by Samaritanus, and both have offshoots in the Greek manuscript families LXXA and LXXB.n By connecting one branch with Judah, the other with Ephraim, Sperber introduced into the discussion the notion of 'local traditions' which in a different make-up was to become a central principle in the 'three recensions' hypothesis later developed under the impact of the Qumran finds. Whereas Sperber's dichotomy of traditions is descriptive, Lieberman applied Kahle's qualitative differentiation between 'vulgar' traditions and a 'received' or 'official' text to an evaluative tripartite classification of manuscripts which were current at the height of the Second Temple period: avh6repa—'base', Koivorepa—'popular', and riKpi^o^eva—'excellent'.12 This classification has a local as well as a societal dimension: the unworthy (JMvXorfpa were found in the hands of uneducated villagers; KoivoTfpa were used in schools and rabbinic academies for study by a not 10

Kahle (1959).

" Sperber (1929); (1938); (1939).

>- Lieberman (1950).

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exactly defined stratum of city dwellers; only the text of the excellent f}Kpij}o[.i€va, meticulously transmitted by the Sages, had binding force. However, neither Sperber's nor Lieberman's method visibly affected scholarly research of the issue.

Ill The discussion was reopened in the wake of the publication since 1950 of biblical scrolls and fragments from Qumran of the last centuries BCE, and several years later of biblical fragments of the first centuries CE from Masada and other sites in the Judaean Desert. The two groups of new sources help in discerning four main stages in the early transmission of Hebrew Scriptures between the inception at varying times of the books contained in the corpus and the stabilization of the text which probably achieved its essential form at the height of the Second Temple period. The first stage of the highly probable oral tradition of the biblical literature lies beyond the limits of our investigation. While it may be taken for granted that already in the oral stage some parts of this literature were also handed down in writing, the extent of such written transmission escapes our knowledge. Variant wordings of biblical texts which presumably were at first handed down orally, at times are still preserved in parallel passages transmitted in writing in Hebrew and in translation, and likewise in quotations from an earlier in a later book which often deviate from the original wording. The preservation of such variants possibly evinces a calculated preference for verbal multiformity over uniformity or a measure of literary licence enjoyed by biblical authors, tradents and even copyists, which is not defined in the sources nor can it be accurately assessed with the means at our disposal.13 In the second stage, after the return from the Babylonian Exile, the weight shifted gradually from 'hearing' the biblical message to 'reading' it with the process culminating in the practically total substitution of written transmission for oral tradition toward the end of the Persian age.14 It may be assumed that the emulation of Babylonian and Persian scribal techniques and conventions by Jewish literati played an important role in this development. However, since no manuscript evidence is available on which to base an investigation, this phase is not yet a ready object for the study of the textual transmission of the Bible. Only in the third stage can research into the history of the text in the strict sense of the word be implemented, thanks to the hoard of biblical scrolls and fragments from the Qumran caves. These manuscripts convey a persuasive impression of the textual variety in which the biblical books were current at the turn of the era, 13 These phenomena are on the borderline between literary creativity and textual transu mission. See Talmon (1975), 321-400. Talmon (1991).

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In the fourth stage there emerged a unified and stabilized text which represents the tradition of pharisaic or 'normative' Judaism and contrasts sharply with the textually multiform manuscripts preserved by the Community of the Renewed Covenant. While this fixed text is reflected in a great part of the variegated Qumran manuscripts, it is to all intents and purposes the one and only text-form displayed in the fragments of the first centuries CE from Masada, etc. At Masada were found fragments of one Genesis, one Deuteronomy, and one Ezekiel scroll, of two Leviticus and two Psalms scrolls.15 From Wadi Murabba'at stern fragments of Genesis, Exodus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Isaiah, and a phylactery which contains the text of Exod. 13: 1-16; Detit. 4: 13-21; 6: 4-9.16 From Nahal Se'ehm. comes a phylactery containing the masoretic text of Exod. 1,3: 210, 11-16, with the variant reading 'tettr in the plural, also preserved by LXX and Peshitta, against the MT reading *7;sn in the singular.17 At Nahal Hever were found a piece of a phylactery containing Deut. 4: 13-21; a fragment with Num. 20: 7-8; another one of Ps, 15:1-5; 16:1 with the first stick of 15: 3 missing.18 In other Psalms fragments three slight textual differences are extant which can hardly be considered variants.19 In conjunction, these two dissimilar groups of manuscripts evince an intensive scribal activity pertaining to the biblical writings in the last centuries BCE and the first centuries CE, a period in which Jews were politically enclosed, in the Hellenistic and then in the Roman empire and were brought into the orbit of Hellenistic-Roman civilization which affected Jewish scribal art and. techniques in a marked degree.20 At this stage the transmission of the biblical text in pharisaic Judaism was most probably geared to the final phase of the formal sanctification of the collection of books which constituted, the 'Written Law', torSh she-biktab, namely 'Scripture'. The promulgation of a unified and fixed text differentiated the 'Written Law' fundamentally from the emerging rabbinic 'Oral Law', torah she-be'al peh, as well as from Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha which were considered 'external' to both,21 and from patently secular writings which constituted another undefined category. The non-biblical and the 'extraneous' literary works were not subjected to any noticeable endeavour of promulgation in one unified exclusive text tradition. During that time-span the books of the Bible were successively translated into Semitic and non-Semitic vernaculars—Aramaic and Syriac, 15 The edition of Hebrew Written Fragments from Masada will be published in the framework of the definitive report of" the excavation (in press). For the present, see Talmon (1993); (1996a); (19%b). 16 Cf, J. T. Milik et al. (1961), 75: 'Le texte biblique conserve sur fes fragments est a fait identique au Textile Receptus etabli vers la fin du ler siecle de notre ere a VAcademic de jarnnia' (sic!). 17 18 Cf. Aharoni (1961), 22-3. Cf, Y. Yadin (1961), 40. 20 " Flint (1997), 82-3. Lieberman (1950). 21 Eeclesiasticus was hovering on the borderline, so to speak, but ultimately was not included either in the one or the other.

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Greek, and Latin—to minister to the needs of Jews, and also of Christians for whom the Hebrew original had become a closed book. At first, the process was presumably sporadic and undirected. Only in later stages of their transmission also the translational versions were submitted to redaction and textual unification. The rendition of the Pentateuch into Greek, reputedly commissioned by Ptolemy II Philadelphus (285-246 BCE) and carried out simultaneously and independently by 72 sages, as reported in the pseudepigraphic Letter of Aristeas, was most likely not the first such undertaking, in all probability that translation which became known as 'Septuagint' was in fact the crowning effort of welding into a standard version preceding diffuse renditions, which then were extant but later were lost Later endeavours at revising the Septuagint are exemplified by tcaiye and by the Greek version of the Minor Prophets from Nahal Hever, dated to between 50 BCE and 50 CB.22 Also the translations attributed to Aquila, Symmachus, Theodotion (early second century CE) which Origen recorded next to LXX in his Hexapla, but which survived only in quotations and excerpts,23 were probably revisions of preceding translations. The non-supervised early translations into Greek often resulted in free or paraphrastic renditions of the Hebrew text, similar to the Aramaic Targumim, with the exception of Onkelos to the Pentateuch.24 Scholars always maintained that notwithstanding translation and transmission flaws, the ancient versions, foremost the Septuagint, time and again exhibit readings which seemingly reflect a Hebrew Vorlage which neither MT nor Samaritanus have preserved. Mutatis mutandis this dictum also pertains to variant quotations of biblical texts in Apocrypha. and Pseudepigrapha, in the New Testament, in rabbinic literature and early Hebrew prayer texts. Some such Hebrew readings did indeed turn up in one or the other biblical scroll or fragment from Qumran, as well as in quotations in the Covenanters' non-biblical writings—Community Rule (1QS), Damascus Document (CD), various Pesher works, Florilegia, etc,—and a few in biblical fragments from the other sites in the Judaean Desert. The new evidence proves convincingly that not all variants in Hebrew non-masoretic and translational witnesses resulted, from scribal mistakes or the deliberate interference of emendators, revisers and copyists. Rather, variants in an ancient version preserve at times pristine readings which were accidentally lost in the course of time or were designedly suppressed by later tradents. Accordingly, in tracing the transmission history 22 See Barthelemy (1975), 127-39, reprinted in id. (1978), 38-50; Tov with Kraft and Parsons (1990). 23 Field (1875). 24 Sperber (1959-73) (eci). For example, the text of the Qumran Targum of Job differs from the printed version and reflects a Hebrew Vorlage which is not identical with MT. Moreover, it may have lacked the closing passage of the book (Job 42: 12-17), See van der Ploeg and van der Woude (1971).

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of the biblical books and submitting them to critical analysis, the evidence of the ancient versions must be carefully weighed. In this respect, the Septuagint outranks all others. It covers all books of the Bible and its textis extant in manuscripts of the third and fourth century CE—the great uncials Vaticanus, Sinaiticus, and Alexandrinus—which predate the oldest codices of the MT by well over half a millennium, and even in some earlier remains from before the Common Era, such as the John Rylands Library fragments. However, in view of the uncertainty which attaches to the retroversion of a translational variant into a presumably underlying conjectural Hebrew reading, variants in the ancient Hebrew scrolls and fragments from the Judaean Desert take precedence in the criticism of the biblical text and the investigation of its transmission history. IV

At this juncture material aspects which affected the transmission of the biblical books must be brought under consideration. That 'writing' was known in Israel in the monarchic and already in the pre-monarchic period is suggested by the biblical text (Judg. 8: 14). Decisive proof comes from archaeological remains such as the Gezer Calendar (c. 925-900 BCE), the Siloam Inscription, stamps and bullae, inscribed jar-handles from Samaria and other sites, the Arad ostraca, the letter from Mesad Hashavjahu and the Lachish letters, all written on potsherds, which date from the eighth to the sixth century BCE.25 We may assume that in the early stages of predominantly oral transmission some biblical texts were handed down in writing. However, it remains an open question what sorts of writing materials were at the disposal of the ancient transmitters of the biblical lore for recording extensive texts.2*' Stone pillars and tablets, potsherds, and wooden slats can be used for incising or inscribing concise messages, accounts, lists and comparatively short royal Prunkinschriften like the Mesha Stone. A few lines of text could be engraved on a small metal sheet like the seventh-century silver amulets found, rolled up at Ketev Hinnom near the City of David which contain the text of the priestly blessing (Num. 6: 24-26).27 But for committing to writing long literary texts a scribe must have at Ms disposal large and easily transportable surfaces. There is no tangible evidence to show that such surfaces were in fact available in the monarchic let alone the premonarchic era. In contrast, the astounding quantity of scrolls and fragments from the second century BCE to the first century CE found at Qumran, some possibly 25

Naveh (1982); Demsky-Bar Dan (1988). The assertion that papyrus was readily available for the purpose already in the monarchic period, as claimed by Haran (1982) and (1983) stands in need of substantiation. 27 See Barkay (1989); Yardeni (1991). 26

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stemming from the third century BCE, and the indeed much less numerous fragments of the first and second century CE from the other sites in the Judaean Desert, prove convincingly that the use of pliable writing materials—parchment, namely treated animal skins, and to a much lesser degree papyrus—had become commonplace. The sudden appearance in the Qumran caves of an abundance of manuscripts signals a revolution in Israelite culture in the late Second Temple period and must be considered a most important aspect of the discovery.28 The writing on parchment is always on the outer side of the skin from which the hair had been shaven off, as decreed by the Sages: 'One writes on the hairy side of the hide' (y. Meg. 1. 71 d; Sefer Torah 1,4). This practice ensures a better preservation of the lettering since the ink can filter into the pores. By far most biblical and non-biblical literary texts from Qumran are indeed written on parchment scrolls. Only a considerably smaller part is on papyrus, less than one hundred out of a presumed total of eight hundred, with a very few containing biblical texts, e.g. 4QpaplsaP and 6Q3—7. The scroll fragments from the other sites in the Judaean Desert are likewise pieces of hide of ritually pure livestock—goats, sheep, or cattle— again as prescribed by rabbinic law: 'one should write on the skins of pure domestic and wild animals' (Sefer Torah 1,1).29 The sparse use of papyrus at the height of the Second Temple period over against the amply documented employment of parchment has most probably an economic reason: animal skins were readily available locally, papyrus had to be imported at considerable cost from Egypt. Taken together the above factors paved the way for a better preservation of the biblical text. However, at the same time they also caused the perpetuation of mistakes which had entered it and new ones resulting from the lapsus calami of copyists. In any case, these developments make the third and fourth phase of the early transmission history of the biblical text, which together extend over a span of approximately five centuries, the kingpin of any study of its promulgation in writing.

v The transmission of the biblical text was profoundly affected by historical events and religious transformations which, Judaism experienced at the turn of the era, the period of the Great Divide. The fateful impact of the destruction of the temple, the termination of political sovereignty, and 28 Hitherto no parchment finds front an earlier period inscribed in Hebrew or any other language have come to light in Palestine. The oldest papyrus document—a palimpsest variously dated in the eighth or seventh century BCE—steins front Murabba'at. It contains part of a letter and a list of names, figures and symbols (Milik et al. (1961), 93-100). 29 The one exception is a small, non-biblical papyrus fragment from Masada inscribed in Palaeo-Hebrew letters which is most probably of Samaritan provenance. See Talmon (1997).

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the emergence of Christianity on the development of Judaism was fully appreciated by authors and thinkers in antiquity, by medieval and modern historians, sociologists and. theologians. It had been assumed that the traumatic events must have had a determinative effect on the transmission of the biblical text. But since no manuscripts from before the destruction of the temple in 70 CE were available, this postulate could not be put to the test. A breakthrough was achieved with the discovery of Qumran documents from before the Common Era, the pre-70 CE fragments from Masada and the somewhat later fragments from other sites in the Judaean Desert. I propose to single out two aspects which in the crucial period of the Great Divide decisively determined the totally different transmission of the biblical books by 'normative Judaism' and by the Community of the Renewed Covenant that contended wilh each other for supremacy in the Jewish body politic: the fall of Jerusalem to the Romans in 70 CE which capped their conquest of the Jewish state and the ensuing dispersion of Jews over many countries; the destruction of the temple with the resulting cessation of the sacrificial service and its substitution by 'synagogue' and institutionalized prayer worship, in which the liturgical reading of biblical texts occupies a central position. (a) The loss of sovereign statehood shook to the foundations the faith of the Jewish society and its members whose conceptual outlook underwent a decisive change. The biblical era in which the books of the Bible had been authored and textual variants tacitly accepted was viewed as a closed chapter in the history of Israel. The 'World of the Bible' was conceived as being intrinsically different from their own world. The incompatibility was encapsulated in the pithy saying: 'the language of Torah is one matter and the language of the Sages another' (b. Abod, Zar. 58b; b. Menah 65a). The saying refers not alone to a basic linguistic' distinction but rather aims at the much more comprehensive contrast of the postdivide Sages' worldview over against the biblical ethos which also informed their attitude toward the text of the biblical books.30 Among the measures taken to counteract the impact of the cataclysmic upheaval was the propagation of a single stabilized version of 'the Written Law', chosen from among many traditions available, which would serve as a unifying factor of Jewry in the homeland and in the Diaspora. A quite dissimilar situation obtained in the Community of the Renewed Covenant. The momentous historical events of the Roman conquest of Judah and the exile of parts of its population did not affect the pre-divide community nor did they have an impact on the textual transmission of the biblical books. The scrolls found in the Qumran caves were all copied before 70 CE. Many if not most had in fact been produced in the last two or 30

See Talmon (1989), 11-52, esp. 25-44.

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three centuries BCE, that is to say in the waning biblical period, when the latest books of the Hebrew Bible, like Daniel and possibly Esther were yet being composed..31 (b) The insistence of the Sages on giving currency to only one legitimate wording of the biblical writings was intensified by 'religious' considerations when prayer worship in which the reading of lections from Scripture is a pivotal element supplanted the sacrificial temple service. A fixed standard text is an indispensable requirement for formal recitation in public ritual. There is no room for a choice between variant readings or for critical annotations. The Covenanters' attitude differed fundamentally. Their literature proves beyond doubt that they too substituted prayer for sacrifice while the temple of Jerusalem was still functioning. However, their devotional, service consisted of prayers only. Nothing in their writings gives reason for assuming that lections from the Bible were ever included in it.32 Rabbinic writings reveal the Sages' acute awareness of the existence of variants in manuscripts of biblical books. The necessity to secure the transmission of the 24 books which constitute Scripture in one and only one legitimate text-form is repeatedly discussed.33 An example is the accusation 'you falsified your Torah' which Rabbi Eleazar son of Jossi levelled against the tradents of the Samaritan version of the Pentateuch that deviated from the 'established' text in many mostly minor instances (b. Sot. 33b). Variation as such was anathema. Manuscripts which contained variant readings were rejected. An entirely different picture emerges from the Community literature. Nothing in their writings reveals a recognition of the phenomenon of textual variation or an apprehension over the great number of variants in their biblical scrolls. Equally, there is no indication whatsover that they considered variance in the biblical text an issue which divided their community from contemporary mainstream Judaism. The absolute silence in these matters contrasts sharply with the vociferous polemic against their adversaries over purity laws and over the calendar issue with which the Community writings are replete. The Covenanters' evident acquiescence in textual variformity reflects the biblical authors' and tradents' tolerance of textual variance which comes to the fore in the biblical literature itself, in, for example, the textual variants present in parallel texts such as 2 Sam. 22 and Ps. 18; Isa. 2: 1-4 and Mic. 4:1-4.34 Clearly, the Community never conceived of the very notion of a unified and stabilized text of the biblical books, just as they most probably did not have a closed canon of biblical books. 31 Not a single fragment of the book of Esther is extant among the Qunvran finds, as is well known. There is nevertheless reason for assuming that author-members of the Community knew the book in its present form. See Talmon (1995), 32 33 M Talmon (1989). Leiman (1976). Talmon (1975), 1-41, esp. 19-21.

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I shall now refer to hypotheses concerning the history of the biblical text which were formulated in the light of the Qumran biblical scrolls and fragments. The momentous discovery paved the way for probing crucial phases of its transmission in the Hellenistic and early Roman period which until then had been beyond the horizon of scholarly investigation. On the one hand, the Second Isaiah Scroll from Cave One (lQIsb) and most fragments from Cave Four give evidence of the existence of masoretictype text-forms which considerably predate the presumed inception of an antecedent of MT in the first century CB as posited by adherents of the Urtext or Ur-recension schools. On the other hand, the rich crop of variants, at first collated from the large Isaiah scroll (lQIsa) and then from numerous fragments, evinces the currency of a variety of text types of biblical books already in the earliest documented stage of their written transmission. At times such variants concur with Samaritan, Greek, Aramaic, and to a lesser degree with Syriac and Latin readings, whereas others cannot be traced to any known version. The presence in a restricted framework of manuscripts which exhibit a pre- or proto-MT version and of others which appear to reflect one or the other ancient Hebrew or translational tradition, next to hitherto altogether unknown text-forms seemed to tip the scales in favour of Kahle's 'textus recepfus and Vulgartexte' hypothesis. However, despite the 'breakthrough' which came with the manuscript discoveries in the Judaean Desert scholars adhere in essence to de Lagarde's 'archetype' or Urtext. theory with some reformulations. In a short paper published a few years after the discovery of the first Qumran cave Albright laid the foundations of a novel theory: all extant witnesses to the biblical text derive ultimately from three 'local recensions' which are linked to Babylonia, Palestine, and Egypt, and are represented by MT, Samaritanus and LXX.35 The theory of the tripartite nature of the transmission of the Old Testament was possibly influenced by the presumed three-pronged transmission of the New Testament in a Palestinian, Egyptian, and Antiochian (Syrian) version. The thesis was more fully developed by Cross who defined the three groups by the less rigid term 'families', rightly arguing against Albright that 'the local families in question are not properly called "recensions". They are the product of natural growth in the process of scribal transmission, not of conscious or controlled textual recensions.'3* The three text-families developed independently between the fifth and the first century BCE in Palestine, Egypt, and Babylonia, but subsequently influenced each other. Especially the Palestinian type so nearly merged with the Eyptian that the latter could be viewed as a branch of the Old Palestinian. The texts of different biblical 35

Albright (1955). * Cross (1975), 278-92,306-20.

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books exhibit the 'family characteristics' to different degrees. But it can nevertheless be said that the Palestinian family is generally 'expansionist'; the Egyptian is often but not always a full text albeit without displaying the extensive additions which mark the Palestinian type; the Babylonian is on the whole a short and pristine text. The Albright-Cross hypothesis absorbed, telling characteristics of earlier theories. Explicit references to the Lagardian thesis in the publications of the 'new' school are few and far between, but the idea of one 'basic text' or Urtext from which the 'three families' supposedly emanated throws a long shadow upon them. Also Sperber's basic notion of a local 'southern' (Judaean) and a local 'northern' (Ephraimite) tradition which underlie MT and Samaritanus respectively, and Lieberman's differentiation between 'village', 'town', and 'academy' manuscripts seem to echo in the identification of 'local texts which developed in the main centers of Jewish life in the Persian and Hellenistic age',37 Again, Kahle's qualitative distinction between 'Vulgartexte' and a standard textus receptus, and Lieberman's equally qualitative classification of 'inferior', 'vulgar', and 'most exact' copies seem to be reflected in the characterization of the Palestinian family as being affected by 'intensive scribal reworking, expansionist and tending to conflation', the Egyptian as preserving 'a mostly full' and the Babylonian a 'short and pristine text'.38 The unanticipated multifariousness of text-traditions, increasingly reflected in biblical manuscripts from Qumran, has led to other attempts to bring some order into the discomforting textual variety: (a) A differentiation is made between 'aligned' and 'non-aligned' manuscripts in the Qumran assemblage,39 the 'aligned' texts having affinities with one of the three major biblical text-traditions—MT, LXX, and Samaritanus, This statement is correct in relation to affinities of a pure 'textual' nature in respect to MT and LXX. However in respect to the presumed alignment of Qumran manuscripts with Samaritanus it is misleading. What confers upon the Samaritanus its 'Samaritan' character are not the types of variants which are also found in other versions, but the rather small number of readings which give expression to exclusive ideological concepts entertained by the Samaritan community, foremost their particular version of the Ten Commandments and certain legal prescriptions. None of these specifically Samaritan variants was found in a 'preSamaritan' Qumran manuscript.40 In distinction to the 'aligned' texts, many Qumran fragments exhibit a wording which does not dovetail with any one known text, sometimes agreeing with MT or with Samaritanus and/or LXX and sometimes also disagreeing among themselves. In my view these 'non-aligned' texts are perfect examples of the type which 37

Ibid., 282, *' Tov (1992), 114-17.

3!t

Ibid., 307-8. * See Skehan (1955); Sanderson (1986).

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Kahle designated Vulgartexte and Lieberman Koivorepa, that is 'popular' texts.41

(b) Several biblical manuscripts from Qumran exhibiting textual traditions which deviate to a greater extent from MT are proclaimed recensionally different from the MT version. These 'editions' presumably have a bearing on the historico-literary criticism of the book in question. Thus fragments of two Jeremiah scrolls (4QJerb and 4QJerd) which are characterized by features that can also be identified in the Greek rendition of the book, for example in respect to length and order of components, engender the supposition that LXX 'was translated from a Hebrew text which was very close to these two Qumran Texts/ and both reflect 'a first, short edition of Jeremiah.., which differs from the expanded edition' preserved in MT, Tg, Pesh, and Vulgate. A similar analysis is applied to several other biblical books: Genesis, Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings, Ezekiel, and Proverbs.42 The existence of ancient different 'editions' of biblical books would, seem to lend support to the contemporaneous currency of 'pristine' traditions as assumed by the Vulgartexte theory. However, by characterizing one of the editions as either a 'shortened' or 'expanded recension', that edition is shown to be dependent on the other and thereby is deprived of 'originality', and the other—in practically all cases the extra-masoretic version, whether shorter or longer—is de facto pronounced the Urtext. This approach can be illustrated by a comparison of the MT account of King Saul's war(s) against Nahash king of the Ammonites (\ Sam. 11), which is backed by Tg, Pesh, and the Vulgate, with a longer version of the story in a Qumran fragment (4QSama). The preceding story of Saul's appointment as king over Israel concludes with the remark EnnDD "m, 'and he (Saul) kept quiet' (10: 27b). In the Qumran version this remark, differently worded, Bin TDZ *m, 'about a month later', and inserted superlineary after a blank half-line, evidently introduces the account in 1 Sam. 11 of the campaign which Nahash mounted against Jabesh Gilead, and at the same time connects it with a preceding episode, not documented in MT but known to Josephus:43 the Ammonite king who had oppressed the Trans-Jordanian tribes of Gad and Reuben 'a month earlier/ had 'gouged out all their (men's) right eyes'; only seven thousand escaped, the torture. The connective notation of the Qumran version, 'about a month later', is reflected in part of the Sephiagint tradition (GBL) and also there introduces the report of the march of Nahash the Ammonite against Jabesh Gilead: Kal fyevrjOt) ws fieTa (i^va Kal dvef$Tj Naas o Afj,nav(rr)s. However in

the Greek version there is no mention of the preceding episode reported in 4QSama. It is possible that the different MT and 4QSama readings resulted from 41

Talmon (1975), 226-63, esp. 227-8.

42

Tov (1992), 320-49.

« Ant. VI, 68-71.

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a simple lapsus calami, the interchange of the graphically similar letters dalet and resh, under the additional impact of a different understanding of a string of letters: s™nDD *m (MT) and. snrt ICD "m (4QSama). However, we must also consider the possibility that 4QSama and MT preserve different primary accounts of Saul's wars against the Ammonites: MT a short version, 4QSama a longer one. The two differ from one another in length and contents like independent 'original' double or triple accounts of historical events in MT. (c) Another recent attempt to 'organize' the textual multiformity of the biblical text at Qumran relates to works which have an evident affinity to biblical books and traditions but whose wording differs substantially from the established versions. They are variously labelled 're-told', 'reread', 're-written', 're-worked' Bibles;14 'para-biblical' or 'apocryphal'.'15 The emphasis on 're-' in the characterization of these works reveals that in the background of this attempt to classify the textually widely varying Qumran materials still lurks the theory of an Ur-recension or an Urtext from which they presumably derive. In contrast, it is my thesis that the presumably 're-told', 're-read', 're-written', etc. Bible-related works should mostly be viewed as crystallizations of 'living' literary traditions, which parallel presentations of these same traditions in the books of the Hebrew Bible, but do not necessarily spring from them. Rather, the preservation of multiform concretizations of biblical themes again evinces the basic 'biblical ethos' of the pre-divide Covenanters, As already noted, like Israel of the biblical period, so also the Community of the Renewed Covenant tolerated diverse formulations of traditions, stories, themes, etc. which differed to an undefined but evidently permissible degree from their formulations in the handed down corpus of biblical books, the culminations of a long process of growth of an earlier diversified biblical literature in oral and written transmission. It is of significance that works of the category 're-read', 're-written', 'para-biblical' are entirely absent from the post-divide manuscript finds at Masada, Wadi Murabba'at, Nahal Se'elim, etc. and equally from the rabbinic corpus of literature. The Sages adopted and promulgated one exclusively legitimate version of Scripture. The production and transmission of quasi-biblical compositions revolving on biblical themes and traditions was evidently discouraged. The radically different attitudes of the 'Bible-inspired' Covenanters and decidedly 'post-biblical' normative Judaism are revealed in the fact that whereas books of the Apocrypha are well represented at Qumran—in the case of Jubilees46 and Enoch47 in 44 It is of interest to note that Cross applied the designation 'reworked' sensu strictu to biblical manuscripts which exhibit a text characterized by expansions and glosses. 45 See e.g. Tov (1994). 46 VanderKam (1994), 47 Milik and Black (1975) (eds.).

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fragments of more than ten copies—such extra-biblical writings were not handed down in the pharisaic tradition.48 VII

The minutely circumscribed and codified text of the books which constituted the 'Written Law' became the hallmark of rabbinic Judaism, setting it off effectively against non-conformist factions like the Community of the Renewed Covenant that did not espouse an exclusive wording of a closed corpus of biblical writings, and against the Samaritan community and nascent Christianity which adopted other fixed versions of Scripture, The text singled out for exclusive transmission was not chosen because upon critical analysis it was found to surpass all others with respect to accuracy and reliability. Rather, it was propagated in exactly the form in which it was current at the time of acceptance, with all its faults and 'abnormalities': manifest scribal mistakes, divergent readings, discrepancies, doublets, particular small and large letters, puncta extraordinaria, etc.49 As far as can be ascertained, no ironing out of internal contradictions was applied nor were readings emended which resulted from misconstrued strings of unvocalized letters which could be pronounced in more than one way. There is no sign of an attempted correction of evident mistakes caused by the indistinct pronunciation of similar sounding consonants or by lapsus calami, such as haplography, dittography, inversion of letters and words. Even glaring instances of garbled readings were 'frozen', so to speak, and became for ever integral components of the untouchable text. The retention of such faults contradicts Lieberman's contention that the Sages adopted the text of r/Kpifio^eva, the most accurate manuscripts available, which stood out in comparison with the much less exact Koivorepa and the inferior avXoTepa. The following example illustrates the uncritical acceptance of a patently faulty text as exclusively binding. Psalms 31 and 71 open with exactly the same introit But in the ensuing verses both display stylistic variation which, however, does not affect the content: 31:2 71:2 31: 3 71:2 31:3 71:3 The ensuing stich in 31: 3 constitutes a fitting parallel to the preceding one: 31:3 48 Some small pieces of a Genesis- and a Joshua-Apocryphon found on Masada presumably are remains of manuscripts which were brought to the fortress by fugitives who fled Qumran when their settlement was overrun by the Romans. See Talmon (1996c); (1996d), 49 Butin(1969). 50 For the interchange oizain/nun cf. Josh 15: 28 wo, Neh, 11: 27 TRIS; 2 Kgs. 17: 31 ins:, rnlt mss ]ra:.

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But in 71:3 one encounters an incomprehensible variant: 71: 3

It could not have escaped the tradents' attention that this unsustainable reading probably resulted, from a concatenation of scribal mistakes, possibly when transmitted in Palaeo-Hebrew: the construct HIIISD ~f2h, was divided into three words, with yod of TO1/ being read as waw and taw being doubled. Misread as 'alep, taw became the final letter of stft, and read as tea; it was taken as the first character of the next word. In the letter combination ~son sade was misread as yod,*1 and the resulting letter sequence TOP was vocalized TOR, 'forever'. The ensuing word rra was probably made up from the letter string rrs, jrnjs or rrrej. The transmission of incomprehensible readings can also be observed in 'established' translational versions. In Jer, 31: 8: nosi iis 03, '(I will gather them from the ends of the earth) among them blind and lame,' the letter string RDBTTOC3 in scriptio continua, before the differentiation between a Inal and a medial form of mem and with the substitution of dalet for resh, was wrongly divided into two words with the resulting absurd Greek rendition: & eoprfj
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Before illustrating some such techniques let me point out a form of preservation of variants in the Christian tradition, exemplified by the first scholarly undertaking of text criticism, Origert's Hexapla (mid-third century CE). Origen systematically recorded in six parallel columns the Hebrew text together with its transliteration in Greek characters, alongside four Greek translations (or revisions of LXX)—Aquila, Symmachus, LXX, and Theodotion—evidently with the aim of preserving all these versions with their divergent readings. At the same time, he marked elements in LXX which were absent from the Hebrew by an obelos and Hebrew elements lacking in LXX by an asterisk, and thus facilitated, the comparison of the then current Hebrew text with the Greek renditions. Origen thereby laid the groundwork for a decision by the Church on which readings to adopt. Jewish tradition never produced any text-critical tool like the Hexapla. The most comprehensive form of preservation of variants is the retention in diverse biblical books—such as Exodus and Deuteronomy, the Former Prophets and Chronicles—of large-scale parallel accounts of specific events and literary materials or diverging formulations of a song in the Former Prophets and the book of Psalms, More widespread is the retention in parallel texts of variant readings of a much smaller compass which derive from the linguistic-literary synonymity of the expressions involved, and may be located on the border line between biblical stylistics and biblical text criticism.52 A few examples will illustrate this phenomenon. The verbs BT and run are often jointly employed in biblical writings as a hendiadys signifying 'observation', for example icpD rm wn 1211 (1 Sam. 23: 22); JJT t6i nvn ^ BDS D; (Koh. 6: 5, cf. 1 Sam. 24:12; 25:17; 2 Sam. 24:13; Isa. 29:15; Jer. 12: 3, etc.). In a 'break-up pattern' the topically coterminous components may serve individually in parallel members of a verse: tm DT^K r-n . . . DTTTK (Exod. 2: 25); 110 vfti IST sb -m cm (Deut. 11:2). Ultimately the two verbs can turn up as variants in parallel passages in MT: VJT ~>S3K"! (Josh. 24: 31) versus is"! ~VSK (Judg. 2: 7) or in MT and another version: Isa. 47: 8 MT: "TDS ais s/i, lQIsa: "TDS nsns s^i. The interchangeability of ST and run is reflected in the topical equivalence of yiyvoScwo* and ei'So) in koine Greek, possibly under the influence of the biblical usage. Thus ran p* (Exod. 22: 9) is rendered in the main Greek tradition by ^Bels •yvti), and similarly IRI (Judg. 2: 7) by eyixaaav; in the parallel, passage Josh. 24: 31 IST is translated ei&oaav. Many more such interchangeable components of word-pairs turn up as variants in parallel texts in MT and also in a comparison of MT with other versions. For example: DIK/B'S (cf. Ps. 109: 14 with 1 Chr. 16: 21); c'8J/]ra = Ti6^vai/SiS6vai — thus ~i^ cmsr? "ona cm (Isa. 42: 16) is quoted in a Qumran fragment (4Q434 1 ii 9) as ~sns ]m TIN*? nn'E1?. Against the background of the foregoing considerations more 52

Talmon (1975), 321 ff.

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attention must be given to the possibilty that variants which at first sight seem to have been caused by a simple scribal mistake, such as an inversion of letters, actually stern from divergent original text traditions. For example: In Ps. 83: 7 MT reads orat 'n^s, 'the gods of Edom', whereas a Masada fragment (MPsa col. II, 1. 19b) exhibits the reading cn» '"7ns, 'the tents of Edom', which is backed by LXX: TO, wipc^ta™ rcav ISajpat2n SD'i = LXX; Isa. 37: 9 MT: D-D^D rfpen BOOT = Tg; IQIs": D'DR^G rf?S"i 22T1 BDS-I = LXX: KCU
Ktil

At times, textual doublets did not result from the conflation of linguistically and stylistically coterminous expressions, but rather evince the inability of tradents to decide which of two available narrative traditions contained a reliable report of a 'historical' event and which was inaccurate. The dilemma was solved by fusing both in the transmitted text. A case in point is the portrayal of King Saul 'sitting under the tamarisk', nsr biasi nsin ^ss" nnn nsrra (1 Sam. 22:6), at an occasion of manifest public import, 53 S4 Ibid., 338-43; (1961). Talmon (1964).

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casting doubt on his retainers' loyalty to him in his struggle with the rebellious David. I suggest that here two accounts were conflated: one located the scene in Raman, the central city of Samuel's days (cf, 1 Sam. 28: 3); the other in Gibeah, Saul's new 'capital'. The doublet was not recognized by translators and exegetes who tried to get around the apparent textual difficulty by taking either nss; or ncn as a general noun signifying 'hill' and 'height' and not as a place name. The medieval exegete Kimhi emphatically thus interpreted rim: There was a high spot in Gibeah of Saul which was called "the height". This cannot be Samuel's Ramah, since (Saul) was in Gibeah.' In distinction, LXX 'generalized' nic; by stating that Saul was sitting 'on a hill under the tamarisk-tree (which is) in Ramah/ ev rca ftowca inro TT)V apovpav TJJV & Ta.(M. LXXB and Lucian fused both solutions of the apparent crux interpretutn by transcribing noi as Bnfia, implying that Saul convened his entourage somewhere in the territory of Benjamin on an unidentified 'high place situated on a hill'. VIII

The textual multiformity which characterizes the biblical manuscripts from Qumran refutes modern views which profess allegiance to La garde's Urtext theory and at the same time assume the contemporaneous existence of 'various pristine texts':55 ... it seems that the opinion of de Lagarde, who posited an Urtext for al! the biblical books, is acceptable, albeit in a more moderate formulation, for it takes into account the possibility of earlier, written stages. It is an ancient text such as this, or various pristine texts that scholars have in mind when they speak of the original form of the Hebrew Bible.56

However, a hypothesis which postulates the existence of a single Urtext is incompatible with the proposition which assumes the co-currency of 'various pristine texts'. These theories envision diametrically opposed transmission processes of the biblical text. A different explanation of the available evidence is required. It has become manifest that the further back the history of the biblical text is traced and the older the biblical manuscripts collated, the wider their textual discordance. Textual variation as such, divergent readings in the Hebrew text as in ancient translations cannot be laid exclusively at the door of careless copyists, unscrupulous or well-meaning emendators and revisers. Rather, at times such variants represent divergent pristine traditions. The juxtaposition of the textually 'multiform' Qumran biblical 55

Tov (1992), 189. My emphasis. Cf, his statement: 'Our argumentation.,, in connection with the original form of the Hebrew Bible in its entirety is also very close to the opinion of de Lagarde' (1992), 183. In another context ((1992,172-7) Tov rejects the very idea of multiple 'pristine texts'. 56

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scrolls of the last centuries BCE and the textually 'uniform' fragments of the first centuries CE from Masada and other sites in the Judaean Desert prompts the following conclusion which mutatis mutandis echoes the basic thrust of Kahle's thesis: the earliest attainable biblical manuscripts give witness to a wide variety of textual traditions which were current in Judaism in the pre-divide stage of transmission. Some of these pristine traditions became known to us in recent decades through their preservation by a dissident Jewish faction that identified itself as 'biblical Israel', and like other such factions was lost to sight in the first century CE. The majority of these ancient traditions fell into oblivion because they were not transmitted by a structured, synchronous and diachronous societal body. The disappearance of the 'Three' (Aquila, Symmacbus, Theodotion), tcaiye, Samaritikon and the Fragment Targum of which only fractions remained attests to this process?7 Only those textual versions survived which achieved, the status of textus receptus in a post-divide socio-religious community: MT in 'normative Judaism', the Septuagint in Christianity, the Samaritan Hebrew Pentateuch in the Samaritan community. IX

The multiformity of the biblical text in antiquity, evinced by the most ancient witnesses attainable, namely the Qumran scrolls and fragments, causes scholars to proceed more cautiously with conjectural emendation of seemingly corrupt readings. One more readily views parallel passages in MT and/or the ancient Versions as possibly exhibiting valid 'genuine' traditions, rather than as variously contaminated emanations of one common prototype which presumably can yet be recovered by their submission to an eclectic critical analysis.58 The more 'prudent' approach informs many modern translations, commentaries on particular biblical books/9 analytical collections of variants,60 and above all full-scale critical editions—the Hebrew University Bible (HUB) and the new Biblia Hebraica (Quinta) Stuttgartensia (BHS): (1) The HUB61 constitutes an editio critica maior of the Hebrew Bible. It is the hitherto most comprehensive attempt at presenting as completely as 57 Klein (1980). In this context reference should be made to a Jerusalem Targum of the Pentateuch, discovered by Diez Macho in 1956 in the Vatican Library in a manuscript written in 1504, This Aramaic translation is dated by its editor to the first-second century CE and by other scholars to the fourth-fifth century. 58 As proposed by Cross (1953). For further pertinent examples of the application of this procedure to other biblical texts, see TOY (1992), 372, n. 2. 59 Tov (1992), 372, n. 1. * Barthelemy (1982-92). 61 The scholarly concepts which inform the HUB and determine its structure were described by the initiator of the project M. H. Goshen-Gottstein (1965). Their application is illustrated by the first two volumes, Goshen-Gottstein (1995) (ed.) Book of Isaiah, and Rabin, Talmon and'Tov (1975) (eds.), the Book of Jeremiah.

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possible the available evidence pertaining to the biblical text collated from the extant Hebrew and translational versions. The basis of the edition is the 'diplomatically' reproduced tenth-century Aleppo Codex (A), which the renowned medieval authority Maimonides recognized as the most reliable representative of the Ben Asher masoretic tradition in respect to the Tiberian vocalization system, punctuation and cantillation symbols. Because of technical limitations the text is not printed in the original tricolumnar arrangement, but rather in one column, surrounded by its own Masora Magna and Masora Parva notations, exactly as in the codex. This innovative feature of HUB was also adopted by the editors of the new BUS. Unfortunately, (A) is incomplete. At its beginning nothing is preserved until Deut. 28: 1. The extant text ends on Song of Songs 3:1.1, with the rest of the book missing and likewise Ecclesiastes, Lamentations, Esther, Daniel, and Ezra-Nehemiah. In addition, several pages of other books and the entire text of several Minor Prophets are lost: 2 Kgs. 14: 21-18:13; Jer. 29:9-31: 35; the ending of Amos 8:12-9:15; Obadiah; Jonah; Mic. 1:1-5:1; Zeph. 3: 20; Haggai; Zech. 1:1-9:17; Ps. 15:1-25: 2. In the hope that some of the missing parts of (A) may yet turn up,62 the editors decided to work first on the edition of the fully preserved books of the prophets (with the exception of the missing section Jer. 29: 9-31: 35). An added consideration was the discovery of the two Isaiah scrolls from Qurrtran (IQIs3 and lQIsb), the earliest witnesses to the Hebrew text of the book, and the availability of critical editions of the ancient versions. Beneath the scriptural text the pertinent evidence from the available sources is presented in four apparatuses, together with a fifth apparatus of explanatory notes. The first apparatus contains variants collated from the ancient translations which cover the entire text of the Bible or of whole books—LXX, Vulg and OL, Targums, and Peshitta. In the second apparatus are assembled Hebrew variants from the fragmentary Qumran sources, Genizah manuscripts, and from quotations of biblical texts in the talmudic and midrashic literature, which former editions had not taken into account. Variants of the Samaritan Hebrew Pentateuch are to be included here. In the third apparatus consonantal variants from selected medieval codices are recorded which upon investigation were found to be the most important. The fourth apparatus contains vocalization and accentuation variants again from a selection of medieval manuscripts. The HUB presents the textual facts without assessing their comparative merits or professing preference for one or the other reading. There are no conjectural emendations. It is left to the reader to weigh the evidence presented and draw conclusions. However, at times an evaluation of read62 Not long ago the one missing page of the otherwise fully preserved book of Chronicles, containing 2 Chr. 35: 7—36: 19, was indeed unexpectedly brought to Jerusalem by a former member of the Aleppo Jewish community. A small lithograph of another page was published by Wickes 0887) as the frontispiece of his book.

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ings (in English and Hebrew) is given in the fifth apparatus of editorial notations, especially in the case of variants, conjectures, and Hebrew retroversions from translations which are defined 'unlikely'. (2) In distinction to the HUB, the new BHS, Biblica Hebraica editions quinta, etc, (BHQ)63 is planned as an edifio critica minor which offers the reader a similarly conceived, although much less comprehensive apparatus of readings. Like the third edition of BH (BHK) and BHS, BHQ is based on the 'diplomatic' reproduction of Codex Leningradensis B19A written in 1008 (L), now designated Codex Firkowitsch, together with its Masora magna in translation and its Masora parva presented, in a 'user-friendly' form. In contrast to preceding editions in which critical notations were registered in two, and, after the inclusion of Qumran variants, in three apparatuses, BHQ combines all in one. The apparatus contains a selection of variants which are important for recovering the basic Hebrew (or Aramaic) text, for the translation and interpretation of a given passage or for textcritical considerations. The variants are culled from Hebrew sources—two of the best Tiberian manuscripts (mostly the Aleppo Codex, the Cairo Codex of the Prophets, and the Damascus Pentateuch) and the Judaean Desert manuscript finds (Qumran, Murabba'at, Nahal Hever, etc,),6"* followed by variants from the ancient versions—LXX, the 'Three', Vulgate (in the original languages), Peshitta, and Targumim (usually in translation). Short evaluations of variants and conjectural emendations, subject to clearly defined, rules, are also included. In view of the importance of the scrolls and fragments from the Judaean Desert for tracing the transmission history of the biblical text two further projects, which, aim at presenting in discrete ways an overview of the textual evidence of these manuscript finds, should be described. (3) The Qumran Bible', to be published next year by E. Ulrich is conceived as a handbook for students in which selections of biblical texts from Qumranfo in the author's fresh transcription are printed side by side with the parallel consonantal BHS masoretic text (Codex L). For Isaiah and Psalms which are extant at Qumran in extensively preserved scrolls (IQIs* and HQPsa) in addition to a considerable number of fragments, the fuller text and the texts of the fragments are printed on facing pages. When the texts of several scrolls or fragments overlap, usually one will be presented as the 'dominant text'. The juxtaposition of MT and the Qumran manuscripts is intended to facilitate a comparison of the uniform textus receptus with the multiform textual traditions which circulated in Second Temple Judaism. 63 See Schenker (1996). BHQ will be published in fascicles, each combined with a commentary in English. The publication of the first instalment is planned for 1998. 64 Readings from Genizah fragments and medieval manuscripts are recorded only in special cases. te To the exclusion of fragmentary finds from other sites in the Judaean Desert.

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(4) While the 'Qumran Bible' is conceived as a 'manual' for students, the 'Biblia Qumranica' is planned by H, Lichtenberger as a comprehensive synoptic six-volume editio critica maior of all biblical texts from the Judaean Desert, except for the medieval Khirbet Mird fragments. These texts will be printed in parallel columns side by side with their parallels in the vocalized MT [Codex (A) or (L)], Samaritanus (for the Pentateuch) and LXX (for Daniel also Theodotion), but not Targumim, together with books of the LXX canon of which (partial) Hebrew versions were found at Qumran and Masada, such as Tobit and Ben-Sira, to the exclusion of Apocrypha of which Hebrew originals are not extant among the discoveries, such as the books of the Maccabees. The running texts of Pesharim will be registered in a separate column, like the text of a biblical manuscript. Biblical quotations in non-biblical works, whether or not formally introduced, will be discussed in a special seventh volume once all non-biblical Qumran manuscripts have been published. In addition the Temple Scroll and the so-called 'reworked' biblical texts will be included in the edition in the expectation that a comparison of their texts with the textus receptus will contribute to a better comprehension of the redaction and interpretation processes of 'sacred' writings. For the Pentateuch also Papyrus Nash and the Ketef Hinnom silver capsules as well as Tefillin and Mezuzot will be brought under scrutiny. A period of ten years is foreseen for the completion of the project.

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BUTIN, R. (1969), The Ten Nequdath of the Torah, or, The Meaning and Purpose of the Extraordinary Points of the Pentateuch (Massoretic Text): A Contribution to the History of Textual Criticism among the ancient Jems (New York: Ktav; originally published 1906). CROSS, F, M, (1953), 'A Royal Song of Thanksgiving I! Samuel 22 = Psalm 18', JBL 72,15-34. (1969), 'Papyri of the Fourth Century B.C. from Daliyeh. A Preliminary Report on their Significance', in D. N. Freedman and J. C. Greenfield (eds.), New Directions in Biblical Archaeology (New York: Doubleday), 41-62. (1975), The Contribution of the Qumran Discoveries to the Study of the Biblical Text', in F. M. Cross and S. Talmon (eds.), 278~-92. — (1975), The Evolution of a Theory of Local Texts', in F. M. Cross and S. Talmon (eds.), 306-20. CJROSS, F. M, and TALMOM, S. (1975) (eds.), Qumran and the History of the Biblical Text (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press). DE LAGARDB, P. A. (1863), Anmerkungen zur griechischen Uhersetzung der Proverbial (Leipzig: Hirzel). DEMSKY, A. and BAR-!LAN, M. (1988), 'Writing in Ancient Israel and Early Judaism', in Mikra. Text, Translation, Reading and Interpretation of the Hebrew Bible in Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity, ed. M. J. Mulder (Assert/Maastricht: Van Gorcum; Philadelphia: Fortress Press), 1-38. DIEZ MACHO, A. (1968-78), Ms. Neophyti I, vols. l-V (Mad rid-Barcelona: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones cientificas). FIELD, F. (1875), Origenis Hexaplorum Cjuae supersunt sive veterum interpretum graecorum in totum Vetus Testamentum fragments (Oxford: Clarendon Press; reprint Hildesheim: Olms, 1964). FLINT, P. W. (1997), The Dead Sea Psalms Scrolls and the Book of Psalms (Leiden: E. J. Brill). GESENIUS, W. (1815), De Pentateuchi Samaritani origine indole el anctoritate commentatio philologica-critica (Hallae: Impensif Libraries Rengerianae). GosHEN-GoTTSTEiN, M. H. (1965), The Book of Isaiah, Sample Edition with Introduction (Jerusalem: Magnes). •—(1995) (ed.), Book of Isaiah (Jerusalem: Magnes). HARAN, M. (1982), 'Book-Scrolls in Israel in Pre-Exilic Times', //S 33,161-73. (1983), 'Book Scrolls at the Beginning of the Second Temple Period: the Transition from Papyrus to Skins', HUCA 54,111-22. JELIJCOE, S. (1968), The Septuagint and Modern Study (Oxford: Clarendon Press). KAHLE, P. (1959), The Cairo Genizah. The Schweich Lectures of the British Academy (Oxford; Clarendon Press). KLEIN, M. L. (1974), Textual Criticism of the Old Testament—the Septuagint after Qumran (Philadelphia: Fortress Press), — (1980), The Fragment Targums of the Pentateuch according to their extant sources, HI1 (AnBib 76; Rome: Pontifidum Institutum Biblicum). LEIMAN, S. (1976) The Canonization of Hebrew Scripture; The Talmudic and Midrashk Evidence (Hamden, CON: Transactions of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences). LIEBBRMAN, S. (1950), The Texts of Scripture in the Early Rabbinic Period', Hellenism in Jewish Palestine (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary), 20-7.

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MARTIN, M, (1956), The Scribal Character of the Dead Sea Scrolls, HI (Louvain: Publications Universitaires). MILIK, J. T, et til, (1961), Les grottes de Murabbaat (Discoveries in the Judaean Desert, 2; Oxford: Clarendon Press). MILIK, J. T. and BLACK, M. (1975) (eds.), The Books of Enoch, Fragments of Qumran Cave 4 (Oxford; Clarendon Press). NAVEH, J. (1982), Early History of the Alphabet: An Introduction to West Semitic Epigraphy and Palaeography (Jerusalem; Magnes Press; Leiden: Brill). OLSHAUSEN, J. (1853), Die Psalnten (Leipzig: Hirzel). RABIN, C, TALMON, S. AND Tov, E, (1975) (eds.), Book of Jeremiah (Jerusalem: Magnes). RAHLFS, A. (1928), P, de Lagarde's wissenschaftliches I,£bcnswerk (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht). ROBERTS, B. J. (1951), The Old Testament Text and Versions, The Hebrew Text in Transmission and the History of the Ancient Versions (Cardiff: University of Wales Press). (1979), The Textual Transmission of the Old Testament (including modern critical editions of the Hebrew Bible)', in Tradition and Interpretation, Essays by Members of the Society for Old Testament Study, ed. G. W. Anderson (Oxford: Clarendon Press), 1-30. RosENMULLBR, E. F. C. (1798-1800), Handbuch fur die Litemtur der MMischen Kritik und Exegese (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht). SANDERSON, f. E. (1986), An Exodus Scroll from Qumran. 4QpaleoExodM and the Samaritan Tradition (Atlanta: Scholars Press). SCHAFEK, P. (1975), 'Die sogenannte Synode von Jabne. II Der Abschluss des Kanons', Judaica 31,116-24. SCHENKER, A. (1996), 'Eine Neuausgabe der Biblia Hebraica', Zeitschrift fur Althebraistik9,5S-6l. SKEHAN, P. W. (1955), 'Exodus in the Samaritan Recension at Qumran', JBL 74, 182-7. SOMMER, J. G. (1.846), Biblische Abhandlungen (Bonn: Konig). SPERBER, A. (1929), Septuagintaprobleme (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer). •—(1938), 'Hebrew Based upon Biblical Passages in Parallel Transmission', HUCA 14,153-249. (1939), 'New Testament and Septuagint', JBL 59, 193-293 (repr. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1940). — (1959-73) (ed.), The Bible in Aramaic Based on Old Manuscripts and Printed Texts, vols I-V (Leiden: E. J. Brill). TALMON, S. (1961), 'Synonymous Readings in the Textual Traditions of the Old Testament', in Scripta Hierosolyniitana 8 (Studies in the Hebrew Bible), ed. C. Rabin (Jerusalem: Magnes Press), 335-83. — (1964), 'Double Readings in the Massoretic Text', Textus 1,144-84. — (1975), 'The Old Testament Text', in F. M. Cross and S. Talinon (eds.), 1-41. — (1975), 'Aspects of the Textual Transmission of the Bible in the Light of Qumran Manuscripts', in F. M. Cross and S, Talmon (eds.), 226-63. (1975), The Textual Study of the Bible^A New Outlook', in F. M. Cross and S. Talmon (eds.), 321-400. — (1981), The Ancient Hebrew Alphabet and Biblical Text Criticism I.', in

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Melanges D. Barthelemy. Etudes bibliques offertes a {'occasion de son 60s anniversaire, ed. P. Casetti, O, Keel and A. Schenker (OBO 38) (Fribourg: Editions Universitaires; Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht), 497-530, — (1985), 'The Ancient Hebrew Alphabet and Biblical Text Criticism II*, in Melanges bibliques et orientaux en I'honneur de M, M. Delcor, ed, A. Caquot, S. Legasse and M, Tardieu (Neukirchen-VIuyn: Neukirchener Verlag), 387-402. (1989), The World of Quntran from Within (Jerusalem: Magnes Press; Leiden: E, J. Brill). — (1991), 'Oral Tradition and Written Transmission, or the Heard and the Seen Word in Judaism of the Second Temple Period', in Jesus and the Oral Gospel Tradition, ed. H. Wansbrough (JSNTS 64; Sheffield: Academic Press), 121-58. — (1993), 'Fragments of a Psalms Scroll from Masada', Minhah le-Nahum, Biblical and Other Studies presented to N. Santa in Honor of his. 70th Birthday, ed. M. Brettler and M. Fishbane, JSOTS154 (Sheffield: Acadeoiic Press), 318-27, — (1994), 'The Community of the Renewed Covenant: Between Judaism and Christianity', in The Community of the Renewed Covenant, The Notre Dante Symposium on the Dead Sea Scrolls, ed. E. Ulrich and J. VanderKam (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press), 3-24. •— (1995), 'Was the Book of Esther Known at Qumran?', DSD 2, 3, 249-67. — (1996a), 'Fragments of a Psalms Scroll from Masada etc.', DSD 3,3,296-314, (1996b), 'Fragments of an Scroll from Masada etc.', OLP 27, 29-49, — (1996c), 'Masada 1045-1350 and 1375: Fragments of a Genesis Apocryphon', IE} 46,148-55. — (1996d), 'Fragments of a Joshua-Apocryphon—Masada 1039-211', JJS 47, 128-39. •—(1997), 'A Masada Fragment of Samaritan Origin—1039-320 etc.', JEJ 47, 220-32. Tov, E. (1988), 'Hebrew Biblical Manuscripts from the Judaean Desert: their contribution to textual criticism', JJS 39, 5-37. — (1992), Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible (Minneapolis: Fortress Press; AssenMaastricht: Van Gorcum). (1994), 'Biblical Texts as Reworked in some Qumran Manuscripts with special attention to 4QRP and 4QPara Gen-Exod', in Ulrich and VanderKam (1994) (eds.), 111-34. — (1.997), The Text-Critical Use of the Septmigint in Biblical Research, 2nd edn. (Jerusalem: Simor). Tov, E. with KRAFT, R. A. and PARSONS, P. J. (1990), The Greek Minor Prophets Scroll from Nahal If ever (SHevXIIgr) (The Seiyal Collection I) (Discoveries in the Judaean Desert, 8; Oxford: Clarendon Press), Tov, E. and PFANN, S. J. (1993), The Dead Sea Scrolls on Microfiche. Companion Volume (Leiden: E. J. Brill). ULRICH, E. and VANDERKAM, J. (1994), The Community of the Renewed Covenant. The Notre Dame Symposium on the Dead Sea Scrolls (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press). VANDERKAM, J. and MILIK, J, T. (1994), 'Jubilees', Discoveries in the Judaean Desert, 13, M 75. VAN DER PLOEG, M. and VAN DER WOUDE, A. S. (1971), Le tar gum de fob de la grotte XI de Qumran (Leiden: E. J. Brill).

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WICKES, W. (1887), A Treatise on the Accentuation of the 2'l so-called Prose Books of the Old Testament (Oxford: Clarendon Press), WURTHWEIN, E. (1979), Tfie Text of the Old Testament, An Introduction to the Biblia Hebraica (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans), YADIN, Y. (1961), 'Expedition D', IE] 11,40. YARDENI, A. (1991), 'Remarks on the Priestly Blessing on Two Ancient Amulets from Jerusalem', FT 41,176-85.

7

The Hebrew Language J. A. EMERTON

THIS chapter summarizes some developments in the study of the Hebrew language of the biblical period that have taken place since the years surveyed in Tradition and Interpretation. Scholars build on the foundations laid by their predecessors, and sometimes it has been necessary to mention works published before the years under investigation in the present volume. Further, a study of scholarly work in a particular period must be selective if it is to keep within the limits of a single chapter. I have focused attention especially on the history of the development of the Hebrew language, which is important both in itself and because of its bearing on the composition and dating of the books of the Old Testament. The history of the Hebrew language and its development Three general histories of the Hebrew language have been published in the relevant period. The first was written by E.Y. Kutscher between 1964 and 1968, It was edited and completed posthumously and appeared in an English translation in 1982. The second work, by Angel Saenz-Badillos, was published in Spanish in 1988, and in an English translation by J. Elwolde in 1993. Third, the French work by Mireille Hadas-Lebel, was published originally in 1970, and in the revised, fourth edition in 1995. All three books place Hebrew in its historical setting and its relation to other Semitic languages, and all describe the language of the Hebrew Bible and inscriptions of the biblical period, the Hebrew used at Qumran, and also Mishnaic Hebrew. Those by Kutscher and Saenz-Badillos go further and write of later developments in the language down to, and including, Modern Hebrew. A discussion of the origin of Hebrew must take into account the question of the Israelite settlement in Canaan. It is difficult to assume that Hebrew was a language or dialect introduced into the land by a people who all entered it from outside. It has long been widely held that not all who later described themselves as Israelites were descendants only of people who had escaped from slavery in Egypt. More recently, it has

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been argued that many—or even all-—were descendants of Canaanites (to use a problematic but convenient term) who had lived in the land from long before. Whatever view is held on such questions (and the possibility remains that, though the ancestors of later Israelites included Canaanites, they also included a group who had come from Egypt), it seems clear that Hebrew is closely related to the North-West Semitic languages or dialects spoken in Syria-Palestine in the later second millennium BC. The most important sources for our knowledge of such languages are two in number. First, there is Ugaritic, the language of the alphabetic texts from Ras Shamra, though it was not the direct ancestor of Hebrew, for it had undergone some developments that are not found in Hebrew.1 Nevertheless, the study of the Ugaritic texts has revealed affinities with Israelite culture and literature, and has shed fresh light on the Hebrew language,2 Two grammars of Ugaritic have been published in recent years, a basic study by Stanislav Segert in 1984, and a more detailed work by Daniel Sivan in 1997. The other important source is to be found in Accadia n uneiform texts written by Palestinian scribes, such as the Tell el-Amarn a tablets from the fourteenth century BC. Although the texts are written in ccadian, they contain glosses in the Canaanite language of the scribes , and they also reflect Canaanite idioms. Such evidence is discussed by Sivan3 and in the magisterial work of Anson Rainey.4 How much Hebrew from the earlier pre-exilic period is preserved in the Old Testament? It is widely held that the oldest Hebrew in the Bible is to be found, in certain poetic texts. Saenz-Badillos, for example, says that the passages 'that best reflect Archaic Hebrew are the Song of Moses (Ex 15), the Song of Deborah (Jg 5), the Blessings of Jacob (Gn 49) and of Moses (Dt 33), the Oracles of Balaam (Mm 23-24), and the Poem of Moses (Dt 32), as well as Ps 68 and other early psalms'.3 The subject matter of, for instance, the Song of Deborah and the Blessings of Jacob and Mose s makes best sense if they are dated in the pre-exilic period, though not all of them in the same part of that period. Saenz-Badillos lists a number of phenomena in passages that he regards as characteristic of 'Archaic Hebrew'.6 He draws attention, for example, to the rarity of the accusative particle 'et and of the relative particle '"ser,7 and to the third-person feminine singular ending -t of the perfect in 'azflat in Deut. 32: 36. However, some of his examples of archaic language should, be regarded with caution. He himself recognizes that some may be evidence of northern dialect.8 That may be why the relative particle sa— is found in Judg. 5: 7? The use of bal as a negative instead of lo'm is not peculiar to early poetry. It is found in, for example, Isa. 40: 24, which is exilic in date (compare also its regular use in Phoenician). Saenz-Badillos refers11 1

See Sivan (1997), 3. Saeiiz-Badiilos (1993), 56-7. "Ibid, 57. 5

2

See Emerton (1994). Ibid., 57-62. '"Ibid., 57. 6

3

4

7

8

(1984). Ibid., 58-9. "Ibid., 57.

(1996). Ibid., 61-2.

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to the orthography of Gen. 49: I I , which has 'troh instead of the later spelling of the suffix as -6. But the use of h for this pronominal suffix was regular in Hebrew inscriptions until the exile; in any case, it is better to treat questions of orthography separately from questions of archaic language. Another example of an alleged archaism listed by Saenz-Badillos is the use of enclitic mem in Deut, 33: 11. In Ugaritic, the letter m is often written at the end of a word, even a word in the construct state, without making an obvious difference to the meaning, and a comparable phenomenon has been identified in some uses of enclitic mi in the Amarna Letters.12 It would not be surprising if a similar enclitic mem existed in Hebrew, and many examples have been suggested in the past sixty years—though not only in the earliest Hebrew texts. The existence of this -m has been widely accepted. On the other hand, its existence in the Hebrew Bible was doubted by so eminent a Semitic scholar as C, R. Driver, and a recent study of the subject has concluded that his scepticism was justified.13 It is not that the theory itself is implausible, but that it may by doubted whether a sufficiently strong case for its truth has been made. A study of the Hebrew language in the pre-exilic period is helped by the existence of contemporary inscriptions. A corpus of Hebrew inscriptions down to c. 200 BC, together with an invaluable concordance, was published by Graham Da vies in 1991, and a number of publications have been devoted to inscriptions. They include books by Dennis Pardee,14 K. A. D. Smelik,15 and Shmuel Ahituv,16 as well as a major work in German by J, Renz and W. Rollig,17 A further aid to the study of these inscriptions and others in North-West Semitic languages is the dictionary by J. Hoftijzer and K. Jongeling.18 W. R. Garr's study of the language of inscriptions in Hebrew and other North-West Semitic tongues between 1000 and 586 BC appeared in 1985. Garr examines linguistic features which differentiate the firstmillennium , . . dialects . . . Phoenician, Aramaic, Samalian, Ammonite, Deir Alia, Moabite, Edomite, and Hebrew'19 in different regions of SyriaPalestine. He looks, in turn, at phonology, morphology and syntax, and correlates and evaluates the results. Hebrew is regarded as 'a minor linguistic center within the Canaanite domain'.20 Differences between the Hebrew of the north and that of the south are noted, and it appears that 'Judah was a single linguistic entity'.21 Ian Young believes that there were various dialects in Israel and Judah in the pre-exilic period. Before that, even in the late second millennium BC, there was a standard form of language in Palestine in addition to the dialects. 'Biblical Hebrew was a continuation of the pre-Israelite literary 12

See Rainey (1996), vol. 3, 234-6. See Emerton (1996), including a discussion on p. 327 of Deut 33:11. 14 15 (1982). (Dutch 1984; ET1991). '« (Hebrew 1992). 17 w w (1995). (1995). Garr (1985), 13. B * Ibid., 229-30. Ibid., 234. 13

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prestige language of Syria-Palestine'.22 From this pre-Israelite standardized language developed Standard Biblical Hebrew (SBH) during the United Monarchy. The administration of the country needed 'a language with more precision than is possible in poetry . . . It is important . . . to distinguish between two types of Biblical Hebrew prose. The first is "Literal}'' Prose", which is found in the Biblical prose books . , . Oil the other hand we have "Official Prose" evidenced particularly in the inscriptions.'23 According to Young, these forms of written Hebrew must themselves be distinguished from the language actually spoken by people in preexilic times. He mentions previous work on colloquialisms (e.g. that of G. R. Driver), and he pays particular attention, to an article of John Macdonald in 1975, who looks at accounts of direct speech in 1 Samuel. Young does not appear to be entirely happy with Macdonald's method, because the evidence of other cultures suggests that 'quotations of "Low" speech are translated into "High" literary language'.24 Nevertheless, he notes that Macdonald 'achieves some definite results'. 'For example, he identifies the inversion of word, order for emphasis, subject first, as a special feature of spoken Hebrew'.23 The other scholar whom Young discusses is Gary Rendsburg, whose doctoral dissertation he knows, but not his book.26 Rendsburg postulates diglossia in ancient Israel, namely, the existence of two forms of Hebrew alongside each other: a written form and a spoken form. Rendsburg accepts—no doubt, rightly—the hypothesis that Mishnaic Hebrew developed from a form of colloquial Hebrew that had been used for several centuries. Rendsburg notes that some apparently anomalous grammatical forms in the Hebrew Bible have affinities with Mishnaic Hebrew. He regards these anomalies as lapses into the colloquial form of the language and believes that their evidence is relevant to the pre-exilic as well as to the post-exilic period, though to a lesser literary extent.27 It is certainly likely that the origins of the vernacular from which Mishnaic Hebrew developed go back to pre-exilic times, though colloquial Hebrew itself doubtless changed over a period of centuries. Allowance must also be made for the possibility that the apparent anomalies of grammar, or some of them, may go back, not to those who first wrote the texts, but to later copyists. Further, Young suggests28 that a distinction must be drawn between 'evidence for a substandard speech' ('mostly . .. the blurring of grammatical rules to which the classical form of the language strictly adheres') and 'features which are not merely substandard uses of the language' but 'instances where variant forms correspond exactly in function to their classical counterparts'.29 Further, we must allow for the possibility that some 'anomalies' have some other explanation. 22 26

Young (1993), 11 (1990a).

s 2?

Ibid., 20. Ibid., 172-3.

24 28

Ibid, 76. (1993), 77.

s M

Ibid. Ibid., 78.

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17;?

There were also regional differences in the Hebrew language, especially between that of Judah, in which a large part of the Hebrew Bible is written, and that of the north, as has long been recognized. Rendsburg has argued for the northern origin of the 'last words of David' in 2 Sam. 23: 1-7,30 and of a number of psalms.31 He believes that there is evidence for northern (he prefers the term 'Jsraelian') Hebrew, not only in vocabulary, but also in morphology.32 In particular, he argues that words and forms that are not adequately or well attested in the language of Judah, but which appear in northern texts, and which have affinities with Phoenician, Aramaic or Ugaritic, are to be regarded as characteristic of Israelian Hebrew'. His suggestions are interesting, but it may be doubted whether the texts at our disposal provide us with sufficient knowledge of the varieties of Hebrew usage to provide a firm basis for some of his conclusions. It is impossible to consider all Rendsburg's evidence here, and it must suffice to consider only one example. The verb fell appears only in Ps. 80: 17 and Isa. 33:12 in the Hebrew Bible.33 The former reference is, indeed, in a psalm that is probably northern, but the latter is probably southern. Rendsburg here postulates use of the device of 'style-switching', whereby a writer deliberately imitates the speech of the geographical setting of his writing.34 Rendsburg notes that the verb ksh has a cognate in Aramaic, that the oracle in Isa. 33: 12 is addressed to Assyria, and that 'the Assyrians used Aramaic widely during the 8th century'.35 He therefore suggests that 'it is likely that Isaiah has peppered his address with Aramaic forms in a variation of style-switching'. Since the argument is supposed to show that ksh was an Israelian Hebrew word, as well as an Aramaic one, its relevance to Assyria seems even less probable than if it were purely Aramaic. Moreover, Rendsburg does not identify the other 'Aramaic forms' with which the passage is 'peppered'. Whatever varieties of Hebrew may have existed in pre-exilic times, it has long been recognized that the sack of Jerusalem, the end of the state of Judah, and the exile of many Jews to Babylonia in the sixth century BC led to changes in the language. A brief account of such changes is given by Naveh and Greenfield. In recent years, there has been much discussion of Late Biblical Hebrew (LBH), and also of the dating of the language of the Priestly Source (P) in the Pentateuch. There had been a general consensus, except among very conservative scholars, that P is to be dated in or after the exile. The question was, however, reopened by the arguments of Yehezkel Kaufmann that P was a pre-exilic document. Since the language of P had been thought to favour a late date, there was a need for its place in the development of the Hebrew language to be re-examined. 30

Rendsburg (1988) and (1989). » Rendsburg (1990W, 79.

31 34

Rendsburg (1990W. Cp. ibid., 3.

3Z

Rendsburg (1992). * Ibid., 79. *'

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LBH was the subject of an important monograph by Robert Polzin, which was published in 1976, and which has provoked further discussion among scholars interested in the development of Hebrew. Polzin 'attempts to characterize the typological nature of P's language by linguistic means alone'.3* He assumes 'that the Books of Chronicles provide us with the best example of what this LBH looked like . . . In addition to the books of Chronicles, the books of Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther, Daniel and Ben Sira are also seen as compositions of the post-exilic period'; and he holds 'that grammar and syntax provide a more objective and reliable basis for chronological analysis than do lexicographic features of a language'.37 For the purpose of his investigation, he focuses attention on 'the non-synoptic portions of the books of Chronicles (those not found in duplicate in Samuel/Kings), the book of Ezra and the non-memoir sections of the book of Nehemiah (hereafter N2)'.38 In his opinion, these books show no evidence of a desire to archaize, which he finds in Esther and the Nehemiah Memoirs (=N*). The influence of Aramaic on the Hebrew of the Persian period is generally acknowledged, but Polzin distinguishes between features of LBH that cannot be attributed to such influence and those that can. He lists thirteen of the former features in the language of Chronicles, and six of the latter. Of the six, however, he believes only three 'to be related directly to Aramaic influence',39 as distinct from features that were probably not of Aramaic origin, even though Aramaic may have influenced their frequency. The language of Chronicles is then compared with that of the books of Ezra and Nehemiah and found to be very similar to that of the former and of N2 in the latter, but differences are noted between N2 and N1 which, like the book of Esther, is found to be archaizing in its use of language. Two examples will serve to illustrate features of the language of Chronicles (and other late books) that are characteristic of LBH. The first is the 'Increased use of 'et before noun in the nominative case: 'et emphatic',40 and the conclusion reached is that 'it was a very rare feature of classical Hebrew which grew in popularity so that in the sixth-fourth centuries it began to be used much more than earlier'.41 The second is 'Repetition of a singular word (= Latin quivis)'.42 A distinction is drawn between mere 'repetition of a singular noun without the waw copulative' such as "fs *fs meaning 'every, all' in earlier Hebrew43 and 'the distributive, quivis meaning of the late texts'.44 Thus, fir iva'fr in 2 Chron. 19: 5 is thought to mean 'for each several city'.45 Polzin next examines the Priestly source in the light of the conclusions that he has reached in his study of Chronicles. He sets on one side the 36 40 44

Polzin (1976), 1. Ibid., 32. Ibid., 50.

37

Ibid., 1-2. « Ibid., 37. « Ibid., 51.

« Ibid., 2-3. Ibid., 47.

42

» Ibid., 69. « Ibid., 49,

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purely legal parts of P and also the Holiness Code (H), and concentrates on the primarily narrative parts, as usually identified by scholars. In this material, he distinguishes between PS, the 'groundwork' of P, and Ps, those parts of P that are commonly regarded as secondary additions. He compares this P material with LBH, on the one hand, and earlier Biblical Hebrew ('classical BH'), on the other. The texts selected as examples of earlier Hebrew are parts of the books of Exodus and Numbers ascribed to JE (the Yahwistic and Elohistic sources of the Pentateuch), the socalled. Court History of David in 2 Samuel and 1 Kings, and samples of Deuteronomy and the so-called Deuteronomistic History.The 'classical BH exemplified in JE, the Court History, and Dtr represents a grammatical/ syntactic profile which is remarkably homogeneous in nature'.46 The result of the comparison is that 'Pg sides with classical BH in 7 key grammatical/syntactic features', but there are 'four . . . features in Ps which are characteristic of LBH'.47 Polzin finds here 'the beginnings of a transition from classical BH , . . toward LBH'. There are also in Ps 'two features which represent neither classical BH prose . . . nor LBH as it appears in the Chronicler's language'.48 P, however, shows signs of further development; 'Ps sides with LBH in 9 features and retains only 2 features of classical BH .. . This massive transformation of Ps. . . places it typologically after PS and somewhat before Chronicles'.49 As was noted above, Polzin attaches importance to grammatical/ syntactic features of language, rather than to lexicographic ones. He does, however, also consider lexicographical evidence. He finds the number of LBH features in P to be 'unusually small', and 'these words appear mostly in Ps and not at all in PS'.50 In 1980, Rendsburg published a review article about Polzin's book. He accepts as valid some of the features that Polzin regards as characteristic of LBH, but contests others. There are two ways in which in general he differs from Polzin. First, despite the existence of 'a handful of usages which no doubt separate LBH from EBH [Early Biblical Hebrew] . . . as a whole, the two idioms are not very different'.91 Second, he contests Polzin's conclusion that, although P& 'shares many features with EBH', 'four features set it [Ps] apart',52 Further, 'of the eight characteristics which. Ps purportedly shares with LBH, only one holds up to further testing',53 and this seems to Rendsburg inadequate to justify Polzin's conclusion. In Rendsburg's opinion, 'the language of P5, like that of PS, is therefore classical BH'.54 Rendsburg makes some good points, though not all his points are convincing. An example of the latter is his discussion53 of Polzin's argument56 that one of the features of LBH is 'Expression of possession by prospective * Ibid., 94. 50 Ibid., 151. 54 Ibid., 76.

47 5! S5

Ibid., 98. Rendsburg (1980), 73. Ibid., 67; cf. 74-5.

** Ibid., 99. Ibid., 74. Polzin (1976), 38-40.

52

K

*" Ibid., 103. Ibid., 75.

53

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pronominal suffix with a following noun, or le plus noun, or sel plus noun'. Polzin finds57 thirteen examples of this feature in Pg in Num. 1, and three verses (Num. 4: 36, 40, 44) in which it occurs in P8. In contrast, Rendsburg notes that the construction is "of common Semitic usage', and claims that there 'are many more examples of the prospective, or anticipatory, pronoun in BH that Polzin does not cite, including many early ones, as in Exod. 2: 6; Lev, 13: 57; Num. 23: 18; 24: 3; 24: 15; 32: 33; Josh. 1: 2; Judg. 21: 7; 1 Sam. 21: 14; 2 Sam. 14: 6'. The reference in Num. 23:18 and 24: 3 is presumably to tfno sippor and If no be'or, respectively (and 67 n. 10 also compares hayeto-'eres in Gen. 1: 24; Ps. 79: 2). This assumes that the ending -
Polzin (1976), 103,121, n. 52. Polzin (1976), 167-70. Ibid., 165-9. (1976), 39.

58 60 62 64

See Hurvitz (1982), XIH-XIV. Hurvitz (1982), 155. Ibid., 165-6. Hurvitz (1982), 166.

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undergone during their long transmission'.65 He believes that the book of Ezekiel is 'an authentic product of exilic biblical literature'.6* He recognizes, however, that some scholars hold that the book of Ezekiel contains signs of later editing. He does not think it likely that the apparent evidence for a pre-exilic date can be accounted for by the hypothesis that P wrote in a deliberately archaizing style, for a writer in the post-exilic period would surely have betrayed himself by sometimes using later forms. Nevertheless, while he favours a pre-exilic date for P, he allows for the possibility 'that P emerged in its final form as late as perhaps 550',67 a date not very different from, the one apparently favoured by Polzin. Another Israeli scholar who uses linguistic criteria for an early dating of P is Menahem Paran.68 In a brief but discerning review of Hurvitz's book, Graham Davies expresses caution about its conclusions.'''' Hurvitz's comparison of P with the book of Ezekiel in its present form is not free from difficulty. 'If, when a distinction is made between original and secondary elements in Ezekiel, it should turn out that the late, post-Priestly linguistic features are predominantly in passages which there is good reason to deem secondary, they would lose their value for establishing that P is pre-exilic.' There is also the further question when LBH should be said to begin, a question which might properly be answered in different ways depending on whether the first appearance of distinctively LBH features or the establishment of a whole complex of such features is being referred to. Is there any evidence for the latter (which constitutes the terminus ante quern for P) before c. 450 B.C.? A similar problem exists in relation to Hurvitz's assumption that classical Biblical Hebrew ceased to be written at the beginning of the exile (so that P, being classical, must be pre-exilic). What about the exilic portions of the Deuteronomistic corpus?

The discussion was carried further in 1990 by M. F. Rooker. He is not concerned primarily with the date of P, although it is relevant to his subject, but with placing the book of Ezekiel in the history of the development of the Hebrew language. Rooker begins by discussing the concept of linguistic change in the study of linguistics, and the history of the diachronic approach to the language of the Hebrew Bible. He then examines the features that Polzin regards as characteristic of LBH. Although Rooker criticizes some of them (including some that Polzin finds in PS and Ps), he accepts others. Polzin 'has laid the groundwork for subsequent study, including this work. Hence, we believe it to be legitimate to use his findings as a basis for comparison'.70 He applies Polzin's typology (with some modification) to the book of Ezekiel. Of the fifteen features of LBH that he examines, all are found in Chronicles, two in PS and three in Ps, and seven in Ezekiel: Pg and Ps thus 'demonstrate more of a typological 65 68

Ibid., 21. (1989).

<* Ibid., 152. (1987).

w

67 70

Ibid., 170; cp. 153. Rooker (1990), 40.

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affinity [than EzekielJ with EBH'.71 This agrees with Hurvitz's conclusions. Rooker devotes the next chapter to method.. He applies the principle of linguistic contrast between 'grammatical and lexical features in Ezekiel which differ from linguistic features extant in EBH';72 and also the principle of 'linguistic distribution' which 'involves determining whether the feature which exists in Ezekiel, which differs from what we find in EBH, is distributed among other sources which are known to be linguistically late',73 Further, he accepts the 'postulate that the Massoretic Text be accepted in Mo in this kind of linguistic analysis'.74 In addition, he holds that comparison of a passage with 'an earlier text which may be its source'75—such as Chronicles, on the one hand, and Samuel and Kings, on the other—may shed light on the development of the language. He values both lexical and grammatical evidence, and does not follow Polzin in preferring the latter. It is not only the dependence of Chronicles on Samuel and Kings that is relevant to such study: Rooker argues that the book of Ezekiel is dependent on Leviticus 26, Ezek. 44: 9-16 on Num. 18: 1—7, 22-3, and Ezek. 22: 25-8 on Zeph. 3:1-4. Rooker next examines late grammatical and lexical features in the book of Ezekiel. The conclusion of his study is that 'Ezekiel appears to be the best representative of the mediating link between pre-exilic and postexilic Hebrew and hence the exemplar of Biblical Hebrew in Transition'.76 What conclusions may be drawn from the studies of the emergence of LBH that have been surveyed above? It seems that P displays greater affinity with EBH than had previously been believed by many scholars, and that the book of Ezekiel reflects a later stage of the development of the language. Graham Davies's comment on Hurvitz's work warns us of the difficulty of attaching precise dates to the emergence of LBH. Moreover, although Hurvitz favours a pre-exilic date for P, even he concludes that a date for the final form of P c. 550 BC is linguistically possible. Among the books of the Old Testament that are generally believed, to come from the late post-exilic period is Ecclesiastes, and its language is thought to testify to such a late date. It was suggested by M. J. Dahood in several publications in the years before those discussed in the present volume that the language of the book shows Phoenician influence. His theory was examined in 1990 by J. R. Davila, who also considered the more widely-accepted theory of Aramaic influence. He challenges some of the alleged evidence of Phoenician influence and also theories that the book has been translated from Aramaic, but he concludes that 'the dialect of Qoheleth was influenced by northern Hebrew'.77 The question of dialect is raised in Bo Isaaksson's study of the language of Qoheleth.78 His book focuses on the verb, and he accepts F. Rundgren's 71 75

Rooker (1990), 52. Ibid.

72 76

Ibid., 55. Ibid., 186.

n 77

Ibid., 56. Davila (1990), 87,

?

* Ibid,, 57. (1987).

7S

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distinctive theory about the nature of the Hebrew verb and his interpretation of the so-called tenses in terms of aspect.79 He believes that 'it is hard to assign the language of Qoheleth a natural place in the history of Hebrew',80 In. his opinion, the 'distinctiveness of Qoheleth's language does not concern the verbal system as much as has often been assumed . . . the difference from "standard" narrative Hebrew is rather a matter of literary genre, and . . . the linguistic difference from M[ishnaic] Hfebrew] is considerable'.81 'It is probable that the language the author used for his work was heavily influenced by a local dialect, or was a local dialect, closer to the spoken language than was classical narrative Hebrew'.82 Isaaksson does not commit himself to a date. Although an 'origin in the fourth century is by no means improbable... our knowledge of the Hebrew, spoken and written, that was current in the various regions and in the several periods of the biblical time, is yet too limited to permit a dating and a geographical location of Qoheleth on purely linguistic grounds'.83 D. C. Fredericks finds the usual arguments for a late date of Ecclesiastes to be unconvincing, and he even argues that it was written before the exile.84 Despite the resemblances between the language of the book and Mishnaic Hebrew, he argues that in grammar 'Qoh is apparently free from MH influence'.85 He also notes differences between the language of Ecclesiastes and LBH, and he maintains that it is unlikely that the former was influenced by the latter. Nor do the resemblances to Aramaic prove a late date, and, for example, the endings -6n and -fit are indigenous Hebrew. He grants that /IMS mm, k;'ehad and the root tqp have parallels in later texts, but maintains that they may be pre-exilic. They do, however, suggest to him a relatively late date in the pre-exilic period, and he suggests the eighth or seventh century BC. Not even the allegedly Persian loan-words parties (Eccles. 2: 5) and pitgam (8:11) need testify to a date in or after the Persian period, for 'a number of noted scholars have been ready to admit Indo-Aryan linguistic influence before the Persian empire'.86 In his opinion, earlier studies fail to do justice to 'the genre and dialectic uniqueness of Qoh',87 which may reflect a pre-exilic vernacular. Fredericks's work is thorough and careful, and he is able to show that arguments for a late dating of Qoheleth's language have often oversimplified the interpretation of the evidence. But his early dating of the book has been challenged. In his review of Fredericks's book, Hurvitz offers some criticisms. The real issue . . . is not whether a theoretical possibility exists that Qoheleth's language is pre-exilic (either reflecting some forgotten dialect or preserving the remains of a particular literary genre unattested in our biblical records). Rather the question is whether the actual philological analysis of the extant biblical text of 79 m 84

See Barr (1979), 55; Endo (1996), 6-7. 81 Isaaksson (1987), 193. Ibid., 194. 85 (1988). Ibid., 259.

& Ibid., 196. * Ibid., 262.

83 w

Ibid., 197. Ibid., 206.

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Qoheleth substantiates the thesis that the language here being studied is to be classified as 'pre-exilic Hebrew'.88

He discusses several examples, including the use of 'en plus the infinitive construct with the preposition I in 3: 14 (where it means 'nothing is to be added to it and nothing is to be taken from it')- He also notes89 the need to consider 'linguistic distribution or penetration' (cp. LBH, the Qumran Scrolls, Aramaic, and Ben Sira 10: 23 [bis]; 39: 21; 40: 26), and also linguistic contrast (the use of 't% /,, rather than fbilti). Too much should not be built on the apparent presence of one isolated case of the construction in 1 Sam. 9: 7 (and this example is, in fact, irrelevant—see below for Seow's comment on the verse). The construction is indeed a 'distinctive feature characterizing the late phases of the Hebrew language'. Anton Schoors90 discusses the orthography and phonetics, the morphology and the syntax of Ecclesiastes, as well as summarizing previous research on the subject. A second volume on the vocabulary is to follow but, as far as I am aware, has not yet been published. His conclusion is that the language of the book is late. He discusses Fredericks's work and recognizes that he 'has built a strong case', but he is not convinced by it. When one isolated linguistic feature does not allow us to ascribe a later date to Qoh's language.. - such a feature can have some importance when taken together with other ones in a general picture. When the evidence does not warrant an exclusively late identification, it may reveal a late predilection, and incomplete similarity, say with MH, does not mean absolutely no similarity . . . Also the exact degree of the impact of literary genre and dialectal phenomena on Qoh's language is not known and the author does not prove his position on this point: he only presents a model of explanation that might be workable."

Fredericks neglects 'the cogency of the argument of convergency, viz. the general picture presented by the combination of all pertinent features'.92 Incidentally, Schoors also considers the Hebrew book by M. Elyoenai, mhejrytn bqhlt zvbmsly,93 which dates Ecclesiastes early, but I have not been able to find a copy of the work. Another scholar who favours a pre-exilic date for Ecclesiastes is Young. He does not list Fredericks's book in his bibliography, and it is to be presumed that he has not seen it (though he lists Hurvitz's review of it). Young finds nothing in either the subject matter or the language of Ecclesiastes that requires a date after the exile. In his opinion, 'when we . . . remove Qoheleth from the Standard and Late Biblical Hebrew traditions, language no longer becomes a criterion for date'.94 He recognizes in Ecclesiastes affinities with Mishnaic Hebrew and Aramaic, but he believes the evidence to be compatible with a pre-exilic date. Young has argued 88 91 94

Hurvitz (1990), 145. Ibid., 15. Young (1993), 157.

89 92

Ibid., 145-7. Ibid., 222.

"a Schoors (1992). »3 Jerusalem, 1977; see Schoors (1992), It,

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earlier in his book that Mishnaic Hebrew is "a simplified colloquial variant of the classical literary Biblical Hebrew', and 'Qoheleth can be described in very much the same terms, albeit there is a greater residual of "classical" forms',* Like Fredericks, he argues that the presence of panics and pitgSm is not proof of a date in or after the Persian period. Young believes that the latter is a loan-word in Hebrew derived from an Indo-European word with a Sanskrit origin, whence it found its way into Persian. It is, he holds, related to the Greek noun ffleypa, and the related Greek verb is found in Homer. Thus, pitgSm is 'a common Indo-European word, attested in Greek, Sanskrit and later Iranian dialects', and the 'Greek attestation is clearly before the Persian period'.96 The other word, pard.es, also has a Sanskrit cognate97 and may have existed in Hebrew before the Persian period. Young believes that the language of Ecclesiastes was a local dialect' of Jerusalem, perhaps 'a local literary dialect, even if it be considered as the author's own invention and filled with what were according to contemporary taste, non-literary forms'.98 He suggests that Qoheleth educated 'the upper classes of Jerusalem for careers at court' and also 'taught the local populace'.99 Young speculates that his teaching was transmitted in oral form before being put into writing.100 If Young believes that the language of Ecclesiastes is not 'a criterion for date', why does he date the book before the exile? It is because of 'the contrast between the presence of the monarchy in the background to Qoheleth, and its absence in the certainly post-exilic Wisdom book of Ben Sira'.101 Ben Sira mentions kings in only three places: 10: 3, which is 'merely a general saying extolling the role of the wise in government', and 'is merely using "king" as a poetic commonplace'; 39: 4-5, which 'speaks vaguely' of a wise man serving princes abroad; and. 7: 4-5, which 'advises not . . . to put oneself forward before the king, implying that to attain position at court was not a common occurrence for Ben Sira's students'.102 In contrast, the 'king is close at hand' in Eccles. 10: 20; and. in 8: 22 ff. 'Qoheleth seems to be aiming his teaching at young nobles about to enter royal service'.103 There are also other references to kings in Ecclesiastes. While 'Ben Sira reflects a distant, foreign kingship', the 'fact that there is king and royal court near at hand is presupposed throughout' Ecclesiastes.104 Young's argument does not stand up well to close examination. There are many references to kings in the book of Proverbs, and it is arguable that the presence of such references was part of the wisdom tradition in Israel (as it was in Egypt). The references to a king in Eccles, 2: 8; 4:13-14; 5: 8 (EVV 5: 9); 9: 14 and 10: 16-17 can be described as 'general sayings' like Ben Sira 10: 3 and need not imply the presence of a king in Jerusalem. The references in Eccles. 1: 1, 12 and 2: 12 are part of the literary device 1)5 100

Ibid., 149. Ibid., 155-6.

% Ibid., 71. ™ Ibid., 157.

'7 Ibid., 161. «« Ibid., 147.

* Ibid., 157. '« Ibid.

*> Ibid., 155. Ibid., 148.

m

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whereby the author presents himself as a king. None of these references need presuppose the existence of a 'king and royal court near at hand'. At first sight, Eccles. 8: 2-5 looks more promising. The reader is told to keep the king's command and reminded that his word is supreme. Similarly, 10: 20 ('Even in your thought, do not curse the king') is compatible with the belief that the king is 'near at hand'. But is the situation really so different from that in Ben Sira 7: 4: 'Do not seek . . . the seat of honour from the king'? Why should Ecclesiastes imply the presence of a king in Jerusalem but Ben Sira his absence? We know, of course, that there was no Jewish king in Ben Sira's time, but why should we assume that comparable sayings in Ecclesiastes imply that it was written during the monarchy? Indeed, the question arises whether both writers are merely following the wisdom tradition in referring from time to time to a king. Young's argument that Ecclesiastes, unlike Ben Sira, implies the presence of a king in Jerusalem and is to be dated in the time of the monarchy is unconvincing. Young's dating of Ecclesiastes seems also to be open to the same objections as those brought by Hurvitz (whose review of Fredericks Young mentions) and by Schoors (whose book presumably appeared too late to be taken into consideration by Young) against Fredericks. The case for a post-exilic date for Ecclesiastes remains strong. Fredericks and Young have, however, made a positive contribution to the discussion by challenging the view that the language of Ecclesiastes is to be regarded as simply a transition between LBH and Mishnaic Hebrew. C. L. Seow argues for a post-exilic date for the language of Ecclesiastes, though he thinks of a time 'between the second half of the fifth century and the first half of the fourth',105 rather than the third century which has been favoured by some scholars. He considers panics and pitgam in the context of 'the dating of all commonly recognized Persian loanwords in the Hebrew Bible',106 and. concludes that they are all 'found in texts postdating the second major wave of returned exiles 'in the second half of the fifth century'.107 He claims that 'there can be no question t h a t . . . pardes is ultimately of Persian origin', and that 'the Persian word, and its renditions in various languages cannot be dated earlier than the second half of the sixth century. There is no evidence that the word existed in any language (including Persian itself) before that time'.108 Similarly, pitgam is traced to an Old Persian word *patigama, first attested c. 500 BC, and the Hebrew and Aramaic cognates 'appear in both languages for the first time in the fifth century'.109 He does not discuss hypotheses of pre-exilic loans from some Indo-European words, but thus concentrates on actually attested forms, which suggest a date not before the fifth century. Seow goes on to consider Aramaisms, Phoenicianisms, Grecisms, and late Hebrew 1(5

Seow (1996), 666; cp. 646-50. "*> Ibid., 646. »' Ibid., 649.

10S

Ibid.

"» Ibid., 650.

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vernacular. Among other things, he discusses *l,rt fh&bt' P'ts M'l'1ohftn in 1 Sam, 9: 7, which Fredericks claims as evidence for the pre-exilic use of the construction 'en plus the infinitive construct plus f- Seow comments that it 'has nothing to do with prohibition [its meaning in Eccles. 3; 14]; it means "there is nothing to bring to the man of God"'.110 Seow's reasons for dating Ecclesiastes in the late fifth or early fourth century, rather than later, are as follows, 'The verb sit is used in a legal/economic sense . . . a sense it does not have after the Persian period', and other terms 'belong to the socioeconomic vocabulary of this period'.111 (But does this exclude the possibility of a later use in Hebrew?) The phrase 'under the sun' (Eccles. 1: 3, 9, 14, etc.) also appears 'on two Phoenician inscriptions from the fifth century'.112 The language is not 'the standard literary language of the postexilic period' but 'the literary deposit of a vernacular, specifically the everyday language of the Persian period, with its large number of Aramaisms and whatever jargons and dialectal elements one may find in the marketplace',113 Young questions a late date for the Song of Songs.114 As far as the subject matter is concerned, it refers to Jerusalem, to places in the north of Israel, and to places to the north and east of the land. The language, he argues, need not be late in date. As we have seen, he regards pardes (4:13) as possibly pre-exilic; he also favours a Sanskrit origin for 'appirydn in 3:9. He finds evidence of 'a type of local Northern literary dialect':113 the Aramaisms, the use of se- as a relative particle, and the way in which zeh is used in 2: 8-9. In the former verse we find cjdl dodi hinneh-zeh ba%, and Young translates the last three words: 'behold there (zeh) he comes'.116 He claims that 'We are forced to translate the word as "there"', and he cornpares 'the divine epithet' zeh smay in Judg. 5: 5 (and. also Ps. 68: 9). (This is unconvincing: zeh is used in the Song of Songs 2: 8-9 as an enclitic, as in a number of verses in the Hebrew Bible. In the phrase zeh struct/ it is not an enclitic, and the phrase is best understood to mean 'the one, or possessor, of Sinai'.) Young therefore suggests that the author of the Song of Songs was a northerner who moved to Jerusalem in the time of the United Monarchy. This seems a fragile hypothesis. The Qumran Scrolls contain both biblical and non-biblical texts, and the latter very likely include some works composed before the book of Daniel was written c. 165 BC (though parts of it are probably older). The Hebrew language in the Scrolls thus overlaps with the latest phase of the Hebrew of the Old Testament. The present study is, however, concerned primarily with the Hebrew of the Old Testament, and it is impossible here to discuss work on the Hebrew of the Qumran texts. It must, therefore, suffice to refer to only two works on the subject. In 1986, E. Qimron published an excellent study of the grammar of the texts, and in 1988 Shelomo Morag "" Ibid., 663. '" Ibid., 665. "2 Ibid. "3 Ibid., 666. 114 (1993), 157-66. "5 Ibid., 165. m Ibid., 163.

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discussed the place of the language of the Qumran texts in the history of Hebrew. Morag finds that while Qumran Hebrew contains some features that 'constitute a continuation of LBH',117 others do not; the latter include some that are shared with Mishnaic Hebrew and some that are not (including some that 'probably represent a continuation of an old dialectal variation'). In addition to the work on the history of the Hebrew language surveyed above, there has been a trend in recent years among some scholars to adopt a radical view of the subject and to question earlier theories of the development of the language. Among the influences at work is probably the tendency in some circles to date the composition of biblical books later than, was previously usual. To date a book late has implications for the language of the book. E. A. Knauf's article, 'War "Biblisch-Hebraisch" eine Sprache?',, was published in 1990. Its title echoes that of a much earlier article by Edward Ullendorff.118 Ullendorff makes the familiar point that the living Hebrew language must have included a vocabulary considerably larger than the words preserved in the Old Testament, and he goes on to observe that the text of the OT was transmitted in a consonantal skeleton until, in the second half of the first millennium A.D., a body of systematizers—called Masoretes— superimposed an elaborate network of vowels and accents which have effectively disguised many of the distinctive characteristics which the living language must have exhibited . . . In any real sense of the term, BH in its Masoretic garb was scarcely a language which in that form was ever actually spoken.119

He concludes that 'The evidence presented by the epigraphical material contemporary with the OT and by the Mishna, its immediate successor, underlines the essentially fragmentary character of the language of the Hebrew Bible. And there is a strong case . , . for looking upon the language of the Mishna as the developed colloquial... of the predominantly formal and elevated diction of the OT.'120 Knauf's article goes far beyond, what Ullendorff had written. According to Knauf, 'Biblical Hebrew originated as a language of biblical literature in the exilic-post-exilic period and was transmitted and used as a "language of education [Bildungssprache]". It is not even a "linguistic fragment" (to take up an expression of Ullendorff): it represents no excerpt from the life of the ancient Hebrew language (or languages) . . .'ni A study of inscriptions from Israel and Judah, and of proper names as they appear in the scripts of other languages, especially Egyptian and Accadian, shows that there was no Koine Hebrew language shared by Israel and. Judah, but only individual languages. Dialects are regularly older than a standard form of speech, which can arise only in specific 117 121

Morag (1988), 161 "a (1971). Knauf (1990), 11-12, my translation.

m

Ibid., 245,

12

° Ibid., 255,

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political conditions. It is unlikely that such conditions existed in the tenth century, in the period of David and Solomon; if they did, we should expect to find, evidence in contemporary inscriptions. Indeed, inscriptional evidence from the eighth century demonstrates that at least three languages were used in Israel and Judah.122 The evidence adduced by Knauf for this is derived from the Gezer Calendar (which he dates c, 900 BC), the Samaria ostraca and the Deir 'Alia texts. Knauf also looks at the shibboleth incident (Judg. 12: 6) in the light of Accadian and Egyptian representations of sibilants in Israelite words; and at various words in biblical texts thought to come from North Israel. 'And if at least two written languages were used in Israel in the eighth century BC, the assumption of an Israelite standard language in the tenth century BC is consequently impossible/123 Although Knauf recognizes greater unity in the language of Judah, he claims that there are differences from Biblical Hebrew. The third-person masculine singular pronominal suffix is written -h (not -w) with singular nouns, and -w (not -yw ) with plural nouns; and r 'w in the Siloam Tunnel inscription contrasts with Biblical Hebrew r'hw (except in Jer, 6: 21, where a pre-exilic origin is likely). After the end of the kingdom of Judah, the orthography changed for the third-person masculine singular suffix. Thus -w replaced -ft in the literary language, in which women appeared more often, and it was desirable to distinguish, between a masculine -w and a feminine -h . Knauf draws five general conclusions from his study. First, BH was never a spoken language, and its orthography comes from the fifth century, while Classical Hebrew prose from Genesis to 2 Kings reflects the morphology and syntax of Judah of the eighth to the sixth century. The spoken language at this time was Middle Hebrew, which, appears in the third century in Ecclesiastes. Second, it is unlikely that the redaction in the fifth century was confined to orthography. No biblical book was edited, in its final form before the fifth century, and only a few later than the fourth. Third, syntax, morphology and a few orthographical archaisms show that the redaction of the Deuteronomistie History (Genesis to 2 Kings) made use of documents going back to the eighth to the sixth centuries in Judah. Israelite sources from the ninth and eighth centuries lie behind the Song of Deborah and parts of Hosea, and. from the tenth century or earlier come only a few short poetical texts such, as Exod. 15; 21 and Num. 21: 14-15. Fourth, not only is Biblical Hebrew not a language; there never was an 'ancient Hebrew [althebmische]' language. What existed was a language in Judah with local dialects, and at least two Israelite languages. Moabite, Ammonite and Edomite were related, but the languages of Judah and Israel were no closer to each other than the language of Judah to Ammonite, or that of Deir 'Alia to Moabite. 122 123 Ibid., 12-13. Ibid., 19.

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Young disagrees in several ways with Knauf,124 While he agrees that there was diversity in pre-exilic Hebrew, he maintains that there was a standardized form of the language-—indeed, there was such a form of language in pre-Israelite times. Young points out that the 'lack of inscriptions is troubling to any argument except that there was no writing at all involved in the administration of the Davidic empire'. It may be added that there are not many long inscriptions from even the later pre-exilic period, though the existence of some shows that such texts could be written, and many written texts may have been on perishable material.125 He claims that Knauf's argument that the Gezer Calendar contains 'some sort of official Israelite language' demands that it is an official document. That seems to me to be going too far: Knauf states that the writer was a future official, presumably meaning that he is a pupil,126 Still, Knauf does appear to hold that the language is an official one, and also that it is by an Israelite, not a Canaanite. Further, while Young recognizes inconsistency even among the Samaria ostraca, he rightly maintains that This does not make them a completely separate language'. 'Knaufs belief that Deir Alia is an Israelite literary language' is also questioned. In view of the unresolved debate about the linguistic nature of the texts and the nature of the people who wrote or read them, Knaufs view that it was an Israelite language is certainly open to question. Knaufs argument may appear relatively moderate when compared with F. H. Cryer's account of the dating of the Hebrew language in the Old Testament. If the dates of different parts of the Old Testament span something like a millennium, the analogy of other languages leads us to expect to find in it considerable linguistic differences, in fact 'an impressive spectrum of phonological, morphological, syntactical, and lexical phenomena'. Yet 'the OT texts do not actually reveal the expected wealth of forms . . . It should be clear that this would be out of the question with any collection of texts spanning a thousand years in any other known language'.127 Cryer considers some suggested explanations of this relative uniformity of language in texts originating over so long a period, but he finds none of them satisfactory. Instead, he considers 'another possibility to account for the lack of formal diversity in the Hebrew of the OT, namely, that the texts are in fact all written in more or less the same Hebrew'.128 He notes two possible hypotheses: first, 'that the text of the OT has been systematically "updated" as to language'; and second, 'that the OT was written more or less at one go, or at least over a relatively short period of time, so that the texts quite naturally do not reveal signs of significant historical differentiation'.129 He makes it plain130 that he does not favour the first hypothesis, and so it may be assumed that he accepts the second. He 124 125 126

Young (1993), 203-5. Cp. also Millard (1997), 45-6. 127 (1990), 14. Cryer (1994), 187.

'» Ibid., 192.

»» Ibid.

m

Ibid., 193.

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also accepts the usual view that the book of Daniel is to be dated in the middle of the second century BC. It therefore appears to follow that the 'relatively short period of time' within which the whole Old Testament was written extends at least as far as to include that date, Martin Ehrenvard effectively refutes Cryer's arguments.131 He draws attention to the fact that literary Arabic has remained stable in its language over a period of many centuries, and he maintains that the continuity of Hebrew over the Old Testament period is not surprising. On the other hand, there is evidence for linguistic change in the Hebrew Bible, and Cryer has failed to do justice (or even to show knowledge of) the work of scholars (especially those who have written in Modern Hebrew) who have investigated the question, Ehrenvard shows how the Siloam Tunnel and Royal Steward inscriptions agree in some details with Standard Biblical Hebrew against LBH. Two years before the publication of Cryer's article, a no less radical view of the history of the Hebrew language was expressed by P. R, Davies.132 He does not date the writing of all the Old Testament books quite as late as Cryer, but believes that the biblical literature was composed between the sixth and third centuries BC,133 He questions attempts to date some books early and others late on linguistic grounds, and to distinguish between 'classical Hebrew' and LBH. He has essentially two arguments, 'First, there is extraordinarily little by way of external control on the dating of "classical Hebrew"... we have very few non-biblical texts by which to date the evolution of the language in which the biblical literature is written.'134 (Since these words were published, he and John Rogerson have argued for a Hasmonean date for the Siloam tunnel inscription, which is generally regarded as contemporary evidence for eighth-century Hebrew.135) For example, Hurvitz's argument that P's language is earlier than that of Ezekiel, and therefore pre-exilic 'involves taking Ezekiel as datable to the 6th century. What linguistic criteria date Ezekiel to this time?'136 Davies evidently holds that non-linguistic evidence is either inconclusive or irrelevant to this argument. The second argument is that typology of language and chronology should not be confused. 'It may be legitimate to conclude, for example, that the language of "P" is typologically earlier than Ezekiel, but that does not necessarily mean that chronologically it is earlier.'137 It is possible for typologically different forms of a language to be used, at the same time, and for scholars to imitate an older form of their language. He also refers approvingly to Knauf's work, and comments: 'On this analysis, "biblical Hebrew" is another scholarly construct; indeed, we might say that it is no more than the imputed language of the scholarly "ancient Israel", and thus part of a larger fabrication.'138 131 135

m Ehrenvard (1997). (1992), 102-5. "3 Ibid., 105. Rogerson and Davies (1996). '» Davies (1992), 102. I37 Ibid., 103.

134 I3S

Ibid., 102. Ibid., 104-5.

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An article by Hurvitz opposes the view of P. R. Davies (and others), 'Even if the assumption that BH was largely literary in nature [as Davies supposes] is correct, it by no means allows us to reject a priori the possibility that it was subject to a process of linguistic change during the biblical period.'139 He finds fault with Davies for failing to deal adequately with the work of scholars who do not share his views. Hurvitz then turns to the question of external controls. He claims that 'our evidence indicates that the closest parallels to the Hebrew inscriptional materials dating from pre-exilic times are to be found specifically in that linguistic layer which is commonly categorized as "Classical BH" and widely assigned to the First Temple period'140 Comparative material for the post-exilic period is found in 'Qumran Hebrew', Ben Sira, the letters of Bar-Kokhba in the second century AD, and Mishnaic Hebrew, The evidence of these texts is clear: 'It is this vast collection of sources . . . which faithfully reflects the linguistic milieu of "post-classical Hebrew" in general; it is this linguistic environment which largely shaped, the profile of LBH in particular.'141 Hurvitz then illustrates his point by showing that LBH use of 'iggeret, letter, missive', in contrast to classical seper (which is found, in pre-exilic times in the Lachish Letters as well as in the Bible), is attested in non-biblical texts of the post-exilic period. In conclusion, much progress has been made in recent studies of the history of the Hebrew language in the biblical period, but not all the problems have been definitively solved and there remains room for differences of opinion on various questions. On the other hand., radical views, which tend to date the language of biblical books later or earlier than has been usual among scholars, have failed to establish themselves. Grammar, syntax, and linguistics Three general books, which will doubtless serve for many years as works of reference, will be mentioned first. Paul Joiion's French grammar of Biblical Hebrew had been a standard work since 1923, and a thorough revision and. translation into English by Takamitsu Muraoka appeared in 1991, A study of Hebrew syntax by B. K. Waltke and M. O'Connor was published in 1990 to meet the needs of those who already had a sound basic knowledge of Hebrew. John Gibson's shorter work of 1994 is a revision of the third edition (1901) of A. B. Davidson's text book on syntax. Many works on different aspects of Hebrew grammar, especially syntax, have appeared in recent years, and only a random selection of them is mentioned, here. They include studies of: the Greek transliterations of Hebrew in the second column of Origen's Hexapla;142 ways of expressing 139

Hurvitz (1997), 303. '* Hurvitz (1997), 309. On p. 315 he refers to published criticisms of the late dating of the ul Siloam Tunnel inscription. Ibid., 311. 142 Janssens (1982).

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emphasis;143 the particle gam;1** the prepositions k and b;1*5 and variation in word order in Isaiah 40-55.146 The influence of modern linguistics is apparent in a number of the works mentioned in the present article. Aspects of the subject also appear in, for instance, W. R. Bodine's discussion of linguistics and philology147 and in the volume of articles that he edited on Linguistics and Biblical Hebrew}*8 He also edited (1995) essays on a relatively new development in linguistics, Discourse Analysis, on which another collection, edited by R. D. Bergen, appeared in 1994. Discourse Analysis (known in German as TextHnguistik) stresses the need to include in linguistic study not just individual sentences but also longer units of text. R. E. Longacre applies its methods to a study of Genesis 37,39-48,149 and N. Winther-Nielson (with the help of a computer) to the book of Joshua.150 It is also appropriate to mention the Semantics of Ancient Hebrew Database project, in which scholars of various countries are co-operating in the preparation of a database on the subject. See the essays edited by Muraoka.151 The Hebrew ¥erbal system The Hebrew verbal system raises problems, A convenient survey and evaluation of some theories from the early nineteenth to the midtwentieth century has been written by Leslie McFall.152 A brief but helpful account, which takes account of more recent work, is offered by Endo.153 A major problem is the maw consecutive construction, whereby the suffix conjugation (or perfect) and the prefix conjugation (or imperfect) are used in senses that appear to be the opposite of those that they have elsewhere. Further, the prefix conjugation can be used after 'iiz or (bc)terem in prose and more generally in verse to denote a single action in past time, for which one would normally expect the suffix conjugation in prose. Ever since the publication in 1910 of Hans Bauer's Die Temper a im Semitischen, it has been widely recognized that the imperfect in such places is related to the preterite, which is also a prefix conjugation, in Accadian, though theories to explain exactly how the historical development took place differ from one another. The view that the Hebrew imperfect in such contexts is a preterite, and is to be distinguished from the use ofyicjfM in other senses, received support when the decipherment and translation of the Ras Shamra texts revealed a similar distinction between the uses of yqtl in Ugaritic. Further relevant evidence was detected by W. L. Moran's work on West Semitic forms in the Tell el-Amama tablets, which has been 143

Muraoka (1985). '* Rosenbaum (1997). 149 (1989). 152 (1982).

144 M? m IK

Van derMerwe (1990). (1987). (1995). (1996), 1-33.

145 m m

Jenni (1992); (1994). (1992) fed.). (1995) (ed.),

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further developed by Anson Rainey. Two forms of the prefix conjugation in these texts are distinguished: yaqtul for the preterite, and yaqtulu for the imperfect, i.e. to express the present-future and also 'continuous or repeated action in the past',154 On the other hand, the suffix conjugation had 'three basic time frames . . . past, present and future', which 'reflect the adaptation of this originally timeless conjugation pattern. The past tense function, which became widespread in Ugaritic prose and in later Phoenician, was prominent in Byblos and present elsewhere/135 'Practically all of the qtl forms expressing present tense are statives or passives.'136 It could be used of the future in the protasis and apodosis of conditional sentences and in certain other clauses.137 Rainey stresses that 'the qtl conjugation pattern did not originate in an expression of completed action',138 contrary to some theories of the basic meaning of the Hebrew perfect. The Hebrew verbal system must be studied against the background of Canaanite usage in the late second millennium uc, whether or not Rainey is right in every detail.159 The loss of final short vowels removed the distinction in form between yaqtul and yaqtulu, although waw consecutive with some forms of the imperfect of weak verbs has the accent on the preformative (e.g. wayyaqom with the accent on -yi-), which has been thought to reflect the accentuation of the preterite.1*1 Mark Smith discusses the origin of the waw consecutive in Hebrew in its North-West Semitic setting.161 He also examines the use of the construction in the Qumran texts. To put forward a theory of the origin of the Hebrew tenses does not remove the need to examine the ways in which they are used in Hebrew texts, and some scholars have sought to meet this need. For example, Walter Gross examines the use of the waw consecutive with the perfect to represent the present.162 A. J. C. Verheij has made a statistical study, with the aid of a computer, of the verbal forms in a 'comparison of the books of Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles with respect to the absolute and relative frequencies of the Hebrew tense forms'.163 This is a contribution to discussion of LBH and its relation to EBH, It differs from earlier discussions of the question. Rather than dealing with heterogeneous peculiarities, I shall examine an aspect of one homogeneous and linguistically defined set of data; the verbal tense forms. By means of mainly quantitative analysis I shall try to establish not only the peculiarities of the language of Chronicles with respect to the tense forms, but also the possible similarities between it and earlier usage.164

He concludes that 'it is clear that the language of Chronicles, Late 154 155 m 161 164

Rainey (1996, vol. 2), 6-7 and also 227ff. 13r Ibid., 365. > Ibid., 352. m Ibid., 366. Endo (1996), 16-17. (1991). "2 (1976). Ibid., 11.

157 m lft3

Ibid., 365-6. But see Revell (1984). (1990), 12.

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Biblical Hebrew, is indeed different from Samuel and from Kings, as far as the tense forms are concerned .. ,'.1W But he also finds some differences between Samuel and Kings, and. he notes that various questions arise in evaluating the evidence. A. Niccacci investigates the uses of qatal and yujtol with or without waw consecutive or simple waw, and. (fatal preceded by waw but with an intervening element,166 He distinguishes between usage in prose and verse, and also between narrative and discourse. His study of the varieties of expression and their significance makes a valuable contribution to the understanding of Hebrew syntax, Various theories have continued to be advanced about the nature of the Hebrew tenses (or whatever they are). Beat Zuber167 distinguishes between 'recto-Formen' (i.e. the prefix conjugation with wow consecutive, and the suffix conjugation except with waw consecutive) and 'obliquoFormen' (i.e. the suffix conjugation with waw consecutive, and the prefix conjugation except with waw consecutive). The recto forms have a direct connection with reality, whereas the oblique forms refer in a modified way, for example, in modal, potential or in some future ways,168 Zuber surprisingly returns to the old. way of speaking of waw conversive. Mats Eskhult169 accepts the aspectual theory of his teacher F. Rundgren.170 Finally, Endo draws his conclusions from a study of the story of Joseph in Genesis (cp, Longacre) from the point of view of Discourse Analysis. Lexicography

James Barr discusses in several publications171 the use and misuse of cognate languages to determine the meanings of Hebrew words, and especially to discover supposedly lost meanings. Among other things, he shows the dangers that often emerge in the use of this method. It is probably largely as a result of Barr's work that there is nowadays a greater caution in—even a suspicion of—the use of cognates in Hebrew lexicography. Yet the method remains valid if used with due caution,172 and it can shed light on the meanings and etymology of Hebrew words. Two major German lexicons of Hebrew have been appearing in the period under review. The first edition of the lexicon of Ludwig Koehler and Walter Baumgartner was published in 1953, and the first part of the third edition, rewritten by Baumgartner, in 1967. After Baumgartner's death, the work was continued by Johann Jakob Stamm and completed by Benedikt Hartmann in 1995. Three volumes of an English translation, edited, by Mervyn, Richardson, were published in 1994-6, and the fourth 165 16S m 172

u M7 Ibid., 119. * (1990 (1986)}. (1986). m 17 Ibid., 138-40. (1990). ° See Endo (1996), 6-7. Especially in his book of 1968; cp. Barr (1979), 44-51. See Emerton (1997).

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will complete it. The other German dictionary is the eighteenth edition of Wilhelm Gesenius's great work, of which the original edition appeared hi 1310-12. The first volume of the new edition (1987) was prepared partly by Rudolf Meyer and partly by Herbert Donner, who completed the work and was also the chief editor of the second volume (1995). The subject of both lexicons is the language of the Hebrew Bible, but both also refer to some words in inscriptions, and to cognate languages and Post-biblical Hebrew, and to relevant literature. Two other major dictionaries do not include information from cognate languages in their individual entries. One is in Spanish, edited by L. Alonso Schokel.173 The other, in English, is The Dictionary of Classical Hebrew, edited by David dines, of which four volumes174 of a projected eight have so far been published. The latter work will be considered in greater detail here because of its innovative features, The Dictionary is to include not only the words in the Hebrew Bible, but also all Hebrew words attested down to AD 200: inscriptions (use is made of G. I. Davies's work of 1991 and of the supplement that he is preparing), Ben Sira, and the Qumran Scrolls and related texts. The words are arranged alphabetically, not according to roots, but each entry contains references to other words from the same root. Vol. I, 14-15, refers to the compilers' 'overriding concern . . . for the uses of words', and so the 'focus . . . is not so much on the meanings, or the translation equivalents, of individual words as on the patterns and combinations in which words are used'. The entries include, among other things, semantic, syntagmatic and paradigmatic analyses.175 Thus, for example, the subjects and objects of verbs are listed, and for nouns 'the verbs of which it is the subject or object; the nouns that are related to it; the adjectives used to modify the noun; and the prepositions and verb-prepositional phrases used with' it.176 Note is also taken of synonyms and antonyms. At the end of each volume is an English-Hebrew index. The Dictionary's 'function is not primarily to tell the user the meaning of words. It has not been written in order to help readers of Hebrew texts to discover how to translate those texts . . . Rather, the primary function of this Dictionary is to organize and rationalize the available data about Hebrew words, enabling readers to make their own decisions about the meaning of words in the light of all the evidence.'177 The entries do not offer etymologies or list cognates in other Semitic languages, because the presence of such 'information in a Hebrew dictionary is highly problematic, and it is difficult to see what purpose it serves'.178 This policy is modified in volume II because of the need to record 'new' words, i.e. words for which scholars have suggested meanings other than those previously recognized.. A number of such words 173 176

(1990-3), Ibid., 20.

m

{1993,1995,1996,1998). 'm Ibid., 26.

17S 178

Ibid., vol. 1,19-21. Ibid., 17.

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are recorded, though without giving a judgement on their probability. A bibliography at the end of the volume lists relevant literature for these 'new' words and also for some 'old' ones, and also records cognates for the former when the suggested meaning is derived from them.179 Time will tell how successful the Dictionary will prove to be in practice. It is useful, for readers to have so much information to help them to make their judgements, but it may be suspected that many readers would wish for more help in seeking to make up their minds. Many may also think, contrary to the view of the compilers, that a dictionary may reasonably be expected to help readers 'to discover how to translate' texts. G. A. Khan comments on the view that 'the meaning of a word is its use in the language', and says: This may well be a sound principle, but a distinction should be made between the nature of meaning and the methods necessary to discover meaning . . . In dead languages with a limited corpus, the number and variety of contexts in which a word is attested is frequently not sufficient to identify its meaning accurately. The definitions of many words that appear in many modern dictionaries of Hebrew, including The Dictionary of Classical Hebrew, are dependent on sources other than the context of occurrence, including the history of the interpretation of the words, the meaning of their Semitic cognates or their meaning in post-Biblical Hebrew.180 As far as the evidence of cognate languages is concerned, I have argued elsewhere for the value of their use, provided that due caution is observed.18' They are part of 'the available data'. Further discussion of the Dictionary, including some criticisms, may be found in a review article by Muraoka.182 Bibliography AH ITUV, S. (1992), Handbook of Ancient Hebrew Inscriptions from the Period of the First Commonwealth and the Beginning of the Second Commonwealth (Hebrew) (The Biblical Encyclopaedia Library 7, Jerusalem: Mossad Bialik). ALONSO SCHOKEL, L. (1990-3), Diccionario Biblko Hebreo-Espanol, 2 volumes (Valencia: Institution San Jeronimo). BARR, J. (1968), Comparative Philology and the Text of the Old Testament (Oxford: Oxford University Press. Reprinted with additional material in 1987, Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns). — (1979), 'Semitic Philology and the Interpretation of the Old Testament', in Text and Interpretation: Essays by Members of the Society for Old Testament Study, ed. G. W. Anderson (Oxford: Clarendon Press), 31-64. BODINE, W. R. (1987), 'Linguistics and Philology in the Study of Ancient Near Eastern Languages', in "Working with No Data": Semitic and Egyptian Studies 1711

Unfortunately, justice is not done to this fact in Ernerton (1997), 12. " Kahn (1997), 392. wi Emerton (1997). its (1994), 87-101. 1S

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Presented to 7". O, Latnbdin, ed. D. M. Golomb (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns), 39-54. BODINE, W. R, (1992) (ed.), Linguistics and Biblical Hebrew (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns). — (1995), Discourse Analysis of Biblical Literature: What if Is and What it Offers (SBL Semeia Studies, Atlanta: Scholars Press). CLINES, D. J. A. (1993, 1995,1996,1998), The Dictionary of Classical Hebrew, 4 volumes (4 more planned) (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press). CRYER, F, H. (1994), 'The Problem of Dating Biblical Hebrew and the Hebrew of Daniel', in In the Last Days: On Jewish and Christian Apocalyptic and its Period (volume in honour of Benedikt Otzen), ed. K. Jeppesen el al. (Aarhus: Aarhus Uni verity Press), 185-98. DAVIES, GJ. (1987), Review of Hurvitz 1982, VT 37,117-18. ——(1991), Ancient Hebrew Inscriptions: Corpus and Concordance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). DAVIES, P. R. (1.992), In Search of Ancient brad (JSOTS 148; Sheffield: JSOT Press). DAVILA, J. R. (1990), 'Qoheleth and Northern Hebrew', MAARAV 5-6,69-87. EHRENSVARD, M. (1997), 'Once Again: The Problem of Dating Biblical Hebrew', S/OT11/1, 20-40. EMERTON, J. A. (1.994), 'What Light has Ugaritic Shed on Hebrew?', in Ugarit and the Bible: Proceedings of the International Symposium on Ugarit and the Bible Manchester, September 1992, ed. G. }. Brooke et al. (Ugaritisch-Biblische Literatur 11; Minister: Ugarit-Verlag), 55-69. — (1996), 'Are There Examples of Enclitic mem in the Hebrew Bible?', in Texts, Temple, and Traditions: a Tribute to Menaheni Haran, ed. M. V. Fox et al. (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns), 321-38. — (1997), 'Comparative Semitic Philology and Hebrew Lexicography', in Congress Volume: Cambridge 1995, ed, J. A. Emerton (SVT 66; Leiden: Brill), 1-25. ENDO, Y. (1996), The Verbal System of Classical Hebrew in the Joseph Story. An Approach from Discourse Analysis (SSN 32; Assen: van Gorcum). ESKHULT, M. (1990), Studies in Verbal Aspect and Narrative Technique in Biblical Hebrew Prose (Studia Semitica Upsaliensia 12, Uppsala, distributed by Ahnqvist & Wiksell, Stockholm). FREDERICKS, D. C. (1988), Qoheleth''s Language: Re-evaluating its Nature and Date (Ancient Near Eastern Texts and Studies 3; Lewiston, New York; and Queenston, Ontario: Edwin Mellen Press). GARR, W. R. (1985), Dialect Geography of Syria-Palestine, 1000-586 B.C.E. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press). GESENIUS, W. (1987 and 1995), Hebraisches und Aramaisches Handworterbuch iiber das Alte Testament, 18th edn., volumes 1. (ed. R. Meyer and H. Donner) and. 2 (ed. H. Donner) (Berlin: Springer-Verlag), GIBSON, J. C. L. (1994), Davidson's Introductory Hebrew Grammar-Syntax (4th edn., Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark). GROSS, W. (1976), Verbform + Funktion wayyiqtal/iirdfe Gegenwart? Bin Beitragzur Syntax poetischer althebraischer Texte (ATSAT 1; St Ottilien: Eos Verlag). HADAS-LEBBL, MIREILLE (1995), Histoire de h hngiie Hebmi'que des origines h I'epoqite de la Mishna (4th edn., Collection de la Revue des Etudes Juives 21; Paris and Louvain: Editions E. Peelers).

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HOFTIJZER, J. and JONCELINC, K. (1995), Dictionary of the North-West Semitic Inscriptions (Handbuch der Orientalistik 1/21, 2 volumes; Leiden: E. J. Brill). HURVITZ, A, (1972), The Transition Period in Biblical Hebrew. A Study in Post-Exilic Hebrew and Us Implications for the Dating of the Psalms (Hebrew) (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute), — (1974), The Evidence of Language in Dating the Priestly Code. A Linguistic Study in Technical Idioms and Terminology', RB 81,24-56. — (1982), A Linguistic Study of the Relationship Between the Priestly Source and the Book of Ezekiel. A New Approach to an Old Problem (Carriers de la Revue Biblique 20; Paris: J. Gabalda). •— (1990), Review of Fredericks, Hebrew Studies 31,144-54. — (1997), The historical quest for "ancient Israel" and the linguistic evidence of the Hebrew Bible: some methodological observations', VT 47,301-13. ISAKSSOM, B, (1987), Studies in the Language of Qoheleth With Special Emphasis on the Verbal System (Studia Semitica Upsaliensia 10, Uppsala, distributed by Almqvist & Wiksell, Stockholm). JANSSENS, G. (1982), Studies in Hebrew Historical Linguistics Based on Origen's Secundn (Orientalia Gandensia 9; Leuven: Uitgeverij Peeters). TENNI, E. (1992 and 1.994), Die hebraischen Prapositionen 1: Die Proposition Beth, 2: Die Proposition Kaph (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer). JONGELING, K. et al, (1991) (ed.). Studies in Hebrew and Aramaic Syntax Presented to Professor }, Hoftijzer (Leiden: E. J. Brill). JOUON, P, and MURAOKA, T. (1991), A Grammar of Biblical Hebrew, 2 volumes (Subsidia Biblica 14/1 and II; Rome: Editrice Pontificio Biblico). KHAN, G. A. (1997), Review of Clines, FT 47,390-3. KNAUF, E. A. (1990), 'War "Biblisch-Hebraisch" erne Sprache? Empirische Gesichtspunkte zur linguistischen Annaherung an die Sprache der althebraischen Literatar', Zeitschrift fiir Aithebraistik 3,11-23. KOEHLER, L., BAUMGARTNER, W., STAMM, J. J. and HARTMANN, B. (1967-95), Bebmisches und Ammaisches ]j>xikan zum Allen Testament (3rd edn., 5 volumes (1967,1974,1983,1990,1995); Leiden: E. ]. Brill). — (1994-6), The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament, translated and edited by M. E. J. Richardson, 3 volumes (1994, 1995, 1996) with one more planned (Leiden: E. J. Brill). KUTSCHER, E. Y. (1982), A History of the Hebrew Language (Jerusalem and Leiden: Magnes Press and E. J. Brill). LEVI, J. (1987), Die Inkongruenz im biblischen Hebraisch (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz). LONGACRE, R. E. (1989), Joseph: A Story of Divine Providence: A Text Theoretical and Texflinguistic Analysis of Genesis 37 and 39-48 (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns). MACDONALD, J. (1975), 'Some Distinctive Characteristics of Israelite Spoken Hebrew', Bibliotheca Orientalis 32, cols 162-74. MCFALL, L. (1982), The Enigma of the Hebrew Verbal System: Solutions from EwaM to the Present Day (Interpreters in Biblical Scholarship 2; Sheffield: Almond Press). MERWB, C. H. J. VAN DER (1990), The Old Hebrew Particle gam: a Synoptic-Semantic Description of gam in Gn-2Kg (ATSAT 34; St Ottilien: Eos Verlag). MH.GROM, J. (1978-9), 'Priestly Terminology and the Political and Social Structure of Pre-Monarchic Israel', JQR, N. S. 69, 65-8.

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MJLLARD, A. R. (1997), 'King Solomon in his Ancient Context', in The Age of Solomon: Scholarship at the Turn of the Millennium, ed. L. K. Handy (Studies in the History and Culture of the Ancient Near East 11; Leiden: E. J, Brill), 30-53. MORAG, S. (1988), 'Qurnran Hebrew; Some Typological, Con.siderati.ons', VT 38, 148-64. MURAOKA, T. (1985), Emphatic Words and Structures in Biblical Hebrew (Jerusalem and Leiden: Magnes Press and E. J. Brill). MURAOKA T. (1995) (ed.,), Studies in Ancient 'Hebrew Semantics (Abr-Nahrain Supplement Series 4; Louvain: Peeters Press). NAVEH, J. and GREENFIELD, }, C. (1984), 'Hebrew and Aramaic in the Persian Period', in The Cambridge History of Judaism I , ed. W. D. Da vies and L. Finkelstein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 11.5-29. NICCACCI, A. (1990), The Syntax of the Verb in Classical Hebrew Prose (JSOTS 89; Sheffield: JSOT Press) (ET of Sintassi del verbo ebmico nella prose biblica classka (Jerusalem: Franciscan Printing Press, 1986)). PARAN, M. (1989), Forms of the Priestly Style in the Pentateuch: Patterns (Hebrew) (Jerusalem: The Magnes Press). PARDEE, D. et al. (1982), Handbook of Ancient Hebrew Letters (SBL Sources for Biblical Study 15; Chico, California: Scholars Press). POLZIN, R. (1976), Late Biblical Hebrew: Toward an Historical Typology of Biblical Hebrew Prose (HSM 12; Missoula, Montana: Scholars Press). QIMRON, E. (1986), The Hebrew of the Dead Sea Scrolls (HSM 29; Atlanta: Scholars Press). RAINEY, A. F. (1996), Canaanite in the Amarna Tablets; a Linguistic Analysis of the Mixed Dialect Used by the Scribes from Canaan, 4 volumes (Handbuch der Orientalistik I/25/I-IV; Leiden: E. J. Brill). RENDSBURG, G. A. (1980), 'Late Biblical Hebrew and the Date of "¥"', }ANES(CU) 12,65-80. •—(1988), The Northern Origin of "The Last Words of David" (2 Sam 23,1-7)', 6*69,113-21. — (1989), 'Additional Notes on "The Last Words of David" (2 Sam 23,1-7)', Bib 70,403-8. •— (1990a), Diglossia in Ancient Hebrew (American Oriental Series 72; New Haven, Connecticut: American Oriental Society). — (1990b), Linguistic Evidence for the Northern Origin of Selected Psalms (SBL Monograph Series 43; Atlanta: Scholars Press). — (1992), 'Morphological Evidence for Regional Dialects in Ancient Hebrew', in Bodine 1992,65-88. RENZ, J. and Rome, W. (1995), Handbuch der hebraischen Epigraphik, 3 volumes (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft). REVELL, E. J. (1984), 'Stress and the WAW "Consecutive" in Biblical Hebrew', JAOS 104,437-44. ROGERSON, J. W. and DAVIES, P. R. (1996), 'Was the Siloam Tunnel Built by Hezekiah?', BA 59,138-49. ROOKER, M. F. (1990), Biblical Hebrew in Transition: the Language of the Book of Ezekiel (JSOTS 90; Sheffield: JSOT Press). ROSENBAUM, M. (1997), Word-Order Variation in Isaiah 40-55, A Functional Perspective (SSN 35; Assen: Van Gorcum).

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SAENZ-BADIL LOS, A. (1993), A History of the Hebrew Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) (ET of Wisteria de la L.engua Hebrea (Sabadell: Editorial AUSA, 1988)). SCHOORS, A. (1992), The Preacher Sought to Find Pleasing Words: a Study of the Language of Qoheleth, Part I (Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta 41; Leuven: Uitgeverij Peeters). SEGERT, S. (1984), A Basic Grammar of the Ugaritic Language (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press). SHOW, C. L. (1996), 'Linguistic Evidence and the Date of Qohelet', JBL 115,643-66. SIVAN, D. (1984), Grammatical Analysis and Glossary of the Northwest Semitic Vocables in Akkadian Texts of the 15th~13th C.B.C from Canaan and Syria (AOAT 214; Kevelaer and Neukirchen-Vluyn: Verlag Butzon & Bercker, and Neukirchener Verlag). —— (1997), A Grammar of the Ugaritic Language (Handbuch der Orientalistik 1/128; Leiden: E. J, Brill). SMELIK, K. A. D. (1984), Behouden Schrift: docurnentcn uit het Oude Israel (Baarn: Uitgeverij Ten Have) (translated as Writings front Ancient Israel. A Handbook of Historical and Religious Documents (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark 1991)). SMITH, M. S. (1991), The Origins and Development of the Wazo-Consecutive (HSM 39; Atlanta: Scholars Press). ULLENDORFF, E. (1971), 'Is Biblical Hebrew a language?', BSOAS 34, 241-55. VERHEIJ, A. }, C. (1990), Verbs and Numbers: a Study of the Frequencies of the Hebrew Verbal Tense Forms in the Books of Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles (SSN 28; Assen and. Maastricht: Van Gorcum). WALTKE, B. K. and O'CONNOR, M. (1990), An Introduction to Biblical Hebrew Syntax (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns). WiNTHER-NiELSON, N. (1995), A Functional Discourse Grammar of Joshua. A Computer-assisted Rhetorical Structure Analysis (CBOTS 40; Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell). YOUNG, I. M. (1993), Diversity in Pre-Exilic Hebrew (Forschungen zum Alien Testament 5; Tubingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck)). ZUBER, B. (1986), Das Tempussystem des biblischen Hebraisch: sine Untersuchung am Text (BZAW 164; Berlin and New York: W. de Gruyter).

8

Canons of the Old Testament J. BARTON

Introduction N o previous volume published by the Society for Old Testament Study has included a chapter on the Old Testament canon. Though much work was done on this in the nineteenth century,1 by the middle of the present century a consensus had emerged, and the subject was widely thought to be of small interest. Scholars were more concerned with analysing and dating the separate books of the Old Testament than with studying how the whole work came together into a finished whole with recognized religious authority. The question of the canon occupied a wholly subordinate position, and was usually discussed towards the end of Old Testament Introductions.2 The rise of interpretative movements such as canon(ical) criticism has moved the canon back into the centre of interest,3 and the last thirty years have seen a number of studies of the historical process of canonization,4 Its importance for Old Testament studies is now widely recognized. The aim of this chapter is to trace the development of a 'canon' (or, more properly, several slightly different 'canons') of the Old Testament, and to examine some ways in which the canonization of the Bible made a difference to the perceived meaning and significance of its component parts. The Old Testament canon today There is a bewildering profusion of different translations of the Bible available today in the English-speaking world. Apart from the difference in the kind of English which they use, there are also, so far as the Old 1 See the surveys of older literature in Beckwith (1985); Anderson (1970); and Mulder (1988). 2 See, for example, Weiser (1961); Eissfeldt (1965); Fohrer (1970). By contrast, more recent Introductions give the canon a more prominent position, see Smend (1981); Soggin (1989). 3 This movement is discussed in detail above by Mark Brett, with bibliography. 4 See Beckwith (1985); Barton (1986); (1997); Blenkinsopp (1977); Ellis (1991); Kaeslli and Wermelinger (eds.) (1984); Leiman (1976); Sundberg (1964); (1968).

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Testament is concerned, significant differences in the extent and order of the books translated. The difference in extent is most obvious as between Catholic and Protestant Bibles, since the former contain a number of books not found in the latter. Most of the uniquely Catholic books are to be found in those Protestant Bibles which include an 'Apocrypha', separated off from the bulk of the Old Testament and treated as a kind of appendix, usually lying between the Old Testament and the New. The difference in order lies between Jewish and Christian Bibles. The Hebrew Scriptures recognized in Judaism are the same as the books of the Protestant Old Testament, but (as can be seen by comparing any Christian Bible with the Bible of the Jewish Publication Society) they are arranged in a significantly different order from, the book of Kings onwards. There are also minor variations. For example, the NRSV alone of modern Western Christian Bibles includes three works that are canonical in the Greek and Russian Orthodox churches (3 and 4 Maccabees and Psalm 151) but not in the Catholic church; and Protestant Apocryphas include 2 Esdras, which appears as an appendix in many Catholic Bibles. The overall impression is thus one of considerable confusion. The underlying fact which results in the diversity of Western Bibles is the existence of three, or perhaps four, fundamentally different canons in the historic communities which have revered the Old Testament. These are as follows: The Hebrew canon

In printed Hebrew Bibles, following the pattern of medieval codices such as the eleventh-century Leningrad, codex from which most modern Bibles derive, there is a clear division into three sections; the Torah (GenesisDeuteronomy), the Prophets (Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, the Twelve minor prophets), and. the Writings (Psalms, Proverbs, Job, Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesia.st.es, Esther, Daniel, Ezra, Nehemiah, Chronicles). The division is already attested in the Talmuds, which use the same technical terms. (The division of the Prophets into 'Former Prophets' (the four historical books) and 'Latter Prophets' (Isaiah, etc.) is post-Talrnudic.) The distinction between Prophets and Writings is not yet clear in the Mishnah, in the second century AD, though some think it is implied as early as Luke 24: 44 which speaks of 'the law, the prophets, and the psalms'. All agree that the Torah was clearly distinguished as a section in its own right well before the writing of the New Testament. Its unique status in Judaism is evidenced in the practice of making special scrolls of the Pentateuchal books, and having a system of lectio continua in the synagogue liturgy whereby these books alone are read, aloud in full over a fixed period (one year in ancient Palestine and in modern Judaism, three years in ancient Babylonia).

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Possible exegetical implications of the threefold canon will be discussed below in section 4. The idea of 'order' among biblical books is most at home in a world of codices, where book follows book as the pages are turned. It is less obviously applicable where each book is written on a separate scroll. Some have speculated5 that early rabbinic discussions of the 'order' (seder) of the books are linked to the way scrolls were supposed to be stored in a bookroom, i.e. that they concern something like a library classification system. For the Pentateuch and Former Prophets there is a natural, chronological order, since these books tell a continuous story, but for the Latter Prophets and Writings there is no such guiding thread, and early sources in fact attest many different orders. The Talmud (the classic text is Baba Bathra 14b—15a) arranges the major prophets in the order Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Isaiah; and for the Writings there are many different orderings even as late as the first printed Bibles. There are even codices which attach one of the megillotf Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, Ruth, Esther, and Lamentations to each of the books of the Torah, according to which Torah book is read in the season of the year when the corresponding megillah falls to be read at a major festival.6 All printed Hebrew Bibles—and hence Jewish translations of the Bible—now follow a standardized order, but this is not necessarily of very ancient provenance. The Greek Bible

The Greek Old Testament consists entirely of Jewish works, but its transmission from ancient times has been almost entirely at Christian hands, and almost exclusively in the form of codices. Its core is the books of the Hebrew canon, in translations which vary in closeness to the original Hebrew, but to these it adds other books of similar type. Some of these we know, or can show, to have been originally composed in Hebrew, but others were certainly in Greek from the beginning. The arrangement of the Greek canon is also broadly tripartite, though the three divisions have less formal status in Christianity than do the three Hebrew divisions in Judaism. The first section is generally designated 'historical', and it includes the whole Pentateuch and Former Prophets, together with the historical books of Chronicles, Ezra, and Nehemiah, which in the Hebrew canon appear among the Writings. In addition to these there are the four books of Maccabees and the two 'novels' Tobit and Judith. The second section is often, for want of a better title, called 'didactic'. It comprises Psalms, Proverbs, Job, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Songs, but also the Wisdom of Jesus ben Sira (Sirach, or Ecclesiasticus) and the Wisdom of Solomon. 5

See Sarna (1971).

6

See Wolfenson (1924).

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The third section is 'prophetic', and includes the books that Christians regarded as prophetic: the Hebrew Bible's 'Latter Prophets' together with Daniel (classed among the Writings in the Hebrew Bible) and three works supposed to have been by Jeremiah, Lamentations, Baruch, and the Epistle of Jeremiah. The order of the prophetic books varies in Greek manuscripts, with the major prophets (defined as Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel) sometimes following the twelve minor prophets. There is no consistent order among the latter. As well as containing more books than the Hebrew Bible, the Greek also includes longer versions of two of the Hebrew books, Esther and Daniel. Esther is expanded at several points and given a framing story in which Mordecai receives a symbolic vision of the events that are about to happen. In Daniel there appear the prayers uttered by Azariah and then by all three of the Jews thrown into the burning fiery furnace; the story of Susanna; and the double story of Bel and the Dragon. A number of books have sharply differing forms in the Hebrew and Greek versions, notably Jeremiah, of which the Greek text is more than an eighth shorter than the Hebrew. The Latin Bible

The classic Bible of the Western church, the Vulgate, is essentially a translation into Latin of the Greek canon as it existed in the time of Jerome (c. 345-420), its primary translator, but based on the Hebrew rather than the Greek text where that existed. (Earlier Latin versions, grouped, together as the Vetus Latina or Old Latin, had been made from the Greek.) In form it therefore follows the Greek canon fairly closely, with a few exceptions. The third and fourth books of Maccabees are omitted, and 1 and 2 Maccabees are regularly placed at the end of the whole Old Testament as a kind, of appendix. In addition to the books of the Greek Bible it is normal to include 2 Esdras, also usually as an appendix. This is a Jewish work (4 Ezra) to which have been added two Christian supplements (5 and 6 Ezra): Latin is its original language, and accordingly it does not appear in the Greek Bible at all. The threefold, division of the Greek Bible is usually followed but, again, is not an 'official' element in the canon. The modern Protestant Old Testament is essentially the Latin canon with those books that are not in the Hebrew Bible removed: thus the contents are 'Hebrew' but the order is 'Latin/Greek'. The books thus removed are gathered together to form the 'Apocrypha', which is an optional component of printed Bibles in the English-speaking world. Being based on the Latin canon, it includes 2 Esdras, but excludes 3 and 4 Maccabees, though the recent NRSV includes them, and thus becomes the first Western Bible acceptable to Orthodox Christians. The books Protestants call Apocrypha are designated deuterocanonical in the Catholic

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church, following Jerome's proposal that they should have a lower status than the mainstream canonical books. The suggestion was, however, never adopted in the Catholic church, and the 'deuterocanonical' status of these books does not appear to have any effect on their authority for Catholics, The EtMopic Bible

The Ethiopic tradition has no direct relevance for attitudes to the Bible in the West, but it is important in its own right and a useful reminder that even the disagreements about Scripture surveyed so far work within a relatively broad band of agreement. There are two ways of enumerating the books of the Ethiopian Old Testament, which yield, respectively, a total of 81 or 46. However, the difference is almost entirely a matter of how certain books are counted, and in substance the two 'canons' agree, with the oddity that Ezra-Nehemiah is included in the shorter canon but not in the longer one. Both canons include most of the deuterocanonical books, but also Jubilees and 1 Enoch, which are not canonical in any other church. The shorter canon includes also the history of the Jews by Joseph ben Gorion, a medieval work. Readers familiar with these three additional works can imagine what a different effect would be made if the Old Testament in the West included them. Among other things, the Old Testament would be given an enormous push in the direction of apocalyptic, which is rather marginal in the present Hebrew canon.7 Differences between Christians and Jews about the contents of the Old Testament or Hebrew Scriptures seem to be important and unimportant at the same time. The issue of whether the Apocrypha is to be reckoned as Scripture has been hotly disputed since the Reformation, and certain apocryphal texts have been used, in Catholicism to support positions rejected by Protestants. The clearest example of this is the justification of prayers for the dead by an appeal to 2 Maccabees 12: 43-5, and the use of texts from Wisdom (e.g. 3: 1-9) to comment, especially in the liturgy, on the blessedness of the saints and the immortality of the soul. Churches in the Calvinist tradition have adopted a strongly anti-Apocrypha stance, giving the deuterocanonical books no more recognition than any other secular works, Lutherans have adopted a softer attitude, closer to the position of the Church of England and other Anglican churches, according to which 'the Church doth read [the deuterocanonical books] for example of life and instruction of manners; but yet doth it not apply them to establish any doctrine' (Article VI of the thirty-nine Articles of Religion). Despite this, Lutheran Bibles seldom contain an Apocrypha, and in England the great majority of Bibles sold consist of Old and New 7

See the discussion in Beckwith (1985), and Ullendorff (1968).

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Testaments only. Since the Alternative Service Book of 1980 the Church of England has provided an alternative, 'canonical' reading for every reading from the Apocrypha prescribed in its lectionaries—a radical innovation which occurred almost unnoticed. Yet at the same time it is hard to think of any doctrinal difference between churches that is really linked with their adherence to one or other of the canons outlined above. Catholics do not pray for the dead because of 2 Mace. 12: 43-5, and many Protestants who do, do not justify it by appeal to this text, but to more general theological considerations. Belief in the immortality of the soul is no less common among Christians who reject Wisdom as canonical than among those who accept it. Again, disagreements between Jews and Christians are intimately bound up with. acceptance or non-acceptance of the New Testament, but hardly, if at all, with their disagreement over the canon of the Old. It is hard to see that it would make much difference if Catholics were now to opt for the shorter, Hebrew canon, or Protestants to adopt the longer, Greek or Latin one. Neither belief system depends critically on the acceptance as canonical of precisely the books that are in the respective Old Testaments. The origins of diversity in the canons of the Old Testament The recent history of scholarship has seen three major theories to account for the complicated development of the Old Testament canon. The 'Alexandrian canon hypothesis

The major divergence among all the canons surveyed above is that between the Hebrew and Greek Bibles: the Latin canon is plainly an offshoot from the Greek tradition, while the Ethiopian canon represents an idiosyncratic development which has had no repercussions beyond the bounds of the Ethiopian church. An attractively simple explanation for the difference between Hebrew and Greek Bibles is the so-called Alexandrian canon hypothesis, first put forward by Francis Lee in 1719s and worked out in more detail by P. Katz,9 This hypothesis begins with the observation that the additional books in the Greek Bible have come down to us only in Greek. Although in recent times Hebrew manuscripts of some of them have begun to be found (Sirach already one hundred years ago, when the texts from the Cairo Genizah were discovered), as a corpus we know them only in their Greek guise; and some (e.g. Wisdom) were certainly written in Greek originally. Yet all are clearly Jewish works. The likeliest provenance for 8 F. Lee in J. E. Grabe and F. Lee (eds.), Veins Te&tamentum iuxta LXX interpretes II, ch. 1, §§ 75-7, " (1956); see the summary in Pfeiffer (1962), 510-11.

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such a library of Hellenized Jewish books would have been Alexandria, in Egypt, the home of many cultivated Jews, some of whom probably had no Hebrew at all by the first century BC or so. It would make good sense if the Greek Bible in more or less its present form represented the Scriptures used by Alexandrian Jews, and the shorter Hebrew canon those of the Hebrew- and. Aramaic-speaking Jews of Palestine. Interestingly enough Josephus, though he wrote in Greek, declares that the Scriptures number only 22 books (the passage is quoted below). In this he would represent the Palestinian tradition, Philo, on the other hand, a Hellenized Jewish philosopher who lived in Alexandria, draws on texts such as Wisdom and can thus be called as a witness to the longer Alexandrian canon. The great advantage of the Alexandrian canon hypothesis is that it explains adequately how the Greek canon came into being, without having to argue that Christians somehow augmented the Hebrew canon, which is the theory it replaced. Why should Christians have augmented it by adding further Jewish books? This is a difficulty that no other theory seems to confront. At the same time, there are also formidable problems for the Alexandrian canon hypothesis. Why have no Jewish manuscripts of the longer canon come down to us, but only Christian ones? Why do Jewish sources never discuss the difference between the canons of Palestine and Egypt? Why does the Hebrew canon as we have received it not only contain fewer books, but also arrange them in such a different way? This suggests that the Alexandrian canon hypothesis, though it accounts for the phenomenon of the diversity in the canon very economically, may be too simplistic. In particular it assumes that in about the first century BC both major Jewish communities, in Palestine and in Alexandria, did have something that can be called a 'canon'—that they had made up their minds which books were to count as Scripture, and how they should be listed. It overlooks two facts: first, that the term 'canon' is a later term, and secondly, that Scripture did not come into being at a single moment, but grew over a period of time. More recent theories have tried to give more weight to these facts. The Greek Bible as the Christian canon

A major shift in the study of the canon began with the work of Albert C. Sundberg Jr., who published a series of works putting forward a quite different theory about the origins of the Greek Bible,10 Most scholars have always agreed that the three divisions of the Hebrew Bible probably came into their present fixed form at different times. Tradition has it that the Torah was compiled and promulgated by Ezra, and this probably corresponds to the reality that the final version of the Pentateuch was already 10

(1964) and (1968).

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complete and authoritative by the end of the fourth century BC. The Prophets must have been compiled later than this, since they contain some texts from well into the Second Temple period. And. the Writings include, for example, Daniel, which is scarcely older than Sirach or Wisdom—a work of the second century BC. Thus a reasonable hypothesis about the threefold division is that it corresponds to the order in which the books were canonized. Sundberg observes that the differences between the Hebrew and Greek canons concern only books which date from the period when we may suppose the Writings were being codified; there are no disputes about the Torah or the Prophets. Accordingly he suggests that by the late Second Temple period all Jews, whether in Egypt or Palestine or, indeed, elsewhere, shared a canon consisting of the Torah and the Prophets, But the Writings were still 'open': it was accepted that there were some holy books alongside Torah and Prophets, but there was as yet no agreement which these were. Different Jews made a different selection from 'a wide religious literature without definite bounds'.11 There may indeed have been some tendency for Egyptian Jews to accept more books than were current in Palestine, including some with no Hebrew original, such as Wisdom. But this did not yet constitute the existence of different 'canons', a term which is anachronistic where the Writings are concerned. This, according to Sundberg, is the situation into which the early Christian movement came, and it shared the common Jewish tendency to pick and choose among the many Jewish religious books then available. But when it began to formalize its canon in the second century AD, it made a longer selection than Jews by then were tending to do. Hence, although all the books in the Greek Old Testament are Jewish in origin, their collection as an official scriptural canon was from the first an act of the Christian Church: there never was a Jewish 'Greek Bible'. Jews and Christians eventually settled on different canons, so that we should say neither that Christians 'added to' the Hebrew Scriptures nor that Hebrew- and Aramaic-speaking Jews 'subtracted from' an 'Alexandrian canon'. The canons are of independent origin, though they share a common core in Torah and Prophets. If Sundberg's theory is correct, it tends to undermine traditional Protestant opposition to the Greek and Latin canons as ecclesiastical expansions of the true Hebrew Scriptures, since it argues that there never was a time when the early Church recognized only the Hebrew Bible as canonical. Jerome and Augustine had a well-known dispute about the status of the deuterocanonical books, in which Jerome, on the basis of his knowledge of Hebrew tradition, argued that the Church ought to 'return' to the Hebrew canon; Augustine on the other hand maintained that the longer canon had always been the Church's Scripture. If Sundberg is " Sundberg (1964), 102.

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right, so was Augustine, though in a sense he had little evidence from which to know how right he was. The Church's refusal to undertake the reform proposed by Jerome then represents a correct even though illinformed instinct. Among modern Protestant scholars, Hartmut Gese has taken up Sundberg's point and argued the case for returning to the Greek canon as the basis for modern exegesis and. biblical interpretation.12 Protestant opposition to the deuterocanonical books turns out to rest on a false assumption about the status of Hebrew Scripture in the ancient Church. Subsequent studies following Sundberg's lead have emphasized two ways in which he may not have been quite radical enough. First, though the Prophets do indeed constitute an area of agreement between the Hebrew and Greek Bibles, their arrangement differs sharply. The Hebrew canon treats the historical works and the prophets 'proper' as a single collection, whereas the Greek Bible sees the histories as a continuation of the Pentateuch and places what Hebrew tradition calls the 'Latter Prophets' (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, the Twelve, with Daniel) in a separate section of their own. Though many sources from the late Second. Temple period, including the New Testament, speak of 'the law and the prophets', we ought not to assume that 'prophets' here refers to the books called 'prophets' in the Hebrew canon: it may be a general term for non-Torah scriptural books. Rather than saying with Sundberg that the Torah and Prophets were 'closed' by New Testament times, but the Writings still open, it may be better to suggest that only the Torah was a fixed entity: all other books, which some at least called 'prophets', still belonged to Sundberg's 'wide religious literature without definite bounds'. Only well into the Christian era did Jews come to distinguish between Prophets and Writings, and by then Christians had devised a quite different way of arranging Scripture other than the Pentateuch.13 Secondly, the term 'canon' itself may have introduced a false sense of definiteness into the discussion. As a technical term in the history of Scripture the term kanon is a Christian one, and is not clearly found in its present sense before Athanasius' Festal Letter 39 of 367.u To ask which books were canonical in the first century uc may be to ask an anachronistic question. If we are using the term to mean more or less the same as 'scriptural'—revered as holy, read as authoritative'—then we should probably say that all the books in the Greek canon were canonical for many Jews of that time, along with many others that neither they nor the Christians eventually 'canonized'. But if by 'canonical' we mean books belonging to an exclusive list—holy in contradistinction to others which were regarded as profane—then there is little evidence that the category 12 13 14

See Gese (1974). See Barton (1986), 35-95; (1984), 1-18; Barr (1983). See Metzger (1987), esp. 210-12.

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was in use as early as late Second Temple Judaism, It could be said of the Torah that it constituted a canon in this sense: the works of Moses could not be added to. But if Sundberg was right, there was probably no 'canon' otherwise, no list of books apart from the Pentateuch which constituted an exclusive corpus. A return to tradition

Recent years have seen an attempt to go back behind the Alexandrian canon hypothesis to something more like the consensus that prevailed in the nineteenth century. This has been spearheaded by an interesting alliance of Jewish and evangelical Christian scholars. Whereas for Sundberg the completion of the canon is a work of the early Christian era, for Leiman and Beckwith it was already accomplished well before the end of the Second Temple period. These two scholars base their conclusions on an examination of rabbinic sources, which they take to provide a reasonable insight into the Judaism of the last few centuries BC. Since the Mishnah and Talmud agree in drawing only on works in the present Hebrew canon as Scripture, there is felt to be a clear prima facie case for arguing that the Greek Bible represents an amplification of a canon, which was already agreed on by all Jews in the New Testament period. The New Testament itself similarly, Beckwith argues, never quotes from any book as a scriptural authority unless it is part of the Hebrew canon. Both of them use a classic argument to show that the Prophets were firmly closed by the first century: since Daniel is genetically a book of prophecy, it would have been included among the Prophets if that section of the canon had. still been open. The fact that it found its way only into the Writings shows that the Prophets were already closed by the mid-second century BC. Beckwith also argues that not only the contents but even the order of the Writings were fixed by the time of Jesus, since his prophecy that 'upon you will come all the righteous blood shed on earth, from the blood of innocent Abel to the blood of Zechariah the son of Barachiah' (Matt. 23: 35) is not a chronological reference but a 'canonical' one, referring to all the blood shed from the first homicide recorded, in Genesis, to the last, recorded in 2 Chronicles (24: 20-22), the last book of the Hebrew canon. Objections to this view are not hard to find. First, do we know that rabbinic and New Testament writers meant by 'prophets' precisely the books that now appear in the Prophets section of the Hebrew Bible? Secondly, is it certain that when New Testament writers cite books which are now not canonical they are not appealing to them 'as Scripture'? A notorious case is Jude 14-15, which refers to a book (1 Enoch) no longer canonical except in Ethiopia, but appears to treat it as a 'prophecy'. A better, because less marginal, case would be Paul's use of Wisdom in his discussion of human

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sin in Rom. 5:12-21. The whole underlying theory of the entry of sin, into the world through the sin of Adam depends far less directly on Gen. 3 than on what had been made of Gen, 3 in the Hellenistic Jewish traditions represented by Wisdom (seen especially in 2: 23-4).15 Can we really say that Wisdom was not Scripture for Paul? As to the order of the Writings, the placing of Chronicles at the end (against the 'natural' order Chronicles-Ezra-Nehemiah) is by no means universal, and the Leningrad Codex, which editors regard as 'standard' for the Masoretic text, has Chronicles as the first of the Writings. It is a very large step to argue that Chronicles was the last book in the canon in Jesus' day on the strength of this one reference. Despite all this, Beckwith and Leiman have succeeded in placing back on the agenda the traditional position according to which only the Hebrew Scriptures were canonical for Jews or Christians at the beginning of the Christian era, and thus giving fresh strength to the older Protestant view that the deuterocanonical books ought not to appear in the Bible. Study of the canon thus shows a certain tendency to circularity, as old positions are restated and old. loyalties reasserted. If progress is to be made, it may be that more attention needs to be given to the concepts of canonicity and of Scripture themselves. What is meant, for example, by saying that a book is appealed to 'as Scripture' or 'as canonical'? Scripture and canon are complex ideas, found in religions other than Judaism and Christianity11' and variously understood in different periods. It is possible that some of the more contentious issues may be revealed as pseudoproblems if more attention is paid to the concepts involved. In the remaining two sections we shall accordingly try to clarify what it was for books to be scriptural or canonical in the period when the Old Testament canon was taking shape. The origins and interpretation of 'canonical' Scripture The present writer has argued that it could be helpful to distinguish 'scripturality'—the fact that a book has high status for the religious community that uses it—from 'canonicity'—the fact that it belongs on an exclusive list to which no further books may be admitted. Whether or not this change to traditional terminology is accepted, the conceptual point is an important one. If we use 'canonical' to cover both meanings, the result is some shadow-boxing among scholars, as some say that the canon is early (meaning that Judaism came to acknowledge the special status of some books at an early period) while others say that it is late (meaning that the decision to establish an exclusive list of holy books was a late arrival). It is partly through this kind of unclarity that Leiman can speak 15 16

On this see Barr (1993), See the sophisticated discussion of the nature of 'scripture' in Smith (1993).

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of a very early canon and Sundberg of a very late one: there are certainly differences of substance, but they are exaggerated through the diverse use of the same terminology. In this section, accordingly, we shall try to keep separate the question of how the books of the Old Testament came to have the high 'scriptural' status they possess for Jews and Christians, and the question of how Jews and Christians came to limit their 'canon' of Scripture to a particular selection of books to which nothing could legitimately be added. The growth of the Old Testament. Scriptures

Official pronouncements about the status of this or that book are exceedingly rare in Judaism in ancient times, and far from common in Christian writings of the first few centuries. The status of the books that form the Old Testament was established by use rather than by decree, and it tends to be only at the fringes of the canon that any of our sources discusses canonicity. This is most apparent in the case of the Pentateuch, which from at least the time of Ezra obviously occupied a central place in the law, spirituality, social life, and liturgy of Israel: there is no record of any ruling whereby the Pentateuch came to be accepted. It is simply a given, from the earliest point in the Second Temple period for which we have any records. The centre of the canon, we might say, was never canonized! It simply became the accepted norm for the whole life of Judaism, and was attributed to Moses as the supreme lawgiver, just as the Psalms were attributed to David and the Proverbs to Solomon. Equally the Prophets do not seem to have been the subject of any formal decisions; and. in the case of the Writings, we have only the very slim discussion reported in Mishnah Yadaim 3: 5 about the status of Ecclesiastes and the Song of Songs, which may in reality not be about their canonicity at all.17 But we can trace the scriptural status of such books from the way they were used and referred to by other writers, and it is this that confirms their 'canonicity' by the end of the Second Temple period. We may note seven ways in which the use of scriptural books tends to confirm the high, status they had in Judaism and in early Christianity. Exemplification Incidents in the historical books (including the Pentateuch) were used by Jewish and Christian writers to exemplify how a good life should be lived, or what sins a believer ought to avoid, or how God deals with people of different types. Thus the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, for example, take incidents from the lives of the patriarchs as recorded in Genesis and use them as examples of good and bad conduct. The reading of the Former Prophets (Deuteronomistic History) in this way was already commented on by Martin Noth: 'When this community 17

See Barton (1997), 106-30.

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preserved and maintained the ancient narrative tradition of the history of Israel along with [the Law], it was understood as a collection of historical examples of the attitude of man to the law and its consequences'.18 Philo and Josephus are assiduous in finding incidents in the Bible from which conclusions can be drawn about how God wants people to live, and how he rewards the righteous and punishes the sinner. For both of them the Scriptures are the natural source for such examples, and they turn to them as a matter of course, thus providing the strongest evidence that these books were regarded as in a special category of holiness and authority. Josephus makes much of the witch of Endor,19 Philo of Hannah.20 Consistency A scriptural text was expected to be free of internal contradictions, and we can find examples in the Second Temple period of attempts to ensure that the books of the Bible were indeed internally consistent. There is a rabbinic discussion of Proverbs (Shabbat 30b) in which some had detected inconsistencies, and it was felt to be essential to show that these were apparent rather than real, otherwise the book would have had to be 'stored away' (gnz), i.e. placed in a genizah, like faulty copies of other scriptural books. It might be said that the author of Chronicles already shows this attitude in what he does with Samuel and Kings, ironing out many inconsistencies and contradictions, perhaps to produce an 'improved' and hence more worthily 'scriptural' text. An example of how inconsistency could be dealt with can be found in Philo's discussion of Ps. 75: 8 (LXX 74: 8), where the text reads: 'In the hand of the Lord there is a cup of unmixed, wine, full of mixture.' Philo deals with this by seeing the apparent contradiction as a key to deeper truth: The powers which God employs are unmixed in respect of himself, but mixed to created beings. For it cannot be that mortal nature should have room for the unmixed. We cannot look even upon the sun's flame untempered . , . and can you think it possible that your understanding should be able to grasp in their unmixed purity those uncreated, potencies which stand around, him and flash forth light of surpassing splendour?21

Truth Apart from internal inconsistency, there is also a problem with any text that appears to be untrue. An example from the New Testament can be cited here: Peter's use of Psalm 16, in Acts 2: 22-36, to point to the resurrection of Jesus. The argument runs that v. 10 'thou didst not suffer thy Holy One to see corruption' is untrue as it stands, since it apparently refers to David, who undoubtedly did 'see corruption'—he is dead and buried. But the text, being Scripture, cannot lie. By referring it to Jesus, who had risen from the dead, it can be 'shown' to be true after all. At the w 2(1

Moth (1966), 87. 1 Sam. 1-2: see de ebrietate 144-53.

w 21

1 Sam. 28: see Ant. 6: 340-2. Quod deus immutabilis sit 77-8.

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same time as it shows how imaginatively texts could be handled, this discussion clearly indicates the status that the text of the Psalm must have had. If it had been a secular text, the writer would, simply have rejected it as untrue. Because it is a holy text, it must be true; but this does not mean that other supposed truths are rejected in the light of it, as, for instance, by saying that David cannot really have died and been buried, but must still be alive. Instead, it is assumed that its meaning must be other than what appears on the surface. There is no doubt that any text which is handled in this way is a scriptural text, and this New Testament citation is thus a clear confirmation that the Psalms were Scripture in the period when Acts was written (not that this is otherwise in doubt). Details One feature of Scripture in many cultures is its tendency to be interpreted with great attention to fine detail. In some cases this means that it is over-interpreted, with details that are really subsemantic pressed into service as keys to its meaning. A classic example is Paul's exegesis of Gen. 15 in Gal. 3: 16. When Genesis says that God makes promises to Abraham's 'seed', it means his descendants in general, and the implication is that he will have many—otherwise the promise is not worth much. Paul, however, wants to argue that the promise to Abraham is fulfilled uniquely in Christ, and so fastens on the fact that 'seed' is grammatically singular: not 'seeds' but 'seed'. The fact that this perverse exegesis is possible is a clear confirmation that Genesis 15 is being treated as a scriptural text. Such exegetical tendencies went much further after Paul's day; in later times rabbinic Judaism attributed meaning to details as tiny as the shape or size of individual letters in the Hebrew text. Strained interpretation In Dan. 9: 24 (cf 9: 2) there is an interpretation of Jer. 25: 11-12, which predicts that the exile of Jerusalem will last seventy years. In order to prophesy the fulfilment of Jeremiah's prediction in the second century BC rather than the sixth, the author interprets the 'seventy years' to mean seventy 'weeks' of years, i.e. 490 years. This is a completely strained and unnatural interpretation which makes nonsense of Jeremiah's words and treats them as a coded message intended for the remote future, rather than as a word of comfort for the generation in exile. For our present purposes, however, it is important because it shows that Jeremiah must have had canonical or scriptural status for the author of Daniel; for there would have been no point in producing such a far-fetched interpretation of a book that had no authority anyway. The very need to interpret it in an unnatural way bears witness to its status. This is the book from which the future can be foretold: hence any predictions that deviate from its letter must somehow be justified as 'interpretations' of it. Where this kind of interpretation occurs—and it is very common in the way the Old Testament is interpreted in the New Testament and at Qumran—the high

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status of the text being interpreted is clear. It follows that Jeremiah, like the other prophets, was already an authoritative text by the time when Daniel was written, which helps to confirm an early date for the 'scripturality' of the prophetic corpus, or its 'canonicity' if that term is used to mean scriptural status. 'Allegorization' is a special type of 'strained' interpretation, in which the overt meaning of the text is taken to be a cipher for truths lying beyond its surface sense. A standard example would be the way in which the Epistle to the Hebrews (11: 13-16) interprets the temporary sojourn of the patriarchs in Canaan as a type or symbol of Christians' temporary citizenship of the world. In the ancient world it was taken for granted that one mark of a sacred text was its aptness for allegorical interpretation. The works of Homer were interpreted allegorically at Alexandria, and Alexandrian Jews such as Philo assumed that the books of Moses, being for them of even higher status than the Homeric texts, should, also be interpreted allegorically. Allegorization is thus a clear mark of scriptural status. Non-triviality One mark of Scriptures in most religious traditions is that they are assumed to have something important to say and to contain no triviality. One can judge the high status that the Pentateuch, for example, had for Jews and Christians in New Testament times by noting that they always interpret the text as non-trivial. A good example is Paul's use of the law in Deut. 25: 4, 'You shall not muzzle an ox when it treads out the grain' to justify the idea that ministers of the gospel should be paid proper wages (1 Cor. 9: 8-12). For him, a law that was really about how to treat oxen would be trivial (by contrast with a modern perception of the matter). Consequently, the text is interpreted metaphorically, as referring to people working in the service of the gospel, and so saved from triviality. For Philo, with his Platonist scheme of thought, the apparent concern of the Hebrew Bible with details of historical events is similarly prima facie trivial, for the philosopher rises above concerns like these. Accordingly he treats historical events as illustrative of types of person or of states of the soul: Abraham is a symbol of the soul setting out on its journey from the material world to the uncreated order where eternal contemplation reigns. In both these cases we see the effect of the scriptural status of the texts in question. Had they been less authoritative, Paul and Philo would not have bothered to reinterpret them non-trivially. Thus from such exegesis we can conclude that these texts had a high, 'canonical' status. Relevance A closely related point is the belief that scriptural texts are always relevant to the reader. In most religions that have a Scripture, it is not acceptable to say that parts of that Scripture are superannuated, irrelevant, or useless. The relevance can be general: events and comments

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in Scripture may be seen as applicable to human life in general, in all places and generations. Or it may be specific, as when apocalyptic sects, and groups such as the early Christians or the Qumran covenanters thought that texts in Scripture were coded references to the events of their own day. The latter type of application can be seen when Peter, on the day of Pentecost (Acts 2:14-21), explains that the pouring out of the Spirit on the assembled. Christians is a fulfilment of the words spoken by Joel, 'I will pour out my spirit on all flesh' (Joel 2: 28 (Hebrew 3:1)). Logically similar is the belief at Qumran that the words of Habakkuk, 'that he may run who reads' (Hab. 2; 2) refer to 'the Teacher of Righteousness, to whom God made known all the mysteries of the words of his servants the prophets' (IQpHab 7:1-5). That it should be felt necessary to explain these contemporary events by reference to the words of the prophets confirms the status the prophetic texts must have had for these writers; conversely, attributing supernatural knowledge of the events to these prophets helps to enhance the prestige of the events themselves. Both processes provide excellent evidence of the scriptural status of the texts in question. Thus there is plentiful confirmation of the growth of authoritative Scripture during the Second Temple period. This is to be found not only in overt pronouncements about the authority of this or that book—which are comparatively rare—but also, and predominantly, in the way later authors use and interpret scriptural texts, treating them as different from secular works and practising special techniques of interpretation on them. The canonization of the Old Testament Scriptures

By 'canonization' I mean, as explained above, the inclusion of scriptural books in an official list of the Scriptures—one stage beyond the acceptance of these books as authoritative. Using the word in this restricted sense can sharpen our focus by making us concentrate on the canon as a collection of sacred books. The most important defining feature of canonicity in this sense is the element of exclusivity. These and only these books are to be regarded as Scripture. Our first witness to canonicity in this sense is Josephus, who in his treatise Against Apion claims that Jewish sacred literature is limited to twenty-two books: It therefore naturally, or rather necessarily, follows (seeing that with us it is not open to everybody to write the records, and that there is no discrepancy in what is written; seeing that, on the contrary, the prophets alone had this privilege, obtaining their knowledge of the most remote and ancient history through the inspiration which they owed to God, and committing to writing a clear account of the events of their own time just as they occurred)—it follows, I say, that we do not possess myriads of inconsistent books, conflicting with each other. Our books, those which are justly accredited, are but two and twenty, and contain the record of all time. Of these, five are the books of Moses, comprising the laws and the

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traditional history down to the death of the lawgiver. This period falls only a little short of three thousand years. From the death of Moses until Artaxerxes, who succeeded Xerxes as king of Persia, the prophets subsequent to Moses wrote the history of the events of their own time in thirteen books. The remaining four books contain hymns to God and precepts for the conduct of human life. From Artaxerxes to our own time the complete history has been written, but has not been deemed worthy of equal credit with the earlier records, because of the failure of the exact succession of the prophets. We have given practical proof of our reverence for our own Scriptures. For, although such long ages have now passed, no one has ventured either to add, or to remove, or to alter a syllable; and it is an instinct with every Jew, from the day of his birth, to regard them as the decrees of God, to abide by them, and, if need be, cheerfully to die for them.22

The Hebrew Bible is traditionally reckoned as twenty-four books, and it must remain, uncertain how Josephus enumerated the books in his canon and which precisely those books were. Some scholars claim to be sure what was included (see, for example, Beckwith) but this is nothing more than wishful thinking. It is interesting that Josephus divides the canon into three categories (Mosaic histories, prophetic histories, teaching books) which are more like the three divisions of the Greek Bible than the Law, Prophets, and Writings of the Hebrew Scriptures: an interesting hint that the Greek Bible may rest on a genuinely Jewish arrangement (the 'Alexandrian canon', in effect!) and not be a Christian creation. But it is also possible that Josephus is describing the books in a way that will be comprehensible to his Greek audience, and that his categories do not reflect any kind of official divisions. He is however unequivocally a witness to the idea of a closed canon. Interestingly, the basis of its closure is not any ruling by a competent authority, but simply the intrinsic importance of date for scriptural authority: any books written since the reign of Artaxerxes cannot be scriptural. Of course this means any book that claims to have been written after this cut-off point. For Josephus, Daniel is selfevidently scriptural (as we know from his frequent allusions to the book) because it purports to come from the period of the Exile, presenting Daniel as a contemporary of Ezekiel. The fact that we know Daniel to be a work of the Maccabean period is irrelevant in this context. As we have seen, the Pentateuch certainly formed a closed collection well before Josephus, This is already clear from the existence of the Samaritan Pentateuch as the only canon of the Samaritan community. Though it is not identical with the Pentateuch of later Judaism and contains a few passages that appear in the Prophets or Writings of the Hebrew canon, it is recognizably the same text, so that the fixing of some version of the Pentateuch as a sacred text must antedate the split between Samaritans and (other) Jews. The date of the split is not known for certain, 22

Against Apion I: 37-43.

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but a plausible case can be made for a date in the early Second Temple period, perhaps in the fifth or fourth century.23 It is much harder to assign a date to the 'closing' of the Prophets. As I argued above, the idea that this division was closed before that of the Writings is hard to sustain, and the best we can say is that by the end of the second, century AD Jews had settled on the present divisions of the Hebrew Scriptures and Christians on the very different arrangement to be found in the Greek Bible. For the New Testament period it is not yet possible to show that 'the law and the prophets' means 'the Torah and the Prophets' rather than 'the Torah and other Scriptures', and on the whole there is much to be said for the view that Scripture was then reckoned as bipartite rather than tripartite, with 'prophets' covering all books that were not by Moses, Much early rabbinic material similarly operates with a bipartite division into Torah and Qabbalah (tradition), the second term including both the Prophets and the Writings of later tradition. The threefold division is normal in the Babylonian Talmud but not yet clearly established in the Mishnah, and there are sometimes two versions of rabbinic sayings, one of which thinks in terms of Torah, Prophets, and Writings and the other of Torah and Qabbalah, suggesting that the latter is an older tradition.24 For what it is worth, Ben Sira's survey of the history of Israel in Ecclus. 44-9 does not follow the order of the Hebrew canon, or draw any distinction between Prophets and Writings, but presents the great heroes of Judaism in chronological order, an approach akin to that of Josephus. We may say that, even if something like the present Hebrew divisions existed, they were not felt to exercise any hermeneutical influence on the reading of the texts, which could be freely arranged chronologically for the purposes of telling the story of Israel, much as they are in the Greek canon. Modern 'canon criticism' has raised the question whether the canon itself can be a 'locus of meaning'.25 In so far as this is a question about modern biblical interpretation, it lies outside the scope of a historical study such as the present. It is, however, interesting to ask whether the whole Bible, or its various divisions, were ever the subject of interpretation in ancient times; for, if they were, that would help to confirm the extent to which the canon was 'closed' at the time in question. One of the oldest discussions of the order (seder) of the Prophets and Writings can be found in the Babylonian Talmud, in Baba Bathra 14b—15a. This reads: Our Rabbis taught: The order of the Prophets is, Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Isaiah, and the Twelve Minor Prophets. Let us examine this. Hosea came first, as it is written [Hos. 1:2]: God spoke first to Hosea. But did God 23

See Coggins (197,5). *4 Many examples of this are discussed by Leirnan (1976). 2 ' This phrase is taken from Gamble (1985), 79. See also the discussion in Barton (1997), 131-62.

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speak first to Hosea? Were there not many prophets between Moses and Hosea? R. Johanan, however, has explained that he was the first of the four prophets who prophesied at that period, namely, Hosea, Isaiah, Amos, and Micah. Should not then Hosea come first?—Since his prophecy is written along with those of Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi, and Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi came at the end of the prophets, he is reckoned with them. But why should he not be written separately and placed first?—Since his book is so small, it might be lost [if copied separately]. Let us see again. Isaiah was prior to Jeremiah and Ezekiel. Then why should not Isaiah be placed first?—Because the book of Kings ends with a record of destruction and Jeremiah speaks throughout of destruction and Ezekiel commences with destruction and. ends with consolation and Isaiah is full of consolation; therefore we put destruction next to destruction and consolation next to consolation.

The implication here seems to be that the proposed order of the Prophets, which is not attested elsewhere, has a hermeneutical significance. It conveys the truth that God punishes, yet also has mercy, and since it begins with 'destruction' but ends with 'consolation', the implication is probably that God's last word is one of mercy. This is an important consequence to draw from the order of the books. It is also possible to read the passage as arguing that the books should be arranged in the order described in order to convey this message, in which case it is not strictly an argument from the order of the books but a suggestion for how they should be ordered. But in either case, the order of books is seen as significant for meaning, and this implies that—at any rate within one section of the Bible, the Prophets—the books are seen as parts of a larger collection, not as freestanding entities. It is hard to find any corresponding significance in the order of the Writings, which varies so much from one manuscript to another. The Talrnudic order is probably meant to be chronological;26 other orders concentrate on keeping together the five megillot. The order of Chronicles, Ezra, and Nehemiah is odd: in the Masoretic tradition the Writings end: Ezra, Nehemiah, Chronicles, which reverses the chronological order but makes the Writings (and hence the Bible) end on a note of optimism with Cyrus's decree permitting the Jews to return and rebuild Jerusalem. But (as already mentioned) the Leningrad Codex, which is the exemplar for most modern Bibles in the Massoretic tradition, in fact has Chronicles as the first of the Writings, separated from Ezra and Nehemiah. From a historical point of view, it seems that little can be deduced from any of these arrangements. Scepticism must be still greater where ordering across the divisions is concerned. For example, in a modern Hebrew Bible Malachi is followed by Psalms, and G, Sheppard has argued that this is significant,27 as part of 36 27

See my discussion in Barton (1986), 82-91, and (1997), 148-9. See Sheppard (1980).

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his case for seeing 'wisdom' as a hermeneutical guiding thread through the Old Testament. But is the juxtaposition of Malachi and Psalms, which does not occur anyway if the three divisions of the Hebrew Bible are thought of in scroll form, more than adventitious? It may be noted that the Greek Bible in many manuscripts places the twelve Minor Prophets bepre the Major, thus making Daniel the last of the prophetic books; there are also manuscripts where Isaiah comes last, possibly because in a complete Christian Bible it is then juxtaposed with the Gospel of Matthew, where so many Isaianic prophecies are fulfilled. The lack of fixity in the order of either the Hebrew or the Greek Bible makes it hazardous to read too much into the ordering. An, approach which concentrates on order may be said to read the Bible rather as if it were a novel with a coherent plot—an idea taken almost literally by Jack Miles in his Cod: A Biography,29 where the character of God is seen as developing throughout the course of Scripture. For this reading a fixed order is of course essential, and the work is therefore strongest if seen as a modern reading of the Hebrew Bible as we have received it, much weaker if approached as a historical enquiry into the meanings that were perceived in the Bible in ancient times. It is fair to point out that ancient perceptions of the kind of meaning to be found in the whole Bible tend rather to be illustrations of the rabbinic principle 'there is no before and after in the Torah'.29 Rabbinic reading is governed by an enormously strong sense of the unity of the whole of Scripture, but precisely for this reason the order in which Scripture unfolds Is seen as practically insignificant. Intertextuality rather than order is the governing principle: any text may throw light on any other text, whether it precedes or follows It. Thus the Mekilta on Exod. 14; 24: You find that the prayers of the righteous are heard in the morning. Whence do we know about Abraham's morning? It is said: And Abraham arose early in the morning [Gen. 22: 3] . . . Whence do we know about the mornings of the prophets destined to arise in the future? It is said: O Lord, in the morning shalt thou hear my voice; in the morning will I order my prayer unto thee, and will look forward [Ps. 5: 4 ] . . . Whence do we know about the mornings of the world in general? It is said: They are new every morning; great is thy faithfulness [Lam. 3: 23].

The internal consistency of the Bible was also recognized as important in ancient times, and this again is strong evidence that it was regarded as a single work—hence for its 'canonization' in the strong sense. The rabbis were naturally particularly exercised by the possibility of inconsistencies on matters of law: hence it is recorded that they worried about clashes between Ezekiel and the priestly regulations in Leviticus, and even considered withdrawing Ezekiel from public use until Hananiah b. Hezekiah produced a reconciliation by sitting up for so many nights working on the w

(1995).

2

* Pesahim6b.

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problem that he consumed three hundred barrels of oil (Shabbat 13b). Questions of historical accuracy seem to have worried them less—there is not to my knowledge a single rabbinic query about the inconsistencies between Kings and Chronicles. Christians also treated the Old Testament as an internally consistent work from early times. Even if the exact limits of the canon were not yet fixed, it was assumed that any scriptural book would be consistent with any other, and there was no question of including in the canon works that were mutually incompatible. In practice this can be less important than it seems, for the inclusion of two works that are in fact mutually inconsistent in a single Bible tends to create a hermeneutical imperative to read them as though they mere consistent. One may think of what commentators have done to reconcile Romans and James. One of the earliest solutions to the problem of Kings and Chronicles is represented in the title given to Chronicles in the Greek Bible, to pamlipomena, the things left out. This signals that Chronicles is to be read as supplementing Kings, rather than—as surely it was originally intended to do—as replacing it with an improved version of the same events. This title is thus a witness to the canonization of Chronicles, making it possible for it to stand alongside Kings: for the title only makes sense on the assumption that there is some other book from, which the 'things left out' were left out. Conclusion In the course of about the last twenty-five years, the question of the Old Testament canon has returned to the agenda of biblical studies in a way that would have surprised most scholars of the last generation. From being almost a byword for a dull and pointless topic it has come to be at the very centre of the study of the Old Testament. Interestingly, this is not because much new material has been discovered (though the Qumran scrolls in particular have contributed materially) but rather because new questions have been asked. One purpose of this study has been to emphasize how important is the terminology used in the study of the canon, which can open up the subject or alternatively condemn it to being a tissue of foregone conclusions. Since (as Mark Brett's chapter indicates) the canon is now at the centre of biblical interpretation, it is important that its historical investigation should be made as rigorous and open-minded as possible.

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Bibliography ANDERSON, G. W. (1970), 'Canonical and Non-Canonical', Cambridge History of the Bible I, ed. P. R. Ackroyd and C. F, Evans (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 113-59. BARR, J. (1983), Holy Scripture; Canon, Authority, Criticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press). •— (1993), The Garden of Eden and the Hope of Immortality (London: SCM Press). BARTON, J. (1984), "The law and the Prophets". Who are the Prophets?' OTS 23, 1-18. (1986), Oracles of God: Perceptions of Ancient Prophecy in Israel after the Exile (London: Darton, Longman and Todd). — (1997), The Spirit and the Letter: Studies in the Biblical Canon (London: SPCK). BBCKWITH, R, T. (1985), The Old Testament Canon of the. New Testament Church (London: SPCK). BLENKTNSOPP, |. (1977), Prophecy and Canon: A Contribution to the Study of Jewish Origins (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press). COGGINS, R. J. (1975), Samaritans and Jews (Oxford: Blackwell). EJSSFBLDT, O. (1965), The Old Testament: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell). ELLIS, E. E. (1991), The Old Testament in Early Christianity: Canon and Interpretation in the Light of Modern Research (WUNT 54; Tubingen: J. C. B, Mohr). FOHREB, G. (1970), Introduction to the Old Testament (London: SPCK). GAMBLE, H. Y. (1985), The New Testament Canon: Its Making and Meaning (Philadelphia: Fortress Press). GESE, H. (1974), Vom Sinai zum Zion: Alttesfamentliche Beitrage zttr biblischen Theologie (BEvT 64; Munich: ChrKaiser Verlag). GRABE, J, E, and LEE, F. (1719) (eds.), Fetes Testamentum juxfa LXX interpretes II. (Oxford; Oxford University Press). KAESTLI, J. D. and WERMELINGER, O. (1984) (eds.), Le canon de I'Anden Testament. Sa formation et son histoire (Geneva: Labor et Fides). KATZ, P. (1956), The Old Testament Canon in Palestine and Alexandria', ZNW47, 191-217. LEIMAN, S. Z. (1976), The Canonization of Hebrew Scripture: The Tahnndic and Midrashic Evidence (Hamden: Archon Books). METZGER, B. M. (1987), The Canon of the New Testament: Its Origin, Development and Significance (Oxford: Clarendon Press). MILES, J. (1995), God: A Biography (London: Simon and Schuster). MULDER, M.-J. (1988) (ed.), Mikra: Text, Translation, Reading and Interpretation of the Hebrew Bible in Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity (Assen: van Gorcum). MOTH, M. (1966), The Laws in the Pentateuch: Their Assumptions and Meaning', in The Laws in the Pentateuch and Other Essays (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark). PFEIFFER, R, H. (1962), The Canon of the Old Testament', Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible I (Nashville: Abingdon Press), 510-11. SARNA, N. M. (1971), The Order of the Books', Studies in Jewish Bibliography, History and Literature in Honor of 1. Edward Kiev, ed. C. Berlin (New York: Ktav), 401-13. SHEPPARD, G. T. (1980), Wisdom as a Hermeneutical Construct: A Study in the Sapientializing of the Old Testament (BZAW 151; Berlin: de Gruyter).

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SMEND, R. (1981), Die Entstehung des Altai Testaments (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer). SMITH, W, C. (1993), What is Scripture? (London: SCM Press). SOGGIN, J. A. (1989), Introduction to the Old Testament (London: SCM Press). SUNDBERG, A, C. (1964), The Old Testament of the Early Church (Oxford: Oxford University Press). — (1968), The "Old Testament": a Christian Canon', CBQ 30,143-55. ULLENDORFF, E. (1968), Ethiopia and the Bible (London: Oxford University Press). WBISER, A. (1961), Introduction to the Old Testament (London: Darton, Longman and Todd). WOLFENSON, L. B. (1924), Implications of the Place of the Book of Ruth in Editions, Manuscripts, and. Canon of the Old Testament', HUCA 1,1.51-78.

9

Hebrew Narrative D. M. G U N N

I

THE category 'narrative' is ubiquitous In contemporary critical inquiry in a host of fields. In biblical studies it has been popular for several decades now, particularly as a proving ground for literary criticism. 'Prose narrative' (as opposed to 'poetic narrative') might be a more accurate term for the major locus of interest since prose is the predominant narrative mode in the Hebrew Bible and the one that has received the bulk of attention. For the most part it is prose narrative as 'story' that has held the Bible's readers in thrall and exercised the critics. Where critics have attempted to articulate formal rules of biblical narrative composition ('poetics') some of what they have had to say may well have general applicability to conventions of classical Hebrew prose in general, but that case has usually remained undeveloped. Definitions of the term 'narrative' are as elusive as the contexts of its use are many. Tentatively one might say that as a mode of discourse narrative communicates meaning through the imitation of human life, the temporal ordering of human speech and action. Time is important: narrative is distinguished from many other genres by plot, a sequence of actions, often (but not always) connected in terms of cause and effect, leading from an initial situation, through complication, to some sense of resolution or revelation. Narrative, then, is generally assumed by hearers and readers to interrelate distinct temporal events, involving several characters, in a coherent whole without extraneous incidents. What counts as 'coherence', however, may vary widely and counter-coherence may become part of narrative meaning. The term 'narrative' is used variously as the mode of discourse and the vehicle, as it were, of narrative communication. As a genre (vehicle) term it can encompass a wide range of other genre terms, such as myth, epic, history, comedy, and tragedy, in a variety of media. Seymour Chatman's influential book on narrative more than twenty years ago was in fact a study of fiction and film. The term is also, of course, used of a definable

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text, as in 'the Samson narrative' of Judges 13-16. In this usage it is often interchangeable with that other ubiquitous term, 'story'. Some critics insist on distinguishing between the two terras: the story is understood to be the events presupposed by the narrative, which tells the story in a particular way. Mieke Bal further distinguishes between the story and the 'fabula', the material that is worked into a story, elements such as events, actors, time, and location; the notion of fabula facilitates her analysis of the ideological dimensions of story-telling by allowing her to show how the 'story' is already an ideologically influenced shaping of the 'fabula',1 While the distinction between narrative and story is undoubtedly of heuristic value, especially where different versions (narratives) of a story are being explored, it tends to reify the story as something existing apart from the narrative, when in fact, as Bal is fully aware, the story can only ever be an inference from the narrative(s), from which it takes its life. The same applies to the category fabula. Which particular definable biblical texts are narrative texts? My first impulse is to begin to make a list, starting with the 'primary story' in Genesis-Kings.2 But already 1 have a problem: While D. N. Freedman and others recognize this as a (the?) primary definable narrative text, yet others are going to insist that a 'Deuteronomistic History', comprising some part of Deuteronomy and extending to the end of Kings, is a definable narrative entity. Beginnings and endings are the makings of narrative. This boundary dispute is of no little consequence. For example, what if my interest is in the story of David and. Goliath? As I seek to read this text in context, this episode within its larger story, what is the larger story? Is Cain's killing of Abel an episode in my story? That inclusion would make a difference to how I read David's killing of Goliath. Do Bethlehemite David's relations with foreigner Philistines play upon foreigner Ruth's relations with Bethlehemite Boaz? But is Ruth part of the 'primary story'? In my English, Latin, and Greek Bibles it would appear so. And if I wish to observe the intertextual connections between my story and other stories of decapitation, I am led to ask whether the book of Judith is a biblical narrative or not. My reformed. (Presbyterian) tradition argues not or not quite! Quickly my interest in defining the boundaries of biblical narratives has turned into an issue of canon and so of ideology or, at least, politics.3 But if I back away from the troublesome macro question about what counts as biblical narrative and return to 1 Samuel 17, I am in no less a quandary. What is the text of 1 Samuel 17? If I check out Kyle McCarter's Anchor Bible (1980) I find that he ranks the ancient Greek LXXB over the 1

Bal (1985), 1-10. Cf. Gunn and Fewell (1993), 3-5. Just so, David Jobling (1993) finds polities and the exercise of power in his search for the 'beginning' of 1 Samuel. 2

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traditional Hebrew Masoretic text (MT). Reading his analysis it is clear that he would expect a biblical scholar scrutinizing this narrative to read a reconstructed Hebrew version of those parts of the Greek that he selects for inclusion and stitch these together with those parts of the MT that he has retained. Roughly speaking this means that I am now missing more than a third of the narrative that my English RSV encouraged me to think I was going to be reading, McCarter's story of the text here in 1 Samuel involves a Hebrew 'original' represented by (or 'behind') the Greek LXXB, to which further material has been added so as to produce the received. Hebrew text (MT). It is this reconstructed text rather than the MT which is the authentic Hebrew text McCarter's story of sources and composition includes this story of (inauthentic?) 'add-on' along with other additions and modifications to a core 'foundation story' (which he reconstructs for us in a sentence). This desire for the 'original', like the myth of presence or pure origin (as Derrida argues), is a characteristically modern one. It also taps into the politics of singularity, a powerful politics in the West. As there is one God, there is one Word of God, one Scripture, For text critics of the Jewish Scriptures/Hebrew Bible or Christian Old Testament this pursuit often involves postulating 'original' texts of the Bible (these are the texts I should, be reading) that are centuries (and who knows how many versions) distant from the time when anything like 'the Bible' came into being. And at the same time the same critics are frequently busy collapsing the difference between 'original' and 'biblical' so that the one biblical text may not become several. Yet, as the Anchor Bible well illustrates for us, text critics who are dedicated to narrowing the divergences between Bibles into earlier or later, superior or inferior, original or spurious, are at the same time in the business of creating Bibles which are different from the received 'biblical' texts. Hence McCarter prints the story of David and Goliath as doublets, according them each the same printed status, both the text that he has been at pains to describe as the inferior text and the one he judges superior.4 In short, the attempt by the critic-reader to define so simple a thing as the narrative text is a process fraught with issues that have as much to do with the reader as with the text. The title of my chapter is 'Hebrew Narrative' and the chapter lies within the 'text' part of the volume's division into sections on readers, text, and authors. This title and arrangement might suggest a singular objective entity ('the text') produced by authors, read by readers, and conceptually separable from both. The reality is more complicated. As my previous remarks indicate, the 'Old Testament' is a fuzzy-edged concept, not a fixed object, and its 'text' is not one but beyond number. The concept is ideologically loaded (that is, reader-oriented); much of the writing I will 4

See also P. R. Davies (1995).

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engage with in this essay is quite specifically not about the (Christian) 'Old Testament'—which is why I will use the, admittedly still unsatisfactory, hybrid term 'Hebrew Bible' or simply the term 'Bible' in what follows. Moreover, I can know little or nothing about the authors of the 'Old Testament' without reading its texts, and somewhat the same goes for its ancient readers. That leaves modern readers, and. then only some, and what I know about them, including myself, is a moot point. In my understanding, then, there is no such thing as 'the text of the Old Testament' apart from its readers. Hence 1 venture the following, partial, account of biblical narrative and literary criticism over the past three decades as an account not of what is 'in' the biblical narratives but of what some readers have claimed to find in these texts and how they have gone about finding it. I used to think that the dividing line in biblical scholarship was that between 'historical criticism' and 'literary criticism'. But that is patently not the case. The divide is between modern and postmodern. Put very baldly, it is the difference between a project that reaches for the unity, stability, and truth of the text, and one that seeks the fractures, instabilities, and multivalences of a text which 'itself is protean. Meir Sternberg's poetics, prefaced by an attack on historical criticism, are modern. David Clines's literary criticism, sometimes entwined with historical-critical analysis, is postmodern. Both were founders of what may be called broadly a 'literary critical' movement in biblical scholarship in the past three decades. The move to the postmodern in approaches to biblical narrative has closely followed, the move towards radically reader-oriented criticism. II

The shift in biblical studies from the monopoly of 'the' (as it was usually termed) 'historical-critical method' to the plethora of methods at presentdeployed, including those that often come under the blanket term 'literary criticism', has been in large part (though this is changing) anchored in the analysis of prose narratives. Indeed, one can be more specific; for a time, the shift towards the legitimation of 'literary criticism' was taking place on the backs of three books in the main, namely, 1 and 2 Samuel and Genesis. This location was hardly an accident: these books contain some of the Hebrew Bible's most extended plot lines, and elaborated characters, characters, moreover, who rank high among the figures entrenched in Christian and Jewish self-understanding (that is, rank prominently in the history of the texts' reception). Yet historical-critical method had produced in over one hundred years at best rather bald readings of these much admired stories. With its insistence that the author, provenance, and purpose of the narrative be determined prior to interpretation proper, the historical-critical

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method tended to produce—apart from an unacknowledged circularity in the argument-—a highly reductionist frame (the 'purpose' or author's 'intention' located in some supposed 'historical' setting) which seriously constrained further reading. Ambiguity tended to be eschewed as a problem that the critic had failed to solve. Early literary criticism of the recent literary-critical revival (from the seventies), with its scepticism about historical locations and its interest in plot, character, and word play, seemed able to produce a richer array of interpretations. Theme' often replaced 'purpose' and 'theme' seemed capable of bearing more complex freight. (Today, 'theme' is treated with reserve, perhaps because it implies a totality, or, to put it another way, reduction, of meaning.) Ambiguity was often the stuff of the reading and so was irony. As early as 1965 Edwin Good was writing essays of literary criticism around the topic of irony. Current literary-critical study of Hebrew Bible narrative has disparate roots. There was no one centre or school that provided, the impetus for the change that literary criticism brought about in the study of Hebrew Bible narrative. Moreover such change as did come about can be seen to owe much to institutional as well as intellectual innovations; for the reader interested in the sociology of knowledge, there is grist for the mill here. Let me try, invidiously, to be sure, to single out some early contributions that signalled change from a variety of places and perspectives. Michael Fishbane in 1979 offered 'close readings' of biblical narratives and 'narrative cycles', especially in Genesis, with particular attention to the relation between form and meaning. Meir Sternberg was not well known to English-speaking biblical critics before the end of the decade, though his important initial paper (with Menakhem Perry) on reading 'gaps' in the story of David and Bathsheba appeared in modern Hebrew in 1968. His major impact came later with the publication of his work in English in 1985, an extensive narratology with copious exemplary readings. Robert Alter published, a series of essays expounding the artistry of biblical narratives (mostly in Commentary) between 1975 and 1980. It was not until the publication of his book in 1981 that his work came to the notice of many critics and. had widespread influence (on which more below). It took some time, too, before several other innovative books received due attention internationally: Jan Fokkelman's detailed formal study of parts of Genesis, published in the Netherlands in 1975; Jonathan Magonet's analysis of Jonah as a literary unity rich in allusion, published in 1976; and Shimon Bar-Efrat's guide to biblical literary technique (narrator, characters, plot, time and space, and style) in Narrative Art in the Bible, published in Hebrew in 1979 and in English a decade later. David Clines and I in the UK, on the other hand, had broader ties to the North American biblical studies guild, especially to active members of the Society of Biblical Literature, who opened valuable avenues of support and stimulation. For example, my own first literary-critical essay on

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Hebrew narrative (to become a key chapter in my 1978 book), after the fashion of F, R. Leavis and British practical criticism learned in Australia in the fifties and sixties, was commissioned, by Robert Culley as editor for an early issue of Semeia. This journal, founded by Robert Funk for the Society of Biblical Literature, has proved to be of central importance for biblical narrative criticism. That particular issue in 1975 contained, papers and comment by, among others, Culley himself, George Coats, Burke Long, Robert Polzin, David Robertson and Hugh White, all of whom have played significant, though very different, roles in shaping the field of study. Kenneth Gros Louis and James Ackerman, collaborated to publish in 1974 a pioneering collection of essays, which would be followed in 1982 by a further volume, by this time reflecting a considerably expanded repertoire of texts and critics. Like Culley, Ackerman was an influential figure, as much through his encouragement of others as through his own finely nuanced writing, Ackerman had been a student of James Muilenburg who coined the term 'rhetorical criticism' for a study of literary features of texts, in New-Critical mode, that offered an alternative to traditional source and form criticism, Muilenburg's legacy shows in the 1974 collection of essays in Ms honor by 'some of [his] younger students', edited by Jared J. Jackson and Martin Kessler. It shows, too, in the writing of Walter Brueggemann and Phyllis Trible, both Muilenburg students. Brueggemann wrote imaginatively on the David stories in Samuel between 1968 and 1974 (and. again in the eighties). Trible wrote meticulous rhetorical criticism from a feminist perspective that was ground breaking in a profoundly new way, issuing in 1978 in a book of essays of signal importance, David Jobling published the same year as Trible's book another set of essays that reflected the first really successful attempt to convey the potential of structuralist readings of biblical narrative texts to a wide audience of biblical scholars. Most accessible was 'Jonathan: a Structural Study in 1 Samuel', an analysis with remarkable staying power. In 1978, too, James Crenshaw wrote a lively book of what he termed 'aesthetic criticism' on the Samson narrative in Judges 13—16. Also that year Peter Miscall began to explore in article form the subject of 'narrative analogy', comparing narrative patterning across different texts, influenced by Robert Alter among others. Crucial to these new explorations of narrative was a shift in publishing outlets for innovating scholars and a reorganization of the Society of Biblical Literature. In 1974, as already noted, Robert Funk founded and edited Semeia, 'an experimental journal for biblical criticism' for the Society. In Britain, David dines, Philip Davies and 1 founded and edited the journal for the Study of the Old Testament in 1976, which from its outset offered a home to literary critical work on narrative. As in the case of

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Semeia, accompanying the journal was a monograph series also receptive to new methodologies. At the Society of Biblical Literature forums were established for cultivating contacts and discussion on the new narrative studies. Especially important were the Consultation on Narrative, the Structuralism and Exegesis Section, the Biblical Criticism and Literary Criticism Section, and the Rhetorical Criticism Section.5 Semeia from its foundation was a forum for innovation in biblical criticism, both Hebrew Bible and New Testament. While giving voice to a plurality of alternatives to conventional historical criticism, it was in particular an outlet for much of the discussion of structuralism that went on in the seventies and early eighties, particularly in the Structuralism and Exegesis Seminar at the Society of Biblical Studies, with New Testament critic Daniel Patte a driving force. Structuralism is concerned with patterns, the relation of items in a system, often one of binary oppositions. Individual elements in the system have meaning only in their relations with one another; hence the systems explored tend to have a high level of abstraction and are often thought of as 'underlying' the surface text which encodes them.6 Connections between the New-Critical or formalist types of literary criticism and the varieties of structuralism (e.g., literary' and 'anthropological') being deployed in the analysis of biblical narrative at this time were obvious. Both were inclined to see the text in a 'synchronic' rather than 'diachronic' fashion, that is, as a meaningful whole containing the essential elements of its own understanding rather than as understandable only as the product of an historically determined process of composition. On the other hand, to many structuralists, the readings of those influenced by New Criticism seemed to be too much concerned, with the surface of the narrative and to lack rigour, to be more art than method; and, to many of the latter critics, analyses of deep structures seemed to be reductionist, eliminating the enlivening differences of individual narratives, and to be arcane and rigid. An important mediating critic was David Jobling.

in I am inclined to see 1980 as something of a threshold year, after which literary criticism began to gain serious recognition in biblical studies. That year Robert Polzin published Moses and the Deuteronomist, a highly innovative study of Deuteronomy-Judges utilizing Mikhail Bakhtin's account of narratorial voices and dialogic narrative. He viewed his text in terms of an ideological struggle between 'authoritarian dogmatism' (adhering strictly 5 Some of the work of the last-named section can be seen in the articles in Art and Meaning, Rhetoric in Biblical Literature, edited by Cliees, Gunn and Hauser. 6 See further Aichele et al. (1995), 70-118.

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to an original authoritative law) and 'critical traditionalism' (sustaining a tradition by critically reinterpreting it). That year also I published my (more New-Critical) close reading of the Saul story, which unapologeticaliy cut through source-critical boundaries in the interests of an extended, final-form interpretation which read Saul sympathetically and problematized the roles of Samuel and Yhwh in the story. Cheryl Exum published the first of a series of detailed analyses of the artistic composition of the Samson story, among a steady stream of other literary-critical studies she would go on to write. The next year (1981) saw the founding of Prooftexts, 'a journal of Jewish literary history' with serious commitment to literarycritical study of the Bible and often the vehicle, for example, for important contributions from. Edward Greenstein. The same year saw the publication of the inaugural volume of essays, edited by Burke Long, in the Bible and Literature series with newly founded Almond Press, and also Fokkelman's massive study of King David. Most important, however, for the immediate impact of literary studies on the field of biblical studies, Robert Alter's The Art of Biblical Narrative was published and received wide and favourable publicity. In 1982 Northrop Frye's massive analysis of the Bible from the perspective of archetypal criticism made its appearance. Despite Frye's reputation in English literature scholarship it had limited impact among biblical scholars. It was much more enthusiastically received, by scholars teaching Bible as literature, especially in 'Christianity and literature' circles, perhaps in part because it was so patently a Christian project. In other developments of the early eighties, Francis Landy connected prose and poetry in a richly evocative analysis of the Song of Songs and the Garden story in Genesis 2-3. Peter Miscall took a major new step in his exploration of the 'undecidability' of texts, using texts from Genesis and 1 Samuel as a proving ground.7 Adele Berlin offered students and scholars interested in entering the new field a clear presentation of the 'mechanics' of narrative composition, especially character and point of view, in her Poetics and Interpretation of Biblical Narrative.6 The contrast between the 1983 books by Peter Miscall and Adele Berlin is striking and marks out the beginnings of the modern/postmodern divide in biblical studies. Miscall had been reading Roland Barthes, Paul De Man, Jacques Derrida, Stanley Fish, Geoffrey Hartman, and J. Hillis Miller, among other critics. His close readings led to complexity and indeterminate conclusions about 'the' meaning of the texts. They had this outcome because he resisted resolving ambiguities and because he followed the verbal and structural connections of one narrative with another not so as then to impose a thematic solution, which would reduce the differences to sameness, but so as to deepen and. complicate the implications and con7 8

Miscall (1983). (1983).

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notations that arose from reading text on text. As some critics might say today, his readings were 'thick' ones. Many readers found his analyses difficult to 'grasp' and unsettling in their resolute irresolution. By contrast, Berlin's book offered certainties. Unlike Miscall, Berlin in her interpretations—of Ruth, for example—read for closure. She drew upon the approaches of Alter, Bar-Efrat, and Sternberg, as well as a typology of perspective in the compositional theory of Boris Uspensky, to offer a 'poetics' of biblical narrative, that is, a reader's guide to how the text was composed. Given an understanding of the text's poetics interpretation becomes possible, she argued. For 'poetics makes us aware of how texts achieve their meaning. Poetics aids interpretation. If we know how texts mean, we are in a better position to discover what a particular text means,'9 In a culture where the machine is a root metaphor, the proposition is attractive, and so it proved. Learn the mechanics and you will be in a position to understand the purpose. The argument, however, slips between composition, purpose, and meaning: none is deductible without remainder from any of the others. Crucially missing from this account of poetics are the reader's subjectivity and social location. Nevertheless, this highly accessible book did much to legitimate literary criticism in biblical studies. In so doing, it enabled many readers simply to exchange one modernist mode of the pursuit of the truth for another. That is one reason why many conservative Christians embraced the 'new' criticism.10 In another development of moment for the study of biblical narrative specifically and of biblical literature generally, Phyllis Trible in 1984 brought out a second influential book of feminist readings, starting from the same New-Critical (rhetorical) reading method as before but now more reader conscious and. troubled by the text. At about this time Esther Fuchs began to write her hard-hitting, 'text-resisting' feminist readings of Hebrew Bible narratives.11 Both critics read their texts as though meaning lay 'within' the narrative, in discernible constructions of key words, plots, characters, and points of view. Both brought avowed commitments to feminist values in their pursuit of meaning in the texts, that is, they both foregrounded their role as reader in a way that marked them out as different from the vast majority of biblical critics, literary or otherwise. A difference in their interpretations emerges, however, that well illustrates the difficulty of attempting to chart the critical enterprise. It is a commonplace to see Trible as representing a phase of feminist criticism that was intent on 'rehabilitating' the text. That is, the critic's purpose is to recover original meanings, showing thereby that traditional patriarchal interpretations were just that, namely constructions by patri9 10 11

Berlin, ibid., 17. See Gunn (1988). (1985a); (1985b).

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archal interpreters. By the same token Fuchs is seen as representing a more radical stance, recognizing the inherently patriarchal nature of the texts and pointing the way to dealing with this phenomenon, namely by invoking feminist values to judge the inadequacy of such texts for contemporary appropriation. Yet it seems to me that in an important respect Trible's analyses in Texts of Terror suggest the more radical path, even if it is not one she was inclined to take, explicitly, herself. Her readings, to be sure, are unremittingly formalist on the surface and often work hard to 'recover' redeeming features in the text. But they also work to invoke a reader's subjective alignment with the text's 'victim' and, through the mechanism of confronting the terror that a tradition of patriarchal interpretation had erased, they have a way for many readers of turning the terror into triumph. The existential 'meaning' of the narrative is then liberating. The christological aspects of this critical turn are obvious, and clearly, from many points of view, not only feminist and Jewish, such an exposition is open to serious objection. But as a reading strategy or process it has striking affinities with deconstruction and as such suggests a path that others, including feminists, could take without necessarily producing the same specific interpretative conclusions. In this sense Trible's readings leave the text an openness to future understanding that Fuchs disavows. A year after Trible's Texts of Terror, Meir Sternberg's book, The Poetics of Biblical Narrative, appeared, and, two years later, the collection of essays edited by Robert Alter and English literature critic Frank Kermode, The Literary Guide to the Bible, The former book, replete with a host of brilliant readings, represented the outcome of more than a decade of work on a system of interpretation claimed to comprehend all Hebrew Bible narrative. Central (and problematic) is Sternberg's view that God and the narrator are omniscient and that the coincidence of their omniscience helps make irresistible the meaning of the text, 'the point of it all'. The work elaborates with extraordinary sophistication modernist assumptions about objective textual meaning and has clear links to formalist and New-Critical methods. The Literary Guide indicated the growing numbers of scholars working in the field but also, following the editors' agenda, reflected for the most part a fairly conservative, formalist approach. Several significant scholars, particularly those pursuing feminist criticism'—Exum, Fuchs and Trible, for example1—were noticeably absent. This absence marked a significant failure on the part of Alter in his critical method to come to terms with the power of feminist theory and critical practice. (The same failure could be argued of Sternberg's work.) The conjunction of literary criticism and feminist criticism was already well established in biblical studies by the time The Literary Guide appeared and was not going to go away.

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Looking back at the crucial period of shift to literary-critical scholarship in biblical studies, through the mid-seventies into the early eighties, Robert Alter'& The Art of Biblical Narrative still seems to me to stand out as a focal point-—though it was, as I have indicated, but one of a number of works carving out space for new (in biblical studies terms) modes of criticism. Pulling together the essays he had been writing for several years, mostly for Commentary and mostly previously unread by biblical scholars, he offered elegantly styled and refreshingly nuanced readings that struck a chord with a wide audience. He also laid out several claims about the intrinsic nature of biblical narrative that provided starting points for imitative criticism. He argued that repetition—one of the historical critic's criteria for discerning disparate sources—was instead a fundamental compositional technique providing the critic with major clues to meaning. At the level of words and phrases, and often in the details of reported speech, repetition might, for example, contribute to theme building (so not to be read as redundancy but intensification) or, when viewed in the context of variation, it might point to significant discrepancy (and so, for example, in a slightly discrepant report to be read as impugning a character's reliability). At the level of the scene or episode, he took up the notion of the type scene. This category had played an important role in discussions of 'oral traditional' composition deriving from the studies of Milman Parry and Albert Lord originally relating to the Homeric epics: in that debate typical scenes or (confusingly) 'themes', as Lord styled them, were generally taken to indicate a traditional dimension of the narrative. Alter instead used them to argue for creative authorship; variation on the stereotype— he called the process 'narrative analogy'—was always significant and often the key to the meaning of this component in the larger narrative. Alter also stressed the role of word play, in a variety of forms, as a primary feature of biblical narrative which contributed to both art and meaning. Dialogue, he argued, was a predominant feature of the genre. And, closely related to his focus on dialogue, he asserted that a deep interest in character was fundamental to the genre. He claimed to show that while the roles and motivations of human characters were beset with uncertainty and ambiguity, the narrator is 'omniscient' in his detailing the actions and fate of these characters, and is thus able to 'adopt the all-knowing . . . perspective of God'.12 God's purpose and action, on the other hand, unlike those of the human characters, provides the counterposing point of stability and, indeed, inevitability that is the ultimate import of the narrative. Finally, he argued that often what historical critics saw as contradictions in the text were in fact the product of a shift in point of view— 12

Alter (1981), 157.

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though he did allow that some contradictions were simply that and not a matter of concern to the author/editor. Alter framed his account of biblical narrative within a set of contentions relating biblical narrative to ancient Near Eastern literary history. He argued that the best general rubric for describing biblical narrative is 'prose fiction', or more precisely 'historidzed fiction' or—'when we move into the period of the Judges and Kings'—'fictionalized history'. He also claimed that this kind of narrative was an innovation on the part of the Hebrew writers, unique, bound up with its 'history-centered' monotheism which rejected, polytheism and a 'mythological' worldview typically associated with verse narrative. The Hebrews came up with a unique conception of a single all-seeing God whose divine will creates and mysteriously accommodates the messiness of individual human freedom. Prose apparently lent itself to this particular monotheistic purpose because of its special 'suppleness' as a narrative medium, that is, its remarkable range and flexibility in the means of presentation of men and women. Many of these claims about the conventions of Hebrew Bible narrative composition proved highly influential. Many critics continue to recognize the textual features Alter recognized (repetitions and variations, shifts in point of view, uses of direct and indirect speech, omniscient narrator, etc.) and attempt to emulate his deployment of such observations in building interpretations. Other contentions met with less enthusiasm. Almost to a person, a panel of reviewers in JSOT a year or so after the book appeared13 reacted negatively to the claim that monotheism could be invoked to account for the rise of biblical narrative. Thus Norman Whybray wondered pertinently why, if monotheism were indeed, the impetus and mainstay of this new artform, high quality prose should then have diminished (according to Alter) with the advent of the post-exilic period where monotheism most obviously 'comes into its own'. In Alter's view, for example, the Book of Esther departs from the 'historical verisimilitu.de' that supremely characterizes pre-exilic Hebrew narrative. Other reviewers (Jobling, Gunn) saw in the claims to the uniqueness of Hebrew monotheistic thought and narrative art a new version of earlier, discredited claims of the biblical theology movement that Hebrew thought was distinct from (and superior to) Greek thought: the dynamic Hebrews with their history-oriented, linear view of life and their God Who Acts, on the one hand, and, on the other, the mythbound Greeks and ancient Near Easterners, caught in cyclical, timeless, and static patterns of existence and subject to the caprice of their gods. Alter advanced his method of reading as one that recognized the way the biblical texts were actually constructed and used the knowledge of that construction to determine meaning. He was interested in the 'art' of biblical narrative (the 'how' of the telling) as a means to interpretation. He 13

Issues 27 (1983) and 29 (1984).

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was also interested in this art because it produced the pleasure of reading.14 It was, he suggested, a value-neutral method of reading; and this claim is reiterated in the preface to The Literary Guide to the Bible where he eschews feminist criticism, for example, as a kind of ideological addon to the basic business of discerning the narrative's artful construction and objective meaning. Yet his own book was pushing a construal of the artform itself as being 'unique'—and 'unique' in this context was clearly a value-laden term. This narrative was superior to existing artforms both in its artistry and as a vehicle for expressing a worldview that was itself superior to those of the so-called myth-bound cultures. Moreover, the artistry and worldview were inseparable. The worldview came with the artistry. Literary criticism then disclosed, the details of the text's meaning, the main dimensions and values of which—through the history-monotheism versus myth-polytheism contrast—were treated as a given by Alter and subject to no further criticism. This high valuing of the art-andthought of biblical narrative naturally appealed to many Jewish and Christian readers and has continued to do so, so that it is common to read in textbooks today of the unique art and sophistication of ancient Hebrew narrative. Where were the value judgements in this account coming from? Alter implied that they were intrinsic to the artform. But it is not easy to show that biblical narrative makes any claims regarding either its uniqueness or superiority as an artform in the ancient world. Nor does Alter offer more than the most cursory view of comparative literature, a view that is most notable for its omissions of comparable texts and its failure to accord those noticed even the possibility that they, too, might be constructed according to sophisticated principles. His conclusion is foregone. What all of the reviewers recognized, however, was the explanatory power of Alter's method of textual analysis, the skill with which he applied his tools, and the art of his own writing—it was, for many readers, a pleasure to read Alter's text. For many readers, then, the question of values was either not raised or else, as in my own case, relegated to a secondary concern. Today, my concern is markedly different, a measure of how much biblical criticism (of all kinds of texts) has changed in the intervening years, particularly under the impact of critical theory and feminist criticism's reassessment of the 'neutral' reader. I am not suggesting that the kind of formalism that Alter and others of us have espoused is intrinsically aligned with any particular ideological stance. It does mean to reiterate, however, the point that Burke Long makes in relation to Alter, and that many have made in the general field of critical theory, namely that method is never devoid of ideological implications or, perhaps better, use.15 In the language of feminist criticism, it means to ask, In whose interest is this method being promoted? B » Cf. Alter (1989). Long (1991).

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If the biblical text itself is in significant measure a construction of the reader, so too are the formalist's building blocks (repetition and variation, direct and indirect speech, omniscient narrator, etc.), though the reader may well believe that they are 'there' in the text, waiting to be discerned by means of a readerly frame, namely the reader's 'poetics'. The problem is that postulating formal features as the predominant control over my interpretation leads me too often to mistake my interpretations for objective messages encoded in the text. Likewise, since I am convinced that meaning resides in those encoded repetitions 1 am not encouraged by this method to reflect upon, let alone critique, my own predisposition to read to suit my own interest. Formalism readily aligns with the status quo. In Alter's case, and a fortiori with Meir Steinberg's poetics, such alignments become apparent when the critic seems unable to accommodate countervailing voices, such as those of feminist critics, or when the critic asserts, as both these critics are at pains to do, that the ideology (Steinberg's word, not Alter's) of the text is both unmistakable and singular—and then proceed to define this unmistakable singularity in singularly conventional theological terms. V

Alter also argued that the best general rubric for describing biblical narrative was 'prose fiction', or more precisely 'historicized fiction' or—'when we move into the period, of the Judges and Kings'—'fictionalized history'. Fifteen years ago I argued against the use of these terms. 'Prose fiction' bought into a history/fiction dichotomy that seemed to me then, but less so now, a confusing anachronism, dependent upon the historian's judgement rather than the literary critic's. To coin the labels 'historicized fiction' and 'fictionalized history' did nothing to escape the problem, though the terras have since been welcomed by many looking for a convenient bridge between their desire to read as literary critics and their need to shore up at least some remnants of their received understanding of biblical narrative as 'history'. And, indeed, the terms simply mimic the earlier claims of historical critics such as Gunkel and Gressmann to be able to discern genre shifts from myth to saga (German sage), to (oral) historical story/narrative and finally to history-writing, though these descriptions were based more on contents than sustainable formal distinctions and on the perceived distance of the subject matter (according to the biblical story's chronology) from the period of the monarchy. As it happens, the last decade, in particular, has seen the fiction quotient in Alter's categories rise drastically, at least in some circles, as historians have subjected the writing of a history of Israel to radical critique.16 Perhaps 'prose fiction' may turn out to be a helpful anachronism, after all. '* E.g. Philip Davies, Niels-Peter Lemche, Thomas Thompson, and Keith Whitelam.

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For the most part, interest in the form-critical project has waned along with waning confidence in its results. Terms such as 'legend' and 'saga' have lost currency and the portmanteau terms 'narrative' and 'story' are ubiquitous. Increasingly critics of biblical narrative have chosen their textual units on the basis of canonical form (e.g., a biblical book) or plot (e.g., the 'story of Jephthah's daughter')—which may or may not cut across conventional canonical 'book' boundaries or historical-critical 'sources'. As Jobling saw in 1983, the challenge to critics is to evolve methods of analysis that will have explanatory power for the diversity of materials that many such narratives encompass (e.g., the 'primary story' or 'Deuteronomistic history'). Noticing Alter's selectivity in choosing sections of biblical narrative for major analysis (the Joseph and David stories primarily, parts of the Jacob story, Ruth, and 1 Samuel 1), Jobling wondered what Alter would make of some other biblical texts. He instances the whole book of Judges, or, by contrast, the presence of some elements in Exod. 12: 37-39 (departure from Egypt) and Numbers 11 (desire in the desert) which seem to be both shared and random. He went on to make a case for structuralism as an alternative to Alter's literary criticism and raised the question of values: what underlies [Alter's] obviously brilliant technique is, on the showing of this book, simply a broad humanism and enlightened common sense [which he also ascribes to his readers]—equipment which seems to me adequate neither to the current philosophical scene nor to plumbing the depths of the Hebrew Bible.17

The issue, however, he continued, 'goes beyond what techniques prove useful at particular points of narrative analysis, to the whole question of what the Hebrew Bible is'. Picking up Alter's view of the Bible as dealing with dialectical tensions in Israel's belief, Jobling pressed the matter further in classic structuralist terms: The Hebrew Bible is the 'myth' of Judaism, by which I mean the expression of and the determinant of group assumptions—of which members of the group are not necessarily consciously aware—regarding what is essential to the group. It functions thus taken as a whole in its final form. . . . Judaism, for whatever reason, 'bought into' a literary abject as expressing its faith, even its 'mind', and it is from this perception that study of it should begin.18

He then pointed to how anthropologist Edmund Leach, for example, could proceed from such a point of view and read the Solomon (and related) traditions as expressive of the fourth-century community's concern with ethnic purity. In the underlying structures of myth—the places where society tries to hold together the unreconcilable—Jobling uncovered the lines of a major alternative to the New Criticism's concern for the nuances of the narrative surface. 17

(1983), 93.

"> Ibid., 94.

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Alter and Kermode also eschewed structuralism and deconstruction as approaches appropriate to their volume. Not surprisingly, Jobling was not among the contributors. He himself, however, in 1986 furnished a second volume of essays in structuralist vein that have proved prescient in the way they identify pervasive topics in a narrative, open up questions of readers' interests, and handle major textual disjunctions. His analysis of Judges and deuteronomic political theory, for example, sought a way of understanding discordances in the text without collapsing or harmonizing them. Thus, instead, of dissipating the often observed pro- and antimonarchical strains in the book into redactional layers, he held them in tension in Levi-Straussian fashion. The book thus construes its account of polity in a way that is neither 'pro' nor 'anti', nor, for that matter, 'balanced'. This construction, Jobling argued, opens for its exilic audience possibilities for creating a new 'political theology' for its own situation. Here structuralism in biblical studies stood on the verge of a more radical poststmcturalist move to the reader and textual instability. VI

From the mid-eighties major literary-critical studies and collections appeared with increasing frequency. Alex Preminger and Edward Greenstein edited The Hebrew Bible in Literary Criticism, and Greenstein subsequently brought together some of his own work in Essays on Biblical Method and Translation. Cheryl Exum edited in 1989 a collection of papers, mostly on narrative, that well convey a sense of the literary-critical activity of the end of the eighties. David Clines published the following year a set of his own essays on a range of narrative texts, essays that were typically both eminently readable and indicative of important directions literary criticism had been taking in the eighties and was to take in the nineties. The books of Samuel continued to be favourites. Joel Rosenberg explored political allegory in Genesis and Samuel, Previously established critics Fokkelman, Miscall and Polzin all wrote extensively on this material, along with Brueggemann in a more theological vein and trenchant critic Lyle Eslinger. Eslinger also treated the Deuteronomistic History as a whole.19 The first of several book-length studies of Judges appeared in 1987 in the form of Barry Webb's close reading of the whole book, Webb's monograph, which saw the book as addressing the issue of Yhwh's failure to give Israel the whole land as promised, attended to complexities of structure as a clue to meaning. He showed themes of Israel's apostasy and Yhwh's refusal to be 'used' by Israel reaching a climax in the Samson episode, and. treated the Inal chapters as a coda resonating with many 19 Rosenberg (1986); Fokkelman (1986) and (1990); Miscall (1986); Polzin (1989) and (1993); Brueggemann (e.g. 1985); Eslinger (1985); (1989).

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ironic references to the main story. Lillian Klein configured the book as an ironic spiral ('the widening gyre') of anti-Yahwism and the displacement of integrity by territory until 'mere anarchy is loosed upon the world' (quoting W. B. Yeats).20 The new veins of criticism also began to show in commentary writing, especially in series addressing an audience beyond the academic guild. E. John Hamlin's 1990 book on Judges is notable: he interpreted, in terms of liberation and cross-cultural reading (with a Southeast Asian focus), drawing freely on Norman Gottwald (Israel's formation through social revolution), on literary critical method, and on feminist criticism. Thomas W. Mann explored the 'narrative integrity7 of GenesisDeuteronomy. Ezra-Nehemiah was the subject of a book-length study by Tamara Cohn Eskenazi and Danna Nolan Fewell read Daniel 1-6 as a narrative whole, rather than as discrete tales according to historicalcritical (form-critical) designations, in a close reading with deconstruct!ve sympathies. James W. Flanagan, while not claiming to be a literary critic, wrote an extraordinary, interdisciplinary, study of the figure of David as a metaphor of the social world of Iron Age I and then constructed a systemic model of literary images of the David figure in the Hebrew Bible as a whole, drawing from Psalms, Chronicles, and the Deuteronomistic History, as well as the books of Samuel. All of these studies appeared in 1988. ' The question of literary criticism's relation to historical criticism exercised many. A common strategy (indeed a commonplace of book reviews) of historical critics willing, albeit grudgingly, to allow literary criticism some place in the sun was to insist that it must build on the achievements of historical criticism, as though the latter were 'basic' to biblical criticism, It remained the case, however, that much of the best literary criticism, that which carved out literary criticism's place in the field of biblical studies, was largely independent of, or in controversy with, historical criticism, Few scholars, in practice, demonstrated an ability to afford literary and historical criticism equally serious consideration in a sustained study of biblical narrative. Among early exceptions are David Clines and W. Lee Humphreys,21 Marxist criticism has viewed with deep suspicion theory and practice that leave out of account the production of the text. The text is a literary product of some 'history' which is its 'absent cause', as Frederic Jameson puts it.22 Jobling is one of the first biblical critics to have attempted to write from such a perspective, for example, on the account of Solomon's reign in 1 Kings 3—10.23 Using Peter Brooks's model of plot as desire, Daniel Hawk wrote on plot in Joshua. His 1991 book remains one of the few to have tackled 211 22

Klein (1989). Jameson (1981).

21

Clines (1984) and Humphries (1985) and (1988), » In Jobling and Moore (eds.) (1991).

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Joshua at length from a literary-critical approach. The book was also one of the first in a new series, 'Literary Currents in Biblical Interpretation', designed to foster literary-critical scholarship in a variety of modes (see also the important series, 'Indiana Studies in Biblical Literature')- Another early title in the series, on a biblical book that has received significant attention from narrative and feminist critics (including both Mieke Bal and Phyllis Trible), was a study of characters in Ruth by Danna Fewell and myself.24 The study employed the device of retelling the story as a way of giving narrative expression to an interpretation which was also presented analytically. Such recourse to narrative (and poetry) in critical writing has precedents outside biblical studies and is becoming more common in our own field. Also early in the series, David Penchansky's 1990 book on Job signalled the growing engagement of biblical literary criticism with ideological criticism and deconstruction. Drawing on the work of Pierre Macherey and Fredric Jameson, Penchansky explored dissonances of the text of Job as a window into the social conflict producing the text and as a means by which readers explore the dissonances in their own world. VII

A powerful influence in reader-oriented criticism since the mid-eighties has been Dutch narratologist Mieke Bal.25 In Death and Dissymmetry, a study of the book of Judges, she deconstructs the customary coherence, seen in a pattern of holy war, and reads for a counter-coherence, seen in a pattern of murder. With others, she sees gender-based violence shaping the book. Radically, she affirms the women who kill men. In a world where men have disproportionate power over body, life and language, these women introduce a countervailing anger. They kill 'for' the women victims. Schooled in critical theory and wielding interpretive tools borrowed widely from, for example, semiotics, psychoanalysis and anthropology, Bal has challenged biblical critics to broaden their disciplinary horizons. She is adamant that her own narratology, which, has structuralist roots, does not produce the only 'correct' interpretation. (Here clearly she differs from the other professional narratologist in the field, Steinberg.) Rather she believes that working with a given set of concepts for describing a text makes the discussion accessible to others. In a sense the distinctions that narrative theory formulates are heuristic—they have no essential reality in themselves but they enable interpretation to proceed in a consistent and discussible manner. As a feminist reading strategy, Bal often makes particular use of the concept of point of view, what she calls focalization. Another strategy, 24

Fewell and Gunn (1990).

K

Ba! (1985); (1987); (1988a); (1988b).

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characteristic of deconstruction, is to build a reading around some puzzling element in the text that is usually bypassed or harmonized (cf. Penchansky). By dwelling on what appears to be intractably discordant she can often expose both the traces of the 'other' voice that the dominant voice (or subject) of the text 'suppresses' and the ideological (e.g., patriarchal) stamp of traditional interpretation. Perhaps most strikingly, her work is marked, by illuminating shifts in disciplinary perspective. Thus in 'A Body of Writing: Judges 19'2(> she considers relationships between death, women, and representation through an analysis of narrative argumentation which includes a Rousseau short story and a sketch, by Rembrandt. Her work is arguably the single most creative force at play in current studies of biblical narrative. A growing diversity of approaches to biblical criticism is a mark of the 1990s. For example, Gale A. Yee's contributors to Judges and Method address narrative, social scientific, feminist, structuralist, deconstructive, and ideological criticism. At the same time, in the definition and application of these criticisms there is often significant overlap: Fewell's deconstructive (but also narrative, feminist, and ideological) reading of Achsah and the '(e)razed city of writing' in the chapter on deconstructive criticism is a case in point. Elsewhere, she and I have attempted to write a feminist deconstructive reading of Genesis-Kings as a narrative whole, recasting the story from one where well-to-do male heads of households are in the 'subject' position into one where women and children have subjectivity, and. in the process attending to legal texts encompassed by the narrative and to questions of social location. Both of us would still claim literary criticism as a primary category with which to describe our work. So, too, I think, would ideological critic Randall C. Bailey, whose readings are imbued, with questions relating to race and class, among other dimensions.27 David Clines and Cheryl Exum in their editorial introduction to The New Literary Criticism list deconstruction, feminist criticism, political criticism, psychoanalytic criticism, and reader-response criticism as major topics under the broad, rubric 'literary criticism'. The list could easily be expanded. Several scholars, for example, have used folklore studies (a resource common earlier in the century) to illuminate biblical narratives, with particular interest in the trickster figure.28 Elsewhere, for example, Ken Stone employs Bat's narratology and shows the advantage of bringing an anthropological frame to bear on questions of gender, as he discusses honour and shame in narratives drawn from Judges, Samuel, and Kings.29 Lori L. Rowlett draws on Michel. Foucault's principle that power 36 27 38 29

Bal(1993). Fewell and Gunn (1993); Bailey (1991). E.g., Niditch (1990) and (1996); see also articles in Exum and Bos (1988) (eds.). Stone (1996); see also Matthews and Benjamin (1996) (eds.) and Laniak (1998).

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is something exercised rather than merely possessed to read the conquest narrative of the book of Joshua as a text defining identity and otherness in a complex web of negotiations. Roland Boer applies Fredric Jameson's Marxist model of interpretation to the Jeroboam narratives in 1 Kings 11-14, and 2 Chronicles 10-13. All the while, formalist literary analysis has continued to be elaborated, sometimes in conjunction with redactional ('diachronic') criticism, as, for example, in Robert H. O'Connell's extensive account of the 'rhetorical purpose' of the Judges 'compiler/redactor'. This purpose O'Connell infers from formal structures and 'motivic patterns' recurring throughout the book's narrative framework and from patterns of plot-structure and characterization in the plot-based deliverer stories and ending.30 VIII Despite the perseverance of formalist approaches, it is clear that the exploration of texts from reader-oriented perspectives (not necessarily the same as 'reader-response') has been at the cutting edge of Hebrew Bible narrative studies over the past decade, particularly where critics are taking account of the ideological dimensions and deconstructive possibilities of reading. Nowhere is this better exemplified, than in the lucid essays by David Clines,31 with topics such as 'Haggai's Temple, Constructed, Deconstructed and Reconstructed', 'God in the Pentateuch: Reading against the Grain', and 'David the Man: The Construction of Masculinity in the Hebrew Bible'. Critics are also increasingly interested in reading a text in light of its 'intertextuality'—its interconnection with texts lying 'outside' its immediate contextual boundaries.32 This interest harks back to the 'narrative analogies' that critics such as Alter and Miscall earlier saw between story segments or 'type scenes' (such as a 'betrothal scene'), though it now embraces a much broader and more nuanced range of interrelations between texts that often historical critics have deemed to be unrelated. Thus Fewell reads Judges as a rewriting of Genesis for the purpose of constructing post-exilic identity—and accordingly constructs her own essay dialogically as a play of past and present voices.33 Ranging even more widely, Claudia V. Camp in a forthcoming book uses Proverbs 1—9 as an analytical starting point from which to explore the play between wisdom and priestly interests in an array of narratives, such as the stories of Dinah, Miriam, Samson, and Solomon. She combines an eclectic literary criticism (with structuralist and deconstructive leanings) with a concern for anthropological and social historical readings as 30 32

Rowlett (1997); Boer (1996); O'Connell (1996). Cf. Fewell (1992) (ed.).

31 33

(1995a). Fewell (1997).

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she deploys the metaphorical figure of 'strangeness', set against wisdom on the one hand and holiness on the other, to several ends. She undermines the Bible's ostensibly sharp constructions of identity between Israelites and non-Israelites, as well as between priest and non-priest. Similarly, she complicates polarizing analyses of power and powerlessness with respect to both gender relations and the politics of the postexilic period. Moreover, in illuminating the conjunction of priestly and wisdom writing, her readings also offer insight into the tensions and convergences which shape the Hebrew canon.34 Both Fewell and Camp exemplify, in different ways, an important move to incorporate ancient social location once again into the construction of narrative meaning. Both do so by postulating post-exilic implied readers, in line with the shift to assign a post-exilic date to Genesis-Kings.35 Alice Bach also makes use of a range of 'intertexts', both biblical and extra-biblical, in her study of 'wicked' women—Potiphar's wife, Bathsheba, Delilah, and Salome.3*' She seeks to construct subjectivity for these women characters through appeal to intertexts which are either renditions of the 'same' story (such as the ancient Jewish Hellenistic romance, Joseph and Aseneth, and The Testament of Joseph) or narratives of 'different' stories with shared features. By moving backwards and forwards between these various texts, searching out their sameness and difference, she finds clues to alternate ways of construing her biblical characters and their ideological cast. Nor does she privilege the biblical text as the 'original', but instead shifts her readerly focus from one text to another, allowing, for example, the biblical text to be read in light of the Greek romance, and. the Greek romance to be read in light of the biblical text. Her goal is the elaboration of alternative stories that bring enhanced subjectivity ('life') to the characters, especially those whose perspective appears to be given short shrift in the texts. In the process of exploring her intertexts she moves her analysis yet a step further by bringing into play modern 'retellings' in text, art, and particularly film. Recognizing the implication of herself and her own readers in the construction of meaning, she is seeking to track some of the ways in which interpretations become 'received' in particular cultures and subliminally shape further interpretation, irrespective of what is actually 'in' the text. By way of comparison, Michael Fishbane's interest in the relation between texts, inner-biblical exegesis, involves tracing the way biblical texts have come into being as interpretive reflexes of other biblical texts.37 Bach is not postulating an historical sequence of influences by text upon 34

Camp (2000). Camp has long seen this period as one of important social and literary formation; see Camp (1985). 36 Bach (1997). 37 See, e.g. Fishbane (1985). 35

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text but rather she is treating the biblical text in synchronic fashion, as a collage which may offer insight into the values of an ancient Mediterranean society and which may be read against a similar collage of contemporary texts and images which purport to derive from the ancient text. Fishbane's primary interest is in the (objective) history of ancient interpretation; Bach's is in the (subjective) role of the contemporary reader/viewer in constructing meaning. Biblical narrative is deeply embedded in Western art and movies. Bach's analyses are symptomatic of a growing interest in such cultural appropriations, how they are to be understood in their cultural context, and, very importantly, how they shape our reading of the biblical texts themselves. The essays that Bach has edited recently in 'Biblical Glamour and Hollywood Glitz offer an excellent starting point for the inquiring reader. So, too, does Cheryl Exum's pioneering Plotted, Shot, and Painted: Cultural Representations of Biblical Women, with studies of narratives, including Bathsheba, Michal, Naomi and Ruth, and Delilah, in (variously) text, painting, and film. I dwell on Bach's 1997 book because it seems to me to point to important and potentially fruitful approaches to biblical narrative—her intertextual exploration, for example, has great potential in a discipline long given to drawing tight 'canonical' boundaries around its subject matter-— and also because it points up some seemingly intractable problems that continue to confound the notion of a postmodern criticism that is not at the same time modern. Let me say a few words on this last point. Basic to Bach's project is her attempt to find a way of reading as a feminist critic, reading 'against the grain' of the text, by revaluing the notion of 'character' in biblical narrative and by constructing the narrator as a character and a potentially unreliable one at that (hence her contention against Steinberg). A reader who views the narrator as unreliable and who does not subscribe to Sternberg's theory of the 'blank' (a lack of information that is off-limits, irrelevant, to the interpreter, unlike the relevant 'gap' that invites filling) can probably construct any number of undermining alternatives to what appears to be the surface meaning of the text without departing radically from conventional construals of the syntax and the semantics of the words of the text. In practice this reading strategy is difficult to sustain (Bach's book is no exception). An obvious reason has to do with the notion of the 'grain'. Reading 'against the grain' implies that the text is already encoded with its ideological meaning and that this meaning is stable. It also implies that the critic can readily recognize this meaning as a precondition to reading against it. That is essentially the position Esther Fuchs, for example, adopted. It is not, I think, a position to which Bach would immediately subscribe, at least in theory. One may not doubt (though some critics do)

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that authors encode ideologies in texts and yet still recognize that the determination of that ideology (the 'grain') is the reader's construction and highly dependent, for example, upon the reader's social location. Nothing is stable here. The ease with which one may slide between the rhetoric of meaning 'constructed by the reader' to meaning 'discovered in the text' is something I know from my own critical writing. It is also nicely portrayed in The Postmodern Bible?8 While periodically championing reader-located theories of textual meaning, the authors' Collective espouses 'grain' language, without comment, when applauding ideological criticism of the text by feminists and ethnic minorities (see especially Chapter 6, on feminist and womanist criticism). Criticism is not only the creature of theory (as The Postmodern Bible sometimes seems to urge), it is also the creature of rhetoric. And often the three are at odds. IX

An ongoing issue for literary critics throughout the past three decades has been that of determinacy. If meaning is to be located 'in' the text, as the New Critics and structuralists, for example, were inclined to argue (or assume), was that meaning determinate? Among the incipient forms the question took earlier in this period was whether a critic must strive to encapsulate a narrative's meaning in terms of a single theme, or whether narratives might give expression to multiple, perhaps even contradictory, themes,39 Another form of the question concerned the roles of irony and ambiguity: if these qualities were intrinsic to biblical narrative, how was a critic to determine irony and resolve ambiguity? As noted above, Peter Miscall, alive to deconstructionist critical theory, early framed the issue as one of the intrinsic 'undecidability' of texts and put the theory into practice by reading, radically, for undecidability as opposed to determinacy.40 Critical theory, of course, has a great deal to say about textual determinacy and various biblical critics have struggled explicitly to relate theory to their own critical practice. Semeia has devoted two volumes to the question, in 1993 and. 1995, edited by Robert C. Culley and Robert B. Robinson. The responses in the first volume by Adele Berlin and Burke O. Long encapsulate the differences that have emerged between biblical critics on the issue, Berlin's position seems close to those of Alter or Sternberg. She acknowledges the place of the reader's hermeneutics in the production of meaning and urges that biblical literary critics become fully cognizant of the hermeneutical systems they are invoking. Her account of the reading process starts from the reader's choice of textual features which 'reside in the text', irrespective of the reader's reasons for choosing those features, She mentions, for example, features such as key words and repeated 38 39 Ed. Aichele et al (1995). Cf. Clines (1997). * Miscall (1983).

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patterns. It is in a further stage, where a reader moves from 'individual features' to 'a well-formed interpretation' that hermeneutics plays a role. As becomes apparent from his critique of several contributions in the volume, Long sees the reader's 'choice' of formal features as a much more thoroughgoing part of the process: in effect it is, for him, the 'choice' that is the starting point for criticism, not the alleged 'features'. Although he does not discuss Berlin's response or raise the question of 'key words', the position he articulates would suggest that Berlin's account of the formal features that are 'in' the text can easily be undermined. The idea, for example, that any words are 'key', because they are repeated, is the postulate of a theory of ancient Hebrew narrative poetics or rhetoric. This postulate might indeed be supported by evidence of ancient rhetorical conventions (in the same way that New Testament scholars argue from ancient Greek rhetorical manuals) but it remains a theoretical formulation. It is quite possible, for example, that residual conventions of oral narrative production, where repetition may have a high utility value or signal acceptable 'traditional' composition, rendered the significance of repeated terms in biblical narrative at least complex and even multivalent to ancient Hebrew-speaking audiences/readers. Whatever the case, it is difficult to single out any discrete part of the text for the purpose of investing it with significance without invoking or assuming some readerly hermeneutical system. Formal features are intrinsically meaningless. To a critic holding such a theoretical position, it is not the case, however, that simply 'anything goes'. Critics negotiate areas where agreement is possible according to recognized rules of discourse. This is usually most obvious and easiest at points in the reading process where decisions do not appear to carry explicit ideological freight, such as Berlin's observation of repeated words, or arguments about the semantics of a particular lexical item or phrase, though in reality such 'neutral' decisions may be heavily freighted, as many of the essays make clear in the recent volume on race, class and politics of translation edited by Tina Pippin and Randall C. Bailey. In the second Semeia volume on textual determinacy, David Clines has what I find to be a very helpful essay on 'Varieties of Indeterminacy'. He offers 'an account of the experiences of a practical exegete and textual scholar alert to the question of meaning, and not a little surprised, at times, by the apparent mismatch between what I hold as theory and what I find myself doing by way of "good practice"'. In trying to make sense of his demonstrable ambivalences toward indeterminacy in his own work, he comes up with some observations. One is that the more text the critic is handling, the more indeterminacy may be likely to seem a viable option (which accounts in part for the difference between his push for determinacy as a lexicographer, on the one hand, and for indeterminacy as a deconstructive critic of the book of Job, on the other). Another observation

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is that a critic has finally to make choices to present and to defend as viable in the public arena where biblical criticism is a shared discourse, unless the critic wishes to retreat into a private incommunicable world. Even indeterminate (strictly speaking, undecidable) readings must be negotiated with the interpretive community and that means serious commitment to at least some common rules and rhetoric. Deconstruction focuses on meaning in texts as always potentially destabilizing, on how texts have a way of undermining themselves. Against the (sometimes justified) criticisms that deconstruction is solipsistic, amoral, inimical to political change, I have always been inclined to argue that one can (and does) start and stop a deconstructive reading at will, and that it is precisely the stopping that obliges one to stake out, and take responsibility for, the moral values and political or ideological stands that motivate the stopping and decide the undecidable. By the same token I am obliged to recognize that my stopping is always subject to shift, that the exercise of power in reading is always a process. Any talk of indeterminacy and undecidability raises the question of the ethics of reading which encompasses, rather than is a subset of, the topic of the ethics of the text. Again the second Setneia volume on textual determinacy is an excellent entry point into current discussion. Stuart Lasine, who was writing on indeterminacy and the Bible more than a decade ago, has also long been concerned to understand where ethics belongs in the reading process. His essay in the volume in question examines how 'vagueness, contradiction, competing intertexts, and ambiguous genre conventions generate indeterminacy' in the Solomon narrative of 1 Kings 3-11. It also suggests how differing ideological stances have led scholars 'to make incompatible determinate judgments' concerning Solomon's wealth and 'golden age'. At this point Lasine considers what is at stake ethically for the reader when Yhwh's influence on Solomon's career is assessed.. Elsewhere in the volume New Testament critic Gary Phillips discusses the implications of deconstructive reading: Above all else, deconstruction stirs up important questions about responsibility: the obligation we have as readers and citizens to come to grips with our culture's central texts (especially the Bible), with one another as readers, with our culture, with history, and with the obligation of obligation. It may very well be that deconstruction's most enduring contribution is that it flushes out those ethical issues implied in every aspect of our critical actions as professional readers of the Bible, as believers, as teachers, as citizens in order to get us to be even more responsible.'"

A recent volume of Semeia edited by Phillips and Fewell addresses as its main topic, 'Bible and ethics of reading', and contains a valuable introduction by the editors,42 41

Phillips (1995), 197.

« Phillips and Fewell (1997).

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Characteristic of much cutting edge biblical criticism as the decade comes to a close is a more explicit dialogue than has previously pertained between biblical critic and contemporary writers, particularly theorists, whose work lies in the main outside the conventional boundaries of biblical studies. Lack of such dialogue is one of the major complaints levelled against biblical criticism over the past few decades by the Bible and Culture Collective in The Postmodern Bible, Exemplary today is the interweaving of theory and critical practice, interpretation, that emerges in the writing of Timothy K. Beal. Beal's analysis of Esther in The Book of Hiding moves easily between the biblical narrative, on the one hand, and the texts of contemporary writers such as Judith Butler, Helene Cixous, Luce Irigaray, and Emmanuel Levinas, on the other, illuminating both ancient and contemporary texts as he thinks through their correspondences. Characteristic, too, as has already been indicated above in relation to other recent work, is a deep engagement with questions of self and other (i.e., issues of identity) in a variety of construals—of gender, ethnicity, nationality, and religion. Forthcoming studies by scholars such as Yvonne Sherwood on Jonah, or Jan Tarlin on the Elijah narratives, will show the same combination of close reading of the text and wide-ranging engagement with critical theory. But while the work of biblical critics such as those I have instanced in these last several pages may suggest distinct outlines of future narrative criticism in Hebrew Bible studies it cannot contain the remarkable diversity of approach that we have seen over the past decade, a diversity which will continue to mark, muddy, and keep redefining the field. Even the publishing outlets for new work have expanded and diversified. In particular, Biblical Interpretation (Brill) has quickly become a home for a range of 'contemporary approaches', as has also its companion monograph series. Two other new series are Gender, Culture, Theory (Sheffield Academic) and Biblical Limits (Routledge). Most recently, Biblicon (Sheffield Academic) has focused on Bible, media, and culture. Berit Olam: Studies in Hebrew Narrative and Poetry (The Liturgical Press) is publishing commentaries with a strong literary flair.43 The lack of an obvious institutional centre (unless it be the University of Sheffield) for a 'discipline' of narrative criticism or literary criticism is paralleled by the lack of an obvious theoretical or methodological centre. That, it seems to me, has been a strength of this broad stream of critical endeavour and is still probably a healthy, if sometimes confusing, state of affairs. 43

Note especially David Jobling's deeply considered account of 1 Samuel, appearing too late for proper notice in this essay. Jobling models a richly rewarding postmodern mode of criticism, including an autobiographical awareness of the relationship between author and method.

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Bibliography AICHELE, G. et ttl. (1995), The Postmodern Bible (New Haven: Yale University Press). ALTER, R. (1981), The Art of Biblical Narrative (New York: Basic Books). — (1989), The Pleasures of Reading in an Ideological Age (New York: Simon and Schuster). ALTER, R. and KERMODE, F. (1987), The Literary Guide to the Bible (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press). BACH, A. (1997), Women, Seduction and Betrayal in Biblical Narratives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). BACH, A. (1996) (ed.), Biblical Glamour and Hollywood Glitz (Semeia 74; Atlanta: Scholars Press). BAILEY, R. C. (1991), 'Beyond Identification: The Use of Africans in Old Testament Poetry and Narratives', in. Stony the Road We Trod: African American Biblical Interpretation, ed. C. H. Felder (Minneapolis: Fortress Press), 165-84. BAKHTIN, M. (1981), The Dialogic Imagination (London: University of Texas Press). BAL, M. (1985), Narmtology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative (Toronto: University of Toronto Press). — (1987), Lethal Love (Bloomington: Indiana University Press). — (1988a), Murder and Difference (Bloomington: Indiana University Press). — (1988b), Death and Dissymmetry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). •—(1993), 'A Body of Writing: Judges 19', in A Feminist Companion to Judges, ed. A. Brenner (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press), 208-30. BAR-EFRAT, S. (1989), Narrative Art in the Bible (Sheffield: Almond Press) (original Hebrew edn: Sifrat Poalim 1979). BEAL, T. K. (1997), The Book of Hiding: Gender, Ethnicity, Annihilation and Esther (London: Routledge). BERLIN, A. (1983), Poetics and Interpretation of Biblical Narrative (Sheffield: Almond Press). — (1993), The Role of the Text in the Reading Process', in Culley and Robinson, 143-47. BOER, R. (1996), Jameson and Jeroboam (Atlanta: Scholars Press). BROOK, P. (1984), Reading for the Plot (New York: Random House). BRUEGGEMANN, W. (1985), David's Truth (Philadelphia: Fortress Press). CAMP, C. V. (1985), Wisdom and the Feminine in the Book of Proverbs (Sheffield: Almond Press). — (2000), Wise, Strange, and Holy: The Strange Woman and the Making of the Bible (Stanford: Stanford University Press), CHATMAN, S. (1978), Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Ithaca: Cornell University Press). CLINES, D. J. A. (1978), TJje Theme of the Pentateuch (JSOTS 10; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press) (2nd edn. 1997).' — (1984), The Esther Scroll (JSOTS 30; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press). •—(1990), What Does Eve Do To Help? And Other Readerly Questions to the Old Testament (JSOTS 94; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press). — (1995a), Interested Parties: The Ideology of Writers and Readers of the Hebrew Bible (JSOTS 205; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press). — (1995b), 'Varieties of Indeterminacy', in Culley and Robinson (1995) 17-27.

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CLINKS, D, J. A., GUNN, D. M. and HAUSER, A. J. (1982), Art and Meaning: Rhetoric in Biblical, Literature (JSOTS 19; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press). CRENSHAW, J. (1978), Samson: A Secret Betrayed, A Vow Ignored (Atlanta: John Knox). CULUBY, R. C. (1975) (ed.), Classical Hebrew Narrative (Missoula: Scholars Press). CULLEY, R, C, and ROBINSON R, B. (1993) (eds.), Textual Determinacy 1 (Semeia 62; Atlanta: Scholars Press). — (1995), Textual Determinacy II (Semeia 71; Atlanta: Scholars Press). DAVI.ES, P. R. (1995), Whose Bible is it Anyway? (JSOTS 204; Sheffield: Sheffield. Academic Press). ESKENAZI, T. C. (1988), In an Age of Prose (Atlanta: Scholars Press). ESLINGBR, L. (1985), Kingship of God in Crisis (Sheffield: Almond. Press). — (1989), Into the Hands of the Living God (Sheffield: Almond Press). EXUM, }. CHERYL (1989), Signs and Wonders; Biblical Texts in Literary Focus (Atlanta: Scholars Press). — (1996), Plotted, Shot and Painted; Cultural Representations of" Biblical Women (JSOTS 215; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press). EXUM, J. C. and Bos, J. W. H. (1988) (eds.), Reasoning with the Foxes: Female Wit in a World of Male Power (Semeia 42; Atlanta: Scholars Press). EXUM, J. CHERYL and CU.NES, D. J. A. (1993) (eds.), The New Literary Criticism and the Hebrew Bible (JSOTS 143; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press).* FEWELL, D. N. (1988), Circle of Sovereignty (Sheffield: Almond Press [2nd. edn, Nashville: Abingdon 1991 ]). — (1997), 'Imagination, Method and Murder: Un/Framing the Face of Post-Exilic. Israel', in Reading Bibles, Writing Bodies: Identity and the Book, ed. T. K. Beal and. D. M. Gunn (London: Routledge), 132-52. FEWELL, D. N. (1992) (ed..), Reading between Texts: Intertext utility and the Hebrew Bible (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox), FEWELL, D. N. and GUNN, D. M, (1990), Compromising Redemption (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox). (1993), Gender, Power and Promise: The Subject of the Bible's First Story (Nashville: Abingdon Press). FEWELL, D. N. and PHILLIPS, G. A. (1997) (eds.)/ Bible and Ethics of Reading (Semeia 77; Atlanta: Scholars Press). FISHBANE, M. (1979), Text and Texture: Close Readings of Selected Biblical Texts (New York: Schocken). — (1985), Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel (Oxford: Clarendon Press). FLANAGAN, J. W. (1988), David's Social Drama: A Hologram of Israel's Early Iron Age (Sheffield: Almond Press). FOKKELMAN, J. (1975), Narrative Art in Genesis (Assen: van Gorcum (reprinted Sheffield Academic Press 1992)). — (1981), Narrative Art and Poetry in the Books of Samuel, I (Assen: van Gorcum). — (1986), Narrative Art and Poetry in the Books of Samuel, II (Assen: van Gorcum). (1990), Narrative Art and Poetry in the Books of Samuel, III (Assen: van Gorcum). FRY, N. (1982), The Great Code: The Wtble and Literature (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich). FUCHS, E. (1985a), 'The Literary Characterization of Mothers and Sexual Politics in the Hebrew Bible', in Feminist: Perspectives in Biblical Scholarship, ed. A. Y. Collins (Chico: Scholars Press), 117-36.

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— (1985b), 'Who is Hiding the Truth? Deceptive Women and Biblical Androcentrism', in Feminist Perspectives in Biblical Scholarship, ed. A. Y. Collins (Chico: Scholars Press), 137-44. GOOD, E. (1981), Irony in the. Old Testament (Sheffield: Almond Press) (1st edn. Philadelphia: Westminster 1965)), GREENSTEIN, E, (1989), Essays on Biblical Method and Translation (Atlanta: Scholars Press). GROS Louis, K. and ACKERMAN, J. (1974), Literary Interpretations of Biblical Narratives (Nashville: Abingdon Press), (1982), Literary Interpretations of Biblical Narratives II (Nashville: Abingdon Press). GUNN, D. M. (1978), The Story of King David (JSOTS 6; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press). — (1981), The Fate of King Saul (JSOTS 14; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press), — (1984), Review of R. Alter, Tlie Art of Biblical Na native, JSOT 29:109-16. -—(1988), 'New Directions in the Study of Biblical Hebrew Narrative', /SOT 39: 65-75. GUNN, D. M. and FEWELL, D. N. (1993), Narrative in the Hebrew Bible (Oxford: Oxford University Press). HAMLIN, E. J. (1990), At Risk in the Promised Land. A Commentary on the Book of Judges (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans). HAWK, D. (1991), Every Promise Fulfilled (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox). HUMPHREYS, W. L. (1985), The Tragic Vision and the Hebrew Tradition (Philadelphia: Fortress Press). — (1988), Joseph and his Family (Columbia: South Carolina University Press). JACKSON, J. J. and KESSLER, M. (1974), Rhetorical Criticism (Pittsburgh: Pickwick Press). JAMESON, F. (1981), The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press). JOBUNG, D. (1978), The Sense of Biblical Narrative (JSOTS 7; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press (2nd edn. 1986)). — (1983), Review of R. Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative, JSOT 27: 87-99. •—(1986), The Sense of Biblical Narrative, II (JSOTS 39; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press). (1993), 'Ruth Finds a Home: Canon, Politics, Method', in Exum and Clines (1993) (eds.), 125-39. — (1998), I Samuel (Collegeville: The Liturgical Press). JOBUNG, D. and MOORE, S. D. (1991) (eds.), Poststructumlism as Exegesis (Semeia 54; Atlanta: Scholars Press). KLEIN, L. R. (1989), The Triumph of Irony in the Book of Judges (Sheffield: Almond Press). LANDY, F. (1.983), Paradoxes of Paradise (Sheffield; Almond Press). LANIAK, T. S. (1998), Shame and Honor in the Book of Esther (Atlanta: Scholars Press). LASINTE, S, (1995), The King of Desire: Indeterminacy, Audience, and the Solomon Narrative', in Culley and Robinson (1995) (eds.), 85-118. LONG, B. O. (1991), The "New" Biblical Poetics of Alter and Sternberg', JSOT 51: 71-84.

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LONG, B. O. (1981) (ed.), Images of Man and God: Old Testament Short Stories in Literary f-'ocus (Sheffield: Almond Press). MCCARTER, P. K. (1980), 1 Samuel (AB 8; New York: Doubleday). MAGONET, J. (1976), Form and Meaning (Bern; Lang (2nd edn, Sheffield: Almond Press 1983)), MANN, T. W. (1988), The Book of the Torah (Atlanta: John Knox). MATTHEWS, V. H. and BENJAMIN, D. C. (1996) (eds.)/ Honor and Shame in the World of the Bible (Semeia 68; Atlanta: Scholars Press). MISCALL, P, (1978), The Jacob and Joseph Stories as Analogies', /SOI* 6: 28-40. — (1983), The Workings of Biblical Narrative (Philadelphia: Fortress Press). •— (1986), 1 Samuel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press). NIPITCH, S, (1990) (ed.), Text and Tradition: The Hebrew Bible and Folklore (Atlanta: Scholars Press). — (1996), Oral World and Written Word: Ancient Israelite Literature (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press). O'CoNNELL, R. H. (1996), The Rhetoric of the Book of fudges (Leiden: Brill). PENCHANSKY, D. (1990), The Betrayal of God: Ideological Conflict in Job (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox). PHILLIPS, G. A. (1995) '"You Are Either Here, Here, Here, or Here": Deconstruction's Troublesome Interplay', in Culley and Robinson (1995) (eds.), 193-211. PHILLIPS, G. A. and FEWELL, D. N. (1997), 'Ethics, Bible, Reading As If, in Fewell and Phillips (1997) (eds.), 1-21. PIPPIN, T. and BAILEY, R. C. (1997) (EDS.), Race, Class and Politics of Biblical Translation (Semeia 76; Atlanta: Scholars Press). POLZIN, R. (1980), Moses and the Deuteronomist (New York: Seabury). — (1989), Samuel and the Deuteronomist (New York: Harper and Row). — (1993), David and the Deuteronomist (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), PREMINGER A. and. GREENSTEIN, E. (1986) (eds.), The Hebrew Bible in Literary Criticism (New York: Ungar). ROSENBERG, J. (1986), King and Kin (Bloomington: Indiana University Press). ROWLETT, L. L. (1997), Joshua and the Rhetoric of Violence: A New Historicist Analysis (JSOTS 226; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press). STERNBERG, M. (1985), Tlte Poetics of Biblical Narrative (Bloomington: Indiana University Press). STERNBERG, M. and PERRY M. (1968), 'The King through Ironic Eyes: The Narrator's Devices in the Story of David and Bathsheba and Two Excursuses on the Theory of the Narrative Text', Hasifrut 1,262-91 (Heb) (ET in Poetics Today 7, 1986). STONE, K. (1996), Sex, Honor and Power in the Deuteronomistic History (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press). TRIBLE, P. (1978), God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality (Philadelphia: Fortress Press). (1984), Texts of Terror: Literary feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives (Philadelphia: Fortress Press). UPENSKY, B, (1973), A Poetics of Composition (Berkeley: University of California Press). WEBB, B. (1987), The Book of Judges (JSOTS 46; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press). YEE, G. A. (1995) (ed.). Judges and Method: New Approaches in Biblical Studies (Minneapolis: Fortress Press).

10

Hebrew Poetry W. G. E. WATSON

Introductory Recent work

THE discovery of the verse traditions of the ancient Near East, especially from Ras Shamra (Ugarit) has led to a revival of interest in Hebrew poetry in recent years.1 Both Ugaritic and Hebrew poetry belong to the same tradition especially in terms of poetic technique and figurative language.2 Comparative studies are too numerous to list, but special attention must be paid to the Ras Shamra Parallels Project3 among a number of other studies,4 Another approach has been from the disciplines of literary studies* and of linguistics, particularly under the influence of Roman Jakobson.6 Stimulus of a different kind has been provided by studies on Greek verse in the light of oral tradition, exemplified by the work of Parry and Lord on Yugoslavian improvised poetry. This has led to identification of the formula7 and to awareness of the significance of word pairs.8 The result of this revival has been a series of lengthy works on Hebrew poetry as welt as several journal articles and there has been a gradual refinement in the way Hebrew poetry is analysed and understood. However, as Pardee has pointed out, there is a difference between using the analytical techniques available to us in the study of Hebrew poetry and trying to understand how the poet composed and how Ms readers/listeners understood what he intended.9 Our ever increasing knowledge of ancient 1 For a brief survey ef. Raabe (1990), 9-28. For previous periods see Kugel (1981), 96-286 and Berlin (1991). 2 Avishur (1994). 3 Fisher (1972) (1975); Rummel (1981). 4 E.g. Loretz (1979); Loretz and Kotteieper (1987); Pardee (1988). 5 Sehokel (1988); Alter (1985); Kugel (1981). 6 Berlin (1985); Geller (1979); Greenstein (1983); O'Connor (1980); Collins (1978). 7 Culley (1967); Walters (1976); Whallon (1969). 8 Avishur (1984). " Pardee (1988), xv, n. 2.

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Near Eastern texts enables us to approach Hebrew poetry from both standpoints. The difficulties of reading Hebrew poetry

The difficulties inherent in Hebrew poetry are due to several factors, relating to time, place and language. Overall, this type of poetry is remote in time from modern readers and the geographical setting is ancient Israel. Although most passages are difficult to date, some poems may be very early10 and even the prophetic writings, which are chiefly in verse, range from the eighth to the sixth centuries BCE. More significantly, Hebrew poetry is written in a Semitic language which is very unlike Western European languages in many respects. In particular, Hebrew is very concise, so that a line of verse can comprise just three words, e.g. krm hyh lydydy My beloved had a vineyard (Isa. 5: 1).

In addition, poetry demands a knowledge of and familiarity with its cultural setting for the allusions, oblique references, puns, imagery, etc. used. These all depend on the reader/listener reacting to the known and to the twists on the known as well as being jolted by the unknown. Furthermore, most Hebrew poetry is religious poetry with the evident exception of the Song of Songs, which has no reference at all to God or to anything religious. This means that there is virtually no secular poetry (either it has been lost, or perhaps was less likely to be composed) and therefore that the corpus is skewed. Also, there are no long epics, eulogies, or narrative verse (with a few exceptions, such as Pss. 78; 105; 106; Prov. 7: 6-23), although snatches of various types of lyric poetry have been preserved, e.g. the dirge in Jer, 22:18, the ribald song of Isa. 23:16, etc. In fact, there is almost no narrative verse at all (but see below), unlike other traditions such as Ugaritic, where most of the verse is narrative. Some would even argue that Hebrew 'poetry never narrates'.11 Furthermore, there are problems with the metrical structure which is difficult to determine (see below) and certain conventions familiar to us, such as rhyme, are not prominent, whereas other less well-known conventions, notably parallelism, are very common. However, although several references and probably many of the plays on words are lost to us, some have been identified by comparison with ancient Near Eastern texts.

10 11

See in general Robertson (1972). I. Yeivin, EM VII, col 638, translated in Preminger and Greenstein (1986), 191.

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The writing poet and the listening reader

There is a fundamental difference between production, i.e. the creative activity of the poet, and perception, the act of comprehension by listener or reader.12 Whereas there have been a considerable number of studies on poetry from the aspect of the writer (his techniques and the like), comparatively little work has been done from the point of view of the reader. The reader must assume that the goal of the poetic message 'encoded in parallel verse, is not clarity and economy; in other words, its form is not subservient to its meaning. The meaning of the poetic line is, rather, inherent in its form/13 'By the intricacy of its structuring, the text draws itself inward. For the reader . . . that structuring inevitably leads beyond the poem—creating a bond between the life of the poem and the life of the reader which permanently alters both. The multi-dimensionality of the poetic sign ensures that no two readers will experience that bond in precisely the same way.'14 A related aspect is audience participation which is particularly evident from the use of refrains. Where refrains have identical wording 'there is a strong possibility that the congregation did participate. This is supported by the fact that the refrains of Psalms 8 and 46 use the first person plural. The fact that the refrains of Psalm 67 are calls for all the peoples to praise supports a communal participation for that psalm. The parallel in 2 Chron. 7: 3 shows the probability of communal participation in the refrains of Pss. 118 and 136.'15 Further evidence is supplied by such texts as Ps. 129:1—2 ('Let Israel now say "Sorely have they afflicted me from my youth"') and. Isa. 21: 11; 2 Chron. 20: 21. The poet's resources: tradition versus innovation

To engage his audience, the poet must capture their attention by steering a middle course between tradition and novelty. Veering too much in either direction would alienate his listeners. Hence the battery of resources at the poet's command: the various forms of poetry (lyrical, didactic, narrative, etc.) and the range of techniques available (see below), both subject to change. Although almost all our knowledge of Hebrew verse derives from written documents, there are still several clues to the underlying elements of oral techniques, e.g. formulae, adding style, repetition. It is important to be aware that Hebrew poetry was oral because it helps us understand how it was composed and how, therefore, it has to be interpreted. 'In a world where personal authorship was not as sacrosanct as it is today in the Western world, and where literary tradition was more a cumulative than a repetitive process, great value was attached to the 12 por this distinction cf. Greenstein (1986-7), 33-42, esp. 42. " Cooper (1987), 240. >4 Ibid., 241. 1S Raabe (1990), 168.

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ability to rebuild a well-balanced whole from the materials at hand,'16 For instance, the formula 'wise in their eyes' of Isa. 5: 21 comes from Proverbs (3: 7; 26: 5,12,16; 28:11). A poem may comprise a large number of formulae; for example, much, of Ps, 98 comprises formulae found elsewhere:17 Ps, 98: I 3 4 5 7b 9

= Isa, 42:10; Pss. 96:1; 149:1; = Isa, 52:10; = Pss, 66:1; 100:1 (cf. Pss. 47: 2; 96: 1); = Pss. 32: 2; 147: 7 (cf. Pss. 9:12; 30: 5); = Ps. 24:1; =Pss. 96:13; 9: 9; (cf. 96:10).

Motifs, too, were traditional, e.g. the motif of sitting on the ground to denote grief Descend and sil in the dust, Virgin Daughter Babylon sit on the ground without a throne Daughter of the Chaldaeans. (Isa. 47:1}

which occurs several times (Isa, 3: 26; 58: 5; Lam. 2:10, etc.). Other motifs are the reaction to bad news (Isa. 13: 7-8; 21: 3-4; Nahum 2: 11), youth waiting at lover's door (Song 2: 10-14; 5: 2b),18 the trembling of nature (Isa, 29:6; Ps, 18:8; Job 26: lOff,),19 the battle with Chaos20 and many others, several known in Ugaritic literature. The poet's voice and the lyrical 'I'

Where poems are written in the first person singular it is not always clear whether the poet is identifying with the T of the poem. Prophets appear to speak in Yhwh's name (e.g. Hos. 12:1, though Yhwh speaks in v. 10); in Isa. 38: 10-20, Hezekiah is speaking; in Jeremiah's 'confessions' (Jer. 18: 19—23; 20: 7-13) it is again the eponymous prophet who speaks and in Prov. 8: 4ff., the T is 'Wisdom personified'. The high literary quality of the Song of Songs shows that the author is distinct from the speakers (uneducated, lovers) within the poem. He (or she) created the personne and it is they who speak, not the author, although 'Eat, lovers, drink! Drink and get drunk on love!' (Song 5: 1) may represent the author's own words.21 In laments, 'the poet often abandons his role as impartial narrator and stands rather as a privileged, internal observer, who nonetheless is not actually involved in the action',22 e.g. Isa. 15: 5; 16: 9-11; Jer. 8: 18-23; 22: 4; Lam. 2: 1.1, 13-19, Sometimes, the use of the first person singular may simply be a device adopted by the poet in order to engage his audience. 16 17 2(1

de Hoop (1995), 275. The same tradition continued in the writings from Qumran. w n Spronk (1997), 42. Culley (1967), 100. Munro (1995), 128-9. 21 n Wyatt (1996). Fox (1985), 255-6. Ibid., 33.

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Poetry or Prose The whole issue of differentiating between prose and poetry, which of course is not a new topic, was brought into the limelight in recent years by Kugel.23 Since then, the debate has been long, vigorous, and inconclusive although it is worth remembering that even ordinary conversation in a modern language has been considered a form of verse, and some Native American Indian texts which appear to be prose belong in fact to a verse tradition,24 In addition, recent attempts to discover Hebrew narrative verse in what seem to be prose texts have caused the whole issue to be raised yet again. Part of the problem lies in the absence of an overall theory for Hebrew poetry, especially whether or not it is metrical. One school of thought considers that since most Ugaritic poetry is narrative in form, there must also have been narrative verse in Hebrew.25 This has led to reanalysis of several books of the Bible-—the Samson Saga, Ruth, Jonah, etc.26 There is much to be said for this method since (a) it questions commonly held assumptions about verse and prose, (b) it shows, by using rigorous analysis based on the Masoretic text, to what extent passages apparently in prose are written in some sort of verse form, and (c) it provides some insight into the meaning of the texts concerned. Ultimately, we are up against the chief difficulty which is the relative dearth of poetic texts in classical Hebrew.27 The Hebrew Bible does not distinguish clearly between prose and verse. Even though there are separate systems of Masoretic accents for the prose and verse books, this is not useful, since they are applied globally and there are sections of verse in the prose books which are not noted with the system for verse.28 Unlike prose, verse is written in separate lines: 'Continuous correspondence of successive segments, called "lines", is the only constant feature which distinguishes verse from prose'29 and this applies whether heard or seen (i.e. read),30 Unfortunately, few Hebrew manuscripts use such lineation and so the modern interpreter has to rely on parallelism as determined by meaning and by counting letters or syllables. Indicators of verse include the use of gapping or ellipsis, the general use of parallelism in various forms, the presence of such sound patterns as rhyme or assonance and rich imagery.31 23

(1981). See O'Connor (1986), 121-32; Watson (1994), 31-44. 25 Korpel and de Moor (1986). 26 Kim (1993); Koopmans (1990); de Hoop (1988); Korpel and de Moor (1998); de Hoop (1998), etc. 27 See also de Moor and Watson (1993). 28 Cf. generally Cloete (1988), 11-12. » de Groot (1964), 299. 30 Cf. Cloete (1988), 12. " These topics are considered below. 24

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W. G. E. WATSON Metre and Rhythm

Explanations of Hebrew metre It has long been a matter of debate whether Hebrew poetry is metrical or not. For example, Lowth considered that it was impossible to recover Hebrew metre,32 yet since his time several theories have been put forward to describe and explain metre.33 Brief summaries of these theories are set out in what follows.34 Metre is based on stress It is argued that metre depends on the primary stress of words or word-groups within a line, with couplets forming patterns such as 3 + 3, 4 + 4, 4 + 33:> and so on, and similarly for tricola and longer strophes. There are several problems with this theory of which two seem to be insurmountable. First, there is considerable uncertainty about which words are to be stressed (proclitics such as b may or may not take the stress but there seem to be no fixed rules; also, there may be secondary stress and additional words can be isolated within a line, etc.). Second, no stress pattern is sustained for long within a poem, i.e. it is neither regular nor predictable. For example, van Grol concludes that none of the poems he analyses has any metrical regularity in respect of the sequence of verse lines.36 Similarly, Raabe concludes: 'In no psalm [i.e. Pss. 42-43; 49; 56; 57; 59] is there a stress pattern which is consistent and predictable from verse to verse . .. But usually there is a dominant stress pattern'37 and as examples he gives the 3 + 3 pattern as dominant in Pss, 49, 56 and 59. Van Grol also argues for an underlying stress pattern which has differing surface realizations.38 However, although there are indications that stress metre was used to some extent, for example the qinah metre, a pattern of 3 + 2 stresses, used in various forms of poetry,39 it is only by a comprehensive study 'of stress patterns in all types of discourse, using consistent stress assignment rules, can we discover to what extent some types of discourse, such as poetry, use marked stress patterns which contrast with other discourse types'.40 Metre can be recovered by counting letters or syllables Although proponents of either approach do not consider that the poets actually counted letters 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39

Likewise, O'Connor (1980) and Kugei (1981). Cobb (1905); Longman (1982), 230-54, etc. A useful summary, with critique, is provided by Andersen (1986b); also Cloete (1989). I.e. three stresses in the first line and three in the second, etc. (1986). Raabe (1990), 155. (1986). It is not exclusive to laments and some laments do not use this metre: Gordis (1978),

503. *' Andersen (1986b), 72.

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or syllables, the apparent balance of syllables (or letters) for couplets seems to indicate an underlying symmetry, e.g.: 'al-ra'sS heharan i/'zabbelul 10 syllables (16 letters) iff"al-haggeha'6t yeqafteru 10 syllables (14 letters) Upon the mountain-tops they sacrificed and upon the peaks they burned incense. (Hos. 4:13a)

When applied by modern scholars there is a tendency to make the verse fit the pattern (by excising material that does not fit) and ultimately it is equivalent to determining the lengths of lines in a poem. Metre is based on syntactic restraints Several attempts have been made to describe Hebrew metre in syntactical terms. Of these, the descriptions by O'Connor41 and Geller'12 are quite complex. Collins, instead, has proposed a fairly simple approach,43 but it has been severely criticized.44 Nevertheless, syntactic analysis does seem to be the most promising way of coming to grips with the Hebrew metrical system if there was one. According to Greenstein,*3 the two indirect indications of metre are (1) the fact that most Hebrew verse is 'in couplets in which there are two lines of virtually equal length' which take about the same time to be recited, and (2) the use of ballast variants, where the deletion of an element in the second (parallel) line is balanced by the use of a longer term (see below). An alternative to metre

Instead of strict metre, it has been proposed that 'the poets seem to have striven for rhythmical balance between the cola of a poetic verse, without ever becoming dogmatic about it. For example . . . ellipsis is often compensated for by the addition of elements (words, suffixes, etc.) which have no counterpart in the preceding colon'.46 Reading Hebrew verse

Evidently, Hebrew poets followed constraints of some sort when cornposing verse, otherwise it would be indistinguishable from prose. It is possible that musical elements, which cannot be recovered or even reconstructed, played some part in verse composition. The modern reader, especially when using a translation, must simply accept that the metrical or rhythmical component is only apparent in the balanced, parallelistic structure of most Hebrew verse and some of the effects intended by the poet are irretrievable. In conclusion, it is now generally accepted thaiHebrew poetry may not have been metrical and that this has little effect on how Hebrew verse is read and understood, especially by modern readers. 41

42 45 (1980). (1979). « (1978). « e.g. Talstra (1984). (1986-87), 37. * Sanders (1996), 135; see especially de Moor (1978). Also Giese (1994).

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W. G. E. WATSON Parallelism

Since the time of Lowth, and almost certainly much earlier, it has been established that parallelism is fundamental to Hebrew verse. In classical literature, parallelism is known as the isocolon, i.e. 'co-ordinated lines of the same length within a period or sentence group'.47 To put it in other terms, 'the most fundamental characteristic of Hebrew poetry is the preference for that certain type of information structure expressed by parallelism'.48 Several descriptions of parallelism are available.49 In terms of meaning (i.e. semantics) parallelism can take the following forms.50 Synonymous parallelism

(A = B) (or within a line a = b)

Strengthen the hands that are slack, make firm the stumbling knees! (Isa. 35: 3)

In this couplet the message of line A is reiterated using different terms in line B. A variant of this form is A // Av // B where couplet is parallel to couplet, as in Will a man take fire onto his chest and his clothes not be burned? If a man walks on embers are not his feet scorched? So is one entering his fellow's wife; whoever touches her will not go unpunished. (Prov. 6: 27-28) Parallelism within a line is apparent in Acquire wisdom, acquire discernment (Prov. 4: 5) .51

Antonymic or antithetic parallelism

Line B states the opposite of line A

(A * B):

The wealth of a rich man is his fortress, the poverty of the poor man is his ruin. (Prov. 10:15)

Alternating parallelism A couplet such as Though an army encamp against me, my heart shall not fear (Ps. 27: 3a) would appear not to exhibit parallelism. However, in combination with the following two lines, it is evident that there is parallelism, but of the type known as 'alternating', where lines A and A" correspond, as do lines Band FT: 47 48 49 50 51

Nel (1992), 135, following H. Lausberg. Andersen (1986b), 81. Berlin (1985); Limburg (1992), esp. 528-9. 'A' denotes the first line, 'B' the second line, etc.; note that a, b, etc. denote half-lines, See generally Watson (1994), 144-91.

H E B R E W POETRY (A) (B) (A*) (B"')

261

Though an army encamp against me, my heart shall not fear; though war rise against me, yet I will be confident. (Ps. 27: 3)

Other examples include Ps. 38: 4; 68: 16; 94: 18-19; Amos 5: 19; Prov. 6: 27-28 (quoted above).52 Grammatical parallelism 'That pattern in which the syntactic structure of one line of poetry is replicated in the following line(s). .. [it] serves to correlate lines that share a similar syntactic construction'53 and includes word pairs in various guises.54 It has been argued that parallel word pairs are created by word association55—the term left' provokes the corresponding term 'right', 'father' elicits 'mother' and so on, although such associative pairs can also be inventive. However, the presence of a large number of word pairs common to Ugaritic and Hebrew56 suggests instead that such pairs were part of the poet's traditional stock in trade, for example 'wine' // 'blood of grapes' (Gen. 49: 11) and 'wine' // 'blood of trees' (Ugaritic) is due to inventiveness not word association.57 It would seem that poets drew on a common traditional source but at the same time were prepared to be creative. For instance, traditional word pairs could be used in unusual ways: They are drunk, but not with wine, they stagger, but not with strong drink. (Isa. 29: 9)

Here the pair 'wine' // 'strong drink', which has a literal meaning in Prov. 31: 4; Isa. 5:11,22; 28: 7, etc. (based, on Lev. 10: 9, etc.), is used, metaphorically. Note also: 'Wine is a scoffer, strong drink a noisy person' (Prov. 20:1) where the terms are personified. Although the last two passages are easily understood, they acquire more edge in view of the traditional pair.58 A word pair can even be used as the basis of a whole poem, e.g. ysr // bf, 'to form' // 'to create', in Isa. 45.59 Building blocks: line, half-line and couplet The elemental component of Hebrew verse is the line. It can either be divided into two half-lines or doubled to form a bicolon or couplet. Occasionally, three such lines form a tricolon. The building-block of poetic 52 53 iS4

Willis (1987), Greenstein (1974). Berlin (1985), 31-63, discusses several types of morphological and syntactic parallel-

ism. 55

Berlin {1985}, 67. •"*" And other languages such as Phoenician, Aramaic and Akkadian; cf. Avishur (1984). 57 Greenstein (1986-87), 41. 58 cf. Whallon (1969), 148-50. » Miller (1984), 88-9.

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structure, then, is either the bicolon or the tricolon.60 How these blocks are combined to form poems is the subject of the next section. The line and the half-line

'Verse is language in lines'61 and in fact the basic unit in Hebrew verse is the line. Quite often, such single lines occur with no parallel line and are termed 'monocola'.62 These isolated lines are frequently used to introduce a speech or section of verse, e.g. Therefore, thus says Yhwh the Lord. (Amos 3:11)

They can also close a section of verse. In Hos. 2: 4—5 four couplets are framed by introductory and closing monocola (Hos. 5: 4a and 5: 5c).63 Frequently enough also, a single line may have inner parallelism, e.g. Abstain from, axiger // and renounce wrath. (Ps. 37: 8) The couplet

More generally, however, two single lines are combined to form a couplet or bicolon, e.g.: (A) I will save you from the hands of the wicked (A'') and rescue you from the clutches of the violent. (Jer, 15:21} Line A is a self-contained unit, a single line; line A" is a rewording of line A and in a sense is redundant. However, here a message is being put across (it comes at the close of a long poem) and the listener's task of understanding is made easier because of the parallelism. The tricolon In spite of scepticism in some quarters64 it is now accepted that three-line strophes do exist in Hebrew and it has even been argued that the tricolon is the highest strophic unit65 (however, see next section). The point at issue here is the significance of tricola: why are they used at particular points in a poem? Since the couplet is the norm, the presence of a tricolon most probably acts as a marker of some kind. In fact it seems to function largely as a transition marker, to open and/or close units of verse,66 for example, Job 10:1-2 (opening tricolon); 13:27-28 (closing tricolon).67 « Pardee (1988), 201. "' Hartman (1980), 11; cf. Cloete (1988), 12. 62 63 Note especially Fohrer (1954). Andersen and Freedman (1980), 217. 64 Notably by Mowinckel (1957). *5 Van der Lugt (1995), 475, n. 10. 66 Cf. Ibid., 482. 67 Ibid., 480-82. See also van Grol (1983); Willis (1979).

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The tetracolon or quatrain

'It is clear from some of the alphabetic acrostic poems that the ancient poets worked with units larger than the bicolon or tricolon/68 An example of such a longer unit is the four-line strophe, called a quatrain or tetracolon: The kings of the earth did not believe, nor all the inhabitants of the world, that enemy and foe could enter the gates of Jerusalem. (Lam. 4:12)

This is the lamedh-strophe69 of the acrostic poem Lam, 4 which (apart from v. 15) is written in quatrains and the same applies to Ps. 37. The four-line strophe also occurs elsewhere, e.g. Remember these things, O Jacob, For you, O Israel are my servant: I fashioned you, you are my servant, O Israel, never forget me. (Isa. 44: 21)

Also Jer. 2:13 and Isa. 35; Hos. 5: 3; 5: 6; 7: 9. Sometimes, two couplets can form a higher, independent four-line unit, especially in Proverbs70 e.g. Do not answer a fool according to his folly, else you will become like him. Answer a fool according to his folly, else he will think himself wise. (Prov. 26: 4-5) Longer units

Not all scholars agree about the existence of units longer than four lines.71 If they do exist, they are rare and by their very rarity stand out. An example, with five lines in a chiastic pattern is Who has said to them 'This is your resting-place. Give rest to the weary. Yes, this is your place of repose.' But they would not listen. (Isa. 28:12)

Also Isa. 42: 2-4; 55: 8-9; Jer. 2: 27c-28; 30: 16; Ps. 104: 29-30. Ps. 104: 14 may be a hexacolon and Lam. 1-3 mostly comprises strophes with six cola. Prov. 24:10-12 runs to eight lines, Isa. 3:18-24 contains nine cola and Ps. 119 is made up of units of 16 cola (or 8 couplets). 68 69 70 71

Raabe (1990), 21. I.e. the strophe within the alphabetic sequence which begins with Itanedh. Hildebrandt (1988). Examples include Prov. 10:12-13; 11:5-6; 13: 2-3; 15:8-9, etc. Loretz (1989).

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The significance of these units

The poet uses the 'building blocks' described above to form a poem or poetic unit. They are ready-made modules into which he or she can cast his/her thought. By skilful, use of these blocks—for example, by selecting particular patterns within a Mock such as the use of a chiastic or concentric pattern or by changing from a regular pattern of couplets to a tricolort—the poet can mark the poem in some way or achieve a particular effect. For example, the central line, which embodies the main thrust of the stanza, is highlighted by chiasmus in And in the time of their disorder they say: 'Rise and save us!' But where are the gods you made for yourselves? Let them rise and even save you in the time of your disaster! (jet. 2: 27c-28)

Segmenting poems Poems are best understood if their inner articulation is known, but the first step is to determine the actual boundaries of a poem which may be evident from a number of indications. Some poems, in fact, are selfcontained, notably, proverbial sayings (especially in Prov. 10-21) and the psalms (generally indicated by the headings). Another boundary marker is the acrostic pattern (Lamentations; Psalms). Change of speaker would, seem to be an obvious marker (e.g. in Job, Song) but in the prophetic writings such changes are not always clear even when introductory speechformulae are used. Other texts are embedded in prose and so are clearly defined.72 Within a poem, the various sub-sections are (1) strophe (2) stanza, sometimes marked by a refrain. Since not all 'stanzas' or 'strophes' are regular in Hebrew, some scholars prefer different labels.73 No ancient Hebrew names are known for these segments, and thus as long as any particular system is consistent it is as valid as another.74 Strophe and stanza

Here, strophe denotes a unit of verse-—monocolon, bicolon, tricolon, etc.— as part of the next higher unit, the stanza. A stanza can be marked off by catchwords, inclusio, lexical echoes, interlinear parallelism, patterns of 72 See especially Watts (1992) on Exod. 15: 1-21; Deut. 32: 1-43; judg. 5: 2-31; 1 Sam. 2: 1-10; 2 Sam. 22: 2-51 (// Ps. 18); Isa. 38: 10-20; Jonah 2: 2-9; Dan. 2: 20-23 and 1 Chr. 16: 8-36. Other poems of this type are Gen. 4: 23-24; 27: 27-29, 39-40; 49; Num. 1C): 35-36; 21: 14-15, 17-18, 27-30; 22-24; Deut 33: 2-29; Josh. 10: 12-14; 1 Sam. 18: 7; 2 Sam. 1: 17-27; 3: 33-34; 23:1-7; Dan. 3: 33; 4: 31-32 and 6: 27-28. 73 Others prefer poem, canticle, canto or strophe. On strophe cf. Giese (1994), 34. 74 Cf. van der Lugt (1980); (1995).

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assonance and alliteration, heaping up of synonyms, repetition, change of meaning, etc,,75 but there is no single marker or type of marker, Generally speaking, 'stanzas of a poem do not have to display the same number of lines'/6 but note Prov. 8 which has 'seven uniform stanzas of five lines each'.77 As an illustration, the structure of Job 7 can be set out as explained by van der Lugt.78 The most important clues to the overall division are the repetitions of 'man' Cnws) in 7:1 and 7:17 and of 'I do not exist' Cynny) in 7:8 and the final line, 7:21. The result is a set of three blocks, with the central block marked off by default: I

II

7:1

Has not MAN CHIPS) service upon the earth

7: 8

Your eye is on me, but i DO NOT EXIST Cynny)

7: 9

7: 16 III

7: 17 Whatis MAN Cnws)

7: 21 when you seek me I DO NOT EXIST Cynny).

Within these principal sections there are further subdivisions based on meaning (e.g. each section begins by referring to man as transient) and word repetition (e.g. sections I and II close using the root 'to live'). The 'blocks', which van der Lugt calls 'cantos', each contain two stanzas. Refrain, chorus and repetend

The refrain is a repeated line or set of lines which occurs at fixed intervals and helps to give a poem its structure, for example, Ps, 57, though sometimes the refrain occurs at irregular intervals (Ps. 39, etc.). The chorus is a recurring line repeated very frequently, and may have been spoken by the audience, e.g. Foreigners have eaten away his strength, •—but he has not realised it. Mould is sprinkled upon him ^but he has not realised it. (Bos. 7: 9)79 75 76 77 78 79

Skehan (1979), 369. Exum(1981), 339, n. 31. Skehan (1979), 366. (1988), 11-14; (1995), 90-101. Cl. Andersen and Freedman (1980), 467. Similarly, Ps. 129: 1-2.

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A repetend is a variant refrain, in the form of a phrase or passage, occurring at irregular intervals within a poem, for example My beloved is mine and I am his: he grazes among the lilies, (Song 2:16)80

A combination of fixed refrain and repetend is found in Ps, 107: 8-9, 15-16, 21-22, 31-32. Usually, the refrain comes after the stanza and is separate from it, as in Pss. 42-43; 46; 49; 57; 59; 80; 99. Sometimes there is no final refrain, as in Pss. 39; 56 and 67.81 Envelope figure

This is the repetition of a line at the opening and close of a poem or stanza, The significance of this form of repetition (also termed 'inclusio') is that it clearly shows the boundaries of a poem, For example, I will pour out my spirit on all flesh, and your sons and daughters will prophesy, your old men will dream dreams, your young men will see visions, and even on servants and maidservants, in those days J will pour out my spirit. (Joel 3:1-2 [EVV 2: 28-29])

Similarly, Zech, 8: 9-13, where 'let your hands be strong (i.e. be courageous)' frames the poem. Other examples are Pss. 8:1,9; 118:1, 29. Alphabetic poems or acrostics

The alphabetic sequence of letters provided a good framework for composing a poem or set of poems (e.g. Lamentations). For instance, each stanza in Ps. 119 comprises sixteen lines, each beginning with the same letter, with twenty-two such stanzas, each stanza with a different letter of the alphabet. It would seem that the poet was trying to portray the completeness of 'the law' by using the full alphabet to describe it. At the same time, he was giving himself a grid which made composition easier although he had to exercise his ingenuity to achieve his intention. Other poems use the alphabet as a grid but they are structured in different ways (Pss. 9-10; 25; 34; 37; 111; 112; 145; Prov. 30:10-31; Sir. 51:13-20).82 Some poems appear to use sequences of twenty-two or twenty-three verses, e.g. job 4-14;83 Pss. 22; 33; 38; 103. 80

Further examples are given in Fox (1985), 209-214, 220-21. Raabe (1990), 164-5. 82 Note that Nahum 1: 1—11 is only a partial acrostic: see most recently Spronk (1997), 19-26. On acrostics cf. Soil (1988). 83 Cf.Skehan (1971), 97-8. 81

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Repetition Introductory

Some scholars argue that repetition is a form of parallelism,84 whereas for others, parallelism is a sub-type of recurrence, peculiar to Hebrew (and other Semitic) poetry.85 Here it is treated as a separate topic, fundamental to Hebrew verse. The poet uses repetition (a) as an aid in composition since he has less need to invent new material, (b) to bond consecutive or neighbouring lines, (c) for structural reasons (see below) and (d) to achieve certain effects notably emphasis, to indicate what he considered important. The reader can easily recognize repetition which can then be an aid to interpretation. It makes him aware of the structure of a poem, e.g. by the refrains or the use of envelope figure, and can highlight the important words (keywords). Repetition, besides, creates an element of familiarity, since the reader hears the same words or sets of words repeated. The redundancy of information is of assistance in the processing of a poem and in addition, can lend a rhythmic element to single lines or to a whole segment. Furthermore, it can also have certain rhetorical functions, for example, it can express inevitability: A day of wrath will that day be, a day of trouble and distress, a day of waste and wasteland, a day of darkness and obscurity, a day of cloud and murk, a day of trumpet blast and clarion call, etc. (Zeph. 1:15-163)86 Keywords

Keywords or, as some prefer, dominant or motif words, can carry the meaning of a poem.87 For example, in Ps. 49 terms for 'wealth' and 'death' each occur seven times and summarize its theme: 'The wicked rich perish in the grave'.88 Similarly, in Ps. 56 the keywords are terms for 'God' and 'enemy'. The repeated words 'Yahweh', 'righteous', and 'wicked' highlight the central theme of Ps. 11,89 Other examples are 'day' in Obad. 1215; 'to guard/guardian' in Ps. 12190 and the various synonyms for 'law' in each of the 176 verses which make up Ps. 119. m 85

Andersen (1986b), 88. Cf. Nel (1992), 137. Similarly, Zeeh. 11:2; Ps. 148: 3-4. 87 Cf. Muiienburg (1953); Ridderbos (1953). 88 Raabe (1990), 87. m Stek (1974), 18. w jjeb, sifjf ( occurring five times, echoed in samnyim, 'heavens', v. 2 and semes, 'sun', v. 6, making a total of seven. 86

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Chiasmus Chiasmus is the repetition of elements in an inverted sequence, as in She led him on with her many persuasions, by her smooth talk she pressed him (Prov. 7: 21)

where the equivalent clauses 'she led him on' and 'she pressed him' occupy slots at the beginning and end of the couplet. Although it is easy to exaggerate the presence of chiasmus,91 this does not invalidate its existence. Chiasmus can be present at all levels—within a line (e.g. Isa. 3: 8), a couplet (Job 7: 14), a tricolon (Ps. 27: 14), a tetracolon (Jer. 2: 13) etc, or even throughout a whole poem (Judg. 9: 8—15), Akin to chiasmus but not identical with it is inversion in various forms, e.g. Lady Wisdom says (A) Come, eat of my food, (B) and drink the wine I have mixed (Prov. 9: 5)

whereas Lady Folly states: (B'} Water stolen is sweet, (A") food . . . in secret is pleasant (Prov. 9:1.7)

where (A), (A1) denote 'food', and (B), ( B'), 'drink'. The exploitation of sound Hebrew poetry was intended to be recited aloud, chanted or sung, and therefore was meant to be heard, rather than to be read silently. As a result, its sound and sound patterns were important components of meaning. Sound was used partly to reinforce (and to some extent, create) the verse but also it was used in various ways to convey meanings at different levels and to achieve certain, effects. For simplicity, the use of sound in verse is considered first as affecting the way it is heard and then how it is understood, although, of course, the two aspects overlap. Our main concern is why such effects were produced and how the}? can be perceived. Sound patterns

Patterns which exploit the sound of a language, particularly in poetry, can only be fully appreciated in the original, here classical Hebrew, but even in transliteration the effects are noticeable. Their main function is to hold the listeners' attention. In consonance, the consonants remain more or less the same but the principal vowels are different (otherwise it would be rhyme), e.g. 91

Andersen {1986b); Boda (1996).

H E B R E W POETRY nip sdcjh whsd A fd 'sd i/rns' hyi/tn sdcfli wkbwd s ' " sd d

269

One pursuing justice and mercy finds life, justice and honour. (Prov. 21: 21}

The relevant consonants in Hebrew have been set out under the transliteration and an attempt at mirroring this effect is provided in the translation. The sound links two lines which otherwise would only be loosely parallel.92 In assonance, sets of vowel sounds are repeated, e.g. One who ignores (p6rea') discipline rejects (ma'es) himself, but who heeds (somecf) correction gains (qoneh) understanding. (Prov. 15: 32)

There is a match in sound between the first words of each half-line in the first colon ('ignores', 'rejects') and the corresponding words in the second ('heeds', 'gains') which counters and so underscores the contrast in meaning.93 Alliteration is produced by the repetition of consonants, strictly speaking at the beginning of words as in 'ys 'I 'hyw V yhmlw someone does not spare Ms sibling, (Isa. 9:18)

where three consecutive words begin with aleph, though two-word alliterative combinations are more common, e.g. qdl cjdre', 'shouting sound' (Isa. 40: 3).94 Other alliterative patterns also occur.95 Rhyme is evident in: '"iif Modi ufdodi li I'm my lover's and my lover's mine (Song 6: 3}

where the rhyme underscores the content (mutual belonging). See also Gen. 4: 23; Judg. 16: 23-24; Isa. 33: 22; Sir. 44: 1-8. However, it has been noted that 'rhyme, which occurs very rarely in Biblical Hebrew, is not a poetic device because rhyming is never sustained'.96 End-rhyme sometimes occurs within a line, as in I am first (-on) and I am last (-on). (Isa. 44:6) Similarly, Hos. 8: 13 (-am); Judg. 5: 3 (-im), etc. Onomatopoeia 'is an imitation of a sound using the phonic qualities of a language; it is linked to the meaning of the word and the sense of the phrase'.97 For example, the insistent ninefold repetition of nippasti, '1 clubbed' (Jer. 51: 20-23) effectively portrays destructive hammer blows.98 112

Cf. McCreesh (1991), 32. Ibid., 95. "* Boadt (1983), 357. 95 Cf. Hos. 5:14b, 15c; Isa. 22: 2b; etc. "* Schramm (1976), 170. 97 Schokel (1988), 26. "s For other examples, cf. Schokel (1988), 26-8; Stek (1974), 17. 1)3

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Wordplay and ambiguity

Other exploitations of sound work at the level of meaning, principally, various forms of word play (paronomasia, puns, 'Janus parallelism', etc.) and sound patterns serving to hold the listener's attention. In ambiguity or polysemy, a single word can have two meanings, e.g. He smites heads over the wide earth (Ps. 110: 6)

which can mean that God strikes either anatomical heads (cf. Ps. 68: 22) or leaders ('heads over the wide earth' as in Exod. 18: 25), though perhaps both meanings may be intended." 'Such multivalence functions to engage the hearers/readers, to cause them to interact with the psalm, and to lead them, to recognize the truth of the various possible interpretations'.100 Related is Janus parallelism, where a single word also has two meanings, each in parallel to a different word. For example, Even if I should wash my hands with nitre, and dean my palms with/in br, you would still dip me in the pit. (Job 9: 30-31)

Here br means both 'lye' (and so is parallel to 'nitre') and 'cistern' (parallel to 'pit' in the last line). There are numerous other examples e.g. Gen. 49: 26; Hos. 4: 16-17; Job 3: 23-24; Song 1:17.m Figurative Language Particularly in verse, where it is used more intensely and more often, figurative language needs to be understood so that the meaning intended by the poet can be grasped. It is not always possible or even necessary to make clinical distinctions between one figure and another, but some awareness of the various types can be of help in deciphering the language of verse. This entails some knowledge of the background to the Hebrew texts, especially the customs, religion and lifestyle and the geographic and historical setting of Israel and her neighbours.102 Imagery

Far less urbanized than in the Western world, the Hebrew poets drew on natural phenomena for much of their imagery. However, this does not mean that they were all unschooled illiterates and many images are extremely sophisticated. The essence of imagery103 is the juxtaposition of 99 10(1 101 102 103

Raabe (1991), 216-17, 227; Payne (1967), Miller (1979a). Raabe (1991), 227. Collected by Noegel (1996), with extensive bibliography. Brown (1955); Wakeman (1973); Munro (1995); Caird (1980). Andersen (1986a); Machinist (1983).

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two different levels of meaning where there is a common aspect or some element of interchange.104 For example, the idea of refining, of removing dross, is present in For silver, the crucible; for gold, the furnace. And Yahweh tests the mind. (Prov. 17: 3) More strikingly: The lion has roared-— Who will not fear? Lord Yahweh has spoken— Who can but prophesy? (Amos 3: 8)105

Some imagery derives from the mythology of neighbouring civilizations, For instance, Craigie has shown that 'the portrayal of Deborah in Judg, 5 is based upon the use of poetic imagery which is associated primarily with the Canaanite goddess Anat'.106 Simile

Similes107 are common enough in Hebrew verse and in many cases, these similes come in pairs, because of the dominance of parallelism: Let justice well up like water, uprightness like a constant stream. (Amos 5: 24)

Occasionally they are in sets of three (2 Sam. 23: 4; Isa. 1: 8; Job 7: 1-2) or even more (Deut. 32: 2-3; Num. 24: 6; Isa. 32: 2; Joel 2: 4-5; Hos. 13: 7-8; Sir. 50:6-10; etc.). Extended similes are 'similes that move beyond a simple comparison',108 e.g. Ezek. 32: 2-6, where Pharaoh is compared to a water monster who is captured and destroyed or Ps, 75: 9 which describes at length the cup of God's wrath. Metaphor

In metaphor the comparison is direct: Your word is a lamp to guide my feet, and a light on my path. (Ps. 119:105}

It is important to recognize which metaphor the poet intends; some may be transparent, e.g. 'road' = way of life (Prov, 1:15; 3: 25; 5:21; etc.), others less so. Like the simile, a metaphor can be extended, e.g. Ezek. 27: 3-11, 25-36. 1(14 Schokel (1988), 99. 106 (1978). 108 Exum (1981), 332.

1(B

Willis (1987), 60. 107 Payne (1970); Rosner (1974); Millers (1983).

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Allegory An allegory is a continuous metaphor where everything is at the level of words. A complex image is provided, and each one of its elements must correspond, to a concept. An example is Isa. 5: 1-7, the song of the vineyard, where each component of the poem is explained in the text ('For the vineyard of Yhwh of Hosts is the House of Israel. And the seedlings he lovingly tended, are the men of Judah') though the one-to-one correspondence also involves metaphor. See also Isa. 14: 25a; Amos 2: 9b; Hos. 5: 1-2,14-15.109 A parable is an allegory with a narrative structure, e.g. 'The eagle and the cedar' (Ezek. 17:1-10).110 Other figures

In personification an inanimate object is treated as if it were a person and the effect is to make the image more vivid and immediate: Her gates shall lament and mourn. (Isa. 3: 26) Apostrophe is the addressing of an inanimate object, as in O sword of Yhwh, when will you be quiet at last? Withdraw into your scabbard stay quiet and still! (Jer. 47: 6)

It is a sub-type of personification and the effect is even more dramatic. See also Isa. 23: 4,12 (Sidon); 23: 1,14 (ships); Mic. 6: 9 (sceptre); Lam. 2: 13, 18-19 (Zion); 4: 21 (Edom), etc. In contrast, the poet makes a comparison between, say, past and present, as in Alas, she has become a slut, the faithful city once filled with justice uprightness lodged in her, but now murderers. (Isa. 1: 21)111

In reversal, something is described using 'a succession of literary representations depicting the reverse of the normal order of things'112 as in Zion's roads are in mourning, empty of festival pilgrims; all her gates are deserted etc, (Lam. 1: 4)

1OT

See Bj0rndalen (1990). "" Schokel (1988), 109-10. 111 Also Isa. 23; 7, 8,12; 47: 1-2; Ezek. 27:1-11, 26-36; Lam. 1:1; 2; Ib, 6b, 15; 4: MO, 20. 112 Dobbs-Allsopp (1993), 40.

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Abstract for concrete is the use of an abstract noun to denote an individual as representing a totality: Uprightness protects the blameless of way, but wickedness subverts the sinner (Prov. 13: 6)

where the term for 'sinner' is literally 'sin' (hafta't), an abstract term. Poetic diction Here, diction is used in its wider sense and includes lexis, morphology (endings, nominal and verb forms) and syntax. As has been noted: 'Poetic traditions (and to a lesser extent all literary traditions) preserve older vocabulary and grammatical forms that have been lost from ordinary speech and plain prose. The lexical and morphological resources thus tend to be larger. These linguistic facts interact in complex ways with other structural features of Hebrew verse.'113 Some studies are available on poetic diction in general114 and on aspects of vocabulary115 the verb116 and syntax117 in Hebrew verse. Lexis Very many of the words used in certain compositions (particularly Job, Song) are either unique (e.g. M 'alas!', only Ezek. 30: 2) or rare. Of course, the same applies to certain sections of Leviticus, e.g. the section on clean and unclean animals (Lev. 11), but these lists are avowedly of unusual and technical terms—they are intended to be consulted as reference works—and the mere presence of rare or unique words is not of itself a characteristic of verse. Nevertheless, some words are exclusive to verse, for example ketem (Isa. 13:12 etc.) and harus (Zech. 9: 3; Ps. 68:14; Prov. 3: 14, etc.) both 'gold', instead of zahab which occurs only in prose. Other rare words are used to form word-pairs, for instance yaptah, 'witness' (unique to verse) in. parallelism with more common 'ed, also 'witness' as used in Ps. 27: 12; Prov, 12: 17; 1,4: 5, 25; 1,9: 5, 9.m In addition, variant forms of particular words are sometimes used to fit the sound patterns of a line, e.g. 'tstm, 'men' (for the standard but irregular plural '"na$tm) found only in Isa. 53: 3; Ps. 141: 4 and Prov. 8: 4.m One of the difficulties of Hebrew is determining the meaning of rare or unique words, so many of which occur only in verse.120 113

Waltke and O'Connor (1990), 58-9. Driver (1953); Dion (1980), 34-5; O'Connor (1980), 144-6. Individual commentaries sometimes discuss this topic, e.g. Murphy (1990), 67-76. 115 Culiey (1967); Tsevat (1955). ' '< Michel (1960). 117 ns O'Connor (1980); Grossberg (1980), Pardee (1978); Miller (1979b). 1W Boadt (1983), 362-3; Fitzgerald (1978). 120 Cohen (1978), 171-3, lists 100 hapaxes of which 65 occur in poetic books; but his list is not complete. 114

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Morphology and syntax In Hebrew poetry, archaic forms are used such as the rare negative bal, vocative lamedh121 enclitic mem (Judg. 5: 13; Pss. 29: 6; 85: 4, etc,),122 forms of the demonstrative, certain forms of prepositions,123 epexegetical wow (e.g. Isa 44:1),124 Where certain non-animate nouns can have both masculine and feminine forms, it has been found that in five cases one such form tends to occur in prose and the other in poetry or elevated style, e.g. gan largely in prose (Deut 11:10; Meh. 4:16, etc. but note Song 4:12,16; 5:1; 6: 2) and gannti in verse (Isa. 1: 30; 61: 11; etc., but also the prose texts Esth. 1: 5; 7: 7), both meaning 'garden'.125 The term rogez, 'agitation, nervousness, anger' is unique to poetic texts (Isa. 14: 3; Job 3:17,26; 14:1; 37:2; 39: 24; Hab. 3: 2; Sir. 5: 65. Certain verb forms are more common in poetry or even unique to poetry, for example the hothpael (Isa. 34: 6), forms with paragogic nunnt} and the hitpael.127 Syntactical features include the broken construct chain (when a grammatical element is inserted between a construct and the following noun).128 'The relative clause may be unmarked, especially in poetry, when the clause clearly functions as part of the sentence' as in 'into the pit (which [unexpressed, i.e. '"ser is not used]) they have dug' (Ps. 9:16).129 In Lam. 1: 18, 'Righteous (saddiq) is Yahweh', the rare word order predicate-nounsubject is used so that the first word (which begins with s) fits into the overall acrostic pattern.130 On the other hand, certain prose particles are rare in verse, chiefly the definite article,131 the accusative marker Cet), the relative '"ser,m certain clausal adverbs such as the adverb raq, 'only',133 etc. Ellipsis or gapping 'Gapping' is when an element in the first line of a parallel couplet is 'deleted' in the second, as in See, 1 go forward, and he is not there, Backward, and I cannot perceive him (Job 33: 8)

where the verb 1 go' is missing from the second line but understood to be 121 See the survey by Miller (1979c); HALOT, 510-11. 122 However, Enterton (1996) is sceptical about the existence of this particle in Hebrew. 123 See the table in Waltke and O'Connor (1990), 189. 124 Brongers (1978); Waltke and O'Connor (1990), 652-3. 125 Ben-Asher (1978); cf. Waltke and O'Connor (1990), 106. 126 Hoftijzer (1985); cf. also Waltke and O'Connor (1990), 517. 127 Mazars (1968); Waltke and O'Connor (1990), 426. 121 Waltke and O'Connor (1990), 140. 129 Ibid., 333. 130 Ibid., 299, and n. 34. 131 Ibid., 250, with bibliography. See also 114. 132 Ibid., 332. 133 Ibid., 669, n. 91.

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there. (Cf. also Jer. 50: 43; Mic. 7: 19a; Job 31: 19). The deleted ('gapped') element may also be non-verbal, here marked by «He»: He tears their altars apart,

«He» smashes their pillars. (Hos. 10:2b) This omission of an expected component in the second line, also called ellipsis, can range from simple to more complex, depending on the size of the component. For example, in I have become like leavings of a fig harvest, like gleanings when the vintage is over (Mic. 7:1)

the expression 'I have become' is missing from the second line, but is easily supplied by the reader. In a couplet such as I will always obey your teaching, forever and ever (Ps. 119: 44)

the underlying structure is as follows: I will obey your teaching always, [I will obey your teaching] for ever and ever.

'A listener decodes the surface structure of the incoming speech into more abstract representations during clause breaks. Accordingly, when we hear a unit of verse, we analyze each colon in turn during caesurae, which are nearly always clause breaks.' Thus, Ps, 119: 44 'should be analyzed as a bicolon in which the second colon shares the deep structure of the first, but in which only part of the underlying structure is represented on the surface'.134 Inversions

Generally speaking, in Hebrew the verb comes at the beginning of a clause or sentence, although word order is fairly free. In verse, variations in word order are common, for example in inversion.135 Her leaders for a bribe do judge, her priests for pay instinct, and her prophets for money practise divination and yet on Yahweh support themselves. (Mic. 3:11)

Here 'the key words are the second in each clause, before the verbs: . . . briber}?, payment, money. Each occurs immediately after the title of a religious official; the contrast is extreme and the effect shocking'.136 Sometimes such inversions are used to create a chiastic pattern: He will certainly punish Jacob for his ways, for his deeds he will discipline him. (Hos. 12: 3)137 ]M

Greenstein (1983), 51; similarly, Ps. 119: 53,103; Isa. 14: 8; jer. 51: 40. i3s jn jp,e translations the Hebrew word order has been kept as far as possible. 137 Gliick (1977), 26. As noted by Andersen and Freedman (1980), 596.

136

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W. G. E. WATSON Stylistic devices

In the use and recognition of certain stylistic devices the shared knowledge of poet and audience come into play, otherwise they lose their intended effect. By the same token, we cannot hope to recognize many of them since we lack the requisite background, although comparison within and beyond the Hebrew tradition may be of some assistance. The nonstructural devices considered here are allusion, irony, oxymoron, hyperbole, litotes, merismus, and hendiadys,138 Allusion Allusions may be inner-biblical139 or extra-biblical. The description of men in power as The best of them is like a thornbush, the upright worse than a barrier of thorns (Mic. 7:3-4)

may be an inner-biblical allusion to Jotham's fable, where the thornbush is asked to rule over the other trees (Judg, 9:8-15). Isaiah's satire on the king of Babylon: I shall climb up above the heavens, above the stars of El 1 shall establish my throne, and I shall sit on the mount of assembly in the recesses of Zaphon (Isa. 14:13}

is an allusion to the enthronement of the god Athtar in Ugaritic tradition.140 The more ancient Near Eastern literature comes to light the more transparent do such allusions become. Irony Though not confined to verse, irony—where the literal meaning is the opposite of what is really intended—is largely apparent from context and serves to link poet and reader. For example, the prince of Tyre is addressed ironically: Yes, you are wiser than Daniel, no secret is hidden from you. (Ezek. 28: 3)141

Irony can be dramatic as in Judg. 5: 28-30 where Sisera's mother is described as on the lookout for her returning son whom the audience and the author know to be dead. 'There is thus a complicity between author 138 139 140 141

As suggested by Andersen (1986b), 88. Gunn (1975). Wyatt (1986); (1996), 30-31. Sec Schokel (1988), 159.

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and reader at the expense of the character.'142 A whole genre can be ironic, for example, Nah. 2:12—14, an ironic song of lament.143 Oxymoron

The apparent contradiction of oxymoron is an invitation to its resolution, as in the apparent equivalence of 'to bless' and 'to curse' in Prov, 27:14: He who greets (lit. 'blesses') his neighbour with a loud voice early in the morning shall have it reckoned to him as a curse.144 Another example is: To ignore discipline is to reject oneself, to listen to criticism is to gain understanding. (Prov. 15: 32)

'The coordination in this saying involves oxymoron: the one who avoids discipline is not saving himself from anything but is actually destroying himself, while being harsh on oneself really does not subvert the self but leads to enlightenment'1*3 Hyperbole and litotes Hyperbole is a form of exaggeration generally using very simple words and often used to express large numbers, e.g. 'altars common as heaps of stones beside a ploughed field' (Hos. 12: II). It can be descriptive, as when horsemen are depicted as 'flying like an eagle swift to devour' (Hab. 1:8) or 'men slain by the sword will lie on your hills, in your valleys and in all your watercourses' (Ezek. 35: 8). Some forms of hyperbole are quite lengthy: Rescue me, O God, for the waters have reached my neck, I arn sinking into the slimy deep and there is no foothold, I have entered the watery depths and the flood sweeps me away. (Ps. 69: 2-3)146

The reverse of hyperbole is litotes or understatement, but it is very much rarer, e.g. 'to wipe out nations, not a few' (Isa. 10: 7 and 28: 23-29).

142

Ibid., 163. Spronk (1997), 104. 144 McCreesh (1991), 43-4. 145 Ibid., 95. 146 Eybers (1970). 143

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Merismus and hendiadys

Both these devices are forms of writing concisely. Merismus is the expression of a whole in terms of its parts, for example, the whole universe is depicted in four lines in In his hand are the depths of the earth, and the mountain peaks are his, his is the sea and he made it, and dry land which his hands formed. (Ps. 95: 4-5)

Quite often a word pair can be meristic—'young' // 'aged' (Job 29: 8); 'morning' // 'night' (Isa. 21: 12, etc.)—and a larger concept ('everyone', 'always') is expressed in simple yet vivid terms. In Ps. 22: 2-3 the psalmist uses a merismus involving both space and time ('by day', 'by night') to express the remoteness of God: My God, my God, why have you abandoned me? Why are you far from my cry, from the words of my groaning? My God, I call out by day, but you do not answer, by night, and there is no respite for me.147

Like merismus, hendiadys is the expression of one concept using two words, usually nouns. Holding the reader's attention Having first gained the attention of his audience the poet must then sustain their interest. Many of the 'devices' discussed above could have been mentioned here, such as wordplay, allegory and the parallelism of greater precision as well as others such as rhetorical questions or introductions to speech (especially in Job). For lack of space, only two topics are presented in illustration: the riddle and various forms of suspense. Riddles Although not peculiar to poetry, most riddles are in verse, even the famous ones of the Samson saga, which are embedded in prose.148 A riddle engages the listener/reader directly and requires an intellectual or even a verbal response. It also serves to entertain and instruct. Texts such as Prov. 16: 24; 20:17 and 22:1 probably originated in riddles. Similar are the numerical sayings, e.g. Prov. 30: 15-16. In Prov. 8: 22-32: the word 'wisdom' is not actually mentioned; it may be a riddle posing the question 'Who am I?'. 147 148

Kselntan (1982), 183. But see Kim (1993), 249-52.

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Suspense Suspense is created in various ways. In delayed identification, the identity of an unspecified subject is withheld as long as possible. For example, right at the beginning of Lamentations an unnamed city is mentioned: Alas! Alone she sits, the city (once) thronged with people. She has become like a widow, (once) great among the nations. The princess among provinces has become a menial.

Six more lines follow, then comes ZION'S roads are in mourning, etc. (Lam l:l-4a)

but the city is not actually identified until the tenth line (although a transparent clue—'Judah'—is given hi line 7). Delays of this type occur in Isa. 8: 5-8; 22; Jer. 5:15; Ezek. 30:13a; Sir. 47:12-13; 48: 1-11. Dramatic delay is when the beginning of an action is described but the effect of that action is made clear only later: Wail, alas for the day! For a day is near, and near is a day of Yhwh, a day of cloud, a time of nations will it be. A sword will enter Egypt and trembling will occur in Nubia. When the slain fall in Egypt, they seize her wealth and her foundations are overthrown. (Ezek. 30: 2-4)

From vague 'the day' the event is first called 'a day of Yhwh', then described in figurative terms ('a day of cloud'), which is a form of delay, and finally the calamity is spelled out graphically. The gradual narrowing of focus, once attention has been gained, helps to retain interest. Other passages use this technique in various ways (Isa. 40: 9-10; Mic. 1: 2-5; Prov. 1: 11-15, 20-26; 2: 1-5; Job 4: 12-17, etc.). Similar is the delayed answer to rhetorical questions, as in Mic. 6: 6-7, where the answer comes only in 6: 8. In parallelism of greater precision, the second line of a parallel couplet 'is often more precise or specific than the first'.149 An example is And Lebanon is not enough to burn, and its animals not enough for a burnt offering. (Isa. 40:16)

Line A provides no reason why Lebanon or even its trees might be burnt. 'Only with line B, and with its last word, is it made clear that the image of >4*' dines (1987), 77.

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the whole couplet is of sacrifice; the burning of line A must be of wood upon the sacrificial fire,'150 The climax in itemized number parallelism, is the last item enumerated, whereas the other items simply lead up to that climax: Three things are astonishing to me, four I do not comprehend: a vulture's course in the sky, a snake's course upon rock, a ship's course in mid ocean a man's course in darkness, (Prov. 30:1.8-20)151

'The itemization makes it plain that it is precisely four things that the speaker does not understand. Line A contains the approximate number ('three'), line B the precise number.'152 Concluding remarks

The array of techniques described above is by no means exhaustive, yet it serves to convey the richness of meaning within Hebrew poetry which can be recovered by the modern reader sensitive to the demands imposed by such ancient verse. In spite of unsolved problems, particularly in respect of metre but also in terms of syntax and of structural analysis, there has been considerable progress in our understanding of this body of literature especially in recent years.153 Bibliography ALTER, R. (1985), The Art of Biblical Poetry (New York: Basic Books). ANDERSEN, F. I. and FREEDMAN D. N.'(1980), Hosea (AB 24; Garden City, NY: Doubleday). ANDERSEN, T. D. (1986a), 'Renaming and Wedding Imagery in Isaiah 62', Bib 67, 75-80. (1986b), 'Problems in Analysing Hebrew Poetry', EA]T 4, 68-94. AVISHUR, Y. (1984), Stylistic Studies of Word Pairs in Biblical and Ancient Semitic Literatures (AOAT 210; Kevelaer and Neukirchen-VIuyn: Neukirchener Verlag). — (1994), Studies in Hebrew and Ugaritic Psalms (Jerusalem: Magnes Press). BEN-ASHER, M. (1978), 'The Gender of Nouns in Biblical Hebrew', Semitics 1,1-14. BERLIN, A. (1985), Tfe Dynamics of Biblical Parallelism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press). — (1991), Biblical Poetry through Medieval Jewish Eyes (Bloomington: Indiana University Press). 150

Ibid., 78. See also Isa. 40: 3, 6,17,21,22, 26,27,28,31. As explained by Lete (1986). Alternatively, the last word may mean 'maiden'. Clines (1987), 88. Some recent work includes Brensinger (1996), Fokkelman (1998, with further bibliography ibid. 1 n. 1, 200-2), Meynet (1998), and Niccacci (1997). 151 152 153

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Bj0RNDALEN, A, (1990), 'Allegory', DEI, 14-16, BOADT, I. (1983), 'Intentional"Alliteration in Second Isaiah', CBQ 45,353-63. BODA, M. J. (1996), 'Chiasmus in Ubiquity: Symmetrical Mirages in Nehemiah 9', /SOT 71, 55-70. BRENSINGER, T. L. (1996), Simile and Prophetic Language in the Old Testament (Lampeter: Mellen Biblical Press). BRONGERS, H. A. (1978), 'Alternative Interpretationen des sogennanten Waw copulativum', ZAW 90,273-7. BROWN, S. J. (1955), Image and Truth; Studies in the Imagery of the Bible (Rome: Catholic Book Agency), CAIRO, G. B. (1980), The Language and Imagery of the. Bible (London: Duckworth). CLINES, D. J. A. (1987),"The Parallelism of Greater Precision. Notes from Isaiah 40 for a Theory of Hebrew Poetry', in Directions in Biblical Hebrew Poetry, ed. E. R. Follis (JSOTS 40, Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press), 77-100. CtoBTE, W. T. W. (1988), 'Verse and Prose: Does the Distinction Apply to the Old Testament?', JWSL 14,9-15. (1989), 'The Concept of Metre in Old Testament Studies', Journal for Semitics \, 39-53. COBB, W. H. (1905), A Criticism of Systems of Hebrew Metre. An Elementary Treatise (Oxford; Clarendon Press). COHEN, H. R. (1978), Biblical Hapax Legamena in the Light of Akkadian and Ugaritic (SBLDS 37; Missoula: Scholars Press). COLLINS, T. (1978), Line-Forms in Hebrew Poetry (Studia Pohl, Series Major 7; Rome: Biblical Institute Press). COOPER, A. (1987), 'On Reading Biblical Poetry', Maarav 4,221-41. CRAIGIE, P. C. (1978), 'Deborah and Anat; A, Study of Poetic Imagery (judges 5)', ZAW 90,374-81. CULLEY, R. C. (1967), Oral Formulaic Language in the Biblical Psalms (Toronto: University of Toronto Press). DE GROOT, A. W. (1964), 'The Description of a Poem', Proceedings of the Ninth International Congress of Linguists, ed. H. G. Lunt (The Hague: Mouton), 294-300. DE HOOP, R. (1988), 'The Book of Jonah as Poetry: An Analysis of Jonah 1:1-16', in The Structural Analysis of Biblical and Canaanite Poetry, ed. W. van der Meer and J. C. de Moor (JSOTS 74; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press), 156-71. (1995), 'The Testament of David: A Response to W. T. Koopmans', VT 45, 270-79. — (1998), Genesis 49 in its Literary and Historical Context (Leiden: E, J. Brill). DE MOOR, J. C. (1978), The Art of Versification in Ugarit and Israel I: The Rhythmical Structure', in Studies in the Bible and the Ancient Near East Presented to S. E. laewenstamm on his Seventieth Birthday, ed. Y. Avishur and, J. Blau (Jerusalem: E. Rubinstein's Publishing House), 119-39, DE MOOH, J. C. and WATSON, W. G. E. (1993) (eds.), Verse in Ancient Near Eastern Prose (AOAT 42; Kevelaer and Neukirchen-VIuyn: Neukirchener Verlag). DION, P. E. (1980), Hebrew Poetics: A Student's Guide (Ontario: Benben Publications). DOBBS-ALLSOPP, F. W. (1993), Weep, O Daughter ofZiom A Study of the City-Lament Genre in the Hebrew Bible (Biblica et Orientalia 44; Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute).

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DRIVER, G. R. (1953), 'Hebrew Poetic Diction', SVT 1, 26-39. EMERTON, J. A. (1996), 'Are There Examples of Enclitic mem in the Hebrew Bible?' in M, V. Fox et al. (eds,), Texts, Temples and Traditions, A Tribute to Menahem Harm (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns), 321-38. EXUM, J. C. (1981), 'Of Broken Pots, Fluttering Birds and Visions in the Night: Extended Simile and Poetic Technique in Isaiah', CBQ 43, 331-52. EYBERS, I. H. (1970), 'Some Examples of Hyperbole in Biblical Hebrew', Semitics 1, 38-49. FISHER, L. (1972, 1975) (ed.), Ras Shatnra Parallels, I-II (Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute). FITZGERALD, A. (1978), 'The Interchange of L, N, and R in Biblical Hebrew', JBL 97, 481-8, FOHRER, G. (1954), 'Uber den Kurzvers', ZAW66,199-236. FOKKELMAN, J, P, (1998), Major Poems of the Hebrew Bible at the Interface of Hertneneutics and Structural Analysis. Volume "I: Ex. 15, Deut. 32, and Job 3 (Studia Semitica Neerlandica; Assen: Van Gorcum). Fox, M. V. (1985), The Song of Songs and the Ancient Egyptian lave Songs (Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press). GELLER, S. A. (1979), Parallelism in Early Biblical Poetry (HSM 20; Missoula: Scholars Press). GIESE, R. L. (1994), 'Strophic Hebrew Verse as Free Verse', fSOT 61,29-38. GLUCK, J. J. (1977), 'The Figure of "Inversion" in the Book of Proverbs', Semitics 5, 2.4-31. GORDIS, R. (1.978), The Book of Job: Commentary, New Translation and Special Studies (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary). GREENSTEIN, E. L. (1974), 'Two Variations of Grammatical Parallelism in Canaanite Poetry and Their Psycholinguistic Background', [ANES 6, 87-105. — (1983), 'How Does Parallelism Mean?', in A Sense of Text: The Art of Language in the Study of Biblical Literature (JQR Supplement 1982; Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns), 41-70. — (1986-7), 'Aspects of Biblical Poetry', ]ewish Book Annual 44: 33-42, GROSSBERG, D. (1980), 'Noun/Verb Parallelism: Syntactic or Asyntactic', JBL 99, 481-8. GUNN, D. M. (1975), 'Deutero-Isaiah and the Flood', JBL 94,493-508. HAETMAN, C. O. (1980), Free Verse: An Essay on Prosody (Princeton: Princeton University Press). HILDEBRANDT, T. (1988), 'Proverbial Pairs: Compositional Units in Proverbs 1029', JBL 107, 207-24. MILLERS, D. R. (1983), The Effective Simile in Biblical Literature', JAOS 103, 181-5. HOFTIJZER, J, (1985), The Function and Use of the Imperfect Forms with Nun Paragogicum in Classical Hebrew (Assen: van Gorcum). KIM, J. (1993), The Structure of the Samson Cycle (Kampen: Kok Pharos Publishing House). KOOPMANS, W. T. (1990), Joshua 24 as Poetic Narrative 0SOTS 93; Sheffield: JSOT Press). KORPBL, M. C. A. and DE MOOR, J. C. (1986), 'Fundamentals of Ugaritic and Hebrew Poetry', Iff 18,173-212.

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— (1998), The Structure of Classical Hebrew Poetry: Isaiah 40-55 (OTS 41; Leiden: E.J. Brill), KSELMAN, J, S. (1982), '"Why have you abandoned me?" A Rhetorical Study of Psalm 22' in Art and Meaning: Rhetoric in Biblical Literature, ed. D, J, A. Clines, D, M. Gunn, and A. ]. Mauser (JSOTS 19; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press), 172-98. KUGEL, J. (1981), The Idea of Biblical Poetry. Parallelism and Its History (New Haven/London: Yale University Press). LETE, G, DEL OLMO (1986), 'Nota sobre Prov 30,19 (ufderek geber b^almah)', Bib 67, 68-74. LIMBURG, J. (1992), 'Psalms, Book of, ABD 5, 522-36. LONGMAN, T. (1982), 'A Critique of Two Recent Metrical Systems', Bib 63, 230-54. LORETZ, O. (1979), Die Psahnen. Teil II Beitrag der Ugarit-Texte zmn Verstcindnis von Koknnetrie und Textologie der Psahnen. Psalm 90-150 (AC)AT 207/2; Kevelaer/ Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag). -—(1989), 'Hexakola im Ugaritischen und Hebraischen. Zu KTU 1.3 IV 50-53 et par.', Iff 21,237-40. LORETZ, O. and KOTTSIEPER, I. (1987), Colomefry in Ugaritic and Biblical Poetry: Introduction, Illustrations and Topical Bibliography (UBL 5; Altenberge: CIS Verlag). MACHINIST, P. (1983), 'Assyria and its linage in the First Isaiah', JAOS 103,719-37. McC.RF,ESB, T. P. (1991), Biblical Sound and Sense, Poetic Sound Patterns in Proverbs 10-29 (JSOTS 128; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press). MAZARS, P. (1968), 'Sens et usage de 1'hitpael dans le Bible hebraique', Divinitas 12, 351-64. M.BYNET, R. (1998), Rhetorical Analysis. An Introdution to Biblical Rhetoric (JSOTS 256; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press). MICHEL, D. (1960), Tempora und Satzstellung in den Psahnen (Bonn: Bouvier). MILLER, P. D. (1979a), 'Poetic Ambiguity and Balance in Psalm XV, VT 29,416-24. — (1979b), 'Yaptahin Psalm 12.6', FT 29,495-500. — (1979c), 'Vocative Lamed in the Psalter', UF 11,617-38. (1984), 'Studies in Hebrew Word Patterns', HTR 73: 78-89. MOWINCKF.L, S. (1957), Real and Apparent Trieola in Hebrew Psalm Poetry (Oslo: Aschehoug). MUILENBURG, J. (1953), 'A Study in Hebrew Rhetoric: Repetition and Style', SVT 1, 97-111. M.UNRO, J. (1995), Spikenard and Saffron. A Study in the Poetic Language of the Song of Songs (JSOTS 203; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press). MURPHY, R. E. (1990), The Song of Songs (Minneapolis: Fortress Press). NIL, P. ]. (1992), 'Parallelism and Recurrence in Biblical Hebrew Poetry: A Theoretical Proposal', JNSL 18,135-43, NICCACCI, A. (1997), 'Analysing Biblical Hebrew Poetry', JSOT 74, 77-93. NOEGEL, S. B. (1996), Janus Parallelism in the Book of fob (JSOTS 223; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press). O'CONNOR, M. (1980), Hebrew Verse Structure (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns). (1986), '"I Only Am Escaped to Tell Thee": Native American and Biblical Hebrew Verse', Religion and Intellectual Life 3,121-132. PARDEE, D. (1978), 'Yph «Witness» in Hebrew and Ugaritic', VT 28,204-13.

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PARDEE, D. (1988), Ugaritic and Hebrew Poetic Parallelism. A Trial Cut fnt I and Proverbs 2) (SVT 39; Leiden: E. J. Brill). PAYNE, D. F. (1967), 'Old Testament Exegesis and the Problem of Ambiguity', ASTI5,48-68. — (1970), 'A Perspective on the Use of Simile in the Old Testament', Semitics I , 111-25. RAABE, P. (1990), Psalm Structures, A Study of Psalms with Refrains (JSOTS 104; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press). — (1991), 'Deliberate Ambiguity in the Psalter', JBL \ 10, 213-27. RIDDE.RBOS, N. H. (1953), The Psalms: Style-Figures and Structure', OTS 13,43-76. ROBERTSON, D. A. (1972), Linguistic Evidence in Dating Early Hebrew Poetry (Missoula: University of Montana). ROSNEK, D. (1974), The Simile and its Use in the Old Testament', Semitics 4, 37-46. RUMMBL, S, (ed.) (1981), Ran Shamra Parallels III (Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute). SANDERS, P. (1996), The Provenance of Deuteronomy 32 (Leiden: E. J. Brill). SCHOKEL, L. ALONSQ (1988), A Manual of Poetics (Subsidia biblica 11; Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute). SCHRAMM, G. M. (1976), 'Poetic Patterning in Biblical Hebrew', in Michigan Oriental Studies in Honor of George G, Cameron, ed. L. L. Orlin (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan), 167-90. SKEHAN, P. W. (1971), Studies in Israelite Poetry and Wisdom (CBQ MS 1; Washington DC: Catholic Biblical Association of America). — (1979), 'Structures in Poems on Wisdom: Proverbs 8 and Sirach 24', CBQ 41, 365-79, Sou., W. M. (1988), 'Babylonian and Biblical Acrostics', Bib 69,305-23. SPROMK, K. (1997), Nahum (HCOT; Kampen: Kok Pharos Publishing House). STE.K, J. H. (1974), The Stylistics of Hebrew Poetry. A (Re)New(ed.) Focus of Study', Calvin Theological Journal 9,15-30. TALSTRA, E. (1984), Review of Collins (1978) in BO 41, cols 453-57. TSEVAT, M. (1955), A Study of the Language of the Biblical Psalms (Philadelphia: Society of Biblical Literature). VAN DER LUGT, P. (1980), Strofische structural in de bijbels-kebreeuwse poezie (Kampen: J. H. Kok). — (1988), 'Stanza-Structure and Word-Repetition in Job 3-14', JSOT 40,3-38. — (1995), Rhetorical Criticism and the Poetry of the Book of Job (OTS 32; Leiden: E. J. Brill). VAN GROL, H. (1983), 'Paired Tricola in the Psalms, Isaiah and Jeremiah', /SOT 25, 55-73. — (1986), De versbouw in hef Massieke hebreeuws (Diss. Amsterdam). WAKEMAN, M. (1973), God's Battle with the Monster: A Study in Biblical Imagery (Leiden: E. J. Brill). WALTKE, B. K. and O'CONNOR, M. (1990), An Introduction to Biblical Hebrew Syntax (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns). WATSON, W. G. E. (1994), Traditional Technicjues in Classical Hebrew Verse (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press). WAITERS, W. R. (1976), Formula Criticism and the Poetry of the Old Testament (BZAW 138; Berlin: W. de Gruyter).

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WHALLON, W, (1969), Formula, Character, and Context, Studies in Homeric, Old English, and Old Testament Poetry (Washington DC: Center for Hellenic Studies). WILLIS, J, T. (1979), 'The Juxtaposition of synonymous and chiastic parallelism in tricola in Old Testament Hebrew Psalm Poetry', VT 29,465-80. — (1987), 'Alternating (ABA'B7) Parallelism in the Old Testament Psalms and Prophetic Literature', in Directions in Biblical Hebrew Poetry, ed. E, R. Follis (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press), 49-76. WYATT, N. (1986), 'The Hollow Crown: Ambivalent Elements in West Semitic Royal Ideology', UF 18,421-36. — (1996), Myths of Power: A Study of Royal Myth and Ideology in Ugaritic and Biblical Tradition (UBL13; Munster. Ugarit Verlagi

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PART III The Old Testament and its Authors

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11 The Pentateuch and the Deuteronomistic History O. KAISER The state of the question: the plurality of models1 C U R R E N T discussion of the formation of the Pentateuch and the socalled Deuteronomistic History (DtrG) is based, either in agreement or disagreement, on the model which Martin Noth proposed in the middle part of this century in his Uberlieferungsgeschichtliche Studien2 and Uberlieferungsgeschichte des Pentateuchs,3 There he sought to establish, a connection between the documentary approach and that of tradition-history. His Studien demonstrated the existence of a DtrG extending from Deuteronomy 1 to 2 Kings 25. In the UberKefemngsgeschichte he traced the two parallel sources, the Yahwist (J) and the Elohist (E), which he located in the southern kingdom in the tenth century, back to a common basis (G), which had a cultic origin in pre-state time. The Jehovistic work (JE), which originated in a combination of J and E, was, in post-exilic time, set in the framework of the priestly writing (P) which ended with the death of Moses. This led to the loss of J's conquest story. The resulting JEP was then linked into the deuteronomistic narrative of the death of Moses in Deuteronomy 34. After the separation of the individual books, the book of Deuteronomy, now separated from Joshua, moved closer to the Tetrateuch, so forming the Pentateuch. With this traditio-historical reinforcement, the new documentary hypothesis, associated especially with Wellhausen,4 gained fresh life and was assured of unbroken dominance until the end of the 1970s. The same is true for Noth's theory of a DtrG as having come into being essentially as a single unified work. Since then, however, his explanation of the origin of the Pentateuch has, because of its having connected the history of traditions and documentary 1 2 3 4

See the reviews by North (1951); Snaith (1951); Clements (1979); Porter (1979). (1943). (1948). (1963); (1927).

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approaches, been criticized as methodically wrong, and in its place a pure traditio-historical solution has been proposed. In addition, questions have been raised concerning the existence of G, the unity and antiquity of J, as well as the existence of E and P as originally independent works rather than redactional layers. Since mediating solutions are also not lacking, the reviewer is presented with a richly varied picture. The same is true with regard to DtrG; its primary unity has also been disputed in different ways. Besides a block or stage model, which reckons with a two or three phase origin, there is another view which understands the work as the result of a threefold redaction. At the same time, the age and character of the narrative complexes understood by Noth as sources have been differently defined. Further, the primary existence of a DtrG has been increasingly questioned in favour of older theories according to which the books of Joshua to Kings should be understood as independent literary works, in part pre- and in part post-deuteronomistic. It was only as a result of a series of redactional processes that they came together to form the DtrG. Moreover, different proposals have been made with regard to the age and origin of Deuteronomy and its real connection with the cultic reform of Josiah in 621 BC. Since this has been, since the days of Wellhausen, the fixed point in the reconstruction of the history of Israelite religion and literature, the unstable state in which Old Testament scholarship now finds itself is clear. Although in what follows we give most attention to those new proposals which strongly question the traditional view, it should, be pointed out, in the interests of a balanced overall picture, that the documentary hypothesis still today has its respectable representatives, in, for example, A. Campbell,5 G. W, Coats,6 J. A. Emerton,7 J. Scharbert,8 W, H. Schmidt,9 L. Schmidt,10 H. Seebass,11 E. Zenger,12 and not least E. W. Nicholson. Following an investigation of the positions to be described below, Nicholson argues for the suitability in principle of the documentary hypothesis to explain the different issues raised by the text, even if in the light of recent discussion some modifications to that hypothesis are required.13

5 Campbell and O'Brien (1993). '' (1983); (1988), 7 (1982); (1987 and 1988); (1988). 8 See his commentaries on Genesis, Exodus and Numbers: (1983); (1989); (1992), 9 (1995), 40-62 (ET 43-61); (1974-88 and 1995); cf. also Kohata (1986), >° (1986); (1990); (1993); (1998). " See his articles on J and E in TRE 9 (1982), 520-24; 16 (1987), 441-51; his commentary on Genesis (1995-7); and, on the dating of J and E between 950 and 750 BC (1989) 235-57. 12 Weimar and Zenger (1975); Zenger (1989), 327-31; (19963), 46-75, 89-123. 13 (1998), See further below.

THE PENTATEUCH AND THE DEUTERONOMISTIC H I S T O R Y 291 Pentateuchal problems The problem of the literary stratification of]

The main outstanding issue which emerges from an overview of Pentateuchal criticism since Noth is that of the unity of the work of the Yahwist (J). This is clear, on the one hand, from Eissfeldt's adherence to his distinction in the J stratum between an older lay source' (L) and a later Yahwist (J)14 and the parallel proposals of Simpson and Fohrer,15 and, on the other hand, from the proposals for a proto-Yahwistic narrative standing behind J. So the studies of Kilian and Fischer16 on the Abraham stories, Weimar and Zenger17 on the exodus tradition, Weimar18 on the Red Sea story, and Fritz19 on the wilderness tradition, should be seen as first steps in a modification of the documentary hypothesis. The restricted scope of these studies did not, of course, provide an answer to the question which they provoked, whether the proto-Yahwistic accounts which had been traced were limited to individual themes or reached beyond single themes. The elaboration of this approach to include the whole of the Yahwistic history, which then has consequences for the place assigned to the Yahwist in the history of Israel's religion and literature, is first found with John Van Seters and then with Christoph Levin, who see in the Yahwist an exilic redactor and author whose account is based on proto-Yahwistic, and in their view also Elohistic, stories. The documentary hypothesis put in question

Once Noth's presuppositions were seen to be questionable the way was open for a fundamental revaluation of what, in terms of the documentary hypothesis, was the Jehovistic history, JE.20 In looking at further development in research the value of Claus Westermann's modification of the documentary hypothesis in his monumental commentary on Genesis, published between 1966 and 1981, must not be underestimated. He dispensed with an Elohistic work in the patriarchal story and interpreted the relevant texts, together with others which had hitherto been regarded as Yahwistic, as later additions. This tied in with theories put forward by 14

(1921); (19643), 258-66 (ET (1965), 191-9). Simpson. (1948); Fohrer (1964); (1965"), 173-180 (ET 159-65). 16 17 18 19 Kilian (1966); Fischer (1994). (1975). (1985). (1970). 20 See the review of research by M. Weippert (1991). On patriarchal religion and the age of the promises to the patriarchs see especially Kockert (1988); and on the dating of Genesis 12: 1-3, see pp. 294-9. For further discussion, Berge (1990), 244-85; and Van Seters (1992), 215-76,298-306 and 318-20. For a refutation of theories on the antiquity of the idea of amphictyony and covenant, see esp. Fohrer (1.969); Perlitt (1969) and de Geus (1976). On the problem of the so-called short historical credos, e.g. Richter (1967). For doubts concerning the existence of a reliable oral tradition behind the Pentateuchal narrative see Whybray (1987), 133-219, esp. 215ff.; Kirkpatrick (1988), 101-17; Van Seters (1992), 203f. and 209-21, and also Wahl(1997), 7-62. 15

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Paul Vobe, Wilhelm Rudolph and Sigmund MowinckeL21 Furthermore, he was not uninfluenced by those who spoke in favour of the special place of the Joseph story within Genesis 37-SG,22 in that he distinguished between an older Jacob story and a Joseph story later added to it,23 Further discussion was crucially influenced by the three investigations of John Van Seters, Heinrich Schmid and Rolf Rendtorff published in 1975, 1976 and 1977 which from various points of view questioned the documentary hypothesis in its traditional form. Van Seters and Schmid24 pleaded for the surrender of the early dating of the Yahwist, and Rendtorff for taking leave of the documentary hypothesis in favour of a consistent tradition-history method which followed the growth of individual themes from, their smallest units through to their final literary form and their coming together in the Pentateuch.25 Van Seters developed the discussion opened in 1975 in three further monographs incorporating ideas from Schmid, finally including the whole Tetrateuch and DtrG. He described the Yahwist as a post-deuteronomistic antiquarian historian, dependent on eastern and western traditions, who reconstructed the history of Israel's origin on the basis of the JE traditions available to him. The question as formulated by Schmid was taken up by his student Martin Rose. In view of the late dating of the Yahwist by Schmid, Rose posed the inevitable question of the relationship between the account of the capture of the land in the deuteronomistic book of Joshua, the summary of the account of the wilderness wandering in Deuteronomy 1-3 and the related narratives in Numbers 10-21*. He came to the conclusion that the nonpriestly account of the wilderness wandering was to be regarded as a narrative transformation of Deuteronomy 1-3 rather than that the latter should be considered a summary of the former. At the same time he indicated that the whole Yahwistic history could possibly be judged to be post-deuteronomistic,26 an hypothesis which Van Seters has continued to try to prove. Finally, Christoph Levin (1993) has attempted to give precise definition to the work of the Yahwist, understood as a redactor living after the downfall of the southern kingdom, by distinguishing between the pre-Yahwistic sources existing as unconnected blocks of narrative and the Yahwist's own frameworks and additions. He came to the conclusion a

Volz and Rudolph (1933) and Rudolph (1938); Mowinckel (1964). E.g. Whybray (1968); Donner (1976). » Cf. Wesfermann (1981), 390E (ET1986,407); (1982), 9f. (ET1987,23), where he comes to the conclusion that the difficulties which lead in ch. 37 to a division of sources are caused by the combining of the Jacob story in Gen. 37*; 38; 46-50 with the Joseph story in chs. 39-45. On varied solutions to the literary problem, cf., e.g. H.-C. Schrnitt (1980); L. Schmidt (1986); and Dietrich (1998). 24 Van Seters (1975); H, H. Schmid (1976). K Rendtorff (1976) (ET 1990). On the independent elaboration of Rendtorff s approach by his follower Blum (1.984); (1990), see further below. M Rose (1981), and his summary, 316-28. * An asterisk indicates that there are secondary additions in the quoted unit 22

THE PENTATEUCH AND THE DEUTERONOMISTIC H I S T O R Y 293 that the Yahwist was indeed influenced by Deuteronomy but not by the deuteronomistic movement, a fact which he tentatively explained by distinguishing between the Palestinian origin of Deuteronomy and. an origin of the Yahwistic work outside Palestine.2' The consistent tradition-history approach To avoid making this review more difficult we shall first of all present Rolf Rendtorffs proposal and its elaboration by Erhard Blum, Rendtorff subjected the documentary hypothesis to a fundamental critique in his treatise, Das uberlieferungsgeschichtliche Problem des Pentateuch. He also proposed what in his view was the only appropriate solution to the literary and traditio-historical problem of the Tetrateuch. His objections to Noth's approach in Uberlieferungsgeschichte des Pentateuch already show the direction his recommendations will take: the notion of sources ought to stand at the end, and not at the beginning, of traditio-historical research. The latter should be much more concerned with the growth of the large thematic narrative complexes from their smallest units to their final form. Only then may the manner and type of their combination leading to the appearance of the Pentateuch be properly investigated,28 The problem of assuming a Yahwistic history was already demonstrated for him in the fact that the promises to the patriarchs are not uniform, and in his view originally served gradually to bring together the Abraham-Jacob-Isaac stories. Their appearance in the Exodus narrative is only redactional, and in the record of the wandering in the wilderness only connected with two references in Num. 11:12 and 14:23. Num. 24: 9b refers back to Gen. 12: 3a and not to Gen. 12: 3b, the half-verse which was given a programmatic interpretation by Hans Walter Wolff.29 From this, Rendtorff drew the conclusion that the narrative blocks are in large measure independent and self-contained., and that the theological shaping of the patriarchal stories ought not to be equated with that of the Pentateuch.30 His further critique of the documentary hypothesis concentrated on the Yahwist and the priestly writing. The existence of an originally independent Yahwistic history seems to him to have been rendered so doubtful through scholarly disagreement on almost all basic questions—unity, continuity, conclusion, linguistic usage, literary models, style, theology—that he recommends its abandonment.31 Since a coherent priestly narrative cannot be demonstrated in either the patriarchal story or in the first chapters of Exodus, we are dealing with an editorial stratum rather than an originally independent written source, despite the links between the patriarchal and exodus stories (cf., e.g. Gen. 17: 7f. and Exod. 6: 2ff.).32 Both results are in keeping 27

Levin (1993), 34 f. -" Ibid., 134 f. 31 Ibid., 86-109.

™ Rendtorff (1976), 5-18. Ibid., 29-79, see esp. 69 and 73, n Ibid., 112-42. 30

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with Rendtorff's basic thesis concerning the original literary independence of the themes and their relatively late redactional combination.33 Rendtorff s investigation, therefore, consistently results in the demand for the surrender of the documentary hypothesis as an unsuitable model and its replacement by methodical research into the literary growth of individual themes and their ultimate combination.34 In his dissertation, Die {Composition der Vatergeschichte, published in 1984, Erhard Blum sought to realize this programme by proving that the traditional patriarchal history in Genesis 12-50 owes its present form essentially to a process of redaction and rewriting lasting about five hundred years. Probably this process had already begun in the northern kingdom during the reign of Jeroboam I, in the composition of the Jacob-EsauLaban story in Gen. 25:19-33:17, which itself depended on older individual stories.35 Probably in the eighth century this was joined with the Joseph story which had originated in the Israelite court, so resulting in the Jacob story extending from his birth to his death (Gen. 25:19—50:21*). This development must have begun in the northern kingdom because it already contained the theme of Ephraim's precedence over Manasseh in Gen. 41: 50-52 and ch. 48.36 So Blum presupposes that a distinction between Yahwistic and Elohistic elements in the Jacob and Joseph stories is in principle unsuitable. So, for example. Gen. 28:l(M3a«, 1.6-19 is seen as an old and unified aetiology,37 and the story of Jacob's cunning in 27: 1-40 as self-contained;38 likewise, following Herbert Dormer,39 the Joseph story is seen as essentially a literary unity.40 Following the downfall of the northern kingdom, this north Israelite Jacob story was enlarged in Judah to become the first edition of the patriarchal history by placing at the beginning the Abraham-Lot stories, Genesis 13* + 18-19*,41 and was bound together by the promises introduced in 13: 14-17 and 28: 13f.42 It was first the destruction of the northern kingdom and the threat to the southern in 701 that gave rise to the theology of promise. During the exile this first edition was developed into a second by making Gen. 12:1-5,10-20 an introduction and by adding 13: If; 16*; 21: 8-21; 22* and 26*43 as well as linking itineraries and building notices,44 Itreceived its theological structure through the promise speeches in 12: Iff;* 26: 2f;* 31:13b* and 46: 3f*. In this way the patriarchal narratives became a history of the fulfilment of the promise of increase.45 Finally, the 33

34 Rendtorff (1976), 29-79 and 151-8. Ibid., 141-51. M Blum (1984), 66-151,168-75,175-84, Ibid., 229-43 and esp. 258-60. 37 3S Ibid., 7-35. Ibid., 79-85. 39 (1976). * Apart from their expansion through the Ephraim-Manasseh texts In 41:50-52 and 48 as well as later additions. Cf. Blum (1984), 246-57, 270,4271. and 435. 41 42 Ibid., 282-9. Ibid., 289-97 and 158. 43 4 Ibid., 297-331. * Ibid., 331-49. 45 Cf. ibid,, 339 with 300. 35

THE PENTATEUCH AND THE DEUTERONOMISTIC H I S T O R Y 295 patriarchal story was subjected to a D-editing from the deuteronomic/ deuteronomistic circle of tradition. As a result, it was enlarged not only through the shaping or addition of the promises in 12: 7; 16:10; 22:15-18; 26: 3b-5; 28: 15; 32: 13 and of the story of the promise and covenant in Gen. 15, but also through the addition of 28:20-22; 35:1-5; and S6.46 Since this D-editing on the one hand presupposes the exilic edition of the patriarchal story and on the other hand takes up the story in Gen 24 which, is rooted in post-exilic conditions, it is best dated in the last third of the sixth century. Through the promise of the land on oath in 15:18, Israel received a legal claim to its possession; through his portrayal in 15: 1, 6 as the father of faith, Abraham is presented as an exemplar; and through the attribution to him of merit in 22: 16, 18b; 26: 5, 24, he is guarantor of the validity of the promises.47 Interconnections of the D-editing indicate a relationship with a literary context which extends through Exodus, Numbers and. Deuteronomy to Joshua 24.* Blum regards Gen. 18: 17-19, 22b-32, probably added after the exile, as related to this D-editing, as also the originally independent Abraham-Abimelech story in 20 + 21: 22-34. The problem of theodicy discussed in 18: 17ff. and 20 brings these narratives close to the book of Jonah.49 In his Studien zur Komposition des Pentateuch (1990) Blum extended the scope of his study to include Exodus and Numbers, coming to the conclusion that the deuteronomistic 'Komposition' (KD) includes most of the non-priestly texts in the Pentateuch, which had received its appropriate interpretation through the insertion of passages such as Exod. 3: 1-4: 18; 11:1-3; 12:21 ff.; 13: 3ff. (17-43); 19: 3-8; 22: 22; 24: 3-8,9-11*, 12-15a, 18b; 33:1, 5,11,13,16£; 34: 9f., 29-35.50 With regard to the priestly sections, Blum, in Komposition der Vatergeschichte, distinguished between the Toledot framework and the El Shaddai texts and explained both as the result of priestly redaction. Apart from the primeval history this stratum exists outside more extensive promisetexts only in the form of a thin thread of notices31 which display the caricature of a narrative rather than a patriarchal history.52 Only the interconnection existing between Gen. 17 and Gen. 9 as between Gen. 17 and Exod. 6 and Exod. 12*, which relates to the Sinai pericope, justifies the allocation of the promise-texts to a priestly circle of tradition. As Frank Cross had already shown, the Toledot framework possesses a subdividing function in Genesis.*3 According to Blum the lack of a specific Abraham genealogy and of a P tradition corresponding to Gen. 37: 2 means that we should not be thinking in terms of a Toledot book basic to 47 * Ibid., 362-89 and esp. 389-92. Ibid., 392-6. 48 Ibid., 396-9. *' Ibid., 400-419. 50 Cf. also Ms contribution de Fury (1989), 271-95. 51 Cf. Gen. 17; 27:46-28:9 and. 35:9-15 with 21:4; 26: 34f.; 47: 27b and 48: 3-7, 52 Blum (1984), 428. 53 Cross (1973), 291-335, esp. 304 f.

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the P document (as held by von Rad:'4) but rather of its derivation from editorial activity,55 In his view there are the following reasons for making the date of this redaction post-deuteronomistic: 1) the proof put forward by S, E. McEvenue that Gen. 17 is dependent on Gen, 15;56 2) the observation that Gen. 24 seems to have been secondarily adapted to the Toledot framework;57 3) the character of Exod. 6 as a response to Exod. 3-4 (424); 4) P's method of working, which is appropriate to the more advanced process of canonization, and more integrated than D; 5) the fact that D cannot be detected in the primeval history;38 and. 6) the problem of mixed marriages, dealt with in Gen. 26: 34f; 27: 46-28: 9, which is a post-exilic issue. In his Studien zum Pentateuch (1990) Blum once again subjected the priestly stratum to a thoroughgoing investigation using a selection of five texts from Exodus and Numbers,59 as well as the Genesis primeval history. This led him to a more precise statement of their special character: it is, as indicated in the heading of the relevant second part of Studien, neither a source nor a redaction. In view of their continuity which can be seen for example in Exod. 1: 1-5, 7; 2: 23a-25; 6: 2ff., there is definitely the possibility that the texts were at first composed in and for themselves, even if also with knowledge of the tradition being edited.60 It is the discontinuities, combined with a clear style, which not only facilitates the marking out of the priestly texts but also compels the understanding that there is present here the secondary redactional combination of different traditions,61 Nevertheless we do not find in the priestly texts mere parallels to the older tradition. They are rather placed alongside it as striking corrections,62 compositional developments63 or as complements.64 So, corresponding to the pre-priestly work KD we must now also recognize a composition KP.65 The continuous character of the priestly texts, which means that, e.g., Exod. 1:1—5, 7; 2: 23a—25; 6: 2ff. can certainly be read as a consecutive account, creates the illusion that they originally formed an independent textual strand. However, as soon as one notes that acquaintance with the figure of Moses is assumed without the need for introduction, the lack of coherence, which stands in the way of the documentary hypothesis, becomes obvious. For Blum the leitmotif of KP is the desire of 54 (1934), 33ft Von Rad was followed by Moth (1948), and by Weimar (1974), 65-93; cf. 86 with the reference to Gen. 5:1. 55 Blum (1.984), 438-40. * McEvenue (1971), 281 f; similarly Van Seters (1975), 281-4; cf. also Levin (1985), 247-50. 57 Cf. Gen. 24: 67a, where Sarah still seems to be alive; cf, Blum (1984), 384, 58 Ibid., 452, n. 30. sv Exod. 6f., the plague cycle, and also Exod. 13f., Num. 16 and 20:1-13. 60 Blum (1990), 241V42. « Ibid., 231. « See ibid., 235 on Exod, 6: 2f£ and 270f. on Num. 16. *3 Such as, for example, the P version of the plagues narrative, ibid., 256, 64 Such as, for example, the P version of the exodus narrative in Exod. 14*, ibid,, 261. *5 Blum (1990), 229-85, esp. 243,

THE PENTATEUCH AND THE DEUTERONOMISTIC H I S T O R Y 297 the creator for community, or the nearness of God,6'1 KD and KP are to be associated with the reign of Darius I, 522-486.b7 In the Skudien Blum also answered the question what had led the official and priestly circles behind, both works to compose them. In doing this he referred to the Persian legal institution described by Peter Frei as state authorization. The latter consists in that authorities of the central government administration conferred on the accepted customs of local communities the dignity of locally valid state law.68 This presupposes the existence of an authoritative and generally accepted written authority on the part of the Jewish community. This presupposition enables us to understand the discontinuous nature of the priestly composition as the result of an internal Jewish compromise arising out of respect for the existing deuteronomistic tradition, for acceptance of the deuteronomic/deuteronomistic Torahtradition would exclude an independent priestly initiative,''9 The specific piece of pre-priestly editing in Josh, 24:26a, with its reference to the law of God, shows that KD presupposed the connection between the Pentateuch and the book of Joshua and understood the Hexateuch as a meaningful unity,70 Next to such editorial contributions belonging to the D-family, and not referred to here in detail, those of the P-circle came into being, so that both would have existed next to one another for some time before the elements of both 'schools' were combined, as e.g. in Num. 32: 6ff and 33: 50 ff.71 According to this model of redaction history we have no need to accept the existence of a final redactor of the Pentateuch since Ms role has been taken over by the author of KP.72 Looking back we can see that Erhard Blum has turned the model of tradition-history developed by Noth into a consistent literary history of the Pentateuch, and no one acquainted with the inherent problems of the subject will deny its great analytical as well as systematic strength.73 Nevertheless it is no sign of mental inflexibility if literary critics are not exasperated by his criticism, based especially on structuralist grounds, of conventional distinctions between Yahwistic and Elohistic texts. Of course texts or sequences of texts such as Gen. 27:1—45; 28: lOff. and Exod. 3: 1-4: 18 can be read as continuous; but that does not get rid of doubts about their original literary unity.74 Also objections can be raised against w ** Ibid., 287-333. Ibid., 357. « Frei (1984), 7-43, esp. 9ff., and Mum (1990), 345-55. "» Blum (1990), 358. 70 C1. ibid., 363-5 and Gen. 33:19; 35:1-7; 50: 25,26b; Exod. 13:19; Josh. 24: 32 and esp. 24: 26a. 71 72 Blum (1990), 378. Ibid., 379. 73 For a systematic and fair assessment of Blum's contribution cf. Wynn-Williams (1997), esp. 195-238 and 239-52. 74 For example, with respect to Gen. 27:1-45 there is plenty of evidence that the storv has two layers: cf. the analysis of L. Schmidt (1988), 159-83. But whether the findings should be explained in terms of a source hypothesis or a redactionai hypothesis should be cautiously judged in every particular textual situation. In my opinion the findings are more elegantly explained in terms of a later enrichment of the J story from an E source with an Elohistic revision. On Gen. 28 see the critique of McEvenue (1994), 375-89.

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particular allocations of texts to KD, such as the series extending from Exod. 19: 3ff. to 34: 29-35, as Eckart Otto has done by making them part of the final redaction,75 If the Pentateuchal redactor is detected not only in the primeval history/6 but also in the Sinai pericope, the assessment of P as a redactional layer is questionable, despite the weighty reasons in its favour brought forward by Erhard Blum. Also problematic is, for example, the starting point for the reconstruction of the patriarchal history in the form of a Jacob-Esau-Laban composition, about the original setting and date of which there can be other opinions.77 Nevertheless Erhard Blum's attempt to reconstruct the growth of the Pentateuch by way of a coherent traditio-historical process is fascinating. As a model it possesses great heuristic value. All future outlines will have to be measured against its comprehensive fidelity to the text. The Yahwist as a post-Dtr antiquarian historian

In his first work, Abraham in History and Tradition, Van Seters used the example of the Abraham stories to argue that the literary development of the Tetrateuch occurred in three steps: a 'pre-Yahwistic first stage' followed by a 'pre-Yahwistic second "E" stage', and then the exilic late Yahwist',78 In distinction to his later works, Van Seters saw the last of these as standing in contrast to Deuteronomy, and to Jeremiah and Ezekiel, and related to Deutero-Isaiah.7"* At that time he already asserted the impossibility of determining the nature of the dependence of the written narratives on an oral tradition lying behind them.80 He also came to the conclusion in this study that the priestly texts are a redaction.81 Before we turn to the modification and development of his basic understanding of the growth of the Pentateuch and of DtrG in his three following monographs, we must take a look at the study published in 1976 by Hans Heinrich Schmid with the title Der sogenannte jahwist; for his arguments here against the usual dating of the Yahwist in the DavidicSolomonic period and in favour of a setting shortly before deuteronomic/ deuteronomistic activity during the closing years of the monarchy or beginning of the exile82 clearly decisively influenced Van Seters. The closer determination of the relationship between the Yahwist and the deuteronomistic movement he left open as an issue to be resolved in the future.83 His basic rejection of an early dating he based on the following 75

76

77

n

(1995), 164-9. Cf. Wahl (1997), 286-8, 7 " Ibid., 311.

Cf. Witte (1998), 329. Van Seters (1975), 310 f.

80 Ibid., 309: There is virtually no way of deciding when oral narrative forms or motifs became associated with a particular person such as Abraham. It could well have happened in every case when the story first was put in a written, form,' 81 Ibid., 285, 311. ^ Schmid (1976), 167-83. 83 Ibid., 168.

THE PENTATEUCH AND THE DEUTERONOMISTIC H I S T O R Y 299 arguments; 1) the picture of Moses in the Yahwistic stories of his call in Exod, 3,m the plagues in Exod, 7:14-9: 3485 and the exodus from Egypt in Exod, 14*86 should be judged post-prophetic; 2) the pre-priestly wilderness story with its murmuring motif is best allocated to a period close to the formation of the deuteronomic/deuteronomistic tradition;87 3} the existence of a self-contained pre-deuteronomic Sinai pericope cannot be proved;88 4) the promise of land in Gen. 15 idealizes with hindsight the political situation of the Davidic-Solomonic empire; its promise of increase is best understood as coming from a time when Israel was no longer a great people; and the promise of blessing in Gen. 12; 1—3 stands in the shadow of the royal ideology;89 5) neither the patriarchal nor the Moses or Sinai traditions find an echo in the pre-exilic prophets, and acquaintance with the exodus tradition is still confined in the eighth century to the prophets of the northern kingdom.90 There is no reason to doubt these observations. They are related, particularly with regard to the last point, to subsequent research on the prophets, and have been confirmed by various arguments in the later researches of Erhard Blum, John Van Seters, Hans Christoph Schmitt91 and Christoph Levin, and. according to Ernest Nicholson have to be given fundamental consideration.92 In Ms investigation, In Search of History, Van Seters turned to an examination of the extent of DtrG and its classification as a piece of ancient historical writing.93 He came to the conclusion that the stories of Saul's reign and the rise of David, regarded as pre-deuteronomistic, do not constitute the beginning of Israel's historical writing in the early monarchic period but already represent the work of the Deuteronomist, From three older Saul stories depicting election, anointing and rejection he shaped the history of Saul as a contrast with the following story of the rise of David. In doing this he worked up his different materials so skilfully that they can no longer be detached from the present narrative.94 2 Sam. 7, with its dynastic promise, taken to be a unity on form-critical grounds and judged to be deuteronomistic on account of its linguistic and theological relation to the context, was originally followed immediately by 1 Kings 2: 1-4, 10-12 as a bridge to 1 Kings 3: 1-15.95 On the other hand the narrative 2 Sam 2-20 and 1 Kings 1-2*, designated 'Court History' by Van Seters, concerning David's reign and the succession to the throne, is nothing else than a post-deuteronomistic narrative from the post-exilic period with an anti-messianic tendency.96 In, his assessment of the sources 84

ss m Ibid., 19-34. Ibid., 44-53, Ibid., 54-82. Ibid., 61-82. «* Ibid., 83-118. "* Ibid., 119-53. 90 Ibid., 154-66. Cf. also Hermann Vorlander's detailed proof in id. (1978). For the familiarity of post-exilic prayers with the Pentateuch tradition cf. Probstl (1997), 91 Schmitt (1980), 189f, and id. (1985), 161-79, where he also argues for the understanding of P as a redaetional layer.
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relating to the monarchic period, apart from the succession narrative, Van Seters' view coincides essentially with Noth's, except that he regards the Elisha stories97 (as Hans-Christoph Schmitt before him98) as later additions to the deuteronomistic book of Kings." Contrary to the view of Hermann Gunkel and Hugo Gressmann the prophetic legends are not a later development of the Moses and Samuel stories; rather, the latter have been influenced by the former.100 Deuteronomy and DtrG are older than the Yahwist and the priestly writer, who has acted partly as redactor and partly as author. Both had considered the deuteronomistic conquest story of Joshua as the fulfilment of the promises of land given to the patriarchs, and composed the Tetrateuch as a supplement to DtrG.101 Apart from a series of insertions which mainly went back to J (Josh. 2*; 4: 23-5:1.5) and P (Josh. 7 and 12), the account of the conquest in Josh. 1-12* was a deuteronomistic composition not preceded by any older collection.102 Assyrian and Babylonian attacks on Israel and Judah had served Dtr as a model for the idea of a military conquest.103 Dtr was satisfied with the account of the conquest of the land, and ended it with the report of the establishment of cities of refuge (20: 1-5, 7-9), the concluding note about the gift of the land (21: 43-45), the narrative of the discharge of the east Jordanian tribes in 22:1-6 and the retirement speech of Joshua in 23:1-16. Tt was the priestly writer who first added the account of the distribution of land to the individual tribes in chs. 13-19, the glosses in 20: 6,9bb, and the account of the setting apart of the Levitical cities in 21: 1-42. Finally he had attached the burial notices in 24: 32-33 to the story of the parliament at Shechem introduced by J in 24: 1-27,104 Judg. 1: 1-2: 5, the origin of which is much discussed because it disrupts the continuity, is also traced by Van Seters to P, as is 2: 22-3: 4.105 Otherwise, the beginning of the deuteronomistic history of the judges is to be found in 2: 6—16: 31* for the construction of which Dtr relied on legendary sagas of which Van Seters can find no sign of an earlier collection.106 From the start this judges' history was written with a view to its continuation in 1 Sam 1-7 which is itself entirely dependent on the narrative skill of Dtr.107 John Van Seters' understanding of the Yahwist as an antiquarian historian is already discernible in this book, J's history of Israel's origins being intended as an historical introduction to DtrG. In his Prologue to History and The Life of Moses he developed this idea into a noteworthy conclusion. Instead of searching for a putative background to the stories in oral tradition, he consistently takes up the question of possible literary antecedents *' With the exception of 2 Kgs. 3 and 9. 98 (1972), 131-8. w Van Seters (1983), 305. m m !ffi Ibid., 306. Ibid., 323. Ibid., 324-31. 103 m Ibid,, 330. Ibid,, 331-7. "* Ibid., 337-42. m Ibid., 342-6, and esp. 343 f. For a similar view cf. Becker (1990), 300. 107 Van Seters (1983), 346-53.

THE PENTATEUCH AND THE DEUTERONOMISTIC H I S T O R Y 301 or impulses, as well as the creative skill of the author who subjected the most varied materials and motifs to his purpose in order to write a history of Israel's origin. If research into the primeval history of Gen, 1-11 has hitherto almost exclusively looked to the east,108 Van Seters argues that attention should also be turned to the west where the best parallels are found for the connection of episodes by means of genealogies and itineraries, as for the central theme of the patriarchal history, the origins of the people and its neighbours.109 Furthermore, Ms post-deuteronomic dating of the Fall story is emphasized, a view which has also meanwhile been expressed by Eckart Otto, Michael Unger and Markus Witte.110 In this connection, Witte produced evidence that in it we should distinguish between an older anthropogenic tradition, its elaboration into the Fall story by the post-deuteronomistic author of the independent 'Yahwistic' primeval history, and its editing by a final redactor. The four-river geography of Gen. 2: 10-14 derived from him, and the tree of life insertions. The connection with Mesopotamian traditions is for geographical and political reasons unproblematic and therefore recognized by scholarship in general. However, the connection with Greek traditions and techniques of story-telling is no less unproblematic; direct contacts were not lacking, at the latest from the post-exilic period, and they are self-evident for the late Persian and Hellenistic periods.111 Gen. 15; 22: 16-18; 26 :3b-5; 28: 14 (cf. also 18, 19), usually judged in research to be deuteronomistic redactional additions, are for Van Seters integral elements of the Yahwistic work and as such decisive for the postdeuteronomistic dating of the promises to the patriarchs.112 On the other hand, he refers to the fact that the gift of the land in the original Deuteronomy was dependent solely on loyalty to Yhwh and obedience to his commands.113 It was the Deuteronornists who first introduced the motif of the promise of land to the patriarchs as oath. The fathers in the deuteronomistic references at Irst meant, as Thomas Romer believed, Israel sojourning in Egypt and moving from there to Horeb.114 Only after a 1(18

Van Seters (1992), 42-72. Ibid., 78-99. Otto (1996a); Unger (1996); Witte (1998). Cf. also Vermeylen (1989), esp. 19,71. 111 One need only remember that Dor was a member of the first Attic maritime alliance; cf. 'Athenean Tribute List I' in Merritt, Wade-Gary and McGregor (1939), 483, and (1950), 9ff.; for the cultural connection between. Greece and Palestine in exilic and post-exilic times, cf. Smith (1971), 57-81. 112 Cf. also Van Seters (1992), 467, where he explains that Gen. 26:5 and 22:18 could not be related to the deuteronomic law but that the demand for obedience was here intended by the Yahwist as establishing right behaviour in a wider sense. However, this contextual explanation seems to me to be forced in view of the actual wording. 113 The three instances of the promise of the land on oath in 19: 8f.; 26: 3 and 15 are taken as later insertions: on the first cf. Mayes (1979), 284 f. and Romer (1990), 188-94; on the priestly character of the second, Mayes, 332, and Romer, 240£); and on the third, Mayes, 337 and Romer, 242-5. m Cf. Romer (1990), 268; see also Jer. 11:3-5; Ezek. 20; 4b-6. 1W

m

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further step in interpretation were the fathers expressly identified with the patriarchs,113 Accordingly, the decisive achievement of linking Israel in Egypt with the patriarchs116 and of severing the promise from the condition of obedience to the law is to be attributed to the Yahwist.117 The thesis that the deuteronomists understood the fathers as the exodus generation and not as the patriarchs is not undisputed,118 but is not « priori improbable. On the other hand, it can nevertheless be shown that in the promises of Genesis there is a clear distinction between patriarchal promises without deuteronomistic influence and those which do show such, influence.119 Consideration should also be given to Susanne Boorer's denial that all the texts in Exodus-Numbers in which the promise of land as oath occurs are deuteronomistic;'-20 rather, the relevant verses are redactional additions. So the global assignment of Yahwistic texts in Num. 10-21 to a postdeuteronomistic Yahwist is according to this finding unjustified,121 Even if many problems in this area are still awaiting their final solution, one may readily agree with Van Seters that the patriarchal promise in Gen. 12: 1-3 stands in the shadow of royal traditions,122 a thesis earlier put forward by Hans Heinrich Schmid and Matthias Kockert.123 In his analyses of the non-priestly narratives in Exodus and Numbers, Van Seters tries to prove that they are in general either free creations of the Yahwist124 or are linked with motifs or structures from Deuteronomy or DtrG.125 Accordingly, the development of the Sinai pericope into the story of the making of the covenant, including the addition of the Book of the Covenant126 and the small code in Exod. 34: 11-26,127 also go back to the Yahwist. One cannot reckon either with an older Sinai tradition or 115

Cf. Deut 1: 8; 6; 10; 9: 5; 9: 27; 29:12; 30; 20 and 34:4; and Romer (1990), 269 f, Van Seters (1992), 227-43 and 248. 117 Van Seters (1994), 467. 118 Cf. Lohfink (1991a). 119 On Gen. 13:14-17 and ch. 15 cf. Levin (1985): 24.7-50. He also takes (18:17-20); 21:17f.; 22:15-18; 26: 3b~5, 24 as later reproductions of the basic promise in 12: 1-3; cf. Levin (1993), ad loc. and 436. 120 Exod. 33:1-3; 32: 7-14; Num. 14: llb-23a and 32: 7-11(12), 13-15. 121 Cf. Boorer (1992). Cf. esp. her summary 428-41. Schart (1990), 181f. similarly distinguishes between the original JE stories and an early pre-priestly (Dje) and later post-priestly (Dp) deuteronomistic redaction. m Van Seters (1992), 252-7. 123 Cf. above and Kockert (1988), 248-99. !34 Cf. e.g. his judgement on the story of Moses' birth, Exod. 2: 1—10, Van Seters (1994), 21-9. 125 Cf. e.g. his comparison of Exod. 2: 11-22 with 1 Kgs. 11: 14-22 (Van Seters (1994), 32); his explanation of the plague stories in Exod. 7:14-12:32* as a transformation of Deut. 7:15; 28: 60 (81); his derivation of Exod. 16* from Deut. 8: 3a, 16 (190); Exod. 17: 8-16 from Deut. 25:17-19 (202f.); but also his conclusion (227) that Deut. 9: 22-24 is dependent on Num. 11: 1-3. His explanation (68) of Exod. 4: 24-26 as a post-priestly tnidrashic type of addition deserves special attention. m Van Seters (1994), 278-82. 127 Ibid.,, 355.f. m

THE PENTATEUCH AND THE DEUTERONOMISTIC H I S T O R Y 303 with oral traditions behind the other Moses narratives. The idea of Moses as lawgiver in the wilderness goes back to a deuteronomic writer of the late monarchic period. The understanding of Israel as a covenant community, however, was developed in the exilic diaspora in order to secure their group identity. 'Zion was not the heir of Sinai, as is commonly suggested, but Sinai the heir of Zion.'128 We may round off this sketchily outlined picture by referring to how, when he establishes the priestly contribution to the plagues narrative, Van Seters once more justifies his understanding of the priestly elements in the Hexateuch as the result of redactional activity: 1) the attempt to reconstruct an independent priestly document must account for the gaps in its narrative; 2) a priestly document understood as independent and continuous demands 'mental supplementation'; 3) it is increasingly difficult to give a sufficient reason for distinguishing between a basic priestly document PS and supplementary redactional texts (RP or Ps); 4) it is therefore simpler to take the priestly texts (as Erhard Blum and J, L. Ska on Gen. 17; 35: 9-15; Exod. 2: 23-25; 6: 2-8; 7:1-5 and 29:43-45, have demonstrated)129 as deliberately composed for their present context.130 For the reviewer, just as much fascinated as irritated by the simplification of scholarly findings, the question inevitably rises whether Van Seters' outline picture of Israelite historiography does not altogether oversimplify the actual development of the Tetrateuch. For, as distinct from the case of Herodotus, if there was no noteworthy historiographic tradition before the Deuteronomist, not to mention the Yahwist, then the Deuteronomist was in fact the father of Israelite historical writing and the Yahwist his learned pupil. Both were able to base themselves on sagas and legends which for the most part they themselves first collected, or even invented. The present writer would have been glad to learn more about the proto-Yahwistic and Elohistic antecedents of the theological Yahwist in Genesis. He continues to have doubts about ironing out the difference between the proto-Yahwistic and Elohistic texts on the one hand, and the Yahwistic and deuteronomistic and post-deuteronomistic texts on the other. But he does not hesitate to acknowledge the service which Van Seters has done by his impressive references to parallels in Greek historiography and by the intellectual and cultural classification of the Yahwisf s history as antiquarian historiography suspended between eastern and western traditions. Nevertheless it seems improbable to one experienced in the redaction criticism of the prophetic books and not altogether without experience of literary problems, that in the prehistory of Israel extending from Gen. 1 to Num. 32, we are essentially concerned only with a post-deuteronomisic Yahwist and a subsequent priestly 12S 1211 130

Ibid., 289; cf. 286-9. Cf. above and Ska (1989), esp. 123f. Van Seters (1994), 100-103.

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redaction. Van Seters has surely achieved elegance at the expense of disregarding differences and inconsistencies,131 The Yahwist as redactor ofpre-Yahwistic sources

Christoph Levin produced a parallel outline to explain the origin of the Yahwistic history in his Gottingen thesis Der ]ahwist. He interprets the Yahwistic material, which is considerably reduced, especially in Exodus and Numbers, through the hypothesis of a Yahwistic redaction (RJ) which reached back to individual hitherto isolated literary blocks of tradition and fragments.132 The sources edited by the Yahwist included an older patriarchal story, which had its own history of origin, the Joseph story, an independent Moses story and a concise history of the wandering in the wilderness, later enlarged by the episodes of Moses on the mountain of God and the Red Sea miracle.133 Sometimes these older traditions already show traces of literary editing and therefore point back to a lengthy tradition process. Apart from the eastern materials in the primeval history and the Egyptian tale of the two brothers, edited in the Joseph novelle, Levin looks for the transmitters of the patriarchal narratives in the circles of their descendants.134 He regards the substance of the exodus tradition as Israelite national literature. The Israelite priesthood were possibly bearers of the Moses tradition, while the Balaam story reflects tension between the Northern Kingdom and Moab.135 Apart from the tradition underlying Exod. 14 and the Song of Miriam, Exod. 15: 21, the name of Yhwh was missing from the sources used by the Yahwist. Where religious themes 131 He was nevertheless outdone by Whybray (1987) who took over from H. H. Schmid, R. Rendtorff and J. Van Seters the hypothesis that in the Pentateuch we are dealing with something exilic or early post-exilic. However, the comparison with Herodotus's methodology, which had created a single united historical narrative, containing many digressions, out of the most diverse sources (cf. 227-9), led him to understand a single author (229); 'There appears to be no reason why (allowing the possibility of a few additions) the first edition of the Pentateuch as a comprehensive work should not also have been the final edition, a work composed by a single historian.' In retaining P, even though now onlv as a redactor, he saw in Van Seters a remnant of the documentary hypothesis. Since the post-exilic character of P was uncertain, there was no reason for thinking that the author of the Pentateuch did not also have priestly texts at his disposal in the composition of his work (230f.). This single author would have used oral as well as written sources and given them literary shape. It is no longer possible to decide to what extent he changed his models or left them unchanged. Apart from with laws and poetry, therefore, there is no certain criterion for distinguishing them from his own constructions (235-42), Whybray's concluding judgement is (242), 'He had at his disposal a mass of material, most of which may have been of quite recent origin and had not necessarily formed part of any ancient Israelite tradition. Following the canons of his time, he radically reworked his material, probably with substantial additions of his own invention, making no attempt to produce a smooth narrative free from inconsistencies, contradictions and unevennesses. Judged by the standards of ancient historiography, his work stands out as a literary masterpiece.' 1K Levin (1993). Cf. his translation, 51-79, which gives in printed form what J took over and what comes from J himself. "•' Cf. besides the detailed analysis the summaries on 389-93 and 414f. 134 1K Ibid., 395. Ibid., 396.

THE PENTATEUCH AND THE DEUTERONOMISTIC H I S T O R Y 305 are to the fore we mostly find the word Elohim (God).136 The Yahwist has created something wholly new on the basis of Ms sources. His language is that of the royal court,137 with a stylistic preference for direct speech, monologue without a reply, and not least the relationship between promise and fulfilment. Theologically his presentation is a history of blessing in which from beginning to end of the work a series of curses and blessings stand over against each other.138 Yhwh's unconditional involvement in Israel's interests is, in Levin's view, an effect of pre-exilic popular religion. The emphasis on mono-Yahwism is due to the circumstance that the Yahwist, like those whom he addressed, was compelled to live in the diaspora. In contrast to the predeuteronomic form of Yhwh religion attested in the Elephantine papyri, the Yahwist advocates the uniqueness of Yhwh as something perfectly obvious. He therefore presupposes the Shema of Dent. 6: 4. So he is to be understood as post-deuteronomic, but pre-deuteronomistic,':w This Yahwistic work was systematically developed by the author of the groundwork of the priestly document (PS) and then the final redactor. Whilst insertions in a post-deuteronomistic spirit are, in Genesis, of peripheral importance, in Exodus and Numbers they take up a broad space in the form of an elaboration of the theme of disobedience and punishment. The final redactor, according to Levin, did not develop his own theology, but made only the cuts and connections necessary in the combination of J and P. Before the uniting of J and P by the final redactor, J was extended by a post-Yahwistic supplement (Js). Also after this the work experienced yet further supplementing.140 Levin has also given up the distinction between J and E in the classical sense. He reckons the relevant texts as in part belonging to the W collection of sources,141 and in part to later expansions,142 With some variations this position may be combined with the understanding of the E stratum as a redaction. His reconstruction of the Sinai pericope is noticeably brief. He confines it to the report that Moses ascended to God on the mountain and stayed there forty days and nights in order to beseech God to go with Israel on its journey.143 So Levin sees the Yahwist as no mere collector and reviser of older sources, but also as a theologian. His model, based as it is on careful analyses of the text, compares with that of Blum and Van Seters for plausibility. It recommends itself despite its fragility because it avoids the difficulties of the traditio-historical reconstruction of the one and the sweeping generalizations arising out of the approach of the other.144 137 "" Ibid., 396 f. Ibid., 408, ct. the survey in 399-408. 1:38 m Ibid., 440f. Ibid., 426-8. "9 Ibid.,429f. H1 Cf. e.g. ibid., 217f. on Gen, 28: lift and 269 on Gen. 37:4bff*. 142 Cf. e.g. ibid., 172-80 on Gen: 20-22*. >43 Ibid., 78,363. vw His evaluation of the final redactor is problematic. This redactor's contribution is assessed as substantially greater by Otto (1996), 61-111 and Schmitt (1995); cf. also Witte (1998).

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The changes needed to accommodate the documentary hypothesis to the present state of the discussion

Following a comprehensive testing of the objections brought against the validity of the documentary hypothesis and of the models proposed to replace it, Ernest Nicholson, in his The Pentateuch in the Twentieth Century, concludes that it still provides the best explanation of the evidence. To be sure, he finds that some modifications are required. With reference to J and E, we must reckon that they originated over a longer period of time.1* Moreover, in view of the theologico-historical objections raised by Schmid against an early dating of the Yahwist, it is necessary to assign a more comprehensive range of texts than before to the Jehovistic redaction,14f> As far as the idea of a substantial deuteronomic-deuteronomistic redaction of the Tetrateuch is concerned, Nicholson inclines to the theory represented by S. R. Driver,147 that one must distinguish between a predeuteronomic redaction, similar to deuteronomic texts, and a postdeuteronomic redaction. To justify this finding, Nicholson proposes to dismiss the idea of an individual Jehovist and to understand under the siglum R'E a 'school' which began work in pre-deuteronomic time and continued possibly into the deuteronomistic period.148 It may be difficult to determine the absolute date of J and E: their early dating may be excluded because the idea of a Solomonic enlightenment is invalid, but on the other hand, neither work gives any indication that Yahweh has already given Israel into the hands of the nations. This indicates that they, and also the beginning of the Jehovistic redaction, should be dated to preexilic time.149 This suggests that one should reckon with a late elaboration of the Genesis promises of a son or of land into the theologically based promises of descendants, land and blessing,150 as well as with later additions.151 The question of the pre-deuteronomistic history of the book of Joshua requires further investigation.152 As for the proposal, most recently put forward in an impressive way by Blum, that P should be seen as a redactional stage rather than a historical work, Nicholson grants this as being of value for a synchronic reading of the final text, but does not feel it necessary on this account to give up the traditional understanding of this layer as having been an originally independent source;153 one can still agree with Emerton in the view that the theory of the existence of a priestly writing is probable even if not certain.154 145

Nicholson (1998), 247. '* Ibid., 244f. >47 (1895), LXXVIIf. Nicholson (1998), 243f. '* Ibid., 247. '°° Emerton (1982), sees only the promises of a son in Gen. 16: 11; 18: 10 and the promise of land in 12: 7 as rooted in the sources, while the theologically developed promises of descendants and land are redactional formations. 151 m Nicholson (1998), 240. Cf, Bieberstein (1995). 153 Nicholson (1998), 198-221. 154 Emerton (1988), 384, accepted by Nicholson (1998), 220; cf. also Propp (1996), Davies (1996) and, for current discussion, Otto (1997). m

THE PENTATEUCH AND THE DEUTERONOMISTIC H I S T O R Y 307 A comparison of this view with the proposals of Blum and Levin might suggest that the future belongs to a combination of their respective concerns, in which on the one hand the pre- and. proto-Yahwistic texts are investigated, and on the other the redactional contribution of the Yahwist and the following redactors up to the final redactor are carefully distinguished. In an ideal situation this would unite the historical insights of Blum and the meticulousness of Levin, the sodo-historical interests of Crusemann and the legal-historical concerns of Otto,155 with Van Seters' cultural historical view of what is possible. Such a comprehensive redaction history of the Pentateuch should be the aim of future investigation. The problem of the age and stratification a/Deuteronomy1'*

This review of Pentateuchal criticism concludes with a look at the problem of the age and growth of Deuteronomy by way of preparation for a treatment of DtrG. The history of Old Testament literature turns on the identification of Deuteronomy with Josiah's law book. So, the role of sanctuaries in ] and E is the usual basis for deducing their pre-deuteronomic origin. The terminus pro ante for them both follows from the dating of Deuteronomy's core law on the centralization of the cult. So it is understandable when a number of scholars such as Norbert Lohfink, Horst Seebass, and Erich Zenger137 adopt a middle course in dating the Jehovistic work since this gives them the necessary room for what they take to be the development of deuteronomic and the deuteromistic theology. The hypothesis of a four or five stage origin of Deuteronomy, worked out by Georg Braulik and Martin Rose can then be linked with it. The two first constitutive stages are accordingly placed in the time of Hezekiah (cf. 2 Kgs. 18: 3f., 22) and Josiah (2 Kgs. 22f.) and the later regarded as exilic/late exilic to early post-exilic.138 The answer to the question of Deuteronomy's age is inextricably bound up with the view taken on the notice of Hezekiah's centralization of the cult in 2 Kgs. 18: 3f. and the report of Josiah's reform in 2 Kgs. 22 and 23. Whoever takes both to be pre-exilic and basically reliable has room for dating at least the basic stratum of the laws on 'Yahweh's privileges' in 155

Criisemann (1992); Otto (1989); (1991). On the state of research cf. also Preuss (1982); for discussion, Lohfink (1985) and Veijola (1996). 157 Lohfink (1991a), 106 ff.; Zenger (19962), 73-5. 1SS Cf. Braulik (1986), 9-14, and (19962), 79-84, which distinguishes between five stages of development: 1) a Hezekian Dtn as a combination of the law of Yhwh's privileges with the formula for the centralization of the cult; 2) a Josian Dtn as a covenant document; 3) its transformation from what was presumably an earlier form as spoken by Yhwh into one spoken by Moses on the occasion of the conclusion of the covenant in the land of Moab, along with its simultaneous integration into the framework of the narrative concerning the taking of the land, Dent 1-Josh 22*; 4) the exilic addition of the constitutional organization of Israel, Deut. 16:18-18: 22; and 5) its post-exilic additions in Deut. 19-25. Cf. also Rose (1994), 23-6, who distinguishes between two deuteronomic and two deuteronomistic strata. 156

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Deut. 12: 1-17: 7 anywhere from the end of the eighth century to 621 BC. On the other hand, anyone who doubts the historical reliability of 2 Kgs. 22 f, or sees in the chapters a narrative sermon addressed to the exiles159 is dependent on the cult-historical and legal-historical study of Deuteronomy, and will in certain circumstances have an exilic origin in view.160 Now that Hermann Spieckermann has demonstrated the tendentious character of the portrayal of Hezekiah as an early reformer in 2 Kgs. 18:4a and has thereby removed, the only ground for fixing an initial cult centralization law at the end of the eighth century,161 there remains the controversial reform narrative in 2 Kgs. 22-23. Agreement on its assessment is scarcely to be expected in view of its nature (as Norbert Lohfink has established by looking at discussion since I960162) and the currently available tools of critical research.163 Eckart Otto therefore attempts to secure the dating independently of the report in 2 Kgs. 22 f. by comparing the duty of loyalty to Yahweh in Deut, 13: 2-10* and 28:1,5,20-44* with Esarhaddon's vassal treaties.164 For him the deuteronomic sequence of texts turns out to be a translation from the latter, which could only have originated in the period between 672 and. 612 BC. In their tendency they correspond to the reform measures of Josiah, as derived by C, Uehlinger from 2 Kgs. 23: 5, *11 f., which were concerned to re-establish the purity? of Yahweh worship through expelling solar cult emblems and their priesthood.165 As evidence of a contemporary mono-Yahwistic tendency Otto refers to the epigraphic find of over 300 Judean seals from the last decades of the seventh century BC on which there are scarcely any divine images or astral symbols.166 Deuteronomic interpretation of the Book of the Covenant, associated with this declaration of loyalty, would indicate that Deuteronomy originated before 587/6 and. was later given deuteronomistic editing. The parallels from Assyrian vassal treaties to Deut. 13: 2a, 3aaba, 4a, 6a«, 7ab«, 9abfc, lOaa, produced by Otto are astonishing. Whether they demand a date before the collapse of Assyria is a question for itself. Following 2 Kgs, 22: 3 and Jer. 36: 10 one may associate with Deuteronomy the family of 159 Cf. Wurthwein (1984), 411 f. and 446-64. Cf. id. (1994). Further, Hoffmann (1980), 169-270, who regards the report as both substantially pre-deuteronomistic and fictitious. Nielsen (1.995), 9-11 shows that this judgement can be accepted and also the Josianic dating; so also Otto (1996c). 160 Cf. Kaiser (19845), 132-4; or more briefly, id. (1991), 96-8. m Spieckermann (1982), 170-75. »2 (19911,), I93f. For discussion cf, e.g. Gieselmann (1994), 223-4, as well as the contributions of H. Niehr and C. Uehlinger in Gross (1995), 33-55 or 57-89. Niehr, 37f., believes that the historical kernel lies in 2 Kgs. 23: 8a and with it the purging of the high places, while Uehlinger prefers the destruction of the chariots of the sun, the priestly class of the kemarim and the roof altars. Cf. 2 Kgs. 23; 5*, llf.* Similarly Wurthwein (1984), 459, cf. 453. 163 Cf. Lohfink (1991b), 202. 1(4 Otto (1996c), 1-52. m Uehlinger, in Gross (1995), 57-9, and similarly earlier Wurthwein (1994), 210, 156 Cf. Keel and Uehlinger (1994), 41 Off.

THE PENTATEUCH AND THE DEUTERONOMISTIC H I S T O R Y 309 Shaphan, who belonged among the state officials,167 and they could have made their information available even after 587. The evidence produced by Otto seems to rule out a substantially later dating of Deuteronomy. In this he has set down a marker in relation to the dating of Deuteronomy. As a minimum point in literary critical judgement concerning the strata in Deuteronomy the distinction between deuteronomic formulations using the second person singular and the deuteronomistic clauses containing the second person plural forms of address has in principle proved its worth. It must not, however, be mechanically applied since not all texts containing the second person singular are in fact deuteronomic.168 Whoever has been seriously concerned with Deuteronomy knows the complex nature of its problems and how time and again the answer to them leads to the correction of generally accepted positions.169 It may be that further patient work on Deuteronomy and DtrG will eventually lead to a better understanding of their origin, at once more complex but also more just to the rich nuances of the text. Fundamental questions concerning the Deuteronomistic History The basic problem of DtrG

Noth's hypothesis of DtrG as a unified structure containing Deuteronomy2 Kings has been influential up to John Van Seters. But terminological distinctions and theological shifts of accent within DtrG show that it did not have a single point of origin. This state of affairs is explained on the one hand by means of a block or stages model, and on the other hand in terms of strata.170 It will be shown that both models can be combined. The block model

The Mock model, which has its precursor in Ewald and Wellhausen,171 predominates especially in the English-speaking world. It is found in three varieties. According to one (which refers to the change, connected with the death of Hezekiah, in notices concerning royal burials), the work originally ended at latest in 2 Kgs. 20: 21.172 Of all attempts at interpretation this is the most fragile because the relevant findings can also be 167

Cf. also Lohfink (1987) = (1991c). Minette de Tilesse (1962). 1W Against the assumption that in Deuteronomy we are concerned with state law, cf. Perlitt (1994). On the differentiation of its strata, cf. e.g. Knapp (1987); Renter (1993); and Veijola (1996). 17(1 Cf. the reviews of research by H. Weippert (1985); Preuss (1993); Romer and de Pury (1996), 1-120. 171 Wellhausen (1963), 297-9. 172 Cf. Provan (1988), 133-43; Moenikes (1992). 168

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explained in historical terms.173 The two-stage model, originating with F. M. Cross and elaborated by R. D, Nelson, seeks to explain the change between pro- and. anti-dynastic tendencies which pervades the work by seeing the original DtrG, concluding in 2 Kgs. 23; 25, with its unqualified promise of the eternal dynasty in 2 Sam. 7, as a piece of royalist propaganda,1174 In its exilic, extended form, however, it is a cultic doxology of judgement transformed into literature.175 The three-stage model put forward by A. D. H. Mayes is of special interest because it presents a combination of the stage and strata models. When DtrG began there came into existence a book of Kings written in the shadow of the Northern Kingdom's downfall and Hezekiah's reform, and ending with the reign of Ahaz. The actual deuteronomistic historian (DtrH) enlarged it under the direct influence of Josiah's reform and drew a positive picture of the Davidic line. At the same time he included the whole tradition complex from Deuteronomy 4 onwards, making use of substantial compositions for the books of Judges and Samuel. The third and final development was in the nature of a redaction which annotated the whole work and at the same time enlarged the history by bringing in the last four Judaean kings. It was marked throughout by a critical view of kingship and also a nomistic tendency, and belonged to the time of the exile.176 In addition there was a post-deuteronomistic levittcal revision in Deuteronomy and Joshua, as well as the concluding addition of Judg. 1:1—2:5; 17:1—21: 25; 2 Sam. 21-24.m Mark O'Brien made a further advance on the strata model on the basis of the two-stage model in his proposal published in 1989. Like Cross and Nelson he ended the oldest edition of DtrG with 2 Kgs. 23: 23. In a first revision it was extended to 2 Kgs. 25: 21. In a second the criticism hitherto confined to the northern kings was also applied to the Davidic dynasty. Only with the third, nomistically oriented redaction was attention turned to the people. Even later, besides Judg. 1; 17-21; and 2 Sam. 21-24, the Elisha stories were added.178 Mayes and O'Brien are therefore in agreement with the advocates of the Gottingen strata model in that the latest revision of DtrG had a nomistic and anti-monarchic character. Also noteworthy, however, is the idea developed by Mayes of starting with a book of Kings which later received a continuation going back in time.

173

Hachmann (19%), 228-41. Cross (1973), 274-89, csp. 278-85; and Nelson (1981), 36-42, 43-69, 121-2. Cf. also de Vries (1985), XLIIJ. Hobbs (1985), XXII, believes that this stage ended in 2 Kgs. 23: 27. On the other hand, Seitz (1989), 189-200, effectively gives up the model, in that he dates the work in the Exile and makes it end originally with. 2 Kgs. 24*. 175 Nelson (1981), 123. 17(5 Mayes (1983), of, 122f. and the summary, 133-9. !77 Cf. Mayes (1983), 51 f., 60,79,166 n. 12. 178 O'Brien (1989). Cf. the summary 287-92. m

THE P E N T A T E U C H AND THE D E U T E R O N O M I S T I C H I S T O R Y 311 The so-called Gottingen strata model17<> Among German speakers Rudolf Smend's essay in the von Rad Festschrift provided the crucial impetus to modifying Martin Noth's hypothesis of a single author of DtrG. In it he demonstrated the existence of a nomistic edition of DtrG (DtrN) in Josh, 1: 7-9; 13: lb&-6; 23; Judg, 1: 2-9 and 2: 17f, 20 L, 23.180 Shortly afterwards his student Walter Dietrich showed in texts of Kings and Samuel that there was an earlier prophetictheological deuteronomistic edition (DtrP) which interpreted history by means of a connection between prophecy and fulfilment.181 On this basis Timo Veijola later investigated the deuteronomistic presentation of the rise of the Davidic dynasty and the deuteronomistic judgement on the monarchy.182 According to Martin Noth the Deuteronomisf s intervention into the description of the early monarchic period was essentially limited to 1 Sam. 7-12* and the addition of further brief notices, until he came to expression again in greater detail in the programmatic temple prayer of dedication, 1 Kgs, 8: 14-53, and. the critical review of Solomon's reign in 1 Kgs. 11: 1-13.183 Timo Veijola, on the other hand, assigned to DtrH the whole text stratum in the book of Samuel preparatory to David's political testament in 1 Kgs. 2: 5-9,184 which served as the justification of David and the first royal measures of Solomon. Admittedly it is still debated whether this stratum is in fact simply deuteronomistic and not rather pre- or postdeuteronomistic.185 Likewise the linking passages between the story of David's rise and the succession narrative, 1 Sam. 20:12-17,42b; 23:16—18 and 24:18-23a, which are preparatory to 2 Sam. 9, stemmed from DtrH.186 Above all, however, he traced back to DtrH the texts contained in 1 Sam. 25: 21 to 2 Sam. 7: 29 which give theological support and justification to the future position of David and his dynasty. Among them 2 Sam. 7* is central but was in no form part of the pre-deuteronomistic succession narrative.187 These are only the main points in Veijola's conclusions. He 17y

Cf. also the review by de Pury and Romer (above, n. 170). Smend (1971), 494-509 = (1986), 124-37. ™ Dietrich (1972), cf, esp. 107-9 and 134-48. 182 Cf. the tabular survey of his allocations to DtrH, DtrP and DtrN in Dietrich and Naumann(1995), 83. 183 Noth (1943), 61-72,104-6 (ET, 54-62,93-5). 1M In order to avoid misunderstanding in what follows the designation of the deuteronomistic basic stratum by Veijola as DtrG will be replaced by DtrH. The abbreviation DtrG remains reserved, for the designation of the whole historical work. W5 See already Schulte (1972), 148-65; and Wurthwein (1974), 33-47 (= id. (1994), 54-68), both of whom acknowledge pre-deuteronomistic editing. This line in the critical analysis of Veijola and the general post-deuteronomistic setting of the narrative by J. Van Seters is also taken by Langlamet (1976), 321-79 and 481-528; Kaiser (1988), 5-20; id. in de Pury, Romer and Ma'cchi feds.) (1996). Langlamet (378 f., 528) dates this stratum between Hezeklah and Josiah, while Kaiser judges it to be in any case pre-deuteronomistic. For information on the direction of the discussion, cf. Dietrich and Naumann (1995), 229-96, esp. 201-7. Meanwhile under the influence of observations by Wurthwein and Langlamet, Veijola also reckons with the existence of a pro-David and pro-Solomon redaction, cf. id. (1990), 80f. and 102. 1S(> 1S7 Veijola (1975), 94f. Ibid,, 100. 180

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infers from them that it was first DtrH who made a connection between the ark narrative, the story of the rise of David and the succession narrative. The links inserted by DtrH between the latter two stories extend from 1 Sam. 20; 15 through 1 Sam. 25: 26b, 29 and 2 Sam. 3:18 to 2 Sam. 8: 14b, 15 and ch. 9.1S8 For DtrH David was the perfect pious and just king, whom Yahweh himself could designate as his servant (2 Sam. 3: 18; 7: 5, 8), and put on a par with Moses and Joshua.189 However, he converted, the pre-deuteronomistic Nathan prophecy, originally intended only for Solomon, into one of an eternal dynasty, granting it a legitimacy and permanence beyond the catastrophe of 587.190 On the other hand, DtrP had designated only the prophets as Yahweh's servants.191 In contrast to DtrH, DtrP passed, over the bright features in the picture of David, and by the addition of 2 Sam. 12: 1-14 placed alongside them a dark shadow, although he nevertheless depicted the king as a penitent sinner. For Dtr N, however, David was again the ideal king, unsurpassed by any of his successors, who complied with the demands of the royal law of Deut. 17: 18f. and, on his death-bed, imposed upon his son the duty of obedience to the divine commands, 1 Kgs. 2: 3-4*. He took up once more the hope of an eternal dynasty (1 Kgs. 11: 36; 2 Kgs. 8: 19) but included in it Israel itself (2 Sam. 7: 24).m This clearly pro-monarchic picture also contains within the late deuteronomistic strata summarily described by Veijola as DtrN, an (earlier?) anti-monarchic counterpart. While DtrH characterizes the pre-monarchic period as godless,193 and so has taken up the old traditions on Saul's rise to kingship in 1 Sam. 9:1-10:16* and. given them a positive framework in 8:1-5 and 10:17—18a, 19b-27a, the late Deuteronomists saw in the kingship an innovation which contradicted the kingship of God,194 and expressed this view especially through the interpolation of the Jotham fable in Judg. 9: (7)8-15, (16-21 *),195 the old law of the king in 1 Sam. 8:11-17 and the addition of 1 Sam. 12. If we bring in Uwe Becker's investigation, Richterzeit u. Konigtum, the picture becomes even more complicated, since according to him the DtrH responsible for the composition of Judg. 2: 11-16: 31* already represented an anti-monarchic tendency.196 Ernst Wiirthwein associated himself with the strata model in his commentary on Kings, tracing the text back to DtrG, DtrP and DtrN.197 According to him DtrG indicates only the author of the early exilic first !s8

Ibid., 102-5. Cf. e.g. Deut. 34: 5; Josh. 1: If., 13; 18: 7; 22: 2; 24: 29 (=Judg. 2: 8). ™ Veijola (1975), 133 f., 136-8. m Ibid., 138. Cf. e.g. 1 Kgs. 14: 18b; 18: 36; 2 Kgs. 9: 36 and 2 Kgs. 9: 7; 17: 23; 21: 10 and 24: 2. m Ibid., 138-42. For the effect of this noitiistic theology on Ps. 89, cf. Veijola (1982). 'w On what follows cf. Veijola (1977) ad loc. and the summary, 115-22, as well as the promonarchic notices in Judg. 17: 6; 18:1; 19: \ and 21:25. !<M m Cf. Judg. 8: 23; 1 Sam. 8: 7; 12:12. Cf. Judg. 8: 22f. 9: 16b-19a. m Becker (1990), 174^83 and 303. '*' (1977) and (1984). m

THE PENTATEUCH AND THE DEUTERONOMISTIC H I S T O R Y 313 edition of the deuteronomistic book of Kings, In order to avoid misunderstanding it would be better to use for this stage the sign DtrK. He regards DtrP as standing for the group of redactors oriented towards prophetic theology, and DtrN for late deuteronomistic editing. The attribution of the opposition of prophet and king to DtrP, which W. Dietrich argued for in 1972198 but has recently questioned., proves its worth in Wurthwein's analysis: it goes back originally to DtrP and represents a radical response to the issue of where guilt was to be laid for the catastrophe of 587.TO The redactors known collectively as DtrP are responsible for the inclusion and arranging of the Elijah200 and Isaiah201 legends in the book of Kings, The Elisha stories, however, which had their own literary pre-history, were first incorporated at a post-deuteronomistic stage.202 The record of Josiah's reform, which still serves as the hub of Old Testament literary and religious history, consisted of a discovery report, in 2 Kgs. 22; 3—11, originating in a deuteronomic-associated tradition, the report of the consultation of the prophetess Huldah in 22: 12-20*, added by DtrP, and the covenant and reform reports in 23:1-3 and 23: 4-22* deriving from DtrN. In this way the reform report connects with the historical record concerning Josiah's anti-Assyrian purification of the cult in 23:11 f*. As far as the function of the three texts is concerned, the first explains the allegedly mysterious emergence of Deuteronomy, while the second legitimizes it and the third underlines its binding character. This sequence is in itself logical, but problematic for Wiirthwein's reconstruction is the fundamental separation of the reform and discovery reports; for without a corresponding continuation, the significance of the discovery remains obscure and the conclusion in 22:11 unsatisfactory.203 More crucial than the question to what extent Wurthwein has given the last word on the problem of the origin of the reform report are the conclusions which he has drawn from his insight into the original independence of the deuteronomistic book of Kings. In 1981 Norbert Lohfink had already argued, for the existence of a deuteronomistic account of the conquest of the land, DtrL, extending from Deuteronomy 1—Joshua 22.204 In 1983 A. D, H. Mayes advocated the book of Kings as the starting point of deuteronomistic historiography.203 In 1988 Ian Provan asserted that the original DtrG comprised only parts of Samuel and Kings.206 A year before Ernst Wurthwein, and obviously after long consideration, Claus 198

(1972), 62 f. For his allocation of appropriate texts to DtrPl and DtrP2, cf. Wurthwein (1984), 496-8. 20(1 Dietrich (1972), 120-27 and Wurthwein (1984), 205, 498, as well as the relevant essays now collected together, Wiirthwein (1994), 102-77. Cf. already Jepsen (19562), 771. m Cf. Wurthwein (1984), 269-72 and 405f., as well as Jepsen (19562), 77. 202 Cf. H.-C Schraitt (1972), 131-8, and Wurthwein (1984), 366-8. m Cf. Wurthwein's explanatory essay (1984), 448. And also Uehlinger in Gross (1995). 204 Lohfink (1981), 92-7. 205 Cf. above. 206 (1988), 173. w

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Westermann argued that the varied forms of the individual books militated against the claim that the books Deuteronomy to 2 Kings originated as parts of a unified DtrG,207 He referred to the objection already raised earlier by Georg Fohrer, who, in his survey of research, drew attention to the difference between the deuteronomistic schema of Judges and the historical theology of the books of Kings which gradually leads to destruction. He had explained this by arguing that the book of Judges had undergone deuteronomistic editing but that the book of Kings was itself written by a deuteronomistic hand, and so he rejected the idea of a continuous DtrG,208 It ought not to be overlooked that Gerhard von Rad in his Theologie des Alien Testaments I had noted that it was hard to imagine that the redaction of the books of Judges and. Kings had been accomplished as a single piece of work.209 So Wurthwein has drawn the conclusion that to the deuteronomistic book of Kings, as stage 1, was added the deuteronomistic edited book of Samuel as stage 2; then a later Deuteronomist collected the tribal sagas and created a book of Judges comprising 2; 11—12: 6*, as stage 3; and finally the conquest sagas of Josh 1-11* were placed as an introduction by yet another Deuteronomist.210 In this way he expressly acknowledges the necessity of combining the stage model with the strata model.211 The wheel of history may return to its original position, but time has completed a spiral movement so that the position itself has changed. That is also now true for the understanding of DtrG: it is not a unified whole, as Noth thought; nor is it, as Wellhausen judged, a collection of books only superficially harmonized with one another. It is rather a threestage literary unity which has grown over time through repeated, mutually co-ordinated partial redactions. Retrospect and prospect In retrospect, it appears that the view has gained ground that the Yahwistic work is a more complex entity than had been thought in mid-century. It has also become widely held that the promise texts of the Yahwistic work, which have undergone theological editing, are exilic or post-exilic. There are uncertainties with regard to the literary evaluation, but not the existence, of the elohistic and priestly texts. Discussion has led to a closer recognition of their theological individuality. As far as DtrG is concerned, a combination of the stage and strata models emerges, which requires giv207

Cf. Westermann (1994), 30. Fohrer (196510), 211 (ET, 194). von Rad (1969*), 359 (ET, 346-7). 210 Cf. the proof offered by Becker (1990), 3001, who nevertheless finds the original deuteronomistic book of Judges in 2: 11-16: 31*. Chs. 17f. are late deuteronomistic, while 1: 1-18 and chs. (19)20-21 were probably placed at beginning and end by the final redactor of the Pentateuch. The pro-monarchic notices in 17; 6; 18: la, 19a; and 21:25 probably also go back to him, 296-8. 211 Wiirthwein (1994), 1-11. 208 209

THE PENTATEUCH AND THE DEUTERONOMISTIC H I S T O R Y 315 ing up the idea of a single work extending from Deuteronomy 1 to 2 Kings 25 in favour of a more complicated stage and strata model which still needs further working out. Whoever complains that the picture of origin of the work which in the end extends from Genesis 1 to 2 Kings 25 is more complicated than was suspected in mid-century should, remember that a more nuanced picture also furnishes deeper insight into the history of Israelite faith. Knowledge lives and advances through controversy. It is an astonishing sign of the appropriateness of current vigorous discussion that out of manifold theoretical possibilities of interpreting the textual evidence there are in the end only three or four explanatory models with a serious claim for attention. The accusation of Hegelianism, uncontrolled subjectivism or worse, against the historical critical method, with its concern for cultural developments and the history of growth of the biblical books, should be raised only with great care; Hegel may not have been understood; the historical character of our understanding has perhaps not been fully appreciated.212 Apart from that, it should be noted that for mankind there is no immediate access to the absolute, and in the context of the relative there are no eternal truths, but only anthropologically conditioned constants and historically determined developments and changes. Therefore the abandonment of the historical question concerning the origin of the biblical text and its original significance at the same time involves the abandonment of its appropriate use in the present, which, with or without reflection, depends upon the principle of analogy.213

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THE PENTATEUCH AND THE DEUTERONOMISTIC H I S T O R Y 317 — (196510), Einteitung in das Alte Testament (Heidelberg: Quelle & Meyer) (ET, Introduction to (he Old Testament, London: SPCK). — (1969), 'Altes Testament—"Amphiktyonie" u. "Bund"?', in id, Studien zur alttestamentlichen Theologie mid Geschichte, (1949-1966) (BZAW 115; Berlin: de Gruyter), 84-119, FREI, P. (1984), 'Zentralgewalt und Lokalautonomie im Achamenidenreich', in Reichsidee und Keichsorganisation im Perserreich, ed, P. Frei and K. Koch (OBO 55; Freiburg/Schweiz und Gottingen: Universitatsverlag/Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht), 7-43. FRITZ, F. (1.970), Israel in der Wuste, Traditionsgeschichtliclte Untersuchung der Wiisteniiberlieferung des Jahnristen (MThSt 7; Marburg: N. G. Elwert). GEISELMANN, B, (1994), 'Die sogenannte josianische Reform in der gegenwartigen Forschung', ZAWW6, 223-42. GROSS, W, (1995) (ed.), fenmiah u. die 'deutemnemistische Bewegung (BBS 98; Weinheim: Beltz Athenaeum), HACHMANN, R, (1996), 'Das Konigsgrab von Kamid el-Loz und die Konigsgraber der mittleren und spater Bronze- und friihen Eisenzeit im Kustengebeit ostlich des Mittelmeeres und in Mesopotamien', in Kamid el-Loz 16—'Schatzhaus'— Studien, ed. R. Hachmann (Saarbriicker Beitrage zur Altertumskunde 59, Bonn: Dr. Rudolf Habelt Verlag), 203-87. HOBBS, T. R, (1985), 2 Kings (WBC 13; Texas: Word Books), HOFFMANN, H.-D. (1980), Reform und Reformen. Untersuchungen zu einem Grundtheina der deuteranomistischen Geschichtsschreibung (ATbANT 66; Zurich: Theologischer Verlag). JEPSEN, A, (19562), Die Quellen des Konigsbuches (Halle: VEB Max Niemeyer Verlag). KAISER, O. (19845), Einleitung in das Allen Testament (Gutersloh: Verlagshaus Gerd Mohn). (1988), 'Beobachtungen zur sog. Thronnachfolgeerzahlung Davids', EthL 64. — (1992-4), Grundriss der Einleitung in die kanonischen und deutewkanonischen Schriften des Alien Testaments l-III (Giitersloh: Gerd Mohn). (1997), 'Zwischen Interpretation und Uberinterpretation, Vom Ethos des Auslegers', Variations hermeneutiques 6, 53-70. KEEL, O, and Uehlinger, C. (1994), Gottinnen, Cotter und Gottcssymbok, Nate Erkenntnisse zur Religionsgeschichte Kanacms und Israels aufgrund bislang unerschlossener ikonographischer Quellen (QD 134; Freiburg i. Br.: Herder). KILIAN, R. (1966), Die vorpriesterlichen Abrahamsubcrlieferungen (BBB 24; Bonn: Peter Hanstein Verlag). KIRKPATRICK, P. G, (1988), The Old Testament and Folklore Study (JSOTS 62; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press). KNAPP, D, (1987), Deuteronomium 4. Literarische Analyse und theologische Interpretation (GthA 35; Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht). KOCKBRT, M. (1988), Vatergott und Vaterverheissungen (FRLANT 142; Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht). KOHATA, F. (1986), jahwist und Priesterschrift in Exodus 3-14 (BZAW 166; Berlin: de Gruyter). LANGLAMET, F. (1976), 'Pour ou contre Salomon? La redaction prosalomonienne de I Rois l-II' RB 83, 321-79,481-528.

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LEVIN, C. (1985), Die Verheissung des neuen Eundes (FRLANT 137; Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht). — (1993), Derjahwist (FRLANT 157; Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht), LOKFINK, N. (1981), 'Kerygmata des deuteronomistischen Geschichtswerks', in Die Botsclwft and die Boten, FS H, Wolff, ed. J. Jeremias and L. Perlitt (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag), 87-100. — (1985) (ed.), Da's Deuteronomium. Entstehung, Gestalt mid Botsdwft (BEThL 68; Leuven: Leuven University Press). — (1991a), Die Voter Israels an Deuteronomium. Mif einer Stellungnahme von T. 'Rimer (OBO 111; Freiburg and Gottingen: Universitatsverlag/Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht). — (1991 b), 'Zur neuesten Diskussion iiber 2 Kon 22-23', (1985) in Studien zurn Deuteronomium und zur deuteronomistischen Literatur II (SBAB 12; Stuttgart: Katholisches Bibelwerk), 179-207. — (1991c), 'Die Gattung der "Historischen Kurzgeschichte" in den letzten Jahren von Juda und in der Zeit des babylonischen Exils', ZAW90 (1978), 311-47 = Studien II (SBAB 12; Stuttgart. Katholisches Bibelwerk), 55-86. McEvENUE, S, E. (1971), The Narrative Style of the Priestly Writer (AnBib 50; Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute). — (1994), 'A Return to the Sources in Genesis 28:10-22?', Z AW 106,375-89. MAYES, A. D. H, (1979), Deuteronomy (NCBC; London: Oliphants). •— (1983), The Story of Israel Between Settlement and Exile. A Redactional Study of the Dcutemiioinift'ic History (London: SCM Press). MERRITT, B. D., Wade-Gary, H. T. and McGregor, M. F. (1939), The Athenian Tribute List I (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press). — (1950), The Athenian Tribute List III (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press). MINETTE DE TiLESSE, G. (1962), 'Sections "tu" et sections "vous" dans le Deuteronome', VT12,29-87. MOENIKES, A. (1992), 'Zur Redaktionsgeschichte des DtrG', ZAW104,333-48. MOWINCKEL, S. (1964), Erwagungen zur Pentateuchquellenfmge (Trondheim: Universitets Forlaget). NELSON, R. D. (1981), Tlte Double Redaction of the Deuteronomistic History (JSOTS18; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press). NICHOLSON, E. W. (1998), The Pentateuch in the Twentieth Century. The Legacy of Julius Wellhausen (Oxford: Clarendon Press). NIELSEN, E. (1995), Deuteronomium (HAT } /6; Tubingen: J. C. B. Mohr). NORTH, C. R. (1951), 'Pentateuchal Criticism', in The Old Testament and Modem Study, ed, H. H. Rowley (Oxford: Clarendon Press), 48-83. NOTH, M. (1943), Uherlieferungsgeschichtliche Studien (Tubingen: Max Niemeyer), ET (1981) The Deuteronomistic History (JSOTS 15; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press). — (1948), Ubetiieferungsgeschichte des Pentateuchs (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer), ET (1981) A History of Pentateuchal Traditions (Chico: Scholars Press). O'BRIBN, M. A. (1989), The Deuteronomistic History Hypothesis. A Reassessment (OBO 92; Freiburg and Gottingen: Universitatsverlag/Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht). OTTO, E. (1.989), Rechtsgeschichte der Redaktionen ini Kodex Esnunna und int. 'Bundes-

THE PENTATEUCH AND THE DEUTERONOMISTIC H I S T O R Y 319 buck' (OBO 85; Freiburg and Gottingen: Universitatsverlag/Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht). — (1991), Kdrperuerletzungen in den Keikchriftrechten und im Alien Testament (AOAT 226; Kevelaer and Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag). — (1995), 'Kritik der Pentateuchkomposition' ThR 60,164-9. — (1996a), 'Die Paradieserzahlung Genesis 2-3: Eine nachpriesterschriftliche Lehrerzahlung in ihrem religionshistorischen Kontext' in 'fedes Ding hat seine Ze.it.,.' Stvdien zur israelitischen und altorienfalischen Weisheit. FS D. Michel, ed, A, A, Diesel et al (BZAW 241; Berlin: de Gruyter), 167-92. (1996b), 'Die nachpriesterschriftliche Pentateuchredaktion im Buch Exodus', in Studies in the Book of Exodus, ed. V. Vervenne, (BEThL 126; Leuven: Leuven University Press), 61-111. — (I996c), Treueid und Gesetz. Die Urspriinge des Deuteronorniums im Horizont neuassyrischen Vertragsrechts', Zeitschrift fur Altor, u, Bibl Rechtsgeschichte 2,1-52. -—(1997), 'Forechung zur Priesterschriff, ThR 62,1-50. PERLITT, L. (1965), Vatke und Wellhausen (BZAW 94; Berlin: Tope!maim). — (1969), Bundestheologie im Allen Testament (WMANT 36; Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag). — (1994), 'Der Staatsgedanke im Deuteronomium', in Language, Theology, and the Bible (FS ]. Barr), ed. S. E. Balentine and J. Barton (Oxford; Clarendon Press), 182-96. PORTER, J. R. (1979), 'Old Testament Historiography', in Tradition and Interpretation, ed. G. W. Anderson (Oxford: Clarendon Press), 125-62, PREUSS, H. D. (1982), Deuteronomium (EdF 164; Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft). — (1993), 'Das deuteronomistische Geschichtswerk', ThR 58,229-64,341-95. PROBSTL, V. (1997), Nehemiah 9, Psalm 106 u, Ps 136 u, die Rezeption des Pentateuchs (Gottingen: Cuvillier Verlag). P.ROPP, W. H. C. (1996), The Priestly Source Recovered Intact?', FT 46,458-78. PROVAN, I. W. (1988), Hezekiah and the Books of Kings, A Contribution to the Debate about the Composition of the Deuteronomistic History (BZAW 172; Berlin: de Gruyter). RENDTORFF, R. (1976), Das uberlieferungsgeschichtliche Problem des Pentateuch (BZAW 147; Berlin: de Gruyter), ET Tire Problem of the Process of Transmission in the Pentateuch (JSOTS 89; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press). REUTER, E. (1993), Kultzentralization. Entstehung und Theoiogie von Dtn 12 (BBB 87; Frankfiirt am Main: Anton Main). RICHTER, W. (1967), 'Beobachtungen zur theologischen Systembildung in der alt. Literatur', in Wahrheit und Verkitndigung. FS M. Schmaus J (Paderborn: Schoningh), 175-212. ROWER, T. (1990), Israels Voter. Untersuchnngen zur Vaterthernatik im Deuteronomium und in der deuteronomistischen Tradition (OBO 99; Freiburg and Gottingen: Universitatsverlag/Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht). ROMER, T. and de Pury, A. (1996), 'L'historiographie deuteronomiste. Histoire de la recherche et enjeux du debat' in de Pury, Romer and Macchi (eds.), 1-120. ROSE, M. (1981), Deuteranainist und Jahwist. llntersuchungen zu den Beriihrungspunkten beider Literatunoerke (AThANT 67; Zurich: Theologischer Verlag),

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ROSE, M, (1994), S.Mose 7-25 (ZBK.AT 5/1; Zurich: Theologischer Verlag). RUDOLPH, W. (1938), Der 'Elohist' von Exodus bis josim (BZAW 68; Berlin: Ciessen: Topelmann). SCHARBERT, J. (1983), Genesis (NEB; Wurzburg: Echter Verlag). — (1989), Exodus (NEB; Wurzburg: Echter Verlag). — (1992), Numcri (NEB; Wurzburg: Echter Verlag). SCHART, A. (1990), Mose und Israel im Konflikt. Erne redaktiomgeschichtliche Studie zu den Wtistenerzahlungen (OBO 98; Freiburg and Gottingen: Universitatsverlag/ Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht). SCHMID, H. H. (1976), Der sogenannte Jahwist. Beobachtungen und Fragen zur Pentateuchforschung (Zurich: Theologischer Verlag). SCHMIDT, L. (1986), 'Literarische Studien zur Josephsgeschichte' in A. Aejmelaeus and L. Schmidt (BZAW 167; Berlin: de Gruyter), 121-207. — (1988), 'Jacob erschleicht sichden Vaterlichen Segen', ZAW100,159-83. — (1990), Beobachtungen zu den Plagenerzahlungen in Exodus VII14-IX 10 (StB 4; Leiden: E. J. Brill). (1993), Studien zur Priesterschrift (BZAW 214; Berlin: de Gruyter). — (1998), Gesammelte Avjsiilze zum Pentateuch (BZAW 263; Berlin: de Gruyter). SCHMIDT, W. H. (1974-88/1995), Exodus (BKAT) II/l. 1-4; 11/2, 1 (NeukirchenVluyn: Neukirchener Verlag). — (19955), Einfuhrung in das Alte Testament (Berlin: de Gruyter), ET (1984) Introduction to the Old Testament (London: SCM Press). ScrnvriTT, H.-C. (1972), El/sa. Traditionsge$chichtikhe Untersuchungen zur vorklassischen Prophetic (Giitersloh: Gerd Mohn). — (1980), Die nichtpriesterliche Josephsgeschichte (BZAW 154; Berlin: de Gruyter). — (1985), 'Die Hintergrunde der "neuesten Pentateuchkritik", u. der literarische Befund der Josephsgeschichte Gen 37-50', ZAW 97,161-79, (1995), 'Die Suche nach der Identitat des Jahweglaubens im nachexilischen Israel. Bermerkungen zur theologischen Intention der Endredaktion des Pentateuchs', in Pluralismus und Identitat, ed. J. Mehlhausen (VWGTh 8; Giitersloh; Chr. Kaiser), 259-78. SCHULTE, H. (1971), Die Entstehung der Geschichtsschreibung im Alten Israel (BZAW 128; Berlin: de Gruyter). SEEBASS, H. (1989), 'Que reste-il du Yahwiste et de 1'Elohiste?' in A, de Pury, Le Pentataicjiie (MoBi 19; Geneva: Labor et Fides), 235-57. — (1995-97), Genesis 1—11/2 (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag). SEITZ, C. R. (1989), neology in Conflict. Reactions to the Exile in the Book of Jeremiah (BZAW 176; Berlin/New York: de Gruyter). SIMPSON, C, A. (1948), The Early Traditions of Israel (Oxford: Blackwell). SKA, J. S. (1989), 'Quelques remarques sur Pg et la derniere redaction du Pentateuque' in de Pury (1989), 95-125. SMEND, R. (1971), 'Das Gesetz und die Volker' in FS G. von Rad, Munich, = id., Die Mitte des Alten Testaments, Ges. Studien 1 (BevTh 9; Munich: C. Kaiser), 124-37. SMITH, M. (1971), Palestinian Parties and Politics that Shaped the Old Testament (New York & London: Columbia University Press). SNAITH, N. H. (1951), The Historical Books', in The Old Testament and Modern Study, ed. H. H. Rowley (Oxford: Clarendon Press), 84-114,

THE PENTATEUCH AND THE DEUTERONOMISTIC H I S T O R Y 321 SPIECKBBMANN, H. (1982), Juda und Assur in dcr Sargonidenzeif (FRLANT 129; Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht). UNGER, M, (1996), Die Paradieserzahlung Gen 2-3 (Diss Graz). VAN SETERS, J. (1975), Abraham in History and Tradition (New Haven and London: Yale University Press). — (1983), In Search of History, Historiography in the Ancient World and the Origins of Biblical History (New Haven: Yale University Press). — (1992), Prologue to 'History (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press). — (1994), The Life of Moses (Katnpen: Kok Pharos Publishing House). VEIJOLA, T. (1975) (ed.), Die, ewige Dynastie, David und die Entstehung seiner Dynastic in der Beurteilung der deuteronomistischen Historiogmphie (AASF.B 193; Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia). — (1.977), Das Konigtum in der Beurteilung der deuteronomistischen Historiographie, (AASF, B 198; Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakateniia). — (1982), Verheissung in der Krise. Studien zur Litemtur und Theologie der Exilszeit unhand des 89. Psalms (AASF.B 220; Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia). — (1990), David. Ges. Studien zu den Daviduberlieferungen des Alien Testaments (SFEG 52; Helsinki and Gottingen: Finnische Exegetische Gesellschaft). — (1996), 'Bundestheologische Redaktion im Deuteronomium' in id. (ed.) 1996, 2.42-76. VEIJOLA, T, (1996) (ed.), Das Deuteronomium u. seine Querbeziige (SFEG 62; Helsinki and Gottingen: Finnische Exegetische Gesell.sch.aft/Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht). VERMEYLEN, f. (1989), 'Les premieres etapes litteraires de la formation du Pentateuque', in A. de Fury 1989:149-97. VOLZ, P. and Rudolph, W. (1933), Der Elohist als Erzahler. Ein Irrweg der Pentateuchkritik? An der Genesis erlautert (BZAW 63; Giessen: Topehnann). VON RAD, G. (1934), Die Priesterschrift im Hexateuch (BWANT 4/14; Stuttgart: Kohlhanimer). •—(1963*), Theologie des Alien Testaments (Munich: C. Kaiser), ET Old Testament Theology I (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1962). VoRtANDER, H. (1978), Die Entstehungszeit des jehovistischen Geschichtswerkes (EHS.TH XXIII/109; Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang). WAHL, H. M. (1997), Die Jakobserzahlungen. Studien zu Hirer mundllichen Uberlieferung, Verschriftung und Historizitat (BZAW 258; Berlin: de Gruyter). WEIMAR, P. (1974), 'Die Toledot-Formel in der priesterschriftlichen Geschichtsdarstellung', BZNF 18,65-93. — (1985), Die Meenmtndererzahlung (A AT 9; Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowite). WEIMAR, P. and Zenger, E. (1975), Exodus. Geschichten und Geschichte der Befreiung Israels (SBS 75; Stuttgart: Katholisches Bibelwerk). WEIPPBRT, H. (1985), 'Das deuteronomistische Geschichtswerk. Sein Ziel und Ende in der neueren Forschung', ThR 50, 213-49. WBIPPERT, M. (1991), 'Die Vorgeschichte Israels in neuem Lichf, ThR 56,341-90. WELLHAUSEN, J. (1927), Geschichte Israels (1878) = Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels (Berlin: de Gruyter, 19276), ET Prolegomena to the History of Ancient Israel (New York: Meridian Verlag, 1957). — (1963), Die Composition des Hexateuchs (4th edn Berlin: de Gruyter). WESTERMANN, C. (1981), Genesis. 2 Teilband. Genesis 12-36 (BKAT1 /2; NeukirchenVluyn: Neukirchener Verlag), ET Genesis 12-36 (London: SPCK, 1986).

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WESTERMANN, C. (1982), Genesis 3. Teilbaiid, Genesis 37-50, (BKAT 1/3; Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag), ET Genesis 12-36 (London: SPCK, 1987), •— (1994), Die Geschichtsbttcher des Alien Testaments, Gab es ein deuteronomistisches Gcschichtswerk? (ThB 87; Giitersloh: C. Kaiser). WHYBRAY, R. N. (1968), 'The Joseph Story and Pentateuchal Criticism', VT 18, 522-8. — (1987), The Making of the Pentateuch; A Methodological Study (JSOTS 53; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press). WITTE, M. (1998), Die biblische Urgeschichte (BZAW 265; de Gruyter). WURTHWEIN, E. (1974), Die Erzahlung von der Thronfolge Davids (ThSt 115; Zurich: Theologischer Verlag) = 1994,29-79. — (1976) 'Die Josianische Reform und das Deuteronomium', ZThK 75, 375-97 = 1994,188-216, — (1984), Die Biicher der Konige. l.KSn. 17-2. Kim 25 (AID 11/12; Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht). — (1994), Studien zutn deuteronomistischen Geschichtswerk (BZAW 227; Berlin: de Gruyter), 188-216. WYNN-WILUAMS, D. J. (1997), The State of the Pentateuch (BZAW 249; Berlin: de Gruyter). ZENGER, E. (1989), 'Le theme de la sortie d'Egypte et la naissance du Pentateuque' in A. de Pury, Le Pentateuque (MoBi 19; Geneva: Labor et Fides), 301-31. ZENGER, E. et al. (19962) (eds.), Einleitung in das Alte Testament (KStBTh 1/1; Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer).

12

Prophecy and the Prophetic Books J. BLENKIMSOPP I SINCE the survey of the prophetic literature by McKane some twenty years ago1 not much has been added to the non-biblical data bearing on the phenomenon of prophecy in ancient Israel, though studies on texts known for some time have continued to appear. Some few additional texts of a prophetic-divinatory sort from the Kingdom of Mari have been published, and the term nabu, an apparent cognate of nabf, has turned up among recently published texts from Mari and Emar, the context suggesting the role of diviner or omen-giver.2 In the intervening years work has progressed on Neo-Assyrian oracular as distinct from divinatory texts. For the most part these collections of oracles offer guidance on military and political matters and assure the ruler of success, much like the Mari 'prophetic' texts. Court and temple archives would obviously have had no interest in preserving opposition prophecies, though their existence may be deduced from stipulations in the succession treaty of Esarhaddon.3 Of the many other studies published since the 1970s on texts dealing with related phenomena in other parts of the ancient Near East, among the more interesting of which are the plaster texts from Deir 'Alia,4 none appears to have had a significant new impact on our understanding of Israelite prophecy; and no further information has been extracted from the Lachish ostraca, the only non-biblical texts that actually mention Israelite (Judaean) prophecy,5 Since McKane wrote there has been no revival of ' (1979), 163-88. Durand (1988), 444-5; Fleming (1993). See also Heintz (1990); (1992); Malamat (1991); Parker (1993); Gordon (1993). 3 Lines 108-22; see Parpola and Watanabe (1988), 33. On Neo-Assyrian oracular texts in general see Weippert (1981); Strong (1984); Weippert, Seybold and Weippert (1985); de Jong Ellis (1989); Starr (1990); Nissinen (1993). 4 Edifio Princeps by Hoftijzer and van der Kooij (1976); see also Hackett (1980); MuIIer (1982). 5 Barstad (1993a), the most recent contribution to the subject at the time of writing, argues 2

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interest in the origins of prophecy in Israel either, due no doubt in part to the confused state of current scholarly opinion on Israelite origins,6 Attempts to categorize different types of prophecy in Israel according to their social co-ordinates have had the effect of broadening the search for comparative material both geographically and chronologically. Deut. 13: 9-22 provides biblical warranty for pursuing one line of enquiry by contrasting prophecy with different forms of divinatory and necromantic practices which, though described as foreign abominations, are known to have been in use throughout the history of the two kingdoms. While the more prominent kinds of prophetic activity recorded, in the Old Testament (not necessarily an accurate indication of what was actually going on) are phenomenologically quite different from these practices there is some overlap, e.g., with the ro'eh consulted by Saul (1 Sam. 9; 5-14), the hostile stare of Elisha (2 Kgs, 8:11), and his magical use of arrows accompanied by incantatory words (2 Kgs, 13:14—19), and we should in any case be wary of making categoric distinctions between intuitive and technical kinds of 'prophetic' activity. In recent years a number of impressive studies of the kinds of practices listed in Deut. 18: 9-14 with respect to Israel, Ugarit and the ancient Near East in general have appeared. These deserve mention insofar as they can be located on the same broad spectrum of mediatory techniques and practices as some forms of Israelite prophecy.7 Once biblical prophecy, whether individual or collective, is categorized as a form of mediation the possibilities for comparison can be extended chronologically, topographically and. culturally almost indefinitely taking in a very broad range of related phenomena and types, e.g., prophetic figures among the pre-Islamic Arabs, the Nuer of Sudan and the Plains Indians of North America.8 Comparative studies of this kind can stimulate reflection on biblical prophetic phenomena and even help us to formulate better questions about the social location and functioning of Israelite prophecy, though sometimes at the risk of neglecting the specific character of Israel as an ancient Near Eastern-Levantine society and of overlooking features unique to Israelite prophecy. Before pursuing the issue of the social location and function of Israelite prophecy any further it will be well to consider a rather basic matter alluded to in passing by McKane in the 1979 volume, where he referred to the danger of form-critical positivism and the problematic nature of the against the common identification of hub' in ostracon XVI:5. It is sometimes still assumed, on the basis of the similar language used at Jer. 38: 4, that the individual accused of undermining morale in the defective ostracon VI:5 was a itSWbut this is quite uncertain, * It is therefore no longer possible to conduct the debate on the lines of nomadic as opposed to Canaanite origins, as Holscher, Fohrer and others. Some aspects of this issue are discussed by Wilson (1978); Porter (1982). 7 Lewis (1989); Cryer (1994); B. B. Schmidt (1994); Grabbe (1995); van der Toorn (1996). 8 Examples in Lindbloen (1963), 1—16; Lewis (19892); Johnson (1994). The most assiduous student of such phenomena from a specifically biblical-prophetic perspective is Overholt (1974); 0986); (1989); (1990).

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passage from text to prophetic realia, including prophetic biography.9 No one doubts that this passage has become more problematic in the intervening years, especially for biblical scholars influenced by currents of literary theory or theories of interpretation falling under the broad rubric of postmodernist. The subversion or deconstruction from within the text under consideration of its explicit meanings and intentionality encourages the idea that only provisional and optional meanings can be assigned to it. So stated, this is really not all that different from the assumptions and procedures of critical exegesis in the modern period in general, but the important difference for the postmodernist biblical critic, certainly in practice and probably also in theory, is that radical indeterminacy is now an, essential postulate of interpretation of any kind. This evidently spells trouble for all varieties of referential reading of texts and calls into question both the possibility and the value of determining original meanings, that is, meanings intended by authors, comprehended by or at least comprehensible to their audiences, or dictated by the circumstances in which, the text in question was produced. On this showing, texts attributed to prophets or about prophets cannot be expected to provide ready access to information about prophetic realia including social location and function. A word should be said at this point about B. S. Quids' advocacy of interpretation in the context of canon pursued with great determination and at great length over a period of about three decades. Childs' emphasis on the final shape of a biblical book as the appropriate object of interpretation is dictated by a theological and confessional rather than literary and aesthetic agenda, but it too represents a turning away from historicalcritical investigation with its strong interest in original meanings and the literary history of texts. In its sheer scale Childs' opus is one of the more impressive achievements of biblical scholarship in the last quarter of a century. If it has nevertheless failed to convince many it is because there are important issues, theological as well as historical, which exclusive attention to final forms is obliged to bypass—e.g. the rich variety of traditions embedded in the texts and their reciprocal interactions over time, and the working out of conflicting authority claims in the religious sphere, an issue of particular relevance to prophecy.10 Though often lumped together with post-structuralist literary approaches, reader response theory or Rezeptionstheorie moves along a rather different groove. Reacting against the textual solipsism of the New Criticism (no longer new after the passage of more than sixty years) its practitioners operate on the assumption that interaction with an at least implied readership is a constituent element of the origin and raison d'etre of any text, even one which may seem to have no social visibility, for 9

(1979), 163-4. Childs (1978); (1979) (1985). Child's work has been thoroughly reviewed and criticized by Barr (1983) and in a number of reviews in. /SOT 16 (1.980), 2-60.' m

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example, a private diary. Unlike deconstruction, reader response theory is therefore obliged to take the social situation of the reader, real or implied, into account, and provides motivation for its practitioner to invoke the sociology of knowledge. Nevertheless, a common feature of both approaches is a fairly decisive shift from the viewpoint of the text to that of the reader as the controlling factor, and a consequent disincentive to take seriously the constraints specific to biblical compositions which, are culturally and chronologically distant from the interpreter.11 It seems, however, that prophetic texts have proved more recalcitrant to these forms of experimental literary analysis than biblical narrative, which may explain why stories about prophets, including Jonah, have claimed more attention than non-narrative prophetic genres.12 On, the other hand the advocates of Ideologiekritik, also at the experimental stage at least as far as biblical scholarship is concerned, have found ample scope in prophetic books for unmasking the agendas, prejudices and interested, perspectives implicit in the texts in question. This, again, is not as innovative an interpretative procedure as might appear. Any interpretative process involves an encounter between two ideologies, that of the text and that of the reader, inclusive of the latter's social class and political and religious affiliations and gender, an encounter ending more often than not with the subjugation of the former by the latter.13 Social analysis of prophetic texts has also had to cope with a terminological issue much discussed in recent years. We are not in a position to trace the development in the use of the standard prophetic label nabi"in any detail since its incidence is patchy and uneven and the only nonbiblical occurrence (in the Lachish ostraca) is not very helpful. It is accepted that by the end. of the biblical period the term had undergone a semantic expansion to the point where practically any significant figure in the tradition (e.g. Abraham, Moses, David) could be referred to as a nabi', and where a wide range of activities, including historiography and the composition and rendition of liturgical music, could be reclassified as prophetic.14 A decisive point on this trajectory was the redefinition of prophecy and the prophetic role in Deuteronomy. According to deuteronomic !I In addition to R. P. Carroll, The Reader and the Text' in the present volume see Aichele et at, (1995); Davies and Climes (1993) (eds.). Some of the essays in Exum and Clines (1993) (eds.), deal with prophetic texts. n Rofe (1988) discusses most of the biographical genres and sous-genres. Of the great deal written on Jonah a few examples will suffice: West (1984); Craig (1990); Band (1990); Wilt (1993); Crouch (1994); Person (1996). The exemplary commentary of Sasson (1990) could serve as a corrective to the occasional excess of whimsy in some of the contributions listed above. " For documentation see Carroll (1995). Since feminist interpretations are dealt with in another essay in the present volume, it will suffice to mention the essays in Brenner (1995) (ed.), dealing with well-known and well-criticized texts in Hosea and Ezekiel and the language of sexual violence elsewhere in the prophetic literature. 14 On concepts of prophecy in the late biblical and post-biblical periods see Blenkinsopp (1977), 124-38; (1996a); Barton (1986); Schniedewind (1995).

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theory, prophecy originated at Horeb with the intercessory and legislative functions discharged there by Moses, prophet kafexochen, and its historic role, carefully circumscribed by deuteronomic authors, was to continue the work of Moses after his death (Deut. 18: 15-22).15 So redefined and circumscribed, prophetic servants ('"badayw hann'bt' tm) play a crucial role in the Deuteronomistic History (hereafter Dtr) (1 Kgs. 14:18; 15: 29; 18: 36; 2 Kgs. 9: 7,36; 10:10; 14: 25; 17:13, 23; 21:10; 24: 2), even though the 'classical' prophets are almost totally and conspicuously absent from it. The situation is less clear with respect to the ongoing debate about the incidence and extent of a deuteronomistic redaction of Latter Prophets16 and of Jeremiah in particular, but it is arguable that deuteronomistic editors have attempted to make over Jeremiah according to the tenets of the school, perhaps even representing him within their historical-theological schema as the last of 'his servants the prophets' as Moses was the first.17 The incidence of prophetic terminology in Jeremiah illustrates the point about late usage and the consequent difficulty of applying the designation MM* to the canonical prophets as a descriptive label. Auld has shown that the term is absent from Jeremian passages in verse, and that it occurs only four times in prose passages common to MT and LXX and twentyfour times in the textual material exclusive to MT, this last about one eighth of the length of the book and part of a version later and longer than the material common to MT and LXX. On this basis he concluded that Jeremiah, and the other individuals to whom prophetic books are attributed, became known as n'W'fm only in the post-exilic period.18 Consistent with this conclusion is the fact that Jeremiah condemns contemporaneous n'bt'tm with such vehemence and so frequently as to render it unlikely that he himself would have wished to be known as a nabi'.w Isaiah likewise is called a nabV only in the prose section corresponding to Dtr (Isa. 36-39 cf. 2 Kgs. 18: 13-20: 19), and allusions to tfbftm elsewhere in the book are uniformly unfavourable (3: 2; 9: 14; 28: 7; 29: 10), Amos appears to disavow the designation while accepting the activity indicated by the verb, though the verses in question have been explained otherwise (Amos 7: 14—15), Micah defines his mission explicitly over against the ri'Wim (3: 5-8) whom he elsewhere accuses of venality (3: 11). The denominative verb nb' occurs thirty-five times in Ezekiel 1-39 (thirty-three times in 15

Zobel (1992); Barstad (1994a). Albertz (1994), 379-87, on the acceptance and editing of prophetic material in the postdisaster period including the activity of the Jeremian Deutercmomists; also Blenkinsopp (1996%), 161-5, on exilk-deuteronomistic editing of prophetic books. 17 Auld (1984). Note the frequent reference to prophets as '"badim (Jer. 7: 25; 25:4; 26:5; 29: 19; 35: 15; 44: 4) and the forty-year span of Jeremiah's prophetic activity (1: 2-3), one of several Mosaic echoes in Jeremiah's prophetic commissioning. 18 Auld (1983). Vawter (1985) took a somewhat similar tack, and Auld's thesis was greeted with approval and taken further by Carroll (1983), for whom the prophetic books are essentially postexilic literary orations. w Jer. 2:8, 26; 4: 9; 5:13; 6:13; 8:1,10; 14:13-16; 23: 9-40; 27:9,14-1.6; 28-29; 32: 32. 16

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Niphal, twice in Hithpael) yet Ezekiel himself is designated a nabt' only indirectly (2: 5; 14: 4, 7; 33: 33) and Ms diatribe against contemporaneous prophets takes up where Jeremiah left off (Ezek, 7: 26; 13: 1-23; 14: 9-10; 22: 25, 28), Of the fifteen to whom books are ascribed, only three— Habakkuk, Haggai, Zechariah—are given the title nab? in the superscription or the body of the book in question.20 This has been taken to indicate that at least these three were cult prophets, but it is doubtful that their status can be determined on that basis alone. Auld argued, then, that the individuals to whom the fifteen books are attributed, were designated n'bt'fm only in the post-exilic period, and he then went on to suggest that we should think of them as poets rather than prophets. But even if as opponents of the neln' im they rejected the prophetic label, which we cannot be sure was invariably the case,21 it may be that their primary concern was to avoid confusion with prophetic prebendaries attached to state cults in both kingdoms—a conclusion supported by the very frequent condemnation of prophets alongside of priests.22 The issue cannot, in any case, be resolved on the basis of terminology alone without reference to the substance of the discourse contained in the books, including forms of speech comparable to those associated with prophetlike intermediaries in other Near Eastern societies. Different attempts at relabelling the putative authors of the books-—as poets, intellectual dissidents, ideologues, demagogues, and pamphleteers23—can capture this or that aspect of their agenda and activity but none of them obliges us to dispense with the traditional designation.24 I!

A social-scientific approach to prophecy was and is implicit in the formcritical method, though until recently it was rarely articulated as an important part of the agenda of Old Testament scholarship. The interest of form critics tended to focus on the relation between prophets and institutions including warfare, legal practice, and cult, especially cult. Some gains were registered, but many areas of dubiety remained (e.g. which if any of the canonical prophets were cult personnel), attention was concentrated rather narrowly on matching specific types of discourse » Hab. 1:1; 3: 1; Hag. 1:1, 3,12; 2:1,10; Zech. 1:1, 7. Gevaryahu (1975); Tucker (1977). 21 Allusions to an established prophetic, i.e., nebiistie, tradition here and there in the prophetic corpus (Amos 2: 11—12; Hos. 6: 5; 9; 8; 12: 11; Jer. 28: 8) are not at al! negative, nor is the tone negative where reference is made to the prophetic role in the abstract (e.g. Jer. 28; 8-9; Ezek. 2: 5; 14: 4, 7; 33: 33). 22 Jsa. 28: 7; Jer. 2:8, 26; 4:9; 5: 31; 6:13; 8:10; 14:18; 23:11; 32:32; Hos. 4:4-5; Mic. 3:11. 13 Carroll (1983), 25-6; Blenkinsopp (1995), 141-7 ('dissident intellectuals'). The characterization of demagogue and pamphleteer occurs in Weber's discussion of the prophet as teacher of ethics; see Weber (1978), 444-6. 24 Several scholars have reacted critically to the displacement of prophetic material and prophetic designations into the post-exilic period, among them Williamson (1983); H. Ringgren (1988); Ward (1988); Barstad (1993b).

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with specific social matrices or Sitze im Leben and, as noted by McKane, the temptation to pass directly from literary form to social reaiia was not always resisted,25 And nowhere more clearly than in the debate about the relation of prophet to cult did the social (especially denominational) Site im Leben of the interpreter come into view. More recent attempts to bring sociological and anthropological theory to bear on the study of Israelite prophecy have at least resulted, in broadening the agenda and formulating new questions or reformulating old ones, among them the following: What are the social determinants of or the social conditions favourable to ecstatic phenomena? What social expectations determined prophetic roles? To what extent did prophets meet these expectations, and what resources did the society have for encouraging prophetic role performance and discouraging role deviance? What was the individual prophet's support group and how did the prophet interact with it? How did one become a prophet, from what social classes were prophets likely to be recruited, and what difference did the social variable of gender make to prophetic role performance? Since it is obviously impossible in the space provided even to provide basic documentation for recent attempts to address these issues, one or two examples will have to suffice. Until fairly recently surveys of Old Testament prophecy would have contained a section under the heading of the prophetic psychology or the supranormal experiences of the prophets. Under this rubric the issue of continuity or discontinuity between 'primitive' and 'classical' prophecy would call for discussion as well as the question whether ecstasy was of the essence of prophecy or one of its epiphenomena. The extraordinary psychological experiences of prophets were seen as occasionally having an impact on society, but rarely as themselves the product or precipitate of social forces. Beginning in the 1970s, however, anthropological fieldwork in shamanistic possession cults and theoretical studies based on the fieldwork began to have an impact on the study of prophetic phenomena in ancient Israel. One of the most influential of these studies from the point of view of biblical scholarship was I. M. Lewis' Ecstatic Religion which inspired new and suggestive ways of reading the prophetic material.26 Lewis' distinction between psychological dissociation and accompanying behavioural change on the one hand and soul-loss or possession on the other opened the way for social interaction in the form of interpretation of the phenomena by the prophet's support group or a segment of society. This could eventuate in acceptance and authorization of prophetic credentials, without which no prophet could function, but a diagnosis of sickness 25 Form-critical study with special reference to prophecy and cult is well covered in previous volumes by members of the Society. See Eissfeldt (1951) and McKane (1.979), 172-6,181-7. 26 Lewis (19892); Parker (1978); Wilson (1979); (1980), on which see the critical comments of Carroll (1989); Culley and Overholt (1982) (eds.), to which I. M. Lewis contributed an essay on 'Prophets and their Publics', 114-17; Michaelsen (1989).

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or insanity was also possible (e.g. 2 Kgs. 9:11; Jer. 29:26; Hos. 9:7). Equally suggestive is Lewis' distinction between central and peripheral possession cults and phenomena, not least in raising once again the issue of prophets operating in the cult as an essential component of the state apparatus in the two kingdoms. Lewis also noted the correlation between the incidence of ecstatic phenomena, especially of the group variety, and situations of social and political stress, a correlation exemplified in the activity of prophetic bands at the time of Philistine encroachment, the bene hantfbr tin during the Syrian wars, and the 'classical' prophets during the heyday of the Neo-Assyrian and Neo-BabyIonian empires. If Lewis' comparative material dealt more directly with group phenomena, and proved therefore to be more particularly relevant to the earlier stages in the history of prophecy in Israel, recourse to Weber's theory of charisma helped to illuminate the nature of the authority claimed by or on behalf of the individual prophet and the social role, either corroborative or destabilizing, played by the prophet. Since Weber has often been accused of over-emphasis on the gifted individual, it is only fair to note what he has to say about charismatic succession—admirably illustrated by the succession of Elisha to Elijah as the leader of the prophetic bands27 —and the routinization of charisma in institutions—exemplified by the deuteronomistic neutralization of the disruptive potential of prophecy referred to earlier.28 Other borrowings from the social sciences include sporadic appeal by biblical scholars to role theory and reference group theory in connection with the putative support group of the prophetic individual, the societal expectations which the role exists to fulfil, performance and nonperformance and their respective consequences, and the explanation of the various designations or role labels occurring in the literature (ro' eh, hozeh/ts' "lohtm, etc.).29 The concept of cognitive dissonance or dissonance theory, introduced into the social sciences by Festinger in the 1950s,30 provided a framework within which to test cases of unfulfilled prophecy, thereby contributing to the perennial issue of false prophecy.31 The theory would seem to apply better to apocalyptic than to prophecy, however, and we note that instances of what appear to be unfulfilled predictions 27 2 Kgs. 2: 9-10, an appointment signified by passing on the prophetic mantle, confirmed by miracles, and acknowledged by the Ifne hantfbf frn (2 Kgs. 2:12-15); quite distinct, therefore, from his call as prophetic disciple and acolyte of Elijah (1 Kgs. 19:19—21), It seems that this transmission of prophetic charisma served as a model for Moses' subdelegation of authority to the elders (Num. 11: 16-17, 24-30) and for the succession of Joshua to Moses (Num. 27:15-23, cf. Deut. 34: 9). 28 Weber (1978), 241-54 (charismatic authority), 439-51 (the prophet); (1952); Emmett (1956); Berger (1963); Eisenstadt (1968) (ed.); Holstein (1975); Mayes (1989), 18-77; SchaferLichtenberger (1989). 2 " Buss (1979); Petersen (1981); Blenkinsopp (1995), 1-5. 30 Festinger et a!. (1964), 25-30. 11 • Facile princeps among those who have addressed this issue is Carroll (1978); (1979); (1980).

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by Amos (7: \l), Micah (3:12) and Huldah (2 Kgs. 22: 18-20) lead neither to the loss of prophetic credentials nor to the kind of rationalization demanded by the theory.

Ill One of the issues in the study of biblical prophecy which refuses to go away in spite of totalizing literary theories and canonical readings is the process by which prophetic books and the prophetic corpus as a whole reached the form in which we have them. The tension between adherence to 'final forms' (whether on theological-canonical or literary-critical and aesthetic grounds) and the use of more traditional source-critical methods of reconstructing earlier stages of development, therefore between synchronic and diachronic approaches, has continued to be felt during recent years. This is also the case with Latter Prophets as a whole. Allusions to 'the law and the prophets' and to the specific contents of Latter Prophets in late antiquity suggest that the compilation of the Three and the Twelve was in existence by the second century BC, and on this there appears to be broad agreement.32 Since the first stage in the history of interpretation of prophetic texts has to be recovered from the texts themselves,33 the capacity to generate commentary distinct from the text in question may be considered an important criterion of classical or canonical status, no less important than reference to a particular text indicative of its status as an authoritative source. Hence the importance of the Qumran fsmim on Isaiah, Hosea, Micah, Nahum and Habakkuk, the earliest commentaries on biblical books known to us, as indicating that this point had already been reached. Since it is accepted that the prophetic books were compiled, and in some (but not all) cases composed in the Second Temple period, it makes good sense to trace the process by which they achieved their present form backwards from this terminus rather than forwards from, a hypothetical original form. There has been some interest in recent years in arguing for a deliberate structuring of Latter Prophets on the basis of cross-references, catchwords and similar features. These are taken as evidence for the intent to present the compilation as a coherent and symbolically meaningful unity.34 Perhaps also the contents of Latter Prophets had to be manipulated 32 References in Prologue to Sirach; Sir. 46; 1; 48: 2CM9: 10; Dan. 9: 2; 2 Mace. 15: 9; Josephus: C. Ap. 1:37; Ant 10:35; Luke 24: 44, etc. At Qumran IQIsa" is dated on. epigraphical grounds to the second century BC, as also the fragmentary 4QXJP containing parts of Zechariah, Malachi and Jonah, The remains of a scroll which contained the Dodekupropfteton discovered in the so-called Cave of Horror (Naljal IHever), 8 Hev XHgr, has been dated to the mid-first century BC and taken to be a recension of LXX Minor Prophets; see Tov (1990). 33 Willi-Plein (1.971); Fishbane (1985). Fishbane gives more attention to legal and aggadic than to what he calls mantological exegesis. There is a growing literature on biblical intertextuality; see e.g. Wesselius (1996). 34 Clements, (1977); Bosshard (1987). Other essays in this direction are surveyed by Jones (1995).

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in order to arrive at the number twelve; for if the last three sections, all of more or less equal length and all beginning in the same formulaic manner (Zech. 9:1; 12:1; Mai. 1:1), had been left in place as independent units we would have ended, up with a compilation of fourteen books rather than twelve. Support for this view has also been found in the final verses of Malachi (3: 22-24) which speak of the eschatological Elijah's role of bringing together the dispersed family of Israel (cf. Sir. 48:10), thereby serving as an appropriate excipit for the entire compilation, perhaps for both Torah and Nebi'im.35 A remarkable feature of the prophetic books is that so many of them conclude, often against the grain of their previous contents, with the scenario of a final act of salvation, and judgement to take place in Jerusalem, We can put together a composite picture of this event by conflating the concluding verses of Joel (4: 9-21), Amos (9: 11-15), Obadiah (17-21), Zephartiah (3: 14-20), Zechariah 1-8 (3: 20-23) and Zechariah 12-14 (14: 16-21), to which can be added elements from the final sections of Isaiah (56-66 especially 66: 18-24), Isaiah 24-27 and Ezekiel 38-48. At the risk of oversimplifying, we could, list the principal features of this complex scenario as the return of dispersed Israelites, a pilgrimage of Gentiles to Jerusalem, judgement carried out in or near the city, the incineration of hostile forces, miraculous fertility of the land, cosmic disturbances, and the abiding presence of Yahweh on his holy hill. The debate as to whether apocalyptic developed out of prophecy or wisdom has been displaced in recent decades by attempts, which will probably continue to be inconclusive, to anchor these converging projections of the eschatological 'singularity' in specific social and political situations of the Judaean community under Persian and Macedonian rule.36 It can at least be said that the conservation, redaction, and 'recycling' of older prophetic material was one way of responding to and making sense of the changing situations in which that community found itself. The disputed political and social issue of the restoration of Jerusalem and control of its temple, which was the centre of the Iranian province of Yehud (Judah) both religiously and in terms of sociopolitical realities, will also suggest an answer to the intriguing question, why so much, was added to the Isaian nucleus rather than to sayings attributed to some other prophetic figure less singlemindedly concentrated on the destiny of Jerusalem and Judah.37 •5 This possibility would not be excluded by the assumption that tnaVakf is a genuine rather than a fictitious personal name (as proposed by Childs (1,979), 492-4). See Blenkinsopp (1977), 120-23; Rcndtorff (1991), 67-70 (ET 61-5). * It is at least clear that the discussion must now be on a different basis from that of the trajectories provided by Ploger (1968) and Hanson (1975). The issue is discussed, with bibliography to the time of writing by Knibb 0,982); Saebo (1994); Cook (1995); Clements (1996). See also Albertz (1994), passim. 37 Beuken (1986) points out how prominent in Third Isaiah are the linked themes of the mountain of Yhwh ('my holy mountain'), har Cjodsi, 56: 7; 57: 13; 65; 11, 25; 66: 20, meaning the Jerusalem temple, and possession of land. The connection between these themes is to be

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Over the last two or three decades major commentaries on several of the prophetic books have appeared which exhibit varying degrees of willingness to concede a significant role to the individual whose name appears in the superscription. Since it is impossible in the space provided to survey all recent commentary even in a cursory fashion, one or two examples will have to suffice. In Ms Hermeneia commentary S. Paul attributes the entire book with the possible exception of the superscription to Amos, while the latest edition of O. Kaiser's commentary on Isaiah in Das Alte Testament Deutsch reads the Denkschrift (6: 1-9: 6) as a composition aimed at coming to terms with the exile in the sixth century BC and is sceptical of finding any clear indication of the hand of the eighth-century prophet elsewhere in the book. For Kaiser the prophet called Isaiah has retreated into the shadowlands of legend, and the real authors of chapters 1—39 are liturgical musicians attached to the Jerusalem temple in the fifth century sc.38 Jeremiah has continued to receive attention with the appearance of several major commentaries. The issue of deuteronom(ist)ic redaction and composition in the prose sections, which originated with Duhm and Mowinckel, focused in recent years on the arguments of Bright, H. Weippert and Holladay inter alias for a standard rather than distinctively deuteronomistic prose style in the book. This issue is still alive, but there seems to be less doubt about a linguistically and thematically distinctive deuteronomistic contribution though considerable disagreement continues with respect to its extent and purpose, and how this strand relates to others within the deuteronomistic spectrum.39 Ezekiel studies are still dominated by Zimmerli's massive commentary in the Biblischer Kommentar series which attributed much of the material to Ezekiel while assigning a significant role to Ms 'school'. Some of the more notable recent contributions, however, have been in the area of the textual rather than the redactional history of the book.40 Over the last three decades the book of Isaiah has been subjected, to particularly broad-ranging and intense scrutiny and has received by far the most attention among the canonical books. Isaiah differs from Jeremiah in not presenting the exegete with the advantages (together with the problems) of versions differing in length and arrangement.41 In addition to the sought in the social and political as well as religious centrality of the temple in Judah during the Persian period. II seems that political status, including title to property, was contingent on good standing as a participant in and contributor to the cult of the Jerusalem temple. n Paul (1991); Kaiser (19815), 1-10 and passim. 3V The issue and its history are discussed in McKane (1986), xli-1, Ixxxiii-lxxxvi; Carroll (1986), 38-50; (1991). 4(1 Zimmerli (1969). On the text see Lust (1986) (ed.); Tov (1986). 4i Of the two versions of Jeremiah MT is supported by 2QJer, 4QJer9 and 4QJer€; LXX, shorter by about one eighth, by 4QJerb and ^Qfet^. In addition to major commentaries, numerous studies have appeared since the 70s on textual and literary-critical issues connected with the two versions. I must limit myself here to mentioning the more recent publications of E. Tov who is preparing the Hebrew University Bible Project volume on Jeremiah: (1981); (1985). See further S. Tatmon in the present volume.

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complete Isaiah scroll (IQIsa*1), many fragments from Qumran caves 4 and 5 and from Murabba' at have been published containing material representative of all sixty-six chapters except 31, 32 and 34, Despite numerous variants, mostly of an orthographic nature, this new material is remarkably close to and evinces relatively little divergence from MT.42 In recent years we have seen numerous attempts to look beyond the tripartite division standard since Duhm's commentary of 189243 in order to view the book as a whole, i.e., as a literary work rather than an accumulation of disparate segments. These studies have as their aim to identify linguistic, thematic and structural clues which would permit a reading of Isaiah as, in some respects and to some degree, a cohesive literary unity. The alternative thesis of Mowinckel who postulated an Isaian school active over several generations has made little progress, not surprisingly in view of the lack of evidence for a tradition of Isaian discipleship continuing over several centuries and the diminution of confidence in the staying power of oral tradition taken by itself.44 For several recent investigators linguistic cross-reference and the repetition of key terms seem to offer the surest way of establishing lines of continuity over the conventional boundaries of First, Second, and Third Isaiah. Almost half a century ago L. J. Liebreich pointed out numerous verbal correspondences between chapters 1 and 66 which were taken to constitute a kind of inclusion rounding off the book and conferring on it a semblance of unity. Liebreich, however, accumulated parallels in a somewhat mechanical way, and failed to note that the significant linguistic and thematic parallelism is limited to the last stanza of the first chapter, i.e., Isa. 1: 27—31. This final section alone reflects in a distinctive way the same milieu as the last chapters of the book. The elect are 'penitents' (sabtm cf. 59: 20), the reprobate are rebels (pose'im cf. 66: 24) who forsake Yhwh 42 We are fortunate that the magisterial first volume of the Hebrew University Bible Project, fruit of the labours of the late Professor Moshe Goshen-Gottstein, is now available: The Book of Isaiah (Jerusalem, 1995). See also Ulrich, Skehan and Cross (1997), 1 wish to thank my colleague Professor Eugene Ulrich for making the Cave 4 material avilable to me in advance of publication. 43 Duhm (19224). The distinction between chs. 1-39 and 40-66 had been acknowledged since the Middle Ages (e.g. by Rashi and Ibn Ezra, then Luther and Spinoza) and Duhm himself acknowledged that the distinct origin of 56—66 had long been suspected ('seit langerer Zeit behauptef), pointing out that Cheyne, Kuenen and others had assigned these chapters, with the probable exception of 60-62, to an author other than Deutero-Isaiah (19). Duhm did not, in any event, argue the case in detail either for the tripartite division of the book or for the originally distinct origin of the 'Servant Songs'. 44 Mowinckel (1933); (1946). A similar approach was taken by Jones (1955); Eaton (1959); (1979); (1982); and Schreiner (1967). Rejection of this line of argument does not, however, exclude the possibility of postulating Isaian disciples either in the early or later stages of transmission on other grounds. Their activity could arguably be deduced not just from explicit allusion to discipleship (8: 16; 50: 4) but also from interpretative or expansive comment within the book (e.g. 50: 10-11 as a comment on 50: 4-9, the third 'servant song'; 53: 1-10 as the comment of the servant's disciple preceded and followed by words of Yhwh; and 66: 5 addressed by an anonymous seer to a group known as those who tremble at Yhwh's word).

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('ozebe YHWH cf. 65:11), and who make a positive choice (bhr cf. 65:12; 66: 3-4) of non-Yahwistic cults carried out under terebinths (cf. 57: 5; 61: 3) and in gardens (65: 3; 66: 17), There is also the prospect of judgement under the image of unquenchable fire (cf. 66: 24). Most intriguing is the quite different meaning attaching to the key terms ntisp&t and fdaqti in 1: 27: no longer 'justice' and 'righteousness' but 'judgement' and. 'victory' or 'retribution' ("Zion shall be saved in the [final] judgement, her penitents in the retribution') in keeping with late usage in the book, especially in the final chapters (e.g. 61:10-11; 63:1).45 Identifying linguistic parallelism as a key to structural and thematic cohesion has become of late a popular pursuit in Isaian studies but the results are not always convincing. It is doubtful, for example, whether we can conclude from the not particularly impressive verbal correspondence between 6:1-13 and 40:1-8 to direct dependence of the latter, understood as a call narrative, on the former.46 And in any case verbal cross-reference is generally more convincing when linked with thematic parallels.47 Much recent discussion has concentrated on the significance for the book as a whole of the so-called Isaian 'legend' in chapters 36-39 (= 2 Kgs. 18: 13-20: 19 with the addition of Hezekiah's prayer, Isa. 38: 9-20). This passage, which presents an Isaiah more like a gentler, kinder Elisha and less like the Isaiah of the sayings in the early chapters of the book, has been interposed between 35 and 40, the former ending as the latter begins with the way through the wilderness (maslfil 35:8; m'-$ilM, 40:3) and return from exile. But the interposition created a new connection since it concluded with a prediction of exile in Babylon (39: 5^8) and thus prepared the reader for the return from Babylon announced in the following chapters. The broader nexus is the argument from prophecy on which the proclamation was based, for it appears that the expression 'the former things' (harfsonot, 41:22; 42:9; 43:9,18; 46:9; 48:3) refers to the predictions of disaster in 1-39 now seen to be spectacularly verified.48 It seems, then, that chapters 36-39 were inserted with an eye to the shape of the book as a whole. The account of Isaiah's dealings with Hezekiah facing the full might of the Assyrian military machine provides a parallel and antithesis to the Denkschrift 45 Liebieich (1955/6); (1956/7). Similar observations in Sweeney (1988), 21-4 and Tomasino (1993). A broader approach to the place of the first chapter in the book is explored by Fohrer (1962); Becker (1968); Ackroyd (1977). Rendtorff (1993), 181-9 ('Isaiah 56:1 as a Key to the Formation of the Book of Isaiah') has commented perceptively on the double meaning of s''rf«(|(fat56:l. ** Melugin (1976), 83-4; Ackroyd (1982), 5-6; Seitz (1990), who holds that 40: 1-8 is not a distinct call narrative but a direct resumption of the divine council scenario of 6:1-13; Rendtorff (1993), 170-80 ('Isaiah 6 in the Framework of the Composition of the Book') finds in this chapter other points of contact with chs. 40-66. 47 E.g. R. E. Clements has noted the incidence of the theme of deafness and blindness throughout the book, and on that basis has argued that the author of 40-55 drew on the sayings of Isaiah of Jerusalem; see Clements (1982), 125-6 (=(1996), 99-100); (1985). *• On the place of 36-39 in the book see Melugin (1976), 177-8; Ackroyd (1982), 3-21; Seitz (1991).

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featuring Isaiah and Ahaz (6:1-8: 22), and one worked out in some detail. And since chapter 35 is not just an isolated segment of 40-48 but rather anticipates and recapitulates major themes from those chapters (water in the wilderness, the via sacra, the divine k&bdd, the opening of eyes and unstopping of ears), it could have served as the hinge between the two parts of the book before the insertion of the prose section from Dtr or a source drawn on in common with Dtr.49 If this is granted, it will illustrate a point which, though obvious, is often overlooked: that since the book has gone through multiple redactional stages it has also been subjected to multiple restructurings, with the result that no one overall theory will be able to account for all of its structural features. If it is agreed, that an original eighth-century BC nucleus can be disengaged from 1—39,50 we would expect its editorial history to reflect the impact of critical events towards the beginning51 and the end of the following century. At this point H. Earth's arguments for a Josian redaction, the aim of which was to present the rise and decline of the Assyrian empire as the outcome of a divine plan, have been well received though some scepticism is in order with respect to the detailed list of Josian texts assigned to this redactional stage.32 The collapse of the Judaean state was of course of decisive importance for the formation of the book, as it was for all of the prophetic material. Whatever existed in written form before that juncture would necessarily have been reread and reinterpreted so as to wrest some meaning from the disaster and permit some hope for the future.53 While the historical setting of the Cyrus chapters (40-48) and the accompanying anti-Babylonian polemic is tolerably clear, it remains a matter of debate to what extent and in what ways this section relates to material in the first half of the book.54 When we enter the section 49—55s5 we hear no more about Cyrus and 49

This thesis is developed at length by Stock (1985). Pace Kaiser (1983), 1-3, who expresses scepticism about getting further back than the levitical-deuteronomic circles who assembled Isaian material in the post-disaster period. 51 One of the more recent of many studies of the impact of Sennacherib's campaign is that of Clements (1984). 53 H. Barth (1977). 53 The impact on the Isaian compilation of the disasters of the early sixth century BC has been assessed in so many different ways as to practically defy documentation. Two recent examples are: Clements (1980); Williamson (1994). 54 The place of 40—48(55) in the book has been dealt with perceptively by Melugin (1976) and Rendtorff (1993) 146-69. On the distinctive character of 40-48 vis-a-vis 49-55(54) see Blenkinsopp (1990). The alluvial plain, of southern Mesopotamia is still the preferred location for these chapters, but see Barstad (1982), 'Lebte Deuterojesaja in Judaa?', to which his answer is in. the affirmative. 55 Over the last two decades we have seen increasing uncertainty in sectioning chapters 40-66. Does 48: 20-22 form an inclusio with 40:3-5, or 55:12-13 with 40:1-5, or 56:1-8 with 66: 18-24? Should a break be made with 54:17, which refers to the servants of Yhwh? And what of 'there is no prosperity for the wicked' with which 40-48 and 49-57 conclude? Complicating the issue is the possibility that all of these may have been section markers at different points in the literary history of 40-66. 811

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the Babylonians; attention is focused exclusively on the internal affairs of the emerging Second Temple community. It opens with the second of Duhm's ebed-Dichhmgen (49:1-6) which therefore occurs in a quite different context from the first (42: 1-4), a circumstance clearly relevant to its interpretation.56 Frequent allusion to the temple reflects the central issue in Judah of the early Persian period, namely, whether Jerusalem and its cult should be restored as the religious, political, and social centre of the life of the province and, if so, who should control its operation. It was suggested earlier that this issue may explain why so much has been added to Isaiah rather than to another prophetic figure. IV

Interest in the early Second Temple period which has been developing in the course of the last three decades and which, for English-language scholarship at least, can be conveniently dated to the publication of P. R. Ackroyd's Exile and Restoration in 1968,57 was in part a reaction to the widely accepted Wellhausenian reconstruction of the history of Israel with its prejudicial implications for religious life in the post-exilic period. The study of prophecy in this period has also been revitalized, though the ongoing controversy about late dating is a complicating factor, and it does not help that so little reliable information on the situation of Judeans in the homeland and diaspora during that period is available. Some of the characteristic features of Second Temple prophecy vis-a-vis earlier types have called for discussion. At the literary level frequent allusion is made to earlier written prophecies, a procedure which in the course of time will lead to a shift from direct prophetic inspiration to inspired interpretation of existing prophecy, as in Qumranic and early Christian texts. Noticeable also is the disintegration of the standard, brief oracular saying in verse, often introduced with koh 'amar YHWH or a similar formula, and the emergence of new types of discourse including the disputation, the latter especially in evidence in Malachi. The vision narrative also undergoes an interesting transformation and begins to feature an angelus interpres who plays a prophetic-interpretative role within the vision, including that of intercessor (Zech. 1:12) and giver of oracles (Zech. 1:14-17; 2: 4-5).58 Though prophets are not listed in the census of the Judeo-Babylonian community in Ezra 2 (= Nehemiah 7), they seem to have found a place » The distinct identity of the four passages (42: 1-4; 49: 1-6; 50: 4-9; 52: 13-53: 12) has been denied inter alias by Mettinger (1983) and Barstad (1994b). 57 Ackroyd (1968). See also id. (1979). 5S Note the reference to 'the former prophets' (hann'bf tm Imrf sonitn) in the framework to the vision sequence of Zechariah 1-8 (1: 4; 7: 7) and the frequent allusions to earlier prophetic texts in the visions themselves (1: 12, cf. Jer. 25: 11; 29: 10; 2: 3, cf. Isa. 54: 15-17; 2: 5, cf. Ezek. 42: 20). See the commentary on the visions of Mason (1977); Peterseii (1984); Meyers and M.eyers (1987).

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among cult personnel at Jerusalem and possibly elsewhere (Zech, 7: 3; Neh. 6: 10-14} though not, as far as we know, in the Jewish colony at Elephantine, While we have no information on the origin and institutional connections of Haggai and the author of Zechariah 1-8, they are described as taking a leading role in supporting the re-establishment of the Jerusalem cult during the early years of Darius I (Ezra 5:1-2). In general, the cultic associations of Second Temple prophecy are much more in evidence than during the time of the kingdoms, a reflection of the change from monarchy to temple community and the loss of royal patronage. This is apparent in Joel and in passages with a distinctive liturgical flavour in Isa. 40-66 and Mic, 7. The description in Chronicles of the composition and rendition of liturgical music by Levites qua prophets and the prophetic role assigned to David as liturgical musician (1 Chr. 25: 1-8) point in the same direction.* In the changed conditions of Judah in the post-disaster period it was inevitable that the note of judgement and doom sounded so often during the time of the kingdoms would give way to a note of encouragement and promise. This is apparent in new prophetic compositions of the Achaemenid period, but change was also effected, by recontextualizing or 'recycling' earlier prophetic material by means of addition or deletion as, for example, Amos 9: 1,1-15 and Jer, 30-33. However, it has not proved easy to achieve agreement on the identification and dating of the additions. There was also the need to relate expectations for the future to an explanation of the recent disaster. Prophetic texts from the exilic and early post-exilic periods present a range of different attempts to do this. The exilic-Isaian author repeats the common line, familiar from Dtr, that disaster is the direct result of sin (Isa. 43: 27-28), but he also uses the rather peculiar argument that the fulfilment of the former prophecies of doom— the 'former things' (hari'sdndt, 41: 22; 42: 9; 43:18; 46: 9; 48: 3)—is proof of the reliability of his own predictions of a better future,60 V

One of the most contentious issues in the study of the prophetic texts from Wellhausen to von Rad, Noth, and Zimmerli was the relation between prophecy and law. Though the issue has lost none of its edge, it is now at least agreed that it cannot be posed in a straightforward way in terms of relative priority. Even if we were sure of the date of the legal compilations, especially the so-called Book of the Covenant (Exod. 20: 23-23: 19), we would still have to allow for a much older legal tradition to which individual prophets could have appealed. But in point of fact there seems s

" See Petersen (1977); Blenkinsopp (1996%), 195-212,222-6. See the section titled The struggle over a theological interpretation of the political catastrophe', in Albertz (1994), 375-99. 60

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to be no instance of a prophetic indictment based explicitly on a law. Amos's condemnation of contemporaries for lying on garments taken in pledge (2: 8a), a parade example, corresponds to a stipulation of the Book of the Covenant (Exod, 22: 25—26) but the law in question is not quoted or referred to,61 and what have sometimes been interpreted as allusions to the decalogue at Hos. 4; 1-2 and Jer, 7: 9 exemplify a recapitulatory tendency in the ethical teaching of the prophets (see also Mic. 6: 6-8) and most probably represent a stage preceding and leading up to the standard deuteronomic formulation (Deut. 5: 6-21), The discussion must therefore be conducted on a broader basis than that of which came first. It would have to eschew generalizations dictated by the interpreter's own religious predispositions,62 take account of such related forms as the prophetic judgement saying, the priestly tdrfl, and especially the prophetic lawsuit (rib) in their relation to existing traditions, and allow for the possibility that prophetic denunciations of social inequality and injustice could also have drawn on the teaching of the old wisdom tradition, well established as it was by the eighth century BC and having clearly detectable links with the legal tradition,63 The study of traditions in the prophetic literature is one area on which, sociological, philosophical and theological perspectives could usefully come together. Old Testament scholars have been talking about tradition and the history of traditions for a long time, but generally without benefit of a careful analysis of what the term means, of how traditions are formed and constituted, and what conditions either favour their survival and growth or lead to their demise.6* This is unfortunate since there is still much to be done in the detailed study of the appropriation and transformation of specific traditions—historical, sapiential, juridical—in the prophetic literature and the different ways in which, the tension between tradition and situation is resolved. Prophets could play a validating as well as a destabilizing role in the political and social life of the nation, and it is now recognized that the distinction between true and false prophecy is a matter of perspective and certainly cannot be reduced to a distinction between the prediction of salvation and judgement. But one tradition internal to prophecy of the 61 The plaintiff in the seventh-century BC Yavneh-yam inscription, whose cloak had been confiscated perhaps for non-payment of a debt, does not appeal to a law either, but the situation may be different from that contemplated by Exod. 22: 25—26. For the text see Gibson (1971), 26-30, 62 In evidence in the second volume of von Rad's Old Testament Theology (1965), with its thesis of a radical discontinuity between prophetic religion and the old legal and election traditions, and Zimmerli's The Law and the Prophets (1965), arguing that prophecy represented a new stage of religious development superseding the law, 63 Among individual studies see McKane (1965); Terrien (1962); Wolff (1973); Whedbee (1971); a somewhat broader approach in Barton (1981); Davies (1981). 64 Any account of tradition would have to take critical note of Weber's classic treatment of traditional authority in Economy and Society I (1978), 226-41. One might also consult Shils (1981); Maclntyre (19842); Gadamer (19892),'384-405 and passim.

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Neo-Assyrian period which, whatever its origins, achieved visibility and coherence with Amos and was taken up in Isaiah and Micah, is protest against social injustice. Recent work on social conditions in both kingdoms has enabled us to fill out the background against which the strength and originality of this tradition during the Neo-Assyrian period can be better appreciated. The relevant archaeological data suggest that only with Omri in the north and Jehoshaphat in the south did the state system in the two kingdoms achieve the degree of consolidation which necessitated a large bureaucratic apparatus and which brought with it considerable urban development and commercial expansion.65 It is therefore not surprising that eighth-century prophetic protest is directed against the political leadership, the state cults which served to legitimate and. sustain the political status quo (e.g. Amos 5: 21-24; 7: 9-11; Isa,' 1:10-17), and what were perceived to be abuses characteristic of urban living (e.g. Amos 3:15; 6: 4-7; Isa. 5: 11-12; 23: 7-8). But the strongest denunciations target confiscation of peasant holdings by enclosure or foreclosure, generally for insolvency and often by manipulating the legal and judicial system (1 Kgs. 21:1-16; Amos 2: 7; 5:10; Isa. 3:1-3; 5: 8,18-23; 10: 1; Mic. 2: 2; 3: 9-12), a process which would have led to the formation of latifundia and a kind of rent capitalism if the great powers had not intervened.6'' While it is unlikely that this protest had initially much success outside of limited prophetic circles, it achieved a degree of official recognition by being incorporated in the deuteronomic social legislation and would become a powerful force in the formation of the social conscience of church and synagogue. Bibliography ACKROYD, P. R. (1968), Exile and Restoration (London: SCM Press). (1977), 'Isaiah I-XII: Presentation of Prophet', SVT 29,16-48. •— (1979), The History of Israel in the Exilic and Post-exilic Periods/ in Tradition and Interpretation, ed. G. W. Anderson (Oxford: Clarendon Press), 320-50. — (1982), 'Isaiah 36-39: Structure and Function', in Von Kanaan his Kerala: Festschrift fur ]. P, M. van der Ploeg, Q.P., ed. W. C. Delsman et al. (NeukirchenVluyn: Neukirchener Verlag), 3-21. AICHELE, G. et al. (1995), The Postmodern Bible (New Haven: Yale University Press). ALBERTZ, R. (1994), A History of Israelite Religion in the Old Testament Period, Volume II: From the Exile to the Maccabees (London: SCM Press). AULD, A. G. (1983), 'Prophets through the Looking Glass: Between Writings and Moses', JSOT 27, 3-23. (1984), 'Prophets and Prophecy in Jeremiah and Kings', ZAW96, 66-82. *5 The Samaria ostraca from the eighth century BC Illustrate the flow of goods from the country to the recently founded capital of the Northern Kingdom as well as the absorption of the old clan centres into the state grid. The archaeological evidence is marshalled by Mazar (1990), 403-530 and Jamieson-Drake (1991). *6 Bardtke (1971); Premnath (1988); Dearman (1988).

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BAND, A. J. (1990), 'Swallowing Jonah: The Eclipse of Parody', Proof 10,177-95. BARDTKE, H, (1971), 'Die Latifundien in Juda wahrend der zweiten Halfte des achten Jahrhunderts v. Chr./ in Homrnages d Andre Dupont-Sornmer, ed, A, Caquot and M, Philonenko (Paris: Libraire d'Amerique et d'Orient), 235-54. BARR, J. (1981), Holy Scripture. Canon, Authority, Criticism (Oxford; Clarendon Press). BARSTAD, H. M. (1982), 'Lebte Deuterojesaja in Judaa?', NTT 83,77-86. — (1993a), 'Lachish Ostracon III and Ancient Israelite Prophecy', El 24: 8*-12*. — (1993b), 'No Prophets? Recent Developments in Biblical Prophetic Research and Ancient New Eastern Prophecy', JSOT57, 39-60. •— (1994a), The Understanding of the Prophets in Deuteronomy', SJOT 8,236-51. — (1994b), The Future of the "Servant Songs": Some Reflections on the Relationship of Biblical Scholarship to Its Own Tradition/ in language, Theology and the Bible. Essays in Honour of fames Ban, ed, S. E. Balentine and j. Barton (Oxford: Clarendon Press), 261-70. EARTH, H. (1977), Die Jesaja- Woiie in der Jasiazeit. Israel und Asshur als Thema finer productiven Neuinterpretation der Jesajaiiberlieferung (WMANT 48; NeukirchenVluyn: Neukirchener Verlag). BARTON, J. (1981), 'Ethics in Isaiah of Jerusalem', JTS 32,1-18. — (1986), Oracles of God. Perceptions of Ancient Prophecy in Israel after the Exile (London: Darton, Longman & Todd). BECKER, J, (1968), Isaias: Der Prophet und sein Buck (Stuttgart: Verlag Katholisches Bibelwerk). BERGER, P. L. (1963), 'Charisma and Religious Innovation: The Social Location of Israelite Prophecy', American Sociological Review 28, 940-50. BEUKEN, W. A. M. (1986), 'Isa. 56.9-57.13: An Example of the Isaianic Legacy of Trito-Isaiah/ in Tradition and Reinterpretation in Jewish and Early Christian Literature, ed. J. W. van Henten (Leiden: E. J. Brill), 48-64. BLENKINSOPP, J. (1977), Prophecy and Canon (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press). — (1990), 'A Jewish Sect of the Persian Period/ CBQ 52, 5-20. (1995), Sage, Priest, Prophet. Religious and Intellectual Leadership in Ancient Israel (Louisville: Westminster/ John Knox Press). — (1996a) '"We Pay no Heed to Heavenly Voices": The "End of Prophecy" and the Formation of the Canon/ in Biblical and Humane, A Festschrift for John F. Priest, ed. L. B. Elder et al (Atlanta: Scholars Press), 19-31. — (19962b), A History of Prophecy in Israel (Louisville: Westminster/ John Knox Press). BOSSHARD, E. (1987), 'Beobachtungen zum Zwolfprophetenbuch', BN 40, 30-62. BRENNER, A. (1995) (ed.), A Feminist Companion to the Latter Prophets (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press), Buss, M. (1979), The Social Psychology of Prophecy', in Prophecy; Essays Presented to G, Fohreron Ms Sixty-Fifth Birthday 6 Sept, 1980, ed. J. A. Emerton (BZAW1950; Berlin: de Gruyter), 1-11. CARROLL, R. P. (1978), 'Second Isaiah and the Failure of Prophecy', Studio Thcologica 32,119-31. •— (1979), When Prophecy Failed. Reactions and Responses to Failure in the Old Testament Prophetic Traditions (London: SCM Press),

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CARROLL, R. P, (1980), 'Prophecy and Dissonance: A Theoretical Approach to the Prophetic Trad ition', 7A W 92,108-19. (1983), 'Poets not Prophets. A Response to "Prophets through the Looking Glass"',/SOT 27, 25-31. — (1986), Jeremiah A Commentary (London: SCM Press). — (1989), 'Prophecy and Society', in The World of Ancient Israel, ed. R. E. Clements (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 203-25. — (1991), 'Arguing about Jeremiah: Recent Studies and the Nature of a Prophetic Book' (SVT 43; Leiden: E. J. Brill), 222-35. (1995), 'An infinity of Traces: On making an Inventory of Our Ideological Holdings. An Introduction to Ideologiekritik in Biblical Studies', JNSL 21/2, 25-43. GUILDS, B. S. (1978), 'The Canonical Shape of the Prophetic Literature', Int. 32, 46-55. — (1979), Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture (London: SCM Press). — (1985), Old Testament Theology in a Canonical Context (London: SCM Press). CLEMENTS, R. E. (1977), 'Patterns in the Prophetic Canon', in Canon and Authority, ed. G. W. Coats and B. O. Long (Philadelphia: Fortress Press), 42-55. — (1980), 'The Prophecies of Isaiah and the Fall of Jerusalem in 587 BC', FT 30, 421-36. — (1982), The Unity of the Book of Isaiah', Int 36,117-29. •— (1984), Isaiah and the Deliverance of Jerusalem (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press). — (1985), 'Beyond Tradition-History: Deutero-Isaianic Development of First Isaiah's Themes', JSOT 31,101-4. — (1996), The Interpretation of Prophecy and the Origin of Apocalyptic', Old Testament Prophecy: From Oracles to Canon (Louisville: Westminster/ John Knox Press), 182-8. COGGINS, R. J. el al, (1982) (eds.), Israel's Prophetic Tradition: Essays in Honour of Peter Ackroyd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). COOK, S. L. (1.995), Prophecy and Apocalypticism: The Postexilic Social Setting (Minneapolis: Fortress Press). CRAIG, K. M. (1990), 'Jonah and the Reading Process', JSOT 47,103-14. CROUCH, W. B. (1994), To Question an End, to End a Question', JSOT 62,101-12. CRYER, F. H. (1994), Divination in Ancient Israel and its Near-Eastern Environment: A Socio-Historical Investigation (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press). CUUJEY, R. C. and OVERHOLT, T. W. (1982), 'Anthropological Perspectives on Old Testament Prophecy' (Serneia 21; Chico: Scholars Press). DA VIES, E. W. (1981), Prophecy and Ethics: Isaiah and the Ethical Traditions of Israel (Sheffield: Sheffield. Academic Press). DAVIBS, P. R. and CLIMBS, D. J. A. (1993), Among the Proplwts: Language, Image and Structure in the Prophetic Writings (JSOTS 144; Sheffield: JSOT Press). DEARMAN, A. (1988), Property Rights in the Eighth Century Prophets (Atlanta: Scholars Press). DE JONG ELLIS, M, (1989), 'Observations on Mesopotamian Oracles and Prophetic Texts', JCS 41,127-96. DUHM, B. (19224), Das Bitch Jesaia iibersetzt und erklUrt (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht).

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DURAND, f.-M. (1988), Archives epistolaircs de Mart J/'l (ARM 26; Paris: Editions Recherche sur les Civilisations). EATON, J, H, (1959), The Origin of the Book of Isaiah', VT 9,138-57, •—(1979), Festal Drama in Deutero-Jsaiah (London: SPCK). — (1982), 'The Isaian Tradition', in Coggins et al. (eds.), 58-76. EISENSTADT, S. N. (1968) (ed.), Max Weber on Charisma and Institution Building. Selected Papers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). EISSFBLDT, O. (1951), The Prophetic Literature', in Rowley (1951) (ed.), 115-61. EMMETT, D. (1956), 'Prophets and their Societies', Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 86,13-23. EXUM, J. C. and CLINES, D. J. A. (1993) (eds.), The New Literary Criticism and the Hebrew Bible (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press). FESTTNGER, L. etal. (1946 [1956J) (eds.), Mien Prophecy Fails (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press). FISHBANE, M. (1985), Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel (Oxford: Clarendon Press). FLEMING, D. (1993), 'Nffbu and munabbiatu: Two New Syrian Religious Personnel', IAOS 113,175-83. FOHRER, G. (1962), 'Jesaja \ als Zusammenfassung der Verkiindigung Jesajas', ZAW 74,252-68. GADAMER, H.-G. (19892), Truth and Method (London: Sheed & Ward), GEVARYAHU, H. M. J. (1975), 'Biblical Colophons: A Source for the "Biography" of Authors, Texts and Books', SVT 28, 42-59. GIBSON,]. C. L, (1971), Textbook of Syrian Semitic Inscriptions, I. Hebrew and Moabite Inscriptions (Oxford: Clarendon Press). GORDON, R. P. (1993), 'From Mari to Moses: Prophecy at Mari and in Ancient Israel', in Essays in Honour of R. Norman Whybray, ed. H, A. McKay and D. J. A. dines (JSOTS 162; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press), 63-79. GRABBE, L. L. (1995), Priests, Prophets, Diviners, Sages. A Sodo-historical Study of Religious Specialists in Ancient Israel (Valley Forge: Trinity Press International). HACKETT, J. A. (1980), Balaam Text from Deir'Alla (Chico: Scholars Press). HANSON, P. D. (1975), The Dawn of Apocalyptic (Philadelphia: Fortress Press). HEJNTZ, J.-G. (1990), Bibliographie de Mari—Archeologie et Textes (1933-1988) (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz). — (1992), 'Supplement I (1989-1990)', Akkadica 77,1-37. HOFTIJZER, J. and VAN DER KOOIJ, G. (1976), Aramaic Texts from Deir 'Alia (Leiden: E. J. Brill). HOLSTEIN, J. A. (1975), 'Max Weber and Biblical Scholarship', HUCA 46,159-79. JAMIESON-DRAKE, D. W. (1991), Scribes and Schools in Monarchic Judah (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press). JOHNSON, D. H. (1995), Nuer Prophts: A History of Prophecy from the Upper Nile in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Oxford: Clarendon Press). JONES, B. A. (1995), The Formation of the Book of the Twelve (Atlanta: Scholars Press). JONES, D. R. (1955), The Traditio of the Oracles of Isaiah of Jerusalem', ZAW 67, 226-46. KAISER, O. (19815), Das BMC* des Pmpheten Jesaja, Kapitel 1-12 (ATD 17) (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht), ET Isaiah 1-12. A Commentary (2nd edn. completely rewritten, London: SCM Press, 1983).

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KNTBB, M, A. (1982), 'Prophecy and the Emergence of the Jewish Apocalypses', in Coggins et al. (eds.), 155-80, LEWIS, I. M, (19892), Ecstatic Religion. A Study of Shamanism and Spirit Possession (London: Routledge). LEWIS, T. J, (1989), Cults of the Dead in Ancient Israel and Ugarit (Atlanta: Scholars Press). LIEBREICH, L. J. (1955/6), 'The Compilation of the Book of Isaiah', ]QR 46,259-77. — (1956/7), The Compilation of the Book of Isaiah', JQR 47,114-38, LINDBLOM, J. (1963), Prophecy in Ancient Israel (Oxford: Blackwell). LUST, J. (1986) (ed.), Ezekid and His Book, Textual and Literary Criticism and their Interrelation (Leuven: Leuven University Press). MAC!NTYRB, A. (19842), After Virtue (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press). McKANE, W. (1965), Prophets and Wise Men (London: SCM Press). — (1979), 'Prophecy and the Prophetic Literature', in Tradition and Interpretation, ed. G. W. Anderson (Oxford: Clarendon Press), 163-88. — (1986), ]ereiniah Volume 11: XXV-L1I (ICC) (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark). MALAMAT, A. (1991), 'New Light from Man (ARM XXVI) on Biblical Prophecy (III-IV)', in Staria e Tradizione di Israels. Scritti in Onore di J, Alberto Soggin, ed. D. Garrone and F. Israel (Brescia: Paideia Editrice), 186-90. MASON, R. A. (1977), The Books of Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). MAYES, A. (1989), The Old Testament in Sociological Perspective (London: Marshall Pickering). MAZAR, A. (1990), Archaeology of the Land of the Bible 10,000-586 B.C.E. (New York: Doubleday). MELUGIN, R. P. (1976), The Formation of Isaiah 40-55 (BZAW 141; Berlin: de Gruyter). METTINGER, T. N. D. (1983), A Farewell to the Servant Songs: A Critical Examination of an Exegetical Axiom (Lund: CWK Gleerup). MEYERS, C. L. and MEYERS, E. M. (1987), Haggai, Zechariah 1-8 (AB 2.5B; New York: Doubleday). MICHAELSON, P. (1989), 'Ecstasy and Possession in Ancient Israel: A Review of some recent contributions', S}OT 2,28-54. MOWINCKEL, S. (1933), 'Die {Composition des Jesajabuehes Kap. 1-39', AO 11, 267-92. — (1946), Prophecy and Tradition (Oslo: Jakob Dybwad). MULLER, H.-P. (1982), 'Die aramaische Inschrift von Deir Alia und die alteren Bileamspruche', ZAW94; 214-44. NISSINBN, M. (1993), 'Die Relevanz der neuassyrischen Prophetic fiir die alttestamentliche Forschung', in Mesopotamica-Ugaritica-Biblica. Fst. fiir Kurt Rergerhof, ed. M. Dietrich and O. Loretz (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag), 217-58. OVERHOLT, T. W. (1974), 'The Ghost Dance of 1890 and the nature of the prophetic process', Ethnohistory 21,37-63, — (1986), Prophecy in Cross-Cultural Perspective (Atlanta: Scholars Press). •— (1989), Channels of Prophecy: The Social Dynamics of Prophetic Activity (Minneapolis: Fortress Press).

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— (1990), 'Prophecy in History: The Social Reality of Intermediation', /SOT 48, 3-29. PARKER, S. B. (1978), 'Possession Trance and Prophecy in Pre-Exilic Israel', VT 28, 271-85. (1993), 'Official Attitudes towards Prophecy at Mari and in Israel', VT 43, 50-68. PARPOLA, A. and WATANABE, K. (1988), Neo-Assyrian Treaties and Loyalty Oaths (SAA, II; Helsinki: Helsinki University Press). PAUL, S. (1991), Amos (Hermeneia; Minneapolis: Fortress Press). PERSON, R. R, JR. (1996), In Conversation with Jonah (JSOTS 220; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press). PETERSEN, D. L. (1977), Late Israelite Prophecy: Studies in Deutero-Prophetic Literature and in Chronicles (Missoula: Scholars Press). — (1981), The Roles of Israel's Prophets (JSOTS 17; Sheffield: JSOT Press). — (1984), Haggai and Zechariah '1-8 (OTL) (London: SCM Press). PLOCTR, O. (1968), 'ITieocracy and Eschatology (Oxford: Blackwell). (Theocratic und Esdiatologie (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 19622).) PORTER, J. R. (1982), The origins of prophecy in Israel', in Coggins et al, 12-31. PREMNATH, D. N. (1988), 'Latifundialization and Isaiah 5:8-10', JSOT 40,49-60. RENDTORFF, R. (1.991), Kanon und Theologie (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag), ET (1993) Canon and Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press). RINCGREM, H. (1988), 'Israelite Prophecy: Fact or Fiction', FT 38, 204-10. Rorf, A. (1988), The Prophetical Stories (Jerusalem: Magnes Press). ROWLEY, H. H. (1951) (ed.), The Old Testament and Modern Study (Oxford: Clarendon Press). SAEBO, M, (1994), 'Old Testament Apocalyptic in its Relation to Prophecy and Wisdom', in In the Last Days: On Jewish and Christian Apocalyptic and its Period, ed. K. Jeppesen et al. (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press), SASSON, J. M. (1990), Jonah. A Nezo Translation with Introduction, Commentary and Interpretation (AB 24B; New York: Doubleday). ScHAFER-LiCHTENBERGER, C. (1989), '"Josua" und "Elischa"—ein biblische Argumentation zur Begriindung der Autoritat und Legitimitat des Nachfolgers', ZAW101,198-222. SCHMIDT, B. B. (1994), Israel's Beneficent Dead (Tubingen: J. C. B. Mohr). SCHNIEDEWIND, W. M. (1995), The Word of God in Transition, From Prophet to Exegete in the Second Temple Period (JSOTS 197; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press). SCHREINER, J. (1967), 'Das Buch jesajanischer Schule', in Wort und Botschaft. Erne theologische und kritische Einfuhrung in die. Prabteme des Alten Testaments (Wiirzburg: Echter Verlag), SFJTZ, C. R. (1990), 'The Divine Council: Temporal Transition and New Prophecy in the Book of Isaiah,' JBL 109,229-46. — (1991), Zion's Final Destiny, The Development of the Book of Isaiah: A Reassessment of Isaiah 36-39 (Minneapolis: Fortress Press). SHILS, E. (1981), Tradition (London: Faber). STARR, I. (1990), Queries to the Sun God: Divination and Politics in Sargonid Assyria (Helsinki; Helsinki University Press), STECK, O. H. (1985), Bereitete Hehnkehr: Jesaja 35 als redaktionelle Briicke zwischen dem ersten und dent znviten Jesaja (Stuttgart: Verlag Katholisches Bibelwerk).

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STRONG, S. A. (1984), 'On Some Oracles to Esarhaddon and Asurbanipal', Beit rage zur Assi/riologie 2: 627-45. SWEENEY, M, A. (1988), Isaiah 1-4 and Hie Post-Exilic Understanding of the Isaianic Tradition (BZAW 171; Berlin: de Gruyter). TERRIEN, S. (1962), 'Amos and Wisdom', in Israel's Prophetic Heritage, ed. B. Anderson and W. Harrelson (London: SCM Press), 108-15, TOMASINO, A. J. (1993), 'Isaiah 1.1 - 2.4 and 63 - 66 and the Composition of the Isaianic Corpus', /SOT 57, 81-98. Tov, E. (1981), 'Some Aspects of the Textual and Literary History of the Book of Jeremiah/ in Le Livre de Jeremie: Le Prophete et son Milieu, les Oracles et leur Transmission, ed. P.-M. Bogaert (Leuven: Leuven University Press), 145-67. — (1985), The Literary History of the Book of Jeremiah in the Light of its Textual History', in Empirical Models for Biblical Criticism, ed. J. H. Tigay (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press), 213-37. — (1986), 'Recensional Differences between the MT and LXX of Ezekiel', ETL 62, 89-101. — (1990), The Greek Minor Prophets Scroll from Nahal Never (SHevXHgr) (D/D VIII; Oxford: Clarendon Press). TUCKER, J. M. (1977), 'Prophetic Superscriptions and the Growth of a Canon', in Canon and Authority, ed. G. W. Coats and B. O. Long (Philadelphia: Fortress Press), 56-70. UUUCH, E., SKEHAN, P. W., CROSS, F. M. (1997), BMcal Texts from Cave 4. X: The Prophets (D/D 15; Oxford: Clarendon Press). VAN DER TOORN, K. (1996), Family Religion in Babylonia, Syria and Israel, Continuity and Change in the Forms of Religious Life (Leiden: E. J. Brill). VAWTER, B. (1985), 'Were the prophets nabi's?', Bibl 66,206-20. VON RAD G. (1965), Old Testament Theology II (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd). WARD, J. M, (1988), 'The Eclipse of the Prophet in Contemporary Prophetic Studies', Union Seminary Quarterly Review 42, 97-104. WEBER, M.. (1952), Ancient Judaism (New York: Free Press (1917-19)). — (1978), Economy and Society I (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press). WEIPPERT, M. (1981), 'Assyrische Prophetic der Zeit Asarhaddons vmd Assurbanipals', in Assyrian Royal Inscriptions: New Horizons in Literary, Ideological and Historical Analysis, ed. F. M. Fales (Rome: Institute per 1'Oriente), 71-116. WEIPPERT, H., SEYBOLD, K., and WEIPPERT, M. (1985), Beitrage zur prophetisehen Bildsprache in Israel und Assyrien (OBO 64; Freiburg: Universitatsverlag). WESSBLIUS, J. W. (1996), 'Analysis, Imitation, and Emulation of Classical Texts in the Hebrew Bible', Dutch Studies. Near Eastern Languages and Literature 2,43-68. WEST, M. (1984), 'Irony in the Book of Jonah: Audience Identification with the Hero', Perspectives in Religious Studies 11, 233-42. WHEDBEE, J. W. (1971), Isaiah and Wisdom (Nashville: Abingdon Press). WILLIAMSON, H. G. M. (1983), 'A Response to A. G. Auld', JSOT* 27,33-9. — (1994), TJje Book Catted Isaiah (Oxford: Clarendon Press). WILLI-PLBIN, I. (1971), Vorfarmen der Schriftexegese innerhalb des Allen Testaments (BZAW 123; Berlin: de Gruyter). WILSON, R. R. (1978), 'Early Israelite Prophecy', bit 32,3-16. — (1979), 'Prophet and Ecstasy: A Reexamination', JBL 98, 321-37.

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WILSON, R. R. (1980), Prophecy and Society in Ancient. Israel (Philadelphia: Fortress Press). WILT, T, L. (1993), 'Jonah: A Battle of Shifting Alliances', in Davies and Clines (1993), WOLFF, H. W. (1973), Amos geistige Heimat (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag) (= Amos the PropJiet, The Man and his Background (Philadelphia: Fortress Press). ZIMMERU, W. (1965), The law and the Prophets (Oxford: Blackwell). — (1969), Ezechiel I, II (BKAT XlII/1, 2; Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag). (ET Ezekiel I , 2 (Hermeneia; Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1979,1983).) ZOBEL, K. (1992), Prophetic und Deuteronomiuni. Die Rezeption pmphetischer Theologie durch das Deutemnomium (BZAW 199; Berlin: de Gruyter).

13

Wisdom in Israel K. J. DELL

Definition, scope, and influence THREE books in the Old Testament are generally designated wisdom texts and regarded as coming from a wisdom context—Proverbs, Job, and Ecclesiastes. These are the books that make up the wisdom literature although there is seen to be a phenomenon called 'wisdom' which is wider in scope than these three books. On these points scholars are in agreement. However, on the questions of how to define the wisdom phenomenon, how to regard its nature and development, how to decide which texts should be included under the wisdom umbrella and what kind of context(s) gave rise to and perpetuated this phenomenon there is much scholarly disagreement. In the last couple of decades we have seen a fascination with wisdom in the scholarly community and yet no real consensus has been reached on any of these issues. On the problem of definition, it has increasingly been realized that to try to find a definition of wisdom that is able to encompass its breadth and diversity, even if one confines oneself to the three designated wisdom texts, is a difficult task. Definitions suffer from being either too broad or too narrow or from overstressing the human aspect of wisdom over the divine. So the description of wisdom as 'non-revelatory speech'1 suffers from being too broad-—any part of the Old Testament not explicitly presented as revelation by God could be included under this rubric—and also suffers from excluding the divine element of the wisdom enterprise. The definition of wisdom as 'the ability to cope'2 also stresses the human element over the divine, as does von Rad's definition as 'practical knowledge of the laws of life and of the world, based on experience'.3 Clearly wisdom is more anthropocentric than much of the rest of the Old Testament and this comes across in these definitions. However, God is behind the scenes, a presupposition of the material, and dearly should not be excluded from the debate-—The Lord has made everything for its purpose, even the wicked for the day of trouble' (Prov. 16: 4). This emphasis ' Cited by Crenshaw (1974).

2

Kenworthy (1974).

3

Von Rad (1962), 418.

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has affected evaluation of the context of wisdom too with the idea that it was a largely secular enterprise, divorced from the mainstream theological concerns of Israelite life. There is certainly truth in the claim that the major themes of Israel's history are lacking in the literature, but it would be a mistake to deny a basic religious worldview to those who formulated and compiled the wisdom texts. Questions of definition then take us straight to the heart of the complex problems that are opened up in wisdom scholarship. The nature of the wisdom enterprise is at the heart of this debate. Is it basically to be seen as the human attempt to understand life and to systematize the world in terms of right and wrong behaviour? Or, is it an assertion that there is an underlying order in the world, laid down by God, revealed in creation and accessible by human beings who follow the wisdom enterprise? Again, there is truth in both assertions and the material is characterized by the tension between these two emphases. The question of development is also a vexed one. Whilst we may have become overcommitted to the idea that one set of ideas develops into another,4 it is clear that within the three basic wisdom texts we find a wide range of ideas, many contradicting earlier conclusions. Some change in worldview away from a positive evaluation of the successful nature of the wisdom, approach towards a realization of its limitations clearly took place. This appears to have been accompanied by a more profound and extensive theological character being given to the material. However, scholars are divided as to the exact nature of the changes and the time-scale during which such developments took place. The question of which texts to include as wisdom relates to that of definition. Older scholars argued for inclusion within the corpus of wisdom literature of the Song of Songs, mainly on the grounds of Solomonic attribution.5 There is an ancient Jewish tradition that Solomon composed the Song of Songs in his youth, Proverbs in middle age and the book of Ecclesiastes in old age. The Song of Songs, however, whilst it is attributed to Solomon (1: 1), does not display the characteristics of the genre of wisdom—its forms or subject matter—and so is best excluded from the category of wisdom literature. We might wish to find wisdom influence in its pages, but that would be a rather different classification. There are also smaller sections of texts, rather than whole books, that are commonly viewed as wisdom literature, both traditional sayings within larger texts (for example, 1 Sam. 16: 17; 24: 13)6 and certain Old Testament narratives that display a particular interest in human relationships and interactions, rather than in divine revelation in a historical context. Thus the Joseph story of Genesis was included by von Rad,7 the figure of Joseph being seen as the epitome of the successful administrator, 4 6

Dell (1997). See Fontaine (1982).

5 7

Ranston (1930), see also discussion by Baumgartner (1951). von Rad (1966).

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the court being one of the likely contexts for wisdom teaching. Further, the Succession Narrative of 2 Sam. 9—20 and 1 Kgs. 1-2 was included by Whybray8 on the grounds that God is very much behind the scenes in a narrative that is imbued with court intrigue and human machinations. These inclusions generally rely on a definition of wisdom that sees the context of the court as a primary one and we shall see how recent scholars have questioned the emphasis placed by older scholars on this context. It may well be that wisdom literature should include such narratives in its remit but we should perhaps withhold judgement on this until we have assessed the arguments concerning context. We should, probably again speak of wisdom influence here rather than wishing to broaden the scope of the wisdom literature proper. Some scholars have turned their attention to the prophetic books, notably Wolff, Terrien and Whedbee.9 Isaiah, in particular, is widely regarded as deeply influenced by the forms and ideas of the wisdom tradition and Whedbee classifies Isaiah as a court prophet, educated in wisdom schools used to train administrators. Again the inclusion of this material largely rests on conclusions concerning context, although no one would want to state that the book of Isaiah is wisdom literature rather than prophetic literature. This time it is a matter of wisdom's influence and it raises the question, how far was wisdom simply a widespread phenomenon that came to have a formative influence on the prophets or how far was it the preserve of the educated taught in schools? Related to this question is that of whether wisdom influence was an early formative influence on the actual thought of these prophets,10 or is to be regarded as the result of later editing in literary circles. The same issues have been raised in relation to wisdom influence in Deuteronomy, which no one would deny is a law book, but which shows a broad ethical and humanitarian concern thought to be linked to wisdom ideas,11 and in apocalyptic, notably in the book of Daniel and the development of mantic wisdom.12 Problems over the limits of the wisdom literature and the extent of wisdom influence naturally bring us to the vexed question of context. It is generally thought that there existed a group of 'sages' distinct from prophets and priests,13 although not all would agree.14 It is assumed that these sages were educated men, trained in schools, whose lives probably circulated around the court and who were likely to be involved in administration of some kind.15 Questions have, however, been raised regarding s

(1968). Wolff (19'77), Terrien (1962) and Whedbee (1971). See recently Macintosh (1995) on Hosea. 11 lz Weinfeld (1972). Rowland (1982). " Blenkinsopp (1995). 14 Whybray (1974), for example, argued for the existence of an ongoing intellectual tradition in Israel rather than for a distinct group of sages, 15 See recently Gammie and Perdue (1990) for a generous definition of the scope of activity to be attributed to sages of various kinds. v

w

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these assumptions in recent scholarship, which I shall go on to discuss below. We also find wisdom literature outside the Old Testament itself, notably in the Apocrypha in the books of Ecclesiasticus and the Wisdom of Solomon, both of which are considered mainline wisdom books, and there are also contenders for the wisdom category amongst a broader range of material in the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha (e.g. 1 Esd. 3: 1-5: 3; Baruch 3: 9-4: 4; and 3 Enoch) and beyond in early Jewish and Christian writings. These are outside the scope of this chapter, but the Apocryphal wisdom literature in particular is interesting with regard to both the development of its theological concerns, notably the link with the Torah in Ecclesiasticus, and the development of the figure of Wisdom in the Wisdom of Solomon. They are also interesting in the way they both link up much more closely with institutions and salvation-history motifs from other parts of Israelite life, as well as with prophecy and with the more spiritual aspects of Israel's self-expression. One of the characteristics of biblical wisdom is that it lacks many of the distinctive theological ideas and record of historical events so well known in other parts of the Old Testament. Ecclesiasticus and the Wisdom of Solomon redress this balance and so bring wisdom much more into the mainstream thoughtworld of Israel. The acquisition of wisdom is not confined to Israel. It is a much older phenomenon. The quest is a wider ancient Near Eastern concern and we find ethical instruction along similar lines to Proverbs, notably in Egyptian Instructions, in musings on the sufferings of individuals like Job, especially in Mesopotamian literature, and reflections like Ecclesiastes, by those world-weary and confused.16 Lambert17 recently found the theme of 'vanity of vanities' so prominent in Ecclesiastes to have its counterpart in Mesopotamian wisdom texts before 1600 BC. Day,18 in the same volume, draws attention to West Semitic influence on concepts in Proverbs, an interesting change of emphasis from the major focus on Egyptian parallels that has characterized scholarship to date. This raises the question: Was there direct borrowing and a strong formative influence on Israelite wisdom, or are these parallels simply likely developments within cultures with similar worldviews? We are able to find a literary 'school' tradition running through the ancient Near East to which Israelite wisdom is naturally likened.19 Furthermore, the context of Israelite wisdom has often been reconstructed on the basis of what we know of the structures in nation states such as Egypt, with its developed administration systems and class of those with time for leisure and intellectual pursuits. We have considerably more written archaeological evidence from Egypt and Mesopotamia than we do from Israel and some striking parallels to 1(1 18

For these texts see Pritchard (1969). (1995).

17 w

(1995). Heaton(1994).

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Israelite wisdom have been found, such as the Egyptian Instruction of Atnenemope, However, influence is hard to measure both in extent and direction. Clearly Israel borrowed, but she also created. In recent years, there has been more caution in drawing such parallels, an antidote perhaps to the huge interest in such parallels in previous decades.20 The enthusiasm with which scholars sought to identify Israelite wisdom in this wider context led to a tendency to separate Israelite wisdom from its Israelite context in which it came to be seen as a foreign element. Recent scholarly work has sought to rectify this. There has been a questioning, for example, whether Egyptian models of education really provided, the complete background to Israelite wisdom.21 The question is raised whether developments that took place in more advanced cultures many centuries before Israel emerged as a monarchic state can really be seen as close parallels given the time lapse. There has furthermore been an interest in finding a legitimate home in Israelite thought for a distinctively Israelite wisdom. However such parallels as we have are still drawn on widely and there is no doubt that Israelite wisdom cannot be interpreted in isolation from its ancient Near Eastern context. It is clear from the outset, therefore, that it is important to set up criteria for discerning the limits of the category of wisdom literature as opposed to merely discovering wisdom influence in texts so that the term 'wisdom' becomes meaningless. There are those scholars who wish to cast the net widely22 whilst there are those who prefer to narrow its scope.23 It is selfevident that one can find forms of wisdom elsewhere than wisdom literature proper, notably the proverb which is arguably the most central wisdom genre. One can also find a content that seems to fit the wisdom sphere of interest, such as a concern with just retribution. One can also speak of a wisdom context for other writings which may have been edited by sages at a late stage in their formation or may have been influenced in their original spoken or written forms by wisdom genres or ideas. Again, assumptions about context affect one's conclusions on this issue. If, rather than being seen as education for an elite group, wisdom is seen as basic education undertaken in families or local schools, as a number of scholars argue, many stories and ethical instructions could come under its umbrella, and its influence on speaking and writing is likely to have been great. On this model, wisdom is likely to have been a strong formative, probably largely oral, influence on texts from early times and would naturally have impacted on other areas of Israelite life such as worship or the development of ethics. However, if wisdom is very much a court endeavour, the literature of the educated, its influence on early written material would be extensive, and court narratives such as the Joseph story and Succession Narrative would have a good claim to be included in that 2(1 22

See discussion by Emerton (1979). Morgan (1981).

a a

Weeks (1994). Crenshaw (1981).

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category. Alternatively, wisdom can be regarded as the product of intellectual life primarily in the post-exilic period in which case much redactiortal work could be ascribed to its sages. On this model, redactors from wisdom circles would have edited a wide range of works, pulling them into a more literary framework, and hence the discovery of wisdom forms and ideas in other parts of the Old Testament would hardly be surprising. It is our task to evaluate these suggestions in what follows. In any case, it is clear that the influence of wisdom on material in the Old Testament other than the so-called wisdom books was significant. It is also clear thaiwisdom was not a phenomenon confined, to Israel, and yet Israelite wisdom managed to acquire a distinctive flavour of its own. However, if we want a stable definition of what wisdom literature proper actually includes, we need to restrict it to that material containing in large measure the forms, content, and context of wisdom and this brings us back to the mainline wisdom books on which we shall focus in this essay. It is interesting that the tradition has preserved wisdom as a separate entity with its own forms, content, and theology and it may well have belonged to a distinctive context in the social world of the Israelites, This suggests that consideration of its literature should focus on the major biblical wisdom books plus a few wisdom psalms, and that the issues of wisdom influence elsewhere in the Old Testament, and its context of origin and development, should have these books as their point of reference. Old Testament wisdom literature Proverbs

Much discussion continues to revolve around the issue of social context and this is especially so with reference to the earliest wisdom as found in Proverbs. New lines of enquiry have also opened up concerning the formation of the proverbial literature and fresh thought has been given to how the early wisdom quest should be characterized in theological terms. I shall explore the recent debate in these three areas of social context, literary history and theological ideas. Social and historical context For a long time it has generally been held thatmany proverbs, notably those in Prov. 10: 1-22: 17, originated in the family or clan. Simple observations such as 'Better is a dinner of herbs where love is than a fatted ox and. hatred with it' (Prov. 15: 17) or 'To make an apt answer is a joy to man, and a word in season, how good it is!' (Prov. 15: 23) are of so basic a nature that no complex social context is necessary to explain them. There are numerous references to 'father' and 'mother' in the proverbial literature which, rather than being seen as standing for teacher and pupil, are more plausibly taken at face value

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as proof positive of the primacy of this context. This has been explored recently by Westermann.24 On the basis of parallels in African tribal societies Golka25 stresses the nature of proverbial wisdom as an oral folk tradition rather than as literary formulations by the highly educated. The family context has not only been seen as primary early on in Israel's history. Camp,26 for example, has argued that the family would have provided a continuing point of stability throughout the changing political fortunes of Israel into post-exilic times with wisdom at the heart of family relationships. The family context then is receiving at present much more emphasis than hitherto, perhaps as a reaction against overconcentration on other possible contexts. Until recently, the emphasis was on wisdom as the sole possession of the educated, most likely promulgated through schools designed to educate future leaders and administrators and therefore connected in some way with the court. Wisdom was thus seen to be the possession of those in government, of administrators and educationalists at the highest level. Some proverbs were seen to reflect court concerns and to refer to the king and so to provide evidence of this context.27 Egyptian parallels were cited as providing evidence of such contexts for Israelite wisdom which was perceived to have sprung from the same essential quest as Egyptian wisdom. This was largely based on the noting of striking parallels between Prov. 22: 17-24: 22 and the Egyptian Instruction of Amenemope, which, led scholars to suppose that this section of Proverbs and probably more was used as a school textbook for the training of young Israelite men. There was thus perceived to be a development of wisdom through various social contexts, from family to court and finally to a more theological context as represented by the figure of wisdom in Prov. 1-9 and. repeated reference to the fear of the Lord as the beginning of wisdom. This picture of the development of wisdom has been challenged in recent years and. the whole presupposition of a neat developmental line thrown into question. The court context of proverbs has been questioned, the number reflecting court concerns being seen as negligible or nonexistent.28 The use of Egyptian parallels has also been considered to have been overstressed.29 Although cultural influence is highly likely, this does not mean that the institutions were the same—the cultures were developing at different rates and at different times. Some have recently argued, moreover, the parallels between Prov. 22: 17-24: 22 and the Egyptian Instruction of Amenemope have been overstated.30 Furthermore, whilst this part of Proverbs may correspond closely to an Egyptian parallel is it then right to posit this for all sections of Proverbs? Whybray stresses the need to treat different parts of Proverbs separately and finds different social 2<

(1995). Humphreys (1978). -» Whybray (1994b). 17

2S

(1993). » Whybray (1994a), Dell (1998).

26

(1985). » Weeks (1994).

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contexts for each part. He finds an affluent, urban, and educated context for Prov. 1-9; 22: 17-24: 22; 24: 23—4 but a broader context for Prov. 10: 1-22: 17. He sees the authors of the latter group as people of moderate means who strive for increased prosperity but are also aware of the dangers of sloth and the resultant poverty.31 This discussion raises the question of whether these contexts and developments may not have taken place at different times, rather than being the product of a linear progression. We may be too wedded to the idea of one set of ideas giving way to another, and what we find in Proverbs is a wide mixture of different ideas springing out of diverse situations. Ray32 has cautioned, in reference to Egyptian wisdom literature, that whilst it is neat and in may ways possible to draw a straight line of development from one set of ideas to another, it may not represent reality. In fact there is likely to have been copying and learning from others mixed with direct observation of the world. It has also been noted that there is no real archaeological or textual evidence for the existence of schools. So Weeks argues that the positing of schools in Israel at the time of the monarchy is by no means certain. He writes, The Biblical and epigraphic evidence adduced for schools seems very weak indeed and can certainly not support any hypothesis of an integrated school system. Tf the existence of schools cannot be proved, though, it cannot be disproved, either: all we can say for certain is that it should not be presumed/33 We cannot assume, even with the overlap with Amenemope, that there were schools in Israel for the training of administrators. The idea of an enlightenment at the time of Solomon requiring an infrastructure of educated courtiers to service a growing and influential state is open to question. It is doubtful whether the state under Solomon was large enough to support such a system. It has been suggested that schools in Israel were a more widespread localized phenomenon34 and it is even possible that elders of communities may have had the requisite educational skills to be promoters of the wisdom ideal. Heaton3* speaks of a 'school tradition' spanning the centuries, though understanding this as the preserve of the literary, educated class, Whybray suggests that there was a growing middle class who might well have been responsible for the promulgation of proverbs, particularly those dealing with the benefits of striving for wealth and the dangers of slipping into poverty— not the concerns of a well-entrenched aristocratic group. He writes of Prov. 10: 1—22: 17, for example, The tenor of these proverbs suggest that those who speak in them are themselves neither rich nor poor in the sense in which they use these terms, but are people of moderate means who consider that increased prosperity may well be within their means, yet are equally aware of the possibility of falling into destitution',* 31 34

Whybray (1990). Lemaire{1981).

H

35

(1995). (1994).

33 3lS

Weeks (1994), 153. Whybray (1990), 60-61,

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The focus of scholarship has been on the ninth century BC and the Solomonic period when discussing wisdom, probably because of Solomon's legendary connections with wisdom. Recent scholarship, however, has asked about the eighth century BC, a period that is increasingly being seen as a time of literary activity, based on archaeological evidence of inscriptions. The idea of recontextualization of material has also been suggested by those wishing to stress later contexts for the continued use of wisdom. Clements argues, for example, that the proverbs may have found an important context amongst those of the Diaspora from the time of the exile and that this led to a decisive development in the ideas of and production of wisdom literature with its practical and universal nature. He writes, 'For a time wisdom held a unique key to understanding the new world in which the Jews found themselves among the nations',37 Literary Mstori/ A related discussion has been taking place in the area of literary history on the issue of the development of forms and their changing oral to literary contexts. The idea of a development from simple to more complicated, from one-limbed sayings to multi-limbed sayings and from proverbial forms to instruction forms38 has been challenged in recent times by those wishing to stress the oral stages through which the material passed. On this model, wisdom was regarded as primarily a literary product, formulated by the educated who had the time and leisure to think up pithy sayings. However, those of the family persuasion have argued that such a literate and literary context is not needed. It is argued that the role of the oral stages was scarcely given consideration and a new interest in the pre-literary stages of the material has opened up.39 This, however, again presupposes a developmental model when it may be wiser to see different genres such as 'instruction' and 'maxims' as different strands of the tradition.40 Furthermore, an approach to different sections of Proverbs which has its focus on their thematic links may be just as edifying as a more technical analysis of form, which has tended to be the preferred approach. We do not know when the transition from oral to literary took place. There is evidence of literary activity from the time of Josiah with the production of Deuteronomy (2 Kgs. 22: 8-10) and of Hezekiah before him if the reference to the 'men of Hezekiah' in Prov, 25:1 is to be taken at face value. Prov. 25: 1 refers to the activity of the 'men of Hezekiah' who copied material and this has suggested to some a writing down of previously oral material at this time, rather than seeing the proverbs as literary formulations from the start. There may also have been significant literary activity from the time of the exile. It cannot be certain that a proverb, cited by a prophet for example, was part of the prophet's own vocabulary or 37

Clements (1992), 25-6. 3* Westermann (1995).

» McKane(1970). <° Whybray (1994a).

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was a literary addendum by those shaping the book in more literary circles. There is good evidence that oral sayings found their way into written material. A more literary setting for wisdom may have existed, but it may have been at a time well after the Solomonic period and its earliest roots may well lie in an ancient oral tradition. There is a danger in generalizing about the book of Proverbs. The largest body of material, such as in Prov. 10:1-22:17, usually considered the earliest part of the book, may indeed have had a primarily oral formulation, whilst there may be sections that never existed in other than literary forms (Prov, 22:17-24:22). Some sections may have received literary shaping at the hands of final editors whilst some may have been expanded in new situations in which the material was recontextualized. We need to be open to the possibility of oral and literary existing alongside each other and to different types of formulation all being represented in the different sections of Proverbs, as Whybray has argued.'11 Once again recent scholarship has stressed the need to get away from strictly developmental models. Theological ideas The developmental model has also influenced the discussion of theological ideas in the book of Proverbs: was wisdom once secular and later on theologized by the addition of more explicitly theological material? Did the simple quest to find patterns in life and to illuminate human behaviour by drawing unlikely parallels with the natural world give way to a more God-centred theology as found in Proverbs 1—9? To what extent is the early wisdom literature to be seen as humancentred or secular, and to what extent does it take its starting point from divine revelation? Scholars such as McKane42 saw the context of the earliest proverbial material as secular and. regarded many proverbs as having this character: they make no reference to God and their concerns were pragmatic, practical, and often purely material. Only later did wisdom interests move into more theological realms so that the book of Proverbs in its final form is prefaced by a more theological section (Prov. 1-9) through which the rest of the book has tended to be read. During the sixties a debate raged between von Rad and Schmid over the precise development of the explicitly theological cast of wisdom literature.43 Von Rad argued, that God was very much on the periphery of concern for the early wisdom quest and that gradually he became more centre-stage. He wrote, 'At a later date, not precisely ascertainable, there was a decided movement into the realm of theology.'44 Human achievement and actions were at the centre of concern for wisdom and. so those more explicitly theological sections such as Proverbs 1-9 were dated late. Schmid, however, saw the development 41 43

Ibid. Von Rad (1962); Schmid (1966).

* (1970). Von Rad (1962), 440.

44

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the other way around: wisdom was imbued, even in its earliest stages, by religious ideas. This view was based on parallels in Egyptian and Mesopotamia!! wisdom in which Schmid found a basic presupposition of a relationship of order between the divine and the human world. He emphasizes those proverbs that refer to God in the oldest sections of Proverbs and argues that they perceive God as planning what happens in human lives as well as maintaining an existing order. Later developments in wisdom are seen as being less God-centred in that interest developed in moral structures and in the doctrine of retribution. He wrote, 'Like the law in post-exilic Judaism wisdom ceases to be a way of relating to reality and becomes a reality of its own, fixed, eternal, static and absolute.'45 I mention these earlier debates because it is only now that scholars are appreciating the strength of Schmid's arguments, the field having been dominated by von Rad's views (as expressed in more developed form hi the very influential Wisdom in Israel),46 In Prov. 16: 1-11 for example we have a cluster of proverbs where Yhwh is in view and there seems to be no pattern in the mixing of less and more theological proverbs in this early section. Furthermore, for some time now, scholars have been unhappy about using the word 'secular' to describe Israelite thought in any of its developments, given the religious orientation and worldview of the Israelites. The presupposition of an educational context for proverbs in Israel as in Egypt may have contributed to the idea that they were secular in the sense of being commonsense advice for all, regardless of their religious commitment. Whilst this is no doubt the character of many proverbs, in that most do not mention God explicitly, it is often forgotten that there is frequently a mixture, as in Proverbs 16, and that no explicit mention of God does not mean that he is not a presupposition of the wisdom quest. It appears to modern scholarship unlikely that wisdom was without religious roots. Ancient Near Eastern parallels also reveal a literature that is not without religious dimensions from its earliest formulations, as Schmid showed.47 A related issue concerns the character of the theology of wisdom as represented in the book of Proverbs. Zimmerli48 argued that creation theology was at the very centre of wisdom thought and Schmid pointed to a concern for order that corresponded to the Egyptian idea of Ma'at who had a similar role in creation to the figure of wisdom in Proverbs 8. This has been taken up recently by Perdue49 who sees creation as a fundamental metaphor of wisdom thought. Von Rad, however, espoused the position that wisdom was essentially anthropological in its concern. Perdue50 has considered various models for weighing the cosmological and the anthropological aspects of wisdom and has concluded that they did in fact 45 47 48

Schmid 0966), 151. 4" Von Rad (1972). See recently Ray (1995) in reference to Egypt. w M (1964). (1994b). (1991).

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exist alongside one another, We can perhaps see the figure of wisdom in Prov. 8: 22 ff. as representing a tension between the cosmological and the anthropological. She represents cosmological wisdom alongside God at creation, the first of God's creative acts, and yet she calls out to young men to 'Hear instruction and be wise' (Prov. 8: 33) on a practical level and follow her path. The figure of wisdom combines an essential role in the creation of the world and a practical role in providing the key to human wisdom to all who will follow her advice. She therefore combines the divine and the human, the theological and the anthropocentric and. holds them in tension. Another aspect of the theology of wisdom is that it is not so historically bound as other parts of the Old Testament and there is no mention of Israel's key historical figures or of the salvation history. Rather than being the God who acts in historical events, God is the creator whose role is rather less proactive; he is at the limits of the wisdom quest, the originator of the order to be found in the world and as such is the theological presupposition of all wisdom, however non-religious its character. The figure of wisdom is a mediator of God's creative intention. She bridges the inevitable gap in human perception between God as creator and practical, maxim-based wisdom. There has been recent interest in the personification of wisdom from feminist studies, as well as exposure of the patriarchal stance that permeates Proverbs.51 It has also been suggested that elements of a pagan goddess myth can be found in the portrayal of wisdom as a woman, although it is perhaps in the figure of the loose or foreign woman in Proverbs 7 that closer associations with descriptions of pagan goddesses, such as Astarte, can be found. Lang has argued along rather different lines that elements of a specifically Israelite goddess myth are to be found in Proverbs 8, that of the goddess of scribal education to be likened to the Egyptian goddess Seshat, the goddess of writing. He writes: 'Beautiful polytheistic texts about an Israelite goddess can be found in Proverbs, chapters 1-9'.52 He sees the primary role of the goddess 'Wisdom' as a teaching one, and argues that it was only under the influence of monotheism that Wisdom became simply a poetic personification of school wisdom and also a representation of God's own wisdom. Lang's assertion of the antiquity of this goddess imagery has led him to argue for a pre-exilic dating for these sections of Proverbs 1-9 and for a long period of development of these ideas. His views about an Israelite goddess have not found general assent, especially given the uncertainty regarding the existence of schools in ancient Israel, but his earlier dating of Proverbs 1-9 has been echoed in the work of other scholars. Even Whybray,53 who had argued strongly for a post-exilic dating in his earlier work on Proverbs, has moved in this direction. More recently, Whybray54 has pointed to the fact that we need 51 52 M Camp (1985). Lang (1975), 129. "(1965). (1994a).

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to be open to the possibility of parallel and even contradictory developments. Society is never represented by one view alone at one particular time; rather there may have been pockets of more theological reflection existing alongside more practical concerns. Parts of Proverbs, such as Proverbs 1-9, may represent more profound theologizing, whilst other shorter sections do not have such profundity (Prov. 30-31), The mistake is to see one set of concerns necessarily developing out of the other. It seems likely rather that the book of Proverbs represents both areas of concern in its different sections and that whilst God as creator is the presupposition of the wisdom quest, this came to expression in various ways, most profoundly perhaps in the figure of wisdom herself who holds together the tension between the human quest for wisdom and its divine origin,— 'When he marked out the foundations of the earth, then I was beside him, like a master workman, and I was daily his delight, rejoicing before him always, rejoicing in his inhabited world and. delighting in the sons of men' (Prov,8:29b~31),

Job The book of Job continues to fascinate and intrigue the reader today as much as it ever has. Scholarship of recent times has dealt both with traditional questions in relation to the book, such as source-critical concerns about authorship and redactional shaping, and with new questions that have arisen as a result of fresh literary-critical and hermeneutical trends in Old Testament studies. Date and authorship The book of Job has a timeless quality that makes dating it a difficult task. This has led some such as Albertz and Penchansky55 to focus on the wider sociological setting and background of the book. However, the book is generally dated, after the exile on the grounds that it attacks the fundamental premise of exilic theology that suffering must be the direct result of sin and represent punishment from God. Job is a paradigm of one who has tried to lead a blameless life and is nonetheless suffering greatly at the hand of God. The friends uphold the traditional view against which Job argues with increasing bitterness until he is brought to a confrontation with God himself. Although the book of Job concerns an individual rather than the entire nation Israel, it is clear, in the light of the individualism of the exilic prophet Ezekiel that interest in an individual test case would be likely to arise in this milieu. Some scholars wish to date the book rather earlier than the exile: so, Wolfers56 argues for a seventh-century BC dating on the grounds that Isaiah the prophet is the author. However, the consensus of opinion dates the book between the sixth and fourth centuries BC.57 This is supported by the S5

Albertz (1981); Penchansky (1990).

* (1995).

57

See recently Perdue (1991).

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observation that the book is a clear critique of the earlier wisdom exercise, as represented by Proverbs, and a more literary formulation in its entirety than its forerunner. The issue is complicated by the fact that the book contains additions so that the shaping of the final form may have taken place over the period of a couple of centuries. Thus, for example, the references to 'the Satan' in the prologue may reflect the influence of Persian dualism and are regarded by some as added to an earlier form of the prologue.*8 It is also complicated by the general consensus that the prologue and epilogue section could have formed a separate and earlier prose story that circulated, independently of the dialogue. Thus the prose sections (without Satan passages) are likely to be pre-exilic—witness the mention of Job alongside Noah and Daniel in Ezek. 14:14, 20 as righteous men—and the dialogue early post-exilic, with redactional additions such as the Elihu speeches belonging to a slightly later period. Questions regarding authorship tend to be a focus of attention in Job scholarship since there is no evidence of a specific historical event that gave rise to this writing, nor of a social situation that precipitated its production. The book of Job is the only 'wisdom' book that is not ascribed to Solomon or to some named author. The Edomite connections of the names of the friends may suggest Edom as a location for the book,59 but our main understanding of the raison d'etre of the book comes from an analysis of what the author of the dialogue was trying to do when he used it to overturn the traditional picture of the righteous Job that we find in the prologue and epilogue section. The author may have been some kind of renegade sage, working at the edge of the wisdom, tradition and parodying earlier material in order to critique the easy conclusions of the earlier wisdom quest;60 or he may have written the book as the result of a bad dream about becoming poor,61 Genre and literary-critical concerns A feature of the book of Job is that varied attempts to classify it on the basis of genre have been made (e.g. lament, disputation), but no one genre classification has proved suitable to describe the book as a whole. This has led to a tendency to decide the genre of the book on the basis of the primacy of one section. For example, Cheney characterizes Job as a frame tale, seeing the prose sections as the key to interpretation of the book, whilst Course shows a particular interest in the speeches of Job and the friends, finding many links between them on grounds of recurrent words and themes.62 However, this kind of approach ignores the wealth of different genres contained in the book. Wolfers63 concluded recently, as others had done before him, that the work is sui generis. Alternatively, rather than trying to bring the different elements of the book together under one classification, it has been 58 61

See Dell (1991). dines (1994).

» See recently Day (1994a). Cheney (1994); Course (1.994).

&

«° Dell (1991). (1995).

63

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suggested that parody, a genre that feeds on other genres, might be a suitable description of the way that the author treats the traditional genres he uses, for example psalmic lament forms in the dialogue section are parodied so that they express the opposite of usual sentiments.64 Zuckerman has also used the genre of parody to describe the nature of the overall structure of the book with its disjunctions and contradictions.65 Increased appreciation of the subversive nature of the book has given rise to such suggestions along the lines of genre and also to other suggestions regarding the purpose of the author. So, for example, Brenner argues that the author of Job pretended to be retelling a story to assure himself of a sympathetic hearing and then proceeded deliberately to subvert the story.66 Ancient Near Eastern parallels have increasingly been drawn upon as evidence for deciding the genre of Job. Comparisons have been made between Job and the Chaoskampf myth in Babylonian, Ugaritic, and Hittite sources;67 between Job as a frame tale and similar genres in the ancient Near East68 and between Job and ancient Near Eastern catalogue literature.69 However, it is not just questions of genre that are aired by these parallels, rather they are often used to shed, light on literary-critical problems long connected to the book. So Hoffman argues that the style of the author of Job is thoroughly grounded in ancient Near Eastern literary conventions and that therefore we should not expect argumentative continuity between the speeches of Job and the friends, since in Mesopotamian long poetic dialogues there is no argumentative continuity between stanzas. He calls Job a 'perfect imperfection' with which we must cope as the product of an author of integrity rather than distort with our literarycritical conclusions. The book of Job lends itself to interpretation along traditional literarycritical lines and to creative readings in line with more recent hermeneutical shifts that have been taking place in biblical studies. Interest continues in source-critical problems such as the dislocation of the third cycle of speeches and the resultant reorganization of the text that naturally springs from this observation, without which Job would be arguing against himself. Wolfers70 has recently suggested that there are in fact only two speech cycles in Job, rather than three, with the material attributed to Job in the text being entirely in keeping with his point of view. Redditt argues similarly that the speeches attributed to Job do belong to him—Job is simply vacillating over the possibility that the friends are right after all,71 He also argues for the originality to the main author of the Elihu speeches which many have denied. Job is clearly a complex jigsaw that many have sought to put back together in various ways.72 In the light of the uncertainty over 64 a 70 72

Dell (1991). « Zuckerman (1991). <* Brenner (1989). w Puchs(1993). <* Cheney (1994). Hoffman (1991). 7I (1993). Redditt (1994). See recently Maag (1982), and also Vermeylen (1994).

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the process by which the text came together and of increasing interest in the final form of biblical books/3 recent scholars have concerned themselves with the structure and integrity of the whole book rather than spending time on deciding earlier and later versions.74 This has highlighted issues of plot development75 and drawn attention to structural patterns such as schematization and symmetry76 previously unnoticed by scholars. Habel has found a striking coherence in the overall pattern of the book, finding the Elihu speeches for example to be an integral part of the plot functioning as a foil to the speeches of Yhwh, which leads him to describe the whole as a 'paradoxical totality'.77 There has been an increasing awareness of the subjectivity of the reader in appreciating the book of Job, with dines suggesting different options for reading the text depending on one's starting point. So Perdue78 puts forward a metaphorical reading of Job in which root metaphorical structures from ancient Near Eastern mythic traditions of cosmology and anthropology shape the debate between Job and the friends in the dialogue. It is Job, he argues, who subverts the old paradigms and attempts to create them afresh. This is only finally done in the divine speeches and epilogue section to the book. Thus, exciting new possibilities are being opened up by such approaches, and yet we need to take care that subjectivity does not overturn all the findings of the more objective questto understand what is going on at different levels in the book of Job. A scholar who represents the direction in which such subjectivity leads is Good (1990) who provides in his commentary on Job a 'dispensable' introduction which treats standard issues but does not regard them as relevant in his reading of the book which centres on his own concerns. Along with an interest in exploring fresh hermeneutical approaches in relation to Job has come an interest in how interpreters dealt with the book from early times.79 There is an accompanying interest in artistic representation in Job and. in the history of Job illustration.80 Thematic concerns It is in the realm of theology that Job makes its greatest impact. Scholars are divided over the central theme of the book. Whilst early scholars found the theme of disinterested righteousness the most important theme, based, on the primacy of the prologue/epilogue sections, subsequent scholars have tended to stress the problem of suffering in the light of retribution, the issue debated in the dialogue, as the key to Job. More recently the focus has been on the relationship between God and human beings, especially as aired in the divine speeches and in Job's responses and laments.81 So Hoffman82 considers Job a collection of 73 74 75 77 79 81

See Seitz (1989). Clines (1989), prefers not to speculate on 'insoluble problems', 7 Habel (1985). * Hoffman (1981). 7fi Habel (1985), 9. (1991). m See Clines (1989); Besserman (1979). Terrien (1996). 82 Dell (1991); Lacoque (1996). (1996).

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writings centrally concerned with the problem of theodicy. Newsom83 stresses the importance of this God/human relationship theme in the dialogue section as well as in the later sections of the book, whilst Pleins84 places an emphasis on the important part played by God's silence, a silence which allows Job time to grieve and to rise above the ensnared rationalizations of suffering offered by his friends. A recent study by Perdue85 has explored the relationship of Job to creation theology and has highlighted the significance of chapter 28 and the divine speeches in this regard.. Thematic concerns have also been refreshed, by an interest in Job from a psychological angle. Quillo in his psychological reading for example traces the process by which Job accepts his own death, looking too at the stages of grief experienced by Job and at his interaction with the friends and Yhwh.*' He finds an old and a new Job in whom old and new theologies of suffering and evil coincide in a compelling and yet paradoxical way. Jungian psychology has also been practised on the book, and a recent article has compared Job and horror theory.87 Job lends itself to many 'readings'. It has been treated from a liberationist perspective88 and seen as a tract for those poor in South America suffering terrible hardship. Another angle is the feminist one which has placed emphasis in particular on the under-explored figure of Job's wife.81* There are other readings of Job as tragedy and as a black comedy90 and in Clines' commentary on Job there is even a vegetarian reading to be found! Ecclesiastes Two particular issues concerned early Jewish and. Christian interpreters of the book of Ecclesiastes. The first was authorship, which was generally ascribed to Solomon, and the second was the presence of contradictions in the book.91 These two issues continue to dominate discussion of the book and, although few now would attribute the book to Solomon, the question of the identity and purpose of the author continues to be of major interest. The presence of contradictions leads scholars to put forward complex theories about structure, earlier and later redactions, and theological purpose or aim. Authorship and social context There is little doubt about the identity of the author of this book—he is Qoheleth, mentioned as author in the first line of the book. However, the complicating factor is that he is described as 'son of David' and 'king in Jerusalem' (Eccl. 1:1) and that this is followed at the end of chapter I with a royal testament, a section in which Qoheleth seems to take on the persona of a king, usually identified with Solomon. 83 86 m

(1993), Quillo (1991). Brenner (1989); van Wolde (1997).

« (1994). Schlobin (1992). «° Whedbee (1977).

87

8S w n

(1994b), Gutierrez (1987). Dell (1994).

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Qoheleth is himself probably a wise man as indicated in 12: 9, possibly a teacher in a wisdom school. This observation links up with questions of dating and. social context. Clearly if the book could be dated to the Solomonic period of the ninth century BC King Solomon might himself have been the author. This is what early interpreters assumed. However, the language of the book is thought to verify a post-exilic dating, as is the thought of the book which acts very much as a critique of earlier wisdom and may be quoting existing proverbs in order to refute them.92 Some have, moreover, argued for the influence of Hellenistic philosophy (especially that of Skeptics, Cynics, and Stoics) and of gnomic utterances (such as those of Hesiod and Theognis) on the book and have on these grounds dated the book to the early Greek period of the third century RC.93 Others have been more interested in finding a precise social locus for the book, although that attempt has proved at best tentative. Scow94 has recently argued for a date in the Persian period, specifically between the second half of the fifth and the first half of the fourth centuries BC. He argues this on linguistic grounds but also on the basis of fresh epigraphic finds and on the results of archaeological surveys and excavations of Persian period sites. His analysis is thus essentially a socio-economic one. Harrison,95 by contrast, maintains that Qoheleth's thought is to be seen in the context of the sociological milieu of third-century BC Judea. He finds evidence for social disturbances in cultural and economic life that led to Qoheleth's negative worldview. One wonders whether the evidence is really strong enough to place the book in any one socio-economic situation. Rather it may be more sensible to acknowledge that, like other wisdom books, the precise social location of the author is lost to us. Literary issties Much recent scholarship has been concerned with the issue of the contradictions of thought displayed in the book. The attempt has been made to make sense of the book by finding a distinct structure for the whole. It is generally held that the epilogue to the book in 12: 7ff. is a later addition, although some scholars see it as integral to the thought of the book, even if its addition was later. Fox,96 for example, sees the true author of Qoheleth as the epilogist or frame narrator, and regards the book as built on three levels: level 1 is the epilogist who is telling his audience about the wisdom of Qoheleth; level 2a is the reporting T who speaks as an old man looking back on his own experience when younger; level 2b is the younger Qoheleth, experiencing T, who made the investigations described in 1: 2f. A less complicated approach is found in Shead who argues in favour of the essential unity of main text and epilogue. He holds out the possibility that the redactors imitated the style of the original, but argues that there is enough of a preponderance of Qoheleth's 92 93 94

Gordis (1939). Braun (1973); Hengel (1973); Lohfink (1980). (1997). « (1997). * (1977).

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favourite words to lend 'a peculiar sense of unity to the work and a feeling of intertextual allusiveness',*7 One might also note the view of Vogels98 that there is no essential divergence of view in the epilogue. Rather, it forms the climax and conclusion of the work. This viewpoint has much in common with the tendency to read the book as a whole in the interests of final form reading, thus laying aside issues of earlier and later redaction which so exercised the minds of earlier scholars. An interest in early readings and in the influence they have had on interpretations today is a feature of current scholarship." For example, early commentators, including Luther, suggested the idea that the contradictions might be explained by imagining Solomon in dialogue with political associates. This same idea has resurfaced, in recent scholarship in the dialogic reading of Perry100 in which two points of view, K and P, are represented hi the book, and in Gordis' idea of 'quotations'. De Jong has recently found a pattern of alternation between observation and instruction complexes throughout the book.101 The instruction, he argues, mainly consists of advice, admonitions and imperatives all of which are in the realm of the possible and the sensible.The observation sections are mainly concerned, with the vanity of human labour and even texts that advocate enjoyment are tempered by the vanity theme. Thus such sections are characterized by either negative or neutral evaluations of wisdom. Like many, De Jong102 is unable to find a logical ordering of the book, rather he finds some texts unified by keyword association,103 some linked by repetition, others united by quotation of a traditional saying followed by an opposite reaction and so on. Alternatively, Qoheleth has been seen to be using the technique of adding interpretation to existing proverbial material, whether quoted or not. Loader,104 for example, finds a dynamic unity in the polarities within the book. The evaluation of material as quoted or the author's own is very much reliant on what the worldview of Qoheleth himself might have been. It is also dependent on which reconstruction of the authorial stages in the book an individual scholar takes as the basis for argument. Thematic concerns Many analyses of the structure of Ecclesiastes are unable to divorce themselves from thematic concerns, such are their prominence in the thought of this author. The question is raised concerning the tone of the book, was the author an unbridled pessimist or were there more positive aspects of his thought? Walsh105 characterizes the mood of Qoheleth as 'peaceful despair' and there is no denying the sense of the futility of life that comes across in his thought. Whybray and Murphy,106 on the other hand, speak of joy in the context of this author's 97

Shead (1996), 75. *> (1995). (1993). "" (1992). m Cf. Murphy (1992). (1979). ice Whybray (1982); Murphy (1992).

* Murphy (1992); Dell (1994); Jarick (1990). Ibid. (1982).

10(1

m

m

m

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thought. In discussing the question of an overall genre of Qoheleth, Levine has even suggested that it is intended to be 'serious humour' to teach others to cope with the uncertainties of life,107 In the evaluation of the content of Qoheleth's book, much, attention has been devoted to vocabulary and to key words, notably febel.108 There are furthermore forty statements about God in Qoheleth, the subject of a study by De Jong.109 He notes that God-talk is always in relation to humanity or to the limitations of humans in the light of God's infinity and finds this to be the main theme which gives to the book its cynical tone. He sees this polemic as having its place in a historical context, notably it is directed against the hubris of the Ptolemies. This aside, it is clear that the relationship between human beings and God, as in Job, is at the top of the theological agenda in this book and that the tension between God-given wisdom and human acquisition of it that we noted in Proverbs is still alive and well in Ecclesiastes, if in more cynical vein. A further question is raised concerning Qoheleth's place amongst the wisdom books and the nature of his wisdom. Was the author trying to undermine traditional wisdom or did his work represent a fresh direction for wisdom as it developed? Fox110 argues that the quest for knowledge is a keynote of Qoheleth's method and in this he has gone beyond the received wisdom of the sages to create knowledge of his own. He does not attack wisdom literature, rather he regards his own thought as wisdom of the same kind as his predecessors. As Fox writes, 'He took existing wisdom to himself—not to attack it but to make it his own . . . But then he proceeded to extend it boldly by seeking new knowledge in new ways in new frontiers/111 Murphy argues a similar case that Qoheleth remains within the boundaries of biblical wisdom, as does Seow who makes the point that one cannot solely interpret Qoheleth as a reaction to practical texts such as Proverbs since one cannot be certain about the precise chronological development of each. Rather reflective texts such as Job and Ecclesiastes may have formed a separate line of development. Wisdom psalms

It is generally agreed by scholars that some psalms are to be classified as wisdom psalms and. included in the wisdom corpus. They are however an ill-defined category. The same problem is faced regarding definition as when trying to define the limits of the wisdom literature, i.e. that many psalms contain wisdom forms, some contain wisdom content and some may have been devised, certainly edited, in circles of the wise. As Day remarks, the problem is 'how many wisdom characteristics a psalm must possess before it may legitimately be so described [as a wisdom 107 110

Levine (1997). (1989).

11M 1]1

McKenna (1992). Fox (1989), 120.

m<>

(1997).

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psalm]'.112 The main criterion for designating psalms as wisdom psalms is on their likeness to the already established wisdom books. So, for example, Psalm 1 is likened, to Proverbs and often regarded as having been edited in wisdom circles; Psalm 34: 11-22 and Psalm 37 are also likened to Proverbs whilst Psalms 39 and 90 align closely with Ecclesiastes, Psalm 49 with the laments of Job and. Psalm 73 with the Job dialogue and God's response. These psalms are generally agreed by scholars to belong in this category, whilst there are other psalms containing elements of wisdom—Psalm 111, for example, which in verse 10 contains the wisdom motto that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom—but which are not overall classified as wisdom psalms. If we only possessed the Psalter and no wisdom literature, we might not immediately recognize the wisdom psalms as substantially different from other discursive psalms or laments. In fact Whybray113 has recently denied these psalms a separate existence as a group, seeing them as essentially belonging to the same setting as other psalms. This highlights the problem of deciding the boundaries of the wisdom genre. The wisdom psalms have traditionally been regarded as essentially literary compositions from a late period, possibly part of the final editing of the Psalter. Wisdom circles are regarded as having given the Psalter its final form and are generally regarded as non-cultic.114 However, we might question this assumption in the light of the broader classifications of genre enjoyed by the wisdom psalms—a lament such as Psalm 49, for example, is hard to imagine outside a cultic context, particularly in the light of the observation that more didactic or discursive psalms cannot necessarily be denied a context in cultic life. There might well have been a closer connection between religious observance and instruction than is often maintained. The author of Psalm 119, a psalm included by some in the wisdom category, prayed to God seven times a day (Ps. 119: 164) and there is a distinct development into the realm of prayer in extra-biblical wisdom, in Ecclesiasticus and the Wisdom of Solomon. Perdue115 argues for a more far-reaching influence between the two, seeing some wisdom psalms as being written for the cult, although he also sees many written as aids for teaching in wisdom schools and thus non-cultic. Croft sees no tension between the two worlds of cult and education and regards Perdue's distinction as unnecessary, preferring to see the cult as functioning educationally, although mainly in the post-exilic period. This restriction to the post-exilic period may however be unnecessary and from earliest times the wisdom and worship of Israel may have found, important points of contact, as shown by the close integration of different genres in the wisdom psalms and in the hints of wisdom influence found more widely in the Psalter. As an essential part of the self-understanding of the people, "3 Day (1994b), 54-5. 114 Mowinckel(l%0).

113 (1995). "5 (1977).

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wisdom legitimately found expression in Israel's cultic life, in the same way that other areas of Israelite life and history did. There is an indication here that wisdom, in its important links with the worshipping life of the people of Israel, was not so sharply separate from other areas of Israelite life as scholars have traditionally maintained. This brings us on to the wider question of the place of wisdom theology within the Old Testament as a whole. Wisdom's place in Old Testament theology It is only in recent times that wisdom literature has begun to find its rightful place in an evaluation of Old Testament theology. Having said this, a recent Old Testament theology by Preuss116 makes but passing mention of it. It has been regarded as the 'foreign element' within the Old Testament because of the absence of the themes of election, covenant, and salvation history in its pages, and because of its links with the ancient Near East, both in its literature and thought world. As Bright wrote in 1967, 'Some parts of the Old Testament are far less clearly expressive of Israel's distinctive understanding of reality than others, some parts (and one thinks of such a book as Proverbs) seem to be only peripherally related to it, while others (for example Ecclesiastes) even question its essential features.'117 Much work has been done to redress this evaluation of wisdom. It is generally agreed that historical and. covenant materials have been disproportionately stressed in scholarship concerned with Old Testament theology to the detriment of an appreciation of both sapiential and hymnic materials.118 The issue is complicated by a lack of agreement as to how precisely to characterize wisdom's theology. Wisdom was defined by Zimmerli as creation theology when he wrote, 'Wisdom thinks resolutely within the framework of creation',119 His outlook has been recently taken up by Perdue120 who reaffirms the centrality of creation in wisdom thought. Others such as Schmid and Gese121 affirmed the centrality of order in wisdom's theology. Some have stressed the ethical concerns of wisdom from the human side, others the centrality of theodicy and issues of relationship between the divine and the human. Wherever one places the emphasis, it is clear that wisdom's theology is in the realm of relationship between the human and divine (as embodied in the figure of wisdom in Proverbs 8 who mediates between the two worlds) and that its basic view of God is that of creator and orderer of the universe and of a moral structure within that universe (even if that is found difficult to comprehend as in Job and Ecclesiastes). The wisdom view of God and his relationship with human beings is a very different one to the rest of the Old 116 m

(1995), Zimmerli (1964), 148.

"7 Bright (1967), 136. (1994b).

ia

m 121

Terrien (1978). Schmid (1996); Gese (1958).

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Testament and the crux of the issue is whether this is a valid view within the context of Old Testament thought as a whole. For those such as Tenien,122 the integration of wisdom into the theology of the Old Testament has involved a redefinition of the nature of Old Testament theology. Terrien argues for the elusive presence of God as the unifying factor within the Old Testament, a classification that suffers from being too broad, but nevertheless points the way to a more integrative approach. Westermann123 usefully draws a distinction between the historical and the ahistorical in biblical revelation. Both are, he argues, essential sides of the full understanding of revelation and whilst the main emphasis is on the revelation of God in and through historical events in the Old Testament, there is an important timeless and universal element that cuts across the historical of which the wisdom outlook is a key part. There is more work to be done in the area of the theological integration of wisdom with other parts of the Old Testament. Perdue has pointed the way in his book Cosmos and History,12* as has Brueggemann in his recent Theology of the Old Testament.125 It is clear that wisdom as a phenomenon has had a rich and varied influence on the Old Testament as a whole. It can no longer be ignored or marginalized or regarded merely as a late, literary concern. Its thought world is distinctive, and from earliest times it had unique insights to offer into the nature of God and into the ethical response demanded of humans seeking to become wise. The richness and diversity of wisdom, and the extent of its influence, lead one to suspect that wisdom's proper place is at the heart of the Israelite experience of God. For 'The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge; fools despise wisdom and instruction' (Prov. 1: 7). Bibliography ALBERTZ, R. (1981), 'Die sozlalgeschichtliche Hintergrund des Hiobbuches und der "Babylonischen Theodizee"', in Die Botschaft und die Boten; Festschrift fur Hans Walter Wolff zum JO.Geburtstag, ed. J. Jeremias and L, Perlitt (NeukirchenVluyn: Neukirchener Verlag), 349-72. BAUMGARTNTER, W. (1951), The Wisdom Literature', in The Old Testament and Modern Study, ed. H. H. Rowley (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 210-37. BEGG, C. T. (1994), 'Comparing Characters: The Book of Job and the Testament of Job', in The Book of Job, ed. W. A. M. Beuken (Leuven: Leuven University Press), 435-46. BESSERMAN, L. L. (1979), The Legend of Job in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press). BLENKINSOPP, J. (1995), Sage, Priest and Prophet: Religious and Intellectual Leadership in Ancient Israel (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press). BRAUN, R. (1973), Kohelet und die friihhettenistische Popularphilosopkie (BZAW 130; Berlin: Walter de Gruyter). 122 (1978).

123 (1978),

124 Perdue (1994b).

12S

Brueggemann (1998).

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BRENNER, A. (1989), 'Job the pious? The characterization of Job in the narrative framework of the book', ]SOT 43, 37-52. BRIGHT, J. (1967), The Authority of the Old Testament (London: SCM Press). BRUEGGEMANN, W. (1998), Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy (Minneapolis: Fortress Press). CAMP, C. V. (1985), Wisdom and the Feminine in the Book of Proverbs (Sheffield: Almond Press). CHENEY, M. (1994), Dust, Wind and Agony: Character, Speech and Genre in Job (CBOTS 36; Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell). CLEMENTS, R. E. (1992), Wisdom in Theology (Carlisle: Paternoster Press; Grand Rapids: Herd mans). CLINES, D. J. A. (1989), Job 1-20 (Word Biblical Commentary 17; Waco: Word Books). —— (1994), 'Why is There a Book of Job and What Does it Do to you if you Read it?', in The Book of Job, ed. W. A. M. Beuken (Leuven: Leuven University Press), 1-20. COURSE, J. E, (1994), Speech and Response: A Rhetorical Analysis of the Introductions to the Speeches of the Book of job (Chaps, 4-24) (CBQ Monograph 25; Washington, DC: Catholic Biblical Association). CRENSHAW, J. L. (1974), 'Wisdom', in Old Testament Form Criticism, ed. J. H. Hayes (San Antonio: Trinity University Press), 225-64. •—(1981), Old Testament Wisdom: An Introduction (Atlanta: John Knox Press; London: SCM Press, 1982). CROFT, S. J. L. (1978), The Identity of the Individual in the Psalms (JSOTS 44; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press). DAY, J. (1994a), 'How could Job be an Edomite?', in The Book of Job, ed. W. A. M. Beuken (Leuven: Leuven University Press), (1994b), The Psalms (Old Testament Guides; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press). — (1995), 'Foreign Semitic influence on the wisdom of Israel and its appropriation in the book of Proverbs', in Wisdom in Ancient Israel: Essays in Honour of /. A. Emerton, ed. J. Day, R. P. Gordon and H. G. M. Williamson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 55-70. DE JONG, S. (1992), A Book of Labour: The Structuring Principles and the Main Theme of the Book ofQohdeth (JSOTS 54; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press). — (1997), 'God in the Book of Qoheleth: A Reappraisal of Qoheleth's Place in Old Testament Theology', VT47,154-67. DELL, K, J. (1991), The Book of Job as Sceptical Literature (BZAW 197; Berlin: Walter de Gruyter). •—(1994), 'Ecclesiastes as wisdom: consulting early interpreters', FT 44, 301-29. — (1997), 'On the development of wisdom in Israel', Congress Volume: Cambridge 1995, ed. J. A. Emerton (Leiden, New York, Koln: B. J. Brill), 135-51. (1998), The King in the wisdom literature', in King and Messiah, ed. J. Day (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press). EMERTON, J. A. (1979), 'Wisdom', in Tradition and. Interpretation, ed. G. W. Anderson (Oxford; Oxford University Press). FONTAINE, C. (1982), Traditional Sayings in the Old Testament (Sheffield: Almond Press).

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FONTAINE, C. (1992), 'Proverbs, Ecclesiastes' in The Women's Bible Commentary, ed. C. A. Newsom and S. H. Rtnge (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press), 145-53. Fox, M. V. (1977), 'Frame narrative and composition in the book of Qoheleth', HUCA 48, 83-106, — (1989), Qoheletk and his Contradictions (Bible & Literature Series 18; JSOTS 71; Sheffield: Almond Press). FUCHS, G. (1993), Mythos und Hiabdichtung, Aufnahme und Umdeutung alfarientalischer Vorstellungen (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer). GAMMIE, J. G. and PERDUE, L. G. (1990) (eds.), The Sage in Israel and in the Ancient Near East (Winona Lake: Bisenbrauns). GESE, H. (1958), Lehre und Wirklichkeit in der alien Weisheit (Tubingen: JCB Mohr (Paul Siebeck)). GOLKA, F, (1993), The Leopard's Spots: Biblical and African Wisdom in Proverbs (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark). GOOD, E. M. (1990), In Turns of Tempest: A. Reading of Job with a Translation (Stanford: Stanford University Press). GORDIS, R. (1939), 'Quotations in Wisdom Literature', JQR NS 30,123-47. Reprinted in Poets, Prophets, Sages (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1971), 160-97, GUTIERREZ, G, (1987), On Job (Maryknoll: Orbis Books). HABEL, N. C. (1985), The Book of Job (Old Testament Library; London: SCM Press; Philadelphia: Westminster Press), HARRISON JR., C. R, (1997), 'Qoheleth among the sociologists', BibM 5,160-80. HBATON, E. W. (1994), The School Tradition of the Old Testament (Oxford: Oxford University Press). HBNGEL, M. (1973), Judaism and Hellenism, Vols. 1 & 2 (London: SCM Press). HOFFMAN, Y. (1981), The Relation between the Prologue and the Speech-Cycles in Job', VT 31,160-70. — (1991), 'Ancient Near Eastern Literary Conventions axid the Restoration of the Book of Job', ZA W103,399-411. — (1996), A Blemished Perfection: The Book of job in Context (JSOTS 213; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press). HUMPHREYS, W. L. (1978), 'The Motif of the Wise Courtier in the Book of Proverbs', Israelite Wisdom, ed. J. G. Gammie et al, (Missoula: Scholars Press), 177-90. JARICK, J. (1990), Gregory Tltauinaturgos' Paraphrase of Ecclesiastes (Atlanta: Scholars Press). KENWORTHY, A. W. (1974), The Nature and Authority of Old Testament Wisdom, Family Ethics, with Special Reference to Proverbs and Sirach (diss. University of Melbourne). LACOQTJE, A. (1996), 'Job and Religion at its Best', Biblnt 4,131-53. LAMBERT, W. G. (1995), 'Some New Babylonian Wisdom Literature', in Wisdom in Ancient Israel: Essays in Honour of ]. A. Emerton, ed. J. Day, R. P. Gordon and H. G. M. Williamson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 30-42. LANG, B. (1975), Fran Weisheit. Deutung einer biblischen Gestalt (Dusseldorf: PatrnosVerlag). LEMAIRE, A. (1981), Les ecoles et la formation de la Bible dans I'ancien Israel (OBO 39; Fribourg & Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht).

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LEVING, E. (1997), 'The Humor in Qoheleth', TLA W109,71-83,

LOADER, J. A. (1979), Polar Structures in the Book of Qoheleth (BZAW 152; Berlin: Walter de Gruyter). LOHFINK, N, (1980), Kohetet (Wiirzburg: Echter Verlag). MAAG, V. (1982), Hiob: Wandlung und Verarbeitung des Problems in Novelle, DialogdicMung und Spatfassungen (FRLANT 128; Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht). MACINTOSH, A. A, (1995), 'Hosea and the Wisdom Tradition: Dependence and Independence', in Wisdom in Ancient Israel: Essays in Honour of J. A. Emerton, ed. J. Day, R, P. Gordon and H. G, M, Williamson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 124-32. McKANE, W, (1970), Proverbs. A New Approach (Old Testament Library; London: SCM Press). MCKENNA, j. E. (1992), The Concept of hebel in the Book of Ecdesiastes', S}T 45, 19-28.' MORGAN, D. P. (1981), Wisdom in the Old Testament: Traditions (Atlanta: John Knox Press). MOWINCKEL, S. (1960), 'Psalms and Wisdom', SVT3,205-44. MURPHY, R, E. (1969), The Interpretation of Old Testament Wisdom Literature', M 23, 289-301. — (1992), Ecdesiastes (Waco: Word Books). NEWSOM, C. A. (1993), 'Cultural Politics and the Reading of Job', BMnt 1,119-38. PENCHANSKY, D. (1990), The Betrayal of God (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press). PERDUE, L. G. (1977), Wisdom and Cult (SBL Dissertation Series 30; Missoula: Scholars Press), 286-91. — (1991), Wisdom in Revolt (JSOTS112; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press). (1994a), The Collapse of History (Minneapolis: Fortress Press). •—(1994b), Wisdom and Creation (Nashville: Abingdon Press). PERRY, T. A. (1993), Dialogues with Qoheleth: The Book of Ecdesiastes: Translation and Commentary (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press). PLEINS, D. J. (1994), 'Why do you hide your face? Divine silence and speech in the book of Job', M 48, 229-38. PREUSS, H. D. (1995), Old Testament Theology (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press; Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark). PRITCHARD, J. B. (1969) (ed.), Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament (Princeton: Princeton University Press (3rd edn.)). QUILLO, R. (1991), 'Naked ant I: Psychological Perspectives on the Unity of the Book of Job', Perspectives in Religious Studies 18,213-22. RANSTON, H. (1930), Old Testament Wisdom Books and Their Teaching (London: Epworth Press). RAY, J. D. (1995), 'Egyptian wisdom literature', in Wisdom in Ancient Israel: Essays in Honour of ]. A, Emertont ed. J. Day, R. P. Gordon and H. G. M. Williamson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 17-29. REDDITT, P. L. (1994), 'Reading the Speech Cycles in the Book of Job', Hebrew Annual Review 14, 205-14. ROWLAND, C. (1982), The Open Heaven: A Study of Apocalyptic in Judaism and Early Christianity (London: SCM Press).

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SCHLOBIN, R. C. (1992), 'Prototypic Horror, the Genre of the Book of Job', Semeia 60, 23-38. SCHMID, H. H. (1966), Weseti und Geschichte der Weisheit (BZAW 101; Berlin: Topelrnann). SEITZ, C, R. (1989), 'Job: Full Structure, Movement and Interpretation', M 43,5-17. SHOW, C-L. (1997), Ecclesiastes (Anchor Bible; New York: Doubleday). SHEAD, A. (1996), 'Ecclesiastes from the outside in', RTR 55, 24-37. TERRtEN, S. (1962), 'Amos and Wisdom', in Israel's Prophetic Heritage, ed. B. W. Anderson and W. Harrelson (London: SCM Press), — (1978), The Elusive Presence: Toward a. New Biblical Theology (Religious Perspectives 26; New York: Harper & Row). — (1996), The Iconography of fob through the Centuries: Artists as Biblical Interpreters (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press). VAN WOLDE, E. (1997), Mr and Mrs Job (London: SCM Press). VEKMEYLEN, J. (1994), "Le mechant dans les discours des amis de Job', in The Book of Job, ed. W. A, M. Beukcn (Leuven: Leuven University Press), 101-27. VOGELS, W. (1995), fob, honime qui a Men parle de Dieu (Paris: Editions du Cerf). VON RAD, G. (1962), Old Testament Theology, Volume 1 (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd). — (1966), 'The Joseph Narrative and Ancient Wisdom', in The Problem of the Hemtench and Other Essays (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd). •— (1972), Wisdom in Israel (London: SCM Press)." WALSH, f. T. (1982), 'Despair as a Theological Virtue in the Spirituality of Ecclesiastes', BTB 12,46-9. WEEKS, S. (1994), Earh/ Israelite Wisdom (Oxford: Clarendon Press). WEFNFELD, M. (1972), Deuteronomy and the Deutermomic School (Oxford: Oxford University Press). WESTERMANN, C. (1978), Blessing in the Bible and the Life of the Church (Philadelphia: Fortress Press). — (1995), Roots of Wisdom (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht; Edinburgh: T.& T.Clark). WHEDBEE, J. W. (1971), Isaiah and Wisdom (New York: Abingdon Press). •— (1977), The Comedy of Job', Semeia 7 (Studies in the Book of Job, ed. R, Polzin and D. Robertson), 1-39. WHYBRAY, R, N. (1965), Wisdom in Proverbs: The Concept of Wisdom in Proverbs 1-9 (SET 45; London: SCM Press). — (1968), The Succession Narrative (London: SCM Press). — (1974), The Intellectual Tradition in the Old Testament (BZAW 135; Berlin: Walter de Gruyter). •— (1982), 'Qoheleth, Preacher of Joy?', JSOT 23, 87-98. — (1990), Wealth and Poverty in the Book of Proverbs (Sheffield: JSOT Press). — (1994a), The Composition of the Book of Proverbs (Sheffield: JSOT Press), — (1994b), 'The Structure and Composition of Proverbs 22:17-24:22', in Crossing the Boundaries, Essays in Biblical Interpretation in Honour of Michael D. Goulder, ed. S. E. Porter, P. Joyce and D. E, Orton (Leiden: E. J. Brill), 83-96. (1995), The Wisdom Psalms', in Wisdom in Ancient Israel: Essays in honour of J. A. Emerton, ed. J. Day, R. P. Gordon and H. G. M. Williamson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 1.52-60.

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WOLFERS, D. (1993), The Speech Cycles in the Book of Job', FT 43,385-402. — (1995), Deep Things Out of Darkness, The Book of fob, Essays and a Neu> English Translation (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdnians), WOLFF, H. W. (1977), Joel and Amos (Philadelphia: Fortress Press). WRIGHT, G. E. (1952), God who Acts: Biblical Theology as Recital (SBT 8; London: SCM Press). ZIMMERLI, W. (1964), The Place and Limit of Wisdom in the Framework of Old Testament Theology', S/T17,145-58. ZUCKERMAN, B. (1991), job the Silent: A Study of Historical Counterpoint (Oxford: Oxford University Press),

14

The History of Israel: Foundations of Israel K. W. WHITELAM

Introduction: shaking the foundations A decade ago it was possible to complain of complacency and sterility in the study of Israelite history compared with the vitality of historical debate in other areas,1 The situation has now changed out of all recognition with the study of Israelite history standing at an interesting, if not critical, juncture at the end of the 1990s. Any complacency has been swept away as the very enterprise, its critical methods, assumptions, results, and the adequacy or appropriateness of basic terminology—'the history of ancient Israel', 'pre-exilicf, 'conquest', 'United Monarchy'—have been called into question. Such fundamental questioning has elicited an equally vehement response and defence of long-held positions. The explosion of published material on the problems and prospects of Israelite or Palestinian history has gone some way to fulfilling Miller's appeal for 'fresh ideas based on solid research'.2 Although biblical studies still lags behind historical studies in many areas, the debate on the very nature of Israelite history, which, has engulfed it over the past few decades, bears witness to what Lucien Febvre described as 'the fight for history'.3 It is difficult to predict the outcome of this conflict with any confidence, although some trends do appear to be emerging from the confusion. The danger of trying to read the runes of contemporary scholarship in such a volatile situation is evident in the review essay of Gazelles only two decades ago:4 Ms account of the foundations of Israelite history in the pre-exilic period, based firmly on the biblical texts as the primary source of such a history, displays a confidence in historical research within biblical studies which betrays a lack of awareness of the revolution which was about to shake its very foundations.5 2 3 4 ' Whitelam(1986),45. (1985), 23, (1953). (1979). Any consideration of Gazelles' analysis as representative of the state of the discipline at the time has to be tempered by the fact that Anderson admits in the preface to the volume to protracted delays in publication, with most of the chapters having been completed before the end of (1974). The footnotes to Gazelles' review suggest that it was finished well before the publication of the works of Thompson (1974) and van Seters (1975) which undermined attempts to preserve the Patriarchal period as historical. 5

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The periods of Israel's emergence and the Judaean and Israelite monarchies, as described in the books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings, have long been seen as the foundational periods of Israelite history, representing the defining moments in Israelite history for biblical studies:6 it is here, rather than in the so-called periods of the patriarchs or exodus, that the essential Israel has been located. Thus Dever could state, at the beginning of the 1990s, that 'there are no more crucial problems in the study of ancient Israelite history and religion than those that pertain to the settlement in Canaan. This is the earliest, most formative horizon that we can recover historically, the one in which the distinctive entity known as "Israel" arose, two centuries before the formation of the Israelite state.'7 Similarly, Knoppers, in a review of the monarchic period, points out that 'three decades ago scholars viewed the united monarchy as one of the most secure periods for historical reconstruction'.8 Not only was it considered to be one of the most secure periods, but also the defining moment in which Israel emerged as a power on the world stage of antiquity as well as the context for the development of many of the written traditions within the Hebrew Bible. The monarchy, and its supposed documents, represented, the basis of sound history as epitomized in Soggin's celebrated statement that the period of David denotes 'a datum point' for Israelite history.9 Yet, the vigour and direction of the debate in recent years has threatened these once seemingly secure foundations. The parameters of the discussion have changed little during this period: the nature and historicity of the Hebrew Bible in comparison with the relevance of archaeological data remain at the fulcrum of the debate. The question of what type of history is possible or desirable underpins the discussions.10 Many of the standard histories of ancient Israel,11 published in the 1980s, were in effect commentaries on the biblical texts rather than histories of ancient Israel per se. This is particularly true for the monarchic period, covered by the books of Samuel and Kings, where the biblical text and philology were of primary concern. They are not problem-based histories with the primary emphasis on 'understanding', but 'fact-based' where the emphasis is on establishing facts as the anchors for chronological-political histories in which the event, unique individual, and teleology, the direction of history, are dominant.12 They are prime examples of what Da vies has referred to as 'midrashic paraphrase'. 7 8 * Whitelam (1996), 71. Dever (1990), 39. Knoppers (1997), 19. ! w * (1977), 332. Whitelam (1986); Dever (1997), " Bright (1981); Moth (1983); Jagersma (1982); Soggin (1984). u See Whitelam (1996) for the view that the privileging of standard types of history within biblical studies, and cognate areas, has been heavily influenced by religious and political presuppositions. The standard positions maintain the modernist assumption that history has direction, purposeful movement—from emergence to monarchy—while newer perspectives suggest that regional responses to climatic, social and political factors are not evidence of purposeful, unilinear movement but part of recurrent regional patterns in response to socioenvironmental conditions.

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The fight for history waged by Febvre, Bloch, and the French Annales school, from the 1920s onwards, and epitomized by Braudel's magisterial study of the Mediterranean,13 has increasingly impinged upon biblical studies over the last two decades. This fight for history, expressed at the surface level of rhetoric with frequent references to 'minimalists', 'maximalists', 'nihilists', and similar pejorative terms, is illustrated by Halpern's complaint about 'the erasure of history',14 or Whybray's claim that new approaches which question the centrality of the biblical traditions for understanding the foundational periods of Israelite history threaten 'to wipe out an entire nation from world history'.1-' Southgate's description of the current situation in historical studies in general is an apt reflection of the hostility of debates on the nature of Israelite history: There is little doubt that the vehemence with which the debate between the traditionalists and more theoretically inclined "meta-historians" is sometimes conducted, indicates some considerable anxiety on the part of its participants. It is as if not only the discipline of history, but the very integrity of the historian is coming under threat/16 The result is a widely acknowledged crisis in history deriving from the complex of intellectual movements which have increasingly challenged and undermined the authority and the stability of established disciplines and their previously 'assured results', including biblical studies.17 The debate about the very nature of the historical task underpinning the search for ancient Israel has seen the battle lines drawn around the two foundational periods of that history as traditionally understood and represented in the standard textbooks of Israelite history and archaeology. Textual and material foundations of Israelite history: the history of the gaps The fulcrum of the debate continues to turn on the assessment of the historical veracity of the biblical traditions in relation to the ever increasing body of archaeological data. It is commonplace to attribute negative assessments of the text as historically reliable to the 'growing enthusiasm for "the Bible as literature"'.18 This has been compounded by the increasing impact of the social sciences on the study of Israelite history.19 These two 13

M 15 (1972). Halpern (1995). Whybray (1996), 71. '" Southgate (1996), 3. Barstad (1997), 39 (see also Carroll (1997), 878), with excellent bibliography, is one of the few biblical scholars to address the importance of the effects of postmodernist debates on understanding this crisis in historical studies and its effects upon Israelite history. As he emphasizes (1997), 46-7, paraphrases of the biblical text as the basis for Israelite history ignore the (postmodernist) d.ebates on the nature of texts, reading, and objectivity while continuing 'apparently unaware of the fact that there has been a veritable upheaval in the theoretical discussion about the nature of history and the possibilities of history writing in general'. 18 Provan (1995), 585. H See Brettler (1995) for an insightful analysis of these trends with bibliography. He also offers a series of interesting readings of biblical narratives as explanations of the past which reflected the time and ideological concerns of their authors. 17

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broad movements have played central roles, as most commentators agree, but they are only the most visible aspects of much wider intellectual currents which have progressively eroded the foundations of Israelite history, as traditionally conceived. Those who try to defend or reassert a traditional conception of Israelite history, in which the biblical text takes priority and is only supplemented by archaeological data or non-biblical materials, ignore or fail to engage the intellectual climate of the late 1990s. This failure to engage with the central issues, to reappraise the nature of the enterprise and the implications of the various movements—literary, new archaeology, social anthropology—is probably best illustrated in the rearguard actions, retreat, and retrenchment in defence of the so-called 'starting point of Israelite history'. The patriarchs, exodus, and conquest of Palestine have over the last thirty years or more been the front-line of the debate on the historicity of the biblical narratives which, despite the most trenchant of defences, have been removed fironi most critical histories of ancient Israel, The same situation has been witnessed in the debates over the emergence of Israel in the Late Bronze-Iron Age transition with the conflict now shifting to the early monarchy and beyond. The protracted discussions within biblical studies represent a failure to address the implications of the structural weaknesses of Israelite history, as traditionally conceived, which is most evident at the points of intersection between the biblical text and archaeology. The reaction in defence of standard positions is reminiscent of the theology of the gaps of the nineteenth century when religion faced an ever increasing challenge from the growing body of scientific discoveries. It was only in retrospect that many theologians were able to adapt to the new knowledge in redefining the theological task. In the same way, standard defences of 'the starting point' of Israelite history have been forced to retreat from the patriarchal period through the exodus and conquest, as the defences have been breached, to a point where the battle lines are now drawn around the monarchic period as the defining moment in Israelite history. Rather than recognizing the implications of the growing body of evidence in trying to redefine these periods in the history of ancient Palestine, attempts have been made to defend text-based reconstructions on the basis that there must be 'a limit to scepticism'.20 It is at this juncture that the fight for history, over what Le Goff 2l terms the 'reactionary modes of history—narrative, the history of events, biography, and political history', is most fully engaged. Whybray, in ruling out archaeology and comparative anthropology as adequate for writing what he considers a continuous history of ancient Israel, argues that 'if none of these methods can provide an adequate basis for the writing of a 20 The phrase is taken from Hallo (1990) and is echoed in a number of recent studies. Halpern (1997), 314 n. 9, claims that 'the creeping critical rejection of biblical accounts has reached its natural limits', -' (1992), x.

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history of Israel, it would seem that if such a history is to be written the biblical text, however liable to correction, must be taken as a foundation',22 In all such cases, with the proviso of varying degrees of critical acknowledgment of difficulties inherent in the text, what is produced is the most skeletal of histories focused upon the history of events, biography, and. political history. Provan, who places great emphasis on the integrity of the text, complains that revisionists disregard what he calls 'the plain sense of the text'.23 Yet the practical implications of this are not explored beyond the reiteration of the call that historians should, use all available sources. It is not explained what the plain sense of the narrative of Joshua's capture of Jericho is in light of archaeological evidence that the site was not occupied in the Late Bronze Age. Appeals to 'the traditional middle ground of scholarship' are vacuous in the absence of practical examples of how particular texts or parts of texts are to be utilized to write a history of Israel for the Late Bronze and early Iron Ages. He asks, for example, 'why not assume the historicity of the Canaan/Israel polarity, for example, even though it is biblically based and unverified by extrabiblical evidence, unless and. until it is shown to be unhistorical?'24 Yet it is this biblically-based assumption of a polarity which has skewed the interpretation of archaeological data for the Late Bronze-Iron Age transition. It has slowly emerged over the last few decades that the material culture of the area does not confirm such a polarity but illustrates instead the continuity of culture, including religious culture, throughout the region. Davies argues that it is not possible to take the biblical story as a 'first draft': To assign non-biblical data the role of 'elucidating', 'confirming', (or equally, of 'denying') the biblical narrative (or 'biblical record') will mean that the many remaining gaps in our knowledge are occupied by biblical data. More importantly, because less often debated, major biblical categories, like 'pre-exilic', 'United Monarchy', 'Canaanite', 'Israelite', remain in place though historically unclear, inaccurate, or inappropriate. If the fate of the non-biblical data is to be made to fit into the remnants of a framework which they themselves have not sponsored, then they are not being properly utilized. The capacity to generate different frameworks, categories and interpretations is hamstrung.25

The rear-guard action in defence of 'the starting point' of Israelite history which has been witnessed throughout the century bears testimony to the methodological confusion. Febvre, long ago sounded the warning to '. . . be careful not to underestimate the persistence of that old taboo which says, "You can only do history from texts'".26 22 23 25

Whybray (1996), 72; see also Yamauchi (1994), 5. 24 Provan (1995), 596. Ibid., 603, n. 76. Davies (1997), 107-8. » Febvre (1973), 35.

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The central point at issue here is how the traditions are to be read and understood and what they reveal about the perceptions of the past of the writers of these narratives, Paul Veyrte notes that history is 'a struggle against the perspective imposed by the sources',27 The problem for the historian of ancient Israel or Palestine in utilizing the biblical traditions is the lack of an agreed sociology of canon: the social production of the literature which comprises the canon of the Hebrew Bible is a matter of considerable conjecture and debate. The increasingly late dating of much of this literature and. the artistic integrity of the narratives has undermined attempts to mine the texts for some fabled historical kernel. Yet, despite the growing consensus on the late dating of biblical texts, the study of their social production and reception in the Persian and Hellenistic periods is at a preliminary stage. It is the very conditions of production and the structures of power in which the biblical texts derive their meaning, particularly in their representation of Israel's past, that are so problematic for the historian, Barstad notes that 'this theological story does not tell us what Israel's history really looked like in ancient times' nor does it allow the systematic study of the history of ancient society in all its 'complexity and multifaceted reality',28 The construction of the past and its retelling, in oral or written form, is the way in which particular groups define identity and their relationship to the present,29 Carroll compares the creation of the third-century Celtic poet Ossian in the eighteenth century with the problems of assessing the historicity of the narratives about Balaam, Omri, and Baruch in light of extra-biblical materials. He adopts the terms togus tales' or 'bogus history' to refer to the creation of such traditions which are then represented as historical accounts within biblical studies: Bogus also qualifies all those scholarly antics whereby fragmented texts are restored to read whatever will make the artefacts conform to an imagined narrative constructed from the biblical text-—where blanks are filled in from artefacts discovered from outside the Bible, but where in the absence of such artefacts the biblical text is deemed to be reliable,30

This is the history of the gaps which has comprised, and continues to comprise for many, the study of Israelite history. The reluctance to pursue alternative forms of history has been brought about by the privileging of the memory of particular social groups who produced the biblical traditions—the literate elite, whose reading of the Israelite past excluded those groups who were peripheral to the power structures they sought to control. The alternative is to examine the 'zones of silence', to adapt Michel de Certeau's phrase,31 The injunction to use all 27 28 29 30 31

(1971), 265, cited in Le Goff (1992), 182. (1997), 57, Plumb (1969); Hobsbawm and Ranger (1983); Le Goff (1992); Whitelam (1991). Carroll (1997), 93. Cited in Le Goff (1992), 27,

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available evidence, which has become a rallying cry in the reassertion of the primacy of Hebrew Bible in the construction of the history of Israel in the early Iron Age, also requires the questioning of the 'historical documentation itself concerning its lacunae, and to ask ourselves about the holes and blank spots in history, the things it has forgotten. We have to inventory the archives of silence, and write history on the basis of documents and the absence of documents.'32 It is the attempts to inventory the archives of silence which represent the most significant advances in the study of the history of the region and a radical reappraisal of the foundations of Israelite history. The emergence of ancient Israel A new horizon

Attempts to explore the lacunae and silences of the biblical texts for understanding the emergence of ancient Israel in Palestine have resulted in an explosion of new material and intensity of debate which have led, in little more than a decade, to astonishing shifts in basic perceptions about one of the foundational periods of Israelite history. The works of Lemche,33 Ahlstrom,34 Coote and Whitelam,35 and Finkelstein36 signalled the beginnings of a revolution in understanding whose implications are only now becoming fully apparent. Coote37 was able to refer to a 'new horizon' in the understanding of ancient Israel in the Late Bronze-Iron Age transition by emphasizing important shared assumptions within these works. The most important points of consensus are the recognition of considerable cultural continuity between the Late Bronze and. early Iron Ages and the largely indigenous nature of settlement shifts in the highlands and margins. The rhetoric of recent exchanges has tended to obscure this staggering change in perception across the many different wings of scholarship. The almost nonchalant way in which scholars now accept that the settlement shifts in the highlands and margins of Palestine during the Late Bronze-Iron Age transition are the result of largely indigenous processes stands in stark contrast to the catalogue of complaints which accompanied the first attempts by Mendenhall,38 Gottwald39 and Chancy40 to challenge the prevailing assumption that socio-political changes in the region were the result of external invasion or infiltration. The sheer speed with which previous models collapsed and understandings shifted was impossible to predict at the time because of the complex interaction of a variety of factors: fundamental shifts in attitude to reading the Hebrew Bible, the quantity and quality of emerging archaeological data, and the context of wider intellectual, social, and political movements affecting 32 37

LeGoff(1992), 182. (1990), viii.

M

(1985). * (1962).

« (1986). 3 " (1979).

35

(1987). * (1983).

» (1988).

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Western scholarship. Lemche,41 Coote,42 Thompson,43 and Davies44 confirmed the rapid and radical nature of the shift.45 In addition, a whole series of important works have presented and analysed the archaeological data, such as Mazar,46 Ben-Tor,47 Finkelstein and Na'aman,48 and Levy.49 A number of the individual essays in these major collections, particularly in Finkelstein and Na'aman, and Levy, adopt a Braudellian perspective in analysing the results of surveys and excavations in the context of longterm settlement and demographic trends in the region, emphasizing the way in which 'the fight for history' has had subtle and lasting effects on the investigation of Israelite history. They also confirm the most important and central feature of a growing consensus, which tends to become submerged in the rhetoric of debate, namely, the striking continuities in material culture of settlements from the Late Bronze through the early Iron Age. It is important not to lose site of this basic agreement across a range of scholars, biblical specialists and archaeologists, who are often presented as being in the diametrically opposed camps of minimalism and maximalism. It is perhaps the most important feature in the development of a new horizon in understanding the history of ancient Palestine from the Late Bronze through the Iron Age. It is ironic that the search for ancient Israel which inspired and motivated the regional surveys and much archaeological excavation has failed to find the object of its quest. Dever50 refers to this growing consensus and its importance for understanding the history of the region, providing a convenient outline of many of its most important features: mostly small, unwalled villages, with small-scale terrace farming and some herding. Strikingly, he notes that the pottery 'is solidly in the LB IIB Canaanite tradition; nearly all forms exhibit only the expected, normal development from the thirteenth into the twelfth (and even eleventh) centuries B.C.' before adding that 'it must be stressed in the light of archaeology today, it is the Late Bronze-Iron I continuity in material culture—not the discontinuity—that is striking, the more so as research progresses'.51 Many of these characteristics are now found throughout the region, including Transjordan, suggesting that these are general features, especially in rural and highland areas.52 Finkelstein,53 in n

42 (1988); (1991). (1990). « (1992a). 'u (1992). Thompson (1992b), 4, refers to 'a new historiographical paradigm'. Barstad (1997), 50-1, however, argues that this is not an adequate description of the situation since Lemche and Thompson, and many others, still work within the parameters of historical critical research, assuming that history is a science dealing with 'hard' facts. He describes them as the 'first of 46 47 the last modernists'. (1990). (1992). * (1994), *> (1995). See also now many of the essays in Silberman and Small (1997). Lemche (1996), 74—150 provides a programmatic statement for the integration of archaeological and textual Sl data in the construction of the history of the period. (1990), 78-9. 51 Ibid., 79; cf. (1995), 204. 52 The essays in Finkelstein and Na'aman (1994), Ben-Tor (1992), and Levy (1995) provided a wealth of detail drawn from survey and excavation. For Transjordan, see the essays in 53 Bienkowski (1992). (1998); (1.994); (1995a); (1995b). 45

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particular, has analysed the results of excavations and survey data, focusing on the long-term socio-economic and environmental aspects of settlement shift. He presents a picture which is remarkably similar in terms of the basic understanding of the material culture and economy of the transformation of highland and marginal settlement in the Late Bronze-Iron Age transition. The new horizon which has emerged offers a greater understanding of the multifarious aspects of the history of ancient Palestine in this period, the lacunae and zones of silence, which were lacking in standard biblical histories concerned solely with the event or personality. An increasing body of literature has addressed the regional aspects of ancient Palestinian society and economy focusing upon the processes involved in sociopolitical change,54 Bunimovitz,55 for example, provides an excellent study of the socio-political transformations in the region, particularly the central hill country, in the Late Bronze-Iron Age transition from the perspective of la longne duree in order to understand, as he terms it, the '"silent majority"—the rural backbone of all past societies'.-"*6 He utilizes survey data to characterize the hill, country as a frontier zone in which crises in occupation are felt more acutely than in the lowlands. It is this revolution in understanding and approach which has laid the basis for alternative conceptions of the history of the region allowing for the investigation of long-term trends in Palestinian history, the recurrent and regular, and the processes which shape such trends. It represents a continuing struggle to break free from the power of the Hebrew Bible to organize memory and shape the history of the region. Historians and archaeologists have increasingly focused on the processes which led to settlement shifts—continuities and discontinuities—and their implications for understanding later periods. Nevertheless, there remain numerous disagreements on the interpretation of the data, particularly concerning the factors and processes which contributed to the transformation and realignment of Palestinian society in the Late Bronze-Iron Age transition: the nature and importance of regional and interregional economic decline and stagnation,57 climatic features,58 and the socio-economic background and location of the inhabitants of the highland sites, whether pastoral nomads in the process of sedentarization or displaced groups from the urban centres and lowlands in the wake of political and economic disruption, or other external elements,59 The appearance and use of pillared buildings, silos, cisterns, terracing, and utilitarian pottery forms, as 54 Coote and Whitelam (1987); Weippert (1988); Dothan (1989); Thompson (1992a); Finkelstein (1994); (1995b). 35 (1994); (1995). 56 Bunimovitz (1994), 179. 57 Coote and Whitelam (1987); Whitelam (1994); Finkelstein (1995). 58 Thompson (1992a). s " Finkelstein (1988); (1995a); (1995W; Dever (1994); (1995).

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revealed in excavations at Khirbet et-Tell, Khirbet Raddana, Giloh, Izbet Sartah, Khirbet ed Dawwara, Shiloh, Tell el-Umeiri, Sahab, and the numerous surveys of the hill country and margins, are explicable in terms of the topographical and environmental conditions facing the inhabitants of highland and marginal sites in the context of the disruption of lowland and regional economies.60 The accumulating evidence has revealed a number of interesting features concerning the direction of settlement expansion which remain the subject of debate, Finkelstein has argued that settlement was established in eastern margins first before expanding in a westward direction, while settlement density gradually decreased from north to south. Yet, the significance of such patterns is difficult to determine, Ofer, for example, points out that the north-south distinction was the result of differences in settlement potential and says nothing about the direction from which the settlers came.61 Similarly, as Finkelstein notes,"2 settlement in the eastern flanks can be explained by the fact that these are the most convenient for cultivation, requiring a minimum of preparation, and were invariably preferred over more marginal areas. Thus there were ecological and. socioeconomic reasons for 'opting for areas which were topographically moderate, ecologically convenient and agriculturally promising (the desert fringe, the intermontane valleys and flat areas of the central range)',63 Again such evidence is consistent with groups moving away from disruptions in the lowlands and coastal plain as a result of the reverberations following the collapse or severe decline of eastern Mediterranean urban economies. The burgeoning body of data allows for debate and disagreement on the relative weight of the various factors involved in such settlement shift in a way that was not possible a decade ago. It is this which offers a new horizon in the investigation of the history of ancient Palestine. At the same time, it raises important questions about the understandings of this period as foundational for Israelite history. These fundamental, underlying trends in the study of the history of the region for this period have been obscured by the rhetoric and continuing power of the discourse which is concerned principally with the search for ancient Israel.64 It is, as Finkelstein noted concerning the dating of Philistine settlements, '. . . a rewarding case study for the tyranny of a historical paradigm over archaeological finds'.65 It is a discourse which is dominated by the search for ancient Israel in defence of one of the foundational periods for Israelite history in the face of ever mounting evidence. The issue which has provided the focal point for this dispute, 60

Whitelam (1994); Finkelstein (1994); (1995b); see also Dever (1991), 83-4. Ofer (1994), 10? and 108. Bienkowski (1992), 6,8,99-112, notes that settlement In Jordan begins in the western fringes where the best agricultural land is found and decreases from north to south, 62 (1995b), 357. « Ibid. 64 m Whitelam (1994); (1996), Finkelstein (1995c), 213. 61

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whose rhetoric has detracted from the growing consensus on other important aspects of the region, has been the vexed question of the ethnic identity of the inhabitants of the highland and marginal sites in the Late Bronze—Iron Age transition. The problem of ethnicity

The revolutionary understanding of these settlements as largely indigenous has seriously undermined the common assumption, from the time of Albright and Alt, that the settlements and their material culture provide the physical manifestation of ancient Israel. The implications of the failure to distinguish an 'Israelite' material culture from an indigenous material culture in terms of the archaeological data have been difficult to disentangle from the dominant discourse concerned with the search for ancient Israel. Whitelam66 has analysed some of the confusions in work from the mid-1980s onwards, particularly among scholars who discount the evidence of the biblical traditions for this period on methodological grounds. Thompson, among others, realized the irony that the increase in archaeological data undermined attempts to locate and describe Israel during the Late Bronze-Iron Age transition: 'It has become exceedingly misleading to speak of the term "Israelite" in an archaeological context of Iron I Palestine.'67 However, the preoccupation with the search for ancient Israel has continued to dominate and confuse the analysis of the archaeological data. The continuing struggle to break free from the perspective imposed by the biblical traditions and the continuing power of its ability to shape the discourse is evident in the series of important studies which have presented the results of survey and excavation in the region. Finkelstein has revised his understanding of the problem of the identification of the inhabitants considerably since the publication of his seminal study on 'Israelite Settlement'.68 More recently, he has claimed that 'the material culture of the Iron I sites in the hill country should not be viewed in ethnic perspective'.69 This view is reinforced with the statement that the name 'Israelites' for all inhabitants of the hill country can hardly reflect the complex ethnic, social and cultural reality of the area in Iron Age I. Since there is no clear difference in material culture between the various groups that settled in the highlands in Iron I, any effort to distinguish between 'Israelite' and 'nonIsraelite' hill country sites during the twelfth-eleventh centuries BCE according to their finds is doomed to failure.'0

Such a view clearly undermines the very foundations on which this period has been viewed as the bulwark against the progressive removal of <* (1994); (1996), 176-222. 68 Finkelstein (1988). 7(1 Finkelstein and Na'aman (1994), 17.

a

Thompson (1992a), 310. " Finkelstein (1994), 169.

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starting points for the history of Israel. He goes on to add that the material culture reflects the ecological background, subsistence economy, and social frameworks of the highland settlements rather than any precise ethnic identity.71 Yet the biblical perspective reasserts itself when Finkelstein and Na'aman use 'Israelite', with quotation marks, to describe the hill-country areas that were included later within the territory of the early Israelite monarchy.72 The power of the history of the gaps is evident in his conclusion that 'the truly exceptional event' in the highlands in the late second millennium BCE was not 'Israelite Settlement' but 'the emergence of the United Monarchy—the unification of the entire central hill country and most of the lowlands under one rule'.73 It is the later Israelite monarchy, or at least the biblical presentation of this monarchy, which becomes the defining moment which is used to interpret the archaeological data and thereby to retain the foundational position of this period for Israelite history,7'1 The paradox is that the analysis of the archaeological data, often from a Braudellian perspective, has opened up a new horizon for understanding the history of the region while at the same time continuing to force thaidata into a historical framework derived from the biblical traditions. The failure to resolve the paradox is evident in a number of other key works. The assumption in the title From 'Nomadism to Monarchy75 colours the whole volume. It is the 'United Monarchy' of David, considered to be the pinnacle of political achievement in the region, which ultimately determines the interpretation of archaeological data. For instance, Mazar accepts that 'research has failed to develop tools which enable one to differentiate between the material culture of Israelites and that of other ethnic groups in the hill country during the period under discussion'.76 The archaeological data are ambiguous and allow for different interpretations so that the hope that it would 'serve as a conclusive source for defining the early Israelite material culture has proven somewhat exaggerated, as the ethnic, historical and cultural developments during Iron Age I were extremely complex'. However, he then goes on to claim that Giloh and other sites reflect the formation of a material culture different from the Late Bronze Age allowing it to be related to the emergence of Israel. The determining factor is again the Israelite monarchy.77 One further illustrative example of the tyranny of a historical paradigm over the data will suffice. Herzog illustrates the problems of ethnic identification in 71

Finkelstein (1994), 169. Finkelstein and Na'aman (1994), 17. 7:1 Finkelstein (1994), 178; see also (1995W. 74 Thompson (1992a), 311, rightly asked 'if the distinction between Canaanite and Israelite* cannot be made when we speak of the variant cultural tradititions of Iron I, have we really sufficient grounds for seeing this period as uniquely the period of emergent Israel?' 75 Finkelstein and Na'aman (1994). 76 Mazar (1994), 91. 77 Mazar (1994), 91; (1992), 295-6. 72

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discussing data from the Beersheba valley. He is particularly aware of the flexibility and adaptability of the notion of ethnicity as opposed to a determined and permanent list of traits, such as common language, territorial continuity, and shared biological ties of origin concluding that it is impossible 'to speculate on their exact ethnic identity'.78 However, he then goes on to add that 'if we choose to identify the groups who settled in the Iron Age I in the Beer-Sheba valley not on the basis of their material culture but according to later developments in the region, they may be considered Israelites'.79 The ethnicity of the settlements is defined in reference to the Israelite monarchy even though it is recognized that there is nothing inherent in the data themselves which allows for such an interpretation. The most vehement defence of this period as foundational for Israelite history has been mounted by Dever in a long series of articles which address the question of the ethnic identity.80 Dever insists that these highland sites represent a new and distinctive entity which can be identified as Israel or, at the very least, Troto-Israel' in contrast to 'Philistine', 'Canaanite' or 'Egyptian' sites.81 His initial argument is that the series of traits which characterize highland settlement in the Late Bronze-Iron Age transition illustrate that they represent a new and distinctive group: 1) small, rural villages in the agricultural hinterland linked together in small-scale, self-contained economic networks; 2) no temples, palaces, or monumental architecture; 3) stereotyped, courtyard farmhouses clustered together in close knit kin-based, unstratified society; 4} a simple technology and subsistence system,82 Yet none of the items listed are sufficient in themselves to determine the question of ethnicity since they all relate to the socio-economic and environmental conditions facing the inhabitants.83 Dever, although well aware of the manifold problems in discussing ethnicity in antiquity, is insistent that a label must be attached to the sites, 'if only for our own conscience in the classification of cultures and cultural change'. He rejects broad terms such as 'hill country settlers' or 'Iron I people' insisting on 'properly archaeological and socio-anthropological terminology'.84 However, his use of the term 'Proto-Israelite' can hardly be said to fulfil this requirement and, more importantly, illustrates the inherent weaknesses in the analysis since he has to appeal to biblical and extra-biblical sources in order to decide which label to apply despite his n

Herzog (1994), 147 and 148, " Herzog (1994), 148. 80 Dever (1992); (1993); (1995a); (1995b). 81 Bunimovitz (1990) illustrates how difficult it is to identify Philistine material culture and some of the circular reasoning which has been used. See also Singer (1994), 300, on the problems in trying to define the nature of Philistine culture. However, Bunimovitz and Yasur-Landau (1996) have recently argued for the possibility of ethnic identification through pottery by trying to identify cognitive and ideological elements encapsulated in pottery M assemblages. Dever (1996), 16. 83 See Thompson (1997) and Fmkelstein (1995); (1996); (1997) for a critique of Dever's M arguments. Dever (1992), 72. 7

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insistence that the archaeological data themselves should determine this,83 His only justification for equating this new and distinctive group with the Israel mentioned in the Merneptah stele is the 'simple logic' that if this is not Merneptah's Israel, then the question of their identity and location remains unresolved.86 However, his most important argument is an appeal to the material continuity from the twelfth to the sixth centuries BCE which shows a 'national Israelite material culture' deriving from the monarchic period.87 It is evident that the archaeological data are insufficient in themselves to determine the question of ethnic identity and resolve the search for ancient Israel in the Late Bronze-Iron Age transition. Their identification with Troto-Israel' is based on disputed readings and relationships with the Merneptah stele and the biblical traditions about the Israelite monarchy. As in other important analyses of survey and excavation data, the foundational nature of this period for Israelite history is particularly dependent on the construction and interpretation of the Israelite monarchy in the Iron Age. However, one of the most intriguing recent features of the discussion has been the exploration of the potential for 'foodways' to indicate ethnic identity by exploring diet on the basis of animal bone assemblages from various sites. Finkelstein88 argues that in the Bronze Age pig husbandry was present in the lowlands and highlands with greater numbers in the Shephelah and southern coastal plain (Tel Miqne, Tel Batash, and Ashkelon) indicating a taboo on pigs in the hill country in the Iron I. This he believes offers the most important avenue for exploring ethnic boundaries in the period. However, such analyses are in their infancy and there is a complex range of factors which need to be considered in determining the reasons behind the presence or absence of particular animals.89 Hesse's study of the variety of factors which affect pig husbandry provides an important basis for discussion,90 while Hesse and Wapnish have sounded an important warning against the rush to conclude that the absence of pig bones can at last resolve the search for ancient Israel: 'If the absence of pig bones in an Iron Age archaeological site is taken as diagnostic for the presence of ethnic Israelites, there are a lot more Israelites in the ancient world 85

Dever (1995a), 204, For problems In interpreting the Merneptah stele in relation to the highland settlements see Whitelam (1994); Na'aman (1994), 247-9; Edelman (1996), 358; Finkelstein (1997), 222; and Thompson (1997), 173-4. 87 Dever (1995b), 72. m (1996), 206. 89 Baruch Rosen (1994), 342, in a detailed study on the subsistence economy of Iron Age I, notes that the Iron Age I settlers neglected the horse (which was already present in the region), and made little or no use of the camel, the pig and the chicken: their utilization of animal resources was characterized by extreme conservatism. It is difficult to decide if this is an economic, social or cultural avoidance. See also Edelman (1996), 47-9 for some of the problems in the interpretation of the absence of pig bones at many Iron I sites. One of the major problems, of course, is the vexed question of the dating of the biblical dietary laws (see Hesse and Wapnish (1997); Edelman (1996)). " *° (1990). 86

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than we ever expected/91 They produce a detailed analysis of 'the uncritical interpretation' of archaeologists and biblical specialists in dealing with this issue. There are numerous factors which need to be considered, not least socio-environmental conditions, before firm conclusions can be drawn. Furthermore, such analyses are hindered by the lack of published data, particularly from sites in Jordan, or problems in the collection and publication of data from earlier excavations. The discussion raises important questions about the economy of Iron Age sites which have not been explored in the past. But the danger at present is that hasty conclusions about the absence of pig bones at a site repeat the same mistakes which accompanied the discovery of particular features of the material culture— collared-rim ware and pillared houses—and the conclusion that these were ethnic markers, and in particular Israelite innovations. Hesse and Wapnish point to a host of issues that need to be addressed before confident predictions that the presence or absence of pig bones can be used to determine ethnic identity in this period will be borne out.92 The increasing volume of archaeological data from the region has helped to undermine the traditional understanding of the Late BronzeIron Age transition as one of the foundational periods of Israelite history. The search for ancient Israel in this period has foundered on the problem of material continuity with the Late Bronze Age and the relevance of the biblical traditions for constructing this period. The result is that it is possible to say very little about the nature, location, or identity of ancient Israel. The volumes which have made such a conclusion possible provide very little in terms of positive historical reconstruction: the vast amount of space is devoted to debates on the inadequacies of the text, the relevance of anthropological parallels, and the problems and possibilities in the interpretation of the archaeological data. It is the power of the dominant discourse of biblical studies, its search for ancient Israel, which continues to determine the interpretation of much archaeological evidence. The inventory of the silences, which archaeology has pursued, has brought forth invaluable information on the demography, settlement patterns, and economy of this period. Yet at the same time the failure to discover ancient Israel in any significant sense has undermined its foundational position in the study of the history of ancient Israel as traditionally conceived. This is not to deny the existence of ancient Israel in the region or that, presumably, it formed some part of the transformation and realignment of Late Bronze-Early Iron Age society in ancient Palestine. Yet, it is possible to say very little more than this on the basis of current evidence. Attempts to retain this as a foundational period for Israelite history are dependent even more on assumptions about the nature of the Israelite monarchy as the defining moment in the history of the region. 91 n

Hesse and Wapnish (1997), 238. Hesse and Wapnish (1997); see also Edelman (1996).

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The Israelite monarchy The break up of the old paradigm: shaking the foundations

The centrality of the monarchic period for the study of Israelite history is illustrated in Lemaire's description of the 'United Monarchy' as 'the moment of Israel's glory on the international scene—a moment to be remembered and recalled for millennia'.93 As already noted, more recent revisionist treatments of Israel's 'emergence' in the Late Bronze-Iron Age transition also appeal to the monarchy as the anchor and defining moment of this history.94 Similarly, in the work of Dever, the Israelite monarchy becomes the defining moment which allows the identification of 'Israelite' or 'Proto-Israelite' settlement in earlier periods.95 It has been the rock on which traditional conceptions of the study of Israelite history have been constructed. However, these seemingly secure foundations have been increasingly eroded to such an extent that it is doubtful if it can retain its centrality as the defining moment in the history of the region. The power of the old discourse is illustrated at its most forceful in the way in which the seemingly irreconcilable differences between the followers of Alt and Albright on earlier periods disappeared in their constructions of the Israelite monarchy. The power of the discourse also needs to be understood in the context of the development of Western biblical scholarship and the central role of the model of the nation state.96 Thus, the assumption was that history begins with texts and that the monarchy was the locus for the development of biblical historiography. In this context, archaeological evidence, as it became available, was used to close the gaps within the biblical framework. In particular, the description of Solomon's building programme in 1 Kings 9 provided the controlling influence in the dating and interpretation of monumental architecture at Hazor, JVlegiddo, and Gezer, The existence of 'Solomonic' gates at these sites was used to confirm the biblical picture of Solomon's power and magnificence. The discovery of Iron Age fortresses, particularly in the Negev,97 added further weight to the conviction of centralization under the burgeoning state. Similarly, destruction layers at various sites were interpreted as confirmation of an Egyptian campaign under Shishak described in 1 Kgs. 14: 25-26 and thereby dated to the end of the tenth century BCE. Knoppers' detailed review of the Davidic-Solomonic period illustrates just how dramatically the earlier consensus has collapsed in the face of increased questioning: 'Virtually all modern historians wrote histories of ancient Israel that included, if not commenced with, the monarchy of « Lemaire (1988), 85. 95 Dever(1996). *' Mazar (1982); Cohen (1980).

*' Finkelstein (1994), 178; (1995b), 362. Sasson (1981); Whitelam (1996).

96

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David and Solomon. This is no longer the case.'98 He concludes that 'one dominant discourse about the tenth century has been replaced by a variety of competing discourses. The only present certainty is that the age of consensus is past'.99 The key elements in the earlier consensus on the Davidic and later monarchic periods are no longer viewed by many scholars with the same confidence. The rereading of the biblical traditions, particularly under the influence of the literary movement1*1 has resulted in claims that it is not possible to pursue the historical David101 and helped to open up new perspectives on the archaeological data. The idea of a major state, let alone an empire, centred on Jerusalem in the tenth century BCE has been increasingly disputed in recent years as each element of this once interlocking network has been re-examined. A few individuals, such as Garbini, Thompson, Lemche, Davies, Wightman, and others, have long held that the picture that has been presented hi our histories does not stand on solid ground and that the interpretation of archaeological results has been influenced by presuppositions drawn from the biblical traditions. They have been joined more recently by a growing number of scholars, biblical specialists and archaeologists. The dating and interpretation of the so-called 'Solomonic' gates at Megiddo, Hazor, and Gezer has become perhaps the most spectacular area of disagreement between archaeologists over the identification and understanding of tenth-century remains.102 The search for the tenth century is now one of the most critical areas of debate among archaeologists. The Negev sites, previously thought to represent part of a network of royal fortifications, have been reinterpreted by Fmkelstein and Perevolotsky as resulting from the 'sedentarization' of nomads during a period of economic prosperity.103 The interpretation of Shishak's campaign, central to the tenth-century dating of destruction layers, has also been challenged by Thompson,104 Davies,105 and Gelinas.106 The extent of the switch is illustrated by Barkay's recent survey of the archaeology of Iron II in which he concludes that 'the precise dating of the settlement strata and find assemblages of the tenth and ninth centuries is fraught with difficulties',107 noting that it has not been proven that any sites were destroyed by * Knoppers (1997), 19, Knoppers's comprehensive review of the crucial debates means w that many of the points do not need to be repeated here. Ibid., 44, 101:1 Gunn (1978); (1980); Alter (1982), m Brueggemann(1985),13. 102 See Ussishkin (1980) and Mazar (1990), 382, 399-400 n. 15, and Knoppers (1997), 27-9. Knoppers concludes that 'hence, the early Iron II date for all relevant levels of fortifications at Gezer, Hazor, and Megiddo can no longer be assumed to be secure'. 103 FinkeLstein and Perevolotsky (1980), 104 (1992), 306-7. IBIS (1992X42-73. 10* (1995), 230-33. Knoppers (1997), 33, believes that the Shishak material remains crucial for the construction of the history of this period, although it is interpreted completely differently by opposing sides. 107 Barkay (1992), 306.

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Shishak in 925 BCE and that 'the attribution of destruction levels to the end of the tenth century at many sites is mere conjecture'.108 In highlighting the differences in the construction of the gates at Hazor, Megiddo, Gezer, inconsistencies in the size, construction, and the type of wall to which they are bonded, he denies that they were 'built according to a single blueprint designed by a central authority'. He is forced to conclude that the 'glorified picture' emerging from the biblical traditions does not correspond to 'the reality reflected in the archaeological findings'.109 A recent thorough review of the main planks in the argument by Finkelstein represents a significant departure in the debate.110 His redating of Philistine pottery,111 removes many of the most important structures, such as the gate complexes at Megiddo, Hazor, and Gezer, from the time of David and Solomon.112 What is significant about his analysis, however, is that he illustrates the circular reasoning, based on assumptions drawn from the biblical texts, which removes any firm archaeological anchors in this period. This means that what has conventionally been represented as the pinnacle of political evolution in the region, the nationstate of David, virtually disappears. The biblically-based accounts appear as little more than a mirage, suffering a similar fate to that of Moth's amphictyonic hypothesis which had seemed so assured, but which collapsed, so suddenly. Tt is strange, however, that Finkelstein claims that his analysis, which removes crucial structures from the tenth century has 'nothing to do with the historicity of the United Monarchy'.113 He claims that the kingdoms of David and Solomon could have been chiefdoms or early states in the process of territorial expansion, lacking monumental architecture or a developed bureaucracy. Yet this is a significant departure from the consensus position which challenges the picture drawn from the biblical traditions and raises serious questions about the historicity of the so-called 'United Monarchy'.114 It is illustrative of the continuing fight for an alternative understanding of history, focusing on long-term trends in a wider regional history and the ways in which ancient Palestinian society responded to the complex factors which it faced. The search for a tenth-century state which dominated the region, the 'United Monarchy', has failed to deliver the object of its search in the same way that the search for ancient Israel in the Late Bronze-Iron Age transition has remained unfulfilled. m

lln Barkay (1992), 307. '«" Ibid. (1996a). '" Finkelstein (1995c). Mazar (1997) has challenged Finkelstein's analysis, although he admits that there are few, 'if any', chronological anchors for this period. 113 Finkelstein (1996a), 185. 114 Mazar (1997), 163-5, disputes Finkelstein's claim and suggests that his view has profound implications for the historicity of the 'United Monarchy'. He states that Finkelstein's analysis will 'encourage historians who tend to the minimalistic or even the nihilistic approach in evaluating this period' (1997), 164. 112

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In defence of tradition

Yet once again, the challenge to the consensus on the monarchy has brought forward equally trenchant attempts to defend the status quo, or, as noted above, at least some modified form of it, thereby reflecting the upheavals which have engulfed the study of the 'emergence of Israel' from the mid- to late-1980s.115 In particular, Holladay's analysis of the period of the Judaean and Israelite monarchies attempts to build on the older consensus, with the notable exception that he explicitly eschews appeal to the biblical traditions in analysing the archaeological data.116 He raises important questions about how to account for the similarities between the material culture at various sites, such as Hazor, Megiddo, Lachish, and Gezer, the construction of fortifications and public buildings, and their importance for trade, arguing that developments at strategic sites point to centralization and co-ordination. He presents the case for the existence of a territorial state in the tenth century echoing a similar view to that espoused by Dever: 'For ancient Israel, the archaeological evidence for the rise of statehood is clearest in the trends towards urbanization, centralization, and ethnic consciousness, as reflected in material culture.'117 However, despite the proviso, it is the biblical representation of the past which provides Holladay's interpretative framework in which the terms 'David' and 'Solomon' are used to periodize the discussion 'in view of the familiarity of the sources, the numerous, quite exceptional, synchronisms with externally documented foreign rulers, and the relative certainty of the dynastic succession(s)'. Furthermore, he assumes that the settlement shift which took place in the Late Bronze-Iron Age transition is to be associated with 'Israel'.118 Thus, he attributes the change to fortified sites at Hazor, Megiddo, and Gezer to 'early Israelites' on the grounds that it is 'abundantly clear from the material culture complex, which, however much it differs from the early restricted categories of the central highlands and the Galilee . . ., clearly forms a continuum with the later material culture complex of both Israelite and Judaean sites, including the later highland sites of the ninth and eighth centuries'.119 Holladay makes the same assumption as many other recent scholars that the history of the region is determined by an understanding of the later Israelite monarchy which, despite the caveat, is dependent upon an understanding of the biblical traditions. Furthermore, he takes the campaign of Shishak as the archaeological benchmark for understanding destruction levels at many sites throughout the region.120 "5 See Whitelam (1994); (1996). Knoppers's (1997), 33-44, reassessment of the revisionist challenge is an attempt to salvage the united monarchy, albeit in a reduced form, "* Holladay (1995), 368. "7 (1995c), 418. 118 m Holladay (1995), 370. Ibid., 372. !3 " However, he notes (1995), 394, n. 9, that Shishak's poorly preserved campaign list mentions only Megiddo by name.

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It is the concerns and categories of the Hebrew Bible which determine the study of the history of the region and allow the period to retain its foundational position for Israelite history.121 This has become most evident in the combative exchanges which have accompanied the discovery of fragments of the Tel Dan stele polarizing the debate even further.122 Halpern,123 for instance, claims that the Tel Dan inscription has caused extraordinary contortions among revisionist scholars who question the Hebrew Bible's history of the early Israelite monarchy, going so far as to assert that it is no longer necessary to debate the existence of 'a David' since the stele confirms that 'the house of David' was the dynastic name of the Judaean monarchy in the ninth century.124 Similarly, Knoppers makes the surprising claim that although the inscription cannot prove the existence of the united monarchy or Solomon, 'it does point to David as a historical figure'.123 Yet such conclusions go way beyond the evidence. The stele confirms the existence of a monarchy in the ninth or eighth centuries which understands its founder to be David. However, this cannot be used to confirm the historicity of David, and particularly not the biblical David as presented in Samuel. It is well known that traditions which appear or claim to be old are often quite recent and in many cases 'invented'.126 It was common in the medieval West, for instance, for royal families or other nobles to trace their origins back to mythical ancestors and legendary founding heroes thereby legitimizing royal power by attachment to imaginary genealogies.127 The Tel Dan stele, despite its importance as a written source, cannot bear many of the interpretations placed upon it: it does not confirm the existence of the 'biblical David', nor the existence of a significant state in the tenth century which controlled much of the region. In this respect it is very similar to the Merneptah stele which offers important but tantalizing information on the existence of Israel in the Late Bronze-early Iron Age: it does not, however, confirm the biblical Israel of the books of Joshua and Judges, Such claims are further examples of the construction of a history of the gaps in which extra-biblical evidence is determined by the biblical framework and. used to plug the lacunae in that framework. A new point of consensus, among minimalists and maximalists, does however appear to be emerging in which the eighth century is becoming the pinnacle of state development and, for some scholars, beginning to represent a new starting point for Israelite history. The eighth century is seen to be the focal point of a number of convergences of data from excavation and survey, increasing numbers of inscriptions, and readings 121

See also Barkay (1992), 302. See Knoppers (1997), 36-43 for a discussion and bibliography. In particular, Cryer (forthcoming) gathers together a series of studies which have addressed some of the central issues in the interpretation of this important find. 123 m m (1995), 27. Halpern (1997), 314. (1997), 39. 126 127 Hobsbawm and Ranger (1983). Le Goff (1992), 134-42. 122

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of the biblical traditions.128 Whybray signals just how far opinion has moved in recent years with his view that it is difficult to reconstruct the early monarchic period, including David and Solomon, since the biblical traditions contain legendary or heroic material. However, he claims that the accounts of the divided monarchy, from 1 Kings 12 onwards, signal a change in style and content which reveal an 'organized systematic history of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah'.129 Yet this is the very same kind of argument that underpinned the earlier consensus on the Davidic period: the assumption that the monarchy is the locus for historiography and history. Furthermore, the shift towards the later monarchic period, particularly the eighth century, has not been subjected to the same kind of critical scrutiny which has been imposed on earlier periods. The divided monarchy is rapidly assuming the crucial defining role for Israelite and Palestinian history which had earlier been accorded the 'United Monarchy' of David and Solomon. The study of Iron Age Palestine, particularly Iron II, needs to be viewed in long-term perspective in order to overcome the frequent assumption that the Israelite monarchy represents a unique, self-contained, episode in the settlement and political history of the region. The continuation of this process of debate and retrenchment only serves to continue the history of the gaps and delay setting the study of the history of the region on firmer foundations. The reason for this dogged rearguard action in defending an outmoded concept of Israelite history and unwillingness to revise the conception of the history of the region, including the history of Israel and Judah, is explicable in terms of the social location of biblical scholarship. Text in context The study of the social and political setting of biblical scholarship and archaeology and the ways in which it has influenced the search for ancient Israel or the construction of a 'United Monarchy' is becoming increasingly influential and important. The intellectual and political milieu in which Western scholars understood, and appropriated the ancient past, the ways in which knowledge was constructed and represented has become of increasing scholarly interest in recent years.130 Sasson illustrated many years ago that because biblical scholarship is pursued, internationally, the dominant models in reconstructing Israelite history often differ markedly:131 he traced the different models and political settings which influenced German and American scholarship throughout this century. The rise of the nation state, national consciousness, state archives, and specialists 128

Thompson (1992); Jamieson-Drake (1991); Niemann (1993); Barkay (1995), 349; Finkelstein (1996a>. 129 Whybray (1996), 72. m Kucklick(1996). 131 (1981), 8.

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were of central concern in German and Western scholarship as it searched for its own roots in the past, including the Israelite past.132 Silberman133 has produced a series of important studies which illustrate how historical research on ancient Israel has been influenced by 'the modern western attitude to the Bible, great power competition, and the development of modern nationalism in the Middle East'.134 The reason for the dramatic shifts in understandings of the foundational periods of Israelite history is intimately linked to radical changes in understanding key concepts— nation, nation-state, race, progress—which informed the models of historical scholarship. Silberman demonstrates how various theories which underlie the work of Petrie, Schumacher and Gellin, and Macalister influenced their archaeological work and conclusions: 'The archaeological interpretations of these scholars in the era of high imperialism can still be clearly seen as metaphorical validations of the contemporary European penetration of the Middle East.'135 Whitelam traces how similar ideas informed biblical scholars and archaeologists in their constructions of the ancient Israelite past in dialogue with their own present.136 As historical perspectives have changed, so key ideas and concepts have become outdated and lost their explanatory power. It is not coincidental that the focal point of discussions on the foundational periods of Israelite history has switched, from the search for the nation-state to the question of ethnicity and social identity, particularly in the USA and Israel in the context of multi-cultural societies. The combative debates and polarization of biblical scholarship only serve to illustrate that history writing 'participates . . . in the political management of reality'. Thus by the very act of writing, historians inevitably express some ideological commitment; for they have to stand somewhere in relation to their material, and that place (as well as that material) has been chosen by themselves'.137 The characterization of postmodernity by Keith and Pile is an apt description of the current situation in the study of Israelite history: 'No one is quite sure of the ground, on which they stand, which direction they are facing, or where they are going.'138 The history of recent scholarship tends to suggest that attempts to defend the foundational nature of Israel's 'emergence' or 'United Monarchy' will suffer the same fate as attempts to retain the Patriarchs and Exodus for history. As Thompson notes: There is no putting the old paradigm back together again, no matter how comfortable we may have been with it.'139 The convergence of various social, political, and intellectual movements in the 1990s and their effects upon contemporary biblical scholarship have led to a situation in which competing claims and uncertainty are the dominant characteristics. Yet it is also characterized by 1:K 134 136 138

See Whitelam (1996). Silberman (1995). Whitelam (1996). (1993), 3.

»3 (1982); (1989); (1991); (1995); (1997). Ibid., 15. 137 Southgate (1996), 75. 13¥ (1995), 697.

135

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vitality and opportunity as older models and paradigms are overturned allowing for new possibilities and prospects in the study of ancient Israel within the history of ancient Palestine,

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SILBERMAN, N. A. and SMALL, D. B. (1997) (eds.). The Archaeology of Israel, Constructing the Past, Interpreting the Present (JSOTS 237; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press). SINGER, I. (1994), 'Egyptians, Canaanites, and Philistines in the Period of the Emergence of Israel', in Finkelstein and Na'aman (1994) (eds,), 282-338, SOGGIN, J. A. (1977), "The Davidic-Solomonic Kingdom', in Israelite and Judaean History, ed. J. H. Hayes and J. M. Miller (London: SCM Press). — (1984), A History of Israel: from the beginnings to the 'Bar Kochln Revolt, AD 135 (London: SCM Press). SOUTHGATB, B, (1996), History: What and Why?: Ancient, Modern, and Postmodern Perspectives (London: RouHedge). THOMPSON, T. L. (1974), The Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives: The Quest for the Historical Abraham (Berlin: de Gruyter). —— (1992a), The Early History of the Israelite People: From the Written and Arclweological Sources (Leiden: E. J. Brill). — (1992b), 'Palestinian Pastoralism and Israel's Origins', SJOT6:1-13. (1995), 'A Neo-Albrightean School in History and Biblical Scholarship?', JBL 144: 683-98. — (1997), 'Defining History and Ethnicity in the South Levant', in Grabbe (1997) (ed.), 166-87. UssiSHKiN, D. (1980), 'Was the "Solomonic" Gate at Megiddo built by King Solomon?', BASOR 239:1-18. VAN SETERS, J. (1975), Abraham in History and Tradition (New Haven: Yale University Press). VEYNE, P. (1971), Comment ecrit I'histoire. Esai d'epistemologie (Paris: Editions du Seuil). WBIPPERT, H. (1988), Palasfina in vorhellenistischer Zeit. Handbuch der Archaologie: Vorderasian IJ/Band I (Munich: C. H. Beck'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung). WHITELAM, K. W. (1986), 'Recreating the History of Israel', /SOT 35: 45-70. — (1994), 'The Identity of Early Israel: The Realignment and Transformation of Late Bronze-Iron Age Palestine', JSOT 63: 57-87. — (1996), The Invention of Ancient Israel: the Silencing of Palestinian History (London: Routledge). WHYBRAY, R. N. (1996), 'What Do We Know about Ancient Israel', ET101: 71-4. WIGHTMAN, G. J. (1990), The Myth of Solomon', BASOR 228:5-22. YAMAUCHI, E. (1994), 'The Current State of Old Testament Historiography', in Faith, Tradition and History, ed, A. R. Millard, J, K. Hoffmeier, and D. W. Baker (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns), 1-36.

15

The History of Israel: The Persian and Hellenistic Periods LESTER L. G R A B B E

THE 'post-exilic period' has often been a step-child to Old Testament studies. Scholars have frequently been occupied with this period because it was thought that a great deal of the Old Testament was edited after the return of the exiles, but by labelling its products 'late' a certain negative judgement on, or at best a slighting of, this period was implied. The recent revival of interest in early Judaism, however, has included a surge of positive attention to the Persian and Greek periods. The importance of understanding the history and society of the Jewish people in the Persian and Greek periods for a proper understanding of Old Testament literature and history is becoming more and more recognized. What is often not sufficiently appreciated is the extent to which the Judah of these periods is still terra incognita. It is not really until after 200 BCE that we begin to find a reasonably reliable sequence of events and even some detailed data. Our knowledge of the Persian and Ptolemaic periods still has enormous gaps, and a good deal of what is presented in standard histories represents more wishful thinking than carefully documented historical reconstruction. We have some religious literature from these periods—or allegedly from them—but primary historical sources are few and far between. A good deal of the study of this time in Judah's history has to be taken up with matters of sources and methodology. Simply citing unanalysed prooftexts to support one's theory is too easy to do and therefore too frequently done. This does not mean that genuine academic evaluations and disagreements do not make one scholar's reconstruction quite different from another's, but it is important to make explicit the basis on which one operates and, especially, the historical argument used in support of a particular interpretation. Although the subjective element cannot be eliminated, a limited objectivity' is not only possible but strongly desirable.

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The question of historical methodology has become a major issue of debate in recent years.1 Although much of this discussion has focused on the period of the monarchy and earlier, the considerations involved apply equally well to the Second Temple period. Part of the cause of this debate is no doubt the implications of postmodernism for historical study, but this cause should not be exaggerated;2 much of the dispute still involves classical issues of evaluating sources, determining their failings and general Tendenz, and asking critical questions. A new European Seminar in Historical Methodology has recently been formed to attempt to come to grips with these methodological issues and has already produced two volumes of papers.3 This debate has wide implications for both the First and Second Temple periods. What our sources for the Second Temple period give us is a series of vignettes or 'peepholes' into what was happening in the Palestinian region, but the complete picture of what was going on has to be inferred from fragmentary data. There are also major questions about the value of some of the traditional sources. What follows is naturally my own reconstruction, and others might give a rather different one from the same data. The one claim I do make is that I try to relate any conclusions to specific arguments or sources—that my reasons for specific conclusions or reconstructions are reasonably transparent. Persian period Sources We are fortunate to have a few contemporary literary sources from the Persian period itself. These are the Elephantine papyri, from a Jewish colony on the upper Nile.4 These mainly relate to the local colony and to Egypt, but there are also a few bits of data relating to the Palestinian area. The Samaritan papyri were found only in the 1960s and have not yet been published for the most part.* They seem to consist mainly of slave conveyance documents, with some other legal documents. The bullae which seal the documents also contain valuable information. On the archaeological side, we have two recent syntheses of the artifactual evidence6 and also studies of coins from Judah in the Persian period.7 A number of biblical books are, by common consent, from the Persian period, including Ezra and Nehemiah, Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi (probably), Isaiah 56-66, and possibly 1-2 Chronicles. The question of the 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Cf. Davies (1992). Cf. Barstad (1997). Grabbe (1997a); (1998a). Porten (1968); Cowley (1923); Porten and Yardeni (1986). Cross in Lapp and Lapp (1974), 17-24; Cross (1985); (1988). Stern (1982); Weippert (1988), 682-728. Meshorer (1982); Barag (1985); (1986-87); summarized in Grabbe (1992a), 70-72.

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dating of the biblical traditions has been strongly challenged in recent years, with some wanting to make little or no use of them for the period of the monarchy or even the early post-exilic period;8 on the other hand, this approach is not accepted by everyone, even among the so-called 'minimalists'.9 Many would also put the editing of various books in this period (e.g., some of the prophetic books), even if the traditions are older (e.g., Job). Ezra and Nehemiah appear to give a narrative which outlines the first part of the Persian period. The value of the book of Nehemiah is that it seems to have a genuine writing of Nehemiah (called, the 'Nehemiah memorial/memoir', abbreviated as NM) behind a number of chapters (Neh. 1-6, a bit of 7 and 1,2, and possibly 13). There is a strong consensus on this even if everyone does not agree to the limits of the NM,10 This makes portions of Nehemiah an important contemporary source, even though the views expressed are very biased.11 Ezra is more of a problem. Many accept a good portion of Ezra as having reliable information. Williamson has argued that the author of Ezra 1-6 had no information beyond, the sources cited there (the Cyrus decree, a list of temple vessels, a settlement list, the prophets Zechariah and Haggai, and some Persian documents).12 This means that the narrative of these chapters has been created by the author from the extant sources and has no independent value. My own studies indicate that there is very little in Ezra that can be considered trustworthy for historical purposes.13 Even the Persian documents have been worked over by Jewish scribes to a lesser or greater extent,14 making them questionable for the most part (Ezra 5: 6-17 seems the most trustworthy). Josephus is mostly derivative for the Persian period, drawing mainly on 1 Esdras and the Greek Esther. However, he has one tradition which, is independent and may be a reliable record of a significant event in Judah.to Reconstruction of events

In view of the problematic nature of the sources very little is certain about Persian period Judah. Archaeology gives us some broad indications of what was happening, but we can relate little of that to literary sources, which means that archaeology gives only a skeleton of the history at most. If the 'Nehemiah Memorial' is genuine, as is generally thought, then we 8

Cf. Davies (1992). Cf. the essays in Grabbe (1997a). For example, the inclusion of Nehemiah 13 is not accepted bv everyone, e.g. Ackroyd (1970), 28, 41; Steins (1995), 198-207. " dines (1990). 12 Williamson (1983). '•' Grabbe (1991a); (1994); (1998b). 14 Grabbe (1992W. 15 Ant. 11.7.1, 297-301; see Williamson (1977); Grabbe (1991W, 9

w

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have some insight into the events of a few years in the mid-fifth century BCE, albeit from a very partisan perspective. All in all, we can have some confidence in a few events; some Jews returned to the land., over a period of time; the temple was rebuilt, probably in Darius' reign, though exactly when is uncertain; the old area of Benjamin suffered some sort of destruction in the first half of the fifth century; Nehemiah repaired the wall and undertook some other reforms. Beyond that we find fewer certainties the further we go. Whether Cyrus issued a specific decree in respect of the Jews in Babylon is unlikely,16 but it is likely that Jews returned fairly early in Cyrus's reign. What the book of Ezra deliberately overlooks, because of its 'myth of the empty land', is the fact that a large Jewish population was already living in Juctah, descendants of those who were not taken captive by the Babylonians,17 A conflict between the returnees and those still living in the land was inevitable. If many of those left were subsistance farmers (cf. 2 Kgs, 25: 12: 'the poorest of the land'), they would have taken over any fertile vacant land, especially if it was better than what they had been working. After more than half a century, it would have been the children of the original groups who once more confronted each other over possession of the property. The descendants of those not taken captive were not likely to have easily given up what they had been holding for all of living memory. We may get a glimpse of the natural friction between different Jewish groups in the episodes in Ezra and Nehemiah about intermarriage and intercourse generally with the 'foreigners' and the 'peoples of the land'. The 'peoples of the land' are clearly identified as foreigners in the two books, but in later Jewish sources the term always means Jews, not outsiders. Not all those left in the land after the fall of Jerusalem were of the lower classes. The various groups mentioned in 2 Kgs. 25: 22-26 and Jeremiah 40-41 suggest that some members of the upper classes were also not taken captive. One of the families probably already prominent at the time and better known during the Ptolemaic period was that of the Tobiads.18 They had a family estate in the Transjordan area, and it seems to have been a member of this family who was labelled an opponent by Nehemiah (Neh. 2: 10, 19; 6: 17-19). Tobiah was not 'an Ammonite slave' as suggested by Nehemiah but an important Jewish person and probably a Persian official in the region (though his family home was in the old area of Ammon). Some of those who returned seemed ready to come to terms with the new situation and even married with the local women who were, after all, Jews in many or most cases. Similarly, Tobiah had close contacts with the local nobles and officials of Jerusalem, which is hardly surprising despite v

' Defended in Bickermann (1976); rejected in Grabbe (1992a), 34-5, Carroll (1992); Barstad (1996). 18 Mazar(1957), 17

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Nehemiah's hostility. Sanballat is a difficult character to assess. We know that he was governor of Samaria (though never so acknowledged by Nehemiah), and some have tried to connect him with the later Samaritan religious community on Gerizim. Whether the later Samaritan community had anything to do with the controversies of the Persian period is debatable, however.19 The man who reveals himself to us in the book of Nehemiah, especially in the 'Nehemiah Memorial', was a man of clear vision, strong views, and a decidedly abrasive manner. He appears to have alienated a lot of people unnecessarily. His secret night ride as soon as he arrived, in Jerusalem (Neh. 2: 11-16) would have conveyed a message that he did not trust the local people. Considering that he told them of the project directly afterwards, the night reconnaissance seems to have been unnecessary. Whether his hostility towards Tobiah was justified is debatable, but certainly many others in Jerusalem—who do not seem to have been particularly antagonistic to Nehemiah—thought that cutting ties with Tobiah was unnecessary; however, their attempts at reconciliation were met only with suspicion from Nehemiah (Neh. 6: 17-19). Perhaps the most difficult traditions to assess are those surrounding Ezra.20 On the surface Ezra looks similar to Nehemiah, but the closer one looks, the more blurred he becom.es. He com.es to Jerusalem, with priests, Levites, and temple vessels (Ezra 7-8)—but there were already plenty of priests and Levites in Jerusalem, and the temple vessels had come back under Sheshbazzar (Ezra 1: 7-11). Therefore, we have the odd situation in which Ezra seems to be coming to Jerusalem to restore the temple cult— but the cult and temple had been restored at least sixty years earlier! He also had. 'the Torah of Moses', 'the law of your God in your hand' (Ezra 7: 6, 10, 14, 25). The impression one has from Nehemiah 8 is that this law was a new one, previously unknown. Yet other passages contradict this. Already when the altar was restored, they sacrified according to 'the Torah of Moses' (Ezra 3: 2). When Ezra came he was to appoint judges to judge those who already knew the law, as well as to teach it to those who did not (Ezra 7: 25). The ignorance of the Feast of Tabernacles in Neh. 8: 14-17 seems strange in the light of Ezra 3: 4—5 in which the festival was celebrated 'as it is written'. So the new law allegedly brought by Ezra was hardly new, according to the information in Ezra itself. Ezra was also given enormous power and wealth, according to the text. He brought with him more than 25 metric tonnes of silver and gold, a real king's ransom, to the temple in Jerusalem (Ezra 8:26-27). Yet he could also call on another 100 talents of silver from the royal treasury at will, almost as if it were petty cash (7: 22). He also had the right to appoint judges in the entire satrapy of Ebir-nari (Trans-Euphrates). When he arrived in Jerusalem, he was called on to resolve the matter of mixed, marriages (he w 20 Grabbe (1993). Grabbe (1994); (1998b).

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is even called 'high priest' in 1 Esdras 9: 39), This suggests that Ezra was a man of great authority; indeed, he seems to have been satrap of Ebir-nari, governor of Judah, and high priest all rolled into one (some have even referred to him as 'governor' without discussion as if it were obvious). So we are rather surprised to find that Ezra is afraid to ask for an escort of troops when he takes this enormous treasury on its journey to Jerusalem (Ezra 8: 21-22). (Surely the king would have insisted on it, since a good part of the money was supposed to have come from him!) And when Ezra was told about the issue of mixed marriages, he who was supposed to appoint judges and magistrates did not issue orders like a satrap, governor, or high priest but instead only tore Ms clothes and hair and sat in the dust of the street (Ezra 9: 3-4). Others took the initiative to resolve the problem (10: 2-4). The harder we look at Ezra the more difficult he is to pin down. Much of the other information in the book of Ezra is in the same category of uncertainty.21 However one evaluates the traditions in Ezra and Nehemiah, there is very little information about the Jews for the last century of Persian rule. Although Josephus depended mainly on I Esdras and also a Nehemiah tradition of unknown origin (though probably not the book of Nehemiah in the Hebrew Bible), he had one independent tradition which may be credible.22 In Ant 1,1.7.1,297-301 he described, how the high priest Johanan quarrelled with his brother in the temple and killed him there. The governor Bagoas (Bagohi) imposed a tax on the lambs for sacrifice as punishment. Some date this to the time of Artaxerxes III (359-338 BCE), but I have argued that the Bagoas here is the Bagohi of the Elephantine papyi.23 Otherwise, the period after Nehemiah is largely unknown (depending on how one evaluates and dates the historical Ezra). Archaeology indicates two or three destructions in Palestine during Persian rule.24 One was about 480 BCE and affected mainly the areas of Benjamin and southern Samaria. About a century later a second period of destruction is attested for parts of the Shephelah and the Negev. A third was toward the end of Persian rule. This last archaeological destruction is sometimes associated with a supposed rebellion of Tennes about 448 BCE.25 However, the evidence for this rebellion is problematic, making it rather uncertain that there was even such a rebellion.26 This final destruction could actually be dated to the time of Alexander and the Diadochi. A number of recent publications have attempted to reconstruct aspects of Persian-period Judaean history and society. Hoglund argues that the missions of Ezra and Nehemiah are explicable in the light of the Egyptian revolts of 460-456 BCE, investigating the context in detail, especially the archaeological evidence for Persian fortifications constructed all over the 21 23 25

Grabbe(1991a);(1998b). Grabbe (1991b). Barag (1966).

2

'- Williamson (1977). Stern (1982), 253-5. 2S Grainger (1991), 24-31; Grabbe (1992a), 99-100. 24

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eastern Mediterranean seaboard at this time. From this and other data it is inferred that the Persians were concerned about threats from a Greekled coalition, Nehemiah's mission was to fortify Jerusalem, while Ezra's was to clarify membership of the community by legal reform. Thus, the missions were to carry out Persian interests and policy, though the biblical writers interpreted them from their own theological perspective, Hoglund's explanation is quite convincing for Nehemiah's mission, but the Ezra tradition is more problematic (for reasons already noted). The article of Schaper argues that the Jerusalem temple was an important economic institution and instrument of Persian rule. It collected not only revenues for its own operations but also various taxes on behalf of the Persians. Certain officials of the temple were responsible for the king's affairs. A recent study has appealed to a sociological model to explain what Nehemiah was doing/7 using the 'revitalization' model of A. F. C, Wallace, This model fits the final form of Nehemiah fairly well; however, this could be an editorial fit since the actual progress of Nehemiah's activities seems to have been less neat. Nevertheless, Wallace's model works because it describes the general contents of most reform movements. Where the thesis is weakest lies in the acceptance of the reforms (Wallace's 'cultural transformation phase'). The authors of the article seem to have more faith in general support for all Nehemiah's reforms28 than is justified by the text.29 In another use of sociology, Berquist tries to make a connection between the literature and the model of a colonial context. Weinberg's concept of a Burger-Tempel-Gemeindewas expounded several decades ago, but his essays have only recently been translated into English.30 For a critique of his position, see especially Blenkinsopp.31 Willi raises a number of issues. Among them is emphasis on the fact that Judah must be seen as a province within the Persian empire and not simply a cultic community. The temple is a symbol of the new era envisaged by Ezra-Nehemiah (which, in his opinion, stress a new beginning rather than continuity with pre-exilic Israel); it is the holy place for all Israel—for all the world—not just a narrow cultic community, and its building is an imperial matter;32 the Persian kings are the legitimate successors of the Davidic kings.33 Willi makes a number of important points even if at times it seems that he confuses historical with literary matters. An indication of a governor at the end of the Persian period is the coin with the name Tlezekiah the governor' (hphh yhzqyh3*). Some have identified this individual with a high priest Ezekias who migrated to Egypt at 27 29 31 33 34

2S Tollefson and Williamson (1992). E.g. ibid. (1992), 60. x Cf. Grabbe (1998b). Weinberg (1992). (1991). s2 Willi 0995), 55-6,64, 66-7, 72-6. Ibid., 74-5,175. Meshorer (1982), 1.33; Mildenberg in Weippert (1988), 724-5.

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the beginning of the Ptolemaic period according to Josephus,35 but Rappaport has argued against the thesis.36 A coin recently found mentions a 'Johanan the priest'.37 If the dating of this is mid-fourth century, as argued by Barag, it would be a different person from the high priest Johanan known from the Elephantine papyri, but there is much uncertainty. Although the Persians appointed a governor of Judah part or possibly even all the time during the empire, the high priest seems to have had a prominent place most of the time as well. Joshua is mentioned alongside Zerubbabel in Ezra 3-6 and. Haggai and Zechariah. The Jews of Elephantine wrote to the high priest for moral support in having their destroyed temple rebuilt.38 There are also the coins with the names of 'Johanan the priest'. The later reports relating to the period of the Diadochi and the Ptolemaic and Seleucid periods all suggest that the high priest was the main leader of the nation and the intermediary between it and the ruling government. It is a reasonable extrapolation, in light of the few other data available, to consider the high priest also the main native leader of the nation during the Persian period. A number of the governors were Jewish (e.g., Sheshbazzar, Nehemiah, probably the Hezekiah known from coins), but we cannot be sure that all were. Religious developments

Certain religious developments probably belong to the Persian period. The whole question of the growth of the Hebrew Bible is very much, under discussion at the moment, though many would see the main editorial work during Persian rule. This does not mean that this was the first time Jews began to think about their traditions; portions of what became the Hebrew canon show evidence of having originated long before the Persian period. Nevertheless, much editorial activity for not only the Pentateuch but also the Deuteronomistic History and the prophetic books fits well into this period. The disruptions of the fall of Jerusalem and the deportations accompanying the immediately following period would not have been conducive to literary activity; assigning a lot of redaction to the 'exile' ignores the practical problems of doing it at this time. Those deported are not likely to have been carrying records and scrolls, while both the exiles and the population left behind, would have put their first concerns into surviving and making a living in the new situation. On the other hand, the destruction of Jerusalem would have alerted the priestly and scribal classes to the dangers that the traditions could be lost forever. Once the cult was restored and the temple rebuilt, this would have been 35

Ag. Ap, 1,22,187-9. * Rappaport (1981); see below under 'Greek Conquest' for further discussion. 37 Barag (1985); (1986-87). 38 Cowley (1.923), nos 30-31.

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a natural time for the priests (whose numbers were likely larger than necessary for full-time devotion to the cult) and others to begin to put the various traditions into some sort of order. Of course, books continued to be written and edited, for a long period of time, well into the Hellenistic period. For example, books that later entered the Hebrew canon but may also be Hellenistic include Qohelet (late Persian39 or Ptolemaic period); Ezra and Nehemiah (late Persian or early Greek period), Chronicles (late Persian or Greek period40); Esther, Ruth, and the Song of Songs (late Persian or early Greek period); and Daniel (chs. 1-6, pre-Maccabaean period; cits. 7-12, about 165 BCE). Isaiah 56-66 and a number of the Minor Prophets (Joel, Jonah, Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi) are usually assigned to the Persian period, though dating is often difficult. Other works of Jewish Hebrew or Aramaic literature from the Persian and Greek periods which entered other canons (albeit in Greek or other translations) were 1 Esdras, Ben Sira, Tobit, Jubilees, Judith, 1 Maccabees, 1 Enoch (except 37-71). The frequently made statement that the Jews ceased to write original books and turned to commentary41 is not borne out by what we know of the literature of this time. This conclusion has usually been based heavily on the case of Chronicles which has been seen as a reinterpretation of Samuel and Kings; however, one recent work has argued that both Kings and Chronicles are taken independently from another post-exilic narrative.42 Much recent work has been done on Chronicles, the most extensive being Japhet's large commentary.43 The dating of the book is still debated, though there is a tendency to favour the Greek period.44 Especially important for historical purposes is the view that 1 and 2 Chronicles reflect aspects of Judaean society in the Persian (or Greek) period, such as the temple cult.45 Albertz argues (contrary to some recent trends) that the cultic split with the Samaritan community forms the background to the book.46 He dates this split (and. the writing of the books) to the early Greek period. The recent commentary by Johnstone emphasizes its theological aims and is less concerned about the possible historical contents.47 The dating of Leviticus and. the priestly work in general has been the subject of much debate recently;48 however, Gerstenberger makes a valiant attempt to situate the text of Leviticus in the actual society of postexilic Judah.49 In this he goes counter to a number of recent works which have argued for a pre-exilic dating of much or all of Leviticus. Similarly, Albertz sees the context of P as the Persian period:50 the authors of P 3

4! " Scow (1996) 'm Steins (1995), 491-9. Eg. Willi (1995), 36. Auld (1994). * Japhet (1993). 44 Japhet (1993), 27-8; 'more probably' the fourth century; Steins (1995), 491-9: Maccabaean period. 45 Cf. Japhet (1997), 222-65. *' Albertz (1994), 544-56. *7 Johnstone (1997). 48 Cf. the survey in Grabbe (1997b) and the discussion in Nicholson (1998), 196-221. w 5I) Gerstenberger (1996). Albertz (1994), 480-93. 42

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created, 'in collaboration with the Persian government, a normative basic religious and legal basic document, backed up by the law', which made it easier for the minority Jewish communities to live in the multicultural and multireligious Persian empire.51 One particular development which probably emerged in identifiable form in the Persian period is that of apocalypticism. Exactly how to define apocalypticism (or apocalyptic, as it is also called) is a problem,52 but it is agreed that classic apocalyptic texts are Daniel 7-12, 2 Baruch, 4 Ezra, Revelation, and large portions of 1 Enoch. Some would label such Old. Testament books as Zechariah 1-8 as apocalyptic, but this is strongly opposed by others. Isaiah 24—27 ('the Isaiah apocalypse') is widely thought to be apocalyptic or at least close. The origin of apocalypticism has been long debated. There are definite affinities with prophetic texts but also with wisdom, in particular what is referred to as 'mantic wisdom';53 on the other hand, prophecy and mantic wisdom themselves share many elements,54 A good argument can be made that some apocalyptic texts could even be products of the priestly establishment.53 Some have seen the origin of apocalypticism in the decline of prophecy; however, it is not clear that prophecy 'declined' as such during this period. A number of individuals 'prophesied' during the Persian period (e.g., Haggai, Zechariah), and prophetic-type figures are attested over the next several centuries in Judaism.36 Part of the problem is using an artificial definition of prophecy.57 Apocalypticism is a scribal phenomenon (even if, as is sometimes argued, it is based on visionary experiences), but then so is much of the prophecy we know of from the Old Testament. I have argued that apocalypticism is a form of prophecy,58 but it obviously has its individual characteristics. Apocalyptic texts are already attested at least as early as the Ptolemaic period (e.g., 1 Enoch 1-36) and perhaps earlier, depending on one's definition. Greek conquest The details of Alexander's conquest are very well known in comparison with many other episodes of ancient history.59 The histories of Arrian are considered first-class sources by modern historians, and we also possess some other accounts with which to supplement them (though the other accounts are usually thought to be less trustworthy on the whole). The period of the Diadochi (the generals who carved up Alexander's empire during the 40 years following Alexander's death in 323) is also relatively 51

Ibid., 493. Cf. Collins (1979), 1-28, and the discussion in Grabbe (1989), 28-30, and n. 14, 53 54 Muller (1969); (1972). VanderKam (1986). 55 Grabbe (1989); (1995), 176-8; Cook (1995). *' Cf. Grabbe (1998c). 57 Grabbe (1995), 98-107. » Grabbe (1989). s " See especially Will (1979), 52

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well recorded in Diodorus of Sicily and other sources. Unfortunately, there is very little information on the Jews as such. Apart from some very brief references in Josephus, there is very little which can be associated with this half century with any confidence. Not much in the way of archaeology can be related specifically to this period.60 Hecataeus of Abdera probably wrote during this time and. is one of our most valuable sources. He is said to have written a work on the Egyptians during the reign of Ptolemy I, probably sometime around 300 BCE.61 His work was lost in antiquity, but Diodorus of Sicily gives a quotation from it which also mentions the Jews, and this work has been widely accepted as authentic.62 Although some alleged quotations from Hecataeus are also found in Josephus,63 these have been controversial, and the most recent study concludes that they are a Jewish forgery from around TOO BCE/** The authentic piece from Diodorus is coloured by Hecataeus' source (probably Jewish priests) and by his Greek perspective, but the insight into the Jewish community of this time is invaluable. The most important conclusion is that Judah was a theocracy, a priestly state in which the high priest was the head of state and. the priests were an important component in the government. Hecataeus asserts that the high priest dictated what was to be done and was meekly obeyed. This is perhaps an exaggeration, but it suggests considerable authority on the part of the high priest. Hecataeus also states that the priests act as judges (cf. Deut. 17: 8-13). Finally, he suggests that land was assigned to the priests as a source of income so they could devote themselves to their temple and other duties. This goes contrary to various Pentateuchal statements (Num. 18: 20; Deut. 14: 27-29), but it agrees with the implications of Neh. 13: 10 which suggests the Levites have their own fields. One of the alleged incidents most frequently cited is the legend of Alexander's visit to Jerusalem in which he bowed to the high priest and honoured the Jewish people because of a dream he had had.65 The main version is found in Josephus,66 though there are also some other versions of it in later Jewish sources.67 Although this is a rather interesting story, recent study has generally discounted it entirely.68 Alexander's activities are recorded in detail, and it is unlikely that the Alexander historians would have omitted such an event. There is a clear Jewish apologetic intent in the story as we have it, as well as an element of anti-Samaritan polemic. It was once thought that at least the statement about the building of the Samaritan temple about this time was essentially correct, but the most recent archaeological study would suggest caution in accepting even this version of events.69 60 62 64 66 68

Kuhnen (1990), 38. Diodorus of Sicily, 40.3.1-7. Bar-Kochva (1996), 249. Ant. 11.8.1-6,304-45. E.g. Cohen (1982-83).

61

Bar-Kochva (1996), 13-43. « Ag.Ap. 1.22,183-205. 65 Grabbe (1987), 242-3; (1992a), 181-3. 67 b Yoma 69a; Josippon 10. ''" Pummer (1989), 167-74.

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Josephus also gives two quotations which may relate to this period. One comes from Agatharchides of Cnidus and concerns the taking of Jerusalem by Ptolemy on the Sabbath,70 If this relates to Ptolemy I (which seems the most likely identification) it would have been during this period; in any case, the reason for the siege and capture of Jerusalem is not given. The other quotation, ascribed to Hecataeus of Abctera,71 is more interesting. It states that the high priest Ezekias (Hezekiah) came to Egypt under Ptolemy, bringing many Jews with him, and settled there.72 This same person has often been identified with 'Hezekiah the governor' (hphh yhzqyh) on a coin from the late Persian period.73 The dating is unusual but not impossible, and the high priest may well have also been the Persian governor of Judah at times. However, since this account of Ezekias is a part of Pseudo-Hecataeus,74 may well date from a rather later time, and seems to be a piece of Jewish propaganda about the origin of the Jews hi Egypt, the identification looks unlikely at this point Ptolemaic period Sources The history of the ancient Near East in the Ptolemaic period is perhaps not as well recorded as the time of Alexander and the Diadochi, since there are significant gaps here and there, but we have a considerable amount of information on the Ptolemaic period thanks to the finds of papyri in Egypt. Many of these documents do not tell us much about political history but make up for this in giving a great deal of data about economics and administration. The most valuable source for the Palestinian region is the Zenon papyri.75 As an agent of the Egyptian finance minister Zenon toured Palestine in the year 259 BCE; in the years following this trip he continued to correspond with certain of those he met on his tour. These letters and other contemporary documents give us a vital window on to Judah during this period. Another source is much more difficult to evaluate; this is the story of the Tobiads found in Josephus.76 Josephus's source seems to have been some sort of family chronicle, though there are definite novelistic elements in the narrative. The reason scholars tend to give it credence, at least in its general outline of events, is that it meshes well with independent data known from other sources.77 One contemporary source gives some insight into matters of economics, n

n Ant. 12.1.1,6; Ag. Ap. 1.22, 209-11. Falsely, according to Bar-Kochva (1996). Ag, Ap. 1.22,187-9. " Meshorer (1982), 1.33; Mildenberg in Weippert (1988), 724-5. 74 Bar-Kochva (1996). ™ See Durand (1997). 7t > Ant. 12.4.1-11,157-236. ^ Cf. Mazar (1957); Gera (1998), 36-58. 72

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legal status, and social practices. This is the decree of Ptolemy II found in the Rainer papyri preserved in Vienna.78 It shows the large number of taxes imposed by the Ptolemaic government, the extent to which people tried to evade taxes (those who reported evaders shared in the tax and penalties collected), how military settlers routinely took native wives, and the practice of kidnapping free persons and selling them into slavery. The Hellenistic period has had less attention from archaeologists until recently, with the historian having to track down a variety of scattered publications. However, the recent volume of Kuhnen79 brings together these studies into a synthesis of considerable utility; another work of particular help is that of Arav.80 Reconstruction of events

Under the Ptolemies Palestine seems to have been administered simply as if it were a part of Egypt. Previous empires had been interested in collecting taxes and other wealth, but the Ptolemies perfected it to a fine art. The infrastructure of direct taxation reached down to the lowest levels of society. The number of different taxes was astonishing (cf. Ptolemy II's decree in the Rainer papyri [see above]; 1 Mace. 11: 34-36). Census lists and registration of fixed property facilitated collection; also tax collection was often put out to tender to tax farmers as the most efficient method to maximize and guarantee income. It was in this context that the Tobiad family found an opportunity to increase its influence and position in the region. As noted above, the evidence of Hecataeus of Abdera is that the high priest was the leader of the nation and its chief representative to the Ptolemaic government. This is confirmed by Josephus.81 However, the Zenon papyri show a man by the name of Tobias in charge of a military colony (cleruchy) in Transjordan. What seems to be his ancestral home has been excavated at Araq el-Emir and the name Tobiah' found inscribed on stone in two places, though a number of issues are still disputed in the interpretation of the finds.82 This individual was already a prominent local nobleman, and we find from some of his preserved correspondence to the finance minister that he later sent gifts to the Ptolemaic king. According to the Tobiad, romance used by Josephus, a conflict developed between this Tobias's son (or possibly grandson) Joseph and the high priest Onias II. (One needs to be careful about setting up a dichotomy of Tobiads and Ortiads, as is often done, because the families were intermarried; indeed, Joseph was the nephew of Onias.) When Onias refused to pay a tribute of twenty talents, Joseph stepped in and did it himself on behalf of the 78 80 82

Cf. Grabbe (1992a), 185-7. (1989). See the essays in Lapp (1983).

7

" (1990). « Cf. Ant. 12.4.1,156-9.

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people (interestingly, he borrowed money from friends in Samaria). As a result lie gained an office as representative of the Jews to the Ptolemies, an office apparently taken from Onias,83 Joseph also managed to obtain the tax-farming rights for the whole of the region which he kept for more than twenty years. Eventually, however, Joseph was displaced by his youngest son Hyrcanus, causing a breach between his father and brothers on one side and Hyrcanus himself on the other. The manner in which Hyrcanus seized the family enterprise for himself alone would have caused an alienation from his father and brothers in any case, but there was more to it than that.84 It seems that Joseph and his other sons had come to see the handwriting on the wall for the Ptolemaic control of Palestine and became proSeleucid; Hyrcanus, on the other hand, remained loyal to the Ptolemies. It turned out that he had miscalculated, and after the transfer to Seleucid rule he retired to his home and lived by raiding. However, he kept connections with Jerusalem, having on deposit there a significant portion of 400 talents of silver and 200 of gold in the time of Seleucus IV (2 Mace. 3: 10-11). Problem of Hellenization

One of the most interesting phenomena, but also one of the hardest to come to grips with, is that of Hellenization.85 Despite the fact that this is a complex entity and not easily summarized in a sentence or two, much unnecessary nonsense has been written about it, partly because so many writers treat it only in relationship to the Jews and not in its complete context. Hellenization is in many ways analogous to the Anglicization of India or the spread of American popular culture to much of the world. When Alexander's armies marched across the Persian empire, beginning in 334 BCE, Greek culture was not new to Asia. Many cities under Persian rule in Anatolia were Greek, and Greek culture had long since made an inroad into other coastal areas such as Phoenicia. Greek mercenary armies had been fighting in the Near East for a long time, possibly centuries. As Alexander and his successors settled, veterans in newly founded poleis (cities set up on the Greek model), there was little desire on the part of the Greeks to share their privileges with the natives—there was no mission to Hellenize. However, many of the upper class and local aristocracy were useful in administration, and some saw that a Greek education would be useful to their heirs in gaining the best advantage with the Greek rulers. A man like Tobias of the Zenon papyri had a Greek secretary and may have spoken Greek. Certainly, the Tobiad romance depicts Joseph and 83 84 85

Depending on how one interprets Josephus' wording; see Tcherikover (1959), 132-4. Cf.Ant, 12.4,11,228-9, Grabbe(1992a), 147-70.

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Hyrcanus as being fully at home in the Ptolemaic court, including its language and culture. What began as a move on the part of native peoples to better themselves continued on for centuries to the point that 'Greek' became a matter of education and language rather than ethnic origin, but it was a gradual process, Greek institutions and cultural elements took their place alongside those of Egypt and Mesopotamia but did not displace them. Rather than driving out the native cultures, Greek simply became another element in the multifarious mixture already indigenous to the region. Many of the features that we think of as characteristic of the Hellenistic empires were not known in the Greek homeland but were simply continued from the Oriental empires which had preceded Alexander, not least the institution of the Hellenistic king and court. The Jews were not particularly different from other native peoples in their reaction to Hellenization. Certain overt cultural elements were probably rejected as conspicuous symbols of the conquerors, but most became so much a part of their world that they would not have been recognized as having a foreign origin. There is no evidence of rejection of general Greek culture; on the other hand, the lives of most Jews who were simple agrarian workers were not particularly changed by the coming of the Greeks. The lives of peasants all over the ancient Near East seem, to have gone on with little alteration from the days of Sumer to the Ottoman empire. The inhabitants of Judah would have noticed most the changes in the collection of taxes and the fact that Ptolemaic officials were present even in the individual villages to oversee such matters, though such officials were often local people. Greek was used for official communication, but local languages continued in widespread use, especially at the lower levels of administration (Aramaic was still the lingua franca for much of the ancient Near East). The ones most immediately affected by Greek institutions and culture were the upper classes. They were also the ones most likely to see the advantages of embracing some of these or, as time went on, even to regard them as desirable in their own right. Being able to communicate on some equality with the Greek administration could be useful, but a Greek education could supply more than that. Greek theatre and literature provided entertainment. The daily exercises in the gymnasia would have furnished a spectacle to divert those with time on their hands. Some individuals became literati with a considerable reputation, though most Jews who set their hand to compose literature in Greek seem not to have been known much outside Jewish circles (e.g., Ezekiel the tragedian). But there is no question that some Jews found Greek culture very seductive. However, ordinary Jews would also have come into contact with Greek to a lesser or greater extent as time went on. Not a few Jews followed military occupations, from the brief references we find in the literature, either

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as mercenaries or perhaps as part of certain official units. Josephus claims that Ptolemy I used Jewish soldiers,86 and various anecdotes put Jews in Hellenistic armies,87 Tobias's military settlement included Jews, though there were other ethnic groups as well.88 The papyri also show a number of Jewish military settlers in Ptolemaic Egypt.89 The result was a slow but steady acculturalization to the new civilization, the Hellenistic civilization, which was neither Hellenic nor Oriental but a dynamic synthesis of the two, forming a culture sui generis. Society and religious developments

Although we know little about the Jews specifically in the Ptolemaic century, the period seems to have been generally a peaceful one. One of the most significant religious events of this period was the translation of the Pentateuch into Greek. The story in the Letter of (pseudo-) Arisieas is scarcely credible (Ptolemy II is hardly likely to have been interested in adding Jewish sacred writings to Ms library), but the Jewish community of Egypt would, by the middle of the third century, have begun to feel the need for their religious law to be in Greek. The Septuagint gradually expanded to include the other Old Testament books over the next century or two and formed the Bible of Greek-speaking Jews and then early Christians. The importance of this act of translation into Greek cannot be exaggerated, even though it is often not appreciated. It has been proposed that the Hebrew Bible is a 'Hellenistic book'.90 Although certain sections of it were written in the Hellenistic period, as noted above, I find it hard to see the book as being primarily a product of the Hellenistic period. The collection was still growing, and a final defining of the canon and textual standardization does not seem to have taken place before the first or second centuries CE.91 Notwithstanding, the survey of the 'heroes of Israel' in Ben Sira 44-50 (not long after 200 BCE) and the prologue written by the grandson for his Greek translation (late second century BCE) indicate an accepted collection of books which would be the core of the later Hebrew canon.92 These suggest that the Pentateuch and Deuteronomistic History were complete and widely accepted in a form similar to that known from the Hebrew Bible today; also many of the prophetic books were viewed as authoritative, including the twelve Minor Prophets which were already considered a unit. There were also some other writings. Although these are not named for the most part, they would have included Job (Ben Sira 49: 9) and we can be fairly certain about the Psalms. Beyond that the contents of what Ben Sira's grandson calls the 'other writings' is a matter of speculation and may have included >* Ant. 12.1.1, 8. m CPJ 1.11-15,147-78. '-*2 Cf. Grabbe (forthcoming b).

«7 Ag. Ap, 1.22,192, 201-4. Lemche (1993).

w

m 9I

CPJ 1.118-21. Cf. Davies (1998).

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books which did not make the final Hebrew canon. But it seems to me that the view expressed by Ben Sira around 200 was not something completely new, which is why in the discussion above, I suggested the Persian period as the primary matrix for codifying and editing the early traditions. It may have been during the Ptolemaic period that one of the most remarkable writers of the Hebrew Bible lived. The person known as Qohelet stands out as unique among early Jewish writers in the questions he asks and the observations he makes which come closest to critical thought of any Semitic writings of late antiquity. He is generally dated to the Ptolemaic period. The case has recently been made to put him in the Persian period?3 Although Seow's arguments are not decisive, it is also difficult to make any better case for the Ptolemaic period. Qohelet's thought is certainly compatible with the Greek period, but there is little that could not be a development from ancient Near Eastern wisdom. In any case, we need, to recognize his own original contribution which is too often overlooked in favour of more 'theologically correct' parts of the Bible. Seleucid rule Sources

The main sources for Seleucid rule of Judah are the books of 1 and 2 Maccabees. The former, although preserved only in Greek translation, was probably originally written in, Hebrew. It was most likely completed during the reign of John Hyrcanus, perhaps around 125 BCE, but it has been argued that at least some of the battle descriptions are taken from eye-witness accounts.94 The latter is an epitome of the larger work of Jason of Cyrene (2 Mace. 2: 23); unfortunately, we know nothing further of Jason or his work. The book has usually been seen as less trustworthy than 1 Maccabees, partly because of clear theological intent and partly because it freely admits supernatural elements. However, some of the differences between the two are more apparent than real, and it is 2 Maccabees alone which gives the vital details about events leading up to the suppression of Judaism by Antiochus IV. Both books have their own biases and must be read critically. The only other real source is Josephus. Although he depended on 1 Maccabees as Ms main source in the Antiquities, he also had some other sources about the transfer to Seleudd rule. For example, he quotes a decree of Antiochus III which is widely accepted, as authentic. Thus Josephus's account is very important for the early part of Seleucid rule. In the War he had another independent source about the Maccabean revolt, probably 93 M

Seow(1996). Bar-Kochva (1.989), 158^62; opposed by Schwartz (1991), 37, n. 64.

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Nicolaus of Damascus?5 Josephus'account in the War is often dismissed in preference to those in 1 and 2 Maccabees, but when 1 Maccabees conies to an end, his version of Hasmonaean history is the only source we have. The book of Jesus ben Sira or Ecclesiasticus could probably be said to represent the Ptolemaic period as much as the Seleucid, since it was written not long after Palestine passed to Seleucid rule and probably toward the end of Ben Sira's life. Many attempts have been made to extract information about society and even events, as well as beliefs and teachings, from Ben Sira, His book is valuable for religious teaching, but many attempts to write history from his information have over-interpreted the evidence. No doubt such attempts will continue, but their tenuousness needs to be recognized. Reconstruction of events

Josephus describes the defeat of the Ptolemies by Antiochus III ('the Great') at the battle of Paneas in 200 BCE. Jerusalem also suffered, but pro-Seleucid supporters had opened the gates to Antiochus III, Josephus quotes his decree which allowed Jews to continue with their traditional religion and also granted some temporary tax relief to help them repair their city.* This decree was the normal expectation; conquerers routinely allowed, the conquered peoples to continue their traditional customs. Apparently, though, this decree was not just a unilateral issue from Antiochus but followed negotiations with the Jews, led by a man named John (2 Mace. 4: 11). Curiously, the current high priest Simon II is not mentioned in Antiochus's decree, but he saw to the repair of some of the damage to the city and also took care of other building projects (Ben Sira 50: 1-4). Although there was likely a pro-Ptolemaic party as well as a pro-Seleucid one, Seleucid rule seems to have been generally welcomed. The people may simply have been tired of Ptolemaic rule, and a change seemed in order. Initially, their expectations were not disappointed: for about twenty-five years things appear to have been quiet in Judah. The only episode that we know of to mar this peace was an attempt by Seleucus IV to confiscate the temple treasury (2 M.acc. 3). There are a number of uncertainties about this account; however, it seems that for whatever reason the attempt failed, Seleucus was assassinated not long after this episode, and the throne was taken by his brother Antiochus IV in 175 BCE. Much unsubstantiated calumny has been written about Antiochus IV. He was not a pagan missionary with, the aim of imposing some ideal of Hellenization on his subjects, nor was he mad or incompetent (some would make him one of the most able of the Seleucid rulers). Nor was he '-*' Nicolaus, who wrote a universal history of great value with regard to events relating to Judah, was secretary to Herod the Great; unfortunately, most of what we know of him and his writings is from Josephus, '-"' Ant. 12.3.3-4,138-46.

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especially concerned about the Jews who were a minor ethnic group in his vast realm. His immediate objective was to conquer Egypt, for which he prepared during the first five years of his reign, and. he achieved major success when he invaded at the end of 170 and beginning of 169 BCE. But this goal required resources, and this is where he became involved with the Jews. Contrary to widespread belief it was the Jews who made the first move in dealings with Antiochus. In 2 Maccabees 4 we are told that shortly after Antiochus became king, Jason (the brother of the high priest Onias) approached Antiochus with an offer of a considerable sum for the office to be taken from Ms brother and given to him. Antiochus had no reason to favour Onias, it made no difference to him who held the office, and he needed as much money in his coffers as he could get. Therefore, he accepted. Jason also offered an additional sum to transform Jerusalem into a Greek polls, which Antiochus also agreed to. Writing in the aftermath of the religious suppression and the Maccabaean revolt, both 1 and 2 Maccabees are very much against Jason and against the 'Hellenistic reform' he set up in Jerusalem. However, if we simply read the actual data (as opposed, to the emotive but empty rhetoric) of the accounts, we find that Jason's move was popular among the inhabitants of Jerusalem. Clearly many enrolled as citizens, and we read of absolutely no opposition to his reform (except in the fantasies of some modern scholars). If there was opposition, it has left no trace in the sources. The accounts also give no evidence of a breach of Jewish law under Jason; the cult continued, the daily (tamid) sacrifice was not interrupted, the temple was not polluted, and Jason carried out the normal duties of high priest. Jason was sensible enough not to damage the traditional cult system, with its inbuilt support for the priesthood through tithes and offerings, which was his own powerbase. Jason's reform was a political reform, not a religious one.97 After only three years, however, a man named Menelaus who was brother of the temple administrator offered Antiochus an additional sum of money to replace Jason. The amount he offered was unrealistic (we know this because he was then unable to pay it), but it must have looked appealing to Antiochus who was rapidly approaching the planned invasion date for Egypt. Antiochus agreed, and Jason suffered what he had originally inflicted on Onias. This was about the year 172, so Jason's experiment with a Greek polis came to an end after only about three years. There is no evidence that Menelaus kept up the Hellenistic reform. Although we have no indications of opposition to Jason, it was different with Menelaus. The people reacted but not to Hellenization; it was, instead, a reaction to rumours of religious sacrilege—that Menelaus had been selling some of the temple vessels. 97 For further information on the 'Hellenistic reform' and how it has often been distorted see Grabbe (forthcoming a).

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This is further evidence that Jason's reform was a political and not a religious one, for when religion became an issue the people clearly would not tolerate a breach of religious law. When the people thought the temple had been dishonoured, they rioted and killed Menelaus's brother. Then the council—the same council organized by Jason and supportive of his reforms—sent a delegation of some of their own members to Antiochus to ask for Menelaus's removal (they were unsuccessful). It also seems evident that Menelaus, unlike Jason, violated the law. About 170 BCE he not only gave over a large amount of the temple treasure to Antiochus but even conducted him through the inner parts of the temple itself, contrary to all Jewish law (2 Mace. 5:15-21). Antiochus's first invasion of Egypt was successful, but because of manoeuvring by the Ptolemies he had to lead a second invasion only two years later in 168 BCE. This time the Romans forced him to break it off by threatening to become his enemy if he continued. Meanwhile, Jason believed a rumour that Antiochus had been killed and led an attack on Jerusalem to regain the office taken from him by Menelaus. Antiochus assumed a rebellion had broken out and. sent an army to put it down. At this point, the sequence of events is difficult to put together, and one wonders whether part of the problem is the way 2 Maccabees may have shortened the text of Jason. For reasons still inexplicable, though, the Jerusalem temple was polluted and the practice of Judaism forbidden, probably in December 168 BCE." Antiochus is generally blamed for this by the sources, but Menelaus also seems to have had a hand in the process in some way (cf 2 Mace. 13: 3-8). What followed was the Maccabean revolt. The temple was retaken, cleansed, and the cult restored three years later. There was much heroism, even given the exaggerations of the books of Maccabees, but no military miracles. Initial success was overtaken by major setbacks (e.g., Judas Maccabaeus's death), and real victory came only when rival dynasties developed in the Seleucid empire, rivalries which the Maccabaean brothers were able to exploit to gain, valuable concessions. As a result Judah became an independent state with its own ruler in the person of the high priest (who later took the title king) for almost a century before the coming of the Romans. This is a story in its own right and will not be given here. Epilogue The history of Judah in the Persian and Hellenistic periods is basically the story of a small ethnos, occupying a province in the western part of a succession of empires. Although this province had. a Persian-appointed governor during part or all the time under Persian rule, the high priest w See Grabbe (1991 c) for the date.

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always occupied a prominent position, and possibly under the Persians and certainly under the Ptolemies and Seleucids he acted essentially as head of state or ethnarch. It was a small, state, but he was the spokesman and intermediary before the ruling overlord. Or, to use Josephus's term, Judah was a 'theocracy'. During much of this time, the country was at peace (with some exceptions, such as the period of the Diadochi). The Jews seem to have accepted, their subservient role in the large empires (did. they have much choice?). The main intellectual activity appears to have gone into a series of writings or editings which led to the Hebrew Bible and also some other early Jewish writings which never became canonical. The religious and literary activity and developments were the chief accomplishments during this time, and history has shown it to be a seminal period in the history of Judaism and Jewish literature. The Maccabean revolt changed a lot of things. In response to provocation a peaceful, submissive people revolted against their rulers, threw off their yoke, and became independent. However, they then proceeded to become conquerors themselves, expanding the territory of Judah to include what was probably the largest ever kingdom of Judah in history (keeping in mind the legendary features of Solomon's kingdom in 1 Kings). In less than a century this independent state came to an end, and the Jews were left only with a memory of what might have been. This memory fed. into the understandable discontent with being under the thumb of yet another conqueror, the Romans, and helped to build toward the disasters of 70 and. 135 CE and the end of Judah as a nation until modern times. Only a portion of the history of Judah in the Second Temple period has been surveyed here, but the Persian and Hellenistic periods were very much formative periods in the development of religion, literature, and identity of the Jewish people. Yet this time in the 'history of Israel' is also to a large extent enigmatic. When these periods are drawn, on to explain and understand portions of the biblical literature or the development of Jewish religion, the state of our knowledge and the methodological issues involved in writing the history of this period must be fully recognized. In spite of the substantial scholarly contributions in the past century, the serious work of history has only begun.

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ACKROYD, PETER R. (1970), The Age of the Chronicler (Supplement to Colloquium— The Australian and New Zealand Theological Review). ALBERTZ, RAINER (1994), A History of Israelite Religion in the Old Testament Period; Vat, 1, From the Beginnings to the End of the Exile; Vol. 2, from the Exile to the Maccabees (London: SCM Press; Louisville: Westminster/John Knox) (ET of Religionsgeschichte Israels in alttestmnentlicher Zeit (Das Alte Testament Deutsch Erganzungsreihe 8/1; Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1992)), ARAV, R. (1989), Hellenistic Palestine; Settlement Patterns and City Planning, 337-31 B.C.E. (British Archaeological Reports International Series 485; Oxford: BAR). AULD, A. GRAEME (1994), Kings Without Privilege: David and Moses in the Story of the Bible's Kings (Edinburgh: T. & T, Clark), BARAG, D. P. (1966), The Effects of the Tervnes Rebellion on Palestine', BASOR 183: 6-12. — (1985), 'Some Notes on a Silver Coin of Johanan the High Priest', BA 48:166-8. — (1986-87), 'A Silver Coin of Yohanan the High Priest and the Coinage of Judea in the Fourth Century B.C.', Israel Numismatic Journal 9: 4-21. BAR-KOCHVA, BEZALEL (1989), Judas Maccabaeus: The Jewish Struggle Against the Scleucids (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). — (1996), Pseudo-Hecataeus, On the jews; legitimizing the Jewish Diaspora (Hellenistic Culture and Society 21; Berkeley: University of California Press). BARSTAD, HANS M. (1996), The Myth of the Empty 'Land: A Study in the History and Archaeology of judah During the 'Exilic' Period (Symbolae Osloenses 28; Oslo: Scandinavian University Press). •— (1997), 'History and the Hebrew Bible', in Can a History of Israel Be Written?, ed. L. L. Grabbe (European Seminar in Historical Methodology 1 = JSOTS 245; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press), 37-64. BERQUIST, JON L. (1995), Judaism in Persia's Shadow: A Social and Historical Approach (Minneapolis: Fortress Press). BICKERMAN, ELIAS ]. (1976), The Edict of Cyrus in Ezra V, Studies in Jewish and Christian History (AGAJU 9, Leiden: E. J. Brill), 1.72-108 (partial revision of JBL 65,1946). BLENKINSGPP, JOSEPH (1991), Temple and Society in Achaemenid Judah', in Second Temple Studies: The Persian Period, ed. P. R. Da vies (JSOTS 117; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press), 22-53. CARROLL, ROBERT P. (1992), The Myth of the Empty Land', in Ideological Criticism of Biblical Texts, ed. David Jobling and T, Pippin (Semeia 59; Atlanta: Scholars Press), 79-93. CLINKS, DAVID J. A. (1990), The Nehemiah Memoir: The Perils of Autobiography', in What Does Eve Do to Help? and Other Readerly Questions to the Old Testament (JSOTS 94; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press),' 124-64. COHEN, S. J. D. (1982-83), 'Alexander the Great and Jaddus the High Priest according to Josephus', AJS Review 7-8:41-68. COLLINS, JOHN J. (1979) (ed.), Apocalypse: The Morphology of a Genre (Semeia 14; Atlanta: Scholars Press). COOK, STEPHEN L. (1995), Prophecy and Apocalypticism: The Postexilic Social Setting (Minneapolis: Fortress Press).

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COWLBY, A. (1923), Aramaic Papyri of the Fifth Century B.C. (Oxford: Clarendon Press) (reprinted Osnabruck: Otto Zeller, 1967). CROSS, FRANK M, (1985), 'Samaria Papyrus 1: An Aramaic Slave Conveyance of 335 B.C.E. Found in the Wad! ed-Daliyeh', El 18: 7*-l7*. — (1988), 'A Report on the Samaria Papyri', in Congress Volume: Jerusalem 1986, ed. J. A. Emerton (SVT 40; Leiden: E.}. Brill), 17-26, DAVIES, P. R. (1991) (ed.), Second Temple Studies: The Persian Period (JSOTS 117; Sheffield: Sheffield. Academic Press). — (1992), In Search of 'Ancient Israel' (JSOTS 148; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press). •— (1998), Scribes and Schools: The Canonization of the Hebrew Scriptures (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox). DURAND, XAVIER (1997), Des Grecs en Palestine au IIP siecle avant Jesus-Christ: Le dossier syrien des archives de Zenon de Caunos (261-252) (Cahiers de la Revue Biblique 38; Paris; Gabalda). ESKENAZI, T. C., and RICHARDS, K. H. (1994) (eds.), Second Temple Studies: 2. Temple Community in the Persian Period (JSOTS 175; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press). GERA, Dov (1998), Judaea and Mediterranean Politics 219 to 161 B.CX. (Brill's Series in Jewish Studies 8; Leiden: Brill). GERSTENBEK.GER, EKHAKD S. (1996), Leviticus; A Commentary (OTL; Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox); ET of Das dritte Buck Mose: Leviticus (ATD 6; Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1993). GRABBE, LESTER L. (1987), 'Josephus and the Reconstruction of the Judaean Restoration', ]BL 106: 231-46. — (1989), The Social Setting of Early Jewish Apocalypticism', JSP 4: 27-47. — (1991a), 'Reconstructing History from the Book of Ezra', in P. R. Davies (1991) (ed.), 98-107. •—(1991b), 'Who Was the Bagoses of Josephus (Ant. 11.7.1, 297-301)?', Transenphmtene 5: 49-55. — (1991c), 'Maccabean Chronology: 167-164 or 168-165 BCE?', JBL 110: 59-74. (1992a), Judaism from Cyrus to Hadrian: Vol. I: Persian and Creek Periods; Vol. II: Roman Period (Minneapolis: Fortress Press; British edition in one-volume, London: SCM Press, 1994). (1992b), The Authenticity of the Persian "Documents" in Ezra': Aramaic Section, Society of Biblical Literature annual meeting, San Francisco (November 1992); publication forthcoming. — (1.993), 'Betwixt and Between: The Samaritans in the Hasmonean Period', in Society of Biblical Literature 1993 Seminar Papers, ed. E. H. Levering, Jr. (SBL Abstracts and. Seminar Papers 32; Atlanta: Scholars Press), 334-47. — (1994), 'What Was Ezra's Mission?', in T. C. Eskenazi and K. H. Richards (eds.), 286-99. (1995), Priests, Prophets, Diviners, Sages: A Socio-historical Study of Religious Specialists in Ancient Israel (Valley Forge: Trinity Press International). — (1997a) (ed.), Can a History of Israel Be Written? (European Seminar in Historical Methodology 1 = JSOTS 245; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press). •— (1997V), The Book of Leviticus', Currents in Research: Biblical Studies 5: 91-110. — (1998a), (ed.), Leading Captivity Captive: The Exile as History and Ideology

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(European Seminar in Historical Methodology 2 = JSOTS 278, Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press). — (1998b), Ezra/Nehemiah (Readings) (London: Routledge). •— (1998c), 'Poets, Scribes, or Preachers? The Reality of Prophecy in the Second Temple Period', in Society of Biblical Literature 1998 Seminar Papers (SBL Seminar Paper Series 37; Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press) 2.524-45. (Forthcoming a), 'The Hellenistic City of Jerusalem', paper delivered at the Royal Irish Academy, March 1997, and to be published by the Academy. — (Forthcoming b), 'Jewish Historiography and Scripture in the Hellenistic Period', in DM Moses Speak Attic? Jewish Historiography and Scripture in the Hellenistic Period, ed. L. L. Grabbe (Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement = European Seminar in Historical Methodology 3; Sheffield Academic Press). GKAINGEK, JOHN D. (1991), Hellenistic Phoenicia (Oxford: Clarendon Press). HQGLUND, K. G. (1992), Achacmenid Imperial Administration in Syria-Palestine and the Missions of Ezra and Nehemiah (SBL Dissertation Series 125; Atlanta: Scholars Press). JATHET, SARA (1993), / & II Chronicles: A Commentary (OTL; London: SCM Press; Louisville: Westminster/John Knox). — (1997), The Ideology of the Book of Chronicles and its Place in Biblical Thought (Beitrage zur Erforschung des Alten Testaments und des Antiken Judentums 9; Frankfurt-Bern-New York: Lang (corrected reprint of 1989 edn)). JOHNSTONB, WILLIAM (1997), 1 and! Chronicles'. Vol. 1,1 Chronicles 1-2 Chronicles 9: Israel's Place among the Nations; Vol. 2, 2 Chronicles 10-36: Guilt and Atonement (JSOTS 253-54; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press). KUHNEN, H.-P. (1990), Palastina in griechisch-rdniischer Zeit (HdA, Vorderasien 2, Band 2; Munich: Beck). LAPP, N. L. (1983) (ed.), The Excavations at Araq el-Emir, Vol. 1 (AASOR 47; Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns). LAPP, P. W. and N. L. (1974) (eds.), Discoveries in the Wadi ed-Daliyeh (AASOR 41; Cambridge: ASOR). LEMCHE, NIELS PETER (1993), 'The Old Testament—a Hellenistic Book?', S/OT" 7: 163-93. MAZAR, BENJAMIN (1957), The Tobiads', IE/ 7:137-45, 229-38 (revision of articles in Tarbiz 12,1941,109-23, and El 4,1956,249-51). MESHOEER, Y. (1982), Ancient Jewish Coinage, Volume I: Persian Period through Hastnonaeans; Volume II: Herod the Great through Bar KoMiba (2 vols.; New York: Amphora). MtJLLER, H.-P, (1969), 'Magisch-mantische Weisheit und die Gestalt Daniels', Ugarit-Forschungen 1: 79-94. — (1972), 'Mantische Weisheit und Apokalyptik', Congress Volume, Uppsala 1971 (SVT 22; Leiden: E. J. Brill), 268-93. NICHOLSON, ERNEST (1998), The Pentateuch in the Twentieth Century: The Legacy of Julius Welttwusen (Oxford: Clarendon Press). POETEN, BEZALEL (1968), Archives from Elephantine: The Life of an Ancient Jewish Military Colony (Berkeley: University of California Press). PORTEN, B. and YARDENI, A. (1986), Textbook of Aramaic Documents from Ancient Egypt: 1 Letters (Hebrew University, Department of the History of the Jewish

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People, Texts and Studies for Students; Jerusalem: Hebrew University). RUMMER, RBINHARP (1989), 'Samaritan Material Remains and Archaeology', in 'Die Samaritans, ed, Alan D, Crown (Tubingen: Mohr (Siebeck)), 135-77. RAPPAPORT, U. (1981), The First Judean Coinage', JJS 32:1-17. SCHAPER, JOACHIM (1995), 'The Jerusalem Temple as an Instrument of the Achaemenid Fiscal Administration', VT 45,428-39. SCHWARTZ, SETH (1991), 'Israel and the Nations Roundabout: 1 Maccabees and the Hasmonean Expansion', JJS 42:16-38. SHOW, CHOON-LEONG (1996), 'Linguistic Evidence and the Dating of Qohelef, fBL 115:643-66. STEINS, GEORG (1995), Die Chmnik als kanonisches Abschlussphanomen: Studien zur Entstehung und Theologie von 1/2 Chmnik (Bonner Biblische Beitrage 93; Weirtheim: Beltz Athenaum). STERN, EPMKAIM (1982), Material Culture of the Land of the Bible in the Persian Period 538-332 B.C. (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society; Warminster: Aris & Phillips). TCIIKRIKOVER, VICTOR (1959), Hellenistic Civilization and the Jews (New York: Jewish Publication Society). TOLLEFSON, KENNETH D. and WILLIAMSON, H. G. M. (1992), 'Nehemiah as Cultural Revitalization: An Anthropological Perspective',/SOT 56: 41-68. VANDERKAM, JAMES C. (1986), 'The Prophetic-Sapiential Origins of Apocalyptic Thought', in A Word in Season: Essays in Honour of William McKane, ed, J. D. Martin and P. R. Davies (JSOTS 42; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press), 163-76. WEINBERG, JOEL (1992), The Citizen-Temple Community (JSOTS 151; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press). WEIPPBRT, HELGA (1988), Palastina in vorhellenistischer Zeit (HdA, Vorderasien 2, Band 1; Munich: Beck). WILL, EDUOURD. (1979), Histoire politique du monde hellenistiqm (323-30 av. J.-C.): Tome I De la mart d'Alexandre aux avenentents d'Antiochos III et de Philippe V (Annales de 1'Est, Memoire 30; Nancy: Publications de 1'Universite). — (1982), Histoire politique du monde heliAiistujite (323-30 av. J.-C.): Tome II Des avenenienfs d'Antiochos III et de Philippe V a la fin des Lagides (Annales de 1'Est, Memoire 32; Nancy: Publications de 1'Universite). WILLI, THOMAS (1995), Juda-Jehud-Israel: Studien zutn Selhstverskandnis des Judentunts in persischer Zeit (Forschungen zum Alien Testament 12; Tubingen: Mohr (Siebeck)). WILLIAMSON, H. G. M. (1977), 'The Historical Value of Josephus' Jewish Antiquities XI. 297-301', ]TS 28: 49-66. — (1983), 'The Composition of Ezra i-vi', JTS 34:1-30.

16

The Religion of Israel J, DAY

THE sur¥ey of work on the history of the religion of Israel by W, Zimmerli in the previous SOTS volume, Tradition and Interpretation, covered the period from 1951 to 1973, though the volume itself was not published until 1979. Accordingly, the present survey will deal with the period, from 1974 to 1997. During this period a vast amount of work relating to the religion of Israel has appeared. Consequently, it will not be possible to treat every conceivable topic here. In particular, I shall not be dealing with such important themes as prophecy, wisdom (except in so far as it relates to natural theology), or feminist concerns in the study of religion (except the goddess Asherah), as these are covered, in separate chapters in this volume. Even granted that a survey of a generation's work on the religion of Israel cannot be totally comprehensive, one is still struck by the fact that Zimmerli's earlier survey virtually ignored the whole of the post-exilic period, doubtless a reflection of the theological denigration of this period that was earlier current. Ironically, in more recent years, whilst greater justice to the post-exilic period has been achieved, it is the pre-exilic period that has sometimes been in danger of disappearing at the hands of some scholars, not for reasons of theological prejudice, but because of increased historical scepticism about what might meaningfully be said of it. The past generation has seen the production of two major syntheses of the religion of Israel. The first is Ancient Israelite Religion, a composite volume of essays in honour of F. M. Cross, edited by P. D. Miller, P. D. Hanson, and S. Dean McBride1 whilst the second is a two-volume work of a single German scholar, R. Albertz, Religionsgeschichte Israels in alttestamentlichei" Zeit (ET, A History of Israelite Religion in the Old Testament Period).2 The latter has more sociological awareness, one of the developing trends in recent years, but sticks more closely to the Old Testament itself as a source of knowledge of the religion. The strength of the former volume, as befits a work in honour of a pupil of W. F. Albright, is that it takes greater account of archaeological discoveries in illuminating the religion and is more fully aware of the fact that the history of the religion of Israel should, be more than a historical presentation of the Old Testament ' (1987),

2

(1992).

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religion. The essay by W. G, Dever,3 in particular, highlights the need for biblical scholars to take greater account not merely of extra-biblical texts but also of archaeological artifacts in reconstructing Israelite religion. This interdisciplinary exercise, if carried out, will doubtless prove to be a source of progress in years to come. The pre-monarchical period Over recent decades there has been increased scepticism on the part of many scholars about the historicity of the narratives concerning the earliest period of Israel's history. With this, inevitably, has gone increased scepticism about what one might meaningfully say about the religion of this period. But this does not mean that we have to adopt the position of the more extreme 'minimalists' and give up all hope of reconstructing Israel's early religion. There has been a growing consensus that much of the origins of the people that became Israel arose in Canaan. But this does not exclude the likelihood of a Moses/exodus group from outside Canaan. Yahweh himself does not appear to have been a Canaanite god in origin—e.g. he does not appear in the Ugaritic pantheon list. The view that he was the same god as El (a view going back to Wellhausen4 and associated especially with F. M. Cross3) has been reargued more recently by J. C. de Moor.6 However, against this stands first the fact that El's character is uniformly benevolent in the Ugaritic texts, whereas Yahweh has a fierce side as well as a kind one, and secondly, in early poetic texts such as Judg. 5:4—5 Yahweh is associated with the storm, which, though reminiscent of Baal, does not fit El.7 Most scholars who have written on the subject during the period under review support the idea that Yahweh had his origins outside the land of Israel to the south, in the area of Midian (cf. Judg. 5:4-5, Deut. 33: 2, Hab, 3: 3, 7)8 and there has been an increasing tendency to locate Mt. Sinai and Kadesh in N. W. Arabia rather than the Sinai peninsula itself.9 The latter view, long held by German scholars, has been supported by evidence of a civilization in the Hejaz area in N. W. Arabia (Midian) in the Late Bronze Age/Early Iron Age, in contrast to the general lack of this in this period in the Sinai peninsula. Also, the epithet 'Yahweh of Teman' in one of the Kuntillet 'Ajrud inscriptions fits in with this. References to the Shasu Yahweh in Egyptian texts alongside the Shasu Seir have continued to be cited, though M. C, Astour10 questioned this, claiming that the reference was not to Seir in Edom but to Sarara in Syria, but on balance the Egyptian 3 5 7 8 9

(1987). * (1885), 433, n. 1 (not in German original). (1973), 44-75. <> (1990), 243-47 (2nd edn, (1997), 323-35). Mettinger (1990). Even the arch-minimalist N. P. Lemche feels confident about this in (1991), 113—15. w E.g. Cross (1988), 46-65. (1979), 17-34.

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S'rr still seems more likely as a slip for S'r than the name Sarara. Archaeology suggests that from the earliest times Yahweh was not represented by anthropomorphic images and it is likely that a monolatrous tendency (even if only held by a minority at first) is also ancient (see below). The period under review has seen a continuation of the tendency of the 1960s and early 1970s to reject the amphictyony thesis of the nature of the tribes in the Judges period, as is witnessed by studies by A, D, H. Mayes, C. H. J. de Geus, and O. Bachli,11 for example. With regard to the period of the Judges, N. K. Gottwald in 1980 wrote a massive book entitled The Tribes of Yahweh: A Sociology of the Religion of Liberated Israel, 1250-1050 B.c.E.12 Gottwald argued that Late Bronze Age Israel was the result of a peasant's revolt by oppressed, lower-class Canaanites against their feudal masters in the Canaanite city states, and that this revolt was sparked by the arrival of the newly liberated exodus group of Yahwists from Egypt. For Gottwald Israel was an egalitarian society, the liberated people of Yahweh, and their religion is to be seen as a function of their society. The fact that Gottwald sees religion as a function of society is a reflection of his Marxist materialist viewpoint. However, for all his radicalness, Gottwald. is strangely conservative in his acceptance of the centrality of covenant and of the existence of a tribal confederacy (though not amphictyony) during the period of the Judges, views which are now generally rejected. Moreover, whatever the precise nature of the settlement of the tribes, the available evidence does not suggest that it was due to a peasant's revolt. Archaeology has shown that the earliest Israelite settlements in the central hill country were unfortified, clearly indicating a peaceful origin rather than a background in a violent overthrow of the authority of the Canaanite city states. This therefore sheds doubt on Gottwald's picture of early Yahwism as essentially a manifestation of an anti-feudal mentality. Indeed, his whole picture of early Israel as an egalitarian society is somewhat exaggerated when seen in the light of its patriarchal structure and tolerance of slavery. Nevertheless, Gottwald's work has served to increase sociological awareness amongst Old Testament scholars. Canaanite syncretism in the religion of Israel In recent decades there has been considerable interest in the question of Canaanite syncretism in the religion of Israel. One subject that has led to many books and articles is the goddess Asherah and the question whether she functioned as Yahweh's consort.13 Interest in the subject was particuK " Mayes (1974); de Geus (1976); Bachli (1977). Gottwald (1980). 13 Jyst as a sample of the vast literature I shall cite the following: Etnerton (1982); Winter (1983); Day (1986a); Maier (1986); Olyan (1988); Smith (1990), 80-114; Pettey (1990); Dietrich and Loretz (1992); Wiggins (1993); Frevel (1995). J. M, Hadley's oft-cited excellent Cambridge PhD thesis (1989), 'Yahweh's Asherah in the Light of Recent Discovery', should be published, shortly.

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larly stimulated by the discovery of the texts from Kuntillet 'Ajrud in North-East Sinai, dating from c, 800 BC, referring to 'Yahweh of Samaria and his Asherah' and 'Yahweh of Teman and his Asherah',14 as well as a text from Khirbet el-Qom (near Hebron, c. 700 BC) referring to 'Yahweh and his Asherah'.15 Although some scholars have taken this to be a direct reference to the goddess Asherah, it has been widely noted (following J. A. Emerton) that the presence of the possessive suffix in 'his Asherah' favours the understanding that it is the Asherah cult object that is referred to. However, since there is good evidence that the Asherah cult object symbolized the goddess of the same name (as each is mentioned in comparable contexts), we may assume that implicit here is a pairing of this goddess with Yahweh and that she did, function as Yahweh's consort. This coheres with the references to (the) Asherah in Yahweh's temple in 2 Kgs, 21: 7, 23: 4, 6 or next to Yahweh's altar (Deut. 16: 21). This is not surprising since at Ugarit Asherah was El's consort and Yahweh was equated with El in ancient Israel. A subject in which there has been remarkable new interest recently is the question of the relationship of Yahweh to the sun—a topic in which little interest had been shown previously since the time of the Myth and Ritual school. Several scholars have suggested that Yahweh and the sun were actually equated, the most detailed argument for this being in a book by J, Glen Taylor.16 However, no clear, concrete evidence has been produced. Amongst some of the arguments that various scholars have employed are the following. First, the east-west orientation of Solomon's temple has sometimes been appealed to, but it should, be noted that not only solar temples had this orientation. Secondly, 1 Kgs. 8: 12 (cf. LXX 8: 53) has been held to imply the equation of Yahweh and the sun, but it is probable that they are rather contrasted. Thirdly, 2 Kgs. 23: 5, 11 and Ezek. 8: 16 attest sun worship in Yahweh's temple. However, this in no way demands Yahweh's equation with the sun any more than with any of the other deities alluded to in 2 Kgs. 23 or Ezek. 8. Rather, the sun was probably seen as part of the host of heaven and therefore subordinate to Yahweh. Fourthly, Ps. 84: 12 (ET 11), 'Yahweh is a sun (semes) and shield' has been appealed to. But better parallelism is obtained if we render semes as 'battlement' or the like, as in Isa. 54:12. Fifthly, it is claimed that the use of the verbs zrhand yp' (hiphil) 'shine' in connection with Yahweh implies a solar understanding. These verbs are used of Yahweh in Deut. 33: 2 and. Ps. 50: 2, but the allusions are more naturally to the lightning than to the sun in view of clear Sinai theophany contexts (cf. Exod. 19: 16; Ps. 50: 3, 14

There has still been no final definitive publication of the finds from Kuntillet 'Ajrud. For the time being, see Meshel (1978), The pages are not numbered! 15 Dever (1969-70), 165-7. 16 Eg. Stahli (1985); Niehr (1990), 147-63; Keel and Uehlinger (1994); Taylor (1993). Mark S. Smith has argued in a number of places, most recently in (1990), 115-24, that Yahweh appropriated solar symbolism, but denies that Yahweh was actually equated with the sun.

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etc.). Noteworthy is the fact that no theophoric personal names such as Yehoshemesh or Shemeshiah are ever attested, which is surprising if Yahweh and the sun were equated. Two major books on the subject of the god Molech have appeared in recent years. These are the studies by G. C. Heider and the present writer.17 In spite of some disagreements, these two authors are agreed on certain central points; first, Molech. is the name of a god, not that of a sacrifice like Punic molk, as Eissfeldt18 thought (or a misunderstanding of such). Secondly, Molech was an underworld, god, equivalent to Ugaritic mlk and Akkadian Malik. Thirdly, child sacrifice actually was offered to Molech—we should not simply think of some less harmful ritual of running through the fire. Contrary to what has sometimes been supposed, it also seems that Molech was not equated with Yahweh. Until the period covered by this survey there had been unanimous agreement that sacred prostitution was a part of Canaanite religion and that it was appropriated by the Israelites. Over the last couple of decades this view has come to be widely questioned. Occasionally it has been supposed that what were supposed to be Old Testament allusions to it are simply misunderstood as such by modern scholars (H, M. Barstad19), but more usually the claim has been that the Old Testament allusions are there, but that they constitute unreliable polemic (e.g. R. A. Oden20). Over against the former view, however, it should be noted, that the context requires that qedeM or (fides mean female or male cult prostitute in Hos. 4: 14, Gen. 38: 21-22 (cf. v. 15) and. Deut. 23: 18 (ET 17, cf, v. 19, ET 18). The reasons alleged for denying the facticity of these allusions are insufficient simply to dismiss sacred prostitution. Whilst we may not be able to say much about its purpose, the mere fact of lack of clear attestation of it at Ugarit does not prove that it did not exist several centuries later in ancient Israel. There are many classical allusions to sacred prostitution in the Canaanite world, and although on the late side, the earliest is in Cyprus in the fifth century BC (Herodotus), only a century after the latest Old Testament reference (Isa. 57:5, 7-8) and it is hypercritical to dismiss all of these classical allusions as unreliable. The independent attestation that they provide is suggestive. Moreover, in contrast to certain recent claims, W. G. Lambert21 has shown that sacred prostitution did exist in Mesopotamia and was especially associated with the goddess Ishtar. Divination and the cult of the dead One trend of our period, part of the continuing reaction against the Biblical Theology movement period, has been the increased interest in the actual religion of Israel in all its strange otherness. One aspect of this has 17 20

Heider (1985); Day (1989). (1987), 131-53.

w 21

(1935). Lambert (1992).

19

(1984), 26-33.

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been the renewed interest in subjects like divination and the cult of the dead. As for divination, our period has seen the publication of the first fulllength studies (by Frederick H. Cryer and Ann Jeffers22) for many years, Again, 1997 saw the publication of the first book on the Urim and Thummim since 1824, This was a study by Cornells Van Dam.23 However, his theory that Urim and Thummim meant 'perfect light' and consisted of a single gem involving a miraculous light is highly speculative; most scholars maintain that the LXX of 1 Sam, 14: 41 gives the original text, and this suggests rather that the Urim and Thummim were sacred lots. As is well known, consulting the livers of animals (extispicy) was an important feature of divinatory practice in Mesopotamia, Two scholars, O. Loretz and F. H. Cryer24 have sought to argue that it also had considerable importance in ancient Israel. However, these arguments are exaggerated and such evidence as we have is extremely slight. As for the Teraphim, there has been a growing belief that these are to be seen as images of deified ancestors, used for divinatory purposes.2-"' However, although such figurines may have been in use at Nuzi, nothing in the Old Testament particularly suggests that the Teraphim were deified ancestors; for example, they are not mentioned in condemnations of necromancy, which one would have expected if this view were correct.26 Our period has seen a greatly renewed interest in the cult of the dead in ancient Israel and its environs, with books by K. Spronk, J. Tropper, T, J, Lewis, E. M. Bloch-Smith and B. B. Schmidt,27 in addition to various contributions by M. H. Pope and others.28 What has particularly stimulated interest in this subject has been the discovery of extra-biblical texts, especially a Ugaritic text (JCTlf2 1,161), in which the shades of the former kings, called rp'um (cf, the Hebrew repa'im) are invoked, but also the Ugaritic king list, (KTlP 1.108), indicating that the dead kings were divinized; other stimulating factors have been the Mari texts about feeding of the dead at the kispum ritual, speculation about possible funerary connections of the marzeah ceremony attested at Ugarit and elsewhere in the ancient Near East, including the Old Testament, and renewed attention to the contents of Israelite tombs. With regard to the marzeah M. H. Pope argues that over a period of almost two millennia in Syria-Palestine this was a ceremony involving lamentation for the dead as well as sexual orgies. In his massive and 22

Cryer (1994); Jeffers (1996), -' (1997). 25 Loretz (1990); Cryer (1994). The most detailed study is Van der Toorn (1990). 26 The only Old Testament passage that Van der Toorn can appeal to is 2 Kgs, 23; 24, where Josiah is said to have put away 'the ghosts and the spirits lor the mediums and the wizards] and the Teraphim and the idols', but 'the Teraphim' are here parallel with 'the idols' rather than with 'the ghosts and the spirits'. 27 Spronk (1982); Tropper (1989); Lewis (1989); Bloch-Smith (1992); B. B. Schmidt (1994). 28 E.g. Pope (1981), and Pope's commentary on the Song of Songs cited in the next footnote. 24

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learned commentary, Pope29 held that the Song of Songs had its setting in the marzeah, but this view has had little following, since it can claim no support from the text itself (marzeah is not mentioned and love is strong as death' [8:6] is the only reference to death in the whole work). Over and above this, we should heed the cautionary note of Dennis Pardee/10 that in our ancient sources the only unambiguous connection of the marzeah with death cult practices is in Jer. 16: 5. He also notes that there is no evidence from Ugarit, unless wa"£ is the same as mrzh in KTU21.21. In my view mrz" is probably a variant spelling of mrzh. What is certain is that the marzeah was associated with drinking parties, and lamentation for the dead would have played only a subordinate role in it. The Deuteronomic movement, Josiah's reform, and covenant theology In the past there has been debate as to whether we should see the deuteronomic movement as deriving from prophets, priests, or wise men. In recent decades there has been an emerging consensus that in order to do justice to the different features within Deuteronomy, we should think in terms of a reform movement that encompassed elements from all three of these groups.31 It is perhaps no coincidence that a priest (Hilkiah), a prophetess (Huldah), and. a court official, perhaps a 'wise man' (Shaphan), were all associated, with the discovery of the law book in 2 Kgs, 22 (vv. 8-20) in connection with Josiah's reform. Although some scholars have doubted the historicity of Josiah's religious reformation,32 the strength of the arguments supports those who maintain its basic historicity.33 First, there is circumstantial evidence for believing that some religious transformation took place in Josiah's reign. Thus on the one hand the prophet Zephaniah, whose oracles date from sometime (presumably early) in Josiah's reign, attests the kind of religious syncretism in Judah and. Jerusalem that 2 Kings describes prior to Josiah's reform (Zeph. 1: 4 f.; cf. Jer. 2: 8, 23, 27-8, etc.). On the other hand, in a poetic section of Jeremiah, certainly not deuteronomistic, Jeremiah praises Josiah as a just king (Jer. 22:15-16). Jeremiah would hardly have done that if he had allowed syncretism to run rampant in the land like Manasseh or as Jehoiakim later did. The absence of authentic oracles from the reign of Josiah in Jeremiah (apart from the early chs. 2-6) is most easily accounted for if Jeremiah was happy with the reforms under Josiah. Secondly, there is a growing consensus that in addition to a final redaction in the exile, there was a first edition of the Deuteronomistic History (including Kings) in the reign of Josiah himself, as argued by F. M, Cross and others. fl (1977)_ 3,, (19%)_ 31 32 33

Mayes (1979), 103-8; Clements (1989), 76-9; Albertz (1992),!, 314-16 (ET, 202). E.g. Wurthwein (1976), esp. 417ff.; (1984), 462ff.; Levin (1984), esp. 353ff. E.g. Spieckermann (1982), 53,76,79-130,378ff; Lohfink (1987).

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Amongst other arguments, only this properly explains the tensions in the account of Josiah. No one inventing the whole story in the exile would have introduced such tensions. Accordingly, the account of Josiah's reform (from Dtr I) is nearly contemporary with the alleged events, and is therefore likely to have a high degree of historicity. In contrast, the Chronicler's account in 2 Chr. 34-5 dates from several (perhaps three) centuries later. It is therefore surprising that some scholars have previously assigned it greater historicity than the account in Kings. In Chronicles, Josiah begins to seek the Lord in his eighth year, while he was still a boy, and in his twelfth year he began to purge Judah and Jerusalem of idolatry (2 Chr. 34: 3) prior to the discovery of the law book in his eighteenth year. The difference from Kings is most naturally explained in terms of the Chronicler's own theology: if Josiah was really such a good king, why did he not start reforming as soon as possible instead of waiting till his eighteenth year? Josiah's twelfth year (when he was twenty) was when he reached the age of majority34 and was therefore first able to engage in independent action. F. M. Cross and D. N. Freedman35 had earlier (in 1953) attempted to correlate the Chronicler's dates with significant events in the decline of the Assyrian empire. But not only are the precise Assyrian dates uncertain, it is doubtful that Josiah's reform should be understood as specifically removing Assyrian cults. J. W. McKay and M. D. Cogan36 argued independently in 1973 and 1974 respectively that the Assyrians did not impose their cults on subject peoples and that Josiah's reforms were aimed at Canaanite rather than Assyrian cults. More recently, in 1982, H. Spieckermann,37 has revived the view that Josiah's reforms were anti-Assyrian. He draws attention to some Assyrian texts in which subject peoples have to do obeisance to the Assyrian gods, especially Ashur.38 But against Spieckermann, the point needs to be made that of all the Assyrian records concerning the imposition of gods he is able to cite only one text relating to Syria-Palestine, namely that concerning Hanunu of Gaza39—but even there the Assyrian images are set up in the palace, not the temple. Clearly, as A. Laato40 rightly says, there was no systematic policy of forcing subject peoples to worship the Assyrian gods. Furthermore, the Old Testament data in 2 Kgs. 23 clearly imply that the deities Josiah removed were Canaanite: Baal, Asherah and Molech (the latter with human sacrifice—not an Assyrian custom) were Canaanite deities. Since the Canaanites also worshipped the sun and other astral deities, there is every presumption that the removal of these too was directed against Canaanite, not Assyrian cults. It is quite forced to 34

This point about majority was made by Mosis (1973), 95f. Cf. Williamson (1982), 398. Cross and Freedman (1953). * McKay (1973); Cogan (1974). 3S (1982). Ibid., 322-44. 3 " Ibid., 325-30. *} (1992), 43. 35 37

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suppose that Asherah is a code name for the Assyrian Ishtar, as Spieckermann supposes,41 since the Canaanite equivalent of Ishtar was Astarte (Ashtoreth), not Asherah, Spieckermann wrote his book before the Kuntillet 'Ajrud and Khirbet el-Qom texts referring to 'Yahweh and his Asherah' had become widely known, which reveal the importance of Canaanite Asherah worship in pre-exilic Israel/Judah. (Spieckermann had claimed that Canaanite Asherah was unimportant in pre-exilic Israel, and therefore supposed that this was a reason for seeing her name as a code name for Ishtar.) Central to deuteronomic theology is the notion of covenant. Whereas an earlier generation of scholars (cf. W. Eichrodt) tended to see the Mosaic covenant as pervasive of the entire Old Testament, scholars in recent decades have been more conscious of the diversity within, the Old Testament, and suspicious of attempts to place a straitjacket on it, whether in terms of covenant or Heilsgeschichte. Scholars now generally agree that covenant theology has a greater centrality in the deuteronomic literature than anywhere else in the Old Testament. The work of L. Perlitt,42 written prior to the period under review here, has continued to be influential; Perlitt argued that the deuteronomists actually created, the notion of covenant (b'rit) to describe the special relationship between Yahweh and Israel and that earlier apparent references to covenant in the Old Testament were really the work of the deuteronomistic redactors (or in the case of Hos. 6: 7, alluded to a political treaty, not a covenant with Yahweh). Both E. W. Nicholson,43 who has devoted a whole monograph to the subject, God and his People: Covenant and Theology in the Old Testament, and the present writer,44 however, have argued that the notion of covenant is certainly already attested earlier in the eighth century uc. Both of us agree that Hos. 6: 7 and 8: 1 are authentic pre-deuteronomic allusions to the covenant with Yahweh. For example, we note that Hos. 6: 7 cannot be referring to the transgression of a political treaty, as Perlitt believes, since elsewhere in the Old Testament the verb 'br, employed here in connection with tyrtt, is never used of breaking a political treaty; rather, the verb used for that is the hiphil of prr. Other arguments are also adduced against Perlitt's interpretation of Hos. 6: 7, which I will not go into here. Anyway, if there is an allusion to Yahweh's covenant in Hos. 6: 7, there is no reason why the prophet should not have referred to it again in Hos. 8:1. Nicholson also convincingly argues that the account of covenant making in Exod. 24: 3-8 is also pre-deuteronomic: 'blood of the covenant' (Exod. 24: 8) is not at all a deuteronomistic expression, since the deuteronomists nowhere envisage covenant making by sacrifice, a point earlier noted by D. J. McCarthy.45 Nicholson concedes much of the rest of Perlitt's case, however. He maintains that Exod. 24:1-2,9-11 have no covenant connection, Josh. 24 is an exilic deuteronomic narrative, Exod. 34: 10-28 is also 45 n 42 44 (1982), 21.2-21. (1969). « (1986a). Day (1986W, (1972), 117.

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relatively late, whilst Exod. 19; 36^8 is either late exilic or early post-exilic, amalgamating deuteronomic, priestly and prophetic elements. Nicholson believes that Hosea may have been the one who actually coined the term 'covenant' to describe Yahweh's relationship with Israel. The present writer, however, is inclined to believe that it is somewhat earlier, since I have argued that allusions to covenant in Ps. 78: 10 and 37 are also predeuteranomic and date from before 722 uc and probably before 733 uc (and probably therefore earlier than Hosea), since the Psalm, though antinorthern, knows nothing of the fall of the Northern Kingdom, which for the deuteronomists was the significant sign of Yahweh's rejection of the north. The net conclusion of all this is that, though the deuteronomists certainly made covenant central in a way it had never been before, they did not create the concept out of nothing and we should beware of 'pandeuteronomism'. Monotheism and the prohibition of images During the period of the heyday of the biblical theology movement it tended to be claimed that it was Yahweh's action in history (Heilsgeschichte) which set the Old Testament apart from other religions of the ancient Near East, which emphasized rather divine action in nature. Albrektson's History and the Gods46 dealt a mortal blow to that view, since it noted that other nations also saw their gods as acting in history, and, of course, Yahweh was a god of nature too. Nevertheless, I would argue there may still have been greater emphasis on divine action in history in the Old Testament than among some of the surrounding peoples, especially the Canaanites. All the same, the playing down of divine revelation in history in recent scholarship has tended to mean that any distinctiveness in Israel's religion has had to be located elsewhere—and a good case for seeing this as monotheism (originally monolatry) can be made. When ancient Near Eastern ideas and customs were taken over by Israel, they tended to be 'monotheized' in order to make them compatible with her faith. This strong monotheistic trend does seem to be unique in the ancient Near Eastern world. The only real parallel was the Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaton's solar monotheism of the god Aton in the fourteenth century BC, but this was short-lived and lacked the ethical element of Israelite Yahwism. The noted Egyptologist J. Assmann's recent revival of Freud's view that it influenced Israel's monotheism is a maverick position: Yahweh was not a solar deity and there are also chronological problems with this view.47 Zoroastrianism, which B. Lang48 (again implausibly) 46

4? (1967), Assmann (1997). * (1983), 47-8. (Not in the German original from which this article is adapted, cited below in n. 50.)

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thinks influenced Deutero-Isaiah, was as much dualistic as monotheistic. Also, there is no real evidence to support A. Lemaire's claim49 that Ammon, Moab, and Edom were monolatrotts, even though each did have its own national god. Nevertheless,during recent decades there has been a continuing general rejection of the notion that full-blown monotheism went back to early times in Israel (an idea once associated with W, F. Albright). There has been a widespread return to the view of Wellhausen that absolute monotheism was not attained till Deutero-Isaiah in the exile and that its achievement was a gradual process in the development of which the monolatrous challenge of Elijah, the work of the classical prophets, and the deuteronomic reform, movement played a significant role. There has been much talk of a minority 'Yahweh-alone party' in the development of monolatry in the pre-exilic period, following the work of B. Lang,50 who took the term up from Morton Smith.51 Unlike Lang, however, some scholars are willing to grant that this minority monolatry may indeed go all the way back to the earliest times,52 presumably to Moses. J. Tigay,53 indeed, has argued on the basis of pre-exilic personal names from both the Old Testament and inscriptions that Yahweh was the deity overwhelmingly worshipped then—he claims that monolatry is indicated by the presence oft/fa? in so many personal names. However, it should be noted that most of the epigraphic occurrences date from the latter part of the pre-exilic period, when it is generally agreed that monolatry was gaining strength. Further, most of the names come from Judah, and conceivably a different picture would emerge from the Northern Kingdom. Again, it may be argued that the predominance of Yahweh names certainly indicates that Yahweh was the chief deity worshipped then, but it may be debated how far the personal names imply that Yahweh was basically the only deity worshipped. For example, it may be noted that although no one doubts that Asherah was worshipped at Ugarit, her name virtually never features in Ugaritic personal names. In fact, the extent to which personal names give one a complete picture of a religion has been queried, since many personal names could be traditional. We may accept, therefore, that there was much worship of other gods in pre-exilic Israel, whilst at the same time maintaining that Yahweh was the predominant deity. At the other extreme from J, Tigay is A. P. Hayman,54 who has argued that even in the post-exilic period and later still in post-biblical Judaism prior to the Middle Ages full-blown monotheism was never really achieved. This too is an exaggerated position. Much of Hayman's argument centres on the prominence of angels in the Judaism of this period, but throughout history monotheists have regarded belief in angels as not 51 * (1994), 142-5. 'io (1981), 47-83 (ET, 13-59). (1971), passim, esp. ch. 2. 52 E.g. Nicholson (1986W, 28; Mettinger (1990), 412; Albertz (1992), 98 (ET, (1994), 62). 53 A (1993). * (1991).

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incompatible with monotheism,55 Hayman also notes the tendency of Judaism to have 'two powers in heaven'. However, provided the second power was not actually seen as a second god, it may be argued that monotheism remained intact. At the same time, however, it did create a modified monotheism and prepared the ground for Christianity. In addition to the absolute monotheism which the Old Testament eventually came to advocate, another area where scholars have tended to think of the Old Testament as unique is its rejection of images of Yahweh. It still remains true that, in contrast to the multitude of female divine images found in Israelite sites, archaeology has failed to produce any Iron Age male anthropomorphic image that certainly depicts Yahweh.56 This indicates that the rejection of anthropomorphic images of Yahweh goes back to the earliest times. However, in a valuable comparative study entitled No Graven Image?, T. N. D. Metlingers7 has shown that the rejection of anthropomorphic divine images is not unique to the Old Testament but is found elsewhere amongst certain other Western Semites: the Nabataeans, the pre-Islamic Arabs, the Phoenicians, various Syrian Bronze Age cities, in addition to Bronze and Iron Age Palestine. Like the early Israelites, Mettinger finds evidence amongst these peoples and places of symbolism of the deity by an aniconic standing stone rather than by an anthropomorphic image. Where the Old Testament is unique, Mettinger concludes, is in its eventual programmatic aniconism, i.e. the rejection of any symbol, including standing stones, to represent the deity. Where one may dissent from Mettinger is in his view that the early Israelites consistently rejected theriomorphic as well as anthropomorphic images of Yahweh. Most likely Jeroboam I's golden calves were symbols of Yahweh (cf. 'Bull El' in Ugaritic), not simply pedestals of the deity as he claims. Note Hos, 8: 6, where Hosea insists that the calf 'is not God', which would be odd if everybody regarded it as simply a pedestal (cf. Exod. 32: 4 and 1 Kgs. 12: 28, where the calves are likewise 'gods').58 Cultic law Much, though not all, of Israel's cultic law is found in the work of P. A few, especially certain Israeli and Jewish scholars,'9 have defended a pre-exilic date for P. It is claimed by them that P's institutions are pre-exilic and that its language supports this. But the linguistic criteria 55 In addition to the works listed above, the following volumes are also relevant to the discussion of monotheism in the period under discussion: Keel (1980) (ed.); Haag (1985) (ed.); Barker (1992); all the articles in Dietrich and Klopfenatein (1994) (eds.); Gnuse (1997); Shanks and Meinhardt (1997) (eds.). 56 57 Cf. Hendel (1997), 212-24. (1995). 58 Since the time of writing it emerges that Mettinger has modified his position and now thinks it is, on balance, slightly more likely that the bull image did indeed symbolize Yahweh. See Mettinger (1997), 190-2. 59 Haran (1978); Hurvitz (1982); Milgrom (1991), 3-13.

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employed have been shown to be invalid.* Some of the institutions are admittedly pre-exilic—for example, Deut. 24: 8 implies priestly rules about leprosy, such as we find in Le¥. 13-14, and. the primitive scapegoat ritual of Lev, 16 was presumably not simply invented at a late date. But P in its final form can hardly be pre-exilic. Thus, for example, advocates of a pre-exilic P have offered no satisfactory explanation of the fact that there is in P a division between priests and Levites, elsewhere confined to postexilic literature (cf. Chronicles), fully explicable as a spin-off from the aftermath of Josiah's reform (cf. Ezek. 44), Again, the priests in P are the sons of Aaron, as in the post-exilic period (cf. Chronicles again), in contrast to Deuteronomy, where all the Levites are priests; even in the exilic Ezek. 44 the priests are the Zadokites, not quite identical to the post-exilic reality such as P reflects. Furthermore, of all the Pentateuchal sources, P is the only one to employ the spring calendar, most naturally understood as appropriated from the Babylonians around the time of the exile, in contrast to the autumnal calendar followed by the other sources, which reflects the natural seasonal cycle of Canaan. Finally, cult centralization is taken more for granted in P than in D; P lacks D's concent with the high places and never mentions the Asherim, which were a feature of them. The traditional early post-exilic date of P has gained fresh illumination from a recent sociological study by Daniel Smith, entitled The Religion of the Landless,i*1 who has shown that in our own century experience of exile and the transportation of populations has tended to lead to a growth of ritualistic practices. This helps explain the fact that from the exile onwards the Sabbath, dietary laws and circumcision gained increased significance as badges of Jewish identity. In considering cultic law, we shall concentrate on the dietary laws, on which particular interest has focused, in recent decades. First, the command not to boil a kid in its mother's milk (Exod. 23:19; 34: 26; Deut. 14: 21) lies at the basis of the later talmudic law prohibiting the mixture of meat and dairy products (b Hullin, U3a-116a). The period under review here has seen the rejection of one view very popular during preceding decades, as well as the proposal of alternative suggestions, Maimonid.es' view (The Guide for the Perplexed, 3.48) that the law was directed at a pagan practice appeared to be supported by a Ugaritic text (KTlP 1.23.14) that was translated as 'Coo[k a ki]d in milk, a lamb (?) in butter'. However, this view is now generally rejected, since it is clear that the translation is unjustified.62 Even if fWzwere correct, it would mean 'slaughter', not 'cook', but it is now clear that the reading is tb, not tbh. Secondly, there is no reference to the mother. Thirdly, annh probably means 'mint', not 'butter', and the parallel gd might therefore mean 'coriander', as in Hebrew (it is 61 *° Blenkinsopp (19%). (1989). 63 This has been frequently noted. The most detailed discussion is in Ratner and Zuckerman (1986).

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Ugaritic gdy, not gd, that elsewhere means 'kid')- All in all, therefore, it seems as if the proposed Ugaritic parallel was reconstructed out of the biblical text! The original purpose of the biblical law is still unclear. In spite of the rejection of the Ugaritic parallel, it is still possible that a Canaanite cultic custom is being rejected all the same.63 On the other hand, M. Haran64 has revived the view of Philo that the purpose of the law is humanitarian. Again, O. Keel,65 who has provided an iconographical study (as he has of many other Old Testament problems), claims that the law derives from a Canaanite taboo against violating the life-sustaining and divinely ordained nurture inherent in all human beings. Finally, somewhat related to this, J. Milgrom66 proposes that the prohibition is simply another instance of the biblical rejection of the commingling of opposites (the principles of life and death). The distinguished anthropologist Mary Douglas has made various contributions to the understanding of the dietary laws in Lev. 11/Deut. 14. Although her primary study in Purity and Danger was published in 1966,67 her subsequent modifications became widely publicized in the period under review68—and what is more, the time of her influence and reactions to it have primarily been in this period. For example, J. R. Porter and G. W. Wenham69 have given her uncritical acceptance in their Leviticus commentaries. Ultimately, her own position has proved untenable, but her work has been a stimulus to others. Her basic position is that the system in Lev. 11 /Deut. 14 is to be seen as primary: clean beasts are those that correspond to the criteria and unclean beasts are those which are anomalous. However, against Douglas, the weight of evidence suggests that in many instances creatures were deemed clean or unclean first and criteria were later found to account for the situation. Thus, no criteria at all for the birds are given, but simply a list of birds deemed unclean. Or again, some of the criteria given do not quite accurately fit the animals in question, for example the hyrax, hare, and camel. Douglas herself misunderstands the Hebrew text of Lev, 11: 27 when she claims that certain creatures are regarded as going on their hands—'al kappayim rather means 'on their paws'. In her later work Douglas came to see the pig and other borderline creatures as abominable in a special sense, but there is no justification for distinguishing between abominable creatures and unclean creatures generally. Further, seres, 'swarming creatures', does not define a particular class of creatures by virtue of their 'mode of propulsion'. The most prolific and. learned writer on the cultic theology of the Priestly writer has been the Jewish scholar Jacob Milgrom. With regard to the 63

This is the view of Craigie (1983), 76. «5 (1980). 67 Douglas (1966), 41-57. ** Porter (1976); Wenham (1979).

M

(1979). «» (1985). <* Douglas (1975), 27-46, 249-75, 276-318.

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dietary laws70 Milgrom argues that they serve an essentially ethical purpose. Following in the Jewish tradition of Phllo and Maimonides, he sees the purpose of the dietary laws as being to limit the types of animals killed, for eating. But limiting the types of animals killed would not necessarily limit the total amount of meat eaten, and Milgrom's view is difficult to square with the large number of animal sacrifices that P prescribes for the cult—something that may be described as a cross between a cathedral and an abattoir! Finally, as Walter Houston has observed, 'the designation of the forbidden species as "unclean", "abhorrent", "abominable" is not the most obvious way of teaching reverence for life',71 The most thorough study of the subject of clean and unclean beasts has come from Walter Houston, Purity and Monotheism: Clean and Unclean Beasts in Biblical Law, Houston's careful, thorough, and meticulously argued study argues inter alia that the broad outline of the dietary laws was not unique to the jews but was common throughout Syria-Palestine. Thus, the taboo on the pig is attested, in Lucian of Samosata, De Dea Syria, 54 of the cult of Atargatis in Syria (second century AD), and the Phoenicians are mentioned as abstainers from pork in Porphyry, De Abstinentia 1.14 and Herodian, 1.6.22 (both third century AD). The Ugaritic texts and the Marseilles tariff (KAI69, end of third century BC) show no evidence of pig sacrifices. Again, Houston shows from archaeological evidence that the pig was not much cultivated, in Palestine in comparison with sheep and cattle. As Houston says,72 'It can be seen from our figures that pig production and consumption, already quite low, suffered a marked downturn at the beginning of the Iron Age, and remained, high (or got higher) only in a few places that are certainly not Israelite.' Natural theology Symptomatic of the reaction against Barthian theology and the general emphasis on Heilsgeschichte and covenant has been the development of an interest in natural theology in the Old Testament—that is, a realization that the Old Testament shows awareness of God and his ways apart from direct revelation.73 This is perhaps most obvious in the wisdom literature, where the sages commonly appeal neither to the law of the Lord, like the priests, nor to the word, of the Lord, like the prophets, but to general reason and experience. This was well pointed, out by J. J. Collins in an important but little-known article in 1977,74 which rightly stresses that wisdom is akin to natural theology and complementary rather than contradictory of other more directly revelational Old Testament emphases. n

Milgrom (1983), 75-83; (1990); (1991), 704-42. (1993), 77; cf. Firmage (1990), 195, it. 24; Wright (1991). 72 (1993), 137. 73 Schmid (1974), 9, provides for the first time that I am aware the term 'natural theologv' 74 in a modern work of biblical theology. (1977). 71

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The only criticism I have is that the strict act-consequence notion found in the book of Proverbs does not wholly correspond to observed reality but owes something to dogma, though we may note that later wisdom in the books of Job and Ecclesiastes was self-correcting in this regard, highlighting the reality of innocent suffering. John Barton has taken up the general idea of natural law and theology with special reference to the prophets in a book and in a couple of articles. In his book Amos' Oracles against the Nations75 Barton argues convincingly that when the prophet Amos condemns the foreign nations in chs. 1-2, he presupposes a kind of international morality ('international customary law')—standards generally recognized by all men. No one needed a blinding revelation, from heaven to tell them, that war crimes were wrong! Barton develops his ideas further in his articles on 'Natural Law and Poetic Justice in the Old Testament', and 'Ethics in Isaiah of Jerusalem'.76 The most comprehensive study of the subject has been offered by James Barr in Biblical Faith and Natural Theology,77 a work not confined to the Old Testament, but embracing the New Testament (Acts, Romans), the apocryphal Wisdom of Solomon and. containing considerable debate and interaction with Karl Earth, who was notorious for his opposition to natural theology, which he claimed was anti-biblical. So far as the Old Testament is concerned, Barr builds on the work of Collins, et al., with regard to a natural theology in wisdom and of J. Barton with regard to the prophets. In addition, he detects attitudes akin to natural theology in the creation psalms 19 and 104, as well as in Ps, 119. Further, he notes areas in Hebrew law where indebtedness to the laws of other nations or the application of common sense points to natural theology rather than direct divine revelation. The trend to do justice to wisdom and natural theology in the Old Testament is fully to be welcomed. With this has gone increased interest in the subject of Yahweh as creator, a subject that tended to be downplayed in earlier scholarship. At the same time one may argue that in some respects the pendulum has moved too far from the earlier position. It may be argued that in terms of space devoted to it in the Old Testament as a whole, the special relationship of Yahweh to Israel (whether called covenant or not) has greater centrality than that of Yahweh and creation. Universalism and exclusivism The attitude of the Jews to outsiders was a matter of debate in the exilic and post-exilic period, and 'Universalism and Exclusivism' is a useful heading under which to consider a number of studies in recent years.78 For example, with regard to Deutero-Isaiah, there has been continuing 75 78

(1980), » Barton (1979) and (1981). ™ (1993). In addition to works listed below, see also Brett (1996) and Goldenberg (1997).

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debate over the existence and extent of universalism in the work. Everyone now rejects the earlier view of H. H, Rowley that Deutero-Isaiah was a missionary prophet expecting Jews to go out and. convert the gentiles, and accepts that the prophet's main concern was with the coming deliverance of Israel. Debate turns on the question of whether this was all or whether Deutero-Isaiah also envisaged the salvation of the nations in some sense, even though they are to be subordinate to Israel, D. W. Van Winkle and A. Gelston79 have made a number of good points in favour of the latter interpretation. Whilst both accept that the prophet anticipates the nations' voluntary submission to Israel (Isa. 45:14; 49: 17), they point out that the prophet does nevertheless envisage their 'salvation'. Thus, Van Winkle in particular pointed out that in Tsa. 51: 5, where the nations 'wait' and 'hope' for Yahweh's salvation and reign, the former verb (yahal) is always elsewhere employed in a positive sense, and the second verb (cjiiwa) is elsewhere used only positively in Deutero-Isaiah (Isa. 40: 31; 49: 23), so there can be no question of the nations waiting in dread, as some had claimed. Again, Gelston has shown that Isa. 45: 22's call to the ends of the earth to turn and be saved must have reference to the nations, not the Jews in the diaspora, since the people addressed, 'survivors of the nations' (p'lttS haggdyitn, Isa. 45: 20), must refer to the nations themselves (cf. Judg. 12: 4f.), their idolatry (Isa. 45: 21) suggests foreigners, and the reference in Isa. 45: 23, 'To me every knee shall bow, every tongue shall swear' indicates something universal and not merely Jewish. Until fairly recently it was universally agreed, that the Chronicler was responsible not only for Chronicles but also for the books of Ezra and Nehemiah. In recent years this has been challenged by scholars such as Sara Japhet and H. G. M. Williamson.80 One of the more compelling arguments is the contrast in their attitudes to mixed marriages. Thus, whilst Neh. 13: 26 condemns Solomon for being led astray into idolatry by his foreign wives, this is unmentioned in Chronicles. Again, whereas Ezra and Nehemiah vehemently opposed mixed marriages (Ezra 9—10; Neh. 8), Chronicles has a whole number which are recorded without disapproval, including David himself, the hero of the work (1 Chr. 3: 2). There is also greater openness to the north in Chronicles. Whereas the help of the northerners in rebuilding the temple is rejected in Ezra 4:2, Hezekiah welcomes the northerners to participate in his Passover celebrations in Jerusalem (2 Chr. 30). Although the history of the Northern Kingdom is omitted, the door is thus left open for the northerners' rehabilitation, and Chronicles still regards the north as part of Israel. 2 Chr. 28: 8-15 even goes out of its way to commend the northerners for their humanitarian act in assisting Judaean captives taken in war by the Northern Kingdom (thus probably forming the basis for the parable of the Good Samaritan in Luke 10: 30-7). 7¥

Van Winkle (1985); Gelston (1992).

m

Japhet (1977); Williamson (1977a).

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Mary Douglas81 has pointed out too that the Priestly writer, for all his obsession with purity, nowhere outlaws mixed marriages (Ezra and Nehemiah appeal not to P but to Deuteronomy, cf, Ezra 9: 1—2 [Deut 7: 1-6]; Neh. 13: 1-3 [Deut, 23: 4-7, ET 3-6]); indeed, in Num. 31: 18 the Israelites are actually commanded by Moses to take Midianite virgins. Nevertheless, Douglas's attempt to show that P in Leviticus and Numbers was consciously polemicizing against the anti-mixed marriage policies of Ezra and Nehemiah can only be described as maverick: she nowhere engages with the fact that P is generally held, to date from a time earlier than Ezra and Nehemiah, and the allusions which she sees to Ezra and Nehemiah are implausibly cryptic. For example, she believes that Numbers is a cryptic attack on Nehemiah's xenophobia, with Balaam, symbolizing Nehemiah and the ass representing the Israelites! Another maverick theory is M. D. Goulder's view that the Song of Songs is 'a fourth-century liberal tract, whose purpose is to win acceptance for foreign marriages'.82 We may grant that the writer must have been a liberal who tolerated mixed marriages, since the woman is 'dark and comely' (1: 5), but it is going too far to claim that this was the whole purpose of the book, for the woman's being a foreigner can hardly claim to be the central theme of the work. The book of Jonah is very widely agreed to have a universalistic purpose. Attempts made in our period to question this have proved unsuccessful. Thus, R. E. Clements83 claims that Nineveh is in no way symbolic of foreign nations and. that the purpose of the book was simply to teach the possibility of repentance. However, as I have argued, elsewhere,84 the possibility of repentance is not a lesson which Jonah (and hence the reader) is being taught, for Jonah 4: 2 makes it clear that the prophet believed in this already, which, was why he did not want to preach to the Ninevites in the first place. Rather, it is sympathy for the Ninevites in their repentance that Jonah is being encouraged to feel (Jonah 4; 10—11). A different attempt to deny the universalistic purpose of Jonah has been made by G. I. Emmerson,85 who claimed that Jonah is annoyed when Nineveh is spared not because he is anti-gentile, but because he does not like being a false prophet. However, amongst other objections,86 it is difficult to believe that any post-exilic Jew could have viewed the Assyrians (who had destroyed the Northern Kingdom) with neutrality. Another short work that has often been thought to embody a universalist message is the book of Ruth. It was first proposed by L. Bertholdt in 1816 that this short story is a reaction against the policies of Nehemiah and Ezra with regard to mixed marriages. In more recent years, including 81

82 (1993). (1986), 77. » (1974). Day (1990), 45. « (1976). 86 See further objections to this and other non-universalist interpretations of Jonah in Day (1990), 46f. 84

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the period under review here, this view has tended to go into disfavour. It is one of the curiosities of our age that when there has been such a strong tendency on the part of some scholars to date many Old Testament works late, a considerable number of scholars who write on Ruth have chosen to date it to the pre-exilic period;87 this, in spite of the fact that all the other works included in the Writings are undoubtedly post-exilic (or in the case of Lamentations, exilic) or at any rate post-exilic in their final form (Psalms, Proverbs), so that Ruth would stand out like a sore thumb if it were pre-exilic. If, then, Ruth is post-exilic, it must date after the time when Deut, 23: 4-7 (ET 3-6) had debarred Moabites from the temple and not so far from the time when Nehemiah and Ezra were banning marriages with them. The fact that the writer repeatedly emphasizes that Ruth was a Moabitess (cf. 1: 4, 22; 2: 2, 6, 10, 21; 4: 5, 10) surely is significant and indicates that he is trying to counter anti-Moabite prejudice in some way. Apocalyptic In recent decades much work has been done on the subject of apocalyptic. At the time of the previous SOTS survey volume, Tradition and Interpretation, the work of Paul Hanson, The Dawn of Apocalyptic, had been published, but it appeared too late to be discussed.88 Hanson theorized, that the apocalyptic movement arose among disinherited visionaries who felt alienated from the priestly establishment in Jerusalem. There has been a general consensus that Hanson's reconstruction is rather simplistic and overpolarizes the situation in post-exilic Judah. The beginnings of protoapocalyptic can be detected in Ezekiel and Zech. 1-8, yet in Ezekiel (who was a priest), or perhaps rather his disciples, we find a positive view of the Jerusalem cult in chs. 40-48, and proto-Zechariah was actually a supporter of Joshua, the high priest. On the other hand, the Chronicler, who clearly reflects the point of view of the Jerusalem cult, seems not, after all, to have been lacking in eschatological hope,89 but actually adds references to the eternity of the Davidic dynasty not in his deuteronomistic Vorlage, which, writing as he did in the Persian period, must reflect some element of eschatological expectation. Recently, Stephen Cook90 has gone so far as to propose that apocalyptic actually arose in priestly circles, a thesis which still needs to be evaluated. Another sociological approach is that of Robert Carroll.91 In his book When Prophecy Failed, Carroll took up L. Festinger's model of cognitive dissonance to help understand the rise of (proto-)apocalyptic. This term alludes to the way in which groups reformulate their expectations when 87 m m

Campbell (1975), 23-8; Sasson (1979), 251; Niditch (1985), 451; Nielsen (1997), 28-9. (1975). See Williamson (1977b). *> (1995). 'n (1979),

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the original expectation does not come to pass, applied here specifically with regard to post-exilic prophetic expectations. This has generally been thought to be a useful model. There has been continuing debate about the precise definition of apocalyptic. Here J. J. Collins' long definition has been widely quoted: 'a genre of revelatory literature with a narrative framework, in which a revelation is mediated by an otherworldly being to a human recipient, disclosing a transcendent reality which is both temporal, insofar as it envisages eschatological salvation, and spatial, insofar as it involves another, supernatural world',92 The spatial dimension of apocalyptic has been especially emphasized by C. C. Rowland,93 who in The Open Heaven has criticized the tendency to see apocalyptic simply in terms of eschatology; he pointed out that in addition to the revelation of future eschatological mysteries, part of apocalyptic is concerned with the revelation of unseen mysteries generally, as for example in 1 Enoch. There is, therefore, it is claimed, a vertical as well as a horizontal dimension to apocalyptic. This is certainly true, though it may be argued that in the specifically biblical apocalypses and proto-apocalyptic texts the eschaton is the main centre of interest. Reference was made above to 1 Enoch. Increased, interest in this book has been spurred by the discovery of fragments of the Aramaic original of the work at Qumran published by J. T. Milik.94 Especially important from our point of view is the fact that, contrary to the older tendency to see Daniel as the earliest full-blown apocalypse, the Astronomical Enoch (chs. 72-82) and the Book of the Watchers (chs. 1-36) have proved to be even earlier, the oldest fragments of the former dating from the late third or early second century BC and the oldest fragments of the latter dating from the first half of the second century BC. Probably both these works were extant in some form already in the third century BC. There has also been a growing recognition of the importance of the Mesopotamian influence on the development of apocalyptic. This is highlighted in the studies of J. C. VanderKam and H. Kvanvig on the Enoch tradition, which is strongly rooted in the tradition of the Mesopotamian seer Ertmeduranki.95 The Mesopotamian contribution to apocalyptic has also been noted in other ways. For example, there are striking parallels between Dan. 8: 23-5; 11: 3-45 and three so-called Akkadian apocalypses, and W. G. Lambert96 has concluded that 'it is certainly possible, perhaps even probable, that the author of Daniel adopted the style of a traditional Babylonian genre for his own purposes'. Again, there has been continuing recognition of the validity of the claims for influence from Mesopotamian mantic wisdom on Jewish apocalyptic:9'1' this may be said to be 'a Collins, (1979), 9. 93 (1982). ** (1976). * VanderKam (1984); Kvanvig (1988). % (1978), 16. See also 9-16,18-20. *' See the recent survey of Mastin (1995).

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the permanent spin-off from von Rad's earlier suggestion that apocalyptic was indebted to wisdom, a claim, admittedly that failed to do justice to the prophetic contribution to apocalyptic. On the other hand, during the period covered by this survey, there has been growing support for the view that the Son of Man imagery in Dan. 7 is rooted in ancient Canaanite symbolism, as originally argued, by J. A, Emerton, and that the figure is to be identified with the archangel Michael.98 Bibliography ALBERTZ, R. (1992), Religionsgeschichte Israels in alttestamentlicher Zeit (2 vols.) (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht), ET A History of Israelite Religion in the Old Testament Period (London; SCM Press, 1994). ALBREKTSON, B, (1967), History and the Gods (CBOT 1; Lund: C. W. K. Gleerup). ASSMANN, J. (1997), Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). ASTOUR, M. C. (1979), 'Yahweh in Egyptian Topographic Texts', mFeschrift Elmar Edel, ed. M. Gorg and E, Pusch (Agypten und Altes Testament, 1; Bamberg: M.G6rg), 17-34. BACHLI, O. (1977), Amphiktyonie im Allen Testament (TZ Sonderband 6; Basel: G. Reinhardt). BARKER, M. (1992), The Great Angel: A Study of Israel's Second God (London: SPCK). BARR, J. (1993), Biblical Faith and Natural Theology (Oxford: Clarendon Press). BAJRSTAD, H. M. (1984), The Religious Polemics of Amos (SVT 34; Leiden: E. J. Brill), BARTON, J, (1979), 'Natural Law and Poetic Justice in the Old Testament', JTS 30 n.s., 1-14. — (1980), Amos' Oracles against the Nations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). — (1981), 'Ethics in Isaiah of Jerusalem', JTS 32 n.s., 1-18. BLENKINSOPP, J. (1996), 'An Assessment of the Alleged Pre-exilic Date of the Priestly Material in the Pentateuch', ZAW108, 495-518. B LOCH-SMITH, E. M. (1992), Judahite Burial Practices and Beliefs about the Dead (JSOTS 123; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press). BRETT, M. (1996), Ethnicity and the Bible (Biblical Interpretation Series 19; Leiden: E. J. Brill). CAMPBELL, E. F. (1975), Ruth (AB 7; Garden City: Doubleday). CARROLL, R. P. (1979), When Prophecy Failed (London: SCM Press). CLEMENTS, R. E. (1974), The Purpose of the Book of Jonah', Congress Volume Edinburgh 1974 (SVT 28; Leiden: E. J. Brill), 16-28. — (1989), Deuteronomy (OTG; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press). COGAN, M. (1974), Imperialism and Religion (SBLMS19; Missoula: Scholars Press). COLLINS, J. J. (1977), The Precedent for Natural Theology', JAAR 45/1 Supplement, March 1977, B: 35-67. * See Day (1985), 151-78 and Collins (1993), 268-91, 304-10, developing the arguments of Emerton (1958).

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COLLINS, J. J. (1979), 'Towards the Morphology of a Genre', in Apocalypse: The Morphology of a Genre, ed. J. j . Collins (Senteia. 14; Atlanta: Scholars Press), 1-20. (1993), Daniel (Hermeneia; Minneapolis: Fortress Press). COOK, S. L. (1995), Prophecy and Apocalypticism (Minneapolis: Fortress Press). CRAIGIE, P. C. (1983), Ugarit and the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: W.B. Eerdmans). CROSS, F. M. (1973), Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). — (1988), 'Reuben, First-born of Jacob', ZAW100 Supplement, 46-65. CROSS, F. M. and FREBDMAN, D. N. (1953), 'Josiah's Revolt against Assyria', ]NES 12, 56-8. CRYER, F. H. (1994), Divination in Ancient Israel and its Near Eastern Environment (JSOTS 142; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press). DAY, J. (1985), God's Conflict with the Dragon and the Sea: Echoes of a Canaanite Myth in the Old Testament (UCOP 35; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). — (1986a), 'Asherah in the Hebrew Bible and Northwest Semitic Literature', JBL 105,385-408. (1986b), 'Pre-Deuteronomic Allusions to the Covenant in Hosea and Psalm Ixxviii', VT36,1-12. — (1989), Mokch: A God of Human Sacrifice in the Old Testament (UCOP 41; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). (1990), 'Problems in the Interpretation of the Book of Jonah', QTS 26, 32-47. DE GEUS, C. H. J. (1976), The Tribes of Israel (Studia Semitica Neerlandica 18; Assen & Amsterdam: Van Gorcum). DE MOOR, J. C. (1990), The Rise of Yahitrism (Leuven: Leuven University Press and Peelers) (2nd edn. 1997). DBVER, W. G. (1969-70), 'Iron Age Epigraphic Material from the Area of Khirbet el-K6m', HUCA 40-41,139-204. (1987), The Contribution of Archaeology to the Study of Canaanite and Early Israelite Religion', in Miller, Hanson and McBride (eds.), 209-47. DIETRICH, M. and LORETZ, O. (1992), 'Jahwe und seine Aschera' (Ugaritisch-Biblische Literatur 9; Miinster: Ugarit-Verlag). DIETRICH, W. and KLOPFENSTEIN, M. A. (1994) (eds.), Ein Gott allein? (OBO 139; Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht). DOUGLAS, M. (1966), Purity and Danger (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul). (1975), Implicit Meanings (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul). — (1993), In the Wilderness: The Doctrine of Defilement in the Book of Numbers (JSOTS 158; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press). EISSFELDT, O. (1935), Molk als Opferbegriff im Puniachen und Hebraischen und das Ende ties Gottes Moloch (Beitrlge zur Religionsgeschichte des Altertums 3; Halle (Saale): Max Niemeyer Verlag). EMERTON, J. A. (1958), The Origin of the Son of Man Imagery', JTS 9 n.s., 225-42. — (1.982), 'New Light on Israelite Religion: The Interpretation of the Inscriptions from Kuntillet Ajrud', ZA W 94, 2-20.' EMMERSON, G.I. (1976), 'Another Look at Jonah', ExpT 88,86-8. FIRMAGE, E. B. (1990), The Biblical Dietary Laws and the Concept of Holiness', in Studies in the Pentateuch, ed, J. A. Emerton (SVT 41; Leiden: E. J. Brill), 177-208. FREVEL, C. (1995), Aschera und der Ausschliesslichkeitsanspruch YHWHs (2 vols.) (Weinheim: Beltz Athenaum Verlag).

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GELSTON, A, (1992), 'Universalism in Second Isaiah', JTS 43 n.s., 377-98.

GNUSE, R. K, (1997), No Other Cods: Emergent Monotheism in Israel {JSOTS 241; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press). GOLDENBEHG, R. (1997), The Nations that Know Thee not. Ancient Jewish Attitudes to Other Religions (The Biblical Seminar 52; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press), GoTTWAto, N. K. (1980), The Tribes ofYahixh: A Sociology of the Religion of Liberated Israel, 1250-1050 B.C.E. (London: SCM Press). GOUI.DER, M. D. (1986), The Song of Fourteen Songs (JSOTS 36; Sheffield: Sheffield

Academic Press). HAAG, H. (1985) (ed.), Gott, der Einzige: Zur Entstehung des Monotheisnms in Israel (Quaestiones disputae 104; Freiburg: Herder). HANSON, P. D. (1975), The Damn of Apocalyptic (Philadelphia: Fortress Press). HARAN, M. (1978), Temples and Temple-Service in Ancient Israel (Oxford: Clarendon Press). — (1979), 'Seething a Kid in its Mother's Milk', fJS 30,23-36. HAYMAN, A. P. (1991), 'Monotheism—A Misused Word in Jewish Studies', JJS 42, 1-15. HBIDER, G. C. (1985), The Cult of Molek (JSOTS 43; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press). HENDEL, R. S. (1997), 'Aniconism and Anthropomorphism in Ancient Israel', in The Image and the Book, ed. K. Van der Toorn (Leuven: Peelers), 205-28. HOUSTON, W. (1993), Purity and Monotheism: Clean and Unclean Animals in Biblical Law (JSOTS 140; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press). HURVITZ, A. (1982), A Linguistic Study of the Relationship between the. Priestly Source

and the Book of Ezekiel (Cahiers de la Revue Biblique 20; Paris: J. Gabalda). JAPHET, S. (1977), The Ideology of the Book of Chronicles and its Place in Biblical Thought (Hebrew; Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik), ET (1989) same title (Beitrage zur Erforschung des Alten Testaments und des antiken Judentums 9; Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang). JEFFERS, A. (1996), Magic and 'Divination in Ancient Palestine and Syria (Studies in the History and Culture of the Ancient Near East 8; Leiden: E. J. Brill). KEEL, O. (1980), Das Bocklem in der Milch seiner Mutter und Verwandtes (OBO 33; Freiburg and Gottingen: Universitatsverlag and Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht). KEBL, O. (1980) (ed.), Monotheismus im alien Israel und seiner ilmioelt (Biblische Beitrlge 14; Fribourg: Schweizerisches Katholisches Bibelwerk). KEEL, O. and UEHLINGER, C. (1994), 'Jahwe und die Sonnengottheit von Jerusalem', in Dietrich and Klopfenstein, 269-306. KVANVIG, H. S. (1988), Roofs of Apocalyptic (WMANT 61; Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag). LAATO, A. (1992), Josiah and David Redivivus (CBOT 33; Stockholm: Almqvist & Wicksell). LAMBERT, W. G. (1978), The Background of Jewish Apocalyptic (Ethel M. Wood Lecture; London: Athlone Press). (1992), 'Prostitution', in Aussenseiter und Randgruppen: Beitrage zu einer Sozialgeschichte des Alien Orients, ed. V, Haas (Xenia: Konstanzer althistorische Vortrage und Forschungen 32; Konstanz: Universitatsverlag Konstanz), 127-57. LANG, B. (1981), 'Die Jahwe-allein-Bewegung', in Dereinzige Gott (Munich: Kosel), 47-83.

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LANG, B. (1983), 'The Yahweh-Alone-Movement and the Making of Jewish Monotheism', in Monotheism and the Prophetic Minority (Sheffield: Almond Press), 1.3-59, LEMAIRE, A, (1994), 'Deesses et dieux de Syrie-Palestine d'apres les inscriptions (c. 1000-500 av. n. e.)', in Dietrich and Klopfenstein, 127-58. LEMCHE, N. P. (1991)/The Development of Israelite Religion in the Light of Recent Studies on the Early History of Israel', in Congress Volume Leuven 1989, ed, J. A. Emerton (SVT 43; Leiden: E. J. Brill), 97-115. LEVIN, C. (1984), 'Joschija im deuteronomistischen Geschichtswerk', ZAW 96, 351-71. LEWIS, T. J. (1989), Cults of the Dead in Ancient Israel and Ugarit (HSM 39; Atlanta: Scholars Press). LOHFINK, N. (1987), 'The Cult Reform of Josiah of Judah: 2 Kings 22-23 as a Source for the History of Israelite Religion', in Miller, Hanson and McBride (eds.), 459-75, LORETZ, O. (1990), Leberschau, Siindenbock, Asasel in Ugarit und Israel (UgaritischBiblische Literotur; Altenberge: CIS-Verlag). MCCARTHY, D. J. (1972), 'b'rtt in Old Testament History and Theology', Bib 53, 110-21. McKAY, J. W. (1973), Religion in Judah under the Assyrians (SBT 2nd series 26; London: SCM Press). MAIER, W. A., Ill (1986), 'Aserah: Extrabiblical Evidence (HSM 37; Atlanta: Scholars Press). M^ASTIN, B. A. (1995), 'Wisdom and Daniel', in Wisdom in Ancient Israel: Essays in Honour of]. A, Emerton, ed. J. Day, R, P. Gordon, and H. G. M. Williamson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 161-9. MA YES, A. D. H. (1974), Israel in the Period of the Judges (SBT 2nd series, 29; London: SCM Press). (1979), Deuteronomy (NCB; London: Oliphants). MESHEL, Z. (1978), Kuntittet 'Ajrud: A Religious Centre front the Time of the Judaean Monarchy on the Bonier of Sinai (Catalogue no. 175; Jerusalem; Israel Museum). MBTTINGER, T. N. D. (1990), The Elusive Essence: YHWH, El and Baal and the Distinctiveness of Israelite Faith', in Die Hebmische Bibel und ihre zweifache Nachgeschichte, ed. E. Blum, C. Macholz, E. W. Stegemann (FS R. Rendtorff; Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag), 393-417. — (1995), No Graven Image? (CBOT 42; Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell). — (1997), 'Israelite Aniconism: Developments and Origins', in The Image and the Book, ed. K. Van der Toorn (Leuven: Peelers), 173-204. MILGROM, J. (1983), Studies in Cuttic Theology and Terminology (Leiden: E. J. Brill). (1985), '"You Shall not Boil a Kid in its Mother's Milk": An Archaeological Myth Destroyed', Bible Review 1,3,48-55. — (1990), 'Ethics and Ritual: the Foundations of the Biblical Dietary Laws', in Religion and Law: Biblical, Jewish and Islamic Perspectives, ed. E. B. Firmage, ]. W. Welch and B. Weiss (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns), 159-91. — (1991), Leviticus .1-16 (AB 3; New York: Doubleday). MILIK, J, T. (1976) (ed.), The Books of Enoch: Aramaic Fragments of Qutnran Cave 4 (Oxford; Clarendon Press). MILLER, P.O., HANSON, P. D., and MCBRIDE, S. D. (1987) (eds,), Ancient Israelite Religion: Essays in Honor of Frank Moore Cross (Philadelphia: Fortress Press).

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Mosis, R. (1973), Untersuchungen zur Theologie des chranistischen Geschictitsiverkes (Freiburger theologische Studien 92; Freiburg: Herder). NICHOLSON, E. W, (1986a), God and His People: Covenant and Theology in the Old Testament (Oxford: Clarendon Press), — (1986b), 'Israelite religion in the pre-exilic period', in A Word in Season: Essays in Honour of William McKane, ed. J. D. Martin and P. R. Davies (JSOTS 42; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press). NIPITCH, S. (1985), 'Legends of Wise Heroes and Heroines. II. Ruth', in The Hebrew Bible and its Modern Interpreters, ed. D. A. Knight and G. Tucker (Philadelphia: Fortress Press). NIEHR, H. (1990), Der hochstc Gott (BZAW 190; Berlin: W. de Gruyter), NIELSEN, K. (1997), Ruth (OIL; London: SCM Press). ODEN, R. A. (1987), The. Bible without Theology (San Francisco: Harper & Row). OLVAN, S. M. (1988), Asherah and the Cult of Yahuxh in Israel (SBLMS 34; Atlanta: Scholars Press). PARDEE, D. (19%), 'Marzihu, Kispu and the Ugaritic Fertility Cult: A Minimalist View', in Ugarit, Religion and Culture, Proceedings of the International Colloquium on Ugarit, Religion and Culture, Edinburgh, July 1994. Essays Presented in Honour of Professor John C. L. Gibson, ed. N. Wyatt, W. G. E. Watson and J. B Lloyd (Miinster: Ugarit-Verlag), 273-87. PERLITT, L. (1969), BundestJieologie im Alien Testament (WMANT 36; NeukirchenVluyn: Neukirchener Verlag). PBTTEY, R. J. (1990), Asherah: Goddess of Israel (American University Studies, series VII: Theology and Religion 74; New York: Peter Lang). POPE, M. H. (1977), Song of Songs (AB 7C; Garden City: Doubleday). — (1981), The Cult of the Dead at Ugarit', in Ugarit in Retrospect, ed. G. D. Young (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns), 159-79. PORTER, ]. R. (1976), Leviticus (Cambridge Bible Commentary; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). RATNER, R. and ZUCKERMAN, B. (1986), '"A kid in milk"?: New Photographs of KTU 1.23, line 14', HUCA 57,15-60. ROWLAND, C. C. (1982), The Open Heaven (London: SPCK). SASSON, J. M. (1979), Ruth (Baltimore and. London: The Johns Hopkins University Press). SCHMID, H. (1974), Altorierttalische Welt in der alttestamentlichen Theologie (Zurich: Theologischer Verlag). SCHMIDT, B. B. (1994), Israel's Beneficent Dead (Forschungen zum Alien Testament 11; Tubingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck]). SHANKS, H. and MEINHARDT, J. (1997) (eds.), Aspects of Monotheism—How God is One (Washington, DC: Biblical Archaeology Society). SMITH, D. L. (1989), The Religion of the Landless: the Social Context of the Babylonian Exile (Bloomington: Meyer-Stone Books). SMITH, M. S. (1990), The Early History of God (San Francisco: Harper & Row). SMITH, MORTON (1971), Palestinian Parties and Politics that Shaped the Old Testament (New York: Columbia University Press; reprinted London: SCM Press, 1987). SPIECKERMANN, H. (1982), Juda und Assur in der Sargonidenzeit (FRLANT 129; Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht).

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SPRONK, K. (1982), Beatific Afterlife in Ancient Israel and in the Ancient Near East (AC)AT 219; Neu.kirehen-V1u.yn: Neukitchener Verlag). STAHLI H.-P. (1985), So/are Elements im ]ahweglauben des Altai Testaments (OBO 66; Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, and Freiburg: Universitatsverlag). TAYLOR, J. GLEN (1993), Yafnoeh and the Sun (JSOTS 111; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press). TIGAY, J. (1993), Yo« Shall Have no Other Gods: Israelite Religion in the Light of Hebrew Inscriptions (HSM 31; Atlanta: Scholars Press), TmoppER, J. (1989), Nekromantie: Totenbefragung im Alien Orient und im Allen Testament (AOAT 223; Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag), VAN DAM, C. (1997), The Urini and Thummim (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns). VANDERKAM, J. C. (1984), Enoch and the Growth of an Apocalyptic Tradition (CBQ Monograph series 1.6; Washington, DC: Catholic Biblical Association of America). VAN DER TOORN, K. (1990), The Nature of the Biblical Teraphim in the Light of the Cuneiform Evidence', CBQ 52, 2(33-22. VAN WINKLE, D. W. (1985), The Relationship of the Nations to Yahweh and to Israel in Isaiah xl-lv', VT 35, 446-58. WBI.LHAUSEN, J. (1885), Prolegomena to the History of Israel (Edinburgh: A. & C. Black). WENHAM, G. W. (1979), The Book of Leviticus (NICOT; London: Hodder and Stougliton). WIGGINS, S. A. (1993), A Reassessment of 'Agherah' (AOAT 235; Neukirchen-VIuyn: Neukirchener Verlag). WILLIAMSON, H. G. M. (1977a), Israel in the Books of Chronicles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). — (1977b), 'Eschatology in Chronicles', TynBul 28,115-54, (1982), 1 and 2 Chronicles (NCB; Grand Rapids: W. B. Eerdmans, and London: Marshall, Morgan. & Scott). WINTER, U. (1983), Frau und Gottin (OBO 53; Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, and Freiburg: Universitatsverlag). WRIGHT, D. P. (1991), 'The Spectrum of Priestly Impurity', in Priesthood and Cult in Ancient Israel, ed. G. A. Anderson and S. M. Olyan. (JSOTS 125; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press), 150-81, WURTHWEIN, E. (1976), 'Die josianische Reform und das Deuteronomium', ZThK 73, 365-423. — (1984), Die Bttcher der Kanige 2 (AID 11,2; Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht).

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Index of Biblical References Old Testament Genesis: 1:24 178 2-3 89,230 2:10-14 301 2:24 132 3 210 3:21 48n27 6:6 121 9 295 12 97,125 12:1-3 294,299,302 12:3a 293 12:3b 293 12:7 295 12:10-20 121,125 12:18-19 125 13 294 13:1 294 13:14-17 294, 302nll9 15 213, 295,296, 299,301,302nll9 15:1 295 15:6 295 15:18 295 16 294 16:10 295 17 295,296, 303 17:7f. 293 18-19 294 18:17-20 302nll9 18:17-19 295 18:20-21 126 18:22-33 126 18:22b-32 295 18:25 126 19 126 19:8f, 301nll3 20-22 305nl42 20 97,125,295 20:1-18 125 20:12 125 21:8-21 294 21:17f. 302nll9 21:22-34 295 22 121,294 22:15-18 295, 302nll9 22:16-18 301

22:16 295 22:18 301nll2 22:18b 295 24 295,296 24:67a 296 25:19-50:21 294 25:19-33:17 294 26 97,125,294 26'2f 294 26:3b-5 295,301,302nll9 26:3 301 nil3 26:5 295, 301 nil2 26:6-11 125 26:15 301 nl 13 26:24 295, 302nll9 26:34 f. 296 27 133 27:1-45 297 27:1-40 294 27:46-28:9 296 28 297n74 28:10 ff. 297 28:10-13aa 294 28:11 ff. 305nl41 28:13 f. 294 28:14 301 28:15 295 28:16-19 294, 301 28:18 301 28:20-22 295 31:13b 294 32:13 295 33:19 297 n70 35:1-5 295 35:1-7 297n70 35:9-15 303 36 295 37 292 n23 37:2 295 37:4bff. 305nl41 38 292n23 39-45 292 n23 39 98 41:50-2 294 46-50 292 n23 46:3f. 294 48 294 49 172

456 Genesis (anit.): 49:11 173,261 50:20 71 50:25 297n70 50:26b 297n70 Exodus: 1:1-5:7 296 1:15-20 126 2:1-10 302nl24 2:6 178 2:11-22 302nl25 2:23a-25 296,303 2:25 160 3-4 296 3:1-4:18 295,297 3 299 3:18-20 121 4:24-26 302 nl 25 6f. 2%n59 6 295, 296 6:2-8, 303 6:2 ff. 293,296 7:1-5 303 7:14-12:32 302n 125 7:14-9:34 299 11:1-3 295 12 295 12:21ff. 295 13f. 296n59 13:1-16 148 13:2-10 148 13:3ff. 295 13:11-16 148 13:19 297n.70 14 2%n64,299 15 172 15:21 187,304 16 302nl25 17:8-16 302nl25 19:3-8 295,298 19:16 431 19:36-8 437 20:23-23:19 338 22:9 160 22:22 295 22:25-6 339 23:3 14 23:9-12 128 23:19 441 24:1-2 436 24:3-8 295,436 24:8 436 24:9-11 295,436 24;12-15a 295 24:18b 295 29:43-45 303 32:4 439 32:7-14 302nl20

INDEX OF B I B L I C A L R E F E R E N C E S 33:1-3 302nl20 33:1 295 33:5 295 33:11 295 33:13 295 33:16f. 295 34:9 f. 295 34:10-28 436 34:11-26 302 34:29-35 295, 298 34:26 440 Leviticus: 11 441 f. 11:27 441 13-14 440 13:57 1.78 16 440

25 128 26 180 26:21-22 121

Numbers: 1 178 4:36 178 4:40 178 4:44 178 5:11-31 49n32,98 10-21 292,302 11:1-3 302nl25 11:12 293 11:16-17 330n27 11:24-30 330n27 12:6-8 48n28 14:llb-23a 302nl20 14:23 293 16 2%n59n62 18:1-7 180 18:20 413 18:22-23 180 20:1-13 296n59 20:7-8 148 21:14-15 187 23-24 172 23:18 178 24:3 178 24:9b 293 24:15 178 27:15-23 330n27 27:18 53n38 31:18 445 32:6 ff. 297 32:7-12 302nl20 32:13-15 302nl20 32:33 178 33:50ff. 297 Deuteronomy: 1-Josh 22 307nl58,313

I N D E X OF BIBLICAL R E F E R E N C E S 1-3 292 1:8 302nll5 4:13-21 148 5:6-21 339 6:4-9 148 6:4 305 6:10 302nll5 7:1-27 445 7:1-5 121 7:15 302nl25 8:3a 302nl25 8:16 302nl25 9:5 302r>125 9:22-24 302nl25 9:27 302nl25 11:2 160 12-26 95 12:1-17:7 308 13:2-10 308 13:2a 308 13:3a 308 13:4a 308 13:6a 308 13:7a 308 13:9a 308 13:10a 308 14 441 f. 14:21 440 14:27-29 408 15 131 15:14-15 131 15:15 128 16:18-18:22 307n 158 17:8-13 413 17:18 f, 312 18:9-22 324 18:9-14 324 18:15-22 327 19-25 307ml 58 20:1-20 106 21:10-14 106 23:4-7 (EW3HS) 445,446 24:8 440 25:4 214 25:17-19 302nl25 28:1 164 28:15 308 28:20-44 308 28:60 302nl25 29:12 302nl25 30:20 302nt25 32:1-43 172 32:36 172 33 172 33:2 429,431 33:11 173 34 289 34:4 302nll5 34:9 330n27

Joshua: 1-11 314 1-12 300 1:2 178 1:7-9 311 2 300 4:23-5:15 300 7 300 12 300 13-19 300 13:lb-6 311 15:28 158n50 20:1-5 300 20:6 300 20:9fc* 300 20:7-9 300 21:1-42 300 21:43-45 300 22:1-6 300 23 311 23:1-16 300 24 436f. 24:1-27 300 24:26a 297 24:31 160 24:32 297n70 24:32-33 300 Judges: 1:1-2:5 300, 310 1:1-18 314n210 1:2-9 311 2:6-16:31 300 2:7 160 2:11-12:6 314 2:11-16:31 312,314n210 2:17f.,311 2:20f. 311 2:22-3:4 300 2:23 311 3:15-26 121 4-5 104 4 96 4:17-20 121 5 96,172 5:4-5 429 5:5 185 5:7 172 5:28-30 276 8:22f. 312nl95 8:23 312nl94 9:8-15 312 9:16b-19a 312 12:4f., 444 12:6 187 17:1-21:25 310 17f. 314n210 17:6 314n210 18:1a 314n210

457

458 Judges (coiif.): 18;19a 314n210 19 103 19-21 314n210 20:15 161 21:7 178 21:25 314n210 Ruth: 1:4 446 1:22 446 2:2 446 2:6 446 2:10 446 2:21 446 4:5 446 4:10 446 1 Samuel: 1-2 212n20 1-7 300 8:1-5 312 8:7 312nl94 8:11-17 312 9:1-10:16 312 9:5-14 324 9:7 182,185 10:17-18a 312 10:19b-27a 312 10:27b 156 11 156

12 312 12:12 312nl94 13:14 121 14:41 433 16:17 349 20:1-34 126 20:15 312 21:14 178 22:6 161 23:22 160 24:12 160 24:13 349 25:17 160 25:26b 312 25:29 312 28 212nl9 28:3 162

2 Samuel: 1:11-16 127 2-20 299 3:18 312 6 103 7 299,310 7:5 312 7:8 312 7:23 161 7:24 312

INDEX OF B I B L I C A L R E F E R E N C E S 8: Mb 312 8:15 312 9-20 350 9 312 11:2-5,121 12:1-14 312 14:1-11 127 14:6 178 21-24 310 23:1-7 175 24:13 160

1 Kings: 1-2 299,350 2:1-4 299 2:3-4 312 2:10-12 299 3-11 247 3:1-15 299 8:12 431 9 391 11:14-22 302nl25 11:36 312 12 396 12:28 439 14:25-26 391 19:19-21 330n27 21:1-16 340 22:2-23 121 2 Kings: 2:9-10 330n27 2:12-15 330 n27 2:23-24 121 3 300n97 8:7-15 127 8:10 127 8:11 324 8:19 312 9 300n97 9:11 330 13:14-19 324 14:21-18:13 164 17:31 158 n50 18:31 307 18:4a 308 18:13-20:19 327,335 18:22 307 19:9 161 20:21 309 22-23 307 f, 22:3-11 313 22:3 308 22:8-20 434 22:8-10 356 22:11 313 22:12-20 313 22:18-20 331 23 435

I N D E X OF BIBLICAL R E F E R E N C E S 23:1-3 313 23:4-22 313 23:5 308,431. 23:8a 308nl62 23:1 I f , 308,313 23:11 431 23:23 310 23:24 433 n26 23:25 310 23:27 310nl74 24 310nl74 25:12 406 25:21 310 25:22-26 406 1 Chronicles: 3:2 444 1.6:21 160 25:1-8 338 2 Chronicles: 7:3 255 19:5 176 20:21 255 24:20-22 209 28:8-15 444 30 444 34-5 435 34:3 435 35:7-36:19 164n62 Ezra: 1-6 405 1:7-11 407 2 337 3-6 410 3:2 407 3:4-5 407 4:2 444 5:1-2 338 5:6-17 405 7-8 407 7:6 407 7:10 407 7:14 407 7:22 407 7:25 407 8:21-22 408 8:26-27 407 9-10 444 9:1-2 445 9:3-4 408 10:2-4 408 Nehemiah: 1-6 405 2:10 406 2:11-16 407 2:19 406 6:10-14 338

6:17-19 406,407 7 337,405 8 407,444 8:14-17 407 11:27 ISSnSQ 12 405 13 405 13:1-3 445 13:10 413 13:26 444 Job;

7 265 9:30-1 270 10:1-2 262 13:27-28 262 28 364 32 130 33:8 274 39:26 130 Psalms: I 368 8 255 II 267 15:1-25:2 164 15:1-5 148 15:3 148 16:1 148 16:10 212 19 443 22:2-3 278 22:18 65 27:3 260 f. 31 158 31:2 158 31:3 15 34:11-22 368 37 263,368 37:8 262 39 265,368 46 255 49 267,368 50:2 431 50:3 431 56 267 57 265 67 255 68 172 68:9 185 69:2-3 277 71 158 71:2 158 71:3 158f. 73 368 75:8 212 78 254 78:10 437 78:37 437

459

460

INDEX OF B I B L I C A L R E F E R E N C E S

Psalms (cant.); 79:2 178 80:17 175 83:7 161 84;12(EW11) 431 90 368 95:4-5 278 98:1 256 98:3 256 98:4 256 98:5 256 98:7b 256 98:9 256 104 443 104:14 263 105 254 106 254 109:1.4 160 110:6 270 111 368 118 255 119 263,266,267,368,443 119:44 275 119:105 271 119:164 368 121 267 129:1-2 255 136 255 Proverbs: 1-9 98,129, 354,355, 357, 359 1:7 370 4:5 260 6:27-28 260 7 359 7:6-23 254 7:21 268 8 265,358,359, 369 8:22-36 129 8:22-32 278 8:22 ff. 359 8:29b-31 360 8:33 359 9:5 268 9:17 268 10-31 129 10:1-22:17 353,355,357 10:15 260 13:6 273 15:17 353 15:23 353 15:32 269,277 16 358 16:1-41 358 16:4 348 17:3 271 20:1 261 21:21 269 22:17-24:22 354,355,357

24:10-12 263 24:23-4 355 25:1 356 26:4-5 263 27:14 277 30-1 360 30:18-20 280 Ecclesiastes: 1:1 183,364 l:2f. 365 1:3 185 1:9 185 1:12 183 1:14 185 2:8 183 2:12 183 3:1-9 101 3:14 182,185 3:16 130 4:1 130 4:13-14 183 5:8 (EW 5:9) 183 6:2 130 6:5 160 7:15 130 8:2-5 183,184 9:14-16 130 9:14 183 10:16-17 183 10:20 183,184 12:7ff. 365 12:9 365 Song of Solomon: 1:1 349 1:5 445 2:8-9 185 2:16 266 3:9 185 3:11 164 4:13 185 5:1 256 6:3 269 8:6 434 Isaiah; 1-39 334n43,335f. 1:10-17 340 1:21 272 1:27-31 334 1:27 335 3:1-3 340 3:18-24 263 3:26 272 5:1-7 272 5:1 254 5:8 340 5:11-12 340 5:18-23 340

I N D E X OF BIBLICAL R E F E R E N C E S 5:21 256 6:1-8:22 336 6:1-13 335 7:14 55n47 8:16 334 n44 9:18 269 10:1 340 11:15 159n51 14:13 276 21:11 255 23:16 254 24-27 332 28:7-8 340 28:12 263 29:9 261 29:15 160 33:12 175 35 335 f. 35:3 260 35:8

335

36-39 327, 335 37:9 161 38:9-20 335 39:5-8 335 40-66 334n43,336n55,339 40-48 336 40 335 40:1-5 336n55 40:1-8 335 40:3-5 336 n55 40:3 335 40:16 279 40:24 172 40:31 444 41:22 335,338 42:1-4 337 42:9 335,338 42:16 160 43:9 335 43:18 335,338

43:27-8 338 44:6 269 44:21 263 45 261 45:14 444 45:20 444 45:21 444 45:22 444 45:23 444 46:9 335,338 47:1 256 47:8 160 48:3 335,338 48:20-22 336 n55 49-55 336 49:1-6 337 49:17 444 49:23 444 50:4-9 334n44,337n56

50:4 334 n44 50:10-11 334 n44 51:5 444 52:13-53:12 337n56 53:1-10 334n44 54:12 431 54:13 49n34 55:12-13 336 n55 56-66 334n43 56:1-8 335n55 56:7 332n37 57:13 332 n37 59:20 334 60-62 334 n43 61:10-11 335 63:1 335 65:3 335 65:11 332 n37, 335 65:12 335 65:25 332 n37 66:3-4 335 66:5 334n44 66:17 335 66:18-24 332, 336 n55 66:20 332 n37 66:24 334,335 Jeremiah; " 2-6 434 2-3 99 2:8 434 2:23 434 2:27-S 264,434 2:31 99 3:1-4:4 99 6:21 187 7:9 339 11:3-5 301 iill4 12:3 160 13:22 99 15:21 262 16:5 434 22:15-16 434 22:18 2.54 25:11-12 213 29:9-31:35 164 29:26 330 30-33 338

31:8 159 31:15 10 36:10 308 38:4 324 n5 40-41 406 47:6 272 48:7 159 51:20-23 269 Lamentations: 1-3 263

461

462

INDEX OF B I B L I C A L R E F E R E N C E S

1:1-4 279 1:4 272 4 263 4:12 263 Ezekiel: 6:11 161 8:16 431 16 18 17:1-10 272 20:4b-6 301nll4 22:25-28 180 23 18,99 28:3 276 30:2-4 279 38-48 332 40-48 446 44 440 44:9-16 180 Daniel: 4:19-22 19 4:21 20 7 448 8:23-5 447 9:2 213,331n32 9:24 213 11:3-45 447 Hosea: 1-3 100 1 18 1:4 127 2:4-5 262 2:14 100 2:17 100 3 18 4:1-2 339 6:7 436 7:9 265 8:1 436 8:6 439 9:7 330 10:2b 275 12:3 275 Joel: 3:1-2 (EW 2:28-9) 266 3:1 (EVV 2:28) 215 4:9-21 (EW 3:9-21) 332 Amos: 1-2 443 2:7 340 2:8a 339 3:8 271 3:11 262 3:15 340 5:10 340 5:21-24 340

5:24 271 6:4-7 340 7:9-11 340 7:11 331 7:14-15 327 8:12-9:15 164 9:11-15 332,338 Obadiah: 12-15 267 17-21 332 Jonah; 4:2 445 4:10-11 445 Micah: 1:1-5:1 164 2:2 340 3:5-8 327 3:9-12 340 3:11 275,327 3:12 331 6:6-8 339 6:6-7 279 7 338 7:1 275 7:3-4 276 Nahum: 1:1-11 266n82 2:12-14 277 Habakkuk: 2:2 215 3:3 429 3:7 429 Zephaniah: l:4f. 4-34 1:15-16a 267 3:1-4 180 3:14-20 332 3:20 164 Zechariah: 1:1-9:17 164 1-8 338,446 1:12 337 1:14-17 337 2:4-5 337 7:3 338 8:20-23 332 9:1 332 12:1 332 14:16-21 332 Malachi: 1:1 332 1:2-3 121 3:22-24 332

I N D E X OF BIBLICAL R E F E R E N C E S New Testament Matthew: 1:23 S5n47 23:35 209 Mark: 2:23-28 56n48 7:1-14 56n48 10:1-10 56n48 12:28-34 56n48

Romans: 5:12-21 210 1 Corinthians: 2:6-16 57n54 9:8-12 214 15:51 44nl9 Galatians: 3:16 213

Luke: 10:30-7 444 24:44 201,331n32

Ephesians: 3:3-5 57n54

John: 19:24 65

2 Timothy: 3:14-17 ',55 n46

Acts of the Apostles: 2:14-36 57n51 2:14-21 215 2:22-36 212 7:1-53 57n51 8:30-31 3 17:11 56 24:5 40n8

Hebrews: 11:13-16 214 2 Peter: 1:21 55n46 Jucle: 5-19 57n52 14-15 209

Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha 1 Esdras: 3:1-5:3 351 9:39 407 2 Esdras (4 Ezra): 14:44-47 48n29 Wisdom: 2:23-1 210 3:1-9 204 f. Ecdesiasticus: 7:4-5 183 7:4 184 10:3 183 39:4-5 183 44-50 418 44-49 217 46:1 331 n32 48:10 332 48:20-49:10 331 n32 49:9 418 50:1-4 420

Baruch: 3:9-4:4 351 1 Maccabees: 11:34-36 415 2 Maccabees: 2:23 419 3 420 3:10-11 416 4 421 4:11 420 5:15-21 422 12:43-45 204 f. 13:3-8 422 15:9 331 n32 I Enoch: 1-36 447 72-82 447 Jybilees: 1:1-4 45n21

463

464

INDEX OF B I B L I C A L R E F E R E N C E S

Scrolls IQS:

I 2-3 43nl7 VIS 44 VI24 44 VIII11 44 nl 9 VIII15-16 45n20 VIII15 44 VIII16 43nl6

CD: III 12-16 44nl9 IV 8 44nl9,45n20 IV 13-14 43nl7 VIII 16 40n8 XIX-XX 43 XIX 12 43n17 XX 6 44

XX 8-9 45n20 XX 31 45n20 IQpHab: 118-10 44 VII1-5 215 VII1-2 43 VIII 43

VII4-5 44 4QpNah: 1 7 46n22 1 JQPsatasa: XXVII 2-11 40nlO 6Q: 3-7 151

4Q174: 1-3i14 43nl5 4QMMT: C7-8 40 n» CIO-11 40nlO 4Q 266(4QDa): 11:18 44nl9 11:20-21 45n20 4Q270 (4QDe): 7 it 1,5 45n20

Other Ancient Sources Josephus: Antiquities VI68-71 156n43 VI 340-2 212nl.9 X35 331 n32 XI 7 1,297-301 405 nl 5,408 XI8 1-6,304-45 4131166 XIII 1,6 414 n70 XIII 1,8 418n86 XII3 3-4,138-46 420n96 XII 41-11,157-236 414 n76 XII4 1,156-59 415n81 XII 4 11, 228-29 416n84 XII1171 40 n8 XVIII11,23 40 n8 Against Apion 1 22,187-89 410n35 1 22,183-205 413n63 1 22,187-89 414n72 1 22,192 418n87 1 22,201-4 418n87 1 37-43 215 f. 1 37 331 n32 1 40f. 48n29

War II119 40n8,58n55

Philo: Fife Mosis 14 54n42 II37 54n43 de Cherubim 27 55n4S quod deus iimnutabilis sit 77-8 212 n21 quod omnis profnis 13 54 de ebrietate 144-53 212n20 Mishnah; Aboth 3:6 53 3:12 50 Yadaim 3:5 47n25,211

465

INDEX OF A N C I E N T SOURCES

Tosefta: l.Solah 13:2 48n29 14:2,9 49n32 t.Yadaim 2:13 48n30 2:14 47n26 Mekilta: Pisha 1 53n37 BesMllah 6 (on Ex 1.4:24) 219 Babylonian Talnuid: Berakoth 64a 49n34 Shabbat 13b 220 30b 212 63a 50 116a 46n22 Pesahim 6b 219 66a 53n40 Yotna 9b 48n29 69a 413n67 Soteft 48b 48n29 Bata Knmma 92b 48n30

Ait'«rt/iof/l 65a 152 Hirflw113a-116a 440 Sanhedrin Ila 48n29 34a 50 Palestinian Talmud: Megillah 1.7Id 151 Sefer Torah: 1,1 151 1,4 151 Mid rash Rabbah: Genesis Rabbah XX 12 48n27 Leviticus Rabbah XIII 3 49n33 Numbers Rabbah XIII15-16 48n3! Deuteronomy Rabbshl'l:3 53n37 Song o/ Songs Ral'te/i to 2:4 48 n31 Seder 'Okm Rabba 30 48n29 Lucian of Samosata: De Dea Syria 54 442 Porphyry: DeAbstinential.H 442

Bata Mezwi 59a-b 53

Pseudo-Justin: Cohortatia ad Graecos 13 55n47

Bubo. Bathn !2a 52 14a-15b 47n24 !4b-15a 202,217f.

Epiphanius: De mensuris et ponderilms 3-11 55n47

Ahodah Zarah 58b 152

Maimonides: Hitkhot Sanhedrin 4:2 53n38 Guide for the Perplexed 3.48 440

Author Index Ackerman, J. 228 Ackerman, S. 93 f. Ackroyd, P. R, 11 n!5, 335n45, n46, n48, 337,405nl(J Addinall, P. 15n31 Aharoni, Y. 148nl7 Ahituv, S. 173 Ahlstrom, G. W. 382 Aichcle, G. 21 n48, 229 rt6,245, 248,326 nl 1 Alberts, R. 70n29, 80,327nl6,332 n36,337 n60, 360,411 f., 428,434n31,438n52 Albrektson, B. 437 Albright, W. F. 154 f., 391,438 Alexander, P. S. 38n7,44nl8,45n21, 48n29, 50n35, 51n36,56n48 Alonso Schokel, L. 194,253 n5, 269 n97, n98, 271nl04,272n110,276f. Alt A. 391 Alter, R, 9, 22, 227, 228,230, 232ff., 235 it, 253n5,392nlOO Altieri, C. 23n55,24n63 Andersen, F,I. 262n.63, 265 n79, 275 n 137 Andersen, T. D. 258,260, 267n84, 268n91, 270nl03,276nl,38 Anderson, B. W, 76n68 Anderson, G, W, 200nl Anderson, J. C. 89 Appleby, R. S. 20n44 Aptowitzer, V. 145 Arav, R. 415 Aschkenasy, N. 103 Assmann, J. 437 Astour, M. C. 429 Auld, A.G. 327f.,4Hn42 Avisltur, Y. 253 n2, n7, 261 n56 Bach, A. 17n40,22,89,98,103,104,105,243 f. Bachli, O. 430 Bahnsen, G, 122n23 Bailey, R. C. 241,246 Bakhtin,M. 229 Bal, M. 22,86,89,94,96 f,, 103,104,105,224, 240 f. Balentine, S. 77n76 von Balthasar, H. U. 74n5G Band, A, J. 326nl2 Barag, D. P. 4(34 n7,408n25,410 Bardkte, H. 340 n66 Bar-EfratS. 227 Bar-Han, M. 150n5 Barkay, G. 150n27,392f., 395nl21,396n 128

Barker, M. 434 n55 Bar-Kochva, B. 413n61, n.64,414n71, n74, 419n94 Barr, J. 20n44, n45, 23n57,63nl, 76n63,79, 181 n79,193, 208nl3, 210nl5, 325nlO, 438 Barstad, H. M. 323n5, 327nl5,328n24, 336 n54, 337 n56, 378 nl 7,381, 383 n45,404 n2,406n17,432 Barth, H. 336 Barth, K. 442 f. Barthelemy, D. 64 n3,149n22,163n60 Barton,}. 5nl, 13n23, 23n55, 64f., 117,128, 134n56, 200n4,208n 13,211 nl7, 217 n25, 218n26, 326 n4, 339 n63,443 Bauckham, R. J. 57n52 Bauer, H. 191 Bauman, Z. I2n21,16, 129,130,131 f. Baumgarten, J. 45 n20 Baumgartner, W. 193f., 349n5 Deal, T. K. 22,23n56, 248 Becker, J. 335n45 Becker, U. 300nl06, 312,314n210 Becking, R. 90 Beckwith, R. T. 200nl, n4, 204n7, 209f., 216 Ben-Ashcr, M. 274nl25 Benjamin, D. C. 241 n29 Benn, T. 1.5 Ben-Tor, A. 383 Berge,K. 291 n20 Bergen, R, D. 191 Berger,P. L- 330 n28 Berlin, A. 9, 23n53,230f., 245f., 253nl, n6, 260 n49, 261 n54, n55 Bertholdt, L. 445 Besserman, L. L. 363 n79 Beuken, W. A. M. 332n37 BIckennan, E. J. 406 nl6 Bieberstein, K. 306nl52 Bienkowski, P. 383 n52, 385 n61 Birch, B.C. 116,124f. Bird, P, A, 93,99n66 Bjerndalcn, A. 272nl09 Black, M. 157 n47 Blenkinsopp, J. 5nl, 66nl2,200 n4, 326 n!4, 327nl6, 328n23, 330n29, 332n35,336 n54, 337n59, 350n 13,409,440n60 Block, R. 36 Btoch-Smith, E. M. 433 Bloom. H. 9, 22 Blum, E. 292 n25, 294 ff., 297 f., 299,303,305, 306 f.

AUTHOR INDEX Boadt,L. 269 n94, 273 nil 9 Boda, M, I, 268n91 Bodine, W. R. 191 Boer, R, 242 Boone,K.C, 20n44 Boorer,S. 302 Bos, J. W. H. 90n32, 241 n.28 Bosshard, E. 331 n34 Boyarin, D. 21, 23n52,105 Boyer, P. 20n44 Braaten, C, E, 7n6, 22n49 Braudel,F. 378 Braulik,G, 307 Braun,R. 365 n93 Brawley, R, L. 6n3,79n91 Brenner, A. 17n40,871., 91,95n49, 99n65, n66,101 f., 103,104,326nl 3, 362,364 n89 Brensinger, T. L. 280 n 153 Brett, M. G. 18n42, 23n55, 63nl, 66nl3, 74 n49, 75n56,76n61,134,443 n78 Brettler,M. 378nl9 Brichto, H. C. 9, 23n53 Bright,]'. 333,369,377nll Brongers, H. A. 274nl24 Brooke, G. J. 40n9,41nl2 Brooten, B. 87n6 Brown, S, J, 270nl02 Brueggemann, W. 23n57,76n70, 77f., 79f., 228, 238,370, 392nl01 Bruns, G, L, 5nl Buckley,].J. 6n4 Buhl,F. 145 Bultmann, C. 117n3 Bunimovitz, S, 384,388n81 van Buren, P. 6 n4 Buss,M. 330n29 Butin,R. 158n49 Butler,). 91n36 Butting, K. 102f. Caird,G.B, 270nl02 Camp, C. V. 87n4,90n33,95, lOOf., 242f., 354,359n51 Campbell, A. 290 Campbell, E. F. 446 n87 Carroll, R, P. 5n2,13n23,15n30,23n59, n60,24n67,99n66,104n78, 326nll, n!3, 327nl8, 328n23, 329n26,330n31, 333 n39,378 nl 7,381,406 nl 7,446 Carroll R., M.D. 119nl5,133 Castelli, E. A. 13n22,15n34,17n38, n39 Gazelles, H. 376

Chaney,M. 382 Chapman, M. 73n42, 74n48, 75n59 Chatman, S. 223 Cheney, M, 361,362n68 Childs, B. S. 23n55,65 ff., 72,74nSO, 79,80, 120,325,332 n35

467

Clements, R. E. 66nl2, 76n65, 289nl, 331 n34,332 n36,335 n47,336 n51, n53,356, 434n31,445 Clines, D. J .A. 88,105,194, 226,227,228, 229n5, 238, 239, 241,242,245n39,246f., 279f., 326nll, 361 n61, 363,364,405nll Cloete, W. T, W. 257n28, n30, 258, 262n61 Coats, G.W. 228,290 Cobb,W.H. 258n33 Cogan, M. D. 435 Coggins, R. ]. 119n15, 217n23 Cohen, H. R. 273nl20 Cohen, R. 391 n97 Cohen, S. J. D. 413 n68 Collins, A. Y. 89 Collins, J. J. 68f., 71,412n52,442,443,447, 448n98 Collins, T. 253116,259 Conk, S. L. 332 n36,412n55,446 Cooper, A. 255 Coote, R.B. 382f.,384rt54,n57 Course, J. E. 361 Cowley, A. 404n4, 410n38 Craffert,P. 70n28 Craig, K, M. 326nl2 Craigie, P, C. 271,441n63 Crenshaw, J. L. 77n76,228, 348nl, 352n23 Croft, S.J. L, 368 Cross, F. M. 154f., 157n44,163n58, 295, 310,334n42,404n5,429,434 f. Crouch, W. B, 326 nl 2 Crusemann, F. 66,76n66,117, 307 Cryer, F, H. 188f., 324n7,395nl22,433 Culler,!. 89nl7 Culley, R. C. 228, 253n7,256n 17, 273nll5, 329 n26 Dahood,M.J. 180 Van Darn, C. 433 Damrosch, D, 9 Davidson, R, 79n93 Davies, E. W. 339n63 Davi.es, G. I. 173,179,180,306nl54 Davies, P. R. 22n49, 23n59,71 £, 134,189f., 225n4, 228,326nll, 377,380, 383, 392, 404nl,405n8,418n91 Davies, W, D. 56n49 Daviia,]. R, 180 Day,}. 351,361 n59, 367f., 430nl 3,432, " 436f.,445,448n98 Day, P. L. 90 Dearman, A. 340n66 Deist, F. E. 14n29 Dell, K.}. 349 n4, 354 n28,361 n58, n60, 362 n64,364 n91,366 n99 Demsky, A. 150n25 Dever, W. G. 23n59,377, 383, 384n59, 385n60,388 f., 391, 429,431 n!5 Diamond, A. R. P. 99

468

AUTHOR I N D E X

Dietrich, M. 430 nl 3 Dietrich, W, 292 n23, 311, 313,439n55 Diez Macho, A, 163n57 van Dijk-Hemmes, F. 17n40,99,101,103 n76 Dijkstra, M. 90 Dion, P. E. 273nil4 Dobbs-Allsopp, F. W. 272 Donaldson, L. E. 18n42, 23n58 Donner,H. 194, 292 n22,294 Dothan, T, 384 n54 Douglas, M, 441,445 Driver, G. R. 173,174,273nil4 Driver, S. R. 306 Duhrn, B, 333, 334, 337 Durand,J.-M. 323n2 Durand/X. 414n75 Eaton, J, H. 334n44 Edelman, D. 389n86, n89 Ehrenvard, M, 189 Eichrodt, W. 69, 70,436 Eilberg-Schwartz, H. 105 Eisenstadt, S. N, 332 n28 Eissfeldt, O. 200 n2, 291, 329 n25,432 Eldredge,L. 68n22 Ellis, E. E. 57n52, 200n4 Elon,M. 53n39 Elyoenai, M. 182 Emerton, J. A. 172n2,173nl3,193nl72,195, 274B.122, 290,306, 352n20,430nl3,448 Emmerson, G. I. 445 Emmett, D. 330 n28 Endo,Y. 181 n79,191,193 Engelken, K. 95n49 Eskenazi, T. C. 95, 239 Eskhult,M. 193 Eslinger,L, 238 Eugene, T. M. 87n4 Evans, C, F. Hnl5 Exum, J. C. 23n56,90n32, 97L, 99n66, 103£, 105,117n4,134,230,238, 241, 244, 256n/6, 271, 326nll Eybers, I. H. 277n46 Fackenhcim, E. L. 9f., 77n75 Febre, L. 376, 378, 380 Felder, C, H. 18n42 Festinger, L, 330,446 Fewell, D. N. 23n52,88, 89, 224n2,239,240, 241,242,247 Field, F, 149n23 Finkelstein,!. 382 ff., 385ff., 388 n83, 389, 391 n94, 392nl03, 393,3%nl28 Firmage, E. B. 442 nTl Fisch,H. 9, 23n53 Fischer, I, 291 Fishbane, M, 9, 36n2,64n4,67, 227,243f., 331 n33

Fisher, L, 253 n3 Fitzgerald, A. 273nll9 Flanagan, J. W, 239 Fleming, D. 323 n2 Flint, P. 64n2,148nl9 Fohrer, G, 200n2,262n62, 291,314,335 n45

Fokkelman, J. 227,230, 238, 280nl53 Fontaine, C. 17n40,87n7,90n33, 349n6 FowlS.E, 14n28 Fox, M. V. 256n21, it22, 266 n80,365, 367 Fredericks, D. C. 181, 182 Preedman, D, N, 224,262n63, 265n79, 275nl37,435 Frei,H.W. 15n33, 23n57, 76n60 Fn?i,P. 297 Fretheim,T. 79 Frevel, C. 430nl3 Frick, F. S. 117 Fritz, F, 291, Frye, N, C, 230 Frymer-Kensky, T. 92, 95 Fuchs, E. 90,95f., 231 f., 244 Fuchs, G. 362 n67 Gabler,J.P. 68,74n51,78 Gadamer, H.-G. 12,24n61,339n64 Galambusch, J, 99 f, Gamble, H.Y. 217n25 Gammie, J. G, 350nl5 Garr,W. E. 173 Geisler,N. L. 122n23 Gelinas,M. M, 392 Geller, S. A. 253 n6, 259 GeLston, A. 444 Gera, D. 414n77 Gerhardsson, B. 56n50 Gerstenberger, E. 411 Gese, H. 67, 208,369 Gesenius, W. 194 de Geus, C. H. J. 291 rt20,430 Gevaryahu, H. M. I. 328 n20 Gibson, J, C, L. 190,339 n61 Giddens, A. 118,123 Giese, R. L. 259 n46,264 n73 Gieselmann, B. 308nl62 Ginsburg, C. D, 48n27 Ginzburg, C. 15n32 Clancy, J. 105 GluckJ.J. 275 Gnuse, R. 72,75n58,80,439n55 Goitein, S. D. 101 Goldberg, A, 36,37 Goldenberg, R, 443n78 Goldingayj. 23n57,67nl8 Golka, F. "354 Good, EM. 227,363 Gordis,R. 258n39,365n92 Gordon, R, P. 323n2

AUTHOR INDEX Goshen-Gottstein, M. 63n61, 334 n42 Gottwald, N. K. 23, 73«42,79n91,88,123, 382,430 Goulder, M. D. 445 Gowan,D. 79 Grabbe, L. L. 23n59,46n22,324n7,404n3, n7,405,406nl6,407n!9, n20,408,409 n29, 411 n48,412n52, n55, n56, n57, n58, 413n65,415n78,416n85,418n92, 421n97,422n98 Grabe,J.E. 205n8 Graf ton, A, 24n66 Graham, W. A, 64n6 Grainger,J. D. 408 n26 Greenblatt, S. 70n29 Greene-McCreight, K, 6n4 Greenfield, J. C 175 Greenslade, S. L. llnlS Greenstein, E, L. 230, 238, 253n6, 254nil, 255 nl 2, 259, 261,275 van Grol, H. 258,262n67 de Groot, A. W. 257n29 Gros Louis, K. 228 Gross, W. 192,308nl62, n!65 Grossberg, D. 273nll7 Gunn, D.'M. 23n56, 88,224 n2, 227 f., 229 n5,230, 231 nlO, 234, 240,241,276nl39, 392nlOO Gunn,G. 70n29 Gunneweg, A. H, J. 72 Gutierrez, G. 364 n88 Haag, H, 439 n55 Habel, N. 73,79n91,363 Hachmann, R. 310nl73 Hackett, J. A, 89,92,323 n4 Hadas-Lebel, M. 171 Hartley, J. M. 430nl3 Halbertal, M. 5nl,21n46,23n55 Hallo, W. W. 379n20 Halpem, B. 378,379n20,395 Hamlin,E.J. 239 Handelman, S, A, 9nlO Hanson, P. D. 79,332 n36,428,446 Haran, M. 150n26,439 n59,441 HarrisJ. R. 57n53 Harris, M. 71n.37 Harrison, C. R. 365 Hartmart, C. O, 262 Hartmann, B. 193£ Harvey, D. ]4n26 Hasel/G. 63, 78n80 Hassan, I. 16 Hawk, D. 239 £ Hayman, A. P. 438f. Hays, R. B. 11 n!4,21 n46, 23n57 Headland, T. N, 71n37 Heaton, E. W. 351 n!9,355 Heider,G.C. 432

469

Heintz,J.-G. 323 n2 Hcndel, R, S. 439n56 Hengel,M. 365 n93 Herzog,Z. 387f. Hesse, B. 389 f. Hiebert,T. 72 Hildebrandt, T. 263n7 Hill, C. Ilnl6 Millers, D. R. 271 n!07 Hobbs,T.R. 315nl74 Hobsbawm, E 381 n29, 395nl26 Hoffman, E.]. 117n4 Hoffman, Y. 362,363 f. Hoffmann, H.-D. 308nl59 Hoftijzer, J. 173, 274nl26,323n4 Hoglund, K. G, 408f. Hofladay, J. S. 394 f. HolsteinJ.A. 330n28 de Hoop, R, 255f., 257n26 Hopkins, D. C. I28n40 Houlden, J. L. 7n6 Houston, W. 437 Humphreys, W L. 239,354n27 Hurvitz, A. 178 f£, 181 £, 189 f., 439 n59 Iggers, G. 66nl3 Isaksson, B. 180f. Jackson,).)'. 228 Jagersma, H. 377nll Jahnow, H. 90 Jameson, F. 14n26, 239 Jamieson-Drake, D. W. 340 n65, 396nl28 Japhet,S. 411,444 JarickJ. 366 n99 Jay, N. 94 Jeanrond, W. 74 Jeffcrs, A. 433 Jenni, E. 191nl45 Jenson,R.W. 7n6,22n49 Jepsen, A. 313n200, n201 Jobling, D. 14n27, 88, 224n3, 228,234,237£, 239,248 n43 Johnson, D. H. 324 n8 Johnstone, W. 411 Jones, B. A. 331 n34 Jones, D. R. 334 n44 Jones, L. G. 6n4,22n49 de Jong, S. 366 f. de Jong Ellis, M. 323 n3 Jongeling, K. 173 Josipovici, G. 7n7,9,11 n!4,22 Jouon, P. 1.90 KaestliJ. D. 200 n4 Kahlc, P. 145£, 154,155,156,163 Kaiser, O. 78, 308nl60,311nl85, 315n213. 333,336 n50 Kaiser, W. C. 116,1211,125,132 f.

470

AUTHOR I N D E X

Kalimi, I. 69n24, 77n75 Kant,i. 15 Katz, P. 205 Kaufman, Y. 175 Keel, O, 308nl66,431 n!6,439n55,441 Keith, M. 397 Kelsey, D. H. 67nl8, 75n57 Kenworthy, A. W. 348n2 Kermode, F, 232 Kessler,M. 228 Khan, G. A. 195 Kilian, R, 291 Kim, J. 257n26, 278nl48 Kimclman, R. 89n23 Kirkpatrick, P. G. 291 n20 Klein, L, R, 239 Klein, M. L, 163n57 Klopferxstein, M, A, 439n55 Knapp, D. 308nl69 Knauf, E, A, 186.H. Knibb,M. A. 332 n36 Knierim,R. 78n83 Knight, D, A. 117ff., 123 Kiioppers, G, N. 377,391 {., 394nll5,395 Kockert, M, 291 n20,302 Koehler, L. 193 f. Kohata, F. 280n9 van der Kooij, G, 323 n4 Koopmans, W. T. 257n26 Korpel, M. C. A, 257n25, n26 Kottsieper, I. 253 n4 Kraemcr, R. S. 87n6 Kraft, R. A. 149 n22 KristevaJ. 251168,88 Kselman, J. S, 278n147 Kucklick,B. 3%nl30 Kugel, J. L, 253nl n5, 257,258n32 Kuhnen, H.-P, 413n60,415 Kiing, H, 69n27 Kutscher, E. Y. 171 Kvanvig, H. S. 447 Laato, A. 435 de Lagarde, P. A. 144 ff., 162 Lambert, W. G. 351,432,447 Lampe, G. W. H. llnlS Landy, F. 88,230 Lang, B. 359,4371. Langlamet, F, 316nl85 Laniak,T.S. 241 n29 Lanser, S, S, 88 n23 Lapp, N, L. 404n5,415n82 Lapp, P. W. 404 n5 Laquer,T. 91n36 Lasine, S, 247 Lawrence, B, B, 20n44 Lee, F. 205 Le Goff, ]. 379, 381 n27, n29, n31,382 n32, 395n127

Leiman, S, 144n6,153n33, 200n4, 209f., 2101, 217n24 Lemaire, A. 355n34,391,438 Lemche, N. P. 117,119, 382f., 418n90,429 n8 Lerner,G. 88nl6,92 Lesko, B. S, 87 n7 Lete, G, del Olmo 280nl51 Leveason, J. 7n5, n6,67ff., 70,72, 76n68,77 n75 Levinas, E, 9,131 Levin, C. 291, 292f., 296n56,299, 302nll9, 304 f., 307,434 n32 Levine, A.-J. 87116 Levine, E, 367 Levy, I.E. 383 Lewis, I. M. 324n8,329f. Lewis, T.J. 3241X7,433 Lichtenberger, H. 166 Lieberman, S. 146 f., 148n20,156,158 Liebreich, L. J. 334 f. Lim,T. 43nl5,57n53 Limbing, J. 260 n49 Linda.rs,'B. 57n53 Lindbeck, G, 75 LindblonxJ. 324 n8 Lindstrom, F. 76 n70 Loader, I. A. 366 Lohfmk,"N. 79n91, 302nil8,307,308f., 313, 365 n93,434 n33 Long, B. O. 228,235,245f. Longacre, R. E. 191 Longman, T. 258n33 Lorefz, O. 253n4, 263n71, 430nl3,433 Lowy, S. 54n41 van der Lugt, P. 262 n65,1166, n67, 263 n.74, 265 Lust,J. 333 n40 McBride, S. D. 428 McCarter, P. K. 224 f, McCarthy, D. J. 436 McConneB, F. 9t& McCreesh, T. P. 269n92n93, 277 MacCulloch, D. 120nl7 Macdoiuxld, ]. 174 McEvenue, S. E. 296, 297n.74 McFall, L. 191 McGrath, A. E. 7n6 McGregor, M. F. SOlnlll Macintosh, A, A. 350 nlO Maclntyre, A. 339 n64 McKane, W. 323, 324 f., 329, 333 n39, 339 rx63, 356 n38, 357 McKay, J. W. 435 McKenna,J. E. 367nl08 McKinlayJ. 102 Maag,V.'362n72 Maachi,J.-D. 311nl85

AUTHOR INDEX Machinist, P. 270n103 Magonet, J. 227 Maier, C 95 Maier, W. A. 430 nl 3 MaIamat,A. 323 n2 Mann,T.W. 239 Marty, M. B, 20n.44 Mason, R, A, 337n58 M.astin, B. A, 447n97 Matthews V. H. 241 n29 Mayes, A. D. H. 75n59, 301 nil 3, 310, 313, "330n28,430,434n31 Mazar, A, 340n65, 383, 387,391 n.97,392 n!02, 393nll2nl14 Mazar, B. 406nl8,414n77 Mazars,P. 274nl27 Meinecke, F. 66nl3 Moinhardt,]. 439n55 Melugin, R.'p, 335n46, n48, 336nS4 Mendcnhall, G. E, 382 Merritt, B. D. 301nlll van der Merwe, C. H. J. 191 n!44 Meshel,Z. 431 n!4 Meshorer, Y. 404 n7,409 n34,414 n73 M.ettinger, T. N, D. 337 n56,429 n7,438n52, 439 Metzger,B.M, 208n!4 Meyer, R. 194 M.eyers, C. L. 89n23,92 f., 94,95,337n58 Meyers, E. M. 337 n58 Meynet, R. 280nl53 Michaelsen, P. 329n26 Michel, D. 273nl16 Milbank, J. 74n48, 75n59, 76n61 Miles, J. 219 Milgrom, J. 439n59,441 f. Milik, J, T. 148nl6,151 n28,1.57 n47,447 Millard, A. R. 188nl 25 Miller, J. M. 376 Miller, P. D, 261 n59, 270n99, 273nll8, 274 n!21,428 Milne, P. J, 89 Minette de Tilesse, G. 309nl68 Miscall, P. 228, 230 f., 238, 245 Miskotte, K. H. 22n51 Moberly,W. 79n84 Moenikes, A. 309 n 172 Montrose, L. 91 de Moor, J. C. 257 n25, n26, n27, 259n46, 429 Moore, S. D, 23n56, n59,105 Morag,S. 185f. Moran, W, L. 191 f. Morgan, D. F. 352 n22 Mosis, R. 435n34 MotteJ. 77n75 Mowinckel, S, 262n64, 292, 333, 334, 368nll4 Mozley,]. B. 120nl8

471

Muilenburg, J. 228, 267n87 Mulder, ML J. 200nl Mulier,H.-P. 323n4 Miffler, M. 55n47,125n33 Munro, J, 256nl8, 270nl02 Muraoka, T. 190,191,195 Murphy, R. E. 273nil4,366n99, n!03, 366f. Na'aman, N. 383, 386n70, 387, 389n86 Naumann, T. 311 n!82, n!85 Naveh,J. 150n25, 175 Nel, P.J. 260,267n85 Nelson, R. D. 310 Neusner, J. 36 f. Newsom, C. A. 90n34, n35,98f., 101,364 Niccacci, A. 193, 280nl53 Nicholson, E. W, 290, 299, 306,411 n48, 436f.,438n52 Niditeh, S. 241 n28, 446 n87 Nichr, H. 308nl62,431 n!6 Nielsen, E. 308nl59 Nielsen, K. 446n87 Niemann, H. M. 118f., 396nl28 Nissinen, M. 323 n3 Noble, P. R. 63nl Noegel,S.B. 270nl01 NohmbergJ- 22 North, C. R. 289 nl Moth, M. 211 L, 289f., 2%n54,300, 309, 311, 314,377nll, 393 O'Brien, J. M, 100 O'Brien, M, A. 290n5,310 O'Connell, R. H. 242 O'Connor, K. M. 99 O'Connor, M. 190, 253n6,257n24,258n32, 259,273, 274 OchshornJ. 92 Oden, R. A. 432 Ocming, M. 63nl Ofer,A. 385 Ogden,S, 74,80 Ollenburger, B. C, 70n31, 75n57, 79n85, n86 Olshausen, J. 144 n4 Olson, D. 79n84 Olyan,S. M. 430nl3 Otto, E. 116f., 127, 298, 301,305nl44, 306 n!54, 307,308f. Overholt, T. W. 324n8, 329n26 Paine, T. 7n7,11 f. Pardee, D. 173, 253, 262n60,273nll8,434 Pardes,!. 97 Paris, P.J. 117 f., 119 Parker, S. B. 323n2,329n26 Parpola,S, 323n3 Parsons, P. J. 149n22 Patrick, D. 76n71

472

AUTHOR I N D E X

Patte, D. 13n24,n25,229 PauI,S. 333 Payne, D, F. 270 n99, 271 ol07 Penchansky, D. 240, 360 Percy, M, 20n44

Perdue, L, G. 23n57,63, 76n60, n63, 79n91, 350n15,358f., 360 n57,363,364, 368, 369 f. Perevolotsky, A. 392nl03 Perlitt, L. 291 n20, 308nl69,315n2t2,436 Perry, M. 227 Perry, T, A, 366 Person, R. P. 326n12 Petersen, D. L. 330 n29, 337 n58,338 n59 Pettey, R.J. 430n!3 Pfann, S.J. 142nl Pfeiffer, R, H. 205 n9 Phillips, G. A, 21 n48,247 Pike, K. L, 71 n37 PiIe,S, 397 Pippin, T, 14n27,246 Pleins, D. J. 364 van der Ploeg, M. 149n24 Ploger, O. 332n36 Plumb, J. H, 381 n29 Polzin, R, 176 ft, 179, 228, 229 f., 238 Pope, M. H, 433 f. Porten, B. 404n4 Porter,)'. R 289nl, 324n6, 441 Preminger, A, 238, 254nil Premnath, D. N, 340 n66 Pressler, C. 95 Preuss, H. D. 23n57,72,73, 78,307nl56, 309nl70,369 Prickett, S. 24n67 Prior, M., 19n43, 23n58 Pritchard, J. B. 351 n!6 Probst!, V. 299 n90 Propp, W, H. C, 306nl54 Provan, I. W, 23n59,309nl72, 313,378 nl 8, 380 Pummer, R, 413n69 de Pury, A. 309nl70,316nl79, n!85 Pypcr,H. S. 22 Qimron, E. 185 Quillo,R 364 Raabe, P. 2S3nl, 255,258, 263, 266 n81, 267 n88, 270 RabanJ. 15n30 Rabin, C. 163n61 von Rad, G, 296,314,339n62,348n3, 349, 357f., 448 RahIfs,A, 145n7 Rainey, A. F. 172,173nl2,192 Raiser, K, 6n3 Ranger, T. 381 r.29,395nl26 Ranston, H. 349n5

Rappaport, U. 410 Ratner, R, 440n62 Ray,J. D, 355, 358n47 Reddltt, P. L, 362 Reed.W.L. 23n54 Rendsburg, G. A. 174f., 177,178 Rendtorff, R. 66, 67, 292, 293 f,, 332 n35, 335 n45, n46,336n54 Renz,J. 173 Reuter, E. 308nl69 Reventlow, H. G, 11 n!6,63, 76n63, 78n80, 120nl7 Richardson. M, E. J. 193f. Richter,W. 291 n20 Ricoeur, P. 21,24, 7'4n49,76 n62 Ridderbos, N. H. 267n87 Rings, S. H. 90n34 Ringgren, H. 328n24 Ritschl, D. 74n51 Roberts, B.J. 142n2 Robertson, D. A. 228, 254 nil) Robinson, N. H. G. 118118 Rofe, A. 326nl2 Rogerson, J. W. 76n67,118,120nl6,131, 189 R6Uig,W. 173 Romer, T. 301 f., 309nl70, 311 r»179, n!85 Rooker, M. R 179f. Rose, M. 292,307 Rosen, B. 389n89 Rosenbaurn, M. 191 nl 46 Rosenberg, J. 238 Rosenmuller, E. F. C. 144 Rosner,D. 271nl07 Rowland, C. 350 nl 2,447 Rowlett, L. L. 241 f. Rowley, H. H. 444 Rudolph, W. 292 Rummel, S. 253 n3 Rushdoony, R 122 n23 Russell, L, M. 89 Rutledge,D. 22 Saebo,M. 332 n36 Saenz-Badiilos, A. 171,172f. Sakenfeld, K. D. 89 Sanders, J. 63 f. Sanders, P. 259 Sanderson, J. E. 90n35,155n40 Sandys-Wunsch, J. 68n22 Sarna, N. M. 202n5 Sasson, J. M. 326n!2,391 n%, 396,446n87 Sawyer, J. F. A. 23n52 Schaberg,]. 90n35 Schafer, P. 144n6 Schafer-Lichtenberger, C. 330 n28 ScharbertJ. 290 Schart, A. 302nl21 Schenker, A. 165n63

AUTHOR INDEX Schlobin, R, C. 364 n87 Sehmid, H. H. 292, 298,302,357L, 369,442 n73

Schmidt, B. B. 324n7,433 Schmidt, L. 290,292n23, 297n.74 Schmidt, W. H. 126n36,290 Schmidt, H. C. 292n23, 299,300,305nl44, 318n202 Schneidau, H. N. 22n51, 24n62 Schneiders, S. 74n49 Schniedewind, W. M. 326 nl 4 Scholder,K, Ilnl6 Schoors, A. 182 Schottroff, L. 90 Schramm, G. M. 269 Schreiner, J. 334 n44 Schroer, S.' 90 Sehulte, H. 117,119,311nl85 Schungel-Straumann, H. 92 n38 Schussler Fiorenza, E, 87 n5, n6, 89,91 Schwartz, R. M. 9, 22,103 Schwartz, S. 419n94 Scott, J. C, 133 Sedgwick, E. K. 91n36 Seebass, H. 290,307 Segert,S. 172 Segovia, F. 23n58 Seitz, C, R, 310nl74,335n46, n48, 363n73 Seow, C, L. 184f., 365,367,411 n39,419 Setel,T.D. 89f. Van Seters, J. 291 f., 296ri56, 298 ff., 301 ff., 305,307,311nl85,376n5 Seybold, K, 323 n3 Shanks, H. 439 n55 Shead,A. 365 f, Shdford,A, 24n66 Sheppard,G. 64n4,66nl2,218f. Sherwood, Y. 22,100,1041, 248 Shields, M. E. 99 Shils, E. 339 n64 Shroyer, M. J. 55n44 Siegert, F. 55n44 Silberman, N. A. 383n49,397 Simpson, C. A. 291 Singer, I. 388 n81 Siraisi,N. 24n66 Sivan, D. 172 Ska,J. S. 303 Skehan, P, W. 155n40, 265,266 n83, 334n42 Small, D. B. 383 n49 Smelik, K, A, D. 173 Smend, R. 117,200n2,311 Smith, D. L, 440 Smith,J. Z, 64 Smith, M, 117 n4,301 nl 11,438 Smith, M.S. 192,430nl3,431nl6 Smith, W. C. 64 n6,210nl6 Smith-Christopher, D, 18n42 Smith, N. H. 289nl

473

SogginJ. A, 200 n2,377 Soil,W. M. 266n82 SommerJ. G, 144n4 Southgate, B. 378,397nl37 Sperber, A. 146f., 149n24,155 Spieckermann, H, 308,434 n33,435,436 Spinoza, B. 7n7,11 Spronk, K, 256n!9, 266n82,277nl43,433 Stah.lt, H.-P, 431 nl 6 Stamm,J.J. 193f. Starr, L 323 n3 Steck, O, H. 336 n49 Steinberg, N. 94 Steiner,G. 7n7,9,22 Steinmetz, D. C, 17rt37 Steins, G. 405nlO,411n40 Stek, J. H. 267n89, 269n98 Stemberger, G, 47n23 Stern, E. 404 n6, 408 n24 Sternberg, M. 9, 22, 76n?2, 226, 227, 232, 236 Stevens, W. 3 Stone, K, 241 Strong, S. A, 323 n3 Strozier, C. B, 20n44 Sugirtharajah, R. S. 18n42, 23n58 Sundberg, A. C, 200n4, 206f£., 211 Sweeney, M, A. 335 n45 Tahnon, S. 147nl3nl4,148 n!5,151 n29,152 n30,153n31.n32n34,156n41,158n48, 159n51,160n52,161n53n54,163 n61 Talstra,E. 259n44 Tarlin,J. 248 Taylor, C. 70n28n30 Taylor, J. G, 431 nl6 Tcherikover, V. 416n83 Terrien, S. 77n76,79, 339 n63, 350, 363 n80, 369nll8, 370 TMstlethwaite, S. B. 87 n4 Thompson, T. L. 23n59, 376n5, 383,384 n.54, n58, 386 n67,387n74,388 n83,389 n86, 392, 396nl28,397 Tigay, J. H. 438 Tolbert, M, A. 23n58,86,89 Tollefson, K. D. 409 n27 Tomasino, A. J, 335n45 van der Toorn, K, 324n7,433n25n26 Tov, E. 41 nil, 142nl n2,149n22,155n39, 156 n42,157n45,162,163n58, nS9, n61, 331n32,333n40n41 Tracy, D. 75, 76 Trevor-Roper, H. 15n32 Trible, P. 70,72,76n69,89,96,125,228, 231 f. Tropper, J. 433 Tsevat, M, 273nil5 Tucker,]. M. 328n20

474

AUTHOR I N D E X

Uehlinger, C 308,313n203,431 n16 Ullendorff, E. 186, 204 n7 Ulrich, E, 165,334n42 Updike, J. 23n60 Upensky, B. 231 Urbach, E. E. 48n29 Ussishkin, D. 392 nl 02 VanderKamJ. 157n46,447 Vawter, B, 327nl8 Veijola, T. 307n 156,308nl69, 311 f. Verheij, A. J. C. 192f. Vermes, G. 35,36 VermeyIen,J. 301nllO,362n72 Veyne,'P. 381 Voge!s,W. 366 Volz, P. 292 Vorlander, H. 299n90 deVriesJ. 310nl74 Wacker, M.-T. 70,90 Wade-Gary, H. T. SOlnlll Wahl, H, M, 291 n20, 298n.75 Wakeman,M. 270nl02 Walsh, J. T. 366 Waltke, B. K, 190, 273,274 Wapnish.P. 389f. Wartij.M, 328n24 Washington, H. C, 105f. Watanabe,K. 323 n3 Watson, F. 7n6,22n49,23n57, 70 f., 72, 73, 76n72 Watson, W, G. E, 257n24n27, 260n51 Walters, W. R. 253 n7 Watts,]. W. 264n72 Webb,B. 238 f. Weber, M. 328n23,330, 339 n64 Weeks, S, 352n21,354n29,355 Weems,R.]. 18n41 Weimar, P. 290nl2, 291,296n54 Weinberg, J. 409 Weiefeld, M. 350nil Weippert, H, 309nl70,323n3, 333, 384n54, 404n6,409n34,414n73 Weippert, M. 291n20,323n3 Weiser, A. 200n2 Weiss, M. 9 Weiss Halivni, D. 38 n6 Wellhausen, J. 289,309,314,429,438 Wenham, G. W, 441 Wermelinger, O. 200 n4 Wesselius, J. W. 331 n33 West,G. 14,133 West, M, 326 nl 2

Westermann, C, 74n51, 76n64, 291 f., 313f., 354, 356 n39,370 Wtiallon, W. 253 n7, 261 n58 Whedbee, J. W. 339n63,350 White, H. C 22,228 Whitelam, K. W. 23n59, 376nl, 377n6, nlO, n!2, 381 n29, 382,384n54, n57,385n60, n64., 386,389n86,391 n96, 394nll5,397 Whybray, R. N, 234, 291 n20,292 n22, 304 n!31,350, 354f., 356n40,357,359f,, 366 f., 368, 378,379 f., 396 Wkkes,W, 164n62 Wiggins, S, A. 430nl3 WiSl,E, 412 n59 Willi, T. 409,411n41 Wffli-Plein, I. 331 n33 Williamson, H, G- M. 328 n24, 336n53,405, 408 n22,409n27,435 n34,444,446 n89 Willis, J. T. 261 n52, 262 n67,271 n!05 Wilson, G, H. 66nl2 Wilson, R, R, 324n6,329n26 WiSt,T. L. 326n!2 van Winkle, D.W. 444 Winter, U. 430nl3 Winther-Nielson, N, 191 Witte, M, 298n76 vanWolde, E. 364 n89 Wolfenson, L, B, 202n6 Wolfers, D. 360, 361,362 Wolff, H. W. 293,339n63,350 Wolterstorff, N. 23n57 van der Woude, A.S. 149 n24 Wright, CJ. H. 116,122f,,125 Wright, D, P. 442 n71 Wurthwein, E. 308nl59, n!62, n!65, 311 n!85,312ff.,434n32 Wyatt,N. 256 n20, 276nl40 Wynn-WiJliams, D. J. 297n73 Yadin,Y. 148nl8 Yamauchi, E, 380n22 Yardeni,A. 150n27,404n4 Yasur-Landau, A, 388n81 Yee,G.A. 241 Yeivin,!. 2,54nil Young, I. M. 173 f., 182ff., 185,188 Zenger,E. 290f.,307 Zimmerli, W. 77n75,333, 339n62, 358, 369, 428 Zizek, S. 14n27 Zobel,K. 327nl5 Zuber,B. 193 Zuckerman, B. 362,440n62

General Index Acrostic 266 Aggadah 50,51 Akhenaton 437 Aleppo Codex 164 Alexander 412 ft Alexandria 54f.,205f. Allegory 55,214,272 Amphiclyony 430 Anti-Judaism 10 Antiochuslil 420 Antiochus IV 420ff. Apocalyptic 332,412,446ft Apocrypha 201,203 L, 204 f. Aquiia 149,160,163 Aramaic 175,176 Archaeology 379, 380,383f£, 392f., 404, 408 f, Artaxerxes III 408 Asherah 94,4301,436,438 Astarte 359 Aton 437 Auschwitz 9f. Baal 100 Bagoas (Bagohi) 408 Biblia Hebraica (Quinta) 165 Biblia Qumranica 166 Biblical interpretation in Christianity 54ff. in Dead Sea Scrolls 42 ff. in Judaism 46 ff. inner-biblical 243 f. see also Criticism, Reading Canaanite 123,172,192,380 Canon 5,40nlO, 44f., 47f., 55,58,63ft, 20011,224 ff., 2431, 325,418 f, Christian 206 ff. Ethiopia 204 Greek 202f v 205ff. Hebrew 201 f., 206 f. Latin 203 f. Canonization 215ff. Centralization 307f. Chaoskampf 362 Charisma 330 Chiasmus 264,268,275 Codex 202 Codex Neofiti 1 35 Community Rule 41 Court History 299 Covenant 69,436f.

Credo 291 n20 Critical theory 235, 240,245,248 Criticism anthropological 237, 238, 240,241 cross-cultural 239 deconstructive 225,232, 235, 238, 241, 242,247 feminist 17£, 86ft, 228,231 f., 235,240ff., 243 f., 245, 248,359, 364 formalist 229,235,236, 242,246 historical 12f., 15,19, 226f., 239 ideological 14f, 71 73 74 86f. 91 224 229f. 235 240ff. 326 intertextual 102 ff., 242,243 liberation 239 literary 227ff. marxist 239, 242 modern/post-modern 4, 6,10,12ff., 15ft, 76f., 87,129f., 226,230ff., 244, 248,325, 378 nl 7,397,404 New-Critical 229 f f., 232 ff. reader-oriented 225f., 231, 235f., 238, 241 ff. rhetorical 228,229 structuralist 228,229, 237f., 240 s« also Biblical Interpretation, Reading Culticlaw 439 ff. Cyrus 9, 406 Damascus Document 42 David 392f., 394,395f. DeirAlla 187f., 323 Derash 50 determinacy/indeterminacy 230£, 238,240, 245 ff. Deuteronomist 295, 301 f., 436 f. Deuteronomistic history 211 f., 299 f., 309ft, 410,418,434f. Deuteronomy 307ft dietary laws"389f., 440 ff. Discourse ethics 131f. Divination 432ff. Ecdesiastes 180ft, 183 ff. El 429 Elephantine 404,408 ellipsis 274 f. Elohist 291, 305 Etnic and etic 71 f. Enlightenment 5, 6, 7n6, n7, n8, lift, 15, 68,128 essentialism 132ft

476

G E N E R A L INDEX

ethnicity 18ff. Ezckias 409f,,414 Ezra 407 f., 409 feminism 70 Formula 255 f. Fundamentalism 20 ft Genesis Rabbah 38 Gezer 391 ff., 394 Gezer calendar 187f. Governor 407,408,409 f., 414,422 Halakah 9, 50,56 Hazor 391 ft, 394 Hebrew University Bible 163ff. Hellenistic philosophy 365 Hellenization 416ff./421 Hesychios 144 Hexapla 149, 160, 191 Hezekiah 307f., 310 High priest 408,410,413f., 422f. Historiography 76 Hyrcanus 416", 417 Images 439 Inclusio 266 Inspiration 43,48 £, S2t, 57 Instruction of Amenernope 352, 354 interpretive communities 240, 247 Isaiah. 332 ff,, 335 ff., 350 Israel identity 386 ff. origins' 382 ff. religion of 70n29, 74,80,93 f. Israelite 123 Jabneh 47,144,146 Jason 421 f. Jericho 380 Jerusalem 9 Jesus 10 Johanan 408,410 John Rylands Library 150 Joseph 415f,,416f. Josephus 206, 212 Josiah 307f., 310, 313,434 f. Jubilees 45 Kimhi 162 Kuntillet Ajrud 429,431 Lachish 323,394 Leningrad Codex 165 210 218 lexicography, 193ff. linguistics 191 Lucian 144 Maccabean revolt 422

Mari 323 marriage 94 Murzeah 433 f. Masada 142,148,157 Masoretic text 41,141 ff., 143ft, 146,155t, 163,164 Megiddo 391 ff., 394 Mekhilta of Rabbi Ishmael 38 Menelaus 421 f. Merneptah stele 389, 395 metaphor 271 metre 258 f. Middot 50 Midrash 35ff., 37ff., 50f., 56f. Mishnah 50f. Mishnaic Hebrew 174,186 Molech 432 monarchy 377,387,391 ff., 394 f. monolatry 430, 438 monotheism 234 f., 359,437ft motif 256 Murabba'at 142,148,157 Nabi 326ft NahalHever 142,149 Nahal Se'elim 142,148,157 narrative, biblical ambiguity 227,233, 245 boundaries 224 f. character 2261,233,242ft coherence 223, 240 composition 231, 234 f. definition 223 f. fiction/history 234, 236 irony 227, 239, 245 meaning in 231,236, 244ff. narrator as reliable/omniscient 2321, 234, 236,244 plot 223,226t, 239,242 point of view 231, 240 repetition 233,236, 245 f., 267f. social work! 231, 239, 240, 242ff. narrative verse 254,257 narratology/poetics 2231,2261, 231ft, 240t, 244, 246 natural law/morality 117,126,127f. natural theology 442f. nature 128t Negev 392 Nehemiah 4061,409 OniasII 415t Onkelos 149 oral torah 52, 53 oral tradition 147, 291 n20 Origen 144,149,160 parable 272 parallelism 260 f., 270

GENERAL INDEX Parshanut 37 n4 patronage 117,119 Pentateuch 2061, 211, 216 f., 410, 418 Pesher 41,42,43,44 Peshat 50 Philistines 388,393 Philo 54f., 206,212, 214 Plato 54 f. poetic style 276 ff, priestly writing 175ff., 178ff., 293, 295f., 296 f., 303,411 f., 439 ff., 445 prophecy 48,323 ff, and ecstasy 329 f. and law 338 ff. and social theory 328 ff, and tradition 339 prostitution 432 Ptolemy 1 413,414 Ptolemy I! 418 Qoheleth 419 Qumran community 40,45,152f., 157 Hebrew 185f. scrolls 35,40ft, 142,1471,149f., 153f., 155f.,157f.,333f. Qurnran Bible 165 Rabbinic schools 46 f, Rainer papyri 415 reader Z ft, 3251 reading Christian 10f.,35f. ethics of 247 hierarchy of 7,20 Jewish 8ff., 22,35f., 39 political 13f. social context of 4ff. see also Biblical interpretation, criticism Ruth 97,103,104 sacrifice 94 Salome 103 Samaria ostraca 187 f. Samaritan community 407,411,413 papyri 404 Pentateuch 143,145,146,154,155,163 Samaritans 216 f. Samson 97,103 Sanballat 407 scripture 21 Iff, scroll 202 Sect 39 n8 SeleucusFV 420

477

Septuagint 5,8, 55, 67,143,144f., 146,149f., 154 f., 1551,160,163,418 Servant Songs 337 Seshat 359 settlement 377, 385 f. sexuality 91,92,95,98,99 f, 102,104f. Shekhinah 53 Siloam inscription 189,190nMO simile 271 Simon II 420 Sinai 9 Sinai pericope 302 f. Solomon 391 ff., 394, 396 Spinoza 11 stanza 264 f, state 118f, strophe 264 f. sun 431 ff, Symmachus 149,160,163 Synagogue 9, 47 syncretism 431 ff, Talmud. 8,9 Targum 37f., 39,42,51 f., 149 Teacher of Righteousness 441., 215 Tel Dan 395 Tell el-Amarna tablets 172,192 Temple 409,4101., 421 f., 431 Temple Scroll 42 Tennes 408 Teraphirn 433 Theodotian 149,160,163 theology of Old Testament 63 ff., 68 ff., 74 ff. Tobiah 406 f., 415 Ugaritic 172,173,191 Universalism 443 ff. Urim and Thummim 433 verbal system 191 ff. Vulgate 8 wisdom and. theology 369 f. 'wisdom psalms 367ff. wisdom schools 355 writing 150f. Yahweh 429 If.,437ft. Yahwist 291 ff., 298f., 300 ff., 304 ff, Yavneh, see Jabneh Zenon papyri 414, 415,416ff. Zerubbabd 410 Zoroastrianism 437 f.