Evangelists' Calendar

M. D. GOULDER

BY THE SAME AUTHOR Type and History in Acts (1964) Midrash and Lection in Matthew (1974)

M. D. G O U L D E R

The Evangelists' Calendar A LECTIONARY EXPLANATION OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF SCRIPTURE The Speaker's Lectures in Biblical Studies

1972

LONDON

SPCK

First published 1978 SPCK Holy Trinity Church Marylebone Road London NW1 4DU © M. D. Goulder 1978

THE JACKET picture shows the Bodmer papyrus, p75, Luke 10.36—11.1. The papyrus is usually dated between 175 and 225, about a century after Luke's autograph. The projection of two epsilons from the left margin of the text should be noted, one near the top, the other on the bottom line. These can be explained as markers for the reading of the Gospel in a continuous cycle. The story of the scribe who tempted Jesus and was answered by the parable of the Good Samaritan ends in the line above the first edentation; Mary and Martha then follow until the line above the second edentation; then follows Jesus' teaching on prayer. Dr Goulder argues that such a continuous reading system, with these divisions, was a part of the intention of Luke himself. (The photograph is from Papyrus Bodmer XIV, edited by V. Martin and R. Kasser, published in 1961 for the Bibliotheca Bodmeriana.)

Printed in Great Britain by R. & R. Clark Ltd Edinburgh ISBN 0 281 03583 0

CONTENTS

Preface List of Abbreviations 1

vii xiii

A CYCLE OF LITURGICAL GOSPELS

2 THE TORAH AS AN ANNUAL CYCLE OF READINGS (i) The Calendars (ii) The Torah as an Annual Cycle of Recitals (iii) The Holiness Code and the Autumn Festival Readings (iv) The Sidrot as the Work of the Redactors (v) The Chronicler's Work as an Annual Reading Cycle (vi) The Samaritan Annual Cycle (vii) The Special Sabbaths (viii) Philo (ix) Matthew APPENDIX THE DECLINE AND DEMISE OF THE ANNUAL NISAN LECTIONARY CYCLE

(i) (ii) (iii) (iv)

The Armenian Lectionary The Origins of the Triennial Cycle The Mishnah Megillah The Growth of the Triennial Cycle

1 19 21 26 31 35 38 40 42 47 48

52

53 56 61 64

TABLE I

The Traditional Sidrot and Haphfarot TABLE II

3

67

The Chronicler's Lectionary System

70

LUKE AND THE ANNUAL TORAH CYCLE

73

TABLE I I I

4

The Sidrot and St Luke's Gospel

103

THE (i) (ii) (iii) (iv)

105 106 114 126 129

DEVELOPMENT OF THE HISTORIES CYCLE Five Alternative Prophetic Cycles The Formation of the D Histories Cycle The Redaction of the Law and the Chroniclers The Redaction of the Law and the Histories V

(v) The Use of the Histories Cycle in 1 Maccabees

132

TABLE IV

A Reconstruction of the D Lectionary Year

139

TABLE V 5

1 Maccabees as Readings between Pentecost and New Year

140

L U K E A N D THE HISTORIES

141

TABLE VI

6

Luke and the Histories Cycle

156

ISAIAH, LUKE AND THE TWELVE (i) The Liturgical Origins of Isaiah (ii) Luke and Isaiah 1—12 (iii) Isaiah and the Lucan Journey (iv) The Liturgical Origins of "The Twelve'

157 157 164 170 174

TABLE V I I

Isaiah, Luke and the Twelve

181

7

PENTECOST AND THE THIRD CANON (i) Ruth (ii) Job (iii) Aramaic Daniel (iv) Hebrew Daniel (v) Proverbs (vi) Ecclesiasticus

183 184 186 191 199 204 206

8

M A T T H E W , T H E O.T. C Y C L E S A N D T H E EPISTLE

(i) (ii) (iii) (iv) 9

The Formula-Citations The Origin of the Epistle A Lectionary Hypothesis Pauline Logia in Matthaean Discourses

MARK AND HIS SUCCESSORS TABLE VIII The Lectionary System in Operation in the Churches of the Synoptic Evangelists

INDEXES Biblical Passages Extra-Biblical Passages General Index

212

215 218 223 227 241 following page 306

307 327 329

PREFACE

This book is a revised and expanded form of the first six Speaker's Lectures in Biblical Studies, delivered in Trinity College, Oxford, in the summer of 1972. I was elected Speaker's Lecturer originally for three years, 1968-71, to present the thesis that Matthew had no other considerable source but Mark, which he elaborated midrashically. During the first of these years, a second idea occurred to me, that it was possible to give a more convincing account of the arrangement of Matthew than was available, on the assumption that the Gospel was a lectionary book—that is, a series of liturgical Gospels for the Saturdays and feasts of a Jewish-Christian Year, taken in order. I was able to incorporate this suggestion into the 1970 and 1971 Lectures, and the whole Matthaean thesis was published in 1974 under the title Midrash and Lection in Matthew. At every step, the claims I had been making for Matthew involved the consideration of Luke. This had been so from the beginning, for if Matthew had only Mark and no Q, the Q material in Luke could be explained only on the hypothesis that Luke derived it from Matthew. The problem here was not to show the Lucan versions of Q-sayings to be secondary—for which I was able to produce arguments—but to account for the changes that Luke would then have made in the Matthaean order. Here again, it was a lectionary thesis which pro.vided a neat solution to the difficulty: only whereas Matthew had been concerned principally to provide Discourses to fit the themes of the Jewish-Christian Feasts, Luke was attempting something more elaborate in a weekly story 'fulfilling* the Saturday Old Testament lesson. I provided a sketch of such a theory in the last chapter of my Matthaean book, and asked the Electors for an extension of two years (the maximum) to discuss the topic more fully. This they granted, and in 1972 I attempted to establish the background of O.T. readings in the first century. In 1973 I applied the resulting pattern to the exegesis of Luke as a whole. It may be of assistance to the reader if I make two comments here, one on the way in which my lectionary theory suggested itself, and the other on the logic of the exposition as I have come to write it. Dr D. E. Nineham writes, in the Introduction to his The Gospel of Saint

Mark:

It appears that the tradition on which the Gospels are based was handed on during the greater part of the oral period in the context of public and formal occasions-, that is to say, the people by whom it was passed on were preachers and teachers, speaking at meetings for public worship . . . The natural thing would be for the preacher or catechist to repeat one story, or parable, or group of sayings, at each meeting and then go on to expound its significance for his hearers. Naturally he would choose his story or parable on each occasion in accordance with the particular needs of his audience.1 Nineham sums up accurately the conclusion of forty years of form critical study, and although he does not claim proof ('It appears'), the picture which he presents is very plausible. Now suppose that we go on and ask, 'On what occasion would the preacher be especially likely to choose to tell the Resurrection story, say?', the answer must be, 'Well, presumably on Easter Day.' This is not to deny that it might have been told on other days, but surely it will have been told at Easter; and the fact that the story is set in all Christian lectionaries to be read at Easter is not irrelevant. What about the Passion story? Well, the early lectionaries all set the Passion story for Maundy Thursday/Good Friday, and in many cases they divide it up into units for a 24-hour vigil, with readings at the watches, every three hours. Christians did not keep Good Friday in the first century, but they did keep Passover at first; and so we cannot help wondering whether the churches of the evangelists did not tell the Passion story each year at Passover, starting with the Last Supper at the time of the Paschal meal, and whether such a practice would not have been very likely in the 30s. We are encouraged in such a thought by the fact that all the four Gospels themselves divide the story into three-hour units, or something similar; and by the further fact that Luke and John still have the same indications of time even when the stories differ from those in Mark and Matthew. I do not think that these suggestions will be very surprising, but once one admits early lectionary use into the discussion, a further point, not so obvious, will occur to us. Egeria, our first witness to Christian lectionary practice, tells us that in Jerusalem about 380, on the Tuesday in Holy Week the bishop 'reads the passage from the Gospel according to Matthew where the Lord says, "See that no man lead you astray". The bishop reads the whole of that discourse.'2 On Wednesday a presbyter read 'the passage about Judas 1 2

(Harmondsworth 1963), pp. 21 f., Nineham's italics. J. Wilkinson, Egeria's Travels [£T] (London 1971), ch. 33, p. 134.

Iscariot going to the Jews and fixing what they must pay him to betray the Lord'. 1 The Tuesday lesson, then, was Matt. 24—25 ('the whole of that Discourse'), and the Wednesday lesson was also from Matthew, since he alone tells of the money Judas 'fixed'. The verses Egeria refers to are Matt. 26.14-16, but the fact that she cites only Matt. 24.4 for Tuesday may mean that all the first sixteen verses were read: they include Jesus' words, 'You know that after two days the Passover is coming', and the supper at Simon's house, which took place on the Wednesday night. Whether this is so or not, the suggestion is on Matthew's page before us: could it be that the first Christians remembered Judas' betrayal and Simon's supper the day before Passover, and the Apocalyptic Discourse before that? We should have in this way an attractive explanation both for the details of time in the Gospels, and for the serial use in Egeria (late though she is): the last chapters of the Gospels were, so to speak, lessons for •Holy Week'. Once we have got as far as this, the soaring possibility follows: could it be that the Gospels are in the order in which we have them because they provided lessons for a whole primitive Christian Year, partly Jewish in its background, but reaching its climax each year at Passover and Easter? All three Synoptics close with an Apocalyptic Discourse, a Passion narrative and Resurrection material: could it be that all three were written as a series of 'readings' for a succession of Saturday nights and festivals running up to Easter? The preacher would still be choosing his story to suit the needs of his audience, as Nineham conjectured, but the needs would arise from the (O.T.) texts in the liturgy, as with a modern sermon. That is a big leap, but scholarship sometimes advances by the careful consideration of big leaps and soaring possibilities. What kind of considerations would be relevant to examining such a proposal? Many. We should need to know what were the themes, and if possible the readings, for the Jewish holy days at the period. We should need to know the way in which the synagogues read the Law and the Prophets on the intervening sabbaths. We should need evidence that the churches of the evangelists still observed Jewish festivals and traditional synagogue lections. We should need some external check on the subdivision of the Gospels into Nineham's 'stories or parables or groups of sayings', lest the whole topic break down into subjectivism. We should need some fairly striking correlation between the Jewish holy days and the passages in the Gospels which correspond with them; and a much more than random 1

ibid., ch. 34, p. 134.

correlation between the individual pericopae and the sabbath readings. That is asking quite a lot. The amount of knowledge that is available to us varies. Most of the Jewish holy days were biblical, and had been long established by our era; and even where the evidence is Talmudic, a much earlier date is often arguable. The sabbath reading system is a matter for learned dispute, but a good case can be made for the Torah readings in our period, and some case, of a cumulative kind, for the other books. There are formulas in the texts of the Gospels which suggest where the evangelists divided the pericopae, and the paragraphs are sometimes marked in the early manuscripts. Some correlations leap to the eye: the Sermon on the Mount, for example, would make a fine Christian comment on Pentecost as the feast of the Law-giving on Sinai, and the Harvest Parables in all three Gospels would be suitable for Tabernacles, or Ingathering, as the festival was once called. But we must be clear from the start that there is never going to be enough evidence to 'prove' the case. I can never hope to achieve more than a plausible reconstruction, and to reject this as 'speculative' is to miss the point; when we have no adequate evidence, our alternatives are to speculate or to go ignorant. It is a commonplace of philosophy that some arguments are Kke links in a chain, and others are like spokes in a bicycle-wheel. We all have a preference for the former: we know where we are, and can spot the fallacies. But to insist upon the former alone is to reduce scholarship to pedantry. In considerable tracts of ancient history and archaeology the arguments available are of the latter kind. We have this fact from here and that from there, and all that can be hoped for is an imaginative reconstruction that will explain them plausibly. The arguments will be cumulative, and in part subjective, but they will be none the worse for that. My own book is such. My reconstructions of the Torah reading-cycle and the Prophetic cycles are spoke-like, accounting for the evidence we have in what seems a credible context. None of these would hold the weight of the argument on its own, but before long they are seen to support one another. Ruth, Job and Daniel, for example, can be rather convincingly explained on this basis; and later Luke and Mark as well as Matthew. Each plausible explanation added helps to confirm the whole structure. Bicycle-spoke arguments impose more strain on the reader than chain-link arguments: he has to make judgements all the time, and he cannot form an opinion of the whole until the end. I feel justified in making these demands because of the importance of my theory, should it turn out to be true: it would explain so much, on so

radically new a basis. The judgement whether a new theory is right or wrong, in whole or in part, belongs not to its prejudiced author, but to his peers, the scholars of his discipline. Scholars are properly sceptical of radical new theories; it seems unlikely that the whole learned community has been wrong in some important matter. Yet, of course, from time to time learned communities have been found to be mistaken, even in very important matters. Radical changes are not easily accepted—as Max Planck is said to have observed, old theories do not die, but professors do. I do not wish such a fate upon my colleagues and friends; but I do hope that they will not think that they have dismissed the book by noting that it is speculative. When our evidence is limited, disciplined imagination is a virtue. The nightmare which has haunted me throughout is that I should be drawn into writing a one-man Bible Commentary. Who is sufficient for such a thing? I have accordingly limited myself by excluding three large areas of study. First, I have omitted all those Old Testament books which were not, or not much, used by Luke and his fellow synoptists: this has meant in practice the prophetic books of Jeremiah and Ezekiel, and a number of the Writings, such as Ecclesiastes and the Song of Solomon. Second, it has been impossible to cover the Psalter, which has an elaborate and fascinating history of composition requiring a monograph, even though the use of the Psalms is cardinal in the Synoptic Passion narratives. Third, I have omitted chapters on Acts, on John, and on Revelation, as being inessential to the argument, and have left the discussion of Mark as the natural climax. In a cumulative argument, the omission of any material reduces its plausibility; but there is evidence enough in three hundred pages for the critic to determine its validity. My thanks are due to my old college, Trinity, which kindly put the Danson Room at my disposal throughout the Lectures; to Professor H. F. D. Sparks, Canon John Drury and Canon Cheslyn Jones, and some thirty students, who attended and asked pertinent and helpful questions; to Mr J. H. Eaton, who has kindly read and commented on Chapters 2 and 4; and to the Electors who entrusted me with so august a Lectureship. Birmingham, March 1976

MICHAEL GOULDER

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

Al Ant. AT B.J. BJRL BRPOS CHB e. E.T. ET FCB Git. H.E. HUCA Huck IOT JBL JG JJS JQR JTS Judaism KP LXX Meg. Mek. Midr.

Roland de Vaux, Ancient Israel. 2e. E.T. London 1965 Josephus, Antiquitates Judaeorum Author's translation Josephus, Bellum Judaicum Bulletin of John Rylands Library J. Mann, The Bible as Read and Preached in the Old Synagogue. Vol. i. Cincinnati 1940 P. R. Ackroyd & C. F. Evans (eds), The Cambridge History of the Bible. Cambridge 1970 edition English translation J. Wilkinson, Egeria's Travels. London 1971 H. von Campenhausen, The Formation of the Christian Bible. E.T. London 1972 Gittin Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiastica Hebrew Union College Annual Albert Huck, Syrtopse der drei ersten Evangelien. Tubingen 1922 G. Fohrer, Introduction to the Old Testament. London 1968 Journal of Biblical Literature I. Elbogen, Der jiidische Gottesdienst in seiner geschichtlichen Entwicklung. 3e. Frankfurt 1931 Journal of Jewish Studies Jewish Quarterly Review Journal of Theological Studies G. F. Moore, Judaism in the First Centuries of the Christian Era: the Age of the Tannaim. London 1926 Kerygma Petrou The Septuagjnt: the Greek translation of the O.T. and Apocrypha Megillan Mekilta Midrash

MLM

M. D. Goulder, Midrash and Lection in Matthew: The

NEB Ned.

Speaker's Lectures in Biblical Studies 1969-71. London 1974 New English Bible Nedarim

Nestle-Aland NTS Passio Scil.

Novum Testamentum Graece. 25e. 1963 New Testament Studies Passio Scillitanorum Martyrum

Pes.

Pesahim

PG PL Proc. B.A.

Migne, Patrologia Graeca Migne, Patrologia Latina Proceedings of the British Academy

R. R

Rabbi Rabbah

RAC

T. Klauser (ed.), Reallexikon fur Antike und Christentum.

Ref.

Hippolytus, Refutation of All Heresies

R.H. S Sanh. SB S-B

Ro'sh Hashshanah Codex Sinaiticus Sanhedrin S. Schulz, Die Stunde der Botschaft. 2e. Hamburg and ZUrich 1970 H. L. Strack & P. Billerbeck, Kommentar zum Neuen

SL Sof. Taan.

M. Righetti, Storia Liturgica. 3e. Milan 1966 Soferim Ta'anit

TDNT TRL

Theological Dictionary of the New Testament J. Bowker, The Targums and Rabbinic Literature. Cam-

Stuttgart 1966

Testament aus Talmud und Midrasch. 4e. Munich 1926

bridge 1969 VT

Vetus Testamentum

WI Yeb. Zeb.

H.-J. Kraus, Worship in Israel. E.T. Oxford 1966 Yebamoth Zebahim

Biblical quotations are from the Revised Standard Version (RSV), copyrighted 1946, 1952, 1971, 1973 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA, and are used by permission. Where they diverge, they are marked AT (Author's Translation), except where the context indicates that the translation is from the Septuagint.

A CYCLE OF LITURGICAL GOSPELS

To understand an artefact of the ancient world, it is often more useful to ask, 'How was it used?' than to rely upon descriptions or names; for all descriptions carry the peril of anachronism. Holidaying in the Dordogne valley, we may be persuaded to go into one of the palaeolithic caves to admire the paintings: cave paintings—the description is systematically misleading. Our French not being up to the speed of the guide, we stand as if before an earlier Picasso: naive, we feel, but look at the strength of the lines! But then a glance at the guide-book reveals the use: these are not paintings in Picasso's sense at all—these are stone-age man's magic, his attempt to ensure his success at hunting, his first frail effort to control his environment. We look at the paintings again, with a new understanding: the use reveals the thing. Especially must we be wary of descriptions of religious actions and sacred things, lest they mislead us. One misleading description has been the calling of the various biblical units by the term sipher, pipuov, a book: for we handle books daily, and think we know what the word means—a roll, of course, in place of our codex-form, shorter than our books, but of the same species. So people suggest that Theophilus paid for the publishing expenses of Luke-Acts, 1 or that it was intended for the commercial market,2 or wonder under what section it was catalogued by the librarians at Alexandria.3 But a moment's imagination suffices to make such ideas problematic. Did one walk down the Argiletum and say to a bookseller, 'Good morning. A copy of Horace's Satires, please. Oh, and have you The Acts of the Apostles? By Dr Lucas, of Corinth'? How were ancient books advertised? It was often the practice for an author to become known by giving readings in public or at private dinner-parties.4 Did Luke perhaps give readings at dinner-parties? If so, to judge by the general tenor 1

H. Schurmann, Das Lukasevangelium (Freiburg 1969), i, 2. M. Dibelius, Aufsatze zur Apostelgeschichte (4c., GSttingen 1961), p. 118; H. von Campenhausen, The Formation of the Christian Bible [FCB} (1968, E.T. London 1972), p. 128 n. * C. F. Evans, 'What kind of a book is a Gospel?', in A Source Book of the Bible, ed R. C. Walton (London 1970), pp. 239 ff. 4 Juvenal; Sat. 1.1; 3.9; 8.126; Pliny, Ep. 7.17.1, etc. 1

l

of the Gospel at least—the Septuagintal style, for example, the assumed background of Jewish ways, the stress upon perseverance and the danger of apostasy1—they will have been Christian dinnerparties; and Christian dinner-parties sound like church services. So although Luke may, with his posh Greek preface and his Jesus-was-innocent tendency, have had an eye to the Argiletum, his book is likely to have taken shape within the Church; and that is how we find it being used fifty years later, when Justin, who often uses Luke, says that the memoirs of the apostles, and of those who accompanied them, were read at Sunday services.2 The use suggests the intention: perhaps the Gospel was first meant for church reading. The reference to Theophilus bears this out, for he had been instructed (KC(TTIXT)0TI<;) in the faith. 3 How natural for him, and for the many friends of God behind him who perhaps could not read, or afford a copy of the book, to hear the challenge to faithfulness, poverty and humility, in the context of weekly worship! Two other pieces of evidence bear this out. Mark calls his book 'the Gospel' (1.1), and the term stuck. Why 'the Gospel'? The word goes back to Paul and before: 'I would remind you, brethren, in what terms I preached to you the gospel, which you received (). For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received . . . ' (1 Cor. 15.1, 3). The gospel is thus the outline of the good news about Jesus which is delivered and received; delivered, that is, by a Christian teacher, and received by the Church. At first the good news is taught in a Christian gathering, from memory; with time it expands and takes on a more set form; at last it is written down and read out—or so the continuity of the name would seem to imply. Names, as I have said, are not trustworthy; but little more than a decade separates 1 Corinthians from Mark, and it is not easy to see 1

2 3

S. Brown, Apostasy and Perseverance in the Theology of Luke (Rome 1969). The Church context is allowed by Dibelius—'nicht nur fttr die christliche Gemeinde bestimmt (), sondern auch fur den Buchermarkt'—and is evident: cf. E. Trocm6, Le 'Livre des Actes' et I'histoire (Paris 1967), p. 48. "The memoirs of the apostles', I Apol. 67; 'and of those who accompanied them', Dial. 103.8. The more plainly Luke-Acts is seen to assume Christian commitment, and to be concerned with intra-Church issues like the admission of Gentiles, the more evident is it that Karnxetv means 'instruct' and not 'inform' at 1.4. Trocm6, p. 49, argues that this meaning is invariable throughout the N.T.— not only (as is clear) at Rom. 2.18; 1 Cor. 14.19; Gal. 6.6 (x 2); Acts 18.25; but also in Acts 21.21, 24, where the Jewish Christians have been instructed by their leaders about Paul's teaching. When Luke wishes to say 'inform', he uses £n(t>avi£eiv five times in the later chapters of Acts. So also G. Klein, 'Lukas 1, 1-4 als theologisches Programm*, in E. Dinkier (ed.), Zeit und Geschichte (Tubingen 1964), p. 213; cp. H. W. Beyer, TDNTiii, 638-40.

why Mark should have thought of his work as 'the Gospel' unless, like Paul's gospel, it was delivered and received in the Christian community. 1 Secondly, we have six set-piece books in the New Testament: the four Gospels, Acts and Revelation. Although Revelation is so different in content and tone from the others, it is of similar length and date, and the burden is surely on those who deny a similar method of publication. Now, Revelation was written to be read out in church, for in the Proem it is said, 'Blessed is he who reads aloud (6 dvocyxv(BCTK(ov) the words of the prophecy, and blessed are those who hear . . .' (1.3 RSV). The reader is mentioned alongside the hearers; the context is plainly a Christian assembly. We have the same background even more specifically in Hermas, of the same genre (Vis. 2.4). Hermas and the Elders are to read the vision in church, while two other copies are to be made, one for Grapte to instruct the widows and orphans, the other for Clement to send to the cities without. The passage is suggestive for the context of writing down a Gospel: the catechists would need one, especially as daughter-churches came to be founded. The presence of a reader (6 AvotYivdxTWDv) in the church is evident from these passages and from 1 Tim. 4.13 (TQ dvayvdwei), and has led to the suggestion that 6 dvoryiv(BOK(Dv in Mark 13.14 is the public lector of Mark, who is to understand and warn his hearers.2 If Luke, then, were read in church by the evangelist's intention, how would this be done? All at one sitting? Well, hardly: more likely a bit each week. The Gospel is too long, and too rich. Later use, again our trembling guide, suggests subdivision. In our first knowledge of church readings, the Gospels are subdivided, a liturgical 'Gospel' to each Sunday or ferial day, as they are to this day. But a more difficult and more interesting question follows: Would the bits be taken at random, at the choice of the reader, or would they be read serially, starting this Sunday where we left off last? That is a conundrum, for Luke himself leaves us in two minds, when he tells of Jesus reading Isaiah in the synagogue at Nazareth, whether he found Isa. 61 because that was what he wanted to read, or whether he found it because that was where the marker (yadh) was. All Luke 1 1

cf. von Campenhausen, FCB, pp. 105 ff. O. Michel, 'Evangelium', in T. Klauser (ed.), Reallexikon fiir Antike und Christentum [RAC], vi (Stuttgart 1966), coll. 1142 f., argues that it is easier to think that the Foremass was taken over from Judaism directly, rather than inserted later; and reading and readers would come with it. The Epistles were intended for public reading, and almost the same wording occurs in Eph. 3.4 as in Mark 13.14, 6uva
says is (4.17), 'He opened the book and found the place where it was written,.. .\ and we can take it either way. Four considerations would incline us to think that in the earliest times the Gospel of Luke was read serially rather than eclecticaDy. First, the Jewish Law has been read serially for at least 1800 years. Having spoken of the special readings for four of the last five sabbaths in the year, the Mishnah says, 'On the fifth they revert to the set order. At all these times they break off (from the set order in the reading of the Law): on new moons . . A1 Less than a century separates Luke from the writing down of the Mishnah, which is the codification of established uses; so the synagogues from which the Church grew are likely to have been familiar with a pattern of serial reading. The earlier development of the Jewish reading cycle will concern us in the next chapter. Although Christianity often saw itself as a radical movement away from Judaism doctrinally, it is noticeable that breakaway religious movements, such as Anglicanism, Lutheranism, or Methodism, tend to be rather conservative in matters of worship. Second, it has become clear2 that serial reading, lectio continua, was universal in the early patristic period. The sermons of Origen cover whole O.T. books in a way that virtually requires serial reading; and on occasion they are said to be read fc^tl?.3 Egeria makes it plain that Matt. 24-28 were read on successive days in Holy Week in Jerusalem about 380.4 Augustine refers to the hitherto continuous reading of St John, now interrupted by Holy Week.5 The Armenian lectionary,6 from about 430, has readings for Wednesdays and Fridays in Lent in steady series, the former from Exodus and Joel, the latter from Deuteronomy, Job, and Isa. 40-47. In the Syrian churches about 480,7 the numerous readings from the Writings, Law, Prophets, Epistles and Gospels are all in series. The Greek Lectionary, even though our MS evidence is late,8 is serial throughout or both Epistles and Gospels. The Old Galiican lectionaries of the 1

Meg. 3.4, H. Danby's translation and parenthesis, p. 205. M. Righetti, Storia Liturgica [5X) (3e„ Milan 1966), iii, 235 ff.; O. Michel, 'Evangelium', RAC col. 1146. 3 Horn, in I Libr. Regn., PG 12.1011, cited below, pp. 108f. 4 chs. 35-38. * In tpist. Johann. ad Parthos, prolog., PL 35.1977. * Dom A. Renoux, 'Un manuscrit du vieux lectionnaire armfoien de Jerusalem', Le Museon, 74 (1961), 361-85. 7 BM Add. 14528, cf. F. C. Burkitt, 'The Early Syriac Lectionary System', from Prae. B.A. xi (1923). • F. H. A. Scrivener, A Plain Introduction to the Criticism of the New Testament (4e., London 1894), pp. 80 ff. 1

5th-6th centuries1 consist of lectio continua broken by festal Propers. Even the old Roman Gospel lections, long believed to have no trace of serial reading left,2 have now been seen to contain, interwoven but in order, series of seven or eight readings from each of the three Synoptics, for the Sundays and feriae after Epiphany.3 So both the institution from which the first-century Church grew, and the institution into which the first-century Church grew, show strong evidence of serial reading. There is a third, more general, consideration. To the Jews the Torah was the word of God, and it was essential for everyone to know the word of God so th^t he could do it Only consider Josiah's dismay (2 Kings 22.11 ff.) when he heard of the discovery of the roll of the Law in the Temple: ignoratio Legis neminem excusat.

Now, there is no surer way of leaving some parts of the Law unread than to pick and choose on each sabbath: if all is vital, all must be read, and the only methodical way is to read in series. The Church did not value the Gospel less than the Jews did the Law: the Lord's words were life and truth, and it would be worth while putting up with the Genealogy once a year, if that is how you think of it, to be sure of missing none of their other treasures. So it would seem psychologically as well as circumstantially probable that the Church read Luke's Gospel in series; and I have argued in the first volume of my Speaker's Lectures4 that the same is true of Matthew's Gospel. Finally, there is a somewhat banausic but practical point It appears from the account in Luke 4 that Jesus—and therefore presumably any visiting preacher in synagogue or church—was given the scroll without his having given prior warning of the text of his address. Now, on the understanding of the passage which takes it that Jesus chose his own reading, we are able to make a rough computation of how long it would take him to find Isa. 61. The Isaiah A scroll at Qumran, which is near to contemporary, was 7.34 metres (about 24 ft) in length. Scrolls were wound forwards, the reader unrolling with the right hand and rolling up with the left; and it would be necessary to begin from the beginning.5 Thus, 1

Alban Dold, 'Das Slteste Liturgiebuch der Iateinischen Kirche', Texte und Arbeiten (Beuron 1936), I pt., Fasc. 26-8; J. Mabillon, De Liturgia Gallicana (Paris 1685), pp. 106-73; Ximenes, Missale Mixtion, PL 85 and 86; cf. E. Werner, The Sacred Bridge (London and New York 1959), pp. 61 f. 2 A. Fortescue, The Mass (New York 1922), p. 259. 1 T. Klauser, Das ramische Capitulare Evangeliorum (Miinster 1935), pp. 13 i t , Righetti, SL iii, 237. 4 Midrash and Lection in Matthew [.MLM] (London 1974). * O. R. Driver, The Judaean Scrolls (Oxford 1965), pp. 23 ff.; cf. A. Biichler, 'The Reading of the Law and Prophets in a Triennial Cycle', JQRvi(l893), 12f.

to reach Isa. 61 one would have to unroll more than twenty feet. Experiments show that a man with strong wrists can unroll a foot of scroll in about six seconds, so that the operation would take three minutes, or more if he could not be sure of finding his place. It is difficult to believe that such a delay would be tolerable; and something similar would be true of Luke, whose scroll would, pro rata, be about four metres in length. Where do such questions lead us? I began by suggesting that the use of an ancient artefact is our best clue to the designer's intentions. We may, of course, be misled, but at least it is worth while asking the question: If Luke's Gospel may quite likely have been read as a series of stories, could it have been developed as a series of stories? Rather in the same way as this book was written as a series of Speaker's Lectures: only, in Luke's case, it would have begun not as a series of readings, because we are speaking of a time before it was written down, but as a series of recitals, in liturgical order, of Jesus' words and deeds. For clearly, if it was developed like this before it was written down, it would be natural to use it like this after it had been written down. Certainly this would explain one or two features of the Synoptic Gospels. The Form-critics have so inured us to the concept of a pericope that we no longer wonder at the absence of real connection between one and the next: well, that would be explained if one pericope were the 'lesson' for one week, and the next pericope for the next. All three Gospels end with an Apocalyptic Discourse, and a full account of the Passion, in which much of Passover Day is divided into three-hour units: these would make excellent readings for the preparation and vigil of Passover; and, as I have said, they were being used like this when first the curtain lifts for us on church lectionary practice. And there are other matters to which we shall come in due course. But what sort of liturgical series would a Gospel be? Perhaps I can make my meaning plain by means of a modern parallel—not an historical one. Let us imagine the situation in the French village of Ars in the last century after the death of the famous cur6 JeanBaptiste Vianney. No doubt the stories of his wonderful life would be told in private houses by pious Catholics, but the perpetuation of these stories would owe most, we may think, to the Sermon at Mass. We can picture the new curd preaching on the fourth Sunday in Lent, on the Feeding of the Five Thousand: 'You yourselves will remember, my brothers in Christ, how our own saint was called to the orphanage in the days of the famine, and prayed; and the nuns

went at his word to open the loft door, and the corn ran down the ladder.' The attempt of Jesus to escape from the crowds would recall the old curd's attempt to flee the village; Jesus' nights of prayer, his vigils; Jesus' dying words, his dying words; and so on. As a cult of the saint formed, so it could happen that year after year these stories would be told in the same order, until a generation unfamiliar with the historical sequence of the saint's life would be apt to take the liturgical sequence as the historical one. None of this happened, I dare say, at Ars: but something very like it did, I believe, happen at Corinth, or wherever Luke's church was in Greece. Luke developed his Gospel in preaching to his congregation, as a series of fulfilments of the O.T.; and this development in liturgical series explains the basic structure of his Gospel, which has been a riddle so long. My illustration at Ars is apocryphal; but it would not be hard to lay one's finger on an historical instance of the same thing. The Didascalia Apostolorum is a manual of church order produced in Syria in the third century; it is in intention, and usually in fact, faithful to the Gospels, especially Matthew; but it has an interesting deviation in its chronology of the Passion. This is not due to an attempt to reconcile the Synoptics with John, for John is scarcely quoted throughout the book, and the chronology corresponds with neither Gospel tradition. Nor is it probable, as has been maintained,1 that the chronology of the Didascalia is historical, and that all the four Gospels are wrong. On Monday, say the 'Apostles', while Jesus is at the house of Simon the leper, the chief priests assemble and decide to seize him and to keep the Passover on Tuesday. Jesus celebrates the Passover on Tuesday. He is arrested on the night of Tuesday/Wednesday, and passes Wednesday in the house of Caiaphas. On Thursday he is brought to Pilate and accused, and then imprisoned in Pilate's house. On Friday he is crucified, on Saturday he is in the tomb and on Sunday he rises from the dead. Applied to Matthew's Gospel, this gives the following table: Sunday

Matt. (24)—26.2,

Monday

26.3-16:

Tuesday Wednesday

26.17-46: 26.47-68:

1

ending with Jesus' warning, 'You know that after two days the Passover is coming . . . ' The Priests' Plot, Simon the Leper's House, Judas' Assignation Passover Meal, Gethsemane Arrest, Trial by Sanhedrin

A. Jaubert, Date de la Cine (Paris 1957), 'Le Mercredi oil J&us fut livrt', NTS 14.2, 145-64.

Thursday

26.69—27.10: (Peter's Denial) Jesus brought to Pilate (Judas' Death) Friday 27.11-56: Accusation before Pilate, Crucifixion1 Such a table at once prompts the reflection, What a happy chronology, which provides a suitable reading for each day in Holy Week! The Didascalia belongs to the century when the Church was moving from keeping Passover-and-Easter to observing Holy Week. All that is left of Passover is a fast.2 The liturgical problem thus created has been solved by spreading the Passion readings over Holy Week. The acceptance of this as a fixed liturgical order has passed over to the belief that it reflects the actual historical order. Hence a marked defensiveness shown in emphasizing the days on which the successive events purported to have occurred3—not surprisingly, as so little of it fits with the unforced Gospel story! Something similar happened with Christmas Day, which was adopted to be the feast of the Birth of Jesus, perhaps by Constantine, and was rapidly believed to be the date on which his birth occurred.4 Such a process would seem to be plausible in itself as a suggestion for the milieu in which the Gospel grew to its present form. But it is n o t merely a plausible suggestion: it is what Luke himself says that

he is doing in his Prologue. He begins his work, 'Since many have undertaken to order (dvaTd^aoOai) a narrative of the things which have been brought to fulfilment among us . . ., it seemed good to me also, having followed everything accurately alongside (KapTpooXou8T|K6Ti) from the beginning, to write to you in order (ca8e5flc), most excellent Theophilus . . . ' (AT). There are several important things which Luke states in this exordium, but the most ineluctable is his stress upon order. Luke uses K«8B^ five times, always meaning 'in series'. 'It happened £v x<J> Ka8e£f|<;, after this' (8.1, AT); 'All the prophets, from Samuel and tfflv Ka8e$fi<;, those who came afterwards' (Acts 3.24); Peter 'explained to them icaSe^s, in order' (Acts 11.4); Paul 'went KaGe^fl?, from place to place through the region of Galatia and Phrygia' (Acts 18.23). Three times it is a temporal series, once it is a geographical series. Jesus' life was a series of incidents, and the next after his Anointing (Luke 7.36 ff.) 1

Didasc., ch. xxi, in Horae Semiticae, tr. M. D. Gibson (London 1903), if, 94-101. Those incidents not mentioned by the Didascalia I have put in parentheses. 2 ch. xxi (ed. cit.), p. 100. 1 cf. Jaubert, art. cit., p. 150, 'Visiblement la Didascalie defend une thdse'. 4 J. A. Jnngmann, The Early Liturgy (E.T. London 1960), p. 148. In the Chronograph of 354 it is noted: 'Vm Kal. Jan. natus Christus in Betleem Judaeae'.

was the extension of his mission (&1). There is in Scripture a series of prophets beginning with Samuel (in the Former Prophets), all of whom in turn prophesied of the time of Messiah. Peter recounted to the Church the series of incidents which had ended in the preaching to Cornelius. Paul visited each of the Galatian churches along the road in series, without deviation. In almost every instance that we have of the word in contemporary secular literature the meaning is the same.1 Luke uses the related word five times (7.11, 9.37, Acts 21.1, 25.17, 27.18), each time with the similar meaning 'next*. Now, all this is particularly significant because the whole emphasis of Luke's elaborate opening period falls upon the word KaWftc. 'Since many have undertaken . . . E8o£e xdnoi, 7tatpr|KoX.ou&r|K6Ti fivwflev jtamv dxpifkfr;, Korfte^fte aoi ypdvoti, Kp&twrre ©e6tte'. After the long ijteiSnnep clause comes Luke's decision, E8o£e Kdjiot; before the substance of the decision comes his qualification for taking it, napnicoftvroOev itftcnv dxptPffi?; now the rabbit is out of the hat, ica6e!;fte aoi Tpdvjrai. KaQs^fjg is in the emphatic position preceding the verb.2 The central point that Luke wishes to put over is that his account of Jesus is an account in order. The problem is, What order can it be that Luke is undertaking to provide? To an earlier generation of commentators the answer was plain: a chronological order. 3 Of the four, Luke was the Greek historian: Luke set the Gospel in the context of Tiberius and Pilate, of Quirinius and the Census; Luke wrote the Acts. But such an answer will not convince us now. What sort of a Greek history is it which moves from the Prologue to two chapters whose indebtedness to the O.T. is evidenced in every verse? The order is no whit more chronological than Mark's: in fact it is the Marcan order. When Luke deserts it, as in the Rejection at Nazareth (4.16-30), he involves himself in contradictions: the crowd asks Jesus to repeat miracles done at Capernaum, where Luke has not yet taken him. When he 1

M. Volkel, 'Exegetische Erwagungen zum Verstandnis des Begriffs KaOe^fi? im lukanischen Prolog', NTS 20.3 (1974), 289-99, discusses eight instances, and justifies the translation 'continua serie' for seven of these, and for all the Lucan uses. He differentiates by the translation 'deinde', but the distinction is rather fine: compare 7.11 with 8.1. 2 This is widely agreed. An exception is S. Schulz, Die Stunde der Botschaft [SSI (2e., Hamburg and Zurich 1970), pp. 243 ff., who takes Kct9e£fi<; with the participle. This means that the participle is modified by three successive adverbs, which must be unparalleled in Luke; and that the main verb is prefaced by an enclitic, aoi. 3 A chronological order is maintained among recent commentators by J. M. Creed, N. Geldenhuys and K. H. Rengstorf, without apology. Schiirmann thinks Luke intended to claim no more than the Marcan order; but this seems to deprive the sentence of all point.

leaves Mark for a protracted period for the Long Journey, there is not the least sign that Luke thought he was improving Mark's chronology. The Journey is not a chronological exercise, but an amorphous mass of heterogeneous material. The Lucan Jesus cries Woe to Bethsaida for its coming rejection of the Seventy just after he has left Galilee for Jerusalem (10.13, cf. 9.51); and he weeps over Jerusalem while still seventy miles away (13.34 f., note the bathetic 35b). If Luke meant that he had taken trouble to provide a chronological order, then he has promised goods which he cannot deliver; and this is a conclusion which exegetes have been reluctant to admit. A number of alternative theories have therefore been tried, to escape this conclusion: that KaOE^ffc means something different from 'in order'; or that some kind of theological order is in view. H. J. Cadbury, whose 'Commentary on the Preface to Luke' 1 remains the classic examination of the piece, lays down the entirely proper principle that each word should be interpreted in the light first of Lucan, and second of wider, usage. However, when he comes to Kaes^fj? his nerve gives way. The word, he claims, can mean 'successively', or 'continuously', and 'need not imply accordance with some fixed order'; but in the other instances in Luke-Acts it clearly does imply accordance with a fixed historical or geographical order. Cadbury actually wishes to translate 'hereinafter, below' (p. 505) in line with the meaning of 4£fl<;, fefreSflc, in certain papyri; now against the Lucan use not only of KaGeSfic, but of i^fi; as well. The words are not interchangeable; and if there were fifty uses of KotGeSfls in this sense, the climactic position of the word would still make it impossible—'I decided, having followed everything accurately from the beginning, as follows to write to you.' Two modern translations, the products of groups of scholars, similarly take KotfleSfis not to mean 'in order'. RSV translates: 'to write an orderly account'; NEB: 'to write a connected narrative'. The former is even a morally dubious translation because there is no instance of KotOe^; meaning 'orderly', and a suggestion of respectability seems to stem from the similarity of the English root. But order and orderliness are not the same. NEB reduces Luke's meaning to verbiage, for all narratives are connected. This does not show it to be wrong, for Luke is not above writing verbiage, but, as with Cadbury, the translation founders on the rock of the sentence's emphasis. 'The others have made an a t t e m p t . . . I decided to write a connected narrative'?? Of the proposals of theological order, perhaps the most widely 1

In Foakes- Jackson & Lake (eds), The Beginnings of Christianity (London 1922), ii, 489-510.

considered are those of E. Trocmd, G. Klein and E. Lohse.1 Trocmd2 suggests that Luke is contrasting the Marcan order with his own in that (i) Luke omits the Marcan account of the evangelization of the Gentiles (Mark 6.45—8.26, the Long Omission), and (ii) Luke tells the latter story in Acts, where it forms the crown of his united work. This is not very convincing. Mark 6.45—8.26 contains much material which has nothing to do with the Gentile Mission, including everything from 6.45 to 7.23; and it is notoriously difficult to justify a Gentile reference for almost anything except 7.24-30. Trocmd himself accounts for many of the omissions elsewhere as made for a different reason, namely, Luke's 'critical' spirit, which removes the second Feeding, for example. Moreover, if Luke wished to keep the Gentile Mission theme for Acts, why did he include the Gentile Centurion's story at 7.1 ff? Klein3 also turns the contrast implicit in ica8e5f|<; partly by including Acts. The 'many', e.g. Mark, had made an attempt at putting into writing the apostolic account of the events, dn' dpxfls, beginning from John's baptism and on to the resurrection (cf. Acts 1.21 f., etc.). Luke himself has sought out the whole matter (naoiv) from the beginning (fivroGev) at John's conception, and has decided to write it section by section ('Stuck fur Stiick') in its three theological steps—the Birth stories, the ministry of Jesus, the history of the Church. So Theophilus will know the certainty of the teaching of Luke's predecessors in which he has been instructed; for they accepted the apostolic witness, while he has studied the facts himself, which alone can yield such certainty. This looks contrived. Surely dit'dpxflcand dvcoOev are synonyms, not in contrast; cf. Acts 11.15; Matt. 19.8. The strong sense of nftcnv (which has become td ndvto on p. 216!) is at variance with Luke's common loose use of the word. How could Luke see the three great theological phases as 'completed' with Paul's arrival at Rome? How are his researches into the Birth stories supposed to be more dependable than the apostolic 1

1 leave out H. Conzelmann's proposals in Die Mitte der Zeit (Tubingen 1953; E.T. The Theology of St Luke, London 1960) as I have already criticized them elsewhere, Type and History in Acts (London 1964), pp. 142 ff. E. E. Ellis, The Gospel of Luke (London 1966), pp. 29 ff., suggests a series of 'logical' divisions—the Infancy Stories, Jesus' Messiahship, twenty-four acts of Messiah, the Journey, Jerusalem—but the breaks are unclear, even to Ellis, and the contrast with Luke's predecessors obscure. Volkel (see n. 28) also takes Koe8e£fi<; as meaning logical order, on the strength of a discrepancy between Peter's account in Acts 11 and the narrative in Acts 10. Luke is too naive for such subtle treatment—he thought he had told the same story twice! 2 op. cit., pp. 46 f. s 'Lukas 1, 1-4 als theologisches Programm' (see note 7, above), pp. 193-216; followed by S. Schulz, SB, pp. 243-50.

tradition of die ministry? Where is the parallel between &von6£a06at and Kofegft; gone, with the former reduced to 'auszeichnen'? Above all, how can K O c a r r y so much weight? It is simply not true to say that it refers 'less to the ordering than to the compass of the material' (p. 211). To say, 'They tried to write out the historia Jesu: / am giving you the whole story section by section', would leave the reader completely in the dark—was not Mark's story also told KotGe^fis: John's baptism, the ministry, the cross, the resurreotion? Lohse 1 understands Kcefle^fj? to mean 'in geographical order'. Both Gospel and Acts follow a sequence in which geographical divisions suggest theological purpose. In the Gospel 1.5—3.20 describes the coming of John Baptist, the end of the old covenant (Luke 16.16); then 3.21—9.50 covers Jesus' Galilaean mission; 9.51—19.10, his Way to Jerusalem; 19.11—24.52, the Jerusalem mission culminating in the Passion and Resurrection: the book ends, as it began, in the Temple. Acts 1.8 sets out the progression from Jerusalem to Rome which the story is to follow. Each section of the Gospel begins with a rejection of Jesus, symbolizing the cross; each has an adumbration of the Gentile mission. Lohse's sections are thus shorter than Klein's—four in the Gospel alone, where Klein has three over all. He has not, however, carried many commentators with him; and this, I think, for two reasons. First, it seems rather unnatural to use the phrase 'to write to you in order', meaning a geographical order, without precisely specifying so. Luke says that Paul went through the towns in order (Acts 18.23), but then he is talking of towns. Indeed, the whole notion of writing a story in geographical order seems somewhat strange. But secondly, even so we are in the same predicament vis-a-vis Mark as we were with the chronological order. Despite Lohse's correct point that Luke mentions John's imprisonment earlier than Mark, the fact remains that Mark, like Luke, divides Jesus' mission into three geographical units (if one chooses to look at it so): Mark 1—9, Galilee (and briefly beyond); Mark 10, the Way to Jerusalem; Mark 11—16, the Jerusalem mission, with the Passion and Resurrection. So in fact Lohse, no less than the old chronological school, loses the contrast with Luke's predecessors. If none of these solutions proves convincing, perhaps my Curd d'Ars suggestion is worthy of consideration. Why should KoeG^g not mean 'in liturgical order'? Such an exegesis would have two 1

E. Lohse, 'Lukas als Theologe der Heilsgeschichte', Evangelisehe Theologie 14 (1954-5), 256-75; followed by W. Grundmann, Das EvangeUttm nach Lukas (6e., Berlin 1971), p. 2.

j

'

'

i

immediate merits: it safeguards the 'order' meaning of the word, and it makes sense of Luke's emphasis. He has decided to revise the work of his predecessors, and to provide a series erf" pericopae which will fit the year in order. It also makes sense of two other features of the Prologue: the ordering of the earlier Gospels, and the Gospel as the fulfilment of Scripture. Every commentator notes that Luke has been at pains to balance his opening sentence in an approved rhetorical way: 'Since m a n y . . . it seemed good to me also', 'eyewitnesses &n' dpxffc . . . all things OvmOev', etc. Is there a word in the opening clause to balance ko8e$ffc? Indeed there is: dvoexdSaoflai means 'to order fully', 'to arrange'. 1 Irenaeus says that when the Scriptures had been corrupted, God inspired Ezra to set in proper order (dvatd^aoeoi) all the words erf"the prophets. 2 Plutarch uses the term to mean 'to rehearse in proper order'. 3 It is true that it is used by Athanasius with the more general meaning 'to compile',4 and has other meanings in pagan authors, 5 but the root meaning of the word is 'to order', and the balance with Koriteijfic shows plainly that this is the meaning here. Others—Mark, Matthew (perhaps more, but we cannot trust Luke's noXXot too far®) —have undertaken to order a narrative: he has decided to make a thorough job of it, providing Gospel fulfilments for the liturgical themes of feast and Sunday for virtually the whole year. The relation of the Gospel to the Scriptures of the Old Testament is a theme not omitted from the Prologue either. A Gospel is not a list of things which Jesus did: it is an account of the things which have been brought to fulfilment among us.7 It is the things which Jesus did, seen as the fulfilment of the O.T. Where do the stories come from? Well, ultimately of course from eyewitnesses, but the 1

G. Delling, TDNT, viii, 32 f. Adv. Haereses, iii, 21.2. Moralia, 968C. 4 39th Festival Letter. ' See H. J. Cadbury, art. cit., and in JBL 52 (1933), 56-8; W. C. van Unnik, 'Once More St Luke's Prologue', Neotestamentica 7 (1973), 12 f. * It occurs in a pleonastic sense, for example, in the opening verses of both speeches in Acts 24. 1 Cadbury, loc. cit., takes rcX.r|poopETv to mean 'complete', not 'fulfil'. The word is found only here in Luke, but Cadbury shows that Luke is fond of -$opstv compounds, which serve to add dignity. nXripoCv itself has to mean 'complete', not 'fulfil', only at 7.1; while it has to mean 'fulfiT, not 'complete', at 1.20; 4.21; 22.16; 24.44; cf. also 9.51. Klein also translates 'complete' on the grounds that TtpdYpcna requires such a meaning, pp. 196 f.: but Jesus' exodus is to be fulfilled at 9.31, and Passover will be fulfilled at 22.16, cf. also Acts 14.26; 19.21. Trocmi (op. cit., p. 46) observes that x. includes 'accomplissement' as the most 'noble' sense for a grand word. 1 J

eyewitness accounts have been mediated in preaching: 'just as they were delivered to us by the original (dw' dpxfls, AT) eyewitnesses and ministers of the word'. 'The word' in Luke means the Gospel as preached: the stories have come by the mouth of preachers, often themselves the eyewitnesses. In the only service for which we know the lesson in Luke's writings, that at Nazareth in Luke 4, the sermon expounds the reading, Isa. 61; and the readings, and the exposition of them, are mentioned several times by Luke as the people's normal means of instruction—'They have Moses and the prophets; let them hear them' (Luke 16.29, 31), 'From early generations Moses has had in every city those who preach him, for he is read every sabbath in the synagogues' (Acts 15.21). Sermons on the Scriptures read were the traditional Jewish use: 'Moses laid down a rule for the Israelites that they should enquire and give expositions concerning the subject of the day'. 1 In view of this, and of Luke's unwearying claims of Christ as the fulfilment of law and prophets (and psalms), it is easy to believe that the ministers of the word related those deeds and words of Jesus which were suggested by the Scriptures liturgically read. Although there is no reference to any readings of Scripture either in 1 Cor. 14 or in Acts 20, the descriptions of Christian services included in these chapters are only partial, and we should not necessarily expect readings to be mentioned. Paul does, however, seem to imply a reading of the Torah in 2 Cor. 3.14 ff.: 'To this day, when they read the old covenant, that same veil remains unlifted, because only through Christ is it taken away. Yes, to this day whenever Moses is read a veil lies over their minds; but when a man turns to the Lord the veil is removed.' 2 Knowledge of Scripture is assumed by Paul: 'Do you not know that those who are employed in the temple service get their food from the temple, . . . ?' (1 Cor. 9.13). He had taught the Corinthians to appropriate the O.T.—'Our fathers were all under the cloud . . ( 1 0 . 1 ) — a n d in all his letters he drew on wide areas of Scripture for his argument, treating them as a shared authority with which he expected his churches to be familiar. Such appropriation and such authority are scarcely explicable without the assumption of liturgical reading. Our first open reference to the liturgical use of the O.T. in church is in the Pastorals, that is, like Luke, in the Deutero-Pauline communities, and probably within twenty years of the Gospel: 'Till I come, attend to the public reading of scripture (tfl dvayvcbaei), to 1 2

b Meg. 32a. Michel, col. 1142, where Rom. 1S.4 is also taken as a text suggesting the same.

preaching, to teaching' (1 Tim. 4.13).1 This is a very convenient text, for the implication is that the readings were followed by exhortation and exposition in the liturgy. This is stated by Justin: 'The memoirs of the apostles or the writings of the prophets are read, as long as time permits; then, when the reader has ceased, the president verbally instructs and exhorts to the imitation of these good things' (/ Apol. 67). The Gospel now has its place alongside the O.T. reading, and the sermon is said to expound the lection, the same two verbs being used as in 1 Tim.2 In Justin's later contemporary, Hegesippus, a three-part canon is assumed as universal: 'In every city that which the Law and the Prophets and the Lord preach is faithfully followed'.3 'The Lord' here must mean the Gospel: 'preach' (iciipoaaei) implies a public proclamation. Later use shows at least one O.T. lesson as universal until the sixth century.4 Thus everything points, however tentatively, to the conclusion that the Church continued the Jewish practice of readings from Law and Prophets, followed by an expounding sermon; and that the expounding sermon in time gave birth to the liturgical Gospel. There is one final possibility latent in the Prologue. Luke says that the basis for his own undertaking is that he has followed everything accurately alongside from the beginning (JI<XPIIKOX.OO0T|K6TI fivmGev nfioiv dtcpipa*;). W. C. van Unnik has shown that there is an instance in Josephus of the word icapaicoX.ouBetv meaning 'to acquaint oneself with',5 so there is no reason why the phrase should not be just the stock Greek historian's claim to know the facts. But the verb is used in a number of senses, and the Greek could equally easily mean, 'having followed all the Old Testament parallels accurately from Genesis on'. Such a translation would be speculative, but it would have the advantage of providing the best possible basis for writing a Gospel in liturgical order: and if it makes the best sense, it should not be excluded. We thus have an understanding of the Prologue which makes sense of every word—and further makes sense of the fact that Luke has plainly drawn the details of Luke 1.5—2.52 not from eyewitnesses, 1

The Pastorals are sometimes dated about 150—cf. von Campenhausen, FCB, p. 181. But they are cited several times in Polycarp's Letter, which appears to have been written soon after Ignatius' martyrdom. Liturgical reading of the O.T. is the natural background of 2 Tim. 3.15 also, 'From childhood you have been acquainted with the sacred writings . . . All scripture is inspired by God'. 2 There is a discussion of the use in Justin's church below, p. 53. 3 ap. Eusebius, H.E., iv.22.3. 4 Michel, coll. 1144-8; Righetti, SL, pp. 239 f. 5 art. cit., p. 16.

but from the Scriptures. The contrast which he is drawing is, I shall suggest, fully borne out by an examination of the texts. Mark and Matthew did both undertake a rough liturgical ordering of the Gospel material. Mark (as I shall argue in ch. 9) made a first attempt at a liturgical series of stories, running from New Year in October round to Easter. Matthew provided a full year's readings, running from after Easter round to Easter, but concentrating on the Jewish festivals, being so Jewish a Gospel.1 They did both undertake to draw up a series, but their series were incomplete. Mark started in October, and what is the use of that? Six-and-a-half-month calendars have no sale; Luke followed everything through fivcoGev, from the beginning of the cycle. Matthew's stress on Jewish festivals is equally inadequate for a Gentile church. It is the fulfilments of the Sunday-by-Sunday readings2 which count, every one taken accurately in order: for only so can it be seen that no jot of the law has fallen, only so can Theophilus have certain knowledge, based partly upon eyewitnesses, and partly on the infallible word of God, of the full Gospel story to which he has been introduced.

In my apocryphal example of the life of the Curd d'Ars, I supposed that the stories of the saint's life were told in parallel with the Gospel at Mass; and in that case the real nature of such a life could be immediately exposed by anyone familiar with the order of the Gospels in the Roman Missal. The reason that the real nature of St Luke's Gospel has not been exposed long since is that Luke did not use the Roman Missal; and we do not have any copy of the lectionary that he did use. Our first task, therefore, is to reconstruct the system of readings which were in use in the West, that is in Palestine and the Diaspora of the Roman Empire, in Luke's day, and this is no inconsiderable labour: it will occupy us in the next chapter and through chapters 4, 6 and 7. But before I begin to unravel this tangled skein, it may be of some assistance to my readers to know where the argument is leading. Courses of biblical lectures are not detective stories whose denouement must be reserved to the last page. I shall therefore now set out starkly the conclusions to which I see my study as tending; and those whose reading time is limited can move on to the last chapter direct. 1 2

MLM, ch. 9, with Appendix A. Acts 20.7, 'On the first day of the week, when we were gathered together to break bread . . . ' shows that Luke was used to Sunday worship. I take this to signify what we should call Saturday night worship, and have discussed the transition from sabbath to Sunday in MLM, pp. 176-9.

In the first century A.D. the Western synagogue used an annual cycle of lections beginning in Nisan, in the spring. It had not only a fixed cycle of readings of the Law, which consisted of the S4 units which are in use to this day; it had also a series of fixed cycles for the Prophets and for the Writings. These were later broken up, but in Luke's time they were intact, and were used as alto-native cycles of second and third lessons. The Torah was read every year, but there were five alternative cycles of the Prophets—the Former Prophets (that is, Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings), Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezckiel, and the Twelve (Minor Prophets). There were also a number of cycles of the Writings, including the work of the Chronicler, the Wisdom of ben-Sira, and a series of shorter books taken together to form a cycle beginning with Daniel and ending with Proverbs. Some latitude was customary in the choice and number of these lessons, but Luke's church was accustomed to hear all the books which I have mentioned, except Ezekiel and perhaps Jeremiah, and the Gospel was developed in the course of expositions of these readings. The Lucan cycle began after the Easter octave, following Matthew, on the fifth Sunday of the Jewish cycle, and it ran round to the Easter octave, following Matthew and Mark. It took up the themes of the Law (Chapter 3), the Histories (Chapter 5), Isaiah and the Twelve (Chapter 6), and the Writings (Chapter 7). The pattern of readings, thus reconstructed and confirmed in Lucan use, will now enable us to take a further look at Matthew, which will be seen to have drawn on the same cycle, especially in the formulacitations; and Matthew will further be seen to show signs of familiarity with a fixed cycle of readings from the Pauline letters (Chapter 8). Finally, we shall be in a position to ask whether the given cycles cast light on the structure of Mark; and I shall argue that the lectionary theory provides a persuasive explanation for the origin and development of the whole Gospel tradition from the 30s on (Chapter

9).

I have not included an account of the liturgical origin of Acts for reasons of economy. I hope one day to do this in a second edition; in the meantime those interested will be in a position to work the cycle out for themselves. Before composing his Gospel, in the days when he simply read Mark, Luke had been wont to illustrate his sermons with stories of the Apostles, and in the course of time these stories also were formed into a continuous cycle, our Acts of the Apostles. Just as the Torah was the classic statement of God's being, activity and will for Israel, and the Prophets and Writings were commentary upon it, displaying God's continuing activity and will for Israel throughout history; so the Gospel was the classic

statement of God's redemptive activity and will for the world, and the Acts displayed his continuing activity in the Church. 'In the first book, O Theophilus, I have dealt with all that Jesus began to do and teach . . . ' : in this follows the continuation in the works of the Spirit. I wish to emphasize finally that I am not claiming that the reconstructed lectionary cycle explains every detail of the structure of each of the three Synoptic Gospels. Mark and Luke were no more bound to preach on the readings of the day every Sunday than a modern vicar (or curd) is bound to preach on the Gospel and Epistle every Sunday. I am obliged to show that there is a higher correlation than that which chance would provide, and there is no difficulty in doing this—more than half the pericopae in Luke are explicable on the basis of the lections, and something similar holds good for Mark. Further, it is a help if divergences from the lections can be explained on plausible ad hoc supplementary hypotheses, and these again are easy to supply: both Matthew and Luke were constrained by the need/desirability of including all the Marcan material, for example, and there is the question of the preparation of catechumens for Easter baptism. So the lectionary theory is not to be expected to solve every problem unaided; but it is my hope that it will be found illuminating—and, indeed, revolutionary.

2 THE TORAH AS AN ANNUAL CYCLE OF READINGS

The manner of Old Testament readings in the synagogues of New Testament times is a complex and controverted question, but not one that is beyond solution. There are three major problems: (1) Did the first-century synagogue have any set system of readings? The Mishnah, as I have said, shows that lectio continua was the rule prescribed in the second century: 'On the fifth (sabbath) they revert to the set order', 1 but we need to know more for our purposes. For the set system might have been part of the Jamnia reforms, and therefore might not have been heard of before the churches broke with Judaism; or it might have been in process of growth in the first century, in which case we should have to reckon with the possibility of untrammelled freedom in those parts of the Diaspora where Pharisaic reformism was not a powerful force. (2) The first Jewish month was Nisan, our April, roughly speaking—'This month shall be for you the beginning of months' (Exod. 12.2): but, for reasons we shall be going into, the ancient autumn New Year in Tishri, our October, was and is celebrated as New Year, Ro'sh Hashshanah. If the year began in Tishri, there is the further complication over the day in Tishri, the 1st, the 15th, 21st, 22nd or 23rd. So the second thing we need to know is whether the lectionary year, if there was one in the first century in the West, began in Nisan or in Tishri; and if the latter, on what day in Tishri. (3) There is a comment in the Babylonian Talmud about 'the people of Palestine who complete the reading of the Pentateuch in three years'.2 As the Babylonian synagogues then (c. A.D. 500), like all Jewish synagogues today, read the Torah in a year, this leaves open whether the system (if any) in Palestine in the first century was annual or triennial. In all, therefore, there are five possible theories, four of which are actual 1

2

Meg. 3.4, cf. above p. 4, note 1. The tractate Megillah ('Scroll') is concerned first with rules for the reading of the scroll of Esther, but other rules on the reading of the Scriptures in general have been appended; and then amplified in the Megillah tractates in the two Talmuds and the Tosefta. b Meg. 29b.

theories, a b o u t the lectionary system in the first-century Western synagogue: (a) t h a t there was freedom, no system, which is the opinion of m a n y non-Jewish scholars; 1 (b) t h a t there was a triennial cycle beginning in Tishri, which was t h e opinion of J. M a n n ; 2 (c) that there was a triennial cycle beginning in Nisan, which was the opinion of A. Biichler; 3 (d) that there was an a n n u a l cycle beginning in Tishri, which is the system obtaining today; a n d (e) t h a t there was an a n n u a l cycle beginning in Nisan, which is the view f o r which I shall argue. T h e triennial-cycle theories have been influential since Biichler wrote in 1893, b u t they were n o t thoroughly examined until Prof. A. Guilding applied them in detail to St J o h n ' s Gospel in I960. 4 They were then criticized, a n d in my view demolished, by Prof. 1

This position has been set out most recently and most fully by Ch. Perrot, La Lecture de la Bible dans la Synagogue (Hildesheim 1973). Perrot's particular theory turns on the 290 p'tubdt and 379 s'tumdt in the Pentateuch, marked in BH with the letters p and s: many of these correspond with edentations in the Dead Sea biblical MSS, and they are therefore ancient. Sometimes they fall close together, especially in passages about priests and Levites, so Perrot suggests that these were the original lections introduced about the Chronicler's time. There would have been almost enough p'tufidt to go round a seven-year period (cf. Deut. 31.9 ff.), and fixed passages, with associated sections from the prophets, could have become traditional. The Jamnia reforms then brought in lectio continua with a minimum of twenty-one verses per sabbath, so that cycles of three years and three and a half years became customary in the second century A.D. The controversy between R. Judah and R. Meir (see below, pp. 56 f.) then issued in the formation of the standard triennial and annual cycles by about 200. The festal readings were fixed later than the sabbath cycles. The origin of the p'tuhdt and s'tumdt is obscure, but Perrot's theory is not very convincing. There are not in fact enough p'tubdt to go round seven years; and although the combined number is very large (669) there are still nine lections in the best testified triennial cycle and one in the annual cycle which do not correspond with either. The growth of traditional set lessons over a seven-year period without lectio continua is a difficult hypothesis. But many of Perrot's conclusions are sound. The Mishnaic festal readings are not ancient: the triennial cycle (his main interest) is to be dated about A.D. 200: its origin is connected with the discussion between R. Meir and R. Judah. 1 The Bible as Read and Preached in the Old Synagogue [BRPOS], vol. i (Cincinnati 1940), vol. ii, by I. Sonne (1966). 3 The Reading of the Law and the Prophets in a Triennial Cycle', JQR v (1893), 420-68, vi (1894), 1-73. BUchler's system was accepted by many Jewish scholars, at least in outline: it is in the Jewish Encyclopaedia (1901-6) vii, 647 ff.; xii, 254 ff., and in Encyclopaedia Judaica (Jerusalem 1972), art. 'Triennial Cycle'. It is criticized and developed by I. Elbogen, Der jiidische Gottesdienst in seiner geschichtlichen Entwicklung [JG] (3e., Frankfurt 1931), pp. 155 ff., 540 f. 4 The Fourth Gospel and Jewish Worship (Oxford 1960).

J. R. Porter, 1 L. Morris, 2 a n d Dr J. Heinemann, 3 a n d I shall n o t repeat their criticisms now. I shall a t t e m p t to trace the development of the lectionary systems, b o t h a n n u a l a n d triennial: we have hints of the use of one or other system in a fair n u m b e r of documents between 6 0 0 B.C. a n d A.D. 5 0 0 , a n d all fit together into a coherent whole. It will be convenient to begin with the second problem set out above, that of the Calendar.

(i) The Calendars In pre-exilic Israel there were three great feasts: Unleavened Bread, Pentecost, a n d Tabernacles. In all five calendars in the O.T.—Exod. 2 3 . 1 0 - 1 9 (?E); Exod. 34.18-26(J); Lev. 23.4-44 (H); N u m . 28—29 (P); Deut. 16.1-17 (D)—the feasts fall in this order, a n d it is evident t h a t before the exile the year ' t u r n e d ' with Tabernacles (Ingathering). Exod. 23.16, ' Y o u shall keep the feast of Ingathering at the going o u t (b'tse'th) of the year' (AT) means either 'at the end of the year' (RSV) or 'at the going f o r t h of the year'. Exod. 34.22 refers to 'the feast of ingathering at the end (t'quphath) of the year': t'quphah means t h e completion of a revolution or series (1 Sam. 1.20; Ps. 19.6; cf. J o b 1.5). 4 Tabernacles thus b o t h closes the year, a n d looks f o r w a r d to a renewal of earth a n d people t h a t will come with the 1

'The Pentateuch and the Triennial Lectionary Cycle', in F. F. Bruce (ed.) Promise and Fulfilment, Essays presented to S. H. Hooke (Edinburgh 1963). 2 The New Testament and the Jewish Lectionaries (London 1964). 1 'The Triennial Lectionary Cycle', JJS, xviii (1968), 41 ff. Heinemann is concerned with Mann's theory, but Mann is most effectively confuted by his own disciple, I. Sonne, who wrote up his material into the second volume (of three or four) between Mann's death in 1940 and his own in 1960: "The objections of Albeck and Lieberman are justified . . . (Mann's arguments) are not always convincing He left the realm of science' (II, xxiii f.). He refers to 'the Herculean labour of removing all the apparent considerable number of negative instances' (xxiii): he and Mann did not work simply, that is, from given lists of haphfardt—'our task was to ascertain from underlying data the original prophetic lections' (p. 13). This was done on principles of symmetry, avoidance of repetition, etc., and when the given haphfardt did not fit, they were put down as 'late' and 'removed'. The theory has been supported recently by J. Bowker, The Targums and Rabbinic Literature [TRL] (Cambridge 1969), pp. 72 ff. * H.-J. Kraus, Worship in Israel [WI] (1962, E.T. Oxford 1966), pp. 26 ff. R. de Vaux, Ancient Israel [.41] (2e„ E.T. London 1965), pp. 190 f., maintains that the year began with Tabernacles. It is true that tse'th can mean 'the going forth', e.g. of the sun, and that t'quphah is also ambiguous; but there is no ignoring of the order of the festivals in the biblical sources. De Vaux also gives a forced interpretation of t'shubhath hashshanah (2 Sam. 11.1 =1 Chron. 20.1, cf. 1 Kings 20.22, 26), the (re)turn of the year 'when the kings go forth to battle'. The year (re)turns at new year: equinoxes, as de Vaux tells us seven

following rains. It was a seven-day feast before the exile, and the new year will have begun on the first day, 15th, or the last day, 21st, or the day following, 22nd Ethanim. This was the name of the month in early times; but the Babylonian name, Tishri, was adopted after the exile. The Jews are conservative, and the cycle of readings from the Law (sidrdt) still begins today after the (now lengthened) feast of Tabernacles, on Simhath Torah, 23rd Tishri. The exile brought about a change in this pattern. The Babylonian new year was in the spring, not the autumn, and the main stream of the Israelite exiles adopted this usage: almost all the biblical dates are taken from a new year on 1st Nisan. According to 2 Kings 25.8 the Temple was destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar in the fifth month, and this must have been in August/September because the wine, fruit and oil were already gathered (Jer. 40.10), and after the murder of Gedaliah two months later, were stored (Jer. 41.8). The tradition that the destruction of the Temple in August of A.D. 70 was at the same time of year as the destruction by Nabonidus 1 is correct, for a fast of the fifth month is observed in Zechariah (7.3 ff.; 8.19), and is still observed on 9th Ab, the fifth month from Nisan, to commemorate the fall of the city. Jer. 36.22 describes an event in 'the ninth month, and the king was sitting in the winter house, and there was a fire burning in the brazier before him'—clearly the ninth month Kislev (December), starting from Nisan. Jeremiah's oracles were edited after the exile, so there is no need to suppose 2 that the change to a spring calendar took place earlier, when Babylonian influence became strong towards 600 B.C. There is no question of the Nisan new year being accepted for a secular calendar, while retaining the traditional sacred calendar in the way that Jews (and Christians) do today. All the dated events in the Heilsgeschichte were reckoned from Nisan. Solomon's Temple was dedicated (1 Kings 8.2) 'at the feast in the month Ethanim, which is the seventh month' from Nisan; the Exodus was in the first month, Abib/Nisan; Sinai in the third month, and so on. This calendar was accepted by the fourth-century Redactors, and dominates the Bible. Its controversial tone is hinted by the defensive note of Exod. 12.2, 'This month (Nisan) shall be for you the lines above, enter Judaism later. No doubt Assyrian and Babylonian kings went out to battle in the spring; but then their new year was in the spring. In Israel the work of harvesting was done, and the army mobilized and consecrated at Tabernacles; ploughshares had but to be beaten into swords. Pss. 2, 46, 48, which are all probably Tabernacles psalms, picture invasions by enemy kings; cf. also the scene at the beginning of 1 Kings 22. 1 Josephus, B.J., vi, 269 f., m Taan. 4.6. 2 De Vaux, AI, p. 192.

beginning of months; it shall be the first month of the year for you.' This state of affairs could never have obtained if the D-community had not taken the annual religious cycle to begin in the spring. Nor did the order of festivals in the old calendars contradict it: they gave the cycle of feasts as Unleavened Bread, Pentecost, Tabernacles—new year on 1st Nisan would do very well. The spring calendar is not, however, the only one in post-exilic Israel. According to Exod. 40.1 (P) the Tabernacle was erected on the 1st day of the first month, and in .17 (P) this is specified as the 1st day of the first month of the second year. But which is the first month? Since the Dedication of the Temple was in Ethanim/Tishri, we should have expected the Dedication of the Tabernacle to be in Tishri likewise, for P is hardly drawing on genuine history, but is concerned here as elsewhere to justify current liturgy. This is confirmed in what follows. In Num. 1.1 (P) Moses is commanded to make the census on the 1st day of the second month of the second year; and in Num. 7.1-83 (P) the princes bring their offerings for twelve days. Even if the census took only a day, this would bring us to 13th Iyyar (the second month). But in Num. 9 (P) Israel keeps the Passover a year after the Exodus, and if the 'first month' of Exod. 40/Num. 1 were Nisan, this would mean backtracking. The events can be kept in order only if the 'first month' of Exod. 40/ Num. 1 is Tishri: there are then six months for the census, offerings, etc., till Passover the following Nisan. The Redactors have corrected most deviant dates in P, including putting Passover in the first month (Nisan) at Num. 9.1, but those in Exod. 40 and Num. 1 escaped their notice. So P retained the autumn new year: indeed, even without this evidence we should have to postulate a conservative community in exile which persevered in the old ways, for unless some influential group had retained the autumn new year, Ro'sh Hashshanah would have been on 1st Nisan. But, interestingly, it is not; nor is it on the old new year in mid-Tishri: it is on 1st Tishri, the date of the erection of the Tabernacle in P. We find already in Ezekiel (45.18) the cleansing of the sanctuary on 1st Tishri, and it may well be that preparations for Tabernacles began with the blowing of trumpets at the new moon (Ps. 81.3) earlier still, when all Israel had to make the pilgrimage to the central sanctuary.1 The H and P calendars in Lev. 23 and Num. 28-29 1

As 'all Israel' had to appear before the Lord at Tabernacles (and Unleavened Bread and Pentecost), and some Israelites lived a hundred miles from the central sanctuary, especially when the central sanctuary was at Dan or Jerusalem, the pilgrimage would take some ten days each way, and a hornblowing at 1st Tishri would seem an obvious desiderandum.

have 1st Tishri as a solemn day of rest marked with the blast of trumpets (Lev. 23.23; Num. 29.1): the day is not mentioned in the J, E and D calendars. Perhaps it is more the opening of the penitential pre-Tabernacles season than New Year still, but it is a day of joy in Neh. 8.9-12. By the time of the Mishnah, 1st Tishri is Ro'sh Hashshanah par excellence. There are three other subsidiary New Years: 1st Nisan ('for kings and feasts'), 1st Elul ('for Tithe of Cattle'), lst/15th Shebat ('for fruit-trees');1 but mid-Tishri is forgotten. We may reconstruct with some confidence the relationship between the different exiled communities and the three different calendars. The returning exiles at the end of the sixth century observed the Nisan calendar; and the Nisan calendar governs the dates through the Deuteronomic corpus. The four fasts of the fourth, fifth, seventh, and tenth months (Zech. 8.19; 7.2-5) all commemorate disasters associated with the fall of Jerusalem, and all follow the Nisan year. The fast of the fifth month is 9th Ab, as I have already commented. That in the seventh month is in memory of Gedaliah, murdered in the seventh month of 586 (2 Kings 25.25, Jer. 41.1 f.), Tishri, when the wheat, barley, oil, and honey were stored (Jer. 41.8). The fast of the tenth month recalls the beginning of Nebuchadnezzar's siege of Jerusalem (2 Kings 25.1) 'in the tenth month, on the tenth day of the month', Tebeth (January). The fast of the fourth month commemorates the cessation of the Burnt Offering in the Temple shortly before the fall of the city, on 17th Tammuz,2 the fourth month from Nisan. Haggai prophesied of the coming glory of the Temple 'in the seventh month, on the twenty-first day of the month' (Hag. 2.1)— the day on which Solomon completed the Dedication of the first Temple on the 21st Ethanim/Tishri (1 Kings 8.65 f.; cf. 8.2), the seventh month from Nisan. The editors of Zechariah's oracles have named the months in which his prophecies were dated, confirming the same Nisan calendar: 'the ninth month, which is Chislev' (December, 7.1), 'the eleventh month which is the month of Shebat' (February, 1.7). The returned exiles of the sixth century thus observe a Nisan calendar like the Deuteronomists, and they keep feasts and fasts marked in the D-corpus. Zechariah's thought and language 1 2

m R.H. 1.1. The fast of 17th Tammuz is also associated by Jewish tradition (m Taan. 4.6) with the breaking of the Tables of the Commandments, and with three events in A.D. 70. But the breaking of the Tables can only be placed on 17th Tammuz by forced mathematics. The receiving of the Law (Exod. 19—23) on 6th Sivan (Pentecost), plus forty days that Moses was on the mountain (Exod. 24.18), would yield 17th Tammuz if Sivan were 29 days. But the six preliminary days of Exod. 24.16 have to be subsumed into the forty.

are much influenced by the homiletic matter in Deuteronomy.1 It is easy to conclude that the D-traditions were dominant in late sixthcentury Jerusalem. The exiles who returned with Ezra about the year 400 brought with them the H or P tradition of a 1st Tishri new year.2 Ezra was a priest, and his coming is portrayed as with shock at the ignorance and slackness of the people in Jerusalem, which he counters by reading them the Law (Neh. 8). The people do not keep the laws because they do not know them: they are the priestly traditions from Babylonia, hitherto unknown in the West. This is made plain by the dating: 'And when the seventh month had come . . . And all the people gathered as one man into the square before the Water Gate; . . . Ezra the priest brought the law before the assembly, . . . on the first day of the seventh month' (Neh. 7.73—8.2). On the 1st Tishri: on the date when the 'P' year began. The substance of Ezra's teaching was P/H material: 'This day (1st Tishri) is holy to Yahweh your God; do not mourn or weep' (Neh. 8.9). 1st Tishri is holy in the H code at Lev. 23.23-25, and in the P code at Num. 29.1-6, but is unknown in the earlier calendars. And again: 'They found it written in the Law that Yahweh had commanded by Moses that the people of Israel should dwell in booths during the feast of the seventh month' (Neh. 8.14). And again: 'Go out to the hills and bring branches of olive, wild olive, myrtle, palm, and other leafy trees to make booths, as it is written' (.15). These instructions are not found in the J, E or D calendars: they come in the H calendar at Lev. 23.4042. Thus in the course of time Israel came to have a D-calendar beginning on 1st Nisan, with an anomalous H/P New Year 'in the seventh month, on the first day of the month' (Lev. 23.24). But there were other Jews who settled in Babylonia and did not go back to Palestine. They took with them into exile a New Year at the feast of Tabernacles, and they, the Babylonian Jews, have bequeathed to Israel the traditional cycle of readings beginning from Simhath Torah, the Rejoicing in the Law, at the end of the feast of Tabernacles. In a ghetto situation, they were the most conservative community of all, and in the course of time their annual cycle of readings from after Tabernacles became normative for Judaism as a whole, like most other Babylonian traditions. Without positing the 1

2

With Zech. 1.6 cf. Deut. 28.2,15; with 1.21 cf. Deut. 32.10; with 2.12 cf. Deut. 32.9; with 5.3 cf. Deut. 29.27; with 6.15 cf. Deut. 30.1 ff.; with 7.14 cf. Deut. 28.33; with 8.14 cf. Deut. 9.7 f„ 22. It is irrelevant to our purpose whether Ezra brought just P/H traditions with him, or, as is often thought, something close to our Pentateuch; e.g. G. Fohrer, Introduction to the Old Testament [IOT] (E.T., London 1968), p. 192.

survival of the old Tabernacles New Year in such a community, we should have no explanation for the traditional pattern of readings. We have thus a solution to the second of our problems. There were at the turn of the era, in Luke's century, two Jewish calendars in operation. The one valid in the West was the biblical calendar whose year began on 1st Nisan: 'This month (Nisan) shall be for you the beginning of months; it shall be the first month of the year for you.' This is the calendar in use in the West in the following centuries. Judas Maccabaeus dedicated the new altar 'on the twentyfifth day of the ninth month, which is the month of Chislev'—the ninth month from Nisan (1 Macc. 4.52). Simon the high priest was murdered 'in the eleventh month, which is the month of Shebat'— the eleventh month from Nisan (1 Macc. 16.14). The same year was taken over into the Church. Tertullian can ask, 'Cur Pascha celebramus anno circulo primo mense?'1 There was a second calendar operative in the East, with a New Year on the old pre-exilic date at the end of Tabernacles. But for the main Jewish tradition based on Jerusalem, in the synagogues of the western Diaspora, and in the church of St Luke, any cycle of readings must have begun on 1st Nisan.

(ii) The Torah as an Annual Cycle of Recitals It is probable that the autumn festival was used even in pre-Israelite times for the recital of the community's sacred stories: such appears to have been the occasion for the recital of the Ba'lu myth at Ugarit.2 In early days in Israel the law was read at the autumn festival every seventh year: 'At the end of every seven years, at the set time of the year of release, at the feast of booths . . . you shall read this law before all Israel in their hearing' (Deut. 31.10 f.). Our first document that is part of the Tabernacles liturgy is Ps. 81, which implies both a recital of God's mighty deeds at the Exodus and a statement of his law. 'Blow the trumpet at the new moon, at the full moon, on our feast day' (.3) is not a clear text, but it is widely agreed that the hagh is Tabernacles. The psalm has a series of references to the Exodus narrative: God's going out against Egypt (.5), Israel's deliverance from bondage (.6f), the thunderstorm at Sinai (.7b), the testing at Meribah (.7c), the forbidding of idolatry (.8f), the people's disobedience (.llf). The psalm is thus well suited to be a 1 2

De Jej., 1.14; the same is implied by later Western fathers, Ambrose, Victorinus of Pettau and Zeno of Verona; cf. Dold, op. cit., pp. xcii ff. J. C. de Moor, The Seasonal Pattern in the Ugaritic Myth of Ba'lu (NeukirchenVluyn 1971), pp. 56 ff.

response to a recital of the Exodus-Desert traditions; and the references to God's statute and ordinance (.4), his decree (.5), and his admonishment to hear (.8) suggest a setting of law-reading likewise. Ps. 118 is another festival psalm (.27) in which the people's leader undertakes to 'recount the deeds of the Lord' (.17); and there are many other psalms which are thought, with less certainty, to have been part of the Tabernacles liturgy, and which make reference to meditating on God's deeds (e.g. 77.11 ff.), or which do so (e.g. 78, 80, 83; 95, 99, 103, 105, 106). Deut. 27 similarly echoes a regular pre-exilic recital in the cult, the setting of which at Shechem shows it to be in part ancient.1 The whole people is assembled, and blessed and cursed according to the twelvefold law proclaimed by the Levites and written on stones. So the law, and the mighty deeds of God leading up to the covenant, were never a matter of secret priestly lore: they were proclaimed in worship from the beginning. From the time of our earliest calendars, in Exod. 23 and 34, Tabernacles is not a septennial but an annual feast, and so are Unleavened Bread and Pentecost. Deut. 26 prescribes an annual harvest thanksgiving of the first fruits, whether at the spring (Lev. 23.10) or summer (Exod. 23.16), which includes a recital of the sacred history (Deut. 26.5-9). It is often thought that Josh. 24 and Neh. 9 reflect the pattern of an annual renewing of the covenant, including the recital of the Heilsgeschichte and the law.2 Joshua rehearses the sacred history from Abraham on (Josh. 24.2 ff.), and makes statutes and ordinances for the people (.25f.). A similar renewal takes place at the end of the feast of Tabernacles in Neh. 9, when Jeshua and Ezra have similarly rehearsed God's mighty deeds from Abraham to the Desert, with an appendix for more recent times. So it seems likely that the recitation of the national history and the covenant with Yahweh was in one way or another made in the context of the feasts, on an annual cycle.3 The fullest recital is likely to 1 2 3

Kraus, Wl, pp. 141 ff. M. Noth, Das System der Zwolf Stamme Israels (Stuttgart 1930), pp. 65 ff., Das Buch Josuas (2c., Tubingen 1953), pp. 135 ff. The pre-exilic recital of the sacred history at a national cultic centre at Tabernacles is controverted. G. von Rad's form of the theory, The Problem of the Hexateuch and Other Essays (E.T. Edinburgh 1966), pp. 1-78, in which the recital of the Sinai tradition at an autumn festival at Shechem is divorced from a recital of the Exodus-Entry traditions at Pentecost at Gilgal, is problematical; but the same general theory is held by A. Alt, 'Die Wallfahrt von Sichem nach Bethel', Kleine Schriften zur Geschichte des Volkes Israels (Munich 1953) i, 84 ff.; H.-J. Kraus, Wl, pp. 134 ff.; S. Mowinckel, The Psalms in Israel's Worship (E.T. Oxford 1962). It is criticized, for example, by G. Fohrer, IOT, pp. 116 ff.: the assumptions of (1) a sacral tribal league, (2) a common central sanctuary, (3) a Covenant Festival, (4) a special type of cult

have been at the autumn festival. In time the spring festival included Passover as well as Unleavened Bread in the calendar (Deut. 16.1-8), and so came to carry associations with the Exodus and Entry. But whether the recital was made at one or two or all of the feasts, an annual cyclical basis seems inevitable. Just as the Exile brought a change of calendar, so did it bring a break-up of the old patterns of worship. Not only was it impossible for all Israel to gather at the central sanctuary at Jerusalem; it was impossible for all Israel to gather at the feasts anywhere. Further, it would have been impossible to prevent the exiled communities from disintegrating on the basis of thrice-yearly worship. So it is not surprising that we find an increased use of the new moons, and a religious use of the sabbaths. Thirteen of Ezekiel's prophecies are dated: 1 five of them in the first weeks of Nisan and Tishri, three more on new moons. The three Nisan prophecies are all oracles against Egypt, and draw on the Exodus type: of the two Tishri prophecies, one includes reference to Eden and the Cherubim in ch. 28, and the other is the Temple vision of 40—48. This is interesting because it shows the prophet as drawing inspiration from the sacred tradition in themes of the liturgical season: Nisan is the time of the smiting of Egypt, Solomon dedicated the old Temple in Ethanim/Tishri, God's mighty deeds recited at Tabernacles opened with Creation. The visions are thus seen as arising out of the context of corporate worship, rather than as sheerly individual experiences, and the dates are given because the liturgical season gave \ with recitals of law and history, (5) a relationship between the theophany of the Psalms and that of Sinai, are all said to be speculative—'In reality nothing is explained; the primary role is assigned to a completely speculative process.' Our difficulty, however, is that where evidence is limited speculation is unavoidable. Fohrer himself thinks that the motives and forces behind the growth of the Hexateuch were (1) 'a scholarly interest in the recording of past events', (2) the provision of 'catechisms . . . based on a corresponding system of domestic instruction', (3) 'the pronounced pleasure Orientals derive from telling and listening to stories' (p. 116), (4) 'the attempt to permeate the portrayal (of the past) with religious concepts and understand events theologically' (pp. 143 f.). It is a matter of which speculations give the most convincing overall picture. 1 Ezek. 29.17 ff. is dated on the first day of the first month of the twenty-seventh year (l.i.27); 30.20 ff. on 7.L11; 32.17 ff. on 15.L12*; 31 on l.iii.ll; 1—3.15 on 5.iv.5; 20 on lO.v.7; 8—11 on 5.vi.6; 26—28 on l.vii.ll*; 40—48 on 10.vii.25; 33.21 ff. on 5.X.12; 24 on lO.x.9; 29.1-16 on l.xii.10*; 32 on l.xii.12. * marks disagreements between texts on the dates. Note also the occurrence of three prophecies on the 5th day of even-numbered months; this may have been a holy day at the end of the fifth week of a two-month cycle. The same feature occurs in the Roman calendar, where Nones is on the 5th day of the evennumbered months.

point—otherwise surely they must have been forgotten. Thus opening vision by the river Chebar will have been at the same sort of riverside worship as is evidenced in Ps. 137.1 (and Acts 16.13); it seems to be an extension of the vision of Moses in Exod. 24, who saw the glory of God on a pavement of sapphire (cf. Ezek. 1.26). In chs. 8—11 Ezekiel sees the seventy elders worshipping idols, like Aaron and the people in Exod. 32, and the executioners slaying them from the four gates of the city (Ezek. 9; Exod. 32.25 ff.). Although new moon and sabbath first appear in the Bible as days of rest (2 Kings 4.23; Amos 8.5), they were already, before the exile, days of worship. They stand together with the festivals in Hos. 2.11 ff., as 'feast days of the Baals', and are hated and despised along with other occasions of worship in Isa. 1.13 f. But Ezekiel deepens their importance: 'Moreover I gave them my sabbaths, as a sign between me and them' (20.12)—the sabbath is now a symbol of the covenant. Special new regulations are laid down for the future both for sabbaths (46.1-5) and for new moons (46.6 ff.), with the prince presiding; and the abuse of the sabbath is a particular sin in 20.21, 22.26, 23.38. Nor is it Ezekiel only; Ill-Isaiah, deriving from another exilic tradition, can look forward to a day when 'From new moon to new moon, and from sabbath to sabbath, all flesh shall come to worship before me' (Isa. 66.23). It is to be noted that here no reference is made to the major festivals. The focus of worship is now new moon and sabbath, as was inevitable. By the time of P, and of the Chronicler, sabbath and new moon are firmly ensconced alongside the festivals as the main occasions of worship (Num. 28.9 f., 11 f.; 1 Chron. 23.31; 2 Chron. 2.4; Neh. 10.33). The Deuteronomistic community has no direct connection with Ezekiel, and was no doubt exiled to a different part of Babylonia. But here also the original function of the sabbath as a day of rest (Exod. 23.12) has been expanded with the command to observe and sanctify it, and it has been promoted into the Decalogue (Deut. 5.12-15). The same pressures to broaden the base of worship from the three festivals were on the D-community as on Ezekiel; and it is even clearer with the Deuteronomists than with him that the (now much amplified) sacred traditions were recited at such worship.1 The whole D-corpus was undertaken as a preaching exercise. Its aim was to edify the people: to insist that obedience to God's law was their duty, and that their fathers' failure to obey God's law had been their undoing. This emphasis runs from the opening paraenesis 1

cf. Kraus, Wl, p. 143, 'What is remarkable is the cultic actuality of the "today" that runs through the whole of Deuteronomy and shows the connection that the traditions have with worship.*

30

The Torah as an Annual Cycle of Readings

THE TORAH AND THE TWO CALENDARS EAST

WEST

Nisan

Gen. Gen. Gen. Gen.

Passover

1.1 In the Beginning 6.9 Noah 12.1 Go you 18.1 And God appeared

Gen. 23.1 The Life of Sarah Gen. 25.19 The Descendants Gen. 28.10 And he went forth

Iyyar

22nd Tishri

Cheshvan

Kislev Pentecost Sivan Exod. 1.1 The Names

Tebeth

Tammuz Shebat Exod. 27.20 You shall command Exod. 30.11 When you take Exod. 35.1 And he assembled

Ab

Adar

Lev. 1.1 And he called

Elul • 1st Tishri 10th 15th-22nd

Sheqalim"

New Year Atonement Tabernacles

Nisan Lev. 16 After the Death Lev. 18 Lev. 23 Feasts Lev. 26 Curses Num. 1.1 In the Wilderness

Passover

Iyyar

Cheshvan Sivan

Pentecost

Kislev Tammuz Tebeth

Deut. 1.1 The Words Ab

Shebat

Adar

Sabbath Zakor

Deut. 25.17-19 Zakor Deut. 28 Curses

Scale: 10 pp. of Biblia Hebraica—11 days.

Elul 1st Tishri 15th Tabernacles

in Deut. 1—4 to the funeral oration over the fall of Samaria in 2 Kings 17, and beyond; and it demands a preaching Sitz-im-Leben for the work. We have no prima facie evidence of the pattern of recitals in either Ezekiel's or the Deuteronomists' community; though I have some suggestions to make in ch. 4. No doubt at first the selection of a part of the tradition for a particular new moon or sabbath was on a tentative basis, whether it was ad hoc or serial. Sooner or later it was a serial selection, because that is what we find in operation in the Mishnah; and nothing forbids its having been serial from the start. But be that as it may, it is plain that the recurrence of the festivals in an annual cycle would ensure that the developing pattern had an annual structure; and this suggests the beginning of an answer to our third problem. The annual cycle is primary: the triennial cycle is a sophistication.

(iii) The Holiness Code and the Autumn Festival Readings For the first part of the Torah, the problem facing the fourth-century Redactors was mainly that of reconciliation: the outline of the story was fixed, and there was little freedom over the order. This situation obtained until the first sacrifice was offered in the Tabernacle in Lev. 9, with the exception of any variations in the order of the desert events of Exod. 15—18. After Lev. 9, however, in the legal sections, there is no demanding logical order, and the Redactors could suit other needs. There is, for example, a marked artificiality about the order in the middle of Leviticus. In Lev. 10 Nadab and Abihu are struck dead for offering unholy fire, and instruction is given to Aaron, and to their surviving brothers; in Lev. 11—15 the people are to be taught the laws of uncleanness, in food, for women, in leprosy, in sexual discharge; in Lev. 16, 'after the death of the two sons of Aaron, when they drew near before the Lord and died', Aaron is taught, through Moses, the ritual for Atonement Day; then follows the H-code, with laws about sacrifices (17), forbidden marriages (18), sundry matters (19—20), the holiness of priests (21—22), the Calendar (23), etc. I wish to explain the postponement of ch. 16 from its natural context following ch. 10, and other matters, by a proportional argument, which I shall use a number of times. In Biblia Hebraica the Torah occupies 320 pages of text; the midpoint occurs, therefore, at p. 160. If, then, we take up the possibility which I suggested in the last section, and suppose for a moment that the Torah was recited sabbath by sabbath in sections round the

year from Nisan in lectio continua, then by the first sabbath in Tishri (half-way through the year) we should have reached about p. 161. There are 354 days in a normal Jewish year, fifty weeks and four days; so there would be either 50 or 51 sabbaths in a year, and each sabbath would require an average of just over six pages of text. Now Lev. 16, the law of the Day of Atonement, occurs on pp. 169-70, and is therefore sited exactly so as to be read on the proper day in the course of such a cycle of continuous readings: it would fall (by its place in Biblia Hebraica) to be read in the second

week of Tishri, and the date of the Day of Atonement is 10th Tishri. Lev. 16 is the reading for Atonement in the Mishnah and Talmud; and the Talmud adds an additional reading for the evening of Atonement, Lev. 18. This is a surprising choice, for Lev. 18 is a chapter about forbidden marriages, and has no clear connection with the theme of Atonement. However, Lev. 16—18 are combined into a single reading in the traditional sabbath series of sidrdt, and the lectionary hypothesis would offer a straightforward solution for the choice. The whole unit, the Law of Atonement and the Noachian Commandments (forbidding sacrifice to idols, the eating of blood, and consanguineous marriage)1 was the original fourth-century lection for the Day of Atonement. In this way, forgiveness for sins was provided, and the central sins were outlined (cf. Acts 15.20, 29). In time, the day of affliction on 10th Tishri (Lev. 23.26-32) was divided into a main service and an evening service, with Lev. 16 taking pride of place in the morning, and Lev. 18 being retained at 1

Lev. 16, the law for the rites of Atonement, leads on naturally to the laws for sacrifice to Yahweh only at the central sanctuary (Lev. 17.1-9) with the blood poured out on the ground (Lev. 17.10-16)—cf. 17.11, 'I have given (the blood) for you upon the altar to make atonement for your souls; for it is the blood that makes atonement, by reason of the life*. The table of sexual taboos follows in Lev. 18, with the general conclusion, 'Do not defile yourselves by any of these things, for by all these the nations I am casting out before you defiled themselves* (18.24-30). The nations committed idolatry and consumed blood as well as committing sexual perversions. The triple theme of sacrifice to Yahweh, the sanctity of the blood and the forbidding to uncover the nakedness of one's parent are found together in Gen. 8.20—9: 'the Lord smelled the pleasing odour' (Gen. 8.21; cf. Lev. 17.6), 'Only you shall not eat flesh with its life, that is, its blood' (Gen. 9.4; cf. Lev. 17.11), 'And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father' (Gen. 9.22; cf. Lev. 18.7). They recur in the apostolic decrees against pollutions of idols, blood and what is strangled, and unchastity, in Acts 15.20,29; 21.25; they were felt by the Jews to be the fundamental commandments incumbent on all mankind (G. F. Moore, Judaism, i, 274 f.). The alternative explanation offered by Rashi for Lev. 18 being read in the evening of Yom Kippur is: 'Apparently this section is chosen because the temptation to sexual offences is particularly strong' (M. Simon, Soncino ed. of b Meg., p. 188).

the end. The uncleanness laws of Lev. 11—15 were inserted so that Lev. 16 did not come too early. For the first day of Tabernacles the Mishnah prescribes Lev. 23,1 and the Talmud is understood as prescribing Lev. 22.26—23.44.2 Lev. 23, the H law of the Feasts, is in part a suitable reading, and comes on pp. 179-81 of Biblia Hebraica. There would thus be space for just one sabbath's reading between pp. 173 (end of Lev. 18) and 179, should there be a sabbath between Atonement on 10th and Tabernacles on 15th. These three initial correspondences between the positions of the traditional lessons in the Pentateuch and their positions in the hypothetical synagogue year seem to me quite striking. They are presented in diagram form on p. 30, the calendar from Nisan being marked down the left side of the page, and the Pentateuch being represented by a column in the middle of the page. No correspondence would be practicable between such a lectionary system and the other two feasts, Passover and Pentecost, since both these feasts would fall within the Genesis section; all we can say is that where the Redactors had freedom the correspondences are there. Just as the readings Lev. 16 and 18 for Atonement suggest that the original lection was Lev. 16—18, so the Mishnah and Talmud readings for the first day of Tabernacles suggest a fuller earlier lection. The only part of Lev. 23 which is truly appropriate for the occasion in any obvious sense is Lev. 23.33-end, the Tabernacles law. But the Mishnah provides (cf. n. 1) for the whole of the chapter to be read, i.e. the laws for sabbath, Passover, 'Omer, Pentecost, gleanings, 1st Tishri and Atonement as well; and to this the Talmud adds 22.26-33, certain rules for sacrifices. These have no clear connection with Tabernacles, and are at the end of a section on the subject, Lev. 22.17-30. Again, therefore, we seem to be faced with an abbreviation; perhaps the original lesson was the sidra, Lev. 21—24, the laws for the holiness of priests,3 of offerings, of the calendar, of oil and shewbread and, of God's name. 1

m Meg. 3.5, 'On the first Festival-day of the Feast (of Tabernacles) they read the section "The Set Feasts" in the Law of the Priests.' Danby interprets this as Lev. 23.1 ff.; Elbogen, JG, p. 165, as Lev. 23.33-end, the 'few verses referring to the particular feast'. Danby is surely right: the phrase 'The set feasts' occurs in Lev. 23.2,4, but not in 33. Elbogen's hypothesis is a part of his theory that the original lections were very short. 2 b Meg. 31a, 'On the first day of Tabernacles we read the section of the Festivals in Leviticus.' This might naturally be read to mean Lev. 23. However, the traditional reading for the day is Lev. 22.26—23.44, and Elbogen takes this to be the intention of the Talmud (p. 165): it would be hard to explain the traditional reading otherwise. 3 Fohrer, IOT, p. 140, comments, 'Since this is all part of priestly professional lore, its use in cultic recitation is quite out of the question.' But then its use in

The indication that this is so arises from the multiple links between the H-code and the autumn festival. One Canaanite name for the festival was hillulim, Thanksgiving: 'And (the Shechemites) went out into the field, and gathered the grapes from their vineyards and trod them, and held festival' (hillulim, Judg. 9.27). Lev. 19.23 ff. provides for the consecration of new fruit-trees for four years: 'and in the fourth year all their fruit shall be holy, an offering of praise (hillulim) to the Lord'. H.-J. Kraus comments, 'The rite laid down coincided, of course, with the festival of the autumn cult (sc. in Israel).' 1 Lev. 25.1-7 sets out the law of release for the land in the seventh year, and the year of release is said elsewhere to have been dated from the autumn festival: 'At the end of every seven years, at the set time of the year of release, at the feast of booths . . . ' (Deut. 31.10). Lev. 25.8 ff. provides for the jubilee, the similar release that is to take place in the fiftieth year. This also is dated from the autumn festival, and is prefaced by the blowing of trumpets at Atonement: 'Then you shall send abroad the loud trumpet on the tenth day of the seventh month; on the day of atonement you shall send abroad the trumpet . . . ' (.9). Lev. 26 is largely devoted to the curses that will fall on disobedient Israel, the effect of which will be that the land will automatically enjoy its sabbaths of release (.34 ff.). Lev. 27 is the law of vows; and vows in Jewish tradition are valid round the year until the service of Kol Nidrei at Atonement, when all unfulfilled vows are cancelled. The concentration of autumn festival lessons (Lev. 16; 18; 22.26— 23.44) and autumn festival laws (Lev. 19.23 ff.; 25; 26; 27) in the H-code cannot but make us suspect two things. First, the code was originally an autumn festival proclamation. Much of the material is in the form of apodeictic laws, which seem to require a setting of proclamation in a national festival. Some laws needed to be proclaimed at Tabernacles, others not; but the law-reading which has been inferred from Josh 24. and other texts a staking place at Tabernacles seems actually to be instantiated in the Holiness Code, which contains plentiful examples of both. It was Ezra's community's form of the covenant law, read by him in the seventh month before the Water Gate: 'And day by day, from the first day to the last day, cultic recitation/reading is an established fact in the traditional sidrdf, at what stage are we to suppose that the priests released their professional lore for public hearing, if not from the beginning? In many communities priestcraft was a secret in the ancient world, just as police practice is in many modern ones. But in Israel the priests were subject to divine law, just as the police are subject to parliamentary law in England, and then the laws are available for all to read or hear. 1 Wl, p. 136.

he read from the book of the law of God' (Neh. 8.18). For, as we have seen, the provisions mentioned for celebrating the festival in Neh. 8 agree only with those in the H-code calendar, Lev. 23. Second, it would seem that the Redactors of the Pentateuch have retained the H-code as the readings for the autumn festival, so siting it in the total Torah that each year it was reached at the appropriate date: Atonement Sabbath after Atonement Opening of Tabernacles End of Tabernacles

Lev. 16—18 Lev. 19—20 Lev. 21—24 Lev. 25—27

These units survive as sidrdt 29-33 in the traditional use; the last being split into two short units, Lev. 25—26.2 and 26.3-27, for reasons which I shall come to shortly.

(iv) The Sidrdt as the Work of the Redactors We need now to generalize the suggestion of the last section. If it is so that the Redactors arranged the Pentateuch not so much as a whole but rather as a series of public liturgical readings, with the H-code designed to coincide with Atonement-Tabernacles, then the traditional units, the sidrdt, will not be the work of later generations but of the Redactors themselves. That this is in fact the case may be seen from an examination of the divisions in the text.1 Ancient redactors were not equipped with the tools of modern criticism, and it was difficult for them to discern the proper, or best, divisions in an already fixed text; but if they were constructing the text for themselves out of various traditions, they would be at liberty to make their own divisions, which would therefore be logical ones. Now some parts of the Pentateuch came to the Redactors in already fixed blocks, which were left by them virtually untouched, notably the book of Deuteronomy; while other books required constant sewing together, like the book of Genesis. If the Redactors put the Pentateuch together as a series of readings, we should expect the divisions in Genesis to make sense, and those in Deuteronomy to make less sense; and that is exactly what we do find. The Deuteronomy sidrot are on the whole irrational. The actual structure of the book, as every theological student knows, is a collection of laws in chs. 12—26, prefaced by two paraenetic introductions, 1—4.40 and 5—11, and followed by further paraenetic material, 1

The traditional sidrdt (and haphfardt) are set out in Table I on pp. 67-9.

27—33, and Moses' death, 34. The sidrdt hardly correspond with this at all. The second sidra begins at 3.23, 'And I besought the Lord at that time', which is a minor break like that at 3.18, 'And I commanded you at that time'. The third begins at the equally minor break, 7.12. It would have been logical to make the divisions at the end of chapters 4 and 7. We cannot really criticize the breaks at 11.26 (a few verses before the laws begin), 16.18, and 21.10; but it seems curious to divide the text at the end of 25 instead of 26, and 29.10 is in the middle of a speech of Moses. Thus, when presented with a fixed block, those who made the sidrot were out of their depth in trying to find suitable divisions. With the divisions in Genesis, however, we have a very different picture. There are two opening sections, 'In the Beginning' and 'Noah'; three sections for Abraham: (a) the promises (12—17), (b) the conception, birth, and sacrifice of Isaac (18—22), (c) Abraham's old age (23—25.18); three sections for Jacob: (a) Jacob and Esau (25.19—28.9), (b) Jacob and Laban (28.10—32.2), (c) Jacob's return (32.3—36); three sections for Joseph: (a) Joseph's sale into Egypt and imprisonment (37—40), (b) Joseph in power (41—44.17), (c) Joseph's discovery to his brothers and bringing of his family to Egypt (44.18^47.27); and finally, Jacob's death (47.28—50). Each section has its own theme, and sections (1), (2), (5), and (8) are rounded off with a genealogy, which acts as a punctuation mark. If the dividing had been of an already existing text, it would have been highly skilful, and in strong contrast to the dividing of Deuteronomy; but in fact the divisions are so natural that they seem to have been written in the Redactors' own text. The only point on which a modern scholar would take issue with the sidrdt is that the second section begins at 6.9 and not at 6.1, as we should expect. But the provision of an introduction to next week's sidra is a regular and natural feature: Gen. 11.26-32 introduces Abram; 17.15-21 is an initial promise of the conception of Isaac; 28.1-9 sends Jacob on his way. Furthermore the opening formula of sidra (2), 'These are the generations of Noah', introducing the story, is exactly paralleled by the opening formula of (6), 'These are the descendants of Isaac' (25.19), and of (9), 'This is the history of the family of Jacob' (37.2)—the Hebrew is the same in all three cases.1 1

The distinction between the Genesis and Deuteronomy divisions is paralleled in the other three books. The first half of Exodus is the Redactors' own compilation, and its divisions are logical: (13) 1—6.1, The Oppression, (14) 6.2—9, The First Seven Plagues, (15) 10—13.16, The Last Three Plagues and the Exodus, (16) 13.17—17, Through the Desert, (17) 18—20 Sinai, (18) 21—24, The Ordinances and Moses' second ascent. In the second half, the break between (21) and (22) coincides with that between J and P material, but elsewhere,

It begins to look possible, therefore, that the Redactors rewrote the Pentateuch in divisions for reading in an annual cycle. But would such a cycle of sidrdt correspond with the liturgical year of feasts in the same way that they fitted the proportions of Biblia Hebraical The outline can be seen in the left-hand half of Table II. The Jewish year is based on the unit of a moon, which is close to 29£ days in length, so that the six months from 1st Nisan to 29th/30th Elul (approximately our September) normally consist of 177 days. A month may not be less than 29 nor more than 30 days, so for our purposes the norm suffices; in practice the length of a month depended on the sighting of the new moon. 177 days comprise twentyfive weeks and two days, including 25 or 26 sabbaths. The first 26 sidrdt would then be readings for these sabbaths: (26) describes the opening of sacrificial worship (Lev. 9—11), and would fall about New Year. When there were 25 sabbaths (as there usually were), we should have to assume the modern practice of combining the last two readings in a book, either Genesis or Exodus, as has been done for at least a millennium.1 No lectionary can work without such a minimum of elasticity. Passover would fall after the second, Pentecost about the tenth sidra. There might be either one or (rarely) two sabbaths between New Year on 1st Tishri and Atonement on 10th; and whereas hitherto the average length of a reading has been four chapters, we now find two sidrdt of only two chapters, (27) Lev. 12—13, and (28) Lev. 14—15. Lev. 13 and 14 are on the same subject, leprosy. These could be combined or split as occasion required, leaving (29) Lev. 16—18 for Atonement. The brief (30) Lev. 19—20 could also be used on its own in years when there was a sabbath between Atonement on 10th and Tabernacles on 15th. When there was not, it could be combined with (31) Lev. 21—24 on the sabbath in the festal week. There are now twenty-three sidrdt remaining for 155 days, twenty-two weeks and a day, with either 22 or 23 sabbaths. There are two short ones when P matter is being subdivided, the Redactors are plainly at a loss. The same is true through most of Leviticus, a book of pre-formed P and H blocks, and through the beginning and end of Numbers, which is largely P material. Some of the sidrdt in the middle of Numbers display a rough unity of theme, e.g. (37) 13—15, the refusal to enter the Land, and (38) 16—18, The Primacy of the Aaronic priesthood; precisely where the Redactors have had to do most editing. 1 Rules governing the combination of sidrdt so that the whole Pentateuch may be read in the year, and different points reached before each feast, are first found in the Gaonite Jehudai, about 750, but may be inferred to have been in operation in the second century A.D. (see below, pp. 45-7): cf. Elbogen, JG, p. 163.

at the end of Leviticus, (32) Lev. 25—26.2, and (33) Lev. 26.3—27: this cannot be accidental, and probably the rule was to finish Leviticus by the end of Tishri—the remaining sidrot would then fit exactly. There are four short readings at the end of Deuteronomy: (51) Deut. 29.10—30, (52) Deut. 31, (53) Deut. 32, and (54) Deut. 33—34. These were probably also originally for convenience of combination at the end of the year, but they have been retained for the sake of the balance of the Histories readings, as I shall explain later. One year in three, roughly (more exactly seven years in nineteen), an extra month was required to cover the shortfall between the lunar year of 354 days and the solar year of 365£ days. This month was called Second Adar, Adar being the twelfth month, and was inserted on an ad hoc basis in our period.1 Readings would be supplied for the thirteenth month by repetition, in the same way that the Book of Common Prayer divides the Psalter for a thirty-day month, and the psalms for the thirtieth day are repeated when the month has thirtyone days.

(v) The Chronicler s Work as an Annual Reading Cycle In the generation following the redaction of the Torah, the histories were rewritten by the Chronicler, and here we have a tentative confirmation of the lectionary hypothesis. In my earlier book I argued that the work of the Chronicler was undertaken for a liturgical, lectionary purpose;2 the whole corpus is constructed in such a way as to provide a series of second lessons to fit the theme of the Torah readings. The Hebrew order begins with the book of Ezra, in which Jeshua and Ezra complete what Joshua began, the fulfilment of the promises to Abraham that he would inherit the land. Then the tribal Genealogies in 1 Chron. complete the families of the patriarchs in Genesis. The story moves on at once to David, who is set out as a second Moses, and the construction of the Temple is told as a duplicate to the construction of the Tabernacle in Exodus. Solomon's prayer and sacrifice take up the opening passages of Leviticus, and there are strong Levitical echoes in the stories of his reign, and those of Rehoboam, Abijah, and Asa. The national apostasy of Numbers is re-enacted in the disobedience of the following kings, with special emphasis on Zechariah, who is stoned, as Moses' spies almost were, with Moses' words on his lips; on Uzziah, whose smiting takes up the stories of Miriam's leprosy and Korah's 1 2

1 Sanh. 2.6. MLM, ch. 10.

incense. Manasseh breaks the Deuteronomic laws, and Josiah enforces them; and to close the tale, the threat of exile in Deut. 28, and the promise of Return in Deut. 30, are fulfilled in the disaster of 586 and the edict of Cyrus. The parallels (which are reproduced in Table II, pp. 70-2) are not general only, but in many cases detailed; all but three of the fifty Chronicles sections marked had correspondences with the Pentateuch, and they fall in parallel series. For a fuller exposition I must refer the reader to ch. 10 of my Midrash and Lection

in

Matthew.

Now, the only satisfactory conclusion to this analysis is that the Chronicler was used to a sidra-haphfarah system, under which the second lesson (haphfarah) was related to the theme of the first (sidra).1 The Chronicler's purpose is transparently edificatory: he uses history as a means of teaching the people. To this end he takes the natural parallel of the Torah-saga with Israel's later history, and elaborates the points as they come. I hope to show in ch. 4 that the Deuteronomic Histories also bore this relation to the Torah as it was before the inclusion of the P-material, and the redaction. Now that there was a new R (Redacted) form of the Pentateuch, our Pentateuch, a new edition of the histories was required, and this the Chronicler has provided. Such an understanding of the rationale of the Chronicler's writing is doubly important for our thesis. For not only does it suggest that the Pentateuch was already being read cyclically. It confirms that the cycle was an annual one, because the correspondences only work for an annual cycle.2 The divisions I have marked break in most cases at the obvious points, being about two chapters each, fifty in all. This would be just about the number required for a 50-sabbath year; and the Passover of the Return (Ezra 6.19 ff.) would fall at Passovertide. The correspondences would fall in nicely round the 1

m Meg. 4.2, having set out the rules for the reading of the Torah, says: 'and they close with a reading from the prophets'. The prophetic reading was therefore called the 'closer', haphfardh, and it continued the theme of the sidra, often in the same words; cf. b Meg. 29b, 'Now according to the one who says that "When you take" (Exod. 30.11-16) should be said (on sabbath Sheqalim), there is good reason for reading Jehoiada the Priest (2 Kings 12) as haphfarah, because it is similar in subject, as it is written, "The money of the persons for whom each man is rated".' 2 This becomes obvious when the table is examined in detail. For one thing, although the normal subdivisions of Chronicles are of an even length, the portions opposite to the end of Numbers and the beginning of Deuteronomy are markedly shorter, and simply could not be divided into three to fit a triennial cycle. For another, the parallels which are so striking, for example, between the construction of the Tabernacle and the Temple on a 50-unit basis, would often fall one or two units out on a ISO-unit basis.

year with the 54 sidrdt; assuming that the latter were still in a semiformed state with the four short Deuteronomy readings at the end of the year being taken together, except in leap years. If Chronicles were divided into 154/165 units as the Torah is for a triennial cycle, most of the correspondences would not coincide.

(vi) The Samaritan Annual Cycle A further indication of the originality of the annual cycle may be seen from the practice of the Samaritans. Until at least the fourth century B.C. the Samaritans were more a party within Judaism than a sect without; and during the fourth century the Samaritans took over the Torah, substantially our Torah. Whether the break with Judaism occurred with the building of the Samaritan Temple in the 320s, as Josephus says,1 or earlier, or later,2 it was certainly possible for a considerable traffic in religious ideas and practice to take place at this period. The Samaritans developed an oral law,3 a hilluk, like, but independent of, the Judaean halakhah\ they adopted the practice of sabbath worship; they used the methods of midrashic exegesis and gematria to interpret the Law; and they made an Aramaic Targum that the people might understand it. In all these matters Judaeans and Samaritans share a common heritage. This is visible in the often remarked common ground between Samaritans and Sadducees against Pharisees. Samaritan religion was oriented towards the priesthood, as Judaism was until the rise of Pharisaism. The Samaritans denied the resurrection of the dead, as the Sadducees did, and followed Sadducaic calendrical practice in counting the fifty days to Pentecost from a Sunday, and in other details of h°lakhah. However, from the Hasmonean period, if not earlier, this traffic largely ceased. The hostility towards Jewry hardened to such a degree that religious and cultural exchange was reduced to a trickle. M. Gaster wrote, 'The slightest leaning towards the practices of the 1 Antiquities xi, 302-47. ? Josephus relates the building of the Samaritan temple to the work of a certain Sanballat. The coincidence with the name of the Samaritan governor of Nehemiah's time led Wellhausen and others to identify the two, and date the event a century earlier: cf. H. H. Rowley, 'Sanballat and the Samaritan Temple', BJRL 38 (1955), 183 f. J. D. Purvis, The Samaritan Pentateuch and the Origin of the Samaritan Sect (Cambridge, Mass., 1968), argues from the palaeography, vocalization and text of the Samaritan Torah to a second-century B.C. date for the final cleft with Judaism. The first two arguments are approved by B. J. Roberts in JTS 20.2 (1969), 569 ff. Similar conclusions of a gradual cleft over the last centuries B.C. are drawn by H. G. Kippenberg, Garizim und Synagoge (Berlin 1971), and R. J. Coggins, Samaritans and Jews (Oxford 1975). 3 M. Gaster, The Samaritans (London 1925), pp. 44-76.

hated Jews and the rival priesthood would have been fatal to (the Samaritan priests') position',1 and Prof. J. Macdonald says that he cannot detect in all his reading one definite example of Samaritans borrowing directly from Jews.2 The Samaritans from at least the time of Baba Rabba in the fourth century A.D. read the Torah in an annual cycle.3 The cycle began after Tabernacles, on the last sabbath in Tishri. Genesis was read for 13/14 sabbaths, ending with the last sabbath in Tebeth; or in intercalated years, for 18 sabbaths, till the end of Shebat. Exodus was read for eight sabbaths or nine, till the end of Adar; Leviticus in Nisan-Iyyar; Numbers in Sivan and Tammuz and the first week in Ab; and Deuteronomy through till the end of the year. To mark the readings by months is a simple precaution against getting out of step, and the only considerable inconvenience in the Samaritan system is that the Exodus readings are too long, with eight divisions against eleven in the traditional Jewish pattern. At all events the number of readings in total and per book is different in every case from the traditional Jewish scheme, and requires explanation. The facts would suggest that the Samaritan annual cycle was set up with the taking over of the Torah in the late Persian period. What did they want the Torah for, if the people were not to keep it? And how could they keep it, if they did not know it, and how could they know it without a reader? In what did sabbath worship consist if not in prayers, reading, and exposition? Why should anyone have gone to the length of translating the Law into Aramaic if the Targum were not required in the service? At every step a simple continuous reading cycle from the beginning is the easiest solution. If it is objected, 'But readings and Targum and a cycle, or any of them, could have been developed in the Samaritan renaissance period in the fourth century A.D.', there is the difficulty that few practices or doctrines can be pointed to with confidence as early A.D. borrowings from the Jews. Besides, had the borrowing taken place under Baba Rabba, we should have expected the Samaritans to borrow from the Jews of the West, by whom they were surrounded, and so to have borrowed the triennial cycle, which was dominant by then. Or 1 2

5

ibid., p. 47; cf. p. 63. The Theology of the Samaritans (London 1964), p. 53; cf. p. 29, 'Any claim for Samaritan borrowing from Judaism is nonsense, as anyone who has read all the available literature must judge.' Macdonald overstates the case, at least for the later period. The Samaritans borrowed Sa'adia's Arabic version of the Pentateuch, and the Jewish Palestinian vocalization system, about the twelfth century: cf. P. E. Kahle, The Cairo Geniza (2e., Oxford 1959), pp. 54, 66. A. Cowley, 'The Samaritan Liturgy and Reading of the Law', JQR vii (1894-5), 121-40.

alternatively, if it should so happen that they borrowed from Babylon, they would be taking over a Babylonian annual cycle starting in Tishri; and how, then, is it that they did not take over the Babylonian divisions, the sidrdt? The solution offered by the B.C. date escapes all these difficulties. The Samaritans had some preexilic roots: not many, but enough to know that ancient worship had been celebrated at Shechem, and that the year had begun after Tabernacles. They took over from Jerusalem the completed Torah and the habit of reading it in an annual cycle, but they kept their old New Year, and formed a regular independent cycle of their own. The tides of history marooned them, but the fundamental pattern of continuous annual reading still testifies today to a religious culture they shared with Judaism in the days of the last Persian kings.

(vii) The Special Sabbaths Between the final canonization of the Torah in Jerusalem and the fixing of the Mishnah more than half a millennium later, four special sabbaths were instituted in the last five weeks of the year, roughly in Adar (March); and of these, three testify to the existence of an annual cycle in the B.C. period. The earliest is probably the sabbath Zakor, the second sabbath in Adar, for which was appointed the special lection, Deut. 25.17-19, 'Remember (zakdr) what Amalek did . . . ' It is very likely, as G. F. Moore says,1 that there is a connection between this lection and the feast of Purim, for Purim was celebrated between 11th and 15th Adar, 2 and its special reading is the book of Esther and her battle of wits against Haman the Agagite: for Agag, in 1 Sam. 15, was an Amalekite; and Amalek's attack upon Israel, remembered in Deut. 25, is re-enacted in Haman's attack upon Israel in Esther. The dates of 13th-15th Adar are written into Esther, and it is likely that they are in some way associated with the Adar full moon. 3 The curious feature of the whole institution is that there should be a text of this nature in Deut. 25. Deut. 12—26 is a collection of laws and precepts, whether anachronisms or for everyday living; the vindictive little zakdr paragraph is of quite a different type, and lacks any credible Sitz-im-Leben * Furthermore, if one 1

Judaism, i, 298. The Tosefta, Meg. 4.2, fixes Zakor as the sabbath next before Purim. m Meg. 1.1. 3 cf. de Vaux, AI, pp. 514-17, bibliography p. 552. 4 G. von Rad, Deuteronomy (1964, E.T. London 1966), p. 155, asks appositely, 'What could be the contemporary significance of demanding this duty at a time when this notorious Bedouin tribe was hardly likely to be any longer in existence?' 1

wished to choose from the Torah a text on the viciousness of Amalek, Exod. 17.8-16 is fuller, and just as vindictive.1 A solution of these problems is plain when the position of Deut. 25.17 ff. is noted in the proposed lectionary system. Proportionally, the paragraph falls on p. 301 of Biblia Hebraica, and would thus be on the margin of the third and fourth sections from the end of the year (see the diagram on p. 30). By the sidrdt, it is the last three verses of sidra 49, and would thus be the closing piece of the Law reading for the third sabbath from the end of the year, or thereabouts (see Table II).2 What could be more suggestive? The unofficial celebration of Purim had begun before the close of the redaction of the Pentateuch, brought to the West by returning exiles who had lived in fear of pogroms;3 the persecutors had been aligned with Israel's implacable enemy, Amalek; the celebration called for a justifying text in the Torah reading for the week; the sabbath concerned would be the second in Adar, if it was to precede Purim, and would thus be usually the third from the end of the year; so a direction calling for the obliteration of Amalek was inserted at the end of sidra 49, Deut. 21.10—25.19, 'When you go forth (to war)'. The position of the sidra in the series could not be more exact, nor the position of the paragraph in the sidra more suspicious: it comprised the last verses of the section for the sabbath before the festival, on the basis of an annual cycle beginning in Nisan. So Purim as a semiofficial feast, and the zakdr reading that went with it, will have been established before the close of the Pentateuchal canon, i.e. by the first half of the fourth century. A second special reading whose institution is illuminated by the lectionary hypothesis is that on the last sabbath in Adar, Hahodesh: the reading is Exod. 12.1 ff, 'This month shall be for you the beginning of months; it shall be the first month of the year for you' (m Meg. 3.4, b Meg. 30a). The tone is somewhat aggressive, and the point of when the calendar is to begin is irrelevant to the main theme of Exod. 12, the instructions for celebrating the Passover. Why has the Jewish tradition made a special point of having the passage read on the last sabbath in Adar? If it were so that the people might prepare for Passover,4 it should rather be read on the first or second sabbath in Nisan, so that the lambs could be taken on the tenth day 1 2 3 4

This passage was the lesson for Purim in b Meg. 31a. On the assumption of a 51 -sabbath/51 -sidrdt year, as argued above, pp. 39-40. cf. b Meg. 7a, 'At first they decreed the observance of Purim only in Susa, but afterwards throughout the world.' The point of the passage is often explained so, e.g. by Moore, Judaism, i, 298. Biichler, JQR,v, 427, suggests an origin in a dispute of Pharisees and Sadducees, but offers neither detail nor evidence.

of the month (12.3). It looks more likely that the section was read on the last sabbath in the old year so that the new liturgical year really did begin in Nisan: that it marks the triumph of the Dtradition with its Nisan cycle over the P Tishri cycle. A clash of the two traditions was inevitable, and the dogmatic way in which the redactors open the passage looks like the assertion of orthodoxy. If so, then it would ensure the eclipse of Ezra's Tishri cycle if the primacy of Nisan were celebrated annually before Nisan began; and this in turn would only be important if synagogue liturgical practice hung on it, i.e. if a Nisan cycle of readings and not a Tishri cycle of readings were to be followed. So far as the Scriptures were concerned, the Redactors had done their best to assimilate all the dates to a Nisan first month; if their victory required liturgical proclamation, it would be for a liturgical reason. As later with the Birkath-ha-Minim, nonconformity could best be brought into line by an addition to the liturgy. So both Zakor and Hahodesh were insertions made into the text of the Pentateuch by the Redactors for contemporary liturgical reasons. The principal nonconformists were not in Palestine but in Babylon, where, as we have seen, the original liturgical new year at the end of Tabernacles was still in use, and flourishing. The Babylonian Jews accepted the redacted Pentateuch with joy, and simply used the sidrdt beginning from their own new year; if they had not done so, we should lack any explanation for the origin of the modern synagogue practice, which follows the same pattern against both the biblically laid down New Years, the D/R 1st Nisan year (Exod. 12.1), and the P/H 1st Tishri year (Lev. 23.24); and which also goes against the 'landfalls' of Lev. 16, 18 and 23 with Atonement and Tabernacles. They were also pleased to adopt the practice of reading the zakor paragraph on the second sabbath in Adar to justify Purim, though this now meant reading the verses as a special supplement to the sidra, as it does today.1 They also had no objection to reading Hahodesh a fortnight later, as it could easily be interpreted as a reminder to be ready for Passover. The adoption of the reading cycle on a base at the end of Tabernacles in Babylonia soon set in motion a reverse process, with a 1

The four special sabbath readings are often interpreted, e.g. by Elbogen, JG, p. 153 f., as being originally the sole readings for these sabbaths. The Mishnah is ambiguous, but must in fact mean them to be supplementary readings, see below, pp. 61 f. The discussion in the Gemara (b Meg. 29b), and the traditional use, confirm this. The Tosefta (4.1-4) merely repeats statements in Mishnah and Talmud, and does nothing to confirm Elbogen's theory that the two reading cycles, annual and triennial, developed from such small units as these.

further special sabbath, Sheqalim, which fitted the Babylonian cycle and meant a supplementary reading in the West. Sabbath Sheqalim fell on the 1st Adar or the six days preceding at the end of Shebat:1 that is, normally there was an intermission of one sabbath between it and the other three special sabbaths. The Amoraim disputed which was the proper lesson between Exod. 30.11-16 and Num. 28.1-15, which was defended by Rab against the Babylonian Samuel.2 In the Exodus lesson, which triumphed, Moses ordains a contribution of a half-shekel per adult male for the Temple treasury, and the significance of the reading was that in the intertestamental period the levy came to be made annually, the money being delivered from all over the world to Jerusalem by Passover.3 In the Western cycle which I have been describing, the lection for 24th Shebat—1st Adar would be that for the fifth sabbath from the end of the year, and would fall in Deuteronomy; but in the Babylonian cycle these dates would be between 120 and 127 days after Simhath Torah (23rd Tishri), and the sabbath would be the eighteenth or nineteenth in the series, and the sidra from the middle of Exodus.4 That Exod. 30.11-16 actually did fall to be read on or about sabbath Sheqalim is evidenced by disputes in the Babylonian Talmud as to what should be done when the Sheqalim paragraph, qua special supplementary reading, coincides with sidra 20, Exod. 27.20—30.10 (from which it is a direct continuation), or sidra 21, Exod. 30.11—34.35 (in which case it would be read twice).5 Now, we know that the second Temple was begun by means of gifts sent from the East,6 and it was maintained by sh'qalim sent from East and West in the early A.D. period;7 it is hardly believable that it was not the same in the hard times between. The annual reading of the shekels paragraph in the course of a Babylonian cycle some seven weeks before Passover could well suggest to Babylonian Jews the desirability of taking up a collection each year at that time, and the sending of the money to Jerusalem 1

m Meg. 3.4. b Meg. 29b. 3 H. L. Strack & P. Billerbeck, Kommentar zum neuett Testament aus Talmud und Midrasch [S-B] (Munich 1926) i, 760 ff. 4 R. Jehudai's rules (see above, p. 37, n. 1) require the 25th sidra to be reached before Passover, which is at most twenty-four weeks from 23rd Tishri: the last two sidrdt in a book were often telescoped, so sidra 20 would be reached on the nineteenth sabbath if the last two sections in Genesis were combined. 5 The passage is cited below, p. 64. ® Ezra 1.6, 'all who were about them aided them with vessels of silver, with gold . . . besides all that was freely offered'—the verb hithnaddebh recalls the free offering for the first Temple in 1 Chron. 29, and the free-will offering (n'dhabhah) for the Tabernacle in Exod. 35, taken up in response to Exod. 30.11 ff. 7 References in S-B, i, 763. 2

in time for the Feast. The habit would be received with enthusiasm in the West no doubt, and instilled in Palestinian Jews also as a duty, by the expedient of introducing the paragraph from the Babylonian lesson as an additional reading. In this way we should have an explanation for the institution of sabbath Sheqalim.1 The fixing of the date for 1st Adar or the days preceding would be for the convenience of the West, for whom the moving date on the Babylonian calendar would be irrelevant.2 The Babylonian cycle explains a further ancient tradition from the Talmud: 'We have learned in a Baraita: R. Simeon b. Eleazar said, Ezra ordained that Israel should read the curses in Leviticus before Pentecost, and those in Deuteronomy before New Year.' 3 R. Simeon was a fifth-generation Tannaite, a contemporary of Rabbi Judah; but the ascription to Ezra is almost certainly an indication of B.C. practice. If R. Simeon thought before A.D. 2 0 0 that Ezra had ordained it, it was not an innovation from Jamnia—rather it may be an indication of ancient practice in Babylonia, from where Ezra had come. In fact the two cursing chapters regularly fall before the respective feasts in the modern reading cycle from 23rd Tishri. We have no better guide to ancient practice in such details than the traditional use, and this involves special lessons not in the cycle for the sabbaths in the weeks of Tabernacles and Passover; hence there are 48 or 49 sabbaths for the lectio continua in a normal 50- or 51-sabbath year, and some 'squeezing' is necessary, usually by the combination of the two last readings at the end of a book, if all 54 sidrdt are to be read. Pentecost is in the 32nd week after Simhath Torah, and the curses in Lev.(26) are in the 33rd sidra. New Year (1st Tishri) is in the 48th week after Simhath Torah, and the curses in Deut.(28) are in the 50th sidra. The required squeezing always ensures that the cursing chapters are read before the feasts.4 Reference to the diagram on p. 30 will show that on the proportional basis the same is true. The traditional Jewish cycle from Simhath Torah forces its ancient character as a B.C. use upon every learned worshipper by the constant recurrence of the sh'qalim paragraph and the two cursing 1

2 s 4

Biichler, JQR v, 426, explains the origin of the sabbath by a controversy between Sadducees and Pharisees on free-will sacrifices settled in lst-8th Nisan, 79 B.C. The controversy is associated with the collection of sh'qalim in the first-century Megillath Ta'anith. But the connection of the collection with the controversy is remote, and the motive for perpetuating its memory obscure. With intercalation involving a Second Adar roughly one year in three, a fixed distance of seven sabbaths before Passover would be an advantage. b Meg. 31b. In 1970, for example, Lev. 26 was read eleven days before Pentecost, and Deut. 28 twelve days before New Year.

chapters at the times specified in the old traditions. The chapters for Atonement and the first day of Tabernacles, and the paragraphs for sabbaths Zakor and Hahodesh do not fit this lectionary pattern; but they do fit an identical cycle starting from the D/R New Year, 1st Nisan. It is these units which fit with the already fixed liturgical occasions—Atonement, Tabernacles, Purim, New Year—and this shows that the lectionary cycle is an integral part of the redaction done in Jerusalem to fit a Western (D/R) calendar. The annual collection in Shebat, and the recitation of curses before Pentecost and New Year are not pre-biblical institutions: they grew out of the Eastern reading cycle.1 (viii) Philo But it is not the fourth century B.C. which is our concern, but the first century A.D.: what we need to know is, Was the same annual cycle beginning in Nisan operative four centuries after the developments I have been describing? We are lucky enough to have the answer to this question from Philo.2 Philo wrote many works of commentary on Scripture, mainly on the books of Genesis and Exodus; and at the end of his life he wrote two semi-continuous commentaries, Questions on Genesis and Questions on Exodus. Neither covers the whole biblical work, and both have omissions which correspond fairly closely to material on which Philo had already commented—Gen. 1—2.3, for example, which he had covered in De Opificio Mundi, Gen. 11—15.6, which are the subject of De Confusione Linguarum, De Migratione Abrahami, etc. There were six books of the Questions on Genesis, which survive in an Armenian translation. Now, the interesting thing about the divisions into six books is that they correspond almost exactly with the six opening sidrdt of the traditional cycle. The first book omits Gen. 1—2.3, but continues to 6.13: the first sidra, 'In the Beginning', runs from 1.1 to 6.8. The second book continues from Gen. 6.14 to 10.9, omitting the Genealogies and the Babel story for the reason I have suggested, but otherwise coinciding with sidra (2), 'Noah', which 1

There is a fourth special sabbath, Parah (the red heifer), which falls between Zakor and Hahodesh. It is by no means impossible that this also has liturgical roots, as symbolizing the break for proselytes with heathendom as with the grave. The proselyte was cleansed, in part by a baptism, before joining Israel in his reception before Passover. 2 I have drawn the argument that follows from the introduction to R. Marcus's edition of Quaestiones in Genesim/Exodum, Loeb edn., XI (Cambridge, Mass. 1953), viii ff., to which the reader is referred. The divisions between the books are not all testified in the MSS, and are in part Marcus's reconstruction.

ends with Gen. 11. The third sidra, 'Go you', runs from Gen. 12 to 17, and Philo closes Book III at the end of 17, omitting the earlier part, Abraham's Migration and Melchizedek. The fourth sidra, 'And he appeared', comprises Gen. 18—22, and Philo's Book IV is Gen. 18—20; he does not comment on Gen. 21—22. There is no omission in the remaining two books, and they correspond with the sidrot exactly. 'The Life of Sarah', Gen. 23—25.18, corresponds to Book V, in which there are comments from 23.1 to 25.8. 'The Descendants', the sixth sidra, Gen. 25.19—28.9, corresponds to Book VI, in which there are comments from 25.20 to 28.9. We could not account for Philo's division into books on the grounds of equalizing length, for the first three books are 100, 82 and 62 questions in length respectively, and the number of pages of text is also unbalanced. Nor could we say that he had made the divisions in the obvious places, on the ground that the Redactors divided Genesis logically, as I have suggested. For one thing, his first division is in the middle of God's speech to Noah at Gen. 6.14, having overrun 6.8 by accident; for another, even when the breaks are logical they are not always obvious. The end of 17 is not an obvious break, for 17.15 ff. and 18 both tell of the promise of Isaac's birth, and might easily be taken as belonging together; but both Philo and the sidrdt put the division between them. Jacob's leaving home in 28.1-9 might as easily go with his coming to Beersheba in 28.10 ff.; but Philo and the sidrdt both close the sixth unit at 28.9. This means that Philo must have been following the sidra divisions of his day for Genesis; and R. Marcus's conclusion, on somewhat slenderer grounds, is the same for Exodus. Few results could be more helpful to us. Here is a writer in Luke's century; in Egypt, a part of the Western Diaspora such as Luke lived in; and it appears that he was familiar with an annual cycle, with divisions closely similar to those referred to by Amoraic rabbis, and still used in synagogues today. Not only do we thus have confirmation that the annual cycle was still operative in Luke's age and ambit; but we are even able to conjecture with some confidence what chapters and verses would be read on what sabbath or Sunday. We could hardly ask for more.

(ix) Matthew This conclusion agrees with some evidence which emerged from the analysis of the Gospel according to St Matthew in the first volume of my Speaker's Lectures. The basic structure of the Matthaean year was given, it appeared, in the division of the Gospel into stories broken by blocks of discourse; and the significance of these was that

if one story were allotted per sabbath according to the divisions in the Codex Alexandrinus, etc., the discourses were found to fall each on a Jewish feast—the Sermon on the Mount at Pentecost, the Missionary Discourse at New Year, the Parables of the Harvest at Tabernacles, the Church Order at Dedication, and the Apocalyptic Discourse at Passover.1 This meant that the sabbath readings were automatically fixed by the feasts, and no latitude at all was left to the interpreter: Matt. 23, for example, had to be the lesson for the first sabbath in the year, a kind of pre-Passover discourse; the sections of Matt. 24—25 had to run from the second sabbath through to Passover itself; Matt. 1 had to be the reading for the fifth sabbath, following the Easter octave, etc. Now, an examination of the relative sidrdt, on the assumption of an annual cycle, produced the then surprising suggestion that Matthew found inspiration not only from the feasts, but from the sabbath readings also.2 The first sidra is the stories of Creation, of Adam, and of Cain and Abel; and the onslaught of Matt. 23 culminates in the threat, 'that upon you may come all the righteous blood shed on earth, from the blood of innocent Abel .. .' The second sidra is the Noah story. Now, for the second sabbath of the year Matthew virtually transcribes the Marcan Apocalyptic Discourse; but as soon as he has finished it he adds, 'As were the days of Noah, so will be the coming of the Son of man. For as in those days before the flood, they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day when Noah entered the ark, and they did not know until the flood came and swept them all away, so will be the coming of the Son of man' (Matt. 24.37 ff.). The third and fourth sabbaths are the celebration of Easter, but the fifth covers the last days of Abraham. Now, Matt. 1 begins with a genealogy which traces the descent of Jesus from Abraham; and sidra (5) closes with a genealogy of Abraham's descendants (Gen. 25.1-18). The annunciation of Jesus' birth is made by an angel to his father, just as the annunciation of Isaac's birth was; and in almost the same words, 'She will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus', 'She will bear you a son, and you shall call his name Isaac' (Matt. 1.21; Gen. 17.19). The sixth sidra tells of the struggle between Jacob and Esau, or Edom as he is also called. Jacob is blessed by his father, 'Let nations serve thee, and princes bow down to thee', and Esau plans in consequence to kill him (Gen. 27.29, 41). In the second unit of Matthew (2.1-12) the Gentile magi come and bow down to Jesus, 1 2

MLM, ch. 9 and Part II. The Matthaean cycle is set out in this book in Table VIII. MLM, pp. 227 f„ 236 f„ 239 f.

and Herod, the Edomite king whom he is to supplant as king of the Jews, plans to kill him. The seventh sidra describes the marriages of Jacob and the birth of his children, at first by Leah in face of Rachel's childlessness, later by Rachel also; Jacob grows rich and sets out for home. In the third unit of Matthew (2.13-23) Herod kills the innocents, and Matthew cites (somewhat surprisingly), 'Rachel weeping for her children, and would not be consoled because they are not' (AT); Joseph and his family spend a period in exile and set out for home. The series breaks off as Matthew takes up the Marcan thread at Matt. 3.1, but the occurrence of five 'fulfilments' of the sidrdt in a row like this, and especially of the names Abel, Noah, Abraham, Rachel, each in place, is a strong indication that Matthew's church was using an annual cycle of sidrdt, starting in Nisan. The hypothesis of an annual lectionary cycle beginning in Nisan as the use of the first-century A.D. western synagogue, Jewish and Christian, rests, then, upon a wide documentation, and explains numerous details which otherwise would remain puzzling. An annual liturgical cycle was the ancient pattern of Israelite worship, and the keeping of a Nisan new year in the West, and an end-of-Tabernacles new year in Babylon, is attested in biblical and post-biblical documents: in particular, the Nisan new year in the West is universal in D and R, and continues through to Tertullian. A pre-exilic practice of reciting the sacred tradition at Tabernacles, although controverted, is the most likely Sitz-im-Leben for the development of the Torah; and there is evidence for the spreading of such liturgical recitation round the lesser liturgical occasions during the exile. Several independent lines of argument suggest that the final redaction of the Pentateuch was made in the light of a week-by-week recital of the tradition in series: the logical nature of the sidra divisions, wherever the Redactors were not taking over ready-made blocks of material; the coincidence of Lev. 16, 18 and 23 with the positions of Atonement and Tabernacles in an annual Nisan calendar; the numerous step-by-step parallels with the work of the Chronicler; and the coincidence of the passages Zakor and Hahodesh with their positions in the same calendar. Externally, the Samaritan adoption of a lectionary use of the Torah, also on a yearly cycle, but with an autumn base-date and different divisions, suggests a familiarity with such a use in the B.C. period; and the dates of sabbath Sheqalim and the two curses chapters testify to the use of the sidrdt on the base of the old Tabernacles new year in the fourth or third century

in Babylon. The sidrdt are presupposed in the writings of Philo, and are thus evidenced for an annual lectionary system in the first century A.D. in the western Diaspora; and they explain a series of allusions to Genesis introduced at given places in the Gospel of Matthew, again on a Nisan base. The cumulative effect of such arguments is powerful: we are now in a position to test the hypothesis by setting the sidrdt alongside St Luke's Gospel. So shall we be able to see whether the evangelist has set out his account in liturgical order, and followed through all the parallels from the beginning.

APPENDIX

THE DECLINE AND DEMISE OF THE ANNUAL NISAN LECTIONARY CYCLE

The weakness of the annual cycle was its length, both for the Synagogue and for the Church. When the cycle was first instituted, and the tradition consisted of the J-E-D material, we might estimate that some three pages of Biblia Hebraica would be cantillated each sabbath: the recital of the sidra might take 10-15 minutes. With the accretion of Priestly and Redactoral material in the fourth century, the Torah nearly doubled in length, and the sidra must have taken at least 20 minutes (as it does today)—perhaps more, for there were seven readers1 among whom the reading had to be divided, with a blessing said by each, and they might not all be very fluent. But in the last centuries B.C. Hebrew became increasingly a dead language, and the practice of adding a Targum became widespread. The Targums are all paraphrastic translations: even Onkelos and the LXX have explanatory additions and periphrases, and Jonathan is considerably longer than the original. Where orthodoxy reigned, the sidra was read in Hebrew and the Targum recited alongside it,2 so that the hearing of the Torah portion of the readings could hardly have occupied less than three-quarters of an hour. But the sidra was not the only lesson. The haphfarah (prophetic lesson) was not so long, but, as I shall argue, it was about a chapter of our prophetic books, or about three chapters of our histories; and again there was a Targum to follow—at least a further fifteen minutes. The word haphfarah means 'closer', and from early times it had closed the reading part of the service; but in the last centuries B.C. a third canon was beginning to form, the so-called Writings, and a further, third lesson, and Targum, were normal in many synagogues, as long as the haphfarah.3 Such a length of time, perhaps an hour and a 1

m Meg. 4.2. m Meg. 4.4: t Meg. 4.13 acknowledges that there are synagogues of 'foreigners* who cannot speak Hebrew. 3 A third canon is testified in the Prologue to Ecclesiasticus, and perhaps the habit of reading it:"... by the law and the prophets, and by others that have followed in their steps . . . not only the readers . . . the law itself and the prophecies and the rest of the books, have no small difference when they are spoken in their original language'. For the public reading of 1 Macc., see below, 2

52

quarter in all, spent listening, is wearisome and unedifying, and recalls the Lucan comment, 'Woe to you lawyers! for you load men with burdens hard to bear'.

(i) The Armenian Lectionary The Church was much quicker to ease this burden than the Synagogue. Pauline Christians had been taught that the Law was but our ffaiSay<»y6i; till Christ should come, and by Justin's time Jews in the Church were outnumbered by Gentiles1—and now by Gentiles who had never been God-fearers in the synagogue. So the system of lectionary parallels, which had seemed precious to the evangelists, quickly came to seem capable of abbreviation: Justin writes, 'On the day called S u n d a y . . . the memoirs of the apostles or the writings of the prophets are read as long as time permits'. 2 We are not to suppose that the Roman church ever omitted a Gospel reading on a Sunday: such is not only repugnant, but without any later parallel. Justin is using the general, not the alternative 'or', as when I might say, 'In the mornings I write letters or read', whereas I virtually always do both; or when Papias says that Mark wrote accurately td (w6 TOO Koptoo fl XsxQtvvx fl JTPAXOFEVRA, meaning that he wrote both; or when Ambrose says, 'cum vel Patriarcharum gesta vel Proverbiorum legerentur praecepta', meaning that there were readings from both. 3 Justin's church read a passage of the Gospel every Sunday, and a piece of the O.T. too; and he mentions the Gospel first, not because it was read first (which would again be unparalleled)4 but because it was the more significant reading to his public. But our concern is the tell-tale clause that has been added to the O.T. reading, 'as long as time permits'. We can hear the president saying, 'As time presses this morning, brethren, I propose that the lector limits our O.T. reading to Lev. 1, rather than the whole of Lev. 1—5.' Justin's expression, 'the writings of the prophets', is too loose to allow us to say whether there was a single O.T. lesson or several. Hegesippus says that the Law and the Prophets and the Lord were

pp. 132 ff.; for three lessons in the Church, law, prophets and writings, with the prophets last, see the next section. The earlier reading of the Writings may be inferred from its forbidding: t Yoma 13.1, 'We must not read from the Writings on the Sabbath'; cf. j Yoma XVI. 15c. 1 IApol„ 53. 2 IApol„ 67. 1 De Mysteriis, 1.1. 4 Michel, art. cit., col. 1145.

faithfully followed in every city,1 and at least two O.T. lessons were normal in Syria for centuries;2 a single O.T. lesson is first plainly testified by Chrysostom.3 From early days the Church's tendency was to abolish the Jewish year on which the lectionary was based. Paul reproached his Galatian converts, 'You observe days, and months, and seasons, and years!' (Gal. 4.10): the months are new moons, the seasons festal seasons, the days either such occasions as 9th Ab and Yom Kippur, or perhaps sabbath, the years the Jewish liturgical year. Gentile converts at Colossae were despised by Jewish Christians for laxity over the Jewish (-Christian) calendar: 'let no one pass judgment on you . . . with regard to a festival or a new moon or a sabbath' (Col. 2.16). Ignatius wanted the observance of the sabbath to cease,4 and Jewish customs of all kinds are under pressure from the Pastorals on. 5 The Nisan year was maintained in the West by Tertullian, Victorinus of Pettau (d. 304), Zeno (d. 375) and Ambrose,6 but any observance of a Jewish calendar was being harried by Chrysostom at the end of the fourth century.7 It is almost unevidenced in Egeria's account of Palestinian liturgies in the 380s; even Passover had been replaced by Holy Week and Good Friday, and I have suggested that the Didascalia gives us an insight into this change in process a century and more before.8 With shortened O.T. lessons, and no festivals to link them together, nor any belief in the primacy of the Torah, it is no wonder that the old lectionary fell into desuetude in the Church. The sermons of the Fathers, and especially of Origen on the books of the Pentateuch and Joshua, covering the whole text in detail, are our principal evidence that the Church continued the lectio continua of the Law at all. In view of all this, we are fortunate to find plain relics of the annual Nisan cycle still surviving in our first Church lectionary, the Jerusalem Armenian lectionary of about A.D. 430.® There are three O.T. 1

Eus. H.E., iv. 22.3. Ap. Const., 8.4.6, 8.5.11, cf. 2.57.5/8. 3 In Hebr. Horn., 8.4, In Act. Horn., 29.3. 4 Magn., 8.9. ' Titus 1.10,14; 1 Tim. 1.7 ff.; 4.3-5. ' A. Dold, Das dlteste Liturgiebuch, pp. xcii f. 1 Horn. adv. Jud., 6.7 (PG 48.916), cf. M. Simon, Verus Israel (Paris 1948), pp. 379 ff. • See above, pp. 7-8. ' The lectionary was a part of the papers of the Armenian Convent of St James in Jerusalem, published in Armenian in 1948, and in a French translation by Dom A. Renoux as 'Un manuscrit du vieux lectionnaire armdnien de Jerusalem'; see above, p. 4, note 6. There is a discussion and tabulation of it in J. Wilkinson, ET, pp. 253-77. J

lections appointed for each of the Fridays in Lent,1 of which the first is from Deuteronomy, and the others from Job and Isaiah. The order is the old Jewish order, with the Torah first and the prophets as the closer. All the readings run serially from week to week, with some gaps. The Deuteronomy readings are as follows:

u

First Friday in Lent Second Friday in Lent Third Friday in Lent Fourth Friday in Lent Fifth Friday in Lent Sixth Friday in Lent

Deut. 6.4—7.10 Deut. 7.11—8.1 Deut. 8.11—9.10 Deut. 9.11-24 Deut. 10.1-15 Deut. 11.10-25

Lent is in February and March, and nearly coincides with the end of the Jewish Year: 1st Nisan would fall in the fifth or sixth week. The book of the Pentateuch being read under the old lectionary at this time of year therefore would be Deuteronomy. Not only are the Armenian lections from Deuteronomy, and in series, but the divisions coincide in part with the not very logical sidrdt. SidrS 45 ends at Deut. 7.11,2 sidrd 46 at Deut. 11.25. It looks as if the Church has selected the most edifying part of Deuteronomy, beginning with the Shema', and subdivided the old sidrdt so that the readings should not exceed the permitted time. The lectionary also has three O.T. lessons for each of the first four days of Holy Week: from Genesis, Proverbs and Isaiah/Zechariah— again the Jewish order. These readings also run in approximate series. The Genesis readings are as follows: Monday in Holy Week Tuesday in Holy Week Wednesday in Holy Week Thursday in Holy Week

Gen. 1—3 Gen. 6.9—9.17 Gen. 18.1—19.30 Gen. 22.1-18

Again, the Pentateuch readings are from the part of the Pentateuch covered by the old annual Nisan cycle; for Easter always falls on the Sunday after Passover (in early times), and the Sunday after 14th Nisan is always the third in Nisan. Again, the lections show affinities with the sidrdt: sidrdt 1, 2 and 4 begin respectively at Gen. 1.1, 6.9, and 18.1, exactly where the first three Armenian 1

2

Wilkinson, ET, pp. 364 f. Wednesdays and Fridays are the only weekdays for which lessons are provided in Lent, except in the first full week and Holy Week. The Wednesday lessons from the Torah are a complete series from Exod. 1.1—5.3, the reason for which is self-evident: there are only two Wednesday lessons, except in the first full week, the second lessons being mainly a series from Joel. The break in the Armenian lectionary is one verse earlier, at 7.10. The logical division is not obvious: NEB prints 7.11 as a paragraph on its own.

readings begin, and the fourth sidrS ends at Gen. 22. The stories of the Creation and Fall, of Noah and of the Binding of Isaac, might be thought suitable for Holy Week, but there is no obvious appropriateness in the Conception of Isaac and the Destruction of Sodom. It would look as if Lent had been given over to the 'best' sections of Deuteronomy at the end of the old year, and the first four Genesis sidrdt, suitably abbreviated, had been concentrated in the weekdays of the third week in the new year, Holy Week. If so, we are looking at the last ribbons of the old serial cycle. We do not lack evidence elsewhere of the serial reading of Genesis before Easter. There are serial Genesis lections for Holy Week in the oldest Syriac lectionary, c. 480,1 and for Easter Eve in the oldest Gallican lectionary, c. 500;2 and Genesis readings in Lent are testified in the sermons of Ambrose, Augustine, Chrysostom, and Basil.3 But nowhere else is the provenance of the institution so plain as here, with a Deuteronomy series preceding a Genesis series, and substantial agreement with the old Jewish divisions.

(ii) The Origins of the Triennial Cycle The annual Nisan cycle, whose shallow rooting in the Church soon led to its withering in the noonday of a new liturgical year, had deeper roots in the life of the Synagogue. Nevertheless it had outgrown its strength, and by the middle of the second century we find the same pressure to subdivide and to abbreviate the readings. The Mishnah has a ruling, 'On Monday and Thursday and on Sabbath at Minhah (afternoon service) the regular portion of the week is read, and this is not reckoned as part of the reading for the succeeding sabbath.' 4 The Monday, Thursday and Sabbath Minhah services had readings by three lectors, as against sabbath when there were seven.5 Any alteration of the sidra in these additional services was forbidden: 'they may not take from them or add to them'. 6 The background of these rulings is made clear in the Talmud and Tosefta: 7 'Our Rabbis taught: The place (in the Torah) where they leave off in the morning service on Sabbath is the place where they begin at Minhah; the place where they leave off at Minhah (on Sabbath) is the place where they begin on Monday; the place where 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Burkitt, op. cit. Dold, pp. xxviii flF. Righetti, SL, p. 239. m Meg. 4.1. m Meg. 4.2. m Meg. 4.1. b Meg. 31b; t Meg. 4.10.

they leave off on Monday is the place where they begin on Thursday; the place where they leave off on Thursday is the place where they begin on the next Sabbath. This is the ruling of R. Meir. R. Judah, however, says that the place where they leave off in the morning service on Sabbath is the place where they begin at (Sabbath) Minhah, on Monday, Thursday, and on the next Sabbath'. This passage makes good sense on the basis of an annual cycle of readings. R. Meir is a liberal, flourishing about 150, who is trying to lighten the liturgical burden. If the sidra is Lev. 1—5, and we have four services in the week, sabbath morning and the three additional services, why should we not subdivide the sidra, taking Lev. 1 at Sabbath Minhah (having left off in the morning at Exod. 40), Lev. 2 on Monday (having left off on Sabbath Minhah at the end of Lev. 1), Lev. 3 on Thursday, and Lev. 4—5 on the following Sabbath morning? In this way the whole sidra will be read every week; people will attend better to the shorter readings; and perhaps more people will come to the additional services. R. Judah is a conservative, of a generation later. We stopped the Sabbath morning reading at Exod. 40: very well, we will start on Sabbath Minhah at Lev. 1, and on Monday at Lev. 1, and on Thursday at Lev. 1, and the following Sabbath morning at Lev. 1. People need to hear the whole portion each sabbath, and for those who come in the week, they cannot know the Torah too well. As usual, the conservative won, and the Mishnah provides that the additional service lections shall be the whole and not a part of the portion of the succeeding sabbath's reading, without addition or abbreviation.1 There would have been no purpose for R. Meir's splitting of the sidra unless it were too long for convenience: so we have an indication both that the annual cycle was still operative in the West in the mid-second century, and that its length was causing it to break down. There could have been no motive for splitting the later triennial s'dharim into four: they were only about a chapter in length.2 1 1

m Meg. 4.1. Elbogen, JG, p. 160, computes on the basis of the minimum figure of three verses per reader (m Meg. 4.4) times seven readers per sabbath, as testified in the discussion in b Meg. 23a, that the whole Torah would be read in cycle in 2J years on R. Meir's principle, and 5i years on R. Judah's. On a 21-verse average reading, there would be something under 300 units, and the second figure would be correct; but there is no evidence for such a length of cycle having ever existed. As R. Meir's proposal takes the units four times as fast, it is not clear how Elbogen has arrived at the figure of 2i years (which is also unknown as a length of cycle elsewhere). But the whole basis of the computation is speculative. The Mishnah rule on the minimum reading—'He that reads in the Law may not read less than three verses'—was designed to prevent the professionalization of reading, with an expert cantillator doing the lion's

However, R. Judah was locking the door, like many a conservative, on a horse already escaping. Before the middle of the third century a debate took place in Babylon on the correct Torah lesson for sabbath Sheqalim, between Samuel who maintained the traditional Exod. 30.11 ff. (which I have discussed above), and Rab, who defended Num. 28. The Exod. 30 lesson commended itself in later discussion because there were rules provided for when the Sheqalim lesson was the same as that for the sabbath in the regular cycle; and Exod. 30.11 begins sidra 21, which does sometimes coincide with sabbath Sheqalim on the Babylonian (23rd Tishri) cycle. The passage continues, 'But according to the one who says that "My food which is presented to me" (Num. 28) is read—does (the portion containing that passage) fall about that time (in the cyclical reading of the Torah)?—Yes, for the people of Palestine, who complete the reading of the Pentateuch in three years.'1 The discussion is revealing, for it tells us not only that a triennial cycle was in operation in Palestine by the fifth century when the Talmud was set down; it tells us that it was in operation in Babylon three centuries before. Num. 28, as Samuel's disciples are quick to point out, would not be read anywhere near sabbath Sheqalim at the end of Shebat, the eleventh month, on the annual Babylonian cycle, but in Tammuz, the fourth month; as is the case in modern practice, and can be seen from the right-hand side of the diagram on p. 30. ITie Num. 28 lesson is, however, said to be justifiable on the basis of the triennial cycle prevalent in Palestine; and since it is implied that under this cycle it can coincide with sabbath Sheqalim we can find out the base date of the cycle. If the Pentateuch were evenly divided, a triennial cycle would have as its opening portions for the three years Gen. 1, and approximately Exod. 18 and Num. 13.2 The third year of the cycle covers 107 pages of Biblia Hebraica, and Num. 28 is on the 37th page; so that it would be read in a triennial share and the six other readers a nominal verse each; in practice an expert cantillator now does the entire reading, with the nominal participation of seven members of the community. We cannot infer an average reading from a rule governing a minimum reading. 1 b Meg. 29b. 2 Biichler, JQR, v, 432, divides the Pentateuch on the basis of references to Passover, and opens the second year at Exod. 12, and the third at Num. 6.22; he claims to be making the divisions on the basis of the 154/155 s'dhartm, but it seems (cf. the table in A. Guilding, The Fourth Gospel and Jewish Worship, p. 234) that the division can only be made in the way his scheme requires by taking the 165 s'dhartm elsewhere testified, and treating the surplus units as bisques, of which seven are taken in the first year, six in the second and none in the third. L. Zunz, according to Elbogen, JG, p. 540, began the third year at Num. 10.

cycle just over a third of the way through the third year. If the cycle began on 1st Nisan, it would be read at the beginning of Ab (the fifth month); if the cycle began on 23rd Tishri, it would be read at the end of Shebat. Since the latter is within days of Sheqalim, the base-date for the triennial cycle was in Tishri and not Nisan; 1 and 1

Elbogen, JG, pp. 540 f., deploys this argument and others respectfully to confound Biichler. It is worth noting why Biichler's Nisan triennial cycle seemed attractive, and why this attractiveness is meretricious. The following dates and days are culled by him, pp. 434 ff., from the Mekilta and Seder 'Olam (first- and second-century evidence); I have italicized those occurring in Scripture. The Exodus At Rameses Red Sea Song Marah Manna Massah

P

Sinai Lawgiving

19.1 ff.) 19 ff.) 34)

Th. 15th Nisan Mek. ad 12.21 S.O. 5, Sab. 17 th Nisan 14.2 Wed. 21st Nisan 14.9 a.m. 22nd Nisan 5 Sab. 24th Nisan 14.22 15 th Iyyar 28th Iyyar 17.2 (Sab. 29th) 5 Sun. 1st Sivan 19.1 Fri. 6th Sivan 16.1 (Sab.) 5 29th Ab 34.1

To which we may add:

§ Golden Calf

m

12.21-36) 12.37) (Exod. 14) 15.1-21) 15.22-6) 16) 17.1-7)

(Exod. 32)

17th Tammuz

m Taan. 4.6,

P which unfortunately does not fit Biichler's scheme. This block of dates is the

Ik linchpin of his argument for the priority of a triennial Nisan cycle: their number is impressive, and Biichler argues that they marked the readings of an m ideal year when 10th, 17th, 24th Nisan etc. all fell on a sabbath—hence the f days, and the incidence of sabbaths. He is not daunted by the fact that Seder jSip" 'Olam has two events one day later than the Mekilta; nor by the fact that there J ;V is no reading (on his hypothesis) for 1st or 8th Iyyar. He has to force the Manna story, which the Bible dates 15th Iyyar, on to 1st and 8th; Rephidim/Massah, which the haggadists date 28th/29th, on to 15th; 18—19.5, including the scriptural date of 1st Sivan at 19.1 on to 22nd Iyyar; and to assume that the Sr it; <st divisions in the Mekilta were the original s'dhartm, and not the s'dhartm of tradition, of which there are twelve, not eight. The dates are in fact no great cause for wonder, for the haggadists were only 'searching' Scripture. The Exod. 16 story gives the first mention of sabbath, which falls on the 7th day of the giving of manna. Since the story opens on the 15th day of the second month (Exod. 16.1), and the manna falls during the following night (.12ff., 16th) and for six nights before a sabbath (J22ff.), the latter must fall on 22nd Iyyar, and there will have been sabbaths on 1st, 8th, 15th, and 29th Iyyar also. The Mekilta assumes a 30-day Nisan and a 29-day Iyyar, and the days are then all given. The Seder 'Olam assumes a 30day Iyyar, which makes Pentecost (6th Sivan) a sabbath instead of a Friday. Exod. 14 is the festal lesson for the seventh day of Passover still to this day, so Biichler's contention for 21st Nisan is probably right; the haggadist arrived at the 17th for Rameses by subtracting the camping sites—Pihahiroth

this in turn yields the conclusion that it had its origin in Babylon and not Palestine, where the calendar began in the spring. Nor is this in the least surprising, for in the earlier period Palestine was the centre of orthopraxy; if R. Judah could stop R. Meir's mild reforms, he could stop a triennial cycle. But it is the same excessive length that underlies both moves. It is too much of a coincidence to suppose that Num. 28 was selected as an ideal Sheqalim lesson for its own sake, and just happened to fall on Sabbath Sheqalim in the third year of the triennial cycle by accident. It must be the other way round: the passage happened to fall on Sabbath Sheqalim in the third year of the cycle, and so commended itself as suitable for that sabbath; and was then adopted as the regular annual additional reacting. This means that Rab himself was familiar with a triennial cycle; and this carries the date of the provenance of the cycle back to about 200. So although R. Judah succeeded in stifling reform in his own generation, a means to shorter readings was already afoot in the East, which would one day be the norm in Palestine. The perseverance of the year beginning on 1st Nisan in the West all through the second century may be seen from several pieces of evidence. In the Mishnah the feasts are given in the order: Passover, Pentecost, New Year, Atonement, the Feast (of Tabernacles), Dedication, Purim. 1 The six New Moons on which messengers are sent out are given in the order: Nisan, Ab, Elul, Tishri, Chislev, Adar. 2 We even hear in a Jewish-Christian writing of the second century, the Kerygma Petrou [KP], fragments of which have been preserved by Clement of Alexandria, of a special 'First Sabbath', falling in Nisan. Fragment IV reads, 'And if the moon does not appear, they do not keep the so-called First Sabbath, nor do they keep New Moon, nor Unleavened Bread, nor the Festival, nor the Great Day'. 3 The reference is to the Jewish custom of not declaring the on 20th, Etham on 19th, Succoth on 18th, Rameses on 17th. Exod. 15.22 says that they went three days into the wilderness after the Red Sea, so they reached Marah on 24th. The Massah incident cannot be later than 28th Iyyar, as there is the battle with Amalek to follow before 1st Sivan. Moses goes up the mountain in Exod. 24, after the Law-giving, which tradition associated with Pentecost—hence on 7th Sivan, after Pentecost on 6th. He stayed there forty days and nights (Exod. 24.18), coming down therefore on 17th Tammuz to find the Golden Calf. There followed a second forty days and nights (Deut. 9.25), before the Exod. 34 Law-giving, which comes to 29th Ab. 1 m Meg. 3.5 f. 1 m R.H. 1.3. 3 Strom. VI. v. 39-41. The texts were first edited and commented upon by E. von Dobschutz, Das Kerygma Petri kritisch untersucht (T-U. xi. 1, Leipzig 1893): there is a recent comment on Fragment IV and other matters, with

new month on the thirtieth day of the old month unless the new moon was testified as having been seen.1 KP's community is plainly keeping a fixed cycle (of alternating 30- and 29-day months?), and is critical of the Jewish pragmatic use. The practice of observation was inconvenient because messages had to be sent out to all parts of the world in those months when there were festivals, so that their celebration would be simultaneous everywhere.2 KP limits himself to pointing out this inconvenience for Nisan (First Sabbath, Unleavened Bread) and Tishri (Tabernacles and Ydma, the Great Day— Atonement), and for New Moons in general. But 'the so-called First Sabbath' must be the first in Nisan, not that following Tabernacles,3 because the latter would be affected by the date of the Tishri new moon, and would require to be mentioned therefore with the Festival and the Great Day at the end of the list if that were in the author's mind. iSkrtt-

< i <

».,••(.

(iii) The Mishnah Megillah

,

The Mishnah mentions the reading cycle, without specifying an annual or triennial structure; but actually, as we have already seen, the debate between R. Meir and R. Judah implies an annual cycle still. Having set out the special readings for the four sabbaths in Adar, it continues, 'On the fifth (sabbath) they revert to the set order (likh'sidran, lit., to according to their order). At all these times they break off (from the set order in the reading of the Law): on the first days of the months, at the (Feast of the) Dedication, at Purim, on days of fasting, and at Maamads and on the Day of Atonement' (Meg. 3.4). The Torah is viewed as a continuous whole,4 read in a series of sidrdt. When an additional Torah reading is bibliography to date, by Prof. P. Nautin, 'Les Citations de la "Predication de Pierre" dans Cltoent d'Alexandrie, Strom. VI. v. 39-41', JTS xxv. 1 (1974). 1 m R.H. 1.3—2.1. * m R.H. 1.3. 1 Von Dobschtttz (op. cit., p. 44) suggested this as one explanation for the 'socalled first sabbath', the phrase being an approximation to the sabbath B're'shith; he also proposed the sabbath before Passover, sometimes called 'the great sabbath'—but 'great' is not the same as 'first'. Nautin produces a different translation, 'lis ne c616brent pas le sabbat, qu'ils disent etre la premiere chose c616brer)' (art. cit., p. 105), which is manifestly forced. 4 The omission of any verse was forbidden (m Meg. 4.4), in contradistinction from readings from the Prophets; backtracking was unthinkable (b Meg. 29b); the conclusion of Deut. 34 is followed immediately by the reading of Gen. 1. So although for practical purposes the Torah had to be divided into lections, the continuity of the whole was never lost sight of, and special readings were felt to be interruptions.

included in the service, such as Deut. 25.17-19 on sabbath Zakor, the lectio continua is thought of as being broken off. There is a series of such interruptions in Adar, and on the fifth sabbath (the first sabbath in Nisan) they revert to their set order (sedher)—i.e. the Nisan annual cycle. This interpretation of 'they break off' is confirmed by three supporting witnesses. First, it is required by the last clauses of the sentence, for if the cycle were interrupted by omitting the sidra (as has been suggested1), this would take place not only on the four special sabbaths, but also on the twelve new moons, two feasts, five fasts, and an unspecified number of station days (Maamads); and the cycle could then never be completed. There would be only about forty-four sabbaths available for the cycle in the year; and one could then never get round either a cycle of 54 sidrdt in one year, or 154/167 s'dhartm in three.2 Second, it agrees with a saying of R. Isaac Nappaha in the Talmud: 'When the New Moon of Adar falls on Sabbath, three scrolls of the Law are taken out (of the Ark), and read out of—from one the portion of the day, from one the portion of New Moon, and from one "When thou takest" (Exod. 30.11 ff, the Sheqalim paragraph).' 3 The day is sabbath Sheqalim and New Moon, both of them days specified for 'breaking off' in the Mishnah: but the cyclical portion is read as well, and first. Lastly, it is Jewish practice today for the four special sabbaths to carry their readings alongside the sidrdt. Thus the Mishnah reference to a sedher, which is our first express mention of a cyclical lectio continua reading of the Torah, is entirely consonant with the annual Nisan cycle whose history I have described. The times specified in Meg. 3.4 for interrupting the cycle (the Adar sabbaths, New Moons, Dedication, Purim, fasts, Maamads, Atonement) are, with the exception of the last, given appropriate lessons in Meg. 3.6: Num. 7 for Dedication, Exod. 17.8-16 for Purim, Num. 28.11-15 for New Moons, Gen. 1.1-23 for Maamads, Lev. 26.3-46 for Fasts. None of these lessons falls on the day required by the cycle (on either a Nisan or a 23rd Tishri base, with either an Annual Cycle (AC) or a Triennial Cycle (TC)): but the holy days would not normally coincide with sabbaths, and it is easy to understand their provision. The same lessons are in each case provided by the Talmud, and in most cases by the Tosefta. 4 Meg. 3.4 1

e.g. Biichler, p. 432. The numbers of s'dhartm vary in the different sources, cf. Elbogen, JG, pp. 160, 539. 3 b Meg. 29b. 4 b Meg. 31a-b; t Meg. 4.1-4.9.

2

does not mention 'breaking off' at the major feasts; with a Nisan AC one did not break off at Atonement and Tabernacles, for the Leviticus readings coincided with the cycle. Meg. 3.4 is continuous with Meg. 3.6; and Meg. 3.5, which does provide lessons for the major feasts, is a redactoral insertion. Danby says, 'The following paragraphs suggest that the text (of Meg. 3.4 ad fin., cited above) should read, "at the set feasts and at Maamads".' 1 But the absence of the words 'at the set feasts' suggests a different conclusion: that special lessons for Passover, Pentecost, New Year, Atonement and Tabernacles, as provided in Meg. 3.5, were a novelty at the end of the second century. This is confirmed by the fact that the Babylonian tradition, which has the same lessons for the minor feasts, hias considerable differences for the major ones: MISHNAH Meg. 3.5 TALMUD Meg. 31ab Exod. 12.21-51 Lev. 23.1 ff. Lev. 23.1 ff. Exod. 19—20.23 Deut. 16.9-12 Deut. 16.9-12 Num. 29.1-16 or Lev. 23.23 ff. Gen. 21 Gen. 22 (2nd day) Lev. 16 Atonement Lev. 16 Lev. 18 CMinhah) Tabernacles (1st day) Lev. 23.1 ff. Lev. 22.26—23.44 (Other days) Num. 29.17 ff., seriatim Num. 29.17 ff., seriatim — Lev. 22.26—23.44. (2nd day)

Passover

(1st day) (2nd day) Pentecost (1st day) (2nd day) New Year (1st day)

The apologetic note of the Talmud—'Nowadays that we keep two days ...'—and the invention of such a bogus festival as the second day of Pentecost,2 makes it plain that the Mishnah lections for the major festivals (except for Atonement and the first day of Tabernacles) have grown up in recent times: the Babylonians believe them to be secondary, and have put them on the second days of the feasts, or omitted them. Only those lections (for Atonement and Tabernacles) are in common which are abbreviations of the old Nisan cyclical readings. The other lections, in both communities, are independent second-century innovations. The aim in the West was 1

H. Danby, The Mishnah (Oxford 1933), p. 205, n. 12. 'And on the Atonement' should also be omitted at the end of 3.4; Atonement is not provided with a lesson in 3.6 but in 3.5, and note the natural ending, 'and at Maamads'. 2 Pentecost in the O.T. was the concluding day of the Paschal Week of Weeks, as the name implies in Hebrew and in Greek, and no second day is ever mentioned.

to impress the observance of the holy day,1 in the East to show its significance.

(iv) The Growth of the Triennial Cycle The Annual Cycle was still in use in the West a century later. The following discussion in the Babylonian Talmud is revealing;2 it relates to the difficulties arising from the fact that the portion set for sabbath Sheqalim, Exod. 30.11-16, in the eastern tradition follows on directly at the end of sidra 20, Exod. 27.20—30.10, and is the opening paragraph of sidra 21, Exod. 30.11—34 end—and the Sheqalim sabbath might coincide with either of these two cyclical readings. (I have substituted the references in figures where the Talmud refers to passages by their opening words; T'tsawweh, 'You shall command', for sidra 20, for example). 'It was stated: If it (sabbath Sheqalim) falls when sidra 20, Exod. 27.20—30.10, is read, then six persons read from Exod. 27.20 to Exod. 30.10 (i.e. the whole of sidra 20), and one from Exod. 30.11 to Exod. 30.16 (the Sheqalim paragraph). Abaye remarked, If that is done, people will say that that is where they stop (i.e. since seven readers were normal for the sidra, people will think that sidra 20 does not finish at Exod. 30.10 but at 30.16, and the significance of the Sheqalim paragraph will be missed). No, said Abaye: six read from Exod. 27.20 to Exod. 30.16 (i.e. the sidra and the Sheqalim paragraph together), and one repeats and reads from Exod. 30.11-16 (i.e. the Sheqalim paragraph alone, thus stressing its independent importance).' 'If it (sabbath Sheqalim) falls on sidra 21, Exod. 30.11—34 end, itself, R. Isaac Nappaha says that six read from Exod. 30.17 to Exod. 34 end (i.e. the whole sidra except for the Sheqalim paragraph which opens it), and one from Exod. 30. 11-16 (the Sheqalim paragraph). Abaye strongly demurred to this, saying, Now people will say that we are reading backwards! (because the first verses are read last). No, said Abaye: six read to Exod. 34 end (i.e. the whole sidra), and one repeats from Exod. 30.11-16 (the Sheqalim paragraph).' Several points emerge from these two quotations. First, the three cyclical readings which are referred to under the names T'tsawweh, Ki Tissd' and Wayyaq'hel correspond to sidrdt 20, 21 and 22 in the traditional cycle, and are still known under these names. This is the 1

J

As western Judaism came under increasing imperial pressure in the second century, the feasts became more important in themselves as a means of holding the people together. b Meg. 29b-30a.

first rabbinic evidence of cyclical readings in units with which we are familiar, and shows the annual cycle to be firmly established by the fourth century. Second, of the two rabbis cited, R. Isaac Nappaha was a Palestinian Amora, living about A.D. 300; Abaye was a Babylonian of a generation later. Since the whole discussion presupposes an annual cycle, it is clear that both in Palestine and in Babylon an annual cycle was in use (even if another system was also in use). Thirdly, R. Isaac, like Abaye, is using an annual cycle beginning on 23rd Tishri, the Babylonian base-date, since the Sheqalim paragraph can only coincide with sidrdt 20 and 21 from then, and never from 1st Nisan. So around A.D. 300 there were rabbis in the West who were using an annual cycle beginning on 23rd Tishri. We can put these details together into a provisional picture. Philo, Matthew, and R. Judah's rulings in the Mishnah show that the annual cycle was in operation in the West in the first and second centuries A.D.; Matthew, the Mishnah lists of feasts and months, and Kerygma Petrou show that in the same period the cycle still began in Nisan. R. Meir's attempt to subdivide the lections shows that the system was felt to be onerous by 150, and Rab was using a triennial system in Babylon fifty years later. R. Isaac Nappaha was still using an annual cycle in the West in 300, but now one based on 23rd Tishri; the influence of the Babylonian communities was increasing, and in time its alternative base-date came to be more and more widely used, either with an annual cycle (R. Isaac, and ultimately all Jewry), or in the laxer triennial form. The triennial cycle was never fixed like the sidrdt. In some versions it is likely that there were 154 s'dhartm, corresponding to the number marked in the Masora. 1 In the Yemen a division into 167 s'dhartm has survived.2 The divisions in the Mekilta and Midrash Rabba are other probable indications of triennial readings, the former perhaps going back to the beginnings of the system.3 The Mekilta tractates are eight4 in number for the continuous section covered, Exod. 12.1—23.19, against twelve in the Yemenite tradition, and only four of these 1

This was first conjectured by S. L. Rapoport in 1846, in G. Pollack (ed.), Halikot Kedem: see I. Sonne, BRPOS II, xxv. But some of the units are less than the stipulated 21 verses, and the minimum number of sabbaths in three years is 156. 2 ibid., p. xxvi. 3 Elbogen, JG, p. 160. But the Mekilta was revised and systematized after the second century; cf. J. Bowker, TRL, p. 70. 4 The Mekilta tractate divisions are rather long as units for a triennial cycle; the Pentateuch, at this rate, would yield only about 130 s'dhartm. Nor does the tractate 'Amalek (18.8-27) provide the full 21 verses.

begin at the same verse; nor do the thirty-seven chapters of Lev. R. agree with the twenty-five s'dhartm. There is a reference in Lev. R. 3.6 to a reading beginning at Lev. 2.10, which does not agree with any sedher. In view of such disparity, it seems likely that from the third to the fifth centuries the annual cycle steadily broke down in the West under its own weight, and was replaced in each community by shorter readings in a three-year cycle, formed ad hoc, without any generally accepted set of lections. The advantage of the triennial cycle was its brevity; but such variety of use was no match for Babylonian orthodoxy, which clung to the ancestral Annual Cycle. It was still widespread in the days of Moses Maimonides, but was in desuetude by the seventeenth century.1 The probability has always been on general grounds that the simple system should have preceded the complex. This last decade has seen the Roman Catholic Church and the Church of England replace an annual system of readings with a triennial or biennial system, and it would seem likely that the same was true of a Jewish system, whose liturgical roots are an annual cycle of feasts from time immemorial. All the evidence which we have examined points in the same direction. The traditional Jewish annual cycle from 23rd Tishri is very old—it dates from Babylonia in the fourth century B.C. The triennial cycle on the same base, favoured by Elbogen and Mann, is an adaptation of this from the early centuries A.D. Biichler's triennial cycle on a Nisan base is a pipe-dream. The 'free' use, without a lectionary, in the Church, assumed by many Christian scholars, is a development from the breakdown of the Jewish-Christian year from the second century on. The original annual cycle, on the biblical Nisan base, was the lectionary in the West in Synagogue and Church until at least the second century A.D.; and would have formed the basis for the devotion and preaching of St Luke. 1

Elbogen, JG, pp. 160 f.

TABLE I The Traditional Sidrdt and Haphtarot A. FESTIVALS AND HOLY DAYS NISAN Great Sabbath (II) Passover, 1st Day 2nd Day 3rd Day 4th Day 5th Day 6th Day Sabbath 7th Day 8th Day

Exod. 12.21-51 (b) Lev. 22.26—23.44 (m)b Exod. 13.1-16 (b) Exod. 22.24—23.19 b Exod. 34.1-26 b Num. 9.1-14 b Exod. 33.12-34.26 b Exod. 13.17—15.26 b Deut. 15.19—16.17 b

SIVAN Pentecost 1st Day 2nd Day

Exod. 19—20.23 b Ezek. 1, 3.1-12 b Deut. 15.19—16.17 (b 16.9-) Hab. 3 b

Theophany to Ezek. Theophany from mt.

AB 9th, a.m. p.m.

Deut. 4.25-40 b Exod. 32.11-14, 34.1-10

Silent Assembly •Seek the LORD'

TISHRI New Year 1st Day 2nd Day Tashltkk Sabbath Atonement, a.m. pan. Tabernacles 1st Day 2nd Day Sabbath 8th Day 23rd, Simhath Torah

Mai. 3.4-24 Elijah's Coming Josh. 5.2-6.1 b Passover at Gilgal 2 Kings 23.1-10 b, 21- •5 Josiah's Passover

Ezek. 37.1-15 b 2 Sam. 22 b Isa. 10.32—12.6 b

Jer. 8.13—9.23 b Isa. 55.6—56.8

Life renewed Deliverance Song Deliverance & Psalm

Gen. 21 b (m Num. 29.1-6) 1 Sam. 1—2.10 b Gen. 22.1-19 b Jer. 31.2-20 b 20-40 Mic. 7.18-20 Hos. 14.2-10 Joel 2.15-27 Isa. 57.14—58.14 b Lev. 16 mb Jonah b Lev. 18 b

Barren visited Dear son remembered Sins cast in sea Israel, return Sanctify a fast Chosen fast Ninevites repent

Lev. 22.26—23.44 (m)b Lev. 22.26-23.44 b Exod. 33.12—34.26 b Deut 14.22—16.17 b

Nations keep Feast Solomon's Feast Last Battle Solomon's Blessing

Zech. 14 b 1 Kings 8.2-21 b Ezek. 38.18—39.16 b 1 Kings 8.54-66 b

Deut. 33—34, Geo. 1- -2.3 b Josh. 1.1-18 (b 1 Kings 8.2-21

Joshua and the Law Solomon's Feast)

KISLEV Dedication, 8 Days

Num. 7—8.4 (serially) mb

Zech. 3—4.7 (sab.) b

Candlestick

ADAR Sabbath Sheqalim Zakor Parah Hahodesh

Exod. 30.11-16 mb Deut. 25.17-19 mb Num. 19 mb Exod. 12.1-20 mb

2 Kings 12.1-17 b 1 Sam. 15.2-34 b Ezek. 36.16-36 b Ezek. 45.18—46.18 b

Jehoash's Shekels Amalek and Agag Land Cleansed New Passover, etc.

(The relevant sacrificial laws from Num. 28 f. are also read through Passover and Tabernacles.)

TABLE I (contd) B. SABBATHS GENESIS 1. 1—6.8 2. 6.9—11 end

In the Beginning Noah

Isa. 42.5—43.10 Isa. 54.1—55.5

3. 12—17 4. 18—22 5. 23-25.18

Go And he appeared Sarah's Life

Isa. 40.27—41.16 2 Kings 4.1-37 1 Kings 1.1-31

The Descendants And he went forth And he sent And he dwelt At the End And he drew near

Mai. 1.1—2.7 Hos. 12.12—14.9 Hos. 11.7—12.11 Amos 2.6—3.8 1 Kings 3.15—4.1 Ezek. 37.15-28

12. 47.28—50.26

And he lived

1 Kings 2.1-12

EXODUS 13. 1—6.1 14. 6.2—9 end 15. 10—13.16 16. 13.17—17 17. 18—20 18. 21—24 19. 25—27.19

The Names And I appeared Go in When he let them go Jethro The Ordinances The Offering

Isa. 27.6—28.13 Ezek. 28.25—29.21 Jer. 46.13-28 Judg. 4.4—5.31 Isa. 6.1—7.6 Jer. 34.8-22, 33.25 f. 1 Kings 5.26—6.13

6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

25.19—28.9 28.10—32.2 32.3—36 end 37—40 41—44.17 44.18—47.27

20. 27.20—30.10 b You shall command

Ezek. 43.10-27

21. 30.11—34b 22. 35—38.20 b

When you take And he assembled

1 Kings 18.1-39 1 Kings 7.40-50

23. 38.21—40

The Sum

1 Kings 7.51—8.21

LEVITICUS 24. 1—6.7 25. 6.8—8 end 26. 9—11

And he called Command On the eighth Day

Isa. 43.21—44.23 Jer. 7.21—8.3 b 2 Sam. 6—7.17

27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

If she conceives The Leper After the Death Holy Say On the Mountain In my Statutes

2 Kings 4.42—5.19 2 Kings 7.3-20 Ezek. 22.1-16 Amos 9.7-15 Ezek. 44.15-31 Jer. 32.6-27 Jer. 16.19—17.14

NUMBERS 34. 1—4.20

In the Wilderness

Hos. 1.10—2.20

35. 36. 37. 38.

Take the Census When you set up Send you Korah

Judg. 13.2-25 Zech. 3—4.7 Josh. 2.1-24 1 Sam. 11.14—12.22

12—13 14—15 16—18 19—20 21—24 25—26.2 26.3—27 end

4.21—7 end 8—12 13—15 16—18

39. 19—22.1

The Statute

Judg. 11.1-33

40. 22.2—25.9 41. 25.10—29

Balak Phinehas

Mic. 5.6—6.8 1 Kings 18.46—19.21

42. 30—32 43. 33—36

Tribes The Stages

Jer. 1—2.3 Jer. 2.4—28, 4.1 f

•He that created' Covenant, waters of Noah Seed of Abraham Birth to old woman Concubine and successor Jacob and Esau •Jacob fled' Jacob strove with God Righteous sold Dreams and wisdom Ephraim & Judah reunited • Time to die Prophets rejected God against Pharaoh Oracle against Egypt Song after victory The Vision of God Freeing Hebrew slaves Tabernacle, Temple gifts Altar of Burnt Offering False gods confounded Tabernacle, Temple built Shekinah descends No sacrifices Sacrifices invalid Consecration and death Naaman the leper Lepers of Samaria Blood and Incest Holy life rejected Priests' marriage, etc. Redemption of land Exile for idolatry Number of people, wilderness Nazirite Candlestick Sending of spies Moses, Samuel rejected War with Moab and Edom Balak and Balaam Zeal of Phinehas, Elijah 1st Haph. of Rebuke 2nd Haph. of Rebuke

DEUTERONOMY 44. 1—3.22 The Words 45. 3.23—7.11 And I besought

Isa. 1.1-27 Isa. 40.1-26

46. 7.12—11.25

When

Isa. 49.14—51.4

47. 11.26—16.17

Behold

Isa. 54.11—55.6

48. 16.18—21.9

Judges

Isa. 51.12—52.13

49. 21.10—25

When you go forth

Isa. 54.1-10

50. 26—29.9

When you come

Isa. 60.1-22

51. 29.10—30 end You stand 52. 31 And he continued 53. 32 Give ear

Isa. 61.10—63.9 Isa. 65.6—66.8 Hos. 14

54. 33—34

Josh. 1.1-10

This is the Blessing

3rd Haph. of Rebuke 1st Haph. of Consolation 2nd do. Discipline of suffering 3rd do. Righteousness rewarded 4th do. Justice blessed 5th do. God's kindness 6th do. Israel above nations 7th do. 'I will repay* Repentance and healing (Continuity)

The traditional lections may be found in the Jewish Year Book. The references given here have been adjusted to the numeration in the English versions. m signifies 'witnessed in the Mishnah' (m Meg. 3.4-6). b signifies 'witnessed in the Babylonian Talmud' (b Meg. 29—31 mainly). The witness of Mishnah and Talmud is to the opening verse only, and not always that. The names of the sidrdt are the traditional Hebrew names, drawn from the opening words or subject: I have put these into English. The right-hand column gives the connection between sidra and haphtarah as understood by J. H. Hertz, The Pentateuch and Haftorahs (London 1947).

TABLE II The Chronicler's Lectionary System (The numbers follow the modern annual cycle. * signifies the Chronicler's additions to Kings, (*) a change of Kings order. Italics signify striking coincidences, and/or more general parallels.)

NISAN

GENESIS

JOSHUA

EZRA

1—6.8 Creation. Fall. Cain. Genealogy.

1—3 Be strong. Rahab. 1* Sheshbazzar. Israel returns to land. Waters part for Israel to enter promised Land.

2. 6.9—11 Noah. Babel. Genealogy.

4—6 Circumcision. Passover. Walls of Jericho fall to trumpets and shout.

3—6* Jeshua and Zerubbabel raise temple and walls to trumpets and shout. Passover.

3. 12—17 Abraham (a): In Canaan by Bethel and Ai. Promise to inherit land from peoples. Circumcision. 5 Kings: Melchizedek.

7—12 Actum. Ail Bethel. Heading Law. Mixing with peoples, 5 Kings: Adonizedek.

7—10* Confession of Ezra. Intermarriage with peoples.

PASSOVER

NEHEMIAH

4. 18—22 Abraham (b): 13—16 Joshua Birth and binding of conquers Canaanites Isaac. Promise renewed, and allots land to Genealogy. first five tribes.

PENTECOST

7* Returning Families.

5. 23—25.18 Abraham (c): Sarah. Rebecca. Keturah. Genealogy.

17—22 Joshua continues to allot land to remaining seven tribes.

8* Ezra reads, Jeshua interprets Law.

6. 25.19—29.8 Jacob and Esau.

23—24 Rehearsal from 9* Rehearsal from Abraham. Covenant. Abraham. Covenant. (Jeshua).

7. 28.10—32.3 Jacob and Laban. Leah. Rachel. Birth of Patriarchs.

1 CHRONICLES 1.1-42* Adam-Noah (10). Descendants of sons of Noah (70) Shem-Abram (10). Descendants of sons of Abraham (70).

8. 32.4—36 Jacob and Esau. Sons of Israel. Esau's descendants. Kings and chiefs of Edom.

1.43—2* Kings and Chiefs cfEdom, Sons of Israel (—Gen. 35.22ff.). Judah clam.

9. 37—40 Judah tries to save Joseph. Judah and Tamar. Joseph in prison.

3* Sons of David.

10. 41—44.17 Joseph in power. Judah and brothers. Simeon hostage.

4* Villages of Judah. Simeon.

11. 44.18—47.27 Joseph recognized. Israel to Egypt. Sons of Patriarchs.

5—7.13* Families cf Reuben. Gad, half-Manasseh, Levi. Issachar, Benjamin, NaphtaU.

12. 47.28—50 Jacob blesses Manasseh and Ephraim, the Patriarchs (... Joseph, Benlamth): dies.

7.14—8* Manasseh, Ephraim. Benjamin.

EXODUS 1—6.1 Oppression In Egypt. Moses kills Egyptian, draws water from well. Moses raised to deliver Israel, enter land of Jebusita, etc.

10,11(*) Death of Saul (.Oppression under Philistines). David made king, takes Jebus. Mighty Mm draw water from well.* Benaiah kills Egyptian.

14. 6.2—9 Egypt smitten with seven plagues. Moses' Thirty (6.14 ff.).

12* David's army. Amasai chief of Thirty. Ark from Kiriath-Jearim: God 'breaks forth'.

15. 10—13.16 Last three plagues. Passover. Exodus.

13—14 David smites Philistines.

16. 13.17—17 Red Sea. Moses' Song. Timbrels and Dancing (15.17). Manna. Meribah. Amalek.

15—16* Ark processed Into Jerusalem. Cymbals and Dancing. David's Song by Asaph.

17. 18—20 Jethro. Sinai. X Commandments.

17—18 Temple adumbrated. (17.21) David's victories over Philistines.

18. 21—24 Laws of Covenant: so. 'enemies driven out, bounds from Red Sea to sea of Philistines desert to Euphrates'.

19—20 Syrians, Edomites, Ammonites ... to the River.

19. 25—27.19 Tabernacle (a): Pattern of Ark, structure Altar, Court, etc.

21—22 Census. Site of Temple. Temple planned.

20. 27.20—30.10 Tabernacle (b): Pattern of Priests' clothes, consecration, Incense, Altar.

23—28* Levites, priests, acolytes, officers for Temple. David gives Solomon the pattern.

21. 30.11—34 Tabernacle (c): Half-shekel. Bezalel and Ohollab. Golden Calf. Moses' Visions. 22. 35—38.20 Tabernacle (d): Freewill Offering. Bezalel and Ohollab. Construction. 23. 38.24-40 Tabernacle (e): Gold. Priests' clothes. Induction. Glory-cloud.

NEW YEAR

YOM KIPPUR

2 CHRONICLES 29*; 1—2 Freewill Offering. Solomon's vision. Huram. 1 Construction.

5 Induction. Glory-cloud.

LEVITICUS 24. 1—5 Burnt Offering. Cereal Offering. Peace Offering. Sin Offering. Swearing.

6.1-23 Solomon before Altar. 'Hear and forgive'. Swearing.

25. 6—8 Burnt Offering, Cereal Offering. Sin-Offering. Guilt Offering. Ordination of Aaron and sons.

6.24-end 'If they confess ... hear and forgive.' 'Let thy priests be clothed with salvation'.*

26. 9—11 Sacrifice: fire from heaven. Priests replaced. Clean and Unclean.

7—8.10 Sacrifice: fire from heaven.* Solomon's building.

27. 12—13 Uncleanness: Women, Leprosy.

8.11—9 Solomon's wife away from ark.* Queen of Sheba.

28. 14—15 Lepers. Discharge.

10 Division of Kingdom.

29. 16—18 Atonement. Worship only for God at Tabernacle, not he-goats. Marriage and consanguinity.

11 Priests secede to Rehoboam at Temple.* Jeroboam's he-goats.* Rehoboam marries cousins.*

30. 19—20 Holiness code.

12 Rehoboam forsakes Law. Shishak.

TABERNACLES 31. 21—24 Priests' cleanness. Feasts. Shewbread, lamps, blasphemy.

13 Abijah and Jeroboam. Shewbread and lamps.*

32. 25—26.2 Jubilee, Redemption. (If faithful, peace, 5 chase 100).

14—15 Asa destroys Idols.' Peace. Chases million Cushites *

33. 26.3—27 But if not... Vows.

16 Asa unfaithful: War, Disease,* Death.

NUMBERS 34. 1—4.20 First Numbering of Host.

17*, 18 Jehoshaphat's host .* With Ahab to Ramoth-gilead.

35. 4.21—7 Levites (Kohathltes.). Judgement by Ordeal. Nazirites. Offerings.

19—20* Judges. Levites and priests to judge. Moabite War (Kohathltes).

36. 8—12 Lamps. Passover (2nd month). Quails and 70 elders. Miriam's leprosy.

21—22 Jehoram, Ahaziah. Lamp for David.

37. 13—15 Spies. Sacrifices.

23—24 Joash. Jehoiada. Zecharlah.*

38. 16—18 Priestly prerogatives. Korah and incense. Priests' incomes.

25—26 Amaziah and Edom. Host numbered.* Uzziah's incense and leprosy.*

39. 19—22.1 Red heifer. Edom refuses passage (2 Chron. 20). Brazen Serpent. Sihon, Og.

27—28 Jotham. Ahaz.

40. 22.2—25.9 Moab obstructive (2 Chron. 20). Balaam (2 Chron. 18).

29 Hezekiah: (a) 2nd month. Passover preparations (Num. 9).*

41. 25.10—30.1 Second Numbering. Feasts and Offerings.

30—31.3 Hezekiah: (b) Passover kept. Provision of offerings.*

42. 30.2—32 Vows. Midianites. Portion of spoil to Eleazar and Levites. Gad, Reuben.

31.4-13 Hezekiah: (c) Portions and Tithes to priests and Levites.*

43. 33—36 Stages of Journey. Borders. Levites' cities and suburbs. Zelophedad.

31.14-end Hezekiah: (d) Reckoning of Levites by cities and suburbs.

DEUTERONOMY 44.. 1—3.22 Moses encourages People (3.22).

32.1-8 Hezekiah: (e) encourages people (32.7).*

45. 3.23—7.11 Commandments. Driving out nations greater and mightier.

32.9-23 Hezekiah: (f) Sennacherib.

46. 7.12—11.25 Trying Israel to know all his heart. Wealth.

32.24 Hezekiah: (g) Wealth. Babylon Embassy.

47. 11.26—16.17 High places forbidden. Jerusalem worship. Passover.

33 Manasseh builds high places. Augury, sorcery, wizards, fire (Deut. 18). Amon.

48. 16.18—21.9 Destroy Asherah. Host of Heaven not to be worshipped. King to study book of taw under priests.

34 Jostah destroys Asherahs, etc. Follows book of law produced by Hilkiah.

49. 21.10—25 Various laws.

35 Josiah's Passover and death.

50. 26—29.8 Blessing and Curse. Exile foretold: no mercy on weak.

36.1-21 Last Kings. Exile. No mercy on weak.*

51. 29.9—34 (As many readings as are necessary) Repentance and Return. Moses' Song, Blessing. Death.

36.22-end Cyrus authorizes Return.*

LUKE AND THE ANNUAL TORAH CYCLE I have now, I hope, given sufficient reasons for believing two theses to be plausible: first, that Luke wrote his Gospel as a cycle of liturgical gospels, to be used round the year in fulfilment of the Old Testament lections; and second, that in the first century the Torah cycle in use in the Western Diaspora of Judaism and Christianity was an annual cycle beginning on the first sabbath in Nisan. We have now to set the Lucan Gospel side by side with the sidrdt, and see how far the theory is confirmed by the presence of convincing parallels. Two immediate problems pose themselves. Where should we take the Lucan cycle to begin? And upon what principle shall we divide the Lucan text? There might seem to be three places where Luke could begin: the first Sunday in Nisan, following the Torah cycle; Jewish New Year on 1st Tishri; and the Sunday after the Easter octave, following Matthew. Of these the last is plainly to be preferred. The logic of the Gospel is such as to require the reading of the Passion story at Passovertide, and of the Resurrection at Eastertide: how could one celebrate the Lord's death and rising again in Lent (were Luke 1 read on Nisan I) or high summer (were Luke 1 read in Tishri)? All the earliest lectionaries—indeed, virtually all lectionaries—have this arrangement: 1 since we have accepted the argument that the use of the Gospel in the fourth century is the best guide to its original purpose, we can hardly reject the rock-solid evidence for the use of the end of the Gospel at Passover-Easter. Nor is it credible that Luke should adopt a different starting-point from Matthew. If the first evangelist was writing an annual cycle of liturgical gospels starting after the Easter octave (as I have argued in Midrash and Lection in Matthew),2 then the third evangelist will be likely to have done the same. All Jewish major festivals but Pentecost are eight-day 1

The earliest lectionaries that we have are those of the Armenian church in Jerusalem (c. 430, cf. pp. 53-6 above), the Syriac church (c. 480, cf. p. 4, n. 7), the Gallican church (c. 500, cf. p. 5, n. 1), and the Greek church (ninth-century MSS, cf. p. 4, n. 8). Their witness agrees with the testimony of Egeria in the late fourth century. I have made an abbreviated table of the Holy Week and Easter lections Of these authorities in MLM, p. 433. 2 ch. 9, and Part II.

feasts, and all early lectionaries celebrate Easter as an octave—we even find reference to the eighth day from Easter in St John. 1 So it would seem that Luke will have celebrated Easter on the third Sunday in the year (the Sunday after 14th Nisan), its octave on the fourth, and he will have begun his Gospel cycle, if any, on the fifth. As regards the divisions of Luke, we have three indications, which sometimes coincide and sometimes not: the logic of the Gospel, with its introductory and closing formulae, the divisions numbered in Codex Alexandrinus and other manuscripts, and the edentations in the Bodmer Papyrus, p75. Of these our most dependable resource is Luke himself, for he is given to opening his pericopae with a rubrical formula: 'And it came to pass as h e . . . ' , 'In the meantime, when so many thousands of the multitude had gathered together that they trod upon one another, he began to say . . . ' , 'He went on his way through towns and villages, teaching, and journeying toward Jerusalem. And some one said to him . . . ' Often a new lection is introduced by a question or comment that serves as a foil: 'He was praying in a certain place, and when he ceased, one of his disciples said to him, Lord, teach us to pray, . . . ' , 'The apostles said to the Lord, Increase our f a i t h ! . . O n the other hand, when Luke breaks the continuity, he sometimes tells us that the next scene happened 'at that very hour', and when this is the case presumably the evangelist means the two pieces to be taken together. Sometimes the rubrical pointers are quite elaborate, as in the opening two chapters, where Luke presents a complex diptych of John and Jesus in which the readings are marked off in several ways. Elizabeth closes the first with her thanksgiving, 'Thus the Lord has done to me . . . ' (1.25), Mary the second with the Magnificat (1.4655), Zechariah the third with the Benedictus (1.68-79), Simeon nearly closes the fourth with the Nunc Dimittis and 'Behold this child . . . ' (2.29-32, 34-5). The first is ended by Zechariah going to his home (1.23), the second by Mary returning home (1.56), the fourth by the holy family returning into Galilee, to their own city, Nazareth (2.39), the fifth by Jesus' going down with his parents and coming to Nazareth (2.51). There are notes of time at the end of the first two: for five months Elizabeth hid herself (1.24); in the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent (1.26): 'And Mary remained with her about three months' (1.56). At the end of the remaining three readings there are notes of progress: 'And the child grew and became strong in spirit' (1.80), 'And the child grew and became strong, filled with wisdom' (2.40), 'And Jesus increased in wisdom and in stature . . . ' (2.52). These indications of the close of self1

John 20.26.

contained units coincide exactly with the division of the story by theme, and make a fivefold division a virtual certainty:1 1.5-25 1. 26-56 1.57-80 2. 1-40 2. 41-52

Annunciation of the Birth of John Annunciation of the Birth of Jesus: Visitation Birth, Circumcision and Naming of John Birth, Circumcision and Presentation of Jesus Jesus Aged Twelve

Luke's formulae do not always yield certain breaks, but there are few places of doubt. When I suggested a lectionary theory for Matthew, I relied, with only minimal adjustments, on the 69 numbered divisions in the Codex Alexandrinus and other Greek uncials as the lections for the Matthaean year.2 Matthew was a Gospel for a Jewish-Christian church, and there were many Jewish-Christian churches through to the fourth-century for whom Matthew's lessons for Jewish feasts were ideal; it is not surprising, therefore, that Matthew's own divisions survived nearly intact in so many MSS. Luke, however, was written for a Gentile church which soon lost its enthusiasm for long O.T. readings: as Justin says, already in the 150s, 'the writings of the prophets are read as long as time permits.' 3 We might have expected therefore that the anchoring of the Lucan readings to O.T. lections would be less firm, and in consequence that the Lucan divisions themselves would be more liable to flux; and this is the case. However, the divisions in Alexandrinus, etc.,4 are far from worthless. For example, the whole of Luke 1 is the Proem in A, and Luke 2 is divided into four units. This means that Luke 3 comprises the 6th and 7th lections, which is precisely what the Lucan formulae suggest; perhaps the margins became worn and torn in the first leaves of an earlier codex, and the places of division were guessed up to the 6th which was marked at 3.1. From Luke 4—9 the A divisions are mostly just where the rubrical formulae would suggest, and it is not until the Journey that additional, and 1

R. Laurentin, Structure et theologie de Luc l-ll (Paris 1957), pp. 32 f., gives a sevenfold division, adding the Visitation and the Presentation as separate units; but he does not stick so closely to the criteria of division which he and I have in common—for instance, he cites no 'conclusion' for his units II and V, and his V and VI are in joint parallel with his IV, where we have the birth, circumcision and canticle for John set against the same for Jesus. 2 MLM, pp. 180 fF. 3 / Apol. 67. 4 These are marked in italic numbers in the margins of the more recent editions of Nestle. The uncials containing these divisions include ACOEZ: cf. MLM, pp. 180 ff.

sometimes irrational, divisions creep in.1 A's total of 84 readings nevertheless seems to me substantially correct, and agrees with my own computation by the 'rubrics'. 2 This would be natural once numbers were written into the margins; individual readings could be subdivided, but only by adjustment to fit the numbers later on. There is a reason for there being 84 lections to the Lucan year as against 69 to the Matthaean year, which I shall explain shortly. Alexandrinus has the numbers of the readings marked down the side margin, and the title of each reading at the top of the page, and a table of the readings at the front of the Gospel; but its testimony is subject to doubt in that the older uncials, Vaticanus and Sinaiticus, do not contain the same divisions. We are fortunate, however, to have A's evidence substantially confirmed by the Bodmer papyrus, p75, which preserves more than half the Gospel in excellent condition, including, for the greater part, the margins.3 The text is copied with an even left margin which is broken from time to time with the edentation of a single letter, and these edentations correspond with the beginning of a new pericope, and are interpreted by Martin and Kasser, who edited the papyrus, as indications of lections. The letter is extruded in the line following the start of the new unit where this begins in the middle of a line; and in other places the break is marked with a line in the text, perhaps where the edenting has been forgotten. The reader would thus carry on until he could see his way barred by an edentation or mark in the next line. p7S has text to cover 40 places where the 'rubrics' indicate a break, and of these it has edentations or marks which agree with 31 exactly and with a further 5 nearly; but there are also 23 additional edentations and marks, all in the Journey section, often clearly secondary as in the case of the Woes in Luke 11, each of which is edented. p75 is a valuable confirmation of the lectionary thesis because it is so early: it was copied only a century to a century and a quarter after the autograph, 4 and shows clear evidence of lectionary use in the way the text was written. More than half its divisions correspond with the rubrical breaks. The tendency to subdivide is the same as with Alexandrinus, but the papyrus does not have in the margin the numbers which proved such a conservative force with the latter. 1

For example, unit 66 is the single verse Luke 19.12, while the remainder of the Pounds is unit 67. See the list in Table IE, pp. 103 f. 3 Papyrus Bodmer XIV, edd. V. Martin and R. Kasser (Cologny-Geneve 1961). There is a reproduction of the folio covering Luke 10.32—11.1 on the jacket of this book. 4 Martin and Kasser date the papyrus between 175 and 225; the earlier date seems to be favoured by most papyrologists. 2

If I were being rigorous, I would eschew two simplifications which I am going to make in the matter following. First, the correspondences which I am about to allege between Luke and the Old Testament are correspondences between a Greek Luke and a Greek LXX, so far as we are able to reconstruct those texts. It is, however, cumbrous to quote every passage in both Greek and English, so I shall ask the reader to trust me if I give the correspondences in English only; and in return I shall make a promise to use the same English word only when the Greek word is the same. Sometimes I shall need to cite the Greek, but usually I shall save the time. Secondly, I ought properly to refer to the opening passage in Luke, 1.5-25, as the first section, or reading. But if I do this I impose an intolerable strain on my reader's concentration; for my claim, which (I hope) he wishes to test, is that the opening passage corresponds with sidra 5.1 Not only is it difficult to remember that passage 1 in Luke is meant to correspond with sidra 5, but, as I shall explain, there are certain additional readings in Luke, so that a differential of 4 is not a constant. I shall therefore take the liberty of referring to the opening passage in Luke as Lection 5, thus assuming for the moment the soundness of my theory. The Abraham saga occupies sidrdt 3, 4, and 5, and is therefore nearly complete before Luke begins his tale. Sarah in fact dies and is buried in the opening chapter of the 5th sidra, which is called 'Sarah's Life', Hayye Sarah, from the opening words. The parallels between Abraham and Sarah and Zechariah and Elizabeth are in every commentary. Zechariah and Elizabeth 'walked in all the commandments and ordinances of the Lord': Abraham kept 'my commandments and my ordinances' (1.6; Gen. 26.5). Elizabeth was barren: Sarah was barren (1.7; Gen. 11.30). Zechariah and his wife were 'advanced in their days': Abraham and his wife were 'advanced of days' (1.7; Gen. 18.11). The angel of the Lord appeared to Zechariah by the altar: God, in the form of three men, later called angels, appeared to Abraham by the oak (1.11; Gen. 18.1 ff.). The angel says to Zechariah, 'Your wife Elizabeth shall generate a son to you, and you shall call his name John': God says to Abraham, 'Behold, Sarah your wife shall bear you a son, and you shall call his name Isaac' (1.13; Gen. 17.19). Zechariah doubts the promise, 'How shall I know this?': Abraham doubts the promises, 'How shall I know that I shall inherit it?' (1.18; Gen. 15.8; cf. 17.17, 18.11 ff). The angel says of Elizabeth's conceiving, 'No word shall be impossible with God': the Lord says to Abraham, 'Shall any 1

The Lucan units, or lections as I am claiming, are set out in parallel with the sidrdt in Table III, pp. 103 f.

word be impossible with God?' (1.37; Gen. 18.14). These correspondences are in fact principally with sidrd 4, not sidrd 5, and the last of them occurs in Gabriel's word to Mary in Lection 6; but it is no part of my hypothesis to exclude references to near-by sidrdt. Given Luke's situation as I am supposing it, with a sidra covering the last days of Sarah and Abraham, and—which is often significant —bearing Sarah's name, we can easily understand him filling out the characters and history of Elizabeth and Zechariah from earlier episodes in the patriarchal saga. Indeed, he throws in that they were righteous before God, and that Mary found grace with God (1.6, 30): it was Noah who found grace before God, and who was a righteous man (Gen. 6.9 f.). Such phrases could well be carried over in the mind from week to week. Sidrd 6, 'The Descendants' (ysviaeu;), tells of the birth and rivalry of Jacob and Esau. The destiny of the two boys is set from the womb, and Rebecca went to inquire of the Lord because the children leaped in her belly. Now in the 6th Lection Mary visits the pregnant Elizabeth, and the babe leaps in her womb in recognition of its future Lord: Elizabeth goes on to say, 'The babe leaped in my womb for joy.' These are the only two occasions in the Bible of such an event; and the Lucan reading is indeed a story of yevfoeic. The Lection also contains a number of more general references to the patriarchs: 'He will reign over the house of Jacob for ever' (1.33), 'He has helped his servant Israel in remembrance of his mercy, as he spoke to Abraham and his posterity for ever' (1.54 f.). These would be not inapt in the first of the Jacob sidrdt. The foundation of the people of Israel rests in fact upon a series of marvellous conceptions of children: not only Sarah and Rebecca, but Rachel in sidrd 7 is barren until the action of God. The 7th sidra records the birth of all Jacob's children but Benjamin: each is born to his mother's delight, each is named, and a brief oracle is pronounced upon the destiny of each. So in Lection 7 is Elizabeth's child born amid joy and named, and the Benedictus pronounced over him. When Rachel conceived Joseph she said, 'God has taken away my reproach': and when Elizabeth conceived John she said, 'Thus the Lord looked on me, to take away my reproach among men' (1.25; Gen. 30.23). When Leah gave birth to her first-born, Reuben, she said, 'Because the Lord has seen my lowliness'; and at the birth of her last-born, Asher, she said, 'Blessed am I, for women shall call me blessed' (Gen. 29.32; 30.13): Mary says in the Magnificat, 'He has looked upon the lowliness of his handmaiden: for behold, henceforth all generations shall call me blessed' (1.48). The Benedictus opens by blessing the Lord God of Israel, and recalls the mercy

promised to our fathers, the holy covenant which he swore to Abraham. As God preserved Jacob from Laban and Esau, so are we, being delivered from the hand of our enemies, to serve him without fear all the days of our life. In sidra 8 Jacob returns to his homeland. He wrestles with the angel at Penuel and names the place Face of God: 'for I have seen God face to face and my life was preserved'. He outwits Esau and comes with his sheep and oxen to Shechem: and after the incident there reaches Bethlehem, where his youngest child Benjamin is born. It is in Lection 8 that Jesus is born at Bethlehem. His parents are also on the road, going back to Joseph's home-city. The first witnesses of his coming are shepherds, and he is hailed at his Presentation by Anna the daughter of Phanuel of the tribe of Asher, and by Simeon. Holding Jesus in his arms, the old man says, 'Mine eyes have seen thy salvation'. Sidr& 9, Wayyeshebh, Korafricei 84, 'And he dwelt', tells of the boy Joseph, seventeen years of age, dwelling with his father and mother in the land of Canaan. It describes the dreams which presage his future destiny, and how 'his father kept the saying'; he is then sold into slavery, and lost to his father for a period. In the final section of Luke's infancy stories, Jesus lives with his father and mother in Nazareth. Aged twelve, he is left behind at Jerusalem, to their perplexity; 'and Mary kept all these sayings (AT) in her heart' (2.51; cf. 19; Gen. 37.11). As Easter is the third Sunday in the year, so does Pentecost fall in the tenth week of the year, and Pentecost Sunday is the tenth Sunday. Pentecost was to the Jews the Festival of the Law-giving; but Luke tells us in Acts the significance of the feast to his church. It was the giving of the Spirit rather than the Law, perhaps with conscious opposition. In the 10th Lection Luke describes the Baptist's preaching (3.1-20, a single theme opened with John's dated coming, and closed with his arrest). This reaches its climax with his witness to Christ: 'I baptize you with water, but he who is mightier than I is coming . . . he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire' (3.16; Matt. 3.11). The earlier tradition could hardly have supplied a more apt text. The meaning of the fire to Matthew may be in doubt, but to the author of Acts 2 it stands without amendment for the tongued flame of inspiration. Nor is this theme absent from the Jewish tradition. In the 10th sidra Pharaoh said to his servants of Joseph, 'Can we find a man such as this, in whom is the Spirit of God?' (Gen. 41.39): a theme, as I hope to show, developed in Isaiah. In the 11th sidrd Joseph is revealed, Joseph whom his father loved

more than his other sons; Jacob and his family go down to Egypt, and a genealogical table of his descendants is given. In the 11th Lection (3.21-38, Jesus' Baptism), Luke records the descent of the Holy Spirit, with the apt Marcan words, 'Thou art my beloved Son; with thee I am well pleased', and upon this peg he proceeds to hang his Genealogy of Jesus' ancestors. The name Joseph is to the fore, as if to emphasize the link with Joseph in Genesis. The Genealogy begins, 'being the son, as was supposed, of Joseph', and Jesus' seventh ancestor is another Joseph, and his 35th another; and in the Nazareth synagogue the crowd, amending the previous tradition, asks, 'Is not this Joseph's son?' Nor are the other patriarchs absent: four of them occur in a row in the fifth 'week'—Levi, Simeon, Judah, Joseph—and there is a further Levi and the biblical Judah as well, besides (if they are relevant) Semein, Josech, Joda. Sidra 12 completes the Joseph saga: Jacob blesses his children and dies. Earlier tradition had followed Jesus' Baptism with the Temptations, and Luke is content to take over the Q/Matthaean Temptations story nearly as it stands for his 12th Lection (4.1-13, a single theme with a new location, closed with the devil's departure).1 All the land of Egypt hungered and cried to Pharaoh for bread, and Jacob sent his sons to buy corn 'that we may live' (Gen. 41.55; 42.1). Jesus in Matthew had said that man shall not live by bread alone, and Luke leaves out the following, ' . . . but by every word . . . ' , which do not belong in the Genesis context. Matthew's third Temptation is promoted, and reworded to point the fulfilment of Genesis. 'To you', says the devil, 'will I give all this authority and the glory of them; for it has been delivered to me, and I give it to whom I will. If you, then, will worship me, all shall be yours.' Pharaoh had said to Joseph, 'Behold, I have set you over all the land of Egypt . . . Only in the throne will I be greater than you'. He had given him the symbols of vice-gerency, so that Joseph could say, 'Tell my father of all my glory in Egypt' (Gen. 41.40-3; 45.13). Before summing up what has emerged so far, it may be well to complete our survey of Genesis by working back from the end of the Gospel through the first four sidrdt. The Emmaus Road/Easter Evening story would fall, then, against sidra 4. Sidra 4 is called Wayyera\ <50r| 86, 'And he appeared', and opens with the theophany 1

As there were 54 sidrdt to go round a year of 50/51 sabbaths and the Day of Atonement, some combination would be required every year, and this was later done at the end of a book of the Torah, as might be convenient. In the year that I have set out in Table VIII I have taken the last two units of Exodus together, and Luke may have done this regularly, cf. p. 37, n. 1, p. 45, n. 4, p. 83.

to Abraham: it is the occasion when Abraham entertained angels unawares. God eats at his table in form of the three men, and then speaks the word of promise which his hearers find it hard to credit. In the following chapter, two angels come to summon Lot from Sodom. Lot invites them into his house, and when they show reluctance he constrains them (KaxePidaato, 19.3). There is more than a casual similarity in the Gospel. Jesus walks with Cleopas and his companion and they do not know him: he makes as if to go further and they constrain him (roxpePidoavio, 24.29). Returned, they hear that he has appeared to Simon. He eats with them and reveals his resurrection, and they scarcely believe for joy. Life from the dead and life from the dead womb of Sarah are expressly compared by Paul in Rom. 4. Sidra 3, then, would fall on Easter Day: it is a passage full of suggestiveness for Easter preaching—Abraham's faith, the old circumcision covenant and baptism, Christ our high priest of the order of Melchizedek: but Luke 24.1-12 shows no trace of it. Sidra 2, Noah, was, however, a clear invitation to compare the tribulation to come with the flood, and I have already suggested that Matthew did so.1 Christ prophesied wars, famines, persecution, celestial signs and his return: it is Luke who introduces into the tradition the flood motif—'on earth there shall be distress of nations in perplexity at the roaring of the sea and the waves, men fainting with foreboding' (21.25 f.). It is no longer a fiery consummation only, but a new Flood as well. Sidra 1 has no Lucan parallel. It will not, I think, be denied that Luke has the Greek book of Genesis in mind as he writes Luke 1—3; and indeed consciously so. The question is whether, as is usually thought, Luke was content to paint a story of annunciations by angels, of barrenness relieved, and children marvellously born, in the colours of the LXX, which means Genesis in this case; or whether there is close enough correspondence with the Jewish serial readings to support the thesis which we are considering—and here the very multiplicity of references reduces the clarity of the picture. We must admit at once that Luke is not bound by the sidrdt: 1 and 3 are missing, 3 not surprisingly. On the other hand, a continuous series of correspondences with the lessons for weeks 4 to 12, nine in a row, is impressive, and I cannot escape the impression of the Lucan story moving forward in parallel with Genesis: Lection 2 with the Flood, Lection 4 with the appearances to Abraham and Lot, and Lot's constraining, Lection 5 with the conception of Isaac, Lection 6 with the leaping of the children in Rebecca's womb, Lection 7 with the birth and naming of 1

p. 49, above.

Jacob's sons, and the oracles, Lection 8 with Benjamin's birth at Bethlehem and the Penuel reference, Lection 9 with Jacob keeping the saying about his son, Lection 10 with the man in whom is the spirit of God, Lection 11 with the patriarchal Genealogy, Lection 12 with Joseph's authority and glory in the days of hunger. There is a coincidence of names and rare words and whole phrases between the two accounts which it would be rash to ascribe to accident. The 13th Lection, the Rejection at Nazareth (4.14-30, a single theme with an introduction and conclusion of a formal kind), brings us, then, to the beginning of the book of Exodus, and so suggests the answer to a long-standing puzzle: why has Luke promoted the Rejection from its much later context in Mark and Matthew?1 In Stephen's speech in Acts 7 (17-35) we have an insight into Luke's reading of Exod. 1—5, and into the considerable significance he ascribed to it; for he devotes to it nineteen verses, more than a third of the whole. Moses, mighty in words and deeds, defended an oppressed Israelite, supposing that his brethren understood that God was giving them deliverance by his hand; but they did not understand, they thrust him aside, they refused him; he spent forty years in Midian, and was sent in the wilderness by God to deliver his people; but the fathers continually refused to obey him, and resisted the Holy Spirit. So now, in the Gospel, Christ comes from his forty days in the wilderness to deliver Israel. Full of the Spirit, in the power of the Spirit, he proclaims his inspiration in a full citation of Isa. 61: since Isaiah is itself a prophecy of a new Exodus, the words are well suited to a new Moses, 'He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives . . . to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord'. But they will no more accept him than they accepted Moses of old. As Elijah fled the land to Zarephath, where he brought blessing to the heathen widow, as Elisha gave healing to Naaman, so does Jesus escape with 1

It is vain to explain the change of order by reference to Luke's special source, since we do not know the order of Luke's special source, or even that it included this passage; but the change can be in part explained as a gloss on Matt. 4.13 Kal KotTotXiiwbv rfiv NaCapd, by those who concede Lucan knowledge of Matthew. Most commentators, e.g. Schiirmann, adopt a symbolic explanation: Luke, as with a lens, concentrates the events of the whole mission —Jesus' spirit-filled proclamation of the Gospel, its rejection and his attempted murder—in a single programmatic first story. If so, it would appear to be rather a flash in the pan: does Luke change the order of the Marcan Call of the first Apostles, or the Call of the Twelve, or the Mother and Brethren, for symbolic reasons?

his life, and turn at last to the Gentiles. No prophet is acceptable in Israel. They have resisted the Holy Spirit from the days of Moses on. With the end of the Rejection story we reach a turning-point in Luke's Gospel. Hitherto we have had a series of non-Marcan stories: there have been parallels with Matthew, but the connections with Mark have been limited to a few words and phrases. From 4.31 to 6.19 there is a change of policy: Luke not only follows the Marcan wording of the stories much more closely, he also (with one or two exceptions) follows Mark's order. Concurrently with this change of policy comes a lapse of the close parallelism which we have hitherto remarked; for while we might allege a general similarity between God's mighty works in the Exodus and Jesus' mighty works of healing, there is clearly no close relationship between the two. Such a lapse would be no surprise for the hypothesis we are examining; for (to resume my image of the curd at Ars) no preacher feels that he must follow a course on the liturgical gospel unbroken round the year. Perhaps he will give a short series of sermons on the epistles, or some topical subject; or perhaps (at Ars) there is already fixed a tradition of events in order about the saint, and this cannot be interrupted without offence. So here: we know that Luke had a tradition of events in Jesus' life in order, because we have it in Mark. There are ten sidrdt remaining in Exodus, and there are, on a natural count, nine Marcan incidents in a row from 4.31 on: the Demoniac in the Synagogue, Simon's Wife's Mother with the Mission Tour, the Call of the First Apostles, the Leper, the Paralytic, the Call of Levi, the Cornfield, the Man with the Withered Hand, the Call of the Twelve. Every year either Genesis or Exodus had to be shortened by combining the last two sidrdt in one or other book: 1 if Exodus were read over the full ten weeks, Simon's Wife's Mother could be separated .from the Mission Tour, as they are separated in Alexandrinus. The riddle of the order of Luke's Gospel can be broken down into three main subsidiary questions: (1) Why does Luke break the Marcan sequence which he has followed from 4.31 to 6.19? He has included almost all the Marcan material up to Mark 3.19, and when he resumes taking Mark as his source, he will begin at the Motherand-Brothers and the Sower (Mark 3.31, Luke 8.4), having omitted the Beelzebul story. In the place of this single omission Luke has introduced six lessons: the Sermon on the Plain, the Centurion's Slave, the Widow's Son, the Baptist's Question (with Jesus' testimony to the Baptist), the Woman who was a Sinner, and the Ministering Women. (2) When Luke does resume following Mark, why does he continue his policy of faithful inclusion of each Marcan pericope 1

cf. pp. 37, 45, 80.

up to the Feeding of the Five Thousand (Mark 6.44, Luke 9.17), and then make the Great Omission? He leaves out the Baptist's death immediately before the Five Thousand, and then the Walking on the Water, the Controversy over Purity, the Syro-Phoenician Woman, the Deaf Stammerer, the Four Thousand (with pendant conversation in the boat), and the Blind Bethsaidan. (3) Having again taken Mark as his authority from Caesarea Philippi to the Strange Exorcist (Mark 8.27—9.40, Luke 9.18-50), why does he desert him for a protracted period (9.51—18.14), introducing a variety of material for a much extended version of Jesus' journey to Jerusalem? There has been no satisfactory answer to these three questions, and I should wish to claim that the lectionary theory provides one for the first time. There are some minor order-changes besides, on which I shall comment, but given Luke's understandable policy of making Mark his principal authority, these are the three major problems with which any exegesis must contend. On the lectionary hypothesis, as we have seen, Luke's church celebrated Passover with the Passion story, Easter with the Resurrection, and Pentecost with the Baptist's preaching of Christ's baptism with the Spirit. The Genesis readings provided him with texts through the months of Iyyar and Sivan, and there were Exodus and Marcan readings through Tammuz and Ab, and into Elul. I have set these out in Table III at the end of the chapter (pp. 103 f.), where the reader can see the relation between the festivals and the weekly readings—for sabbaths in the Synagogue, and (we must suppose) for Saturday nights in the Church (cf. Acts 20.7 If.). Now, however lightly Luke sat to his Jewish heritage, it is difficult to believe that his church would have discontinued the use of the old Biblical festivals; and he seems to hint his observance of Atonement at Acts 27.9, 'As much time had been lost, and the voyage was already dangerous because the fast had already gone by . . .' Winter was beginning, and the fast was Atonement. If this is so, the end of the Exodus sidrdt would be the sign of the approach of the festal season. Luke is already a week or two into Elul; the next month is Tishri, with first New Year, then Atonement and finally Tabernacles. New Year is to Judaism something like what Advent is to Christianity,1 that is, a season of sober joy, in which expectation of God's coming action is mingled with penitence at what such action will mean for the believer. In the Mishnah it is one of the four days on which judgement is decreed: 'On New Year's Day, all that come into the world pass before (God) like flocks of sheep'.2 Ultimately 1 3

cf. Moore, Judaism, ii, 63-5. R.H. 1.2.

God will establish his kingdom in the age to come at the final New Year, and this is anticipated in the Jewish New Year liturgy with the recital of ten sentences on God's