Harvard Theological Review 2009-01

T HR Harvard Theological Review

102:1

JANUARY 2009 ISSN 0017-8160

HTR

Harvard Theological Review 102:1 ISSUED QUARTERLY BY THE FACULTY OF DIVINITY IN HARVARD UNIVERSITY

The Harvard Theological Review is partially funded by the foundation established under the will of Mildred Everett, daughter of Charles Carroll Everett, Bussey Professor of Theology in Harvard University (1869–1900) and Dean of the Faculty of Divinity (1878–1900). The scope of the Review embraces history and philosophy of religious thought in all traditions and periods—including the areas of Hebrew Bible, New Testament, Christianity, Jewish studies, theology, ethics, archaeology, and comparative religious studies. It seeks to publish compelling original research that contributes to the development of scholarly understanding and interpretation. EDITOR

François Bovon EDITORIAL BOARD

David D. Hall, Jon D. Levenson, Kevin Madigan, and Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza A S S O C I AT E E D I T O R S

Members of the Faculty of Divinity MANAGING EDITOR

Margaret Studier E D I T O R I A L A S S I S TA N T S

Cavan Concannon, Brian Doak, Aryay Bennett Finkelstein, Jonathan Kaplan, Piotr Malsyz, John Robichaux, Bryan L. Wagoner P R O D U C T I O N S TA F F

Anne Browder, Eve Feinstein, Rebecca Hancock, Richard Jude Thompson, John Whitley

Manuscripts and communications on editorial matters should be addressed to the Managing Editor, Harvard Theological Review, Harvard Divinity School, 45 Francis Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02138. “Instructions to Contributors” may be found in HTR 80:2 (April 1987) 243 – 60; an updated style sheet is available upon request ([email protected]). For subscriptions (US): Subscription Coordinator, Cambridge University Press, 32 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10013-2473; tel: 800-872-7423 or 845-353-7500; fax: 845-353-4141. Email: [email protected]. Annual subscription rates for Volume 102, 2009: Individuals, print only: US $55 in the U.S.A., Canada, and Mexico; £36 in UK, elsewhere. Institutions, print only: US $160 in the U.S.A., Canada, and Mexico; £95 in UK, elsewhere. Institutions, electronic only: US $146 in the U.S.A., Canada, and Mexico; £87 + VAT UK, elsewhere. Institutions, print and electronic: US $175 in the U.S.A., Canada, and Mexico; £105 in UK, elsewhere. Prices include surface postage and are payable in advance or on receipt of invoice; only personal check or credit card accepted for individual subscriptions (corporate check also accepted for institutional subscriptions). Website: journals.cambridge.org. For subscriptions outside the US: Journals Marketing Department, Cambridge University Press, The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 1BR, UK. Tel: +44 (0) 1223 326-070; fax: +44 (0) 1223 315052. Email: [email protected]. VAT registration no: GB 214 1416 14. Payment in pounds sterling. Back issues of vols. 1 (1908) through 93 (2000) are available from the Periodicals Service Company, 11 Main St., Germantown, NY 12526; tel: (518) 537–4700, fax: (518) 537–5899. For more recent issues, contact the journal’s customer services at Cambridge University Press, 100 Brook Hill Drive, W. Nyack, NY 10994-2113; tel: 800-872-7423. The foreign language and transliteration fonts used in this journal are available from Linguist’s Software Inc., PO Box 580, Edmonds, WA 98020-0580 USA; tel: (425) 775–1130. Website: www.linguistsoftware.com. 7\SHVHWLQWKH+DUYDUG7KHRORJLFDO5HYLHZ2IÀFHV+DUYDUG'LYLQLW\6FKRRO&DPEULGJH0DVVDFKXVHWWV 3XEOLVKHGE\&DPEULGJH8QLYHUVLW\3UHVV1HZ
The Second Passover, Pilgrimage, and the Centralized Cult* Simeon Chavel Princeton University

The passage in Numbers 9:1–14 presents new legislation on the Passover sacrifice. For one who contracted impurity immediately prior to the Passover or was too far away to participate in it, the amendment prescribes an alternate date, one month later: When any of you or your posterity who are defiled by a corpse or are on a long journey would offer a passover sacrifice to the Lord, they shall offer it in the second month, on the fourteenth day of the month, at twilight (vv. 10–11).

In 1899, Arnold Ehrlich pinpointed this legal innovation as “a novella without parallel in the entire Pentateuch”—and justly so.1 The idea that for personal reasons an individual may defer a calendrically defined rite, miss a monumental date in the history of the nation and make it up some typological thirty days later, flies in the face of the significance of time to the potency of ritual.2 Indeed, the law of the Second Passover stands alone, not only in the Hebrew Bible, but also, apparently, * It is with gratitude and appreciation that I note that the preparation of this article was made possible by a grant from the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture. An early draft was presented at the Hebrew Bible Seminar at Harvard University, February 2006. Sincere thanks to the editors of HTR for their helpful comments. English citations of biblical passages come from Tanakh—The Holy Scriptures: The New JPS Translation According to the Traditional Hebrew Text (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1985), except where otherwise noted. 1 Arnold Ehrlich, Scripture in Its Plain Sense (3 vols.; Berlin: M. Poppelauer Buchhandlung, 1899–1901) 1:254 [Hebrew]. 2 For one brief critical review of Mircea Eliade’s foundational work in this area, see Jonathan Z. Smith, Map Is Not Territory: Studies in the History of Religions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978) 88–103. For the extreme example of the Passover as the sole focalizing moment of an entire calendar in early Christianity, see the citation and discussion in idem, To Take Place: Toward Theory in Ritual (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987) 88.

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in the ancient Near East and beyond.3 Hittite law, for that matter, explicitly forbids just this scenario: You who (are) the temple officials: If you do not perform the festivals at the time of the festivals; (if) you do the spring festival in fall, (or) the fall festival in spring, (or) if the right time for doing the festival (has) arrived, and he who is to do it comes to you . . . and he seizes your knees, (saying) “The harvests (are) before me,” or a marriage or a journey or some other matter. “Let me off. Let that matter finish for me, and when that matter is finished for me, I will do the festival thus”: Do not do according to the wishes of (that) man. He must not persuade you. Do not conduct business concerning the will of the gods.4

The temple functionary who, baited by a bribe, succumbs to such a request will suffer the consequences: (If) a man persuades you, and you take payment for yourselves, the gods will demand it of you at a later time. They will stand in evil against your spirit, wives, children, (and) servants.5

With regard to the Second Passover, an added level of complexity or even irony comes from the fact that the primary text instituting the Passover, Exod 12:1–24, forges an organic link between the Passover and the new calendar that will constitute the nation of Israel ever after: “This month is hereby for you the first of the months; it is the first, for you, of all the months of the year . . . on the tenth of this month, See Mark E. Cohen, The Cultic Calendars of the Ancient Near East (Bethesda, Md.: CDL, 1993). According to the standard interpretation of 2 Macc 10:5–8, the Maccabees modeled their temple inauguration on the Festival of Sukkot, which they had been forced to forego only shortly before, and the letter in 1:1–9 refers to the festival celebrated thereafter as “the Festival of Booths.” At the very least, it would go far beyond the evidence to infer that Hanukkah served essentially as an annual opportunity to make up a missed Festival of Booths. Joseph Tabory does not make much of these references for a reconstruction of the original Hanukkah, or of the opinions he conveniently collects that do; see his Jewish Festivals in the Time of the Mishnah and Talmud (3rd ed.; Jerusalem: Magnes, 2000) 374–75 [Hebrew]. In a similar spirit, see Uriel Rappaport, The First Book of Maccabees (Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi, 2004) 78 [Hebrew]. Daniel Schwartz sees 2 Macc 10:5–8 as an interpolation by the author of the letters in the first two chapters, and refers to it as “an early interpretation” of Hanukkah; see his The Second Book of Maccabees (Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi, 2004) 14–16, 289–95 [Hebrew]. For an argument against these texts making any reference at all to the Pentateuch’s Feast of Tabernacles, see Moshe Benovitz’s online piece [in Hebrew] at http://www.schechter.ac.il/bima. asp?ID=35 (a more detailed, scholarly version, in print, is in preparation). 4 “Instructions to Priests and Temple Officials, 9,” in The Context of Scripture, Volume One: Canonical Compositions from the Biblical World (ed. William W. Hallo and K. Lawson Younger, Jr.; trans. G. McMahon; Leiden: Brill, 2003) 217–21, at 219. McMahon notes that the verb he has rendered as “persuade” (loosely, apparently, to judge by his use of italics) is the medio-passive “to see.” This idiom appears throughout the ancient Near East in the context of visiting king (= doing homage or seeking audience) or deity (= pilgrimage), often with attending gifts. In this context, it would seem that when the Hittite law speaks of “conducting business” it has these gifts in mind, and envisions the farmer offering some kind of a bribe, perhaps in the form of a donation to the temple. 5 Ibid. 3

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they should take each one a lamb.” The irony would appear to thicken in light of the framing narrative, which dates the law of the Second Passover to the very first turn of the new national calendar, one year after the exodus from Egypt (Num 9:1).6 According to the larger narrative that provides the setting for the law, when the time came to begin preparing for the first Passover since the exodus, several people stepped forward with the problem that they had contracted impurity, which would exclude them from the proceedings (Num 9:1–8). God responded with the new law. Tight parallels with Lev 24:10–23; Num 15:32–36; 27:1–11 (also 36:1–12)—in terms of structure, terminology, plot, characterization, and conception of jurisgenesis—illuminate the passage as cast in a highly stylized mold.7 Scholars have unanimously identified the passage in its entirety, along with its parallels, as part of the Priestly literature.8 Taken together, the mythic setting in the wilderness, the stylized, abstract character of the novella, and the Priestly source of the Second Passover pericope all indicate its fundamentally unhistorical nature. Setting aside, then, the current narrative frame, what were the historical circumstances that led to the development of this rare law of an untimely, deferred Passover, and what was its purpose?9 Over the years, scholarship has put forward only a few theories. The first two sections of this paper will offer a critical review of the two most influential theories, and the final three sections will suggest an alternative.

■ Hezekiah’s Delayed Passover in 2 Chronicles 30 Building on the fact that, according to 2 Chronicles 30, King Hezekiah must consult with the city elite to hold a belated Passover rather than draw on Mosaic authority, Ehrlich inferred that the law of the Second Passover in Num 9:1–14 originated in 6 What is more, note the way the form of Num 9:1–2 seems to parallel Exod 12:2–3, which suggests deliberate modeling: Exod 12:2–3: [NU][...VQEPPEVp]XH?POPE[VFH Num 9:1–2: [p?][ VQEP...LpQPE€LVFH][ 7 See Michael Fishbane, Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel (2d ed.; Oxford: Clarendon, 1986; repr. 1989) 98–106. 8 For example, Wilhelm M. L. de Wette, Lehrbuch der historisch-kritischen Einleitung in die kanonischen und apokryphischen Bücher des Alten Testamentes (6th rev. ed.; Berlin: Reimer, 1845) 203–8 (§§152–153); Samuel R. Driver, Introduction to the Literature of the Old Testament (7th ed., 1898; repr. Cleveland: Meridian, 1963) 159; Martin Noth, A History of Pentateuchal Traditions (trans. B. W. Anderson; Germ. orig. 1948; Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1972) 261–76, esp. 272, 273, 275; Israel Knohl, The Sanctuary of Silence: The Priestly Torah and the Holiness School (trans. J. Feldman and P. Rodman; Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1995) 105 and passim. 9 For some arguments that the law first existed without the narrative altogether, see Heinrich Holzinger, Numeri (KHAT; Tübingen-Leipzig: Mohr-Siebeck, 1903) 35; Diether Kellerman, Der Priesterschrift von Numeri 1:1 bis 10:10 (BZAW; Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1970) 129–32; Jacob Licht, A Commentary on the Book of Numbers (3 vols.; Jerusalem: Magnes, 1985–1995) 1:135, 138–39 [Hebrew]; Knohl, ibid., 90.

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the wake of Hezekiah’s deferred Passover.10 Chronicles, by implication, preserves an ancient historical memory. Nearly sixty years later (without referring to Ehrlich), Shemaryahu Talmon proposed a more ambitious version of this suggestion. To his mind, Jeroboam I’s festival in the eighth month, related in 1 Kgs 12:32–33, together with Hezekiah’s Passover in the second month, reflect a northern, Israelian11 agricultural cycle and corresponding calendar that differ from those in Judah in the south, lagging behind them by a month. The Second Passover instituted in Num 9:1–14 represents Hezekiah’s politically motivated attempt at incorporating the northern Israelian calendar into that of the Judahite south.12 The Hebrew Bible does attest to original laws earning Mosaic authority only secondarily.13 Calendars, for that matter, are indeed notorious for their political significance—as the story of Jeroboam I’s change in 1 Kgs 12:26–33 makes deliberately unmistakable. However, even granting the dubious assumption by Ehrlich and Talmon alike that Chronicles can hold so much reconstructive value for an entire historical chapter in the First Temple period, the approach with respect to this particular event has several serious flaws that thoroughly undermine its viability. 1) The assertion of a neat dichotomy between the agricultural cycles in the north and the south directly contradicts the vast agricultural data compiled anthropologically by Gustaf Dalman and mined from rabbinic literature by the botanist Yehuda Feliks; it confuses geography with topography, kingdoms with highlands and lowlands, atlas with almanac. Rather than distinguishing north from south, agricultural seasons in the land of Israel tend to differentiate the Jordan valley

10 Ehrlich, Scripture in Its Plain Sense, 1:254. In Ehrlich’s opinion the author of Chronicles reports an historical event but did not know the law legislated in its aftermath. Ehrlich does not go so far as to state that Numbers 9 was written after 2 Chronicles 30. For a convenient list of Pentateuchal references found in the book of Chronicles, see Judson R. Shaver, Torah and the Chronicler’s History Work: An Inquiry into the Chronicler’s References to Laws, Festivals, and Cultic Institutions in Relationship to Pentateuchal Legislation (Atlanta: Scholars, 1989) 73–121. On the nature of such references (for example, 2 Chr 30:15–16, 18), see the important discussion in Sara Japhet, The Ideology of the Book of Chronicles and Its Place in Biblical Thought (trans. A. Barber; 2d rev. ed.; Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1997) 234–44, esp. 239–44. 11 H. L. Ginsberg’s aptly coined term in his work, The Israelian Heritage of Judaism (New York: The Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1982) 1–2. 12 Shemaryahu Talmon, “Divergencies in Calendar-Reckoning in Ephraim and Judah,” VT 8 (1958) 48–74; reprinted as “The Cult and Calendar Reform of Jeroboam I,” in idem, King, Cult and Calendar in Ancient Israel: Collected Studies (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1986) 113–39. 13 See, for example, Isac Leo Seeligmann, Studies in Biblical Literature (ed. A. Hurvitz et al.; Jerusalem: Magnes, 199) 11–45, at 37–39 (Hebrew; German translation: idem, Gesammelte Studien zur Hebräischen Bibel [ed. E. Blum; FAT 41; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2004] 77–118); also Fishbane, Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel, 256–61, 530–34.

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from the hills and the coastal plains.14 Accordingly, the supposition of two competing fixed calendars emerges as overly speculative and essentially unusable.15 2) In addition to the problems with the above synthesis, building it upon the text of 2 Chronicles 30 as if it represents a reliable historical source encounters several significant obstacles.16 First of all, one can discern no base-text with which to bridge the roughly four centuries between the composition of Chronicles and the events it describes. Hezekiah’s Passover has no parallel material anywhere.17 Likewise, from the very first phrases of the chapter, P?NPp (“sent to”) and P?FXOX[VKE (“wrote letters to”), to the episode’s finale in an inconsistent concatenation of ]O clauses culminating in the distinctive syntax of Hezekiah’s prayer, the language represents not a classical biblical Hebrew base overlaid by the Late Biblical Hebrew of Chronicles, but rather a stratum fundamentally and consistently late in character, which makes the idea of any pre-existing base-text or orally transmitted memories tendentious in the extreme.18 Secondly, the backbone of the plot of Hezekiah’s Passover, namely, the relationship he forges with the northern populace, appears highly suspect against 14 Gustaf Dalman, Arbeit und Sitte in Palästina (7 vols., 1928–1942; repr., Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1964) 2:215–18; 3:1–6; Yehuda Feliks, Agriculture in Eretz-Israel in the Period of the Bible and Talmud: Basic Farming Methods and Implements (2d rev. ed.; Jerusalem: Rubin Mass, 1990) 173–88, esp. 175–79 [Hebrew]. 15 See John Gray, I & II Kings: A Commentary (OTL; London: SCM, 1964) 292–93; Ginsberg, The Israelian Heritage of Judaism, 59. On this specific point, see also the criticisms in Oded Borowski, Agriculture in Iron Age Israel (Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 1987) 41–42. 16 For a balanced illustration of how to mine Chronicles for historical data, see Gary Knoppers, “History and Historiography: The Royal Reforms,” in The Chronicler as Historian (ed. M. Patrick Graham et al.; JSOTSup 238; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997) 178–203. For a critical survey of the history of scholarly positions on the reliability of Chronicles, see Kai Peltonen, History Debated: The Historical Reliability of Chronicles in Pre-Critical and Critical Research (2 vols.; Helsinki: The Finnish Exegetical Society, 1996). 17 See, for instance, the lists of correspondences in de Wette, Lehrbuch der historisch-kritischen Einleitung, 241–42; Abba Bendavid, Parallels in the Bible (Jerusalem: Carta, 1972) 141–42, more broadly, 140–44, 156 [Hebrew]; of particular significance, Robert Polzin, Late Biblical Hebrew: Toward an Historical Typology of Biblical Hebrew Prose (Missoula, Mont.: Scholars, 1976) 27–28; also, John C. Endres et al., Chronicles and Its Synoptic Parallels in Samuel, Kings, and Related Biblical Texts (Collegeville, Minn.: The Liturgical Press, 1998) 209–306, esp. 300 (the graph), 303–5. From 2 Chronicles 29 to the end of the book in chapter 35, the ratio between material revised from the book of Kings and unparalleled material radically changes from that in the rest of Chronicles, which makes the historicity of this section highly dubious. Note well how Steven McKenzie’s study The Chronicler’s Use of the Deuteronomistic History (HSM; Atlanta: Scholars, 1984) stops at 2 Chronicles 28. 18 For several relevant telltale signs of Late Biblical Hebrew, see Eduard Y. Kutscher, The Language and Linguistic Background of the Isaiah Scroll (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1959) esp. 266–74, 305–14, 340–42 [Hebrew]; Jan Joosten, “The Distinction Between Classical and Late Biblical Hebrew as Reflected in Syntax,” Hebrew Studies 46 (2005) 327–39 and bibliography; with respect specifically to Chronicles, Polzin, ibid., 28–84 (but regarding the placement of numerals, qualify by Steven Weitzman, “The Shifting Syntax of Numerals in Biblical Hebrew: A Reassessment,” JNES 55 [1996] 177–85).

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the archaeological and epigraphical data. Finds indicate that as part of the expulsion of the Israelian populace, Sargon II repopulated the north with foreign elements in successive waves and maintained it actively and intensively.19 Hezekiah’s calling upon the northern populace, even only those Israelians that remained, to celebrate a national festival in the competing capital of Jerusalem would mount a direct, open challenge to Assyrian hegemony. In light of the repeated Assyrian incursions and major successes in the region, the image of Hezekiah, at an early stage of his reign, reaching out to poke a Judean thumb in the Assyrian eye seems difficult to envision.20 Indeed, one can fully account for the existence of the story of Hezekiah’s Passover on hermeneutical grounds alone.21 3) Moving from the historical unreliability of the account in 2 Chronicles 30 to underlying phenomenological suppositions, the view of Ehrlich and Talmon that the supplementary Second Passover in Numbers 9 reflects Hezekiah’s delayed Passover in 2 Chronicles 30 assumes that the two texts refer to one and the same phenomenon. However, a careful comparison of Numbers 9 and 2 Chronicles 30 shows that this view involves misleading abstractions that overlook defining details. The analysis below will demonstrate that the two texts describe two completely different and unrelated phenomena; that, accordingly, the texts employ alternate sets of terms; and that, undergirding the distinction, the texts are in total accord with their respective textual environments—namely, the Priestly literature and

Nadav Na’aman and Ran Zadok, “Sargon II’s Deportations to Israel and Philistia (716–708 B.C.),” JCS 40 (1988) 37–46; David P. Wright, “The Laws of Hammurabi as a Source for the Covenant Collection (Exodus 20:23–23:19),” Maarav 10 (2003) 11–87, at 58–67; J. Maxwell Miller and John H. Hayes, A History of Israel and Judah (2d ed.; Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox, 2006) 388–90, 403–10. 20 Nadav Na’aman, “The Debated Historicity of Hezekiah’s Reform in the Light of Historical and Archaeological Research,” ZAW 107 (1995) 179–95, at 180–81. Hezekiah’s rebellion against Sargon II’s son Sennacherib (2 Kgs 18:17–19:37) would represent a change in policy meant to take advantage of the opportunity provided by the death of the previous king, during the instability presumably occasioned by it, not evidence of an ongoing struggle emerging now in full-blown proportions. Compare Miller and Hayes, ibid., 410–20, who reapply this “northern initiative” in 2 Chronicles 30 to preparations for war in the wake of Sargon’s death. But they couple this move with Hezekiah’s centralization of the cult more broadly, which raises more problems than it solves. For further remarks on the problems in taking the story as historical, see Fishbane, Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel, 155. 21 The point will have to appear elsewhere, but the hermeneutical touchstones comprise 1) the apparent contradiction between 2 Kgs 18:5 and 2 Kgs 23:25 and the historical questions raised by them; 2) Hezekiah’s unique opportunity to undo the damage wrought by Jeroboam I and return to the glorious days of Solomon; and 3) the role of the Levites in the Passover in Ezra 6:20 (see also 2 Chr 35:2–6, 10–14). On Chronicles’ Hezekiah as a second Solomon, see Andrew G. Vaughn, Theology, History, and Archaeology in the Chronicler’s Account of Hezekiah (Atlanta: Scholars, 1999) 174–79. On the reunification of Israel and Judah as a constitutive ideological plank in Chronicles, see Japhet, The Ideology of the Book of Chronicles, 267–334. 19

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Chronicles—and never so much as refer to one another. Any apparent points of contact claimed to exist between the two texts evaporate as illusory.22 The passage about the Second Passover in Numbers 9 establishes a precedent and enacts a permanent law. This new law targets only the individual. Taken at face value, the law implies that because missing the Passover leads to the severe result of XVO (being “cut off”), it provides for those unable to attend because circumstances beyond their reasonable control had them impure or too far away during the Passover’s primary date.23 The dispensation covers only the Passover sacrifice itself; the Festival of Unleavened Bread remains firmly anchored to the first month. As a result, the celebrant comes with, at the most, just his own immediate family. These facts are so clear as to have generated a midrashic-style digression within the text itself on the practical implications a Passover held a month late would have on the Passover laws (vv. 11b–12):24 Disconnected from the Festival of Unleavened Bread, shall the pilgrim eat the Passover without unleavened bread (and bitter herbs)? In the absence of enough people to consume all the meat, can the leftovers be eaten the next day? Perhaps only some of the animal need be prepared, not all of it? The passage answers: all laws remain in force regardless of the artificial circumstances.25 The circumstances of Hezekiah’s Passover in 2 Chronicles 30 could not differ more. Hezekiah defers the Passover not on the basis of any law or tradition, but solely and explicitly through human deliberation and consultation capped by his own royal decree. He does so as a limited, one-time decision in response to very specific circumstances (note the palpable relief with which the author stresses that the circumstances did not recur in the Passover of the returnees, in Ezra 6:19–20). These circumstances, moreover, have nothing to do with the ritual or physical ability of any individual to attend the Passover, but rather reflect the larger socio-political interests of the king, the lethargy of the priests and the apathy of the people. Hezekiah pushes off the Passover in its entirety, together with the Festival of Unleavened Bread, even for those who did come to Jerusalem to celebrate the first time around (2 Chr 30:21–22). The priests were not prevented by “impurity” but rather unmotivated 22 In this vein, note Ehrlich’s remark: “The author of Chronicles did not know the laws of the Second Passover; otherwise, he would have said of Hezekiah’s Passover that it was done in accordance with the Torah” (Scripture in Its Plain Sense, 1:254). The citation in 2 Chr 30:18 could refer to the implicit assumption in Num 9:6, 7, 10–11, but much more likely, it points to the explicit prohibition in Lev 7:19–20.

For a discussion of the Priestly concept of guilt that has implications for the concept of XVO, see Baruch J. Schwartz, “The Bearing of Sin in the Priestly Literature,” in Pomegranates and Golden Bells: Studies in Biblical, Jewish, and Near Eastern Ritual, Law, and Literature in Honor of Jacob Milgrom (ed. D. P. Wright et al.; Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 1995) 3–21, esp. 8–14. 24 See m. Pesah. 9:3; t. Pesah. 8:7; Sipre §69. 25 While answering these questions, the laws in vv. 11b–12 also improve the formulation of the original laws in Exod 12:8–10. Literary-critical indications suggest that these three elements represent a secondary expansion, and also, against consensus opinion, that Exod 12:46 then borrowed from and revised Num 9:12. 23

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to “sanctify themselves” (v. 3);26 indeed, subsequently in the story, impurity prevents no one from participating in the Passover: Hezekiah’s prayer suffices to cover them (vv. 17–20).27 Likewise, the people who did not come to Jerusalem for Hezekiah’s original Passover were not unable to do so but simply uninterested in doing so (vv. 3–12). The threat of XVO never even enters the debate.28 The one apparent link, the close linguistic similarity between the phrase “because they could not perform it at that time” in 2 Chr 30:3 and that in the narrative passage Num 9:6, “and they could not perform the Passover on that day,” in fact offers a parade example of an exception that proves the rule.29 In Numbers 9, the clause refers to those who were prevented from coming to perform the Passover altogether, whereas in 2 Chronicles 30 it describes that minority that did arrive for the Passover, but was prevented from observing it because of the majority that did not show up or sanctify themselves. As said above, in Numbers 9, only those prevented from participating perform the Passover subsequently; in 2 Chronicles 30, Hezekiah defers the Passover equally for everyone, as the text declares explicitly: “The king

26 Note that the phrase, which appears to suggest a relative state rather than the absolute one of impurity, almost always applies to the priests and Levites alone (1 Chr 15:12, 14; 2 Chr 5:11; 29:5, 15, 34; 30:3, 15, 24; 31:18; 35:6; contrast only 30:17). 27 On the basis of 2 Chr 30:6–9, 14; 31:1, it seems safe to conclude further that the Chronicler meant to indicate that the impurity contracted by these Israelites have contracted derives not from a corpse but from idolatry; so Fishbane, Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel, 154, 156, 249. On impurity caused by idolatry, see, for example, Lev 18:21, 24–30; 19:31; 20:1–7; Jer 2:23; Ezek 20:7, 18, 27–31, 43; 22:3–4; 36:18; 37:23; Ps 106:34–40. On its character see Jonathan Klawans, Impurity and Sin in Ancient Judaism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) 26–31. 28 This comprehensive set of essential differences between the Second Passover of Numbers 9 and Hezekiah’s deferred holiday precludes the opposite contention as well, that the story in 2 Chronicles 30 represents the extension and application of the law in Numbers 9, as Fishbane would have it (Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel, 154–59, 248–49). Indeed, had the author of 2 Chronicles 30 in fact derived the deferred Passover he described from the Second Passover in Numbers 9, he would have drawn upon such Pentateuchal authority explicitly, as so often occurs precisely in these kinds of legal midrash throughout Chronicles (see above, n. 10). As said already above (n. 22), it is just this reasoning that led Ehrlich to suggest that the law in Numbers 9 emerged in the wake of Hezekiah’s Passover as described in 2 Chronicles 30: why have Hezekiah “consult” with local leaders if he could rest on such a pillar as Mosaic authority by citing a Pentateuchal passage (Scripture in Its Plain Sense, 1:254)? The differences analyzed above suggest that the author of the story in 2 Chronicles 30 did not cite from or even refer to the law in Numbers 9 because he saw them as two distinct phenomena, analogous perhaps, but with no actual points of contact between them to warrant drawing a direct connection. As Fishbane’s study illustrates so trenchantly, exegesis leaves a trail; in this case, though, no signs of it exist. And one cannot use the analogy between the texts as an indication of exegesis, for it is the presence and nature of just this analogy that is under debate. 29 Contra Fishbane, ibid. The text is my translation; see the even more pronounced similarity in the Hebrew original: Num 9:6 E[LL˜[]FNWTLX[p?P[PO]EP[ 2 Chr 30:3 E]LLX?F[Xp?P[PO]EP[

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and his officers and the congregation in Jerusalem had to keep the Passover in the second month, for at that time they were unable to keep it.”30 Seen in this light, the phenomenon described in 2 Chronicles 30 recalls the well-known one-time manipulations in the Greek calendar similarly effected for various political, military and social reasons. In these cases, a month is called by the name of the previous month, or specific dates are moved backwards or frozen to repeat themselves for extended numbers of days.31 For instance, in order to placate his soldiers and sidestep a tradition against fighting in a particular month, Alexander the Great changed the name of the month to that of the previous one. In the campaign against Tyre he changed the date within the month from the 30th to the 28th to make a prophecy of victory that month more credible—and inspiring—to his soldiers.32 Thucydides recounts that in order to avoid a ban on fighting in a sacred month, the Argives counted the 27th of the preceding month for the duration of their campaign.33 Similarly, when the Athenians needed to delay the festival of Dionysos, they did so by repeating the date prior to that of the festival for four days in a row.34 In an extreme instance, Demetrius wrought havoc on the months in the Athenian calendar in order to have himself initiated into all the mysteries at once, rather than over a period of more than a year and a half.35 These examples culled from the fifth, fourth, and third centuries B.C.E. match the period of the composition of Chronicles.36 The rabbis referred precisely to this practice when they censured Hezekiah for intercalating the month of Nissan within Nissan itself, turning Nissan into a repeated Adar, in order to defer the Passover.37 To put it more succinctly, the law of the Second Passover in Num 9:1–14 has no impact on the calendar itself and describes rather a personal “make-up” date for the individual pilgrim. In stark contrast, the story of Hezekiah’s Passover in 2 Italics mine. On the phenomenon, see Simon Price, Religions of the Ancient Greeks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) 25–29. Thanks to Amram Tropper for pointing me to this discussion. 32 Plutarch’s Lives (vol. 7; Loeb Classical Library; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1919; repr., 1967), “Alexander,” ch. 16 §1–2, pp. 263–65; chap. 25 §1–2, pp. 295–97. 33 Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War (vol. 3; Loeb Classical Library; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1921; repr., 1966) book 5 §53–54, pp. 105–7. 34 Arthur Pickard-Cambridge, The Dramatic Festivals of Athens (rev. J. Gould and D. M. Lewis; 2d ed.; Oxford: Clarendon, 1968) 65. 35 Plutarch’s Lives (vol. 9; Loeb Classical Library; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1920; repr., 1968), “Demetrius,” ch. 26 §1–3, pp. 61–63. 36 For additional examples, but without their historical contexts, see Benjamin D. Meritt, The Athenian Year (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961) 161–65. 37 See m. Pesah. 4:9; b. Pesah. 56a. More stringently, recall the Hittite law cited above: “You who (are) temple officials: If you do not perform the festivals at the time of the festivals; (if) you do the spring festival in fall, (or) the fall festival in spring” (The Context of Scripture, 1:219 §9). Against this background, it seems quite plausible to see in a similar light the month “dreamt up” by Jeroboam I—and the sharp derision of it—in 1 Kgs 12:32–33, as suggested in Sacha Stern, Calendar and Community: A History of the Jewish Calendar, Second Century BCE—Tenth Century CE (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) 2–3. 30 31

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Chronicles 30 tells of an intervention in the calendar that affects everyone equally and from the very outset was intended to do so. The Passover, together with the Festival of Unleavened Bread, takes place on its correct, original date, on the fourteenth of the first month, but that date has been deferred for nearly thirty days by the addition of a month. From this point of view, one should not be misled by the use of the term ]RZ that modifies the “month” in which they perform the Passover (vv. 2, 13, 15). In Numbers 9, the term means “second,” as it does everywhere else in calendar references within the Priestly literature. In light of the above, though, in 2 Chronicles 30, it must mean “other, next.”38 The two texts, then, describe two fundamentally different phenomena unlinked by any relationship, historical, analogical or other.39 One final point remains to be made. Ehrlich and Talmon do not take into account the two provisions explicitly established by the law, namely, that one may miss or defer the Passover if he contracted impurity beforehand or found himself too far away. Methodologically speaking, any theory about the Second Passover should first attempt to anchor itself in at least one of these two provisions.

■ Yehud, the Merchant Community In 1903, Heinrich Holzinger articulated what has remained the most widely held opinion on the matter today: The law very obviously presumes the circumstances of the post-exilic period, when the Jews became a merchant community, who frequently found themselves on business trips.40

This explanation clearly puts decisive emphasis on the provision of distance. Moreover, it is critical to appreciate that Holzinger does not infer a relative rise in the number of people traveling within the local markets of Yehud to supplement their resources by bartering or otherwise exchanging their excess produce for other necessities. Rather, he posits a fundamental change in the very nature of the society in Yehud, from that of subsistence farmers into a community of longdistance traders.41 38 Abū al-Walīd (Jonah) Ibn Janāḥ, Sefer Hashorashim (ed. W. Bacher; trans. J. Ibn Tibbon; Berlin, 1896; repr. Jerusalem, 1966) 524–25 [Hebrew]; Ludwig Koehler and Walter Baumgartner, The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament: Study Edition (trans. and ed. M. E. J. Richardson; rev. W. Baumgartner and J. J. Stamm; 2 vols.; Leiden: Brill, 2001) 2:1604–5. 39 See also Segal, The Hebrew Passover, 200 n. 7, 229; Sara Japhet, I & II Chronicles: A Commentary (OTL; London: SCM, 1993) 939–40. 40 Holzinger, Numeri, 35. 41 Similarly, for instance, Philip J. King and Lawrence E. Stager, Life in Biblical Israel (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox, 2001) 193–94. In this spirit, note the following remark on the implementation of monotheism in the Return period: [T]he differentiation between truth and reality, operational as it is in the distinction of gods and a true God, presuppose (sic!) most probably the mind’s acculturation to a monetarian economy in which every thing has a value measured and attributed different

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Such a radical transformation in the basic structure of a society should leave its imprint on the literature or archaeological record of its time. Yet the scholars espousing the theory of just such a transformation have yet to cite any evidence to support it, biblical or archaeological. To the contrary, the Priestly literature to which the passage of the Second Passover in Num 9:1–14 belongs consistently depicts a provincial, patriarchal, agrarian Israel—in the history it writes for retelling, in the laws it legislates for practice, as well as in its underlying theology and ideology.42 Indeed, David Margoliouth’s comprehensive and nuanced survey in 1939 reveals that the Hebrew Bible as a whole, a large portion of which comes from the period of the return in the sixth and fifth centuries B.C.E., rarely refers to trade, and when it does, it directs itself to the uppermost crust of society, either explicitly or by referring to high-end luxury goods—hardly the reflection of a society broadly and fundamentally engaged in long-range, large-scale trade.43 Margoliouth’s findings lead him to conclude further, “it would appear that till the taking of Jerusalem by Titus, and perhaps even later, agriculture remained the normal occupation of the Israelites.”44 From the standpoint of archaeology, material finds from the period of the return do not indicate the sharp increase in the kinds, amounts, and origins of goods befitting a community gone suddenly from farmer to merchant. Rather, initially, they continue First Temple patterns; subsequent growth and change remain moderate and gradual. Surveys, for that matter, have yet to turn up the sizable warehousing depots, distribution centers, and markets appropriate to large-scale, long-distance trade.45 To the contrary, settlement patterns reflect decentralized, rural farming from its inherent (natural) virtues (e.g., to feed, warm, or protect). So, monotheism might have indeed originated in Jerusalem (or, previously or simultaneously, in the Babylonian support group of the settlers of the Persian period). Ernst A. Knauf, review of Othmar Keel, Die Geschichte Jerusalems und die Entstehung des Monotheismus (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2007), RBL 05/2008, n.p. [cited 16 June 2008]; online: http://www.bookreviews.org/pdf/6377_6859.pdf. 42 Along these lines, see Jan Joosten, People and Land in the Holiness Code: An Exegetical Study of the Ideational Framework of the Law in Leviticus 17–26 (SVT 67; Leiden: Brill, 1996); Jacob Milgrom, Leviticus (3 vols.; AB; New York: Doubleday, 1991–2001) 2:1352–57, 1391–93, 1397–1404, 1407–14. 43 David S. Margoliouth, “Trade and Commerce,” in James Hastings’ Dictionary of the Bible (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1939) 944–46. Analysis of commercial terms and consciousness in Qohelet exemplifies the point well; see James L. Kugel, “Qohelet and Money,” CBQ 51 (1989) 32–49, at 45–49, esp. 46. 44 Margoliouth, “Trace and Commerce,” 946. 45 See Ephraim Stern, “The Archaeology of Persian Palestine,” in The Persian Period (ed. W. D Davies and L. Finkelstein; vol. 1 of The Cambridge History of Judaism; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984) 88–114. The granaries found in Palestine, reflecting the Persian military system (ibid., 113), have been linked to regional trade by which the Persians intended to strengthen Yehud and the entire western frontier; see Charles E. Carter, “The Province of Yehud in the PostExilic Period: Soundings in Site Distribution and Demography,” in Temple Community in the Persian Period (ed. T. C. Eskenazi and K. H. Richards; vol. 2 in Second Temple Studies; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1994) 106–45, esp. 139–45.

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communities.46 Moreover, Yehud itself may have been too small and too poor to produce enough to survive, let alone thrive, as a merchant community.47 Historically speaking, the constant external pressure seemingly exerted by other local groups and the concomitant power vacuum that characterized the period at least until the latter part of the fifth century B.C.E. (see Nehemiah 1–4, 6) make it hard to imagine the Jewish community successfully establishing and maintaining the infrastructure necessary for constant large-scale travel, shipping, and distribution. The beleaguered returnees struggled even to rebuild the one temple in Jerusalem. Again, the archaeological record strongly suggests that Yehud did not even begin to recover from the wholesale destruction caused by the Babylonians and emerge recognizably as a state until the latter part of the Persian period, in the late fifth and fourth centuries B.C.E.;48 Jerusalem itself remained extremely small, its population never expanding beyond the spur known as the city of David until the Hellenistic period.49 A spate of studies from the 1990s strongly discounts the viability of the merchantcommunity model for Yehud. Jack Pastor’s socio-economic study of the Second Temple period highlights subsistence farming as the backbone of the economy.50 The various data brought by Yaron Dan for the period turn the tables on the merchant community conception to depict Yehud more as a hub or way-station for foreign merchant communities, particularly Phoenician merchants promoted by Persian interests and backing.51 Ze’ev Safrai’s study of Roman Palestine, reaching back to the Persian period, meets the theory head on and rejects it outright as entirely unfounded and contradicted by the literary evidence not only in the Talmud, but in non-Jewish sources as well.52

46 Kenneth Hoglund, “The Material Culture of the Persian Period and the Sociology of the Second Temple Period,” in Studies in Politics, Class and Material Culture (ed. P. R. Davies and J. M. Halligan; vol. 3 of Second Temple Studies; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2002) 14–18, at 18. 47 Carter, “The Province of Yehud in the Post-Exilic Period.” 48 Ephraim Stern, The Assyrian, Babylonian, and Persian Periods (732–332 B.C.E.) (vol. 2 of Archaeology of the Land of the Bible; New York: Doubleday, 2001) 307–11, 323–26, 348–50, 576–82. 49 Ibid., 434–36. 50 Jack Pastor, Land and Economy in Ancient Palestine (London: Routledge, 1997) 1–20, 168–70. 51 Yaron Dan, “Trade within and Trade without the Land of Israel in Second Temple Times,” in Chapters in the History of Trade in the Land of Israel (ed. B. Kedar et al.; Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi and the Israel Exploration Society, 1990) 91–107 [Hebrew]; see further Ephraim Stern, “Between Persia and Greece: Trade, Administration and Warfare in the Persian and Hellenistic Periods,” in The Archaeology of Society in the Holy Land (ed. T. E. Levy; London: Leicester University Press, 1995) 432–45; idem, The Assyrian, Babylonian, and Persian Periods, 379–422, 559–61. Jacob L. Wright adds that in Neh 13:15–22, “Nehemiah’s Memoir” ascribes the activity of long-distance trade to Phoenicians, not Yehudim (personal communication). 52 Ze’ev Safrai, The Economy of Roman Palestine (London: Routledge, 1994) 222–414, esp. 315–16.

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Finally, the foregoing concrete considerations benefit from the strength of theoretical support. The very idea of a pre-industrial merchant society, in which large numbers of members regularly travel abroad to distant lands and live primarily by trade, simply does not fit with current models in sociological research. Large-scale, long-distance trade remains in the hands of the wealthiest few, while the average citizen struggles to eke out a subsistence living through agriculture, whether as owner or otherwise.53 With regard to ancient Israel in particular, Magen Broshi made several important methodological remarks, pointing out that the incredibly high costs of long-distance transportation and distribution, coupled with the fact that the majority of goods transported and distributed throughout the ancient world comprised non-produce, luxury items, deny the likelihood of a Jewish merchant community engaged in large-scale commerce.54 Likewise, Richard Horsley reveals such models as anachronistic, having more to do with Western socio-economic history than ancient Near Eastern.55 Taken together, all these literary, archaeological, historical, and sociological analyses uniformly paint in bold strokes a completely different picture of the returnees than that posited by Holzinger and others. The economic structure of life for Israelians and Judahites in the Iron Age did not undergo fundamental change for Jews in the Persian period (and beyond): as a community, the majority of Jews lived first and foremost not by long-distance, large-scale trade, but rather by subsistence agriculture, supplementing their material needs through local markets.56 The conception here bankrupted does have one very significant merit, the recognition that one should look only to the terms of the law itself in order to reconstruct its origins and not rely on the narrative currently attending it. The law of the Second Passover delineates only two scenarios as warranting a make-up sacrifice—impurity and distance. The story of the legislation of the Second Passover, though, tells only of a case of impurity. As noted at the outset, scholarship has not taken the story prima facie as historical, but the story, by its very presence, can create the impression that it has value for the historical reconstruction of the law. Specifically, it can suggest that at the heart of the law lies impurity, whereas 53 The classic work on the topic is Moses I. Finley, The Ancient Economy (3rd ed.; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); see also Karl Polanyi, The Livelihood of Man (ed. H. W. Pearson; New York: Academic Press, 1977). For a collection of essays qualifying Finley’s views, see Economies beyond Agriculture in the Classical World (ed. D. J. Mattingly and J. Salmon; London: Routledge, 2001), esp. 3–11, a nuanced overview of the significance of the volume for Finley’s theories. 54 Magen Broshi, “On Trade in Ancient Times: Some Methodological Notes,” in Chapters in the History of Trade in the Land of Israel, 195–201 [Hebrew]. 55 Richard A. Horsley, “Empire, Temple and Community—but No Bourgeoisie! A Response to Blenkinsopp and Peterson,” in Persian Period (ed. P. R. Davies; vol. 1 of Second Temple Studies; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1991) 163–74. 56 See also J. David Schloen, The House of the Father as Fact and Symbol: Patrimonialism in Ugarit and the Ancient Near East (Studies in the Archaeology and History of the Levant 2; Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 2001) 83–89, 101–4, 140–41 and passim.

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distance constitutes a second-order clause, or even, some scholars go so far as to infer, a secondary one.57 However, it is the larger narrative context of the wilderness that has determined the case related in the story. For the law to emerge from a case of distance simply would not suit the wilderness context, when according to the presuppositions of the larger narrative history, the Israelites are always within walking range of the tabernacle. Impurity, by contrast, can occur in any place at any time as the byproduct of any normal death and render someone unfit to approach the tabernacle. In response to precisely this incongruity between the law’s provision of distance and the larger wilderness context, Ibn Ezra parsed the unusual phrase in v. 10 “of you or of your posterity” (˜O]XVHP[E˜OP) as follows (ad loc.): “of you”—with reference to the impure person; “or of your posterity”—with reference to either the impure person or the person too far away.

To take his insight one critical step further, this uncharacteristic qualifier itself appears to represent an interpolation designed specifically to bridge this very gap between the law’s provision for distance and its complete irrelevance to the narrative context.58 In order to set the origins of the Second Passover law within the wilderness context, the story had to describe a case of impurity. This means that to reconstruct the origins of the law of the Second Passover, one should resist the misimpression created by the story that the weight of the law falls on impurity and consider the provision of distance as of at least equal significance.59

■ Centralization and Distance What circumstances, then, might lie behind the concept of “distance”? In what historical context would a problem of proximity have led to the legislation of the Second Passover? The answer hinges on the meaning of “distance.” For those who would have the law referring to an Israelite away on a journey, “distance” refers to See Baentsch, Exodus-Leviticus-Numeri, 492; also Fishbane, Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel, 103; from a different point of view, Alexandser Rofé, Introduction to Deuteronomy: Part I and Further Chapters (expanded ed.; Jerusalem: Academon, 1988) 14–18, at 17 [Hebrew]. The conjunction “or” can often serve as a hook by which to add material into an existing text (examples and discussion in Fishbane, ibid., 170–72), but this does mean that it must do so in every casuistic law; the prime impetus for arguing as much in this case ultimately comes from the imbalance created by the story, which throws all its weight behind the issue of impurity. 58 In addition to the unique form of this clause, which otherwise appears only as “for your/their descendants” (˜O]XVHP/˜XVHP), note its absence in the similar casuistic laws in the parallel pericopes in Lev 24:10–23, Num 27:1–11, and 36:8–9. The fact that, as opposed to Lev 24:10–23, Num 27:1–11, and 36:1–13 (also Num 15:32–36), the passage in Num 9:1–14 does not have a mediating section in which God responds first to the actual case, then reformulates and elaborates for posterity, may exacerbate the way the legal section jars with the narrative. On the history of the term, see Avi Hurvitz, A Linguistic Survey of the Relationship between the Priestly Source and the Book of Ezekiel: A New Approach to an Old Problem (Paris: J. Gabalda, 1982) 98–101. 59 Literary-critical analysis, moreover, indicates that the story represents a secondarily prepared frame intended to incorporate the law into the the larger Priestly work; see above, n. 9. 57

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those temporarily far away from home or homeland. However, at the literary level, the text does not necessarily warrant this interpretation, which emerges exclusively by hermeneutical analogy with the impurity clause that precedes the distance clause. The concept of “distance” may in fact have its sights set on those whose home is permanently out of reasonable range of the temple. As amply demonstrated in the literature of the Hebrew Bible as well as in the material culture recovered by archaeology, ancient Israel of the Iron Age was a clan- and land-based agricultural society whose various structures presupposed and depended upon access to local sacred sites. The move to a single temple could wreak havoc on such structures. The Deuteronomic Code, representing the Hebrew Bible’s most uncompromising call for cultic centralization, attempts to manage just such a radical transformation by anticipating (rhetorically, at the very least, if not historically) the manifold shock-waves throughout society this could cause and providing a bulwark against them through legislation.60 Palpably, the single most prevalent problem the code struggles to overcome consists of the new geographical distance opened up between individual Israelites and the single sacrificial site, namely, the inaccessibility of the temple. One can gauge the significance of distance to the program of centralization in the mind of the Deuteronomic legislators by the fact that ultimately they themselves come to employ distance as a literary trope for legal innovation.61 Explicitly, one’s distance from the single legitimate sanctuary justifies local, secular slaughter (Deut 12:20–28; compare Exod 20:22–26 and Lev 17:1–7);62 exchanging tithe produce and firstborn animals for money in order then to buy fresh goods in the temple city (Deut 14:22–26);63 and the establishment of cities of asylum (Deut 19:1–10; compare Exod 21:12–14).64 Implicitly, it provides the rationale behind a host of changes in many different laws. The Hebrew slave no longer has his ear pierced in a local temple, as in Exod 21:6, but rather at the doorpost of his 60 See Bernard M. Levinson, Deuteronomy and the Hermeneutics of Legal Innovation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). 61 See especially Rofé, Introduction to Deuteronomy, 14–18. 62 Subsequently, the passage in vv. 13–19 extended this allowance to the temple city as well. 63 According to Moshe Weinfeld, the dispensation in vv. 24–26 applies to the firstborn animals mentioned alongside the tithed produce in v. 23 (Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomic School [1972; repr., Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 1992] 215). In this case a contradiction emerges with 15:19–23, which requires one annually to bring to the temple all the male firstborn animals. August Knobel interpreted the provision in vv. 24–26 to apply only to the tithed produce and not to the firstborn animals (Die Bücher Numeri, Deuteronomium und Josua [KEHAT; Leipzig: Hirzel, 1861] 264–65); likewise, August Dillmann dismissed the presence of the firstborn animals in v. 23 as a tangent mentioned along with the tithe in passing because of their similarity or because they were brought to the temple at the same time (Die Bücher Numeri, Deuteronomium und Josua [2d ed.; KEHAT; Leipzig: Hirzel, 1886] 304–5). 64 On the development of the cities of asylum, see Alexander Rofé, “The History of the Cities of Refuge in Biblical Law,” in Studies in Bible (ed. S. Japhet; Scripta Hierosolymitana 31; Jerusalem: Magnes, 1986) 205–39, repr., idem, Deuteronomy: Issues and Interpretation, 121–47.

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master’s home (Deut 15:17).65 Whereas Exod 22:28–29 required the farmer to offer every firstborn animal eight days after its birth, now the farmer may keep them all for a single annual visit to the temple; as a result, the law must stress 1) that in the costly interim, one may not give in to temptation and work them or shear them; and 2) that in light of the greater likelihood of a blemish developing, one may not bring a blemished animal, which one may as well eat at home like game (Deut 15:19–23).66 Distance from the temple also gives the law apt reason to incorporate the wisdom warning against vows, the fulfillment of which is now ever more likely to be pushed off and eventually forgotten (Deut 23:22–24; Qoh 5:3–4). With the sequestering of priestly mantic and oracular means for administering justice in the one faraway temple, the Deuteronomic law must insist upon the establishment of a local secular judiciary, determine its relationship to the centralized court, and, at the same time, thrusting in the opposite direction, assiduously assert the authority of the temple court (Deut 16:18–20 and 17:8–13; compare Exod 22:6–8).67 Likewise, in the absence of local shrines to support levitical priests and other landless or otherwise vulnerable people, the Deuteronomic law transfers that responsibility to the laity, demanding repeatedly of them that they remember these unfortunates and provide for them (Deut 12:11–12, 17–19; 14:26–29; 16:11, 14; 24:19–21; 26:12–15).68 In the specific context of the festivals, H. L. Ginsberg argued that the farmer’s distance from the single temple made it imperative in D that the Harvest Festival close the harvest season (16:9–12) rather than inaugurate it, as in Exod 23:16a. By the same reasoning the Ingathering Festival must take place not after the gathering in of the harvested crops, as in Exod 23:16b, but only after their having been processed for the coming winter (Deut 16:13–15). This distance-driven adaptation had the added result of disconnecting the firstfruits from any specific date altogether; the farmer, by implication, should bring them whenever he happens to have the opportunity, recite the prayer appropriate to the occasion, and return home (Deut 26:1–11).69 Within the Priestly literature as well, Lev 23:9–22 appears to evince a change both in the omer and in the firstfruits from citizen gifts to priestly 65 Samuel R. Driver, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on Deuteronomy (3rd ed.; ICC; Edinburgh: Clark, 1902; repr., 1960) 181–85. 66 Regarding vv. 20–21, see Knobel, Numeri, Deuteronomium und Josua, 268; Dillmann, Numeri, Deuteronomium und Josua, 310. The connection made here between centralization and the blemish law in vv. 21–22 seems to have escaped scholarship. 67 Weinfeld, Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomic School, 233–36. 68 On temple support of the local poor, see Marty E. Stevens, Temples, Tithes and Taxes: The Temple and the Economic Life of Ancient Israel (Peabody, Mass: Hendrickson, 2006) 131–35, 167–71. In the phrase “with all the desire of his soul” ([pTRX[EPOF) in 18:6, Menahem Haran hears the Deuteronomic law’s recognition of the difficult disconnection suffered by a Levite who leaves hearth and home to join the temple priests (Temples and Temple-Service in Ancient Israel: An Inquiry into Biblical Cult Phenomena and the Historical Setting of the Priestly School [2d ed.; Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 1985; repr., 1995] 61–62, esp. 62 n. 6). 69 Ginsberg, The Israelian Heritage of Judaism, 58–60. The prayer may very well have undergone a corresponding transformation from communal hymn to individual declaration.

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offerings, which effectively erases altogether the popular Pentecost, and it does this precisely for the reason that the average farmer cannot leave his fields in this critical agricultural period.70 By contrast with this list of far-reaching enactments meant to ameliorate the (envisioned) new circumstance of a distant temple, the Deuteronomic treatment of the Passover (Deut 16:1–7) achieves almost nothing. Indeed, when seen against the broad variety of adjustments made elsewhere for the sake of centralization, this text stands out for failing, or refusing, to make almost any meaningful provision at all. Rather, it remains focused almost exclusively on the demand that one perform the Passover at the one chosen sanctuary (see vv. 2, 5, 6, 7). The way the text demarcates the conclusion of the Passover as the time when one returns home resounds with the new substantial character of the journey71—and makes the total absence of any provisions for it all the more significant: no accommodations here.72 One can recover intellectual ruminations on and responses to the impact of cultic centralization upon society not only from the Deuteronomic laws, but from rabbinic lore as well. Through a confluence of forces, the Deuteronomic idea came to define Yehud of the Second Temple period, but rabbinic materials reflecting Second Temple reality indicate that the idea of a single temple did not materialize quite the way the Deuteronomic legislators had envisioned and attempted to ensure. Shmuel Safrai’s comprehensive study of rabbinic sayings, stories and legal comments about the three major pilgrimage festivals reveals that, for most of the Second Temple period, masses of people simply did not visit the place of God’s choosing three times a year. Indeed, so out of step was Second Temple pilgrimage practice with the Pentateuchal pilgrimage laws that the rabbis gave those laws an otherwise bewildering reinterpretation, according to which one never need appear at the temple—except in the event that he is already in Jerusalem at the time that a festival occurs.73 The main debate as to what, geographically defined, constitutes 70 Milgrom, Leviticus, 3:1981–2011, esp. 1986–87, 1991–96, 2006–7, 2009. Note that in his opinion, this change actually took place before centralization, since even a trip to a regional temple would take too much time at such an important moment in the agricultural cycle. But, in that case, one must explain how the rite ever successfully established itself at that critical period in the first place. Here, too, it seems preferable to imagine a change having taken place, one that made the rite that much more difficult to maintain, namely, centralization. 71 See Jeffrey Tigay, Deuteronomy (JPS Torah Commentary; Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1996) 155. 72 Levinson argues that the law commands the pilgrim to return home after the first day of the Passover and observe there the unleavened bread laws (Deuteronomy and the Hermeneutics of Legal Innovation, 53–57). For a strong critique and an alternate reading of the text, see Shimon Bar-On (hereinafter: Gesundheit), Festival Legislation in the Torah: A Literary-Historical Analysis of Exod 12:1–20, 21–28; 23:14–19; 34:18–26; Deut 16:1–8 (Ph.D. diss., The Hebrew University, 1999) 144–240 [Hebrew]; translated and abbreviated in “Der deuteronomische Festkalendar,” in Das Deuteronomium (ed. G. Braulik; OBS 23; Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2003) 57–68. 73 Shmuel Safrai, “The Pilgrimage Commandment,” in The Pilgrimage in Second Temple Times: An Historical Monograph (Tel Aviv: Am Hasefer, 1965) 24–41 [Hebrew]; repr. with addenda in In the Days of the Temple and in the Days of the Mishnah: Studies in the History of Israel (2 vols.;

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being “in Jerusalem” at the time of the Passover comprises two opinions: either “Jerusalem” encompasses whatever sits within a twenty-eight kilometer radius, or “Jerusalem” is none other than the temple itself, and one must already be on the other, holier side of the threshold of the temple precincts to activate the requirement.74 Safrai concludes: Tannaitic law, according to most Tannaim, interprets the concept of being too far away in symbolic terms and in practice transforms the Passover into a voluntary matter.75

As a matter of fact, 2 Chronicles 30, a Second Temple composition that reflects the ritual conceptions and practices of its time, depicts just this mentality as characteristic of Second Temple Yehud. As stressed above, the people at first did not attend Hezekiah’s Passover in Jerusalem because they recognized no obligation to do so; in the words of the narrator at the end of v. 5 (and not as part of the preceding proclamation): “not often did they act in accord with what was written,” namely, to congregate in Jerusalem for the Passover as enjoined by Deut 16:1–8 (and illustrated by 2 Kgs 23:21–23).76 In this context one may also understand the series of variants in the textual tradition (granting the otherwise standard assumption that later manuscripts preserve Second Temple scribal activity, which in this case actually makes more sense).77 At Num 9:10, MT and the Samaritan Pentateuch (SP) read ÞVHF. . . L]L]]Op]Ep]E LUNV, according to which the adjective “distant” (LUNV) modifies the immediately preceding noun “road” (ÞVH): “anyone who is . . . on a distant road.” LXX MS B renders the passage: E?RUV[TSbE?RUV[TSbSabINERKIZRLXEM. . . INRS.H[DQEOVEZR, in which case the adverb “distant” (QEOVEZR) modifies the verb “is” (INERKIZRLXEM), and, now in apposition to the prepositional phrase “on a road” (INRS.H[D), serves in an explanatory capacity: “anyone who is . . . on a road, i.e., far away.” Nowhere does this change indicate that the person is only temporarily “on the road.” In line Jerusalem: Magnes, 1994) 1:43–60 [Hebrew]. Consistent with the centralization framework posited here, Safrai’s survey turns up that the Babylonian Talmud reverts to the straightforward meaning of the Pentateuchal pilgrimage passages; since the Babylonian amoraim lived without any temple whatsoever, they had no motive or determinative realia pushing them to interpret otherwise. 74 See, for example, m. Pesah. 9:2; Sipre §69. According to an amazing anecdote in b. Pesah. 70b, one sage went south before the onset of Passover in order to escape the obligation to perform it. 75 Safrai, In the Days of the Temple and in the Days of the Mishnah, 1:57. 76 It would appear that pilgrimage enjoyed something of an upsurge in Hasmonean and especially Herodian times. See Martin Goodman, The Ruling Class of Judea: The Origins of the Jewish Revolt Against Rome A.D. 66–70 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987; repr. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) 50–58; “The Pilgrimage Economy of Jerusalem in the Second Temple Period,” in Jerusalem—Its Sanctity and Centrality to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (ed. L. I. Levine; New York: Continuum, 1999) 69–76; Seth Schwartz, “Herod, Friend of the Jews,” in Jerusalem and Eretz Israel: Arie Kindler Volume (ed. J. Schwartz et al.; Ramat Gan: Bar Ilan University, 2000) 67–76; idem, Imperialism and Jewish Society, 200 B.C.E. to 640 C.E. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001) 40–62, 94–95. 77 The translations in this paragraph are mine.

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with the mentality charted by Safrai and seen in Chronicles, the new text could refer to—indeed serve—those living far away on a permanent basis.78 The complete erasure of the adjective “distant” in MT and SP at v. 13 (contrast tellingly LXX) would further expand the bounds of those who can perform the Passover on the secondary date to include anyone living “on a road,” namely, not in the vicinity of the temple or the temple city. The dot over the letter L in MT at v. 10 (L UNV) could have meant to signal either possibility—erasure of the L alone as in LXX79 or of the entire word as in MT and SP at Num 9:13.80 Safrai never actually ventures an explanation of how this state of affairs—both on the ground and in textual hermeneutics—ever came about. But the very terms of his discourse, together with the text-critical data, could not indicate more clearly that behind it all stands the reality of a single solitary temple physically far from most of the people—to wit, a reality created by cultic centralization. When taken together—the Deuteronomic code’s resistance to altering the Passover to make it easier for the farmer; the fact that in the Second Temple period, Jews rarely went on pilgrimage to celebrate the Passover at the temple; and the rabbinic reinterpretation of pilgrimage as a voluntary matter—all these converge to point towards an explanation for the rise of the law of the Second Passover. The centralized cult in Jerusalem made the distance to the single temple too far for many farmers to trek there with their families for Passover, especially in the difficult period towards the unpredictable end of the rainy season on one hand and the delicate beginning of the grain harvest on the other.81 Sources attest that during these times, in order to bolster popular participation in the temple Passover, Judean authorities—not entirely unlike Chronicles’ Hezekiah—would intercalate a month depending on precisely these same two factors: if the barley ripened late or the rains made the roads impassable.82 The law of the Second Passover attempted to achieve the same result through a different means—by providing individuals with an alternate, secondary date, one month later.83 78 If the variant was created by the translator, it would reflect the needs of the Alexandrian community itself, at least rhetorically and ideologically, since in practice an annual Passover pilgrimage would seem be even more distant than for those living within Yehud. The variant more likely reflects a Hebrew text: UNVÞVHF. . .L]L]]Op]Ep]E 79 See Dillmann, Numeri, Deuteronomium und Josua, 46. 80 See Knobel, Numeri, Deuteronomium und Josua, 38. 81 On the unpredictable end of the rainy season, see Dalman, Arbeit und Sitte in Palästina, 2:15; on weather conditions as a factor in the extent of any given year’s Passover pilgrimage, see in general terms Feliks, Agriculture in Eretz-Israel, 186–87; in specific terms, Milgrom, Leviticus, 3:1999–2001. On the many and varied challenges besetting the farmer during harvest season, see David C. Hopkins, The Highlands of Canaan: Agricultural Life in the Early Iron Age (Sheffield: Almond, 1985) 223–27; Feliks, Agriculture in Eretz-Israel, 186–88, 194. 82 B. Zuckermann, “Materialen zur Entwicklung der altjudischen Zeitreichnung im Talmud,” Jahersbericht des jüdisch-theologisches Seminar in Breslau (1882) 39; Elias J. Bickerman, “Calendars and Chronology,” in The Cambridge History of Judaism, 1:60–69, at 65. 83 Contrast Rofé, who remarked on the relationship between the law of the Second Passover and Deuteronomy with regard to the concern for proximity but presumed Deuteronomy to have

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In this case, then, the pivotal phrase L UNVÞVHF in MT Num 9:10 did not originally mean “on (i.e., in the midst of) a distant journey.”84 Rather, the phrase originally meant “on (i.e., along) a distant road” or perhaps “on a difficult road,”85 in line with the rabbinic lore cited above about how far from the temple constitutes “too far” for one to be required to bring the Passover.86 And the shifting textual traditions surveyed above represent not changes in the phrase’s meaning, but rather a series of attempts to remove its ambiguity and refine its sense with greater specificity. What comes to the fore so strikingly in this analysis is the realization that the emphasis in the law of the Second Passover falls not on sympathetically freeing the Israelite from bringing the Passover on time, but rather on insisting that he bring it sometime. Like the Passover law in Deut 16:1–8, the Second Passover law insists on the obligation to celebrate the Passover at the temple every year. It denies one’s right to view the sacrifice as a voluntary matter, rejects the standing waiver the people applied to themselves, and refuses to compromise on the Passover’s annual character. It does not represent the leniency projected by the narrative currently framing it (Num 9:6–8), but rather a stringency. Indeed, the Second Passover law is the only biblical text anywhere to state that one who fails to come perform the Passover will suffer XVO.87 influenced the Priestly law, perhaps to the degree that it led to the interpolation of proximity into it (Introduction to Deuteronomy, 17). Closer to the suggestion made here, Baruch Levine sees centralization behind the law of the Second Passover, but he too argues for Deuteronomic literary influence on Num 9:1–14 (Numbers 1–20 [AB; New York: Doubleday, 1993] 293). However, literary-critical analysis of the passage reveals no Deuteronomic signs whatsoever, the text having been minted purely in the Priestly coin. 84 See, for example, Knobel, Numeri, Deuteronomium und Josua, 38; Markus P. Zehnder, Wegmetaphorik im Alten Testament. Eine semantische Untersuchung der alttestamentlichen und altorientalischen Weg-Lexeme mit besonderer Berücksichtigung inhrer metaphorischen Verwendung (BZAW 268; Berlin: de Gruyter, 1999) 312–15, esp. 312. Compare biblical idiom in Prov 31:14, LQNPE]FXUNVQQVN[WX[]REOLX]L, and Prov 7:19, U[NVQÞVHFÞPL[X]FFp]ELÚ]E]O, or even the expression LU[NV¨VEF in Deut 29:21; Josh 9:6, 9; 1 Kgs 8:41; 2 Kgs 20:14; 2 Chr 6:36. For a briefer semantic study of ÞVH, but without specific reference to Numbers 9, see Semantics of Ancient Hebrew (ed. T. Muraoka, ed.; Abr-Nahrain Supp. 6; Peeters: Louvain, 1998) 11–37. 85 Compare, for example, Exod 13:17; Deut 30:11–14. 86 See m. Pesah. 9:2; Sipre §69; b. Pesah. 70b. 87 See vv. 13 and 7, respectively. On various grounds it appears that in the original form of v. 7, the plaintiffs argued, PEVp]]RFÞ[XQ?VKRLQP (“Why should we be cut off from among the Israelites?”). So already Abraham Kahana, The Book of Numbers (1914; repr., Jerusalem: Makor, 1969) 28 [Hebrew]. Original Q becomes current F in one of three possible scenarios: a) text-critical error due to graphical similarity (on F/Q interchanges, see Emanuel Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible [Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992] 247–48); b) a copyist’s stylistic change due to the interpolation of [H?QF]LÚFVUXEF]VUL]XPFP, making the verse’s final clause qualify not the now distant verb ?VKR but rather the closer verb F]VUL; c) an editor’s attempt to highlight the significance of all Israel performing the Passover together. In the first two scenarios, the interpolated clause, [H?QF{LÚFVUXEF]VUL]XPFP, could have entered the text at the wrong place, in the middle of the sentence rather than at its end as originally imagined. In the third scenario, it reflects the original intention of the interpolator. Relatedly, on the basis of several considerations, it appears that v. 13 originally concluded with XVO.

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At first glance, the strict approach in this Priestly law appears to diverge widely from that taken with regard to the Pentecost, when Priestly legislators waived the popular requirement altogether by transferring it to the temple priests. In fact, the two solutions represent alternate directions in the application of a single shared notion, one that characterizes the Priestly literature—the essential, concrete nature of the dates anchoring the festivals, with which one may not tamper. By contrast, the Deuteronomic code willingly and deliberately delayed and reconfigured two agricultural festivals. Notably, the D source also immovably fixed the date for Passover observance, having defined it historically rather than agriculturally.88

■ Centralization and Purity What, then, about the law’s provision for the impure person? How does it fit into the historical reconstruction laid out above? Several possibilities recommend themselves, each of increasing integrality to the specific issue at hand. From the strictly literary point of view, one may take it, at the very least, as a predictable, unremarkable reflex of the law’s Priestly provenance and marshall in support of this view the absence of the factor of impurity from the comparable Hittite law. From the point of view of legal logic, one could argue that the provision of impurity serves as the natural, perhaps even necessary, complement to the provision of distance, for together, the two provisions represent and encompass the two categories of obstacles that may prevent any person from participating in the Passover: the physical and the ritual. More forcefully, one can make a historical argument, parallel to that for the provision of distance. In the same context of a reality defined by cultic centralization, sanctity would have played no less a role than proximity in alienating the people from the temple cult. In the absence of a local temple and easily accessible means for purification, the need and concern for purity would plummet severely in terms of daily significance and the people’s vigilance would wane. Again, the Deuteronomic laws, written to take into account a centralized cult, provide telling examples. Though it does not appear to have been interpreted so by scholars, Exod 22:30 forbids (or recommends against) touching the impure carcass of a non-ritually slaughtered animal;89 by contrast, the Deuteronomic law forbids 88 This point holds for the current form of Deut 16:1–8. If vv. 1, 3, 4, 6b, and 8 comprise a series of additions, as convincingly argued by Gesundheit (above, n. 73), the possibility exists that originally D did not hold as rigid a view of the Passover date and one of the goals of the editors consisted of providing just such a delimitation of the date. 89 Surely the law in Exod 22:30 does not command one who chances upon a carcass out in the field to pick it up, carry it somewhere, and there toss it to the dogs. Rather, the expression [XEÚ[OPpXFPOP means “you shall abandon it to the dogs” or “you shall leave it for the dogs.” For other instances where Þ-P-p means “expose, abandon, leave untouched,” see Gen 21:15; 37:20 (as opposed to vv. 22, 24 there); Isa 2:20–21; 34:3; also 1 Kgs 13:24, 25, 28; Jer 14:16; 36:30; Dan 8:11, several of which were already discussed in Morton Cogan, “A Technical Term for Exposure,” JNES 27 (1968) 133–35. On the phenomenon of the semantic extension of verbs from the action itself to the result of that action, see Edward L. Greenstein, “Trans-Semitic Idiomatic Equivalency and the Derivation of Hebrew ml’kh,” UF 11 (1979) 329–36, esp. 335. Incidentally, according to Koehler

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consumption alone and explicitly allows one to handle the carcass and sell it to the non-Israelite (Deut 14:21).90 What the law had first treated comprehensively on the grounds of sanctity, it subsequently broke down as a matter of mere taboo.91 By the same token, whereas previously all slaughter of domesticated animals had a sacred aspect to it (as illustrated by 1 Sam 14:32–35) that required one to eat meat in purity (as articulated in 1 Sam 20:24–26), the Deuteronomic abolition of local sacred slaughter (Deut 11:31–12:28)92 allowed one to eat domesticated animals in impurity, no different from game (12:15, 22).93 In this desacralized atmosphere, the people could easily slip and arrive at the temple in a state of impurity. Indeed, in Chronicles—which tells of a recentralized cult and was composed during a period of centralized cult—the northern masses, displaying just this secularized state of mind, fall into the trap and eat the Passover in a state of impurity. With no technical, ritual recourse, Hezekiah can only pray to God and beseech him to accept the people’s good intentions, which God in fact does, rather than stipulate a procedural remedy (2 Chr 30:18–20). Just as the rabbis’ reinterpretation of the pilgrimage laws reflected de facto popular practice, in this instance too the rabbis formalized in principle the forbearance featured in Chronicles; and they did so specifically with regard to the Passover, though by extension to other public offerings as well: “impurity is waived in a public setting.”94 However, average Judeans or Jews, who, with the pilgrimage season upon them, suddenly recall the untended impurities that have accumulated, may not have known or anticipated such leniency, expecting rather priestly rigor in the maintenance of temple strictures and so just as easily have forgone the journey to stay at home. The particular exchange in Hag 2:11–13 suggests that priests may very well have questioned pilgrims.95 In such circumstances, the law of the Second Passover would and Baumgartner, Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon, 2:1527, the identification of the root Þ-P-p as the ½ pattern of Þ-P-L goes back to C. J. Labuschagne in 1971. In fact, Naftali Tur-Sinai had already made the suggestion twenty years earlier, in 1952; see Eliezer Ben Yehuda, A Complete Dictionary of Ancient and Modern Hebrew (ed. H. Ben Yehuda, M. Z. Segal and N. H. Tur-Sinai; 17 vols.; Tel Aviv: La’am Publishing House, 1948–1959) 14:7167 n. 2 [Hebrew]. 90 The Priestly law allows the average Israelite to eat carrion but requires proper treatment of the resulting impurity (Lev 11:39–40; 17:15). Priests, by contrast, may not contract impurity by eating meat of an animal that did not undergo ritual slaughter (22:8). It remains unclear whether this position reflects centralization or a different conception altogether. See, for instance, the discussion in Weinfeld, Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomic School, 225–32. 91 Note how the motive clause about the people’s holiness in Exod 22:30 now frames an entire series of dietary and other laws shorn of the original cultic value in Deut 14:1–21. 92 For the argument that the section begins in 11:31 and not in 12:1, see Alexander Rofé, Deuteronomy: Issues and Interpretation (London: T&T Clark, 2002) 97–99. 93 On some of the broader implications of centralization for sacrality, see Weinfeld, Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomic School, 225–43. 94 See m. Pesah. 7:4, 6 and 9:4; Sipre §§65, 70; and the many discussions in b. Pesah. 69a–b, 77a–80b. 95 In this context see also lines 4–5 of the Aramaic “Passover Papyrus” from Elephantine: “And from the fifteenth day to the twenty-first day. . . . Be scrupulously pure.” For the text see James M.

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insist that, like the distant farmer, the impure may not take impurity as a waiver and settle in his mind on coming only the following year; he must fulfill his Passover obligation one month after the original Passover date.

■ Conclusion In sum, the law of the Second Passover represents a Jerusalem priesthood living in the unintended fallout from the centralization of the cult, unwilling to give up on the Passover as an annual temple rite.96 Narrowing down the period in which the priests may have legislated this law poses a sticky problem that depends on one’s view of several overlapping issues, each of which in its own right represents a series of complex historical and literary cruxes: the historical reliability or probability of the centralization reports in 2 Kings 18 and 21–23, the provenance of the Priestly literature, and the character of the Passover sacrifice and its historical development.97 Without going into the various problems and theories, suffice it to Lindenberger, Ancient Aramaic and Hebrew Letters (2d ed.; Leiden: Brill, 2003) 61–63, 65–67; for a reconstruction of its historical context, see Bezalel Porten, Archives from Elephantine: The Life of an Ancient Jewish Military Colony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968) 278–82. 96 The theory advanced here does not depend on the broader question as to whether the Priestly literature in the Pentateuch presumes (an ideology of) centralization. (For some classic statements, see, on one side, Julius Wellhausen, Prolegomena to the History of Israel [trans. J. S. Black and A. Menzies; 2d ed.; Edinburgh: Black, 1885]; Haran, Temples and Temple-Service in Ancient Israel, esp. 132–48, 189–204, 289–348; on the other, Yehezkel Kaufmann, The History of the Israelite Religion [4 vols.; Jerusalem: Bialik, 1937–1957] 1:113–42 [Hebrew]; trans. and abridg. M. Greenberg, The Religion of Israel from Its Beginnings to the Babylonian Exile [New York: Schocken Books, 1960; repr., 1974] 175–89; Milgrom, Leviticus, 2:1503–14.) Two factors limit the relevance of this overarching question to the interpretation of Num 9:1–14. First of all, the profoundly ambiguous nature of the Priestly Passover texts in the Pentateuch—1) two notoriously cryptic calendar entries in Lev 23:5 and Num 28:16 offer no more of a hint as to its character than the brief formulation {LP NWT, which recalls typical sacrificial terminology; 2) the domestic form detailed in Exod 12:1–11, 22 said in vv. 24–25 to endure for generations but destined in vv. 14–20 to transform into a sevenday “festival” connoting a temple pilgrimage; 3) and the seemingly domestic setting envisioned in the land in Exod 12:46—sets the Passover apart as outside whatever framework the Priestly texts have otherwise established for the sacrificial cult, if these texts do not themselves actually debate precisely this point. Secondly, scholars have routinely identified the passage in Num 9:1–14 itself as secondary within the Priestly text (for instance, Carl Steuernagel, Lehrbuch des Einleitung in das Alte Testament [Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 1912] 161 §40, 5d), which allows it its own independent set of presupposed circumstances, as reconstructed here. 97 The argument does not treat, depend upon, or affect the question as to whether, in the wake of the centralization of sacrifice, the people kept no Passover whatsoever or, despite centralization, kept the Passover at home, presumably continuing something akin to whatever it is that Exodus 12 attests. Suffice it here to survey briefly the meager evidence for a domestic Passover—essentially, Exodus 12, which, moreover, may have conjured up a domestic Passover for historiosophical reasons (see August Knobel, Die Bücher Exodus und Leviticus [KEHAT; Leipzig: Hirzel, 1857] 92–93; Wellhausen, Prolegomena, 102; Haran, Temples and Temple-Service in Ancient Israel, 347–48; but compare Gesundheit, Festival Legislation in the Torah, ch. 2). It would go too far beyond the available evidence to draw any conclusions from the Passover Papyrus (see above, n. 95). The existing text contains neither the word Passover nor any description of an associated rite, the weight in the text falling substantially on the technical details relating to

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point out one piece of data, that the language of the original Second Passover law arguably recoverable through literary criticism contains no signs of Late Biblical Hebrew.98 In any case, it seems appropriate to close by highlighting the innovations introduced by the law of the Second Passover. The very idea of a make-up date for a festival and, on the flip-side of that coin, punishing one who unjustifiably misses the Passover with XVO, together help set the Passover apart as sui generis.

leavened foods during the period of the fifteenth to the twenty-first days of the month (compare lines 4 and 5–9). Indeed, the very scheme of the fourteenth day of the month, on the one hand, and the fifteenth to the twenty-first, on the other, that presumably emerges from lines 4–9 and which could suggest some independent content specific to the fourteenth, does not in fact hold up under scrutiny. In lines 4–5, all that remains of the relatively small amount of space originally dedicated to the fourteenth—less than a single line—specifies only that one count fourteen days. Taken together with the calendrical framework explicitly defined in line 8 as “from sundown [sic!] until the twenty-first,” the counting of fourteen days looks like nothing more than a run-up to the evening at the end of the fourteenth and the prohibition against leaven that begins then, exactly like the counting of forty-nine days that leads up to the Pentecost on the fiftieth in Lev 23:14–15. Precisely such a calendrical rubric, defined by the same emphasis on leavened foodstuffs, appears in Exod 12:18–20 and (with slight differences in the specific date) in Ezek 45:21. (In this direction, see the relevant comments in Segal, The Hebrew Passover, 7, 9–10, 221–24; Lindenberger, Ancient Aramaic and Hebrew Letters, 61–62; on Exod 12:18–20, see the instructive analysis in Gesundheit, Festival Legislation in the Torah, 73–143, translated and compressed in idem, “Zur literarkritischen Analyse von Ex 12,21-27,” ZAW 107 [1995] 18–30, at 25–26). Significantly, the papyrus comes from Elephantine, where in any case centralization did not have the strongest of holds for the Jews there maintained their own temple. Likewise, no evidence can be gleaned from the ca. 500 B.C.E. ostracon that says, “Tell me when you will be doing the Passover” (on which reading see E. L. Sukenik and Y. Kutscher, “A Passover Ostracon from Elephantine,” Qedem 1 [1942] 53–56, at 55–56 [Hebrew]; Segal, The Hebrew Passover, 8; Lindenberger, Ancient Aramaic and Hebrew Letters, 48). The text gives no indication of any rite performed on the Passover and could refer to the same week of prohibited leaven. Yet another fifth century B.C.E. ostracon (for the text of which see A. Dupont-Sommer, “Sur la fête de la Pâque dans les documents araméens d’Eléphantine,” REJ 7 [1947] 39–51, at 45; Segal, The Hebrew Passover, 8) seems to link the term Passover with inspecting vessels. The rabbis use just such a nomenclature; see, for instance, m. Pesah. 2:2–4; 3:1. Again, in the absence of other evidence, the vehement tone with which the later Book of Jubilees stresses the temple provenance of the Passover in 49:9–21 does not warrant inferring a live polemic against a domestic Passover (for the text, see R. H. Charles, The Book of Jubilees, or the Little Genesis [London: Black, 1902] 256–57; J. C. Vanderkam, The Book of Jubilees [Louvain: Peeters, 1989] 317–24). Qumran writings do not reflect any awareness of such a practice; the Temple Scroll, for that matter, a sectarian document, explicitly locates the Passover in the temple courts (col. XVII lines 7–9; Elisha Qimron, The Temple Scroll: A Critical Edition with Extensive Reconstructions [Beer Sheva: Ben-Gurion University of the Negev Press, 1996] 27). Rabbinic literature, too, seems ignorant of a domestic Passover; see, for instance, m. Pesah. 4:4; 5–9. Finally, Num 9:1–14 itself betrays no signs of having been formulated against Exod 12:1–24; to the contrary, its terms and conditions, in the law as well as in the narrative, consistently target one who fails to bring the Passover altogether, not one who does so away from the tabernacle/temple, LHpL]RTP? “in the open” (Lev 17:5). 98 Noted in Knohl, The Sanctuary of Silence, 90.

The Job of Judaism and the Job of Kant Alan Mittleman Jewish Theological Seminary

The presents its chief protagonist in two discrepant ways: Job the patient and Job the rebel. Ancient Jewish interpretations of Job praise Job the patient and condemn, or at least do not praise, Job the rebel. Modern Jewish interpretations, by contrast, praise Job the rebel and scant the patient, pious Job of the frame story. Job the rebel becomes a model of sincerity or authenticity, a chief value of modernity. Job the patient and pious sufferer so celebrated by antiquity is at best an ambivalent figure. This is a first approximation. To be more precise we must distinguish between types of ancient Jewish interpretations. In Hellenistic Jewish literature, most notably the Testament of Job, Job is a hero—but at the cost of completely ignoring the rebellious Job of the majority of the biblical text.1 So too, in the sole New Testament reference, Jas 5:11, Job is commended for his patience and fortitude; his rebelliousness is simply ignored. This sets the patient Job on a trajectory toward Christian sainthood. Rabbinic Jewish literature, by contrast, does not ignore the full complexity of the Book of Job and therefore has a decidedly mixed assessment of its main character. Although the Babylonian Talmud is sometimes as bold as the Book of Job itself in challenging the justice of God, it cannot unequivocally affirm the rebellious Job. One might even say that the rabbis marginalizd both the book and its protagonist. The book has no liturgical use per se. One text suggests that the book was at one point used liturgically on the Fast of the Ninth of Av, but the rabbis suppressed its use. Similarly, the rabbis seem to have gone to great lengths to avoid reading Job as the source for such Jewish mourning customs as sitting for seven days or rending one’s garment, both of which could easily be traced to the

1 For an analysis of the Testament of Job within the context of early Jewish interpretation, see Gabrielle Oberhänsli-Widmer, Hiob in jüdischer Antike und Moderne. Die Wirkungsgeschichte Hiobs in der jüdischen Literatur (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 2003) 59–93.

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book.2 The philosophers of the rabbinic tradition in the Middle Ages reclaimed the book as a framework for their ventures in theodicy. They continued, however, the rabbinic criticism of Job qua rebel against God. Philosophers such as Saadia Gaon exonerate Job’s doctrinaire friends, rather against the grain of a straightforward reading of the book itself, and criticize Job’s challenge to divine justice.3 It remains for Jewish moderns, whether philosophers, literary figures or biblical scholars, to find the words to affirm the rebellious Job. Among the moderns, Job’s friends become shallow philistines. Job becomes a paradigm of modern intellectual and moral virtue. He combines truth-seeking and truthfulness. He remains true to his own experience, unwilling to bow to external authority and tradition. Job regains his heroism. But unlike the heroic Job of antiquity, it is the Job of the poem, not of the prose frame story, that is valorized. The history of Joban interpretation among Jews casts light on the development of theodicy within Judaism. Within the biblical literature, Job offers a challenge to the dominant theodicy-orientation of the deuteronomic literature.4 Indeed, the Book of Job itself, likely as the result of a composite authorship, might well be the product of an intramural argument between competing theodicies. Bruce Zuckerman has argued that the pietistic ideals embodied by the patient Job of ancient Near Eastern legend “provoked the anger of a great literary artist who determined to counterattack its message, using the literary weapon of parody,” which yielded the contrapuntal, tension-ridden received text.5 The intramural argument over theodicy continues in rabbinic literature. In general, the earlier rabbinic texts (of Palestinian provenance) take a more conservative, doctrinaire approach to the assertion of God’s justice and the inadmissibility of doubt or challenge to that justice. The Bavli, although frequently upholding the “orthodox” view, also gives much greater latitude to radical views, echoing those of the rebellious Job. Some sages explicitly endorsed a reward and punishment theodicy of the kind articulated by Job’s friends (e.g., the view attributed to Rav Ami in B. Shabbat 55a: “There is no death without sin and no suffering without transgression”); others explicitly reject this, believing that suffering can be unmerited and inexplicable.6 While the complexity of rabbinic 2

B. Taanit 30a. For a discussion, see Oberhänsli-Widmer, Hiob in jüdischer Antike und Moderne, 102–119. See Ismar Elbogen, Jewish Liturgy: A Comprehensive History (trans. Raymond Scheindlin; Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1993) 151. 3 See Oliver Leaman, Evil and Suffering in Jewish Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) 55. 4 Nonetheless, for an intimation of a theodicy similar to that of Job, see Deut 8:2–6. For other challenges to the dominant, reward and punishment theodicy see Hab 1:2–4, 13, Jer 12:1–4, and several psalms (sections of Pss 10, 11, 12, 13, 77) call God to account for apparent injustice. See David C. Kraemer, Responses to Suffering in Classical Rabbinic Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995) 27–33. In addition to texts that enshrine a “tradition of complaint,” Kraemer essays all of the varieties of theodicy found in the Hebrew Scriptures. 5 Bruce Zuckerman, Job the Silent: A Study in Historical Counterpoint (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991) 175. 6 Kraemer, Responses to Suffering, 184–210.

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theodicy must not be simplified or flattened out, it is nonetheless fair to say that there is rabbinic ambivalence toward Job. Perhaps this represents anxiety in regard to the full brunt of the Joban challenge.7 To make a philosophical distinction, the rabbis excuse what people say in the midst of suffering but they do not justify it. Job is an example of suffering humanity and a goad to our empathy, but he is not a moral exemplar.8 The rabbinic ambivalence toward Job implies a refusal to sanctify the attitude of defiance that Job shows toward God. Job is excused, not justified. Rather than justifying God’s ways, even when morally unintelligible, Job requires that God justify them to him. This claim on God, as Job himself learns, has its limits. It is not, in a tradition as polyphonic as that of Judaism, ipso facto wrong. But neither is it ipso facto right. Better the willing acceptance of martyrdom, as demonstrated by Rabbi Hananiah ben Teradion and his family, for example, than the open skeptical impatience of Job.9 The medieval philosophical authors are even more concerned than the rabbinic sages to buttress standard theodicy tropes against Job-induced skepticism. The reliance of medieval philosophers on Greek metaphysics expands the conceptual vocabulary with which they work. Metaphysics introduces system and rigor, with the possibility for both new depth and new rigidity. Unlike the talmudic sages, the philosophers have doctrines to defend. Metaphysics allows for, indeed requires, doctrinal precision.10 By contrast with the medievals, the philosophers of modernity give vent to so profound an aporia that they imperil the very possibility of theodicy. Indeed, for some, such as Emmanuel Levinas, theodicy is no longer an intellectual possibility. It is, or ought to be, a moral impossibility.11 In this article, I consider trends in the Jewish interpretation of Job in order to gain perspective on the problem of theodicy as a problem for modern Jewish thought. Such an inquiry, of course, touches on a vast field of literature, both in terms of 7 Ephraim E. Urbach, The Sages: Their Concepts and Beliefs (trans. Israel Abrahams; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979) 514. After assessing the many varieties of rabbinic theodicy, Urbach makes a summary assertion: “Irrespective of the answer given to the question ‘the righteous man who fares ill and the wicked man who fares well’. . . the actual existence of reward and punishment is not in doubt.” 8 Kraemer, Responses to Suffering, 69. The Tosefta (Bava Mezi’a 3:25) criticizes Job’s friends not for the content of their speech but for their insensitivity toward the suffering Job. Their insensitive speech is tantamount to oppression. By extension, Job’s speech is excusable but not justifiable. 9 The story of Hananiah ben Teradion’s martyrdom, with its extreme justification of God’s judgment, is found in Sifre: A Tannaitic Commentary on the Book of Deuteronomy (trans. Reuven Hammer; New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1986) 311 (Piska 307). Note also the theodicy claim attributed to Moses at the end of the piska. 10 Menachem Kellner, Must a Jew Believe Anything? (London: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1999) 71. 11 For Levinas, according to Richard Bernstein, “Theodicy, in both its theological and secular forms, is the temptation to find some sort of justification, some way to reconcile ourselves to useless, unbearable suffering and evil. But intellectual honesty demands that we recognize that theodicy—in this broad sense—is over.” Levinas cited in Richard Bernstein, Radical Evil: A Philosophical Interrogation (Cambridge: Polity, 2002) 169 [emphasis added].

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biblical interpretation and philosophical theology. One can only make a small advance here. After looking at some samples of premodern Joban interpretation, I shall attend to Kant’s interpretation of Job. Kant argued for the failure of all possible theodicies. He delineated the philosophical conditions in terms of which precritical theodicies must now be seen as unacceptable. The plausibility of theodicy as an intellectual project, I suggest, rests on more than the strength of faith. It rests on the cogency of a supporting metaphysics. The Kantian and subsequent modernist rejection of metaphysics, as an intellectual framework for giving us knowledge of the ultimate nature of reality, enfeebles the project of theodicy. It is not then necessarily the case that modern Jews doubt theodicy because of a weakness of faith. Rather, the intellectual context in which they operate denies them the conceptual tools for making the kind of assertions available to their ancestors. Kant is not, needless to say, solely responsible for the decline of theodicy among modern Jews. He is an important factor, however. Kant’s contemporary, Moses Mendelssohn, could still use Leibnizian metaphysics to grapple with the theodicy problem in response to his own infant daughter’s death.12 But such robust confidence in metaphysics, either in the ancient and medieval or early Enlightenment versions, did not survive the Kantian critique. Modern Jewish views, even if not explicitly Kantian, work within the horizon of the critical philosophy. They have lost the confidence, still shared by Mendelssohn, in speculative metaphysics. With the loss of metaphysics, I suggest, one can no longer justify God’s ways by reference to the harmony, perfection, or justice of the whole; for metaphysics as the science of the whole has lost its plausibility.13 What becomes plausible, after the demise of the whole, of the “Great Chain of Being,” is an explanation of suffering from the perspective of the suffering individual. The emphasis in Jewish modernism on the rebellious, “authentic” Job reflects the “massive subjective turn of modern culture” as Charles Taylor puts it.14 The assertion of the self, or of the moral universe as seen from the perspective of the self, replaces the metaphysical whole within which theodicy, on the philosophical account of the ancients up to Leibniz, made sense. We are then left with the question of what role, if any, there is for a contemporary theodicy without the kind of metaphysical assertion about the whole that modern thought seems to exclude. Is the focus on the authentic individual who struggles to remain true to the voice of his or her own suffering a sufficient basis for rational reflection on the reality of suffering for believing Jews? 12

Leaman, Evil and Suffering, 149. Alternatively, where metaphysics continues to attempt a science of the whole it does so in ways profoundly incompatible with traditional Jewish theodicy. The historicist metaphysics of Hegel, the nontheistic metaphysics of Heidegger or the process metaphysics of Whitehead leave no room for the expression of traditional Jewish assertions about God’s power, knowledge and justice. 14 Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991) 26. See also, Charles Taylor, The Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989) 266–84 for the demise and transformation of metaphysical concepts of the whole such as the “great chain of Being.” 13

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■ The Job of Traditional Jewish Interpretation Susan Neiman argues that in the Western tradition, “Job’s [misfortunes] were not viewed as unfair until a very late date. Sometime during the Enlightenment, commentators stopped looking for ways in which Job’s torments could be justified.” 15 Neiman further suggests that “Earlier writers identified with Job’s friends, the theodicy makers who found justification. Later ones identified with Job, who found none.”16 The stance of traditional Jewish commentators is more complex. It is negative, but also ambivalent. They struggled with Job’s behavior, with whether he acted justly or presumptuously before God. Seeing their own condition reflected in his, they blamed him in some ways and exculpated him in others. Unlike Hellenistic Jews and Christians, they did not identify with the pious Job of the prose frame story so as to heroize him. Traditional rabbinic interpreters saw all of the characters as flawed and mistaken in their views. But ultimately God is just and Job errs in his challenge of God. Let us consider three different traditional approaches to Job: a midrashic analysis in the Talmud, a theological analysis by Saadia Gaon, and a philosophical treatment by Maimonides. The extended talmudic discussion of Job (Bava Batra 15a–16b) reveals rabbinic ambivalence toward the character of Job and toward the implications of the book.17 The rabbis struggled to determine whether Job was a real person or whether the story was simply a parable.18 A long discussion was conducted in prerabbinic literature as to the genealogy of Job. Job was often related to Abraham. By suggesting that Job might be purely imaginary, the rabbis signal a break with the discourse of Job as an ancient worthy.19 Furthermore, the possibility that Job is merely an allegory—a prospect that the rabbinic sages otherwise almost always eschew for biblical figures—minimizes the challenge to God. If the book is a parable, then God did not really cause the suffering of an actual righteous man. On the view that it is a parable, what is its point? The classic rabbinic commentator on the Talmud, Rashi, claims that the point of the book (qua parable) is twofold: It provides examples of how to answer heretics who blaspheme against God’s justice, and it shows that people cannot be held accountable for what they say when they are in pain. While Rashi’s first pronouncement indicts Job, his latter view exculpates, or at least excuses, him. Traditional rabbinic ambivalence toward Job is in full flower.

Susan Neiman, Evil In Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002) 17. 16 Ibid. 17 Translated texts are drawn from the Soncino translation of the Babylonian Talmud, tractate Baba Bathra. Baba Bathra (trans. Isidore Epstein; London: Soncino Press, 1935) 77–81. The diversity and development of rabbinic approaches to suffering are brilliantly analyzed by Kraemer, Responses to Suffering. That Kraemer’s own sympathies lie with the heterodox “Bavli rebels,” as he calls the texts that challenge God’s justice, is clear (viii, 200). 18 The view that the book has a fictive character is also found in Bereshit Rabba 57:4. 19 Oberhänsel-Widmer, Hiob, 52–55. 15

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On the assumption that Job was a real person, the rabbis debated about when he lived and whether he was Jewish. As to when Job lived, the Talmud asserts that after Moses’ death, the divine presence no longer rested on gentiles. Thus if Job were a gentile he must have lived before or during the time of Moses. In this view, even if Job were a gentile, the rabbis did not deprive him of his experience of the divine presence. That does not spare Job a harsh assessment, however. One source that the Talmud quotes implies that Job was a gentile prophet, similar to Balaam, whom the rabbis utterly condemned. Another suggests that he was a gentile who was blessed in this world, (i.e., after his possessions and family were restored to him), but will be punished in the world to come due to his blasphemy.20 Although the argument over his status is not fully resolved, the text seems to favor viewing Job as a Jew. One of the implications of considering Job to be a Jew is that he can now be compared with other Jews. The Gemara enters into a lengthy parallel between Job and Abraham, in which Job initially compares quite favorably. Job’s righteousness is so outstanding that God even rebukes Satan for persuading Him to let Job suffer affliction (16a)! The Gemara suggests, astonishingly, that Satan was acting for the sake of heaven and had pure motives. Satan feared that because God was so favorable toward Job, God would forget the merits of Abraham. (R. Levi said: “Satan . . . had a pious purpose. Satan, when he saw God inclined to favor Job said, ‘Far be it that God should forget the love of Abraham’ ” B. Batra 16a.) Satan had therefore to suggest that Job had potential failings in order to defend Abraham. Although the initial assessments are positive, in the discussion that follows, the rabbis dwell on Job’s flaws. Commenting on the verse “In all this Job did not sin with his lips” (Job 2:10), the sage Rava remarks, “With his lips he did not sin, but he did sin in his heart.” Rava argues that Job sought to “turn the dish upside down,” that is, to deny the sovereignty and justice of God in the world.21 Another sage, however, defends Job, limiting his alleged blasphemy to a critical comment about the temporary sway of Satan over the world. Another instance of his alleged blasphemy is adduced: Job blames God for creating him the way that he is. Job invokes a Clarence Darrow defense. He could not act other than he did due to forces beyond his control. His friends, here evaluated positively by the Gemara, censure Job for his view. Should people come to believe that there is no free will, then religion will collapse. Although God created us with the disease of the evil inclination, he also gave us the Torah as its cure. Job’s blasphemies are enumerated by the Talmud. A sage recommends: “Dust should be put in the mouth of Job” not only because of the accusatory quality of what he said, but because of his presumptuous 20 “There was a certain pious man among the heathen named Job, but he [thought that he had] come into this world only to receive [here] his reward, and when the Holy One, blessed be He, brought chastisements upon him, he began to curse and blaspheme, so the Holy One, blessed be He, doubled his reward in this world so as to expel him from the world to come.” Baba Bathra 15b, quoted from Isidore Epstein, trans. Baba Bathra, 75. 21 Baba Bathra 16a, in ibid., 79.

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familiarity with God. “He makes himself the colleague of heaven.”22 Can a slave call his master to account? Is God, as Rashi puts it, a business partner with whom one negotiates to see who owes what to the other? The discussion concludes with two main points. The text comes to teach that a man cannot be held responsible for everything that he says when he is in pain. Second, without friends a man dies. Job’s friends were true friends who came from an enormous distance to comfort him. The Talmud does not condemn them. Does the ambivalence toward Job, the partial exculpation, open up a narrow space for legitimate Jewish “blasphemy?” Do the rabbis insinuate that the accusations of the Jewish people against God in the pain of exile are not without foundation? This may press the text too far. The text excuses the “blasphemy” of Job; it does not justify it. God is fully entitled to be God, to do with Job what he will. Although God apparently regrets his rough treatment of Job, there is no suggestion that God has acted unfairly or unjustly. What the Talmud does is allow the rabbis room for both psychological release— the expression of anguish that might almost verge on heresy—and political responsibility, that is, keeping the belief in God’s sovereignty and justice intact for the Jewish people. Albeit in a very unsystematic fashion, the Talmud upholds both a justification of God’s actions and a morally excusable opportunity for protest against them. The Jewish thinkers of the Middle Ages are impatient with the unsystematic, midrashic approach of the Talmud. Philosophical theologians such as Saadia (882–942) feared that the Talmudic mélange of conflicting assessments of Job was likely to confuse people and obscure the “real” point of the book.23 Saadia follows the Mutazilite school of Kalam in his belief that God always acts justly and that divine justice is fully comparable to human justice.24 The mystery and sovereignty of God do not render his justice inscrutable. In Saadia’s reading of Job, Job is a righteous man who is tested by God so that he will receive an even greater reward than what he was already owed. God only tests those whom he knows can withstand his trials. He imposes “sufferings of love” upon them. They do not deserve these as punishments. Rather, their very righteousness motivates God to provide them

22

Ibid., 80. Leaman, Evil and Suffering, 50. A systematic overview of Saadia’s theodicy, drawn however from his Book of Beliefs and Opinions and not from his commentary on Job, may be found in Eliezer Schweid, PEVp]XFpNQF˜]LPEXUH\NVp]]OH]KLP (Bat Yam: Tag, 1994) 151–81. 24 Saadia’s relationship to kalam in general and to the Mutazila in particular, however, is by no means straightforward. For an analysis see Sarah Stroumsa, “Saadya and Jewish kalam,” in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Jewish Philosophy (ed. Daniel H. Frank and Oliver Leaman; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 23

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with opportunities for greater heavenly blessedness.25 Saadia attributes this view to Job’s youngest friend, Elihu.26 None of Job’s friends, in Saadia’s view, have committed theological mistakes. Their fundamental understanding of theodicy was correct. They failed to apply their principles to the case at hand in the proper manner, however. Their improprieties, such as they were, were ethical improprieties, insofar as they impugned Job’s character, not theological ones. Thus Saadia renders the critical verse (42:7), where God, at least in modern translations, seems to accuse the friends of speaking falsely about the divine and to exonerate Job for speaking the truth: “God said unto Eliphaz the Temanite: ‘My wrath hath waxed against thee and against thy fellows, for ye did not speak the truth in My presence about my servant Job.’ ” Saadia’s rendering shifts the emphasis from talk about God to talk about Job. The friends got God right; they only misrepresented Job.27 For Saadia the main point of Job is to enlighten the believer on the perfect justice and rationality of God’s universe and of his actions within it. Even fully righteous men—as well as fully innocent children—may suffer justly at God’s hand not as a punishment but as a means to higher blessedness and reward. These martyrs perforce witness to God’s blameless ways in the world. The seeming absence of God strengthens their fortitude. The perplexity of their condition only contributes to their merit if they endure. As for the public, the suffering of the righteous has a heuristic function. People see that God chooses the righteous because they are exemplary: They bear their suffering with faith and confidence. The people will see and be awed. To the modern reader, Saadia’s view is disturbing. The equanimity and certainty with which he asserts his analysis of gratuitous suffering is hard to bear. The package is too neat, too tidy. Better the unsystematic, emotional give and take of the Talmud to Saadia’s rigorous theological rationalism! For Saadia, however, a disorderly, recondite universe is more terrifying than one where God tries the righteous with gratuitous suffering. Saadia mutes the subversive potential of Job, the book’s implicit challenge to a theodicy of reward and punishment. Job is harmonized with the Torah’s more “orthodox” theodicy-strategy. We may assume that, as the 25

Saadia Gaon, The Book of Beliefs and Opinions (trans. Samuel Rosenblatt; Yale Judaica Series 1; New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1948) 214. For the sources for “sufferings of love,” see Deut 8:5 and Prov 3:12. A critical rabbinic discussion of the concept is found at B. Berachot 5a–b. 26 Saadia is the first to identify the speeches of each character in Job with a determinate philosophical position. See The Book of Theodicy: Translation and Commentary on the Book of Job by Saadiah ben Joseph Al-Fayyumi (trans. Lenn E. Goodman; Yale Judaica Series 25; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988) 55. 27 Goodman, The Book of Theodicy, 410. Compare this translation with the New Jewish Publication Society Version: “After the LORD had spoken these words to Job, the LORD said to Eliphaz the Temanite: ‘I am incensed at you and your two friends, for you have not spoken the truth about Me as did My servant Job.” Moshe Greenberg et al., eds., The Book of Job: A New Translation According to the Traditional Hebrew Text (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1980) 62.

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occupant of an important political post, the head of the academy of Sura, Saadia acted out of political responsibility as well. He quelled the doubts of the people and assured them that righteousness will, in the end, receive its reward. Two centuries later, Maimonides (1138–1204) offers a much more complex reading of Joban theodicy than Saadia. While Saadia’s work is entirely exoteric, aimed at assuring the believer that his faith is rational, Maimonides is an esoteric writer who probes, in veiled fashion, the tensions between faith and Aristotelian reason. Maimonides rejects Saadia’s doctrinaire approach, equating it with the consensual view of the friends. The friends believe that “everyone who does good obtains a reward and everyone who does evil is punished” and that “the heaviest misfortunes befall the most perfect individual.”28 Job, by contrast, believes that God’s affliction of the righteous proves that God has contempt for the human species and treats the righteous and the wicked alike. According to Job, God must be aloof from cares about this world. In Maimonides’ view, both of these opinions are wrong. God does not dispense particular providence in the form of reward and punishment on ordinary individuals, as the friends (and Saadia) believe. Nor is God detached from governing the world at all, as Job originally believes. As an Aristotelian, Maimonides believed that divine providence is equivalent to natural law. God governs the entirety of the universe through fixed laws; he ensures the continuity of each species. He does not, however, take account of the individual members of the species. This is only possible for human beings and only then for those humans who are capable of abstract thought.29 Human beings who are able to transcend the severe limitations of matter and embodiment and cleave to the Active Intellect can experience divine providence, transcend contingency, and achieve a kind of impersonal immortality. Evil, in a physical sense, is a necessary feature of a material world full of contingency. The existence of natural laws and the eternity of the species are sufficient proof of divine providence. Given these indications of divine providence and cosmic perfection, one cannot complain especially since God has given human beings intellect, which means that they have the possibility of redemptive intellection.

28 Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed (trans. Shlomo Pines; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963) 491. The discussion of Job is found in Guide III: 22–23. Maimonides asserts that the friends agree with each other only superficially, that is, on the exoteric level. A closer reading indicates that the text “hide[s] the notion that is peculiar to the opinion of each individual, so that at first it occurs to the multitude that all the interlocutors are agreed upon the selfsame opinion; however, this is not so (495).” Each friend articulates a classical view with regard to providence, i.e., to divine justice in the governance of the world. Job’s opinion is in keeping with Aristotle. Eliphaz’s opinion is in keeping with “the opinion of our Law.” Bildad’s corresponds with the Mutazila and Zophar’s with the Asharites (494). Since Maimonides rejects Eliphaz’s opinion, his own stance is esoteric. 29 Kenneth Seeskin, Searching for a Distant God (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999) 151.

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In Maimonides’ view, the Book of Job describes its protagonist as righteous, but not as wise.30 What Job learns in the theophany is that righteousness is not correlated mechanically with desert, in this world or in the next. Righteousness is at best a necessary but not a sufficient condition for the emergence of wisdom. Wisdom, in the sense of rational speculation, allows one to move beyond mere hearsay about the deity based on “acceptance of authority, just as the multitude adhering to a Law” know Him.31 With wisdom, one knows Him with certain knowledge, which confers true happiness in the Stoic sense of ataraxia, of imperturbability. When Job grasps the truth about God, freeing himself from the doctrinaire calculus of reward and punishment, he realizes that such things as “health, wealth, and children” are not the ultimate goal.32 The internal good of true, abstract, speculative knowledge of the divine is the ultimate goal. When he learns this during the theophany, Job accepts his situation with equanimity. Due to Job’s repudiation of his prior view—that God has nothing to do with the direct governance of the world—God says that Job (now) speaks correctly of Him (Job 42:7), unlike his friends who still cling to their rabbinic, Saadia-like orthodoxy. Note that for Maimonides, Job’s previous view had no merit. God’s praise of him for speaking the truth about the divine comes only after Job realizes his error. Although on an exoteric level Maimonides sometimes seems to assert the traditional view that reward and punishment flow from God in relation to human action, the esoteric, modified Aristotelian position is probably his real view.33 The wisdom that Job acquires is equivalent to the central insight of Maimonidean theology, which is that the language that we use to describe God is necessarily a human language, a language whose nouns, adjectives, and verbs derive their sense from a world of human actions, traits, and qualities. The uniqueness of God, however, entails that no terms rooted in the human sphere can logically describe God at all. Maimonides’ theology is severely negative. The notion of His providence is not the same as the notion of our providence; nor is the notion of His governance of the things created by Him the same as the notion of our governance of that which we govern. The two notions are not comprised in one definition, contrary to what is thought by all those

30 Guide III:22, 487. On the distinction in Maimonides between the righteous and the wise, i.e., between moral and intellectual virtue, see Marvin Fox, Interpreting Maimonides (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990) 174. 31 Guide III:23, 492. 32 Ibid., 493. 33 For an example of his exoteric teaching on theodicy, see Guide III: 17. “It is thus one of the fundamental principles of the Law of Moses our master that it is not at all possible that He, may He be exalted, should be unjust . . . all the calamities which befall men and the good things that come to men, be it a single individual or a group, are all of them determined according to the deserts of the men concerned through equal judgment in which there is no injustice at all.” Quoted in Leaman, Evil and Suffering, 79.

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who are confused, and there is nothing in common between the two except the name alone.34

This radical and indeed subversive—from the point of view of naïve faith—truth comes out in the theophany, where the point of the description of the wonderful complexity of creation is to show us our epistemic limits. All of the creatures and processes described exist at our level of the universe, that is, below the sphere of the moon, yet we do not understand the genesis of any of them. Even within a sphere where our knowledge can reach, unlike the sphere of the divine, our knowledge is necessarily limited. Thus, the purpose of the Book of Job as a whole is to argue from the hard facts of our epistemological experience that we “should not fall into error and seek to affirm in imagination that his knowledge is like our knowledge or that his purpose and his providence and his governance are like our purpose and our providence and our governance. If a man knows this, every misfortune will be borne lightly by him.”35 He will be able to bear misfortunes because he will have abandoned idle questions about divine “purpose,” “providence,” and “governance” of the world. Maimonides is not saying that God is simply mysterious and inscrutable and that our questions therefore are impious. He is saying that our questions are illogical. They derive their sense entirely from our world yet pretend to knowledge about another world. Of that world we literally know nothing, can know nothing, and ought to keep silent.36 The questions of classical theodicy arise in imagination, not in reason. Imagination, as Maimonides states elsewhere, is the domain of the evil inclination, which is equivalent, in his demythologizing view, to Satan. The ordeal of Job begins in a failure of reason. Maimonides is thus poles apart from both the Talmud, in all of its ambiguity, and Saadia, in all of his assertive certainty. Yet all of them stand at some remove from the modern, post-traditional interpreters. All of them continue to affirm a divine governance of the world that can be disclosed by reason. All of them hold to a purposive, teleological universe, as opposed to a modern universe of mechanical, material causation from which final causality has been banished.37 All of them counsel acceptance of misfortune as the appropriate response to the divine plan. None of them see evil as a fatal threat to an ordered universe and a coherent theism. None despair of theodicy.

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Guide, III:23, 496. Ibid., 497 36 But of course, we don’t keep silent and Maimonides doesn’t either. Although no language can describe God, Maimonides understands the Torah’s attributive language to be descriptive of God’s actions rather than of his being. That is, language can describe how we experience, on a phenomenal level, the manifestations of divine activity. 37 Norbert M. Samuelson, Revelation and the God of Israel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) 130–31. 35

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■ The Job of Kant Kant’s commentary on Job is found in his 1791 “On the Failure of all Possible Theodicies” (Über das Misslingen aller philosophischen Versuche in der Theodizee), a brief essay appearing soon after the publication of the third Critique, The Critique of Judgment (1790). 38 The latter work has been characterized as the product of “a mind exhausted by its labours, still pregnant with unformed thoughts, but unable to give them their full elaboration.”39 This characterization can apply with equal justice to the theodicy essay. Although Kant’s concise treatment of Job is clear and well-formed, his analysis of traditional theodicy leaves much to be desired. Kant sometimes descends to disparagement in lieu of analysis. He seems to assume that, given his immense work of systematic criticism, his readers are already conversant with his views and do not require a detailed interrogation of the alleged failures of all versions of theodicy. The theodicy essay assumes the apparatus of the various Critiques and of the Critique of Judgment, in particular. That work dealt extensively with teleology, that is, with the issue of purposiveness in nature.40 Nature, on the Kantian view, discloses itself to the human understanding under, among other things, the category of cause. Causation is strictly mechanical. Causes precede their effects. The Aristotelian and medieval understanding of teleology, of final causation, does not belong to the categories of the understanding. Nonetheless, teleology does belong to reason. It is an ineluctable idea of reason, a schema for organizing our concepts of nature, which derive from the understanding, at the highest level. When we reflect on the mind’s work of making sense of nature, we discover that we cannot do so without teleological ideas however alien those ideas are to the immediate work of the understanding. There, only mechanical (i.e., efficient) causality applies. Once we become aware of the ineluctability of rational teleology, we can appreciate teleological schemas for what they are worth: they tell us nothing about the world; they tell us everything about reason’s role in sense-making. Kant thus envisages a two-tier program of scientific sense-making. On the bottom tier (the tier of “determinant judgment”) is the empirical process of seeking out mechanical causes for objects, states, events, etc. This is the primary work of science and must proceed without metaphysical impediments thrown in its path by speculative reason. On the top tier (the tier of “reflective judgment” 41) 38 “Über das Misslingen aller philosophischen Versuche in der Theodizee” in Immanuel Kant, Was ist Aufklärung: Aufsätze zur Geschichte und Philosophie (Göttingen: Kleine Vandenhoeck-Reihe, 1994). A translation of the essay appears as an appendix in Michel Despland, Kant on History and Religion (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1973). 39 Roger Scruton, A Short History of Modern Philosophy (London: Routledge, 2003) 162. 40 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment (trans. J. H. Bernard; Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Publications, 2005). The second half of the Critique is entitled “Critique of the Teleological Judgment.” 41 For a crisp description of these two types of judgment, see William James Booth, Interpreting the World: Kant’s Philosophy of History and Politics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986) 36. “In determinant judgment, the act of judging consists in the application of a known principle

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speculative reason finds that it must integrate all of the discrete causal accounts generated by natural science into what we today would call a master narrative. This master narrative will necessarily have a teleological form; nature will appear to be thoroughly purposive, goal directed. That appearance, however satisfying it might be to reason or however heuristic it might be for further conceptual exploration, does not describe the world-in-itself, however. It does not even describe how understanding accounts for the existence of any discrete object. It is a work of pure reason; the very thing repudiated by Kant in the first Critique. Nonetheless, Kant had reintroduced a kind of metaphysics in the second Critique and continues with that indulgence of a chastened metaphysical urge in the third Critique. In the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant postulated freedom as a necessary idea of reason over/against the causal determination of the will from a natural point of view. In the Critique of Judgment, Kant posits teleology in a purely rational sense over and against mechanical causation, which is the more grounded framework for interpreting nature. Once we grant that purposiveness in nature—including the idea that God’s design and guidance of nature is one way of imparting purpose to the whole—is a regulative idea, we run up against the limit Kant imposes on metaphysics. Our minds may need the imputation of purpose in order to make sense of the data fixed by both experience and the sciences, but nature, in herself, as it were, has no purpose. No purpose, at least, that we can know. We cannot make any claims about the goal-directedness of the world per se.42 Even if we grant entrance, on stringent Kantian terms, to God as the creator and governor of the whole, we do so only to the idea of God. We talk only about more or less efficient or coherent ways of human sense-making, not about the world in se. Kant does maintain, in the Critique of Judgment, that the idea of God is the most powerful, coherent and useful idea to bring order and sense to nature, but idea it remains.43 In the project of theodicy, the idea of God is employed in illegitimate ways. God figures as more than a regulative idea. Theodicy asserts metaphysical knowledge— claims about divine agency—which cannot be known. Kant argues that given ineluctable human ignorance about God, claims about God’s justice or about evil as divine punishment for injustice are not merely empty, they are disingenuous. Pre-critical thinkers made them not only because they were confused about the to a set of particular circumstances or facts. Judgment is here required to supply no concepts of its own; it is rather a relation, or function, by which one kind of data is brought to bear on another. But in those cases where no principle is supplied, the faculty of judgment must supply its own, and, according to Kant, the only standard it can employ in selecting this principle is the requirements of judging itself.” For the primary text, see Kant, Critique of Judgment, 11–13. 42 Kant, Critique of Judgment, 175. 43 “Theism can just as little establish dogmatically the possibility of natural purposes as a key to Teleology; although it certainly is superior to all other grounds of explanation in that, through the Understanding which it ascribes to the original Being, it rescues in the best way the purposiveness of nature from Idealism, and introduces a causality acting with design for its production.” in Kant, Critique of Judgment, 180.

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limits of the legitimate deployment of reason but because they were self-interested. They were trying to flatter God with a kind of unctuous philosophical praise (Schmeichelei). Job’s friends become a paradigmatic case of such disingenuousness. Job becomes a model of resistance to it. We have seen that Kant’s critical philosophy can support teleology as a purely conceptual way of organizing ideas. Kant even concedes that invoking divine purpose can be the most coherent expression of teleology. In interrogating theodicy, what is at issue for Kant is whether claims of divine purposefulness can withstand the abundant evidence of natural and moral evil. Granted that the idea of God is a useful idea, but is its use compatible with the presence of evil? One can, in the manner of Job, as we will see, hold the idea of God together with the reality of evil. What one cannot do, in the manner of Job’s friends and all other practitioners of theodicy, is to take the idea of God from the realm of the conceptual and ascribe substantive properties to it—endow it with agency—vis-à-vis the phenomena of suffering. Insofar as this is an illegitimate move, from the critical point of view, theodicy does not defend God at all; it defends illicit religious speculations. Theodicy is a rear guard attempt to protect territory that has already been lost. Three sorts of evidence challenge the view that a divine wisdom purposefully guides the events of the phenomenal world. There are evils that reason finds so contrary to the putative divine plan— especially sin (moral evil)—as to cause doubts that there is such a plan. Some evils are so grave that we must reject the view that they serve a higher purpose. (The Holocaust, we might say, cannot be justified on the grounds that it led to the establishment of the State of Israel.) Second, there are evils, such as physical pain (natural evil), which might conditionally serve some purpose. Pain, although evil, may be justified when it is employed as punishment to bring about a desirable correction. The frequent disproportion between pain, construed as punishment, and the putative crime leads straight to a third sort of evidence against divine purposefulness. The disproportion, which reason often perceives in the relationship of “crime” and “punishment,” casts doubt on whether a relevant evil should actually be construed as punishment. These three complaints are lodged against the divine wisdom, which has three corresponding attributes. The holiness of God as a legislator is held in tension with the moral evils of the world. The goodness of God as a governor or sustainer of his creatures seems to be offset their physical sufferings. The justice of God as a judge is questioned by the scandalous disproportion between the crime of human sin and the divine punishment. Kant construes the traditional arguments of theodicy as attempts to refute the three kinds of complaint by assertions compounded from the three putative attributes of God. The existence of massive moral evil, for example, may be “refuted” by an appeal to the mysteriousness of God’s thoughts, which is a correlate of his holiness. His ways are not our ways; his laws are not our laws. We therefore “err when we make a law valid only relatively for men in this life into an absolute law, so that we hold that what, in our consideration from

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our lowly observation point, appears unsuitable must be so also from the highest observation point.”44 Significantly, Kant does not try to refute such a classic move with a developed argument. He brushes it aside with no small amount of indignation. “This plea, in which the response is worse than the charge, needs no reply. It can safely be left to the reprobation of any man who has the slightest sense of morality.”45 The attempt to ascribe to God a morality allegedly higher than the moral laws of which we are aware is odious in a moral sense and self-contradictory in a philosophical sense. The stipulation of a mysterious divine morality that differs fundamentally from our morality is an example of the sort of empty, indeed morally blasphemous, speculation that the critical philosophy condemns. Our morality is the only one of which we have knowledge; its laws are the only laws that deserve to be called moral. Furthermore, within our moral universe—the only moral universe known by reason—agents cannot be held accountable for acts over which they have no control. Thus, the typical attempts of theodicy to exculpate divine purposefulness because of the limitations of creaturely matter or because of the consequences of human freedom offend against human responsibility. If I have no responsibility for how I have been made, then I can take no responsibility for those occurrences that issue as a result of my nature. Although not all of Kant’s answers to the various attempts at theodicy are persuasive or clear, his own position is categorical: “No theodicy proposed so far has kept its promise; none has managed to justify the moral wisdom at work in the government of the world against the doubts which arise out of our experience of the world.”46 The failure of theodicy does not signal a loss of wisdom about God. It signals rather a salutary recognition of the overreach of reason. This critical recognition does not bring religious affirmation to an end. It constrains and transforms it, however. Kant freely admits that while, because of the limitations of our reason, we cannot in good conscience make claims about the divine, neither have we disproved claims about the divine. Our ignorance cuts both ways. We cannot say for certain that reason is “completely powerless when it comes to determining the relationship between this world, as we know it through experience, and the supreme wisdom.”47 Although a glimmer of human competence in such matters may be possible, until such competence can be demonstrated reason has no choice other than to abandon the effort to fathom divine wisdom. The “negative wisdom” of understanding the limits of our reflection on the divine should “put an end once and for all” to theodicy.48 Despland, Kant on History and Religion, 286. Ibid. 46 Ibid., 290. 47 Ibid. 48 Ibid. Kant’s denial that we can know anything of the divine wisdom rules out the entire theodicy of Leibniz, which rests on an analogy between divine and human wisdom and thus on our ability to know the former. Our concepts of perfect and best guide us in thinking about God. A 44 45

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Against this background, Kant offers his own interpretation of Job. Job practices what Kant calls “authentic” (authentisch) as opposed to “doctrinal” (doktrinal) theodicy.49 Authentic theodicy—a term that does not imply that such theodicy is correct or intellectually permissible—arises spontaneously from the wounded soul of a pious man whereas doctrinal theodicy is burdened by theological sophistry. Although Kant rejects the intellectual content of Job’s claims he validates their moral basis because of their spontaneous authenticity. He rejects, correspondingly, the moral basis (and, of course, the intellectual content) of the utterances of Job’s friends. Kant dismisses the ratiocinations of both Job and his friends (which are “not remarkable”) but emphasizes their respective moral characters. Job spoke as he thought, as he felt, and as every man in his position would feel. His friends, however, spoke as if they were overheard by the Almighty whose behavior they were judging, and as if they cared more for winning his favors by passing the right judgment than for saying the truth. The dishonesty with which they affirmed things of which they should have confessed that they had no knowledge and with which they feigned convictions which in fact they did not have, contrasts with Job’s free and sincere outspokenness, which is so removed from lying flattery that it almost borders on temerity. This contrast puts the friends in an unfavorable light.50 Job becomes a Kantian hero because he confesses that he had spoken unwisely about things of which he knew nothing. Job rejects, as it were, the old, precritical, discredited metaphysics. While his friends’ theories were more in accord with doctrinal speculative reason and would therefore “seem to exhibit more pious humility,” it is Job’s sincerity and integrity that win God’s approbation.51 “Only uprightness of the heart, not the merit of one’s insights, the sincere and undisguised confessions of one’s doubts, and the avoidance of feigned convictions which one does not really feel . . . are the qualities which caused the upright man Job to be preferred in the eyes of the divine judge to the pious flatterers.”52 Job roots his faith, according to Kant, in the conviction of his own moral integrity. Sincerity stands in for or replaces faith, at least the faith that is a conviction of the existence of things unseen. Faith is transposed into the key of ethics, into the decision of man to live a moral life: “Job proved that he did not base his morality on his faith but his faith perfect (i.e., divine) wisdom must choose the best of all possible worlds. Our world, as a creation of divine wisdom, must therefore be the best. See G. W. Leibniz, Theodicy: Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man, and the Origin of Evil (trans. E. M. Huggard; New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1952) 128. For a concise analysis of Leibniz’s theodicy, see Donald Rutherford, Leibniz and the Rational Order of Nature (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995) 7–18. 49 “Über das Misslingen aller philosophischen Versuche in der Theodizee” in Immanuel Kant, Was ist Aufklärung: Aufsätze zur Geschichte und Philosophie, 86; Despland, Kant on History and Religion, 291. 50 Ibid., 292. 51 Ibid., 293. 52 Ibid.

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upon his morality. In this case, faith, however weak it may become, is a truer and purer one; this kind of faith is not found in a religion that cultivates self-interest and seeks favors, but in a religion of good behavior.”53 This encapsulates the Kantian transformation of religion into ethics. Religion no longer has a wisdom of its own. Its language is an encoded moral language that speaks, however misleadingly, only of worldly and practical (that is, moral) things. At its best it inculcates virtue. Its church is the good will. Its mission is to secure the civil peace of the secular city. By transposing faith into the key of ethics, Kant not only deprives religion of a unique nature but he embeds it without remainder into the inner world of the self. Henceforth, with its exclusive focus on moral duty, religion becomes a dimension of the modern self’s reflexive process of self-creation. Religion becomes a domain where the self affirms its integrity, sincerity and authenticity.54 Job becomes a drama about how a man remains true to himself. The aspiration of moral rectitude, the enactment of the good will, fills the space where affirmations of divine justice once held sway.

■ The Job of Post-Traditional Judaism There is an almost categorical difference between the ancient and medieval interpretations and modern ones. In the traditional interpretations, even at their most skeptical, daring, and esoteric, Job deserves in some measure what he gets. The distance between the dominant theodicy orientation in the Torah and the prophets— that suffering and sin are implicated in one another—and the theodicy implicit in Job—that God’s ways cannot be exhaustively justified in terms of the dominant theodicy of the Torah and the prophets—is minimized. Traditional exegetes, while not ignoring the tensions between a theodicy of reward and punishment and the more inscrutable theodicy of Job nonetheless seek to harmonize their different thrusts. (Maimonides is an exception to this rule only in the esoteric strata of his text. Exoterically, he asserts the cogency of the deserts-oriented framework.) Job, on the traditional account, is a flawed and ambiguous figure. Job on the modern account, however, is a heroic figure: a model of probity that rejects the facile pseudo-answers of the official “orthodoxy” and insists on the truth of his own experience. For modern Jewish interpreters, the Book of Job in a sense redeems the Torah. Were reward and punishment all that Jews had to work with, not only theodicy but Judaism might wither. For the traditional interpreter, the gap between

53

Ibid. Kant is more concerned for sincerity than for authenticity. This distinction has not yet become fully articulated. Authenticity is a more contemporary ideal that has displaced the still quite morally oriented ideal of sincerity. See Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972). 54

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these strategies must not loom too large. For the modern interpreter, the larger the gap, the better.55 I have suggested that Kant’s attempt to demolish theodicy marks a caesura between traditional and modern philosophical practice. We see that caesura clearly in Kant’s greatest modern Jewish disciple, Hermann Cohen.56 Cohen, like Kant, relates religion to the legitimate work of practical reason: God, free will, the soul, etc., are necessary postulates for the fruitful deployment of practical reason on which moral action depends. Like Kant, these terms stand for logical constructs required by (practical) reason, not substantive realities about which metaphysical inquiry could provide knowledge. Unlike Kant, Cohen fills religion—at least religion governed by practical reason (Religion der Vernunft)—with a purpose that allies with ethics but is not reducible to ethics. Religion, for Cohen, is the ground for the discovery and nurture of authentic selfhood. Ethics, in its Kantian universality, has to do with duties, with a moral law, which addresses the generality of human beings, indeed, of all rational creatures. Religion, by contrast, discovers the individual, who can not be reduced to a moral agent standing under a universal moral law. The individual has to do with uniqueness, with unique and sacred value. Such a concept does not emerge in Greek thought, where persons are confined by their lineage and set on trajectories governed by fate. (Cohen sees tragedy, especially the Oresteia, as paradigmatic of the highest Greek thinking about personhood.) According to Cohen, the Torah and the biblical prophets first discover the concept of the individual. The one proximate to us (Nebenmensch) becomes a fellowman (Mitmensch), for whom we can, indeed must, feel empathy and love. This insight recognizes the individuality of our fellow man or woman and calls upon us to respond to his plight with compassion. This, however, is not yet enough for the discovery and grounding of one’s own authentic individuality, without which the individuality of the other is imperfectly grounded. The late prophet, Ezekiel, constitutes a breakthrough in his assertion that every man dies for his own sin. It is sin, more specifically, the consciousness of guilt that gives rise to the desire for forgiveness, which in turn occasions the relationship with God known as repentance that provides the ground for individuality. Individuality emerges, not merely in the I–Thou encounter with the Mitmensch, but in the experience of self as sinner, penitent, sufferer and reborn being, which the turn to God out of guilt effectuates. It is in Cohen’s treatment of suffering, in the context of his discussion of atonement and the Day of Atonement, that he considers the meaning of Job. Cohen’s teaching about suffering is provocative. It provides one of the standard objections to his thought; his view of suffering seems entirely too benign for a 55 An excellent survey and analysis of Job in modern Jewish belles lettres and in so-called Holocaust theology may be found in Gabrielle Oberhänsli-Widmer, Hiob in jüdischer Antike und Moderne, part II (Hiob in jüdischer Moderne). Oberhänsli-Widmer’s analysis, especially of such modern classics as Isaac Leib Peretz’s “Bontsche Schweig,” corroborates the thesis advanced in this essay. 56 For an overview and analysis of Cohen’s views, see Leaman, Evil and Suffering, 157–64.

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post-Auschwitz age. As a Kantian, Cohen rejects the question of the cause of suffering. “Why is this happening to me?” is the kind of illegitimate metaphysical question raised by pure reason. It must be systematically translated into the kind of question that practical reason can legitimately ask and answer, namely, “What must I do given the fact of suffering?” The pervasive fact of human suffering must not be ascribed a divine causality. To the extent that the causal question has any legitimacy, we can say that suffering has to do with our management of the world. Suffering for Cohen has little to do with death, disaster or sickness. These latter are simply part of the world and cannot fruitfully be questioned in metaphysical terms. Following Kant, there are neither legitimate questions nor answers here; there is no philosophical theodicy available. The proper context is that of practical reason and the imperative of practical reason is: alleviate suffering! In the first instance then, the only suffering that bears meaning is humanly induced suffering, such as poverty and other injustices. These can and must be alleviated. Suffering is therefore a call to recognition and response. Suffering teaches us about ourselves and the moral universe we inhabit. Suffering is an occasion for the moral growth of the individual (Bildung) and for the historical progress of humanity. The Jewish people, suffering throughout history on behalf of humanity, serve to remind humanity of its higher moral purposes, namely, to cease doing injustice and turn toward a Godly path. At this level, suffering (typically in the form of poverty and other injustices) is something that non-sufferers perceive and, turning to the sufferer as a Mitmensch, ought to try to alleviate. Recalling Cohen’s deepened concept of individuality, however, we must also ask how suffering grounds one’s own individuality. What should we think when we ourselves are sufferers? The conceptual framework remains the same: It is not fruitful to ask “Why am I suffering?” What we must do is respond to our suffering in such a way so that we learn from it and thereby deepen our sense of relationship with God (in Cohen’s technical idiom, our correlation). We must accept our suffering as an occasion for advancing our correlation with the good God who forgives us, alleviates our guilt, and renews us as rational beings and moral agents no longer freighted by past sin. (Sin equals inevitable moral failure in this scheme.) Suffering is a divine gift that allows us to engage in repentance. Repentance entails, among other things, construing our suffering as punishment for our sin. There is no true repentance without paying a price; suffering (qua notional punishment) is the price we pay for renewal of the correlation with God. Cohen is not saying that suffering is, in some metaphysical-causal sense, punishment for sin. He is saying that the sufferer should, within the conceptual vocabulary of practical reason, construe it as such for the sake of his own moral and spiritual development. True to his Kantian roots, Cohen asserts that suffering qua punishment must even

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be self-legislated: “Suffering is the punishment that man demands inexorably of himself for himself.”57 The tale of Job, on Cohen’s account, exemplifies the moral purposiveness of suffering. Cohen applauds Maimonides’ view that Job is a prophet. Recalling that prophecy for Cohen stands for the imperative work of practical reason in alleviating suffering and nurturing true selfhood, Job qua prophet teaches that suffering is a meaningful part of God’s plan for human betterment. Job’s friends were both theoretically and morally wrong to ascribe a cause (Job’s putative sin) to his suffering and to frame his suffering as punishment for his sin. Such a framing is something that the sufferer can do as an expression of practical reason. It is not something that an observer should do, especially in terms of a speculative metaphysics. Cohen writes: Job’s friends are not right when they wish to console him in his suffering by reminding him of his sin. His friends should have acknowledged him as a prophet who could instruct them about the value of suffering. Job is a prophet from whom his friends should have learned that suffering is a force in God’s plan of salvation. This plan, however, is obscured and dissipated unless the sufferer is considered as suffering for the sake of others. It is obscured if one thinks erroneously that suffering and punishment are related as cause and effect.58

The friends should have seen that Job suffers, in a sense, on their behalf, that is, his suffering can teach them about “God’s plan for salvation.” By this Cohen refers to the process of asking forgiveness such that guilt is alleviated, accepting punishment and being renewed as a moral agent and a self. Job, like Israel, should be seen as suffering for the sake of, that is, teaching, the world. Cohen’s “prophetic” interpretation of Job brings us to concern for the Mitmensch but it does not yet address the deeper process of developing authentic individuality, which Cohen found to be initiated by Ezekiel. Continuing his analysis, Cohen argues that “Job himself does not lack the deeper insight that he is in need of suffering and deserves to pass through it, although not so much as a single individual but as a self in its correlation with God.”59 As a prophet, Job is “the symbol of humanity.” The world is in need of this symbol; but the symbol is also a human being, who is “in need of himself.”60 Job is both a public and a private man, so to speak. “The ambiguity in Job’s suffering therefore remains: as a prophet he suffers for others,

57 Hermann Cohen, Religion of Reason Out of the Sources of Judaism (trans. Simon Kaplan; American Academy of Religion Text and Translation Series 11; Atlanta, Ga.: Scholars Press, 1995) 226. 58 Cohen, Religion of Reason, 227. 59 Ibid. 60 Ibid., 228.

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but he himself remains a man and, as such, is in need of suffering for his own self.”61 Bildung has its costs. Cohen’s interpretation of Job is brief but immensely subtle. Unlike other moderns, including Kant, Cohen does not valorize the rebellious Job who boldly questions divine justice. Like the ancients, his Job is the patient Job of the frame story who accepts suffering as an inscrutable part of the divine plan. He also echoes the rabbinic concern that sufferers should be excused, not criticized for what they say in their pain. And, like the medieval exegetes, Cohen sees the purpose of the Book of Job as inculcating a correct philosophical position. He puts it quite categorically: “The value of the biblical poem is limited to the refutation of the prejudice that there is a causal relation between sin and suffering; it rather introduces suffering, as do all the other prophetic writings, into the working of the theodicy of the moral world.”62 This last phrase, “the theodicy of the moral world,” might suggest that Cohen is reintroducing theodicy where his master, Kant, would bar it. But this is not correct. Here we see Cohen’s break with the past; his fundamental modernity. Cohen, no less than Kant, disallows theodicy in the manner of metaphysical speculation about providential divine action within the context of an ordered, balanced or harmonious physical universe. The “theodicy of the moral world” refers to the organization of the concepts of practical reason, the transcendental conditions for ethics and, in Cohen’s religious thought, for authentic selfhood. Despite mapping some of the theodicy tropes of ancient and medieval Judaism, Cohen’s approach is thoroughly formed by the “massive subjective turn in modern culture.” Cohen’s Job is patient because he is a critical philosopher: what he acquiesces to is the incompetence of pure reason. His only recourse is to admit insuperable ignorance about the ultimate features of the nonmoral world and to rise to faithful practical activity in the moral one. Whether Cohen’s deep hope, which must not be trivialized, in the moral progress of humanity can withstand the disconfirming evidence of Auschwitz cannot easily be answered.63 Cohen provides, within Kantian limits, a rational theodicy for an irrational age. Cohen’s intellectual and political opponent, Martin Buber, offers a far more existentialist interpretation than that of the rationalist Cohen. Buber’s point of departure is the contrast between the Book of Job and the prophet Ezekiel. Cohen saw Job as flowing from Ezekiel’s teaching about individuality. Buber agrees to an extent but also differentiates his view from Cohen’s. Buber argues that Ezekiel does represent a certain breakthrough in the history of Israelite religion. He stands at the point where the old understanding of collective guilt and punishment breaks down and a new, individualized understanding of agency and responsibility takes 61

Ibid. Ibid. 63 For Fackenheim’s rejection of Cohen on these grounds, see Emil Fackenheim, To Mend the World (New York: Schocken Books, 1978) 273. I agree with Kenneth Seeskin that Cohen’s views deserve a contemporary defense. See the introductory essay of Kenneth Seeskin, “How to Read Religion of Reason,” in Cohen, Religion of Reason, 40. 62

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hold. Earlier prophets, such as Amos, hardly deviated from the ancient belief that natural and historical catastrophes punished the entire people, without regard to the deserts of the individuals among them. Collective punishment would be counterbalanced by collective restoration; a remnant will return. Ezekiel, writing after the destruction of Judah, had to speak to a generation that could no longer accept such cold comfort. Accordingly, Ezekiel “denounces the whole religious tradition of collective responsibility.” Buber continues: It may also be said that Ezekiel in his Messianic prophecy sees Israel as a community, but in his vision and reproof of the present he sees it as a multitude of individuals, each one of whom is responsible before God for himself alone. This personal responsibility, however, is full and entire. No one has to bear an inherited sin, no one shares in accumulating new guilt, no one has to answer for his fellow, but each one has to answer fully for himsel.64

The new emphasis on the responsibility and hence the “objectively comprehensible” punishment of individuals atomizes the community and the covenant. Ezekiel compensates for this atomization by stressing the centrality of a renewed cult, which will unify the people once again in the messianic future. For Buber, this emphasis on religion, as it were, negates Ezekiel’s positive discovery of individuality. Consequently, Ezekiel is a flawed figure. Although his teaching responds to the lived experience of his people, indeed, although it originates in his own authentic prophetic experience, it remains stultified and doctrinaire. Ezekiel produced a divine image that “did not come from an overwhelming experience, but from an attempt to overcome a questionable situation.”65 The detached, relatively inauthentic, merely “religious” quality of Ezekiel’s experience—doktrinal, in Kant’s terms—meant that it could not satisfy the anguished perplexity of the generation of the Babylonian Exile. Although those Jews fundamentally agreed with Ezekiel that God metes out punishment to the wicked on account of their individual sins, the discrepancy between their assent to this theodicy and the facts of their own experience led to the felt need to honor that experience. Out of this tension, the Book of Job was born. The view of Job’s friends represents the view of what Buber dismissively terms “religion”: “the assertion of an all-embracing empirical connection between sin and punishment.”66 The friends take Ezekiel’s situation-specific theodicy and universalize it into a mechanical rule thereby mocking the lived experience of the innocent sufferer. Theodicy of this sort erects a “great ideological idol.” “Religion,” which visits Job on his ash heap, attacks man’s faith and “uses every art of speech to take away from him the God of his soul.”67 Religion is the paradigm for inauthenticity. Its static, abstract framework cannot but help to alienate the sufferer

64 65 66 67

Martin Buber, The Prophetic Faith (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1960) 186. Buber, The Prophetic Faith, 187. Ibid., 191 Ibid.

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from an authentic confrontation with his suffering. Buber replicates, within his own idiom, the Kantian distinction between authentic and doctrinaire theodicy. Job’s own view amounts to a repudiation that God is just. Job continues to believe in justice and he continues to believe in God, but he cannot believe in both with a single faith. He believes in justice in spite of believing in God and believes in God in spite of believing in justice.68 He does not understand how God can violate his own justice. This irresolvable dilemma drives Job into isolation from both God and other human beings. His friends, he knows, do not contend for the true God. The true God must be “near and intimate,” a “nearby person” rather than the silent and “sinister power” that seems to confront him now. What Job craves is intimacy with God. Although he does not want to abandon justice, he begins to sense that intimacy with God is a separate matter from affirming justice. When God ceases to hide his face, as he soon does, the theophany will not reveal a God of justice, at least of a justice intelligible in human terms. The speech of the theophany “declares in the ears of man, struggling for justice, another justice than his own, a divine justice. Not the divine justice, but a divine justice, namely that manifest in creation. The creation of the world is justice, not a recompensing and compensating justice, but a distributing, a giving justice.”69 But in what sense is creation justice? Buber’s view is not that of a medieval who finds in creation a divine equilibrium—in a perfect whole, the good outweighs the inevitably concomitant evil, for example. Rather, justice qua creation means every being receiving that which it needs “to become entirely itself . . . The just Creator gives to all his creatures his boundary, so that each may become fully itself.”70 Our ordinary conception of justice relies on a principle of desert and “intends to give everyone what is due to him.” God’s creation-justice, which man is here called upon to emulate, “gives to everyone what he is.”71 Job was not wrong to expect justice from God. He just expected justice of the wrong kind. But what kind of justice is receiving what one already has? Maimonides, at least, rescues the radical equivocation of terms such as justice by a theory of language. Buber seems simply to redefine terms and subordinate our ordinary language sense to an allegedly superior sense. The answer is found in Buber’s underlying philosophy of Ich and Du. The dialectically constituted Ich is given back to Job only in his encounter with the divine Du. He becomes himself, so to speak, only when God becomes near to him again. Although Job was mistaken about the character of divine justice, he was not mistaken in his understanding of God as a living person and in his demand for encounter, Begegnung. Job contrasts favorably with his friends, who were locked Ibid., 192 Ibid., 194 [emphasis added]. 70 Ibid., 195. 71 Ibid. See also Buber’s approach to reconciling oneself to one’s fate in Martin Buber, I and Thou (trans. Walter Kaufmann; New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970) 100–2. 68 69

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into an objectifying, “religious” construal of God. Accordingly, God justifies Job because he has spoken rightly of Him, unlike the friends. Within Buber’s distinctive idiom, Job has become a hero of authenticity. He insists on individual religious experience as a means of disclosing the truth of Being. Unlike Maimonides, whose Job moves from acceptance of inherited, authoritative opinions to rational, speculative proofs, or Cohen, whose Job, accepts the limits of reason and sets out on the infinite task of ethics, Buber’s Job does not think or act, he encounters. Being displaces thought and ethics. Mere religion defers the encounter with Being. Religion is an inauthentic mode of being. Buber’s neo-romantic thought arises in the changed intellectual field necessitated by Kant’s critical demolition of speculative metaphysics and rational theology. As in Cohen, Buber’s Job learns the deepest truths about individual existence through suffering. Suffering enables Job to grow in authentic selfhood in a way that inherited religious “truths” could not. Unlike Cohen, Buber places encounter with God as a living presence, a divine Du, where Cohen posited a correlation with a transcendental idea. Let us briefly consider some American interpreters to round out the modernist picture. Although not as robustly existential as Buber, other modern Jewish interpreters have absorbed the same predilections. Horace Kallen, a German-Jewish émigré philosopher revised the Book of Job on the model of a Greek tragedy. Styling its anonymous author an Hebraic Euripides, Kallen sees his book as a testament to a tragic view of life. For Kallen, Job exemplifies the aloneness of man in an unjust universe. Man proves his worth by rejecting the platitudes of religion and demonstrating the virtue of courage. [T]he ultimate value of human existence is not existence merely; the ultimate value of human existence is the quality and distinction of existence of which consists a man’s character, his nature as this or that kind of man. . . . To cling to his integrity while he lives, to assert and to realize the excellences appropriate to his nature as a man, as this particular kind of man, knowing all the while that this is to be accomplished in a world which was not made for him, in which he shares his claim on the consideration of Omnipotence with the infinitude of its creatures that alike manifest its powers—this is the destiny of man. He must take his chance in a world that doesn’t care about him any more than about anything else.72

The appropriate, authentic response to his condition is “courage rather than faith, with self-respect rather than with humility, or better perhaps with a faith that is courage, a humility that is self-respect.”73 Robert Gordis also construes Job as a conflict between personal experience and accepted religious tradition. While praising Job for affirming his own integrity in the face of tradition, Gordis sees honest rebellion as enriching tradition. “For 72 Horace M. Kallen, The Book of Job as a Greek Tragedy (New York: Hill & Wang, 1959) 76–77. 73 Ibid., 77.

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religious truth, like all truth, can grow only through the evidence derived from the experience of life. To use the language of the hour, Job’s protest is existential, but it contributes to a deeper essential religion.”74 Similarly, Moshe Greenberg, praises the book’s “theological honesty” and “passion to teach the reality of God’s relation to man [in a manner] unique in the Bible. Job cannot rest after the collapse of his old outlook until he has come to a better one, more congruent with the facts of experience.”75 Once again the emphasis is on Job’s lived experience, in all of its immediacy and authenticity. Greenberg posits a sharp contrast between Job, on the one hand, and the Torah and Prophets on the other. They present radically different justifications of God in history. The Torah and Prophets speak primarily to the fate of the nation. When individuality became thematic in Israel, the theodicy concept of the Torah and the Prophets failed. Judaism, according to Greenberg, preserved these discrepant approaches because the “religious sensibility apparently absorbs or even affirms the contradictions embodied in these books. That may be because these contradictions are perceived to exist in reality.”76 Experience is larger than any rational scheme of the sort that a Saadia or a Maimonides would employ to pretend to account for it. Where the authenticity of experience becomes thematic, rational, systematic thought must recede.

■ Conclusion Kant, as mentioned in the introduction, is not the only factor in the development sketched above. Modernity as a whole, as Anthony Giddens reminds us, is a world of “disembedded selves.”77 The social systems of modernity removed people from what were once stable locations in time, space, class, religion and other markers of an ordered cosmos. The practice of theodicy, I suggest, assumes an ordered cosmos. Theodicy is a theory of disorder, but it assumes the reality of an underlying normative order. Theodicy is most at home in a traditional society where timeless social referents undergird cosmic order. Suffering, in the Jewish case especially the suffering of the exile and its attendant disorder, is only temporary. In the future, the underlying order, the divine justice, will become apparent once again. The exile will end and the disordered cosmos will be rectified. Until then, the ideal order of the Torah, the divine law, remains as a symbol and a model of divine justice. In a future kingdom, God will rule according to the Torah, which is already in the midst of Israel.

74 Cited in Nahum N. Glatzer, ed., The Dimensions of Job (New York: Schocken Books, 1969) 84. 75 Moshe Greenberg et al., eds., The Book of Job: A New Translation, xx. 76 Ibid., xxiii. 77 Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991).

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The promise of the divine kingdom is the telos of history. The order of the universe is a teleological order: it begins in a divine creation and it ends in a divine redemptive unity. Along the way, all events, whether in the natural world or in the fraught domain of history, can be ordered according to a teleological narrative. In such an ordered, rationally perspicuous universe, evil does not disconfirm order. Evil may be redeemed, albeit with great difficulty, by the transcendent telos. As we have seen in Kant, the demise of theodicy reflects, in part, the demotion of teleology. Teleology becomes a way of organizing concepts—essential for human reason but also essentially fictive. Further, as understood by modern science, the inherent rationality of the world has to do with its material causes, not its spurious final ones. Philosophical assaults on theodicy, such as Kant’s, are of a piece with the reconfiguration of teleology. The diminution of metaphysical theodicy gives expression to the dynamic, “disordered” world of modernity. In a world without an ultimate purpose that bridges the physical and the metaphysical, the natural and the divine, humans are thrown back onto their own resources. The virtue of authenticity, of being true to oneself, replaces the rational project of understanding the universe as given in reason and revelation. Rather than seek certitude in God, moderns seek honesty, or at least clarity, about their own experience. Job becomes a paradigm of this search. God becomes an accessory to the human project of self-creation. It is difficult to see how, without the indulgence of a second naïveté, theodicy can be restored as a respectable intellectual project. But it is also difficult to see why, given the horrors of our time, it should be. The problem of evil cannot be solved by profound contemplation about the problem of evil.

From “Linguistic Turn” and Hebrews Scholarship to Anadiplosis Iterata: The Enigma of a Structure* Gabriella Gelardini University of Basel, Switzerland

In 1963, when the “linguistic turn” had evidently taken hold of New Testament studies, Albert Vanhoye, a linguistically trained Catholic priest, published a monograph entitled La structure littéraire de l’épître aux Hébreux.1 The manifold reactions to his refined literary-rhetorical approach and conclusions in favor of a concentric structure oscillated between euphoric approval and offensive disapproval. Along with its translation into German (1979/1980) and a decade later into English (1989), Vanhoye’s study influenced and stimulated Hebrews scholarship like none other in the twentieth century. Vanhoye and the so-called French school of Hebrews scholarship carried out what the “linguistic turn” had heralded: the turn to language. From the very outset of this philosophical movement, however, language was studied along two lines: the structuralist line focused on the structure and logic of language, and the pragmatic line maintained interest in its use. The first section of this essay provides a short history of ideas and highlights issues relevant to biblical studies. While the French school engaged mainly in structuralism, the two subsequent schools, the German and the American, turned to pragmatics. Each school made key contributions to advancing the scholarly understanding and interpretation of the Epistle to the Hebrews. Section two considers their history, methods, structures, and main theological emphases. Based on the distinction between structure and pragmatics and on the three key insights of Hebrews scholarship—concentric structure, homiletic form, and covenant theology—the third section formulates a new structural proposal. I aim to demonstrate that the argumentation on the macrostructural level follows a concentric catena (or anadiplosis iterata), whereas that on the microstructural level operates in terms of concentric circles of thought (Gedankenkreise) throughout the entire book. The generated result allows for an interpretative comparison of sister *

The present article is based on a paper given at the Annual Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature in Washington D.C. in 2006. As co-chair of the Hebrews Consultation, I was privileged to present my reflections alongside George H. Guthrie and Cynthia Long Westfall in a session entitled “The Structure of the Book of Hebrews.” I am also grateful to Dr. Mark Kyburz for proofreading this essay. 1 Albert Vanhoye, La structure littéraire de l’épître aux Hébreux (2d ed.; Paris: De Brouwer, 1976). HTR 102:1 (2009) 51–73

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paragraphs and generates a hermeneutical key capable of placing all parts of the book into a logical and coherent whole.

■ History of Ideas “Linguistic Turn” Linguistics claims cult status in biblical exegesis. Given the nature of this literary craft, this propensity seems to suggest itself. The circumstances leading up to it, however, reside in the so-called “linguistic turn” that originated in England and subsequently took hold of philosophy in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Shifting from neoidealistic to scientific concepts, the “linguistic turn” initially resembled the attempt to resolve traditional philosophical problems by analyzing the meaning of related terminology and subsequently of human language per se. This procedure, however, came at the price of eventually forsaking the long believed unity of language and its represented reality. Generally speaking, we can distinguish two traditions: on the one hand, analytical philosophy—represented chiefly by Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), Rudolf Carnap (1891–1970), and Willard Van Orman Quine (1908–2000)—attempted to clarify philosophical language by means of formal logic. On the other hand, ordinary language philosophy—exemplarily represented by George Edward Moore (1873– 1958), Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951), Gilbert Ryle (1900–1976), and John Langshaw Austin (1911–1960)—sought to provide clarification by analyzing the colloquial use of philosophical terminology. The two traditions revealed early two possible viewpoints with regard to language analysis: 1) language itself—its system, its logic, and its structure—and 2) language for its use and pragmatics. Avram Noam Chomsky (1928– ) introduced a third aspect: the capacity of language production or language competence.2 Structuralism The analysis of language as a structured system became important in the 1950s and 1960s within the intellectual movement of structuralism, which originated in France. Published posthumously and edited as early as 1916 following its reconstruction by two of his former students on the basis of lecture manuscripts and student notes taken at the University of Geneva, Ferdinand de Saussure’s (1857–1913) Cours de linguistique générale became generally regarded as the seminal structuralist work.3 The acceptance of the Cours, however, took a long time. 2 See Christoph Helferich, Geschichte der Philosophie. Von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart und östliches Denken (2d ed.; Stuttgart: Metzler, 1992) 381–89; Siv Bublitz, Der “linguistic turn” der Philosophie als Paradigma der Sprachwissenschaft. Untersuchungen zur Bedeutungstheorie der linguistischen Pragmatik (Internationale Hochschulschriften 116; Münster: Waxmann, 1994) 1–11. 3 Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de linguistique générale (ed. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye; Paris: Payot, 1916).

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Whereas linguists had traditionally looked at the history or etymology of language to explain its meaning, the Cours so to speak performed a Kantian turn immanent to language by placing the production of meaning and regulations into language itself. Saussure considered language—langue—a structured system from which he distinguished the individual linguistic utterances—parole. Modern linguists widely accept this central idea of language as a structured system. Notwithstanding this common denominator, various schools emerged from linguistic structuralism: for instance, the Prague school and its theory of functionalism (Roman Jakobson, Nikolaj S. Trubetzkoy), the Copenhagen school and its theory of glossematics (Louis Hjelmslev), and the American school with its descriptivism and distributionalism (Leonard Bloomfield). Apart from linguistics, structuralism proved profoundly influential in other areas within humanities as well. First and foremost, it affected the study of literature, as evidenced by the work of Roland Barthes (1915–1980), 4 Algirdas Julien Greimas (1917–1992),5 and Vladimir Yakovlevich Propp (1895–1970),6 who laid foundations for narrative criticism. It also influenced the anthropology of religions, where Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908– )7 applied Saussurian ideas to the description and analysis of myths in prephilosophical societies. Finally, it helped to shape sociology, where Barthes (once more) and Umberto Eco (1932– )8 proceeded to apply structuralistic ideas to modern societies, arguing that here too the meaning of cultural forms becomes evident in relation to a structured system of signs for which the term semiotics was coined.9 Poststructuralism Structuralism, the last modern scientific attempt to devise an interpretational system of the cosmos, which assumed metaphysical dimensions in Lévi-Strauss’s version, provoked criticism and gave rise to poststructuralism. The protagonists of the methodologically heterogeneous poststructuralism dismissed the idealistic consequences of classical structuralism albeit without discarding its instruments wholesale. They critiqued both the concept of a closed structure being in effect beyond history as well as the idea of a center existing above this structure. Instead, they tried to think of the existence of decentered structures, such as that of Barthes in the field of text theory, Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) in the field of philosophy (by applying deconstruction), Michel Foucault (1926–1984) Roland Barthes, Le plaisir du texte (Paris: Seuil, 1973). Algirdas Julien Greimas, Sémantique structurale (Paris: Larousse, 1966). 6 Vladimir Yakovlevich Propp, Morfologija skazki (Leningrad: Academia, 1928). 7 Claude Lévi-Strauss, Anthropologie structurale (2 vols.; Paris: Plon, 1958, 1973). 8 Umberto Eco, A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1976). 9 Friederike Rese, Frank Heidermanns, and Johann Figl, “Strukturalismus,” RGG4 7:1781–84; John Barton, “Structuralism,” ABD 6:214–17; Ute Daniel, Kompendium Kulturgeschichte. Theorien, Praxis, Schlüsselwörter (Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Wissenschaft 1523; Frankfurt a.M.: Surhkamp, 2001) 120–38. 4 5

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in historiography (by analyzing power discourses), and Jacques Lacan (1901–1981) in the field of psychoanalysis. They asserted that neither the identity of the subject (author) nor the identity of signs are certain, and that meaning instead relates to context. This insight substantiated the rhetoricity of all communication, which engendered the new rhetorical criticism in the 1980s and furthermore instigated a shift from the analysis of language as a structured system toward the analysis of language in its contextual and pragmatic use.10 Cultural Turn Poststructuralism was succeeded by the cultural turn, and the cultural turn itself includes a variety of turns, of which the last one seems to be the so-called iconic turn.11 But I shall focus on the “linguistic turn” and shall now consider biblical criticism to show how this philosophical concept has influenced Hebrews scholarship in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

■ Hebrews Scholarship in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries History Historical critical exegesis arrived as a much-needed rationalistic response to the dogmatic and single-verse-oriented approach of German Protestant orthodoxy.12 The historical interest subsequently taken in Hebrews scholarship occurred as an expression of this intellectual climate. Yet this historical quest circled mainly around the ancient dilemma of the authorship of Hebrews and culminated in Friedrich Bleek’s outstanding two-volume introduction and commentary (1828–1840) in which he unquestionably proved that Paul was not its author. At the same time, however, Bleek quickly exhausted the historical quest.13 Some forty years later, this prompted another eminent scholar—a friend of Friedrich Nietzsche’s—to draw a symptomatic and pessimistic conclusion, with which most Hebrews scholars will be familiar (or at least with the italicized passage): Es liegt im Wesen aller Kanonisation ihre Objecte unkenntlich zu machen, und so kann man denn auch von allen Schriften unseres neuen Testamentes sagen, dass sie im Augenblick ihrer Kanonisirung aufgehört haben verstanden zu werden. Sie sind in die höhere Sphäre einer ewigen Norm für die 10 Daniel, Kompendium Kulturgeschichte, 138–49; Petra Gehring, “Poststrukturalismus,” RGG4 6:1518–19; Mathias Richter, “Poststrukturalismus,” in Metzler-Philosophie-Lexikon. Begriffe und Definitionen (ed. Peter Prechtl and Franz-Peter Burkard; Stuttgart: Metzler, 1996) 407–8. 11 Doris Bachmann-Medick, Cultural Turns. Neuorientierungen in den Kulturwissenschaften (Rowohlts Enzyklopädie, Rororo 55675; Reinbek b.H.: Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, 2006). 12 Thomas Söding, Wege der Schriftauslegung. Methodenbuch zum Neuen Testament (Freiburg i.B.: Herder, 1998) 54–80. 13 Friedrich Bleek, Der Brief an die Hebräer. Erläutert durch Einleitung, Übersetzung und fortlaufenden Commentar (2 vols.; Berlin: Dümmler, 1828–1840).

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Kirche versetzt worden, nicht ohne dass sich über ihre Entstehung, ihre ursprünglichen Beziehungen und ihren ursprünglichen Sinn ein dichter Schleier gebreitet hätte. Was sich aber in dieser Beziehung von den meisten neutestamentlichen Schriften nur unter gewissen Einschränkungen behaupten lässt ist vom Hebräerbrief, einer der eigenthümlichsten unter ihnen, im strengsten Sinne wahr. Man kann von diesem Brief, mit Anwendung einer seiner eigenen seltsamsten Allegorien auf ihn, sagen, dass er im Kanon vor dem nach seiner historischen Entstehung fragenden Betrachter wie ein melchisedekitisches Wesen ohne Stammbaum dasteht. Wer hat ihn geschrieben? Wo und wann ist er geschrieben worden, und an wen ist er ursprünglich gerichtet gewesen?—Man weiß es nicht. Auf alle diese Fragen hat die Tradition entweder gar keine Antwort, oder sie beantwortet sie doch in anderer Art als bei den übrigen Schriften des Neuen Testaments. Sie sind daher, wovon aus der neueren Geschichte der Auslegung des Hebräerbriefs nur zu viel zu erzählen ist, gänzlich der Hypothese preisgegeben und werden mit dem gegenwärtigen Bestande der Quellen zur Geschichte des Urchristenthums niemals mit Gewissheit zu beantworten sein. All canonization by nature makes its object unrecognizable. Thus one can say that all New Testament writings stopped being understood at the moment of their canonization. Canonization shifted them into the higher sphere of an eternal norm for the church where a thick veil spread over the circumstances of their emergence and their original relations and meaning. What one maintains with respect to most New Testament writings only under certain conditions, however, holds true in the strictest sense in regard to the Epistle to the Hebrews as one of the most characteristic among them. Concerning the historical emergence of this letter, one can apply its own inherent and most peculiar allegory: it stands in the canon like a Melchizedekan being without genealogy. Who wrote it? Where and when was it written? At whom was it originally addressed? We do not know. The tradition has either no answer at all to these questions or answers them in view of the other New Testament writings. These questions are therefore wholly exposed to the hypothesis about which the newer history of interpretation of Epistle to the Hebrews tells only too much and, with the present inventory of sources on the history of early Christianity, may never be answered with certainty.

Franz Overbeck wrote these lines in 1880 in Basel where he became professor of New Testament Exegesis and Old Church History after his departure from the University of Jena. The “linguistic turn,” that is, the turn toward the text occurring at this time, proved useful for Hebrews scholarship. It gave rise to the first of three schools that made an impact in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. I shall outline the achievements of these schools and their shortcomings below.14 14 For a comprehensive and most up-to-date survey of the history of Hebrews research, see Gabriella Gelardini, “Verhärtet eure Herzen nicht.” Der Hebräer, eine Synagogenhomilie zu Tischa be-Aw (BINS 83; Leiden: Brill, 2007) 11–77.

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Under the influence of structuralism, the French school—starting in 1902 with F. Thien15 and followed by Léon Vaganay,16 Albert Descamps,17 and Rafael Gyllenberg18—introduced new and important insights into the study of the Book of Hebrews. They observed the announcement of themes, hook words, thematic words, and changes in genre. Their method—literary-rhetorical criticism—was implemented in its most refined fashion in the work of Albert Vanhoye in 1963, who added two further observations, namely inclusion and symmetry.19 As many argued, the work of Louis Dussaut in 1981 led their method ad absurdum.20 Vanhoye, the French Catholic, had studied linguistics—prior to theology—just as de Saussure’s Cours began taking hold of French intellectuals.21 Their prioritizing of the text at the expense of historical and theological aspects was, as it were, revolutionary. While their accomplishments lay definitively in the area of textual composition, the chief theological thrust remained to this day exclusively Christological. By contrast, their compositional accomplishments did not thoroughly convince scholars. The missing correspondence of form and content underwent critique in particular, and that created momentum for the German school during and especially after the Second World War in the early 1960s. In reaction to the French school, scholars such as Ernst Käsemann,22 Otto Michel,23 Wolfgang Nauck,24 and later Erich Gräßer25 emphasized content and applied thematic criticism. This allowed them to raise awareness of the paraenetic material. The main theological emphasis subsequently shifted from Christology to paraenesis. This shift produced the

F. Thien, “Analyse de l’épître aux Hébreux,” Revue Biblique Internationale 11 (1902) 74–86. Léon Vaganay, “Le plan de l’épître aux Hébreux,” in Mémorial Lagrange. Cinquantenaire de l’École biblique et archéologique française de Jérusalem (15 novembre 1890–15 novembre 1940) (Paris: Gabalda, 1940) 269–77. 17 Albert Descamps, “La structure de l’épître aux Hébreux,” Revue diocésaine de Tournai 9 (1954) 251–58, 333–38. 18 Rafael Gyllenberg, “Die Komposition des Hebräerbriefs,” SEÅ 22/23 (1957/1958) 137–47. 19 Vanhoye, La structure littéraire de l’épître aux Hébreux. 20 Louis Dussaut, Synopse structurelle de l’épître aux Hébreux. Approche d’analyse structurelle (Paris: Cerf, 1981). 21 Biblical Archaeology Society, ed., Who’s Who in Biblical Studies and Archaeology (2d ed.; Washington: Biblical Archaeology Society, 1993) 307. 22 Ernst Käsemann, Das wandernde Gottesvolk. Eine Untersuchung zum Hebräerbrief (FRLANT 55; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1939). 23 Otto Michel presided over this thirteenth volume of the series Kritisch-exegetischer Kommentar über das Neue Testament for almost forty years, Der Brief an die Hebräer (KEK 13; 7th ed.; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1975). 24 Wolfgang Nauck, “Zum Aufbau des Hebräerbriefes,” in Judentum, Urchristentum, Kirche. Festschrift für Joachim Jeremias (ed. Walther Eltester; BZNW 26; Berlin: Töpelmann, 1960) 199–206. 25 Erich Gräßer published widely on the Book of Hebrews; his most comprehensive work, though, remains his commentary, An die Hebräer (3 vols.; EKKNT 17; Zürich: Benziger; Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener, 1990–1997). 15 16

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form-critical side effect—which influenced the American school—that perceived Hebrews as a sermon mainly in the context of the ancient synagogue. Against the backdrop of the rise of rhetorical and new rhetorical criticism in the 1980s, the early American school appeared most closely associated with the accomplishments of the German and French schools with regard to the rhetorical character of Hebrews. Scholars such as George W. Buchanan,26 Harold W. Attridge,27 and Craig R. Koester28 applied rhetorical criticism and frequently disregarded the rather simplistic structural solutions of the German school. They opted instead for a five-partite structure similar to the French school, albeit on the basis of ancient rhetorical paradigms. In the tradition of Buchanan, the main achievement of the early American school was the rehabilitation of covenant theology in Hebrews, which—beginning with Attridge—expressed itself in a dual covenantal-Christological emphasis. Notwithstanding the discovery of Jewish covenant theology, their method of rhetorical criticism—except for that of Buchanan, a Jewish scholar—focused more on Hellenistic-Roman traditions at the expense of Hellenistic-Jewish literary traditions. Probably due to the triumph of pragmatics in the context of structural and poststructural linguistics since the late 1980s, members of the younger American school have further elaborated the rhetoricity of Hebrews first postulated by the early school. Scholars such as Linda Lloyd Neeley,29 George H. Guthrie,30 Kenneth Schenck,31 and most recently Cynthia Long Westfall32 have applied discourse analysis or text-linguistics and narrative criticism with its particular interest in the rhetorical effect of the text on its addressees. Another group of younger scholars—such as John Dunnill (cultural anthropology),33

26 George W. Buchanan, To the Hebrews: Translation, Comment and Conclusions (AB 36; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1972). 27 Harold W. Attridge, The Epistle to the Hebrews: A Commentary on the Epistle to the Hebrews (Hermeneia; Philadelphia, Pa.: Fortress, 1989). 28 Craig R. Koester, Hebrews: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (AB 36; New York: Doubleday, 2001). 29 Linda Lloyd Neeley, “A Discourse Analysis of Hebrews,” Occasional Papers in Translation and Textlinguistics 3–4 (1987) 1–146. 30 George H. Guthrie, The Structure of Hebrews: A Text-Linguistic Analysis (Biblical Studies Library; Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 1998). 31 Kenneth Schenck, Understanding the Book of Hebrews: The Story Behind the Sermon (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox, 2003). 32 Cynthia Long Westfall, A Discourse Analysis of the Letter to the Hebrews: The Relationship between Form and Meaning (Library of New Testament Studies 297; London: T&T Clark International, 2005). 33 John Dunnill, Covenant and Sacrifice in the Letter to the Hebrews (Society for New Testament Studies Monograph Series 75; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

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David A. deSilva (socio-rhetorical criticism),34 and Ellen Bradshaw Aitken (politicalideological criticism)35—has applied methods of nonliterary structuralism. With the exception of a few approaches adopted by female scholars such as Mary Rose D’Angelo,36 Cynthia Briggs Kittredge,37 Ulrike Wagener,38 and Gabriella Gelardini,39 who apply methodological insights from poststructuralism—namely feminist biblical hermeneutics—Hebrews scholarship, as might have become clear, remains a stronghold of structural methods. While taking into account that it is a method that generates a structure and a structure that generates one or multiple textual centers, that is, main theological emphases, what can we learn from these three schools with regard to the structure of Hebrews? Methods The demarcation of texts requires a method. We see such a method even applied in antiquity, for instance, considering the kephalaia, the practice of inserting titles into manuscripts. I mention this because not every Hebrews scholar considered it necessary—James Moffatt and his colleague Theodore H. Robinson, for instance, explicitly opted for an agnostic approach.40 The application of methods ought to be explicit. Astonishingly, most scholars fail to address what seems obvious, instead they apply their methods implicitly, especially in relation to thematic criticism. The application of a method must be thorough. For instance, while most thematic approaches demarcate subsections, they frequently neglect to demonstrate the relation or the logic linking of certain subsections to a section and of certain sections to a main section.

34 David A. deSilva, Perseverance in Gratitude: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary on the Epistle “to the Hebrews” (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2000). 35 Ellen Bradshaw Aitken, “Portraying the Temple in Stone and Text: The Arch of Titus and the Epistle to the Hebrews,” in Hebrews: Contemporary Methods, New Insights (ed. Gabriella Gelardini; BINS 75; Leiden: Brill, 2005) 131–48. 36 Mary Rose D’Angelo, “Hebrews,” in The Women’s Bible Commentary (ed. Carol A. Newsom and Sharon H. Ringe; Louisville, Ky.: Westminster/John Knox, 1992) 364–67. 37 Cynthia Briggs Kittredge, “Hebrews,” in A Feminist Commentary (vol. 2 of Searching the Scriptures; ed. Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza; 2 vols.; 2d ed.; New York: Crossroad, 1997–1998) 2:428–52. 38 Ulrike Wagener, “Brief an die HebräerInnen. Fremde in der Welt,” in Kompendium Feministische Bibelauslegung (ed. Luise Schottroff and Marie-Therese Wacker; rev. ed.; Darmstadt: WBG, 2003) 683–93. 39 Gelardini, “Verhärtet eure Herzen nicht,” 193–99, 237–45, 281–86, 321–24, 349–51, 383–84. 40 James Moffatt, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistle to the Hebrews (International Critical Commentary; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1975); Theodore H. Robinson, The Epistle to the Hebrews (Moffat New Testament Commentary; 7th ed.; London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1953).

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The application of multiple methods is part of common sense in Hebrews scholarship. One of the first scholars to demonstrate this was Walter G. Übelacker (1989).41 The application of multiple methods, however, must be performed in a transparent and comprehensible manner, something that is lacking in some sociorhetorical and textlinguistic approaches. Only interpretations that disclose their underlying presuppositions and the various analytical and interpretive steps taken are fair and ethical. The choice of a method or methods must consider the function that it or they ought to serve. Thus, thematic and/or literary-rhetorical criticism is useful if the focus lies on textual logic and structure. Discourse analysis best serves a pragmatic interest, that is, an interest in the addressee. A joint textual and pragmatic focus calls for the application of both methods (and possibly even of additional methods). A thorough understanding of the text remains indispensable, and all findings arrived at through the application of various complex methods must ultimately measure up to the text. Structures Current Hebrews scholarship assumes the integrity of the text. Most scholars have thus proposed a text center or—beginning with Vanhoye—a concentric three- or five-partite structure on the basis of production aesthetics.42 With the exception of Westfall,43 all scholars—Vanhoye,44 Neeley,45 Guthrie,46 Gelardini,47 as well as John W. Welch48—who have undertaken detailed structural analyses, have observed symmetries on the macrostructural level; numerous scholars, moreover, have observed symmetries on the microstructural level. Without any doubt, however, Hebrews scholarship owes the most fruitful impact regarding structure to Vanhoye, and subsequent scholarship is strongly advised not to dismiss his original insight of a concentric composition. By contrast, both the beginning and the end of the supposed centric part remain subject to dispute. Simplistically speaking, the largest group of scholars holds that the center commences either in Heb 4:14, arguing mostly for a wide-spanning

41 Walter G. Übelacker, Der Hebräerbrief als Appell. Untersuchungen zu exordium, narratio und postscriptum (Hebr 1–2 und 13,22–25) (Coniectanea biblica, New Testament 21; Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International, 1989). 42 Vanhoye, La structure littéraire de l’épître aux Hébreux. 43 Westfall, A Discourse Analysis of the Letter to the Hebrews, 11, 21. 44 Vanhoye, La structure littéraire de l’épître aux Hébreux, 59 and passim. 45 Neeley, “A Discourse Analysis of Hebrews,” 61–62. 46 Guthrie, The Structure of Hebrews, 144 and passim. 47 Gelardini, “Verhärtet eure Herzen nicht,” 80–83, 353–57 and passim. 48 John W. Welch, “Chiasmus in the New Testament,” in Chiasmus in Antiquity: Structures, Analyses, Exegesis (ed. idem.; Hildesheim: Gerstenberg, 1981) 211–49, esp. 220–21.

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inclusion with a correspondence between Heb 4:(11)14–16 and 10:19–23(25),49 or in Heb 7:1. Correspondingly for most scholars, the centric section ends either in chapter 10 at verse 18—or in chapter 12 at verse 29. These scholars usually perceive the climax somewhere in the central section in either chapter 8 or 9. Interestingly however, those three scholars, who have applied discourse analysis—Neeley, Guthrie, and Westfall—all identify the climax in the final section or rather in Heb 12:18–24(29).50 The structural proposals presented so far seem to fall short in one or several of the following areas: the correspondence between structure and content, the relation between structure and the many and important quotations from the Hebrew Bible, and the correspondence between structure and genre on the basis of ancient production and reception aesthetics. This seems odd, especially in light of the fact that scholars by and large perceive the theological message of Hebrews as a unity. Main Theological Emphases Generally speaking, Hebrews scholarship has overcome Christocentric exclusivity with regard to the choice of its main theological emphasis. Covenant theology in particular has attracted, and quite rightly continues to attract, growing attention, among others in the work of Attridge, Dunnill, Koester, Knut Backhaus, and Gelardini.51 Certain methods and their resulting structures do not necessarily produce a typical theological emphasis. For instance, Thien’s five-partite structure emphasizes paraenesis, 52 and Eduard Riggenbach’s three-partite structure highlighted Christology.53 Rather, a scholar’s particular milieu or context would appear to influence where he or she places the main theological emphasis. Along these lines, it is hardly accidental that the French-Italian Catholic context promotes a high-priest Christology up to this day, or that paraenesis is advanced mainly by scholars based in post-Second World War Germany, and that a Jewish scholar, Buchanan, was the first to propose covenant theology in the mostly Protestant American context since the 1970s. Guthrie, The Structure of Hebrews, 76–89; Westfall, A Discourse Analysis of the Letter to the Hebrews, xii, 136–37, 230–40. 50 Neeley, “A Discourse Analysis of Hebrews,” 41, 51; Guthrie, Structure of Hebrews, 143; Westfall, A Discourse Analysis of the Letter to the Hebrews, 301. 51 Attridge, The Epistle to the Hebrews; Dunnill, Covenant and Sacrifice in the Letter to the Hebrews; Koester, Hebrews; Knut Backhaus, Der Neue Bund und das Werden der Kirche. Die Diatheke-Deutung des Hebräerbriefs im Rahmen der frühchristlichen Theologiegeschichte (Neutestamentliche Abhandlungen 29; Münster: Aschendorff, 1996); Gelardini, “Verhärtet eure Herzen nicht.” 52 Thien, “Analyse de l’épître aux Hébreux,” 79, 86. 53 Eduard Riggenbach, Der Brief an die Hebräer (Leipzig: Deichert, 1922; repr. Wuppertal: Brockhaus, 1987) xxiii–xxiv. 49

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In conclusion, the following new proposal takes into account the three great accomplishments of twentieth-century Hebrews scholarship: the concentric structure of the French school, the homiletic form of the German school, and the covenant theology of the American school (see History). The method applied to generate the structure I consider to be explicit, thorough, transparent and considerate of the function that it ought to serve (see Methods). The subsequently generated structure demonstrates the correspondence between structure and content, between structure and the central quotations, and between structure and homiletic form (see Structures). And finally, the resulting theological emphasis is considered logical and corresponding to method and structure (see Main Theological Emphases).

■ Structural Analysis: A New Proposal The following structural analysis and subsequent proposal is only one out of seven methodological steps that I took in interpreting Hebrews.54 Although I started out from structure, this analysis continually developed, along with its interpretation, as I proceeded through the various steps. The results allowed me additionally to draw conclusions between structure and homiletic form.55 Method Presupposing the text’s integrity, the structural analysis served the function of gaining an initial interpretive understanding of the text and its compositional logic. This approach helped to transcend—where necessary—the medieval chapter and verse divisions. From the viewpoint of structural text theory, a text is a text because the elements of the linguistic expressions contained therein refer to each other, and they can only be understand in relation to each other as well as to the immediate intertext.56 In my first reading—the structural analysis—I applied a combined method, which allowed me to demarcate sections in respect to content (including the central quotations) and form: first and foremost, I paid attention to three thematic aspects of content, and second, I looked at three formal, literary-rhetorical aspects. With regard to the thematic aspects, and in relation to keywords (or Leitworte), I first found myself in agreement with what Nauck—summarizing other commentators—termed “stufenweises Vorgehen” (step-by-step action).57 This expression refers to a step-by-step composition or procedure, which affords a twodimensional view of the text. This scheme named Anadiplosis refers to a repetition of the final word (or phrase, or clause, or concept) of the previous line (or phrase, 54 For a comprehensive overview of my methodological and structural considerations, see Gelardini, “Verhärtet eure Herzen nicht,” 79–84, 193–99, 203–6, 249–54, 288–96, 326–35, 352–59. 55 Gelardini, “Verhärtet eure Herzen nicht,” 87–180. 56 Wilhelm Egger, Methodenlehre zum Neuen Testament. Einführung in linguistische und historischkritische Methoden (3d ed.; Freiburg i.B.: Herder, 1993) 28–33. 57 Nauck, “Zum Aufbau des Hebräerbriefes,” 201–2.

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or clause) at the beginning of the next one. As a well-described rhetorical figure of speech, even within the New Testament, it often appears repeated, and is hence termed anadiplosis iterata.58 We often find it combined with climax and/or chiasm.59 Second, I paid much attention to the intertext and especially to the longer quotations in Hebrews 3–4 and 8 along with its interpretations and applications. Hereby I wanted especially to take into account the story from Numeri 13–14 to which Hebrews 3–4 referred by means of Psalm 95. Both author and addressee recall the story in the absence of a numerical reference system not just as narrative but as a narrative in context. Thus, the breaking in Kadesh-Barnea of the renewed Sinai covenant between God and the exodus generation lead to their disinheritance of the land. Third, I paid attention to the specific text-semantic and narrative logic. Regarding literary-rhetorical aspects, I first paid attention to hook words in their natural relationship to the rhetorical figure of anadiplosis iterata, second to thematic transitions (rather than changes in genre), and finally to symmetries on the microstructural level, that is, with regard to concentric circles of thought (Gedankenkreise), and to symmetries on the macrostructural level. Macrostructure of Hebrews The application of a combined method, an approach that serves to understand the logic of the text, resulted in a macrostructure consisting of a five-partite twodimensional and concentric step-by-step arrangement with a climax at the center along with rhetorical accents at the beginning and at the end of the text. A Heb 1:1–2:18

B Heb 3:1–6:20

Elevation and Faithlessness abasement of of fathers and the Son sons

C Heb 7:1–10:18

B´ Heb 10:19– 12:3

A´ Heb 12:4– 13:25

New covenant and cult Faith of sons institution and fathers

Abasement and elevation of the sons

Covenant e Heavenly tabernacle 8:1–6

Heavenly tabernacle e´

d Curtain 6:13–20 9:11–14 10:19–23 Curtain d´ c Invisible 4:12–13 b Look at Jesus 3:1–6 a Escape 2:1–4 1:1–4

11:1–3 Visible c´ 12:1–3 Look at Jesus b´ 12:25–29 Escape a´

13:20–25

58 Walter Bühlmann and Karl Scherer, Sprachliche Stilfiguren der Bibel. Von Assonanz bis Zahlenspruch. Ein Nachschlagewerk (2d ed.; Giessen: Brunnen, 1994) 26–29, at 28. 59 Wilfred G. E. Watson, “Chiastic Patterns in Biblical Hebrew Poetry,” in Chiasmus in Antiquity: Structures, Analyses, Exegesis (ed. John W. Welch; Hildesheim: Gerstenberg, 1981) 118–68, esp. 149–58.

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Following the diagram above, close analysis revealed the subsequent concentric structure on the horizontal macro level. A. Heb 1:1–2:18: The first main section (= A) compares the Son with the angels in chapter 1, in explicit favor—in quality and locally—of the elevated Son. The addressed abasement of the Son under the angels in chapter 2 serves to save the sons. The keywords “Son” and “angels” establish the coherence of this first main section, which we consider structurally the least disputed part in Hebrews. B. Heb 3:1–6:20: The intertext of Numbers 13–14 dominates the second, more heterogeneous main section (= B). That text compares the faithless fathers at Kadesh-Barnea in chapters 3, 4, and 6,60 that is, their disobedience toward the law as specified in the Sinai covenant, with the sons and addressees in a warning manner. The keywords “disobedience” and “faith” establish the coherence of this main section. One may wish to contest my suggested coherence of this main section by pointing out the introduction of the Son as a high priest in chapters 4 and 5. By way of response, I would argue that Hebrews 3 starts out by comparing the Son to Moses, both of whom are deemed “faithful.” According to the intertext from the Septuagint, Moses’ faithfulness comes from the fact that as the servant of God’s house (the fathers), he once again atones for the sin(s) of the fathers at KadeshBarnea and thereby saves them from impending death. This deed qualifies him as “faithful.” Similarly, as introduced in chapter 2, Jesus’ faithfulness also arises from his atoning for and thereby saving of God’s house (addressees) from impending death; this action qualifies him as “faithful” and “obedient.” Hence the talk about the Son in chapters 4 and 5 deals with his predisposition, his aptness—his “faithfulness” and “obedience”—for the atoning work discussed in section C. The theme of “faith(fulness)” and “disobedience” belongs to section B and does not appear in section C at all but reappears in the corresponding section B´. C. Heb 7:1–10:18: The third and central main section (= C) introduces God’s new covenant in chapter 8 as mediated through his Son. Since a covenant by necessity introduces or requires a cult institution, cultic vocabulary, located mainly in various semantic fields, such as “priesthood” (ch. 7), “sanctuary” (chs. 8 and 9), and atoning “sacrifice” (chs. 9 and 10) establishes the coherence of this central main section. B´. Heb 10:19–12:3: The fourth main section (= B´) again compares the faithful Son and faithful sons in spe in chapter 10 with the faithful fathers in chapter 11. The keyword “faith,” establishes the coherence of this main section and hence establishes its inverse correspondence with its sister paragraph B. A´. Heb 12:4–13:25: After introducing atonement, the fifth and last main section (= A´) addresses the abasement of the sons via discipline in chapter 12 and their 60 The authors of the following articles convincingly demonstrate that Hebrews 6 forms an integral part of the interpretation of the quotations in Hebrews 3–4: Randall C. Gleason, “The Old Testament Background of the Warning in Hebrews 6:4–8,” Bibliotheca Sacra 155 (1998) 62–91; Dave Mathewson, “Reading Heb 6:4–6 in light of the Old Testament,” Wesleyan Theological Journal 61 (1999) 209–25.

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elevation—locally and in quality—in chapters 12 and 13. The keywords “sons” and “angels” establish the coherence of this main section and hence establishes its inverse correspondence with its sister paragraph A. Close analysis revealed the following concentric structure on the vertical macro level: a-a´. Heb 2:1–4 and 12:25–29: Only the transitional sections a-a´ contain the word “escape” (Heb 2:3a; 12:25b: INOJIYZK[). b-b´. Heb 3:1–6 and 12:1–3: Only the transitional sections b-b´ contain the invitation to look up at Jesus (Heb 3:1; 12:2). c-c´. Heb 4:12–13 and 11:1–3: Only the transitional sections c-c´ contain the stem JEMZR (Heb 4:13a; 11:3b), which stands in the context of the word of God once as “invisible” and once as “visible.” d-d´. Heb 6:13–20 and 10:19–23: Only the transitional sections d-d´—apart from one other occurrence (Heb 9:3)— contain the word “curtain” (Heb 6:19b; 10:20a: OEXETIZXEWQE). e-e´. Heb 8:1–6 and 9:11–14: Finally, only the transitional sections e-e´ address the heavenly tabernacle (Heb 8:2a; 9:11a: WOLRLZ). Heb 4:(11)14–16 and 10:19–23(25)?: It has become evident that there is more than just one wide-spanning inclusion (see Structures), and that the passages Heb 4:(11)14–16 and 10:19–23(25) fail to correspond in the above scheme. While they may do so on the surface, they do not correspond on a deeper structural level. At least four criteria support my thesis: a semantic, a compositional, a contextual, and an intertextual one.61 Microstructure of Hebrews 3:1–6:20 To display the microstructural symmetries existing throughout the entire book would go beyond the scope of this essay. Nonetheless, I would like to demonstrate how I generated the three formal, literary-rhetorical aspects inductively by means of the concentric circles of thought (along with hook words and transitions) or the so-called “waves” (ondes concentriques) that Ceslas Spicq62 had already intuited in the 1950s. The reader may find it surprising to see how nicely one concentric

61 1) Semantic criterion: Heb 6:13–20 has many semantic overlaps with Heb 10:19–23, of which the most important was mentioned, the “curtain.” 2) Compositional criterion: the two transitional sections flank the central and exclusively cultic section, which does not contain the keyword “faith.” 3) Contextual criterion: Heb 6:13–20 is preceded by two themes that immediately follow Heb 10:19–23 in inverse order. Hebrews 6:9–12 as well as 10:24–25 contain the “works of love,” and Heb 6:4–8 as well as 10:26–31 contain the stern message that for those once enlightened and sinning again neither repentance nor sin sacrifice is left. 4) Intertextual criterion: the neglected renewal of repentance in Hebrews 6 is related to the intertext in Num 13–14; Hebrews 6 hence also pertains to the interpretation of Ps 95:7–11 in Heb 3:7–11. 62 Ceslas Spicq, Introduction (vol. 1 of L’épître aux Hébreux; 2 vols.; Études bibliques; Paris: Gabalda, 1952) 1:32.

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thought circle lines up to the next one. This occurs throughout the entire book, including that main section considered the most heterogeneous out of all (= B): 3:1–6 Chiastic transitional element: look up to the faithful Jesus 3:7–4:11 Section: Faithless fathers 3:7–11 Chiastic subsection, quotation: Ps 95:7–11 The father’s rebellion 3:12–19 Chiastic subsection, interpretation/application a: warning of such rebellion 4:1–11 Chiastic subsection, interpretation/application b: thus, do not miss to enter rest 4:12–13 Chiastic transitional element: for nothing is hidden from the judging word of God 4:14–6:12 Section: Faithless sons 4:14–5:10 Chiastic subsection, interpretation/application c: faithless people need high priest’s redemptive interaction 5:11–6:12 Chiastic subsection, interpretation/application d: repeated sin after such redemption leaves only godly judgment 6:13–20 Chiastic transitional element: thus, hold on to God’s oath given to Abraham that reaches behind the curtain.

The following chart displays the symmetries in each element, the transitions and the hook words linking these elements, and the semantic overlaps occurring only in the corresponding sister paragraphs: Hook words 3:1–6 Chiastic transitional element1 3:1¶3UIRENHIPJSME_KMSMOPLZWI[b INTSYVERMZSYQIZXSGSMOEXERSLZWEXIXSR ENTSZWXSPSROEMENVGMIVIZEXLDbS.QSPSKMZEb L.Q[DR©-LWSYDR 3:2TMWXSRS?RXEX[DTSMLZWERXMEYNXSR[.bOEM 1[Y"WLDbINR[S_P[ŸX[DSM?O[EYNXSYD 3:3TPIMZSRSbKEVSY`XSbHSZ\LbTEVE 1[Y"WLDRLN\MZ[XEMOEU©S_WSRTPIMZSREXMQLR I?GIMXSYDSM?OSYS.OEXEWOIYEZWEbEYNXSZR 3:4TEDbKEVSM@OSbOEXEWOIYEZ^IXEMY.TSZ XMRSbS.HITEZRXEOEXEWOIYEZWEbUISZb 3:5OEM1[Y"WLDbQIRTMWXSbINRS_P[X[D SM?O[EYNXSYD[.bUIVEZT[RIMNbQEVXYZVMSR X[DRPEPLULWSQIZR[R 3:6'VMWXSbHI[.bYM.SbINTMXSRSM@OSR EYNXSYDSY`SM@OSZbINWQIRL.QIMDbINEZR[TIV] XLRTEVVLWMZEROEMXSOEYZGLQEXLDb INPTMZHSbOEXEZWG[QIR

2:17; 3:1 high priest

A: Heb 3:1 Jesus B: Heb 3:2 faithful Moses, house C: Heb 3:3 builder C´: Heb 3:4 built B´: Heb 3:5 Moses faithful, house A´: Heb 3:6 Christ

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Hook words 3:7–4:11 Section2 3:7–11 Chiastic subsection 3:7(MSZOEU[bPIZKIMXSTRIYDQEXSE_KMSRWLZQIVSRINER XLDbJ[RLDbEYNXSYDENOSYZWLXI 3:8QLWOPLVYZRLXIXEbOEVHMZEbY.Q[DR[.bINRX[D TEVETMOVEWQ[DOEXEXLRL.QIZVERXSYDTIMVEWQSYDINR XLDINVLZQ[ 3:9SY`INTIMZVEWERSM.TEXIZVIbY.Q[DRINRHSOMQEWMZE OEMIM@HSRXEI?VKEQSY 3:10XIWWIVEZOSRXEI?XLHMSTVSW[ZGUMWEXLD KIRIEDXEYZXLOEMIM@TSRENIMTPER[DRXEMXLDOEVHMZE EYNXSMHISYNOI?KR[WERXEbS.HSYZbQSY 3:11[.b[?QSWEINRXLDSNVKLDQSYIMNIMNWIPIYZWSRXEMIMNb XLROEXEZTEYWMZRQSY 3:12–19 Chiastic subsection 3:12&PIZTIXIENHIPJSMZQLZTSXII?WXEMI?R XMRMY.Q[DROEVHMZETSRLVEENTMWXMZEbINRX[D ENTSWXLDREMENTSUISYD^[DRXSb 3:13ENPPETEVEOEPIMDXII.EYXSYbOEU© I.OEZWXLRL.QIZVERE?GVMbSY`XSWLZQIVSR OEPIMDXEMM_REQLWOPLVYRULDXMbIN\Y.Q[DR ENTEZXLXLDbE.QEVXMZEb– 3:14QIZXSGSMKEVXSYD'VMWXSYDKIKSZREQIR INEZRTIVXLRENVGLRXLDbY.TSWXEZWI[bQIZGVM XIZPSYbFIFEMZEROEXEZWG[QIR– 3:15INRX[DPIZKIWUEMWLZQIVSRINERXLDb J[RLDbEYNXSYDENOSYZWLXIQLWOPLVYZRLXIXEb OEVHMZEbY.Q[DR[.bINRX[DTEVETMOVEWQ[D 3:16XMZRIbKEVENOSYZWERXIbTEVITMZOVERER¬ ENPP©SYNTEZRXIbSM.IN\IPUSZRXIbIN\%MNKYZTXSY HME1[Y"WIZ[b¬ 3:17XMZW MRHITVSW[ZGUMWIRXIWWIVEZOSRXE I?XLSYNGMXSMDbE.QEVXLZWEWMR[`RXEO[DPE I?TIWIRINRXLDINVLZQ[¬ 3:18XMZW MRHI[?QSWIRQLIMNWIPIYZWIWUEM IMNbXLROEXEZTEYWMREYNXSYDIMNQLXSMDb ENTIMULZWEWMR¬ 3:19OEMFPIZTSQIRS_XMSYNOLNHYRLZULWER IMNWIPUIMDRHM©ENTMWXMZER

3:5; 3:12 faithful, faithless

A: Heb 3:7–8 hearts B: Heb 3:8 testing B´: Heb 3:9 tested A´: Heb 3:10–11 heart

A: Heb 3:12 unbelieving B: Heb 3:13 sin C: Heb 3:14–15 listen, rebellion C´: Heb 3:16 listened, rebelled B´: Heb 3:17–18 sinned A´: Heb 3:19 unbelief

GABRIELLA GELARDINI

4:1–11 Chiastic subsection 4:1*SFLU[DQIRSY@RQLZTSXIOEXEPIMTSQIZRLb INTEKKIPMZEbIMNWIPUIMDRIMNbXLROEXEZTEYWMR EYNXSYDHSOLDXMbIN\Y.Q[DRY.WXIVLOIZREM 4:2OEMKEZVINWQIRIYNLKKIPMWQIZRSMOEUEZTIV OENOIMDRSMENPP©SYNO[NJIZPLWIRS.PSZKSbXLDbENOSLDb INOIMZRSYbQLWYKOIOIVEWQIZRSYbXLDTMZWXIMXSMDb ENOSYZWEWMR 4:3)MNWIVGSZQIUEKEVIMNb[XLR]OEXEZTEYWMR SM.TMWXIYZWERXIbOEU[bIM?VLOIR[.b[?QSWE INRXLDSNVKLDQSYIMNIMNWIPIYZWSRXEMIMNbXLR OEXEZTEYWMZRQSYOEMZXSMX[DRI?VK[RENTS OEXEFSPLDbOSZWQSYKIRLUIZRX[R 4:4IM?VLOIRKEZVTSYTIVMXLDbI.FHSZQLbSY_X[bOEM OEXIZTEYWIRS.UISbINRXLDL.QIZVEXLDI.FHSZQLENTS TEZRX[RX[DRI?VK[REYNXSYD 4:5OEMINRXSYZX[TEZPMRIMNIMNWIPIYZWSRXEMIMNb XLROEXEZTEYWMZRQSY 4:6INTIMSY@RENTSPIMZTIXEMXMREbIMNWIPUIMDRIMNb EYNXLZROEMSM.TVSZXIVSRIYNEKKIPMWUIZRXIbSYNO IMNWLDPUSRHM©ENTIMZUIMER 4:7TEZPMRXMRES.VMZ^IML.QIZVERWLZQIVSRINR (EYMHPIZK[RQIXEXSWSYDXSRGVSZRSROEU[b TVSIMZVLXEMWLZQIVSRINERXLDbJ[RLDbEYNXSYD ENOSYZWLXIQLWOPLVYZRLXIXEbOEVHMZEbY.Q[DR 4:8IMNKEVEYNXSYb©-LWSYDbOEXIZTEYWIRSYNOEAR TIVME?PPLbINPEZPIMQIXEXEYDXEL.QIZVEb 4:9E?VEENTSPIMZTIXEMWEFFEXMWQSbX[DPE[DXSYD UISYD 4:10S.KEVIMNWIPU[RIMNbXLROEXEZTEYWMR EYNXSYDOEMEYNXSbOEXIZTEYWIRENTSX[DR I?VK[REYNXSYD[_WTIVENTSX[DRMNHMZ[RS.UISZb 4:117TSYHEZW[QIRSY@RIMNWIPUIMDRIMNbINOIMZRLRXLR OEXEZTEYWMRM_REQLINRX[DEYNX[DXMbY.TSHIMZKQEXM TIZWLXLDbENTIMUIMZEb

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A: Heb 4:1 enter his rest B: Heb 4:2–4 rest, rested C: Heb 4:4 day D: Heb 4:5 enter D´: Heb 4:6 enter C´: Heb 4:7 day B´: Heb 4:8–10 rested, rest A´: Heb 4:11 enter this rest

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Hook words 4:12–13 Chiastic transitional element3 4:12>[DRKEVS.PSZKSbXSYDUISYDOEM INRIVKLbOEMXSQ[ZXIVSbYNTIVTEDWER QEZGEMVERHMZWXSQSROEMHMM"ORSYZQIRSbE?GVM QIVMWQSYD]YGLDbOEMTRIYZQEXSbE.VQ[DRXI OEMQYIP[DROEMOVMXMOSbINRUYQLZWI[ROEM INRRSM[DROEVHMZEb 4:13OEMSYNOI?WXMROXMZW MbENJERLbINR[ZTMSR EYNXSYDTEZRXEHIKYQREOEMXIXVEGLPMWQIZRE XSMDbSNJUEPQSMDbEYNXSYDTVSbSaRL.QMDRS.PSZKSb Hook words 4:14–6:12 Section4 4:14–5:10 Chiastic subsection 4:14µ)GSRXIbSY@RENVGMIVIZEQIZKER HMIPLPYUSZXEXSYbSYNVERSYZb©-LWSYDR XSRYM.SRXSYDUISYDOVEX[DQIRXLDb S.QSPSKMZEb 4:15SYNKEVI?GSQIRENVGMIVIZE QLHYREZQIRSRWYQTEULDWEMXEMDb ENWUIRIMZEMbL.Q[DRTITIMVEWQIZRSR HIOEXETEZRXEOEU©S.QSMSZXLXEG[VMb E.QEVXMZEb 4:16TVSWIVG[ZQIUESY@RQIXE TEVVLWMZEbX[DUVSZR[XLDb GEZVMXSbM_REPEZF[QIRI?PISbOEM GEZVMRIY_V[QIRIMNbIY?OEMVSR FSLZUIMER 5:14EDbKEVENVGMIVIYbIN\ ENRUV[ZT[RPEQFERSZQIRSbY.TIV ENRUV[ZT[ROEUMZWXEXEMXETVSbXSR UISZRM_RETVSWJIZVLH[DVEZXIOEM UYWMZEbY.TIVE.QEVXM[DR 5:2QIXVMSTEUIMDRHYREZQIRSbXSMDb ENKRSSYDW MROEMTPER[QIZRSMbINTIM OEMEYNXSbTIVMZOIMXEMENWUIZRIMER 5:3OEMHM©EYNXLRSNJIMZPIMOEU[b TIVMXSYDPESYDSY_X[bOEMTIVMEYNXSYD TVSWJIZVIMRTIVME.QEVXM[DR

4:7; 4:12 heart

A: Heb 4:12 the word B: Heb 4:12 soul and spirit B´: Heb 4:12 desires and thoughts A´: Heb 4:13 the word

4:12; 6:5 word of God

A: Heb 4:14 high priest B: Heb 4:15–16 suffer with C: Heb 5:1–4 high priest taken from men does not take honor on his own C´: Heb 5:5–6 Christ did not glorify himself as high priest B´: Heb 5:7–8 suffered A´: Heb 5:9–10 high priest

GABRIELLA GELARDINI

Hook words 5:4OEMSYNGI.EYX[DXMbPEQFEZRIM XLRXMQLRENPPEOEPSYZQIRSbY.TS XSYDUISYDOEU[ZWTIVOEM©%EV[ZR 5:53Y_X[bOEMS.'VMWXSbSYNG I.EYXSRINHSZ\EWIRKIRLULDREM ENVGMIVIZEENPP©S.PEPLZWEbTVSb EYNXSZRYM.SZbQSYIM@WYZINK[ WLZQIVSRKIKIZRRLOEZWI 5:6OEU[bOEMINRI.XIZV[PIZKIMWY M.IVIYbIMNbXSREMN[DREOEXEXLRXEZ\MR 1IPGMWIZHIO 5:7SabINRXEMDbL.QIZVEMbXLDb WEVOSbEYNXSYDHILZWIMbXIOEM M.OIXLVMZEbTVSbXSRHYREZQIRSR W[Z^IMREYNXSRINOUEREZXSYQIXE OVEYKLDbMNWGYVEDbOEMHEOVYZ[R TVSWIRIZKOEbOEMIMNWEOSYWUIMb ENTSXLDbIYNPEFIMZEb 5:8OEMZTIV[ARYM.SZbI?QEUIRENJ©[`R I?TEUIRXLRY.TEOSLZR 5:9OEMXIPIM[UIMbINKIZRIXSTEDW MR XSMDbY.TEOSYZSYWMREYNX[DEM?XMSb W[XLVMZEbEMN[RMZSY 5:10TVSWEKSVIYUIMbY.TSXSYD UISYDENVGMIVIYbOEXEXLRXEZ\MR 1IPGMWIZHIO

5:11–6:12 Chiastic subsection 5:114IVMSY`TSPYbL.QMDRS.PSZKSbOEM HYWIVQLZRIYXSbPIZKIMRINTIMR[UVSM KIKSZREXIXEMDbENOSEMDb 5:12OEMKEVSNJIMZPSRXIbIM@REMHMHEZWOEPSM HMEXSRGVSZRSRTEZPMRGVIMZERI?GIXIXSYD HMHEZWOIMRY.QEDbXMREXEWXSMGIMDEXLDbENVGLDb X[DRPSKMZ[RXSYDUISYDOEMKIKSZREXIGVIMZER I?GSRXIbKEZPEOXSb[OEM]SYNWXIVIEDb XVSJLDb 5:13TEDbKEVS.QIXIZG[RKEZPEOXSbE?TIMVSb PSZKSYHMOEMSWYZRLbRLZTMSbKEZVINWXMR

4:12; 6:5 word of God

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5:14XIPIMZ[RHIZINWXMRL.WXIVIEXVSJLZX[DR HMEXLRI_\MRXEEMNWULXLZVMEKIKYQREWQIZRE INGSZRX[RTVSbHMEZOVMWMROEPSYDXIOEM OEOSYD 6:1(MSENJIZRXIbXSRXLDbENVGLDbXSYD'VMWXSYD PSZKSRINTMXLRXIPIMSZXLXEJIV[ZQIUEQL TEZPMRUIQIZPMSROEXEFEPPSZQIRSMQIXERSMZEb ENTSRIOV[DRI?VK[ROEMTMZWXI[bINTMUISZR 6:2FETXMWQ[DRHMHEGLDbINTMUIZWI[ZbXIGIMV[DR ENREWXEZWI[ZbXIRIOV[DROEMOVMZQEXSb EMN[RMZSY 6:3OEMXSYDXSTSMLZWSQIRINEZRTIVINTMXVIZTL S.UISZb 6:4©%HYZREXSRKEVXSYbE_TE\J[XMWUIZRXEb KIYWEQIZRSYbXIXLDbH[VIEDbXLDb A: Heb 5:11 sluggish INTSYVERMZSYOEMQIXSZGSYbKIRLUIZRXEb B: Heb 5:12–14 beginning TRIYZQEXSbE.KMZSY C: Heb 6:1–3 works 6:5OEMOEPSRKIYWEQIZRSYbUISYDV.LDQE D: Heb 6:4–6 tasted once HYREZQIMbXIQIZPPSRXSbEMN[DRSb D´: Heb 6:7–8 drank often 6:6OEMTEVETIWSZRXEbTEZPMRENREOEMRMZ^IMR C´: Heb 6:9–10 work B´ Heb 6:11 end IMNbQIXEZRSMERENREWXEYVSYDRXEbI.EYXSMDbXSR A´ Heb 6:12 sluggish YM.SRXSYDUISYDOEMTEVEHIMKQEXMZ^SRXEb 6:7KLDKEVL.TMSYDWEXSRINT©EYNXLDbINVGSZQIRSR TSPPEZOMbY.IXSROEMXMZOXSYWEFSXEZRLR IY?UIXSRINOIMZRSMbHM©SY‡bOEMKI[VKIMDXEM QIXEPEQFEZRIMIYNPSKMZEbENTSXSYDUISYD 6:8INOJIZVSYWEHIENOEZRUEbOEMXVMFSZPSYb ENHSZOMQSbOEMOEXEZVEbINKKYZbL`bXSXIZPSbIMNb OEYDW MR 6:94ITIMZWQIUEHITIVMY.Q[DRENKETLXSMZXE OVIMZWWSREOEMINGSZQIREW[XLVMZEbIMNOEM SY_X[bPEPSYDQIR 6:10 SYN KEV E?HMOSb S. UISb INTMPEUIZWUEM XSYD I?VKSY Y.Q[DR OEM XLDb ENKEZTLb L`b INRIHIMZ\EWUI IMNbXSS?RSQEEYNXSYDHMEOSRLZWERXIbXSMDbE.KMZSMb OEMHMEOSRSYDRXIb 6:11INTMUYQSYDQIRHII_OEWXSRY.Q[DRXLREYNXLR INRHIMZORYWUEMWTSYHLRTVSbXLRTPLVSJSVMZER XLDbINPTMZHSbE?GVMXIZPSYb 6:12M_REQLR[UVSMKIZRLWUIQMQLXEMHIX[DRHME TMZWXI[b OEM QEOVSUYQMZEb OPLVSRSQSYZRX[R XEbINTEKKIPMZEb

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Hook words 6:12; 6:15 perseverance, persevering 6:13–20 Chiastic transitional element5 6:138[DKEV©%FVEEQINTEKKIMPEZQIRSbS.UISZb INTIMOEX©SYNHIRSbIM@GIRQIMZ^SRSbSNQSZWEM [?QSWIROEU©I.EYXSY¸ 6:14PIZK[RIMNQLRIYNPSK[DRIYNPSKLZW[WIOEM TPLUYZR[RTPLUYR[DWI 6:15OEMSY_X[bQEOVSUYQLZWEbINTIZXYGIRXLDb A: Heb 6:13 God B: Heb 6:13 promised Abraham INTEKKIPMZEb C: Heb 6:13 swore 6:16E?RUV[TSMKEVOEXEXSYDQIMZ^SRSb C´: Heb 6:16 swear SNQRYZSYWMROEMTEZWLbEYNXSMDbENRXMPSKMZEb B´: Heb 6:17 heirs of promise TIZVEbIMNbFIFEMZ[WMRS.S_VOSb A´: Heb 6:18–20 God 6:17INR[`TIVMWWSZXIVSRFSYPSZQIRSbS.UISb INTMHIMD\EMXSMDbOPLVSRSZQSMbXLDbINTEKKIPMZEb XSENQIXEZUIXSRXLDbFSYPLDbEYNXSYDINQIWMZXIYWIR S_VO[ 6:18M_REHMEHYZSTVEKQEZX[RENQIXEUIZX[R INRSM`bENHYZREXSR]IYZWEWUEM[XSR]UISZR MNWGYVERTEVEZOPLWMRI?G[QIRSM.OEXEJYKSZRXIb OVEXLDWEMXLDbTVSOIMQIZRLbINPTMZHSb 6:19LaR[.bE?KOYVERI?GSQIRXLDb]YGLDb ENWJEPLDXIOEMFIFEMZEROEMIMNWIVGSQIZRLR IMNbXSINW[ZXIVSRXSYDOEXETIXEZWQEXSb 6:20S_TSYTVSZHVSQSbY.TIVL.Q[DRIMNWLDPUIR ©-LWSYDbOEXEXLRXEZ\MR1IPGMWIZHIO ENVGMIVIYbKIRSZQIRSbIMNbXSREMN[DRE 6:20; 7:1 Melchizedek

Notes to the Readings 1. Lexeme occurring only in the transitional elements Heb 3:1–6 and 12:1–3: witness, witnesses (Heb 3:5; 12:1). 2. Lexemes occurring only in the sections Heb 3:7–4:11 and 11:4–40: Egypt (Heb 3:16; 11:26, 27), disobedient/disobedience (Heb 3:18; 4:6, 11; 11:31), David (Heb 4:7; 11:32), saw (Heb 3:9; 11:5, 13, 23), wilderness (Heb 3:8, 17; 11:38), foundation (Heb 4:3; 11:11), left (Heb 4:1; 11:27), people of God (Heb 4:9; 11:25), fall (Heb 3:17; 4:11; 11:30), wander (Heb 3:10; 11:38), come short (Heb 4:1; 11:37), be afraid (Heb 4:1; 11:23, 27). 3. Lexemes occurring only in the transitional elements Heb 4:12–13 and 11:1–3: invisible/visible (Heb 4:13; 11:3), word of God (Heb 4:12; 11:3). 4. Lexemes occurring only in the sections Heb 4:14–6:12 and 10:24–39: love (Heb 6:10; 10:24), judgment (Heb 6:2; 10:27), Son of God (Heb 4:14; 6:6; 10:29), enlightened (Heb 6:4; 10:32), need (Heb 5:12; 10:36).

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5. Lexeme occurring only in the transitional elements Heb 6:13–20 and 10:19– 23: curtain (Heb 6:19; 10:20). Main Theological Emphasis and Interpretation The Center in Section C: The logic of a concentric structure necessarily unfolds from its center. Unlike Vanhoye, I locate the center not in Heb 9:11, with Christ’s high priesthood,63 but instead in Heb 8:7–13 (9:10), which contains God’s promise of a covenant renewal as expressed in the longest quotation of the Hebrew Bible in the New Testament from Jer 31:31–34. Contrary to the opinions of Neeley (Heb 10:19–13:21), Guthrie (Heb 12:18–24), and Westfall (Heb 12:1–28), moreover, the center proposed here does not lie either in Hebrews 12, which issues the invitation to approach the heavenly sanctuary.64 From a pragmatic point of view, we could consider locating the center in Hebrews 12—indeed plausible—and commend the latter three scholars for their analyses. Yet from a logical, structural point of view, the center must lie in Hebrews 8 in which God and not the Son promises a new covenant. This proposal in turn disqualifies a center in Hebrews 9. Rhetorically speaking, this center forms the logical and necessary precondition for the appointment of the Son as mediator and for the invitation to the addressees to approach God’s throne in the aftermath of the high priest’s atoning endeavor. Hence, rather than judging either the one or the other proposed center as flawed, we can—based on the insights from the “linguistic turn”—distinguish the center in Hebrews 12 as the pragmatic and therefore paraenetic one, yet the center in Hebrews 8 as the logical, structural, and therefore theological center. This approach not only allows an interpretative comparison of sister paragraphs but also generates the hermeneutical key that allows us to place all the parts of the book into a logical and coherent whole: Main Section C: This central section speaks of a new covenant inaugurated by God and mediated by Christ. Hence, God, the central persona and considered more important than the Son, initiates the covenant renewal. We can confirm this when analyzing the semantic inventory related to God, which appears slightly higher than that related to the Son. Commentators frequently neglect this fact. Along with the new covenant, this section describes the new—actually old and original (see Exod 25:40 in Heb 8:5)—celestial cult institution. Beautifully reflected in the mountain-like-shaped climactic structure, the passage relates the new covenant to the celestial mount Zion. Relation of Main Section C with B: Chiasm serves not merely an ornamental function, but rather, its power lies in the potential to unify what seems incompatible.65 63

Vanhoye, La structure littéraire de l’épître aux Hébreux, 237, 269. Neeley, “A Discourse Analysis of Hebrews,” 41, 51; Guthrie, The Structure of Hebrews, 143; Westfall, A Discourse Analysis of the Letter to the Hebrews, 301. 65 Rodolphe Gasché, “Über chiastische Umkehrbarkeit (1987),” in Die paradoxe Methapher (ed. Anslem Haverkamp; Edition Suhrkamp 1940: Aesthetica; Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1998) 437–55. 64

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In this chiastic sense, the relation of B—covenant breaking—with C—covenant renewal—appears logical. Both of the long quotations related to the Hebrew Bible express well-established polar concepts in early Jewish texts, liturgy, and culture.66 Relation of Main Section B with A: I did not immediately perceive the relation of B with A, and only extensive intertextual search made clear to me that KadeshBarnea finally ends the renewed Sinai covenant on account of the people’s sin. This one final sin in a series of ten (Num 14:22; cf. also Pss 78; 106), appears most similar to the idolatry with the golden calf committed at Sinai in Exodus 32–34. This context makes plain that the existence of angels occurs as the natural consequence of God’s absence (Exod 33:2–3). Haggadic literature from the first century on widely reflects not only the danger that angels of revenge present for the people but also Moses’ saving role. This narrative structure interlocks Hebrews with the narrative matrix of the Hebrew Bible, it further confers Moses’ office upon Jesus, and vice-versa relates the intended listener to the fathers of the Hebrew Bible. Relation of Main Section A with B´: The understanding of section A leads smoothly over to B´. The faithful fathers and mothers (in past and present) become entitled as “witnesses.” This legal term makes clear that their mentioning before God by Moses in the golden calf pericope (Exod 32:13–14) helps to save the lives of the sinful people. Likewise, the protecting and even salvific function of the faithful fathers in the interests of the sinful people appears also as a well established motive in Hellenistic-Jewish, protorabbinic, and rabbinic literature, beginning with the writings of Philo (see, for instance, Praem. 166). Relation of Main Section B´ with A´: In the latter section (= A´), we see the sons invited to the celestial cult and ethically and legally equipped for an existence under a renewed covenant. I have argued elsewhere that the location of the cult in heaven does not serve supersessionist needs, but rather, liturgical (for instance, the fast day of Tisha be-Av) and/or historical reasons (for instance, the destruction of the second temple in the year 70 C.E., which implies God’s absence on earth and consolidates the broken covenant) might have necessitated this rhetorical strategy.67 In making up for the earthly loss, the author invites his addressees to the one remaining legitimate temple, according to Exod 25:40, which is quoted in Heb 8:5, the celestial and original one to which God withdraws from earth in times of broken covenants. He takes them there step-by-step and relativizes possible apprehensions while empowering them at the same time mentally and spiritually to transcend their experiences of a disheartening present.

Gelardini, “Verhärtet eure Herzen nicht,” 123–90. Gabriella Gelardini, “Hebrews, an Ancient Synagogue Homily for Tisha be-Av: Its Function, its Basis, its Theological Interpretation,” in Hebrews: Contemporary Methods, New Insights (ed. eadem.; BINS 75; Leiden: Brill, 2005) 107–27. 66 67

The Rapture of the Christ: The “PreAscension Ascension” of Jesus in the Theology of Faustus Socinus (1539–1604) Alan W. Gomes Talbot School of Theology

In this essay I examine a rather quirky and possibly novel teaching of Faustus Socinus (1539–1604): what George H. Williams calls a “pre-Ascension ascension” (hereafter PAA) of Christ into heaven. Faustus claimed that this bodily ascent into heaven took place before Christ’s final visible ascension to heaven some time between his baptism and the commencement of his earthly teaching ministry. The theory states in brief that Christ, “after he was born a human, and before he began to discharge the office entrusted to him by God, his own Father, . . . was in heaven, and abode there for some time.” Christ took this heavenly sojourn “that he might hear from God himself and . . . see in his very presence what he was soon to proclaim and reveal to the world in God’s own name.”1 In another place Socinus states that Jesus, “after his birth from the virgin, and before he announced the gospel, was

1 “Ipsum Christum, postquam natus est homo, & antequam munus sibi à Deo Patre suo demandatum obire inciperet, in coelo, divino consilio atque opera fuisse, & aliquandiu ibi commoratum esse, ut illa ab ipso Deo audiret, & praesens apud ipsum, ut ipsa scriptura loquitur, videret, quae mundo mox annunciaturus & patefacturus ipsius Dei nomine erat” (Christ himself, after he was born a human, and before he began to discharge the office entrusted to him by God, his own Father, was in heaven by divine counsel and work. He abode there for some time, that he might hear from God himself and, as the Scripture itself states, see in his very presence what he was soon to proclaim and reveal to the world in God’s own name). Faustus Socinus, Christianae religionis brevissima institutio, per interrogationes & responsiones, quam catechismum vulgo vocant [hereafter Institutio] (vol. 1 of Bibliotheca Fratrum Polonorum quos Unitarios vocant [BFP] 1, 2; Amsterdam: 1668) 1.675. (Note that the first two volumes of the BFP comprise the Opera omnia of Socinus.) Unless otherwise noted, all translations from the Latin are mine. The Latin text has accent marks and ampersands (&) because it comes from a 1668 printing of Socinus’s Opera Omnia.

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raptured into heaven (in caelum raptus fuerit). There he learned from God himself what he was to reveal to the human race.”2 Possible Sources of Influence How did Socinus come by this unusual theory? The possible sources and influences on Socinus, beyond the biblical arguments that he sets forth, remain obscure. Williams speculates, without drawing any definitive conclusions, that Italian Neoplatonist thought, influenced by the Arab philosopher Avicenna, would have influenced Socinus. The idea of a mystical celestial ascent, applied to the Prophet Muhammad in Avicenna, came from Neoplatonist Christians, who adapted it to Enoch, Moses, Elijah, Isaiah, and Paul. For example, Williams cites Marsilio Ficino of Florence (d. 1499), who “opened his Commentarius in Epistolas D. Pauli with a proemium on Paul’s ascent to the third heaven for ‘the arcane mysteries’ in the tradition of Plotinus.”3 Although we have no evidence of any direct influence of this on Socinus, Williams says that “the important fact is that this kind of thinking was abroad, whether in approval or disapproval, in Italian circles in which Socinus had once moved.”4 Williams does note that the “ascent” in all of these other instances indicates a purely mystical and not a spatial one. Furthermore, the Neoplatonic literature does not apply any of these mystical ascents to Jesus. Williams concludes that “the originality of Socinus lay in reappropriating this tradition and centering 2 “Similiter, quòd Filius hominis in caelo fuerit antequàm eo conspicuè ascenderit, revera & propriè ad hominem illum Iesum Nazarenum referri & potest, & debet. Nam quòd revera homo ille, postquam natus est ex virgine, & antequam Evangelium annunciaret, in caelum raptus fuerit, ibique ab ipso Deo ea didicerit, quae humano generi patefacienda per ipsum erant, adeò est verisimile, ut aliter fieri non potuisse videatur” (Similarly, concerning the fact that the Son of Man was in heaven before his visible ascension to it: this can and ought to be referred, truly and properly, to the man Jesus of Nazareth. For that man truly, after his birth from the virgin, and before he announced the Gospel, was raptured into heaven. There he learned from God himself what he was to reveal to the human race. This has so much the appearance of truth that it seems it could not have happened otherwise). Faustus Socinus, Tractatus de Deo, Christo, & Spiritu Sancto, 1.813. He sets forth the same theory in his De Unigeniti Filii Dei existentia, inter Erasmum Iohannis, & Faustum Socinum Senensem disputatio (hereafter Adv. Erasmum Iohannis) 2.511: “Propterea enim fuit Christus homo ille in caelo [ut ego quidem nihil dubito] priusquam à mortuis resurgeret, ut rerum caelestium uberrima cognitione imbueretur, eaque certa & constantissima, quam deinde, quatenus liceret atque opus esset, cum hominibus communicaret, & cuius vi praedicandi Evangelii munus quam rectissime obiret, & alia admodum ardua, quae illi exequenda erant, fideliter omnino atque intrepide exequeretur” (Therefore, Christ was that man in heaven—as I indeed have no doubt—before he rose from the dead, that he might be instructed in the abundant, certain, and firm knowledge of heavenly matters. Later, in so far as it was permitted and necessary, he would communicate [these truths] to people. In the power of this knowledge he would rightly discharge the office of preaching the Gospel, fearlessly and faithfully accomplishing all the exceedingly difficult tasks that he was to perform). 3 George H. Williams, “The Christological Issues between Francis Dávid and Faustus Socinus during the Disputation on the Invocation of Christ, 1578–1579,” in Antitrinitarianism in the Second Half of the 16th Century (ed. Róbert Dán and Antal Pirnát; Studia Humanitatis 5; Leiden: Brill, 1982) 317. 4 Ibid.

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it in Jesus and (in four passages in John) also in understanding the pre-Ascension ascension as no less spatial than the final Ascension and the ultimate descent at the Second Advent.”5 Williams’s interesting observations notwithstanding, it perhaps moves beyond the evidence to speak of Socinus as “reappropriating this tradition and centering it in Jesus” given the marked discontinuities between Socinus’s version of the ascent and these earlier accounts, together with the lack of any direct evidence that Socinus made reference to these. The biblical texts that Socinus cites, coupled with his fecund mind, may adequately account for it, and at all events constitute the only sources of influence about which no one disputes. Beyond Socinus’s use of texts that he believes teach a PAA directly, together with indirect biblical parallels that suggest it, Socinus himself does not betray enough information to settle the question of antecedents. While we cannot be certain, he might have derived it simply from his own reflections on the biblical text and in light of other systemic considerations. Faustus did make certain statements that come close to claiming originality for the doctrine, although he expresses himself ambiguously. In what is perhaps his first work to mention the PAA, his Brevissima institutio,6 Socinus grants that the PAA, although it provides an excellent accounting for some otherwise difficult texts, is nevertheless novel and “unheard of by most of us.”7 This statement comports with the idea that Faustus originated the teaching but falls short of proving it. Likewise, the “Arian”8 Erasmus Johannis attacks Socinus’s interpretation on the grounds that it is “novel” (novam) and “departs from the simplicity of Scripture” (à simplicitate scripturae alienam).9 Socinus grants the former while denying the latter. He replies, “scarcely surprised” (haud sane mirror), that Johannis considers this interpretation novel (Quod haec interpretatio tibi sit nova), although he does marvel that Johannis could charge this interpretation with departing from Scripture’s simplicity; Faustus cannot imagine a more literal and straightforward reading of the text. Here again, Socinus acknowledges the teaching’s novelty but falls short of claiming authorship for it.10 5

Ibid. The dating of this work is uncertain; see below. 7 “Jam tuae sententiae . . . quantumvis novae & majoribus nostris fortasse inauditae, libenter acquiesco. Video enim hac ratione complura sacra testimonia admodum alioqui explicatu difficilia planissima reddi” (I now freely agree with your opinion . . . however novel and perhaps unheard of by most of us. For I see that in this way many sacred testimonies that are otherwise exceedingly difficult to explain are made crystal clear) (Socinus, Institutio, 1.675). 8 See the discussion of “Arianism” below. 9 “Fateor, mihi hanc interpretationem esse novam, & à simplicitate scripturae alienam” (I confess that his interpretation is novel to me and departs from the simplicity of Scripture). Socinus, Adv. Erasmum Iohannis, 2.511. 10 “Quod haec interpretatio tibi sit nova, haud sane mirror. Sed, quod illa à simplicitate Scripturae aliena tibi videatur, equidem satis mirari non possum; cum potius nulla alia interpretatio excogitari queat, quae tam Scripturae simplicitatem sequi quam haec facit, cuiquam merito videri possit; immo 6

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The Prominence of the PAA in the Writings of Socinus Whatever the doctrine’s provenance, Williams notes that the PAA constitutes “a major topos” in the writings of Socinus.11 The teaching appears not only in Socinus’s own exegetical, catechetical, and polemical writings, but makes its way (through Valentin Schmalz) into the slightly later Racovian Catechism12 and thence into the works of some important later Socinians, such as Christopher Ostorodt, Johann L. Wolzogen, and Jonas Schlichting. Other Socinians, such as the prominent theologian Johann Crell, however, did not find the teaching compelling and treated it either with ambivalence or outright rejection.13 Williams notes that Socinus does not mention the PAA until after his disputations with the “nonadorant” Unitarian Francis Dávid of Transylvania in 1578–1579.14 This observation leads Williams to opine that this doctrine did not yet form a part of Faustus’s Christological inventory, because Socinus could have used this doctrine to great effect against Dávid.15 In terms of the extant writings, Williams first finds the PAA teaching in Socinus’s undated Christianiae religionis brevissima institutio, which, he believes, Socinus wrote early in his career. Socinus composed the work in Italian and then translated it into Latin, but it appeared published posthumously cum haec interpretatio nihil aliud sit, quam ab ipsa Scripturae simplicitate nihil prorsus discedere, sed verba omnia ut proprie sonant accipere” (I am scarcely surprised that this interpretation is novel to you. But I am utterly surprised that it strikes you as departing from the simplicity of Scripture. On the contrary, anyone can see that there is no other interpretation imaginable that follows the simplicity of Scripture more than this one. Indeed, this interpretation does not depart from Scripture’s simplicity in the slightest but takes all of the words at face value). Socinus, Adv. Erasmum Iohannis 2.511. According to Williams, “Socinus acknowledges in 1595 that it [the doctrine of a PAA] is new, suggesting that he had come to clarity about it on his own.” In support, Williams footnotes the aforementioned exchange between Socinus and Johannis, although, as seen above, all that Socinus admits here for certain is that the teaching was not widely known, leaving open the question of the teaching’s authorship. See George H. Williams, The Polish Brethren (2 vols.; Missoula, Mont.: Scholars, 1980) 1:85. We should also note that the disputation itself took place in 1584, although it was not published until 1595. See Christof Sand, Bibliotheca Antitrinitariorum (composed around 1670; published Amsterdam [posthumously], 1684) 72; and also Socinus, Adv. Erasmum Iohannis 2.492. Toulmin wrongly gives a publication date of 1598; see Joshua Toulmin, Memoirs of the Life, Character, and Sentiments, and Writings of Faustus Socinus (London: J. Brown, 1777) 334. 11 Williams, Polish Brethren, 1:88. 12 “Section V: Of the Prophetic Office of Christ,” in The Racovian Catechism, with Notes and Illustrations, Translated from the Latin: To Which Is Prefixed a Sketch of the History of Unitarianism in Poland and the Adjacent Countries (trans. Thomas Rees; London: Paternoster Row, 1818; repr. Lexington: American Theological Library Association, 1962) 170–72. 13 Williams, Polish Brethren, 1:86. 14 Dávid was a Unitarian who argued that because Christ was not God he should not be invoked in prayer nor receive religious adoration, which should be given only to God. Those who espoused this position were called “nonadorants.” Socinus debated with Dávid at length. Williams provides a fine background and discussion of this debate (Williams, “Christological Issues”). Socinus furnishes the details of the debate in his De Iesu Christi invocatione disputatio, quam Faustus Socinus Senensis, per scripta habuit cum Francisco Davidis anno 1578, & 1579, paulo ante ipsius Francisci obitum, 2.709–766. 15 Williams, “Christological Issues,” 319.

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in Rakow in 1611.16 As for works that we can date with some confidence, we find Socinus floating the theory somewhere around 1580 in his response to the Lithuanian Calvinist Andrew Wolan17 and also in his response to some lectures on the Trinity given at the College of Posnania in 1583–1584.18 The specific documents of Socinus that establish the PAA, then, I list as follows: 1) Disputatio adversus Andream Volanum (written 1580);19 2) Tractatus de Deo, Christo, & Spiritu Sancto (written 1583–1584);20 3) De unigeniti Filii Dei existentia, inter Erasmum Iohannis, & Faustum Socinum Senensem disputatio (conducted 1584);21 4) Responsio ad libellum Vuieki . . . de divinitate Filii Dei, & Spiritus Sancti (written 1593);22 5) Explicatio variorum locorum Scripturae Sacrae (date of composition uncertain);23 and 6) Christianae religionis brevissima institutio (original date of composition uncertain and unfinished due to the author’s death in 1604).24

■ The Systemic Function of the PAA in Socinus’s System We must observe just what the doctrine of a PAA “buys” Socinus in terms of its function in his overall theological system. Socinus espoused a humanitarian/dynamic monarchian Christology along the lines of Paul of Samosata. Indeed, the detractors of Socinus and of his followers sometimes called them “neo-Samosateans” (novi Samosatenici).25 This appellation fit more accurately than the catchall epithet “Arian,” a capacious term often hurled without nuance at those who denied the deity of Christ. We need to distinguish the

16 Williams, Polish Brethren, 2:416 n. 28. Williams cites Christof Sand, Bibliotheca Antitrinitariorum, 67, who gives no date for the work, noting only that Socinus composed it in Italian and afterward translated it into Latin. 17 Williams, “Christological Issues,” 314, citing Listy, says that Socinus composed this treatise before 20 June 1580. However, in his earlier Polish Brethren, 1:85, he offered a date of 1583 for this work. 18 Toulmin, Memoirs of the Life, 330, 332. 19 BFP 2.371–422 (published Raków, 1588). 20 BFP 1.811–814. Note that through a printer’s error this material is duplicated verbatim in BFP 1.281–285, following the Summa religionis Christianae. 21 BFP 2.489–528 (published Raków, 1595). Toulmin (334–35), and Williams (“Christological Issues,” 315–16) discuss the circumstances surrounding this debate. 22 BFP 2.529–624 (published Raków, 1595). 23 BFP 1.139–156 (published Raków, 1618). See the discussion in Williams, “Christological Issues,” 314, where he describes this collection as “evidently assembled over a number of years and published posthumously.” See especially his discussion of the background of the Explicatio variorum S. Scripturae locorum (hereafter Explicatio locorum) 318. 24 BFP 1.651–676. See Sand, 77; Williams, Polish Brethren, 1:85. 25 E.g., Faustus Socinus, Assertiones theologicae de trino & uno Deo, adversus novos Samosatenicos, 2.423.

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Christology of Faustus from that of the “Arians” of his day with whom he exchanged polemical blows.26 Socinus affirmed the full humanity of Christ but denied that he possessed a divine nature in any sense of the word (Arian or orthodox) and accordingly rejected the notion that Christ existed before his birth through Mary. He did, however, grant Christ a virginal conception, wrought by God as a divine testimony and imprimatur of his messiahship from the beginning.27 Compared to Socinus’s humanitarian view, one could argue that the Arians had a “higher” Christology—in some sense a “Christology from above,” although not in an orthodox understanding of that term. Their Christology comes “from above” in the sense that they held to Christ’s preexistence as a divine spirit being, albeit one subordinate to the Father, who then came down to earth, took flesh, and became human in the virgin birth. While the Trinitarians regarded the Arian Christology as no more orthodox than Socinus’s, one could argue that it was “higher” in that the Arians, like the orthodox, admitted to a “divine” element in Jesus (although not full deity in the orthodox Nicene sense) and also to his preexistence. A PAA would allow Socinus to account for (or to evade, as his orthodox critics would charge) certain biblical texts that might otherwise run afoul of his dynamic monarchian/humanitarian Christology—specifically, those cited both by the Arians and by the orthodox in proof of Christ’s preexistence. One class of such passages speaks of the Son of Man “coming down from heaven” (e.g., John 3:13), “where he was before” (John 6:62) in his divine preincarnate existence. Both the orthodox and the Arians ascribed this “descent” to his coming to earth from his heavenly abode 26 According to Socinus, the “Arians” whom he opposed held that Christ was a created divine being who existed as the son of God even before his earthly birth. Specifically, Christ existed as a divine spirit creature, possessing a created, immaterial nature that was “divine,” not human. In the incarnation this created divine son took on human body or flesh through the virgin birth. What Socinus finds especially problematic is that this view, on his reckoning, destroys Christ’s true humanity. Socinus relates that the Arians were explicit in regarding only Christ’s body as truly human, not his immaterial nature or soul. See Socinus, Adv. Erasmum Iohannis, 2.489. 27 “Quodsi nihilominus aliquis dicat: quare Deus ita et non aliter [i.e., than through the virgin birth] concipi eum et nasci voluerit, causae inquirendae sunt. Earum praecipue et fortassis haec una est, quod non semper fuisset Dei Filius nec ab ipsa conceptione et nativitate filius dici potuisset, si ex Iosepho natus fuisse, sed oportuisset eum exspectare ea, propter quae postea Dei filius dictus fuit; quod in Iesu Christo servatore totius mundi fuisset valde absurdum. Hinc est, quod angelus dicebat Mariae: id quod ex te nascetur vocabitur Dei filius.” (But if nevertheless someone should ask why God did not wish him to be conceived and born in another way [than through the virgin birth], the reasons ought to be sought. Chief among the reasons, and possibly the one reason, is that if he had been born of Joseph he would not always have been the Son of God, nor could he have been called the Son from his very conception and birth. Rather it would have been necessary for him to await those things on account of which he was afterwards called the Son of God. But that would have been exceedingly absurd in the case of Jesus Christ, the savior of the whole world. It is for this reason that the angel said to Mary, “What will be born of you will be called the Son of God.”) Faustus Socinus, Epitome colloquii Racoviae habiti anno 1601 (ed. Lech Szczucki and Janusz Tazbir; Biblioteka Pisarzy Reformacyjnych 5; Warsaw: Panstwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1966) lines 553–560.

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in order to become a human being. Socinus extricates himself from this difficulty by taking the “descent from heaven” as occurring during Christ’s earthly sojourn. But if Christ descended from heaven, he first had to find his way up there somehow, and so Socinus postulates a literal, bodily rapture before the commencement of his earthly ministry. In short, one could write off Socinus’s theory of a PAA as simply an ad hoc concoction cobbled together to evade some pesky passages that stand in the way of his Samosatean Christology. While such an accounting for the theory may well have some truth—for Socinus’s interpretation of these texts does circumvent the difficulties they otherwise might pose for his humanitarian Christology—it does not go far enough in giving due weight to the theory’s critical role in light of Socinus’s larger doctrinal concerns. One could make the case that the PAA of Christ spreads out much more extensive systemic tentacles beyond the mere convenience of allowing Socinus to escape from an exegetical jam. As we shall see, Socinus himself suggested a non-PAA option for interpreting these problem texts—an option on which he could have rested his case if he had so chosen. Yet, he bypasses this option in favor of a literal, spatial rapture. Socinus actually goes so far as to say that he regards the doctrine of a PAA as “necessary” (necessarium).28 To see the significance of the PAA in Socinus’s theological system, one must first identify the center of his system (if in fact one exists) and then examine several of the “spokes” (particular doctrines in his system) that connect to that center. After doing so we can see how the PAA fits into it. The Center of Socinus’s System As I have argued in another place,29 the “center” of Socinus’s system is the attainment of eternal life (immortality), which one achieves through keeping the commandments of God as revealed by Christ.30 The “spokes” that connect to this 28

“Unde perspicuum est, graviter errare, si quisquam est, qui existimet, haud verisimile esse, vel non adeo necessarium fuisse, Christum hominem ante mortem in caelum ascendisse, ibique aliquandiu commoratum esse, ut verba ipsa indicant, in quibus Christus in caelo fuisse significatur; cum potius nihil aut verisimilius, aut magis necessarium esse potuerit ante ipsam Evangelii praedicationem” (From this it becomes clear how gravely someone errs, who thinks that it scarcely appears true, or thinks it unnecessary, that the man Christ ascended into heaven before his death and abode there for some time. The words themselves indicate this, in which Christ is shown to have been in heaven. On the contrary, nothing could appear more true or be more necessary before the very preaching of the Gospel). Socinus, Adv. Iohannis, 2.511. 29 Alan W. Gomes, “Some Observations on the Theological Method of Faustus Socinus (1539– 1604),” Westminster Theological Journal 70 (2008) 49–71. 30 For example, the first two sentences of this Summa contain in microcosm the center of gravity for Socinus’s theological system: “Religio Christiana, est doctrina caelestis, docens veram viam perveniendi ad vitam aeternam. Haec autem via, nihil est aliud, quam obedire Deo, iuxta ea, quae ille nobis praecepit, per Dominum nostrum Iesum Christum (Hebr. 5:9)” (The Christian religion is the heavenly doctrine, teaching the true way of attaining eternal life. Moreover, this way is nothing other than to obey God, according to those things which he commands us through our Lord Jesus

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center—specific doctrines relevant to the PAA—include Christ’s prophetic office, the absolute necessity of divine revelation, and his nature as human simpliciter. This accounting stands in contrast to other proposed “centers” for his system, including the oft-repeated conventional wisdom that the system of Socinus represents a species of rationalism, whether pure or hybrid.31 In my view Socinus’s system has a moral center, and Socinus examines the necessity and importance of any given doctrine in terms of how it conduces to obedience to God’s commandments. Such obedience in turn conduces toward the attainment of eternal life. Thus, the doctrine of the reward of immortality, attained through obeying the divine precepts, provides the center from which we may sweep the circle of his system.32 Therefore a person must know about these precepts, since his or her eternal felicity hangs on their observance. Contrary to the rationalistic approach attributed to him, Socinus denied that one could even know the existence of God apart from divine revelation much less the specific precepts that one must observe to attain eternal life. As he makes plain in his De sacrae scripturae auctoritate,33 Socinus eschews any natural knowledge of God whatever; human beings utterly depend upon a direct revelation from God.34 This includes the rejection of a properly innate, inborn knowledge as well as a natural theology drawn discursively from observing the created order. Therefore reason, Socinus tells us, cannot be the principium on which a knowledge of the Christian faith rests, for reason “is much too fallible in a matter which depends upon divine revelation, such as the Christian faith.”35 Thus, Christ). Faustus Socinus, Summa Religionis Christianae, 1.281. One could adduce numerous quotes making this same point. 31 For a sample of some works, old and new, postulating a rationalistic bent in the theology of Faustus, be it pure rationalism or a hybrid of rationalism and supernaturalism, see Maurice A. Cauney, “Socinians,” An Encyclopedia of Religions (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1921); Martin I. Klauber and Glenn S. Sunshine, “Jean-Alphonse Turrettini on Biblical Accommodation: Calvinist or Socinian?” Calvin Theological Journal 25 (1990) 13; Bengt Hägglund, History of Theology (trans. Gene J. Lund; St. Louis, Mo.: Concordia, 1968) 322; Herbert J. McLachlan, Socinianism in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1951) 12; Philip Schaff and Johann A. Herzog, “Socinus (Faustus) and the Socinians,” in A Religious Encyclopedia or Dictionary of Biblical, Historical, Doctrinal, and Practical Theology (ed. Philip Schaff; New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1891); William M. Clow, “Socinianism,” Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics (ed. James Hastings; 13 vols.; New York: Scribner’s, 1917); and Adolph Harnack, History of Dogma (ed. and trans. Neil Buchanan; 7 vols.; New York: Russell and Russell, 1958) 7:139. 32 I am indebted to Clow (“Socinianism”) for this metaphor (i.e., “sweeping the circle of his system”), although Clow himself was referring to the significance of the death and resurrection of Christ for Socinus, not to the center that I have given above. While Socinus certainly gives prominence to the death and resurrection of Christ, I disagree with Clow that these provide the Archimedean point from which he is able to leverage the rest of his system. 33 Faustus Socinus, De sacrae scripturae auctoritate libellus Fausti Socini Senensis (hereafter De auctoritate) 1.265–280. 34 Socinus, De auctoritate, 1.273. He makes the same point in his Praelectiones theologicae, 1.538. 35 “Quod enim ad rationes attinet, haec nimis fallax via est in re, quae ex divina patefactione pendeat, qualis est Christiana religio” (Moreover, concerning [the use of] reasons [for overthrowing a

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one needs a prophetic word from God to know what precepts to keep in order to attain eternal life. Christ as prophet fulfills this critical role. Christ mediates to us the divine precepts and brings them down from heaven to us.36 As Socinus stated in his famous De Jesu Christo Servatore, Christ is our Savior because he has announced to us the way of eternal salvation,37 which we obtain by imitating him.38 For Socinus, and also for the later Socinianism, the prophetic office of Christ comprises almost all of his salvific work. When one inspects the later Socinian Racovian Catechism—a document not written by Faustus but one on which his fingerprints appear at every turn39—the amount of space devoted to the prophetic office of Christ, as opposed to the kingly and priestly, is eye-opening but hardly surprising. Although the catechism ostensibly employs the threefold office as an organizing principle when treating the work of Christ, it presents a massive discussion about the prophetic office, little about the kingly, and almost nothing of the priestly.40 One would expect this,

NT doctrine]: This way is much too fallible in a matter which depends upon Divine revelation, such as the Christian religion) (De auctoritate, 1.267). In context, Socinus is considering specifically the hypothetical possibility of using “reasons” to overturn some doctrine of the New Testament. This Socinus rejects as an utter impossibility given the fallibility of reason in matters of faith. 36 Socinus paraphrases Christ in John 3:9–13 in his Explicatio locorum (1.146a): “Indeed, for that reason am I sent that I may teach you celestial things. Neither before was there anyone who ascended into heaven where celestial things are first acquired, besides me, I say, who when I was there whence I descended, that this which I learned there, I should undertake the office of teaching among you. . . . Therefore it is necessary for him who wishes to know heavenly things, without which a sure hope of eternal life is not possible to be conceived, to come to me [Jesus] and to have total faith in me. Not otherwise did Moses go out into a desert and set up a bronze serpent on a high place [for healing]” (Williams, “Christological Issues,” 318; translation his). 37 “Ego verò censeo, & orthodoxam sententiam esse arbitror, Iesum Christum ideo servatorem nostrum esse, quia salutis aeternae viam nobis annuntiaverit, confirmaverit, & in sua ipsius persona, cum vitae exemplo, tum ex mortuis resurgendo, manifestè ostenderit, vitamque aeternam nobis ei fidem habentibus ipse daturus fit” (But I regard and judge the orthodox position to be that Jesus Christ is our savior because he announced to us the way of eternal salvation, he confirmed it, and he clearly demonstrated it personally—both by the example of his life and by rising from the dead. And he himself will grant eternal life to us who have faith in him.) (Faustus Socinus, De Jesu Christo Servatore [hereafter De Servatore] 2.121). 38 “Demonstratur, . . . nos Christum imitari posse, hancque esse aeternae salutis viam: ob idque Christum iurè Servatorem nostrum appellari” (It is demonstrated . . . that we can imitate Christ, and that this is the way of eternal salvation. Therefore Christ is rightly called our Savior.) (Socinus, De Servatore, 2.128). 39 Valentin Schmalz (a close associate of Socinus) and Johannes Volkel completed the Racovian Catechism. However, the Institutio of Socinus (1.651–676) is in some sense the rough draft of it and certainly provided a good bit of the thought material that found its way into the catechism. For a good discussion of the production of the Catechism see Earl Morse Wilbur, A History of Unitarianism (2 vols.; Boston, Mass.: Beacon, 1945) 1:409. 40 Although the Socinians wrote a great deal about Christ’s work on the cross, they devoted almost all of it to undermining the orthodox doctrine of satisfaction. Their positive statements about the priestly work are much fewer and often vague by comparison, especially when placed alongside the sharp dialectic that one finds in their assault on the penal theory.

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since the Socinian Jesus, preeminently a prophet, functions as the purveyor of the saving truths. The Role of the PAA in Socinus’s System Now, if one connects the necessity of divine revelation with Socinus’s humanitarian Christology, the propriety of a PAA becomes evident. Christ, fully but merely human, must have the divine truths that constitute the saving gospel revealed to him supernaturally. Since Jesus does not have a divine nature, he has only a human mode of knowledge open to him, and so God must reveal the divine arcana to him just he would to any other prophet. But why would God reveal these truths to Christ through a spatial rapture into heaven and not in a more conventional way as with other prophets? Socinus argues for such an exotic mode of revelation to Christ as utterly appropriate if not necessary given Christ’s preeminence over all the spokespersons from God, who came before and after. Socinus will argue from the lesser to the greater. If Moses under the old dispensation and the Apostle Paul under the new had revelation given to them in a direct audience with God, how much more ought Christ to have received the saving precepts in a similar but an even greater way? Thus, considering the various systemic threads that the PAA draws together in Socinus’s thought, the doctrine appears less contrived than at first blush. Consequently, I cannot agree with McGiffert, who places the doctrine of a PAA among those that lie “outside of Socinus’s controlling principles.”41 McGiffert includes the PAA in a collection of Socinian teachings that have either a supernatural cast (such as the virgin birth and his literal ascension after his resurrection) or stand in tension with what McGiffert sees as the logic of their humanitarian Christology (such as the teaching that Christ should receive worship). But none of these doctrines fall outside of Faustus’s “controlling principles,” once we properly identify and understand these principles.42 Whatever one may say about the move toward rationalism in the later Socinianism, Socinus himself was a confirmed supernaturalist, and the supernatural aspects of a PAA would not have fazed him.43 The PAA comports well with Socinus’s theology as a whole and with his Christology in particular. 41

Arthur Cushman McGiffert, Protestant Thought Before Kant (New York: Scribner, 1924) 117. Surely one might well ask how these “controlling principles” came to lose so much control that Socinus so very often departs from them! 43 Later Socinianism does show the impact of seventeenth-century Cartesianism. Interestingly, as Wilbur recounts (History, 1:530), the Socinian Johann Ludwig von Wolzogen worries that if reason replaces Scripture the inevitable result will be a falling away from the true faith. For this reason Wolzogen opposed the onslaught of Cartesian rationalism. Wolzogen’s protest not withstanding, later Socinians and Remonstrants alike were to imbibe significant aspects of Cartesian thought, and by the time Andreas Wiszowaty came on the scene, the Socinian movement had moved significantly toward genuine rationalism. Spinoza and Descartes particularly influenced Wiszowaty. He outlines his program in his important Religio rationalis seu de rationis judicio, in controversiis etiam theologicis, ac religiosis, adhibendo, tractatus (Amsterdam,1685). In this work he states unequivocally that 42

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■ Theological and Exegetical Arguments in Support of the Pre-Ascension Ascension of Christ Socinus used exegetical arguments, which revolved around a few key biblical texts, to establish and to defend his theory of a PAA. The texts that Socinus draws upon for direct support for the PAA come from John’s gospel, specifically 3:13, 31–32; 6:38, 62; and 8:28b.44 He also cites other passages both from the Hebrew Bible, such as Moses’ ascent on Mount Sinai (Exodus 19 and 24) as a type of Christ, and from the New Testament, such as Paul’s rapture to the third heaven (2 Cor 12:1–5), to provide indirect support for the propriety of the PAA. Biblical Texts Construed as Directly Teaching the PAA Of the aforementioned Johannine texts, Socinus singles out for special consideration John 3:13 and 6:62, which express quite similar ideas but which contain some important differences as well. The texts read as follows: John 3:13: “And no man hath ascended up to heaven, but he that came down from heaven, even the Son of Man which is in heaven.”45

sound reason is the touchstone of truth and anything taught in Scripture that offends reason must be rejected. Wilbur (History, 1:572) says that Wiszowaty was the first Socinian to enunciate this view unambiguously. Note, however, that by Wiszowaty’s time, rationalism was gaining ground among those who were not Socinians in any official sense, and by the turn of the century it became the dominant intellectual pattern in many circles; it came to affect even the orthodox communions. Note, for example, Stapfer and Wyttenbach, who were “orthodox” theologians attempting to incorporate the rationalist philosophy of Wolff. Hadorn describes Stapfer, who wrote in the mid-eighteenth century, as advocating an “orthodox rationalism of the mild Reformed type.” See Wilhelm Hadorn, “Stapfer,” The New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge (ed. Lefferts A. Loetscher; 15 vols.; Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 1949–1950). On the rise of rationalism in late-seventeenthand eighteenth-century Reformed theology see Richard A. Muller, Prolegomena to Theology (vol. 2 of Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics; 4 vols.; Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 1987) 38–39; Michael Heyd, Between Orthodoxy and Enlightenment: Jean-Robert Chouet and the Introduction of Cartesian Science in the Academy of Geneva (The Hague: Njhoff, 1982); John W. Beardslee, “Theological Development at Geneva under Francis and Jean-Alphonse Turretin (1648–1737)” (Ph.D. diss.; Yale University, 1956); and Ernst Bizer, “Die reformierte Orthodoxie und der Cartesianismus,” Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche 55 (1958) 306–72. Concerning the rise of “natural religion” in later Socinianism, in contradistinction to the view of Faustus, see Zbigniew Ogonowski, “Faustus Socinus,” in Shapers of the Religious Traditions in Germany, Switzerland, and Poland, 1560–1600 (ed. Jill Raitt; New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1981) 206–7. See also Delio Cantimori, Eretici Italiani del Cinquecento (Florence: G. C. Sansoni, 1967) 359–62. 44 Williams (Polish Brethren, 2:416 n. 28) for some reason also includes John 3:6 in this list, although I suspect this to be a typographical error since John 3:6 does not appear to be relevant, nor did I observe Socinus discussing it in the context of the PAA. 45 The Alexandrian text type supports a shorter reading of this verse, which does not contain the words “who is in heaven” (S. [?RINRX[D SYNVER[D). The Byzantine and Western text types available in Socinus’s day, however, strongly attest to the longer reading. The longer reading is also in the Vulgate. Socinus, working from both the Greek text of Erasmus (based upon a Byzantine text type) and the Latin Vulgate, of course accepted the text as he found it, as did his opponents.

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John 6:62: “What if ye shall see the Son of Man ascend up where he was before?”

Socinus states that in order to untangle a proper understanding of these texts one must ascertain what in them to take literally versus what one should understand figuratively or as a “trope.” Socinus urges that either these texts contain a figure of speech (tropus) or they do not.46 Now, if one wishes to take the passages as containing a trope, the question becomes where ought one to locate the figure. Profound implications for one’s Christology depend upon which elements (if any) one takes as figurative. Socinus does not believe that the Christologies of his “adversaries,” whether Trinitarian or Arian, stand up to a careful exegesis of these texts because of their error in taking as figurative parts of the text that one must understand literally. THE TRINITARIAN INTERPRETATION OF THESE TEXTS Faustus declares that the orthodox (Trinitarian) exegesis requires some kind of trope in these texts, even though it takes other parts of these same texts literally. In John 3:13 the orthodox take as literal the parts of the verse that refer to Christ’s descent from heaven and also to his present tense dwelling there. They say that his literal descent (i.e., in becoming a human being through the virgin) proves his divine preexistence, while the force of the present tense in describing him as “in heaven” shows that Christ, subsisting in two natures, remained in heaven according to his divine nature even as he informed his disciples of this fact while on earth. As for John 6:62, the orthodox take as literal the Son of Man’s future ascent to heaven as well as his heavenly preexistence, “where he was before.” Now, on an orthodox reckoning, Christ’s preexistence in heaven, his descent from there, and his present tense heavenly dwelling, must refer to his divine and not to his human nature. Yet, in both texts Christ ascribes these activities to the Son of Man, a clear reference to his humanity. Consequently, Socinus observes, the orthodox take the expression “Son of Man” as figurative, not literal. In doing so the orthodox “take refuge” in what Socinus sarcastically calls “that holy anchor of the Trinitarians” (ad sacram illam Trinitariorum anchoram),47 namely a christological doctrine known as the “communication of attributes” (communicatio idiomatum). According to this doctrine, one can, through a figure of speech, predicate a divine activity to Christ (such as being in heaven) under one of his human titles (e.g., “Son of Man”) as well as predicate a human activity to him (such as suffering crucifixion) under one of his divine titles (e.g., “the Lord of Glory,” 1 Cor 2:8). This communicatio idiomatum becomes possible because all of these activities and titles have reference

46 47

Socinus, Explicatio locorum 1.146; Adv. Volanum 2.380; Adv. Erasmum Iohannis 2.511. Socinus, Adv. Erasmum Iohannis, 2.511.

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to the same concrete individual (or suppositum), to whom the orthodox predicate these actions and names.48 Socinus attacks the use of the communicatio idiomatum to explain these particular texts. For one thing, he believes that one cannot use these texts to prove Christ’s preexistence and divinity, since such proof relies on the doctrine of the communication of attributes (denied by the Unitarians and others), while the doctrine of the communicatio, in turn, relies on these same texts to establish it. The orthodox assume his divine preexistence in these texts in order to prove that they incorporate a communicatio idiomatum and then seek to demonstrate his preexistence from these same texts by employing the communicatio idiomatum in their explanation. Thus, they argue in a circle.49 Furthermore, Socinus states that, at most, his opponent could use a figure of speech (such as that which the communicatio idiomatum entails) for explaining his position and perhaps even for deflecting certain criticisms of it. But this differs from proving one’s position through the use of such a figure. As Socinus states, “the explanation of words through figures of speech certainly has the power to provide a response or to ward off [criticism], but it is useless for proving the point.”50 Socinus believes that “the communicatio idiomatum is clearly a fiction” (commentitia plane est ista idiomatum communicatio). Socinus presents as an 48 For a brief but helpful description of the communicatio idiomatum see Richard A. Muller, Dictionary of Latin and Greek Theological Terms (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 1985) 72–74. To be perfectly accurate, the form of the communicatio idiomatum described above is more fully called the communicatio idiomatum in concreto, since the predication of the attributes is on the level of the person, i.e., to the concrete suppositum. This is in contrast to a communicatio idiomatum in abstracto, in which the attributes of one nature are predicated to the other nature—the natures being “abstractions,” as distinguished from the concrete suppositum who bears those natures. We should observe that Socinus was hardly the first antitrinitarian to take the cudgels against this theory. Servetus, among others, rejected it as a scholastic quibble throughout his De Trinitatis erroribus libri septem (1531) as well as in his slightly later Dialogorum de Trinitate libri duo (1532). Earl Morse Wilbur has made these writings of Servetus available in an accessible English translation. See Michael Servetus, The Two Treatises of Servetus on the Trinity: On the Errors of the Trinity (Seven Books); Dialogues on the Trinity (two books); On the Righteousness of Christ’s Kingdom (four chapters) (ed. James H. Ropes and Kirsopp Lake; trans. Earl Morse Wilbur; Harvard Theological Studies 16; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1932; repr., New York: Kraus, 1969) 9, 15, 16, 18, 59, 118. So, while Socinus may not break any particular new ground in his arguments to undermine the theory, he does expend considerable energy in neutralizing it, as he must if his literal PAA theory is to stand. 49 See Socinus, Adv. Erasmum Iohannis 2.511. See also his Responsio ad libellum Iacobi Vuieki Iesuitae, Polonice editum, de divinitate filii Dei, & Spiritus Sancti [hereafter Ad libellum Vuieki ] 2.610, where he states, “Sed, ut hoc illis concede possit, oporteret saltem de ista coniunctione personali Dei, & hominis, seu divinae, & humanae naturae in Christo, aperte constare: quod illud ipsum est repisa, quod ex hoc loco probare volunt” (But, in order to grant this [the communication of attributes] to them, it is necessary at least to establish clearly that personal conjunction of God and humanity, or of the divine and human nature in Christ. But that is the very thing that they wish to prove from this passage). 50 “Quo fit, ut verborum explicatio per sermonis figures ad respondendum quidem, atque excipiendum valere possit, sed nihil omnino ad probandum” (Socinus, Adv. Volanum 2.380).

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analogy the case of the soul and the body, entities characterized by different sets of attributes and activities. One cannot predicate concerning the body that which characterizes the soul alone, nor can one predicate of the soul the unique characteristics of the body. For instance, one does not say that the soul “stands” or “procreates” just because the body does, nor does one say that the body thinks or philosophizes just because the soul does.51 Similarly, one cannot say that the human nature resided in heaven because the divine nature did so. In the above argument Socinus has tacitly shifted his attack to the doctrine in abstracto, in which the characteristics of one nature literally apply to the other nature (and therefore do not involve any trope). He did this rather than attack the form of the doctrine in concreto, the figurative form, which his opponent had invoked in explaining these texts and which was the form on which Socinus had based his criticism to that point.52 In his later work (1593) against the Jesuit Wujek (Vuiekus), Socinus nuanced his polemic and ruled out either form of the communicatio in relation to this passage. Socinus’s argument there, although a bit sketchy, merits attention. Wujek has attempted to establish the divine attribute of immensity (immensitas) as applying to Christ based on John 3:13. Wujek infers a divine (and therefore immense) nature in Christ from this text as follows. On the one hand, Christ states that he is in heaven (present tense). On the other hand, he makes it clear that his body was not in heaven at that time because he said that he will ascend to heaven (future tense). Now, if he had not yet ascended into heaven bodily but at the same time said that he was there, then, Wujek reasons, he must have been there according to some other nature, namely, his deity. Since deity entails immensity, “filling both heaven and earth simultaneously,” then one can predicate immensity of Christ.53 In response, Socinus points out, as before, that Wujek relies on the trope of the communication of attributes in as much as Christ refers to himself as the “Son of Man” in this text. Socinus then, also as before, repels the possibility of 51 “Quemadmodum enim non dicitur anima stare aut federe, quia corpus stet aut fedeat; sic neque corpus cogitare aut philosophari dicitur, quia anima cogitet aut philosophetur” (For just as the soul is not said to stand or to procreate because the body stands or procreates, likewise neither is the body said to think or philosophize because the soul thinks or philosophizes) (Socinus, Explicatio locorum 1.146). Socinus argues similarly in his Ad libellum Vuieki 2.610. 52 For the distinction between the various forms of the communicatio idiomatum, again see Muller, Dictionary, 72–74. 53 “Si Christus in caelo erat, quando haec loquebatur in terra, igitur simul in coelo & in terra erat: non autem corpore tunc erat in coelo, cum se diceret ascensurum in coelum, igitur alia in Christo natura erat, praeter humanam illam, quae cernebatur oculis mortalium, videlicet divina, quae immense est, & coelum simul, ac terram replet” (If Christ was in heaven when he was making these statements on earth, he was therefore in heaven and on earth simultaneously. Moreover, he was not in heaven bodily at that time, since he said that he was going to ascend to heaven. Therefore, there was some other nature in Christ beyond his human nature, which was discerned by mortal eyes, i.e., the divine nature, which is immense and fills heaven and earth simultaneously) (Socinus, Ad libellum Vuieki 2.610).

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a communicatio idiomatum in abstracto54 by repeating unchanged his earlier argument that the characteristics of one nature cannot apply to the other. He cites the same example of the impossibility of applying the properties of the soul to the body and vice versa. But unlike before, Socinus now extends the argument to rule out as well the inference of a communicatio idiomatum in concreto through this passage. Socinus does grant that one can predicate properties of either the body or of the soul to the person (suppositum), and so accepts the communicatio idiomatum in concreto as not absurd per se (as is a communicatio in abstracto). But Socinus argues that one cannot use John 3:13 to establish such a thing about Christ. Socinus seizes on Wujek’s claim that in this text Christ indicated his future bodily ascension, at which point—but not before—his body would be in heaven. Socinus marvels at this inference and wonders what in this text Wujek used as evidence for a future ascension. One could derive this idea only from the phrase, “no one has ascended/ is ascending to heaven” (nemo ascendit in coelum). Such an interpretation could work if one took the verb ascendit (in the Vulgate) as present tense. In that case the present tense ( “is ascending”) could and would refer figuratively (figurate) to a future event in this context. (It could not refer to something happening before Nicodemus’s eyes.) But when comparing the Vulgate with the underlying Greek text, one must construe ascendit (ENREFIZFLOIR “has gone up”) as a perfect and not as a present indicative. Thus, these words do not indicate a future ascension for Christ but in fact demonstrate a past one. What options, then, does Wujek have left? He could abandon a literal interpretation altogether and take the ascent, descent, and existence in heaven as metaphorical, allegorical, or otherwise figurative. (The next section discusses how such a figurative interpretation might look.) Alternatively, he could throw in his lot with Socinus and admit “that Christ truly, after he was born a human but before he spoke these words, [literally] ascended into heaven.” Regardless of which alternative Wujek should choose, “Christ’s words [in this passage] are altogether useless for proving his immensity.” To summarize, then, Wujek could not prove his point by an appeal to the communicatio idiomatum in abstracto, even if he wanted to, because that doctrine turns out to be false per se. On the other hand, he cannot prove his point here by an appeal to the communicatio idiomatum in concreto because the grammar of the text will not allow it.55 54 Note that in the actual text of Socinus on which I base my summary of his argument he always refers simply to the communicatio idiomatum and does not specify the further description in abstracto or in concreto. I have employed these added details in my own discussion to make clear the logic of his argument. I have provided the verbatim and complete passage in Socinus here under consideration in the following note. 55 The above summary is what I take to be the logic of Socinus’s argument and entails a number of amplifications from the rather terse and telegraphic way in which he sets forth the discussion. The actual passage in question, on which the above interpretation is based, runs as follows: Sed

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A NON-TRINITARIAN BUT FIGURATIVE INTERPRETATION OF THESE TEXTS Although Socinus will cast his lot with a purely literal interpretation of these texts, he does offer a non-Trinitarian alternative for those who wish to see some aspect of these texts as figurative. The Trinitarians against whom he has argued chose to situate the trope in the words “Son of Man” and to take as literal the heavenly adversarii figuratum sermonem in ipso nomine filii hominis esse contendunt; de quo per idiomatum communicationem dici volunt id, quod Dei cum eo in eadem persona coniuncti est proprium. Sed, ut hoc illis concede possit, oporteret saltem de ista coniunctione personali Dei, & hominis, seu divinae, & humanae naturae in Christo, aperte constare: quod illud ipsum est repisa, quod ex hoc loco probare volunt. Praeterea, quemadmodum in homine, qui ex animo, & corpore constat, quae propria corporis sunt, animae tribui separatim non possunt, nec contra; sic, si Christus, ut adversarii volunt, constat ex Deo & homine, sive ex divina, & humana natura, non possunt quae sunt Dei seu divinae naturae propria, separatim homini seu humanae naturae tribui: nec contra. Nec idiomatum communicatio aliud praetera efficere potest quam ut quae unius tantum sunt naturae, ipsi supposito tribuantur; quemadmodum, quae propria sunt animae tantum, aut corporis tantum, ipsi homini merito tribui possunt. Sed quid est, quod adversarii dicunt, Christum non potuisse dicere, quod tunc corpore esset in coelo, cum, se diceret ascensurum in coelum? Nam quomodo, obsecro, probant, Christum tunc dixisse, se ascensurum in coelum: Dicent (neque enim video, unde id alioqui colligere audeant) ex illis verbis, Nemo ascendit in coelum. Atqui verbum ascendit, ut ex Graeco patet, non est praesentis temporis, ut figurate ad futurum tempus accommodari aut possit, aut etiam debeat, sed praeteriti; adeo ut necesse sit (nisi Ubiquitarii esse velimus) fateri, vel totum Christi sermonem figuratum esse, & istum ascensum & descensum atque existentiam in coelo metaphorice & allegorice accipi debere, vel Christum revera, postquam homo natus fuit, antequam verba ista diceret, ascendisse in coelum: ex quo etiam merito dicere potuerit, se hominem ibi fuisse (iam enim dictum est pro qui est, iure posse reponi qui erat) & sic nihil prorsus ad Christi immensitatem probandam haec ipsius verba pertinere possunt. (But the adversaries contend that the figure is in the expression “Son of Man.” They speak of it in this way through the communication of attributes, because it is the property of God conjoined with him in the same person. But, in order to grant this to them, it is necessary at least to establish clearly that personal conjunction of God and humanity [hominis], or of the divine and human nature in Christ. But that is the very thing that they wish to prove from this passage. Besides, just as in the case of a human being, who consists of soul and body, the properties of the body cannot be attributed separately to the soul, nor vice versa. Thus, if Christ [as the adversaries wish] consists of both God and humanity [homine], or of a divine and a human nature, the properties of God or of the divine nature cannot be attributed separately to the human nature, nor vice versa. Nor can the communication of attributes bring about anything else than that the properties [lit., “things”] that belong only to one nature should be attributed to the suppositum, just as the characteristics [lit., “things”] that are properties of the soul alone, or of the body alone, can rightly be attributed to the human being. But what is this that the adversaries declare: that Christ could not say, at that time, that his body was in heaven, since he said that he was going to ascend to heaven? For how, I ask, can they prove that at that time Christ said he was going to ascend into heaven? They will say it based on the following words [for I fail to see from where else they would otherwise dare infer it]: ‘No one is ascending [ascendit] into heaven.’ But the word ascendit, as the Greek makes plain, is not present tense, which, understood figuratively, would allow for or even demand a reference to the future. Rather, it is past tense. Thus, unless we wish to be Ubiquitarians, it is necessary to admit either that the entire saying of Christ is figurative—and that the ascent, descent, and existence in heaven ought to be taken metaphorically and allegorically—or that Christ truly, after he was born a human but before he spoke these words, ascended into heaven. In line with this Christ rightly would have been able to say that he was there as a human [for as was already stated, the words ‘who is’ can rightly be replaced with ‘who was’]. Thus, Christ’s words are altogether useless for proving his immensity) (Socinus, Ad libellum Vuieki, 2.610).

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descent, ascent, and present-tense abiding. Socinus reverses the orthodox conclusion and suggests an interpretation that takes the expression “Son of Man” as literal and the parts that speak of a heavenly descent, ascent, and present-tense abiding in heaven as figurative.56 Socinus says that one can make a case for taking these verses figuratively from the preceding verse in John 3:12, which speaks of the knowledge and understanding of heavenly things. On this reckoning, Socinus says that “to ascend into heaven” would mean nothing other than to investigate the truth of heavenly matters, while “to descend from heaven” would mean to go forth to teach those same heavenly truths to others. “To be in heaven,” stated in the present tense, would mean to apprehend rightly (probe tenere) these same heavenly truths with such clarity and immediacy that one could describe them as present in one’s consciousness (tanquam praesentes inspicere atque intueri).57 Thus, Socinus concludes that however much Christ may have abided on earth, one could nevertheless say that he had abided in heaven at the same time. Against Wolan, Socinus suggests a similar interpretation for John 6:62. Why could not one understand Christ to have ascended already “in heaven” (i.e., before his postresurrection ascension took place) in the sense of constantly residing “in heaven” in thought and mind? He certainly did hold in his mind all the most divine and heavenly arcana (omnia coelestia, id est arcana quaeque divinissima) to such an extent that he saw them as if present to him. The above interpretation does not require one to affirm anything or to take anything for granted (pro concesso sumitur) except the plain truth. By contrast, the orthodox opinion requires assumptions (such as the communicatio idiomatum) that not only raised doubt in their own day but have caused bitter contests historically.58 56 “Si agnoscendus est [i.e., a trope], nihil impedit, quominus iste ascensus in coelum, & iste descensus de coelo, & denique istud, Esse in coelo, figurate accipiatur, non minus quam adversarii velint, nomen illud Filius hominis figurate accipi debere & inde duas in Christo naturas colligi”(If [a trope] should be acknowledged, nothing stands in the way of taking as figurative the ascent into heaven, the descent from heaven, and [the words] “is in heaven,” any more than for the adversaries, who wish the name “Son of Man” to be taken figuratively, and from which [figurative understanding] they infer the two natures in Christ) (Socinus, Explicatio locorum 1.146). 57 Ibid. Socinus makes this same point in Tractatus de Deo (1.813), in which he says that if one takes the present tense figuratively, the reference is to “the penetration (as it were) into the knowledge of divine things” (“penetrationem [ut ita loquar] ad rerum divinarum cognitionem sint interpretati”). He again advances the same line of argument in Ad libellum Vuieki (2.610). 58 “Non videmus inquam, cur non potius haec interpretatio amplectenda sit, in qua nihil vel dicitur, vel pro concesso sumitur, quod verissimum esse non constet, quam ista vestra, in quo coniunctio illa duarum naturam in Christo aut pro iam posita habetur, aut expresse affirmatur; de qua & olim, & hodie non modo dubitatum, sed etiam tam acriter pugnatum est” (We fail to see, I say, why this interpretation ought not rather be embraced, in which nothing is either stated or taken for granted that is not [already] well known to be absolutely true. In your interpretation [on the other hand] that conjunction of the two natures in Christ is either already taken as a given or expressly affirmed—about which, in times past as well as today, it was not only in doubt, but was even so bitterly contested) (Socinus, Adv. Volanum 2.380).

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The figurative interpretation suggested by Socinus appears compatible with the teaching office of Christ as the Son of Man qua man and does not require anyone to invoke such a contested and tendentious doctrine as the communicatio idiomatum. In reading Socinus’s praise for this interpretive option, one may think at first blush that he favors it. Williams apparently thought Socinus might have favored it originally, albeit tentatively, and said that in Socinus’s treatment of the verse in the Explicatio (cited above), he regarded this option as “the literal [sic]59 and proper sense of the verse.” Williams tries to reconcile Socinus’s praise here for the figurative interpretation over against his ultimate advocacy of a literal PAA by describing Socinus as “still wavering between an ecstatic and experiential over against a spacial or physical transport.” Williams suggests that such wavering provides an argument for an early date for this particular entry in the Explicatio.60 Socinus oscillates between a figurative and a literal interpretation in the Explicatio in an uncharacteristic and puzzling way. Consider what follows in the Explicatio on the heels of this effusive endorsement of the figurative model: If nevertheless someone wishes to be so obstinate (ita pertinax) that he is unwilling to concede in these matters any figure of speech, however elegant and free of difficulty—and therefore most appropriate, if not necessary, to this passage (as this [figurative] sort of interpretation certainly is)—the only alternative is that we say that the Son of Man, or that man, truly and properly had already both descended from heaven and was in heaven.61

Yet Socinus straightway places himself among the “obstinate” by professing his unbridled enthusiasm for just such a literalistic approach to the text. He declares that he “not only freely grants but even plainly contends” (non modo libenter concedimus, sed etiam plane contendimus) the truth of the purely literal interpretation “without a doubt” (nec ullo modo dubitandum esse).62 But then, Socinus further muddies the matter when he doubles back to the figurative option and states that one can in no way take literally the early part of the verse, in which “no one has ascended to heaven,” granting that Elijah and most probably Enoch had already literally 59 I presume Williams means “literal” in the sense of “true” or “actual,” since Socinus’s whole point is that this option involves a trope, in contrast to the literal approach he suggests in his discussion immediately following. 60 Williams, “Christological Issues,” 319. As Williams points out, the Explicatio comprised explanations of various difficult biblical texts; Socinus wrote these explanations at different times throughout his career. 61 “Quod si tamen quispiam ita pertinax esse velit, ut nullum tropum, quamvis elegantissimum, eumque facillimum, ac praeterea ipsi loco accommodatissimum, seu potius necessarium, quails profecto iste est, in rebus istis admittere velit, nihil aliud restat, nisi ut filium hominis, sive hominem illum, & vere & proprie, iam tum & de coelo descendisse, & in coelo fuisse dicimus” (Socinus, Explicatio locorum 1.146). 62 “Quod nos sane, non modo libenter concedimus, sed etiam plane contendimus, nec ullo modo dubitandum esse dicimus” (ibid.).

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ascended there. On this basis Socinus concludes that the “entire passage should be taken figuratively” (totum locum figurate accipiendum esse).63 While the flow of the discussion in the Explicatio admits to no easy explanation, Williams’s interpretation—that Socinus wrote this entry early in the Explicatio when vacillating between the two options—seems to me not correct. The point here is not whether Socinus wrote this entry in the Explicatio early (he certainly could have) but whether the apparent “vascillating” that one sees in this passage can be construed as evidence for that. Upon examining Socinus’s later writings that treat these texts, we see a striking similarity in the structure of his argument insofar as he also praises the figurative option only to reject it. Thus, one should not see this particular characteristic of the Explicatio as an anomaly, since we find it in nearly all of his other treatments of the topic including those written well after one could have any doubt but that he had made the PAA his definite, settled opinion.64 Consider his dispute with Erasmus Johannis, written in 1584: If you wish, I say, to understand the [true] sense, I think you ought to consider that the words of Christ must either be taken with some trope or without any trope. Now, if they are to be taken with some trope, who would not see how aptly Christ could say, speaking as a human being, that he was in heaven before he ascended to it bodily with his disciples looking on. For his mind was always dwelling in heaven, so that he harbored all heavenly thoughts, considering these as if always present to him. This is clearly so in a unique way, above and beyond the experience of all other godly persons. But if, as it indeed appears to me, the words of Christ are to be taken without any trope, then it is necessary to confess that he, as a human, or certainly after he was human, was in heaven before that ascension that was observed by the Apostles. I strongly [vehementer] commend that opinion, and freely follow and embrace this interpretation of Christ’s words.65

63

Ibid. And so for the treatises already cited in which support for the figurative interpretation appears: Ad Volanum (1580), Tractatus de Deo (1583–1584), Adv. Erasmum Iohannis (1584), and Ad libellum Vuieki (1595). What makes the discussion in the Explicatio more difficult to interpret, however, is that after seeming to drop the figurative interpretation in favor of the literal one, which he “freely contends, without a doubt” to be true, he concludes the discussion with an argument that appears to favor taking the entire passage as a trope. It is this latter feature that distinguishes the argument in the Explicatio from the way in which he structures it elsewhere. 65 “Si velis, inquam, hoc scire, considerandum tibi esse arbitror, Christi verba aut cum aliquo, aut cum nullo topo accipienda esse. Si cum aliquo; nemo non videt, quam apte Christus, ut homo, in caelo fuisse dici possit, antequam, videntibus discipulis, cum suo corpore eo ascenderit; cum perpetuo in caelo mente sua versaretur, calestiaque omnia ita cognita haberet, ut ea tanquam praesentia semper inspiceret: idque ratione quadam plane singulari, & praeter ac supra omnem aliorum divinorum hominum sortem. Sin autem, ut mihi quidem videtur, nullo cum tropo sunt Christi verba accipienda; necesse est fateri, ipsum, ut hominem, aut certe, postquam fuit homo, fuisse in caelo ante ascensionem illam suam Apostolis conspicuam. Quam sententiam ego vehementer probo, hancque verborum Christi interpretationem libentissime sequor atque amplector” (Socinus, Adv. Erasmum Iohannis 2.511 [emphasis mine]). 64

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Now, why would Socinus offer a figurative interpretation and praise it so highly only to drop it in favor of something else? Other antitrinitarians, such as Servetus, had already suggested something close to this figurative understanding of the text, and Socinus may have not wished to discredit this manner of handling the issue.66 Further, many of his fellow antitrinitarians might not have agreed with this new interpretation of his, whether due to its novelty or for some other reason. If this was his worry, then his disquiet had foundation: some of the later Socinian theologians (e.g., Crell) did in fact abandon this teaching as untenable. Therefore, Socinus, in cogently stating and praising a figurative understanding of these texts, may have wished to leave his cobelligerents with an alternate refutation of the orthodox exegesis, even if they proved unwilling to embrace the one that he favored. Second, Socinus might have offered this figurative possibility for the sake of completeness (i.e., to canvas all the possible options) and for systemic (and, dare I say, scholastic) tidiness. Socinus might have thought that logically speaking, whether or not one wishes to see a trope in the text, one cannot sustain the orthodox view. INTERPRETING THE TEXT WITHOUT A TROPE: A LITERAL RAPTURE His sometimes circuitous mode of presentation notwithstanding, Socinus embraced a literal PAA as the best explanation for these texts. But one sticky issue yet remains for Socinus and, on its face, appears to present a formidable if not fatal objection to the theory. What can Socinus do about the present tense in the expression “the Son of Man who is in heaven”? How can that comport with a literal approach to this text? To grant that Christ was in heaven when he made that statement—as the present tense would indicate—would grant him some kind of divine status, would it not? The significance of the present tense does not escape the orthodox, who forcefully press this point against him. Socinus suggests an alternate translation for the verse. He claims that one can take the Greek participle ¢n ([?R), rendered in the Vulgate as “is” (est), as a “past imperfect” (praeteritum imperfectum), “was” (erat), “so that it reads not ‘who is’ but ‘who was in heaven.’”67 Socinus cites Beza and Erasmus as authorities favoring this rendering of the text. Not only grammatically possible, this reading has the benefit of bringing John 3:13 into line with the statement in John 6:62, which says that the son “was in heaven before” (erat prius; L@RXS TVSZXIVSR), not that he “is now” (nunc est) in heaven.68 Indeed, one should not overlook the fact that John 6:62 poses a significant challenge to the orthodox view, because the statement “where he was before” (ubi prius erat) most naturally suggests that he no longer remains For example, Servetus had already suggested taking as figurative the “ascent” mentioned in both Johannine texts. See Servetus, Two Treatises, 26–27; 71–73. 67 “Ut legatur non qui est, set qui erat in caelo” (Socinus, Institutio, 1.674). Socinus makes this identical point in his Explicatio locorum (1.146) and in his Ad libellum Vuieki (2.610). 68 Socinus, Institutio 1.675. 66

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there.69 By rendering est as erat, Socinus is convinced that his view can reconcile both texts on solid grammatical grounds in a way that the orthodox interpretation cannot. Socinus believes that the theory of a PAA provides an accounting of these verses strong both for defense and offense. Socinus says that whatever these texts say about the descent of Christ from heaven, his going forth from the Father, and his antecedent dwelling in the same place as his later visible ascent into heaven, has no force against his view, however much the orthodox urge these passages against him. Indeed, his opponents, who accuse him of departing far from the letter of Scripture, instead stand rightly accused by Socinus of doing that very thing in this case! They attribute to some imagined nature or essence what the Scriptures attribute either to the Son of Man or simply to the “suppositum” (in orthodox parlance) Jesus Christ.70 In contrast, Socinus argues that one need not resort to such figurative interpretations here. Rather, one ought to accept Christ’s words in this passage in their literal significance and at face value, since to do so is consistent with his humanity. Observe that Christ, in this context, stresses his humanity by his reference to himself as the “Son of Man.”71 Aside from modifying the translation to read “who was in heaven,” based on the grammatical propriety cited earlier, one can take the rest of this text according to its plain sense.72 69 “Potius interrogandum est, quomodo Christus illa verba, ubi erat prius, de seipso secundum illam divinam naturam, quam isti sunt commenti, dicere potuerit, ut quidem iidem isti volunt. Ea enim indicant eum, de quo dicta sunt, tunc temporis ibi, id est, in coelo, non fuisse, & consequenter, si istorum interpretatio admittatur, Christum cum haec dixit, secundum suam divinam naturam non fuisse in coelo. Quod ex ipsorummet sententia absurdissimum est” (It rather ought to be asked how Christ would have been able to utter the words “where he was before” about himself with reference to his divine nature, which they have falsely contrived [for him], as indeed these same individuals would have it. For these words indicate that he, about whom they were spoken, was not there, i.e., in heaven, at that time. Consequently, if their interpretation is allowed, the words indicate that Christ, when said these things, was not in heaven according to his divine nature. But in terms of their own view, this conclusion is utterly absurd) (Socinus, Institutio 1.675). 70 “Ex quo fit, ut quidquid de decensu Christi de coelo, de exitu ipsius à patre, de antecedente eiusdem visibilem ascensum in coelum, ipsius ibidem commoratione, in Sacris Literis legitur, quod tantopere contra nos adversarii urgere solent, id nihil plane sit. Immo efficitur, ut adversarii nostri, qui nos, tanquam interpretationibus nostris à Litera ipsa longe recedentes, accusare solebant, à nobis merito, hoc eodem nomine, accusentur; quippe, qui, quod scriptura, vel illi filio hominis, vel simpliciter, supposito illi, ut vocant, quod Iesus Christus est, aperte tribuit, divinae cuidam à se somniatae naturae, sive essentiae tribuere non vereantur” (From which it is the case that whatever one reads in Holy Scripture about the descent of Christ from heaven, or about his going forth from the Father, or about his abiding in heaven preceding his visible ascent there—which things our adversaries are so often accustomed to urging against us—plainly accomplishes nothing [to harm our position]. On the contrary: it turns out that our adversaries, who are used to accusing us of departing far from the literal meaning of Scripture [à Litera ipsa longe], are rightly charged by us of that very thing. Indeed, these are the ones who do not fear to attribute to some divine nature or essence [that they have dreamed up] what Scripture clearly attributes either to the Son of Man, or simply to the “suppositum” [as they say], which is Jesus Christ) (Socinus, Explicatio locorum 1.146). 71 Socinus, Institutio, 1.674–675. 72 Ibid., 1.675.

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If these passages teach a PAA, in which Christ receives instruction in the heavenly arcana, then this fact not only removes them from the orthodox arsenal of proof texts for Christ’s deity but makes them proofs against it. If Christ always was true God and existed always from the substance of the Father, God would have no need to rapture him into heaven whether to contemplate the heavenly arcana or for any other reason.73 Socinus argues that if the person of Christ has an indivisible conjunction of the divine nature with his human nature, this conjunction per se would prove sufficient to enrich his humanity with perfect knowledge of divine things.74 In leveling this criticism, Socinus again shifts to the literal form of the communicatio in abstracto from the form of the doctrine in concreto, which involves a mere verbal predication. Biblical Texts Construed as Indirectly Teaching the PAA Besides the texts in John that he construes as speaking of a PAA, Socinus finds indirect parallels in support. He draws upon the case of Moses and his ascent up Mount Sinai (Exodus 19 and 24) and that of Paul the Apostle regarding his rapture into the third heaven (2 Cor 12:1–5). MOSES’ ASCENT AS A TYPE OF CHRIST’S RAPTURE In his Brevissima institutio, Socinus puts forth what he considers a telling argument in support of the PAA.75 He argues for the PAA of Christ based on the well established notion of Moses as a type of Christ. But his application of it to the PAA appears unique. Williams summarizes this line of argument as follows: As Moses ascended into the clouds of Mount Sinai (“an antitype [sic] of heaven”) to receive the Law, so Jesus during the comparable forty days in the wilderness was lifted even higher to receive in the bosom of his Father the secret saving Gospel he was called to exemplify on his descent and to proclaim.76

Socinus cites verses out of Exodus 19 and 24 to show that Moses (a type of Christ) went up into the presence of God on Mt. Sinai (a type of heaven) on multiple 73 “Nam, si Christus, antequam homo natus est, non solum fuit, sed etiam verus Deus semper ex patris substantia extitit, quid opus erat, eum postea in coelum rapi, sive ut Dei arcana contemplaretur, sive quamcumque aliam ob causam?” (For if Christ, before he was born a man, not only existed but even always existed as true God from the substance of the Father, what need was there for him to be raptured into heaven afterward, whether to contemplate the arcana of God, or for any other reason?) (Socinus, Adv. Volanum 2.380). 74 Ibid. 75 Williams (“Christological Issues,” 315–16) states that Socinus cited both the case of Moses and of Paul in his De unigeniti filii Dei existentia, i.e., his dispute with Erasmus Johannis. However, I did not observe any reference to Moses in this work, although he does cite the case of Paul in Argument Seven of the dispute (Socinus, Adv. Erasmum Iohannis 2.510–511). 76 Williams, Polish Brethren, 1:85.

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occasions. There Moses received instructions on all the procedures of the divine worship and the guidelines for manufactured artifacts (both as to their form and their material) related to that worship.77 On two separate occasions, he ascended to receive the ten commandments written on stone tablets by the finger of God (i.e., once when originally given and subsequently to replace the tablets that Moses shattered when he cast them to the ground in the face of the Israelites’ idolatry). Socinus states that just as Moses constitutes a type of Christ, even so Sinai provides a type of heaven.78 Hence he concludes that Christ ascended into heaven “and that perhaps more than once” (idque fortasse non semel, ascenderit).79 PAUL’S RAPTURE INTO HEAVEN AS AN ARGUMENT FOR CHRIST’S PAA Socinus cites the case of Paul’s rapture into the third heaven (2 Cor 12:1–5) as support for Christ’s own PAA. Likely the first place Socinus sets forth this argument is in his debate with Lithuanian Calvinist theologian Andrew Wolan.80 Socinus then repeats this argument four years later in his dispute with the Arian Erasmus Johannis. Here the argument rests not on any typical likeness between Paul and Jesus, but rather Socinus argues from the lesser to the greater. If Paul “was raptured in the third heaven before his death” (ad tertium usque coelum raptus fuit), we should expect his teacher and Lord, Jesus of Nazareth, to have arrived there some time before his death. In particular, we would expect him to have abode there before the commencement of his earthly service/office (munus).81 That something granted to Paul would not also have gone to Christ in no way rings true (nec ullo modo sit verisimile).82 Socinus also uses the case of Paul to refute the inference that Christ possessed a quasi divine, created substance—a conclusion that some draw from the faulty notion that Christ was in heaven before his earthly birth. Here Socinus has in mind specifically the Arians, who asserted a heavenly existence before Christ became human. Such an inference could stand only if one reasons that Christ, as a human being, could not have existed as a human in heaven at some time before he uttered the statement. By invoking the case of Paul in 2 Corinthians 12, he shows this 77 “Manufacta opera omnia, quae ad ipsum divinam cultum pertinerent, cuius materiae cuiusve formae esse deberent, ipsi Mosi à Deo praescriberetur” (God prescribed to Moses himself all the manufactured artifacts pertaining to the divine worship, both as to their form and material) (Socinus, Institutio 1.675). 78 “Nam ut Mosis Christum, sic montis Sinai coelum antitypum esse, apertissimum est” (For it is quite clear that just as Christ is the antitype of Moses, even so heaven is the antitype of Mount Sinai) (Socinus, Institutio 1.675). 79 Socinus, Institutio 1.675. 80 Socinus, Adv. Volanum 2.380. See also the discussion in Williams, Polish Brethren, 1:85. 81 Socinus, Explicatio locorum 1.146. 82 Socinus, Adv. Erasmum Iohannis 2.511. Williams discusses this passage (“Christological Issues,” 315).

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reasoning faulty. When Christ says that the Son of Man was in heaven, we have every reason to believe that he was in fact present there as a human being, just as Paul later would be. Socinus says that even if one granted that Christ possessed some nonhuman, quasi divine, created substance (i.e., in an Arian sense), this would neither prove that he preexisted in heaven according to that substance (i.e., before the virgin birth), nor less would it disprove his PAA theory. Certainly, for the sake of argument, he could have possessed both a human and a nonhuman substance while on earth, i.e., after his birth, and then been raptured into heaven according to that nonhuman substance. One might argue that something analogous to this occurred with Paul, who remained unsure whether God raptured him into heaven with or without his body. Thus, Socinus sees no necessity to conclude that Christ’s abiding in heaven could have occurred only before his earthly birth.83

■ Conclusion The doctrine of a pre-Ascension ascension of Christ constitutes an oddity in the history of doctrine. Yet the doctrine has significant cogency within the context of Socinus’s own system. While the doctrine does provide Socinus with a way of removing potential obstacles to his dynamic monarchian Christology, its roots penetrate more deeply than that. Given that Socinus had another viable interpretive option at his disposal, he did not advocate a literal PAA out of desperation. Rather, he believed that this interpretation best explained the text and tied together a number of doctrines about which he had become certain: his humanitarian Christology, the absolute need for divine revelation for a knowledge of God and salvation, and Christ’s prophetic office. I find nothing ipso facto unorthodox about affirming a PAA for Christ. Socinus himself believed it incompatible per se and argued that the conjunction of Christ’s divinity with his humanity would impart more to his store of knowledge than any pre-Ascension rapture would or could, which would render the latter superfluous.84 The premise that underlies this conclusion, however, is that an orthodox Christology does not allow for Christ to acquire knowledge or to grow as a human being. Although orthodox Christologists have construed the matter variously,85 one can speak of Christ’s authentic growth in knowledge as a human, as Luke 2:52 and numerous other texts indicate. An orthodox Christology can and indeed ought to affirm that Christ related to his Father as a human being relates to God, and that includes receiving instruction from God in modalities possible and appropriate to a human person. That some or even the bulk of this instruction might have happened in a divine audience with the Father, situated in heaven, appears neither impossible 83

Socinus, Adv. Erasmum Iohannis 2.510. Socinus, Adv. Volanum 2.380. 85 An older but helpful book in this regard is Alexander B. Bruce, The Humiliation of Christ (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1955). 84

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nor contrary to an orthodox Christology. Even granting the position’s theoretical compatibility with orthodoxy, I do not see any particular pressure on the orthodox to embrace such a quirky interpretation, which even the later Unitarians themselves abandoned as untenable. For the student of Socinus, the doctrine of a PAA may have the greatest value as a test case that illustrates the exegetical differences between Socinus and the orthodox. A theme that runs throughout this particular debate concerns what aspects of the text one ought to take literally versus what one should take figuratively. In much of their anti-Socinian polemic, the orthodox accused him of seeking refuge in figures of speech and metaphorical language to evade orthodox credenda. This he did in his handling of the redemption, ransom, and propitiation language, denuding it of its ability to establish penal satisfaction.86 Yet here Socinus turns the tables and does not lose the irony in this. Socinus now champions taking the words at their face value and in their most literal signification despite the oft-leveled charge that it is he who “departs far from the Letter” in his interpretations (tanquam interpretationibus nostris à Litera ipsa longe recedentes).87 Perhaps this difference—the way in which he distinguishes the literal from the figurative—underlies not only the debate on this issue but is, in the exegetical sphere at least, the exact point at which the Socinian and the orthodox systems diverge.

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For example, De Jesu Christo Servatore. “Immo efficitur, ut adversarii nostri, qui nos, tanquam interpretationibus nostris à Litera ipsa longe recedentes, accusare solebant, à nobis merito, hoc eodem nomine, accusentur; quippe, qui, quod scriptura, vel illi filio hominis, vel simpliciter, supposito illi, ut vocant, quod Iesus Christus est, aperte tribuit, divinae cuidam à se somniatae naturae, sive essentiae tribuere non vereantur” (On the contrary: it turns out that our adversaries, who are used to accusing us of departing far from the literal meaning of Scripture [à Litera ipsa longe], are rightly charged by us of that very thing. Indeed, these are the ones who do not fear to attribute to some divine nature or essence [that they have dreamed up] what Scripture clearly attributes either to the Son of Man, or simply to the “suppositum” [as they say], which is Jesus Christ) (Socinus, Explicatio locorum 1.146). 87

Native Americans, Conversion, and Christian Practice in Colonial New England, 1640–1730 Linford D. Fisher Indiana University, South Bend

Fortunately, the two travelers arrived before sunset. Earlier in the day, on 5 May 1674, John Eliot and Daniel Gookin had set out from Boston for Wamesit, the northernmost of the fourteen Indian “praying towns” within the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and the one most subjected to retaliatory attacks from raiding bands of Mohawks in the previous few years. Upon safe arrival, the Englishmen greeted their Pennacook friends and gathered as many as they could at the wigwam of Wannalancet, the head sachem of Wamesit, where Eliot, the aging missionary to the Indians, proceeded to talk about the meaning of the parable of the marriage of the king’s son in Matthew 22:1–4. Wannalancet, according to Gookin, was a “sober and grave person, and of years, between fifty and sixty”; he had from the beginning been “loving and friendly to the English,” and in return they had tried to encourage him to embrace Christianity. Although the English missionaries would have desired him to readily accept the gospel message they preached, Wannalancet voluntarily incorporated Christian practices slowly, over time, without necessarily repudiating his native culture and traditional religious practices.1 For four years Wannalancet “had been willing to hear the word of God preached”; when Eliot or other missionaries made their periodic visits to Wamesit, Wannalancet made sure he was there. Over time, Wannalancet adopted the English practices of keeping 1 Although it is easy to assume too quickly what missionaries in this period did and did not want from their Indian proselytes, the combination of Gookin’s commentary on Wannalancet (he “hath stood off” and “not yielded himself up personally”) and Wannalancet’s own interpretation of the Englishmen’s activity and desires (that they “for four years . . . [did] exhort, press, and persuade us to pray to God”) provides ample evidence, it seems to me, that the missionary timetable was different than the one Wannalancet chose.

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the Sabbath, learning to go to any available meeting or instruction, fellowshipping, and refraining from various activities proscribed by the town’s praying leaders. Despite all that, however, the English missionaries still complained that he “hath stood off” since he had “not yielded up himself personally.”2 On this particular visit, after the sermon, the meeting ended without incident, and everyone returned to their respective residences except the two Englishmen, who stayed overnight in Wamesit. The next day, however, in another, perhaps more informal, gathering, the Englishmen pressed Wannalancet to “give his answer concerning praying to God.” After some “serious deliberation and serious pause,” he stood up and made the following speech recorded by Daniel Gookin, the Superintendent of Indian Affairs in the Massachusetts Colony: Sirs, you have been pleased for four years last past, in your abundant love, to apply yourselves particularly unto me and my people, to exhort, press, and persuade us to pray to God. I am very thankful to you for your pains. I must acknowledge I have, all my days, used to pass in an old canoe [alluding to his frequent custom to pass in a canoe upon the river] and now you exhort me to change and leave my old canoe, and embark in a new canoe, to which I have hitherto been unwilling; but now I yield up myself to your advice, and enter into a new canoe, and do engage to pray to God hereafter.3

This somewhat surprising turn of events was “well pleasing to all that were present,” both Indians and English. Eliot and Gookin followed up, encouraging Wannalancet and his people to “sanctify the sabbath, to hear the word, and use the means that God hath appointed, and encourage their hearts in the Lord their God.” For Wannalancet, at least, the practices that he found meaningful before his “conversion” continued to be so afterward; Gookin reported that Wannalancet “doth persevere, and is a constant and diligent hearer of God’s word, and sanctifieth the sabbath, though he doth travel to Wamesit meeting every sabbath, which is above two miles.”4 This little vignette invites us to consider the rich, overlapping worlds of Native spirituality and Christian practice, one in which the rituals, symbols, and beliefs of European Christianity were adopted by Indians over time, either voluntarily or in response to the overtures of English missionaries. In the end, Wannalancet apparently did embrace Christianity in a way that was satisfying to the AngloAmericans, but it happened in his own way, in his own time, and on his own terms. And when the time came for that crowning Puritan religious practice, the public confession, Wannalancet described the event with symbols familiar and meaningful to him and his lifeworld; he spoke of leaving his old canoe for a new one—a metaphor hardly English or biblical in origin. Ironically enough, the pre- and post-conversion descriptions of Wannalancet’s Christian practices by Daniel Gookin 2 Daniel Gookin, Historical Collections of the Indians in New England (ed. Jeffrey H. Fiske; [n.p.]: Towtaid, 1970 [1674]) 75. 3 Ibid., 76. 4 Ibid., 74.

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sound strikingly similar: Wannalancet attended sermons and kept the Sabbath. The only added practice was the one mentioned by Wannalancet, to “engage to pray to God hereafter.” Such identification must have surely had significant social consequences, however, for Gookin noted that “sundry of his people deserted him, since he subjected himself to the gospel.”5 Scholars of early America have described the complex process normally referred to as the “colonization” of North America in a variety of ways, variously preferring to emphasize the one-sided nature of things (an “invasion”), the longterm co-created world of shared symbols and cooperation (a “middle ground”), or a variety of possible combinations of the two at various times.6 In most accounts of early New England, religion and missions play a fairly prominent role, with interpretations of that role ranging from nefarious to benign. Historians often—and, sometimes, rightly—fault the Puritans for their cultural insensitivity, political complicity, and financial impropriety. Indians—even those who did convert—are often faulted for not grasping the finer points of Christian theology or for persisting in their traditional practices. Ultimately, seventeenth-century missionary projects are deemed failures, in part because of the traumatic rupture to Indian–colonist relations caused by King Philip’s War (1675–1676), but also partially because of the perceived illegitimacy of the religious hybridization that resulted from the evangelization attempts.7 Historians often quote Eliot’s famously pessimistic 5

Ibid., 74. Francis Jennings, The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975). James Axtell, The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 7 The major exception, of course, is Martha’s Vineyard, where the Mayhew family has often been seen as the most tolerant and successful of the English missionaries. As part of Plymouth Colony until Massachusetts annexed it in 1691, Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard were under different colonial oversight and largely spared the devastation of King Philip’s War. David Silverman’s recent work is the best scholarship available for the Island Wampanoag during this time period. See especially David J. Silverman, Faith and Boundaries: Colonists, Christianity, and Community among the Wampanoag Indians of Martha’s Vineyard, 1600–1871 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005). An older but excellent study is by James P. Ronda, “Generations of Faith: The Christian Indians of Martha’s Vineyard,” William and Mary Quarterly 38 (1981). Regarding “failure,” the longer the time frame under consideration for the historian, the more emphatic the pronouncements of failure become; microhistories of specific missions towns might display success, but ultimately they feed into the grand narrative of mission failure. What follows is just a sampling of stances regarding missions failure: William Kellaway takes the sentiments of Josiah Cotton, the son of missionary John Cotton, Jr., to be representative of eighteenth-century missionaries, writing, “Like many of those who preached to the Indians, he believed that little or nothing was being achieved in spite of their exertions.” William Kellaway, The New England Company, 1649-1776: Missionary Society to the American Indians ([London]: Longmans, 1961). Francis Jennings believed the missions to the Indians were a failure numerically, based on Daniel Gookin’s estimate that out of 1,100 praying Indians, only 45 were baptized and 70 were in full communion. Jennings, The Invasion of America, 251. Jean Fittz Hankins’s dissertation is a large-scale investigation into the self-pronounced failure of the missionaries from four major eighteenth-century missions efforts in New England and New 6

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deathbed lament in 1690 that “There is a Cloud, a dark Cloud, upon the Work of the Gospel among the poor Indians”; less cited, however, is the more optimistic last half of his statement, which reads: “the Lord Revive and prosper that Work and grant it may live when I am dead.”8 However, to focus on the failure of either the missionaries or the Indians, especially using missionary standards, ignores an important line of investigation that reveals a world of religious practices that somewhat obviates the question of success or failure. In recent years some scholars of religion have advocated a “lived religion” approach to the history of religion in America, one that focuses on, in the words of David D. Hall, the “everyday thinking and doing of lay men and women,” in short, on “religion as practiced.”9 In this context, the idea of “practice” encompasses “the tensions, the ongoing struggle of definition, which are constituted within every religious tradition and that are always present in how people choose to act. Practice thus suggests that any synthesis is but provisional. Moreover, practice always bears the mark of both regulation and what, for want of a better word, we may term resistance.”10 Such a focus moves beyond questions of orthodoxy and heterodoxy to discover the formation of meaning within the lifeworld of particular individuals in a particular community in a particular time and space using religious symbols and idioms from a variety of sources that hold meaning for them. Religion as “practice” assumes that religion is not fixed, either in a society or in an individual; it allows for the messy confluence of ideas and beliefs that constituted the religious lives of men and women throughout history. York: the New England Company, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts [SPG], the Scottish Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge, and the Moravians. Jean Fittz Hankins, “Bringing the Good News: Protestant Missionaries to the Indians of New England and New York” (Ph.D. diss., University of Connecticut, 1993) 6. John Frederick Woolverton states of a SPG missionary to the Mohawk, William Andrews, “Like those before him and those who would come after him, Andrews, for all his courage and seriousness, failed.” John Frederick Woolverton, Colonial Anglicanism in North America (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1984) 103. 8 “An Attestation by the United Ministers of Boston,” in Experience Mayhew, Indian Converts, or, Some Account of the Lives and Dying Speeches of a Considerable Number of the Christianized Indians of Martha’s Vineyard, in New-England (London: 1727) xvii. Kristina Bross states that Eliot believed the “missions enterprise itself had been murdered” in King Philip’s War. Kristina Bross, Dry Bones and Indian Sermons: Praying Indians in Colonial America (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2004) 199. By many measures, however, neither the missionary program nor Indian churches suffered irreversible losses in King Philip’s War. William Kellaway has pointed out that the postKing Philip’s War Indian-language publications funded by the New England Company outnumbered those published prior to 1675. Kellaway, The New England Company, 147. Similarly, when Grindal Rawson and Samuel Danforth were sent to Indian communities around Massachusetts in 1698 to count the number of Indian churches and active participants, they reported that there were thirty congregations in Massachusetts, with thirty-seven Indian ministers or schoolmasters and seven or eight English ministers overseeing them. “Account of an Indian Visitation, A.D. 1698,” in Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society 10 (Boston: Munroe, Francis, and Parker, 1809) 129–34. 9 David D. Hall, ed., Lived Religion in America: Toward a History of Practice (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997) viii. 10 Ibid., xi.

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Religion as practice assumes a fluidity within that practice in response to various social and personal conditions, as Robert Orsi has argued: “People appropriate religious idioms as they need them, in response to particular circumstances. All religious ideas and impulses are of the moment, invented, taken, borrowed, and improvised at the intersections of life.”11 In the field of Native American history, several scholars have fruitfully applied this methodology to various geographic areas. Michael McNally, Rachel Wheeler, David Silverman, and Christopher Bilodeau have explored Christian ritual and practice among the Ojibwe, Mahican, Wampanoag, and Illinois Indians.12 Central to much of this scholarship is an exploration of the meaning of “conversion” in the American Indian context—even as theorizing about the nature and meaning of conversion has garnered much recent attention in many other fields of religious history.13 Too often, historians, working primarily within an Eurocentric framework, conceive of religion as fixed, knowable, and singular, and imagine religious conversion to be total and complete.14 In this model, as Michael McNally has described it, contact between the Europeans and the Native peoples becomes a “ ‘collision’ of two ostensibly well-bounded systems of belief: Protestant or Catholic ‘Christianity’ on the one hand and tribe-specific traditions on the other,” 11 Robert Orsi, “Everyday Miracles: The Study of Lived Religion,” in Lived Religion in America: Toward a History of Practice (ed. David D. Hall; Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997) 8. 12 Michael D. McNally, “The Practice of Native American Christianity,” Church History 69 (2000). See also David J. Silverman, “Indians, Missionaries, and Religious Translation: Creating Wampanoag Christianity in Seventeenth-Century Martha’s Vineyard,” William and Mary Quarterly 62 (2005). Silverman, Faith and Boundaries. Rachel M. Wheeler, “Women and Christian Practice in a Mahican Village,” Religion and American Culture 13 (2003) 27–67. Christopher Bilodeau, “‘They Honor Our Lord among Themselves in Their Own Way’: Colonial Christianity and the Illinois Indians,” American Indian Quarterly 25 (2001) 352–77. 13 See, for example, the two volumes edited by Kenneth Mills and Anthony Grafton on conversion throughout the history of Christianity. Kenneth Mills and Anthony Grafton, eds., Conversion in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages: Seeing and Believing (Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 2003). Kenneth Mills and Anthony Grafton, eds., Conversion: Old Worlds and New (Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 2003). Allan Greer’s essay in the second of these volumes addresses these questions in the Native American context, specifically among the Mohawks. See Allan Greer, “Conversion and Identity,” in Conversion: Old Worlds and New. Other classic discussions of conversion among American Indians include: William S. Simmons, “Conversion from Indian to Puritan,” New England Quarterly 52 (1979) 197–218. James Axtell, “Were Indian Conversions Bona Fide?,” in After Columbus: Essays in the Ethnohistory of Colonial America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). More recent discussions include Charles L. Cohen, “Conversion among Puritans and Amerindians: A Theological and Cultural Perspective,” in Puritanism: Transatlantic Perspectives on a Seventeenth-Century Anglo-American Faith (ed. Francis Bremer; Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1993). Keely McCarthy, “Conversion, Identity, and the Indian Missionary,” Early American Literature (2001). 14 Kenneth Morrison challenges the ethnocentrism of historians with regard to the concepts of “religion” and “conversion” in Kenneth M. Morrison, The Solidarity of Kin: Ethnohistory, Religious Studies, and the Algonkian-French Religious Encounter (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002).

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where “Christianity’s gains were unequivocally the losses of traditional religions,” or the “persistence of traditional religions signaled a lack of inroads on the part of Christianity.”15 Instead, there is a growing recognition that the bipolar framing of the question of conversion itself might be misleading. If it is the case, as Kenneth Mills and Anthony Grafton have argued, that “complete religious conversion—prescribed change or pure transmission, if you prefer—was and is impossible to achieve,” then Native “converts” will always fail to live up to historical and theological scrutiny, at least as presently framed.16 Furthermore, to gaze into the past with such lenses ultimately obfuscates a much more interesting and complicated world that the Natives actually inhabited and experienced—one that involved a confrontation with the divine, to be sure, but also multiple identities, shifting allegiances, changing economic and spiritual factors, and a multiplicity of kinship ties—all of which Neal Salisbury has summed up in the term “ambiguity.” Salisbury contends that simplistic, Eurocentric words like “conversion” and “convert” are unhelpful when trying to understand the world of Indians and their very ambiguous, ongoing relationships to Christianity and their European neighbors, and therefore historians should drop the words completely.17 One possible replacement suggested by Kenneth Morrison is the more ambiguous phrase “religious change,” which avoids the totalizing, triumphalistic notions implicitly embedded in the word “conversion,” while recognizing changes over time that did occur—including the partial, selective adoption of European cultural and religious practices.18 A focus on religious practice can meaningfully broaden our understanding of Natives and their relationship to European ideas about religion, a relationship that might have included, but was not limited to, concepts such as religious “conversion.” The sources upon which we are forced to rely usually come from the missionaries or their exemplary Native converts—Christian Indians who seemingly repudiated particular elements of their traditional religious practice but who were not representative of a majority of Indians whose experience occupied a more middle, gray ground of practice and belief. Even when using these exemplary accounts, however, a fragmented, partial picture emerges from the texts that suggests a complex world of religious practice in which the Indians responded to their changing social, cultural, economic, and religious conditions in a variety of ways, drawing from both Native and Christian practices and taking on both Christian and Native identities. The end result, as the missionaries were sometimes loath to admit, was a bricolage of indigenous and Christian ideas and practices that was not an exact representation of the imagined static orthodoxy professed by AngloMcNally, “The Practice of Native American Christianity,” 836–37. “Introduction,” Mills and Grafton, eds., Conversion: Old Worlds and New, xi. 17 Neal Salisbury, “Embracing Ambiguity: Native Peoples and Christianity in Seventeenth-Century North America,” Ethnohistory 50 (2003) 247–59. 18 Morrison, The Solidarity of Kin, 161. 15 16

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Americans. Scholars have various words for this—“syncretism,” “hybridity,” “dimorphism”—but arguably these potentially pejorative words apply equally to European and Indian Christianity in this time period. To focus on practice is merely to recognize the diversity of belief, practice, and meaning-making among Indians and their Anglo-American counterparts, and to acknowledge the construction of an indigenous Christianity without making facile pronouncements of whether the result is good or bad.19 A practice-centered interpretation, then, redirects the focus away from normative measurement—away from quests to find out if the Indians were “bona fide” Christians or not, or whether the missionaries or their Indian “converts” had failed. To focus on practice also recognizes the range of responses that emerge from a close reading of the sources, which ultimately requires a redefinition of what “conversion” is—what it meant to Anglo-Americans and Indians, and how present-day conceptions of it might obscure seventeenth-century realities.20 In an attempt to draw out these parallel themes over a longer stretch of time, this essay draws upon the experiences of the very varied Indian communities in New England from the 1640s through the 1720s, without intending to ignore the very real differences between the various eras and geographies under consideration. The fact that the social and political contexts of Massachusett Indians prior to 1675 and Wampanoags on Martha’s Vineyard in the 1720s were so different actually strengthens the argument of this essay, since it gives evidence that, to a certain extent, some themes and experiences transcend the usual influences of contextual and temporal factors. This essay, then, is a synchronic exploration of the Christian practices of the Native Americans who did, in some fashion, choose to adopt certain forms, rituals, and beliefs of European Christianity—including all the ambiguity, mixed elements, surprising Native appropriation, and range of responses that their practice of Christianity entailed. These appropriations eventuated in the formation of a hybridized indigenous Indian Christianity that remained simultaneously Native

19 Jace Weaver calls the coexistence of Native and Christian practice “dimorphism,” and says it has long been a characteristic of Native religious practice. Jace Weaver, That the People Might Live: Native American Literatures and Native American Community (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997) vii–viii. Reference taken from Wheeler, “Women and Christian Practice in a Mahican Village,” 48 n. 6. Lamin Sanneh is in favor of dropping words like “syncretism” and “hybridity” from the vocabulary of scholarship completely since they are terms of “otherness” intended to imply disapproval. Lamin O. Sanneh, Whose Religion Is Christianity? The Gospel Beyond the West (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2003) 44. 20 Harold W. Van Lonkhuyzen helpfully raised some of these questions about the nature of conversion in his study of Christian Indians at Natick. See Harold W. Van Lonkhuyzen, “A Reappraisal of the Praying Indians: Acculturation, Conversion, and Identity at Natick, Massachusetts, 1646–1730,” The New England Quarterly 63 (1990).

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and Christian but tended to satisfy neither seventeenth-century colonists nor later generations of American historians.21

■ Praying as Practice Central to Indian Christian spirituality in the seventeenth century, regardless of geography, was the practice of praying. Although in the case of Wannalancet given above, “praying to God” was a practice added after his public confession, for many Indians “praying” was the first, not last, step of identification with European Christianity. Many Indians seemed to adopt praying as a preliminary practice after initial contact with the English missionaries, most likely because the English commanded the practice in even the earliest non-missionary phases of contact. Totherswamp, one of the first Massachusett Indians to attempt to provide a public narration of his conversion, implied that even before John Eliot and the others first preached to the Indians in 1646, praying to God was urged upon him by his English neighbors: “Before I prayed to God, the English, when I came into their houses, often said unto me, Pray to God; but . . . I did not. . . . Then you came unto us, and taught us, and said unto us, Pray unto God; and after that, my heart grew strong, and I was no more ashamed to pray, but I did take up praying to God.”22 In a meeting with many Indians in the wigwam of the Indian leader Waban on 28 October 1646, after the sermon and a prayer, an Indian relayed how, since the first time he heard the Englishmen talking about praying to God, he had tried to pray in his wigwam, but “that while he was praying, one of his fellow Indians interrupted him, and told him, that hee prayed in vaine, because Jesus Christ understood not 21 William Hart, in his analysis of the Mohawk’s response to the missionaries of the eighteenthcentury Anglican missions society, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG; founded 1701), found that there was a range of responses to the missionaries’s overtures, from outright rejection to full acceptance and everything in between. William Bryan Hart, “ ‘For the Good of Our Souls’: Mohawk Authority, Accommodation, and Resistance to Protestant Evangelism, 1700–1780” (Ph.D. diss., Brown University, 1998) 36. 22 John Eliot and Thomas Mayhew, “Tears of Repentance,” in The Eliot Tracts (ed. Michael Clark; Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2003) 269. Waban similarly described pre-missionary encounters with the English—all of which somewhat complicates the notion that no missionary activity took place in the Massachusetts Bay before the efforts of Thomas Mayhew and John Eliot. Waban recounts that “When the English came hither, they said, when I came to the English houses, that I loved the Devil: then I was very angry, and my words were, You know the Devil: I do not know the Devil, and presently I would go out of the house. Sometime they spake meekly to me, and would say, God is in heaven, and he is a good God: yet I regarded not these words, but strongly I loved my sins: it was hard for me to believe what the English said: after many yeares, I sometime[s] believed a word, but I left not my sin. When I began to understand more, I began to doubt, but I desired not Conversion from sin. Afterward, when the English taught me, I would sit still, because they would give me good victuals; then I sometimes thought, certainly God is in heaven.” Only after this does Waban mention his conversation with “Mr Jackson,” which occurred in October 1646 when Eliot and the rest first preached to Waban and his fellow Indians. The other encounters undoubtedly happened prior to these official missionary outreaches—years, if not many years before. John Eliot, “A Further Account of the Progress of the Gospel,” in The Eliot Tracts.

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what Indians speake in prayer, he had bin used to heare English man pray and so could well enough understand them, but Indian language in prayer hee thought he was not acquainted with it, but was a stranger to it, and there for could not understand it.” His question was “whether Jesus Christ did understand, or God did understand Indian prayers.”23 Eliot assured the man that God does in fact understand Indian prayers since he made Indians and English alike. Even for those who persisted to the point of making a public confession, however, praying surfaced early in their confessions as a practice they adopted for a variety of reasons. John Speene, another Massachusett to make an early profession, testified that when he first prayed to God, he did so to maintain already established networks of kinship and friendship: “When I first prayed to God, I did not pray for my soul but only I did as my friends did, because I loved them; and though I prayed to God, yet I did not fear sin, nor was I troubled at it.”24 Similarly, Anthony, a Natick praying Indian, says in his conversion narrative that he decided to pray to God because of his love for his brothers, who were already praying: “If any Warrs were, I would go with my brothers; only I thought of my love to my brothers: and then that, if my brother make Warr, I would go with him, to kill men. Now he prayes, shall not I go with my brother? And my brothers love me, and they both pray to God, why should not I? They prayed morning and evening; and when they eat, and on Sabbath dayes, then I thought I would do so: but it was not for love of God, or fear of God, but because I loved my brothers.”25 In their conversion narrations, other Indians gave different reasons, such as conviction of sin or truth, or sometimes gave no reason at all for giving into the English injunctions that they pray to God. Either way, praying was one of the first Christian practices that many Indians incorporated into their already complex spiritual lifeworld for social and spiritual reasons. “Praying to God” was not merely a perfunctory point of identification, serving as some sort of initiatory rite allowing access into the larger praying community, however. Evidence abounds that the practice of prayer remained central to Native American Christian experience throughout the Massachusetts Bay and over the long span of Native Christian lives. When the wife of Momonequem, the first Indian preacher at Nashauohkamuk (Chilmark) on Martha’s Vineyard, fell ill, Momonequem “waited patiently on God” for three days “till they obtained a merciful Deliverance by Prayer.”26 Margaret Osooit, who Experience Mayhew memorialized in 1727 as a veritable Indian saint, “constantly prayed with her children” and “frequently went into secret places to call upon the Name of the Lord: at which devotion she was sometimes accidentally surprised, by her relations and neighbors.”27 Samuel Coomes, the son of Hiacoomes, the first Indian to fully 23 24 25 26 27

John Eliot, “The Day Breaking, If Not the Sun Rising,” in The Eliot Tracts, 85. Eliot and Mayhew, “Tears of Repentance,” 284. Eliot, “A Further Account of the Progress of the Gospel,” 365. Mayhew, Indian Converts, 12. Ibid., 278.

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commit to Christianity on Martha’s Vineyard, prayed “Morning and Evening in his Family as long as he lived.”28

■ Additional Practices: Collective and Individual Praying, however, was not the only Christian practice adopted by Indians. Two related but separate practices emerge around the Sabbath day exercises, which were undoubtedly the centerpiece of formal Native Christian practices, at least in terms of communal activity: attending sermons and observing the Sabbath (obeying strictures on various kinds of work). The day was seemingly full of events: the service “consisted of an opening prayer, scriptural reading and exegesis, the singing of psalms, the sermon, another psalm, and a final prayer. The celebration of the Lord’s Supper was often part of the morning service, along with catechism, while the conduct of church business, baptism, and ‘any act of publick discipline’ took place in the afternoon of the same day.”29 Even in Indian communities before and after King Philip’s War where there was not a formal, Anglo-sanctioned church, indigenous leadership in each praying town, supplemented by visits from itinerant English ministers and missionaries, ensured that each Sunday the majority of these communities had some sort of Sabbath celebration. Aside from these formal, communal practices, however, Indian Christianity was infused with a plethora of individual and family practices, including family prayers, catechisms, scripture-readings, and hymns. Margaret Osooit took great care with her children by “teaching them their catechisms, and also reading the Scriptures to them, and pressing them to the duties mentioned to them, and warning them against the sins therein forbidden.”30 Wunnanauhkomun, an Indian minister in Christiantown who passed away in 1676, “constantly read the Scriptures in his Family, and usually sang Part of a Psalm before Morning and Evening Prayer; and did very frequently and diligently instruct his Children and Household in the Things of God, and his Kingdom.”31 Samuel Coomes, in the later years of his life, “set up the worship of God in his House,” praying twice daily with his family. He also “read the Scriptures,” and “frequently sung Psalms in his House,” and was “careful to instruct his Children in their Catechisms, and bring them up in the Nurture and Admonition of the Lord.”32 The practice of reading the Bible and other devotional literature, for Indians who had acquired the skills to do so, seems to have become a meaningful Christian 28

Ibid., 92. Kathleen Joan Bragdon, “Native Christianity in Eighteenth Century Massachusetts: Ritual as Cultural Reaffirmation,” in New Dimensions in Ethnohistory: Papers of the Second Laurier Conference on Ethnohistory and Ethnology (ed. Barry Gough and Laird Christie; University of Western Ontario: Canadian Museum of Civilization, 1983) 120. 30 Mayhew, Indian Converts, 278. 31 Ibid., 18. 32 Ibid., 92. 29

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practice for many literate Indians. Abigail Sekitchahkomun, who made a “publick Profesion of Religion while she was but a young Maid,” was taught to read while she was young, and “made a good use of the Advantage, reading abundantly in the Bible, and such other good Books as our Indians have among them.”33 Margaret Osooit, when contemplating her own shortcomings, “used to take her Bible, to which she was no stranger, and turn to and read such places in it as she apprehended to intimate what holiness was required to be in such as so drew nigh to God.” Similarly, Margaret “mightily delighted” in Lewis Bayly’s The Practice of Piety “and would scarce pass a day without reading something in it.”34 Tantalizing evidence of intense Bible reading practices emerges from the extant copies of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century copies of the so-called Eliot Bible, first translated by John Eliot into Massachusett in 1663. Ives Goddard and Kathleen Bragdon have transcribed, translated, and published copies of the sometimes barely intelligible but numerous Indian-language marginalia that fill the blank spaces of the Indian Bibles. The marginal notes reveal not only a close reading of the biblical text and, variously, identification with and distance from it, but also signs of personalization and decades of use and interaction. Some of the pages contain the owner’s name, along with a date, where it was purchased, and sometimes, even for what price. The last page in Malachi in one Bible reads “In Boston the 17th of the 5th month, 1670,” while on a page in the book of Romans the owner wrote: “I Mantooekit this is my hand.” Across the title page of the New Testament in one Bible is written, “I Laben Hossuit own this bible, June 11, 1747. Solomon Pinnon sold it to me. It cost four pounds.”35 More than just personalization, however, the Bibles’ marginalia evidence a range of interaction with the text: identification, alienation, and, at some points, expressions of sorrow, and mini-sermons of warning. In a blank page following the metrical psalms, someone wrote: “There is much of this word of God, this bible, and the Lord Jesus Christ, and the one who believes in him shall find eternal life.” In another Bible, the pages after the metrical psalms contain the words: “All this we believe in the name of Jesus Christ, who (is) our savior, whom you [possibly he] sent to me.” Among the pages of the book of Isaiah is written, “Josiah Ned meditates about savior.” The word “meditate,” in fact, appears in the margin beside passages in Amos, and several times in the gospel according to Mark—indicating the appropriation and use of another Christian practice with a long history.36 Ibid., 188. Ibid., 199. Bayly’s The Practice of Piety, first published in London in 1615, was the all-time Puritan bestseller on personal piety. It was the third work to be translated into the Massachusett language by Eliot, in 1665, after the Bible (trans. 1663) and Richard Baxter’s Call to the Unconverted (trans. 1664). The New England Company wanted The Practice of Piety to be translated first, but Eliot preferred to work on the Baxter treatise. Kellaway, The New England Company, 135. 35 Ives Goddard and Kathleen Joan Bragdon, Native Writings in Massachusett (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1988) 380–83, 391, 414. 36 Ibid., 443, 449, 453, 465. 33 34

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Some of the marginalia contain warnings and messages to future readers. The book of Acts contains the marginal exhortation, “My brothers, remember love for God and all people, always.” In the margin of the book of Exodus we find: “Forever are happy all who believe, forever. I say it you say it I say it I say it you say it you say it This truly is so among all of us. It was the truth in former times.” Simon Papenau seems to have especially interacted with his Bible. In the book of Numbers he reminded himself, “This is your book, you Papenau. Read it with c[oncentr]atrion. Your God [will] bless you.” In the book of Nahum he pleaded with his friends: “I Simon Papen[au] say this to you, my f[ri]ends, all (of you) pray hard.” In an unfortunately incomplete marginal note Simon set out to distill the personal application of 1 Samuel: “1 Samuel say this to you Papenau: if you pray hard to your God . . . .”37 Other moments of painful, comparative Indian self-scrutiny surface, however. A mysterious note in 1 Samuel laments, “We are poor people. We are unable to do that.” Written notes in Numbers include, “Pitiful people (are) we. It is not good. Always falsehood among us all”; “I am forever a pitiful person in this world. I am not able clearly to read this book.” In 1 Kings we read, “I am not able to defend myself from the happenings in the world.” Over and over again “pitiful” recurs as the descriptor of choice. In Malachi: “I am a pitiful man”; in John: “I Isak Papenau am a pitiful person. It is so.”38 Such statements, however, are not entirely unlike the extreme yet routine expressions of contrition expected in the normal rhythm of Puritan spirituality, as evidenced in the conversion narratives of English men and women and in the Indian conversion narratives recorded by John Eliot and published by the New England Company in 1653. The fact that such sentiments were voluntarily recorded as marginal notes in personal Bibles by Indian Christians merely confirms the depth of internalization and appropriation of various Puritan and Protestant practices by some of the Native proselytes. Heartfelt abasement, awareness of sin, and appropriate contrition were learned behaviors, and ones that the Indians did not learn quickly, as Charles Cohen and Kristina Bross have argued. But biblical marginalia demonstrate that more abstract Christian practices such as spiritual journaling and scriptural cross-referencing were also adopted over time by literate Christian Indians.

■ Relations of Grace and Church Membership From the perspective of the Puritan missionaries and ministers and their sponsors in Old England, however, the most important religious practice for the Indians to perfect was the public narration of their conversion. Interestingly, Daniel Gookin reported in 1674 that in Natick it was not uncommon for Indians to incorporate a wide variety of Christian practices into their normal lives without making an official 37 38

Ibid., 417, 423, 437, 453. Ibid., 375, 423, 431, 437.

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profession of faith in Christ. Many of the Natick Indians, Gookin reported, “have subjected to the gospel, that are catechized, do attend publick worship, read the scriptures, pray in their family morning and evening; but being not yet come so far, as to be able or willing to profess their faith in Christ, and yield obedience and subjection unto him in his church, are not admitted to partake in the ordinances of God, proper and peculiar to the church of Christ; which is a garden enclosed, as the scripture saith.”39 As noted above, Wannalancet observed the Sabbath and attended sermons for four years before confessing Christ. Nishohkou, a Natick praying Indian, noted that he prayed to God “about three years” and attended services during that time but “understood nothing at all,” especially since he attended the services primarily to “look upon women.”40 Many examples undoubtedly exist of praying Indians who practiced Christianity devoutly without embracing the covenant community of visible saints through formal church membership; a few such examples survived the censorial selection of the missionaries in their publications. Samuel Coomes, who Experience Mayhew otherwise describes as an exemplary Christian, laments that “he was guilty of one Fault, which I must mention, and a Fault it is which I believe many other good Men are guilty of: he never asked an Admission to the Table of the Lord, tho none that knew him would have scrupled to admit him to it.” The only reason Mayhew gives is because Samuel “feared that he was not well qualified for the Enjoyment of so high a Privilege.” Margaret Osooit was one of many Indians who received instruction under the ministry of the Mayhews and the Indian Christian leaders on Martha’s Vineyard. As mentioned above, if her devotional practices are any indication, her life of faith was robust: she “constantly prayed with her children;” “frequently went into secret places to call upon the name of the Lord,” often picked up and read her Bible, “to which she was no stranger.” According to Experience Mayhew, “She was looked upon as a person so well qualified for communion with the church of Christ, that many wondered that she did not ask admission thereunto; and some discoursed with her about the matter, but she had such apprehensions concerning the holiness required of those who are admitted to fellowship with God in his ordinances, that she could not be persuaded that she was herself qualified for so high privilege.”41 This seemingly distanced (but not necessarily insincere) practice of Christianity as described by Gookin and Mayhew appears to be the norm, however, not the exception. According to the numbers provided by Gookin’s estimates for the colony of Massachusetts alone, in 1674 there were 1,100 Penacook/Pawtucket, Nipmuc, and Massachusett Indians associated with the fourteen praying towns in Massachusetts, including seven “older” towns in the eastern part of the state and seven “newer” towns in Nipmuc country. Of those fourteen towns, however, 39 40 41

Gookin, Historical Collections, 69. Eliot, “A Further Account of the Progress of the Gospel,” 361–63. Mayhew, Indian Converts, 278.

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there were only two established churches—in Natick and in Hassanamesitt. Of the 1,100 praying Indians, only between sixty-four and seventy-four were in communion, or members, of any church, and only forty-five are listed as having been baptized. At most, then, only 119 out of 1,100 praying Indians in Massachusetts saw the need to move their practice of Christianity beyond the realm of meaningmaking that made sense to them, despite the continual proddings of the English missionaries.42 It is significant to note, however, that Gookin’s numbers did not include the Wampanoag in Plymouth Colony, on Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard, and Nantucket, whose praying Indian population in 1674 numbered close to 3,500, according to recent estimates by David Silverman.43 Although more churches had been established among the Wompanoag in 1674 than among Massachusett and Nipmuc, the evidence suggests that practices among the Wampanoag in this same time period differed only slightly from their mainland counterparts with regard to actual church membership. Interestingly enough, scholars of New England have long recognized that the same statistical phenomenon existed among the Puritans. From very early on, the Puritan church in New England was more closed than open, with church membership limited to those who could give testimony to their experience of faith. With the formalization of the practice of the public confession of one’s faith in 1636 as a major part of church membership, the bar was raised so high that many Anglo-Americans in New England society, like many praying Indians, contented themselves with the rituals of Protestantism, such as Bible reading, prayer, and church attendance, without taking the final, formal step of church membership. Although steps were taken later in the seventeenth century to broaden the possibility of membership for later generations in the form of the so-called Halfway Covenant in 1662, even by 1700 the number of full church members as a percentage of the total population was undoubtedly small.44 It should come as little surprise, then, that the same might be true in Indian circles. Gookin, Historical Collections, 87. Francis Jennings has a helpful chart that summarizes Gookin’s numbers. See Jennings, The Invasion of America, 251. In his introduction to the first published Indian conversion narratives, Eliot notes, “These Indians (the better and wiser sort of them) have for some years inquired after Church-Estate, Baptism, and the rest of the Ordinances of God, in the observation whereof they see the Godly English walk.” The implication is that only “the better and wiser” (i.e., only a few) of the Indians sought membership, and the rest did not. Eliot and Mayhew, “Tears of Repentance,” 268. 43 David Silverman has an even more expansive chart that includes Massachusett, Penacook/ Pawtucket, Nipmuc, and Wampanoag Christian Indian populations. See Silverman, Faith and Boundaries, 80. 44 Robert Pope has studied in detail the effects of the Halfway Covenant in seventeenth-century New England churches and concluded that in general, it did not represent “declension” at all; the churches were not inundated with “halfway” members, and the process of acceptance in the Massachusetts Bay was slow and long. Furthermore, the fact that the churches experienced growth of full members in the 1680s seems surprising given the lowering of standards supposedly represented by the possibility of “halfway members” in the 1662 Halfway Covenant. Pope’s analysis, however, does not directly address the question of the proportion of church members to the total population of New England. 42

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■ Hybridity and Religious Negotiation among Indians and AngloAmericans Somewhat more surprising, however, is the degree to which the Native Americans shaped their Christian practices and doctrines, either in seeking to continue traditional religious and cultural practices alongside of the newly adopted Christian ones, or else in choosing to focus upon the Christian practices and themes that most resonated with traditional practices, teachings, and beliefs. Many of the conversion narratives and descriptions of the “Indian converts” by Eliot and Mayhew contain examples of the incorporation of various Christian practices alongside the simultaneous retention of Native ones. Nishohkou related that After wee pray’d to God about three years, my heart was not yet right, but I desired to run wilde, as also sundry others did. . . . And I went to Pawwauing among others, and these things I loved thoroughly, and they grew in my heart, and had nourishment there, especially lust. . . . When the Minister came to teach us, hee taught, and I came to meeting; but I came to look upon women, I understood not what he taught; sometimes I came, and understood nothing at all. . . . Then I desired my heart might be made strong by Church-covenant, Baptism, and the Lords Supper, which might be as a Fort to keep me from enemies, as a Fort keepeth us from outward enemies.”45

Of course in the context of the conversion narrative, the “old life” is contrasted with the “new life,” but what is supplied for us rather incidentally is how easily Christian practices like praying and church attendance coexisted with traditional ones (here interpreted as running “wilde”), such as “Pawwauing,” and healing remedies, and traditional, promiscuous sexual mores.46 The reliance on powwows (Native religious leaders) for medicinal relief was apparently not uncommon, even on Martha’s Vineyard, where Experience Mayhew, perhaps somewhat facetiously, reported in 1704 that of 180 families on the island, only two people were pagan.47 Matthew Mayhew obviously believed in the efficacy of the powwows, given that they did their arts by “Diabolick Skill,” and gave two examples of “bewitched” or “Tormented” individuals going to a “Powaw” and finding relief, and Matthew said he could give “many instances” beyond just these two.48 The first one involved an Indian, later called Simon, whose friends, since Robert G. Pope, The Half-Way Covenant: Church Membership in Puritan New England (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1969). For a similar argument against the Halfway Covenant as an indicator of declension, see Mark A. Peterson, The Price of Redemption: The Spiritual Economy of Puritan New England (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997). 45 Eliot, “A Further Account of the Progress of the Gospel,” 361–63. 46 For an excellent account of “popular” religious practices among the Wampanoag during this time period, see Douglas L. Winiarski, “Native American Popular Religion in New England’s Old Colony, 1670–1770,” Religion and American Culture 15 (2005) 147–86. 47 Kellaway, The New England Company, 239. 48 Matthew Mayhew, A Brief Narrative of the Success Which the Gospel Hath Had, among the Indians, of Martha’s-Vineyard (and the Places Adjacent) in New-England. (Boston: 1694) 13–15.

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he had been for some time “greatly Tormented,” “advise[d] him to the Powaw’s, concluding him to be Bewitched; they being met, and dancing around a great Fire” with the bewitched Indian lying nearby. Some of his neighbors and friends, however, began to suspect that the powwow to whom they came for a cure was the one who bewitched their friend in the first place, so “they threaten[ed] him that as he had Bewitched, unless he would Cure the Sick man, they would burn him in that fire.” In the end, the sick man’s friends and neighbors picked up the powwow, “resolving at least to singe him; who no sooner felt the heat of the fire near him, but the Sick immediately recovered.”49 In the other instance Mayhew specifically names two English observers, Capt. Thomas Dagget, Esq., and Richard Sarson, Esq., both justices of the peace. Apparently they were on an island close to Martha’s Vineyard with a “Bewitched Woman” who “lay in great Extremity.” Since the powwows on that island were unable to cure the woman, the Englishmen “sent to Martha’s Vineyard, for more famoused Powaw’s.” While the Englishmen watched, these more famous powwows danced and used “certain Ceremonies usual in such cases, Praying to [their] god with such ardent desires and fervency.” In the end, the rituals were effective: the powwows chased the troubling spirit, “the Spirit of an Englishman drowned in the Adjacent Sound,” out of the woman and caught it in a deerskin, but they recommended that the woman leave the island since the powwow who bewitched her was still close by and, furthermore, the captured spirit was an “English Spirit,” and they “could not long confine it.”50 Although historians have normally understood European-Native missions in terms of “power encounters” or show-downs between the spiritual leaders of the Natives and those of the European Christians, at times powwows allowed and even encouraged Christian practice and allegiance. One unnamed “Powaw” on Martha’s Vineyard “could precisely inform such who desired his Assistance, from whence Goods Stolen from them were taken, and whither carried.” Strangely enough, this “Powaw” had a wife who “was accounted a Godly Woman, and lived in the practice and profession of the Christian Religion, not only by the approbation, but incouragement of her Husband; She constantly Prayed in the Family, and attended the Publick Worship on the Lords Day’s: he declared that he could not blame her, for that she Served a God that was above his; but that as to himself, his gods continued kindness, obliged him not to forsake his Service.”51 As many scholars of Native New England have pointed out, such continuities with Native traditions and practices even after the explicit adoption of Christian practices was possibly more common than the missionaries liked to admit to their sponsors in Old England.52 In addition to the covert practice of powwowing, James 49

Ibid., 14. Ibid., 15. 51 Ibid., 12–13. 52 David Silverman notes that “scholars of Christian Indians, particularly the so-called praying Indians of New England, have reached a consensus that the natives’ religious institutions, rituals, and 50

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Axtell asserts that “Native social values, dress, housing, work patterns, language, and religious rituals survived and even flourished in many ‘praying towns.’”53 Richard Cogley notes that in the praying towns, the Indians continued to live in wigwams and continued to fish and take part in traditional forms of recreation. Proselytes in most praying towns elected traditional sachems and Native leaders into positions of authority, thereby maintaining previous, familiar hierarchies of leadership, kinship, and spiritual oversight. Some elements of Native burial practices coexisted with Christian ones, too. On Martha’s Vineyard, according to David Silverman, although many Wampanoag abandoned some ritual practices like coloring their corpses red, coloring their own faces black, mangling their face and hair, and screeching; funerary objects such as kaolin pipes, metal pots, glass bottles, and shell beads continued to be interred with the deceased. Christian Indians still “avoided mentioning the names of the deceased” in order to not disturb their ghosts, and they “continued to point their graves westward toward Kiethtan’s House, a practice based on the idea that the soul exited the body through the skull and should begin its journey to the afterlife traveling in the proper direction.”54 Similarly, on the mainland, excavations of Indian cemeteries at the three praying towns of Natick, Punkapoag, and Hassanamesit, arguably “the three most Anglicized communities,” have shown that “material objects were sometimes interred with the bodies,” a traditional practice that “violated the Puritan prohibition of grave goods.” Richard Cogley concludes that although there is no evidence that leading Christian Indians were buried in this way, “they were surely aware that the practice continued in the settlements and, at the very least, condoned it.”55 Hints of continuity in social practices surface from time to time, too. David Silverman’s description of a mideighteenth-century Wampanoag church meeting renders the rituals and functions of the service in the Native community as indistinguishable from the role of other pre-Christian meetings of the past.56 Even as late as 1792 the traditional peace pipe was passed after the Christian church service in some congregations.57

other behaviors included Christian traditional elements, often in syncretic form.” What is missing from much of the scholarship, as Silverman notes, is a nuanced understanding of the process through which this occurred. Silverman, “Indians, Missionaries, and Religious Translation,” 143. 53 James Axtell, “Preachers, Priests, and Pagans: Catholic and Protestant Missions in Colonial North America,” in New Dimensions in Ethnohistory: Papers of the Second Laurier Conference on Ethnohistory and Ethnology (ed. Barry Gough and Laird Christie; University of Western Ontario: Canadian Museum of Civilization, 1983) 70. 54 Silverman, “Indians, Missionaries, and Religious Translation,” 166. Kiethtan was the “good” spirit, who balanced Cheepi, the “bad” spirit. 55 Richard W. Cogley, John Eliot’s Mission to the Indians before King Philip’s War (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999) 244. 56 David J. Silverman, “The Church in New England Indian Community Life: A View from the Islands and Cape Cod,” in Reinterpreting New England Indians and the Colonial Experience (ed. Colin G. Calloway and Neal Salisbury; Boston: Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 2003) 264–65. 57 Bragdon, “Native Christianity in Eighteenth Century Massachusetts,” 123.

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It was, perhaps, the continuities between Native religion and culture and Christianity that allowed Native Christians to “convert” to any degree in the first place. As Charles Cohen, Richard Cogley, and David Silverman have argued, American Indians in the northeast demonstrated an admirable capacity for apprehending the fine points of Reformed theology, but on the whole they showed preference for some concepts and slight aversion to others. Original sin and the bodily resurrection never quite took root as much as the English missionaries had hoped, while concepts of doing good works, punishment for sin, and heaven all resonated with traditional beliefs already existing within Native religion and culture.58 It is interesting to note, however, that if the imaginative religious space between European Christianity and Native religious traditions was minimized by the Indians, the English ministers and missionaries themselves contributed to this process in small ways. English sermons to Natives, for example, seemed to resonate with already-existing ideas and mores within Indian culture and religion, such as the need for general good-will and morality. Gideon Hawley, an eighteenth-century missionary, once noted that when Jonathan Edwards, known by later generations of theologians for his abstruse treatises on God, original sin, and true virtue, preached to the Mahican Indians at Stockbridge he was a “plain and practical preacher: upon no occasion did he display any metaphysical knowledge in the pulpit.”59 58 Cogley, John Eliot’s Mission, 243. Silverman, “Indians, Missionaries, and Religious Translation,” 145–47. Cohen, “Conversion among Puritans and Amerindians,” 250, 255. Kristina Bross and Charles Cohen both speak of the “learning” of Puritanism. Bross highlights the lapse in time between the first sermon to the Indians in 1646 and the first public conversion narrative in 1652, arguing that it took a while for the Indians to learn what exactly the genre of the conversion narrative was. Cohen points out that even after the Indians were familiarized with the genre of the conversion narrative, they still needed more time to perfect it, since many, if not all, of the conversion narrations first given by the Indians in 1652 were rejected as insufficient and the same candidates were brought forward again seven years later in 1659. Not all English men and women, let alone Indians, however, successfully mastered this particular practice. Bross, Dry Bones and Indian Sermons, 89–90. Cohen, “Conversion among Puritans and Amerindians,” 244, 250. See also Robert James Naeher, “Dialogue in the Wilderness: John Eliot and the Indian Exploration of Puritanism as a Source of Meaning, Comfort, and Ethnic Survival,” The New England Quarterly 62 (1989). 59 Kellaway, The New England Company, 274. Part of this was undoubtedly due to the fact that Edwards did not know enough of the Native languages to preach in the local dialect; he routinely preached in English and had an Indian serve as an interpreter. Rachel Wheeler has written at length about the degree to which missionary experience shaped Edwards, including much attention to writing more simplified sermons full of relevant metaphors about the love of Christ. Ironically, however, in comparing hundreds of sermons preached by Edwards at Stockbridge and Northampton, Wheeler does not see much de-emphasis of Calvinism. William Hart has also argued that plain and simple preaching was a racialized missionary strategy adopted by various agencies in the eighteenth century as ideas about the inherent dullness of Indians and blacks gained more currency, something Wheeler does not see evidenced in Edwards. Rachel M. Wheeler, “Living Upon Hope: Mahicans and Missionaries, 1730–1760” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1999) 134–35. William Bryan Hart, “‘Christianity Made Easy to the Meanest Capacity’: S.P.G. Missionary Attitudes toward EighteenthCentury Mohawk Cognition” (paper presented at the Tenth Annual Conference of the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Northampton, Mass., June 2004).

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In general, English sermons were on “family love and the importance of family worship” and the importance of “good behaviour on earth to ensure eternal life,” all with “continual reference to the brotherhood of Christians, using generalized Massachusett kinship terminology such as nemat (‘brother, friend’).”60 To highlight the continuity of Indian Christianity with traditional Native culture or the coexistence of traditional and Christian practice, however, is not to argue for the superficiality of the praying Indians or to rule out genuine belief or knowledgeable Christian Indians.61 It is an attempt to understand the complex process of conversion that is much more than simply replacing one set of beliefs with another, and one that involves the process of making the “new” religion of Christianity something meaningful and truly indigenous in the process. Over the course of the seventeenth century, the rituals of Christianity became for many Indians a source of meaning-making and comfort, even as they did for the English.62 If scholars insist on endlessly scrutinizing Indian conversions to see whether they were “bona fide,” to use a phrase popularized by James Axtell in this context, however, it is only reasonable that the same should be done for their English counterparts. A more helpful direction, however, might be to simply recognize the ambiguity and open-endedness of religious practice among both English and Native Christians. As David Hall has demonstrated in Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment, even the religious culture of the most biblically literate, pietistic of all of the American colonies was infused with a surprising amount of so-called “popular religion” and rather unorthodox belief and practice—by the laity and clergy alike, to a certain extent. The Puritans, no less than the Indians, relied upon extra-biblical explanations, home-cures, and rituals to make meaning in their universe. In short, at times they both used whatever worked. “Yet it may surprise some readers (as I myself was surprised),” Hall writes, “to discover how much ‘magic’ circulated in New England—the magic of ‘murder will out,’ prophetic dreams and visions, pins hammered into buildings, shape-shifting dogs, and much more besides. The religion of the colonists was infused with ancient attitudes and practices, some

60

Bragdon, “Native Christianity in Eighteenth Century Massachusetts,” 121. Charles Cohen, Richard Cogley, and David Silverman argue against notions of vacuous Indian understandings of Christianity or even Reformed doctrine; Keely McCarthy and Kristina Bross argue for the need to allow for genuine belief in decisions to convert—McCarthy resists especially Axtell’s political-motivation-for-conversion narrative. Cohen, “Conversion among Puritans and Amerindians.” Cogley, John Eliot’s Mission. Silverman, Faith and Boundaries. McCarthy, “Conversion, Identity, and the Indian Missionary.” Bross, Dry Bones and Indian Sermons. 62 For a rich discussion of the use of ritual in Puritan religious life, see Charles E. HambrickStowe, The Practice of Piety: Puritan Devotional Disciplines in Seventeenth-Century New England (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1982). See also David D. Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989) esp. ch. 4, “The Uses of Ritual,” and the last half of ch. 5, “The Mental World of Samuel Sewall.” 61

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indeed so old as to antedate the rise of Christianity.”63 One English colonist visited the unnamed powwow on Martha’s Vineyard known for his ability to divine the location of lost or stolen items (mentioned above) and requested his assistance in locating an item that was stolen, “having formerly been an eyewitness of his ability”; at first the powwow said he could not help the colonist “since himself served another God,” but later decided, “If you believe that my god will help you, I will try what I can do,” at which point the Englishman desisted from “further inquiry.”64 John Winthrop, the pious, orthodox first governor of Massachusetts, is on record as participating in the rather superstitious (but apparently efficacious) rituals associated with the popular belief that “murder will out” in two cases: to determine the guilt of a murderer in 1644 and the mother of an illegitimate baby in 1647. In both cases, when the accused either touched the deceased or was in his or her presence, fresh blood flowed from the body or through the veins of the corpse.65 Even many “orthodox” Puritans mixed superstition with Christian belief and just as a large percentage of English men and women found the practice of Christianity apart from the official entrance into church membership meaningful, so, too, Indians accepted many Christian practices without abandoning their traditional beliefs or joining official Christian churches.

■ Indian Leaders and Religious Regulation The presence of such mixed, unorthodox belief, however, did not always guarantee ongoing acceptance; historians of “popular religion” often speak of the “reform of popular culture” as magistrates and clergy cracked down on various elements of popular practice and piety outside the cope of official approbation.66 In New England, the situation among the Indians was not much different. The towns that Eliot and the Massachusetts Bay Colony set aside for Christian Indians were called “praying towns,” starting with Natick in 1660; Indians who lived in these towns were called “praying Indians.” Terms like “praying towns” and “praying Indians” connote a uniformity of belief and practice that was almost completely lacking in most cases, however. Affiliation with the praying towns required only a willingness to listen to the missionaries, and although pressure was undoubtedly placed on the Indians to conform to some English cultural and religious standards such as Sabbath observance, men cutting their hair, etc., in reality English were in no position to impose uniformity on the Indians, even those within the praying towns. Furthermore, the “imposition” narrative of European-Native contact history obscures another 63

Hall, Worlds of Wonder, 19. Mayhew, A Brief Narrative, 12. 65 Hall, Worlds of Wonder, 176. 66 See, for example, David Underdown, Fire from Heaven: Life in an English Town in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992) ch. 4. See also Imogene Luxton, “The Reformation of Popular Culture,” in Church and Society in England (ed. Felicity Heal and Rosemary O’Day; London: Macmillan, 1977). Keith Wrightson and David Levine, Poverty and Piety in an English Village: Terling, 1525–1700 (New York: Academic Press, 1979). 64

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important aspect—the willing appropriation of Christianity by the Natives, and, even more interestingly, the leadership given by the Native tribal leaders themselves. Although it is more comfortable to blame the missionaries for the supposed strict moral and social codes in the praying towns, in reality the leadership was largely in the hands of the Indians who themselves undertook various levels of moral reform (or lack thereof, sometimes to the missionaries’ chagrin). Missions among the Massachusett and Nipmuc Indians are often viewed as the sole enterprise of John Eliot, as if Eliot himself was omnipresent, capable of simultaneously and continuously exerting his presence in the fourteen scattered towns of the Christian Indians in Massachusetts. In fact, Eliot throughout his life remained the fulltime pastor of the church in Roxbury, and although he was absent from his home church for months at a time, his primary duties were arguably still in Roxbury. The main responsibility for the direction and leadership of the Christian Indian communities fell upon Native Christian leaders, who in many cases were traditional sachems who adopted the practices and beliefs of Christianity. Although the Native leaders no doubt in some cases provided more latitude than Eliot might have, in other cases they upheld similar standards, to the point that if “blame” is assigned for the imposition of Christianity upon Native religion, the Native Christian leaders themselves played a large role, much larger than is usually admitted. In some cases, in fact, Indian Christian leaders adopted Puritan standards, such as the requirement for conversion narratives for church membership, and then continued them well into the eighteenth century, even though by this time many Puritan congregations had adopted less rigorous tests for membership.67 Examples of Native leaders, many as reformers of their own people, abound. Wunnanauhkomun, an Indian minister on Martha’s Vineyard, “would neither drink to Excess himself, nor keep Company with such as did.”68 Indian ministers were not the only source of such sentiments, however. Abel Wauwompuhque, Sr., although he “was not a minister . . . he was a zealous Reprover of the Sins of the times in which he lived, especially the Sin of Drunkenness he did abhor, and earnestly testify’d against it. He could no endure Contention among the Brethren, but earnestly endeavoured to promote Peace and Unity among them”; he would call for peace at church meetings, and as a magistrate among his own people he “used to be a Terror to Evil Doers when he was in that Place of Trust, by inflicting deserved Punishments on them.”69 Similarly, James Nashcompait, also a layman, “feared God and eschewed Evil, and was a sharp Reprover of Sin in his Brethren and Neighbors, and would tell them plainly that they sinned against God when they did so.”70

67 68 69 70

Silverman, “Indians, Missionaries, and Religious Translation,” 164. Mayhew, Indian Converts, 18. Ibid., 98. Ibid., 100.

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The point here is that in many cases the leadership for “European” type reform largely came from the Indian leaders and Indian Christians; their effectiveness, as well as that of the English ministers and missionaries, is of course another issue. Richard Cogley and others have pointed out that over time John Eliot had to learn to tolerate a certain degree of co-mingling of Indian and English culture in the praying towns. In a sense, Eliot was forced to do so, given the diversity of responses and various “levels” of practice contained within each praying town.

■ Generational Dimensions of Religious Practice The experience of Indians and English was not always an ongoing, first-contact, frontier situation, however. In most situations in New England, a small proportion of Natives did adopt various aspects of Christianity and its practices and, with the help of English missionaries and ministers, gathered churches and educational organizations that were largely run by Indians. Furthermore, at some point, Indian children were born into more or less Christian Indian households, or perhaps, more accurately, households that were simultaneously practicing and preserving elements of Christian culture and Indian culture. Samuel Coomes was sent by his father Hiacoomes at a young age to live with Thomas Mayhew, Sr., one of the main English missionaries on Martha’s Vineyard, where Samuel “was very well instructed. He could read well, both in Indian and in English, and well understood the Principles of the Christian Religion. He had no doubt also many good Instructions, and Counsels from his own Father, who listened and preached about two Miles from his Master’s House.”71 Abigail Sekitchahkomun “made a publick Profesion of Religion while she was but a young Maid”; she read the Bible and other books translated into the local Indian dialect and in general it was reported that “she ordered her Conversation as did become the Gospel.”72 Martha Coomes was a “Daughter of religious Parents” and was “solemnly devoted to God in her Infancy, and had a religious Education.”73 Before long, the religious experiences of second and third generation Natives immersed in the religious culture of seventeenth-century Puritanism mirrored at points the experiences of their English counterparts. Mary Coshomon, who died in Chilmark, in March 1721/22, was “a Daughter of pious Parents,” namely, the Deacon Jonathan Amos and his wife, who “taught her to read, and instructed her well in the Principles of the true Religion: and she, so far as I can learn, was of a sober conversation from her Youth up.”74 After she married, she encouraged her husband to “constantly uphold the Worship of God in his House”; after two years of marriage she experienced a deep desire to be a full member of the church, lest she be “excluded from [God’s] Presence in the World to come.” After a time of 71 72 73 74

Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., Ibid.,

91. 188. 187. 179.

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thoughts and “many Tears,” and “seeking earnestly to God to prepare her for the Privileges which she earnestly desired to enjoy,” one night after the church service she met with the Indian ministers and made a profession of faith and was “readily admitted to a Participation of all the Ordinances of the Gospel.”75 Examples of second and third generation Christian Indians illuminate even more the “ambiguity” outlined by Neal Salisbury in attempting to define Native identity, but they also confirm the degree to which Christianity “went Native”—how it was adapted and adopted by the Indians to the point that the rituals of the faith not only allowed them to deal with the present in a meaningful way but also allowed them to preserve the future of their own traditions and community. Indians occasionally even spoke of Christianity as a return to what their forefathers knew.76 The irony of the Native Christian church communities, as Daniel Mandell has pointed out, is that although they were arguably institutions designed by some of the missionaries and English sponsors to eradicate various aspects of Native religion and culture, in the late-seventeenth and eighteenth century they were vital to the preservation of that same Native culture, practice, and identity.77 On Martha’s Vineyard, especially, in the eighteenth century the Christian churches “played a multivalent and principal role in offshore Wampanoag community life, reinforcing the Indians’ village, tribal, and colonial ties, and providing an institutional framework in which to address issues often unrelated to religion,” leading David Silverman to conclude that if anything, the importance of the churches in Wampanoag country expanded over time.78

■ Conclusion The important point here is that the Christian practices and beliefs that were adopted, even by second and third generation Indian Christians, were done so alongside other, more traditional elements of Native culture and religion. Native Americans responded to English missionaries across a spectrum that included rejection, 75 Ibid., 180. There is an interesting gendered dimension here, too, one that parallels patterns in English society in the seventeenth century, where women were typically the ones who initiated church adherence, membership, and baptisms, primarily at particular moments of transition within the family, like childbirth, marriages, etc. See Anne S. Brown and David D. Hall, “Family Strategies and Religious Practice: Baptism and the Lord’s Supper in Early New England,” in Lived Religion in America (ed. David D. Hall; Princeton, N.J.: Princeton, 1997) 55–56. Laurel Ulrich has also argued that women joined churches earlier and at a younger age than men (including their husbands) in part because “church membership was one of the few public distinctions available to women.” Laurel Ulrich, Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650–1750 (1st ed.; New York, N.Y.: Knopf (distributed by Random House), 1982) 216. 76 William S. Simmons, Spirit of the New England Tribes: Indian History and Folklore, 1620–1984 (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1986) 67. Lamin Sanneh has noted a similar phenomenon among twentieth-century post-colonial African tribes, namely, that Christianity helped them become “renewed Africans.” Sanneh, Whose Religion Is Christianity?, 43. 77 Daniel R. Mandell, Behind the Frontier: Indians in Eighteenth-Century Eastern Massachusetts (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996) 5, 49. 78 Silverman, “The Church in New England Indian Community Life,” 265–67.

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embracement, and a variety of positions in between. For some, like Wannalancet in the praying town of Wamesit, Christian practices and belief were incorporated slowly, over time, as Christianity, and even Puritanism, was learned gradually. For others, the process happened more quickly. A select few made a formal confession and joined the church; others continued to make meaning of their lives through avenues of Christian practice besides formal church membership, at times very intensely, as in the case of Margaret Osooit. For none of the Indians involved, however, was the process ever total or complete as the word “conversion” implies. If this is what is meant by the pronouncement of the “failure” of missions to the Indians, than perhaps the indictment is correct. But, in fact, if we take the testimony of the Indians who decided to make Christianity their own, the story is different. Indians, no matter how Christianized and Anglicized they became, rightfully still remained Indian, and the Christianity they fashioned contained as many traces of their indigenous culture as the Protestant version of Christianity did of the English culture brought to the New World by the Puritan missionaries.

Books Received Adelman, Janet. Blood Relations: Christian and Jew in The Merchant of Venice. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. 224 pp. $35.00 hb. Ahearne-Kroll, Stephen P. The Psalms of Lament in Mark’s Passion: Jesus’ Davidic Suffering. Society for New Testament Studies Monograph Series 142. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 239 pp. $95.00 hb. Anderson, Janice Capel and Stephen D. Moore, eds. Mark & Method: New Approaches in Biblical Studies. 2d edition. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2008. 288 pp. $22.00 pb. Arbuckle, Gerald A. Laughing With God: Humor, Culture, and Transformation. Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 2008. 208 pp. $34.95 pb. Assmann, Jan. Of God and Gods: Egypt, Israel, and the Rise of Monotheism. George L. Mosse Series in Modern European Cultural and Intellectual History. Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008. 196 pp. $26.95 pb. Bal, Mieke. Loving Yusuf: Conceptual Travels from Present to Past. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. 250 pp. $22.50 pb. Ball, Bryan W. The Soul Sleepers: Christian Mortalism from Wycliffe to Priestly. Cambridge, U.K.: James Clarke & Co., 2008. 235 pp. n.p. Bamforth, Nicholas C. and David A. J. Richards. Patriarchal Religion, Sexuality, and Gender: A Critique of New Natural Law. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 403 pp. $95.00 hb. Bash, Anthony. Forgiveness and Christian Ethics. New Studies in Christian Ethics 29. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 208 pp. $85.00 hb. Beattie, Tina. The New Atheists: The Twilight of Reason & the War on Religion. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 2007. 209 pp. $20.00 pb. Beecher, Norman. Reform of Christianity: The Emerging Church. Concord, Mass.: Concord Seven Doors, 2008. 100 pp. n.p. hb. Beeley, Christopher A. Gregory of Nazianzus on the Trinity and the Knowledge of God: In Your Light We Shall See Light. Oxford Studes in Historical Theology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. 396 pp. n.p. hb. Benedetto, Robert, ed. The New Westminster Dictionary of Church History: Volume One, The Early, Medieval, and Reformation Eras. Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox, 2008. 691 pp. n.p. hb. Bennett, Jana Marguerite. Water Is Thicker Than Blood: An Augustinian Theology of Marriage and Singleness. New York, Oxford University Press, 2008. $55.00 hb. Bergant, Dianne. Scripture: History and Interpretation. Engaging Theology: Catholic Perspectives. Edited by Tatha Wiley. Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 2008. 174 pp. n.p. HTR 102:1 (2009) 125–34

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Berger, Alan L. and David Patterson, et al. Jewish-Christian Dialogue: Drawing Honey from the Rock. St. Paul, Minn.: Paragon, 2008. 317 pp. $19.95 pb. Bernardin, Cardinal Joseph L. The Seamless Garment: Writings on the Consistent Ethic of Life. Edited by Thomas A. Nairn. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 2008. 305 pp. $30.00 pb. Billings, J. Todd. Calvin, Participation, and the Gift: The Activity of Believers in Union with Christ. Changing Paradigms in Historical and Systematic Theology. Edited by Sarah Coakley and Richard Cross. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. 218 pp. $100 hb. Bohak, Gideon. Ancient Jewish Magic: A History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 483 pp. $135.00 hb. Bonifacio, Gianattilio. Personaggi minori e discepoli in Marco 4–8. La funzione degli episodi dei personaggi minori nell’interazione con la storia dei protagonisti. Analecta Biblica 173. Rome: Editrice Pontificio Istituto Biblico, 2008. 293 pp. n.p. pb. Bostom, Andrew, ed. The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism: From Sacred Texts to Solemn History. Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2008. 768 pp. $39.95 hb. Bouteneff, Peter C. Beginnings: Ancient Christian Readings of the Biblical Creation Narratives. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2008. 256 pp. $22.99 pb. Brady, Bernard V. Essential Catholic Social Thought. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 2008. 294 pp. n.p. pb. Brock, Sebastian. The Luminous Eye: The Spiritual World Vision of Saint Ephrem the Syrian. Cistercian Studies 124. Kalamazoo, Mich.: Cistercian Publications, 2008. 209 pp. n.p. pb. Brock, Sebastian, ed. and trans. The Syriac Fathers on Prayer and the Spiritual Life. Cistercian Studies 101. Kalamazoo, Mich.: Cistercian Publications, 1987. 381 pp. n.p. pb. Brown, David. God & Mystery in Words: Experience through Metaphor and Drama. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. 288 pp. $ 49.95 hb. Brown, Peter. The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity. 2d ed. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008. 568 pp. $27.50 pb. Brown, Raymond E. Christ in the Gospels of the Liturgical Year. Edited by Ronald D. Witherup. Expanded ed. Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 2008. 437 pp. $29.95 pb. Bulkeley, Kelly. Dreaming in the World’s Religions: A Comparative History. New York: New York University Press, 2008. 331 pp. $23.00 pb. Busch, Eberhard. Barth. Abingdon Pillars of Theology. Nashville, Tenn.: Abingdon Press, 2008. 95 pp. n.p. Byrd, James P. Jonathan Edwards for Armchair Theologians. Illustrations by Ron Hill. Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox, 2008. 195 pp. n.p. pb. Byrne, Brendan. A Costly Freedom: A Theological Reading of Mark’s Gospel. Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 2008. 283 pp. $26.95 pb. Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Bollingen Series17. 3d ed. Novato, Calif.: New World Library, 2008. 418 pp. n.p. hb. Carter, J. Kameron. Race: A Theological Account. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. 489 pp. $35.00 hb. Cary, Phillip. Inner Grace: Augustine in the Traditions of Plato and Paul. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. 189 pp. $55.00 hb.

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Cary, Phillip. Outward Signs: The Powerlessness of External Things in Augustine’s Thought. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. 344 pp. $74.00 hb. Ciccarelli, Michele. La Sofferenza di cristo nell’epistola agli ebrei. Associazione Biblica Italiana. Supplementi alla Rivista Biblica 49. Bologna: Edizioni Dehoniane Bologna, 2008. 370 pp. €35,00 pb. Colless, Brian E. The Wisdom of the Pearlers: An Anthology of Syriac Christian Mysticism. Kalamazoo, Mich.: Cistercian Publications, 2008. 240 pp. $34.95 pb. Collinge, William J., ed. Faith in Public Life. College Theology Society Annual Volume 53. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 2007. 300 p. $30.00 pb. Collins, Raymond F. The Power of Images in Paul. Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 2008. 307 pp. $49.95 pb. Comings, David E., M.D. Did Man Create God?: Is Your Spiritual Brain at Peace with Your Thinking Brain? Durate, Calif.: Hope Press, 2007, 2008. 694 pp. $25.99 hb. Congourdeau, Marie-Hélène. L’Embryon et son âme dans les sources grecques. Collège de France - CNRS Centre de Recherche D’Histoire et cvilisation de byzance. Monographies 26. Paris, France: Association des amis du Centre d’histoire et civilisation de Byzance, 2007. 349 pp. € 75.00 pb. Coppa, Frank J. Politics and the Papacy in the Modern World. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2008. 278 pp. n.p. hb. Cornick, David. Letting God Be God: The Reformed Tradition. Traditions of Christian Spirituality Series. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 2008. 171 pp. $18.00 pb. Cortright, David. Peace: A History of Movements and Ideas. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 376 pp. $29.99 pb. Daube, David. The Deed & the Doer in the Bible: David Daube’s Gifford Lectures. Vol. 1. Edited & Compiled by Calum Carmichael. West Conshohocken, Pa.: Templeton Foundation Press, 2008. 304 pp. $34.95 pb. Davis, Stephen J. Coptic Christology in Practice: Incarnation and Divine Participation in Late Antique and Medieval Egypt. Oxford Early Christian Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. 371 pp. $130.00 hb. D’Elia, John A. A Place at the Table: George Edon Ladd and the Rehabilitation of Evangelical Scholarship in America. New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 2008. 271 pp. $45.00 hb. Delio, Ilia. Christ in Evolution. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 2008. 228 pp. $18.00 pb. Dell, Katharine. Opening the Old Testament. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishing, 2008. 224 pp. $38.00 pb. De Vries, Hent, ed. Religion: Beyond a Concept. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008. 1006 pp. n.p. pb. Dozeman, Thomas B. Holiness and Ministry: A Biblical Theology of Ordination. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. 158 pp. $65.00 hb. Driel, Edwin Chr. van. Incarnation Anyway: Arguments for Supralapsarian Christology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. $74.00 hb. Dupré, Louis. Religion and the Rise of Modern Culture. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008. 136 pp. $25.00 p.b. Evans, Roger Steven. Issues of New Testament Anti-Judaism: Son of Man, Deicide, and Divine Predetermination. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2008. 96 pp. $20.00 pb.

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Faber, Roland. God as Poet of the World: Exploring Process Theologies. Trans. Douglas W. Stott. Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox, 2008. 365 pp. n.p. pb. Farmer, Jared. On Zion’s Mount: Mormons, Indians, and the American Landscape. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008. 455 pp. $29.95 hb. Fee, Gordon D. Galatians. Pentecostal Commentary Series. Dorset, U.K.: Deo Publishing, 2008. 262 pp. n.p. pb. Finlan, Stephen. The Apostle Paul and the Pauline Tradition. Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 2008. 229 pp. $29.95 pb. Fishbane, Michael. Sacred Attunement: A Jewish Theology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. 246 pp. $30.00 hb. Frank, Daniel and Matt Goldish. Rabbinic Culture and Its Critics: Jewish Authority, Dissent, and Heresy in Medieval and Early Modern Times. Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 2008. 496 pp. $49.95 hb. Fredriksen, Paula. Augustine and the Jews: A Christian Defense of Jews and Judaism. New York: Doubleday, 2008. 457 pp. $32.50 hb. Gaillardetz, Richard R. Ecclesiology for a Global Church: A People Called and Sent. Theology in Global Perspective Series. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 2008. 312 pp. $30.00 pb. Garlington, William. The Baha’i Faith in America. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2008. Repr., Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2005. 248 pp. $27.95 pb. Genuyt, François. L’épître aux Romains. L’instauration du sujet Lecture sémiotique. Paris: Les éditions du cerf, 2008. 222 pp. 22€ pb. Greene, Colin and Martin Robinson. Metavista: Bible, Church and Mission in an Age of Imagination. Colorado Springs: Authentic, 2008. 278 pp. n.p. pb. Gregory, Eric. Politics and the Order of Love: An Augustinian Ethic of Democratic Citizenship. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. 384 pp. $45.00 hb. Goldfrank, David M, ed. and trans. Nil Sorsky: The Authentic Writings. Cistercian Studies Series 221. Kalamazoo, Mich.: Cistercian, 2008. 369 pp. $39.95 pb. González, Justo L., and Catherine Gunsalus González. Heretics for Armchair Theologians. Illustrations by Ron Hill. Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox, 2008. 166 pp. n.p. pb. Harmon, Kathleen. The Mystery We Celebrate, the Song We Sing: A Theology of Liturgical Music. Collegeville, Minn.: The Liturgical Press, 2008. 78 pp. $29.95 pb. Harrison, Peter. The Fall of Man and the Foundations of Science. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 300 pp. $95.00 hb. Hills, Julian V. Tradition and Composition in the Epistula Apostolorum. 2d printing with new preface and bibliography. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Divinity School, 2008. 180 pp. $ 22.95 pb. Hogan, Linda, ed. Applied Ethics in a World Church: The Padua Conference. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 2008. 287 pp. $28.00 pb. Holman, Susan R., ed. Wealth and Poverty in Early Church and Society. Holy Cross Studies in Patristic Theology and History. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2008. 320 pp. $32.95 pb. Hood, Ralph W., Jr., and W. Paul Williamson. Them That Believe: The Power and Meaning of the Christian Serpent-Handling Tradition. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2008. 301 pp. $24.95 pb.

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Horsley, Richard A., ed. In the Shadow of Empire: Reclaiming the Bible as a History of Faithful Resistance. Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox, 2008. 199 pp. n.p. pb. Horton, Michael S. People and Place: A Covenant Ecclesiology. Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox, 2008. 325 pp. n.p. pb. House, H. Wayne, Michael Behe, Eddie Colanter, Logan Paul Gage, Phillip Johnson, Casey Luskin, J. P. Moreland, and Jay W. Richards, eds. Intelligent Design 101: Leading Experts Explain the Key Issues. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Kregel Publications, 2008. 284 pp. $16.99 pb. Hsia, R. Po-Chia, ed. Reform and Expansion 1500–1660. Vol. 6 of The Cambridge History of Christianity. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 749 pp. $195.00 hb. Isaac, Gordon L. Left Behind or Left Befuddled: The Subtle Dangers of Popularizing the End Times. Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 2008. 168 pp. $16.95 pb. Izmirlieva, Valentina. All the Names of the Lord: Lists, Mysticism, and Magic. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. 224 pp. $45.00 hb. Inboden, William. Religion and American Foreign Policy, 1945–1960: The Soul of Containment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 356 pp. $80.00 hb. Jandora, John W. States without Citizens: Understanding the Islamic Crisis. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2008. 112 pp. n.p. hb. Jenkins, Willis. Ecologies of Grace: Environmental Ethics and Christian Theology. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. 363 pp. $35.00 hb. Jensen, David H., ed. The Lord and Giver of Life: Perspectives on Constructive Pneumatology. Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008. 189 pp. n.p. pb. Kaye, Bruce. An Introduction to World Anglicanism. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 276 pp. $29.99 pb. Kearns, Cleo McNelly. The Virgin Mary, Monotheism, and Sacrifice. New York, N.Y.: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 356 pp. $85.00 hb. Kelly, Anthony J. The Resurrection Effect: Transforming Christian Life and Thought. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 2008. 205 pp. $30.00 pb. Kelly, Joseph F. The Birth of Jesus According to the Gospels. Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 2008. 106 pp. $14.95 pb. Khan, Ruqayya Yasmine. Self and Secrecy in Early Islam. Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 2008. 200 pp. $39.95 hb. Kim, Heerak Christian. Intricately Connected: Biblical Studies, Intertextuality, and Literary Genre. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2008. 102 pp. $20.00 pb. Kim, Sebastian C. H., ed. Christian Theology in Asia. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 296 pp. $35.99 pb. Kirkpatrick, Frank G. The Episcopal Church in Crisis: How Sex, the Bible, and Authority Are Dividing the Faithful. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2008. 219 pp. n.p. hb. Kleinberg, Aviad. Flesh Made Word: Saints’ Stories and the Western Imagination. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008. 340 pp. $29.95 h.b. Klink, Edward W., III. The Sheep of the Fold: The Audience and Origin of the Gospel of John. Society for New Testament Studies Monograph Series 141. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 316 pp. $101.00 hb. Leuchter, Mark. The Polemics of Exile in Jeremiah 25–45. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 320 pp. $90.00 hb.

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Levinson, Bernard M. Legal Revision and Religious Renewal in Ancient Israel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 206 pp. $75.00 hb. Lewis, James R. and Olav Hammer, eds. The Invention of Sacred Tradition. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 306 pp. $95.00 hb. Lindberg, Carter. Love: A Brief History Through Western Christianity. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishing, 2008. 195 pp $22.00 pb. Lindly, Susan Hill, and Eleanor J. Stebner, eds. The Westminster Handbook to Women in American Religious History. Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox, 2008. 249 pp. n.p. pb. Lindqvist, Pekka. Sin at Sinai: Early Judaism Encounters Exodus 32. Studies in Rewritten Bible 2. Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 2008. 391 pp. n.p. pb. Lovin, Robin W. Christian Realism and the New Realities. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 231 pp. $29.99 pb. MacCammon, Linda M. Liberating the Bible: A Guide for the Curious and Perplexed. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 2008. 269 pp. $24.00 pb. MacDonald, Margaret Y. Colossians and Ephesians. Sacra Pagina, edited by Daniel J. Harrington, S.J. Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 2000, 2008 (with updated bibliography). 394 pp. $34.95 pb. Malina, Bruce J. and John J. Pilch. Social-Science Commentary on the Book of Acts. 243 pp. $29.00 pb. Malinar, Angelika. The Bhagavadgita: Doctrines and Contexts. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 296 pp. $95.00 hb. Markham, Ian S. Understanding Christian Doctrine. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2008. 232 pp. n.p. pb. Massa, Mark, S. J. and Catherine Osborne, eds. An American Catholic History: A Documentary Reader. New York: New York University Press, 2008. 287 pp. $25.00 pb. May, Cedrick. Evangelism and Resistance in the Black Atlantic, 1760–1835. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 2008. 157 pp. $36.95 hb. McIntosh, Mark A. Divine Teaching: An Introduction to Christian Theology. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2008. 252 pp. n.p. pb. Miller, David W. God at Work: The History and Promise of the Faith at Work Movement. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. 222 pp. n.p. hb. Moore, Sebastian. The Contagion of Jesus: Doing Theology As If It Mattered. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 2007. 208 pp. $20.00 pb. Morris, Bridget, ed. The Revelations of St. Birgitta of Sweden, Volume 2: Liber Caelestis, Books IV–V. Trans. Denis Searby. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. 339 pp. $65.00 hb. Moser, Paul K. The Elusive God: Reorienting Religious Epistemology. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 292 pp. $90.00 hb. Moser, Paul K., ed. Jesus and Philosophy: New Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 236 pp. $26.99 pb. Murphy O’Connor, Jerome. St. Paul’s Ephesus: Texts and Archaeology. Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 2008. 289 pp. $29.95 pb. Myers, Ched. Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark’s Story of Jesus. Twentieth Anniversary Edition. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 2008. 497 pp. n.p. pb.

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Niebuhr, Reinhold. The Irony of American History. With a new introduction by Andrew J. Bacevich. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. 198 pp. $17.00 pb. Niebuhr, H. Richard. “The Responsibility of the Church for Society” and Other Essays by H. Richard Niebuhr. Edited and with an Introduction by Kristine A. Culp. Library of Theological Ethics. Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox, 2008. 155 pp. n.p. pb. Newman, Richard S. Freedom’s Prophet: Bishop Richard Allen, the AME Church, and the Black Founding Fathers. New York: New York University Press, 2008. 357 pp. n.p. hb. Nicoletti, Michele, Silvano Zucal, and Fabo Olivetti. Da Che Parte Dobbiamo Stare: Il personalism Di Paul Ludwig Landsberg. Rubbettino, Italy: Rubbettino Editore, 2007. 395 pp. n.p. Nicholas of Cusa’s Didactic Sermons: A Selection. Translated by Jasper Hopkins. Loveland, Colo.: Arthur J. Banning Press, 2008. 474 pp. $40.00 hb. Noll, Mark A. God and Race in American Politics: A Short History. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008. 209 pp. $22.95 hb. Noll, Mark A. and James Turner. The Future of Christian Learning: An Evangelical and Catholic Dialogue. Edited by Thomas Albert Howard. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Brazos Press, 2008. 144 pp. $16.99 pb. Novetzke, Christian Lee. Religion and Public Memory: A Cultural History of Saint Namdev in India. Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008. 309 pp. $50.00 hb. O’Brien, Suzanne J. Crawford, ed. Religion and Healing in Native America: Pathways for Renewal. Religion, Health and Healing. Susan Starr Sered and Linda L. Barnes, Series Editors. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2008. 222 pp. n.p. hb. O’Collins, Gerald, S.J. Jesus: A Portrait. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 2008. 246 pp. $25.00 pb. O’Collins, Gerald, S. J. Salvation for All: God’s Other People. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. 279 pp. $29.95 pb. O’Connor, David. God, Evil, and Design: An Introduction to the Philosophical Issues. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishing, 2008. 226 pp. $25.00 pb. Olivetti, Fabio. Paul Ludwig Landsberg: Una filosofia della persna tra interiorità e impegno. Methexis 2. Serafini, Italy: Pisa University Press, 2008. 510 pp. n.p. Olyan, Saul M. Disability in the Hebrew Bible: Interpreting Mental and Physical Differences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 188 pp. $80.00 hb. O’Murchu, Diarmuid. Ancestral Grace: Meeting God in Our Human Story. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 2008. 270 pp. n.p. pb. Orobator, Agbonkhianmeghe E. Theology Brewed in an African Pot. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 2008. 162 pp. n.p. pb. Pace, Sharon. Daniel. Smyth and Helwys Bible Commentary. Macon, Ga.: Smyth & Helwys, 2008. 383 pp. n.p. hb. Pearson, Lori. Beyond Essence: Ernst Troeltsch as Historian and Theorist of Christianity. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Divinity School, 2008. 252 pp. $ 28.00 pb. Peterson, Anna L. and Manuel A. Vásquez, eds. Latin American Religions: Histories and Documents in Context. New York: New York University Press, 2008. 324 pp. $25.00 pb. Pickering, W. S. F. Anglo-Catholicism: A Study in Religious Ambiguity. 2d ed. Cambridge: James Clarke, 2008. 284 pp. n.p. pb.

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Plant, Stephen. Simone Weil: A Brief Introduction. Rev. and exp. ed. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 2008. 108 pp. $18.00 pb. Pope, Stephen J., ed. Hope & Solidarity: Jon Sobrino’s Challenge to Christian Theology. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 2008. 282 pp. $26.00 pb. Porter, J. R. The Illustrated Guide to the Bible. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995, 2008. 288 pp. $24.95 pb. Ramachandra, Vinoth. Subverting Global Myths: Theology and the Public Issues Shaping Our World. Downers Grove, Ill.: Intervarsity Press, 2008. 296 pp. n.p. hb. Reed, David A. “In Jesus’ Name”: The History and Beliefs of Oneness Pentecostals. Journal of Pentecostal Theology Supplement Series 31. Dorset, U.K.: Deo Publishing, 2008. 396 pp. n.p. pb. Rewritten Bible Reconsidered. Proceedings of the Conference in Karkku, Finland, August 24–26, 2006. Edited by Antti Laato & Jacques van Ruiten. Studies in Rewritten Bible 1. Edited by Antti Laato. Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 2008. 287 pp. n.p. Riches, John.Galations: Through the Centuries. Blackwell Bible Commentaries. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2008. 336 pp. n.p. hb. Rios, Marlene Dobkin de, and Roger Rumrrill. A Hallucinogenic Tea, Laced with Controversy: Ayahuasca in the Amazon and the United States. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2008. 162 pp. n.p. hb. Rist, John M. What Is Truth? From the Academy to the Vatican. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 361 pp. $34.99 pb. Robinson, Bishop Geoffrey. Confronting Power and Sex in the Catholic Church: Reclaiming the Spirit of Jesus. Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 2007, 2008. 307 pp. $24.95 pb. Rothchild, Jonathan, Matthew Myer Boulton, and Kevin Jung, eds. Doing Justice to Mercy. Studies in Religion and Culture, edited by Frank Burch Brown, Gary L. Ebersole, Edith Wyschogrod. Charlottesville, Va.: University of Virginia Press, 2007. 280 pp. $49.50 hb. Rowland, Tracey. Ratzinger’s Faith: The Theology of Pope Benedit XVI. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. 214 pp. $24.95 hb. Rynne, Terrence J. Gandhi & Jesus: The Saving Power of Nonviolence. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Press, 2008. 228 pp. $20.00 pb. Safouan, Moustapha. Why are the Arabs Not Free?—The Politics of Writing. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishing, 2007. 106 pp. $25.00 pb. Santmire, H. Paul. Ritualizing Nature: Renewing Christian Liturgy in a Time of Crisis. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2008. 311 pp. $24.00 pb. Schenck, Kenneth L. Cosmology and Eschatology in Hebrews: The Setting of the Sacrifice. Society for New Testament Studies Monograph Series 143. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 220 pp. $95.00 hb. Scheck, Helene. Reform and Resistance: Formations of Female Subjectivity in Early Medieval Ecclesiastical Culture. Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 2008. 238 pp. $70.00 hb. Schifferdecker, Kathryn. Out of the Whirlwind: Creation Theology in the Book of Job. Harvard Theological Studies 61. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008. 217 pp. n.p. pb.

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Schliesser, Christine. Everyone Who Acts Responsibly Becomes Guilty: Bonhoeffer’s Concept of Accepting Guilt. Foreword by Jürgen Moltmann. Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox, 2008. 217 pp. n.p. pb. Schneider, Tammi J. Mothers of Promise: Women in the Book of Genesis. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2008. 240 pp. $21.99 pb. Schroeder, Roger P. What Is the Mission of the Church? A Guide for Catholics. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 2008. 159 pp. n.p. pb. Seligman, Adam B., Robert P. Weller, Michael J. Puett, and Bennett Simon. Ritual and Its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. 229 pp. $19.95 pb. Settembrini, Marco. Sapienza e storia in DN 7–12. Analecta Biblica 169. Rome: Editrice Pontificio Istituto Biblico, 2008. 259 pp. n.p. pb. Sharlet, Jeff. The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power. New York: HarperCollins, 2008. 454 pp. $25.95 hb. Sharpes, Donald. Outcasts and Heretics: Profiles in Independent Thought and Courage. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlfield Publishing Group, 2008. 366 pp. $34.95 pb. Slingerland, Edward. What Science Offers the Humanities: Integrating Body and Culture. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 370 pp. $24.99 pb. Sloyan, Gerard S. Jesus. Engaging Theology: Catholic Perspectives. Edited by Tatha Wiley. Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 2008. 194 pp. $19.95 pb. Southgate, Christopher. The Groaning of Creation: God, Evolution, and the Problem of Evil. Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008. 196 pp. n.p. pb. Stackhouse, John G., Jr. Making the Best of It: Following Christ in the Real World. New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 2008. 370 pp. $27.95 hb. Steinmetz, Devora. Punishment & Freedom: The Rabbinic Contruction of Criminal Law. Philadelphia, Pa.: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. 240 pp. $55.00 hb. Stock, Brian. Ethics through Literature: Ascetic and Aesthetic Reader in Western Culture. The Menahem Stern Jerusalem Lecture Series. Hanover, N.H.: Brandeis University Press, 2008. 167 pp. $45.00 hb. Strauss, Lauren B. and Michael Brenner, eds. Mediating Modernity: Challenges and Trends in the Jewish Encounter with the Modern World: Essays in Honor of Michael A. Meyer. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2008. 380 pp. n.p. hb. Swedish, Margaret. Living Beyond the “End of the World”: A Spirituality of Hope. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 2008. 222 pp. $18.00 pb. Tan, Jonathan. Introducing Asian American Theologies. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 2008. 210 pp. $24.00 pb. Treier, Daniel J. Introducing Theological Interpretation of Scripture: Recovering a Christian Practice. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2008. 224 pp. $17.99 pb. Urban, Martina. Aesthetics of Renewal: Martin Buber’s Early Representation of Hasidism as Kulturkritik. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. 238 pp. $32.00 hb. Van Engen, Charles E., Darrell Whiteman, and J. Dudley Woodberry. Paradigm Shifts in Christian Witness: Insights from Anthropology, Communication and Spiritual Power. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 2008. 166 p. $25.00 pb. Vecoli, Fabrizio. Il sole e il fango. Puro e impuro tra i padri del deserto. Centro Alti Studi in Scienze Religiose 3. Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2007. 183 pp. 28.50€ pb.

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Verkamp, Bernard J. Encyclopedia of Philosophers on Religion. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2008. 239 pp. $65 hb. Vollmer, Ulrike. Seeing Film and Reading Feminist Theology: A Dialogue. New York: Palgrave, 2007. 297 pp. $69.95 hb. Walls, Andrew and Cathy Ross, eds. Mission in the 21st Century: Exploring the Five Marks of Global Mission. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 2008. 219pp. $25.00 pb. Webber, Robert E. Ancient-Future Worship: Proclaiming and Enacting God’s Narrative. Grand Rapids. Mich.: Baker Books, 2008. 191 pp. $14.99 pb. Wedemeyer, Christian K, ed.. Aryadeva’s Lamp that Integrates the Practices: Caryamelapakapradipa: The Gradual Path of Vajrayana Buddhism according to the Esoteric Community Noble Tradition. Treasury of the Buddhist Sciences. Translated by Christian K. Wedemeyer. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008. 856 pp. $55.00 hb. Wettach-Zeitz, Tania. Ethnopolitische Konflikte und interreligiöser Dialog: Die Effektivität interreligiöser Konflicktemediationsprojekte analysiert am Beispiel der World Conference on Religion and Peace-Initiative in Bosnien-Herzegowina. Theologie und Frieden 33. Stuttgart, Germany: Kohlhammer, 2008. 288 pp. €34.00 hb. Williamson, Arthur H. Apocalypse Then: Prophecy & the Making of the Modern World. Praeger Series on the Early Modern World, edited by Raymond B. Waddington. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2008. 354 pp. n.p. hb. Witte, John, Jr. The Reformation of Rights: Law, Religion, and Human Rights in Early Modern Calvinism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 388 pp. $29.99 pb. Witte, John, Jr. and Frank S. Alexander, eds. Christianity and Law: An Introduction. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 343 pp. $29.99 pb. Wood, Charles M. The Question of Providence. Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008. 120 pp. n.p. pb. Worcester, Thomas, ed. The Cambridge Companion to the Jesuits. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 361 pp. $29.99 pb. Yannaras, Christos. Person and Eros. Translated by Normal Russell. 4th ed. Brookline, Mass. Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2007. 395 pp. $24.95 pb. Yong, Amos. Hospitality & the Other: Pentecost, Christian Practices, and the Neighbor. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 2008. 172 pp. n.p.

Harvard Theological Review 102:1

JANUARY 2009

ARTICLES

The Second Passover, Pilgrimage, and the Centralized Cult

1

Simeon Chavel

The Job of Judaism and the Job of Kant

25

Alan Mittleman

From “Linguistic Turn” and Hebrews Scholarship to Anadiplosis Iterata: The Enigma of a Structure

51

Gabriella Gelardini

The Rapture of the Christ: The “Pre-Ascension Ascension” of Jesus in the Theology of Faustus Socinus (1539–1604)

75

Alan W. Gomes

Native Americans, Conversion, and Christian Practice in Colonial New England, 1640–1730

101

Linford D. Fisher Books Received

125

Cambridge Journals Online For further informaion about this journal please go to the journal website at: http://www.journals.cambridge.org/jid_htr