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Hebrews between Cultures : Group Portraits and National Literature Indiana Studies in Biblical Literature Sternberg, Meir. Indiana University Press 0253334594 9780253334596 9780585235240 English Ethnicity in the Bible, Ethnicity--Cross-cultural studies, Jews-Identity--History, Bible.--O.T.--Comparative studies, Middle Eastern literature--Relation to the Old Testament. 1998 BS1199.E84S74 1998eb 305.8/924 Ethnicity in the Bible, Ethnicity--Cross-cultural studies, Jews-Identity--History, Bible.--O.T.--Comparative studies, Middle Eastern literature--Relation to the Old Testament.
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Hebrews between Cultures
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Indiana Studies in Biblical Literature Herbert Marks and Robert Polzin, general editors Mieke Bal. Lethal Love: Feminist Literary Readings of Biblical Love Stories Mieke Bal. Murder and Difference: Gender; Genre, and Scholarship on Sisera's Death Adele Berlin. Biblical Poetry through Medieval Jewish Eyes Daniel Boyarin. Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash Robert L. Brawley. Text to Text Pours Forth Speech: Voices of Scripture in Luke-Acts Leslie Brisman. The Voice of Jacob: On the Composition of Genesis Martin Buber. Translated by Lawrence Rosenwald with Everett Fox. Scripture and Translation Harold Fisch. Poetry with a Purpose: Biblical Poetics and Interpretation Michael Fishbane. The Garments of Torah: Essays in Biblical Hermeneutics Herbert J. Levine. Sing Unto God a New Song: A Contemporary Reading of the Psalms Peter D. Miscall. 1 Samuel: A Literary Reading James Nohrnberg. Like Unto Moses: The Constituting of an Interruption Robert Polzin. David and the Deuteronomist: A Literary Study of the Deuteronomic History, Part Three: 2 Samuel Robert Polzin. Moses and the Deuteronomist: A Literary Study of the Deuteronomic History, Part One: Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges Robert Polzin. Samuel and the Deuteronomist: A Literary Study of the Deuteronomic History, Part Two: 1 Samuel Joel Rosenberg. King and Kin: Political Allegory in the Hebrew Bible Jason P. Rosenblatt and Joseph C. Sitterson, Jr., editors. "Not in Heaven": Coherence and Complexity in Biblical Narrative George W. Savran. Telling and Retelling: Quotation in Biblical Narrative Uriel Simon. Reading Prophetic Narratives Meir Sternberg. The Poetics of Biblical Narrative: Ideological Literature and the Drama of Reading Steven Weitzman. Self-Fulfilling Poetry: Song and Story in Biblical Narrative
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Hebrews between Cultures Group Portraits and National Literature Meir Sternberg
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Disclaimer: This book contains characters with diacritics. When the characters can be represented using the ISO 8859-1 character set (http://www.w3.org/TR/images/latin1.gif), netLibrary will represent them as they appear in the original text, and most computers will be able to show the full characters correctly. In order to keep the text searchable and readable on most computers, characters with diacritics that are not part of the ISO 8859-1 list will be represented without their diacritical marks. This book is a publication of Indiana University Press 601 North Morton Street Bloomington, Indiana 47404-3797 USA www.indiana.edu/~iupress Telephone orders 800-842-6796 Fax orders 812-855-7931 Orders by email
[email protected] © 1998 by Meir Sternberg All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses' Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984. Manufactured in the United States of America Cataloging information is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN 0-253-33459-4 cloth (alk. paper) 1 2 3 4 5 03 02 01 00 99 98
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To the memory of my father, Aharon David Sternberg, a man of feeling and faith, who studied and taught the Talmud for love, always intent on the plain sense of things, wherever it might lead.
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Contents
Preface
xi
1. The Hebrews in the "Hebrew" Bible: Culture-Blindness, Crosscultural Romance, Intercultural Poetics
1
Who Were the Hebrews? Reopening the Question
The Forces for Studied Closure: A World in a Grain of Sand
The Hebrew as Hab/piru: Traffic across Cultures
Source and Discourse, Sources as Discourse
Fables of Identity, or, Poetic License in Historical Reconstruction
Babelian Confusion and Translational Mimesis: The Hebrewgram 2. Heterocultural (Mis)Representation in Inverted Commas: Outsiders at Name-Calling
Image and Victimage
Polar Cultures in Contact, Nations in Total Conflict: An Interim Outline
De-nomi-nation as Process
The Law of Intercultural (De)Nomination: A Poetic Microcosm
From De-nomi-nation to Re-nomi-nation: The Hebrew/Hamite Master Plot 3. Proteus in Culture Land: Stereotypes, Melaslereolypes, and Idolatry
Proteus Principle vs. Package Dealing
1
11
31
50
60
75
90 90
106
121
135
146
155 155
160
Descriptive Packaging: Character Traits Misallied
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Packaging for Ideology: Culture, Nature, and Their (Sub) Human Correlates
(De) Stereotyping the Stereotype
Otherness: Restrictive vs. Open-Ended, Polar vs. Gradable, Discriminatory vs. Differential
Foreignness
Hamiteness
Ethnocentricity vs. Ethnocentrism 4. The Translated Self in Adverse Encounter
Speaking Like a Foreigner: Enforced Self-Designation
Maneuverable Imagery: The Hebrewgram Refined in Theoretical and Comparative Light
Adaptable Culture Heroines and the Rhetoric of Pretended Solidarity
Stiff-Necked Prophet, Versatile God, Mimicking Villain: Three Forms of Self-Translation 5. Intergroup Dramas in the Secret Life
Speech and Thought
Expressive Duplexity: Ellipsis as Mimesis
Abomination in High Places: Joseph's Feast between Dietary Taboo and State Terrorism
A Champion Miscast: Abram the Hebrew
Presence and Absence: Vocal Stereotype, Inner Ear
168
171
182
186
193
196
206 206
216
232
259
279 279
283
286
308
318
Shuttling between Identifies: Moses' Route to Prophecy 6. Dissonant Discourse, National Discord: Echoing Outgroup Parlance at In-Fighting
378 378
Bicultural Stigmatizing
384
High Art under Low Criticism
393
High Criticism, Low Historicity and Narrativity
399
The Way to Hebrewgrammatic Resolution
404
A Nation Divided, a Kingdom United
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7. Slave Law: Outside Parallel and Internal Process
Coming to Terms with Hebrew Bondage in Israel
Underprivileged Class, Privileged Treatment: The (Il)Logic of Sociolegal Synchronism
Displacing the Israelite from the Hebrew Codes: Leviticus as national preserve
The Nuzi connection: Verbal co-portraits, legal co-privileges
Freedom limited in going free: Quantifying a canonical absolute
Tales of Diachronic Distribution: How a Class Becomes a People in Midcareer
Synchrony and diachrony among pattern-making universals
An unbrotherly Pentateuch?
The longest bridge, the deepest freeze
Checkpoint romances of identity change
Toward a Fresh Start in the Reconstruction of Legaliterary Culture 8. In-Group Servitude between Yes and No: The Law's Rhetoric of Deterrence
Saving the Texture
Green Light, Red Backdrop
License Rebarbed
Bonds and Bondage: Loving Unto Perpetual Servitude
426 426
434
434
438
445
447
448
453
458
460
467
471 472
481
494
504
9. Law, Narrative, and the Poetics of Genesis
520
The Source of Discourse and the Discourse of Source: Law as Compound Law-Tale
The image of diachrony in (lega)literature: Genesis mimeticized and canonized
521
522
Intergeneric composites
525
Law-speaking within the represented events
Law-telling among modal event-representations
Law-tale interacting with overall process and canon
Evolving a macro-lawtale: The Hebrew bondage series
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Variance for Persistence, Variance for Novelty: Two Evolutionary Drives behind Literary History
Exodus at Bridging: The Double Covenant Code, Covenant/Code
Rebridging with Updating across Distance
The Sinai to Jordan to Jerusalem route: Post-Exodus exigencies
Longer intervals, stronger bridges: Memory updated
Disclosure and development: Narrative universals as generators of change
From Exodus to Deuteronomy: Loci, Ranges, and Teleologies of Variation
Unpacking the manifold of change
Poetic genesis as poetic justice
From tact to bluntness: Inherited scenarios newly focused without favor
Updating or outdating? The program of successive co-eternities
Systematizing Legal Communication
Pregnant silences, divergent ambiguities: Between artful re-formation and material reformation
From type enumerator to unitype generalizer: Alternative coverages of the possible law-world
From Judgment to Rejudgment: (D)evolution of and by Conduct
Bidirectional Motivation
From Pentateuch Codes to Jeremian Coda
539
550
563
563
564
568
572
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586
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Notes
639
Works Cited
673
Indexes
687
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Preface Fielding in Tom Jones likens an author to the keeper of an ordinary at which all persons are welcome for their money. If honest, either host provides a bill of fare to let customers acquaint themselves with the entertainment they may expect. In a study about as long as his novel, the analogy, is compelling. The menu supplied in the elaborate table of contents should do the jobas well as signpost the readingexcept that its very detail may promise (or threaten) a distribution of interests precisely where I hope to have composed a new whole. The mystery enveloping the Hebrews, Biblical literature against its environment, the poetics of culture, national canonizing, group typology, stereotype and metastereotype, quoting and/or translating in second-order mimesis, rhetorics, arts of memory, Babel's fallen tower mated with its confused tongue, the possible bittersweetness of election, or freedom, or equality, the discourses of law, origin, history, and (lega)literary history as narrative modalities, for example, may even look like a hodgepodge. An outline of how the book grew will perhaps best introduce the complex of themes that its argument draws together, most immediately the relations between title and subtitle. The ultimate proof is, of course, in the eating. Never in my experience has a puzzle either taken so long to work out or ramified so widely in the unraveling as that from which this volume sprang. It all began in wonder, as far back as my school days, when, like most innocents abroad, I kept stumbling upon one incongruity after another. Quite a few of these, predictably enough, had to do with verbal behavior. Some I discovered or would discover to have been old hat, some to have apparently become too naturalized, or normative, to attract much attention. Why, for instance, do they teach us at home to put the ''I" last and at school to call it the "first" person? (The answer can now be found in a paper on the ordering logics of deixis, to which chapters 3 and 8-9 will revert.) But the most persistent incongruity, dividing collective rather than personal I's, nagged something as follows. "An Englishman lives in England and speaks English. A Frenchman lives in France and speaks French. A Spaniard lives in Spain and speaks Spanish. Yet here I am, a Jew living in Israel and speaking Hebrew. Yehudi, yisra'el, ibrit: Why three words instead of one? Why these words? Is the excess good or bad? Has
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it always been like that, or did some normal three-in-one fall apart, in exile maybe, with the people itself?" Whether one smiles at or on the naive questioner, his sense of anomaly presents a genuine challenge, even with the benefit of hindsight. The questions are still vivid in my mind, at any rate, as is the woeful inadequacy of the resources then available to a school child on an extra-curricular quest. The handiest and most obvious reference book, the dictionary, mainly iterated the known; the next in line, the Bible, undercut this supposed knowledge. A reading from cover to cover disclosed a bedrock of all-too-hard facts: the bad news that the Jew-Israel-Hebrew spread dates back to early antiquity, and the worse news that the ancient trio neither coincides with the latter-day nor appears to make better sense in its own framework. An Israelite, it transpired, might also have gone under the name Hebrew, for some reason, as he might have styled his home groundJoseph fashion"the land of the Hebrews"; yet he could never have been a "Hebrew"-speaker, for all the continuity of his dialect with today's. Whatever the native's speech, it was otherwise labeled in his worldor hers. For once the clan has leaped into nationhood, to judge from Exodus 1, the anomaly visibly overtakes the Daughter of Israel, alias ''Hebrewess." Double ethnicon and toponym, neither stretching to the vernacular? As if this were not odd enough, the Israelite/Hebrew or at least his descendant on the Bible's stage might have uniformly identified himself by resorting instead to "Jew," or "Jewess," and its cognates (all from "Judah"). A multiple disclosure with a vengeance, this, frustrating the hope of quick closure in its infancy. The dictionary's blissful amnesia hardly sugared the pill. Readers likewise habituated to current usage, or experts in this lexical field who think back to their own uninitiated state, will doubtless imagine the effect of the news from antiquity. Alice, with her own "curiouser and curiouser" Wonderland, easily would. The root of the trouble was as easy to figure out. Somehow, sometime, somewhere, history must have intervened not just to divide the collective markers, untidily at that, but to redivide (then, who knew, perhaps to re-redivide) them, leaving me worse off than before. The premise from which I had started reversed into a product, its unknowns dependent on those of the original tripartition and the in-between process. A new start was indicated, complete with a definite re-starting point whose fascination would gradually overshadow the very sequel, as it would outlive childhood. Even at the time, the disclosures sprung by the Bible promised to repay close attention, if not to steal the show. While thickening the mystery, they established both where its heart lies and where any search for an answer must centerin "Hebrew," by far the oddest of the group terms within the canon and the most uncanonical thereafter. From every viewpoint, the puzzles bundled into it create an eyesore. Why does this
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term apply at the outset to some group, extending to the habitat if necessary, but never to the group's (for that matter, to any) language, in sharp yet silent discontinuity with millennia of pseudo Biblical usage and the Bible's own doublepurpose reference to, say, "Jewish"? What's wrong with the tongue that its name should alone suffer exclusion from the canonical circle of Hebrewness? It hardly takes a complete literary detective, much less a fancy vocabulary, to pounce on the ill-assorted basic givens, once they have surfaced. How to turn them into operational clues is, or was, another matter. Over the decades since the restart, this anchorage in the miscalled Hebrew canon's "Hebrews" has proved to be the only constant. It has led to their emergence as something quite other than what any later namesake means or any exegetical tradition reads. Properly located in the discourse world then and thereto anticipate the bare minimumthe name encodes the chosen group sadly caught between diametric (ethno)cultures: blessed vs. unholy, ideal (if never quite, or long, realized) existence under God vs. dystopia on earth, "Israelite" vs. "Hamite" in terms of ethnodramatic role or character. So laden with duality, the codename encapsulates and its bearers enact nothing less than Scripture's intercultural paradigm, running from Abram's call in Shemland to Joseph's vicissitudes in Egypt to Mosaic exodus and law-giving to the trials on the promised land to Jerusalem's fall. If anything, those earliest "Hebrews," along with their non-Hebrewed language(s), steadily gained weight in my reconstruction of the grand intergroup narrative and network that the Bible focuses on its Chosen People, to inglorious shock effect. The discourse we encounter about, to, by them under this label, typically (hence, for an ethnohistory, untypically) reveals them under the antitype's yoke: it "translates'' a dominant parlance and perspective and power that could not be more foreign, or unflattering, to the elect "Israel." Though the codename looks as vernacular, hence interchangeable with the honorific national ethnicon, its occurrences rather betray an outside speech-origin and stereotype: an adverse heterolingualism, even literally strange on top of everything else. The in-group (the Deity's, the writer's, the equally native audience's) then appears in the worst image, or self, or voice, wished and thrust on it by what counts here as the outgroup. Only, the lower the fall in polar contact, the higher its strategic value and implications for the Holy Writ that memorializes the ancestors' comedown from the glory of Israel, or the comeback from Hebrewness in emplotted reverse, under God. No abnormality implicit in today's embarrassment of nominal riches can go nearly so deep; nor so clean against the rule of foundational self-portraiture vis-à-vis the outside world, let along the archoppressor cum antipole that Egypt, say, epitomizes. Apart from anchorage in the odd ethnographic markers, little has remained unchanged on the way to this solution, still less to this book. The
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change has involved a number of phases, directions, trespasses on adjoining fields that became regular, convergences with my extraHebrew or extraBiblical work, whose story could possibly engross the genesis-minded alone. But the results, like the child's originary wonder, have more than autobiographical interest. I would single out certain widenings of focus that loom large in the finished argument, appreciably extending its (comparative, theoretical, interdisciplinary) range, hence also its relevance to ancient Israelite literature and beyond. What started as an attempt to figure out a particular, if historic, group identityknottiest and least univalent on its hallowed founding recordnow doubles as a case study in the poetics of culture, especially of intergroup representation. A firm believer in the two-way traffic between theory and minute textual analysis (my Poetics of Biblical Narrative is an obvious earlier instance), I venture to think that either component has gained from the doubling. In its absence, moreover, the converse also holds. My opponents would often seem to get into trouble exactly because they theorize regardless of the empirics, artistic finesse in particular, or analyze without reference to the operative, or to any, discourse system. A look through the table of contents, where general alternate or combine with Scriptural headings, will suggest the busyness of such traffic here. Its actual business, though, forms a tighter whole than appears at a glance. Instead of rehearsing the inquiry's movement from chapter to chapter, let me briefly and selectively abstract a nucleus of problems that keep traveling in both directions. The case owes its exemplary force, inter alia, to the grouping's long-drawn, troubled, ongoing afterlife, and on two planes of existence at that, namely in interpretive or scholarly parallel to ethnonational reality. Or arena, better, given the constancy of strife along either "Hebrew" world-line. The last two millennia have seen analysts of varied persuasions exercise their wit and skills, anything from identikit toolbox upward, on the "Hebrews" in Biblical Israel. Yet the enigma has only tangled with every fresh bid for resolution, itself increasingly liable to proliferate variants and subvariants. Across, among, within the approaches, the still growing body of work is divided on every occurrence and every topic, with Who's Who at the head of the list. Does "Hebrews'' refer to Scripture's in-group or to some entity outside the circle, if not beyond the pale? To the Israelite ethnos or to the whole Shemite family or to the Hab/piru class notorious all over the ancient Orient? Juxtaposing the divergent identifications with one another and with the testimonies themselves amounts to a laboratory on reference, co-reference, cross-reference. Their scrutiny in the twofold "Hebrew" arena will also bring out generally neglected lines of nicer difference: between selfand other-reference, for example, or between archival and artistic practice, or among art's own genres, or along history, and so forth. But reference in turn comes from or with a host of other quarrels:
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over historicity vs. fictionality, synchrony vs. diachrony, word vs. world, mirroring vs. meaning, origin vs. given, text vs. context or megatext, canon vs. anthology or ad hoc corpus, law vs. story, ethnology vs. ethics, brother vs. alien or sojourner, enslavement vs. liberty or emancipation, male vs. female rights, single vs. dual identity, to extrapolate only the inescapable trouble spots, with endless ramification. And I mean extrapolate, because the disputants themselves are not always aware of the underlying variances, far less of their amounting to variant pictures, even models of culture as reflected in literature and other semiotic encodings. (For most "Hebrew" analysts, literature proper doesn't come into it, regarding either the texts or the tools at issue.) Nor do they stop to observe how their assumptions are variously negated, often anticipated beforehand, in Scripture's own drive against all forms of human culture, particularly those inflicted on the "Hebrews" by Egypt: against all except the God-made. His way originates with the creation of nature, then expresses itself in life under the covenant and, literarily, in "Israel's" national canon. So the militant, iconoclastic paradox of "natural culture'' is a key to the trial of Hebrewnessas vice versawhile its adverse opposite numbers within the (hi)story peep out anew from the debate among the critics. By the same token, however, this unsurpassed range of divergence boasts paradigmatic value to match. It invites study, alongside the immediate focus that elicits it, as a higher-level, "metacultural" issue par excellence, namely: the varieties of critical practice (and, however latent, theory) brought to bear on a single crux. How have the Hebrews fared in the assorted hands laid on them since the Rabbis? Why handle them after this fashion or that? What ensues concerning their image, faith, status, lifestyle, alliance, valuation, (hi)story, posterity, testimonia, canonical or otherwise? Do the differences in approach betray any predispositionsfor or against, analytic or existential, conservative or revisionist, the source-critic's or the ideologue's, the canon (here, Bible) specialist's or the comparatist's or the universalist's? What with the fundamentals in dispute, just extrapolated, an anatomy of the critical heritage therefore promises to widen the case's implications for the study of intergroup affairs represented in literature and in discourse generally. An encoded collective life amid alien heterocosms, an afterlife in some other world(s) and discourse world(s), a metalife with its own eventful, virtually Babelian run and record, all present different faces of one question. So the argument moves between two levels. One develops an intercultural poetics around the codename, whereby to reread all the givens, to bring them under one manifold ("Hebrewgrammatic") law of translated discourse, to chart the patterns they form along and athwart the Bible's grand chronology, and to explain why a sacred election-centered ethnohistory, of all writings, would take such trouble, devise such brilliant artistry, to
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perpetuate such grim ancestral memories. The other level newly weighs and conceptualizes the poeticsfrom descriptive to interpretive to structuring to explanatory forceagainst the traditional alternatives. Among those alternatives, again, the Hebrews' linkage with the Orient's Hab/piru typifies the crosscultural approach, usually known as comparativist; while their Apocrypha-old interchange with the Bible's "Israelites" does the unicultural or, when unthinking, culture-blind. Insofar as these co-groupings are diametric, they proceed to fork accordingly at every Hebrew crossroads on every axis in question. Their branching out stretches from Genesis to Jeremiah, from narrative to legistic occurrence, from pre-text to text, from the meaning of words (around the keyword itself) to what happens or really happened in the world, from who to how and when and why, etc. The two co-reference hypotheses and the forked chain reactions within the immediate arena, however, exhibit on scrutiny numerous latent viewpoints and interests and drives just as polar but in no way peculiarnot even in overall cross-vs. uni-culturalism. Either method finds untold equivalents in the study of the Bible, of other ancient corpora, of literature and related fields, with the appropriate disciplines. (E.g., scattered throughout are glances at various prevalent comparativismsliterary, crossartistic, anthropologicaland they easily could, indeed I hope will, be multiplied and expanded.) This family likeness even embraces issues apparently removed from humanity's exercises in self-division: whether works, genres, styles, arts (instead of people) group together across or along boundaries of national culture, for example. And small wonder, because there is ultimately no dividing, far less curbing the rationale of division itself, not that practiced by one analyst as against another, any more than by the object of analysis. The lessons, negative and constructive, implied by the strife among the methodologies in the Hebrew arena extend accordingly. They will often come to the argument's surface, even to the fore. We will draw them in compounded form, too, as whenever notions of genus and genre interdepend (e.g., throughout the chapters on legaliterature). Typically, the Hab/ piru crossculturalist would then reduce both the kinds of writing and of the agents written about to all-Oriental community; the Rabbinic uniculturalist would set both (qua God's Torah and God's Elect) apart from all others in identity, hence in valuation, to make a unique enclave, twice sui generis. No less typically, either extreme treatment founders on the evidence. An intercultural poetics must therefore redefine jointly the two grouping factors at issue: how the Bible's art coordinates literary with ethnographic novelty; self-imaging with self-exposure elsewhere kept for others; particularism of discourse and world, both revolutionary at that, with universality, in brief.
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Does the text, then, form part of a crossculture, hence of a megatext? Or the whole authorized legacy of a peculiar theo- and/or ethno-culture, broken away from its neighbors? Or the self-definition of an embattled interculture against neighboring yet unneighborly heterocosms, whose power threatens its own membershipHebrews them out of Israeliteness in word, deed, even mentality, to the limit of inside victimage and self-destruction? Evidently, the sharpness and multiformity of the divergence among the approaches juxtaposed here enhance its general suggestiveness; so, the other way round, does its amenability to shrinkage via compromise measures, especially taken in face of awkward data. Readers are sure, and welcome, to think of parallels from their own expertise. On the case study's immediate Hebrew front, as on the issues of theory and method behind it, the poetics thus works against twofold opposition. That, between the two alternatives, the Hab/piru nexus relatively stands out as a foil does not affect the principle, nor does it bespeak higher merit. This disproportion in countering and countertesting, always short of counterfocusing, has miscellaneous grounds, some contingent, some associated with the respective premises and practices; yet none indicate any (let alone any universal) value scale other than the expository priorities of the argument. It so happens that the crosscultural bearing on Hebrewness arose millennia after its polar rival, as late as the end of the nineteenth century; that it has since received a vast, incomparable amount of specialized attention and elaboration; that it has cropped up in unexpected disciplinary quarters, such as Freud on Moses; and that, what with the accidents of usage, it is yet presumably less familiar (in its detail and variants, even to the uncommon reader) than the age-old native pairing with the Israelite. In basic group reference, hence in much else, the Orient-wide identikit also goes counter to my "Hebrew as the insider viewed from the outside," no less than to the simplistic allnative equation of ethnica. And, largely as a result, the services it can be made to render are in inverse proportion to its strength. The least viable approach, by every standard, nevertheless proves a most versatile heuristic aid to the understanding of Hebrewness, with further and broader claims to interest. I will just touch on several recurrent uses. First, there is the evolving comparison among rules of intergroup nomination: their fixtures, their latitudes, the pictures and processes they miniature, and so on. As already implied, the Biblical occurrences of the codename show a remarkable unity in variety, along well-defined intercultural lines. Those "Hebrewings," with their movements into and out of "Israel," fall under a single discourse grammar that I dub for short the Hebrewgram. Law-like, it determines throughout who-calls-whom-when-why. At the same time, by the same grammar, the principle of (literally) name-calling fans into a quartet of discourse patterns, according to the make-up of the speech-
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or thought-situation between the ethnocultures concerned. Owing to this rule-governed flexibility, the Hebrewgram is readily extendible to inter-group discourse elsewhere in literature, as in life's arena; and comparable glances at such "heterograms" old and new (e.g., those regulating Cynic, Mameluk, Hun, Nigger, Whitey, Formalist, women's sexist labels for men) will indeed punctuate the argument. But the Hab/piru material demands and enables a full-scale comparison, with results to suit. The "Hab/piru-gram" inferrable from the extant evidence not only ranges over diverse-looking (even pronounced chaotic) usages, tongues, documents, environments, etc., in which the class-name figures. By its very simplicity as well as by its set-up and point, the underlying rule contrastively illuminates the Hebrewgram's artful system. Nor do the consequences end with the highlighted opposition between the two legacies, groups, or methodologies, always in the crossculturalist's disfavor. They run to the general applicability of the heterogram to comparable instancesdown to marking off one practice of grouping, co-grouping, or especially, as here, outgrouping via (de)nomination from another. What's more, the case in point indicates how such variance will also alert us to further and larger reflexes of either groupment by name, the "Hebrew's" vs. the ''Hab/piru's." For example, has any co-referential honorific been preserved (e.g., "Israel") or suppressed? Or inversely, has any counterabusive term? Or macrocosmically, has any channel of self-expression, from graffiti to canonized art and literature? In such aspects, the disparity under review turns polar for good measure, as would that between, say, Greece's Persian "barbarians" and Sparta's voiceless "helots." Second, adherents of the crossculturalism so hopelessly mix the roles of crosshistorians and crossexegetes that the need for principled untangling imposes itself. In reason, genesis contrasts with poesis, source with discourse world, what "really" happened with the image thereof on record, counterreading the text in whatever light and cause you want to import, or promote, with reading it in its own matrix. As this list of opposites unrolls, their applicability to viewpoints and disputes elsewhere (on matters outside crossculturalism, in areas far beyond ancient Oriental civilization) perceptibly rises, I trust. But so does their order of priority: reading before counterreading, as before crossreading, most obviously, whatever your ultimate business with the text. And so does the prospect of dynamizing the opposition and turning either member to the best, richest account. The extremes having been duly polarized, the apparent chasm in between shows itself negotiable: one may read with an eye to the text's eventual counterreading against its surmised "true" origin, or against parallel representations, or, ideologue style, against uncongenial valueframes. Even routes less traveled, composites more intricate, beckon to the adroit negotiator. Foremost
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among them is what I call the "poesis of genesis"such as the discourse image of the origin and evolution of the name, or the law, reserved for the "Hebrew" within Scripture. Third, the Hab/piru are now usually deemed in the field a motley class, or underclass; the Hebrews, at some points at least, an ethnos. Their crosslinkage, whether real or imagined, whether uniform or changeable, therefore assumes special heuristic value for the typologist as well: doubly so for the literary anthropologist, which all of us willy-nilly are, even the commonest novel reader. Try reading the simplest world on the simplest level without breaking down its population into multiple feature-networks: individuality itself becomes unthinkable if you don't refer the character to the appropriate juncture of characteristics. And about this (co-, cross-) reference, in a much larger sense than the ordinary linguist's or semanticist's, the quarrel over Hebrewness can teach a few things. Thus the all-Oriental crosslinkage brackets different texts from different milieus not only to forge a shared underclass identity; at times, under pressure, it would also bracket different aspects of collective identity to generate, say, the native underling, the Hebrew-born Hab/piru. Either way, this bridgework distinctly fills out the picture of groupments, complete with divides, yielded by the unicultural isolation and the intercultural quandary of the Chosen. The rivalry among all the identities (memberships, portraits, or both) attributed to the collective in dispute affords another virtual laboratory, where our products as typologists ("Hebrewness," say) are decomposible into the elements, nexuses, rationales that go to produce them. Testing the whole set against the data foregrounds the logic, the lines, the allegiances, the variables, the montages, the triggers, and the results of groupingsociopolitical vs. ethnonational, above allthe operations of outgrouping again notably included. For example, how does a low class stand to a lowered kinship group or people? How is either figured in the adversary's eyes, in the text's, in its own, in posterity's, or in the respective lexicons and mouths? What difference would alternative affiliations (e.g., Hebrew = Hab/piru or ≠ Hab/piru) make to the reading of a tale, a statute, an ordeal of freedom, an entire canonical history, a legaliterature ethnos-centered in both address and enactment yet sensitive to misfortune outside the circle (with the codename bearer explicitly shielded)? What if, instead of either fused or polarized, the grouping lines converged (always, here and there, along time) on a mixed entity, a socioethnic cross? In turn, how would each mapping of the pair, onto the words or worlds in question, affect our view of other, intersecting represented typologiesby the dramatis personae's age, sex, tribe, marital status, ethical worth, selfunderstanding? (E.g., the favor or even-handedness shown to the "Hebrewess" bondwoman vis-à-vis the "Hebrew"
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in the Mosaic law codes is hardly reconcilable with the discrimination against her putative namesake in the Nuzi service contracts. But the preferential treatment does link up with the culture heroines of Exodus memory, who saved "Hebrew" bondmen from the oppressor's genocide.) And whatever the cumulative differences, where do they reside between art and life, poetics and practicalities, image and truth and truth-claiming imagery? In short, the more densely and intricately the typological axes crisscross on record, the more instructive the paradigm; and the joint record, even if otherwise factitious, maximizes both advantages of the Hebrew case as such. Fourth, narratology has yet to discover the many guises and generators of narrativesome occluded by its own limitations, some turning on conditions and constraints institutionalized elsewhere, even dramatized in professional in-fighting about matters that look remote. Our example will often show those obstacles to knowledge twinned, as in the general disregard for, say, what I call nomi-narration or law-telling or the poesis of genesis. Of the two obstacles, though, the former is the more easily surmountable, the latter the more hidden and deep-rooted as well as compounded, and so the more in need of emphasis. The theorist may especially want to know how, where, why, even what stories arise from the text, or vanish, or perish, in relation to a contest of methods that apparently proceeds on grounds and for stakes other, if not higher, than narrative value. Here the bones of contention range all the way from the model of culture and cultural analysis to the Hebrew's portrait; similarly with the assortment of contenders. As that rivalry is both focused and many-sided, so is the light thrown on the action sequences that lurk beyond or, often, below it: on what the quarrel is really about, in considerable part at least. How does crosslinkage with an extraneous source (e.g., Hab/piru) affect narrativity in various discourse types and magnitudesan etymon, an episode, a law unit, a series in any of these genres, a canonlength underground plot that twists through them allover against the narrative fortunes of the same discourse under alternative umbrellas and readings (e.g., intercultural Hebrewness within one text)? At its utmost, such divergence in pattern-making gravitates toward polarity: narrativicide (e.g., the breakdown of action logic) as opposed to narrativizing even the extranarrative realm (a metamorphosis innovated by Scripture, in forms so protean as bundling tales into a name and multiply emplotting the law). These pointers will suffice, I hope, to motivate and recommend the detail expended on the Hab/piru nexus to those readers who have no special interest in it, or to specialists already convinced of its illusoriness. If necessary, I might add recommendations. (One cardinal example would then be the effects of the divergence in approach on the shape and sense of literary history.) But I want to finish this overview, instead, by ascending to a still higher level of generality examined in and through the "Hebrew"
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casethe highest, most revealing, most determinative and, unhappily, most predetermined level of all. From this vantage point, an astonishing family resemblance exhibits itself among studies of literature and discourse that are otherwise apart, even opposed in everything: corpus, goal, period, discipline, critical language, equipment, value frame, attitude toward the world studied. The extremes meet in the tendency to freeze the life and workings of discourse by analytic violence. Autonomous elements are then bound together, variables pseudo-universalized into invariance, the infinite play of form and function arrested in some fixed configurationa character type, a narrative setup, a rhetorical device, an evaluative measure, a group antithesis, a bundle of generic differentiae, as if each were some eternal package deal. Except in the specifics of the package, there is little to choose between the "Hebrew's" stock-figures on the cross- and the uni-cultural agenda, between his downgrading along with the rest of his alleged Oriental class and his upgrading to normative electness by local patriots. Nor do his frozen images essentially vary from constructs reified elsewhere in the annals of interpretation and system-building. Today, in fact, the tendency is not just strongest but also more incongruous than everbecause unalive to its double standard, let alone to the realities of discourse, artistic dynamism least of all. A host of ideology-driven "cultural criticisms" profess to expose the deplorable reification of "otherness," "ethnicity," ''gender," "culture" itself, yet only substitute newer idols of the same, or of the same unreality, prefabricated in the desired image. To pile irony on irony, one major target for such criticism, the Bible, really practices the exposure, to unsurpassed as well as unprecedented lengths, in keeping with its ideopoetic iconoclasm. Its horror of fixture in world-making extends from heaven to earth, from the first commandment to the first article of art. And I trust the reader now begins to appreciate how many of the different themes sketched above converge on exactly this key junction. The convergence should in turn bring out that one need not sympathize with any particular ancient Israelite tenet or treatment to appreciate the ideopoetic ground rule. What matters is one's will (with the dogmatist, one's sheer willingness) to understand how texts make differentiated worlds, how we make sense of them, how the two compare, and how we can best generalize from performances to principles. Scripture's way with graven imagery finds an exemplary manifestation in the "Hebrewgram," whereby network and narrative alike break every ready-made formula of singling out one's own in-group. Yet the paradigm also exemplifies the reverse movement in criticism, namely, the ways of reimposing the broken conventions on the strategic turn to domesticate the revolution. On the highest level, then, just as the Bible's antagonist is stereotypic representation in discourseverbalized, interior, not to mention visualso mine
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is all along the stereotypic discourse about discourse that flattens our reading and theorizing: the core of my argument is accordingly chapter 3, "Proteus in Culture Land: Stereotype, Metastereotype, and Idolatry." Readers may wonder how the present inquiry stands to The Poetics of Biblical Narrative. The short answer would be that it forms a companion volume rather than a direct sequel. In either work, the Bible's ideopoetic revolution is studied both in its own right and for its larger exemplary value. Yet the focus shifts from the brand-new epistemology of trial and error in the human condition to the no less agonistic, time-bound, and multivocal ethnography: from the poetics of narrative as a drama of reading to the poetics of culture as a drama of (inter)group imaging. The respective titles and subtitles mirror this difference, and the preface should by now give an idea of the implications. For balance, let me add that these include the keeping of some promises made in Poetics: to widen the range of genre, of narrative modality and synthesis, of ideoartistic junctures, or of part/whole interplay, stretching here all the way from the one-word name to the canon, for example. Also, the continuities between the two arguments have not been taken as read, nor only relegated to passing references. Wherever necessary, they have been explicated, even developed to enhance the new volume's autonomy and at the same time to highlight the advance in the ongoing reconception of the field. Likewise with the provisions made for the different readerships that the book addresses. This inquiry, too, strategically alternates generalities with close practical analyses. On the various issues woven together here, more background information has often been suppliedunobtrusively, I hopethan experts in each would strictly require. All the texts that call for exegesis have been incorporated: my translations from the Bible are again as literal as possible and the transliterations kept simple to reflect the finer points of the original. The comparisons drawn with alternative versions from the Septuagint onwardexhibiting how translators have played or echoed the interpretershould also help the nonBiblicist to appreciate and the specialist to reconsider the weight of the evidence. I therefore venture to believe that the measures taken for leveling up will promote accessibility and with it the chances of fruitful exchange at an intersection where such diverse interests meet. No part of this book has been published before. Yet I did have the privilege of presenting the core of the argument as the Efroymson Lectures, "Hebrews in the Hebrew Bible: Poetics, Culture History," delivered in March 1993 at the Hebrew Union College at Cincinnati. The College made this an unforgettable experience. I fondly remember the warm hospitality, the keen interest shown in the topic, the lively discussions during and between the lectures, as well as other kindnesses, personal and academic. I would
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especially like to thank the President, Dr. Alfred Gottschalk, and Professors Chanan Brichto, Alan Cooper, Samuel Greengus, and my old friend Matitiahu Tsevat, with their gracious wives. Some of the theses, Biblical, theoretical, historiographic, (lega)literary, have also been presented to various audiences elsewhere and tried out in my classes at Tel Aviv University, always with profit. As dispute is the life of scholarship and heuristics one of my chief tools, I have considerably benefited from rival accounts of the questions at issue, not least from those with which I differ most. Many individuals have been of help in the processtoo many, and in too many ways, for me to thank them except in the aggregate. I would nevertheless single out John Gallman, Director of Indiana University Press, for his faith in the project over the years, against ever-lengthening odds. How to acknowledge the debt I owe to my family, let alone repay it, God only knows. Among the three generations involved, I have dedicated the book to the memory of my father. As concerns the living, and may they long be preserved, I am reduced to stammering out my gratitude for their daily rocklike support. My children, Giora and Esther, can never imagine what a comfort and inspiration they have been. Tamar, as ever, has made it all possible and worthwhile, to the last letter of the final draft. M. S.
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1 The Hebrews in the "Hebrew" Bible Culture-Blindness, Crosscultural Romance, Intercultural Poetics Who Were the Hebrews? Reopening the Question "O Hebrew, speak Hebrew!": so went the battle cry of Eliezer ben Yehudah, the reviver of the language in modern times. The writers of the Bible would cheer the sentiment and the campaign, but only provided that they somehow managed to understand the wording. In all likelihood, the result would be a failure of understanding, if not a sad misunderstanding, due to an intermediate change in vocabulary. Of the slogan's two cognate words, both so naturalsounding today, the first is actually against the Biblical norm and the second absent altogether from the ancient lexicon. The call for revival ascends from peculiar to sheer anachronistic evocation of the world and the speechworld that it would revive among their heirs. This twofold discordance in usage already foreshadows a set of themes that will run throughout my argument: how a group's origins haunt it even, or most, when outgrown; how its present agenda bears on the shape (review, memory, design, judgment) of its transmitted, indeed canonized heritage; how writing stands to understanding; how literary and extraliterary history meet, or part, in small verbal compass; how the microcosm of name-giving reflects large continuities and discontinuitiestextual, intertextual, poetic, legislative, national, sociopolitial, intercultural. For anachronism itself is only a special and, where transparently betrayed, simple case of the interlevel traffic to unfold. In its rare reflexive moments, the Bible never calls its language "Hebrew," as we anachronists have been doing for over two thousand years. The term employed is rather "the tongue of Canaan [sephat kena'an]" or "Judahite/Judaean/Jewish [yehudit]." ''In that day," Isaiah prophesies, "there will be five cities in the land of Egypt which speak the tongue of Canaan
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and swear allegiance to the Lord of hosts" (19:18). In Isaiah's own lifetime, when the Assyrian Rabshakeh would cajole and bully Jerusalem into surrender, the delegates of king Hezekiah interpose nothing but a metalinguistic request: "Pray, speak to thy servants in Aramaic, for we understand it; do not speak to us in Judaean within earshot of the people who are on the wall" (II Kings 18:26; Isaiah 36:11; II Chronicles 32:18). Their "Judaean" may at the time (688 B.C.) refer to the dialect spoken in Judah; but, with the sister kingdom of Israel already fallen and her people (''the Ten Tribes") dispersed forever, the word came to embrace the native language as a whole, "Jewish," the mother tongue of the Jews (Nehemiah 13:23-24). Whichever term or period you take, the Bible knows no such language as "Hebrew." Nor does the Bible usually refer to the native speakers of its language as "Hebrews [ibrim]" but as "Sons of Israel [bene yisra'el]," "Israelites," or, later, "Judahites/Judaeans/Jews [yehudim]." So "Mordecai the Jew [ha'yehudi]" is in fact no Judahite but "a Benjaminite" (Esther 2:5), and his joint portraiture no longer makes a contradiction in terms, as it would from the Exodus to the first Exile, when every tribesman bore the nationwide ethnicon "Son of Israel," every tribeswoman boasted herself a "Daughter of Israel." Rather, the hero's twofold portrait now assumes a comparable unity, in variety: (ethnonational) genus and (tribal) species. By the same extension of reference that made the term for the Judaean dialect cover the Bible's language system as a whole, the Judaean tribe or population lent its name in time to the "Jewish" people at large. A double pars pro toto, because the survivor takes all. "O Hebrew, speak Hebrew!" thus abandons historicity for symmetry between group name and group language: it replaces the oldest by newer terms that sound old but familiar and continuous with each other as well as with the ancient past. Compare the phrase "Hebrew Bible," invented rather to give a sense of discontinuity, much like "the Old Testament," only on a wider front than belief. Otiose for the insider, early or late, the adjective appended to the Book equivocates here between the group and the tongue from an outsider's distancing viewpointone that implies foreignness, posteriority, and often ideological superiority to both. What such mini-rhetorics of insidership and outsidership share is the history-likeness of their parlance. They trade on forms of reference deemed Biblical among latecomers since postBiblical (literally Apocryphal) antiquity. Still, the two current anachronisms involving "Hebrew"the metalinguistic and the ethnographicare not apocryphal (or retrojective) to quite the same degree. While the Bible's rule of nonHebrewing the language has no exceptions, the lexical norm of group reference is apparently broken to manifest Hebrewness about thirty times; and its breach has long exercised scholarswith reason, considering the issues at stake. Who are the Bible's
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Hebrews? What and how does the name (or the epithet) signify? How do we account for its application by the Egyptians to the immediate, familial sons of Israel (especially the favorite, Joseph) in Genesis, then to the national Sons of Israel in Exodus, then, more problematically, by the Philistines to the territorial Sons of Israel in the book of Samuel? Does it apply to them only? And why do those native sons, the Bible's in-group, follow suit? Why, for instance, should Joseph style his place of origin "the land of the Hebrews," or Jonah describe himself on shipboard as a Hebrew rather than as an Israelite? Among women, again, why does Miriam call the Daughters of Israel (her own mother included) Hebrewesses? No less puzzling, though rarely puzzled over, is the sequence of usage, its black holes as well as its continuities. Where, for example, has this label disappeared between the Pentateuch and Samuel, from the era of Conquest to the last of the judges? Or, if we take a more practical, because legal, crux: When Exodus (21:2ff.) and Deuteronomy (15:12ff.) and Jeremiah (34:8ff.) enjoin the manumission of the "Hebrew" slave, to whom precisely does the law advert? Cui bono? As we shall soon find out, this list does not yet exhaust the riddles posed by the so-called Hebrew in the so-called Hebrew Bible. Actually, the more we detail and sharpen them beyond the customary limits, the better the chances of their falling into pattern, one that would in turn offer a paradigm of how a masterwork of (national) literature operates between group images, such as those represented by the "Hebrew/Israelite" pair. But, even reduced to its bare-bones formwho's who?the set of questions has elicited divergent, often conflicting answers over the ages. The solutions proposed range between extremes: one assimilates the unknown quantity to Scripture's inner ethnonational circle, the other to some international (multinational, crossnational) group, whether defined by race or, usually, social class. Who are the Bible's "Hebrews"? Israelites, of course; so most exegetes on record declare, as would the common postBiblical reader and speaker, if the question occurred to them at all. It never occurred, for instance, to the Jews whom the books of Maccabees show defiantly proclaiming their Hebrewness under Hellenistic torture; nor even to a changer and reshaper of identities like the New Testamental convert-missionary writer, either in addressing the subversive "Epistle to the Hebrews" or in self-placement among them. "Circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews": thus Paul describes himself, in boasting his "reason for confidence in the flesh" (Philippians 3:4-5). He vaunts Israeliteness and Hebrewness alike with the same confidence as a fellow Benjaminite, Mordecai, would assert his Jewishness in late Biblical terms of group discourse about the self. 1 Except that "flesh,'' covenantal, national, tribalOld Testamental, in shortis one
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thing in the missionary's new book, faith another. This Pauline disjunction would outrage most of his predecessors and contemporaries; numberless successors, whatever their flesh and faith, would at least oppose it to the wholeness of self envisaged in the Bible. Yet few, until quite recently, would dream of contesting Paul's marriage of "Israel" to "Hebrews." The two terms interchange as co-referential ethnica, as gentilics designating one and the same ethnonational entity, chosen among all others by the Bible's God as early as the first patriarch, "Abram the Hebrew." In this pairing by co-reference, the writers of the Apocrypha are at one with their New Testament opposite numbers, the Rabbis with the scholars up to the late nineteenth century, ancient with contemporary usage. Fellow victims of anachronism due to lost Scriptural knowledge and competence? Maybe, yet hardly on a par with those who call the language "Hebrew," again from the Apocrypha (prologue to Ecclesiasticus, second century B.C.) and the New Testament (John 5:2, Revelation 9:11) onward. For, concerning the group name, they might all appeal on demand to Scripture's own authority. The appeal has never been properly madewhether because deemed superfluous or because mixed with error and unreason or because left inconclusive 2nor will I stop now to repair the omissions beyond outlining a few pros to be taken up in due course. Time and again, the Israelite reference of the name finds anchorage in the name-bearer's known identity, as with the very first "Hebrew" staged by the canon, Abra(ha)m, or for that matter the last, the bondmen in Zedekiah's Jerusalem (Genesis 14:13, Jeremiah 34:8-17). Such contextual aids to identification, moreover, often join forces with textual, notably lexical pinpointing. Exodus's two opening dialogues, for instance, virtually equate the terms through immediate substitution. In the first, Pharaoh declares the growth of "the people of the Sons of Israel" a menace to Egypt, and in the second he instructs his conscripted agents of genocide, "When you midwife the Hebrewesses . . ." (1:9, 16). Same voice, same plot, same tongue and milieu, hence same referent across different forms of reference. In I Samuel, the interchange making for co-reference also goes the opposite way: the Philistines begin by dreading "the gods" of "the Hebrews'' enshrined in the Ark and finish by paying tribute to "the God of Israel" (4:8-9, 6:3-9). As with plotted, so with explicative substitution. In the discourse of the law, for example, the co-nationality of the bondman entitled to release after six years presumably gains in explicitness from one variant to another. Exodus's "Hebrew slave" (21:2) reappears as "thy brother the Hebrew," first in Deuteronomy (15:12), then in Jeremiah (34:14), which even switches the gentilic itself to produce the most current equivalent, "brother Jew" (34:9). Along this all-canonical series, the later enunciators of the "Hebrew" ordinance are its earliest interpreters in and for Israel.
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So, if challenged, the advocates of the purely native connection might reason, but to less than adequate effect. Without running too far ahead of my argument, I would emphasize that such impressive-looking evidence does not by itself settle the issue, because it fails to explain the very coexistence and the transposition of the supposedly coreferential group names. If the referents co-extend in the world, then why should the referring terms co-occur in the discourse? The rule that the economy of language abhors duplication ("exact synonymy") holds with special force here. Paul indeed multiplies ethnica for show, name-dropper style, consecutively boasting descent from "Israel" and the "Hebrews''; but would his equation of pedigrees enjoy more canonical warrant than his disjunction of flesh and faith? Again, Shakespeare's Juliet proverbially divorces word from thing, "Romeo" from Romeo: "What's in a name? That which we call a rose / By any other word would smell as sweet" (Romeo and Juliet, II, ii, 43-44). Outside the ecstasy of love, or the ideal of science, her rhetorical question would presuppose an answer very different from the one she gives, nowhere more so than in Scripture's matching of chosen nation and nomination. Of all proper names in the Bible's onomasticon, "Israel" is, if not the last, then the last but one to suffer the cavalier treatment of being taken or taken away lightly: it even incorporates ("-el") the very last one, God's own, as well as commemorating the father of the nation's triumphant struggle ("Yisra-") with divinity, from whom Jacob at Jabbok wrung a "blessing" in the shape of a renomination. Or a pre-nomi-nation, if you will, since it prefigures the advance from individual through familial to national election in terms of a widening range of eponymy. The chosen Wrestler will pass on his blessed name first to his immediate descendants, "the sons of Israel," then, as soon as their own descendants have accomplished a miraculous quantum leap in numbers, to "the people of the Sons of Israel," all duly tested for eligibility (Genesis 32:22-30, Exodus 1:1-9). Therefore, the rose in this garden could never smell so sweet (and, in decay, so foul) by any other word, let alone "Hebrew": even if an ethnicon, the makeshift is apparently unsung and unblessed, certainly preJacobite, preJabbok, and prenational. Once "Israel" has been encoded on the highest authority as a nomination in the fullest senseby a process traceable from the Genesis night encounter with the supernatural to the Exodus conflict with the enslaverits abandonment for "Hebrews" looks like a regressive and adverse move, a de-nomi-nation. Given the standard national ethnicon, agonistic, honorific, eponymic, theophoric, why should the national literature deviate from it at all? Why in this frequencylow or high, depending on your viewpoint? Why by reference to these books, times, places, set-ups, characters, and not others? As long as the question marks persist, and so far they do, the "Hebrew = Israelite" hypothesis remains not just incomplete
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but unmotivated to the point of arbitrariness and otiosity. All the more so where the hypothesis does as little to divide the respective name-bearers in culture (e.g., "faith," language, status, politics, history, text role, image and selfimage) as in nature ("flesh"). It is sensitive to nothing, blind to every possible variety in unity. If the (formal) difference between the terms makes no (functional) difference, if one of them could and should and normally does single out God's Chosen People, then the very assumption of their co-existensiveness in the Bible's world is left open to attack. Attacked it has in effect been, from various quarters and motives. In effect, because the opponents have been less concerned to expose (or repair) such holes as those just outlined than to draw some alternative equation. Whether Rabbis and later patriots wishing to cut Israelites loose from the "Hebrew" nexus or scholars anxious to forge it with nonIsraelites, in the interests of crosscultural bridge-building, they have other axes to grind than making sense of the discourse. But though not exactly oriented to the interplay of form and meaning, reference and difference in significationor not even to the Bible's signifying context per sethe alternatives are still relatable to this interplay for better or worse. Across all variations of the second master hypothesis, we now find the "Hebrews" placed in a category outside or at least beyond "Israel." "If thou buyest a Hebrew slave, six years he shall serve" (Exodus 21:2): the Rabbinic tradition itself glances with a frown at a nonconformist, presumably Karaite, understanding of this law. (See Ibn Ezra ad loc. and the discussion in my last three chapters.) The dissenters identify the slave in question with the unchosen offspring of the earliest namebearer, "Abram the Hebrew," as distinct from the elect branch of Abrahamites, named after the first patriarch's grandson, Jacob/Israel. "Hebrew" then covers the Abrahamites minus the Israelites. The two gentilics diverge, and in fact contrast, rather than co-refer. A difference in meaning between the group terms immediately results, and even carries with it a threefold practical demarcation according to origin. An Ishmaelite or Edomite would qualify for the bittersweet lot of "Hebrew" servitude (temporary, unless voluntarily made lifelong) denied to the rest of the world on opposite grounds: the nonAbrahamite has no title to seventh-year release by law, while the Israelite must never be enslaved in the first place. Actually, this minority opinion on Hebrewness internationalizes the scope of the term, and with it the ruling, in order to shield the co-national. Widened outgroup extension for privileged exclusion. But if so, among other difficulties, how is it that the sons and Sons of Jacob/Israel fall under the name, often along with the yoke, throughout preexilic history? They range from the first "Hebrew slave," Joseph, to the last, the "Hebrews and Hebrewesses" emancipated only to be reenslaved by their "brother Jews" in Zedekiah's Jerusalem (Genesis 39:14-18, 41:12,
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Jeremiah 34:8-22); and so from literal to national Israelites, from the favorite Jacobite abroad to the Judaeans oppressed at home. Again, if the group term excludes the Bible's insiders, how can Miriam use it to describe her mother ("a nurse from among the Hebrewesses") to Pharaoh's daughter, or Jonah to identify himself ("I am a Hebrew") to the sailors? Misgrouping an insider, the future prophetess and the fugitive prophet would then lie gratuitously (Exodus 2:7-8, Jonah 1:8-9). The attempted rescue from bondmanship comes at an exorbitant textual (and even moral) price. In law, as in narrative, the reference cannot be to the Sons of Abraham outside the elect circle. Modern scholarship unknowingly avoids this obstacle, if only to bump against others, by repopulating the category of Hebrewness along more inclusive lines still. In one classic formulation, "Alle Israeliten sind Hebräer, aber nicht alle Hebräer sind Israeliten." (So Böhl 1911:67; or, more recently, Rowley 1950:54-55, Jepsen 1951:57-58, Olmstead 1965:196, Koch 1969, Stolz 1981:84-85, Mazar 1986:59, Merrill 1988:101, and with certain zigzags, Jacob 1992:12528, 612-13.) The "Hebrews" (ibrim) now become co-extensive with the "Sons of Eber" (bene eber) listed in the Genesis Table of Nations (10:21ff.) and ramifying thereafter. Accordingly, they include not only the Israelites, nor only their fellow Abrahamites, but also the Joktanite tribes and possibly all the Shemites (e.g., Elam, Ashshur, Aram). Possibly, because the genealogy's opening verse can be taken to mean that "Shem" is "the father of all the Sons of Eber'' (10:21), whereby "Hebrew" = "Eberide" = "Shemite." On the widest reading, the label thus comes to encircle a third of the Biblical postdiluvian world: among those descended from Noah, only the Hamites ("Put, Egypt, Cush, and Canaan . . .") and the Japhethites (notably "Yavan," Ionians) would have no title to Hebrewness. At all events, the Hebrew/Eberide umbrella outreaches "Israel," and this is a mixed blessingtoo mixed for explanatory viability. On the one hand, it seems an improvement over both the purely Israelite and the Abrahamite hypotheses in combining inclusive with differential force vis-à-vis the Bible's chosen people under their chosen name. While sharing Hebrewness with the rest of the Eberides, they now preserve their unique, Israelite attributes, as everyone else does his own: a familiar taxonomy by (ancestral, ur-ethnic) genus and (ethnonational) species. An analogue from another great culture and canon would be Homer's "Achaeans" (or "Argives" or "Danaans," all designating what we call "Greeks") in relation to "Hellenes," who (e.g., Achilles) inhabit Hellas in Thessaly. With the earliest national ethnography considered apart from subsequent remappings, this Hebrew is to the Israelite much as the Achaean is to the Hellene. On the other hand, besides the taxonomy's operational weaknessesfor example, the uncertain (all-Shemite?) range of membershipits very logic tells against it. The "Hebrew-Eberide" equation keeps the reference distinct
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from "Israel's" at the cost of erasing the distinction between "Hebrew" and ''Eberide" themselves, ibri and ben eber. A tolerable double standard of economy? A balance of differential gain and loss? In theory, perhaps; only the facts of usage tip the scales beyond doubt. Ibri never points in Scripture to a character known to be a nonIsraelite Son of Eber, whether Ishmaelite or Joktanite or generally Shemite, any more than it does to an offspring of Ham or Japheth. (Contrast the frequent reference of "Achaeans" to non"Hellenes" in Homer.) Ben eber, inversely, never surfaces anywhere outside the Table of Nations. Taken together, these minuses underline the logical non sequitur in the advance from "'ibrî appears to go back to Abraham's ancestor Eber ('eber *)" to "A Hebrew, then, was an Eberite" (Merrill 1988:101, after Greenberg 1955:92-93, or Soggin 1995:287): a conflation of species with genus, etymology with typology. Another nonstarter, in short. The empirical data support the co-reference of "Hebrew" with "Israelite," rather than with "Eberide," which the Bible keeps for a certain international sector of its population, an earlier and lower order of election by descent. The nomi-national ethnicon for the inmost elect circle still runs parallel to the apparently denomi-national. With one ethnicon too many left on the Books, an attempt at removing it to a sphere other than ethnic would appear predictable. In the event, thousands of years elapsed before the idea came to mind, and even then only under the impetus of new documentary finds. Once arisen, however, it eclipsed all rivals, certainly in notoriety, as in sheer output. I mean of course the Hab/piru link, which, ever since the late nineteenth century, has stolen the scholarly show (and caught the popular imagination). A host of Biblicists and Orientalists have sworn by the theory ("fact," the most zealous call it); others have given qualified assent or introduced no end of twists and turns; others yet have doubted, objected, adhered on balance to the older views, mostly to the Israelite equation. But few have escaped the Hab/piru spell. Novelty value apart, who can remain indifferent to the unearthing of documents from all corners of the Ancient Orient, Jerusalem included, which ostensibly associate the enigma left by Scripture with a population element omnipresent in the second millennium B.C.? The parallels, always short of manifest juncture, have been endlessly drawn and redrawn. For example, "Abram the Hebrew" of Genesis 14, where the patriarch turns warrior, would thereby correspond to the Hab/piru soldiers of fortune notorious in the area. (So would, centuries later, his namesakes who hold the balance of power between Saul and the Philistinesup to David, Achish's vassal, luckily excused from engagement in the ultimate interstate showdown.) The "Hebrews" oppressed in Egypt would form part of the multiracial Hab/piru (Egyptian 'pr.w) known to have been subjected there to forced labor, notably in construction and agriculture. Again, before and/or after the Exodusdepending on the
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truth-value assigned to the book of Joshuatheir seizure of Canaan would fall into pattern with the Hab/piru violence reported so graphically in the Amarna Letters of the fourteenth century B.C. And to change genres from narrative to law, as well as geopolitical domains, from the Egyptian to the Mesopotamian: the Exodus provision for the "Hebrew slave" would be in the legal tradition of the fifteenth-century Nuzi service contracts, freely entered into by Hab/piru aliens, e.g., recent arrivals from Akkad. All such analogies need thorough rechecking, but we can already see in what perspective. Against the Apocrypha-old orthodoxy, their common denominator springs into relief as a bundle of novelties. Two deserve special attention, because they amount to what philosophers of science would call a paradigm change. First, while the Israelite equation is by nature culture-specific, and in practice virtually culture-blind, the Hab/piru alternative is crosscultural. Instead of restricting itself to the Bible's givenslanguage, discourse, orbit, faith, history, social matrixit thrives on correlating them as tightly and widely as possible: with Sumer's, Hatti's, Babylon's, Assyria's, Nuzi's, Mari's, Canaan's, Egypt's record of the alleged analogues. Far from self-evident cynosures, as privileged in analysis as they are in the Israelite-centered action and law, the Hebrews become a subgroup among others. They do not even necessarily form the object of inquiry but may serve to enrich the Hab/piru picture: the Amarna raider's or the Nuzi contractant's. Likewise with the Bible among sources of information, its one-time authority now frequently turned round into lower historical value than most. Holy Writ is too holy, as it were, to be trueor literally true, or nothing but truecompared with such earthy remnants of the past as lists, stelae, reports, dictionary items, interpersonal and international agreements that feature the Hab/piru. The putative traffic across cultures, then, runs in either direction. No longer arrested within the Bible's circle, national, sociopolitical, territorial, religious, linguistic, evidentiary, the crossculturalist enterprise widens the horizons by introducing data with a variety of new points and frames of reference. Since the heart of the mystery lies in the coreference among the termswho's who depends on which entity goes with which, if anythe opportunity for testing the divergent hypotheses through cross-reference is especially welcome. It remains to discover whether or not breaking out of the old "Hebrew" circle by postulating the Hab/piru nexus with the outside world launches another circular movement. Only the empirics of bridge-building can tell. Second, circular or not, the movement alters the basis for co-grouping, as well as the identity and make-up of the populations grouped together. Relative to all other typologies, therefore, this entails a sea change in what a philosopher would call the intension (i.e., defining features) and the
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extension (or membership) of Hebrewness. Like the Eberide, the Hab/piru theory usually subsumes "the Hebrews" under an umbrella that Israelites may share with an assortment of nonIsraelites. 3 Except that the group affiliation is no longer ancestral, racial, ethnic, far less ethnonationalcommon descent from Eber or Shem, any more than from Abraham or Jacob/Israelbut social. "Hebrew" and ''Hab/piru" refer to the same international (under)class, defined by its members' rootlessness, outlawry, low footing, refugee status, or some analogous parameter of existence on the margins of society. More open-ended yet more differential than other groupings, and so potentially more explanatory, the class to which "the Hebrews" belong (if they do) would resolve the apparent duplication of group names: it would tell the name-bearers apart from the "Israelite," even the fellow Israelite, by investing them with a peculiar cosmopolitan character. The newest co-reference thus plays across the boundaries of Scripture and across the lines of origin at once. This would yield much the same humanity-wide crosscut as when the Bible labels some existent a fool, a good-looker, a shepherd, or a righteous man, yet again with one important dissimilitude. Here the free variation in the portraitee's nationality, between the collective Self and Other, involves more than shifting him, or the thrust of his portraiture, to the relevant (mental, physical, occupational, ethical) axis. It also goes to underscore a specific constant of otherness, namely, his membership in an outgroup dispersed among all the nations. Taken for a Hab/piru, the "Hebrew" need not (according to some, cannot) at all belong to the Chosen People, Scripture's insiders; and where he does, he (e.g., Abram, Joseph, Jochebed, David, Jonah) still does not feature as such but assumes a character that relegates him, along with the alien, to the mixed bag of social outsiders. Their common denominator, wherever located, would in either instance mark his differentia specifica vis-à-vis the "Israelite," the Bible's or the Ancient Orient's. This broadly suggests the extent and the focus of the paradigm change in modern scholarship. At least one conclusion follows. However the Hab/piru theory may eventually fare under scrutiny, nobody can afford to dismiss it out of handnot even those literary-minded readers who would urge me to leave history to the historians and get on with the business of poetics. Their two wishes actually contradict each other: the former must be denied for the latter to be acted upon. If too impatient to wait, such readers may skip to the final section of this chapter, which introduces the poetic manifold of life and discourse between cultures that I call the Hebrewgram; even so, it would be in their interest to double back at some point to the intermediate argument. History, especially where involving a literature with its own historiography as well as history, is too dependent for its reconstruction on the arts of reading the discourse of the past to be left to
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all-too-world-oriented historians. Literature, or for that matter culture, never parcels itself up into lots (e.g., writings about reality vs. the reality written about), each answering to some predetermined disciplinary expertise, responding to its proper esoteric treatment. All the less so where, as here, the enigma lies in the relation of historiography to historythe operative (ethnic? social?) axis of culture includedand thickens with the quarrels, often variant gross failures of reading, among supposed experts. I would, and will throughout, go further than challenging such artificial division of monopolies ("labor"), the unhealthy fixture of compartments by departments. Reopening the issue of Hebrewness, with a view to redefining, if possible settling it, is at once a condition and a test for poetics, whether deemed the enemy or (as I have always believed) the key to all other approaches. A condition and a test, I mean, in a principled, not just a pragmatic or institutional sense. By the rules of the scholarly game, of course, the Hab/ piru theory has wielded too much influence to be waved aside, as has its chief rival before and alongside it; poetics, conversely, may lay itself open to charges of unprofessionalism in disregarding either entrenched thesis, as if bent on figuring out a third way merely to uphold its reputation for novelty. All true, yet the moot points run far deeper than institutional in-fighting. The controversy triggered by the emergence of the Hab/piru group only brings those points nearer (and with a little help, right) to the surface, hence to the top of any research agenda: unicultural, crosscultural, or, like mine, intercultural within a certain unique yet exemplary universe of discourse, the Bible's. The Forces for Studied Closure: A World in a Grain of Sand Some of these pressures for adjudicating between the current (and, if necessary, exploring new) hypotheses about "Hebrews" are already discernible at this early stage. They consist in the penalty for suspending (or, inversely, foreclosing) judgment, in the polarity of the alternative hypotheses, variants included, and in the problematics of either. Among them, the three P's go a long way toward defining not just the issues at stake but also the terms of their resolution. First, the penalty for irresoluteness hangs over all comers, regardless of discipline and objective. By the nature of his enterprise, the Bible's interpreter can least evade the decision with impunity. Even he may fall into unconsidered or hasty determination, though, the next worst thing and unfortunately widespread across the lines of approach. Most interpreters since the ancient Rabbis have foreclosed, in effect avoided, the issuesome apparently unaware, some disdainful of any coun-
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tertheory to be weighed. (Ibn Ezra on Exodus 21:2, stopping to tear apart the Abrahamite linkage, is a notable exception, as are a few anti-Hab/piru reasoners in modern scholarship.) The all-native equation looks so obvious to them that they freely intersubstitute "Hebrew" with "Israelite" in the Bible's discourse, as in their own metadiscourse, or presume the reader's doing it for himself in his strideat times where the stakes are highest, the latter-day debate fiercest. Here, one need not bother to tell accidental from dogmatic blinkers, innocent from studied uniculturalism. A decision of sorts, if only by default, it must accept the interpretive consequences of automatism, down to the possibility, of mistaking the referent's identity all along the (hi)story line. In the more recent scholarly tradition, the converse holds for numberless crossculturalists: historians proper, philologists, text-critics high and low, theologians, jurists, Ancient Oriental comparatists, and Bible exegetes leagued with them. All revisionist by definition, as well as by training in the so-called historical method, they have done nothing like justice to the age-old alternative, hence to the canon whose meaning hangs in the balance. Such is their attachment to the Hab/piru linkage, in this or that form, that they rarely pause to weigh it against the Israelite bond on fine, or any, interpretive scales. Perfunctory and world-oriented evaluations abound, most of them not very impartial even as far as they go. But in vain will you look for an attempt to consider which reading of "Hebrew" makes better sense of the text within its own parameters, for example, canonicity, ethnocentricity, novel reality-model, verbal economy, hard truth-claim, intricate character, large-scale plotting, thematic development, and creative literary artistry in general. Nor is the neglect justifiable even by the logic of revisionism. Revisionist scholars' assumptions about the Bible's text (literariness vs. factuality included) and their competence to read it, or willingness to read it with those trained in making sense of texts, usually leave much to be desired. In principle, though, the nature and quality of their equipment matter less than their failure to bring it (such as it is) to bear on the text's cruxes, as if one could do history without subjecting the documents to the best reading available: indeed, as if the Hab/piru nexus did not constitute and urge a fresh reading of Hebrewness, perhaps better than the old, perhaps worse, perhaps just dissimilar, yet in any case insistent on the finest interpretive tools and efforts for resolution. In this regard, the occasional self-excuse from closure is especially enlightening, for it implies another and deeper contrast than may seem. Such incertitude, though an ostensible antithesis to the assurance with which fellow practitioners determine "Hebrew" identity, nevertheless lays bare the premises shared by the field vis-à-vis those of the ancient writing in question, Scripture itself at historical discourse. Articles of faith to the respective parties, the two sets of premises are in fact equally convention-
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based and mutually inimical, from the ideology through the methodology to the narratology behind the representation of the past. A family quarrel, especially if intergenerational, is the bitterest of all: even where, as within the family of history-writing, genre substitutes for genes and culture would pass for the law of nature. This cultural antinomy therefore warns against approaching either truth-claiming discourse, the new or the old subgenre, on the other's axiomatic terms, naturalized or supernaturalized. Rather, it is (say) the limits of human knowledge encoded in the newer mode, and invoked by the practitioners, that bring home the Bible's stance of God-inspired omniscience throughout the tale and the need for gearing our interpretation to it. Likewise with the underlying (supposedly commonsense, ideally neutral) view of existence, always earthbound, where the ancient ontology mediates between earth and heaven. (On these and related narrative models see my Poetics, esp. 23-128.) In face of "Hebrew," as of all enigmas, the result turns operational: where a modern can hypothesize or keep silent, the Bible is always free to provide the answer on divine authority. But then, no matter how unacceptable its supernatural premises today, unless and until you recover the answer based on themif only as a key datum to be correlated with the restany variant solution amounts to foreclosure. Even your baffled silence would run ahead of the evidence. An example would be the statement made by the Orientalist who has compiled the fullest list to date of Hab/piru mentions: "It goes without saying that the Biblical passages have been excluded, for they constitute exactly one of the yet unresolved points of the problem, and one which does not directly relate to Assyriology" (Bottéro 1972:14, my translation). More notably still, in reviewing the moot points, a historian of the Bible's world itself exhausts the language of fence-sitting, e.g., "for the present, it is best to suspend judgment," or "the evidence concerning the 'apiru * is open to the alternative construction," or "this issue remains unresolved,'' or even, hedging a compromise solution both ways, "the 'Hebrews' may have been ethnic even if they were a social class; and the inverse relationship could also obtain" (Halpern 1983:52-54 and in Shanks et al. 1992:147-48; cf. Jagersma 1982:29).4 Outside the operative frame of reference, this doubtless sounds like evasiveness. Yet both students of ancient history may legitimately, even creditably refuse commitment by the rules of their game: because the question lies outside their (e.g., the Assyriologist's) "direct" concerns, because its indeterminacy mirrors "exactly" the state of research, and, above all, because the field, defining itself as an inquiry into so-called real life, not only tolerates but values the inquirer's adherence to the limits of empirical knowledge, inherent or contingent, enduring or "for the present." Such licensed humility is the other, nicer and soberer, face of the ar-
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rogance with which the guild has privileged its rationalistic (or, in literary terms, realistic) conventions of knowing, world-making, storytelling, imaging of time, in short, by appeal to objective "reality as it is" and "things as they were." Now that theorists (semioticians, poeticians, narratologists, philosophers) have begun to investigate the discourse of history, only the naive will take that appeal at face value, ideological innocence and all, or regard the difference from other claims to truth-telling as generic, that is, between the factual and the factitious, if not downright fictional. 5 Only in the same naive eyes, again, will it appear natural that a student of the past dispenses with an interpretation of the past's own bid for (hi)story: that he (fore)closes or leaves open the crosscultural gap without showing any sign of having tackled (not to say mastered) the one indisputable record left of the ''Hebrews," possibly by themselves. But the etiquette of representation at least cuts either way, in principle, depending upon circumstances. If the modern historian finds himself unable to determine what happened in history, for example, how "Hebrew" really stood to Hab/piru, it would be unprofessional of him to pretend otherwise. His fellow historian in ancient Israel (not that he has gained due recognition as precursor, albeit heterocultural, or as anything beyond a "source") has another professional code, another narrative contract, remarkable for its heavenborn absolutism yet hardly less binding on himself and his audience than the empirical monopoly today. The Bible's discourse, seeking to establish a certain revolutionary version or image of history, works on its own premises for its own ends. Its writers may never have known about the Hab/piru, or never bothered to inquire into the relationship, or never to the extent of ferreting through the evidence. If they did, again, they may have chosen to advertise their learning or bury it out of sight, to make or unmake or remake the connection with the "Hebrews," always in the interests of their artfully storied historiography. The truth-value of their finished discourse remains variable (positive, negative, mixed) and contingent, as in all specimens of the historical genre; the truth-claim persists, however, uniquely authoritative and built into the system of inspired narration. Nor would there be anything unusual, for them, about such procedure, whatever the resulting break with the ethnographic map and lexicon current elsewhere at the time. This is why external knowledge, if not downright misleading, hardly suffices to interpret any Biblical proper noun, much less the whole Table of Nations drawn up by Genesis for future reference and branching. On the contrary, the group names that the Bible apparently shares with the extraBiblical corpus, or with what passes among experts for ancient reality, more often diverge than overlap in their bearing on the world's existents.6 In the canon's remapping of humanity, the name-bearers fall into new rubrics as well as take on new attributes: delineative
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("intensional") and extensional variance in nominal unity. Even at their most cognate, the namesakes may turn out to be poles, hence portraits and populations, apart. Thus, in dealing with "Canaanites," "Amorites," and ''Hittites," the Bible will as a rule switch usage or emphasis from the prevalent nonethnic meaning (e.g., social and/or geographical) to ethnic signification. And often with good reason, cultural, political, ideological, fact-like in the telling, if not factual. So fact-like, indeed, that the very disparity or, historically, shift in representation is never made explicit, far less its ground. Scripture's absolute claim to truth precludes even the acknowledgment of any alternative version of reality, and nowhere more so than concerning the human domain. What it recounts about a group (the name, character, extension, typology, origin, development in spacetime) is all there is. Where outside accounts exist, however, a comparative analysis may lead us below the surfaceif not to the truth, distortable by either variant, then to the how's and why's of image-making/breaking/shaping, the rhetoric of absolute truth. Whether the group portrait drawn misrepresents common knowledge or represents a minority tradition, it goes its own way for an in-group purpose. Take the ethnicon "Canaan" assigned, from the Genesis Table onward, to the mixed lot of aliens who occupy the land promised to Israel and threaten her faith and offend against her ethics, so compounding geopolitical with doctrinal rivalry. To make the hated adversaries hateful, the Bible veers from their nomination elsewhere. In (re)naming them "Canaanites," it overturns the name's standard group attribute (merchant class and/or Phoenician habitation) 7 into ethnicity, so as to taint the archenemy with Noah's curse upon their putative eponymous ancestor, Canaan son of Ham, who violated his father's nakedness (Genesis 9:18-27). No wonder he anticipates (or inspires) his offspring, the latter-day Sodomites. Encumbered with such an eponym, the ethnicon becomes a homonym of outside usagein value judgment, even an antonymits bearers untouchable, unweddable, and unworthy of the land called after them. The label presumably inherited from the environment changes substance and scope to accommodate a peculiar negative inheritance of retribution, one that contrasts with Israel's all along the line, glorious eponymy definitely included. To the Israelite audience, the reference group that alone counts, because alone chosen in the telling along with the happening, the ethnonational Self will have found its Other, the elect its anti-type, just where and as their struggle requires. Such practices invite generalization into a rule of writing, one that holds for all the Bible's assorted divisions of humanity, whether more or less conventional, more or less value-laden, harder or easier to motivate. The historicized truth-claim within the discourse (regarding, say, "Hebrews") always outranks, though it never precludes, the historical truth-
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value; centripetal overrides centrifugal force; teleology regulates the ethnographer's typology, as it does the rest of the maps imaging the world and, given the premium put on blood ties, more strictly than most. Far from exceptional within the canon, the ethnographic rule itself manifests an order of priorities that governs representation as a whole: (contextual) effects before (extratextual) facts, poetics before empirics, in a nutshell. Israelite historiography takes its reference, even literally in the case of proper names, from the iconoclastic doctrine told and the unprecedented art of telling, rather than from the data available to them per se. An assorted trio of coordinates? No doubt, but not left uncoordinated either, nor quite sui generis. How the writers' communication welds those rival forces together, along lines already expounded in my Poetics, the argument will demonstrate throughout in tracing the network and narrative of "Hebrews," a paradigm case second to none. It will also demonstrate that, (supernatural) worldview and (superior) artistry apart, the resulting product bears a family likeness to the practice of the Hab/piru theoristor the historiographer in generalwhatever the latter's routine premises and protestations to the contrary. Whether flattering or otherwise to either member, the likeness resides in the crisscross of exigencies below the generic narrative surface. After all, the Biblical writers were the first to address the genre's key question: how to shape a jumble of materials, or at best a series of events, into a large meaningful plot (e.g., about the "Hebrews" from Abraham to Jeremiah, from Babel to Babylon) under the truth-teller's constraints. However, the immediate point is rather the need for symmetry between their writing and our reading. To make sense of whatever they chose to transmit in and through the finished construct, we must follow their lead as best we can by performing a reconstruction from within. Exactly here interpretive reconstruction stands not just opposed but prior to critical deconstruction, in the historians' manner or the literati's or, most aggressive, the cultural ideologues'. (See the detailed argument in Sternberg 1985:7ff., then in 1992, for the antecedence of poetics to politics, theological and especially sexual; cf. Machinist 1991:202.) Reading goes before counterreading, fashioning a whole before taking it to pieces, tracing the (self-)image as drawn before matching it with the reality, actual or ideal, judging from the givens before evaluating the judgment itself from withouton pain of inventing one's own text. Even the same judgment (e.g., pronouncing the text "ancient," "religious," "ethnocentric," "traditionary,'' "supernatural in narrated happening and narrative access") may lead us into or out of the Bible's world of discourse, according to when and how we make it: as an interpretive premise, guideline, ground rule, or as a call for some variant and usually hostile (modern, secular, pluralist, critical, naturalistic) analysis, in effect a rewriting from a predetermined viewpoint self-styled "higher."
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Of these alternativesall too often lumped together under the catchall "reading"the second is less improper than insufficient, overhasty, not to say overbearing, and, unless preceded by the first, anachronistic. (For instance, there is little to choose between the metalinguistic and the ethnographic retrojection of our "Hebrew" into Scripture's, except that the former is obviously counterfactual.) In replacing one set of value-laden discourse parameters by another, born of a different time and culture, we surely need to know what has been replaced as well as by what, to understand before we rewrite, or else we only project onto the writing our own forms of desire. Thus, the ill-timed appeal to outside standardswhether made the Rabbinic or the scholarly way, from local patriotism or for cultural criticism, in a tendentious or playful spirit, with or (like the fence-sitters above) without commitmentfails to historicize the historiography supposed to be interpreted. The text's framework changes along with its original message at the hands of anachronists old and new, revisionist historians inter alia. In contrast, an enterprise like that of decoding the Chosen People's self-portraiture among the peoples of the earthfor example, as or as against "Hebrews"calls for quite an exercise of the historical imagination. Not the least obstacle is history itself, along which many of the names in the picture gathered diverse values by the time of their canonical recoding or, equally deceptive, since. But however wrong (odd, suspect, unfounded) the folk's folk typologies may look, due to their own prehistory or to the Bible's ethnocentricity or to our anachronism in scientific garb, they handsomely repay the effort of getting them right, as do the so-called folk etymologies and genealogies often blended with them. How else to reconstruct the world of the past, if not through reconstructing the world(s) of discourse constructed by and about that past? Whether we believe or disbelieve hardly matters, nor whether we approach the canonized image of Hebrewness as an end in itself or as an official version from which to piece out the underlying "true" reality, international, social, political, doctrinal, crosscultural, literary, nomistic, genetic. Either way, trying to understand who-what-where-why this text means by "Hebrew" in its own context remains the first imperative. Inescapable by the nature of communication, further, the priorities even set up an inverse ratio between encoding license and decoding compliance. Where does the pressure for adjusting ourselves to an alien reality-model exceed (or so much as approach) that built into the literature of faith, fantasy, folktale, group-founding, often compounded in, and with, antiquity? Today's historiography would obviously offer the least likely analogue, since the conventions within which the writer now operates always leave him vulnerable to challenge even, or especially, from readers who share
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them. The more accordant, lifelike, natural the conventions encountered, the more we feel at liberty to dispute the conclusions about what happened. The ground common in every sense and to all partiesthe agents willy-nilly included, because subsumed under the operative law of naturethen empowers us to draw another, more "realistic" picture from the historian's very body of evidence. Yet we must not let antiquity (as otherness in time) breed contempt, or a discourse family divided against itself lure us into category mistakes. This younger variety stands so committed in essentials to the factual and the familiarto an earthbound ontology, epistemology, narratology rolled into onethat the Bible's practitioners of the same truth-claiming genre have been mistaken for precursors of fiction. If anything, however, theirs is the stronger truth-claim of the twothe more privileged and the less assailable from within its logicqualitatively stronger, because made on divine authority as well as about a divinely regulated world. Lord and speech-dispenser at once within the culture, God is the ultimate author of everything, from the narrated to the narrative domain. He therefore constitutes the Bible's first premise on every reconstruction, just like his absence from either authorship thereafter. (See again my Poetics, esp. 23-128.) Given such an absolute and yet institutionalized truth-claim, the disparity between the practices of history writing migrates from the generic axis to the strategic: the ideological, methodological and, especially at a remove of three millennia, communicative. For example, where a latter-day surveyor of "the Hebrews" ventures to hypothesize a tie-up with the Israelites or with the Hab/piru or, failing decisive evidence, with neither, his Biblical predecessor claims to know their identity as a matter of course. The one would forfeit credibility in pretending to omniscience; the other in sinking to an analysis of the data by human wit, let alone to ignorance. (If the population of the earth remained beyond his ken, what would become of his silent appeal and overt access to heaven?) Accordingly, we latecomers are supposed to take either's "Hebrew" grouping, not indeed at its own valuation, but on its own premises, the empiricist vs. the omniscientif only to quarrel with it afterwards on ours, once we change orientations from readers to truth-seekers, from the discourse to the source-world. The greater the freedom open to the writer, the heavier the constraint on the interpreter as such to ascertain and, for the nonce, play by the operative rules of the symbolic system. Or else, even the data-based quest for truth would proceed regardless of the data, at least those that fall outside its ready-made coordinates of interpretation and truth-value. How can one so much as plead ignorance of what "really happened" in (say) the arena and annals of Hebrewness, without having first equipped oneself for ''really understanding," and thereby for assessing, the Bible's claim to knowledge? Interestingly, something like this twofold procedure has been general-
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ized about the discourse of ethnography at its ideal best. "The hermeneutic process is not restricted to the reader's relationship to the text, but includes as well the interpretive practices of the parties to the originating dialogue. In this respect, the model of post-modern ethnography is . . . that original ethnographythe Bible" (Tyler 1986:127, see also the overview in Clifford 1988:19-91). Coming from a radical postmodernist experimenter in anthropology, such originary tribute is unexpected indeed, though not undeserved, and all the more telling against the jump to the record's deconstruction outside the circle of "primitive" or self-centered others who shaped and shared it. Actually, as part of the overall play of perspectives, we will find this multiple vision built into the very structure of communication: Scripture frames the ethnocultural Other's (e.g., the Egyptian's) discourse about himself, his Other (e.g., the "Hebrew"), and the world at large within its own Israelite discourse, so turning the incongruity to rich account. Even unsympathetic analysts can therefore hardly do less in attempting to frame Scripture's own discourse, multi-voicedness and all, within theirs. In this sense, or sense-making, every reader must decide the "Hebrew" issue within the Israelite literary frame of reference on pain of virtual self-exclusion from a good many Biblical texts, contexts, intertextures, with their possible crosstextualities. Once you get down to the business of reading, the apparently theoretical, not to say esoteric imperative of symmetry compels obedience on the most practical grounds: the narrator's certitude (or presupposition) about the name-bearers holds the key to both local and large-scale intelligibility. Disobedience never goes unpunished, not even by the interpreter's own criteria. Among literary scholars, for example, Harold Bloom would cover his bet: "The history of the Jewish people begins with the ancient Hebrews, or Habiru, an unruly lot [of] . . . wanderers or semi-nomads, perhaps more a social caste than an ethnic unity. . . . One group among them was later headed by a troubled and charismatic seeker, Abram, who as Abraham became the father of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam" (1990:193). The half-hearted gesture toward history, in "perhaps more a social caste," has little to do with the Bible's historiography: this type-portrait applies to the Hab/piru, rather than the Hebrew, member of the conjunction. Incongruously, the selective rendering of Genesis attached to Bloom's commentary leaves out chapter 14 altogether (ibid.:77)the only reference to the group's ancestor as "Hebrew" and the chief support for numbering him among the "unruly lot." Moreover, even this truncated version, which also excises the whole genealogy leading from Shem through Eber to Abraham (ibid.:72-74), inevitably preserves the "ethnic unity'' of the Hebrew name-bearers and the "Jewish people" at large from Abraham onward. Nor does his description as "seeker," along with the prolepsis regarding his father-
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hood of the great monotheistic religions, tie him and his "group" to the environment's social internationalism, except by way of contrast. Focused on the inside circle, with its unmatchable lineage, belief, ordeal, destiny, the literary critical reading presupposes throughout an identification exclusive of the open class-membership it half professes. In another literary approach, Northrop Frye would likewise hedge his bet in relating the urbanite Abraham and Moses, as well as the city-builder Cain, to the Bible's assumption about the oldest form of human settlement. The Hab/piru link "may even be evidence that the word 'Hebrew' . . . originally meant something more like 'proletariat' than a conventional name for a people" (1983:144; the note ad loc. adds that "this link is a much disputed point" [242]). Yet Frye wisely omits to bring his "may be" to any text; or else he would need to explain what urban proletarianism has to do with, say, "Abram the Hebrew," which designates the patriarch when he has abandoned city life in marked antithesis to Lot, now resettled in Sodom and never called ''Hebrew." Evading the test, the equivocal appeal to "evidence" proves hollow. A verse-by-verse exegete like Benno Jacob (1992), denied refuge in glib speculation, or in the silence of the analyst free to pick his cruxes and examples, is manifestly overtaken by the shilly-shallyer's fate. To accommodate the everramifying data on the Bible's own terms, he shuttles among the various hypotheses outlined so far, with the exception of the Hab/piru. As his commentary on Exodus advances from the Enslavement to the Burning Bush theophany to the law of release, the scope of "Hebrew" shrinks more and more under pressure. "In the broadest sense," he initially asserts, ibrim covers all bene eber, the Shemites listed in Genesis as Eber's descendants. (This postulates co-reference, at the expense of verbal difference, in order to align national history with the Table of Nations.) Yet the broad coverage is short-lived. The first shrinkage coincides with the Burning Bush: specifically, with the term's ascent from the human to the heavenly plane, whose designation now alternates between "the Lord" or "the Lord, God of Israel" and "God of the Hebrews" (e.g., 3:18, 5:1-3). "In the narrower sense, they were the descendants of Abraham 'the iv-ri' (Gen 14.13) as well as all their relatives through Terah, especially the Arameans." (Why pile Terahide "relatives" on top of miscellaneous Abrahamite "descendants"? And if so, why exclude the rest of the Eberides? The boundary line twists to mark degrees or stages of election: the chosen people thereby retain their monopoly on "the Lord of Israel," as distinct from "the God of the Hebrews," supposedly handed down by Eber to the wider and less-favored Terahide circle.) When it comes to the "Hebrew's" manumission, however, the reference narrows yet further: "As a practical matter this law dealt only with Israelites" (Jacob 1992:12528, 612-13). A shabby excuse, this descent from the heights of
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theology to "practicality." As a matter of fact, the exegete himself earlier attached nonIsraelite Hebrews (the ereb rab of Exodus 12:38, a double near-anagram of eber or ibri) to the Exodus; and as a matter of law, the manumission issue will equally arise in regard to them, along with other Terahides and Eberides. But then, were they all to enjoy equal protection from lifelong servitude in Israel, the Exodus ordinance would clash with its later, explicitly restrictive ("brother"-focused) variants in Deuteronomy and Jeremiah. If the piecemeal worker's lot is hardly enviable, as is the risk taken by the predisposed generalizer, he still muddles through the texts that altogether indecisive spirits cannot even approachor not without evading the question of group identity. In fact, the better you know your Bible, the more numerous and extensive you will find the areas kept offlimits to the uncommitted. Seldom does the penalty for keeping a blank or open mind on a name come so high and so fast. Elsewhere we occasionally can, or think we can, afford it. Specialists aside, how many of us readers over the last two millennia have taken the trouble to work through, say, the roll calls in the Table of Nations? Or to correlate the Bible's Canaanites or Hittites or Philistines or Amorites, or for that matter Asherites and Benjaminites, with their extraBiblical namesakes? Or to investigate whether or not "the Midianites" in the episode of Joseph's victimization (Genesis 37:28, 36) designates the same group as "the Ishmaelites" (37:25, 27, 39:1)? Parallels in extraBiblical literature, from Homer's catalogues to the western's Indian cast, will suggest themselves. If truth be told, faced with a mere list or a local unknown, even otherwise close readers will often have more attractive and urgent things to do than systematically mapping proper nouns onto the world, the textual and/or the real. The game does not seem worth the candle, or not until one learns better; and the poetry of names hidden in the Bible's driest prose, from the earliest genealogies onward, takes some learning. Even so, consider the price of neglect in this case. Obviously enough, leaving the reference of "Hebrew" suspended between in- and out-group would bar access to a variety of discourses where the identity of the referent makes all the difference. Just recall the oppression-todeliverance tale of the "Hebrews" in Egypt, from the horrors of bondage cum infanticide, through Moses' wondrous parting and abortive reunion with his ''brothers," to the Deity's iterated self-presentation to Pharaoh as "the Lord, the God of the Hebrews." (In face of the theological dilemmas sprung by this equation through apposition alone, little wonder a Benno Jacob performs such acrobatics.) Or recall the law of the "Hebrew" slave in its threefold ExodusDeuteronomy-Jeremiah movement. Or the struggle for Israel's independence, waged by Saul against the Philistines, who both denigrate and enlist "Hebrews." The plainest sense, never mind the poetry,
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will elude the undecided reader. Does Pharaoh oppress and Moses deliver the chosen people, whose growth threatens Egypt, or a motley class to which they belong? If the latter, why? Which entity worships God, and after which does he call himself? Who benefits from the slave law, or laws? In I Samuel, is the war of independence fought between two ethnic groups, "Israelites/Hebrews" vs. "Philistines"the native one spotted with "Hebrew" quislings and turncoatsor among three differently constituted groups? At key junctures like these three, you can never hope for a minimum understanding of the action, or the legislation, while the agents remain undetermined, and with them the motives, the values, the ethnosocial solidarities and processes. Moreover, the Egyptian/Hebrew encounter boasts foundational importance: not for nothing does it run through all three junctures, as well as on and beneath the surface of numberless other laws, tales, oracles, articles or professions of faith, headed by the Decalogue. A loose cornerstone threatens the whole building. Less obviously, the same holds for extensive Biblical crosscuts, synchronic and diachronic. Were analysts a little more aware of them, not only the incentives but also the aids to closure would greatly multiply, and with them the premium on poetics as the sense of a system at work, below, across, through, around "the Hebrews." Contrary to the variations on atomism played since the Rabbis, Hebrewness is anything but reducible to the sum (or, for that matter, the series) of its occurrences, much less to any individual exemplar. Analysis therefore needs to reckon with the Bible's arts of synthesis, each with its own logic and network of part-whole relations, hardly decomposible in turn from the entire crisscross. By arts of synthesis I mean especially the following interlinkages: • intertextual composition, whereby one name-bearer's tale works as both a prelude and a parallel to his successor's. For example, Joseph's "Hebrew" fortunes in Genesis look ahead to Israel's in Exodus, then preexodus Israel's in Egypt to premonarchic and territorial Israel's vis-à-vis Philistia in I Samuel, then, in reverse, to preexilic Judah's on the eve of her downfall. • intergeneric traffic, as between the narrative(s) and the law(s) of "Hebrew" bondage from Genesis to Jeremiah, a traffic occasionally surfacing in the form of the lawgiver's recourse to historical memory for motivation. • interlevel play between language and reality, style and structure: whether by way of word/world homology (e.g., where nominal Hebrewness goes with prenational, hence preIsraelite, existence) and/or apparently for contrast (Abraham, the first Hebrew, is also the first recipient of the promise of nationhood ["I will make a great nation of thee"] with honorific nomination ["I will make thy name great"]).
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• intertemporal relations between early and late, whether in the sequence of events or in legislative diachrony or in their confluence. (For example, does the Bible unfold the history of a single nation under two ethnica or a main national plot counterpointed by a discontinuous social underplot? Again, in the evolution of slave law, what persists, what changes, and why?) • intersexual vicissitude, like the sudden foregrounding of the "Hebrewess" as culture heroine in the Exodus tale of bondage, then as equal bondwoman for better or worse under the Deuteronomy/Jeremiah law-code, and nowhere else. • intercultural dynamics, always pitting the "Hebrew" side (individual or collective, human or divine, male or female, abroad or at home, early or late) against Canaanites, Egyptians, or Philistines, and against them only. Throughout such crosscuts, do the name-bearers figure as the Bible's chosen insiders, or among the disadvantaged "Hab/piru" outsiders in its world at large? And in either case, why are they restricted to certain parts of its world? This set of puzzles again leads, by another route, to the fundamentals of the Bible's worldview, in and across time. To generalize only from the foregoing paragraphs, the "Hebrews'" identity already bears more or less directly on the thematics of nationhood, of power relations, of the collective self vs. the other, of the brother (and/or sister) vs. the alien, of life among cultures, of freedom and service under man vs. God, of nomination between name-giving and election, of history repeating itself with variations from forerunner to group, from the happy end of the Exodus to the ultimate catastrophe of Exile. Therefore, either reference of "Hebrew" to those key ideas must trigger a chain reaction that will distinctively affect their emplotment and understanding, their conceptual weight and persuasive force and poetic art. Even in bare outline, I hope, such ramifications indicate the extent to which the eye for detail makes or breaks the synoptic vision: the little and apparently little-used word in question comes to encapsulate a whole universe of discourse. Leaving the microcosm unresolved would proportionally bar access to the macrocosm. And considering the price of inaccessibility, better even a wrong or hasty decision ("gap-filling"), with all it entails, than none. The former is at least testable and adjustable. Second, the issue's polarity bears yet harder upon closure. In forcing the decision about "Hebrew," it gives the reader little latitude to hedge his semantic choice. For one thing, the indeterminacy here concerns not some shade of meaning or attitudenot primarily at leastbut reference itself: what existents in the world the name designates, what agents come into
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play, which humans or groups or roles are meant to stand for the ancestral self, which for the other. In fact, the less independently known the referent, the starker the need to derive the knowledge from the referring term. Thus, contrast "Abram the Hebrew," where the epithet serves more to characterize than to identify the hero, with the anonymous "Hebrews" involved in the Egyptian or Philistine attack on "Israel," where the first proper noun's extension vis-à-vis the last makes the difference between, say, a three- and a two-group conflict. But since these limitcases themselves vary in degree onlyas "Hebrew,'' Abraham of Genesis 14 likewise enters the international arena in proto-Israelite or in Hab/piru capacitythe pressure against open-endedness is always there. Who's who remains the most basic and determinative of signifying factors, hence the one most in need of determination at the crossroads. Even referential issues much below "Hebrew" in strategic importance present forks to the interpreter, only that most of them we take in our stride (or, again, skip as too negligible to puzzle over). Because world-making comes first in representational discourse, then, the limits imposed on world play (e.g., between "Hebrew" identities) are stricter than on the rest of wordplay (e.g., between assorted judgments). Out of group anchorage, the represented reality is liable to drift about purposelessly, along with the (hi)story and everything else. This chain reaction would definitely overtake the nonreferential aspects of meaning. For example, look at the diverse senses that commentators old and new have attributed to "Hebrew," within either group identification, by way of etymology. Does ibri signify "Eberide" (by derivation, ethnic and linguistic, from Eber, the chosen Shemite, himself recently bracketed with King Ebrum of Ebla)? Or "One From Across the River" (eber [hannahar], on which Joshua 24:2-3 would appear to pun)? Or "nomad, refugee, expatriate" and the like (from 'br, "pass")? Or "Dusty One" (donkey caravaneer, from 'pr, "dust")? Obviously, failing independent evidence as to the name's origin and semantics, the conjectured meanings depend for their verification on the name-bearers: on whether the "Hebrews" and/or Hab/piru fit in reality the descriptions packed or projected into some etymology. If all the "Hebrews" on record, but not all the Hab/piru, demonstrably traced back to Eber or to the other side of the Euphrates River, for instance, the fact would go a long way toward dividing the signifiers in accordance with the respective signifieds. If not, both aspects of the sign would proportionally elude fixture in intergroup mergence or opaqueness. Yet, either way, who's, what's, whence's, etc., on the actual ground of the world (real or reality-like) come, in the quest for intelligibility, before the underground meanings of the words. No matter how verbal nuances shift, collide, intersect, equivocate, they perform their dance within some more or less stable network of referents constructed from the discourse as best we can.
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For another thing, if every reference to the world marks a crossroads, then "Hebrew" forks in opposite directions. Israelite or Hab/piru? Inner or outer circle? We readers are caught in an either/or choice, as stark as it is strategic and value-laden. That the name-bearer may in theory be a fellow national of a certain supranational classas he is, according to somedoes not yet enable the name to harmonize the two possible attributes in context. The operative value system would by itself undercut any compound (or compromise) both/and meaning. Insofar as Israelite vs. Hab/piru relates to the difference between native and foreigner, insider and outsider, self and other, the Bible's ideology of election sharpens the universal contrast into thematic polarity between incompatibles. Where God uniquely chooses in the happening, we must follow suit in the reading. Even if the Hab/piru umbrella covers the born Israelite, therefore, it perforce groups him with, or as, the other: such Hebrewness at best overshadows, at worst negates, his chosenness. The same difference also forces a basic choice of methodology. Does the "Hebrew" question center in Israelite nationality or in Hab/piru society? Distinctive self-portrait or portrait of an alien shared with the rest of the Ancient Orient? Analysis of intranational and international or of intersocial relations? Culture-unique or crosscultural approach to the representation of sameness vs. otherness among groups? Even partisans of indeterminate literary signification, whether ultimately decidable or undecidable, must recognize its limits. The very thrust of my Poetics toward the Bible's difficult art of ambiguity makes it necessary to repeat the warning that not all ambiguities are tenable, far less equally constructive. There is a time to ambiguate, Qohelet might say, and a time to disambiguate. The Exodus manumission law, for example, will brook no shilly-shallying. Unless you locate the "Hebrew slave" at one of the extremes, as even a Benno Jacob eventually ("practically") does, the ordinance will fail to apply as well as to signify in theory. And according to the extreme you have opted for, the world's population will resolve itself into two different and differently treated categories, namely, the beneficiaries vs. the non-beneficiaries of seventh-year release. On the question whether the Hab/piru counts as a member of the ''Hebrew" group therefore depends, if not his life, then his servitude for life; and the Israelite will suffer or gain correspondingly. Beyond and beneath the immediate judicial practicalities, much else lies in doubt. The direction, and to a large extent the results, of comparative analysis, for instance. Where does the Bible's ruling find its proper analogue, maybe its genesis? In the Hammurabi Code, which sets a limit to the fellow citizen's as opposed to the foreigner's bondage, or in the Nuzi contract of Hab/piru service under a citizen, where the nominal term for
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the servant (but never the legal terminus) rhymes with Exodus? (For now, see the documents in Pritchard 1969:17071 and 220, respectively.) Crossculturally or otherwise, moreover, the law's rationale hangs in the balance. Since the Exodus ordinance of "Hebrew" slavery and release in Israel looks back to the Exodus ordeal of mass "Hebrew" slavery and release in Egypt, what kind of experience (memory, origin, lesson) does the law codify? A tale of national or of social deliverance? Of ancestral promises kept, within the circle of the chosen, or of universal commitment to the oppressed? Given the variant sets of participants in question, each with its dramatics and thematics of (hi)story, hence with its treatment under the law, it cannot be both at once. There is no reconciling the extremes, as there is no dividing them between the Exodus ordeal (e.g., "Hebrew" = Israelite) and the Exodus ordinance ("Hebrew slave" = Hab/piru), on pain of breaking the continuity along all lines, from the verbal to the actional to the ideo-legal. Similarly with the dynamics of the narrative along the Bible's grand chronology, as when Joseph prefigures the "Hebrew" changes of collective fortune or when the Philistines replay the Egyptians vis-à-vis the Samuel "Hebrews"; or with the diachrony of the law, moving from Exodus's concern for the "Hebrew slave," possibly regardless of ethnicity, toward Deuteronomy's and Jeremiah's loaded appeals to "Hebrew brotherhood" in memory of Egypt. Among other questions that arise in such long historical perspective, does Joseph's chequered career in Egypt anticipate that of his fellow Jacobites/Israelites or that of his fellow victims at large? Or the other way round, does this advance from "Hebrew'' part to whole, from individual to ensemble, generalize what we would today call Egypt's antisemitism or her xenophobia unlimited? Accordingly, what do the Philistines reenact, ethnic or class animus, selective or indiscriminate racism? Again, do the younger, "brother"-oriented versions of the release law spell out the Exodus "Hebrew" codification or break with the Nuzi Hab/piru contract that is supposed to have inspired it? Do they evolve or devolve, change the scope or just the style of the original Mosaic reference to Hebrewness, whose own contested genesis pushes the enigma further back than Exodus? The alternatives would always involve divergent findings, trajectories, testimonia, explanations, research methods and priorities. Likewise with every single occurrence in relation to the network as a whole: the twofold network, more exactly, given the inevitable correlation, one way or the other, with "Israel." At whatever point, book, cluster, crosscut you launch and terminate the quest, the forked reference of "Hebrew" darkens the very reference point throughout. The practice of Hab/piru analystsno matter how contorted their way with the awkward "Hebrew" dataactually testifies to the exigency of resolution. Faced with the basic dilemma, they as a rule try to slip between
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its horns via some middle course. (If you observe how these experts have increasingly surrendered the ideal of bringing the Hab/piru themselves under a unitary accounteven when dealing with a single corpus, like Amarnathen the fragmentation of the Hebrew/Hab/piru nexus becomes predictable.) The means answer to the desperateness of the end, yet stop short of irresolution: multiplicity, yes, ambiguity, no. Three escape routes from unity, variously intersecting and seldom left untrodden altogether, merit particular notice. The more so because, as deducible from this case and further illustrated in what ensues, all three universally apply to subdivision under pressure. Given any bundle of variant data (nominal, cognate, group-related, or otherwise kindred, as within some literary genre), each of them enables the analyst to preserve or create order by alleging the data's systematic variance. One goes the way of what I would call synchronic partition: even within a single "Hebrew" cluster, located at a welldefined spatiotemporal juncture, the referring terms then divide between the two referent groups, Israelite and Hab/piru. In Moses' earliest contact with Pharaonic oppression, for instance, "the narrative distinguishes between Hebrews whom it describes as brothers of Moses, thus characterizing them as Israelites, and Hebrews hostile to him who seem to make common cause with the Egyptians" (Lewy 1957:2): the deliverer supposedly encounters first Hab/piru of his own kin, then of other races. And not their loyalties alone but also his, and the Bible's, diverge to suit: "it was Israel and not the Hebrews" at large for whose emancipation Moses pleaded (ibid.:3). Likewise with their respective namesakes, pro- vs. anti-Philistine, in I Samuel. (See, e.g., Gray 1958:180-82, Weingreen 1967, or Gottwald, who deplores the customary "blindness toward the double meanings of Hebrew in I Samuel 13-14" [1979:420] that he himself alternates from one reference to the next. Typically, the three like-minded partitions fail to overlap.) Diachronic distribution supplies another loophole for compromise. Thereby, assuming a shift in time from social to ethnic usage, a legion of inquirers associate the Bible's early "Hebrews" with the Hab/piru, the late with the Israelites. Joseph's "I have been stolen from the land of the Hebrews" (Genesis 40:15) would thus antedate and oppose Jonah's "I am a Hebrew" (Jonah 1:9). Or, in legal history, Exodus's provision for the "Hebrew slave," regardless of nationality, is supposed to have shrunk into ethnocentric concern for ''thy brother the Hebrew or the Hebrewess" by the time of Deuteronomy and, at the latest, Jeremiah. But early vs. late along what diachrony? The one given in the text as an event sequence or the one surmised behind the text as an order of formation? The historiographic chronology or the genetic, which the distributors (mis)take for exclusively historical and so privileged? In both the examples above, the two chronologies happen to march in step on all
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accounts. By either reckoning, Joseph goes before Jonah, social outlook before ethnic self-identification in terms of Hebrewness. Yet such agreement between narrative and formative order may elsewhere give place to disjunction, almost at will. Thus the dating of the first occurrence in canonical line, "Abram the Hebrew": it ranges all the way between preBiblical, Akkadian origin and postexilic, midrash-like retrojection, to suit each geneticist's idea of the overall Hebrew/Hab/piru meeting-to-parting trajectory. Semantic duality, or mixture, effected between person and portrait (reference and sense, designating coverage and descriptive content) forms yet another much-traveled route to having it both ways. On this mixed premise, "Hebrews" at times or always designates born Israelites while casting them into some typical Hab/piru role, mold, pursuit, condition in life, normally unsavory. Thus designated, they will figure as nomads, emigrants, fugitives, aliens, mercenaries, raiders, outlaws, slaves, inferiors, detribalized men and women, 8 according to each theory's center of gravity or composite portrait. The resulting mixture of ethnic designation with social description under one linguistic umbrella is most often contrived and invoked for the same reason as the alternative lines of compromise: to accommodate otherwise intractable data. For instance, how to explain the constructions where ibri forms an adjective (rather than a noun) predicated of some unmistakable Israelite, whether of "Abram" or "thy brother" favored in Deuteronomy's release law? The synchronic partitioner would appeal to the instability of the canon's usage; the diachronic distributor, to the lateness of the nonHab/piru usages. The semantic dualist, or mixer, would answer that the phrase indeed refers to a member of the Bible's own circle but views him in a crosscultural aspect: he is an Israelite turned Hab/piru, or Hab/piru-like, by force of some acquired property (e.g., Abram's rootlessness, alienness, sword-happiness) characteristic of the class. The exigency faced by the combining analyst is always the same; the attempt at resolution alone varies in the logic and possibly the limits of having it both ways. Instead of dividing the Bible's thirty-odd "Hebrew" referents by either the divided or the dynamic reference imputed to the term, the mixer would divide the term's meaning into referential and non-referential signification, which freely diverge or converge ("mix"). In divergence, the Bible will then speak of "Israelites" or of their ''Hebrew" co-referents (e.g., Jonah) as distinct from the Hab/piru by virtue of their parentage; in convergence, it will stage its "Hebrew" (e.g., the bondman in Exodus law) as a Hab/piru, or a Hab/pirulike, Israelite. But the logic of mixture is also freely extendible. If the significations converge here and there, then why not everywhere? For example, "At least some" of the Israelites "were abiru in the sense that they were aliens in Egypt or . . . in Palestine" (Coote 1990:91): if "some," why not all? Or, by Freud's half-measure, "the name of 'Habiru' (Hebrews) was transferred to [the Israelites] in the
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Amarna period"; but even if "we do not know how" (1964:129, 49), what becomes of their preAmarna forerunners, starting with Abram? Indeed, while the two other compromise solutions perforce split the occurrences of "Hebrew"across or along time, according to the line of least resistance and most conveniencethis mixture has recently been generalized from special cases to the whole lot. Unity in duality, you might say. 9 Now, it may be objected, don't all these middle grounds between Israelite and Hab/piru argue for an ambiguous reading, and so in effect for its feasibility along other lines as well, down to undecidable bifurcation everywhere? Don't they premise (and, taken together, compound) the hovering between the extremes? Not at all, I would stress, because such intermediacy entails nothing like indeterminacy, either in theory or in practice. On the contrary, exactly here the quest for a middle ground opposes the multiple choices rolled together in fence-sitting, the Orientalist's or the Biblicist's, the historian's or the (literary) interpreter's. If each midway Hab/piru subhypothesis divides the term "Hebrew" against itselfnational vs. cross-national reference, early vs. late usage, and/or person vs. portraiturethis is with a view to somehow fixing the meaning, on every occasion, between the antipodes of the ethnic and the social, insidership and outsidership. Each compromise would have it both ways, yet only by a certain parting of those ways, never any which way. Opaque in the given text, "Hebrew" is thereby alleged to grow transparent in partial interplay (rather than perfect accord) with the broader extraBiblical, Hab/piru context. Whether this interplay promises, let alone achieves success where the diametric hypotheses fail, is another question. The alleged transparence may remain not only in dispute among these halfway houses but also disputable across them, indeed disprovable. They all lay themselves open to charges of shallow and myopic exegesis, ad hoc construction, special pleading, inconsistency with method and evidence, explanatory weakness ascending from local to strategic knots, the workings of the Bible's diachrony included. Their shared crosscultural outlook, I will soon argue, is misguided and hopeless in the first place, inevitably yielding little beyond variations on historical romance. And even the fact that the assorted modes of compromise under pressure, despite the changes rung on them since the nineteenth century, have never been acknowledged as such and duly theorizedfew practitioners, I'm afraid, will thank me for repairing the omissionbespeaks more enthusiasm than self-awareness at the crossroads. But the problem of adequacy can wait for its turn. However the intermediate variants complicate, even torture the meaning, they would disambiguate the reference of "Hebrew" between Israelite and Hab/piru to an extent analogous to the polar univocalities affirmed by the hard-liners on either side. Even apart from patently untenable minority opinions, like that invoking
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the Abrahamites or the Eberides, conventional wisdom therefore ramifies into a set of five alternatives. Each of them having decided the issue according to its own lights, we readers must form our own decision. How do the two antipolar hypotheses compare with each other? Does any of the three middle ways, so widely followed and crossed among the scholars, offer a golden mean? If not, would it be possible to intertie them afresh or necessary to make a fresh start? Third, in the existing state of affairs, the closure jointly demanded by the issue's weight and polarity is left problematic on all hypotheses. Given the earlier factors alone, the embarrassment of riches in gap-filling would be troublesome enough; how much more so when it apparently confronts us with a choice among types of poverty. Whatever enthusiasts may say or think to the contrary, deciding among the traditional solutions proves anything but easy, and for the worst reason: they are each riddled with difficulties that much outweigh the corresponding advantages. Bound up with the respective premises and practices, this unhealthy ratio shows even before we get down to the details. As already hinted, the absolute Hebrew/Israelite equation has a good deal to commend it, but always short of any explanatory power: the difference between the names as co-referential ethnica or gentilics appears to make no difference, or worse than none, hence no sense in the Bible's telling and reading. On any of the Hab/piru-based imports, by contrast, this nominal difference does come to signify, but never plausibly, far less unanimously. The endless quarreling within this camp, which produces a balance (if not a stalemate) of negatives all round, would by itself throw into doubt all the what's, when's, how's, why's of imported crosscultural signification. Thus, if the Bible's "Hebrew" means Hab/piru, does the meaning point to an outsider, or pile the insider on the outsider within one transnational class, or portray the insider in the role of outsider? If a number of references point inside Israel, as the semantic mixer et al. would hold against opposition from the wholesale combiner, why doesn't this pointing extend to all the "Hebrews"? And if it does, according to some mixers, why should other Hab/piru-like Israelites fail to receive the same class-term? (Jephthah, say, would qualify for Hebrewness no less than Abram as captain of irregulars before him and David under Philistine vassalage after.) Again, assuming outside (or transnational) reference, does it hold throughout or only part of the time? If the latter, as most scholars would concede, which part, what becomes of the rest, by what logic? And, not least, at what cost? For, regardless of the answer, either partitionthe synchronic or the diachroniccannot but pay dearly for retreating here and there, here or there, to the age-old Hebrew/Israelite equation. The
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breach of consistency incurs a still graver minus, namely, the loss of explanatory advantage over the persistent coreferentialists: now the difference between the words at times fails to make any difference in the world on either account. Where the brother delivered by the young Moses or Jonah in flight remains Israelite anyway, the narrative might spare him and us the label of Hebrewness, at best distracting as a false clue to othernessto an identity at odds with the proper ethnicon. The imported social bearing shared by all these Hab/piru variants, in opposition to the purely national hypothesis, already creates more problems than it solves. Does the choice lie, then, between the evils of crossculturalism and culture-blindness? No, I will argue, but that is another reason why we must weigh their respective pros and cons with special attention. Drawing up each balance sheet will teach us something, and far more than a negative lesson, on the way to the understanding of the "Hebrews" within the poetics of intercultural relations developed by ancient Israelite literature. The Hebrew as Hab/piru: Traffic across Cultures Heuristically speaking, if the Hab/piru never existed or the thought of their linkage to the Bible never arose, the comparatist might do worse than invent them, or it, with a view to throwing into relief the features, issues, coordinates, discourse arts, multidisciplinary implications of Hebrewness proper. From the interplay of the specific terms, he might (as we will) generalize even further: about, say, the difference between class and people, their respective footings in the world, their modes of expression or suppression, their image and trajectory in (hi)storytelling, their treatment under the law, the attitudes and stereotypes they elicit from the analyst in their afterlife down the millennia. Similarly with the bearings of the class/people difference on national literature (here also sacred, revolutionary, militant, canonized, history-driven) at the intersection of poetics with culture, or cultures, just where we have already found the Bible messing its Hebrews. As it is, far from having to invent the comparison between the groups, by way of heuristic aid or exercise, one must investigate, and if anything de-invent, their supposed real-life contact, often pushed to the limit of co-extensiveness. The scanty material has long kindled the rage for connection, so that the balance of likeness and unlikeness in intergroup comparison needs anything from redressing to redefining to sheer saving. This in the interests of either group, as well as of their comparative portraiture, whether linked at source or just mutually enlightening in juxtaposition. Two classic monographs, Jean Bottéro's Le problème des Habiru * (1954) and Moshe Greenberg's The Hab/piru* (1955), offer between them a superb
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critical introduction to the large and polemic-ridden body of work on the topic since the late nineteenth century. Apart from their judicious analyses, both contain the original documents and the scholarly references that accumulated from the discovery of the Amarna archive, in 1887, to the early 1950s. More recent surveys can be found in Borger 1958; Weippert 1967:66-102; de Vaux 1968 and 1978:I, 105-12, 209-16; Bottéro 1972:14-27, 1981; Loretz 1984; Lemche 1992. Most of them cite intermediate additions to the debate, as well as to the debated and far less abundant source material, yet the basic issues persist. Among the moot questions, the tie-up with the Bible's Hebrews has always prominently figured and generated more heat than light. Even where the facts about either group are beyond dispute, the heat of controversy affects not just their reading and matching and ultimate weighting; their very presentation often leaves much to be desiredmost of all, foreseeably, at the hands of the crossculturalist side. The state of the art is itself in (presumably rhetorical) dispute, incompatible claims of consensus and all. A newcomer to the field would hardly know whether to believe the announcement of the combined theory's triumph (e.g., Lemche 1975:136, Wright 1990:253, Coote 1990:92) or of its demise (Redford 1987:155n. 11). If only by way of preliminary overview from which to work toward the center of our interest, therefore, let me now bring together a few revealing points of comparison, to be taken up in the sequel as the need for them arises. A population constant of the Ancient Orient in the second millennium B.C., the Hab/piru are yet remarkable for their variability. The only stable and certain thing about them as a group is their protean elusiveness, much like characters in Alice's Wonderland or in a Robbe-Grillet novel. An apter association than may seem, this, because the historians so long intent on pinning the Hab/piru down in the ancient worldespecially alongside "the Hebrews"grow on scrutiny more and more akin to the literary interpreters who would domesticate the wildest fictional creations of modernism. By comparison, the Bible's "Hebrew" party operates all the more evidently within the limits of change normal for agents in story and history. Consider some of the awkward facts of diversity. The very name under which those omnipresent mystery people of old appear transforms in different eras, places, cultures, scripts, languages. Thus Hab/piru * in syllabic cuneiform, SA.GAZ in ideogrammatic writing, 'prm in alphabetic script, 'pr.w in hieroglyphics. Of these signifiers, the two most frequent variants, Hab/piru* and SA.GAZ, look so unlike that their co-signifying relation escaped scholarly notice for a time. Nor are their own subvariants, graphic and/or phonic, reducible to uniformity. (For details see Greenberg 1955:88-91, and especially Bottéro 1954:144-66, 1972:15-23.) The Akkadian one, notoriously indeterminate between the vocalizations Habiru* and
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Hapiru *, not to mention the Egyptian-based 'Apiru/'Eperu/'Aperu, also assumes such forms as the proper nouns Hab/piri* or Hab/pira*. The Sumerian one, whether a genuine logogram or a pseudo-ideogram to be read phonetically as a loanword, is no less variform: most often SA.GAZ, but also SA.GAZ.ZA, for example, or merely GAZ. And the rest of the scripts, with their implications for likeness or unlikeness of sound, further diversify the picture. Would the uniform "Hebrew" (sing. ibri, pl. ibrim, fem. ibriyya, pl. ibriyyot) offer an antithesis or just another variant, exceptional for its stability?10 If the latter, as the combined theory perforce insists, why should the distance between the word-forms "Hebrew" and "Israel" stand for a dividing line in the world, that between Hab/piru* and SA.GAZ for a tolerable range of instability? The double standard leaps to the eye, because the theory's explanatory advantage over the competing, unicultural hypothesis resides precisely in turning the Bible's alternation of group names to account. How is it then that the extraBiblical variants, no less distinct from each other, make no such difference but point to the same thing? In this regard, take again the Eberide nexus, whereby ibrim interchanges with bene eber vis-à-vis "Israel": the double standard there pales by comparison, for the groups involved at least merge and divide according to the resemblance among the group names. If left undifferentiated, in short, the Eberide pair has one label too many, the ibri/Hab/piru/SA.GAZ* trio one label too unlike the rest for verbal grouping to mirror reality at all. In co-reference, any word-form may indeed go with any otherfor example, "Jacob" with "Israel," as well as "Abram" with ''Abraham," "Sarai" with "Sarah"but only after the word-to-world correlation has been independently ascertained: failing that, the decoder rather infers, if at all, existential from nominal (un)likeness. And once he does, can he apply the inference from soundwork here and not there, one way and not the other within the same cluster of givens? However that may beand the question will before long resurgenobody familiar with the ways of meaning is likely to shrug off assorted linguistic vehicles as mere surface phenomena. The opposite has indeed proved true here. These instabilities in the signifier outside the Bible reflect all kinds of differences in signification proper, from lexical sense to cultural attitude, if not to the signified human reality. As has been established (and summarized in Bottéro and Greenberg ibid.), the chief variants are themselves multiply divergent. The eagerest equation-drawer cannot read "Hab/piru*" for every occurrence of "SA.GAZ," which may retain its normal pejorative value of 'killer, aggressor' (shaggashu*) or 'brigand, vagabond' (habbatu*), so that it often literally eludes decoding. Far from interchangeableas phonetic or semantic, any more than as graphic, equivalentsthe two labels only point at best to the same farflung group. And even such
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co-reference would be qualified by analysts who attribute to the Sumerogram a wider, generic range of application. "Sa.gaz représente le genre dont les Habiri * ne sont qu'une espèce" (Dhorme 1938:172, or, more recently, Cazelles 1973:6-7; contrast Greenberg 1955:86n. 1). The chameleon-likeness of the names, then, would (and at one stage did) keep them apart were it not for the common referent named. Their common denominator is even lower than that between "Hebrew" and "Israel" on the alternative traditional hypothesis, because it includes nothing like, say, the genealogical nexus traceable in the descent from Eber to "Abram the Hebrew'' to Jacob/Israel. This further calls into question, not the marriage of the extraBiblical, but the divorce of the Biblical, pair of group names. As sound joins forces with sense, the double standard grows in oddity: why should we both affirm the weaker equivalence (Hab/piru* = SA.GAZ) and transfer it across cultures (to "Hebrew"), at the expense of the firmer bond within a single literary culture? Whatever their naming, again, the Hab/piru outlived most of the host collectives (orders, nations, states, environments) by whom they were so variously grouped apart. They range in time from the Akkad period and the III Ur Dynasty in the second half of the third millennium, through the reign of Hammurabi (1792-1750 B.C.) and the Amarna age four hundred years later, down to the twelfth-century Pharaohs of the New Kingdom, toward the end of the Egyptian empire, and the Babylonian kings of the Second Dynasty of Isin in the eleventh century B.C. A long run, doubtless, yet perceptibly short of the Israelite monarchy, whose beginnings teem with "Hebrews" to an extent unprecedented since Exodus. Likewise with the Hab/piru's spatial distribution. "There is no single country that can be regarded as their original home" (Rowton 1976:17). The antithesis that springs to mind is the tale of origins recounted by Joshua in God's voice. "Across the [Euphrates] River [be'eber ha'nnahar] did your fathers live of old, Terah, the father of Abraham and Nahor. . . . Then I took your father Abraham from across the River [me'eber ha'nnahar] and led him through all the land of Canaan" (Joshua 24:2-3): the geo-ethnic pun on ibri, latent in the twice-repeated eber, virtually surfaces every time by association with the first "Hebrew" cum patriarch, Abraham. Under the name of "Hebrews," moreover, these former TransEuphratensians keep within a sharply delimited arena or, when mobile, routefrom Canaan/Israel to Egypt and back. Fixed on this southwestern side of the River, the "eberites" do not once approach, let alone recross itnot, I would emphasize again, under the nameso that each occurrence of Hebrewness enacts afresh the geographical pun on other-sidedness, yondermanship, displacement for election. (Unlike Abraham the Crosser, suggestively, Jacob the re-Crosser into Mesopotamia never gets "Hebrewed" at all and turns "Israel" in re-re-crossing into Canaan at Yabbok.)
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Their putative namesakes, hailing from nowhere, crop up everywhere. They are scattered from the north as far as Alishar or Hatti in Asia Minor; through various parts and partitions of Mesopotamia (Sumer, Babylon, Assyria, Nuzi, Mari); through Syria and Canaan across the Euphrates, where their goings-on inspire terror in El-Amarna reporters from the city-states, Jerusalem among them; down to Egypt in the south. Further, the differential geography translates into spheres of cultural contact: CisEuphratensian (with or within the Canaan-Philistia-Egypt triangle at that) as against Orient-wide, respectively. The globe-trotters' ancestry, going by personal names and other detail recorded, is no less heterogeneous, as between Semitic and nonSemitic. So would their language doubtless show itself to be, if ever put on record by the surrounding culture. None of the extant documents emanates from them, or even preserves their voice at second hand: objects of speech, they never speak themselves, 11 unlike the role-shifting "Hebrews." It is as though all the rest of the world, bent on monopolizing expression, let alone formal transmission, conspired to keep the Hab/piru silent. Were the disapora assembled and the mute restored to utterance, however, Babel would presumably ensue, so that they could not "understand one another's speech." The Hebrews, though we shall find them switching codes as well as roles in intercultural exchange, always can communicate among them-selvesan unbroken mutual intelligibility that stretches to their dealings with Israel and her God. (Only when facing the brothers in his nonHebrew masquerade does Joseph place an "interpreter between them.'') The one group's language barrier is the other's bond. Finally, even the reputed "(under)class" identity turns out less than determinate. In occupation, the Hab/piru branch off into state mercenaries and looting raiders, hired agricultural laborers and town dwellers, palace and temple employees, self-made and captive slaves, also vagrants, thieves, singers, shepherdsyet not without arresting counterparts at the top. Some of their number belong to the higher echelons, as exalted as princehood, clean against the rule of low status that most analysts would generalize for the Hab/piru. (If they want to level down for symmetry the imagined namesakes in the Bible's world as well, they only reap further trouble: the "Hebrewing" of Abram the chieftain [Genesis 14:13], of Joseph the viceroy as well as the slave [43:32, 39:17], of Jonathan the heir apparent [I Samuel 14:11], of David, formerly a general, now a guerrilla leader and still the husband of a princess [I Samuel 29:3].) Does such high rank prove or break or disconfirm this conjectural rule about the "(under)class"? The answer largely hinges on whether the miscellaneous positions occupied by the rest of the groupe.g., the settled and the migrant, or the enslaved and the free and the freebootercount as a single estate throughout antiquity, across the whole gamut of names, times, places, documents,
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cultural hierarchies involved. They would doubtless hardly qualify for oneness by modern socioeconomic yardsticks of class-identity, whether Marxist (relationship to the means of production) or Weberian (life-chance on the market). Yet suppose we apply criteria both less anachronistic and less materialistic. Would Hab/piru status cut across variants operative at the timewhether judged by, say, friend or foe, by prestige or by power, by eligibility for indigenous honors or for intergroup contact, all the way to signing treaties with great kingdoms? A tricky and debatable matter, whose untangling (like that of "Hebrewness," our center of interest) requires much finer sociocultural tools than the blanket distinctions and package deals usually brought to it. Status maybe excepted, probably not, chameleon-like diversity thus reigns across the board, its extent only growing more conspicuous with every body of new evidence unearthed since the late nineteenth century. The only safe generalization about the Hab/piru is negative: that they do not form an ethnic group, much less an ethnonational entity, nor their label(s), accordingly, an ethnicon. (For a dissent, rare enough nowadays, from this scholarly consensus see Rowley 1942:51-52, Moscati 1959:88-89, de Vaux, 1978:I, 110-12, or, with qualifications, Halpern 1983:52-56.) Considering how the balance inclines toward unlikeness, no wonder some openly despair of reducing the Hab/piru themselves to a unitary class of society dispersed and marginalized among the nations. Reluctant for the most part to give up the attempt at grouping, however, the despairers have among them loosened or withdrawn every condition of adequacy made in earlier scholarship, when a unified theory still appeared within reach. "No explanation can be considered . . . unless it satisfies one essential prerequisite: it must apply to all the known occurrences of the Habiru *. We cannot devise at this stage one set of rules for the Palestinian Habiru* and another one for their Nuzian contemporaries" (Speiser 1933:35-36). This "cannot" has since become common practice in need, fanning out almost at will. On one view, already cited, the SA.GAZ relate to the Hab/piru as genus to species. On another, the latter themselves bifurcate into '''Apiru" vs. Amarna "Hab/piru*" (Koch 1969:68-69). On yet another, the Amarna name-bearers in turn subdivide according to the name-callers. For example, "there is no reason to assume that the term has the same meaning in every corpus of correspondence in the Amarna Letters, and there is definite evidence to the contrary" (Mendenhall 1973:126n. 21; for additional examples of fragmentation beyond reason, see the jumble of meanings in Lemche 1985:421, or Ahlström 1993:235-36; contrast Bottéro 1981: e.g., 101, 103, 105). All along this ascending order of despair, the resemblance to what I called the synchronic partition of the "Hebrews" should now be obvious; but the two additional modes of compromise, distribution and mixture, hardly lack employment either. So the very mem-
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bership of the group, like or despite the group name, eludes fixture even within a single age, tongue, people, country, or body of writing, to the limit of re-formation with each ancient writer's idiolect. What, then, has impelled a whole cavalcade of researchers, despairers included, to persist in associating the Hab/piru with the Hebrews? Amateurs may hope to cover their nakedness (e.g., Frye's "Hebrew as proletariat" whimsy) with a scrap of learning, or find "the later Khabiru or Hebrews" (Jaynes 1982:293ff.) a manner of parlance too exotic to resist. But shouldn't experts, at least now that the link's novelty value has somewhat worn off, know better than to make confusion worse confounded? (Compounded, in fact, along the lines of retreat from both group and crossgroup unity.) Particularly, if bunching the Hab/piru assortment together under a common social rubric has proved so troublesome, why denationalize (or transnationalize) the Hebrews to boot? Aside from the occupational scholarly rage for connection, the prime incentive lies in the ever-green hope to satisfy the mind's hunger: to obtain fuller, more reliable information by dovetailing the exiguous bodies of source material. On this positivist version of structuralism, the composite whole is expected to supply what the two parts by themselves withhold or even distort. The alleged cross-references should between them help to illuminate (verify, amend, balance, gloss, or just fill out) either problematic record, the Hab/piru's or the Hebrews', by appeal to the other as its complement. The quest for such illumination therefore goes both ways, with shifting emphases and targets. For now, here is an example to delight spy story fans and conspiracy theorists. The surface career of the Bible's Joseph has been mined for an answer to a vexing question posed by the extraBiblical data on the state of affairs in fourteenth-century Canaan. With the Hab/piru on the loose, raiding and terrorizing, how to account for Egypt's neglect to assert her imperial authority, despite the entreaties of her beleaguered local governors? If you place Joseph's meteoric rise to high office in the age of Akhenaton (1369-1353 B.C.), it has been argued, the picture of donothingness emerging from the contemporary Amarna tablets makes sense. Not that the reformist Akhenaton was weak, or too busy imposing his will at home, but that his administration was run by an interested party: The charges of treachery made in some of the letters would not reach the ears of the Pharaoh, or would be offset by the counter-charges, and the support given to the enemy by some of the Pharaoh's own officials would be more understandable if those officials knew that they had the connivance of the Pharaoh's chief minister. (Rowley 1950:119, also Bruce 1967:13-14) 12
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The one-time "Hebrew man" or "slave" or "boy" kidnapped from "the land of the Hebrews'' (Genesis 39:14, 17, 40:15, 41:12) would shield his unruly brother Hab/piru in the old country. Never mind the facts: that the viceroy has every reason to hate his brothers, that he takes pains to forget them, that the Bible omits to mention any local disturbances or any Egyptian involvement in Canaan at the time. (A conspiracy theorist, or a joking literary iconist, would perhaps go so far as to suggest that the narrative mimes the hero's covert activity in covering its tracks.) On less than no evidence, Joseph becomes the first, and the highest placed, mole on record: secret record, of course, one undecipherable, indeed unseen and unwritten but for the imaginative dovetailing of the two histories from a latterday vantage point. Real-life gap, midrashic closure into melodrama. As with historical, so with legal cross-reference, notably between the "Hebrew slave" of Exodus and the Hab/piru servant in Nuzi. The two having been yoked together, some comparatists push the analogy in their lot toward full identity. Were it not for the Exodus provision"six years he shall serve" (21:2)who would think of reading a fixed term of service into the Nuzi contracts? (A move initiated by Lewy 1939, with a following to this day, as will appear in my last chapters.) Not to speak of the ordinance's further extension to altogether contractless Hab/piru elsewhere, in Ugarit for example. (So Gray 1967:157, or, on a wider front, Bottéro 1981:102-104.) With the bridge postulated, analogizers feel impelled and entitled to infer from the more to the less explicit version(s) of the crosscultural law, as it were. Still more feverishly has the Hab/piru material been ransacked for new, parallel data on key chapters in Biblical history, especially the patriarchal age and, above all, the takeover of the land. Thus the books of Joshua and Judges recount how, after Israel's exodus from Egypt, the territorial promise fulfilled itself in turn via another international showdown: a conquest-for-settlement by tribes united through faith, kinship, memory, purpose, divine title to the land of the ancestors' sojourn, and the leadership of Joshua ben Nun. Reviewed in the light of the extraBiblical source material from Amarna, this narrative was judged by the scholars less credible than ever. Inevitably, the reviewers have fallen out among themselveswhat with the wing perspectives on the topography, the settlement patterns, the material cultureexcept for a kind of negative consensus, amenable to moderate or radical development. Some find the Hab/piru testimonia confirmatory of, or at least congruent with, the essential historicity of the Bible's account. 13 The majority would accentuate the differences, hence the need for thorough revision, even wholesale reversal (e.g., from an Israelite takeover of Canaan to a sociopolitical process of change within Canaan). On either approach, though, the Amarna archive complicates the picture in almost every respect, to suit modern views of what really happened. Assuming the tie-up with
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the hit-and-run Hab/piru, the movement becomes far less solidary and coordinated, better disposed and more assimilated to the local population, if not homegrown in the first place, more interested in loot than in land, more waveslike than floodlike, and so on. Going this way or that, however, the Hebrew-Hab/piru traffic has little to support it beyond good intentions, farfetched conjecture, and wishful thinking. On the extant evidence, adjudicated by anything like normal scholarly rules, the case for linkage should have been thrown out of court long ago as nonproven, if at all provable. It is revealing that the two indefatigable compilers of the Hab/piru material dissociate themselves from this among all the crossculturalisms at issue: Bottéro suspends judgment, Greenberg ends by voicing his opposition. If anything, I would suggest, the balance sheet drawn up by the opposing party remains far too charitable and incomplete at its most outspoken, as well as too little anchored in the workings of the Bible's discourse to recommend any counterview, traditional or original. Not a single ground adduced by the proponents firmly makes for the combined theory, while a great deal (more and heavier than usually thought) weighs against it. This unhappy balance of pros and cons shows even by strictly historical criteria, as distinct from those associated with poetic form, function or finesse. So much depends on the interlocking of the two judgments that it would be best to argue them independently first. I will now leave aside, therefore, most of the parameters and tests introduced in the foregoing section as criterial with respect to the Bible's "Hebrews"thus, narrative followability, ideo-legal movement, intertextual and intergeneric juncture, thematic design, grand coherence in general. Likewise with the finer initial results yielded by the intergroup comparison now under way. I will pass over some of the telling disparities just noted, e.g., in expressiveness: Hab/piru silence vs. Hebrew speech throughout the respective cultural legacies (from Sumer to Egypt, from Joseph to Jonah). We might well ask if practices of discourse so wide asunderregarding citation, viewpoint, interest, empathybear on one and the same crosscultural Other. Still, in the framework of my larger argument, exemplary and interdisciplinary, questions of this order must await their turn for their own good. Not that such measures would turn out less than decisive in application, or that a sophisticated historical inquiry into the Bible's world can afford to ignore the arts of Biblical historiography, least of all in a comparative aspect. Rather, these measures and arts have not yet gained evidentiary weight in the field, except perhaps of the negative kind. They are likely to meet with automatic dismissal as "literary" midrash, on a par with Scripture's own "folk" typology and etymology, from the self-appointed guardians of hard fact. Even now that poetics has become a force that the
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older approaches can no longer wave asideindeed a major influence, acknowledged or otherwise, on their own practitionersthey would all too often keep it within bounds, meaning outside real life, their exclusive preserve. The more versatile and comprehensive the poetics, the likelier it is to draw the boundaries afresh, as mine has done, and therefore to elicit the old stock response in self-defense against trespassing. Exactly here, on a ground as fundamental as what constitutes evidence for whator where the storied artifact ends and history beginsthe newer historians would be most apt to close ranks with the old guard. After all, the priority given by the combined theory to the world's happenings over the discourse's meanings, to the truth behind the testimonia, has outlived every reorientation in the field. Here as elsewhere, actually, all earlier source-critical delimitations even pale beside the recent trend toward doing Israelite and/or Hebrew history without the Bible, under the slogan that its literariness nullifies its historicity (Thompson 1992, with extensive survey). Tomorrow the revisionist fashion may change again, but not the deeper premise at issue, or not unless we test the alternatives against a crux like "Hebrews," and from within the ongoing crossculturalist position, to start with. In playing by the rules lies the only hope of reducing them to manifest absurdity, with both principled and practical implications for betterment. From the highest methodological viewpoint, to be sure, this sanitary cordon thrown around "literariness" already bristles with oddity at first glance. For one thing, the isolationist attitude might cite chapter and verse from its diametric extreme, those so-called literary approaches that flaunt their break with history, to the limit of studied ignorance. (Accordingly, these will approach the pivotal "Hebrew" narratives, e.g., Joseph's, Moses', Saul's, in complete disregard of the Hab/piru; and an exception like Northrop Frye scarcely improves on the rule.) For another thing, you would expect scholars who work across cultures, and have so little material to work with, to be most in need of crossing disciplinary lines and pooling scholarly competences. A crossculturalist who preaches and practices self-enclosure is a living paradox. For yet another thing, as the next section will reveal, the comparatists have devised their own brand of midrash, textual and intertextual, pushed ad absurdum in the guise of scholarship. (Joseph the Hab/piru mole offers a mild example.) And to judge by the chronic lack of unanimity among themselves, they are in trouble for all thator, more likely, because of that. Neither the nature of the material, especially Biblical literature, nor the issues it raises, all turning here on the Self vs. the ethnic and/or social Other, nor the tools brought to it, whether comparison or character-building or plotting (hi)story lines, nor the results of its usual truth-driven analysisnone of these can justify the exclusion of poetics from the debate.
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Literary competence could hardly make things worse. As a matter of principle, I hope to demonstrate the exact opposite in and through the "Hebrew" paradigm case: that where apparent hard-headedness has fallen into unreason and unproductiveness (or, what amounts to the same thing, over-productiveness ad lib.) by any standard, poetic rethinking may yield not just fresh insights and solutions but also overdue controls to benefit all the disciplines involved. In the present state of affairs, however, the demonstration had best start by meeting the combined hypothesis on its own official ground. Even herethe argument will also specify as we go alongthe finer the distinctions we make, regarding the comparative method or the compared testimonia, the heavier the odds against the crosslinkage. Regarding method, the network of escape routes (synchronic, diachronic, dualistic) from total Hebrew-Hab/piru equivalence would be a case in point. As to the testimonia, let us glance for interim illustration at two sets of facts, one bearing on things, namely chronology, the other on the words used to designate them. The first set has already been partly outlined above, in the commentary on the respective spacetime manifolds. The groups' variant distribution in space should be evident. The Hebrews alone boast a definite origin and orbit, the one Across, the other this side of the River, from Canaan to Egypt. Joshua 24 only puns (eber/Abraham) on what the Pentateuch narrated and the sequel will develop within the same river-marked limits: the uncommon territorial history of the name-bearers. I will therefore focus now the complementary world-axis, in order to show that time likewise makes for apartness, with still greater vigor. "Do two walk together," Amos (3:3) wonders, "unless they have made an appointment?" Such a date, he might add, entails a confluence of dates, an intersection of the walkers' chronologies as of their itineraries. And the more extensive and repeated the synchronism, the more likely it is to generate, or attest, a union. In the Hab/piru's imagined affair with the Hebrews, by contrast, the respective times of mention and action, entrance and exit, resist synchronizing. First of all, the two groups originate in different millennia. The second millennium B.C. produced most of the extant Hab/piru record (all of it in the Greenberg collection, where the earliest source dates from about 1990 B.C.); yet their advent goes further back to the Akkad period in the third, as indicated (among other evidence) by several retrospections on them. "The SA.GAZ dwelt on the roads," one Sumerian text witnesses in memorializing the calamity that befell the land in the reign of Naram-Sin (dated between 2450-2413 and 2254-2218 B.C.: see Bottéro 1954: no. 6, also no. 71, and commentary on pp. 1-3, 14, vs. Brinkman 1977:335). But
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their putative mates in the Israelite tradition arose long after Naram-Sin, whether referred to the Bible's inner chronologythe only dating other than conjecturalor to the termini between which most historians operate. The first "Hebrew," Abraham (Genesis 14:13), emerged sometime in the first half of the second millennium B.C., when a whole Adamic line (including the prototype of Hab/piru-like fugitives, Cain, then the dispersed Babelians, then the emigrant Terah) had come and gone unHebrewed. The late arrival of Hebrewness becomes doubly revealing, since the new term coincides in Genesis with a new arena and entity and focus: the interest narrows from universal (or, if you like, crosscultural) history down to the promise and growth of Israelite nationhood. Where the timing within the Bible disables, the suggestive coincidence between the neologism and the narrative of beginnings at large also discourages in principle, any outside connection. Therefore, time and space fuse into a distinctive spacetime manifold of phylogenesis. Even assuming a synchronism whereby "the SA.GAZ-Habiru of lower Mesopotamia during the dynasty of Larsa correspond . . . with the clan of Terah at Ur" (de Vaux 1978:I, 214), for instance, the hard data still point away from convergence. No member of this "clan" features as a Hebrew before the patriarch's departure from Mesopotamia, or indeed ever; while upon his own arrival in Canaan, and long thereafter, no "SA.GAZ-Habiru" inhabit the land to emulate his newly acquired Hebrewness, let alone give it the community's blessing. According to David Ben-Gurion, the first Prime Minister of Israel and an ardent Bible student, once Abraham discovered monotheism, he left Ur to join "the Hebrew people'' already settled in Canaan (1962:154; for ideopolitical background, see now Shapira 1997). But how could the juncture take place? (If he lived in the early second millennium, by the synchronizer's own reckoning as well as Scripture's, then his given lifespan of 175 years would need trebling to bring him down to the Amarna period.) "'Tis needless to inform the geographical reader, that when Diego was in Spain, it was not possible to meet the courteous stranger in the Frankfort road'" (Sterne 1979:270), even less across a distance of centuries. So the two labels, and the two bearers, fail to meet at the outset on either side of the Euphrates. According to the Bible's time scheme, indeed, they could never possibly meet, owing to a, or the, historic break in continuity. However you synchronize the two chronologies in relation to the first Hebrew, the earliest-known SAG.AZ/Hab/piru (ca. mid-third millennium) would always antedate Noah's six-hundredth birthday, and so would all have perished in the Flood, leaving behind neither issue nor memory nor name. From the figures scattered over the primeval history of Genesis, it is easy to deduce all the interior landmarks: Noah's birth (2704 B.C.), Abraham's (1812 B.C.), with the Flood in between (2104 B.C.). For survival, then as ever after,
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these antediluvians must look to extraBiblical chronology alone. (Here they no longer count as antediluvian, in that both the Sumerian King List and the Gilgamesh Epic push back the Flood by a good many thousands of years: whole dynasties intervene even between Gilgamesh and Naram-Sin, in whose time the SA.GAZ might already "dwell on the roads" without jarring against the proper indigenous tradition.) Correspondingly, the postdiluvian Hebrew patriarch would bear his title on his stage in characteristic isolation, glorious or inglorious. All the more characteristic, in fact, because it is at odds with the Hab/piru character-type notoriously related to the same land (if not the same era) by the Amarna archive. Never, pace accepted opinion, does Abraham fit this outgroup description less than on the single occasion (Genesis 14:13) when the epithet attaches to him. The reputed "soldier of fortune" has by now settled down in the Hebron area, turns warrior for once on behalf of his abducted kin, not of his social kind or of an ambitious king, and forswears the loot retrieved by and pressed on him. Along with the external time-line, the crosscultural identikit portrait manages only to highlight the singularity of Israel's ancestor. For good measure, the separate beginnings have their counterpart in the endings. By this I do not mean only that the Hab/piru die young outside their proper spacetime, or universe of discourse. It would indeed be awkward for the combiner both to relegate the Flood to mythology and to associate the authentic Hab/piru with the offspring of the one mythic survivor: a shuttle between ontological levels. Even assuming that this among all extraNoahide groups somehow kept its head above the water of the Bible's Deluge, however, it would hardly outlive its own certified extinction in ripe old age. Just as the Hab/piru come on the stage of history much earlier than "Abram the Hebrew" in Genesis, so do they bow out (or rather, more suggestively yet, peter out) ahead of the last "Hebrews" on canonical record. Except that now, for a change, the respective termini are both exactly datable, hence their discrepancy measurable and unbridgeable. The attempts at synchronizing them are only more doomed. For example, to resume the quotation concerning the Larsa/Terah nexus: "The Habiru-'Apiru cease to appear in the extrabiblical texts at about the same time as the 'Hebrews' disappear from the biblical texts" (de Vaux 1978:I, 214, or Yeivin 1970:282n. 50, Grant 1984:25, Cazelles 1987:70, 90). Same time? In God's eyes, perhaps, where a thousand years count as yesterday. Heavenly timescale aside, the simultaneity is born of wishful thinking. The Hab/piru disappear from Canaan itself in the fourteenth century B.C., from Egypt in the first half of the twelfth, from Mesopotamia in the first half of the eleventh at the latest. (Maybe earlier, since the late documents have been challenged [Bottéro 1954:130-33, Greenberg 1955:78].) Even the most persistent, and geo-historically least
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relevant, among the Hab/piru therefore exit well before Samuel's "Hebrews" (going down to David, ca. 1000 B.C.) and no fewer than five centuries before Jeremiah's (588/87 B.C.). Anxious to minimize the time gap, synchronists would explain away Jeremiah's naming (or Jonah's self-naming, "I am a Hebrew," two centuries before) as derivative, evocative, in effect a literary flourish. The fact remains that the prophet not only has God quote Deuteronomic law on the "Hebrew's" enslavement, which might by itself sound like an evocation of things and words past. His own narrative likewise speaks of "the Hebrew and the Hebrewess" enslaved in contemporary Jerusalem, to flaunt the group's ongoing existence in reality along with national memory (34:9, 14). The same holds for "Abram the Hebrew" itself, in genetic inversion. Many would discredit the occurrence as a "late midrash" retrojected into the people's beginnings by some nationalistic archaist, who sought to dignify the name with the longest and best possible pedigree. The first name-bearer in the canon's narrative history would thus bring up the rear in the canon's history of formation. But then, groundlessness apart, this conjecture merely shifts the problem of dating between cultures from the a quo to the ad quem terminus. The later the expression's genesis within Israeloften deferred to the postexilic erathe wider the distance from the last-known supposed equivalents without. At either Biblical terminus, it is also worth noting, "Hebrew" forms an adjective, rather than a noun, and one characterizing members of the chosen people: from the proto-Israelite Abraham (or the next recipient of the epithet in canonical line, Joseph as "Hebrew man/slave/boy") to his remote descendants, the enslaved Judaeans/Jews of either sex ("Hebrew and Hebrewess") in the capital about to fall. Beyond doubt, the grammar undercuts, and from both ends at once, the strong version of the crosscultural hypothesis, whereby "Hebrew" and "Hab/piru'' co-refer to an ethnically alien or mixed class. The reference is never at issue here. For the term does not strictly occur in a referring capacity, while those that do (proper or common names, e.g., "Abram") always single out referents who may widely vary in time, place, circumstance, happy or unhappy end, everything but descent. Knowing who's who from the noun, we discover what's what in the adjectivethe ethnic strings attached to its applicability, at least. As Hebrewness (whatever it may signify) arises with the patriarch, so it fittingly recurs among his heirs, early or late, Jacobite or Israelite or Judaean. The variations among the insiders thus characterized, accordingly, join forces with those already seen to divide them from the Hab/piru at either cut-off point. The sharper the joint set of differences, the less alienable, mixable or "socializable" the "Hebrew" identity that persists through canonized history for over a millennium. Or rather, the millennium. For the
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interval between the name's first and last appearance doubles as the interval between the nation's first call and last fall, between Promise (made to Abram the Hebrew in Genesis) and Exile (attributed by Jeremiah to the abuse of fellow Hebrews). So the nominal (or de-nomi-national) and the national ends correlated in the historiography loop back all the more pregnantly to the correlated beginnings, in a sense literally: the exiles from the land are driven back to Abraham's native land. The story of Israel comes full circle with, and within, the "Hebrew" circle. All this multiple interlinkage, in and through the time deployed by the historiography, augurs ill for the linkage with the bits and pieces that have survived the accidents of outside history. The built-in connectivity repels the imported connections. In a "Hebrew" framework where even we latecomers can ascertain what's what, the theory of class-defined miscellany is evidently a nonstarter. But do weaker versions of the Hebrew-Hab/piru linkage come out better? Take the retreat from (the class's) ethnic to (the term's) semantic mixture, conceding under pressure of the identifying features (ancestorhood, brotherhood) that "Hebrew" may or must signify a Hab/piru of Israelite origin, a Hab/pirutype native. To grant the Bible's unique usage and focus makes it no easier to prove that the two labels yet share anything deeper than sound; all the less so against the rest of the evidence, notably the time gaps between the parties as well as the sociocultural divergences. So Abraham's ill-suitedness to the time and the type goes down his line. For example, on such a compromise reading, does it make sense for Joseph in prisonespecially if synchronized with the Amarna ageto tell the Egyptian official that he has been kidnapped "from the land of the Hebrews" (Genesis 40:15)? In challenging the Empire's title to Canaan, as though he and his were Hab/piru rebels, the prisoner would be asking for trouble where he pleads his innocence. A self-declared enemy, rather than an alien or, come to that, a mole, he would then never live to govern Egypt. At the other end of the record, how can Jonah style himself a Hab/piru or Hab/piru-like Israelite as late as the eighth century B.C.? And, even assuming that the memory of the class (nowhere more ill-famed than in the region) has so long outlived it, why should he? As a matter of fact, to crown the unreason, nobody anywhere, anytime, designates himself by the Hab/piru name, either. Still worse fares the equally popular compromise by way of "diachronic distribution." Given that ethnic strings attach to "Hebrew" at both ends of the grand chronology, how can its reference have undergone a metamorphosis from social bearing across cultures to ethnicity within the culture? An interim transformation followed by an interim regression? When, let alone why, would the group name have changed (then rechanged) poles between the multiracial other and the collective self? Nowhere on
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record, certainly, along either diachrony of meaning and happening, the canon's or the Ancient Orient's, their essential polarity stable over time. That the first and last occurrences close ranks against the Bible's environment, as if by premeditated art, has therefore far-reaching implications: historically negative yet ipso facto heuristically valuable. Nor does the intermediate series break that alliance for distinctiveness. Even where the inside and the outside time-spans appear to run parallel, they variously fail to match, let alone merge into each other. Each of the groups maintains its own course, like ships in the night. Of these bits of parallel track, the couple most promoted, because of the greatest strategic importance, is kept apart by a strategic omission. In between the canonical termini, the "Hebrews" vanish from sight precisely when and where the revisionist has alleged their coincidence with the ubiquitous marauding El-Amarna Hab/piru of the fourteenth century: in the Biblical Conquest narratives of Joshua and Judges. We know, as the authors of the Old Testament knew, that not all Israelites came from outside, with Joshua. The Hebrews knew as well as we do that 'Hebrews' were the outlaws who lived on the margins of society in an ambiguous position, and that these 'Hebrews' (the Babylonians called them khabiru) were particularly numerous in the areas and periods of greatest political and social disturbancelike those which favoured the settlement of some Israelite tribes in Palestine. (Garbini 1988:63-64) This is more than we know, because not at all what they enable us to know and, for all we know, not what they, authors or readers, knew themselves. A typical instance of protesting too much, except that it comes from a supercritical historian. The facts backing the factive language he so generously distributes all round amount to nil, or less. In their absence, the many intergroup bridges vying here for acceptance as the truth rest on sand. Actually, the original, most optimistic form of the combined suppositionthat the fourteenth-century Amarna letters offer a parallel account of the conquest under Joshua himselfwas soon abandoned, since new data and datings laid bare a hiatus. The events told in the extraBiblical material assumed a time limit too early for a Joshua by far. Nor, more generally, can they accord with the widespread dating of the Bible's Exodus to the thirteenth century. Where parallel-hunting dies so hard, though, repairs and makeshifts come easily, as does their breakdown in turn. Even by inventing precursors for Joshua, the endlessly revised and debated versions manage at best to synchronize those earlier conjectural Israelite activities with the Amarna Hab/piru, but never the group names of the actors.
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In this regard, the multi-wave entry into the land (or indeed the subversion from within) is not a whit better than the floodlike takeover. The alleged namesakes from the two corpora invariably run parallel at a distance, if at all. Thus, some historians would relate the control gained by chief Lab'ayu's Hab/piru over the Schechem district in the fourteenth century to a Simeonite and Levite occupation of that citypersonalized in Genesis 34, the Dinah taleor would associate various southern Hab/piru marauders of epistolary notoriety with postExodus groups (e.g., Kenites, Judahites) infiltrating into Canaan ahead of the main Conquest. (See Bright 1972:132-33, or Weinfeld 1993:107-109, 113, 117.) Now, the former thrust against the Egyptian empire's governors of the land happens at a time when the Bible's "Hebrews" (according to the synchronizer's own computation) are still enslaved in Egypt; the latter, when they have already gone free as "Israel" and nowhere reappear in the Hexateuch under the old name outside the hypothetical mood, the retrospective glance, the all-native discourse frame, the alien setting, and the inglorious roleassignment of the Law-code: "If thou buyest a Hebrew slave" (Exodus 21:2 at Sinai, cf. Deuteronomy 15:12 in TransJordan). While the Israelites conquer the land in the Joshua narrative, the Hebrew remains a potential slave under Mosaic law, as he actually was in Egypt and will become to Philistia. Even for die-hard synchronisms, then, all these rewritings of Joshua strain credulity to the breaking point. (To duplicate the breach from without, the one foreign, and it so happens, Egyptian, mention of the people by a contemporary occurs in Pharaoh Marneptah's Israel Stella.) Interposed between the appearances of "Hebrews" in the Pentateuch and Samuel, the sudden vanishing act executed by or on this group term, at this of all junctures in the sequence, looks prophetic: as though the Bible snaps in advance the link that scholars would forge. 14 Taken together, furthermore, the respective dates sharpen the sense of incongruity. Consider a few bands of Israelite desperadoes that have routinely been pronounced Hab/piru: David's still appears in Scripture as "Hebrews" (I Samuel 29:3) at a time when the Hab/piru have already disappeared, while Abimelech's or Jephthah's receives no such title (from Judges) when the Hab/piru still linger in the contemporary world. With the traffic again immobilized from both sides, the putative bridge is as useless as it is costly. The (hi)story of either group, in short, has its own beginning, middle, end. Also its own roots and reference in language, it would seem. From the ado made since the nineteenth century about the names' verbal origins, one firm conclusion emerges: comparative philology is nothing but a smokescreen for the lack of evidence regarding the etymology. However glorified, the sundry guesses range between sheer far-fetchedness and bare possibility, never approaching anything like probability, least of all when
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crosslinguistic. Except for those blindable with the trappings of science, the more abstruse the technical specifics marshalled here pro and conthe more divorced from reality, that is, notably from the rationale of so-called folk etymologizing in life and artthe more transparent their inconclusiveness. The attempts to pull "Hebrew" and "Hab/piru *" under a common etymology wobbleas well as endlessly quarrel among themselves15all the more so if you recall the alternative designation "SA.GAZ," cognate with neither yet pronounced coextensive with both. And as we go from roots to reference, where do the supposed cognates themselves demonstrably indicate the same population? Rather than co-extending anywhere, they must diverge in, say, the law's rulings on the enslaved Israelite qua "brother Hebrew" or "Jew.'' Such divergences have indeed expedited the retreat from hard-line crossculturalism. Put to the same test, however, the assorted compromise solutions display more losses than gains. Whether they admit Israelites into the Hebrew/Hab/piru class, or identify "Hebrews" as Hab/piru-like Israelites, or transfer some mentions of "Hebrews" from Hab/piru internationalism to Israelite ethnicity, from social to gentilic useand most researchers today advocate, often syncretize the weaker versions of the theorythey incur further discontinuities in verbal origin and bearing. Like SA.GAZ, needless to say, "Israel" does not begin to rhyme with its imagined companions, native or foreign. But does it at least manifestly interchange (i.e., co-signify) in the documents either with "Hab/piru" or with Hebrew as Hab/piru? Even if it did, the interchange would vitiate the only theoretical advantage that the Hab/piru connection as such has over the all-native reading, namely, the possibility of explaining the diverse labels, "Hebrew" and "Israelite," by appeal to diverse (social vs. ethnic) referent groups. Were it the case that these and the alien labels all did somehow interchangeas they must for any compromise hypothesis to arisethe explanation would suffer or fall accordingly. But they don't, so that empirical vacuity marries theoretical inferiority. As a matter of fact, not once are Israelites styled "Hebrews" throughout the wide-ranging extraBiblical testimonia, any more than we find them labeled as Hab/piru. On Marneptah's well-known Stela of the thirteenth century B.C., for example, it is not over either but over "Israel" that the Pharaoh boasts victory. So, four hundred years later, does the Moabite Stone in proclaiming Mesha's defeat of "Omri, king of Israel," or Shalmaneser III of Assyria in listing "Ahab, the Israelite" among the hostile contingents. (For the inscriptions see Pritchard 1969:378, 320, and 279, respectively.) Laid low, by the power of words if in no other fashion, the Israelite enemy yet always receives the ethnicon of his own choosing. In the Bible itself, conversely, "Hebrew" never points to a nonIsraelite, other than by a circular argument, ex hypothesi.
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Either way, there is no visible cross-reference between the two bodies of data, which alone would enable the interchange of the respective terms, groups, attributes, portraits, ups and downs. Importing the Hab/piru into the Bible, or doing the history of "the Hebrews" without the Bible, is a will-o'-the-wisp. The frustrated analyst will at times stoop to equivocal language that may give an impression contrary to this indisputable fact. Thus statements like "Two cuneiform terms [SA.GAZ and Hab/piru] are used of the Hebrews," or "The ancestral Hebrews founded the First Dynasty of Babylon" (Albright 1968:65, 70), or "the ancient Orient of the second millennium BC [used] to describe such people, who were deprived of the rights of the old-established inhabitants of the land, as 'Hebrews'" (Noth 1966:21) or, deceptively low-key, ''there is just one non-Hebrew document from Syria-Palestine which speaks explicitly [sic] of the Hebrews: this is the famous stele of king Mesha" (Garbini 1988:33): each begs the question as a counsel of despair. A transparent exercise, perhaps self-deceiving, in what I will call the rhetoric of identity. All this goes to reinforce the opposite, canon-focused view, and not by default only. If the decision on Hebrewness lies between mutual incompatibles, the ethnic and the other, then we arrive by a different, Ancient Oriental route at the firm negative conclusion already drawn from Scripture itself about the bids for Abrahamite or Eberide otherness. In more positive wording, "Hebrew" is co-referential with "(proto-)Israelite." Exclusively so, indeed, just the way that the bond of co-reference has been perpetuated down the ages: by ordinary anachronistic usage, by orthodox exegesis since the ancient Rabbisif not since Jeremiah 34:9and by literary tradition from the Apocrypha to Joseph Heller's novel God Knows. The strongest argument for it is the converse of its rival's besetting weakness. The finer points, literary and otherwise, will come up at every turn of my own story. They must wait, because the culture-sensitive arts of discourse they presuppose, or foreground, would be obliterated in the unicultural as well as the crosscultural reduction of the issue and the text(s) to bare referentiality. Meanwhile, the broad facts of usage speak for the native equation, with yet greater eloquence than when I initially outlined them. The progress we have made since exhibits its constructive face. Whatever the group term's nuances and variations of meaning, social, evaluative, history-bound, etymological, intercultural, its mapping onto the world remains constant in its ethnic particularity and exclusiveness. Far from the "Hebrews" resisting even the plainest spatiotemporal collocation with the "Israelites," as they do vis-à-vis the Hab/piru, the Scriptural pair regularly both coincide in the happening and interchange in the telling. The Bible's "Hebrew" never applies or extends to anyone independently stamped as an outsider, while all along attaching to members of the Chosen
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People who figure in its history. Thus Abra(ha)m, Joseph, Moses, Jochebed, and the rest of the women threatened with infanticide in Egypt, through Jonathan at the Michmash Pass or David in Philistia, down to Jonah on shipboard or the Judaean "Hebrews" ("Jews," the text itself glosses them) enslaved by their compatriots in Jeremiah. The few remotely disputable occurrences all involve generic or collective figures, such as the "Hebrew slave" of early Mosaic law. And even they do not remain suspended between Israelite and Hab/piru, between peculiarly native and indiscriminately wide or mixed coverage. For a basic rule of interpretation authorizes (and, in the absence of hard evidence to the contrary, obliges) us to infer the less from the more self-evident. If Abra(ha)m the Hebrew and all his identifiable God-chosen offspring "Hebrewed" within the canon are (proto-)Israelite, then so is the "Hebrew slave'' of Exodus. In perfect accord with the rule, he actually recurs in later canonical versions of the same ordinance as "thy brother the Hebrew." Source and Discourse, Sources as Discourse On pain of hasty foreclosure, however, we must now advance (or revert) to two knottier questions about the vying hypotheses. First, precisely in or as what does the Hab/piru connection break down? The answer is far less selfevident than may seem to both exponents and opponents within traditional scholarship. Take their common negative presumption of divorce from poetics, as if making or breaking the real linkage wholly depends on the state of affairs in real life. This presumption does not hold, in that the chain of evidentiary dependence must start earlier than any brute reality: always with a represented ("discourse") word, and here with two, of which one also constitutes an artistic product. Given the nature of the evidencehalf of it Scriptural and a masterworkthe failure to examine the literary corpus in its literariness is surely remarkable for its unwisdom. We have no access to the life except through the literature, along with other material remains, coded in their proper (e.g., epistolary, triumphal, inventorial) semiotic systems, hence as dependent as high art on expert and comparative decoding for their very beating on real life. Not only would the outside linkage to the Hab/piru deeply affect (and, unless verified or falsified, ambiguate) all readings of each "Hebrew" occurrence, network, crosscut, emplotment. It must itself stand the test of reading, hence of poetic fit, local and global: the test, for instance, of whether the Exodus drama coheres or falls to pieces in the multifold alternation between Israelite and Hab/piru personae, between the ones' "Lord" and the others' "God of the
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Hebrews," between the collective release of the elect and the outsider's individual release by the elect under the law. To be sure, the imported reference never aims at literary adequacy, whose measures have accordingly been shelved above, for argument's sake; but they still need correlating with the rest, since the Bible qualifies as literature on most definitions, and national literature in the form of a canon, too. So, canonicity apart, do certain outside materials, even by a rigorous yardstick. Thus the Sumerian and Hittite variants of the Naram-Sin Epic, conjuring up the highway robbery perpetrated by third-millennium SA.GAZ; or, far removed in everything else, Marneptah's hymn of victory over "Israel." Interestingly, the more radical the so-called historical approach, the greater the willingness or eagerness to admit as muchor so it appears at first glancewith a view to disqualifying the evidence a priori from crosscultural testimony. Among some, for example, this dismissal on literary grounds is the effect, if not the cause, of their overall dating of the Bible to the postexilic era, centuries after the events represented. "Abram the Hebrew," say, then makes just one of numberless belated (mis)representations. In the approving language of a spokesman, the issue is not merely the length of time involved, but the extent of the social transformation that took place, separating the very different worlds of the premonarchic and postexilic worlds [sic]. Lemche [e.g., 1979, 1985, 1991] has given us substantial a priori reasons to doubt that the fifth to third-century literary world can be translated in such a way as to give us insight into the real social world of fourteenth to tenthcentury Palestine. For none of the literary traditions about Hebrews would Lemche argue historicity. Hardly the Abraham, Joseph, Moses, and David stories! . . . The lack of evidence for historical continuity between the Amarna letters and the biblical tradition prevents historians, in the light of Lemche's and Liverani's work, from understanding the term 'ibrim apart from the literary world in which it has its context. (Thompson 1992:135-36) Note how everything hinges on one implicit premise, too simplistic to bear the weight of the new revisionist agenda, including the veto on cross-cultural transfer. If, and only if, literariness is in inverse ratio to historicity, then the sociotemporal discontinuity between the "worlds" of the Hebrew ('ibrim) tradition and the Hab/piru action rules out any genuine continuity of the population across the two worlds. A formula-like binarism, the premise is itself easily challengeable in theory, refutable on the empirics through-
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out literary history, and, again, ironized by the low interpretive skill often exhibited by its adherents where the highest comes into demand on the very premise of artistic "transformation." Failing external evidence one way or the other, how in reason to infer the historical (e.g., crosscultural) value of literature, or a literature, except through the workings of its poetics? And ruling out the extant literature, only because it is not something else, less intricate and more transparent, amounts to opting out: shirking the challenge, complete with the mandatory task, under the cloak of science. This soft option is itself out. ("An impartial historian," Edward Gibbon remarked, "is obliged to extract truth from satire, as well as from panegyric" [I, 333].) Much the same oversimple formula underlies the tendency to associate the SA.GAZ in Ancient Oriental epic with the time of the writing, rather than the happening: a counsel of prudence, because "textes administratifs'' are one thing, "textes littéraires" another (Bottéro 1954:12), given to fictionalizing, apparently, whereas administrators never lie. In direct or boomerang fashion, the issue of poetic reality turns crucial even for truth-driven comparison. With a different twist, the issue bears anew on the rest of the fraternity, those who avoid (disregard, qualify, manipulate, localize, even reject) the writing/happening, literature/history binarism in the interests of the crossculturalism. The apparent moderates only change the form and locus of excess in their drive toward optimum historicity. Apropos of the Bible at least, the majority stop well short of polarizing the two "worlds," the narrated and the narrative, into mutual exclusiveness. They would instead have the real-life best of both, if only to enable the bidirectional movement across: somehow, somewhere, the tradition unfolds the truth about the Hebrew-Hab/piru union. It doesn't, in reality, but then, how real is their annexation of the composite material to and for reality? Would the crossculturalism fare better or worse in a literary perspective? Its advocates' appeal, overt or veiled, to gap-filling, analogizing, etymologizing, time- and scene-shifting, long collective memory, underground affair with the environmentall hallmarks of the Bible's poeticsrender this question more than rhetorical. Probably to the crossculturalist's chagrin, as well as to the literati's surprise, his ingenious modes of linkage, exercised to excess in a rage for order, leave a genuine doubt about his frame of reference and the nature of his enterprise, because poetic license may sanction what ordinary rules forbid. By the theory's official platform, moreover, it stands or falls (and would now appear to have fallen) as "history"; but, considering the notorious slipperiness of the term, what exactly does this judgment mean? History in contrast to "literary" patterning? Not necessarily, we have just seen, whatever the historians given to binary oppositions may think: failure in one domain can infect or enhance the other. Then perhaps the weakness
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of the joint account concerns Biblical as against world history? No, if only because the Hab/piru themselves seem too variegated for unity outside the canon. History in the happening as distinct from (Biblical) historiography in the writing and the reading? Less obviously, no, because the combiners assert that the text's "Hebrew" signifies (i.e., encodes and communicates, rather than merely overlies) "Hab/piru." What, then? The second complex of questions to be addressed is the obverse of the first. Insofar as we must and still may decide between the polar "Hebrew" thesesfor all the queries just raisedwhat exactly does the Israelite connection by itself gain us, and at what cost? Moreover, where does this more tolerable balance of profit and loss reside? Does it consist in a superior fit (or lesser friction) with the details and march of ancient history? In a better sense made of the Bible's historiography, trained on God and people? In higher literary returns than yielded by the crossculturalism? Furthermore, in view of these multiple possibilities, would some division of labor (improving on the three unworkable compromises) happily settle the rivalry? And if not, how to proceed? Having then reaffirmed the basic choice (two ethnica for one entity) to categorical effect (Israelites in, Hab/piru out), where do we go from the native anchorage? Taking the second question first, I would emphasize that the balance sheet as it now stands is hardly a cause for cheering. Sworn antagonists of the Hab/piru nexus (as of the earlier Abrahamite or Eberide ideas) should attend here to Proverbs 24:17: "When thy enemy falls, do not rejoice," or not until you have made sure of your own ground. For the co-ethnicizing of the two group names, Hebrew and Israelite, also has its problems, in excess of anything ever diagnosed, let alone resolved, by the ethnos-minded. However forced vis-à-vis the main alternative, it poorly accounts even for the narrower range of givens demarcated on its own logic. The co-reference to the elect circle would by itself erase rather than highlight and motivate the difference between the co-referential usages. And now that the rival theory has been found wanting, we can better appreciate the number and size of the holes left by reducing the difference to random or mere "stylistic" variation. The traditional reductionist approach, though centered on one book from a unique culture, simply ignores all the operative norms and data alike: the averseness of language to synonymy, for example, or the Bible's art of naming, or the value ascribed to the eponymous ethnicon by a national literature, especially after the birth of the nation, or the tendency of the parallel, "Hebrew" ethnicon (if it is one) to surface in international contact with certain alien groups, or to dominate the law of bondage, or to mass at strategic narrative junctures, such as the oppression in Egypt and, chiasmus-like, the beginning and end of the chosen people's history on the land. To presume the Hebrew/Israel equation, as the speakers of
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the Apocrypha and the New Testament already do, is to leave out of account all (or in the scholarly aftermath, to be discussed, most) of this complicating evidence. The evidence turns harder yet, its semantic and poetic and historical aspects still less detachable from one another, owing to the interdependence among language form, text-function, and reality-frame. With the lexicon behind the discourse coded in terms of the Bible's own ethnography, as against the environment's, the neglect to explain where and why the discourse (inter)changes the group lexemes at issue must boomerang on the supposed ("Hebrew = Israelite") rule of lexical usage itself: especially since the more one considers those variants, the more rule-governed they would appear, and by extralinguistic (e.g., structuring) forces. Even the few patterns just cited bespeak a hidden coherence, a method in variance, by nature irreducible to the variants' referential identity. Such identity of the referents in the worldthe lowest common denominator between "Hebrews" and "Israel"does not yet make the referring (or, where adjectival, portraying) expressions interchangeable in the discourse. And vice versa, from expression to world: if the names do not interchange outright, the name-bearers must change with them, whether in ethnicity, ethos, footing, honor, orbit, or some other distinctive group attribute. Whence a fresh threat, this time from within, to their commonality at any level. 16 By now, therefore, the general arguments against free interchange, beginning with that from Occam's razor, have to some extent mapped themselves onto the artwork in question, ramifying and hardening accordingly. The more specifics brought into the picture, whether constants or variables, details or designs, the more evident the theory's inability to accommodate them. For balance, at least one additional measure of adequacy deserves notice at this point. As the foregoing section has put the crossculturalism to the test of comparative dating in history, we may now reapply the test to the unicultural equivalence within the Bible's historiography. For example, interchangeability presupposes the availability of both expressions at the time. Yet that is not the case here before Exodus, which first adverts to "the people of the Sons of Israel" (1:9) and so marks a watershed. Foreseeably never attested, "the Hebrew people" circulating in specialist as well as ordinary postBiblical discourse (e.g., Ben-Gurion 1962:154, Kaufmann 1962:158-59, Redford 1970:235, Weems 1992:28, 31, Josephus, Antiquities 8.173), compounds anachronism with oxymoron. If Hebrewness is a latecomer relative to Hab/piru-ness, then Israeliteness as peoplehood emerges still later on the culture's own account of phylogenesisthe internal diachronyto meet Pharaonic oppression at birth, after the death of Joseph. Along the Bible's grand chronology, the occurrences of "Hebrew" subdivide into Genesis vs. the rest, according to whether they antedate or postdate the rise of Israel as an ethnonational body, hence of
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"Israel" as a full-fledged ethnicon. And either "Hebrew" subdivision, pre-or post-Exodus, negates the idea of free interchange: the earlier, because the co-referential term of growth-with-glory is yet to arise; the later, because it has arisen at long last, so that the name-caller's pretending otherwise implies a meaningful ("de-nomi-national") choice in the throwback to Hebrewness. Like the workings of time, further, synchrony insists on the variety in the ethnica's unity from its own perspective. Thus, even across the Exodus dividing line, nominal usage corresponds to existential abusage. The recurrent association of Hebrewness with servitude (Egyptian and Philistine and Israelite, economic and political and legal, individual and collective, on and outside the promised land), followed by deliverance, would appear to encode the word as a correlate or reflex of an archetypal plot in the Bible's world. Hard, plotted, multilevel, context-bound, the "Hebrew" variant recoils on the tendency to flatten it into a simple native equivalent. The penalties accumulate with every new occurrence, every unmotivated switch to or from "Israel." Little wonder this simplistic hypothesis has not provided us (except despite itself, under interrogation) with any workable clues, much less keys, to the larger fiddles beckoning between the names. The poetic questions involved, with all their far-flung coordinatesstylistic, intertextual, intergeneric, diachronic, historiographic, ideological, ethnographic, geographic, sociopolitical both inside and outside the nation's arenastill await due notice. They cannot even arise unless the (formal) difference makes a (functional) difference, one stretchable from microcosm to macrocosm, from local effect to canonwide deployment. As it is, atomism tops off reductionism. Or, if you weigh the two competing hypotheses, explanatory impotence here vies with sheer improbability there. On both accounts, the rose would smell as sweet (or as foul) by any other word, whether the equivalence is drawn within a single book and culture (Hebrew = Israel) or across testimonia and cultures (Hebrew = Hab/piru ≠ Israel). So what would you rather have: a tolerably firm equivalence in coverage between a pair of terms yet without any difference in so much as usage, or a far-fetched equivalence and difference in the coverage of a trio? Dead end or lame start? A pox o' both your houses, Mercutio would no doubt answer. This is one of several reasons why (who's-who likelihood apart, of course) there is in practice less to choose between the two theories than may appear. Another reason is that, poor returns aside, they to a certain degree compete in the same textual framework, as alternative, world-centered decodings of the Bible's message. And if neither would qualify as "literary," the one annexing the national literature to international life for cross-ref-
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erence and two-way gap-filling oddly looks more so, in a way, than the other's bracketing of ethnonational terms. Such bracketing, conversely, has at least an equal (on the evidence, stronger) claim to "historicity." Either readymade label produces the usual blur. To cut through the tangle, we need sharper theoretical instruments and one set may have already suggested itself to the reader. Don't the Hebrew/Hab/piru and the Hebrew/Israelite pairings, that is, fall under the opposition I conceptualized elsewhere between source-oriented and discourse-oriented analysis, respectively (Poetics, 7ff.)? To a large extent, these polar orientations do manifest themselves here. The two enterprises regarding "Hebrew" diverge, not just in their feasibility under the circumstances but in their essential logic of inquiry, from end to means: from the kind of questions posed or posable, through the priorities of analysis brought to bear on the data, even the same data, to the answers considered appropriate or adequate. As the foregoing sections in effect began to reveal, however, the divergence at issue is less complete than between, say, the typical genetic vs. discoursive ("poetic") approach to Biblical literature. There, the geneticist would reconstruct the formative processwhat the original text looked like, how it came to be written, interwoven, emended, edited, transmittedwhile the discourse analyst would interpret the finished product by the rules of its communication with the audience. So what divides them is not the evidence or the skills required to handle it but the means-end combinations it falls into: you can neither surmise the Biblical genetic process without a reading of the product, nor read the product without making certain assumptions (always wishing in vain for more givens) about the real-life process, so that either's aid to inquiry becomes the other's object and objective. Such is the logical relation, with the methodology geared to the teleology. In respect to Hebrewness, 17 nevertheless, the dividing line grows fuzzy because the crossculturalists invariably, if variously, shuttle between the goals (agendas, research projects) themselves, as between the corpora. The extremes meet again; the all-native and the imported hypotheses vie with each other in the same arena, for the interpretation of the discoursespecifically, of its group typology. To sort out this complication would help to redefine the issues, sharpening our insight into the traditional solutions and clearing the way for a third line of inquiry. To put things in a nutshell, the approach through the Hab/piru is by and large source-oriented, in that it wants to find out what really happened in history: what events, agents, conditions, contacts, movements underlie and produce the record that has survived. The practitioners go behind the discourse to reconstruct, not an urtext or a theology or a language system, like other source critics, but a first-order reality. "The Habiru*-He-
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brew materials," as one typically puts it, have important "revelations" to make about "the nature of society and social organization in the ancient Near East" (Gray 1958:196). To this end, the researcher pieces together clues from all the available material, Biblical and extraBiblical alike. Few adherents of the combined theory would seriously maintain that, in referring to "Hebrews," the Bible always intends to tell us about the fortunes of the Hab/piruor that whether it does so intend or not, even whether it speaks the group name or keeps silent about it at a certain juncture, makes much of a difference to one's right to work out the connection for oneself, against the text's grain if necessary, in the light of documents from another language, genre, culture, source. All of which is, essentially, unexceptionable. The means (which include the dialectics of unifying and tearing apart, observing from within and from without, accepting and, detective style, interrogating the evidence) follow from the end. So far, so simple. We now have, of course, to pose or re-pose the question (unaddressed before in these clear-cut terms) if the thesis holds as a source inquiry. But a more urgent and principled question explores the limits of such inquiry. Can it restrict itself to the genesis of Hebrewness, fixing the Bible in the network of Ancient Oriental comparison (an order tall enough to satisfy the most ambitious) without automatically drawing interpretive conclusions about the referents and the message of the finished discourse as Scripture? Can it read the text in quest of the underlying group at sourcewhich it perforce will for historical valuewithout reading that source into the text at the end of the quest, any more than, circularly, at the outset? In theory, yes: it would be possible for the bridge-building historian to sever the (or his) "true" crosscultural history from the meaning of the Bible's historiography, the process from the product of group reference. (His opposite number, the uniculturalist aiming for the practical exegesis of Scripture, has always done the converse; and, since the Amarna tablets emerged in the late nineteenth century, advisedly so.) In fact, through the example from "Canaan" I have already sketched the twofold line of approach followable here: a bridge drawn across the sources, only to be withdrawn, or pushed underground, vis-à-vis the self-containment manifested by canonical Israelite discourse. Extending the principle, the bridge-builder might affirm that, though "Hebrew" really traced back and amounted and ran parallel to "Hab/piru," the Israelite writers chanced or (in their ethnocentricity) chose to break the connection altogether. Such a breach, once postulated, is none the less historical for being textualized as a continuity within the culture, overlaid ex hypothesi by an apparently seamless narrative of Eber- or Abraham-old election. (A notable mirror image of Canaan's Ham-old diselection.) The rise of that Scriptural historiography, alleged to have been
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overwritten, would itself belong to the processes of history. Yet the over-written surface implies its own reading, like all writing and more distinctively than most. Changing hats from Oriental comparatist to exegete of a national literature, when it comes to the Bible, the investigator might then reasonably change equations in line with the given world of discourse. "Hebrews," encoded afresh by insiders for insiders to suit their own history, rather than the word's and the world's outside, would now co-extend with "Israel." Ancient form, new function. Instead of fencing off his project, however, the combined source analyst has always played the discourse analyst, at the same time, under the same hat. This is not just because he must interpret the Bible's text after a fashion as a means to crosstextual linkage (the way another must with an eye to decomposing the finished text into its strands). Unlike pure source critics, his end product is itself largely an interpretation: for (as well as below) "Hebrew," he tells us, read "a member of the Hab/piru class, not or not necessarily of the Israelite people." If a hard-liner, he will reach for the maximum: his equative decoding will spread over all the occurrences in the canon, from Genesis to Jeremiah, go the other, Orient-bound way as well, and push the cross-reference to the limit of (verbal, social, legal, historical) identity. Applied to the law, for example, the two-way traffic will both denationalize the "Hebrew" slave up to the nation's exile and confer the social benefit of release on the Nuzi (or all) Hab/piru. And although the canon's grand (intergeneric, intertemporal, etc.) designs of Hebrewness have thus far escaped such treatment, through sheer oversight, they are as liable to it in principle. If more alive to the obstacles, the combiner will settle for less than full discoursive interchange. Thus the synchronic partition of the "Hebrew" references between Hab/piru class-membership and Israelite ethnos by kinship; and/or their diachronic distribution along a timeaxis leading from the (para)social to the ethnic; and/or their semantic halving, down the middle of each, into ethnic referents with social portraiture. Carried to its limit, such interpretive minimalism would find no more than one or two exceptions to the text's breach with the environment's usage in the genesis. For example, "Apart from the case of Exodus 21, then, the word 'ibhrî seems always to have had an ethnic meaning and, apart from I Sam 14:21, it seems always to have referred to the Israelites" (de Vaux 1978:I, 213; cf. Merrill 1988:101, 1994:248-49, who locates the exceptions elsewhere). A remnant instead of a rule. But whether aiming high or low, all these variants of comparative source analysis gloss at least part of the Bible's own discourse of "Hebrews'' in the light of outside data. Or rather, it turns out, in the guise of such data. While the end of forging and tracing a possible linkage across cultures is doubtless legitimate, even laudable, the means necessary for the job are now unavailable (if
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they ever existed) and those substituted ill accord with historical method. (On the generality of this predicament, see Poetics, esp. chaps. 1-2.) Regrettably, yet inescapably, a chasm separates the logic from the empirics of the quest, the ambition to reconstruct crosscultural, Hab/piru-Hebrew traffic in the second millennium from the prospect of anything like adequate accomplishment on the evidence, under the rules of the modern ("scientific") historian's game. Now, to bridge this chasm, the players in effect switch to the rules of an altogether different game, one normally associated with fictional invention, the making of an artefact rather than an ordinary earthbound construct. Unknown to them, the game bears a family resemblance to the one played more deliberately, though never without artifice and stricture, in other quests for large crossdiscourse unifies: whether by literary comparatists and historians in search of a European, even Western Neoclassicism, Romanticism, Modernism, Postmodernism (as opposed to the respective localized, possibly divergent isms) or by certain general and literary semioticians who decode one message (e.g., "the voice of society") from a variety of sign systems at a given time, jigsaw puzzle fashion. Anything thereby qualifies for the status of a "text," up to an entire cultureor here, across all local differentiae, a mega-culture. The Ancient Orient (or some part thereof, always comprising Israel and at least one extraIsraelite body) assumes by fiat the nature, if not the name, of textuality. The bridge-builders treat the miscellaneous sources as a single discourse which, moreover, gives rein to fanciful crosslinkage, wordplay, hide-and-seek designs, transformations à la Alice. In making up this permissive text, they show an ingenuity that their opposite numbers, drawing a reductionist equation within a given canon, might well envy and emulate, to better and sounder purpose. No less ironically, the foregoing section has taken greater pains to meet the combined theorists on their own ground than they to keep to it, so that we must now follow them elsewhere. They actually shuttle not between two but among three objects of analysis: source, discourse, and, so to speak, motley source as discourse, in order of widening distance from their proper business with reality. Therefore, to the extent that the third object displaces and regulates the first two, the crosscultural bridging holds neither for the real source-world of antiquity nor for the Bible's discourse (image, simulacrum) of the world. The freer, more "poetic" the equivalence-ties allegedly structuring the data, the less historical or history-like. If blindness to literature soon brings the unicultural ''Hebrews" to a dead end, then fabricated mega-cultural literariness cannot produce any kind of truth. This makes an object lesson in several ways, with positive counterparts. Before going on to demonstrate the claim, which some may find outrageous, some incredible, it is therefore well to prevent misunderstanding. The legitimacy of the enterprisebeyond question as source analysis, whether
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leading to or away from the Bible's universe of discoursemust not be confused with its feasibility or with the performances bearing its name. I for one would give much to know the truth about the Hebrews' (dis)continuity at source with the Hab/piru, if only as a matter of putting the historical record straight. (A definitive answer at the level of source, this way or that, would not greatly affect my own argument, focused on the Bible's arts of telling the history of the chosen people under God, more counter than parallel, let alone according to the way of the world.) The knowledge is just not to be had, and the issue is therefore doomed in all likelihood to remain moot forever, not very productively at that. The thin documentation of the cultures in reputed contact will never yield a thick description here, nor grow thicker if one trusts or blames, impugns, or (as I will do) rereads the literary heritage, nor warrant sitting on the fence in wait for better things. It will be time to cross the bridge at issue if and when we ever come to it in reality. A century of debate among the best scholars in the field has, or should have, generated this much certitude. It hasn't, actually, since the will to connect outruns reason, leaving the methodological and empirical problematics behind, with at most a nod in passing. As a result, the connectors turn inventors, the enterprise of reconstructing history unleashes the creative imagination. Even a playful literary critic, or a serious historical novelist, would shy at the liberties taken with the ancient documents in the quest for crosscultural truth. That the truth-seeker doubles as interpreter, character-drawer, maker of plots or parallels, need not by itself cause any surprise: closing the holes ("gaps") in the evidence, a sine qua non of all pattern-making, equally informs source and discourse analysis, qua forms of reconstruction. 18 But there are holes and holes, closures and closures; and one marvels at the extremes reached in the matchmaking process here. (Not here alone, though, Hebrewness being a paradigm case, and its lessons widely extendible, in this as in other aspects within or beyond the field: on the immediate questionto recall an example just citedgeneral literary, semiotic, ethnographic, historical comparativisms would instructively juxtapose with the Ancient Orientalist variety, e.g., qua source/discourse tangle, parallel-hunting, or mega-text formation.) For very survival on the agenda of research, the end comes to justify the means that it should have proscribed and to relax, often to lift the controls that would foredoom its achievement. Fables of Identity, or, Poetic License in Historical Reconstruction Whatever else it may do without, a source-oriented inquiry presupposes sourcesin our case, sources also linked or linkable at source, fast enough to override the disunities that show between the groups in question and,
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to some degree, within the extraBiblical one. All that we actually have by way of intersource linkage, however, is a few shaky Hebrew/Hab/piru analogies: a tenuous web of conjecture, because made by parallel-hunters rather than found in the data, and poorly made, too. (Some other famous cross-cultural analogiese.g., the Alt-Noth idea of a Greek-like twelve-tribe "amphictyony" in early Israel, never asserting any real contact between the analogues and yet increasingly under attacklook strong by comparison.) 19 Poorly as well as externally made: in view of the disputed status of analogy construction, let me underline beforehand that this criticism means, and will mean throughout, exactly what it saysa judgment on performance. I do not illegitimate the tool, any more than the goal, not even at their most source-oriented. Here I would take issue with Edmund Leach's generalization about crosscultural comparison (e.g., of kingship) as practiced by students of myth: "History cannot be reconstructed on the basis of homology" (Leach and Aycock 1983:18). Observe that this verdict entails a certain moot historiosophy, namely the assumption that history, as against myth for example, works by nature on nonanalogical principles (for related views see my Poetics, esp. 23-35); arid the historian's method of reconstruction would have to follow suit. Instead of predefining the object of inquiry itself, I wish to show that, even on the opposite assumption, the crossculturalists fail to establish by analogy ("homology") so much as class-identity between the historical phenomena (existents, echelons, movements, institutions) juxtaposed. Nor, come to that, do this and kindred failures expose the uselessness of the comparative method in toto, as Leach further generalizes regarding both history and anthropology, in the name of "structuralism." Even relatively speaking, one wonders if a structuralist machinery that flattens, say, Cain and Jesus into "precise structural analogues of one another,'' as well as takes for granted the Old/New Testament mega-text (Aycock in Leach and Aycock 1983:120), is a great improvement on crossculturalist parallelomania. Fortunately, the choice does not reduce itself to such reductionprone evils, any more than to uni- vs. cross-culturalism. ("For me," Leach writes, "'culture' is a concept which exists only in the singular" [ibid.:1], for reasons of science, naturally, rather than from myopia or local patriotism.) Hebrew and Hab/piru, then, are too poor a match in everything to count as true congeners. This poverty extends from the signifying words to the signified groups and realities. Even my earlier, less discriminate argument to this effect now bears afresh on the problematics of signification, comparative and canonical, by analogy. On the verbal level, we recall, the combined signifiers never achieve so much as equivalence in form. Graphically, they vary with the respective scripts and languages, as the extraBiblical terms within the assorted cultures do among themselves. Phonically, nobody knows for sure how exactly to
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vocalize any of the reputed equivalents to ibri, least of all the Akkadian (Habiru *, Hapiru*, 'Abiru, 'Apiru?); yet we do know, for instance, that SA.GAZ need not sound anything like it, or like its own bunch of heterolingualisms (Hab/piru*, 'prm, 'pr.w). Lexically, therefore, the Sumerogram also keeps apart, and the rest have yet to be proved cognate. The weaker the cross-linguistic analogy, the graver the doubt even about the words' common origin and, a fortiori, the less warranted the jump to the language system underlying the Bible's discourse. Were the equivalence to "Hebrew" closer in one or more of these formal regards, however, it would not yet make the two signifieds equivalent in the real wordlet alone, again, in the Bible's image of it. Mere verbal analogy is insufficient for the purpose, since it traffics in what an eminent Assyriologist has called "the phantoms of homonymy" (Benno Landsberger in Bottéro 1954:161; cf. Weippert 1967:84), whereby one might just as well relate ibri to, say, Iberian;20 and all the less sufficient when either of the analogues possibly has its own etymology and their coupling boasts such a variant rhyme fellowship. Also, the threat of homonymy in the actual signification would not be ruled out by any shared etymology. In different frameworks of use, the selfsame word may change its meaning, as does the reference of "Canaanites'' in intercultural passage: from a socially defined class to the Bible's national archenemy, unified by Hamite origin (with the appropriate sexual mores), language, and geopolitics. Were he to read the Bible, an Amarna correspondent's familiarity with this name would mislead him about the population and the portrait and the prejudgment intended by it in context. Therefore, if the discourse recasts "Canaan" in the role of the abominable Other, what would keep it from annexing the "Hab/piru," an equally social group in the world's arena and lexicon, to the polar extreme of the Self? Nothing in the word, certainly.21 Nor is formal linguistic analogy necessary for referential identity, since in its absence we know beyond doubt that "Achaean" co-refers with "Danaan," "Tully" with "Cicero," or "Boz" with "Dickens," or "Jacob" with "Israel" in Genesis, or SA.GAZ (however vocalized) with Hab/piru in the Amarna letters. By the same token, "Hebrews" visibly intersubstitutes with the non-cognate "Israel" or "Jew" in Exodus, Samuel, Jeremiah; and it would therefore require powerful evidence indeed to trace the former's origin back to Hab/piru, all the more so to dissociate its extension from the latter substitutes' in the rest of the canon. The presence or absence of graphic/phonic likeness in the signifiers can by itself at most imply (always subject to disproof) but never verify the unity or diversity of the signified. Never, that is, outside art's poetic license or, the other way about, outside the contract that may govern the play of word and world in fictional discourse. May govern, I would stress, because the rules of art itself do not automatically license the projection of identity from words to things, from
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(near-)equivalent referring terms to co-reference. Were such a package deal offered by language, artworks would still decline it to leave room for ambiguity or just for maneuver in significationfor the many-to-many interplay between signifier and signified. Where synonyms or co-designations have different forms, homonyms branch into different meanings, often confused in life yet also fusible for a purpose, from rhyme and wordplay to reality games. It is exactly this room left for leakage that has always enabled art to stage its comedies or tragedies of error, as when in Julius Caesar Cinna the poet gets lynched by the mob who take him for his namesake, Cinna the conspirator. The phantoms of homonymy trigger the killing. Still, the poet falls victim to a poetic license turned loose upon the world, to the allure of the sound-as-meaning non sequitur on which his craft has immemorially traded. His protestations of innocence even meet with the response, "Tear him for his bad verses" (Julius Caesar, III, iii, 31). And if Shakespeare dramatizes the slippage as a fallacy, exposing the mob's bloodlust, others (or he himself elsewhere) use it to establish the truth within the fiction, e.g., the constants of identity in and through nominal similarity. An example packed with implications for the Hab/piru network would be the crosslinguistic wordplay that signals and often unmasks the antagonist in Ian Fleming's saga of James Bond. The legendary subtext of these novels casts the hero as Saint George and the villains plotting against England as the Dragon (himself allied with the devil, "the old dragon"). Among other effects, the reenactment of the myth in contemporary garb occasions (or, from our side, uncovers) no end of verbal disguise. The old-new polarity makes for internal semiotic signaling in that it "illogically"in face of the realistic probabilitiesenables the reader to spot the villain long before Bond and the Secret Service. In From Russia With Love, the clue consists in the dragonfly hovering above the recumbent man's spine. . . . In Moonraker, the name of the much-admired constructor of the new British missile is, disturbingly, Draxwho indeed reveals himself later as a dedicated Nazi called Drache (dragon in German). And one who regards Bond's less reputable friends as transformations of the Fleminesque villain will find his suspicions confirmed by the fact that the most conspicuous of them are linguistically disguised dragons. Tracy's father, head of the Corsican Mafia, is named Draco, the Latin word for dragon (On Her Majesty's Secret Service); and DarkoBond's colorful friend in From Russia With Loveis of course an anagrammatic variation on the same cover name. The dragonry is multinational, multilingual, multiform; but there is only one knight. (Sternberg 1983d:174-75)
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The last sentence will ring a bell. "Multinational, multilingual, multiform" in their occurrence, the names "Hab/piru/'prm/'pr.w/SA.GAZ *" ostensibly relate to the Biblical "Hebrews" much as ''Drax/Drache/Draco/Darko" do to the English "dragon." Against this background, the disparities in integrability and interchangeability spring into relief. The novelistic, Flemingesque quintet makes a set because all the variants are not only united by a high linguistic common denominator but also meet in a single artistic corpus that thematizes their play of unity and variety by appeal to an archetypal ("St. George vs. Dragon") master plot. The ancient quintet fails to satisfy any of these requirements. Nor indeed does the extraBiblical quartet by itself. (This in marked contrast, again, to the uniformity of the fifth item: one term, one corpus, indeed, as I already hinted, one master plot, i.e., the oppression-to-liberation drama enacted by Joseph, then by his fellow Hebrews in Egypt, then by their fellows in conflict with the Philistines, and, timelessly, by the Hebrew slave of the law.) Even if the Ancient Oriental quartet did rhyme togetherso "Canaan's" metamorphosis into nationality and Cinna's demise through mistaken identity warn uspassing verbal muster would not yet ensure co-reference with "Hebrews"; or else "Iberian" and "Arab" and "Ubru" would equally qualify. But the failure to pass any of those tests conclusively disables the bid for equivalence on linguistic grounds alone. Is history to play by looser rules than fiction, complete with the fiction imputed to Scripture by the historians? Are constructs of truth to out-poeticize artefacts designed for their own sake? (The poetic function, according to a wellknown view [Jakobson 1960], reveals itself exactly in the system of equivalences imposed on the medium by organized violence.) May source analysis, in or beyond its role as the Bible's deconstructor, override all literary contracts and lifelike contingencies, including those implicit in the various discourses analyzed? If not, always failing certitude, how to obtain firmer support for the combined hypothesis? An identity condition yet more important to remember, because much less understood and observed in the field, also even less immune against human ingenuity at parallel-drawing, bears on things, entities, activities, circumstances, rather than words. The advice given to Alice by the Duchess in topsy-turvy, Wonderland, "Take care of the sense and the sounds will take care of themselves," reverses the evidentiary priorities to double- edged effect. The aphorism is not unsound (pun intended) as far as it goes, but it may be carried too far, and is so carried, ad absurdum, on the occasion that elicits it from the lady, in defense of a preposterous semantic twinning: "The moral of that is'Oh, 'tis love, 'tis love, that makes the world go round!'"
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"Somebody said," Alice whispered, "that it's done by everybody minding their own business!" "Ah, well! It means much the same thing," said the Duchess. (Carroll 1970:120-21) As with co-signification in general, so with co-designation. In the reading for likeness, the Duchess's advice (or Juliet's "What's in a name?") sounds better than it works; and its fallibility grows on the way from likeness to strict equivalence. Putting reality above language, the "take care of the sense" directive answers to the historian's own value scheme, where truth-value comes first and foremost. No wonder many crossculturalists bent on parallelism have in effect repeated and followed it, under the banner of ''sachliche Identität." This withdrawal from the quicksands of homonymy, or factitious literariness, may seem all to the good. As analogous existents, the parallels enjoy a more objective ("sachliche") appearance than analogous lexemes, their parallelism a higher reputation for hard scientificity. In fact, however, the choice lies between apologies for data. Of the two makeshifts, if anything, existence-directed parallelism is the less given, the more inferential or inventive. Even the mind-boggler posed to Alice by the Mad Hatter, "Why is a raven like a writing-desk?", has not been left unanswered (e.g., "because Poe wrote on both," or "because both stand on their legs.") 22 Challenged by a riddle, in literature or in culture at large, analogism will always find a way. Circumstantial analogy is therefore not sufficient for identity, either, unless anchored fast in thick detail, positive all along the line, and unique to the analogues, which is never the case here. Rather, this is the case with the "Hebrew" and "Israel" groups. They run so parallel in the worldas descendants of the patriarchs, victims of Egypt, agents in the fight for independence on the land, slaves in Mosaic lawthat their intersubstitution in the discourse only seals the grouping together. On top of it all comes the uniqueness of some intersections: nobody else has any dealings with the Samuel Philistines, for example. Given the existential unity, we wonder instead, why the nominal duplication (or the postGenesis de-nomi-nation)? On the other hand, the analogy between Hebrew and Hab/piru is negative at so many junctures as to break the desired class-identity. Generalizing my earlier argument about synchronism, for example, I would observe that the (linguistic) phantoms of homonymy double as (ontological) ghosts in reality. Synchronized with the Bible's chronology, the antediluvian Hab/piru would all sink without trace, centuries before the emergence of the inaugural Hebrew from Noah's line. Even had they miraculously resurged after the Flood under their old name, they would
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have become extinct by the time of David, Jonah, Jeremiaha fortiori by the time of writing about these and other "Hebrews," as dated in source criticism. No geneticist has collocated all the Biblical writings involved in the second millennium B.C.; some (most radically, Loretz 1984, or Thompson 1992:135-37) would defer their origin to as late as the postexilic era, nearly a millennium after Amarna; the majority distribute them in between. Therefore, to switch chronologiesreplacing the official Abraham-to-Jeremiah order of happening by, say, the imagined monarchic-topostexilic order of writingwould only undo the connection all the more irreparably: no room whatever for group overlap in the second (let alone the third) millennium B.C., extra room for the survival of the fittest in the next. Deluge or no Deluge, by discoursive and/or genetic reckoning, how can the two possibly walk together down the ages? To judge from the respective termini ad quem alone, the Hab/piru linger nowhere, not even as a byword, when the "Hebrews" are still alive and kicking (or kicked) in the sociopolitical arena, still of interest to the makers and audiences of canonical literature, from narrative to prophecy to law. Where the image of diachrony constructed by the literary text agrees with the outside reconstruction, where sacred and profane history for once join testimonia, the analogues get disjoined many times over in real spacetime. The irony of sober modern historians building upon an otherworldly ontology, where the quick and the dead coexist to the extreme of inter-penetration, will be pursued in specific texts below. For now, to clear the fog enveloping these questions, let us briefly draw the primary moral. From the impossibility of coexistence (still less confluence, not to mention equivalence) all along the historical line, the world's or the writing's, there follows the impossibility of regular co-reference. In plain language, if "All Hab/piru are Hebrews" makes a false statement, because patently antihistorical, then so does the converse, "All Hebrews are Hab/piru"; 23 and what's more, this negative conclusion holds for source as well as for discourse analysis. By "Hebrews," at the discourse level itself, the Bible cannot possibly always, if ever, mean (name, stage, encode, intend us to understand) the Hab/piruleast of all where demonstrably gone on their own chronologyjust as the Hab/piru record never features any Hebrew. Most crossculturalists tacitly admit this impossibility by retreating to one or more of the three halfway houses: synchronic partition, diachronic distribution, semantic duality or mixture. The retreat is always executed under discoursive pressure, because the text's Hebrew givens will not all or wholly answer to their supposed Hab/piru genesis, not even in partisan eyes. But the price of their self-division (as well as the inquirers') along and among these lines comes so high in terms of unity, and mounts so in the actual reading, that the discourse cannot afford it.
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This is obviously the case with partitioning, between Hab/piru and Israelite, the references of a single "Hebrew" complex located within a well-defined episode, for example, Moses' trial in Exodus 2, or the uprising against the Philistines in I Samuel 13-14. Unreasonable in the abstract, repugnant to the ethnocentric outlook, the double standard of collectivity imposed on a textual unit foreseeably grows less and less viable with each ad hoc alternation. Try it on Moses' brotherly ventures and you will find yourself unable even to tell whom he encountered first, the ethnic or the social brother "Hebrew": which is which, and why not in reverse order? The surprising thing would be if two adjacent verses did use the same word for groups of different membership and constitution in the world, poles apart in Scripture's worldview. And by ''word" I mean the kinship ("brothers") as well as the group term: partitioning the latter's coverage would entail the anomalous stretching of the former to aliens. Likewise with the escape to the distribution of references between the early (= social, e.g., the "Hebrewing" of Joseph or of the Exodus bondman) and the late (= ethnic, e.g., Jonah, Deuteronomy, Jeremiah). Thus, if the latter namings are indisputably gentilic, without parallel outside the Bible, then they should in reason clinch, not oppose, the similar decoding of the former. Take the threefold series of "Hebrew" bondage laws: the in-group Israelite application of the Deuteronomy (15:12ff.) and Jeremiah (34:8ff.) enactments having been concededsince they invoke the bond of brotherhood against lifelong bondagethe Nuzi analogy is too weak to preserve the original Exodus version (21:2ff.) for the Hab/piru. In turn, once the Exodus law of release institutes the privileging of the co-national, it would make even less sense (philological, historical, thematic, intergeneric) to denationalize the "Hebrews" of the Exodus narrativeor, by ad hoc partition, those unfriendly to Moses. And so on. Dogged by internal inconsistency and wanting genuine outside support, the retreat from the hard line of class-identity again quickly turns into a rout. Nor will shifting the ground, or the emphasis, to aspects of discourse signification other and less rigorous than "Hebrew"/Hab/piru co-reference improve matters. Such interpretation endeavors to harmonize ("mix") native coverage with foreign linkage, gentilic with status label, keeping the reference of "Hebrews" for born Israelites while attributing to the referents some trait characteristic of the Hab/piru underclass. But this conjectured shift from extensional to social identity between the groups incurs either old or fresh liabilities. If the mixed decoding governs only part of the occurrences in the Biblee.g., where the name-bearer is undeniably an insider or a latecomerthen it inherits the troubles of partition and/or distribution. Whereas if all-embracing, then it at best escapes impossibility and inconsistency without approaching probability. One example will be enough to reveal the quandary of either semantic mixture: given that the
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designation involved occurs both late and within the national circle, the piecemeal worker will tend, as the generalizer will need, to bring it under the mixed compromise formula. Jeremiah 34 overtly relates the fall of Jerusalem to the oppression of slaves by brother Judaeans in disregard for Mosaic law. Now, five centuries after the last Hab/piru known anywhere on earth and eight after Amarna, would Jeremiah's ill-treated "Hebrew and Hebrewess" (34:9, 14) be intended to signify Israelites with Hab/piru-like sociocultural features, such as uprootedness, marginality, outsidership, detribalized status? What with the doubts whether the sixth-century prophet ever heard about the Hab/piru, whether he would want to invoke them at this of all solemn moments, whether he might assume his audience's catching an allusion distant in every sense, whether the Judaean referents fit at all the imported character-type, and whether the type itself answers to the alleged characteristics, the time gap points elsewhere. Instead of a compromise solution (distinctively ethnic reference with internationalized portraiture), the Jeremiah text urges an all-Israelite understanding. Its contemporary "Hebrews" thematically looks back to an ancient formative precedent of Hebrewness, via a memory enjoined on the nation for all time and explicitly refreshed in context: the Egyptian house of slaves (34:13). Maximalist or minimalist, then, the crosscultural interpretations of the national literature break down, often several times over. Perhaps the most instructive lesson of their breakdown is the array of forces mustered against them in various alliances. Thus, the standards of consistency are here at one with internal and external evidence; discourse universals align themselves with the norms or particulars specific to Biblical discourse; narrative with juristic rationale; local with global ill-fit. The Hab/piru reading does violence to the text in its textuality, contextuality, intertextuality, as well as in its crosstextuality. (Not to mention the extra costs that a literary balance sheet would, and soon will, register) Indeed, the chief alternative hypothesis, traditionally amounting to an atomistic (Hebrew = Israelite) equation, also fails most of these tests. But it at least satisfies the bare discoursive minimum: selfconsistency in reference within a national, ethnocentric framework. Now, the fact that the Hab/piru key breaks any which way in the gaps of the discourse does not by itself rule out, though it does much weaken, the possibility of intergroup contact at source. For Israelite literature was quite capable of breaking, or burying, the real-life key. (If the emergence of a people depends on collective amnesia, as Ernest Renan generalizes, then the origin in an underclass might rank high on the list of things to be forgotten.) But nor need this key have ever existed outside the modern imagination and, judging by the empirics, it probably never did. In which
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case, would it make sense for the Israelite writer (fiction writer, if you like) to thrust on his ancestors an identity at once false, foreign, and infamous? The unbelievability of the tie-up at source, I will now argue, thus further unhooks its discourse counterpart and consequent. The bottom line is a chain of flat negatives either way: no real-life, because/hence no literary, connection. So let us turn from the interpreter's crosscultural decoding of the evidence given in the Bible's text to the historian's digging for giveaways buried in the evidence. In his source-analytic capacity, the reconstructor then approaches each manifest "Hebrew" sign as if it were a palimpsest, with two notable differences: what has been erased to make room for a new writing is (in his opinion) not the signifier but the signified alone, and the method of recovering it involves not contrast photography but straight analogy. Alleged to have been there in the first place, then ethnically overlaid, the Hab/piru original he would recover from the Bible's palimpsest of meaning stands or falls, above all, by its correspondence to reality: the likelihood of the Hab/piru signified having preexisted in the sign depends on his fleshand-blood existence alongside, or instead of, the actual, "overlying" native signified. This asks little enough of the textual archaeologist, too little if anything; but nothing less counts, or else the premises and patches intolerably multiply. (In regard to the people's antagonist, the superimposition of "Canaan" the Hamite ethnic group on "Canaan" the multiracial class would fulfil the requirement. The latter could and did lead a parallel existence at the relevant junctures, from Abraham onward.) And by this moderate empirical test, the allegation comes to grief at the first and lowest hurdle, that of possibility. The spacetime mismatch reissues its veto. The "Hebrew" occurrences can no more be taken to betray information about dead and gone Hab/piru at source, on pain of otherwordly (comm)union, than they can officially encode it in the discourse. For the source analyst to proceed against the text's grain is one thing, against his discipline's ground rules another. Even if we grant for argument's sake his necessary assumption that the Biblical writers obliterated the intergroup link throughoutas they theoretically might, whether out of national zeal or amnesiathen for the two groups to co-extend below the word's surface, they need at least to co-exist in the real world at all relevant times; and they don't, as early as the respective beginnings. Further, mythologizing Scripture, especially Genesis, in the interests of survival (the class's, hence the class-theory's) will only backfire on the demythologizer thereafter: no synchronism possible by either world logic, at either end of the chronology. Even if the historian, qua crossgeneticist, rescues the Hab/piru from Biblical submergence by pronouncing the Deluge a fiction, how to treat the "Hebrews" of Samuel or Jeremiah as datable
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contemporary realities while equating (grouping, replacing) them with the bygones of history? The ancient palimpsest-maker would then be concealing, and the modern digger seeing, nothing but ghosts. Or, if you translate the ontology into a key of literary genre, the one would be writing for naturalism, the other reading ("backwriting") for fantasy. Clio's nemesis on hubris. The intersource critic, too, must therefore willy-nilly lower his sights. The only alternative to identity by posthumous conjuration across time is episodic parallel tracks, which may or may not intersect underground from time to time, depending on the evidence. Just as the untenable discourse-oriented formula "All 'Hebrews' are Hab/piru" must come down to the piecemeal hypothesis, "Some 'Hebrews' are Hab/piru (or Hab/piru-like)," so must its source-analytic basis and counterpart: from "All Hebrews" to ''Some Hebrews were in reality Hab/piru." In turn, however, this new comedown is scarcely an improvement. It rather creates even more difficulties than, and for, the prior halfway withdrawal from the Hab/piru interpretation of the Bible's discourse. To begin with, self-consistency reaches its nadir. Every compromise has to account for the occurrences that fall outside its "Hebrew-Hab/piru" equation. What becomes of the other, often larger, recalcitrant half? Now, the various discourse-oriented compromises may always push that half back or down to genetic history, in which the transnational class-name supposedly divided against itself. But here, in the genesis, the regress must stop, and it no longer does if the genesis itself forks. Half a palimpsest of twofold, laminated signification, half a new parchment of and about national origination? Once you admit that some of the Bible's "Hebrews" (e.g., the otherwise ghostlike agents) betray no outside origin even at source, then they presumably trace back as well as attach to Israel. They have always belonged where, and only where, we find them placed in the writing about the Chosen Peoplewith a violent chain reaction all along the crossculturalist line. The retreat from a unitary genesis makes the rout inevitable under the circumstances. However unlikely, again, two distinct sources behind the Bible (of which the Hab/piru one alone involves a palimpsest now) are yet conceivable in theory. But, to offset its awkwardness, the theory must adduce harder evidence than usual for the exterior, overlaid source. Actually, this rock-bottom equation with the Hab/piru finds little empirical anchoragenot so much as a single unique correspondence between the groups, wherefrom to argue their underground ("sachliche") convergence at the few spots where the name-bearers might conceivably run parallel in international history or law. There is here nothing to rival, say, the Philistines' exclusive contact with the Israelites and/as "Hebrews" in the Bible's own arena, and so nothing on which to found the view that the latter anywhere reflect a
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crosscultural origin "Israelized" in the ethnocentric telling. The bondage in Egypt, the provisions for slaves in Israel and Nuzi, the movements in or around late Bronze Age (postExodus/Amarna) Canaan, or general negative traits like outsidership vis-à-vis established society: all are shared by contemporary groups other than the Hebrews and the Hab/piru. 24 Moreover, these points of contact being so few and intrinsically vague relative to the differences, as well as to the outright breaks, they do not total much even when joined to the intermittent likeness in sound. It is mounting the blind on the lame, in Rabbinic parlance; blowing up a faint resemblance into a sufficient identity condition, in the language of philosophy. What, then, might rescue, and may sometime revive, the case for the occasional tie-up of the bodies at least? Nothing more (or less) than a single firm documentary identification of an Israelite with or as a Hab/piru, under whatever name and in whatever source. This is how we know, for example, that "the people of the Sons of Israel" dreaded by Egypt co-extend with "the Hebrews" oppressed by Egypt a few verses later; that the latter's namesakes cum fellow victims in Jeremiah represent "brother Jews"; and so on. Outside Scripture, this is also how we know that Tully is the same individual as Cicero; or, more to the point, that Hab/piru and SA.GAZ denote approximately the same human reality. Indeed, how their near-sameness came to light (Greenberg 1955:3-12, 85-88) makes a tale worth retelling for comparison. In brief, decades after the unearthing of the Amarna archive, experts were still quarreling about the relation, if any, between its Hab/piru (found in the Jerusalem letters only) and its SA.GAZ. Hugo Winckler took the bold step of equating them outright, against opposition justly voiced in the then state of knowledge, because he could adduce nothing harder than the shared predatory character of the two groups. Among other criticism, "if 'sachliche Identität' (Winckler's phrase) was going to be sufficient to establish actual identity, then on the basis of the El-Amarna evidence the Sutu had as much claim to be considered SA.GAZ as the Hab/piru" (Greenberg 1955:4; cf. note 24 above). In time, however, a documentary bridge, actually a whole bridging system, followed upon the pioneer's intuitive leap: whether the free alternation of the two names in Hittite material or their parallel usage at Ugarit. So the minority opinion became, if not knowledge (recall the instabilities of reference and value) then the next firmest thing. But the two corpora, histories, groups, the Biblical and the extraBiblical, never meet on anything like such firm ground, except in the partisan beholder's eye. Ventured at about the same time, and in the same breath, the guess joining "Hebrews" to the equation has essentially lived since on hope and credit, by now exhausted. Not one cooccurrence, however short
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of alternation, has surfaced anywhere to reinforce the old empty premises and promises in face of the their mounting difficulties. Failing any source material for correlation and control, the links are not so much interpreted as invented by way of jugglery, normally the province of faith or fiction. Fiats and fables of identity do duty for facts, guesswork for grounds, (im)-possibility for probability, rhetoric for reasoning. One pseudo-logic, known from poetry and propaganda, trades on the sound/sense nexus, whereby fellows in rhyme come to double as fellows in reality. The echoing group-names then press a silent argument from minor to major: "Hebrew" relates to "Hab/piru" as "Hab/piru" does to "SA.GAZ'' even without the benefit of vocal or visible proof on the level of the signifier. The weaker the rational justification for coupling the analogues, the greater the demand for rhetorical tricks, headed by word magic. Where any opponents may get branded as "unscientific" or "fundamentalist"and aesthetic patterning, let alone world-making, officially falls beyond the paleit is odd that historical science should exhibit such a relish for homonymic incantation. In the afterlife where the philosophers of fiction eternally ride their hobbyhorses, the elder Shandy must chuckle over the triumph of his way to learning: "tantum valet, my father would say, quantum sonat" (Sterne 1979:333). To advertise and hammer home the interchangeability of the group labels across the ancient record, they are often freely interchanged by the contemporary analyst, with transparent persuasive design akin to brainwashing. Such rhetoric of identity may work through two-way apposition, for example, "Hurrians and Habiru, or Hebrews, were found together in Mesopotamia," while the Amarna age brought "Hebrews, or Habiru, into Syria and Palestine" (Meek 1960:16, 18; cf. the quotes from Albright 1968:65, 70, Noth 1966:21, and Garbini 1988:33 above). More recently, the slash has added graphic compression to the repertoire of identity-making signs: "Some of the Israelite ancestors may have been Habiru/Hebrews in terms of their political and social standing" (Miller and Hayes 1986:67). Or the juggling with the homonyms may run to downright two-way substitution. What Exodus or Samuel does in replacing "Israel" by "Hebrews," or vice versa, the historian as inventor and persuader thus fabricates across cultures, languages, bodies of data: he rewrites either corpus in the vocabulary appropriate to the other. Moses, for example, intervened "between two 'Apiru"; the Philistines "label David and his gang 'Apiru"; and under the monarchy alone did the Israelites cease "to be 'Apiru and became a nation" (Mendenhall 1973:20, 136, 137). 25 Inversely, outside the Bible, we encounter "three other Hebrews" than Joseph who rose to power in the Ancient Orient, or "Hebrews in Nuzi," whose Biblicized group-name finds its way into the local service contracts: their exordium allegedly features, in the analyst's translation, some "Hebrew from the country of Y" (Meek
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1960:1n. 1, 8-9n. 21, also in Pritchard 1969:220). With the sound likeness religiously blown into all-round identity, Hab/piru may count as even nearer to the Bible's ibri than to SA.GAZ itself, which at times invites a different phonolexical reading (as habbatu *, 'brigand') (Meek 1960:9-10). Either way, of course, this awkward Sumerian relative is kept out of sightand even quietly changed for the co-referential, better-sounding foreignism to enable its interchange with the Biblicism. In what follows, we shall encounter on the way a host of allied devices from the repertoire of ludic, artistic, persuasive connection, verbal and otherwise: hyperbole, equivoque, false analogy, time jumps, non sequiturs, tall tales, fluid characters, Janus-faced argument, selective highlighting, patterns made of whole cloth. It is nice to find such arts amid source analysis, with the babel of documents virtually ordered into a single network of literary discourse, a huge crosscultural mega-text. I would be the last to object, were the sources-as-discourse not pressed into serving the wrong cause, none other than that of historical reconstruction, under the banner of truth, empiricism, ultracriticism, and all. Even the apologists for poetic truth since Aristotle or, inversely, the postmodern theorists who liken history writing to fiction, would beware of resting their case on this order of jeu d'esprit. By another, opposed and yet wilder license, things substitute for words in parallel-making. The equivalence relation is then drawn between the Hebrews and the Hab/piru even where neither appears on the Bible's surface: actually, if you recall the talk about preJoshua infiltrators of Canaan, the alleged link holds in the very absence of any piece of text for either group term to surface on. The name, possibly along with its bearer, may then always be read into the discourse by appeal to circumstantial evidence from, or about, the source. With the historian's latitude of invention ("gap-filling") pushed to such lengths, one not only rewrites but in effect writes at will the ancient pieces of historiography oneself to suit one's reconstruction of the corresponding history. Far from invariably clandestine, the latter-day (super)inscription may even dispense with the guise of reconstruction and trumpet its reconstructive validity instead. As a typical statement of principle has it, "If Abraham had not been called a Hebrew, we should be nevertheless justified in classing him with the Habiru*" by his lifestyle as "a soldier of fortune, forever on the move" (Speiser 1933:43). And, in practice, exactly so have fared to this day the conquerors of the promised land, Abimelech, Jephthah, Sheba ben Bikhri, all called otherwise. "The fact that the term 'Ivrî is not used," Mendenhall asserts, "does not obscure the fact that the pattern is the same" (1973:136). If not one "fact'' of equivalence, language-based, then another "fact," pattern-based; and if the "pattern" manifested in the respective corpora is not "the same" either, then it may always be drawn
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into sameness on the basis of the first "fact," a nonfact in fact, because nowhere witnessed. The Duchess would applaud. Even she might wonder, though, how to reconcile the claim about the sufficiency and self-sufficiency of the term-less "pattern" with the earlier admission of the term's decisive role: ''it is inconceivable that the Amarna letters should ever have been used as materials for the reconstruction of Israelite history had it not been for the identification of the Amarna 'Apiru with the biblical 'Ivrî" (ibid.:122). By precisely such acrobatic circling and twisting in the air, Mendenhall invented his famous theory, the "peasant revolt" alternative to the Conquest. "The fact is, and the present writer would regard it as a fact though not every detail can be 'proven,' that both the Amarna materials and the biblical events represent politically the same process" (1962:73). "Sameness" as, or due to, linguistic fact? No, not even by homonymy, because Joshua and Judges know no "Hebrews," while the Amarna correspondence knows only "SA.GAZ," except for the "Hab/piru"-calling tablets from Jerusalem, occupied by Israel as late as David's reign. 26 Then maybe a fact of sheer existential ("political") sameness? Again, not on the givens, unless an assortment of sporadic depredations equals a war of occupation. Nevertheless, the two minuses somehow yield a plus in the form of a third, constructed term. Mendenhall having read "Hebrews" for the Amarna "Hab/piru"undeterred by the former's absence and latter's near-absence from the combined materialhe selectively projects the "Hab/piru" goings-on into the Israelite annals to invert the Bible's own account of what happened: not a unified twelve-tribe invasion by reclaimants from without Canaan, but a grassroots revolution from within, waged by the indigenous peasantry against the Canaanite city-states. To dignify the substitute projection with the name of history is an encroachment on light historical romance.27 Caprice reaches its height among those who disqualify the Bible's artefacts, judged late ("postexilic") and literary ("novelistic"), even for scientific projection into reality. If half of the equivalence is so hopeless as to be lost even to rewriting, the abandonment of the crossculturalism would appear to follow; but it doesn't. Instead, to quote one such radical, the "decision to speculate on the 'apiru as potentially informing the origins of Israel" becomes "selfconsciously hypothetical: an idea awaiting evidence," yet "neither dependent on a necessary historical association with 'ibrim or with any later biblical tradition" (Thompson 1992:134). You hardly know what to marvel at mostthe outspokenness, or the grotesquerie, or the self-betrayal in rationalization. Until further notice, it seems, better an open counterfiction of Hab/piru genesis made of whole cloth than Scripture's (putative) fictionalizing of Israelite/Hebrew developments. No need to go into the primary evidence, such as it is, armed with the finest literary tools, because it is such; nor to adduce and weigh any counterevidence, discoursive, genetic, internal, external; nor to ask oneself if the magic
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of homonymy still affects one's preference of the urgroup (evocatively dubbed by the new historian "'apiru" rather than, as usual in the area, SA.GAZ) over mates and neighbors ineligible for the charmed rhyme. In this Newspeak, science is license. As with bipartite history read across cultures into name-less cultural texts, so with law. An example would be the attempt to equate Exodus's law of the "Hebrew slave" (and Deuteronomy's "Hebrew brother") with Nuzi's Hab/piru service contracts by appeal to material where neither group term is in evidence. "To be sure, the document does not state that [the contractants involved] were habiru *, but their Akkadian names," plus the recurrence of a certain legalism, "favor the assumption that they belonged to this class"; and hence that, like the Hebrew slave, the Hab/piru might opt for or against perpetual service. (See Lewy 1939:611-12, also 1940:50n. 10, 53n. 34, 56-57; cf. for now the objection in Bottéro 1954:55n. 2, also Greenberg 1955:65-66. The same logic yields the ''exact parallel" found in Paul 1970:48 between the respective slaves when mated by the householder.) With the number of absentees risen from one to the maximum two, the entire argument for their sociolegal equivalence proceeds in absentia. The threefold chain of substitution (from class blank to Hab/piru to Hebrew) must be taken (or left) as a whole: a fiat diametrically opposed in spirit, though joined in rhetorical practice, to the insistence elsewhere on literal affinity and intersubstitutability, a fortiori to word magic. Though the language of reference in question keeps silent, or implies diversity, the alleged referents may now group together by virtue of their extralinguistic features: a grouping that (like Mendenhall's) itself circularly presupposes the continuity of the referring terms. Would the analogy otherwise have been claimed, (over)stated, monopolized, sought and discerned in the first instance? Most partisans, anxious to build on foundations more solid than verbal-etymological likeness, behave as though it would and (if only in their own variant of the theory) did arise from hard "sachliche Identität." Were the procedure and the improvement both demonstrable, they would still lead to the free interchange, transfer, grafting of names, as of whole episodes in the supposed event-chain. The route, not the results, might then vary. Where the data never fix either the co-reference of the words or the cross-extension of the things, the circle of argument for both turns vicious. Babelian Confusion and Translational Mimesis: The Hebrewgram In group combination, though, the two encircled victims have not suffered the same injury. The Hab/piru, luckily for them, appear on a record that is plural, far-flung, open-ended, often cross-referential beyond doubt, as
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well as unliterary for the most part. Their group identity, their history, their whereabouts, their very mysteries, all define themselves in essentials outside Scripture. Therefore, with the arguable exception of Nuzi bondage and Amarna outlawry, they are relatively immune against the connectors' jumbling of the evidence or of the source- and the discourse-oriented analyses. When it comes to the Bible and its study, however, the vagaries of historians at crosscultural analogy should bring home to every student the imperative of demarcation. Here, the factitious combined history plays havoc not with the cast and design of the given Israelite historiography alone but, at the same time, with the only genuine material from which we can hope to piece together, as historians, the role and fate of the "Hebrews" among the nations. Only, I said, because field archaeology has no more unearthed them out of the mute cultural remains than the textual archaeologist has out of the written. In the state of our ignorance, the one discourse where they figure also holds the key (palimpsest-like, mirror-like, broken, or just lost) to the source-world from which they originate. Even assuming that Scripture holds a reconstructible palimpsest, the geneticist's and comparatist's dig into it will lead nowhere, or anywhere, unless forearmed with the best possible interpretation of the relevant cruxes on the narrative and legal surface, from Genesis to Jeremiah. The reconstructor having carried out his own discourse analysis, or adopted another's, ideally the professional interpreter's, he will at least arrive at the construction that the Bible apparently offers as history. He may then proceed, with whatever success, to deconstruct: to use the interpreted givens against themselves (e.g., early against late "Hebrews" along some diachrony) in an effort to go behind the authorized tale. Yet anything beyond this, an independent counternarrative to the Bible's or, who knows, a supportive cross-bearing, waits on future documentary windfalls. Meanwhile, we cannot rid our working priorities too soon of the phantoms of hope and desire. The immediate operational gulf divides, not so much historians from interpreters of either ancient population element, as demarcators on the evidence from combiners beyond and despite the evidence. For the scholar, there is only one game playable in Hebrewtown, one solvable mystery, posed and delimited by the canon: better relegate the "Hebrews" to simplistic yet attested Israelite ethnicity, if nothing else avails, than to empty, endless Hab/piru circularity. And the patterns into which they have been falling all along this explorative chapter imply that a new kind of solution, where ethnopoetic teleology regulates the group typology, might well avail. In fact, most of the clues to their identity (verbal or plotted, synchronic or time-bound) have not been tapped yet, as against the overworking of the combined material in vain. At least some of those pointers would hardly escape the inquirers'
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notice but for the energy wasted on ringing the changes of co-genesis. What difference can it make whether the source-as-discourse licenses are taken by the crossculturalist practitioner in this fashion or that? Among them, the one great, continuous and self-enclosed artwork involved must anyhow lose its proper reality: everything in it, from surface details to overall thrust, from encoded truth-claim to extrinsic truth-value, counts (if at all) as a means to an end other and higher than its own. Who and what "Hebrew" means within the Bible as a unique art of discourse, far less why, when and how, comes a poor second to revealing the truth about the agents and the movements on the world's stage. Never mind that this chapter of Ancient Oriental history does not stand revealed, after all, and that this line of inquiry has got into chronic trouble on its own permissive premises. Never mind even that its quandary may well have something to do with the cavalier splicing of assorted names, tales, materials, languages, frameworks: the quest for the intersource itselflogic and experience jointly teachmust pass through fine-grained discourse comparison. Let us examine, instead, the priorities and proprieties built into the alternative research agenda, geared to the (con)text's operations rather than the world's: to historiography (true or false or equivocal) before history, in either's best interests. The end and the means having now changed places, the Hab/piru sources become one of many possible clues (possibly even inverted or irrelevant, though never dismissible a priori) to the enigma of the Hebrews unfolding within the Israelite national masterpiece. Clues that will at most outline a real-life background of uncertain value, maybe purely heuristicI emphasizeno longer data to be integrated and explained for their own sake, on a par with those that the canon itself encodes. By the same token, that the inquiry into the Hebrews may newly illuminate, perhaps even redefine, the Hab/piru crux (e.g., in relation to an autonomous logic of writing, which I will soon introduce as the "Hab/piru-gram") is a by-product, no longer a or the top priority. Once oriented to the arts of discourse, a fortiori to high literary discourse such as the Bible's, you must act accordingly in making the best possible sense of the discoursive givens. Or else, where the source analyst will have failed to exploit one primary means to his endreconstructing what happened by throwing bridges across time and milieuyour failure will directly bear on the end itself, understanding the text in context. For example, "sachliche Identität" between referents, even within the Bible, preserves here little of its taxonomic use for the analyst and (no matter how apparently firm the taxonomy, e.g., Hebrew = Israelite = Jew or, regarding individuals, Jacob = Israel) still less of its explanatory value. In explanation of why X and Y occur together, "X has the same reference as Y" must now come down all the way from first to last resort, on pain
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of separating "content" from "form": an offense against all discourse, however ordinary, this would amount to breaking the poetic decalogue and, as I further argued, threatens the very identity in signification. Occam's razor, the economy of language, the selectivity of art, the Bible's word-to-world dynamics, all point the opposite, harder but integrative way to the (re)construction of group typology. The forms of reference chosen out of the available set are no less important to correlate and explain (by, say, the distinctive plotting, memory jogging, theme building, intergeneric network into which Hebrewness as such has already entered above) than are the referents themselves. A fortiori with national correlates, second in importance to the heavenly alone. So let us take up again the basic question, progressively sharpened and elaborated throughout this chapter. If "Hebrew" is co-referential with "Israelite" in terms of Biblical discourseas virtually agreed down the ages spared the Hab/piru red herringwhy does the Bible from time to time shift into the less normative and (to us latecomers) more opaque referring expression of the two, and why in these of all places? Odd though it may look, the traditional exegetes never say, indeed rarely appear to have wondered. At best, starting from the ancient Rabbis, they motivate the etymology (rather than the functionality, i.e., the differential value) of "Hebrew," so as to fix its substantive identification (rather than trace its correlation and alternation) with "Israelite." The midrash on the first Hebrew, Abraham, already multiplies etymologies in his honor. It derives ibri from Eber the Shemite in the Table of Nations; or, by geographical in lieu of ethnic origin, from eber hannahar, "Beyond the (Euphrates) River"; or, by the genesis of monotheism, from the trail-blazing patriarch's occupation of the side (eber) opposed to the rest of the world's (Bereshit Rabba 42:8, which also features the anachronistic tie-up with the "Hebrew" language; cf. Pesikta Rabbati 33:3). But all this etymological wealth does not yet explain why, or when, the Chosen People he begot are usually named after his grandson. If the two ethnica were co-honorific (''conominational") as well as co-referential, then their co-occurrence, their transposition, their unequal and changing fortunes in Scripture would grow even less intelligible. Where moderns have attempted an answer beyond "sachliche Identität"now within the canonit again follows more or less uniform, and uniformly inadequate, lines. One of these, akin and sometimes indeed wedded to the partitions rife in the alternative theory, takes the form of breaking down the occurrences of "Hebrews" into clusters, delimited by the items' textual, spatiotemporal, topical, or generic co-occurrence. Thus the Joseph and/or Egypt, the Samuel, the law clusters. (See, among others, Kraeling 1941:242-43, Gray 1958:174, de Vaux 1978:I, 210, Lemche
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1979:9ff., Sarna 1991:265.) Even as a description, however, this does not quite cover the picture of Hebrewness, leaving (and often, foreseeably, censoring) out the Bible's solitaries: Abraham himself in the van, Jonah toward the end. And the explanatory value approaches nil. The fresh partition only makes you wonder, for instance, why these clusters at these locations, why so few (or many) of them, why related to precisely these agents and voices, or why an Abraham stands alone, unmatched even by his nephew Lot, fellow Eberide and TransEuphratensian (eberite). Moreover, the clustering breaks the lines of "Hebrew" continuity implicitly drawn by the Bible across units, times, spaces, even genres. Such inner macro-bridging runs through all text-bound delimitations, as well as against outside bridgework. A few large continuities have already been suggested in my argument: how Jeremiah, for example, circles back to Abra(ha)m; how Joseph prefigures the nation; how the Exodus enslavement-to-deliverance plot reenacts itself in Samuel and in the bondage-law trio. Where such grand part-whole composition falls victim to atomism, the atomist will naturally shrug off the atoms of his own making: from "the spotty nature of its occurrence," it follows that "this name plays no discernible role in the historical life of the people" (Kraeling 1941:241, taken up in, e.g., Rowley 1950:55). Furthermore, the clusters themselves are never pure: why do their "Hebrews'' alternate with "Israelites," at times within a single verse? This question, at least, has received another uniform answer of sorts. Here is a typical statement from the GeseniusKautzsch Hebrew grammar: The distinction between the name Hebrew . . . and Israelites is that the latter was rather a national name of honour, with also a religious significance, employed by the people themselves, while the former appears as the less significant name by which the nation was known among foreigners. Hence in the Old Testament Hebrews are only spoken of either when the name is employed by themselves as contrasted with foreigners (Gn 4015, Ex 26f 318 etc., Jon 19) or when it is put in the mouth of those who are not Israelites (Gn 3914 17 4112 etc.) or, finally, when it is used in opposition to other nations (Gn 1413 4332, Ex 211 13, 212). (1976:8, § 2b; echoes include Böhl 1911:72, Greenberg 1955:92, Speiser 1964:103, Bruce 1967:11-12, de Vaux 1978:I, 210, McCarter 1980:240, Hallo 1991:43.) The reference to outsiders here contains a grain of truth, but so mixed with vagueness, inapplicability, and plain selfcontradiction that the explanation explains next to nothing. Tested against the facts of the Bible's discourse, each of the three parts of the hypothesis collapses in turn.
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If "the name is employed by [Hebrews] themselves as contrasted with foreigners," then why does its employment occur so seldom relative to the self-designation as "Israelite"? Or, inversely, why does ''Hebrews" occur at all, given that the alternative term is at least equally contrastive (and honorific to boot)? In Exodus 3:18, come to that, why does God shift from "Israel" to "Hebrews," followed by Moses quoting God to Pharaoh in 5:1-3, both in mid-cluster, even in mid-dialogue? Next, if the name "is put in the mouth of those who are not Israelites," then why do those mouths also tend to voice the other name ("Israel," later "Judahite/Jew") on the Bible's stage as well as, invariably, on the external record, from Marneptah to Mesha to Shalmaneser to Nebuchadnezzar? And, to raise a subtler issue, why do the nonIsraelite mouths that occasionally voice the ethnicon "Hebrew" (against the extraBiblical rule of silence) belong to, say, Egyptians but never to, say, Moabites or Arameans or Babylonians? (It would be forced onto their lips, e.g., Mesha's, only by the rhetorician of identity, as well as by the innocent anachronist.) To reshuffle the questions: why does the Bible's Pharaohlike God and Moses within the same cluster, but unlike either his own real-life originals or his canonical postExodus heirs or so many of his opposite numbers anywhereoscillate between the ethnica? Finally, if the name "is used in opposition to other nations," then its use compounds the difficulty, to judge only by the further steep decline in its relative frequency. As either group name marks by definition the contrast with the alien, nothing accounts for the ratio of a handful (going by the items listed in the Gesenius statement above, a quintet) to a host of properly "Israelite" occurrences. Again, if "used in opposition to other nations," why do we never find "Hebrew," as we find "Israelite," collocated with "people"? Inversely, that it does collocate with "slave," but not with "master," trains the opposition on a grouping other than national, or sheerly national. And cutting across all three parts of the hypothesis are additional riddlesnotably the one latent in the Bible's overall sequence, already found to march out of alignment with the Hab/piru. Why do the "Hebrews" appear, disappear, reappear, then disappear for good along Scripture's text-line and time-line, historiography and history, canonical and chronological order? 28 Not for nothing do these modern clusterers of the discourse likewise appeal under pressure to source analysis, now of the "low" (textological) rather than the "high" (crosscultural) variety. Gesenius himself, finding that "Hebrews" in I Samuel 13:3, 7 and 14:21 break all his rules, pronounces "the text . . . clearly corrupt," a judgment near unanimous to this day. Others of his ilk, beginning in effect with the Septuagint, have also detected and corrected ostensible misfits elsewhere: from the phrasing of the slave law (e.g., the language of servitude and/or Hebrewness, judged otiose) to
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Jonah's self-description ("a copying mistake"). Where the exegete's preconceived scheme manifestly fails, he would salvage it by rewriting the given words, and with them, like the crossculturalist, the history of the world. The mystery of "Hebrew" usage and identity accordingly endures, in fact thickens; and so it will until we spell out, then puzzle out, the array of questions converging from all sides on the heart of darkness: why this Biblical speaker to this audience at this juncture about this group, and not otherwise. The spelling out having been carried far enough by now, for the moment at least, we can get down to the puzzling out. Stripped to its bare bones, I will argue, the principle underlying all the occurrences of the mysterious term in the canon is the signaling of foreign discourse about the chosen people. The literature of and for the collective self quotes, at one remove or more, the word-image formed by the dominant Other within an adverse ethnoculture (the antipolar enemy, as a rule) about that self. Across all variations, "Hebrew" always applies to Israelites, but distinctively (re)sounds or "translates" a note of foreignness in intercultural perspective. Let me very briefly outline the explanatory principle I have in mind, before testing and elaborating it in closer analysis. Among ancient texts, the Bible is at once the most exclusive and the most inclusive regarding intercultural contact. Nothing in Oriental literature earlier and contemporary, or in Greek, compares with the militance of its ideology against the world's at large, as nothing (except Herodotus and the tragedians later) matches its interest in outside cultures. This ostensible paradox dissolves once related to the Bible's poetics at large. Here, in terms of ideology, as of narrative structure, intercultural contact usually means conflict, not concord, along with the rest of the relations plotted on earth or between earth and heaven. As a matter of rhetorical strategy, again, the Bible aims to win its arguments all the more decisively by bringing rival viewpoints (e.g., the serpent's, Esau's, Pharaoh's, the murmurers', Saul's, Ahab's) into the open, rather than sweeping them under the carpet. To discredit the opposition, this persuader realizes, you had better give it a voice, however distorted, and a hearing of sorts, no matter how fixed the trial and how foregone the conclusion. Which they need not be. Even in intergroup drama, like the strife between Esau ("Edom") and Jacob ("Israel"), the rhetorical may answer to the normative complexity: the polyphony is genuine, the attitude ambivalent, the balance finely tipped, all against the simplistic idea of ethnocentricity. Nor must we leave out of account the Bible's equally innovative drive toward things as they are, toward history and the world, toward manners and mentalities outside the native circle, which often enough produces a concern for hard reality-effect even as an end in itself. With all these forces working for a culture-sensitive poetics, little wonder
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it greets us as early as the beginning of the beginning. Genesis starts by tracing the genesis of difference: the branching universal history, the segmented primeval genealogies from the moment Eden recedes into dream-life, the Table of Nations, the Tower of Babel . . . Now, the Tower marks the single most important crossroads in the Bible's poetics of culture, synchronic and diachronic, because it divides language as well as language-users. In the nomenclature I have expounded elsewhere, the field of reality itself turns polylingual after Babel; the speakers in it multilingual, or else heterolingual to one another, so that they "cannot understand one another's speech"; and the literature representing them all at discourse grows wonderfully language-sensitive to match, complete with the niceties of dialect variants. (For the general theory behind this argument, interspersed with Biblical examples, see my "Polylingualism as Reality and Translation as Mimesis" [1981b], "Point of View and the Indirections of Direct Speech" [1982b: esp. 85-93], and "Proteus in Quotation-Land: Mimesis and the Forms of Reported Discourse" [1982a:136 and passim].) Accordingly, the Bible's intercultural range extends thereafter from international and interdoctrinal to interlingual contactdown to the hidden translation of foreign speech and thought, voices and perspectives. A character in touch with foreign speakers must play his own translator (if multilingual) or call for the offices of one; the reader is also invited to spot and recover heterolingualisms from the narrating translator's flow of vernacular, so as to translate the givens back into the character's spoken or thought original, as it were. These hidden workings have their overt counterpart in the references made to foreign expression on the surface of discourse. There, what I call for short translational mimesis assumes two primary forms, the (selectively) reproductive and the attributive. Both are visible (if not always transparent in sense, let alone in function and artfulness) to all comers, the entire target audience of insiders. Actually, such is their visibility that they, and they two alone of the narrator's inner translational repertoire, may spell foreignness even if you belong to the outsiders who encounter the artwork in translationat some contingent and unauthorized remove(s) from the language(s). Instances of direct reproduction span the Bible's canon and history alike. In Jacob's parting scene from Laban, the narrative thus leaves a dual-language record of the Heap of Witness they erected between them: Jacob's vernacular (Biblese, so-called Hebrew) name "Gal'ed" vs. Laban's Aramaic equivalent "Yegar Sahaduta" (Genesis 31:46). At the moment of parting, the respective identifies crystallize in the naming. To the patriarch, on the way to repatriation and glorious renomination and eponymous pre-nomination, a toponym concordant with the language of the narrative frame itself; to the antagonist, who treated him and his own daughters as foreigners, a heterolingualism for goodbye. In divisive force, what with the
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ceaseless broadening of the self/other polarity from individual to clan on the way to nationhood, the Heap is a miniature Tower. Elsewhere, the reproduction of foreign speech may run or give place to attribution, that is, to a comment that adverts to that speech's foreignness. In Ezra, the correspondence with the Persian court is both quoted in the original Aramaic and so attributed (4:7ff.); while the code-switching throughout Rabshakeh's quarrel with Hezekiah's ministers over which language to usethe native Jewish or the international Aramaicregisters in the shifting attributions alone (II Kings 18:26-28). 29 Suggestively, the first occurrence of the device coincides with the first narrative that multiplies predications of Hebrewnessthe tale of Joseph and his brothers. "They did not know that Joseph understood [their asides] because the interpreter was between them" (Genesis 42:23) signals the otherwise unrecorded movement of the official interview into and out of Egyptian. But the representation of foreign discourse need not appear on the surface at all, in either form of code-switching, the reproduced or the attributed. It may also lurk below the homogeneous-looking text, as pure, wholly implicit translational mimesis under (more or less deep) unilingual, native cover. Another of the Bible's strategic novelties, and so widespread that the advertised foreignisms make the visible tip of an iceberg, this covert working for distinctiveness recalls a parable by Kafka: The Pit of Babel What are you building?-I want to dig a subterranean passage. Some progress must be made. My station up there is much too high. We are digging the pit of Babel. (1966:35) The world is upside down in space but not quite in spirit. Paradoxical-looking, the Kafkaesque reversal of direction along the axis of height has a fairly literal counterpart, if not origin, in the text which inspired the parable. That is indeed where the Bible mainly commemorates the humbling of Babel and enacts the babel after Babelunderground. A case in point, leading straight back to the "Hebrew" question, would be the Philistine lament upon the Ark's arrival in the Israelite camp. "When the ark of the Covenant of the Lord came into the camp, all Israel shouted a great shout, and the earth resounded," so the narrator tells the event in propria persona. Then he changes sides, discourse roles, and, unobtrusively, languages in everything but surface manifestation: (6) The Philistines heard the noise of the shouting and said, What is this great shouting in the camp of the Hebrews? When they learned that the ark of the Lord had come to the camp, (7) the Philistines were afraid, for they said, A god has come into the camp. And they
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said, Woe to us! For nothing like this has happened before. (8) Woe to us! Who can deliver us from the hand of these mighty gods? These are the gods who struck Egypt with every sort of plague in the wilderness. (9) Take courage and be men, O Philistines, lest you become slaves to the Hebrews as they have been slaves to you. Be men and fight! (I Samuel 4:6-9) Viewed against the storyteller's discoursethe contextual "objective" norm and the key to everything, its own enclosures, above allthis passage characteristically implies ("mimes") and runs together two kinds of subjectivity. The first is universal, a matter of discoursive peculiarity or overflow, which nobody in the world escapes but the wellspoken recorder of the world; the second is ethno- and ultimately theo-centric, distinguishing the wrong from the right thinkers, speakers, name-callers. In short, the former axis of objectivity/subjectivity opposes the narrating to the narrated voices; the latter polarizes the voices ("languages") of what counts here as selfhood and alterity, truth and error, ideally but not terrestrially always emitted from within and from without the elect circle, respectively. If anything, we will discover throughout, more natives go foreign, in idiom and thought and conduct, than foreigners go native. Where ethnocentricity might (and, according to its current bad press, should) flatter the collective self, the Bible's higher theocentricity and hard realism all too often work to expose the Chosen People in outward movementin voluntary as well as helpless displacement from their own circle, in self-translation to foreignness on every level. The two axes of voice, therefore, always crosscut to significant, even arresting effect: their intersection at any given moment of language-use defines the subject for better or, as in the present example, for worse. By one measure of subjectivity, the Philistine outburst abounds in expressive features that the Bible reserves for its characters in quotation, the inset speakers (or, where monologic, thinkers) as opposed to the narrator quoting them to us in the frame. Thus interjections, emotive repetitions, commands and exhortations, questions, genuine as well as rhetorical, conditional clauses, and so on. While all these distinguish the quoted speakers as characters, a complex of additional markers planted in the quotation also exposes them as foreigners, speakers in an alien idiom and voice. So the text widens or sharpens our sense of difference from the universals of talk and thought embracing humanity as such to group-variables, inter-lingual, international, interreligious, intercultural at large: in short, we go here from expressive to properly translational mimesis. These translational signals, or reflexes, are of diverse kinds. But all jar together against the surface native discourse in which they officially appear; and all find their resolution as (conceptual) heteroculturalisms, often attended or pinpointed by (lexical, grammatical) heterolingualisms. The
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inset quoted above manifests and dovetails the resources in strength to catch the alien (i.e., Philistine) mind at talk. The oblique image of speech yields in turn an insight into the thought behind it, a twofold indirection within the form of direct quoting. Here lies the underground Babel, challenging our detective and recuperative skills as interpreters of the cultures in contact, ostensibly on the battleground alone. "Things once expressed in Hebrew," the prologue to ben Sira ("Ecclesiasticus") warns, "do not have the same force in them when put into another language" (trans. Goodspeed 1959:223). Yet the converse, the Bible suggests, does not hold, or not in the unprecedented case where an artist wants the difference between the languages to retain and exert its differential value between the lines of transmission. On the informational level, geared to the knowledge of reality and history, the Philistines thus betray their foreignness in locating the plagues of Egypt "in the wilderness": a mistake no Israelite, qua inheritor and rehearser of the exodus tradition, is likely to commit. Ideologically, they expose themselves again, this time as alien to the true faith, in referring to elohim (God/gods) again and again as an existential plural, "gods," not just a grammatical plural with singular reference, "God." Plural pronoun (eleh, "these"), plural adjective (adirim, ''mighty [ones]"), plural copula (hem, "are"), plural verb (makkim, "[they] struck"): each plural reinforces our sense of the inset pluralizer's polytheism, opposed to and by the monotheistic ("God"-singularizing) frame of discourse. 30 Ethnonationally, again, the Philistines' insistent designation of the Israelites as "Hebrews" (a de-nomination motivated by a will to power over the "slaves") joins the cacophony of foreign notes and brings us to the heart of our matter. So let us address it in orderly, if telegraphic, fashion. As part of this overall translational thrust, "Hebrew" reflects the otherness of nonIsraelite (more exactly, as will appear, Hamite) culture and discourse in four patterns, which mark an ascending order of intricacy: 1. "Hebrew" used in place of "Israelite" by a native speaker of a language other than Biblical Hebrewthat is, within a direct quotation of foreign speech, as a rule implying the name-caller's superiority and hostility to the people so (mis)called. A representation in the second degree, the gentilic we encounter is the nucleus and index of a heterodiscourse upon the elect quoted in otherwise canonical discourse among the elect. The narrator silently relays ("imitates") to us, his frame-sharers, the group image hurled from the outside at his (meaning "our," the in-group's) ancestors and co-nationals. It is "they," ill-speaking outsiders, about and against "us" insiders, the protagonists on the narrative stage and the participants in the narrative staging rolled into one circle. This forms the basic discourse-pattern, which the next three complicate
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by variously lengthening and/or tangling the chain of mimetic transmission: the wrong or misapplied ethnicon now grows more removed, less immediately quoted, from the foreign voice that originates and would perpetuate it to the nation's inglory. Thus, 2. "Hebrew" used by an Israelite engaged in talk with foreigners in power and willy-nilly assuming their perspective on Israelites (himself included, as with Joseph in Egypt) because he or she cannot speak otherwise without loss (from giving offense to risking unintelligibility to tearing a hole in the mask of allegiance, even of collaboration). Recontextualized, in brief, the misnomer here implies a direct quote of foreign speech that was originally voiced by a native speaker in forced dialogic role-playing as underdog. So Miriam on "the Hebrewesses" to Pharaoh's daughter, or Jonah's "I am a Hebrew" to the ship's crew. The given (inharmonious) utterance then reflects a double translational poetic genesis, a mimesis on stage followed by a reverse one behind the scenes. The overpowered self-''Hebrewing" character needs must translate himself (in word and exteriorly in thought) out of the Israelite vernacular, while the storyteller translates him back, except for the giveaway clue to de-nomi-nation of and by the self. 3. "Hebrew" used by the narrator to render an alien or alienated mind (e.g., the Sodomite fugitive's or the Egyptianbred prophet's) at work in connection with Israelites: an indirect, hidden if not buried, report of foreign thought. Reframed once again, here from dialogue to monologue, the codename newly gives away the subject's genuine othermindedness, or ill-disposition, vis-à-vis the name-bearer. The first pattern recurs with a multifold ascent in complexity: an inward turn, a deeper psycho-cultural effect, a less transparent shift from the objective frame of storytelling to the quoted inset. 4. "Hebrew" used (i.e., translated) by an Israelite addressing Israelites in order to evoke the foreign perspective as such by way of sharp intercultural dissonance with their own: "a Hebrew slave" among Israelites, the Lawgiver thus implies, is a contradiction in terms, offending against a national history and solidarity born in the Exodus from the Egyptian "house of slaves." Should the exigency of bondage nevertheless arise in Israel, the fellow ex-slave ("thou") must not replay the oppressor. So the term "Hebrew" comes to serve the rhetoric of ethnoideology as a reminder and deterrent: a verbal stick borrowed from nonIsraelite culture to influence the members of the Bible's culture on pain of going foreign. These four patterns make up what I shall call the Law of Intercultural (De) nominationthe functional discourse grammar of "Hebrews" vs. "Israel" or, in short, the Hebrewgram. Its operations, in and among the out-
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lined quartet of subrules, as within and athwart the ill-defined, "spotty"-looking clusters of text units, need to be worked out in fine detail, of course. A good many stiff tests, both more pinpoint and more wide-ranging than known to any earlier approach, therefore lie ahead. The Hebrews-between-Cultures reorientation must demonstrate its strength, not just trade on the weakness of the competition or on the novelty value of its own paradigm shift. But such rule-governed play of intercultural difference, I trust, already shows its equidistance from the accepted hypotheses, especially in their diametric form: the uniculturalist, to the point of culture-blindness, and the uncompromisingly crossculturalist. The reductive Hebrew/Israelite equivalence blanks out altogether the self/other complex of tensions in favor of the shared ethnic extension. The Hebrew/Hab/piru link misplaces the tension in the social domain and, we shall find, misconceives it even there. If anything, the Hebrewgram throws into relief the independent and elementary logic of the Hab/piru-gram. There, the name-calling self may undergo a sea change from one occurrence to another (in race, nationality, geography, language, belief, estate, along with the name-form chosen), except for two invariants: his position as full-fledged speaker, rather than either "mimer" or "thinker," and his opposition (possibly short of antagonism) to the Hab/piru name-bearer as the cross-cultural Other (outsider, even though of the same race, faith, etc.). The Hab/piru-monger in the Ancient Orient therefore corresponds neither to the Bible's storyteller nor to the fourfold typology of subjects reported at vocal and mental "Hebrewing." Among the latter, he only resembles to some extent the high-handed alien dialogist of our first pattern. This, in a nutshell, promises to generate a discourse analysis of the extraBiblical testimonia along autonomous lines: the more autonomous the extrapolation of their grammar, the more fruitful the comparison with the "Hebrews"or even within the parallel aggregateand the better informed the eventual divergence or convergence of the respective labels, populations, movements, frameworks, outsiderships. Long overdue, the Hab/piru-gram might certainly do some good within its proper field. (So will the adjustment of the Hebrewgram's universals, variables, and workings to any miscellany of name-callings, analogously regulated by, say, a Yid-gram, a Yuppy-gram, a Hun-gram, a Dagogram, a Nigger-gram, a Fascist-gram, a Male-Chauvinist-gram, etc., with corresponding translational echoes.) Further rudiments of this extraBiblical sociologic, as well as glances at later intergroup (ab)usages, will emerge in passing throughout. But the poetics of and around the Hebrewgram, exactly because it compounds such high intrinsic with theoretical value, is more than enough to keep us busy in the following chapters. Instead of relegating the Hebrews to the Bible's putative historical background and sources, as Hab/piru, my argument will anchor them in the Bible's arts of discoursewhere "He-
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brews" are Israelites as viewed awry from a certain foreign perspective, genuine or assumed, but always translated in transmission to the all-native frame, possibly more than once and one way. The referent stays constant between "Hebrew" and "Israelite," only the cultural load changes with the referring term to the point of mutual incompatibility, often warfare to the death between the group images, among their makers, victims, breakers, revivers. With this extension of focus from the person signified to the signifying word and code and mind, the play of "Hebrew" throughout the Bible dramatizes in miniature how a literary text reflects intercultural diversity and tension even below a homogeneous-looking surface of discourse, and how widely the effects sought range. They stretch from history-likeness to psychology to ideology, from the synchronies to the evolution of language and literature in contact, from the law of narrative to the narrative of the law, especially of legaliterature, from plot development to master plotting across developments or genres, from character in the mass to breach of stereotypes, from phylo- to psycho- to text-genesis, from the ethnonational self's rise and assertion vis-à-vis the other to the otherness within the self, from minute insight to canon-length trajectory. On top of its intrinsic and illustrative value, the Bible offers a historic case in point, since it was the first artwork to make such an issue of intercultural relations, including their linguistic correlates in speech and thought. Homeric epic, where the warring groups of Greeks and Trojans are virtually cultural twins, no more affords an equivalent to this art than the Orient does a precedent. The imaging of Hebrewness vis-à-vis the nations, the chosen Israel herself among them, comes therefore with another of Scripture's ideopoetic revolutions. In the process, ancient Israelite literature remodeled the world's arena, redrew the lines of battle, redefined the forces and frictions of intergroup contact, often renamed or reimaged or rearranged the actors, with the repertoire of (self-)translation built up accordingly. It all goes to mark a departure as strategic as the narrative's concurrent epistemological turn, already highlighted in my Poetics and invoked afresh in my preliminaries here. What this landmark implies for developments since, especially how it compares with modern theorizing about (literary) culture, sometimes not unlike the facile or dogmatic talk about historiography, therefore promises to be of commensurate interest. As the Bible unsettled antiquity's ready-made schemesquite possibly even within its own original audience, if only the jingoists intent on self-aggrandizement, regardless of God or for that matter the Hebrew in Jerusalemso will we find it thwarting the newer shapes of desire, from the local patriot's to the crossculturalist's to the universalist's. Not surprisingly, all such counterreaders have lost their way in the attempt to domesticate Scripture's image of Hebrewness. This national discourse blazes trails less easily mappable than praising, socializing
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or generalizing the national in-group about and to which it writes, the often unhappy happy few under God. The very route to the Bible's universality passes through its unconventionalityas its idea of the universal Creator literally begins with iconoclasmand the journey will prove second to none in either if you travel light. For confirmation of your assorted certitudesphilosophical, historical, artistic, sociopolitical, ethnographic, psychic, generic, genetic, canon-formative, textbound, theoreticalyou must look elsewhere.
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2 Heterocultural (Mis)Representation in Inverted Commas Outsiders at Name-Calling Image and Victimage The four-pattern Hebrewgram just outlined locates and interprets at once the group-referring terms that open ("this great shouting in the camp of the Hebrews") and close ("become slaves to the Hebrews") the Philistine panic-stricken outcry at Aphek. Evidently, like kindred heteroculturalisms (informational, theological, grammatical) voiced in the process, these Hebrewings belong to the first and most accessible category: the direct, if translated, report of foreign utterance. The further we read, the more certain not only the term's bearing on the insiders who count as the Chosen People, Israel, but also its outside, heterolingual speech-origin, reflected in the Bible's translation for poetic effect, from realism upward. As it turns out, I Samuel is interspersed with quoted discourse-events where the same foreigners indicate the same native referents by the same peculiar locution. "Behold, Hebrews are coming out of the holes where they have hidden themselves," the Michmash garrison troops exclaim on observing Jonathan and his armor-bearer (14:11). "What are these Hebrews doing here?", the Philistine lords want to know as David and his men show up amidst the Achish contingent on the eve of the war against Saul (29:3). "There was no smith to be found in all the land of Israel," it also transpires, "for the Philistines said, Lest the Hebrews make sword or spear" (13:19). These instances range between the limits of dialogue and monologue: from public speech to private counsel to hidden thought. (The last is intimated by the ellipsis of the main clause, highlighting the secret fear [''Lest . . ."] to the exclusion of everything else, as in Genesis 38:11.) But across all variations in the discourse-type quoted by the text, one verbal norm persistsor antinorm, rather, because markedly outgroup by every inside standard,
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whether contemporary and emplotted or retrospective, literary, authorial. The Philistines designate as "Hebrew" a people who not only would and do style themselves "Israelite" but also receive this native ethnicon from the storyteller in the enclosing frame. Here also arises the first of many culture-laden parallels in (mis)reference between the ethnic and the divine sphere. For stronger parallelism, either name combines underground a twisted genesis on the way from we- to out-group usage with an artful mimesis in reverse: diachronic ill-translation across the languages gets backtranslated, as it were, on the injured people's record. Both ibri and elohim look like good Biblical words, with origins that reach back to primeval history: the Eber etymology cum genealogy implied in the Table of Nations, and the first scene of Creation, respectively. Except that, reading between the lines of the ensuing historiography, both words have developed meanwhile an outside version or perversion against the native grain, and so have gone foreign in their perverted ideolinguistic usage or altogether. The former is the case with the pluralized elohim; the latter with the ethnicon, twisted by adversaries into such unScriptural meaning (as will emerge before long) that it always occurs at a remove implicit in direct or oblique quotation: never out of inverted commas, so to speak. In the Bible's translational mimesis, therefore, "Hebrew" stands to "Israelite" as the misnumbered "gods" to the normative, Creation-old single "God" or "the Lord'' or "the Lord God"; and the closer we trace the four-term analogy, the less do the two domains branch out, modern style, into the profane and the sacred, respectively. Forcing these domains apart, as "ethnology" and "theology" for example, would compound anachronism with atomism, exactly where the Bible's drive toward wholeness militates against alien world-pictures. Not for nothing does the Aphek episode throw the alternative, canonical lexis (and grammar) of reference against the inset quote on the two fronts at once: the relatively open attack made on the Philistines' internationalized as well as pluralized "elohim" carries over to their de-Israelized label for God's chosen people. Nor does this twinning yet exhaust the intergroup opposition enacted underground in the play of the tongues. Multiple, the conceptual polarity also spreads to (or behind) objects and spheres of representation less charged than the ideonational. Such is the mistake quoted in the same breath about Exodus history ("plague in the wilderness"): the Philistines' getting things wrong makes a cognitive rather than practical or even theological difference. In turn, on a practical, "material" axisjuxtaposable with the antagonist's deficient mental equipmentwe find the weaponry denied to the "Hebrews" amid name-calling. Given that "spear [hanit *]" has no cognate in any Semitic language (Ellenbogen 1957:74), and no precedent in the Bible's own historiography, it may reflect yet another Philistine
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heterolingualism. By iconic implication, then, having the thing itself and having the word for it would go together; conversely with the have-nots. And if, as some believewith the blessing of the Table of Nations, where the Philistines originate in Egypt (Genesis 10:14)hanit * is an Egyptian loanword, then the item's reflex lengthens and deepens. A chain of foreign genetic transmission underlies the foreignism's mimetic translationthematically so, in view of the continuity pointedly drawn between Egypt and Philistia vis-à-vis Hebrewness.1 Again, to pass from material to sociopolitical culture, much the same difference (and apparently the same Egyptian provenance) lurks in the betterknown seren, "captain" or "city-ruler": the thing never institutionalized in Israel, and the word resonant, for instance, in Achish's marching orders to the "Hebrewed'' David (29:2-3, 6-7).2 Altogether, this already shows the cultures at variance along five axes, or six, if you count the (hetero)language that reflects them all in littlewhile still not counting the actual military struggle that activates, emplots, and so also repatterns the network's latent frictions in terms of the will to dominance vs. independence. Still, the twofold polarity regarding belief and affiliation lies at the heart of the network, as of the discord between the combatants. By force of joint contrast to the vocal, quoted Other, theology and nationality silently mesh for joint self-definition, the teller's and the people's, the teller's with the people's, under God. The group referred to from without as "Hebrew" is the teller's own reference group and, in the reading, ours: the collective self past (narrated) and present (narrative), the elect "Israel." Then as now, now as then, Israel (her holy Ark led into the Aphek battle by the unholy and doomed Elide priests) may always transgress, but she is "Israel" still. Her electness may redouble not lessen her punishmentsa fortiori the trials etymologized, as early as Jabbok, in the God-given agonistic namebut always within the covenanted limits, short of de-nomi-national erasure or regress. Thus the immediately framing notice that on the Ark's arrival at the camp "all Israel shouted a great shout" (4:5), or that "Israel were encamped by the fountain which is in Jezreel" (29:1), or that "there was no smith to be found in all the land of Israel" (13:19). Always agreeing with the inset usage of one group while jarring against another's, the frame clinches the two-way, mutually implicative link between naming and nationality within each of the parties to the conflict. From such linkage, an in-group/out-group polarity results all along the line of ethnocentric discourse, no matter how ethnocritical. On the one hand, the narrator thereby obliquely identifies himself as an Israelite speaking in the vernacular to fellow Israelites about their common ancestors the way they would and do speak of themselves. (E.g., Jonathan in response to the "Hebrew"-baiters at Michmash: "Arise after
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me, for the Lord has given them into the hand of Israel" [14:12].) On the other hand, due care is taken to ensure the attribution of the name "Hebrews" (prenational in time, perverted in sense, as audibly as the "slavery" evoked at Aphek) to foreign voices and minds. The Bible does not rest content here with the name's direct quoting but sharpens its foreignness by way of multiple counterpoint to Israelite usage, narratorial and figural. In this usage, conversely, the abusive enslaver does not escape abuse either, receiving a group-name very different from the one whereby he would style himself ("Be men, O Philistines"). On Israelite lips, the national enemy often figures not as ''Philistines" but as "the uncircumcised" (e.g., 14:6, 17:26, 36, 31:4): a counterblast to "Hebrews," only more overtly negative, distinctive, undeniable, binary, loaded with religious force. 3 The conflicting imagery draws yet another line on the thick map of difference, and from both sides. Against the one-sidedness of the jibe at the Philistines' genitalia in the Samson cycleoppressive but Hebrewless, like the rest of Judgesthe pattern of retaliation stands out here. Thus Saul, whose ascent to kingship provokes a chorus of Hebrewings, kills himself after the Gilboa defeat, "lest these uncircumcised come and run me through and make sport of me" (31:4), with the return hateword on his lips for goodbye. More happily, Jonathan's "Let us cross over to the garrison of these uncircumcised; maybe the Lord will work for us" (14:6) not only gets in his insult first, with God's blessing, as it were, but also puns ahead in "cross" (na'abra, then obrim, both from 'br) on what he is about to receive from the ibri-spurning Michmash garrison (14:11). And David, whose very first utterances characterize Goliath twice as "the uncircumcised Philistine" (17:26, 36), soon crowns his own anticipation of the enemy's namecalling with a king-size inverted pun. A dowry paid in two hundred "Philistine foreskins" (18:25-27, II Samuel 3:14) silently prepays as many times over (among them, an extra hundred for good bride-price measure) his single Hebrewing by the city-rulers (29:3). Two pejorative literalisms for one, then two hundred literalizations, on the way to the throne of Israel: the advance ratio befits the man who will delete the national stigma altogether from the aggressor's vocabulary. Meanwhile, his elegy on his two fallen predecessors immortalizes and takes over their quarrel in the solemn accents of poetry. "The daughters of the uncircumcised" may now "exult," the "daughters of Israel" must "weep" (II Samuel 1:19-27): the committed in-group language implies the elegist's undertaking to right the names, reverse the scenarios. To perfect the tit-for-tat symmetry, just as the Hebrewing always originates in the Philistine dramatis personae, so does the counterblow in the Israelite. While staging (and, where necessary, translating) the exchange of compliments within the inset discourse, the narrative frame adheres to the respective and respectable ethnica: the objective historian, as it were,
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will not take sides. Like the very choice to record (if only, so far, between dissentient inverted commas) the abuse heaped on one's own people, this offers another insight into the unusual ways of the Bible's ethnocentricity and another caution against approaching it with ready-made tags, schemata, and value-judgments. On either side of the quarrel, then, both reference and self-reference encode the adverse attitude to the other in the denial of his chosen terms for himself or oneself. The intercultural opposition, miniaturized in the language of warring group-images, is complete. No less so, almost as if concurrently intended and ensured, is the divorce from the Hab/piru. Everything tells against the nexus often forged by analogy, especially to the Amarna letters. Wherever this speech context, our first, occurs in the book, we readers independently know who's spoken about: from the army headed by the Ark at Aphek, through Jonathan and his armor-bearer at Michmash, to David and his men, at Aphek again, chiasm fashion. The signifieds of "Hebrews," whether collective or individual or both, fall within the native circle, as they do where the signifier changes to its honorific mate. Not that the signifier itself is either opaque or unmarked. For the name-bearers' "sachliche Identität" to those co-represented under the proper ethnicon, "Israel," dovetails with the arts of representation focused on the name-callers, particularly the mimesis and exposure of alien utterance. Either referring term comes and goes not with the referent group singled out in the world but with the reference (i.e., referencemaking or -orienting) group that produces the discourse we encounter: whether at first hand, or in inset-frame harmony or, when voiced by the other about the narrative's self, at a dissonant remove. Reconsider the translation of "Hebrews" from directly quoted outsiders; or the "Hebrews/Israel" alternation, as the tale shifts national voices, ensuring pointed and exclusive co-reference amidst value-laden difference; or the homology between God and his chosen people in foreign vs. native perspective; or the kindred intercultural disparities (in ritual, knowledge, material know-how, etc.). This set of measures blocks any attempt to locate the Hebrewed referents beyond, let alone outside Israel, by fixing the undue referring expressions inside the idiom, hence the mind, of non-Israelites, visibly peculiar, ignorant, antagonistic, stereotype-ridden from the outset. Thus marked with subjectivity throughout the first discourse-pattern (and all the rest to be considered), "the Hebrews" lead no separate objective existence in the Bible's world, as they would if meant to fill the third-party role of Hab/piru: a social group co-extensive with neither people, Israelites or Philistines. The known native identity of these agents (if not their hidden other-minded imaging) often forces even the zealous combiner to except them
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from his third-party rule. By way of synchronic partition, the imported class-name then doubles as an ethnicon in regard to them; "all" shrinks into "some." The equivalence having been "demonstrated most convincingly," one crossculturalist begins, ''we shall apply this principle to I Samuel and render the word 'ibrîm as Habiru * wherever we quote it in this book." Yet he hastens to concede that "there are, indeed, passages where the term 'ibrîm must necessarily refer to the Israelites"those passages in which the Philistines make the reference (Weingreen 1967:63). Like the reference of "Hebrews," moreover, the sense (i.e., the bundle of properties ascribed to the referents) does not at all fit the Hab/piru. And this noncoincidence dismisses in turn the alternative, "mixed" compromise solution, whereby the former are Israelites characterized by the latter's qualities. Among such qualities, for example, the "Hebrews" mentioned by the Philistines are in fact neither "uprooted" nor "detribalized" nor, with the equivocal exception of David, "renegade Israelites in Philistine paramilitary service." (Contra Rowton 1976:18-19, or the less Procrustean variant in Na'aman 1986:279ff.) The narrative frame enclosing our quotes again invariably establishes the contrary, point by point. Denied arms, "the Hebrews" include no smith "throughout all the land of Israel" (13:19); from Samuel's opening verse, tribal affiliations abound and bind, so that even David on the run cultivates his Judahite connections, as specified immediately after his "Hebrewing" (30:26-31); and as early as the Aphek battle, "the Hebrews" fight against, not for, the Philistines. Conversely, the only trait generalized by the enemy about the "Hebrews"i.e., slavery (4:9; cf. 27:12, 29:3)ill fits the Hab/piru in general. The respective portraits, even if alike stereotyped by some outsider, no more cross than the populations.4 Even the source material from the rest of the Ancient Orient bears out the thrust of the Bible's inward-focused ("ethnocentric") discourse. It nowhere records any dealings of the Philistines with the Hab/piru at any time. Nor could it possibly record such contact at the time in question, the late eleventh century B.C., when the Hab/piru had already vanished without traceeven longer on this than on that side of the Euphrates, and longest of all (since the Amarna age, over three centuries before) from the territory of Canaan. To anchor the Philistine "Hebrewing" of Israelites in "the continuing existence of non-Israelite 'apiru" (Gottwald 1979:421, or Yeivin 1970:282n. 50, Merrill 1994:247-48) is to muddle one's dates across the testimonia. The muddle gets worse the later you date the writing of Scripture: a postexilic dating, for example, would interpose a near-millennium between the "continuous" records. Inversely with the events on Scriptural record. You must antedate their chronology beyond all limits to assert that "the Amarna Habiru do not simply bear a striking resemblance to David's Hebrewsthey are David's Hebrews!" (Rohl
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1995:202). This is probably why some analogists (e.g., Lemche 1979:2) highlight the territorial, rather than the temporal, coincidence between the Amarna Hab/piru and the Samuel "Hebrews." In the nature of things, however, a meeting presupposes a spatiotemporal union; also, the former group's arena actually extended northward, toward and across the Euphrates, where the latter never show up, except as "Israelites" in David's reign and after, then as exiled "Jews." Failing any genuine convergence (co-reference, co-portraiture, even coexistence) between the terms, in either discourse-pattern or intersource history, their analogy reveals itself to be merely sound-deep; and not even that in the region's leading, SA.GAZ variant. The combiners seem oblivious to the fact that they are pursuing ghosts of homonymy in a literal (or pseudo-literary) sense. One of the analogues is not at all conjurable here except posthumously, nor importable into the world of Samuel to rub shoulders with the living, short of a miracle of resurrection. However you approach the text, or from whatever group perspective within the text, the struggle for dominance features not a nation and a motley class but two ethnoterritorial nations. Studied insults apart, the Philistines themselves know the truth, as well as the narrator facing his audience, and proclaim it in extremis. For now, consider only how they open this ideopolitical engagement by recalling with apprehension the "gods" of the "Hebrews" and will end it by doubly reversing themselves in paying tribute, not least verbal, to "the God of Israel" (4:8 vs. 5:7, 8, 10, 11, 6:3, 5, and, decades later, 27:12, 29:3). It is also false, therefore, that the Philistines have no other expression than "Hebrews" for those tenacious neighbors of theirs (as claimed by Koch 1969:44-45 and Rowton 1976:19). The I Samuel references to "Israel" just cited even disconfirm the fallback argument (in Koch, ibid.) that the "Israel"-calling Achish of Gath (29:3) is the one exception to the Philistine speech-rule. How could he be, when preceded by the afflicted Ashkelonites, the city-lords (sranim), the Ekronites, the priests and diviners? Nor, by the same token, would the Philistines (any more than the rest of the outside name-callers, much less the self-distinctive name-bearers) confuse the "Hebrews" with "the peoples known as 'apiru. . . . This in turn led the Hebrews to use some other term with which to identify themselves, the usual being, in later times at least, 'Israelites''' (Merrill 1988:38, 101-102, or Moscati 1959:89). The chorus of "Israelizers," unless their muddle comes and (in distress of all times) goes, prove otherwise. Likewise with the query why, if ibri counts as an ethnicon, the Philistines do not opt straight for "Israel" (Weippert 1967:88-89): because an ethnicon, and one amenable to pejorative twisting at that, is a far cry from a national ethnicon, which they withhold by design from the other side as long as
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humanly possible. The men of Philistia always know better as ethnolinguists than (until compelled to switch labels for the better) they pretend as antagonists and shout as polemicists. In the Bible's long history of power playinterpersonal, intertribal, international, interdoctrinaltheirs is not the first nor the last recourse to the weapon of speech, with the mind as target and arena. After the fashion of psychological warfare, they would understandably rather designate the enemy by a minimum (and, if only because outdated, manipulative) ethnic term of their own choosing than by his own ethnonational image. Choice implies meaningfulness and choice systematically polarized redoubles it: this law of discourse came into its own in Biblical literature, and no amount of obfuscation, "sachlich," verbal, perspectival, will flatten its workings into univocality. The variance amid co-reference mirrors the battle on stage in pulling toward the limit of discordance. "That the Philistines . . . are made to speak or think of 'Hebrews' rather than of 'Israel' may well be due to the fact that the story-tellers consider them as subjectsnow in a state of rebellion, it is truebut theoretically Philistine dependents" (Kraeling 1941:245, or in crossculturalism, Lewy 1957:6). The jump from "Philistines" to "story-tellers" (across the lines of plot, interest, wording, reference group) betrays a conflation of mutually hostile ethnolinguistic viewpoints: the latter undercut and reverse in the telling, never endorse, the former's polemical usage in the war told about. Geopolitics would further actuate (or, from our side, explain) such polemics. The denial of the proper name also implies the denial of the name-bearer's right to the contested territory, which he and his narrator significantly call "the land of Israel" in the same verse where the Philistines (their thought fixed on "sword or spear") deprive "the Hebrews" of iron technology (13:19). Adding word to sword in that monopolistic vein, the adversaries will no more acknowledge the land's title, and with it the title to the land, than they will the people's or the Deity's. Throughout, ibri suits their propaganda best, for it is derived or derivable from eber, "Beyond (the River)," whether the Euphrates or that of Egypt, the latter overtly invoked by them (4:8, 6:6) as the Hebrews' anterior, maybe originary habitation. Either way, they would advertise, a Beyond-the-Riverian has no business this side of the River, except on a vassal's footing. "As a child," Suetonius writes, "Augustus was called Thurinus ('the Thurian'), perhaps because his ancestors had once lived at Thurii. . . . Augustus was often sneeringly called 'the Thurian' in Antony's correspondence. Augustus answered by confessing himself puzzled: why should a name which he had outgrown be thrown in his face as an insult?" (1960:53-54). A rhetorical show of puzzlement, of course, for Antony's sneer was exactly designed to saddle the opponent with his childhood name. The throwback to it would make political capital out of its bearer's youth as
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out of its distancing force, its having been given and borne elsewhere, in memory of nonlocal origins. The wider the old name's recirculation and the less deniable the "insult," the more publicized the wonder how "the Thurian" can aspire to the leadership of Rome under an august alias. The Philistines anticipate this image-smearing tactic, on both axes, the temporal and the spatial. ("Hebrews" will be found to pile the latecoming on the yondership of the self-styled "Israel.") Yet the differences are as remarkable, and I do not mean just that in scale, between in- and inter-group fighting, between de-nominational and de-nomi-national throwback. Less obviously, the comparison brings out a variation in effect: the invidious name-calling, simple if not exactly pure, turns here double-edged, because double-voiced in the quoting. Meant to lose face in the vocal inset dominated by the alien speaker, the Hebrew name-bearers regain it from the silent but all-authoritative frame of discourse, and what's more, by virtue of that "outgrown" ethnicon itself as well as of the growth into the current and normative "Israel." No longer autonomous, like Antony at epistolary de-nomination, the reference here forms a pocket of otherness, a polyphony ` by the national literature for and/or against either side in the conflict. Among its claims to theoretical interest, this multivocality belies the prevalent apriorism that would have us associate all stereotypes with falsity. Instead, the outside "Hebrewing" turns dangerous and the Hebrews odious because the label applied (to that extent, like Antony's "Thurinus") is partly true. It spikes undisputed group differentia, misvalues and misplaces and ill-times to the limit of inversion but well short of invention. What the national history accordingly counterattacks is less the nationals' typecasting by the foreigner per se (as dogmatic theory would expect) than their miscasting on the international stage. The Philistines' allusion to nonindigenous geographical origins thus matches the Bible's own telling and etymologizing alikerecall Joshua's iterated eber-Abraham wordplay (24:2-3)yet with a diametric contrast in value judgment: between the distancing of roots for negative propaganda (earthly, you may well call it) and for evidence of heavenly election. Cited by Joshua, the latter space-value even arises in God's voice. "I took your father Abraham, from Beyond [or Across] the River" punningly Hebrews the first Hebrew, in all but collective name, via his eberite (as well as his Eberide) genesis and his heroic crossing ('br) into the unknown. So the Elector focuses, celebrates, and weights the historic rite of passage. Latent in the ethnicon ever since the proto-Israelite ancestor of the elect, this rite is reenacted by his descent group at strategic junctures, always with the thematic ('br) paronomasia: by his homecoming grandson, Jacob/Israel of Jabbok memory, then by Joshua's own contemporaries and addressees, the Jordan-crossing Sons of Israel. Later still, Jonathan anticipates by "let
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us cross" (more thematically than David himself will by his foreskin hunt) the sneer at "the Hebrews" as mousy cave dwellers: his prophylactic pun shows him conscious and worthy of the tradition. From Abraham onward, accordingly, "Hebrew" twins divergent groupments, with etymologies of origin so compounded in and between them that they amount to polar nomi-narratives. The multiple underground etymology counters the ill-disposed Cis-Euphratensian (e.g., Philistine) usage: the subjective mimetic inset pulls the judgment on the name-bearers one way, the authoritative frame another, and the polarity of the valuations encapsulates the intercultural conflict within a single word. Leading a double textual existenceovert in power play, while at the same time hidden in wordplayHebrewness grows doubly coded, doubly loaded, doubly nomi-narrativized, between surface and depth, original utterance and artful translation, error and God's truth, "them" outsiders (or their mimickers) and "us" frame-sharers. 5 The referring expression so doubled or divided between all these extremes communicates a bivalent attitude toward the referent, nothing like the mixed feelings of ambivalence. These are always evocable, as at Aphek, yet contingently and additionally, by way of ethnocriticism amid ethnocentricity, not through the forked reference itself. Diachronically, further, the polarity looks back to a peripety whereby the original word-portrait cum nomi-narrative miniaturing the group's electedness has veered round in adverse outside translation. Along this axis, the invertedcommas metaphor for quoting actualizes itself anew: the illtranslation enclosed between them gets not simply inverted but reinverted into propriety in the frame's vernacular back-translation. The double coding of "Hebrew" suggests an agonistic intergroup narrative fuller, longer, and more eventful than any random or timeless conflict of meanings, judgments, origins attributed in nomination. For all these describe a plot themselves here, one that twists between the nomi-narratives. What's more, both the (synchronic) polarity and the (diachronic, indeed peripeteic) plot thicken after Genesis, certainly by the time of Samuel: from de-nomination to de-nomi-nation. In the meantime, the old group-name imposed from without has been outgrown altogether: Israeliteness, though more of a latecomer than Hebrewness, did arise in Exodus, then won its liberty through the exodus, then reclaimed and gave its name to the homeland bestowed upon the first Crosser, the one-time "land of the Hebrews." So the miniaturized conflict between self-understanding and outside image extends to a word pair. By this fresh ethnolinguistic turn, one nomi-narrative grows evolutionary, the other all the more devolutionary. Under the kingship, the promise and process of election bundled into Eber/eber/'br/Hebrew, always within the silent narrative counterdiscourse, have now long fulfilled themselves in the glory of "Israel"likewise merging eponymy with toponymy,
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but for a change in open, univalent, nationwide reference. Demonstrably aware of the end product, if only of the adversary's proper name and nationhood, the Philistines yet find amnesia more convenient, the Genesis-old stereotype more expedient. The self-appointed master race's purely ethnic nomination of the "slaves" therefore amounts to an act of denationalizing: the will to dominate urges de-nomi-nation backed up by the reminder (if not the stick) of expatriation. As with the Philistines in Samuel, so much earlier with the Egyptians in Genesis and Exodus. Across the distances of time, text, place, nationality, language, a multifold continuity runs between the two groups playing, in word and deed, the foreign antagonist to Israel. The widespread tendency to bunch and divide occurrences of Hebrewness mechanically, by surface (or, worse, source) location instead of contextual workings, proves ill-conceived at once. The Hebrewgram repatterns the given sequence of "Hebrews" according to ethnopoetic criteria, now adding, now opposing functional to sequential design, here marking off one item from the next in line along the grand chronology, there associating like with nonadjacent like. So, for example, our first discourse-pattern is common and peculiar to the two apparently unrelated "Hebrew" junctures in question. Both exhibit privileged outsiders in speech, direct quoting, latent translational mimesis, reversal of fortune, and all: the keyword occurs within the same configuration of features, none automatic. On top of all this, at a level accessible to everybody, virtually "foolproof," the recurrence of the discourse-pattern is enacted in the world itself. The narrative elegantly overleaps the wall thrown up by episodic criticism between the Genesis and/or Exodus and the Samuel clusters. The way to continuity goes through memory, the Bible's, the reader's, the dramatis personae's own. If versed in how Scripture works with genealogy, you are sure to remember (or look up) the Table-old Hamite fellowship of the two outgroups: actually, the "Philistines" derive from "Egypt" (Genesis 10:13-14). Their immediate pairing as Hebrew-callers, though, does not turn on recall of this order but on events more easily spannable, because later and foregrounded. Indeed, memory enjoying the power to range freely in time and space, the narrator has his agents execute the jump for our benefit: the inter-textual allusion grows vocal, with a self-conscious twist. For no sooner have the Philistines opened their lips than they bracket themselves with their fellow antagonists, in fearful long-distance retrospect on the plagues inflicted on Egypt by the mighty "gods" of "the Hebrews." And so history (international, interdoctrinal, interlingual) will repeat itself to the end of this chapter in the Bible's historiography. According to the discourse, what the latest enemy inherited from the Egyptians is not the title to sovereignty
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over Canaanas an intersource analysis might gather, against the Bible's polemic thrustbut the old struggle with the collective hero, down to niceties of aggressive usage. Moreover, what recurs across books, casts, spacetimes, discords, is not just the (quoted) form of reference within the alien world but its functions within the (quoting) Biblical text as well. The multipurpose use of the quotee's alterity, which we have glimpsed in the reproductive and attributive forms of translation, then in the reflexes of the divinity concepts, manifests itself anew. Among those functions, the rendering and counterpointing of viewpoints at group portraiture invariably operates, whether as a mimetic ("translational") end in itself or also as a means to additional effects, including plot dynamics. For such dynamics, consider how the Philistines screw up their courage at the thought of becoming "slaves to the Hebrews," or jealously guard in their hands the monopoly on smitheries "lest the Hebrews" should arm themselves, or veto the presence of "those Hebrews" amidst the army mobilized against their countrymen. Throughout, the reference to "Hebrew" is not only delineative and evaluative, marking by opposition to "Israel'' the referent's alleged ethnos (short of nationhood), outlandership (by geographical etymology), and outsidership generally, while exposing the reference-maker's own foreignness of idiom and thought. The statics of contrast also develop the conflict in progress. The iterated reference serves as a shorthand for the speaker's motive, especially fear, prompting action by implicit yet unmistakable appeal to the specifics of otherness, and hence to the threat, presented by the referent. So all these plot chains go from fearful cause, lurking in the Philistine group discourse, to some open preemptive effectthe prevention of enslavement, armament, betrayal by the so-called Hebrews. In the mouth of Egyptians, we find the gentilic usually charged with the same descriptive-evaluative load and the same fearful attitude, which in turn produces the same effect on a nationwide scale. "Lest [pen] they multiply" rhymes with "Lest [pen] the Hebrews make sword or spear," and the bid for prevention duly ensues, heralded by the thematic codename. "When you midwife the Hebrewesses," Pharaoh orders Shiphrah and Puah, "if it is a boy, you shall kill him, and if it is a girl, she shall live" (Exodus 1:16). But while the Philistine recourse to the codename implies and elicits their fear, the Egyptian use also harps on racial aversion or even hate; and the outcome correspondingly stretches from preventive to offensive action against the alien. Either emotion targeted on the Hebrews already goes to unsettle the automatic linkage of sentiment to stereotype often made nowadays under psychoanalytic auspices. According to Gilman's well-known theoryon whose (stereo)typicality more laterthe Self threatened by disintegration
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projects onto the Other images of the things feared or glorified (1990:15). But here, obviously enough, the "self" is the state incarnate, the "threat" (if any) demographic cum geopolitical, hence exterior rather than psychic, and the "image" anything but glorifying, less and less so in fact as it draws nearer to ''Hebrews." Even regarding the opposite, manifested ("lest") emotion, the king's craftiness ("let us deal shrewdly with him") would suggest that he plays on the Egyptians' fear rather than projects his own on the Others and that his genocide never betrays a death wish, royal or national. Similarly with the varieties and dynamics of collective animosity. "A defensive hatred, the cult of origins easily backslides to a persecuting hatred" (Kristeva 1993:3): the generalization is too mild for the Egyptian way with the Hebrews, either as individual group members or as a body. Here the two adverse feelings compose another mass psychology, an uglier and knottier interplay, equally generalizable. A defensive exigency of sorts, if only self-created or fancied, may animate the initiator of persecutionlest the aliens get out of hand, lest the bondman tell the truth about his wanton mistress. Even then, however, the preemptive strike urged in the address counts on the deep-set indigenous lust for persecuting the target because of his antecedents. Observe how, with a shrewdness akin to the Pharaonic in Exodus, name-calling barbs the charge of rape pressed against Joseph by his would-be seductress. "He has brought us a Hebrew man to play games with us" and "There came in to me the Hebrew slave that thou hast brought us to play games with me" (Genesis 39:14, 17): so Potiphar's wife complains to her household and to her husband respectively. Afraid of the true story coming to light, she initiates an attack by switching round the parts of victim vs. victimizer and sustains it by modifying the latter's image from one telling to another. Of the two group features (class and origin) joined in the process of image-making, her reference to Joseph's social status changes to suit her audience: she first calls him "a man" when addressing and enlisting "the men of her house," then "a slave" to her husband's face, both in the interests of rhetorical effect. Clearly, or so she hopes, the servants would be most outraged at the thought of the alleged criminal's equality to them; the master, at the reminder of his inferiority and effrontery. But, whatever the sociocultural variations played by the woman, the intergroup sting attaching to "Hebrew" remains invariant as a weapon against Joseph, part of a divide-and-conquer rhetoric. Her insistence on his origin would trigger a stock response by way of emotive, invidious opposition to the common denominator of non- or rather anti-Hebrewness among the rest of the dramatis personae. Anti-Hebrewness, I say, because ethnic otherness again goes with a cultural divide, akin (increasingly so, as the Egyptian tale unrolls) to that between polytheism and monotheism in I Samuel. The narrative has already
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glanced at this juncture of differentials through two accounts of Joseph's footing in Potiphar's house: He left all that he had in Joseph's hand and, with him there, did not concern himself with anything but the bread which he ate. (39:6) He said to his master's wife, Behold, with me here, my master does not concern himself with anything in the house, and all he has he has put in my hand; he is not greater in this house than I am, and he has kept back nothing from me except thyself, because thou art his wife. (39:8-9) Even at the best of times and under the best of masters, he has no access to "the bread"; nor will his rise to viceregal authority (and, ironically, providership, indeed "bread"-mastership) have the least effect on the taboo against his race: his own dinner guests will not "eat bread with the Hebrews, for that is an abomination to Egypt'' (43:32). The alien's power ends where indigenous apartheid begins. And his own replacement of the narrator's "bread" by "wife" as the dividing line implies in advance the all-Egyptian nexus on which his false accuser now trades: the continuity between dietary and sexual taboo, a two-in-one abomination (abomi-nation, from Exodus onward). So it is not the "defense" or "cult" of one's own originsno more visible in Biblical Egypt than in Philistiabut the abhorrence of the other's that generates "persecuting hatred." As in the Philistine smear campaign, further, that origin evoked by the designation would be multiply removed from the locals. Why should the ill-disposed evoker twice insist on the rapist's having been "brought us," if not to elicit a sense of distance, of his outlandership as well as outsidership generally? In this imaging as a malevolent import, the woman only spells out, or activates and reloads for her purposes, the etymology latent in his ethnicon. The typical adverse nomi-narrative ensues. Geographically, she would suggest, an ibri belongs not in a noble Egyptian house but across the Riverof Egypt (today's Wadi El-Arish), if not of Mesopotamiain what Joseph himself calls "the land of the Hebrews" (40:15). Nor is he to the interlocutors a mere generic "alien" or outlander, the Bible's "nokhri" or ger, but a member of a specific foreign group, "Hebrew," the only one pitted against the Egyptians by name in early canonical history (as it will be against the Philistines in Samuel). 6 Whether the judgments coexist in synchronic forkedness or exhibit a reversal in diachrony, such bi-valence has its parallels throughout the world's later annals of naming. "Hun" is thus a byword for savagery and predatoriness, of the kind unleashed on Europe by the nomadic horde under Attila: in English the name specifically designates the German as aggressor. From
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historical to generic to nation-specific usage, the West's collective memory has fixed the odium of the referent. But the indigenous tradition remembers and judges otherwise. "While the British in World War I used the term 'Hun' in the pejorative sense, in my native Hungary schoolchildren were taught to look up to 'our glorious Hun forefathers' with patriotic pride . . . and Attila is still a popular first name" (Koestler 1978:23). The Hun-gram's analogy to "Hebrews" even outreaches that presented by ''Thurinus" for Augustus, where an originally neutral, rather than favorable, charge turns negative in the opponent's circle. However, one difference persistsbetween interlocked textual levels and independent zones of communication, between quoted and straight reference. Scripture's judgments of the "Hebrew" referent polarize within a unitary polyphonic discourse, their value (in every sense) correlative with their voice: determined not only by the reference group at talk but also by the frame/inset hierarchy that exposes and subordinates the alien's licensed name-calling to native punning. In several ways, further, the translated onslaught via name-calling may well reflect known Egyptian practices in connection with low or undesirable elements. The practices rest on an extreme logic of iconism, whereby the nexus between signifier and signified carries over to the world of things itself: verbal form affects as well as denotes life, involves making rather than simply meaning by way of mirroring. To the Egyptian mind, generally, "word and image were realities, not just symbols" and "the name, even more than the image, was fully identical with the named." This identification went so far that "since early times hieroglyphs representing living, and especially dangerous, beings appear mutilated or cut in two" (Barb 1971:155-57, cf. Assmann 1994). Again, criminals were liable to forfeit their names altogether or to have them so deformed as to assume an infamous character (Vergote 1959:142). The two routes to de-nomination converge on Joseph's treatment. In neither incriminating speech does the woman mention his personal name. (Nor will anyone else: the noble fellow prisoner, e.g., ultimately harks back to the dream interpreter as "a Hebrew boy" [41:12], until Pharaoh renames him during the investiture with high office [41:45], suiting verbal to worldly Egyptian nomination. In Hebrewness, they all treat him as if he issued from one of the oddest neighboring sand-belt tribes described by Herodotus. "Atarantes is the collective namebut individually they have none" [1955:304].) As to Joseph's group name, though the ibri form seems to have been preserved, she yet throws it into deformity by inverting the evaluative load of its 'br/eber origin: from Abrahamic rite-of-passage merit to malevolent outlandership. Of course, herself an outsider to the Bible, Mrs. Potiphar need not be aware of the ethnicon's original value, hence of its inversion as such. The Egyptian record, however, goes to underline her awareness of the geo-
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graphical aspect and effect of her name-callings. Thus "the common Egyptian interest in the country of origin of a slave, and their practice of appending a gentilic to a slave's name" (Redford 1970:202): with the "name" elided, because of the "slave's'' alleged criminality, what the inset auditors (the household, then the husband) encounter is only "a gentilic" pointing to a foreign "country of origin." Moreover, the harping on the alien's yondermanship accords with some of the Egyptians' oldest referring terms for the wild Asiatic of Canaan, including one that articulates the idea of habitation Beyond/Across latent in ibri. "Since they come from the north, 'northerners' was an obvious appellative; but because they lived beyond the Sinai [and, we might add, the River of Egypt], 'those-who-areacross-the-sand' also suggested itself" (Redford 1992:32; see, e.g., the historical text in Pritchard 1969:227-28). So, against what anti-representational theory would lead you to expect, the very adverse stereotyping of the hero proves nothing like false: nothing, that is, like the selfsame adversary's sheer invention of what happened between them. Rather, it compares in truth-value as well as truth-claim with the far simpler word-portrait "the uncircumcised" that the Israelites themselves will direct at the Philistine oppressor, to much less effect. True or half-true in the world shaped by the national literary we-culture, the "Hebrew" de-nomination also fits the real life of the heteroculture at image-making. The exterior data confirm even the maligner's appeal to the geographical barrier. Her audience may change, and with it her social ranking of the accused, yet the gentilic reflects and unleashes their worst collective instincts: the fabricated sex offense, however explosive, is only the trigger or detonator for pent-up group animosities. Accordingly, the (translating) frame and the (translated) inset aim to wield the same weapon to the same resultlanding Joseph in Hebrew-specific troublefrom their opposed motives and perspectives on Hebrewness. The narrator's adherence as well as the woman's original recourse to the loaded expression again fulfil a plot role, in using xenophobia to turn round the course of events. As time flows on, moreover, the Egyptian name-callers add insult to injury: the negative twist given to the Genesisold "Hebrews" within the quoted discourse redoubles its force through the withholding of the canonical and allpositive "Israel." When this first occurred, in Exodus 1:15ff., the target might well have wondered, with the "Thurinus-ed" Augustus: "why should a name which he had outgrown be thrown in his face as an insult?" And he could infer the answer, as we, his presumed fellow nationals do, from the circumstances. Human nature being what it is, an object of fear and/or hate increasingly comes in not only for sociopolitical oppression, persecution, discrimination, but also for mental demotion on the oppressor's part. To round out, keep up, often also give color to the victimization, the victim must suffer downgrading, if possible below the
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threshold of humanity and even in his own eyes. Victimage becomes largely a matter of image and self-image. (Victimage makes atrocious etymology but good cultural psychology.) By this mechanism, all too well-known from history, Jewish and otherwise, either group of foreigners would deny the Israelites their proper, God-given and Godbearing name along with their land and freedom, if not their very right to exist. Polar Cultures in Contact, Nations in Total Conflict: An Interim Outline In the Egyptian affair, the language of foreign quotation indicates precisely how all these denials come together on a national scale. Also processually, because the denials accumulate (indeed, like the victims, multiply) over the centuries that separate the migration in Genesis from the oppression in Exodus, the clan from the people, as though growth in reality engenders countergrowth in the jealous beholder's eye. Distributed along the grand chronology, yet interlinked and followable below, the occurrences of the codename tell in shorthand a running story of phylogenesis under attack (hitherto on de-nominational, henceforth on de-nomi-national trial) that will plot its way as far as the Jeremiah closure. Not for nothing does the Potiphar affair focus an interpersonal triangle, domestic in everything but the victim's outlandership. The international trials still lie ahead: the continuity between the Genesis and the Samuel "Hebrewing" must not obscure the intermediate Exodus watershed. The dynamics of history, with its ever-widening elect circle, makes a change in the operations of the Hebrewgram, from bad to worse. Short of prescience, Potiphar's wife could not advert or shift to Joseph's "Israeliteness" even in theoryas the Exodus Pharaoh and the postExodus Philistines always can and at times dosince this nomination arises only with the nation. She might conceivably (and, to be sure, counterproductively) "Israelize'' him by way of patronymic, never of gentilic. Whatever Joseph's early miseries, therefore, the "Hebrewing" that attends, reflects, even aggravates them does not yet deprive him of any proper group-name since he has none, or none other, least of all an ethnonational counterpart to, say, "Egyptian." This absence of a national ethnicon has its motivation in the thematic lateness of Israel's emergencea posteriority objective and creditable, if troublesome, to the chosenrather than in any ill will subjectively harbored by the diselect nations and nationals in Genesis. Foreign-injected odium aside, Joseph is Hebrew, like his grandfather, "Abram the Hebrew" before him: for better (descent from Eber, grandson cum heir cum equal of Noah's blessed son) or, temporarily and mundanely, for worse (uprooting, via crossing, 'br, on God's orders from Beyond, me'eber, the Euphrates River).
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But outsiders (whether his female tormentor or the oblivious minister or, less understandably, traditional scholarship) will read otherwise, both underreading and counterreading the etymology from their own viewpoint. They fail to recognize the two (with the Crosser's badge, three) derivations as marks of divine election: the Eberide origin presumably lies outside their ken, a fortiori their value system, while the eberiteness gets twisted against Joseph in vict-image. Among all the frame/inset dissonances regarding Hebrewness in translation, the clash suggested between the proper and the improper reading of (below, into) the ethnicon goes deepest, existentially, psychologically, thematically, as well as literally. (Compare, say, the mistake about the plagues "in the wilderness.") Qua dramatic underreaders and counterreaders, the name-callers read the name-bearers out of the very determinants of human existence together with the foundations of the Promise: heredity and home, time and space, indeed life-space, under God. Never mind the hereditary heroism, retested at key junctures, of crossing into an unknown (to Abraham, even unnamed) homeland and an unmatched faith. It is because the group reference has come to circulate among adverse neighboring nations with its values erased or inverted that the referent group avoid it themselves, except for selfdevaluation (e.g., Joseph's "land of the Hebrews") in a "mimetic'' international perspective. Become a travesty and a target as well as a stereotype, it would hardly appeal to them. Yet the impropriety of the foreigners' speech and thought lies at the time, as it does throughout the patriarchal era, in the context of name-calling (where outside usage infects the very derivation) rather than in the name itself. And even the foreignized name, precisely because the addressors themselves know it to be such, manifests a high contextsensitivity. It sinks underground, in the characters' discourse as well as the (hi)storyteller's, once Joseph rises to the top, then appears to have grown obsolete with the clan's rise to nationhood under a later Pharaoh. He himself is the first to register the twofold, word/world development: He said to his people, Behold, the people of the sons of Israel is too numerous and too mighty for us. Come, let us deal shrewdly with him, lest he multiply . . . (Exodus 1:8-10) The somewhat awkward (presumably because newly coined) expression "the people of the sons of Israel" reveals that, though this Pharaoh "does not know Joseph," he does (as the Philistines will) know "Israel," or at least knows Israel's "sons" to have become a "people," only too much so. In effect, the Bible forestalls here the modern theory, repugnant to it anyway and generally disputable, that nationalism invents nations where they do not exist (e.g., Gellner 1964:168). Far from being an Israelite
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nationalist, the speaker picked by the tale to report on the in-group's developmentcatching up with the old-timers of the Table at long lastwould want to brush aside its emergent nationhood as an invention. Yet he cannot gainsay the ungainsayable, so to speak, if only with a view to impressing it on his own circle and assailing it after the event. By an astute twist given to the subjective/objective antithesis, it is the very hostility of the witness (not, as usual, his innate, e.g., heavenly, trustiness) that promotes the frame's rhetoric of authenticity. Admitted by him, the nationhood is as real as it is late. Hence Pharaoh's recourse to an overdetermined, or overcoded, title. The otherwise superfluous "people [am]" equals, and so rivals, "his people [ammo]" earlier in the verse; the blood-ties already implicit in am-hood then come to the surface in ''sons," whose father ensues in "Israel"; the perfect linguistic equivalence of these "sons of Israel" and the emigrant "sons of Israel" listed in verse 1, now all deceased, 7 underlines the twinning of lineal with ethnic sonhood, as of ancestry with eponymy, continuity with major development; and the following reference to this entity in the singular crowns its integrity. A well-wisher could hardly improve on the ethnicon heralded by the Pharaonic agitator. But once he embarks on a policy of enslavement, then of secret and finally open genocide, he would turn (or, recalling Genesis, turn back) those Israelites into "Hebrews" (1:15ff.). Like the Philistines, then, the Egyptians know better than they see fit to image, or re-image, the ethnonational enemy. We even know that they know from the king's own mouth as he first opens it, not in retrospect alone, and before the storyteller himself has used the new-fledged ethnicon. Pharaoh's opening utterance, however, betrays no equivalent to, say, the polytheism mimed in the Philistines', hence no compound friction. Does this for once restrict the imagemaker's outlook and hostility, along with the future struggle, to the international arena, as distinct from the intercultural? Not at all, and even less so, if anything, than in the replay of the intergroup drama on the soil of the promised land. As he launches the campaign against the outsize Other in their midst, the king's are pragmatic, rather than ideological, priorities. Yet the first issue in order of urgency ("too numerous and mighty for us") does not so much reflect as presuppose the foremost in weight. Later disclosures and developments, to be traced in close reference to the Hebrewgram, will establish the matter beyond doubt. Since the relations plotted between these variables (ethnicity, and culture, identity born and made, national and cultural strife) within Scripture's discourse universe lie at the core of my argument, however, a few preliminary generalities about their most significant and explosive intersection will be in order now. All along the line here, on every possible level of group self-definition, the Chosen encounters the antitype: contact
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must sooner or later generate conflict, resolvable in the same way as it erupted and escalated, by force alone. The antitype, with his lust for monopoly, understands no other language. By a discourse principle already seen in action, utterance may always veil as well as flaunt awareness. The Bible's outsiders share this speech/thought complexity with the rest of the dramatis personae: they know better than they speak, speak less, more or other than they know, notably in contact with the adjoining Other. (Pushed to the limit, this gap between sound and sense, appearance and reality, yields the kind of double talk that I analyzed elsewhere [Sternberg 1991] with respect to a third thematic antagonist: the Canaanites, or "Hittites," blandly imposing on the outlander Abraham their terms for the sale of the Machpelah cave.) Indeed, Egypt's tacit knowledge of the Goshen population exceeds by far what is registered, or denied for state propaganda, in the opening shift of names to, then from, "Israel." Like Scripture's Philistines, emigrants bent on hegemony, amateur historians of the region, city dwellers, seren-led, metal workers, hanit * importers, elohim pluralizers, Dagon worshippers, believers in divination, loose livers, uncircumcised, the Egyptians too know the pole of diametric otherness (their mirror image or antitype) when they see it, a fortiori when they meet it with unparalleled contempt and violence. The two entities about to join battle are kept asunder by a cultural gulf older and wider than the difference in national interest that Pharaoh singles out for his own reasons. Pharaoh's understanding of the opposition, though more extensive than he now manifests, remains far from perfect, of course, due to genuine or studied ignorance of details beneath his notice. Yet any holes left in his, and Egypt's, polarizing of the two cultures are repaired for our benefit, often well in advance of the decisive showdown with the "Hebrews." Take the ethnic difference, so important to the race-conscious Egyptians themselves and apparently furthest removed from "culture," because given in "nature." We find this line drawn as early as the Table of Nations, yet in ideological (hence, needless to say, cultural) boldface, motivated by the plot and eternalized on high authority. According to the grim narrative interposed between Flood and Table, (18) The sons of Noah who came out of the Ark were Shem, Ham, and Japheth, and Ham was the father of Canaan. (19) These three were the sons of Noah, and from these the whole earth spread out. (20) Noah . . . planted a vineyard, (21) and he drank of the wine and became intoxicated and lay uncovered inside his tent. (22) Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and he told his two brothers outside. (23) Then Shem and Japheth took
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a garment, laid it upon both their shoulders, and walked backward and covered their father's nakedness, with their faces backward, and their father's nakedness they did not see. (24) Noah awoke from his wine and knew what his youngest son had done to him. (25) And he said, Cursed be Canaan, a slave of slaves shall he be to his brothers. (26) And he said, Blessed be the Lord, the God of Shem, and let Canaan be a slave to him. (27) May God enlarge Japheth and may he dwell in the tents of Shem, and let Canaan be a slave to him. (Genesis 9:18-27) Where national literatures will so often exalt and hearten their reference group through myths of a Golden Age centered in unique culture heroes, the Bible moves from a near-universal punitive Deluge to a two-edged Primeval Scene. Shemite vs. Hamite, as laid down by the common ancestor, Noah, occupy with reason the poles of elect vs. diselect, blessed vs. cursed. The former's eponym took the lead in covering what the latter's had shockingly (therefore unmentionably) uncovered: the nakedness of the father, theirs and postdiluvian humanity's as a whole. Retribution follows hard upon the discovery, opposing ("enslaving") the unfilial to the filial, evil-doing to righteous stock and, above all, to those blessed, prophetically, in the name of "the Lord" as well as the universal ''God." Split by the Father himself, urged on the Creator of mankind in his own image, picked up by the Table in implicit classificatory fulfillment, the retribution brings the sons under the prediluvian, Adam-old law of divergence, namely: the election of the fittest offspring by "cultural" rather than "natural" standards. Parent/child filiation is one thing, a matter of birth if not (as with the unfilial Ham) an accident of blood; paterfamilias/inheritor descent is another, 8 contingent on choice, human (e.g., Shem's option for the right act) and superhuman, a choice always (at)tested in the living, then re(at)testable at the next crossroads. To qualify for the legacy of Noah, the Noahide's biology and ideology must join recommendations: neither attribute, however indispensable, will suffice, only the bio-ideological composite whole, so to speak. Within the Bible's ethnography, the protoethnic Shem/Ham divide thus assumes the force, or cutting edge, of a heaven-based ethnocentric dichotomy (one correspondent to Egypt's own, only with the positive and negative values reversed, yet also without ever immunizing the former against judgment by performance. Quite the contrary.). Marked forever by appeal to election, the dividing line further thickens and hardens in time, since it runs unbroken across all developments, e.g., from filial and familial ("Noachic") to remoter fraternal ("Noahide") ordeals, from persons to peoples, from lives to lifestyles, from unilingualism to Babel, hence to group portraiture in the making and (at)testing rather
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than in ancestral foreshortening and foretelling. The typological predictions from biology combined with ideology ("bio-ideology") find their validation in history. Along it, humanity's Primeval Scene is reenacted at key junctures, over and over again, especially in the movement from patriarchal to national contacts with the opposite, Hamite (10:6) lineage group of Egypt. The Genesis-to-Exodus narrative unfolds, before and during the ultimate outbreak of hostilities, a whole set of culture-marked polarities in battle array. The chief parameters will be taken up below, with due elaboration, as they come into the network and narrative of Hebrewness. But to give a sense of their actual unfolding, distributed and timed and reinvoked in casual guise, let me quickly outline them in order of emergence: First morality, notably sexual, as though to resume, update, and generalize the tale of Noahide ethnic origins. The resumption begins with none other than the first Hebrew on record, then passes through the second, then widens to cover the Hebrewed Israelites: they all take over from the chosen of old (the victimized Noah, the blessed Shem, as well as the eponymous Eber), the Egyptians from the cursed victimizer. The Egyptians' reputation for sexual violence actually precedes their appearance on stage: it is the first thing we hear about them, the first Ham-like portraiture, the topic of the first utterance of the first Hebrew, just arrived from across the Euphrates, Shem-land. The worldwide notoriety proves to be well earned. Abra(ha)m, on the way to Egypt in the company of the attractive Sarah, fears for his life and saves himself by deception (Genesis 12:10-20), as will the midwives in rescuing the newborn boys from infanticide (Exodus 1:15-21; note how the king's order to "look [see] upon the obna'yim"involving, perhaps even denoting the genitals of the newbornechoes Ham's outrage; conversely, the midwives having been ordered to see, ure'iten, they rather "fear God," wa'tirena, and enjoy his blessing, as Shem did). In either era, moreover, the lethal discrimination by and for sex implicates everyone. The patriarch expects trouble from "the Egyptians" but loses his wife to Pharaoh through the agency of local talent spotters; the oppressionlaunching Pharaoh, having been outmaneuvered by the midwives, entrusts the infanticide to his people, on top of all earlier anti-Hebrew complicities. The equivocators under constraint, male and female, still escape any direct harm, at least physical. Among the less fortunate, were it not for God's infection of Pharaoh, Sarah would never leave the harem to become a matriarch; and Joseph almost pays with his head for resisting adultery, then sexual assault, behind his master's back. Yet even he gets off more lightly (less Noachically, so to speak) than his analogue in the indigenous "Story of Two Brothers," where the younger's ordeal begins with resistance to incest, escalates into attempted fratricide, and climaxes in sexual mu-
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tilation (see text in Pritchard 1969:23-25, or Simpson 1973:95-98). Even the troping of the projected incest tings a bell. "You are like a mother to me," the youth implores his brother's shameless wife, "and your husband is like a father": in Biblical ears, this figuration would orchestrate the echoes to the Primeval Scene. And given the evidence of interliterary traffic, maybe it did. Likewise, in "The Contest of Horus and Seth," with the goddess Hathor exposing herself before her father Re (Pritchard 1969:15, Simpson 1973:112). Whether or not the Bible (or its original audience) was familiar with such tales, whether or not it alludes to their self-incriminating testimony, or to known practices (notably incest by sibling union) 9 in Pharaonic life itself, it enacts a memento at every key intersection with Hebrewness: patriarchal, then Josephic, then national sex-victimage, generally attended by the vict-image. What with the co-recurrent offenses against hospitality, Egypt thus emulates (in the telling, both anticipates and outdoes) Sodom, as befits their common descent from Ham.10 With a shift from victim to victimizer, moreover, Genesis unrolls a threefold (Egyptian-Canaanite-Philistine) cycle of sex crime punished by God with something like the Young Brother's emasculation in the above tale, namely, impotence. Explicit in Philistia (20:17-18) and crying out for extension to its obvious analogue in Egypt (12:17), the same punishment may also befall the intermediate offenderthe Sodomites eager to commit homosexual gang rape on Lot's disguised angelic visitors. By a retributive pun that echoes back all the way to their forefather, who "saw" the nakedness of his father, the gang struck blind at the door (19:11) would then find it impossible to see anyone's nakedness, as their fellow Hamite Abimelech will before long and Pharaoh, implicitly, already did. Such "blinding" would in turn smuggle yet another meaning into the generalization voiced by Lot's own daughter, as a prelude to incest in the cave: "There is no man on earth to come in to us after the manner of all the earth" (19:31). And, it so happens, Oedipus's self-blinding in self-judgment redeploys much the same figure to realign Japheth ("Yavan") with Shem/Eber/Israel against Hamite immorality. Even by reference to the law of nature, or of the nationsaptly called by the Rabbis "Noahide"nothing would appear sacred in Egypt, then, nobody secure, least of all the alien. The distributed acts of violence against the other's life, freedom, sexuality, reputation, allegiance, guesthood, etc., range so widely as to unfold and compose an inverted ethics. No amount of apologetics by Nilotic partisans, or of sheer poor reading, will invert the inversion ("antitypicality") back into rightness and concord. For instance, one Egyptologist in search of intergroup harmony argues from Joseph's "ability to communicate with the Egyptians on moral issues by appealing to the universal sense of right and wrong. Both he and the Egyptians speak of 'god'" (Redford 1970:247; more sweepingly yet, Wester-
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mann 1987:29). A funny argument, since the hero's one invocation of both morality and the Deity (addressed to Potiphar's wife, "How can I do this great wickedness and sin against God?" [39:9]) falls on deaf ears. So will (or, precisely but for God, would) the outcry of his fellow Hebrews in genocidal bondage. To say the least, "the piety of the Egyptians, regarded by Herodotus [II.37] as the most religious of men, does not seem to have impressed Israel's wise men" (Montet 1968:105). The locals may speak of God, whenever it suits their interests (41:38-40); 11 but Joseph would appear the only person in the land, man or woman, who "fears God" (42:18), in the ethical, universalist, as well as the properly religious sense. And the expression setting him apart from the environment rings all the louder, or lonelier, considering that he speaks it to his brothers in his Egyptian voice. Otherwise, as the first Hebrew characterized the sister land, Philistia, "there is no fear of God in this place" (20:11); and with regard to Egypt, I would stress, the generalization proves even literally true. According to an inventory of loanwords, the Egyptian for "fear of god" was not only borrowed from the Israelites but occurs as late as the fourth century B.C., on a unique tomb inscription (Williams 1971:265). The student of (inter) language history would probably maintain that the Egyptian-speaking Joseph (or the Genesis quoter behind him) committed an anachronism; the poetic analyst, that Joseph coined ("calqued," translated) the phrase impromptu from his native tongue, in addressing like-minded natives, likewise Hebrewed Jacobites. Regarding the moral sense among the Egyptian group, however, the two explanations both dovetail and come to the same thing: a marked ideo-lexical absence, a culturewide blank. (In both the direction and the sphere of late intergroup transfer, this word/thing genesis nicely contrasts with that of the weapon hanit*: from Egypt or Philistia to Israel, and on culture's material rather than moral axis.) That the lines of genealogy, ethics, and language should run together on either side is essentially predictable from the ordering of primeval history. After the Flood, the tale of Noah's drunkenness leads to the Table, which divides the Noahide world by its languages, among other criteria, and in turn modulates into the Babel narrative (9:18-11:9). Therefore, if patriarchal history begins by resuming and specifying the Shem/Ham opposition on the axis of morality, you can expect the third differential to follow. Next, indeed, language becomes visible as another criterial group-feature, plotted into divisiveness on stage and hammered home by way of "translational attribution": Joseph's brothers communicate with the locals through an interpreter (42:23). Even one who might or does overlook the flanking heterolingual reflexes"Pharaoh" or "Hebrew" or "fear of God," analogous to Samuel's seren or hanit*would note the barrier erected by the metalingual comment; and if he thereupon looks no deeper, he has
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only himself to blame. The distinction again persists between the lines, the text's and the arena's; nor does it vanish, but rather thickens, at junctures where the emigrants can do their own interpreting (e.g., Joseph in Genesis, Miriam and Moses in Exodus). The narrator must then still play the translator for us, implied Egyptianless (if not generally unilingual) readers, their offspring, his co-nationals and audience, whenever he quotes the Egyptians at discourse, public or interior, held among themselves or addressed to the Hebrew sojourners. In Egypt, the Psalmist reminisces, "I heard a tongue unknown to me" (81:6); and we, too, come to "hear" it, via our own, as intelligible speech. The teller also needs to perform for us much the same operation on ancestral code-switching: to retranslate into the vernacular of the narrative frame whatever his heroes and heroines translated into Egyptian (not least the ethnicon whereby they define themselves) within their inset encounters with the local population, the Noachic "slave" turned master race. Under the constraint of their own bilingualism, moreover, those heroes are themselves liable to fall (or oscillate) between the tongues, as in the paradigmatic case of Moses. The etymology of his name as mixed as his upbringing, his flight to a third environment occasioning the retrieval of the native heritage, his adaptation of God's words to Pharaoh's ears less than felicitous, he arrestingly enacts the ordeal of cultural identity in and through (hetero)language. From birth, Moses stammers his way to leadership. During the brothers' next visit to Egypt, yet another parameter of inter-group cleavage surfaces. Invited by Joseph to dinner, they are served apart, "for the Egyptians will not eat bread with the Hebrews, for that is an abomination to Egypt" (43:32). This note on the Egyptians' divisive practice signifies for a good many reasons, of which I will attend to those that immediately concern us. (The rest will arise when we examine the verse within its proper Hebrewgrammatic framework, our third discourse-type.) To begin with, though the two-valued link to Hebrewness (a Biblical plus, an Egyptian minus) has run throughout the foregoing parameters as well, whether on or below the narrative surface, it grows inescapable here, "foolproof" as never before. Reconsider the earlier markers and you will see how they vary in the perceptibility of their shared Hebrew connection. Thus, when arriving at the elect line of Noahide descent, the Table of Nations points out in advance Shem's fatherhood of "the sons of Eber" (10:21): the exordium combines the montage of the fathers (Shem/Eber) with allusion to the etymology of the chosen among the chosen sons (ibrim, Hebrews), bio-ideological with eponymic origins, for maximum counterpoint to the preceding genealogy of Ham. Again, the Ham-old sexual violence overtakes in Egypt the first of the Hebrews, then Joseph "the Hebrew man/slave," then (at least in the form of sex discrimination) the
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male infants born to "the Hebrewesses." And, shifting axes yet again, the translational mimesis of "Hebrews" focuses the play of heteroculturalisms generally. What's more, this specific linguistic divide puns back to the universal confusion of tongues. Among all humanity, the eponymous Eber and his chosen son Peleg ("for in his days [the referent nicely hovering between the two] the earth was divided [niplegah])" are alone associated by name with the Tower of Babelpresumably as the inheritors and keepers of the original divine language that others forfeited in the building (10:25). Still, no ethnocultural marker in Genesis has been tied so explicitly and categorically to Hebrewness as the rule against eating together. For the note on dietary apartheid involves the fastest collocation, both dramatic and textual, of "Egyptians" with "Hebrews." In the pinpointing for generality, therefore, all earlier loopholes vanish, and with them the benefit of doubt. We now find the ethnic exemplars or tokens (e.g., Abram vs. Pharaoh, Joseph vs. Potiphar's wife, or indeed the brothers vs. the local guests) not merely standing, as usual, but also changed for the respective groups; the longdistance wordplay and genealogy are likewise articulated (or, to the underreader, replaced) by sequent ethnica; the indirections of translational mimesis, given utterance by the directness of statement. Conversely, never has the antithesis been so exclusive, hence so exact: the verse discourages any possible overgeneralization (to Hamite vs. Shemite/Eberide, or even Egyptian vs. Other at large) in focusing the two groups ("Egyptian" vs. "Hebrew") by ethnicon. Nor has this antithesis ever been drawn, let alone "translated," with such mutual reinforcement as between narratorial authority and figural subjectivity, to produce an inside view of the antagonism felt by the Bible's rank outsiders toward its God-chosen insiders. Nor has the multifold gulf between them ever been literalized in terms of the situation, with the apartness mapped onto the world itself, visibly encapsulated in the dining partition. On the contrary, the Egyptians of either sex, from Pharaoh down, have thus far shown themselves only too desirous of physical contact. The lust for forbidden intercourse now gives way to a fiat of physical distance in the smallest possible compass. (The iconic arrangements at table will themselves have large-scale equivalents that turn the tables upon the discriminators: first, by Joseph's advice, the clan's settlement apart from the Egyptians, in Goshen; then the ideo-spatial line between the nations flaunted during the plagues by the "God of the Hebrews," or Moses' insistence on putting the wilderness between his fellow celebrants and the locals; then the climactic, and by Mosaic law irreversible, disengagement with the homebound Exodus.) Nor, finally, has Egyptian animus risen before, in the Genesis narrative, to any height like "abomination.'' In the narrative, mind you, for it cannot but have poisoned every encounter of the subjects with the objects of wordless abhorrence (with Joseph, above all, once a Hebrew slave denied access to the master's
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"bread," now viceroy cum host dispensing "bread") and will find in Exodus an outlet as well as a measure plainer than the symbolism of ritual. Whence, then, the intensity of feeling behind the visible anti-Hebrew policy of segregation? The two motive clauses ("for . . . for") unveil the abhorrence (and, by surprising implication, direct it even against Joseph the viceroy, who also eats by himself, probably because still counting as what he was once called) but leave it motiveless: worse, actually, if you reckon with the debt of gratitude owed to the visiting aliens' namesake. So the immediate context activates against the outlanders the racial hatred latent in the Egyptian/Hebrew antithesis, foregrounded as never before. And so the emotion runs throughout the centuries of victimage: a cause, in the sense of a driving force, yes; anything like a sufficient motive, no. The longer perspective strengthens, deepens, widens, to some extent even reciprocates, the hatred without ever justifying it. The bipartitions that have already come into view highlight the typological aspect of new disclosures and developments. Among the disclosures to ensue, significantly, the newest ones echo in resumptive continuity, from the language of abomination upward, as though to flesh out the bare bones of the dinner party. The point of contact with the abominables grows threefold, broadening in sequence from race through lifestyle to faith. Only, given the friction, broadening means progressive narrowing of the areas and chances of normal interaction: such contact at best transposes into disengagement, as it initially does on all three fronts, prior to escalating into joined battle. Observe the resonant retrospects on the line drawn at table. Shortly thereafter Joseph turns the weapon of apartheid against his adoptive country in the interests of peace. At his hands, the glance backward (also ahead, prophetically, from the medieval ghetto to Nazi residential statutes) comes with a twist in initiative, design, and sheer magnitude. Introduce yourselves to Pharaoh as herdsmen of old, he primes his brothers, "that you may dwell in the land of Goshen, for every shepherd is an abomination to Egypt" (46:34). This novelty complements the earlier ethnic ("the Hebrews") with an occupational (''shepherd") source of disgust: both aversions unilaterally harbored by one group ("Egypt") against another (plural there, "every" here) as a whole, and to retroactive no less than prospective effect. Insofar as the duality stretches from the occupation ("shepherd") to the lifestyle or material culture that goes with it, then Nilotic xenophobia will in time also generate a lust for monopoly and self-aggrandizement over the bodies of the abominables. Even among Hamites elsewhere, material difference is wielded against the other for power, not power over the other against the material difference between them, with a view to compounding monopolies as well as antipathies. While Philistia withholds her ironwork from "the Hebrews," Egypt forces upon them the burden of
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her grandiose construction work: a throwback to Cainite city-building, the first of its kind, and to Babelian presumptuousness, with slave labor replacing self-elevation by one's own hands. 12 Egypt's splendid monuments would or should evoke in the Bible's Israel nothing but the memory of hard labor (cruellest, as the dualism indicates, to the free-ranging pastoralist), a resentment of their aping by Solomon at Hebrew-like cost, and a yearning for their destruction. Jeremiah therefore hits upon the perfect sociohistorical figure of vengeance in dooming the temples and obelisks to the torch: the destroyer, Shemite, Babylonian, Heaven-sent from the north, "will clean out the land of Egypt, as a shepherd cleans his garment of vermin" (43:10-13). In the process of gloating over the enemy, annihilated by the shepherd figure he has abhorred, the oracle silently draws together the whole history of the "verminous" enemy-type culture, or anti-culture, the larger ideological target. It reaches back all the way to the fall of Babel's pride by God's direct intervention, and ahead to Solomon's Temple, before long destroyed by the same firewielding agency, Nebuchadnezzar, for much the same crimes. The jeremiad on the temples brings us to the next resonant disclosure. Still another axis of contact, we learn, has been prefigured in the dinner guests' hatred for the "abominable," namely religion itself. A post-Joseph and likewise twocultured ironist, Moses, lays bare (or, to the reader versed in Egyptian ways, bears out) that a yet deeper cause of antipathy attaches to the same key word. The people cannot celebrate within Egypt's borders, according to Pharaoh's latest offer, for the abomination of Egypt shall we sacrifice to the Lord our God; if we sacrifice the abomination of Egypt before their eyes, will they not stone us? We must go a three days' journey into the desert. (Exodus 8:21-23) For extra specificity, then, the chain of "abomination" moves through the livestock that the so-called Hebrews eat, shepherd, offer up. And for climactic effect, the worst arises last. The oppositions in dietary mores and in lifestyle set up by Genesis have concealed an unbridgeable religious chasm, wider even than that normally yawning between polytheism and monotheism. What "they"-Egypt taboo, presumably because worshipped as a god, "we" sacrifice to "the Lord'': the qualitative difference runs to the extreme of incompatibility, which, ideo-geographically, bars any peaceful coexistence. With the ascent from ritual to religion proper and the descent in the status of the outlanders, now officially persecuted rather than protected, gone is the Josephic model of togetherness-with-apartness symbolized by his own table arrangements. At least since his death, we infer, God's worship has therefore been in abeyance. The faiths, and their re-
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spective adherents, cannot occupy the same space but must divide between the cultivated and the desert zonesor, again, riversideson pain of violence from the locals. The threatened stoning, left undenied by Pharaoh, breaks the images of tolerant paganism vs. fanatic monotheism that have gone down in history. It is rather the polytheists who would terrorize their way to a monopoly of faith, as of brute power and material culture: an agenda that exceeds anything promised to the chosen or even projected thereafter by the jealous Lord of Sinai himself. But the current balance of power renders it all the more imperative for the weaker group to disengage. The Mosaic plea for disengagement would appear to resume and literalize (especially via the Josephic zoning by occupation) another Deluge-old figure of speech. After all, Noah has not only equated "the Lord" with "Shem's God," exclusive of Ham, but also framed the divide in locative terms. ''God . . . will dwell in the [pastoral?] tents of Shem" (9:26-27), whereupon, as if on cue, humanity scatters in Table and Babel. So the discoveries mount, by a process repeated with shortcuts vis-à-vis Philistia, in the ascent from the circumcision issue in Judges to the Ark's capture in Samuel: from ritual to faith again. The grounds for conflict, it turns out, have always been there, sharper and more numerous than we knew prior to the resolution. Nor are they left static. Developments in the happening alternate, sometimes interlace, with the progressive disclosures in the telling. Especially contrastive, and likewise thematic to the Hebrewgram, is the movement toward landwide slavery. The history of contact with the Philistines will appropriately reenact this dynamics as well: tense coexistence with the patriarchal households, interspaced by outbreaks of violence, then all-out attack on the settled nation, Hebrewed out of nationhood, into servitude. The model, though, not only precedes but outreaches and enriches the replay. However disappointing the silence on Egypt's imperialism abroad may have proved to historiansand whatever their bids for "cross"-reading it into the datathe Genesis-to-Exodus historiography focuses instead the absolute power that she exercised within her borders. As with the related lust for monopoly, hers is a domestic imperialism; and its earliest victims are Hebrews, always caught at the local intersection of power and sex unrestrained. The matriarch's abduction into the royal harem opens the theme (the wife-sister imbroglio perhaps wryly glancing at Pharaonic marital license); next, Joseph gets sold into bondage and seduction. This completes the travesty of Noah's two-way linkage, whereby (Hamite) illicit sexuality should go with subservience, as if for control, (Shemite) purity with power over the vile and violent. Turned upside down now, such an ideal world is at best a thing of the future, certainly unrealizable by the elect on the long
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way from Hebrewness to the promised territorial nationhood, "great" as well as "blessed." The multifold abuse of force also clashes head-on with a still earlier and more revolutionary fundamental of the Israelite worldview: that Man was created in the image of God to exercise freedom of choice, a privilege with which the omnipotent Creator himself will not tamper. Under Pharaoh, Egypt could not carry the tampering with the other's image of divinity any further than she already does in Genesisor so it appears until the Exodus overall jump in scale, when she greets nationhood with infanticide, mass bondage, and projected mass rape. She denies the liberty of choice to the Chosen themselves, their coercion not only multiplied with their number but also driven to the limit of the thematic anti-form, slavery. And her rushing in where nobody on heaven or earth has any business to tread explains the anomaly of Pharaoh's "hardened" heart. He deserves to be made an example of by the "God of the Hebrews," an admonitory exception to the rule that the Almighty exerts and publicizes his superhuman might over all the universe but the human heart. Within Genesis itself, the violence suffered by the patriarchal line hardly exhausts the theme or the energy of domestic imperialism. The developments that ensue rather pile outrage on outrage. It soon transpires that absolute power usurped by an earthling corrupts absolutely, recognizing no bounds whatever, not even of in-group solidarity and accountability. As a Pharaoh can seize an alien's womenfolkkilling the man first, if he presented an obstacleso can he imprison, release, execute his own ministers with no questions asked. He can likewise raise another foreigner at will from the prison "hole" to the highest office: as though he were God at least (a status which he not just claimed in reality, while the God-fearing Joseph pointedly disclaimed, but will uphold against the real thing) and the prototype of the arbitrary kingship that threatens Israel herself (I Samuel 8:11-18) once she turns her back on the justice of heavenly leadership. In due course, famine compels the tyrant's people to become in name and law what, ever since the retribution on Ham, they have always been in Scriptural eyes: "We and our land will be slaves to Pharaoh," they entreat Joseph, only ''give us seed that we may live," and the contract stands "to this day" (47:13-26; for real-life parallels, see Herodotus 1955:151, Redford 1992:425-26). So Noah's curse realizes itself by degrees and, what's more, from within the mentality of the cursed, rather than through any supernatural or even extragroup intervention. History not only manifests the bio-ideological legacy (as in regard to the ethics) but also overtakes the scenario predicted and now issuing from it, and from it alone. Left to its own devices, Ham's "slavish" nature will out, in the forms and processes of the culture it makes for itself. Having long debased, in effect dehumanized themselves by ex-
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changing their sociomoral freedom (and with it their share in God's image) for an absolute king-godship, the Hamites of Egypt proceed to surrender the rest of their liberties for bread. In enacting the forecast, they as resonantly counterenact the precept, "not by bread alone does man live" (Deuteronomy 8:3), addressed to the chosen yet generalized for all humans who would live up to their humanity. Conversely, the final inheritors of Shem's blessing have given up nothing of what is not theirs to give: they preserve intact the far greater treasure that has by degrees of election come down to them, from Adam ("hu/man") onward. Intangible, that treasure still has a visible existential correlate in the owners' autonomy, marking off the Goshen enclave from the land of slaves. Their legacy thus exhibits to the naked (a fortiori, the jealous) eye its earliest, most basic honors, the Creation-old image of God-likeness on earth alongside the Deluge-old reward for virtue, both prior to the Promise and, in Scripture's ethnographic theory, more widespread. Individually and collectively, in short, the elect remain free agents. The very member once enslaved by force governs Egypt now, and accepts her offer of selfenslavement, on Pharaoh's behalf. The Primeval scenario appears to have come true. Yet the Bible's history never stands still, either in the recounting or in the happening, especially not when it seems tailored to an ideological, much less ideal pattern. This way didacticism would lie, with its easy and transparent lies. Instead, amidst belated bilateral realization ("retribution"), the status quo looks precarious, the future ominous, considering how the "appropriate" imbalance achieved toward the end of the book goes against the land's grain, natural or (agri)cultural, and rests on Joseph only. Even if Noah truly diagnosed Ham's low nature and future, Shem's eternal ascendancy need not follow therefrom, or not yet. On the contrary, Egypt having become a slave culture, down to the state economy, she will predictably not long tolerate the freedom of the abominables (aliens, emigrants, Hebrews, shepherds, other-thinkers, taboo-breakers) in Goshen. Equally predictably, the king-god will initiate the leveling down of "the house of slaves," if necessary by killing off "the Hebrews"; his people will follow orders, all too eagerly, because, apart from everything else, they can now drive slaves inferior even to themselves; and God will in turn initiate, perform, and theologize the countermovement toward ''Israel's" liberty. Here, then, the frictions of intercultural contact associated with Hebrewness since Abraham break into international conflict. The frictions come first, in time and weight alike. According to the genesis of difference traced by Genesis, they even antedate the first Hebrew, evolving from such primeval crossroads as Babel, Eber, Noah, Adamic Godlikeness. The chosen must form a culture of their (i.e., the Deity's) own before growing into nationhood, let alone nation-statehood, and therefore must define and
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constitute themselves beforehand, in early phylogenesis, against a polar, unnatural culture: if they fall short of the ideal, being only human, the antitype runs counter to it all along the line of value and evolution. At the opening of Exodus, accordingly, the archvillain as well as the narrative assume rather than spell out the tense prenational antecedents on which they build the address to their respective audiences. In foregrounding the here-andnow, though, their motives typically diverge, so that the outbreak of the conflict, indispensable to the Bible's grand ethnocentric polarity and progress, also makes sense in terms of realpolitik. (Such opposed motives have earlier cogenerated the imprisonment, as well as the very bondage, of Joseph: another doubling along the same macroplot to the same end, with a leap in scale.) On Pharaoh's agenda, once the multiply abominable outgroup in Goshen has multiplied itself to nation size, the first priority is the counteroffensive of de-nomi-nation. De-nomi-nation as Process This thrust toward de-nomi-nation unfolds as a process within the large conflictual process. The shift in the reference made by the Egyptians is actually more gradual than I suggested before, creeping forward between the Israel/Hebrew extremes parallel to the oppression of the referents: the harsher the treatment, the less acknowledged the victim's group identity and the worse his repute. (8) There arose a new king over Egypt, who did not know Joseph. (9) And he said to his people, Behold, the people of the Sons of Israel is* too numerous and too mighty for us. (10) Come, let us deal shrewdly with him,* lest he multiply and, if war befalls us, he join our enemies and fight against us and go up from the land. (11) Then they put taskmasters over him to afflict him with their burdens and he built for Pharaoh store-cities, Pithom and Raamses. (12) And the more they afflicted him, the more he multiplied and the more he spread about. And they became weary of the Sons of Israel. (13) Then the Egyptians made the Sons of Israel serve with rigor, (14) and embittered their lives with hard service in mortar and in bricks and in all kinds of service in the field; in all their service they made them serve with rigor. (15) Then the king of Egypt said to the Hebrewess midwives, one of whom was named Shiphrah and the second named Puah, and he said, (16) When you midwife the Hebrewesses, look [see, u'reiten] upon the birthstool: if it is a boy, you shall kill him, and if it is a girl, she shall live. (Exodus 1:8-16)
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(Here [*] and throughout, I preserve the Bible's anaphoric reference to "people" in the singular masculine thirdperson ["him/he"], because no alternative fits the context. With regard to a people on the increase, the customary feminine anaphora might give the wrong impressionas if the gender were a trope for sexwhile the shift to the plural would efface a vital contrast and development in number. Again, the colorless "it," as in Fox [1986], is too dehumanizing where the persecution menaces the referent's vitality and very humanity.) Patchwork or process? Notorious in criticism for its mixture of the two worst kinds of incongruity, repetition and contradiction, this sequence has long been decomposed into variant sources (J, E, P). Whatever the genetic prehistory, still moot and possibly imaginary, the finished narrative is an artwork in Scripture's best tradition. Instead of the easy coherence sought in vain by the decomposers, it plays off one apparent incongruity against another to generate unity, meaning, and effect, as usual in the Bible's innovative repetition structure. Further, the coherence thus implied dynamizes the sequence into a plot of repetition with variation, so that a multiphase development unrolls in line before the eyes of the reader who cares to read. (See my chapter on repetition structure in Poetics, 365-440, and on doublets in Sternberg 1990b:123-36, especially for the plots readable behind other prime examples of source criticism, such as the Flood narrative.) Throughout, the terms of reference play a vital role. By flexibly matching the oppressor's acknowledgment to his treatment of the other, linguistic to physical violence, the narrative encapsulates a fourfold process of degradation in intergroup contact, all the way down (or back) to Hebrewness. (1) It all begins with the new Pharaoh's stock-taking in verses 9-10, "The people of the Sons of Israel is too numerous and too mighty for us. Come, let us deal shrewdly with him, lest he multiply . . .": explicit recognition of "peoplehood," compounded with both due ancestral name, "Israel," and insistent mention as a body, in the singular (pace the routine pluralizing translation). All three group-defining markers not only hang togetherwith extra linkage thrown in to ensure or "overdetermine" the sense of nationhoodbut also agree with what counts in the discourse universe as the truth; and so presumably do more quantitative attributes, which have been taken for symptoms of the attributor's derangement. Thus, reading Pharaoh as paranoid about the magnitude and might of the alien entity relative to "us" (e.g., Ackerman 1974:81, Fox 1986:12, 15, Jacob 1992:10ff.) would break the norm of subjective/objective correspondence at this stage. The text's foregoing emphasis on a miraculous proliferation rate is now echoed verbatim in the king's opening words. Pharaoh not only reports the same demographic leap from his own viewpoint but also invests it with qualitative significance of the kind long foretold
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by God, namely, the birth of the "people": harmonious repetition with division of labor between frame and inset best serves the rhetoric of authenticity. The one's (narratorial) premises regarding the emergent collective Self validate the other's (and Other's) dramatized group portrait of his Other as such. In truth-value, as in scale, in everything but illdisposition, actually, this portrait outreaches even that drawn of Joseph as "Hebrew" by Potiphar's wife: the incredulity expressed in criticism negatively testifies, via misreading, to how the Bible frustrates stock response, and at a juncture where a lower art (or our own low desire) would most invite it. Quite apart from its concordance with the text's supernaturalist premises, the Pharaonic review of the demography would imply them in any case. He, and all Egypt, would have to be more than insane to harbor and express fear about the natural growth of a single family, as though it could ever compare with the population of a great kingdom. In this regard, there is little to choose between the two exegeses of mimmennu in verse 9: (too numerous) "for us" vs. (more numerous) "than we." Likewise with the ambiguity of the negative and only cause given by the tale in advance. The inside view "did not know Joseph," whether taken as a lapse or a denial or a suppression of knowledge, anticipates an unmerited but plausible change for the worse: it grounds the attack on the many sojourners in ingratitude to Egypt's one benefactor, hence in the resurgence of the xenophobia against which he shielded them. All entirely in Egyptian national character, as we know from the victimage undergone by Joseph himself. Also in Babel-old cultural character, including the foulest thanklessness: the allusions make up a travesty of God's own viewpoint on the rebels"Behold, one people and one language among them all, and this is what they have begun to do"prior to the ''Let us . . ." of their scattering lest they do worse (Genesis 11:6). 13 The king's subjectivity is of the confrontational not computational type, and premeditated, paranoia-inducing if you will, not paranoid. In fact, writing him off as mad would even break a sly connection to history proper, which tempers the miracle not just with reality effect but with real-life numbers. If this Pharaoh is indeed Rameses ("Raamses") II, as widely believed, then he speaks from personal experience and accomplishment. "He had an enormous harem, and as the years passed his children multiplied rapidly. He left over a hundred sons and at least half as many daughters, several of whom he himself married. He thus left a family so numerous that they became a Ramessid class of nobles" (Breasted 1967:387). No Augustus, he, endlessly urging the Romans to procreate while himself living in childless marriage with Livia. Were all the Egyptian menfolk breeders of anything like their sovereign's caliber, the predicament of hosting a foreign race "too numerous and mighty for us" would hardly
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loom so large, not even to the xenophobes of antiquity. (That Rameses II committed incest with his own daughters would also qualify him typo-logically for the role of unbounded sensualist, as true to his Hamite ancestry as his Sodom cousins, male or female.) At any rate, the story's likely allusion to history underlines how it weaves together at this juncture facts of different ordersextraneous and internal to itself, as well as narratorial and dialogized within its own sphererather than opposing fact to fantasy: The Egyptian diagnosis is cast in the most accurate terms, however unpalatable to the diagnostician, as beseems a national situation report. Instead, where the king already sounds like the earliest Hitler is in the prognosis, gratuitously equating the aliens' magnitude with a menace to Egypt: the danger of a people-size Fifth Column aiding in wartime the international bloc of "our enemies" must be "shrewdly" forestalled. Intimations of Babel again, yet only to highlight the difference. While God inferred from what the Tower-makers had begun "doing" to what they might end up "doing,'' the Israelites have done nothing whatever, except grow. Nowhere, for example, do they instantiate Max Weber's famous thesis that shared political action generates ethnicity: Pharaoh himself reverses the Weberian chain of cause and effect in moving from the accomplished ethnicon to the ethnonational threat of concerted activity. He projects onto the nation his own belligerence and ingratitude and treachery, apparently in cold-blooded shrewdness, as Potiphar's wife did her illicit sexuality onto Joseph, whom she knew to be all too guiltless. Once the sojourning outsider has been pronounced an enemy from within, biding his time, the emergency measures in the name of national security duly ensue, all the way to the final solution. (2) The practical and the denominative changes for the worse start together, with the leading countermeasure. There, in verses 11-12, a partial devaluation of the enemy already enters into the "shrewd" treatment, that is, the burdening with forced labor (as levy or corvée) in the state's building projects. ("Pithom and Raamses": the latter a clue to the nameless Pharaoh in charge, the whole to his ideo-cultural genealogy, Cainite antecedents plus Babel-like aspiration.) Designed to reduce the numbersto kill the victims, and more immediately their sexual potency, with workthe yoke manages only to lower the group-image. "They put taskmasters over him to afflict him. . . . But the more they afflicted him, the more he multiplied and the more he spread about. . . . The Egyptians became weary of the Sons of Israel": "people" is here already dropped from the first round's ethnicon, with ancestry and singularity still preserved, to imply the oppressor's grudging yet ongoing sense of Israelite identity and unity in miraculous growth. Still, let me restress, because the march of the co-referring terms foreshadows not just another invidious change but the very next object of
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change. While "him/he" refers back to "people," for the last time, "the Sons of Israel" reaches ahead to a ''them" and, existentially, to an assault on "their" integrity. (3) Hence the closure of the second phase with the erasure of "peoplehood" from the national ethnicon. There, the abbreviated rifle, "Sons of Israel," is ideally placed to look back and forward in a variety of roles: contrastive, summative, transitional, propulsive. It not only measures but also motivates the distance from the fullness of the original nomination. Three targets for diminishing interpenetrate: the numbers, the nationality, the name. The greater the oppressors' "weariness," the stronger the need felt to demote (literally, and so iconically, to shorten) the irrepressible element in their midst, by way of justifying harsher oppression. Next, indeed, the shortened gentilic immediately recurs, as a prelude to a new wave of violence aimed at body and mind alike: even the grammatical difference in number between the earlier "people" and the current "Sons" assumes meaning on both the physical and the psychological front. In verses 13-14, "Egypt made the Sons of Israel serve with rigor and embittered their lives with hard service . . .": now, with the imposition of outright enslavement ("service," abodah), the hitherto constant singular reference to the victim turns plural as, de-"peopled," "the Sons of Israel" disintegrate ("their") into a collection of individuals, no longer a collective body, or not in the official view. Observe how, parallel to this linguistic turn, the bondage itself turns individual as well as overt (the fivefold emergence of the root "serve/slave") and extreme ("with rigor"). Even if you surmise behind (2)-(3) variant pre-textual traditions regarding the mode and locale of enslavement, the discourse has composed them into a bad-to-worse order. Before, the forced labor was as well-defined and concentrated as the labor force: two state enterprises, "Pithom and Raamses," one body of men, "the Sons of Israel." Now we see both fragmented, so as to wrench the Israelites apart from one another, and probably from their wives, too. The work is "in mortar and in bricks and in all kinds of service in the field"the three proverbial for their bitterness in Egypt, the first two a direct echo to the Tower (Genesis 11:3), the last also necessarily carried out by work gangs or even one-man units scattered far and wide. Like Babel, the onetime Goshen autonomy transforms into a point of dispersal; and its blessed occupants, worse, into slaves of those long cursed and lately burdened with slavery. Given the allusive precedent, the dispersal might even conspire against the workers' unilingualism, because they would need to communicate with their superiors, to the last tenant farmer under Pharaoh. No longer would they be "one people" with "one language," or language of oneness, for them all. The state has extended the rule of force to individual enslavers vs. slaves, with a double end in view: cementing
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the Egyptian, while breaking up the Israelite, sense of community. The singular/plural dynamics operates in word and world alike. Here, then, the grammatical distinction in number, which my rendering and reading of the text has integrated into the semantics all along, becomes perceptibly meaningful, not to say crucial. That distinction largely accords (and often correlates) with the more loaded and systematic one regarding elohim. Amid the shift from the theology to the nationality, the grammatical singular reflects ontological and conceptual unity, the plural diversity or dispersal. 14 So our tale now condenses the same kind of movement between poles in the national sphere as the Ark narrative did in the "God/gods" alternation. At the first stage above, the Bible's insistence on adverting (or having Pharaoh advert) to Israel by the singular pronoun may escape notice altogether,15 especially if one overlooks the ethnonational thematics encoded in related markers. Which is why translations, as always articulating what interpreters can bury in discreet silence, will consistently shift into the plural (e.g., the Authorized Version: "Let us deal wisely with them, lest they multiply," etc.). But the fewer the markers of nationality in evidence, the greater the weight each of them assumes in plotting the international action and relation, not least by their very lessening. At the next stage, therefore, to persist in pluralizing the Israelites along with the Egyptians is not just to risk confusion between they's on the simplest (who's who?) level of understanding. It is also to accelerate the process of bondage, to weaken the spiritual resistance offered by Israel to the bids for de-peopling "him," and to obscure the motive, if not the very occurrence, of the Egyptian escalation to "servitude" with rigor, fieldwork, popular complicity. Only at the third stage does the narrative itself gravitate toward plural reference, so as to imply the oppressor's success in breaking the spirit of unity at last: world and word, physical and psychological deterioration continue to go hand in hand, exactly owing to the felt discontinuity in number. (4) Ultimately, the slaves continuing fruitful, "The king of Egypt said to the Hebrewess midwives . . . , When you midwife the Hebrewesses . . .": even the God-given name (first honorific, then patronymic, now eponymous) is replaced by the older, hate-filled, stereotyping foreignism when it comes to the wiping out of the name-bearers by infanticide, so that physical and linguistic ill-usage reach their climax together. Give the dog a bad name and bury him, as the folk saying has it. Apart from the designs and consequences that this chapter has gradually explicated, the re-Hebrewing would take away the protection built into the national ethnicon's link with divinity ("Yisra-El") as early as the eponym's night-wrestling at Jabbok. And to judge from local history, the de-nomi-nation inflicted on the victim to this end is as calculated as any other regress toward the vict-image, or as the games of de-nomination played before by Joseph's mistress. For,
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within the repertoire of name-changing directed in Egypt against the criminal (Vergote 1959:142), we equally encounter the removal of theophoric elements and the celestial aegis that went with them. Referentially, existentially, politically, mentally, in short, the opening stands to this climax as all to nothing, problem to final solution. For extra sign-posting, the narrative shapes the two limits into direct if translated quotes of the Egyptian voice, while the creeping escalation (or deterioration) in-between arises from nondirect forms of report geared to the Egyptian mind at wordless enslavement. In fact, now that the victim's disunity has been achieved (and mustn't be repaired by a sense of common fate) genocide itself proceeds by the tiniest conceivable, single-unit installments, one Hebrew baby at a time. Individual deaths may best lull to sleep the collective life instinct. And so the policy remains even when Pharaoh, having been thwarted by the midwives, goes public, as it were, and entrusts its implementation to the civic spirit of his "people, saying, Every boy that is born [to the Hebrews, some add, following the Samaritan and Septuagint versions] 16 you shall cast him into the Nile, and every girl you shall keep alive" (1:22). With "Israel" gone, he can now afford to play it slowly and safely; and, with "the Hebrews" come back, he is able to unleash Egypt's race memory on them. Only a tactical novelty, this, because the liquidation of one slave group, alien and pressed, by another, indigenous and voluntary, finalizes a logic of segregation implied by the book's opening chapter all along. Divide peoples, then workers, then bondmen, then sexes, and kill through a network of tame patriotic agents happy to oblige, if for no other reason than because they, too, have long internalized and overlong repressed the ethnocultural divide. Hardly mad, foolish, ironized, as the critics like to believe, Pharaoh emerges victorious from the war of attrition, due to his skill in coordinating naked force with mass psychology. Nor do the exegetes counterread his figure, and his achievement, by accident. They rather project onto the king-god the stock character derived from their idea of the genre (e.g., "wisdom literature," "folk tale," "farce"), of the narrative's art and value frame, especially when the chips are down, or just of the treatment coming to a, let alone the, antagonist. Such ideas would fit Egyptian writing itself, often also Greek literature vis-à-vis barbarians, Egyptians included, and many counterparts ever since, yet do violence to the ideopoetics of the Bible, however nation-minded. Far more daring and artful than its interpreters, or today's theorists of group representation, it breaks the conventional mold of expectancy: while showing how the king-god astutely (re)flattens the we-group protagonist by word and deed into a low antagonist-type, Scripture neither pays him back in his own reductive coin nor mocks at his achievements as oppressor. Local patriotism, with its stock figures and responses, never comes into it.
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In effect, the tale even undercuts the Egyptian stereotype of royalty, whereby the Pharaoh (e.g., Rameses II himself, in the famous Qadesh battle against the Hittites) overcomes a numerous, numberless enemy single-handed: heroic quality vs. mere quantity. From the outset, the topos gets inverted in Exodus. Pharaoh expresses fear of the Israelite numbers and mobilizes public support ("Let us . . . fight against us"), thus implicating all Egypt in the victimage. Yet the remodeling of the one-against-many into an intergroup conflict proper, only triggered and led by Pharaoh, appears to stop short of the outcomewhich is happy for Egypt, as usual in her own vainglorious annals. Even the midwives' defiance of his orders with impunity, though exhilarating, leaves the plot essentially unaltered. A moral victory, it amounts in practical terms to a stay of execution: a brief deliverance from infanticide, crowned with the self-deliverance of the deliverers, who themselves obediently advertise the vict-image ("Not like the Egyptian women are the Hebrewesses") to ward off their own victimage. The heroines' credit is genuine, but the relief only comic and ours. The dilatory interlude over, the threat to existence returns in deadly earnest. That "the Hebrews" offer no resistance to the seizure and drowning of their male infants by watchful neighborseven the ploy to which Moses owes his life forms an exceptionis a measure of the success that the tyrant has achieved at long last on all fronts. His earlier intrigue of secret killing has presumably arisen to forestall the danger that genocide may boomerang, reviving instead "ethnic cohesion and consciousness, or helping to crystallize it," as one theorist of nationalism (Smith 1991:31) affirms in the modern framework. Therefore the resignation of the Hebrews to the murder of their boysagainst expectancy and ancestry and theoryproves less the intriguer's overanxiety than their undermined state. The fight would seem to have gone out of the de-peopled people, along with the entitlement to the honors of the agonistic "Israel" bestowed upon their indomitable ancestor. Can the elect ever retrieve so much as the Adamic heritage of freedom "in God's image," now surrendered under duress? Anomalous for a canonized foundation history, such a breakdown at birth is a worth), prelude to the first and greatest literary drama of nationhood in the making, as well as a large-scale exemplar of the Bible's way with character. Nearer home, and Shemless, it goes even further in stereotype-wrenching than the replacement of a primeval Golden Age by a Primeval Scene that opposes the ingroup's to the diselect's forefather. Here the earthliness gets intensified, and not, as you might expect, at the cost but rather in the interests of heaven-orientedness. With the complication operating both ways, therefore, the chosen peoplelike their descendants at Aphekemerge from the struggle unflattered as well as unmade. If Pharaoh plays the archvillain to the verge of
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success, in the worst of (Cain/Ham/Babel) traditions at that, the insiders are no angelsnot even a collective hero by any measure (daring, ethics, wits, optimism, other than the vitality of the genes) in the black-and-white style of group portraiture associated with ethnocentricity. The enemy's "shrewdness" has paid off, always humanly speaking. Finally, let me restress that this multiphase and multilevel dynamics is as remarkable for its conceptual, i.e., sociopolitical, as for its literary or evaluative originality. Unprecedented in ancient writing, it multiplies and interlaces features of group oppression still unaccommodated (uncaptured, unassimilated, unordered) by present-day models; and the distance in complexity, whether due to the number of variables at work or to their patternability or both, further widens with the unfolding of the Hebrewgram as a whole. To give one example, modernity's bestknown theorist of power relations, Michel Foucault, could learn a thing or two from the opening of Exodus alone. Briefly, Foucault envisages three types of will to power in large, hence of intergroup struggle. "Domination" is a matter of control; "exploitation" would deprive its target of what he produces; "subjection" aims at the subject's identity, because the less in touch with himself, the more readily will he submit to the authority of others. Though the three drives may co-occur, one "almost always" predominates. Nowadays it is the will (or, correspondingly, the resistance) to the subjection of subjectivity, bound up with the newly instituted power structure of the state (Foucault 1984: 303-304). But to cover the dynamics latent in Exodus 1, as for various real-life junctures since, we need a more refined model, with nicer, additional, or simply more history-based analytic tools. Thus, always leaving the finesse of poesis aside, Scripture knows all the theorist's power drives but not vice versa. It also knows that they may have unexpected antecedents and enabling conditions, including the exact counterforce: the hospitality offered to the emigrants and, above all, their mass settlement in Goshen, which appears to promise them immunity from all types of oppression. In this, moreover, the initial autonomy reveals a macabre symmetry with the climactic genocidea form of oppression that not only outreaches but would put an end to other oppressive measures, together with the oppressed. You cannot dominate, exploit, subject an extinct group, and to your own loss as well as theirs: the ostensible counterproductivity of mass killingso troublesome to the Exodus interpreters, or to the specialist in nationalism, despite its frequency on humanity's recordmay also explain its absence from the Foucauldian power scheme. But then, of all relations, hostile intergroup affairs are perhaps least governed by cost-effectiveness. As with the symmetry between the first and the last extreme, so with the dissymmetry between the will and the resistance to power. Where
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Foucault assumes symmetry (if only because the one is the cause of the other) yet actually orients himself to the resistance ("trois types de luttes"), Exodus foregrounds the will, in keeping with its two-edged representation of the struggle. Thereby, Pharaoh stands condemned as the unprovoked aggressor, launching and escalating an oppressive policy to the death against a harmless outgroup, one indeed progressively found deficient in the spirit of resistance, counter to his expectations and their own eponymous heritage. The power symmetry arises, and plague by plague reverses, only when the Omnipotent enters the arena. In between, theory has to reckon not merely with structural complexities, such as gradation and accumulation of evils, but also with priorities. For the Pharaonic order of priorities apparently runs ahead of its time in sociopolitical history. How is it that the issue of group denomination leads the way here and recurs in every phase until settled by utter de-nomi-nation (akin to Foucault's "subjection"), millennia before the advent of the modern "state"? The surprise at this priority, like that regarding the Bible's Table-old focus on nationality, would give away sheer parochialism. Just as Pharaoh is the first to diagnose the birth of "the people of the Sons of Israel," so, in historical along with Biblical Egypt, he was the state. "The people of the Sons of Israel" → "the Sons of Israel" (with singular antecedents) → "the Sons of Israel" (with plural anaphoras) → "the Hebrew(esse)s": the modulation epitomizes the overall process. And this by a logic of iconicity geared, even in Nilotic reality, to the enemy's mind. The more numerous and hence dreaded and hence oppressed the name-bearer, the shorter and the more improper and the more regressive the name he bears in foreign expression. The Egyptians would in effect turn history back step by step, as though intent on cutting the adversary down to Genesis size (in numbers, note, and name alike) and thus on undoing what Joseph has done for his brother ''Hebrews." (The running Babelian analogy not only lengthens the throwback still further but also makes the "Hebrewing" at this stage, if not predictable, then appropriate to the deployment of inverted allusion. Among the entire contemporary world, Eber alone gets synchronized with the event of dispersal by name, and in the role of name-giver after the event, too [10:25].) But the sequence in the discourse also establishes the equivalence in the world. The more finely paired and concatenated and devaluated the referring terms, the firmer their co-reference. Their march works to the same groupequative effect as their interchange between the quoting frame and the Philistine insets of I Samuel, or between the homolingual and the translated insets themselves. Either enemy demonstrably knows better than he speaks in aggression, images his group's diametric Other worse than he might, did, will in less conflictual set-ups. No room is left for the im-
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portation of the Hab/piru, a non-"people" in the first instance. The exclusive Hebrew/Israel co-reference now rests on far more than the argument from silencethe negative ground that Exodus, like Genesis before it, mentions no Hebrews, nor any outsiders in contact with Egypt, other than Israelite. The very struggle is now ethnopolitical, turning in little on the issue which of the two co-referential names should be borne by the referents, the Genesis-old ethnic hateword or the recent national ethnicon. Nor does the struggle end, but only the first, human round, with the accomplished throwback. God launches the counter-countermovement, we will find, by suitably reversing Pharaoh's reversal. Double checking from the opposite end leaves this closure unrivaled and indivisible. To identify "Hebrews" with Hab/piru, a transethnic social class of which the Israelites form part, would ruin the logic of action, as well as of the artistic composition. Narrativicide, traced in my opening chapter all over the practice of crossculturalism as (inter)source criticism with discourse aspirations, goes here beyond missing or misreading data to undoing the event chain. Given that the Israelite sector alone multiplies by leaps and bounds, why should the entire underclass suffer death? This combines moral with pragmatic absurdity. Pharaoh, it has often been opined, must be out of his mind to liquidate the slave force indispensable for his vast building projects. Now, though opinions about it come easy, madness in the intergroup arena is a question of culture and circumstance, undecidable out of historical framework. In reality, slaves were decimated by Pharaohs of the 19th Dynasty, including Rameses II. (So, periodically, were the rebellion-prone Helots by Sparta, Egypt's Greek analogue in xenophobia, slave-economy, and conservatism, except that she was in fact a threatened dominant minority upon her own-land.) But only a raving maniac, if fixed on preemptive genocide, would stretch the liquidation order to quarters that have given no cause for alarm, such as the Hab/piru other than Hebrew. Need they go the way of poor Cinna the versifier, lynched in Shakespeare by the accident of homonymy? Narrative emptiness and incoherence aside, the connection may here for once aspire to underground existence, at source, between the parallel tracks. Not that the Pharaonic corpus draws it, any more than the Biblical, but that their synchronization tolerates it. Pre-exodus Egypt affords the only crosstextual ground on which Hab/piru ('pr.w) and Hebrews could meet in real spacetime. (Which they could not do on the ground of, say, the world depicted in the Amarna archive, for lack of a Biblical parallel, or of the Samuel-to-Jeremiah record, unmatchable because the other party had by then vanished.) Further, a meeting of the two groups on this ground would serve certain political as well as scholarly interests. An advocate of "liberation theology" must thus be eager (as is Pixley 1987:XVIII-XX, 2-3, 5, 170) to read an archetypal class struggle into
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Exodus, with the Hebrews denationalized accordingly, in the pre-text at least. Even by traditional source-analytic norms of linkage, however, all attempts to tighten the coincidence beyond mere possibility have failed. (E.g., regarding the common servitude, Weippert justly objects: "dieselben Tätigkeiten sind auch von anderen Leuten ausgeübt worden, bei denen die Gleichsetzung mit den 'apiru/Hebräern überhaupt nicht zur Debatte steht" [1967:93]. Likewise with the widespread uprootedness on which Posener comments in Bottéro 1954:175.) And tested against the Bible's discourse, at a level as rudimentary as the logic of events, the possibility itself gravitates toward improbability. By contrast, that logic is among the strengths of the exclusive Hebrew/Israelite equation. On it, even the royal order given first to the midwives, then to the populace, is not nearly so insane as it has been made out to beany more than are the earlier acts of tyrannyleast of all in the Bible's long intercultural perspective. If bent on diminishing the numbers of the potential enemy, commentators object, then Pharaoh issues a death warrant for the wrong sex, because a handful of men with an unlimited supply of women may keep up the population growth. 17 Or, shifting from biological to textual genetics, maybe the deficient intelligence exposed by the oversight is not or not only the king's but the editor's, who incorporated an ill-fitting source. Poetic (e.g., character-directed) or genetic, the objection reasons in the abstract, out of context and precedent, Scriptural historiography and Egyptian history. Recall, instead, the fear expressed by Abraham to Sarah before crossing into Egypt: "They will kill me, and thee they will keep alive" (Genesis 12:12; that the patriarch will experience the same dread in Philistia, as will Isaac, fastens anew the link between the thematic antagonists to the elect). At the time, passing himself off as her brother saved his life at the cost of her abduction into the royal harem. Now, however, the first Hebrew's twofold alarm would appear to resound, about to materialize on both counts, in Pharaoh's nationwide scenario for his offspring, the last "Hebrews"-to-be. Drown the male infants, he orders, and preserve the female. Of the two threats, if anything, the one concerning the female to be "kept alive" recurs verbatim across time (yehayyun* in Genesis→ tehayyun* in Exodus) for intertextual glossing. An index of yet another processwhere the conflict widens from exemplars (Pharaoh vs. patriarch) to the groups affiliated with themthe allusion implies the aggressor's ongoing motive: deed and thought recur together at the power/sex juncture. It is not to any survivors among the Fifth Columnists, then, but to his own people ("you") that the despot offers an unlimited supply of "Hebrewesses," as an added incentive for doing away with the male issue. Why else should he speak of the daughters at all, as he already did to the midwives, and with equal
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emphasis again? Indeed, why should he so insistently exempt them, always in the same breath? What would count as repeating a discoursive superfluity and an operational error, if genocide were alone on the agenda, makes sense by appeal to a twofold forecast, crowning one Egyptian advantage with another. "Every boy that is born [to the Hebrews] you shall cast into the Nile, and every girl you shall keep alive," both commission and omission meant equally for "your" own sakes in the visible future. With this double orgy in view, the omission itself assumes now the grammatical form and the illocutionary force of the commission. The one agentless verb addressed to the midwives by the same royal speaker apropos of the same sex, "she shall live" [wa'haya *], develops into full agenthood, "you shall keep [her] alive" [te'hayyun*], when redirected to the interested party of males.18 Further, if he needed an inducement to keep them alive for eventual interbreeding, the midwives would just have unknowingly supplied it in associating the group's fantastic lifeforce (hayot*) with "the Hebrewesses" vis-à-vis "the Egyptian women," rather than with their menfolk (1:19). As the carriers of the superior genes, they become irresistible to the master race. With everything else monopolized, it remains to appropriate the genetic heritage. "Hast thou killed and also taken possession?" (I Kings 21:19): Pharaoh would anticipate Ahab in the Naboth affair, only that the "killing" envisages the ''possession" of life itself, rather than (or besides) land. A diabolically clever blueprint, this reputed absurdity; and, assuming the allusion to the philoprogenitive Rameses II, one in personal, along with Primeval, typological, ethnic, and Pharaonic, character. His unbridled sexuality, not shying at his own daughters, would top off a genealogy that runs from Ham to his latter-day predecessors. An earlier (for all the Bible tells us, ancestral) Pharaoh, bringing to pass what the ancestor of the Hebrews and the implicit readers had generalized about all Egyptians, took Sarah; yet the precedent looks tame beside the record set and now waved by this insatiable heir. "You will then become like myself"Rameses winks"each of you master of his own harem, whereby not just to save but to turn round the situation. In putting an end to the enemy's growth, you will also gain before long the pleasure and profit of swelling the ranks of Egypt." (The Chinese in Tibet must have taken a leaf out of his book, as might a Foucauldian concerned to repair and dynamize his power typology.) With less historical piquancy but equal retrospective force, the message suits any Pharaoh. In lieu of reversing the fates of the sexes, as the critics expect him to do, he would reverse the demographic balance of the nations through mass murder over time followed by mass rape. "Genocide," an already-mentioned theorist affirms, "is a rare and probably modern phenomenon. It includes those cases where we know that mass death of a cultural group was premeditated and that the basis of that targeting was exclusively the existence and membership of that cultural
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group" (Smith 1991:30). But if "Nazi policies towards the Jews" meet this definition, then so do the Pharaonic ones towards the Hebrews: though distinctively shrewd (gradual, infanticidal, unisexual), they equally aim at the extinction of the target group as such. The variance regards the means, not the end, and the end itself has a further horror lined up. At the same time, while the throwback to the prenational, Abraham-and Joseph-old codename revives (if that's the word for a death sentence) all the latent ethnogeographical associations, the reviver will not act upon them for the better. As early as his incitement of the locals to hamstring "the people of the Sons of Israel," who in case of war may "join our enemies and fight against us and go up from the land," the question arises why the danger should be confused with the remedy. Why not let the Israelites go forthwith, in peace, if necessary by mass expulsion from "the land of Goshen"? (The same preemptive measure would apply even if one takes Pharaoh's words as a euphemism for an opposed scenario: the Egyptians driven out by an enemy alliance). But once "Israel" reverts to "Hebrews," with the sense of geographical otherness built into the etymology, the wonder thickens apace. Why, if experience counts for anything, repeat a power game already tried, not exactly with success, on the patriarch? Instead of enslavement and genocide and total conflict, down to the bid for repossessing and resettling the Exodus fugitives in Egypt by violence, why not initiate the quickest possible return of the "outlanders" to their own land Beyond the River of Egypt, "the land of the Hebrews''? After all, their repatriation would cost nothing, as it would solve everything. Unlike the Philistines, and even unlike themselves in real-life history (e.g., contemporary Amarna), the Bible's Egyptians had no stake whatever in Canaan, or not before Solomon. The gap invites multiple, and multiply discreditable, closure. A trumped-up alarm? A Ham-old, if not Cainite, strain of evil? A desire to have the best of all worlds? A will to still further power? A lust for the womenfolk? Fear or envy of the superior biology defying the race's inferiority in everything else, combined with the hope to annex and harness it to the monopolies of force, culture, worship? A group hatred so intensebecause so ancient, so nourished by allround cultural opposition, so long repressed under Joseph, so burdened with the guilt of ingratitudeas to override the lessons of history, to silence the voice of reason and memory, let alone of humanity? Whatever the answer, though, the gap reimpresses on our mind the foreignized (inset, translated) ethnogeography of "Hebrews" via another negative. With no territorial existence allowed to the name-bearers on either side of Egypt's River, in Goshen or Canaan, the revival of the name advertising and stigmatizing their alienness will expose them, in compulsory intrusive fixture, to the worst possible xenophobia.
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The Law of Intercultural (De)Nomination: A Poetic Microcosm Loss of glory, of liberty, of lineality-with-nationality, of territoriality, of life itself: all minutely interact along the via dolorosa from "people of the Sons of Israel" back to "Hebrews." It is as if the process were designed to realize in narrative action (with a glance at real-life Egypt's way with offenders) the full potential of the idiom of "blotting out the name." Realized, reality-like, and real at once, the artful mimesis carries de-nomi-nation (or, before Exodus, denomination) further, to the limit of the Egyptian penal repertoire, that is, deformation. Even worse, if possible, than remaining nameless, the name imposed from without typically breeds derogatory as well as distinctive affect, mingled with fear and hostility in situations of conflict. There, the vict-image takes its direst form, even outside Exodus. Thus the geo-socio-racial instincts quickened by the Egyptian mistress's reference to "the Hebrew slave" brought into the household; or the Philistine garrison's mixture of hilarity and wonder at the Hebrews creeping out of their holes; or the Aphek army's grim determination to resist enslavement by their own Hebrew slaves. Nor do kinder voices in more tranquil contexts break the pattern. When the Chief Cupbearer recommends to Pharaoh the imprisoned Joseph-thirty years old, master interpreter, the speaker's benefactor and prospectively the king'she calls him "a Hebrew boy, slave to the Captain of the Guard" (Genesis 41:12): a put-down as unthinking as the French "garçon" for "waiter," without the offense attached to the "boying" of the other in hostile interpersonal and interfacial encounters, 19 but none the less suggestive. (To Potiphar's wife, three years earlier, the same ''Hebrew" had already grown into a "man"-size rapist: age would appear to go backward, in step with the varying demands of image.) Again, pace the Rabbis and later sentimentalists, Pharaoh's daughter is not quite "an angel of humanity," sympathizing with "the whole outlawed people," any more than Pharaoh's own dealings with that people show up a "foolish king" or "raving maniac."20 The Princess does feel for the "Hebrew" infant exposed on the Nile. Yet she vouchsafes his countrywomen nothing but a string of imperatives, beginning with "Go!" snapped at the young woman who offers to fetch "a nurse from among the Hebrewesses" (Exodus 2:3-9). That the two actually get the better of the Princess does not, of course, affect her own sense of their inferiority. The flagrant disesteem common to all these examples is much too systematic to be neutralized, let alone inverted. The attempt has nevertheless been made, under the usual assortment of exigencies. For instance, some would assimilate "the Hebrews" to an older, larger, supraIsraelite groupthat of the Eberidesand must therefore keep their nomination
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descriptive; or, if one dates the name (rather than several of its occurrences) forward to the postexilic era, then it must share the honors of "Israel." (See, respectively, Jepsen 1951:55, Koch 1969:44, 50-52, and Loretz 1984: 105, 233-34.) Characteristically, the name-callers have other, more pragmatic axes to grind than the armchair nametheorizers. On their lips, the invidiousness springs to the eye and the ear. "When the hostile Philistines say 'Behold, the Hebrews come forth out of the caves,' there can hardly be detected any contempt in the word 'ibrîm which they use, just as there is none in the words, 'The kings of the Hittites and the kings of the Egyptians,' when expressed by the battling Arameans [II Kings 7:6] regarding the supposedly allied force of the Israelites." (Rapaport 1941:162, cf. Jepsen 1951:55-56, Hyatt 1980:42 on Exodus, and Durham 1987:320 on the law as well). But the analogy is surely false. The Arameans neither claim superiority to the groups they mentionand run away fromnor take liberties with their proper ethnicon, as Rabshakeh does before the walls of Jerusalem in sneering at "this broken reed, Egypt" (II Kings 18:21). Like him, in a fashion less overt yet none the less certain, the Philistines abuse their opponents (at Michmash, they literally speak from above, whereas he shouts from below) and so do the rest of the Hebrewing voices. Even if you miss all the finer pointersthe underground heterolingualism and etymology, the withholding of the honorific, the dynamics of devolution/devaluation in Egypt, the situational constants to be generalized soonthe negative energy runs through the words and intonations with which the Biblical outsider surrounds the codename. Nowhere so perceptibly, indeed, as through the Hebrewgram's first discourse-type, with its alien speakers, direct quoting, open conflicts, private, intergroup, ethnic, sexual, hegemonic, territorial, theological, all occasions for abusive image-making, at times on either side ("the uncircumcised"). Here the antagonism cum opprobrium remains foolproof, unless you play deaf and blind. Nor is there any call for imaginary aids to this antagonistic stance, whether fabricated by appeal to the Hab/piru (the value judgment associated with them problematic, at least unstable, anyway) or by rewriting the givens. Some text critics propose the addition of a letter to I Samuel 14:11, whereby ibrim would turn into akhbarim (mice): "Behold, mice [?] are coming out of the holes where they have hidden themselves." (So Hitzig, then Budde, cited in Driver 1960:108.) Though unattested, the emendators might even argue, were they less atomistic, the substitute commends itself by its reversion to the book's earliest "Hebrew" affair. A glance (vindictive on the speakers' part, ironic on the narrator's) back at the mice with which Philistia was infested after the capture of the Ark (5:1ff.)? Even so, the dehumanizing portraiture, allusion and all, would be implicit in the figure actually voiced
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by the garrison. 21 The discourse of "Hebrews" requires no boost to attitude-molding from source critical imports, high or low. With the attempts to deny, invert or manufacture the antipathy out of the way, the real questions emerge in strength. Calling the attribution of Hebrewness to Israelites negative, derogatory, invidious, and the like, is fuzzy (undistinguishable, hence also unilluminating, vis-à-vis other -grams on record) beside the precision work already traced thus far. Where precisely does this negative come from? What does it amount to, as a hateword, a vict-image, a translated (inter)group stigma? How to tell its constants from its variables, and the stigmatizers' designs and perspective on the stigmatized, always in inverted commas, from the Bible's own? To either's mind, when does the name-bearer qualify for Israeliteness? It is time, in short, to generalize our findings about the Hebrewgram in discoursive action, if only (like the related notes on "Cultures in Contact and Conflict" above) by way of provisional outline. Starting with the indubitably wrong answer again, the first thing to establish is the hopelessness of the popular recourse to the lexicon, as though the minus-values in question were built into the word itself, along with the reference and all meaning-components. Where a few analysts have tried to pull the sting out of "Hebrews" altogether, many (often, unsurprisingly, with different axes to grind) would rather lexicalize it by and for the Hab/piru equation. The two main lines of semantic cross-fixture go back to Parzen and Alt in the 1930s: Originally the cognomen Ibri was a degrading derogatory appellation, a mark of inferiority denoting an alien, a barbarian, a Beduin. The name was used by the more civilized peoples of the ancient Near East to designate the roving and unsettled folk of the desert. It was a mock-name that ridiculed its bearers. . . . The Bible purposely and intentionally uses the name "Hebrew" whenever it describes a slavish state of subjection. And the reason therefor is, I hold, that the word "Hebrew" contained this meaning in the minds and in the traditions of the writers. (Parzen 1932/33: 258-59) [Even in very late usage, such as Jonah's, "Hebrew"] does not carry the full weight of a straightforward description of nationality; no historian, no poet, and no prophet ever uses it in this sense, and in legal language it only occurs [like the cognate habiru* in Nuzi] as the designation of a man who sells himself to pay his debts. . . . The step from the legal use of the word, shown here, to its secondary
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meaning as a substitute for the name of a people which in reality is not respected as a nation in its own right, but is regarded and referred to as an oppressed class, is not a long one. (Alt 1989 [1934]:94-95) Either description of the unfavorable meaning "that the word 'Hebrew' contained . . . in the mind" of its ancient users, or in their "language," founders on the primary level of the co-reference with the Hab/piru, and so might be waved aside without further ado. Yet the endless echoes, variants, and muddles generated ever since by these nonstartersa few still lie ahead and their analogues haunt name-callings elsewhere to the present daymake it worth disposing of the idea once for all. Both lexical exercises quickly prove indefensible, in or out of crossculturalism. Even on the premise of co-reference, the "degrading" racial and/or legal overtones that allegedly go with it would not follow in either co-referential term. "Hab/piru" never means anything like "debt-slave" or "slavish,'' and seldom points to referents who would satisfy the description at that. For contrast, think of "Mameluk," which both means "slave" (from Arabic malaka, "possess") and fits the early name-bearers: the Turks enslaved under this name by Arabs. As they were in bondageprior to the turn of fortune's wheel that gave them mastery of Egypt (1254-1811)so were they designated and self-designated. With "Hab/piru," almost the opposite is true. Even the Nuzi service contracts, quite apart from the fact that they nowhere mention debt or ascribe slavery, introduce the contractant by group-name prior to his entrance into service of his own free will. For example, "Mar-Idiglat *, a Hab/piru* of the land of Ashshur, into service to Tehiptilla* . . . made herself enter," or "Tuntukatil, a Hab/piru* woman, with her offspring, made herself enter into service to T." (Greenberg 1955: nos. 33, 38): first collective grouping, among other attributes, then contingent self-binding. (On the bondman's free namesakes elsewhere, raiders, insurgents, employers, princes, more soon.) On the other hand, the Bible's referents of "Hebrew" would indeed fit the description, yet not at all by force of the group-name, which is the lexical point at issue. The very "Hebrew slave [ebed ibri]" of Exodus law verifies the principle, "for would not 'ebed be unnecessary and tautological if 'Ibri per se meant debt slave?" (Kraeling 1941:243). So would it be in the tale invented by Potiphar's wife about "the Hebrew slave [ha'ebed ha'ibri]," if, as has been asserted, the group-name's load of "contempt" made it "synonymous with serf" (Rowley 1942:52). And to turn from redundancy to contradiction: does the Hebrewing of Joseph and David affirm their insolvency, of all things, or the self-Hebrewing of Jonah predicate his bondage? Rather than anywhere encoded in the name by the language system, I will shortly argue, the slavery is ascribed to the name-bearer from the hostile
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outside world through the name-calling, i.e., the act of (de)nomination as performed and multiply contextualized onstage. This is also why the narrator can at the same time frame the same word with a view to reversing judgments between the name's elect bearer and diselect ("slavish") utterer. For a more recent parallel of sorts, think of the noun phrase "Uncle Tom" in Englishwholly innocuous, applicable to your beloved Uncle Tomas against the contextspecific militant usage kindled by Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852): within the same interracial framework, the phrase's counterloading now images a black man subservient or unduly respectful to whites. The linguistic and the discoursive semantics, though both encoded, keep their values apart, if not in opposition. Nor, still assuming the co-reference with the Ancient Orient's usage, does the rest of the mud stick to the Bible's lexis proper. For the alleged derogation adheres at most to the wrong, because visibly nonequivalent, co-referential term ("mock-name") for "the roving and unsettled" element of antiquity, that is, SA.GAZ. The exact reading and meaning of the Sumerogram (ideo- or logo-grammatic?) have eluded the decoders, possibly because irreducible to univocality in the first instance; but they would appear uncomplimentary for the most part, as between, say, "robber" and "murderer." Not always, though, even according to scholars bent on maximum connectivity: in the Alalakh texts, inter alia, "the depreciatory or derogatory nuance . . . seems to have disappeared'' (Gray 1958:148). With "Hab/piru" itself, the normative range grows wider yethence more dependent on the time, locale, society, etc., that make up the context of usenot excluding pointed verbal choice. To round out one earlier example, "At Nuzi Hapiru * is always written out in full and never with the ideogram SA.GAZ which was rather pejorative in Mesopotamian eyes" (Cazelles 1973:9). Such variations, within and between the undoubted referential twins, pose grave problems to any future Hab/piru-gram. They, and least of all the multivalent homonym, are certainly incapable of building a negative constant into "Hebrew." Once you jettison the crossculturalism in favor of inner Biblical linguistics, as some have done, nothing remains. "Alien," for example, is much too general, covering everyone but the in-group self, and would be rendered by the umbrella term nokhri. "Barbarian" (with or without its peculiar Greek load) is nowhere implied. "Beduin . . . roving and unsettled" neither fits the territorial Israelite between Conquest and Exile nor accords with "a slavish state of subjection." And, turning from inconsistency to redundancy, the latter attribute itself falls foul of "Hebrew slave." If absent from the lexicon behind the text, the stigma must attach to the lexical item in context. So everything about the name's respectable origins (the latent Table-old genealogy, etymology, hence the ideology just valo-
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rized by the Primeval Scene) would lead one to expect; and so its workings tell, complete with the reasons that have driven "Hebrew" outside and underground, away from canonical use and into foreign, "translated" abusage. In the mimesis of such adverse counterloadingor hetero-loading, as it werethe Hebrewgram operates with lawlike regularity, even amid protean multiformity. An iron rule underlies all instances of the first speech type (and variously extends, we shall discover, to the rest of the "Hebrew" patterns). This Law of Intercultural (De)Nomination governs and correlates a set of context-parameters, among which four are our immediate business: sociopolitics, ethnology, geography, and history. In the Bible's poetic action, all four interpenetrate to determine who-calls-whom-what-when, to make sense, that is, of the text's shifts into and out of Hebrewness. Together, as a set of enacted discourse-contexts, this quartet also reactivates in the characters' talk and thought the array of existential, often preHebrew intergroup differentiae (e.g., ethics, language, lifestyle, mores, religion, etc.) outlined above, under "Polar Cultures in Contact, Nations in Total Conflict." The groups multiply opposed earlier by their agency, qua objects of representation, now divide afresh in terms of their symbolic behavior, qua makers of images and self-images, subjects, in short. From either viewpoint, the teamwork of the operative axes is essential to understanding the Bible's poetics of culture, as a picture and a process, a literary art and a vision of reality. For convenience, though, let me briefly introduce the discourse-parameters in turn. Such unpacking will also bring out the implications for theory we will pursue in later chapters and widen the range of applicability, testability, and inter-gram comparison. To begin with the sociopolitical, or power, axis. The Law draws a correspondence, so tight as to imply causality, between the unflattering perspective and the unfavorable position in which the so-called "Hebrews" are revealed at the time of discourse about or with them. Value-laden designation as "Hebrew" by the other turns on the current (situational, history-bound) powerlessness of the character so designated vis-à-vis the other: having the upper hand carries the privilege of free, and freely detrimental, utterance in one's own tongue and terms. Freedom of speech, as of nonverbal action, like armament or for that matter enslavement, lifestyle, worship, birth control, existence itself, is to the strong. Throughout our first discourse-pattern, it is no accident that the group name imposed (and, in Egypt and Philistia, withdrawn, then reimposed) by the foreigner on the Israelite always appears in a context where the name-caller outranks the name-bearer, sociopolitically if not otherwise, as a master does his "slave." Examples would be Potiphar's wife in relation to Joseph, the archetypal "Hebrew slave"; Pharaoh and his daughter to the "Hebrews/Hebrewesses" at their mercy; the Philistines to the "Hebrews''
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who have (or should) become their "slaves" in Canaanincluding David, whom Achish trusts and the rest of the high sranim command distrusts because he has changed "masters." From Genesis onward, these realities of power commonly manifest themselves in brute deeds (sexual assault followed by imprisonment, hard labor with infanticide, bringing the rebel vassals to heel again by force of arms) as well as rude words. Even if the victimizers experience feara recurrent motive in this configuration, as in ancient Sparta or preEmancipation Americait is from above, so to speak, and usually without cause except the superior's own violence, past, present, or prospective. And the imbalance is made yet worse by correlates of weakness other than bondage, soon to be generalized in their own frameworks, which essentially transcend power relations. For now, think of the "Hebrew's" invariable downgrading to outsider by xenophobes, even to outlander on the promised land (implicit in the geographical etymology of ibri, "from beyond the River," i.e., one considered by the locals not to belong at all east of the Euphrates, in Egypt or Canaan). The intersection of these axes with sociopolitics makes the lot of Hebrewness unenviable indeed. By the same sociologic, expressive license cuts across dialogic groupings, whether all-foreign or mixed. The namecaller speaks to the "Hebrew" name-bearers as he would and does speak (or think) about them behind their backs: the presence or absence of the referents makes little difference to him, since they have lost all claim to deference. On a very scale of name-calling, this would approach the upper limit. 22 In our first discourse-type, even if "Hebrews" are present, we also find them spoken to and about without opening their mouths at all, let alone speaking back. Here they for once appear in the role normally assigned to the Hab/piru everywhere, that of the silent other. (And when they do utter, like Miriam in the next dialogue-pattern, their group reference and self-reference echo the tag imposed by the master. Servility befits a servant.) Whatever else "Hebrew" may voice, it encodes a low and vulnerable status in the (Egyptian or Philistine, collective or individual) speaker's eyes. But the master doubles, in his own eyes, as a master race. Drawing on this second contextual logic, the Bible's ground rule of "Hebrews" widens its jurisdiction from society's power-network to the map of the world at large. For the Law coordinates the sociopolitical hierarchy with a multifold ethnographic (interracial, intercultural, international, ever-"bioideological") gulf between the parties. If the name-bearer under the Hebrewgram is always Israelite, then the name-caller likewise remains fixed and determinate in Scriptural context, much more so than the blanket term "foreigner" would suggest. According to the Table of Nations in Genesis 10-11, where Eber's own line unfolds from Noah to Abram, such a foreigner is invariably Hamite: Egyptian, Philistine, or (in a discourse pattern to ensue)
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Canaanite. Theirs is, literally because lineally, a family resemblance, a three-group portrait. In the Bible's framework, moreover, the geography aligns itself with the ethnology as bone and weapon of intergroup contention at once: the two mappings join forces against the "Hebrews." Abraham's call breaks the natural coincidence between lineage and land, ordering him to abandon his native Shemland for Hamland, specifically Canaan, preempted, polluted, and promised. There, the outlander will find himself, not indeed the sole latecomerrecall the Philistinesbut certainly the latest: for good or for ill, depending on the viewpoint between heaven and earth. The order of displacement (in either sense) renders him the newest arrival at the place, by the same counterhuman logic of choice that will mark out the nation sprung from him as the youngest on recordtoo young for the Table and, in the environment's worldly ("Hebrewing") eyes, an even later claimant of the promised land, an even more unwelcome settler on the face of Hamland. The patriarch adumbrates the codename, the destiny, the forking judgment of the people as an oddity in spacetime. With either's latecomership grown two-dimensional, his plus/minus bi-valence doubles, again for better or, terrestrially, worse. Beginning with the first Crosser, therefore, proximity stands in inverse ratio to the latecoming Hebrew's parity as well as parentage vis-à-vis the occupants. What with the group differences on every other front, unneighborly contact dogs the name-bearer from Genesis to Samuel, all over the existing three-land orbit. The bitter territorial disputes with the Canaanites and the Philistines, looming so large from the patriarchal to the monarchic era, find an intermediate equivalent in the ambiguity of Pharaoh the Oppressor's scenario. Who, in case of war, is liable to "go up from the land" (Exodus 1:10)? On one reading, the immigrants whom Joseph settled in Goshen may expel the vanquished locals from Egypt altogether. But then, in stereo-Hebrewing their antagonist, the Hamites aim for more than either individual vilification or collective de-nomi-nation. They would also turn against the threat to their life-space the spatialities latent, hence invertible, in his own name, and wholly absent from "Israel." All of its members Cis-Euphratensian, this Hamite race group is literally in a geographical position to wield the reverse and adverse etymology of ibri for deterritorializing "the Hebrew" as outlander: for denying his title to land, including the Promised Land, and consigning him Beyond the River, at times more than one river, allegedly his sole proper habitat by name and origin. Does Egypt consign the eberite Beyond the River (or Brook) of Egypt, whence he emigrated to her knowledge, as Joseph's "land of the Hebrews" indicates, or further north, Beyond the Euphrates River, whence he had previously moved into Canaan itself on his own account? (Recall also the attested Across-theSands idiomatics.) Does Philistia pro-
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pagandize as well as fight for the eberite's return in the opposite direction, south of the River of Egypt, where she evidently knows him to have lived of old, or again northward? The space-pointing goes both ways, all ways, which means no way, because it literally points the referent away. Invested by the enemy race group with so many, so wideranging, and so incompatible there's, from Mesopotamia through Canaan to the Nile, he has not a single here left upon the entire earth. The name-bearer, thus cast and outcast and shuttled, belongs nowhere. Not only do the Egyptians and the Philistines fail to see in the uprooting from eberalong with the roots of descent from Eber, to them unknowna mark of heavenly rite-of-passage election (as implied in Joshua's wordplay on be'eber/me'eber/Abraham). Between them, they would doom the eberites to universal outlandership, to homelessness without end: so twisted round, or counterloaded, the etymology projects the earliest image of the Wandering Jew. Conversely, this unique ethnogeographical (op)position goes to explain the otherwise puzzling fact that nobody else, friend or foe, will under any circumstances Hebrew an Israelite. Neither of the Table's remaining groups of Nations, the Japhethites or the Shemites, ever takes part in this of all power games, another dubious Hamite monopoly throughout the Bible. 23 Thus the portrait of who calls whom Hebrew (or not) gains a second, twofold facet from a new domain. Blind to context, ethno- and geo-poetic as otherwise, traditional scholarship has missed this compound world-dividing variable (right in the line of historians, you would think) even more utterly, if possible, than its sociopoetic fellow determinant. One immediate result of noting the ethnogeography would be another death blow to the conflation of the "Hebrew" with the Hab/piruwho, low or exalted, in or out of power, receive the name from all quarters and inhabitants of the Ancient Orient. Too thin to survive intrasocial comparison, the link forged between the groups snaps again under international pressure. So much for both the respective discourse grammars and the genetic, "real-life" continuity of the sources. On the Bible's own stage as a discourse world, the three axes of Hebrewness outlined thus far are not just equipollent and correlative but complementary to the point of indissolubility. The geoethnic drama interpenetrates in turn with the power antithesis. For now, a glance at the rationale behind the dubious Hamite monopoly on the vict-image will suffice. Even by itself, such restriction to a third of the foreign world underlines anew the uniqueness and purposiveness and systematicity of the Bible's (mis)naming its natives. All the more so given the immemorial lust for binary divides elsewhere, reflected in numberless hetero-grams, with "us" calling "them" names at that (e.g., the Greek's barbaros, the Chinese "foreign
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devil," the left-winger's "imperialist" or "reactionary," the black militant's "Whitey"). The Israelite art will further define itself if you consider the identity of the third singled out for the ignoble labeling job. That identity, to go by what we have discovered about the ethnocultures in contact and conflict, falls into polar incongruence with the namecaller's role as Hebrewer. The cultural polarity we have been tracing joins the longest possible genesis to the widest possible reach, the firmest possible values, and the deepest possible gulf, for maximum shock effect. As established in the story of Noah's drunkenness, immediately preceding the Table of Nations, Ham is the worst of the Noahides, the perpetrator of an unspeakable act never redeemed any more than forgotten in the Israelite literary canon. Early or late, his descendants inherit not only the criminality, recurrent in the variations on the Primeval Scene, but also the shameful name of its originator and theirs. Nor, though the Table spans the Hebrew Bible (Genesis 10:1ff., II Chronicles l:4ff.), does the eponymic inheritance and memory surface by way of genealogical catalogue alone. The original scene itself anticipates matters in repeatedly branding Ham's youngest son. It twice calls Noah's "youngest son" after his youngest, "Ham, the father of Canaan" (9:18, 22, 24), as if putting to us the question which youngster is the worse. Then it has Noah thrice curse his youngest via his own youngest son, "Canaan," rather than directly (9:95-27; cf. Stern-berg 1992:483ff.). With the other sons, we find prolepsis exchanged for long nominal back-reference. Thus, the Psalmist's retrospect on Israel's foundation story involves a yet longer retrospect on humanity's Noachic history, so that the latter-day, Egyptian villain assumes the name and by implication the role of his unholy ancestor. "Jacob sojourned in the land of Ham. . . . [God wrought] miracles in the land of Ham. . . . He smote [wa'yyakh, cognate with makkah, 'plague'] all the firstborn in Egypt, the first issue of their strength in the tents of Ham" (105:23, 27, 78:51). The allusion in replay, straight and contrastive, is denser than may appear. The name-bearer's offspring again suffer for his misdeed, once unfilial, now infanticidal; "the firstborn . . . the first issue" replaces the youngest and his youngest; and the almighty punishment wrought "in the tents of Ham" rhymes back to the outrage perpetrated in Noah's "tent" and counterpoints God's memorable blessing on ''the tents of Shem" (Genesis 9:21, 27). Had the poet looked deeper into the intertext, he might have discovered another bridge in Ham's taste for rape across the narratives, grown wholesale vis-à-vis the Hebrewesses. Likewise with the Philistines in Chronicles. The book not only relists them among the Sons of Ham when incorporating the Genesis Table of Nations (I, 1:12). It also tells how, in the reign of Hezekiah, the Simeonites expanded westward to "the entrance of Gerar," 24 known already from Gen-
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esis as a Philistine town. "The former inhabitants there belonged to Ham . . . and they smote [wa'yyakku] their tents" (I, 4:39-41). The tents interestingly recur, and so does the collocation with the rest of the Hamites: the book later celebrates King Asa's victory over "the Cushites," descended from Ham's firstborn and probably settled in the area by Egypt. "Asa and the people who were with him pursued them as far as Gerar . . . smote [wa'yyakku] tents . . . and returned to Jerusalem" (I, 1:8, II, 14:12-15; see also how the Table points out in Genesis 10:19 the Hamite territorial continuity, ''the Canaanites extended from Sidon, in the direction of Gerar, as far as Gaza"). Still, the Hebrewness that intervenes between the Deluge-old two-edged prospect and these triumphant retrospects does not agree with either. The power ("status") axis flaunts the sharpest contradiction of all. For the ancestral retributive logic has been expressed in its terms, so as to align ethical and ethnic ("bioideological") with social value, plus with plus, minus with minus. Once Noah found Ham out, he doomed his offspring, in particular Canaan, to serve their betters. "A slave of slaves [ebed abadim] shall he be to his brothers" (Genesis 9:25). That the Egyptians in Genesis-Exodus sell themselves en masse to Pharaoh, that they never dream of regaining their liberty, that they place and persecute their fellows under the yoke, does indeed bespeak a slavish nature. Yet, in the short term at least, history validates the Noachic diagnosis without the prognosis. While Hamite wrongdoing persists, especially against the Hebrews, the foretold relation veers round, even to the letter. Themselves "slaves [abadim] to Pharaoh," the Egyptians enslave [wa'yya'bidu . . . abodah . . . abdu] the sojourners in their midst (Genesis 47:19, 25, Exodus 1:1314). Wordplay reinforces power play, both counter to authoritative prediction. And in their light, one would venture to think it no accident but a related, inter-lingual puna crowning stroke of translational mimesisthat Egyptian itself denotes "(castrated) slave" by hm. *25 Their own tongue exposes them, as it were. So, for Hamites to lord it in deed and word over the "Hebrews"by divine choice, the best of the blessed Shemites/Eberides, handpicked for eberite crossership and relocation and nationhood as early as Abram the Hebrewis the bitterest mockery of all. But Scripture's ethnography differs from the genre's modern variety in its favored representational balance between the product and the process of group life, between being and becoming in this as in any sphere. It essentially makes a generic cross: timebound, eventful, peripeteic, narrative rather than descriptive. Thriving on change in and among the objects of representation, further, the writing not only dramatizes it at will on an international stage but also relates it to the world order as a theocentric macrosystem.
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Like every other state of affairs, then, the world turned upside down is contingent on history, that is, the Lord's management of history, and so reversible over history back into the appropriate scale of intercultural power, embodied in reference with deference. The negative term (value, image, situation) may therefore always be followed by its positive counterpart; the Hebrewgram's synchrony, governing all occurrences of "Hebrew," by an equally lawlike diachrony plotting a countermovement toward "Israel." Context, in short, has its dynamic axis, freely manipulable by the Omnipotentas Egypt and Philistia learn the hard way after having degraded Israel to a slave's lot and name. As their illusion of power gives way to heavenly reality, their discourse of power follows suit. Let us turn, then, from the mockery vocalized in unequal intergroup encounter, apparently forever, to the all-round peripety enacted by the universal superpower. From De-nomi-nation to Re-nomi-nation: The Hebrew/Hamite Master Plot Master plot, by a happy homonymy, fuses the two ideas at work here, that is, the cyclical or typological action and the imbalance between the actors, first to the anti-Self's advantage, then to the Self's. With either Hamite aspirant after mastership, the violent reversal of fortune induces and the-matizes the shift in referring term from "Hebrew" to standard Biblical usage, "Israel." Not that the name-callers' fear vanishes in the process but, on the contrary, that it grows so mortal in the rise from human to divine threat as to force a change of mind, policy and language all at once. The counteraction, with a wry twist, puts "the fear of God" into the hearts alien to the emotion, as to the expression, in either country. Literalized on the world stage, the pun hits the Godless and sweeps everything before it. "'We are all dead men,'" the Egyptians wail as the ten plagues culminate in the smiting of all the first-born in the land. "And Pharaoh . . . summoned Moses and Aaron by night and said, Arise, get out from among my people, both you and the Sons of Israel, and go, serve the Lord, as you have said" (Exodus 12:29-32). As they have said, indeed: a proper beating has (re) taught him overnight proper speech, exact and deferential and up-to-date and addresseeoriented in wording, deautomatized in cognition, no less than obedient in sense. For the first time since the conflict arose, both of the references he has disputed, as Oppressor and King-god rolled into one antitype, appear in their canonical form; and, intermediate between them, his "serve" acknowledges the true master, the object of due service. Typologically, he bears an uncanny resemblance to the angel on the warpath, from whom
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Jacob, about to make the last of his rite-of-passage crossings homeward, wrung the glorious eponym in another night scene. If Pharaoh does not quite "speak the language of Canaan," nor quite "swears allegiance to the Lord of hosts"as Egypt will one day, according to Isaiah's oracle (19:18)his Egyptian has gone a long way toward (re)assimilating the idiom peculiar to the emigrants and future inheritors of Canaan. Instead of having "the Hebrews" murdered at birth, the archenemy will now save himself by letting ''the Sons of Israel" go to "serve the Lord"a good riddance, for a change. In face of collective death, now boomeranging on the genocide, what are dreams of monopoly over imagery, worship, culture, power, indeed life and death, the best genes included? Rather, the emergency urges disengagement, in line with the resolution of all the precedents (Cain, Babel, Abram, Joseph as space-allocator) invoked by the narrative. "The people of the Sons of Israel" lapsing back into "Hebrews" of Josephic (or preJosephic) memory, only to re-emerge as "Sons of Israel": this captures the whole story, with the Egyptian perspective thrown in, from expatriation through oppression to exodus. Actually, beyond the Exodus as well, to judge from the rest of the canon. So (omni)potent is this lesson that it endures forever, setting a record of long-term bi-national memory. Where Joseph's deliverance of the Egyptians from starvation failed to prevent their relapse into "Hebrew" name-calling, God's deliverance of Israel from Egypt checked their tongues once and for all. This contrastive analogy between the human and the divine agency maps itself onto the Exodus plot as early as the symmetrical beginnings of action and counteraction, where the Pharaoh "does not know" the respective analogues (1:8, 5:2). No sooner has the linkage been made than the sequel, followed by the entire Bible, demonstrates the extent to which ignorance vs. knowledge, oblivion vs. memory, and the shifts between them, hinge on power-relations vis-àvis God: what I call the omnipotence effect (Poetics, 99ff.). If Joseph stays forgotten, all Biblical Pharaohs to come would appear to remember the Lord. Egypt will again treat and clash with his people, but never in "Hebrew" terms, either existential or nominal. 26 Not for nothing are those renewed dealings concentrated in the book of Kings: they proceed on a nation-to-nation, monarch-to-monarch basis, with "the house of slaves" turned a house-of-death for the enslaver continuing an ever-present memory, apparently to both sides. Hasn't God, while ordering Israel to make a record of Almightiness for posterity (e.g., "Narrate in the hearing of thy son and thy son's son" [Exodus 10:2]), undertaken to imprint his own on Egypt? As it happens, though the Exodus finds no mention outside the Bible, in the Nile region or elsewhere, the extraBiblical sources do virtually
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confirm the diachronic point (or dramatic peripety) even at their most hostile. They witness the group's national ethnicon, or related ("Jewish") ethnica, but never the de-nomi-nation. In this light, observe especially the twist readable into the coda of Marneptah's Hymn of Victory (ca. 1207 B.C.) over foreign peoples: "Israel is laid waste, his seed is not" (Pritchard 1969:377, and comment ad loc., updated in Stager 1985, Bimson 1991: esp. 13ff.; see also Yurco 1990, 1991 vs. Rainey 1991 on the correlative visual representation of those Israelites in a battle relief adjacent to the poem). The Pharaoh here gloats and claims a total victory, even more so than over some of the other wretches listed. As Egyptologists have long noted, moreover, "Israel" is the only name in context that the Hymn writes with the determinative of people rather than land, as though referring to the postExodus but preSettlement entity by its eponymous gentilic. 27 Also, the clue about the referent of "Israel" provided by the written hieroglyphic form dovetails with the time of writinggiven that Marneptah succeeded Rameses II, a likely candidate for the Pharaoh of the Exodus bondage. In turn, Scripture itself possibly locates Marneptah at the right spacetime juncture, and within the right book, through toponymic allusion: "the spring of Me-neptoah,'' exclusive to Joshua (15:9, 18:15). But the more attractive the synchronization with the Bible, I would moreover point out, the thicker the irony. Read against the canon, the Hymn's negatives take on a favorable aspect. Allegedly crushed, seedless, landless, it is nevertheless "Israel" and a people, in collective singular masculine form ("his") at that: the three group-markers that Exodus introduced via the Oppressor's (translated) Egyptian address, then erased by oppressive degrees, then wrung back from his successor, now independently emerge together from the horse's mouth, on the same high authority and in the original language. Balaam would understand, maybe find comfort in a greater one's discomfiture. The Marneptah reference, interestingly, even avoids the derogatory epithets showered upon a fellow victim such as "the wretched, ignorant enemy of Rebu." Still less does it team "Israel" with the Hab/piruotherwise notorious in Egypt before and after the eventan omission disappointing to modern historians, yet in perfect tune with the Bible's own historiography, and not of the Conquest alone, where "Hebrews" nowhere appear. To the Biblical insider, the nonappearance of either misnomer would be only part of the confirmation of the Exodus lesson from the Pharaonic antagonist's own lips, hence with an authenticity proportionate to the irony. The two accounts do not officially know (and in truth contradict) each other, yet both do "know the Lord" after their respective fashions. Whatever we make of this intersource accord in proper designation, the Biblical writer would knowingly smile at Egypt's so-called Israel Stela, and perhaps did smile, via the "Me-neptoah" allusion. What with featuring
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a border-marker and a life-giving spring within the reclaimed land, the toponym would nicely qualify for a wink at the reality. However that may be, and regardless of the narrator's intent, the joke on Marneptah lurks in the Chosen People's very survival under their chosen name where their Lord has chosen to return them, against all opposition. The survival of their writing, or counterwriting, rounds out the joke: Egypt has achieved no monopoly over literary, still less historiographic production, any more than over the rest of culture and nature. Here, even the reading of the independent sources as discourse (in my earlier phrase) is poles apart from both the violence and the thrust of crossculturalist pseudo-literarizing. The combined material does generate a finesse worthy of high literature: a fable, if you will, but one that resolves the attested cross purposes into the semblance of overall design. 28 It is not merely that the nation's ongoing history and her narrator's living to the tell the story give the lie to the enemy's boast of annihilation. Pharaohs come and go, yet their lust for genocide ("seed is not") never dies. At the same time, the empty boast gives itself away by lending color to the national record, to the recorder's own plotting of "Hebrews" among the nations in the key of superhuman diachrony. From his viewpoint, the commemorative hymn, whether otherwise true or false, would betray a memento mori; Pharaoh in his vaunted triumph still bows to God through the name "Israel." All as promised. This offers another suggestive contrast to the Hab/piru, now on the axis of development. There, as Bottéro generalizes from the Nuzi testimonia, the name-bearer would reassimilate to the social order he once abandoned, but reassimilate to it "elsewhere, within another group, another town, another country" (1981:104). The Hebrews, instead, regain the name and the group identity and ultimately the country that has been theirs, and theirs alone, since the evolution into Israelitenessin embryo, ever since God's first promise of nation-statehood. Appropriately, the stereo-"Hebrewed" people themselves (no longer God, though with his blessing) reclaim the gamut of their "Israelite" titles once the nation-state arises, with the monarchy, fighting the Hamite for Israel's independence on "the land of Israel" to the ultimate victory under David. The individual under-class member's desire of reintegration into multiple otherness vs. the ethnic collective's fulfillment of selfhood grade by grade against the other's opposition: the two trajectories are so mutually illuminating because they never cross. Centuries after, when the promise of land has fulfilled itself in turn, the fulfillment (as befell that of nationhood in Goshen) comes under threat of frustration from another Hamite quarter. History repeats itself with the Philistines, except for the incidence of the thematic change of name and fortune between extremes (bad to good, good to bad). The Ark narrative
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unrolls a plot somewhat less dense and complex than the threefold reversal among the Egyptians (from "Hebrews" in Genesis to "the people of the Sons of Israel" at the beginning of Exodus, then by degrees the other way round, then back again for good). This is partly because Egypt remains the historic model and memory par excellence; partly because the discourse can now thicken the Philistine variant by way of retrospective allusion to the foundational case; and partly because it wants to keep the final, decisive round for the reign and honor of David, the nemesis of "the uncircumcised," and what's more, the last of the elect to be called a Hebrew in any foreign service. But the contours of the Hamite master plotthat is, two-level (world/word, macro/micro) ascendancy followed by inversionunmistakably show as early as the first round in I Samuel. Having defeated "the Hebrews" and captured the Ark as a trophy, the Philistines learn to observe the proprieties of Biblical discourse once visited with an evocative series of plagues. "The Men of Ashdod . . . said, The ark of the God of Israel must not remain with us, for his hand is heavy upon us and upon Dagon our god. . . . The Ekronites cried, saying, They have brought around to me the ark of the God of Israel to kill me and my people. . . . The priests and the diviners . . . said, If you send out the ark of the God of Israel, do not send it out empty" but with appropriate reparation that will "give glory to the God of Israel" (I Samuel 5:1-6:18). By a newly happy coincidence, outside the Bible's framework and designs but quite in character, even the irony of the Ark's proving a double-edged trophy is reminiscent of Marneptah's victory (so-called Israel) Stela. Other echoes, linkages, bridges, cross references textual and temporal, are still happier, yet anything but coincidental. We even find the running allusion to Exodus voiced by the Philistines themselves at the two most strategic points, the rise and the resolution of the conflict over the Ark (4:8, 6:6). As in Egypt, for instance, the excerpt just quoted from the outcry of Philistia signals a multifold turn, affecting name and fortune, peripety and discovery, theology and nationality, all inscribed in the Bible's shorthand. "The Philistines never use the term 'Israelite,' only 'ibrî" (Rowton 1976:19): rather, they never use it willingly. The triumph of the latter-day Egyptians having given way to trembling, the improper speech in which they expressed their improper thought is replaced by native-like proprieties: "Hebrews" by "Israel," elohim-gods by elohim-God. Within this fourterm homology, again, the relation between the two pairs grows much closer than standard ideopoetic correspondence. It tightens from parallel inversion under duress into immediate collocation, "God of Israel"; and, by long-distance retrospect, from collocation within a phrase into virtual identification within the Hamite master plot. Just as the new Egyptians substitute for the old, so, yet more remarkably, does God for their common victims. The Ark, mistitled ''the gods" of the "Hebrews" and inspiring fear and seized by
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violence and liberated by divine omnipotence in Philistia, now retraces the fortunes (by now, ancient history) of the chosen people in Egypt, down to minutiae. Apart from the parallel shift in the forms of reference, note the echoes devised among the accessories of liberation. The chain stretches from the promise "you will not go empty-handed [reikam]" made and kept to the enslaved Hebrews in Egypt (Exodus 3:21); through the provision for "thy brother the Hebrew or Hebrewess" enjoined by Deuteronomy's ''thou shalt not send him out empty-handed [reikam]" in memory of Egypt (15:13); to the advice received and followed by the Philistines concerning the Ark, "do not send it [lit., him] out empty [reikam]" (I Samuel 6:3). Through the emplotment perfected in word and deed by this not-reikam substitution, God himself comes to double as the latest Hebrew slave forced into and out of Hamite vict-image. In Egypt the Almighty voluntarily assumed the title "God of the Hebrews" (Exodus 3:18), found by the prophet too demeaning to repeat in the oppressor's ears (5:1); now he stoops to go through the very ordeal of Hebrewness, beginning with the Ark's capture, whose "inglory" shocks the high priest to death (I Samuel 4:17-22). The cross-references virtually cross the divine and the national terms, or levels, of the master story. (For good resumptive measure, let me just hint that the Exodus-old community of fate outreaches "the Lord's" selfpresentation to Pharaoh under the foreignism "God of the Hebrews," and that the interim developments bring us much nearer [in time, space, happening, rationale] to the Ark narrative. The Sinai bond having sealed the deliverance from Egyptian bondage, the Philistines' trophy-to-be comes into being in the twofold role of witness and sharer. The Ark shared not only the people's wanderings but also, with fanfare, the Crossing into Canaan: the latter at the side of another, newer metonymy for the covenant, "the Book of the Torah," and assimilated to the Hebrew theme via the changes rung on 'br [Deuteronomy 31:24-26, Joshua 3-4]. As the ex-Hebrews [ibrim] turn Crossers [obrim, same form in the consonantal text, with a shift of etymological focus], so do their "gods.") Carried to such extremes, and less than merited by the nation, this show of divine solidarity in "enslavement" is as impressive as the following show of divine power in the countermovement toward the Ark's "exodus" from the new Egypt. Here, the symmetry across spacetime again informs the micro- as well as the macro-plot. Either reversal of fortune thus combines the restoration of the proper unifying singulars ("God/Lord," "Israel," "God/Lord of Israel") with the retributive disturbance of the enemy's own unity. As the plagues multiply, so do the fissures in the Egyptian camp (e.g., Exodus 8:14-15, 9:11-12, 20-21, 10:7-8, 11:2-3, 8, 12:30-36) and, more vociferously, among the cities of Philistia. The earlier uniform "Phi-
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listines" now breaks down into its local components, from "Ashdodites" to "Ekronites," each splinter-group intent exclusively on "our" (citywide only, like the egocentric collective ''my") survival in face of "the Ark of the God of Israel." Whichever we-group target suffers improper reference amid other violence, or suffers most, the penalty remains the same. "With him I will be in trouble" (Psalms 93:15): no mere form of words, the commitment to shared misfortunes realizes itself throughout in the dramatic as well as empathetic sense. In turn, the Egypt/Philistia cross-references, along with the heaven/earth crossing, deepen the intercultural lines that persist across history. The more identifiable or substitutable the plot roles on either side, the sharper the opposition between the sides: between the Israelite "Hebrewed" in slavery and the Hamite enslaver; between monotheism and polytheism, the pluralizing cum "Hebrewing" of God included; between divine and human might, leveled by the enemy to their sorrow; between the canonical understanding and the alien misconception of it all. From conflict to happy end, then, the narrator's translated quotation of Hamites in talk with or about Israelites nicely pinpoints the sense and the source of difference. It is not so much that the Egyptians or Philistines express themselves in their own languagewhich they of course doas that they refuse to acknowledge the premises, concepts, origins, traditions, updatings, value systems, entitlements, group images of the self vs. the other, incorporated into that of the Israelites and equally translatable by the outsider; not that they cannot but that they will not adjust their discourse, let alone their mind-set, to the coordinates of a culture repugnant to their own all over, except in face of death. This also explains why God, initial fellow victim and ultimate deliverer and self-vindicator, looms so large in the two reversals. His people subjected, their attributes negated, their genesis forced backward, their destiny jeopardized by the least tolerable master race, he alone is left to exert on the usurper the pressure for change; and he exerts it with a view to stretching the lesson from the domain of human-centered action (verbal, social, political, ethnogeographical) to that of heavenly choice and ideology. Hence, among many examples, the advance notice given to Pharaoh (himself deified by his people) that the call for freedom reaches him on divine "Hebrew" authority and in the interests of divine service, or the repeated nocturnal abasement of Dagon in the Ashdod temple, or the acceleration of the Philistine surrender through the retrospect on Egypt's proverbial hard lot (I Samuel 6:6): all motifs that connect or even subordinate the adversary's treatment of Israel in word and deed to his knowledge of Israel's God. The same nexus is verbalized in the turns (diachronies writ small, as it were) of the Hamite lexis and/or grammar, Pharaoh's denial of "the Lord" veering round into acknowledgment and the
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Philistines' plural elohim into the singular. So the narrative weaves together two plot movements on an international scale. One is exterior (from deprivation to liberation, from recalcitrance to obedience, from inglory to glory), one interior (from pride to humility, from ignorance to knowledge), and both encapsulated in the directly quoted speech of the foreigner who needs moving. His switch from the oppressive "Hebrews" to the overdue "Israel"correlated, even crossed with their heavenly analoguesreflects in miniature the dynamics of intercultural relations under God. Even such plot dynamics, therefore, ultimately goes back to the viewpoint (interiority, subjectivity) hidden in the jarring reference to "Hebrew" within a quote otherwise harmonized in translation with Biblical discourse. It is because this disturbance of the linguistic surface implies what inverted commas would advertisean origin in noncanonical talk and outlookthat we are alerted to the underlying cultural tension, resolution, encapsulation. Here, typically for the Bible, states of mind and awareness relate but do not reduce to states of affairs. On the contrary, perspective (above all, intergroup polyphony) makes plot, plot depends on perspective, if anything, more than the other way round. Accordingly, as the plot value of "Hebrew" decreases, the perspectival comes to the fore: the mimesis of alien expression and subjectivity rises from means to an end in itself. This is the case when the Chief Cupbearer labels Joseph "a Hebrew boy, slave to the Captain of the Guard" (Genesis 41:12) or when Pharaoh's daughter identifies the crying infant in the basket as one of "the Hebrews' children" (Exodus 2:6). In their voices, the term (unlike, indeed against, the utterance enclosing it) for once bears no immediate propulsive role, self-directed or external, any more than it incurs the usual punitive counterplotting, with a view to counternaming, in the storied image of diachrony. Given the Egyptian milieu, instead, the named "Hebrew" origin would operate as a ground against, not for, recommending Joseph to Pharaoh or saving Moses. (Contrast a wellwisher's designation of prisoners as ''Hab/piru * gentlemen" [Greenberg 1955: no. 12] in the letter urging their discharge.) The stock reference has, in fact, negative plot energy: its deterrent load might keep the speakers themselves, or the fellow Egyptians addressed, from acting upon their initiative, which goes against the national grain (and ultimately, unknown to them, against the monopoly-driven national interest). Why, then, risk undoing, in the nomination, what one proposes to do for the name-bearer in the action? Why should the Helper echo the Antagonist (the thwarted virago, the genocidal king) at victimageand precisely where he or she run counter to their own group-type? The latter, as represented by the quintessential instance, Pharaoh, itself breaks any stock association of (extreme) alterity with folly or madness; and his two
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associates show how the image-breaking carries over to the removal of individual "enemy" figures from the negative pole on higher axes yet, for example, (in)gratitude or (un)feelingness. If therefore the effect, the interest, and the value all lie in the destereotyping, whereby the Bible tempers even the worst of its antitypes, how is it that the two favorable exceptions alike still typecast the Other whom each would favor in turn? The dissonance redoubles, I believe, to give an insight into the limits of the self's variance (a fortiori escape) from the discourse world inherited and internalized by it as a second nature. Concealing neither malice nor motive on the name-callers' part, "Hebrew" still betrays the prefabricated invidious distinction unique to Hamite speakers as such (never mind how exceptionally well-wishing) and reflected by the narrator for mimetic effect. To thicken the intercultural power-context, the Cupbearer's utterance even runs to the extra "boy" and the Princess's to the curt imperatives. They speak, identify, condescend, deterritorialize as they think, Egyptian fashion, and presumably cannot help it. Unconstrained by either naturalized etiquette or divine supernaturalism, the collective self will out, if only in utterance. So their exceptionality reinforces the Law of (De)Nomination by drawing it across the standard lines of plot, perspective, purpose, portraitureacross the battle lines, in short, that these two sympathizers avoid in all but the group name that rises automatically from mind to mouth. For once no hateword, it is still a codeword, within their discourse universe and, in reverse, ours, the frame-sharers'. The very term whereby they distinguish the Jacobite/Israelite as foreigner in their original Hamite speech comes to distinguish them as foreigners and foreign speakers in the Bible's reporting ("translation'') of their speech.
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3 Proteus in Culture Land Stereotypes, Metastereotypes, and Idolatry Proteus Principle vs. Package Dealing Owing to the all too divergent accounts of Hebrewness, starting with who's-who, our inquiry into group representation and adjacent topics has proceeded on more analytic levels than the immediate, Scripture-directed one. Among the higher-level issues already encountered on the way are fictionalizing, anachronizing, historicizing; uniculture, crossculture, inter-culture; class- vs. nation-centeredness; unifocal (e.g., exclusively Israelite), bifocal (through "partition" or "distribution"), confocal ("mixed") world-making; reference vs. referent group; literary canon vs. pseudo-literary mega-text; lexical vs. contextualized word-image or heterogram; stereotyping, destereotyping, counterstereotyping; inset vs. framing portraiture; mimetic (translated, chain-translated) utterance vs. self-expression; reading with vs. against the communicative grain, notably including the operative value scheme; typology in vs. out of line with teleology; synchrony (e.g., network of references or cross-references or for that matter etymologies) vs. diachrony (the narrative passing through them in emplotment). Large questions, no doubt, and inescapable, toopartly by the very terms of the inquiry, partly because the case in point joins great artistry to such a chequered exegetical history. All along, then, my argument about Hebrews between Cultures has programmatically run together the arts of discourse and various styles of metadiscourse so as to explore the intersection of literature not only with culture but also with cultural study. It would now help, I believe, to articulate what has emerged thus far regarding this double juncture against the background of accepted theory. As the issues grow more complex in the chapters ahead, we will be in a position to retest and if necessary elaborate at every stage the lessons drawn here from the Bible's ideopoetic iconoclasm. Yet look first at a milder kindred spirit. One of Jane Austen's finest parables of reading occurs in Persuasion, when the heroine, Anne Elliot, leaves the decorum and snobbery of her
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native Kellynch Hall to visit the Musgroves, her countrified relatives at Uppercross. Anne had not wanted this visit to Uppercross to learn that a removal from one set of people to another, though at a distance of only three miles, will often include a total change of conversation, opinion, and idea. She had never been staying there before, without being struck by it, or without wishing that other Elliots could have her advantage in seeing how unknown, or how unconsidered there, were the affairs which at Kellynch Hall were treated as of such general publicity and prevading interest. . . . The Mr. Musgroves had their own game to guard and to destroy, their own horses, dogs, and newspapers to engage them, and the females were fully occupied in all the other common subjects of housekeeping, neighbours, dress, dancing and music. She acknowledged it to be very fitting, that every little social commonwealth should dictate its own matters of discourse; and hoped, ere long, to become a not unworthy member of the one she was now transplanted into. With the prospect of spending at least two months at Uppercross, it was highly incumbent on her to clothe her imagination, her memory, and all her ideas in as much of Uppercross as possible. (Austen 1961 [1818]:70-71) The "removal from one set of people to another" is never effortless. Even "a little social commonwealth"or its novelistic equivalent, Austen's own "little bit (two inches wide) of ivory"forms a microcosm: if other than our own little world, a heterocosm. It has its peculiar body of "conversation, opinion . . . idea . . . matters of discourse," to which the ''transplanted" (in effect, with a double bearing, translated) subject needs to adjust "her imagination, her memory, and all her ideas . . . as much . . . as possible." A welcome antidote, this, to the habit of associating translation between codes with the special case of language shift, here nowhere in evidence. Far from privileging the medium of exchange, the novelties listed in the shift significantly oscillate between topic and attitude, horizon and perspective, all likewise variable: if one is to become "a not unworthy member" of the discourse community, the adjustment will embrace the local discoursive repertoire and skills as a whole. Equally important, the novelties all belong to the give and take of discoursewhere the intentness on translating oneself will find a proper vocal outletrather than to the secret self "clothed" in it. A successful visit to a heterocosm entails mastery of a new culture game, as encoded and played by the locals. But acknowledging the claim of the host's otherness in its differentiality, to the extent of self-projection into it for the nonce, "at least two months,"
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is a duty, "highly incumbent on her," whose fulfillment also pays. The social and existential benefits that Anne derives therefrom as heroine combine with her interpretive discernment as focus of narration to yield a multiple "advantage" over the rest of the Elliots, who, Hamite-like solipsists, disdain the effort. She proves throughout an acute (the novel's acutest) reader of both life and literature, of the minds and morals and manners impinging on her ordeal of self-fulfillment as it winds its way toward a belated happy end. More violent at every level, the removal to the Bible's discourse universe, from its contemporaries or ours, is accordingly more unsettling and demanding. At the profoundest level of allprofounder even than the revolutionary theology, yet at one with its war on graven imagerythe representation endeavors to wean us, not excluding lazy or dogmatic believers, of the shortcuts to making sense of the world. True belief is belief in a difficult order: one fluid within limits, created and controlled but evercontingent on choice, absolute yet irreducible to formula, hence always partly mysterious. Any easier order would offer false comfort, especially the appearance of stability, at prohibitive cost. Neat, changeless, transparent, shockproof, it would come at the expense of both divine and human liberty or, ontologically, of things as they are or, epistemologically, as they are made out by trial and error. Facile misrepresentation inflicts the compounded penalty on every item in its word, every sharer in the discourse. Readers of my Poetics will no doubt appreciate how the tortuous narrative sequences that launch and maintain "the drama of reading" converge on exactly this key juncture. The dynamics of ordering, gapped ordering, late reordering go to bring home a complex sense of order in the narrated reality. Nothing there escapes the workings (developments, discoveries) of time; but then, neither does anything, short of chaos, metamorphose all the time. Things on earth, a fortiori in heaven, also persist over time, coexist in space, if only for a time. Reality presents a spacetime manifold, by whose continuities we form our concept of a locale, a state of affairs, a rule of existence, an international orbit, a tribe, a character, from God downward. Yet the ideopoetics behind temporal arrangement, as an ordeal of order inseparable from experience (living, meaning, reading, being human) will not allow those apparent spatialities to click and harden: it extends to all objects and lines of pattern formation, whose most thematic or reflexive umbrella is our present business, image-making. The Bible's iconoclasm challenges posterity's ideas to this day, enshrined in set ways of thinking, judging, observing, picturing, concept-forming, responding, analyzing, theorizing, no less than in the graven images worshipped or the group images made by its own environment. All imagery, if reified beyond time and circumstance, is deemed idolatry (or, ethically, the exchange of freedom for fixture). In contrast, the Hebrewgram operates
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to deautomatizing, often two-edged effect: to balance regularity with variety, law-likeness with lifelikeness; to play off the culture against the heterocosm, self- against other-imaging from either viewpoint, heavenly against terrestrial (dis)privilege, sometimes even God's choice against the chosen's merit; to show everyone and everything in flux, with reversal itself reversible. The Law is accordingly packed with exemplary value beyond the logic of the heterogram as such. It invites wider generalization still, negative and constructive, which will in turn ramify as our paradigm case unfolds. Of these implications, the widest, also the unhappiest, bear on the lust for (meta)stereotype in (meta)discourse. Ironically, analysts and critics of stereotypes in first-order representation are as vulnerable to it as any, perhaps more than most, because they all too often import and enforce their own rigidities, especially the ideologues among them. The reification that Scripture calls idolatry has never died out since, only modulated the objects and rituals of worship in endless forms, or formalisms. Now the Hebrewgram, precisely due to its bearing on stereotypes and its high systematicity, can give us a measure of how distant idolatry-free engagement with imagery is from the antiBiblical extreme that ostensibly resembles it. Its workings thus go to uncover some of the "formalistic" thinking behind the study of culture, ancient and modern, literary and extraliterary, corpus-specific and comparative and universalist. Mixing loose with dogmatic thought, the formalism exhibits itself in a tendency to overconnection among essentially independent variables, as if their play were arrestable in this or that fixed signifying complex. Even among those who have no special axe to grind, or in fields of discourse analysis little constrained by ideology, such arrest passes for theory, indeed for science, because it answers to a certain ideal of ordereasy and reassuring where the Bible's is difficult and unquiet. Thereby, neatly linked taxonomies (factor A goes with B, C involves D, E predicts F) appear to draw things together by rule: the chaos and flux of literature, history, behavior, culture, or their sheer multiformity, settle into universal configuration. Threatened with intractable variety, you then need only apply the linkages ready to hand for a unified picture to emergeone most desirable when it establishes the sort of coherence wanted. Elsewhere I demonstrated, in several connections, how both reason and empirics falsify this method. What I call the Package Deal Fallacy runs against the grain of discourse in language and all semiotic systems, which rather live on the boundless dynamism of the Proteus Principle: the many-to-many correspondences between form and function. By "form" I refer to, say, uncontextualized words, utterances, activities, gestures, traits, nexuses, enchainments, polarities, units and their combinatory spectrum, in short; and by "function" to the meanings, effects, values, differential roles that they assume or shed or transform in context. Rule-governedness is
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role-governedness, never quite foreseeable a priori even at its least novel, inferrable and generalizable (if at all) from the communicative practice, the device's, the work's, the author's, the genre's. Instead of marrying form to function, then, the Proteus Principle highlights the contingent nature of their affair: their liaisons in an assortment of guises, the regularities and vicissitudes of their interplay, always goal-directed, in theory endless. If every form can perform many functions and every function realize itself in many forms, then every such nexus is temporary, purposive, frame-dependent. Unrest, however regulated for a time and to an end, as within a well-defined poetics, substitutes for arrest, living for lifeless order. 01 Some Protean workings have visibly run through the above argument, in opposition to diverse analytic packages or "metastereotypes" as well as to literary fixities old and new. Thus, if the dependence of words on context for their meaning and effect needed any proof, one would have to look no farther than the exemplary context-boundness of Scripture's "Hebrew": from its purposive usage against the background of "Israel" within the Israelite national literature, to its fourfold, socio-ethno-geo-historical definition, to its antithetical value-laden semantics between frame and inset, to its multiphase intergroup (''translational") genesis, to its ranging over a quartet of discourse patterns, to its irreducibility to either the ancient rhyme-fellow outside the Bible or to its own later, anachronistic senses even amid co-reference. All the attempts to imprison the word's signification (extension, intension, evaluative charge, etc., down to the etymology) in the lexicon are foredoomed, because the lexical item we encounter on the page operates under two encoding systems, linguistic and discoursive. "Hebrew" owes its ethnic bearing alone to the lexicon behind Scripture, the rest of its meaning to the indirections trained on it by Scripture with definite communicative ends in view. The two decodings, like the codes to which they appeal, resist packaging even at their most convergentand indeed break apart from the earliest postBiblical usage. Nor must we forget the weight of the special case: if so with group tags, which the discourse may appear to transfer ready-made from the language, attitudes and all, a fortiori with language in discourse generally. By the same token, the principle charges the lexical form/function dynamics with yet larger significance. As a pointer, key, or miniature, the codename variously affects in turn its own determinative contexts. For such mutual part/whole determination, observe interlingual traffic. That the speakers throughout our first discourse-pattern are Hamite, by Law, alerts the reader to their heterolingualism: like the pluralized elohim, the Philistines' "Hebrews" reflects otherness of tongue and mind. Once the reflex has been encoded, however, it not only invites us to dig for more occasional co-heterocosmisms (e.g., the Egypto-Philistine hanit,* else liable to escape notice, indeed to lose its functional life below the surface of
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unilingualism). The encoded reflex also bespeaks and delineates and emplots the interlocutor's aliennesswith Jonah, as will appear, it suffices to identify the addressee's Hamitenesseven in the absence of any, kindred tokens. The outsider's outsidership turns operative as such, by force of a difference marked in and through some Hebrewing expression. Concurrently, though, the Proteus Principle works here to unmake another, elsewhere operative difference: that between the foreigner's original hetero-utterance, as supposedly voiced in the world, and its given, directly quoted equivalent in the frame's Biblese. Now, the very noncoincidence of the two versions challenges, and would baffle, the standard theory of reported discourse, whereby direct quoting "reproduces" the original: the (linguistic) form of directness and the (mimetic) function of reproductive-ness allegedly go together. (For references and refutation see note 1 above.) Against the spirit of this illusory package dealing, the Bible contextualizes the link. The question is hardly whether the direct report preserves or breaks the identity with the original, unattainable anyway, but whether their lack of identity signifies. And the answer is at times Yesnotably within the structure of repetition, where variants make all the difference (Poetics, 365ff.)at times No. Given the translational mimesis, with its "Hebrew" key reflex, the quoted foreign speech and its direct quoting in the vernacular count as one heterolanguage for all practical (e.g., emplotting, characterizing, evaluative, verisimilar) purposes, one tell-tale intergroup opposition. The differential force, actualizable through either form of heterolingualism, manifest or submerged, lies in the grouping apart of the Israelite vs. Hamite by reference to their diametric ethnocultures. Descriptive Packaging: Character Traits Misallied Having illustrated the principle in brief from our earlier findings, I will now detail the two commonest ways of misrepresenting representation by falsely arresting its play. Each would immobilize a whole gamut of discourse phenomena; but the ensuing argument focuses the most relevant and often most sensitive cases in point, those bearing most directly on issues of self/other representation, and so testable against the Hebrewgram. One line of package dealing operates on the descriptive level: to characterize or theorize some entity in the interests of pure scholarship. It consists in binding together discrete features attributable to that entity, as if they necessarily correlated, or configured, or implied one another. That the operation may well hide some premise, belief, even agenda other than the scholarly pursuit of knowledge goes without saying. But it is not very important here relative to the descriptiveness (vs. inbuilt value-ladenness) of the items operated on and except as an aid to accounting for their
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misarrest. The question is rather whether the analyst's underground premise itself answers to the described world or smuggles in its own dogma, if only that of reductive pseudo-universalism in complex-making. One such major dogma, regarding the genre of historiography, has already been introduced in chapter 1, namely, that the historical function of truth telling attaches to the historical form of realistic telling. Or forms, rather, because the teller's perspective and the tale's worldthe epistemology and the ontology, essentially discrete as well as variable aspectsmust then by fiat exhibit the same earth-boundness. Among ancient works, therefore, Thucydides would pass muster, Homer or the Bible would not, whatever the role they fulfilled in cultural context. (So little so that "Hebrews" may end up in a world of novel-like fiction.) The anachronism combined with the self-directedness of the typology is, as usual, especially ironic when perpetrated by historians bearing the name of science. Conversely with the pole diametric to realism. As package dealing makes historians unhistorical, so does it make critics uncritical of the chains in which they would keep poetic license. Narratology thus interlinks the features of omniscience, omnipotence, and reliability: given one supernatural qualification, it appears, the rest ensue. In balder terms of alterity, if the narrator is other than humanthan the limited, error-prone historian, say, or his fictional surrogate and oursthe otherness must be complete. However logical-sounding, though, the interlinkage proves contingent. It does hold for, say, Diderot's teller in Jacques the Fatalist or John Fowles's in The French Lieutenant's Woman; yet the Bible divests its omniscient narrator of omnipotence, enjoyed by God alone, and Vanity Fair of authoritativeness. 2 The narrative tradition breaks the narratological stereotype (ultimately not a logical but a theological figure, cast in godlike power-imagery): it unpacks the package even when resorting to it as one composite of many. Similarly with characters proper. Interbound characteristics do occur, clicking together on some personality model institutionalized in life or literature, and producing a "fiat" as opposed to "round" variety of character, a stock figure, in brief. Even so, this genuine stereotype (encountered in the discourse world of, say, comedy or propaganda) is a thing apart from the metastereotype: the bundle of traits that we ourselves join together in our discourse about some figure(s) already, and possibly otherwise, represented. Such flatness may correspond to nothing in art or history or society or cultural psychology, but again just to the exigencies and desires of analytic reductionism. The analyst will then have flattened the round character to suit his own schemata of the life or literature in questionfor example, of their alleged portraiture of the other. How else, to glance at two complex villains, would Pharaoh get schematized as a wicked fool by approach after approach to Exodus since the Rabbis, or Milton's Satan glamorized into the Romantic rebel? Endemic to ideology-driven criticism,
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whether attacking or championing the otherness of its own construction, this reductive second-order imaging is also found in hard traditional scholarship. An example would be an issue of crossgrouping left unresolved so far, i.e. the putative underclass membership. According to the combined theory, Hebrews rank with the Hab/piru as a social "class" of low "status." In the Hebrewgram, of course, a quartet of discourse axes must meet to generate the naming. For the sake of testing the allOriental class-identity on its own ground, however, let us extract the social factor regardless of the whole. Does the simplified Law of Denomination then match, or reforge from within the Bible's world of discourse and poetics of interculture, the crosscultural nexus? Would it then be valid to generalize that "the political status of the individuals and groups designated by the Old Testament as Hebrews was virtually the same as that of the aliens who, in prebiblical times, used to be designated as habiru *" (Lewy 1957:13)? The short answer is no; and not just because the defining attribute of the Biblical group's statusnamely, inferiority on the power hierarchyhas been missed (or misplaced or mismatched) as such in the tangle of variables and accidentals and specifics through which it cuts. A reason more fundamental yet, and instructive beyond the immediate nexus, lies in the collapsing of different attributes, forcibly yoked together to the point of (con)fusion. A type-character is yet a character, his make-up (beyond the defining characteristic) alterable from one context to another, with time, role, focus, specific exigency, general shift of attitude. Instead of combining or distinguishing features by the value (lifelike, normative, scalar, integrational) they assume in the milieu reconstructed, however, the reconstructor's group typology package-deals them into some fixed identikit, often ill-made and ill-judged as well as ill-adapted to the givens. The stock portraiture is more dubious when the typology operates across groups, for comparison, let alone for subsumption under one rubric, e.g., the underclass character that the Hebrews allegedly share with the Hab/piru. Here we again encounter, in crosscultural shape, this major obstacle to progress in the study of culture old and new, or of its literary representations. To judge from the ongoing controversy alone, it would even seem questionable whether any of the negative properties ascribed by the experts to the Hab/piru themselves (e.g., alien, fugitive, vagrant, predatory, detribalized, living on the margins of society in all roles) fit the type as a whole. The class-identity wavers among rival portraits. How, then, will this amorphous mass compare, let alone co-extend, with the line of "Hebrews," well-defined (if illused and ill-famed) sociopolitically as otherwise? The impression of "sameness" arises only from the blur enveloping the linkfrom the indiscriminate choice and slippage among the many possible (in theory, endless) operative correlates and measures of "status." The anal-
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ogies made by the comparatists, at times downright false and more often than not loose on their own slippery grounds, as already shown, are invariably beside the main point of comparison. For the examination of likeness across the groups, a fortiori of identity in character or membership, the analogy needs to be redrawn along contextual lines. And once redrawn, by appeal to the well-defined group, it turns out weak and sporadic, at best mixed, at worst contrastive, hence always divisive rather than unitary. In the Bible itself, one sociopolitical constant, namely vulnerability to another's might, typifies all the group exemplars, whatever their individual differentiae (old vs. young, men vs. women, early vs. late, expatriate vs. territorial, storied vs. legal, etc.). With the "status" relation cast in terms of powernormally even driven to the extreme of literal bondage and mastership in age after agethe Hebrews spring apart from the Hab/piru, to whom no analogous Law applies. This dividing line now takes on yet sharper perceptibility, because it stretches to the expressive domain. Character typology and discourse typology fork alike, not only in concert but also in connection with the same power-variable. If you go by the speech context, the Hab/piru-gram turns out to enact one of the Hebrewgram's four set-ups, and the most elementary of the lot, pitting the self who assigns against the other who bears the name: the reference against the referent groups, as I called them. In who-says-what-of-whom, the entire Hab/piru source material nicely corresponds to the first "Hebrew" discourse-type: the name-bearers, themselves voiceless, are always spoken about by outsiders to their class, implacable enemies included. Observe therefore how differently, and how variously among themselves, the members of this multinational class fare in power relations even through the voice of others, their supposed betters. With them, first of all, anything like servitude proper (freely entered into by "Hab/piru" contractants at Nuzi, imposed on 'pr.w captives in Egypt) is more the exception than the rule. 3 Whether or not one agrees with Bottéro about their constant "refugee" status, he properly focuses (albeit with qualifications) "la liberté et l'indépendance" (1954:190, 1972) they enjoy, where Greenberg (1955) misgeneralizes their ''dependence" from supposedly related or concomitant traits. Such generalization would leave the trait meaningless, for who in the world (below God or an absolute potentate) escapes dependence, strictly speaking? To preserve a cutting edge, the trait must be relativized without being reduced to, or deduced from, other variables. Cultural features (no matter how "organic" or "sociological" their association looks or how they actually go together at times) resist automatic package dealing into, say, frozen group portraits, here class stereotypes. The respective feature-complexes once unpacked, indeed, this Hab/piru privilege of freedom shines by comparison, just as the typical "Hebrew" deprivation springs into sharper relief.
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The exact contrary has been maintained by those who push the blanket feature of "dependence" to the limit of literality. They read a sociolegal footing of bondage into the very term "Hebrew" by association with the Hab/piruactually, with the least privileged among the Hab/piru. (Such a line of reading has been current since the influential accounts of Parzen and Alt in the 1930s.) But the extraBiblical group and its members usually rank higher than that low point, often higher by far, even on official scales encoded in a source or culture unfriendly to them. To begin with the next lowest outside ranking, a Hittite document positions the Hab/piru between the freeborn citizens and the slaves (Bottéro 1954: no. 91, with commentary ad loc, Greenberg 1955: no. 135), as indeed do the Nuzi service contracts, in both evoking their prior freedom of agency and allowing for their manumission. Elsewhere we find them at the top, hobnobbing with the great of other societies, most notably the indigenous culture that depicted and graded them from its own viewpoint. On a Pharaonic list of prisoners taken in war, they follow hard upon royalty, and given their number, 3600, the high status cannot be restricted to the leadership (Bottéro 1954: no. 183; Greenberg 1955: no. 159). Again, an Alalakh tablet interposes two of them between a palace official and a prince (Bottéro, no. 39); and others bracket them with the military forces (Hess 1994:206-208). The conclusion that they formed the Indo-European "warrior aristocracy" (Cazelles 1973:18 and passim) is therefore not quite groundless. The record actually names some who exercised authority in national and international life, even beyond the sphere of their own class. One is "Harbi-Sihu * who . . . lived during the twelfth century B.C. at the court of the king of Assyria, and was described by the king of Babylonia as the actual ruler of Assyria." Another is "Kudurrâ, servant of the king Mardukahhe-eriba* of Babylon about 1050 B.C., and recipient of real estate as a gift from the king. The grandfather of the king Tettis* who reigned over Nuhasse* and Barga in the fourteenth century B.C. was likewise a Habiru*."4 Reminiscent of Joseph? Certainly, but with a tell-tale disparity in nomination. Upon his rise to Egyptian viceroyalty, the ungentle gentilic "Hebrew" (so often leveled at him as bondman earlier) abruptly drops below the social surface, to reemerge with a vengeance after his departure from life and memory. His counterparts in the north, on the other hand, receive the name Hab/piru (or the cognate adjective) while still at the height of their power, as though it had nothing derogatory about it. So do less eminent worthies. This group designation's very oldest occurrence on record, in a letter from Alishar of the nineteenth century B.C., suggestively contrasts with Genesis again. As a prelude to Joseph's release from jail on Pharaoh's orders, he is called "a Hebrew boy" by a friendly (unthinking, hence all the more revealing) Egyptian intercessor;
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the Egyptian's opposite number in Alishar consistently dignifies the alien prisoners that he would set free with a title inapplicable to the lowly or the enslaved, "the Habiru * gentlemen." In the commentary on this tablet (Bottéro, no. 5, Greenberg, no. 12, ad loc.), the honorific overtone has been disputed; yet the fact remains that those (gentle)men are connected with the Palace at home, may expect succor from the local Palace, and have enough wealth to ransom their way out at all events. It is therefore misleading to generalize that "at their first appearance the Hab/piru* are already in the same dependent role in which we find them throughout their history" (Greenberg 1955:63): compared with the bottomless dependence of a Joseph, they gravitate toward the upper end of the power hierarchy, firmly occupied by some of their confreres. Even away from home, in temporary misfortune, and spoken about behind their backs, they inspire respect. Later personages include a "chief of the SA.GAZ" to whom a Hammurabi letter refers by name and attributes a cook (Bottéro, no. 17, Greenberg, no. 20): he, and his like, thus employ servants as well as command troops. In contrast, given the Biblical norm of servitude, a "Hebrew gentleman, or chief, or master" would be a contradiction in terms, and is therefore a predictable absentee. (Unless, of course, one reads the phrase into the discourseapropos of Abra(ha)m, Jephthah, Abimelech, Davidto spin the fables of identity anatomized in chapter 1.) Again, while "Hebrew" typically compounds subservience with stigma in the name-caller's eye and discourse, the Hab/piru may retain, or even gain, their power at their least (as at their most) respectable. Always discrete in principle, though they do look of a kind, if not mutually implicative, the two "status" characteristics may fly apart, as well as come together, in actual portraiture. Throughout the Amarna corpusthe most pejorative of all and the most widely yoked together with the Biblethis divergence of sociopolitical features even makes the rule. Below the surface of abuse heaped by the Canaanite city-governors on the Hab/piru in their epistles to the Egyptian court, there lurks a sense of realpolitik. For example, the more opprobrious the names that the letter-writer calls the Hab/piru armed bands (e.g., "runaway dogs") in the pay of some opponent, the more he gives away that the name-bearers hold the balance of power. The hiring opponent who has enlisted them, even if a native prince or a fellow governor, such as the notorious AbduAshirta, is himself liable to receive the bad name ("SA.GAZ-man," etc.) by association. Though not quite a badge of honor, this again reads like an inverted token of success in loyalist diplomatic writing, easily penetrable because in effect coded double talk. So one often can't really tell from the token who's who, except that he's winning. "At times all limits on the use of the name seem to have burst, and the writers of the Amarna letters savagely label
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anyone who opposed and threatened them as traitorous, conspiratorial, reprobate, rebellious 'apiruor, in effect, 'apiru fellow travellers" (Gottwald 1979:404). This sound and fury always proceeds, however, within the reference group on either side of the written message, exclusive of the referent himself. Given the uniform discourse-situation, one therefore wonders if those writers, freely libelous behind the backs of their opponents high and low, would dare to call them so to their face, "Hebrew" style. Recall Alice's timidity in addressing the "Cheshire Puss" while doubtful "whether it would like the name'': it "had very long claws and a great many teeth, so she felt that it ought to be treated with respect" (Carroll 1970:88-89; and cf. chapter 2, note 22 above). Perhaps most significantly, along with the Amarna ruler named after the company he keeps, the stigma applies to his diametric opposites in feudal society, namely to "slaves who have become Hab/piru *" (Greenberg, no. 111, Bottéro, no. 144). So the petty king of Jerusalem brands the commoners responsible for the death of his ally in Lachish. Not Hab/piru slaves, much less Hab/piru as slaves or slaves as Hab/piru, but Hab/piru ex-slaves, virtually anti-slaves: revolutionaries fighting for independence against dynasts and imperialists, a sympathizer would call them. In falling lower than the slaves they were, into the worst kind of outlawry, the gang charged (by Er-Heba* of Jerusalem) with killing their master (Zimrida of Lachish) have turned anti-feudal and accordingly become a threat to the established order, a force to be reckoned with. Descent on the one scale is ascent on the other, which alone regulates the term in the hostile official usage of the age. Power (or its glorified counterpart, free agency) without respectability is power still. With the multiple hierarchies duly untangled, then, this one crowds out all the rest here to pinpoint and polarize the contrast with the Bible. To mention only the closest analogue, the "Hebrews" enslaved in Egypt are remarkable for their clawlessnessall too pathetically and ingloriously so by the decorums of ordinary national literatureas were the free "people of the Sons of Israel" before them. Intent on victimage, Pharaoh of the Oppression jumps from their numbers to a scenario of their alliance with external enemies and, possibly, their takeover of the countrybut, unlike his real-life vassals terrorized by the Hab/piru, without reason. In ironic fact, if you locate him in the Amarna age, and combine the sources, then the reality would expose the groundlessness of his forebodings. It is as though he literally projected onto the innocent herdsmen sojourning in Goshen by kingly invitation the enormities reported to him of the Hab/piru, who (his correspondents often shriek) "have joined" an assortment of aggressors and "have taken all the lands" of the king. The refrain-like allegations made about one grouponly to be filed away and apparently ignored by the real king, because emanating from interested partiesare fabricated and disseminated by his Biblical surrogate about another. The
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"Hebrews" never pose a threat to the country of their sojourn; never raise their hand, or so much as their voice, in selfdefense against abuse, enslavement, de-peopling, genocide; never rally around their deliverer; never appear more feckless than when, restored to liberty, a host of 600,000 men quail at the sight of Pharaoh's chariots. On the axis of sociopolitics, in short, the Amarna archive shows how brute forcenever an attribute of the "Hebrews" as such, who rather endure than wield it under this ethniconmay come to dominate the Hab/piru portrait. It may also come to gain the portraitee respectability of sorts as well as healthy if grudging respect for his "long claws." The two attributes that seem to diverge into force vs. repute with the Amarna Hab/piru are equally linkable (and in a positive way, too, unlike the twofold Hebrew minus) among others of their class. Beyond the achievements of specific members, there is the recognition won by the group in the national and the international arena. The fact that "the gods of the Hab/piru * (or the SA.GAZ)" are invoked as witnesses to treaties signed by the Hittite empire (Bottéro 1954: nos. 75-86, Greenberg 1955: nos. 121-32) has obvious implications in this regard. (All the sharper if you contrast the Biblical Egyptians' drive toward a monopoly of worship, on pain of stoning the abominables, or Moses' vain bids for getting Pharaoh to recognize, if not "the Lord God of Israel," then "the God of the Hebrews.") Elsewhere, the worshippers themselves make one of the parties to the accord. In an eighteenth century B.C. contract from Alalakh, the date formula reads, "The year Irkabtum, the king, Shemuma, and the H* soldiers made peace" . . . Shemuma was, perhaps, the chief of an independent H.-group* who had so harassed the Alalahian* as to make it necessary to come to terms with him and his men. The H* of 18th century Syria are thus shown to have been sufficiently autonomous and important to have had a treaty concluded with them. The significance of the event may also be measured by its serving to date the entire year. (Greenberg 1955:64, on no. 22 in his collection, no. 36 in Bottéro 1954) But the significance carries over to the axis of sociolinguistic deference, that is, negative vs. positive attitude. Having once joined your name to an enemy's, on a treaty from which the entire people ("The year . . .") literally take their reference, you can no longer maintain any stigma attached to his without demeaning yourself as co-signatory. Power then breeds prestige and politeness along with peace.5 Contrast again Pharaoh's (and later, by implication, the Philistines') refusal to negotiate with the Hebrews, from their God down: even when "the God of the Hebrews" breaks his pride, he never signs a treaty with
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them and before long attempts to repossess his property by the sword. The only agreement we find them entitled to make (and, as Jeremiah 34 demonstrates, powerless to enforce when unilaterally violated) concerns the entrance into self-enslavement, temporary or lifelong, among fellow Israelites. Even here, unlike the individual contracts of Nuzi, it is actually the law that makes the provisions for them, in its address and appeal to the owner ("thou"), under divine, covenantal auspices. As always, the Hebrewgram encodes, polarizes, thematizes the inequality of power that the Hab/piru-gram leaves open, even reversible, along with much elseexcept the elusive and debated constant of presumably "social" alterity. The accepted Hab/piru group portrait is a metastereotype, the assimilation of the Hebrews to it a crossmetastereotype, both observably, if differently, inconsistent with the grouping method and latitude of the imagery on record. (Compare again the abstraction of some ism, political or artistic, from an invented mega-text; or the result of checking the Foucauldian scheme, its history as dogmatic as its taxonomy, against Exodus 1.) Either group does get stereotyped under the name in the respective ancient testimoniafrom a definite viewpoint exterior to itbut along other lines of otherness than fixed or fused by the scholars. Packaging for Ideology: Culture, Nature, and Their (Sub)Human Correlates The second line of package dealing is always geared to an ideology, in whose light or service it binds descriptive together with evaluative features. An all-embracing case in point is the correlation made fashionable by Claude LéviStrauss between the Self/Other and the Culture/Nature dualisms. 6 According to this formula, not only the two dualities are universal but also their linkage. All societies both oppose nature to culture and attach to them negative and positive values, respectively: whoever figures as "they," characterized by savagery or man-animality, is other than "we"-humanity. Applied to the Bible by followers, the anthropologist's metastereotype turns Cain, for example, into a Prometheuslike "culture-hero" on the strength of the novelties (e.g., city-building, industry, art) he and his offspring introduced. "By killing Abel, Cain replaces him, while at the same time he makes himself sacred"; "from Cain's violent act of mortality arise exactly those activities which typify Culture in its immortal sense" (Leach and Aycock 1983:19, 12129). Or similarly, if oddly, related to our grand thematic design of Hebrewness: Lot's transfer from Sodom to the hill), cave is best "understood as a contrast of the 'Culture' of the city with the 'Nature' of the wilderness" (ibid.:115). Far from new-fangled, moreover, this pseudo-universalist theory has its
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parallels and antecedents in various disciplines, Biblicist and Oriental scholarship among them. Some even underwrite (as the anthropologist needn't, and Lévi-Strauss doesn't) the preconstruction that they read into the corpus. To focus again on our Hebrew/Hamite antithesis, observe how a comparative historian invariably and (stereo)typically draws it to Israel's disfavor in the guise of an imagined material universalism. "At their entrance, the Hebrews [like the rest of the Hab/piru] were simple nomads, blessed no doubt with high potentialities, but still at an extremely low cultural stage." Conversely, dead against the misnomer which has rendered "'philistine' synonymous with self-satisfied ignorance," the Philistines "were in truth a part of the wonderful Minoan world . . . and they settled in historic cities which had long enjoyed the closest relations with Egyptian culture. We have learned to sympathise with the Hebrews. . . . We should at least realise that at this time [the settlement period] it was the Hebrews who were barbarians, that the advantages of a higher material civilisation were all on the side of their enemies." Later, "David was a 'man of war,' but culture began when he copied foreign palaces" after the Canaanite model; and only under Solomon did the people "outgrow'' the ways of "the desert" (Olmstead 1965:viii, 271, 320, 341-50). For an echo from a discipline as removed as psychoanalysis, just listen to Freud wondering about Moses: "What could induce an aristocratic Egyptian . . . to put himself at the head of a crowd of immigrant foreigners at a backward level of civilization" (1964:18)? Throughout, the analysts represent the inter-group contact and conflict in terms derived from the anti-Israelite part), but objectified into a statement of fact (naturalized, you might say, if nature were not cast as the wrong, "low" extreme). The historian even enlists "truth" to quash the laity's fancied partisan anachronism, whereby the Philistines oppose both culture and the Chosen. Except to counterreaders riding their hobbyhorses against the plainest sense, however, the first verse of Genesis already introduces quite another model of the universe, unique and exemplary at once. A little Bible will go a long way toward dispelling the mirage of a package deal between symbolic function (e.g., the intergroup difference to be encoded, with or without value judgment) and symbolizing form (e.g., the lifestyle that bifurcates to encode the difference). Even taken alone, the Culture/Nature binarism does not sit well on a world picture where nature itself springs from a prior, higher, creative, mankind-exalting reality. For nature here arises before our eyes as a divine artefact made ex nihilovirtually a semiotic ("cultural") systemand embraces a worldwide humanity created, unlike animal life, in God's image. So what we nowadays term culture, humanity's own web of fabrications and institutions and symbolisms, becomes a third-level reality, a second-order making, essentially distinct if not deviant from Heaven's.
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But to the extent that the Nature/Culture polarity does apply here at all, on a rank order of making, the Other and the Self change the value-laden poles allegedly correlated with them. Recall how the Bible opposes the pastoralist ingroup to the so-called high civilization of immoralists, abominators, ingrates, heathens, vict-imagers, enslaving slaves of slaves, genocides, whose brazen monuments will eventually fall to the torch, "as a shepherd cleans his garment of vermin." 7 Primeval ethnography, the confrontations distributed throughout the later history of Israel's phylogenesis, from Abraham onward, the Hebrew/Hamite master plot, the Jeremian figure of vengeance: all orchestrate the same oppositional theme. Counteroppositional, to be more exact. The Bible's four-term homology (roughly, in our jargon, Nature is to Culture what the Self is to the Other) gets drawn here against world pictures and value frames current in the environment, as well as among its like-minded successors. This reverse coupling almost appears designed to undercut the modern prefabrication, even to expose its inglorious ancient genealogy. It is the Cainite, then the Babelian, then, above all, the Egyptian anti-Self that exhibits the Lévi-Straussian dogma regarding the superiority of "culture," the Hebrews that would adhere to "nature," and Solomon's volte-face (''return") toward Egypt that spells the beginning of the end for Israel. He pays with a troubled, then divided monarchy, Zedekiah with the downfall of Jerusalem. And small wonder, given that all Babel-type human culture aspires to rival the divine Creator, none more so, foreseeably, than the Pharaonic. Whereas life in God-made nature (natural culture, as it were) reaches its highest form in a society living under the Lord as "shepherd," each "under his vine and his fig tree": the figurative language evokes a picture of Creation-like, all-embracing ordered harmony. The ideal so figured can realize itself nowhere except in life under the covenant, from the Edenic to the Noachic to the Mosaic to that of the Last Days. Hence second- and first-order, "material" and "natural" culture, or their adherents, are poles asunder. It would be easy but, I hope, unnecessary to multiply kindred counter-examples, from diverse worldviews since. The Pastoral and the Romantic literary traditions suggest themselves, along with their equivalents in history, visual art, philosophy, anthropology, ecology. That examples nearer to the metastereotype under review have also persisted, in the Cain-Babel-Egypt line, only clinches my argument regarding the invertibility of value between the opposed descriptive terms. (Sometimes this co-occurs with other inversions, even under one name: as when "Gypsies," supposedly originating in Egypt, come to embody the nomad for their sedentary European environment, on which they in turn look down.) It is only to be expected that every Noble Savage should have his Ignoble twin, that the Garden should rise and fall, deliver and diminish us, in inverse proportion to the City.
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(De)Stereotyping the Stereotype At the level of generality next highest to "culture," umbrella terms such as "image" and "stereotype'' have fared no better in the hands of unself-critical critics. The preface to Sander Gilman's erudite and disquieting book on images of race, sexuality, and illness, for example, orthodoxly warns: "Stereotypes can assume a life of their own, rooted not in reality but in the myth-making made necessary by our need to control our world" (1990:12). But then, more insidiously yet no less dangerously, so can the images of these particular representational stereotypes offered by analysts as myth-makers seeking to control their (if not our first-order) world; and so in turn can the images of these imagesstereotyped into ever-greater but always frozen and "mythic" abstractivenessup to the very notion of imagery. If the historians who look down on the Bible's "fictions" (say) invent their own romances, are the critics of discoursive prefabrication equally or less given to double standards? Certain signs augur ill: the recurrence of vested interests underneath the common "myth vs. truth to life" watchwords, if not of an open revisionist agenda, for example, or the twinning of (mete)poetic with (meta)stereotyping licenses in the cross-culturalist's "Hebrew = Hab/piru" identikit. Who will guard the guardians, keep the image police in touch with reality? The boomerang effect actually overtakes criticism right and left, with the self-appointed vigilantes most prone to selfexposure. Among the best of them, Gilman's own high-level theorizing proves unmindful of the rigid misrepresentation that he warns against and indeed shows up throughout the corpora examined. 8 His "Introduction: What Are Stereotypes and Why Use Texts to Study Them" so often lapses into petrifying variable attributes or complexes as to forge a metastereotype of Stereotype itself. To see why and how, we need to articulate what should have been obvious. All that "stereotype" properly denotes is a fixed image: a representation associating its object with some intertwined cluster of features at hand to produce a stock character. Whether it bears on an alleged object-type (e.g., "Hebrews" in the Hamite mouth and mind) or on a token leveled to type (as Joseph in Egypt is to "Hebrew man/slave/boy"), a type-portrait results. Preassociated and now reassociated by strong metonymy, that is, contiguity within the operative world schema, the type-features (including the codename) become mutually implicative: given one, the rest follow. "By the conventions of the classical detective story, to take a single example, the entrance of a policeman arouses deep misgivings about his intelligence even before he manages to say or do anything" (Sternberg 1985:347; cf. 1981a: esp. 62ff., and, on the family resemblance to verbal interbinding, 1976). Likewise with subjective type-portraiture,
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whether outside the consensus in reality or ironized within the discourse that frames it. Thus a Biblical Hamite need not spell out to his interlocutor what, any more than who, he means by "Hebrews." And Anne Elliot's father, Sir Walter, has a mind so dominated by ready-made pictures that he need only hear about Admiral Croft to jump to conclusions about his appearance: "Then I take it for granted . . . that his face is about as orange as the cuffs and capes of my livery" (Austen 1961:50, 48). If a sailor, then weather-beaten. (Likewise with metastereotypes in all domains and all levels of generality. Recall how narratology conflates the privileges of the author-like teller, or how crossculturalism welds independent status-features to delineate the Hab/piru and/or Hebrew type.) In short, a cliché binds together a number of words; a stereotype, within the same family of pre-fabricated discourse, only on the represented level, binds together a number of characteristics. Either is a package deal, for better or worse. Such definition has the further virtue of adhering to the etymology. In printing, "stereotype" has denoted for centuries the casting of metal plates from a mold of composed type. Accordingly, in the passage from the (typo)graphic to the (typo)semantic domain, the word preserves the three key ideas of mold-like solidity, content-freedom, and endless replicability. The vocabulary items allied with itfor example, cast of mind, role-casting, typecasting, typologythen also gain in suggestiveness. If the figure were unavailable for the purpose, we would have to invent one. "But the term stereotype seems to me particularly apt inasmuch as its origin is in the manufacture of texts" (Gilman 1990:16): quite so, provided that its origin informs the extension to world-making. Nothing either less or more than represented interbinding will cover this subfield of prefabricated discourse. On the one hand, for example, it will only confuse matters to range under the notion of stereotyping any groupwide, let alone individual portraithowever fresh, ad hoc, changeablebecause we happen to find it untrue, undesirable, etc., or to suspect all portraiture of a will or proneness to hypostasis. The names for the two must themselves be kept apart, as the cliché is from poor language, even amidst common negative judgment. Thus Gilman's equation of "stereotyope" with "image" or ''mirage" (1990:15-16) opens the door to a category mistake between part and whole. (Even if these three terms were interchangeable by fiat, the tripartition would still need to be made under different labels.) The stereotype is evidently to the image as the cliché to the phrase, and to the mirage as the cliché to the ill-formed phrase. All stereotypes are images, i.e., representations, and can be mirages, i.e., false representations; but not all images (whether mirages or otherwise, or even were they all mirages) are stereotypes, i.e., fixed representations. The word-image "Hebrew" as encoded, or miscoded, in Hamland is one; the image of divinity is not, owing to its iconoclasm and enigmaticness, nor is Man
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as created in the image of God, because every single man and woman counts as a unique, to this extent God-like, juncture of attributes, rather than a stereotypic cluster. Likewise with "image" in the figurative sense, as "metaphor" or "analogy," which is in turn reduced to "a habitual perception of the world" and hence to "the basis for'' stereotypic compounds (Gilman 1990:21). By the same category mistake, the sweeping charge transfers here to an adjacent field of imagery, and again without regard to the empirics across verbal behavior. That even ordinary language-use wrenches or breaks or replaces as well as iterates habitual figuration, that poetic discourse specializes in such wrenching, that science shifts metaphors along with paradigms, and that the innovative no less than the hackneyed word-image bears on world-image: where has all this counterevidence gone? Surely, assuming the generative power of language figures, if the old re-generate, and thus perpetuate, then the new must regenerate, stereotypes. Imagery in either sense does not live but divides by fixity and/or falsity, among its many ramifications. On the other hand, the stereotype is undefinable beyond this universal of fast clustering. All extras (in the shape of characterological, affective, normative, ontological, psychic, combinatory, stylistic, goal-directed specification) must and do freely vary. Overclustering, or undervariability, threatens to stereotype the very idea of stereotype into some illusory, at most local universalism, idolized against both reason and practice. Yet the threat all too frequently materializes. The variables number, inter alia, what Gilman erects into major constants, some already disproved by my analysis: (1) "We all create [stereotypic] images of things we fear or glorify" (1990:15): yes, but also of things we love, hate, desire, belittle, generalize, Platonize, analogize, quantify, trope, legislate, encode, put into maxims and syllogisms, boil down to formula through ignorance or indifference, for shorthand or countless practical ends, such as advertising and what not. Like the printer's stereotype, the representer's boasts limitless con-tent-freedom. The shrinkage of this open-ended range to objects of "fear or glorification" would appear incredibly drastic even if put to the test of the few examples just given. Untenable, the narrowness is yet explicable. It arises from the joint pressure of two special interests, psychoanalytic conjecture and (socio)ideological critique, both designed to save humanity from its worst instincts as a species that lives, but does not easily let live, by its imagery. These two drives toward short-listing run through the whole approach, in grooves typical enough nowadays. Within the psychoanalysis, the narrow object-range springs from viewing our entire inner life (hence our mental and public representations) in terms of a Manichean dualism. "Stereotypes arise when self-integration is threatened" (Gilman 1990:18), which it allegedly is at every turn. From early childhood, our self bifurcates into "the 'bad' self," made anxious by
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its loss of control over the world, vs. "a 'good' self," in control and unruffled. Instead of living with our divided self, we project it onto a world imagined to objectify the bipolarity in the nature of others: the bad vs. the good, the frightening vs. the attractive "they." The imaginary antithesis exteriorized in self-defense may come to be refined, or relocated among externals, never outgrown (16-21). Afraid of disease, and the loss of control incurred, especially by mental illness, we project it onto "the sick," whose decay threatens to invade us. When we fantasize about potence, we typecast some outsider as frigid; when about impotence, as disgustingly or enviably hypersexual (23-25). Some would quarrel with this approach on psychoanalytic grounds, of course, but we needn't. If "texts are an ideal source . . . for the study of stereotypes" (26), then the infinite variety of their practice certainly discredits the theory. As early as the first questionthe stuff ("content") of imagerya chain-reductionism leaps to the eye. Along it, the ultimate reduction, whereby the stereotype dwells between the limits of fearful and glorified objecthood, can somehow be imposed only via earlier oversimplifying moves: our whole representational activity allegedly answers to psychic exigencies, and these get minimized in turn. Not that the theory would hold even within its limited scope. For now, just check the two putative objects against examples already discussed. Nobody glorifies the Hab/piru, some acknowledge their power, the Amarna tablets betray fear of them, the service contracts never doall within a single ancient mega-text ringing the changes on one stereotype. On canonical record, the Hamites mostly fear (as well as begrudge, despise, abominate, lust after) the outsider they Hebrew, but exclusive of a Pharaoh's daughter. Again, Joseph's mistress projects onto him her violent sexuality, but to save herself from death, not her self from disintegration. Further, does Pharaoh's oppression of the group expose his own "bad self's" yearning for bondageas his people's self-enslavement to Joseph does on Noachic authorityand the genocide externalize a death wish, first royal, then collective? Or does God's casting of Man in his image reflect a taste for low life? Conversely, "Israel" for once encodes a glorious ethnicon, yet its reference and referents never harden into any stereotype, because they all too often pull against the fine codename, as well as (like humanity in general) against their divine image. The analyst's speculative psycho-logic literally, and inevitably, reduces itself out of text logic, whereby even a given content will change meaning with context. The socioideology, yet trendier, increases the pressure for displacing the stereotype's hallmark from the inter- to the content-boundness of its elements. The Manichean dualisms that the self is believed to thrust upon the world ostensibly jeopardize our very existence in the world, and their critique would make for salvation:
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Like many other innate and ungovernable human needs, the need to stereotype has acquired increased catastrophic potential at a pace roughly in step with technological advances in our ability to harm one another. . . . The formal recognition and study of stereotyping, which in the years since the Holocaust has taken many forms in fields as diverse as psychology and literary criticism, is an important token of our wish to live. . . . The need for stereotypes runs so deep that I do not think it will ever be thwarted; nor do I think that it will ever be converted to purely harmless expression. But I believe that education and study can expose the ideologies with which we structure our world and perhaps help put us in the habit of self-reflection. (Gilman 1990:12) As "Hebrew," barbaros, etc., testify, the dangers (and in Scripture, the awareness of them) antedate the upsurge of technology. Without belittling the concern, however, one must guard against blowing it into monstrous proportions, in every sense, while ignoring the bulk of more normal, innocuous, artful, constructive phenomena in this realm. Does the image given here fit the stereotype as such, throughout its instances and practices? No more than it would all theorizing that has become establishedthe paradigms of "psychology and literary criticism" includedor the whole larger category of generalization that subsumes both. Among the numberless counterexamples, the form of syllogism is perhaps the best antidote to apocalyptic overanxiety: All Boojums are Bible readers. Your neighbor is a Boojum. Therefore your neighbor is a Bible reader. This should be enough to indicate that syllogistic thinking underlies our application of stereotypes to reality (e.g., that of the weather-beaten sailor to Admiral Croft or, less overtly, that of Hebrew malevolence to Joseph); and textbook examples of syllogism have themselves become stereotypes. Little wonder the form as described by logicians readily translates into the operations of interbinding in world-representation. The major premise associates two classes (Boojums and Bible readers) by the strongest possible, because definitional, hence indeed for the nonce "universal," metonymy; the minor premise locates an individual in one of the classesor assigns to him one of the defining featuresand so the conclusion locates him in the other as well. Yet your attitude (fear or whatever) toward the represented objects counts for nothingthe less so given that the drive to their juncture may be cognitive or playful, say, or
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(like mine) heuristic, rather than emotive, social, or ethnopolitical. As long as you observe the rationale binding together the three terms, the three propositions, and the three steps, all is grist that comes to the syllogism's mill. Nor do our beliefs signify; for the propositional content, however universalized or enchained by type, is strictly contextrelative. The very inevitability of the "if/then" deductive movement presupposes and underscores its reference to a well-defined hypothetical world only. Any thought of banning its use (and censorship has always attended image policework) would therefore join groundlessness to hopelessness. Presumably "innate," syllogizing operates by formal laws that make it anything but "ungovernable" and restrict its "catastrophic potential" to bad logicians, whether they misapply the standard form (''All Hab/piru are outsiders, Joseph in Egypt is an outsider, therefore Joseph is a Hab/piru") or confuse the game of logic with the untidiness of life. The safeguards, alarm bells, and lie detectors inhere in the representational, even the notational matrix, uninspired and unaffected by psychoideology. Similarly with less rule-governed forms of stereotyping (e.g., generalizing by induction) in culture: to mistake the abuse for the use, the part for the whole, is ironically to metastereotype each variety, the nature of the stereotype at large, the yet larger repertoire of discoursive paradigms, from art's to science's, and the entire work of generalization, upon which the barest survival depends as much as the highest intellectual flight. (Even regarding catastrophic potential, try to imagine an existence with some jumble of particulars for cognitive equipment.) Likewise with the gamut of objects over which the assorted forms and schemata range: "the things" given to stereotyping (as to destereotyping, making strange, paradigm shifting, etc.) are endless, because they include everything in the world. (2) Or, for that matter, everything out of the world, in every possible world. "These images never remain abstractions; we understand them as real-world entities" (Gilman 1990:12): but surely not if we, makers or decoders, know them to be fabricated, at times out of whole cloth, as we do the stock characters of logic, humor, lawenactment, propaganda, statistical average, fantasy, inventionartistic and otherwiseagain with equivalents in the cultural analyst's higher-level mythology or what we deem such. To confuse all of these factitious personified abstractions, especially when ready-made, for "real-world entities" would border on the pathological. Who else would take the Dictionary, of Received Ideas as a guide to life and thought? Not, one suspects, the very bourgeoisie whose conformist idiocies Flaubert parodies in the hundreds of mock-items there. ("Catholicism. Has had a very good influence on art.") Even the Bible's Hamites at their most xenophobic Hebrewing, from Potiphar's wife to Pharaoh to Philistia, know better than they stereo-image. And the "If thou buyest a Hebrew slave . . ." ordinance generically assigns to the target of their pre-
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fabricated discourse a hypothetical existence, reminiscent of that led by the syllogism's entities, or fiction'sonly more overt and still less apt to delude anyone but the self-deluding. (The law's rhetoric, I will argue, even works to prevent foreign-style Hebrew bondage from materializing in Israel.) As the use of stereotypes is not to be generalized from the abuse, nor is the reasonable user from the abuser or victim, competence from the incompetent in the games and genres of discourse. It is not "we" who are like that, in short, but a certain overcritical analytic stereotype of humanity, ill-qualified to assume definitional weight and recoiling upon its own unself-critical construction. (3) On the other hand, the very fact that this metastereotype of a credulous humanity does yet apply sometimes, and may in principle apply to all of us sometime, goes to contradict the charge of falsity routinely brought against the stereotype wholesale. 9 Gilman himself now reaffirms, now retracts along various lines the absolute delusional status he imputed to it above. Reaffirmatory is its mass portrayal as an "illusionary image of the world" (1990:17), as a "projection of anxiety" or of the divided self onto discrete exterior targets (17, 20-21, 22), as "fantasy life," the culture's or the individual's (20, 24), as "admixture of myth and unconscious deformation of reality'' (35). Yet these repeats alternate with retreats. Thus a multiple quantitative limitation: "our need to create stereotypes" has engendered a vast number, "some of them quite remote from observable fact but all of them at one time or another solemnly accepted as veritable truth" (11). Not all have been counterfactual, then, nor have they always been mistaken for fact. Elsewhere, stereotypes come to be defined by their intermediate ontology, "neither entirely of this world nor entirely of the world of myth" (21). Or they boast a "mimetic kernel" around which "cultural fantasies are spun": "The black, the proletarian, the child, the woman, the avant-garde," as imaged in the corpus, all "relate to some reality" (37). Again, the mimeticism of the kernel transfers to the fruit: "Stereotypes are a crude set of mental representations of the world" (17), as if an increment of finesse would put them right. (Or the other way about: as if every mental representation were not crude over against the world represented, without perforce becoming thereby stereotypic, let alone spurious.) Far from the analyst's reality judgments being arrested at the delusional pole, as would suit his psychoideology, or even short-listed, like his two objects of stereotype-formation, they shuttle between near-extremes. What his wavering lays bare, in fact, is the protean ontology of the domain under analysis, which he can neither ignore, to his credit, nor accept, much less register and theorize. For the stereotype's truth-value, where at all ascertainable, eludes a priori judgment, comparably to other propositions. A rough outline will suggest the diversity. Some type-portraits are necessarily trueby definition, stipulation, en-
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tailmentor necessarily false. Given the matrix of syllogism, examples would be the propositions associating the class's (or the individual's) Boojumship with Bible readership and characterizing the Hebrew (or Joseph) as "outsider, therefore Hab/piru," respectively. However stereotyped the terms, genuine factual belief or disbelief never comes into themand if entertained, would expose its aberrancyonly valid or invalid reasoning from premises to consequent. One might also instance the game universe's rules, closed metaphysical systems, ideal worlds, legal type-agencies and -scenarios, or just dictionary followability: the self-evident "All bachelors are unmarried" vs. the selfcontradictory "All bachelors are married" and the lexically indeterminate ''All bachelors are happy." For a change, the last represents (considering its habitualness, re-presents) an empirical claim, subject to probabilistic, not absolute, judgments of truth vs. falsity, and quantifiable accordingly on the evidence. Take the scale of probability that I have induced from the Bible's data: the typology "All Hebrews are (proto-)Israelite" ranks highest there; "All Hebrews are nonIsraelite (Abrahamites, Eberides, Hab/piru)" lowest; "Some Hebrews originally were, or were considered, Hab/piru" in between; with further possible gradations of stereotypicality and likelihood. On the same text-empirics, "All . . . ," "No . . . ," and "Some Hamites miscast or coun-tervalue the Hebrews" range themselves. So did and will the numerous finer claims advanced in this book about either party or object, speaking or thinking subject, quoter, translator, initiator, imitator, parodist, ironist of historiographic group (mis)representation. So obviously must every statement about the phenomenal world, regardless of its topic, aim, form, style, generality, expertise; verifying procedure, as between the common newsmonger's and the learned model-builder's. Fiction in turn has its own ontology, debated since the Greeks yet plainly irreducible to the logic of either entailment or empirics, because it makes no literal truth-claim. (If Plato would expel Homer from the ideal republic as a poor mimeticist and the Israelites cherished the Bible as God's word, they yet share the assumption that the canons purport to image history. Inversely, the truths often ascribed to literary fiction since the Renaissance are of a "higher," more imaginative order than correspondence with factuality.) Making no literal truth-claim, the fictive eludes all literalist, if not simply all judgments of truth and falsity, all reference points outside its suppositional discourse universe, and with them the extremes of delusion and disbelief. The representation is interiorized, or "analogized," its truth judged by communicative (e.g., the omniscient author's) norms, the extrapolation from it to "life" at best intricate, and neither freely transferrable among fictive universes. Nor will this ontic distinctiveness grow or lessen in regard to prefabricated existents: the miles gloriosus in Roman drama,
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the knight errant of medieval epic, the avenger of Elizabethan tragedy, the fair vs. dark woman of the Victorian novel, the Jew in antisemitic literature, the detective story's countless avatars of Holmes and Watson and Inspector Lestrade, the classical Western's polarized cast . . . A Gilman, therefore, will shuttle and equivocate among the domains in a foredoomed attempt to unify the systematically unlike, without altogether erasing the lines of divergence. The uneasy shuttlework betrays a somewhat higher awareness of these lines than does the wholesale coupling of representation with "invention" among the trendiest of the trendy aspirants to theory; yet the results cannot be taken more seriously, not even to the extent that some earlier bogus representational universalisms can. (Plato himself, the archreducer of "mimesis" to one unearthly truth criterion, grades mimetic systemse.g., the artisan's vs. the artist'sby the degree of failure inherent in them.) For example, it makes nonsense to interchange "fiction," "convention," and "mental representation'' with one another; or to assert in the same breath that artworks "consciously form a fiction of the world," that "psychology, biology, anthropology, sociology, genetics, and medicine relate, directly or tangentially, to perceived realities," and that nonetheless "science creates fictions to explain facts" (Gilman 1990:27-28). Alas, conventions have doubtless been known to pass for inventions, readers to take fictions for gospel, scientists to outrun their evidenceas well as vice versaand others to pay the price. But how would that justify the theorist's stereotyping once again breaches of rule into the operative rule and lumping everything together, ontological malpractice with practice, counterreading with communication, frame with incompatible frame of reference? No (un)reality principle cuts across them all, only the Proteus principle. Each act of world-making, universal, typological or singular in range, prefabricated or novel in history, comes on inspection somewhere between the truth and the untruth proper to its discourse world. We may at times hesitate about its exact location, even about the axis on which to locate it, but then such hesitancy reaffirms our awareness of the protean proprieties. (4) As these proprieties not only multiply but cross variables, the dynamism compounds at every intersection. The crossing of the stereotypic representation's ensemble and truth-value, for instance, will dismiss a pietism ceaselessly iterated. From the mechanical assumption of untruth, there appears to follow the conclusion that the stereotype rather betrays its speaking/thinking subject (the reference maker or group) than captures its object (the referent or target). The premise's invalidity, however, overtakes the conclusion about subject/object disclosure. Just like the novel image, the stereotype can instead tell us about both existents in varying degrees, as with "Hebrews"especially when individual or mass victimage pulls them
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down to the vict-image. (In fact, Mrs. Potiphar's stereotype of Joseph is truer than her brand-new story of his attempted rape, the nomi-narrative implicit in "Hebrew" closer to the frame than the vocal ad-hoc narrative.) It also can tell us, or tell most, about either, as when a characteristic ascribed to a group proves apocryphal or all-embracing. And it can tell us about neither, or very little, as with pure "suppose games" inventing their own typologies, borrowing type-names from life at random, etc., and with stereotypes that barely, concern either the ''I/we" or the "he/they." Annexing prefabricated imagery (and minus the novel kind at that) to the Self/Other domain is sheer imperialism. Except by reductive and circular definition, a great many instances have little to do with this nexus unless and until functionally brought into it. The Optimist, the Rough Diamond, the Wise Grandparent: who in the outside world need they expose, and plump between identity and alterity, too? The commonplace about inherent selfbetrayal holds only for the metastereotype, the analytic pseudo-universal whose elements fall as they purport to stand, together. (5) An additional reason against binding the disclosure to one party is that subject and object may, as always, coincide in self-representation. Further, in self- as in other-representation, a third partyneither directly representing nor representedmay share, even hog the limelight, that is, the addressee. So will the Hamite turned auditor in our next dialogue pattern: there he forces self-Hebrewing on the Israelite (e.g., Joseph's "land of the Hebrews") to deepen the sense of his own constant grinding otherness along with the in-group's weakness at the moment. The vocal selftranslator obliquely typifies the wordless oppressors who exact his self-translation into the low image they prefabricated for him. And within the Chinese boxes of quoted discourse, an inset stereotype will also reveal, even variously counterpoint the parties to the frame. But then, the subject/object coincidence (a fortiori the indirect light possibly thrown on the addressee and the framesharers) never enters the theory in question, either, or not except by the backstairs. Of what "we fear or glorify" are created our stereotyped "images of the Other" and "we assign them labels that serve to set them apart from ourselves"as if self-imaging, grave or fanciful, true or delusive or imaginative, public or secret, cast in this or that mold, with tags attached, were not ubiquitous in representation. Themselves belonging to the world, any world, our selves invite and undergo all manner of typecasting no less than the objects that enclose us: if we contrive labels "to set them apart from ourselves," so do we to set ourselves apart from them, with parallel results, good, bad or indifferent. And vice versa, it is necessary to add, because the reverse over-emphasis on the self-image occurs elsewhere, for example, in Anderson's thoughtful Imagined Communities (1991; see also chapter 4, note 8 below).
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Either privileging tack reckons without so much as the insight dramatized (however proteanly) by the literary tradition and now (however moot its conceptualization) seldom disputed: that identity and alterity interdepend. (6) Finally, it should now go without saying that teleology directs as well as reflects the variety of typological axes and their intersections in context. On it, indeed, there is either a great deal to say, as between the covers of this book, or very little, most economically put the negative way. Given the stereotype's demonstrated free variability in everything beyond interbinding and the presumption that manifest variants overlie and express variant goals, how to limit, even to orient it to any single goal, e.g., the need for psychic integrity? Or the other way round: the stereotype, qua interbound discourse, can work par excellence for two of the opposed master ends of representation at largefamiliar shorthand in use, defamiliarizing shock in breachbut you cannot imagine any representational end denied to it, nor will the Hebrewgram (what with its Chinese boxes and interlinkages) fail to actualize the latent multifunctionality. This is exactly what the Proteus Principle universalizes by affirming the many-to-many correspondence between form and function. It may come as a surprise, then, that Gilman should object to the "rigidities" imposed in earlier work on a "protean" domain. That he happens to echo my figure is an added ground for singling out his theory, however, because it pinpoints the contrast. The lines of variance that he draws among stereotypes belong to the formative processin effect, the genesisrather than the underlying form. Those lines are dynamic enough as far as they go. In response to stresses within the psyche, "we can move from fearing to glorifying the Other" (Gilman 1990:18). The world without also exerts generative influence. The stereotypes available to us depend on milieu and history, their target and relative power shift with the actions of the entities (e.g., the group endangering our control) in outside life (20). Again, they may fall into patterns of association by analogy: "sexual anatomy is so important a part of self-image that 'sexually different' is tantamount to 'pathological'" (21, 25). But there is here nothing protean about the stereotype's basic form, let alone its role. Instead, the very manifestations of diversity, in surface or target or patternability, allegedly owe their rise to this formal constant. So much so, we hear, that the entire line of inquiry into group typologies and representations has paid dearly for ignoring it: "All the images of the Other derive from the same deep structure" (21, 26). Shackled to the utmost, in excess of the criterial interbinding of features, Gilman's structure rather epitomizes ("idolizes") his own composite metastereotype than produces the variform genuine article as we use, abuse, and encounter it.
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Otherness: Restrictive vs. Open-Ended, Polar vs. Gradable, Discriminatory vs. Differential Similarly with overclustering on lower levels of generality, with ingredients and subheadings of the humanwide metastereotypes. Associated myths of fixture in representation are legion nowadays among would-be demythologizers, who purport to criticize and unfix yet actually refix loaded traditional binarisms. So they (re)reify Identity, Alterity, Foreignness, Gender, Minority, Ethno- or Andro-centricity, to name a few shibboleths sorrily unequal to the Protean dynamism of life and art. Unreasonable in theory, because against the nature of discourse, such reductions will all fail where they promise to work best: vis-à-vis an ideo-national literature, written by men, enacting divine absolutes, abounding in categorical imperatives, bent on consensus, geared to the Chosen in the narrated and the narrative world alike. To take the bull by the horns, let us start with the largest catch-all, "otherness." The more comprehensive a term, the more likely its usage to change anything from references to attitudes under a single nominal umbrella. This has and has not been the case with alterity, in that the changes rung on the meaning often themselves aspire to changelessness, the variants to invariability of (self/other) difference, the ideologisms and local patriotisms and animosities to universalism: the form to functional singularity and monopoly, in a word. Predictable, even understandable within literary or instrumental discourses utterly committed to a causehence wielding the appropriate totalizing rhetoric, for and against, "we" vs. "them" othersthis aspiration makes nonsense of the study of discourse practices. Yet alterity-fixture hardly tells the language apart from the metalanguage of representation. Over the millennia, countless usages have specialized, i.e., limited, the extension, the characterization, and the valuation of otherness, often designating it by this label. I have pointed out that Lévi-Strauss's bid for universalizing the other than we-"cultured"-humanity as natural-animal man finds equivalents that go back to antiquity. And outside the Culture/Nature dichotomy, the equivalents (each with its own specifics) multiply. To the Greeks, for example, the rest of the world was "barbarian"; to the Rabbis, the negative term of the Jew/Gentile polarity literally assumes the name "other [aher *]." Whatever the distance in the nonself's identity (nonGreek, nonJewish) and attributes (e.g., linguistic, political, theological), it must not obscure the common bipartition along predetermined lines, whereby otherness equals foreignness in range, character, judgment, inferiority, possibly even in terminology. So it continues to do nowadays; for example, "a foreigner . . . is one who does not belong to the group, who is 'one of them, 'the other" (Kristeva 1991:95). The grouping, though, may now change
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parameters: from the ethnic or ideonational, say, to the social or the sexual. Thus Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex (1949), newly compounding megalomania with paranoia, inaugurated a one-track and one-way binarism: that Woman, and Woman alone, is the quintessential Other to Man, yet not vice versa. Conversely, "anthropological feminists work against an other cast as essentially different and violent" (Rabinow 1986:257), in tune with a host of militant gyrocentrisms. The normative scheme may also change poles, not to mention emphases. Witness countermovements toward privileging alterity, whether launched to valorize its Noble Savageness, to advocate its cultural example, or, more recently, to defend it against the self's will to hegemony. Such diversity in very partisan arrest should bring home to every user the label's content-freedom. As "stereotype" is evidently defined by nothing more than the interboundness of its features, so is "alterity" by their sheer differentiality and relationalityon pain of stereotyping whatever hetero-image (also, in reverse, self-image) they construct. But then, obvious truths and vested interests resemble Euclidean parallel lines. The assortment of the forms in and through which this differential function has expressed itself seldom dampens the lust for formalism, necessarily attended by amnesia. No matter what the polarity in view, the cultural formalist will rarefy, and so reify, its terms on every axis involved, by an automatic defense mechanism against the unruliness of empirics. After all, putting the desired (here, self/other) representation to the test of context would put most ideologies out of business, together with the (meta)discourse styles and stereotypes embedded in them. To this the Bible offers an instructive counterexample, since keeping the difference flexible and ramifiable is exactly part of its ideopoetic business. Historically speaking, again, the modern preoccupation with "otherness" has its roots in ancient Israelite as well as Greek literature. The value frame, though, has often altered since, in directions just instanced. Nor have the language, the coordinates, and the very discriminateness of the original mapping been preserved in transfer. To avoid misunderstanding, especially the pitfalls of anachronism and sham universalism, we had better sort out the nomenclature first. Take the deepest polarity of all. In context, the label that would suggest itself nowadays for the Hamite anti-self is, if not a misnomer, then almost vacuous. By the norms of Scriptural discourse, much finer than our Babel's, referring to the Hamite as "an, or the, Other" (or having him refer so to the Israelite) would incur overextension and understatement at once. All Israelite parties to the discourse (hearer, writer, audience) would certainly be familiar with the term, but none would make out either its referent in the word or the judgment it carries in the worldview. Other than who or what? they would ask. Other for the better or for the worse, and in which
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of the possible spheres, regards, degrees? They might even wonder at my own use of this shorthand, despite the strings I have gradually attached to it in the interests of meaningful translation across the discourse universes. The obstacle to mutual intelligibility is already encoded in the lexicon. The Bible's noun or adjective for "other," aher *, covers the whole web of difference from any given entity in any sphere on any axis. If matchable by today's equivalent, its formal synonym, then the word effectively translates into our ordinary language rather than our specialized, "cultural" vocabulary. For instance, the entity in question, and correspondingly its own aher*, may belong to any order of existence. In the nonhuman domain, the referents so paired for apartness (and, being inanimate, along lines possibly unrelated to the self altogether) include money, field, place, land, clothes, door, evil, name, language, scroll, day, year. . . . In the human, they number man, woman, wife, son, brother, tribe, people, generation. . . . In the superhuman, one god is marked off from "another," yet with a notable, because exceptional, partiality. Here, of the two otherworldly terms, the sign of otherness always adheres to the outsider, never to Israel's God, or, by extension, to God's chosen Israel as such: always to the many, in short, never to the one. Still, the anomalous case not only proves the rule but even follows its logic. In aiming the otherness at the adversary within the heavenly field of reference, the Bible does not much inhibit its overall scope, compared with the privileging of the human (and, normatively, the human other) over all fields in the current discourse of alterity. Also, God being one, it makes differential sense to "other" all the members of all pantheons together at the opposite end. Moreover, "other gods" serve as a foil to God himself, God's own elusive self, unprecedented and unmatched, hence in even greater need of contrastive light than most existents. If the world here presents a chain of being, it doubles as an all-inclusive web of relations. Not the self alone (the individual's, the in-group's, elohim's) but every item on every level defines itself against its other(s), actual or potential or imaginable. "Other than I/mine" is just one differential option, with the nonself slot filled ad hoc, too. As a relational term for everything that needs setting apart within the discourse universe, aher* attaches to nothing in reality, labels nothing over time, not even to the extent of appearance in proper noun form. The language rather precludes it from designating by itself any collective, standing for any individual, assuming so much as the definite articlein anyone's speech, on pain of ungrammaticalityand thus immunizes it from the hypostasis into which "the Other" is chronically liable to fall among vociferous critics of reification. Become name-like, and the name-bearer (e.g., the alien, the wo/man, the nonEuropean) stereotypable to match, the postBiblical usage always threatens their declared goal.
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Regarding differential sharpness, again, aherhood * stretches from minimum to maximum, from the additive through the divergent to the antithetical kind, from near-unity in variety to variety carried nearly out of unity, much like the polysemy of "(an)other" in everyday English. Along this ascending order of difference, compare: (a) Rachel's "May the Lord add to me another son" (Genesis 30:24) or Jeremiah's taking "another scroll" (36:32), with (b) Laban's "It is better that I give her to thee than that I should give her to another man" (Genesis 29:19) or Mordecai's "If thou keepest silence at such a time as this, relief and deliverance will arise for the Jews from another quarter" (Esther 4:14), and (c) the Deity's "Thou shalt not bow to another god, for the Lord . . . is a jealous God (Exodus 34:14) or Job's "Let my wife grind for another, and let others kneel down upon her" (31:10). In a world model where God qualitatively differs from all other so-called gods by every measure, including existence, they occupy the pole of what Moses styles "no-god" (Deuteronomy 32:21). Otherness as nonentity: little wonder the term relates on this level to pagan myth. Similarly, as indicated by the figures of jealousy and kneeling, with the nuptial tie. (Proverbs 2:16 literalizes the tie between the ties in describing the loose woman as one "who forsakes the companion of her youth and forgets the covenant of her God.") Given monotheism or monandry, the pledged party's intercourse with another is neither a mere addition nor simply a thing apart but the antithesis to the spirit of the covenant, an abomination. Finally, these last binarisms (God vs. other gods as no-god, husband vs. no-husband) also polarize in the value judgment made on the respective incompatibles. A foretoken of later package deals that stigmatize or valorize the outsider? No, and not just because the Scriptural token extends beyond the outsider, the nonself, a fortiori the antiself. Even when contrastive with the self, it is only at the transcendent level that ontology (true vs. false) entails axiology (good vs. evil), by a kind of Platonic definition weighted against the other's image of otherworldliness: Homeric literature's in The Republic, pagan mythology's in Scripture. Elsewhere, throughout the realm of contingencies on earth, the attitude toward the aher* freely changes. Unlike whoring after "other gods," even the "other man" who takes a betrothed woman will escape censure if her fiancé has lost his life (Deuteronomy 20:7, cf. 28:30) and taking "another wife" is standard practice (Exodus 21:10). By the nature of things, the aher* can still be as hateful in the Biblical as in the actual world: say, a foreclosing and child-enslaving moneylender (Nehemiah 5:5). Yet he or it may also count as the better term (e.g., when the anointed Saul gains "another heart" [I Samuel 10:9]), as equally good (in Rachel's yearning for "another son"), or as just indifferently equal
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(often in additive series). The value spectrum available for earthlings cast in self/other terms thus runs from the positive through the neutral to the negative, and in favor or disfavor of either term or both. Nor is the polyvalence of alterity, on this last and trickiest dimension, to be confused with ambivalence: any mixed response would merely actualize one possibility, and also lends itself to freezing (e.g., the odi et amo topos) as much as the ultimate blackand-white stereotype, univalence. Where alterity signifies nothing but differentiality, like the phoneme in the field of meaningful sound, it disables the signified's (on a higher, analytic level, also its own) stereotyping or, positively, it becomes a condition of signifying at large. "Difference is that which threatens order and control; it is the polar opposite to our group," engendering "an anxiety that is given shape as the Other" (Gilman 1990:21). In the Bible, difference rather makes order and control, ever since the outset of Creation when "God saw that the light was good, and God separated the light from the darkness" (Genesis 1:4). As such it enjoys constructive, not to say creative value, even though it may present either term, e.g., the self or the other, in a negative light. Nor would it appear an accident that this constructiveness is underlined at the first opportunity, in the juxtaposition of darkness with the newborn and "good" light, apparently to impress the principle on the reader's mind. Concerning the practice that ensues, even the above rough outline bespeaks a discourse code akin to Saussure's theory of the language system, and in certain regards finer-grained. Meaning (here extended to identity and attitude) lives in a network of differences (here also context-bound, rather than premarked by the language, and so flexibly variable, even invertible). The relationality is built-in, hence alone universal, the relations endless. Foreignness The Bible, therefore, could never afford, far less inspire, the anthropocentrism or the sociopolitical thrust or the prefabricated judgment rife in today's discourse and metadiscourse of alterity. Instead, while keeping aher * openended in the lexicon and protean in the textalways excepting theocentric antithesesit reserves a separate nomenclature for the divides and coordinates of ethnography. Expressible through "another people" (Deuteronomy 28:32, Psalms 105:13), the specific otherhood of foreignness will usually find its proper expression in nokhri or ben nekhar. To accentuate the word's specialized exocentric meaning, the text will occasionally place it in opposition to the weethnos by way of juxtapositional redundancy. So the emphases "Thou shalt not put a nokhri over thee, who is not thy brother" (Deuteronomy 17:15) or "We shall not turn aside into
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the nokhri city, who are not from among the Sons of Israel" (Judges 19:12) or "the nokhri who is not of thy people, Israel" or, geographically, "who comes from a distant land" (I Kings 8:41). 10 However, lexicalized in the underlying code, the word's outgroup bearing requires no explication. Nokhri is a foreigner, nokhriyya a foreigness, and, in adjectival use, they can encompass and qualify as such every item outside the collective self: man, woman, child, tongue, dress, land, city, god, all ethnically removed by the polar logic of election. Thus, wherever Ruth may glean at Bethlehem, whether in "this" or "another field,'' she would remain and style herself a nokhriyya (2:8, 10). Again, while "another god" points to a deity other than God, a "nokhri (or nekhar) god" is one worshipped among foreigners. Even in shared negative theological reference, the group connection here importantly comes to the fore: as spelled out in the admonition against whoring after the Canaanite pantheon, "the gods of the land's foreignry [nekhar]" (Deuteronomy 21:16).11 These examples also imply more strategic features encapsulated in the wording. The choice to lexicalize a subcategory, however descriptive or representation-oriented, is never quite innocent but always a reflex of a conceptual order of priorities. And the unlexicalized might-have-beens highlight the actual word chosen, especially those pertaining to the relevant category ("semantic field"), such as aherhood*. The Bible thus encodes a term for the ethnic other (nokhri), even for the socioethnic other (ger, "sojourner," toshab, "resident"), but not for the sheer social other: rather than subgrouped under one heading, the disadvantaged lexically branch out into the varieties of the widow, the orphan, the poor, or indeed the "Hebrew" on the mixed Hab/piru reading.12 Taken together, the words present and absent express in miniature the ideal of classless nationhood. In turn, the discourse makes its own systematic choice from among the options afforded and in theory equalized by the code's selective lexicon, to the end of projecting its vision of chosenness. Of any two ethnic groups, either might (in the extratextual world, does) figure as nokhri to the second. Like alterity or brotherhood or neighborship, and unlike parenthood or barbarism, for example, the word entails a symmetrical relation. By sheer (ethno)logic, if he is foreign to me, then so am I to him. Biblical usage, however, goes one way only, from the elect to the outside circle, from "I/we" to "him/them," which thereby become the proximate and the distal terms in name and orientation as well as in identity and solidarity. The point of view on nokhri literally takes its reference from the in-group.13 Common if not inevitable practice down the ages, this asymmetry yet deserves notice for at least two reasons. While in (hi)storytelling elsewhere the foreigner's perspective often gets blanked out altogetherhis lips sealed, his mind opaque, as with the Hab/piru on recordhere it enjoys nonlexical expression vis-à-vis its alien, e.g. the "Hebrew" insider under outside vict-image. The Hebrewgram's first pattern already so reverses the easy self-
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centering option as to break yet another vogue-linkage, given wide currency by Derrida. Granting that "identity presupposes alterity," it hardly follows that the shaping or ultimate shape of serf-identity must silence the voice of alterity, nor that their "rapport of violence," if any, must come from the self or the self alone (1984:116-17). And the Bible lays bare the non sequitur in practice, together with its far-flung corollaries regarding "the notions of property, appropriation and self-presence, so central to logocentric metaphysics." It is the Bible, instead, that follows the relational logic of the terms: ''presupposing" an alien entity necessarily means keeping it in the picture for selfdefinition, possibly even bringing it onstage to voice its alien-ness in casting the insider as low alien and denying him a voice. (With Ruth, foreign expressiveness also goes the other, native way, to the verge of paradox: her modest and unusual, if rule-governed, self-designation as nokhriyya establishes her title to in-grouping, because she has publicly translated herself out of her old heterocosmic reference-frame.) Still more revealing is the interlevel homology in lexical self-anchorage between the nokhri and the "aher * god," which phrases like "the gods of the land's foreignry" tighten into montage proper. In small compass, the discourse assimilates its ethnocentricity to the highest, theocentric frame of reference. Yet the elect's parallel or assimilation to the Elector's frame of reference, as a matter of joint communicative centering, is one thing; to the value frame quite another thing, a matter of doctrinal equalizing of the transcendent with its creaturely image, unthinkable for the Bible. The two spheres co-focused in the lexis and discourse of representation markedly fork in evaluationall appearances, analogues, incentives, wishful patriotic thinking, charges to the contrary notwithstanding. On the face of it, "our ethnos as against the rest of the world" or "we vs. them" presents a complete equivalence to "our supernatural vs. theirs." All the more so, it appears, given that nokhri, unlike aher* yet like both "Israel" and "God," is a veritable, "proper" noun as well, hence freezable into a composite word-portrait at the other extreme. And never more so, apparently, than when the shared binary division opposes in-group singularity to out-group plurality, ethnic or celestial, thus sharpening into "the one vs. the many" on either front. Never prior to the Bible, of course, did the article of faith "elohim- God vs. elohim-gods" twin with "Who is like thy people Israel, one nation on earth?" (II Samuel 7:23). By otherworldly analogy, if not fiat, the term for the outsider then seems most liable to join negative with exclusionary or sheer taxonomic force. Examples abound in the usage of the Rabbis.14 Actually, the rage for blanket negation, or worse, shows even prior to the advent of monotheism, as well as in secular chauvinism old and new.
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Among the numerous cases in point, the ones that invite comparison here, for different reasons, are the ancient Greeks and Egyptians. Theirs are also well-known cases, relative to, say, the Chinese (Bodde 1961, Anderson 1991:13) and so juxtaposable in a few words, especially regarding their highest common denominator: the normative bisection of the world into the we-group vs. the rest. To either, all foreigners typically embody not just the other than the collective self but the anti-self, negated out of all the attributes and values that define humanity itself. Range, characterization, judgment, privilege: the bipolarity claims absoluteness throughout, so deepening the freeze, compounding each aspect's invariance with the whole package deal's to generate an all-round stereotypic opposition. The ideal best of existence is reified inside, the worst outside. After the Persian war in the fifth century B.C., barbaros famously comes to encode a set of antitheses beyond its root onomatopoeic meaning of incomprehensible speech. Thus the binarism of what Matthew Arnold would designate as Anarchy vs. Culture or, more immediately to our point yet, slavery vs. liberty. Aristotle opens his Politics by formulating this sense of Greek superiority to the nonGreek: Among barbarians no distinction is made between women and slaves, because there is no natural ruler among them: they are a community of slaves, male and female. Wherefore the poets say 'It is meet that Hellenes should rule over barbarians'; as if they thought that the barbarian and the slave were by nature one. (1252b, 1-8; 1966:1128) This excerpt is an object lesson in several respects: (1) the continuity of poetic (notably tragic, here Euripidean) with sociopolitical thought, as with other contemporary forms of expression. No figure or license of art, this, but an earthbound world picture, with fact, faith, and fiat drawn together by the most hard-headed of philosophers; (2) the universal stereotyping of the poles, all against all. "Barbarians" at large (irrespective of race, place, or, explicitly, sex) get opposed to "Hellenes," as though constituting "by nature'' two discrete genera. The anomalous erasure of the sexual line here"male and female," rather than "male vs. female"underscores not just its comparability but its assimilability to the primary divide of master vs. underling, born ruler vs. subject, hence "we" keepers vs. "them" infringers of natural law. "They" may even be relegated to a category other than human: Aristotle himself illustrates from them how "the brutish states" are pleasant to "originally bad natures" (Nicomachean Ethics 1148b, 1524; 1966:1044-45); and he could again enlist the
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support of literature and mythology, beginning with the Odyssey's Wonderland. (See Sternberg 1978: esp. 102-28.) (3) the political strife. Apart from its generic or otherwise biology-like all-inclusiveness, "a community of slaves" evidently glances at the barbarians' despotic form of government, to which Persia would subject and annex Hellas itself, led by the Athenian democracy. As with Scripture's ideal of freedomenvisaging a holy classless societythis goes to the heart of the group difference, only that the difference should already appear different and on closer inspection proves so in almost every regard. (4) the match of political culture with individual nature. That distinction is not nearly so sharp in the first place as it may look today, for Aristotle holds both that the state is a creation of nature and that man is by nature a political animal. Yet the group structure does reflect on the member. From the "community of slaves," Aristotle moves and ostensibly infers to the type-generalization "that the barbarian and the slave were by nature one": he is what his regime (as well as his female partner in unfreedom) shows him to be, and conversely with the Hellene. (5) the operational consequences of the polar ethnology and self-image: to enslave nonGreeks becomes a right, if not a duty. Theory generalizes, sanctions, encourages practice, even in the light of cold scientific reason (or, elsewhere, mythopoesis) as against the transparently interested rationalizing, rhetoric, or retaliation endemic to the discourse of power politics. Themselves barbarians to Greece, as Greece would in effect be to them, the Egyptians had long anticipated its selfelevation above the ethnic other throughout the world. The group nomenclature again embodies the bipolarity. (For details, with a diachronic outline, see especially Helck 1964.) The Egyptians' self-referring term, rmt *, doubles as a signifier for "Man" and the cognate name for their language as "the language of Man," whereby the part aspires to encompass the whole. The rule at times alleged to the contrary has as much, or as little, general validity as LéviStrauss' affirmatory pseudo-universal. ''No nation imagines itself coterminous with mankind" (Anderson 1991:7); but it actually may, and here encodedly does, in excluding the rest from the human species. Amid the shift of lexical emphasis between the plus (rmt*) and the minus (barbaros) values, therefore, the Pharaonic self-equation with humanity operates to much the same effect as the Greek barbarizing of alterity. The crosslinkage disconfirms again the analytic set toward auto- or hetero-image. Poles apart in the focus of group referencenot to mention in who's-who bearing on the worldthe codewords are yet mutually implicative. Little wonder they capture or generate further analogies on almost every level
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of the superior's encounter with the inferior, from reality-model to charged portrayal to sociopolitics, all immutable in theory. (If anything, that Egypt deemed immutability the condition and measure of the harmonious lifeagainst the Heraclitian ontology of fluxwould reinforce its incentive to typecast the opposites.) For example, the antithesis between Culture and Anarchy recurs, now modulating into Order within vs. Chaos all round, threatening to break inside. So does the generic characterization of the foreign as evil, the art of caricature, the animal imagery. So does the power hierarchy envisaged and actively sought in the international arena. "The best foreigner is a dead one, next comes a submitted one. His correct location, according to the Egyptian ideology, is under the feet of Pharaoh" (Liverani 1990:144). Once more, and remarkably in keeping with the Bible's diagnosis, except for the universal proportions, the stereotyped vict-image justifies victimage: worldwide imperialism, genocide and all, becomes a categorical imperative. Juxtaposing these totalizing ethnographies with the Bible reveals a world of difference in every sense. The lexis already bespeaks uniqueness and complexity on either side of the key ethnographic partition. If "Israel" is honorific and "Hebrew" two-edged, then their extragroup counterpart has no sting attached to it, only attachable but also invertible where appropriate. As nokhri may apply to all varieties of nonIsrealite, so may its referent assume any character, footing, affective shade. Functional plurality in formal unity, and again by a rule of usage that accords with the spirit of the term's very definition. No matter whether an adjective or a noun, its lexical sense is the thinnest possible, in inverse ratio to its all-but-Israel scope. Given that the lexeme itself marks a single differential feature, namely ethnic otherness, this feature comes unpackaged to the user, or reader, and enters into the trait-cluster wanted at any juncture, along with the object's particularizing variables: outgroup, e.g., lineage or homeland, yet also intergroup, from status to morality, even belief. The latter variability is the most revealing. Where a stereotype would already prejudge in the nomination, the Bible's word for "alien" gets as near to pure descriptiveness as an exocentric term can, nearer than it usually does in antiquity and since. Within the vocabulary underlying the discourse, the evaluative load of nokhri comes down to the barest minimum, such as attends the sheer ascription of ethnic otherness. Not even the match with polytheism, a statistical near-certainty, lexically follows (or else a converted outsider, if imaginable, would become an oxymoron analogous to an Asiatic Egyptian). Within the discourse itself, the marking with this otherness shows a one-way directionality, from the native circle outside. The fixed anchorage and target, though, work per se more for orientation ("ethnocentricity" as reference point) than for judgment. The normative force superadded to the exocentrism, if any, remains wide open to the
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play of contextunlike ibri, encoded into two-edgedness, and much like aher *, complete with its sui generis divine bipolarity. A brief illustration of terrestrial usage will therefore suffice. At one extreme, nokhri gravitates under pressure toward stark negativity, embattled ("nokhrim entered his [Jacob's] gates and cast lots for Jerusalem" [Obadiah 1:11], emotive ("How shall we sing the Lord's song on nekhar land?" [Psalms 137:4]) and/or doctrinal ("You have trespassed and married nokhri women, and so increased the guilt of Israel" [Ezra 10:10]). In the middle range, the investment with nokhri hood weights and clarifies the referent's exclusion from what is proper to Israel alone: from group-specific legal bans and benefits (Deuteronomy 14:21, 15:2-3, 17:15, 23:21), from kingship (Deuteronomy 17:15) or, with an ironic twist, from hostship (Judges 19:12, where the aliens that the Levite traveler avoids could hardly prove worse than the gang rapists he finds at Gibeah: his stock response, or if you will, package dealing, boomerangs). At the opposite extreme, the label further softens into mere distinctiveness, its cutting edge possibly yet blunter than given in the vocabulary. When David on the run tells Ittai of Gath, ''Why dost thou also go with us? Return and stay with the king, for thou art a nokhri, and also an exile" (II Samuel 15:19-20), he does not exclude but exempt his mercenary from the war against the usurper Absalom. Conversely with the inclusive force that tempers the distinction when the born foreigner aligns himself with the true believers, to the limit of overriding it altogether in Isaiah's universalist utopia: Let not the ben nekhar who has joined himself to the Lord say, The Lord will surely separate me from his people. . . . The bene nekhar who join themselves to the Lord, to minister to him and to love the name of the Lord, to be his servantsevery one who keeps the sabbath from profanation and holds fast to my covenantI shall bring them to my holy mountain. . . . For my house shall be called a house of prayer for all the peoples. (56:3-7) Beyond the lexicalized binary typology and the discourse anchorage in-sideeither a concomitant of the gulf in chosennessnokhri thus eludes any linkage of reference with judgment. Rather than the name having some value preattached to it, the valuation gets assigned to the name-bearer on his merits, depending for better or worse on the operative variables of his (op)position relative to the insiders. Even "foreign god," uniformly negated in ideo-ontic context, does not break the rule, much less enforces a chain reaction from heaven to earth. By the same token, when Proverbs loosens the word's very referencenow applying to anyone other than the individual self, "Let . . . a nokhri praise thee, and not thy own lips"
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(27:2)its usage just takes one further step toward mergence with the all-protean aher *. Hamiteness The lexicon's structure and deployment, therefore, already resist any tie-up with any exterior (real, literary, analytic) group portraiture. The nearest equivalent in ancient Israel to the Egyptian or Greek two-value ethnology is the Rabbinic worldview at its most polarizedand often most controverted from within the establishmentnot the Bible itself, least of all in its discourse of Hebrews.15 Counter to the either/or logic of binarism, there are always nokhrim and nokhrim. In the Edinburgh of her youth, Muriel Spark reminisces, "'foreigners' were fairly tolerated but 'the English' were something quite different": her Scottish-Jewish father got by, while her mother could never screen her Englishness from watchful eyes and ears (1992:21-22). If every group has its particular anti-group, "something quite different" from the non- or out- or extra-group, then the Hamite in the Bible's ethnography is "the English" of the novelist's Edinburgh, only far more so. (To a degree, the Asiatic filled this bill even in Nilotic culture and the Persian in Athens, though they did not so much exceed as epitomize the standard reverse self-image.) The reasons having been progressively elicited and dovetailed in the foregoing chapter, we can now make do with one point of comparison where various axes of group typology intersect on every map in question. "The poets say, 'It is meet that Hellenes should rule over barbarians'; as if they thought that the barbarian and the slave were by nature one": the Bible, presumably alive to the Egyptian version of the antinomy, would never say or think so. By quasidivine nature, humanity, was created free, man and woman sharing the image of God and the dominion over his earlier, subhuman artefacts. This includes the liberty of jeopardizing, forfeiting, renouncing liberty, as some primeval creatures already do before our eyes (and the "Hebrew or Hebrewess" may, at a pinch, under covenant law). Genesis's own division of the world, even insofar as it runs to extremes, accordingly takes its reference from the logic of superhuman election in contact with human action. So bioideologically motivated at each crossroads, the fork taken opposes not species to species, let alone "we-" to "them-'' genus, or Culture to Nature, but the God-chosen to the nonchosen and the fellow chosen to the nokhri. Moreover, the opposition is gradable and the inherited gradation regradable in, meaning by, practice. The dichotomy sets up the extremes only, between which there lies an intricate merit-to-demerit spectrum, with a corresponding history to unroll and explain it. There is always "the rest
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of the world," yet it is never of a piece, except for the common difference from the elect or the inmost elect circle under the Covenantitself never hermetically sealed in the narrative and thrown wide open in utopian prophecy. As early as the Primeval Scene, Ham having committed his unspeakable violence on Noah and "told his two brothers," Japheth follows Shem's lead in covering the parental nakedness with their eyes averted. So the fear of God (unlike idolatry, among other indigenous privileges, in Egypt) is never monopolized. The tale is not even content to brand Ham as deviant by having him violate a near-universal taboo and compounding the violation many (try to list how many) times over. It goes on to embody the norm in the rest and bulk of humanitynot in any single member, possibly counterexceptional, nor through silent judgment alone. The victim's own retribution fixes the victimizer outright at the negative pole, then subdivides the deliverers at the opposite pole, in Shem's favor, to generate a hierarchical tripartition. Diselect, lower elect, higher elect: a somewhat untidy cut, you might think, yet thoroughly in character, the Bible's as well as the agents', hence destined for greater intricacy. Ranging over the entire world, this postdiluvian scale at once maps itself onto the threefold Table of Nations and accommodates ensuing developments. The sequel populates it more densely, refines it more nicely, given that the kinfolk continue to part in Genesis and the tale to narrow its focus toward phylogenesis. As only one can be chosen at every juncture on the way to Israel, the rest of the Shemites, the Eberides, the Terahides, the Abrahamites, the Isaacites must gradually drop out of the innermost elect circle, but not into that of the cursed abominables. Not even Lot, who knowingly forfeited his Terahide descent and his chance of inheritance from (or with) the leading Crosser, has so moved beyond the pale as to countenance the reenactment of Ham's outrageeither by his fellow Sodomites on his guests or by his own Sodombred daughters on his inebriated self in the cave. Nor is the movement irreversible. With individual precedents strewn along the Genesis-to-Kings history, Isaiah's universalist vision explicitly runs to the diselect limit as such, foreseeing how "cities in the land of Egypt speak the tongue of Canaan and swear allegiance to the Lord of hosts" (19:18; or Amos 9:7, regarding another branch of Ham, "the Cushites"). In "allegiance to the Lord," they will not only come to observe the universal imperatives that they have always defiedthe fear of God, the Noahide laws binding on humanity as suchbut adopt the Covenant of Israel proper. The ex-monopolists over Godlessness will then turn sharers in the ultimate good. And their linguistic transformation perfects the contrast to the immutability of barbaros and rmt *, whereby the idolaters idolize themselves within an otherwise dehumanized (speech)world.
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The oracle, though, has yet to come true. Meanwhile, the Bible thinks it fit that the chosen should "rule over" the Hamites, the Hamites alone, and the Hamites as traitors to the divine image. Exactly because they are slaves against rather than "by nature," exactly because they do or at least did and should know the meaning of freedom, unlike the Persians in Herodotus (1954:458), they come out all the worsemorally, hence sooner or later politically, by their own choice again. The very correlation of terms works otherwise than usual: inferiority does not so much issue from as betoken and engender servitude, willing unfreedom at that; and conversely with superiority vis-à-vis freedom. The Noachic master/slave relation, to judge from history, is a figure for an ethical rank order, expressing the superior's worthiness and the inferior's want of control. Slaves to their basest instincts, the Egyptians see to their agropolitical enslavement themselves and petition the Bread-master for it on their knees. Next, in Exodus, God brings Egypt to her knees and might subject her to Israelpiling contemporary on Noachic measure for measureyet he would rather eternally disengage Israel from her. In disengagement, neither power nor any subtler influence will be exercised either way, by or on the hopeless case. The claim about the anti-type having been demonstrated, as it were, the trials of the chosen people need to shift arenas, away from the unholy land and toward state nationhood. The slave of Ham, though, redoubles his offense in aspiring to total mastery over his betters. Scripture never forgets his effrontery, not even the book generally considered the most Egyptianized and intent on universal wisdom, the least (hi) storied and phylogenetic. Proverbs would rather seem to assume the proverbial in Israel. "Under three things the earth trembles, under four it cannot bear up: under a slave when he becomes king, and a lout when he is filled with food ['bread']; under an unloved woman when she is mated, and a bondmaid when she succeeds her mistress" (30:21-23). Thematic and strong anyway, the language may well elaborate an intergeneric allusion to the history of our intergroup contact. Out of the four earth-shaking anomalies, the two at either end directly relate to social inversion, while the two in between even map themselves onto the Noachic storied crossroads: overindulgence followed by sexual violence. To clinch the pattern, the chapter multiplies examples of both filial impiety (with curse or retribution attached) and sexual depravity. Again, in ongoing canon-length retrospect, the quartet retells in epigrammatic shorthand the genesis of the Hebrew/Hamite scandal itself. When the first Hebrew descends to Egypt, his Hamite antagonist meets no fewer than three of the given specifications: he plays king, enjoys a surplus of food, and drags an unloved (by him) woman into his harem, if not into his bed (Genesis 19:10-20). Years later, his cousin in Philistia replays the part (20:lff.), then
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the fourth-generation "Hebrew man/slave/boy" undergoes the threefold ordeal. And between the male-centered violations of order, the one remaining upside-down scenario of Proverbs gets enacted in the female domain. Sarai's "Egyptian bondmaid, Hagar her name" has no sooner conceived by Abram than "her mistress became light in her eyes" (16:1-5). As early as Genesis, the earthquake comes fourfold, all too often and, short of divine interference, irreparably. But then, keeping the diselect in their place is one thing, saving the elect from themselves another, outside God's own control by the very predication of chosenness on free daily choice. The struggles against Ham without and Hamlikeness within run, at times parallel, at times alternately, down to the Exile. Neither resolvable for good, the two cross in the acutest crises of Hebrewness: first Egypt's oppression, then Philistia's, happily ended in turn by the master plot; then Jerusalem's, whose mock-replay of the inherited narrative and legal plot, after her Egyptian ally, brings statehood and with it national freedom to an end. Ethnocentricity vs. Ethnocentrism Juxtaposing Scripture's with Greek or Egyptian ethnography therefore helps to disclose yet another (con)fusion between the invariant and the variant, now enshrined in the modern jargon of ethnos-centeredness. This (con)fusion, like its Lévi-Straussian relative, betrays not just an ancient but the worst genealogy, for the pseudo-universalist metadiscourse of "we-as-center" unwittingly takes after the anti-Scriptural (Hamite or real-life Egyptian/Greek) discourse pole. To top off the irony, the pedigree counts as "worst" not in the Bible's eyes only, or (ethno)logic's. The very thought of it would shock the analysts and theorists who bear the lineal hallmark, especially those committed to fighting such age-old "racism" tooth and nail. But then, across ethnoideology and politics as well as time or discourse levels, the extremes meet on the slippery grounds of centeredness. In the modern study of culture, the slippage dates from the work that has given currency to this particular bit of jargon, William Graham Sumner's Folkways: Ethnocentrism is the technical name for this view of things in which one's own group is the center of everything, and all others are scaled and rated with reference to it. . . . Each group nourishes its own pride and vanity, boasts itself superior, exalts its own divinities, and looks with contempt on outsiders. . . . Opprobrious epithets are derived from these differences. "Pig-eater," "cow-eater," "uncircumcised," "jabberers,'' are epithets of contempt and abomination.
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. . . The most important fact is that ethnocentrism leads a people to exaggerate and intensify everything in their own folkways which is peculiar and which differentiates them from others. It therefore strengthens the folkways. (1906:13) This looks unproblematic today, indeed all too familiar, because most of us have internalized the non sequitur along with the term. (Only, some would use "ethnocentricity" instead or interchangeably.) The opening and ending throw the emphasis on the in-group's self-centralization whereby it becomes the "reference" point for all others; the middle, on its invidious self-elevation above all others. The truth of the matter is that the former self-centering never entails the latter in theory, nor always involves it in practice. Yet Sumner lumps the two together under the single rubric of "ethnocentrism," and with them, inter alia, our diametric exemplars: "The Jews [presumably meaning the Israelites, as shown by the tenses] divided all mankind into themselves and Gentiles. They were the 'chosen people.' The Greeks and Romans called all outsiders 'barbarians'" (ibid.:14). In homologizing the tags cited, the Israelite and the Greco-Roman, he fails to distinguish the invariant (by lexical definition) from the variable (within actual usage or abusage) reflexes of ethnos-centeredness: not even to the extent that he sets "patriotism,'' as "loyalty to the civic group to which one belongs," apart from "chauvinism," where it "degenerates into a vice," that is, "boastful and truculent group self-assertion." In reason, from the idea of centering a group within the discourse's sphere of interest there follows no group bias and loyalty, whatever, neither excessive ("chauvinistic") nor ordinary ("patriotic"). The varieties of such focal choice are therefore all the more urgently in need of conceptual, practical, and terminological delimitationor else groupcenteredness will remain arrested in its worst (meta)image. To supply the need, let me now briefly generalize what I have argued since the first chapter (and led up to in this) by opposing "ethnocentricity" to "ethnocentrism" as constant to contingent, form to effect, theme to thesis, whole to its part or, if you like, pathology. For symmetry, "egocentricity" will bear the same relation to "egocentrism," "theocentricity" to "theocentrism," "androcentric" to "androcentrist," "Eurocentric" to "Eurocentrist," and so forth. These have been co-victims to stereotypic prejudgment by name-calling: if you call androcentric writing "phallocentric," for example, why not call Israelites "Hebrews" or Italians "fascists" on the analogous pars-pro-toto basis? Given that every discourse must be (and therefore center) about something, or someone, all the -centricities just instanced variously exhibit the universal principle of aboutness on the representational level. Ethnocentricity is thus a matter of apportioning interest, hence foreground and background, among the represented (or representable) groups. It consists
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in nothing more, or less, than focusing the ethnic or ethnonational we-group to the relative marginalizing of the others. Given a representational ethnologic, moreover, the others comparatively defocused include not only (or even chiefly) peoples foreign to the self but all rivals for the limelight: a nonethnic grouping, a world- or society-picture, an individual hero(ine), a relation, an event sequence, a place, a mindscape, a theme, a game of art. Among all these rivals, ethnocentricity as such does not necessarily (i.e., functionally, let alone centrally) oppose heterocentricity or universalityand they itany more than the option for androcentricity perforce contrasts in a significant way with a might-have-been gyrocentricity: neither theoretically imaginable counterfocus will always head the phalanx of actual contenders, to say the least, except in the bigot's prefocused eye, imagining slights and rejections wherever it finds its own group underrepresented. To correct the imaginary wrong, if only by way of adverse judgment on it, the discourse then gets thrown out of focus or into Procrustean focus. "What is not about me is against me" drives egotistic binarism to self-tormenting as well as other-persecuting unreason. What a far cry from Anne who, during her visit at Uppercross, wishes that the rest of the Elliots saw with her "how unknown, or how unconsidered there, were the affairs which at Kellynch Hall were treated as of such general publicity and pervading interest." In simple truth, the range of focal choices inevitably varies with the state of the world, the horizons, conventions, goals, priorities in force. About the Hebrew reference group, for example, most criticism properly divides (or maneuvers) not between ethnic extremes but between an ethnos and a class: this issue makes the difference here, just as elsewhere the rivalry may run along other nonbinary lines, a plot vs. a character focus or a theme vs. a style. And a big difference it has already, typically and progressively, shown itself, since either fork yields a construct of Hebrewness with its own large-scale network and narrativein effect its own Bible. Crosscutting, yet no less paradigmatic, is the enormous difference that has emerged between the unifocal and the multifocal patterning of the data. The former exhibits itself here in a stable reading of "Hebrew" throughout, either ethnos- or class-centered; the latter in the various compromise solutions, whose twists cannot save the text from falling apart. (The main demonstrations still lie ahead, especially in chapters 6-9.) Again, for the communicative choice to encode itself, with the proper difference, ethno-focusing can draw upon the entire repertoire of attention-focusing strategies, tactics, aids, indicators available to all representation (and most extensively surveyed, with further references, in Yacobi 1985). Thus the quantitative indicator correlates the variables of textual space given and contextual interest generated. The sheer representational disproportion trained on some world-items (Fielding's Tom Jones,
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Flaubert's Emma Bovary, Gibbon's Rome, the Bible's Israel) signals its centrality to the discourse; and vice versa. Or the perspectival indicator, whereby the focus of interest arises from (e.g., Winterbourne in Henry James's Daisy Miller) or doubles as (Maisie in What Maisie Knew, lifeless Dublin in The Dubliners) focus of narration. Or the indicator of development, which exploits the inherent perceptual advantage of the dynamic (e.g., "Hebrews/Israel") over the static ("Egypt") to foreground the existent undergoing change: especially the thematic ordeal of growth, individual or collective. But whatever the repertoire activated, in ethnocentric discourse as elsewhere, it always sets up a contextual hierarchy of importance, which may or may not go with that of approval, to which the package dealers have unthinkingly assimilated it. Unthinkingly, that is, even apart from such irrationalities as binarism, collective egotism, particular intergroup animus or group-hatred at large. For they draw a false analogy between nature and culture: between the literal usage in, say, cosmography (e.g., "geocentric" or "heliocentric") and the derivative metaphors of, say, ethnography. There, the center set up is perforce one round which the world itself revolves no less than, figuratively, the discourse made about it; here, the two centerings (one now become a metaphor for real-life, one for discoursive, importance and value) freely correlate, according to the representational goal. Thus ethnocentricity anchors interest, while ethnocentrism also has a vested interest, in ethnonationalityjust as ethnophobia has in the reverse world-order. If an individual hero can turn out to fall anywhere between the heroic and the antiheroic, why not a collective? If numberless private identifies have been represented from varying distances, why should mass representation enforce self-identification? What the text is about and what it is for or against are two independent issues, relatable in any number of ways: from the compounding, through the partial overlapping, to the counterpointing of focus with favor, centricity with -centrism. The point being apparently so elusiveto many vested interests, centrist and anticentrist, so uncongenialthink of a related, crosscutting discourse system at the heart of language itself. Person deixis ("I, you, he, she . . .") is to the individual, representing or represented, much as group anchorage is to the collective: the two intersect on the very surface, and less evidently below it, in the system-constitutive oppositions of the "I" and/or "we" to the "he" and/or ''them." These centering systems also meet in the principled divergence (or, negatively, the confusion engendered) between their inherent and their variable end: self-centering for representational aboutness, coherence, guidance, etc., and for normative scaling of the represented world by merit, attractiveness, human value, etc. In person deixis, the misalliance of egocentricity (self-anchorage, I-boundness) with egocentrism (self-regard, ego-
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tism) shows in the social decorums that would constrain the former's expression to keep down the latter. Thus the selflast (you-he-and-I) ordering etiquette; or the replacement of "I" by "we" and of pronominal by lexical (e.g., "the undersigned") usage; or, best, passive voice, altogether self-less formation (see Sternberg 1983a for details). Born in error, these social protocols are doomed to failure no matter how rigorously enforced. As always, censorship and suppression will boomerang in drawing notice to the proscribed, here via an ethos of false modesty at that. Also, relative to other and larger factors involved, pro-nominal choice often turns out almost nominal, rather marking than making a differenceor the difference wanted. For impolite surface egocentricity may itself extend from the egotistic "I . . . I . . . I . . ." or "I am a saint, he a devil" to the converse of serf-denial, -criticism, even -hate, with the poles joined together in a Montaigne's running self-judgment amid unabashed self-absorbedness. But then, so may thirdperson self-reference: obvious in the discourse of everyday life, the free variability of either style carries over to art, sometimes against appearances. For example, the theories and practices that consider literature an escape from serfexpression apparently intersect with society's ruling on deictic usage. Yet, according to a theorist-practitioner as authoritative as Henry James, such poetics involves only a movement away from the old, limitlessly roving and garrulous narrator toward a narration restricted and so "dramatized" either in the "third-person" (The Ambassadors) or the "first-person'' (The Turn of the Screw) mode. Inversely with the Bloomian theory of poetry as solipsism. In selfdefense against "the anxiety of influence," the poet will blind himself to everything outside. "This egocentricity is itself a major training in imagination. . . . The center will therefore hold better. . . . The strong poet knows only himself and the Other he must at last destroy, his precursor" (Bloom 1973:121). Like that of Jamesian dramatism, though, the poetics of solipsism cuts across the "I/he" opposition in the poet's self-reference. If antisocial, to the limit of patricidal egomania, then its breaches go deeper than the etiquette of grammatical person. Elsewhere, come to that, the more prolonged the observance of "I"-less self-reference, the more disingenuous it seems: the impersonal autobiography, already evidenced in Caesar's Gallic War, would read like a paradox were it not for the built-in rhetoric of objectivity. The cross-linkages available make it yet harder to correlate self-referential form and function. Thus Xenophon's shifts in Anabasis between himself as teller now ("I") and as agent then ("Xenophon"), Ezra's or Henry Esmond's less orderly subjective/objective instabilities in pronominalizing himself, and so forth. Again, consider the signature on paintings: from the unconventional, majestic personalism "Io, Lionardo," as-
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serting itself within an impersonal artistic field of representation, down to the impersonal "Rembrandt f." on less and less flattering self-portraits. Norand here language proper contrasts with alternative mediais formal self-effacement itself ever attainable. The "I" having been expelled, it will reappear in the "you," in the proximal/distal (this/that, here/there, now/then) deictics, and in the tense markers, all going back to the speaker on pain of referential chaos. Without him centralized over against some other(s) for point of subjective orientation, how would we ever map words onto the world? Hence the bid for anonymity and disembodiment made by the Genesis-to-Kings teller (Poetics, 58-198) goes a long way, yet still short of the ideal goal. Linguistic discourse, produced or received, is necessarily egocentric across the spectrum of valuation leading from egocentrism through egocriticism to egophobia. If language-use distinctively entails an all-orienting "I," then an additional self-centering "must" attaches to it in common with the rest of semiotic practices. All communication implies a "we" as against a ''they" reference group, if only ones defined by competence in the medium: we insiders vs. they outsiders to the code, the tongue, the register, the sign system, the art form involved. With this obligatory discoursive as with (or on top of) linguistic selforientation, however, the discourse-maker can yet range between poles of value-laden subjectivity, e.g., between reluctant and studied exclusiveness, or between feelings of superiority and inferiority to the excluded. He can even adopt, as does Anne Elliot at Uppercross or the Hebrews of the next pattern, the medium to which he and his native "we" are outsiders, "they" his audience insiders. Amid code- and center-switching outside the self, into the very antiself, the dialogist's excluded other will just change grouping to match: the nonEnglish or the nonEgyptian speaker, respectively, will perforce become "they," if only on this among the many identity/alterity axes always involved, often at odds. And quotation, as discourse in the second degree, generically (a fortiori if intercoded) complicates all these relationships, into two-in-oneness at least. So the Hebrewgram crosses polar group identities or allegiances at its very simplest. When Hamites utter the codename, their inset "we/they" dualism, from the language upward, is counterdualized by the frame that translates them to "ourselves." Now ethnocentric discourse as such brings into playfreely for a changean additional identity/alterity axis, which adjusts the foregrounding and backgrounding of the respective ethnic groups to the text's priorities of interest. By one further centering, this discourse genre not only addresses but also images the people, speaks to native speakers about their ("our") own ethnonational affairs, or mainly about them. "I am myself the matter of my book": turn Montaigne's celebrated singular into plural first-person and you have the collective equivalent of autobiography, oriented
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all over to, say, the "we"-nation. (Further widespread, though less inevitable, parallels would be the double casting of men in androcentricity, of women in gyrocentricity, Westerners in Eurocentricity, God in theocentricity, where directly or ultimately addressed to him.) Subject then coincides with object, reference with referent group as focal pointsone of the communication, one of the representation. Freely chosen, this extra self-centering is yet definitional, because generic, text-constitutive, and as ever value-free: no more -centrist in principle than either of the universal constraints, on deixis or on encoding. (Indeed, Proverbs shifts the reference of nokhri from the ethnos's to the ego's other, without abandoning the orientational or the representational or the ad-monitory-critical focus on the old-new self.) Along all these axes, we must come to terms with the fact that discourse is undemocratic in its representations, even when they zealously preach democracy among the items (subjects, audiences, bodies) represented out of the infinitude of representables. You can never cover everything, nor level whatever you do cover in manner and matter. Focusing is a sine qua non of patternmaking and sense-making, because there is no other way to reconcile their opposite first imperativesdifferentiation with integration, selection with arrangement, actual meaningfulness with might-have-been exclusiveness. 16 The infinite possibilities only bear on the how, the where, the degree and effect. Along all axes, conversely, no imperative whatever binds the interplay of theme with thesis, representation with evaluationfor example, of more or less centrality with more or less sympathy. Ethno-focusing therefore meets the condition and exploits the inverse license to the hilt. To ethnophobes old and new, of course, the focus itself may look intrinsically objectionable. Nationalism has been reviled as by nature limiting, divisive, Other-hating, conflictual, oppressive, immoral, not to say mad. And if nationalism is bad, ethnonationalism is worse, if possible, and one driven by a sense of electness worst. Leaving aside virulent attacks from diverse quarters, it is characteristic that even so sympathetic a student of nationalism as Tom Nairn [1977:359] can nevertheless write that: "Nationalism is the pathology of modern developmental history, as inescapable as 'neurosis' in the individual, with much the same essential ambiguity attaching to it, a similar built-in capacity for descent into dementia, rooted in the dilemmas of helplessness thrust upon most of the world (the equivalent of infantilisim for societies) and largely incurable." (Anderson 1991:5) All the more characteristic if you note the family-likeness of this type image
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to the psychoideological metastereotype of the Stereotype and its ramifications. In answer to such indictmentsas to those of ego, God, sexual allegiance, class nexussome have written hymns to nationalism, some counterlisted its beneficial effects, the inspiration of love and art among them (e.g., Anderson 1991:141ff.; cf. the pragmatic defense of "anti-anti-ethnocentrism" in Rorty 1991:203-10). The just-quoted "pathologist" himself builds ambivalence into it. Not that there are "two brands of nationalism, one healthy and one morbid. The point is that . . . all nationalism is both healthy and morbid" (Nairn 1977:347). Others still, most interestingly and reasonably, advance what amounts to a protean argument: "An ideal and an identity that can fulfil so many functions, collective and individual, are bound to have the most varied social and political consequences, given the variety of circumstances in which nationalists must operate'' (Smith 1991:18, 143-77, or in a more literary context, During 1993:139ff.). However that may be, four facts of division should remain beyond dispute and with them, exponentially, the respective lines of approach. First, the world divides (on the Bible's account, always has divided since Babel) into nations, nationalisms, national identities. Second, these in turn divide by their geneses, features, values, aspirations, practicesif only by whether they mobilize or transcend other forces for collectivity, such as the Bible's ethnic and theological links. Third, the realities at source must be set apart from their discoursive images, even from those (e.g., ethnohistories, mythologies, symbolisms, taxonomies, self-representations) attached to them, as the Hebrewgram and the whole canon was to real-life Israel. Neither, including their categorical difference in reality level, will vanish if ignored: short of universalist utopia or Platonic censorship, both are there for us to investigate (preferably in source/discourse juxtaposition) as best we can. Fourth, the images themselves divide, more widely still than the corresponding brute realities. Given a single object, its representations may freely vary in detail, in truth-claim and truth-value, in semiotic form, in artistryand in attitude toward the common focus of interest. Discourse about and to the people by one of themselves may but need not work for the people, not even to the extent of acknowledging their peoplehood. The most unselfish of us speakers cannot help speaking egocentrically, and the most un-ethnos-selfish of native ethnographers, ethnocentrically. What else do the very ethnophobes in building up their case studies against local ethnonationalism, or Joyce in his exposure of Dublin as the site of paralysis, the figure for the anti-life, or the German writers horrified by Nazi Germany? This also quashes once more the belief that mention, not to speak of prominence, confers value by itself, while silence devaluates. In face of such all-out ethnocritiques as just instanced from ethnocentric writing, the centered "we"-groups in question would rather
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wish themselves neglected and have been known to take suppressive measures. Censorship, protean like everything else about imagery, mediates among a host of vested interests. The challenge now, therefore, is to unpack this metastereotype in turn, identify the elements, outline their combinatory gamut, and distinguish the varieties of finished textual product. Generalizing the picture from what has gone before need not take much time. Ethnocentric representation divides along evaluative lines into three gradable subcategories. At one pole, we have ethnocentrism, with aggressive (e.g., Hellocentrist, Nilocentrist, Aryancentrist) xenophobia as limit-case: the former will tend to an affirmative stereotyping of the in-group, the latter also to a negation, often a mirror- or vict-imaging of the outgroup, possibly the entire outworld. At the other pole, we have the isms (internationalism, cosmopolitanism, humanism, universalism, Marxism, anarchism) that would replace the focal group in question by some idealized inclusive counterstereotype, with ethnophobia as their limit-case. In between there range the shades of ethnocriticismautocritique trained on the collectiveall essentially stereotype-wrenching, if not downright antistereotypic across the group fence. The Bible dramatizes the possibilities. It is (1) ethnocentric, yet with Creation-old universalist nexuses and movements; (2) ethnocritical to an unusual as well as unprecedented degree, including the elect's criticism vis-à-vis the archenemy's (the shrewd Pharaoh's, the unified Egypt's) positive; and, or rather because, (3) theocentrist in principle, always keeping in mind that the supreme values cannot bear any automatic one-to-one correspondence with the transactions and judgments enacted by a character so intricate as its God. The picture drawn thus far will steadily grow in complexity with the unfolding of the Hebrewgram's next three patterns. Most upsetting, yet in human, national, and artistic character all at once, are the sundry He-brew-motivated convergences of the ethnocultures where they should conflict instead. At times (in the order of analysis below) the convergence is venial, even laudable; at times, part of the grand design or of the throes of phylogenetic evolution; one time, at the end told in Jeremiah 34, it becomes too deep, settled, and collective to forgive. The cynosure then so loses his claim to God's treasured possession, by merging into the antitype as enslaver of Hebrews, that he forfeits the exterior markers of ethnonationality, peoplehood and land. At the hour of God's despair, ethnocriticism modulates to the verge of ethnophobia, one retributively, if still selectively, trained on the elect along with the diselect incarnate, their Egyptian partner in crime. Never lapsing en route into ethnocentrism,
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which would count as idolatry, the Hebrewgram fittingly leads up (or down) to multiple iconoclasm: the two-sided breach of Israel's image and covenant. This enables me to finish the chapter where it started, with the Bible's ideopoetic cornerstone and its family likeness to the principle on which my book's analysis and theorizing rest. Think of the chasm here separating visual from verbal portraiture: one interdicted wholesale by Scripture, one commanded, treasured, innovating everywhere with wonderful artistry. Odder yet, the split is itself novel in the history of aesthetics, and either mimetic project goes under the name of "imagery" (dmut, tselem). However, if you overdraw the contrast, or relegate it to the domain of sense perception, it will keep hidden the meeting of the extremes in the war waged against representational fixture. All reification (of oneself or others, in word or thought, particular or collective, stereotypical or metastereotypical) is to the Bible what a graven image is to its God: worship of some man-made idol, some material form of culture. Theology apart, and constructively speaking, the rationale amounts to the Proteus Principle.
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4 The Translated Self in Adverse Encounter Speaking Like a Foreigner: Enforced Self-Designation Under the Bible's Law of Intercultural Nominationits sociologic, its ethnologic, its geologic, its historical dynamics in language and plotthe "Hebrew" group-image extends to a second discourse-pattern, with a marked shift in voice from the first coupling of opposites. Here, the dialogue's speaker and addressee change ethnic identities: the narrator directly quotes an Israelite self-Hebrewer placed in unfavorable circumstances relative to his interlocutor, the Hamite Other. Unfavorable, because no Israelite confronted with foreigners in the Bible will ever name himself or his people "Hebrew" except when speaking or miming speech from an inferior position as well as in the foreigner's tongue. To impel him to such usage, or self-abusage, both conditions would seem necessary, and the former even turns out to be the more basic: power-status again determines the very medium of communication, including the forms of reference and self-reference across group boundaries. In short, as the ethnologic behind the Hebrewgram reserves the term for Hamite contexts, so does the sociopolitics for adversity. At the intersection of these axes, the vict-image taken on by the self (i.e., transferred to the character's own utterance and, as always, translated into the narrator's vernacular quotation of it) reflects a Hamitism in unequal encounter. Take a pair of simple examples. "I was in fact stolen out of the land of the Hebrews, nor have I done anything here that they should put me into the pit," Joseph explains to Pharaoh's Chief Cupbearer, the same functionary that will call him, in belated remembrance, "a Hebrew boy" (Genesis 40:15, 41:12). ''I am a Hebrew": thus Jonah identifies himself to the sailors, in response to the question, "Of what people [am] art thou?" (Jonah 1:9). His self-designation, so bonded with peoplehood, has unsurprisingly been an eyesore to the class-centered Hab/piru analogizers, hence an object of discounting on source-critical grounds. The routine expedient is to allege the lateness of the writing and with it a change in the name's meaning: from the early sociological internationalism to the
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postexilic national honorific (e.g., Lemche 1979:9, 23). Some geneticists even dismiss the special case as no case at all, by appeal to the Septuagint, which (mis)reads "the servant [ebed] of the Lord" instead of the near-ho-mographic "Hebrew [ibri]" (e.g., Lewy 1957:6-7, Gray 1958:186). Yet, whatever the truth about the genesis, the discourse-type preserves its systematicity across the canon: from the imbalance of power between native self and Hamite other, to the heterolanguage of dialogue, to the contextuality of the ethnic self-reference, to the features attached to the referent, to the self-valuation expressed, anything but honorific. Though otherwise wide apartin time, space, clustering, conversational partner and mediumthe two situations dramatize a native hero in straits. Both Joseph and Jonah find themselves away from their land, alone among strangers of polar birth and breeding. In addition, each labors under his own contextual disadvantages. The former, "a slave to the Captain of the Guard," has just been imprisoned sine die on a charge of attempted rape; the latter, a fugitive from God, stands guilty of having brought "evil" upon the entire ship. This multifold situational inferiority exacts from both a price in self-expression and self-placement vis-à-vis the foreign (Egyptian or otherwise Hamite) superior. It accounts not only for the nonIsraelite language in which the dialogue is supposedly held but also for the Israelite dialogist taking on the image most acceptable and understandable, rather than prestigious, among the members of the culture he addresses. Hence the self-presentation in terms of Hebrewness, along with related outbound attributes, geographical in one case, theological in the other, all twice translated: the son or Son of Israel quoted at talk must have switched codes to, and the quoting Israelite narrator from, the foreign tongue underlying the discourse. So newly contextualized, that is, poeticized, the immediate mimesis (written, artful) implies an anterior one (oral, compulsory) and pushes it further back in turn to unroll a fourfold genetic history. The line of the ethnicon's genesis reconstructibly moves from its canonical origin in Eber/eber/'br to its three interlingual shifts: its stereotypic alien abusage, then its adoption by a native character among aliens, then its reflection by the teller in the vernacular shape we encounter it. (In the reading, of course, this whole "Hebrew"-centered movement arises counterclockwise, as we infer it from the end-product to the devolutionary process to the starting point: from the given and ostensible to the absent and genuine Biblicism, via the foreign-like and the foreign twists.) Another poetic diachrony thus emerges in little, outreaching by one link the chain of transmission compressed into the first discourse-type and accordingly exhibiting more changes en route in everything but the ethnic reference. Within the genesis of this tale of genesis, it is suggestive that Joseph
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should lead the way in Hebrew self-naming. The first (proto-) Israelite to have both spent years in Egypt and met with the hateword in public, he requires no interpreter, as his brothers still do (42:23), but can interpret himself and his self to the Egyptian lord. Earlier still, if you want harder evidence than likelihood, there would obviously have been no interpreter between him and Potiphar's wife: in the ascent from seduction to attempted rape, the frame's comment that nobody else "was there in the house" (39:11) guarantees the intimacy of their tête-à-tête. Now, too, he is his own translator within the jail inset, as the storyteller is ours in reverse, each geared to his respective target culture between the poles. Setting in Joseph's ordeals a precedent charged with historical, symbolic, anticipatory force, the Bible takes care to anchor the interlingual in overall realism, the new microcosmic dissonance and bivalence in the circumstances most likely to engender them. Observe, however, that the shared foreignism does not voice (denote, lexicalize) but only reflects (or contextualizes) the addressor's low power-status. The difference, traditionally beclouded here as elsewhere, in and out of Hab/piru linkage, is fundamental. Jonah's "I am a Hebrew," for example, does not at all signify "I am a vagrant, fugitive, dependent, alien, Hab/piru or Hab/piru-like, in short." (Most ingenious among combiners here, Brichto [1992:70-71] pairs Jonah's self-definition as ''a vassal" with the ensuing reference to "his liege lord"; but that wouldn't answer the crew's questions.) Far less does the signification of "Hebrew" purposely invoke the Hab/piru in an attempt "to conceal his identity" and "to bewilder his inquisitors" (Parzen 1932/33:259, Danell 1946:46n. 48), fobbing them off with an international class-membership where they demand an ethnicon. In that event, he might bewilder them altogether by his gibberish, since the class thus invoked had been extinct for centuries. (Much the same absurdity would follow, only more inevitably and radically, from the ethnic Abrahamite/Hebrew equation. On such a premise, every Israelite speaking of himself or his congeners as Hebrew is a liar, not just an equivocator, because that Abrahamite group excludes, by definitional fiat, the chosen offspring of Abraham the Hebrew.) Rather, to a straight inquiry about ethnicity, "Of what people art thou?", Jonah gives a straight ethnic answer. Only the terms of that answer ("Hebrew" substituted for the co-referential and canonical "Israelite") socialize it as welland by reason of the inequality in the dialogists' position at the time, not of any fixed, objective, extradialogic attributes. The ethnic reference is thus encoded in the Bible's lexis as part of the language system itself; the social reflex of inferiority, evaluative (counter)loading and all, is encoded in the language as discoursed on the Other's homeground; neither encoding governs the allegedly parallel source-material. The same holds for Joseph's tracing his origin to "the land of the He-
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brews," on pain of multiple counterproductiveness. Despite itself, indeed, the nexus forged by the crosshistorian may again yield heuristic dividends, in proportion to its negative truth-value, complete with anti-narrativity. "It is not unreasonable to assume that the Egyptians would have identified Joseph, who was sold in their country as a slave . . ., with the 'apiru * against whom they had fought in Canaan and whom they had taken prisoner" (de Vaux 1978:I, 215-16). Chapter 2 in this study, on the outsider at name-calling, has already shown how little reasonable the assumption would be in the mind and mouth of the Egyptians. And the unreason would in its turn pale beside that of Joseph's self-identification with the enemy "against whom they had fought in Canaan." Nothing short of follyeither the addressor's irrepressible solidarity with his namesakes or, quite the opposite, his reluctance "to disclose his family identity because of family pride" (Parzen 1932/33:259)could motivate such self-grouping by one knowledgeable about the culture he addresses. True or false, it would amount to his justifying and courting, rather than pleading, victimage. If socialized (i.e., antisocialized) as Hab/piru, the group of Amarna ill-fame with which he affiliates himself in "the land of the Hebrews" would antagonize the official to whom he pleads his case; the group's placement by the toponym in "a more or less lawless territory" (Lemche 1979:11) would also echo the worst complaints about it on Egyptian record; and the attribution of "the land" to this of all outgroups, as though it were an "empty area" up for grabs (Ellison 1973:32), would even challenge the Egyptian empire's title to suzerainty over Canaan (or Kharu, in imperial parlance, whence the gentilic Kharu/Kharian). That way suicide lies, with narrativicide in terms of action logic. Where Jonah would be invoking the dead, unintelligibly yet harmlessly, Joseph would be incriminating himself as a living menace to the state. So he remains even on the premise that the Egyptians, like all neighbors, confused the Hebrews with the Hab/piru (Merrill 1988:34, 101): rather than inviting the confusion, dangerous as well as uncomplimentary, he would seek to avoid it by eliding the homonym altogether from the toponym. Pulled into the Amarna framework, in brief, the self-defense would give nothing but offense to the high-powered auditor (as in another way it certainly does, or should, to all the scholars who want to keep the Hebrew-Hab/piru landless, migrant by type-definition). Not so in Biblical context, where the emphasis falls on the oppressor's rage for monopolism at home, without any trace of expansionism. From Genesis to Samuel, Egypt (however tyrannical within her own borders) never exhibits any imperialistic drive toward Canaan, or further north. "The land of the Hebrews [later, of Israel]," "the land of Canaan," "the land of the Philistines": these rival tides do mirror intergroup strife as to territorial entitlement, of which we have caught a glimpse in Philistine
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propaganda. But Egypt nowhere figures here, except, significantly, within the phrase for the Promised Land's southern border, "the River of Egypt" (Genesis 15:18; or "Brook," Joshua 15:4, 47, I Kings 8:65, II Kings 24:7, Isaiah 27:12, II Chronicles 7:8)beyond which her inhabitants consign the Hebrews as eberite outlanders. This is indeed why Joseph, pleading for release, if not for repatriation, identifies himself to Pharaoh's courtier by his homeland, rather than directly by his race, which would misfocus his story of kidnapping from home, across the border, and which has already weighed against him in the Potiphar affair. 1 Having a country of his own, so the indirection argues, he never meant to impose himself elsewhere, on people abroad. And to reinforce the sense of his apartness, forlornness, innocence, the expatriate also highlights the circumstances of his departure and arrivalin effect anticipating the minister's possible suspicions of his background. He is no outlaw of any kind, no captive, adventurer, fugitive from justice, least of all (this being an offense with which he will charge, and for which he will imprison, his own brothers) a spy. Instead, a harmless outlander from Beyond the River (of Egypt, most immediately and pertinently), he has been "stolen" across the River (into Egypt). Alluding to the ethnicon's geographical etymology (eber hannahar) barbed by the local xenophobes, he gives it a favorable turn and incorporates its nomi-narrative into his own narrative: "You consign me by name to the other side of the River, and there I indeed belong." Joseph in self-translation thus makes the most of his outsidership. Attempting to persuade against all odds, he not only aligns the referring expression, as well as the medium and the tone, with the heterocultural reference group that victimized him. He so manipulates the vict-mage as to argue (and, in time, gain) his release from the vict-image he has suffered because of it. The ethnic origin (ibrim) stated in the phrase is duly humble, the geographical (ibrim-land) inoffensive, their two-in-one montage conciliatory and moving. But Joseph's persuasive maneuvers have a larger appropriateness in that they fit and complement the action dynamics of the Hebrewgram. The plot value assigned to the speaking of the term in the first discourse-pattern now reverses together with the reversal of the speech-roles. If there the antagonist's recourse to Hebrewing expresses or evokes such emotions as fear, hate, etc., by way of intergroup discord, the protagonist's self-Hebrewing means to allay them by advertising his concord with the master group on its own terms. So, while the Israelite narrator tacitly keeps "Hebrew" bi-valent, as always, the self-Hebrewer in adversity vocally flattens it to inglorious but welcome univalence. On this miniature battlefield, the frame's rhetoric is one of disharmony, operating within the elect circle
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and preserving its credentials not just against but through foreign or foreign-like de-nomi-nation; the inset's is a rhetoric of harmony, or its appearance, geared to the stronger outsider with earthly ("actional") ends in viewhence a mirror image and an antidote to the co-inset rhetoric of disharmony quoted from the outgroup itself (Potiphar's wife, Pharaoh, the Philistines). Dramatically and rhetorically, as mimetically and genetically, the new variations enrich the Law's poetic system. The self-designation would also fit the extraBiblical evidence, which testifies to "the common Egyptian interest in the country of origin of a slave, and their practice of appending a gentilic to a slave's name" (Redford 1970:202). Yet more remarkably, it accords with the spirit of a vainglorious Nilotic document, cited in Liverani (1990:65), where natives of Punt are said to ask Egyptian prospectors, "Why did you come to this foreign land, that men [rmt *, also Egyptians] do not know?": bowing to the superior's viewpointits dominance and exclusive "humanity" tell-tale, however wishfulthe locals quoted cast the geographic zero-point, their own land, as foreign and unknown. How much more would the other's self-adjustment be expected from the bottommost inferior (e.g., Joseph) at discourse on the Egyptian homeground about the elsewhere (e.g., the locale of Hebrewness). From a larger viewpoint yet, the document also miniaturizes the gulf between Egyptian and Israelite "ethnocentricity," as alien to each other as the cultures themselves: the former, its self-centeredness twinned with self-exaltation, alone answers to modern valueladen (''package-dealing") usage.2 Moreover, the interlevel, four-term homology between earth and heaven, the Chosen and the Chooser, similarly carries over from alien to the translated self's alien-like utterance. Here, the incongruous, demeaning self-reference as "Hebrew" nicely corresponds to Abraham's pluralized reference to elohim (Genesis 20:13) vis-à-vis the Philistine Abimelech: either makes sense in terms of the forced self-orientation to the other side's viewpoint. Under stress, indeed, Jonah's own self-definition to the mariners now piles incongruity on other-directed incongruity. It compounds for their ears national misnaming (the "people" in question figure in their lowest group profile) with theological redundance: "I am a Hebrew, and I fear the Lord, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land." The kidnapped pleader and the fugitive prophet bring to mind again, by way of redoubled antithesis, the convertmissionary Paul, with his "circumcised on the eighth day, a Hebrew born of Hebrews." On the face of it, his anachronism is yet at one with a versatility (gift of tongues, in New Testamental idiom) even superior to theirs, because cultivated to chameleonic lengths. Polyglot and polymorphous, he writes: "To the Jews I became as a Jew, in order to win Jews" (presumably through the above Hebrewed self-projection, inter alia). "To those under the law I became as one under
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the lawthough not being myself under the lawthat I might win those under the law." Ditto with those outside the law, ditto with the weak. "I have become all things to all men, that I might by all means save some" (I Corinthians 9:2092). To all? You wonder what, if anything, he became to the strong, the contemporary Pharaohs of the earth, who finally executed him. Transported to Biblical spacetime, the role-player might then opportunely become, if only for survival, as a Hebrew in Ham-land: assuming not the others' identity but their ready-made image for himself, and to save not their souls but his own life, at whatever cost to group ego. In contact with fellow Israelites, on the other hand, the proselytizer's self-denomination (in Joseph's era) or self-de-nomi-nation (in Jonah's) would be selfdefeating, worse than wasted, because gratuitous. The original speech-rule cuts both ways, for defense outside the circle, against offense inside it. And in Biblical eyes, therefore, Paul breaks the Law, unwritten as well as written, with a vengeance. This also goes to uncover and sort out afresh the double anachronism typified by Eliezer ben Yehudah's battle cry, "O Hebrew, speak Hebrew!" The wording, especially the neologism at the end, would not only puzzle but mislead all Biblical writers and speakers. By their Law of usage, for a Hebrew to speak Hebrew would mean to adopt whatever foreign tongue his Hebrew-calling dialogist in power spoke: Egyptian, Philistine, Phoenician ("Sidonian"). Faced with the slogan's words, the ancient Israelite must therefore hear in them the very opposite of what they intend to signify: a call, not for linguistic revival with a view to self-distinctiveness, but for ongoing self-effacement and abasement, for protective coloration in the world's jungle, where the strong virtually de-Babel their environment. By the same discourse logic, the neologism for the Israelite tongue will hardly pass muster as an authorized revival, that is, as a relic of a more extensive ancient vocabulary that was current in the Bible's living speech-world and handed down in oral use but left unmanifested in the Bible's text, or anywhere prior to the Apocrypha. "The absence from the Old Testament of the term ['Hebrew'] is quite possibly no more than sheer accidentas must indeed be expected in a document of comparatively modest size" (Ullendorff 1977:38-39). 3 But the statistic itself joins forces with the poetics here to make the accident theory improbable, considering the relative frequency both of "Hebrew" as ethnicon and of the non-"Hebrew" terms for the language, including the twofold inheritor 'Jewish." In matters ethnonational, the difference amid co-reference opposes not written to oral transmission, the accidents of the literary heritage to the repertoire of everyday life, but free, self-assertive reference to that preferred or enforced by the alien interlocutor. Objectivity gives way to subjectivity, the authorized to the translated self, the Israelite to the adverse
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target culture, the frame's eternal truths to the enacted dynamics of imaging. Actually, this conclusion even suggests itself from a nice remark ventured in passing (and then withdrawn) by the same linguist on another of those metalinguistic terms. In Isaiah 19:18, "the expression 'the language of Canaan' might have been chosen as the one most likely to be known to the Egyptians (who are being addressed in the context)" (ibid.). 4 Precisely; and if the tongue's name on native lips orients itself (unlike, say, 'Jewish") to the outsider in contact, then a fortiori the nation's ethnicontoward the "Hebrew" manifestly voiced by that Egyptian outsider and his kindred nearer to home. So our Law of Intercultural (De)Nomination carries over to self-nomination, with a change of dialogic side and voice rather than of heterocosm and privilege and perspective, let alone of the burden packed into the name. For, given the thematic inequality, the emergence of this alien viewpoint depends not on the speaking but on the controlling, stronger party within the dialogue: the viewer in control may then not only transmit the undesirable image of the elect in his own speech to a like-minded (Hamite) or other-minded (Israelite) auditor, but also wordlessly press it out even from an other-minded speaker as his due. Foreign or foreign-like, the speaker of Hebrewness sounds the note of foreignness, and the teller resounds it in native translation (for us readers to detect and correct) across the lines dividing the first from the second intergroup pattern. The two configurations do vary in certain regards, even beyond the dramatized persuasive art or genetic zigzaging along history. Ethnographically, while the first pits "Hebrews" against Egyptians and Philistines, the second also brings on Canaanites in the alien's role, up against Jonah. The origin of the crew, left unspecified by the tale, may yet be safely enough inferred from the Bible's casting of the Phoenicians of Sidon and Tyre as archetypal mariners, with particular regard to Jonah's destination, Tarshish. And Sidon, according to the Table of Nations, is the eldest son of Canaan, son of Ham (Genesis 10:15). How the memory of this lineage persisted down to late antiquity is exemplified by the variant descriptions of the woman from "the Tyre and Sidon" region who appeals to Jesus for help: "a Canaanite" in Matthew (15:22), "a Syrophoenician'' in Mark (7:26), updating the gentilic. (By now, I hope, my reader will have accepted that the Table conceals the single most important key to the Bible's intergroup dramas and thematics, especially regarding selfhood vs. otherness: modern source analysts "fictionalize" it, as the literaryminded tend to forget it altogether, at their peril.) If we add the port town to the destination, the Phoenician nexus grows closer yet. Joppa was a Sidonian settlement by the mid-fourth century B.C. and probably where Hiram's timber landed en route from Tyre to Jerusalem as early as the Solomon era. Alternatively,
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judging by the traditional occupancy of the coast along which their home port lies, the sailors may have been Philistine. (See the discussion in Koch 1969:44, Cazelles 1973:3, 1987:90, Ap-Thomas 1973:259-86.) Either way, Phoenician or Philistine, the crew retain their Hamite affiliation. If so, further, they may well retain with it their Canaanite dialect, akin yet less than identical to the Bible's. Linguistic pressure in the world and translational mimesis in the discourse reveal themselves anew. The encounter would presumably have been conducted in an idiom other than Jonah's, and the Bible's, for the Sidonians (like the nearacculturated Philistines) speak their own dialect within or parallel to the language of Canaan (Deuteronomy 3:9; borne out by extraBiblical evidence, e.g., Ap-Thomas 1973:276, Hoerth et al. 1994:197-99). In context, still, the widening of the ethnographic and ethnolinguistic picture only revalidates our Law of (De)Nomination. The Sidonians are as Hamite as the Egyptians confronted with "Hebrews" in Genesis-Exodus, or as the Philistines in Samuel, and therefore as little worthy of the privileges they enjoy, at the Israelite's expense. Their mastery looks especially unbecoming, if anything, because it is Canaan that fell plump under Noah's curse, "slave of slaves." So much for the variations in the group identity of the Bible's Other within the threefold unholy family. Likewise with the parameters of dominance: the equally criterial (and, however reversed by the master plot, equally constant) disequilibrium between the outsider and the native at talk. What is often meant by "status," even if extended from the social to the political and cultural and ethnogeographical axis, does not yet capture the Bible's finer nuances of imbalance between power and adversity in hostile encounter. For example, the foreign reference to "Hebrews" often originates in speakers who remain nameless, characterless, or (like the Philistines in Samuel) just collective nationalistic voices, embodying the licensed antagonism of the powerful. True, in its ideopoetic aversion to typecasting God's creatures between the unique and the universal limits of the human image (Poetics, 321-64, esp. 346ff.), the Bible will not quite let even the Hamite antitype freeze into stereotype. As already with Pharaoh's daughter, or Achish in Philistia, so with the minister and the mariners within the self-naming pattern. The more singular traits with which the narrative invests them do not fall out of group character (name-calling included) but humanize it in close-up, and only partly owing to their relative favorableness: the extra singularities assumed by Potiphar's wife or the Pharaohs themselves, to the opposite effect, give the very devil a human face and accent even at his worst dehumanization of his Other. Their Israelite counterparts, however, appear in individual, often leading roles, as full-fledged protagonists; and the narrative accordingly elaborates and diversifies the pressures
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on their freedom of speech (not the least or the least telling of the agon's ordeals) beyond brute oppression. Reconsider the multiple constraints brought to bear on Joseph or Jonah: the latter's self-portrayal as "Hebrew" even signals above all a sense of moral inferiorityhis guilt vis-ô-vis the crewnearly exclusive of outside, Egyptian-like downgrading. To be sure, the potential for the ordinary exterior imbalance between the dialogists (hence for restaging the Genesis-old showdown to the letter) is there. The crew outnumber the passenger, operate in their element, and (depending on the time, possibly after Northern Israel's downfall in 723 B.C.) may boast a homeland when he has lost as well as fled his own, Israel. The most perfunctory comparison with a Joseph, though, will bring out how little those factors signify in the plotting, conspicuously so indeed: their de-emphasis throws into relief what transpires, notably the situation's inward turn, against the background of what has as a rule been the case and might have been again. The sailors do press the alien passenger for answers but never oppress himmuch less into what their congeners would deem and style Hebrewnessirrespective of the life-threat to themselves. Rather, the prophet would appear so to have internalized the canonical Hebrewgram that he discerns and enacts the pattern across surface transformations. Faced by his moral superiors, the innocent victims of his rebellion against God, the unhappy victimizer assumes the burden of vict-image in self-debasement. Does conscience make cowards of us all, as Hamlet's philosophy would have it, or also heroes of sorts? At any rate, to the extent that something like the typical Hamite monopoly of brute force comes into the Jonah plot, it is vested in the Omnipotent, not in any earthling, or sea-ling, and even gathers an interior equivalent in the conflict between divine might and human qualm within the speaker's psyche. Nor is this interiorized arena wholly new, because the ethical dimension has been running through our picture of the intercultural contact and struggle miniatured in Hebrewness. From the Primeval Scene onward, we have found the elect (Noah, Abraham, Joseph, the Sons of Israel) victimized by the diselect's immorality. Now, by way of complementary and half-complimentary variation, we find him, in Jonah, vulnerable to his own sense of moral responsibility and, accordingly, as disempowered from within as his ancestors under unprincipled tyranny. Ethics here replaces or outweighs sociopolitics as the cause of the "Hebrew's" lowered self-image. Apart from what this tells about the hero himself, we discover morality operative on an axis apparently at odds with its own, where it becomes another variable of power-relations, a force for or against conversational control, down to the language of reference on either side. As with ethnography, then, so with hierarchy in adversity: the principle is one, the reflexes and coordinates protean yet nicely orchestrated.
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Maneuverable Imagery: The Hebrewgram Refined in Theoretical and Comparative Light The advance just made over the first pattern would appear straightforward enough. Joseph's or Jonah's self-imaging in talk with the diametric Other runs parallel to his or his group's imaging by that Other; the parallel stretches from reference to devaluation to medium of exchange to contextual juncture; and the hero's invidious typecasting on both ends is dramatized within a single national canon, which itself regards him as unfixable, either out of human uniqueness (God's image) or into diselect, topsy-turvy, lowness (vict-image). But each finding, at once novel and continuous in terms of the Hebrewgram, would be less than welcome in some quarters. As noted in the preceding chapter, the very co-possibility of self- and other-representation (a fortiori their co-occurrence, never mind their convergence on one type-portrait, e.g., "the Hebrew's") has been underemphasized. These relatively simple examples therefore already invite a number of fresh conclusions about the Law's range, potence, and delicacy, all standing out in high relief against the background of various rival accounts. As earlier in my argument, the lessons derivable extend from matters of theory (notably approaches to world-making in history, literature, ethnography, philosophy, psychoideology, sociopolitics) to the practical (Biblicist, comparative, or otherwise) treatment of the questions in hand. To start with, the common denominator whereby the two patterns have now fallen under the Hebrewgram lends additional sharpness and weight to what I have been arguing all along about the image/reality crux. Sharpness is at a premium, seeing how the extraordinary genuine difficulty of the issue has been compounded, or obscured, by gratuitous darkness in scholarship. Such is the case with the very language of images, thematized as early as the advent of humanity in Genesis's opening chapter, against all literary precedents at that, and therefore indispensable to my analysis. Here, the modern rush to value judgment again infects a basic descriptive tool, with losses that Scripture knows better than to incur. A look at Creation's seminal four-term analogy, whereby Man uniquely relates to God as "image" to original, will show that its uses for world-making outreach, indeed transcend religion; and a comparison with the inverted, antagonistic thrust in the Decalogue's ban on graven images will further establish the dynamism of the signifying relation involved, whether on the normative axis (between plus and minus) or on the ontological (between truth and untruth, with their fictive equivalents). In the Creation account, the language of imagery celebrates humanity's modeling on the highest reality; in the Decalogue, it would check our own lust for icon-making, inevitably geared at best to low-order, static, deceptive reality, at worst to
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sheer unreality, always to nokhri-like models of the world, heaven and/or earth. Clearly, the imagery associated with either pole lends itself to the widest application elsewhere, the polarity to fine gradation (between all and nothing) and to further ramification (beyond the domains of ideological and truth value). Of these twinned extremes, however, the attack on iconography has since proved the more attractive by far, and has often narrowed into selective iconophobia. 5 The narrowing produces the contradictory result of breaking one set of idols to put up another: "their" image is false and harmful, "ours" (or at the metadiscourse level, our image of theirs) true and good. Plato himself, apparently the first absolute iconophobe vis-à-vis art at large, never pursues the consequences for his own adverse meta-image of artwrought to boot within an art of dialogue that his student Aristotle rightly, if slyly, calls mimetic. Ever since Plato, further, this inconsistent way with representation shows not just among theologians or apropos of visual (''graven") as distinct from verbal mimesis. On the whole, the Platonic heritage and example have in effect outrivaled, and what's worse, endlessly adulterated, the Israelite. The concept that the greatest ideological literature of old shaped for maneuverability across ideology has fallen victim to a host of latter-day ideologues bent on fixity across the different practices of imaging in life, mind, and, above all, art.6 The loading of this Scripture-old term has itself bred much confusion, especially between essentials and accidentals, universals and variables of representation. If only by association with advertising and politics, as formerly with heathenism, "image" all too often labors under a bad name. What it interposes between us and reality (you might then think) is a deceptive facade, a pretender to the real thing, not a mediating sign: a picture, imitation, construct, schema, model of the signified object ("original"), with the exact nature of their correspondence (fit, truth-value) determinable in context alone. Unless you keep the relationality fixed and the relation totally freeall the way to the utmost signifiable likeness, short of identityMan's creation "in the image of God" enacts, or exposes, the greatest trick ever played on us creatures. This primeval mystery, however unraveled,7 rather flaunts the earliest and highest and widest-flung testimony to the Bible's investment in the problematics of reality-likeness, from the human species' as a whole downward. Having focused on the portraiture of the groupa cross between humanity's image and the individual character's, now also visible across the line between other-imaging and self-imagingwe may usefully draw together some of the threads and generalize the accumulated results. Let us follow an ascending order of complexity, that is, of genuine variability and, less happy, scholarly bias. An image, then, is not a euphemism for a lie, nor for a cast-iron mold,
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nor for a dream, wishful or nightmarish, regarding the imaged objectthe Deity, the self, the outsider, the roots, the becoming, the language, the utterance, the mind, the weather, the universeany more than literature entails frivolous games or ethnocentricity does prejudice and xenophobia. Instead, like all representation in all forms, genres, and media, an image is essentially a piece of discourse bearing on a piece of world from a certain viewpoint (or, where inset by a quoter who represents it in turn, from a perspectival multiplex). No more, no less, for better or worse, in default of any alternative to communication, even to thought, about what is, was, should be, or may have been. Qua divine image, Man himself does not break the rule, in that he stands, though never substitutes, for God on earth, now worthily so, now outrageously. In short, the ontological status of an image may be ambiguous (true or false? real or fictive?) or mixed (true and false, real and fictive) but never leveled, up or down, to a priori univalence. Likewise, at its most stereotyped as at its newest, with the image's axiological force between the positive (consonant with the appropriate world order, sociopolitics, morality, usage, aesthetics) and the negative (dissonant). Unpredeterminable, because protean, every instance launches afresh the quest for determination by the operative rules. The first question for the interpreter, cutting across the rest of the variables to ensue, is accordingly that of the contextual (ill-)fit between image or self-image and object. Contextual, since it all depends on the reference point judged highest (true, infallible, "objective") by the writer-audience reference group at discourse, often in sharp, if tacit, antithesis to the nominal (inset, error-prone, "subjective") image-maker on stage. And the antithesis ranges from matters of fact to matters of valuefrom, say, sheer who's-who identification in quoted misreference (''It was not I/we/they") to the sense of identity ("I/we/they are like this, not like that") amid co-reference, our focus of interest. Thus, within the Bible's discourse world as a framework of reference, a group image in words may (e.g., "Israel") or may not ("Hebrew" travestied or under de-nomi-nation) fit the referent group, even though the misnomer equally picks that group out in the world; or (like the preExodus vs. the Exodus and postExodus "Hebrew") the image may fit the object to a greater or lesser extent, even where self-referential. In such light, the Hab/piru nexus already betrays the worst possible fit: it jars against all discourse coordinates, from spacetime to plot logic to character typology to thematics, from identification to identity, from narrative to law. A self-portrait so humble as Joseph's in jail resists this nexus (because it would defeat his ends) no less than his portraiture by an enemy from without the group. The balance between interpretive violence and coherence would rule out the class-image, even if its evaluative load vis-ôvis "Israel" were more ap-
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propriate (subjectively and dramatically, hence more assimilable as appropriately inappropriate) than we have found it. In short, as the portrait's contextual likelihood makes, so its unlikelihood breaks, the portraitee's tie of likeness to the group (ethnic or social) represented as "Hebrew" within the discourse universe, and eventually defines the group itself by its membership. This also goes to revalidate a general principle. The Hab/piru theory fails not because it comes up with a stereotype, or with the wrong stereotype for Hebrew, but because its candidate for the (joint) image falls foul of the evidence. The two questions cut across each other. As argued in my previous chapter, an image does not entail stereotyping, only the schematizing built into all representation, of which the stereotype with its inter-bound features is one product of many. And the stereotyped image itself may best answer to the contextual norms (of truth, economy, artfulness, rhetoric, etc.): better than would a fresh or subversive opposite as well as vice versa. This applies even outside universes type-inhabited by definition, such as allegory's, logic's, the law's. Again, across the same axis of novelty, the discourse world may or may not claim to mirror the real world, and at times does mirror it, in part or in whole. The how's and why's likewise vary. Insofar as Scripture's world does reflect foreign affairs, this proceeds the intercultural way, not the cross-cultural, least of all the pseudo-literary ("sources discoursed"). The phantom-like Hab/piru nexus would thus cast its shadows over the outward-directed mirroring as well as the inner art of miming: an ever-present danger just brought home afresh via the unreason of Joseph's selfimaging in terms of the class, at what appears to the superficial eye the historically fight time and place. The network of hard outside references woven into the text itself (e.g., to the Egyptian repertoire of de-nomination, to the missing "fear of God," to the Nile, the state bondage, the sexual mores, the insatiable Rameses II, the apartheid, the xenophobia, the ethnocentrism unlimited, to the Phoenician dialect, to the Philistine borrowing from Egypt of hanit * and seren, on top of "Hebrews'') draws the two worlds together with far greater certitude, as with greater artistry and significance. The testimonia from the polar cultures verify the antitype to "Hebrew"whom they jointly fit, amid disjunctive judgmentnot the crosstype forced upon a spectral mega-text. Unless Egypt's own records were party to a conspiracy against herself, then her casting in the Bible as alterity incarnate is accordant with historical truth. Such bridgework also offers an antidote to the trendy overreaction (lately echoed in sundry Biblicist circles) against yesterday's representational fallacy. Where the naive conflated truth-claim with truth-value, and still do, the oversophisticated now reduce all discourse to "fictionalizing" or "inventing" (the self, the other, the barbarian, the people, the state, the tradition, the culture)as if neither generic truth-claim nor empirical
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truth-value made any difference, not even to the reading. All imaging then becomes imagining, well-intentioned or malicious, cold-blooded or serf-deceptive, a fortiori where it affects the writer's own sense of group identity. 8 The postexilic (some add, "literary") ethnicizing cum glorification of the Hebrew/Hab/piru throughout Scripture, alleged on no ground firmer than the scribe's axiomatic ("nationalist") bias, would be an example. The bias and automatism are there, in the reader's jaundiced eye, circling around its own premise to conjure up (imagine, if you will) a multiply false image: of the logic of imagery, of Scripture's poesis, and therefore, doubtless, of the real-life genesis, too. Fallen into the old theoretical snare in reverse, the countermovement toward all-embracing "invention" likewise turns counterproductive in practice. It thus reduces itself to absurdity as you follow the Bible's maneuvers within the most suspect cultural domain of all, namely, the ethnographic. No apriorism, one-dimensional at that, can hope to deal with the resulting givens: how, for example, self-image ("Israel") opposes yet often loses to vict-image ("Hebrew"); how the literary ''translation" blends facts with hostile foreignisms, demonstrably authentic with subjectively imagined, even caricatured group life and language, under a uniform ("so it was/was projected") truth-claim; how the known or checkable reflexes lend the unknown a semblance of authenticity beyond inventive mimesis; how the world's history, in short, punctuates and tinges the nation's historiography for reality effect between the cultures staged in contact. Labeling the result a (wishful, chauvinistic) stereotype, therefore, would itself betray a (critical) stereotype of the worst kind, neither alive nor just nor true to any reality, discoursive or first-order, subjective or objective. In its disregard for the specific variablesthe groups in play, the modes and limits of their imaging, the accord with the data in the historical world, the underlying poetics of character, the equally revolutionary value-scheme, where ethnology is one axis of many and two-edged effects abound even on it, from the process to the upshot of intergroup contactsuch reductionism falls lower than indiscriminateness. What with the negative judgment on "ethnocentricity" routinely attached, the group image misor counter-read into the text by the stereotype-hunter would form a mirror image to the nationalistic interpreter's: the same culture-blindness, the same package dealing, the same Procrustean bed, in reverse.9 The wider and finer the network of relations, the more does the art of representation demand both a theory and a reading competence to suit. Further, the lessons may now be redrawn, with some added profit, from the opposite end. That we have already found two of the canon's own "Hebrew" matrixes both integrated and differentiated, under a single ex-
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planatory principle, also newly settles the wider comparative issuevia the logics of representation behind the Israelite and the nonIsraelite testimonia. We must not, that is, "invent" the Hebrew as Hab/piru, on pain of throwing the discourse about either out of focus, especially the respective practices and products of group imagery. The Intercultural Law within the Bible's poetics and the Crosscultural Rule have even less in common than our first pattern may imply by itself. There, for all the sharp oppositions in rationalesociopolitical, ethnogeo-graphic, diachronic, not to mention those in connectivity and virtuositythe discourse grammars I set off at least appear to share the outside imaging of the name-bearer. However, while the Hab/piru-gram begins and ends with the reference made by the class's other, the Hebrewgram proceeds to the intricacies of the group's self-reference (and therefrom to yet more artful configurations, wholly innovative in transmissional manner and transmitted matter alike, e.g., the free indirect thought of "Hebrews" in the next pattern). The chasm in usage widens apace, and everything else with it: the divergence affects the frame along with the object of reference, the portraiture and value judgment (who's what?) no less than the extension and truth-value (who's who?), the historical as well as the discoursive context or, to narrativize the fired old phrase, Sitz im Leben. If only because this variance in the logic of ancient image-making has such consequences for our "real" worldmaking, its due appreciation promises quite an advance on both fronts. As it is, those most concerned (or their equivalents among later comparativisms and mega-textualities) seldom exhibit any awareness of either. Even the few passing glances at the disparity still labor to save the analogy at any cost: Whether the expanding bands . . . of escapees from Canaanite feudalism characteristically or uniformly called themselves 'apiru is a moot point. In fact, since all the references to the 'apiru in the Near East are by officials in the dominant order, we do not know how extensively, if at all, people in that social stratum accepted the term 'apiru for themselves, even in more stable situations than post-Amarna Canaan. As entire "outlaw" communities sprang up, without any previous 'apiru tradition, they may have resisted employing a term so freighted with negative judgment by the society they had abandoned. If "Hebrews" as a selfdesignation of the Israelites is an equivalent to 'apiru, the decided limitation of the name to very restricted contexts (e.g., in talking to foreigners) may indicate an aversion to the local 'apiru among many of the rebels as they broke loose from feudal dependence. (Gottwald 1979:407-408; cf. Men-denhall 1973:124)
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If this is what bridging the chasm in self-reference yields, then perhaps the silent majority of analogists have chosen the wiser course. Misleading and muddled at once, the argument testifies obliquely to the force of the inconvenient polarity between the two discourse grammars, with its implication for the groups discoursed about. The opening sentence's "moot point" reveals itself in the next to be as close to certitude as an absolute zero can get. Far from arguably "characteristic or uniform" usage, not one Hab/piru self-nomination exists on record, in any of the pertinent millennia, orbits, cultures, languages, scripts, genres, word-forms. How would it exist, if the class members hardly ever receive a speaking part? (Only a monopoly on voice hogged by the egocentrist superior can blank out of the record their self- in favor of other-portraiture.) But even the one possible exception to the rule and role of the silent other never has them designate themselves by this label, and so goes to establish the zero's meaningfulness. The Nuzi service contracts display the ascendancy of the indigenous over the alien party not just in their master/bondman scenario; their viewpoint is also geared throughout to the master's law and language, forms of reference and judgment. The local culture occupies the frame, discoursively as much as existentially, and sets the outsider into it. If heard at all, his voice gets represented at second hand, in one of four modes of quotation: (a) Mar-Idiglat *, a Hab/piru* of the land of Ashshur, into service to Tehip-tilla*, son of Puhi-senni* made (him)self enter. (Greenberg 1955: no. 33, also 35, 36, 38) (b) Sill-kubi*, a Hab/piru*, (by) his (own) statement, into service to Tehip-tilla*, son of Puhi-senni* made himself enter. (No. 32, also 34, 37, 39) (c) (By) his (own) statement, Adad-rabi*, a Hab/piru*, made (him)self enter [into . . .]hood to T., son of P. As long as T. lives Adad-rabi* shall serve him. If ever Adad-rabi* should leave the house of T. he shall give to T. 1 man of Lullu as his substitute; then [he may free] himself. (No. 41, also 42-45, 47) (d) Mar-Ishtar*, a Hab/piru* of the land of Akkad, gave his son, Zilgenuri, for service to T. Thus Mar-Ishtar*: "If I withdraw my son Zilgenuri I will give 10 slaves to T." Thus Mar-Ishtar*: "This year I came from Akkad." (No. 46, also 40, 48, 49) The four exemplars mark an ascending, at times even cumulative order of particularity in speech representation. In (a), the bondman's original words are implicit in the writer's reference to him as subject ("made [him]self enter"). In (b), the quoter adds a telescoped quote ("[by] his
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[own] statement"). In (c), he goes on to detail the agreement between the two parties in free indirect style ("As long as . . . If . . . then," without heralding the inset via a quoting signal). And in (d) he rises to a direct citation, properly introduced. Now, even the directness falls short of reproducing the original utterance, if only because the utterer we hear at second hand is evidently less autonomous than usual among quoteesnot to mention speakersdown to his very expressiveness. The modularity of the agreements and their recurrent phraseology show that the culture's law puts its formulas into his mouth (as affidavits today superimpose their legalese on the idiom of the deponent). 10 Still, where the Nuzi master and master culture dictate terms in every way, they draw the line at group self-reference. They go so far as to inscribe the underclass name in the name-bearer's presenceassuming him to be presentbut not in his name. The frame calls Mar-Ishtar "a Hab/piru* of the land of Akkad"; the inset has him designate his provenance "from the land of Akkad," never himself or his son as a Hab/piru, any more than do the nondirect echoes to the original undertaking. Outside the Bible's Hamland, it would appear, the Ancient Orient set limits to the self-degradation heapable even on a creature as low as an alien servant of a none too respectable group. Moreover, the whole idea of the "bands" (e.g., in Amarna) voicing the other's image of their otherness, Bible style, rests on less than nothing.11 What we find is the exact opposite, namely, people disclaiming such undesirable or unsafe identity, as suspected aggressors categorically do by Hittite judiciary fiat. In case of a border incident, they "have to swear: 'We do not know the habiru who destroyed that farm, and we are not ourselves the habiru who destroyed that farm" (Bottéro 1954: no. 162; English translation from Liverani 1990:103). The round denial of the self's Hab/piru-ness (elsewhere implicit, as in the example from Amarna below) perfects the contrast with a Jonah's affirmation of his Hebrewness. Therefore, the question is not ''how extensively, if at all, people in that social stratum accepted the term," but why they never did, unlike their fancied "equivalents." Nor will this glaring absence be discounted by appeal to the fact that "all the references to the 'apiru in the Near East are by officials in the dominant order," because so are ultimately all the "Hebrew" references in the Israelite canon and yet we find a subset of them transferred to the referents' own mouth, as early as Joseph, as late as Jonah. What has survived (e.g., the official writings in either culture) or vanished (the testimony of the group written about) depends on chance at source; what happens or fails to happen in the surviving evidence, canonized or unearthed, turns (and so throws light) on the rules, purposes, world-and-collectivity-images that govern the discourse. Why, then, don't the rest of the Ancient Oriental
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writers quote the referring term from the Hab/piru themselvesthe way the Bible does "'Hebrews' as a self-designation of the Israelites"? The closer your reading of the two bodies of discourse, the more tell-tale the former's systematic omission, and accordingly the latter's commission. Even when the Amarna officials hint at the enemy's incriminatory self-reference as Hab/piru, they dare not actually put it on record. Thus the governor Rib-Addi of Byblos writes to the Egyptian king with venom about the most notorious troublemaker, Abdi-Ashirta, "the GAZ, the dog," and his son Aziru, rampaging "like the SA.GAZ, an escaped dog" (Greenberg 1955: nos. 81, 92). Unscrupulous in ill- or misnaming by type, Rib-Addi yet draws the line at (mis)quoting the same from the name-bearer's own mouth, just where the businesslike Nuzi contracts have drawn it in peacetime. His fullest and bitterest report on the success of the enemy's propaganda distinguishes the two voices, or expressive levels, the quoting vs. the quoted, even in maliciously orchestrating them. "Behold now, Abdi-Ashirta has taken Shigata for himself and has said to the people of Ammiya: 'Kill your chiefs and become like us; then you shall have peace.' And they fell away in accordance with his message and became like GAZ" (Greenberg, no. 69). Only in propria persona, when reverting to his own narrative frame and voice, does the Amarna quoter substitute "like GAZ" for the speaker's inset ''like us." Whatever the equivalence insinuated in the interchange, the class-name officially expresses Rib-Addi's designation, as always, not Abdi-Ashirta's self-designation: not even by way of simile ("like") and in a report intended, maybe invented, to vilify him in the eyes of the authorities. (Contrast Moran 1992:144n. 8.) Next, the quoter as cleverly, i.e., deniably, maneuvers for intimations of identity between pronominal and sociopolitical reference within the quoted inset itself: "Abdi-Ashirta has sent word to the army (as follows): '. . . Let us fall upon Gubla. Behold, there is no man who will rescue it from our hand! Then we shall drive the governors out . . . and all the lands will go over to the GAZ.'" Does "'our hand'" equal "'the GAZ'"? No and, by innuendo, yes. Of course, Abdi-Ashirta would (judging from his treatment of related charges) denounce even the implicit co-reference as libelous, all the more hotly if attributed to himself. In his own letter-writing, appropriately, he took as much care to avoid the term, in reference to anyone, as the majority did to brand all opponents and undesirables with it. 12 Locked in their real-life struggle to the death, either Amarna party takes word-imaging far more seriously and discriminately (to this extent, Biblically) than do their historians, or the comparatists, or, again, the theorists trapped in the vicious circle of representation as "invention."13 If co-reference were all, if self- and other-portraiture were either interchangeable or incompatible by nature, if inventive license went without saying, if imaging counted as imagining, if the word bore no relation to the thing and
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made no difference in the world itself, then the Amarna gladiators would be shadow-boxing in the diplomatic arena, perhaps for the amusement of the Egyptian overlord. And the Nuzi contracts, privately maneuvering on that tricky ground, lack even such entertainment value. Nor does the discreet or inhibited privacy of female sexism as it has arisen in chapter 2: from contemporary vulgarisms for men (not unprecedented, only undocumented in strength before) to ladylike Austenian confidences about matrimony, the representations are expressed and exchanged behind the back of the other sex. Throughout, why would anyone trouble to dovetail representational fit with communicative fittingnessor judge the image produced by the two sets of normsunless genuine issues were at stake? Affecting realities even beyond truth-value, these standards are yet all criterial to it at need: to who's who in the Ancient Orient, for example. Of all discourse topics, representation is least congruent with armchair analysis. Moreover, the crossculturalist's assumptions would predict the opposite, and counterfactual, incidence of the respective quotes. Insofar as the Hab/piru may have "characteristically or uniformly" called themselves so, one would expect "the officials" to echo and relay the self-nomination in force, with a view to condemning the enemy from his own mouth. The letter-writers in the Amarna agethe analyst's immediate business herewould be only too happy to do so in reporting to the Egyptian government. (The same holds true on the firmer premise that the evaluative load of "Hab/piru" widely varied: the bearers might then often apply it to themselves without "negative judgment'' and the quoters include neutrals or well-wishers.) Conversely, assuming that the Hebrew "rebels" may have felt "an aversion to the label 'apiru," the Bible would surely opt for the total erasure, rather than just "the limitation of the name," from the "Israelite" name-bearers' own utterance along with everyone else's about them. Such erasure of Hebrewness becomes more expected, if possible, where the reportee and the reporter are co-nationals bearing the same glorious as well as unmistakable ethnicon. They would share the "aversion" to the demeaning substitute. And in any case, were the one to demean himself in actual speaking, the other would always be able and anxious to correct the lapse in literary reporting. National honor (signally attached to the discourse of an ancestor, like Joseph, or a prophet, like Moses and Jonah) must then press for eliminating what official foreign hostility would transmit with glee. Either prediction about in-group reference, as "Hebrew" (doomed to nonoccurrence anywhere) or as "Hab/piru" (wellqualified to dot the record), logically follows from the combined theorist's premises and statements. If the names mean the same, the identity of name-caller with name-bearer should, in the given circumstances, polarize the respective testimonia between such extremes of self-naming. Why, then, do both predictions run counter to fact, so that their No/Yes
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dichotomy actually shows in reverse? This is the key question, partly missed, because outside the critical system, and partly resisted in advance. Instead of tackling the plus/minus awkwardness evidenced on the self-labeling front, the crossculturalist at best dismisses both halves of itthe plus to "very restricted contexts," the minus to the tricks played by archaeological chancefor the sake of the dubious analogy in the labels (e.g., "negative judgment") or the labeled (e.g., "rebels'' against "feudalism"). On the evidence, our second pattern compounds the opposition between the discourse grammars in extending it from the frame to the inset of report. In the frame, as always, the Biblical narrator avoids, while his Ancient Oriental counterpart multiplies, the respective group-names. When it comes to inset self-nomination, however, the frame's imbalance has its mirror image in the (non)performance of the reportees: vocal Hebrewgram, silent Hab/piru-gram. And properly compared, the two discourse logics enhance in turn the mutual autonomy of their "real-life" sources. Not that the Hebrewgram's second configuration proves awkwardwhy designate oneself (meaning the quoter's as well as the speaker's self) by "a term so freighted with negative judgment"?only to researchers who advocate a strong or any variant of the Hab/piru linkage. Among the remarkably few moderates who touch on the issue at all, whether cross-culturalists (partitioners, distributors, mixers, source-deep linkers) or uniculturalists, symptoms of discomfort likewise abound. For example, the pregnant silence on self-naming kept by the majority gets broken (and oddly, echoed) in loud amnesia that drowns out the characters' own voices. Another minus ensues, now reigning across the cultural fence. "Hebrews" as inset within our second pattern is then altogether rubbed out of Biblical existence to match the Hab/piru nil: denying all knowledge of "Israel" to the Samuel Philistines, as ventured by some within the Bible's earlier pattern, looks mild by comparison. Going to such lengths, the denier now finds in Jonah 1:9 "the only example of the OT where an Israelite (or Judean) calls himself a 'Hebrew'"; and even there the term occurs very late, out of cluster, and with the age-old social burden of Hab/piru-like fugitiveness. But the clusters proper, as it were, disallow any exception. In the Joseph cycle, then in the Exodus narrative, the references have all "been put into the mouths of Egyptians, never into the mouths of Israelites." Which supposedly proves that "'Hebrew' is not used by Israelites as a designation for themselves, not even in a national meaning" (Lemche 1979:10n. 29, 11, 14, 20, 1992:95; cf. Plastaras 1966:38-39, Durham 1987:320). In crosscultural framework, the exigency behind this wholesale denial is transparent. The alternative to equalizing the usages through the supposition that nonIsraelite refugees "characteristically or uniformly called
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themselves 'apiru"parallel to the Bible's namesakeslies in the assertion that Israelites never called themselves "Hebrew," either. Same end, opposed means. Denying the undeniable in Israel, like affirming the nonexistent in the rest of the Ancient Orient, yields the wished-for balanceof minuses, this way around, instead of pluses. (And the theorist whose metastereotype privileges other- as against self-imaging, e.g., Gilman 1990, would find his restrictive bias confirmed twofold.) False in both textual fact and contextual logic, the denier's generalization now enables us to reilluminate the Law by inverting the two falsities in turn. "Hebrew" is of course also used on the Israelite side: Joseph, Miriam, God, Moses, Jonah. Less obviously, their usage parallels (and, by overwhelming implication, mimes) that of the aliens, down to specific word-forms. Thus the Exodus novelty "Hebrewesses," ibriyyot, voiced in the book's two opening chapters by Pharaoh and his daughter, on the one hand, and by the midwives and Miriam, in echolike response to them, on the other. Further, either speech-context, like Joseph's before and Jonah's after, adheres to the rule of usage on all axes: the label does serve "the Israelites as a designation for themselves" but not as a voluntary self-designation, nor one applicable out of adversity in the Hamite world. (A mirror image, this, of "Israel'' in Hamite other-designation under constraint: the symmetry, or two-way dialogic grammaticality, is perfect.) As such, finally, self-directed Hebrewness occurs not because or in spite of ("even") its "national meaning" but in subservience to its pejorative, topsy-turvy, denomi-national loading by the Other. A predictable alternative to denying the facts is the denial of their negative forcehence of the insider's selfdevaluation herealong lines already refuted in my previous chapter. Of the two suppressions, let me just add, this is not (despite the appearances to the contrary) the more modest and viableif only because it would govern all the "Hebrew" occurrences, rather than some inconvenient batch, e.g., self-naming. The latter's extra nuisance value at most redoubles the incentive to oust or overturn the generally unwelcome judgment associated with the name. Over the ages, of course, either normative recoding has been perpetrated on "Hebrew" by innumerable unthinking anachronists in all tongues and cultures, postBiblical Jews at vernacular self-reference among them. Less innocently, modern experts have busied themselves to the same effect. An advocate of the Hebrew/Eberide unity, for example, will naturally do his utmost to keep the referring term purely descriptive of Eber's lineage: free from self-valuation, positive or negative, as from outside valuation in the first pattern. (Jepsen 1951:55 finds no "Selbst-demütigung" in, e.g., Joseph's choice of toponym for his "land," any more than in the flanking indigenous references to Joseph; nor does Koch 1969, the most elaborate version of the Eberide theory.) And a geneticist who defers the codification
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of "Hebrews" (not just the odd occurrence, as in Jonah) to postexilic Israel, when ethnonationalism went strong, must even twist the word round into an honorific. (E.g., Loretz 1984, Sasson 1990:116-17.) Among those latter-day Jews, to resume an earlier intergram comparison I drew, "Hebrew" would then have grown into something like "Mameluk," born in servitude yet afterwards borne with pride by the referents and self-referents, in the teeth of the outside world. Other possible analogues would be ''Cynic" (Greek for dog) as applied to Diogenes and his school, 14 or "(Russian) Formalist" hurled at the now classic school of poeticians by their contemporary enemies. Except that such theoretical analogy in Balaam-effect actually pits the invented against the attested member. Thus the non sequitur that, as "Hebrew" everywhere denotes the Israelite group, we may conclude "mit Sicherheit" that it has "keine pejorative Bedeutung" (Loretz 1984:233). Even in logic, the inference "self-denoting, therefore at worst harmless, never self-demoting" is fallacious. It would have a claim to validity only on one added chauvinistic premise, observably untrue in the Bible's case: that national literature, intent on healthy selective group amnesia, turns a blind eye to any low footing and fortunes suffered by co-nationals. The expert on antiquity stereotypes and package-deals ethnocentric writing, high art included, in the fashion of modern cultural analysis. (On which strange bedfellows, already noted in the foregoing chapters, more soon.) Or take a longer chain of conjecture on the same page. The Hab/piru, it suggests, need not have shared the enemy's derogatory view of them and may have bequeathed "a positive ring" to "Hebrew," which "understandably" established itself as "an honorable self-designation" in the framework of the "national self-regard" after the Exile, lending a vivid expression to the new "folk and religious identity" (ibid.). The holes, logical, empirical, discoursive, genetic, should by now so leap to the eye that the most fatal pair alone requires comment. "Hab/piru" selfdesignation appears nowhere; while "Hebrew" altogether disappears from Scripture exactly in the books covering the postexilic era, having bowed out, moreover, just prior to the Exile, with Jeremiah's account of dire native enslavement in Jerusalem under Babylonian siege. The timing and role of the group's last name-bearer, chiastically opposed to the first, Abraham, speak volumes. If national, then nationalistic to the limit: this non sequitur, perpetrated here on "Hebrew" in good decoding faith, should bring back to mind my argument for the imperative of symmetry between the writing and the reading. The asymmetry just exemplified invites a larger comparison of the forces (if you will, the ethics) behind interpretive modes. Though untenable by any standards, whether reason or fact, the underlying assumption about the blinkered solidarity of group (e.g., national)
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writing is all too widespread, alas. Immemorially tied up with approaches given to local patriotismethnic, social, political, religious, philosophical, aestheticit has now spread under another guise to "cultural criticism" of the corresponding subdivisions. Except for the particulars (the basis, the tactics, the sound and fury) of dogmatic value judgment, such criticism also goes back to antiquity: contrast Plato's with Aristotle's views on poetic "mimesis" in Homer, or, among revisionist ideologues of faith, how the New Testament dates or outdates the "Old'' in updating it with how the Rabbis appropriate the Bible. Still, the apparent mutual hostility between the campswhether ancient or latter-day, exhibited on this front or thatmust not obscure their deeper unity in variety as readers against the grain, counterreaders. For generality, we will explore the strategies of (counter)reading, rather than specific performances; and to train the comparison on our center of interest, let us take the writing of, or as, ethnology. Where the local patriot reads his ethnic sympathies and antipathies into the text, by violence if necessary, the cultural critic will bring and, at his militant worst, attach to the same text a prejudgment on "ethnocentricity." (Likewise, in feminism, with the sticks of "patriarchy" and "an-drocentricity" waved as yardsticks: see my "Biblical Poetics and Sexual Politics: From Reading to Counterreading" [Sternberg 1992a]. See also note 9, this chapter, on "Eurocentricity" or "Occidentalism" reified by a would-be demythologizer of "Orientalism.") As a matter of fact, both encounters with the text deal in what I call ethnocentrism, possibly of their own devising, wishful or baleful, nostalgic or revisionist. However wide the opposition in premises, practices, purposes may look, it is only surfacedeep. Either camp has a much greater investment in the (good old or brave new) world than in art's world-making: the militants on each side would rather fashion the discourse in their own image than follow the play of images wherever it leads, so that understanding may at least inform the will to judgment. If anything, therefore, such cultural criticism does not even have the virtue of the local patriot's consistency (e.g., the Rabbi's on the Bible, the Slavophile's on Dostoevsky, the Jamesian's on the modern novel) in the alignment with whatever figures as the collective self. Instead, while preaching resistance to the self's hegemony over the other, in actual or imagined life, it doctrinally violates the otherness of the text (e.g., the elect-mindedness of Scripture, or Dostoevsky, or James) criticized for this very offense. Torn by contradictory moves, between precept and practice, the strategy always verges on double-think. At any rate, to the extent that neither interested party interprets the writing by the rules of its communication, let alone the fine detail, both counterreadings reduce the group portraiture to its lowest variety, ideological and artistic. Nothing has suffered more from this flattening than literary anthropology, with its different as well as differential imagings of humankind.
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Briefly, to reformulate what I argue throughout, ethnocentric discourse entails the centralization of the insider at the outsider's expense, rather than his glorification in terms worldly or utopian, secular or sacred. Both preferential, each axis has its own sense and rationale of preference. The two axes are autonomous in principle, infinitely relatable, variously relatedfrom foregrounding vs. backgrounding as a sheer universal condition of meaning, without any normative strings attached, to the package-deal twinship of black-and-white drawing. In ancient historiography, Thucydides' focus on Athens would illustrate the one extreme; Livy's on Rome, or the triumphal and annalistic norm in the Ancient Orient, the opposite. If you want to put "ethnocentricity" to evaluative use, and I don't, the latter extreme should alone incur it by its combined binarism of treatment and judgment, of representational and existential scaling: the focused is the favored group there, the defocused the disfavored. Now, irreducible to either extreme, Scripture builds the interplay of the axes into the very concept and history of election, markedly via the Hebrewgram. In a nutshell, divine leads to discoursive chosenness, but mixes predicaments and penalties with privileges and promises, whose balance never settles for long in the (master) plot. Chosenness is, literally, a mixed blessing, indeed like the all-human, because Adamic and though quasi-divine, freedom of choice "in God's image." (Compare again the bliss and bale of the free agency peculiar to the elite of James's heroes and vessels of consciousness, Strether in The Ambassadors, for example.) Therefore, with regard to "Hebrew," the usage inevitably falsities the descriptive Biblicist's "certitude" of laudatory signification, as it would the chauvinistic or the pious or the cultural dogmatist's, all fellows in pack-age-dealing automatism. You must dig well below the surface, beyond the inset, to recover the ethnicon's native load (e.g., Eberideship, Crossership) from the vict-image of foreign or foreign-like perversion. Furthermore, when "Hebrew" resurfaces in postexilic, invariably post-Biblical literature, its normative value does reverse itself. This occurs, however, not only centuries after Jeremiah has closed the Bible's own series, in the Apocrypha, but under a poetics quite distinct from the original Hebrewgram's, unrelated along all the axes and in effect often contrastive. The basic reference to the Chosen People alone survives the mutation. In the books of Maccabees, for instance, "Hebrew" co-refers with "Jew" and "Israelite," yet counts as the most glorious term of reference or, especially, self-reference, because the one most charged with the national faith and heritage. The corpus accordingly reserves it for triumphs over enemy power-pride and ideology, if only through the martyr's defiant proclamation of his Hebrewness. Even in "local patriotic" metamorphosis, whereby ethnocentricity does gravitate toward ethnocentrism, then, the writing still guards against overdrawing (reifying, absolutizing) the antith-
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esis between the culture heroes who invoke the name and the villains who elicit it from them. The "Hebrewing" now rather divides the world between two scales of value, with the name-bearer in extremis put at the top of the higher one alone: the martyred self's heavenly as opposed to the antagonist's terrestrial victory, right vs. might, or (adapting Paul's disjunction to the torture scenes) faith vs. flesh. Insofar as the Maccabean reloading and revoicing implies a counterreading of the Bible's vict-image, inadvertent presumably, if typical, they have a definite limit. 15 The ethnicon in Maccabees otherwise ranges freely over all variables, the Hebrewgram's law-like constants among them. The rule substituted here, and observed by the inset voices at self-nomination, boils down to this: provided you keep the usage honorific and the occasion memorable in Judaism's life-and-death struggle with HellenismJaphethite rather than Hamite culture, according to the ethnogeography of the Tablenever mind the rest of the circumstances. Elsewhere I hope to do more justice to Hebrewness in the Apocrypha and postBiblical literature as a whole. But enough has been instanced to suggest the gulf between tracing such developments, evolutionary or revolutionary, unified or assorted, and retro-jecting the process into the genesis, let alone the finished text, of the Bible. While the negative persists, undivided and unredeemed within the intergroup drama, why should the Israelite speak of himself and his own to (certain) aliens as if he were an alien speaking of Israelites? Nor will it help the whitewasher to opt for the opposite extreme: to dissociate the Hebrew from the Hab/piru, to antedate the rise of the gentilic by centuries, long before the Exile, and to invest it with an exclusively native (hence favorable) origin and circulation. Thus, from Marneptah's and Mesha's references to "Israel," which supposedly imply that other foreigners (e.g., the Philistines) "were also wont to use the national name," it has been inferred that "'Hebrew' is purely a self-designation," one coined thereafter in the people's quest for identity. So the two ethnica more or less change places relative to other diachronies and valuations, certainly to mine. With the terms switched round, the homegrown neologism, later and better than the internationalism known to Marneptah et al., came into vogue some time in the early history of the monarchy as a result of Israelite self-orientation in the world in which it had become a power. The question who we are and who are our next of kin must inevitably arise in youthful peoples that come to have a national consciousness. One answer . . . impressed itself enough to gain widespread acceptance at a certain time: we are 'Ibrim. (Kraeling 1941:1246-47; cf. the objections, some cogent, some ill-founded, in Rowley 1950:54-55; for the converse guess, see note 16 below)
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For once, it is not the self-Hebrewing but the outsider's Hebrewing of the insider, and as early as Genesis, that becomes the problem. Why should aliens, especially enemies, follow Israel's "vogue" and "self-orientation," pay tribute to her newly unearthed ibri roots, acknowledge her coming of age? The hole-picking may again be left to the reader. But two fresh inversions of the Hebrewgram, both unsurprisingly counter to the data and the design alike, will round out our survey of the alternatives. On this attempt at beautifying, the "Hebrew's" powerlessness in self-reference, as in the openly adverse reference to him, changes all the way into "power" and de-nomi-nation into a coinage born of "national consciousness." Yet the grand chronology nowhere enables such a turn, least of all under the first king. By a throwback symmetrical to the postexilic vanishing act, "the early history of the monarchy" advertises in fact the ethnicon's return to international currency: a thick cluster of ''Hebrew" designations overtakes the Israelites anew, this time in contact with the Philistine master race, flanked by Joseph's lowly self-designation in Egypt at one end of history and Jonah's vis-à-vis his Hamites at the other. 16 Cutting across discourse-patterns, as across eras, lands, stages, languages, exigencies, antagonists, text units, the Law of (De) Nomination is protean but one. Adaptable Culture Heroines and the Rhetoric of Pretended Solidarity For a more complex example of the forces at workincluding an ambiguity between our two patterns of hostile encountertake the Egyptian escalation to genocide: (15) The king of Egypt said to the Hebrewess midwives, one of whom was named Shiphrah and the second named Puah; (16) and he said, When you midwife the Hebrewesses, look upon the birthstool: if it is a boy, you shall kill him, and if it is a girl, she shall live. (17) The midwives feared God and did not do as the king of Egypt had spoken to them, but kept the children alive. (18) Then the king of Egypt called the midwives and said to them, Why have you done this thing, and kept the children alive? (19) The midwives said to Pharaoh, Because not like the Egyptian women are the Hebrewesses, because they are instinct with life: before the midwife comes to them, they have given birth. (20) And God dealt well with the midwives . . . (21) and made them houses. (1:15-21) In our intercultural perspective, this well-known tale reveals some of its finest arts, capitalizes on its darkest riddles. To start with, the very oldest who's-who puzzle now redefines itself as an intersection of group
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and dialogue typology. Are "the Hebrewess midwives" (and this odd-seeming phrase best captures the ambiguity) Egyptian functionaries assigned to the Hebrewesses, in which case their utterance, like Pharaoh's own, would belong to our first discourse-type? Or are they Hebrewesses themselves and their utterance, accordingly, of the second type? Linguistically, their identity hangs on a single vowel-sound, a point of pointing. It all depends on whether we follow the Masoretic vocalization la'meyalledot ha'ibriyyot (roughly, preposition + nominal participle + plural adjective, signifying "to the Hebrewess-born midwives") or repoint the phrase into li'meyalledot ha'ibriyyot (preposition + verbal participle + plural noun, yielding "to those who midwife the Hebrewesses"). The second makes the less natural formationone wonders who would think, or think much, of it today but for its promoters (the Septuagint, the Vulgate, Josephus, Philo) among the ancientsyet it remains acceptable. Contrary to time-honored opinion, it also makes the weaker, because less univocal, hypothesis of the two. That the women do the midwifing for the Hebrewesses need not exclude their own Hebrewnesswhich accordingly gains weight in the balance of probabilitiesalthough it can exclude such kinship, wherefrom interpreters have jumped to the conclusion that it does. Still, possibility on top of acceptability would be enough to leave this alternative identity viable, forcing open a gap between selfhood and otherness at the heart of the tale. Israelite or Egyptian agency? "Hebrew" or "Hebrew"-directed heroism in the translated encounter with Pharaoh? The oppressed closing ranks or the oppressor foiled by his own underlings? Intracultural (intraracial, intranational) solidarity with intercultural conflict, or the other way round? First or second pattern of the Hebrewgram? So recast and realigned, the two long-competing identifications of the women grow all the more thematic, their divergence apparently wider to match. But then, we may now also see with a fresh eye that they will not lend themselves to contextual (any more than to grammatical) resolution, 17 and exactly why: the alternatives have more in common, and their commonality signifies more, than otherwise appears. Regarding group portraiture, the oscillation between these mutually exclusive nationalities coheres with the large ideopoetic framework, the Hebrewgram's and the Bible's, as a move against stereotyping. And not just another move, but the strongest to date, because the most foregrounded, the most unsettling, and the most crosscutting at once. The Chief Cupbearer, Pharaoh, the Princess, have each gathered individual features, but still within the limits of the Hamite group image and idiom, which exceptionally turn ambiguous here. Nor do those ethnonational boundaries alone give way to the tale's strategy of re- or cross-grouping its heroines, always against the prevalent typology.
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For now, observe that even the midwives' Israelite categorization would pick out women (if only these two "Hebrewesses," unprecedented in group name and act) as the best and bravest among the multitudes of the oppressed collective self. Their Egyptian reading, at the same time, would go to de-generalize and so to de-polarize the oppressor's image, if only on the margins of his culture, among the rank and file of the "weaker" sex, the lowest of the low. As such, moreover, their belonging to a people itself long demoted to state bondage (as early as Joseph's viziership) also implies class solidarity, especially in face of the common Pharaonic exploiter at the top; the womanto-woman ministrations cross sexual with professional allegiance, too. But the least expected meeting point would then be the "fear of God" disclosed among the ungodly, against all the odds, and hence to memorable universalizing ("de-monopolizing") effect: every Sodom has its righteous few. Or, along a thicker line of continuityin sex, Fifth Columnism, grand promise-to-fulfillment narrativeCanaanite Jericho will have its Rahab. However you look at the midwives, they stand out as heroines amidst a conflict where heroism (battered out of one party by the other) is in unusually short supply, even for the Bible; and, failing a resolution of their ethnic ambiguity, as exceptional heroines at both ends of the Egyptian/Israelite axis. The duality works for them, along with the rest of the cross-groupings. 18 Thanks to their characterization, the alternative characters also happily fall between our speech patterns, right upon the common denominator, the interactional middle ground. Even if not oppressed as "Hebrewesses" in Egypt, the midwives are certainly hard pressed in the dialogue with the genocide-bound king and react as if they were Hebrewesses themselves. Either way, the (op)pressed midwives resort to much the same tactics in their discourse of "Hebrews"notably self-translation of one kind or another into the antagonist's privileged idiom. Their double reading as double-talkers sharpens before long the contrast with another mixed quantity, another and greater variant of this polar biculturalismthe future Moses disdaining such tactics vis-à-vis Pharaoh in 5:1-2, a scene to which we shall come. Whatever the midwives' nationality, they practice the right morality. And practice is the operative issue in the first half of the tale, as speech in the second. For their calling, then their orders, then their God-fearing-ness, all insist on their agency, one unreservedly committed at that, since the actions demanded from them allow no maneuver between pro- and anti-"Hebrew": either the deliverer's role, in the national as well as professional field, or the secret killer's, the infanticide's and genocide's. By calling, they are already called into an active life-giving role. Where the English "midwife," say, betokens agenthood in the weak sense of assistance, attendance or mediacybeing "with" the "wife"the original's meyalledet trades on all the strength of the intensive and causative Pi'el
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conjugation: a birth-maker, one who brings a delivery (hulledet) or child (yeled) into existence. In context, the adjective ibriyyot may follow suit in punning on the latent and necessarily antecedent ibar ("breed" or "impregnate," as in Job 21:10), thus equating Pi'el with Pi'el, genetic output with input, female with male doing at the two ends of procreation. The broader framework certainly invites such equating, complete with a scale of overwork among the women themselves, where our heroines rank highest. The occupational quality ascribed to the birth-makers by the lexis is quantified in the drama. Strong anyway, their activeness gains tremendous vigor and scope from the earlier counterpointing of the Israelites' proliferation rate ("were fruitful and teemed and multiplied and grew very-very mighty, so that the land was filled with them") with the heaviness of their yoke ("The Egyptians made the Sons of Israel serve with rigor, and embittered their lives with hard service, in mortar and in bricks and in all kinds of service in the field"). The nights in Goshen, then, were as busy as the days. The Israelite wives must have labored as hard at home as their husbands outdoors, though to a contrary or balancing effect ("the more they afflicted him, the more he multiplied"); and "the Hebrewess midwives" with them, to say the least. Whether ''Hebrew" themselves or "Hebrew"assigned or both, the meyalledot share between them a workload even heavier than most, far beyond the call of their calling. This is also why the text, having charged the phrase la'meyalledot ha'ibriyyot with such contextual loador "Hebrew" burden, so to speakimmediately goes on to number and name the load-carriers: "one of whom was named Shiphrah and the second named Puah." After the ado made about the birthrate, "one . . . and the second" looks exceedingly odd. Commentators of all stripes have found it incredible that a pair of midwives should minister to the needs of an, or this, entire people. Hence the endless drive to save, if not always the received text from improbability, then the accepted, naturalistic canons of probability from the text. Interpreters old and new would smooth over the difficulty by appeal to some form of condensation. On the oldest naturalizing view, the two were heads of the midwivesno fewer, Ibn Ezra assures us, than five hundred in strength. (For later echoes of the midwives-in-chief theory, see Jacob 1992:19, or Sarna 1986:95.) According to a more recent conjecture, the number is a matter of style, a poetic or generic ("folk-tale") license: a figurative figure, in short. (E.g., Cassuto 1967:13-14, Childs 1974:16-17, Exum 1983:70-71, Houtman 1993:252.) Alternatively, the two were in charge of a small region, either citywide (Sforno ad loc.) or inhabited by the "Hebrews" among the Israelites (Ackerman 1974:85). This circumscription of space envisages the same rationale as that by which a midwife of novelistic fame, Laurence Sterne's, came into her office: the villagers found that counting upon the services of the functionary in the neighboring
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parish "was sometimes next to having no midwife at all." So they installed one of their own, and she "acquired, in her way, no small degree of reputation in the world; - by which word world, need I in this place inform your worship, that I would be understood to mean no more of it, than a small circle described upon the circle of the great world, of four English miles diameter, or thereabouts, of which the cottage where the good old woman lived, is supposed to be the centre" (Tristram Shandy, 1979:11ff., I, 7). The interpreters who encircle the Exodus "world'' of obstetrics in effect supply the realism that Tristram trumpets into his tale. Yet either bid for probability, via shorthand or short range, omits to explain so much as why the narrative courted this trouble. Why should it specifyand in perceptibly awkward, retardatory fashiononly to condense? Moreover, why did it handle otherwise such functionaries as "the taskmasters and foremen of the people," left both anonymous and unnumbered (5:6ff.)? A converse and still nicer objection beckons from the tale's marked deployment of pairs, amounting to a structural logic. Thus "two stones" (birthstool, obnayim), "Egyptian women" and "Hebrewesses," "boy" and "girl," and, later, Jochebed and Miriam, the two two-party "Hebrew" quarrels, Moses and Aaron. The last is of course the most flattering, possibly also the most revealing, analogue; but the whole set of dyads, all literal, invests the opening member with concrete numerical significance. Where interpreters domesticate, text-critics decompose. Instead of harmonizing the given number with life or art, the critical naturalizers take it for a giveaway of disharmony at source. The story cannot pertain to "the tradition of slave labor" in that it features "only two midwives," and so clashes "with the datum that the Israelites were increasing in number, which was presumably the reason for oppressing them" (de Vaux 1978:I, 324). The usual naiveté of arrogance. For the judgment passed by the alert source critic on the nodding source composer involves its own fantasy: it merely substitutes genetic for dramatic strangeness. It would be a blind redactor indeed who failed to see the discordance between his (alleged) traditions and its resolvability through nothing more than the erasure of the number. To judge from his performancethe multiphase "people of the Sons of Israel"→"Hebrew(esse)s" sequence traced in my foregoing chapter, or the men/women equivalence in hard "labor" just drawn, or the string of dyadshe would rather appear a master of continuity. So, if we only look to his articles of faith or rise to the challenge of his difficult art, he proves again. Simple believers will of course take in their stride the fewness of midwives, as they already took the clan's explosive growth. But the reader who views either datum as improbable by itself, and the former as easily omissible in the editing, might stop to wonder if the extreme disproportion between them does not compound the improbability
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for a purpose: the two numberings, in their ascending ("births to birth-makers") order of surprise, would appear to link up by their very polarity. Nor do the extremes meet only on the common ontological ground of supernaturalism, thematically built into a history that takes the Almighty, however invisible, for author. The ontology assumed also enables a specific twist of realism in polar clash, quite unlike both the earthly and the mythic formulas of condensation invoked to save the narrative. Readers who deliteralize the "one . . . and the second" numbering as an offense against verisimilitude (even in face of the hard reality-effect of the attendant names) miss the point of the exposition, before long taken up by the complication and resolution. Instead of a simple shortcut, or neglect to cut, we have here a finesse of realistic incongruity, whereby the Bible pits the tool against the task, minimum-sized agency against maximum action, usually for positive emphasis. Compare Rebekah's watering the visitor's ten thirsty camels with one little pitcher, endlessly shuttled by hand between the well down the hill and the encampment above. Likewise with Abraham's potence in old age, Deborah's judgeship and Yael's nail, Gideon's handful of fighters against Midian, or David against Goliath. The present disproportion (registered, ironically, by Pharaoh, as will soon emerge from within the tale's world) is therefore in ideopoetic character. In effect, if not in name, Shiphrah and Puah have been consigned to the most unrelieved slavery of all, worked off their feet in the line of life-giving. On any reckoning of the proportion of births to "birth-makers," their service amounts to compounded Hebrew or Hebrew-like servitude with nationwide rigor, and mounts accordingly. But which is theirs, Hebrew or Hebrew-like servitude? As the narrative moves from exposition to complication, so does the difference: it first gains urgency and significance, then loses them to a lower (or, depending on the viewpoint, higher, because ethical) common denominator, under the pressure of events. Once the midwives face Pharaoh, that is, the gap about their nationality yawns all the more widely and perceptibly, since it comes to bear on plot suspense. He cannot mean well and they, if Egyptian, are likelier to align themselves with his new scheme. The long interpolation between the two Pharaonic "said's" retards the issue by an artlessly artful false start. "The king of Egypt said to the Hebrew midwives, one of whom was named Shiphra and the second named Puah; and he said . . .": two speaking verbs, applied by the quoter to one speech, key us up for the speaker's next anti-Hebrew plot. But with the advent of the resumptive "said," it transpires that we have even more reason to fear than appeared beforeno matter what the nationality of the present hearers and appointed agents of the genocide venture. The dilatory suspension over,
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suspense proper only rises, because Pharaoh is once again intent on "dealing shrewdly" with the emergency: He said, When you midwife the Hebrewesses, look upon the birth-stool: if it is a boy, you shall kill him, and if it is a girl, she shall live. Some exegetical traditionsdriven by local patriotism of all kinds, ancestral, national, ideological, humane, emotive, even aesthetic in its leaning toward generic ("folktale," "farce") binarismportray the speaker as the fool or maniac that he has always been in their eyes. Rather than catering to such trite forms of desire, now or ever, the address dramatizes a smart operator, all the smarter-looking in our ignorance about his prospective accomplices. Pharaoh's ostensible (and behind him, the storyteller's genuine) "shrewdness" consists in so formulating the scenario as to neutralize any possible ethnic difference and impediments several times over beginning with the gap about his addressees' lineage. "It would have been strange for the king to have expected the Israelites to kill the males of their own people" (Sarna 1986:25); so it would, but only assuming they were of the same people as the male infants to be killed and/or given an alternative to getting themselves killed. By reference to the actual two-faced data, if the midwives are Egyptian, he counts on their loyalty, their group hatred, their disgust at aiding the enemy; and if Hebrew, on their fear or broken spirit. In either case, moreover, their reputation will not suffer, professionally or otherwise, because the deed will be done in tiny and quiet installments, "birthstool" by "birthstool," "boy'' (observe the singular) by "boy." Danger in large numbers, safety in small: the macabre formula insinuated by the tempter runs from the infants to the infanticides-to-be. Minimum personnel, if unequal to the current birth-making task, is ideal for secrecy in birth control: nobody need ever know, outside the three of them, the conspirators. (As the Hebrews themselves spoke Egyptian by nowunlike Jacob's sons treating with the disguised Joseph, and like Joseph himself under the trial of adulterythere would not even be an "interpreter between them." This conspiracy of silence is opposed to the publicity of Pharaoh's next genocidal move, enlisting "all his people.") But most and most diabolically of all, he appeals to their self-interest, whether it operates along with or above moral, national, professional commitment. Whatever his own interest in reducing the state's cheap work-forcewhich they, if Egyptian, must share anywayit is certainly in their best interest to reduce their impossible workload by slow yet sure degrees, instead of abetting its growth by further leaps and bounds. In this light, Pharaoh's call upon the midwives toward the height of
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the persecution speaks to much the same ignoble motives as that upon "his people" at the outset: "Behold, the people of the Sons of Israel is too numerous and too mighty for us. Let us deal shrewdly with him, lest he multiply." A repeat performance in camera, it would appear, fittingly updated: the Israelite people has meanwhile been lowered back to Hebrews, and the demographic preliminaries scarcely need repeating, least of all to those in daily touch with the statistics. It is once more the circle of "we/you" (the all too few, the threatened, possibly the Egyptian as well) against the swarming multitude of ''them," which accordingly requires shrewd treatment, from containment downward. Just as the Egyptians, helpless in face of "the more oppressed, the more prolific" ratio, "become weary" of the menfolk, so must they two vis-à-vis the womenfolk: what with their ridiculously inferior numbers, their bearing the brunt of the slaves' nightwork rather than playing the master and enjoying the fruit of the daywork, or the sisyphean prospect that the harder they toil, the more toil they create for themselves to the (untimely) end of their lives. Joining forces against the common menace is therefore again indicated. Divide-and-rule, the Oppressor's tried weapon, also suggests here the contrary, unite-and-rule, as a logical complement and consequence and countermove. This idea likewise arose in the tempter's opening scenario, whereby the immigrants may ally themselves with external enemies of Egypt, unless the Egyptians themselves rally around the king and strike first: common interest makes a bond on either side of the division projected, once (the "they"-alliance) athwart, once ("we") along ethnonational lines. The two-pronged, divisive-cohesive strategy now recurs with fresh twists. The ambiguity of the blood lines, far from mattering, rather implies their coming second to the battle lines; and there would also be the irony of the secret agents destroying the Fifth Column by playing Fifth Columnists within it, under the guise of active life-givers, ethnic or sympathetic. If so, in narrative terms, our backward-looking curiosity gives way to future-directed suspense: the gap about the midwives' national antecedents pales beside the forking of personal consequences across resolutions. The choice put to them lies between working themselves to deathwhether as the slaves among slaves or as slaves to slavesand exercising the power of life and death for their own deliverance. This line of reasoning with the overburdened, moreover, points forward as well as backward. Again articulated within the book of Exodus, though in a very different key and spirit, the persuasive logic comes to operate upon the greatest of the children in danger, none other than Moses as exhorted by Jethro. Having watched his son-in-law at judgment "from morning to evening," he urges the division of labor among a hierarchy of subordinate magistrates to be appointed ("rulers of thousands, rulers of hundreds, rulers of fifties, and rulers of tens") on pain of inevitable breakdown:
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"Thou wilt surely wear thyself out, both thou and this people with thee, for the thing is too heavy for thee, thou canst not do it alone" (Exodus 18). Before long, Moses will extend the argument to the sharing out of the burden of leadership, even prophecy itself, with tell-tale echoes of the Oppressor's overture and the midwives' trial, as well as of Jethro's advice. "Did I conceive all this people, or did I give birth to him, that thou shouldst say to me, Carry him in thy bosom as the nurse carries the suckling . . .? I cannot carry alone all this people, because he is too heavy for me. If thou do thus to me, kill me" (Numbers 11:12-15). The entire quartet of situations rhymes together here. 19 Twice iterated in connection with the same group, the formal parallelism between kabed mimmekha/mimmenni (''too heavy for thee/me") and Pharaoh's initial rab we'atsum mimmennu (Exodus 1:9) even tends to resolve the latter's ambiguous semantics in favor of "too numerous and mighty for us." Note also the masculine singular anaphoras ("him/he") for "people," which orchestrate both the king's earliest form of reference to this numerous people and the male offspring consigned to death one at a time. At any rate, the two Mosaic contexts offer a mirror image to the archenemy's problem-solving logic, already implemented by his nation in enslavement (ultimately, in genocide, too) and now advanced to the midwives. In face of a similarly impossible disproportion in numbers, Pharaoh would as always conspire with the overburdened for the opposite way out: to decrease the patients rather than to multiply the agents. Built into the situation with its focused numerical givens and in keeping with the overall compositionas already shown this appeal to the lower self informs Pharaoh's language, down to minutiae. Thus the drastic shrinkage in the specification of the parties connotes a shift in posture to match. The initial quoting clause, "The king of Egypt said to the Hebrewess midwives"formal, scalar, ethnos-marked at either endsheds all differentia in resumption to leave "he said" tout court, as if between equals, co-plotters, accomplices. To get his way, he would for once make the most of both statuses. Then comes the "when you midwife the Hebrewesses" exordium: the phrase (be'yalledkhen et ha'ibriyyot) harks back to the description of the addressees themselves as "the Hebrewess midwives" (ha'meyalledot ha'ibriyyot), only the gentilic is now lifted altogether from the midwives (addressed in the bare second-person) to descend upon their charges. Of the two set-ups (grammars, meanings, interrelations) between which the expositional mini-portrait hovers, Pharaoh revoices the divisive one, with no trace of the co-ethnic. (The accusative particle et now gets interpolated to disambiguate, if only in connection with the ibriyyot patients, the opening's equivocal form of reference to the ibbriyyot birth-agents.) Subjective, the revoicing uncovers less the facts of identity than the desired recasting of identities in terms of pragmatic roles. Whether or not his addressees are "Hebrew-
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esses," too, the royal seducer takes care not to address them as such. Instead, the earlier ambiguity in the origins of the agent vis-à-vis the patient gives way to a sharp functional dichotomy. It is birth-makers vs. work-makers: "you" (with lineage stripped away, as though of no importance relative to the onerous office of midwifing), against "them'' Hebrewesses (lineage all-important, for the converse reason, because tied to their abnormal fertility). Divide personsif not, as before (1:9ff.), "peoples"and conquer by persuasion. Again, observe the total absence of preliminary explanations (necessary at the first, rabble-rousing phase but too obvious for words in the present time and company) or of any threats in case of noncompliance. Self-interest will best do the trick, the tyrant expects, as it has done before. For that matter, replaying the fellow conspirator and selfdefender rather than the august king, or king-god, Pharaoh once more stops short of issuing direct orders in the first place. Why force compliance where taking it for granted will show and inspire confidence in the partners (Egyptians long self-enslaved or Hebrews newly enslaved) otherwise so beneath royalty? Strictly, his operational verbs hover throughout between the imperative mood and the futurity of a scenario certain to be performed for the dialogists' common good. (The distinction is nice but meaningful in context. Compare again the inaugural hortative "Let us deal shrewdly with him"; note also how the text describes the illocutionary force of the act as "saying" and "speaking," both mild relative to the later "Pharaoh ordered all his people" [1:22] or to the Princess's string of imperatives in her affair with the Hebrewesses, "Go . . . take . . . nurse" [2:8-9], followed by Pharaoh's own in the Plagues cycle.) The same quartet of verbs, finally, also traces in the "saying" a regular alternation between maximal and minimal doing on the part of the agents-to-be. "When you midwife the Hebrewesses": bundling the nuclear sentence (predicate as well as subject, and in the causative Pi'el form) into the one-word be'yalledkhen, Pharaoh opens with a shrewd reminder of what the meyalledet job entails, a fortiori when two practitioners attend to a population of multiparous "Hebrewesses." "Look upon the birthstool": compared with their normal load of mass delivery, as just evoked, the alternative offered sounds all the more effortless, requiring a mere act of observation for a start, and one that they perform anyway. The act envisaged also sounds innocuous, and maybe subtly flattering besides, due to its allusion to an obstetrical couple in the indigenous pantheon. Like the Philistine elohim-gods associated and correlative with "the Hebrews," the plural or rather dual form of obnayim (literally, "two stones") may reflect a polytheistic heteroculturalism in the vicinity of the ethnic heterolingualism. Referred to the local mythology, Pharaoh's original for "birthstool" (obnayim) glances (via its alternative meaning, "potter's wheel") at the Egyptian god Khnum, potter-like creator of humans, together with his consort, the goddess Heqt,
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believed to aid women in labor. Through the Egyptian turn given to the Hamitism, this mimesis signals in any case a professional compliment from the alluder to the addressees. But the upgrading equation to a pair of heavenly fellow workers would (if addressed to natives) even double as a marker of all-Egyptian cultural solidarity vis-à-vis "the Hebrewesses." Effortless, innocuous, complimentary, solidary, the act of seeing upon the birthstool paves the way for the one piece of dirty work involved: "if it is a boy, you shall kill him." Even with the genocide commission in full view, the operative verb does not remain so bald as may appear, because Pharaoh continues to sugar the "kill." Note especially the shift from the earlier indefinite plurality of mothers to the lucid singularity of babies: where "the Hebrewesses" conjured up a picture of the multitude always waiting to be delivered all at once, "a boy . . . him" now belittles the countermeasure for self-deliverance, as well as ensures its secrecy, by reducing it to a single act. Appropriately, following the earlier play on the dual, the rhetoric of (grammatical) number is again invoked to meet the threat of (actual) numbers. And no less in persuasive character is the second half of the conditional, whereby the whole address ends on the most labor- and guilt-saving note. "And if it is a girl, she shall live": for the first time, the midwives receive no mention whatever, least of all as agentive subjectshence ''shall live" (hayah *) rather than the Pi'el "keep alive," reserved for the next phase (1:22)while the newborn occupy the stage. "In about one of two cases, you will need to take no extra action at all, yet achieve the desired result." The agenthood coefficient, so to speak, regularly increases and decreases to serve the persuader's overall thrust. Whatever their ethical, national, sexual, professional instincts, then, "the Hebrew midwives" are caught in a terrible dilemma. They would have to be more than human, or less, to escape it altogether. Their narrow interests do coincide with the state's, the persuasion brought to bear on them does join forces with the machinery of coercion in hand, and only an optimist will see the outcome as a foregone conclusioneither possible outcome, in fact. Commentators since the ancient Rabbis take for granted their disobedience, as Pharaoh does their acquiescence, not to say their eager complicity, where the narrative leaves a question mark of suspense between the two results. To this end, the dialogue itself is kept one-sided: their answer (if any) gapped into equivocal silence, their thought (assenting, dissenting, undecided?) buried out of view to the same effect, their reaction a mystery, in short, and their course of action with it. Short of what I call the hindsight fallacy, that is, reading backwards, abetted by a rose-colored view of human natureboth all too manifest among the tale's interpretersthe worst is therefore definitely on the cards.
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If one must choose, then the king's would appear the safer bet, considering that we know nothing for certain about the two women in a quandary beyond their (over)work. With the ambiguous past followed by a scene where despotic comes on top of daily pressure and offers relief, how can the future look other than open-ended at best? A character test par excellence, it all depends on their conscience, left still more opaque thus far than their origin. From the tale's heart to the agents', from collective self/other binarism to a unique crossroads, from parentage to plot to psyche: the network of ambiguity deepens as it spreads. Indeed, so diabolical is the temptation that nothing short of God, or godliness, can withstand it: The midwives feared God and did not do as the king of Egypt had spoken to them, but kept the children alive. No "But" leads the way for reassurance, since the narrative would keep in play the suspense that translators and other interpreters dispel with the benefit of hindsight. 20 Instead of assuming a foregone conclusion, the mini-sequence dynamizes and twists our expectancy to the last possible word. Enactment or misfire, harmonious or conflictual repetition? In the original, the verse starts by (untranslatably) punning for plot tension. Where the Hebrewless or artless reader encounters "But/And the midwives feared, . . ." the text actually heightens our fear of their obedience by matching the given sound sequence with an alternative, Pharaoh-like sense. (As usual, the better the reading, the more vulnerable to Scripture's arts and the more eventful and enlightening its drama.) The verb at the head of the nuclear sentence wa'tirena ha'meyalledot not only forms an exact anagram of the leadword of Pharaoh's scenario, ure'iten ("Look . . ."), but also sounds like a punctilious fulfillment of that scenario combined with a variant of the Primeval Scene. He told them to "look" for sexual markers, it appears, and they did "look": an echoing, harmonious forecast-toenactment plot of repetition.21 Not that the plot chain's appearance of harmony, and with it our alarm, stands or falls by the sound-and-sense chain. Even if one misses the wordplay altogether, or its Noachic undertone, or its linear dynamism, the power play still augurs ill. As the verse unfoldsliterally, "And feared the midwives . . ."the initial predicate seems to denote the emotion, and so to predict the action, inspired by the tyrant. The characters' fear, needless to say, plays on the reader's. In ostensible agreement and reinforcement, the ensuing subject, "the midwives," occurs for the first time without any "Hebrew" affiliation attached, ambiguously ("Hebrewess midwives") or juxta-positionally (''when you midwife the Hebrewesses"), as though Pharaoh's divisive tactics have again come off.
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Given the verb and the subject, doesn't the player of the next grammatical role follow as a matter of course? Where the stage has been set for the entrance of Pharaoh as object of "fear," therefore, it is with tremendous impact that "God" springs out of nowhere to fill the part, disentangle allegiances, relieve (or rechannel) tension, and invert the scenario. Suspense, or worse, has been overtaken by surprise. What the surprising enlightenment leaves unresolved is the antecedents of the two God-fearers. Is it by inheritance that they replay Shem to Pharaoh's Ham, or by a deeper and more widespread instinct? After all, Japheth shared the counterHamite action (if not the elect's initiative, repaid in the distinctive blessing); and the heroines fear, and later flourish by, the transnational "God," as did Joseph in his Egyptian guise (Genesis 42:18). Without being necessarily Shemite, or even nonHamite, they are Shem-like. In the process, therefore, we continue uncertain about the midwives' nationality but no longer about their morality. "Fear of God," you will recall, is entirely absent, in both Scripture's and history's world, from the local ideo-lexicon. The Egyptianized viceroy alone experiences it in Genesis, now followed by the two possible Egyptianesses (whose feeling the narrator significantly mediates in thought-quotation, as if to verbalize what Joseph could and did express for himself by way of calque from his native tongue). Blood is indeed not all, but then, dead against Pharaonic cynicism, nor is ego. The ethical self/other relation outshines the ethnic in the tale, and (if the two axes crosscut) may well have overcome it in the heroines' interior world: Egyptian or not, the women's heart is in the right place, with the implied reference group's "us," Pharaoh's "them.'' Unlike Jonah facing his Hamites, they are the tyrant's moral superiors; and even this distribution of power does not quite leave them (the way the Apocrypha will the Hebrew martyr to Hellenism) with the moral victory alone. As the expected ("feared") royalty turns about in mid-sentence into the Deity, so does everything associated with him, and in a mounting order of counter-agenthood, too. It is as though the Almighty they worship in their hearts has intervened in person. Within the dynamics of variant repetition, the act of "looking" (ure'iten) forecast and enjoined by Pharaoh veers round, amidst wordplay, into the equally subjective but contrary act of "fearing" (wa'tirena). The pun now, and only now, pays tribute to a higher power, the highest by all measures. (Within the intertextual repetition, they no more "looked," as ordered, than Shem and Japhet did when invited to by Ham in Genesis 9:22-23, and at a risk so high that the highest self alone can brave it.) By a similar contrastive retrospect on the immediately following Egyptian allusion in "birthstool/potter's wheel" (ha'obnayim), Khnum likewise gives place to "God" (ha'elohim), the true Creator and the sole arbiter of life and death. 22 He is also, if defined by his subjective ("fearful") effect, the keeper of the
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line between them within the human spirit. "In the fear of the Lord there is a stronghold, and to his sons [banav, from ben, male offspring, generic for 'child' only by extension] will be a refuge; the fear of the Lord is a fountain of life, whereby to circumvent the snares of death": Proverbs' teaching (14:26-27) comes so literally true here as to read like a quashing of foreign with native allusion, mythology with reality. On cue, the subjects' proper feeling at once issues in a doing to match, or rather in an abstention from wrongdoing: "they did not do as the king of Egypt had spoken to them." Unsatisfied by such negative activity, a mere avoidance of the snares of death, however, ''they kept the children alive." This apparently redundant ending has generated some conjecture, for example, that the midwives now provide food, advice, etc., in excess of their usual services. 23 But there is really no need to look for an explanation beyond the tale's crafted language, which tops off the earlier minus (their own, actionally, as well as Pharaoh's, ideologically) with a resounding plus. The enjoined "if it is a girl, she shall live" (wa'haya*) transforms into the enacted "they kept the children alive" (wa'tehayyena*): conditional into categorical modality, distinctive sex into shared (infant)age, part into whole, natural survival into human choice to save nature (one's own God-likeness included) from the jaws of Nilotic culture, a saving appropriately cast in the Pi'el now, like the saviors' title itself. In the circumstances, where the pious emotion is unexpected and the omission of evildoing even more so, letting babies live counts as a heroic action of life-giving. The overall antithesis between the heavenly and the Pharaonic scenario, then, culminates in the act most pregnant with agenthood as well as with thematic burden: "keep alive" vs. "kill." Centuries before, Abraham voiced his misgivings about the liability of Hamites to carry the assault on foreigners to the point of selective murder along sex-discriminating lines. The Egyptians, he tells Sarah, "will kill me and keep thee alive"; so may the Philistines, because "there is no fear of God at all in this place" (Genesis 12:12, 20:11). Proverbs' statement on the fear of the Lord among the believers has a converse, more adjacent and specific to the immediate issue, in the patriarch on the anti-group that do not know it. The first Hebrew's prognosis now assumes fresh relevance, down to the language, on a scale beyond anyone's imaginings at the time; it even anchors the Hamite sexual discrimination in an ongoing "harem" mentality (now expanded from the matriarch, the former barren beauty, to all her daughters, the biological wonders). The prospect of an unlimited supply of women with such genetic credentials, especially if originating in Rameses II, is an added inducement to male enslavement, then to secret and open genocide: the Egyptians would eventually all live like kings, while the midwives, would, in between, exercise the life-and-death power of gods at the birthstool. In a sense, however, the full inversion
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dramatized by this narrative overtakes the patriarch's judgment as well: with life itself at risk, there is fear of God in this place, if only among the downtrodden "Hebrews" or their few upright allies. On the way from forecast to enactment, the persuader's "shrewd" appeal to a common denominator lower and more egocentric than nationality founders on the addressees' adherence to one higher and ideally universal. The enduring ambiguity about antecedents, then, pays new dividends in counting for so little on the balance sheet. The who's-who issue gets exceptionally relegated to the margin (in favor of who's-what) by all the parties concernedhuman, narratorial, and divine. Pharaoh tempts, the midwives withstand, the narrator evaluates, God inspires, then will bless and the Law of Intercultural Nomination holdsregardless. The cumulative process of discounting, with a few twists still ahead, has by now untangled the priorities at least. For once in the Hamite master plot, ethics cuts not only across but through ethnology (as through more variable factors in the Hebrewgram, like the timebound power-relations); shed or sheddable blood outweighs the inherited bloodlines; biology and ideology elude combination into a good (elect) or ill (diselect) bioideological whole; the self created in God's image may underlie or transcend or else, Pharaoh-like, vanish in the born ethnonational self, may attract or prevent or perpetrate victimage. Having defied Pharaoh, the equivocally "Hebrew" midwives qualify for culture heroines, just as the indubitable "Hebrew" who will defy Moses (2:13-14) gravitates toward the pole of culture villain, a would-be Egyptian born into the wrong label and the right slavish fate. The character resolution and the triumph of the moral imperative, however, do not yet end the suspense but rather change its object by triggering a plot complication: Then the king of Egypt called the midwives and said to them, Why have you done this thing and kept the children alive? Shrewdly asked, in effect a corrective to the understatements (e.g., the talk of noncompliance, passive resistance, civil disobedience) often made about the "doing" by exegetes. For the questioner repeats, with further embellishments, the text's own heightened account of the nonevent: he imitates to the letter the earlier ascent from letting the girls live (the prospective wa'haya *) to keeping all the babies alive (the enacted wa'tehayyena*), even replaces omission ("did not do") by commission ("have you done")only in the opposite spirit. Authorial recommendation turns into dramatic accusation, all the more ominous in the heightening, and none the less so for being true. No matter how one evaluates the deed, and whether the doers are "Hebrewesses'' (the culture's earliest resistance
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fighters) or just decent women (Hebrew-lovers, Pharaoh would call them), unobservance remains too pale a word for their active sabotage. The double agents must now allay Pharaoh's suspicions of treachery (if not treason) on their part, or accept the consequences, maybe including the doom of the children. Like those who smile at the tyrant, readers who overfocus the unborn Moses, prematurely too, diminish the threat to all concernedthe would-be serial killer, the life-savers, the numberless lives yet to be savedalong with the heroines' stature: the national record is far more large-scale and appreciative, as its memory of heroism will prove far longer. The women themselves never underrate the emergency. The impression of acquiescence given by their silence in the first round has bought them some time. Yet the appointed infanticides failing to produce any results, the crunch inevitably ensues, when persisting in silence would count as an admission of guilt. To justify themselves to Pharaoh, therefore, they now hit upon the idea of maximizing the distance between (pro-Israelite) action and (pro- or even ultra-Egyptian) expression. The doing vs. speaking antithesis carries over to the second round so as to inform the entire plot, but this time in a vocal variation, with Hebrewness as keynote: The midwives said to Pharaoh, Because not like the Egyptian women are the Hebrewesses, because they are instinct with life: before the midwife comes to them, they have given birth. The overall key to credibility works by and for harmony across the turns of adversarial dialogue. Whether the pretended like-mindedness is in- or inter-group, whether the (op)pressed side projects ("translates") itself into the adversary's evil thought or also into his native tongue, acquired by the "Hebrew(esse)s," the mimesis of otherness goes to unprecedented lengths. The inset rhetoric of apology fashions the women's discourse, to the letter, and even beyond, after Pharaoh's: the report models itself upon the scenario, the answer upon the question, the defense upon the charge. Everything sounds the sameand no wonder, the apologists imply, they being so at one with Pharaohexcept that things have not come out as desired, agreeably to the agreement between the interested parties. Negatively speaking, this posture determines (and, to us readers, motivates) the midwives' avoidance of all friction, even at the cost of acrobatics and double talk. For example, to begin with an ungrammatical and ostensibly unrelated feature, their answer to Pharaoh does not make a complete sentence but rather launches into a series of motive clauses ("Because . . . because . . ."). Such ellipsis may follow the rules of living, colloquial dialogue innovated by the Bible, yet on one condition: only if the answer's elliptic sentence assumes, in effect reaffirms and so takes over, the question's premises by way of implicit main clause. Recall a scene already analogized to ours, in
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typological and prefigurative terms, namely, the Hebrew encounter with the murderousness of Hamite sexuality and sex-discrimination: Abimelech said to Abraham, What didst thou have in view, that thou hast done this thing? And Abraham said, Because I thought, There is no fear of God at all in this place, and they will kill me on account of my wife. (Genesis 20:10-11) Abraham's elliptic response makes sense, considering that he both has and admits to having "done this thing" as chargedthat is, passed off his wife as his sisterfor the reason that he goes on to unfold. And so, had the questioner waited for an answer, could the patriarch have met the equivalent reproach hurled by the Pharaoh of his day, "What is this that thou hast done to me?" (12:18; cf. also the chapter-length dynamics of his negotiation with the Hittites over Sarah's burial, as I traced it in ''Double Cave, Double Talk" [1991a]). Left operative by the defendant, the shared assumption does duty for the missing explicit resumption. But that is scarcely the case here. The midwives would never grant the truth of their having "done this thing and kept the children alive"or, for that matter, done anything at all, according or counter to royal orders. In fact, they go on to assert and excuse the very opposite: total omission for want of opportunity, rather than commission of any kind. Having been cast twice as archagents, God-fearing or treasonable, they must now disclaim all agenthood on pain of exchanging suicide for genocide. The midwives, then, could and should begin by flatly denying Pharaoh's allegation of active lifesaving, the way many a Biblical addressee in trouble receives his accuser's uncongenial premises. Thus, at the origin of the birth theme, the annunciation to the first matriarch: "The Lord said to Abraham, Why did Sarah laugh, saying, Shall I indeed give birth, old as I am? . . . Sarah denied, saying, I did not laugh, for she was afraid. But he said, No, but thou didst laugh" (Genesis 18:13-15). Or, in head-on collision with another ill-famed king: "When Ahab saw Elijah, Ahab said to him, Is it thou, troubler of Israel? And he said, Not I have troubled Israel but thou and thy father's house" (I Kings 18:17-18). Why not join, then, the chorus of deniers, negators, counterstaters? Partly because the net result of the heroines' enlistment, a nonevent, is undeniable, if at all defensible, and partly, let me suggest, because open denial (even of the deniable intent and busyness) would launch their response on a note of conflict where self-preservation calls for a footing or appearance of maximum harmony. Without the benefit of either Sarah's tolerant interlocutor or Elijah's strong position, their life hangs by the thread of discourse as born Egyptian patriots or loyal "Hebrew" collaborators and secret sharers, hence as a voice attuned, not adverse, to the
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king's. So they rather opt for a gambit of Abraham-like concurrence-by-ellipsis that their actual words take away in equal silence. The double agents perfect the art of double talk, nontalk under cover of self-grounding in the other's talk included. Far from startled into vocal denial, they exploit the rule and resources of elliptic dialogue not just to align but literally to interweave their utterance with Pharaoh's: a show of full continuity that reinforces the tacit denial made throughout, beginning with the negative comparison (Ki lo, "Because not . . .," where a downright negative counterstatement, as in the Annunciation to Sarah, would invert the word order into Lo, ki," "No, but . . ."). Their clients have done everything, so the apology runs, and left them nothing to do. It is in regard to those clientstheir being, doing, namingthat the rhetoric of solidarity exhibits its positive (i.e., in translational context, Pharaoh-like) face as well. Like Anne Elliot in Persuasion, they know that a successful shift to a heterocosm involves "a total change of conversation, opinion, and idea," an imaginative "reclothing" of oneself in the locals' "matters of discourse." Sociology, or sociolinguistics, offers an apparently hard-headed variant of that known rule of discourse: "the closer the identifications of speakers the greater the range of shared interests and the more probable that the speech will take a specific form. The range of syntactic alternatives is likely to be reduced and the lexis to be drawn from a narrow range'' (Bernstein 1980:165). But once you take the arts of rhetoric (not to mention politeness) into account, the sociologist's rule also needs to be stood on its head, because the same holds true for pretended identification in covertly hostile encounters, as here. And the more bitter the underlying hostilityalong or athwart ethnocultural linesthe thicker the veneer of speech-mimesis required to bring off the show. Self-translation into the other's discourse (from tongue to style to worldview to value system) therefore grows even more imperative for the false self-identifier with the powers-that-be, especially if ruffled, than for the inferior in general. Lip service, of the kind paid by Joseph to the minister, would not be enough to persuade the antagonist that they think alike, that they "speak the same language," whatever the appearances to the contrary. The present turn of dialogue, replying to a well-founded accusation of sabotage, offers an object lesson. To a remarkable extent, the midwives draw their key words from Pharaoh's lexicon: "instinct with life [hayot *]" (derived from the same root as "keep alive [tehayyena*]"). "midwife" [meyalledet] and "give birth [we'yaladu]" (cognate with the verb "midwife [be'yalledkhen]" and the noun "children [yeladim]"), and, above all, "Hebrewesses." As the official shibboletha matter of state policy and collective memory, both now reencoded in Pharaonic idiomthe last expression is the name of the game; and the defendants flaunt it accordingly, ahead of the rest of the set. Having already been duly plotted in the leading inset's divisive rhetoricthe
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oppressor's talk of "Hebrewesses" to the midwivesit now gains counterplot value within the assimilative rhetoric once the dialogue changes sides. So far from content to echo the codeword at once as a mark of solidarity in vict-image, they intensify its pejorative load beyond Pharaoh's own usage. Thus, to render their opening words, ki lo ka'nnashim ha'mmitsriyyot ha'ibriyyot, as "Because the Hebrew women are not like the Egyptian women" (RSV) is to divorce the matter from the manner of the argument: the propositional content (indifferent to the names and the name-sequence chosen as long as the rendering keeps up "sachliche Identität") from the persuasive language. Oriented to the bare gist, the (interlingual) translator then flattens the design and achievement of the heroines in (intercultural) self-translation. Such unhappy word choice plus reversed word order leave an impression of mere apologetics where the original aspires to the finesse and force of thwarted zeal, patriotic or collaborationist. In ha'ibriyyot, for one thing, the midwives iterate verbatim Pharaoh's one-word gentilic "the Hebrewesses," rather than expanding it into the noun phrase "the Hebrew women" (or even Buber and Rosenzweig's elliptic adjectival variant "ebräischen"). Their hearing is as quick as their wit, for it catches a coinage in the making. Generations before, Potiphar's wife alternated between "Hebrew man" and ''Hebrew slave" to please her audiences; the Chief Cupbearer, also speaking in Genesis, degraded the same man to "a Hebrew boy." Pharaoh, however, has just introduced the twofold novelty of female reference with maximum compression, whereby the adjective in his predecessors' noun-phrases does duty for a noun, "the Hebrewesses." (If you think back to the process of de-nomination, the compressed form miniatures the ultimate volte-face of the overexplicit "the people of the Sons of Israel." The narrative of the ever-worsening heterolanguage in Exodus marks here a turn sharper than it seemsa greater distance from the earlier phase's usage, a revival with interest of the earlier book's abusageand as always parallel to the escalating conflict.) In sociosemantic terms, this compression means that the despot would omit from the group reference everything but the irreducible attributes of number plus race plus sexa host of outlandish femalesand the midwives in impromptu response bow at once to his laconism. Nor does their iteration merely signal the harmony with the addressee but pushes the formal equivalence toward existential outreaching: if Pharaoh denies "the Hebrewesses" the name, his interlocutors proceed to deny them the nature and the very humanity, of "women." This uttermost denial already lurks in the emphatic word-order of "Not like the Egyptian women are the Hebrewesses," where the echoing gentilic contrasts, in makeup as well as in sense, with the full-blown noun phrase referring to the daughters of the land: females vs. properly human females. "The Hebrewesses," they suggest to Pharaoh by way of pinpoint opposition in
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juxtaposition, "are not comparable to the Egyptian women from whom you have judged, but a kind apart from the run of womankind, to an extent you could hardly imagine at the time." A far-reaching implication, this, but anchored fast in the language (as well as in real Egypt's rabid ethnocentrism) and progressively made explicit. To start with, the principle has been anticipated throughout the creeping devaluation of "the people of the Sons of Israel" toward "the Hebrew(esse)s." At every phase before, the shortened term of group reference worked to imply a referent fallen short of some group characteristic (e.g., nationhood, unity). Now, with genocide on the agenda and officially unopposed by the midwives, the same logic of iconism pushes the shortage yet lower down, below the threshold of the human image. In context, the asymmetry between the full and the contracted, "women"-less ethnic reference discloses not a grammatical ellipsis (as Buber and Rosenzweig, in "ebräischen," understand it) but an existential negation, taking away from the referent an otherwise standard generic, transgroup attribute. In line with this double, indigenous/foreign ontology, the order of the two termsthe comparative yet noncomparable ("not like") before the comparedsignifies a gulf in the order of being. A gulf all the wider because, within the comparative term itself, the original's noun-before-adjective sequence (literally, "women Egyptian") places the emphasis of the negation on the immediately following noun. "Not like the women Egyptian,'' the Hebrewesses are like something else in Egyptian experience. Unprecedentedly loaded and lowered, even for the addressee, the vict-image would best serve to avert victimage without precedent, now threatening the imagestainers on trial as well as the image-bearers. Further, what the negative comparison impliesa difference in genusthe ensuing motive clause buttresses. Ki hayot * henah, "for they are instinct with life," also reads like "for they are animals [hayyot*]": same root, same spelling, near-same sound, to much the same propositional and explanatory effect. Twinned by their virtual identity, the variants produce the semantic compound "instinct with animal life." An analogous double-edged compliment in English would be the punning of "animate" with "animal," or their idiomatic fusion in "animal spirits." Recall also the wordplay between the female ha'ibriyyot and the male ibar, "impregnate," predicated in Job 21:10 of a bull. Within the Hebrewgram itself, we already observed how the latter-day Egyptians of Philistia relish their dehumanizing joke about the Hebrews ("mice," according to the literal-minded emendator) "coming out of the holes." From a viewpoint both longer, Cain- or Babel-old, and more narrowly trained on Egypt's other-mindedness, the disanalogy speaks to the Pharaonic (nowadays Lévi-Straussian) ranking of "nature" below "culture": the pastoralists, already abominated, segregated, de-peopled, enslaved, forbidden outlandish worship by the civilized environment, merge with their
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own beasts. Most notable, however, is the continuity with the language of Israelite proliferation that opens Exodus. As early as Creation, the words used here for Israelite "fruitfulness" and "multiplying" and "filling" apply to the animal order along with, or actually before, humanity (Genesis 1:22, 28); while "teeming" (or "swarming'') departs from the semantic rule to connote a fertility normally associated with lower forms of life. 24 The Masoretic pointing, hayot* rather than the usual hayyot* for "animals," enjoys further advantages. The hapax legomenon makes it possible for the midwives, if themselves "Hebrew," to insinuate their womenfolk's low nature under respectable cover: in the guise of a compliment, not just to Egyptian womanhood but also to the life force of "the Hebrewesses." If themselves nonHebrew, their insinuation would also return the compliment paid to them, in Pharaoh's upgrading and solidary allusion to the Egyptian gods (Khnum et Heqt), by downgrading "the Hebrewesses" below the human level. There the antipodes to proper womenfolk would belong, as it were, even more visibly and measurably so than the rest of the nonEgyptian world: by their fruits, or overfruitfulness, shall ye know them. And on either identification, the given hayot* pointing suggests yet another finesse of harmony in rhyming back to Pharaoh's im bat hi wa'haya*. Where he meant "If she is a girl, she shall live," the punsters now twist his words into meaning something like "If she is a woman, she is instinct with (animal) life." (Bat may signify "woman," e.g., Proverbs 31:29, and hayah* doubles as the singular of hayot*.) His majesty said so himself in effect, they imply after their customary manner.25 All this turns the old riddle of the pointing to fresh self-exculpating account. The rhetorical context, as well as the consonantal or even the Masoretic text, favor the indeterminacy between the two readings, precisely due to its Janusfaced evaluation in unitary comparative argumentation. It enables the midwives to put it to Pharaoh in the same breath that "the Hebrewesses" are more (vital) than "the Egyptian women" and less (human): more, indeed, because less.26 On the theoretical level, if both the narrator's and Pharaoh's maneuvering among groups variously reinforces the protean approach to the stereotype, then the midwives' categorical group-binarism overflows with support from the opposite end. For example, it lucidly demonstrates how the application of stereotypes to reality passes through syllogistic reasoning: All hayyot* give birth without a midwife (too obvious to state). "The Hebrewesses . . . are hayyot* (for common Nilocentrist ground). Therefore, "before the midwife comes to them, they have given birth." Within the formal rules of the game, all is "true": the two premises given, the conclusion following. Within the dramatic inset, that truth would even exceed the form-governed limits, because the major premise appeals to
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a natural, the minor to a (hetero)cultural typology, and the conclusion blends reality-like with interior deducibility. However, forwarded by sheer deductive (stereo)logic, the advance from the minor premise to the conclusion needn't, and here doesn't, represent any life-truth about either the object or the subjects of type-representation. Outside the juncture of the syllogism's with the heterocosm's discourse-world, of artificial with xenophobic thought, "the Hebrewesses" never count as such, much less as hayyot * in nature and birth-giving: vitality apart, evidenced in the growth rate, the frame ironizes the whole package. Nor do the Hebrewess midwives believe in the package of their own clustering. They rather assume the minor stereotypic premise, psycho-rhetorically as well as logically, because it speaks to the addressee's misbelief, and deduce the conclusion likeliest to get them off the hook: novel yet thoroughly in premised type-character, it would be hard for him to dispute. Of the three onstage parties to the stereotyping, then, the Pharaonic addressee alone reveals himself as oriented and true to type. In all but enunciationitself mouthed ("translated") to gratify himhe is the subject, his the fixed and false other-dehumanizing long become second nature to Egypt. The multiplicity therefore stretches from the truth values and perspectives orchestrated in context to the functions: their richness is notable within the dialogic inset, thickened and widened by the enclosing history. Even the fear with converse glorification that attends the midwives' type-casting of "the Hebrewesses" vs. "the Egyptian women" would hardly reduce to the psychoanalytic mindscape, whereby a self threatened by disintegration projects its anxieties upon the world. Instead, they contrive a happy mean between the earthly fear of Pharaoh and the ethical fear of God; they imitate under a real life-threat (to themselves, then to the in-group) a self anxious under a fancied collective lifethreat, without betraying in any way their genuine self. Like every rhetorician in this set-up, they never externalize their mind either to or onto others but throw themselves into the mind of others. Not for a moment do these heroines fall into the delusions they promote about who, what, where, why is who. So the midwives, carrying Pharaoh's lexicon and animus to new lengths, outrageous but presumably welcome, make a sweeping denial of the charges of "doing" brought against them as ill-founded, not just untrue, by appeal to the varieties of being: the incommensurability of "Hebrew" with human ("Egyptian," rmt*) nature. In child-bearing, they suggest, the latter alone involves the material and, because species-differential, normative plus of obstetric culture. Such a gulf invalidates all contingencies, trivializes all variables of time, person, action, good faith. Hence the shift from his future- or past-oriented statements to their eternal present, befitting an
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omnitemporal, inherent, nonagentive generalization. This stress on the invariance of ethnobiological variance culminates in the explanatory follow-up, "Before the midwife comes to them, they have given birth." The gnomic present ties up here with the impersonality of "the midwife"not "we" or "either of us" but any practitioner, always, and, of course, regardless of nationality. Pharaoh's drive to personalizing as well as otherwise contextualizing the issuerecall the ''you" planted in almost every verb of hismeets the extreme of depersonalization ("they . . . they . . . she . . . they," all generic in reference). Given the dehumanized nature of Hebrewesses, personalities never "come" into the matter, nor do agencies. If the option and charge of midwives "keeping alive" (te'hayyena *) fails to arise in regard to birth-givers "instinct with (animal) life" (hayot*), neither does the very performance of midwifely offices, for better or worse, where anticipated by spontaneous delivery.27 Here also lurks the answer to the question, seldom faced, how the midwives could expect the accusing Pharaoh to believe them and why he in fact does. (By now, I hope, we may confidently dismiss the villain's chauvinistic or otherwise simplistic typecasting as foolish, insane, etc., on every ground: Scripture's art, thought, rhetoric, build-up, all work for complexity within the polarity itself, even in its best interests.) Such an argument as theirs, from "Hebrew" nature, proves itself by its very strangeness, ad hominem. It flatters not only the Egyptian sense of qualitative superiorityor its underside, xenophobiabut Pharaoh's own psycho-logical approach, grounded in common self-interest vis-à-vis the numbers. The apologists now hark back to the tempter's premise in the first round, even as they deny the conclusion drawn about them by the accuser in the second. "It is not that you were wrong about us, or that we did any wrong, but that they are the wrong people for such countermeasures. How else, if not because mother nature looks after her own, would the two of us cope with this multiparous multitude over the years? We would surely be dead today, by your own reckoning, were 'the Hebrewesses' not instinct with low life." Unspoken, the argument is yet so built into the dialogue's context as to grow visible or incarnate in the speakers, their survival against the heaviest occupational odds vouching for their truth. Credo quia incredibile, at least when the explanation offered tallies to a nicety with what one does or would believe about the world, the other, the self. Failing a belief in divine supernaturalism on the addressee's part, low realism and racism, culture and ego join persuasive forces in the address. Its very final word, "they have given birth" echoes, only to stamp as inoperative, both the immediately preceding trade-name meyalledet and Pharaoh's cognate opening verb in the Pi'el, be'yalledkhen. The encounter has come full circle, with the root that ties together the two ends miniaturizing the rhetoric of pretended ("self-translational") harmony.
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A successful rhetoric, evidently, if we judge by its plot effect. It dissuades the tyrant addressed, if not from infanticide, which he soon entrusts to an obliging people in broad daylight, then from vengeance on its initial frustrators. He must have forgotten both Ptah-hotep's wise instruction, "Good speech is more hidden than the emerald, but it may be found with maidservants at the grindstone" and that given to Meri-Ka-Re, "Speech is more valorous than any fighting" (Pritchard 1969:412, 415). Though the Hebrewess midwives "did not do as the king of Egypt had spoken," they did very much speak as he had spoken so as to give color to their nondoing and live to enjoy God's reward. "He made them houses'' discloses in retrospect their unmarried and childless status, hence their extra exposure to temptation in the absence of ready parental solidarity with their kind. ("He has no children," Macduff says of Macbeth, who destroyed his.) A last-minute commendation, it returns the perfect measure for measure. Inversely, at the same time, "He made them houses" throws a sly cross-lingual glance at "Pharaoh," meaning "the Great House" in Egyptian. (On the royal title see Gardiner 1961:52.) To perfect the tit-for-tat the negative way as well, "the Great House" will eventually lose his first-born son, along with the rest of the Egyptian infanticides, "for there was not a house where there was no dead," except "the houses of the people of Israel" (12:27ff.). He will also experience (if faced with dissident Egyptianesses, is experiencing) in his own house the disunity he has always sown, now for the first time unsuccessfully. The struggle's end looks back to the beginning, complete with the opposition of the revived "Israel" (in exodus from a plagued Egypt) to the first resurgence of Hebrewness (in genocide). It's still early, but for now such houses/House closure draws everything together: the translational mimesis below the surface of the entire dialogue, the intercultural suspense plotted throughout, the retributive logic, even the Mosaic dualities soon to arise. The tale having started by poising the midwives' identity between the Hebrew and Egyptian lineages, it would appropriately crown the ordeal by punning between the languages to their glory. The midrash (Sotah 11b, Shemot Rabba 1:13) identifies the pair with the next in line, Jochebed and Miriam, Moses' mother and sister respectively. Without attempting to defend the conflation of the referents or even of the nationalities, I believe that it might gain some plausibility from an interscenic clue lost on the Rabbis, namely, the analogy in the occasion and the manner and the consequences of speaking to the Egyptian royal house. At a level higher than who's who, the bridge is there. No matter how widely the two pairs of figures may diverge in reality, their figures of "Hebrew" speech converge and interlock in the plot of deliverance by women. This plot resumes in the scene that immediately ensues. Pharaoh having ordered his people to throw every newborn Hebrew male into the Nile
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and the three-months's old Levite baby having been abandoned to his fate in token compliance, Miriam ("his sister") stays behind to watch: (5) Pharaoh's daughter went down to bathe in the river, her maidens walking beside the river. She saw the basket [tebah, 'ark'] among the reeds and sent her maid to fetch it. (6) She opened, and saw him, the child, and behold, a boy crying! She took pity on him and said, From among the children of the Hebrews is this. (7) Then his sister said to Pharaoh's daughter, Shall I go and call for thee a nursing woman from among the Hebrewesses, that she may nurse the child for thee? (8) And Pharaoh's daughter said to her, Go. The girl went and called the mother of the child. (9) And Pharaoh's daughter said to her, Take this child and nurse him for me, and I will give thee thy wages. Then the woman took the child and nursed him. (2:5-9) 28 The conversational as well as situational alliance between the two encounters will by now, I trust, leap to the eye (though their joint variance from Moses' less happy dealings with the machinery of power still needs to be explored). This continuity is far more revealing than the oft-drawn parallels to extracanonical, and usually extradialogic, birth stories of heroes, from Oedipus to Sargon. The peculiarities reenacted center in the Bible's dialogue of survival, unparalleled for its complementary balance of chance (or providence, if you will) and human skill at manipulating authority. God is behind the scenes, the life-savers on stage, armed only with their tongue, or tongues. None the less complementary, this Exodus balance, in that the humans acting the manipulator are always female, the weakest of the weak "Hebrew" parties to the discourse, and always confronted with royalty, superhuman by Egyptian tradition. In pitting wit against strength, native or native-like eiron against foreign alazon, each tale even mixes suspense with laughter, however fleeting. The freshness of the storied typology has undergone interpretive as well as comparative domestications. For example, "The wisdom of the unnamed Pharaoh is called into question when even women are smart and bold enough to defy him. . . . Even women are superior to him in wisdom" (Weems 1992:31, echoing Exum 1983). This insistent "even" comes not from androcentrist but from feminist exegesis, apparently so determined or accustomed to pick quarrels with the Bible that it misreads compliments for insults, upgrading for downgrading. In fact, it stereotypes both parties to the encounter, always invidiously. Pharaoh is anything but stupid, and certainly no living male Hebrew's inferior. As this foreseeable variation among men indicates, women rank below them along a hierarchy other than "wisdom," namely status or power. On the contrary, Rebekah,
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if not Eve herself, already overcomes status through "wisdom." The midwives follow suit, only with greater honor: they exercise the same characteristic in a better cause, against an opponent who has thus far combined shrewdness with absolute power to leave the in-group helpless. And Miriam resumes the enterprise, now vis-à-vis a woman of Pharaonic statusas though the Bible would cross the variables anew, unsettle any sexual package dealing. Nor does wisdom remain a female (or Hebrewess) expertise or monopoly, any more than a constant: Joseph has proved himself to be what the Pharaoh of his time calls him, the "wisest" in the land. Given such endless characterdynamism, "even" applies neither way. Seeing that women rather than men enact throughout this phase the group's true, higher self, the culture heroines belie even more obviously the universalist prefabrications of so-called cultural criticism. Recall Simone de Beauvoir's early feminist charge that Man always casts Woman as the Other: it is no overstatement that such uncritical stereotypes run to the verge of paranoia and, given the Bible's web of alterity-lines, megalomania. Actually, when it comes to the second Exodus adverse encounter, the royal antagonist as well as the Hebrewess deliverer break the metastereotype afresh: not even the cross of femaleness with foreignness (Hamite at that, and amid genocide, too) quite imposes polar otherness on her, any more than her father incurred that label because of his maleness. Yet nor does she, qua woman, assimilate to the Self. As with the midwives, briefly, the sister takes her cue from the Princess, whose utterance reveals a heart softer than Pharaoh's, but nevertheless Egyptian, royal, undecided. Upon the Princess's exclamation, in (translated) Egyptian of course, Miriam therefore hastens to play the inferior, eager to please and volunteer service on the terms laid down by her betters. Of course, I say, because the original foreignness of the discourse exchanged within the represented world (and on the bank of the "Nile," the Egyptian-derived ye'or, too) should, per se, be taken as read in context. It has not been so taken, for the usual reasons, but suffered outright denial, more than usual, to the loss of the finer touches orchestrated in the process. They all go to disclose how the mimesis of alterity ties up with the rhetoric of solidarity, both that pretended by the inset culture heroine abroad and that pursued by the framing national artwork in relation to members of its own culture and hers. First, then, a word about the dialogue's underlying heterolingualism. Granted that "the Egyptian princess is . . . viewed by an outsider and not from within the Egyptian court," it does not follow that "she speaks Hebrew" (Childs 1974:12). 29 The non sequitur also multiply violates the Bible's ideopoetics, foisting on it a preBabel naiveté compounded with an ethnocentrist linguistic imperialismnowhere more grotesque than here, since the highest royalty on earth would be discoursing in the tongue of her bond-
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people. With a few sentimental touches added, "What could be more charming, more beautifully self-aware, than a fable of deliverance in which the Egyptian princess is wholly benign, knows Hebrew, and rejects the male violence of her father?" (Bloom 1990:243). What, indeed, if one blanks out the surface homogeneity of Pharaoh's own expression in violence and physically edits out whatever might embarrass the fable, such as the text's "non-J" core of Hebrewness (ibid.:141)? Rather, that the lady speaks "Hebrew(s/esses)" is precisely a reflex of her Egyptian utterance, never quite benign even where the encoded public vict-image co-occurs with an act of secret deliverance. Invariable precedent clinches the question: Pharaoh's daughter would hardly speak to herself and to her inferiors otherwise than Joseph the Hebrew, and the Hebrewess/Hebrewess-assigned midwives, did to their superiors. As always in Hamite adversity, the native-looking intergroup dialogue represents and overlies a conversation in the appropriate foreign medium. The interest of the episode goes deeper still. If the Princess requires a translator for our comprehension, Miriam also enacts the self-translator within the encounter itself and at levels ranging from (hetero)lingual system to (hetero)cultural thought. So, while the narrative frame has particularized the infant as a Levite, descended on both sides from the third son of Israel (2:1), it is "Hebrews/Hebrewesses" that recurs on both sides of the inset dialogic fence, always boasting the latest Pharaonic novelty of one-word gentilic. The servant adapts her discourse to the term of reference, and to the equally low plane of knowledge, expressed by the mistress. Again, the intercultural shibboleth becomes the nucleus of a wider rhetoric of feigned identification on the part of the self-translator. Miriam thus plants her own ideas in the addressee's mind as though she were merely voicing them, echo fashion. If the Princess considers the infant to be "from among the children of the Hebrews," then she must want "a nursing woman from among the Hebrewesses." And, to provide for the more distant future, it is of course all ''for thee": the nurse, like herself, will be happy to minister to the Princess's adopted child. An ironic measure of success is that Pharaoh's daughter not only ratifies the stranger's ideas of Hebrew nursing and Egyptian adoption but even echoes back their pretended echoes of her wishes. "Shall I go? . . . Go"; "And nurse him for thee? . . . and nurse him for me." The superior comes to imitate the inferior's imitation that she apparently dictates. By such adroit action and language, the humble volunteer carries everything before her: the Princess committed to the foundling; his survival and welfare and whereabouts ensured; the mother appointed nurse and paid for her trouble. From a higher and longer perspective, closed to all the humans on stage, the infant also grows up in the best of possible
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worlds for a national deliverer from bondage: maternal nursing among "the children of the Hebrews" with royal upbringing in the oppressor's mansion, as the Princess's "son," among the freest of the free. "It is almost as though the decree was designed to get Moses into the custody of Pharaoh's daughter'' (Greenberg 1969:39-40); but there is no "almost" about the womenfolk's immediate design, eventually leading to greater things. In her modest sphere, Miriam anticipates Godrather than, as will emerge, her brotherdown to the retributive despoiling of the Egyptians. Indeed, "the Hebrewess midwives" themselves, their speech elicited in defense of past conduct and their action rewarded by heaven, never managed to outwit Pharaoh to that extent: in their sterner ordeal, leaving the palace on their feet was achievement enough. But they would doubtless applaud, and recognize in Miriam one of themselves: if not literally their own selves, going from strength to strength, as the Rabbis would have it, then certainly a kindred spirit. Stiff-Necked Prophet, Versatile God, Mimicking Villain: Three Forms of Self-Translation The one apparent exception to the Hebrewgram's rule of unequal dialogue, located next on the Exodus chronology, only proves it the negative way: nonobservance tests and, having boomeranged, validates the rule's constraint, its ground, its effects on action along with communication in the Bible's world. An eloquent measure of the need for Joseph-like, then mid-wives-like, then Miriam-like self-adjustment to the privileged addressee is what happens when a later and greater culture hero, Moses, fails to oblige in the selfsame Hamite environment, royal presence included. This negative lesson arises at the beginning of the national struggle with Egypt, and all the more dramatically because Moses stands opposed here to God himself as well as to his human forerunners. In structural terms, variant repetition (of heavenly in Mosaic discourse) meshes with contrastive (observance vs. breach) analogy, intracultural with intercultural encounter, auspicious precedent with plot arrest, to thematize the Law of Nomination afresh. Observe the structure of repetition launched in the Burning Bush theophany. At the stage of forecast, as long as God plans the work of deliverance with Moses himself, he not merely assumes but sets up their common frame of reference: (6) I am the God of thy father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob . . . (7) I have assuredly seen the affliction of my people in Egypt, and have heard their cry because of his taskmasters; I do know his sufferings. (8) And I have come down
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to deliver him from the hand of Egypt and bring him up out of that land to a good and broad land, to a land flowing with milk and honey, to the place of the Canaanite, the Hittite, the Amorite, the Perizzite, the Hivite, and the Jebusite. (9) Now, behold, the cry of the Sons of Israel has come to me; also I have seen the oppression with which the Egyptians oppress them. (10) Now therefore come, I will send thee to Pharaoh that thou mayest bring forth my people, the Sons of Israel, out of Egypt. (Exodus 3:6-10) This circles back to two key junctures in canonical history. One is the promises made to the Fathers in Genesis. Having listed the promisees by way of introduction and self-introduction to their heir, God echoes the promised good things throughout, none more resonantly than those of nationhood and name. Thus the promise to Abraham as early as the first call: "I will make a great nation of thee, and I will bless thee, and I will make thy name great" (Genesis 12:2). Then to Jacob, with the two items in reverse order to the greater glory of the nomination cum re- and prenomi-nation: "No longer shall thy name be called Jacob, but Israel shall be thy name. . . . A nation and a company of nations shall come from thee" (25:9-10). To echo the nomi-nation (in "my people . . . the Sons of Israel . . . my people, the Sons of Israel") is to reaffirm the patriarchal covenant. In view of developments since, however, reaffirmation must involve restoration, for the covenanted "greatness" has been won and lost, fulfilled and frustrated abroad. At the same time as the discourse harks back to the patriarchs in Genesis, therefore, it alludes verbatim to the Exodus starting point, with its even-handed conferral of nationhood on both lineage groups, followed by one-sided denial. "There arose a new Pharaoh over Egypt . . . and he said to his people, Behold, the people of the Sons of Israel is too numerous and too mighty for us" (1:8-9). Now, speaking to Moses, God not only recalls but also restores the international balance that Pharaoh has meanwhile upset by degrees and decrees of violence against the Israelite people, Egypt's current "Hebrews." To reverse the reversal forced in the process of subjection, the countermovement toward liberation starts by equalizing afresh the terms of national reference. An end to vict-image, before anything else. This is why we, with Moses, find the divine voice so insistent on parity in every respect, down to grammatical number, with its implications of corporate vs. atomistic existence. The original singular of the opening, long lost, now amply reappears ("his sufferings . . . deliver him . . . bring him up"), except when the plural best matches the antagonist's side ("the Egyptians oppress them"). So do the national title, entity, entitlement. Just as there is "Egypt" so there is "Israel"a people with a unique name and habitation ("land . . .
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land") and destiny, all assigned (indeed newly proclaimed and rolled together) by the Lord of their fathers. Like the earlier Pharaonic movement toward disparity, the countermovement back to parity begins with language; and, like charity, it also begins at home. To this extent, Moses ("Hebrewed" in infancy, "Hebrewing" his "brothers" in Egyptianized youth) stands for the Israelites at large, who badly need to be delivered from the image and selfimage of inferiority hammered into them ever since the new Pharaoh's accession. In birth and rebirth as in bondage, in communal as in ancestral and personal fortunes, the name is the thing, not least for the name-bearer himself. Speaking of birth, indeed, note that God's very first order to Joshua after crossing the Jordan enjoins the revival of another act of postnatal symbolism lapsed in expatriate adversity, namely: circumcision, and again on a nationwide scale. The closer you look, the tighter the relation between the group features. The negative linkage in Samuel, "Hebrew" vs. "uncircumcised," thus implies the positive coupling "Israel/circumcised" forged since Abraham the Hebrew and illuminates the dark circumcision scene gone through by the Egyptian-bred Moses on his way to reIsraelize the kinfolk that Egypt has oppressed into Hebrewness (4:24-26). As for Exodus and Joshua themselves, observe also the long-range thematic pun that spans God's two addresses: the present de-Israelized and deterritorialized "Hebrews" in bondage (ibrim, relegated by the enemy Across the River, eber) stand opposed to the renominated Israelites "crossing'' (obrim, from 'br) into their own land under Joshua, except that neither entity is in good repair for the Chosen People. And the way to repair loops back at each phase to the distinctive symbols established between God and the Fathers. The restoration of the proper sign in discourse, as of the proper sign in the fleshboth covenantalis an equivalent and earnest, a promise and prerequisite and preenactment, of the divine workings to be unleashed on the Hamite enemy, Egyptian or Canaanite. Indivisible, these modalities of action yet unroll in due order. Symbolic comes before naked power: "Today I have rolled away the disgrace of Egypt from you" (Joshua 5:9). 30 So, in effect, God tells Moses throughout the opening address quoted above. Yet soon thereafter, in drafting the message intended for Pharaoh, he withdraws halfway toward the Egyptian frame of reference: Say to him, The Lord, the God of the Hebrews, has chanced upon us; and now, pray, let us go a distance of three days into the wilderness, that we may sacrifice to the Lord our God. (3:18) God having just made such an issue of turning back the wheel to the starting point, covenantal and ethnohistorical, why return it now the other,
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alien, "Hebrewing" way? And if so going alien, why not go all the way of return, to the suppression of "the Lord" himself along with his "Israelite" people? A change in either reference or source has often been conjectured here. By the former, "it was Israel and not the Hebrews" (i.e., the entire Hab/piru class) whose release God initiated (Lewy 1957:3). But this synchronic partition is manifestly inane on its own crosscultural ground. If the present "Hebrews" no longer co-extend with their foregoing Exodus namesakes and God sends Moses to deliver "Israel" alone, then why should he call himself after ''the Hebrews," here of all places? And if you think of action logic, who would employ the class-name, at the risk of misleading the antagonist about the extent of the demand, when bent on singling out the (Israelite) part from the (Hebrew/Hab/piru) whole, a determinate people from a motley underclass? Rather than twisting among the three terms, now forming a social pair, now an ethnic match, the co-reference holds throughout between the two terms alternating in the Exodus narrative, as elsewhere in the Bible. Witness the constancy of reference amidst the interchange of the referring expressions, "Israel" and "Hebrews," in the mouth of one speaker after another: first Pharaoh (1:9→1:16), now God (3:6-17→3:18), later Moses (5:1→5:3). To clinch matters, God will switch labels even within one continuous utterance, from (re-)nomi-nation or national entitlement to de-nomi-nation (as in our verse, where "Thou shalt come, thou and the elders of Israel, to the king of Egypt," and invoke "the Lord, the God of the Hebrews") or the other way (e.g., "Thus said the Lord, the God of the Hebrews, Let my people [ammi] go" [9:1]). It is the referential continuity that brings home the to-and-fro switching of the discontinuous ideopolitical values. More popular is the division into sources, whereby J inclines to "(the God of) the Hebrews," E to "Israel." In keeping the reference steady, this genetic hypothesis avoids the crossculturalist's trouble with the discourse but incurs plights of its own. In the immediate context of the utterance, it (or its "editor") leaves open the gap that every approach must resolve: why should God change divine attributes for the worse, along with titles, once he gets down to the business of introducing himself to Pharaoh, his people's victimizer and his reputed opposite number in Egypt? The ethics of the discourse is only part of the question, and not the most worrisome part, except to the easily shocked moralist. How, Abarbanel frets, could the Blessed One order Moses to utter a lie in his name? Instead of "Let us go a distance of three days into the wilderness," wouldn't it be more suitable to tell Pharaoh outright, "Release the people from the burdens of Egypt!"? 31 Now, strictly and importantly, the prospective lie is not to go forth in God's name but in Moses', like Samuel advised to anoint David under cover of sacrifice (I Samuel 16:1-3). Nor is the lying of a
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culture hero in face of the enemy unprecedented within Exodus itself, if one remembers the midwives, their ethics likewise impugned and defended since the Church Fathers. The narrative suggests a continuity, presumably for better rather than worse, between early trickery and late, female and male, human resistance and superhuman deliverance. The greater wonder is why, in coaching the prophet, the Deity not only stoops to the title "God of the Hebrews" but should also be supposed to have manifested himself in the pagan form of "chance." While the God-inspired white lie has its counterpartsdown to making a pretext of sacrificethe mistitling and the heathen-style theophany remain unique throughout heavenly self-parlance. This excess of ideological fractures invites a joint dialogical closure (again reminiscent of the midwives and the Miriam precedents on the human level, and so all the more notable for reenacting under heavenly auspices the drive toward harmony in adverse encounter). Within the rhetoric of dialogue, all these incongruities become felicities once lined up the way communication goesfrom overt voice to inner ear, from present divine speaking to prospective royal hearing. Self-description borrowed from the foreign lexicon, then revelation modeled on the heathen pantheon, then cover story invented to overcome Egyptian resistance by guile or face-saving: the lord of the universe projects ("translates") himself into Pharaoh's universe of discourse, putting the other side's mentality before his own (to say nothing of his envoy's) dignity and ideology, the bid for persuasiveness above the real balance of power. Increasingly so, to the extent that the three items of self-projection trace an ascending as well as cumulative (lexical→conceptual→factual) order of divergence from the truth. Another measure of the infinite graduation of the distance between image and reality, this order captures here the lengths to which the Almighty goes in harmonious self-imaging beforehand. Among the adjustments or concessions made in the process, "God of the Hebrews" fulfils a strategic, because multiply introductory, role: the transparence and acceptability of the divine credentials are likely to affect the reception of the worshipper's message as a whole. To set the work of deliverance on footin intercultural (Moses/Pharaoh) contact, as within the native (God/Moses) circleone must begin on the right footing. Moreover, God has the best reason to anticipate semantic and conceptual trouble in introducing himself via Moses to an audience who does not know him at all, and would not know his "Israel," or not by their proper name. Suggestively, the reason lurks in an earlier phase of the very same Burning Bush exchange, just between God's initial ringing invocation of "Israel" and his present comedown to "Hebrews." That intermediate phase, I would argue, has given him a lesson in self-reference, a foretaste and a forewarning of the difficulties ahead, through the contact with his
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own elect people, starting from their appointed leader. The value-laden God/people analogy in designation, elsewhere expressed in terms of grammatical (mis)numbering, spreads here to the axis of lexical choice between the old and the new word-images. In the immediately preceding stretch of dialogue, Moses' query with regard to the Name triggers a mini-drama of incomprehension: Suppose I come to the Sons of Israel and say to them, The God of your fathers has sent me to you, and they say to me, What is his name?, what shall I say to them? God said to Moses, Ehyeh asher ehyeh [I am/will be what I am/will be]. And he said, Thus shalt thou say to the Sons of Israel, Ehyeh has sent me to you. And God further said to Moses, Thus shalt thou say to the Sons of Israel, The Lord [YHWH], the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you: this is my name forever, and this my remembrance for all generations. (3:13-15) At the beginning of the scene, God already revealed himself to Moses as "the God of thy father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob" (3:6). But the prophet-designate having mastered the formula, to which he now reverts ("the God of your fathers") in short, he goes on to impugn its adequacy to the public business ahead. A meaningful and reassuring description, as a memento of things past, the historicism yet falls short of a nomination suitably associated with divine being, essence, potence, what we today call ontology. It is this "name" of God, proper in the revelatory as well as the linguistic sense, that the people will want to know and he must supply. But the famous "ehyeh asher ehyeh" response leaves the inquirer silent, because, I would claim, too puzzled for words. What does the answer mean? Does it form an answer (signifying "Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh is my name")? Or does it bespeak an evasion? (i.e., "Let my name be whatever it is." This would be comparable in force to the parrying of Jacob's or Manoah's questions by the angel, "Why dost thou ask my name?'' [Genesis 32:29, Judges 13:17-18], and in form to Moses' own shirking of the call later, "Send, pray, by the hand of whoever thou wilt send" [4:13]). Response or rebuff? Elliptic or complete sentence? If the former, what sense is the addressee to make of the compound name equating two identical instances of the verb "to be" (hyh) in the first person? If the latter, has an impasse been reached? Moses simply does not know and, for all the pretensions to the contrary, no human can do any better to this day. Wisdom literature, across the cultures for once, puts a premium on silence. While ignorant of so much
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as whether the name is a name, how can you tell what is in the name? The vocal expense of words on the crux since, by numberless interpreters, 32 only reenacts (or, wisdom-wise, counterpoints) by its sound and fury the dramatic auditor's wordless puzzlement. In keeping his peace, he waits and calls for enlightenment. But neither does God's amended follow-up improve matters, though it cuts down the original phrase to the one-word "ehyeh" and provides the rest of the sentence ("has sent me to you") for clarity. Moses, and the reader, have now discovered what's what in the (to them, virtually foreign, otherworldly) language, nothing more. (Possibly less, because ehyeh, "I am/will be," as a verb in the first person, does not yet make quite a transparent reference to God as third-person "sender.") With the syntax almost resolved, the mystery centers in the opening lexical item, the topic of the clause and the dialogue alike. How to map the unfamiliar lexis onto the known (''natural") world? Beyond the idea of Being, readily decodable by etymology, from hyh, what does the name Ehyeh signify? The bearer's constancy over time? Ubiquity in space? Plenary or transcendent existence? Future or ongoing providence? As all such options are left in play, and intermix to divergent effect, Moses continues silent. The best possible Israelite auditor still out of his deptha running index to the limits of human comprehensionGod must try once again, taking even less for granted and aiming yet lower. (The link to the Oppressor's creeping withdrawal from "the people of the Sons of Israel" accordingly tightens.) The shift from the first-person Ehyeh ("I am/will be," etc.) to the third-person YHWH ("he is/will be," meeting the demand for "his name") would by itself complete the disambiguation of the syntax ("He . . . has sent me to you") but leave the unknown quantity opaque as ever. When it comes to divine mysteries, the shared linguistic forms on the surface only underline that God's is a foreign language to humans, even of the chosen minority and minority culture. Self-revelation demands selftranslation, a cross between accessible image and arcane identity, more so than either party envisaged at the outset. Hence the third attempt settles for the composite "the Lord [YHWH], the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham. . . ," where ontological mixes with historical self-reference, future promise with ancestral precedent and providence. The exigencies of comprehension ("translation") behind this mixture determine the order and proportioning of its two elements as well as their choice. For the new, ontology-oriented title (preserving in the tetragrammaton YHWH, "the Lord," Ehyeh's linguistic root hyh and with it the root idea of quintessential Being) has its mate and gloss in the traditional appeal to history (borrowed verbatim from the human inquirer's "God of your fathers" and, to make doubly sure, nailed down through the relisting of "the fathers" in question, now declared eternal along with the
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Deity styled after them). God having created Man in his own image, he now half-images himself in his creature's, to suit the low imaginative power displayed even by the chosen among the chosen at the moment of choice. For once, neither Babel nor bad faith nor any cultural barrier is the origin of the trouble, since the otherness is other-worldly: common language must end where the divine heterocosm and idiolect begin. As the newly mixed formula rolls on and on, moreover, the exigency of re-re-naming the Name once for all makes ever-increasing demands on the heavenly self-introducer. Observe the complete final version to be relayed for want of human wit: "The Lord, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob." In the unfolding, the appeal to the form of apposition as a last self-explicative resort generates an assorted and recursive make-up. Thus, no sooner has the primary apposition ("the God of your fathers") been provided for intelligibility than a second one follows to gloss the gloss: the ensuing roll call, slow and particularized, will not assume so much as familiarity with the Fathers of the nation to be addressed. And if the appositional self-reference as the God of the fathers is picked up from Moses ("the man knows this at least"), recall that Moses himself has acquired and carried over the phrase from the initial Burning Bush address, which then proceeded to itemize the same fathers (3:6). In effect, the Deity as auto-translator goes back to square one, leveling down the mystery, reinsuring against ignorance and oblivion, explicating explications, repeating for the people's benefit the formula already impressed on the prophet, taking no chances whateverand all because those dull minds would aspire to nothing less than his Name. "What shall I say to them?" So the two major terms run together for the purpose are coordinate and co-referential, but otherwise hardly symmetrical: from length (one vs. eight words in the original) to sense, even sense-modality (e.g., ontology vs. history), to viewpoint or discourse role and bearing. The first member is a or the proper name, the second a portraitlike array of descriptive references; the first ineffable, therefore obscure, the second earthbound and interpretive; the first geared to the speaker's will or challenge to revelation, the second to the (present, a fortiori prospective) auditor's horizons of knowledge and understanding. In short, the redundant and ill-paired apposition serves to minimize dialogic friction or, if you like, opposition. And judging by results (4:27-31), the mixture has done the trick, though you would hardly think so in wading through the voluminous scholarship on the issue. Where commentators have waxed solemn and polemical, the Bible dramatizes a seriocomic encounter between unequal orders, all in wonderful keeping with its poetics, from the bedrock of divine vs. human epistemology upward. Mystery being mystery, history alone supplies a meeting ground for the two ordersexcept that human vanity, now as then,
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would still penetrate the secret that divinity itself offers to reveal but then needs to wrap up again and again in face of Mosaic blankness. Step by step, then, God is driven to the limit of compromise between truth and expediency, correct selfrepresentation to the other and effective communication with the other. By inference from minor to major on the scale of otherness, this frustrating experience with the elect leader must have determined him against a repeat performance with Moses' opposite number, Pharaoh. Waving the proper divine credentials in his face, or otherwise standing on ceremony with him, would only sidetrack the embassy into a quarrel (fruitless, except to the ill-disposed king) about the relations of "God" and "Lord," "Hebrew" and "Israelite," words and images and things. To keep that prospective interchange short and to the point, God opts instead for beginning it from the equivalent of the recent one's terminus, with a mixed ''name." Freshly mixed, of course, because outside the Israelite sphere the invocation of the patriarchs would no longer qualify for reference, much less for explicative co-reference with the Tetragrammaton. The addressor's removal from his true voice and self must be proportioned to the addressee's otherness, whose thematic context-dependence gets multiply underscored: by the invariability of the divine referent and his qualitative difference, by the quick succession of human interlocutors, by the variance amid referential unity in contact with them. Moses is accordingly ordered to introduce his deity to Pharaoh under the title "the Lord, the God of the Hebrews," cast in the same grammatical mold as "the Lord, the God of your fathers . . ." and to the same cognitive end: the variant appositions are each devised to elucidate the invariant novelty in the terms most assimilable by the respective ears. Not for nothing are the two parallel composite formulas also immediately sequent in the dialogue (3:15-16, 18) and ranged in an ascending order of compromise, from traditionalism to heteroculturalism. Even this further compromise, significantly, draws the line at articles of faith. God never deigns to pluralize himself under any name: it remains "the Lord, the God . . . has chanced," both titles in the singular again, because monotheism is not for sale. (Contrast "ilani habiri *," "the gods of the Hab/piru*" in the Hittite treaties [Bottéro 1954: nos. 75-86, Greenberg 1955: nos. 121-32], predictably forced into equation by crossculturalists;33 and contrast also "the gods" of "the Hebrews," ill-numbered in the mouth of the Philistines at Aphek.) More positively, within the broader frame, the apparent retreat toward heteroculturalism doubles as an inverted judgment on the two human parties or cultures at strife, the name-callers and the name-victims: their earthly hierarchy is turned around in the self-naming to agree with the logic of election. Coming from the Elector, the new formula reproportions the overtones of irony and sympathy to the prospective auditor's disfavor. In self-Hebrewing, "the Lord" translates himself into an image that is both
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most self-distancing from those creatures least worthy of his true imagehaving undone themselves, they would undo othersand most self-identifying with those chosen to live up to their divine creation. This underground thrust will come to the surface before long, when the Almighty resumes the humble name amidst the plagues, and again centuries later, when the Ark ("gods" of the "Hebrews") in Philistia reenacts the name-bearer's fate under the name. The play between assumed and genuine solidarity (a fortiori between God's image in man and man's imaging of self, other, and God) takes deeper understanding than given to an outsider, least of all Pharaoh. Yet the words must enable him to hear whatever suits him. Intended for the ears of a proud and powerful enemy, the second message of deliverance therefore does exceed the limit reached in the earlier, ancestor-invoking one, and on the front of nomination to begin with. The text assigned to the prophet substitutes the inglorious but acceptable as well as intelligible "Hebrews" for the just restored "people" and "Sons of Israel," then reckons in "chance'' with the Egyptian monopoly of faith, 34 then even bends truth to the expediency of "a distance of three days into the wilderness," silently glancing at the multiform local apartheid and intolerance. Given the projected hostile encounter, then, the title assumed by divinity for international negotiation is no evidence that it or its variants at large constituted the genuine ethnicon originating in the bearers themselvesthe "national name" within "Israelite self-determination" (Lemche 1979:13-14, 20; cf. my review of similar claims earlier in the chapter). Among all Exodus self-Hebrewings, far from being "the most likely candidate" for the part, this makes the least likely. In a dialogue thematizing forms of reference, "God of the Hebrews" has occurred nowhere, "Israel" everywhere, as long as the dialogists conducted national business within their native circle. The shift in selfdesignation arisesor more exactly, will arise, as it always has arisenin mixed Israelite/Hamite company, vis-à-vis the highest power in the land. Of course, unlike Joseph and the midwives and Miriam, his forerunners in "harmonious" self-translation, the Almighty is Pharaoh's superior in power as in everything else. But then Moses isn't, and the call for release will supposedly issue from himliterally in his group name and in the name of his group ("us . . . us . . . we . . . our")as a "Hebrew" response to theophany and appropriately addressed from below. Such masking or delegation of voice not only wards off the indignity but also answers the overall strategy of deliverance. God would begin by suspending power in favor of persuasion, with a double end in view: to enable Pharaoh to make his choice in the most Egyptianized, face-saving circumstances, and then, upon the expected recalcitrance, to multiply the divine signs of power in Egypt. Implementing Phase One of the scenario, then, Moses needs to go
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even further in self-translation at the palace than the line of women credited with his survival, because his task is harder. For example, God's real name, the tetragrammaton YHWH ("the Lord"), is markedly less familiar than "the Hebrews'"; national liberation a taller order than clandestine life-saving; the initiator's role more delicate than the counteragent's. In all this God runs true to the Psalmist's encomium: "With the loyal thou art loyal, with the blameless man thou art blameless, with the pure thou art pure, but with the perverse thou art devious" (18:26-27; cf. II Samuel 22:26-27); and one might add, with the foreigner schooled in perverse "shrewdness" thou art foreign-like, switching codes of language as well as nonverbal behavior to avoid trouble, facilitate understanding, and get things done by human accord, if possible. Nor is this divine versatility at odds with the Psalm's immediately ensuing tribute to divine might (''A humble people thou wilt deliver, and the eyes of the exalted thou wilt bring low"): in the Exodus drama, adumbrated in the inaugural scenario (3:18 vs. 19-22), both features stand out sharply enough to suggest a crossgeneric long-range allusion between the poetry and the narrative. Out of pride or inexperience, however, Moses will not bend even in imitation and direct quotation of God. His departure from the scenario grows yet odder if we note the passage (easily missed within the homogeneous-looking text) from the language of the fathers, in which God must have approached and commissioned him, to the language of the antagonist. Not that a bilingual (or, counting Midian, polyglot) like Moses would experience much difficulty in switching languages. A suggestion to the contrary has been made apropos of the call scene itself, but not very persuasively. Shocked at the idea that God might have chosen a stammerer for a conversational partnerface to face, mouth to mouththe twelfth-century exegete Rashbam substitutes a lesser evil, bearing upon outside adversity rather than the prophetic office. He glosses Moses' demurrer, "I am slow of utterance and slow of tongue" (Exodus 4:10, cf. 6:12, 30), as "I am not proficient in Egyptian enunciation, since I escaped from there in my youth and now I am eighty": the congenital speech impediment turns into a contingent language barrier in deference to the prophet's image. Moses in self-portrayal accordingly excuses himself from approaching Pharaoh under the plea that his Egyptian has grown rusty abroad. 35 Even so, Aaron as spokesman, indeed "mouth (piece)" for him, would repair the interlingual no less than the physical deficiency. "Thou shalt speak to him and put the words in his mouth," God conclusively answers. The trouble is rather that "speaking" a language (we recall the ado about the Name in apparent unilingualism) entails more than a command of "words"; therefore mediating it, whether one plays the interpreter oneself or delegates the role, needs to go beyond word-for-word translation. Surface
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must join forces with deeper translation, borrowed linguistic expression with native-like reflection, speech with thought proprieties, as Rabshakeh's self-translated ("Judaean/Jewish") yet self-defeating message to Jerusalem warns from the opposite, foreign side of bilingualism. Code-switching means throwing or "translating" oneself into another universe of discourse in the fullest sense, along every cultural axis, from the verbal to the conceptual to the communicational. (Anne Elliot's serf-transfer to the heterocosm of country life foregrounds, if anything, the extraverbal switches requiredin "conversation, opinion, and idea . . . matters of discourse . . . imagination . . . memory"and within one language, too.) All the more imperatively so in the face of royalty, Egyptian divinity incarnate at that, as God intimated beforehand and Moses should have been in the best position to know anyway, from first-hand experience with courtly life and literature. Whether still fluent or grown rusty, whether translating himself as he goes along or calling on Aaron's good offices, Moses the ambassador does resort to Egyptian, but not as an Egyptian would speak it, far less as Pharaoh might expect to hear it spoken by a person bred in the highest circles at court: Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, Send out my people that they may hold a festival for me in the wilderness. (5:1) Brusque enough in the vernacular, this would sound worse in Egyptian. For the code-switching is here reduced to, and actually below, the bare minimum of (hetero)language. The agreement that expositors find between the prepared message and its actual transmission therefore carries "sachliche Identität" to lengths worthy of the Duchess in Wonderland. Rather than transmitting to Pharaoh God's "essential thought . . . in different words," the playback does violence to both thought and word, to the thought behind the original wording, and so overturns the hyperbole that "no one could have interpreted God's words better" (Jacob 1992:120, 114; see also Childs 1974:105, on the "close parallel'' to 3:18). The ambassador's performance only repeats the operational drift of God's text, excluding its annotative and rhetorical provisions for the medium, the venue, the addressee, the ostensible power hierarchy, the real culture gap. The very frame of discourse undergoes a strategic change, in everything but the receiver's sheer identity. The originator (literally, "sender") transforms from naked humanity to their shielding deity, the mediator from delegate to prophet, the utterance from an appeal made by the bondpeople themselves ("us . . . our"), in compliance with God's tacit wishes, to a report of God's official message concerning the people that owe him allegiance ("my . . . me"). Instead of a spokesman for an undergroup caught between their earthly and heavenly lords, Moses proclaims himself an envoy
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quoting the Lord's word to an earthling, royalty or no royalty. Hence the variations in detail, all meant to assert, if not to parade, the new addressor's dignity and authority at the expense of the enjoined set toward the addressee. First and foremost, "Hebrews" gives place (more exactly, re-reverts) to "Israel." In the same vein, the force of the speech act mounts from request (''Let us go," nelkha, in the humble cohortative) to command ("Send out my people," shalah *, in the imperative, and the intensive Pi'el at that): the command sounds even harsher when stripped of both the temporizing or face-saving "three days' distance" and the ordinary courtesy shown by "pray." (If a "lie," though, even the bare mention of a feast goes from bad to worse in the direct attribution to God.) Nor is any trace left of the allowances made for pagan theology, such as the heterolanguage of "chance" (the counterpart of, say, Rabshakeh's lip service to "the Lord" as the author of Assyria's power over Judah). All these gratuitous toughenings seem to prefigure the mediator's fatal departure from God's order in the wilderness (Numbers 20:7-13): he would rather hammer than talk the rock of Egypt into disgorging its prey. The version transmitted by Moses to Pharaoh (and translated back into so-called Biblical Hebrew by the narrator in his report to us of the Mosaic reported discourse) has grown curt, peremptory, uncompromisingly Israelite, less than wholly intelligible, and so certain to offend in dialogic manner on top of conceptual and sociopolitical matter. But then, if the offense is not intended, giving it would not deter the offender, either. For him, proper thought must go hand in hand with proper utterance in ideal unity, as it were, such that the knowledge, right, and might vested in the self will find expression without regard to earthly appearances, to the other's diametric otherness. He will never "become all things to all men," certainly not play the underling to this man, enslaver, dehumanizer, infanticide, king-god. Speaking in God's voice and under his true name, the prophet rather speaks as Pharaoh's superior. By way of crosscultural analogy, one recalls Plutarch's anecdote about the opposed receptions of Solon the Athenian lawgiver and Aesop the fable-writer by Croesus. "[Aesop] was upset to hear that Solon was so ungraciously received, and offered him some advice: 'I suppose, Solon,' he remarked, 'when we talk to kings, we should tell them either as little as possible, or else what they most want to be told.' 'Not at all,' retorted Solon, 'either as little as possible, or else what they most need to be told'" (1960:71). The foundational lawgivers would appear two of a kind. Among the various elements that compose this change of front, the divergence in naming at once shows itself to be a tactical mistake, whereby Moses plays in effect into the royal addressee's hands:
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Pharaoh said, Who is the Lord, that I should listen to his voice and send Israel out? I do not know the Lord, and nor will I send Israel out. (5:2) Is his question about "the Lord" rhetorical, and so expressive of defiance? (I.e., "Who is he to tell me what to do?", the dismissal conveying in turn a sense of superiority that a less polished empty boaster articulates: "Who is Abimelech, and who [we of] Schechem, that we should serve him?" [Judges 9:28]. Though elliptic here, the king's self-aggrandizing "Lord''/"I" comparison would then betoken the rival deity as well as the monopolist of faith and force.) Or does the query genuinely mark the limits of his information, so that it reveals ignorance? (As understood by Shemot Rabba, where Pharaoh consults his reference books: "He started reading: The god of Moab, the god of Ammon, the god of Sidon . . . He said to them: I have looked for the name of your god in my archives, and haven't found it" [5:18].) Even so, given the neglect to pursue it, the lacuna exposed reads at the same time as a lacuna flaunted, to equal the knowing defier's contempt. Whether a matter of values or also of facts, polemically widened or wide in reality, the culture gap is doubtless there between the sides, yawning wider than it would if Moses followed orders. Not that the royal questioner waits for an answerhe, unlike his bookish midrashic surrogate, could hardly care less about such knowledgebut that the foregoing address does provoke, almost beg his question. After all, if an earlier Pharaoh "did not know Joseph" (1:8), a recent Egyptian celebrity, this one may genuinely "not know the Lord" associated with an outlandish slave-class theologynot even in the minimum sense of identifying the ineffable name by which that divinity "did not make [himself] known" to the very patriarchs (6:2-3). How can you expect a foreigner (long before Rabshakeh or Cyrus, themselves speaking of "the Lord" by diplomatic rote) to have been initiated into a mystery of reference/existence/providence apparently closed to the founding fathers in Canaan and, when disclosed, an object of bewilderment to their descendants in Egypt (3:13-15)? God, of course, never expected any such knowledge. Why else should he have coached Moses to introduce him by the two-valued phrase "the Lord, the God of the Hebrews," if not with an eye to a working balance between proper and translated reference, between revelation and rhetoric, novel and current imagery? Given the jarring "Lord," "Hebrews" must ensue for harmony: one culture shock at a time, in due order of importance, urgency, sensitivity, gradability, all synchronized. Only, the first in a line of prophets less accommodating than their sender, as well as their fellow humans, Moses upsets God's balance in that he retains the form of apposition while reversing its filling to proclaim total opposition. War is in
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effect declared, ahead of schedule, on two fronts. His shift from the explicative "Hebrews" to the explosive "Israel" compounds the unintelligible mention of "the Lord" by the unacceptable (unmentionable, if remembered) name for God's people. (Compare Falstaff's hail-fellow-well-met salute to ''King Hal! My royal Hal!", reviving in the nomination unwelcome memories of equality and precipitating the callous denial, "I know thee not, old man" [Henry IV, Part 2, V, 5, 44-51].) This misstep enables Pharaoh to parade (or pretend) ignorance of the bizarre referent, and even to demonstrate his superior adaptability and skill in derisively miming the ambassador's alien referring expressions as a cause (and/or cover) for dismissal. He proves himself the better listener and echo-speaker. It is as though the midwives or Miriam and their Pharaonic interlocutor (joined in "Hebrew" parlance before) have sadly changed roles, voices, achievements. If Moses inverts the strategy of assumed identification, by his openly hostile counterlanguage, then so does Pharaoh in the guise of re-echoing. His "the Lord . . . Israel" appears, twice, in the vocal equivalent of inverted commas: the borrowed sound gives an ironic overlay and twist to the negative sense, verbatim repetition counterpoints practical rejection and ideological nonrecognition. Quite a show of power, but more discoursive than naked. Presented with such an opening for one-upmanship, the master of words can afford to keep the big stick in reserveas did "the Lord, God of the Hebrews." So the embassy backfires, rather than just fails, because the ambassador has literally altered his terms of reference in code-switching, and the wrong way for a diplomat under handicap, too. Of the three self-translators en-chained in the foreaction of deliverance, two have learnt better than to monologize in contact with the other: God by trial and error, the king through occupational art and generic "shrewdness," uncannily turning the tables ("'Hebrewesses'"→"'Israel'") on the midwives who double-talked their way out of his predecessor's vengeance. The one who should know best, from his upbringing between the cultures, his exile abroad, his perplexity with a fourth, divine idiom, his ready-made message, shows himself least adept, because unadaptable. Where Moses should cross into Pharaoh's world of discourse to establish a common ground, if only a shared medium of negotiation, he made it possible for Pharaoh to score an easy victory by laughing him out of his own ground; instead of borrowing or "quoting" for the nonce the foreign interlocutor's parlance, with whatever mental reservations, he lost the initiative by finishing at the quoted end. He has simply defeated himself, and not at all through his speech impediment, unless taken as a metaphor for communicative deficiency at large. He stammers not so much in as between two languages. The failure enacted by the structure of repetition plays off (bi)lingual competence against dialogic ill-performance: his "speech and tongue," rather than being "slow,"
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move too fast for an ambassador, too freely for the good of his mission. International dialogue, especially between groups at odds on every issue, has its own rules, by which the inferior party, humanly speaking, must learn to play, and play best, in the absence of alternative choices. Perceiving his error, Moses at once falls back on God's diplomatic version: The God of the Hebrews has chanced upon us; let us, pray, go a distance of three days into the wilderness that we may sacrifice to the Lord our God, lest he smite us with the pestilence or with the sword. (5:3) Instead of a change to a parallel source, fabricated by lazy geneticists who divide the ethnica between "traditions," 36 we have a return to a harmonious key of discourse within a single plot of repetition. Only now does Moses repeat verbatim, and (as instructed) in propria persona, all the allowances originally made for his opposite number, and even tops up the reorientation by some amenities of his own devising. He restarts with the most transparent, because ultra-Egyptianized, term for the divinity and the worshippers involved, "The God of the Hebrews": "the Lord" is elided under reintroductory pressure, so as to get across the explication without the explicandum. (Such minimalism, of course, again falsities the notion that "the Hebrews" may point to the larger class of Hab/piru. Even Moses the beginner would know better than to jack up his demands in hasty retreat, when he abandons the very Name.) There duly follows the heathen model of encounter with the divine (''has chanced upon us"); then the cover story ("let us go, pray, a distance of three days into the wilderness that we may sacrifice to the Lord our God"), including the cohortative form of request ("let us go," nelkha), the marker of politeness ("pray"), the limit set to the withdrawal ("a distance of three days"). For good measure, he concludes on a note of entreaty ("lest he smite us with pestilence or with the sword": "us" Hebrews, your workforce, or including you Egyptians as well).37 But all to no avail or, as it soon transpires, worse than none: the interview once over, and the gloves taken off, the bondpeople pay with extra labor (5:5ff.). However doubtful whether the original, Egypt-friendly message could have swayed Pharaoh at the time, it is certain that the inflexible variant left no chance at all for persuasion, starting off the encounter on the wrong foot, or footing. Like the first patriarch (Genesis 12), the first leader and prophet opens his international career with a minus score in Egypt. An exception, as I said, this lesson complements the national history's autocritique by changing its target: if the people have grown inert and
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unresistantthe menfolk at leastthe prophet is still too hard and rash. The analogy also bears out by way of negative contrast the rule of intercultural address in adversity, and with it the rule-governed symmetry to the adversary's own talk. The latter's Hebrew-calling, in the first pattern, normally both implies and enlists such hostility toward the referent as may lead to genocide. The second pattern, however, transforms everything in concert: the dialogic addressor's grouping shifts to insidership, the thrust of his persuasion to harmony with the outsider addressed from below, the cause-effect chain to a favorable turn. The (self-)Hebrewer would now save a victim's life (or, in Jonah's case, abase oneself for having endangered the addressee's). God, then, wants Moses to follow the emplotted rule, hitherto invariably triumphant, as his own survival attests. And the effects of unruliness on the plot ensue at once: instead of an advance, let alone a turn, there comes an arrest, even a further deterioration and, regarding the nonconformist's mind, a gap. Not that the exception itself remains unmotivated, hence "ungrammatical" in context, as it would do if uttered by some genuine Israelite underdog (or if the martyrs defiantly proclaiming their Hebrewness in the Apocrypha were transported into the Bible). For once, the addressor knows his adversity to be unsacred, superficial, temporary, lingering in the alien beholder's cum oppressor's eye only: he foreknows, actually, the Hamite master plot. But then he jumps the gun. The Almighty who enlightened him also insisted on the other's illusion (complete with imagery) being treated, until further notice, as if it were the reality. Moses therefore speaks not out of perspective, factual, oracular, ethnocentric, any more than out of character; but he does speak out of the multiply constrained "Hebrew" perspective set up for the occasion: out of the role that his analogues in Israel assume willy-nilly, with more to show for it than his overzeal for role-inversion. So we find the discourse rule or grammar broken by and through the roleplayer himself to instructive effecta matter of art, not chanceahead of the ''grammatical" peripety that will duly come. One intergroup logic, one dialogic pattern, one evolving hero/subject, with two enactments juxtaposed to counterpoint their unity. This is also why the departure joins uniqueness to subjective motivation. In breach of the Hebrewgram, Moses stands opposed on well-defined grounds to an otherwise polyphonic chorus of voices. Thus his human rescuers from Pharaoh at and after birth, outside and within the family, perhaps even the nation; thus the omnipotent yet versatile God of the fathers who put in his mouth the words suitable to the overture of the struggle for "Hebrew" deliverance; thus even himself as a later translator outechoing the mock-echoer in visible and licensed superiority. (In the age of the monarchy, and in contact with Philistia, I Samuel 29 picks up the thread: David, just "Hebrewed" by the distrustful sranim, treats Achish
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to a show of solidarity in appropriate Hebrew character.) The multiple opposition from all these quarters ramifies still further and intermeshes still faster. Take the human/divine equivalence on the side contrasted with Moses. Like God, for example, the midwives are national redeemers, though by short-term defensive installments only. Again, the ultimate confrontation of leaders has its analogue-by-precedent in the scene between the women of the same families, with Miriam cast in a quasi-divine role, from superintendence at a remove to humble-sounding approach to wry irony. She prefigures God, not her brother, down to the token retributive despoiling of Egypt. Women, modern research has generalized, tend to show themselves more alert and adaptable to sociolinguistic variations than men (e.g., Labov 1980:287, Trudgill 1982:93ff.). Whatever the truth in realityand what reality?this is by no means exclusively the case with literary representations of the mimetic instinct in heterocosm travel. Austen's Anne Elliot contrasts with both her father and her sister, Henry James's Strether with both the male and the female unbending New Englanders of his circle. More radically yet, the tale here excepts the protagonist not from the inflexibility of the rest, like the novels, but from their adaptability, even if we leave God and the derisive Pharaoh out of the "Hebrew"-based comparison. As with the midwives and Miriam, so earlier, and on a larger scale, with Joseph, the first Hebrew slave, the first alien to master Egyptian, the proverbial keeper of brothers, and the agent of lifesaving descent into Egypt. They have all internalized the Law of (De)Nomination. Within the broad Egyptian framework, compare the analogue chosen by God to play much the same leading part within the movement toward expatriation as Moses fulfils within the countermovement toward repatriation. An interpreter of dreams, Joseph is an expert at projecting (or, in the happy double sense, translating) himself into another's mind while keeping his own counsel and divinely inspired vantage point. Small wonder that his references to himself (as hailing from "the land of the Hebrews") and his heavenly guide (as the international "God," e.g., Genesis 39:3 to Potiphar's wife, 40:8 to the courtiers in prison, 41:16 to Pharaoh) never offend against the decorums of mimesis: they harmonize with the actual usage of Egyptians, whether foes (like Potiphar's wife) or friends (like the Chief Cupbearer in 41:12, Pharaoh himself in 41:38), and he averts friction accordingly. (By the same token, he keeps, or calques, "the fear of God" for the brothers' ears.) But the practice does not really call for Joseph's special gifts, any more than for God's versatility or for the women's developed survival instinct and technique. Even a character otherwise so stiff-necked, and so exclusive, as Jonah introduces himself at a pinch by the tame "I am a Hebrew, and I fear the Lord, the God of heaven": the ethnicon conformist, the theology double-barreled (note the form of ex-
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plicative apposition). Throughout Biblical history, Moses approaching Pharaoh is the only Israelite who needs to learn the hard way that, in dealing with advantaged foreigners, one must recode thought itself, or else the heterolingual speech will aggravate one's disadvantage. Why the Egyptian-bred Moses of all people makes the exception, and how long, are issues to which we shall come back in the next chapter. Meanwhile, observe that the plot gap opened by his unique divergence continues to widen, and the mystery accordingly to thicken, in the Exodus sequel. For Moses' initial "The Lord, God of Israel" also contrasts with the recurrence of the unIsraelite formula "The Lord, the God of the Hebrews" at the head of later messages transmitted to Pharaoh by the same messenger (starting with the very next oracle in 7:16, then 9:1, 13, 10:3). Given the changed circumstances, moreover, this opposition of the earlier to the subsequent usage looks anything but simplee.g., mistake in imagery followed by repairif not downright self-contradictory. Once the messages arise from a position of demonstrated strength, why should the formula imposed by the weakening Egyptian party continue to recur? The blows struck for national freedom under God must surely have some relation to the freedom of speech, on matters of national identity above all? Doesn't the sociologic of reference, as of dialogue in general, cut both ways? Actually, it does, and in style, via the indirections of tit-for-tat. To this extent, at least, the oracles Hebrewing the (omni)potent self bear a family likeness to "the Lord's" stretching of the retribution brought down on the apostates in Judges 10:11-14, from deed to ironically pluralized word. "Go and cry to the elohim whom [asher . . . bam, plural] you have chosen; let them deliver [yoshi'u, plural] you at the time of your distress": straight punitive logic, inverted polytheistic language at several translational removes from the addressor's genuine voice and values. 38 As with the mimicry of foreign-like natives at their idolatrous worship and discourse, so with that visited on the arrogant foreigner in self-demeaning national parlance. Far from conciliatory, or automatic, this recurrence of "the Lord, the God of the Hebrews" comes to sound more and more like a grim joke played on the Pharaonic addressee, an act of retaliation with translational interest. Yes, the more visible the shift in the balance of poweras Pharaoh gets to "know the Lord" and even learns to speak his chosen name under the influence of the plaguesthe stranger the continued attribution of the demands for liberty to "the God of the Hebrews." Except that this feigned Egyptianism now pays Pharaoh back in his own ironic coin, turning against him the very device whereby he initially mimicked the Mosaic terms ("the Lord . . . Israel") to counterpoint the realities of power. The boomerang effect incurred by Moses' error of judgment reboomerangs on the king in the Almighty's mock-deference; he who parodies last, parodies best. (At the climax, God's killing of the firstborn, the stem of "Hebrews"
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even modulates from nominal and adjectival into verbal form, with terrifying impact. "We'abarti in the land of Egypt that night" [Exodus 12:19, 23]: the verb, usually rendered as "I will pass," comes to mean, in the upside-down interlingual context of reprisal, something like "I will 'Hebrew' it. . . ." Compare also the outset, when the oppression launched pen yirbeh, "lest he multiply," achieves nothing but the counterproductive ken yirbeh, "so he multiplied.'') Yet the inversion of roles and voices by divine might, which ended in forcing "Hebrews" out of the Egyptian lexicon forever, as well as the name-bearers out of the Egyptian slave camp, only underscores anew the envoy's original lapse from the proprieties and rhetoric of assumed self-alignment, if not from the reality principle behind the dialogic façade. According to the Hebrewgram, there is a time for the self's de-nomi-nation, as there is for nomination and renomination: times, indeed, to judge by the Almighty's own example of protean code-switching back and forth.
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5 Intergroup Dramas in the Secret Life Speech and Thought In the first two discourse patterns, a mixed bunch of characters have appeared in action, reaction, repeat action, counteraction, verbal and otherwise, along the "Hebrew/Israel" axis. Yet the speech enacted, we have found, also points inward, so that plot and perspective can hardly be told apart. Man or woman or God, individual or collective, unblessed Hamite or elect Eberide/eberite, translated into the Bible's vernacular or self-translating out of it, initiator or negator or reviver of "Hebrew" or "Israel" parlance: whoever the dialogist, he combines the role of agent with that of subject of discourse, that is, of utterance and implicitly of consciousness. For the two roles meet in, or beneath, this value-laden intercultural parlance, if only to divide its users into warring camps. Not that the division proceeds straight along the lines of usage. With the arena located between cultures in all-toopressing contact, with the war now declared, now underground, with fortune changing sides and accordingly reshaping the very terms of exchangemedium includedhow will speech lines run parallel to battle lines, vocal reference to true allegiance, code- and image-switching to change of heart? Quite the contrary often happens, as the systematic interplay of unity and variety throughout our first two discourse situations has established. The interlocutors in parley may sound alike"Hebrew" on native lips, "Israel" on foreignwithout relinquishing their divergent emotions, beliefs, identities, viewpoints, subjectivities, any more than they abandon their pragmatic group interests, short- or long-range. The forms of verbal, symbolic agency will then alone vary, most notably with the balance of power: between free expression and forced self-translation either way, between offense and (self-)defense, the underdog's assumed sympathy and the top dog's lethal irony, even between Moses' untimely breach and useless hurried repair of the proprieties. The Law of (De)Nomination is one, its reflexes many and context-sensitive. By this intercultural poetics, we have all along inferred thoughts, trains
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of thought, changes of thought regarding the "Hebrews" from the foreign or foreign-like speech exchanged among the characters: the characters' inner "monologic" experience, in short, from their dialogic expression plainly quoted and translated by the narrative. The secret life, in its diversity as well as its drama and dynamics, maps itself onto the uneven, tension-filled surface language of reference, self-reference, type-reference, counterreference. I would now emphasize the diversity as a bridge from thought mediated through variant and veiled social voices, which ring in the arena of ethnopolitics, to the altogether silent thought of the next pattern. Where foreign-spoken, so that the reference comes from outside the referent group, improper speech about "Hebrews" mirrors in context improper thought, if only the automatism of Pharaoh's daughter. The speaking and the thinking subjects are at one, in the wrong. Where foreign-ad-dressed, to the wrongful reference group, such speech mimes such thought on the lips of right-thinkers, whether pressured or crafty or ironicas "Israel" in Hamite address (e.g., Pharaoh's to God's envoy) variously reciprocates the exterior mimesis. Considering the diverse voices and the still more diverse implications for thought ranged under the group term, how to pinpoint its unity in diversity? By now the answer should be evident: the stereo-reference to Hebrewness distinguishes not speakers but a manner of loaded speaking, not foreign persons of certain extraction but a certain foreign persona or perspective, adoptable (and thus also sheddable, even reversible) on either side of the adverse encounter according to circumstances. Conversely with the honorific "Israel," and exactly because so opposed to "Hebrews'' under the Law on all fronts: plot, perspective, typability, sociopolitics, ethnography, history. Born of strife, in the dark trial that the eponym went through at the last Jabbok crossing, it is uttered to mark or mask the utterer's genuine self reflecting anything from the native's true sense of group identity, vis-à-vis all others, to the Hamite's grudging acknowledgment (akin to the dark angel's at bay) of the better image of his other. The unity in diversity, if you will, thrives upon the dynamics of adversity between the cultures. That is why the iron rule also transcends all situational ambiguities between the first and the second category. When Moses' sister, Miriam, offers to provide the lady's foundling with "a nursing woman from among the Hebrewesses," it does not greatly matter whether she speaks as a Hebrew about Hebrews to an Egyptian or pretends to be an Egyptian herself. Either way she simulates and outsmarts the dominant foreign mentality just expressed in her interlocutor's "This is from among the children of the Hebrews" (Exodus 2:6-7). Likewise, and apparently in greater need of untangling: Were "the Hebrewess midwives" themselves Israelites or merely assigned to the Israelites? However we resolve the old puzzle, the resolution cannot be found
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in their type-name for their clientele, voiced by either party and pattern. The statement that "all the examples of the use of 'Hebrew women' and '-children' have been put into the mouths of the Egyptians, never into the mouths of the Israelites" (Lemche 1979:14) is false to the art and to the data alike, no less than is the converse erasure of "Israel" from the Philistine vocabulary. The bipartition of usage by nationality, into ''reference group vs. referent group" fixture, works neither way, with neither ethnic referring term. As Pharaoh and his daughter resort to the heteroculturalismthe one for vict-image, the other moved against victimageso does Miriam, herself flanked by Joseph and God in persuasive self-designation. From either side of the analogy, it is even inferrable that the midwives also knew the honorific ethnicon and would (actually, given their sympathies, would rather) publish it in the appropriate circumstances. Like anyone else, how they speak uncovers by itself not what they know but what they want to make known, not what they think but what they think fit to express at the moment: not who they are between the nations in conflict, hence between the Hebrewgram's set-ups, but where and why they locate themselves in public discourse related to the conflict. In a way, this not merely forestalls but turns on its head the antisemitic refrain that, whatever the surface polish, the Jew will always betray his imperfect command of the indigenous tongue. As Richard Wagner put it, "the Jew speaks the language of the nation in whose midst he dwells from generation to generation, but always as an alien" (quoted in Gilman 1990:179). The rhetoric of solidarity, effectively contrived by Hebrews from Joseph onward in testing circumstances, shows their insight into the spirit of the heterolanguage as discoursed, even as updated among its native users. And the occasional ambiguity about the rhetorician's filiation as such underlines the point: you cannot tell the Hebrew from the Hamite by their shared idiom, any more than could their interlocutors within the drama, the antisemites of yore. In the telling, if anything, it is the Hamite who "speaks the language of the nation in whose midst he dwells from generation to generation," canonized forever, "but always as an alien" notably giving himself away to us readers by Hebrewing the ancestors. The inset rhetorician on the weaker side just echoes him for a purpose, desperate enough to muzzle the heart's voice and truth's. Whatever the heroines' ancestry, therefore, it scarcely makes an essential difference to our reading of their excuse to Pharaoh, as a piece of translational mimesis at two removes from them: from the artful dialogic self, heterolingual to excess, and from the innermost, ethical ("God-fearing") self that the dialogue overlies, and audibly belies. Hence the two removes in idiom amount to none in attitude. In "Not like the Egyptian women are the Hebrewesses," they translate or project themselves into the sociopolitical frame of reference established by Pharaoh's order to them, "When
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you midwife the Hebrewesses . . ." (Exodus 1:15-19); and the narrator translates both addresses from the Egyptian for the benefit of his audience, while still preserving or miming the invidious Egyptian terms of reference. The heroines' self-translation works for the maximum appearance of harmony with the state; the teller's counterpart, for linguistic harmony with the native reader amid multifold perspectival disharmony with the ethnicon given and wrung by the oppressor, to his own ultimate discomfiture at the hands of the righteous. The crucial question is therefore not whether the speaker but whether the speechand hence the viewpoint adopted in it, freely or feignedly, for good or for ill, from within or without the speech communityis supposed to be foreign, and if yes, whether foreign-controlled. So it is in both encounters, where the original speaker (the midwives, Miriam) vocally associates herself with the Egyptian perspective of the addressee, down to the literal echoing of the codename "Hebrews," in the interests of the afflicted nation or of the individual destined to lead it out of slavery. Accordingly, whether or not the midwives are Israelite, whether or not Miriam passes herself off as Egyptian, their utterance certainly reveals a foreignness with a view to concealing their true mind. The line between speech and thought turns criterial in the Hebrewgram's third pattern of group imagery. To repeat my introductory outline of it, we have to do here with quotation, "hidden, if not buried," of foreign thought involving "Hebrews." Against both the stereotypic practice and the critical metastereotype of the Silent Other, the archforeigner rises here from vocal to inner speaker, with further effects of destereotyping, too. Become a subject of consciousness proper, his thought is no longer enclosed and implicit in his utterance, yet (just like that of the Israelite) it may still need disentangling from the teller's. The instances range in their marked-ness between such extremes as "the Philistines said, Lest the Hebrews make sword or spear" (I Samuel 13:19) and "the Egyptians will not eat bread with the Hebrews, for that is an abomination to Egypt" or ''the fugitive came and told Abram the Hebrew" (Genesis 14:13, 43:32). Of the two extreme cases, the former's reading as interior speech appears relatively straightforward, because the characters no doubt speak (and the narrator quotes them): the question is only whether to each other or to themselves, or perhaps both. In contrast, my placing of the latter among quotations, a fortiori thought-quotations, will no doubt excite wonder. This descending order of transparence combines with the rising order of enacted othermindedness to suggest the novelty and flexibility latent in the Bible's third discourse-pattern of "Hebrews." The pattern introduces a twofold shift, under the same Law of Nomination, from the common denominator (evaluatively, de-nominator) operating thus far. Social dialogue gives place to secret monologue as the
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object of report, and, most often, the direct form of report to the nondirect. More exactly, in terms of the problematics of reading: we no longer encounter here any unequivocal character-speech at all, while what we do encounter need not announce itself as thought either but may pass for standard objective authorial discourse, unless the reader knows his Bible. By itself, the former, defining shift opens a new range of subjectivity, an interior (though, as always, alien) perspective on the "Hebrews." The name-caller's mind, opaque in the human condition and ambiguous in the speaking, grows for once visible in superhuman mind-reading: the teller shares with us not just the discourse frame but the highest, or deepest, privilege of omniscience. A rudimentary example would be the above insight into the antiHebrew group of Philistia as a weapon monopolist. If "said" means "said to themselves,'' then they mean exactly what they say, however left unspoken outwardly. Where compounded with its optional matethe quoter's avoidance of directness, often of visible indirectnessthe novelty goes underground in the compositional as well as the psychic sense. The result is more intricate and still less understood than either of the earlier patterns, mainly because the surface grammar no longer delimits the reporter's frame from the reportive inset, via a transformer (some transitional reporting verb, like "He said"). And in the absence of graphic inverted commasoutside the Bible's repertoire altogetherthe disappearance of their linguistic equivalent ambiguates the givens, from pattern recognition upward. If no transformer, then no explicit figural anchorage (or what I will call "discourse of source"), no marker of a passage to the subjective, let alone voiceless world occupied for a while by the "saying" adversary. The tale's very modulation into report tends to go unnoticed, as the history of exegesis abundantly shows, in or out of Hebrew/Hab/piru context. The reference to "Hebrew" does not then seem to originate in any character but in the Biblical storyteller himself, so as to form a piece of overt homebred narration rather than of covert heterolingual quotation. Little wonder that "Abram the Hebrew," fallen victim to precisely such objective misreading, has remained an enigma. Expressive Duplexity: Ellipsis as Mimesis Although the novelties most often concur, however, the defining feature strictly attaches here to the reported object, across reportive variety. This third discourse-pattern need not compound the secret life in the happening with a secret inside-view in the telling. It rather materializes in all forms of quotation: direct, indirect, free indirect, and the linguistically indeterminate kind (e.g., a lone word or phrase implying subjectivity) that I call
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telescoped (1979: esp. 111-33). Exhausting and even stretching the options known to modern theory, the list marks an ascending order of complexity in the Bible's encoding of foreign thought into "Hebrews." For comparative simplicity, therefore, let us begin by reconsidering an earlier example of direct translational mimesis: There was no smith to be found in all the land of Israel, for the Philistines said, Lest the Hebrews make sword or spear. (I Samuel 13:19) Frame, transformer, inset unroll in orderly sequence: the quotation leaps to the eye, but not its object and sphere within the represented world. Does "said" herald, and the "Lest" clause quote, speech or thought? Public or private discourse? Communion or self-communion? The former reading looks inescapable, because the Philistines must have voiced their fear among themselves as a preliminary to concerted action against the other side's armament. In this regard, their externalized discourse would parallel the utterances they produce elsewhere throughout I Samuel, all indubitably vocal, headed by the very first utterance, where an analogous "Lest" mobilizes apprehension for action: "Be men, Philistines, lest you become slaves to the Hebrews" (4:9). But the parallel is not complete. It rather brings out one disparity, in formal grammar, and thereby implies another, in the placement of the quoted voice between spoken and silent language. On the surface, the presence of a main clause there ("Be men") to introduce the ''lest," as required, underscores its absence from our equivalent and "Hebrew"-fearing inset. Below the surface, this opposition in linguistic grammaticality finds its rationale in poetic (discoursive, contextual) typology. The "Lest" clause standing on its own here is self-sufficient, an exemplar of a radical (and, historically, innovative) form of ellipsis that the Bible devised for the mimesis of thought. Compare a monologue of fear reported without translation. Against the practice of levirate, Judah withholds his youngest son, Shelah, from Tamar, "for he said, Lest he die, like his brothers" (Genesis 38:11). Where, the grammarian within us objects, is the main clause, "I will not give him to her" or something to this effect? But the narrator violates grammaticality in transmission, as the hero does family law in the action, for a reason: the quoter focuses exactly, by iconic ellipsis, what the quotee wishes to conceal, not least from himself, from his own better self. With the main clause conspicuously absent, the decision made by Judah remains implicit in the quoting discourseas it presumably did in the quoted thoughtto underline the secret, fearful, and none-too-creditable motive. Even in self-address, the subject of consciousness buries his denial of the widow's rights under the scenario of what may otherwise happen. Poesis in and through
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the mimesis of inner grammar. So bold and precocious is this innovation that some timid souls would iron it out. (Thus RSV repairs the ellipsis by overspecifying the quoting verb, or transformer, and switching to indirect quotation: "For he feared that he would die, like his brothers.") Modern novelists, knowledgeable about the shortcuts and suppressions of interior monologue, would rather applaud the artistry. 1 The concern felt by the deniers of armament to "the Hebrews" has likewise been subjected to repair jobs, as though to meet the characters' experiential by the interpreter's textual anxiety, under- by over-articulation. E.g., "for the Philistines said, We must beware lest the Hebrews make a sword or bow" (Klein 1983:122): the interpolated main clause tips the balance in favor of vocal self-warning, as the RSV's "for he feared that . . ." seals the lips of Judah. Or notice how the latter's counterpart is produced here within the direct style: "The Philistines said to themselves: 'The Hebrews might make swords or spears!'" (thus McCarter 1980:232). The changes again affect both the reporting verb (from expression in general to self-communion) and the inset report (from subordinate to self-contained clause), but with results that make a larger difference than in the Judah example. There, given the hero's need for secrecy, the twofold repair mars the psychoartistic effect. Here, it not only domesticates the imaging of self-communion (grammatical sentence instead of ''Lest") but disambiguates the givens into self-communion ("said to themselves") where they actually point outward as well as inward. Over the Philistine "Lest the Hebrews . . . ," then, plot and psychology appear to engage in a tug-of-war: the logic of (concerted) action pulls one way, the art of (egocentric) motivation another. Nor can we look to the quoting verb for an answer, since the Bible's "said" equally ushers in speech and thought, dialogue and monologue, public and private discourse about the world, "Hebrews" included. However, the two readings converge by virtue of a further Biblical novelty, which literary theory has yet to register. Instead of (mis)taking dialogue and monologue for either/or incompatibles, the Bible rather treats them as gradable, even mixable opposites, and accordingly populates the range between the extremes with various intermediate or indeterminate categories of (quoted) discourse. One is hearing (i.e., the reception of a dialogic turn in the privacy of one's mind, to be exemplified below from Abram's listening to the Canaanite fugitive's news, then from Potiphar's to his wife's complaint about the Hebrew slave).2 Another, most widely and typically attested in collective discourse, as here, I would term expressive duplexity. When the earth opens to engulf Korah and his gang, "all Israel that were round about them fled at their cry, for they said, Lest the earth swallow us up!" (Numbers 16:34). "Said" in thought or in outcry? Probably in both at once: some of the crowd, too dumbfounded for words, may just have
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felt, while others also voiced, the terror driving them all into flight. Similarly with the Philistines' "Lest," intermediate between Judah's twice-private (singular and silent) monologue of fear and their own twice-public (collective and vocal) dialogue of fear at Aphek. Another expressive mixture or cross, it even outdoes its Numbers analogue in plot value, newly assumed by the hatename: a subjective motive, arising within with the individual, is voiced for collective action. 3 Again, the duplexity captures and thematizes the ambivalence of the Philistine attitude no less than the pell-mell, silent/vocal flight of the crowd witnessing the retribution on Korah. Like Judah, they would be none too anxious to publish abroad their fear of their declared inferiors ("slaves"), if only on pain of losing face. At the same time, like Achish's fellow sranim who veto David's enlistment, they would have no hesitation in calling the Israelites "Hebrews" to their face. This also elaborates the contrast with more inhibited ways of name-calling, behind the target's back only, whether he is the Hab/piru in Amarna or the man in female sexist interchange. For the duplexity recalls the indeterminacy or intermediacy between our first and second patterns of "Hebrew." As with that between foreign and native but foreigncontrolled speech, the hovering between foreign speech and thought serves a constructive end: to dramatize the constancy and brutality of power-relations in, through, across the variables of discourse. Taken together, blurs and all, the three imagery varieties uncover the same reality where, given (existential) dominance, (expressive) license ensues. You may then speak and be spoken to as you think fit, speak without thinking, mix discourse genres and proprieties by thinking aloud even in mixed (e.g., Hamite/"Hebrew") company, always pleasing yourself at the other's expense. Abomination in High Places: Joseph's Feast between Dietary Taboo and State Terrorism The further away the report from the formalities of directness, however, the more covert the reported thought and the higher its interest. The secret life may then run as secretly in the telling as in the living; yet arise it must in the reading, or else we will get essentials (e.g., large-scale inter-group dynamics) wrong, misread or counterread, at best underfeed. Nor does the pocket size of the mindscapelikely to render the insight negligible elsewhere, altogether questionable in antiquity or superfine in the novelcorrespond to its significance. Within the Bible's art of miniature indirections, the opposite ratio of volume to value is the norm, as our paradigm will now show. Where thrown about Hebrewness, this double secrecy (triple, with the hidden foreignism added to the object and shape of mimesis) does not
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merely offer a bonus, luxury, feather in the skilled reader's cap, and deprive the unskilled accordingly. To begin at the penalizing end, incompetence is here apt to fall as low as the tissue of absurdities woven about the encounter between cultures in the Joseph cycle: What is amazing is the completely positive and friendly portrayal of the Egyptian people. . . . The portrayal gives the impression of a first encounter. Everything that is narrated is new to the narrator and his listeners. There is no sign of any anxiety to preserve what one has against what is foreign or any condemnation of the foreigners. The brief remark that the Egyptians may not eat at table with foreigners (43:23, cf. 46:34) can only be made by those who do not know such a custom. . . . The brothers become aware of the Egyptian prohibition to eat at table with Canaanites. Surprise such as this at the exclusive nature of Egyptian table customs is possible only in Israel's early period. . . . This detail, in no wise necessary for the progress of the action, is taken up only because it is a piece of surprising information for both the narrator and his listeners. (Westermann 1987:29, 126) A handy compendium of counterreadings, from whole to part, from part to whole. Not even the Bible's foolproof narrative strategy can insure against such resolute gullibility, or optimism or sheer perversity, as a watch guaranteed shockproof will disintegrate if you take a hammer to it. Every single assertion made here is false, cumulatively, interdependently, disastrously, and demonstrably so, though at times perhaps less than obviously. And it all intersects in the one-verse comment on the meal to which the disguised Joseph invites his brothers. The waiters served him by himself, and them by themselves, and the Egyptians who ate with him by themselves, for [ki] the Egyptians will not eat bread with the Hebrews, for [ki] that is an abomination to Egypt. (Genesis 43:32) Generally neglected, where not read backwards, this verse is the single most important prefiguration of the Exodus theme and conflict. Such working comes on top of the role already played by the aside in, and since, our first bird'seye view of the Hamite/Hebrew polarity. The specifics, the secrets, the group solidarities and separatisms, the contactto-conflict sequence of the whole encounter, all depend for their elucidation on the showdown's prefigurement across books, just when everyone appears to enjoy the "friendly" meal, an immemorial symbol of unity.
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Relate this juncture to the long perspective we must, since the verse flouts and outranges short-term coherence. Within the drama in progress between Joseph and his brothers, its sundry incongruities call for notice. Given the priorities of that drama, the obtrusive background information marks an ascending order of redundancy: from the note on seating arrangements, to its ground in local dietary ritual, which crowns superfluity with distraction, to the grounding of the ground in the antipathy felt toward "the Hebrews" by the locals on the margin of the tale. As the incongruity rises, so does the pressure for looking around, below, beyond the scene. The stage direction, overmotivated ("for . . . for") and overloaded ("abomination") with heteroculturalisms to the point of defocusing the family affair, takes on an importance larger and darker than the visible context. It opens two related issues of Hebrewness that will burst forth in the sequel. One has to do with Joseph, the other with his people ("brothers"), over against the Egyptians. The defocusing of the present scene leads up to the wider focus ahead: same actors, new roles and alignments. Concerning Joseph himself, at the moment estranged and symbolically apart from his brothers, the passage makes us wonder for the first time about the realities behind his standing in the land. Is his viceregal position so Egyptianized, glorious, impregnable, hence so diametric to his kinfolk's, as might appear thus far (and may still appear to the unsuspecting observer, whether the outlanders at table or the careless reader)? Take the emphasis on his being served apart from the indigenous guests, as well as from the nonresidents. Where the announced line runs between groups, he leads the way "by himself," with the brothers mentioned second and the regulars last. An innocent, upgrading explanation has often been assumed, most predictably by advocates of the combined theory: if Hebrewness, like Hab/piru-ness, defines a base social class, then the stigmas and trammels attached to it no longer apply to an ex-member who has been integrated into the ruling class. Of those present, he stands highest, "the Hebrews" lowest, and each is served accordingly. "Joseph's eating by himself was evidently a matter of rank, since the cultic and social taboo ('abomination, anathema') against taking food with Hebrews would scarcely include the Vizier who bore a pious Egyptian name" (Speiser 1964:328-29; cf. Skinner 1925 [1910]:482, Interpreter's Bible 1953:I, 793). But the text, with its intertexts, undercuts this assumptionreference, sociologic, binarism, ameliorism, and all. The undercutting involves the equivocal raising of the possibility with an eye to its ultimate dismissal. In our verse itself, the mini-sequence progressively draws the lines otherwise, thrice over. Once by running together "him" with "them," the brothers, so estranged; then by removing him in both order and space from those "with him"; then, through longer-distance
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echoing, in virtual question and answer form. Among these, the third device is the most suggestive but the least selfexplanatory. The detail lavished on the arrangement of the company already equivocates between return to precedent and mark of precedence. Ceremonial decorum aside, the scene harks back to the Viceroy's footing as majordomo, when Potiphar left everything in his charge "but the bread which he ate" (Genesis 39:5-6). Is the recurrent discrimination at table honorific, therefore, or again invidious? New apartness or old apartheid in new shiny guise? Social protocol or racial prejudice, or the one as veneer over the other to save the host's face? No sooner has the gap opened than it would appear to find its closure: "the Egyptians will not eat bread with the Hebrews, for that is an abomination to Egypt," now as then, then as now. His own father-in-law, "Potiphera priest of On," or even his own wife, will never have eaten with him, any more than did Potiphar at his kindest. Across the changes in time, rank, name, achievement, company, voice, the two Joseph set-ups mirror and fill each other out, to disturbing effect: a persistent ethnic segregation, regardless of everything else. If soand the warning signal is inferred, of course, not giventhe persistence runs to the label of Hebrewness itself. Its indelibility draws further support from the allusion to the grim end of the Potiphar tale. There, the mistress already joined two cultural features in imaging the supposed rapist as "a Hebrew man" to the household, the "men" under Joseph, then as "the Hebrew slave" to the husband, the master of them all. And her sociocultural variations go to fix race as a constant, ever potent, divisive, irredeemable within the culture. (So it actually was fixed in the external Nilotic reality, with its absolute Egyptian/nonEgyptian split: the Bible's truth-claiming image of the enemy again has truth-value, the imaged testify to their own racism in both contexts, as to their ethnocentrism at large, and the inference from the Hebrew-calling among them becomes a near-certainty.) Directly and memorably applied at the time to Potiphar's overseer, the label now resurfaces in generic ("the Hebrews'') form, still applicable to Pharaoh's viceroy along with his ex-compatriots at tablethe Beyond-the-Riverians invited by him to dinner, apparently for auld lang syne. Once a Hebrew, always a Hebrew, since to the Egyptian mind "abomination" overrides position? A reunion of abominables? "God has made me forget all my hardship and all my father's house" (41:51): if the Viceroy would leave behind his origins and anguish, then he seems to reckon without the longer memory of his adoptive culture, which wordlessly and politely registers, indeed ritualizes them, now as at every meal. In turn, this implication of unbroken (if unspoken) invidious type-reference carries over from ethnos and fellowship to status proper. On the face of it, of course, the king alone is his superior in the land. "Only with respect to the throne shall I be greater than thee" (Genesis 41:40). But,
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having learnt the need to keep apart the various cultural axes (e.g., power, respect, establishment) whose interplay defines "status," we may well ask how deep the analogy between Potiphar's and Pharaoh's trusty runs in fact, even in law. If the Hebrewness may persist, albeit under glossy cover, why not the bondmanship that went with it before? Amid the change of masters and responsibilities, has Joseph ever thrown off the strings attached to his debut as "the Hebrew slave?" Of all the appearance-and-reality questions broached so far, this may look the strangest, and the answer obvious, in the circumstances. The fact remains that the givens, whether internal or external to the canon, keep it open, alive, troubling. However seductive the assumption that Joseph regained his liberty as he came to power, it never materializes in the Egyptian documents. They tell us "practically nothing" about "the laws governing the emancipation of slaves"; which may imply that "slaves had no rigidly fixed legal status in Egypt and could pass, without any legal formalities, from a state of slavery to one in which they were regarded as servants" (de Vaux 1978:I, 315-16). Once in bondage, always bound? Given the richness of source material on the question (laws, contracts, passing notices) elsewhere in the Ancient Orient, this hole discourages optimism. Genesis itself joins this conspiracy of silence, as it were, except for one ominous clue. Whatever the powers and privileges bestowed on Joseph, they draw the line at freedom of movement. "Without thy approval," Pharaoh solemnly declares, "no man shall lift up his hand or his foot in all the land of Egypt" (41:42). However, as indicated by the go-betweens and excuses necessary to wangle royal permission for his attending his father's burial in the Double Cave (50:4ff.), the Viceroy himself must not "lift up his foot" across the Egyptian border: specifically not toward ''the land of the Hebrews," from which he was "stolen." To weight the clue, the rest of Jacob's offspring, never enslaved, dispense with such permission, just like the rest of the Egyptian nobility; 4 while the future "Hebrew" slaves will again have to apply for it through intercessors and pleas, with divine backing for a change. The higher our vantage point, finally, the more wide-flung the unspoken term of reference behind the dinner tableau. By virtue of the statement's omnitemporal generalizationunqualified by, say, "formerly"it may cover not only Joseph, along with his fellow Beyond-the-Riverians, but all Israelites up to the time of writing, the narrator's own day. "They will not eat with you either," he then informs his audience, "because in their eyes you remain abominable Hebrews." Such all-inclusive extension in scope (from token to type, from narrated to narrating world) would elaborate afresh the correspondence between personal and national history.5 As traced so far, the analogy consists in the rise and fall of "Hebrew" in Egyptian usage according to the user's power over the abused. Genesis having dramatized the process
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on a small scale, through Joseph's biography, Exodus will go on to show the old ethnicon revived in nationwide victimage, then re-forced out of social currency under the blows of counter-victimage: Pharaoh quickly learns (as does the extraBiblical Marneptah) to speak of "Israel" again. However, the Joseph precedent carries the analogy further, from mouth to mind, from intercultural to psychocultural and less triumphant effect. As the Egyptian guests to Joseph and his brother Hebrews, so the Egyptian people to their descendants since the Exodus. Underlining the gulf between speech and thought, voiced and voiceless image, our verse suggests that the wider lesson to come was not internalized either, and still isn't. Whatever his mouth professes, Pharaoh's heart has never really softened. By such interlinkage, Joseph counts not only among the "Hebrews" present but even as the typological Hebrew bondman. It is precisely because the responses to Hebrewness he elicits from the Egyptians cut across his ups and downs that they lay the ground for the otherwise abrupt ("mad," to certain readers) turnabout in the Exodus sequel. The history that will repeat itself on a nationwide scale through his agency, as phylogenesis, will also have been found pretold and motivated, under the guise of biography, in his lifelong vulnerability to ethnosocial animus, whether outspoken, as with Potiphar's wife, or silent, as at his own dinner table. Of the two labelings, the silent one is less direct but perhaps more eloquent than the vocal. A collective memory so long, so ugly, so intense, so sweeping, so unmindful of merit, will sooner or later burst into action. The arrested thought itches for utterance and performance, the festering vict-image for the release of victimage. And after Joseph's death, the conjunctions between the person and the people emerge in force. It starts with the analogy in their first exposure to the ways of the Court. The Cupbearer, once reinstated as foretold, "did not remember Joseph and forgot him" (Genesis 40:23); the king "did not know Joseph," nor the welcome extended through him to Joseph's kin, once come to power in better times and making out the nation. Private or public dream-interpreter under God, sojourner or leader into sojourn, the alien has now served his purpose. There ensues the quick transition from the new Pharaoh's "not knowing" Joseph to his instituting "shrewd" measures against "the people of the Sons of Israel." To forget the Viceroy is to remember the Hebrew and/or the Hebrews, as the Egyptians have always done, only now with practical results and accumulated interest: not content to obliterate the alien upstart's former greatness, the new ingrate regime would visit it upon his nation by downgrading them to the lot and name he "properly'' bore at the start. He rose too high, they, his congeners, have grown too many: pent-up hate and envy channel political fear in joint reaction to the abominable. A Hebrew remains a Hebrew, and if not a slave, then best enslaved.
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Moreover, the new Pharaoh's exhortation, "Let us deal shrewdly [nit'hakkmah *] with him" echoes back to his predecessor's tribute to Joseph, "There is none so intelligent and wise [hakham*] as thou" (Genesis 41:39). In rhyming across the regimes, the countermove against the people thus implies a counterstatement ad hominem, with the "him" changing (or doubling) its target: "Let us outsmart the foreign prodigy.'' This complex of motivation, shuttling between the group exemplar and the group as a whole, at once spreads further. In the reason given for the shrewd treatment, there lurks a manifold etymological pun on another form of reference to the slave that the Genesis king changed for an honorific and the locals accordingly suppressed during his viziership. After death, Zaphenat-pane'ah's old name, Joseph ("May God add [yoseph] to me another son," his mother wished), comes to life in the new Pharaoh's scenario, designed to inspire fear and ultimately liquidate every son. The idea of addition now binds together two Egyptian grounds for collective oppression: lest the alien people, in the singular, further "multiply" and "join [nosaph] our enemies." This increase in turn recalls that etymologized by Joseph, at a moment of wishful oblivion, into the name of his son Ephraim, "God has made me fruitful in the land of my affliction" (Genesis 41:52). The affliction of one-time Hebrew victimage now springs to life, too, with a backlash that matches not only the recurrence of fruitfulness on an unprecedented scale but also the return of the repressed. He never really forgot his origins, nor did his adoptive country. Likewise with the burial of Joseph in Egypt: the veto on his movement homeward, never placed on his neverHebrewed father, Jacob/Israel, apparently stretches to the afterlife, certainly to the group life. His fixture abroad soon ties up with Pharaoh's refusal, as early as his opening words in Exodus 5:2 and then throughout the plagues, to let Israel go. It is therefore symbolic (i.e., in typological character) that the departing ex-Hebrews should carry the first Hebrew slave's bones with them, and his alone, by his own prescient request (Genesis 50:24-25, Exodus 13:19). Now, Joseph's prescience having been denied (or spared) the intermediate group conflict, it foregrounds the problem of oursthe relations between Genesis-to-Exodus prolepsis and Exodus-to-Genesis prophecy ex eventu. All this inference-making that I have brought out, personal, national, actional, typological, intercultural, short- and longrange, germinates from the comment about the seating arrangements. (So do, you will recall, the kindred progressive disclosures and developments on the axes of lifestyle and faith, traced in "Polar Cultures in Contact, Nations in Total Conflict.") But how much of it arises in immediate sequential reading, as anticipation, and how much in retrospect only, as late (gradatim, not all together, at that) as the movement from Genesis to Exodus 1-13? Can we see through
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the appearances and foresee the reversalin contrastive parallel to the family affair, drawing toward a healing of the breachor merely retrace our steps when overtaken by events? On all the thematic issues and levels that first meet here, in the dietary aside, what is the balance of prospection and recognition, of forward-looking suspense and backward-looking surprise? Even with the advantage of hindsight, further, do all the lines of development prefigured enjoy the same measure of certainty? The answers crucially depend on where we situate the verse between the internal and the external poles, along three axes. One leads from polyethnic (crossnational, Hab/piru) to ethnic, uniquely Biblical (election-centered) reference; another, from objective (narratorial) to subjective (figural) discourse; still another, from heterocultural (Egyptian) to homo- or intracultural (Israelite) viewing. Not for the last time, "origin" branches off into three external/internal polarities, each calling for a decision on pain of misreading, even (as exemplified) counterreading. Does the group of "Hebrews" referred to in the verse (and accordingly their storied phylogenesis toward Exodus's "Israel'') belong without or within the nation? Is the reference to them made from without or from within the circle of characters? From without or from within the text's own culture? In short, who precisely gets opposed to "the Egyptians" with such intensity, who does the opposing (or, deeper down, in whom does the opposition voiced by the narrator originate), and where does the opposer himself stand? The different possibilities, with their combinations, make a tremendous difference. Thus, crossculturalists must gloss the verse's "Hebrews" as "non-Egyptians of whatever race" (Lewy 1957:5, Gray 1958:177) or "les asiatiques" serving the higher local culture (Cazelles 1958:202-203); so may interpreters of other persuasions. (E.g., "foreigners" in Vergote 1959:188-89, Fox 1986:13; "eber-ites," i.e., Mesopotamians, in Rashbam ad loc.; "bedu of the desert" in Redford 1970:235, or "Canaanites" in Westermann 1987: 126.) 6 Needless to say, if the Bible wanted to generalize the reference from determinate to all aliens vis-à-vis Egypt, it could and should opt for nokhrim (or, if intent on a more specific type of alienness, for bene eber, "Canaanites," and the like). Nor does the objection to widened Hebrewness end with the immediate context, because the same choice of group term flanks the dinner partythe mistress's going before, the new king's afterwhereby its recurrence signals the Genesis-to-Exodus continuity. The taboo would even appear less than sweeping in Egyptian reality: when Rameses II married a Hittite princess, not long after our scene on the accepted historical chronology, the wedding guests all ate together (documented in Helck 1964:112-13). Unsurprisingly by now, the Bible's focus proves truer to life than the generalizers ancient and modern. Taking the verse's "Hebrews" for such a mixed bag as Hab/piru incurs the worst trouble, on all levels: by now we may leave aside the recurrent
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objections and glance at the injury done to this two-book sequence. The crossculturalism would denationalize ("socialize") the plot of national becoming, emergency, and rescue from Egypt. Thematics aside, it would play havoc with the logic of action. Within the immediate context, "abomination" is a feeling much too violent to express a purely social difference. And regarding long-term developments, the overstatement would then at best lead to an anticlimax. The present notice of "abomination" would turn from a time bomb into a false or misdirected alarm and the aftermath of Joseph's death in Exodus would pivot about from a well-anticipated effect into a cause for increasing wonder. Rendered motiveless, the Egyptian oppression loses first its intelligibility (why now pick on the "Israelites" among, or instead of, all the ''abominable" Hab/piru?), then its rationality (why stretch the genocide plan, if launched against the Israelite threat, to all "Hebrews"?). Counterproductive, moreover, the hypothesis is also circular. The Genesis-Exodus discourse identifies no "Hebrews" outside Israel, nor does the outside source-material class any Israelites with the Hab/piru in Egypt or elsewhere. As usual, the social reference is a phantom of homonymy. Once the terms of the opposition have been duly locatedone ("Hebrews") within the chosen circle, the other ("Egyptians") withoutthe real issues of origin move to the fore, all bearing on perspective, the discoursive source of the comment about the bipartition, hence also on its authority. The structure of transmissionwhat I call the discourse of sourceshows a radical opaqueness unmatched elsewhere in the Hebrewgram, either in the patterns already met above or in the law's below. We know here who's who, better indeed than the two sets of dinner guests put together, but we do not know yet who registers whom in the given language and from which side of the fence, or (counting the intermixed loner, Joseph) the fences. To take up the second external/internal polarity, then, does the verse (the stage direction, followed by the two motive clauses) emanate from the teller as privileged observer, who addresses us, his frame-sharers, or from the dramatis personae as thinking subjects? Traditionally, the former, objective reading has been taken for granted. Even analysts who quarrel about the namebearer's identity, between the Israelite and the Hab/piru limits, agree about the name-caller's: "the editor himself" or "the narrator himself contrasts Egyptians and Hebrews on a point of custom." (Inter alia, Kraeling 1941:242, Greenberg 1955:92, Lewy 1957:5, Redford 1970:235, de Vaux 1978:I, 210, Westermann 1987:29, 126.) Whether or not this consensus fits the Law of Nomination or the textual detail, its own implications leave the matter open, because unpursued, and the answer reversible. Through the gaping hole in consequentiality, the same enigma of perspectival origin inevitably comes forth by another route. Objectifying the account would not really eliminate the dramatic
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subject(s) from it, as wanted, but only push him (or them) one level down, one mind-link back in the chain of transmission. The reason is simple. If objectified, the verse gains in authority, and so in long-range proleptic force, at the expense of its instant relevance to the dinner scene. The narrator then interposes it, apparently as local color, with an eye to the future "Hebrew" conflict latent in the present tableau of apartness: ostensible description, strategic propulsion. By the same token, however, the verse must then overlie a hidden subjectivity, where the motive clauses, at least, have their ultimate origin. Their very plot value for the sequel in Exodus hinges upon the characters' silently experiencing (and, if Egyptian, later activating) what the narrator now expresses for our benefit in a vocal aside, perhaps translates for us without endorsing. He relays but cannot possibly authorize, let alone originate, the sequence leading from inner cause (unilateral group antipathy) to visible effect (subgrouping at table, with bondage and genocide ahead). On every interpretation, therefore, the characters assembled perforce combine the role of subjects, feeling, naming, registering, typecasting, with that of objective diners, group members, neighbors-to-be. In the subjective role, they are even orderable into a chain. Among them, some could mediate, while others could produce and approve as ultimate originators, the thought-stuff that goes into the teller's finished discourse: scenic within narratorial mediacy, a glance at thought exercised or piled on thought, would nicely accord with the Bible's arts of report within report and with the Joseph's tale perspectival intricacy. Whether this occurs here or not, and if yes, who plays the inbetween observer, this is rather the question. The Egyptians present must ultimately lead the hostile secret life narrated; but they or some other agent(s) may also double as focus of narration, observing the scene, mindscape and all, from within. Who can the latter be? Only a cultural (or two-cultural) as well as situational insider, because no stranger to Egypt would penetrate, let alone share, the antagonisms running below the festive occasion. To read the Egyptian mind, it takes an Egyptian or his equivalent in inside knowledge: forgive the pun, but it does accurately reflect the coordinates twinned by the narrative here. The inside view of the anti-Hebrew drive presupposes the viewer's insidersidership, born or acquired, native or native-like, just as its transmission to ourselves (possibly an inside view of an inside view, mind-reading in the second degree) rests on the narrator's quasi-divine omniscience. Now, among the dramatis personae, it is the brothers whom the narrative has been following about. Peripatetic subjects between Canaan and Egypt, the visitors do qualify, by force of continuity, for the role of viewers as well. But the inside information required to see through the etiquette, and the host's dissembling, would evidently lie beyond their ken. And if imaginably
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sensitive enough to feel their way through the atmosphere, they might yet be overstating through oversensitiveness the anti-Hebrew rule (to the detriment of prolepsis) even as they must in their ignorance except from it the strongest, typological case in point. On the other hand, Joseph and/or the Egyptian party would escape either objection, but their focusing by default looks too abrupt and too interchangeable for comfort. 7 All around the table, then, general considerations fail to determine by themselves the point of view and so the weight of the evidence: the neglected verse will keep its secrets unless we puzzle them out from its minutiae. Puzzle we must, for the verse turns secretive once it goes beyond, or behind, the stage direction proper. Indeed, the givens never announce, never formally encode in the language, a shift away from objective telling about the world. The ki-clause featuring "the Hebrews" offers us none of the signals (usually multiplied and coordinated in the Bible, our first two imaging patterns included) that attend the direct quotation of speech or thought. We encounter neither a quoting sentence ("X said . . ."); nor a follow-up, resumptive lemor ("saying") for good transitional measure; nor an autonomous system of pronouns within the quoted inset (oriented to the quotee as ''I"); nor (unlike even indirect quotation, with its that-clause) any determinate inset whatever. Fortunately, in the absence of the linguistic trappings of reported discourse, contextual substitutes abound. Thus the intergroup contact, the loaded nomination, the emotion unprovoked and unbridled, its plot value as cause to the visible segregating effect, or the allusive network which associates them all with the imaging (mental by nature, fixed and adverse by precedent) of Hebrew otherness. The inside view is there, but in what I call telescopic rather than articulated shape. Were it not for the tell-tale signals of interiority planted in and around the referring term, "the Hebrews," the whole verse might read the way it has in fact traditionally been (to say the least) underread: as the narrator's own sidelight on alien manners. Further, given the independent evidence offered by this array of clues, we may now also invoke the Law of Nomination without falling into a circular argument. (For example, nothing could be less dependent on any general hypothesis about "Hebrews" than the verse's inescapably subjective plot logic, both immediate and forward-looking.) The question is now how the specifics of the viceregal dinner integrate, if at all, with the Bible's pattern or patterns of usage as a whole, especially with the regularities already shown in my foregoing chapters. Judged by this standard of canon-wide patternability, the traditional underreading of the verse again omits too much, and explains too little, for adequacy. We have seen enough of the Intercultural Law to appreciate how resourcefully it builds a certain alien subjectivity into the language, if necessary by indirection (e.g., via overt Israelite talk). So, is the present
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unattributed reference to "Hebrews" an infraction or a novel indirection? Deep or surface change in usage? Narrative aside concerning the Egyptians (where the narrator speaks like and for the others, to the point of self-identification) or mediated, translational inside-view of the Egyptians as others? If the former, does the objectivity extend to, say, the "abomination" visited on the "the Hebrews" in both the private and the public world? If the latter, how exactly to disentangle frame from inset? Where to situate the ethnic codeword, for instance? All real poetic questions, these would merit close analysis even in a sphere less charged than the Bible's poetics of culture. Instead of judging by appearancesand unwittingly saddling the narrator himself with alien-ness into the bargainthe answer must depend on the text's repertoire of quoting forms, whether dialogic or monologic, and the context's pointers to the operative form chosen. Modern students of discourse hardly need telling that quotation never lives by grammar alone, or its formal surface equivalents, of the kind just cited; and, indeed, does not necessarily live by it at all. The theory I have myself developed, largely on Biblical evidence, only goes further than most in ranking the discoursive above the linguistic component. 8 Scripture, the first artwork to range over the gamut of quoting schemata, turns this principle to masterly account throughout its poetics of narration between the truth and the whole truth. Thus, its telescoped reports of speech and/or thought (e.g., "was afraid," "answered with deceit," ki clauses) elude verbal uniformity altogether. Free indirect discourse may so elide the transformer as to glide unobtrusively from the storyteller's words to a subject's thought ("The cloud removed from the Tent, and behold, Miriam leprous as snow" [Numbers 12:10]). The clues to the inset and its origin lie chiefly in the manifold discourse coherencies at workstylistic, actional, perceptual, cognitive, normativeamong which the best fit is a quotation of a certain shape from a certain character at a certain distance vis-à-vis the quoter. Let us check, then, how the data, with the specialized factual and cultural knowledge evidently needed to register their underside, become the various candidates here. Try again the visiting Jacobites. How would they grow "aware," to their "surprise," of "the exclusive nature of Egyptian table customs" (Westermann 1987:126)? If anything takes the brothers by surprise, it is the hospitality accorded them ever since Joseph told his majordomo, ''with me will the men eat at noon" (43:16ff.): the language, counterpointed with the present aside, "Egyptians will not eat bread with the Hebrews," rather underlines togetherness. Given such a favorable change, the detail of the treat would impress them as exotic. Born in Mesopotamia (Across two Rivers) and inhabitants of Canaan (Across one), they know too little about Egypt to tell prejudice from protocol, to recognize themselves as objects of segregation by dint of abomination. Indeed, whenever this cultic apartheid recurs
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in the plot, it is formulated by the initiate, who alone can turn its peculiar vetoes against the culture that originates and enforces them. Reconsider, now in terms of voice and viewpoint, the "abominable" chain already explored in connection with the local rage for monopoly. Thus, once the family has been reunited, Joseph coaches his brothers to describe themselves to Pharaoh as vocational cattlemen, "so that you may dwell in the land of Goshen, for every shepherd is an abomination to Egypt" (46:34). Why else spell out, let alone reiterate, the indigenous culture's abhorrence and its bearing on physical distance, 9 if not to open the eyes of the newcomers? Later still, Moses' inside knowledge enables him to counter Pharaoh's idea of worshipping God within the borders of the land: "If we sacrifice the abomination of Egypt before their eyes, will they not stone us?" (Exodus 8:21-23). From settlement to departure, then, the characters alive to this divisive sense of revulsion are all native or naturalized Egyptians. As part of their overall ignorance, further, the brothers certainly miss the irony, unfunny and unobtrusive, behind the threefold segregation. In their eyes, the host ("the lord of the land," they call him [42:30]) dines by himself in token of his exalted position above everyone, not at all under the constraint of being reckoned among "the Hebrews" present. He can't be a (far less the) brother. To the Egyptian guests, on the other hand, Pharaoh's viceroy would remain as much of "a Hebrew," and possibly a glorified ''slave," as was the overseer of Potiphar, who entrusted Joseph with everything "but the bread which he ate" (39:6). In eating apart from all the company, Joseph makes a social virtue, or status symbol, of an interethnic necessity. And among the assorted viewpoints in play, dramatic or discoursive, the face-saving cover-up will be lost only on the group of innocents abroad, intended to mistake the subgrouping for a pure rank order: "the lord of the land," his entourage, his alien clients and recent victims. As the next verse implies, such misperception would even thrive on the uncanny rightness of their own placement by seniority, "the first-born according to his first-bornness and the youngest according to his youth." They could never take this hierarchy-within-hierarchy for the exception that proves the rule: the lord is actually free to seat his Hebrew "brothers" (anathema in either the familial or the ethnic context) as he likes, but not his associates or himself. The brothers, therefore, fail to qualify at the moment as subjects of anything outside their immediate vision as eyewitnesses: of the dietary taboo, the resulting quarantine, and the scope (maybe even the stigma, or the very applicability) of the group label tied up with both customs. Newcomers to Egypt, unlike Joseph in prison before or Miriam in contact with the Princess later, they have never been "Hebrewed" to their knowledgeor oursnor does their exculpatory self-description appeal to a
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provenance "from the land of the Hebrews": "sons of one man in the land of Canaan" (42:13) is rather the group portrait and passport trotted out by them on demand. No Hebrewness in evidence, from either ethnodialogic side. But suppose they do know better than they hear or speak of their image abroad, and, if pressed, would likewise fall back on the Egyptianism. Even so, the dinner scene, of all occasions, least motivates any show of harmony with the foreigner at the self's expenseor, if it comes to that, any genuine solidarity on their part with the long-lost brother. Given their nonspeaking role and their illusory sense of release from all earlier pressure, why should they now view themselves as "Hebrews''? Still less could they possibly align themselves under such name with their all-powerful host, the master of Egypt. Although negative, this is a significant finding. The minus still enters into the play of viewpoints centered in the ominous ethnicon. The very irony to the brothers' disadvantage rules "Hebrews" out of the one thoroughly (and, because left uncoerced, spontaneously) Israelite perspective on the occasion. The Law of Nomination, thus grounded in access (i.e., epistemology) and mentality and expertise in the anticulture at large, to the effect of barring the havenots from translational mimesis, receives fresh independent support. No improper self-labeling vis-à-vis Hamites, except in dialogic adversity and, we may now confidently restress, in aliveness to the vict-image. By the same token, the brothers' disqualification highlights the positive requirements for the role of thinking subject. To qualify now, one must be, if not heterocultural, then at least familiar with the anticulture in power; and the familiarity must stretch to the Viceroy's, if not to the brother's, unseemly past. This locates the field of thought within the initiate circle, namely, the omniscient storyteller, the two-cultured Joseph (looking ahead to Moses between his two worlds), and the Egyptians on hand, whether serving or served. Each of these can generate by nature or, midwives-like, throw himself into, the foreign viewpoint reflected. Whatever else separates them, their insight equally covers (i.e., uncovers) local mores, Joseph's background, and so the application of the feeling and the placing and the naming to him along with the rest of "the Hebrews." All three possibles being distanced by life or art from genuine Israelite usage, conversely, none would violate the Bible's Intercultural Law. On this graded range of foreignness, the Hamite foreigners think the way they elsewhere speak of and to "Hebrews"; while the natives know enough to relay such thought in its own foreign terms, properly improper, even if they (with their dialogic counterparts, from God down) know better than they translate. Nor does it greatly signify whether the train of thought endemic to the former, and reflected through the latter, is in actual progress at the moment. All the less so because, like the direct interior monologue
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unveiling the Philistines' fear of Hebrew armament, this thought evokes an attitude both collective and habitual. The noneating with the tabooed Hebrews may be at the back of the locals' minda second nature to "the Egyptians . . . Egypt" in general and also a routine to "the men who ate with him"or brought to the forefront by the unusual addition of visiting outlanders. In either instance, Joseph can by now read that collective mind, however wryly, transmit its workings as subject, and exploit its dictates as stage manager of the ongoing Jacobite drama. Even if the visitors present lift the film of familiarity from his eyes, too, he would only be reminded of what the locals remember all the time or recall afresh: his origins, their antagonism, the intercultural reality behind the show of power, amity, hospitality. (With the difference that the jogging of his memory, an antidote to suppression and a force for "Hebrew" reunion in Egypt as well as in the Egyptian ethos, would destabilize rather than entrench his location between the groups.) Likewise, possibly via Joseph's insight, the narrator mimes or borrows for his own purpose the stock idiom that comes naturally to the Egyptians, so revealing their xenophobia at work, from visible seating effect to deepseated motive. Given its ultimate origin in the xenophobes, "the Hebrews" is a reflex of subjectivity, whether dormant or active, whether habitual or also excited into new life, whether communicated to us from within the original indigenous mind through one other-minded reflector (the quoting storyteller) or two (mediated by Joseph, whose middlemanship would then extend from identity and action to perspective). The distance between first-order and second-order quotation appears negligible, perhaps, a matter of lesser or greater technical intricacy, rather than of urgent indeterminacy, beside the common denominatornamely, the opposition of those originating, probably now as always entertaining the group vict-image in silence, to those intercepting and translating it while judging otherwise. Multivoiced in the telling anyway, the alien note again spans the extremes of culture and posture, much as it did in (or, recalling the ambiguous case of the midwives, between) the dialogue forms. So grasped, the alternative structures of transmission behind the finished versethe two- and the three-link discourse chainlook equally probable, equally rule-governed by the Hebrewgram, equally in no need of further inquiry. But then, the point of view hasn't been so grasped, as a montage of any kind, twofold or threefold, and the customary objectivist would reject all intimations of subjectivity here. Even if accepting the difference between the foreign and the foreign-like, the translated and the self-translating speech about "Hebrews," he might yet challenge its extension to thought certainly where the discourse reads to him like straightforward narratorial exegesis. As part of the commentary offered by "the writer" himself, some
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even assert, the group-name he assigns to the proto-Israelites, his own ancestors, has nothing "derogatory" about it (e.g., Greenberg 1955:92). This would in turn escalate into "the completely positive and friendly portrayal of the Egyptian people," drawn by a "narrator" to whom "everything that is narrated'' appears as "new" and "surprising" as to "his listeners" (Westermann 1987:29, 126). Harmonious, on the surface, expressed by one approving voice, the intergroup contact would then never break the uniformity of appearances at any level. To some readers, I trust, all this externalizing will sound counterintuitive, even in its mildest version. But how to establish it as false, not just far-fetched? The line between (given) speech and (inferred) thought, which has already proved tortuous enough, accordingly needs some further exploring. In context, three questions arise with regard to this line. First, given that the narrator formally and knowledgeably speaks the words throughout the verse, "Hebrews" included, why shouldn't he speak them in his own voice? Why not take his discourse at face value?Because the discourse is on no account wholly and originally his, not even on the face of it. Imparting a predisposition that characterizes and actuates the Egyptians, the statement must count as thought-reportive, hence at best divided between narratorial objectivity and figural subjectivity. The dividing line exhibits itself, not in any formal markers of quotation, but in the double motive clause ("for . . . for"), which accounts from within for the outward behavior and set-up. A veiled quotation, it offers a long inside-view of a mind, and of course an idiom, perceptibly other than the quoting speaker's. Second, granting this otherness on the thought/speech axis, does it yet go with parity or affinity elsewhere, in more substantive regards? Certainly not in ethnocultural grouping, for the minds read are Egyptian, the (ultimate) mindreader Israelite. Qua mind-reader within the Biblical frame of narration, he also enjoys privileges superior in kind to any attainable by the inset characters within the Bible's world, always subject to the human condition. His peerless authority most notably asserts itself in the form of divine-like omniscience: he sees into the Egyptian heart's "abomination" where the feeling has never surfaced and into its continued "Hebrewing" when no longer expressible, far less expressed, in public. All this covert life is revealed by him to ourselves without any fuss, moreover, because all in the day's work. To the extent that one may grade qualitative performances, his superhuman knowledge enables him to lay bare deeper mysteries than these, God's own secrets included, with equal ease and weight. In short, rather than maintaining even the semblance of a balance of discoursive power, authority unlimited contrasts with earthbound fallibility, from the reader's to the agent's, from the dialogist's to the thinking subject's, from the native's and native speaker's to the translated outsider's. (Right now, for instance, every unprivileged viewpoint on the feast lacks
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some element in play that the narrative has already recounted, is recounting, or will recount in its own good time.) Hence the bizarreness of the idea that manners abroad could surprise the narrator as much as they do his listeners. In the same light, only more so, if possible, whenever his viewpoint collides with that of the Othersubjective by archforeign, Hamite nurture, as well as by human naturethere is no question where the Bible's truth resides. Third, whatever the general case with earthlings vis-à-vis the storyteller, need otherness here go to the extreme of total opposition, or preclude a meeting of minds? Even though less than all-knowing, cannot subjects (whether alien or native, each by virtue of differential insidership) know enough about their circle to pass muster for once? After all, unlike the brothers, those more insightful minds do share with the voice of omniscience both the cultural and the factual premises required to generate the verse's discourse. Compare the seamless perspectival montage effected among sharers in motive (ki, "for") clauses elsewhere. For example, "Therefore to this day the Israelites do not eat the sinew of the hip which is upon the hollow of the thigh, for he touched the hollow of Jacob's thigh on the sinew of the hip," or "The men [Dinah's brothers] were grieved and very angry, for he had committed an outrage in Israel by lying with Jacob's daughter, a thing not done" (Genesis 32:32, 34:7; for details see Poetics, 451-55). The inset/frame harmony is unqualified. Beyond noting the mediator's presence in the reason given for Israelite self-denial or excitement, how to cut asunder what the discourse has joined together? So, even if the words of the teller-andreporter here voice the Egyptian sentiment in translation, couldn't he likewise give it his imprimatur, objectifying it to the point of indistinguishability from his own outlook? No, he couldn't, because access to knowledge and language, however shared, is by no means everything in perspective: the reporter's framing text unmistakably jars against the reported value system, instead of harmonizing with it, as in the earlier Genesis reports by way of ki-clauses focused on natives. (Compare the Egyptian-speaking Moses' interview with Pharaoh.) The switch from all-Israelite to intercultural discourse makes a profound difference, never more so than where the judgment bears on ideo-ethnic strife. Here, instead of contingent and shifting objective/subjective alliancesthe diselect may at times prove superior to the chosen, hence nearer to the authorial frame, in awareness, in linguistic expertise, even in the moral courage shown by the midwives read as foreignersthe lines are sharply drawn, to the exclusion of any middle way. Where Hebrewness provokes categorical abuse, and from doctrinary motives on top of everything else, even a literature so remarkable for its unsparing ethnocriticism will turn away from the abusers. Rather, the law of frame/inset bi-valence assets itself: "Are you with us or with our adversaries?" Once more,
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the array of oppositions to the Hamite that we have been reconstructing all along yields dividends in viewpoint, this time on the normative level: a cutting edge between group mindscapes, an in-group covenant of solidarity over the ages. The barrier erected by the Egyptians against "the Hebrews" doubles in reverse as the storyteller's bond with his heroes and audience. Granted the teller's omniscience and multilingualism, supposing that he might even bring himself to call the founding sons of Israel "Hebrews," he would never consider eating with them "an abomination." (The shoe is on the other foot, if anything.) Nor, whatever his grievances, would Joseph as an Israelitemuch less as a fellow victim of the tag with the taboo, past and present. On the contrary, the barrier imposed on them all in his own house would again reforge the bond, with dynamic force: one unwelcome memory of power relations abroad would counterbalance another within the Jacob family, the deautomatized viewpoint on the self vs. the anti-self would urge (if not foretell) the regrouping of the three parties at table into the appropriate, collective polarity. As regards the verse from which all these effects arise and ensue, therefore, Joseph's involvement in the mental bias unveiled (if any) is that of the silent mind-reader, the interceptor, the translator, never the (co)originator or sharer. He is at most the thinking intermediary behind the narrating intermediary, both other-minded vis-à-vis the locals transparent to them. The implications for the make-up (or, the other way round, the unpacking) of the discourse between speech and thought, transmission and emotion, objectivity and subjectivity, necessarily follow. With the thought so improper, with the Israelite and Egyptian attitudes so polarized along specifically ethnocultic lines, there can be little doubt where the ethnicon "Hebrews" belongs in the last analysis. As always, even when nominally voiced by a native, it encapsulates, subjectifies, motivates foreign animosity. In this role, actually, the term here exceeds most of its canonical occurrences. Nowhere in the Bible is "Hebrews" paired with an animus comparable to "abomination [to'evah]." On a scale of intensity, it outreaches the fear normally attached to the term in Egypt and Philistia; likewise on a scale of explicitness; and likewise on a scale of gratuitousness, because the antipathy for once discriminates against "the Hebrews" as such, groundlessly and exclusively. The Bible's Egyptians, unlike Herodotus's, divided by ritual even among themselves, treat no other ethnos as pariah cum anathema. To underline the point, even where the same violent ill-feeling recurs in Genesis-Exodus, its targets are not "Hebrews" but keepers or sacrificers of cattle, a reference both more explanatory and more inclusive owing to its transethnicity. Retroject the later into the earlier context, if you wish, but the given order of telling will by then have produced the extra damning
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effect. At the moment, we have only an ethnicon with which to make the best narrative (and the worst normative) sense we can: no occupational or religious framework is yet in evidence, not even an equivalent to the ensuing "sacrificeable vs. nonsacrificeable" polarity, for example, a correlation between "eaten vs. not eaten with" and "eatable vs. not eatable." Instead, the persistent generic reference to "bread" (laid on the table, uneaten with the Hebrews) highlights the division of service amid the unity of the food served. It is under the pressure of rationalizing the irrational that commentators, from the Rabbis (e.g., Onkelos) to Egyptologists (Montet 1968:102-104), have domesticated this emphasis by subdividing the eaten in line with the eaters. Like the attempts to stretch the anathema beyond the group named as its target, its motivations on the ground of dietary variance pull against the narrative's thrusttoward specificity ("Hebrews'') and generality ("bread") respectively, hence toward sharpened incongruity. Contrast the ex-Hebrews' sighing in the wilderness for "meat to eat! We remember the fish we ate in Egypt for nothing, the cucumbers and the melons and the leeks and the onions and the garlic" (Numbers 11:4-5). The focus now does reverse with the shift of subjective anchorage: the murmurers' memory highlights the variety, the plenty, the accessibility, while blanking out the lack of company. Every juxtaposition, then, establishes anew our verse's bid for all-round darkness. The motivational darkness keeps out any show of reason; the normative darkness radicalizes the judgment on the anticulture; and the perceptual darkness leaves the outsiders unaware of either, as of their group victimage itself, for they share the "bread" minus the code prescribing its service. The "abomination" entertained and exercised against the "Hebrews" at the feast does not, or not yet, go back to so much as sociopolitics, or theology, or indiscriminate (all-nokhri) xenophobia, only to race hatred pure and pinpointed. Apart from its intrinsic value, therefore, the disentanglement of the viewpoint along group lines correlates with the tangling of the plot. Here, the voices in antagonistic play meet to the best dynamic effect. If the extreme subjectivity revealed (from inwardness to immoderation to baselessness) augurs the worst, so does the high authority of the teller who records it in passing against the national and the artistic grain alike, as well as against the festive facade. What with the attendant indicators, the uneasy conjunction makes for salient long-distance prolepsis where the underreader suspects nothing below or ahead of the appearances, and may never attain even to retrospective enlightenment. (Failing prophecy ex eventu at least, the Exodus return to Hebrewness with a genocidal turn defies understanding forever.) And to the degree that Joseph enters into the inside view, then the consequent sharpening of his insight into the Hebrewed self vs. the Hebrewing other, as a barrier impossible to cross
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either way, a bond impossible to sever, must forward his turnabout in the shorter run and in the opposite direction. Nor does this end the Bible's lesson on how to read a world (divided three ways at that) in a grain of sand, a forecast in a collective image, tension in a tableau, murder in manners. As with the overall sequences, those of the two books or the cycle, so with the verse-length. The further we read this piece of text, the firmer and deeper and grimmer its anchorage in the alien mind. Correspondingly, to underline the polarity below the apparent tripartition, Joseph's involvement gets minimized. Far from sharing the emotion, he hardly figures in the chain of transmission: we infer his viewpoint less and less from the text than from the context (his presumed knowledge, stage management, intermediacy, revitalized perception, growing discordance with the series of heteroculturalisms). Even the introductory and most objective-looking segmentthe trisection of the dining partycasts the Egyptian waiters in the role of grammatical, and implicitly perspectival, subjects: They served him by himself, and them by themselves, and the Egyptians who ate with him by themselves. Along with the brothers, we wonder about this unprecedented ceremony and make the best sense of it we can, always short of the truth. But the waiters must know the reason for serving the meal as they do, and without any instructions beyond Joseph's laconic call for service. "Put on the bread," he says, and they "put" it three ways as a matter of course. Indeed, thanks to the narrator's omniscience, the reason behind their procedure at once surfaces for our enlightenment in two installments, both explicitly tied to the Egyptians as a collective originator. "For the Egyptians cannot eat bread with the Hebrews": widening the range from the servants to the served but keeping the locals in the role of double subject, the explanation does uniformly motivate the entire preceding clause. The one subjective geno-cultural ground, flanked and focused by the polar ethnica, accounts not only for the brothers' seating but also for Joseph's; and, less obviously, not just for the ethnic or physical but for the textual subgrouping of the three items. The Joseph-brothers-locals order of service, apparently defying all ordinal rationales, e.g. the proprieties of hierarchy, coheres with the same invidious binary division into "Hebrews" and ''Egyptians": those who cannot be eaten with vs. those who cannot eat with them. In such a viewpoint, the highest and the lowest among the diners group together as fellow pariahs, since rank itself must bend here to the imperatives of race. (Not for the last time in world
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history, indiscriminate discrimination on the part of, say, antisemites works to bracket the victims against their will, regenerating a lapsed or forgotten solidarity.) Even the fiat contradiction between designating the locals as "the Egyptians who ate with him" and pointing out that "the Egyptians will not eat bread with the Hebrews" now makes thematic sense by appeal to the variant topographies at work. They do eat with him, but apart, "by themselves." 10 To reconcile the opposing forces of race and rank, the dinner space gets equivocally as well as multiply partitioned into a crisscross of tiny heterocosms. "For that is an abomination to Egypt" in turn follows to give a reason for the reason. Accordingly, while the subject of consciousness ("to Egypt") persists, the subjectivity deepens all along the line. It sinks from negative action ("not eat"), backed by negative language ("Hebrews") characteristic of the nonagents, to the bottom of negative feeling (''abomination"). The inside view at the same time plunges from overt (non)behavior and speakable, though currently unspoken, (mis)naming down to the root of the matter, so ugly that the subjects themselves would keep it to themselves, under wraps, even glossed over by etiquette. This range of social expressibility testifies to the progressive depth of the emotions laid bare, as to their order of intensity and irrationality. "Hebrew," applied ad lib to Joseph the slave, has been withdrawn from dialogic usage since his rise to power, but not expunged from the Egyptian lexicon: it still appears in the secret life, as here, and will reappear in public with Joseph's disappearance and his nation's enslavement. The name has merely gone underground for the time being. On the other hand, the abhorrence never breaks surface. Even when the conflict between the two peoples hurts the aggressor in turn, and so might loosen his tongue, it is not Pharaoh but Moses who voices the Egyptians' sense of abomination, as did Joseph and the storyteller before him. Except that the ugliness buried in the mind of the diners, characteristic of "Egyptians . . . Egypt," looks uglier than ever thereafter by force of its gratuitousnessand, in relation to the land's provider, ugliest of all. If ethnic abhorrence without cause is particularly outrageous, how much more so is noneating with the man but for whom one would have nothing to eat? To be sure, like "the men of [Potiphar's] house" enlisted against "the Hebrew man" set above them, Pharaoh's men would presumably (as the new Pharaoh himself will) resent the upstart. But jealousy hardly generates, far less instigates, the daily apartheid at his own table. Here, rather, ethnocultural gratuitousness darkens into personal ingratitude. So the axis on which the motive clause shows the least progress is that of motivation proper: the supposed reason explains little beyond the type-equation of the Hebrew with the abominable in their minds. The motiveless malignity that Coleridge ascribed to Iago, in face of his attempts at ration-
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alizing Othello's victimization, swells to nationwide magnitude. The consequences for perspective and plot development accordingly follow. The more sweeping, violent, unreasonable, ingrate the prejudice, the more self-condemning. Also the more alarming, to an extent undreamt of by Joseph. In his twofold role as "Hebrew" prototype and provider, he sets up the plot that the omniscient narrator foretells behind his back. Half-insider, half-outsider, once slave, now viceroy, he himself never quite appreciates, after all, the precariousness of his hold on Egyptian power or (even if alive to the Cupbearer's "forgetting") gratitude: our inside view appropriately casts him more as object than subject of thought. Omniscience alone can penetrate for our benefit the opacity of the future in relation to the innermost recesses of the Other's psyche. Far from abrupt, the Egyptian volte-face in Exodus is anticipated as early as this unsung verse, which radicalizes the implications carried by the ups and downs of "Hebrews" to belie the auspicious exterior. Ahead of enslavement, genocide, and deliverance, such an array of negatives, hidden and altogether unprovoked, must sooner or later break into hostilities. The judgment silently passed on the silent multiple negators repays them in kind, as future Scriptural thunderings against alien "abominations" will return the compliment in so many words. The Hebrewgram even predicts the identity of the aliens who, by Mosaic law, epitomize for Israel the abominable Other, namely the Egyptians and their fellow Hamites of Canaan (e.g., Leviticus 18, Deuteronomy 12:29-31, 18:9-15). Rhyming across genres, books, spacetimes, the law pinpoints, or rather counterpinpoints, what the narrative has enacted all along. With the to'evah attributed where it belongs, codified on heavenly authority, diametric otherness receives a local habitation and a name from the Israelite side as well. And such pinpointing, of course, validates afresh the ethnic thrust of the hateword in our verse, to the exclusion of the polyethnic or cross-cultural reference to strangers at large. Within the mutual antagonism packed into the bandying of this ultimate negative, however, one difference stands out. Those who abhor the "Hebrew(s)" for less than no reason are themselves given to abhorrent crimes against God and human nature and humankind, always duly specified by Moses in the accents of ideology proper, without any racial, deterministic, or vindictive overtones. (So trained on the doings, actually, the abhorrence excepts by law the doers themselves and the most unexpected group at that: "Thou shalt not abominate [lo teta'ev] an Egyptian, for thou wert a sojourner in his land" [Deuteronomy 23:7].) But then, in Scripture's long memory, the proneness to abomination runs in that family, having a genesis as early as Ham. Given all these clues, an Israelite speaking to Israelites of the sons (plus later, even contemporary Sons) of Israel thus ill-imaged may take
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the line between speech and thought as read. Like his own resourceful ancestors in dialogue, he translates himself into foreignness to counterattack (here, to expose) the victimizer from within. And if the form of translation grows nondirect in the monologue, then the assumed point of origin and reference turns doubly incongruous, so as to offset the blurred boundaries. Relative to direct mimesis, the inset is less delimited from the frame in grammatical but not in perspectival terms, carried here to the limit of "we/they" incompatibility. Mutually abominable, the ethnolinguistic poles fuse on the surface without being confused. The emotion giving rise to the seating arrangements, and with it the designation of those who must suffer apartheid as "Hebrews," originates neither in the storyteller nor in the brothers nor in Joseph himself but in the Egyptians. They act and feel, ritualize and think as they would speak if they could, or dared, just the way the reporter pretends to speak for them. Across all variations in the matter and manner of the reported discourse, the foreign camp still opposes the native, according to our Intercultural Law. A Champion Miscast: Abram the Hebrew This unity in variety sheds light upon an even less transparent example, which has several claims to notice. Apart from its intrinsic interest, it marks the debut of "Hebrew" in the Bible, with reference to the first patriarch; it involves a notorious, rather than neglected, crux; and, for another change, it brings Canaanites and Mesopotamians into the ethnographic picture, on a warlike footing apparently unrelated to the new immigrant. In Genesis 14, after the defeat of the five Canaanite kings and Lot's abduction from Sodom, a fugitive came and told Abram the Hebrew, who was dwelling at the oaks of Mamre the Amorite, brother of Eshkol and brother of Aner, these being allies of Abram. Abram heard that his brother had been taken captive, and he led forth his retainers . . . and went in pursuit. (Genesis 14:13-14) In scholarly ears, this first occurrence of "Hebrew" has long sounded outlandish, so much so as to betray a provenance outside the canon's mainstream: a genesis either very late and nationalistic (Hebrew = Israelite) or very ancient and cosmopolitan-minded (Hebrew = Hab/piru). The late dating (e.g., to an interfering postexilic writer or glossator) is widely surmised in an effort to explain why "Abram the Hebrew" eludes all the usual classifications. It falls out of the main clusters of Hebrewness:
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the Joseph tale, the Exodus ordeal, the slave law, the Philistine wars. It also precedes their terminus a quo in the fourth generation, much as another loner, Jonah's "I am a Hebrew," oversteps their imagined terminus ad quem (the rise of the monarchy). Nor does the phrase create its own matrixas it would in a dialogue held by foreigners with or about "Hebrews"but springs at us, unheralded and unintegrated, from a narratorial (or "editorial") comment in the aftermath of a war between foreign powers. Genuine or apparent, such breaches of canonical norm press for resolution, and late dating is not nearly enough to supply it. One variant of the theory, in fact, does not even make the attempt. Obviously, referring "Abram the Hebrew" to the common "national-religious self-designation of postexilic Judaism," one which suits nobody better than the father of the nation (Loretz 1984:179), amounts to ignoring those breaches by passing them off as observances. The patriarch's grouping then merely follows the brand-new protocol of self-nomi-nation by the writer's collective. (Even soapart from the unlikelihood of the protocol itselfthe one-off labeling ahead of Joseph's time is anything but standard.) The majority of late-dating geneticists plead the youth of the variant instead. Thereby, at least, the belated exception concerning Abra(ha)m gets marked off from the ancient Biblical rule of "Hebrew" usage: the alleged postexilic epigones would imitate this rule, but do so with more nationalist zest than literary insight and skill. The word must have reappeared "after the Exile, when it occurs once in the book of Jonah and in the late midrash of Gen 14," as a "deliberate archaism'' (de Vaux 1978:I 210, 216; also Westermann 1986:192-93, 199, 207). If the title here came latest in the genesis, then its coming out wrong (alone, prematurely, out of focus) in the received Genesis narrative should make sense. Checked against the set of questions posed by the narrative, however, this line of conjecture fails in turn: its explanatory weakness even reflects on its larger premises, methodological and classificatory. For the sake of argument, suppose a postexilic writer or interpolator missed the Bible's clustering and termini of "Hebrew." But why would the supposed archaist reserve the title for Abraham, of all patriarchs, notably excluding the eponymous Jacob/Israel? Why invest Abraham with this of all titles? Why at this of all junctures rather than, say, on his first appearance, back in Mesopotamia? And why designate him so in the narrator's ("writer's/editor's") voice 11 instead of the customary figural discourse, going down to Jonah's self-introduction? If a companion piece, the Jonah one-off groupment backfires to fatal effect, since the rightness of all its contextual parameters (an Israelite in unequal dialogue with Hamites, according to the Law of Hebrew Nomination) suggests how well latecomers knew their Bible. Throughout the canon, with patriarch as with prophet, archaizing does not entail bungling, nor does it motivate, therefore, the supposed imitator's supposed breach with the tradition. If the genesis is late, one cannot tell
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its lateness from the manifest poetics of Hebrewness; and if the poetics seems opaquefor example, regarding Abraham at war and Joseph at dinner, as against Jonah at seait will not gain transparence from the postponement of the genesis. As with the romances of intraBiblical origination, so with their extra-Biblical counterpart, advocated by many. Indeed, where the dating of the phrase (or the tale) makes such little difference to the reading, why not push it all the way to the other limit, and the hero's identification with it? Thereby "Abram the Hebrew" transforms from premature Israelite to well-precedented Hab/piru. Correspondingly, everything shifts out of national into polyethnic social history: the reference and the frame of reference, the referent's portrait and associates, the (real-life and literary) genealogy and the genesis. Again, the objectivity of the title grows stronger, if possible, in the linkage of the discourse to the external world. The inadequacies alone persist. Here are some representative affirmations of the ancient class-nexus: The word is manifestly used here, not as an ethnic term, but as an appellative . . . and the meaning in both Greek and Hebrew is "one who crosses (from place to place), a transient, a nomad." (Meek 1960:6-7; by "Greek" he points to the Septuagint's reading or glossing or etymologizing the Masoretic ha'ibri as ha'ober, from 'br in the allegedly Hab/piru sense of footlooseness detailed above.) [The patriarch] appears to travel a great deal with flocks and herds, living in a tent as a nomad. But it must be emphasized that Abraham is denoted as [ibri] just that moment when he takes decisive military action . . . when his actions most closely resemble those of the Habiru *. (Gray 1958:176) This episode presents a warrior Abraham, with a rather different character from that in the other Genesis episodes. . . . We have here what is really a typical hapiru of the Amarna type. (Cazelles 1973:22, 1987:86) The general objections to the theory, progressively elaborated since my opening chapter, resurge with interest, as usual, in the specific context. For example, all the quotes above share a rhetoric of identity in designating the group as "Hab/piru" (one even overtly socializes it through the joint 'br etymology). They would forge the lexical nexus with "Hebrew" where Amarna usage, except the Jerusalem tablets, inconveniently prefers SA.GAZ. Again, of all characters from the patriarchs onward, Abraham the elect ancestor would surely be the last that the Bible would want to
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stigmatize, or just denationalize, as Hab/piru under any name. (This weakness presents the converse of the late retrojective honorific, the only good argument for archaism.) Outside the Bible, moreover, time and place fail to coordinate. While still in Mesopotamia, Abraham might enjoy Hab/piru fellowship, but he never receives the title there and then. Once arrived in Canaan, unless we push the date forward as late as the Amarna era, he would suffer inglorious isolation, to judge from the blank Hab/piru record. Degrading apart, why should the tale go out of its way to class the forefather with a group nonexistent in the real spacetime as well as noncoincident with his own? Nor, unlikelihood apart, would it help to move Abra(ha)m forward along the time axis, not even if you also put him on a pedestal beyond the reach of his supposed Canaan mates. In conduct, to begin with, he does not fit "the Amarna type." Instead of the aggressive, predatory, anti-Egyptian or -feudal lifestyle, we have an anomalous counterattack, mounted to liberate a kinsman from Mesopotamian captivity, with no political, territorial, far less economic spoils in view. His very recourse to arms, exceptional and hardly type-specific anyway, runs counter to that extraScriptural type of the fourteenth century B.C. And if you invert the perspective in which he appears, from the city-state's monotonous denunciation of the outlaw to anomalous favorableness, then the exercise backfires. "In terms of literary symbolism," one ingenious crossculturalist would have us believe, the chapter draws on ''the theme of a city ruler [i.e., the king of Sodom] who recruits support among the habiru. . . . However, unlike Amarna, the subject is viewed from the standpoint of tribal society, with all sympathy for the parasocial leader [i.e., Abram]" (Rowton 1977:195; cf. Yeivin 1970:218). Even in its own terms, couched in the inevitably rhetoricized terminology, such handling would break the Amarna pattern of discourse as well as of behavior. According to the Hab/piru-gram, as formulated earlier and in effect acknowledged by this analyst, an Abra(ha)m so typecast should have been viewed from the outside as an outsider par excellence, Otherness personified. But then, how will granting the unique breach of pattern, toward insidership and "tribal" deference, save the internationalism here? If anything, with the nomination readjusted to the in-group "standpoint," it is exactly the "sympathy" for that founding "leader" that argues against the tribe's calling him "Hebrew," outsider style, in its own annals. Or else, like Othello's savage, the name-callers would be throwing a pearl away richer than all their tribe. 12 Again, the imputed class stereo-portrait (or, because disputed, portraits) of the hero under this "appellative" remains sui generis in the Biblical corpus, where it might easily find duplicates before and after. If "Hebrew" adverts to Abraham's nomadismto the rootlessness shared with the Hab/piru and implied in the common root 'brwhy does the label never surface regarding Cain, Isaac, Jacob, or the Israelites in the wilderness, who were
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Hebrewed precisely when immobilized in Egypt? And if the label signifies the "warrior Abraham," fighting to rescue a kinsman taken captive, why withhold it from the brothers in the Dinah affair? (The sense of absence there would even outreach the close analogy with the family and the familial deliverance plot. For the clan's attack on Shechem both redresses a villainy "done in Israel" [Genesis 34:7] and supposedly reflects a Hab/piru takeover of that area: Biblical ethnicon and extraBiblical witness join forces to underline the absent Hebrewness.) Not least troublesome is the Orientalism's incoherence with the larger actual givens. A Hab/piru Abraham runs against the canon's usage, against the book's ethnopolitical thrust on the way, to nationhood, against the patriarch's own figure, its uniqueness in history included. The "rather different character from that of the other Genesis episodes," if crossnationalized, would also blur his ever-growing differentiation from his environment, past and present. Such a balance of pros and cons hardly lends substance to the fabricated homonymy. On the contrary, if the Bible knew or acknowledged the Hab/piru at all, under the name ''Hab/piru" at that, it would seem to invoke them on every front, and exactly here, as an antitype to its own homophonic circle of insiders: punning for maximum polarity at the very first opportunity. Undeterred by trifles, some enthusiasts jump across the evidence to further conclusions. The same analyst who affirmed that "If Abraham had not been called a Hebrew, we should nevertheless be justified in classing him with the Habiru *" (Speiser 1933:43) thus proceeds to infer from the name-calling the entire tale's foreign, cuneiform source. "The fact that the author himself refers here to Abraham as a Hebrew," Speiser claims, "is strong presumptive evidence that the document [Genesis 14] did not originate with Israelites" (1964:103, still echoed in, e.g., Wenham 1987:313). Beside such a claim, Abram's personal identification with the Hab/piru pales into moderateness and routine. Nor would the labeler's ("author's") own group identity escape the target's outsidership, thereby piling ethnic on social incongruity with the operative, Israelite frame of reference. If, in nondirect discourse, the attribution of "Hebrew" to the narrator always risks stamping that narrator a foreigner, here the risk becomes the point of the conjecture about origins. As so often, however, it is only the blindness to the text's poetics, miniatured in the Hebrewgram, that impels the jump to genetic conclusions, far-reaching and irretrievably fallacious. Once reconsidered with an open mind, the issue of "origin" itself comes to bear on the term's perspective within the discourse (whose viewpoint or observation?) rather than on any textual source (whose writing or tradition?). To begin with, from the premise "that the author himself refers here to Abraham as a Hebrew" it by no means follows (not even as "strong presumptive evidence") that "the tale did not originate with Israelites." By Speiser's own rationale, for example, the notice that "The Egyptians will
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not eat bread with the Hebrews" would likewise come from "the author himself"; and yet he assigns the surrounding tale to J, not to any source outside Israel. Nor would he divert to such an origin Egypt's movement toward infanticide on the strength of the exordium "The king of Egypt said to the Hebrew midwives," or the narrator's equally objectivelooking mention of "Hebrews" in I Samuel (13:7, 14:21). The foreign term in the narrative no more constitutes sufficient than necessary evidence for a foreign tradition behind the narrative. 13 In narrative context, moreover, the premise itself lies open to challenge as a misplacement of both emphasis and viewpoint. Why make such an issue of the term in the first instance? After all, so far from improper by itselfleast of all in objective "authorized" usage and prior to Exodusthe epithet for once describes nothing but the literal truth. Abra(ha)m is "Hebrew" according to either etymology of his roots in the world, whether oriented to the genealogy (descent from Eber) or the geography (emigration from Across the River, eber hannahar); his inaugurating the verb 'br in Scripture (12:6) rounds out his Hebrewness in terms of Crossership, heroic and epoch-making to the insiders within the circle of narrative communication, while at least distinctive to the locals within the narrated reality, this side of the Euphrates. And conversely, he is not Israelite in any rigorous historical sense, unless one calls him after his grandson, Jacob/Israel, an anachronism never perpetrated by the Bible. A founder and prototype is one thing, a name-bearing member is another, especially where the in-between evolution toward nationhood looms so large. (All other occurrences of "Hebrew" indeed follow Jacob's acquisition of a family and a new namethe one people-size before long, the other its ethniconso as to jar against the expected "son of Israel." To Biblical ears, therefore, the midrash that "Abraham was called Israel,'' like Isaac after him (Bereshit Rabba 63:3), would sound preposterous.)14 Of course, reviewing the gentilic from a vantage point subsequent to Genesis 14, we may well link its inaugural occurrence with its counterloading by the enemy, with its underground persistence in ostensible abeyance, then with its imposition anew and in lieu of the national ethnicon, as my account has done ever since Joseph's vict-image. Yet the ethnicon's downgrading is no more visible or foreseeable now than its bearer's upgrading from "Abram" to "Abraham." Not even the hindsight wisdom obtainable from the seriatim disclosures of the reading process is to be confused with prescience at this landmark. Whatever the retrospective effect, the description of the first patriarch agrees with the facts, to an extent unmatched in later canonical history. The strangeness of "Abram the Hebrew" therefore lies not so much in the impropriety of the title itself as in its ostensible irrelevanceespecially at the time, three chapters after the title-bearer's introduction. Why call
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him so here, and here only, of all places? That a statement is true does not yet constitute a sufficient reason for making, let alone mistiming it. And it is exactly in the apparent lack of sufficient reason that this occurrence contrasts with our preceding example"The Egyptians will not eat bread with the Hebrews, for that is an abomination to Egypt"where the Hebrewness of the visitors supplies the ground for their being served apart from the locals. Unrelated to the Jacobite conflict in progress, what disqualifies the entire family as messmates takes on intergroup plot value, immediate and long-range. Hebrew, ergo tabooed: secret cause, ethnosocial effect. But once we define the question as one of relevance within the discourse, an answer begins to suggest itself along much the same lines, only more obliquely. (A further ascent, this, along our order of nondirectness in the translation from an outsider's mind.) The essential clue to relevance lurks again in the workings of plot between cultures. Here, "the fugitive came and told Abram the Hebrew" fulfils a vital role as the turning point from action (defeat, capture) to counteraction (chase, rescue): the verse appropriately occupies the exact peripeteic middle of the tale. Of the two figures brought on at this juncture, however, the Hebrew addressee of the news (or rather the epithet characterizing him) has so engrossed the critics' attention that the gap about the foreign addressor is liable to escape notice. Some ancient midrashim filled in the gap. The Genesis Apocryphon identifies him as one of Lot's herdsmen; Bereshit Rabba 42:8 as Og (cf. Genesis 14:5, 15:20, Deuteronomy 2:10-11, 3:11), come to get Abra(ha)m killed in the war, leaving Sarah vulnerable to his own attentions. But the canonical Genesis tells us nothing in excess of his agency: neither his name, nor his background, nor his immediate circle, nor his point of departure, far less any specific reason for his doing what the countermovement must have him do. Why should this anonymous Canaanite, in flight from the battlefield or from Sodom, make a beeline for Hebron to inform none other than "Abram the Hebrew"? With the missing plot link on the way to counteraction highlighted by the mismatch of the two counteragents, the epithet proves informative and well-timed as an aid to the logic of events. It motivates the dramatic reversal (starting from the choice made by the fugitive to "come and tell") by implicit appeal to the origins of the main dramatis personaenot just the rescuer, naturally affiliated with the captive, "his brother," but also the captors, themselves alien to Canaan. Here the latent etymologies, especially the geographical, materialize between the lines to extraordinary effect, since they interrelate all the dramatis personae in various capacities. Far from springing out of the blue, accordingly, the one overt occurrence of Hebrewness ramifies underground to form a virtual cluster. And this in turn goes a long way toward explaining the placement of the epithet within the Abraham cycle. Here, with the patriarch uniquely revisited by his past,
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the unprecedented gentilic looks before and after, encapsulating a whole network of affiliations due for testing. Thus his bond with his kinsman and ex-companion, now removed to Sodom; with his fellow Shemites or Eberides, left behind in Mesopotamia; with his new environment, Hamite and Cis-Euphratensian, like the fugitive cast in the role of fourfold subject, grammatical, agentive, "telling," and, by implication, thinking. Insofar as Abraham is a Hebrew, he bears a near relation to the invaders, all of them likewise hailing from Across the River. (This is beyond doubt the case with Shinar and Elam, listed in the Table of Nations: the former even hails from the area where the Tower of Babel was erected, while the latter heads the Table's roster of the offspring of Shem, "the father of all the sons of Eber" [Genesis 10:10, 21-22, 11:2]). By geography, at least, they would count as Abraham's compatriotsif not in the view of the Bible, which officially reserves the term "Hebrews" (as distinct from "sons of Eber") for the patriarch and his elect descendants, then to the mind of people this side of the River, most immediately the carrier of the news. So the reference to Hebrewness again does duty for a plot link, closing the gap about the Agent's motive: he runs and addresses himself to "Abram the Hebrew" as such, because of the name-bearer's marked outlandership, in a way comparable to the Egyptians keeping their distance from "the Hebrews" at table. His implied motive even recalls how they bracket assorted persons (and, it so happens, estranged "brothers") under this rubric, simply as outlanders of a definite group. To the fugitive, likewise, the three parties involved are all birds of a certain alien feather: Abra(ha)m would have a special interest in the victory of his former over his present neighbors as well as a special reason to (counter)act upon the news. 15 He may join the invaders or join battle with them for the sake of his fellow emigrant, always to the messenger's personal advantage. This unveils once more a pocket of subjectivity within the neutral-looking account. Just as the seating arrangements at Joseph's feast have their explanation in nonIsraelite thought about Israelites, so does the fugitive's arrival. It is in fact he who mentally "refers to Abraham as a Hebrew," while "the author himself" only transmits his reference with an eye to a double gain: forwarding the public action ("came and told Abram," required for the counterattack) and implying the Canaanite/Sodomite agent's private registration ("the Hebrew''), so as to motivate the one in terms of the other. The verse opens with the visible effect and then supplies the cause in the form of an oblique miniature inside view of an outsider's attitude to the patriarch. The word-image is as good as a (or the) feast for the Hebrewgrammed reader. This reading, the nexus between plot and perspective included, enjoys much further support. It accords with the Bible's Law of restricting the foreign users of "Hebrew" to Hamite voices and subjects: Egyptian, Phi-
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listine, and now (as, possibly, with Jonah) Canaanite. It similarly keeps up the practice, already evidenced in our first configuration, of attributing the group term to those subjects as a clue to some motive bearing on the referent's Hebrewness: fear, hate, contempt, abomination, and now apparently a less ominous drive, reminiscent of the Chief Cupbearer or the Princess in Egypt, yet still tied fast to the name-caller's interests and the name-bearer's alienness. Within Biblical poetics, user and use thus combine to associate "Hebrew" with the fugitive's mental idiom, rather than with the narrator in propria persona, let alone with a nonIsraelite writer. What the figure originates, in interior as in social language, the storyteller mediates (frames, quotes, reflects, distances) by way of more or less perceptible translation: here, as apparently with the Philistines, from an ideo-dialect otherwise akin to "the tongue of Canaan." Such reading also makes sense of the episode's details, in and around the verse in question. For example, given that "the fugitive" plays the role of speaking ("told") as well as grammatical and agentive subject, he is best qualified to fill the role of thinking subject next: to originate the title borne in the immediate sequel by the object-and-addressee ("Abram the Hebrew"), just like Pharaoh in "the king of Egypt said to the Hebrewess midwives." The perfect isomorphism of these two reports (''Hamite X said to Hebrew Y"), far exceeding the surface analogy in grammar, establishes them as tokens of the same discourse type. And their type-identity becomes all the more notable since the thought-quotation implicit in the Exodus reporting clause is at once followed by a direct speech-quotation from the "sayer's" mouth ("When you midwife the Hebrewesses") that voices the same dissonant term. In either case, then, the dissonance suggests a foreign mind at thought within the tale's world (an outsider's built-in involvement as imagemaker) rather than a foreign hand within its genesis (an outsider's imported document). A poetic, not a genetic, chain of transmission-with-translation across cultures. In the larger context, again, the story develops a correspondence between the movements of plot and perspective, both falling into a threefold sequence: (a) They [the victorious invaders] took all the possessions of Sodom and Gomorrah and all their food, and departed. They took Lot and his possessions, the son of Abram's brother, and departed; he was living in Sodom. (b) The fugitive came and told Abram the Hebrew . . . (c) Abram heard that his brother had been taken captive, and he led forth his retainers, born in his house, three hundred and eighteen, and went in pursuit as far as Dan. (14:11-44)
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The plot dynamics, foreshadowing in a way the bondage-to-liberty master tale, goes from action through transition to counteraction. Correspondingly, and less obviously, the narrative glides from the adversaries' to the hero's view of the situation: from their pouncing on the spoils of victory in generalLot among them, singled out by the narrator, not the captorsto his exclusive focus on the capture of a "brother"; from long shot to close-up. So here the fugitive, already oriented to "Abram the Hebrew" yet without quite sharing his concern, again plays a transitional role. The threefold structure of repetition even fixes his intermediacy on the level of perspective, too, by leaving his news as indeterminate as his motive for bringing the newsas his character, his exact identity, the rationale of his plot agency, in short. While specifying both what the victors "took" and what Abra(ha)m "heard," the repetition elides what the fugitive ''told." We do not even know for sure whether in telling about Sodom's fate he mentioned Lot at allthe auditor's inference may have had to repair the teller's silenceand if he did, whether in passing or in particular, on his own initiative or under interrogation. (Biblical messages and messengers are always liable to misadventure, as with the comedy of errors attending the transmission of Uriah's death to the king; and so in turn, though within welldefined limits of reception, are their audiences.) Did he consider "Abram" an interested partybecause a "Hebrew" in terms of geographical or of ethnic/familial origin or both? So, beyond the exigencies of counteraction, we remain ignorant of precisely what he told and why. The inset Canaanite teller's unresolved perspective therefore underscores the single-mindedness of the auditor, who moreover reacts not in the least as a Hebrew (the epithet indeed vanishes once the narrative shifts sides to him) but as the next of kin. Among all the details listed in (a) and presumably relisted in (b) after a fashion, "Abram heard" only that "his brother had been taken captive." Blood comes first; charity begins, though it will not end, in the family circle. Nothing else registers at the time, because nothing else matters neither the captors, nor the rest of the captives, nor even the favored captive's property, much less their respective antecedents, whether geographical, genealogical, political or ideological. If anything, Abra(ha)m joins forces with his local allies (Mamre, Eshkol, Aner) against the invaders from Across the River, to the benefit of the Sodom coalition at large. Thus the invariable dissonance between the authorized and the alien view of the elect group resounds (chronologically, arises) here in a lighter key than usual. The tale pivots on a miniature comedy of errors, where the fight man gets nominated, in every sense of the verb, for the wrong reasons, which bring out his rightness in the eyes of the knowing ironist and audience. The prospective as well as the retrospective nomi-narratives
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centered here on the codename split between inset and frame. To the degree that the news-carrier (possibly unaware of Lot altogether) expected "the Hebrew" to act in concert with his fellow outlanders, the mock-scenario would be reversed by the discovery that the immigrant had left his origins behind. (As, ignobly, the fugitive so understood had himself done in turning his coat: a reversal of values with a reversal of intent and action.) Alternatively, if he expected the name-bearer to counteract out of group solidarity with a victim whom the environment in all likelihood deemed a fellow "Hebrew," he would never even discover his mistake. Abra(ha)m does counteract, but neither as nor for a Hebrew, since that relationship is gone, too. In his judgment, as in the Bible's, filiation never equals or ensures descent: the Lot who has abandoned him for Sodom (as the Chosen himself had that side of the River for this, his native Shem- and Eber-land for sojournship apart in Ham-land) lost all title to a share in Hebrewness, especially in Crossership under God. The bond of kinship (''brotherhood") has alone survived the breach. In retrospect, the patriarch's true mainspring having emerged from his own viewpoint and conduct, the epithet applied to him from without settles into a new but not untypical functionone of a relevant (because operative from the plot level downward) irrelevance (because subjective, here wrong-headed, even for an outsider). By a thematic irony, his Hebrewness turns out to be beside the immediate point after all, except to the foreign observer caught (not unlike the foreign-oriented crossanalogist) at miscasting the champion he enlists. Presence and Absence: Vocal Stereotype, Inner Ear If likewise miscast, none of the future "Hebrews" counts as anything like a champion in the name-caller's eyes or mouth. (To the damsels in distress, the chivalrous Moses appears as nothing other than "an Egyptian": a bitter yet uncommonly telling mistake of identity.) Theirs is rather the victim's part; and the vict-image occurs even where the target should have been a hero to the victimizers as well as to his fellow victims. Only, its occurrence then goes underground. At Joseph's banquet, we have seen how the negative group-image withdrawn from social life persists, even rankles unspoken among the image-makers, the vetoes attached to it unaffected, its hostility unabated and straining for release in talk and action, as of old, at least. So absence in one discourse-sphere joins forces with occurrence in another to reilluminate the covert foreign thought behind the group term. I would now emphasize the latter, more general formulation, leaving the elements ("one . . . another") in the interplay unspecified, because their alliance is again protean. The absent and the manifest Hamitism
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need not correlate with figural speech and thought, respectively. In different circumstances from the Viceroy's hospitality, those two expressive spheres can change poles, between Hebrewlessness and Hebrewing, yet with the same mutual reinforcement of dialogue and monologue. Such inverse pairing even cuts across group lines, showing itself in nominations on either side of the ethnographic divide. At the Hamite end, "Hebrew" becomes conspicuous for its absence from the subject's thought at junctures where he (or his ilk) earlier flaunted it in talk, and all the more so where the abrupt interior re-imaging applies to the selfsame Israelite person as before. Appropriately, it is Joseph, now in bondage and jeopardy, who elicits the resulting difference amid co-reference: (11) One day he came into the house to do his work, and none of the men of the house was there in the house. (12) And she caught him by his garment, saying, Lie with me. And he left his garment in her hand and fled and got outside. (13) When she saw that he had left his garment in her hand and fled outside, (14) she called the men of her house and spoke to them, saying, Look, he has brought us a Hebrew man to play games with us; he came in to me to lie with me, and I cried out with a loud voice. (15) And when he heard that I raised my voice and cried, he left his garment by me and fled and got outside. (16) She kept his garment by her until his master came home. (17) Then she spoke to him according to these words, saying, There came in to me the Hebrew slave that thou hast brought us to play games with me. (18) And as I raised my voice and cried, he left his garment by me and fled outside. (19) When his master heard the words of his wife which she spoke to him, saying, Such and such things did thy slave do to me, his anger was kindled. (20) And Joseph's master took him and put him into the prison where the king's prisoners were confined. (Genesis 39:11-20) Having analyzed the tale elsewhere (Poetics, 423-28), I will now single out its dynamics of reference to the protagonist abroad. In staging the crisis, the narrator invariably refers to Joseph by the most neutral form available, that is, the third-person pronoun ("he . . . his . . . him," etc.). But whenever the frame modulates into the inset of quotation, the reference turns both variable and loaded: "a Hebrew man" (v. 14), "the Hebrew slave that. . ." (v. 17), "thy slave" (v. 19). This mini-contrast is integral to the Bible's strategy of repetition. Here, the shift between frame and inset coincides with that between the members of "enactment'' and "report," essentially opposed in their objectivity: the one establishes the authorial truth about what happened, the other dramatizes the characters' subjective (fallible,
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erroneous, misleading) viewpoint. Thus, the discourse goes from enacting an attempted seduction by the woman to quoting three reports of an attempted rape by the man. Yet how exactly do the assorted forms of reference enter into the overall strategy of recurrence with variance? By itself, the principle at work does explain the antithesis between the narrator's objective "he" and the three charged figural labels: the (proto-)Israelite hero, exhibited as such by the facts of the case, is the Egyptians' villain, and abused accordingly. But this does not yet make sense of the variant terms of abuse themselvesleast of all the concluding and, to judge by plot effect, apparently conclusive one, which, though alone Hebrewless, issues in Joseph's imprisonment. Reconsider the trio in sequence, the dimension along which the shifting gentilics of, say, Exodus 1 have built up their meaning. Spoken by an Egyptian to Egyptians in Egyptian concerning an object of Egyptian revulsion, both "Hebrew man" and "Hebrew slave" fall right under the Intercultural Law. In context, as already pointed out, their load even worsens from the standard negative to the explosive. Their common de-nominator of "Hebrewness," kept intact by the pretended victim of sexual assault, would divide race against race, the inset and reportedly beset "we''-group against the foreign taboo-breakers. Moreover, the sociocultural variation between "man" and "slave" is then designed to adapt the affective intercultural constant to the trouble-maker's successive audiences: household and husband, "men" and "master." But if so, why should the narrative dispense with the hateword in the third round? Where has "Hebrew" gone, its place taken by the weaker-looking "thy slave," and just before the action leads to the climax? Nor is this abrupt disappearance the only odd thing about the terminal member of report: When his master heard the words of his wife which she spoke to him, saying, Such and such things did thy slave do to me, his anger was kindled. Why repeat the wife's immediately foregoing repetition to her husband, Potiphar, of what she has just told the household? Why repeat, this time, without so much as a change of audience from the latest account? Again, why repeat with drastically flattening variations? ("Such and such things did thy slave do to me" looks anemic, and so altogether pointless, beside the earlier vivid coloring of the deed and the doer.) By the logic of plot coherence, finally, why repeat in this of all ways to bring about the new development, "his anger was kindled"? Weakened cause just before strong effect? Under pressure of multiple incongruity, the verse lays open a newly focused and slanted version. Its givens combine to imply yet another shift,
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not indeed in audience, as earlier, but still in the perspective quoted. The report of the discourse-event between the Potiphars now changes sides, from reporter to listener, hence also changes generic gears, from dialogue to monologue: from "she spoke to him" to "his master heard the words of his wife which she spoke to him"; from the wife's vocal narration to the husband's private registration and evaluation of what she narrates by his own scale of interest. In the passage from a dialogic to a monologic subject, the subjectivity even redoubles. For the one's speech, itself a distorted image of the truth, goes in the "hearing'' through the operations of the other's thought to yield an appropriately refocused and refashioned attitude. Mouthwork provides grist for earwork. Of all the words "spoke[n] to him," what most concerns the hearing subject, Potiphar? Not the details of the alleged attack, which (against expectation) his mind flattens into "such and such things"; still less, though no less surprisingly, does he take notice of the attacker's "Hebrew" origin, clean vanished (and by implication filtered out) on the way to the inner ear. Even the one locution that does register, and provokes a response, undergoes a change that gears it to the listening self: "thy slave." Where the speaker counted on racial animus ("Hebrew") together with social odium ("the . . . slave") and wifely needling ("whom thou hast brought to us," from eber, Beyond the River), the hearer rather smarts under the ingratitude on the part of a servant he has made his own. The bondmanhe feels or, in yet another, intralingual way, translateshas violated their special bond of trust. Therefore, "his anger was kindled" as "his/Joseph's master," the possessive in the retribution matching and countering that in the reception of the offense allegedly perpetrated by "thy slave." This interestingly compares with the scene where "a fugitive came and told Abram the Hebrew . . . Abram heard that his brother had been taken captive, and he led forth his retainers." 16 The switch from "telling" to "hearing" recurs, along with the disappearance of "Hebrew" on the way and the perspectival variance between the subjects in contact as the implied ground. Either inset Hamite teller would provoke action by appeal to the auditor's ethnicity vis-à-vis the object of discourse: the Canaanite fugitive turns to Abra(ha)m as a "Hebrew," the Egyptian woman incites Potiphar against "the Hebrew." Instead, contrary to their group-oriented expectations, either auditor reacts in personal termsAbra(ha)m as the next of kin to "his brother," Potiphar as a master betrayed by his trusted "slave." The speaker's affective stereo-reference would, then, prove ineffective if it did not change terms in the listener's mind. That the two examples contrast in the nationality of this personalizing listener makes a subtler point yet. So encoded is "Hebrew," we recall, that its users include Egyptians more well-disposed than the vindictive seductress of our tale, like the Chief Cupbearer in mentioning Joseph himself to the king. And Potiphar, before
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as after the domestic crisis, would doubtless publicly join the chorus of "Hebrewing" speakers. He never does so on record, but neither does the Pharaoh of his time, or of Abraham's, whose way with Sarah otherwise looks ahead to Mrs. Potiphar at her most uninhibited: none of these minuses signals by itself a divergence, in talk or thought, from public opinion. Yet the nonHebrewing can signify to this effect, if made perceptible, as here. Exceptionally and insistently underlined by its divergence from actual He-brew-mongering talk along a repetition plot, the blank in "thy slave" assumes the force of a gapof a felt absence demanding psychocultural closure with reference to the mind involved. In the auditor's role, Potiphar gives a further delicate touch to the Law of Nomination by circumventing it for once, maybe under emotional stress but certainly in private, and so without challenging accepted Egyptian usage. The fact that Potiphar's ear invites comparison with Abra(ha)m's goes to suggest that even all Hamites do not think of Israelites as "Hebrews" all the time. Nor, although this is usually the case, need the change for the better reference (as for the better treatment) follow from divine pressure exerted on the enemy nation at large; human motives can also intervene now and then. However uniformly Egyptians may express themselves in public, direct interpersonal contact with a Joseph is liable to have an effect on mental imaging and labeling, if only to replace the ethnic poweraxis (Hebrew/Egyptian) by the social (bondman/master, two-way possessive and all). Like Abram vis-à-vis "his brother," individuals outside the elect cycle will defy the flattening of themselves and their associates into stereotypes, at least when revealed in a doubly private capacity, interpersonal and monologic. Like the stereotyping current in Hamland, destereotyping by and of this Hamite will not reduce to psychoanalytic metastereotype. If the pathological mind "is consistently aggressive toward the real people and objects to which the stereotypical representations correspond," whereas the non-pathological can "repress the aggression and deal with the people as individuals" (Gilman 1990:18), then Egypt's group pathology does now juxtapose with Potiphar's mental health. Only that the antithesis holds, even deepens, amidst the common outbreaks of aggression. What separates the ill from the healthy is their committing or avoiding (''repressing") not violencemuch less in response to an injurybut predetermined violence, as automatic as the typology that kindles it. Nor does it most signify whether the ground for counteraction is invented (Joseph's assault) or "real" (Lot's kidnapping), disfavorable or favorable to the Other, but whether it registers in stereotypical or personal imagery. All in keeping with the Bible's fundamentals of character. The revelation also emerges at a perceptible juncture along the overall sequence of Hebrewness: the first two occurrences, with their major culture
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heroes and crossing ethnic viewpoints. (In the next book, with "the Hebrewess midwives," everything escalates to the limit: ethics itself cuts across ethnicity within a single mind in face of death.) Scripture takes the very earliest opportunity to qualify the generalizationelsewhere amply made by its narrative and held within its narrative worldthat the in-group's counterloaded image is just a button, or always the right button, for Hamites to press with a fail-safe outcome. In either Genesis framework, group polarity and solidarity turn out much less automatic than the respective invokers of Hebrewness would appear to believe. The given as well as the expected intercultural (de)nominations grow ironic by their absence from the receiver's secret life, assuming what I called the relevance of pointed irrelevance. Miscasting and misjudging the figures involved, the speakers elicit the hoped-for response less by what they utter than by what it means and how it comes home to their partners: by a subjective trigger not of their own devising, probably beyond their ken even after the fact. Converselyto return to my beginningPotiphar's ear stands opposed not just to his wife's mouth but to the mind of the Egyptians at Joseph's feast, who deem eating with "the Hebrews" an abomination. Their mind/mouth unharmony bespeaks the immemorial secret racist, whether exposed in hypocritical discourse or in the protesting "Some of my best friends are X-type" or, as here, in wordless abuse, directed at a superior and savior, too. By now, the Viceroy's power has temporarily forced on the land, as God's will for good, a reversal of expressive proprieties: no "Hebrewing" in social intercourse. But his own guests keep alive in their thoughts the indigenous tradition of stereotyping, which had no appeal to Potiphar even in anger, in more permissive times, in respect of an inferior and dependent cum ostensible evildoer and ingrate. That he secretly resists the vict-image (long before the Princess will resist the genocidal victimage of the "Hebrews,'' in contact with "the Hebrewesses") shows how the Bible qualifies the stereotype of the Egyptian Other himselfearly, artfully, diversely, progressively, if only in interpersonal affairs. When it comes down to cases, there are Egyptians and Egyptians. Acts of humanizing the enemy repaid in kind, (Israelite) measure for (Hamite) measure? Yes, except that either measure ultimately issues from the same unique (psycho) culture. Both go back to Scripture's revolutionary ideopoetics of character: neither the life nor the literature outside its art herald such maneuvering between the collective and the individual, between public and private role-assignment, far less with aliens, least of all the antitype on either side. Canaan has its Melchizedek, Egypt its Potiphar, erring but human. The Biblical quantum jump thus compounds the (arch) foreigner's very ascent to onstage subject of talk and/or thought with the deschematizing of his subjectivity. No matter how low their group has sunk over time, God's creatures will at times revert (as the most righ-
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teous among the elect will run false) to the Image in which they have been created, and so will, in intergroup relations, image their fellow creature accordingly despite all otherhood. And the fact that all our three Genesis examples in this chapter turn out to be variations on a theme "Hebrew" conspicuously expressed and/or elided by subjects in the Hamite orbitshows anew the psychocultural unity of the discourse-pattern. Shuttling between Identifies: Moses' Route to Prophecy Cutting across ethnographic lines, the interplay of "Hebrew's" absence and presence recurs on the Israelite side when they are engaged in self-imaging, to much profounder effect. Among the chosen, these extremes of representation are not only still observable at a time when the foreignism should have been deemed outgrown as well as odiousafter the group's leap into Israelitehood. Their distribution also opposes the prophet to the people along the least expected (and traditionally the least detected) axis of mentality and movement. The interplay of self-namings (absent, manifest, illfitted, transformed) thereby uncovers the shifting balance of unity and diversity between the two parties chosen by God for partnership, all the way from early parting to abortive reunion to re-parting to lifelong, indeed eternal rereunion in "Israel." By absence I mean here, to start with, that this third configuration of "Hebrew" has no equivalent in quoted Israelite thought, as the first has in Israelite speech, and with equally good reason. In intercultural dialogue, the Israelite (like the Jacobite Joseph before him, the preExodus "son of Israel") will at need adopt the privileged foreigner's idiom, with its abusive type-image, on pain of antagonism or worse; whereas in inner monologue he can afford to please himself and refer to his nation by its proper, vernacular, God-given name. But this in turn presupposes a sense of national identity, which cannot quite be taken for granted, seeing that the greatest Israelite acquires it rather late, almost despite himself. Having been raised in Pharaoh's house, Moses went out to his brothers and looked upon their burdens, and he saw an Egyptian man striking a Hebrew man from among his brothers. He turned this way and that, he saw that there was no man about, and he struck the Egyptian and hid him in the sand. He went out the next day, and behold, two Hebrew men fighting. He said to the guilty one, Why dost thou strike thy fellow? And he said, Who put thee as a ruler and judge over us? Dost thou mean to kill me as thou killedst the Egyptian? Then Moses was afraid and said, Surely the thing is known. When Pharaoh heard this thing, he sought to
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kill Moses; and Moses fled from the face of Pharaoh and dwelt in the land of Midian. (Exodus 2:11-15) Hero and focus at once, Moses reveals himself by his thinking as well as by his speaking and doing. As concerns his attitude to Hebrewness, the italicized segments offer us a pair of thought-quotations: the first rendered in indirect ("saw. . .") and the second in free indirect ("and behold, . . .") discourse. Well-defined for once, their interiority exhibits itself on the surface, what with the abundance of mental events reported before and after ("looked upon . . . turned this way and that . . . saw that . . . was afraid . . ."). This is quite a change from the elusiveness of ''Abram the Hebrew," whereby an ancestral deliverance plot characterized a hero likewise quick to rescue "his brother" in captivity. The paired equivalents (not to say allusions) in the Moses doublet would appear all too transparently subjective, labels for Israelites attached by and to the beholder's eye. It is therefore hard to understand, except as a limit-case of the rage for objectification, how commentators again mistake these "Hebrew" epithets and/or the pointing to "his brothers" for the narrator's own discourse. (E.g., "the narrator himself uses the word in speaking of his own people" [Kraeling 1941:242, Jepsen 1951:56, Kaufmann 1962:146, de Vaux 1978:I, 210], or "the author" in designating the Hab/piru [Gray 1958:179]. Likewise, more surprisingly, among literary analysts: Moses himself has not yet discovered "that the Hebrews were his brothers" [Davies 1992:129], or the question is "not really germane" [Ackerman 1974:98].) Yet the maneuvering between surface and depth, the play of transparence and opacity integral thus far to "Hebrews" in the secret life, has not vanished. It rather finds another new vehicle of expression to suit a psychocultural experience without precedent, half-articulated and half-betrayed by the idiom of the experiencing self. The narrator's anchorage in an observing mind within the drama (i.e., in Moses as subject of consciousness) is more pronounced than in any of the foregoing thought-examples; but so is the strangeness (oddity compounded with, and ultimately motivated by, alienness) of the recorded observation. The strangeness goes back to the Hebrewgram's contextual parameters. Who thinks what of whom when? Relative to our earlier cases, this one marks a novelty in both the origin and the time, as well as in the form, of the interior discourse. Like Abraham silently Hebrewed by the Canaanite fugitive and Jacob's sons by the Egyptian guests, the object of discourse (the "brother" under attack, the quarreling pair) remains native to the we-group; yet never before did it come with or through a native thinking subject, or even a Gentile one other than Hamite. Further, to sharpen the departure from the expected thought-image, the Hamitism biasing the wrong mind no longer occurs in the patriarchal era, first or fourth gen-
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eration, but after the rise of the nation in Exodus and with it the national ethnicon. Last but not least, the subjectivity rendered is at odds with the agency, concomitant and future: interior perspective jars against exterior plot, local against grand development. How come Moses of all people thinks (twice in a row at that, which bars accident) of the Israelites involved as "Hebrew"? Would an Israelite driven to violence at the sight of brothers victimized project onto them the vict-image himself? The deliverer of the nation an accomplice (secret, uncoerced, one and only) to de-nomination? The mechanical solution that those "Hebrews" are not Israelites but Hab/piru gets into worse trouble in context than earlier. Just as the book opens with Pharaoh's recirculating of "Hebrews" for the hated "people of the Sons of Israel," so does the tale's exposition now insist that "Moses went out to his brothers"the sentence echoing Joseph's quest for his brothers in Genesis 37:12-17 and the extended kinship term ruling out any analogues or fellow sufferers of polyethnic origin. That an altogether heteroethnic origin is unthinkable would go without saying, except that one Hab/piru-inspired rendering does affirm it, to the utter confusion of ties and perspectives: "beating a foreign man who was of his kin. . . two foreign slaves who were in angry tussle with each other'' (Coote and Ord 1989:207). This also blocks the more ingenious attempt at synchronic partition, whereby the cast of the doublet splits into fraternal and foreign Hab/piru: "The narrative distinguishes between Hebrews whom it describes as brothers of Moses, thus characterizing them as Israelites, and Hebrews hostile to him who seem to make common cause with the Egyptians" (Lewy 1957:2; also Gray 1958:179). Not only does the expositional rubric "brothers" (2:11), inapplicable to aliens, cover either encounter in advance. Assuming the narrative wanted to single out the "brothers of Moses" in the first encounter "as Israelites," why not call them so, by their proper ethnicon? Why risk confusion, instead, by rhyming them with the "Hebrews hostile to him"? The assumption of a referential shift in mid-doublet is senseless where the language (or the mind generating it) both underlines the commonality between the referents and omits the differentia ready to its hand. Nor is there anything markedly Hab/piru-like about them, any more than about their namesakes in the Philistine context. Throughout the doublet, in fact, the characterizations added to the observed object's Hebrewness, notably manhood and brotherhood, complicate the gap about the observer's psyche. Thus, if "Hebrew," why in attributive instead of nominal form? As ibri may figure in either role varying between adjective and noun, like today's "Israeli"the question relates less to grammar than to style, possibly mind-style. What, that is, makes these of all references assume the verbose epithet-plus-"man" form? Such verbosity goes against Exodus precedent, exclusively manifesting the shortened "Hebrews/Hebrewesses"; against canonical usage at large, where
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the epithet in question hardly ever occurs except to qualify an informative noun (e.g., "Hebrew boy/slave/midwife," none compressible without loss to ibri by itself); 17 and also against the Bible's mimesis of interior discourse (typified by the Philistines' "Lest" clause), which rather favors ellipsis. So, considering that one-word gentilics would suffice to characterize the parties at strife (e.g., ''An Egyptian . . . a Hebrew . . . two Hebrews," as in most translations), why recurrently expand them into noun phrases ("An Egyptian man . . . a Hebrew man . . . two Hebrew men")? And why go to the extra redundancy "from among his brothers," whose self-identifying effect is on top of everything else incongruous with the distancing "Hebrew"? As already indicated, such puzzles resist the easy ways out: that the phrase bears on the Hab/piru, or that it emanates from the narrator, or that its coverage hardly matters. Nor yet will they lend themselves to the reductiveness of selective exegetical amnesia. Privileging the inside-view's first half, in disregard for the tie of brotherhood, yields the claim that "Moses here represents the Egyptians" (Lemche 1979:14; cf. ibid.:12 on Joseph): a short step from the theory, notoriously invented by Manetho in the Hellenistic era and taken up by Freud in Moses and Monotheism, that he was an Egyptian. Reckoning with the second half only, to the exclusion of the ascribed Hebrewness, others produce "a native Moses who has no doubt of his Israelite identity, . . . fierce to avenge his brothers" (Bloom 1990:243), as though such a complete nationalist would denationalize the avenged, Pharaoh fashion, rather than suit the word to the avenging deed. Putting the two halves together, then, what brings Moses to generate this label, in this construction, by this rote, with this added feature to the opposite effect? Stranger yet, the gratuitous labeling as "Hebrew" in the privacy of the observer's mind clashes head-on with his wilful erasure of the same label in the first public address to Pharaoh (3:18→5:1). Why should Moses, alone of all Israelites, be the exception to two justly antithetic norms of Israelite discourse of "Hebrews"commission in thought, omission in speech, rather than vice versa? In the broader intercultural framework, however, the exceptionality of this exception diminishes to the gain of its meaningfulness. It has a counterpart, on the other side of the ethnic divide, in the (social) presence/(silent) absence dynamics of "Hebrew" traced by the Potiphar episode. That the dynamics focused there a psychodynamics at workas in a way did the label's wholesale inward turn from Egyptian mouth to mind along the Joseph cycleaccordingly invites extension to the new thinking/talking subject, Moses. The fact that his two symmetric lapses from usage occur in sequence, I would moreover argue, implies a psychocultural development; and this indeed proves an Ariadne's thread to the prophet's education, complete with (self-)discovery and reversal.
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Hence also the multiple interweaving of the hero's drama with the larger design, for the psychogenesis twists between the ethnocultures that struggle in the phylogenesis. And like the concurrent evolutionary threads, I will argue, the interweaving itself describes a zigzag: nothing, pace accepted opinion, runs straight toward the Exodus. Characteristic of this interplay, uneasiness, setbacks and all, is the ethnica's vicissitudes. The two odd Mosaic pointings to the elect group coincide with the two beginnings (the false and the real start) of his work of deliverance. In narrative order, of course, the Pharaoh audience comes long after the above scenes of violence observed and perpetratedeven longer in terms of years than of text. Let us therefore see how the hero's earlier phase ties up with the later via mirror images of unsuitable reference to Israel. Or rather, we discover before long, the tie-up involves all earlier phases. The present visit to the "Hebrew" scene is itself an effect as much as a cause, a two-facing link in a chain along which Aristotle's ideal of intricate poetic wholeness, with inversion ("peripeteia") and recognition ("anagnorisis"), assumes Scripture's guise of episodic artlessness. For the trajectory as a whole, we must restart at the beginning of the life story, thus far overfocused in our inquiry on the Helpers vs. the Antagonist, to the marginalizing of its newborn Protagonist. Among the Mosaic phases, the key to the prophet's entire development (its temporalities, continuities, advances, retreats, dissonances, such as inner Hebrewing vs. outer championing) lurks in the earliest one of all. It forms a self that the Burning Bush encounter can alone reshape and press into prophecyagainst opposition even thenyet the formative process unfolds through tantalizing obliquities. There, at the outset, the narrative sets in motion a peculiar rhythm of intergroup traffic, conducted not for its own sake but over the body of the baby, as it were, the object repeatedly changing hands and everything else with them. The zigzag course marked out for the infant by the birth and exposure tale proceeds to twist in the sequel, at a quicker rate, if anything: The woman took the child and nursed him. The child grew and she brought him to Pharaoh's daughter and he became a son to her; she called his name Moses [mosheh] and said, Because out of the water I drew him [meshitihu]. In the course of those days, Moses grew and went out to his brothers. . . . (2:9-11) All along this sequence of to and of to movements, the hero comes on as a living shuttlecock between the polar milieus, embodied in the two mothers. (Observe also the changes rung in the shuttling on the complementary kinship terminology"son . . . sister . . . daughter . . . sister to daughter
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. . . daughter . . . mother . . . daughter . . . daughter . . . son . . . brothers"with the notable exception of "father," kept for the Burning Bush theophany.) His secret birth at home to Levite parents is followed by abandonment on the Nile and the takeover by the rescuer, Pharaoh's daughter. Then back home, among the "Hebrews" or at least (in view of the absentee father) "Hebrewesses," for suckling. Then, weaned ("grew"), back to the Princess for adoption, naming, and, doubtless, acculturating. Now, in adulthood (''grew"), foreseeably back to "his brothers"if only by the logic of the oscillatory compositional rhythm, as distinct from the hero's psycho-logic, which is supposed to motivate it in lifelike terms but is itself in urgent need of motivation. Unlike the first two rounds of intercultural turn-taking, the third can no longer make do with any generalized action logicor none external to the protagonistbecause it opens with a self-initiated move. The object changing hands time after time has evidently, if enigmatically, "grown" into a subject making and changing judgments on either of those hands; the shuttlecock has turned shuttler, next bound for Midian. Variance amid recurrence, in short. For extra perceptibility, the narrative zigzags forward by way of inverse ratio between narrated and narrating time: the longer the objective span, the lesser its coverage, so as to accelerate the tempo of the shuttling between cultures. In the process, therefore, most of what the hero underwent (experienced, learned, retained, forgot, withstood, internalized) between the first and the second "grew" is left untold, as if to throw us unprepared into the heart of the crisis, the self-generated riches-to-rags backswing followed by backlash against Hebrewness. Throughout, the perspective also completes the gap-ping work of the time scale. By this I mean not only the descent in particularity from the river scene to bare-bones summarythe showing/telling face of the quickening tempobut also the disproportioning of the inner life to what the reader needs to know. Omniscient and freely roving in practice, the narration withholds from us any in-between inside view of the figure tossed between worlds. Not a glimpse, be it so telescoped as the mother's admiration (2:2) and the sister's resolve to watch (2:4), let alone the Princess's "saw . . . saw . . . took pity" chain of mental events (2:5-6). With the subjectivity all theirs, he grows, and grows up, an object in every conceivable way. This sense of the child's objecthood pinpointedly, and tantalizingly, arises in a subtler way yet: from the discourse about the reciprocal links that kinship, natural or naturalized via adoption, forges among the characters. "I will be a father to him and he will be a son to me" (I Samuel 7:14): thus God prefigures the relation between himself and Solomon, with its two-sidedness ensured by the apparent overemphasis in the movement from statement to converse. But what if the actual statement goes in one direction
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only? It would then perforce still entail its equivalent logically but not ideoor psycho- or socio- or teleo-logically. For example, "I am nokhri (foreign) to him" entails "He is nokhri to me." Yet we have found the Bible invariably opting for the latter role-assignment: it predicates nokhrihood of the out-group alone, from gods (for the new theocentricism) to human membership and trappings (for ethnocentricity). In principle, the one-directionality that may contextualize an ethnic and symmetrical relation (nokhri) out of two-way entailment, or equivalence, also applies to familial and asymmetrical terms (parent/child): the axes even cross here, in fact. Given that such links may always be anchored (centered, "subjectified") on the side of either party to the relation, the text's actual choice implies a difference, especially where contrasted with other anchorages present as well as with the absent alternative. The question is only if, and how, our verse turns the loophole to distinctive use between the characters retied. "He became a son to her" thus equals its converse, "she became a mother to him," by logical, legal, lexical semantics. "The foreigner," Julia Kristeva generalizes, "has lost a mother" (1991:5); but the transplanted Hebrewling seems to have gained another in her stead, and with her a mother tongue, a homeland, and an advantageous cultural identity. Within the Bible's discourse world, further, that motherhood of the lady exceeds and precedes the cold rationale of entailment. It already comes into play in the first round, as early as "she took pity on him,'' proverbially associated with the parent's softheartedness: whether the father's for his "son" (Malachi 3:17, Psalms 103:13) or the mother's for "the son of her womb" (Isaiah 49:15). Yet the tale never calls her so, either in describing the adoption bond or in the equivalent of those unilateral proceedings where it refers to "his sister" or to "the mother of the child" (2:7, 8). In sociolegal eyes, the "son to her" choice of wording will mirror the respective statuses and freedoms of action, the objective balance of power, in short. An optimist may rather want to infer therefrom an imbalance between legal status and inner state, whereby the child never (mis)took the Princess for his mother. The fact remains that the perspective adheres here to the (im)balance between the objectified infant and the subjectified adults: cutting across the first two rounds, the strategy warns against jumping to local (most temptingly, local patriotic) interpretive conclusions. Where the shuttlings in the plot and in the perspective intersect, we even find the child an object of rivalry between the mothersthe biological one in the know, the adoptive one uninformed of the Hebrewess nurse's identity, yet possessive all the same. Thus, the Levitess having "borne a son," she observes, spares, takes him; and Pharaoh's daughter uncannily follows suit, often literally, until he becomes in turn "a son to her." In face-to-face contact, again, note how the repetition structure juxtaposes the one's imperative "nurse him for me!" with the other's silently truncated
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enactment, "she nursed him" (2:9): for herself, of course, but to what precise effect? The greater the frequency, polarity, quickness, and side- or cross-lighting of the bodily movement, the darker the infantile-to-youthful mind nurtured in that body. Up to the crisis, the narrative pulls against its thematic and actional focus. Once returned home, for example, the suckling would presumably draw cultural along with physical sustenance at its mother's breast. To think of the language alone, the Egyptian talk of "the Hebrewesses" in the river scene, captured so finely by the translational and self-translational mimesis, implies a code-switch back to the vernacular among the self-translators themselves, in the home circle. (The Babel associations likewise resume, in the notice drawn to "the bitumening with bitumen" [Exodus 2:3, Genesis 10:3] that waterproofs the basket on its way to the ethnolinguistic antipole.) The figurative range of "suckle" even outreaches the mother tongue (e.g., the bulwark against the enemy divinely thrown up "from the mouth of babes and sucklings" in Psalms 8:2). "No doubt it was in those early years that Moses learnt of the 'God of the fathers' (Ex. 3:15) and realized that the Hebrews were his fellow countrymen (Ex. 2:11)'' (Cole 1973:58): quite possibly, but still erasably. Whatever he imbibed until his weaningeven if drawn out, with the solicitous exegetes, as late as his fourth year it could not amount to very much; and how much of it would the weaned child retain in the backswing thereafter to "Pharaoh's daughter," apparently for life? Our misgivings deepen as the particulars of that second transfer unroll. The "son" born to the Levitess now becomes "a son" to the Princess (2:2, 10): a reversal of fortune so wholesale as that, from the death threatening the male child of "the Hebrews" to adoption into the royal house of child-killers, has not quite been on the cards thus far. Earlier, the more modest advance from finding to keeping, or even to preserving, counted as a boon, one wangled against all odds by the sister's assumed rhetoric of solidarity with "Pharaoh's daughter" at "Hebrew"-calling. Thus we go from wonder to wonder, from the initial peripety (despite the foundling's recognition as Hebrew) along the Aristotelian complex plot to the next that brings the sonhood full circle. If such an ascending chain of marvels betokens divine superintendence in context, it yet remains unforeseeable before the event and none too obviously favorable thereafter. Hindsight wisdom apart, in short, this fresh turn upon re-return is more (worse or better, depending on the length of one's perspective and the strength of one's belief) than anyone would reasonably expect; as is the disclosure that the privilege of name-giving (or its appearance) has been left by the anonymous biological family to the adoptive mother (or so she thinks and acts). Together, these far-reaching bids for absorption
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go on to encourage the kind of inferences made since antiquity about the child's nurture at Court. The most elaborate gap-filling, Philo's, even anachronizes the specifics to Hellenize the princely education he received. While "learned Egyptians" instructed him in "arithmetic, geometry . . . music . . . philosophy . . . and in the regard paid to animals," he also "had Greeks to teach him the rest of the regular school course" (De Vita Mosis 1.5; cf. Josephus, Antiquities 2.236-37, Acts 7:22). Whatever the exact details of the nurturing process, the product would or should in all likelihood come out the same, his mind-set as far removed from his origins as his manners and status. The Hebrew foundling must have turned into a Pharaonic princelingan Isra-Egyptian, at the most optimistic best. (In the latter case, it so happens, Philo's addition of Greek tutoring would burden Moses with the further duality actually attributed by Joyce to his Ulysses hero, "Jewgreek is greekjew.") In vain, therefore, have local patriots of all stripes tortured the narrative out of its plain drift, to an extent rivaled only by the Manetho vein of sheer and often hostile invention. Foremost among modern Jewish apologists, Benno Jacob (1992:30ff.) shields Moses from any touch of foreignness, lest the religion he communicated to Israel be taken for an import or its communicator, "Israel's greatest man," for an outsider by birth. According to him, no adoption ever transpired, no Egyptian naming, no schooling in outgroup wisdom, no residence in the palaceand all with the connivance of the royal "godmother," who foresaw his immense services to "our people." The national literature thwarts such nationalizing of the culture hero from the cradle, as it does the opposite extreme of pronouncing him Egyptian-born. (Instead of Egyptianizing him outright, Freud might well apply to him the theory that we partly live in an ''internal foreign territory" [inneres Ausland; 1964b:57].) The bioideological whole that has thus far characterized God's elect splits for once at the earliest age. Not only must the natural and the naturalized extremes (analogous to Paul's flesh vs. faith) coexist in the adopted son. A disjunction between them, with the inherited self in abeyance, appears at the moment likelier than a tension. Given the clues to thorough acculturation in 2:10, unbroken and uncountered ever since the last takeover, permanently for all we know, what is there to warrant confidence in so much as a dual self? Nothing in the verse, unless again subjected to the chronic hindsight fallacy. Not even the notoriously dual-language etymological closure inspires optimisim: "She called his name Moses [mosheh], and said, Because out of the water have I drawn him [meshitihu]" (2:10). With the ingenuity of despair, Abarbanel wrenches the verse's reference so as to identify the "she" as the mother, "calling his name" and "saying" what it means to Pharaoh's daughter (meshitihu = "thou hast drawn him out"). Linguistically possible, this change of roles yet overlooks the ellipsis
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of the "saying's" main clause, which, like the Philistine "pen . . . ," connotes interior discourse, obviously not the mother's. Even if exteriorized into an address to the Princess, the utterance would ill-fit both the ethnosocial and the dramatic situation, where the alleged obtrusive speaking "she" figures as the lowest of the low, an alien wet nurse. Instead, the Princess's control over the named child seems absolute. The leaving of the (official) nomination to her reinvokes the Hebrewgram. Naming is power; and the Hebrew(esse)s, too powerless to voice their own ethnicon and kept anonymous even as individuals, would never take the liberty of thrusting any coinage upon their superior. Apart from its internal unLawlikeness, as it happens, such liberty would enact the Egyptian nightmare of anarchy: ''Why really, all maid-servants make free with their tongues [lit., have power-rights over their mouths]" (see the Admonition in Pritchard 1969:442). Nor would they dare to breathe outside their home the proper name they must have given the infant at birth and then used among themselves until his weaning. The royal property goes back to its finder and owner as nameless as it ostensibly arrived; whence also the assorted interim substitutes in reference, pronominal (e.g., "child") or pronominal ("he"). Nor do we frame-sharers, or will we ever, learn the homegrown originalany more than the patroness discovers it or the prophet himself divulges its remembranceas though to underline ("mime") in the telling how well the secret was kept from the outside world. (Excluding the later ideonational antipoles: the Rabbis know of no fewer than seven preMosaic names current in the Levite home, e.g., "Tobiah," while the antisemitic Manetho Egyptianizes him into "Osarsiph"; and cf. Herodotus's [1955:60] story of Cyrus.) It is all the adoptive mother's privilege, as it were, and she exercises it in characteristic foreign style. The foreignness runs from the name-giver to the etymology given in her name. The latter's bearings, debated for millennia, invite reconsideration in light of the episode's translational art and its intercultural zigzagging, now arrived at the fourth, apparently final plot turn. Combined, the two strategies dismiss the idea, improbable anyway, of artless unilingual homogeneity: that the Princess spoke the Biblical language manifest on the surface of the name and the etymology. In this regard, the variants of the unilingual hypothesis are all one. Whether she invented the designation mosheh herself or picked it up from native speakers, as alternatively conjectured by Ibn Ezra, or maybe from her advisors on home affairs (Jacob 1992:34), whether she knowingly chose it as a Righteous Gentile (Exum 1983:8081) or blundered into it as an incompetent Hebraist (Ackerman 1974:94-95), the same objection arises. If she designated the foundling by the coded Egyptianism, "from among the children of the Hebrews," then she would be all the less likely to go native in formally elevating him to adoptive sonhood cum nobility.
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The only wonder is that, in taking him over for good, she stops short of uprooting the low and dangerous ethnocultural past altogether from his memory, along with her environment's. She rather legibly inscribes narrative upon nominal origin: the tale of meshitihu, in little, upon mosheh (or their original, reflected equivalents). The nominarrative, always alive in the etymology of coinages, surfaces here for the whole Egyptian or Egyptianized dramatis personae to read. But then, is it she who does the inscribing or the teller or some combined agency, not necessarily harmonious? That the given text presents a reportee/reporter montage of a kind, like all reported discourse, should by now go without saying. The question is rather, of what kind, and especially if it miniatures afresh the polar disharmony activated by earlier etymologies on either side of the fence: built into "Hebrews" itself between the cultures, or winking at us from the interlingual "Great House"/''houses" wordplay in the midwives tale. Since the inscription we now encounter falls between two languagesassociated with variant designs and perspectives on the herothis question again hinges on the exact Egyptian utterance implied to underlie the translated givens. The possibilities would take too long to work out in full. 18 For our needs, it will be enough to juxtapose two of the interlingual (and, in effect, interperspectival) lines of decoding suggested over the ages. Josephus advances a compound etymology for "Mouses," whereby mou signifies "water" in Egyptian and eses "saved" (Antiquities 2.228, Against Apion 1.286). In "she called his name Moses [mosheh] and said, Because out of the water have I drawn him [ki min hammayim meshitihu]," accordingly, the name as recorded by Exodus forms a near-transliteration of its Egyptian original, and the whole nomi-narrative is a brilliant echo-translation of the Princess's utterance. Sound and sense come to march in harmony across the languages. Predictably, however, latter-day scholars reject this etymology as unscientific. (If understood by them, the translational masterstroke involved would only seal the judgment: too good to be true.) The standard countertheory agrees that the name given to the child is of Egyptian origin. But it has as its base the verb msy, "to be born," or the noun ms, "a child, son," frequent elements in Egyptian personal names, usually with the addition of a divine element. Examples are Ah-mose, Ramose, Ptah-mose, Thot-mosein each case meaning "The (god) x is born". . . . Sometimes the second element alone [Mose] appears as an abbreviated name. (Sarna 1986:32, with earlier references) Where proponents mount discourse on source analysis, they in effect claim an additional virtue for this base. It enables what we may describe as the resolution of a hole left in the text between the semantics of the actual
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name and its dramatized etymological exegesis. The verse's two givens obviously clash, for mosheh is an active participle of msh, signifying "the one who draws Out," 19 while the passive role in which the explanation as well as the birth tale cast him, "the one drawn out," would lead you to expect mashuy. On the ms derivation, however, the incongruity would find its closure in a two-stage genesis, a palimpsest whose overlying level exhibits either a folk etymology based on soundplay (e.g., Hyatt 1980:64-65) or a major narrative irony: The king's daughter gave the Hebrew child an Egyptian name, which the biblical narrator has reinterpreted in terms of a Hebrew verb, thereby hinting scornfully that the Pharaoh's own daughter unwittingly has rescued the one who will eventually deliver his people from her father's oppression. She has given him a name that foreshadows his destiny. (Sarna 1986:33)20 But then, the Josephus alternativeor the construction of the Princess as a faulty speaker of the Hebrews' language, mixing up her participles (Ackerman 1974:94-95)enables the very same closure of the gap. Unless you romantically, or chauvinistically, attribute to the lady a deliberate foreshadowing of the child's greatness in his own tongue (Exum 1983:80-81, Jacob 1992:35), then the discourse ironizes the anticipatory effect across all reputed sources, native or heterolingual, ancient or modern, folkish or bookish. The meaningful variance among them lies elsewhere. It is not even true that the scientific approach, in fixing the gap between the real and the given derivationthe source and the discourse etymon lays bare the narrator's ethnolinguistic provincialism. Had he been aware of the underlying Egyptian noun, his depreciators assert, he "would not have invented the etymology based on assonance and turned a princess of Egypt into a speaker of Hebrew" (Durham 1987:17), or he would have made use of these "facts" (Noth 1966:26, Childs 1965:116, 1974:19). The reasoning is weak, the reading poor. As the storyteller need not at all have etymologized by confusing languages and linguistic identities, so he may well have exploited the "fact" of original heterolingualismover and above playing off its encoded against its anticipatory value, the foreigner's intention against God's. Read as translational mimesis, "He became a son to her and she called his name Moses" nicely puns between the languages: ''son"/ben = mosheh/ms/"son." With equivalence thus casting light on the sequence and the vernacular on the Egyptian, his very name testifies to his sonship. He became to her what she called him. Likewise, possibly, with his adoptive grandsonship. Mose the grandson of Raamses would be another feather in the narrator's cap as a master of interlinguistic wordplay, a despoiler of Egypt in the telling itself.
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Without trying to adjudicate the issueif only because it has been left irresolvable in order to launch a play of closureI would therefore rather bring out its implications for the minds and the movements enacted in the chapter. Far from reducible to a mere (inter)linguistic variant, either etymology as nomi- narrative affects the narrative macrostructure in that it constructs a Princess, a young Moses, and an action dynamics of its own. On Josephus's hypothesis, the Princess loses in coherence to the gain of everything else. The "saved-from-water" nomination by origination flaunts the alien identity that she would presumably (if reasonable) want to bury in the interests of her "son's" very survival and his becoming ''a son to her," let alone his footing and future at Court. (Beside her exigency of concealing the Hebrewness, even the Viceroy's pales in retrospect: he gave nonEgyptian names and backgrounds [Genesis 41:50-52] to sons inevitably known to be outsiderslike himself under his Pharaonic alias rather than threatened by the discovery or the memory. So his is a psychocultural giveaway, hers a practical one as well.) But in jeopardizing her work of adoption, she promotes the story's consequential development toward (re)inversion. Moses, however isolated from both the outside world and the xenophobic whispering around him, would then guess at his provenance before long; the eagerness to resume contact with his kinfolk would naturally follow; Pharaoh would be waiting to settle accounts with the upstart; and so on. The early violence done to one character generates a well-made complex plot thereafter along, or between, the desired lines. (The same would apply with even greater force to mosheh as a unilingual, "Hebrew" coinage originated by the aristocratic Gentile, whether in righteous deliberation or in amusing confusion. Either way, the name would then advertise its heterolingualism to others in her circlethe bearer himself, every caller and auditor, Pharaohthrough its nonEgyptian form as well as its meaning or, except to the bilinguals among them, its very meaninglessness. The child's nomination thus becomes even more ill-considered for the adopting well-wisher, the leakage of his ethnic identity even more probable.) Failing this lapse from the adopter's consistency and rationality, a hole in the plot's continuity will ensue: nothing in the world then motivates, far less anticipates, the continuance of the shuttle strategy. 21 An end to the balance maintained in the foregoing rounds between the probable and the unexpected, causal enchainment and peripeteic leap. On the nomi-narrative excavated and often discoursed by the scholars, how can the macronarrative advance backward, so to speak, toward the pivotal memory-driven reunion with the "Hebrews"? True to the (psycho)logic of adoption, the Princess now thoroughly Egyptianizes the infant, as befits her "son" in name and destiny, "Mose": she leaves no trace of the meshitihu for him to evolve into the mosheh.
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To be sure, the latent clash between the Princess's and the storyteller's viewpoint on the name remains here as attractive as ever. Mose vs. mosheh also crowns the series of intercultural inversion puns, launched in the wellknown ironic echoing between Pharaoh's excuse for oppressing the people, pen yirbeh ("lest he multiply") and the narrator's report that the more oppressed the people, ken yirbeh ("the more he multiplied"), then orchestrating the rhetoric of feigned solidarity. The viewpoint least considered by the sundry etymologists, however, is Moses' own, the one essential to the ensuing plot development in terms of immediate agency and to the hero's portrait throughout. If unalerted by or via his name, the only indelible trace of otherness relative to his Egyptian associates, why would Mose initiate the countermove? The speculative vagueness of "it came into his heart to visit his brothers" (Acts 7:23) or "Moses did not forget that he belonged with his people, a fact of which he became aware in some way" (Noth 1966:35) actually highlights the mystery. Nor will the jump from his "initial nurture" to "How could he do anything other than identify with his people?'' (Coats 1988:43) unravel it. Comparing the nurtures by age or length, prestige or expediency, one might rather expect him to identify with the indigenous culture, for him perhaps the ethnoculture: so did, against heavier odds, various Asiatic princes brought up in Egypt as hostages and devoted to her throughout life, notably vis-à-vis the Amarna Hab/piru. The choice between the primary nomi-narratives, then, involves a choice between evils in the macrostructureits logic of (foreign) characterization or of (heroic) action. Irresolvable on the data released thus far, the disjuncture throws us forward in the hope of retrospective closure. So does the intersecting, more pivotal, and less either/or gap about the hero's own character between the Israelite and the Egyptian extremes. But though we know what we would need to know for gap-filling, down to its frame of reference and its scale of importance, we do not know what will emerge, let alone when or how. What we actually encounter next half-fulfills and half-frustrates our expectation in every regard, from the informational to the compositional, from the narrative to the normative. Given the dark antecedents, the fact that the shuttling proceeds, that Moses goes looking for his kinfolk, that he at last reveals himself from within are all to the good: better than might transpire, however short of the ideal in matter, manner, mind style, all fragmentary. Instead of an orderly retrospection on the event-chain and the character that have long developed out of sight, the narrative affords us such bits of insight into the grown-up as pose more questions than they answer. The gaps about the new (re)turn, listed in my introductory exploration of it, have not gone away. But the rhythm of the foregoing zigzags now at least
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gives us to understand that the problem is substantive, centering not so much in the tale's complexity as in the hero's own. He, and the telling oriented to him, cannot present a quantity simpler than his bipolar genesis. All the oddities that mark and mar the prophet-to-be's entrance find their explanation in his state of awareness at the time. No wonder the first inside view of that state, with regard to "a Hebrew man from among his brothers," so clamors for notice. The stereotyping of the group, interior in every way, unusual for its halfway point, is no less telltale than the rare outgroup avoidance of that stereotype. While Potiphar's inner ear screens out the imputed Hebrewness, Moses' eye projects ("sees") it on its own accord, yet again with such discord that the beholder characterizes himself in characterizing the beheld victim. The multiple incongruities all cohere as a reflex of inner division, of a psychocultural oxymoron. In terms of bi-maternal history, Moses' observation-compassion-action sequence, in defiance of the Oppressor, reenacts at a stroke two precedents from his own infancy. One was set by the Levitess at birth, who "saw that he was good" and concealed him from the authorities; the other by the Princess on the Nile, when "she saw the basket . . . saw the child . . . crying, took pity on him and said, From among the children of the Hebrews is this" (2:2, 5-6). A tie of kinship, on the one hand, an upsurge of kindness, on the other: this echoing between extremes, in reenactment, will often thicken (e.g., counterpoint) the subsequent line of development, notably when the Burning Bush exchange harks back to the elect's beginnings. As with the biographical process of growth told in shorthand, so with the product in the reunion episodes. The opposed features that the narrative, or rather its subject of consciousness, attributes to the object viewed (i.e., Hebrewness and brotherhood) give away the coexistence of opposed attitudes or drives (self-removal with selfaffiliation) in the viewer. To disregard either side of this tense balance would idealize or Egyptianize Moses; and keeping both, tension and all, external to Moses would leave the narrator incompetent, whether muddled or of two minds. Only with the cross signals properly subjectifed and yoked together does the hero gain complexity, the text unity. "Hebrew" is then no longer inappropriate, because current and obligatory in the labeler's adoptive cultural milieu; nor "brothers" redundant, because a witness to an ongoing ethnic awareness and sentiment; nor their disharmony puzzling, because an expression of cognitive dissonance. Where the midwives' identity remains ambiguous in filiation between the two sides, Moses' still partakes of both in registering the world, though, miraculously again, without detriment to his wholehearted agency as deliverer. To readers unversed in the poetics, let alone the Hebrewgram, the enactment of a dissonance from within may sound overambitious for the Bible or an aspersion upon Moses. But on all other readings, whether less
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charitable to the text or more flattering to the hero or just differently (e.g., crossculturally) ambitious, the specifics of the doublet fail to cohere, and much else besides. To the extent that they do cohere, moreover, they turn stereotypic in the unicultural exegesis or the intersource parallel-hunting or both, always against the narrative grain. Of these routes to metastereotype, the practice of interpreters will often concern us below, especially the tendency to romantic (heroizing, idealizing, nationalizing, sentimentalizing) reduction of the character and his drama. Let me now glance therefore at the cross-geneticists. Where preconceptions about the source flatten or misdirect the analysis of the discourse, the insight into Moses not only remains buried along with the inside view. As with "Abram the Hebrew," the analyst is then even liable to confuse three senses of origin: genetic, or source-oriented, ethnic, and perspectival. For instance, arguing for the distribution of the paired encounters between native and alien Hab/piru, some find in the opening reference nothing but a gradual specification of the referent. "If the racial significance of ['Hebrew man'] were obvious, then the expression ['from among his brothers'] is quite redundant. It is to be explained only by the need of the author to specify, 'this particular [as distinct from the next Hab/piru in line, left unspecified] was one of the Israelites'" (Gray 1958:179; cf. Ellison 1973:31, Cole 1973:59). But (as we already wondered about the meaning of the hero's name itself) "obvious" to whom? Granting, for the sake of argument, that "the author" makes us privy thereby to the link of brotherhood, as well as to the "racial significance," this would still leave Moses' own awareness undetermined, his response unmotivated or open to misunderstanding. How else, if not through the follow-up expression, would we know that he recognizes ''the Hebrew man" as a "brother"? Failing such recognition by the onlooker himself, his violent counteraction would (always on the Hab/piru premises) make social, never "racial" and fraternal, sense; hence he must not only share with ourselves the descriptive supplement to Hebrewness but generate it for us from within. A figural inside view, in short, rather than an "authorial" outside notice. (Compare the pressure for internalizing his own nomi-narrative, or the abomination of the Hebrews at Joseph's table.) And if so, why does the figure's mind register the victim through the circumlocutory phrase given, instead of some alleged laconic equivalentfrom "Hebrew brother" to the one-word "Israelite" or "brother"? Back to square one, otiosity and all, unless you take the inside view one further level downor, artistically, upbeyond the mere awareness of who's who. The attribute complex, superfluous for the referent's ethnic origin, functions to locate the perspectival origin of reference; by overspecifying the object's identity, the narrative problematizes the subject's sense of identity, with an eye to its trials ahead. Like this first inside view as a whole, moreover, either of its parts betrays
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the same duality, the same unique cross between stereotyping and anti-stereotyping the referent group. Some of the features that the young observer attributes to it have always clustered in or with the hatename by Law, some never, because unclusterable there: those rather pertain, if not to "Israel," then to the lineage group as an empathetic member would characterize it. Diverse, tense, out of any known group character, yet thematically so, the crosses fall into a subjective network of antitheses. Thus, educated as an Egyptian in the royal palace, Moses now comes to feel and demonstrate his kinship to the "Hebrew(s)," but still short of complete self-identification. "A Hebrew man from among his brothers," so he categorizes the victim, not "a man from among his Hebrew brothers" (still less, with NEB, "a fellow-Hebrew"); and the difference in word order lengthens the distance implied by the choice of Pharaonic ethnicon. Having thus far been luckily (or providentially) spared the enslavement along with the opprobrium and tag inflicted on the ''Hebrews," Moses does not regard himself as one, least of all as an outsider from Across the River. Indeed, the lifelong exemption from bondage that uniquely qualifies the Princess's "son" for playing the rescuer, and in time the leader, would ill assort with his instant mergence into the crowd of unfortunates. A nice psychocultural wrinkle, this, which duly smoothes itself out over the decades. Where the fledgling "ruler and judge" stands back, the veteran Lawgiver plunges in, as if by way of reparation. Toward the end of his ministry, facing a nation about to cross the Jordan into the promised land, Moses will address the Israelites in no uncertain language on the buying and selling of "thy brother the Hebrew or Hebrewess" (Deuteronomy 15:12): the observer's lingering distance amid deliverance at the outset will by then have shrunk into the leader's identification, prospective and retrospective, with the brother fallen on hard times. Even then, I would emphasize, the self-identification is with, rather than as, the so-called Hebrew: rhyming back in anger to Egyptian abusage, his own included, the leader's translational mimesis properly encloses the stock term with bitter quotation marks. (For details, see my last chapters.) Therefore, to say of the early scenes that "Moses is one of the Hebrews oppressed" (Thompson 1987:135) or, on the contrary, that "Moses has not yet become a Hebrew" (Ackerman 1974:98) is to make the wrong diagnosis and judgment by miscasting the hero. As he never gets oppressed as one, so will he never become one, due to a providential sequence of heterocultural education followed by divine initiation into the covenant: ignorance and knowledge would alike preclude such becoming. At either phase, he rather grows away from the Hebrewness into which he was bornand under which he was, if anything, saved (2:6), not mistreated as usual, even then only in opposite directions. Where the young courtier applies the name to his brothers from the outside, the Lawgiver dissociates himself from
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the improper name and would affect Israel by its impropriety, while embracing the unhappy name-bearer. 22 Nor does the young Moses yet invest that fraternal bond with national (e.g., religio-political as well as ethnic) significance: they are exactly "from among his brothers," not (as translators, spelling out the routine interpretive line, would have it) "of his people" or ''nation."23 He does play his brother's keeper, yet the brotherhood harbored and evinced is still of the familial, clannish, Abrahamic or Josephic order, so that he reacts like the next of kin. Along with Joseph, Moses' closest analogue throughout, Abraham comes to mind again because, precisely when Hebrewed, he rescues "his brother," Lot, who has already drifted away from him toward Sodom. Kinship is not (no longer in the earlier, Genesis case, not yet, if ever, in the later) partnership along the Hebrew/Hamite axis; flesh may rouse the natural self without extending to fate, faith, fellowship in culture. Which is also why Moses can take action against the alien assailant but only take sides in the ensuing all-fraternal quarrel, though the guilty party does speak as though Moses were threatening his life, too. And to make it easy for the noviceon the threshold of a career packed with complications featuring all orders of brotherhood, from Aaron downthe tale keeps the issues clear-cut, and so amenable to instinctive response. One is left wondering how Moses would feel and act if one brother killed the other, or for that matter the Egyptian, or if there were somebody around, or if he observed bondage without brutality. One further wonders about the extent to which removal of "brothers" from "Hebrew" compounds socio- with geopolitical distancing. These axes of placement and (de)nomination certainly intersect in the stage direction that leads into either of the Hebrewing inside views: "He went out [wa'yyetse]" (2:11, 13), from the palace to the sites and sights of hard labor. Wa'yyetse, cunningly based on the verb for the Exodus, does not, or not yet, read as an anticipation of it in little, whereby the prophet (already "going out") stands for the people (destined to "go out"). Not only is the prophet still to be called, but his aliveness to peoplehood nonexistent and the prefigurative or typological nexus loose at best, soon indeed undone. His, even as a one-man affair, is a very restricted "exodus," since it implies an exploratory "going out" from one's habitat toward the outside world, nothing like a break without any thought of return. For how the verb heralds an encounter between unlikes, this time an outward move in the opposite direction, from the Israelite to the Hamite pole of geocultural space, compare: "Dinah, the daughter of Leah . . . went out to look upon the daughters of the land" in the Shechem neighborhood, where she fell victim to rape and wherefrom the brothers extricated her with the sword and "went out" (Genesis 34:1, 25-26). Another ancestral deliverance plot; another fraternal retribution visited upon a
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Hamite aggressor by the delivering Levite. (Levi himself, with Simeon, heads the counterattack, in "anger" killing "a man," as Jacob poetically and prophetically singularizes it [49:6], to foreshadow how wrathful Leviteness passes down the line in the genes.) And all triggered by a move toward intercultural contact. Note, further, how the correspondence runs to the wording of the out-goer's purpose through "look upon" (lit., "see,'' wa'yyere b . . . or lir'ot b . . .), with a preposition suggestive in itself less of heartfelt involvement (which expositors have wishfully attributed to Moses on its strength, by hindsight alone) than of keen interest. Dinah went sightseeing among an outgroup, the most polar one in the Bible, as the consequences reestablish. Likewise, any humanly unprivileged observer of Moses (his Egyptian associates, the taskmasters, the laborers themselves) would think he has gone slumming; and so, were it not for the ensuing disclosures and developments, might we. But his present twofold removal from the "brothers" underscores for us the truth about themtheir geopolitical mirror image in the past and the future, indeed in covenantal eternity. It stages what the downgrading to Hebrewness has always reflected, only that now it is the fraternal champion who plays the foreign reflector. He has quite possibly "grown" foreignized, his biography allows us to deduce, in tongue as in terminology: the name-calling, along with the entire serf-communion, may well have proceeded in Egyptianand for a reason unlike the midwives/Miriam forced show of solidarity with the oppressor. We frame-sharers know that those brothers are compatriots with a land of their own, divinely promised to the first Hebrew and named "the land of the Hebrews" by the first Hebrew slave; that Hamite usage packs into "Hebrew" a denial of territoriality; that the new Pharaoh, even when he still conceded peoplehood to "the Sons of Israel," would take away their right to "go up from the land," treating the guest's freedom (and God's scenario) of repatriation as a threat to be "shrewdly" met by enslavement. But does Moses, the "outgoer" after decades in the Palace, know the relevant territorial facts, good and bad: the history and the etymology, the plus ("Crosser") and the minus ("Outlander," Yonderman, in effect "No-lander") values attached to eberite in the Hebrewing, the nation's charter and the state's violent abrogation of it? Whether Egyptianized in thought or also in tongue, his labeling now implies a tabula rasa at bestmore probably a negative awareness, complete with another dissociation of naturalized self from heterocultural brothers. Qua "Hebrews," that self feels, they are really out of place in Egypt. Where the Outlanders do belong, if at all, whether he does not belong with them, how to get there: such queries never cross his mind. Here, in other words, the name-caller's own name and his kinfolk's invite pinpoint linkage by virtue of their dual signification. Palimpsest-like and bipolar, either correlates three semantic variables: the manifest vs. the
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hidden, the in-group vs. the out-group, the favorable vs. the unfavorable readings. With the difference that ibri polarizes an unfavorable alien surface with a favorable native (and, counting "Israel," also national) subtext, while the favorable native datum mosheh jars against some inauspicious Egyptian reflex, like mose, the Pharaonic "son." But the array would appear lost on the hero in its homologous, polar, correlative, differential wholeness. To him, for all we know, they are ibrim, he mose, the nexus just ethnic. (This startlingly prefigures in little the attitude of assimilated toward old-style Jewry throughout the ages. Germany between the Enlightenment and Hitler thus invites comparison with Egypt between Joseph and Moses, down to the fact that genocide both exploded the assimilatory wishful thinkingthe mirage of peaceful coexistence with the locals, the sense of a difference to uncultured kinfolkand forwarded a national rebirth on the land. Unlike the ordinary prototype, though, the Bible'sJosephic or Mosaicsuggests greater intricacy than the bulk of the tokens to come. Again, the prefiguration renders it odder still that Freud, in exile from Nazi Vienna, Egyptianizes a Moses who ostensibly lends himself, rather, to a Freudian "inneres Ausland" analysis and could even enrich the theory itself. For example, "the repressed is foreign territory to the egointernal foreign realityjust as reality . . . is external foreign territory" (1964b:57): Moses already literalizes the simile in compounding internal with external foreignness as his naturalized territory vis-à-vis "his brothers," and he will deterritorialize them in the zigzag advance toward Israeliteness/Israel. But then the very complexity of his psyche and process, on top of Freud's Hab/piru-ing the Hebrews, may have obscured the prototypical relationas well as eluded the narrowly subject-centered analytic toolbox. In the history, for example, the vict-image is enough to suggest how oppression precedes and motivates repression, how conflicts in every sphere of life develop together, how the focus on the uncommonest individual never breaks the larger theocentrist and ethnocentric thread. The psychoanalyst's adjustment to Scripture must begin, in short, with his doubling as phylogeneticist of the chosen people.) By the same psycho-logic that keeps in check the self-identifying half of the inside view, the self-distancing half involves a positive complication for balance. He views the "Hebrew" as "a man," just like the "Egyptian," rather than as a nonperson: a slave beatable at will, far less a species apart, literally and insistently denied the name of "man," or "woman.'' Such denial was initiated by Pharaoh's one-word "Hebrewesses"; then taken up in the midwives' clever opposition of "the Egyptian women" to "the Hebrewesses" instinct with (animal) life; then related to Moses himself when the Princess declares the infant on the Nile to be "from among the children of the Hebrews" and the sister offers to fetch a wet nurse "from among the Hebrewesses." So, with subjective appropriateness, "Hebrew man/men"
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now falls midway between "the people of the Sons of Israel" and "Hebrews." In (de)nomination, as always before, length is a function of strength and an icon of status, including the mental status now reflected with unprecedented intricacy, because peculiar to the in-between reflector. Cast in Moses' expanded noun-phrases, the "Hebrews" regain their manhood and humanityfor the first time since the oppressor revived the old labelbut not yet their title to unified and glorious ancestral eponymity. Personhood without peoplehood. Where, then, has the ethnicon "the people of the Sons of Israel" gone? No sooner had it arisen in the first Exodus dialogue among the Egyptians, we remember, than it came under serial attack leading down to the vict-image. Presumably, as it was eroded by degrees, so must it now be repaired, and first of all (the Burning Bush order of priorities will confirm) in the mind's arena. Without a sense of nationhood, let alone of Israel's uniqueness, though with the best intentions toward every "Hebrew man" as a "brother," the deliverer misconceives the ills and the cure alike. The justice he would secure, by force if necessary, remains a matter of interpersonal relations, calling for private, indeed furtive interference (e.g., a one-to-one "striking [wa'yyakh]" for a one-to-one "striking [makkeh]'' rather than high-handed national deliverance (e.g., the future nationwide "strikings" in and through the plagues [makkot] of Egypt, with a view to liberating "my people"). 24 The genocide, not "seen" by the outgoer, nor remembered and generalized by the "grown-up" from his own exposure, never elicits any response, ad hoc or collective. Nor would the servitude, known to him in advance and now verified at first hand, but for the stick. Though Moses does "look upon their burdens," the sight fails to rouse him to action until topped off by direct physical, maybe life-threatening assault. Actually, considering the seclusion of the first scene and the ambiguity of Moses' looking "this way and that"for fear of detection or in hope of authorized intervention?the assault may have involved a private quarrel, like its companion piece, rather than a taskmaster brutalizing a slave in the line of duty, consistent with official policy. If so, it need not have arisen, leaving the visitor blind and unresponsive to the root of the trouble: the systematic intergroup victimage encoded in the vict-image. In such light, the issue (like the midwives' prevarication before, then God's) is hardly reducible to ethics. The age-old tendency to blame or cheer Moses for killing the Egyptian misses not just the point but the very frame and focus of reference invoked by the discordant "Hebrew" series. Judging instead by the congruity or otherwise of his semiprefabricated thought with the parameters of the operative Intercultural Lawstatus, ethnos, geography, historywe ascertain exactly what and how much the fledgling hero leaves to be desired. Born with an instinct for justice and kinship, in the teeth of power-re-
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lations, he yet betrays an ethnopolitical innocence, an ambivalent attitude toward the status quo, and a complete ignorance of the unique Israelite past, process, promise, providence. His heart is in the right place, his spirit bold, his action quick, his hand strong. (All too violently so, moralists complain, though God himself never does, the way Jacob in belated preaching did about Moses' great-grandfather, the deliverer of a ravished "sister." Better observe, instead, that the champion acts in mixed and thematic character: nurture among the most licensed of the free has presumably reinforced the double genetic inheritance from Levi, his tribal ancestor on both sides, to the verge of trigger-happiness.) Nevertheless, deprived at court of all Israelite schooling from the day he was weaned, how else would he think of "his brothers" if not as "Hebrew"? Further, the Hebrewgram's is, as always, an art of relations, which owes its tremendous semantic density to the convergence of the entire network and narrative on each item, e.g., Moses' doublet. A throwback to the few welldisposed Egyptians talking at cross purposes with their doing, his thought would then reenact the grip of acculturation: the limits of the self's variance, not to mention escape, from the discourse world internalized by it as a second nature. Only, what he crosses is not or not just signals on different levels (for instance, verbal with extraverbal acts) but mental group-idioms, mindscapes in a nutshell. To drive home the contradiction in terms, Moses' low gentilic epithet and the juxtaposed phrase "from among his brothers" break the pattern of the Egyptianisms voiced in the foregoing birth story: the Princess's reference to his infantile self as "from among the children of the Hebrews," mimed by Miriam's calling their mother "from among the Hebrewesses." For opposite reasons, neither of the womenthe alien speaking as she thinks, the native speaking to veil her thoughtwould ever yoke together the languages of hardship and fellowship, antipathy and empathy, between which Moses is caught. This is also why, as what we have already discovered should predict and the sequel will clinch, all his numerous typological readings must fail. The best of them, James Nohrnberg's, thus roundly objectifies "the polarity Hebrew/Egyptian," as if it were canonical, and after the watershed of Exodus, too. Thereby, "Moses' singularity is that he is a Hebrew Egyptian and an Egyptian Hebrew: in him are combined what the Exodus will separate," with a view to pure elect Hebrewness. Without necessarily stereotyping either of the characters by himself, the prophet or the people, this would settle their relation into a comparable fixity, a token-type analogy. Or in evolutionary terms, "Moses is an Egyptianized Hebrew who becomes the reverse, the adopted son of Pharaoh's daughter who alienates himself from the land of his birth, calls the Hebrews out of Egypt" (1981:37, 39).
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Rather than fixing any such typological relation between the Hebrews and Moses as their exemplary-prefigurative token, the narrative develops a flexible analogy, now straighter, now more oppositional, always complex. In fact, "the polarity Hebrew/Egyptian" is (re)made by Pharaoh, as the arch-Hamite, clean against Scripture's meaning and value system and phylogenetic history, even against his own better knowledge. Nobody else does or would "Hebrew" Moses, certainly not Moses himselffrom adoption to high Nilotic education to exile to callleast of all if the tag points, as Nohrnberg has it (ibid.:47), to the Hab/piru underclass, whose misfortune he never shared in any sense, rather than to the ethnic group into which he was born. And the plot logic of the Hebrewgram, needless to say, undercuts the polarity in its developmental ("separated" or "reverse") aspect: by the time the slaves go free under Moses' leadership, not even Pharaoh calls them anything but "Israel.'' This branching of the prophet's evolution (genesis, crisis, fulfillment) and the people's vis-à-vis Hebrewness makes a large difference to the uniqueness of either's picture and process. It works against their mutual reducibility, translatability, foreshadowability. Even when they ultimately meet in Israeliteness, the Hebrewing and the Hebrewed cannot quite merge: witness their tension as late as the valedictory bondage ordinance"If thy brother the Hebrew or the Hebrewess is sold to thee"where the addressees alone qualify, in prospective relapse across the Jordan, for the hatename their fathers endured abroad. The narrative accordingly sets up a more distinctive (or, along time, dynamic) balance of unity and variety than readable on a typological approach to Moses, as "a hero whose individuality is dissolved in his office, and whose life is almost totally conscripted by the history of Israel" (ibid.:35). Typology, premising flatness and invariance, needs to reckon here with multiple quiddity, at least that contingent on intercultural fortune as well as that built into every creation in God's image. The rounder the characters, individual or collective, the more they become irreducible to type, a fortiori their play of analogy. At the first crossroads of his own seeking, then, Moses' allegiance is not so much divided as short-sighted, halfformed, locked in the ethnosocial world. What such turns of thought indeed reveal to be divided, or mixed, is his sense of identity. Like the name hovering between the tongues, it partakes of both extremes to yield a round character with a vengeance. The juxtaposition of the Egyptian-derived "Hebrew" and the kin-minded "brothers" or the egalitarian "man" reflects, always from within the subject, the mixture of foreign upbringing and native instinct, of the outsider's and the insider's perspective. This mixture looks backward and forward, dramatizing the nadir of the grand international plot by appeal to the hero's zigzag advance toward
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leadership. In retrospect, Pharaoh's policy of degradation and disintegration (encapsulated in the fourfold de-nominational shift from "the people of the Sons of Israel" to "Hebrews") seems to have worked, after all, with the final phase as the turning point. And to judge by events since, the decline has not only continued but arrived at a point of no return, humanly speaking. It is this state of emergency that gets blurred, even inverted, by the common rendering of Moses' "brothers" (disunifying plural and all) as "people" or "nation." However large the "Hebrew'' population may have grown, it has evidently lost its solidarity and cohesiveness along with its freedom and will and name, the best of its inheritance from the unbeatable "Israel." By now, the evidence for this loss has outreached the anterior hints, whether the grammatical number (shifting from "he" to "they") or the plotted nonevent and sex, both against expectation (not so much as a gesture of resistance, except by a handful of women). Has the group meanwhile deteriorated further in continued Hebrewness, or has only our knowledge of its state under Hebrewness all along improved at close quarters? New development in the happening or new disclosure in the newly focused telling? Either way, the novelties that surface are hardly to the credit of God's chosen people, who multiply the failings of the Jacobite elect Hebrewed before them, without promising to reenact in turn the later growth into worthiness. Thus the internecine squabbling for no good reason; the contempt for the Mosaic voice of justice, tempered only by fear of its strong arm; the tittle-tattle, if not outright tale-bearing, to the jeopardy of the deliverer. Like Joseph's kin, yet without extenuating circumstances, they have in a fashion "sold" to Egypt the brother who came looking for them. Patriarchal history repeats itself to gloomy effect in the national, or denationalized, framework. The "Hebrews" have clean forgotten in adversity the lessons of brotherhood so memorably gained by the sons of Jacob ("Israel") from their ordeal in Egypt. Where Israel's sons have risen to the challengepresented by the first Hebrew slave, using the threat of enslavement as a test of corporate responsibilitytheir offspring now behave like a parcel of slaves, each "man" for himself. This behavior reads like a mirror image of Isaiah's oracle, "I will stir up Egyptians against Egyptians, and they will fight every man against his brother and every man against his neighbor," itself followed by the prophecy that Egyptian cities will then "speak the tongue of Canaan and swear allegiance to the Lord of Hosts" (19:2, 18). In a way, the scenario already fulfilled itself centuries before, at the turning-point of the Hamite/Hebrew master plot. Under God's "strikings," the Egyptians, then the Philistines, gradually lose their unity while regaining their ability to speak "the tongue of Canaan" and the name of "the Lord." But it is early days yet, even for the narrative prefiguration of Isaiah. Meanwhile, the Hebrew brothers do
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all the in-fighting, the Hebrew neighbors all the reciprocal striking, shamelessly and, in any human eye, irredeemably. But for the tendency of interpreters to project onto the text their own ethnocentrism, or that derived from their experience of kindred literature and ethnohistory, one could never explain how lightly the double encounter has often been takenas an unfortunate accident, or even fortunate in enabling the prophet's removal to the finishing school of Midian. The resultant stereotyping affects everything, the norms, the characters, the trajectories, the intersections, the artistry, all tailored to the putative ideal of univalence and linear advance, in effect blissful uniculturalism. This produces counter- rather than under-reading, since the exact opposite is the case on all fronts. You don't need any uncommon reading skills to understand that in-fighting is in-fighting, betrayal betrayal, escape from the sword a traumatic memory. But the more attentive the reading, the more diametric to the facile stereotypes and the more continuous with the antecedents and the developments of either participant: with the ethnocriticism below ethnocentricity, with the ongoing trials of ethnogenesis no less than its few (and future) triumphs. Those five verses (2:11-15) not only manifest but multiply all the elements that Aristotle deems essential to the finest (e.g., Oedipus's or Iphigenia's) tragic plot: the crime within the family, the peripety between happiness and unhappiness, the ignorance-to-knowledge anagnorisis. For good measure, all run at two levels, the public and the private, the observable and the subjective, the vocal and the silent. The drama interior to the nation gets interiorized in the narration itself, because anchored fast in the mind of the hero (who suffers the crimes, arrives at the discoveries, enacts and/or undergoes the reversals of fortune) to an extent unforeseen by the outward-directed Greek Poetics. Moreover, the group character he elicits from the hatename-bearers would seem an extension, always devolutionary, of the "Hebrews" as de-peopled by Pharaoh's "shrewdness," apparently even beyond his foresight when it came to genocide. The continuity of the foundation narrative thus stretches to its bleak, "low" realism, the lowest point coinciding with the advent of the founding hero, who gets rejected in face, even in favor of the enemy. Nothing could offend more against standard generic practice and expectancy down the ages, as postBiblical adjustments to the norm testify. That the scandal of manifold inner strife has been erased altogether from the apologetic retellings by Philo and Josephus, both addressed to a ''high" Gentile culture, underscores anew the fearlessness of the teller's exposureor, more generally, the distance between ethnocentricity and ethnocentrism. This distance (or, historically, shift) correlates in turn with divergent approaches to the role suitable for collective memory, of the group's origins, above all. As if anticipating the unIsraelite theory that
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nations must forget in order to emerge and endure, the apologists would suppress the collapse from within on a national level, the self-destructive-ness, not to say the death wish, that their precursor text memorably brings into full view, the protagonist's and posterity's. Moses shines by comparison, as do the "Hebrewesses," their turn on stage doubled earlier to match. They indeed fare (or fared?) better at the last extremity, saving lives by their wit, playing for time, closing ranks under cover of going foreign, if necessary. But the survival techniques have proved more a tribute to the women than a light to their menfolk, far less a blueprint for collective redemption. Without access to such a long perspective, the Bible's and ours, the dramatized observer yet gathers this much about the immediate situation. Both the form and the substance of the reports centered in him trace a process of learning, where disclosures multiply, enchain, escalate toward a horrible disenchantment. To one who "went out to his brothers and looked upon [lit., saw] their burdens," the unpleasantness that "he saw an Egyptian man striking a Hebrew man, from among his brothers" would not come unexpected: the earlier "sight" relates to the later as a generalized to a particular observation along an ascending order of specificity and mistreatment. The scene's novelty resides less in the discovery than in the peripety ("He struck the Egyptian''). On the second day, however, this balance of unforeseen elements abruptly changes, with the form of the inside view. "And behold, two Hebrew men fighting!": the mind-quotation transforms from the indirect to the free indirect style, created and reserved by the Bible for discoveries in the making. 25 Actually, if to a lesser degree, the in-fighting comes as a surprise to the reader too, and the first of a series at that, all of it likewise experienced together with the center of consciousness. Moses' soft remonstrance elicits the wrongdoer's defiant "Who put thee . . . over us?", acknowledging the authority of the oppressor alone (who "put taskmasters over him [the then 'people']") and extending its law of the jungle to ingroup affairs. (More startlingly yet, the offender's challenge also aligns him with the earliest and darkest model of the Hamite jungle, Sodom, its citizens all "wicked, great sinners." In their quarrel, the Sodomites attack Lot for taking it upon himself to "judge" between them and the "men" they would "know" by violence [Genesis 13:13, 19:4-9].) The immediate follow-up, "Dost thou mean to kill me as thou killedst the Egyptian?", goes yet further in reducing everything to brute power, in identifying oneself with the outside victimizer as against the brother, whether struck now or then, whether the object or the instrument of deliverance. Its retrospect on the killing also exposes a larger and graver breakdown of solidarity, at once underscored by "Moses was afraid and said, Surely the thing is known." He frames the leak of "knowledge" in the passive, because he hasn't the
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time, or the heart, to think of its agent. Yet who could it have beengiven that he had "turned this way and that, and saw that there was no man"except" the Hebrew man" rescued on the first day? And the further leakage of the secret to the authorities themselves would become the second (''guilty") Hebrew, compounding two of his attested features: aggressiveness toward his kin, allegiance to his kind, the master race. Such ascent from blabbing to snitching not only tells afresh against the partition of the doublet between two Hab/piru groups: Israelite and (by local patriotic stock-inference, hence) loyal vs. foreign and treacherous (Lewy 1957:2). The continuity also brings home a sorry family resemblance among the Hebrews involved in the doubling. The wronged will not keep silence and faith, any more than will the wrongdoers acting as informers, and between them the cause seems doomed. This conclusion must have been reached and pondered by the hero during the years of exile, into which Pharaoh's wrath drives him. His contact with his own has left a record of sheer discouragement, escalating from ingratitude to defiance to betrayal. 26 At the ultimate parting on the Jordan, he will intersperse his oration with reminders of what a trial they have been "from the day that I knew you" (Deuteronomy 9:24). If he also "knew Joseph," unlike Pharaoh, he would consider himself equally sold, but even less predictably, deservedly, and, under the threat of being killed in turn, retrievably. He does come to know "his brothers," at all events, with the most violent reversal to date as an outcome. To an extent unprecedented even on the born shuttler's record, that discovery actually costs him two simultaneous inversions: one, in worldly fortune, manifest and external (the Poetics' "happiness-to-unhappiness," dramatized in the flight abroad); the other, in the selfhood/brotherhood nexus, implicit and psychocultural. Aristotle himself would admire the Oedipus-like double peripety generated by the anagnorisis regarding kinfolk, "the change from ignorance to knowledge, and thus to either love or hate, in the personages marked for good or evil fortune" (1452a, 30-32; trans. Bywater). Love for the fortunate brother going out to seek them hardly overflows in any Hebrew and, by the end of the reunion, not much of it could have been lost between the parties. As we look back from this anticlimax, all the adverse encounters staged thus far by Exodus read like adumbrations of the psychocultural theme, variants of the bipolarity at the heart of the Mosaic portrait and process. For in enacting the clash between ethnocultures, we now learn, those antecedents to the thickest mixed quantity all dramatize the other within (as well as vis-à-vis) the self; and not just the linguistic other, into which the (op)pressed audibly translate themselves, their own speaking selves, with a view to camouflaging and achieving what they truly think. The two-inoneness may run deeper yet, as it may spread further than the individual.
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Nor, even less expected, is the protean duality (e.g., speech/thought, exterior/interior, ethnos/ethics, feeling/upbringing) restricted to the weaker group, split without and within under pressure, but also overtakes members of the dominant culture. Moses, who thinks but does not act as he would speak, foreign-like, and the Hebrew wrongdoer who outrageously speaks and acts as he thinks fit, against his presumed collective self: this illassorted couple only shocks us into discovering how often otherness has already penetrated below the surface of expression in either ethnocultural camp, to diverse effect on plot and judgment. The frequency goes with high patternability. All belonging to a well-defined spacetime, a reality focused as arena and fluid as drama, the multiple variations on the theme integrate along multiple lines. Along one, they describe a network of contiguities artfully governed by the metonymic principle, so that each world-item (character, group, facet) bears a convertible as well as a complementary relation to its neighbors. The divided outside, or outsider, may thus both reflect and round out the inside, or insider, and vice versa. Similarly with whole and part, group and member, leader and led, always depending again on the nexus of metonymy implied. (E.g., neither of the two Hebrews in the doublet, one beaten and a blabber, one beating and foul-mouthed, is presumably sui generis; and either's conduct is symptomatic of a different unIsraelite mentality, further generalizable in turn to the broken ensemble.) But, like that of "Hebrews" in the canon at large, the network of variations unfolds as a narrative, along a sequence of both narrational and narrated time. Due to this rendering of the world in flux, the spatial interweaves with a temporal logic of metonymy, the set with a chain of lifelike contiguities, equally complementary and convertible (e.g., before/ after, cause/effect, agent/patient) in terms of the same theme. Further, the narrative temporalities enable the artist to pattern the assorted variants into a tight and dynamic sequence of meaning, in the form of an ascending order of interiority, ethnocentricity, complexity, all at once. Exodus accordingly introduces the theme in the plainest terms, via Pharaoh's opening scenario. The division relates to the body politic; the enemy within is the sojourning foreigner in Goshen, always deemed by the indigenes the overall antitype and now, grown people-size, liable to "join our enemies" without; and the countermeasure escalates by degrees from oppressive (including divisive) to genocidal policy, with a Hebrew-free Egypt in view. Short of externalizing the conflict altogether, out of the domestic arena, things could hardly be simpler. The midwives imply the first complication, all the way to a divided psyche, through their ambiguous nationality. On either grouping, their exterior and interior not only divide but further subdivide along one or more linesin contrast to the indivisibility of, say, Potiphar's wife or of
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Pharaoh himself, whose speech, thought, and action all unite against the "Hebrew(esses)." If themselves Israelite-born, of course, the split regards the exterior women alone: the midwives' Egyptianized wording disguises the patriotic action that it vocally denies, both inspired by the "fear of God" peculiar to their group. The tension then lies in the (expressive vs. agentive) behavior and its (happy vs. unhappy) consequences, not in the selves and the causes. If Egyptian-born, however, the tension penetrates inside, for the midwives then break ethnonational solidarity in favor of a deeper instinct, a higher, universal bond. They resort to their native language, and outdo Pharaoh's, while exceptionally ("antitypically") thinking and acting as God-fearers: a double, indeed multiply compounded duality, in all but agenthood. Next, with the Princess, comes sheer inner self-division: ambivalence without bio-national ambiguity. Where her predecessors (low, God-fearing, and/or alien) required a measure of self-translation, she need not exert herself at all to sound like her father regarding "the Hebrew(esse)s." The more natural and imperious the style, however, the less expected and typical the soft spot that Miriam nurses into the sharpest breach of Egyptian allegiance on record, combining filial betrayal ("Pharaoh's daughter") with high treason in the highest place: with loyalty to the higher, private (e.g., maternal) self. Miriam herself sardonically imitates that breach in either of her possible mock-roles: as a Hebrewess volunteering aid to the enemy incarnate and as an Egyptian accessory to a Hebrew-related crime against the state. By the joint logic of the network, her performance also takes up the midwives'. A known Levitess dancing in temporary appearance between the groups to which they have been co-fixed, she reembodies the theme of self-division both ways, only in a key of almost pure irony. Born in the same hut as Miriam, Moses then emerges from the Great House to enact on a major scale the psychodrama foretold by his shuttlecock childhood and adumbrated by the rest of the dramatis personae. Without rehearsing my earlier analysis, I hope that the two "metonymic" prefigurations of his duality, the biographical and the environmental, are now seen to converge on his first-hand experience of Hebrewness. Not only his own mixed antecedents, for example, but also the tale's augur a real, if perhaps bridgeable, culture gap. What divides Moses against himself is ultimately what divides him from the Hebrews (even more from the Hebrewesses) and them from one another and him: all these varied forms of self-division trace back to the in-group's forced removal from "the people of the Sons of Israel" by the exterior antitype's divisive (inter)national policy. Conversely, what divides the Princess from her father and her own stereotype, the midwives (if local) and Miriam (in local appearance) from
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their neighbors, but the voluntary self-removal from "Egypt"? As each divided self operates somewhere between the well-established thematic antipodes, the variables guide us toward a fine individuation of its portrait and, in Moses' unique case, its progress. By now, I trust, the general implications will also suggest themselves. The network and the narrative of divided egos, the assorted instances and the focal exemplar, the portraiture and the processing: all resist the current metastereotypes of "otherness within selfhood," as our earlier patterns did those of the other against the self. A Protean approach to self-division (nothing like the psychoanalytic formulas whereby alterity is an externalized component of an identity under threat of disunity or a repressed "internal foreign territory") can alone accommodate the variations on the stranger within the gates. The forms, the forces, the arts, the genres, the contexts will only thicken as the Bible modulates from the explorer to the expatriate to the prophet and, in the ensuing chapters, from the leader to the Lawgiver. It is, then, on the ground of Hebrewness that the exterior and the interior plot-lines meet only to diverge anew, with apparent finality, into separate lands of exile. Given such "brothers" and denied their heritage as well as support, Moses enters the arena against impossible odds. How they are compounded would seem to escape the hero down to his hasty exit: whatever unpleasant lesson about sociopolitics and in-group division he may have carried away, it stops short of his own psyche and equipment. He simply does his best according to his lights; and his best fails him, not for the last time, yet for a reason he must learn once and for all, as he ultimately will in the Burning Bush theophany. While they remain "Hebrew," in his eyes as in Pharaoh's, by the "outgoer's" internalized vict-image and their own self-victimage as by state policy, they cannot act like "brothers" or even like "men'': to know them, he must know himself. Self-knowledge comes harder, later, elsewhere than usually diagnosed, and following a process unlike the action stereotype through which interpreters have rushed their paragon, i.e., the simple Aristotelian mythos, the straight evolutionary trajectory of Bildung. When, where, how self-knowledge comes, and why as it does, the uniquely selfbetraying Egyptianisms have already begun to tell, if only the negative way, by ruling out shortcuts: not yet, not here, not from the inside alone, not from half-cocked or half-baked "strikes," not without an ordeal that will turn the learner's very grooming in the enemy camp to national account. Here lurks another suggestive, thematically doubleedged analogy between group and shepherd, physical or collective and psychic becoming. While the Hebrews jump out of the womb ahead of the midwives, the prophet's is a hard delivery. By the same token, his course runs true to Israelite form, in that the prophet makes as late (and initially, as brief and unhappy) an
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arrival on the national scene as the people on the international. Either's is a long, winding genesis, in which their Elector must intervene to effect the reversal toward self-fulfillment against earthly odds. At this early phase, however, we glimpse an earthbound mind still caught between two worldsnature vs. nurture, if you like, or rather nature vs. second nature, hut vs. palace nurtureand so it continues even in flight and exile abroad. The Egyptian court has afforded the best nursing in profane leadership, yet Midian is nothing like the ideal and idyllic school for the Israelite prophet that commentators have variously dreamt up. The most frequent and fantastic of those dreams, the "Kenite hypothesis"that Yahwism originated in Midian, where the newcomer acquired it from the local priestalso goes farthest in twisting the truth by untwisting the course of Moses' evolution. What is there to show, however remotely, that either character has ever heard of Israel's Lord, or even of a singular divinity? 27 Nothing in Midian, any more than in Egypt (actually less, because the God of the Fathers may still circulate among the Hebrews, who may have whispered his name in the ear or the hearing of the infant, who may have kept the memory alive through all vicissitudes). The revelation never appears prior to the Burning Bush theophany in the protagonist's case and as late as Sinai in the priest's: even such Mosaic knowledge as has intervened early in the happening, we shall find out, the tale likewise withholds from us until their reunion at Sinai. Why so delay all knowledge of the Lord (even of the monotheistic God) in the living and the telling? By now, the entire pattern of development foretells the answer: the historic revelation must overtake the hero in a geocultural space(time) distinct from all earlier ones, including Midian, as they have been from one another. And the Burning Bush in the wildernessnot for nothing coterminous with Sinai, where the theophany will extend to the whole peoplefills the bill. Among the "Kenites" themselves, if anything, the hero's alien side is most in evidence, focused by the Midianite interlude to the point of suggesting a reaction. On the rebound from his traumatic experience with "his brothers," it would be natural for him to meet rejection with rejection, as Joseph did until the second encounter with the brothers who sold him to Egypt. (This sense of mutual rejection, persisting into the Burning Bush dialogue, underlies his attempts to evade the call and erupts at least once. "Who put thee . . . over us?" still ringing in Moses' ears, God's assurance, "they will listen to thy voice," provokes the flat contradiction, "they will not listen to my voice" [3:18, 4:1]. As implied by his forearming thereupon with miraculous signs, God understands that the Chosen's offense comes in self-defense: wounded, the human psyche shrinks from the prospect of exposure to repeated betrayal that is God's lot in history.) Surprisingly, though, the same retributive mechanism does not at all cut the other way.
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His mind never responds to exile by likewise banishing the country of oppressors and would-be revengers, nor to welcome abroad by finding peace in a third alternative. As if seeking oblivion from the immediate past and the present, instead, Moses the exile would revert to his youthful existence, to the self as and where it was before the crisis of identity. Launched at birth, the psycho-logic of shuttling between extremes marks yet another swing, predictably away from Hebrewness and with better, more first-hand reason than ever. An ironic clue to the backswing gives us advance notice. While Moses is running for his lifefrom the consequences of having killed "an Egyptian man"Reuel's daughters characterize their champion at the well as "an Egyptian man" (2:19), presumably going by his appearance, his language, his short way with the shepherds. Many a true word has been spoken in ignorance. (Analogues in pregnant misperception would include the brothers who take Joseph for the Egyptian lord of the land and, conversely, the Pharaonic princes who fail to identify the wild Asiatic before them as Sinuhe, the one-time courtier repatriated in old age.) Having realized Pharaoh's worst fears of the Israelitesbecome an enemy and "gone up from the land"he now typifies abroad the Egyptian instead. And what his looks signal to the uninformed Midianite observer, by a tragicomedy of errors, his outlook before long confirms and deepens from within, against the improvement in exterior fortune. "Why have you left the man? Call him, that he may eat bread," the priestly father responds, and afterwards he ''gave Moses his daughter Zipporah" (2:20-21), a welcome in pinpoint antithesis to the combined dietary/sexual abomination greeting Joseph, "the Hebrew man," on his arrival in Egypt. (Even when later married as viceroy to a priest's daughter, by royal arrangement, the former taboo still isolates him, along with all brother "Hebrews," at his own table.) But precisely when Moses finds a refugecomplete with home, job, wife, off-springwe gain a startling insight into his malaise and nostalgia: [Zipporah] bore a son, and he called his name Gershom, for he said [thought, presumably], A sojourner [ger] have I been in a foreign land. (3:22) Having never opened his mind or his lips since his flightas though turned object againMoses breaks into discourse that resumes and radicalizes the psychocultural crisis instead of sealing its happy resolution. The immediate witness to continuity lies in the subjective nomination, evoking two dissonant precedents. The father replays, down to the verbatim echoes of "son . . . called his name . . . said," the would-be Pharaonic mother, whose naming of himself dramatized a complex of intergroup tensions, as between languages, between explicandum and explication, between ge-
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netic kinship and outgroup kindness, between Israelite and foreign, in short. What intervened, though, offers a companion piece nearer to home, within the family, as it were. The son given a (proper) name in Midian also harks back to the brothers called (ethnic) names in Egypt, with the named object again thoroughly refracted through the naming subject, the "I" expressing its sense of foreignness. But foreignness, and commensurately relatedness, to what? In the romantic view of Midian as the school for prophecy, the refugee can no longer feel at home outside the promised land: another lesson earned, another achievement check-listed, another qualification demonstrated, in the hero's step-by-step advance toward the call from the Burning Bush. Thus, having idealized the earlier "Hebrew"calling yet "Hebrew"-saving novice into ''a mature Moses who has no doubt of his Israelite identity," a Harold Bloom credits the name-giver abroad with being "wholly dedicated to the fate of his people" (1990:243-44). Such typecasting, rosy, respectful, retrojective, not only impoverishes and stales but misconceives the whole process of education: from the mosheh two-in-oneness, attached and indissoluble since childhood, to the zigzags described by the bicultural consciousness in its trials, to the (im)balance of pulls at each stage, to the intertextual resonances that orchestrate, orient, often ironize for us the laconic inside view. Multivoiced through allusion to past landmarks of Hebrewnesson Moses' own record, Joseph's, Abraham'sthese few words come to speak volumes and to bespeak anything but a straight line of amelioration. Reconsider first the sequence (direction and all) underlying the two Mosaic phases themselves. Their interlinkage is even closer and finer than may appear, since the past name-calling shares a rationale of geographical (or, more exactly, orientational) etymology with the present name-giving. Ibri implies an origin Across the River, thus dooming the name-bearer to foreignnessliteral outlandershipin foreign usage. "Gershom" verbalizes the name-giver's own feeling of outsidership (gerhood) "in a foreign land." Yet the cross-reference is as dark as it is nice: for an Israelite, or even a Hebrew, Moses feels exiled from the wrong place. He has gone from bad to worse, in that his thought now adopts and solemnizes what it earlier slipped into by labeling rote, namely, the Egyptian viewpoint on the world, geographical self-orientation in particular. 28 Hence the make-up of the antithesis between home and abroad, rootedness and foreignness. That "foreign land" where he sojourns is Midian in implicit yearning opposition to Egyptnot to his "Hebrew" kin, apparently clean forgotten, or banished, still less to what Joseph termed "the land of the Hebrews," quite possibly out of the latter-day exile's ken as well as out of his mind. Extended further back to Joseph's own name-givings, intermediate between the prototype's and the people's "Hebrew" servitude, the comparison remarkably tightens and thickens:
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To Joseph were born two sons . . . [by] Asenath, the daughter of Potiphera priest of On. Joseph called the name of the first-born Manasseh, for God has made me forget [nashshani] all my hardship and all my father's house. And the name of the second he called Ephraim, for God has made me fruitful [hiphrani] in the land of my affliction. (Genesis 41:50-52) That the situational analogy in commemoration leaps to the eye should not obscure but rather highlight and gloss the psychocultural (or, along time, psychogenetic) differences. Of the two commemorators, it is the one more assimilated, higher placed, longer expatriated, and on the best terms with Pharaoh, that would seem less cut off (even if despite himself) from his native Israelite roots. Joseph professes too much, overcongratulates himself on the reversals of his fortune, interior as well as tangible, multiplies self-contradictions from one naming to another. He does not just let slip but guarantees, indeed perpetuates remembrance in nominally celebrating oblivion. With the etymology behind them, the names borne by the sons (like "Moses" on either the innocently unilingual or the Josephus reading) cannot but embody and hand down his antecedents, divergent from the environment's in parentage, homeland, faith, vicissitudes, language, Hebrewness by implication; nor would the names (their form unEgyptian as their meaning), bristle with otherness for his eyes only. 29 Etymological, ethnocultural, spiritual roots: all intertwine on the absent native soil, contrary to appearances or desires. Nor is Joseph, as nomi-narrator, quite blind to the tug of war imprinted on his coinages. If the first name gives away his true state of mindrecollection in pretended tranquilitythe second advertises it, balancing Egypt as "the land of my affliction" (which is to say, though he would never say it, of my Hebrewness) against the torments inflicted by and through his kinfolk. A balance unfavorable on either side, of course, a biography dark amid scene-shifting. Unsentimental even in wishful thinking about the present, Joseph's memory retains everything, one way or another, in the form of a chain of experienced negatives: "all my hardship," Egypt included, no less than "all my father's house." (Of the two balance sheets, in fact, the Egyptian comes out the worse: its evil more explicit, and undistanced, perhaps ongoing, its rewards unmentioned. If he doesn't know that the land of his affliction still ''Hebrews" him in thought [43:32], the disclosure would not take him by surprise either, though the volte-face into open wholesale victimage might.) "God," always cast as superagent, makes the only exception, and the whole difference. A positive value throughout, he is gratefully credited with the apparent happy outcome, or the fresh start, in the teeth of a world fraught with enemies, hostile all around. Roots are one thing, whereabouts another, survival (the mind's "forgetting" combined
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with the body's "fruitfulness") yet another. In or with God alone, psychologically speaking, does the otherwise disenchanted, displaced, negatively defined self find a home, an address along with a redress. Moses now likewise (re)defines himself in negative terms ("a sojourner [ger] in a foreign land," with a double semantic minus), except that his implied positive counterpart is both earthly and genocidal, the house of slaves where neither the ex-champion of Hebrews nor his newborn Hebrew boy would survive for a moment. The former, because Pharaoh will not forget the transgressor until he dies; the latter, because he will not remember the Provider after he has died. "The land of my affliction," the current exile might therefore well repeat, but he doesn'tsuggesting the contrary insteadas if overtaken by amnesia. In retrospect, moreover, we find this variance from Joseph (and the younger, tenser self) wryly underlined by the very disclosure that shapes it toward similitude. As late as the family reunion at Sinai, it transpires that Moses begot in exile not one son but two: The name of the one was Gershom, for he said [or, thought], A sojourner have I been in a foreign land. And the name of the other was Eliezer, for the God of my father was my help [be'ezri] and delivered me from the sword of Pharaoh. (18:3-4) Why doesn't the narrator adhere to the chronology, thereby also fortifying the analogy to earlier key-doublets along the grand Hebrew plot? (Apart from Joseph's two sons, there have been the two royal encounters with "the Hebrewesses" and the two Mosaic ones with the "Hebrews.") Taking the line of least narrative resistance here, as the Septuagint version actually and typically does in restoring the "proper" order of events, is to simplify what needs complicating: from the hero's mind to God's imminent choice to the dynamics of the intercultural theme. 30 Where the truth about the prophet chosen for the people is liable to be missed, or romanticized, the whole truth is best delayed. Told in time, the fact of double birth would crown the situational equivalence between the name-givers and straighten out their psychic antithesis to favorable effect. Without glossing over the sojourner's present nostalgia, the tale might then counter it with the refugee's heartfelt gratitude and grudge-bearing, with the memory of "God" and "father," of who proved "my help" and from whose "sword." The full enlightenment would not quite replicate Joseph (who longs for nothing past, as he brackets Egypt with Canaan, not with Midian or any third alternative). It would all the same produce another Joseph-like balance of human negatives, redeemed by heaven alone, and so a later, riper, more prophetic variant of the mixed quantity brought face-to-face with the Hebrews in Egypt.
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Replacing, instead, orderly chronological development by the shock of disclosure behind time, the given narrative sequence imbalances for a while the self's true equilibrium and equivalence-links. A misleading impression? Doubtless, yet one neither arbitrary nor irretrievable, more one-sided than false even in the misdirecting, and calculated to (over)dramatize an unpalatable truth about God's electhow unpalatable, the interpretive record shows by omission down the ages. The progressively alienated inside views, though less than foolproofcomplex character in the Bible seldom iswould and should overcome the audience's hero worship, schematic expectations, forms of desire: everything liable to resist the Hebrew-delivering champion's, then the nostalgic exile's, incongruity, with the prophetic type, indeed archetype, or what they deem such. On the way to the Call, if you filtered out his Egyptianisms in Egypt, you get a second, improved chance, a stronger dose, in Midian. It is to prevent, not to promote, the idealization of the hero that the Bible's high art now focuses (actually overfocuses by eliding and marginalizing everything else) his self-image as outsider "in a foreign land." To much the same end as this piecemeal disclosure, the art of sequence works in a yet smaller compass on "Gershom" itself: the order of its various etymological readings is so timed that the more alien-minded nominarratives (i.e., those less germinal, assimilable, creditable to Moses the prophet-to-be) suggest themselves at once, the more nation-oriented later. The continuity between the two sequencings, of the births in the macro-plot and of the first-born's linguistic origins in the nomi-plot, even has its negative measure. For the exegetical tradition has not only overlooked but would in effect reverse the thrust, and so arrest the play of language, flatten and flatter the character, uncurl the Egypt-to-Midian-to-Egypt itinerary, reduce the ordeal of election to the simplest Bildungsroman type. More visibly than ever beforeMoses' naming in adoption includedthe drive of the exegesis proves here as little aligned as the Septuagint with the Bible's time arts and as anxious to "Israelize" the culture hero ahead of God's own time. Within this nomi-narrative miniature, therefore, observe how our process of reading twists again in concert with the dynamics of becoming read about. Indisputably, the name for once rings a bell, and within the clan itself, having already been assigned to Levi's own first-born (Genesis 46:11); Moses' uncle according to Exodus 6:16-20, Numbers 26:57-59. Yet the name recurs to the exclusion of the nomi-narrative, and with it of any clannish, much less geoethnic sentiment on the name-giver's part. For Levi, having begotten his Gershon/Gershom in Canaan, would never associate him with sojournship "in a foreign land." On the contrary, this nominal recurrence in etymological variance links "Gershom" faster than ever to the Abraham-old ethnicon "Hebrew" and the neologism mosheh,
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in terms of cultural (semantic, evaluative) bipolarity. As re-etymologizer, the sojourner certainly diverges from the inherited toward "foreign" signification; the question is only how and how much, relative to, say, the Nilotic counterreading of "Hebrew." In regrettable fact, however, just as the Hamites counterread the ethnicon for the worse, so do the exegetes the personal name for the better. Overeager in enmity or in solidarity, the extremes meet. Instead of starting with the memory of the first Levite first-born in Genesis, critics run ahead to the Levite prophet's achievements in the Exodus, against the probabilities generated along both discourse and world time, canon and chronology. According to a widespread view, the ger exhibited on the surface is a mere folk etymologythought up in authorial and/or Mosaic ignorancewhile "Gershom" really comes from grs *, "drive out." For example, thereby some intimately personal significance attaches to the name, for its stem g-r-sh . . . is the same used to describe the actions of the shepherds in v. 17, which was the occasion for Moses to meet his future wife and to be received into Jethro's family. But Gershom also carries a wider, national allusiveness, for later in the narrative the stem is used three more times [Ex. 6:1, 10:11, 12:39], to underscore the abject humiliation of the stubborn Pharaoh as he is forced to reverse his refusal to let Israel go. (Sarna 1991:12-13; cf. Greenberg 1969:49, Cole 1973:61, Exum 1983:80) Even before his official call, the prophet would then be speaking so prophetically as to anticipate the future collective deliverance. But it would take a prophet, surely, to detect the prophet of mass expulsion in the expatriate here and now. In fact, grs* enjoys neither scientific (i.e., evidentiary) nor interpretive nor ordinal, perceptual priority to ger. What is there to mark the one as the real derivation, the other as folkish? Thus, the "sojourner in a foreign land" explanation adduced in the text for "Gershom," via his begetter, does not lose credibility (to the alternative's gain) through any obvious discordance with the name explained. To become "grammatically as inept as that of Moses" (Greenberg 1969:49, Exum 1983:80), it would have to incur a clash of the passive (mashuy) vs. active (mosheh) order, and it doesn't.31 Unlike meshitihu on the Princess's lips at the time, ger can therefore enjoy to the full the evidentiary advantage of givenness. In terms of accessibility, givenness also means inescapable and immediate presentness, if not ultimate exclusiveness, as opposed to the alternative's dependency on inferenceand of a high order, too, because it presupposes the upper limit of competence. If inferred by the reader at all and inferred at once, accordingly, grs* would arise parallel to ger, the act of expulsion
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juxtaposed with the state of expatriateness. Even on this best possible reading, however, the surface and the deeper etymologies would then run not counter but complementary to each other: the two would join forces, at the outset, against the prophetic imaging (or foreloading) of the name and the name-giver. The basic conditions of reading in time ensure this initial convergence. Suppose we have some reason to suspect another etymology below the one given in the nomination scene. Without the benefit of hindsight, we must look to the past for it, or at least for its meaning and support. With regard to grs *, the past offers two anchorages in the name-giver's biography. One lies in his quarrel with the shepherds at the well, whose "driving off" (wa'ye'garshum, in all-masculine form to clinch the rhyme with Gershom) of the priest's daughters led to Moses' "Egyptian"-style intervention and his resettlement in Midian (2:17ff.). Another, less verbatim and recent yet equally in foreignized character, concerns Moses' own affair with his Hebrew brothers, where the attempt at deliverance led to his being driven out of Egypt. Whatever Gershom-as-grs* commemoratesthe old home lost for nothing, the new home gained by mutual kindness, or boththe commemoration is personal and anything but patriotic, let alone prophetic, any more than that signaled by ger. Only "many days" later, after Pharaoh's death, the Burning Bush call, and the return to Egypt, does grs* swing toward "a wider, national allusiveness." (It will take a few "days" longer to uncover the existence of Eliezer.) Even then, significantly, we find the novelty both introduced in a voice other than Moses' and modulated along the entire route to the Exodus, for the sake of character-conservation in progressive development from the initial to the ultimate "expelling." God's punning forecast of inversion, "with a strong hand will he drive them out [ye'garshem] of his land'' (6:1), arises to reassure the despairing ("why has thou sent me?") Moses; but Pharaoh will "drive out" [wa'ye'garesh] of his presence the leader of Israel (10:11), as his predecessor did the champion of the victimized Hebrew, on the way to the enactment of the scenario in the urgent "driving out" [gorshu] of the people from Egypt (12:39). The verb's meaning, especially the value ascribed to it between alienation and nationalism, outsidership and ethnocentricity, comes full circle at the last possible moment, the Exodus event itself. So on all readings short of prescience, and throughout the happening, the nomi-narrative unrolls in step with the macronarrative. Of the two Gershom etymologies, grs* need not register at the time, if at all. Where it does, the interpreter obtains a yet deeper and darker insight into the name-giver's reaction (as into the challenge presented to God's eventual counteraction) than afforded by the voiced ger on its own. For that matter, while the silence on Eliezer's birth temporarily keeps out of play the aus-
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picious inner counterforce to "Gershom" reflected in eli-ezer, the early joint emergence of ger/grs * with Gershom would double the impression of withdrawal from the native selfalways back toward an Egypt purged of Joseph's "affliction," the Hebrews', the withdrawer's own. Moreover, the polarity of the two meanings on a scale of explicitness is a precise, iconic measure of what he does remember (''a sojourner in a foreign land") vis-à-vis what he would keep down ("expulsion" from his land and/or as an aid to resettlement in a new land). A subjective order of priorities in little. What a far cry (if we take another step back along the chain of Hebrewness) from God's prediction of gerhood to Abraham, himself just labeled as Hebrew by a Hamite and impelled to rescue a brother: "A sojourner [a Beyond-theRiverian, he might have said, by implication from the Hebrewness attached to his auditor in the foregoing chapter] will thy offspring be in a land not theirs" (Genesis 15:13). Moses now unwittingly echoes the wordsJoseph, and later the Israelites, only enacted the predicament foretoldbut to almost contrary effect. The divine scenario actualizes itself in the ger's feelings as well as fortunes, except for still another discontinuity in continuity: the tell-tale variation in wording and reference from "not theirs" to "foreign." Of the two variants, the one cast in plain language ("foreign") may seem to express an acuter and therefore more commendable sense of otherness in exile; but if so, it is certainly, because literally, misplaced. In the forecast made at the time, God's opting for a roundabout negative term established an absolute, either/or dichotomy, a two-value map for "thy offspring's" orientation. Thereby, the land of Canaan (promised to be theirs) gets singled out from the rest of the world ("not theirs"), with little to choose between, say, Egypt and Midian. Nor is this pairability of the two countries under "not theirs" random or arbitrary. In retrospect, from the vantage point of Exodus, the Genesis verse looks like a knowing forward glance to precisely Moses' squeeze between them. By an otherwise curious omission, God abstains from naming the land "not theirs," so that the reference, anonymous as well as negative, stretches beyond Egypt. And by an equally perceptible failure of agreement in number, that outreach assumes a direct intertextual bearing on Midian. This is why the singular of "a sojourner" clashes (and the intermediate singular/plural "thy offspring" moderates the discord) with the plural of "not theirs": to foreshadow "thy offspring" Moses in exile and provide for his verbatim repetition, while bringing home that he, like every individual Israelite, must remain "a sojourner" in any land (whether Midian or Egypt) not "theirs," not possessed by the nation, "thy offspring," as a whole. The phylogenesis long anticipated, then, also silently mirror-images the crisis in the psychogenesis undergone by its chief future agent. Nor does the interplay between the two evolutions, always to antistereotypic effect
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on character and plot, end with the locatives. If we turn from the spatial to the temporal bridge thrown across the Genesis/Exodus, patriarch/prophet spacetimes, the same long-distance rhyming for a difference explains the verb form assigned to Moses in the etymology. "A sojourner will thy offspring be [yihyeh]" changes tense but not root (hyh, "to be") on the way to the Mosaic "A sojourner hayiti. . . ." Commentators and grammarians find his hayiti troublesome on account of its alleged reference to the past ("I was," as though the sojourning were over, lingering in memory alone). They could spare themselves the trouble, because the given verb form may also, and here does, express an ongoing action or state ("I have been,'' if not, as the NEB legitimately renders it, to the same Midiandirected effect, "have become"), in the manner of the English present perfect. (Thus Joseph's brothers to Pharaoh: "Cattlemen have thy servants been [hayu] from our youth till now" [Genesis 46:34]). But supposing otherwise, for the sake of argument, the exigencies of allusion would nevertheless yield the given form. In Biblical language, the alternative to the supposed past reference would then be not any overt present-tense copula ("I am") 32 but a mere pronoun ("I"), with a loss of bonding ("be"-ing) force across the two books. As it is, Moses the sojourner's hayiti resonantly, and grammatically, counterpoints God's future-indicating yihyeh in Genesis ("will be") to deepen our sense of false fulfillment.33 Therefore, the Genesis anticipation of the naming scene by allusive art, itself motivated through divine prescience, ironizes the inside view of Moses. To him, "foreign" is still whatever lies outside his birth place and adoptive land: the rest of the world (such as Midian) stands opposed to Egypt, not to Canaan. Still, I emphasize, because we must not (if we could at all, any more than the experiencing-I) run ahead of the process. "Without the long exile in Midian he would not have experienced even a semblance of the alienness that was his people's lot in Egypt" (Greenberg 1969:49). True and equalizing and auspicious, but only in the eyes of the omniscients, existential or storied, in charge of the grand design leading from the prophet's formation to the people's. At the moment, the last thing anybody else (fore)sees in Moses, himself least of all, is the prophet. Instead of generating thoughts about a or the ancestral homeland, as the mini-exile from home to court did about the "brothers," exile pulls him back to the land of Joseph's affliction and theirs and his own. His is an "inneres Ausland" in more (and more cumulative) senses, literal and otherwise, than ever dreamt of by Freud. Like earlier Mosaic swings on the rebound, this proves temporary, but for once casts a long dark shadow before it, all the way to eternity. Temporary, the hero's deviance will find its repair (if not its reparation) in duly counterallusive manner: an echoing alignment of self and nation with the Genesis forecast to the trailblazer who crossed into Hebrewness
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that his offspring may cross ('br, "Hebrew it") back into the promise. The belated counterecho even forms a whole with the amends made for associated heteroculturalisms, e.g., the shift from the neophyte's "a Hebrew man from among his brothers" to the valedictory empathy with "thy brother the Hebrew" in bondage. The selfsame lawgiver will properly re-etymologize (reinterpret, renarrativize, revaluate, recode) the geography latent in this ethnicon: from alien-minded Beyond-the-Rivership that deterritorializes the Hebrews to the Crossership for which he prepares the Israelites, by insistent wordplay ('br) along with suitable ordinance and exhortation, as heirs to Abraham. He will also overhaul the territorial relation in warning Israel on the Jordan against "abhorring an Egyptian, for thou wert a sojourner in his land" (Deuteronomy 23:8, pointedly going on to speak of the "sons born'' to that alien; cf. also the harping on the duty to show every sojourner kindness, "for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt," e.g., Exodus 22:20, Deuteronomy 10:19). In the elect's own time and teaching, as the distance shrinks vis-à-vis the brother, it widens vis-à-vis the birthplace, to the joint inversion of the polarities entertained by the Court-to-Midian self. In the same Pentateuch-long viewpoint, however, this future development from ignorance to knowledge breaks, rather than converges, with that from unhappiness to happiness on earth. The Midian scene only fulfils one barbed long-range anticipation to launch another, more enduring and tragic. The Abraham-old irony also works forward, since Canaan (still, or already, "the land of the Hebrews") will in the end become "theirs," Israel's in name and fact, but never his own, the prophet's, since he is destined to live forever outside territorial boundaries. As is known all too well to the Deuteronomic voice counterechoing its one-time aberrant mindscape, the full ethnogeographical turn described after Midian stops short of the exile's happy return. In tragedy, the rule-of-thumb says, you learn all you need to know, and in comedy you learn it in time. By a sad logic of retribution, he who has embraced the wrongest and most wrongful homeland finds himself debarred from the promised land. Everyone and everything in his keeping crosses (given the ordeal of the founding, the eponymous, the tribal fathers, indeed recrosses) the Jordan: the nation he has formed, the Torah he has written down, the bones of the Provider and Precursor he has carried along. Except through them, his works, the shepherd does achieve a home, in God, without a homecoming. Spared a Hebrew's life, moreover, he in effect comes to rest as one, God having visited upon him the stigma of extraterritoriality (sojournship, outlandership, Across-the-Riverhood) that aliens bring to the group name. Another telling mirror image of Joseph's fate: lifelong Hebrewness, voiced or nursed against him, posthumous Crossing. God's justice is harsh but in kind. Nor have we yet exhausted its sense of poetic rightness or, in the shorter term, the intimation of other-mind-
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edness given at this juncturealways by appeal to the Hebrewing debut and the Hebrewgram. The fugitive's curious nostalgia for Egypt thus recurs with an extra twist in the underlying and more literal etymology of Gershom: getsham, meaning "a sojourner there." Within the canon itself, such is the reading that Judges 17-18 inscribes anew in connection with Moses' grandson, the peripatetic Levite youth. Inverting the original, name-before-derivation order of elements, it knowingly puns on the Levite's residence in Judah"he sojourned there [gar sham]"to anticipate the patronymic that eventually arises with his name, "Jonathan son of Gershom" (17:7, 18:30). 34 Even in its overlaid Exodus form, however, this alternative derivation is not hard either to spot or to appreciate. Thematically, it outdoes the given self-displacement: in locating the quotee "there," it evokes with greater power the territorial overtones of "Hebrew" as mimeticized, always consigning the name-bearer elsewhere in foreign or foreign-like usage, Moses' own included. Linguistically, in terms of sound/ sense congruence, its superiority is more evident yet. For the underground etymology alone recovers the entire missing half (-shom) of the baby's name, via a deictic equivalent (sham, "there'') to the objective spatial pointer ("in a foreign land") on the surface. The alignment of the two halves also deepens the psychological focus: the location gets relativized to the self"there" is where the "I" is notthe nomination more internalized. But what does this closure of the hole in the etymology reveal ("nomi-narrate") about the dramatic etymologizer? Negatively speaking, it makes untenable the rose-colored view of his portrait and process, whereby he has now grown into maturity, fully aware of his Israelite identity and dedicated to the national cause: "The 'land' is Egypt, not Midian, and Moses speaks of 'there' not 'here,' as well as referring to the past . . . so that the birth of the child may be seen as symbolic of the coming regeneration of downtrodden Israel" (Sarna 1991:13). The argument surely contradicts itself: if "there," along with "in a foreign land," refers to Egypt in the past, then he must feel at home (not or no longer "a sojourner") in the here and now of Midian. With one homeland changed for another, both outside the promised land, where is his "regeneration" as a symbol of Israel's? The whole idolatrous packagesentimentalism combined with typologism, ethno- and prophet-centrism, hero worshiponce more defeats itself beyond repair. Among the other imaginable permutations of time (hayiti) and space (sham), two founder on the threshold of the data. Needless to say, the phrase cannot possibly refer to Egypt in the present, because the etymologizer no longer sojourns there, nor to Midian in the past, where he still does. Yet observe that even if both spacetimes did not so obviously fail to qualify, neither involves the ancestral homeland and would thus further disqualify any simplistic linear account of Moses' development since his brush with the Hebrews. The only possibility that remains is my construal of the
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alternative derivation: as a reference (accordant with both "in a foreign land" and the overall psychodynamics) to the name-giver's sojournship in Midian now, where and when he appears most domiciled by objective criteria. Not that this reading clicks together with the data in easy harmony but that it brings them into pattern with the ordered, if ever-shifting, tensions integral to the subject's mind. Divorced from the pattern, his etymology finishes with an offense against the logic of space-deixis, because "there" as a rule indicates a place other than the one currently occupied by the speaker. To map the world onto the discourse, you take your reference from the locus of the language-event: the near contrasts with the far on the axis of space-orientation, or more technically, the proximal with the distal. Wherever he happens to be, the talking/thinking subject must (re)fix himself in his immediate whereabouts, on pain of disorientation suffered, caused, betrayed. Hence Midian (where the sojourning and speaking take place) should have figured as the zero-point, "here," Egypt as the distant "there," not the other way round. 35 Even God, though omnipresent in the universe, complies with this earthbound discourse logic. Speaking in the next chapter from the desert Burning Bush at Horeb, he promises to wrest Israel "from the hand of Egypt and to bring him up from that land" (3:8): a fittingly distal term for Egypt, which relates to the proximal "this" as "there" to ''here." Conversely, having made the forecast about the offspring's expatriation, God proceeded to assure Abraham that the sojourners "will return here" (15:16). Abraham himself duly opposes "this land" to his birthplace "there" (24:6-8), beyond the Euphrates. Again, "I have been stolen from the land of the Hebrews, nor have I done anything here" (Genesis 40:15): as Joseph spoke in Egypt, so Moses in Midian thinks of Egypt. But then, Moses etymologizes in a psychological rather than logical mode, taking his reference ("here") from the place where his spirit lingers and consigning the location of his exiled body to remoteness ("there"). Physically "gone up from the land" as an enemyin effect realizing Pharaoh's scenario about the Israelites, along with the outlandership built into "Hebrews"he privately still homes in on it from afar. The longing mind transcends its earthbound container. As the great medieval poet Yehudah Halevi will sing from Muslim Spain, "My heart is in the East, and I at the end of the West": an analogous self-division, except that this fellow Levite's heartultimately pulling "him" after it in legendary reunionhas winged its way to the right place. Far from anticipating Halevi, Moses sounds like the Puntians of Nilotic wishful thinking and state propaganda, which has them unrealistically talk of theirs as a "foreign land" in contact with Egyptian visitors. By an ethnocritical twist of viewpoint, Scripture imposes on its hero, the runaway and in time the deliverer from Egypt, a comparable lococentrism to the oppres-
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sor's (vain)glory. Among Egyptians proper, within their own literature, he outdoes the courtier Sinuhe, another fugitive from the Pharaoh, who sought and eventually achieved repatriation. What with further pertinent detail, the analogy may assume allusive force, as may earlier interliterary rhymes on which we touched. So intended or not, the juxtaposition develops a meaningful antithesis. For example, Sinuhe escaped North, to Canaan, or the greater Canaan, driven by a mysterious impulse: Report was made to me. My heart quailed; it carried me off on the way of flight. (Yet) no one had gossiped about me; no one had spat in my face; not a belittling word had been heard in the mouth of the herald. I do not know what brought me to this country. It was as though it might be a god. (Pritchard 1969:19) A point-by-point contrastdown to the thought of heavenly scriptwriting, long withheld in Exodusflanked by two kindred emotions: mortal terror as cause and aching homesickness as aftereffect. The contrast in antecedents thus overtakes the aftereffect itself, incomparably more natural to Sinuhe (and again, to the Pharaonic propaganda behind him, especially at the time [Redford 1992:85-86]). Even so, it is the born Egyptian, not the "Hebrew"-born, who switches references to his location outside Egypt: now the utterance-bound "here" or "this country" or "land'' or "place," now the chauvinistic "foreign (or 'another' or 'barbarous') land." And the paradox of deixis remains Moses' own. novelty. For good measure, the tale crowns his paradox of self-displacement with a puzzle as to his real whereabouts. The wonder about the subject's mindscape has a counterpart in an objective hide-and-seek game played with the reader throughout the Midian interlude: its locatives range as widely as the territory covered by the Midianites, famous for their nomadism in search of pasture or (Joseph's luck) trade. So where, on the world's map, is "there"? The location, Biblical geographers agree, remains "quite uncertain, but clearly it was somewhere beyond the Egyptian frontierposts, and to the east. Somewhere in the Sinai peninsula, or the Arabah (the area south of the Dead Sea), or that part of Arabia east of the gulf of Aqabah, would suit" (Cole 1973:60). Yet this uncertainty would suit the narrator's purposes down to the ground, because it mirrors afreshnow from without, in and through the sense of disorientation evoked in our-selvesthe unsettled hero's own feeling. The instability and immateriality of the real "there" as "somewhere" (what with God's promised "here" existing, or at least surfacing, nowhere) throws into yet sharper relief the determinacy of Egypt, objectively out there but present to the winged mind as "here." Nor, deixis apart, is this paradox altogether new, or what it gives away
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a fleeting state of mind. In a longer perspective, it substitutes geographical for geocultural terms to restage a continuous and progressive, if unconscious, self-distancing on Moses' part from where he really belongs. For the exile's describing Midian as though he were still in Egypt recalls the "outgoing" deliverer's thinking of "Hebrews" as though he were an Egyptian, riveted where they have wanderedexcept that the sense of kinship has in the meantime gone. No "father's house" and no ''God" is invoked in (Eliezer-less) paternal name-giving, not even by way of Josephlike wishful oblivion; as, conversely, no (again, not outside the Septuagint's automatic reordering) "hardship" and no "land of affliction" tarnishes the mental image of home nursed in absentia. Where Joseph was forced and then invited his brothers to sojourn, where Pharaoh enslaved the sojourners by force, where Moses himself deemed them sojourning brothers, always as Hebrews, ibrim/eberites, there his pain of enforced sojournship centers. If their exile was his home, so it continues in his own exile, to the blanking out of shared roots and variants of uprooting alike. Far from knowledge and self-knowledge coming in Midian, they would rather appear to go. The youthful self's internal division persists in spite of everythingwith the difference that flight has now tipped the balance on the less expected and certainly less auspicious side. The reversed deixis is a measure of reversal, or at least regression, in the subject's group awareness and commitment. It is apparently to moderate this violence perpetrated on deixis in name-giving that the storyteller in quoting replaces "there" by the equivalent, yet nondeictic and less disharmonious, place reference, "in a foreign land." Even so, the verbal harmony imposed in transmission on Moses' logic of thought does not yet settle the thinking mind. Confronted with the substitute locative term, even the reader who takes it at face value, directed to Egypt in the past, will be struck by Moses' emphatic, overprotesting redundance ("a sojourner" being by definition "in a foreign land"); the better reader will proceed to remap it on the Midianite present; while the most alert reader (like the punning reinscriber of Judges 17-18) will also figure out the original word, the deictic locative "there," and with it the underlying dissonance, acuter than ever, in Moses' orientation to the world. On any level of reading above stock response to the prophetic model, therefore, the etymology betrays a troubled, homesick, literally undomesticated psychology. All this also goes to suggest that, in identifying "foreign land" or "there" as Egypt, the popular interpretive line repeats with "Gershom" the confusion of perspectives on the name (i.e., the name-giver's vs. his environment's, let alone the teller's) that already beset "Moses" itself. In the earlier nomination scene, we found it imperative to distinguish the Princess's own idea of the name and the etymology (however reconstructed) from everyone else's within her world, or ours, including the name-bearer's, whose
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future hangs in the balance. Mose/"son" would operate for cover-up and assimilation, mosheh/moueses/meshitihu would ask for trouble; and she, if rational, must appreciate the difference, as must the reader in the frame. Become in turn a parent and name-giver, Moses has now every reason to hide the darkness of his thought from the family that embraced him. Advertising his sense of alienness in nominal commemoration would pain those to whom he owes a debt of gratitude (where Joseph duly paid it, twice over, to God) and imprint the breach on his son forever. Instead, while himself privately thinking of Egypt as his home, he lets the Midianite circle joyfully read it into "Gershom" as "there" and/or "a foreign land" and/or the grs-ing * antitype, commemorated by the wanted emigrant in thankful contrast to the domestic here-and-now. Denied Scripture's inside views and countersignals, they would at least have a right to their wishful thinking, as they would rightly project it on the fugitive in his personal, not prophetic capacity. Either polar nomi-narrative then embodies the beholder's form of desire. In this light, moreover, the theme of Hebrewness reenters the picture by a complex of indirections. As an ethnicon, "Hebrew" dramatizes throughout the same perspectival collision latent in both "Moses" and "Gershom" as individual names of group members, however alienated. Further, the "Hebrews'' grow more conspicuous not only by their absence from the hero's thought abroad, but also by the literalness of their presence in it earlier, since the Gershom etymology for the first time reveals Moses, as name-giver cum nomi-narrator, to be a speaker of so-called Biblical Hebrew. In a way characteristic of the entire story of psychogenesis, whether in the telling or in the happening, this revelation about the mother tongue's deep-rootedness is progressive, a disclosure that effects a long-awaited closure. Freud read the opposite into the "slow of tongue" self-portrayal: that the Egyptian-born Moses "spoke another language and could not communicate with his Semitic neo-Egyptians without an interpreter, at all events at the beginning of their relation" (1964:33).36 However, the actual beginning or even the renewal of the contact with the group antedates the "tongue" self-excuse by "many days," and it leaves a question that the discourse-event now in progress rather answers favorably, ahead of the Burning Bush. The beginning problematizes the linguistic issue in the "child's" shuttling between homes, then in the "outgoer's" advance from monologue to dialogue. The observer's self-communion regarding "the Hebrews," we found, may well have been as Egyptianized in language as in ethnicon. On the other hand, the agent's communication with "the Hebrews," unlike Joseph's, must have been immediatewithout an interpreter, on pain of deathand hence in some common language. But which? After all, if Miriam could adjust herself to the Princess, so could the men to the prince-
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ling. Except that they do not sound nearly as obliging and might wish to taunt the "ruler and judge" with his low origins, to force self-adjustment on him by talking back in the vernacular. So the only thing beyond question about that reunion concerns Moses' knowledge of the heterolanguage, not of the ancestral tongue. His performance in the doublet is open to three readings: (1) Great House education notwithstanding, the whole discourse originally proceeded as we encounter it, in the hut language dotted with certain naturalized and self-translated foreignisms; (2) Egyptian unilingualism throughout, from thought to speech, translated in the writing alone; (3) Isra-Egyptian bilingualism, with code-switching, voluntary or forced, in middoublet. This does not enable the patriotic reader to opt for (1), or limit the choice between (1) and (3), nor the pessimist to infer total amnesia, much less repression, from the native term's absence in (2). The ambiguity lingers until the naming scene, which overtly casts the hero as (re)etymologizer. He must have thought up at least one of the three vernacular derivations packed into "Gershom" and in all likelihood tactfully translated by him to his family circle, the Midianite speakers: this underlines his peculiar linguistic competence, as well as validates afresh the hypothesis about the nonconvergence of the respective nomi-narratives. In brief, he shares more with the Hebrews, and always has, than revealed so far. Even if he imbibed the mother tongue at his mother's breast, as the reflexes of code-switching suggested at the time, only a miracle (i.e., God) would ensure its retention throughout the decades of disuse, or counteruse, between infancy and paternity. Over and above the exile's recourse to the ancestral tongue, like Joseph's before him, his demonstrated knowledge of it gives us pause. (So does his possible, no matter how op-positional, harking back to Levi's firstborn; so, but for the text's reticence about Eliezer, would his ongoing awareness of the ancestral deity, "the God of my father"; and so will the dark Bridegroom-of-Blood episode on the way back to Egypt, which reveals that Moses, unlike his son, was duly circumcised.) To top off our surprise, Moses' name-giving cum etymologizing shows none of the hovering between (given, reportive) vernacular and (original, reported) heterolingualism traceable in the incongruity of his own nomination by Pharaoh's daughter. Ambivalence between the cultures, or (at the moment) worse, yes; ambiguity, let alone confusion between the languages, no. 37 And if he retains such command of the language, he might equally well have remembered the hut of his birth throughout his displacement to the Great House: no need for the Princess to jeopardize her own interests, along with the sense of the hero's etymology and the tale's larger coherence, in naming the foundling. Her "Mose," thus equipped, would preserve enough of his born self to initiate without outside
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help or gossip or enmity the quest for the "brothers," on the long way toward the eventual mosheh. Yet the same newly disclosed linguistic expertise also reilluminates the crookedness of the way, the complexity of the traveler. In retrospect, his iterated thought-references at the time to "Hebrew man/men" gain weightier import from the probability that they, too, have been made originally in so-called Hebrew (not in Egyptian, which the narrator translated for our benefit, just as he smoothed away the intralinguistic paradox of "there"). If for an Israelite to think of fellow Israelites as "Hebrews" at all is unparalleled, then his thinking so in the common native tongue renders him doubly foreignized (or in our jargon, alienated) and, being against all odds, doubly fraternal at once. This intricate retrospective light in turn serves both to explain and to entangle Moses' conduct abroad. On the one hand, its loosening of his Israelite bond falls into pattern with his rescue of the seven damsels from the shepherds' tyranny (2:16-17). He will champion anyone in personal distress, it emerges, regardless of nationality: the man practicing universal justice (and, himself rescued by an alliance of women, poetic justice) gains in stature at the further expense of the Israelite. Likewise with his description by the girls as "an Egyptian man"; with his settlement and marriage among foreigners of yet another faith and culture, viewed as such in marked opposition to Egypt at that; even with his obliviousness of his own "brothers." It is a short step (as Pharaoh has already demonstrated, by way of murderous commission rather than mental omission) from denying them their proper name to blanking out their existence. What the first Hebrew slave attempted in vain, the first native Hebrew-caller of the enslaved seems to have managed at last. Moses apparently forgets, God alone "remembers" (2:24) and will remind him after "many days" (3:1ff.). The very development in our knowledge of him, through inside view and analogy and rereading behind time, accentuates the deterioration of his self-knowledge in time. On the other hand, Moses' sitting down by the well abroad, as a prelude to acquiring a home and a wife and (abominable to Egypt) a flock, not only triggers our memory of patriarchal tradition but also implies his own. So can he truly have forgotten the immediate past and present? Hasn't Joseph set the precedent of wishful erasure, undone ("Joseph remembered . . .") by the very first new contact with the brothers? Again, doesn't Joseph appear at his most repressive just before the unexpected return of the repressed? Following the same logic of action, the shuttling from one extreme to the other would also make the same psychological sense. The alien or alienated drives would best respond to the pressure for inversion if given enough time (twenty years there, "many days" here) to work themselves out, by a catharsis of sorts. And why should Moses use the idiom
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of his people to express his longing for the country of their, and his, persecutors? Sojourning in Midian while dreaming of Egypt in the language of Canaan (more than enough to prefigure the murmuring Israelites) bespeaks a knotty sense of identity indeed. Only the Burning Bush encounter (pointedly, if by now foreseeably, removed from all anterior geocultural spaces) cuts through this tangle, springs on the expatriate his national identity along with the mission of rescuing his true compatriots from his imagined homeland. Or you may put it in reverse, so as to focus the dynamics of tying, loosening, and retying the knot between the prophet and the people. The ethnic tie having rubbed against alien nurture since birth, there comes an early dissociation on the ground of Hebrewness, to the limit of mutual rejection, followed by reintegration on the shared but outlawed, forgotten, unfamiliar Israelite heights: who but the Almighty could reconcile the two opposed exigencies of deliverance? Exactly because it is the need for a shepherd groomed since childhood (Joseph rises in adulthood) as far apart as possible from his flock that has torn them apart on contact, and has added distance to distance thereafter, nothing less than superhuman revelation would bring them together again for good. Not the inherited Levite genes, not the infantile grouping, not the genius, not the genocide, not the grievance against the sword, not the passage of time, not the perspective of distance, evoking if anything the wrong memories and emotions, certainly not any sudden, Joseph-like reunion with the estranged brothersunless newly defined and knotted and launched in advance from a higher ground by the God of the Father(s). However necessary, everything else would be insufficient to rectify the effects of the Hebrew condition on all the parties involved. God's approach to Moses, beginning with the elaborate self-introduction, indeed reads like a crash course that can afford to take nothing for granted. Or the other way round: were it not for the presumption of the addressee's ignorance, most of the opening address would be redundant, because literally ancient history, and repetitious to boot. Decontextualized out of sequence and speech-event, by genetic automatism, the iterations have been "objectified" in source analysis: attributed to the wrong duality or mixture of origins, indeed to the wrong mixed genesisthe text's within the culture, in place of the hero's between cultures. Faced with this challenge of calling a dual self to leadership, God practices in exemplary fashion what he will preach. He anticipates, as it were, his own commandment, "thou shalt teach them [the key 'words'] diligently to thy children" (Deuteronomy 6:7), acting the father to the greatest (and virtually fatherless) child of Israel, hitherto least taught, most alienated, who will in due course impress and reimpress the same on the people. Once taken as a revelation to Moses in the fullest sensetheophany with disclosurethe
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objective textual liabilities become psychocultural assets: the more "ancient" the Burning Bush givens, the tighter their fit as counterweights to the subject's mixed antecedents and zigzag growth to date. First of all, on this tabula rasa premise, the divine mentor quickly takes him through the rudiments: ancestral sacred history ("I am the God of thy father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob"), providence ("I have seen the affliction of my people in Egypt"), land ("flowing with milk and honey, the place of the Canaanites . . ."), all unique to the covenant with Israel. All group-constituting elements, moreover, are brought home by way of repetition and variation, not least the terminology. Thus God's language of national reference advances by easy stages. It opens with the descriptive, hence most intelligible, "my people in Egypt"; rises to the proper name ''the Sons of Israel"; and finishes with the compound "my people, the Sons of Israel" (3:6-10), a phrase first and last used on the eve of Pharaoh's persecution (1:9) and by degrees eroded since into "Hebrews." The erosion having penetrated Israel's speech under Egyptian duress and the Egyptianized Moses' very thought, in the ancestral tongue itself, the work of restoration must begin at home. It must begin, that is, less as a direct sequel to the hero's evolutionreputedly linear, on the upgrade, perfected in Midianthan as a corrective to his zigzags between cultures all along. To make the divided self whole, God repairs not only the latest fractures in the exile's memory and solidarity but also the gaps in knowledge and self-knowledge laid bare as early as the princeling's ordeal among the "Hebrews." Not for nothing does the repairer obliquely advert to all the parameters of the Intercultural Law of Nomination: the term "Hebrew," which aroused such wonder by its foreignlike recurrence in a mind where it least belongs, now grows conspicuous again by its systematic, motivated, instructional absence from the paradigm of native discourse, virtually a counterdiscourse to the hero's thus far. Getting the idiom right stands high on the list of priorities, for it amounts to a re-education. That the paradigm conducts a silent dialogue with the addressee's turns of thought, especially with his heteroculturalisms old and recent, is perhaps the best measure of its educational thrust, no less than of its heavenly insight. Thus read, the self-introduction as "the God of thy father . . . Abraham . . . Isaac . . . Jacob" comments upon Moses' "brother"-directed mentality. He needs to reckon with his sonhood as well; and if he has two mothers (2:8, 10), then his "father" is one, like his ancestral deity, who indeed acts in loco parentis. 38 So, again, is the multitude of unfortunates he has left behind. For "I have seen the affliction [or in 6:6, 7, 'the burdens'] of my people in Egypt" rhymes with Moses' debut, when "he went out to his brothers and looked upon [saw] their burdens, and he saw an Egyptian man striking a Hebrew
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man from among his brothers" (2:11-12; cf. the allusive role-montage in Isaiah 59:16). Does God's allusion salute his elect's like-minded and self-generated commitment to the oppressed "many days" ago, or call for its revival? However that may be, the divine substitution as well as elision of terms from the common "sight'' gently preach narrower and wider horizons at once. Moses' viewpoint must outgrow the biculturalism and ignorance and myopia that trained it earlier on "Hebrew" individuals in adversity, to the exclusion of "my people." Two verses later, the tacit divine retrospect on the auditor's career will stretch yet further back, echoing the language of the birth tale to reinforce the same ethnolinguistic point with another ad hominem counterpoint. "And now, behold, the cry of the Sons of Israel has come to me, and I have also seen the oppression with which the Egyptians oppress them" (3:9) alludes to "she saw him, the child, and behold, a boy crying! and she took pity on him and said, From among the children of the Hebrews is this" (2:6). The cross reference bristles with suggestiveness. Rather than escaping "oppression," once his "cry" has been "seen," Moses underwent its insidious forms. He now emerges as a helpless object of oppressive discourse, and by implication, a brainwashed subject of it thereafter. The "boy crying" on the Nile, later the Pharaonic "son," could not know what the adult and prophet must know in face of the ongoing "cry": "the children of the Hebrews," among whom he was numbered at birth, are really "the Sons of Israel." According to the variations pointed by the interscenic textual rhyme, that is the usage of his adoptive mother and country, this the truth of his ancestral "father" and God. In between, the allusive chain passes through the undertaking "to deliver him ['my people,' singularized individualfashion anew, for collectivity] out of the land of Egypt and bring him up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey, to the place of the Canaanite . . .": why the overabundant mentions of "land"? Doing duty for italics, or an amplifier, they re-echo an earlier, unwitting echo between the same parties, this time with a view to spatial on top of historical and ethnic reorientation. In the "Gershom" etymology, Moses the sojourner twisted God's "land not theirs" (and Joseph the etymologizer's "land of my affliction") into a homelandnostalgically polarized to Midian "there." So God now untwists matters by equating "Egypt" with the distal "that land," in opposition to a land unnamed (perhaps because known to Moses, if at all, as "the land of the Hebrews") and still occupied by other Hamites, the next antagonist ahead, yet a land good, promised, "theirs." The formal language of the call thereupon draws these threads together for Moses' benefit. It duly (re)names the nation vis-à-vis the ethnogeographical Other: first the "Egyptians" (mitsrayim) as oppressor of "the Sons of Israel," then
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"Egypt" (mitsrayim) as the land of exile, and impending exodus, for "my people, the Sons of Israel." Joyce's Leopold Bloom was partly modeled on Teodoro Mayer, a Hungarian Jew who led the Italian nationalists in Austrian Trieste, before the First World War, and whose very name exhibits a "Moses"-like assortment. Though somewhat less mixed than his original, the hero of Ulysses provokes a xenophobic discussion among the Irishmen in the pub: -And after all, says John Wyse, why can't a jew love his country like the next fellow? -Why not? says J.J., when he's quite sure which country it is. (Joyce 1968:335; cf. Ellman 1959:203-204) Whatever the case with Bloom, Moses having distanced the "Hebrews" from Egypt and then himself from Midian, in favor of Egypt again, is now at last quite sure. His brothers in flesh and faith double as his compatriots. At the same time, we must not forget, the broader and categorically Israelite frame of narrative outreaches as well as incorporates the troubled hero's experience. In our ears, as already noted in chapter 4, the Burning Bush instruction rhymes further back to the opening of Exodus, when Moses was not yet born. To mention the geographical echo only, Pharaoh's playing on the fear lest "he go up [alah] from the land" (actualized since in Moses' escape, later in the mass Exodus) is counterpointed by God's resolve "to bring him up [le'ha'aloto] from that land" (1:10, 3:17): negative vs. positive scenario of departure. "The prison in which Pharaoh proposed to keep Israel is now about to be sprung" (Greenberg 1969:99). Along the geographical axis built into ''Hebrews," then, the outer plot of deliverance runs together with and ahead of the innerbut in the telling, not in the living. While the intercultural, Israel/Egypt dynamics frames and so outranks the psychocultural, the priorities of action imply the opposite hierarchy: the deliverer must first break with the oppressor inside himself, the victims shed their vict-image. Or else the countermovement would degenerate into a brute power struggle, with a foregone conclusion but no genuine redemption. This is why the Almighty modulates his approach from Moses to the people to Pharaoh, and at his most high-handed will never lose an opportunity of touching the heart. To repair the damage done by the enemy, force itself works in the service of faith. So the rudiments have been covered during the theophany with an eye to psychocultural effect, above all, and therefore more than once if necessary. In marked contrast, there is hardly a word from God about law, ritual, or doctrine proper, as though anything beyond the minimum required for the sense of collective identity and destiny can wait. (The waiting
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list would include God's secret name, we recall, if it were not for Moses' inquiry; and, even in disclosure, the Name gets adjusted to Israelite memories, capacities, priorities.) The basic training once over, the commission may follow ("now therefore") as a consequent on an antecedent. Moses shows himself a quick learner. As early as his first refusal of the commission, he already echoes the newly discovered in-group terminology: "Who am I . . . to bring the Sons of Israel out of Egypt?" (3:7-12). For one trapped among such diverse (Hebrew, Egyptian, Midianite) identities, each problematic, the revelation of his true, Israelite collective self would be unforgettable. An immense relief from lifelong shuttling; a firm and unlooked-for, literally heaven-sent closure to the "Who am I?" question, with appropriate corollaries regarding fatherhood, brotherhood, peoplehood, landhood, otherhood, enemyhood. If it takes him time to catch God's name, rooted in a mysterious ideology and suitably reserved for the end of the lesson (3:13ff.), this only underlines his instant mastery of the people's. The shift from "Hebrews" to "Sons of Israel" thus charts in small compass the plot of the deliverer's education in national awareness, as it will do that of the oppressor's humbling (the slowest learner in the Bible, he). Nor does the symmetrical equivalence between the two leaders thrown into conflict rule out the workings of narrative sequence: the one tortuous process of education must finish to qualify its beneficiary for launching the other. National before international ordeal of "knowledge"; the psyche's arena before the world's. As Bakhtin might say, a character needs to be "internally dialogic" before he is "interactively dialogic" (1981:32). Only that the novel theorist's formula is a little too ready-made to capture the finesse of the highest art: the Bible transforms this schematic passage from inner to outer dialogism by interposing the dialogue with God for modulation cum resolution. Speaking to the alienated exile, the divine voice fixes his identity and lifelong office; speaking to Pharaoh through the newly appointed mediator, he plagues him into letting "the Hebrews" return to their name, destiny, country. Moreover, the initiatory Egypt-to-Midian sequence keeps its potential for disclosure and development even when the native leader reenters the international arena, beginning with his very first misstep. Given the "secret'' psychodynamics of culture traced thus far below the discourse, we may now resolve the gap opened in Moses' inaugural confrontation with Pharaoh. Why does he substitute "God of Israel" (5:1) for the divine message's "God of the Hebrews" (3:18)? Surely because, having at last gained abroad a sense of Israelite identity, he cannot bring himself to relapse into the old foreignism; having in the past thought of his brothers the Egyptian way even in the native medium, he now flaunts the native terms even when speaking Egyptian to royalty. A swing between the extremestoo
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violent at the moment, as usual, but in the right directionto end all intercultural swings. So Moses' two opposed, "mirror-image" violations (private observance, public breach) of the norm governing "Hebrews" in Israelite discourse under the yoke fall into psychogenetic continuity, cause and effect included: haft-assimilation to the antipolar Other, actually to the enemy, followed by discovery and overassertion of corporate self vis-à-vis the Other. The process has come full circle, but the new convert still needs to learn the art of maneuvering between national serf-knowledge and international self-reference, among prophecy and power and persuasiona teaching that Pharaoh is only too happy to administer, until he suddenly finds himself at the receiving end.
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6 Dissonant Discourse, National Discord Echoing Outgroup Parlance at In-Fighting Bicultural Stigmatizing This insight into the leader's ordeal of national consciousness settles one question about "Hebrews" only to sharpen another. If in approaching Pharaoh Moses so resists the Egyptian name for Israel, even as a temporary expedient, how is it that he later freely adopts it in addressing Israel herself for all eternity on the treatment of the "Hebrew" slave (as early as Exodus 21:2ff., as late as Deuteronomy 15:12ff.)? Can it be a relapse into Egyptian stereotypic parlance when away from Egypt? Another regression in psycho-biographical sequence, last enacted forty years after Midian, when the old man finds himself exiled again for his pains, this time alone and irretrievably? (The syndrome has meanwhile certainly reappeared elsewhere, with a parodic twist, in the murmurers' grotesque nostalgia for the fleshpots of Egypt.) Even assuming that Moses' is again a special case, why do both his Lord and his fellow Israelites at times stoop to this usage among themselves, on the most solemn covenantal occasions interspersed between Exodus (21:2ff.) and Jeremiah (34:8ff.)? Like Potiphar's wife in maligning Joseph, God and his prophets from Sinai to Jerusalem and the storyteller himself ring changes on the "Hebrew slave"; Philistine-like, Saul and the narrator revert to "Hebrews" precisely when the battle for freedom resumes under the monarchy (I Samuel 13:3, 7, 14:21). All, it appears, in defiance of the Hebrewgram. Throughout, the trouble with these Hamitisms is not the speaker's foreign-likeness per se but the addressee's conationality, down to co-lingualism, as well as the referent's. The three parties concerned in the branding with Hebrewness are all insiders. The three even expand to a quintet where the Hebrewing occurs on stage, framed by the teller-quoter in contact with his own audience; and the inside circle may widen beyond five parties, as when
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the characters themselves quote within the tale's quotation (Jeremiah 34:12-14). Narrower or wider, however, the membership remains of a piece. This co-membership differs from the second dialogue-pattern, where the heterocultural form of (self-) reference gets addressed by an insiderpossibly the midwives, evidently Joseph, Miriam, God, Moses, Jonahto a member of an outside culture who encodes and expects and exacts it. To foreground the difference between the patterns, some of the native Hebrewing voices resound across it, and those the most ethnocentric of the lot. They include God, who not only can do as he pleases but spurns Ham and his works in eternal diselection; also Moses and Jeremiah, both uncompromising prophets, the first having earlier replaced the heteroculturalism by an honorific to Pharaoh's displeasure, against God's orders, the second a good hater of Egypt; or Saul, who spent and lost his life fighting the "uncircumcised" Hebrew-callers of Philistia. Although for once homogeneous, the dramatis personae nevertheless image themselves among themselves as if they were in mixed companythe referent's dignity seemingly ignored, the brother's mouth and ear fallen to the level of the outsider's. Is it, then, a difference with or without a cutting edge? To sharpen the difference still further, toward contextual polarity, time and circumstance separate the respective usages. The insider-to-outsider foreignized (self-)designation takes birth in the patriarchal era, on the lips of a slave jailed indefinitely; then it repeats itself in force when the victimage with vict-image overtakes his group at large, growing collective once the Jacobites grow into nationhood (from "sons" to "Sons of Israel"). Whereas the insider-toinsider occurrences begin at Sinai, in the Covenant Code, when Israel has gained her national liberty along with her proper name, so that all of them regressively express the de-nomi-nation that they could and should suppress. Their failure to improve on it becomes even more salient if you note the generic distribution, whereby the messages now often rise to the top of the scale of formality: from ordinary interchange to legal and prophetic address. Odder yet, this persistence of Hebrewness, seeing that the ascent in generic formality naturally correlates with a switch in linguistic medium from the Hamite to the Israelite. By the same token that the Law codes forging God's covenant with the people rule out any alien language codeand heterocosmic symbolisms in generalyou would expect them to eradicate the enemy's de-peopling codename. Even the fact that Moses the young "outgoer" thought of his "brothers'' in such terms and tongue doubles the shock of their recurrence on the authority of Moses the Lawgiver. Taken together, then, how can it be that the differences in the hearer, freedom, proprieties, vernacularity of speech make no apparent difference to the speakers? Divine or mediatory or earthly, uncoerced or uncoercible, theirs are the last voices one would expect to go Hamiteleast of all when
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raised within the native and national circle, without having to consider others at all, or to translate oneself into dialogic otherness. Further, how does this continuity in gratuitous self-abasement, from the nation's rise to its fall, accord with the historical developments traceable along the Bible's record? Specifically, how does it tally with the logic of the intergroup master plot? If prior to David's reign "Hebrews" still enjoys extranational currency, among Hamites, by Jeremiah's time the word-image has apparently long gone out of circulation; so why should native speakers, of all interlocutors, go to the trouble of reviving an alien archaism to their own inglory? The more persistent the term, across the variations in who-addresses-whom-when, the more incongruous it looks. Since these cumulative puzzles rule out any appeal to accident or idiosyncrasy, then, they ostensibly present a new challenge to the unity of the explanation that we have worked out so far. Of the various discourse-patterns in which "Hebrew" figures, it may seem, the last eludes the principle underlying and integrating all the others, namely, the mimesis (quotation, translation) of a foreign, Hamite viewpoint on native characters beneath the uniform-looking verbal surface. In a more or less covert way, this Law of Intercultural (De)Nomination holds for a foreign or alienated mind thinking of Israelites, for a foreign voice speaking of Israelites to another foreigner or to an Israelite on a lower footing, and for an Israelite in talk with a privileged foreigner. But how can the same Law work for a native voice, including God's and the teller's, who refers to "Hebrews" in the ears of fellow natives? It nevertheless does work, I would argue, to establish yet another distinctive and systematic configuration of viewpoints for another distinctive purpose, namely: the mimesis of foreign discourse in reaction and warning against fellow natives who enact such discourse in Israelite reality, who make the worst stock images come true by provoking foreign-like judgment on their Hebrew-like attitudes and offenses. Born Israelites, they do not behave accordingly. Rather than living up to the covenanted national ethnicon, they lower themselves (or their brothers) to the infamous sociopolitical role associated with Hebrewness among the (Hamite) nations. Having in effect answered and given color to the label, let them (or their victims) wear it for all to see, hate, fear, avoid as a scarlet letter, a badge of shame. Thus, in I Samuel, the contemptuous references made by native voices to "Hebrews" who fled across the Jordan at the approach of the Philistines (13:7) or even defected to the enemy and then changed sides again once the fortunes of war turned (14:21). Slaves in spirit, they and they alone deserve the name imposed by the Philistine oppressor on "Israel," and here become a hate-word from both sides, in both languages. This pattern of discourse thus makes a new well-defined variation on the Intercultural Law. As always, the value and viewpoint borne by the
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word-image (itself re- or counter-encoded, away from the implicit sense of election, Crossership, etc.) pertain to an alien culture, the most inimical of all; but they now twist ("translate") inward, directed in vernacular polemical heat against members or sectors of the home culture who fit the bill. The discourse relates the discordance to a state of discord within, internal in a new way, if only because the arena grows nationwide: Israeliteness and Hebrewness divide between co-lineal subgroups, one the protagonist, the other the antagonist, rather than between the facets or experiences of an individual character, let alone a hero. And as the sews unity breaks down on the largest possible scale with the reframing of the "Hebrew" stereotype, so again does the heap of corresponding metastereotypes: above all, those of ethnocentricity reduced to ethnocentrism and of imagery, fixed or novel, to myth, mirage, imagination. A comparison with the foregoing chapter's discourse of interior discordtrained there on the midwives, equivocally, on Miriam, ironically, on Pharaoh's daughter, anomalously self-divided among the Egyptians, and, climactically, on the young Moseswill suggest itself. Now, during the postexodus era, the alien within shifts location from the mind to the body politic, and to that constituted by the elect themselves as such, rather than as the barbarian peril within the Egyptian kingdom. This shift in focus does not quite exteriorize the rift, since the group, like the individual, beginning with the future prophet, can be of two minds (one, e.g., unIsraelite). However, the revealing analogy cum metonymy between the zones of native otherness still preserves, even underlines, the disparity in mimesis and coverage, voice and effect. With "Hebrews" turned inward to image those unworthy of "Israel," its operative reference shrinks (vis-à-vis normal foreign or foreign-bound usage) so that its odium will double by worldwide consensus. On this narrow frontreserved for self-made slaves to the enemy, as in I Samuel above, or enslavers of their own people, including self-enslavers, as in manumission law from Exodus to Jeremiahthe Israelite and the Hamite attitudes toward the name-bearer may converge, if nowhere else. Let us therefore call the pattern of echoes after its distinctive feature: bicultural stigmatizing. For contemporary equivalents, we need only listen to speakers around us, or to ourselves, at in-fighting. Attack on members of one's own group (however defined) often finds vent in branding them with the very mark that the outsider or the adversary uses for the group as a whole. Yesthe hostile note resounded by the insider then affirmssome pretenders to our circle or some bad lots amidst us are like that, unfortunately, and we must designate them so on pain of sharing their odium in the eyes of the world and our own. It's either giving the bad name where it applies, possibly with a view to more than nominal exclusion, or incurring it oneself by association.
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Among the analogous discourse grammars I have mentioned in passing, take the Niggergram. In the novel Report to the Commissioner, a young liberal joins the New York police department and worries about the squad to which he has been assigned. "I knew what those guys'd be like. . . . Stupid, really ignorant, calling all the blacks nigger and that sort of thing. I was really hung up about that." To his relief, one of them, Crunch Blackstone, turns out to be "a really huge black man, about six foot four, maybe 250 pounds . . . No one's going to go around calling anyone nigger in front of him." So he can hardly believe his ears when Crunch does the name-calling himself, with four-letter words and physical violence thrown in. "Instead of a big, brutal, bigoted white cop, I get a big, brutal, bigoted black cop. I couldn't figure him out''; all the less so because, while reducing his group members to "niggers" in the worst racist tradition, Blackstone boasts himself "a Negro." Eventually, the novice summons up the courage to protest: He looked at me like I'd just landed from Mars. He looked at me a long time, really hard, and then he smiled and he said, "You gotta be kiddin'." . . . I just mentioned it once more to Schulman, this other detective on the block, and he said, "That's no mystery. Look at the precinct arrest figures. Eighty-five percent of the collars are blacks. You can go around the precinct ten minutes and know that almost all the crime . . . here is black, and almost all the victims are white. So maybe Crunch just hates bad guys, and it just happens that in this case the bad guys are black, so he hates the blacks, and maybe he hates them more because they're his brothers. That's not hard to understand." (Mills 1973:53-54, 58-62) Nor should the references made by Israelites to, say, turncoat "Hebrews" during the Philistine oppression have been hard to understand, as an ancient montage of the same type: hostile in-group utterance pitched in an alien key, with a view to invidious distinction between name-bearers and name-callers, indeed to self-dissociation from every victimizer of his own people. Yet misunderstanding has been their lot to this day, even beyond any of our foregoing configurations of "Hebrew" discourse. In the scholarly line, a measure of the uncommon difficulty felt here is the mass escape from the discourse to source analysis; and no longer to high genetic criticism alone (whereby "Abram the Hebrew" has been alleged to originate outside Israel) or to high cross geneticism (Hebrew = Hab/piru) but also to the lowest possible variety, namely, emendation. If you cannot read the text, nor recover a pre-text, you can then always
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rewrite the textual givens, making up to make sense. So fared the notorious occurrences punctuating chapters 13-14 in I Samuel: (3) Jonathan struck the garrison [or prefect] of the Philistines that was at Geba, and the Philistines heard. And Saul blew the trumpet throughout the land, saying, Let the Hebrews hear. (4) And all Israel heard, saying, Saul has struck the garrison [prefect] of the Philistines, and Israel has also become odious to the Philistines. And the people were called out to join Saul at Gilgal. (I Samuel 13:3-4) (6) The men of Israel saw that they were in straits, for the people were hard pressed, and the people hid themselves in caves and in holes and in rocks and in tombs and in pits. (7) And Hebrews had crossed the Jordan to the land of Gad and Gilead. Saul was still at Gilgal, and all the people followed him trembling. (13:6-7) (20) [Jonathan's surprise attack having thrown the Philistines into panic,] Saul and all the people who were with him came to the battle, and behold, every man's sword was against his fellow, a very great confusion. (21) And the Hebrews who had been with the Philistines, as on former occasions, who had gone up with them into the camp round about, they also came to be with Israel who were with Saul and Jonathan. (22) And all the men of Israel who had been hiding themselves in the hill country of Ephraim heard that the Philistines had fled, and they too pursued them in the battle. The Lord, on that day, delivered Israel. (14:2023) This trio reveals low source criticism at its poorest: most consensual and least self-critical, while most desperate behind the facade of assurance. Instead of wrestling with the received text in contextserial context at that, for the quick succession of cruxes unique to the book implies a family likeness, maybe a developmentanalysts gratuitously rewrite the first two "Hebrew" passages to suit their convenience. Institutional license and laziness? Certainly, judging from the acceptance of the rewrites down the line, ever since the nineteenth century. But predisposition is also at work: whatever resists easy categorization must "obviously" be emended, whether into familiarity or, if necessary, out of existence. Even so, the Bible's (ethnocritical) discourse takes its quiet revenge on the (ethnocentrist, unself-critical) source critics, in that the third occurrence of "Hebrews" cited above (14:21-23) no more lends itself to emendation than to ready-made categorization. The only obvious thing about the whole business is therefore the need for a fresh start, preferably in terms of an integrated theory. Let me now argue the issue more closely in two stages, negative and
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positive. For analytic convenience, let us also divide the issue into its two generic componentsthe Israelite-to-Israelite Hebrewing in the narrative of the early monarchy and in bondage lawthe former series to be treated in this chapter, the latter in what ensues. I will begin by trying to demonstrate not just the arbitrariness of the accepted "critical" solutions but also their incongruity with their own premises, declared or hidden, microtextformative or metastereotypic regarding the nation and canon formed. By the same norms, the Hab/piru-directed approach, though trading on a source analysis other and "higher" than the low critical, is useless in turnexcept as a supplementary repertoire of prefabricated metadiscourse about group imagery brought to a discourse that opposes its very (e.g., sociocentric) coordinates. More than anywhere before, finding out exactly why the accepted roads to Hebrewness are not to be taken can in the process also teach us a great deal about a great many higher-level issues, Scriptural and theoretical, converging on our exemplar. (Among the questions that newly arise or come to the fore here are microtext/macrotext/megatext/context/subtext, unicentering/bicentering, synchrony/diachrony, law/narrative, representation/rhetoric, orality/writing/Scripture, chosenness as exclusive benefit and fateful burden, sexual and national privilege.) With these lessons in mind, I will proceed to develop the alternative hypothesis"'Hebrews' as bicultural stigmatizing"in the framework of Samuel, then of the narrativized law on the move from Exodus through Deuteronomy to Jeremiah, by implication into exile. The explanatory force of my hypothesis, and the larger theory run together with it, will accordingly be tested against parameters of increasing magnitude: the detail of the individual occurrences; their serialization in either framework, within or across the book-unit; the family resemblance between two otherwise unrelated, even generically distinct, frameworks; and the manifold of the Intercultural Law as a whole. A stiff test, perhaps. But nothing less removed from the usual ad hoc, piecemeal work, I believe, can hope to uncover the system of regularities governing "Hebrews" within the Bible's poetics of culture and history, culture in history among the nations. High Art under Low Criticism All such large generalities crucially depend on the fine articulations of the text. But what is the text to be read? Is it I Samuel 13-14 as rewritten by the low critics? First, the Masoretic the Philistines heard. And Saul blew the trumpet throughout the land, saying, Let the Hebrews hear. And all Israel heard, saying, Saul has struck the garrison [prefect] of the Philistines,
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transforms at their hands into the Philistines heard, The Hebrews have revolted. Saul blew the trumpet throughout the land, and all Israel heard it said, Saul has struck the garrison [prefect] of the Philistines. The key clause suffers changes in (lexical) wording, (grammatical) mood, (dramatic) voice, (ethnic) ear, (narrative) placement, all at once and all inflicted on a bare subject-predicate minimum, two words in the original. A record hard to beat. Yet what authorizes such wholesale emendation? Nothing, ultimately, but a selective appeal to the Septuagint, which reads, "The slaves have revolted [pashe'u ha'abadim]," as against the Masoretic, "Let the Hebrews hear [yishme'u ha'ibrim]." This appeal is selective even within the bounds of the inset clause. "Slaves," everyone concerned agrees, mistakes abadim for the original near-homograph ibrim. The Septuagint version therefore distinctly proves less trustworthy here than the Masoretic; and its getting the subject wrong must reflect upon its predicate (revolting vs. hearing) and grammatical mood (indicative vs. imperative). Or so you would think. The mainstream critics, instead, blandly emend the warrant for their emendation, picking and choosing between sources to produce the composite utterance, "The Hebrews have revolted." By their own account, however, the result leaves something to be desired. For all the ancient witnesses are at one in attributing the words to Saul, as Israel's liberator from the Philistines; and the emendatory mixture (with its pejorative "revolted"), to say nothing of the Greek version ("slaves" revolting), would fit him even less than the Masoretic ("Hebrews" trumpeted among Israelites). Such malapropos again negates the rewording in the first instance. And Wellhausen draws the, for him, logical conclusion by regarding the whole synthetic phrase as a marginal gloss, thus purging it off in effect (1871:80-81). But once incorporated and incurred anyway, it demands additional changes for relief. The utterance, already rewritten, must then transfer to another voice and hearing than Israel'sto the enemy's ears at thatand so to another place than the given. Abruptly losing faith in the Septuagint, 1 as if their own witness turned hostile, the text-critics accordingly push their operations from the quoted inset to the quoting narrative framethis time by spurious arguments from coherence. Thus the oft-repeated claim that the quote about the Hebrews is "out of place" at the given juncture (McCarter 1980:225, after Driver 1960 ad loc.) has no leg to stand upon. All ancient versions find its placement acceptable, and no rule of grammar or style (or what we today call well-formedness) has ever been adduced to impugn their testimony. It would be idle to suggest otherwise. Conversely with the place and the ears to
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which the news has been moved: any argument from ellipsis falls to the ground. That the Masoretic text leaves the Philistines' hearing objectlesswithout so much as an anaphoric pronoun ("it"), let alone a sentence, for complementationdoes not at all indicate repair through the transposal of "The Hebrews . . ." to the empty object slot. For, by Biblical rule, "the Philistines heard" may dispense with any complement (or, in quotational terms, inset) specifying what they heard (Sternberg 1986: esp. 300-304). It will act upon this license of ellipsis all the more freely, because retrievably, where the narrator has just told the event heard, that is, the attack on the garrison as casus belli; and all the more understandably so where the interest centers in how the event impresses the native rather than the foreign side. (Within the same discourse pattern as that to which the emendators unknowingly relegate the king's messageour thirdcontrast genuine instances of specified "hearing": Abram's, duly ancestral and opposed to the ellipsis of the Hamite messenger's ''telling," or Potiphar's, where the interest lies in the variety of foreign attitudes to Joseph.) The abbreviated account of the Philistine hearing strikes a balance between plot and perspective, generating the necessary hostile counteraction to the blow for liberty while keeping the struggle in ethnocentric focus. Grammar, discourse, poetics, testimonia thus jointly commend the juxtaposition of Philistine ellipsis with Saulide fullness. Yet the vaguest talk of displacement, it appears, is enough to reverse this balance of particularity, hence of centrality, between the subjects at war. The Masoretic "Let the Hebrews hear," already relexicalized and regrammaticalized within the inset, also gets revoiced, readdressed, and relocated within the frame of quotation. Now that all the trouble spots have been made over, everything fits: poetic license (here microtextual) in genetic guise. Next, against the same confirmatory array, the item midposed by the received text fares no better under much the same low critical pretexts. So the men of Israel saw that they were in straits, that the people were hard pressed, and the people hid themselves in caves. . . . And Hebrews had crossed [we'ibrim abru] the Jordan to the land of Gad and Gilead (13:6-7) jettisons its Hebrew burden altogether in the rewriting. Unlike Hab/piru analogists, who often read (and at times literally write) "Hebrews" into a Biblical text for the sake of crosscultural parallelism, low harmonizers would rather write out the text's "Hebrews." Exactly where ibri for once rhymes on the surface with the ideas of Crossing and Yondermanship (abru) punned into it throughout the Bibleever since Abram the Hebrew, the Eberide eberite who plunged across Euphrates and Jordan into the future Israelthere it gets crossed out. A monument to blindness and deafness, or rather
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an assemblage of monuments. More drastic than before, the emendations also grow more divergent and conjectural, because the Septuagint variant is here too lame to attest the true reading, not even partly. The Greek version substitutes we'obrim ("and those who crossed") for the clause topic in we'ibrim abru ("and Hebrews had crossed"): a homograph of the Masoretic ibrim (same letters, different pointing, hence different sense) and a cognate of abru (from 'br). Gratuitousness aside, therefore, a tautology would replace an unexceptionable piece of language. Patently inferior, the Septuagint nevertheless keeps its obrim apart from the earlier clause's topic, "the people," and so in effect testifies for the received text with its double focus, Israelite hiders vs. Hebrew crossers. Let down by the ancient witness, yet in accord with its "Hebrews out!" spirit, critics multiply amendments of their own devising. In face of the Masoretic we'ibrim abru, some would delete the subject to leave "and [or] crossed" (e.g., Kraeling 1941:242, RSV, NEB). But this shifts or widens the trouble incurred by Hebrewlessness from the Greek's tautology to infelicity, even ungrammaticality: from the semantics to the syntax. With the disappearance of ibrim as new subject, the final independent clause transforms into a coordinate phrase within a long sentence about "the people" of Israel, who now both ''hid themselves . . . and crossed." Only, in that event, why does the verb form assigned to the latter action (abru) turn perfective? On the one-subject-two-predicates reading, the first imperfect (wa'yyit'habbe'u *, "hid") should be followed by a second (e.g., wa'yya'abru) to maintain the continuity (in group reference, spacetime, agency) between the hiders and the crossers. All the more so where they are kept apart by a long string of words as well as by their activities. Yet the substitute version provides no such equivalent follow-up, or anything else like a bridge. Its shift to a different, perfective verb form (abru) rather bespeaks a shift in topic, possibly in arena as well: indeed, much like the original Masoretic abru predicated of ibrim as distinct from "the people." So the attempt to elide the unwanted gentilic contradicts itself, unless one proceeds to recast the predicate, as befits a coordinate verb, into imperfect form (abru→wa'yya'abru). The grammar now passes muster to the heavy cost of literal fidelity. Likewise with other speculations, which would rather alter than elide the embarrassment. Many favor we'am rab abru ("and many people crossed"): new subjectdifferent from ibrim as well as from the earlier hiding "people," yet associated with both in formold predicate. (Thus Klosterman 1887:41, followed by Driver 1960:100, Smith 1899:96, Greenberg 1955:92, Herzberg 1964:101.) Most radical and least plausible is the chain of variants wa'yya'abru ma'abrot ha'yyarden ("and they [meaning "the people" in verse 6] crossed the fords of the Jordan"). An improvement in grammatical coordination on Julius Wellhausen's we'abru ma'abrot ha'yyarden (1871:82), it pays for this imperfect in a compound distance
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from the received text. (Its advocates include Kittel, Biblica Hebraica, the RSV, McCarter 1980:226.) I have gone into some detail here, because the more numerous and assorted-looking the apologies for a pre-text, the more revealing their deeper convergences on the issue truly at stake. In laying bare the appearance-and-reality tensions omnipresent in low criticism, the enigma of Hebrewness affords once more a virtual laboratory. And to bring out its paradigmatic value, we need only draw the conclusions from the miscellany of corrigenda elicited by our verse. Let us advance by degrees. You don't need special linguistic expertise to make out that, appearances aside, the rage for correction issues from anywhere but the language under correction. If anything, some lines of rewriting (e.g., the Greek's we'obrim) are themselves indisputably senseless and/or ill-formed, where the received version is faultlessor, to avoid disputes again for the moment, at least more acceptable by any standard, including * the other rewriters'. Indeed, the critics' own lines preserve the Masoretic verb form (abru), with the exception of the improvement (wa'yya'abru ma'abrot ha'yyarden) on Wellhausen's improvement, itself far-fetched. But all lines, excepting none from the Septuagint onward, blot out "Hebrews." This is where the eyesore lies, and this is also why it infects the companion word, the verb abru, in some of the attempted genetic resolutions. (Woe to the offender, the Rabbis would say of such infection, and woe to his neighbor.) The root of the trouble having been isolated, its diagnosis readily follows. What makes "Hebrews" so offensive to the critics? Nothing about its phonology or morphology, obviously, because the group name appears here in the same form as elsewhere. Therefore, its deletion without a nominal substitute (leaving abru, "and/or crossed"), or in favor of another, anagram-like noun governed by the same verb in the same order (we'am rab abru), cannot possibly rest on any linguistic ground whatsoever. Nor, as this purely lexical replacement testifies, is the syntax into which the name enters problematic at all. But let us assume that it does somehow offend the supercritical beholder's eye, by its allegedly wrong ordering (hence the predicate-first we'abru) and/or verb form (hence the imperfect coordinate wa'yya'abru). If so, the easiest and logical way of righting the syntax would be to reorder and/or reform the predicate, always short of the topic's lexical substitution. But this is never the case: the language, including the verb reordered and/or reformed, only suffers for the non-linguistic offense of the noun, which must vanish without trace. The rub is all, beyond the shadow of doubt, in the group name ibrim as such. Throughout, moreover, the substitutions of and around this name pinpoint the larger forces at work. They freshly illustrate what I have argued in regard to a good many Biblical cruxes, namely, the extent to which the
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Page 389 (micro)language and the (micro)linguistics turn on the analyst's poetic horizons and skills, as well as vice versa. To appreciate the interdependency of the language/discourse pair of components, or competences, observe the charge sheet trumped up by a respectable linguist, S.R. Driver, in his anxiety to damn the given passage unheard: As v. 7 carries on the thought of v. 6, there is no ground for the repetition of the subject and its emphatic position before the verb [abru]: a verb coordinate with "they hid"] of v. 6 is what would be expected. (Driver 1960:99-100)
[ibrim]
[wa'yyit'habeb'u *,
The author of A Treatise on the Use of the Tenses in Hebrew should know better than to pick such low quarrels. The continuity of "thought" between the two verses, from the hiding to the crossing, neither precludes (as ungrammatical, or even as inelegant) nor entails (as a matter of linguistic form) the alleged "repetition of the subject" in the given discourse. With the two nuclear sentences ("the people hid . . . and ibrim abru") interspaced by a fivefold series of conjuncts ("in caves" and so forth), the narrative might well repeat the agent in picking up the line of action, exactly for connectivity. But then, does ''Hebrews" repeat "people [of Israel]" in the first instance? Only on the unspoken premise of their full (referential, sociopolitical, geographical, normative) equivalencean assumption that begs the very question at issue and attaches to the world, or universe of discourse, not to the language-system per se. For good question-begging measure, the rest of the grammar is found wanting. The same continuity of "thought" allegedly disallows both the "repetitive" subject's "emphatic position before the verb" and the non-coordinate (perfective abru, in lieu of the imperfect wa'yya'abru) verb form itself. However, the cavils again founder together on the actual givens. Once you accept the datum that the verb for crossing (abru) assumes here a different, perfective form and thus signifies a different, anterior phase ("had crossed," pluperfect) to that for hiding (wa'yyit'habbe'u*), then the prepositioning of the subject ("Hebrews") becomes normal to match the distinctiveness of its predicate. Surely, the expert on tenses knows that "a verb coordinate with [wa'yyit'habbe'u*] is what would be expected" only if the two actions were demonstrably co-temporal, as well as the two agents co-referential. Which still remains to be demonstrated, against the weight of the evidence to the contrary, notably including the linguistic evidence as a whole. Driver himself, far from venturing to demonstrate or even to textualize the improbable, actually goes with this evidence which he professes to criticize. His own favorite alternate, we'am rab abru, preserves the Masoretic syntax all along the line, neither reordering the subject's "emphatic position before
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the verb" nor reforming the verb itself into coordination with that for the imperfect "hid." Why? Evidently, because nothing repeats itself in his view: once the troublesome proper noun has made way for a common noun, the grammar and the rest of the lexis may be kept intact without offense. The subject am rab ("many people") does not co-extend in identity with the foregoing am ("people''), nor does the action denoted by the verb abru co-occur in spacetime with the hiding. Ergo, if he denies to the given text what he adopts for his own pre-text, this is because ibrim cannot but repeat "people [of Israel]" ex hypothesi. Outside such a circular approach, the text's proper noun outranks the text-analyst's common noun in firmness and at least rivals it in meaningfulness, whether judged by thematic interest or by the difference from the set-up of the verse before. The shift to "Hebrews," coming on top of the same distinctive predicate and verb form as attend Driver's hypothetical "many people," should a fortiori tell us something new about the war, and through the same encoded markers, to begin with. Whatever the narrative continuity between the two verses, therefore, it involves a doubling-back (and/or a lateral move) rather than a straight advance along the time-line, with implications for everything else in play, and needs overall reinterpreting accordingly. But criticism has never met, or even acknowledged, this need: the resistance to a key element overtakes the discoursive maneuver hinging on it and in turn the intricate sense of the episode as a whole. It is precisely the exigency of drawing together the names, the events, the when's, the where's, the why's, the relationships, etc., from which the geneticist wishes to escape by fabricating some tame makeshift under linguistic cover. He is at once unequal to the poetic challenge, untrue to his own profession, and, if successful in covering up, an obstacle to progress. "How so clear a reading [as the Masoretic 13:7] has got so written over" (Stoebe 1973:244) would indeed defy explanation were it not for the common endeavor to pull the text down to one's own level of understanding. Pull, I say, because the wrenching is always visible; down, because it flattens the original; and level, in the singular, because the low-critical end-products remain essentially as uniform as the driving forces. For all their surface variance, these alternatives are means to the same end, genetic remedies and indexes to the same poetic malaise. Like their counterparts devised for 13:3, they presuppose the infelicity of "Hebrews" in Israelite context, this time on the narrator's lips rather than Saul's. In the absence of foreigners around, however, the term will not lend itself here to revoicing (as the trumpeted "Hebrews" just did under protest) and must therefore suffer the ultimate penalty of losing its voice along with its existence. In comparison with this institutionalized erasure, "Let the Hebrews hear!" never fell so low even at its lowest (when relegated to a marginal gloss by
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Wellhausen). From the Septuagint to yesterday, from reshuffling to silencing, the Bible's language has once again fallen victim to preconceptions about its discourseits discourse of victimage, as it happens. The textual remedy turns out worse than the imagined contextual ailment; the patient must die to vindicate the physician's diagnosis and credentials. Even so, he tenaciously clings to life. In fact, the very rewritings invented to cut out ibrim only drive it underground, where it lurks in the makeshift obrim, we'am rab abru, wa'yya'abru ma'abrot, all thematic partners in sound and sense. (Recall the Abraham-old interpenetration of the meanings, ethnopolitical, geocultural, boundary-crossing, in the shared 'br master root; or the terrible we'abarti, "I will 'Hebrew' it," visited by "the God of the Hebrews" upon the Hebrew-calling Egyptians.) From the secret life of wordplay, the ethnicon then resurfaces in distinct and distinctive group parlance, no longer amenable to submergence, much less to silencing. In 14:21, when ''the Hebrews" on the side of "the Philistines" go over to "Israel who were with Saul and Jonathan," there is no denying the facts: neither the occurrence of the label in Israelite speechas twice before, and here in the storyteller's voice at that, exactly like 13:7nor the distinctness of its bearers from the two other groups between which they shuttle. At this moment of truth, the Septuagint reinvokes the near-homograph abadim ("slaves"), a few hardnoses smell corruption, but the majority admits defeat at last. All earlier strictures and giveaways pale beside the irony that the entire operation mounted to escape from the text under "low" cover has been in vain. And if "Hebrews" will not be rewritten out of the series, the challenge of reading inescapably asserts itself. It asserts itself, moreover, to the exclusion of piecemeal work. Reading involves the task, and test, of coherent serializing. Or the other, negative way round: that the traditional attacks on the data are or seem local must not blind us to their cumulative undermining of part-whole relations, (hi) story line included. Evidently compounding desperateness with futility, all this apology for genetic analysis leaves the discourse series a tissue of incoherencies. By a chain reaction, the damage goes from the language to the identity and attachment of the "Hebrew" group, to the intelligibility of the overall state of affairs in the land, to the very understanding of what happened. The premises, the politics, the participants, the picture, the process: none makes sense in the rewritten version. The adverse effects on the narrative and its narrativity are themselves multifold, verging on narrativicide. With the first serial occurrence transferred from Saul's mouth to the Philistines' ears, the plot role of "the Hebrews" woefully diminishes: from specific addressees to all-Israelite objects of alien judgment, from expected agency on the native side to reported agency as insurgents, and nondirect agency at that, because the actual
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deed has been performed by Jonathan. On the second occasion, written out of the crossing into TransJordan, they have no role left at all. And so on the third, when they emerge out of nowhere as a force apart from Israel and opposed to Israel, then allied with Israel, their role turns purely disruptive. Who are they? How do, or did, they stand to the first-mentioned "Hebrews," and why? Where have they been so far? The answers presumably lie in the serial antecedents that the critics would displace, remake or omit to the breakdown of the action-chain, or even of minimum followability, as of everything else associated with the name-bearers. The failure both to retextualize the last serial item out of Hebrewness and to review (at least to retain, if not to reinterpret and recontextualize) the entire trio in its light throws source criticism into the worst of all possible worlds, lacking even internal consistency. How to explain the persistence of such hopeless tampering with the received version? The reason goes back to the ill-conceived usage of "Hebrews"among natives, above all, their Israelite ethnocentrism in utterance and writing taken for granted as usual. Worse, the misconception hardens into immutable law, superior to the facts themselves. It judges, indeed prejudges, and at will corrects Biblical practice, rather than submitting itself to the test of practical judgment. Thus found wanting, our Samuel cruxes appear to be in need of deliverance from the Masoretic text, wherever the expression is voiced by Israelites, whether Saul or the narrator. A group-representational metastereotype, a topsy-turvy methodology, an elementary defense-mechanism: censorship, already found to protect the most diverse vested interests in culture, assumes just another, learned garb. Here its low repressive measures would "recover" (i.e., shape in its own image or key) the original collective ego's voice. These influences conspire as early as the Septuagint. In handling the five occurrences packed into I Samuel 13-14or, for that matter, all the seven distributed over the book thus farthe Greek reveals a systematic correlation between narrative voice and translational fidelity. Where and only where the Masoretic ibrim is attributed to Philistines, there it reappears in a literal Greek equivalent (4:6, 9, 13:19, 14:11); elsewhere, on Israelite lips, ibrim disappears, and our entire threefold series with it, in favor of the near-homograph abadim ("slaves," 13:3, 14:21) or the alternative and perfect homograph obrim ("crossers," 13:7). Such correlation rules out accident, because the either/or pairings go to fix a cause-and-effect link between the translator's idea of discoursive (im)propriety and the forms of language he keeps or alters to match: between perspectival and textual origin, between national image and international variation. His ostensible inconsistencies in now rendering, now rivaling, the Masoretic term are therefore all consistent with what he genuinely, if erroneously, thinks fit for the embattled speakers to express. Throughout, the Septuagint would
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make the best, that is, the best fit, of the apparent contrarieties within the original; except that it betrays in the process the narrowness (or just the belatedness) of its chauvinism and its storytelling art vis-à-vis the Bible's tough-minded ideological poetics. Either source reflects its own model of discourse. 2 The ancient translator's practice, complete with the guideline behind it, has since inspired the mainstream of Biblicists: fellow practitioners, text critics, commentators ad loc., already instanced above, or students of "Hebrew" usage and fortunes generally. Among the latter, an example would be Gesenius's abortive bid for reducing this usage to three categoriesminimal (who-speaks-of-whom) discourse-contexts, in effect. On his account, "Hebrews" appears only when "employed by [the Israelites] themselves as contrasted with foreigners . . . or when it is put in the mouth of those who are not Israelites . . . or, finally, when it is used in opposition to other nations.'' Since none of the categories fits the all-Israelite discourse attested herefor example, the king's trumpet blastGesenius must go on to pronounce "IS 1337 and 1421 . . . clearly corrupt" (1976:8, §2b). "Clearly," by fiat alone, issued in self-defense against all three misfits, too. He would save not the Bible's text but his own Procrustean rule by forcing the Masoretic offenders into the line of decorum, whether into obedience (Saul's address reworded and Philistinized, to meet the second condition above) or into nonexistence, with the narrative killed correspondingly. There is little to choose, then, between the party of ad hoc Samuel expositors and the Scripture-wide generalizers. This counsel of despair also has numerous analogues, which may vary in the phrasing of the rule and the rephrasing of the items to suit. Specifics apart, however, all bear the name of textual evidence in vain, actually operating in its guise, or even in its teeth, to salvage as much as possible of their contextual pre-fabrication. Whatever the appearances to the contrary, in short, low criticism of the source arises and machinates here in response to the imagined higher exigencies of the discourse at large: the alignment of Samuel's "Hebrews" with the canon's as a special term for Israelites. Better, as it were, to pick verbal quarrels with the data, resolvable by genetic license into the formation wanted, than to leave matters of principle (e.g., national voice and grouping) unresolved on the data. High Criticism, Low Historicity and Narrativity Conversely, one who associates "Hebrews" with the Hab/piru will defend the received text against such violence, because the group name may serve the cause of the name-bearers' dissociation from "Israelites."3 Saul or the narrator, that is, properly replace the ethnicon where they have in mind
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an entity outside the nation, the one known under a cognate label elsewhere in the annals of the Ancient Orient. The Masoretic data, under the aegis of "sachliche Identität," have now less to fear from the Septuagint, from the grammar, from charges of misvoicing (i.e., miscontextualizing) the key word relative to the Bible's usage. Focused on the extraBiblical world and history, the defense refers the source material not so much to the discourse as to another, higher level of source analysis, and claims to find a harmonious whole: the Masoretic wording in alignment with the real outside world, the group members true to the underclass image, the story in touch with history. So it's either low (verbal and adverse) or high (referential and well-affected) genetic criticism. At either pole, nevertheless, the text's givens stand or fall on the critic's ready-made idea of the "Hebrew" context and charactertype, with losses to match. Losses, I insist, because neither approach yields any gains remotely commensurate with the disrepair into which it throws the Bible's language and/or logic, from the reference upward. The idea of an Orient-wide Hab/piru megatext is no more tenable than the Israelite-centered micro-textual vagariesand again, not even on its own premises. I trust you recall what force the array of objections to the Hebrew/Hab/piru nexus exert in Samuel. Unlike Exodus, for instance, the time span of "Hebrews" in the book (running to the end of Saul's monarchy, around 1000 B.C.) does not synchronize with the Hab/piru, by now vanished. Nor indeed does the term anywhere refer outside Israel. On the contrary, we find "Hebrews" applied to known Israelite figures, like Jonathan (14:11) and David (29:3); or, in collective reference, unmistakably interchanged with "Israel'' (4:1-6:16, 13:19-20); orby strong implication from the rest, as well as, negatively, on pain of self-contradiction 4distinguishing groups within Israel (the trio at issue). Suppose the times did fit, therefore, the plain facts of the book's usage (and the Bible's) would militate against the substitution of a crossnational for the native entityOccam's razor, against multiplying entities at will, let alone significations in the discourse on top of referents in the world. As always, the unresolved who's-who mystery bears straight on who's with or against whom and why. The unicultural account of "Hebrews," reductively equating them with "Israel" vs. Philistia, limits the conflict to two national groups: only that 14:21 (where the referents switch their allegiance) breaks the equation in favor of some tripartition. But no more will the parties to the war fall into a trio of two nations and one social class of mercenaries (Hebrews/Hab/piru) wooed by both. The cross-culturalists, too, have got the picture of the struggle wrong. As with the picture, moreover, so with the process, because the synchronic trouble redoubles on the diachronic axis; and by diachrony I mean
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the (hi)story, not of the text's development (if any) from conjectural to canonical version, but of the war's along the given "Hebrew" series. Outside-directed, the theory fails the test of internal narrative coherence even on the bottommost level of what happened. (So did the Septuagint-old, Israel-oriented tradition of rewriters; but then, one could predict their failure, because they retain too little of the series to make a story.) Applied to all the givens that demand linearizing from an external perspective, this "diachronic" test is also more eye-opening than usual in the Bible. For the material both exhibits a high narrative potential as a "Hebrew" sequence and yields low narrative returns under Hab/piru interpretation. From Genesis onward, of course, every single occurrence discussed thus far has turned out to enjoy such potential by Law and to actualize it in a variety of ways. The naming operates, for example, to identify the name-bearer vis-à-vis the name-caller, to imply their respective footings, motives, states and changes of mind, or to encode large developments in the advance toward, the regression from and/or the return to "Israel" within the Hamite master plot. Accordingly, the alternative, Hab/piru reference always makes a difference, always unfit, often crucial, not just to the picture but also to the integrability and followability of events: as when it plays havoc with the logic of action dynamizing the Exodus conflict, or with the psychologic of Moses' zigzags en route to leadership. Throwing the Bible's (hi)story out of Israelite focus incurs, among other penalties, an adverse effect on its (hi)storyhood. Yet the present instance offers more than another standard test case. The three occurrences in question flaunt a multifold, if mysterious, connectivity on the very surface of the discourse. Problematic even for the Bible, and in much the same way, they form a subset apart from the rest of the Samuel cluster. Unlike the textual and temporal distance separating Genesis's "Hebrews" from Exodus's, moreover, these items are perceptibly serialized: collocated within two chapters (I Samuel 13-14) and a single episode (the first Philistine war against the kingdom of Israel). Further, the threefold subcluster invites linearization, even concatenation into nothing less than a "Hebrew" subplot. The distinctness of the referents from either national camp, their mention at every crossroads along the tale, the hopeful expectations generated by the king's appeal to them, the disappointment (his and ours) at their unresponsiveness, with heightened suspense to match, and their last-minute reversal of allegiance: all point to an eventful narrative diachrony, a story hidden and twisting forward between the lines of text and battle and group membership. We have already seen how little the rewriters as emendators make of this underground (hi)story: how little they can hope to make out from the one serial item (by implication, phase) left intact. The trio shrinks into a torso, the process into a climax without antecedents or even deter-
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minate agents. 5 But the threefold Hab/piru analogy hardly makes for better (hi)storytelling, which is perhaps why its advocates seldom rise to the challenge of filling in the gaps. Among the few attempts, none persuasive, most perfunctory, Weingreen's "Saul and the Habiru*" has at least the virtue of ingenuity and comprehensiveness. Aware that "the restoration of this historical episode" depends on "bring[ing] about a sensible sequence of the recorded events" (1967:63), he sequences the events anew into the following narrative: (1) A Hab/piru band of mercenaries, unrelated and uncommitted to either the Israelites or the Philistines and strong enough to decide the outcome, crossed the Jordan into Canaan on the eve of battle (13:7). (2) This third military force joined the Philistines, who seemed likelier to prevail, and then went over to the Israelites (14:21). (3) Thereupon Saul broadcast the news of their defection throughout the land to raise Israelite morale. (13:3) An attractive crosscultural romance, for once, but a romance still: its plot will not follow unless you suspend literary as well as historical disbelief. Unhappily, even assuming the Hab/piru nexus, this retold sequence is riddled with too many holes, both in the production and in the finished narrative product, to count as anything like "sensible." The production involves a reshuffling of the data all along the line. The beginning (13:3) of the given threefold series transposes into the end, the middle (13:7) into the beginning, and the end (14:21) into the middle. A disordered chronology in need of such wholesale reordering for intelligibility would have no parallel even in the Bible's ambitious time-art (if only because the operative artistic rule favors concentrating the gaps in the middle of the episode).6 Worse, the dislocation would appear entirely pointless, since telling (1)-(3) in time might do as well, or better, at no cost. The Bible could jumble for a purpose, never from sheer perversity. Worst of all, the relocation into (1)-(3) must pile local on strategic interferences without eventually producing a well-made narrative, much less a credible chapter of history. For illustration, and future comparison with the "Hebrew" subplot I will trace below, let us quickly check the retold against the received version of event order. Opening with the midposed 13:7 comes at the price of forcing, ignoring, or inventing the evidence. For example, what has become of "the Hebrews" in Canaan or "the land of Israel" itself, pitted against the Philistines as early as the Aphek battle and as recently as the denial of arms in 13:19-22? (If they are Israelite rather than Hab/piru, as Weingreen concedes [1967:63] along with other partitioners, then the inconsistency only escalates from the contingencies of alliance to the essentials of reference.) Again, when have there ever been "Hebrews" east of the Jordan? If never, wouldn't the
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lack of precedent indicate a brand-new development in the happening rather than an old presupposition in the telling? Such development would accordingly fix the direction: those "Hebrews" cross the Jordan not westward, "at (or, by way of) the territory of Gad and Gilead . . . into Canaan" (1967:63), but eastward, from Canaan to Gad and Gilead; not toward but away from the theater of war, in short. Finally, if non- or even anti-Israelite, why do the crossers figure among the natives (13:6-9)their move sandwiched between "the men of Israel's" doings and ''Saul's," to the total exclusion of the Philistines? The latter's mustering, immediately before (13:5), would rather appear to unsettle all three referents. Next, midposing the given terminal item (14:21) further compounds local violence with strategic (ordinal, generative) improbability. Thus, the imagined new arrivals and newer allies from the east are explicitly described in the verse as long-standing allies of the Philistines, whom they reinforce "as on former" occasions. Even if newly arrived, moreover, when and why have they changed allegiance since, ahead of the decisive battle? "What induced the Habiru * to go over to the Israelites cannot be ascertained," Weingreen himself admits (1967:64) in regard to this missing link; the "vital" turn happened "somehow" (as did, we recall, Moses' shuttle from the court to "his brothers" on the poor interpretation of his name and antecedents). But, across the causal hiatus, the reteller would still have the newcomers go over in the meantime by antedating "they also came to be with Israel" (14:21). They had abandoned the Philistines for Saul, as it were, before he trumpeted the news already given, ahead of the event, in the previous chapter (13:3). And this retrojection has the most ironic consequences. If 14:21 looks back on the "Hebrews'" /Hab/piru's prebattle shuttling between the camps, then nothing remains of the series to narrate their participation in the battle: much ado about nothing. (In a longer narrative perspective, this anticlimactic zero also undercuts the speculation that the episode came to generate the law of the Hebrew slave on a quid pro quo basis: "The placing of the Habiru* in a specially favoured position in the framework of slavery may be construed as Israel's acknowledgement of their debt to them" (Weingreen 1967:66). Nonparticipants in the action, they would be owed no debt of honor in commemoration.) In transposing the first serial item (13:3) to the last, the distance between the ado made and the invisible result widens, if conceivably possible. By another montage with the Septuagint, the king is alleged to have broadcast the good news that "'the Habiru* have defected' . . . a rallying call which lifted the Israelites out of their state of despondency and boosted their morale" (1967:64). But did it? And is that why we soon find the uplifted Israelites huddled "in caves and in holes and in rocks and in tombs and in pits"? An odd "sequence of recorded events," where the turning-point
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from misfortune to good fortune has no discernible influence on the conflict (any more than the slightest grounding in what goes before) and its trumpeting has not so much as a psychological effect. The rewriter's censorship in the interests of a preconstruct has just switched to the high-critical level. If the emendators minimize and mystify the "Hebrew" story, the parallel-hunter muddles and virtually kills it another way: the chain reaction goes this time from denationalized narrative to undone narrativity. Low or high, uni- or crosscultural, the source analysis is even more unequal to the discourse as a generic whole than to its parts. Whatever the alternative to the identity and (hi)story of the name-bearers, it cannot group them between these extremes, either. Dividing the references of "Hebrew" by way of synchronic partition yields little but further erraticism, as already indicated, 7 and their diachronic distribution would appear hopeless failing any visible development in usage, plotted or genetic, from Aphek to David. Some have foreseeably opted for the only middle way left, whereby the group name refers throughout to such Israelites as became Hab/piru-like; or, in other words, their distinction from the congeneric "Israel" turns purely social. According to one much-cited theory, for instance, "Hebrews" would then constitute a "social ethnonym" designating elements fallen out of the people's tribal system. "Confined to the uprooted from tribal society, and therein only to the detribalized from one tribal people, Israel,'' accordingly, the "ibrim passages in Samuel" represent "a typically 'apiruû situation, with renegade Israelites in Philistine paramilitary service" (Rowton 1976:19, followed with certain refinements by Na'aman 1986). But those passages, as my second chapter has already shown, in fact dispose quickly of the compromise theory. In the very first one, "Hebrews" covers the nation's entire army gathered at Aphek (4:6-9), without any tribal, let alone "detribalized" or "uprooted" or "renegade" bearing whatsoever; it therefore duly interchanges (victimage apart) with "Israel" in the narrator's idiom and at last even in the Philistines'. Ignoring the one's shift of labels in co-reference and flatly denying the other's ("the Philistines never use the term 'Israelite,' only 'ibrí") will not save the Hab/piru connection. All the less so in the absence of any hint of detribalizing even among "Hebrews" who do turn "renegade," like David. Instead, the measure of his uprooting, in Achish's own view, is loss of national affiliation. "He has made himself utterly odious to his people, to Israel, and will be my slave [ebed] for life" (27:12); and the fellow captains, who dispute the judgment, yet appeal to the same criterion (29:3-10). David himself, it so happens, makes a point of keeping in touch with his tribe (e.g., 21:1, 22:5, 25:42, 30:26ff.): even when he is anointed king of Judah, the Philistines would seem happy enough, because the firmer the tribal loyalties, the weaker the national unity. Only his ascent to the Israelite throne provokes a massive attack, as in Saul's days.
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In the context of our trio, the issue of tribalism remains beside the point as ever, since the contacts governed by the Hebrewgram are intercultural in range and thrust, even when enacted ("translated") within the culture. Far less does the series imply a movement from, say, the breach to the reforging of the tribal link: actually, even when "the Hebrews" have come over to the proper, Israelite side, we never glimpse any reintegration with an in-group of whatever magnitude, least of all with the tribe. Undeveloped as well as unattested, the "social ethnonym'' fails to produce a (hi)story of its own, muddled or otherwise. A synchronic misfit, a diachronic blank. Denationalizing the sense of the term in line with its counterpart's international usage, therefore, is a little better than having it point outside the nation altogether, or at times, as usual among Hab/piru proponents; but not nearly good enough to define, let alone resolve, the issue. "Hebrews" within Israel will no more be assimilated to the Hab/piruthe reference antedates and opposes but highlights the nation, the emphasis falls elsewhere, on the referents vis-à-vis the (Hamite) nationsthan it will be edited out of the Samuel record. The Way to Hebrewgrammatic Resolution Does the choice, then, lie here between symmetrical failures? The premises and practices bundled into either approachHebrews out vs. Hab/piru indoubtless preclude a workable compromise. But need we take, or leave, either bundle as a whole? Or would it be possible to cross the respective discourse-oriented features, while excluding the corresponding source-oriented fiats and the legacy of poor fits with them? Rather than a compromise, we would then have the best of both discourse-worlds: the Samuel text in Biblical context. And the thrust of my argument all along, leading up to "'Hebrews' as bicultural stigmatizing," indicates how we might go about it via the Bible's poetics of culture. It also indicates why such a new account of the givens cannot dispense with poetics in my sense: as a network of relations, a goal-directed communicative system, rather than as just another bid, in the name of "literature," for atomistic interpretation. As a matter of fact, regarding the serial crux that has so long exercised historians and textologists, the exponents of the "literary" approach hold their peace. The Samuel chapters concerned have often been revisited by interpreters of late but not "the Hebrews" that punctuate them; unsurprisingly, maybe. To judge from the experience accumulated over the millennia here, neither the fidelity to the discourse, however religious, nor the quality of its reading, however close, is by itself enough to pose and foreground, let alone integrate the questions at issue. Merely preserving the Samuel textkeeping all the Hebrews in, without
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reference to the Hebrewgramwill just lead to a third kind of failure, the oldest dead end of all. This is the way of blissful uniculturalism, traveled by most fundamentalists and many common exegetes since the Rabbis. To them, given the interchangeability of the ethnica as such, the shifts in nomination present the least difficulty, if any, from the who's-who level upward. Where exegetical ideology and methodology join forces at will against the sense of difference, the book's apparent de-nomi-national turns (amid landed Israel herself) either go unperceived, certainly unadvertised, or lend themselves to ready-made alignment. The Hebrew/Israel equivalence can then be assumed, nodded at, or at most reapplied in passing without detriment to the spirit of national unity, any more than to the letter of the superhuman national charter. On the premises of Rabbinic uniculturalism, accordingly, the three items gain yet another complexion. In 13:3, Saul's trumpet blast warns and/or mobilizes his fellow Hebrews against the inevitable Philistine counterattack; in 13:6-7, as part of the natives under attack hid themselves, so another part fled across the Jordan (the latter, one Rabbi adds by way of insurance, are Hebrewed for elegant wordplay on their act of passage, suiting the name, ibrim, to the deed, abru); and in 14:21, the Hebrews/Israelites who had formerly been pressed into the Philistine war machine, always "despite themselves," of course, now seize the opportunity to close ranks again with their brothers. (Among medieval exegetes, for instance, see Rashi, Radak, Abarbanel.) No self-division, Heaven forbid, within the chosen people, no tampering with their inspired record, no hint of their intercultural contacts, or none on a footing other than warlike. But then, no explanatory, much less (hi)story-telling value, either: whatever gain has been yielded by the preconceived co-reference in the world, the erasure of the difference in form, hence presumably in role, takes away with interest. There is method in the Rabbinic flatness, as in the low critical, and one less Procrustean, too, even though no less ethnocentrist, but the choice remains between debits. How, then, to go about the explanation by means of the Hebrewgram? With this constructive end in view, reconsider the scholarly alternatives. Since "Hebrews" in our threefold series will not link up with the Hab/piru, it must refer to Israelites, as always, and the only question bears on the context of reference. Why should the foreignism occur between fellow natives in their native tongue? But then, context is protean by experience as well as by definition. Even prior to the rise of this enigma, the Intercultural Law has branched out into no fewer than three determinate expressive contextsall sounding the note of foreignnessnor has any Gesenius reduced "Hebrews" to singularity according to his own lights. That his lights prove unequal to generalizing and subclassifying the occasions of the term's use, or even to covering them without recourse to genetic misadventure, is now less significant than the typicality and im-
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plications of the attempt. On every account, except for the uniculturalist limit, usage actually divides along this or that functional line: the ethnicon's co-referentiality with "Israel" yet leaves it some kind of peculiar contextuality, and its own verbatim recurrence may yet overlie a difference. The same form of language enters into multiform patterns. Whatever the answer to the latest enigma, therefore, it need not in reason (as, by now, it cannot in practice) involve textual interference but demands further contextual elaboration. The conclusion, apparently self-evident, has not been drawn by the scholars, much less acted upon, and may yet encounter some last-ditch resistance. This brings home afresh the extent to which the fate of "Hebrews" depends on the threshold of readingif only in the sense of alertness or responsiveness to a set of variations on a theme. Tracing a form demonstrably (and in effect, I repeat, admittedly) protean, who can or would enjoin upon it, as Job's God does upon the sea, Thus far wilt thou come and no farther? Given such a leitmotif as Hebrewness, what degree of variability in the handling is one able to conceive or tolerate, one's instruments to register, one's scheme to accommodate and coordinate? On the record, the traditional threshold shows itself low enough here, certainly by poetic standards, and much too low for consistency by any standard. The inconsistency, exhibited in both the (re) textualizing and the (re) contextualizing of the opaque instances by appeal to the transparent-looking, is the decisive giveawaystill more so than any inadequacy of coverage and explanation. Under my theory, of course, earlier analyses have overlooked the fundamentals of "Hebrews," such as the translational mimesis, the Hamite connection, the play of perspectives between the foreign and the foreign-like, the plot dynamics whereby reference accords for better or worse with the intergroup balance of power. I would be the last to belittle these oversights; yet they do come on top of, perhaps even result from, a deeper problem, one attaching to the logic that generates the analysis, no matter how its findings stand vis-à-vis my Intercultural Law. This logic has to do with the ubiquitous ideal of "easy" order, breeding all kinds of frozen and falsifiable (meta)stereotypes via (low or high analytic, uni- or cross-cultural, ethnocentrist or class-centered) package dealing. Except that it is here illogical even in theory, because it amounts to coupling the protean with the packaged, to arresting functional explanation in midcourse. An equivalent from another domain would be the view that a narrator can be omniscient or limited, truthful or dishonest, straightforward or ironic, masterly or artless, but cannot possibly alternate between the extremesor that he can alternate on one of the axes but not the rest. By the nature of discourse, elements (meanings, traits, values, perspectives) may flexibly combine and recombine, subject only to each discourse's empirical limits, rather than to any apriorism. Thus, a variation from or
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on usage having once been acknowledgede.g., from "Israel" to "Hebrews" in alien, a fortiori alien-like voicesthere is no ruling out of further and finer thematic variants, except on the evidence. As already illustrated from Gesenius et al., however, the postRabbinic tradition narrows down the range of "Hebrews" to the simplest yet least tenable possibilities: not simple enough for draconian uniformity, too simple for contextual plurality. Self-doomed to falling between the stools, sooner or later, the traditionalist will then look to the genesis for extrication, as if the text were at fault and rewriting the answer. The wider set of patterns over which we have been ranging is a gauge of this half-and-half approach. The higher their art, or complexity, the more vulnerable they become to low criticism in flight from reading what is there to be read. Whatever the degree of misreading or underreading suffered by instances of our first two patterns, it has seldom been carried to the length of genetic rewriting. Exceptions would be the stretching of ibrim into akhbarim ("mice") on the lips of the Philistines (14:11), with a view to making explicit the name-caller's scorn; or the discounting of Jonah's self-nomination as ibri, allegedly a "copying mistake" for ebed ("slave/servant [of the Lord]," which the Septuagint alone, who else, got right), actually an embarrassment to the Hab/piru nexus. By and large, however, the texts given in a foreign or foreign-oriented dialogic voice come out intact, often admissibly, if minimally, slottedhence amenable in principle to a higher, poetic system and order of understanding. Detail aside, I believe, few experts on record would or should have trouble with the Hebrewgram's two direct-speech varieties (though the speaker's perspective on "Hebrews'' changes there in attitude and intricacy from Pharaoh's, say, to the midwives'). But the line is drawn, or predrawn, at the third pattern, where the quoter compounds the switches into thought and nondirectness. Here, many visibly fail to register the plainest manifestations of an alien subjectivity (e.g., Moses in youth), let alone to detect and integrate with their aid more hidden cases of the same type (Joseph's guests at table, the Sodomite newsmonger). After some fashion, instead, the subjectivities at work get objectified by the analysts into narratorial discourse, however uneasily or lamely (e.g., "Hebrews" in opposition to nonIsraelites) or genetically (as with "Abram the Hebrew"). It is as though the line between speech and thought, direct and nondirect quotation, were qualitative, marking an impassable barrier; as though anything would be more conceivable than a Bible ringing the mimetic changes on its theme, at ever-growing removes from the original heteroculturalism. In turn, even commentators who somehow explain away the narrator's alleged lapses into foreign usage will not tolerate "Hebrews" in direct quotation from Saul's broadcasting of the news to his own people. It is here
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that the shoe pinches and amendment brings relief. This group name "is strange in Saul's mouth" (Driver 1960:98); it "would be used only by foreigners" (Interpreter's Bible 1953:946, McCarter 1980:225); it "cannot be correct" (Smith 1899:91-92); he "would have had to say 'Israel'" (Herzberg 1964:101). 8 So the real complaintthat the low ethnicon would be self-de-meaning, indeed self-defeating in the emergencypeeps out from its low critical wrapping. Deemed impossibly misvoiced, the label undergoes such overhaul as will assimilate it to Philistine use: in effect, to our first and simplest context of utterance. (Our third, strictly, for ''the Philistines heard, 'The Hebrews have revolted,'" but the text-critical tradition does not know the hidden life of its own contrivance.) The next inside labeling (13:7) in this series, impossible to revoice outside the native circle, must drop out of the text altogether; and the last (14:21), resisting this ultimate exclusion, nullifies the whole exercise in patchwork and the approach behind it. Where the critics find the text least classifiable and interpretable, they have run out of pretexts for pre-texts. This irony tops off what we have been discovering all along: why, how, at what cost the interpreter (whether or not masquerading as geneticist) imposes on the work his own narrow horizons, semantic, conceptual, ethnopolitical, ideological, evolutionary, no less than artistic proper. Conversely, the Hebrewgram's range extends to a further variation on the theme, whereby the intercultural drama gets translated into the culture itself, with much profit and no strain. Just as the decoding of "Hebrews" in indirect and free indirect mind-style leads us below the surface of Moses' growth, so does that of "Hebrews" at infighting make new and newly-plotted sense of Israel's war with the Philistines. What a few scattered de-nomi-nations can achieve in the hands of a master, it will transpire, is again a cause for wonder. Nor do these two patterns compare only in their reference to the same Law at its most artful. The continuity between them runs to the uncovering of an inner Hebrew/Israel split vis-à-vis the Hamite oppressor, shuttles and all. So even the one genuine variance between them (private vs. public, individual vs. collective self) relates to the theme, enacting two forms of the same ill as it affects the same group in contact with the same antipole. On the way from the first prophet to the first king, from "Hebrew"-thinker to "Hebrew"-trumpeter, the narrative executes a shrewd "metonymic" relocation of the arena of turbulent interiority: there in the chosen leader's psyche before the Exodus, here in the allegiance of the chosen people on their land, centuries after. Instead of a settled ethnocentrism, Rabbinic or rewriterly, or any crosscultural socio-centeredness, we find the canon at multiform, multiphase ethnocriticism. Newly attached "from within," and coinciding with the war's highlights, the foreign stigma implies the tale of a nation divided against herself in the struggle for liberty, for a future Israel purged of the vict-image of Hebrewness under the monarchy.
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A Nation Divided, a Kingdom United Either side in the conflict draws the battle lines from its own viewpoint, ethnic, religious, sociopolitical, polemical, expressional, as well as military. To the foreigners, on the one hand, the arena polarizes itself into "Philistines" vs. "Hebrews," masters and slaves respectively. ''Be men, O Philistines, lest you become slaves to the Hebrews as they have been slaves to you": so they encourage themselves on their first appearance as speakers in the book (4:9); and, discounting the lip service paid in extremis to "the God of Israel," they never change terms thereafter. The loaded dichotomy, or twofold stereotype, recurs among the Philistines no matter what the form assumed by their Other. They may be speaking of an army in battle array, as at Aphek; or of a vassalage possibly chafing under the yoke, hence to be denied "sword or spear"; or of rebels venturing out of their holes, as before Jonathan's exploit; or of ostensible collaborators, like David in Achish's employ. The reference quoted is uniform throughout, due to a sense of fundamental inequality. Across all variations, the referents come out as "Hebrews," a race apart, outlandish, originating in a parcel of fugitive Egyptian slaves and deserving nothing better than reenslavement (if only geopolitical) by their superiors, under the age-old name of Hamite memory. In the insiders' view of the war, on the other hand, it by now goes without saying that the values change poles. Beyond that, however, the lines get redrawn to yield a tripartition, with the naming of the forces at strife ramified and redistributed accordingly. The main line of division, as of conflict, still passes between the two ethnonational groups, now recast into "Israel" vs. "the Philistines" or "the uncircumcised." But instead of merely rejecting and countering the Philistine stigma of Hebrewness, the native discourse redirects it against a third group where, alas, it properly applies, with a bicultural vengeance. The cap fits those born Israelites who have forfeited their title to the glorious ethnicon since, and as long as, they do behave like slaves in the national emergency. Indeed, we will soon discover, like quislings. Bearing the yoke themselves and apparently (a throwback to Exodus's Egyptianized villain in Moses' debut, even to the self-enslaved Egyptians themselves) wanting company, they have fought side by side with the oppressor: "The Hebrews had been with the Philistines, as on former occasions." They run true to alien stereotype, and worse. As "nigger" to "Negro" in Crunch Blackstone's parlance about his race, so "Hebrew" to "Israelite" in the freedom lover's, whether quoted or narrating. Having joined the wolves, as it were, the goats are separated by name from the sheep they have, to their disgrace, abandoned and turned upon. Fellow natives, presumably co-religionists, too, these "Hebrews" no longer count as fellow nationals. (For that matter, their being tagged so
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by either party drives home that they have lost all national status in the eyes of the world.) And the best constructive argument against emending the Masoretic text resides in the art with which the intraethnic line gets drawn athwart the international, or the bicultural across the heterocultural. Drawn and redrawn, more precisely, since the Bible's is a dynamic art, remarkable for its coordination of developments in the world with disclosures about the world: our process of reading becomes as eventful as the characters' drama of living. So it becomes here, in I Samuel 13-14, if we rise to the challenge of the poetics, especially the strategy of maneuvering between the (overt) truth and the (hidden) whole truth. On the one hand, according to the Bible's principle of foolproof communication, the (hi)story recounted by our three notorious items is simple enough in essentials to form a bond of minimum understanding among the audience. Were it not for the postBiblical preconceptions about "Hebrew" usage or the Hab/piru analogy, that basic truth (the action line with the appropriate value scheme) would be transparent to all comers. Once war has been declared upon the Philistine oppressor, Saul urged "the Hebrews" to (re)join their Israelite brothers (13:3-4), with dubious consequences: some opted out by crossing the Jordan eastward (13:7), some adhered to the enemy until his unexpected overthrow changed their minds (14:21), none did the right thing at the right time. This much arises from stringing together the distributed items, because what they convey marches in step with what happens, disclosure with development. On the other hand, the tale does not easily yield its secrets, nor even advertise their existence. The artwork rather passes itself off, all too successfully, as a document pure and simple. The finer points lurk, often twist, beneath the givens for us to infer or untwist as best we can, in the hope of advancing by degrees toward something like the whole narrative truth: the interplay of ethnopolitical and action lines, of identity and history in tripartite conflict. For such intricacies, we readers must look and think harder all along, exerting our skills in response to the artist's. To begin at the beginning of the series. Note the thematic timing whereby the emergence of this tripartition coincides with the first blow struck for liberty. Having been objectively told, the deed at once ramifies into no fewer than three hearing acts. 'Jonathan struck the garrison [prefect] of the Philistines that was at Geba," whereupon (1) the Philistines heard, (2) and Saul blew the trumpet throughout the land, saying, Let the Hebrews hear. (3) And all Israel heard, saying, Saul has struck the garrison [prefect] of the Philistines, and Israel has also become odious to the Philistines.
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Within this repetition structure, (1) and (2) obviously concern different "hearings," each associated with its own group; but so in turn do (2) and (3), and not by force of symmetry alone. Clues to the three-way difference abound, all independent of the ground rule of "Hebrews" yet in its spirit. This difference also comes with, or from, a differential artistic treatment. Observe especially how the text maneuvers for Israel- rather than either Philistine- or Hebrew-centeredness; how it plays between the center of narrative interest and the centrism of vested national interest; and what an array of (de)focusing indicators (quantitative, combinatory, plot-based, sequential, analogical, perspectival, linguistic, intertextual) it brings to bear on the three contenders for worldly and discoursive ascendancy. For one thing, only by tripartition does the given register of hearings compose into a well-formed and meaningful order. If bipartite, as widely asserted by uniculturalists, 9 the register ends with the wrong verb form. After the "Philistine"-centered imperfect (wa'yyishme'u) in (1), the "Saul"-to-"Hebrews" address in (2) reasonably switches into the perfect (taqa', 'blew') for topical and spatiotemporal distinctiveness; yet, on the assumption that "Hebrews" equal "Israel,'' why should (3) manifest another distinctive perfect (shame'u, 'heard') where one would expect an imperfect verb for continuity with (2)? If bipartite, again, the heating sequence jumps from ethnonational pole (1) to (2) and then, in (3), awkwardly duplicates the latter item under another name referring to the same entity. Instead, once you take that name to designate a third group, the text not only enjoys the joint imprimatur of grammar and lexis but also shapes them into thick meaningfulness, a gradated far-to-close together with long-shot-to-close-up movement. The (1)-(2)-(3) series, thus read, unfolds according to a scale of national propinquity: it modulates from the alien auditor ("Philistines") through the alienated ("Hebrews") to the native worthy of the chosen ethnicon ("Israel," revealingly doubling now as toponym, for the promised land itself hangs in the balance). The sequence is then a mirror, or icon, of the state of affairs. By iconic logic, each group's position in the discourse at the cutoff junctures of beginning/end vs. the middle, reflects its position in the world. Two ethnopolitical (as well as otherwise cultural) extremes, here openly at war again; one mixed quantity, affiliated with both (vassals to one, kin to the other) yet co-national with neither, and so a universal target for the odium of Hebrewness. For another thing, the implications of this order have at least two suggestive precedents. One reaches back as early as the entrance of the paradigmatic deliverer of "Hebrews." Moses "struck [wa'yyakh] the Egyptian" (as Jonathan "struck [wa'yyakh] the garrison [prefect] of the Philistines"); "Pharaoh heard" (as now do his fellow Hamites) and would retaliate; while the "Hebrews" have lost their cohesion (the unity encoded in the singular "Israel") to the extent of quarreling among themselves, siding with the
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oppressor, challenging the deliverer's authority, all again with parallels in contemporary history since the rise of kingship. As the Hamite master plot suggests, by "Hebrew"-centered analogy to the formative self-division, Israel's war of independence must be re-waged on two fronts. In shorter international retrospect, much the same picture arises from the late embroilment with Nahash of Ammon (10:25-11:15). Of course, the Ammonites being nonHamite, the foreign oppressor would never speak of "Hebrews" (not even at his most abusive, when he wants to "put disgrace on Israel" by ''gouging out every right eye" in JabeshGilead), nor would the oppressed (who ask for a respite in order to "send messengers through all the territory of Israel"). With this rule-governed genolexical exception, however, the crisis does bring out Hebrew-like patterns of behavior. Then as now, outside pressure all too often exposes an abject spirit within the nation: the Jabesh-Gileadites offer to "serve" the king of Ammon (11:1), shying only at disfigurement, while their countrymen evince little eagerness to rescue them from either abuse, and the national honor from "disgrace," before Saul forces the issue. Like the Ammonite attack, moreover, the new emergency catches the king without a standing army (10:25-27, 13:2). He has to muster the whole people for war, if necessary by threats broadcast all over the land. At the time, "he took a yoke of oxen and cut them into pieces and sent them throughout all the territory of Israel by the hand of messengers, saying, Whoever does not come out after Saul and after Samuel, so shall be done to his oxen. Then the fear of the Lord fell upon the people and they came out as one man" (11:7)including the defeatists, the faint-hearted, the nonsolidary, the slave-like, in brief. Now the king substitutes the ox's horn for the meatperhaps he cannot gain physical access to "the Hebrews," or dares not attempt visual contactbut with the same landwide range and the same end in view. So this overall analogy interprets the trumpet blast "Let the Hebrews hear" as a call to arms (or, at least, a warning against further betrayal) pointedly addressed to the third group. With such addressees approached in such fashion, the king naturally resorts to the shared language code, yet encodes a tell-tale difference: the medium is part of the message, half-vernacular (yishme'u), half-translational (ha'ibrim) below its apparent uniform composition. Thereby, yoking fraternity together with foreignness, Saul's message avoids the name of "Israel," which would be at once too honorific for them and too inclusive for discriminate reference to them. (The allusion to the young Moses' ordeal even suggests a contrast with the prophet's later nationwide invocation, "Hear, O Israel," resounding throughout Deuteronomy: most audibly in the contrapuntal and punning intertext "Hear, O Israel; thou art crossing [ober] the Jordan today" [9:1].) The implication follows that if the designated hearers catch, swallow, and act upon the exclusive reference to themselvesas eventually happensthe
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privilege of being included in "Israel" is theirs again. The crunch having come, they may and must prove where their true allegiance lies. By an ironic twist, kept for the next serial occurrences and bearing out in retrospect the logic of the threefold division, "the Hebrews" will prove true to themselves only. They do respond to the call, and yet don't. Some opt out by removing themselves in space, ahead of the Philistine counterattack (13:7); some oblige in their own good timeafter the Philistine defeat (14:21). Faced by an either/or choice, amounting to "Are you for us or for our adversaries?", the third group still finds a third way, ranging between neither/nor and both/and. For yet another thing, the ordinal sense made of the passage ties the arrangement to the selection of detail. As selective art has earlier thrown light on individual dramas of hearingAbram's, then Potiphar'sthe threefold and groupsize enactment in progress draws notice to match. Why the uneven coverage of the receptive acts? Divided three ways, the proportioning is as hierarchical and iconic as the sequencing, in that it constructs an ascending order of particularity. The Philistines' "hearing" gets omitted altogether (through the ellipsis of the subordinate clause); the Hebrews', restricted to the trumpet blast; the Israelites', detailed even in excess of the original happening. This closeup movement goes to fix the scale of interest, itself value-laden, and the network of reference alike. As interest presumably correlates with specificity, the total outsiders are in effect kept off-stage for the moment. The notice accorded to their reception of the news just meets the bare demands of plot, that is, laying the ground for the eventual counteraction in 13:5. If "the Philistines heard," they can and will as a result invade the land of Israel in force before long, never mind the subjective details. It is rather the native side, already centralized as initiator of hostilities, that now comes into double focus with the movement from the action taken for liberty in the world to the action internalized within the hearing self: from plot to perspective. Accordingly, Jonathan having broken the status quo, Moses fashion, not just the appeal or challenge trumpeted to "the Hebrews" but even its verbalized meaning and pejorative word-imaging originate in Saul. The addressees' own interioritywhat they actually "hear" in the trumpet call, whether it affects them at all, how they view themselvesremains out of focus, because out of national ken and sympathy. To judge from the given perspective, they no doubt receive the message, in terms other (if only less derogatory, because the receivers would also know the Hebrewgram) than the sender's; yet they fail to respond at the moment, again like, and apparently in concert with, the Philistines. This unflattering correspondence even brings into pattern the Septuagint's referring term, abadim, "slaves," usually dismissed out of hand as a corruption of the Masoretic ibrim. 10 Whatever its genesis, the replace-
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ment is to the point (more so, in fact, than that of the verb "hear" by "revolted," traditionally thought superior). For abadim underlies the Intercultural Law of (De)Nomination throughout the Bible, across all our discourse types, and here spells out what the immediate context tacitly focuses. Whether branded as such by the composition or by outspoken figural descriptiontoo outspoken, maybe, for the king's rhetoricthese "Hebrews" are "slaves" to the Philistines: they compare unfavorably even with the worst of their namesakes before the Exodus, when the entire people suffered bondage outside the promised land. In judgment, if not in art, the variant source agrees with the thrust of the echoing national discourse. The last member of the "hearing report" brings on the national part), with maximum distinctive éclat. The immediate juxtaposition of "the Hebrews" and "all Israel" (following each other seriatim in the original) dramatizes the in-group opposition between the respective hearers. With the variance in label and in reference, the judgment shifts to the positive pole. The negative concurrently hardens, because the one subgroup's nomination as Israel verifies the other's de-nomi-nation. For emphasis, moreover, the added quantifier "all" denies ''the Hebrews" so much as nominal or partial membership in "Israel," rendering the two categories of auditors mutually exclusive. Not that "the Hebrews" would perforce accept their exclusion. Ideopolitical outcasts rarely doleast of all when they speak the same language as their native adversaries, boast a descent as good, fraternize with a "higher" culture, and can pretend to a deeper, more "realistic" understanding of the national interest. Since the trumpet blast must resound "throughout the land" for them to "hear," it is not even decidable which of the native platforms enjoys the larger following; the text's discreet hint (backed by the Egyptian and Ammonite precedents) certainly rules out the idea of a negligible "Hebrew" minority: enclave, tribe, splinter group. As might be expected, however, any such possible rival claim to "Israel" goes unrecorded and unrecognized within a history sworn to freedom under God, in God's own image. Embracing unfreedom betrays one's humanity in the scheme of creation, a fortiori one's heritage along the chain of election. (And in postdiluvian times, we must never forget, the chain opens with Noah's blessing of Shem as opposed to Ham, "the slave of slaves" whom those Hebrews have taken for master.) Whatever the numerical ratio between the two sectors in the worldanother glance at the majority/minority themetheir narrative proportioning therefore goes by value, so that quality transcends quantity. The representational imbalance, in the enactment of subjectivity as well as of public life, always tells against the traitors to their kind and kin. The Philistine-called "Hebrews," from Jonathan to David, come in for more than their due share of speech and thought, as befits national heroes. The bicultural "Hebrews" (like the
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Hab/piru in the Amarna archives and elsewhere, yet unlike the very Hamites in Scripture) are reduced to nonspeaking, nonthinking, nonexpressive parts, collective at that, by the nation that shaped the record of victory as an ordeal of liberty. Small wonder their viewpoint literally got no hearing at the time of the king's appeal or anytime. On the contrary, we now find it silently rejected in the divisive nomination that introduces "all Israel's" hearing of the emergency. Thus drawn clean across the shared blood line with "the Hebrews," the battle line allows no mixed quantities, no middle way, and by proleptic implication, no mercy thereafter. Then we for once get to know what the hearers heard, a privilege that enables us to see for ourselves why they alone qualify for the blessed name and the limelight. All Israel heard, saying, Saul has struck the garrison [prefect] of the Philistines, and Israel has also become odious to the Philistines. Directly quoted from their minds, or collective inner ear, the inset is specific and laudatory because at one with the quoter's frame. "Israel" register and interpret the unsettling development not only in the proper spirit but also in the proper terms: above all, the self-imaging as "Israel," and at an agonistic juncturereminiscent of the fighting eponym, along with the inheritors of his name and promise and spirit, the Deuteronomic ''hearers" about to cross the Jordanwhen it may pay to do otherwise. They have internalized the national ethicon affirmed by the storyteller, combatted by the Philistines, dishonored by "the Hebrews." (Conversely, that the latter foreignism never emerges in the loyalists' free self-reference is more than accordant with the Hebrewgram in general. By a distinctive rule of monologue already established, its absence from their inner ear stands out to all the greater advantage for having just been voiced in the outer arena: compare Potiphar vis-à-vis his wife.) The fact that the "striker" gets substituted ("Saul" for "Jonathan") and Israel's "odiousness to the Philistines" added does not therefore betoken a sheer mishearing, either. Even their one departure in the uptake from the objective account of the action, "Jonathan struck the garrison [prefect] of the Philistines," shows these hearers constructing the right metonymic chain of signification. To the national mind, the three anti-Philistine terms can and do replace one another. Jonathan acts for Saul, Saul for Israel: ergo, the news amounts to a declaration of war. And as the event for the first time receives a proper hearing, so does its hearing excite the proper doing. "The people were called out to join Saul at Gilgal." The tripartition is complete; and Saul, the first to voice the extra, in-group dividing line, would be the last person to confuse "Hebrews" with
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"Israel." No need, therefore, to extricate him from such discoursive or unpatriotic confusion by wrenching his news out of the loyal trumpeters' mouths, into the ears of the Philistines; far less is the confusion to be compounded by recasting the "Hebrew"-directed announcement he trumpets throughout the land into nothing other than his interior monologue''Saul aber liess im ganzen Land das Widderhorn blasen und sagte sich: 'Die Hebräer sollen es hören'" (Stolz 1981:82) as if Saul were the divided youthful Moses of the monarchy. Instead of hastening to save Israel's king by rewriting and reassigning his message, the emendators will do well to reconsider their own premises and practices in the light of the new variation played on the intercultural theme: the foreign hate-word turned ("translated") inward against the foreign-like. The interiorizing is there, trained on the enemy within, but after the manner of the Hebrewgram's fourth, not third, pattern. But does all this art of groupment, systematic yet fine-grained, clinch the issue? Quite possibly not, or not yet, for those who refuse to take the strategies, workings, indirections, coherencies of literary discourse as evidence for any truth, whether claimed or mirrored by Scripture, whether history-like or historical. Such refusal is absurd, to be sure, and not only considering the "poetic" license taken both by the geneticist in rewriting the words and by the crossculturalist in reconstructing the world. As a matter of principle, even the most hard-headed analysts cannot gain access to their data except via the discourse, by somehow reading the text in context, if merely on the way to a pretext. Whether one does it ill or well, that is always the question; and the traditional readings of Saul's "Hebrews" are poor and Procrustean by any criterion, genesis included, even more so than usual. Along with the evidence from the Bible's poetics of (inter)cultural discourse, their very weakness recommends the alternative I offered above. Still, one possible demurrer (or loophole) needs taking into account, because it has been silently anticipated, almost provoked, by the Samuel narrator himself, with an eye to forwarding the new thematic variant. Given the nature of the issues in question, ostensibly anything but a matter for play, are we entitled to infer the (hi)story's truth-claim, never mind its truth-value, from the literary subtext? When it comes to the hard realities and judgments of sociopoliticsespecially when they intersect with ethnopolitics and cross with no extraBiblical testimonyhow much weight will, or should, the poetics of discourse bear? The network of indirections, textual, contextual, intertextual, sub-textual, in short, would appear to have yielded a key to the discord inside Israel of the early monarchy as she faced her greatest crisis. So the Bible would have us understand, trisect, evaluate the conflictbetween the lines,
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in more than one sense, and on two fronts. So, too, a balance is struck between making an ado about the family scandal and censoring it out of the record. Again, in a large canonical perspective, so the present reaches back to past scandals of Hebrewnessas early as the tensions within and between the leader and the people at the embryonic stage abroadfor commentary, counterpoint, continuity in discontinuity along the grand narrative of phylogenesis. Likewise with more cheerful glances at the outgrowth of such Hebrewness, albeit temporary, under divinely inspired leadership: from the Exodus to the Crossing into Canaan to the victory over Ammon. Nevertheless, whatever store one sets by these reading directivesit may be objected with some justicethe pattern made out in their light falls short of direct authorial statement. Would you (as interpreter, reconstructor, judge) split the nation in two, giving one moiety a bad name and hanging it, on the artistic equivalent of circumstantial evidence? Why not let the suspects enjoy the benefit of doubt? More concretely, the fact remains that we know nothing for sure at the moment about "the Hebrews" in 13:3 beyond the royal message addressed to them. Of course, Israel knows, as does Philistiathe truth, one way or the other, having long been published in Gathbut the reader doesn't, or not yet, since our omniscient guide has seen fit to tell less than he knows. 11 Reading in sequence, as we must, we cannot even foretell at 13:3 whether (much less when or how) the narrator will proceed to level up the discrepancies in information: to turn our hard-earned near-knowledge about Saul's "Hebrews" into the confident factual knowledge shared by all the rest. Until thus proved guilty of offending against national solidarity, the name-bearers may find refuge in the charitable interpretation, whereby they remain coextensive with "Israel" vis-à-vis "the Philistines.'' (This is in effect the line usually taken, or toed, by the Rabbis, who would neither dream of emending the sacred book nor wish to divide and debunk the chosen people. But ideoliterary constraint and hermeneutic open-mindedness come, for a moment, to the same thing here.) If so, the king appealed to a single, loyal entity: the reference and the judgment stay constant under nominal variation from "Hebrews" to "all Israel." The arena splits into two parties, not three, with the international drama to the fore. Though still bicultural, "Hebrews" on such lenient reading sheds for once its stigma in the passage ("translation") from Hamite to Israelite usagefrom anti-national heterolingualism to intra-national (if anomalous) substitute for the ethnicon. The two cultures would then agree about the term's reference but diverge in its valuation of the referents, between odium and, say, neutrality. Rather than opprobrious, one may even claim, Hebrewness exhibits here its original favorableness, usually kept below the surface, whereby it also counterpoints anew with the negative burden long imposed on it abroad and at home. The king's chosen term is thus designed
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to inflame the nationwide audience by playing on their common sense of its opprobrium in the enemy's mouth, from Egypt to Philistia. "Let the so-called Hebrews hear and rise in force against the name-callers." Unlike the straightforward interchange with "Israel," the sarcastic name-calling by an insider finds a precedent: the Lord's mockhumble self-designation to Pharaoh as "the God of the Hebrews." 12 Therefore, considering the flexibility of words in discourse and the seriousness of the in-group-branding alternative, charity demands that we keep our minds open about the configurationeven those of us whom the truth of the matter, real or storied, would otherwise hardly bother. As the narrative of the war rolls on, however, closure does gradually impose itself: its negative thrust against the "Hebrews" group even exploits in retrospect any averseness to foreclosure on our part, as a misplaced suspension of judgment. The sequel removes all lingering doubts, with increasing firmness. The next occurrence, in 13:7, already sharpens the Israel/Hebrew antithesis in the face of the oppressor, and along two converging axes. On the axis of discourse levels, this partition rises from figural to narratorial speech, from the trumpeted inset to the frame itself, all-authoritative within the Bible's universe of discourse. The threefold grouping recurs, along the same lines and under the same names as before. Except that now it is the storyteller himself who distinguishes hiders from crossers, "Israelite" from "Hebrew" reactions to the prospect of "Philistine" attack. And regarding the intermediate category, he mimes in propria persona the foreign-like reference just attributed to the king. So this continuity amid voice-shift does not merely repeat but authorizes the novelty of bicultural stigmatizing. All loyal Israelite minds speak, divide, judge alike, it would appear, as indeed they concurrently do in opposition to the Philistines' indiscriminate language of "Hebrews." At the same time, on the axis of informativeness, our factual knowledge (earlier limping behind everyone else's) progresses from name to deed. The Philistine war machine having been assembled at Michmash, the men of Israel . . . hid themselves in caves and in holes and in rocks and in tombs and in pits. And Hebrews had crossed the Jordan to the land of Gad and Gilead. Discourse reliability and openness about the subgrouping ("men of Israel" vs. "Hebrews") have advanced in concert. Back on stage, the two native-born referent groups now obviously vary in membershipone cannot hide and cross, duck and run, at oncebut also in esteem. At first blush, neither proceeding seems very glorious beside the militia under Saul, however "trembling," far less beside the hard core of six hundred. Yet the difference
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between the rooted Israelite and the runaway Hebrew makes the difference between the solidary and the selfregarding; and the arts of context widen it toward polarity. On the one hand, the Saul cycle loads Israelite hiding with positive value through a chain of variations on the motif. Saul himself, "hiding among the baggage" at the time of his election by lot and then discovered to be "taller than any of the people from his shoulder upward" (10:21-24), leads the way. This symbolic (or, again, metonymic) precedent to our verse, 13:6, is later reembodied in another, worthier member of the royal house, the one who saves the day. For the Philistine garrison at the Michmash Pass inadvertently resumes the chain of echoes in mistitling Jonathan and his lad "Hebrews coming out of the holes where they have hidden himselves" (14:11). After their usual fashion, the enemy conflates under a single umbrella, de-nomi-national and polemical, what the chapter before has so meticulously told apart: first the Hebrew from the Israelite, then the fighter from the hider among the Israelites. The hero of "Israel" (his own counter-term in the aside to the lad) proves the jumblers wrong by word and deed, as soon will his true namesakes, not least those indeed hidden at the moment. They surface by way of more knowing (though equally pinpoint) resumption and in larger numbers. Once Jonathan has thrown the Philistines into panic, ''all the men of Israel who had been hiding themselves in the hill country of Ephraim . . . they, too, pursued them in the battle" (14:22), down to the Ayyalon frontier. An underground movement, indeed, running below the territorial and the narrative surface at once, as if coordinated by one invisible hand. All the way to its triumphant finale, then, the "hide"-chain passing through our verse steadily warms our judgment into approval of what might otherwise appear equivocal and undignified, if not downright unpatriotic. (The same rhetorical thrust, in fact, carries over to David's history as underdog, often holed up, with Saul as antagonist, then Absalom.) Those who cling to the land, if only below the ground, may always join their embattled brothers, and therefore remain "Israel"except to the Philistines, who pay dearly for their lack of discrimination. Pace Shakespeare, or Falstaff, it is not he who runs but he who hides away that lives to fight another day. On the other hand, the "Hebrew" runaways are made to look even shabbier than they would out of context. The Masoretic wording, so brutalized (literally de-Hebrewed) in the guise of source criticism, pinpoints yet another network of retrospects and equivalences, this time for invidious comparison. "Hebrews had crossed [ibrim abru] the Jordan to the land of Gad and Gilead." Take the nuclear sentence, with the dissonant referring expression as subject [ibrim] and the verb in the pluperfect [abru]. The referents,
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instead of digging themselves in now, had already crossed over. So fashioned, the twofold nucleus points not only to an entity but also to a time other than the Israelites gone into hiding in the sentence before (or to Saul at Gilgal in the next). 13 And the rhyming of the two elements further composes their distinct unity of meaning; the sound knits together the phrasal sense, as well as ensures the reference. Far from being in need of rewritinge.g., into obrim or just abru or am rab abru or wa'yya'abru ma'abrotthis pair would therefore have us read afresh the sequence of events they so noticeably disturb. Term and tense alike hark back to Saul's call "Let the Hebrew hear": they heard, apparently, and responded with their feet, even prior to the Philistine muster, which drove "Israel" either into the battlefield or underground. In longer perspective, the "Hebrews" who "cross" eastward into Gilead reverse, and by implication dishonor, all the historic westward crossings into Canaan by the elect, from "Abram the Hebrew's" to Jacob/Israel's to Joshua's, complete with Josephic bones and Mosaic Torah. (Among these rites of passage, steadily advancing in time and magnitude, the last alone comes after the people's birth in Exodus. It is therefore fittingly Hebrewless, to the chagrin of Hab/piru matchmakers, but as significantly resounds with the verb 'br,14 now doubled for contrastive emphasis, ibrim abru.) Again, "Gilead'' recalls the shameful oppression that impelled the Jabesh-Gileadites to cross the other way, into "the territory of Israel," in quest of deliverance by fellow nationals under the new king. The runaways could therefore hardly choose a more telling direction and destination if they set out to excommunicate themselves. Defectors in the war's immediate context, those "Hebrews" are nothing less than anti-Crossers by foundational precedents and ideo-national standards. So network of allusion meshes with counternetwork for mutual reinforcement. But the worst discovery is still to come. In the final occurrence, 14:20-22, the native outgroup's fixture between the two sides rises to absolute transparency with its taking and changing sides in the fighting. "Hebrews," on the narrator's own authority, cannot possibly overlap with "Israel," any more than with "the Philistines," so that the tripartition established on the ground presses for a corresponding adjustment of the rule of discourse. At long last, even permissive source critics and fanciful two-party historians must bow to the inevitableas indeed they dohowever awkwardly the meaning clashes with their preconceived schemes of Hebrewness and whatever the resultant patchwork.15 That these key verses apparently pose certain textual difficultiesall small, yet more genuine than those invented for emendation beforeis another gauge of the force exerted here against confusing the essentials. As the source-critical record ad loc. shows, however, preconception
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dies extremely hard. To be forced into acknowledging the tripartition in the world at this juncture is not yet to extend it backwardas early as Saul's trumpet callmuch less to associate the iterated verbal discordance with a state and story of discord, least of all to generalize therefrom about the repertoire of intercultural discourse. A pity, because the surfacing of the whole truth in victory has its constructive aspect, too, with valuable implications for the poetics of ethnoculture in Samuel and beyond. The arts of reference, sequence, inference brought into play, therefore, deserve a closer look. How does the text maintain its (foolproof, short of biasproof) intelligibility to a multilevel audience, what threefold picture emerges, and why so late in the war? "The Hebrews," first invoked by name only, then glimpsed in fugitive action, are now (re)introduced with the ceremony of description. They number those who had been [hayu] with the Philistines, as on former occasions, who had gone up [alu] with them into the camp . . . The first relative pronoun "who" does not explicitly appear in the text, but we can waive the argument against the conventional wisdom that supplies it: its presence or absence makes as little difference to the art of signification as to the plain meaning. In either case, the string of verbs in the imperfect gets interrupted, and with it the Israel-centered action they propel forward, in mid-victory. The pluperfect tense (hayu . . . alu) looks back not only to the pre-battle but also to the pre-muster past, as if to resume the Hebrew theme by coupling flashback with flashback, those who "had crossed" [abru] eastward into Gilead with those who "had been'' and "had gone up" with the enemy this side of the Jordan. But to couple the two anterior mass actions is to uncouple the mass agents, and thematically so: "Hebrew" selfdivision ("crossers east" vs. "goers-up") within native self-division ("Hebrews" vs. "Israel") in face of the national adversary. Discontinuous both with each other in the text and with the respective imperfect matrixes in verb-form, hence in tense, the twinned pluperfects capture a further discontinuity in grouping. Language again mirrors the world itself. No less suggestive of biforking than this iconicity are the shifts in the definiteness of the reference to the inner outgroup along our series. The bare definite article in "Let the Hebrews hear!" fuses determinacy and totality: it covers all the Hebrews, indeed "throughout the land," as specified in advance by the quoting frame to make doubly sure of the extension over the whole range of name-bearers, however dispersed their whereabouts. Next, however, the definiteness vanishes, a fortiori the overdetermination. "And Hebrews had crossed the Jordan," to signify part of those falling and
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actually addressed under the label in the true Israelite's usage. The logician's "universal" quantifier shrinks into the "existential," "all" into "some." Not that analysts (as usual solicitously interposing their criticism, low, high or exegetical, between the chosen nation and its writers' ethnocriticism) have taken the point of the shrinkage in quantification, or even acknowledged the given switch from definiteness to indefiniteness. Among other spurious arguments, would-be emendators of the group terminto non-existencehave foreseeably raised the linguistic objection that "Hebrews" without the definite article cannot express 'some Hebrews.' (Thus already Wellhausen [1871:82]: "'Einige H.' drückt man nicht so aus.") Odder yet, most upholders of the Masoretic text read or render it to the same definite, all-inclusive effect, for example, "the Hebrews ['ivrim-'apiru *] crossed" (Gottwald 1979:419, or Klein 1983:121; contrast the Authorized Version's rare fidelity).16 Alternatively, they understand the gentilic to mean "other Hebrews," that is, other than the hiding ''men of Israel" in the verse before, though of the selfsame group and disposition (e.g., Loretz 1984:109-10). Against erasers and wholesalers and equators alike, however, the Bible's linguistics weights the difference manifested by the language (see "men" for 'some men' in Exodus 16:20, and Gesenius §139h) in coordination with its differential poetics. The verb forms, the time sequence, the logic of happening, the group record and portraiture, the thematic design in turn converge to imply the joyless outcome: that, all strays having been trumpeted back to the fold, some characteristically took to their heels. Whereupon the foreignism's third occurrence, in 14:21, verifies the implication by supplying the other half of the divided foreign-like quantity. That half cannot appear as indefinite "Hebrews," if only on pain of a mix-up with their lightfoot (ex-)fellows. Instead, their quantification into 'someness' now assumes the shape of definite reference with a relative clause, or two, for particularizing and thus narrowing the scope of reference. "The Hebrews who had been with the Philistines, as on former occasions, who had gone up with them into the camp" singles out the diehards of the lot, evidently compromised by their past. The new wording dovetails with the old to complete the retrospect on the traitors who have parted ways, maybe fallen out among themselves. Even in linguistic terms, then, the reference to the agents encodes the same picture as that to their actions; the backward-looking tense agrees with the gradual disclosure of a totality broken. In Scripture's long memory, this again rings a bell, with some ironic counterpoint. "If war befalls us, [the people of the Sons of Israel will] join our enemies and fight against us and go up [or, drive us out] from the land" (Exodus 1:10). If Pharaoh fragmented the newborn "Israel" into "Hebrews" under the pretext of national security, and the Philistines have detached "the Hebrews" from the contemporary landed "Israel," Saul has not put them all together again,
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certainly not yet. His divide-and-rule countermove, though, is the first of its kind on the native side of the quarrel, a human equivalent to God's own undermining of Hamite unity in Egypt, then in Philistia. He has already managed to decrease the exterior threat to "Israel" (people along with land) by splitting the interior disloyal opposition into two, runaways and camp followers. Of the two, the latter bulk larger by far. The retrospect on theminterposed between the subject ("the Hebrews") and the predicate ("were") of the main clause, between agent and actionwould seem to have been deliberately misplaced for retardatory effect, with high perceptibility. Why else should the narrative break continuity by doubling back to its antecedents, and at the war's turning point at that, just when it might be expected to rush forward at top speed? By another iconic correspondence, the flashback's misplacement in the discourse thus reflects the figures' misplacement in the world: ordering generates meaning, suspense makes sense. Nothing deterred by redundancy on top of retardation, the word-portrait first exposes, then particularizes the group's bond with the enemy. "Had been with the Philistines," unspecific and by itself interpretable as political backing, socalled moral support, gains a military edge in "had gone up with them." Not satisfied with twice identifying ''the Hebrews" in reference to the near unsavory past, moreover, the describer intercalates a longer backward glance"as on former occasions"which increases the time span, the habituality, and so the enormity of the misalliance. They are old offenders. And the offense itself escalates seriatim from opacity (13:3) to truancy (13:7) to treason, from clearing the arena for the principals to (re)entering it in the oppressor's ranks ("camp"). Beside the militant collaborators à outrance, their namesakes who have for once decamped may set themselves up for patriots. Temporarily at least, because the sequence will before long retwist the comparison into double-edgedness. But let us first generalize the drama of reading staged thus far below the minimum, foolproof tale. Along the threefold series of "Hebrews" in native discourse, the various ascending orders remarkably correlate. The later the occurrence, the plainer the referencemore informative, authoritative, outspoken, spatiotemporalized, all at onceand the more invidious the noncoincidence with "Israel." The drive toward this correlation among scalar orders, we now find out in retrospect, even overrides the decorum of chronological order, whereby "the Hebrews" have long played the traitor, to everyone's knowledge but ours. Their collaboration may well date from the national rout at Aphek, preceded by the enemy's wholesale tagging of Israel as enslaved "Hebrews"; and it certainly antedates Saul's call to arms, when "the Hebrews" already form a subgroup. The disclosure behind time of their perfidy works for a gradual hardening of judgment, and so
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of de-nomi-nation: enter a possible (if unlikely) co-referent with "Israel," exit a proved accomplice of the Philistines, in effect a self-made outgroup. Nor could such dynamics of presentation, from the referential to the ideo-rhetorical, arise otherwise than by manipulating the dynamics of events in the telling. Elevated late to the narrator's vantage point, we can appreciate why he denied us early access to it. The art of the series largely hinges on a tight control over the balance of our knowledge and ignorance throughout, so shifting as best to synchronize the release of information with the desired cumulative light on the group. And where timing goes by persuasion, the order of mimetic, history-like time must bend. At the outset, for example, the bare and native "Let the Hebrews hear" insinuates the worst about the referents set apart from and by their own people, while giving them a chance to turn over a new leaf: to redeem themselves in our eyes, as in the king's, in "Israel's," even in their apparent masters', the Philistines, after a fashion. Instead, we next meet "Hebrews" crossing the Jordan eastward. Safety comes before self-redemption, let alone national redemption, to an extent hardly matched even by noncombatant ("hiding'') Israelites. They persist in the kind of behavior latent in their ill-name among Hamites, against the record of westward crossing that punctuates the grand chronology and upgrades the name by alternative etymology. Ibrim has become a travesty of abru, designation of derivation, the present narrative act a mockery of the grand narrative and old inherited nomi-narrative. Response accordingly sharpens, along with in-group disunity, but less than it would if we knew the whole truth about their antecedents. And we don't know it yet, because full enlightenment would be ill-timed, to the point of anticlimax. The discourse of discord has much to gain from compounding its sequential maneuvere.g., by the charged long-range hints at the nation's Crossing originsbut cannot yet afford to straighten out the order of "Hebrew" goings-on: to mass the exposition before the action, in short. Suppose the narrative turned overtly descriptive and retrospective here, in 13:6-7, as it will in 14:20-22, unveiling the earliest as well as most damning fact of all: that those runaway "Hebrews had been with the Philistines . . . on former occasions." Rhetorically, the effect would be self-defeating, because too kind to the lowest-self others. Their present flight would then mark an improvement over their past record of active quis-lingism, and also narrow their distance from the "Israelites" gone into hiding. As it is, the teller continues to keep this explosive exposition in reserve, springing it when he comes to the worst of the bad lot, "the Hebrews" who, now as before, joined the self-proclaimed master race against their own kinfolk and heritage. Thus placed, the long overdue antecedent brings the series to a due climax. "Those who laid thee waste will go forth [yetse'u] from thee" (Isaiah 49:17) now applies to those activist
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waste-layers in both senses of the verb, the originary ("will issue") and the exclusionary ("will remove"). As an added gain, the series thereby presents yet another continuity among its three distributed members, going from address to answer, from suspense to release in wordless long-distance interchange. The ascent in denunciation runs together with a cross-factional dialogue of sorts. Saul initiates it in 13:3 by virtually echoing Moses' remonstrance, after he "struck" the brutalizer of one Hebrew, with another, "guilty" Hebrew: "Why dost thou strike thy fellow?" And he encounters much the same combination of do-nothingness and defiance, only alternating on a larger scale. The king having appealed to "the Hebrews," they all respond in keeping with their bad name and history among the diselectin Egypt-old as well as latter-day stock characterfor some take to their heels in a mock-crossing, while others take up arms ''with the Philistines" against him. Geographically or militarily, and in this order, neither subdivision opts for the right side. Their response to the king traces a growing negative, and so, correspondingly, does ours to them. Further, we next discover, the juggling with information looks forward as well as backward, and in immediate continuity, too. The pluperfect retrospection ("had been . . . had gone up") on the Philistines' camp followers over, the action forges ahead to execute a surprise twist of its own, which crowns their long-standing perfidy, just uncovered, with new peripety. A peripety-within-peripety, actually, because the large international reversal has an interior equivalent nested in it. By chiastic looping, the victors' order of entrance and engagement circles back to the outbreak of hostilities: Jonathan, Saul, "the Hebrews." Jonathan, mockingly "Hebrewed" by the enemy at the Pass yet convinced that "the Lord has given them into the hand of Israel," again strikes the first and destabilizing blow. Thereupon, Saul arrives on the scene at the head of the people, "and behold, every man's sword was against his fellow, a very great confusion." Next, with the unexpected victory certain, "the Hebrews" proceed to stab their masters in the backeven literally, considering the routas they did their brothers "on former occasions"; and the narrative would minimize their credit. To this end, the springing of their discreditable past behind time interlocks with the meticulous timing of their reversal, enacted well after the nation has won the battle under (or for) God's proper name and her own. 17 Once again, larger implications suggest themselves. As often before in the argument, the forces of sequence and imagery multiply conjoinin the process of telling/reading, above alland with them the focuses of my Poetics on ideological literature in its dynamism and of this book on the poetics of (inter)culture. Apart from joint (e.g., distinctively Biblical) norms or goals, as across the shift in focus, communication interpenetrates with representation on all levelshow we get to know the world pictured
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with what picture(s) of the world we form on the move and carry away thereafter. Like everything else in discourse, images are made, unmade, remade, stereotyped, destereotyped, counterstereotyped under the arrow of time; and Scripture brings to bear on them the extra ordering resources unique to narrative discourse, where actional compounds presentational temporality. Or temporalities, rather, if only because the narrator can work, and work together, anything from the mini-sequential (including phrasal) to the grandest (e.g., canon-length) order, in every sense. Given the challenge presented by such group portraitures as the Hebrewgram's, within a sacred national literature at that, all those arts of process are evidently much in demandnot least apropos name-bearing traitors to the very nation-statehood of "Israel," Ham-abetting conspirators in thought and warfare against the ultimate fulfillment of the Promise. Hence the coordination of artistic resources that we've been tracing. Disclosure merges into development; the deferral of antecedents to the latest feasible moment does double duty, retrospective and prospective. Were the scandal of long "Hebrew" collaboration unfolded otherwise along the seriese.g., duly attached to the first member, or postponed to the next, let alone kept under wraps altogetherthe present switch of allegiance would have an impact more favorable than negative. It might imply a change of heart, in response to the king's call: "hearing" is obeying. In the given perfidy-to-peripety order, instead, the switch only lays bare "the Hebrews''' opportunism in face of defeat and the prospect of reprisals. They shift to Israel's side, as the Hamites of Egypt and Philistia did to Israel's name in the master plot, when they can no longer help it. And having "been with the Philistines as on former occasions," now "they also" come to be "with Israel who were with Saul and Jonathan": the minute repetition with variation precisely shows the difference between the two subgroups involved. So, to complete the picture, does the immediately ensuing resumption of the in-between sub-subgrouping. The "Hebrew" absconders spring back to mind by force of renewed allusive antithesis to the "Israelite" hiders on this side of the Jordan, who now erupt out of their holes in hot pursuit. (They do live to fight another day.) With all the lines drawn and the threads drawn together, the series leaves us with one question mark. For a native who "had been with the Philistines," which is the less reprehensible (and, pragmatically, the more expedient) course: to flee at the approach of the showdown or to turn one's coat with the changed balance of power? The pragmatic answer never comes, for the sequel is buried in silence, not necessarily ominous. To go once more by the Ammonite precedent, as well as by the Mosaic oblivion of early Hebrew offenses against the delivering "brother," all have got off lightly. They melt afresh into the Israelite nation as the challengers of the prophet did in the Exodus, and those of
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the king, one war before, in the reelection ceremony. After the victory over Nahash, when the people wanted to kill Saul's opponents, he ruled, "Not a man shall be put to death this day, for today the Lord has wrought deliverance in Israel" (11:13). And now he may again have done the states-man-like thing. Better a general amnesty turning a blind eye to everything except redeeming featuresthe one party's disengagement, the other's last-minute turnaboutthan reprisals on a large and graduated scale. Less forgiving, the rhetoric of national solidarity is no less even-handed. If for a moment the decampers' stigma pales beside the camp followers', the reversal at once redresses the balance of shame for all time. There is little to choose between them, little sympathy to be wasted on their dilemma. Whatever their choice between evils, an Israelite would not (and should not) have to make it in the first instance. Originally double-crossers, subsequently either anticrossers or triple-crossers, the in-group/out-group Hebrews, though given a chance to live down their shame, always rather live down to their name across the cultures. From crisis to resolution, then, chapters 13-14 counterpoint the international by an intranational plot. The latter is mutedeven relative to its Egyptian precedent, where the discourse of inner as well as outer discord shows in the characters' own frictional words and thoughtsyet none the less finely crafted, coded, composed into the overall theme. Below the surface of random and far-between occurrences, if anything, this threefold series approximates in the reading (again, like the Mosaic shuttle psychogenesis) to Aristotle's ideal complex plot: the "Hebrew" action abruptly swings round, and with it our insight and judgment, via the discovery of a shameful past, a crime within the family. All variants of the Hebrew/Hamite master plot have their dark underside, their ethnocritical edge, no less than their inbuilt unhappiness-to-happiness peripety. The war of independence fought against the Philistine Hebrew-callers by Saul's "Israel" on the promised Israelite territory is no exceptionany more than was the nation-constitutive ordeal of liberty in Egypt that it would finish off. However, the subplot now trained on the bicultural "Hebrews" drives selfcriticism toward the extreme of self-caricature or, literarily, self-parody, with reversals and recognitions quietly barbed to match. An underplot in the full sense. As with the Bible's record of "Hebrew" shame across the patterns, only more so, the astonishing thing is not that this scandal twists between the lines but that a national literature has seen fit to imply it at all for eternity. The novelty of translating the outside vict-image (always superimposed, undercut, temporary) looks like a mild experiment in comparison. And the deeper you penetrate beneath the foolproof message, itself grim enough, the wider the distance between (narrative) focus and (normative)
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favoritism, between ethnocentricity and self-aggrandizement. The scandal then grows commensurately less deniable and more embarrassing, implicates a larger sector of the chosen circle and territory, harks back further, ranges over the spectrum of betrayal to the limit. The more of the whole truth you piece together, the more does it come to define a, if not the, state of the nation, recently become a nation-state governed by a king. Doubly so from a higher, canon-long perspective on the Hebrewness festering in the monarchy of the time, a cross as well as an interval between the Mosaic and the Davidic phases: between the earliest formation into peoplehood and the approaching stabilization, between the nadir reached under a hateful tyrant abroad, the antitype incarnate, and the zenith attainable under an elect king. The series' allusions to the discord among the "Hebrewed" in Egypt (greeting the champion who "struck" for them and both precipitating and mirroring his own self-division) need no rehearsal, I trust; but observe their ambivalence. While the echoes to Exodus diagnose an ongoing, apparently chronic split of group personality and purpose, they yet mark some advance toward fusion. From the outset, once Jonathan has "struck," a self-aware "Israel" does rally around the leader, for all ''the Hebrews" in her midst; and, where Moses' "Hebrew" doublet plummeted from bad to worse, now the unity of action against the Hamite enemy only improves (even as the revelations about past breaches darken) along the series. Conversely, a measure of how the progress yet falls short of David's achievement is, on the one hand, the disappearance of "Hebrews" after his takeover and, on the other, the defection of Philistines to him, for a change. The movement would seem to ascend from a united kingdom to a united nation. Between the reigns, though, David's own career from anointment to accession lays bare the underside of the picture and the trickiness of the disunity-to-unity process. History all but repeats itself and so, more than appears, does the historiography of chapters 13-14. Once David seeks refuge in Philistia, Achish deems him "utterly odious to his people, to Israel" and "a slave for life" (27:12), ebed olam, a key element cum near-homograph of the hatename; and Saul must have Hebrewed him day and night, as the Philistine captains audibly do before the fateful engagement on Gilboa (29:2-3). In challenging the presence of "these Hebrews" in their camp, they as good as draw an inference from Saul's first battle against them to his last: "Haven't we learnt, the hard way, that these renegades are sure to betray us, as their namesakes did within living memory?" While Pharaoh attained an innocent enclave with Fifth Columnism and then got hood-winked by the double agency he himself imposed on the midwives, the sranim have excellent reason to suspect David and will not be talked out of it: they will not even listen to the "Hebrew" rhetoric of solidarity, which takes in his overlord Achish. Actually, though never put to the test at the
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moment, their prognosis by analogy has already come true, unknown to them. The equivocal, double-faced role that Achish's vassal plays between the groups at war, "all the while he dwelt in the country of the Philistines" (27:11), makes a synchronic variation of the shuttling performed by his earlier hate-namesakes in sequence. Of course, the tale spares God's elect and the victim of circumstances as much as possible of the odium heaped on those namesakes. David's thoughts, motives, constraints are in plain view throughout, theirs buried out of sight, literally out of "hearing"not least their self-image, in all probability as removed from the bicultural taint as his own. His hands and record stay technically clean, while theirs will never wash out. Nor do we ever hear Saul, far less the teller, calling him the name that the renegades elicit from either side and his kingship will delete from everyone's lexicon for centuries. But then, treason never prospers, for the simple reason that, if it does, no one calls it treasonor Hebrewnessno one that counts, at least. I Samuel's art of composition, always making the name tremble on our lips and yet pushing it back with Davidic variants from the infamous precedent, teeters on the edge of the cynic's quip. (Only the crossculturalist rhetorician of identity, zealously Hab/piru-ing David, thrusts him over the edge. In as zealously de-Hebrewing the anterior, midway series, on the other hand, the low textual geneticist snaps the chain of the overall Moses-to-David tale and critique of phylogenesis.) Regarding the actual serialized name-bearers, however, neither anointment nor true-heartedness nor choicelessness nor favoritism nor cynicism subdues the exposure of their infamyor, for that matter, of the cracks left in the body politic thereafter, when the enemy without has ostensibly been quelled and his allies within incorporated. Despite the action's peripety on all fronts, here the art of relations, the episode's, the book's, the canon's, unsettle every appearance of a happy end, and not just by omitting to announce it. (The intergroup war goes on, and the silence on the aftermath at home is never broken.) The reader attuned to this art can also see how the two plots we have been tracing enter into a grander plot of strife. "And behold, every man's sword was against his fellow, a very great confusion" may be taken as a figure for the internal as well as the external circles of conflict. Variations include Philistines against Israelites they would reduce to Hebrews, self-made Hebrews against Israelites, then against Philistines, even decamping against hard-bitten Hebrews. Actually the "sword" in these chapters ranges wider still and penetrates still deeper into the fabric of the nation: prophet against king, king against prince, cultic zealots against transgressors. A very great confusion indeed; and it is the dynamics of "Hebrews'' that focuses its ethnopolitical aspects as distinct from the rest. Distinct but no more isolated in the telling (observe the alternation of issues, even of crises, throughout)
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than in the happening; showing improvement under Saul, where relations with prophet or prince deteriorate, yet short of settlement. As implied by the glances backward at Egypt and ahead to the Philistine "Hebrewing" of David, the people of Israel under the first king, though landed and centrally led, is still unliberated on both the Hamite and the home fronts, still to be de-Hebrewed, still in the making.
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7 Slave Law Outside Parallel and Internal Process Coming to Terms with Hebrew Bondage in Israel In between the Exodus and the Samuel yoke-breaking, a counterforce threatens their lines of continuity, notably their ethnocriticism. How to reconcile the Hamite/Hebrew master plot (itself vindicating the universal that humanity was created free) with the legal scenario of the Israelite's mastership over the Hebrew? The fight for independence by a group under God, exclusive of all other lords, and the provision for slavery within the group, under God's Code, may well appear to be diametric opposites; and their opposition in ideology may seem attributable to the canon's generic diversity: narrative vs. law, historicized vs. nomistic cluster, or, perhaps, the imaginative vs. the realistic mode. With a forking genesis added, as it has routinely been, the pieces would never make a whole but for the Hebrewgram. In its light, of course, the terms of this opposition grow still further opposed, but now in appearance onlyif you take the "Hebrewing" as voiced by the Israelite law-speaker in propria persona. Duly removed from genuine self-de-nomination, the opposites are found to converge on one plot, one value scheme, one formative memory, one strategy of ingroup discourse. Like the narrative of the early kingship, in short, the Hebrew slave law thrice wields the bi-cultural stigma against foreignness within the circle. The new crux being even more notorious, we must restart with the data and the traditional wrangling over them. The three cases in point are again best taken together, if only because they form a resonant chain of allusion: [God to Moses as mediator of the Covenant with Israel:] (2) If thou buyest a Hebrew slave [ebed ibri], six years he shall serve [lit., slave, ya'abod] and in the seventh he shall go out free for nothing. (3) If he comes in single, he shall go out single; if he has a wife, his wife shall go out with him. (4) If his master gives him a wife and she bears him sons or daughters, the wife and her children shall belong
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to her master and he shall go out single. (5) And if the slave plainly says, I love my master, my wife, and my sons, I will not go out free, (6) then his master shall bring him to God [el ha'elohim], and he shall bring him to the door or to the doorpost, and his master shall pierce his ear with an awl, and he shall serve [slave] him forever. (7) And if a man sells his daughter to be a maidservant, she shall not go out as the slaves go out. (8) If she is unpleasing in the eyes of her master, who has designated her for himself, then he shall let her be redeemed; to a foreign people he shall not have the power to sell her, having broken faith with her. (9) And if he designates her for his son, he shall treat her according to the custom of daughters. (10) If he takes another wife for himself, he shall not diminish her food, her clothing, and her marital rights. (11) And if he does not do these three things for her, she shall go out free for nothing, without payment of money. (Exodus 21:2-11) [Moses to Israel:] (12) If thy brother the Hebrew or the Hebrewess is sold to thee, he shall serve [lit., slave] thee six years, and in the seventh year thou shalt send him out free from thee. (13) And when thou sendest him out free from thee, thou shalt not send him out empty-handed. (14) Thou shalt rather furnish him out of thy flock and out of thy threshing floor and out of thy wine press; as the Lord thy God has blessed thee, thou shalt give to him. (15) And thou shalt remember that thou wert a slave in the land of Egypt and that the Lord thy God redeemed thee; therefore I command thee this thing today. (16) And if it so happens that he says to thee, I will not go out from thee, because he loves thee and thy house, because he lives well with thee, (17) then thou shalt take the awl and thrust it through his ear into the door, and he shall become thy slave forever; and to thy maidservant, too, shalt thou do so. (18) It shall not seem hard in thy eyes, when thou sendest him out free from thee, for at half the hire of a hireling he has served [slaved] thee six years. So the Lord thy God will bless thee in all that thou doest. (Deuteronomy 15:12-18) (8) The word that came to Jeremiah from the Lord, after king Zedekiah had made a covenant with all the people in Jerusalem to proclaim liberty to them, (9) that every man should send out free his slave and every man his bondwoman, the Hebrew and the Hebrewess, so that no man shall enslave a Jew, his brother. (10) They obeyed, all the nobles and all the people who had entered into the covenant that every man should send out free his slave and every man his bondwoman, so as to enslave them no longer; they obeyed and sent them out. (11) Afterward, they turned round and took back the slaves and the bondwomen whom they had sent out free
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and reduced them to slaves and bondwomen. (12) The word of the Lord came to Jeremiah from the Lord, saying, (13) Thus says the Lord the God of Israel: I made a covenant with your fathers when I brought them out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slaves, saying, (14) At the end [or, advent] of seven years you shall send out every man his brother the Hebrew who has been sold to thee and has served thee six years; thou shalt send him out free from thee. But your fathers did not hearken to me and did not incline their ears to me. (15) You lately turned round and did what was right in my eyes by proclaiming liberty, every man to his neighbor, and you made a covenant before me in the house which is called by my name. (16) Then you turned round and profaned my name by taking back every man of you his slave and every man his bondwoman, whom you had sent out free according to their desire, and you reduced them to becoming your slaves and bondwomen. (17) Therefore, thus says the Lord: You have not hearkened to me by proclaiming liberty, every man to his brother and every man to his neighbor; behold, I proclaim to you liberty (the Lord's word) to the sword, to the pestilence, and to famine. (Jeremiah 34:8-17) For the Code to legalize on a nationwide basis a homegrown variant of the ignominy that the Exodus abolished by force and Samuel associates with a traitorous party would be fiddling enough from a canonical viewpoint. But the challenge that the whole statute presents to the Hebrewgram's large design as a struggle for group freedom is vocally miniatured in the group name referring to the unfree. Even compared with the narrow subgrouping reference in the Philistine war, made by the loyal to the disloyal, these occurrences of "Hebrew" apparently raise to a new height and within a new genre, the term's problematics of voicecontextual, crosstextual, intertextual. They all look like straightforward quotations of, by, and for sharers in Biblical culture. The first two passages directly report God's or Moses' ordinance of bounded service; the third indirectly reports the Jerusalem covenant ("that every man . . .") by tacit reference to Mosaic covenantal law, then directly appeals to that law against the many covenant-breakers. Of course, this appeal entangles the structure of report by mounting latter-day on ancient flames: the Biblical writer quotes to us God's self-quotation in Jeremiah's ears, with a view to its re-quotation to the offenders of Jerusalem. What God said to Moses in Exodus, or Moses to the people in Deuteronomy, reappears here at a much further remove, multiply framed along the chain of discoursive transmission. But the Jeremiah entanglement, like the plainer forms before it, still operates within the native universe
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of discourse, a speech-community relatively homogeneous in anything from language to ethnos to heritage to articles of faith. Indeed, the more parties involved or invoked in the chain of communication, the more salient their ethnocultural homogeneity across otherwise distinct speech-events, from the Exodus to the threshold of Exile, and the louder the one alien note that runs through the three texts. (The dissonance ibri sounds loudest of all in Jeremiah, whose retrospective frame not only incorporates and outnumbers the anterior occurrences of Hebrewness in Mosaic law but also dates them in relation to contemporary usage, yehudi, "Judaean/Judahite" or "[Jew": since the fall of the northern kingdom, which had laid exclusive claim to ''Israel," the once purely tribal designation has been widening its range beyond the sister kingdom of Judah toward co-extensiveness with the Exodus-old national ethnicon.) In short, given that both every speaker (whether authorial or dramatized, whether quoted, quoting, or both) and every addressee (past or present or prospective) are Israelite throughout, whence and wherefore the recurrent "Hebrew"? For the last two thousand years, the problem has generally been swept under the carpet, as a mere stylistic (rather than functional) variation between the agents in law, the prospective Israelite master and his Hebrew slave. On this reductionist view, blind to culture from language upward, the enslaved party just happens to bear a different, interchangeable title within the same national group, as Deuteronomy and Jeremiah go to show from the horse's mouth. Later rewordings of Exodus, they embody its earliest readings, first-hand and authoritative in proportion. Their joint testimony dates back the role-players' ethnic co-grouping ("brotherhood") in linguistic variety ("Jew" included) to the Biblical era itself. Hence, the sweepers assume or would argue, there is really no problem. (Or none that concerns the form of reference, as distinct from the referent's identity. The very presumption of his conationality has always forced exegetes to come to terms with the embarrassment of in-group slavery codified by the Liberator. And the Rabbis, it will appear, originated the main line of damage control among uniculturalistsshort of resolutionby prelimiting and improving the state of fraternal bondage.) The Targum, much like the Septuagint at work on the analogously dissonant trio of I Samuel, goes so far as to eliminate the problem altogether by verbal substitution into community and conformity. A deliberate measure, because where the referent's identity is beyond question, with Joseph for example, the Aramaic will duly echo the original lexis: ebed ibri ("Hebrew slave") in the mouth of Potiphar's wife finds its cognate equivalent in abda ibra'ah, but never in the lawgiver's mouth. Throughout the slave laws, the translator makes a point of rendering "Hebrew" (ibri/ibra'ah) as "Israelite" (bar yisrael); nor does he ever resort here instead to the third term, "Jew"
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(yehudi), not even in Jeremiah, when the tribalism has already widened its scope and actually co-occurs with "Hebrew" in the law-tale. Intent on literalizing the Rabbinic view, the ancient rhetorician of identity will settle for nothing less than the God-given ethnicon. Extreme though the Aramaic case may look, it only highlights afresh the principle that translators will (re)write as and what interpreters read, to this day, in fact. 1 From time to time, though, dissenting voices have been raised, especially apropos of the foundational Exodus ("Covenant") Code. Where the majority tradition sees a community between the parties in all but the language of group reference, they sense a disunity manifested by the language. Not that the splitters are otherwise more at one than the homogenizers or perforce more concerned with the discourse as such, far less with its jarring against the norm of "Hebrew" usage. From different motives, on different grounds, by different routes, and even with different findings, the proponents yet invest the label with divisive value. The Aramaic Targum itself protests too much for univocality, and could be shouting down an opposition that elsewhere gains a summary hearing. As early as the ancient Rabbis, the question arises, Is the slave a Hebrew or a slave of a Hebrew? Does he escape the outsider's lifelong servitude owing to his own insidership or to that of the masters, past and prospective, between whom he changes hands? (Mekilta de-Rabbi Ishmael, ed. Lauterbach 1949:III, 3-4). The forked ethnicity, it is worth observing, has a grammatical correlate. Does ibri stand to ebed in an attributive or in a genitive relation, as epithet to noun or as noun to noun in the construct state? This corresponds, I would further add, to the two linguistic readings of ha'meyalledot ha'ibriyyot in Exodus 1:15, "the Hebrewess-born midwives" vs. "the midwives of the Hebrewesses." Except that there the ambiguity not just doubled the set-up in the narrated field of reference but also served a constructive purpose in the discourse. Here, the midrash prefers the former, attributive grammar and signification, analogized to Deuteronomy's "Hebrew brother." This and similar analogies cited (to ''Abram the Hebrew," of course) admittedly fall short of "proof." Yet the midrash's case is stronger, or the alternative at least weaker, than argued. The competing analysis would push the "slave" outside Israel without at all explaining why his Israelite ex-master (the one from whom "thou buyest" him) is designated as "a Hebrew." In the Middle Ages, another attempt at uncoupling the parties does somewhat better. Ibn Ezra on Exodus 21:2 cites a nameless Karaite challenge to Rabbinic tradition, apparently the ultimate in local patriotism. Thereby the "Hebrew slave," like his ensuing fellows in law, is not an Israelite but an Abrahamite. Assuming that a countryman would never be subjected to perpetual bondage, shameful ear-piercing and all, the dissenters identify the referent as an ancestral cousin: a member of some nonIsraelite group (e.g., Edom) that traces its ancestry to the first ibri, himself sprung from Eber,
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the eponym of all the Eberides. In the anthropologist's more specialized parlance, then, the outsider's remote biological co-affiliation ("Hebrewness") allegedly sets a limit to the enslavement that the insider's unbroken ethnocultural co-descent under God ("Israeliteness") prohibits altogether. 2 This minority opinion gets yet shorter shrift from the establishment, with less justice this time. Ibn Ezra contests its etymology, clobbers it with the Hebrew/Israelite equation throughout the Bible, slave law included, and even turns against it the very solicitude for the fellow native ("brother") that occasioned its heterodoxy. To shield the native against the threat of Hebrew lifelong bondage, which may never materialize, is to deny him the antecedent and everoperational privilege of six-year Hebrew bondage, thus foredooming him to the longer, cyclical term codified in Leviticus 25:39-46. "How can one imagine," Ibn Ezra indignantly exclaims, "that the Ishmaelite and the Edomite will serve six years and the Israelite until the [fiftieth year of the Leviticus] Jubilee?" Local patriotism overreaches and so defeats itself, he might conclude. The critique unerringly exposes the opposition's weak points but overlooks its relative advantage. For the first time in the history of interpretation, the nominal difference makes or matches a genuine difference, in law and elsewhere, one substantive to excess, perhaps. If the referents themselves varybetween Israel and her assorted distant co-lineals in the exterior "Hebrew" circleso should and would the terms of nomistic reference: word mirrors world, the style allegedly captures the spirit of the law. No doubt, the premised "if" must carry its full hypothetical burden, and so the chain of inference need not hold in reality. But then, the orthodox Hebrew/Israelite bracketing has its own premise and conclusion, likewise vulnerable to challenge. Why equate under co-nationality where the law-text distinguishes, and in an odd speech-pattern, too? Granting the force of Ibn Ezra's critique, therefore, the two master hypotheses (the equational vs. the differential) would yet reach a more even balance of explanatory value, or its lack, with symmetrical pros and, especially, cons. In modern scholarship, we find the balance of popularity changed as well, possibly inverted. Under the excitement of newly unearthed documents, the age-old minority opinion has resurged into fame in a third version, giving the law a social and crosscultural turn. No longer even a distant relation, Abrahamite or Eberide, the "Hebrew slave" is a Hab/piru. Among the various links forged by the theory, this one has a special claim to notice owing to the peculiar genre allegedly manifested on both sides: Hebrew slave law and Hab/piru service contracts made in Nuzi. A far cry, it appears, from the parallel-hunter's routine drawing together of narrative, or altogether heterogeneous, materials. Less obviously, I would point out, the generic connection, besides its intrinsic interest, is also exceptional in its consequences, two at least.
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For one thing, it seems to escape the troubles of synchronization. A narrative represents events unique in spacetime, hence often (in principle, always) locatable there to the discomfiture of crosslinkage, for example, between Hebrew and Hab/piru. (Thus the noncoincidence of the groups' respective beginnings, middles, and ends, progressively demonstrated since my opening chapter.) But a law, it may appear, entails no such definite reference to the world. On the contrary, it aims for generality, if not for eternity, by the very nature of its genre; and proportionally invites transfer or duplication between cultures, across spacetime. For another thing, the match looks here more pinpoint than ever. The crosscultural traffic expresses itself in crosstextual relations among documents belonging to one genre and bearing on one status hierarchy. Even the sources-as-discourse fallacy is apparently reversible here into a forte: if, as some do, you postulate an Orient-wide urtext governing Hebrew/ Hab/piru bondage, from which the extant materials in Nuzi and Israel sprang and to which they, qua variants, co-refer, on top of their mutual cross reference. All this, I would suggest, goes to explain the change in the balance of popularity. Yet the balance of proof has not changed to match since Ibn Ezra's day, not really, whatever the appearances or pretenses to the contrary. For a turn so radical, so attractive to so many, so long investigated by enthusiasts, so adorned with comparative history and philology and sociology and jurisprudence, the Hab/piru connection has again remarkably little to show by way of either hard evidence or sound argument. Little, that is, beyond the initial premise cum promise, whereby "Hebrew" shifts from mere stylistic to substantive variation, a resource of out-grouping for which Ibn Ezra's antagonists already bid and paid dearly. Divested of its pomp and paraphernalia, including the stick of fundamentalism waved against the opposition, the crossculturalism rests on a few points of contact much too tenuous to bear the weight of the referent's social difference without circularity, inconsistency, overstatement. And if too weak in synchronic comparison, then a fortiori along the diachronic march of Israelite slave law from Exodus to Jeremiah, from implicit to explicit harping on the bond of brotherhood with the "Hebrew." Where a fellow Abrahamite does not count as brother, how would (say) a Hamite member of the underclass? What ultimately remains is the spell cast by the homonymy between Hebrew and Hab/piru. Some analysts in effect admit as much, yet hang on to the theory for no apparent reason, except faith or inertia or the climate of scholarly opinion. Others cast about for a middle way, whether somehow dividing the set of legal references between the two candidates or, with equal failure, projecting the Hab/piru stock image onto the Israelite in bondage. Others still, both pioneers and rearguard hard-liners, insist on full correspondence
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in anything from terminology to sociology to legislation. They push the crosscultural nexus to such lengths as might befit a satirist amusing himself with a reductio ad absurdum. But then, given the shakiness of the evidence and the implausibility as well as unattractiveness of compromise solutions, it's either excess or defeat. Let me now put some flesh on this bare-bones outline, which may sound overharsh. As always, my business is with arguments and principles, not with persons and critical vogues. This is also why the examination below of the analytic metadiscourse(s) regarding the corpus, especially qua megatext, should have more than negative, or local, interest. Of course, I hope to show that, in the law as elsewhere, the weaknesses of the Hab/piru connection have never been fully appreciated even among its opponents and on its own ground, least of all in a historical, "diachronic" light. Regardless of approach, we must exorcise this phantom. But the heuristic value of exorcising it, never so great as here, is inversely proportioned to its offensiveness against the discourse and the truth. The findings yielded by the exposure of the sundry offenses will later reappear, as pointers or controls, within the framework of bicultural stigmatizing and the Law of Nomination in general. They will enable us to see if, how, and why this alternative explanation can avoid or resolve the array of problemstextual, contextual, intertextual, synchronic, diachronicto which both the age-old (Hebrew = Israelite) and the recent (Hebrew = Hab/piru) equations have proved unequal. Here lies the supreme test of any theory, with implications that outreach this case in point. The real question is not how a "literary" perspective (e.g., on Hebrewness, on the law, on its kinship to other genres, on canonical history and historiography) compares with "nonliterary" approaches, Rabbinic or scholarly or whatever. Nor, at a higher level still, does it concern the relative merits of unicultural, crosscultural, and intercultural analysisas if they could be adjudicated in a vacuum. A more precise and principled formulation of the issue at stake would be whether any approach can hope to succeed, even by its own criteria, in disregard of the text's goal-directed operations: without rooting and reading the work in its communicative framework, without studying the literary work in its distinctive literariness, such as the Bible's poetics, unique ethnocentricity included. I would argue, as I have done throughout, that it cannot, seeing that it violates the built-in priorities of understanding: even to go ultimately against the discoursive grain, qua historian or ideologue, you have to start by going with it, on pain of inventing your object and compromising, often disabling your very enterprise. For example, the crosscultural approach to the bondage texts via the Hab/piru must failI would predictif only because it imports sources into the Bible without trying first to understand its discourse of "Hebrews"
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as a play among group images: a web and sequence of enacted intercultural relations, which generate, interpret, emplot, historicize the law. The same rationale governs issues, units, corpora, projects of every magnitude. Insofar as culture is a megasystem of signs, the "reading before cross- or counter-reading" imperative applies to it at large. Nearer to home, intermediately between the megadiscourse of culture and the poetics of Scripture, what hangs in the balance is the way of doing cultural analysis of literature. Underprivileged Class, Privileged Treatment: The (Il)Logic of Sociolegal Synchronism What, then, makes for the Hab/piru reading of the slave law? The pros suggested over the years boil down to three lines of argument. One consists in eliminating the Israelite from the "Hebrew" statutes by restricting him to Leviticus. Another urges the parallel to the Nuzi Hab/piru contracts, with an Orient-wide ordinance possibly lurking behind either analogue. Yet another stretches the analogy to a different widespread class (the hupshu *), whose allegedly limited freedom matches that of the Hebrew gone "free" (hopshi*). Let us examine these in turn, as a first step on the way to the objectives just outlined. Displacing the Israelite from the Hebrew Codes: Leviticus as national preserve One popular argument for the outgroup nexus is by elimination. "To assume that this law [Exodus 21 and Deuteronomy 15] concerns Israelites in the service of other Israelites proves impossible because this assumption would be contrary to the gist of those biblical laws which prevent an Israelite from selling himself into slavery" (Lewy 1957:3-4, also Gray 1958:185, Meek 1960:79, Weingreen 1976:134ff., Wright 1990:249-59), namely Leviticus 25: If thy brother grows poor beside thee and sells himself to thee, thou shalt not make him slave [ta'abod bo] in the manner of a slave's slavery [abodat ebed]. As a hireling, as a sojourner, he shall be with thee; until the year of the Jubilee he shall serve [ya'abod] with thee. Then he shall go out from thee, he and his sons with him, and return to his family, to the holding of his fathers he shall return. For they are my slaves, whom I brought out of the land of Egypt; they shall not be sold in the manner of a slave's sale. Thou shalt not rule over him with rigor, and thou shalt fear thy God. (39-43) The argument by elimination, then, goes perforce in two steps. First comes division of legal Codes between mutually exclusive groups of referents: by
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"Hebrew slave" Exodus (and Deuteronomy) must allegedly advert to the Hab/piru, because the Israelite receives separate treatment in Leviticus. (Hence this neat correlation appeals most to those who identify the law's Hebrew/Hab/piru as alien, with Lewy above, rather than as a mixed class that accommodates natives.) Second is a division of legal fortunes: once the Israelite has been confined to Leviticus, he must be prevented from "selling himself into slavery," for a reason nobody cares to avow. Unless prevented, by hook or by interpretive crook, the Israelite will languish in bondage until the "Jubilee" (fiftieth) year of collective manumissionwhich he may never live to seeas against the Hebrew/Hab/piru's six-year term. An awkward disparity, and on both sides: if not overfavorable to the imported gainer, then too hard on the undoubted loser to be true. Since it would be madness to claim that the native fares worse than the alien under Biblical law, the only alternative left is to have him fare qualitatively better: no slavery at all among compatriots. Along the line of dissent from tradition, the medieval ultranationalist's premise (on which Hebrew bondage attaches to the diselect sons of Abraham) reappears as the modern crossculturalist's exigency of elimination. The same veto on native servitude has even been found by the eliminators in Deuteronomy, against its chain of language and happening. There, "15.7f. requires that the 'brother' be lent all that is necessary, a condition which makes it virtually impossible to enslave the brother"; and hence the alien origin of the ensuing "thy brother the Hebrew," supposedly alone enslavable (Gray 1958:184n. 363). 3 But Deuteronomy's twofold sequence (from the needy "brother" in 15:7-11 to "thy Hebrew brother" in 15:12-18) unfolds the same legal plot as Leviticus's Israelitedirected counterparts (25:35-38 and 25:39-43): first impoverishment, then (and, inferentially, therefore) enslavement. By this twice-dramatized plot logic, brother answers to brother throughout, the (Deuteronomic) Hebrew is the (Levitical) Israelite. Within Leviticus itself, the threefold code/referent/fortune division vulgarizes the letter and the spirit of the discourse, as artful in the law as in the rest of Biblical literature. Given that the word 'bd ranges in the Bible from service to servitude and from free to forced labor,4 it all depends on what "slave/slavery/enslavement" means in context. And the meaning alleged by the parallel-hunters, among others, misrepresents the text under cover of equivocation: by quibbling on the words against the grain of the wordplay set up to define them with exactitude. For example, in the common renderings and glosses that the Israelite must not be sold or treated "as a slave," the negated "as" all too often wavers between two modes of prohibition: absolute (e.g., "no sale into slavery") and qualified ("not in the usual slave-selling manner''). Likewise with the claim that "sold" means here "delivered" or "indentured," as if the same chapter did not abundantly
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and invariably use the same verb in connection with the same type of person (25:14-16, 23, 25-28, 29, 33-34, 47-51) to signify financial dealings. Frowning apart, Leviticus nowhere forbids Israelites in economic straits to exchange money for liberty (or earlier, 25:25ff., for land) among themselves. Just like the Pentateuchal "Hebrew" contexts that flank it, the statute opens by specifying a business transaction with distinctive features and provisoes. If an impoverished brother "sells himself to thee, thou shalt not make him slave [ta'abod bo] in the manner of a slave's slavery [abodat ebed]," but treat him as a hired laborer and emancipate him in due course, namely, the Jubilee Year (29:39-41). Of all the hardships associated with slavery, loss of freedom is itself so degrading as to make the excesses (oppression, limitlessness) unthinkable among countrymen: ''thy brother" will remain under you a slave in name only, and the text even guards against applying the name to him except by negative indirection ("not . . . a slave's slavery"). Service for the money received in the deal, certainly yes, for "he shall serve [ya'abod] with thee" (29:40); servitude, as usually practiced under the same label, no. This is clearly what the ensuing "they shall not be sold in the manner of a slave's sale" likewise means, as the text at once proceeds to reiterate for emphasis. "Thou shalt not rule over him with rigor," Egypt style, but "shalt fear thy Lord," who alone has a title to full possession, "for they are my slaves, whom I have brought out of the land of Egypt" (29:42-43). 5 To speak of a veto on the Israelite's (as distinct from the Hebrew's) "sale" or "enslavement" is therefore to polarize into Yes/No the key idea that the context factorizes, graduates, qualifies, orchestrates in ideo-historical retrospect. Maneuvering between the extremes, fencing round the words as it goes along, Leviticus prohibits not the sale into compulsory labor but its deterioration into an oppressive and permanent state.6 That the Israelite slave enjoys unslave-like privileges, that the buyer will daily come up against them as ethnosocial restrictionsincreased multifold by the Rabbis for deterrence: buy a slave, and you buy a masteris all in keeping with the unique play of antitheses. Go ahead, if you will, but never as you will, or not where "thy brother" (like the Exodus-to-Jeremiah "Hebrew slave" or "thy brother the Hebrew") may find himself abused the Egyptian way. The appeal to Leviticus by Hab/piru connectors even becomes self-defeating in view of the immediate sequel: Thy slave and thy maidservant who may belong to thee, from among the nations who are round about you, from among them you may buy slave and maidservant. Also from among the children of sojourners who reside with you, from among them you may buy, and from among their families who are with you, whom they have be-
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gotten in your land; they may become your holding. You may bequeath them to your sons after you, to inherit as a holding forever. Them you may enslave [ta'abodu]; and over your brothers the sons of Israel, one man over his brother, thou shalt not rule with rigor. (25:44-46) It is either insider or, literally, outsider ("round about you"). This two-value opposition of "your brothers the sons of Israel" (imaged as circle and center) to the rest of the world (the encirclers, the periphery) settles beyond doubt the issue of interlegal juncture elsewhere, for it cuts across all other, nonethnic typological lines. Assuming for the sake of argument that Exodus's "Hebrew slave" is a Hab/piru, then he will be of either Israelite or alien birth, and count as center or periphery accordingly. In the first case, this slave will enjoy the protection of the Leviticus law, yet only by virtue of his ethnic origin, not social status. Conversely, and ironically, insofar as "the Hebrew slave" refers to the Hab/piru outside Israelthe interpretation pressed by those who cite Leviticus against Israelite bondagethen he must fall under the license of unmitigated and perpetual chattel-slavery governing all and only ''the nations who are round about you . . . the sojourners who reside with you" (the final phrase in effect nicely describing the outgroup in question). Denied the privilege of collective release at the end of the fifty-year cycle, the outsider hardly qualifies for the shorter individual term of bondage set by Exodus: Hebrew there accordingly equals Israelite rather than Hab/piru. Diehards, instead of giving up their reading of Exodus in binary contrast to Leviticus, may as a last resort defend it through the further conjecture that such a Hab/piru is similarly excepted from the chattel-bondage rule of Leviticus itself (e.g., Cole 1973:165). But, given "the sojourners" and failing so much as a glance at "Hebrews," why should he be an exception? On the contrary, the Leviticus passage traces a symmetrical descent in status: "thy brother" comes down to "a hireling, a sojourner" on a fellow Israelite's estate, and "the sojourners" (Hab/piru or otherwise) sink in turn to bondage proper on Israelite land. A complete four-term analogy. And if no exception to the Leviticus rule, the Hab/piru can still less benefit from the Exodus "Hebrew slave" ordinance. Again, granting that this particular, Hebrew/Hab/piru sojourner-type still could be excepted from the rest in theoryfor some arcane reason, left unspecified anywhere from Exodus through Leviticus to Deuteronomy to Jeremiahthen Leviticus's very deferral of "your brother's" manumission to the fiftieth ("Jubilee") year proves that he isn't excepted in law. However you integrate this limit with Exodus's six-year term, one consequence follows regarding the Hebrew as alien Hab/piru. The combined law would never give him the privilege of two dates of release, whichever
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comes first, and so does not give him the benefit of either. For him to make an exception to the lot of all enslaved nonIsraelites, as if he were a brother, is by itself somehow conceivable, if improbable; that he should receive more preferential treatment than the nonHab/piru Israelite himself, as though he could go free much earlier, is patently absurd, recoiling once again on the entire line of argument. Constructed to avoid exactly such preference, this line must now either affirm it for the Hab/piruin the face of reason, group solidarity, and all-Oriental oppositionor give up the nongentilic meaning of "Hebrew." With Leviticus recruited to interpret or otherwise complement Exodus, the desired outbound social link fractures under ethnonational pressure. The Nuzi connection: Verbal co-portraits, legal co-privileges More widespread than the argument from intraBiblical split is the zeal for crosscultural analogy. Here, by a further move away from the discourse, the Bible's "Hebrew slave" law reputedly parallels the Nuzi service contracts of the fifteenth century B.C., which feature Hab/piru among other servants. (The crossculturalism grows Orient-wide on the assumption of a "Hab/piru document" 7 extant only in its Nuzi/Israelite form but extendible therefrom in principle, as it was supposedly extended at the time, to all class-members throughout the region.) So aligned with Hurrian tradition as well as international usage, the Bible's problematic terminology would directly correspond to reality: the law then applies to the "Hebrew'' class, not at all to fellow Israelites, or at least (some might allow, against Hurrian precedent) not as such, not unless the Israelite has turned Hab/piru first. In which case his ethnic brotherhood would give way to social otherhood. But does the pivotal Nuzi analogy hold? The choice of analogue by the connectors is itself scarcely innocent. For example, a more natural candidate for the role, because involving a stronger prima facie equivalence, genetic and material, would be the Hammurabi Code: If an obligation came due against a seignior and he sold (the services of) his wife, his son, or his daughter, or he has been bound over to service, they shall work (in) the house of their purchaser or obligee for three years, with their freedom reestablished in the fourth year. (Pritchard 1969:170-71, §117; for a review of the parallels see Chirichigno 1993:67-72, 89-90, 192-95) No need to quibble or dig for resemblance, institutional, formal, literary, pragmatic. Here Code, as law-collection, equals Code, case law ("If . . .") equals case law, not just service contracts that would at best merely apply the lawgenre as expressed and assembled in due form;8 and the legal
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equivalence goes to the heart of the "Hebrew" matter, namely the time limit (three instead of six years). But then, this crossculturalism between Moses and Hammurabi validates the law's ethnocentric thrust by doubling it. To the class-minded, the human equivalent singled out under the ordinance would prove awkward, for the "seignior" in Babylon matches and thus upholds the "Hebrew" in the Bible as native Israelite rather than as alien, lowly Hab/piru. Further correspondences (e.g., the sale or self-sale and the financial plight occasioning it, neither ever attested on Hab/piru record) increase the awkwardness. The rarer and closer the similitude in matter between the Codes providing for the insider, therefore, the more unwelcome and forgettable to those bent on drawing outsiders together. In the interests of the desired heterocentric equation, sound must come before sense, label before law, certainly approximate before exact genre. Better, as it were, to get the nominal equivalents right first, and then to hammer out the substantive equivalencehence the allure of Nuzi. Predictably, what I called the rhetoric of identity is much in evidence. One rhetorician carries the interchange of group terms to such literalness that he translates "Hab/piru'' by "Hebrew" throughout his selection from the Nuzi contracts (Meek in Pritchard 1969:220, who, as it happens, also translated the above Hammurabi edict). 9 Another limit-case of word magic in the name of scholarship. At this advanced stage, we need not belabor such commissions, or wonder at related omissions, but may go on to inquire whether the jugglery does the trick. Never mind, then, the offense against the rudiments of methodology, actually against the very "sachliche Identität" preached and pressed by the same analysts elsewhere. Never mind the imbalance between the Hebrew as distinctive protégé of Israelite slave law and his Hab/piru opposite number as one of several outgroups bracketed in Nuzi tablets. (For instance, nos. 45-56 and 66a-66d in Bottéro [1954], nos. 30-33, 40-44, 46, and 60-63 in Greenberg [1955].) Never mind that, concerning language itself, the key phrase "Hebrew slave" remains without parallel (as admitted by Paul 1970:45): drawn to phrase length, the homonymy actually brings out a hole. Even so, it is by no means the case that the equation follows: that if you take care of the sounds, the legal sense will take care of itself. The bridge thrown from the Hab/piru to the Hebrew parties (and therefrom to the rest of the cultures allegedly sharing the vanished originary "document") stands or falls by the agreement between the respective provisions: the more alike the sociolegal benefits, the more likely the social identity of the beneficiaries. As it transpires, the likeness will not support this weightany more than will the polarizing of Leviticus with its Scriptural counterpartsexcept through overstatement and worse. Leaving detail aside, I will illustrate the problematics from the major set of convergences and divergences. How and where, if at all, are the
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extant vari-cultural "sources" crossable (composible, reconstructible) into a unified discourse, or urdiscourse, whose versions agree in essentials and may therefore illuminate each other's pockets of opacity? Can the drive to real-life synchronism avert for once, within the law, the pseudo-literariness incurred by it throughout the narrative? Do the bridges of equivalence hold where no longer testable against a hard event-sequence? Take first the attempts at characterization through the lexis, whereby some group portrait is read into the character's name, always with a view to low social (if not antisocial) distinctiveness. Even when these attempts recall lexical portraitures already found untenable on their own signifying groundsas well as vis-à-vis the Law of (De)Nominationthe shift in generic context and crosscut might yet invest them with a special bearing. "Six years he shall serve, and in the seventh he shall go out free for nothing." To the Israelite lawmaker from Exodus onward, as to Hammurabi, the heart of the matter lies in the novelty of the fixed and short term of bondage. So much so, that to read the adjective "Hebrew" in ebed ibri (with Cazelles 1958:201ff., de Vaux 1978:I, 212) as itself denoting a temporary, "passing'' condition of slavery (from 'br, "pass") is to wrench it into tautology and inconsistency at once. (Also into impossible plurisignationwhereby ibri doubles as marker of limited time-span and of Hab/piru status, unlimited per sebut that need not concern us here.) If the temporariness attaches to the adjective "Hebrew" in the opening clause, why go on to enjoin it in the apodosis, "six years . . . ," and beyond, especially in Deuteronomy's "It shall not seem hard in thy eyes . . ."? Worse than the pointless injunction, there would follow a contradiction in terms: a slave defined by group-name as temporary who may enter into lifelong slavery. Worst of all, how come the allegedly built-in sense never fits elsewhere? "Hab/piru" itself has nothing transitory about itas a word-portrait, whatever the portraitee's changing fortunes in reality outside languagenor has its imagined Biblical cognate. Ascribing the time feature to the name-bearers produces a collection of semantic monsters. For example, Jonah's "I am a Hebrew"an intimation of mortality or of changeable identity?would then turn senseless. "A Hebrew boy," given the laws of nature, would be implicated in redundancy; "Hebrewesses," as another passing state, in either falsity or fantasy. Likewise, and more seriously yet, with contexts of bondage proper. Thus the description of the conflict between Egyptians and Hebrews as one between masters and slaves (Cazelles 1958:202, Wiseman 1973:1): far from recognizing the temporariness of their hold over their bondmen, the masters want to keep them forever. Unless they pick the wrong termcounter to the implications of their orderly retreat from "the people of the Sons of Israel"the term denotes no terminus. Exodus law alone fixes it at six years, then allows for its unfixing where waived by the "Hebrew slave." If the fixture rests
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on any traceable precedentsbesides Hammurabi, an analogue rather than an established source, much less an allusion worked into the discoursethey are as exclusively Israelite. Such models include God's six days of Creation or his prelimiting of the servitude in Egypt: "They will be enslaved and oppressed for four hundred years" (Genesis 15:13; note also Exodus's own adjacent ordinances, in 23:10-12, regarding the seven-year agricultural cycle and the weekly Sabbath). We shall even see how the Decalogue in Exodus 20 effects a montage of these ideas and terms, as though to pave the way for the explicit ruling of the law on the "Hebrew" in the next chapter. The strings attached to bondage time are a novelty of the Code rather than a feature, hence a product, of the ancient codeword, whatever and whoever it may signify. Not that the significations, and a whole range has been devised against the gentilic sense and/or reference, improve elsewhere. Much the same weaknesses vitiate all other attempts to denationalize the law's "Hebrew" into a particular social meaning or rubric or character analogous to the Hab/piru's. Thus Albrecht Alt's well-known interpretation of the epithet as "sold in payment for a debt" renders otiose not just the context (as with "temporary'') but the phrase ebed ibri itself, meaning this time "a debt-slave slave." 10 Hence, foreseeably, Alt's escape to low criticism, whereby "man" replaces "slave" as well as the Deuteronomic "thy brother." Either law would then begin, "If a Hebrew man . . ." A poor defense, this, at best leaving the sense of ibri completely ad hoc, or ad loc., unmatched anywhere. Who among the known bearers of the label in history, from Abraham to Jonah, is a debt-slave? Least of all the earliest "Hebrew slave" and his people in Egypt, both creditors rather than debtors. Moderating the redundancy, the noun's substitution heightens the adjective's clash with Biblical usage. Nor does this conjecture exactly shine as high source criticismnot even relative to the idea of temporarinessfailing any Nuzi Hab/piru who has enslaved himself for debt.11 The alleged one-word class-stereotype again turns out a fantasy both within and athwart the respective corpora. Other figments of the social imagination at word-portraiture need not detain us. Thus the bracketing of Hebrew with Hab/piru as "one without a legal community" (Mendenhall 1973:90n. 60, cf. the exclusion from the circle of worshippers affirmed by Phillips 1970:73-74): whatever else may remain in dispute about the "Hebrew slave," he enjoys the protection of covenantal law as early as Exodus, and ahead of everyone (21:2). But note that the objections from tautology or inconsistency hold even if you transfer the surmised defining property of Hebrewness in bondage from the Hab/piru as outsider to the Hab/piru-like within Israel, for example, to "an Israelite tribesman, presumably destitute or debt-ridden, who temporarily becomes the house slave of another Israelite" and so "joins the ranks of the detribalized" (Rowton 1976:19). His own favored social attribute
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("detribalized") nowhere apparent in the law, Rowton generates it by extension from Alt's ("debt-ridden") and Cazelles's ("temporarily"), with a shift in reference but hardly in plausibility. Within the scenario of the law, just as in every narrative scene we have visited, crossreadings are all unwelcome: the class/ethnos mixture wished on the agent goes the way of the pure typecasting imported wholesale from without. If anything, as regards the allegedly destitute-hence-detribalized Israelite in slavery, Deuteronomy and Jeremiah call him "thy brother'' and Leviticus even urges his redemption by "a near kinsman from his family" (25:47-55). Together or apart, the sociolegal meanings projected onto "Hebrew" (with the associated character-types) break down no matter what the reference. On such linguistic foundations are crosscultural edifices and highroads supposed to rest. Occasionally, though, the misguided semanticists at least wind their way to the right extreme. Perceiving, for example, that the term set to the Hebrew's bondage marks an "important difference" from his Hab/piru confreres at Nuzi (Gazelles 1958:213-14), 12 they want the difference lexicalized as well as legislated. But the wrong, anti-differential extreme has also been reached. And small wonder, considering the exigency of promoting the rhyme fellows into genuine brothers in lawe.g., co-beneficiaries of a fixed termas are evidently Hammurabi's "seignior" and Exodus's "Hebrew," despite their variant names. This uphill battle can never be to the moderate. "We have no direct evidence," one pioneering comparatist radical concedes, that Nuzi legislated "an analogous provision" to the Bible's; yet, by a wild and, alas, oft-iterated exaggeration, he goes on to affirm that the data "make it certain that this was actually the case" (Lewy 1939:609, 1940:47). In fact, the evidence adduced with such fanfare is next to worthless, being meager, unrepresentative, quite possibly irrelevant, definitely misgeneralized, and so anything but comparable.13 It amounts to two Hab/piru contracts (out of about twenty) that record the contracting servant's year of arrival in Nuzi and of his entrance into service. "This implies, of course, that the contracts were concluded for a limited time. Since, on the other hand, the number of years is not stated in either of the two contracts, it is obvious that, as in ancient Israel, the length of service was automatically fixed by law":14 a non sequitur, "of course," paired with an "obvious" circular argument. Further, this (il)logic must cut both ways: if a terminus a quo entails a terminus ad quem, then the former's absence entails the latter's. No date of arrival/agreementas in the overwhelming majority of Nuzi con-tractsergo no date of release for the Hab/piru contractant. And given the (twenty vs. two) weight of the statistics, one might predict the empirical facts, which indeed quash any speculative ordinance of limitation. Thus the documents that never allow for the Hab/piru's release, or that make
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it conditional on his offering a substitute or a ransom (one always stiff and in effect prohibitive, as Lewy himself admits [1939:608n. 108]), or that delay it to the end of his master's life, or that penalize his bid for freedom with the utmost harshness, at will mixing these contingencies to exclude all idea of Hebrew-like (or Hammurabi-like) vested right several times over. 15 Nor are the few dated items exceptional. Within a single agreement, two Hab/piru who describe themselves in the same words as recent arrivals from the land of Akkad get consigned to different paragraphs and fortunes: one must bind himself sine die, the other may buy his way out (Bottéro 1954: no. 56). Without quite addressing such knockdown objections, the matchmaker tries to anticipate them, where possible, by adding conjecture to conjecture. In for a penny, in for a poundor else the bridge thrown across cultures may shrink into a homonymy across languages. How to characterize "the further conclusion" that all stipulated payments for release in Nuzi apply within the Bible-like contractual time-limits alone, because thereafter the Hab/piru servant would automatically walk away free,16 is an exercise best left to students of logical acrobatics. A related attempt at plugging the holes in the analogy deserves more notice, if only by way of transition to the next key point of crosscultural comparison: How do the bondpeople subdivide? A sharp distinction is to be made between two classes of habiru*: those of the first class were treated as servants who under certain conditions were allowed to quit their service; those of the second class were in the position of lifelong slaves. This means, of course, nothing less than that the legal status of the habiru* at Nuzi was more or less the same as the so-called Hebrew slaves of the Bible; for the well-known laws of Ex. 21:2ff. and Deut. 15:12ff. draw a distinction between the
[ebed ibri] who after six years
of service leaves the house of his patron as a free man and the who, after these six years, becomes a slave forever, since he said to his master, 'I will not go out free from thee.' (Lewy 1939:608-609, echoed by Gray 1958:183-84) "This means, of course, nothing" of the kind, except perhaps the opposite of an analogous typology. Far less does it warrant the sweeping conclusion that the parallel leaves no "room for any legitimate doubt" that "the habiru* of the Akkadian sources correspond to the [ibrim] of the Old Testament," appellative rather than gentilic designation and all (Lewy:609, 623, also 1957:4ff.) Even shorn of overstatement, the analogy in legal status is weak in the first place, more contras five than straight, and drawn in the wrong place.
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If the Hebrew's mandatory and unconditional release gratis after a set term of bondage differs from the Hab/piru's contingent option of ransoming himself at any time, there is a still profounder difference in law between those who may choose to stay on for life and those who must stay regardless of their will. All the more profound, nothing short of qualitative, given the ideo-legal opposition in the culture's teleology of deterrence: between stigmatizing the one for his shameful choice and mutilating the other for venturing to make a choice to the contrary, between an ideal of native liberty, nationwide, and the enforcement of foreign slavery. The end, the means, the object, his relation to the householder and the whole community in power, all diverge. To cite Lewy's own prime example, "(Concerning) Sin-balti *, the habiru* woman: she caused herself to enter as a maidservant into the house of Tehiptilla*. But in case Sin-balti* infringes (the agreement) and goes into another house, [then] Tehiptilla* will pluck out the eyes [of] Sin-balti* and [also] sell her for a price" (Lewy 1939:607; Bottéro 1954: no. 61, Greenberg 1955: no. 45). Not only does such anti-manumission fixture clash head-on with the Bible's refrain-like fiat of manumission ("he shall go out free for nothing . . . he shall go out . . . his wife shall go out with him . . . he shall go out") and have little in common with the post-manumission license grudgingly bestowed on the Hebrew, the freedom to waive his right to freedom ("I will not go out free"). The penalty clause would be deemed abhorrent in Israel even regarding a nonHebrew slave, entitled to leave the household if his master knocks out his eye or so much as his tooth (Exodus 21:26-27). Instead, if Nuzi drew anything like an a priori line between "classes" of Hab/piru, then it appears to have divided not two conditions (or, as Jankowska 1969:251 has it, "cases") of servitude but the two sexes of servants. A two-value taxonomy indeed, yet one geared to biology, hence to a predetermined double standard, rather than to any institutionalized choice of "status" variably made by, or even for, all applicants. Among the extant Hab/piru agreements, the horrible penalty clause imposed on Sinbalti recurs only onceapropos of another woman and including her children (Bottéro, nos. 62, 66, Greenberg, nos. 58, 35). Conversely, no female party gains the option of redeeming herself from lifelong service. The invidious discrimination would therefore seem not gradable ("plus sévère," Cassin terms it in Bottéro 1954:66; or ''more restricted," according to Cazelles 1973:9) but qualitative. As it happens, concerning the use of mutilation to repress bids for freedom, the Hammurabi Code (§282, Pritchard 1969:177) upsets the equilibrium on the opposite side: "the male slave" who disowns his lord shall have his ear cut off. In contrast to both, Deuteronomy and Jeremiah make a point of generalizing the ordinance across sexual variation, "Hebrew or Hebrewess,"
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"Hebrew and Hebrewess." One group, one treatment. Such is presumably their understanding of "Hebrew slave" in the foundational Exodus Code, and so it would appear to read: 17 the masculine form in the generic, unmarked, inclusive sense, common throughout the Bible and discernible even in the pronominal style ("he" as anaphora for "Hebrew and/or Hebrewess," etc.) of the two later passages. Deuteronomy's "Hebrew or Hebrewess" is ushered in by a series of masculine forms (pronouns, verbs, even the kinship term "brother") and followed by a much longer one: so long that when it comes to ear-piercing, the legislator interpolates a reminder of equality (for good or for ill, "and to thy maidservant, too, shalt thou do so") before winding up the ordinance in generic masculine style. Yet more remarkable, because without parallel in the Bible, is the trouble taken by Jeremiah's narrative opening (34:8-11) to articulate the egalitarian principle in all direct reference to "slave and bondwoman, the Hebrew and the Hebrewess," etc.; but even this narrator keeps all anaphoric reference masculine (including the gloss by apposition, ''a Jew, his brother") on pain of stylistic unacceptability. For that matter, Jeremiah's God in self-quotation dispenses altogether with the feminine"each man his brother the Hebrew" (34:14)though he will in practice equally apply the law to the Judaean bondwomen freed and repossessed, as the narrator already did (34:11, 16). Again, the founding Covenant Code itself prescribes that "his wife shall go out with him"; and then it excepts from the rule the daughter sold, without choice, into slavery ("she shall not go out as the [Hebrew] slaves go out") in that it has an even better arrangement in store for her. (Alternatively, on a reading other than generic, a freeborn and adult Hebrew woman is not for sale at all: this would make a difference, but only to widen the gulf between Exodus and Nuzi. With a sisterly Sin-balti ruled out in the first place, issues like manumission or breach of contract would never arise.) At the very least, then, Exodus shows unusual solicitude for the bond-womaneven if you refuse her coverage under its generic "Hebrew slave"while Deuteronomy and Jeremiah make no essential distinction between "Hebrew" and "Hebrewess." A far cry, either way, from the lifelong servitude on pain of eye-gouging and reselling that awaits her Nuzi counterparts, the female Hab/piru in a strange land. Freedom limited in going free: Quantifying a canonical absolute There remains one major handle for packing alien legal sense and reference and class typology into native sound. It has to do with the end-point and inverse of Hebrew slavery, namely, the slave's going "hopshi*" after six years. Everyone since the Rabbis (or for that matter, Deuteronomy and Jeremiah looking back on Exodus 21:2) has taken the word to mean simply "free."
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Recent comparative Orientalists, however, would give it instead a particular and restrictive social meaning by analogy to the extraBiblical hupshu *. Serfs? Peasants? Craftsmen? Corvée workers? Military service-men? Exactly what group hupshu* signifies in Akkadian (including Nuzi) culture is itself a moot point, just like the Hab/piru or Hab/piru-like footing on which the person involved may enter service; but that, again, does not dampen the will to analogy, as long as the referents somehow appear to form a class of dependents. If so, in going hopshi* the Hebrew bondman would not regain his freedom but pass into a state of half-freedom, under his ex-master or the community at large. (For a detailed argument to this effect, with earlier bibliography, see Lemche 1975:129-44, 1988:80-81, 88, 94; also Meek 1960:69-70, Noth 1966:177-78, Childs 1974:469, Wright 1990:256-57, Mayes 1991:251, Marshall 1993:116. For some counterarguments, see the work cited in Chirichigno 1993:212-14, Hess 1994:208-10.) As Hebrew to Hab/piru, in short, so hopshi* to hupshu*. And I would agree, because either parallel falls apart. Where the two intersectthe parallel-maker combining the extension of the beneficiaries under the Exodus slave law with the restriction of the benefittheir weaknesses add up as well. The more terms involved, the more obviously false the analogy. (For instance, where on ancient record do the Hab/piru enjoy a limitation of service or suffer a limitation of freedom on release?) Yet, since neither pair of terms entails the other,18 justice requires that we should deal with the latter pairing on its own merits. And we need only glance at the Bible's usage to find it ruled out of court, starting from Exodus. In a nutshell, just as the discourse ranges over 'bd, so it fixes the opposite status: jumping from the gradability of service to that of liberty (especially after service) is a category mistake, in the reading of the worldview and of the words at once. No amount of contortions (such as performed by Lemche 1974:373-74) will explain away the duelist's reward for victory over Goliath. The king "will make his father's house hopshi* in Israel" (I Samuel 17:25): the benefit, promised to free citizens, promises more, not less, than ordinary freedom. Elsewhere, the state in question points beyond the control of society. A divine artefact, nature matches, or pre-models, the chosen culture: the thematic link between the frameworks is again hostile to the anthropologist's (or the Pharaonic) dogma about their polarity and ranking, along with the crossculturalist's division of the indivisible. "Who has let the wild ass go hopshi*?", God asks Job, ''who has loosed the bonds of the swift ass?" (39:5). The fact that the term, uttered by the same speaker as in the law, applies to wild animals is enough to dismiss the idea of social status, let alone intermediacy, as another contradiction in terms. Rather than gradable and quantifiable, freedom under God is freedom, whether in nature's world or the law's. The equivalence works across subdivisions of one uniquely integrated discourse universe, not across far removed cultural milieus.
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To point up this equivalence, the epithet descriptive of wild life and most often the entire idiom (the root slh * in the Piel + hopshi*) run through all our contexts of human bond-loosing (Exodus 21:2, 5, 26, 27; Deuteronomy 15:12, 13, 18; Jeremiah 34:9, 10, 11, 14, 16). In judicial application, the recurrent idiom even grows a sharper edge, if possible. The order to let the Hebrew slave go hopshi* thus runs to such intensifiers as "from his master" or "according to their desire," making doubly sure of a clean break, with no more strings attached in culture than in the wilderness. (Cf. Isaiah 58:6, in God's voice again: ''Let the oppressed go hopshi* and break every yoke.") Conversely, the nearest Biblical approach to the supposed hupshu* occurs in the one context that no more speaks of hopshi* than of "Hebrew": in Leviticus 25:39-43, where the Israelite's yoke is the lightest, hireling-weight, and his dependence the longest.19 Likewise fatal to the notion of intermediate status is the epithet's cutting across the line between the dead and the quick, as again in Job itself, with special regard to the aftermath of bondage. In the republic of the dead, "the slave is hopshi* from his master" (3:19). Even parallel-hunters, one hopes, will let the grave afford full release, or else Job dreams in vain. As with Hab/piru vs. Hebrew, the similarity is at most name-deep: between rhyme fellows, possibly verbal cognates, not social confreres. The hupshu* in Mesopotamia and elsewhere had good reason to envy the hopshi* in Israel their liberty, suspendable for a time at a pinch but inalienable under divine law. All in perfect harmony again with the tale of the Exodus, where Moses refuses to settle for anything short of unconditional emancipation. The genres of law and narrative, wisdom and prophecy, no less than the Bible's assorted creaturely domains of existence, are at one. Tales of Diachronic Distribution: How a Class Becomes a People in Midcareer So much for synchronic analogizingacross time, as well as place, nationality, the bondman's and the owner's, language, discourse genre, culture at largewhere Exodus naturally bears the brunt of overcomparison. Wide-ranging synchrony, however, also finds its check and its nemesis in the Bible's own diachrony. Whether correlated or independent, all these tacks of pro-Hab/piru argument (from Leviticus, from Nuzi, from the hupshu*) sooner or later run afoul of the sequence of "Hebrew" bondage frameworks. Inevitably so, because as time and text move beyond Exodus, the retrospects quoting, articulating, implementing, vindicating the original law all come down on the Israelite side of the fence. The question is therefore only when, where, to what extent, and in what shape diachronic trouble overtakes the crosscultural, i.e., denationalizing, synchronizers.
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Synchrony and diachrony among pattern-making universals Not that their predicament is unique and entirely self-made. To a certain degree, rather, the series of manumission laws itself presents a formidable structuring challenge to all comersirrespective of approach, mine includedbecause each passage from one member to another unfolds new changes, operational as well as stylistic. The fiat of manumission alone remains constant throughout the law-series. But how, if at all, to harmonize Leviticus's Jubilee cycle with the (fixed, individual, and, unless perpetuated, shorter) term of service elsewhere? Or, where between rephrasing and renovating to place Deuteronomy's emphases in recodifying, e.g., the addition of a golden handshake, the omission of the slave girl, or, together with Jeremiah, the full equality accorded to the woman qua "Hebrewess"? What with the smaller points of divergence, genuine or apparent, this law quartet has kept the commentators busy for millennia. The Rabbis, presuming Scripture's divine unity as an article of faith, would naturally harmonize the lot into ideal synchrony: a tour de force whereby the versions complement one another to a nicety, as though enacted in the same breath for the same overall purpose. (Here, and not here alone, the culture-blind share with their crossculturalist opposite numbers the assumption of some urtext, heavenly or transnational, encoded in God's mind or buried, God knows where, from which all extant reflexes derive their coherence as tokens of a single type, parts of one unadducible yet reconstructible whole. The alleged deep unity below the surface of the respective precepts and practices of the law is therefore no fortuitous common ground: it inheres in either method of legal synchronizing through cross reference.) Modern researchers, armed with very different premises and procedures, have likewise organized the series without necessarily enlisting Nuzi. But then, they have another ready-made machinery whereby to impose order. In their hands, the Rabbinic part/whole configuration gives way to some phase/process linearization, informed by an assortment of diachronic moments, high and low, at sourcenotably Israel's advance toward "humanism" in the centuries that separate Exodus from Deuteronomy/Jeremiah. In turn, my own account, though otherwise contrary to both approaches, must yet explain the ever-shifting balance between recurrence and variance in the law, and will meet the challenge by arguing for a new, poetic interplay of synchronic and diachronic forces under the Hebrewgram. On top of all these ongoing internal difficulties, the Hab/piru connection burdens itself with at least one extra member from without that must be brought into pattern (the fifteenth-century Nuzi service agreement, itself possibly reflecting an Orient-wide "document"). Brought into multiple pattern, in fact. Not only does the canonical lawquartet now expand into something between a quintet and a sextet; the latter's earliest item(s),
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certainly Nuzi, must also enter into an external analogy with the former, a relation that grows more and more burdensome as the series unrolls. The combined theory's adherents find wrenching the "Hebrew" slave ad lib out of the Israelite circle an easier task than relocating him in the international Hab/piru class. Always threatened by the phantom of homonymy, they need first to bring into equivalence two unlike sets of data regarding the alleged namesakes, then to maintain it in face of the voices raised along the intracultural sequence (Leviticus's "Israelite," Deuteronomy's "thy brother the Hebrew," Jeremiah's "Jew") against the Exodus/Nuzi crossculturalism. In this resistance to outside bearing, all postExodus law is at one. How will the fable of class-identity keep up historical appearances, then, unless the historians produce more fables either to deny or to motivate, to synchronize or to defer and linearize the shift in the name-bearer's identity, toward Israeliteness, as well as in the regulations governing his bondage? By an irony typical of the field, and akin to that pervading the I Samuel 13-14 trio, the march of Biblical history thus revenges itself on its unhistorical historians. Nor is this an occupational hazardas would be the overreaching per se or the jumping to conclusionsbut a penalty exacted for breach of the ground rules: interpreting the culture out of its native ideo-legal anchorage and processes, doing literary history without regard to the workings of either history or literature, not to mention poetic historiography. In or athwart time, enchained or ramified into a network, the group of "Hebrews" under the law offer a case as paradigmatic as did their narrative fellows and, I will moreover argue, as instructively storied. What is diachrony itself if not a kind of story with a truth-claim and a glorified name? In whatever nominal guise, the cross-historians find it impossible to evade and arduous to tell. Their performances as tellers, regardless of approach or success, therefore assume enormous general interest, because they testify to a necessity arising from the very nature of the diachronic project. The success, however invariably wanting here, remains in principle contingent, the imperative categorical. Above all, what makes the lesson so valuable and general is that it cuts across the boundaries of genre, as well as those of culture, and to even more principled effect. Hence, to revert to this chapter's outset, the falsity of the impression that narrative generically entails while the law generically escapes time-patterning, from alignment to emplotment. Even at its most analogized, a law-set doubles as a law-series: it always invites and often requires dynamic sequencing, for intelligibility, and thus narrativizing in one manner or another, on this or that time axis. How, when, where, wherefore did X1 persist and/or change into X2, X3, X4 . . .? (On the universal ordering forces and principles involved see Sternberg 1981a, 1983a, 1984, 1985 [index, under Word Order], 1990a: esp. 67ff., 1990b,
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1992b: esp. 529-38.) Wanted here, for example, is a story of real-life genesis, a diachrony within the alleged synchronic Hebrew/Hab/piru mega-frame, to which the combiners typically prove unequal. Even on their own ground, and amid an assortment of attempts at historicizing the law-series, the typicality of the failure is attributable to what they apply in untheorized or even unconscious fashion, namely: the basic cognitive resources and routines and refuges of sense-making under empirical pressure. Instead of doing historyor leaving the nexus alone as unreconstructible, if the amount of hay given will not make bricksthe historians do exercises in speculative combination, more or less forced upon themselves and in turn upon their data. The resulting construct is therefore usually wild, because uncontrolled, and yet tame, because it gets into some groove, itself foreseeable. For demonstration, as well as for generality, let me briefly refer the practices visible here to the complex of underlying organizational principles and parameters that regulate (drive, constrain, subdivide, adjudicate) them for better or worse. In such principled light, they will turn out to be far more transparent, hence easier to sort out, than may appear from their bewildering surface variety and discord, as will their counterparts elsewhere. To start with, all these accounts inevitably follow one master rule of arrangement: equivalence (likeness, concord, recurrence) among the items arranged operates by nature for, difference against, synchronism. The rule governs anything from bits of text to entire works to discourse forms to literatures to cultural trends and macrosystems that the analyst would integrate or, as here, positively crossrelate. Look at the present case in point and further instances will suggest themselves to you everywhere. By this rationale, some of the variables among the unhappy combinations with the law in the Bible's environment are already predictable enoughespecially insofar as they turn on the number or fullness of the extraBiblical analogues claimed. Needless to say, for example, the denser the code/contract parallelism sought, the heavier the resistance encountered on the way from Exodus to Jeremiah. Other aspects of the putative crosscultural merger still demand notice. Above all, what becomes of those postExodus featuresfor example, the growing intentness on the "brother" enslavedthat threaten to undo the initial synchronism of "Hebrew" with Hab/piru, hopshi * with hupshu*? Emergency measures are required and taken to deal with the threat, of course, but in systematically varying proportions between exegesis and genesis. Depending on the canonical range claimed for the analogy, the analogymaker finds himself driven into either interpretive or diachronic extremes in the attempt to uphold his claim. The more Biblical slave-texts you want to synchronize with the extraBiblical record, the more recalcitrant textual data you need to force into the equation by way of exegesis. Tokens
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of one (discoursive, generic, social, bondage) type, they must all somehow enact the same ordinance, reflect the original from which they evolved in various directions. And vice versa: the less Biblical texts analogized across the cultures, the greater the need for explaining the nonconformity of the rest by appeal to imagined historical developmentsin language, society, politics, ideology, transmission, reading of Exoduswhich have supposedly moved the culture away from outside influence and the law from outgroup beneficiaries. More and less, I say, because this is what happens in practice here. By sheer logical standards of part/whole integration, actualized elsewhere, the disparity might well turn qualitative. In reason, maximum crosstextual synchrony arranged among data presses for maximum (inter)textual adjustmentideally short of violencewhile minimum synchrony calls for maximum diachrony. If disposed or forced to choose between extremes of patternmaking, that is, you then carry the givens (elements, texts, agents, institutions) to the limit of either all-embracing equivalence or all-developing sequence: the one would be left with practically no (hi)story to tell, the other with no analogy to draw, or none of much stable value in the ever-changing formation, where even analogues reform and transform on the way. Given a poetic verse, for instance, the extremes would be its readings as sheer descriptive parallelism and as tense narrative plot. In the case of modern literature, the "spatialist" will to ascendancy notoriously opposes the temporalist impulse even outside the patterning of verse, as when it would have us read novels for thematic athwart dramatic coherence. Likewise with structural anthropology's dehistoricizing of a corpus, e.g., Biblical narrative, out of all narrativity. It then treats "the entire text as synchronic. In the story one thing happens after another, because that is the only way you can tell a story. But the truth of myth, which is religious truth, is all of a piece. . . . There is no development, only dialectical inversion [or variation, or permutation]. Christ is the second Adam; the Virgin is the second Eve" (Leach and Aycock 1983:11). 20 Pure diachrony or pure synchrony, narrative or network, in inverse qualitative relation. But this neat either/or branching does not quite cover the exigencies of the Hab/piru's importation into the law of Israel, where neither of the limit-cases applies: total, Exodus-to-Jeremiah synchrony with Nuzi (comparable to the perfect heavenly fit in culture-blind eyes) would be resisted by too many hard data that speak for the insider, while its total absence would of course amount to surrendering the thesis altogether. If no likeness, then no linkage. Rather than facing a dual choice, every parallel-drawer must here steer some middle course, and thus pay his transit duty in either flank's coin, like an Odysseus in the straits between Scylla and Charybdis. Nobody caught
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on one horn of the dilemma manages to escape without appeal to eventful diachronythat is, to an inward turn at some phasebecause nobody has subsumed all three "Hebrew" law-texts under the Hab/piru umbrella. (Or almost nobody: Lewy 1957:6 is the only plain exception, to my knowledge, apparently even relative to his own earlier view in 1939:609.) Nor do the internationalists at bay find it advisable to opt here instead (as many of their stripe, themselves often included, do within the narrative genre) for either of the alternative compromise ways, namely, synchronic partition and semantic mixture. These lines of retreat from impossible outgroup-centered uniformity are also open in theory, but the consequences of taking them would prove even more unattractive than the diachronic distribution of the law-series. The one, synchronic alternative to distribution over the centuries would leave Hebrewness/Hab/piru-ness oscillating between class and people, only without the benefit of a tale (with its possible changes of agent, interlocutor, spacetime, circumstance, attitude) whereby to frame and temporalize and motivate the division in usage; the other, via "mixture," would indeed stabilize the reference (to the Hab/piru as multinational in Nuzi, as co-national in the Bible) yet incur all the prohibitive costs of the law's discriminating against the nonHab/piru Israelite. Better a dynamic (class-to-ethnos) than either a forked (class or ethnos) or a mergent (class + ethnos) duocentricity of group interest. The quest for relief from the awkwardness of the law-set therefore narrows into one option, a makeshift compromise law to itself. Willy-nilly, the enslavement texts must form a time-line and their synchronism must break off at a stage prior to Jeremiah, whose narrativized law overtly identifies the "Hebrews" in bondage as "Jews" of Judah. Hence the double exigency, or double jeopardy, common to all the theory's variants. Hence also a difference in kind between the uniform intraBiblical viewpoint (however culture-blind, local patriotic, overholistic, Rabbi fashion) and the miscellany of crossculturalisms, with implications for a still larger difference: between the unifocal (here ethnocentric) and the bifocal (now class-, now ethnos-centered) reading of a label, an image, a text, a canon, even an entire history. What with the patently unviable bifocalisms, the partitioning or forked and the dualistic or mixed, this clinches my running argument (theorized in chapter 3) about the extent to which unity, meaning, effect, attitude, and the choice among their rival constructions hinges on the center of interest. Here the divergent (bi)centerings make all the difference to the cultural analysis of a (lega)literature poised among strategic options. Anchorage in a culture or a megaculture or, as I will have it, an interculture? Synchronic or diachronic or two-axis arrangement? And in the two latter cases, what drives literary history into what shape via what phases? As always in pattern-making, the options lend themselves to adjudication in terms of the best fit, and so we will progres-
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sively assess them throughout the ensuing chapters, which lead up to my own poetics of genesis. At the crossroads, first, where the Israelite perspective keeps the referents of "Hebrew" stable all along the threefold legal seriesand the Bible as a wholethe Hab/piru analogy imposes at least one shift of reference in midseries from the social outsider to the ethnic insider. Why shift, and why here, and, if here, why not before? 21 In response, apart from all variable emergency measures taken by the crosshistorian to locate (interpose, define, enchain) the shift where and as posited, its very positing calls for diachronic explanationfor a narrative of discontinuity, in short, no matter how wrapped up, how rudimentary, how unhistory-like. And the explanations run to much the same type, so conjectural and foreseeable in the wake of the earlier conjecture as to verge on circularity. If you strip away the learned frilling, each shows itself a historicized relative of tautologous propositions such as "A bachelor is an unmarried man." Likewise self-implicative, those narratives about real life are likewise self-validating, because they feed to excess on their own postulatethe inevitable broken outbound threadwith the modicum of hard data reduced and cooked to suit. The tales of diachronic group-distribution usually follow, rather than start and gain momentum, from the terms of diachronic distribution between out-group and in-group, class and people, so that they gain or yield little in the processfor example, by way of novelty value, textual enrichment, evidentiary support, even sheer dynamism. (Quite the contrary, we shall find.) At least one ancient text, the story passing for history would have us believe, came to misunderstand or misrepresent the law's social, other-bound intention; whereas we moderns, enlightened by the rediscovery of the Hab/piru, especially in Nuzi, know better and speak truer, with the Exodus Code. An unbrotherly Pentateuch? To be sure, Exodus is invariably the fountainhead, the sine qua non of the analogy and (discounting the array of objections mounted above) the Code least directly resistant to it. The given text, after all, nowhere particularizes the "Hebrew slave" as co-national, not in so many words. There, accordingly, the combiner's tale of diachronic distribution always starts in the Bible, restarts after Nuzi. And (re)start it must, for even if you want to foreground the code/contract parallel at the expense of the posteriorityhow the code takes, rather than goes, after the contractthe immediate law-sequel in effect dictates an inversion of these modalities of afterness. Once you proceed to mate the Nuzified Exodus with Deuteronomy, trouble breaks out from the first clause. How, for example, will the new opening phrase "thy brother the Hebrew
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or the Hebrewess," ostensibly a mere restatement of "Hebrew slave," lend itself to Hab/piru occupancy? How to maintain the Deuteronomic cross-cultural synchronism by analogy in face of Deuteronomy's pressure for a unique national (hi)story of legislation? Moreover, insofar as the younger Code echoes the older, not least in the codename, how to keep Exodus itself out of that unparalleled (hi)story, and so to rescue the Nuzi analogy from death at birth? Only by critical violence, frequently blamed on the text's own incoherence. So Alt opines that the peculiarly national "thy brother" should be "replaced by the colourless 'a man'" (1989:93-94n. 28). The connector turns rewriter, as the Samuel low critics do in their unicultural zeal (to save the native connection of "Hebrew" from the Bible's misadventures). He would rather tamper with the well-made discourse than let it challenge his preconception about the extranational source and bearing of Israel's casuistic law. Or, in a vein more exegetical than genetic: Deut. 15.12 either uses the term [brother] in the sense of non-Israelite or else it foresaw the possibility of the enslavement of the "brother" Israelite in spite of the provisions [for him] . . . . The alternatives indicate that Deut. 15.12 is either inconsistent in its usage of
[brother] or in permitting
the acquisition of an [slave] from among the Israelites. (Gray 1958:184-85; see also Wright 1990:254 and note 3 to this chapter) The alternative inconsistencies foisted on the Deuteronomist are both self-made. Never does the Bible stretch the range of "brother" from familial, tribal, national affiliation to humankind, not even at its universalistic moments, let alone in the nation-centered heat of Deuteronomy. Nokhrihood is nokhrihood, however minimally defined; fraternity is fraternity, however strained by misfortune, even misconduct. You cannot leave in the kinship term while pushing its reference outward, to equal Alt's "colourless 'a man'." And if the Israelite "thy brother" in Leviticus 25:39 allegedly implies the nonIsraelite origin of the "brother"-less ''Hebrew" in Exodus 21:2, should not Deuteronomy's "thy brother the Hebrew" count as positive proof of the Israeliteness of "Hebrew" throughout the series? With the Brotherhood of Mankind out of the question, there remains "the possibility of the enslavement of the 'brother' Israelite." Either a double standard of lexis, logic, law, or a self-defeating argument for Pentateuchal uniformity. Moreover, how to reconcile the supposed Nuzi-like alienness of the "Hebrew" with Deuteronomy's ordering the master to lavish parting gifts on him? A Biblical reform in favor of that alien has often been conjectured, occasionally even drawn out ("diachronized") into two stages: Exodus law improved on Nuzi by fixing the Hebrew/Habpiru's term of service, and
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Deuteronomy in turn outdid Exodus by providing for the freedman. 22 Such long evolution, however, makes decreasing sense, in that it would increasingly privilege the outsider at the "brother's" cost, and out of all proportion: far in excess of Scripture's genuine and unusual attentiveness to the resident alien, no less than of the reputed internationalism of its casuistic law. The amendments may sound well enough in isolation from the totality of bondpeople over which the given world of discourse ranges. Check them against that range and they at once prove, if not too good, then too bad to be true. The first putative reform, as already shown, would entitle the Hab/piru/Hebrew of Exodus to walk away after six years, while keeping the Israelite in perpetual service or at best waiting for Leviticus's Jubilee Year. The second reform has the Deuteronomist throw in gifts on departure, to the further exclusion of the Israelite sent home (if at all) empty-handed. Such mounting discrimination would reverse not only the historic precedent set (and called to mind in Deuteronomy) by the Exodus from Egypt, but also the ethnosocial priorities ordered in the book and in the canon as a whole. The alien-before-native ranking might fit the topsy-turvy scale of a Mrs. Pardiggle in Dickens's Bleak House, who drums up support for the Tockahoopo Indians and leaves her children to manage as best they can. This altruism gone mad reads like a fictional satire on what Alt and his ilk would historicize into a way of life under the Mosaic slave law. In the Bible, rather, charity must begin at homeand not surprisingly, until you come to the particulars and the countermeasures. A universal fiat, outside of Last Days utopia or the satirist's dystopia, this "must" is as difficult to criticize for imbalance as to bracket with ordinary local patriotisms. Even an ethics like that of Emmanuel Levinas, if anything overinsistent on our unilateral obligation to the other, yet warns against such impartiality as will "pass by the closest." And even within the myth of the international brotherhood of the proletariat, the tie specific to workers of any given nation has its role, alongside that unifying the national bourgeoisie. The nation proper indeed codifies the difference both ways, for and against, to an extent unmatched by any other grouping, interpersonal, tribal, classbased, religious, etc. Here the sense of legal equality among the members, with "the correlative exclusion of outsiders from those rights and duties," becomes definitional of the community itself (Smith 1990:10, 40): so we find it at Sinai, where the "Hebrews"-to-"Israel'' process of nation-building advances toward the establishment of the Mishpatim Code. This only goes to exemplify, however, the varied shapes assumed by one universal force, cohesive within, divisive without. By appeal to human nature, at times made explicit through the language of the extended family, the same in-group imperative predictably runs through all cultures, ethnic and national, landed and diasporic, ancient
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and modern: among them Hurrian Nuzi, conveniently forgotten here by the analogists. Against the background of the environment and the alleged models, the remarkable thing is how wide the Bible, even at its most ethnocentric and nation-constitutive, flings its network of sociolegal welfare. (As remarkable is the flexible judgment on nokhri in its discourse. And along its history, Abram already sets the example in his concentric circles of charity, widening outward from the "brother" Lot to the very Sodomites.) "Their laws," Haman argues in support of genocide, "are different from those of every other people" (Esther 3:8): although he probably adverts to the unique theology, like most observers since, the Torah's interpersonal code also differed, beneficently, from ''every other people's" legislation regarding their others. The inciter generalizes to wider, truer, and kinder (hence still more anti-crossculturalist) effect than he knows. Yet the we-group-centered order of priorities always holds, except that it modulates over bond-age-law time from hierarchy to stark antithesis, from gradable toward qualitative distance. Whatever the rights accorded to the outsider, the Israelite would in provision come (as in manumission he would leave) first. So he indeed fares in Deuteronomy, and he alone, qua "thy brother the Hebrew": kin by ethnonational criteria, therefore due to special kindness, over and above the Exodus minimum, namely, the time limit. Once you start wondering about the motive behind the law, any synchronism claimed falls into yet deeper incongruity, and deepest of all in historical perspective. Of all Ancient Oriental testimonia, codified or contractual, why should Exodus privilege the Hab/piru over all slaves in the first instance, and as early as the first of its ordinances? Some invoke Egypt: the Israelites having themselves known "Hebrew" slavery, they owe special consideration to fellow Hab/piru. 23 But this fellow feeling might possibly explain the singling out of the Hab/piru class from all other alien bond-men, never the exclusion of the Israelite (or, if the class admits natives, the nonHab/piru Israelite) among the rest. Kindness must rise withnot above or againstkinship, charity with ethnonationality. Judging by Leviticus, moreover, the Hab/piru themselves fit nicely into the category of those alien sojourners approved for perpetual bondage, in opposition to the Israelites, or to Exodus's "Hebrew slave." In as out of evolutionary perspective, "sachliche Identität" thus couples like with like on either side of the national fence. Within this four-term relationship, actually, ethnicity not only cuts both ways, for the insider, against the outsider. It singles out for the worse, by long historical retrospect, the very class of outsider that transnationalists want to privilege. Among the Hab/piru candidates for slavery, those most available to the Israelite purchaser would obviously be Canaanite24their eponymous ancestor vocally branded forever by Noah as "slave of slaves" to the Shemite, and hence
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least eligible for manumission. The less so if you remember that, in the Bible's ethnography, they transform from social to ethnic grouping, unchangeable by the contingencies of existence, certainly not for the better. No Israelite in view here (legislator, audience, master) would dream of liberating them from the chattel-servitude to which they were born, rather than just demoted by fortune. To cap it all, Deuteronomy precludes Canaanites in toto as the epitome of the abominable: their inclusion under "thy brother the Hebrew" turns grotesque considering the rigor with which the book puts them under the ban (7:1-6, 20:16-18). 25 "Hebrew" is virtually inapplicable to Canaanite Hab/piru; and so, given their proximity and failing their exception from the rest, to any Hab/piru. Assuming a diachrony of legal reform, therefore, its thrust must run counter to wishful thinking: Exodus's sense of kinship with the "Hebrew slave" only escalates in the course of time into full-scale inside/outside dichotomy. Canaanite or otherwise, furthermore, do the alleged objects of the enactment so much as run parallel to its chronology, from the genesis onward? All discourse, it is well to keep in mind, abhors a vacuum: every Code and ruling, like every narrative, entails at least one spacetime, within whose coordinates the personae discoursed about have to fallor else it and/or its referents are null and void indeed. Here diachrony, legal as otherwise, again intersects with storyhood. Even if the bondage law were in principle applicable to the Hab/piru, therefore, it would make no sense unless the class existed at the time to realize and enjoy the application. On pain of referring to an empty ("phantom") class, not only the formation but also the transmission and canonization of the "Hebrew's" privilege must antedate the last Hab/piru: the eleventh century B.C., to go by the Mesopotamian documents, and considerably earlier, according to the firmer and more germane Cis-Euphratensian record, notably the Amarna archive. Even the lowest terminus ad quem, however, would be too high for the Exodus Codeits origin usually dated by source-analysts and cross-historians to the monarchical eraand out of the question for Deuteronomy. The further the synchronism with Nuzi is carried in Israel's time and text, the less escapable its reduction to operational absurdity, or, as usual, fantasy in the guise of history: a class of posthumous beneficiaries. Finally, as we advance from Exodus's "Hebrew" to Deuteronomy's, the all-important parallel to Nuzi's Hab/piru grows increasingly contrastive. Take the adult, sui juris Hab/piru woman denied (under the threat of blinding and resale) limitation of service at Nuzi. By the end of the imagined diachronic road, she no longer contrasts with the generic "Hebrew" or, on a bare genderic reading, with the "daughter" sold into protected marriageeither treated as freeborn or restored to freedombut with her exact legal counterpart and the male Hebrew's perfect equal, "the Hebrewess." If any change occurred along the crosscultural tradition, then
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"reform" turns out to be a euphemism for revolution, and revolution presupposes quite another order of evidence for traditionality in the first place. Similarly even with the male Hab/piru allowed by contract to ransom himself: he no longer stands opposed to the Hebrew merely as a six-year bondman by law but also as a recipient of gifts from his master in parting. Linearized or dovetailed, the two Biblical Codes redouble the strain on an extraBiblical nexus that is tenuous anyway. The longest bridge, the deepest freeze This array of objections to a Pentateuch-length analogy has never been faced and would seem unanswerable. Yet enough of it meets the eye ("thy brother the Hebrew") to put a premium on compromise among the analysts, with varying results. At the very least, that is, the surface givens discourage further, maximal extension, toward Zedekiah's Jerusalem; where better appreciated, they induce retreat to the minimum, Exodus/Nuzi synchronismas a joint trace, possibly, of the Hab/piru documentso that two "Hebrew" laws, not just one, change reference to Israel via distribution over time. In ascending order of compromise, then, even zealous parallelists generally draw the line at Jeremiah. Enough is enough, and the one notable exception suggests why. Foreseeably, the combiner whom we have already observed aiming for the tightest parallelism would also extend it longest, as if to compound maximums in synchronization. Bloodshed apart, Lewy (1957) reminds one of Macbeth driven forward at each crossroads by the thought that otherwise the initial plunge would have been in vain: he has ventured "so far that, should [he] wade no more, / returning were as tedious as go o'er" (III, iv, 136-37). 26 In this all-or-nothing spirit, more appropriate to the tragic hero than to the historian, the crossculturalism for once outruns the Pentateuch to denationalize the tragedy of Jerusalemand so, in effect, the nation's Egypt-old affair with Hebrewness as a whole. The ultimate push amounts to generalizing that Israel's fall, like her rise in Exodus, turned on social injustice done to the outsider, now by herself. The overall synchronism, which on the face of it nullifies the diachronic axis, actually implies by its very persistence an ethical (as opposed to ethnocentric) overview of history's march and rationale according to the Bible. A large (if silent) corollary indeed, bigger and bolder than the maximalist's official thesis regarding the law itself, and all on what grounds? As code followed slave code, Lewy doggedly asserts, the reference to the Hab/piru never wavered because none lapsed into "misinterpretation of the biblical sources" (1957:6). The law's conservatism, or statics, turns canon-length. But then, the longer the persistence in outgroup bearing,
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changeless since Nuzi, the heavier the counterevidence, and by more than simple accumulation. After Exodus, for instance, the enslaved "Hebrew" is less and less referrable to the Hab/piru, because such referents (nowhere attested since the eleventh century) have an ever-decreasing claim to existence, even to remembrance. Why should the new statute book that envisages the landed nation of Israel, a fortiori the Jeremiah narrative citing from it to motivate the Exile, occupy itself with a chapter of international history as ancient and dead as the second millenium B.C.? Contrarily, that postExodus "Hebrew" reappears as "brother" not only with higher frequency from book to book but also in sharper national focus. The people of Jerusalem thus undertake to let go "the Hebrew and the Hebrewess, so that no man shall enslave a Jew/Judaean [yehudi], his brother." If Deuteronomy negates the term's extraIsraelite application, then Jeremiah definitely rules it out of bounds. In vain does the same apologist for canonlength statics invoke the Greek version which is here superior to the Masoretic text, "no person from Judah [in lieu of 'Jew,' yehudi] should be a slave" . . . This indicates that Jeremiah's contemporaries knew full well that "Hebrew" meant "alien" and, especially, "resident alien." (ibid.) The conservatist forgets the Greek reading's very usage, whereby "Hebrew" is always opposed to "alien," and so are both "Israelite" and even the factitious "person of Judah." In the latter, the Septuagint would at most de-sexualize the yehudi (to accord with the preceding ''Hebrew or Hebrewess") rather than de-nationalize him, or her. Nor would denationalizing the enslaved referent agree with the Hab/piru source material, any more than with the Bible's discourse. Jeremiah 34 cannot have been narrated prior to 588 B.C.the siege of Jerusalemhalf a millennium too late for the endmost of those alien Hab/piru to benefit from the law quoted at "Jeremiah's contemporaries." (Deuteronomy, though presumably belated as well, is datable with less certainty.) Even by sheer logical criteria, the method also breaks down from within, several times over. Thus, if the "Hebrews" that the young Moses observes allegedly divide between the kindred and the alienby way of synchronic partition within one Exodus chapter (2:11-14, according to Lewy 1957:2)why not their namesakes in the law beginning with Exodus? Inversely, for the uncompromising synchronist to maintain the outside co-reference of "Hebrew" with Hab/piru throughout the nation's grand chronology, from Sinai to Jerusalem, from Exodus to Exile, he must divide the reference of "Jew" against itself, between outsider and insider, at a single point in time, space, usage. A double double-standard.
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Checkpoint romances of identity change The Jerusalem side of the law-bridge thrown across the cultures and the millennia therefore rests on less than thin air, having been occupied in irresistible force by the natives taken up with their own Hebrew affair. Yet it would be hasty to conclude that the strength of that in-group opposition is merely proportionate to the length, or durability, of the synchronism attempted. A shorter, Nuzi-to-Deuteronomy bridge, of the kind already instanced from Alt, say, encounters so much resistance from Pentateuch law itself that the operation becomes unviable. (To give the warlike figure another turn, the difference between the variants is in the amount of overkill suffered in the attempt.) This next longest reach also incurs a necessity that the longest avoids altogether by the terms of its case, that is, explaining why it falls short of Jeremiah. It must plug the hole left in the synchronism through a tale of diachronic distribution, and one that meets a few specifically "Hebrew" constraints in excess of the requisites of all historical narrative. By the logic of the two-stage process surmised, along which "Hebrew" first merged, then broke with "Hab/piru," the double exigency (to resume my earlier phrase) now comes into full effect. In direction and explanation, this tale of genesis projected onto history is overdetermined beforehand. It must zigzag its way from outside reference (in Nuzi, Egypt, the wilderness, and/or the assumed times of writing about them) to self-reference (at home); also from class to national bearing, the former manifest throughout the Ancient Orient, the latter in Scripture alone, if only in Jeremiah. The challenge thus posed to the would-be geneticist teller is even higher than may appear. On top of the obvious difficulties, there is the requirement to correlate the Bible's genres of law and narrative in the Hab/piru-to-Israelite process; there is the sheer number of the items along the law-series itself to pattern into ordered interplay between stability and dynamics; and there is the quantum leap of meaning at the end, forced ex hypothesi and perhaps most awkward for the synchronist in his diachronic role to generate, enchain, tell ex nihilo. A leap, I insist, because the shift in the genesis of "Hebrew" from class reference to national self-reference would involve less an evolution (verbal, juridical, normative, sociopolitical, all-cultural, in brief) than a mutation. Unmistakably so within the Bible, given its polar opposition of outsider to lineal and divinely chosen insider, which we have been tracing in its acutest form, the Hamite/Hebrew conflict. The semantic polarity imputed by the distributor to the Bible's "Hebrew" (now out-, now in-group) therefore depends for its life and likelihood on a narrative of peripety whereby to span and emplot and reconcile the poles jumped between. Of course, even a modest, evolutionary shift runs against the parallel-hunter's grain. But his parallelism stands or falls here by the later twist round into anti-
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parallelism, via a surprise plot. If his imagined culture is to reverse itself at the end of the road on the entire Hebrew issue, so must his narrative of Hebrewnessor else the allegation of earlier, stable Nuzi-to-Deuteronomy crossculturalism breaks down under the weight of the undisputed ethnocentric retrospect in Jeremiah. What happened in history, then? Everything and nothing, to judge from what the proponents have offered among them. Crosscultural romancers, by the standard of truth-value, they yet prove here no better even at romancing than anywhere else in the annals of Hebrewness, vis-à-vis the I Samuel 13-14 trio, for example. As a rule, like Alt and Gray above, they neglect to explain, far less elaborate, let alone justify their own distribution of the givensvia the thick and complex narrative wantedat best darkly suggesting a postDeuteronomic reform in the co-national's favor. A token gesture, to say the least, instead of a tale. (Just consider again the idea of two-stage reform. If Exodus improved on Nuzi's provision for the Hab/piru and Deuteronomy on Exodus's for the Hebrew/ Hab/piru, then Jeremiah's switch to the Hebrew/Israelite/Jew becomes all the less intelligible along reformist lines. Worse for this trajectory of genesis, the amelioration considered the most radical, the equalizing of "the Hebrewess" under the law, goes back to Deuteronomy.) A few admit defeat: the change from "appellative" to "ethnic sense," especially in the ''judicial context," is "still a mystery to us" (de Geus 1976:187). Others yet contrive a zigzag tale of sorts, its dynamics never filled out or even well-motivated at the point of inward turn, least of all by reference to the extant givens in the law-series or elsewhere. For example, since Jeremiah's alternation of "Hebrew" with "Jew" undercuts the Hab/piru identity-link beyond repair, Umberto Cassuto tries to get around it by postulating a longue durée sociolinguistic change, from all-Oriental internationalism to postBiblical Israelitism: the later the occurrence, the narrower and more ethnic the range of the term. Jeremiah is accordingly assimilated to future Rabbinic usage, where "Hebrew" slave refers to Israelites alone, as against the older, Pentateuchal reference that allegedly embraced the entire mixed class of Hab/piru (1967:265-66; cf. Childs 1974:468). Now, the long duration of the outsider-to-insider shift does not by itself quantify it into evolutionary gradualness: whenever and however it came about, if it did, the event would mark nothing less than a revolution on all fronts, a break with the past, and demand emplotment to suit. Further, considering that this supposed lexical change makes an effective legal difference on top of everything elseas though Jeremiah, followed by the Rabbis, restricts the application of the Pentateuch's law of restricted bondageone might expect some evidence for it. (Especially on the part of one who elsewhere trades on the survival of meaning from ante-Biblical down to Rabbinic times.) But none is actually forthcoming to override
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the presumed continuity, much less its reinforcement within and without the chain of legal tradition. This absence contrasts with the abundant hard evidence adducible for semantic transformations of the same order, even within the same field. Among the examples above, you will recall how we established the metamorphosis of "Canaanite" from extraBiblical (social) to Biblical (gentilic) reference; or, intraBiblically, of nokhri from otherness than the in-group ("thou shalt not put a nokhri over thee, who is not thy brother") to the Proverbs norm of otherness than the individual self ("A nokhri [should praise thee], not thy own lips"). In the absence of any support, a tale-telling argument like Cassuto's just patches up one fantasy about the "Hebrew" in social, crosscultural, synchronic existence by inventing another, where he reverses identities in midlife, along the culture's own diachronic axis. For the assumed development itself presupposes an original range of meaning (and application) that has no anchorage in the Bible's discourse, early or late. 27 If anything, it is the opposite, ethnic, continuous reading that finds such independent anchorage, amidst the lawvariants themselves and more unshakable with each new phase. Deuteronomy, obviously looking back (along the chronological as well as the canonical order) to Exodus's "Hebrew slave," already specifies "thy brother the Hebrew"; in turn, Jeremiah, alluding to both, interchanges their formulas with each other and with his own equivalent "Jew." The latter pairing of names for the Israelite alone marks a genuine sociolinguistic change on Biblical record. "Hebrew" would appear to have vanished (ever since David's Philistine name-callers, long before the advent of the most novel among the ethnica) from the international lexicon: Jeremiah's choice of the Genesis-old referring term, attended by its direct quotation from the Pentateuch and its alternation with the new, testifies to a deliberate bid for constancy of reference. Negating the appeal to a sea change, then, the chain of reported discourse points the other way: to the match of ''Hebrew" with "Jew," never with Hab/piru, throughout the law-series and elsewhere. A bridge in lieu of a break, yet one purely internal to the reference group's canon. As though in response, we find the majority of outward-bound analogizers impelled, if not to cut, then to keep down their losses by reducing the scope of the hypothesis to the absolute minimum of the Bible's time and text. They push back the dividing line between the Hab/piru and the Israelite reference of "Hebrew" to the Pentateuch itself, so that the turn inside now occurs right after the ancient Exodus Code. National-minded, all recodifications thereby broke with the Nuzi (or the Document's) heritage. Like the difficulties of maximalism, those besetting the middle ground, where the synchronic/diachronic axes cross and join liabilities, have never been set forth; or else they would render the fallback position as untenable,
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most visibly at the turning point. Even so, they loom large enough in Deuteronomy's exordium to counsel this further retreat, as far as the last ditch, and to bring together minimalists of otherwise incompatible views. Those who number Deuteronomy 15 and Jeremiah 34 among the few exceptions in the Bible to the social (Hebrew = Hab/piru) nexus rub shoulders here with those who except Exodus from the gentilic (Hebrew = Israelite) rule. (E.g., Cazelles 1958:202n. 4 as against de Vaux 1978:I, 212-13.) Or, across demographic boundaries, those who open Exodus's "Hebrew slave" to Israelites of the Hab/piru class meet those who reserve it for aliens. (E.g., Mayes 1991:250-51 vs. Paul 1970:45ff.) Likewise with endorsers and critics of the Nuzi analogy in its extreme, tightest-drawn form. (E.g., Weingreen 1976:133ff. vs. Weippert 1967:86-88.) All these, qua checkpoint backdaters, share another segmentation of the legal trio one law now pointing outside, two inside the Bible's own circle, with a new kernel-story to distribute the items over history in genetic metamorphosis. Thereby, the crosscultural nexus did not outlive Exodus: its "Hebrew" gravitated in relegislation toward national bearing (and its hopshi *, correspondingly, toward unlimited freedom, e.g., Lemche 1975:142, 1976:45, 52, 1979:2, 4). As the reference to the enslaved group shrank over time, the measure of the referent's eventual liberty grew, and so did other sociolegal benefits, all in favor of the Israelite. This common denominator, without so much as a reason for the breach in tradition, is evidently too skeletal for the dynamics of narrative. It leaves a good deal to flesh out along the diachronic axis itself, now maximized with the contracture of the synchrony to one Israelite text, the barest minimum for Hab/piru parallelism. Under such double exigency, each finished inferential narrative must resolve anew the entire complex of holes and puzzles already enumerated (in regard to the longer, Deuteronomy-inclusive bridge, hence the later and shorter breach) or it is again nothing but empty talk aspiring to truth-value. Whence the change, especially amid verbal and substantive continuities? Why in this direction, or at this of all junctures, or with these of all possible reworkings? Most troublesome, why should the changes widen into a sea change when it comes to group-orientation? How can a legislator afford the reversal of his people's own founding Hebrew law along with the internationalism behind it? Surprisingly enough, considering the importance of the questions, the number of minimalists, and the energy and heat spent on matters of variant detail,28 few have tackled such gaps to unfold an orderly tale of genesis from the earliest pre- or at least post-Exodus cause down to the ultimate effects, observable in Jeremiah. As with the alternative distribution, only on a larger scale, the abundance of the parts inharmonious both in and out of line, whether because they fail to agree, or their analysts, renders the underlying whole all the more conspicuous for its absence. To adapt
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the wise folk maxim to the logic of pattern-making: if the beholder cannot, or will not, see the wood for the trees, the trees themselves grow hazy. It's either double gain or double loss. An exceptional attempt at reconstructing the process has been made by Weingreen (1976), whose "Saul and the Habiru *" (1967) already exhibited a flair for storytelling. Indeed, to outline his project in a somewhat more exact idiom than he himself uses, he would integrate not just cross-legal but crossBiblical with crosscultural developments within a single imagined tale. For his enchainment of the threefold "Hebrew" series in I Samuel 13-14 carries over to our legal trio. So, in resumption, does the license of reshuffling the Masoretic givens and name-bearers, this time across books, whose canonical order allegedly hides from view the true writing prehistory, the chronology of genetic installments. If you both run the generic domains together and order the data anew, the overall narrative of distribution yielded thereby will go through the following stages, with (3) as pivot or peripety: (1) A band of "Hebrew" (i.e., Hab/piru) mercenaries from Trans-Jordan left the Philistines for Saul during the war of independence. (2) In grateful remembrance, the contemporary writers of Exodus instituted a law privileging the Hab/piru class as a whole over all slaves: (legal) manumission for (national) liberation. (3) By the Deuteronomist's time, a fortiori Jeremiah's, this measure for measure had gone the way of its beneficiaries. "Not only had the habiru* disappeared from the scene as a class of society but, apparently, all knowledge of their former existence had been lost." (4) Instead, therefore, ibri "had curiously come to designate an Israelite," in ostensible agreement with such landmarks and prooftexts as "Abram the ibri." (5) This mistaken identity in turn caught the Deuteronomic jurist between the Exodus restriction and the Levitical prohibition of the fellow native's enslavement. So (6) his own variant wriggles in midrash-like fashion to harmonize the opposites, tempering, in effect overriding the earliest inherited Code's warrant for Hebrew slavery with the next's spirit of fraternity. The resultant "development of, or advance upon, the existing laws" centers in "the entry of an Israelite into the service of another Israelite not as a slave but as a bound servant." (7) Jeremiah endorsed the Deuteronomic recasting, now become the authorized interpretation of the ordinance. (Weingreen 1976: 133ff.) Does this extensive and engaging story make a credible history of the genesis? Definitely not, for the tale is as tall as it is long. We need only recall the strength of the objections to (1)-(2) and (4)-(7), detailed in the foregoing and the present chapter, respectively. They suffice to untie
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(often more than once) every link in the chain on either side of the pivot, which must accordingly fall with its antecedents and consequents. I will nevertheless single it out for closer inspection, because its rationale change owing to "lost" cultural knowledgeflits through other variants of the genetic diachrony behind the canon. To recall the storied antecedents first, the point of departure (1) compounds intrinsic unlikelihood with a lack of power to generate (2) even on its own hypothesis. Of all reconstructions of the war in I Samuel 13-14, it claims most for the third party but delivers least. Weingreen's exigency of moving the Hebrew/Hab/piru troops from bank to bank and from camp to camp so uses up the Samuel series, as already argued, that no item is left to narrate their participation in the fighting. And if no actual assistance to Israel, then no motive for grateful remembrance by Israel. With such causal discontinuity from within the fancied chain of events, how would the tale start? We may lay aside further questions, more external (e.g., what becomes of the Nuzi source, the code/contract twinship, nowhere operative and apparently stillborn?) or vexed (e.g., whether the rebellion against the Philistines under the monarchy preceded Exodus's ancient Covenant Code). Still less, passing to the consequents, need we dwell on the, I trust, familiar glaring holes in phases (4)-(7). These include the assumption that Exodus itself refers to outsiders; the equivocation that Leviticus forbids enslavement among insiders; the neglect to bring out that Deuteronomy preserves both the six-year term and the scenario of its indefinite, lifelong extension, or that Jeremiah never rages against Jerusalem for keeping "slaves and bondwomen" within the Exodus-old term. Let us rather concentrate on (3), the pivot forged to explain (or, narratively, generate by way of peripety) the mid(sup)posed sea changes in group reference, along with the attested changes in law. This all-important premise asserting the intervention of collective amnesia is only more speculative about what happened, not more tenable, not even logically. Assuming for the sake of argument both that the Hab/piru were a living reality for Exodus (dated to the early monarchy) and that by the Deuteronomist's time (centuries later) they had vanished from the earth, what would follow? Nothing like the inference that all inner cultural knowledge, and so all crosscultural designation, of them had been lost as well in the process. Indeed, there is counterevidence galore in the ancient and the modern world's annals of intergroup retrospection. The Jews are of course best known, yet on no account exclusively programmed, for keeping alive the memory of friend and foe. The Etruscans long haunted Rome; the British still invoke the Druids; the medieval Khazars have never been forgotten in Eastern Europe, or else the unlamented Soviet Union would hardly take such measures as archaeological
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vandalism and academic censorship to exorcise their ghosts, who nevertheless lived on to see its downfall. (In their case, the boomerang effect of Moses' and, parodically, the Israelites' violent removal from Egypt carries over to the time axis: out of sight is not perforce out of mind, and forcing them into unity may well ask for the return of the repressed.) Nearer home, the Hittite Epic of Naram-Sin evokes the SA.GAZ of his day, in the millennium before (Bottéro 1954: no. 71; cf. no. 6). And one neo-Assyrian text speaks of "Hab/piru *" as late as 670 B.C., four centuries after their disappearance (Bottéro 1954: nos. 134-35, 167, but see idem 1972:20): an interval, or memory span, comparable to that extending from the "Hebrews" of Saul's or David's age to Jeremiah's. Whatever the original reference of "Hebrews," moreover, it is still unlikelier to have been forgotten in the law's Israelite transmission down the ages.29 The neo-Assyrian Hab/piru text, as it happens, bears on divine statues; but the Israelite trio records a divine statute and in divine language at that. This remains constant across all variations, with a particular emphasis on memory. From Exodus through Deuteronomy to Jeremiah, the lawgiver speaks in the voice of God, to whom a thousand years are but as yesterday, and impresses on his audience the need for a matching long perspectiveabove all, significantly, in the discourse contexts that historians charge with oblivion. Exodus alone separately tells about the Hebrews in Egypt and provides for the Hebrews to come in Israel, taking their continuity as read. The Deuteronomist not only evokes but thematizes the Hebrew's one-time bondage, presenting himself as keeper and arouser of collective memory: "Thou shalt remember that thou weft a slave in the land of Egypt and that the Lord thy God redeemed thee; therefore I command thee this thing today" (15:15). And Jeremiah's God attacks the Judaeans not so much for their amnesia (they did free "the Hebrews" when the law suited them) as for its coming and going at pleasure: for the breach of covenant made with their ancestors "when I brought them out of the land of Egypt" (34:12-17). Whatever the tricks played by or with memory among the audience, the speaker never forgets who's who in Exodus's historicized law. Furthermore, as Jerusalem's memory comes and goes, so, typically, does Weingreen's premise regarding loss of knowledge. Elsewhere in the same book he affirms the exact opposite: "In a language words may undergo some changes in meaning with the passage of time. Yet in purely legal terminology the conservative influence of tradition tends to preserve original concepts of verbs, nouns, and adjectives," even from Biblical to Rabbinic times (1976:101). In fact, the Janus-faced argument penetrates the very crux under discussion. His essay on I Samuel explicitly brackets Deuteronomy with Exodus as commemorators of the Hab/piru alliance: the version providing for gifts in release, "to enable them to begin an independent
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life," even shows the deeper gratitude (1967:65-66). 30 Is the law's memory, then, sieve-like or elephantine? Its thrust (force, diachrony) innovative, even revolutionary, or conservative? Its wording polysemous, to the limit of semantic incompatibility over the ages, or univocal? Maybe both, yet certainly not as and when a latter-day analyst in trouble would have it jump one way or the other. Toward a Fresh Start in the Reconstruction of Legaliterary Culture In what follows, the memory vs. oblivion issue will loom large as we trace the thread of Hebrewness running through the canon, across time, space, political arenas, forms and increments of collectivity, generic and genderic boundaries, such as the law's. The Bible not only preaches memory, I hope to demonstrate, but also practices exemplary arts of memory. They are deemed essential to the nation's existence (rise, growth, health, survival) under the covenant: so essential that the national state, and much else besides, founders in Jeremiah on the nation's disremembrance of her origins. Jerusalem could stand, and withstand Babylon's might, were it not for the rupture of "Hebrew" solidarity, forged in Egypt, then codified at Sinai. Nor does the sense of collective identity, even in later exilic ("Jewish") reforging, quite outlive the self-betrayal and its punishment. This directly opposes Ernest Renan's theory (in 1993 [1882]: esp. 10ff., nowadays followed by, e.g., Gellner 1987, Smith 1991: e.g., 126-27) that a nation's emergence turns on a shared amnesia, whereby to will itself into a new form of life. Little wonder Renan finds no sign of a nation in antiquity (any more than do others trapped in their own definitional circularities); and his further requirement of a glorious past (1993:19) would also disqualify Israel from nationhood by the inglories she uniquely and canonically remembered. At present, though, the question is not which ethnophilosophy of (legal) history answers to the truth, or even to the Bible's vision of truth. It is, instead, how to apply in reason (and, if necessary, modify) whichever you believe to fit the case of sequenced bondage laws. And what holds for memory (e.g., transmitted knowledge of Hebrewness) also holds for the larger issue affected by it: the (dis)continuity of meaning (e.g., between group-orientations) in the culture's passage through time. Instead of shuttling at will between the extremes, our histories must adhere to the basic rules of interpretation and evidence, which the plainest offenders are not likely to dispute in principle. When the same term recurs in the same (con)text of the same tradition, here enshrined and marked off within the Book, continuity is presumed unless overthrown: the onus of proof falls on whoever burdens the refrains (Hebrew, slave, hopshi*) with a diachronic change of meaning, let alone of ethnosocial typology under
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God's law. Nor does further surmise made out of whole cloth, and inevitably ex hypothesi, count as such proofnot the Biblical jurist's failure of knowledge, not his deliberate misreading of a precursor text through chauvinism, not the advances and reforms evolved by his society. Only independent evidence counts, poetic or otherwise, of the kinds I have been adducing all along to verify, elaborate, explain the presumed continuity, and will soon deploy afresh in relating the threefold law of "Hebrew" manumission to the overall Law of "Hebrew" (De)nomination. Judged by these rulesthe presumptual and the evidentiarythe bids for "Hebrew/Hab/piru" analogy are all found wanting, yet to inversely proportioned degrees. The tiny minority that would immobilize the nexus down to Jeremiah enjoys at least the virtue of consistencyof semantic persistence across the centuries as well as the cultures. And with the synchronism pushed to such an extreme, no room is left for any, or any strategic, diachrony. If no bondage code, as Lewy heroically generalizes, lapsed into "misinterpretation of the biblical sources" (1957:6), then what tale remains to tell about the postNuzi referent groups, the Hebrewed and the Hebrewing, dealt with by the law? If any, the tale would bear on the fixture of their sociolegal (op) position master vs. servant, perpetuated to Judah's undoingnot on its flip into co-nationality. Only, needless to repeat, absolute (synchronic) consistency incurs (diachronic) havoc, self-division not excluded. Even on its own absolutist ground, Lewy's counsel of despair betrays a strange irony, and one reminiscent of the Janus-faced arguments wielded by the opposite camp, whether middle ground or minimalist. There, in the tales spun at the barrier to the endurance of ibri's underclass identity over the testimonia, the law freely oscillates between the conservative and the innovative poles, or between retentiveness and oblivion; here, to keep ibri stable ("unifocal") in reference, co-reference, cross-reference over the ages and the books, yehudi must turn instable, polarized ("duocentric") on this very class/nation axis of grouping, within a single age and book. On the other hand, projecting any of the three "Hebrew" bondage laws from the synchronic onto the diachronic dimension catches the projector between evils. As already shown, the attempt to compromise on a Pentateuchal unity of outside origin and referenceboth imported, the latter denationalized has the worst of all possible bad worlds. It inherits the maximalist's trouble with the Hab/piru-ing of Exodus law, aggravated by Deuteronomy; and it exchanges the irresistible pressures against analogizing Jeremiah, in his turn, for the embarrassment of forcing the prophet's reference inside: a break with tradition that amounts to a legal mutation, or, in narrative terms, a peripety by deus ex machina after a thousand years of stasis. (Or longer, if the Document, as well as the class term, precedes Nuzi.) The fable of social identity, allegedly enduring across the Orient, then comes to entail
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a fable of identity abruptly recast (mistaken, misremembered, counterread) by and into nationalism within Israel's culture. Even if the argument for the Hebrew's initial outsidership were not too shaky to stand anyway, its tailpiece would bring it down and, where tacked on at all, does. Therefore, to pull the shift one law-code back, into the Pentateuch itself, will not improve the compromise hypothesiseither the analogy, whose range now shrinks, or the story, which accordingly lengthens except for averting the wrath of Deuteronomy. On the better-little-than-nothing principle, though, every averted loss appears to count for gain. The majority view bows to the weight of this or that postExodus evidence, yet would save at least Exodus itself for the Hab/piru by deferring the law's interest in the ethnic "Hebrew": at the expense of breaking the presumption of continuity at the earliest juncture thereafter. 31 No doubt, either twofold composite entails a legal history more eventful by far (in memory, agenda, priorities, openness to developments within the culture at large) than the uncompromising alternative: the fixture of Nuzi-like legislation almost a millennium after Nuzi and half a millennium after the Hab/piru's disappearance. But the more eventful scenario is not the more probable, either in the abstract or on the data. And having exemplified the unlikeliness of the one articulated overall story as history, let me end by restressing the extremism of the dynamic, that is, of the interposure, on which all its sharers in compromise build and founder. However skeletal, theirs is a narrative of what I called mutation (as distinct from evolution) or peripety (rather than progress) in the Bible's group reference, with epochal corollaries beyond the law. Of course, our world-making accommodates even the unexpected, in art, life, faith, theory, empirical modelformation. Stories are entitled to their reversals, as culture to its throwbacks and iconoclasms or nature to its mutants. (I have myself charted such reversals throughout, from the nation's birth in Exodus to the intergroup masterplot to Moses' tortuous psychogenesis to the vicissitudes of the I Samuel trio between the warring groups.) Wherever a chasm opens up, in short, a quantum leap over it conceivably ensues. The art of fiction itself, however, would object to a writer's "assuming" the chasm and the leap alike: to his inventing the one (e.g., the Hebrew/Hab/piru vs. Israel polarity) without motivating the other (the all-ethnocentric peripety), as befits its surprise value, let alone their joint claim to truth. Anything may have happened in history, the nation's and the national literature's; but it scarcely follows that anything goes in our reconstruction of either's history. To concoct possibilities as a staple of research is to emulate the Crawleys in Vanity Fair, living well on nothing a year. We must rather go by the probabilities of the evidence, internal, external, comparative, negative, positive, legal, narrational, ideological, multi-
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generational. And it is high time for bridge-builders to acknowledge that, wishful romancing apart, the Hab/piru never comes on the law's stage nor even peeps from behind the scenes. With all the lore and license invested by now in bringing him forward, his exclusion approaches certainty. Come to that, ineligibility for the role would be a verdict preferable to exclusion: were it not for the scholarly investment and advertising over the decades, he would never become conspicuous for his absence on or below the surface. (For our part, we would then forfeit all the heuristic gains made in laying him to rest, which will soon exhibit anew their constructive aspect; yet the richest learning procedure is quite another matter than the truth, within or beyond the frame of discourse.) Nor does the alternative, ethnonational candidate win merely by default. The evidence converges from all quarters, some just adumbrated thus far, to establish the "Hebrew slave" as yet another member of the inner circle, like each of his namesakes before, after, and, most thematically, in Egypt.
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8 In-Group Servitude between Yes and No The Laws Rhetoric of Deterrence If Hebrew servitude is impossible to prettify by wrenching the referent outside the elect home circletoward Abrahamite or Eberide or Hab/piru identity, the local patriot's or the comparatist's way, synchronically or diachronically then we must come to terms with the referring term itself. The question of uneasy difference in coreference now faces us straight, like the angel athwart Balaam's path. The "Hebrew" of the law-trio being an "Israelite" or "Judaean/Jew," as throughout the narrative, why not call him so, plainly and up-to-dately? Why degrade him, instead, short only of the ultimate insult? Representing members of the we-group as "Egyptian" (Exodus 2:19) or ''Canaanite" (Ezekiel 16:3, 45-58) is the worst ethnocultural putdown on Israelite record, because it projects onto the elect the antitype's image; 1 "Hebrew" is the next worst, because perverted by the antitype into the elect's stereotypic vict-image. Which means the very worst in usage co-referential, as against erroneous or figurative, vis-àvis the nation's ethnicon. To complicate the issue, this does more than repeat once again what we have been asking all along about the inglorious throwback. Generically, one would credit the law with an even greater strictness than the rest of a national literature in adverting to its own people in its own language and theirs. Normatively, the law assumes the voice of the highest authority, Moses', hence ultimately God's, and the storyteller's (quite unmediated in the Jeremiah frame). But these have proved, in word and deed, the highest celebrators of freedom: at God's own hands, the value has received top billing ever since the creation of man as a free agent in his image and has only grown more perceptible along the chain of election running down (or, in teleological eyes, up) to Israel. Their voices, instead of legalizing Hebrew bondage, realizing the hetero-stereotype, and amid Israel at that, would therefore be expected to denounce it, or at least to shun the codename that they attack elsewhere, among the nations. Hebrew-grammatically, what's more, the legal name-callings belong to the fourth
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discourse pattern, where the referent and reference groups not only co-extend but co-occupy the inset stage. As already explained, in chapter 6, the de-nomi-nation looks especially odd because of the all-Israelite homogeneity of the parties to the communication: quoters, speakers, addressees, as well as referents. On the face of it, the lawdiscourse involves no foreign voice (or mind) to originate the heteroculturalism and rationalize its bias, nor any insider constrainable into lowering self-translation, nor even any preExodus time-frame to moderate the departure from the proprieties of national sel.f-reference. If the problematics of Hebrewness is yet more acute than usual, however, the voluminous commentary on the slave texts is blinder, dealer, and wilder. It makes assumptions, invents cruxes, espouses values, and picks quarrels so alien to the textual reality as to confuse everything: the framework, the issues, the wording itself. Unsurprisingly, besides high critical parallelistic attentions, this law has come in for an inordinate amount of exegetical and source-analytic violence. From the sole of the foot to the head, as it were, there is no soundness in it, only bruises and sores and bleeding wounds. In the received version's bruisedness, the law-trio apparently forms a companion piece to the I Samuel 13-14 narrative trio integrated with the same discourse matrixuntil you look for the reasons. Here, the wonder is rather how little these pretexts behind the pre-texts on offer concern the discoursive impropriety of "Hebrew." The wounds, like their macroscopic counterparts in parallel-hunting under the influence of Nuzi, have been inflicted without cause. To focus and meet the genuine difficulties, from the synchronic to the evolutionary, the text needs resaving, this time in its finer, "microscopic" articulations. Saving the Texture First and foremost, the exordium cries out for reinstatement in its difficult reading. "If thou buyest a Hebrew slave": the laconism of the opening clause, four words in the original, is in inverse and unmatched proportion to the ado made about it. From whole to parts, from verb to noun phrase, from pronominal subject to direct object, the protasis has long exercised commentators, who often share nothing beyond their disregard for the text's workings, especially the "bicultural" rhetoric of the law. This negative ground will draw together the crossculturalist in quest of Nuzian and/or Canaanite interlinkages and the unicultural patriot, the source critic, high or low, and the Rabbinic traditionalist. To understand and evaluate the ado, let us consider the elements of the if-sentence in their given order.
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From the Hebrewgram's viewpoint, the direct address ("thou") sharpens the incongruity of the discourse in bringing the addressee, and indirectly the speaker, into the picture, so as to foreground their group identity with the enslaved "Hebrew." To the participants' discomfort, the text enunciates the bond that the Covenantal law-context implies. (Were he left unmanifested in the language, the auditor might as well be, or include, the foreigner of the second imaging-pattern.) But this extra rubabsent from the analogous "Hebrews" of I Samuel 13-14, who undergo ethnocentrist low censorship even sonever ails the critics. For many source analysts, instead, the pronominal subject "thou," and with it often the composition of the entire if-sentence, is at odds with ''the homogeneous casuistic style characteristic of the first part of the Covenant Code": they ("we") would rather "expect to find the introductory formula here in the 3rd person singular, future tense, as befits the objective style of this collection" (Japhet 1986:7071). This expected text has duly been "found," and pronounced "original," along two lines of reconstruction. The earlier and less famous, Jepsen's, is content to replace the second person by a generic, indefinite noun: "If a man buys a Hebrew slave" (1927:56). Whereas Alt's tampering with the pronoun carries over to the rest of the sentence units and to the sentential whole: "If a Hebrew man sells himself." In Exodus 21:2, he contends, the second person in the sentence 'If you buy a Hebrew slave' is particularly out of place; it is obviously introduced to follow the preceding passage (not xxi.1, but xx.24ff.) and can be easily seen to be secondary from the fact that it is not carried on at all into the following verses, where there is ample opportunity for its use. The difficulty cannot be removed simply by changing the second into the third person, as Jepsen . . . suggests . . . 'Supposing someone buys a Hebrew slave'; for this would give a very awkward change of subject between this conditional clause and the main clause that follows: 'He shall be a slave for six years' would introduce at the same time a suspicious change of emphasis from the master to the slave, whereas the following verses, up to xxi.3 inclusive, are so worded that they refer to the slave alone. (Alt 1989 [1934]:93n. 28) On inspection, this classic argument leveled at the Masoretic text fails not only on its data and premisesaccepted even by opponentsbut along with them. Generic style has fallen victim to the package dealer's hunger for immutable surface order (e.g., for a taxonomy that correlates genre with deixis) as much as have the lexical choices (including the codename "Hebrew") already found remarkably protean in the narrative. Case law
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thus needs to be delivered from the shotgun marriage of casuistic to pro-nominal style: the grammar of "If . . . then," for example, to the reference by "he," and accordingly the Code to an implicit but exclusive judiciary audience. Among other gains, saving the law-type's flexibility in person-assignment is to save the rhetoric of person variously, and exemplarily, built on it throughout this law-trio. I will now concentrate on Exodus, for the Deuteronomy text saves itself from either rewrite into "man": anything other than ''I-to-you" immediacy in law-giving on the Jordan would break the strategic thread of the inset Moses-to-Israel communication. On six grounds the Masoretic pronominalized addressee-centeredness (or addrecentricity, as I call for short [1983a] the speaking ego's anchorage in his communicational partner) repulses the objective import, and with it the laityexcluding orientedness. Among these counterarguments, one is substantive and principled, five more "stylistic." On the level of the represented world, the objective "If a Hebrew man sells himself" would play havoc with the law's meaning, cast, application, and spirit in admitting a foreign buyer. Improbably, Exodus Hebrew law would then run counter to the Exodus Hebrew narrative of redemption from the alien; it would bracket two "sale" contingencies that the non-Hebrew Leviticus ordinance itself distinguishes in redemptive terms (25:39-46, 47-55); and it would part ways with Deuteronomy's uncensorable ethnocentricity. So transformed, the law would even mar Alt's desired tie-up with Nuzi, where the Hab/piru always sells himself to the citizenry. "Thou" is required to keep the transaction, as well as the communication, inside the Israelite circle. (Even Josephus, who does replace the second by the third person in quoting the law to a heteroculture, at least adds a phrase to identify the buyer as compatriot and so encircle the deal [Antiquities 4.273]). Now for the stylistics. First, if the Exodus direct address ("thou") is "obviously introduced to follow the preceding passage," this datum argues for, rather than against, the text, because the second person maintains the continuity of the discourse. All the more so if you note three additional factors. The antecedent "thou"-passage stretches from the beginning of chapter 20, the Decalogue, to that of chapter 21, the law-Code's superscription ("These are the mishpatim which thou wilt put before them"); discourse continuity is especially wanted at the point of transition to the Code; and it assumes a high value below, in the geneticist's own analysis of person-assignment ("change of subject" or "emphasis") within the slave law itself, so that he cannot have it both ways. Reading in sequence, therefore, "we would expect to find the introductory formula here" exactly as it appears: not "in 3rd" but in 2nd "person singular." Second, that imagined expectancy does not arise in reverse either, through hindsight wisdom; nor merely from the tenacity of the anticipatory
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effect, complete with unifying force, generated by the antecedents to the "Hebrew" law. Contrary to Alt's statement of "fact," the opening's pro-nominal choice looks in two directions. Is the second person ''not carried on at all into the following verses"? We encounter it both in passing (21:13, 14, 23, 22:18) and throughout the Code's final section, which resumes it from an old-new starting point: "A sojourner thou shalt not wrong and thou shalt not oppress, for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt" (22:21ff.). A thematic plus formal chiasm, you might say, working for strong continuity across whatever intervenes: the direct address emerges afresh (and, rhetorically, heightens the pressure on "thou . . . you") where the oppressed is liable to turn oppressor. (Those surfacings of the addressee as Covenant-sharer also defeat the tendency to restrict the Covenant Code, or its homogeneously addressee-less style, to Exodus 21:2-22:16. The two claims, both circular and the latter demonstrably false even so, alternate in Japhet 1986:70-72, for instance. Moreover, kindred delimitations often presume that Codes definitionally, hence as a rule tacitly, communicate with the judiciary alone: "These enactments [21:12-22:17] are the nearest that Biblical law has to a code addressed to judges rather than a sermon to the nation" [Phillips 1984:53]. Observe how the one redrawn limit, 21:12, immediately follows the slave law, and the other, 22:17, precedes equally "nation"-addressed laws, regarding the Egypt-like sojourn inter alia. Between these limits, conversely, observe that all the thou's address "judges." With the circularity complete, the assertion becomes unfalsifiable, the definition of "a code" as true as any tautology.) Third, were the abridgement of the antecedents and the misstatement about the sequel both true, it would not yet follow that the pronoun "is easily seen to be secondary," i.e., unoriginal. Shifts in the pronominal reference to the same individual hardly violate the normwhether between different laws (as just instanced from the Covenant Code itself) or within a single law (as throughout Exodus's very first one, that of the Passover in 12:1ff.). The license actually runs to other genres of the Bible and to extraBiblical writing (cf. Paul 1970:46n. 7). Even an emendation as modest as Jepsen's "If a man buys a Hebrew slave" therefore labors under a false ideal of stylistic homogeneity. Actually, and funnily enough, the veto on the second person is in force not in the law, either casuistic or apodictic, but in the narrative genre, with results that will soon emerge. (For now, see Poetics, esp. 120ff.) As it happens, the companion piece in I Samuel 13-14 again underscores the difference. Foreseeably, by generic rule, the teller never addresses there either ourselves or those he calls "Hebrews." As quoter, though, he might allow Saul to speak otherwise, yet doesn't: he rather has him trumpet the call to the defectors in the third person"Let the Hebrews hear"thus targeting without officially addressing the message.
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Fourth, nor does an "original" third-person exordium in the passive voice or Alt's reflexive ("If a Hebrew slave is sold/sells himself") ensue from the premise that the law casts the slave as grammatical subject, as the agent who "serves . . . comes in . . . goes out," etc. On this assumption, Alt charges Jepsen's above variantwhich shifts the protasis into the third person but retains the active moodwith an offense against discourse continuity: ''a very awkward change of subject between the conditional clause and the main clause . . . from the master [who 'buys'] to the slave [who 'serves']." Very awkward or not at all, a counterexample to this fiat of unchanging topicality occurs as early as the next bondage sublaw, "If a man sells his daughter to be a maidservant, she shall not go out as the slaves go out" (21:7; cf. Jepsen 1951:57, Japhet 1986:72). But to refute the extremist is not yet to validate Jepsen's modest proposal or the inference from the second person to the text's secondariness in general. For, within the same chapter, the next instances of direct address exhibit the same change of topic and person as in the opening law, e.g., "If a man makes a willful attack upon his neighbor to kill him treacherously, from my very altar shalt thou take him to his death" (21:13, 14). In its stronger or weaker variantas an argument from the bondage law's topical or from the Code's stylistic ("objective") homogeneitythe challenge to the given pronominal distribution misfires. Fifth, similarly with the premise regarding the law's focusthe deep (thematic, ideological) as well as manifest (grammatical) topic. Even some opponents of Alt endorse "the fact that the slave is the subject of the law," if not necessarily "the grammatical subject of the opening conditional clause" (Japhet 1986:72). But this assignment of subjecthood goes counter to the transactional or relational dynamism informing the exordium, then developed in the sequel (and manipulated, we shall find, by the rhetoric throughout). As a transitive verb, "buy" is logically tri-valent, regardless of surface linguistic form, or mood, or person. It entails no fewer than three termsthe buyer, the bought, and the seller, as Deuteronomy's "sell" does by the converse logicopen to various permutations. Of these terms, Exodus law has chosen to manifest in action the first two. And since they are both human, either readily qualifies for the roles of grammatical and discoursive subject alike, as well as necessarily implying a partner in the actual fulfillment of the role. Neither party, therefore, can monopolize attention at the outset, and the ensuing law freely proportions the limelight, even from one if-subplot to another. For that matter, the surface grammar of the opening verse, with its shift of subjecthood between conditional and main clause, already mirrors this underlying spirit of relationality or, more exactly, bilaterality. Oddly enough, were he less intent on the package deal, Alt himself could predict the texture from his own generalization about "the character of
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the casuistic law as a whole, concerned as it is only with achieving a just balance between the claims of one man and another" (1989:96). Nor has the verb of the conditional clause been allowed to signify what it plainly, or lexically, does. In its very plainest sense, "buy" might well grate upon sensitive ears: a Hebrew (and later worse, "a Hebrew brother") for sale, as even a Hab/piru never is? One might also understand if its lexical polysemy, opening the door to all forms of acquisition, were found troublesome in that it renders the "buying" too easy (as well as under-specified): you can apparently get hold of him any which way. But such normative misgivings hardly show in criticism. Rather, the verb's plainness or indeterminacy thwarts a host of concerns and predispositions brought to the law over the millennia. Consequently, "buy'' (usually along with the Deuteronomic, or the Alt-inspired, "sell") is a target for another kind of anti-protean violence than that exercised on "thou," not so much genetic and stylistic as semanticin the form of limitation or specialization of meaning. An interference that stops short of the letter of the law, it has naturally had the wider appeal and in fact arises with the ancient Rabbis (e.g., Qiddushin 14b). In the mainstream of their tradition, still ongoing, the limited sense is inferred by analogy and proximity to the Code's ruling on the thief: if unable to make restitution, "he shall be sold for his theft" (22:2). Given the verb's limited sense, a shrunk bondage typology ensues. By "Hebrew slave," the Exodus-Deuteronomy law would then exclusively refer to such an offender "bought" from (or "sold" by) the court for a fixed period against his will. In contrast, Leviticus deals with a penniless Israelite, who "sells himself" to keep body and soul together until the Jubilee. This time-honored specialization has little to recommend it, not even internal coherence. For example, "sell" hardly changes between Deuteronomy and Leviticus: same root (mkr), conjugation (Niph'al), subject (the fraternal bondman), indirect object ("to thee"). Why, then, should its meaning divide between the passive and the reflexive, between forced sale and self-sale? Why, indeed, should it undergo semantic limitation either way? (Never mind the oddity of attaching either time constant, the six years or the Jubilee cycle, to an economic variable, the amount of theft or the degree of poverty.) Strangest of all, if the Exodus-Deuteronomy compatriot may after six years enslave himself for life, how to deny him the option of temporary service, for a term shorter than Leviticus's cycle? Furthermore, assuming this partition among books, the immediate complement to the Exodus "Hebrew slave""If a man sells his daughter" would analogously but improbably govern forced theft-slavery. If anything, a sale under economic duress, Leviticus fashion, provides much the likelier context. But there is really no need to choose one exigency over another:
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the "buying" of the slave and the "selling" of the daughter, instead, work to enact the same (multiform) transaction from opposite ends. Again, turning from the letter to the spirit, why grant the criminal the privilege of earlier release than the destitute, against the Rabbis' own value scheme? The favor shown to the Hebrew/Hab/piru outgroup at the Leviticus insider's expense, on the crossculturalist premise, recurs here within the native circle. In brief, the interlinkage of slavery type with verbal choice goes the way of that between case law and third person. Modern analysts have scarcely given the verbs of transfer a fairer hearing. Some echo the Rabbinic limitation to theftbondage (e.g., Jacob 1992:612, Westbrook 1988:125-26, or, with Leviticus itself drawn in, Harrison 1980: 227, Hartley 1992:432-33, 441, 444-45). Others relegate the "Hebrew or Hebrewess" to a class of Hab/piru or Hab/pirulike Israelites (e.g., Ellison 1973:30-35, Riesener 1979:125, Wright 1990:253-259): all landless, they cannot avert slavery, whereas the Leviticus Israelite ultimately returns to his holding. Whatever the similarity in the immediate antecedent to the transactionpoverty, court order, and so onthe framework yet varies. Others still redivide the Exodus and the Deuteronomy law-codes by the circumstances of bondage they envisage ("ordinary" vs. "exceptional," according to Driver 1965:183) or by the Hebrew's status at the time (bonded man changing hands vs. free man selling himself, as von Rad 1966:14, 107 has it). Most popularly, however, the Exodus-Deuteronomy-Jeremiah law-series gets tied to debt-servitude. Not just one or two items (as some of the above alternatives might have it) but the whole "Hebrew'' set in contrast to Leviticus; nor a possible form of transfer but a constant. The more rigid the fixture, however, the less defensible. In the previous chapter, I have already indicated the semantic grotesqueness of reading debt-slavery into "Hebrew," quite apart from its absence in the name-bearer's annals. Where put forward by Nuzi analogists, such reading undoes itself from without as well: no Hab/piru on record is a debt-slave either, and some may well have gone Hab/piru to escape this condition. In fact, the Nuzi agreements themselves have nothing to do with buying and selling, much less as a compulsory resolution of the Hab/piru's insolvency. The alien, often a newcomer, enters into service of his own free will to obtain socioeconomic security: an exchange voluntarily contracted by either party on a basis other than financial. If debt-slavery cannot attach to the group name, as a semantic feature of "Hebrew," it can yet theoretically underlie the law's scenario, as a presupposition that motivates and restricts the contingency of Hebrew bondage. 2 In the most elaborate version of this theory, Chirichigno's book-length study (1993), the analogy replaces Nuzi by the alreadycited paragraph 117 of the Hammurabi Code. "To meet the obligation of a defaulted loan," the defaulter there is forced into "the surrender or sale of a de-
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pendent (i.e., wife, son or daughter)," barring himself, "since he was probably deemed essential to the existence of the family" (ibid.:218, 222). Exodus and Deuteronomy would correspondingly stipulate a threefold limitation: of the ground (debt) and the object (dependent, not paterfamilias), as well as of the term (six instead of three years). Though this reading and its outside anchorage depart from the Rabbis, the attempt at narrowing the law's scope bears a curious likeness to theirs. Take the argument mounted against the (differently restrictive) view that Exodus and Deuteronomy, along with Leviticus, envisage self-sale under financial pressure: "there is no reference to the necessities of life" (ibid.: 209), as if there were one to debt or to any specific constraint. Even Jeremiah, framing the law with an elaborate narrative, specifies none whatever: the fact and effect of enslavement loom large, exclusive of the cause. Again, the one-track scholars hardly improve on their Rabbinic competitors in all that regards the dovetailing of the law's two halves. The a fortiori inference from voluntary perpetual servitude (at a juncture where the debt, like the theft, has already been worked off) is no more answerable here. How in reason to codify the option for longer self-enslavement while precluding the shorter? And if you go by ordinal implication, then Deuteronomy does advance from the misfortune of indebtedness (15:1-11) to that of slavery (15:12-18), but Leviticus (25:35-38, 39-46) aligns those two scenarios into much the same law-plot. Post hoc propter hoc works for interCode as well as for local continuity, not disunity. The divisive measures unleashed on the key verb should be more reminiscent still. In Deuteronomy, allegedly concerned, like Exodus, with how insolvency necessitates "the sale of dependents by their family" to work off the obligation, sold has a passive meaning; while in Leviticus, where an indigent head of a household "is forced to enter into servitude with his family," it signifies reflexively (Chirichigno 1993:329-30). 3 This hair-splitting again follows ex hypothesi, and not without resistance at that: if self-sale involves the paterfamilias, then Exodus already juxtaposes the married with the single man in one verse (21:3) to level down the candidates and the walls fancied among Codes. The analyst's bipartition of the law quartet, the inconsistency, the circularity, the violence: all recur across the methods, the millennia, the specialized bondage models. Next we come to the heart of the trouble, and of my inquiry, which lies in the designation chosen for the object of purchase, ebed ibri. Neither of its components is universally welcome. "Hebrew," indispensable for cross-reference to Nuzi, has proved an obstacle to sundry Bible-centered readings: they find it difficult, if not to explain away the unusual term of group reference, e.g., as neutral in attitude (Durham 1987:320), or to rewrite it ("Israelite" in the Targum, ''compatriot" in Josephus),4 then to accept the
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referent's liability to bondage. Some thus identify "Hebrew" as "Abrahamite" or "Eberide." Others, who equate Hebrewness with Israeliteness, so distort the grammar and the meaning (even for Rabbis) as to project the attribute onto the native owner of an alien slave, now bought by a second native; or, taking the low-critical shortcut unthinkable to a Rabbi, delete the adjective ibri to keep the noun ebed for the alien (Jackson 1988:93). The routesvia change of grouping, syntax, wordingall lead to the same outcome: the insider shielded at the expense of the text. In turn, the very name of "slavery" may jar upon the apologist's hypersensitive ears. The heading commonly given to this part of the Exodus Code, "slave law," is then argued away as a misnomer: For the opening verse declares that there were no Hebrew "slaves." A person whose bondage is limited cannot be a slave. . . . These preliminary remarks were intended to prohibit Hebrew slaves. Every Israelite who had been led out of Egypt possessed the basic right (mish-pat) of personal freedom. . . . No special Hebrew term for "slave" exists. E-ved is a laboring servant, an underling, a worker, an official, but no concept of duration or ownership of his person was inherent in the word. (Jacob 1992:610-11; also Lauterbach 1949: III, 3n. 3, undercut by the midrash itself on the next page: "Slave . . . A term of opprobrium," attached to him by the law "against his will.") Not even the crossculturalist's quibbling on the word apropos of the enslaved Israelite "brother" of Leviticusdesigned to clear Exodus for Hebrew/Hab/piru occupancygoes so far as the ethnocentrist's operation on Exodus itself in the interests of the Hebrew co-national. Rendered nonexistent, forbidden, less than nominaldespite its explicit assignment and openness to perpetuationthe servitude turns all but honorary. Taken as a whole, moreover, this object phrase has been faulted on three grounds: one external, one crosstextual, and one purely internal. To the parallel-hunter's disappointment, "Hebrew slave" has no equivalent outside the Biblean absence nowhere more conspicuous than in Nuzi's Hab/piru service documents. They place the outside contractant's group identification, you will recall, before his free undertaking to enter into service: the two ideas phrasally conjoined here are kept asunder there. To some, their co-presence here is even more of a nuisance than the blank elsewhere. If, with Alt (1989:93ff.), you want to specify the Hebrew/ Hab/piru as a debt-slave, then half of the given phrase becomes redundant ("a debt-slave slave") and the leftover epithet, alone informative, cannot stand on its own. Regarding internal time-relations, the same object phrase appears to
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anticipate the deal's end because, strictly, the "Hebrew" counts as "a slave" after the act of "buying" only. One already senses this malaise behind the unorthodox exegesis cited (and dismissed) by the Rabbis: if the phrase applies to the slave of the Hebrew, then it would not be jumping the gun but stating a literal fact of pre-ownership at the moment when the object changes hands. This reading, although contrived to draw the slave out of the national ("Hebrew") circle, manages in the process to order the language into smooth temporality. Moderns unknowingly echo the diagnosisalong with the extraIsraelite reference, now to the Hab/piruin taking "slave" as a proleptic noun (Alt 1989:93-94n. 27, Noth 1966:177, or Lemche 1975:135). Among those who so take it, though, the best-known cure is to take it out: a shift not only from the hermeneutic to the source critical mode but also from syntactic rereading ("slave of a Hebrew," unfeasible with a Hab/piru) to lexical replacement. But does the substitute heal the patient? When Alt (ibid.) censors the text into "Hebrew man," the alleged "original version" eliminates all his difficulties at one stroke: the want of a Nuzi equivalent, the otiosity incurred by the law's confinement to the debt-slave, as well as the prolepsis. Or so it might appear. With the bridge repaired, the language rationalized, the verb reflexivized, the sequence naturalized, the admittance of the alien buyer ignored, all should be wellexcept that the rewriting must go yet further in order to harmonize the discourse with the theory of uniformly impersonal casuistic style. The very number of obstacles presented to the line of approach is a judgment by silent mass resistance. Green Light, Red Backdrop In Hebrewgrammatic matrix, those and kindred obstacles reveal their constructive face. Placed where they belong, the "difficult" law-features gain from the Law new validation and significance, purposive, artistic, unified within the item and the series, aligned with the running canonical theme. Not that the difficulties (except those already found imaginary) miraculously vanish. On the contrary, they are aggravated by the data's apparent ill-fit with Hebrew usages that we have been exploring since the preliminaries to chapter 7, indeed since chapter 6: by the unprecedented de-nomi-nation of the referent group, out of "Israel," in an all-Israelite and vernacular reference frame, built round the very idea of holy peoplehood. However, the continuity of this dissonance not only along the Exodus-Deuteronomy-Jeremiah series, nor only with the I Samuel 13-14 trioitself precedented by the law in canonical orderbut also with the thematic horror of slavery brings to mind the Hebrewgram's fourth pattern. Here,
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always on covenantal ground, "bi-cultural stigmatizing" arises, in the Pentateuch, and, having gone through a Monarchy Age episode that looks back on Exodus, will terminate, in Jeremiah's Pentateuch-quoting long retrospect. This does more than establish the order among variations on the oddest communicative set-up. The cut-off points differ from the Samuel middle in two further respects, whose weight and interrelation we will need to ascertain. The first is the difference between law and standard prose narrative, which will gradually turn out smaller and other than marked in common generic typologies. The second is the difference between affective subpatterns. Twice-branded "Hebrew" is at the heart of either. But there, during the monarchy trial, it serves as the core of a hidden in-group tale of shame punctuating an intergroup war, where the "Israelites" fight for liberty; here, of a rhetoric elaborated through an entire discourse, even a discourse series, to deter in-group enslavement by heaping shame on it notably in memory of intergroup analogues. Take the absence of law-enforcement machinery here, conspicuously verbalized in the preference for a nationwide "thou" over a judicial-centered style, addressive or tacit ("objective"), and dramatized in the helplessness of the Jerusalem Hebrews under their masters' tyranny. Does this absence leave the statute altogether forceless (short of divine intervention, retributive rather than corrective anyway)? Not in terms of the Hebrewgram, where we have found pattern after pattern exercising the power of words on agentsespecially of "Hebrew" to preventive effect. So Potiphar's wife, Pharaoh, the Philistines wielding the codename among their own to avert some danger. So, in reverse, Joseph narrating his abduction from "the land of the Hebrews," the midwives confronted with the angry Pharaoh, Miriam on the Nile: each deploys the rhetoric of solidarity with the Hebrew-caller in the interests of lifesaying. So again, across the shift from dialogic to interior discourse, the thought of ''Hebrews" as an impediment to the Egyptians' eating and to the young Moses' wholly identifying with the name-bearers. In the narrative variant of the fourth pattern itself, Saul's "Let the Hebrews hear!" warns his audience, and the teller his own, against slave-like treason. Accordingly, the nomistic discourse replaces law enforcement by a kindred verbal force, the rhetoric of bicultural deterrence. It applies to the elect assembly the stick of going Hamite for multiple, scalar prevention: of Hebrew bondage in the first instance, of oppression even in temporary bondage, and above all, of lifelong bondage, however voluntary. The ordinance having eschewed (for reasons to emerge) the machinery of impersonal coercive power, its dissuasive substitute cannot really prevent these evils. But then, unless the evils reach the oppressive Pharaonic limit, neither does it so much as categorically prohibit themif only because it allows that law must accommodate the exigencies of life, on pain of the
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Hebrew's very survival. Like the narrative of the kingship, the Code is grimly realistic, which also means finely artistic, in attacking what it thinks wrong: it spurns the soft options of beautifying taken by censorship, whether the local patriot's underplaying or the crossculturalist's displacement of harsh realities. (Easiest of all, needless to say, would be the conformist's blanket authorization of servitude or the idealist's unyielding prohibition.) Instead, the dissuader maneuvers throughout between Yes and No, between the legalized and the legitimate, between ethnocentricity and ethnocriticism, to the end of keeping down the offense against the ideal free society under God to an absolute minimum, to the barest necessities. "Red" through and through, the whole colors even the green lights flashed to the potential backsliders into the enemy's stereotype of Hebrewness. The backsliding would look "redder" yet than any historical precedent, because translated in every sense and role within an independent Israel. The twovaluedness with which the codename has been charged all along therefore reappears with an unpleasant shift toward a unity in disharmony: where Hebrews abandon their positive for their negative image among themselves, forked Israelite/Hamite bi-valence turns into convergent, bi-cultural devaluation. Here the suasive thrust as well as the substance of the three Hebrew enactments importantly vary from the Hebrewless Leviticus, set on lightening rather than hindering the brother's bondage. The details of the rhetorical strategy, complete with the variant inter-Code tactics, are the business of this chapter and, from a diachronic viewpoint, the next. Their unfolding will throughout occasion an overdue intergeneric comparison: with the suasive art of narrative proper, much the better known of the two since I programmatically illustrated its workings, rules, and repertoire from the Dinah tale (1973, Poetics 441ff.). Scripture's canonical unity, the intergeneric law/narrative cross reference within the Hebrewgram, the master plot's occurrence and concurrence in the two generic keys, all bespeak a fruitful comparison. In the process, we will also have occasion to ask why the rhetoric of the lawa vital aid to a normative and future-oriented but always possibly unenforceable discoursestill needs to come into its own. 5 "If thou buyest a Hebrew slave, six years he shall serve [lit., slave] and in the seventh he shall go out free for nothing." Besides their sequentiality, the protasis and the apodosis juxtapose on a number of levels, all affectively charged. One is conditional, the other categorical.6 One is short, the other long, indeed too short and too long for what they purport to say. The protasis is all too elliptic, since it never tells either what led to the act of "buyest" or in what the act consists. Narratively speaking, the law-action erupts without an exposition. In the complete absence of antecedents, and with them of minimum intelligibility and applicability, in
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the listening as in the reading, everyone addressed needs to close the gaps for himself, along lines to be soon explored. Meanwhile, note how the clause in the immediate sequel underlines this ellipsis and exigency by its very ostensible wastefulness. Given its first injunction, "six years he shall serve," the apodosis might dispense with the second. Instead, shifting from service to departure, it multiplies redundancies within redundancy: if "six," why ''in the seventh," and if "go out," precisely as just enacted in the Exodus, too, why both "free" and "for nothing"? The lawgiver would seem to advertise his distrust, to overspecify for insurance. In contrast, the protasis is now bound to appear underspecified, multigap, hurled out of the blue. Yet the sequence, I will argue, finds its equilibrium in the rhetoric: maximum pressure against enslavement, not least by its ominous darkening, and then, the undesirable having nevertheless materialized, for a clean break after the legal term. Even by itself, the "Hebrew slave" of the protasis must come as a rude shock to the audience in the Bible's world, at Sinai, as it must to the reader within the literary frame. Having just been delivered from their Hebrew servitude, the brand-new Israelites could never expect to find themselves so redescribed, much less prospectively resituatedleast of all by the deliverer (God and Moses rolled into one voice) in all-native communication envisaging an all-native reality,. Further, they have been exposed to victimage with vict-image, but always short of this full articulation of the Hamite sterotype of victimage: Joseph alone received it (Genesis 39:17) and even he from his mistress not his lord, still less from the Lord, and not in the vernacular or indeed to his face. To judge by the evidence, the auditors would never have heard the phrase before, in this of all forms of Hebrewgrammatic translation. (Nor would they have encountered "Hab/piru slave," nowhere attested in any form.) A compounded novelty with surprise value to match: the overt green light is designed to bring you up short, on pain of rushing into a thorny conditional. Inversely, the extant outside usage in reference to the crosscultural Other (whether or not deemed familiar) pinpoints the stigmatizing, dissuasive intent of the lawgiver within the culture. In the bondage framework, most notably, his preference of "Hebrew" over the co-referential but favorable "Israelite" reverses in effect the choice made by the imagined origin and equivalent: "At Nuzi Hapiru * is always written out in full and never with the ideogram SA.GAZ, which was rather pejorative in Mesopotamian eyes" (Cazelles 1973:9). Of the two grouping labels on hand, the Code opts for the bleaker, the contract for the brighter. If only by heuristic juxtaposition, the mirror image encapsulates the rhetorician's drift. Likewise defiant of wishful rewriting or euphemizing (Josephus or Tar-gum or postdater fashion) is the status-noun attached to the group adjective. While the extraBiblical documents feature Hab/piru who lord it over
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servants, among other underlings, "a Hebrew master" (as well as, on the national axis, "a Hebrew people") would be a contradiction in terms. And nowhere more so than here, due to the artful lexicalizing of the Hebrewgram's implicit social ("power") axis: the law in Exodus 21:2-6 goes out of its way to enhance the contrast between slave (ebed) and master (adon). Either status-term, cognates included, occurs four times; and to keep the symmetry exact, the lawgiver maintains a distinction between near-synonymous words for ownership: mastership (here always adon) vs. husbandship (baal ishsha, rather than adon, as in Genesis 18:12, or Judges 19:26). The slave may be or become an "owner'' under the latter title, never the former. A sheer verbal exercise? Hardly. The rifles make all the practical difference to entitlement at the crossroadsonce the bearers part ways in the seventh yearfor they determine who is whose. When it comes to the fate of the alien spouse given to the Hebrew in bondage"the wife and her children shall belong to her master [la'adoneha]" (21:4)the polarity of the two statuses gains a dramatic correlative in the ruling that he must leave her behind. A few nonMasoretic versions (the Samaritan, the Septuagint, the Vulgate) even substitute "his" for "her master": as if to write larger the point that, despite the universal law enunciated in Genesis 3:16, the slave has fallen so low that he is no master over his own wife. From this sustained attack, it emerges that the Bible translates and institutionalizes the phrase "Hebrew slave" to discourage the institutionalization of the practice. Either, it implies, can appear natural only in the eyes and the life of antitypical foreigners unnaturally playing the master. The strange term threatens whoever actualizes it in Israel with self-estrangement from his collective and heritage. If "Hebrew man/men" (itself, we discovered, startlingly arisen in Mosaic vernacular thought) bespoke the Egyptian-nurtured princeling's alienation from "his brothers" now outgrown along with his shuttleshow much more so "Hebrew slave" on the prophet's lips in addressing his brother Israelites as Lawgiver vis-à-vis possible "buyer" and bought. Still, barbed phrasing apart, has the idea of reversion to the "Hebrew" state ever occurred to the audience of exslaves? Yes and no, but the law infers the worst. In the three months that have elapsed since the Exodus, they have indeed thrice relapsed into slave mentality. First at the approach of Pharaoh's chariots, then in hungry retrospect on the fleshpots, then in thirsty murmuring, they wished themselves back in Egypt (Exodus 14:10ff., 16:2ff., 17:1ff.). A yearning under trial for the slave's security and comforts in a long-familiar exile, you might think, is not yet self- and brother-enslavement among one's own, let alone Egypt-style oppression. Scripture nevertheless views the persistence of the formera lingering Hebrewness unworthy of Israel, a throwback to the Hebrew who denounced the young Mosesas a predisposition and prelude to the latter. Nostalgia is a danger
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to nationality, and who knows the warning signal better than the homesick fugitive turned Code-giver? In the scenario of the collective future, therefore, the law makes the worst of the narrated collective past, rubbing in the bondage with vict-image to keep down their recurrence. The "redder" the agent-to-be's figure, and the squirming auditor's face, the less likely the if-action. But the startling key phrase does not operate alone, nor against the background of the recent, national past only. Without precedent in the Nuzi material, it does yet allude to the Hebrewgram's earlier set-ups, now repatterned, modernized, interiorized in legal translation. As enslaver- or enslaved-to-be, each addressee finds himself cast in a variety of specific unpleasant roles going back to Genesis history: the Brothers', Potiphar's, Potiphar's Wife's, Pharaoh's, together with Joseph's and his later collective analogue's. On either side of the fence, the auditors implicated in the law-scenario would be reenacting within the native orbit the multiple victim-age from which God extricated them, beginning with the prototypical "Hebrew slave." It is all déjà vu, or lu, except that the ancient intergroup history comes back with a peculiar shock effect when twisted inward in the law's retelling. The extent, detail, and power of these unsolicited returns will emerge as we go along, especially from the diachronic viewpoint built into the poetics (what I will call the mimesis of the law's genesis). But a first approach to the strategy, now viewable as a suasive and prospective art of memory, is in order here. Among other givens of the law's exordium, the traffic between past and future motivates afresh the untimely-looking noun in "Hebrew slave." What reads by itself like a proleptic anticipation doubles, if you only shed the atomist's cluster-mindedness, as an allusion to the leading ancient prototype; and the odder the surface prolepsis of bondage in one time-zone (future) and arena (native) and genre (law), the more indicated its reordering into precedent along diametrically opposed word-coordinates but within the same worldview. As it stands, the entire phrase harks back to its imposition on Joseph ("There came in to me the Hebrew slave") at the nadir of his fortunes: when enslavement made him vulnerable to attempted seduction, then to assault, then to character assassination without the privilege of self-defense, then to limitless imprisonment by the master. The evils clumped around "Hebrew slave" now transfer, or translate, from inter- to intra-cultural spacetime, from the Genesis narrative to the Exodus law, from memory to menace. After a fashion, then, the tacit Josephic precedent triggers its own, story-length prolepsis in the Mosaic audience's mind, with a view to deterring them from reenacting this follow-up in the world. In deterrent force, therefore, the echoing chain of events recalled also gives the Exodus law-text a perceptible edge over "a Hebrew man"a
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fortiori over the epithetless "man"into which some critics would emend it for smoothness. In fact, though the emendators neither hear the long-distance intergeneric echo nor would count it as evidence, the proposed substitute actually occurs earlier in the same tale: Potiphar's wife begins by enlisting "the men of the house" in her attack on the outsider, the "Hebrew man" brought "us" to "play with us'' (39:14-15). But it is the Hebrew's "slavery," not just the "manhood" entailed by it and invoked in her equality-feigning, ad hominem argument to "the men of the house," that generates the chapter of abuses which the law's rhetorician carries over in little. An extra measure of suffering for the old-new name-bearer, an extra burden of guilt for the prospective re-subjector. The wording adopted in the noun phrase bites deeper still if you recall the ascent from intergroup to international conflict proper. Here, Pharaoh wanted to denominate the slaves out of (hu)manhood altogether, and no sooner had Moses entered the arena than he (re)equalized "the Hebrew man" with "the Egyptian man." The youth having already improved on the Hamitism when himself still half-alienated, therefore, his older Israelized self's reversion to it now bespeaks his own intent, matching and dramatically motivating that of the all-authoritative communicators behind him. (Which also means that such echoes resume his biography as an affair with Hebrewness.) Become lawgiver, he would know the exact difference between the apparently co-referential variants and how to turn it (not least the associated polar roles) to the account of expressive in-group dissonance, mimetic, memorial, monitory. In "buy," the law again refers (in-group) future to (intergroup) past, with an artful change in the measures taken for long back-reference. The verb by itself hardly compares with the noun phrase in salience and "red" allusiveness; but then, owing to the logic of action, it trades on a felt causal minus to generate wonder about the ante-verb past, from the immediate fact of enslavement backward, from the surface happening downward. For the law-scenario jumps in medias res, without any antecedents or narrative exposition whatever. The ellipsis of why's even darkens the how's of the given: left without a cause, the effect ("buy") itself remains indeterminate. It is into these gaps in the legal narrative chain that the Rabbis have forced the thief and scholars the insolvent, each supplying his own mini-exposition by way of restrictive closure. But the law nowhere privileges such why's and how'sas it might so easily do by beginning at the beginningnor even validates them, among others, on anything like the grounds traditionally adduced. Given an open-ended verb in an open matrix, all local bids for determinacy are foredoomed. Instead, the omission sends us back to the recorded past for a gap-filling that has already materialized
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in the relevant ancestral history. There we find it, exactly where and as the present context can use it to advantage: Joseph was taken down to Egypt, and Potiphar, an officer of Pharaoh, the captain of the guard, an Egyptian man, bought him [wa'yyiqnehu] from the Ishmaelites who had taken him down there. (Genesis 39:1) The verb's literal echoing stretches the playback, in due order and always in shorthand, from the outset ("buy") to the crisis ("Hebrew slave") of the archetypal drama. The ordered recurrence therefore fills out not merely the nature of the trade but also the aftermath, especially what lies between the echoes of Joseph's (monetary) acquisition and vilification. The interim having first (39:2-6) augured well, it soon goes downhill: the relative kindness of the "buyer/master" is overridden and infected by the viciousness of the name-calling mistress. The lesson suggests itself. Even if one party to the deal hopes and the other acts for the best under the circumstances that is, for the Israelite equivalent of Potipharism neither can insure against the threats of deterioration that beset the Hebrew's exposed state. Rather than isolated echoes, then, we encounter a sequence and a system of intergeneric discourse. The law concurrently operates with two forms of the Hebrew master plot, one running in dark casuistic outline on the surface, one rerun underneath it in pristine thickness to offer both narrative and normative commentary from historic experience. As regards such twinning, what I have just shown will be found true of a host of detail: the legal "buy" in Israel runs parallel to the sorry "buy" enacted in Egypt of yore, with money changing hands and all appearances of legality duly observed. Not that I would thereby substitute yet another limitation of meaning, hence of applicability, for the causes and circumstances traditionally attached to the buying/selling. The poetic system of interplotting rather favors pluralityif only because more than one (hi)story may underlie a law and recur in future lifeyet keeps it under control. Building the discourse of law, especially case law, on select past cases is the happy mean between emulating and neutralizing the infinitude of reality, as between overgenerality and overspecificity, new-mintedness and traditionality, generic separatism and canonical monotony, preaching or reasoning and prescribing, undecidable and univocal signification. Throughout, you cannot tell the pragmatic from the aesthetic gains, and, inversely, from the respective losses accumulated in the tendency to compound exclusive with arbitrary (fore)closure of the law's scenario. To bring out the antithesis, we need only resume the twofold enactment just instanced. Joseph's is the paradigmatic case there, down to causation, because most in tune with both the (allusive) letter and the (deterrent)
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spirit of the ordinance. He is the first of his line to be reduced to slavery; 7 the first (thus far, also the last) to have been sold, and by brothers to boot; the only manifest target of the thematic vict-image, "Hebrew slave"; the prototype and precipitator of the nationwide oppression from which the audience have just gained deliverance. Again, his chain of adversitiesfrom "pit" to "pit," from life-threat to double sale to jailcould provide matter for a number of bondage narratives; and its playback in the law's shorthand thus rolls together various bondage scenarios into one. In the process, moreover, he attracts such a catalogue of violence familial, alien, male, female, nominal, sexual, physical, mental, private, official that its recall insinuates violence into the very fabric of the bondage type. Everything therefore qualifies Joseph for the role of exemplary deterrent. But the fact that the law draws its paradigm case from Scripture's (hi)story telling also revalidates the canonwide methodological lesson, namely, the unity of the Hebrewgram as an ordered network. To decode the Code, whether the identity of the "Hebrew" or the explanation for his becoming a "slave," no other reference point than this web will serve. Predictably and demonstrably, all makeshifts (Rabbinic, source analytic, homegrown, crossculturalist) have failed. Unanchored in the Bible's discourse, none of them can channel the lexis of the opening sentenceits object or its verbinto any ready-made univocality. By now, it should go without saying that "Hebrew slave" is irreducible even to any subgroup (thief, debtor, Hab/piru, fringe Israelite) within the nation: the group name lexically denotes the group member and it would take powerful contextual indicators, nowhere in evidence, to specialize the denotation in the law of all frameworks. But the same holds true for the predicate. In the Bible's lexis, the verb usually rendered as "buy" (qnh) covers all objects and modes of acquisition. These do include the "buying" of persons with money (as overtly in Leviticus 22:11), yet not to the exclusion of barter (Genesis 47:23) or symbolic transfer (Ruth 4:11, legitimizing the heroine's voluntary "selfsale") or (pro) creation (Genesis 4:1, complete with prolepsis). Amos's attack on the evildoers who ''buy the poor for silver and the needy, for a pair of sandals" (8:6) testifies by parallelism to the equipollence of such meanings, to the essential interchangeability of the means (here augmented with deceit on top of legalistic violence against the brother). Elsewhere, it is the monetary form of acquisition itself that gets excluded: when "buy" governs some abstract noun (wisdom, truth) throughout Proverbs, for instance, or casts God in the role of maker and lord of Israel (e.g., Exodus 15:16, Deuteronomy 32:6), as of the universe (Genesis 14:19, 22). Qnh ranges as widely over the domain of acquisition as aher* over that of otherness: one lexical form, many semantic uses, which here also involve a corresponding multiplicity of expositional antecedents
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to the "buy" sprung on the law-audience. Word and world elude arrest together. "Buy," then, compounds wide ranges of grammar and semantics: its matrix is tri-valent, its lexis polysemous. And the web of allusion centering on the verb makes the most of either aspect. Due to the former, it can invite us to read into the matrix, by way of precedent or other parallel, all the three terms latent there ("X buys Y from Z"), including the one nominally omitted (e.g., "from [the postExodus likes of] the brothers or the Midianites/Ishmaelites"). Due to the latter, it can pack into the "buying" a whole typology of acts, hence also agents, action determinants, sequels, logics, etc., memorably associated, or associable, with the word. So the economic context attaching to forced theftor debt-bondage is (re)denied monopoly by the verb's polysemy. In context, besides its other qualifications for paradigmatic status, the Joseph tale dramatizes this polysemy in that it rings the changes on the fall into servitude: the narrative chain of causes that once eventuated in bondage now implies, by force of precedent, a set of legal alternatives. The tale's outset, already discussed, moves from the victim's kidnapping ("theft," as Joseph himself will call it in self-"Hebrewing" [40:15] and as the law will soon recall and, on pain of death, forbid it in Israel [21:16]) to his sale, or sales, to his expropriation by Pharaoh out of another "pit." But this variety does not yet foreclose the issue left open by the law. The sequel methodically, if unobtrusively, widens the range of contingencies (i.e., possible beginnings) in drawing on the narrative and network of Hebrewness in Egypt. During the famine, once the Egyptian peasantry have run out of both money and cattle, they appeal to Joseph: Nothing is left . . . except for our body and our land. Why should we die before thy eyes, both we and our land? Buy [qneh] us and our land for bread, and we and our land will be slaves to Pharaoh. . . . Joseph bought [wa'yyiqen] all the land of Egypt . . . and said to the people, Behold, I have this day bought [qaniti] you and your land for Pharaoh. . . . And they said, Thou hast saved our lives; may it please my lord, we will be slaves to Pharaoh. (Genesis 47:18-26) The "buying" repeatedly signifies an exchange of "body" for "bread." What with the free offer of service on the part of the destitute, this reads like a cross between the Nuzi Hab/piru contract and the all-Israelite scenario in Leviticus. The most pinpointed tie-up, though, is with the annals of Hebrewness. Observe the poetic ("Noachic") justice of Joseph's role-inversion here from "bought'' to "buyer," from "slave" to acceptor of (self)-en-
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slavement; or the emphasis laid on the blessing reserved at the time for "Israel . . . in the land of Goshen" (47:27); or, less happily, the glance forward, e.g., via the state-bondage, at the corporate treatment of the "Hebrews" in Egypt, then in Jerusalem under Zedekiah, ally to the new Pharaoh, analogue to the old. Amid such continuities with the foreign emergency measure, acquisition through voluntary exchange at need transfers to the home circle: another legal procedure, incurring another association (ominously steeped in poetic justice) with the abominable house of slaves. 8 Similarly even with the traditional closures of the pre-tale unspecified by the in medias legis opening. That theftbondage, for example, nowhere figures among the causes for the paradigm's own victimage is enough to dismiss its aspiration to exclusiveness. Actually, far from having stolen en route to Hebrew bondage, Joseph insists on his having been "stolen out of the land of the Hebrews" (40:15). But neither does the marked absence of such a preliminary there (or of any valid evidentiary support adduced here by the Rabbis themselves) bar it from the law, as the scholars intent on debt-servitude will want to conclude. If nothing like the only or even primary cause of enslavement, theft may still fit the bill. The surface gap about antecedents in Exodus 21:2 leaves room for it; the ensuing ordinance of theft restitution (22:2) all but names it among possible closures; and Joseph's ultimate test even dramatizes it as such within the framework of Hebrewness proper. Genesis 44 brings to a head the interJacobite dramawhere the two sides have been co-"Hebrewed" by the locals (43:32)via the silver goblet planted and discovered in the youngest Jacobite's bag. Joseph, "stolen from the land of the Hebrews," charges those fellow "Hebrews" with stealing, not him (which would give the show away) but, metonymically, from him (44:5), to prevent the thief's return to that land. Once the homebound party has been overtaken, theft-servitude comes to menace everyone: the brothers' group as a whole, Benjamin as the ostensible culprit, and Judah as the voluntary surrogate. The narrative presents yet another mirror image, again thick with poetic justice, to the exemplar's chapter of misfortunes: this time it doubles back to Joseph's forced ("stealthy") sale into Egypt, and Hebrewness, reversing verbatim even the ground for the enforced bondage. The law's range of if-plot initiation and applicability opens up another notch.9 The role-reversal has even subtler features, certainly in the eyes of the lawgiver as persuader. That Joseph changes roles from victim to victimizer (as he will, Noachically, vis-à-vis the Egyptians themselves) suits not only the logic of his own test but also the Code's double-edged rhetoric: fortunes may change, as may guilt, victimage persists. That his appearance changes along with his roleso that from his behavior you could no more tell the
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brother than the one-time suffererhardens the law's point about double identity. The native enslaver of the Hebrew must always reenact the Egyptian foreigner. (So the obliquities of allusion insinuate the very kind of figuration as Hamite whereby Ezekiel 16 lashes an Israel gone unIsraelite.) And Benjamin's frame-up infiltrates into that servitude itself yet another element of violence, one reminiscent of the all but fratricidal prelude to Joseph's sale ("theft") for money and of the brute Pharaonic force exerted on the nation. Judging by the inference from narrative precedent to allusive precept, then, the guilt never remains one-sided, not even in the contingency least favorable to the "Hebrew slave." The Rabbis, then, were both more right than it seems and less than they would desire. Among all the "buying" ways, ironically, it is the one most popular in scholarship that alone remains unprecedented by the time Moses gives the law at Sinai. Debt-bondage nevertheless falls under the same umbrella verb as its precedented alternatives, and duly materializes afterwards: in Deuteronomy's debt-to-bondage ordering, in narratives about children of debtors liable to servitude (II Kings 4:1-7, Nehemiah 5:4-13), in prophetic (Isaiah 50:1) and proverbial (Proverbs 22:7) generalities, always with the appropriate slur on the "buyer." In terms of the canon as a whole, the difference is between the prospective and the retrospective fleshing out of the Mishpatim ("Covenant") Code's lexis: between, if you will, anticipatory and delayed exposition for the jump in medias legis. As postExodus Israel correctly interpreted and legalistically exploited the open-endedness of the Hebrew slave ordinancewithout sparing the insolvent widow and the orphanso her writers, each deploying the rhetoric available to his genre, knew what to think of such practice. Sharp practice, they in effect call it, and therefore an offense against brotherly ethics rather than (like the Jeremiah scandal) against the Covenant. Yet their attitude accords with the Mosaic undertone: unrighteousness licensed by the Torah, in wordless and grudging acceptance of life's hardships, is unrighteousness still. In turn, the given addrecentric deixis vindicates itself anew by its effect. That it has been avoided throughout the I Samuel 13-14 companion trio highlights both the generic and the contextual variety in the pattern's suasive unity. There, neither the teller (by impersonal fiat) nor the quoted Saul himself (driven to "let the Hebrews hear" out of faceto-face contact) overtly address their respective publics. Here, the second person ("If thou buyest") coheres with the assembly-event and with the norm of direct address maintained since the Decalogue, but also with the rhetorical thrust animating this law-unit. Rhetorically, so far from the addrecentricity exalting the addressee, it goes to diminish or shame him: another instance of the unlimited play between focus and favor, the centric and the centrist in
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representation, arrestable for a purpose by context alone. "Thou" points the finger at every single ex-Hebrew in the nation assembled to enter into God's covenant with "Israel." The bicultural stigma, nominally kept for the potential "Hebrew slave," thereby changes sides and targets to the other in-group party: it threatens the enslaver as an actual recent bearer (or co-bearer) of the vict-image, all but daring him to switch roles in his new, Israelite identity. Wilt "thou" of all people and peoples, now of all times, (re)play this of all "buyers,'' with Potiphar and with Pharaoh and with Joseph enslaving a desperate Egypt in his name or framing Benjamin into theft-servitude? In such a finger-pointing context, alternatives to the received text make sense or nonsense. Among ancient versions, for example, there is something to be said for the Samaritan's "If thou buyest a Hebrew slave, six years he shall serve thee," or the Syriac's further addendum, "and in the seventh he shall go out free from thee." Even if genetically dubious, these at least err on the right side in multiplying the second-person contacts with the addressee. On the other hand, the modern quest for pure casuistic "objectivity" (which amounts to tacit judge-orientedness) is as unfortunate in its results as in its assumptions. Nor can it plead so much as the exigency of a Josephus objectifying the national law in the report to a foreign, Greco-Roman public unaffected by it in any capacity. Jepsen's modest proposal for Exodus, "If a man buys a Hebrew slave," thus impersonalizes the buyer into the socalled third persona nonperson in fact, because exterior to the deictic field of force inhabited by speaker and addressee. Worse, Alt's "If a Hebrew man sells himself" omits the buyer altogether (as referent, agent, counterpart, even compatriot, a fortiori addressee) and accordingly relaxes the pressure on him. Also, besides impersonalizing the deixis, it leaves no trace of how the syntax dramatizes ("imitates") the negative message by aligning linguistic with thematic role: undoctored, the grammatical subject ("thou") is cast as potential (re)subjector in Israel, and the grammatical object ("Hebrew slave") threatened with (re)degradation to objecthood. For the difference made, compare two famous slogans (in persuasive, not dissuasive language) by English military heroes. The critics' rewriting out of the second person belongs with Nelson's "England expects every man to do his duty"; the writing, with Kitchener's "Your country needs YOU" on the 1914 recruiting poster, which "gave every passerby the feeling of being addressed by Lord Kitchener in person" (Gombrich 1969:113, with reproduction). Or contrast Rabbi Meir's saying, "Whoever abides in the land of Israel and speaks the holy tongue . . ., let him know that he is destined for the world to come" (Talmud Yerushalmi, Shqalim, chap. 3) with Eliezer ben Yehudah's vocative, "O Hebrew, speak Hebrew." 10
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License Rebarbed Three books and forty years later, to go by the canon's ordering, the statute of manumission recurs with certain disparities, visible yet undeclared and therefore often elusive. Having so far concentrated on one exordium, let us advance to the other: If thou buyest a Hebrew slave, six years he shall serve [lit., slave] and in the seventh he shall go out free for nothing. (Exodus 21:2) If thy brother the Hebrew or the Hebrewess is sold to thee, he shall serve [slave] six years and in the seventh year thou shalt send him out free from thee. (Deuteronomy 15:12, echoed in Jeremiah 34:14) What persists, what changes, between the Codes? To the synchronist, whether transrational or transnational, the iteration is of course ideally changeless, in essentials at least. But nobody else deems it so, not even the typical analogist forced into (hi)storytelling to bridge the intersource gaps that show somewhere, or everywhere, on the imagined road between Nuzi and Jeremiah. If anything, the contrary tendency has dominated the field. The precise balance of repetition and variation over timeof legal equivalence and canonical sequence, of traditionalism and noveltyis to be thoroughly examined in chapter 9 below, from the diachronic viewpoint. (Or rather viewpoints, since I will oppose the surmised real-life to the implicit poetic genesis.) Our focus at this stage being on the rhetorical, not the historical or historicized (dis)continuity of the law-series, we may do with less than a full-scale analysis of the two contrary forces in play. However, we must, and by now can, get the proportions right. For the balance of analogy, between straight and contrastive equivalence, is crucial to every art of suasion (Poetics, esp. 365ff., 479-80), and here adjudicates between nothing less than suasive continuity and rupture on the way from one text to the next. Just as the interCode comparison in the last chapter brought out the differences underplayed in synchronistic zeal, so it now exposes their overstatement, along with their misplacement and ill-patterning, on other agendas always to the detriment of the rhetoric. Underdifferentiation obscures the laws' variant rhetorical tactics, over-differentiation the common strategy of deterrence behind them. Either way, the emphasis, the linkage, the frame of reference, the sense of purpose attributed to the variants, all are demonstrably wrong, though not always in the same form or measure. A whole spectrum of imbalances comes into view, with weighty consequences for the (unified? dual? half-and-hall?) rhetoric, as well as for the
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interpretation, the application, the march of the law. The harmonizing and the polarizing extremes, it so happens, largely correspond to the oldest and the newest approaches on record. Both have already proved untenable. The one goes back to the Rabbinic venture of keeping the two Hebrew ordinances, Exodus's and Deuteronomy's, for compulsory theft-bondage, while attaching Leviticus to self-sale. By now, we need not dwell on the unreason of the sharp partition wished upon the trio. Yet observe the rhetorical corollary: the Hebrew, "slave" or "brother," is literally incriminated, the destitute "brother" exonerated. Observe, further, this dualism's asymmetry with the actual (short vs. long) terms of serviceall in the name of heavenly harmony. The resulting clash of judgments, normative vs. operational, also underlines afresh the violence done in the process to interCode echoes and shifts alike. For example, Deuteronomy's ''is sold" gets paired off with Exodus's "buy" rather than with its Leviticus cognate: mere synonymy (i.e., formal variation in semantic repetition) overrides identity, at the expense of the entire law-trio's emplotment and meaning and impact. This presents a counterpart, and here also an addition, to the yoking together of "Hebrew" with "Israelite" as co-nationals, on the strength of the bare likeness in reference. We have found modern analysts constructing a similar and similarly tenuous doublet by other expedients. Thus they stretch Hab/piru reference and/or debt-servitude from the Exodus to the Deuteronomy Code. (The crossculturalist Lewy [1939, 1957] or Gray [1958] exemplify the former; the insider-oriented Chirichigno [1993] the latter; Alt [1989] the merger of parities, to the wholesale harmonization of the two law-corpora, via an opening formula attested in neither.) Still, the modern dividing line tends to run between the Pentateuch's Hebrew laws. At its sharpest, it polarizes them, application and all, between two incompatible cases: "ordinary" vs. "exceptional" bondage, respectively. (So the obscure hint in Driver 1965:183.) More often, the cases fork not, or not only, by the sociolegal antecedents within the nation but according to the difference between social class and national collective: Exodus's Hebrew/Hab/piru vs. Deuteronomy's Hebrew/Israelite. Where the Rabbis flatten the discourse variantsbuy/sell, Hebrew slave/brotherthe new bipartitioners would map them onto the world of the law, with about equal success. Having disposed of both extremes, we may proceed to interCode oppositions less binary, sweeping, and operational. These are drawn, as a rule, in scholarship with an agenda ostensibly closer to the Hebrewgram's and to the poetics at large: making sense of the given variants between the Codes across uniform inside reference. The question then becomes, what oppositions, what uniformities, what balance, what sense? Many would endorse the following catalogue of variants:
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Page 496 The replacement of "a Hebrew slave ( (
)" with "your brother, a Hebrew man
)," . . . of "when you buy (
)" with "If . . . is sold to you
)'' which entails a change of verbal root ( ( voice (active-passive). (Japhet 1986:70)
), of person (2nd-3rd) and of
What with the questionable ("a Hebrew man") or factitious ("When" vs. "If" for the recurrent conditional ki) touches in the Englishing, the list blows the difference out of proportion. Even at first glance, rather, the continuity in matter, structure, and texture is hard to escape. As concerns plot, the two laws enact one unique bondage-to-deliverance scenario: the release of the "Hebrew" fellow national after six years. Regarding the master plot, both in-group scenarios can yet draw on anterior intergroup scenes to (for example) affective ends. Likewise with the key specifics of the discourse. The address to the prospective owner recurs; then the exact lexical converse of "buy" in the passive or reflexive; then the term of servitude; then the "free" egress. So do the larger discourse parameters, from the casuistic hypothetical narrative to the jump in medias legis to the context of utterance, where Moses relays God's law to Israel. Whether you judge the opening by pragmatic or literary standards, recurrence definitely outweighs variance. The variants on the list themselves appear more numerous and differential than the intertext warrants, because they receive no unitary explanation. The shift from "Hebrew slave" to "brother Hebrew" has allegedly come for intelligibility: "the archaic term," perhaps misinterpretable, "is replaced by a more unequivocal phrase which leaves no room for doubt concerning the slave's origins" (Japhet 1986:70; cf. chapter 7, note 29 above). It also promotes the emotional effect in "underlining the kinship between master and slave" (ibid.). Yet neither explanatory line holds for the rest of the changes between Exodus and Deuteronomy, motivated instead by appeal to source criticism. What now accounts for these is the influence of the opening formula in Leviticus 25:39: "if thy brother becomes poor beside thee and sells himself/is sold to thee." The variations in "root . . . person . . . and voice" allegedly have their parallel and precedent in a third, intermediate Code (ibid.:73ff.). But this hypothesis of Deuteronomy as a three-source composite no more approaches genetic than teleological adequacy. Regarding the data themselves, some of the Leviticus-derived breaks with Exodus (e.g., in person, actually always owner-bound) are fancied, some of the continuities with Exodus vis-à-vis Leviticus (above all, in the neighbor's Hebrewness and his six-year and olam servitude) forgotten. Regarding the explanation, moreover, the very blown-up Deuteronomic differences from Exodus never
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find their closure in the Leviticus intermediacy except as differences of another and profounder order, or orders, from Leviticus itself. For example, the Levitical ideology of treating the enslaved brother as a hireling is "in fact alien" to the Deuteronomist, who rather views him as a perpetual slave and therefore lifts this "essential element" from the Exodus Covenant (ibid.:83ff.). If so, Deuteronomy's surface echo to the new and newly moving language of brothership clashes head-on with its adherence to the old spirit of lifelong bondmanship. So do related novelties, e.g., its "humanism," its "homiletic style," its adding gifts to facilitate the earliest possible departure. (Actually, the clash would be moderated if Leviticus evolved last, adopting the new designation ''brother" to suit its abrogation of "Hebrew" bondage proper, temporary and unlimited.) Under the weight of such inconsistencies, the rationale as well as the unity of motivation fall apart. The Deuteronomist cannot have known what he was doing or, euphemistically, must have put together "elements from various elements of thought and tradition, without insisting on complete congruity" (ibid.:87). We need, then, to reassess the balance of interCode analogy in a functional, Protean light. Taking the elements as they unroll, consider first how Deuteronomy's altered verb stands to the original and to the Exodus part/whole relations generally. Amid change, the wealth of meaning (lexical, pragmatic, expositional, allusive) recurs. Like its counterpart "buy," "sell" adds polysemy to tri-valence. It denotes assorted modes, as well as objects, of transfer. With abstract objects, money never comes into it: "Buy wisdom and don't sell" (Proverbs 23:23). With nonhuman objects, the quid pro quo remains open: Esau "sold his birthright to Jacob" for a mess of pottage (Genesis 25:29-34). Even where humans change hands, purchase money can alternate with barter (Amos 2:6 on the Israelites "selling the righteous for silver and the needy for a pair of shoes," Joel 3:3 on the Gentiles who "sold a girl for wine"); or with labor ("our father has sold us," Jacob's wives complain [Genesis 31:15]); or with subsistence (Egypt's self-sale to Pharaoh); or with no material return whatever, as always when God delivers somebody (usually Israel, but also Sisera [Judges 4:9]) into another's hands. "For nothing were you sold and not with money shall you be redeemed": thus Isaiah (52:3) opposes the logic of divine retribution to the earthly system of exchange. And on earth itself, mkr reduces as little to the nuclear mercantilism of the English sell as qnh to buy. Pentateuch law's "buy/sell" variation is therefore far from unique. Amos effects the same shift of verb and angle in condemning Israel's hard-hearted-ness (2:6, 8:6); Genesis in narrating Joseph's enslavement to an Egyptian
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(37:27-28, 36, 39:1), then his enslavement of Egypt (e.g., 47:20); the Exodus law-code itself in modulating from the "Hebrew slave" to the bondmaid (22:2, 7). As always, the verb shift bears not on the operational meaning but on the focus of the plot and its rhetoric. The persistence of the key allusion across the verbal change is a telling measure of the law's continuity. As Exodus's "buy" evokes the first tale of Hebrew bondage, so does Deuteronomy's variant. The Jacobites having assented to Judah's proposal, 'What profit is it if we kill our brother . . .? Let us sell him [nimkerenu] to the Ishmaelites, and let not our hand be upon him, for he is our brother, our own flesh' . . ., there passed by [wa'yya'abru] Midianite traders, and they drew Joseph up and lifted him out of the pit, and sold [wa'yyimkeru] Joseph to the Ishmaelites for twenty shekels of silver . . . and the Midianites sold [makhru] him in Egypt to Potiphar, an officer of Pharaoh. (Genesis 37:26-36) In fact, though the two verbs are mutually implicative, the textual occurrences of "sell" here outnumber the one "buying," Potiphar's (39:1); no wonder Psalms (105:17) remembers the family scandal in this wording and light. Either verb (only with the frequencies inverted, as though for balance) likewise rhymes with Egypt's self-subjection to Pharaoh for "bread" (47:18ff.). It is Deuteronomy, further, that most populates the open-ended range of why-andhow expositions. Thus the immediate antecedence (15:1-11) of the fall into debt; the inclusive ambiguity of "is sold'' between passive ("by others") and reflexive ("by himself"), either tri-valent in its own mode; and the ensuing insight into the slave's relish for the (to him) good life, conjuring up all manner of "bad" prehistories in liberty. There are even more ways to servitude than you have thought beforeand, normatively, more unfavorable aspects, too, especially in re-replay. The "selling" of a Hebrew therefore becomes at once easier and, against suasion, harder to actualize. In revisiting the thematic precedent, the new verb also makes a subtle difference to the viewpoint on the law's two parties. The sense of Joseph-like victimage, though shared with the "buying," deepens (as well as multiplies) in the "selling," always to the embarrassment of the addressed latter-day victimizer. Thus, the passive reading "is sold" and the retrospect on a chain of "sell's" enhance together the new Hebrew's abject objecthood; the echo-chain also re-analogizes the native to various foreign subjectors ("Midianites . . . Ishmaelites . . . Egypt . . . Potiphar . . . Pharaoh"); and the unprecedentedness, among all this variety, of the Hebrew's sale to a native brings out the judgment latent in the innocent-seeming pronominal novelty "to thee."
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That judgment sharpens in interCode comparison. The Exodus master having broken faith with the "daughter" he acquired for marriage, to a foreign people he shall not have the power to sell her. (21:8) Leviticus juxtaposes the scenarios of native and foreign acquisition: If thy brother becomes poor beside thee and sells himself to thee . . . (25:39ff.) If a sojourner or resident with thee prospers, and thy brother besides him becomes poor and sells himself to the sojourner or resident . . . (25:47ff.) In this polyphony of "sell's," what Exodus forbids in the bondmaid's special case and Leviticus envisages at a pinch, with special countermeasures, Deuteronomy elides as unspeakable: sale "to thee" is more than enough foreign-like treatment of "thy" brother "Hebrew or Hebrewess." In the same retrospect on the Joseph affair, the "Hebrew brotherhood" is now literalized (by Jacobite association) to grow even less compatible with the victimage: would you, Son of Israel, take after the sons of Israel at their direst hour? And the chief victimizer's words crown the shock effect through their definition of "brother, our own flesh," through their "profit"-mindedness, through their scaling of bondage as the next worst thing to death itself, of fraternal enslavement as next to fratricide. In the eyes of Mosaic law, even Judah's ranking splits hairs: either of their actions would be a capital offense. Enslavement may overtake a thief, as it almost did Benjamin, but never the victim of theft, like the stolen Joseph. "Whoever steals a man and sells him or is found in possession of him, shall be put to death" (Exodus 21:16); "If a man is found stealing one of his brothers, of bene yisrael, and if he ill-treats him and sells him, then that thief shall die, and thou shalt purge the evil from thy midst" (Deuteronomy 24:7). Of the two parallel versions, the later is the harder on the kidnapper, and not only because it ends by coupling judicial with moral judgment. On the way, it also tones up the allusive resonance along lines akin to the Deuteronomic slave law: instead of the object "a man," we encounter "one of his brothers," here further specified through the redundancy bene yisrael, which plays between "sons'' and "Sons of Israel." In 21:16, though, Exodus's own verb echoes the "sell . . . sold . . . sold" refrain initiated by Judah. Of course, the echoed mode of "selling" is for once illegitimated, on pain of death for the equivalent of death (the open-ended verb does have its limit). But with the allusion thus nailed downand in Deuteronomy, within the Hebrew law itselfJudah's hair-splitting nev-
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ertheless imposes itself on the varieties of legal acquisition. Yes, the Hebrew brother's enslavement ranks next to fratricide. The paradigm case's scaling of the two brutalities indeed recurs throughout the variations on the theme in the narrative and, by transfer, the law. The immediate sequel modulates from the deathly and near-deadly "pit" where Joseph landed (39:20, 22, 24, 28-29; cf. Ackerman 1974:117), through the figure of his compulsory "descent to Egypt" as sellable object (39:1), to his gratuitous jailing in another "pit" (40:15, 41:14), under another life-threat. Then, with Benjamin, the "Let him die'' pronounced by Judah on any thief among the brothers gets commuted to servitude (Genesis 44:9-17); then, in the voice of the famished Egyptians, "Why should we die before thy eyes? . . . Buy us . . . and we and our land will be slaves to Pharaoh" (47:19). Pharaoh himself inflicts both victimages, yet still in ascending order and only when the lesser has failed to produce the desired outcome. So the Codes press for turning to bondage as a last resort, when death would otherwise menace the Hebrew. This complex of effects invites some further generalization about the play of recurrence and variance between the laws. Strategically, as concerns ideology as well as practicalities, they are at oneto an extent heralded and typified by the unity of attitude, allusion, casting. If in the Hebrewgram's rhetoric of solidarity the persuaders (the midwives, Miriam, God, David at Aphek) translate themselves into a Hebrew-lowering role alien to them but second nature to the addressee, the rhetoric of deterrence invariably forces on the addressee ("thou") himself a role that is or should be alien to both: to all except heartless agents or helpless patients of servitude. But nor should the disparities amid this interCode unity be atomized, let alone ironed out, for they, too, signal a meaningful coherence, now between emphases. In motivating the shift to "sell," we have thus found the pattern of affective discourse reinforced and elaborated by concomitant, apparently autonomous changes: in mood (passive), personalized grammar ("to thee . . . thy"), lexis ("brother"). And as with functional, so with purely formal structure. For instance, the replacement of the Exodus "slave" (with "brother" or the like) perforce follows from the new linguistic matrix co-established by the other Deuteronomic variants, "If thy Hebrew X is sold to thee." Conversely, the elements fall together, e.g., on Alt's rewriting "If a Hebrew man sells himself": no "thy," no "brother." The same chain reaction in reverse. With whatever element we begin, or continue, the same logic of interplay should (and, as will emerge, does) hold. From the outset, the variance manifested by Deuteronomy is therefore not fortuitous and assorted, any more than substantive, but presentationalor, what immediately concerns us, rhetorical. Here, within the ongoing
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strategy of bicultural and bilateral deterrence, all the variations imply a change of tactics, namely, shifting the balance of pressure on the parties to Hebrew enslavement in the enslaver's disfavor. In this light, what becomes of the old-new pronominal reference, the target for so much criticism, genetic and otherwise? Evidently, the enormous rise in the incidence of the second person (about three dozen to Exodus's one) mocks the quest for a third-person original, deemed proper to the "objective" casuistic style. By the same measure, it quashes the package dealing of (addre)centricity with (addre)centrism that has been taken for granted among uncritical culture critics: reversed thirtyfold, their automatic nexus displays instead its mobility of judgment. The quantity, further, is in expressive or subjective character. Within Exodus's discourse of the law, the two pronominal options alternate and the "If thou buyest" opening might conceivably reflect an afterthoughta latecomer's personalization of (say) "If a Hebrew man sells himself/is sold" for consistency with either an imagined stylistic norm or with the actual narrative that has gone before. In Deuteronomy, though, the second person informs the whole book (minimum frame apart) as Moses' valedictory address to the nation: an objective law would break the pattern, and exactly at a juncture where the personal touch most suggests itself, if only in view of the lawgiver's affair with Hebrewness in early career. (Note how even Jeremiah, quoting Deuteronomy rather than Exodus, sets the personalized quote within an "objective," Exodus-like frame of communication.) By the same token, among the changes detected in the opening conditional"of verbal root . . . of person (2nd-3rd) and of voice"the middle one is downright false. The language preserves, indeed thickens the Moses-to-Israel situation of utterance, with its direct appeals to the individual or the collective. Thereby, the bondman always reappears in the third person and the owner in the secondexcept that the latter pronominal reference migrates on the surface, with the referent, from the clause's subject ("thou buy") to the indirect object ("sold to thee") and to the possessive newly weighting the manifest Deuteronomic subject ("thy Hebrew brother"). The shared communicative set-up also negates the reading that Exodus takes the buyer's "point of view," Deuteronomy the slave's (Greenstein 1984:97). This, I would add, no matter whether the point of view invoked has to do with the surface of expression or with the underlying values. If with the former, then neither law admits the slave (except in quotation) to the intimate I/you circle of deixis; if with the latter, then both imply the two-edged judgment distinctive of the pattern of rhetoric here, bifocal as well as bicultural. Further, the critical imagination has better things to do than invent such shifts in deixis and/or viewpoint. We can instead deepen our grasp of the actual communicative thrust by appreciating their feasibility: as
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might-have-been's, from the protatic to the intermittent to the overall. Since meaningfulness (rhetorical, inter alia) presupposes choice, observe the alternatives open to the Deuteronomist at person-assignment. The modifications freely, hence functionally, introduced into the leading if-clause have already been shown above. But the given protasis itself no more compels than it originates the ensuing quantitative leap in direct address, which amounts to a wholesale recasting of the sequel's pronominal, perspectival, and pressure tactics at once. There is nothing inevitable about this longer and closer engagement with the owner as "thou." The protasis might well have been followed by a chain of third-person references to the bondman's decision and doings, Exodus style. Come to think of it, the entire law might rather have been oriented to the bondman (easily, compared with Exodus) from the start, via protases like "If thou art sold to a Hebrew brother" or "If thou art sold to a brother for a Hebrew slave." (This introductory deictic change would even be facilitated by that in the lexis, for "brother," unlike Exodus's "slave," entails a symmetrical relation.) A fellow auditor in the Jordan assembly and a fellow participant in the scenario, the bondman equally qualifies for the role of direct addressee. Again, within either the bondman-oriented or the existing addrecentric framework, it would have been easy to devise local alterations, notably toward objectivity. What would or does prevent the Deuteronomist from keeping the language of address to a minimum, higher perforce than Exodus's (or than Jeremiah's truncated quote) but lower by far than the surplus encountered? In re-coding, then, the law-speaker combines three separate deictic choices, independent of one another and of the book's transmissional drama (Moses vis-à-vis the Israelite "thou/you") alike. One choice is structural and conservative, namely, to pick up from the Exodus if-clause the idea of orientation to the slaveholder, rather than to the slave, let alone to the judge, as direct addressee. And that addressee, moreover, recurs in the singular ("thou"), never in the collective ("you"), as available and elsewhere preferred. Still another marker is quantitative and typical of the book yet novel: the seizure of every opportunity to intersperse the law with direct addresses, thus multiplying Exodus's one protatic occurrence thirty-odd-fold. "Thou shalt let him go free. . . . Thou shalt not let him go emptyhanded. . . . Thou shalt furnish him . . . Thou shalt remember . . . therefore I command thee . . . It shall not seem hard in thy eyes . . . and the Lord thy God will bless thee," with possessives interpolated wherever feasible. The three choices meet in the working, if nowhere else. Having singled out for discourse the party blessed with freedom of action and liable to
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abuse it, the Deuteronomist throws on him the responsibility for brotherly conduct. The relentless application of the equivalent to Lord Kitchener's finger-pointing YOU will not let the addressee off the hook for a moment (or not, as will transpire, until the bondman initiates the ultimate scandal of life bondage). Other variants similarly cohere with the new balance of responsibility. For now, let me just touch on one or two instances that have been differently explained by critics. Thus "he shall go out free" modulates into "thou shalt send him out free." Is it out of a "humanistic approach" (Weinfeld 1972:283; cf. Chirichigno 1993:283, 286), scarcely reflected in the deictic variant, or for extra affective pressure that the Deuteronomist personalizes the fiat of going free and lays the burden on the owner? And is it not for the same reason that the burden at once grows an economic clause as a further aid to departure? In essentials, the so-called humanism (quite a misnomer for a law ethnonational through and through) has rather been inherited from Exodus's limitation of service. What varies here is the weight of agency ("he shall go"→"thou shalt send him out'') at the time limit, in due relation to the shift between the paired counterparts ("thou buy"→"he is sold") at the outset. On the recoded scenario, "he" loses while "thou" gains control. From an intertextual perspective, moreover, the shift in agency comes with one in the focus and solidarities of allusion. The narrative manifests both emphases for the law to draw upon: it even alternates between them in quoted address foreshadowing the historic plot of liberation. Compare the first advance notice of the Exodus, voiced by God to Abram the Hebrew, "Afterwards they will go out" (Genesis 15:14), with the second, relayed by Moses to the Hebrewing Pharaoh in the name of "the Lord, the God of Israel": "Send out my people" (Exodus 5:1). The two divine plot-scenarios now echo in the respective divine law-scenarios addressed to the ex-Hebrews apropos of the future Hebrew in their midst, complete with the choice between replaying the ancestral or the archoppressive auditor. Again, "the word 'master' ( ) is not employed in the Deuteronomic slave law" (ibid.). True, but nor is "slave" in any nominal form (including "slave law" and Exodus's periphrastic equivalent, "as the slaves go out"). Or rather, not until the Hebrew chooses to enslave himself for life, whereupon the responsibility instructively changes poles. As the symmetrical omission implies, where (or while) the tie of "brotherhood" holds, the normal, asymmetrical "masterslave" relationship does not; and it is "thou," as always, upon whom the appropriate conduct devolves. In return for the fruits of work, "at half the cost of a hireling's hire," the addressed purchaser has double the duties without the name and licenses (indeed, the freedoms) of mastership.
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Bonds and Bondage: Loving Unto Perpetual Servitude By way of transition to the climactic, "reddest" scenario, that of lifelong bondage, it may help to ask another principled question: why has the law's rhetorical strategy as traced thus far (or, if you would dispute my account, why has its rhetorical spirit) been so little appreciated over the ages, across the approaches? Relevant bits and pieces have of course received mention, but never anything like a strategy, which entails the coordination of local features (givens, variants, devices, meanings, effects) into a single, if intricate, suasive whole. Nor are those bits themselves either of a piece as such, or common ground, or (beyond formulas like the Deuteronomist's "hortatory style") adequately identified and motivated in generic, let alone contextual terms. Sundry answers, at times divergent, more often cumulative, always further applicable elsewhere, have already arisen in and through my analysis of the traditional approaches. Thus an assortment of exclusive, overreaching, or misplaced priorities have drawn notice away from the art of suasion, as from the poetics in general. Think only of the persistent misfocuses we encountered: on the world at the expense of the discourse world, on the pre-text rather than the given text or texts, on cross-rather than inter-textual affairs, on rewriting before reading, on uniformity within or beyond the canon instead of the play between unity and diversity, on forms of life and language unanchored in their regulating communicative frameworks. The only rhetoric in evidence there is the metacritical, pseudo-literary one of identity, the Hebrew's with the Hab/piru's. But more specifically anti-rhetorical premises, associated with rigid ideas of (national, sacred, legal) literature, are also discernible. Those who operate on them assume a consensus between writer and reader (especially when deemed fellow professionals in esoteric communication) or among the readers themselves; or take law, a fortiori if divine, to need no boost to the power (normative, statutory, judicial, enforcing) vested in it by the generic code of codification; and/or divorce the genre from others, even when joined together within the same book, here canonical. For these reasons, the rhetoric of the law and the law-code, as distinct from that of the law-court, has traditionally suffered neglect outside the Bible's legaliterature as well. Most specific, though again not unparalleled elsewhere in the field, are the oversights regarding Hebrew bondage law itself, from surface texture to inclusive and deep structureas deep as the Law below the law. The whole rhetorical impact ultimately depends on one's alertness to the Hebrewgram as value-laden network cum narrative, exploited here (then in the I Samuel companion pattern) for bicultural stigmatizing. On the law's arrival at the case of perpetual servitude, however, another
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source of blindness to the rhetoric comes into the open: it issues from the expositor's ideology rather than from (or directly from) the theory and methodology. I refer to the condonation of servitude, if only apropos of the forms, times, persons, exigencies involved here. Counterreading the law's value-frame, whereby death alone outranks enslavement on the list of evils, is hardly the route to the work of deterrence. So a commentator (Carroll 1986:647) wonders: "What if they [Jeremiah's Hebrew slaves] had refused to go, on the grounds that they preferred to stay with their masters (cf. Ex. 21.5-6, Deut. 15.16-17)?" The fact remains that they hadn't and didn't, at either end of the national history: in Pharaoh's Egypt, despite their broken spirit and ranks, or in Zedekiah's Jerusalem, where they have to be repossessed, as they were presumably kept, by main force. Nor does their countrymen's attitude vary, on a groupwide or individual scale, anywhere in between. Even Samuel's doubly stigmatized "Hebrews" turn against their Philistine masters in the end, alongside the unyielding freedom lovers; and before the advent of Israel, Joseph pleads for repatriation to ''the land of the Hebrews." The law-references adduced by the commentator therefore envisage a scenario that is hypothetical ("If. . .") in the law itself and counterfactual on the data elsewhere: without any genuine precedent or parallel on the Bible's record, and so without probabilistic, much less evidentiary, least of all approbatory weight. In psychocultural terms, that scenario captures a form of low desire akin to the ex-Hebrews' intermittent longing for Egypt's fleshpots, or to the Hebrew wrongdoer's lust for power over his neighbor, Pharaoh-like in brutality as well as in mentality and suggestively combined with defiance of the rescuer that breathes attachment to the oppressor. Neither of these instincts, the would-be subject's or subjector's or their juncture, is realized at the time, nor realizable with impunity ever after. On the contrary, from Egypt to Jerusalem, the Hebrew master plot entails and enacts a normative antithesis by way of retribution. Having been set against the victimizer, either enslaved multitude goes free as one man over his dead body: the Israelites (the relics and sons of Joseph among them, presumably even Moses' "Hebrew" challenger) to cross into a land of milk and honey, the Judahites to come into the property of the fallen aristocrats. 11 Midway, the same form of desire ironically expresses itself on the Hamite side, in Achish's wishful thinking about his "perpetual slave (ebed olam)"none other than David, who would rise from Hebrewness to become king of the greater Israel and subjector of the Philistines. Exegetes have nevertheless jumped from the premise, itself shaky, "that the condition of a Hebrew slave . . . was relatively favourable" to the conclusion that the laws view "his 'loving' his master as of likely occurrence" (Driver 1965:181). According to some, the lawgiver deems the eventuality sensible as well as likely. Were they rhetoricmindedwhich they aren't,
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for the usual reasonstheir value scheme might foist into the bondage ordinance an art of persuasion, not dissuasion. But then, in their eyes, the issue would arise here even less than usual, if possible. Why should the Bible trouble to devise or we to decode any rhetoric, why so much as think of it, where the ordinance enacted speaks for itself?. Perpetuating the arrangement, the advocates maintain, would evidently be in the interests of society and/or the individuals concerned. The former, because release, albeit with gifts, "would have created a proletariat or at any rate meant an increase of the number of the very poor" (Lemche 1976:45). The latter, because waiving release ensured a good life with honor. In Israelite as in Ugaritic literature, we hear, "perpetual slave . . . implies somebody of value and importance, and does not seem to have any derogatory implications." Further, "in certain circumstances, the liberating of a slave could be an act of cruelty rather than of love. . . . For example, an old slave with no family, or perhaps a blind slave, or one who was particularly devoted" (Craigie 1976:239, North 1954:137-39, 142-43, 15357)or maybe, give or take a few insults, a landless David in well-paid Philistine service. (What is "Hebrew"-calling, or the climate of suspicion, to the ''perpetual slave" of Achish?) The individual Hebrew's landlessness, often considered his distinctive trait, actually figures among the motivations: it would be senseless to release a bondman "who would only be forced to find support in another household" (Chirichigno 1993:220, or Wright 1990:249). All the more senseless given a community overflowing with lacklands. The defense of the bondage institution occasionally goes so far as to warn us moderns against anachronism regarding contemporary social lifestyle, hierarchies, and values. "Whereas in a democratic society the loss of liberty is an unmixed evil, in an unpoliced tribal society it was far less than the evil of being free"; even Leviticus, therefore, "must be regarded not merely as a law limiting slavery but per prius as a law authorizing slavery," tolerant of "the existing practice" (North 1954:142, 135). "The slave may feel happy to live with his master permanently. Such a proposal was not as strange in a society that was still close to the nomadic state as it is to us. In such an economy the slave [e.g., Abraham's Eliezer] had an important place in the family" (Thompson 1974:191, or Buis and Leclerq 1963:121, Michaeli 1974:195, Chirichigno 1993:347). We have so often found the name of history and historicism taken in vain that I will only draw attention to the continued mix-up of perspectives: the slave's and the Bible's, the one rationalizing the low desire, the other adversely regulating it by law. Even apart from the Hebrewgram and the rhetoric of deterrence, moreover, the slave's conjectured perspective is itself counter to fact. "Happiness" rather stands antipolar to Hebrewness (a fortiori where permanent) throughout history, domestic or intergroup. Ascribing such a "feeling" to the name-bearers under Zedekiah, for example, would be adding insult
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to injury. The law alone represents a lover of bondage, and in the hypothetical mood only: for all we know, the love affair never transpired in Scripture's real life, any more than in its ideal of life. But if the perspective may in theory split between viewers, for example, inset vs. frame, why not between versions? This compromise measure, already seen to partition or distribute or mix a host of textual awkwardnesses, indeed reappears. Accordingly, the law does not present a unified ideolegal front, or whole, on the issue of Hebrew perpetuity. Rather, the judgment is alleged to divide (genetically, to change poles) between the Codes along some time-linethe older being or acting mainly for continued Hebrewness, the younger against, or vice versa. Thus, the original Exodus legislation actively discouraged the release of slaves, for if they were married after their enslavement, their wives and children remained their respective masters' property . . . and in any event no financial provision was made for them on their release. Provided a slave felt well treated, there was no point in exchanging security without freedom for freedom without security. To counteract this, the Deuteronomist enacted that the released slave should be provided with certain provisions with which he could start a new life. (Phillips 1970:77, 1973:357, 1984:51) Not that the release with both family and send-off enjoined on one party guarantees the other's departure. In word and deed, the legal variants actually never "counteract" enough the attraction of "security" to generate any real change, as you might expect of a culture progressively enacting the vision of a free society: Clearly the [Exodus] slave's right to freedom was being rarely claimed; economic conditions had ensured that. It must remain doubtful whether the new Deuteronomic amendments would have rectified the situation. Leviticus 25:39ff. would imply not. (Phillips 1984:57) Some would even widen the Exodus range of eligibility for lifelong bondage, hence also the ensuing countermeasure, to include the unmarried and premarried Hebrew: Perhaps he 'loves his master' because his master has treated him well, and because he has fared better in this way than he could possibly expect to fare after his release with no means of subsistence (the Deuteronomic law attempts to solve the latter problem through a special regulation). (Noth 1966:178)
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Yet the converse forking into negative vs. positive attitude toward the scenario, along with the reverse line of development in valuation, has also been surmised. While Exodus merely allowed the bondman as family man, and him alone, to stay behind with his loved ones, the Deuteronomist generalized "this option rule by recognizing that permanent bondage with security, may be preferable to freedom with penury" (Carmichael 1974:56), irrespective of familial status and attachment, even of sex. It is now the later Code that actively discourages the release of slaves, and on grounds of pure economic expediency, always in the Hebrew's best interests. (Pushing the same reasoning to a diabolic extreme, nineteenth-century anti-abolitionists in America cited statistics to argue the higher incidence of mental illness among free blacks. 12 The justification of servitude in terms of "barbarian" nature, the Greek way, or of some divine hierarchy, in ancient Egypt's or feudal Europe's manner, at least proclaimed the self-interested worldview.) Whether paired or partitioned, then, both Codes are imagined to rank security above liberty. This would assimilate them (as it actually does their counterreading ideologues) to the devil's advocacy: to the fleshpot nostalgics, to Herodotus's Persian offering the doomed Spartan envoys a loophole in the form of well-rewarded service under Xerxes,13 to La Fontaine's dog tempting the thin-bellied wolf with the amenities of home life on a leash, and, in a more tragic vein, to Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor, who burns Christ himself at the stake as a threat to the priorities of human existence. Humankind, unequal to the burden of freedom thrust on it by God, can find happiness only in the assurance of earthly bread. But then, the Inquisitor never mistakes his own version of realism for divine revelation inscribed and interpreted. That Scriptural man cannot live by bread alone, least of all the chosen, is an article of faith on which the entire Hebrewgram rings the changes, yet nowhere so eloquently as in the distinction between the legality and the legitimacy of perpetual servitude for "love." To begin with, observe the array of dissuasive effects produced and coordinated by the multiple sequencing: it is rich even for the Bible, as if to make doubly sure. (Compare again the narrative rhetoric, whose temporalities loom large in my Poetics, esp. 230ff., 441-515. So they have done throughout the present argument, with special reference to the impact of group imagerye.g., hetero- or ethno-critical, dramatized or authorized, univalent or bivalentand thus far to the narrator's discourse of history.) In magnitude, for example, those arts of law-ordering stretch from the overall to the local to the phrase-length; in discourse world, or generic variety, from the inter- to the intra-textual; in sequencing logic, from chronology to hierarchy (taxonomic, teleological, normative) to allusive recurrence
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The interpenetration as well as the sheer number of ordinal crosscuts befit a rhetoric geared to a heterogeneous people-size audience: they exert tremendous power on those versed in the discourse artistry, the inmost insiders, while guarding against misfire among their unqualified fellows, through what I call rhetorical overkill (1985: e.g., 511ff., 1986, 1990b, 1991a: esp. 50ff., 1999a). The opening with "Hebrew," picked and preposed to leave nobody unaffected, everybody "reddened," has its foolproof counterparts in the arrangement of the sequel. A national literature, especially when dealing with nation-making or -breaking issues, must provide for all, in the communicative no less than in the sociolegal domain. On the largest text-scale, either Code reaches further than the Jeremiah quote in unrolling two main cases. 14 And those cases unroll as two phases (first temporary, then permanent bondage) in a fourfold sequence: chronological, most obviously or "foolproofly," yet also precedent-bound, hypothetical, and evaluative. The surface order of happening overlies an order of replay, of contingency, of judgmentthe latter three all rising between the phases to a climax of deterrence. The quartet of ordinal logics thus join impacts within a single rhetoric. The opening phase by itself ("serve [slave] . . . go out free") already replays before the assembled Israelites the "Hebrew" servitude-to-liberation master plotin its latest, formative, nationwide variant, pivoting on the verb (yetse) for the Exodus. And the second phase, immediately developing from it counter to precedent, embitters the judgment against either party. With the servitude perpetuated and publicized, the slave-owner looks even more Pharaonic. At the same time, that the initiative comes from the bondman, to the foreclosure of (re)deliverance ever after, makes a change in his disfavor, one that tips the balance of condemnation. No longer pressed by (say) debt, any more than oppressed by naked force, still less threatened by death, he must now bear the brunt of the rhetoric, take the legal and the ideo-national consequences alike. He gets what he wanted, but not quite in the manner he forecast it, and the ordering sharpens the difference between his understated "I will not go out free" and the reality. If the initial scenario ends as happily as possible with "will go out free for nothing''at once thrice echoed, "go out . . . go out . . . go out"the second, and with it the whole paragraph, closes on the opposite note, "will serve [lit., slave] him forever." Historical memory gives the judgment on his free choice of unfreedom yet another turn, by pitting it against all the Joseph-old variations on the enslavement-in-place-of-death theme. Further, by a characteristic two-way enhancement between analogy and sequentiality, pitting the exception against the bondage-or-death rule newly coincides with an ascending order from minor to major. Strictly, the thematic analogues in Egypt, although invoked by the law as early as the opening, were all forced into perpetual
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bondage under this exigency. And if the implicit value scale nevertheless applies to the temporary state, then it works a fortiorialong with the rest of the disapproval mobilized thereonce the victims on narrative record encounter their exact legal counterpart in perpetuity. He, if making the wrong choice, will become the first of the group to infringe the norm since his most hateful namesake in the formative plot at the corresponding stage. The self-enslaver, voluntary and vocal, recalls (in a way outruns) the "Hebrew . . . guilt), one" who denied the authority of the champion of "Hebrews," the future liberator and present lawgiver. "Who put thee as ruler and judge over us?", he jeered, in Pharaoh's name and voice, as it were. Meanwhile, God has appointed Moses both ruler and judge over Israel: he is now literally laying down the "laws" or "enactments'' (mishpatim), with that of bondage at their head. Nothing would appear more urgent than dissuading the auditor from ever relapsing into the same condition, on pain of replaying the judge's one-time antagonistor worse, because even that villain never had the face, or heart, to declare for servitude then, and to opt for it in the Exodus. His presumable skulking among the audience, though, would actualize as well as historicize the admonition: "If you sink into new bondage, then beware of loving your master above liberty." The overall sequence of hypotheticals emplots and virtually literalizes this effect, on the way from "If bought/sold, then freed" to "if unwilling to go free, then nailed to the doorpost." In the process, it marches in step with both the early-to-late quasi-narrative chronology and the rising bad-to-worse judgment. With "if" piled on "if," the last is cast as the remotest contingency and, by implication, the most undesirable. Thus the strategy welds the four mechanisms of ordering into a chain of deterrence. As for tactics, either law-code builds its own finished pattern on the affective common ground. Between the two all-embracing and cumulative hypotheticals, moving from temporary (21:2) to permanent (21:5-6) servitude, Exodus intercalates a trio of disjunctive cases: if single, then . . .; if premarried, then . . .; if mated in bondage, then. . . . This enables the repetition of the "shall go out" fiat amid circumstantial variation and to the greater inglory of the "I will not go out" antithesis lying ahead. Moreover, the in-between trio, though itself nonchronological, is so ordered that the last of its disjuncts ("If his master gives him a wife and she bears him sons or daughters, the wife and her children shall belong to her master and he shall go out single") comes to imply a chronological nexus with the resumed main plot ("And if the slave plainly says, I love my master, my wife and my sons, I will not go out free . . ."). 15 Of the three midposed coordinate disjuncts, the law-rhetorician has kept to the last the one that is sequencible into
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causal juncture with what follows. In doubling back to the seventh-year crossroads, he also resumes the intermediate development to motivate the fork now unhappily taken, the peripety of perpetuity sprung against the odds and the norms embodied in the exodus-like "going out" refrain. The "wife and children" acquired in the master's household are named by the bondman himself as a cause for ceding liberty regardless. With the middle supplied, this plot dynamics in turn graduates and hardens the dynamics of negative judgment: it now ascends from bad (Hebrew slavery) through worse (foreign union, with miscegenation) to worst (eternal self-enslavement). And the joint dynamics again run true to the Joseph precedent (Genesis 41:45, 50-52), complete with the threat of going foreign and oblivious to roots, yet without the first Hebrew's extenuating circumstances, his self-distancing from Egypt, his trust in God. The intermediate causal link, finally, itself unrolls a miniature sequence: "I love my master, my wife, and my children." Like the pair of main cases, this series of direct objects tightens into a chronology, here intimating a narrative of bonds as they arise in bondage: first with the "master," then with the "wife'' given by the master, then with "the children" borne by the wife. The sentential complements thus retrace and resume in shorthand the tale that the main plot has narrated across the midposed cases: nouns do duty for stages, the listing of agents for the actions involved. Exceptionally, however, the order is the slave's own, and the lawgiver just quotes him. The discourse thus encourages us to look below the chronology for a subjective ordinal logica psycho-logic whereby the speaker will condemn himself from his own mouth. Two such linear rationales actually emerge, both scalar and each charged with its peculiar negative load. One consists in a descending order of social importance, from highest to lowest, betraying a slave mentality reminiscent of the quotee's Hebrew prototype in Egypt. (Who put X over Y, he wanted to know.) The self-exposure is all the uglier because the priority given to the master also connotes a descending order of emotional importance or attachment: he has fallen "in love" with slavery. And even if you minimize the series into a rising order of (ac)cumulationas if the "wife and children" tipped the balance against "going out"the master still figures among the loved ones. In initiating the closure of the Hebrew's unique avenue to freedom, the bondman gives himself away several times over: the inset counter-voice justifies the attitude and the measures taken by the enclosing law-plot. Within the same rhetorical strategy, Deuteronomy alters the tactics to much the same purpose. In between the two linearized main cases, it replaces the Exodus trio of disjuncts by an equally casuistic and extensive but sequent plea for generosity in manumission:
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And when thou sendest him out free from thee, thou shalt not send him out empty-handed. Thou shalt rather furnish him out of thy flock and out of thy threshing floor and out of thy wine press; as the Lord thy God has blessed thee, thou shalt give to him. And thou shalt remember that thou weft a slave in the land of Egypt and that the Lord thy God redeemed thee; therefore I command thee this thing today. (15:13-15) Nominally addressed to the prospective donor, the call for gifts pressures (and, in failure, brands) the recipient as well. The worst contingency therefore seems here even remoter than in Exodus. Due to the length and plot timeliness of the interpolation, the anterior "sending him out free from thee" (15:12) reads like a foregone conclusion, if not an accomplished fact. The language enhances this impression in (otherwise superfluously) picking up that clause verbatim with a shift into a further contingency, "When [ki] thou sendest him out free from thee, thou shalt not send him out empty-handed": the one remaining issue, it seems, is the material equipment of the departing freedman (as in Exodus it was the identity of his co-departers. Only, there the ultimate midscenario, regarding the wife and children to be left behind, kept open an eventuality that is, or appears, foreclosed by ellipsis here: no supernumeraries in sight). The ensuing verse-length itemization of that equipment ostensibly clinches matters by providing for a good (re)start, against the dread of an empty future. And the terminal string of imperatives likewise co-applies to him, from the memento of Egyptian slavery, through God's redemption, to the order to do "this thing today"the vagueness of the last phrase nicely equivocating between send-off and departure. Not only do the two parties, as "brothers," share the formative ''Hebrew" master plot and the anti-"Hebrew" ideology of liberty; anyone in Moses' audience of imminent Crossers is liable to fall into either role on the other side of the Jordan. Thus preempted, virtually, the choice of lifelong bondage comes as an unpleasant surprise indeed, a peripety against mundane along with normative expectancy. Moreover, the sequential effect of the Deuteronomist's altered interposure finds an equivalent and reinforcement in his newly added peroration: It shall not seem hard in thy eyes, when thou sendest him out free from thee, for at half the hire of a hireling he has served [slaved] thee six years. So the Lord thy God will bless thee in all that thou doest. (15:18) This finale, apart from its novelty value, arrests notice by its discontinuity. An eyesore or excrescence by overrationalistic norms, the verse breaks chrono-legal in favor of affective movement, substitutes "green" for "red"
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and round closure. Instead of winding off the second, lifelong case, it not merely reverts to the first but, with "when thou sendest him out free from thee," again picks it up verbatim, just like the interposure before, as if to resume the resumption. A last-minute plea, made by the discourse after the event plotted in the world, it hopes against hope, reurging what Exodus has long changed for the bleakest, most stigmatized prospect. Deuteronomy rather harks back to paint the happiest imaginable: accounts settled, the brother gone free, the owner blessed from above. "He" may prove a difficult case, a glutton for Hebrewness; but "thou," unlike the ''hard" Pharaoh, must work for the best, in your own interest as well as his and God's. Where the earlier Code finished by applying the stick to 'one party ("he will serve [slave] him forever"), the later devises a second finish to offer the carrot to the other. Between interpolation and peroration, the miniature sequence of "love" also changes rhetorical emphasis. The reCoder having already dropped the wife and children from the initial scenario, he now keeps them out of the alternative movement: And if it so happens that he says to thee, I will not go out from thee, because he loves thee and thy house, because he lives well with thee . . . (15:16) Compared with Exodus, the master rises while the perpetual bondman sinks even lower in our esteem. The former, because he has inspired love and hands out parting gifts, as a brother should. The latter, because no strings whatever, familial or economic, never mind deadly or genocidal, attach him to the yoke, only the wrong kind of love. To be sure, the presumption of such love issues another directive to the owner under the guise of a compliment. "You are supposed both to make him feel good in service and let him go well-provided thereafter; then, and only then, will you have done your duty by your Hebrew brother and erased, if not escaped, the oppressor's stigma, even should he fail to erase its mirror image." Thus earned, the compliment of love is not at all left-handed, nor for nothing paid by the bondman, its immediate origin, and voiced by the Deuteronomist. Observe how it assumes extra weight and genuineness in the passage between Codes: from the direct quotation of the slave's utterance by Exodus to the indirect account of his feeling now. Where the social discourse ("I love . . .") may flatter, especially in lower-tohigher address, the inside view ("loves thee") must speak true. And the truth-value carries over to the social utterance itself, which personalizes Exodus's "I will not go out free" into "I will not go out from thee." But the more genuine the feeling, the more polarized its implications. They grow all the more discreditable to the subject, loving unto perpetual
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subjection, as well as all the more creditable to the object and only begetter of the love. For no other loved ones remain on the Deuteronomy list: the place of "my wife and my children" is taken in every sense by "thy house," an extension of the master and so no longer a thinkable extenuation. With the centering of attachment away from the nuclear family itself, the bondage lover merges completely into the Hebrew who rejected the champion-"judge" for Pharaoh and his house, the ''house of slaves." A name-calling thematized by the Hebrewgram, "slave" itself enters into the rhetoric of arrangement. While Leviticus avoids or hedges this word-choice in connection with the fellow Israelite (as against the outsider) and Jeremiah rubs it in wherever possible, Exodus and Deuteronomy variously time its occurrences to accord with the ascending order of stigmatizing. As already noted, Exodus greets us with "Hebrew slave" for shock effect, by proleptic leap, in object position mirroring the abjectness, amid a web of retrospective allusion and an unresolvable ambiguity between forced and voluntary enslavement. So greeted, we cannot quite take the vict-image at face value without perspectival ("translational") distancing, or turn its sting against the name-bearer alone, to the exemption of the "buyer." The immediate sequel harps on this uncertainty. It refers back to the "Hebrew slave" through the cognate yet open-ended verb 'bd (manifest even in Leviticus) and a long chain of third-person ("he/him/his") pronouns, while embarrassing his "buyer" with the designation "master." The weaker party still enjoys all the benefit of doubtfrom ambiguous causality to neutral referencebut only as long as he might have been a victim of circumstances. Once he opens his mouth to initiate the scenario of lifelong bondage, the gloves are off. The nominal and verbal forms under which he entered the temporary condition duly recur, in the same number and order, without any of the previous loopholes: "If the slave plainly says,. . . then he shall serve [slave] him forever." He has now earned the bad name. Deuteronomy's ascent toward outright condemnation for slavishness is yet more gradual. It softens the opening reference ("thy brother the Hebrew" instead of "Hebrew slave") and limits the inglorious but mandatory root 'bd to the action ("he shall serve [slave] thee six years")just as it never indicates his fraternal counterpart, the master, except through the second-person pronoun ("thou/thee/thy"). It then goes so far as to invert the referent of the pejorative term in calling upon the latter to remember that "thou wert a slave in the land of Egypt": present brotherhood at home joins forces with past bondage abroad to deter the addressee from confusing the two states by word or deed. Even when the Deuteronomist finally broaches the option for lifelong unfreedom, he maintains the pronominal reference ("if it so happens that he says to thee," where the earlier Code hardened into "the slave" with
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which it began) to the very end of the ear-piercing ceremony. 16 Much like his resumption of the optimum finish behind time, he would keep the door open (for a change of heart?) to the last possible moment. That moment once passed, however, the stigma in lieu of brotherhood comes with a vengeance, made all the heavier and uglier by its long charitable suspension. To avoid the inherited status-term from the opening protasis onward is not to edit it out but to keep it in reserve for the last, and by canonical measure lowest, status. Nailed to the doorpost of the "house" that he "loves" above freedom, "he will become thy slave forever [ebed olam]" (harsher than Exodus's verb form "he will serve [slave] thee forever," wa'abadkha le'olam); and, to double the blow, so will "thy maidservant.'' With the slavish ears hopelessly deaf to every appeal, the lawgiver's pent-up anger finds its release in the red-hot, thematic name-calling. Has, then, "a crucial change of label been effected" (Jackson 1988:99) between the Codes? Yes, to a degree, though hardly in the geneticist's sense, because the matter is ethno- rather than text-critical. The timing, the temporariness, the congruity, and the goal-directedness of the change assimilate it, not to the fortunes of legal prehistory, but to the dynamics of suasion along the law-story. Finally, the discoursive measures, perspectival, ordinal, lexical, get embodied in a symbolic action: And if the slave plainly says, I love my master, my wife, and my sons, I will not go out free, then his master shall bring him to God, and he shall bring him to the door or to the doorpost, and his master shall pierce his ear with an awl, and he shall serve [slave] him forever. (Exodus 21:5-6) And if it so happens that he says to thee, I will not go out from thee. . . . then thou shalt take the awl and thrust it through his ear, into the door, and he shall become thy slave forever; and to thy maidservant, too, shalt thou do so. (Deuteronomy 15:16-17) The law's attitude toward the proceedings is so hard to miss as to show itself foolproof in actual interpretation as well as in Scriptural intention and execution. Though the details of the symbolism enacted have remained moot, everybody (including the counterideologues of unfreedom) would for once agree about their value-ladenness and the negativity of their joint thrust.17 The wonder is that this unmistakable attitude has not been read back into the earlier scenario, in line with a major force for enlightenment wielded by foolproof composition: what I call the better-latethan-never principle. The various ascending orders we have charted throughout, now risen to their highest, typically double as an insurance policy for nodding auditors.
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To go by age-long experience, at any rate, even such auditors would sit up and take notice at this juncture. But why, precisely, and how does their belated uptake reflect (if only by its abruptness or incompleteness) the ongoing march of the strategy? Consider again the interplay between whole and parts. The very need for a ceremony to mark the perpetuation of the bondage contrasts with the informality of the alternative: stripped down (in Exodus, four times) to "go out," it implies a "reversion to the man's normal status" (Jackson 1988:94). A status, one may add, deemed ever since Creation as natural in its autonomy as that of wedlock ("it is not good for man to be alone") in its complementarity, whose severance fittingly involves a writ and ritual of divorce. The antithesis between the time-marked and the lifelong sharpens from one ceremonial phase to the next. The silence of the departure now transposes into speech on the bondage-lover's part, not for nothing introduced with unprecedented emphasis. Exodus ushers it in by a twofold verbum dicendi (we'im amor yomar ha'ebed, "Spricht abet, spricht der Knecht," in Buber and Rosenzweig's near-literal rendering); Deuteronomy prefers the longest form of the conditional (we'haya ki yomar, "If it so happens that he says . . ."). Because a fellow Israelite "goes out" without saying, as it were, the surrender of that right must be voiced, complete with formal negation ("I will not go out") and shameful motivation. Then the involvement of outside parties, higher authorities divine and/or human, likewise springs into relief against their total absence in the scenario of egress. There they are at most readable into "buy" and "is sold," whose syntactic tri-valence entails a third, judicial party in one of the underlying cases, the thief's. Only thus and then does the judge lurk among the antecedents to the in medias law-plot. If anything, however, his remote implication occurs at the beginning to suggest the unnaturalness of so much as the temporary bondage imposed on a criminal with a view to paying damages. Another unflattering argument from minor to major accordingly develops: from compulsory to voluntary bondage, from implicit and possible to mandatory outside involvement, and perhaps most telling, from earthly to heavenly superintendence. In Exodus, his master shall bring him to the elohim. To cut a long dispute short, the indirect object does equivocate between "God" and "judge(s)." But the two significations may well converge in their reference (e.g., "the sanctuary at which judgment is administered" [Driver 1965:184]) and, what's more, in their affective-symbolic import. "God," as the deity cum rescuer of the "Hebrews'' and the Lord (in prophetic imagery, even the "lover") of Israel, would bring in the party multiply
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and covenantally injured by the switch of allegiance. "Judge" would figure in another double, and double-edged, role vis-à-vis the principals. As the representative of the community, he witnesses the would-be self-enslaver's breach of ideo-national values; as guardian of the law, he ensures against coercion (rife in Egypt-like Jerusalem) on the master's part. Neither of the applicants to elohim would come out well from the public exposure. However, it is the side that has launched, voiced, and reaffirmed the perpetuation that must bear the symbolic brunt of the consequences. The nailing of his ear to the door(post) is inexhaustibly evocative, as befits a last touch. The ideological stigma, the emotional attachment, the social and spatiotemporal fixture: all have their objective correlative in it, a bodily, visible, indelible, public mark of shame. The publicity gains special expressiveness from the fixture of the "Hebrew or Hebrewess" to the door the same door through which the bondperson in "love" with the household(er) could and should instead "go out . . . go out. . . go out . . . go out. . . . ''Or, in larger and historical perspective, credited by the Talmud to R. Simeon bar Rabbi: Wherein do door and doorpost differ from all other things that are in the house? Said the Holy One, Blessed be He: door and doorpost were witnesses in Egypt when I passed over the lintel and the two doorposts and I said, "For to me are the Sons of Israel slaves"not slaves to slavesand I brought them out from bondage to freedom; and such a one went and bought himself a masterlet him be pierced through in front of them. (Qiddushin 22b) We need only add the clincher: that the verb for God's passage over lintel and doorpost, we'abar, puns with the law's ibri, thematically and, now as then, retributively. Then, divine wrath fell upon the Hamite eraser (in the naming) and obstructor (in the action) of Crossership; now, upon the Hebrew anti-Crosser, who violates the name and heritage interechoing along the law-plot, from the 'br left unrealized to the door never traversed except, like I Samuel's Hebrewness bound up with the Jordan, the wrong way. The wronger, if anything, because he opts, not out of a conflict between the diametric values, but for crossing into downright servitude. The tit-for-tat cum rite-of-passage symbolism inscribed backwards upon the material arena recurs in the form of physical pinpointing, whereby the ear has been singled out as the object and locus of mutilation, the figure of disfigurement. Visibility apart, its piercing trades on the Biblical association of "hearing" with compliance to signify two polar things at once, namely, the duty of future obedience and the denial of a higher authority. The Rabbis, now Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai, already sensed the two-in-one message as well:
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Wherein is the ear different from all other limbs of the body? Said the Holy One, Blessed be He: The ear that heard my voice on Mount Sinai at the time when I said, "For to me are the Sons of Israel slaves"not slaves to slavesand such a one went and bought himself a master, let him be pierced through. (ibid.) Or one might instance the commandment to tell the Exodus story "in the ears of thy son and thy son's son" (Exodus 10:2). God thus silently reenters (and in Deuteronomy, first enters) in a figurative guise and a punitive role. This logic of retribution may signify even less directly, via the oft-cited parallel to the Hammurabi Code §282: If a male slave has said to his master, "You are not my master," his master shall prove him his slave and cut off his ear. (Pritchard 1969:177) Enacted to deter and punish the slave's rebellion, the Babylonian operation on the ear (like the eye-gouging in Nuzi) appears to contrast with that kept for his all too "loving" opposite number. But if the interCode allusion obtains, then the analogy will also work straight and a fortiori. The "Hebrew" binding himself to a master among his fellows is a rebel against the highest master of allthe Lord who has demanded and achieved liberty for him, from everybody but himself, and under the name "God of the Hebrews." With the two laws allusively coupled, further, the joint antirebellion measure now visits upon the offender's ear in truth the bicultural stigmatizing that the discourse has earlier inflicted through the arts of language. This also disconfirms the overgeneralizing and high-flown view taken of such rituals in anthropology, sometimes applied to the Bible itself. "Stigmata consecrate by a mark of divine 'ownership' much as priestly vestments cause a cleric to stand out from the laity" (Leach and Aycock 1983:122). With a God-owned nation, however, the stigma of ear-piercing is rather downgrading and deconsecrative: it marks the national's comedown from heavenly to human ownership. As always, the Proteus Principle works both ways. If different symbolic forms (e.g., words and acts) may perform one symbolic role (e.g., branding), then the converse also holds: a symbolic form (e.g., physical marking) lends itself in performance to different, even incompatible symbolic roles. The Principle even gains in force the wider you extend the marking repertoire. To cite just one earlier example, take circumcision, with its concealed and covenantal and consecrative effects: its performance in Joshua fittingly lifts "the reproach of Egypt" from the exHebrew Jordan crossers. Otherwise accordant with Exodus here, Deuteronomy implies the same normative, as well as theoretical, point by omitting the explicit reference
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to "God" (and/or "judges" mediating between him and the community) from the ritual. The omission is widely attributed among Biblicists (e.g., Weinfeld 1972:233) to the centralization of the cult in Josiah's Jerusalem: with local shrines bannedor the mobile shrine of the wilderness no longer availablethe ceremony must turn secular and domestic. Even so, the conclusion does not quite follow from the (surmised) premise. Amidst ellipsisindeed, through the pregnancy of ellipsisthe new law-variant keeps the religious, interworld dimension in sight. The iterated earsymbolism works to this end, as do those added overt references to God before and after the ceremony. The perpetuation thereby turns not secular, a-religious (nor, again, consecrative) but virtually sacrilegious. Even assuming an in-between centralization, the postExodus discourses make an ideo-rhetorical virtue of the historical necessity. The Deuteronomist will not make "God" an accomplice, or so much as a witness, to the (re)enslavement among those he has delivered: he only "blesses" the (re)liberator of a "Hebrew brother" and, by partial transfer, the (re)liberated "slave" himself (15:14-16, 18). In Jeremiah, inversely, he curses the (re)oppressor, from king Zedekiah downward. Either way, the affair stands unblessed. Still less does the affair become private, merely interpersonal, even if the omitted elohim divorces it from the judiciary as well as from God. The whole Hebrewgram argues the opposite, the nationwide kinship term underlines the magnitude of the issue, the plagues inflicted on Egypt testify to its theonational bearing, and Jeremiah clinches the argument with a terrible demonstration from within the we-group. However, while both the foundational precedent and the final account-settling meet the enslaver's force with superior force, the in-between Codes opt for rhetoric instead. And if Exodus dispenses with the elohim superpower in the case of temporary servitude, Deuteronomy extends the rationale to the lifelong, staking everything on affective appeal. The big stick has been wielded abroad and may be (indeed will be) again at home, but only as a last resort, historical, destroying, irreversible, and so the province of narrative. Meanwhile, a Covenant of liberty stands opposed to coercion, fraternity to force (whether exerted by or on it) other than interior and discoursive. The less enforceable the release law, the more finely does it measure the people's solidarity: nothing can test so well as bondage the bonds of brotherhood progressively forged ever since the first Hebrew.
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9 Law, Narrative, and the Poetics of Genesis The Source of Discourse and the Discourse of Source: Law as Compound Law-Tale The rhetoric of deterrence essentially interrelates the three "Hebrew" laws in terms of their shared communicative strategy. Even so, their family likeness across eras and books does not quite reduce them to either a- or cotemporality, as if they were sheer variations on a theme, effect, art, device. Elsewhere sequence can and does get neutralized, with a view to foregrounding some equivalence among assorted instances of one pattern. Examples would be the Joseph and the Jonah self-namings referred to a single type of dialogue between unequals; or the Genesis and the Chronicles genealogies juxtaposed in a comparative light; or the accounts of the Conquest in Joshua and Judges similarly viewed; or the appeals to God's deliverance throughout the law; or otherwise unrelated cases of the Bible's monologue, verbatim echoing, figurative language, characterization by epithet, human error and thanklessness, etc. All would, certainly might then be synchronized out of order, examined as textual patterns and forces across time, networks without narrativity among the items, often to excellent analytic purpose. By contrast, our rhetoric has shown itself two-dimensional from the first. Even under such analysis, performed to uncover common denominators and rule-governedness in formal variety, tactical affective departures in formal unity, the dissuader's off-putting Yes has already implied and exploited sequentiality on more than one level. On the largest scale, all three laws depend for their meaning and effect on precedents in the we-group's contact with Egypt, as far back as Genesis. In the middle range, Jeremiah's quotation from Moses overtly establishes among the laws themselves a history-like order of before and after. Locally, each Pentateuch version wields impressive arts of microsequence, geared to both nature (chronological-causal) and culture (e.g., hierarchical). Of these levels, however, the middle, interbook one still exhibits the weakest linear form and forcean appearance that would give the falsest impression of the law-trio itself and the multilevel traffic as a whole. To
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demonstrate the contrary requires a time-oriented follow-up, whereby the changes amid persistence along the lawseries will come into their own. As ever, the Hebrewgram's network ("synchrony") and narrative ("diachrony") interpenetrate on all text-scales. The shift now wantedtoward legal, or legaliterary, historytherefore bears less on the key elements and structures in play than on the weight they assume in the analysis, even regarding issues already focused. Not that we must overhaul or leave behind the dissuasive strategy but that we need to refocus its operations from a vantage point underexplored thus far, rhetorically as otherwise. Our business in this chapter is with ordinance and order, statute and sequence, law and life, Code and interCode genesis (or its representation) answerable to phylogenesis, all dramatized by the macronarrative of Hebrewness. The image of diachrony in (lega)literature: Genesis mimeticized and canonized From the poetic thread running through the variants of the law in synchrony, then, let us advance to what I would call the poetic image of their diachrony: the mimesis of their genesis, their evolution in its canonical aspect and order. Canonical, I emphasize, because whatever the genetic prehistory of those "Hebrew" laws, their order has been fixed once and for all as a wide-flung story unfolding with variations, retrospections, aftermaths, outgrowths, even closure along the Bible's historiography. Doubly fixed, actually, considering that time and text march in step throughout to generate the backbone of diachrony: a chronological narrative, and one almost canon-length. The speech-event where God addresses Israel through Moses in Exodus accordingly goes first along both given orders; Moses' repetition in Deuteronomy, second; and the breach of covenant that elicits the quote from the Pentateuch in Zedekiah's Jerusalem, last. Along this serial order, the intervals among the items have likewise been doubly fixed, in text and time. Regarding the text as a language continuum, we have the tangible, graphic, Scriptural intervals among the three booksExodus, Deuteronomy, Jeremiahand they make a greater difference, even by themselves, than may appear. Unlike the Bible's ordinary repetition structure, the members of the trio here are anything but adjacent: decreasingly so as we move from Pentateuch to prophecy in the canonized book-sequence. And this increases the demands on the reader's memory, hence the need for commensurate bridging on the text's part. Again, the locus, the memory span, and other features of the dramatis personae themselves undergo traceable shifts on the way, but in represented not representational time. The temporal intervals that separated the formation (rise, editing, hardening) of the law's three variants are anyone's guess. But we can measure exactly the intervals of their enunciation by the given law-speaker to the given audience within the Bible's world. As
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speech-events, they come with parameters of utterance, including dates, even arenas, on top of originators, quoters, intermediary and merely receiving Israelite listeners. So contextualized in narrative history, each of the law-texts has its own imaged spacetime, its interior genesis, its figural reference group, its horizons of memory and meaning: its dramatic Sitz im Leben, as it were, if I may transpose the outworn form-critical watchword from source to discourse or, more precisely, to the Bible's own discourse of source. Like the "source as discourse" made out in crossculturalism, my "discourse of source" has a paradoxical ring, but it captures and literalizes for a change the exact truth, namely, the invariable representation here of the law's origins, and thick origins, too, as befits a dramatic Sitz im Leben. Among many other results, the law-trio's anchorages in the life of the people are firmly interspaced along the grand chronology, each allotted some historic crossroads. The Exodus occasion, greeting the ex-Hebrews with the mishpat of Hebrew bondage, takes place at Sinai, in "the third month" after the deliverance from Egypt (19:1); the Deuteronomy Code arises in Moses' valedictory address, "spoken to all Israel beyond the Jordan in the wilderness, in the Arabah, over against Suph, between Paran and Tophel . . . in the fortieth year, in the eleventh month, on the first day" (1:1-2); and Jeremiah quotes the Pentateuch to the covenant-violators in the next millennium588 B.C. by our reckoningon the eve of Jerusalem's fall (34:1, 7). Along this chain of utterance, the intervals between the occurrences widen anew. Time-compounds text-hiatus, the characters' discontinuous engagement with slave law evolves parallel to the reader's, as do the narrated and the narrational sequence in general. Each discourse times and tells its source at a unique juncture within the represented world. The law may appear timeless and its exterior ("true") fortunes at source may remain undatable, unorderable, let alone chartable; but its (re)voicing is neither, because mapped onto the narrative linethe overall poetic image of diachrony that the canon generates in the telling. Intergeneric composites The law's narrative connection will prove more and more versatile, indissoluble, two-directional, dynamic, operative, as we go along. It has already proved sufficiently built-in, though, to indicate the need for replacing the exterior by a lived and living (hi)story of evolution as well as commonality over time: crosscultural fantasies need replacing by canonical facts and drives, analytic myopia and atomism and narrativicide by a quest for grand synthesis. What we have learnt from case after case, intergroup, in-group, verbal, sociopolitical, psychocultural, most recently and relevantly from the I Samuel trio of bicultural marks of shame, only strengthens the promise
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that the last case at issue will repay, indeed finalize such a quest. The three "Hebrew" laws invite alignment not just with each otherin their given distribution from Pentateuch to Prophecy, from Sinai to Jerusalem, from Israel's birth throes to her death agonybut also with the rest of the "Hebrew" occurrences, athwart the artificial generic, and of course genetic, frontiers imposed by the scholars. This rage for taxonomy has steadily grown over the millennia. For example, Pauline Christianity would abrogate Mosaic law while appropriating narrative and prophecy. Nowadays, again, we find the Rabbinic opposition of Aggadah to Halakhah not only polarized out of its common, if not holistic framework, but also endlessly subcategorized at either pole. As the Bible's narrative has been fragmented into untold documents and traditions, so has the law, whether by style (e.g., casuistic vs. apodictic) or by subject matter (civil, criminal, military, cultic, ethical, ritual, familial . . .). In effect, the same rigidity that we have encountered in the attempt to overdiscriminate case law (into peculiar deictic on top of grammatical fixity) imposes itself elsewhere within the law and on the law in general. Anti-protean arrest, isolationism, decontextualization, rules out of touch with roles: the age-old stereotyping forces conspire to produce yet another metastereotype, this time of a generic nature and reach, as if the law were sui generis, a discourse law to itself, hence also emanating from its own source. (For example, one older or younger than the narrative's, and either way rendering the juxtaposition disharmonious.) 1 On the Proteus Principle, I will demonstrate, the picture and the process transform in this field, too, with the law brought to life and, against appearances, to canonically indivisible life. The agenda of atomism, it may perhaps appear, answers to the canon's own anthology of discourse genres. And the largest as well as oldest generic divide seems the sharpest. Unversed in the law of narrative, how indeed can the dividers help missing (at best minimizing or misidentifying) the narrative of the law? After all, the Bible's law ordinarily assumes the form of precept, not practice: legal enactments and collections intercalated into the narrative, as though to disrupt and adulterate it, rather than legal judgments made in the course of the narrative. For that matterthe segmentor could proceed to argueeven those rare judicial dramas interwoven with the action need not focus or enrich the law. Solomon's trial scene ends in a terse ad hoc ruling that cannot be generalized into a rule: "Give her the living child and by no means kill him; she is his mother" (I Kings 3:27); Ruth's tale of levirate does unveil a rule"Formerly in Israel," a party would draw off his sandal and give it to the other to "confirm" their agreement (4:7)but one no longer operative in the world of the teller, who introduces it as antiquarian commentary for our enlightenment. (What with their brevity, neither example appears to compare with the
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full-fledged novelistic or dramaturgic legal actions recently instanced by the proponents of the Law and Literature movement, e.g., Weisberg [1992] on Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice or Dickens's Bleak House.) However, all these ready-made taxonomies go against the Bible's poetics, especially against its revolutionary approach to narrative. Within the canon, an unprecedented insight into the law of narrative has enabled a metamorphosis of the narrative of the law. Among its radical novelties, the poetics militates against generic as well as genetic fragmentation: no pure law is visible anywhere, no law-units isolated or detachable at will from the enclosing narrative discourse. And the more "legal" units involvedas in our threefold paradigm case, itself ordered along the canon's far-flung Hebrew seriesthe richer their potential for a grand unity: not least for a history-like dynamics impelled across matter, manner, genre, spacetime. These novelties work so counter to familiar literary models and discoursive classifications, as well as to traditional approaches to the Bible, that they require some further grounding before we pursue them in exemplary action. How the law of narrative modulates (and, where necessary, recasts its common forms) into the narrative of the law will best emerge if we proceed from the item to the seriesfrom the narrator's report of law-speaking, through the lawtale spoken, then written down, often by the speaker himself, to the canonized law-macrotale. The implications for the mimesis of law-genesis, and the poetics generally, will accumulate to suit along the way. This in accordance with the rule I have already demonstrated apropos of pre-textual genetic criticism low and high, including the abortive crossculturalist diachronies of our trio. When you affirm that a scribe miscopied a word, that a redactor yoked together several documents, that a class-name became an ethnicon in mid-canon, your explanation of the givens necessarily assumes the form of a tale of genesis. But just as the text's genesis is merely one object, so is the bid for its pre-textualities only one line and mode, of diachronic narrativealways running alongside the con-, inter-, post-textual tracks. What is an account of the Bible's revolutionary way with epistemology, history, character, perspective, repetition, allusion, dialogue, etc., or of their mismatch with later art, from the Apocrypha's or the New Testament's to modernism's, if not a study in the workings of diachrony? An account of how a text came to be and to be changed is a tale of development on any axis, under any name. So pre-textuality, far from equaling literature's life or even coming-to-life in historical time, is one element among many, and in Scripture the least reconstructible element. Both old-style "historians" and newer self-styled "diachronists" (even when confronted with the argument and the evidence of my Poetics) find this very hard to accept, perhaps to understand; nor has their imperialism been much challenged,
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since the literary approaches themselves tend to grant it willingly, and dismissively, on the same restrictive equation, as though they have got the better, "synchronic" part of the territory. The facts, down to literary values, are otherwise. All affairs with the discourse's source entail (hi)storytellinggenetic narrating, or "genarrating" for shortone of a rigorous, well-plotted order, too, because the alleged process (origination, evolution) cannot just stand to the finished product as early to late: their nexus must tighten into cause and effect, the tighter the more plausible. And this universal rule, we will discover, thrives on the variables superadded in the Bible to the law/narrative encounter. Concerning the discourse of source, above all, they give rise to an intergenre whereby the arts of "genarration" can and do project a thick (lega)literary history from Exodus to Exile. Law-speaking within the represented events The drive toward generic mixture and synthesis begins here at the level of the individual ordinance, always a composite unit, a three-in-one. For the kernel-ordinance, if at all isolable, germinates both a tale about an ordinance and a tale in ordinance modality. How to draw any sharp line between the genres in the Bible, when every piece of law is twice narrativized even by itself? Such narrativizing runs deeper than either mere quoting or mere temporalizingone the subjective, the other the objective way to project language onto the flow of represented lifebecause the two measures variously interfuse in the composition. Legal enactment, in the familiar, universal sense of lawmaking proper, goes here with both communicative and plotlike enactment within the world itself. The communicative enactment on stage produces a tale about a lawby which I mean one told ("enacted") not only apropos but also around it, via the teller's shift to the quoting mode. Just as the reference to Hebrewness did in all our earlier patterns, the law gets framed; and usually through direct report, with the inverted commas verbalized, the shift of gears particularized into a surface mini-narrative. When articulated to the full, the shift will exhibit itself in, say, "On that very day the Lord brought the Sons of Israel out of the land of Egypt by their hosts. And the Lord said to Moses, Consecrate to me every first-born; whoever is the first to open the womb among the Sons of Israel, both of man and of beast, is mine. . . . When Pharaoh let the people go, God did not lead them by way of the land of the Philistines" (Exodus 12:51-13:17): frame, transformer, inset, back to frame. A (narrated) address within an (authorial) address, the news and features of its communication among the dramatis personae greet us, in whatever strength, even before we have an idea of its actual content, then lead us to the inset, then show us out again, toward the frame. Engagement with the stage business first and last, with the message
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in between. All characteristic of Scripture's way with the Chinese-box device? Yes, but hardly either an inevitable or negligible technicality attached to the real thing, i.e., the legal "kernel." Due to its framing, the law reaches us at second (or third, or, in Jeremiah, fifth) hand: as an utterance quoted from a legislative affair that boasts eventhood, if only speech-eventhood, rather than as a law-text without any situational context to anchor it in the world, to make a tale, historical or otherwise, about its making. Unlike the anonymous, context-free Laws of Eshnunna or Hittite Laws (in Pritchard 1969:161-63, 188-97) or the typical modern Code, the enunciation of Biblical law always involves (through the omnipresent "X said to Y" lead-in formula) and often specifies (as with Hebrew bondage) the definitional feature of an event: occurrence at a unique junction of time and place, where a determinate speaker (or quoter) faces a determinate audience. What I called the transformer, the verbum dicendi interposed between frame and inset, effects here a generic transformation of the law unit, in that it interposes a verbal event of "saying" between the frame-sharers. The law is thereby never communicated directly from author to reader but mediated through a set-up and process of represented figural transmission, a staged act of discourse about the law. And the act's very stage management, even if minimized to the quoting formulathe transformeralready entails discourse of source, legaliterary history, genarration. The reason should be plain. As all quotation makes discourse about discourse, law-quotation need only contextualize the quoted utterance (by telling who-said-what-to-whom, a fortiori when, where, why, in whose name) to represent the utterance-source, to dramatize and interiorize the genesis, in part at least. Quoting presupposes not only an original speech to be quoted, but also a reference to the origins of the speech as quoted. And here that reference is given in the transformer. (Contrast the opacities of the Hebrewgram's third pattern, e.g., "Abram the Hebrew," where the source and the very fact of quotation need to be inferred: the transformer, e.g., the interposure of the Canaanite fugitive's private monologue, supplied in the reading. Also compare the discourses of source rife in literature outside the Bible, which even at their most unlike yet entail quoting, with or without transformer, and assimilate to the poetics. Thus the Homeric invocation of the Muse, the convention of the found manuscriptborn in II Kings 22as reigned genesis, the assignment to the speaker of powers and motives other than the author's, the allusion to earlier texts, the alliance or quarrel with tradition . . .) Further, the transformatory reference points back to one object. Even at its minimal, the quoter's sourcerepresentation of the law throughout the Bible overtly identifies God as prime originator, sometimes also as the direct transmitter to humanity (Genesis 9:1-7). In so identifying him, the tale of genesis about the law outnarrativizes the narrative frame itself,
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whose appeal to God's inspiration as the ultimate, authorial source remains tacit (Poetics, 58-128). Within the immediate law-discourse family, reputedly its historical parallels and precedents, the source-tale also outdistances even those Ancient Oriental Codes that may appear alike in heaven-orientedness, for example, Lipit-Ishtar's or Hammurabi's. For their prologues rather suggest divine guidance than situate it at the head of an enacted genetic line: the king himself plays the original and sole enunciator (see the texts in Pritchard 1969:159ff., 164ff., and Greenberg 1960). On the Bible's stage, the first cause and context is unmistakable, whatever the intermediate chain of transmission paradigmatically extended to midpose the Law-speaker. In context-boundness, at any rate, you cannot tell the law-speaking (divine any more than human) apart from the nonlegal, even from the nonverbal activities narrated before and after. Anomalous as it may appear nowadays to students of law and literature alike, such projection into eventhood follows here a yet wider, actually all-encompassing rule of artistic synthesis. Genres that elsewhere boast an autonomous existence and poetics undergo recoding by way of intergeneric crossing with narrative. Just as Biblical narrative assimilates all other discourse genresverse, dream, parable, oracle, epigram, catalogue, genealogyso it never interpolates law per se but frames, reports, energizes, historicizes law-speaking. And if all is grist that comes to this storyteller's mill, some varieties come out even less detachable from the whole than others. For example, the law (or the parable but not, say, the genealogy) assumes in the process the features and force of inset utterance among the characters on stage themselves: where normally the words uttered by the legislator (as an enactment) aim to regulate future behavior, here their very uttering (as an act) also changes the state of affairs in the world. That they attach one more item, hence another bond and string, to the national covenant would be change enough. Likewise with the difference made in the process to source assignment, regarding givenness, exactitude, salience, connectivity, tellability. For the Bible's quoted (legal or parabolic) utterance involves as such an originative framework and lineage on top of an original; it is not so much represented as re-presented, often re-re-presented, and with its representational genealogy in the world itself duly noted (e.g., God→Moses→Israel). The antithesis between my dramatic Sitz im Leben and its source-critical counterpart, or any kindred pre-text-bound approach, accordingly redoubles. For yet richer synthesis and markedness at once, the twofold, inset/frame logic of quotation usually stretches to the very material form of the law words. The quoted communication-event is held (again like the parable, unlike the genealogy) in the oral medium, thus reinforcing its continuity with adjacent scenes of characters at talk and its distinctness from the written, scriptural medium of the narrator who quotes them all. Far from
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plain unmediated discourse, addressing us readers straight, the law does not reach us even in transmission as unmarked discourse within and about discourse, but as speech within writing, writing about speech. A multifold generic variety in unity, a lengthened genarrative chain. Nor is writing itself (''literature" as inscription) the monopoly of Scripture but also part of the represented discourse of source itself, in its evolutionary ("literary historical") aspect, because it follows, witnesses, and eternalizes the speaking. The Covenant Code, then the Jordan Torah, are solemnly inscribed in "book" form by the Lawgiver himself on the respective occasions, as the original Decalogue's tablets showed the finger of God. Same plotting of and qua communicative event, same order of doubling the heavenly word, variant media. From Exodus speech to writing, from spoken to written Deuteronomic recoding: by the end of each phase, Moses' Israel approximates, indeed prefigures, the narrator's in having a law-scripture for guidance, reminder, and consultation about, say, the Hebrew within. The implications already reach from generic to genetic study. Inevitably, if the finished product is not to be decomposed into its "original" elements without violence, neither is the process, for the key elements remain constant: law and narrative. In tightening the inset/frame accord and continuity at once, the representational arts leading (thus far) up to the evolution in medium so thicken the discourse of source as to leave no opening for the endless source-critical analysis of the discourse against itself. Failing outside evidence about the law-source, this would be enough to doom all the versions of such revisionist analysis: for example, the crosscultural and the Israelitecentered, the interCode progressivist and the uniformly pseudepigraphic. The last, whereby some inventive belated jurist(s) assumed ("fictionalized") Moses' voice for authority, deserves particular notice here. Following from the very earthbound ("historical") premises of source criticism, it is the most widespread genetic theory, or ingredient; and, alleging a human author (in effect, quoter) behind the "pseudo"-speaker, it is the theory most related to the communicative set-up. Exponents also misally fictionality with literariness and literariness with impracticalitya package still traditional across various disciplinesand so carry the revisionism beyond that set-up. The inventiveness wished upon the law-enunciating then supposedly goes with the inoperativeness of the law enunciated in real Israelite life, if not in the represented world. Sheer fiction, pure vision, with an eye to theoretical, archival, aesthetic, sapiential, educational ends. Observe, therefore, how the narrativizing at work on the legaliterature disables, several times over, any imputed fiction of pseudepigraphy as early as the frame. Thus, the law here is not an independent unit with a thin venerable cover attachedfor example, a superscribed note on originbut part of a history that enacts and deepens its roots through an interposed
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originary mini-tale. There, the grand historiography affirms the historicity of a literary unit that went into it. Given the eventhood of law-communication, it involves the same high truth-claim as the rest of the narrated events: higher than most, if anything, because overtly and directly traced to God via quotation. The primary narratorial quoter having supported the claim with a whole line of authoritative transmission, how would one go behind Moses and the Lord and himself to establish the alleged inventive originator of them all? The strong truth-claim also urges practical implementation: the God-given command of release is meant to be followed as Pharaoh already discovered, too late, and the Judaeans willon pain of terrible retributive justice. The data's ontology multiply contradicts the "scientific" diachronist's, rather than just leaving his presumption of naturalism inapplicable, unverifiable, unproductive, in effect circular. He would then have to counterargue the fictionality of the address from its very offensiveness and tracelessness within the historiography. Even in an age of fiction, which the Bible's wasn't, a work anonymously told makes it hardest for us to distinguish fictional from factual telling (Poetics, 23-35); and this upper limit would still appear low if the writer shared the anonymity, his environment took supernaturalism for granted, and his writing intended to revolutionize it, notably into absolute lordship of reality and discourse alike, with marked implications for his people's written covenant. Starved of hard data, counterreadings under the banner of pseudepigraphy feed instead on the usual makeshifts: guesswork, anachronism, cross-bridging, special pleading, narrativicide, rhetoric, even illogic. Thus, as the revisionist will jump from the enclosure's alleged truthlessness to the inset's forcelessness, so does his consequent about the law tend to outrun his premise about life. Given the chain of transmission, each and every link dramatized along it must become fictional in order to replace the discourse's anonymous with the source's pseudonymous quoter. Against reason, though, ground and target all too often interfuse here: the counterargument from naturalism rests on the dismissal of God's authorship but rules out Moses' in the process. Exactly on the low realistic world-picture behind any source critical agenda, the two high authorities forged (in either sense) should constitute distinct voices, issues, ontologies. Even if the one's impossibility is presumed, the other's still needs demonstrating. Why can't Moses have originated laws (e.g., those regarding Hebrew servitude) or the Law himself, with or without attribution to Heaven? 2 In short, while the enchainment of the address gathers strength on the way to us, its disenchainment forbids the package dealing of the nexuses to be snapped in reverse. Again, the more emplotted the characters along the line of transmission, or the inset quoting within the frame's overall chain of events, or the passage from the spoken to the written medium, the less extractable and
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transplantable and fictionalizable the quoted law-kernel. The resistance to source analysis grows apace with every further axis and practice of narrative synthesis that will emerge: the idea declines, in inverse ratio, below the threshold of empirical argument against the grain. For the earthbound rationalist himself, if empirics alone count, the likelihood and the work-ability of invented attribution must part ways, or else one standard would apply to the characters' world, another to his own world-making on the evidence. As their given, history-like anchorage and belief in a superauthor elude historical proof, or refutation, or even minimum testability, so do his in earthly behind the vaunted authorship. And the mere naturalistic quarrel with the ontology on canonical record, the life's or the law's, the people- or the text-formative, hardly substitutes for the counterdata missing, suppressed (if you will) in the interests of theocentrism. Historiosophy is one thing, historical research another, especially when its very "source"documents have been woven into the finished other-minded historiography with such systematic art. Come down or up to a matter of faith, pseudepigraphy at source is no better (as explanatory "genarrative" tool, even worse) than giving credence to the law's Mosaic, ultimately divine origin in real life. The inquiry into the discourse of source commits us to neither belief, only to the suspension of disbelief that constitutes poetic faith, always for the nonce. Law-telling among modal event-representations From the (hi)story devised about each Scriptural ordinance, we come to the ordinance proper as (hi) story in the legal register. What the intergeneric transformation of law-speech achieves by artnarrativity crossed with legislativitythe formation of the matter spoken about compounds by generic nature. As the frame modulates into the inset and writing into orality, so does authorial into figural narration. The statement "With my lips I tell all the ordinances [mishpete] of thy mouth" (Psalms 119:13) could be an exercise in metapoetics. If you think of the paradigmatic inset, Moses', every word reflects the simple legaliterary truth, the mishpat-telling as well as its oral ("lips . . . mouth") channel and enchainment. The canon-to-cast, primary-tosecondary shift of voice, or discourse gears, entails no shift of genre but rather within the very storytelling genre already operative and now extended by the intermediate marker of quotation. Itself told ("X said to Y") in the quoting, the quoted law-speech goes on to represent a law-tale. For even at its most omnitemporal, the law enunciated projects a course of action to be followed, in the narrative along with the normative sense. It cannot divorce itself from the logic of action in timehowever minimized into, say, the apodictic nuclear clause "Thou shalt not kill''without surrendering its raison d'être of di-
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recting action in future time. All the more so in case ("casuistic") law, where that logic visibly asserts itself: the "If . . . then" advance from protasis (e.g., "If thou buyest . . .'') to apodosis ("six years he shall serve") both draws together at least two action-units and formalizes in their consequential linkage the Suppose Principle underlying all narrative. The generic common denominator (like that between, say, past- and present-tense narration) therefore runs much deeper and further than the apodictic/casuistic difference; nor is the difference itself capturable in terms of legal "style," or sui generis at all. Either law type rather belongs to a well-defined set of modalized narrative: the apodictic to the future-oriented variety (along with "the member of forecast" in the structure of repetition [Poetics, 376ff.]), the casuistic to the hypothesis-governed (as do the nonlegal instances cited in Sternberg 1982a:137-40). The former's command anticipates a whole action-type by enjoining or prohibiting it; the latter's if-clause opens an if-plot by way of more restrictive, case-specific exposition. Here and here alone, in their modality, both kinds depart from the norm of categorical telling about the past 3except that the tale told in case mode necessarily and overtly lengthens regardless into an event sequence, from antecedent to result. Hence also the ease with which more and more action can be generated, more law-plot unrolled when and as wanted. Often, indeed, this variety develops one or more scenarios with beginning, middle, and end duly plotted on the hypothetical line of events. In the case of the Hebrew bondman, for example, the scenarios ramifying from the initial premise ("If . . .") are not only alternative but also en-chained via further conditionals leading up to bondage for life. (Where the Bible's minimum twins the law-event spoken about with the law-speaking event, here the chain of happenings rendered by the inset joins forces in narrativity with the transmissional chain that generates the inset.) Even so, comparable to the versatile interplay between the orders of action and presentation in standard narrative, the path of well-made chrono-logic need not be followed. Both the Sinai and the Jordan "Hebrew" ordinances thus jump in medias legis, with the expositional antecedents left to inference, the gaps to multiple closure from precedent. Temporary anachronies, short of holes in the scenario's chain, are also devisable for a purpose. The law-tales may change the natural sequence in the telling and, moreover, reshuffle the inherited coherent sequence in retelling, with an eye to some desired change of emphasis or response. Within the rhetoric of deterrence againotherwise continuous even in the jump over the beginningthe variant tactics offer an example. Consider the trajectory plotted by the original Mishpatim series of "if's": from the "Hebrew" going out single or married as he came, through his leaving his new family behind, to his staying behind himself, irretrievably. While Exodus 21:2-6 thus marks an order of ever-ascending unhappiness
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as well as complexity, Deuteronomy 15:12-18 would rather end the given (orderly, multiphase) tale of woe on a happier note, a prospect of ideal harmony among well-provisioned freedman, generous master, and retributive God. Storyteller fashion, the Deuteronomist loops back in 15:18 to the crossroadsto the agents' moment of choice between the "If . . . then" of 15:12-15 and of 15:16-17reopening the issue to repaint the fork of his own choice, and the Exodus drama's, for the best possible closure. Where genres so cohabit and interpenetrate under the aegis of Proteus, they resist all the usual surface categorization by form, content, origin, language, or any other hallmark derivable from their autonomous equivalents. Surface taxonomies must give way to inferred, often unique co-regulative teleologies, pigeonholing to principled unity in generic variety, variety in intergeneric unity. One can then no longer distinguish "law" from "narrative" as formal text-types, only legislative from narrative function within a single piece of text governed by a double teleo-logic. 4 So Exodus, then Deuteronomy, then Jeremiaheach lays down the "Hebrew" law of bondage with a view to producing a certain effect at a certain time on a certain audience through a certain variant of the shared core-scenario of release. Obversely, different pieces of such text may be told apart, if at all, by the different balance of power between the legislative and the narrative functions running jointly through each. Among our three discourses, for example, Jeremiah throws the scales out of Pentateuchal equilibrium. No longer just voiced in the world under the modal sign of possibility, the Hebrew slave law gets violated and vindicated there, with multifold implications for its revoicing. The discourse chooses to quote from the array of inherited provisions the one bearing straight on the conflict; and to quote it after the extent of violation at that, in retributive wrath and in apodictic ("you shall send out every man his Hebrew brother"), hence absolute, instead of the traditional casuistic (if/then) form. "Enjoined of old to let your brother go after a fixed term"God thunders at the Judaeans"you broke the covenant and will pay with your lives." The formal novelties, in proportioning, ordering, styling, wording, all dovetail as indexes of functional rescaling, means to a new end. With the shift of focus in context, away from the hypothetical scenarios and toward the actual scene, the narrative function (logic, thrust, teleology) has evidently risen to dominance. And it is in this sense of (dominant) function that the pair of terms, "law'' vs. "narrative," will appear below. Exposed as misnomers, they can now usefully simplify our reference to the Bible's familial text-range. Law-tale interacting with overall process and canon So much for the basics and constants of intergeneric fusion, in the ordinance's immediate context. On either axis, the enunciating and the
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enunciated, this minimum already goes beyond the temporality intrinsic to all verbal discourse, as sign sequence, toward the distinctive extras of (hi)story telling proper. Compare such law with its frameless equivalent, Hittite or modern, with a philosophical treatise, with a word-portrait, with an inventory, with a genealogy, and you will appreciate the difference made by the energies invariably unleashed together here: the flow of representing and represented time, plus, within the latter hemisphere, the dynamics of (e.g., Moses/Israel) communication in the people's world and of (e.g., slave/owner) action in the possible world thereafter, "Hebrewed" for non-actualization because all too apt to actualize itself. Even the functions and effects accomplishable by either genre on its own (the memorializing, the group-constitutive, the ideological, the aesthetic) are therefore compounded in the fusion, since the law-speech now operates on the dramatic auditors as the law-writing on readers. But then, this high minimum only qualifies the law-speech-cum-scenario for yet closer and more variable integration with the Bible's grand chronology. Situated, plotted, irreducible to any single form or force even on its own, it may interact with every other canonical element in every possible way, as the members of our trio will be found to do and, rhetorically, have been. This canonwide interaction adds tremendous power to the discourse of source in enabling it to range and maneuver at will beyond the local frame/inset unit. By the same token, that unit now comes to exert as well as to receive generative (not least, genarrative) dynamism in the interplay with things ahead, possibly far ahead. Concerning the law's implicit sourceunexplicated in the transformer's "X said to Y" datathe wider and freer the licenses of retrospection from an event backward, the more illuminable its origination or, if an event-series, its evolution. The formative cause, often envisaged as hidden "below" the product, strictly goes before it, and here lurks in a variety of antecedents, variously evokable and evolvable. At their most ready to hand, they immediately precede the statute produced by them, as in the "Hebrew"-related case of the Isra-Egyptian blasphemer: (10) An Israelite woman's son, who was the son of an Egyptian man, had gone out among the people of Israel. Now, the Israelite woman's son and an Israelite man fought in the camp. (11) The Israelite woman's son blasphemed the Name and cursed; and they brought him to Moses. The name of his mother was Shlomit, daughter of Dibri, of the Dan tribe. (12) And they put him in custody, till the Lord's word should be declared to them. (13) Then the Lord spoke to Moses, saying, Bring the curser out of the camp, and let all who heard him lay their hands upon his head and let all the congregation stone him. (14) And to the Sons of Israel thou
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shalt speak, saying, Each and every man who curses his God shall bear his sin. (15) He who blasphemes the name of the Lord shall be put to death, the whole congregation shall stone him without fail; sojourner or native, when he blasphemes the Name, he shall be put to death. . . . (23) Moses spoke to the Sons of Israel, and they brought the curser out of the camp and they stoned him with stones. The Sons of Israel did as the Lord had commanded Moses. (Leviticus 24:10-15, 23) The passage marches from the blaspheming agent and act (10-12), through God's individual and nationwide retributive scenario (13-15), to its communication by Moses and fulfillment by Israel (23). In this relentless progress, as in Jeremiah's, narrativity appears to outweigh legislativity, with the interposed law-kernel causally mediating, rather than motivated by, the thrust of the action. The judgment comes into the world to resolve a dilemma posed by the offense. Even in strict quantitative terms, that kernel occupies just two verses (14-15) out of seven. But then, counterweights abound. If the immediate frame is wholly (10-12, 23) or predominantly (13) narrative, the wider Leviticus Code frame redresses the balance. Observe also how the actional chain of cause and effect turns (as underlined by verse 13) on the chain of transmission; how the ruling ascends in coverage from ad hominem particularity (13), alone necessitated (with Solomon's judgment, alone offered) by the action as such, to apodictic generality (14-15, "Each and every man . . ."); or how, the one chain having come to an end, the text does not finish with it, in proper order, but instead circles back to celebrate the other's successful working ("did as . . . commanded"; and recall Deuteronomy's maneuver, against time, for a happy end). The story of retribution thus doubles as a storied explanation of how a penalty got codified, the narrative antecedents double as legal origins. To God himself, the very order of anteriority and posteriority would reverse: the law genarrated by the Isra-Egyptian blasphemer's case in human eyes, Israel's and our own, must have antedated it in "undeclared" form (12). On the originary axis, as with the Bible's causality elsewhere, the sequence of revelation to the world need not match that of existence in the world. Were this affair transposed to the Exodus or the Deuteronomy Code, then, it would shrink into the law-kernel generalized from it in verses 14-15. (There it would mirror-image the incorporation of the gist of the ruling on Hebrew bondage proper into Jeremiah.) Yet this does not at all mean that the Codes would forfeit the explanatory discourse-of-source rationale highlighted throughout the affairthe back reference of law to life. However significant, the difference is only in the transparency of the motivational procedure: between the explicit and the implicit, between
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short- and long-range grounding, between orderly march from antecedent to consequent, amounting to advance notice of origination, and disclosure after the fact. Between these extremes, Protean multiformity reexhibits itself in the shift or juncture of the assorted life-evocative tactics for a single law-generative purpose. Even the transparentlooking case harks back in silence to the two quarreling "Hebrews," of whom the villain disowned the "ruler and judge," Moses, by a kind of prelude to blasphemy. In short, once the framework widens beyond the single unit, Deuteronomy's resumptive move in 15:18, within the inset itself, shows itself as only one of the numerous antichronological (anachronic as distinct from anachronistic) ploys and orderings on hand, with the appropriate spectrum of ends. Besides the inset if-plot's in medias legis option, above all, the enclosing frame can and usually does start in mid-genarrative, as late as the naked transformer. The bulk of the antecedents (headed by the very causes: why this law, at this point, in this shape, with these changes, etc.) is then left to inference from the past, that already (re)scannable for gap-filling and that yet to unfold in or after the law-event. But whatever else varies about the process and the product of such inference, they always hark back. In genarration, agreeably to the rule of the poetics, closure is disclosure. The law-text may thus always revert to earlier occurrences, discoursive or first-order, legal or otherwise, whether by way of reminder, rephrasing, rereading, allusive motivation, overt communication, and/or reenactment in a new keyall packed with clues to that law's genesis, over and above the rudimentary theocentric data always advertised by the immediate frame. The entire retrospective repertoire of narrative, the most time-bound of genres and so the best equipped with arts of memory, is available to it. What we have already traced in synchrony, "the rhetoric of bicultural deterrence," gives an idea of how those arts bear from all quarters on Egypt or on the Hebrew/Hamite master plot at large: the formative cause would then reach back to the group's formative ordeal. In the backtracking, of course, the past life not only motivates the present lawour chief interest thus farbut also gets reinterpreted, reconstituted, indeed even continued by it, as an anterior by a posterior event on the same time-line. The two-way operations of narrative show to advantage. Inversely with forward movement, propulsive and prospective. Here the discourse genarrated becomes plotgenerative, and not just within its modal and spacetime coordinates. Once enacted by the frame, or as it is enacted, the inset law can in turn affect the frame's sequel. Sharing the power given to all events, it then reciprocates and resumes at some juncture the dynamism of its birth. While law in itself governs conduct, yet only by contingent fiat, the represented law-event may generate direct consequences outside its own inset "possible world": as when the enunciation
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of a novel ordinance, or the citation of an old, seals the fate of the dramatis personaefrom an individual, the Blasphemer or Wood Gatherer (Numbers 15:32-36), to an entire people, such as Judah under Zedekiah. The letter can literally kill, or save. The utterance's world-changing effect then no longer stops at covenanting, group-building, commemoration, and kindred diffuse or incremental results, but ascends toward maximum plot value. And the effect on developments, like its origin in them, may stretch from instant to retardatory causal emplotment: the Blasphemer episode, with its uninterrupted chain, presents a fresh contrast (always within the system) to the belated impact of Mosaic legislation on Jerusalem. Again, the ordinance's future-directedness, in the nature of all imperatives and hypotheticals, would go without saying, except that the contingencies are here always liable to materialize before our eyes in the tale's first-order ("real") world, sooner or later, for better or worse. With the two global time vistas opened up for the law as it is enunciated in the present, the intergenre makes a whole beyond the reach of the unit. Its imperviousness to the decomposer's assault (generic or genetic, via typology or pseudepigraphy or comparative jurisprudence) mounts by the same exponential power. If the origins and the literary history were other than the canonized plot tells, the ingredients different from the composite, then such is their transformation that anything up to the Genesis-to-Jeremiah Hebrew macroplot would need breaking down for one law to be traced to them. Where equally able to flash backward and forward, to retell and resume, to disclose and develop, to give and take life, to open and intervene and wind up, to align strategic with tactical anachronies, how would modalized narrative be pulled away operationally from the standard categorical kind? The distinction between them loses whatever qualitative cutting edge it retained on the scale of the discrete item. So, moreover, does the quantitative parity in the ratio of narrativity to legislativity. Within a grand art of relations, these forces' overall need not to coincide with their unit-length balance: the Exodus and Deuteronomy law-variants, for example, ultimately accumulate over time propulsive and genetic, generative and genarrative, import comparable to Jeremiah's, indeed stretching as far as Jeremiah. Their longer run enables a growth of their influence on the world under the law, beyond the law, and in retrospect, even before the law. Further, all these added time attributes and values not merely involve but also temporalize other structuring forces than narrative's own. Every parallel evoked by the lawgiver (whether an earlier law or a nonlegal event) doubles as a precedent, their impact combining to affect the audience rhetorically, say, or to encourage formative gap-filling; every memorial analogy doubles as a loop and link in the chronology; every reenactment, as a variation, hence also a novel viewpoint, on the theme. 5 Finally, all these narrativize the workings along with the shape of com-
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munication. In the rhetorical framework, we have already gained an idea of what compositional, semantic, affective effects are producible by the joining of such extremes of law-telling as the explicit and the implicit, the local and the long-range, the orderly and the twisted, the retrospective and the anticipatory, the overtreated and the elliptic, the sequential and the analogical modes. Haying just theorized the repertoire of legaliterature in its manifold narrativity, we still need to detail the communicative forms, functions, levels, even channels (especially the oral vs. the written). Yet we have seen enough to generalize that not only the inset law-tale but also the tale about the lawthat is, the ambient discourse of source communicate under the ground principle of Biblical narrative: maneuvering between the truth and the whole truth. Evolving a macro-lawtale: The Hebrew bondage series Retrospective, prospective, propulsive, interstructuring, frame-maneuverable dynamics: what holds for the integrability of a single item with the whole canon is evidently yet truer of a trio. Far from accidental, in short, the interspacing of the three Hebrew laws on the narrational and the narrated sequence alike would appear to be part of the Bible's all-out revolutionary drive toward narrativizing whatever material enters into the narrative. 6 As usual, this "Hebrew" part is paradigmatic, unmatchably so, if you want a case study that will encompass the widest range of law-telling arts. Take only the extra, superadded factors already outlined: the number of law-items, the extent of their distribution on the given axes, their placement at historic covenantal junctures, their shared reference back to the everreceding pivotal event in the group's annals, their common enactment of a master plot along the Genesis-to-Jeremiah macroplot, their shifting balance between legislativity and narrativity, between the overt truth available to all and the whole truth retrievable by the expert decoder. Where else will you find the definitional constants, even on Scripture's upper minimum, enriched by such an interplay of key variables, each often paralleled outside Hebrewness in different guises and the whole by thinner combinations? As Aristotle used to say, the best exemplar (tragedy among high literature, for instance) is the most representative. No other law or law-series can therefore teach us so much about the workings of the legaliterary discourse typeeven more in its ordinal than in its rhetorical aspect, and most of all in the union of narration with suasion. This many-sided ordering, alone indisputable where conjectures so abound, needs to be attentively read for its latent poetics and dramatics of genesis. None the less so if believed to have been imposed in the canonizing on a different, "real-life" order of genesis, whereby Deuteronomy, say, arose alongside rather than inspired Jeremiah. (To Exodus most analysts
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grant historical formative priority as well.) For such imposition of one diachrony on another, desired time-image on untimely lumps of matter, bristles with a sense of purpose in regard to history's arrow itself. The conjectured anterior fortunes at source would only throw into relief the forces behind the actual discourse voiced, echoing, and evolving on the Bible's stage. We might then profitably, if tentatively, juxtapose the empirics of the real with the teleology of the represented world, or the subworld peculiar to Hebrewness under the law. But there will be nothing to throw into such conjectural relief, unless we come to grips with the discourse as it evolves on stage from one legislative occasion to the next. Unfortunately, the inquiry into the discourse's ways and phases and ends is obstructed by the very premises of all traditional analysis, a negative feature common to approaches otherwise wide apart, like the Rabbinic vs. the scholarly, the cross- vs. the intra-cultural, the synchronic vs. the diachronic, the pseudepigraphic vs. the fundamentalist. The why's and how's of the large discoursive process will therefore never come to light, or even to mind, without a radical change of ground on our part. This must start with the recognition, which the bitter experience of source criticism in all its varieties should have hammered home long ago, that the only processes likely to be found at systematic and demonstrable work in the Bible are those that the Bible itself chooses to reveal, or artfully conceal, between its own lines for its own purposes. What I have generalized about the models of origination as well as communication built into the Genesis-to-Kings narrative (Poetics, 58ff.) applies with interest to the law-narratives framed along it: the divine authorship signaled in the history-writing turns explicit in the quoting; the inspired, prophet-like speaker normally modulates into the archetypal prophet; the audience contextualizes itself accordingly; the process of transmission thickens, down to written form; and, in requoting, so does the implicit evolution of the transmitted material from one variant to the next. The lesson pointed by my comparison among "narrative models" (e.g., the inspirational vs. the empirical) therefore holds a fortiori. To the diachronist as to the synchronist, the realities accessible (also, I believe, most intricate and valuable) hide not in the brute reality leading up to the discourse but in the pictures of reality constructed by, and reconstructible from, the discourse in world-making, source-making included. 7 If anything, their reconstruction comes first on any agenda, any order of research priorities. For through them alone (e.g., the canonized movement of the Exodus-to-Jeremiah "Hebrew" trio) can the orthodox, pre-text-minded source analyst himself hope to figure out, as deconstructor, what really happened behind the scenes to generate the law and its variants. The deeper his insight into the finished poetics of genesis, the more informed his conjecture about the "true" genesis that led up to the poetics. (In the decoding, who knows, the artefact may even prove to have inscribed
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something of the actual, as well as the whole of the artistic, truth.) A text so jealous of its formative secrets, so adept in covering its tracks, will never betray itself to one deaf and blind to its representations. In the state of our knowledge, whether you like it or not, the accessible image as encoded in the data holds the key to everything. 8 And by everything I mean the tale of the Hebrew slave law's birth and growth, yet also all the other poetic diachronies we have reconstructed on the way to it in connection with various intercultural objects and subjects: the movement of a common noun (e.g., .hanit*), of a gentilic (exemplarily, "Hebrew"), of a psychobiography (Moses'), of a national struggle (against Pharaoh abroad or the Philistine-lovers at home). No more isolated in its artfulness than in its bearing on Hebrewness, the legaliterary trajectory only crowns, even concludes our earlier instances. Accordingly, we must exchange speculative prehistory for dramatized (hi)story of genesis, division of legislative from narrative matter for integration, crossculturalism for the ethnocentric yet ethnocritical poetics of culture with its appropriate dynamics, counterreading for reading in time: sources for their inner simulacra and sequentiality in the finished discourse of source. Variance for Persistence, Variance for Novelty: Two Evolutionary Drives behind Literary History Newly oriented to the law's parmership with the richest time art in literature, nowhere sealed faster than in the Bible, we may confront the issue of temporal sense posed at the outset of this chapter. The new equipment has redefined and refocused the problem, but not shifted its axis or shrunk its magnitude. Each law-unit by itself would now appear to yield such sense in connection with the mimesis of genesis, as with the deterrent rhetoric. On the surface, for example, the item originates in God, via a longer or shorter chain; and underneath, in the ordeal of Hebrewness, from the bondage-to-release master plot to specific details. Or in joint chrono-logical order of genesis: the inset replay (replotting, respecifying) suggests why God enacted, Moses communicated, the narrator framed the ordinance. Every part of the quotation contributes its own share, in or behind time, through overt statement or allusive gap-filling, to the tale of the unit's source. What still challenges understanding is the ordinal rationale behind the three units in their given linear formthe grand discourse of source maintained and presumably evolved across widening intervals. In terms of practical analysis, what follows from our reorientation to the poetic image of diachrony? How does it avoid or meet the difficulties bedeviling the sundry alternatives? What new gains (patterns, effects, meanings, angles, trajectories) does it offer? As an image of time, however covert,
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the law-trio must naturally enact (signify, emplot, dramatize, motivate) rather than betray some genesis en route from the wilderness to Jerusalem; but of what kind, by what energy, in what direction, to what purpose, under what rules, narrative or legaliterary or generally discoursive, and with what bearing on Hebrews and the Hebrewgram elsewhere? Along the grand chronology, I would now argue, our sequence of three texts does indeed represent a historical movement within the canon, where two lines of progression run together. Though concurrent, intertwined, often going through the very same bits of material, each yet follows its own operative logic or teleology: retrospective "bridging" for continuity vs. revisionary "updating" from a posterior standpoint, in a nutshell. One line so unrolls as to throw bridges (in the form of motivation, allusion, recurrence, all Egypt-directed) across the ever-widening interval between the "Hebrew" slave laws and the "Hebrew" slave narrative. Glancing backward as it moves forward through the law, or the law-series, this discourse-of-source teleology would align Hebrewness present (in the wording) and prospective (in the world) with Hebrewness past, which is by nature increasingly apt to fade from the collective mind. So this drive chains the in-group juristic ruling to the agonistic outgroup rule, now less tightly or saliently, now more, but always in the interests of memory, followability, accountability, unbroken sequence-with-equivalence from the earliest to the latest case of the elect's bondage. Another line of movement also reaches backward in the genarrative process, yet with the opposite end in view, namely: explaining why the original crossgeneric tradition has been altered by the legislator, Moses himself included. To be sure, the end having changed poles, the means turns from a necessity into an option; yet in practice we still find the option widely, and wisely, actualized to a different effect: to justify divergence under the shield of recurrence. Here the bridging is indeed no longer executed for the sake of bridging, i.e., of alignment with prior life and/or law, and so need not be executed at all. Given that "updating" essentially looks ahead, it always may (and sometimes will) go to the extreme of "outdating": a fresh start that dispenses with back reference altogether, explicit or otherwiseat the risk of appearing willful, violent, unsanctioned, heterodox, if not downright tyrannical. Such consequences have little appeal to innovators mindful of their precursors, especially if authoritative, and of their reference group, whose unity needs sustaining over time. A clean break will therefore come more easily to those literati heeding their art alone, within a minority or avant-garde group, than to the legal, even legaliterary practitioner; and he will find it most unviable when inheriting a tradition such as the Bible's, which is God-given, history-bound, people-wide, and itself revolutionary. The iconoclasm has already been accomplished on all fronts, over against the pagan environment.
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Instead, amidst the very overhauling of the bridgework, the latecomers as updaters resort to a complementary discourse of source, one that equally seeks motivation in the historical past, but for novelty and difference vis-à-vis early Hebrew law. And how to cover difference with difference if not by rematching the two generic keys of Hebrewness? This dynamics therefore so times and shapes variants among the Codes as to update either post-Exodus ordinance in the light of fresh (narrative) occurrences and (expository) disclosures that have intervened along the macroplot. The review of the tale's old-new "Hebrew" agents justifies recodification; past, present, and prospective rejudgment go together. The bridging and the updating thrusts (or if you will, conservation and innovation, traditionalism and revisionism, memory and modernity) answer to the forces twinned in all evolution, persistence and change, respectively. It would make sense to begin with the former, bridging drive, which arises first and actively works throughout the series for optimum continuity in the perspective on "Hebrews," across both temporal and textual discontinuity. Before exploring its operations in canonical sequence, however, we need to disentangle the principle more clearly from that of updating. This need for disentanglement, and my core argument about the grand narrative of Hebrew bondage law, ultimately proceeds from a rock-bottom communicative fundamental: the inbuilt duplicity of saying (uttering, writing, telling, mediating) things again, itself an outcome of the logical non-identity of anything with anything but itself. Happy or cheerless, constraining or constructive, the fundamental is encapsulated in a Scriptural phrase that the Rabbis applied, arguably reappliedthe very doubt is iconicto none other than the Pentateuch's last book. Mishneh torah (Deuteronomy 17:18) or mishneh torat mosheh (Joshua 8:32) they called it. The encapsulation does not really depend on whether the phrase adverts in the original to the book written down by Moses himself for Israel's life across the Jordan or to a copy thereofthe king's, Joshua's, oursbut on a suggestive play of opposites within mishneh. Its semantic thickness, let alone duality, is never rivaled by the apparent heterolingual equivalent, "Deuteronomy" (from deuteros + nomos, Deuteronomion, Deuteronomium, 'Second Law'). The root sh-n-h, apart from producing "two (shnayim)" and "second (sheni)," denotes both "repeat" and "vary," as though to encode the Siamese twinship of the opposites, their mutual implicativeness. You cannot repeat, not even the same words in the same order, without varying, if only in framework; nor can you vary without repeating something of the original. The repetition may amount to the same thing, and the variation may count as an altogether different thing, in functional terms alonepractically, or in effect, as we say. By which we mean that the context at will neutralizes either twin by appeal to some discourse norms of identity, autonomy, relevance other than strict
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truthnorms that philosophers would consider lower, artists higher, and the rest just more adaptable to a world of everchanging exigencies. (For discussion of this aspect of the Proteus Principle see especially Sternberg 1977, 1981c, 1982a, 1982b, 1985:365-440, 1991b, 1996.) All along our bondage series, one cardinal twofold exigency would thus be re-presenting a foundation narrative in the law's modality. By a further ostensible paradox of communication, however, the constraint also opens a range of choices for constructive use, e.g., for bridging and for updating. If strict echoing were a must, it would preclude either thrust, and if an achievable reality, it would be pursued by neither, certainly not to the utmost extreme. Memory-jogging as well as modernizing trade instead on the two-facedness of mishneh, between the antipodes of the duplicate and the unrecognizable. Yet this very common operational ground, indeed middle ground, renders it tricky to figure out in practice which is which. Which drive underlies which mixed data? Since both rationales entail and exploit variance in replayno two slave laws are identical, much less the two discourse genreshow to tell form from function: variance for persistence from variance for divergence, narrational from narrated shift, communicative re-formation from legislative reformation proper? Take the essential constant of the series, namely, the re-staging in law after law of the enslavement-to-deliverance master plot inaugurated by the Exodus narrative. Since no re-emplotment does or possibly could form a replication of another, where does its invariant bridging role end (if anywhere) and its drive toward updating the anterior storied law begin (if at all)? Similarly with minutiae. Thus a phrase added for insistent recall of Egypt (bridging) looks exactly like one introduced to revaluate or rechannel the genesis in the ordeal of Egypt (updating): particularly since the functional ambiguity between the two within the law may always involve functional coexistence and exchange within a single piece of law. Does that piece require an either/or choice, we wonder, or an unpacking of a both/and intentionality? To make disentanglement even harder yet, no variant openly announces a break with its predecessor(s), not even to the degree licensed and manifest in the Bible's extralegal repetition structure. (E.g., ''Why did Sarah laugh?"→"I did not laugh" → "No, but thou didst laugh.") Much less would the narrator in person declare a statute obsolete, the way he does an expression (I Samuel 9:9) or a custom (Ruth 4:7) that applied "formerly in Israel." Contrast Hittite literature, whose epic and legal branches alike juxtapose the ancient, outdated with the respective modern versions as such: how "they no longer tell" or judge it with how it came to be "told [later]" or judged (e.g., Pritchard 1969:125-26, 188ff.). No ready-made surface typology, then, visibly encodes for our convenience the underlying dual teleology. Instead, the teleology comes first even in order of reconstruction. As artful as it is crucial, the dividing line between
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the forces turns in practice on the interpretive competence we bring to the text within its multiple frameworkslocal, ordinal, generic, Hebrewgrammatic, Scriptural. A comparison of limit-cases, the re-forming as against the reformatory pole, will illustrate this context-dependence both ways. Among the three "Hebrew"-calling texts, Jeremiah 34 is most notable for its discontinuitynot with the original meaning of "Hebrew slave" in Exodus, but with the original condition of "Hebrew'' slavery prior to the Exodus and the behavior enjoined on the former slaves thereafter. The arena, the people as a group, the emergency, the identity of the slaves vs. the masters, the covenantal bond, all have transformed over the centuries. Proportionally, Jeremiah strives most to counteract that discontinuity by harping on the national origins, ordeals, traditions, stigmas, punishments as well as phrases tied up with Egypt. And the bridging repertoire includes all the measures available, from the awesome directness of the oracle to running intertextual commentary, for example, through the underground playback of the Hamite/Hebrew master plot in its earliest and vilest wholesale variant. (First enslavement, then mass liberation, then the unique aftermath, namely, Egypt's bid for repossessing her fugitive "Hebrew" slaves.) The last link in the chain of cross-reference, the book gives top priority to repairing and thematizing lapses of collective memory, Jerusalem's or (by dramatic implication) our own. This already goes to show what difference the functional (ge)narrative viewpoint on the process makes. Oriented to anything but the logic of inner diachrony, with its cumulative time-bound exigencies and resources, scholarship has not only missed the storytelling art at the end of the "Hebrew" tradition. Nor has it only underrated, often dismissed as padding interwoven with pseudepigraphy, the tale that encloses (i.e., contextualizes) the law. It has also misconceived, I think, the dominant force behind the legal novelty told by the story, and with it the nature of the novelty itself. In effect, scholars have frequently placed Jeremiah at the updating rather than the bridging extremeas though its discontinuity vis-à-vis the original legislation were substantive, not generated ad hoc by circumstance. Some thus project, or retroject, into the tale a shift from individual to nationwide, "sabbatical" release: a cross between the Exodus or the Exodus/Deuteronomy week of years and the Jubilee (7 × 7) cycle of Leviticus. 9 Far from reformed or "cross"-formed, however, the earlier ordinance recurs with unprecedented force and fanfare. As shown by the quotation from God (34:12ff.), pointing back to the Exodus and citing Deuteronomy, the law has not essentially changed since its enactment in the wilderness. Even the temporarily equivocal and much-disputed opening, "miqquets [At the end or the advent of?.] seven years you shall let go . . . ," finds its conservative resolution in the immediate sequel: "has served thee six years; thou shalt send him out free."10 What has changed is rather the situational
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context of the law's implementation, quite unforeseen by the Mosaic lawgiver and gradually disclosed to the reader in the poetic telling. Those arts of disclosure build up a surprise plot, twisting the path to recognition: initial misdirection for belated correction with a vengeance. 11 This opposes afresh the compact Blasphemer episode: as centuries elapse before the law/narrative macroplot fulfils itself here in time, so the Jeremian microplot chain untwists itself behind time. Even so, the twisted tale draws the line at giving a false impression of reform, such as would tie the mass release to an inbetween, more or less newly instituted septennial cycle. All along the way from ignorance through surprise to knowledge, the turns we execute never affect the law itself, not for a moment, but only our insight into the history and enormity of its breachits reduction by the group to a dead letter amid official continuity. Read in sequence, the act of mass emancipation issues directly from the national crisis without prejudice to the legal code. As the tale opens, the dramatis personae's nonconformance with the earlier Hebrew slave law, en-joining individual treatment, does not at all suggest its reformation or abrogation or violation in the meantime.12 No postTorah attempt on the genesis, moderate or drastic, would appear to have intervened, nor would a corresponding phylogenesis, if we judge by the attitude to the Hebrew's bondage in theory or practice. Short of the hindsight fallacyand wisdom after the event comes easy but dearwhy should we readers suspect either intermediate turn, in the absence of any hint at change since Deuteronomy? On the contrary, the narrative exposition invites a favorable understanding of the characters' divergence, as a move beyond the line of strict traditional duty. Jerusalem's, we infer, is an ad hoc adjustment on the right side, a gesture made in face of emergency and in the hope of a quid pro quo. The opening evokes a familiar topos: the appeal to God as a last resort and, with Jerusalem in imminent danger, at the last minute. Indeed, the tale's composition powerfully encourages this reading. First, against the background of the emergency (34:7), it starts by associating the two levels of existence: The word that came to Jeremiah from the Lord, after king Zedekiah had made a covenant with all the people of Jerusalem to proclaim liberty to them. (34:8) As the happenings within the city follow hard upon the Babylonian threat to the city, so, internally, does the word from above run into the proclamation below. Second, like that of the warring camps, the alignment of interior affairs readily makes a plot sequence, one generated by the war, at that, to enchain all the events thus far. The temporal linkage ("after") of heaven and earth, response and appeal, tightens into causality (i.e.,
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"because" or "as a result of") by strong implication, local and thematic. Third, its chronology markedly twisted, the sequence presents the divine, retributive effect ("the word . . . from the Lord") before the earthly, cause ("proclaim liberty"), as though to assure us in advance that the appeal has borne fruit. The oracle matches the deed. (Or in terms of the whole chain, the international conflict not only leads but also stands opposed to the accord on the home front.) Fourth, with this complimentary end in view, apparently, the sequel is retardatory and repetitive as well as anachronic. It piles detail on unnecessary detail in quoting the Jerusalem covenant of ''liberty" [deror]: that every man should send out free his slave and every man his bondwoman, the Hebrew and the Hebrewess, so that no man shall enslave a Jew, his brother. They obeyed, all the nobles and all the people who had entered into the covenant that every man should send out free his slave and every man his bondwoman, so as to enslave them no longer; they obeyed and sent them out. (34:9-10) The composition, then, pulls every artistic string to ensure that three whole verses (a lifetime in the Bible) should harp on the topos before we arrive at the peripety in verse 13 ("Afterward, they turned round," signaled by the temporal catchword and the iconic figure for reversal). Meanwhile, as the cause unfolds at leisure behind the effect, theirs appears to be a harmonious nexus of retribution between two positive values. If less than altruistic, it seems, the agents both mean and do well. Under Babylonian siege (34:7), the citizens of Jerusalem desperately cast about for an instant show of piety, on the largest scale, whereby to obtain quick relief from heaven. The law of manumission (what with its ethnonational thrust, its promise of divine blessing "in all that thou shalt do," and its analogy to the city's deliverance from the oppressor, a kind of homeopathic, ritualistic, wishful pre-enactment) nicely fits the bill. Only, desperate for quick returns, they do not have the time to apply the law to each individual bondman, a staggered process that would take years to complete, maybe (if nobody's term has run out) even to launch, and would count as mere routine dutifulness anyway. So, making a virtue of necessity, they manumit all their Hebrew slaves at one blow, apparently ahead of time (34:8-10). After all, they might well think, has not the ordinance itself arisen in memory of a wholesale restoration of freedom? The likelier their special case, the more intact the Code handed down to them and the more traditionalist their group character in the discourse of source implied by the opening verses. Unless they adjust the law to the emergency, putting for once its spirit above its letter at their own expense, they will not live to observe it strictly again.
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Their action, moreover, appears to improve on ancient precedents in reenacting them. As a gesture voluntary and beforetime, the collective release favorably departs from Pharaoh's in the Exodus. At the other end of the people's history on the land itself, the mass manumission finds a subtler covenantal equivalent: Joshua's mass circumcision at Gilgal, down to the "rolling away" of the "reproach of Egypt" from Israel (5:2-9). In large-scale chiasm, the very fact that the Gilgal keeping of the covenant occurred behind time and repaired a nationwide infringement"because they [each in his own turn, naturally] had not been circumcised on the way''redounds to the credit of Jerusalem. The emergency measure's belatedness then highlights a difference all for the better now: the observance needs no reminder from God, takes place sooner than covenanted, and attests a firmer continuity ("bridge") with ancestral heritage. It is this impression of premature release in distress that temporarily even complicates somewhat the outrage we feel at their repossession of the ex-slaves thereafter (34:11). Comparable to the I Samuel 13-14 mid-series, the tale here still leaves room for the more charitable reading. Those skinflints, it appears, want to get their money's worth, the full six-year term particularized by the law. Given that due release after the term can "seem hard in thy eyes," it would seem even harder before, what with owners apt to plead duress, to their own satisfaction at least. However morally revolting the breach of commitment "to enslave them no longer," the act of tyranny (as unforeseen by anyone, the lawgiver included, as the opening gesture) has the color of legality. In diachronic terms, it bespeaks a petty and overliteral traditionalism, if only assumed to save face. But not for long. Hard upon the intermediate complication of attitude there follows a twist so violent as to deny the Judahites refuge even in the semblance of petty tyranny. The oracle shatters the misconception kept up thus far by springing on the highest authority the truth about the past, remote and recent. The covenantal law governing the "brother Hebrew" has indeed never essentially transformed since the exodus "from the house of slaves"; but then nor has it been observed (34:12-14). The long-range shock of disclosure compels a rereading of all that has gone before in the narrative, from the emergency measure onward. The twisted tale abruptly straightens out to fix the opposite continuity with the antecedentsnegative rebridging with Pentateuch law, perfect realignment with its breach sinceand revaluation toughens accordingly. The reader holds against the lawbreakers not just their sin but their false appearance of merit captured and elaborated in the telling, much as God does in the happening. There is no divorcing the law from the narrative, or rather the (ge)narratives: the one it originally enacts as an undesirable scenario of "Hebrew" bondage visà-vis the one it now modulates into on the actual scene, which in turn unrolls as a story followed by a counterstory, the
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latter provoking in its turn a quotation of the law scenario and a judgment on the actual violators. Were it not for the hope of divine intervention, we realize in backtracking, the Judaeans would continue to treat "the Hebrew and the Hebrewess" exactly the way they and their fathers (the new Pharaohs) have always done, as perpetual slaves, in defiance of the law. Defiance, because God's spokesman expressly charges them with practical negation. "Your fathers did not hearken to me and did not incline their ears to me," then ''you," having pretended to "do what was right in my eyes by proclaiming liberty, every man to his neighbor," turned out not to "have hearkened to me by proclaiming liberty, every man to his brother and every man to his neighbor," either (34:14, 15, 17). The emphasis now falls on the age-old bridge of nonperformance rather than of nonremembrance, or, by implication, worseon nonperformance amid academic remembrance. Even in twisting forward, the tale never uncovers a blank of oblivion (much less the intervention of reform) but a split between Torah and practice, law and life. A split, mind you, rather than any imperfect fit, as between the provision of the Hebrew Code and the initial wholesale discharge. That variance hardly figures among the charges thundered at Jerusalem. On the contrary, the oracle having cited the individual term of bondage specified in Deuteronomy, it proceeds to judge the forced mass action as nothing less than "doing what was right in my eyes." The oracular judgment spells out the judgment already intimated by the city's wordless temporary relief. God shows an order of understanding (narrative, sociopolitical, ethical) that literal-minded exegetes would do well to emulate. In the circumstances given, it is the spirit of observance that initially counted, with a boomerang effect on relapse. The split also runs between dissuasive intent and influence: the Pentateuch strategy of deterrence, with all its eloquent appeals to memory, turns out to have failed ever since, always as a result of the collective's genesis on the land, not the Code's. 13 Even if nationhood goes with amnesiaa counterScriptural ideathey have suppressed the wrongest things, the very foundational origins incumbent upon the people to perpetuate in all the symbolic modalities commanded by God, law-keeping as well as retelling and ritual-telling and law-telling. Of these modalities, however, practical observance evidently ranks highest on the covenant scale: far from offsetting the breach of law, the law's bequeathal down the ages has made the offense worse. The scaling also belies from within the popular twinning of "literariness" (pseudepigraphic or otherwise) with inoperativeness (statutory or otherwise), an art-for-art's-sake reductionism which the Judaeans, ironically, anticipated to their cost. Belies afresh, more exactly, in that the priorities were established as early as Sinai, from the mouth of the law-receiving assembly itself. "All the words which the Lord has spoken we will do. . . . We will do and we will hearken," the covenanters
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undertook (Exodus 24:3, 7); and God will now throw back their own word at them, "you did what was right in my eyes. . . . Then you turned round . . . and not hearkened to me"any more than "your fathers," except that they never pretended to go beyond literary transmission toward a legaliterature in living ethnosocial action (cf. Ezekiel 21:5-10, 33:30-33). The siege, we further discover, wonderfully restored the Judaeans' practical memory of Hebrew solidarity and obligations. Their covenant implies an undertaking to observe the law henceforth, 14 perhaps to abolish Hebrew enslavement altogether ("that no man shall enslave a Jew, his brother") by way of balancing the ideo-historical account. Meanwhile, the discharge of the oppressed fellow Judaeans comes for the most part long behind, not ahead of, the enjoined six-year term (hence reenacts, not favorably opposes, the belatedness of Joshua's mass circumcision, without approaching its genuineness). And in such light, the repression "afterward" transforms from a mean legalistic trick into the ultimate outrage, the crime of sacrilege (''profaned my Name"). To pay them back in kind, the anticipatory mention of "God's word" does double retributive duty, first tacitly rewarding with succor Jerusalem's effective return to Hebrew lawby the ideo-causal logic of the toposthen punishing her cynical return to the age-old breach with the fall of the kingdom. Jeremiah, as the last link in the chain of transmission, thus quotes the "Hebrew slave" law (via the mock-observance, then from the Mosaic ordinance) only to declare it irrevocably broken, and covenantal history with it. The very strength of the bridge between the past and the present makes the hiatus between the statute book and the living reality unforgivable: once put to cynical use, the dead letter transmitted by the "fathers" kills the sons. No hint of updating all along, therefore, because updating involves exactly the dynamic cultural reference of law to life that the Judaeans have never maintained (except in the present abusage) and that their catastrophe now declares hopeless. If an oracle of doom qualifies as reform, then it reforms the Code out of existence (no Hebrew, slave or otherwise, will ever appear) together with the Code-violators: the "liberty" now in force is that proclaimed by God "to the sword, to the pestilence, and to famine." A travesty for a travesty of the vision of a free people sworn to administer freedom. And so the bridgework continues to the bitter end. As with the tit-for-tat visited by "the God of the Hebrews" upon Pharaoh's mimicking of the Liberator, one mockery deserves another. By contrast, though ostensibly belonging to the Pentateuch and the wilderness period, the "Hebrewless" version of Leviticus 25:39-43 is no link in this chain. It gravitates instead toward discontinuity, that is, toward the new ideonational reality formed by the Exodus. The polarity between the continuous and the discontinuous viewpoint surfaces in the respective overt motivations
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of the law. Thus Deuteronomy's "thou shalt remember that thou wert a slave in the land of Egypt and that the Lord thy God redeemed thee" (15:15) as against Leviticus's "they are my slaves, whom I have brought out of the land of Egypt" (25:42, 55): the human master's remembrance of his own past slavery vs. God's exclusive mastership over a nation delivered out of human slavery once and for all. This switch of ground also explains why Leviticus, alone of the Bible's manumission quartet, will never apply the retrospective "Hebrew" to "Sons of Israel,'' no matter how low their worldly footing. Expositors who carelessly inject the term here by rote (e.g., the "Hebrew slave" acquired by a foreigner [Qiddushin 14b] or "the duty of a Hebrew master to release his slave in the jubilee" [Daube 1969:53] or the privilege of redemption enjoyed by "a Hebrew slave" [McNeile 1908:lii]) erase a marker of omission charged with singular contrastive value. 15 The book itself suppresses the label imposed by the heterocultural Other for victimage and rebarbed by its law-mates for deterrence within the culture, because it would nullify the life led prior to the historic metamorphosis from Egyptian to divine service. In its own retrospect on the nation's formative experience, therefore, Leviticus substitutes the referring term used for the bondman to parallel and highlight the substitution of the owner. And the strategic change in legislation proper, from individual to mass release (as if a new exodus were reconcerted, "re-plotted," in each Jubilee cycle by God's hand, down to the ultimate repatriation on God's land) crowns the exceptionality. Or the other way about, the Judaeans' exceptional adjustment of law to life staged by Jeremiah, and turning out moreover a hollow gesture toward collective discharge, becomes the Leviticus rule in all seriousness. Co-reference with "Israel," then, is presumed but is not all in law, any more than it was in any foregoing narrative variation into or out of "Hebrew." The choice of referring language for the chosen group, even in "sachliche Identität," again signifies to the point of making or breaking the thematic design. Outrageous though the idea appears at first blush, one might profitably compare Leviticus's change of terms for the enslaved referent with Pharaoh's (or the Philistines') along another diachronic axis. The latter tells in shorthand the chequered (hi)story of an intercultural power struggle; the former, how the original lesson got reconceptualized in the shape of recodification within the culture that suffered and prevailed. At every phase on either axis, however, the labels chosen or avoided, revived or revoked, bristle with significance not only for the labeler's viewpoint but also for the process as a whole. Such precision work once more takes its reference, literally, from the operative contextual norm, sequencing what it elsewhere synchronizes and juxtaposes: the Bible's proper discourse with its translational counterdiscourse. As always, the Law of (De)Nomination packs a macrocosm into the "Israelite/Hebrew" microcosm. Voices, ideologies, reality-pictures writ small may therefore agree or
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differ along lines other than ethnopolitical (e.g., the class-vs. the people-orientedness already examined). The division of usage within the Hamite master plot, where the shift to "Israel" reflects the turning point of the whole intergroup narrative, is only more naturally and sharply antagonistic, or characteristic, than the subdivision among our in-group law quartet. Mutatis mutandis, however, just as the ethnic forms of discourse (e.g., God's vs. Pharaoh's or the Philistines') or their trajectories (e.g., the insider's ethnolexicon before vs. after Exodus, the Hamite's before vs. after the plagues) are irreducible to each other, so with Leviticus vis-à-vis the flanking Codes. Seeing how deep the conceptual and genarrative disunity goes below the variant language of reference, we must not try too hard (in any of the ways attempted since the Rabbis) either to harmonize all the four texts, at least not equally so, or to attribute such harmonizing to the authors ("legislators") themselves as agents of ongoing genesisfor example, to the Deuteronomist supposedly cornered between Exodus and Leviticus. True, all the Bible's slave laws favor the native in memory of the same national drama; yet the presence or absence of Hebrewness on their surface indicates which flow together to compose and unroll an evolving legaliterary tradition, which fall outside the mainstream. 16 The odd case of Leviticus apart, indeed, the law marches in ideo-poetic step with the life (even where, as in Jeremiah, out of practical step) down the ages. Hence, first of all, the increasing perceptibility of the bridges that enable and sustain the march. Viewed as discourse-events separated by growing intervals from their common Egyptian reference point, the three "Hebrew" texts show an inverse correlation between distance and remembrance: as the historic past recedes, the speaking (or the writing we latecomers encounter) takes ever-greater care to bring it back to the national memory in the present and the future. By this I do not mean only that our three law-speaking discourses progressively rise in specificity and narrativity; nor only that their allusive wealth accumulates along the chain. All such measures and movements form part of an extensive crosstextual thrust, a canonical dynamics. The further removed the speech-event in time (and, as it happens, in place) from the Egyptian house of bondage, the more insistent, elaborate, admonitory the retrospect on the degrading past and the judgment on its replay among the onetime victims themselves, Israelites vs. "Hebrews." Exodus at Bridging: The Double Covenant Code, Covenant/Code Communicated as early as "the third month after the Sons of Israel had gone forth out of the land of Egypt," the Exodus version of the law is fittingly operational rather than motivated aloud. It bundles into the dissonance of "Hebrew slave" (together with the sense of top priority given
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by his opening the list of "ordinances [mishpatim]" enjoined on his recent namesakes) all the mementoes and explanations necessary at the time (19:1, 21:1-2). For the assembly at Sinai consists of the participants in the Exodus. Like the prophet who mediates the Covenant Code, each inset hearer (potential buyer, seller, victim, enslaver, selfenslaver of the "Hebrew" that he himself was three months ago) forms a living bridge. Expressly ordered to remember and transmit their story down the generations (e.g., 13:1-16), they of all generations could hardly forget anyway: even in disaffected murmuring, they bring up their "slavery for Egypt" (14:11-12). They may need reminding that, as former gerim (sojourners, resident aliens) there, it behooves them to show kindness to the ger in their midst (22:20, 23:9); but "Hebrew slave" is identical, not just analogous, to the recent vict-image of the self and therefore more loaded, eloquent, and peremptory than any motive clause. The shorthand even concentrates the shock effect. Their lowest self abruptly brought back, translated into the covenant, the ex-Hebrews would gape at the widespread view that "both Jeremiah (34:13) and Deuteronomy (15:15) associate the emancipation of slaves with the redemption from Egypt, a connection that is wholly absent from Ex. 21" (Sarna 1973:146). They are themselves the connection, sixty-myriad-fold, and their Lawgiver makes the most of it. Except to the hopeless underreader, scarcely more in touch with the drama than with the poeticsfar less with the compounded poetic drama of genesisthe texts differ not in the connection's presence or absence but in its visibility between surface and depth. To the dramatized hearers at Sinai, the premise of Hebrewness having been rubbed in from the outset through "improper" verbal and ordinal choice, the law would transparently ensue as a consequent; so, along the law's own plot, would the enslavement foretell the release. Indeed, if the premise refreshes their first-hand group memory, then the consequent will accomplish and eternalize the refreshing even at second hand. By analogy to the law of the Passover itself or the firstling, they may well deem the scenario another act of commemoration for all time, native replay plus foreign hate-name included. "Should you ever turn master over your neighbor, keep in mind your own biography of Hebrew servitude to the following effect": no higher than this does the Exodus threshold of understanding mount. It is underneath the surface (never, as in the later variants, above) that the antecedents ramify and proliferate in excess of the minimum, if only for the ears (or eyes) of the cunning among the audience. Reconsider the positioning for importance. That the first law of the first Code regards the slavean exordium without precedent and parallelwould be perfectly understandable to every former "Hebrew" addressed in the third month after the Exodus. "The lesson of our formative experience before other items; our own future victimage before another's."
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And if moderns have trouble with this double legal priority, so injurious to the quest for analogies across cultures or to the reputed social-mindedness of Israel's casuistic law, this is merely because they have got the unique national agenda backward. In fact, the deeper and wider one looks, the more finely matched do those priorities of Hebrewness come out, both with each other and with their equally novel practicalities, via inter-textual allusion, above all. In the previous chapter, we have already found such intertextual affairs ("bridges") centralized, multiplied, and coordinated within the strategy of deterrence. As the argument's focus shifts, or rather widens, what we need to trace is how their workings extend from the rhetoric viewed synchronically (linear and past-echoing touches included) to the image of narrative-to-law diachrony (with, among other gains, fresh affective value). The axes so interpenetrate in the poetics that analysis alone can tear them apart, into the Code's attitude toward in-group bondage vs. its implicit origin and, after Exodus, movement. Let me first exemplify the principle as diachronizedallusive equivalence mapped onto the overall time sequenceby reverting to the opposition between Nuzi contract and native code. Where Hurrian practice discriminates against the bondwoman, it would appear, Exodus legislates in her favor. On a literalist, gender-specific reading of "Hebrew slave," the counterpart of the Nuzi Hab/piru femalesordinarily denied manumissionwould not be vulnerable to bondage in the first place. On a generic, inclusive interpretation, supported by the language and not for nothing articulated in the later ("Hebrew/Hebrewess") Codes, she receives much the same treatment as the bondman. And on either reading, if sold by her father during her minority, she enjoys privileges akin to the freeborn woman's: protection against resale to "foreign people," marriage to the buyer or his son, undiminished rights vis-à-vis newer wives, with release gratis as the penalty for infringement. Besides the departure from the Ancient Oriental norm, either understanding belies the latter-day metastereotype of the female (Scriptural, Jewish, otherwise) inevitably oppressed under selfish male legislation. So much for the surface balance between favoritism and egalitarianism in Israel according to Exodus. This still leaves certain questions unresolved. (How to translate grammatical gender into sexual coverage, exclusively or inclusively? Who is the "foreign people" in the disallowance of resale? And why should women fare as they do under the slave law compared with men?) But neither does the text's surface monopolize the data for their resolution, least of all those that go to settle and explain the balance. Rather, as befits a masterwork of literature, the Code itself implies a poetic encoding, a (literary) covenant behind the (sheerly legalistic) covenant, so to speak, intended for the appropriate decoder. In this, the
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cardinal rule of the storyteller's poetics at largemaneuvering between the truth and the whole truthfinds a vehicle adapted to the intergenre, in its diachrony-laden genarrativity, above all. Among the aids to gap-filling offered, the subtlest (also, I would argue, the weightiest) kind generally escapes notice, as it already did in synchrony, because it rests on an underlying logic of composition. Thereby, for example, the Bible's intergeneric (law/narrative) play enjoins, delimits, and motivates intersexual (male/female) continuity. In other words, the Exodus ordinance draws its warrant, both positive and negative, both for equalizing and for inequality, from the role assigned to women vis-à-vis men in the tale of the Exodus. Within the overall mimesis of genesis, not just the founding slave law but also the component divergencies trace their origin to the founding ordeal of slavery: where the Hamite/Hebrew(ess) master plot first arose and enacted itself, there the variations in subplotting assume the force of typo-logical (subbridging, subdividing) guides to the law's re-emplotment. The firmer the bridge with the narrative and the resultant who/what/why genarrative, the fuller the message of the law to the shuttling gap-filler. This strategy of encoding and decoding between the genres may well have been adumbrated in the Code's omnibus superscription, immediately prior to the Hebrew slave law. The superscribed term for all the discourse that ensues, mishpat, brings out what casuistic law entails by definition, namely cases, hence enactments in the fullest juristicactional sense not excluding re-enactment of and by precedent. "These are the mishpatim that thou shalt put before them" (21:1): the key word ties together the notions of precept and practice, or more specifically to our point, what should be done in Israel and what has been done to or by the "Hebrews" in Egypt. Also, that God himself voices the superscribed key, and that his verb for law-discoursing ("put") hovers between the oral and the written, ties together all the audiences involved in the decoding. (So will hover the "thou"-covenant-sharer of the following inset address.) As the manifesto cum memento ''that thou shalt put before" the ex-slaves, those mishpatim fittingly open with an ordinance that not only compels retrospection on actual "Hebrew" experience, much of it first-hand, but also invites and guides the experienced auditors to puzzle out the details by way of allusion. Thus the sexual issue, arising as early as the masculine "Hebrew slave" of the first clause, resolves itself in and through this key. Shared groupwide historic precedent in Egypt, subgrouping precedent, lack of precedent: all compose between the lines of the law to motivate both its inclusive and its sex-differential rulings. The inclusive retrospection from the law to the narrative is the more transparent, and so is the push against the (meta)stereotype of discriminatory androcentrism in both. The first "Hebrew slave" in Egyptthematically sold by his brothers, then threatening them with slavery in turnwas
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of course male; yet the distinction evaporates with the expansion of the we-group to national and of the conflict to international scale. Joseph's entire people fell under the yoke, along with the label "Hebrew(esse)s," and all went free as Israel. In reality, the enemy's initial de-nomi-nation of "the Sons of Israel" in Exodus bore on the Daughters of Israel, "the Hebrewesses,'' so fertile as to precipitate, and so heroic as to resist, the ultimate countermeasure of infanticide (1:15ff.). To dramatize the point encoded between the legal and the historical enactment, the issue comes to a head when Pharaoh asks, "Who, who are to go?", and would lift the veto from adult males. (In terms of the law, the Devil quotes Scripture: every Hebrew slave having married and bred under the Pharaonic owner's roof, as it were, "the wife and her children shall belong to her master, and he shall go out single.") The prophet will not have it: "With our young and with our old will we go, with our sons and with our daughters" (10:7-11). 17 Turned law-speaker, he imposes the same condition, only on another and incongruous Hebrew-enslaving audience, in another tongue and speech-register and modalized narrative than used by himself as agent. Now for the disparity in parity. Joseph's own case shows how the bridges also fork, how the arts of memory anchor the subgrouping (narratively, the subplotting) as well as the drawing together of the candidates for enslavement in their past analogues, to the elaboration of the genesis and the rhetoric alike. The legal so match the lived differences, in short, that history motivates typology, for better or worse. Let us ascend from the worse to the better. That first "Hebrew slave," having narrowly escaped rape at the hands of his mistress, came to wed another Egyptian woman at the behest of a new master: "Pharaoh . . . gave him [Joseph] Asenath, daughter of Poti'phera priest of On, for a wife" (Genesis 41:45), whose children must have lived and died under the oppressive regime instituted after the father's exit. A throwback to Joseph's humble beginnings in Egypt, their fate implies in legaliterary retrospect a judgment on his assimilation: exogamy is seldom forgiven, never forgotten, least of all where contracted both with a Hamite and under the shadow of apostasy ("Priest of On," or Heliopolis, the center of the sun god Ra's worship; cf. Judah's exemplary ordeal in Genesis 38 and my discussion in 1992a: esp. 482-87).18 With the contemporary "Hebrew slave" of the law, therefore, history will only repeat itself "if his master gives him a wife," nonIsraelite, of course, and keeps the children in bondage (Exodus 21:4). From the Devil (mis)quoting Scripture to divisive effect among the Hebrews, we come to Scripture quoting itself verbatim, across genres, apropos the Hebrew's foreign union. Elements of the grand narrative plot re-form into a legal subplot, the evoked blemish into a bondage type. In this connection, one also thinks of the "mixed multitude [ereb rab]" that departed from Egypt along with "the Sons of Israel" (Exodus 12:37-38).
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To go by their enigmatic and separate and uncomplimentary mention, they too are the offspring of exogamous unions, like the postexilic ereb forcibly "separated from Israel" according to Nehemiah (13:3). A clue to the same effect lurks in the anagrammatic relations between ereb and eber/ibri: the mixed name reads like an icon of mixed descent, probably also of Hebrewness gone wrong and still infecting Israel at large. Among them, suggestively, the only one that plays an individual role in the wilderness narrative is executed for having "blasphemed the Name" during a quarrel with an Israelite (Leviticus 24:10-23): he replays the notorious Hebrew wrongdoer in Egypt, complete with the verb for quarreling (nitstsimwa'yyinnatsu) and Moses' intervention as judge. The midrash also identifies the crossbreed ereb rab with "the rabble [asafsuf] in the midst of . . . the Sons of Israel" who lead the clamor for the Egyptian fleshpots: enjoyed at the time ''for nothing," the murmurers stress, as though to counter, dismiss, or parody the release "for nothing" (Numbers 11:4ff.). In view of all this, the law strikingly aligns poetic genesis with poetic justice by denying manumission to their future co-ereb's: they had best remain "in Egypt." But "the Hebrewesses" fared otherwise than the prototypical Hebrew slave. (They also behaved otherwise than their menfolk under oppression, and Exodus law, we shall see, fondly remembers the Exodus culture heroines, always to favorable retributive effect: its poetic genesis-with-justice works both ways.) The contrast between the sexes grows all the more telling if you recall that, as already with the first Hebrew's wife in the patriarchal age, Pharaoh's genocide scheme envisaged the takeover of the females; yet the threat came to nothing. Whatever their tribulations at the time, the womenfolk were never actually pressed or sold into Egyptian marriage, let alone (unlike their ancestress) into sexual abuse or illicitness: a never that explains both the sequel's (21:7-11) ruling against that contingency in Israel and its avoidance of the echoing "Hebrew" terminology. So the sisters/daughters of Miriam et al. gain extra protection from the bondage law, in two combined forms. One runs through the manner (art, style, rhetoric, discourse) of legislation, which minimizes the odium of the female's bondage, as systematically and persuasively as it heightens that attached to the male's. The devices wielded for the purpose range from the conspicuous absence of the hatewordthe bondmaid stays unHebrewedto the incognito travel of the adult female slave between the lines. (On which low profile more soon, in comparison with the shift toward explicitness after Exodus.) The twin form of protection consists in legislative matter, bearing straight on the world. While keeping the bondwoman un-typologized, at least on stage and outside the "wife's" role, Exodus law details the case of the bondmaid into a multilinear if-plot with a clear end in view: to spare her (and by extension, it will emerge, her grown-up sisters in law) all foreseeable victimage as well as the thematic vict-image. The
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double bridge thrown backward from precept to precedent testifies to the integration of the legal with the overall culture in the making, as inscribed in the evolving body of literature. If the bondmaid does not please her master enough for wedlock, he must allow her redemption from bondage altogether: "to a foreign people [am nokhri] he shall not have the power to sell her," whereby she might suffer abuse worse than Egypt. The comparison, like that trained on Joseph or the Pharaoh haggling with Moses, evokes the Hamite way with the Hebrew(esse)s in the immediate past, not the Hurrian with the Hab/piru in remote Mesopotamia. But as verses 7-11 have in turn been paired with Nuzi records, this time with marriage contracts involving the sale of freeborn daughters, contrast anew the powers given there to the buyer. He may have the right to sell the young woman to any man "in the gate" or to force her into prostitution: Exodus almost sounds like a reversal of Nuzi in memory of Egypt. 19 Historical and intercultural, again, the workings of the Bible's memory draw the phrase am nokhri into Egyptian pattern. Instead of directing the phrase against "foreign people," commentators since the Rabbis have often generalized its coverage to all "strangers," anyone outside the nuclear family, the maid's or the master's (e.g., Rashi ad loc., Falk 1967:243, Paul 1970:54, or Sarna 1991:120). This strains the languagenokhri as a rule denotes the ethnocultural Other, while am normally outreaches kinfolkas well as blurs the allusion. Yet not impossibly so, nor unhappily, if taken to subsume the insider under the outsider by precedent, thus rendering the veto on further transfer absolute, commemorative, and all the more deterrent. The two references do not exclude each other, either in the world or in the spirit of the law: the unique idiom may even be designed to proscribe both, indeed all groups at once, as if equally "foreign" in this aspect to the maid and her history.20 To the same protective end, by the same expansive reach, further contingencies multiply here. Thus the duplicity of lo ye'adah between the ketib and the qere readings (or, for the original Sinai auditor, their homonymous equivalents): the inscribed lo as "not" and the vocalized lo as "to him [i.e., to the master himself]." Whether or not designated for wifehood, the young maidservant is both redeemable if "unpleasing in the eyes of her master" and unsellable "to a foreign people'' if he has "broken faith with her." In turn, though inevitably against critical opinion and desire, the rest of the wording equivocates between the statuses. "Maidservant [amah]" does not entail wifehood or concubinage; nor "unpleasing in the eyes of her master" spousal or sexual displeasure; nor "broken faith" breach of matrimonial (as distinct from, say, material) promise. All over, multiple meaning works to maximize coverage with cover: the longtime keeper and recent deliverer would hardly fail her now, in enunciating the covenant.
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Safeguarded against alien takeover, then, the Daughter of Israel gains her contractual benefits, up to ("designated") wifehood, or regains her liberty. And if taken for a wife, she is entitled to full marital rights or else to another avenue to release, "for nothing, without payment of money." All such extras would render the girl more than equal to the "Hebrew" man or woman or spouse, because most equalized, in or out of prearranged union, to her free sisters. We can now subsume under the same explanatory principle ("bridging for double coding") an incongruity already treated in another, synchronic connection. Of all the law's features, the most jolting is the scenario of voluntary lifelong bondage, open to a nation just divinely extricated from compulsory bondage in perpetuity. However, the group experience that makes the provision so odd (and so charged with the bicultural stigmatizing latent in the ordinance as a whole) is also a clue and a witness to its grim realism. The scenario generalizes from a scene packed with drama, where at least one "Hebrew" bondman, speaking for the collective ("over us") and to the present lawgiver, opted for his master as against the delivering "judge,'' to him an impertinent, if not rebellious, busybody. So present meaning and future conduct derive from the past ordeal of the nation addressed. Coded in the twofold key of mishpatim, Exodus's "Hebrew" alludes to the actual and only Hebrews, or Hebrewesses, on record; "slave," to the house of slaves par excellence; "buy a Hebrew slave," to the archetypal one, literally acquired and called so, whose victimage initiated and whose demise restarted the entire Hamite plot. Having themselves borne the name with the yoke, the lawmaker's direct addressees would easily catch the reference, and all later interpreters would do best to follow suit. Instead of reading cuneiform precedents into the text of the lawwhich may well ignore and would usually abhor themwe should read backward to the precedents enacted, suffered, overcome, narrativized at the other end of the world, in the land of the hieroglyphs. To fly in the face of these priorities is to go on confusing a hypothetical (not even likely) Ur-source with the referents and ordinances of the Bible's legaliterary discourse, unparalleled in any source outside its own formative experience, the genesis of Israel. For the Bible's history and sociology as for its poetics, better interlinear and intergeneric retrospection than cross-cultural retrojection, better genuine, living memory and self-memory of the Hebrews than speculative analogy with other unfortunates. We shall soon find the principle gathering momentum along the canon on its way from Exodus to Exile; but the light thrown on how the divergences within the typology (e.g., the interbreeding, sexual, olamic issues) answer to one versatile rationale already shows it at work. Or rather, at work along one track of the discourse, between Exodus law and Exodus narrative: between scenarios and scenes, precept and plot.
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Thus far the allusive "bridging" logic has related to a web of precedents from collective history that quietly accounts for the specifics of legislation. But historicizing the Code also goes with properly ideo-legal backward reference, heterogeneric with homogeneric unity in variety. Silent inter-textual play, that is, embraces the traffic between law and law, including no lesser a covenant than the Decalogue. Such traffic, too, has already arisen in the rhetoric of deterrence. Either Code, we found, relates the Hebrew slave law to the kidnapper's (Exodus 21:2, 16, Deuteronomy 15:12, 24:7), and tightens the nexus through the convergent allusion to Joseph's tale, especially the proposal made by Judah about how to take revenge without fratricide and with financial gain. There, the intertext both set a limit to the range of possible "buy/sell" openings and, rhetorically, heightened the sense of fraternal violence within the milder operative pre-scenarios. Here, in the diachronic framework, it correspondingly rules out a narrative source as for once inoperative, i.e., nongenarrative, because pre"sale" kidnapping (like the maid's abuse) is even worse than Egypt: the threat of capital punishment in one law amounts to the episode's disqualification for legaliterary genesis in the other. Now the Decalogue connection both illustrates the versatility of the resource and sharpens its distinctiveness. Given that the unigeneric play works between modalized skeleton talesand the Decalogue's are more skeletal than mostit hardly compares with the intergeneric optimum in extent, wealth, maneuverability, or unobtrusiveness. This fundamental disparity affects bridging along with all other time-bound roles (updating included). By nature, though, such play within the law has the ability to concentrate for the purpose, sui generis, not only various legal relatives and authorities but also dispersed legalized memories, which orchestrate the source-narrative afresh. As already noted by the Rabbis, for example, Ramban ad loc., the first sentence of the Ten Commandments performs aloud the same retrospect on ethnohistory as the first ordinance implies: "I am the Lord thy God, who has brought thee out of the land of Egypt, the house of slaves" (20:2). To nail down the link, the verb for setting free (hotsetikha) resonates throughout the manumission enactment from the opening scenario onward ("will go out," yetse), as it punctuated the antecedent Exodus tale (from Moses' "going out [wa'yyetse]" to ''his brothers" to their joint departure). So ordered and lexicalized, the memory of Egypt draws the two convenants together. And once the Decalogue has been annexed to the bondage theme, the interlegal echoes grow still more exact and explanatory. "Six years he shall serve [lit., slave, ya'abod] and in the seventh he shall go out free" now picks up from "Six days shalt thou labor [ta'abod] . . . and the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord thy God; thou shalt not do any work, thou and thy son and thy daughter, thy slave [abdekha] and thy maidservant [amatkha]"
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(20:9-10). The third person rhymes with the second, the ethnosocial week of years with the cosmic week of days, the generic masculine shorthand ("he . . . he") with the explicit two-sex ("and thy maidservant") range, the future Hebrew slave with his former equivalent turned slaveowner, casuistic with apodictic law, all in a multiple time-perspective. Still, the finer the fine print, the more notable the provision for every eventuality, between the limits of full and failsafe uptake. High interpretive competence, though welcome and rewarded, is less than mandatory (just like the eye, or the auditor's ear, for nuances of judgment against which "rhetorical overkill" insures). The question, "Whom does the law address?", if thought worth posing at all, has been routinely answered in favor of some late elite minority of expertsscribal and/or judicial, alive to the pseudepigraphy at either endand the effort has been channeled into their identification. (Who, when, where was the esoteric law-circle in which writers and receivers communicated, maybe interchanged?) The question, I would argue, bears on fundamentals, notor prior tospecifics. It needs rethinking on an all-national front, hence in multiple terms, comparable to the narrative at large. And the Exodus landmarkthe first Code, the first holy assembly as "Israel,'' the first intergeneric mix in strength, the first treatment of the Hebrew under the double legaliterary covenant, the first orality-to-scripture advance is the place to start my running counterargument. We must not confuse the gains that the law's poetic decoding yields to the scholar, in ancient Israel or nowadays, with the demands made on the lawgiver's immediate nationwide audience at Sinai. The difference lies not in wits but in equipment, (inter)textual and professional, following from the communicative two-in-oneness of reported speech as discourse within and about discourse. The universals entailed by the structure also enable the special markers or manifestations integral to the Bible's poetics. In generalizing the narrative transformation of the law genre, I have identified the points of contact, some harmonious, some disharmonious, between the quoted inset and the quoting frame, e.g., the spoken vs. the written medium. Now we observe such variables in twofold communicative action. And the difference they make establishes that the law-receivers (naive, adept, half-and-half) are as irreducible to a "pseudepigraphic" appendage for cover as the Lawgiver or as the narrative spacetime they share. Instead of a written text to refer back to, far less a canon, the Sinai audience have only memories, private, collective, ancestral, recent. True, they would be Pharaoh-like if they "did not know Joseph," or "the Lord." No less true, their memories are already subject by fiat to a process of invigoration, regulation, transmission, incorporation into the culture forever, via iterated commemorative ritual and/or history telling. "Thou shalt narrate in the hearing of thy son and thy son's son how I have made sport
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of Egypt and what signs I have placed upon them, that you may know that I am the Lord," immediately followed by another message to Pharaoh in the name of "the Lord, God of the Hebrews" (10:1ff.). From the eve of the Exodus itself, the commemorative retrospects ordered for all time double their vehicle and multiply in quick proleptic succession. "When your children say to you, What do you mean by this service?, you shall say, It is the sacrifice of the Passover to the Lord, who passed over the houses of the Sons of Israel when he smote the Egyptians but saved our houses." Then, "Unleavened bread shall be eaten for seven days . . . and thou shalt tell thy son on that day, saying, It is because of what the Lord did for me when I came out of Egypt." Again, "Thou shalt set apart for the Lord every first-opener of the womb . . . and every first-born of man among thy sons thou shalt redeem. And when thy son asks thee tomorrow, saying, What does this mean?, thou shalt say to him, By strength of hand did the Lord bring us out of Egypt, out of the house of slaves . . . and killed every first-born'' (12:24-13:16). Yet the series and the language of these commands only brings out the point. Of the two semiotic vehicles of back-reference enjoined upon the people, one is oral ("narrate in the hearing . . . say . . . say . . . tell . . . saying . . . ask . . . say"), the other not even verbal but itself in want of verbalization for the innocent observer's uptake ("what do you mean by the service?", on which cue "you shall say"). And if anything, the stuff of re-presentation is less determinate than either vehicle, whether judged by well-formedness or presence. Those folk memories (of the Genesis-to-Exodus history, including Joseph and the young Moses) go back to objects (deeds, characters, settings) that are themselves primarily nonverbal in the first instance, an ontological and communicative variable of the greatest significance. 21 Whatever their original object, further, those memorabilia are all still to be committed to the writing that we bookish latecomers encounter (and that analysts take for granted). Not even the Decalogue, exceptional for its verbality as well as for its recency, has yet transformed into inscription (31:18-34:32), any more than "the Book of the Covenant" itself (24:3ff.).22 To the Sinai auditors, within the inset law-speech event, the remembrance of things past ("Hebrew" as otherwise) will have neither the absolute fixity nor the easy juxtaposability to the present associated with literary allusionour domain as the book's, indeed the whole canon's frame-sharers. Nor will these relative inequalities in decodability entirely straighten out with the advance toward literature proper charted after the law-speech: when the Code has been "written" down, "read in the hearing of the people," and deposited in the shrine for testimony and doubtless consultation. The second half of the legaliterary double-coding pattern, the narrative, yet remains unwritten, therefore unconsultable for minutiae. Some of the echoed antecedents go back to the ancestors, some (exactly those that the
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beneficiaries of the Exodus must perpetuate in oral father-to-son retelling) to individual and group life; some will be more widely or sharply remembered, others less, but none in the canonical form that we enjoy, too unconsciously perhaps. And on top of it all, there is the artfulness of the back reference. Where you might expect to find the threshold of access to the law/life interplay lowered by way of compensation, the poetic double coding raises it higher still. For an apt exercise on the bridging, the memories that the immediate collective addressee will have retained need to be triggered and guided in the hearing (or, later, in the Book's reading) by a special discourse cross, an intergenre presumably outside the laity's experience, certainly their expertise. Not that their decoding would necessarily rank below ours, whether measured by competence or performance, by individuals or sectors or averages. Variability characterizes both inside reference-groups, though some of its lines may diverge. Conversely, the Bible has, and wields, its arts of leveling communication across media. Just observe again the duplicity of lo ye'adah between the written lo (= not designated) and the vocalized inscription lo (= to him designated): our two readings parallel, actually mime, the two hearings of Moses' audience, unable to tell the references apart even by their graphic variation. The inclusive ambiguity remains constant. 23 Still, the given frame/inset differences, as well as those likely within either circle, make a differenceby and large, to our advantage. And the Bible on principle reckons with the entire set of differentials it creates, fashioning an equilibrium innovative at either end. Legalese is proverbial for its exclusionary opacity, not unlike the denial of access to all but the happy few in hermetic or experimental art. Its very loci of explicitness, even overexplicitness, need explicating, because they presuppose inguild expertise. (A master of the plain style, Jonathan Swift charged lawyers with fabricating a jargon of their own that no ordinary mortal can understand.) Where generic, specialized law may grow esoteric, however, the Bible's lawspeaking must and does preserve its communicational realism and accessibility within the given narrative inset, the contemporary dialogic Sitz im Leben. However illuminating, such refinements of source allusion as those just decoded are yet a bonus, missable, if not with impunity, artistically or ideo-legally speaking, then without loss of essentials. As in the rhetoric of bicultural stigmatizing, the direct-address "thou" is to be taken at face value. It singles out every member of the Covenant assembly as suchin his electness, his fresh ex-Hebrewness, his liability to (re)play any part in the scenarios, his need to understandregardless of interior differences between, say, the chief and the tribesman, the judge and the judged. Like the rhetoric, again, the image of genesis spans the gulf between the esoteric and the exoteric, in that the Hebrewgram arms it with a dissonance between past and present that is audible
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to all. For the addressed participants in the Exodus, "Hebrew slave" would carry with it all the necessary reference, retrospect, rationale: so grounded and dramatized in history, so phrased for shock value, so thick with memory, so overdetermined, in short, the law's root aetiology becomes foolproof. 24 Nor is the mainspring (with or without the network of legalized subplots, depending again on competence) likely to escape the book's implied reader, as close to the Egyptian ordeal along the written literary discourse as the immediate auditors in terms of "real" Biblical life. The implications for pre-textual diachrony also follow. On any level, in either medium, the communicative system not only patterns the data, but also tests them for patternability. As a result, the given text is now validated, against source critical interference, high or low. Thus, the firmer and more far-flung the backbridging to the people's founding ordeal as early as the founding Code, the more fragile the crosscultural bridge to the homonymous Nuzi outgroup. By the same token, the pseudepigraphic fiction of Mosesweak enough within the local unitcomes yet closer to the realm of fiction itself, in demonstrability at least, when faced with the intertexture. How would it break out of the ever-widening circles, logical and scribal, of its own postulation? And so on, down to the challenged word. Considering the "Hebrew" subtext for the initiate's eyes and the insurance value of the "Hebrew" jolt, the proposal to dislodge the gentilic as unoriginal (Jackson 1988:93) meets its quietus. Where the narrative keeps silent about itself, the law twins revelation with reticence: its discourse of source is therefore the prime antidote, yet also, if imaginatively used, the best available guide, to the source of discourse. Finally, if the Covenant Code turns on minimum surface bridging, then, by the definition of originary genesis, it (and it alone in the series) neither presupposes nor exhibits any updating whatsoever. Or none that would count as such, because the few novelties introduced by this mishpat relative to the original event are all forced on the way from life to law, from told to codified "enactment." Translating a pattern across discourse boundaries (let alone a compounded transfer such as modeling a genesis in one genre on a phylogenesis in another, while timing their emergence along a single history-line) faces the artist with problems unknown to the copyist, in regard to both manner and matter, unity and variety. Thus, for the law to arise at all, in whatever "imitative" conformity with the experienced life, the master plot needs to undergo generic recasting. It must re-form from standard into casuistic narrative; from scenes into scenarios; from linearized into branching, typological subplots and/or vice versa (with the bachelor's orderly descent through foreign liaison toward permanent self-enslavement, where Moses' antagonist just came on to embody in his walk-on role the worst slave-type); the if-plot even demands another foolproof strategy than
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the plot's, now contingently maneuvering between explication ("truth") and implication ("whole truth") for the benefit of the heterogeneous nationwide audience addressed by the discourse. Likewise with the shrinkage of the term of service from the "four hundred years" predicted for Abraham's line as a whole (Genesis 15:13) to the six years meted out for the individual bondman; also with the simultaneous growth of the rationale (the elect's bondage vs. the bond of electness) from patriarchal to national covenant; and, not least, with the reenactment of the intercultural drama of Hebrewness within the culture. Apart from these exigencies of adapting the folk's genesis to the law's genesis, though, the three months that have intervened since the Exodus no more press for evolution than they problematize recollection. Rebridging with Updating across Distance The Sinai to Jordan to Jerusalem route: Post-Exodus exigencies But the next two law-speech occasions take place long after the event, four decades and a good many centuries respectively, and involve an audience that has never gone through it in adulthood or at all. On the Jordan, part of the congregation ranged somewhere between infancy and youth during the Exodus crisis (Numbers 14:26-35, 26:63-65, Deuteronomy 1:34-39, 2:14-16); another part, like the whole of the Jerusalem assembly (or Scripture's implicit readers), were yet to be born: they would have experienced the ordeal vicariously, through the symbolic rituals enjoined on their fathers, with a view to having the tale retold down the ages. Therefore, the unique Sinai immediacy is gone forever; and regardless of any innovation-mindedness, this natural lapse of double participantship has consequences for the discourse sufficient by themselves to mark a shift from originary to evolutionary legal genesis. The very continuity of postSinai Hebrew bondage law, with its raison d'être in preliberation, a fortiori pre-Israelite history, as well as with the intervening Code or Codes already generated by that rationale, is no longer assured. The time interval presses for rebridging, the old bridge for updating of sorts, if only to maintain it on the erstwhile level of its construction. (As in Alice's universe, it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place.) The law-speaker, always divine or divinely inspired within the world of Scripture, enjoys total recall of Hebrew origins comparable to the framing narrator's; but his earthly auditors do not share the privilege and the Judaeans would even find it inconvenient. What with the homologous distance in terms of canon and reading experience, Deuteronomy and Jeremiah need to jog, even to judge, the national memory that their Exodus precursor can take for granted.
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(An equivalent of sorts in postBiblical literary history would be an artist's revival of a device, a genre, a style, an allusive field, a mythology, etc., with adjustments geared to the contemporary audience's uptake. In Tom Jones, addressed to a rising middle class, Fielding never handles his affairs with classical literature on the assumption of familiarity operative in elite vernacular writing since the Renaissance: quotations from antiquity, for example, are now declared, attributed, translated, even glossed.) Bridging back to the source-life past, a condition for sheer intelligibility and accountability as well as intertextual (intergeneric, intergenetic) finesse, accordingly rises in the order of discourse priorities. Yet the very make-up of those priorities is no longer the same either. For, as befits a living culture, the ordinance would also keep in touch with experience, adjusting and responding to developments that have intervened since its first enunciation, even repaying novel collective behavior in kind. Equally bound to novelty along history and to memory of history, then, the two functional dynamics still vary on at least one axis: bridging mirrors and meets changes in the people as auditors, updating as agents. Between them, I will show, they account for the re-formation of postSinai "Hebrew" law in goal-directed terms. Some of the means to this double re-formative end are common to both later (con)texts, others more individual but always proportioned to the lapse of time and solidarity. These intertextualities, then, can rebridge and/or update, overlap or diverge in their means/end arrangement. All, however, are fast contextualized vis-à-vis the Exodus origin, thus unfolding between the linesas between the Codes, the insets, the rationalesan all-embracing, unbroken evolutionary discourse of source. A thick poetic macronarrative of legaliterature in movement along the still grander Hebrew tale, it intelligibly leads from one historicized GodMoses-Israel occasion to the next, clean against the fables of source critical prehistory, whether dismissive (e.g., lawspeaking as pseudepigraphic window dressing) or alternative (the idea of progressivism). Longer intervals, stronger bridges: Memory updated After Exodus, when undeclared backward glances may pass unnoticed, the intertextual linkage need not turn artless but must in part rise to the surface. So it does in the two newer ordinances. Their longer retrospective range beside the original understandably correlates with a shift toward retrospective explicitness: the bridging itself gets updated, as it were, to set off the passage and tooth of time. Most overt among the shared post-Exodus measures for recall, hence continuity, is the specification of the dark past as the reason behind the law of seventh-year unloosing, and through speech-acts charged with particular illocutionary force at that.
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Thus the stark command in Deuteronomy to "remember that thou wert a slave in the land of Egypt and that the Lord thy God redeemed thee," at once followed by an equally commemorative quartet: the laws of the firstling (15:19-23); of the Passover itself, that "thou shalt remember the day of thy going out of [tsetkha] the land of Egypt all the days of thy life" (16:1-8); of Weeks, with yet another reminder that "thou wert a slave in Egypt" (16:9-12); and of Booths (16:13ff.). The overall ordering builds up the emphasis. Not only do the last two regulations feature ''thy slave and thy maidservant" in more thematic proximity to release law than did the Sabbath in Exodus. All four laws having already appeared in the Exodus Code (22:28-29 on the firstling; 23:14-19 on the three yearly pilgrimage festivals), we can now appreciate how and why they have been rearranged into a far more immediate, successive, pointed, Egypt-motivated continuity with that of the "Hebrew" slave. Likewise, the grouping of the various seven-year cycles of release improves upon their suggestive orchestration. In the Code then, an abrupt glance at the Fallow Year (Exodus 23:10-11) long after the term of "Hebrew" service; now, a solemn and "alien"-excluding insistence on the remission of "thy brother's" debt (Deuteronomy 15:1ff.) as a prelude, associational if not causal, to the manumission of "thy brother the Hebrew." All these advances in lucidity already vindicate the Deuteronomist's opening comment on the point of the inset resaying: "Beyond the Jordan, in the land of Moab, Moses undertook to expound this Torah" (1:5). Conversely, they already discredit the belief that "the D code is not intended to be a more up-to-date version of M[ishpatim]" (Carmichael 1974:53). The surface bridging gains yet sharper relief from another of Deuteronomy's novelties over Exodus, namely, the growing professionalization of the judicial system. Formerly administered by "rulers of thousands, rulers of hundreds, rulers of fifties, and rulers of tens" under Moses (Exodus 18:13-26), justice will henceforth also involve "judges and officers . . . at all thy gates" and the top experts, "the Levitical priests and the judge who is in office" at the cult's center (Deuteronomy 1:15-17, 16:18-20, 17:8-12). The more professional the law-audience, you would think, the less explicit the guidance required. The data falsify this expectation, premise included. The guidance turns audible, instead; but then, we have already inferred from the rhetoric of person that the judges do not constitute the law-speaker's or the law-writer's audience, any more than did the Exodus hierarchy of chiefs. Within the Jordan inset as within the frame, they rather number one reference group (or level) of Israel's many, each accommodated by the national literature with its own temporality, its own aids, its own access, its own perspective, its own grasp of the common formative reference-point: everything just like Mishpatim, only that the distance has grown wider, the threshold higher, and so has the insurance for an all-
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Israelite bond of understanding via Hebrewness undergone. Appropriately, Deuteronomy's version never features the judiciary as suchnot even through the ambiguous elohim introduced by Exodus to witness the bondman's waiving of freedommuch less addresses it. The proliferating thou's, five of them in the newly overt call for remembering Egypt, all operate on the individual group member as brother-owner. Having been fortified on all counts to become timeproof as well as foolproof, the rationale will resurface anew in the sixth-century prophet's indignant quoting of the law at Jerusalem. Longest, the final updated bridge is also the strongest (and not just due to the twisted telling, along which memory compounds normative with narrative value under the shock of discovery). By now we could predict from the diachronic movement in text and time that the Jeremiah ordinance will not be left to evoke the past unaided, Exodus fashion. Instead, Deuteronomy's string of commands both prefigures and parallels the divine reprimand administered in Jeremiah for the offense against the "covenant" of liberty "made with your fathers when I brought them out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slaves." Yet the measures taken for continuity again show an advance in salience: not only from presupposing to trumpeting anterior codification ("covenant") on the topic but also from echoing to citing it with due formal notice. Significantly, the back-reference of (Hebrew) law to (Hebrew) life figures as a constant, gaining perceptibility throughout the series; the back-reference of law to thematic law(s), as a variable, confined to two of the three membersthe first being firstand ensured in the last and least innovative alone. At the end, the law's with the national life's, God outlines the whole itinerary from the beginning to make a closure ex post facto. Where Deuteronomy silently recodifies, assuming the Exodus bondage-mishpat, the ''covenant" named by Jeremiah ensues in direct quotation ("saying . . ."), the most explicit form of retrospection on earlier discoursehere the law-discourse addressed to "your fathers," which itself looks back on history as life-source. 25 Round this unadorned language, transparent to the weakest postExodus memory and intelligence, the two (con)texts weave their networks of retrospective indirection, in part again overlapping. An analogue within the narrative of Hamite genesis would be how the Philistine retrospects on Egypt of the Exodus (I Samuel 4:8, 6:6) alert us to the signals of the two outgroups' family resemblance and continuity buried underneath. Apart from the Hebrew-calling itself, dialogic and monologic, the linkage there ramifies into hanit*, "lest" clauses, the analogy between Jonathan and Moses as "strikers" or between the respective collaborators with the victimizers, the ongoing master plot. Dense even by such high criteria, as well as turned inward and intergeneric, the picture of the networks latent here will unfold by degrees throughout this chapter. Owing to their oblique allusiveness, of course, they are more intricate than the stark appeals to memory; but
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they are incomparably more far-flung and more protean, too. Every one of the numerous allusive glances at the past, in whatever mode and form, works for rebridging, even if it co-serves another function (updating with an eye to change included) on the agenda of Deuteronomy and/or Jeremiah. For now, let me instance a major (and typically, as will appear, multifunctional) case in point. While Exodus refers to "a Hebrew slave," the newer law-discourses broaden the reference to improve on the continuity with the past. In both, the masculine adjective "Hebrew" gathers the feminine "Hebrewess" ("Hebrew or Hebrewess," ''Hebrew and Hebrewess"), and the question is to what end. Most commentators have inferred therefrom a drive toward egalitarian updating. Yet the accepted view at best produces half of the answer, at worst (and, I believe, actually) misreads a novelty in style, i.e., explicitness, for one in substance. However that may be, the (re)bridging function doubtless co-motivates the variance: the "Hebrewess" added by postExodus law is otherwise unique to the tale of Egypt (Exodus 1:15, 16, 19, 2:7), where women so distinguish themselves under this group name, tyrannically imposed or craftily assumed. As such, the expansion works for pinpoint allusion, bundling into the lexis what either posterior text concurrently articulates by way of reminder or reproach. Again, as the adjectival component of Exodus's "Hebrew slave" expands, so do we find its nominal mate replaced and reloaded in the later texts with a view to the same end: maximum continuity between the otherwise distinct eras, agents, patients, even nations and nationals in interplay. This is why the noun "slave," with its distant or abject ring, varies into "brother," whose re-pairing with "Hebrew" now creates a twofold awkwardnessredundance plus frictionto shock and deter. The variant's built-in sense of kinship, hence its incongruity with the epithet, gains further point from being likewise reserved for the Egyptian affair, namely, Moses' deliverance of the "Hebrew man from among his brothers." And in Deuteronomy, of course, Moses originates the verbal echo in the role of present speaker, as well as former observer and agent. Moreover, the allusion's updated bridgework reckons with the fact that the deliverer has come to the end of the road, as the slaveowner has changed his nationality, since the original event, and the "Hebrew brother" in trouble alone endures. Among other consequences, the pinpoint intertextuality keys up the rhetoric: Need a new Moses arise to save Hebrews, and Hebrewesses, this time from "thy" hands? Who among you will play foreign antagonist to his (in the actual deixis, my) protagonist? Should the contingency arise under legalistic aegis, should international history repeat itself among co-nationals, the ensuing invocation of God suggests (and, in Jeremiah, administers) a remedy above history. Human role-players may come and go, changing sides with fortunes, but the Omnipotent will
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never abandon the enslaved. In short, if the addition of "the Hebrewess" emphasizes the law's openness to the workings of time, the glance at the "brother" victimized and championed redresses the balance by adverting to the constants below all surface dynamics: the "conservative" vs. the "innovative'' force within the Bible's image of diachrony, legaliterary as otherwise literary historical, under God. By such arts, the newly worded opening phrase adjusts to its belatedness the mini-web of retrospective allusion, still left unadvertised yet grown in perceptibility. Like the all-embracing surface flashbacks, the uncommon echoes (re)bridge a time gap of a magnitude unknown to the Exodus Code (and its poetic code). Disclosure and development: Narrative universals as generators of change Owing to the expansive time gap, however, the three variants do not look back on quite the same history, because the past never stands still, or not in the Bible's retrospection. It constantly changes shape, whether according to the beholder's eye (early vs. late, say) or to its own advance in the wake of the present. Given a chapter of history (e.g., the record of Hebrew servitude in Egypt), its disclosure behind time from or for a new viewpoint and its development beyond or away from the old time-point may always dynamize its shape (meaning, judgment, values, implications) even along the canon itself. Ex post facto or post hoc or both, via subjective and/or objective posteriority, that chapter leads an afterlife. It marches on, potentially ever-resumable without limit, because only the end of time can put a stop to follow-up representations of its understanding and its happening, to the double genesis of change: to the endless narrativity of narrative. It is hard to exaggerate the importance of "disclosure" and "development" as paired agents, generators, hence motivations, of change in culture at large (not excluding the inquiry made by us human subjects, avid for "disclosure," into the processes of nature, e.g., into biological evolution, where objectively "development" alone operates. Biological theory is nothing but another ever-extendible quest story; and its millennial trial-and-error "plot" would continue to unroll even if nature itself were to discontinue evolving, as the stegosaur actually did, just like Etruscan in culture, without arresting its discovery plot). This twofold storied generation ("genarration" for short) comes up whenever we seek to explain a failure of persistence, a break of linear pattern. If things are no longer what they were, the insight into them and/or they themselves must have varied since we last encountered them. Disclosive or developmental, apart or together, bearing on our immediate experience of life or on second-hand, textual images of history or on fictions invented for a purpose, these explanatory mechanisms offer well-defined and ines-
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capable trajectories of the world that a static ("synchronic") arrangement would leave at best opaque. In all that regards the play of equivalence and difference observed in text sequence, hence always mappable onto world sequencea play, I would further argue, coextensive with narrativethe two logics enjoy universal validity. 26 As they cover between them the dynamics of change, they always enable us to make narrative sense of data otherwise unstable, contradictory, recalcitrant, or just heterogeneous, by ordering them between narrational and narrated time (or what we infer to be such): the former consisting in a purely discoursive, the latter in an action-bound, movement. This is how we sustain a thing's unity in face of its linear (or multilinear) variety, explain a thing's linear variety to accord with its unitary point and process of genesis. To illustrate from a domain apparently unrelated to legal tradition, consider how one may shed an earlier self yet remain oneself. What modifies our sense of a character while maintaining his characterhood, between the covers of a book? Either his disclosure in a new light (with the emergence of information thus far hidden from view, such as the cynicism of Jeremiah's Jerusalem) or his development into a new entity (e.g., the "sons of Israel" becoming "the Sons of Israel"), or both (e.g., the double, back-ward-looking cum forward-moving peripety trained on I Samuel's ''Hebrews" as they eventually change sides). The shift resolves itself by appeal to the perceiver (the artfully enlightening narrator, the freshly enlightened subject, witness, interpreter) and/or to the perceived (the object, e.g., the transformed hero). Between the dramas of understanding and of happening, always liable to zigzag in time, the altered figure makes sense. As with character, so, by the dynamics peculiar to narrative, with an event, a theme, a word, a state of affairs, which varies from its earlier appearance. My charting at the time of how the Genesis-Exodus sequence distributes for us the makings of "Polar Cultures in Contact, Nations in Total Conflict" along, or between, exactly these lines will now suffice to indicate that the principle may encompass a whole reality-model. Likewise with all sequent pieces of discourse representing more or less the same piece of world: the causes of variation among them, no matter how assorted they look, always ultimately go back to the two universal forces of narrative. Their recognition as such can illuminate afresh literary history, too, of which our legal trio is a small-scale poetic instance, or image, readily generalizable into a comprehensive theory. The law, whether modeled with a difference on a legal or nonlegal source or both, as here, will inevitably call for making sense between disclosure and development. In turn, if all law presupposes some antecedent analogue in the lawgiver's mind or world as originary cause, then the law-series paradigmatically embodies, (con)textualizes, multiplies, and orders the traces left by the generic genesishence the play of the narrative universals over them en route to full-fledged evolutionary sense.
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Concerning the diachrony of Hebrew bondage law, therefore, the wild extra- or anti-canonical speculations that pass for genetic scholarship (crossculturalist, already examined, along with uniculturalist) are in the last analysis as subsumable under those "genarrative" forces as any. However, the interplay we shall trace has the virtue of being traceable, in that it forms part of Scripture's own image of diachrony. Even if, comparably to this whole, the poetic role of bondage-law diachrony does not quite narrate itself, it gains unrivaled and exemplary narrativity throughout from either master cause of variance in recurrence over time. Latent in the finished sequence, the twofold genesis of change that I propose no more bears evidentiary than evolutionary resemblance to the line of idle conjecture from without. "Disclosure" primarily manifests itself here in and through the lawmaker's revisiting, that is, rereading, hence also revaluating and recodifying, of things past. The link with our pair of functional evolutionary trajectories ensues. To disclose is necessarily to bridge back; yet a fresh disclosure along a series (e.g., of Codes) may bridge back in such a variant way as to invite, generate/genarrate, explain updating. Re-disclosure of events past then motivates otherwise unenchained developments, whether they concern what has happened since, what will happen or, in the law, what should happen. We have in fact already detected this process at work behind Leviticus's strategic shift to the Jubilee cycle: the re-vision of the Exodus storyembodied in the blanking out of Hebrewness to focus the Israelite mass departure under Godcorrelates with legal revisionism. But milder forms of the principle, less unconservative and richer in back-reference for testimonia, operate within the Hebrew series itself. Among the cases in point to be derailed, look again at the key example just given of indirection for mnemonics. Deuteronomy's and Jeremiah's "Hebrew or Hebrewess" implies another view of the roles played by the codenamebearers in the yoke-to-freedom tale than does Exodus's "Hebrew slave." And a history reread/retold from a novel perspective implies in turn a history reapplied: bridging with a charged difference suggests codifying with a difference, namely, updating for optimum equality between man and woman in the legal version of the historic master plot. (As updating a tie-up grown elusive with age can promote rebridging for latter-day memoryof events, characters, traditions, covenants, discourses, even key phrasesso can rebridging be used to update for novelty: the means and the end change places.) Similarly with the brand-new injunction concerning gifts, for example, which "discloses" in longer retrospect features of the Exodus story to which the Exodus Covenant Code was blind at the time, or oblivious for a purpose or just indifferent, so that they escaped its official notice and exerted no influence over the originary genesis and ruling. As the viewpoint on what happened in the world alters, however, so
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does the world itself. From one law-context to another, "development" signifies no less than "disclosure," because the past has moved forward in the meantime. Exodus's lived and throbbing experience of Egyptian bondage has inevitably grown remote, for the most part second-hand, to Deuteronomy's audience (the pronoun in "thou wert a slave" evokes the inherited self) and altogether ancestral (undergone by "your fathers") to Jeremiah's, with an everwidening range of intermediacies between Then and Now. The more time has passed since the ''Hebrew"-to-"Israel" event, the more room is left for changes (evolutionary or devolutionary) in conduct as well as in memory: for the Israelites to have redeemed and outgrown or reenacted and naturalized their sad antecedents, to have leveled up or down their inner (e.g., intersexual) disparities, to have abided by or violated the lessons of their one-time Hebrewness. In turn, the longer the interval cleared for postExodus developments, the better the vantage point from which to evaluate, generalize, freshly codify, if necessary repay in kind, the outcome of the test of nationhood. Here again, now in face of group developments that have intervened, updated bridging for rebridging as an end in itself moves apart from updating proper, even when they run together through the same text unit. Naturally, given their common back-reference, each then meets difference (in the people) with difference (in the law), yet the differences so twinned make all the functional difference. The rebridger's variants would bring the audience's recollection (e.g., of victimage) to the level of their Sinai predecessors; the updater's would adjust their prospective life in Israel to what their behavior since testifies about their recollection. The first revisits history to answer communicative changes by re-echoing the past, the second to mirror and handle existential changes by re-codifying the future in their image. Throughout the series, either's means-end combination preserves and pursues the logic of its own trajectory via development, as via disclosure, or both. Everything, then, is and is not the same over time. Oriented to one memorable reference point, the canon yet individuates each of the three speech-occasions by its relative past, present, future; or, in human terms, by the national body playing the role of agent, listener, commemorator on the strength of inheritance and ordinancehence also object of judgment in and through the law-telling addressed to it. Three distinct, if successive and cumulative, histories of postHebrewness get serialized in legal retrospection, with prospective (re)codifications to match. Within this poetic image of diachrony forwarded through development at source, law-pregnant narrative and narrativized law advance by turns yet in concert along one plot, the latter altering to reflect (as it were, catch up with) and express the dynamics of the former in its own key. As the life of the ex-bondmen (rather than, "disclosure" fashion, its under-
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standing alone) evolves for better or generally worse, so does the law of bondage. The "Hebrew slave" and his master are never immune in law against what their people have done, omitted, undergone in the world since they last (or first) appeared in the Covenant Code, decades or centuries before. How to keep alive the memory of the remote "Hebrew" past and yet hold the ex-Hebrews accountable for more recent commissions and omissions that bespeak forgetfulness? Nothing explains nearly so well Deuteronomy's and Jeremiah's departures from Exodusfor many, too awkward to acceptas the concurrence of the (re)bridging with the updating thrust along time. From Exodus to Deuteronomy: Loci, Ranges, and Teleologies of Variation Unpacking the manifold of change But nor does this bipartite thrust, with its twofold generative ("genarrative") energy, come alone, or alone vanish as such under the pressure of one-track literary historical stereotypes. The factors in evolutionary play are so diverse, their interplay so multiform, their and their end-product's relation to the originary genesis so little understood, that the breakdown of the repeating-variant complexes encountered here must go further. The ever-progressive recall of Egyptian bondage, for example, has already shown the diachronic value encodable and gradable on the series' tacit/overt axis. Quite a few additional axes of text-evolution, as independent and value-laden, need to be disentangled. In extrapolating the set, let us proceed by degrees, from lighter to reputedly strategic changes, from evident to equivocal ones, from the more to the less readily explicable, from single to plural accountability in the terms just theorized. Observe first the verb substitution between the if-clauses. Having already loomed large in the rhetorical context, it will now exemplify how an inheritor may vary for the sake of fresh bridging disclosure per senaturally, with the affective load recharged and rechanneled to suit. "If thy brother the Hebrew or Hebrewess is sold to thee" replaces Exodus's "If thou buyest a Hebrew slave." The replacement looks synonymousthe two verbs, "sell" and "buy," being counterparts, the shift in mood appears to guarantee their equivalencebut only if viewed out of intertextual play. Taking the details of that play as read, I would emphasize for balance its discourse of source: how diachronic and synchronic effects meet in it to generate a rebridged art of suasion or a newly suasive bridgework. In oddly collocating brotherhood with sale, Deuteronomy recalls that their earlier co-emplotment produced not just the first ''Hebrew slave" but also the first
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move toward the story of national enslavement: the "selling" of Joseph into Egypt by his "brothers" (Genesis 37:2798, 36, 45:5). The sense of kinship accordingly grows literal, and its violation downright unnatural, compounding the antithesis to Moses delivering "brothers" from outside violence with the replay of violence within the family. The furbished retrospection on the source-history adds weight to my argument against either conventional way of handling these variants. A minority would take them for substantive, against the record, where the verbs converge in action type (i.e., "expositional" start) no less than Hebrew and Israelite do in grouping. Others would neutralize them, via an imagined pre-text-to-text diachrony as well as through Rabbinic holism. By the former neutralizing I mean the source critical retrojection of the passive (or reflexive) into the active variant, as though the urtext read "sold," Exodus opted for "buy," and Deuteronomy reverted to "sold.'' This idea of the genetic prehistory (originating in Alt 1989 [1934]:93-94, by dubious appeal to case-law style) now shows itself as unalive to the larger pattern of historicized interCode genesis as to the common rhetorical ground. Indeed, that ground now underlines the growth, for example, the ascent in the redness of the legaliterary double coding. Telegraphically, Exodus reads "buy" in memory of "Potiphar bought him [Joseph]" (Genesis 39:1), thus assigning to the latter-day buyer of the latter-day Hebrew a foreign role and value. Then Deuteronomy shifts verbs, hence also parts or sides, to foreground the reappearance in the law of the all too native, and all too little brotherly, cast implicated in Joseph's sale. Another of the word-pairs that have turned out unamenable to mere duplicationand so comparable to "Hebrew/Israel" itself"is sold" interchanges with "buy" lexically, not in terms of poetic synchrony and/or diachrony. As the law and the narrative reform, or reinform, each other on the Jordan, the bicultural stigma grows uglier in proportion. Deuteronomy's rhetoric is not even satisfied to cast the addressed "thou" in a double role (unfraternal brother and alien enslaver) over against the sold "Hebrew," and so to burden him with the worst of the twinned national worlds. Having restarted on the former, "kin unkind" model, it increasingly harps on the Pharaonic theme with a view to maximizing both odium before and compliance after the factto stigmatizing even temporary bondage as an insult to Israelite solidarity and quashing any thought of its perpetuation with the memorable consequences for the enemy. By the logic of analogy, the sale into slavery comes to augur ill for all concerned: for the "sold," for the "seller," and finally for the "thou"-purchaser himself, if, like Pharaoh, he will not release his "Hebrew" victim in time. Indeed, the Deuteronomist finishes with a backward glance at the Egyptian player of this role, through the correspondence of "It shall not seem hard in thy eyes, when thou lettest him go free" to the cyclical "hard-
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ening" of Pharaoh's heart (Exodus 7:3, 13:15) against the call for freedom. What the reworded beginning of the passage implies by opposing the slaveholder in Israel to the nation's deliverer, the end completes by equating him with the archoppressor. In between lurk further tell-tale variations, among which I will now instance two that would appear progressively substantive as well as dissuasive and otherwise audience-minded. The lesser one consists in the omission from the lifelong enslavement procedure of the Exodus phrase about the bringing "to ha-elohim." Starting with Targum Yerushalmi, which literally heals the gap, a few expositors think that the ritual phase endures on and across the Jordan even in the absence of the phrase. "The Deuteronomic Code being only a resumé of former legislation, this is no reason why every detail of a law should be repeated: Only the chief features are given, while details are left to be inferred. Thus the public declaration of the slave [before elohim] is omitted, while the more important act of piercing his ear is stated" (Reider 1937:154-55n. 17; cf. Thompson 1974:191, Chirichigno 1993:300-301). The majority instead deduce ceremonial from verbal ellipsis, and justifiably so, it appears, even by sheer communicative norms: or else the shortcut would save too little in wording for the Deuteronomist to risk misunderstanding. If considered as meaningful as the foregoing substitution, then, why the omission? Affectively, it carries the lifelong bondage scandal to the verge of sacrilege by keeping God an official party to the departure only, thereby aligning him with his role in Egypt. As I also argued, however, this deterrent cum disclosive effect still leaves room for a properly modified form of the standard, reformatory explanation by appeal to in-between cultic change. The "bringing to elohim" edited out, without secularizing or privatizing the unholy ritual, may well imply a ban on the local shrines in which it used to take place. The postExodus so operates on the Exodus version as to reshape both our attitude toward the ceremony and the ceremony itself through a single, if minor, nonconformity. In brief, the locus of change stretches or even gravitates from the communicative to the actional arena, and its rationale from disclosure to development. But this does not yet exhaust the set of phenomena usually lumped together under change, genesis, reform, and kindred catch-alls. It would be surprising if it did in face of the complexity of literary history, and even more so given one that is itself the object of literary representation from within, an artefact in short. Scripture's image of its own evolution is teleological to an extent uncommon elsewhere, in what counts as the real thing, and its drives proportionally irreducible to the lowest common denominator of familiar art historynovelty per se or the anxiety of influencebut it and they are none the less rich for that. The legaliterary sphere, what with its inevitable discourse of source, best exhibits the man-
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ifold. Canonical history lives by the very arts wielded, ramified, often innovated within the literature for other (hi)storytelling (at times miscalled "synchronic") ends: the lines of text-diachrony would thus equal those crisscrossing the arsenal and system of narrative repetition viewed as a multilinear, purposeful equivalencedynamism. The poetics being one, it can always unroll, and we always have to coordinate, many differences along the sequence. The formal change-type can itself change in midtext, as between the extremes of deleting and augmenting. For example, before and more intricately than the erasure of elohim, Deuteronomy adds a string in the name of elohim: Exodus's command to let the Hebrew slave "go out free for nothing" grows a three-verse injunction against sending him off with nothing. The Exodus minimum provision is itself high by the sociolegal criteria of antiquity. Clean opposed to the Hamites' recent dealings with the "Hebrews," obligatory release gratis does not find real-life parallels in the north either, or not outside the Hammurabi Code. (The Nuzi contract, when envisaging the bondman's discharge at all, stipulates that the Hab/piru shall pay for it with money or a replacement: economic on top of sexual limitation on top of arbitrary applicability even to those who qualify.) It is presumably to underline the break with alien norms that the Exodus passage describes a chiastic circle, opening with the Hebrew slave's manumission "for nothing" and concluding with the bondmaid's "for nothing, without payment of money": extra surprise, extra stress. Yet Deuteronomy will not rest content even with this novelty (or, cross-culturally, with anything less than a transposition of the Nuzi giver and recipient). For the score to be settled in departure is twofold, national as well as interpersonal, and the master therefore answerable to the highest ideal of justice, punitive if not altogether deterrent. As he worked his brother like a foreignerindeed like the most notorious foreigner of all so must they part, with goods changing hands the other, "Hebrew" way. To anchor and motivate the demand for parting gifts, the text actually says, "Thou shalt not send him out empty-handed [reikam]," in covert yet verbatim allusion to God's "when you go, you shall not go empty-handed [reikam] but . . . you shall despoil the Egyptians" (Exodus 3:21-22, also 11:2, 12:35-36). The novelty gains further significance in juxtaposition with its remoter verbatim echoes, external and interlegal or canonical and intergeneric. Thus Hammurabi Code §191 predicates "shall not go off empty-handed" of an adopted son turned off by his foster father to the advantage of the biological heirs (text in Pritchard 1969:175; cf. Genesis 21:9ff., 25:6). Whether or not an allusion is intended, across the Codes and the cultures, the cross-rhyming highlights the difference. Where Exodus parallels, Deuteronomy outreaches the one extraIsraelite ordinance restricting the
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co-national's term of bondageand outreaches it by paralleling another Hammurabi ordinance to the letter, so as to match the bondman's treatment in departure with the foster son's. As well as reinforcing the likelihood of the outbound bridge, ancestral history certainly inaugurates the key phrase, within the prefigurative Laban/Pharaoh analogy. Were it not for God's intervention, Jacob accuses his father-in-law, "thou wouldst have sent me out reikam" (Genesis 31:42). And in the Philistine/Hebrew conflict, the Hamite master plot follows suit, down to the rhyme-word's timing. "If you send out the ark of the God of Israel," the wise men counsel, "do not send it out reikam" (I Samuel 6:3): echoing back to the Plague narrative and unwittingly to Deuteronomy law, they finish off God's self-identification with the Hebrew's ordeal. History repeats itself over and over again, in either generic key. A chain stretching from patriarchal to monarchic times, it exerts cumulative pressure on the Israelite enslaver without ever really letting him buy ("furnish") his way out. He need not break the pattern of reparation to find himself in the worst company. As the novel perspective on the Exodus drama lengthens, so it tightens the correspondencesand hence the anchoragein the gift-laden departure from bondage. Over against the iterated reikam, for example, the common denominator between "Thou shalt furnish him out of thy flock and out of thy threshing floor and out of thy wine press" (Deuteronomy 15:14) and "Every man [shall ask] of his neighbor, and every woman of her neighbor, jewellery of silver and of gold" (Exodus 11:2) may appear relatively low, the continuity weaker than usual, the discourse items "furnished" without a source. Which is apparently also why the exact negative replay ("not . . . reikam") leads the way, compensating by artnature has no minus valuesfor the thinness of the positive similitude on the ground. But the attenuated equivalence can look for its explanation to the intermediate and prospective developments in the grand event-sequence, of the kind that justify the elided ritual before elohim, namely: the advance toward settlement on the land (complete with "flock . . . threshing floor . . . wine press'') and a lifestyle different from Egypt, both thematic to the Hebrewgram. At the same time, a more attentive comparison will disclose a stronger underground bridge between precedent and precept. After the ninth plague, and just before the divine relisting of the spoils of Egypt, Pharaoh would let the people go, only without "your flocks and your herds," to which Moses responds: "Thou wilt also give into our hand sacrifices and burnt offerings. . . . Our cattle, too, must go with us, not a hoof shall be left behind" (Exodus 10:24-26). The prophet reverses the oppressor's proviso as Hebrew law in effect does the Nuzi Hab/piru contractand the negotiations thereupon break down. One plague later, however, Pharaoh withdraws this last veto and the storyteller underlines the issue in his own account
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of the happy outcome (12:32, 38). So the gift named first by the law, and the one at the heart of the intercultural (dietary, vocational, cultic) polarity, is actually re-named. "Flock" echoes back to the "flocks" led out with interest. In addition, all three items get Egyptianized through the verb that commands their "furnishing." Where you might expect the straightforward "give," the emphatic and figurative ha'aneq ta'aniq ("thou shalt make a necklace,'' from anaq, "necklace") assimilates "thy flock . . . threshing floor . . . wine press" to the gold and silver jewellery carried away in the Exodus. 27 Here, then, disclosure and development join genetic rationales within the intertext, the first genarrator moderating while the second explains the variance in the detail of the happy ends. Updating thus goes with a deeper sense of the past, as well as with a larger past to sense, legal reforming with change of narrative form in rebridging, revision with re-vision. For that matter, the farewell touch winks back at the opening "Hebrew or Hebrewess" and so links up with our next crux. The "him" laden with gifts embraces the two sexes, even apart from its bisexual anaphoric reference, due to another minute intergeneric retrospect sunk below the generic language: the despoilers of Egypt literally figure once as women (Exodus 3:21-22), once as men (12:35-36), once as both (11:2). So we have nothing less than (egalitarian) revision within (compensatory) revision, one bracketing types of native victims, the other the native with the alien victimizer. And the former change, I will soon argue, likewise coordinates the opposed origins or motivators of change: a rereading of the Exodus past with a registration of developments since. Glossing over the heroism of women vs. men at the timerepaid by the original Code but no longer discerniblethe updater picks out the all-Israelite move against the enemy's wealth. Without fear or favor, his allusive art works for parity between the sexes from entrance to well-appointed exit, though never between the parties to the sale. It is as if, having (re)played the slaveowner, one must pay the historic compensation with every new act of release. Caveat emptor, with an in-group vengeance. As linearized parts of the overall discourse of source, then, what marks off the postExodus discourse of evolution from the Exodus discourse of origination, and what, moreover, unifies the later genetic narrative? In interCode comparison, the examples just given range widely over all the axes of change involved: the formal type of variance (substitution, omission, addition), its functional point (rebridging and/or updating), its effective outcome (harder or softer, or more, less, other directives, or evolutionary step as against the revolutionary jump, nowhere in evidence here), its explanatory, "genarrative" mechanism (between disclosure and development), its communicative transparence (between the explicit and the implicit, the foolproof and the esoteric, surface and subtext) as well as its suasive impact. The "change" catch-all has broken down on analysis into no fewer than
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six universal inconstancies or, if you have no use for paradox, six variable factors of variance. Each marks a track of discoursive dynamism operating and coordinable in literary historiography as story, as a truth-claiming mishneh plot. The manifold of change attached to all storied repetition is then just historicized in the telling about how a literature or its sundry writers retold, even (when also theorized, as here) about how literature retells. Except for the esoteric ring, "diachronizing" a variant or variance amounts to nothing more, nothing less, than producing such a tale about it under the appropriate rules. And conversely with repetition's other, persistent face: the (hi)storied unity of or amid the changes in the literary retelling is as tellable, ever-inferrable from the manifold, with an eye to plot balance and followability. What remains constant among the axes of variance here is the newly bidirectional traffic implied on the Jordan. In revisiting the pastthe ancestral, the Exodus, the interim taleseach variant draws upon elements untapped by the Exodus Code, and so left uncoded altogether thus far, because unwanted, unappreciated, unperceived or yet unborn at the time. All such neglected antecedents are now orchestrated by the Deuteronomist for his own ends, as mishneh-comer, whether to fortify the sense of "Hebrew" tradition across history or to ground innovation in lessons and patterns of history down to his own time, even extendible beyond the Jordan. Legislating anew for the future is reading anew the national past: the two meanings and the two movements of recoding (the jurist's vs. the semiotician's) interpenetrate in evolutionary dynamics, converge on the actor imageof poetic revision. Poetic genesis as poetic justice Now for the trickiest variant data to be explained, indeed upheld in face of the emendators-rewriters outside and against the traditionstarting with the bisexual exordium. Far from simply mnemonic, this change in lexis has definite consequences, elucidatory and to some extent operational, for the equality between the sexes, now perfected under the law. With "Hebrew or Hebrewess," gone is all indeterminacy between the inclusive and the exclusive readings of "Hebrew slave" in Exodus's first section (21:2-6): Deuteronomy eliminates the ambiguity in principlefor good (equal seventh-year release with a bountiful handshake) or for ill (equal liability to irreversible bondage with earpiercing)Jeremiah in reality as well. And nothing is left (unless you take the added "Hebrewess" and "maidservant'' for a remnant) of the original second paragraph (21:7-12), anomalously governing the daughter sold by her father. This even-handedness radicalizes the contrast to Nuzi's sexual discrimination among Hab/piru. It has also bred misgivings among tender-hearted commentators old and new. To save the Hebrewess from lifelong bondage,
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for example, the Rabbis misarrange the Deuteronomist's sequence as well as gloss over his inclusive exordium. They connect the extra admonition, "and to thy maidservant, too, shalt thou do so," not with the immediately foregoing scenario of ear-piercing but with the anterior one of leave-taking with gifts. 28 Modern counterreaders, instead of torturing the plain sense, often censor the words to even more drastic effect. Not only "the maidservant" threatened with nailing to the doorpost but also ''the Hebrewess" entering into bondage for a set period count, by genetic fiat, as late interpolations into an affair between males. (So does next "the Hebrew and Hebrewess" paired in Jeremiah's own voice, as opposed to the law-quotation regarding one's "Hebrew brother": the two-sex frame (34:9) is considered young and unoriginal, the womanless inset (34:14) older and genuinely Deuteronomistic.)29 In either guise, this instinct for overprotectiveness is misplaced. It pulls against the Bible's dynamic reference of law to history, with adjustments ("innovations") where necessary, no less than against latter-day ideals of equality by natural law, sub specie aeternitatis. How would such dynamic reference make sense of the actual givens in their actual wording, placement, variations along the canon? The answer involves a fairly close analysis ranging over a number of phases and issues (even if oriented for a start to how the discourse of source plots the shift toward intersexual equality). The gist of the argument that will unroll in the ensuing section on Exodus and resume apropos of either later book may provide an Ariadne's thread. As already indicated, the precepts here build on precedents, slave types in Israel on slave tales under Egyptian victimage, from a motive deeper than attachment to the past for its own sake. That attachment does exert an influence all over, but in a meaningful form supercharged with ideo-national values: nothing like the chaotic furniture of memory, the bygones codified signify returns to, of, and for Hebrew antecedents, backplots in short. History, as always an object of legal(iterary) repetition and reflectionwhat minimally defines judgment by precedentthen grows into a source of retribution. The tale of poetic genesis concealed (i.e., disclosed and/or developed, yet always decodable in retrospect) between the narrative and the law is a tale of poetic justice. The legal enactment recodes and repays narrated action, good or ill. Cases in point have already dotted our analysis, beginning with the legaliterary rhetoric. The absent exposition thus keeps the range of pre-tales open yet operational, significant, and affective by matching the few givens to the limit of countermatching: the "buying/selling" of Egypt by Joseph for the "buying/selling" of Joseph in Egypt, and so on, with only tactical differences between the Codes. As our viewpoint shifts to the image of genesis, and to further retributive issues and instances, the same is true. (Predictably so, because the logic of retribution distinctively fuses ideology with narrativity
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and equivalence with sequence: its workings therefore co-serve, even inter-relate the two master axes, the synchronic and the diachronic.) Generally speaking, where the Hebrew bondage laws vary is not in the measure-for-measure principle, nor even in its chief practical consequences for the agentse.g., women vs. men, adults vs. children, leavers vs. "lovers"but in the range, the angle, the target, the details, hence also the legal form of its application, to suit with the respective antecedent narratives. The Exodus Mishpat, barely removed from the Exodus event, can and need only launch a play of disclosure over the group's nonuniform Egyptian history to administer two-edged retributive justice. (Thus, the children of the exogamously mated Hebrew suffer the fate of Joseph's, while his licitly married congener benefits from the prophet's insistence on a wholesale departure, with nobody left behind as sop or hostage to Pharaoh.) By the time of the Deuteronomy Code, however, the wilderness trials have all intervened, not merely lengthening the source-history but compounding (re)disclosure of Hebrewness in Egypt with deterioration since Egypt and the in-group enactment originally modeled on it. The joint changes in the balance of antecedents (e.g., female vs. male conduct) foretell, demand, govern, indeed justify the appropriate legal updating. The originary genesis exacts and enacts, the evolutionary adjusts, retribution on the old-new dramatis personae. As the law arises after the narrative, in both meanings of afterness, so it evolvesto an extent and effect that we will now puzzle out. In Exodus, take first the two sexes at their most polarized. The outrageous scenario of "a Hebrew slave" loving his master codedly codifies a bitter and maybe widespread precedent. A "Hebrew" enslaved in Egypt, speaking both for his mates (''us") and in effect for Pharaoh, did challenge the deliverer ("judge"): unlovely but not unlikely, the legal enactment summons up a reality of Hebrewness still within living memory, and not the lawgiver's alone in his capacity as living bridge. Nor is this shameful psychocultural reality a thing of the past. In the wilderness, the exHebrews have since betrayed their ongoing fear of Pharaoh's might. The few developments that have intervened on the way to Sinai parallel, in effect reinforce, the disclosure; plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. As the army despatched to repossess them came into view, they again turned on Moses: "What is this that thou hast done to us in bringing us out of Egypt? Is not this the thing we spoke to thee in Egypt, saying, Leave us alone and let us serve [na'abdah, cognate with ebed, 'slave'] Egypt? Better for us to serve [abod] Egypt than to die in the wilderness" (14:10-12; cf. 5:20-21). Then, once food or water ran short, they deemed the Exodus a plot to kill them and longed for their creature comforts in the good bad old days (16-17:7). Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor could quote Scripture at Jesus, like Pharaoh
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at Moses, only in the wrong voice and cause. The newly called Israelites having failed to outgrow their "Hebrew" slave mentality, they are now officially (re)judged liable to exchange the hardships and vicissitudes of freedom for the security of permanent bondage. By the same ideo-historical rationale, however, Exodus keeps the contingency for malesat least on the genderic surfacewhere the Nuzi documents expressly attach the harshest penalties (mutilation and all in lifelong service) to Hab/piru females. The difference reflects no compassion for the weaker vessels but a tribute on the lawmaker's part to their attested strength. All the nation's pre-exodus heroines in Egyptof whom one, Miriam, is certainly still in the flesh at Sinaidid their utmost to thwart the oppressor. The midwives risked their lives for the newborn sons of the "Hebrewesses"; Miriam and Jochebed, playing the servile "Hebrewesses," saved Moses, himself the only exception to male apathy or worse. For the lawgiving God and his mediator to proclaim at Sinai, against their knowledge, or for the book of Exodus to write, against its own record, that the culture heroines or their daughters may not live up to their example in liberty would therefore be a gratuitous insult. (One added to ingratitude, personal on top of collective, seeing that the mediator who enunciates the law owes to those women his very survival, thrice over, and his lifelong exemption from bondage: a debt shared to some degree by many of his auditors, then bequeathed to their offspring within the implicit readership.) And to expose the heroines among their own people to a fate uglier than Egypt, whether resale or sexual abuse, would be a crying shame. They rather deserve preferential treatment in word and deed, by the same logic that suits the ruling (mishpat) on the "Hebrew" to the other sex's rule of ill conduct, enactment for enactment. In light of the traffic between the genres, ideal poetic justice again operates, and either way, as a real force on earth, with juristic effects proper. Instead of burying or belying the anterior narrative, Exodus law maneuvers to codify it discriminately in its own scenarios: to recast the Hamite plot into a complex of all-native subplots, always observing ("retelling," repaying) the original value-laden difference between the sexes under victimage. Indeed, the very sexual bearing of the narrative's opposition of the activist and the apathetic gains its imprimatur from the law's re-enactment. At the time, we might still wonder if the all-female counteragency to infanticide, though recurrent, were not a matter of chance or circumstance. (The tale's apparent double package deal of femaleness with heroism, maleness with inertia at best, will most trouble the reader versed in the Bible's ideo-poetics of character, which deeply objects to typecasting God-created humans, along biological or any other lines. The inverse package would be as odd.) Now all lingering doubt about the point's generality ostensibly vanishes with the subgrouping, announced and hidden, according to sex:
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the value-laden focus on "Hebrew slave," the separate and more solicitous ruling on the "daughter," the more equal yet less forthright provisions for her sisters. Yes, the ethnic male does go with a minus value, the female with a plus, or so it would appear from the double enactment of the duality, tit-for-tat concord and all. The law effects in typeoriented playback a disclosure (here, also a closure) of the narrative: the intergeneric traffic of meaning flows both ways, to the limit of intergenarration. On the other hand, for all their resistance, "the Hebrewesses" did not escape bondage, and cannot now. Instead, as they were enslaved, with a difference, so may they be at a pinch, with a commensurate tactful or operational difference: relative to the men and to their own subtypology in female unity. Accordingly, we gain fresh insight into the nomopoetic coding, among other arts of discourse, below the Covenant Code. Its measure-for-measure guideline affects less the matter than the manner of differential re-enactment in the drafter's shorthand. Inversely proportioning focus to favor, visibility to sympathy, the Exodus two-level enactment also reillustrates their mutual independence: androcentric ("Hebrew slave . . . he . . . his . . . him") presentation, gyrocentrist privilege. In turn, the maneuvers between codings and between standards alike follow the narrative's master principle: the interplay between the truth given and the whole truth left for us to work out. Except by implication from the generic meaning of "Hebrew slave" and kindred clues, the first law paragraph (21:26) does not once advert to the bondwoman. But nor does it exclude her, either overtly or by association with the nonHebrew bondage ordinances that ensue in the same chapter, all of which feature the "slave or the maidservant" (Exodus 21:20-21, 26-27, 32), as Deuteronomy and Jeremiah will "the Hebrew and/or the Hebrewess." Far from excluding the Hebrew bondwoman, verses 2-6 even work her into the picture in the role of the bondman's (Israelite) "wife," equally entitled to the manumission that Pharaoh would deny her, or her sisters and ancestresses, almost to the last (10:7-11). "His wife shall go out with him'' (21:3): the very need to warn the master against Egyptian-like discrimination for the worse, as if she were the foreigness mated with the bondman in the alternative scenario (21:4), reveals her co-bondage at the time. Unless she does or may serve along with her husband, it would go without saying that she leaves with him. Who, except a Pharaonic tyrant, would detain the free agent, let alone one never "buyable" at all? Thus predicated and precedented, the co-eligibility for service in Israel readily stretches to the unattached womannot freer at the time, nor less vulnerable to the pressures of existence now, than the man or the wifeas it soon will to the last remaining category of females: the daughter under parental authority (21:7-11). Rather than being alone liable to enslavement within the sex, 30 her type is alone articulated in a full-formed if-plot.
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Bondwife, bondwoman (widowed, divorced, or yet unmarried but likewise sui juris), bondmaid. The three categories even answer to the known familial status of the narrative's culture heroines: Jochebed wedded to Amram, the midwives blessed with "houses" sometime after their ordeal, 31 and the young Miriam, respectively. As with other hidden bridges, the typology underlying the servitude-to-release law has its antecedent and key in the servitude-torelease tale that it discloses, or (dis)closes, from a new part/whole, means/end viewpoint.32 How much weight will this fine network of clues bear? More than enough, I think, to overturn the prevalent certitude that "Exod. 21:2 legislates only for a Hebrew man" (Mayes 1991:251; for other exponents of this majority, view, see below).33 Given the special case of the bondmaid ("daughter") and the overwhelming probability of the bondwife, the argument from silence does not by itself rule out the bondwoman (e.g., the widow) even by purely juridical logic: subsequent jurists within the canon have indeed drawn and articulated the conclusion ("or Hebrewess"). So has the Septuagint in Exodus itself. Where the Masoretic Text provides that the daughter "shall not go out as the slaves [abadim] go out," the Greek reads "not . . . as the maidservants go out'':34 her special case, bound for marriage, is the exception to the rule of female co-discharge after six years. All three ancient statements tally with the play of inference encoded by the original mishpat, or in other words, shift codes (from nomopoetic to nomistic) and levels (from tacit to overt) of signification regarding this message. Nevertheless, the oblique coding is itself part of the Covenant Code's message, and a discriminative no less than an inclusive tool. As the law unrolls in Exodus, its focus on the male slave grows sharper with each new mention of the "wife?' whether accompanying the Hebrew into service (21:3) or given to him in service by Josephic replay (21:4) and possibly loved by him above freedom from service (21:5-6). Which goes to suggest a pronounced, if local and always tradition-bound, ascent from manner toward sex-differentiating matter: considerate defocusing hardens into walls of defense, statutory or hopefully preventive. Unlike the bondman and again like the bondwife and the bondmaid, that is, the unattached native bondwoman enjoys immunity from foreign mating, as she did in Egypt hence virtually and wishfully (though, by the same historic token, not statutorily) also from the olam-bondage that may result in Israel. Where the exogamous mating does apply, in connection with the "Hebrew," it is both premised and voiced as the cause of self-made lifelong Hebrewness: the woman shielded as ever against the one, now to frustrate the Pharaoh within, will therefore in all likelihood (or so the text, backed by the tales of resistance, implies) escape the other, complete with the indelible branding, normative and physical, that visits it. Having entered into service by force of circumstanceeconomic, presumably, rather than marital or par-
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ental distress, like her sisters in lawshe cannot depart too soon to resume her free life, "house"-making and all. The limits as well as the claims to intersexual parity are in the spirit of the narrative: they mark a cumulative favorable balance in inverse ratio to the escalating unfavorableness of the scenarios. If such arts of signifying appear troublesome and out of place by common legistic yardsticks, they not only produce great literature, everywhere blazing fresh trails, storytelling, legaliterary, allusive, affective, genetic, ideological, with revolutionary nation- and canon-formative value added. Those arts also make excellent historical sense. Doubly so, in that they play between the evoked past drama and the dramatic present (time, backdrop, speaker, auditors) of the utterance codifying the evocation. Against the ideal of uniform explicitness, if only in-house, to which pure law may aspire, sui generis, double-coded law works by indirections (e.g., gap, opacity, disproportion, viewpoint, ordering, analogy, orchestrated echo, two-way shuttlework) not just comparable and assimilable to the narrative poetics but answering, allusively, to the narrative specifics on record. Apropos of the multigroup bondpeople under legislation, it is more appropriate than ever that the poetics should generate (or again better, genarrate) a multi-level communication to accommodate a multilayered audience; and the specifics it invokes for the purpose accordingly center in the latest Hebrew antecedents, retrievable by the largest number. Open invitation to the subtext alongside opening jolt; dynamism of envisaged uptake within overall protean dynamism. As with all materials that go into the Bible, the simple one-genre-one-teleology formula cannot hope to regulate the new synthesis, the incessant traffic between multiple form and multiple function; nor will the typology (re)disclose, let alone justify itself without the composite teleology. In the light of such interworking, the very shape of the mishpat takes on expressiveness here, with distinctive implications for the group of law-agents in the possible communicated world as well as the law-auditors. Legislative focus is inversely proportioned to evaluative force: the more spotlighted the role-player, the more stigmatized, and vice versa. Kept for one sex, from the opening ethnicon onward, the reticences and obliquities of Exodus show the tact (on intermarriage, even the statutory treatment) due to the heroines of the Exodus as against their "Hebrew" menfolk. The reading and writing that follow upon the lawspeaking (24:3-8) would enable even the inset audience to improve on their original decoding, performed under the shock of the first hearing. And Moses himself is always there to expound, if necessary, the finer points and practicalities below the tactful surface, along with every other "hard thing" (18:26). The second Exodus law (21:7-11) does focus the bondmaid, of course, but never as anything like "Hebrewess." Ostensibly uneven-handed, its avoid-
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ance of the translational hateword coheres with both the Egyptian precedent and the Israelite prospect. These avoidances concur to remind us that sex, overweighted in modern sociopolitics and world-imaging, draws only one taxonomic line among many, even within a single group. Ethnos apart, age or status may always carry equal if not heavier differential weight: without them the disparity twice marked by the intertext here is open to misvaluation, at worst (as shown in note 33 above) to misgeneralization, since it bisects the category of women. Under Pharaoh himself, "Hebrewess" was reserved for the adult, presumably wedded bondwoman in her maternal capacityfor the birth-givers, if not the birth-makers, in the midwives' tale and the nurses in Moses'as the immediate source of danger in the host country's hostile eyes. Nor was there any feminine equivalent to the "Hebrew boy"-ing of Joseph, either apropos of the newborn "girls'' (bat, 1:16-22 passim) or of the nubile "girl" (alma, 2:8), Miriam. We have here yet another interplay of presence and absence, another nice socio- or psycho-linguistic discrimination on the Exodus teller's part, acutely observed ("disclosed") by the Exodus legislator in his reading backward and carried over to the future via his retelling. Its nicety makes it vulnerable to threats other than crude sexual groupment. We also find this distinction literally erased in the automatic references to the daughter as "female Hebrew slave," 35 analogous to the indiscriminate Hebrewing of Leviticus's Israelite. In crosscultural perspective, either tampering with the language grows all the more unfortunate: where even an umbrella term like "Hab/piru slave" is absent from the exterior record, the Bible meaningfully subdivides texts and types of bondage by the allusive Hebrew phraseology flaunted, extended, omitted, adapted. It makes all the less sense, therefore, to correlate the omission en route from "Hebrew slave" to plain "daughter" with a shift in midlaw from class to ethnos or to one female subset thereof (Noth 1966:177-79, Cassuto 1967:967-68). Instead, just as this of all subsets of ethnonational victims was spared the victimage from without the people, so it remains unbranded from within along the corresponding subplot. With a glance at Miriam, that female type is also spared the "buy" that governs the Hebrew male (and implicitly her own adult sisters) in the corresponding protasis. A helpless object of "sell," rather, she would never feature, except as a casualty or victim by kinship possibly, in any of the ordinary, much less the odious (theft, self-enslavement) expositions applicable to those "bought." And to leave no doubt about her peculiar circumstances, the text for the first time brings on the seller, in the role of subject cum agent"a man" controlling "his daughter" in both life and the language. Quite a number of changes from the initial paragraph (21:2-6) accordingly correlate with the delimitation of membership by age and footing. "Hebrew" vanishes; "sell" replaces "buy"; the seller overshadows the buyer,
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overpowers the sold; "thou" gives way to "he." Another assortment of formal properties (midlaw shifts at that, in wording, grammar, semantic latitude, action logic, deixis) compose as a rhetorical subwhole geared to a subgroup, most integratively under the double Code. Not being sui juris, the "daughter" sold by her parent is not a free agent at the time; and thereafter she must either be treated as freeborn, per contract, or allowed to go free. Nowhere would she (or, if law-abiding, her master) incur the stigma of Hebrewness in Israel. Bicultural (and bilateral) destigmatizing, as it were, in intergeneric traffic. From tact to bluntness: Inherited scenarios newly focused without favor Forty years later, Deuteronomy restages the outrageous lifelong scenario and with it the reversibility of the bicultural stigma between the parties to the enslavementminus the sexual favoritism, now withdrawn even from the bondmaid. The closer the comparison of the later with the earlier, foundational text, the more systematic do the variations proveand the less amenable to ironing out, either the Rabbinic or the source-critical way. Having opened with "the Hebrew or the Hebrewess," thus imposing a generic, egalitarian reference on all the masculine pronouns that ensue, the Deuteronomist yet makes doubly sure of female inclusion when it comes to opting for lifelong bondage and its branding on the flesh. "To thy maidservant, too, shalt thou do so." Moreover, this added emphasis on inclusiveness and co-liability, whether stretching or glossing the Exodus ordinance, has its complement in the omissions from Exodus. Actually, those attested omissions militate against the conjectural ones to which analysts bent on either facile interCode harmony or sheer unharmony would subject the Deuteronomist's additions (regarding the share of "Hebrewess" in the name, the role, the choice, the penalty). Consider what befalls here the four enactments turning on marital status, all of which Exodus so oriented toward the male Hebrew as to deemphasize (if not, with the scholars, to disallow) the law's very applicability to the bondwoman. Three of those clausesgoverning the unwedded bondman, the one wedded to an Israelite, and the one lent an exogamous matenow vanish without trace; while the fourth, involving lifelong servitude, drops the mate in transmission. "I love my master, my wife, and my children" (Exodus 21:5) shrinks into "he loves thee and thy house" (Deuteronomy 15:16), a variant co-applicable to the bondwoman and soon indeed extended to her aloud for insurance. The Deuteronomic antecedent having already premised inclusivenessthrough the sexless reference of "he" (looking back to ''Hebrew or Hebrewess") and then, more energetically, through "his" wifeless motivationthe consequent signs off by generalizing the even-handedness in retrospect: "To thy maidservant, too, shalt thou do so." Given
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that the awl has just been Melded, the "so" will not even let her off with an intact ear through the benefit of doubt: equality, like electness itself, is no bed of roses. The chain leading from enslaved to enslaver, from the one party's action to the other's reaction, steadily rises in bluntness, as though the darkest scenario would least imitate Exodus's tact. Bluntness in place of tact, no more, no less. Clean against the glib talk about a brave new law-culture at work on fundamentals, the revisions just described are all a matter of presentational refocusing between "the Hebrew" and "the Hebrewess," not of substantive relegislating. For the Deuteronomist abrogates none of the wife-centered scenarios he inherited, or God/Moses originated, not even those he elides altogether. It now goes without saying, or resaying, that if you enter into bondage single, then you depart single, and if married, married. The initial addition of "or the Hebrewess" even underlines both points by articulating the all-Hebrew coverage. Enslaved, apart or together, the name-bearers run parallel to each other down to the seventh-year finish, when they may independently leave, apart or together, by virtue of their equal Hebrewness. As for the third Exodus case, the mating with a nonHebrew in bondage, the silence on it bespeaks not a divergence but a twofold carry-over from Exodus: a more profound objection to foreign union, typical of the Deuteronomist, and a more pointed exemption of "the Hebrewess" from the interbreeder's lot imposed on "the Hebrew" (as on his prototype Joseph) of old. The postExodus scandal of the Blasphemy would only harden the Deuteronomist's attitude. An offspring of cohabitation in servitude, not even excused as forcible, the Blasphemer was "the son of an Israelite woman and the son of an Egyptian man." And for extra deterrence, the native parent and clan will never outlive their shame: ''the name of his mother was Shlomit, the daughter of Dibri, of the Dan tribe" (Leviticus 24:10-11). The threat of apostasy latent in Judah's encounter with the "cult prostitute," then in Joseph's alliance with the family of the Priest of On materializes, as it will on a far larger scale in the Ba'al Pe'or episode of Numbers 25: all prefigure in action Deuteronomy's warning that carnal and ideological otherness go together. 36 Now, therefore, its leading addition "or the Hebrewess" again explains the ensuing omission of the case even in regard to "the Hebrew." For, once the female joins the male on stage, the undesirable and (albeit envisioned by Pharaoh) unprecedented subjectness to exogamous coupling turns unspeakable. What Exodus has spoken aboutand Nuzi legalized even regarding freeborn daughters soldthe male breeder will now continue to do, always a case apart, yet under wordless protest even so. Refocused to the same end is the last case, where "the maidservant's" overt inclusion (as native co-principal) accounts for "the wife's" exclusion (as alien mate cum mother) from any role in the otherwise familiar scenario
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of lifelong bondage. In playback, it is the Israelite "master" alone whom the Hebrew "loves": a fortiori the Hebrewess, ineligible for breeding on all accounts, and now grown overtly eligible for the voluntary renunciation of liberty for slavish, if licit, because platonic, love. Throughout, in the best tradition of the narrative repetition structure, the Deuteronomist maneuvers between the old lopsided enactments and his own new value-laden drive toward sexual balance. Updating or outdating? The program of successive co-eternities Deuteronomy's "Hebrew or Hebrewess" law refers back to the corresponding Exodus "Hebrew" narrative as well as law; therefore, the evolutionary process and with it the image of grand literary history still need filling out. But even left at that, as it usually is, the relation we inferred between the Codesthat is, between the twin forces of endurance and adjustment over timedeparts from every existing model in Biblical study. (Nor has it any duplicate in the Ancient Orient or, to my knowledge, in the law, literature, or legaliterature since, though comparisons are always worth drawing for the partial likenesses and unlikenesses they sharpen.) The interCode maneuvering we have just begun to chart already suggests an equilibrium in literary evolution that is utterly foreign to both of the diametric customary approaches, the synchronistic and the metamorphic, whether applied wholesale or piecemeal. The former has been carried to the utmost lengths, out of time altogether, in the Rabbis' vision of a megatext, as an ideal, changeless, heavenly law-set, whose items call for appropriate dovetailing by us human expositors. We have found, and will find, this passion for harmony in simultaneity very much alive to this daye.g., among crosscultural parallel-hunters, some operating on more recent corporawith or without the supernaturalism, the interpretive methodology, the categorical timelessness, the all-out holism religiously attached to it. Its inadequacies regarding our paradigm case (which start with the annexation of the Hebrewless Leviticus and carry over to the Hebrew trio) have likewise been found prohibitive. On the very issue of equality, typically, the Rabbis would square the circle by drawing the all-Pentateuchal line at the Hebrewess's olamic bondage: a scenario that Exodus never voices in regard to herindeed never leads up to via the temporary antecedentand Deuteronomy spares no effort to brand with earpiercing. The half-equality contrived for both versions in the name of samesaying agrees with neither. But synchronists need not double as harmonists; and those who don't (e.g., Kaufmann 1960) actually gravitate from the Rabbinic to the analytic or revisionist extreme of concurrence. They attribute the law-codes to parallel sources that the editor cited more or less intact: their synchronism
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breaks with the orthodox (and the crossculturalist) kind in postulating a motley rather than a network of simultaneities. Their numerous diachronic fellows in revisionism serialize the corpora on one line or another, but they generally interpose some metamorphosis, whereby the original (e.g., Hebrew) law has been outdated and displaced, with a view to a fresh start in a new culture. Sometimes, that law-text is as good as erased in the outdating, all backward reference to its echoes or disparities illegitimated wholesale as a confusion of an epochal break with a jigsaw puzzle. This is an astonishing thing to posit in face of the Bible's ubiquitous repetition structure, which demands exactly such piecing out, sometimes across books, or else narrative after narrative will come out overblown, discordant, flat, even unintelligible from the plot level upward; and the implications for the narrativized law-series follow. Granting the postulate, however, one wonders why the updater turned outdater, or why the putative editor, has kept the fossil on canonical record instead of burying it out of sight as a worse than useless memento. On a superficial view, his preserving it under erasure would yet bespeak the antiquarian interest, archival instinct, reverence for the bygone, etc., manifest in the Hittite Code's juxtaposition of earlier with later variants or in the record-keeping of legislatures today. Only, Exodus law has never been pronounced a variant, far less obsolete, by its successor, any more than by the synchronist's imaginary gatherer of autonomous corpora: for all we or the Israelites themselves know, it may (and, I will show, officially does) continue operative after the new arrival. To say the least, therefore, the Pentateuch's record would jar with all ostensible extraBiblical analogues in leaving a troublesome ambiguity between the preservation of the old as keepsake and its perpetuation in its old nomistic capacity. For example, how do you take the Hebrew scenarios unrepeated by the Deuteronomist but (on my reading, because) certainly assumable by his time? How can you outdate them, if at all, except through a circular argument? Much the same trouble overtakes the moderate-looking versions of the theory that prevail in source criticism. Usually, and foreseeably enough in the state of the art, their premises are unargued, undeveloped, unthought-through, often barely articulatedas if self-evident, even with respect to a notorious crux like oursyet discernibly underlie most practices and products of interCode analysis. For example, Driver's much-cited synopsis of interCode parallels allegedly goes to show that Deuteronomy is "a revised and enlarged edition of the 'Boob of the Covenant'," or "the prophetic reformulation, and adaptation to new needs, of an older legislation," written shortly before King Josiah's reform (621 B.C.), when the community's sociopolitical organization had so ''developed" that existing law "ceased to be adequate" (1965:iv-vii, xix, lxi, xliv-xlvi). Such reconstructors only half write off the Exodus mishpat by somehow affirming its heuristic and historical value,
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while annulling its nomistic force within Deuteronomy's metamorphosed world. Still deemed toothless in old age, the ordinance would then remain an indispensable tool of exegesis, of comparison, of genetic study low and high, of conjecture about the very turn in the diachrony that abrogated it. The likeness to the Hittite variants, to parliamentary archives, or to our familiar engagement with a writer's manuscripts accordingly grows stronger. But the difficulties, logical, analogical, methodological, empirical, also rise in strength. If the law corpora, regarding bondage and other topics, "present inconsistencies incompatible with the supposition of both being the work of the same author" (Driver 1965:xli and viii, 181-85), and if the older one "had ceased to be adequate," would not the twofold deficiency preclude its appearance alongside the "revised and enlarged edition" in the same canon? The joint canonizing as law-Scripture, on which this analyst's very synoptic table of parallels depends, rather militates against unbridgeable inconsistency and total inadequacy. (Even the gulf separating "Israel" from the prenational foreignism ''Hebrew"long outdated as well as debasedhas been found bridgeable for a purpose, more than enough to justify the gentilics' tense co-occurrence in terms of both network and narrative.) Again, if "the Deuteronomic legislators are clearly working with the provision of Exodus 21:2-11 before them" (Phillips 1984:59), then so are we canon-readers, as doubtless were their own (informed) addresseesalways without any Hittite-like notice or surface of repeal. Obviously, therefore, that they, the culture or the scribes or the analysts, might put the inherited text to work in juxtaposition would never by itself demonstrate such repeal. Or only circularly and, worse, both against the probabilities attaching to the texts' inscribed co-presence, now as then, from the Wilderness onward, and against the pattern of accord in succession for which I have been arguing. Nor will the circle break and the scales tip on the side of interCode discord through any further general hypothesizing: about the culture's intermediate progress (to be examined in its odd second-order circularity), about the author's pseudepigraphy (already found unproductive and, if anything, continuous) or, maybe less evidently, about the writing's silence on its precursor. With regard to the last, it is now enough to appraise the fact that Jeremiah explicitly quotes, while Deuteronomy tacitly recodes, earlier Hebrew law. However genuine this variance, not only does it assimilate to the rationale of ever-strengthened bridging; it hardly entails the disparity between adopting and updating, let alone outdating. For the mishneh-book at times attributes a law-quotation to its source, as with the Decalogue (4:9ff., 5:2ff., from Exodus 20), at times not, not even amid plain accord, as in face of the Hamite antitype's idolatry (7:1-5, 12:1-3, cf. Exodus 34:11-17). Deuteronomy's alternating quotational practice, indeed, exceeds the narrative's at large; and Hittite literature itself keeps
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the attributed quote for what has gone out of the juristic as well as the storytelling repertoire. So even the argument from silence is at best two-edged. Hence the invalidity of reasonings such as: "if this [whatever it may be] had been the true explanation of the discrepancy," then the posterior law "would surely have contained some explicit reference to the earlier law, and the case in which it was intended to supersede it would have been distinctly stated" (Driver 1965:185). Arguments of such form apply in principle to the Hittite legistic tradition, not to the Israelite. As with the peripeteic tales of distribution romanced in crossculturalism, the analogous uniculturalist hypothesis of a postExodus break(through) loses its claim to consideration if it merely feeds upon itself and patches up surmise by surmise. Nothing less than radical incompatibility with the precursor statute (if only analogous to that of "Israel" with the percursor image "Hebrew") can argue outdating. But then, such radicalism is undemonstrable on the evidence, certainly undemonstrated to date. (Recall the couple of points likely to have undergone a substantive change. Would the dropping of elohimin conformity with the postExodus outlook on local shrinesenable one to generalize a new departure? Not really, because it is too moot, incidental, and singular at once to present more than a weak exception on the fringes of slave law. The gift-laden discharge would not fill the need, either. Unquestionably innovative and thematic, it yet meshes rather than collides with the anterior scenario: a benevolent, practical afterthought, in the hallowed interests of liberty.) Again, suppose we grant the Deuteronomist's intent to repeal, suppose even he left it undeclared because he sought the cover and warrant of traditionalism. The ills of ambiguity would then always follow (and, on this premise, have ever since overtaken) his actual performance, aggravated by the tandem Mishpat/Mishneh canonizing. In the embarrassment inflicted on the receivers, what is there to choose between comparative juxtaposition under silent erasure and sheer antiquarian preservation? As the texts stand, how to deduce the alleged intent from them, how to read, how to explain, how to adjudicate, how to apply their variants, e.g., the "Hebrew" vs. the "Hebrew or Hebrewess" typology? Throw in their harmonious resolvability, encouraged by the very garb of traditionalism (including Mosaic pseudepigraphy) assumed ex hypothesior, where deemed unresolvable, the tendency of some people among the audience to favor the old, some the newand you have a recipe for chaos, with canonicity itself threatened, never mind the poor Hebrew (or Hebrewess?) left dangling. Such enactment of the hidden repeal-withreplay purpose not only courts self-defeat but has achieved it beyond measure over the millennia. Nobody prior to the revisionist genetic analysts suspected the intention, and they are themselves still quarreling about its extent and execution, for the simple reason that the Deuteronomist no more pursues than he voices it.
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The opposite is true, demonstrably so, if you attend to his program and check it against his practice. As examined throughout the last three chapters, the practice itself has implied continuity amid change, both well-defined, from quite a few viewpoints. The intergeneric bridging come to the surface, the interlegal maneuvering just outlined, our findings on the crosscultural and rhetorical fronts, the grand interior narrativity and systematicityall remarkably agree in their dynamics. The same holds for the book's own running testimony, voiced by the old-new Code-given It matches the rest of the evidence about the Hebrew law-series, thus crowning embodied with declared intention, practical with official, metagenetic fit or, negatively, if you go against the grain, ill-fit. (Another of Scripture's uncanny anticipations of its counterreaders, it would appear.) Just as with the back reference to the Exodus narrative, Deuteronomy articulates that to the Exodus Code, even in the same breath and on the same insistent memorial note. The precursor Covenant/Code, as such, assumes nothing beyond the audience's living memory of the Hebrewness at source, especially their own, fortified and transmitted down the line via oral plus ritual-seasonal history-telling within the circle. "Thou shalt narrate in the hearing of thy son and thy son's son. . . . When thy son asks thee tomorrow, What does this mean?, thou shalt say to him. . . ." Rebridging in its turn, Deuteronomy fuses inheritance with innovation since and now to take over either of the precursor's genres. Concerning the source history, it even makes the most of whatever living memory has survived on the Jordan: the Lawgiver's, of course, but also the younger participants' in the Exodus ordeal and events after. "Beware, and be very watchful over thyself, lest thou forget the things [dvarim] that thy eyes have seen and lest they depart from thy heart all the days of thy life: make them known to thy sons and thy sons' sons" (4:9; cf. 11:2-10). Nor does it just build on the narrative and narrativizable aids to memory instituted for all time by Exodus about the Exodus. That repertoire widens here in sundry vehicles and directions and connections, including the exposure of the master plot behind the Hebrew bondage law: "Thou shalt remember that thou wert a slave in the land of Egypt. . . ." On the legal flank proper, the Sinai ("Horeb") Covenant resounds through Deuteronomy from the first chapter. The bridges thrown back to it constitute another repertoire, for example, naming, describing, invoking, overt as well as tacit quoting, self-patterning on the foundational model, none suggestive of anything but reaffirmation in resumption. An especially crucial parameter would be the former law-audience's extension in time down to the Now, hence also the law's, as stated by the lawgiver, himself continuous. At Horeb, Moses recalls, "not with our fathers did the Lord make this covenant [ha'berit hazzot, as if for extra persistence] but with us, we who are all of us here alive today [the presentness carrying over from
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the demonstrative to the personal, spatial, temporal aspects of deixis]." On the Jordan, in the Now moment, he rhymes back to take up this thread and unroll it forward without end: "Not with you only do I make this sworn covenant, but with him who is here with us standing today before the Lord our God and with him who is not here with us today" (5:2-3, 29:14-15). The interCode synchrony in diachrony also governs either law's material persistence over time, complete with evolving channels of transmission, from speech to writing, and of retention, from mind to monument (e.g., Exodus 24:3ff., Deuteronomy 31:9ff.). Co-persistence amid consecutiveness will ensue. The retroactive measures taken for the purpose, decades after Horeb, are less expected still than these replottings of the very discourse partners and properties. It is the younger book that goes out of its way (even, literally, out of its timeline) to urge and ensure that the older Covenant's advance from the fugitive to the graven/scriptural medium does not leave behind the apparently weaker yet living vehicle of remembrance. As a preliminary to the giving of the "second law," Moses circles back to the first: Beware, and be very watchful over thyself, lest thou forget the things that thy eyes have seen and lest they depart from thy heart all the days of thy life: make them known to thy sons and thy sons' sons. How on the day that thou stoodest before the Lord thy God at Horeb, the Lord said to me, Gather the people to me and I will let them hear my words, that they may learn to fear me all the days that they live upon the earth and may teach their sons. . . . He declared to you his covenant . . . and me the Lord commanded at that time to teach you statutes and mishpatim, that you might do them on the land which you are crossing into [ob'rim] to possess. (4:9-14) The bridges thrown here across time are as strategic as their timing. Among others, "the dvarim that thy eyes have seen" miniatures the first Covenant/Code in the play between thing and Word, between God's redeeming acts and the dvarim that he "let . . . hear." The life/law montage ordered for the Exodus antecedents stretches to joint lifelong remembrance, joint father-to-son bequeathal, hence presumably even joint decoding, "make known . . . learn . . . teach." The last two verbssemantic counterparts like buy/sell, only with yet tighter interlinkage, because they share the root lmd as wellhave a further claim to notice. They make their debut in Deuteronomy to assume extraordinary cultural significance, which proportionally makes their retrojection here into the first covenant all the more telling and binding. The significance involved is again encapsulated in mishneh torah. Apart
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from capturing in sh-n-h the universal paradox of two-way entailment between repetition and variation, the phrase suggests a variable of repetition that the book contextualizes and institutionalizes as a prime value. In sound and sense, mishneh also intersects with sh-n-n, "sharpen," notably the memory and/or the understanding, through repeated study. By what sounds like a reflexive pun, Deuteronomy commands: "Thou shalt sharpen [we'shinnantam]" the Torah "words" [dvarim, also the book's Jewish title] "to thy sons'' (6:7; cf., in measure-formeasure retaliation, 28:37). The verb is usually Englished as "instruct with diligence," "repeat," etc.a semantic field to which not mishneh alone but torah itself pertains. So the object of instruction (torah) embodies in its name the instruction to instruct it that the adjacent word in the phrase (mishneh) sharpens and the command of sharpening (we'shinnantam) spells out, then in turn sharpens iconically, through repetitive meta-instruction: "Thou shalt talk about them when thou sittest in thy house and when thou walkest on the road and when thou liest down and when thou risest. And thou shalt bind them for a sign upon thy hand and they shall be as frontlets between try eyes. And thou shalt write them upon the doorsteps of thy house and upon thy gates" (6:7-9, 11:18-20). 37 Similarly with the mishneh torah that the king "shall write for himself in a book . . . and read in it all the days of his life, that he may learn to fear the Lord his God, to keep all the words of this torah and these statutes" (17:18-19). Even prior to the monarchy, God exhorts Joshua on his accession to the leadership: "This book of the torah shall not withdraw from thy mouth, but thou shalt meditate on it day and night, that thou shalt take care to do according to all that is written in it; for then shalt thou make thy way prosper" (Joshua 1:7-8). And so on, with variations in the enjoiner, the agent, the addressee, the beneficiary, the phraseology, yet to a single epoch-making effect. No longer content with the preservation of the national heritage already multiply guaranteedvia remembering, narrating, singing, transmitting, ritualizing, writing down, depositing, double coding, elite training, even law-keeping per seDeuteronomy inaugurates the Age of Study on a nationwide basis. It envisages constant self- and family-teaching, such that "instruction" in all Torah branches will extend from the few (Levites, judges, Moses himself) put over the many to every individual, every unit, every class within the house of Israel. That Moses should now project this vision of elect nationhood into the bygone Horeb event, directly quoting God's resonant "learn . . . and teach" imperative as his source-authority, is therefore a strategic piece of bridgework.38 Rather than outdating the earlier covenant, the follow-up dates back the Age of Study to it and thereby promotes their "day and night" interstudy. By the same token, the Horeb interweave with the Jordan dvarim as eternities that will outlive together the crossing into the land itself. Nor has the Exodus writing, either of the Decalogue or the Mishpatim, outgrown
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its prescriptural eyewitnessing, hearing, making known, learning, teaching: the media will instead run parallel forever, just as the later Torah book will be read in public, to keep all forms of memory (auditory, visual, official, kingly, personal, domestic, collective, specialist, exoteric) alive and in touch with one another. Clean against Hittite practice of legal as well as narrative writing, the successor explicitly invokes the precursor Code to codify their coeternity. Or, against the binarist within us, synchrony and diachrony are not opposed, still less torn apart, but fuse into a manifold with uniquely convertible axes. Or, against well-known schemes of literary history, the manifesto puts tradition high above innovationlet alone the individual talentas it nowhere shows anxiety of influence, only of its loss. On his part, the innovator may forward (disclose and/or develop, even as back-projector) an evolutionary line, yet must stop short of the revolutionary, or the newly revolutionary. The revolution, after all, has been in progress ever since the covenant made with the first Hebrew, then made over to the ex-Hebrews on a national scale and now handed down to his and their sons, the impending Jordan (re)crossers. If therefore the Deuteronomist wanted to break with his forerunner whether under traditionalist guise or in revulsionary zeal, exclusive of any piecing outhe could not go about it in a stranger way: trumpeting the concurrence of the prior with the posterior down the ages, encouraging their interstudy, reconceptualizing literary, even canonical dynamism. You may suspect that he protests too much; but, instead of jumping to conclusions, why not put him to the test first? The subject himself duly ends with a one-word relational term for the nexus he, or his law-spokesman, has begun by preaching: "These are the words of the covenant which the Lord commanded Moses to make with the Sons of Israel in the land of Moab, besides [millebad] the covenant which he had made with them at Horeb" (28:69). The question is what "besidesness" amounts to in relegislative practice. First of all, it should mean that Deuteronomy's slave law actually narrows the range open in theory to every fresh coding: between what repetition entails and what variation enables, between the limits of ineluctable (hence discountable) and outdating (unbridgeable, so anti-programmatic) change. If the practice does turn out to concentrate in the middle range, we still need to ask exactly where, how, why the "besides" program actualizes itself. By now, I trust, it has grown evident how much depends on our recognizing and unpacking the manifold of "change" in (lega)literary history, even as we compose its operative axes into the best possible fit. Yet nowhere is change so multiform, its middle ground so slippery, and its workings so testable and theorizable vis-à-vis competing, especially "metamorphic" approaches, as on the front to which we now returnthe dramatis personae of Hebrew bondage law.
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Systematizing Legal Communication Pregnant silences, divergent ambiguities: between artful re-formation and material reformation As regards the cast, our interstudy has already paved the way for the test by arguing a legislative, alongside a suasive and a memorial, unity in variety. InterCode variants would then dovetail among themselves and make up an effectively continuous if-plot rangeone slave-type ensemble, vari-form not vari-type castsby appeal to a shift in the agent's form of emplotment, e.g., in the balance of sexual foregrounding. A world of difference, from the practical to the poetic, thus lies between associating the given alterations over time with the manner or with the matter of the lawsequence. Once you get down to adjudicating it, this difference in the typology of bond-people not only sharpens on all levels but also runs to the issue of systematicity in context, (meta)legal and (methodo)logical, within and between ordinances. To start with, let me demonstrate how the popular "materialist" alternative to my above reading of the evolution is vitiated by fundamental inconsistency (akin to the Hab/piru theory's erratic exercises in reform along the NuziExodus-Deuteronomy-Jeremiah sequence). Internal difficulties from every quarter mix with speculations about outside reality to make the accepted revisionist picture of genesis unacceptable, Thereby, for example, according to the slave law in Exodus the maidservant is not entitled to manumission after six years of service, while the deuteronomic law stipulates that both male and female slaves must be set free after six years. More instructive still is the fact that the major and casuistic section of the parallel slave law in the Book of the Covenant (Exodus 21:3-4) is completely lacking in Deuteronomy. The reason for this deletion may be ascribed to the change that took place in the attitude toward the slave. According to the deuteronomic view, the master has no command over the private life of the slave. He neither gives the slave a wife nor deprives him of one. (Weinfeld 1972:282) As usual, the analysis ignores the fiat of successive co-eternities, never bothering to inquire if and how the canon practices here what it preaches. By source-analytic fiat, rather, the interCode affair encapsulated in the Deuteronomist's "besides" has a priori given way to an "instead," and one of an unreconcilable order. Not only does the critic thrust his own revisionism onto the otherwise-protesting recoderalong with his own disre-
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gard for the trouble that the canonization of two unlike and adjudicated statutes would incurbut he carries it to radical lengths. The past has been left behind in the wake of progress. Now the question is how the approach against the grain coordinates the specific data. Their appearances of ill-fit, with the metalegal directives that enclose the Jordan covenant and with one another, are all the result of the preconceived scheme brought to them. In progressing from "narrow and casuistic statutory law" toward "humanism," that is, the Deuteronomist must first articulate his innovative sexual parity ("male and female") to redress Exodus's imbalance; but to abolish the master's control over the slave's domestic life, immediately afterwards, he blanks out the majority of the Exodus ordinances. One wonders if a license to female enslavement (in adulthood as well as childhood), plus sentencing bachelor and maid alike to six years of celibacy, stretchable to a lifelong term, would exactly declare any reformer advanced, far less humane and humanistic. You wonder, moreover, at the humanist who altogether bars from consideration slaves of alien origin, for whom the earlier Code did provide in the sequel (or even in 21:2ff. itself on the Hab/piru account, which some like-minded progressivists uphold, e.g., Mayes 1991:59, 249-51). If the outsider-privileging national law and literature is a crossculturalist fantasy, unworldly yet imaginable, then ultranational humanism is a contradiction in terms. Diachronically, the recasting of "change" as abrupt peripety, here within Israel and from "narrow" legalism to sweetness and light, also twins the inconsistency with a quantum leap in history. This wonder about the outlook and goal thrust upon the Deuteronomic second-comer, however, only underlines the resulting oddity of his procedure: added "stipulation" and wholesale "deletion" interchange, in the same breath at that, as means to "humanistic" change. In order to enable the postulated leap of society between extremes, the communicational tactics must willy-nilly follow suit. Left unmotivated, except by ultra-progressivist hypothesis, the yoking together of these opposed discoursive measures grows odder yet if you consider how each signifies. Unlike "stipulation," which is perforce vocal, hence univocal in its novelty, the reticence of "deletion'' hovers between wordless endorsement of the old (too obvious or known for a traditionalist to repeat, as it were) and wordless bid for the new (too innovative in traditionalist eyes for the reformer to verbalize, on pain of a quarrel or a scandal). Circularity apart, why favor the second interpretationagainst the evidence that the alleged reticent innovator opened with an explicit, "stipulative" divergence ("or the Hebrewess") from the precursor text? The mismatch of tactics and strategy indicates a misunderstanding of both. Nor does such zigzagging occur here alone of all putative changes, or
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even all developments toward egalitarianism, within the legal culture. Thus the same analyst's reasoning about the tide to attendance at covenant ceremonies. While in "earlier Biblical sources . . . no mention is made of women . . . . Deuteronomy makes a particular point of mentioning that women, as well as men participate . . . . The same is true of the festivals and of the festal repasts. On such occasions we meet with the Israelite's daughter as well as his son. . . . The wife, it is true, is not mentioned in these passages, but the very absence of all reference to the wife is indicative here of Deuteronomy's view regarding the equality of the sexes" (Weinfeld 1972:291). In short, early "no mention" excludes the woman, late ''mention" comes to include her, but so does late "no mention": the ad hoc turnabouts, right or wrong, cry out for a theory to expound the poetics or, if you flinch, the systematics of legal (re)communication as a genre of discourse. Most immediately, such a nomo-poetics, or -systematics, would bring out the hierarchy of difficulty in unifying opposed formal operations on earlier law. For comparison, recall how the Deuteronomist omits elohim from the olamic scenario while interpolating elohim before and after it. There, the two revisions evidently belong to different issues, crossroads, orders of servitude: they need not meet at all, in harmony or disharmony, yet they do at a profounder, ideo-rhetorical level. Those elohim variants, poles apart in novelty (substantive vs. affective) as well as in form and reference, join forces to enhance liberty by writing God out of and into the respective scenarios. Here, with the typological variants, given that the correspondent ellipsis and addendum, nonmention and mention, involve the same issuehow (bond)women stand to mentheir purposive dove-tailing becomes more imperative, yet also more demanding. What is absent has to correlate with what is present, the drop-out with the old-timer or the new arrival. Mirror images of each other by nature, the pinpoint shift between them (within or across texts) also renders their incongruence salient either way, forward and backward. Inevitably, early silence problematizes later speech, late speech earlier silence, even where otherwise unobtrusive; as is the case with the fall into silence. (Within standard narrative, this has already been the case with the kind of gapping which sharpened the absence/presence interplay, e.g., Potiphar at nonHebrewing, Moses at Hebrewing.) The correlation of the diametric forms then grows harder to infer, more contingent on rules, discoursive, generic, textual, and still less amenable to any outside, possibly quite anachronistic nostrum, such as the instant humanism behind the mismatches just cited. It is a short step from mismatch to mishmash. As though to push the relations between form and function into total anarchywith coding/recoding/decoding executed at willthe converse has also been alleged. One and the same means, notably deleting, may then fulfil seriatim ends so opposed as reaffirming and reforming the inherited law.
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Take the double standard applied to addenda on the Jordan, and obliquely, to the correspondent Sinai reticences they fill with plain language. Analysts of all stripes pronounce the addition of "or Hebrewess" a radical Deuteronomistic innovation vis-à-vis Exodus male-centeredness (e.g., Reider 1937:151-52, David 1948:65-69, Buis and Leclerq 1963:121, Driver, 1965:182-83, Noth 1966:177, von Rad 1966:107, Weinfeld 1972:282, Hyatt 1980:228, 230, Cardellini 1981:251-57, 346, Greenstein 1984:97, Fishbane 1985:211n. 99, Durham 1987:321, Mayes 1991:249-51, Frymer-Kensky 1992:54, Houston 1995:310, Nielsen 1995:162, Halivni 1997:24); but quite a few draw the line at the overt extension of ear-piercing to the newcomeress, which gets censored out accordingly. Those readers for pivotal change turn low critics in favor of the status quo where they find it awkward to reconcile egalitarianism with their imported notions of (sex-discriminating) humanitarianism. For good measure, the waverers double as anachronists. (What is ear-piercing beside, say, Nuzi's eye-gouging?) Such equality levels up only, never down, so that you might think the Code prettified by the code of chivalry. "Deleting" fares worse yet, because dualized here on the same level of analysis as well as in the same breath. For instance, Deuteronomy's ellipsis of the marital statuses listed in Exodus 21:3-4 bespeaks, on all accounts, its reaffirmation of the Hebrew's going out with the Israelite wife who accompanied him into service; while the coellipsis from this list of the mate "given" him without choice and bearing him "sons or daughters,'' followed by the kindred ellipsis in Deuteronomy 15:16 of the "wife and sons" from the catalogue of the Hebrew's "loved" ones, enumerated in Exodus 21:5, somehow works to repeal the ordinance that he must leave behind the foreign wife with whom he cohabited in service (e.g., Phillips 1970:77, Carmichael 1974:55). Two erasures, one reaffirmative, one reformatory, practiced by and on the selfsame text-unit apropos of two alternate "wives"? But this amounts to the claim that the variant form taken by the law reverses functions in immediate allusive sequence. The change in particularity, from listing to gapping the bondage types, divides in import between casual manner of (non)speech and crucial matter, between traditionalist and ameliorative (to the owner, expropriatory) ellipsis. The jump alleged from one verse to the next is a jump between limits of encoding, decoding, recoding, and again triggered by nothing except a will to humanitarian progress, mawkish and ill-defined. In ranging over an integral corpus, let alone a unit, the Proteus Principle itself takes on a dynamism that is regulated, never anarchic, broken out of all control: where anything goes, nothing communicates. As the first principle of communication, Proteus instead urges here quite another modus operandi. Thereby, the theoretical fundamentals must lead the way: the innateness of change to recoding, however conservative, qua resaying;
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the multiplicity and autonomy of change types; the (ge)narrativity latent in them all; their endless permutability; hence the unreason of interpreting them out of context. The varieties in play (e.g., those gradually emerging throughout this chapter, or their fellows in the last chapter's synchrony or in the Bible's "repetition structure") need to be established, their interplay generalized into functional rule(s). Leaving the issue untheorized, the need unrecognized, critics rather bend each (dis)parity ad hoc to whatever meaning and goal they pursue. Wildness meets will, with foreseeable results. Evidently, therefore, the argument from silence (like that from memory, already examined within the Hab/piru tale of diachrony) cannot work ad lib both ways along a single piece of (re)legislation: first against, then for amendment. If Deuteronomy's Hebrew still departs with his native wife, as laid down in Exodus, then he also parts, on the same evidence and inference, with the alien breeder; if not, then "he" is for a change always "sent out free from thee" by himself, mateless and childless, according to the letter of the younger Code. It's an either/or choice of the key to legal meaning and history at once. Has the style of discourse varied, then, or the substance? Re-formation, from explicit to implicit and ongoing disparity between unions, or reformation toward negative parity? Of the two logical possibilities, turning on the value associated with silence, the former alone makes ideo-legal sense throughout (unless you want to perpetuate the Israelite wife's bondage, which nobody except Pharaoh does, of course). The half-and-half illogicality, in trying to evade either limit by recourse to some vague generality, e.g., the idea of progress, just falls between the stools of evolution or, in interpretive terms, explanation. Re-codifying in continuity vs. recodifying for change: the two extremes may always coexist and, failing overt alignments or breaks with the earlier Code, must always be inferredbut neither in nor from the same variant pointer (e.g., silence, nonspecificity, deletion) on the same topic within the same utterance. The language of either law-discourse, even if taken by itself, rather shows the force of continuity. In Exodus, for example, the specification of the Hebrew's family varies between two adjacent cases: If he has a wife, his wife shall go out with him. If his master gives him a wife and she bears him sons or daughters, the wife and her children shall belong to her master and he shall go out single. (21:3-4) However we explain the first if-subplot's reticence as against the ensuing emphasis on "sons and daughters"e.g., in terms of the obvious favorableness, or the unobvious hardness, of their respective lotswe know
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better than to project this variation onto the world under emplotment: it would take a literalism gone mad to infer therefrom that the premarried Hebrew's offspring do not go out with him and his wife. So, in the next verse, would it be with the inference that the discrepancy between the Hebrew's fathering "sons or daughters" on the alien mate (21:4) and his expression of love for his "sons" only (21:5) rules out his daughters from the scenario of perpetual bondage. 39 On the contrary, the meticulous listing of the children in the bitterest, hence least self-evident provision"and he shall go out single,'' without themestablishes that they remain indivisible elsewhere, too, a fortiori that the happiest of all possible endings covers the whole nuclear family. The lesson holds for nicer issues of variety, internal, comparative, timebound. Unless attuned to the arts of discourse coordinating logic with rhetoric, implication by analogy or from major to minor with (over)explication for perceptibility or shock effectyou are liable to pay dearly: to misread the operational ruling, misconfront it with its parallels, misconceive the interCode process, to say nothing of the intergeneric plot. Likewise with Deuteronomy, now concerning the principals themselves rather than dependents. After the opening "Hebrew or Hebrewess" comes a long, more than tenfold string of purely masculine anaphoras: "He shall serve . . . thou shalt send him out . . . thou shalt not send him out empty-handed. Thou shalt rather furnish him" and so on. Does this (pro)nominal omission of the "Hebrewess" exclude her from the right to manumission and/or from the privilege of departing laden with gifts? Obviously not. The topic having once been spelled out, "he" does pronominal duty for "he or she" in referring back to the antecedent "Hebrew or Hebrewess." Only when the legislator arrives at the grimmest contingencyalso the one most removed from the initial pairing and the one never enacted before, certainly never voiceddoes the silent co-occupant of "he" find her overt duplication in "To thy maidservant, too, shalt thou do so." A lesser pressure has brought the Hebrew's "children" to the surface of Exodus where, and only where, his choice lies between abandoning and joining them forever. Lesser, in that three exigencies (the odium of life servitude among them) have to coincide for the Deuteronomist to vary from the pronominal back-reference. Even then, he does not so much break the chain of inclusive anaphoras as interpolate an explication of one tricky link, whereby to underline the ongoing two-sex coverage, burden, deterrence, judgment of Hebrewness. As with grammatical antecedence along one law-text, so with canonical antecedence between intertexts. The fact that addenda innovate, in matter (e.g., gifts) or manner ("Hebrewess"), never logically entails that ellipses repealonly, again, that they innovate somehow, somewhere, depending on context, if no more than in their ability to rely on an anterior and
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Page 602 fuller text. Nor can you pick and choose among silences On bondpeople designated earlier; nor, in the actual Deuteronomic framework, can you escape the conclusion that they, too, all make inclusive sense by presuming ("bridging") their own given antecedents. And the presumption is itself as mandatory, Scripture-constitutive in law-to-law as in law-to-narrative retrospect, unless you brush aside Deuteronomy's harping on the co-eternity of revelation events. Under a covenant where sequents run abreast by fiat in every vehicle of the people's memory, (lega)literary history not only assumes a marked shape and density but also particularly authorizes the hermeneutic rule that intertexture can always fill silence with speech. A glance at less disputed analogues will reinforce the point:
Exodus 23:4-5 (4) If thou happenest upon thy enemy's ox or his ass wandering, thou shalt return it to him.(5) If thou seest thy hater's ass lying under its burden and wouldst refrain from helping him, thou shalt nevertheless help him.
Deuteronomy 22:1-4 (1) Thou shalt not see thy brother's ox or his sheep going astray, and hide thyself from them; thou shalt return them to thy brother. (2) And if thy brother is not near thee, or thou dost not know him, thou shalt bring it into thy house and it shall be with thee till thy brother claims it, when thou shalt return it to him. (3) And so shalt thou do with his ass, and so shalt thou do with his garment, and so shalt thou do with any lost thing of thy brother, which he loses and thou findest; thou mayest not hide thyself. (4) Thou shalt not see thy brother's ass or his ox fallen down by the wayside and hide thyself from them; thou shalt raise them up with him.
Within the Exodus Code, does the lost animal's if-plot stretch to "ox or ass" while the overburdened animal's governs "ass" only? Surely not, any more than the reference to Hebrew's "wife" bars their children from "going out" or than the "sons or daughters'' fathered in temporary bondage restrict the lifelong term to the "sons" voiced by the father. The sequentiality of the two animal-in-distress cases rather indicates again silent co-application amid economy; and of the animals at issue, the one chosen for mention in resumptive advance is the more typical beast of burden, as in a sense is the "Hebrew" vis-à-vis the unmentioned Hebrewess. It would also take a mad literalism to restrict the ordinances to "thy enemy's" or "thy hater's" or indeed to a male's livestock. On the contrary, the addressee's foe would
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be most likely to suffer neglect and, once picked out as the object of mandatory help, all the rest ensue a fortiori; the male is the likeliest, as well as the generic, owner. Throughout, then, the world-items named and/or resumed offer the most appropriate pars pro toto, the best typo-logical case in point, just like the Hebrew and the apparently shifting make-up of his nuclear family. Deuteronomy, taken by itself, plays variations on the same gap-filling rationale. Ordered equivalence thus disambiguates silence. The catalogue of lost property having lengthened into "ox . . . sheep . . . ass . . . garment" and risen to the all-embracing "any lost thing," the formal shrinkage thereafter to "ass or ox" becomes only more drastic and the operational extendibility of the fallen-animal type to the horse, say, only more evident. Likewise with the systematics of Code-to-Code back-reference. For example, the shift from "thy enemy/hater" to ''thy brother" replaces implicit by explicit nationwide coverage, inductive by deductive applicability, as does that from "a Hebrew slave" to "thy brother the Hebrew or the Hebrewess." The lengthened catalogue specifies and universalizes to analogous effect in the nonhuman order. Inversely, the substitution of "ox or sheep" for Exodus's "ox or ass" never implies a change in the statutory reference, not even for a moment, but in the referential (and, as it turns out, initial) common denominator presented on the law's surface. None of the diverse interCode variants suggests any leap, break, revolutionnot even according to those who would read them into the Hebrew law-series (e.g., Driver 1965:249-50, Weinfeld 1972:288-89 in moderated "humanism," Fishbane 1985:177-79). The divergences are in principle as multiform and silent, only less charged with ideo-political energy and so less vulnerable to romances of outdating for progress. This and ensuing features of ambiguity invite a wider comparison between gaps in law and in narrative proper (as treated in my Poetics, esp. 186ff.), not excluding the interplay of theoretically contrasted strategies, like gapping and repeating, lack and excess of data. In turn, their interplay is reminiscent of that we have encountered between compositional extremes like time and space, sequence and equivalence, microcosm and macrocosm. Nor does the intergeneric family likeness progressively drawn by the analysis stop here. Taken together, the arts of compound lawtelling, of multiform and multilevel analogizing, of equally versatile ordering, of many-voiced thematizing, of perspectivizing, of redundancy, of reticence, of theological and interpersonal rhetoric, of destereotyped charactertypology, of divergent focus and favor, of language contextualized, not least in (de)nomination, or (self-)translation, would appear enough to establish a unified poetics, under the ground rule of negotiating between the truth and the whole truth. It accordingly becomes yet harder to distinguish the one genre's
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enclosed from the other's enclosing system, the narrative of the law from the law of narrative, Code from poetic code, interCode from overall literary history. Legaliterariness, complete with (ge)narrativity, is here no figure of speech but an inset discourse mode repatterned on the frame. Moreover, internal and intertextual systematicity apart, this reading of the new ellipses to match the older taxonomic picture best fits the worldview, unmistakable in context. The Deuteronomist openly levels "Hebrewess" with "Hebrew"as he elsewhere promotes other sisters in law to membership in the collective selfwhile leveling the sister with the foreign woman would offend against his nationalist ideology. It must also offend, specifically, against the Law of (De)nomination, which reserves for the collective self both the vict-image of Hebrewess (imposed from without or, as here, self-inflicted) and the enslavement-to-unloosing master plot. Which canonical book would observe more religiously than Deuteronomy the law's patterning on this iron Law? Relative to Exodus, it is beyond question more ethnodoctrinal, not less, particularly concerning exogamy. (And the direst kind of it would also be the likeliest, i.e., a Canaanite liaison: see my argument in Sternberg 1992 about this law/narrative juncture, which supplements the point made here as well as the principle.) Besides, to descend from the heights of ideology and nomopoesis to economic realities, we must keep in mind property rights, as Codes otherwise so unsimilar as Exodus and Leviticus jointly insist with respect to enslaved outsiders. The argument that "we must assume from the silence" of Deuteronomy a move toward the release of all families along with their Israelite head, "whenever he acquired them," because ''the slave's marital status is his private concern, which has nothing to do with his service" (Phillips 1984:56) therefore hinges on a non sequitur. 40 The family (wife "given" by the master, children "born" under the master's roof) has everything to do with the Hebrew's service where it counts as the master's private property, exactly because it is nonbrotherly on top of nonHebrew, and so the less entitled to freedom in default of any embodied variation that proclaims or bespeaks countercoding. It is unlikely that a master's "right of ownership over a chattel slave . . . would ever be abrogated" (Chirichigno 1993:281). Aliens remain inalienable. Even on most versions of the combined theory, the development within the Pentateuch law replaces the social or "humanitarian" (Hebrew = Hab/piru) by the ethnic (Hebrew = Israelite) thrust. How much more so where, as regarding the Hebrew's female companion in bondage, the legislation privileges the native ("his wife shall go out with him") over the alien ("the wife and her children shall belong to her master") in the first instance. Judging by all the empirics, then, the late Mosaic platform of successive co-eternities accords with the discourse system at work.
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From type enumerator to unitype generalizer: alternative coverages of the possible law-world However, though well short of revolutionary vis-à-vis Exodus, in the humanist or feminist or deautomatizing or anxiety-of-influence-ridden or otherwise universalist mode, the newly even-handed treatment of the sexes within Israel is no casual stylistic variation, either, nor one just suasive. It forms part, I would suggest, of a larger drive to generality, aiming for the highest common denominator among types (cases, possibilities, subplots) of Hebrew bondage. The highest, mind you, because generalizing particulars into some common denominator, abstracting from numberless phenomena (human, inanimate, actional, situational) to construct a world of types, characterizes all law by generic definition. These types and typologies, like their fellows within the syllogism, evidently defy current metastereotypes of stereotype, whether regarding form of existence and truth-value and goal or with respect to mobility: between group and outgroup, human and nonhuman, negative and positive, traditionalism and contemporaneity, indeed antistereotypicality, etc. Nor is their recalcitrance to package dealing contingent but essential, as their infinite diversity shows. Yet types they remain, of a well-defined kind, too, even though narrative by inbuilt enactment, compoundly narrativizable beyond the minimum, and given to legaliterary synthesis. Across all variations, down to subject matter (e.g., criminal, civil, ritual) or modality (casuistic vs. apodictic), this deconcretized world- and narrative-making tells the law's scenarios apart from the one-off scenes at the heart of narrative properor, again, from the contract à la Nuzi. The former must eliminate the unique representation (or, considering the obliquities of allusiveness ever-available to it, the direct unique representation) that the latter may only suspend for a time and a purpose: Job's opening thus bundles into one short, deep-fixed, illustrative actionsequence (1:4-5) the cycles of feasts that the children hold, prior to unleashing the narrative forces through the unprecedented development in heaven. The kind of indefinite or indefinitely open-ended reference whereby Job builds up its world, as a premise to a proposition, a preliminary to disaster, is the staple of law-telling as a whole. 41 On this representational axis, the Exodus Code itself actually outreaches the minimum entailed by the narrative of the law. In the first protasis, the jump in medias legis invites us to close the gap by supplying a plurality of antecedents (theft, debt, etc.) to "buy": one effect, many causes-cases. Next, the given "Hebrew" silently extends to the wedded and adult Hebrewess. Then the paired lo ye'adah homonyms collocate in turn the designated (lo = to himself) with the undesignated (lo = not) ''daughter." Like these rises above the bare generic essential, the interCode shift is
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quantitative yet meaningful: from lower to higher generality, now the highest possible under the sign of Hebrewness. The analogy to the reworking of Exodus's animal-in-distress laws assumes fresh pertinence. The recoder there, inferring from the spirit of his precursor text, variously widens the coverage of item after major item, if only by way of explication. (1) The antitypical (hence in context readily generalizable) beneficiary, "enemy/hater," is subsumed under the type-inclusive "brother." (2) The typical specimens of domestic animal, "ox or ass," gather another token of the same type, "ox . . . sheep . . . ass," to ensure the inclusion of all livestock; then the type itself ascends with ''garment" to the animal-plus-inanimate superordinate type, and therefrom to the universal category "any lost thing." (3) In between, "return" develops a provision for late return to "thy brother's" advantage (compare the gifts added to encourage his departure). (4) "Ass lying under its burden" reappears as "ass or ox fallen down by the wayside," which encompasses mishaps beyond overburdening. All along, one evolutionary teleology runs through the diverse forms of change (adding, substituting, transposing, abstracting) in harmony with the concurrent original's intent, and so bears a family likeness to our more complex exemplar of "besidesness" as distinct from mutual incompatibility. In order to outgeneralize Exodus, Deuteronomy's slave law would bring the assorted cases of Hebrewness (whether inherited, inferrable, or imaginable) under a single formula: maximum inclusiveness with maximum economy, openended reference in uniformity. The shift marked by this quest for an umbrella draft again concerns legislative strategy rather than substance: poetics, not policy, updated discourse form, not reformatory updating, never mind outdating. It is even more continuous with the past than the analogue just cited, in time span and historical rootedness, above all. For we now find genres bridged on top of Codes, and the difference is strategic. Instead of outgeneralizing Exodus law by directly amending itas with the stray or overloaded animalthe Deuteronomist's variant goes back to a freshly centered interpretation of the Exodus narrative, on which all Hebrew slave laws pattern themselves. Here the law-to-narrative system of back-reference newly joins, parallels, and mediates, or motivates, that of law-to-law, with an eye to integrated diachronic resystematizing. Whereas the early Code "disclosed" the past to justify (in every sense) the finest in-group typology attainable, the later rediscloses it for the widest commonality vis-à-vis the antigroup. The source-text never varies, only the shape it assumes in and through the (re)disclosers' eyes as "(re)genarrators." Within the same tradition, one and the same tale (of Hebrewness abroad) generates a sequence of (Hebrewness-at-home) law-tales unalike in focus: an eloquent measure of interpretability and retellability, of the
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endless narrativity built into narrative even by virtue of its openness to revisiting alone. This outdoes anything we have encountered thus far. (The master plot has already been seen in transfer from Egypt to Philistia, but without crossing generic lines; again, the Exodus mishpat's replotting did cross generic lines, but without an anterior, established Code to plot against.) No less suggestive, though, is the countermeasure, namely, the limits imposed by the tradition as such on the range of variance between the law-tales sequenced along it. Whatever the disparities in the narrative's reading and the Code's (re)narrativized writing method, or legal style, they yet involve a change of emphasis but not of basic practicalities, any more than of genre, speaker, value scheme, rhetoric, allusive field. The throwback to intergroup history always models the contingencies projected onto the group's future. Exactly how, then, does the innovative quest for generality unlimited correlate with the innovative viewpoint on times past? The antithesis that we have found so thematized in the Exodus narrative, between the divide-and-subject and the unite-and-deliver agendas, gains a new lease on life under the law transmitted on the Jordan. In the Deuteronomist's rereading-with-rebridging, or what I call "disclosure," the fact that all subdivisions within Hebrewness have been pressed by the enemy, to hostile exclusive effect, assumes special and admonitory weight. First came the line drawn between the "son/boy [ben]," marked out for infanticide, and the "daughter/gift [bat]," to be "kept alive"; then, conversely, ''the men" were granted leave for the celebration "that you desire" in the wilderness, if all the rest stayed behind as hostages. Where the Pharaonic villain would discriminate, the protagonist (revealingly, of either sex or, in God's case, none) always levels. The midwives keep all "the children" alive. Jochebed, Miriam, even the Princess, save Moses. The paradigmatic survivor in turn insists on a mass Exodus, from his catch-all "we" in the opening interview ("The God of the Hebrews chanced upon us," etc.) to his countering of Pharaoh's exclusionary "you-adult-males" by the enumeration, "with our young and with our old will we go, with our sons [banenu] and with our daughters [bnotenu]," regardless of age as of sex. God himself never breaks down the people's unity, except to reaffirm it: "sons and daughters" will carry off into liberty the spoils of Egypt (3:22). If anything, in connection with the despoiling itself, he initially assigns the role to "each woman" (ibid.), then shares it out between "each man . . . and each woman" (11:2): in the event, the despoilers appear as bene yisrael for equilibrium or generic reference (12:35). 42 The Deuteronomist follows suitwhere the ramifying Covenant Code preserved nothing of the Israelite battle linedown to the generic "he" throughout. His unilinear scenario resumes in legal re-enactment (and
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canonical re-re-enactment) the thread of group expression broken, as it were, by his precursor, the older divineMosaic law-voice. If the Jordan change from the Sinai antecedent marks a change back to the Egypt ante-antecedent, then it closes a gap in the larger process, in the macronarrative charted by the discourse of source running underground through the books. The innovator's turn is a return to the common agonistic origin. The Deuteronomist's rereading of the narrative, then, motivates a retelling-with-rebridging of it in the law, one appropriately (and to this extent, variantly, updatingly, if you will) focused on the common denominator among Hebrews, whether branded or beneficiaries. Regardless of where his narrative "motivation" stands between cause and cover for that refocusing of the lawthe poetics, I will argue, typically has the best of the two opposite genetic chainsit justifies his innovation in every sense by appeal to formative, prelegal tradition. As the Exodus version of the enslavement-to-deliverance statute multiplies differences, which echo adverse typologies even at their most benevolent, he replots it the Israelite, historical, egalitarian, all-national way. At the same time, while bringing the insider's perspective to the foreMoses the legislator is now at one with Moses the freedom fighterthe Deuteronomic recoder enjoys the latecomer's privilege of assuming in co-eternity what he omits to reiterate, good or bad. All along the line, his silence on inherited scenarios makes for a new overall balance of precept and particulars, law-plot and ramifications, constants and variables, foreground and background, wood and trees. He generalizes where his or Moses' original draft enumerated by cases. The resulting effect goes from unity (or in casuistic narrative sequence, unilinearity) to economy to inclusiveness. The Deuteronomist accordingly cuts across the boundaries of marital status as well as of sex. And again, the less detailwhich may now, in redrafting, especially for the Age of Study, or Interstudy, be taken as readthe more scope. Given the precursor text and the proper intertext, the outgeneralizer can dispense here (as he always can in theory) not only with re-genarrating but also with fleshing out or otherwise emending the law. On this status axis, in fact, he need not add anything of his own (not so much as "or the Hebrewess" before) to range every name-bearer under the ordinance. For all the germane typological variations have already been covered by Exodus (single, married on arrival, intermarried in bondage) or by the ideologic shared with Exodus (veto on the woman's abuse by the master, especially for unspeakable interbreeding). In bare restatement, therefore, the principle of manumission ("in the seventh year thou shalt send him out free from thee") subsumes the whole anterior typology, even urging us to widen the circle described by those givens: to
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cross sexual ("Hebrew or Hebrewess") with marital variables, the new axis in focus with the old. But this does not yet exhaust the objects or the repertoire of type adjustment. The same quest for the Hebrew common denominator reveals itself, with another interesting legaliterary difference, in the movement from temporary to olamic bondage. Rarely have false notions of humanitarianism lured such a throng of interpreters into such acrobatics, between the discourse's reticence and redundance, with a view to making these literary extremes converge in legal harmony. Vis-à-vis the proportioning of roles, or information, the argument often turns Janus-faced again. If the discourse keeps the bondwoman off stage, as in Exodus, then it must allegedly shield her from temporary, a fortiori lifelong bondage. And if a still more "progressive" discourse brings her on with a vengeance as an equalattaching her by name ("or the Hebrewess") to the lighter condition, reattaching her by extra fiat (''To thy maidservant . . .") to the harderthen off she must go: Deuteronomy cannot mean what it says and resays about her parity, or cannot originally have said it at all. (Nor, of course, can Jeremiah, who echoes it in full-fledged narrative action.) Another obvious zigzag in everything but the sentimentalism wished on the law for the defense of the weaker vessel, as it were. The inconsistency worsens if you recall the case of the foreign woman, dropped in recoding from the Exodus typology: the same posterior text's nonmention of her has been interpreted as an advance toward equality, and with "the Hebrewess" of all insiders. Piecework and patchwork thus accumulate on the analyst's way from intralegal to interlegal sequence, without yielding either a coherent message or a followable movement. Such ad hoc twisting in face of unwelcome data reflects more and more fatally on the premises behind it, historical, ideological, methodological, communicational. The sense of a system, from a local to an enduring to an evolving part/whole, means/end relationality, is conspicuous for its absence throughoutin and between the versions, their clauses, or their procedures. The law-texts do harmonize, I would argue, not only to the reverse, inclusive effect but also on a larger scale; yet each goes its own way (the selective type-ennumerator's vs. the crosstype-generalizer's) and establishes its own priorities, legal and literary at once, by appeal to the Bible's common rules of discourse and agreeably to the dialectic of their ordered concurrence ("besides"). On this common ground, the maneuvers they execute in the process are incomparably firmer and subtler, as well as altogether other, than the acrobatics described by expositors, whether Rabbis or source analysts, in the vein of knight-errantry, above all. At the time, among the three given variations in marital status, the
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Exodus sequel picked up the last: "I love my master, my wife, and my sons, I will not go out free." Does this exclude the unmarried and the premarried Hebrew slave from the option (along with the odium) of renouncing liberty? Hardly, any more than it would the husband of a childless, or "son"-less, foreigner. A nice stylistic pointer to extension lurks in the uneven (and for the Bible, unusual) coordination of the objects of "love.'' The slave's inset utterance elides the expected coordinator "and" (we-) between "master" and "wife," householder and family, to imply that the various attachments need not coexist (nor, if they do, correlate). They remain variables, freely permutable in the motivation of lifelong servitude: as between the single and the married, the alien and the native wife, the fruitful and the childless (even the loveless) union, with inducements to suit. The equivalent to this form of parataxis in modern legalese would be "or/and," as against "both/and," designed to generate a scenario obligatorily incremental rather than modular. In narrative retrospect, again, the prototype of "Hebrew" renouncers, who flaunted his taste for slavery to the deliverer, now the legislator, is never said to have contracted any alliance at all, exogamous or endogamous. He simply "loved his master" qua master, whence his victimage of fellow Hebrews, in imitation of the archtyrant. Legal, verbal, narrative, intergeneric reasonings, all point the same way. Within one discourse, as between discourses far apart, the lawgiver's silence on matters treated earlier (e.g., the range of statuses in emancipation) does not pronounce them inapplicable to the next business on his agenda (lifelong self-enslavement). For maximum deterrence, rather, the Exodus law-enumerator singled out the longest enchainable, most odious contingency of the three: exogamy ("wife" given) with miscegenation ("sons" born) added and leading (in text order, implicitly also in plot time) to the surrender of freedom. 43 What with the love for the mastercoming first, presumably foremost, and running throughout the statusesthe unholy bonds tighten into lifelong bondage. "A threefold cord is not quickly broken," for good (as in Ecclesiastes 4:12) or for ill. The cords more easily broken, whether twofold or single-thread, are more likely to break at the moment of choice in reality: if they don't, the consequences, shame and all, always follow from the enacted archetypal yet modular scenario. This explains afresh why the bondwoman (as opposed to the alien bondmate) least figures here. Even though enslavable in principle, she is judged most likely to escape the ultimate shame: in virtue of her record in the Exodus tale, Exodus law spares (or, if you will grudge the inequality, denies) her in advance two of the three "cords" that may entangle the bondman for life. Nor would the same record predict what the law itself couldn't interdict, namely, her turn from heroic opponent to impartible "lover" of the master during bondage. Mishpat as precept chimes in either case with mishpat as historic precedent, legal judgment with poetic justice. The rationale behind the typology holds, even strength-
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ens, in the ascent (normatively, descent) from minimum to unlimited service: for all candidates, the order of foregrounding in the Exodus law-discourse accords with the order of applicability, recorded and to come, in the world. Perceptibility goes by probability, and in inverse ratio to (won, shown, desired) privilege, on a kind of sliding scale. Typically, however, the Deuteronomist replaces the multipoint scale by a unitary system: to understand him, you are no longer expected to operate through any induction from a given list, then from its blown-up negative paradigm case, shrinkable by modularity or analogy, but only through deduction from a rule. (This to an even larger extent than when he multiplies the number of imaginable strays before announcing the "any lost thing" hold-all directive.) In replotting the odious antitype, he leaves out the familial specifics for generality, as he did the catalogue of seventhyear beneficiaries, while attaching the odium to all comers. Strategic though the change may appear, it takes little beyond a way with conjuncts: one newly made, or voiced, another unmade, or silenced. With "or Hebrewess" joined to "Hebrew" and "wife and children" dropped from the objects of ''love"once headed, now exhausted by the "master"qualification for the ignoble role no longer goes by marital (any more than by sexual) feature. Slave mentality alone counts. When the redrafter comes to the Exodus "daughter," with her special privileges, the logic of omission for parity continues on another front and on a bigger scale, to the limit of silence. Not a word about sale into a free-born-like marriage. The blank is predictable, however, since to the Deuteronomist the trouble for once lies in the opening Exodus subrule, which generalizes an exception, even more than in the particulars that follow. In his eyes, egalitarian and synoptic, "She shall not go out as the slaves [abadim] go out" is too awkward to reaffirm or reformulate under any of the possible interpretations. Among these, translators and exegetes have favored the literalizing of the masculine plural (abadim) into semantic maleness. Yet the recoder would find the contrast in sex no better than the alternatives (nor better than the semanticizing of the formal masculine gender of the singular ebed and its anaphoras, "he/his/him," in Exodus law's foregoing paragraph). For, if taken to mean "not as the male slaves go out," the ordinance would run against sexual parity in keeping the bondmaid outside "the Hebrew or the Hebrewess" circle of manumission: the two general exordiums would clash. 44 Again, if glossed "not as the adult slaves," free to dispose of themselves, the verse would produce an imbalance in age, correlated with legal footing (majority vs. minority). Likewise with the reference of the negative to marital status: "not as the slaves who may arrive, or cohabit, with a mate." And likewise with the alternative compound difference, in sex plus status impinging on the master himself, which has been textualized by the
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Septuagint and Vulgate (to the delight of Schenker 1988): "not as the bondmaids undesignated for wifehood." 45 Across all four readings, again, the categorical exception would be false to the historic Egyptian precedent, as now dichotomized between culture hero and villain in rereading, or re-"disclosure," no less than to the spirit of the Deuteronomic precept. Refusing anyone within the group the privilege of "going out," like invidious discrimination among Hebrews in general, becomes a Pharaoh alone. That the disprivileging at Sinai meant to protect the weak, in anti-Pharaonic remembrance of scenes and services past, no longer justifies it, or not as an isolated case. The less so because this case itself ramifies into subcases, of which at most one, and the most improbable one, is readable (if lo = not) as involving lifelong service, namely, that of the girl both undesignated and undis pleasing: the categorical, ominous preliminary, "not . . . go out," hardly fits the Exodus type (with its various avenues to go out) any more than the typologist's kind thought. As the wording stands, though, the "daughter'' sold into unlimited bondage echoes, and adversely reverses, Moses the protagonist's insistence on nationwide emancipation, "with our young and with our old, with our sons and with our daughters": Exodus law divides (always from the standpoint of the latter-day rereader cum reteller) against Exodus narrative, together with the Mosaic voice in which both speak to opposed (negative/positive, exclusive/inclusive) effect. On the microstructural level, the bridge (re)thrown here across the Exodus texts is found by the inheritor even more sharply discontinuous, hence all the less open to crossing and adoption. This pinpoint hiatus will best arise from what is known in semantic theory as componential analysis. "Daughter" includes the semantic components -adult, -male, married; whereas "young and . . . old, . . . sons and . . . daughters" factorizes several times over into the two-value, all-embracing set of components ±adult, ±male, and, by strong implication, ±married. How to uphold, then, any of the four possible readings of "not as the slaves go out"? Well-meaning, the original law yet needs to be saved from head-on collision, or so much as its appearance, with the history that should inspire it. The more wanted the "Hebrew" common denominator, then, the odder, less repeating and assimilable, even less repeatable, the bondmaid's special case. It introduces such miscellaneous variables at once and opposes them so to the rule, item by narrative or narrativized item, that the naysaying in its given form challenges the positive generalization about seventh-year release. What to the Exodus lawgiver as enumerator is just another type-scenario, with an anchorage of its own (e.g., the immunity from nominal "Hebrewing," from physical abuse, from psychocultural torpor) in the nation's formative experience, becomes an irreducible complex of peculiarities to the Deuteronomist as unitype generalizer.
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Furthermore, viewed afresh in a generalizing perspective, the exception marked by the slave girl threatens to break the rule even beyond and against the intent of Exodus itself. For example, would the adult bondwoman (the newly conspicuous "Hebrewess") be denied the right to enter into service on the footing of a "designated" wife? If entering undesignated, would she be ineligible for the master, or his son, with the appropriate privileges and safeguards? If continuing single, would she be liable to resale to "a foreign people"? The questions are rhetorical, by any standardcommon decency, the juridical logic of induction by analogy, or the otherwise divisive Egyptian precedent behind the Code, for once nonexistent, least of all apropos resale. Bondwomen no more deserve, or in historical fact suffered, abuse than bondmaids. Yet the Exodus text's foregrounding of the male "Hebrew'' and the minor "daughter" leaves open all these routes to invidious discrimination. (Even if you still doubt the Exodus text's implicit applicability to the female adult, note that the last problemsubjectness to resalecertainly affects the "Hebrew" himself, bachelor or married, 46 that all problems gain urgency with the surfacing of the "Hebrewess," and that no problem will any longer be referrable to Moses across the Jordan.) To go by the letter of the original Code, the woman may well fall between the two specified cases. Within the same age-group as the bondmaid, so may the "son," unenslaveable for all we hear, counter to every operative rationale (also to later practice in Israel, e.g., the widow's two sons in II Kings 4:1-7, presumably with equivalents among Jeremiah's mass of bondpeople). Were the silence on the male minor exclusionary, it would turn Pharaonic. Only the archenemy, we recall, thinks of separating the inseparable: husbands from their wives in hard labor, boys from girls in infanticide, members from heads of families in departure (as well as herds from vocational shepherds). The Israelite spokesmen will accept no dividing line whatever, by sex any more than by age and/or marital status. Among the permutations of componential features, indeed, "sons and daughters" explicitly occur both in Moses' refusal to settle for the departure of male adults (10:9) and in God's naming of the spoils bearers (3:32). As the experience of enslavement and release covered everybody Hebrew, the ordinance should run true to historic formtruer than may appear from the old law's pair of weakening, if not misleading, specifications.47 Or so the Deuteronomist reasons. To systematize Exodus and plug its holes, always without prejudice to its ongoingness, he therefore maneuvers afresh: this time, between editing out and ruling out the daughter's case, between dismissive and all too inclusive, overreductive silence in redrafting. The wholesale omission leaps to the eye, yet must not blind us to the artist's devices of subsumption. As the finder's "brother" subsumes his "enemy" and the "fallen" animal does the one "lying under its burden," so here, with refinements. Compare
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the introductory protases, "If thou buyest a Hebrew slave . . . If a man sells his daughter" and "If thy brother the Hebrew or the Hebrewess is sold to thee." In replacing Exodus's initial "buy'' with "sell," the younger variant not only iterates the verb peculiar to the old special case but also relocates it in the most strategic, all-dominating position. And in adding first the kinship term "thy brother," then "the Hebrewess," it brings in the "daughter," too, under a wider (± familial, ± male) semantic rubric. Toward the end, likewise, the Codes rhyme to suggest oblique (intrasexual) within direct (inter- or two-sexual) subsumption. When making explicit the bondwoman's co-liability to permanent bondage, the Deuteronomist refers to her by the noun amah (echoing back to Exodus's bondmaid in 21:7 rather than forward to Jeremiah's synonymous lexical choice throughout, shiphah *). The former "maid" now covers her entire sex. Once more, then, we encounter on the diachronic axis the counterpart and complement of the workings of rhetoric in interbook synchrony. Where geneticists digging for the external source have speculated or emended to no purpose, the inner logic of genesis assigns to the play of repetition and variation in time yet another constructive evolutionary role, definite yet characteristic. The play of equivalence implies a grand sequential and consequential plot. From the outset, the relexicalized (or retro-lexicalized) part harks back to the earlier whole, the new whole to the earlier part, whereby the law's range of applicability always grows in inverse proportion to its specificity. On the one hand, with Exodus history and law not just wordlessly assumed but programmatically invoked together, qua co-eternities, it goes without respecifying that the designated daughter enjoys her privileges, just as the married adult, say, does his. The new threefold bridging takes nothing away. On the other hand, in the absence of any specifics, an assortment of fresh possibilities and combinations arise from the bidirectional Exodus/Deuteronomy traffic, with a single end in view: opening wide the door to ultimate freedom (and accordingly discouraging its closure upon oneself). Like the bondwoman, for example, the bondmaid ("daughter") as "Hebrewess" may now come in undesignated and leave after six years; conversely, like the Exodus bondmaid, the bondwoman may come in designated (or undesignated yet eligible) for an upgrading marriage, with all the given Sinaitic provisos, including release ahead of time from any set-up injurious to her honor or welfare. And so on. In effect, where Exodus negates ("shall not go out") for exception, Deuteronomy affirms the rule across the board: everybody covered by the ethnicon may "go out as the slaves go out," and went out, one way or another. Indivisible in principle, reenacted in the uniform single-track master plot, the nationwide coverage yet flexibly ramifies between the discourse lines, old and new, to meet the exigencies of application to a society het-
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erogeneous by nature: individual treatment in Israel must reckon (hence, by type logic, its guidance must do away) with the set of variables that the collective Exodus from Egypt understandably resisted and the Exodus Code has selectively detailed, to the loss of range, balance, continuity, all at once. 48 Forty years after, no "Hebrew or Hebrewess" is excluded from the benefits of liberation properly applicable to him or her, except the self-excluding lover of bondage. Contrary to the usual either/or quandary imposed on the Deuteronomist in piecemeal analysis, his choice lies not between repeating and repealing but between artfully generalizing and endlessly multiplying the inherited special cases. Generalizing is to the law what centralizing is to the cult. Not for nothing do we find centralization instituted in the same book and applied in the selfsame ordinance's jumping over the Exodus referral of the parties to the local elohim siteitself ambiguous, indeed conjunctive between "judge" and "God," law and worship. "Everything that I command you you shall be careful to do: thou shalt not add to it nor take away from it" (13:1), Moses (with God and the narrator as Deuteronomist behind him) has just insisted, in fact iterated (4:2). Here the three communicators along the chain of law-transmission merge: whichever you pick, his own example, in revisiting what is officially his own Mosaic/divine/Scriptural "command," warns against a literalist understanding of the "not add . . . nor take away" directive to the audience. It is rather by knowing the surface from the spirit of the traditional law that the recoder managed to practice what he preaches, as well as to implement the grander, directly interCode fiat of successive co-eternities. Like his fellow addressors, quoters, writers in literature's most virtuoso school of repetition, he shows in recoding that "adding'' and "taking away" are always context-bound: that the sense of purpose alone determines what exactly such verbal tokens of difference mean, how they interrelate, where they fall between the extremes of (pragmatic, normative, expressive, generic) continuity and discontinuity with the original, even whether the original itself (e.g., the law) gains or loses from being realigned with its original (e.g., the narrative). Only by forcing literalism on him, and us readers, to the denial of both plain sense and legaliterary art, will the reshaper turn archreformer. He never revolutionizes the lot of Hebrewness within Israel, any more than Hebrew breaks with Hab/piru in crosscultural peripety. Change is not only inevitable and multiform but also relative, and if you think of the alleged jump from out- to in-group, the Deuteronomist's substantive novelties will fall into proportion. Of course he does update as well as rebridge, even updates as and what he rebridges; yet both activities are a matter of degree (elohim out, gifts in, taxonomy off, back-reference on) and the product stops well short of this ne plus ultra of updating carried to outdating. Or
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if you must speak of reformation, it is ideo-legal, -historical, -artistic more than legislative proper, in that the workings of the discourse chiefly bear on the audience addressed, not the agents-in-law staged. The two groups overlap in their membership, the real (framing) may come to overlap or actualize the modal (inset) world, against the dissuader's ideal of life across the Jordan; but they, and the operations on them, nevertheless stay apart. In the Deuteronomist's hands, abstracting so much from the old command "takes away" nothing from its jurisdiction, nor "adds" undesirables and misfits to it; rather, the abstract levels the precursor's own explicit with its implicit subjects into a casuistic democracy. The shift from enumerative cum inductive to deductive enactment co-qualifies for the low thematic role of bondperson agents thus far kept off stage, whether because regarded as less likely, typical, deterrent, or as more worthy of tact. As it produces a casuistic democracy within the represented if-world, therefore, this shift also levels up the addressees (hearers, readers, future hearers of public readings) in making the ordinance easier to understand and apply. The improved accessibility is in keeping with the dramatic situation of the valedictory, envisaging a future when ''every hard thing" can no longer be referred to Moses and through him, if necessary, to God. The transparency of deductive ruling likewise fits the book's programmatic statements about its own communication event and its newly instituted analogues on the land. Beyond the Jordan, the framing exordium tells us, "Moses undertook to expound this Torah" (1:5). In chiastic antiphony, Moses himself ends by announcing that the book's foolproof communication will henceforth substitute for his prophetic mediation: "This commandment which I command thee this day is not hidden from thee, nor is it far off. It is not in heaven, so that one should say, Who will go up for us to heaven to bring it down to us and declare it to us, that we may do it. Neither is it beyond the sea. . . . Rather, the thing [or word, davar] is very near thee, in try mouth and in thy heart, so that thou canst do it (30:11-14). And then he orders the periodic recitation of "this Torah" to "the people, men and women and little ones and the sojourner within thy gates, that they may hear and learn" (31:11-12). Having been "expounded"e.g., updated for unigeneralizationthe discourse has grown less "hidden," "nearer," more open to "all Israel." Compare the latecomer's updated bridging for memory's sake. Along this parallel communicative line of surface variance, his recall of Egypt on the Jordan supplies ("expounds") the motivation that the bare voicing of "Hebrew" in effect did to his predecessor's audience of recent ex-He-brews: given the interval, the forms opposed in terms of discoursive explicitness amount to the same force. Within the updater's drive toward the unitype, intelligibility even gains force, as befits the operational aspect of the statute. Moreover, given the Age of Interstudy, even the redrafter's formal extremes are likelier to work together in the hearing/reading of
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the two-Code inheritors: addenda to make a whole with erasures, the woman's overt inclusion with her silent divestment of overprotection. And the Jeremiah narrative duly realizes the new legal variant not just in rebridging the time interval but also in pairing "slave and bondwoman, the Hebrew and Hebrewess" throughout (as Nehemiah [5:15] will the "sons and daughters" enslaved among "the Jews''). From Judgment to Rejudgment: (D)evolution of and by Conduct Regarding the discourse of source across generic boundaries, the principle that underlay the originary legislation on the Hebrew is thus enlarged and clinched in evolutionary follow-up. Even with an older law in hand to start from, you (mishneh encoder or decoder) cannot ignore the available source-tales without at best leaving a hole in the explanatory chain, at worst nullifying all generative plot and the key to regeneration. The double coding is anything but a default launching-mechanism, nor an optional legaliterary finesse among others, as one might perhaps think if it were restricted to Sinai. Conversely, observe how the sequel urges its continuance, with appropriate adjustments and also with extra resources, unavailable to the prior literature's history because still unborn at the time in the nation's. The shift from selective typology to people-embracing generalization of Hebrewness in Israelite bondage, if taken alone, refers certain interCode variants to a new discoursive strategy but does not yet motivate the strategy itself. That shift per se has a regenerative effect on the law without a regenarrative cause in the life. Given the bent for the unitype as a turn in the narrative of genesis, its emergence implies some anterior, mimetic (e.g., phylogenetic) link that can actualize and justify the legaliterary by appeal to lifelike evolution. The modified drafting procedure needs emplotment in terms of the represented events, as when the ha'elohim ellipsis traces back to Deuteronomy's thrust against local shrines: history-driven behind enunciative, nomistic change from Exodus; and the reality principle governing an isolated case in point holds even truer for a strategy. By itself, after all, a recoding does not so much initiate as implement in the discourse a change in the world. What macroplot novelties does the novel if-plot express, then? Where did it originate? How did the lifeborn seeds germinate into formal law-remaking? And why at this juncture and with respect to these "Hebrew" topics? The natural place to begin the quest for the antecedent link in the (hi)story is at the beginning, where the text greets us with an extension of the codeword from "Hebrew" to "Hebrewess." Of all the balances redressed in the generalizing process, that along the men/women axis is the most overt, yet also the most equivocal in its consequencesde-nomi-
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national, sociolegal, practical, evaluativehence most notable for its lack of surface motivation. The two motive clauses added in Deuteronomy 15:15, 18 lend the force of reason to the diametric limit-cases of evolution only, the persistent and the unprecedented in law. For those clauses expand upon the inherited main if-plot ("Don't begrudge him his liberation, since he has well earned it by his work and it will also earn you God's blessing") and upon the novel happy end of parting with gifts ("Remember your own slavery and redemption in Egypt"). The discourse of source having thereby manifested itself within the inset, as well as in the obligatory X-to-Y transformer, either provision finds its ground, either benefit its because. Nothing comparable surfaces to account for the in-between adjustments, though the middle range of updating is here less self-explanatory than either extreme, less univocal between reaffirmation and reform, indeed apparently less univalent between good and evil. Enslavement is bad, lifelong self-enslavement worse; release is good, release with largesse better yet. These values could speak for themselvesas in the precursor textmore than those that inform the changes left ungrounded. From addition to erasure, from ill-naming to ear-piercing to the editing out of marital rights, the parity now insistently drawn between the sexes turns out a mixed blessing. Here at least, against the crosscultural evolutionary hypothesis whereby Exodus marks an improvement on Nuzi and Deuteronomy/Jeremiah on Exodus, it is in reality the younger Biblical text that comes nearer to the severity of the agreements binding female Hab/piru. (Always with the difference, of course, that the unusual severity there reflected their unequal footing.) What, then, motivates the drive toward full equality in full view, and does it count as progressive or regressive? How to explain, how to emplot, how to genarrate, how to (re)evaluate, how to make sense of the change, in short? Beyond empty speculation about "advance," the only clues again lurk in the dynamics of the Bible's historical memory. In the Deuteronomist's (and Jeremiah's) quest for generality of enactment, commensurate with the original action's, this dynamism has already begun to suggest a two-level or two-phase answer to the puzzle of variance from the Covenant Code; and the answer makes sense of the normative as well as the purely nomistic aspect of change. The relegislation and the revaluation have their common origin in Deuteronomy's reorientation to the narrative of Hebrewness, along lines we explored. What's more, since the Deuteronomist (even if taken as ultimate recoder) never addresses the law to us straight but quotes Moses' address to Israel, the recoding assumes or undergoes a selfcontained figural emplotment. On the inset mimetic stage, it is the lawgiver himself who chooses to outgeneralize the earlier law in reorientation to things past. And the reorientation itself gets motivated in terms of his narrative hereand-now: a farewell speech is where one would appropriately both review antecedent
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events, complete with new disclosures, and reformulate antecedent ordinances for optimum understanding, applicability, solidarity, all at once. Legal generalization into unitype doubles as a means to ethnonational unity. If the rereading/retelling of the Hebrew past transmitted in the agonistic foundation narrative correlates with the reestablishment of Hebrew parities (sexual and otherwise) in the law, then it also implies a return to the native viewpoint at the time on Pharaoh's infamous subgrouping of the oppressed. The end put to such Pharaonism as might linger in the Covenant Code therefore vindicates the original positive norms. In this realignment with Exodus narrative, athwart Exodus law, what may appear "progressive" out of context and intertext signals a judgment that is retrogressive, though neither unprecedentedly nor unfavorably so. The retrogression is not unprecedented, in view of the Exodus Code's own retrospect on the founding event, slanted toward the better half of the group. Via typological ellipsis and emphasis, particularity and obliquity, it discriminated in favor of its heroines: all these forms of textual and temporal retrogression ("backbridging") to the intercultural drama ensured against any unbecoming sexual oppression within the culture. Only a bigot, however, would view the postExodus denial of the privilege as compounding temporal and allusive with sociolegal and normative regression, or for that matter, as a simple leveling down. Instead, the privilege shifts, in a way grows, together with the scale of the division most emphasized: from woman vs. man to "thy brother the Hebrew or the Hebrewess" vs. the alien, thus reinforcing the inner circle's unity for better or worse. Either law-phase undercuts afresh the metastereotype of the woman cast as the Other by self-centered ("phallocentric'') men: in Exodus, rather, she embodies the higher collective self, in Deuteronomy the normal mixed or lower self, and the law treats her according to her own selfrevelation in the narrative before it. The favor shown by the Covenant (double) Code to one subgroup is now evenly distributed among the whole people in newly evaluative recoding, as are both the liability and the antidote to selfinflicted eternal disfavor. In practical judgment, indeed, Jeremiah's God visits the equivalents of the plagues of Egypt on the Egyptian-like oppressors of "Hebrew and Hebrewess," sons and daughters undoubtedly included. What has become, though, of the one-time favorites' historic claim to special favor? Has the Deuteronomist's inclination to ultragenerality, shared and executed by the Law-speaker on the Jordan, driven the culture heroines out of his mind altogether? Or, what amounts to the same thing, if his memory is not selective here, maybe his teleology is, keeping (or, given the inherited Code and typology, even editing) out the past that goes against the new legal grain. Does his updating for even-handedness limit the range of operative bridges, dismantling those that would uphold and perpetuate the sexual difference celebrated in the two Exodus genres?
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On the contrary, I would argue, he remembers all too wellonly that his memory span exceeds his predecessor's or, in Mosaic continuity, his earlier self's. Necessarily so, because the retrospective mind (the law-speaker's vis-à-vis his inset audience, along with ours in the frame) now also encompasses the Wilderness trials, the forty years that have intervened between Sinai and TransJordan. The Deuteronomist reviews the people's history from a longer perspective (as Jeremiah will from the longest, just short of the exilic). Among other unhappy consequences, the vantage point establishes that the favor gained and enjoyed by women in history has since been lost in history, rather than lost upon the law. Poetic justice adjusts itself toward cross-sexual foregrounding, deterrence, retribution. Here, then, we modulate from one re-genarrating dynamics to another that concurs with it in timescale and explanatory power but not in modus operandi: from the younger law's rereading of the common foundational "Hebrew" narrative after forty years to the old law's overtaking and testing by the forty-year narrative sequel. On its own, the rereading does indeed modify the Code, informed by fresh bridges thrown to an otherwise frozen, everrevisitable past. For a (legal) culture to live, however, it must evolve by keeping not only in touch with the heritage from which it issued but also in step with the aftermath: it needs to reflect upon the one (so the master plot's variants imply) while itself reflecting the other. By their fruits, as well as by their origins, shall you know them. Accordingly, the disclosure of the Egyptian conflict in a new light meshes here with the developments that have newly transpired on stage between the Exodus and the Deuteronomy addressto joint balancing effect. In the interim, the heroic image of women as agents for freedom has been tarnished. Observe their change of role from protagonists who outshine their menfolk in braving Pharaoh to antagonists who turn on their deliverer, and on God himself, along with their menfolk. Observe also that the role-shift postdates the enunciation of the Exodus Code, because the earlier lapses into nostalgic retrospect (on the safety and fleshpots enjoyed under Pharaoh) implicate "the Sons of Israel" alone. Suggestively, the turning point coincides with the Golden Calf apostasy, where the women feature among the donors, by implication among the "dancers" and "sporters" as well (32:2, 6, 19). The breach in the record of glory never heals. Who among them, from Miriam down, has not echoed since the prototype of murmurers, "the Hebrew man" who challenged Moses to show his credentials for leadership and judgeship? By this yardstick, members of either sex have repeatedly backslid into the lowest precedent of Hebrewness, slave mentality and all, often in concert. Not only is Miriam dead (Numbers 20:1) but her memory long under a cloud for rebellionever since she incited (and at all events conspired with) Aaron to speak evil of Moses in the hope of diminishing his power
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to their gain (Numbers 12; would her resulting "seven days" of leprous quarantine "outside the camp"as shameful, according to God, as if "her father spat in her face"anticipate the "Hebrewess's" term of bondage outside ''Israel"?). The former manipulator of the enemy having risen against proper authorityironically, that vested in the "humble" brother for whose survival and welfare and possible elevation she manipulatedall she leaves behind is a negative, deterrent lesson: "Remember what the Lord thy God has done to Miriam" (Deuteronomy 24:9). Nor have her contemporaries or successors in the Wilderness once distinguished themselves from the murmuring multitude, not even in the nostalgia for Egypt. On several unforgettable occasions, the narrative highlights their complicity. Thus the nationwide pressing on Aaron of the ornaments whereby to make the Golden Calf, the alleged deliverer "from the land of Egypt" (Exodus 32:2-4); or the wives standing shoulder to shoulder with the scum of the rebels in the Korah affair (Numbers 16:27). Or consider again the light thrown behind time on Exodus's unidentified ereb rab ("mixed multitude"), and on the offstage promiscuity in Egypt of certain Hebrewesses earlier yet, by the intermediate scandal of the Blasphemer, "son of an Egyptian man . . . His mother's name was Shlomit, daughter of Dibri, of the Dan tribe" (Leviticus 24:10-11). After Sinai, then, fresh evidence for a counterdevelopment, or equi-development, accumulates from book to book. True, "both men and women" generously contributed to the tent of meeting as well (Exodus 35); yet this drives home the same parity in another tonality, as does Jeremiah's faceless mass, whose common race and vict-image overshadow their sexual branching. The value-laden typology of agents by sex, inconsistent in Exodus itself with the Bible's deep objection to character types, has proved short-lived. The objection is to typecasting God's creatures, foreign style, unless they have unmade their divine image and so their individual uniqueness, irreducible by nature to any corporate personality. Such reductive characterization oddly, if flatteringly, overtakes women in Exodus: the narrative depicts them as heroines, in contrast to the men, then the law institutionalizes and celebrates the subgrouping. That the female/male portraiture in Exodus jars against the respective extraBiblical (and all other "androcentrist") stereotypes does not yet harmonize its incongruity at the time with the Bible's own rule of character portrayal nor qualifies the anomaly for eternal fixture. Deuteronomy indeed both unfixes the contrast and suggests why it temporarily applied. Arisen with the threat to life in the international crisisbecause, we now realize, Eve is "the mother of all living" (Genesis 3:20), hence programmed for survivalfemale markedness under oppression fell into abeyance once the emergency and the happy end gave place to the trials of free nationhood. The type-difference now reverts from the psychocultural
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to the sheer biological axis, where it does properly belong throughout Scripture and whereon it has polarized men and women since Creation without detriment to their equal share in the variables and fluidities of human character. In the Garden, Eve would appear to drag Adam down with her; in the Wilderness, the leveling down seems to have proceeded the other way as a rule. Even there, however, the victory song in which "Miriam the prophetess, Aaron's sister" leads the women as or after Moses leads the men, then her inciting or partnering of Aaron against their chosen brother's leadership, go to show that all up-and-down movements are open, all alliances co-possible, all intersexual equivalences contingent. Never again will anything in excess of biology (or related nonelective features of the self, like age, height, looks, tribe affiliation) serve as a constant differential, a basis for wholesale subgrouping. The norm reestablishes itself: Each Biblical character is sui generis, a unique combination of universals and idiosyncrasies. His behavior is therefore referrable to no psychological (and with the exception of a few villains, no moral) charactertype: neither of the Israelite, nor of the Benjaminite, nor of the Woman, nor of the Deliverer, nor of the Prophet . . . nor even, coming down to heredity, of the Patriarch. The agents may have features in common but not clusters; and it is clustering that makes (stereo)types. (Poetics, 253, also 321-64) "Nor of the Woman" indeed, or not beyond the Exodus crisis. In this, at least, the people have achieved onenessnormalcy of sorts, as distinct from elect normativenessa growth reflected in the all-"Hebrew" Jordan provisions made to endure between their two fateful crossings en masse, into and out of the land. The redrafter's alignment with postSinai developments on narrative record, from event to character to attitude, thus undercuts again the sweeping statement that "the D code is not intended to be a more up-to-date version of M[ishpatim]" (Carmichael 1974:53, following Eissfeldt 1972:220-23). Wholly absent (because still nonexistent) in Exodus, or even in his own retrospect on it, the section of the bridge now added by the Deuteronomist in memoriam carries the traffic between the genres down to his terminal here-and-now on the Jordan. If no worse than the men unequal to the challenge of national freedom, the women are no longer any better in updated "Hebrew" perspective, and they reappear accordingly in the glare of slave law from Deuteronomy to Jeremiah. Candidates for the same double-edged label; beneficiaries of the same time-limit, the same parting gifts, the same divine wrath on masters who would emulate Pharaoh; vulnerable to the same branding, physical and ideological, if enamored of slavery. This also accords with the postExodus tendency to multiply the legal
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roles shared by women, e.g., the Ham-like sex offender's, down to bestiality (Leviticus 18:3, 23), the sorcerer's (20:27), the ritual outcast's (Numbers 5:1-4), the sin atoner's (5:5-10), the vow-maker's (Nazirite, 6:1-21, or otherwise, 30:2-16), the priestly offerings-recipient's (18:8ff.), the inheritor's (27:1-11, 36:1-12), the idolator's (Deuteronomy 13:7, 17:2, 5, 29:17), the parent's as defender (21:15-17) or destroyer (21:18-21), the transvestite's (22:5) or cult prostitute's (22:18), all following from their newly instituted membership in the covenant community and circle of communication. At the end of the road, you can hardly overlook the evidence to the effect that eligibility for the law's (indeed the entire Torah's) hearing and keeping no longer goes by sex, any more than does eligibility for embodying its dramatis personae. Concurrent with the alliance between the sexes throughout the intermediate Wilderness narrative, however, such membership is a postSinai leitmotif, not singularly Deuteronomic, as the critics would have it (Weinfeld 1972:291, Phillips 1984:56). The woman's new co-membership, alongside her co-foregrounding and co-accountability, therefore signals less than a revolution (or, narratively, a peripety) on the Jordan, because it falls into pattern with the inner evolutionary trajectory we have been charting. The Pentateuch's two generic components synchronize not only enactments and encodings but also movements: they evolve in step, cross lines, give and take linkages, plot a single diachrony for us to enchain. And this movement toward intersexual equality on the widest phylogenetic front answers to the genesis of bondage law (as a whole would to a part, a rule to an exemplar) even in its fine-grained semantic coding. The apparent leap will be seen to mark the culmination of a forty-year process once related to the Hebrew theme, via the key word 'br ("cross"), implicit in the spatial network of the Hebrewgram itself. The Book of Crossings (the aptest thematic title for Deuteronomy, to my mind) subsumes the one-time "Hebrewesses" under the community of, so to speak, double Crossersinto the ultimate, written covenant and the promised land. Here, significantly, the two communicators along the chain of transmission, the quoting and the quoted, once more reinforce each other's authority, not least by orchestrating the ethnica to which either is so sensitive. What the narrator generalizes about the inset participants in the opening words of the book's frame ("Moses" addressing "all Israel"), the Mosaic law-speaker himself specifies in roll-call style toward the end, finishing with a pun on "Hebrewness" ('br) as an entrance (''crossing") into the covenantal bond: You stand today all of you before the Lord your God, the heads of your tribes, your elders, your officers, all the men of Israel, your little ones, your wives . . . that you may enter into (le'obrekha) the covenant. (29:10-15)
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"Today," while emphasizing afresh the dramatic here-and-now, announces a fresh start, institutionalizes a change that has asserted itself over decades, with an eye to the life on the other side of the Jordan river. The same assorted audience will forever constitute "all Israel" in the public readings of the Torah, Moses goes on to stipulate, with another destereotyping wordplay on "Hebrewness" ('br), this time as Jordan-crossing: Assemble the people, men and women . . . that they may hear and that they may learn to fear the Lord your God . . . all the days that you live on the land which you are crossing (ob'rim) the Jordan to possess. (31:913) As with the two-valuedness of "Hebrews" at large, only more kinetically so, the punning metamorphosis from "Hebrewesses" (ibriyyot) to fellow river-and covenant-Crossers (ob'rot) is neither an unmotivated nor an unmixed blessing. For the advance carries with it both precedents and penalties for regress. If Moses now temporally regresses to the Exodus ordeal of Hebrewness in disclosure, then they have mentally regressed in the developments since to the pre-exodus, unIsraelite group-norm of Hebrewness under the yoke. One may even infer that it is their regression as agents in the fresh Wilderness happenings, toward the low common denominator, human and native, that prompted his reading afresh of what has gone before, in quest for a cause (e.g., the abeyance of the survival instinct) and to similar antitypological ("Hebrew or Hebrewess") effect. The latent macroplot chain would then run from development to disclosure, from behavioral through interpretive to codifying genesis in the represented world. Anyway, however the two motives for legal change are enchained together in the underground genarrative process, the two movements operationally converge on the finished legislative product. As the culture heroines have made themselves equal (again) to their menfolk in the course of history, for better or worse, so they reap the fruits in the evolution of the law after those testing forty years. But is it, strictly speaking, an evolution? As with Moses' psychodynamics, so with the nomo- and phylo-genesis: critics incline toward the neatness and optimism of progressive Bildung. Along with untold historians in all fields, they would order the data into some line of ascent, often by leaps and bounds. For the implied reader, or competent listener, however, the narrative and network woven by Scripture make it easier to go below the appearance of a revolutionary peripety than to tell the evolutionary from the devolutionary process. Even the need to choose between such terms, however natural-looking in our postDarwinian view, confuses the issue: more subtly than would a plain failure to get the values right (e.g., apropos of lifelong bondage) yet nonetheless importantly, because conceptually.
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The terms are biological metaphors, loaded down to their binarism, and so too natural for the intricacies of culturecertainly of a culture that subsumes nature under God's artifice and humanity's ideal lifestyle. As we traced it, in other words, the movement toward equality under slave law (with its numerous but less traceable counterparts after Exodus) does not exactly flatter latter-day preconceptions. Even if the two mappings of this development, the Biblical vs. the belated, look alike, the meanings fork out: the very anachronies (retrospects, prospects) executed and integrated along the Bible's grand chronology signify otherwise than anachronistic (counterhistorical) imports from an outside universe of discourse. The drift and the bottom line of the change registered are the same, the spirit and the norms, let alone the finesse, wide apart. Where a host of crossculturalists (comparatists, humanists, feminists, universalists, even diachronic jurists) may applaud a groundbreaking improvement of their own projection, the Deuteronomist generalizes a (re)judgment long in the making, one visited by the culture upon the self-made "Hebrewesses" for having shared in the throwbacks to the intercultural behavior patterns amidst Israel. It would be true to say both that his review of the past restores them to the all-too-human footing which the Exodus narrative modified against the Bible's characterology, and that it deprives them of the whole-hearted favor, if only the tact, shown by Exodus law; yet his memory of the wilderness simultaneously tips the balance of revaluation (as distinct from relegislation) on the negative side, for it proves them no longer worthy of any special concern. Visibility in Mishpatim law signifies no automatic compliment and advantage, nor does equality under the law thereafter. These two shibboleths of privilege, one attaching it to communicative focus, one to existential status, break down in turn under the ever-mobile rule of poetic justice. Well-defined in the abstract by its singular balancing thrust, it yet eludes attachment in the working to any single agent, act, counteract, arena, vector, form of equilibrium. The rule is special, the implications for art, life, and their traffic universal. From every viewpoint (Moses', God's, Scripture's) and along every axis (e.g., phylogenetic, sociolegal, temporal, normative) involved in the artistic image of diachrony, then, the ultimate equality accorded to "the Hebrewess" pulls two ways: a mixed blessing geared to a record where exceptionality mixes in time with common Hebrewness, glory with inglory, disclosure with development. Gain doubles as loss, advance as retreat, futurity as memory, updating as bridging anew. The unity of all these lies in the mixture and doubling, notably the ambivalent feeling: the rejudgment of heroines who have devolved into the half-and-half normalcy characteristic of humans since Creation (born in the image of God yet prey from youth to their heart's evil imagination, sufficient to have stood but free to fall)
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and transcendable by the elect themselves at irregular intervals. If such an intricate art of relations could fare worse than in the hands of traditional atomists, it is when subjected in the process to alien, ready-made value-schemes. Anachronism, wrenching the texts out of the overall and twin-coded (hi)story line, will only sentimentalize their drift in modernizing it the wrong way. The anachronist turns counterreader, unwitting at that, where the discourse wields all kinds of intergeneric anachronies for updating, on top of (re)bridging, along its own sequence. Always time- as well as culture-bound, modernity here also grows narrative-bound in the fullest possible sense. More generally, rather than alternating with each shift of generic key or dominant between legislation and narration, the two dynamics forward a single narrative by virtue of their common "Hebrew"-laden narrativity. Once law assumes the form of law-speaking cum law-telling, it becomes an event like any other: sequenced, enchainable, history-like, whether or not historical, as able to produce as to undergo or mirror developments in the worldnothing less than the wholesale retribution on Jerusalem. And the metamorphoses of the sexual issue, from Exodus's opening appearance of "Hebrewesses" to Jeremiah's finale, beautifully show how narrative is narrative in any guise. Across all diversity of discourse kind, modality, material, manner, genarration, early-and-late along the grand chronology tightens into cause-and-effect in the grand "Hebrew" plot. Bidirectional Motivation Conversely, all this disables the revisionist's quest for the evolutionary as well as the originary prehistory of the law. The stronger, rounder, deeper, grander the synthesis, the less feasible its other-minded analysis into what "truly" happened (if it did indeed happen otherwise than given, both later and naturalistically). The truth-claim plotted is to the possible truth much as "form" to "substance" in Henry James's ideal of art: "They are separate before the fact, but the sacrament of execution indissolubly marries them, and the marriage . . . has only to be a 'true' one for the scandal of a breach not to show. The thing 'done' artistically is a fusion, or it has not been donein which case of course the artist may be, and all too deservedly, pelted with any fragment of his botch the critic shall choose to pick up'' (1962:115-16). Now that the discourse of source has been charted through two Codes and the entire Pentateuch, we can appreciate how far skepticism about its veridicality is from reconstituting any likely source of discourse. Even the fact that the givens have multiplied in the underground process, beyond anything available to traditional source analysis, hardly narrows the gulf. They rather integrate, as bridges and/or updates, disclosures
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and/or developments, with the ongoing Hebrew macroplot. The fresh evidencethe only hope for ever breaking out of the vicious circle that has trapped every attempt at decompositionworsens the hostile critics' predicament in tightening the Scriptural line of march, and so of defense. For example, try to cross-examine the data where they have most accumulated, in the recoder's genarrative. His newly bridged prooftexts of Hebrewness under the yoke, in Egypt and since, go to explain the new thrust of his own text, but are they its cause or its cover? Do they inspire the change of emphasis or serve to justify it a posteriori, maybe with a view to disguising the "real" evolutionary trajectory? And if furnished a posteriori, what do they in reality postdatea genuine Mosaic law-variant, say, or a first-millennium novelty dissimulated as the Lawgiver's own to compound pseudepigraphic with phylogenetic authority? A more or less belated cover-up is easy to suspect but hard to uncover, let alone recover, for the precedent and the precept both align and mirror each other (as did their Exodus counterparts) internally, and internally alone. Two generic enactments of a unique master plot in a unique canonical time and text and aftermath, they leave no opening for an order, much less a story of genesis other than the traceable, if implicit, precedent-to-precept drama: not just from life (or even bondage life) to law, but from Genesis-Exodus life, via Exodus law, then Wilderness life, to Deuteronomy law, all enacted in due sequence and similitude along the grand chronology, all members of the narrative and network of Hebrewness. So the image of the threefold (or, if you count Jeremiah, fourfold) chain unrolls on its own premises for us to reconstruct in its internal dynamism: always from the narrative to law and, after Exodus, always passing through intermediate law and narrative, headed by the Exodus Code itself. Failing any outside purchase, such as the Hab/piru link, it would be mere romancing to begin elsewhere (e.g., with the Nuzi contract in lieu of the foundational narrative) and proceed otherwise (e.g., to a series of Biblical reforms, including reorientation toward the ethnic group). Nor has any outside counterevidence survived from the Bible's world itself. In fact, unicultural diachronic alternatives have even less to go on than the crosscultural: nothing but speculations about the life, e.g., the upsurge of humanism already discussed, and/or about the literature, e.g., the order of precedence between genres, equally arbitrary at best. For example, did the narrative precede the law in the real source-world (according to Wellhausen's classic documentary theory [1957], oddly matched by the internalist Carmichael [1985]), or did the law precede the narrative (as held by, say, Carmichael's teacher, Daube [1969], himself collocated with innumerable fictionalizers of the Lawgiver), or did one somehow precede the other (in the "literary" approach of Damrosch [1987:35])? 49 Most unicultural diachronies even ignore altogether the Exodus narrative, in favor
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not of Nuzi but of some thin conjectural tale of what happened to slave law within the Israelite orbit. To be sure, these extrinsic approaches, orders, links, phases, causes, effects infinitely diverge and combine. None of the products, though, recommends itself in fact or in reason, by its lifelike or literary coherence: none offers a history of the genesis qualified to displace the manifest, still less the incomparably richer underlying ("whole-truth") historiography, the enterprise of successive co-eternities and all. Further, the one point of near-universal agreementthat Exodus indeed arose before Deuteronomyhelps to secure the entire represented process against assault, especially against inversion, and from within, too. With the second and the third links fixed as Codes along the Pentateuchal threefold chain of Hebrewness, even on the external approach, their bridging back to the narrative origin gains in both continuity and individuality, hence in overall likelihood. The mainspring, the traditionalism, the revisionism, all fall into line, as ordered, to promote the history-likeness of the dramatized evolution. Take only the Deuteronomist's innovative "generalizing" return to the united front that Israel's spokesmen presented to the oppressor intent on disunity. Beyond the overt yet sweeping retrospect on Egypt ("thou shalt remember"), the allusion to the anti-divisive prooftexts establishes itself mainly by virtue of their accord with the younger as against the older law-text. The perfect accord, in turn, renders the cross-reference all the more indissoluble, and its working bidirectional, in the finished synthesis. Given this intergeneric mirroring both ways, the two mirrors would never lend themselves to relative sequencingexcept that the canon does sequence them, with an authority unshakable on the evidence to this day. Apart from its built-in superhuman truth-claim, the narrative-to-law, Egypt-to-Jordan ordering may well reflect the truth in essentials: a legislator working (and if necessary, reworking) after his nation's formative tradition also makes perfect human sense. Characteristically, the poetics covers the tracks of real-life, as distinct from storied, genesisassuming that they are distinct in the first instance, which they needn't be. Recall their enacted smallscale coincidence in the Blasphemer episode, moving not only straight but with open and plausible causality from life to law. But, for this very reason, neither does the choice of imaged temporal direction signify much outside the poetic image. Even if you wilfully choose to read against the given arrow of timefor example, on the surmise that law, or this law, must precede narrativeyou will never break through to the real world: the inverted order, the elements, their cross reference, and their Hebrew framework still operate, yielding a sense doubtless variant from the received yet always Bible-centered. The poetic circle is unbreakable. Similarly with the nicer and more fruitful issue of the book's own implicit genetic priorities. Did Deuteronomy's (if you like, even Moses')
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reinterpretation of the Egyptian ordeal inspire its recodification, or did the will or need to recodify launch a quest for the prooftexts that have been ignored, marginalized, etc., by the Exodus Code? Which Deuteronomic force generated which? The explanatory teleo-logic works either way, from bridging anew to updating or vice versaonly the cause and the effect change places. It is as though the two analogues, the legal and the historical responses to bondage, have happily met each other, so that the two causative directions may interchange, or alternate, to a single effect within a single field of force. Contrast the nexus between the "written" and the "oral" Torah in post-Biblical, Rabbinic literature: does the inference from the Bible (as the source cited with chapter and verse, for a change) give rise or lend color to the halakha? The issue of priority resurges in this nominal, if oral, sequel to Scripture. Yet the corpus, especially the joint Torah, makes a far less self-contained and unified whole. Regarding the same genetic question, therefore, the answer no longer invariably, or equally, or persuasively, runs both waysfrom (written) source to (oral) law and vice versa. Where it does so run, in Scripture's own macronarrative, the happy integrity amid bidirectionality corresponds to the two-way flow of dynamism between event and character in a well-knit plot. These just as inextricably generate each other in, say, Ruth or Jane Austen's Emma. The correspondence also suggests how to explore the dynamics of our finished whole without prejudice to its bidirectionality. Either cause/effect interlinkage falls under the term "motivation," which I have used throughout exactly due to its neutrality between the two storied constructs of genesis (Stern-berg 1983b): between life as origin (seminal, transgeneric pre-text) and as disguise or rationale after the event (antedated generic pretext) for the dynamics of legal tradition. From Pentateuch Codes to Jeremian Coda Centuries after, Jeremiah closes the series, and the entire Hebrew macroplot, by appeal to the (d)evolutionary rationale that has always matched legal with national genesis. The principle of retribution now continues on the land, across the Jordan, with fresh novelties. Besides the spacetime, much else changes in its operation relative to earlier items of the law-trio: virtually everything but the interiorized, all-Hebrew scene and the judgment by whether the reenactment proceeds the fraternal or the foreign way, signifies the plus or the minus values of Hebrewness. As always, of course, poetic justice works back in time and text to suit the measure (favorable, unfavorable, up-, down-, co-grading) taken now to the merit assigned then; and across genres, too. The backworking, though,
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no longer goes from the law to the narrative, possibly via midposed law, as in the two Codesor, if we reckon with the Deuteronomic quote, not primarily. (That legalism is itself emplotted within the overall chain of retribution.) The Jeremiah narrative instead draws upon, and together, all the thematic antecedents canonized. It harks back to the law, to Pentateuch history, to its own outset and turns and counterturns: to every Hebrew on record since Abram, in short, as befits a last test and a final collective judgment. The collectivity forms another variant, now in the scope of application (and, by retroactive matching, in the pronominal style of the legislation). The Exodus double coding referred its bondage types to narrated bond-persons and bondgroups, indiscriminately, all typified in the singular vis-à-vis the owner himself ("If thou buyest a Hebrew slave . . . If a man sells his daughter . . ."). Deuteronomy generalized them into a single type ("Hebrew or Hebrewess sold to thee") after the conflict between nation and nation. Jeremiah, faced with a nationwide rupture at home, brings on whole parties in every mode of (re)enactment, from the historical to the statutory and from the agentive to the communicative. Mass energy, not unlike the chemical law of mass action, runs through them all. As ever, again, the retributive logic cuts both ways, and with new flexibility. The Mishpatim polarized the sexes within the bounds of the circle, distributing favor (and, inversely, foreground) according to their Egyptian performance. The Jordan Code then reaffirmed the two-edged logic by taking away the special treatment in the light of intermediate performance added to redisclosure. Jeremiah's twisted tale now follows in little the Pentateuch's sequencing of the extremes, from positive to negative, but with a fourfold escalation, rendered all the more affective in small compass. The favor-to-disfavor twist wrought upon the cast ascends from manner to matter, from imaging to life and death questions, from individual or typal to national range, and from iffy possible world to emplotment before our eyes on the stage of history. A massive peripeteia indeed. This surprise dynamics, already covered in my introduction, pivots on deserts. When the Judaeans appear to observe the law, albeit with an ad hoc adjustment in time and scale, they immediately gain the hoped-for and wondrous collective rewardthe lifting of the Babylonian siege. Their treachery once disclosed, however, the principle of retribution shows its darker face to the covenant-breakers of Judah. The threat implicit in Deuteronomy's backward glances, especially at the Egyptians without and the womenfolk within, yet still overlaid by positive appeals ("Thou shalt remember that thou weft a slave in the land of Egypt") and promised manna ("The Lord thy God will bless thee") for compliance, rises in Jeremiah to the surface of the quoted utterance about the "Hebrews" and the framing discourse as a whole. Instead of a call for remembrance, there
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erupts a calling to account for disobedience; and the scenario-by-precedent, buried earlier in the two-edged implications and the hypothetical mood of the law, realizes itself in the form of narrative proper at a decisive historical juncture, from the siege to the fall of Jerusalem (588-587 B.C.) and its aftermath. By a further turn of the screw, the intertextual analogy to the past grows yet closer (in specificity, linearity, polarity) and more odious than ever, if still hidden, because the narrative artfully details how the Judaeans reenacted the Egyptian plot, against their own side, all the way from crime to retribution. So Jeremiah on the latter-day Hebrews not only deploys afresh but considerably enlarges the allusive repertoire. A double-keyed tale with a nomistic inset as well as mainspringshort of dominanceit orchestrates all the possible intertextual combinations of the two genres: law variously (e.g., silently or thunderingly) and often variantly harks back to earlier law, law to narrative, narrative to law, narrative to narrative. As the generic reach widens, so does the temporal. At their most adjacent, the cross-references shrink from Exodus's intrabook and Deuteronomy's interPentateuchal span to one chapter. Conversely with the grand Call-to-Calamity macrotale packed into that chapter. The distance from the original occasions of happening and law-speaking has never been longer; their tracing to their own "Hebrew" origins, never more far-flung; the pressure for sheer bridging, without reformatory updating, never so urgent. For this reason, the surface explication of the past-present-future dynamics likewise grows in extent and sharpness and authority, parallel to the elaborate web of implication. Even memory aside, Jeremiah cannot afford to dispense with either extreme of rhetorical appeal. For the leap of the narrative function to dominanceon behalf of the abused and fallen legislative mate, so to speak, but also at its expenserequires an equally heightened art of persuasion. That art is unprecedented in no longer addressing itself to the characters, who have proved immovable and understand brute force only, but to us readers; in motivating less the heavenly ordinance than the boomerang effect on human noncompliance; and therefore also in shifting from a dissuasive to a persuasive goal. The one rhetoric having failed, the other takes over, literally with a vengeance. Considering the flagrant breach of the law in the narrated world and its punishment with the virtual end of that world, the discourse would bring any available measure to bear upon the workings of retribution: upon justifying the way of God to Israel by pulling together the threads of her old-new unIsrael-like ways to the unfortunate within her. What Exodus launched in two forms of "Hebrew" parlance and Deuteronomy reformed by experience, Jeremiah must show to have suffered the ultimate betrayal. Fraternal enslavement having been ranked next to death throughout the Pentateuch's network and narrative, its compounding with cynical violence
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is now punished by deaththat legislated for the kidnapper and spared Joseph's all-but-fratricidal yet thereafter repentant brothers-enslavers. It's either a covenant founded on the nation's birth ("When I brought them out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slaves") or a catastrophe amounting to the nation's death ("sword, pestilence, famine," then exile) and undoing the process in reverse. Among the elements that go into the rhetoric of this climactic bicultural stigmatizing, not a few (overt or oblique, distinctive or shared with the Pentateuch) have by now sufficiently come out. Thus the twisted telling, with its brandnew shock value, and the manifold adaptation of the Deuteronomist's two-level idiom and strategy, themselves pioneered by Exodus legaliterature. What remains to focus now is the cross between the one's peculiar local effect and the other's long-distance yet essentially inherited maneuvers, as between novelty and traditionality in general. Even concerning the Hebrew/Hamite master plot, I will argue, Jeremiah dramatizes its own version of the antecedents, tailored or retailored from minutiae upward to suit its unique position and purpose at the end of the road. If the Pentateuch bondage enactment (like the Moses psychodrama earlier or the Samuel trio after) diagnoses and eventually contains the ethnocultural Hamite Other within the self, then the Jeremiah finale reveals a self that has become this Other: a self-translation in excess of the worst Hebrewing tradition. Not even at his lowest, e.g., Moses' challenger and the pro-Philistine camp, or at his lowest in the downgrader's eyes, has any Israelite sunk to the nadir of Hamiteness before. First, as indicated by the sudden rifeness of plural forms ("every man . . . they . . . you . . . slaves and bondwomen"), the sin against the "Hebrew" in Jeremiah is no longer a matter of individual but of collective responsibility, borne by "the king . . . all the nobles and all the people." It is to highlight this throwback to the ancient all-Egyptian conspiracy (the marked they's of Exodus 1:11-14) that God even starts by pluralizing in (mis)quotation the language of the law: After the set term, "you [not 'thou,' as in both the Exodus and the Deuteronomy Codes] shall send out every man his Hebrew brother.'' The deviation from the original in the addressee's grammatical number (like that from casuistic to apodictic, more binding style) is accordant with the old-new addresser's line of attack, because it promotes yet another intertext: a communicative updating, via rebridging and redisclosure, in tune with the developments since the Wilderness age. Across two law-variants as well as across ethnicities, not to mention books and centuries, the final narrative at law-quoting revisits the foundation story to encode a continuity hitherto at most individualized short of generality: the lawless enslavers of the "Hebrew" are all one, a group apart from the enslaved (even, to an extent, from the Emancipator's self-enslaving antagonists). Too dark for either Pentateuchal attempt at legal deterrence,
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the bridge via renumbering fits the crime of nonobservance. From among the available intergroup data, what the possible world may leave uncodified in Israelunimagined because unimaginablethe actual world brings to pass, with Jerusalem for stage. This is also why God charges them with having "profaned my name": quite literally so (if you recall the ado made about naming in Exodus) because they have in effect demoted "the Lord, the God of Israel," his elect as well-defined and singular as himself, to "God of the Hebrews'' again. The Name taken in vain has devolved back into the foreignism that Pharaoh would approve. Worst of all, on top of the odium incurred since Egyptian times by the enslavement of "Hebrews" (affectively glossed as "Jews . . . brothers . . . neighbors") comes the opportunism of the enslavers. In immediate historical context, set up one verse ahead, they enter into covenant to unloose fellow "Hebrews" just when (and, by implication, because) "the army of the king of Babylon was fighting against Jerusalem" (34:7). Correspondingly, the time phrase "afterward" introduces and motivates their relapse by reference to the (temporary) withdrawal of the Babylonians at the approach of none other than Pharaoh's army (37:5-10; cf. also the opportunistic self-enslaving "Hebrews" in the Philistine wars, by which analogy the trait attaches to the pattern of stigmatizing discourse, whether to the name-bearer there or to his abuser here). Working both ways in the action, this causal linkage of politics and ethics tells all the more heavily against the Judaean agents. It also makes deeper sense than may appear, because if the surface historical plot relates Judah to Egypt as allies vis-à-vis Babylon, the allusive crosshistorical "Hebrew" plot further exposes them as analogues in opposition to the God of Israel. The granting of liberty under pressure followed by backsliding in, or under the illusion of, relief harks back to the Egyptian change of mind after the exodus: "What is this we have done, that we have let Israel go from serving us?" (Exodus 14:5). Judah, besides politically turning to Egypt, has morally turned into Egypt. No wonder such birds of a feather flock (and ultimately fall) together. To reload their offense from within, the Judaeans-turned-Hamites double as the most criminal natives of ancient timesthe gang responsible for the first "Hebrew slave" in the Bible's history and vulnerable to the law's extreme penalty, as if they actually brought upon him the death commuted, for "profit," to servitude in exile. This logic has already been adumbrated (double casting and all) in Deuteronomy's association of "brothers" with "sell"; but it now closes a peculiarly Jeremian circle by tying last and first together. In the circling, it also generates a rich subtextual plot of fraternal villainy that runs beyond Jeremiah 34 to the end of the book. Here, the national sons of Israel (present-day Judaeans) duplicate the role of the familial sons of Israel (led by the eponymous Judah); and accordingly Jeremiah replays Joseph to their collective villain.
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Following his oracles (38:1-3), as unwelcome to the national group as the youth's dreams were to the brothers, and again met with a suspicion of unloyalty to boot (37:12-14), the prophet is likewise first threatened with summary execution (38:4), then "cast into the pit . . . no water in it" (38:6), then "drawn up . . . and pulled out" (38:7-13), but again hardly into a life of ease and freedom. (Compare Genesis 37:2, 5-11, 18-19, 24, 28.) Jeremiah's rescuer from the pit, ''Ebed-melekh the Cushite, a eunuch, who was in the king's house" (38:7), concentrates a whole set of features and associations that advance the underground plot in line with the Joseph ordeal, all the way to the Egyptian court. En route, they also glance at the story of his counterpart, Moses, both object and leader of deliverance from Egypt's victimage. Assimilated to Judaea, solidary beyond the call of duty, Ebed-melekh is a brother of sorts. A "Cushite," and so a Hamite (Genesis 10:6, "Cush" immediately preceding "Egypt"), he breaks the stereotype of group antithesis both ways: the oppressor turned deliverer of his ethnocultural antitype, perhaps because himself in service, now underlines the incongruity of the oppressed turned fraternal oppressors. A thorough role-inversion, if not of the Hebrewgram, then of the originary Hebrew ill-fortune evoked. (His untypicality thereby rhymes with antecedent breaches of the stereotype: Potiphar who avoids Hebrew-calling but incarcerates Joseph, then the unidentified midwives and the unfilial Princess who save Hebrew lives, notably that of Moses, Jeremiah's prophetic exemplar. If Amos's God rhetorically asks, "Are you not like the Sons of Cush to me, O Sons of Israel?" [9:7], then this son's behavior redraws the equation from the other end and implies a still less flattering answer.) In "Cushite" perspective, again, the link grows an ethnogeographical edge. The outsider putting the insiders to shame ties up with both Egypt (the Nile Valley in fact) and Midian, hence also with the two heroes of the emigration-to-liberation plot: Joseph, his life saved by the Midianites/Ishmaelites at the cost of his liberty in Egypt (Genesis 37:25-28, 36, 39:1), and Moses, who took "a Cushite wife" during his sojourn in Midian (Exodus 2:15ff., Numbers 12:1). "A eunuch, who was in the king's house," he next looks back to "Potiphar, a eunuch of Pharaoh" (Exodus 37:36, 39:1). A friend at court, he is akin to another royal servant who intervened with his master on behalf of a clairvoyant "Hebrew" thrown into jail by powerful enemies (40:12-14). And just as he himself embodies, so his very name ("King's Slave," whereby Zedekiah = Pharaoh) literalizes, the idea of slavery. By the same backplotting logic, to do duty for Joseph's incarceration in Egypt, Jeremiah's "pit" (bor) again alternates with "prison" (37:4, 15-16, 18, 38:6-13; cf. Genesis 39:20, 40:15, 41:10, 14); and even his reprieve amounts to suffering a less mortal form of confinement, in "the court of the guard" (38:14-28). The royal audience (foreshadowed by Joseph's at
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the corresponding phase, Genesis 41) duly ensues as well; but this time it is held in deep secrecy and, alas, without producing any real benefit to either side. In face of national emergency, where starvation prominently figures afresh, Zedekiah shows none of the Genesis Pharaoh's faith and foresight and even control over his ministers, so that Jeremiah remains under arrest. (A possible doubling of Israel, this, under the oppressive Pharaoh whom Moses fruitlessly interviews.) Release comes only through the agency of a wiser king, a Shemite for a change, not for nothing an enemy of Egypt as well as of her Judaean ally-and-analogue. 50 It takes an opponent of the antitype, with its imitations at home, to appreciate a man of God at his true worth (39:11-40:5). Even prior to the counteraction, the double coding thus intersperses more than the selected allusive touches of Pentateuch law. The network plots a narrative below the narrative, and the most consecutive, if not the thickest, to date. For this retelling of the Hebrewgram's master tale so orchestrates the two dramatic versionsthe individual and the national paradigm case, the forced "descent" to Egypt through enslavement and the free "ascent"as to align them into a third. The narrative dominant puts a premium on running multilevel narrativity. Under the constraints imposed by history (let alone prophecy) on the formal record of ongoing events, unique and irreversible, the subtext impressively manages to give a sense of ancient intercultural history repeating itself turn by turn at home, with all differences for the worse. In terms of this hidden plot devised as a running commentary on Judah's last year, therefore, the Judaeans assume the villain's part on either side of the "Hebrew" drama. They play both latter-day brothers guilty of violating the bond of brotherhood vis-à-vis an individual sold into slavery and latter-day Egyptians in breach of national covenant, down to opportunism in liberation and enslavement. Having reenacted the manifold crime, they are visited with the appropriate divine retribution: You have not obeyed me by proclaiming liberty, every man to his brother and every man to his neighbor; behold, I proclaim to you liberty (the Lord's word) to the sword, to pestilence, and to famine. As if the specifics of the impending overthrow were not enough, they encode a further ominous prospect by way of long retrospectso long as to call to mind the antagonist's treatment in the struggle for Israelite liberty and nationhood. Only, the countermovement now turns inward, with the antagonist, to break the nation made then. In this tit-for-tat doom, the "tat" follows to the bitter end the logic of the hidden as well as of the overt scenario launched by the "tit." Hidden, I say, not merely because the allusion to the Plagues and with it to the
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overall Egyptian precedentsince cited, then restaged, on the Philistine frontoccurs in the middle ("pestilence") of the three-item list of disasters ahead. The list itself appears to be a conventional catalogue of evils suffered by the besieged and the vanquished, or, in Biblical parlance, figures of heavenly wrath. Except that all three items gain a new lease on life here in rhyming back to their very first co-occurrence: another of the shocking chiasms that span Israel's history between Exodus and Exile. I have already observed that the thematic opposites, having proved at large birds of a feather in the social and international arena, eventually fall together. That they do so shows again how Jeremiah's law-tale in turn coordinates its reenactment with its own rereading of the formative master plot. (More exactly, re-enactment with re-reading, since the ultimate inheritor no more toes the line of Deuteronomy's Hebrew Code or Hebrewgrammatic codeas already evidenced by the plural renumbering of the addressee, etc.than the Deuteronomist will Mishpatim's.) Let the people departMoses concluded his appeal to Pharaoh in the name of "the God of the Hebrews""lest he strike us with the pestilence or with the sword" (Exodus 5:3). At the time, the "us'' in danger was left hovering between the speaking "Hebrews" and the addressed Egyptians. Exclusive (we, not you) or inclusive (both we and you) reference? Or, in terms of speech act, entreaty or threat? Now, in looping back to this first occurrence of "pestilence or sword," via the striker himself, Jeremiah reinterprets and redirects the phrase into multiple, multiphase application. In the event, he reminds us, neither of the scenarios foretold by the pronominal references materialized, because Egypt (the then "you") alone suffered in the Plagues the consequences of her obduracy. Yet, the former Hebrew slaves having now turned enslavers of Hebrews"knowing" neither Joseph nor Godboth the original threatening references come true in sequence: "pestilence and sword and famine" overtake the Judaeans addressed in Jerusalem, then the emigrant survivors in Egypt along with their local ally. The same logic of retribution decimates all Egyptians, ancient and contemporary, born and self-made in the image of polar otherness attached to the vict-image. If anything, those evils fall upon the Judaeans several times over, beyond and below what meets the eye: they reap the fruits of their wrongdoing in all the plots where they have assumed the wrong role (fraternal, national, international oppressor) vis-à-vis "Hebrew" bondage. Leaving aside the manifestations of "sword . . . pestilence . . . famine" during and after the siege, I will briefly trace in narrative order the more secret threads of poetic justice by compound long-range analogy. First, like Egypt pursuing Israel with a view to repossession, Judah is wiped out. The usual fortunes of war? The fate awaiting defeated rebels? Not quite, since the Babylonians unwittingly carry out the judgment pro-
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nounced by a still mightier lord on his rebels, for sins ideo-legal rather than political and as such unknown among the nations. Judah has in fact undone his Abram-old revolution, her distinctive heritage and covenant. Their affair being a law to itself, so are the workings of retributive justice as implemented through the victor. Significantly, instant catastrophe befalls those (and only those) implicated in the crime against "Hebrew" slaves. The king is blinded, the aristocracy liquidated, the rest deported to the region where the Hebrews sprang ("crossed") from and their Hamite enemies have always wished them backAcross the Riverwith the notable exception of "the poor people who owned nothing," least of all owned fellow Judaeans (39:5-10). Natural objects rather than unnatural perpetrators of enslavement, these have-nots do not just retain but probably regain their individual liberty (as, in another sense, does the prophet). For good measure, they even receive from the conqueror "vineyard and field . . . wine and summer fruit and oil" (39:10, 40:10), as if to actualize at last the parting gifts assigned by Deuteronomy to the freed Hebrew in memory of the Exodus. You would think it was the Babylonian royal house who inherited the Deuteronomist's ordinance that every king should henceforth study his copy of the mishneh torah "all the days of his life, that he may learn to fear the Lord his God, to keep all the words'' (17:18-19). Yet God's doom, uttered against "all the people of the land" so as "to make the cities of Judah a desolation without inhabitant" (34:19, 22), finally overtakes "the remnant of Judah," too, complete with ex-Hebrews this time, and by their own misdoing again. After the murder of Gedaliah, "all the people from the small to the great" leave in a body for Egypt, unalive to the symbolism of anti-Crossing, unmindful of Deuteronomy's veto (17:16, 28:68) on the reversal of the ascent from there, unmoved by the prophet's stern dissuasion, and forcing him to join the inverted Exodus. So the ancestral past reenacts itself once more, with still grimmer changes than before. Jeremiah, according to the action logic of his Joseph role, comes to be "stolen out of the land of the Hebrews" and apparently buried in Egypt: the start and the finish of his analogue's career abroadminus the bones destined for homecominground out the secret interplot centered in the God-chosen loner. His antagonists descend into Egypt "to sojourn there" from fear of "famine," like the brothers, as well as of "the sword" (42:14 ff.). The emplotment of the allusion to Genesis is complete. 51 Except that the new emigrants fully belong there, in the historic slave camp from which their people have already been liberated by God, only to reperpetuate slavery among themselves. Having turned toward and into Egypt, Judah may as well literally return to Egypt. The return of the oppressed become fellow oppressors in the mass doubles, psychogenetically, as the return of the repressed on the widest scale: the victory of Moses' challenger, of Moses' own temporary upsurge of nostalgia abroad, of the fleshpots con-
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jured up in the wilderness, of the descent from heroism to normalcy among women, of the impulse acknowledged amid deterrence in the provision for lifelong servitude, of the outgroup reabsorbed into Saul's Israel after playing the Hebrew to the enemy during the war of independence on the land. With nothing left to choose between the elect and the diselect par excellence, not even whereabouts, the trial by in-group freedom under God has miscarried beyond salvaging. The return to and of otherness in such force marks the point of no return (as the original Jacobite emigration did the prelude) to the vision of holy nationhood. Or, for that matter, to the covenanted arena. In playback, therefore, it is also fitting that the action should bar counteraction. The covenant-violating re-turners are destined to share all the miseries of anti-covenantal Egypt, the "pestilence" again included, so that they "shall have no remnant or survivor" (42:17, 44:14; contrast the ''great survival" ensured by God through Joseph in Genesis 45:7) and never "return to the land of Judah" (44:14, 28, 42:18). The bones of the seer himself, a vocal anti-Egyptian minority of one throughout life, will apparently never find peace in re-crossing. A clean sweep. If those who forget their past are condemned to repeat itas Santayana once said, in keeping with the Bible, over against the preachers of mass amnesiathen God is free to determine, inter alia, the limits of their repetition: here, between whole and truncated master plotting. Those who opted for Egypt to the last certainly experience the shorter version's direness, the one-way "descent" in every meaning of the figure. National history has come full circle to its lowest point, but this time with no happy end in sight, not so much as a future. Expatriation, for once retributive instead of redemptive, transpires without any prospect of Exodus. At least not from the Hamite land of bondage, ancient and recent, but from the North, from across the Euphrates, whence Abra(ha)m was called to Canaan and into first "Hebrew" nomination. Out of the North, Shemland, good as well as the evil foretold to the youthful Jeremiah (1:13ff.) did break forth, and shall again. There, where it all started, national history will re-start in the fullness of time, the elect will recross under a new title and dispensation; but my present story must end here, with the "Hebrews" breathing their last.
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Notes Chapter 1 1. Indeed, Paul, speaking to the Roman tribune in Jerusalem and then to the people "in the Hebrew tongue," calls himself "Jew" as well (Acts 21:37-22:3). 2. In Mekilta de-Rabbi Ishmael (ed. Lauterbach 1949:III, 4), though the Rabbis affirm the Israeliteness of the law's "Hebrew slave," they go so far as to declare that the Bible itself does not quite resolve the matter of group identity. It has left us a "clue" or "sign'' (zekher), short of "proof" (re'ayah), namely, the verses "The God of the Hebrews has chanced upon us" and "The fugitive came and told Abram the Hebrew." See also note 16 below. 3. Hence the extremist proposal to fuse the two equations. For example, "The Habiru and the 'Ibrîm were identical. . . . We are not of course limiting 'Ibrî, 'Ibrîm to the small section of the Hebrew race that went down to Egypt and figure in the Old Testament, but take the word in its wide sense as denoting all the Hebrew clans, 'the children of Eber,' Genesis x.21" (Jack 1940:97-98; cf. Olmstead 1965:196, Wiseman 1973:xviii). A more recent variant would further historicize these equations by appeal to the discoveries at Ebla, e.g., "the third and greatest of Ebla's kings was called Ebrum or Ebrium, akin to Eber, who was reputed to have been one of Abraham's ancestors" (Grant 1984:11, also Hallo 1991:43; contrast the anti-Hab/piru turn given to this homonymy in Rainey 1980:251, or its flat dismissal in Loretz 1984:190-92, 239). 4. A halfway measure consists in declaring the exact affiliation sometimes resolvable and sometimes not (e.g., Lemche 1979 passim), or even sometimes relevant, sometimes irrelevant to the text's own intention. Unlike both Deuteronomy and Jeremiah, for example, "the early law of Exodus 21 does not state explicitly that the 'Hebrew' slave is necessarily an Israelitethe whole question is in fact omitted" to highlight the temporariness of his slavery (de Vaux 1978:I, 212; even more extreme, to the point of omitting the designation along with the question, is Jackson 1988:93). But if "Hebrew" means "temporary" in Exodus law, then its coming to mean "Israelite" in the postExodus versions entails an in-between strategic as well as semantic shift toward nationalism. To declare the question irrelevant to part of the occurrences is to break the consistency of the whole on no evidence at all: a typical price (we shall find) of dividing Scripture against itself. 5. The catchall of "mythology" rivals "fiction" in the hands of dismissive binary typologists, sometimes to even odder effect. For example, "as soon as one tells about a god," which the Bible all too often does, "one is dealing with the realm of myth" (Ahlström 1991:23n. 12): that the "god" in question peculiarly features as Lord of and in history, or that the tale communicates under the history-telling contract within its culture, would appear too trivial to make any difference, still less to reflect on the analyst's circular historiosophy itself. Framing the binarism in more professional language (as in the anthropological approach of Leach and Aycock 1983:7-32) will not save it from the misorientation toward some world
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and worldview judged, indeed essentially prejudged to be true, rather than toward the discourse enacting its truth-claim about the world. Among other results, note the circularity of "a myth is true for those who believe in it," the generic category mistake of taking "all the personalities of biblical narrative . . . as wholly fictional," and the denarrativizing of that "narrative" in "I treat the entire text as synchronic . . . there is no development," for in the stories of history alone ''one thing happens after another" (ibid.:8, 10, 11). 6. For a handy range of examples, see the sixfold comparison in Gibson (1961) or the corresponding chapter-length treatments in Wiseman (1973), Hoerth et al. (1994). Typically, though, the explanations for divergence in typology offered there might benefit from relating it to Scripture's ethnopoetic teleology, along lines illustrated by the "Canaan" example below and, throughout, by the "Hebrew" paradigm. 7. Or the variations thereof, reviewed at length in Lemche 1991: esp. 25-62 but irrelevant to our immediate purposes. 8. Or, by a minority inversion, continuously territorial brothers: "the Hebrews" remained in the land, while "the Israelites" returned to it from Egypt (Kaufmann 1962:158-59). 9. Thus one influential exponent of this half-unified approach, Rowton (1976), considers all Hebrews detribalized Israelites. "The terms 'apirû and 'ibrî denote approximatelybut not quitethe same thing. The term 'apirû denotes the uprooted, the social outcast, whether from tribal society or from urban society. The term ibrî is confined to the uprooted from tribal society, and therein only to the detribalized from one tribal people, Israel" (Rowton 1976:19). By a typical crossing of explanations, the mixture itself grows out of a diachronic movement: "Ibrî. . . originally denoted a social [= 'apirû] element and gradually acquired an ethnic connotation" (ibid.). The only resource precluded by the all-embracing thrust of the argument is synchronic partition; but less unitary analyses (e.g., Lewy, 1957) can and do employ it, too, for optimum maneuverability, shall we say, among the trio. 10. The longer plural form ibriyyim occurs once, in Exodus 3:18, never matched even when the phrase recurs verbatim in 5:3, 7:16, 9:1, 13, 10:3. 11. Or, if you regard legalistic formulas imposed and quoted by the other party as self-expression, not outside some of the Nuzi contracts (to be discussed). 12. Among the alternative explanations of Egyptian policy, contrast Liverani 1979: esp. 3-13, which shrewdly reads the archive in its own cultural (hierarchical, epistolary, diplomatic) framework. 13. This even outside the Albright school, routinely charged with fundamentalism. For example, "Historical Israel is not the Israel of the Hebrew Bible. Rather, historical Israel produced biblical Israel. But . . . the Israel of the premonarchic period is not significantly different (except in the ways one would ordinarily expect) from the picture painted in the biblical sources" (Halpern 1983:239). 14. In preemptive effect, this recalls the measures taken against the High Critical enterprise of attributing, and so reducing, the narrative voice to actual persons from the narrated world (Poetics, 58ff.). On different grounds altogether, and indeed from opposite premises, some crossculturalists have reached a similar conclusion here. Regarding "the whole world of the Ancient Orient," Martin Noth generalizes, "there can hardly be any doubt that this ['Habiru *'] is the same word as the Old Testament word 'Hebrew'"; but "the fact that it was widespread means that there is no reason to see any material connection between the Habiru* of the Amarna tablets and the Israelite tribes" (Noth 1965:34, 35). Negation from combined omnipresence, in brief, rather than from one-sided absence.
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15. For a convenient listing of the miscellany of derivations proposed to date see Loretz 1984:235-48. See also Bottéro 1981:91 on the fruitlessness of the "gymnastics" performed and Chaney 1983:53 on the "growing consensus" that the interminable etymological disputes bear ''little historical significance." 16. In a way, the Rabbis' marking off "clue" or "sign" from "proof" (cited in note 2 above) touches on this difficulty with admirable frankness. And their own usage compounds it beyond the limits of anachronism to which we have grown accustomed since. The Talmud sometimes numbers "Hebrews [ibrim]" among foreign peoples, as well as "Hebrew [ibrit]" among languages foreign to the Bible, along with Greeks and Greek, for example (Megillah 18a, Shabbat 115a). This variant Rabbinic usage has never been enlisted, to my knowledge, by proponents of the outside connection, Abrahamite, Eberide, or Hab/piru. Late and anomalous, to be sure, the occurrences are more intriguing than veridical in their implications for the name-bearers within Scripture itself. They do not even identify the foreignness involved, either to suit any of the above hypotheses or to introduce other possible candidates. Such "Hebrew(s)" may thus point, as Rashi ad loc. believes, to the "TransEuphratensian (eberite, eber-naharite)" language and family. 17. What invariably occurs here may occur in diverse source criticism, resulting in all kinds of slippage (on which see my Poetics, 21-23). 18. As it governs all hypothesis formation, whether in life or in art, whether by the agents inside or us readers outside the narrated (hi)story: such comparisons are elaborated throughout my Poetics, esp. 129ff. 19. For the state of the hypothesis, with references pro and con, see Thompson 1992:42-45. 20. Or, what has actually been proposed by some, to "Arab" (Guillaume 1946/47) or to the ubru group (Cazelles 1958: esp. 207-11, 1973:20, 1987:84). 21. None the less so because the two foreign expressions converge outside the Bible. In a Mari document of the eighteenth century B.C., "Canaanites" occurs in immediate parallelism with "the Akkadian word habbatum * ['brigands'], sometimes used to translate the Sumerian expression SA.GAZ, which is normally thought to be a logogram for habiru*" (Lemche 1991:27-28, with earlier references). The stronger the exterior association, the more telling the canonical divorce of the namesakes, signaled as early as the first occurrence of Hebrewness in regard to the first patriarch. Genesis 14:13 styles Abra(ha)m "Hebrew" vis-à-vis (on my reading below, even via) the Canaanite fugitive from Sodom. 22. For details see Carroll 1970:95 and Sternberg 1970, 1981c. 23. Unless you go so far as to combine (in the manner of Jack 1940, Hallo 1991:43, or Rohl 1995:200) the combinations of "Hebrew" with "Hab/piru" and "Eberide" into a threefold identity. The statements would then follow by definition, at whatever cost in both source and discourse empirics. 24. If rhyme-fellowship might as well link the Bible's group to the "Ubru," then thing-fellowship might link them to, say, the "Shasu," and predictably does (e.g., for Rainey 1991, Redford 1992:269-80, in lieu of the Hab/piru, or for Coote 1990:91-92, besides them). 25. A complementary measure of the license typified by Mendenhall is its reversibility at his hands into variant signification, whether between or within the signifiers in play. Just as the two names may freely intersubstitute, so may either divide against itself: 'Apiru undergoes both synchronic partition (even in the Amarna Letters "there is no reason to assume that the term has the same meaning") and, with Ibri, diachronic shift (from "politicolegal" to "ethnic" meaning, which Israelite now likewise bears). See Mendenhall 1973:126, 137. Not surprisingly, what with the loose "sachliche Identität" to follow, anything goes; but one does
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wonder how the ancients managed to communicate among themselves in such linguistic anarchy. 26. Those Jerusalem letters were also composed by an exceptional scribe, as argued in Moran 1975: esp. 151 on the variant, "Hab/piru" writing of the class name. 27. For one "literary" companion piece, recall how Bloom asserts the origin of Scripture's "Hebrews, or Habiru" in Abra(ha)m, while excising the originator's unique designation as "Hebrew" from Scripture (1990:193). Much the same inventiveness shows on the opposite side of the fence, even among exegetes both anti-Hab/piru and usually alert to the text's minutiae, for example, Benno Jacob. In his Eberide vein, he styles "ibri'' characters so diverse as Abraham's Eliezer of Damascus, Balaam, Balak (1992:125, 127). And the Aramaic Targum substitutes at will "Israelite (bar yisrael)" for "Hebrew" in translation, as its Rabbinic fellows do in interpretation: a two-pronged rhetoric of identity corresponding to Meek's on the other side. Casual acts of "Hebrewing" Israelites and Jews, or vice versa, are of course legion, but, in exegetical practice, never quite innocuous either. See also the following note. 28. The tendency to project "Hebrews" onto Biblical contexts where they fail to surface altogether is not limited to the combined theorists or to their hole-ridden beginning, middle, and end. "Serious difficulties arise," one historian of ancient Israel points out, "where we try to decide what to call the men and women who lived in the country." At any rate, he concludes, "once we have reached the epoch when the country has become divided between the kingdoms of Israel and Judah, 'Israelites' and 'people of Israel' will evidently have to be abandoned as a generic term. And so at that period 'Hebrews' may be used insteaduntil the time comes when 'Jews' seems a sufficiently descriptive appellation" (Grant 1984:283-84). An understandable predicament, except that the former makeshift, "Hebrews," never shows up in the book of Kings, which covers "that period," any more than it did in Joshua and in Genesis before Abraham or than it will after Jeremiah. Again, a closer look at the occurrences that flank Kings unveils a method in the given ("spotty") alternation of ethnica, a grand rhythm of presence and absence: Hebrewness was last associated with David, the first Judahite king as well as the most favored of God's anointed, to resurge and sink forever with Zedekiah, the last king of Judah. 29. For the lowest limit, and thus a pure example of such mimesis, compare Thucydides' account of the attack on the Ambraciots: "Demosthenes had purposely put the Messenians in front with instructions to speak to them in the Doric dialect, so as to disarm the suspicion of the sentries" (1962:226). Apart from the attribution, nothing of the actual "speaking" is preserved, not even by way of indirect or telescoped report. 30. Observe how this underground play of tensions within (or against) the grammar, like the violence done at the same time to canonical faith and history, dispenses with the obviousness of imported vocabulary items. In the conceptual reflection of the other's discourse, the surface need not, and usually does not, exhibit any Biblicized loanwords from other tongues and dialects (collected in Ellenbogen [1957]). For loanwords as such or even loan translations ("calque") are meant neither to register perforce as foreignisms, nor to contrast the quoting with the quoted voice, nor to have any special bearing on reality, verbal or extraverbal, in the interests of reality-likeness: they belong to the genesis of the language, in short, rather than to the imaging of a heterolanguage via the we-language, to the poetics of discourse as translational mimesis. Only when the heterolanguage is foregrounded in its otherness, the outside genesis mimeticized, does the loanword
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come to serve this poetic end. What I will call the poetic image of diachrony, whether or not true to the facts as reconstructed in scholarship, leads an existence different from any outer, pre-textual diachrony. (Think of the belated dat, for "religion," and you will see that the difference has nothing to do with the centrality of the item missing and eventually imported but everything to do with its purpose as an import: the more so where, far from filling a lexical gap, the import duplicates a native resource such as Jacob's "Gal'ed" above.) Nor need any mimetic relevance attach to two additional forms of interlinguistic mixture that seem akin to ''reproduction," namely: code-switching or so-called macaronic writing within a single discourse addressed to a highbrow, polyglot audience (see, e.g., Forster 1970), and the multilanguage text encoding one message to suit an assorted readership of unilinguals, whether provincial subjects or modern consumers the world over. All four, like standard translation itself, are distinct cultural legacies of Babel, which may or may not intersect. Chapter 2 1. See also Dothan 1982:5-12, 19 for the recurrence of these two weapons, "sword and spear," in Egyptian triumphal reliefs depicting Philistine warriors, to which Goliath's representation (I Samuel 17:5-7) largely answers. The odd simile there, "the shaft of his spear was like a weaver's beam," may testify anew to the hole in the Israelite lexicon and armamentespecially if we grasp the comparison as proceeding from the native beholder's viewpoint. 2. On the word's derivation, see Ellenbogen 1957:74, 128. What language precisely the Bible's Philistines spoke, or are supposed to have spoken, remains elusive. Nehemiah calls it "Ashdodite" in polar opposition to "Judahite/Jewish" (13:24) and apparently to "the tongue of Canaan" as well. This opposition holds the two members apart, even if the former is taken to represent a larger, generic verbal otherness; e.g., "Ashdodite stands here for some barbarous and unintelligible tongue . . . a model of a non-Semitic and totally incomprehensible language" (Ullendorff 1977:26-27). But most scholars, including Ullendorff 1962:459-61, rather minimize the interlingual distance: nonSemitic emigrants, the Philistines abandoned their native Indo-European language for some Canaanite dialect or patois or indeed "the tongue of Canaan" as a lingua franca. This conjecture about their acculturation, too, would still leave room for the art and workings of underground translation in reported utterance. All the more so given that the Bible's constructed image of language, as of the world in general, need not parallel the source-world reconstructed, truly or falsely, by today's experts from the meagerest evidence. On the state of research see Brug 1985:193-200. 3. Also, from a postBiblical viewpoint, a contrast to the scorn poured on the circumcision of the Jew in the annals of antisemitism, as a self-castrating barbarism, for example. On the Bible's own account, of course, this rite singles out the children of Abraham as sharers in the covenant. Whether it ignores or discounts the practice elsewhere is immaterial here. Grounds for discounting would include variations in the patient's age, in the surgical mechanics and result, in the group statistics (see details in Sasson 1966), but also, perhaps above all, in the symbolic value attached, if any. Among the Philistines, at any rate, circumcision of any kind is almost unknown from the extant documentary and archaeological testimonia. 4. This quite apart from the question whether Rowton's class-portrait applies to the Hab/piru themselves. Rainey (1989:571) thus flatly countergeneralizes that they "were never tribesmen and never tribalized." Yet deeper criticisms have been made in Kamp and Yoffee (1980: esp. 91-94) and Bottéro (1981: esp. 95-97). I
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would just add that, given the class's world- or at least Orient-wide distribution, the idea of an Israelite Hab/piru sounds as paradoxical, in its way, as Marx's concept of a national bourgeoisie (on which see Anderson 1991:34). 5. This, with the additions to follow, does not yet exhaust the play of etymology triggered by "Hebrew," whose less immediate complexities I must reserve for separate treatment. 6. Contra Lewy 1957:4-5; or Lemche's view that we cannot tell here whether the given term "is used in a national, i.e. ethnical, or in a sociological sense," though the latter predominates (1979:11); or the rendering of ish/ebed ibri as "foreign slave" in Coote and Ord (1989:182), where the literalizing of generic alterity on top of low status imply anew Joseph's membership in the notorious international class. In fact, sociological variables, "man/slave," combine with the invariant and specific group feature, "Hebrew," to tip the balance the other way, against the association with the Hab/piru. 7. Or "Sons" and "sons," as the difference has been graphically rendered by Davies (1999:38), following Everett Fox's "Children" vs. "children" (1986:11). In growing numerous, the Sons of Israel have grown capitals, as it were. 8. Regrettably, even expert anthropologists are liable to confuse "the kinship link" with "the legal [or here, moraltheological] principle governing the transmission of rights from generation to generation" (Leach 1970:101). 9. To which Herodotus adds spicy reports of necrophilia among Egyptian males, ubiquitous adultery among females, paternal prostitution, or even violation, of daughters (1955:134, 143, 149, 150, 153). Long thereafter, and against experts' skepticism about the practice of castration there, newly found documents vindicated the Genesis reference to eunuchs in Pharaoh's court (sarisim, 37:36, 39:1, 40:2, 7; cf. Vergote 1959:40-41). As already noted in regard to other features, e.g., name deformation, the Bible's image of Egypt shows itself, on the whole, true to life: underdrawn, if anything, compared with either the reality derivable from the ancient testimonia or the fantasies often spun about the mores of an enemy. On the charge of pathological sexuality leveled at the Jew(esse)s themselves in European antisemitic discourse, see Gilman 1986:38-39 and passim; cf. also the following note. For all the loose talk in some recent isms ("postmodernism," "cultural criticism") about the fictionality or factitiousness of worldconstructs as such, images may range between truth and invention, other-imaging definitely not excluded. That all representing amounts to "inventing" is itself a pure meta-invention, one dismissible as a laughably thoughtless and groundless catchall were it not so dangerous. 10. Intergroup (Greek vs. Trojan) strife in Homer offers a revealing comparison. Paris, who stole the wife of his host, Menelaus, violates the code shared by the Trojans themselves: Homer typically levels the cultures, positing or inventing universals even amid enmity, where the Bible highlights the difference. Less surprising, because out of conflictual framework, is the kindness shown by the epic's Egyptians (even though speakers of "a foreign tongue") to Menelaus on his way home from Troy, in the company of a wife no less beautiful than Sarah. 11. Even so, Montet warns that "there is a great deal of fallacious interpretation" in the attempt to couple their original (ntjr) with monotheistic reference (1968:108; see also Frankfort 1961:67). 12. The Tower of Babel, "with its top in heaven" (Genesis 11:4), has routinely been linked to the Mesopotamian ziqqurat. But once we shift from geographical coincidence to thematic and allusive congruity, as here, the equivalent that suggests itself is the pyramid, "Mer" in Egyptian. "This has tentatively been translated as 'Place of Ascension'" and the Pyramid Texts even "refer to a 'staircase . . . provided
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for the king's ascent to heaven'" (David 1982:59, 72, with further detail on the stellar or solar cults involved). 13. The interpretation of the overture in Ackerman (1974), all the more remarkable for its time, already notes in passing some of the Babel analogies that I have been redrawing. 14. The midrash finds the right sort of connection in the wrong place when it would have the singular in "Let us deal shrewdly with him" refer to God (Shemot Rabba 1:10). Improbable in the first instance, this glance at heaven cannot be maintained in the immediately ensuing singulars on pain of heresy: "Lest he multiply." As I will argue in chapter 5, that singular pronoun would co-refer with better reason to Joseph, now officially deemed "unknown," once officially declared the shrewdest [hakham *] man in Egypt. 15. Or may register on the stylistic level only (e.g., "to underscore the new usage," Greenberg 1969:20, or Jacob 1992:13). Likewise apparently with Buber, whose reading erases the difference in number, as well as in nomination, which his German rendering scrupulously preserves. "This one band among the wandering 'Hebrews' enters the Egyptian land of culture as a unit. It receives and moulds the Egyptian influence as a unit; it suffers slavery as a unit; and as a unit it departs from slavery to freedom" (Buber 1958:32; cf. Buber and Rosenzweig 1930 on 1:9ff.): of these four "unities" claimed, the second and the last misname the referents for the worse, the third misnumbers them for the better, the first alone meets the actual description. Finally, the story outline in Exum (1983:67, 69n. 9) illustrates the routine wholesale leveling down of the group-markers and with them the opening's segmentation markers: the arrest of dynamism extends from the words to the events to their interplay. 16. In more interpretive ancient versions, the addendum's gentilic is less happily speaker-oriented: the now abolished and counterproductive "to the Israelites" (Josephus ad loc.) or the proleptic "to the Jews" (the Aramaic Targum). 17. Thus already the Rabbis in, for example, Shemot Rabba 1:14, or Midrash Tehillim 2:4, where Haman voices the charge of idiocy against his Egyptian prototype; but see also the former, 1:18. 18. In Exodus 10:10-11, Pharaoh's offer to release only the men supplies another clue to the designs on the Hebrewesses. So may the next chapter, 11:1. If we read kalah as meaning or punning kallah, the verse will forecast the oppressor's letting Israel go "as one lets go a bride." (For details, see chapter 9, note 42 below.) After the event, we hear of at least one mixed union, sprung just when it can be judged by its fruits: the offspring executed for blasphemy (Leviticus 24:10-23). For external evidence on how Egyptians of the time lusted after Asiatic women, see Helck 1964:112-13. 19. On which see Gumperz 1984:205-206, 209, Ervin-Tripp 1984:229-30. 20. The phrases are Benno Jacob's in 1942:253, 247, 248-49, also 1992:29. Cf. the typecasting of Pharaoh's daughter as "righteous gentile" in Exum 1983:80-81. The related claim that she even speaks Hebrew will be dealt with later. 21. For the association of "hole" with the animal order, compare Isaiah 11:8, Nahum 2:13; for more on animal imagery, see chapter 4, note 26 below. 22. A more inhibited analogue would be the derogatory terms (especially sexual and sexist) used by women for men. Regarding the fieldwork she has done on them, Barbara Risch notes: "The importance of female interviewers for the results of this study cannot be overemphasized. It is doubtful if any response could have been elicited in the presence of male interviewers," themselves targets rather than members of this "exclusive subculture of women speakers" (1987:356-57). The same would apply to incomparably more refined expressions of female sexism,
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e.g., woman-to-woman dialogues in Jane Austen, who stages no all-male counterpart at that. As for the Hab/piru, the next chapter will show the unlikelihood of the Amarna members being called so to their face. The designation systematically occurs in praesentia at their lowest alone, in the Nuzi service contracts, assuming that they were drawn up under the eyes of both parties: even then, the term chosen for reference to the bondman is always "Hab/piru," never the locally uglier "SA.GAZ." 23. In the postBiblical tradition, however imitative and nationalistic, the rule somehow lost its force as early as the Apocrypha. Thus, after Judith has decapitated Holofernes, Bagoas shouts to the Assyrian army: "The slaves have deceived us; one Hebrew woman has brought disgrace upon the house of Nebuchadnezzar" (Goodspeed 1959:160, also 155). At the native end, Judith likewise identifies herself to the "outpost of the Assyrians" as "a daughter of the Hebrews"; and, earlier yet, in the second century B.C., the Sirach prologue (mis)names the language itself Hebrew (ibid.: 151, 223). Even epigonic writing, it would seem, betrays the effect of intermediate collective amnesia, precisely where language meets literature. Scriptural competence, so long dramatized within the inset and assumed in the frame, has been lost: after Jeremiah, significantly, who last manifests it on the verge of the ultimate Exile back to eber-land. 24. Thus the Septuagint, in place of the Masoretic Text's dubious "Gedor": the latter is itself used by the Septuagint for the Masoretic "Gerar" in the next occurrence of the toponym, quoted below, as if to prove how easily the words could be intersubstituted. See Aharoni 1956: esp. 26-27. 25. On this Nilotic bondage term, see Vergote 1959:41, Théodoridès 1970:314-15. 26. Never, that is, within the canon, as distinct from aftermaths and even retellings out of the original key. Josephus, having misidentified the Queen of Sheba as ruler over "Egypt and Cush," goes on to misrepresent her speech as a postExodus Egyptian: she would never say "Fortunate do I hold the Hebrew people to be" (Antiquities 8.173), unless she meant to pay Solomon a left-handed compliment. The loss of the Bible's opposition incurs diachronic as well as synchronic penalties in the retelling: far from merely verbal, the unconscious anachronism would render the praise a mockery in Biblical ears, if not a threat, and turn back the wheel of history. Cf. note 23 above, on Apocryphal departures from the Law. 27. A bitter pill to swallow, this outside corroborative testimony, for Hab/piru analogizers and rewriters of Joshua, doubly so for one who in addition would have us relexicalize the contemporary "Israel" from ethnicon to toponym (Ahlström 1986:40-42, 1991:23-34). Similarly, now on the time axis, even with uniculturalists who postdate Israelite nationhood (e.g., Sasson 1990:115). But the given ethnic determinative will not be argued away by pleading scribal error and the like. Another, more ingenious attempt at reversal would turn the fact to the account of the Hab/piru equation: that "Marneptah's hymn of victory speaks of Israel and not of the Hebrews," Julius Lewy claims, is evidence for the distinction between the two groups, the ethnic vs. the social (1957:3; cf. Meek 1960:31). He conveniently forgets that earlier Pharaohs twice interchanged the two Biblical designations along the story of the Exodus, and that Marneptah in effect adheres to his predecessor's latest, honorific variant. Observe also the Janusfaced argumentation, reminiscent of Freudian psychoanalysis at its worst. If a text speaks of "Hebrews," it means the Hab/piru; and if of "Israel," it means to set the referent apart from the Hebrews-Hab/piru. All is then grist that comes to the sophist's mill. Actually, the Marneptah reference presents an obstacle to Freud himself''too early" for his trajectory of monotheismand he would bypass it through yet another conjectural division. "The name on the 'Israel' stella does not relate to the tribes whose
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fortunes we are trying to follow and which combined to form the later people of Israel. After all, the name of 'Habiru' (Hebrews) was transferred to these same people in the Amarna period" (1964:49, 29). This piles a later and future on an earlier and allegedly accomplished nominal coincidence: Pharaoh's "Israel" does not thereby advert to Scripture's, who had already been called after the Hab/piru for some unknown reason. 28. Another, less conflicting example has been given above: the rhyming of the Egyptian "Story of Two Brothers," from parental figuration to emasculation, with the Bible's Primeval Scene as the genesis and model of Hamite sexual degeneracy. Chapter 3 1. Most of my work has been concerned to theorize the Proteus Principle and to show its systematic diversity as the first law of communication, maximized in art. Here are some of the more explicit references, arranged by topic. On sequence, narrative and otherwise: 1978, 1981a, 1983a, 1985, 1989, 1990a, 1990b, 1992b. On equivalence relations: 1970, 1977, 1981c, 1984, 1985 (index under "Analogy"). On character and character-drawing, 1978: esp. chaps. 3-7, 1983d, 1985: esp. chaps. 9-10. On reported discourse: 1981b, 1982a, 1982b, 1983c, 1985:365-440, 1986, 1991a, 1991b, 1996; and on point of view in general, also 1978: esp. 254-305, 1983b: esp. 172-86, 1985:58-185. By this very law, of course, the dimensions themselves interpenetrate. 2. See the references on point of view in note 1 above, also Yacobi 1981:119ff. 3. And a contingent exception, too. Even at Nuzi, members of the group could rise higher; for documents and discussion, see Cassin 1958: esp. 231. 4. Gray 1958:165-66, following Lewy 1939:618-19 and the texts in Bottéro 1954: nos. 165, 165', 166, 73. Not to mention fellow travelers of various kinds, high-born yet fallen on evil days. In preExodus Canaan alone, King Idrimi of Alalakh took refuge with the Hab/piru for seven years, then they sheltered the king of Hazor during the Amarna upheavals (Bottéro 1954: nos. 37 and 127, Greenberg 1955: nos. 23 and 93): the royal fugitive's sojourn among them testifies to their power at the time, when his own had gone. 5. Carried a little further, this attested socio-logic would go to reinforce and explain the "circular process" generalized as "one in which people were uprooted from the society in which they were born, lived for a while as foreigners [Hab/piru] in another country, and then were absorbed into their new environment" (Na'aman 1986:273, following Bottéro 1981). 6. This correlation recurs, for example, in the title of a well-known feminist essay, "Is Nature to Culture as Female Is to Male?" (Ortner 1974). 7. Lévi-Strauss himself, otherwise heir to the Nilotic fourfold correlation, has trouble with their sexual practices (1969:9-10), as they would have with his judgments by meat-eating and incest. 8. For a more flexible and self-aware approach, see Amossy 1984, or Gombrich 1969 on pictorial schemata, or, in interart transfer, Yacobi 1995. 9. The charge actually arose with the term in Lippman 1922. 10. The recurrent juxtapositional emphasis underscores the nokhri's variability, in everything else, so as to leave open the dimensions of geography or sociopolitics, for instance. Nevertheless, he has been miscategorized as "the real stranger who is only temporarily in the country; the foreigner who has not given up his original home" (Guttmann 1926:1): evidently refuted by the "city" example from Judges. 11. My last chapter will discuss the term's possible extension to in-group otherness in Exodus 21:8, elsewhere found in Proverbs only.
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12. This links up with the Bible's relexicalization of group terms that originate in the neighboring world, for example, the shift of "Canaanite" from the social to the ethnic pole. 13. Due to the either/or rationale of election, this noun cum adjective involves a more circumscribed, better-defined field of reference and a sharper antithesis than the verbs for distinctiveness catalogued by Machinist (1991:203ff.). For example, bdl, plh, snh * may all draw lines among the chosen themselves, and even within the nonhuman sphere. Actually, the semantics of those verbs associates them with the noun/adjective aher*, likewise applicable in context to ethnic or ethnonational difference, rather than with nokhri, alone lexically earmarked for it. And even in ethnic context, moreover, those verbs' usage has no ethnocentric strings attached to it, so that they may change objects, speakers, and/or reference points between the extremes. Contrast Nehemiah's "All who have separated themselves [nibdal] from the people of the lands to the Torah of God" with his "the people separated all those of mixed [foreign] descent [wa'yyabdilu kol ereb] from Israel" (10:28, 13:3) or with Haman's charge that the Jews' ''laws differ [shonot] from every people" (Esther 3:8). In a word, anybody (and anything) can boast verb-marked "distinctiveness" from anyone else, enjoy or suffer "distinction" in someone's view; one can be nokhri only to and for Israel. 14. See, for instance, Urbach 1975: esp. chap. 16. 15. The conflation of Biblical with Rabbinic sources, as throughout the chapter on "The Chosen People and the Choice of Foreignness" in Kristeva (1991), thus hardly produces a trustworthy guide to either: we need to beware most where the ideo-languages seem most continuous. Similarly with the "Old" and "New" Testaments. 16. I advisedly put these universal "must's" in communicative terms, regardless of their possible biological origins and equivalents. It is the latter that D.H. Lawrence postulates in his criticism of Wait Whitman's leveling of everything and everyone in existence. Indiscriminate self-identification jars against the natural selectiveness allegedly common to all forms of life: "One identity! . . . Walter, leave off. You are not he. . . . The difference between life and matter is that . . . living creatures have the instinct of turning right away from some matter, and of blissfully ignoring the bulk of most matter, and of turning towards only some certain bits of specially selected matter" (1951:175-76, cf. Simpson 1993 on Whitman). Chapter 4 1. "When the land of the Patriarchs' sojourn is called eres* ha'ibrim* (Genesis 40:15) . . ., it is merely because this was the only gentilic available to the writer to set off those proto-Israelites from the surrounding Egyptians and Canaanites of his narrative" (Greenberg 1955:92): this statement misses the point, along with the viewpoint, which concerns the dialogist (not "the writer") and geographical (not "gentilic") self-distancing. Why should Joseph now wish to "set himself off" from any neighbor? He does want to extricate himself from the place, and here weaving "Hebrews" into the toponym serves to link him to another place in the interlocutor's own usage; if it didn't, moreover, he could always replace the place name by one of the available substitutes, as his brothers will by "the land of Canaan" in addressing him (e.g., 42:7, 13). 2. For different approaches to this "land of the Hebrews" toponym, see the discussion in Loretz 1984:41-43, 94-96, 98-100. 3. See also Ullendorff 1977:1-17 for the underlying approach, illustrated from gaps in lexical fields other and more arguable than the ethnolinguistic. Compare
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Halkin 1963: esp. 241ff. for medieval precedents to this approach, now selectively anthologized in Berlin 1991. 4. Alas, Ullendorff (1977) hastily abandoned the idea for the same oral/written grab bag, whereby the term designates some "Canaanite lingua franca" wider than "Hebrew." If such were the designation, however, then Isaiah's ensuing phrase, "and [Egypt will] swear allegiance to the Lord of hosts," must foretell her parallel switch of worship to some Canaanite archdeity. 5. See, for instance, the gamut of usages and attitudes toward "imagery" in Block 1981, Mitchell 1986, with earlier references. 6. Within this large field, the imaging of discourse itselfof speech and thought, among all objects of representationconstitutes a distinctive subcategory, where the image is a quotation of one variety or another, as throughout the Hebrewgram. Once raised to the level of metadiscourse, accordingly, the subcategory also covers all our affairs with (quoted) discourse, for example, Plato's with Homer's, or the visual artist's, the crossculturalists' with the Hebrew/Hab/piru megatext, the literary analyst's with the body of literature analyzed, the cultural critic's with the stereotype critiqued, etc., and so on to yet higher levels, such as my own imaging of images of imagery now, in thirdorder quotation. On how package dealers approach the varieties of first-order quoting, and why their formulas break down, see again the references in chapter 3, note 1 above, all with Biblical material and with implications for the higher orders of discourse imagery. 7. My own solutionthat God's image below, like the original and ultimate reality, transcends fixture in imageryhas already been incorporated into the two chapters on character in Poetics, 321-64. The consequent drive against stock character reappears here in mass action along the thematic axes (e.g., liberty/slavery) of Hebrewness under trial. 8. For an apter and more productive usage than the mass relegation to fictional-it), or falsity, contrast Benedict Anderson's gloss on the title of his book, Imagined Communities. "It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion. . . . In fact, all communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact (and perhaps even these) are imagined. Communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined. Javanese villagers have always known that they are connected to people they have never seen, but these ties were once imagined particularisticallyas indefinitely stretchable nets of kinship and client-ship. Until quite recently, the Javanese language had no word meaning the abstraction 'society'" (1991:6). The only trouble with this usage of "imagine" is its multifold limitation: (1) to self- as distinct from other-imaging; (2) to the group, exclusive of the individual, even at self-imaging; (3) to the "style" minus the truth-value of imagery, or to the psychology, divorced from the ontology, perhaps in reaction against the usual overprivileging of "falsity/genuineness." 9. For the boomerang effect here, compare the double standard of Edward Said's Orientalism, exposed by a leading anthropologist. Insofar as it reduces the Occident and its Orientalists to "Eurocentric" type, this "work frequently relapses into the essentializing modes it attacks and is ambivalently enmeshed in the totalizing habits of Western humanism" (Clifford 1988:271). Likewise self-idolizing in the attack on other gods, "Marxist criticism . . . has made a fetish out of the concept of fetishism, and treated 'ideology' as an occasion for the elaboration of a new idealism" (Mitchell 1986:163). 10. For analysis and examples see Sternberg 1982b:86-87. 11. So does the near-converse hypothesis: that "the term ibri, or 'Hebrew;' was
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adopted into Israelite tribal culture" because, like the displaced Hab/piru, "the typical Israelite tribal leader was a client abiru-ite, or 'alienite'" (Coote 1990:91-92). 12. Having noted this conspicuous absence in the six extant messages of Abdi-Ashirta, then in the eleven of his son Aziru, one analyst goes on to speculate: "Were these leaders sensitive about their origins?" (Chaney 1983:79, after Mendenhall 1973:123). A discoursive countermeasure on their part, more likely. Otherwise, given such Hab/piru "origins," the quoter above, Rib-Addi, would never share the archenemy's sensitivity: he might then freely, and would gladly, impute to the quotees the worst expression on the strength of its literal truth, its lineal fit with the type in which he wants to cast them. If they had something to conceal, no false delicacy would stop him from revealing it, preferably in their own voice at self-Hab/piru-ing. 13. The very deference to the addressee on top has a real-life parallel in the self-reference made by the Amarna correspondents (though of course not by the mute Hab/piru, frequently written about as rebellious subjects). In their letters to Pharaoh, the town chiefs apply to themselves exactly the same designation as that by which Pharaoh addresses them: "the man of town so-and-so," rather than "mayor," far less "king," strictly kept for interchief, equalto-equal communication. Even "friendly rulers 'beyond the pale' continue to refer to themselves as 'servants' of Pharaoh" (Redford 1990: 28-29, or Astour 1964:11n. 23). 14. "When asked why he was called that, Diogenes replied: I wag my tail to those who give me anything, bark at those who don't and clamp my teeth in rogues. . . . The sneer was thrown back at the sneerers. . . . What the Cynics said in effect was: The grounds on which you call us dogs are just the qualities which make us superior in the one thing that counts, natural self-sufficiency and hence genuine virtue" (Finley 1977:95). Unlike the genesis of "Hebrew" as I trace it, then, "Cynic" penetrated into the group from the antagonistic environment. Once adopted, however, it miniatured for the duration a bi-valence similar to the inset's "Yonder-man" vs. the frame's "Crosser.'' 15. The relation to wider developments in the national ethos and literature, pivoting on the Exile, has been explored by another route (see the references in Sternberg 1996:53n. 2), in and through the transformation of dialogue codes. 16. The converse hypothesis to Kraeling's has also been advanced: "a self-designation for the people in the formative period of Israelite history," the name went out of use "with the founding of the monarchy" (Sarna 1991:266). But the actual occurrences, again correlated with the grand design, tell another story. Running on beyond "the formative period," they describe a chiasm within the larger, rise-to-fall "Hebrew" chiasm, one that exactly coextends with the monarchy, from the first king in Samuel to the last in Jeremiah. 17. Against, for example, Greenberg: "the context favors their being Egyptian" (1969:26-27, also Montet 1968:80, Plastaras 1966:40-41, Houtman 1993:251-52); or, on the opposite side, Childs: "it is clear that the Massoretic text . . . described the midwives as Hebrew" (1974:16). 18. Even this is no exception to the law of univocal reference argued in my first chapter: the ambiguity covers the group identity of the midwives, as stated in a phrase larger than the ethnicon, never that of "the Hebrewesses." 19. Nor do these exhaust the points of contact between the heroines and the hero, for example, the one that English would encapsulate in the delivery/deliverance wordplay. Moses is himself named after his drawing out of the water and, proleptically, his drawing of Israel out of Egypt as/and the waters: for such an obstetrical reading of Exodus, see Nohrnberg 1981:45-47, 1995: e.g., 15, 239-40. A still deeper nexus, to which we will revert, lurks in the common embodiment
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of the intergroup antithesisthe midwives through ethnic ambiguity, Moses through incongruity of birth with upbringing. 20. Yet see the comment on the verse in Ackerman 1974:86-87. 21. The pun, where noted, has been taken as antithetical, to the loss of the Bible's time art and the implied reading experience. For example, "Instead of 'looking' at the stones as ordered, the women 'fear' God" (Davies 1992:79; cf. Cassuto 1967:14): a foreclosure that miniatures the hindsight fallacy. The two verbs, rather than contrasted at once, begin by appearing all too disturbingly alike, and Ham-like, in the given sequence. 22. The tale's distribution and inversion of the deities between the parties may draw support from their blasphemous coupling in an Elephantine letter, where one Jew blesses another by "YHWH and Khnum." (For a translation and further reference, see Pritchard 1969:491.) 23. So already Shemot Rabba 1:15. 24. According to one perceptive midrash, "they are like the beasts of the field, who do not require midwives"; but the intuition wants anchorage in the dialogue's reality of intergroup contact, or its rhetoric, adducing instead Jacob's and Moses' all-Israelite testimony: "And where have they been likened to beasts? 'Lion's whelp . . . ravenous wolf . . . hind let loose . . . firstling bull'" (Sotah 11b, Shemot Rabba 1:15). So patriotized, the animalistic group-image turns heartfelt, objective, and complimentary. Rashi, partly following the Onkelos rendition, also hints at an interlingual transfer of the wordplay: as though the original hayot * punned on the Aramaic hayata* (midwives), fusing patient and agent, referent and speaker, to yield the compound sense "knowledgeable like midwives." Brilliant, and of course anachronistic, as well as upgrading. 25. In the same book and reference field, compare the reading of the Masoretic kalah ("completely") as kallah ("bride"), discussed in chapter 9, note 42 below. 26. Such comparison would especially flatter the prejudices of an ancient Egyptian, who looked down on the rest of the world anyway. Not for nothing do the Amarna letters repeatedly call the Hab/piru and their allies "dogs." The Nilotic claim to monopoly on humanity, literalized in the words for the self and the vernacular, entailed the animality of the outsider in general. (See examples in Liverani 1990:36-38, 130.) Likewise with the Greeks, as already noted, and with many cultures unrelated to either. Even if deemed a near-universal topos, or binary master stereotype, the dynamism foretold by the Proteus Principle still exhibits itself. Amid dehumanization itself, the midwives thus never anticipate the charge of sexual promiscuity leveled against the Jew(esse)s in European antisemitic discourse: to the Pharaoh, the Bible's and history's, this feature would hardly count as animal-like, far less as monstrous. Again, not only the correlates but the targets and values of animal imagery, or of one recurrent image, may change. For selfprojection in such terms, see Julian Barnes in Flaubert's Parrot (1984:49-54) on the novelist's ursinity; and for their metamorphoses in sequence, from one phase to another along a continuous narrative, see my reading of Balzac's Père Goriot (Sternberg 1978:208-34). 27. As with the women's natural, so with the men's supernatural endowment: the prefiguration of Moses' trouble with numbers (first spotted by Jethro) runs to the end, except that he would understandably upgrade rather than downgrade his charges. The appointment of a judiciary is only the first of his renunciations in their favor, a prelude to greater things, even less mundane and hierarchical, culminating in a vision of a democracy of sacred power. Having already caused God to inspire the seventy elders and now urged by a jealous aide to quash the outbreak of "illicit" prophecy in the camp, Moses embraces the prospect of the
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nation dispensing with his services altogether: "Would that all God's people were prophets!" (Numbers 11:2430). 28. In a closer analysis than required here, "it" would make an apter pronoun for this "child." 29. Similar assumptions of homogeneity abound (e.g., Noth 1966:26, Hyatt 1980:65, Cole 1973:59, Durham 1987:17), at times likewise patently incongruous as well as flattening. Thus, "the narrative attributes fear of God to the Egyptian midwives just as it later attributes to the Egyptian princess a knowledge of Hebrew" (Exum 1983:73). The comparison undoes itself twice over. The former, supposedly all-Egyptian episode not only radicalizes the unlikelihood of "Hebrew"-spoken dialogue; it also shows the care taken in "attributing" in-group characteristics to outsiders, possible and a fortiori identified, let alone royal. That the midwives' God-fearingness is told by way of nondirect thought-report (as opposed to Joseph's direct speech of it) maintains a nice disparity between the emotion (operating in the pious mind, even if Egyptian) and the expression (absent from the Egyptian lexicon): between the inborn or elective and the acquired, the natural and the (hetero) cultural, between the image of God in humanity and the image of language confusion among human groups after Babel. 30. Given that the Wilderness-born children were not circumcised (5:5, 7), this would seem to prove that the Bible's Egyptians weren't either. According to Sasson (1966:474), the "disgrace" would lie not in the Egyptian-like absence of circumcision but in the rite's performance the Egyptian way. (See also chapter 2, note 3 above.) Even so, the text's point would be that the Egyptian way counts as nothing. Finally, on the hypothesis that circumcision originated in Egypt, Sigmund Freud here reads "contempt" instead of "disgrace" (1964:35). This makes no sense at all, because the Egyptians would have no reason to contemn the equally circumcised emigrants (Joshua 5:5) and no knowledge of their uncircumcised offspring born in the wilderness. 31. The matter has since exercised a variety of didacticists or apologists: Benno Jacob, under antisemitic pressure, goes so far as to whitewash the ruse into a sign of "uprightness" (1992:117-20). 32. For a useful survey, with bibliography, see de Vaux 1978:I, 238-57; on the related crux in 6:3, see Garr 1992 for a documented review. To this logomachy one might add a number of literary critical and philosophical voices, such as Derrida 1985 at deconstructive rarefaction. 33. For example, Lewy, 1939:620, Gray 1958:178, Bright 1972:94 ("parallels exactly"), as against Loretz 1984:16970. But what clinches the point are the hard facts of grammar. How can Pharaoh possibly misunderstand the plural form of elohim as designating "the gods of the Hebrews," those likewise worshipped among "Habiru groups further north" (Cole 1973:71), if he encounters it in between singular co-references? The breach of concordance in number would rather heighten his sense of uniquely "outlandish" difference. 34. Compare, for instance, the scene in Herodotus (1955:185) where the Egyptians explain to their master, Cambyses, why they have suddenly gone on holiday: "a god had appeared amongst them; he was wont to reveal himself only at long intervals of time, and whenever he did so, all Egypt rejoiced and celebrated a festival." 35. Eight centuries later, Freud's iconoclastic theory that Moses was an Egyptian twists round not only Rashbam's deference to the chosen liberator and lawgiver but also all the identities involved in the prospective speech-event. The mention of a speech disorder would then betray "the fact that Moses spoke another language
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and could not communicate with his Semite neo-Egyptians without an interpreter, at all events at the beginning of their relations" (Freud 1964:33). For all this sea changein the language, along with the respective ethnicities and competences of the parties to the discourseGod's appointing Aaron as mediator would yet equally bridge the communication gap. 36. For example, "the narrative reflects a great number of variant sources which have been used by the redactors of the received tradition with correspondingly few attempts at harmonization" (Thompson 1987:139); the ensuing analysis of the interview, blind to the simplest dialogue threads, carries atomism ad absurdum. This concurrence of genetic and poetic miscarriage is hardly unusual, except that the analyst represents a new trend among historians (mentioned in chapter 1 above) that would reduce the Bible to pure "literature," as distinct from historiography. Such old-new failures therefore reflect on the extremists' understanding of the literary, on their competence to read Biblical literature for (or against) history, and so on the worth of their own counter-historiography. Direct implications for the Hebrew/Hab/piru problem follow, because a like-minded revisionist, N.P. Lemche, has devoted a number of studies to it; see the comments by and on him, passim. 37. Alternatively, the "lest" expresses a threat, whether one takes the first-person plural (the threatened "us") to be exclusive ("us" his votaries, rather than "you" Egyptian outsiders, as in the earlier ''chanced upon us . . . let us go . . . that we may sacrifice to . . . our God") or inclusive and solidary (all of "us" together, remiss worshippers along with obstructionist foreigners.) The two ambiguities, in reference (in-group/crossgroup) and illocutionary force (entreaty/threat), are independent of each other, but not without affective intersection. For example, the entreaty may consist in (as well as parallel, overlie, reinforce) the threat to either group or to both. A portent of violent diminution, it also richly harks back to the Pharaonic "lest he multiply" that announced the conflict. 38. A New Testament parallel, involving both a superhuman figure and a late Biblical equivalent of "Hebrew," would be the inversion of Jesus' royal title on the way from birth to death. The Magi's inquiry, "Where is he who has been born king of the Jews?" reverses into the soldiers' mock-salute before the cruxifiction, "Hail, King of the Jews!" and the wording of the charge sheet put over his head thereafter, "This is Jesus the King of the Jews" (Matthew 2:2, 27:27-31, 37). Normatively, of course, this inversion goes from a happy to an unhappy extreme. (Compare also Luther's sarcastic role-playing in chapter 5, note 12 below.) Chapter 5 1. For details on the Bible's interior monologue, see Sternberg 1979. 2. The strategy as a whole has been explored in Sternberg 1982b:104-108 and especially 1986, 1991a passim. 3. This cross has an interesting literal duplicate in the two-in-oneness of the reporting verb's ketib and qere: the written form a-m-r, readable as singular, correlates with the individual's self-communion; the vocalization into the plural amru, with the group's exterior interchange. 4. Even the fact that the Jacobite mourners left behind their children and herds therefore invites an innocent explanation, because so must their aristocratic fellow travelers have done. The future bone of contention in Exodus passes here for a natural exigency (cf. 33:12-14; and contrast the sinister meaning that Abarbanel, or Greenberg 1969:21-22, reads into Genesis 50 by retrojection from
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Pharaoh's insistence on hostages in Exodus 10:8-11, 24-26). Contrast also the domestic mobility freely exercised by Joseph himself, whether in going "through all the land of Egypt" or in taking his chariot "to meet his father in Goshen" (41:46, 46:29). 5. An extension, not a restriction, least of all to the frame's here and now. "The Hebrew writer comments on . . . a contemporary phenomenon" involving "Egyptians" and "Hebrews'' of "[his] own time" (Redford 1970:235): the impropriety of Hebrewing the latter-day in-group joins perspectival with temporal misorientation. Between the narrated and the narrative terminus, the restriction is more often thought to single out the former, there-and-then extreme. For example, what would have been "perfectly intelligible to later Jews, struck the ancient Israelites as peculiar" (Skinner 1925:482, and cf. the quote above from Westermann 1987:126). But why should the narrator bother with the aside if he does not presume the ignorance of "later Jews"? For all we know from the antecedents and surface of this verse, he may well astonish them as readers with a peculiarity of Egypt that would have been obvious to "the ancient Israelites," his characters. 6. Such running beyond the one group named here is due in part to external evidence, especially Herodotus's famous testimony: "No Egyptian, man or woman, will kiss a Greek, or use a Greek knife, spit or cauldron, or even eat the flesh of a bull known to be clean, if it has been cut with a Greek knife" (1955:118). In Laws, Plato further generalizes the target of that xenophobia from Greeks to all outgroups when he warns against making "meats and sacrifices a device for repelling the alien, as we see the 'dusky brood of Nilus' doing today" (953e; 1989:1499). There is now reason to believe that both exaggerate. 7. Consider the unlikelihood of their identification across the ethnic divide: "The reasons for Joseph's reluctance to communicate on more friendly terms with his family . . . [are] presented in a general way as the normal Egyptian disapproval of intercourse with the Hebrews at table" (Lemche 1979:12). This not only exempts Joseph from the group designation and its stingas if he were not a, or the, Hebrewbut also assimilates him to the foreign designators' rule of (ab)usage. 8. For details see the relevant items in Works Cited, especially Sternberg 1973b, 1979, 1981b, 1982b, 1983c, 1986, 1991a, 1991b, 1996, with references. 9. In Onkelos's rendering, the operational effect even substitutes for the interior cause: the Egyptians "remove" or distance [merahakin *] all shepherds. 10. By the same ordinal logic, Joseph's forecast "with me will the men eat at noon" (43:16) assumes the converse meaning. Compare also the interplay of "with" and "among" throughout Abraham's dialogue with the Hittites (Sternberg 1991a: esp. 31ff.) 11. Or, according to the midrash, God's as superauthor: "The Holy One, Blessed be He, called him Hebrew, and also called Hebrew the seed of Abraham who loved him" (Pesikta Rabbati 33.3). Unlike the alternative authorial nominations mentioned, this entails the earliest conceivable dating, to the patriarchal age. 12. Rather, it will soon emerge, the pattern bears a likeness to the Amarna discourse of the Other, except that the name-caller's alien viewpoint gets internalized as well as ethnicized and ironized. 13. Further versions and criticisms of this theory can be found in Emerton 1971:24-47. 14. So would the inverse, postdating absurdity, whereby it is "Hebrew" that becomes "an anachronism in the patriarchal period" (Westermann 1986:199): having arisen here, with Abra(ha)m, it recurs in the Joseph cycle as an established group, or outgroup, designation. 15. Which he wouldn't if Hebrewed, and "pejoratively" so, just because the
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fugitive confused him with the Hab/piru, as surmised by Merrill (1988:38, 101): the entire coming-tellingresponding sequence would then lose its motivation. 16. For further comparison with a range of hearing acts and practices, see note 2 above. 17. In the Potiphar tale, we found out, even the unremarkable noun phrase "Hebrew man" assumed rhetorical (and so differential or informational) value in contradistinction to "the Hebrew slave," later voiced for other ears. But how can such a value, essentially dialogic, transfer to a monologic set-up? Here, denied this function, the same form of words appears to compound local otiosity with the breach of the elliptic norm governing the discourse-type. 18. The name, in part due to its bearer's historic role, would appear inexhaustibly evocative: see the fresh resonances pointed out in Marks 1995:29-33. 19. Mosheh ammo, "the drawer-out of his people," Isaiah 63:11 calls him; and see Buber 1958:36. 20. The etymologists, who so often patronize the narrator's "unscientific" replacement of mose by mosheh, don't care to mention that they themselves execute the same questionable substitution in reverse, for better or worse. "To the layman this [s/sh phonological variance] may seem a trifling difficulty, but to a linguist and philologist it is a warning, if not, indeed, an insuperable obstacle" (Cerny * 1971:201): this reminder is perhaps an overstatement, unmindful of folkways, as usual, yet it is challenging both ways, and even more to the sedulous philologist than to the narrative artist. 21. Circumcision might serve instead as a dynamic giveaway, but only on two unsupported assumptions: that the child underwent it in the circumstances and that the Egyptians (like the "uncircumcised" Philistines) did not practice it or not the Israelite way. This marks another gap, in fact, to which the narrative will arrestingly return during the Midian-to-Egypt shuttle. 22. On the Jordan itself, a cynic might proceed to finesse, he calls that Hebrew slave not "my" or "our," but "thy brother." Forty years after the Exodus, however, his audience of prospective Crossers would include many who have never suffered Hebrew slavery either. 23. As early as the Septuagint, Moses goes out to "his brothers the sons of Israel" and sees "an Egyptian striking a certain Hebrew of his brothers the sons of Israel." Following suit, the two New Testament retellings even leave out the Hebrewness. Stephen confronts him with "the sons of Israel" (Acts 7:23) and Hebrews, of all books, with ''the people of God" (11:25). Whether deliberate or not, their variations signify a movement away from (partisans would say, beyond) the Bible's ethnonational focus toward the universal trials of faith under Christ. 24. If the verb "strike" denotes a series of blows (Greenberg 1969:45, Durham 1987:19)which it needn'tthe link to the Plagues tightens further. However that may be, comparable to the echo between the self-initiated and the national "going out," the "striking"-to-"strikings" linkage is two-edged: it works for contrast along the private/public axis, not for harmony between the early Mosaic and the divine, as usually understood since Ackerman (1974:99) indicated the lexical chain. 25. See Sternberg 1979, 1986, 1991b, and especially 1983 and the 1985 index under "Free indirect discourse." To omit the "and behold" marker, as is often done for pseudo-elegance, is therefore to lessen the surprise value, while a translation like "understandably" (Durham 1987:14) reverses it into predictability. 26. Conversely, he himself may have been deemed by Pharaoh a betrayer of Egyptian solidarity (Ackerman 1974:101-102). 27. If crossculturalist phantoms were quantifiable, then the heretic king, Akhenaton, would make the less unlikely candidate for the role of Moses' human
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teacher: he at least definitely challenged accepted beliefs and practices. To this extent, the Freudian romance of the genesis, originally subtitled "A Historical Novel" (1964:3), shows comparative realism. 28. If ger is an Egyptian loanword (Redford 1992:385), and so maybe a reflex comparable to the outgrown and multiply distancing ethnicon he used, then his alien perspective again betrays even its literal roots in the antitype's value-laden terminology. The very form embodies the sense of identity that it expresses: the medium becomes, or doubles, the message. 29. As Joseph has often been classed with Semite emigrants to Egypt, it is worth recalling the documentary evidence that they tended to give their offspring Egyptian names in the process of assimilation (see, e.g., Williams 1971:25758, 262). Likewise, of course, with innumerable analogues elsewhere and since, even in environments more tolerant, positions less eminent, and unions less exogamous than the Viceroy's. 30. The sequence fares worse yet in Josephus. His retelling (Antiquities 2.277-78) likewise collocates the two births, except that it springs them on us after the Burning Bush, against both the chronology and the unfolding of the hero's psychology. 31. The less so considering the rival's imperfect fitthe name's morphology never quite decomposes to grs *and least of all in the ger sham ("sojourner there") explanatory variant, which near perfects even the lexical cover for "Gershom," as we shall see. 32. Ehyeh (a variant contrastively proposed by Durham 1987:24) would be neither univocal nor quite idiomatic in the role of such a copula, nor would it happily prefigure the ineffable Name. Far less could the same exegete's rendering of hayiti as "have been" (ibid.:21ff.) advert to the Mosaic past "foreign" sojourner in Egypt, thus contrasting with the present idyll in Midian, the "home" found at last. 33. Even a past tense reading ("was") of the copula, for that matter, would only change adverse judgments: the namegiver looking back on his "foreignness" in Egypt would then have transplanted his home to Midian, equally "not theirs." 34. For some further echoes, see Garsiel 1991:136-38. 35. Without resolving the self-contradiction, Rashbam's laconic gloss nicely pinpoints it: "Sojourner there (ger sham), in a faraway land." 36. Sander Gilman concludes from this remark, and the theory enclosing it, that "Freud, like his 'Egyptian' Moses, speaks a language other than that of the image of the Jew which he rejects. It is the language of scientific discourse" (1990:189). The deduction would appear no more likely than the statement on which it rests. Freud completed Moses and Monotheism after his escape from Nazi Austria, identifies himself as a Jew, throws himself into Jewish history down the millennia, privileges roots over images, and apologizes for the book's unscientific disorder as well as speculativeness. This rather makes it odder that he failed to identify Moses as the prototype of the assimilated or halfassimilated Jew overtaken by harsh reality. 37. Nothing but stock response leads to the contrary view, whereby "Gershom" did or might originate in some foreign tongue and what we encounter is its Biblicized rendering. For example, "This name contains a pun by assonance, for it is translated as though it were the Hebrew ger* sam*, 'a resident alien there.' As often in the Old Testament, the remark is a commentary on the meaning of the name rather than an exact translation (cf. Ex. 2:10)" (Cole 1973:61-62). Often attested or not, exact or not, comparable to "Moses" or not, the givens raise this time the simple question: Translated from what? 38. At the same time, in a wider intercultural perspective, operating across
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literatures and, it so happens, across the River, the self-introduction as "God of thy father" may well resume a dialogue with the exordium of Sargon's birth story, "my father I knew not" (see the text in Pritchard 1969:119, which goes on to narrate how the infant was put "in a basket" sealed "with bitumen'' and lifted out of the river by a "drawer of water"; see also the evidence, cited in Sarna 1986:44, for the international currency of the Bible's phrase itself). Having come on nameless, Moses' Levite father disappears after his conception, from a tale thematizing all other nuclear kinship terms, to reappear in God's self-nomination after (and, metaphorically, as) "thy father." This tie-up also helps to explain the backward-looking, none other than Patriarchal choice of the singular (the forefathers, catalogued immediately afterwards, used to speak of the God of their father); in turn, it looks ahead to the bloody aftermath of the Golden Calf apostasy, commemorated in Moses' valedictory praise for the Levi tribe, "who said of his father and his mother, I regard [lit., see] him not" (Exodus 32:26-28, Deuteronomy 33:9, where the singular recurs in force under collective guise, as it already did in Jacob's "blessing" of the eponymous Levi's killing "a man" for Dinah). Readers are invited to work out for themselves what this pointed chain means, how it benefits from the interliterary cross-reference, and where it links up with the movements between knowing and not knowing (one's kin, Joseph, God, oneself) throughout the Egyptian conflict. I would only add that this kind of caustic, two-edged, structured, developing allusion to a foreign literalismhere the great Sargon's avowal of illegitimacyis much more characteristic of the Bible than the artless analogies and typologies (over)drawn in parallel-hunting, genetic or otherwise. Of the two national leaders, the foreigner's discourse of antecedents can hardly be expected to get off more lightly than the foreignized native's; and it does get the rougher treatment in the ethnocentric counterdiscourse. Chapter 6 1. Or garbling it to produce another facile montage: "The LXX reading 'slaves' here rightly stresses that the new events seem no more than a slave revolt to the Philistines" (Herzberg 1964:104). So rewording and revoicing go togetherexcept that the LXX never attributes the "slave revolt" to the Philistine viewpoint. 2. As I have argued elsewhere, the same rage for easy harmony may also lead the Septuagint to the opposite extreme of interference: the "neurotic" ironing out of variations in repetition (Poetics, chap. 11). 3. For example, Lewy 1957:3; Cazelles 1958:203-204; Gray 1958:180-82; Weingreen 1967; Stoebe 1973:241-51; Gottwald 1979:419-25; Stolz 1981:84-85; Klein 1983:121-22, 125-26; Baldwin 1988:103-104; Merrill 1988:101102, 203; Brichto 1992:267n. 10; Caquot and de Robert 1994:162. Among these, Gottwald most forthrightly deplores the "unnecessary textual and exegetical contortions [performed] to avoid the evident meanings of what is said"; but the "meanings" he finds "evident" perform their own contortions in oscillating between 'apiru and Israelite reference, without so much as a fixed semantic nucleus at either limit. See also note 4 below. 4. Incurred, for example, by Mary Gray, who never brings usage under any unitary reference or sense. Thus her fallback on synchronic partition: Saul refers, by "Hebrews," to Hab/piru outsiders; the Philistines, to Israelites. Again, even taken alone, the latter "use the term in the sense of 'immigrants,' certainly in the case of David and his party and perhaps all the time. They use it in the sense of 'soldiers' and also in the sense of 'servants'" (1958:180-82). For a more recent instance of the group name divided against itself (and disarmingly admitted to
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produce "a mixture of meanings, a mélange of nuances," yet without "quite resolving all difficulties"), see Gottwald 1979:419-25. Both thus replace low by high source-critical commixtures to shield another preconception. 5. Thus the abrupt mention of 14:21 in Bright 1972:184. 6. I have detailed these matters in Sternberg 1985: esp. 230ff., and 1990. 7. See note 4 above. With commendable honesty, the best of the partitioners ends by admitting the resistance offered by our series: "I have been unable to determine whether the 'Hebrews' in 13:3 and 14:21 (and 13:7 if that reference to Hebrews is tentatively retained) were Israelites or non-Israelites" (Gottwald 1979:425). 8. This contrasts in principle with the drive toward emending the Philistines' earlier recall of the plagues inflicted on Egypt "in the wilderness" (4:8) into "and the pestilence" and the likeas if the recallers were Bible students or historians of Israel. By a routine inconsistency, Saul incurs correction for not speaking, the Philistines for speaking, in group character: the heterocultural effect suffers either way. Conversely with those who never find ''Hebrews" very odd in Saul's parlance, any more than in the Philistines', but at times do and at times don't in the narrator's, for example, the literary-minded Fokkelman (1986:30 vs. 31); see also note 12 below. 9. "Unequivocally," too, in Redford 1970:203. 10. But see Gray 1958:180n. 340. 11. Among the types of informational discrepancy studied in Poetics, esp. 129-85, this belongs to the "characterelevating." 12. See the end of chapter 4 above, with the "King of the Jews" companion piece from the New Testament. A more vulgar analogue would be Luther's self-reference by the Yiddish term for a Gentile, thus expressing and fomenting Judaeophobia through the punctuation of anti-Jewish polemic with Jewish-like parlance: "I, a damned goy, cannot understand where they have their great skill in interpreting. . . . They see things in Scripture that neither Isaiah nor Matthew, nor all the angels saw, and that we damned goys can never hope to see" (quoted in Gilman 1986:60). Fokkelman 1986:30-31 actually ascribes such a reading to the king's address and then maintains it in face of later disclosures, sprung on the narrator's own authority, by forcing or ignoring their plain sense. 13. Alternatively, the pluperfect indicates a shift not or not only in time but (as often elsewhere) in space, focus, arena. The replacement or reinforcement of linear by lateral maneuvering would then leave the tripartition in force: "the Philistines assembled [ne'espu] . . . the men of Israel saw [ra'u] . . . Hebrews crossed [abru]," with the (plu)perfect guiding us through the movement all along and even dividing the referent groups from the next in line, Saul's host, who "followed him trembling [hardu *]." For more on the interplay among time, space, and foregrounding, see my "Grand Chronology" (Sternberg 1990: esp. 96ff.). 14. Cf. the comment in Polzin 1989:127. 15. For example, the synchronic partition in de Vaux 1978:I, 211-12, whereby 14:21, alone of all texts, diverges from the rule of Hebrew/Israel co-reference. 16. Adhering to it in turn, the novelist Joseph Heller interpolates an untimely possessive in retelling the move in Saul's voice: "And some of my Hebrews even went back over Jordan" (1985:193). Unless automatically equated with Israelites, whom Saul might indeed appropriate, they have never been anybody's men but their own. 17. In vain would some credit those Hebrews with having "turned the tide of battle, since prior to their defection the battle was greatly confused" (Gray 1958:181). At the time, as the narrator specifies, the "great confusion" was in the Philistine ranks, not in the battle.
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Chapter 7 1. So will retellers and reworkers: Josephus, true to his Rabbinic upbringing, substitutes "compatriot" for Pentateuch law's "Hebrew," though the ethnicon has already lost its sting in his normal usage. 2. The Abrahamite nexus has already been introduced and found untenable, in the opening section of chapter 1, as has its modern all-Eberide counterpart. But its logic is worth reviewing in the context of bondage, from and for which it sprang in the first place. 3. Contrast Gray's own exegesis of the redundancy in a parallel phrase, "a Hebrew man from among his brothers," as a specification designed to establish the referent's Israelite, not his alien or class identity (1958:159). For the sake of argument, though, consider this parallel redundancy on its Hab/piru reading. "Hebrew" would then form the larger group, subsuming "his brothers" inter alia. In release law's "Hebrew brother,'' therefore, "brother" must then similarly qualify the class-wide "Hebrew"not vice versa, as Wright (1990:254) affirms in disregard of the parallel along with the Bible's rationale and language of fraternity. At the very least, we may conclude that, even if the brother were Hab/piru, he would still be native-born. And the rest of my argument invalidates the premise itself. 4. The monograph devoted to the root by Riesener (1979) gives an idea of its semantic flexibility. 5. In fact, the special treatment enjoined by Leviticus for the enslaved Israelite draws him closer to his putative antithesis, the Nuzi Hab/piru. The latter, though called slave, is also favorably distinguished from ordinary alien slaves in a number of respects (conveniently listed in Greenberg 1955:67-68), for example, that he does not sell his person to the master, or that the servant/master bond gets expressed at times in language reminiscent of adoption contracts. 6. Apart from trading on the protean semantics of the word 'bd, the workings of the Bible's discourse thus contextualize in verbal form the relativity of sociocultural placement in the world itself. Terms like "'slave' are meaningless by themselves. They become meaningful only when contrasted with other terms involved in social stratification, such as 'semi-free' and 'free'" (Gelb 1967:4). 7. See again the variants in Noth 1934:110-11, 1954:34, 62, Gray 1967:157, Paul 1970:46, Bottéro 1981:103. Some even assume that all Biblical and cuneiform law-codes went back to "a canon that was handed on from one system to another through the scientific tradition" (Westbrook 1988:4): with the ancient jus gentium so generalized, the conjectural Hab/piru nexus would exemplify a supranational Documentary rule and its value as test case widen yet further in proportion. Recall also ur- or mega-textual parallels in various other fields, such as the idea of unified literary isms. 8. Actually, bracketing Nuzi's with Israel's "slave legislation" is extending the mistypology from the slave to the legal writing about him. The disparities, both those constant between the respective forms of writing (especially in modality and narrativity) and those added by Scripture (e.g., in person deixis and larger, canonical interpretability), will appear in the next chapters. See, for instance, chapter 9, note 3 below. 9. The inverse also happens, within or between extremes of grouping. One anti-Hab/piru critic would delete the Exodus "Hebrew" (as a late addition, retrojected from the national-minded Deuteronomy) to much the same effect of early social reference (Jackson 1988:93). Again, on the local patriotic side this time, recall the Targum's substitution of "Israelite" for "Hebrew": it literalizes the unicultural reading into the discourse as the others (substitutor and elider) do the crosscultural, always to preclude some inconvenient divide latent in the original.
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10. "The Origins of Israelite Law," in Alt 1989:93-98, with a large following since the original 1934 publication, down to, e.g., Lemche 1975:138, 143, Gottwald 1979:769n. 412, Mayes 1991:250-51; for a survey of critics and criticisms of Alt, see Loretz 1984:123ff., 199ff. Of course, it is one thing to read the Hebrew's debt-slavery into the name and quite another to infer it from the (con)text (e.g., the language of buying and selling) that encloses the namean older and more arguable approach, to which Chirichigno has devoted a monograph, Debt-Slavery in Israel and the Ancient Near East (1993). A statement like "when the term
[ebed] is qualified by the designation
[ibri], as in Exod. 21:2 and Deut. 15:2, the resultant expression refers especially to debt-slaves" (ibid.:185) is infelicitous but not quite a lapse into Alt's error. What it would in fact claim is that the expression points there to an Israelite who (unlike Joseph as "Hebrew slave'') gets enslaved because of debt. 11. There existed in Nuzi a category of debt-servitude but, as Eichler 1973:47 points out, its members sharply varied from the Hab/piru in their citizenship and their flexible term of indenture: in their stronger Hebrew-likeness, if you will, without benefit of homonymy. Even if the case were otherwise and the emigrant numbered among these debtors, as a matter of historical fact, the term Hab/piru would yet no more denote slavery of any kind than does "Hebrew": actually even less, considering the relative infrequency with which the name-bearers meet or suffer the description outside the Bible. The two semantic attributes, far from dovetailed into a rigid group-portrait, need not coincide at all (as with nonslave Hab/piru, nonHab/piru slaves); and when they happen to intersect, their twinning may result from opposite processes. In the Nuzi tablets, free Hab/piru enter into service; whereas King Er-Heba * of Jerusalem denounces "slaves who have become Hab/piru*" (Greenberg 1955: no. 111). All obvious, of course: the aspiration to built-n semantics is a joke that would nowhere else pass for scholarship. 12. He seems to have recanted in Cazelles 1973:21. 13. For a milder dismissal see Greenberg 1955:67n. 28, Bottéro 1981:103, Chirichigno 1993:209, and the Eichler reference in note 11 above. 14. Lewy 1939:610, 1940:51-52, followed by North 1954:62, Gray 1958:151, 167, 184, Weingreen 1976:133, Cazelles 1973:21, 1987:85, 93, Patrick 1985:70. On the assumption of an underlying Hab/piru document, John Gray (1967:157) even widens the parallel in statutory limit from Nuzi to contractless Ugarit Hab/piru, figuring in the Ras Shamra texts. But see Weippert (1967:87n. 3) for another follower's demurral. 15. These subsets appear, respectively, in Bottéro 1954: nos. 50, 53, 55, 56a, 57, 58, 59, 65a, 65c, 66; nos. 49, 52, 60, 51, 54, 56b; nos. 54, 65b; nos. 61, 62. 16. Lewy 1939:610n. 112. Even his most loyal follower silently demurs here, viewing Exodus's unconditional manumission as a reform of Nuzi practice (Gray 1958:184). 17. Pace both the Rabbinic and the scholarly majority view, but see Cassuto 1967:266-67, Thompson 1974:189. Some vacillate between the poles (Lemche 1975:143 vs. 1976:42) or halve the Exodus woman's equality: co-bondage yes, co-release no (Phillips 1970, 1984, discussed below in chapter 9, note 33). 18. Lipinski* 1976:120-94, for example, identifies the "Hebrew slave" as an "Israelite of an inferior class," whose manumission falls short of "total independence"; cf. also Cardellini 1981:250-51, 345. Brichto (1992:70) even defines the postConquest ibri as a class "neither slave nor free." 19. Contrast also the Joseph narrative. If you recall its analysis in chapter 5, the silence of the Egyptian documents on emancipation may be taken to imply that slaves in Egypt "could pass, without any legal formalities, from a state of
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slavery to one in which they were regarded as servants" (de Vaux 1978:I, 315-16). But, granting this possibility, Joseph is never described there as hopshi *, while his Hebrew fellow slave in Israel's law always is. 20. For further theorizing and illustration, often with Biblical examples, see again the references to my previous work on pp. 449-50 above. 21. Or even why in this, outsider-to-insider direction? The reverse change of meaning is not only equally possible in theory and often traceable in the history of other groups; it has been surmised concerning the Hab/piru themselves at large, from the same meager evidence. "That a non-ethnic term tended to develop an ethnic use is very improbable, since there is nothing to suggest that in a later age any ethnic unity was felt . . . between Habiru* of the various districts where they are known to have been found." By contrast, "it is easy to see how an ethnic term could develop a non-ethnic usage, and become equivalent to slave, in a community where large numbers of people of this tribal group were reduced to slavery." With ''Hebrew," it is still likelier that "the ethnic use is the older" and "never wholly lost," too (Rowley 1942:51-52, 1950:53-54, or Moscati 1959:88-89). 22. E.g., Lewy 1940:52, Gray 1958:184. Cf. the variant in Cassuto 1967:265-66, or, for a one-stage tale of reform, Paul 1970:47, or, for a possible threefold advance, the discussion in Wright 1990:250-51: Leviticus would then count as a third, postexilic reform, extending the term of service from seven to a maximum of fifty years, because the shorter term had proved unenforceable. 23. Cassuto 1967:266. Less plausible on the evidence, though widely assumed, is mere crosscultural practice or imitation of Nuzi. Even less so, as demonstrated in the previous chapter, is Weingreen's (1967, 1976) theory of gratitude to "the Hebrews" for aiding Saul against the Philistines: a motivation soon to be reexamined in terms of the Bible's overall genetic chronology. The objections made below apply, at any rate, to all imputed motives. 24. Indeed, Jepsen 1927:76ff. goes so far as to restrict, as well as to trace, the law to them; contrast Japhet 1986:87. 25. It is odd that the Rabbis should designate the nonIsraelite bondman in perpetuity as "Canaanite slave" (maybe an echo of the curse pronounced upon the Gibeonites who had wangled themselves immunity from the ban in Joshua 9:22-27, or repronounced, because itself an echo of Noah); but no odder than the modern assimilation of Israel's slave law to Canaanite origins. 26. A franker extremist, Martin Noth (1934:101n. 1, 107nn. 1 and 2, 110), indeed admits that a single ethnic ibri would discredit the entire combined theory. But he otherwise never argues against the ethnicon's application to the later, "fraternal" ordinances. And on second thoughts (e.g., 1966:21-22), he comes to distribute the reference. Among literary approaches, surprisingly, the hard line does persist in Brichto 1992:267n. 10. 27. Specifics apart, the critique holds for other thin romances of Jeremian discontinuity with the tradition geared to the Hab/piru's sociolegal welfare. Thus Wright (1990:258-59) locates the turn in a speculative economic history of the Monarchy Age, during which the number of the "dispossessed and landless poor" constantly rose: "Their status in fact corresponded with that of the 'Hebrews' of the early laws, and so Jeremiah invokes that legislation as relevant to their situation. They were Judaean by nationality, but 'Hebrew' in social condition." 28. For comprehensive surveys, from different viewpoints, see Cardellini 1981, Loretz 1984: esp. 122-65, Chirichigno 1993. My own argument in the ensuing chapters will reorganize the main points at issue along more fundamental lines. 29. At the unicultural pole, the same would militate against the in-group version of the hypothesis, whereby the knowledge lost between the Codes finds its repair.
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For example, Exodus's "archaic term, already perhaps somewhat open to misinterpretation," is later "replaced by a more unequivocal phrase ['Hebrew brother'] which leaves no room for doubt concerning the slave's origins" (Japhet 1986:70). Note how the underlying assumption opposes that of Weingreen (1976): if the Deuteronomist's audience were more liable to error, then they must have been more, certainly not less, aware of the outgroup. Equally speculative, the mirror image premises cancel out each other. 30. In all this he repeats Cassuto's double talk (1967), noted above in connection with the bid for a more persistent synchronism, hence a longer reach of Hab/piru memory, just short of Jeremiah and the Rabbis. Compare also the wavering between remembrance and oblivion attributed to I Samuel 13-14 apropos the same cross-cultural equation. "The original narrator was close enough to the events to remember accurately that the Philistines did indeed regularly refer to his people as 'Hebrews'"; yet the text's usage betrays an awkwardness, "perhaps stemming from confusion among the later traditionists once the original sociological context for 'apiru/Hebrews was lost to their view" (Gottwald 1979:421, 423). Now the tricks played by the recording memory within a single two-chapter unit go back in turn to a partition of the namings between early storyteller and late editor: one ad hoc duality (in reference, attitude, truth-value) calls for another (in the genesis). Even so, all these flights of invention leave "a difficulty not easily overcome on any view of the identity of the Hebrews" and best eliminable by recourse to a third ad-hoc ploy, most against the crossculturalist's grainthe low-critical deletion of the name. Ironically, this is because the text's unity, so divided in both product and process, reasserts itself in maintaining a common feature between the occurrences "which gives me pause" (ibid.:423-24). 31. The fancied breach to the insider's advantage may come even earlier than Deuteronomy. The Exodus enactment has itself suffered division along these lines, whereby its first paragraph (21:2-6) refers to the Hab/piru bondman or bond-people, the second (21:7-11) to the Israelite bondmaid. Evidently, however, the firm reference backward at the point of transitionthe bondmaid "shall not go out as the slaves go out" (21:7)advertises their group co-reference. (See Noth 1966:177-79, Cassuto 1967:266-67 vs. Childs 1974:468, Phillips 1984:59, Jackson 1988:92.) Chapter 8 1. A matter of negative imagery, such representation would of course differ from the people's misrepresentation as ethnic Hamites, e.g., the low Egyptian origin attributed to them by the Ptolomaic historian Manetho and famously rejected in Josephus's Against Apion. 2. A measure of the difference between the two approaches is that the latter may be shared by opposed verbal extremists: one who strikes out the group name from Exodus law (Jackson 1988:93) and one who finds it the codeword for debt-as against chattel-bondage (Chirichigno 1993:185). 3. Cf. the Rabbinic-type splitting of the verb within the former pair of Codes themselves: the Exodus maidservant's entrance into bondage "is not her own decision but the will of her father who sells her because of his financial distress, while in Deuteronomy the maidservant, like the manservant, sells herself" (Weinfeld 1972:282n. 1). 4. Interestingly, the standard translation of Josephus by Thackeray restores the original twofold: "A Hebrew sold to another Hebrew . . ." (Antiquities 4.273).
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5. For now, just one example from an important standard work: in Weinfeld 1972:3-4, 171ff., "rhetoric" practically comes down to sermonizing. 6. In the spirit of the law's rhetoric, and to prevent misunderstanding, I have adjusted the rendering of the conjunctions to normal English usage. In the given casuistic discourse, Exodus introduces the first, general conditional or protasis by ki and the follow-up quartet of subclauses by im, while Deuteronomy opts for ki throughout. To mirror the variation between ki and im, they are often Englished as "when" and "if," respectively, just for the sake of difference. But "when" might here imply a temporal and accordingly tolerable contingency, rather than one strictly conditional, never to be realized for preferencehence my unchanging "if." Instead of "when,'' ki is perhaps best translated as "in case that," which would also suit term to directive-type: the ancient legal phraseology, to the meta-legal heading of casuistic ("case") law. 7. Chirichigno (1993:287-88) goes further back to Jacob in Laban's service, with some justification, but he misses the point: there is no Hebrewness, nor can there be, vis-à-vis an Aramean. Any simple backdating of the link (across the ethnographic difference, wholly unsuspected by the analyst) therefore resembles the bracketing of the Hebrew Codes with the Hebrewless Leviticus. The Jacobite precedent needs redefining accordingly, as I hope to demonstrate in a sequel to this book. 8. Observe that in self-sale, as in other contingencies, the tri-valence adhering to "buy" (or to Deuteronomy's "sell") implicitly thickens the law-narrative in excess of the terms actually manifest, yet with a certain refinement: the bought (or sold) is one, like the buyer, only he doubles as the seller. 9. On the hero as scriptrewriter, see the full-scale analysis in my Poetics, 285-308: the Lawgiver takes over from him, with shifts in genre, scale, and purpose that may recast Joseph himself. 10. Compare also the lawgiver's with the storyteller's rhetoric of grammatical person, whether in the opening of Exodus as discussed in earlier chapters or throughout Saul's Amalekite crisis (Poetics, 499ff.). 11. On how the offender fares even worse in the narrative than in the law, compare my discussion of the rapist in Sternberg 1992:473ff. 12. Quotations in Gilman 1990:138-39, 153. 13. They reply: "You understand well enough what slavery is, but freedom you have never experienced, so you do not know if it tastes sweet or bitter. If you ever did come to experience it, you would advise us to fight for it not with spears only, but with axes too" (Herodotus 1955:458). 14. The language always marks this twofold structure, though not in the same way. In Exodus, the entire Hebrew statute is governed by the opening conditional ki, which glides into a number of im conditionals; yet the last of them, regarding perpetuity, manifests an emphatic verb form, im amor yomar. In Deuteronomy, the temporary and the olamic case equally flaunt an initial ki, with the parallel even weighted on the latter side (ki . . . we'haya ki), again for transitional salience. See also note 6 above and the discussion below. 15. Josephus makes the nexus explicit: "If, having had children by a slavewoman at the house of the master who bought him, he, out of love and affection for his own, desires to continue to serve him, then . . ." (Antiquities 4.273). 16. Compare the Potiphar tale's distribution of pronouns and slave-nouns in regard to Joseph. The narrator's reference ("he . . . his . . . him") is pronominal, the Egyptian cast's nominal and de-nominational ("Hebrew man . . . Hebrew slave . . . thy slave").
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17. Josephus obliquely joins the consensus in eliding the inglorious ritual of perpetuation from the account addressed to a high foreign culture (Antiquities 4.273). One last-ditcher, though, reads the pierced ear and the expression ebed olam as markers of difference for the better, advertising "a preferential status over other slaves" (Mayes 1991:252). Chapter 9 1. Among the few modern dissenting voices, therefore, Edward Greenstein is notable for affirming unity along with a traditionalist source-diversity: "The process that constituted the Pentateuch, in each of its stages, tended to blend and integrate its material into a new entity, a text to be read as a continuous whole" (1985:986; see also his 1988:349ff. on the Leviticus analysis in Damrosch 1987). But what text, what reading, what continuity, what wholeness does Scripture imply between the law and the narrative in its narrativity? Actually, the Rabbis' example already shows the distance separating the presumption, or even the erratic practice, from the poetics of unity. They were the first to comment on, say, the link between the Hebrew's mutilated ear and its hearing, or counterhearing, of God's word at Sinai. Yet their piecemeal work, in both its interpretive and its generic aspect, disabled the elaboration of such exegesis beyond ad hoc insights, gestures toward a typological reading. See also notes 5, 6, and 7 below. 2. For example, Driver actually, and logically, arrives at such a conclusion within an otherwise low-realistic, that is, God-less framework of existence and development. All Israelite legislation "was (as a fact) derived ultimately from Moses, though . . . the laws cannot all in their present form be Mosaic: the Mosaic nucleus was expanded and developed in various directions" (1965:lvi-lvii). Even if you diminish Moses' role from originator to hallowed example or inspiration, he can still have been a real force in the processnot a pious fraudand to the legists themselves as well as to their audience. "Conceivably, the attribution to Moses of legal material which was believed to be in the spirit of Mosaic regulations" counted as a legitimate use of his "authoritative name" (Fishbane 1985:537). Contrast Smith 1972:208ff. on the Deuteronomic code as ''the most influential forgery in the history of the world" and the accounts examined in note 7 below. 3. Inter alia, this norm governs the Nuzi service contract, Hab/piru as otherwise, so that the divergence from the Code stretches to the matrix of telling. Having recorded the transaction in the appropriate past tense, the contract may go on to exploit the ever-open narrative license of shifting into modal and/or quotational form, with a view to detailing, qualifying, or anticipating things. (See the examples cited in chapter 4 above.) Even then, however, the modalized addenda still intertie with the antecedent framework of actualityoccupied by historical acts and entities and namesthe way contingency plans do in real life. The manner as well as the matter of law-telling in the two corpora therefore narrow doom the intersource generic similarity and continuity. 4. For generality, it is worth reiterating that the same Proteus Principle applies, mutatis mutandi, to other genres interspersed along the Bible's grand chronology and, one might add, to other crosscuts: of the latter, the best known is the narration/description binarism, for whose Protean unsettling see Sternberg 1981a, 1985:321-64, 1992b: esp. 508ff. 5. The failure to distinguish in such terms the criterial narrativity of narrative from its commonalities with text and representation in general has long hindered the progress of narratology. It also mars some recent welcome attempts to bring legislation and narration together. In an insightful chapter on Leviticus, Damrosch
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(1987) thus mainly singles out the law book's non- or extra-narrative features as its narrative element. Those areas of mistaken generic identity are typical enough. For example, specificity does not by itself make a (juristic) representation "dramatic," because it is equally observable among frozen descriptive images; nor does its absence take away either narrativity or descriptivity, and elsewhere indeed "the narrative details have dropped out as unimportant." Detail is, instead, a free cross-representational, even crossdiscoursive variable. Likewise with meaningful sequence or recurrence, so that ''a narrative order of varied repetition" begs the question twice (Damrosch 1987:264-65, 267; contrast my 1981a, 1984, 1990a, 1992b); inversely, and more obviously, nonchronological ordering produces a twisted narrative rather than "an antinarrative" (Damrosch 1987:279ff.). Likewise with inter-textual "parallel" or "analogy": given a narrative proper, for example, the killing of Aaron's sons, these universal discourse variables may link it to history (ibid.:272-78)as they might any referentbut never constitute its storyhood in the first place. Where, then, if anywhere, does the book's narrativity lie and how precisely does it intermix with the rest? Much the same question arises regarding the suggestive legal theory advanced in Cover (1983). The opening could hardly be more forthright: "We inhabit a nomosa normative universe" where "law and narrative are inseparably related." But I for one cannot puzzle out what "narrative" means here, let alone how, least of all in its "diffuse and unprivileged character . . . in a modern world," which seems to comprise everything in extralegistic reality, actual or imaged (ibid.:4-5; the example from the Bible on pp. 19-25, though, shows a determinate generic focus, presumably because a canon militates against "diffuseness"). It is worth restressing, then, that not everything in narrative is peculiar to narrative, i.e., makes or breaks the text's narrativity. The point is rather that nothing in a narrative text escapes narrativizing in its movement between the peculiar temporalities of action and communication: even words can change their sense in the twofold process, worlds their key, analogies their relationship, themes their ideological burden, just like agents interacting with or within the arena proper. Still, whatever befalls them, the former remain in principle nongeneric if not dispensable, the latter generic and definitional. 6. This is one reason why the cavils of Bernard Levinson (1991) at the focus of my Poetics on the narrative, to the supposed exclusion of the law, exposes such a profound, almost perverse misunderstanding of the Bible's fundamentals and my own argument at once. I could not separate the two genres, even if I would, as Levinson's awkward shuttling between them proves beyond doubt. For some earlier discussion and illustration of the principle, with reference to various (ge)narrativized genres, see my Poetics, 41ff., 132-33, 428-30, 485ff., and the index under "Genre"; see also my "Biblical Poetics and Sexual Politics," (Sternberg 1992a: esp. 482-87). 7. Among the few postRabbinic attempts at generic interrelation, the failure to mark off the two realities vitiates even the most promising venture, launched by David Daube with regard to slave law itself. About the gifts taken from Egypt and enjoined on the Israelite master, for example, he asserts: "God makes the Egyptians follow the social commandments of Deuteronomy (or some rules prior but similar). . . . I assume that Exodus iii.21 [on those gifts] is an allusion to Deuteronomy . . . rather than that the latter is modelled on the former." As a whole, "the law in question, or some similar law at least, is far older than the idea of founding it on the deliverance from Egypt: but, once that event was construed as in accordance, it must have been a tremendously strong argument" (Daube 1969:5052). First ancient Code, then application to Egypt's case, then reinforcement of the Code in its light: is the threephase line of development proposed
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here source- or discourse-oriented? It actually mixes the orientations, so that the phases never cohere into a line. The pre-textual source of discourse (e.g., the "older," nonextant law supposedly applied to "Egypt") hardly aligns with the contextualized discourse of source (e.g., the extant law's appeal to Egypt as precedent), which neither does nor would acknowledge it, rightly for all we know, but tells a story of and in another order, geared to another world. Much the same holds for Daube's follower, Calum Carmichael, though he both reverses the point of origin from law to narrative and rejects the speculative historical method. This may sound like a gravitation toward the finished text (or "literature," as the critique in Levinson 1990 has it). Only, the reversal is pragmatic, forced by the inaccessibility of the "old rules," in Israel or the Ancient Orient, that have led "to those before us now" (Carmichael 1985:16). And the rejection of source criticism excepts several of its major anti-discoursive tenets, adopted by Carmichael as "the key to understanding" what has "never been worked out.'' Foremost among these is "the fictional attribution of the laws in Deuteronomy to Moses" (ibid.)against the Bible's hard truth-claim, doubled in the law with the double bearing on the inset listener and the frame's reader. Also ignored and collapsed, as usual, is the twofold God-to-Moses chaining of the inset itself. Nor does the adopted sourceassumption of pseudepigraphy reckon with any of the generic discourse forces shown above to negate it by inextricably placing the Lawgiver at the heart of the legaliterary system, from the law-speaking event up to the law-macrotale. Internal resistance apart, though, does the postulation of an originary fictionalizer make sense on its own pseudoepigraphic terms? By the time of Deuteronomy, this surmise also bumps against the chronology: Moses having already assumed the role in Exodus's Code, the Deuteronomist can neither have initiated the fiction nor invented the law in direct contact with the narrative, or with it alone. The less so because, if the (re)inventor of Moses wants to trade on his name and authority, then there must have been some inherited law from which the Lawgiver's reputation as such grew and the new Code's Mosaic credentials with it. For all we know, every single item in either Code, or throughout the corpus, went back to presettlement history: the lawtales ancient, the prophet's law-speaking and -writing (if not -quoting) true, their received form alone editorial. In principle, certainly, the belatedness or novelty of the legislative matter and of its mediation do not entail each other, just as you cannot fictionalize Moses by association with God. Moreover, counter to narrative logic and practice alike, the fictionalizing is assumed (or invented) by Carmichael to transcend realistic together with reallife norms, as though a fictional were eo ipso both a fantastic and an author-like, omnicompetent speaker all round (and vice versa). By such package dealing, Moses "looks back on events in his life and before, but he also looks forward to events long after his time, for example, to the Israelite request for a king, because as a prophet he has foreknowledge" (Carmichael 1985:17). Actually, the fictionalizing compounds gratuitousness with inefficacy. It is not at all required in order to have Moses "look back" on what he experienced or inherited. Nor will it serve to cast him as "looking forward to events long after," except by a circular argument most alien, among all narrative, to the logic of fiction: given that a fictional speaker presupposes an author, the latter might well anticipate developments behind his creature's back, as Scripture often does even outside fiction. (Thus the endless ironies of knowledge, or the prospective and the retrospective closures of the in medias legis gap.) Furthermore, reason and truth apart, why appeal to a pseudepigraphic fictionwhere the same attribute and outcome of the lawgiver's prophecy would, for better or worse, ensue from the theocentric narrative dataif not under the impetus of the source critical autom-
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atism? When it comes to the fictionalizer, the symptom repeats itself. Why oppose to the traditional learned theories of authorship "the simple proposition that a single Deuteronomic writer . . . is responsible for the composition of Deuteronomy and the redaction of the historical books" (Carmichael 1985:18n. 6), when this counterthesis amounts to Scripture's original unitary premise? And how does the writer's specification follow? "From our rational, critical point of view we can infer that the laws are the product of someone other than Moses who is surveying the sweep of history from the patriarchal period through to the end of the period of the kings of Israel and Judah. This lawgiver sees himself in the prophetic line of Moses. . . . He sincerely believes he has authority to make judgments on issues that arose in the nation's past because he possesses the mind of Israel's first lawgiver" (ibid.:17-18). The rational analyst, then, posits the author's behind the speaker's irrationality, and to new counterproductive effect. Why should a prophet interpose an anterior prophet (against the rule of the narrative enclosing the Code, anonymous yet charged with divine authority) only to review the same "sweep of history" as his mouthpiece, "the nation's past"? The logic of pseudepigraphy, evident throughout its annals, would rather argue for the opposite inference: that the fictional speaker's pastorientedness was devised to camouflage and warrant the real author's business with his own real-life present. To have him range over the whole of Israelite history but draw the line at the here-and-now would crown the tissue of improbabilities. Therefore, though abounding in points of local interest, Carmichael's inquiry, too, unhappily wavers between discourse and source: between the historiography as given and the prehistory as thought fit. (Except that Daube, e.g., 1969:72n. 146, at least skirts the minefield of truth-value.) However the scattered Rabbinic insights into generic contact fall short of a method, and the prehistorians' method of insight, the polar underlying assumptions at least spare either any analogous wavering in the very frame of reference. 8. The first case in point arises in the next section, down to note 16. 9. For example, Wellhausen 1957 [1878]:119-20, David 1948: esp. 74-79, Lemche 1976:51ff., Phillips 1984:58-59, Carroll 1986:648, Jones 1992:427, Nielsen 1995:163, Houtman 1997:99-100. 10. Apart from other echoes and borrowings, the interchange of the two time phrases nicely coheres with Deuteronomy's usage, e.g., 15:1, 9; cf. also the Qumran parallels cited in Wallenstein 1954:213. The Septuagint, therefore, only betrays its chronic nervousness in emending the "seven" to "six." Inversely, advocates of a fixed nationwide septennial cycle in Jeremiah cannot trade on this "seven" anyway, because the release, like the remission of debt, would always come after six years. The fixture and the figure are two discrete issues. 11. On this plot type in the Bible, see my Poetics, esp. pp. 309ff., and in narrative at large, Sternberg 1978:93ff., 1992b:508-38. 12. Or its consignment to the ethical domain, overridden by profane, royal law that instituted permanent bondage (Cassuto 1967:261). 13. The failure may even have been progressive: the debt-servitude threatened in II Kings 4:1-7 is ugly but legal, and its prevention by Elisha leaves the creditor's designs on the children ambiguous, between temporary and unlimited enslavement. God's categorical retrospect in Jeremiah 34:14, generalizing backward from Jerusalem's malpractice, implies the latter, yet always short of fulfillment. 14. "Zedekiah, in his role as king, declared his (Chirichigno 1993:286).
'release' in order to re-institute the individual release of slaves"
15. Wright 1990:253-54 objects to the same lexical interchange from the opposite viewpoint, that of the crossculturalist set on reserving Leviticus for the Israelite.
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16. Or, possibly, veered away from it in the real-life genesis. This interestingly bears on Wellhausen's (1957 [1878]) famous dating of the Priestly Code and the Leviticus Holiness Laws incorporated in it to the postexilic era, as the latest of the "documents." The time order of the bondage statutes would accordingly be: Exodus, Deuteronomy, Jeremiah, Leviticus. Now, given our finding that the Bible itself correlates the exit of "Hebrews" with the Exileby a logic just inferred from Jeremiah 34the slave's unique nonHebrewing in Leviticus is more than another revealing absence. It may be taken as hard evidence for something like Wellhausen's thesis about the book's postexilicness, arguably harder evidence than most of what he actually adduced, and so for my broader claim: the dependence of the approach to either genesis (the real or the represented, the source-critical or the source-integrational) on the poetics. 17. Apart from being in the spirit of a nationwide exodus, this echoes God's forecast regarding the spoils of Egypt: "put them on your sons and your daughters" (3:22). In connection with the children, Moses thus articulates what God presupposed. 18. The bracketing with Judah at his most assimilated to the Hamiteswhen he accosts an ostensible cult prostitutefinds its darkest expression in the theophoric names of the priestly family into which Joseph marries. An alien divinity may well lurk in his own Pharaonic nomination; but "Potiphera" certainly means "He whom Ra gives" and "Asenat * is Egyptian Ns-nt, 'belonging to (the goddess) Neit'" (Redford 1970:228-31). That his former master, and by extension his master's wife, bore a variant of the same name, "Potiphar," deepens the ideological frown, as well as tightening the legal nexus. In the Bible, of course, "Ra'' means "evil": semantic inversion amid surface reproduction between the languages, comparable to what "Hebrew" undergoes in Hamite translation. And the recurrence of the hostile wordplay on "Ra" afterwards, beginning with the countermovement toward liberty (for some analysis see Rendsburg 1988), implies the persistence of the "evil" memory into the Exodus itself. 19. For documents, and an analysis overbent on parallelism, see Mendelsohn 1935, 1949:10-14, 52-55, still followed by Durham 1987:322; more distinctive is Paul 1970:52-53, Lemche 1975:143n. 62, Phillips 1984:60, or Houtman 1997:101. On the other hand, if "the [Exodus] master could presumably have designated her to a slave" (Carmichael 1974:59, also Noth 1966:244, Hyatt 1980:230, Schenker 1988, Marshall 1993:118), native or foreign, then Egypt would be outdone, Nuzi restaged, in Israel. Recall also Proverbs on the enormity of the unloved woman getting mated. Similarly with the low-critical idea of treating the verb in asher lo ye'adah ("to whom he designated her") as metathesis for yeda'ah, "knew," that is, illicitly "'consummated his union with her'" (McNeile 1908:128 or NEB among translators). 20. For the lexeme's versatile usage, see again chapter 3. Moreover, concerning resale, the no-worse-than-Egypt principle specifically shields the bondman as well, even at his hangdog worst. The plea of ignorance about the matter only exposes the pleader's reading incompetence: "Nothing can be said about the rights and obligations of a Hebrew slave in a prolonged slavery. The term Ex. xxi 6 [he shall serve him forever] seems to indicate that the slave was to remain in the service of his master indefinitely, but whether this meant that the owner could not get rid of his slave by selling him or setting him free later on must at present be kept an open question" (Lemche 1975:142; contrast Patrick 1985:70). The Joseph precedent in fact closes the gap: he was resold (if at all) to Egypt, never by Egypt (Genesis 37:27-28, 36, 39:1), any more than was his nation-size Hebrew counterpart. An intertextual finesse across genres? Maybe, but then the very words quoted from the law by the source critic articulate in the plainest language the
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same ruling that the allusion to the narrative implies. means "serve [slave] him forever": no riddance by either "selling" or ''setting free later." Any competent reader would further note that the wording designed to forge a mutual bond is even more emphatic apropos of lifelong than of temporary bondage, "six years he shall serve"; and a source critic should also have known that nonMasoretic versions (the Samaritan, the Septuagint, the Vulgate, and the Syriac) make doubly sure here by tacking on a comparable pronominal reference to the master, "thee," as the object of service. All this interbonding of the two parties, as I have already argued, accords with the law's thematic two-edgedness for deterrence. Between them, if anything, it is rather the master who fares worse than Egypt, because he can never initiate the perpetuation or expedite the departure against the slave's will: in buying a Hebrew slave, once again, you have bought a master. 21. For an illustrated discussion see my Poetics (esp. 84-152 passim, 365-440), and the references in the following note. 22. On speaking/hearing vs. writing/reading and their inset/frame relations in the Bible, see my Poetics (esp. 58-185, 365-440), also Sternberg 1986, 1991a, and now the fine doctoral thesis "'When Moses Had Finished Writing': Communication in Deuteronomy, Deuteronomy as Communication" (1996) of my student Jean-Pierre Sonnet, as well as the theoretical work on quotation listed in the bibliography. 23. For the play of lo in a narrative dialogue that thematizes hearing, compare Sternberg 1991a:42ff. 24. This perfectly accords with my argument (Sternberg 1986) that the Bible's dramas of oral communication explore various tricks played by hearing on the way to the inner ear but stop short of mishearing: the hearer registers less than the whole truth of the utterance and the event, never an untruth. 25. The nonseriality of the Leviticus version shows here again. Though enunciated at Sinai, like Exodus's, it verbalizes the motivation (25:42) in postExodus style. Conversely, except for the echoing "with rigor," be'farekh (25:46, picked up from Exodus 1:13), it dispenses with the underground web of allusion and so with the thick discourse-of-source traceable, we will find, in all postExodus Hebrew law: this book would have nothing of the original servitude recurnot even the echoing be'farekh, now prohibited instead of practicedonly the Exodus-like mass deliverance under God in the Jubilee. 26. I have theorized them as narrative universals in, for example, Sternberg 1978, 1981a, 1985: esp. chaps. 6-11, 1992: esp. 508ff. For some additional explanations and references, see my analysis of "tales of diachrony" in chapter 7 above. 27. Cf. the hint in Rashi ad loc., where he also cites the Rabbinic attempt to wriggle out of the difficulty by taking the unprecedented gift list as illustrative rather than exhaustive. 28. Thus Qiddushin 15a, 17b, Rashi, Rashbam, Ibn Ezra, etc. 29. See, for example, Loretz 1984:165. 30. So even Schenker 1988:351, who heterodoxly extends "sellability" of one kind or another from the designated daughter to all daughtersbut not to all women. For a yet rarer extension to Hab/piru women, see Cassuto 1967:266-67 and, hesitantly, Lemche 1975:143. 31. Significantly, the lex talionis has already rewarded them in the tale: now it crosses genres to encompass their entire type. Likewise with the set of Exodus female deliverers as a whole, whom Moses' delivery of Jethro's daughters has long ago brought and paid back. This amounts to a twofold measure of gratitude, at least, expressed in two modalities, one generic, one intergeneric, with both coverage and time scale widening as history goes forward: distance, if anything, improves the terms of canonical remembrance.
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32. The intergeneric key thus does duty for the threefold categorization of female status that the law elsewhere makes explicit, as in regard to vowing (Numbers 30). 33. Some scholars, justly taking the "daughter's" as a special but not unique case of female enslavement, would yet appear to deny women the right of "going out" and so break with the consensus in a direction opposed to my own. Thus, for example, David 1948:67-68, Noth 1966:178-79, and most insistently Anthony Phillips. He affirms that the Mishpatim Code, rather than exempting the Israelitess from bondage, excludes her from seventh-year discharge: "Female slaves are not given their freedom (Ex. 21:7). . . . Exodus 21:8ff. contains special regulations should the former slave girl be given in marriage." Only the Deuteronomist "extended the legislation to include the release of a female Hebrew slave'' (Phillips 1970:73, 76). A later article supplies the point with ideosocial grounds: "In contrast to other slave provisions of the Book of the Covenant (Ex. 21.20-21, 26-27, 32), which applied generally to all slaves male and female whatever their origin, 21.2 should be understood as limited to male Israelite slaves. . . . Unlike the foreign slaves drawn from prisoners of war, [they] are not to lose their freedom for all time," since they must gain back their "rightful place" under king and covenant (Phillips 1984:61-62). But this would at best suggest the man's right, never his exclusive right, to discharge here. The argument that the Mishpat correlates sexual with temporal "limitation" among bondgroups in Israel does not followunless the women, having no such "rightful place" as yet, are doomed to serve forever. Even on this assumption, however, the "wife shall go out with him," the bondmaid shall receive freeborn-like treatment or else go free: the analyst's double standard comes down on, and to, the unmarried adult woman. An exorbitant price, surely. All the higher if you consider that the assumption itself reckons without the force of the Exodus precedents and the art of replotting the precept: without either the historic justice or the novel poetics behind the law. 34. Taken up by the Vulgate and discussed in Schenker 1988:552ff., who pushes the general reference further back into the very Masoretic text: as though "daughter" stood for all parentally controlled females ("l'esclave-femme en général") sold "undesignated." Rabbinic exegesis will not except even the "designated" maid from the law of seventhyear, or of Jubilee, unloosing (e.g., Mekilta de-Rabbi Ishmael, ed. Lauterbach 1949:III, 8). 35. So the subtitle of de Boer 1948 and the opening sentence of Schenker 1988, for instance, call her; while van Seters (1996) erases the difference altogether in co-Hebrewing everyone kept unHebrewed by Scripture, whether the Leviticus bondman or the Exodus bondgirl. The fact that she is spared the hatename by the law as well as the narrative ironizes the routine (and in, e.g., Marshall 1993:118-19, trendy) talk about her "inequality" to the male name-bearer. For the practical consequenceslater, also for the need to deautomatize and contextualize the very idea of (in)equalitysee below. 36. In longer retrospect, the Chronicler seems to bundle into a passing allusion all these Hamite affairs, now including the law's. The Judahite genealogy there, having opened by retelling Judah's own antipatriarchal and illfated liaison with "Bathshua the Canaanitess," proceeds to single out Sheshan's giving his daughter to "his Egyptian slave": a plain violation of Deuteronomic law (I Chronicles 2:3-4, 34-35, Deuteronomy 23:8-9) yet also an inverted echo of Joseph and the Blasphemer, if not of Solomon, the Egyptianized Judahire and Pharaoh's son-in-law. Cf. also how Ezekiel 23 dramatizes the women's self-prostitution in Egypt as a vehicle, revealing even if merely figurative, for his plot of national apostasy. 37. Kugel (1981: esp. 12-13) might have used this verse to historicize and elaborate his thesis that poetic repetition by way of parallelism involves "sharpening":
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the very term in effect goes back to Scripture, the implicit theory of resaying covers more than poetry, and the idea of repetition links up the text's own make-up (from parallel phrases to Codes) with our making sense of the text. 38. All the more so given the adjacent recurrence of the backpairing under lmd in 4:1 vs. 5, 5:28 vs. 6:1; and also the different emphasis of Exodus itself, even on the rare occasions when it addresses what seems like the same topic in similar language. Thus concerning the laws of Unleavened Bread and Firstling, "Thou shalt tell thy son on that day, It is because of what the Lord did for me when I came out of Egypt. And it shall be to thee as a sign on thy hand and as a memorial between thy eyes, that the law of the Lord may be in thy mouth; for with a strong hand has the Lord brought thee out of Egypt. Thou shalt therefore keep this ordinance at its appointed time from year to year" (Exodus 13:6-10, 11-16). The cross-rhyming with Deuteronomy 6:6-9, 11:18-20, down to the language of "sign" for memory, highlights the progression (now antedated) from remembering, iterating ("in thy mouth"), transmitting (''tell thy son"), law-"keeping," to studying and teaching and sharpening. (Weinfeld 1972:189, 303 observes the exclusiveness of "teach" to Deuteronomy but not the counterexclusive antedating for bridging. Within Deuteronomy proper, he also weakens the ideonational thrust of the study-and-teach directive by associating it, and in its legal bearing of all things, with cosmopolitan wisdom circles; nor does the verb's association with that for physical disciplinethe precedented and power-exerting and possibly God-administered ysrreflect the spirit of the book's leap into a culture of study.) 39. Apparently too absurd to mention, something like this idea arises ad loc. in Durham 1987:309. 40. Weinfeld (1972:282-83), whom the above quotation from Phillips echoes, is more circumspect, to the point of equivocating between kinds of silence: the moralist's evasive or dissuasive omission ("the subject of concubinage is avoided in Deuteronomy") as against the reformer's innovative variety, endowed with absolute statutory force (" [The master] . . . neither gives the slave a wife nor deprives him of one"). For similar equivocal language within a yet earlier hypothesis of progress, see Driver 1965:182-83. 41. On the ends and means of "deconcretizing" in narrative, compare Sternberg 1978:23-31, and in quotation 1979:117-19, 1982b:93-104. 42. Witness also the verse preceding the intermediate role-assignment. There, on the accepted understanding and in the RSV translation, God foretells: "He will let you go hence; when he lets you go, he will drive you away completely" (11:1). But rendering the word kalah as the adverb "completely" (from kol, "all") leaves the original grammar somewhat awkward. One might therefore consider the proposal (e.g., by Morgenstern 1949, NEB) to read instead the homographic noun kallah, "bride," which would yield the prediction, "He will let you go hence, as one lets go a bride": poetically, this would have the further advantage of echoing back in the departure-scenario to the tyrant's designs on "the Hebrewesses." At any rate, whether a literal adverb or a figurative noun, the word operates to one inclusive end: by totalizing the "you" reference or highlighting the sex otherwise latent in its masculine gender. 43. Compare his focus on the worst contingency regarding the lost animal"thy enemy's"in the interests of unrestrictive suasion. 44. Most jarringly so if you generalize this alleged difference from the male to "the female Hebrew slave" regardless of age and agency, as though it were "expressly stated in verse 7 that she need not be manumitted in the 7th year" (David 1948:67-68, Noth 1966:177, 179, Hyatt 1980:228, 230). 45. According to a fifth, Rabbinic approach, "she shall not go out because of
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damage to any of the external organs, as Canaanite slaves do," but in the seventh and Jubilee ),ears (Mekilta deRabbi Ishmael, ed. Lauterbach 1949:III, 8). Her assimilation to the Hebrew's rule would be welcome to the Deuteronomist if it were not performed by excepting her from the wrong (outgroup and unsequent) rule, the "Canaanite's" (Exodus 21:26-27), and by retrojecting Deuteronomy itself ("or Hebrewess"), along with Leviticus, into the Mishpatim Code. Still less would he countenance a sixth, ethnosocial disparity, "not as the Hab/piru slaves go out" (urged ad loc. in Cassuto 1967). 46. At least on a reading as poor as those cited in notes 19 and 20 above, both tolerant of native abuse. 47. The phrase alludes to the master of gaps, Henry James, in a not unrelated context. Speaking of The Turn of the Screw, he explains his abstention from particularizing the horrors to which the children in the tale are exposed. The artist would doom himself to failure, he says, in the attempt to cover the range of possibilities through "the offered example, the imputed vice, the cited act, the limited deplorable presentable instance." However, "only make the reader's general vision of evil intense enough . . . and his own experience, his own imagination, his own sympathy (with the children) and horror (of their false friends) will supply him quite sufficiently with all the particulars. Make him think the evil, make him think of it for himself, and you are released from weak specifications" (1962:175-76). 48. Van Seters (1996), having oddly posited the reverse "historical" law-genesis, also gets the respective scopes backward: first a narrow, one-case Deuteronomy, then a wide-open Exodus. Contours and detail suffer in proportion, even more than usual. 49. "From a developmental point of view it can be said that the laws were added to the stories, but from the point of view of the people who shaped the text as we have it, it is truer to say that the stories have been preserved as a useful setting for the law" (Damrosch 1987:35). 50. The actual rescuing party sent by that king is, like Ebed-melekh, a montage of Pharaoh's officers: "the Captain of the Guard and Rab'saris [lit., Chief Eunuch]" (39:13-14). 51. So is the case against the misbelief in Joseph's absence from the Bible "outside Genesis and the first chapter of Exodus" and the genetic inference "that the narrative was not yet in existence when [the historical and prophetic books] were written" (Redford 1970:249). This reckons without the arts of indirection, notably the allusive retrospect, here elaborated to the limit of underground back-and master-plotting. Similarly with the related claim about the low incidence of the Exodus tradition, which we have found to lead an eventful subtextual afterlife in law and history and prophecy, from Sinai to Jordan to the early kingship to the Jeremiah multiphase finale. So, within this tradition, do many specific acts, failures, groups, subgroups, even individuals, notably the culture heroines replaced in time by their unheroic sisters in law of the Wilderness era: presence and absence, Scripture teaches, form nothing like a binary contrast, in either representational or evaluative terms. (God himself, after all, remains hidden most of the time.) As a grand network cum narrative, of which leitmotifs alone break surface, unadvertised and apparently at random, too, the Hebrewgram once again points an exemplary lesson.
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Na'aman, Nadav. 1986. ''Habiru * and Hebrews: The Transfer of a Social Term to the Literary Sphere," Journal of Near Eastern Studies 45:271-88. Nairn, Tom. 1977. The Break-up of Britain: Crisis and Neo-nationalism. London: New Left Books. Newsom, Carol A., and Sharon H. Ringe, eds. 1992. The Women's Bible Commentary. London: SPCK. Nielsen, Eduard. 1995. Deuteronomium. Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1969. On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books. Nohrnberg, James C. 1981. "Moses," in Long, 35-57. . 1995. Like Unto Moses: The Constituting of an Interruption. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. North, Robert. 1954. Sociology of the Jubilee Year. Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute. Noth, Martin. 1934. "Erwägungen zur Hebräerfrage," in Festschrift Otto Procksch, 99-112. Leipzig: Deichert & Hinrich. . 1965. The History of Israel. London: Adam and Charles Black. . 1966. Exodus, trans. J.S. Bowden. London: SCM Press. Olmstead, A.T. 1965 [1931]. History of Palestine and Syria. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House. Oppenheim, A. Leo. 1977 [1964]. Ancient Mesopotamia: Portrait of a Dead Civilization. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Ortner, Sherry B. 1974. "Is Nature to Culture as Female Is to Male?" in Rosaldo and Lamphere, 67-88. Parzen, Herbert. 1932/33. "The Problem of the Ibrim ("Hebrews") in the Bible," American Journal of Semitic Languages and Literatures 49:254-61. Patrick, Dale. 1985. Old Testament Law. Atlanta: John Knox Press. Paul, Shalom M. 1970. Studies in the Book of the Covenant. Leiden: Brill. Pesikta Rabbati. 1968. Trans. William G. Braude. New Haven: Yale University Press. Phillips, Anthony. 1970. Ancient Israel's Criminal Law: A New Approach to the Decalogue. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. . 1973. "Some Aspects of Pre-exilic Law in Ancient Israel," Vetus Testamentum 23:349-61. . 1984. "The Laws of Slavery: Exodus 21:2-11 "Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 30:51-66. Philo. 1950. De Vita Mosis, in Philo, trans. F.H. Colson. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, Loeb Classical Library, vol. 6, 273-595. Pixley, George V. 1987. On Exodus: A Liberation Perspective. Trans. Robert R. Barr. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis. Plastaras, James. 1966. The God of Exodus. Milwaukee: Bruce. Plato. 1989. The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Plutarch. 1960. The Rise and Fall of Athens: Nine Greek Lives, trans. Ian Scott-Kilvert. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Polzin, Robert. 1989. Samuel and the Deuteronomist. San Fransisco: Harper and Row. Pride, J.B., and Janet Holmes, eds. 1984. Sociolinguistics: Selected Readings. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Pritchard, James B. 1969. Ancient Near Eastern Texts. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Rabinow, Paul. 1986. "Representations Are Social Facts: Modernity and Post-Modernity in Anthropology," in Clifford and Marcus, 234-61. Rad, Gerhard von. 1966. Deuteronomy. Philadelphia: Westminster Press.
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Schwartz, Regina, ed. 1990. The Book and the Text: The Bible and Literary Theory. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Sebeok, Thomas A., ed. 1960. Style in Language. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Seters, John van. 1996. "The Law of the Hebrew Slave," Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 108:53446. Shakespeare, William. 1942. The Complete Plays and Poems, ed. William Allan Neilson and Charles Jarvis Hill. Cambridge: Houghton Mifflin. Shanks, Hershel, William G. Dever, Baruch Halpern, P. Kyle McCarter. 1992. The Rise of Ancient Israel. Washington, DC: Biblical Archaeology Society. Shapira, Anita. 1997. "Ben-Gurion and the Bible: The Creation of a Historical Narrative?" in Old Jews New Jews, 217-47. Tel Aviv: Am Oved. Simpson, David. 1993. "Destiny Made Manifest: The Styles of Whitman's Poetry," in Bhabha, 177-96. Simpson, William Kelly, ed. 1973. The Literature of Ancient Egypt. New Haven: Yale University Press. Skinner, John. 1925 [1910]. Genesis. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. Smith, Anthony D. 1991. National Identity. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Smith, Henry Preserved. 1899. The Books of Samuel. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark. Smith, Morton. 1972. "Pseudepigraphy in the Israelite Literary Tradition," in Fritz, 189-215. Soggin, J.A. 1995. "Abraham and the Eastern Kings: On Genesis 14," in Zevit et al., 283-91. Spark, Muriel. 1992. Curriculum Vitae: Autobiography. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Speiser, E.A. 1933. "Ethnic Movements in the Near East in the Second Millennium B.C.," Annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research 13:13-54. . 1964. Genesis. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Stager, Lawrence E. 1985. "Marneptah, Israel and the Sea Peoples," Eretz Israel 18:56*-64*. Sternberg, Meir. 1970. "Faulkner's Light in August and the Poetics of the Modern Novel," Hasifrut 2:498-537. . 1973a. "Elements of Tragedy and the Concept of Plot in Tragedy: On the Methodology of Constituting a Generic Whole," Hasifrut 4(1):23-69. . 1973b. "Delicate Balance in the Rape of Dinah Story: Biblical Narrative and the Rhetoric of Narrative," Hasifrut 4(2):193-231; English version in Sternberg 1985:441-81. . 1974a. "What Is Exposition? An Essay in Temporal Delimitation," in Theory of the Novel: New Essays, ed. John Halperin, 25-70. New York: Oxford University Press. . 1974b. "Retardatory Structure, Narrative Interest, and the Detective Story," Hasifrut 18/19. . 1976. "Bound and Productive Forms in Language and Literary Language," Hasifrut 22:78-141. . 1977. "The Structure of Repetition in Biblical Narrative: Strategies of Informational Redundancy," Hasifrut 25:10950; English version in Stern-berg 1985:365-440. . 1978. Expositional Modes and Temporal Ordering in Fiction. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
. 1979. "Between the Truth and the Whole Truth in Biblical Narrative: The Rendering of Inner Life by Telescoped Inside View and Interior Monologue," Hasifrut 29:110-46.
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. 1981a. "Ordering the Unordered: Time, Space, and Descriptive Coherence," Yale French Studies 61:60-88. . 1981b. "Polylingualism as Reality and Translation as Mimesis," Poetics Today 2(4):221-39. . 1981c. "Patterns of Similarity: Part and Whole in Biblical Composition. Paper Presented to the Eighth World Congress of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem. . 1982a. "Proteus in Quotation-Land: Mimesis and the Forms of Reported Discourse," Poetics Today 3:107-56. . 1982b. "Point of View and the Indirections of Direct Speech," Language and Style 15:67-117. . 1983a. "Deictic Sequence: World, Language and Convention," in Essays on Deixis, ed. Gisa Rauch, 277-316. Tübingen: Gunter Narr. . 1983b. "Mimesis and Motivation: The Two Faces of Fictional Coherence," in Literary Criticism and Philosophy, ed. Joseph P. Strelka, 145-88. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. . 1983c. "Language, World and Perspective in Biblical Art: Free Indirect Discourse and Modes of Covert Penetration," Hasifrut 32:88-131. . 1983d. "Knight Meets Dragon in the James Bond Saga: Realism and Reality Models," Style 17:142-80. . 1984. "Spatiotemporal Art and the Other Henry James: The Case of The Tragic Muse," Poetics Today 5:775-830. . 1985. The Poetics of Biblical Narrative: Ideological Literature and the Drama of Reading. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. . 1986. "The World from the Addressee's Viewpoint: Reception as Representation, Dialogue as Monologue," Style 20:295-318. . 1989. "Time and Reader," in The Uses of Adversity: Failure and Accommodation in Reader Response, ed. Ellen Spolsky, 49-89. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press. . 1990a. "Telling in Time (I): Chronology and Narrative Theory," Poetics Today 11(4):901-48. . 1990b. "Time and Space in Biblical (Hi)storytelling: The Grand Chronology," in Schwartz, 81-145. . 1991a. "Double Cave, Double Talk: The Indirections of Biblical Dialogue," in Rosenblatt and Sitterson, 28-57. . 1991b. "How Indirect Discourse Means: Syntax, Semantics, Pragmatics, Poetics," in Literary Pragmatics, ed. Roger Sell, 62-93. London: Routledge. . 1992a. "Biblical Poetics and Sexual Politics: From Reading to Counterreading," Journal of Biblical Literature 111:463-88. . 1992b. "Telling in Time (II): Chronology, Teleology, Narrativity," Poetics Today 13:463-541. . 1996. "Why Saying No Twice Makes a Difference: The Bible's Code of Double Refusal and the Method in Art's Madness," in Rimmon-Kenan et al., 37-53. Sterne, Laurence. 1979 [1759-1767]. Tristram Shandy, ed. James Aiken Work. Indianapolis: Odyssey Press. Stoebe, Hans Joachim. 1973. Das erste Buch Samuelis. Gütersloh: Gerd Mohn. Stolz, Fritz. 1981. Das erste und zweite Buch Samuel. Zürich: Theologischer Verlag. Suetonius. 1960. The Twelve Caesars, trans. Robert Graves. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
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Indexes Index of Names and Subjects A Abarbanel, 262-63, 332-33, 400, 653n4 Abdi-Ashirta, 165, 224, 650n12 Abrahamites, 6, 7, 10, 12, 20, 30, 49, 53, 57, 178, 194, 208, 430-31, 432, 435, 471, 480, 641n16, 659n2 Ackerman, James S., 122, 235, 325, 333, 335, 340, 500, 645n13, 651n20, 655nn24, 26 Addrecentricity, 474-519 passim, 550-638 passim, 650n13. See also -Centricity vs. -centrism; Deixis, personal; Law, addressor(s) and addressee(s) of, pronominal style in; Rhetoric Aesop, 271 Aharoni, Yohanan, 647n4 Ahlström, Gösta W., 36, 639-40n5, 646n27 Akhenaton, 37-38, 655n27 Akkadian, 9, 28, 32-33, 34, 41-42, 61, 75, 222, 223, 443, 446-47, 641n21 Alalakh, 139, 164, 167, 647n4 Albright, William Foxwell, 49, 72, 640n13 Alishar, 35, 164-65 Allusion: communicative variables of, 559-67; directionality of, 627-29 (see also as process, running); dissuasive (see Rhetoric, of deterrence); explicit, 100-101, 564-66 (see also Quotation, Repetition); intergeneric, 22, 78-79, 195-96, 269, 482-638 passim (see also Master plot; Slave law, intergeneric allusion in);
interlegal (see Slave law, all-Oriental urtext of, crosscultural approach to, in Hammurabi code, interlegal allusion in); inter-cultural or -literary, 111-12, 147-49, 241-42, 244-45, 256, 264, 366-67, 518, 657n38 (see also interlegal; Hebrewgram, bivalence in; Translational mimesis); intertext, not megatext (see Sources as discourse); miniature (see Etymology, Hebrewgram); modalized (see intergeneric, Modality); memorial (see Memory); as narrative, network, and normative commentary, 100-101, 106-21, 259-62, 403-25 passim, 482-638 (see also Diachrony, Synchrony); prefigurative, 22, 100-101, 487ff. (see also directionality of, intergeneric, Modality); as process (see Slave law, poetic diachrony of); running, 550-638; toponymic, 148-49 (see also Eberite Etymology; Hebrewgram, bivalence in, geographical axis of) Alt, Albrecht, 61, 137-39, 164, 441, 442, 454, 455, 460, 461, 473-77, 480-81, 493, 495, 500, 573, 660n10 Amarna, 8-9, 34-47 passim, 51, 58, 62, 66, 68, 71, 72, 74, 76, 94, 95-96, 131, 137-38, 165-67, 209, 221-26, 310-13, 457, 650nn12, 13 Ambiguity. See Gaps and gap-filling America, 141, 382, 508 Ammon, 272, 407, 409, 412, 421-22 Amossy, Ruth, 647n8 Amphictyony, 61, 641n19 Anachronism, xi-xiii, 1-5, 17, 49, 54, 78, 80, 91, 113, 155, 158, 212-13, 227, 231, 313, 493, 504-508, 529, 535, 598, 599, 625-26, 641n16, 642n28, 646nn23, 26, 651n24, 654n14. See also Archaism; Hebrews, anachronized; Hindsight fallacy; Historical method; Jew(ish); Unicultural approach Anachrony. See Dynamics, Memory, Narrative, Sequence, Time Anagram: ereb/ eber/ ibri as, 20-21, 554-55; in Fleming, 63-64; other, 243-44, 388, 554-55, 621 Anarchism, 204 Anderson, Benedict, 180-81, 189, 190, 202-203, 644n4, 649n8
Androcentricity vs. androcentrism. See Stereotype and metastereotype, of Woman vs. Man. See also -Centricity vs. centrism; Culture, hero(ine), villain; Hebrews, and Hebrewesses; Slave law, sexual (in)equality in
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Anthropology, xvi, xix, 19, 61, 110, 168-70, 179, 183, 229-30, 318, 431, 446, 451, 518, 639-40n5, 644n8, 649n9 Anticulture, antiself, antitype. See -Centricity vs. -centrism; Hamites; Primeval Scene; Slavery; Stereotype and metastereotype, of self vs. antiself Antisemitism, 106, 281, 289, 305-306, 643n3, 644n9, 651n26, 652n31, 658n12. See also -Centricity vs. -centrism, Genocide, Nazism, Xenophobia Antony, 97-98 Apartheid. See Egyptians, apartheid and taboo among Aphek, 83-85, 90, 91-93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 99, 101, 106, 107, 128, 135, 150, 267, 284, 383, 396, 398, 404, 418, 500. See also Ark narrative Apocrypha: general, xvi, 2, 9, 49, 53, 212, 230, 231, 275, 646nn23, 26; Judith, 646n23; Maccabees, 3, 230-31, 244, 314, 524; Sirach, 4, 85, 646n23 Ap-Thomas, D.R., 214 Arabah, 367 Arabia, 367 Arabs, 64, 138, 641n20 Aramaic, 2, 82, 83, 429-30. See also Onkelos, Targum, Translation Arameans, 7, 20, 80, 136, 663n7 Archaeology: material, 8, 50, 76, 226, 465-66, 643n3; textual, 69, 76 Archaism, 44, 51, 136, 206-207, 220, 308-10, 311, 380, 496, 661n29. See also Anachronism, Postexilic era Aristotle, 73, 189-90, 193, 217, 229, 328, 331, 348, 350, 353, 422, 537. See also Greek culture Ark narrative, 83-85, 90-93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 99, 101, 106, 107, 118, 126, 128, 135, 149-53, 268, 348, 549-50, 576. See also I Samuel 4 to 6 in Index of Biblical Passages Arts: general xvi, xviii, 201, 203, 217-18;
cinema, 21, 406, 408; literature (see Intercultural poetics); visual, 148, 170, 200-201, 205, 649n6. See also Culture, approaches to; Genre; Universals Ashdodites, 150, 151-52, 643n2. See also Philistines Asia Minor, 35 Asiatic, 105, 191, 193, 293, 337, 355, 645n18 Assmann, Jan, 104 Assyria/Ashshur, 2, 7, 9, 13, 35, 48, 62, 138, 164, 222, 271, 466, 646n23 Astour, Michael C., 530n13 Atarantes, 104 Athens. See Greek culture Attila, 103. See also Heterogram, Hun Augustus, 97-98, 104, 105, 123. See also Heterogram Austen, Jane, 155-57, 172, 175, 198, 201, 225, 249, 270, 276, 629, 645-46n22 Authorized Version, 126, 417. See also Translation Aycock, D. Alan, 61, 168-69, 451, 518, 639-40n5 Aziru, 224, 650n12 B Babel, 35, 42, 75-89, 113, 114-15, 116-17, 118, 120, 123, 124, 125, 129, 130, 147, 170, 183, 203, 212, 251, 256, 266, 315, 331, 642-43n30, 644-45n12, 645n13, 652n29. See also Culture, Hebrewgram, Heterogram, Language, Translation, Translational mimesis Babylonians, 9, 34, 35, 46, 49, 80, 117, 164, 228, 439, 467, 518, 544-45, 633, 635-37. See also Babel, Hammurabi Bakhtin, M.M., 376 Baldwin, Joyce C., 657n3 Balzac, Honoré de, 651n26 Barb, A.A., 104
Barnes, Julian, 651n26 Beauvoir, Simone de, 183, 257 Beduin, 137, 139, 293 Ben-Gurion, David, 42, 54 Ben Yehudah, Eliezer, 1-2, 212, 493 Berlin, Adele, 649n3 Bernstein, B., 249 Beyond-the-Riverians. See Eberites; Hebrewgram, bivalence in, geographical axis of Bimson, John J., 148 Block, Ned, 649n5 Bloom, Harold, 19-20, 200, 258, 327, 356, 574, 595, 642n27 Bodde, Derek, 189 Boer, P.A.H. de, 670n35 BöHl, Franz, 7, 79 Borger, R., 32 Bottéro, Jean, 13-14, 31-36 passim, 38, 39, 41, 43, 52, 62, 75, 132, 149, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 223, 267, 439, 443, 444, 466, 641n15, 643n4, 647nn4, 5, 659n7, 660nn13, 15 Bourgeoisie, 455 Breasted, James Henry, 123 Brichto, Herbert Chanan, 208, 657n3, 660n18, 661n26 Bright, John, 47, 652n33, 658n5 Brinkman, J.A., 41 Bronze Age, 71 Bruce, F.F., 37, 79 Brug, John E, 643n2
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Buber, Martin, 251, 516, 645n15, 655n19 Buis, Pierre, and Jacques Leclerq, 506, 599 Burning Bush, 20, 79, 80, 114, 151, 152, 259-78, 299, 328, 329, 338, 344, 353, 354, 356, 359, 361, 369, 371, 372-78, 656n30 Byblos, 224 C Caesar, Julius, 200 Cainites, 124, 134, 170 Canaanites: cursed (see Hamites, as anti-type and anticulture, cursed by Noah); as Hab/piru slaves, 456-57 (see also Amarna; Hebrews as Hab/piru, in conquest and settlement); among Hamites, 7, 23, 62, 109, 112ff., 141-42, 206-208, 213-14, 248, 308-18, 349, 374; as He-brew-elicitors, 86, 206-208, 213-14; as Hebrew-thinkers, 315-18, 526; insulting term for Israel, 471; Phoenicians as, 206-208, 213-14; sexual violence of (see Sodom as); as slaves of slaves (see Hamites, cursed by Noah); from social to ethnic grouping, 14-15, 62, 64, 69, 457, 648n12; Sodom as, 15, 112, 194, 234, 349, 456; and "tongue of Canaan" (see Language, of Canaan). See also Hamites, Primeval Scene, Table of Nations Caquot, André, and Phillipe de Robert, 657n3 Cardellini, Innocenzo, 599, 660n18, 661n28 Carmichael, Calum M., 508, 565, 599, 622, 627, 666-67n7, 668n19 Carroll, Lewis, and Alice books, xii, 32, 59, 64-65, 74, 166, 167, 175-76, 270, 563, 641n22 Carroll, Robert P., 505, 667n9 Cassin, Elena, 444, 647n3 Cassuto, Umberto, 235, 461-62, 585, 651n21, 660n17, 661nn22, 23, 662nn30, 31, 667n12, 669n30, 672n45 Cazelles, Henri, 34, 43, 139, 164, 214, 293, 310-11, 440-41, 442, 444, 463, 484, 641n20, 657n3, 660nn12, 14
Censorship, 79, 171, 182, 199-200, 203-204, 225, 348, 392, 398, 412, 465, 483, 664n17. See also -Centricity vs. -centrism; Hebrewgram, in foreign and foreign-like speech, power axis of; Heterogram; Low criticism; Nomination; Rabbinic exegesis and literature; Rhetoric, of identity; Slave law, beautified; Sourcevs. discourse-oriented approach; Stereotype and metastereotype; Vict-image -Centricity vs. -centrism, 182-205. See also Addrecentricity; Androcentricity vs. androcentrism; Antisemitism; Censorship; Creation, of humanity in God's image; Culture, approaches to, dimensions of; Deixis; Duocentricity; Egocentricity vs. Egocentrism; Ethnocentricity; Ethnocriticism; Ethnophobia; Eurocentricity vs. Eurocentrism; Feminism; Focus of interest; Foreignness; Gyro-centricity vs. Gyrocentrism; Hebrewgram, in bicultural stigmatizing, bivalence in, power axis of; Hebrews, and Hebrewesses; Heterogram; Israel; Law, pronominal style in; Lococentrism; Nazism; Otherness; Rhetoric, of deter-fence, of divide and rule, of grammatical person, of identity, of pretended solidarity; Sexism, female; Slave law, beautified; Sociocentricity; Stereotype and metastereotype; Theocentricity; Translational mimesis; Unicultural approach; Vict-image; Xenophobia Cerny *, J., 655n20 Chaney, Marvin L., 641n15, 650n12 Chiasm, 53, 79, 94, 228, 420, 475, 546, 575, 616, 633, 636, 650n16 Childs, Brevard S., 235, 257-58, 270, 335, 446, 461, 650n17, 662n31 Chinese, 133, 143-44, 189 Chirichigno, Gregory C., 438, 446, 478-79, 487, 489, 491, 492, 495, 503, 506, 574, 604, 660nn10, 13, 661n28, 662n2, 663n7, 667n14 Christ. See Jesus Christianity, 19-20, 523 Church Fathers, 263 Cicero ("Tully"), 62, 71 Circumcision, 3-4, 93-94, 105, 109, 118, 136, 150, 196, 261, 270, 378, 404, 518, 546, 548, 643n3, 652n30, 655n21. See also Flesh vs. faith Clifford, James, 19, 649n9 Coats, George W., 337 Code-switching. See Hebrewgram, Heterogram, Language, Translation, Translational mimesis Cole, R. Alan, 331, 339, 360, 367, 437, 652nn29, 33, 656n37 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 306-307 Combined hypothesis. See Hebrews as Hab/piru Comparativism. See Crosscultural approach; Culture, approaches to; Diachrony; Historical method; Synchrony Conquest, 3, 8-9, 34, 38-39, 46-47, 73-74, 99, 139, 148-49, 520 Conspiracy theory, 37-38, 219 "The Contest of Horus and Seth," 112
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Coote, Robert B., 28, 32, 326, 641n24, 644n6, 649n11 Cosmography, 199 Cover, R.M., 665n5 Craigie, Peter C., 406 Creation: general, 91, 100, 119-20, 169-70, 172-73, 174, 186, 193-96, 204, 216-17, 230, 241, 244-45, 246, 266, 267-68, 307, 323-24, 409, 446-47, 471, 516, 621-22, 625-26, 649n7, 652n29; of humanity in God's image (see general; Stereotype and metastereotype, against Bible's ideopoetics, of humanity, of Woman vs. Man; and see Genesis 1:26-27 in Index of Biblical Passages) Croesus, 271 Crosscultural approach, xiv-xxii, 6, 8-78, 87-88, 94-96, 97, 130-33, 136-39, 143, 147-49, 155, 162-68, 174, 176, 178, 187, 198, 209, 218-19, 220-26, 228, 262, 268, 283, 288, 293-95, 308, 310-13, 325-27, 337, 339, 346, 384, 393-99, 415, 426, 431-70, 471-81 passim, 484, 486, 489, 490-92, 494-95, 506, 518, 522, 524, 528, 539, 552, 556, 557, 562, 575-76, 578, 581, 585, 587, 588-89, 591, 596, 597, 599, 600, 604-605, 615, 618, 625, 627, 628, 653n36, 655n27. See also Culture, approaches to, pseudo-universals in; Diachrony; Hebrews as Hab/piru; Historical method; Middle ways; Narrative, and narrativicide; Nuzi; Quotation, ambiguity between narration and; Rhetoric, of identity; Sequence, fabricated; Slave law, cross-cultural approach to, pre-textual diachrony of, as synchronic network; Source-vs. discourse-oriented inquiry; Sources as discourse; Synchrony Culture: vs. anarchy, 189-91; and anticulture (see vs. anarchy, genocidal, Hamite, "high" vs. "low," monopoly on, oppressive, villain); approaches to, xiii-xxii, 1-89, 155-205, 216-32, 383-403, 426-638 (see also Censorship, -Centricity vs. centrism, Crosscultural approach, Historical method, Intercultural poetics, Middle ways, Proteus Principle, Source- vs. discourse-oriented inquiry, Sources as discourse, Stereotype and metastereotype, Unicultural approach); Bible's view of, xv, 81, 168-70, 446-47 (see also vs. Nature; Babel; Creation; Stereotype and metastereotype, against Bible's ideopoetics); blindness to (see monopoly on, pseudo-universals in, Stereotype and metastereotype, Unicultural approach); Canaanite (see Canaanites); in contact (see Allusion, intercultural; Babel; Crosscultural approach; Intercultural poetics; Language; Translation; Translational mimesis); dimensions of, 81-89, 91-92, 108-21, 140-205 (see also Arts; -Centricity vs. -centrism; Foreignness; Genre; Hamites; Hebrewgram, ethics in, ethnic axis of, geographical axis of, historical axis of, power axis of; Law; Monotheism; Otherness; Polytheism; Slave law; Slavery; Stereotype and metastereotype; Translational mimesis); Egyptian (see Egyptians); foreigner in (see Foreign-ness); genocidal (see Genocide);
Greek (see Greek culture, Hellenism); Hamite (see Hamites); hero(ine), xix-xx, 168, 232-78, 318, 319, 322-78, 555, 567, 577, 578-79, 610-11, 612, 617-26, 672n51; "high" vs. "low," 168-70, 189-91, 409 (see also monopoly on; -Centricity vs. -centrism; Stereotype and metastereotype, of Culture vs. Nature); images of (see approaches to, Babel, Canaanites, Eberides, Eberites, Egyptians, Greek culture, Hamites, Hebrews, Hebrews as Hab/piru, Hebrewgram, Heterogram, Israel, Philistines, Stereotype and metastereotype, Translational mimesis, Vict-image); in-group (see -Centricity vs. -centrism, Israel); inter- (see in contact); and (lega)literature, xiii-xxii, 10-11, 87-89, 155, 423ff. (see also Intercultural poetics); mega- (see pseudo-universals in, Crosscultural approach, Hebrews as Hab/piru, Sources as discourse); monopoly on (see "high" vs. "low"; -Centricity vs. -centrism; Egyptians, as enslavers and genocides, exclusive self-equation with humanity, as monopolists; Greek culture, vs. barbarian; Hebrews, dehumanized; Philistines, as enslavers, as weapon monopolists); and naming (see Etymology, Hebrewgram, Heterogram, Nomination, Vict-image); vs. Nature (see Stereotype and metastereotype, of Culture vs. Nature); oppressive (see Hamites, Heterogram, Nomination, Slavery); Other in (see Otherness); paradigms of (see Hebrewgram, as laboratory, as microcosm, as paradigmatic heterogram; Slave law, as paradigm of (lega) literary art and history); Philistine (see Philistines); poetics of (see Intercultural poetics); Proteus in, xx-xxii,
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155ff. (see also Proteus Principle); pseudo-universals in, xxi, 155-205, 216-32 (see also -Centricity vs -centrism, Proteus Principle, Stereotype and metastereotype, Universals); on rank order of making, 169-70; stereotypes in (see Stereotype and metastereotype); of study and interstudy, 592-96, 608, 616-17; in time (see transmission of, Diachrony, Dynamics, History, Historiography, Sequence, Time); translated and self-translated (see Hebrewgram, Heterogram, Translation, Translational mimesis); transmission of (see Allusion; Arts; Etymology; Genre; Hab/piru, as silent Other; Hebrewgram, bivalence in; Language; Memory; Narrative, nomi-; Quotation; Slave law, oral vs. written, poetic diachrony of; Translational mimesis); universals in (see Universals); villain, 246, 319, 349-50, 404-25, 485, 505, 510, 514, 555, 557, 562, 577, 580-82, 607, 609, 611, 612, 620, 632, 633-37 (see also Hamites, as antitype and anti-culture; Hebrewgram, in bicultural stigmatizing; Stereotype and metastereotype, of self vs. antiself); as web of differences (see dimensions of) Curiosity, and plot of. See Dynamics, of retrospection Cushites, 7, 145, 194, 634, 646n26 Cynic, xviii, 228, 650n14. See also Heterogram Cyrus, 333 D Dago, 87. See also Heterogram Dagon, 109, 150, 152. See also Philistines, Polytheism Damrosh, David, 627, 664nn1, 5, 672n49 Danell, G.A., 208 Darwin, Charles, 524-26 Daube, David, 549, 627, 665n7 David, M., 599, 666n7, 670n33, 671n44 David, Rosalie A., 645n12
Davies, Gordon E, 325, 644n7, 651n21 Da Vinci, Leonardo, 200 Dead Sea, 367 Decalogue, xxi-xxii, 22, 155, 157-58, 205, 216-18, 441, 474, 492, 528, 530, 558-59, 560, 590, 594 Deixis: personal, pronominal, xi, 187-88, 199-205, 254, 270-71, 274, 277, 292, 296, 308, 319-20, 332-33, 347, 362, 36369, 406-407, 444-45, 457, 467, 473-77, 478, 481, 482, 485, 492-93, 496, 498-99, 500-503, 513, 514-15, 523, 552, 553, 557, 559, 561, 565-66, 567, 571, 573, 577, 581-82, 584, 586, 592-93, 601, 603, 606-607, 608, 611, 630, 632-33, 636, 645nn14, 15, 652nn28, 33, 653n3, 655n22, 656n38, 659n7, 663n16, 669n20, 671n42 (see also -Centricity vs. -centrism; Gender, grammatical; Language, and discourse; Law, pronominal style in; Monotheism; Narrative; Polytheism; Quotation; Rhetoric, of grammatical person); and sequence, xi, 199-200 (see also Sequence); spatial, 142-43, 201, 211, 356, 362-69, 371, 374, 592-95, 658n13 (see also Eberites; Hebrewgram, geographical axis of; Lococentrism); temporal, 201, 362-69, 371, 592-95, 658n13 (see also Time, and tense) Democracy, 189-90, 202, 651-52n27. See also -Centricity vs. -centrism; Creation; Law, esoteric and exoteric; Slave law, audience of, sexual (in)equality in, subplots of De-nomination, de-nomi-nation. See Hebrewgram; Heterogram; Israel, as blessed nomi-nation, in de-nomi-nation; Nomination; Vict-image Derrida, Jacques, 188, 652n32 Description. See Narrative, vs. description Destereotyping. See Stereotype and metastereotype Detribalizing. See Tribes Dhorme, E., 34 Diachrony: axes and typology of change in, 145-53, 448-71, 520-50, 568ff., 577-78, 588-96, 599-600; defined and tested as narrative, 447-70, 520-638 (contrast unduly restricted); within etymology (see in miniature; Etymology; Hebrewgram, bivalence in, ethnic axis of, geographical axis of, historical axis of, as microcosm, power axis of; Narrative, nomi-); genesis, (d)evolution, revolution in (see Dynamics, Law, Narrative, Peripety, Sequence, Slave law); intergeneric (see Genre, inter-); in law (see Law, Slave law); against logic of time and action (see Narrative, and narrativicide; Pseudepigraphy); in miniature (see within etymology; objects of; Translational mimesis, chains of); multilevel (see poetic, Allusion);
objects of, 524-25, 539; order of priorities in, xvii-xix, 10-12, 40-41, 50-53, 433-34, 467-70, 537-39; among pattern-making universals, 60, 448ff., 520ff.; poetic, xviii-xix, xx, 145-53, 324-78, 403-25, 447-519 passim, 520-638 (see also within etymology; in miniature;
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Allusion; Dynamics; Intercultural poetics; Master plot; Memory; Slave law, poetic diachrony of); ''real life," xiv-xx, 9-76 passim, 94-96, 131-32, 137-79, 162-68, 208-209, 218-26, 282-99, 308-13, 325-27, 431-81 passim, 490-97 passim, 528-30, 588-91, 604-605, 627-29 (see also Crosscultural approach; Hebrew as Hab/piru; Historical method; Middle ways; Nuzi; Pseudepigraphy; Slave law, dating of, pre-textual diachrony of; Source- vs. discourse-oriented inquiry; Sources as discourse; Stereotype and metastereotype, of narration); simultaneities amid, 433-71, 520-21, 588-96 (see also among pattern-making universals; Slave law, successive co-eternities in, as synchronic network; Synchrony); slave law as paradigm of, 426-31, 447-70, 520ff. (see also Slave law); unduly restricted, 10-19, 39-41, 49-53, 449, 524-25. See also Culture, approaches to; Historiography; History; Narrative; Synchrony; Time Dialogue. See Quotation, of speech Dickens, Charles (alias Boz), 62, 455, 524 Dictionary vs. contextual meaning, xii, 9, 137-39, 158, 178, 208, 440-42, 477-79, 487-90, 497-500, 648nn12, 13, 660nn10, 11 Diderot, Denis, 161 Diogenes, 228, 650n14 Discourse of source, xviii-xix, 283, 294ff., 521-638. See also Culture, approaches to; Diachrony; Etymology; Hebrewgram, bivalence in; Memory; Narrative, nomi-; Quotation; Slave law, poetic diachrony of; Source- vs. discourse-oriented inquiry; Sources as discourse; Translational mimesis, chains of Dostoevsky, F.M., 229, 508, 580-81 Dothan, Trude, 643n1 Driver, S.R., 136, 385, 387, 389-90, 403, 478, 495, 505, 516, 598-90, 591, 599, 603, 664n2, 671n40 Druids, 465 Duocentricity, 26-76 passim, 198, 431-70 passim. See also -Centricity vs. centrism; Hebrew as Hab/piru, in diachronic distribution, in semantic mixture, in synchronic partition; Middle ways Durham, J.I., 136, 226, 335, 479, 599, 652n29, 655nn24, 25, 656n32, 668n19, 671n39 During, Simon, 203 Dynamics:
of allusion (see Allusion, directionality of, as process, running); in complex vs. simple plot, 327-77, 422, 447-70, 617-27 (see also Aristotle, Peripety); cyclical (see Master plot); of evaluation (see Ethnocriticism; Hebrewgram, in bicultural stigmatizing, bivalence in; Master plot; Poetic justice; Rhetoric, of deterrence; Sequence, of judgement); of (lega)literary history, 447-72, 520-638 (see also Allusion, Law, Memory, Slave law, Universals); multilevel, 484-638; of prospection, 237-55, 292ff., 395 (see also Modality); of naming (see Nomination); of recognition, 144-53, 243-44, 292-308, 358-59, 369-71, 410-21, 544-48, 617-38, 667n11 (see also Master plot; Narrative, disclosure and development; Peripety); of repetition (see Repetition, dynamics of); of retrospection, 144-45, 146-47, 232-55, 324-77, 403-25, 484-638 passim (see also Allusion; Etymology; Memory; Narrative, disclosure and development; Slave law, in medias legis); of serialization, 121-34, 232-78, 318-54, 383-628 (see also Hebrews, chronology, order, and series of; Slave law, poetic diachrony of, pre-textual diachrony of). See also Diachrony, Gaps and gap-filling, Hindsight fallacy, Historical method, Historiography, History, Narrative, Sequence, Time E Eberides, as Sons of Eber, bene eber, xiv, 7-8, 10, 20-21, 24, 30, 33, 49, 53, 57, 78, 79, 98, 99-100, 106-107, 111, 112, 114-15, 118, 135-36, 143, 145, 178, 194, 207, 209-10, 228, 279, 313, 315-18, 386, 430-31, 471, 480, 639n3, 641nn16, 23, 642n27, 659n2. See also Eberites; Hebrewgram, ethnic axis of; Hebrews; Shemites; Table of Nations Eberites, from eber [hannahar], 24, 34, 41, 78, 79, 97-100, 103-105, 106-107, 134, 141, 142-43, 145, 151, 194, 207, 230, 261, 279, 280, 289, 290, 293, 297-98, 308, 313, 314-18, 321, 340, 342, 346, 356, 362, 363-65, 366, 368, 380-81, 386-91, 392, 396-97, 400, 404, 405, 407, 410, 412, 413-22, 474, 502, 512, 517, 518, 522, 528, 531, 541, 563-629, 637, 638, 641n16, 646n23, 650n14, 655n22, 658n16, 672n51. See also Deixis, spatial; Eberides; Euphrates; Hebrewgram, bivalence in, geographical axis of; Hebrews; Jordan; Mesopotamia; River of Egypt Ebla, 24, 639n3 Ebrum, 24, 639n3
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Ecology, 170 Eden, 82, 170 Edomites, 6, 81, 430-31 Egocentricity vs. egocentrism, 197, 199-201, 203. See also -Centricity vs. -centrism; Deixis, personal Egyptians: apartheid and taboo among, 102-103, 114-18, 268, 283-308, 355, 482, 577, 647n7, 654nn5, 6, 7, 9; and Asiatic, 105, 191, 193, 293, 337, 355, 645n18; circumcision among, 652n30, 655n21; counterdisintegration of, 151-52 (see also Master plot); and bicultural stigmatizing of Hebrews, 484-638 (see also Rhetoric, of deterrence); destereotyped (see Stereotype and metastereotype, of Egyptians); as enslavers and genocides, xx, 4, 6-7, 8, 10, 19, 21-23, 26, 27, 44, 47, 50, 85-86, 101, 111, 113-34, 144-45, 14749, 166-68, 170, 191, 209-11, 232-79, 286-308, 319-80, 406-26 passim, 482, 484-638; exclusive self-equation with humanity, 190-91, 194, 204, 211, 214, 219, 250-54, 366-68 (see also Ethnocentricity, Genocide, Xenophobia); and Hab/piru (see Hab/piru, in Egyptian connection); as Hamites, 7, 23, 111ff. (see also Hamites); as Hebrew-callers, 3, 4, 100-54 passim, 159-60, 171-72, 176, 213, 286-308, 318-80, 470-638 passim; as Hebrew-elicitors, 141, 206-11, 232-78, 482, 490, 491; as Hebrew-thinkers, 86, 153-54, 243-45, 279-83, 286-308, 314, 318-78, 482, 491; as hostile etymologists (see Etymology, hostile; Hebrewgram, bivalence in); as insulting term for Israel, 471; involvement in Canaan, 101, 134, 147-49, 209-10 (see also Amarna, Marneptah); as land of Ham, 144; literature of, 48, 51, 111-12, 127, 131, 147-49, 195, 255, 264, 270, 355, 367 (see also Marneptah); lococentrism of, 211, 366-68 (see also Deixis, spatial; Hebrewgram, geographical axis of);
in master plot (see Master plot, in Egypt); as monopolists, 116-18, 133-34, 143, 147, 149, 167, 194, 268, 272, 298; name-deformation among, 104-105, 126-27, 135 (see also Etymology, hostile; Nomination; Hebrewgram; Vict-image); pantheon of, 212, 241-42, 244-45, 246, 252, 554, 644nn11, 12, 647n28, 651n22, 652nn33, 34, 668n18 (see also and Pharaonic rule, Polytheism); and Pharaonic rule, 101-34 passim, 152 (see also Pharaoh in Index of Biblical Characters); and Philistia (see as Hamites; Philistines, continuity With Egypt); self-reference of, 190, 211, 366-68; as self-made slaves, 118-20, 145, 195, 219, 234, 241, 404, 490-91, 498, 500, 509, 579 (see also Hamites, cursed by Noah); as sexual offenders, 102-105, 109-13, 124, 132-34, 144, 194-96, 207, 245-46, 248, 288, 319-24, 355, 554, 555, 581, 583, 587, 608, 613, 644n9, 645n18, 647nn28, 7; and sex-discrimination, 101, 111, 119, 127, 128, 132-34, 238-55; slave law among, 289, 340-41; as slaves of slaves (see Hamites, cursed by Noah); and "tongue of Canaan" (see Language, "of Canaan"). See also Culture, and anticulture; Hebrews; Hebrewgram; Heterogram; Israel; Nile; Philistines; Polytheism; Primeval Scene; Table of Nations; Translational mimesis; and see Joseph, Midwives, Moses, Pharaoh, Pharaoh's daughter, Potiphar, Potiphar's wife in Index of Biblical Characters Eichler, B.L., 660nn11, 13 Eissfeldt, Otto, 622 Ekronites, 150, 152. See also Philistines Elam, 7, 315 Elides, 92 Eliot, T.S., 595 Ellenbogen, Maximilian, 91, 642n30, 643n2 Ellison, H.L., 209, 339 Ellman, Richard, 375 Emerton, J.A., 654n13 England and the English, xi, 193, 201, 493, 497 Enlightenment, 349
Ervin-Tripp, S.M., 645n15 Ethnocentricity as ethnofocusing: with or without ethnocentrism, xxi-xxii, 81-89, 93-106, 110, 123-24, 127, 134, 135-36, 182, 185-205, 211, 218, 219, 227-32, 238, 250-55, 289, 330, 348, 361, 365, 366-68, 378, 382-93, 400, 402-403, 406-25, 430-31, 455, 473, 479-80, 483-638 passim (see also Ethnocriticism, Ethnophobia); vs. social focusing (see Sociocentricity); vs. theocentricity, 188 (see also Theocentricity). See also -Centricity vs. -centrism; Creation, of humanity in God's image; Culture, hero(ine), villain; Ethnocriticism; Ethnophobia; Focus of interest; Foreignness; Hebrewgram, in bicultural stigmatizing, bivalence in; Stereotype and metastereotype; Unicultural approach Ethnocriticism, xiii, xv-xvi, xix, xxi-xxii,
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81-89, 92-94, 127-30, 166-67, 174, 196-205, 269-78, 302-303, 347-50, 366-67, 380-425, 426, 428, 467, 481-518, 539, 543-48, 550-638. See also -Centricity vs. -centrism; Culture, villain; Ethnocentricity; Hebrewgram, in bicultural stigmatizing; Rhetoric, of deterrence; Stereotype and metastereotype, of foundation narrative Ethnophobia, 202-204, 229-30. See also -Centricity vs. -centrism Etruscans, 465, 568 Etymology: of Ephraim, 292, 336, 356-58, 374; "folk" (see "scientific"); and genealogy, 359-60 (see also Hebrews, as Eberides); of Gershom, 355-70, 374; of Hab/piru, 24-25, 47-48, 310, 440-41, 641n15; of Hebrew, 24-25, 34, 41, 47-48, 62, 78, 96-106 and passim (see also Hebrewgram, bivalence in); hostile, 96-154 passim, 289, 340, 342-43, 360, 364, 365, 378, 380-638 passim (see also Hebrewgram, in bicultural stigmatizing, bivalence in); of Israel (see Israel, eponymy/etymology of); of Joseph, 292; and macrostructure, 336-37, 346-53, 355-71 (see also Hebrewgram, as microcosm; Hebrews, chronology, order, and series of; Master plot; Slave law, poetic diachrony of); and memory of origins, 34, 96-106, 332-37, 355-71 (see also Hebrews, as Eberides, as Eberites; Hebrewgram, bivalence of; Memory); of Manasseh, 336, 356-58; as mini-narrative (see Narrative, nomi-); of Moses, 114, 332-37, 359-60, 368-69, 370-71; of Pharaoh, 255; and re-etymologizing, 359ff.; as reflex of psychology, 96ff., 332ff., 355ff. (see also Translational mimesis, of thought); and rhetoric (see Rhetoric, of deterrence, of pretended solidarity); "scientific," 39, 47-48, 310, 334-37, 360-70, 440-41;
and sequence, 359-70 (see also and macrostructure); of stereotype, 172; and translational mimesis (see of Gershom, of Hebrew, of Moses, of Pharaoh); viewpoints in and on, 96-106, 334-37, 355-70 and passim (see also Hebrewgram, bivalence in). See also Genealogy, Language, Nomination Euphrates, including Cis- and Trans-, 24, 34, 35, 41-43, 45, 78, 79, 95, 96, 97-100, 103-105, 106-107, 111, 141, 14243, 145, 261, 297, 313, 314-15, 340, 342, 362-65, 366, 386, 457, 637, 638, 641n16, 646n23, 657n38. See also Eberites; Hebrewgram, bivalence in, geographical axis of; Jordan; River of Egypt Euripides, 189, 193, 348 Eurocentricity vs. Eurocentrism, 197, 202, 229. See also -Centricity vs. -centrism, Orientalism Europe, 103-104, 184, 197 Exile, xii, 2, 44-45, 68, 139, 170, 196, 228, 231, 384, 429, 458, 459, 467, 523, 524, 548, 557, 620, 631-38, 646n23, 650n15, 668n16 Exum, Cheryl J., 256, 333, 335, 360, 645nn15, 20, 652n29 F Falk, Z.W., 556 Fascist, 87, 197. See also Heterogram Feminism, 16, 87, 182-83, 229, 256-57, 605, 625-26, 647n6. See also -Centricity vs. -centrism; Culture, hero(ine), villain; Gender, grammatical; Hebrews, and Hebrewesses; Sexism, female; Stereotype and metastereotype, of Woman vs. Man Fetishism, 649n9 Feudalism, 221, 226, 311, 508 Fiction, 13-14, 18, 59, 60, 62-64, 69, 72-75, 155, 161, 176, 177, 178-79, 213, 219-26, 455, 469, 528-30, 562, 568, 639-40n5, 644n9, 649n8, 666-67n7. See also Genre, History, Historiography, Narrative, Ontology, Pseudepigraphy Fielding, Henry, xi, 198, 564 Filiation, vs. descent, 110, 318, 644n8 Finley, M.I., 650n14 Fishbane, Michael, 599, 603, 664n2 Flaubert, Gustave, 176, 199, 651n26 Fleming, Ian, and James Bond, 63-64
Flesh vs. faith, 3-4, 5, 6, 231, 332. See also Circumcision, Paul Flood, 7, 42-43, 65-66, 69-70, 109-10, 118, 120, 122, 145. See also Noahides Focus of interest: as discourse universal, 197-205; divided (see vs. favor or value, and of narration, Duocentricity); vs. favor or value (see -Centricity vs. -centrism); and grammatical person (see of narration); indicators of, 198ff., 405-25; and of narration, 199-201 (see also Deixis; Hebrewgram; Law, pronominal style in; Narrative; Quotation; Rhetoric, of grammatical person); possible candidates for (see -Centricity vs. -centrism) Fokkelman, J.P., 658nn8, 12 Foolproof communication, 100, 114-15, 243, 287, 348, 359, 405, 416, 422-23, 509ff., 515-16, 537, 552-53, 559-63, 565-66, 582ff., 603-604, 616-17, 628.
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See also Dynamics; Law, esoteric and exoteric; Narrative, omniscient, reliable; Rhetoric Foreign devil, in Chinese, 143-44. See also Heterogram Foreignness (nokhri), as protean ethnic difference, 7, 23, 80, 81, 109-21, 141-45, 186-205. See also Hamites, Otherness Forster, Leonard, 643n30 Foucault, Michel, 129-30, 133, 168 Fowles, John, 161 Fox, Everett, 122, 293, 644n7 Frankfort, Henri, 644n11 French, xi, 135 Freud, Sigmund, xvii, 28-29, 169, 332, 343, 352, 363, 369, 646-47n27, 652nn30, 35, 656nn27, 36 Frye, Northrop, 20, 37, 40 Frymer-Kensky, Tikva, 599 Fundamentalism, 72, 400, 432, 538, 640n13 G Gaps and gap-filling. See Dynamics; Foolproof communication; Hebrewgram, between speech and thought, between spoken and heard discourse, and expressive duplexity; Hebrews, mystery of; Hindsight fallacy; Language, ellipsis in; Narrative; Quotation, ambiguity between narration and; Redundancy; Repetition; Sequence Garbini, Giovanni, 46, 49, 72 Gardiner, A.H., 255 Garr, W. Randall, 652n32 Garsiel, Moshe, 656n34 Gaza, 145 Gelb, I.J., 659n6 Gellner, Ernest, 107-108, 467 Gender, grammatical. See Deixis, personal; Hebrews, and Hebrewesses; Law, pro-nominal style in; Slave law, sexual (in)equality in; Stereotype and metastereotype, of Woman vs. Man Genealogy See Eberides; Etymology; Genre, genealogy; Hamites; Hebrewgram, bivalence in; Narrative, nomi-; Noahides; Primeval Scene; Table of Nations Genocide:
as climax of ethnocultural victimage and vict-image, 100-54, 188-91, 232-59, 286-308; destereotyped, 129-30, 132-34, 232-59; in Egypt (see Egyptians, as enslavers and genocides); with genetic appropriation, 132-34, 232-55; in Greece (see Greek culture, vs. barbarian, in Sparta); in modern theory, 129, 133-34; Nazi (see Nazism); open, 111, 119, 120, 127, 128, 132-33, 140-41, 144, 238, 241, 245, 255-59; secret, 126-27, 232-55 (see also Midwives in Index of Biblical Characters); sex-discriminating (see with genetic appropriation); sought by Haman, 456; in Tibet, by China, 133. See also Antisemitism, Xenophobia Genre: general, xiv, xvi, xx, xxi, xxii, 13, 22, 27, 39, 54, 58, 78, 79, 88, 218, 222, 269, 286, 307, 348, 352, 379, 384, 426, 431-32, 433, 438-39, 447, 449-50, 460, 464, 467, 471, 475, 482, 483, 488, 492-93, 504, 508, 519, 523-39, 564, 558-63, 602-603, 605-606, 639-40n5, 659n8, 664nn1, 3, 5, 665nn6, 7, 669n31, 670n37; administrative vs. literary, 52; allegory, 219; annalistic, 230; aphorism, 64-65, 179, 527; archival, 528, 589-90; autobiography, 193, 200-202; Bildungsroman, 353, 359, 624-25; birth story, 232-59, 328-38; caricature, 191, 220, 422; catalogue, 527; comedy, 161, 178, 317-18, 364; detective story, 171, 179; diplomatic, 259-78, 640n12 (see also Amarna); drama, 524 (see also comedy, tragedy, Shakespeare); dream, 135, 276, 527;
educational, 120, 528; elegy, 93; epic, 41-42, 52, 179, 542, 590-91; epistolary, 49, 97-98, 640n12; fantasy, 70, 96, 123-24, 176, 457, 462; farce, 127, 238; fiction (see Fiction); folk tale, 127, 235, 238; genealogy, 23, 82, 100, 109-21, 520, 527, 533; history telling (see History, Historiography); inter-, 520-638 (see also Allusion; Slave law, intergeneric, allusion in, narrative forces in); King list, 43; inventory, 49, 533; law, legaliterature (see Law, Slave law); narrative (see Narrative); novel, xix, 42, 49, 60, 72, 74, 155-57, 161, 179, 193, 199, 200, 229, 230, 235-36, 276, 285, 376, 382, 451, 524, 564, 651n26; panegyric, 52; parable, 83, 527; parody, 176, 178, 277-78, 422, 528; pastoral, 170; philosophical, 533; poetry, 63, 72, 93, 200, 269, 366, 451, 527; propaganda, 72, 97-98, 161, 173, 176, 209-10, 367; prophecy, 1-2, 66, 192, 358, 379, 447, 521, 523, 527, 543-48, 629-38; romance, 1, 74; satire, 52, 455; spy story, 37-38, 40, 45, 63-64; sequence of, 627-29; tragedy, 81, 112, 179, 189, 256, 306-307, 348, 350, 364, 422, 458, 537 (see also drama); triumphal, 48, 49, 51, 80, 128, 147-49, 230; utopia, 1-2, 192, 203, 455;
western, 21, 179; wisdom literature, 127, 195-96, 245, 264-65, 447,
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528, 671n38. See also Arts; Culture, dimensions of; Modality; Ontology Gentile ("goy"), 197, 325, 333, 336, 348, 497, 645n20, 658n12. See also Heterogram George, Saint, 63-64 Gerar, 144-45 Gesenius-Kautzsch Grammar, 79-81, 393, 400-401, 402, 417 Geus, C.H.J. de, 461 Gibbon, Edward, 52, 199 Gibeah, 192, 383, 405 Gibson. J.C.L., 640n6 Gilead, 383, 386, 397, 407, 414, 415, 416 Gilgal, 383, 415, 546 Gilgamesh Epic, 43 Gilman, Sander, 101-102, 171-81, 186, 227, 253, 281, 322, 644n9, 656n36, 658n12, 663n12. See also Stereotype and metastereotype, approaches to, of stereotype God: omniscient, xxii, 12-18, 283, 301, 363, 373-75, 526-27, 534, 563 (see also Narrative, omniscient); omnipotent, 18, 145-53, 215, 237, 268-69, 357-58, 372, 529, 557-58 (see also History repeating/reversing itself; Master plot; Poetic justice); omnipresent, 366; suspending his privileges, 119, 263-69, 272-73, 366, 518-19. See also Creation, Ontology, Theocentricity, God's image. See Creation, of humanity in God's image Golden Age, 110, 128 Golden Calf, 620-21, 657n38 Gombrich, E.H., 493, 647n8 Goodspeed, Edgar J., 85, 646n23 Goshen, 109, 115, 116, 120, 125, 129, 134, 142, 149, 166, 235, 298, 351, 491 Gottwald, Norman K, 27, 95, 165-66, 221ff., 417, 657n3, 658nn4, 7, 660n10, 662n30 Grant, Michael, 43, 639n3, 642n28
Gray, John, 38, 660n14 Gray, Mary, 27, 57, 78, 139, 207, 293, 310-11, 325, 326, 339, 434, 435, 443, 454, 461, 495, 647n4, 652n33, 657nn3, 4, 658nn10, 17, 659nn3, 7, 660nn14, 16 "Great House," 255, 334, 352, 370 Greek culture: and amphictyony, 61; Athens in, 189-90, 193, 230, 271; vs. barbarian, xviii, 81, 127, 139, 143, 169, 175, 182, 183, 187, 188-94, 196-97, 204, 219, 332, 508, 641n16, 644n10, 651n26 (see also Culture, and anticulture; Ethnocentricity; Stereotype and metastereotype, of self vs. antiself; Xenophobia); comparison with Egypt's, 188-191 (see also vs. barbarian, Sparta in, Egyptians, Hamites); contrast with Bible's, 188-205 (see also Creation, Ethnocentricity, Ethnocriticism, Hebrewgram, Slave law, Slavery); democrat, in, 189-90; education, 332; epic (see Homer); Hellocentrist (see vs. barbarian); historiography, 81, 104, 113, 119, 161, 195, 230, 303, 508, 537, 642n29, 644n9, 652n34, 654n6, 663n13; Homeric names for, 7, 8; law, 271; literature, 127, 189-90, 256, 271, 333, 348, 350, 564 (see also historiography, tragedy, Homer, Plato); philosophy, xviii, 189-91, 228, 332, 650n40 (see also Aristotle, Plato); poetics and aesthetics, 73, 178, 217, 229, 328, 331, 348, 353, 422 (see also Aristotle, Plato); Sparta in, xviii, 131, 141, 508; totalizing (see vs. barbarian); tragedy, 81, 112. See also Hellas, Hellenism, Ionians, Persia Greenberg, Moshe, 8, 31-36 passim, 39, 41, 43, 71, 75, 79, 138, 153, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 222, 224, 259, 294, 300-301, 360, 363, 375, 387, 439, 444, 527, 645n15, 647n4, 648n1, 650n17, 653n4, 655n24, 659n5, 660nn11, 13 Greenstein, Edward L., 501, 599, 664n1 Guillaume, A., 641n20 Gumperz, J.J., 645n19 Guttmann, Michael, 647n10
Gypsy, 170. See also Heterogram Gyrocentricity vs. gyrocentrism. See Androcentricity vs. androcentrism; -Centricity vs. -centrism; Feminism; Otherness; Sexism, female; Stereotype and metastereotype, of Woman vs. Man H Hab/piru: in Amarna age (see Amarna); analytic fragmentation of, 26-30, 36-37, 641n15, 659n9, 662n30 (see also identity of, Middle ways); Canaanites as, 456-57 (see also Amarna; Canaanites; Hebrews as Hab/piru, in conquest and settlement); as (under)class (see Hebrews as Hab/piru, in status); disappearance of, 43-44, 65-66, 80, 95-96, 131, 394, 457-70 passim (see also Hebrews, disappearances of; Hebrews as Hab/piru, in time and/or space); dispersed and variously located in Ancient Orient, 8-9, 31-76 passim, 96, 130-32, 163-67, 456-57 (see also Amarna, Hebrews as Hab/piru, Nuzi); documents and surveys of, 8-9, 31-32, 221-26 (see also Amarna; Nuzi; Slave law, all-Orien-
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tal urtext of, crosscultural approach to); in Egyptian connection (see dispersed and variously located, multiform names of, Amarna); elusive diversity of, xviii, 26-76 (see also identity, of, Hebrews as Hab/piru); enslaved (see Hebrews as Hab/piru, in status; Nuzi; Slave law, crosscultural approach to, debt-slavery in); gods of, 50-51, 167, 267 (see also Hebrews, God/gods of, Polytheism); and Hab/piru-gram (see Hab/piru-gram, Hebrewgram, Heterogram); and Hebrews (see Hebrews, Hebrews as Hab/piru, Israel); identity of, 8-75 passim (see also analytic fragmentation of; disappearance of; dispersed and variously located in Ancient Orient; Hebrews as Hab/piru, in defining features, in diachronic distribution, in expressiveness, in membership, in semantic mixture, in status, in synchronic partition); multiform names of, 32-34, 36, 48, 61-64, 71, 72, 73, 74, 96, 139, 310, 484, 641n21, 642n26 (see also elusive diversity of; as silent Other; Hebrews as Hab/piru, in name; Rhetoric, of identity); in Nuzi (see Nuzi); and/as SA.GAZ (see multiform names of); self-nomination lacking (see as silent Other); as silent Other, xviii, 35, 39, 45, 141, 187, 221-26, 408-409 (see also Hab/piru-gram) Hab/piru-gram, xvii-xviii, 78, 87, 137-38, 143, 163-68, 220-26. See also Hab/piru, as silent Other; Hebrewgram; Heterogram Halivni, David Weiss, 599 Halkin, A.S., 649n3 Hallo, William W., 79, 639n3, 641n23 Halpern, Baruch, 13-14, 36 Hamites: as antitype and anticulture, xiii, xv, 15, 23, 108-21, 193-96, 245-46, 307-308, 471, 475, 485, 590, 632-38; Canaanites as (see Canaanites); cursed by Noah, 109-11, 118-19, 144-45, 193-96, 214, 308, 456-57, 462, 485, 491-92 (see also Egyptians, as self-made slaves; Primeval Scene); Cush as (see Cushites); destereotyped (see Stereotype and metastereotype, of Hamites, of Egyptians); Egyptians as (see Egyptians);
as Hebrew-callers, -elicitors, -thinkers (see Hebrewgram, Translational mimesis); Israel become, 86, 471, 481-627 passim, 632-38; midwives as possible, 232-55, 280-82, 430; as oppressors (see Egyptians, as enslavers and genocides; Hebrewgram; Philistines as oppressors; Slave law); vs. ordinary foreigners, 186-205 (see also Foreignness); Philistines as (see Philistines); sexual violence of, 109-13, 114-15, 118-19, 124, 144, 194, 234, 245-46, 247-48, 349 (see also Primeval Scene; Slave law, sexual (in)equality in); as slaves of slaves (see cursed by Noah); Sodom as model of, 349; uniquely associated with Hebrewness, 7, 23, 80, 81, 109-21, 141-45, 186-205. See also Culture, and anticulture; Hebrewgram; Master plot; Otherness; Table of Nations Hammurabi: king, 34, 165, 527; Code of, 25-26, 438-39, 440, 441, 442, 443, 444, 478-79, 518, 527, 575-76. See also Law, Slave law Harrison, R.K., 478 Hartley, John E., 478 Hatti, 9, 35 Heap of Witness, 82-83 Hebrew, as anachronistic language-name, xi-xiii, 1-2, 4, 17, 78, 212-13, 493, 641n16. See also Anachronism; Archaism; Hebrews, co-reference with Israel, language of; Israel, language of; Jew(ish); Language, of Canaan; Unicultural approach Hebrew Union College, xxii-xxiii Hebrewgram: basics of, xiii, xvii-xviii, 81-89; against binary divides, 143-44; between speech and thought, 90-91, 279-86, 402; between spoken and heard discourse, 263-78, 285, 317-24; and Bible's revolution, 88-89, 143-44, 145-56; in bicultural stigmatizing, 86, 196, 340, 378-84, 399-425, 426, 428, 444, 472, 481-638 (contrast bivalence in; see also Rhetoric, of deterrence);
bivalence in, xv, 81-89, 96-108, 114-15, 139, 143-44, 191-92, 201, 208, 210-11, 216, 252-53, 267-68, 272-73, 277-78, 281-82, 301-302, 313, 317-18, 337-53, 359-60, 363-64, 412-13, 650n14 (contrast in bicultural stigmatizing); Canaanites in (see Canaanites); deliberate breach of, 234, 256, 259, 269-78 (see also Rhetoric, neglect of); as discourse grammar of "Hebrews," xiii, xvii-xviii, 85-89, 139-56; Egyptians in (see Egyptians); ethics in, 215, 237-55, 281, 344-45, 481-638 (see also and ideology); ethnic axis of, xiii, 23, 85-86, 90-121 passim, 140, 141-45, 206-78, 340-41, 351-52, 373-74, 426-638; and expressive duplexity, 283-86; in foreign speech, xiv, 85-86, 87, 90-154 passim, 159-60, 171-72,
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176, 178, 186-87, 201, 210-11, 213, 233-59, 272-73, 275, 278, 298, 316, 404, 414, 482, 486-87, 506, 566; in foreign or foreignized thought, xvii-xviii, 86, 153-54, 221, 243-45, 247, 253, 277, 279-377, 403, 482, 484, 491, 526; in foreign-like speech, xiv, 86, 107, 128, 141, 180, 201, 206-78, 378, 482, 490, 491, 500, 520 (see also in bicultural stigmatizing); four patterns of, xv, xvii-xviii, 85-88, 90-91, 140, 204-205, 206, 210-11, 213, 214-15, 216, 221, 226-27, 232-34, 274-75, 279-83, 286, 298-99, 300-301, 308, 314, 316, 318-19, 343-45, 351-53, 378-81, 400-404, 411, 426, 42829, 430, 471-72, 473, 475, 481-82, 484, 500, 526 (see also Quotation, ambiguity between narration and); geographical axis of, 97-100, 101, 103-107, 118-19, 134, 135, 140, 141, 142-45, 207-11, 314-18, 341-42, 356, 363-64, 367-68, 374-75, 637-38 (see also bivalence in; Deixis, personal; Eberites; Etymology; Lococentrism); and Hab/piru-gram, xvii-xviii, 87, 137-38, 143, 162-68, 220-26; Hamites in (see Hamites); historical axis of, xiii, 96, 140, 145-54 and passim (see also Master plot); in ironic/parodic utterance, 273, 277-78, 280, 412-13, 548, 653n30, 658n12; and ideology (see ethics in; Monotheism; Translational mimesis, and worldview); as laboratory, xiv, 388-403; as microcosm, xiii-xxii, 1, 22-23, 88-89, 92, 94, 99-100, 135-55, 286-308, 314-18, 337-53, 428, 549-50; as paradigmatic heterogram, xvii-xviii, 85-89, 137-54, 157-205 passim, 216-32, 399-403, 426-34, 467-72, 537 (see also four patterns of; Heterogram; Law, Hebrew slave law as paradigm of); Philistines in (see Philistines); power axis of, xiii, 85-86, 87, 92, 96-130, 135, 140-54, 162-68, 206-628 passim (see also Master plot); as quotation of foreign discourse at various removes, 85-87 and passim (see also four patterns of, Quotation); unwitting breach of, 208, 211-13, 230-31, 324-77. See also -Centricity vs. -centrism, Culture, Foreignness, Hebrews, Heterogram, Intercultural poetics, Israel, Language, Proteus Principle, Translational mimesis Hebrews: Abra(ha)m as first of (see Abraham in Index of Biblical Characters); as Abrahamites (see Abrahamites); in adjectival form, 44, 54 (see also elliptic vs. expanded form);
anachronized, xi-xvii, 1-79 passim, 87, 139, 211-12, 319, 227, 230-31, 383-93, 402-403, 412, 429-31 (see also co-reference with Israel; Anachronism; Apocrypha; Archaism; Ben Yehudah; Jew(ish); Paul; Rabbinic exegesis and literature, unicultural approach); ante-gentilic for elect, 5-6, 8, 54, 80, 85-86, 91-106, 309, 313; in Apocrypha (see Apocrypha); approaches to (see mystery of); associated with Hamites only, 23, 141-45, 186-205 (see also Foreignness, Hamites); as brothers in flesh, not faith, 3-4 (see also Paul); as Arabs, 641n20; vis-à-vis Canaanites (see Canaanites, Hamites); chronology, order, and series of, 3, 4, 5, 41-47, 54-55, 76, 79, 80, 95-96, 98-99, 100-101, 106, 107-108, 114-15, 135, 164, 232, 309, 311-14, 322-23, 378-638 (see also Abra(ha)m as first of; anachronized; clustering of; disappearances of; Joseph as first slave of; last; late arrival of; Hebrews as Hab/piru, in time and/or space; Master plot; Memory; Narrative; Sequence; Slave law, temporal (dis)order in); clustering of, 78-79, 80, 87, 100, 308-309, 314- 15, 426, 486; co-reference with Israel (see Israel, as blessed nomi-nation, in de-nomi-nation back to Hebrews, vs. interchangeable with Hebrews; Intercultural poetics vs. Unicultural approach; Middle ways); as Crossers (see Eberites; Euphrates; Hebrewgram, bivalence in, geographical axis of; Jordan; River of Egypt); defined as (under)class, xiv-xx, 8-77 and passim (see also Hebrew as Hab/piru); dehumanized, 250-54; deterritorialized (see "land of"; Eberites; Etymology, hostile; Hebrewgram, bivalence in, geographical axis of); in Deuteronomy (see Deuteronomy 15:12-18 in Index of Biblical Passages); differential value of (see co-reference with Israel, Hebrewgram, Heterogram, Nomination); disappearances of, 43-44, 46-47, 93, 107, 148, 164, 228, 278, 290-91, 292, 301, 306, 311-12, 318-24, 373, 423, 424, 462, 548, 549, 555, 570, 584-85; discourse grammar of, 81ff. (see also Hebrewgram); as Eberides/Shemites, bene eber (see ante-gentilic for elect, Eberides); as Eberites, from eber [hannahar] (see Eberites; Euphrates; Hebrewgram, bivalence in, geographical axis of; Jordan; River of Egypt);
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vis-à-vis Egyptians (see Egyptians; Hamites; Master plot, in Egypt; Rhetoric, of deterrence; Slave law); in elliptic vs. expanded form, 250-54, 258 (see also in adjectival form); enslaved (see Egytians, as enslavers and genocides; Hebrewgram, power axis of; Master plot; Philistines, as enslavers; Slave law; Slavery); and ereb pun, 20-21, 554-55; etymology of (see nomi-narrative of; Etymology); in Exodus (see Midwives; Miriam; Moses; Pharaoh, of Exodus, of Oppression; Pharaoh's daughter in Index of Biblical Characters; and see Exodus 21:2-11 in Index of Biblical Passages); forced reference to (see Rhetoric, of pretended solidarity; Translational mimesis, by characters in selftranslation); in Genesis (see Abraham, Chief Cupbearer, Joseph, Joseph's brothers, Potiphar, Potiphar's wife in Index of Biblical Characters); God as one of, 149-53, 267-78, 576, 683; God/gods of, 50-51, 96, 100, 115, 150-51, 167, 261-78, 548, 576, 633, 636 (see also Hebrews as Hab/piru, in worship; Monotheism); and the grand chronology (see chronology, order, and series of); as Hab/piru (see Hebrew as Hab/piru); heard reference to (see Translational mimesis, of hearing); in Hebrew/Hamite master plot (see Master plot); and Hebrewesses, xii, 3, 4, 23, 232-59, 276, 280-82, 552-629 passim (see also Stereotype and metastereotype, of Woman vs. Man; Slave law, sexual (in)equality in; and see Exodus 1:15, 16, 19, Deuteronomy 12:15, Jeremiah 34:9 in Index of Biblical Passages); in Jeremiah (see Jeremiah 34:8-17 in Index of Biblical Passages); as Jews (see anachronized, Archaism, Jew(ish), Postexilic era, and see Jeremiah 34:9 in Index of Biblical Passages); in Jonah (see Jonah in Index of Biblical Characters); Joseph as first slave among (see Joseph in Index of Biblical Characters); "land of," xii, xiii, 3, 27-28, 34-35, 45, 79, 86, 100, 103, 107, 134, 142, 180, 206-11, 218, 219, 225, 227, 232, 249, 258, 268-69, 276, 281, 290, 298-99, 342, 356, 364, 366, 374, 379, 482, 491-92, 505, 637, 648nn1, 2 (see also Hebrewgram, geographical axis of; Israel, as toponym); language of, xi-xiii, xviii, 1-2, 35, 85-87, 140-41, 212-14, 428-29 (see also Israel, language of; Language, of Canaan); last (see Jeremiah 34:8-17 in Index of Biblical Passages); late arrival of, 42, 54-55, 99, 142-43;
between liberty and slavery (see enslaved); in life and afterlife, xiv-xx (see also mystery of); in low criticism (see Low criticism, Masoretic Text); male vs. female (see and Hebrewesses); mystery of, xi-xxi, 1-89 and passim (see also Culture, approaches to); in New Testament, 3-4, 5, 211-12, 231, 271, 332, 523, 639n1 (see also New Testament); nomi-narrative of, 22-25, 96-107 and passim (see also Eberides; Eberites; Etymology; Euphrates; Hebrewgram, in bicultural stigmatizing, bivalence in, ethnic axis of, geographical axis of; Jordan; Narrative, nomi-; River of Egypt); as Outlanders, Yondermen (see Eberites); not a people (see antegentilic for elect); origins of (see Abrahamites, Eberides, Eberites, Hebrews as Hab/piru, Israel); vis-à-vis Philistines (see Master plot, in Philistia; Philistines; and see I Samuel in Index of Biblical Passages); in postBiblical use (see anachronized); in Rabbinic view (see Rabbinic exegesis and literature; Slave law, Rabbis on); relative frequency in Bible, 2-3, 5, 80, 221-26 (see also anachronized, chronology, order, and series of, disappearances of); retrojected (see anachronized); in Samuel (see Philistines; and see Achish, David, Jonathan, Saul in Index of Biblical Characters); in Septuagint (see Septuagint); in slave law, 426-638 (see also Hebrewgram, in bicultural stigmatizing; Rhetoric, of deterrence; Slave law; and see Exodus 21:2-11, Deuteronomy 15:12-18, Jeremiah 34:8-17 in Index of Biblical Passages); as Shemites (see Eberides, Primeval Scene, Shemites); between speech and thought (see Hebrewgram, between spoken and heard discourse); spelling of, 33; spoken reference to (see Hebrewgram, in bicultural stigmatizing, in foreign speech, in foreign-like speech; Rhetoric, of deterrence, of pretended solidarity; Translational mimesis, by characters in self-translation); subgrouped (see chronology, order, and series of; clustering of; and Hebrewesses; Slave law, subplots of); systematics of (see Hebrewgram); thought reference to (see Hebrewgram, in foreign or foreignized thought; Translational
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mimesis, of hearing); in time (see chronology, order, and series of); translated (see Translation, Translational mimesis); as Ubru, 641nn20, 24; in verb form, 277-78. See also Hamites, Hebrewgram, Hebrews as Hab/piru, Israel, Translational mimesis Hebrews as Hab/piru: arguments pro and con, xiv-xx, 8-19, 21-75, 94-96, 131-32, 137-39, 143, 148-49, 162-68, 176, 178, 198, 208209, 218-26, 262, 267, 274, 288-89, 293-94, 310-13, 326, 339, 384, 393-99, 431-72, 479-81, 490-91, 494-95, 604-605 (see also Crosscultural approach; Middle ways; Narrative, and narrativicide; Slave law, crosscultural approach to; Source- vs. discourse-oriented inquiry; Sources as discourse); chronology of (see in time and/or space); compared with other hypotheses of Hebrewness, 1-89 and passim (see also arguments pro and con; Culture, approaches to; Hebrewgram; Hebrews); in conquest and settlement, 8-9, 38-39, 46-47, 73-74, 148, 646n27 (see also Hebrews, disappearances of; and see Joshua in Index of Biblical Characters); cost in narrative value (see Narrative, and narrativicide); and crosscultural approach (see arguments pro and con); in defining features, xix-xxi, 9-75 passim, 94-96, 132, 137-39, 149, 162-68, 176, 178, 208-209, 218-27, 288, 310-13, 326, 431-72 passim, 495, 604 (see also in membership, in semantic mixture, in status); in diachronic distribution, xix, 26-31, 41, 45-46, 48, 58, 66, 67, 70-71, 398, 432, 447-70, 495 (see also in time and/or space; Middle ways; Slave law, crosscultural approach to, pre-textual diachrony of); in etymology, xxiii-xix, 24-25, 34, 41, 47-48, 62, 310, 641n15, 644n5 (see also in name); in expressiveness, xviii, 35, 39, 45, 141, 187, 221-26, 408-409 (see also in self-reference); in extension (see in membership); heuristic value of, xiv-xx, 31ff., 208-209, 431ff. (see also arguments pro and con); regarding individual books, chapters, and verses, see Index of Biblical Passages; regarding individual characters, see Index of Biblical Characters; in intension (see in defining features, in status); in language used, xviii, 35 (see also in name; Hab/piru, multiform names of, as silent Other; Hab/piru-gram; Hebrewgram; Israel, language of; Translational mimesis, multilingualism in);
in law (see in slave law); late paradigm change, xxii, 8-11, 31-32, 431-33; in membership, 9-10, 21-75 passim, 94-96, 131-32, 148, 176, 208, 218-19, 274, 293-94, 310-13, 326, 339, 394-98, 431-72, 604, 639n3, 641n23, 646n4 (see also in defining features, in diachronic distribution, in synchronic partition, in semantic mixture, in time and/or space); in monarchy age, 8, 43-44, 47, 67, 69-70, 72, 74, 94-97, 131, 393-99 (see also Aphek, Ark narrative, Michmash Pass narrative, Philistines; and see Achish, David, Jeremiah, Jonathan, Saul in Index of Biblical Characters); in name, 23-33, 36, 61-64, 72-73, 96, 310, 484 (see also in etymology; in language; Hab/piru, multiform names of; Rhetoric, of identity); in patriarchal age (see Abraham, Chief Cupbearer, Jacob/Israel, Joseph, Joseph's brothers, Pharaoh (in Genesis), Potiphar, Potiphar's wife in Index of Biblical Characters; and see Genesis 14:3, 39:14, 17, 40:15, 42:12, 43:32 in Index of Biblical Passages); and phantoms of homonymy (see Rhetoric, of identity); popularity of, xvii, 8, 32; and rhetorical tricks (see Rhetoric, of identity); in self-reference, 220-26 (see also in expressiveness; Hab/piru, as silent Other; Hab/piru-gram; Hebrewgram; Israel); in semantic mixture, xix, 26-31, 41, 45, 48, 58, 66, 67-68, 95, 311, 398-99, 432-72 passim, 640n9 (see also Middle ways; Slave law, crosscultural approach to); in slave law, 431-72 and passim (see also Nuzi; Slave law, crosscultural approach to, pre-textual diachrony of; and see Exodus 21:211, Deuteronomy 15:12-18, Jeremiah 34:8-17 in Index of Biblical Passages); at source, 56-75 (see also arguments pro and con, in semantic mixture, in time and/or space, Source- vs. discourse-oriented inquiry, Sources as discourse); in space (see in time and/or space); in status, xix-xx, 35-36, 37, 65, 68, 72, 94-95, 131-32, 137-38, 162-68, 198, 208-11, 262, 288, 384, 398-99, 43172, 495, 604 (see also in defining features, in semantic mixture, Nuzi); stereotype and metastereotype in, 162-68, 218-226; in synchronic partition, xix, 26-31, 41, 48, 58, 66-67, 94-95, 149, 262, 326, 398, 432, 452, 459 (see also Middle ways; Slave law, cross-
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cultural approach to); in time and/or space, 26-31, 34-35, 41-47, 51, 65-66, 68, 69-70, 80, 95-96, 131, 148, 208-209, 219, 310-11, 39798, 432, 447-70 (see also in conquest and settlement; in diachronic distribution; in monarchy age; in patriarchal age; in synchronic partition; Hab/piru, disappearance of; Hebrews, disappearances of; Narrative, and narrativicide; Slave law, chronology, order, and series of, pre-textual diachrony of); in worship, 50-51, 167, 267, 652n33 (see also Hebrews, God/gods of). See also Amarna, Hab/piru, Hebrews, Hab/piru-gram, Hebrewgram, Heterogram, Nomination Hebron, 43, 314 Helck, Wolfgang, 190, 293, 645n18 Hellas, Hellenes, 7, 189-90, 204 Hellenism, 3, 7, 8, 230-31, 244, 332, 493. See also Apocrypha, Greek culture, Philo, Septuagint Heller, Joseph, 49, 658n16 Helots, xviii, 131, 141 Heqt, 241-42, 252 Heraclitus, 191 Herodotus, 81, 104, 113, 119, 195, 303, 333, 508, 644n9, 652n34, 654n6, 663n13. See also Greek culture Herzberg, Hans Wilhelm, 387, 403, 657n1 Hess, Richard S., 164, 446 Heterogram: bicultural stigmatizing in, 86, 380-82, 404-25, 481-638 (see also -Centricity vs. -centrism; Ethnocriticism; Hebrewgram, in bicultural stigmatizing; Rhetoric, of deterrence); binarism and binarisms in, 143-144, 168-205 passim (see also -Centricity vs. -centrism; Rhetoric, of divide and rule; Xenophobia); bivalence in, 96-107, 138, 139, 228 (see also Hebrewgram, bivalence in); of Cynic, xviii, 228; of Dago, 87; of Fascist, 87, 197; in female chauvinism (see Sexism, female); of Hab/piru (see Hab/piru-gram); of Hebrew, 81-89 and passim (see also Hebrewgram);
Hebrewgram as paradigmatic, xvii-xviii, 85-89, 137-54, 157-205, 216-32, 399-403, 426-34, 467-72, 537 (see also Hebrewgram); of Hun, xviii, 103-104; of Male Chauvinist, 87; of Mameluk, xviii, 138, 228; of Nigger, xviii, 87, 382, 384, 404; and translated discourse, at various removes, 85-87 and passim (see also Hebrewgram, four patterns of; Translational mimesis); of Yid, 87; of Yuppy, 87. See also Attila, Augustus, Canaanites, -Centricity vs. -centrism, Egyptians, Foreign devil, Foreignness, Gentile ("goy"), "Great House," Greek culture, vs. barbarian, Gypsy, Hamites, Imperialist, Intercultural poetics, Nomination, Philistines, Stereotype and metastereotype, Uncle Tom, Vict-image, Whitey High criticism. See Crosscultural approach; Culture, approaches to; Diachrony; Historical method; Low criticism; Masoretic Text; Middle ways; Sequence, fabricated; Source- vs. discourse-oriented inquiry; Sources as discourse Hindsight fallacy, 242-43, 303-304, 313, 331, 332, 360-62, 363, 474, 544, 554, 607, 651n21. See also Anachronism, Dynamics, Sequence, Time Historical method (self-styled): anachronism in (see Anachronism, Unicultural approach); analogy and comparativism in, 8-76 (see also Crosscultural approach; Hebrews as Hab/piru; Rhetoric, of identity); compromise solutions, 26-31, 447-70 (see also Middle ways); between discourse and source, xviii-xix, 50-76 (see also Source- vs. discourse-oriented inquiry, Sources as discourse); generic atomism in, 78-79, 522-24; law-speaking fictionalized in, 528-30, 665n7 (see also Pseudepigraphy); license of rewriting in (see Low criticism; Rhetoric, of identity); limited object and premises of, 10-19, 39-41, 50-53, 171, 449, 524-25; reading and poetics as precondition of (see Diachrony, order of priorities in); supratemporal continuities weak (see Hebrews as Hab/piru, in synchronic partition; Slave law, as synchronic network; Synchrony, as bridge-building method); time and action logic broken (see Hebrews as Hab/piru, in diachronic distribution; Slave law, pre-textual diachrony of; Narrative, and narrativicide); between uni- and crossculturalism (see compromise solutions); variants all unequal to Hebrew testcase, xv, xxii, 3-11, 22-23, 39-41, 50ff., 75-81, 85-89 (see also Hebrews as Hab/piru, arguments pro and con; Unicultural approach; Middle ways). See also Culture, approaches to; Diachrony; Historiography; History; Synchrony Historiography: forms of (see below and see Diachrony, Historical method, History, Narrative, Synchrony);
functional, not
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formal genre, 10-19, 161, 171-72, 528-30; ill-opposed to ''fiction/myth," 10-11, 14, 16-18, 32, 37-38, 40-41, 50-75, 161, 171, 177-79, 216-20, 451, 528-30, 639n5, 665n7; within and of (lega)literature, 484-519 passim, 520-638; limited vs. divinely omniscient, 12-19 (see also God, omniscient; Narrative, omniscient); of-long durée, 461-62; poetic (see Diachrony, poetic; Synchrony, as poetic force); recourse to pattern-making universals, 60, 448-70; truth value vs. truth claim in, 9, 12-89, 123-24, 132-33, 147-49, 178, 213-14, 219-20, 411 (see also ill-opposed to myth/fiction; Diachrony, "real life"; History; Source- vs. discourse-oriented inquiry; Sources as discourse; Stereotype and metastereotype, and truth). See also Fiction, Genre, Greek culture, Memory, Ontology, Sequence History: backtold, 484-638 (see also repeating and/or reversing itself; Dynamics, of recognition, of retrospection; Narrative, disclosure and development as universals of); foretold, 1-2, 109-21, 145-53, 193-96, 286-308 (see also Dynamics, of prospection; God; Master plot; Modality; Narrative, omniscient; Repetition); God lord of Bible's, 14-18, 145-53, 237 and passim (see also God, omnipotent; Master plot); repeating and/or reversing itself, 22-23, 61, 130-35, 145-53, 167-68, 194-96, 260-62, 286-308, 347, 353-54, 42225, 549-50, 633-38 (see also Allusion; Chiasm; Hebrewgram, historical axis of; Master plot; Memory; Peripety; Philistines, continuity with Egypt; Poetic justice; Repetition). See also Diachrony, Dynamics, Historical method, Historiography, Time Hitler, Adolf, 124, 343. See also Nazism Hittites, 51, 71, 109, 128, 136, 164, 167, 223, 248, 260, 267, 293, 466, 526, 533, 542, 589-91, 595, 654n10 Hoerth, Alfred J., 214, 640n6 Homer, 7, 8, 21, 88, 161, 178, 185, 189-90, 229, 451, 526, 644n10, 649n6. See also Greek culture Horeb. See Sinai Houston, Walter, 599 Houtman, Cornelius, 235, 650n17, 667n9, 668n19 Humanism, 204, 448, 454-58, 497, 503, 596-605, 609, 618-19, 625-26, 627
Humanity, images of. See -Centricity vs. -centrism; Creation; God; Stereotype and metastereotype, of humanity Hun, xviii, 87, 103-104. See also Heterogram Hurrians, 72, 438, 456, 552, 556. See also Nuzi Hyatt, J. Philip, 136, 335, 599, 652n29, 668n19, 671n44 Hyperbole, 73 I Iberians, 62, 64 Ibn Ezra, 6, 12, 235, 333, 430-31, 432, 669n27 Iconicity, 38, 104, 115, 130, 217-18, 251, 284-85, 333, 362, 406, 408, 416, 418, 493, 541, 555, 594 Iconoclasm. See Creation; Decalogue; Proteus Principle; Stereotype and metastereotype, against Bible's ideopoetics Idiolect, 36-37, 263-67, 273 Idrimi, 647n4 Imperialist, as hatename, 144. See also Heterogram Indians, 21, 455 Indo-Europeans, 164, 642n2 Inside view. See Narrative, omniscient; Quotation, of thought Intercultural poetics, xi, xiii-xxii, 3, 10-11, 12-23, 25, 30-31, 39-41, 75-89, 96-121, 139-232, 279-83, 378-84, 399403, 426-34, 468-72, 481-638. See also -Centricity vs. -centrism; Culture, approaches to, dimensions of, and (lega)literature, paradigms of; Diachrony; Dynamics; Foreignness; Hebrewgram; Heterogram; Language; Law; Narrative; Otherness; Poetic justice; Proteus Principle; Sequence; Slave law, poetic diachrony of; Stereotype and metastereotype; Synchrony; Translational mimesis; Universals Interpreter's Bible, 288, 403 Ionians ("Yavan"), as Japhethites, 7, 112, 231. See also Greek culture Irish, 199, 203 Isaacites, 81, 194 Ishmaelites, 6, 8, 21, 431, 448, 490, 498, 634 Isin Dynasty, 34 Islam, 19-20
Israel: vs. antitype and anticulture, 81-205 and passim (see also elect bioideology of, election bittersweet, vs. ordinary foreigners, Babel, Foreignness, Hamites, Hebrewgram, Hebrews, Intercultural poetics, Primeval scene, Slave law); as blessed nomi-nation for Chosen Peo-
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ple, xiii, xvii-xviii, 5-6, 8 and passim (see also in de-nomi-nation, eponymy/etymology of, in re-nomi-nation, as toponym; contrast and Hab/piru, as interchangeable with Hebrews); in de-nomi-nation back to Hebrews, 5-6, 81-153 and passim (see also as blessed nomi-nation, in re-nomi-nation, Hebrewgram, Hebrews, Intercultural poetics, Master plot); elect bioideology of (see eponymy/etymology of, Abrahamites, Eberides, Eberites, Isaacites, Noahides, Primeval Scene, Shemites); election bittersweet (see Ethnocentricity; Ethnocriticism; Hebrewgram, in bicultural stigmatizing, bivalence in; Master plot; Slavery); eponymy/etymology of, 5-6, 34, 53, 82-83, 92, 99, 106, 108, 126, 128, 146-47 260, 280, 309, 313, 410 (see also late birth of; and see Jacob/Israel in Index of Biblical Characters); exiled (see Jeremiah 34:7-18 in Index of Biblical Passages); in Exodus (see Exodus in Index of Biblical Passages); in extraBiblical antiquity, 47, 48, 51, 80, 147-49, 231-32 (see also Jew(ish)); and Hab/piru (see Hab/piru, Hebrews as Hab/piru, Crosscultural approach, Middle ways); as interchangeable with Hebrews, xi-xvii, 1-79 passim (see also Anachronism, Hebrews, Jew(ish), Redundancy, Unicultural approach); involved with Hamites (see vs. antitype and anticulture); and humanity (see Creation, of humanity in God's image; Ethnocentricity; Stereotype and metastereotype, against Bible's ideopoetics, of humanity); as Jews (see as interchangeable with Hebrews, Jew(ish)); under Joshua (see Hebrews as Hab/piru, in conquest and settlement; and see Joshua in Index of Biblical Passages); Judah as, 1-2, 629-38 (see also Jew(ish)); land of (see landed, as toponym); landed, 3, 22-23, 38, 53, 65, 90-100, 119, 149-53, 209-10, 383-425, 459, 576-77, 578 (see also exiled; as toponym; Etymology, of Gershom; Hebrewgram, geographical axis of; Master plot; Philistines); language of, xi-xiv, 1-2, 35, 78, 81-87, 115, 212-14 (see also Language, of Canaan, divine, of Hebrews; Hebrewgram); last and highest in chosen line (see elect bioideology of, late birth of); late birth of, 5, 53, 54-55, 98, 99-100, 105-108, 119, 122-29, 131, 142, 313, 353-54, 379, 550 (see also eponymy/etymology of; Hebrews, chronology, order, and series of, late arrival of; Jew(ish)); under law (see Law, Slave law);
under Law of (De)Nomination (see Hebrewgram); under monarchy (see Philistines; and see David, Jonathan, Saul, Solomon, Zedekiah in Index of Biblical Characters); Moses and (see Moses in Index of Biblical Characters); national covenant of (see as blessed nomi-nation, election bittersweet, under law); vs. ordinary foreigners, 186-95 (see also vs. antitype, Foreign-ness); postexilic (see Anachronism, Jew(ish), Postexilic era, Unicultural approach); in pre-nomi-nation (see eponymy/etymology of); in re-nomi-nation, 145-53 and passim (see also as blessed nomi-nation; in de-nomi-nation; Hebrewgram, historical axis of, power axis of; Master plot); as River Crossers (see Eberites; Hebrewgram, bivalence in, geographical axis of); stigmatized as Canaanites, 471; as toponym, xi-xii, 95, 97, 99-100, 149, 406, 646n27 (see also landed; Hebrews, land of); trials of (see election bittersweet, eponymy/etymology of); tribes of (see Tribes); in wilderness, 426-638 passim (see also Slave law). See also -Centricity vs. -centrism Israeli, 326 Italians, 197 J Jabesh-Gilead, 407, 415 Jack, J.W., 639n3, 641n23 Jackson, Bernard S., 480, 515, 516, 562, 639n4, 659n9, 662n31, 662n2 Jacob, Benno, 7, 20-21, 25, 122, 235, 270, 332, 333, 335, 478, 480, 642n27, 645nn15, 20, 652n31 Jagersma, Hendrick, 13 Jakobson, Roman, 64 James, Henry, 199, 200, 229, 230, 276, 626, 672n47 Jankowska, N.B., 444 Japhet, Sara, 473, 475, 476, 496-97, 662nn24, 29 Japhethites, 7, 8, 112, 143, 231. See also Foreignness, Noahides, Primeval Scene, Table of Nations
Jaynes, Julian, 37 Jepsen, Alfred, 7, 136, 227, 325, 472, 457, 476, 493, 661n24 Jericho, 239 Jerusalem, 2, 6-7, 8, 35, 44, 68, 71, 74, 88, 136, 166, 170, 196, 228, 270, 310, 378, 427, 428, 458, 459, 460, 465, 466, 467,
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482, 491, 505, 517, 519, 521, 522, 523, 536, 540, 543-50, 563, 569, 629-38, 639n1, 642n26, 660n11 Jesus, 61, 451, 508, 653n38, 654n5, 655n23 Jew(ish): as language name, xii-xiii, 1-2, 83, 212-13, 270; as late ethnicon, from Judah, xi, xii, xiii, 2, 6, 19, 48, 50, 62, 71, 77, 80, 96, 106, 143, 148, 185, 193, 197, 211, 212-13, 227, 228, 230, 281, 332, 343, 375, 427, 429-30, 445, 449, 452, 459, 461-62, 465, 467, 468, 471, 545, 548, 552, 617, 633, 639n1, 642nn27, 28, 643n3, 644n9, 645n16, 648n13, 651n26, 653n38, 656n36, 658n8; history (see Apocrypha; New Testament; Postexilic era; Rabbinic exegesis and literature; Slave law, pre-textual diachrony of); as toponym, xii, xiii. See also Anachronism, Antisemitism, Archaism, Hebrews, Israel, Unicultural approach Joktanites, 7, 8 Jones, Douglas Rawlinson, 667n9 Joppa, 213 Jordan, including Cis- and Trans-, 47, 98, 261, 346, 350, 363-64, 380-81, 386-91, 392, 396-97, 400, 405, 407, 410, 412, 413-22, 464, 474, 502, 512, 517, 518, 522, 528, 531, 541, 563-629, 655n22, 658n16, 672n51. See also Eberites; Euphrates; Hebrewgram, bivalence of, geographical axis of Josephus, 54, 233, 332, 334-36, 348, 357, 474, 479, 484, 493, 645n16, 646n26, 656n30, 659n1, 662nn1, 4, 663n15, 664n17 Joyce, James, 199, 203, 332, 375 Jubilee, 431, 434-39, 448, 455, 477, 495, 497, 507, 543, 548-50, 570, 661n22, 668n17, 669n25, 670n34, 672n45 Judaism, 19-20, 230-31 K Kafka, Franz, 83 Kamp, Kathryn A., 643n4 Karaites, 6, 430-31, 432, 435 Kaufmann, Yehezkel, 54, 325, 588-89, 640n8 Kearney, Richard, 188 Kenite Hypothesis, 354 Kenites, 47, 354 Khazars, 465-66 Khnum, 241-42, 244-45, 246, 252, 651n22
Klein, Ralph W., 285, 417, 657n3 Klostermann, August, 387 Koch, Klaus, 7, 36, 96, 136, 214, 228 Koestler, Arthur, 104 Kraeling, E.J., 78, 79, 97, 138, 231-32, 294, 325, 387, 650n16 Kristeva, Julia, 102-103, 182, 330, 648n15 Kugel, James L., 670n37 L Labov, William, 276 Lachish, 166 La Fontaine, 508 Landsberger, Benno, 62 Language: amnesia of, 369-70 (see also Memory); apposition in, 266-67, 272, 276-77; Aramaic (see Aramaic); archaism in (see Archaism, Anachronism, Unicultural approach); "of Canaan," 1-2, 147, 194, 212, 213, 214, 316, 347, 372, 643n2, 649n4 (see also Israel, language of); and comparatist reconstruction, 61-75 (see also Hebrews as Hab/piru; Rhetoric, of identity; Sources as discourse); in contact (see inter-, Hebrewgram, Heterogram, Intercultural poetics, Translation, Translational mimesis); derivation in (see Etymology); dialect in, 1-2, 214 (see also of Canaan, idiolect in; Translational mimesis, between dialects); and discourse, 81-89, 135-46, 388-93, 439-442 (see also Deixis, Dictionary vs. contextual meaning); divine, 85, 91, 115, 263-67; ellipsis in, 90, 247-54, 258, 264-67, 284-85, 327, 332-33, 385-86, 408, 483-84, 487-92, 512, 574-75, 586-88, 591, 596ff., 655n17 (see also Gaps and gap-filling, Redundancy, Repetition); Hab/piru-related, 31-75 passim (see also Hab/piru, etymology of, multiform names of, as silent Other); of Hebrews, xi-xiii, 35, 212 (see also Hebrews, Hebrewgram); hetero- (see multi-, Hebrewgram, Heterogram, Vict-image); homonymy, as word magic in (see Rhetoric, of identity);
iconic (see Iconicity); idiolect in, 36-37, 263-67, 273 (see also dialect in); inter- (see in contact; hetero-; multi-; Genre, inter-; Hebrewgram, bivalence in; Intercultural poetics; Translational mimesis, and interlingual punning); in interior monologue (see ellipsis in; Translational mimesis, of hearing, of thought); of Israel (see Israel, language of); Jewish/Judahite, 1-2 (see also Jew(ish)); of law, 426-638; under low criticism (see Low criticism, Masoretic Text); and metalanguage, xiv-xxii, 1-2, 155-205 (see also Stereotype and metastereotype); mini-narrative in (see Etymology; Hebrewgram, bivalence in; Narrative, nomi-); multi-, 1-2, 32-34, 61-64, 81-89 (see also
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Hab/piru-related, hetero-; Babel; Translational mimesis, and multilingualism); and personal reference (see Deixis, personal; Law, pronominal style in; Narrative; Quotation; Rhetoric, of grammatical person; Slave law, pronominal reference in); of Philistines, 91-92, 214, 216, 643n2; polysemy in (see Hebrewgram, bivalence in; Slave law, polysemy for plurality, in); primeval, 115 (see also Babel); pronouns in (see and personal reference); quantification in, 416-17; reference in (see and discourse, and metalanguage, -Centricity vs. -centrism, Deixis, Hab/piru, Hebrewgram, Hebrews, Hebrews as Hab/piru, Heterogram, Israel, Nomination, Vict-image); scripts in, 32, 61-62 (see also Slave law, oral vs. written); sexual variation in, 275-76 (see also -Centricity vs. -centrism; Hebrews, and Hebrewesses; Stereotype and metastereotype, of Woman vs. Man); and speech acts, 241, 271, 564-65, 636; subject, agentive, grammatical, logical, perspectival in, 305-308, 316-18, 473-519 passim 663n8; tense in (see verb forms in; Time, and tense); uni-, 115, 123, 189, 257-58, 333-36 (see also archaism in; Babel; Postexilic era; Translational mimesis, refusal of; Unicultural approach); verb forms in, 387-91, 406, 414-15, 416-17 (see also Time, and tense); word and world order, 90-154, 232-78, 283-377, 383-425, 470-638 (see also Sequence). See also Anagram, Arts, Culture, Genre, Modality, Quotation Larsa Dynasty, 42 Last Days, 170 Lauterbach, Jacob Z., 430, 480, 639n2, 670n34, 672n45 Law: addressor(s) and addressee(s) of, 473-77, 481-519, 521-22, 525-30, 532, 533, 536, 538, 543, 550-53, 556, 559638 (see also esoteric and exoteric; pro-nominal style in; rhetoric in; systematic (re)communication in; Pseudepigraphy; Slave law, audience, authoritative voicing of, foolproof communication in); allusion, intergeneric, and interlegal in, 484-638 (see also as intergenre, and/as narrative, quotation in, Allusion); of animal in distress, 602-603, 606, 611, 613, 671n43; approaches to (see Culture, approaches to, and (lega)literature);
axes of change in, 572, 577-78, 588-96, 599-600 (see also and/as narrative); of blasphemy, 533-35, 536, 544, 555, 587, 621, 628; of Booths, 565; bridging, outdating, updating as evolutionary drives in, 539-638; casuistic vs. apodictic, 438, 473-77, 478, 481, 483-84, 488, 491, 493, 496, 503, 505, 507, 509-19, 523, 530-32, 534, 553, 558-59, 573, 605, 608, 616, 632, 663nn6, 14 (see also pronominal style in; Modality; Slave law, subplots of); code vs. contract in, 431-32, 438-39; of debt remission, 435, 479, 565; Decalogue as, xxi-xxii, 22, 155, 157-58, 205, 216-18, 441, 474, 492, 528, 530, 558-59, 560, 590, 594; as deconcretized representation, 605ff.; diachrony of (see axes of change in; see also Diachrony; Slave law, poetic diachrony of, pre-textual diachrony of); of divorce, 516; enforcement of, 167-68, 482-83, 519, 629-38 (see also Slave law, as fraternal test); equality in (see Slave law, foreign mate in, minors in, sexual (in) equality in); of Eshnunna, 526; esoteric and exoteric, 473-75, 482, 502, 504, 509, 515-16, 521-22, 537, 550-53, 559-62, 565-66, 590, 593-94, 616 (see also addressor(s) and addressee(s) of; pronominal style in; systematic (re)communication in; Pseudepigraphy; Slave law, audience of, authoritative voicing of, foolproof communication in); of Fallow Year, 565; of firstling, 551, 560, 565, 671n38; (de)evolution vs. revolution in, 447-638; forms of transmission in (see memory and its arts in; Slave law, oral vs. written); generic diversity and composites in, 426, 431-32, 438-40, 522-39 and passim (see also casuistic vs. apodictic, and/as narrative, typologies of); of Hammurabi (see Hammurabi); Hebrew slave law as paradigm of, 449ff., 481ff., 504, 522-39, 569, 574-75, 577-78, 584, 588, 603-604 (see also Hebrewgram, as paradigmatic heterogram); Hittite, 526, 533, 542, 589-91, 595; of homicide, 476; of idolatry, 590; of Jubilee (see Jubilee; and see Leviticus 25 in Index of Biblical Passages); of kidnapping, 499-500, 632;
and Law and Literature movement, 524; legislative function in, 532, 534, 536, 537 (see also memory and its arts in, and/as narrative); of levirate, 284-85, 523; of Lipit-Ishtar, 527; memory and its arts in, 464-69, 484-638 passim (see also allusion, and/as narrative); men and women in (see Slave law,
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sexual (in)equality in); modern, 526, 533, 588, 589-90 (see also esoteric and exoteric); and/as narrative, xi, xv, xvi, xix-xx, 22, 447-77, 481-638, 664nn1, 5, 665nn6, 7; of Nuzi (see Nuzi); of Passover, 475, 551, 560, 565; pronominal style in, 444-45, 457, 467, 473-77, 478, 481, 482, 485, 492-93, 496, 498-99, 500-503, 513, 514-15, 523, 552, 557, 558-59, 565, 566, 567, 570, 573, 577, 581-82, 585, 586, 592-93, 601, 603, 606-607, 608, 611, 630, 632-33 (see also addressor(s) and addressee(s) of; casuistic vs. apodictic; esoteric and exoteric; Slave law, audience of, authoritative voicing of, foolproof communication in; Deixis, personal); quotation in, 525-638 (see also allusion); ramified into subplots, 531ff. (see also Slave law, subplots of); of rape, 663n11; rhetoric in, 481-522, 531-49 passim, 550-638 (see also addressor(s) and addressee(s) of, Rhetoric); of Sabbath, 441, 536, 561; of slavery (see Slave law); systematic (re)communication in, 596-629 (see also Slave law, and Covenant/ Code); of theft restitution, 491; time in (see and/as narrative; see also Slave law, temporal (dis)order in); typologies of, 523ff., 605; of Wood Gatherer, 536. See also Genres, Slave law Law of Intercultural (De)Nomination. See Hebrewgram Lawrence, D.H., 648n16 Leach, Edmund, 61, 168-69, 451, 518, 639-40n5, 644n8 Lemche, N.P., 32, 36, 51-52, 78-79, 96, 207, 209, 226-27, 268, 281, 327, 446-47, 463, 481, 506, 639n4, 640n7, 641n21, 644n6, 653n36, 654n7, 660nn10, 17, 667n9, 668nn19, 20, 669n30 Levinas, Emmanuel, 455 Levinson, Bernard M., 665n6, 666n7 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 168-70, 182, 190, 193, 196, 251, 446, 647n7. See also Stereotype and metastereotype, of Culture vs. Nature Lewy, Julius, 27, 38, 75, 97, 162, 207, 262, 293, 294, 326, 350, 434, 435, 442-45, 452, 458-59, 468, 495, 640n9, 644n6, 646n27, 652n33, 657n3, 660nn14, 16, 661n22
Liberation Theology, 131-32 Lipinski *, E., 660n18 Lippman, Walter, 647n9 Liverani, Mario, 51-52, 191, 211, 223, 640n12, 651n26 Livy, 230 Local patriotism. See Censorship; -Centricity vs. -centrism; Rabbinic exegesis and literature; Slave law, beautified; Unicultural approach Lococentrism, 211, 366-68. See also -Centricity vs. -centrism; Deixis, spatial Loretz, Oswald, 32, 66, 136, 228, 309, 417, 639n3, 641n15, 648n2, 652n33, 660n10, 661n28 Low criticism, 44, 80-81, 127, 136-37, 207, 251, 382-93, 402-403, 414, 415-17, 424, 441, 454, 472-81 passim, 493, 500, 504-508, 512, 515, 524, 573, 579, 585, 599, 646nn24, 27, 657nn1, 3, 659n9, 662n2, 668n19, 671n42. See also Censorship; Culture, approaches to; Diachrony; Historical method; Masoretic Text; Narrative, and narrativicide; Rhetoric, of identity; Samaritan version; Septuagint; Slave law, beautified, pre-textual diachrony of; Source- vs. discourse-oriented inquiry Luther, Martin, 653n38, 658n12 M Machinist, Peter, 16, 648n13 Machpelah, 109, 248, 290 Male Chauvinist, 87. See also Heterogram Mameluk, xviii, 138, 228. See also Heterogram Man vs. Woman, images of. See -Centricity vs. -Centrism; Stereotype and metastereotype, of Woman vs. Man Manetho, 332, 333, 662n1 Mari, 9, 35, 641n21 Marks, Herbert, 655n18 Marneptah, and Stela, 47, 48, 51, 80, 148-49, 150, 231, 291, 646-47n27 Marshall, Jay W., 446, 668n19, 670n35 Martyrdom, 3, 230-31, 244, 275 Marx, Karl, and Marxism, 36, 204, 455, 643n4, 649n9 Mary, 451
Masoretic Text, xxii, 60-76, 80-81, 136-37, 233, 252, 310, 382-96, 399-403, 405, 408-409, 412, 414-17, 441, 459, 463, 472-81, 485, 486-87, 493, 500-501, 504, 562, 573, 578, 579, 583, 599, 626-29, 646n24, 650n17, 651n25, 658n8, 662n30, 667n10, 668n19, 669n20, 670n34, 671n42. See also Intercultural poetics; Low criticism; Qumran; Rabbinic exegesis and literature; Samaritan version; Septuagint; Source- vs. discourse-oriented inquiry; Sources as discourse; Translation, as interpretation; Translational mimesis Master plot: defined within Hebrewgram,
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xiii, 145-54, 214, 380, 395; in Egypt, 146-54, 167-68, 170, 260-62, 275, 290-92, 372-77, 406-407, 509-19, 549-50, 553-54, 566, 576-78, 632-38, 672n51 (see also in slave law); encoded in ethnicon shift, 145-54 and passim; Expatriation to Exodus to Exile as, 632-38; foreshadowed, 316-17, 341-42, 347, 372-77, 406-407, 576; in James Bond novels, 63-64; in oppressive Israel, 55, 64, 86, 632-38; more or less complex, 149-50, 638 (see also in slave law); in Philistia, 96, 149-53, 380, 406-407, 421, 422, 481-82, 549-50, 566, 576, 607, 636, 672n51; shorter version of, 638; in slave law (see Slave law, master plot in, subplots of); undergone by God, 150-52. See also God, omnipotent; Hebrewgram, historical axis of, power axis of; History, repeating/reversing itself; Narrative; Peripety; Poetic justice Mayes, A.D.H., 446, 463, 583, 597, 599, 660n10, 664n17 Mazar, Benjamin, 7 McCarter, P. Kyle, 79, 285, 385-86, 388, 403 McNeile, A.H., 549, 668n19 Meek, Theophile James, 72-73, 310-11, 434, 439, 446, 642n27, 646n27 Megatext. See Sources as discourse Memory: allusive arts of (see as bridging force within canon; Allusion; Slave law, intergeneric allusion in, interlegal allusion in); and antiBiblical theory of national birth, 68, 69, 348-49, 467, 547, 572, 638 (see also and forms of amnesia; Ethnocentricity; Ethnocriticism; Hebrewgram, in bicultural stigmatizing; Renan); binational, 96-107, 147-49 (see also Hebrewgram, in bicultural stigmatizing, bivalence in; Master plot); as bridging force within canon, 1, 22-23, 100-101, 132-35, 147-53, 372-74, 484-638 passim; and continuity of heterogram, 101-102, 103-104;
of divine omnipotence, 147-49 (see also Master plot); encoded in nomination (see Etymology; Hebrewgram, bivalence in; Narrative, nomi-; Nomination); and forms of amnesia, 4, 68, 69, 134, 147, 206, 226-27, 291, 304, 306, 348-49, 369-70, 373-76, 464-638 passim; in law, 464-69, 484-522, 532-638; long (see allusive arts of, as bridging force within canon, as suasive deterrent, updated, vehicles of); repair of, 305-306, 373-76 (see also updated); selective (see and forms of amnesia); as suasive deterrent (see Rhetoric, of deterrence); short (see and forms of amnesia, repair of, updated); updated, 564-638 (see also repair of); vehicles of, 559-63, 592-95, 671n38 (see also Culture, transmission of; Slave law, oral vs. written). See also Hebrewgram, bivalence in, ethnic axis of, geographical axis of; Historiography; History; Narrative; Time Mendenhall, George E., 36, 72-74, 75, 221, 441, 641n25, 650n12 Mendelsohn, Isaac, 668n19 Meri-Ka-Re, 255 Merrill, Eugene H., 7, 8, 58, 95, 96, 209, 655n15, 657n3 Mesha, 48, 49, 80, 231 Mesopotamia, 9, 24, 34, 35, 41-43, 72, 103, 111, 139, 142-43, 293, 297, 308, 309, 311, 315, 447, 457, 484, 644n12. See also Eberites Metastereotype. See Stereotype and metastereotype Michaeli, Frank, 506 Michmash Pass narrative, 35, 50, 58, 80, 90, 92-93, 94, 98-99, 135, 136-37, 251, 383-425, 482, 505, 566, 633 Middle ways, in cultural analysis, xv, xvii, xix-xx, 13-14, 19-21, 26-31, 32-76 passim, 94-95, 198, 398-99, 431-70 passim. See also Culture, approaches to; Hebrew as Hab/piru, in diachronic distribution, in semantic mixture, in synchronic partition Midianites, 21, 114, 237, 269, 325, 329, 348, 350, 354-78, 490, 498, 634, 655n21, 656n32 Midrash. See Rabbinic exegesis and literature, Sources as discourse Miller, J. Maxwell, and John H. Hayes, 72 Mills, James, 382, 404 Milton, John, 161, 625
Mitchell, W.J.T., 649nn5, 9 Moabites, 48, 80, 272, 565, 595 Moabite Stone, 48, 49 Modality: vs. categorical discourse, xxii, 175-79, 245, 483ff., 530-32, 536, 540, 550-626, 630, 632-33; deconcretized, 605ff.; future-oriented, 529, 535-36, 540, 554 (see also in repetition structure); hypothetical, 175-79, 245, 252-53, 483, 496, 505, 507, 509-19, 530-32, 533, 535-36, 540, 554, 562, 608, 616, 630-31, 632-33, 663nn.6, 14 (see also vs. categorical discourse; Law, casuistic vs. apodictic; Slave law, subplots of); if-plot (see hypothetical); in law,
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473-77, 483, 496, 509-19, 525, 530-33, 535-36, 540, 550-626, 630, 632-33, 659n8, 664n3 (see also Law, casuistic vs. apodictic); in repetition structure, 232-55, 259-78, 529, 539-636. See also Ontology Modernism, 32, 59, 229, 451, 455-56, 524, 526, 532, 540, 626 Monologue. See Narrative, omniscient; Quotation, of thought Monotheism, 78, 85, 91, 94, 117-18, 126, 150-53, 184-85, 188, 267, 277, 354, 540, 646n27, 652n33. See also Deixis, God, Master plot, Ontology, Polytheism, Theocentricity Montaigne, 200, 201-202 Montet, Pierre, 113, 304, 650n17 Moran, William L., 224, 642n26 Morgenstern, Julian, 671n42 Moscati, Sabatino, 36, 96, 661n21 Motivation, bidirectional, 608, 624, 627-29 Muslim, 366 N Nairn, Tom, 202-203 Na'aman, Nadav, 95, 398, 647n5 Naram-Sin, and epic of, 41-42, 43, 51, 466 Narrative: ambiguity, vis-à-vis quotation, or between objective and subjective (see Quotation, ambiguity between narration and); and antinarrative (see and narrativicide); deconcretized, 605ff., 671n41; vs. description, 295, 451, 664nn4, 5; diachrony as, 449-70, 520-638 (see also Diachrony); disclosure and development as universals of, 118-21, 199, 324-77, 412-27, 453-84, 568-638, 669n26 (see also and typology of change, Universals); divinely inspired (see models of, omniscient); etymology as (see nomi-, Etymology); eyewitness, 297-99; gaps in (see Gaps and gap-filling);
and genarration, 525-638 (see also diachrony as; Discourse of source; Quotation; Slave law, as paradigm of (lega)literary art and history, poetic diachrony of, pre-textual diachrony of); genres within (see Genre); and/in law, xi, xv, xvi, xix-xx, 22, 426, 431-32, 447-77, 481-82, 500-638, 664nn1, 5, 665nn6, 7 (see also Law, Modality, Pseudepigraphy); interests (see universals); and legislative function, 532ff. (see also and/in law); literary history as (see diachrony as, and genarration); in miniature (see nomi-); modality in (see Modality); models of, xxi, 12-19, 161, 171, 172, 538, 647n1 (see also theory of); multilevel (see Allusion; Hebrewgram, bivalence of; Quotation); and narrativicide, xx, 29-81, 131-32, 208-10, 218-19, 262, 274, 293-94, 391-99, 447-70, 522-23, 529-30; and narrativizing the non-narrative, xx, 536-37, 664n1, 664-65n5, 669n26; nomi-, xx, 96-107, 334-39, 346-53, 355-70 and passim (see also Eberites; Etymology; Hebrewgram, bivalence in, ethnic axis of, geographical axis of; Nomination); omniscient, 12-18, 161, 178, 282-83, 295-308, 329, 363, 401, 412-27, 537, 563, 647n1, 654n11 (see also God); omnipotence in, 161; of origins (see diachrony as, and genarration, multilevel, nomi-, Anachronism, Etymology, Hebrews, Hebrewgram, Memory); plot-types in (see universals of; Aristotle; Dynamics; Master plot; Modality; Peripety; Poetic justice; Repetition, dynamics of; Slave law; in medias legis, subplots of; Stereotype and metastereotype); pseudepigraphic (see Pseudepigraphy); quotation and (see Quotation); range of perspectives in (see Point of View); and reading, xxii and passim (see also Dynamics, Foolproof communication, Hindsight fallacy); reliable or otherwise, 81-154, 161, 166-67, 292-308, 312-77, 421 (see also models of, nomi-; omniscient; Etymology, hostile; Hebrewgram, bivalence in; Quotation; Stereotype and metastereotype); at second hand (see Quotation); subjectivized (see Etymology, hostile; Hebrewgram; Quotation; Translational mimesis); theory of, xx-xxii, 647nn1, 2, 666n4, 664-65n5, 667n11, 669n26 (see also models of, Quotation, theory of; Sequence, theory of); and typology, of change, 568ff., 577-78, 588-96, 599-600 (see also diachrony as, disclosure and development as universals of);
universals of (see disclosure and development as universals of, Curiosity, Proteus Principle, Surprise, Suspense); visual, 201. See also Deixis; Diachrony; Dynamics; Fiction; Historiography; History; Hebrews, chronology order, and series in; Memory; Sequence; Slave law, as law-tale and macrotale, poetic diachrony of; Time Narrativicide, causes and forms of. See Narrative, and narrativicide Nazism, 63, 116, 124, 134, 175, 203, 343, 656n36. See also Antisemitism, -Centricity vs. -centrism, Genocide, Xenophobia Neoclassicism, 59
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New English Bible, 340, 363, 387, 668n18, 671n42. See also Translation New Kingdom, 34 New Testament: general, 4, 54, 61, 211, 229, 523, 524, 648n15; Acts, 332, 337, 639n1, 655n23; Corinthians, 211-12, 271; Epistle to the Hebrews, 3; Mark, 213; Matthew, 213, 653n38, 658n12; John, 4; Phillippians, 3-4, 5, 211-12; Revelation, 4 Nielsen, Eduard, 599, 667n9 Nigger. See Heterogram, of Nigger Nile, 143, 147, 255-59, 329, 374, 382, 634, 654n6. See also Egyptians Noahides, 7, 109-13, 141-45, 194-96. See also Eberides, Flood, Foreignness, Hamites, Japhethites, Primeval Scene, Shemites, Table of Nations Noble Savage, 170, 183 Nohrnberg, James, 345-46, 650n19 Nomination, nomi-nation: of Chosen group in contact with Hamites (see Hebrewgram, Hebrews); of Chosen People (see Israel); de- (see Etymology, hostile; Hebrewgram; Heterogram; Israel, in de-nomi-nation; Vict-image); deformed, 104-105, 126-27, 135 (see also de-); dehumanizing, 250-54; enforced (see as power); eponymic, 15-16, 144-45 (see also pre-);
erased (see de-, deformed; Hab/piru, as silent Other); as fixture (see Stereotype and metastereotype); of Hab/piru (see Hab/ piru, multiform names of); honorific (see of Chosen People; Egyptians, exclusive self-equation with humanity; Greek, vs. barbarian); as outgrouping (see Heterogram); as power (see Etymology, of Moses; Hebrewgram, in foreign and foreign-like speech, bivalence in, power axis of; Rhetoric; Vict-image); pre- (see Israel, eponymy/etymology of); re- (see Israel, in re-nomi-nation; Master plot); retributive, 92-94 (see also Hebrewgram, in bicultural stigmatizing; Master plot; Philistines, counterabused; Poetic justice; Slave law; Culture, hero(ine), villain); and self- (see of Chosen People, honorific, re-, valence of, -Centricity vs. -centrism); shift of, 104, 313, 333 (see also de-, deformed, erased, re-, retributive; Israel, eponymy/etymology of); as storytelling (see shift of; Narrative, nomi-); theophoric (see of Chosen People, deformed); translated (see Hebrewgram, Heterogram, Translational mimesis); valence of (see Canaanites; -Centricity vs. -centrism; Etymology, of Gershom, hostile; Foreignness; Hebrewgram, in bicultural stigmatizing, bivalence in, four patterns of, historical axis of, as paradigmatic heterogram; Otherness; Quotation, frame vs. inset); as word-portrait (see Etymology, Heterogram, Stereotype and metastereotype, Vict-image). See also Language, reference in North, Robert, 506, 660n14 Noth, Martin, 49, 61, 72, 335, 337, 446, 481, 507, 585, 599, 640n14, 652n29, 659n7, 661n26, 662n31, 668n19, 670n33, 671n44 Nuzi, and Hab/piru service contracts in, xix-xx, 6, 25-26, 35, 36, 38, 58, 67, 70-71, 72-73, 75, 76, 137-39, 149, 163, 164, 168, 222-23, 225, 431-34, 438-45, 446, 447, 448-70, 472, 474, 477, 478, 479, 480-81, 484, 486, 489, 490-92, 494, 518, 552, 556, 557, 562, 575, 576, 578, 581, 585, 587, 596, 597, 599, 605, 615, 618, 627, 628, 640n11, 646n22, 647n3, 659nn5, 7, 8, 9, 660nn10, 11, 14, 16, 661nn22, 23, 26, 27, 664n3, 668n19. See also Crosscultural approach; Hab/piru; Hebrews as Hab/piru; Law; Slave law, all-Oriental urtext of, crosscultural approach to, pre-textual diachrony of, as synchronic network O Occam's Razor, 54, 78, 394 Occidentalism, 229 Oedipus, 112, 256, 348, 350 Olmstead, A.T., 7, 169, 639n3 Onkelos, 304, 651n24, 654n9.
See also Aramaic, Targum, Translation Ontology, 5, 13ff., 32, 43, 63-75, 96, 119, 123, 145-46, 157, 165, 176-79, 184-85, 216-26, 235-37, 250-54, 264-67, 268-69, 277-78, 294, 311, 457, 528-30, 560, 588. See also Culture, approaches to; Fiction; Genre; God; Historiography; History; Modality; Monotheism; Narrative; Polytheism; Stereotype and metastereotype; Theocentricity Orality vs. writing. See Language, scripts in; Memory; Slave law, oral vs. written Ord, David Robert, 326, 644n6 Orientalism, 229, 649n9. See also -Centricity vs. -centrism Ortner, Sherry B., 647n6 Orwell, George, 75, 229 Osarsiph, 333 Otherness (aher), as protean difference,
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182ff. See also Foreignness; Hab/piru, as silent Other; Hamites P Package dealing. See Proteus Principle; Stereotype and metastereotype, as package dealing Palimpsest, text as, 69-71, 335, 342 Paradigm change, 9, 10, 87 Parzen, Herbert, 137-39, 164, 208, 209 Pastoralism, 117, 169-70, 251-52, 298, 303-304, 310, 311-12 Patriarchal era. See Genesis in Index of Biblical Passages Patrick, Dale, 660n14, 668n20 Paul, 3-4, 5, 211-12, 231, 271, 332, 523, 639n1 Paul, Shalom M., 75, 439, 463, 475, 556 Peripety, 148, 150, 275, 328, 336, 348, 349, 350, 410-21, 424, 460-70, 512, 543-48, 566, 569, 597, 615, 623, 624, 630-31, 632. See also Aristotle; Dynamics, of recognition; Master plot; Narrative, disclosure and development; Sequence; Slave law, outdating drive in; Time Persia, xviii, 83, 189-90, 193, 195, 508 Persuasion. See Rhetoric Philistines: and bicultural stigmatizing of Hebrews, 378-425 (see also Hebrewgram, in bicultural stigmatizing; Rhetoric, of deterrence); continuity with Egypt, 22-23, 26, 101-102, 113, 118, 132, 149-53, 219, 268, 404, 635-36, 658n8, 672n51; counterabused as uncircumcised, 93-94, 105, 109, 118, 136, 150, 378, 404, 643n3, 655n21; counterdisintegration of, 151-52 (see also Master plot, in Philistia); in cultural opposition to Israel, 83-85, 90-100, 109, 112 (see also Hamites, as antitype and anticulture); as enslavers, 3, 22, 26, 30, 47, 64, 65, 67, 70, 83-85, 90-96, 140-41, 267-68, 382-425, 466-67, 481-83, 504, 505506, 539, 549-50, 607, 633, (see also as Hebrew-callers, -elicitors, -thinkers); gods of (see Dagon); as Hamites, 7, 23, 141-45 (see also Hamites; Hebrewgram, ethnic axis of); as Hebrew-callers, 3, 4, 8, 83-85, 86, 90-100, 101-18 passim, 126, 132, 134, 135, 136-37, 140-46, 149-53, 159-60, 209-14 passim, 268, 283-86, 382-425
passim, 482, 506, 566; as Hebrew-elicitors, 86, 206-208, 211, 214-15, 275; "high" culture of, 168, 409; as Hebrew-thinkers, 83-85, 90-91, 282-86; as hostile nomi-narrators, 91-100 (see also Etymology, hostile); and Israelite war of independence (see as enslavers; Master plot, in Philistia); "land of," 209; language of, 91-92, 214, 316, 643n2; not God-fearing, 113; in psychological warfare, 96-100, 142-43, 209-10; as sexual aggressors, 102, 195-96, 245-46, 247-48; as weapon monopolists, 90, 94, 95, 97, 101, 109, 116-17, 140, 283-86, 299-300, 392, 396, 404, 482, 643n1. See also Ashdodites, Ekronites, Hamites, Hebrews, Hebrewgram, Polytheism, Table of Nations, Translational mimesis Phillips, Anthony, 441, 475, 507, 590, 599, 604, 623, 660n17, 662n31, 667n9, 668n19, 670n33, 671n40 Philo, 233, 332, 348. See also Hellenism Phoenicians, 15, 212, 213-14, 219. See also Canaanites, Hamites Pithom, 121, 124, 125 Pixley, George V., 131-32 Plagues, 85, 91, 115, 117-18, 130, 131, 146-47, 241, 255, 268, 291, 348, 376, 519, 550, 576-77, 635-37, 655n24, 658n8 Plastaras, James, 226, 650n17 Plato, 178, 179, 185, 203, 217, 229, 649n6, 654n6. See also Greek culture Plot. See Narrative, plot-types in Plutarch, 271 Poe, Edgar Allan, 65 Poetic justice, 92-94, 136-37, 195, 204, 255, 273, 277-78, 371, 482, 490-91, 505, 517-18, 529, 532, 548, 554-55, 57886, 594, 619-26, 629-38, 669n31. See also Chiasm; History, repeating/reversing itself; Master plot; Peripety Point of view. See -Centricity vs. -centrism; Culture, dimensions of; Deixis; Hebrewgram; Heterogram; Memory; Narrative; Nomination; Ontology; Quotation; Rhetoric; Stereotype and metastereotype; Translational mimesis Polytheism, 50-51, 85, 91, 94, 96, 100, 108, 109, 117-18, 126, 150-53, 159, 167, 184-85, 188, 191, 211, 217, 241-42, 244-45, 246, 252, 262-64, 267, 271, 272, 274, 277, 540, 554, 644n11, 651n22, 652n33, 668n18.
See also Egyptians, pantheon of; Hebrews, God/gods of; Hebrews as Hab/piru, in worship; Monotheism; Ontology; Philistines, gods of; Taboo; Translational mimesis, and worldview Polzin, Robert, 658n14 Posener, Georges, 132 Postexilic era, 44, 51, 66, 74, 95, 96, 136, 206-207, 220, 227-28, 230-31, 232, 308-10, 393, 484, 668n16
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Postmodernism, 59, 73, 644n9 Power relations. See -Centricity vs. -centrism; Foucault; God; Hebrew as Hab/piru, in status; Hebrewgram, historical axis of, power axis of; Law; Master plot; Nomination; Ontology; Poetic justice; Rhetoric; Slave law; Stereotype and metastereotype, of power; Translational mimesis, by God Primeval Scene, 15, 109-12, 113, 119-20, 125, 128, 129, 133, 139-45, 170, 193-96, 215, 243-44, 647n28. See also Hamites; Hebrewgram, ethics in; Japhethites; Noahides; Shemites Pritchard, James B., 26, 72-73, 105, 112, 148, 255, 333, 367, 438, 439, 444, 518, 526, 527, 542, 575, 651n22, 657n38 Proletariat, 20, 37, 455, 506 Proteus Principle, xx-xxii, 158-205, 216-32 and passim, 647n1. See also Intercultural poetics; Stereotype and metastereotype, against Bible's ideopoetics Pseudepigraphy, 528-30, 538, 543, 547, 555, 559, 562, 564, 590, 591, 627-29, 664n2, 666-67n7. See also Fiction, Historical method, Narrative, Point of view Pseudo-literarizing. See Sources of discourse Pseudo-universals. See Culture, pseudo-universals in; Universals Ptah-hotep, 255 Punt, 211, 366-67 Pyramids, 644-45n12 Q Qadesh, 128 Qumran, 667n10 Quotation: ambiguity between narration and, 81-89, 282-83, 293-324, 325, 339, 340, 378-638 passim (see also Hebrewgram, four patterns of); ambiguity between speech and thought, 90-91, 279-86; anachronism in, 113; of dialogue (see of speech); direct, 90-154 passim, 159-60, 279-86, 296, 299-300, 316, 402-403, 410, 513, 525, 556 (see also in law); and direct discourse fallacy, 127, 223;
as discourse of source, 283, 294ff., 521-638; ellipsis in, 90, 250-54, 285-86, 327, 332-33, 384-85; of foreign discourse (see Hebrewgram, Heterogram, Translational mimesis); frame vs. inset in, 84-107 and passim (see also ambiguity between narration and; markers of; Hebrewgram, bivalence in); free indirect, 221, 223, 283, 297, 325, 349, 403, 655n25; of hearing (see Translational mimesis, of hearing); of "Hebrews" (see Hebrewgram); indirect, 283, 296, 325, 349, 403; innovative, 88-89, 284-86, 297; of interior monologue (see of hearing, of thought); invented (see Pseudepigraphy); and knowledge, 282-83, 295-308, 317-18, 410 (see also Memory; Narrative, omniscient); in law, 426-638 passim; markers of, 99, 283-86, 294-324, 525-26; misread and mistranslated, 283, 285, 286-87 (see also ambiguity between narration and; Translation, as interpretation); multiple transformers in, 237, 240-41; nondirect, 127, 282-83, 286-308, 312, 314, 402, 513; original "improved" in (see Censorship; Low criticism; Repetition; Sequence, fabricated; Translation, as interpretation); play of perspectives in (see frame vs. inset in, Point of view); and poetics of culture, xiii-xxii, 81-89 and passim; repertoire of, 222-23, 282-86, 297, 308, 590-91 (see also theory of); of speech, 90-154 passim, 206-78, 525-638 (see also Hebrewgram, in foreign speech, in foreign-like speech; Repetition; Translational mimesis, by characters in self-translation, in speech); telescoped, 283-84, 296-318, 329; theory of, 647n1, 649n6, 653n1, 654n8, 655n25, 669nn22, 24, 671n41; of thought, 82, 84, 85, 90, 243-45, 263-377, 513, 653n1, 655n17 (see also Hebrewgram, in foreign or foreignized thought; Translational mimesis, by character in self-translation, of hearing, of thought); time in, 520-638;
within quotation, 295ff., 378-79, 428-29, 525-638, 649n6 (see also Repetition; Translational mimesis, chains of, by characters in self-translation). See also Allusion; Law, memory and its arts in; Memory; Narrative; Repetition R Ra, 554, 668n18 Raamses, 121, 124, 125, 133 Rabbinic exegesis and literature, xv, xvi, 4, 6, 11-12, 17, 22, 28, 38, 39, 40, 44, 49, 71, 78, 112, 135, 161, 182, 188, 193, 229, 235, 242, 255, 259, 262-63, 269, 272, 304, 309, 313, 314, 333, 388, 399-400, 402, 403, 412, 429-31, 432, 433, 436, 445, 448, 451, 452, 461, 464, 466, 472, 477-78, 479-80, 481, 487, 489, 491, 493, 494, 495, 517-18, 523, 538, 541, 549, 555, 556, 558, 573, 578-79, 586, 588-89, 609, 629, 639n2, 641n16, 642n27, 645nn14, 16, 17, 648n15, 651nn23, 24, 653n4, 654n11, 659n1,
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660n17, 661n25, 662nn30, 3, 664n1, 665n7, 669nn27, 28, 670n34, 671n45. See also Ethnocentricity; Slave law, as synchronic network; Rabbis on; Unicultural approach Rabinow, Paul, 183 Rad, Gerhard von, 478, 599 Radak, 400 Rainey, Anson F., 148, 639n3, 641n24, 643n4 Ramban, 588 Ramses II, 123-24, 128, 131, 148, 219, 245, 293, 335 Rapaport, I., 136 Rashbam, 269, 293, 652n35, 656n35, 669n27 Rashi, 400, 556, 641n16, 651n24, 669nn27, 28 Redford, Donald B., 32, 54, 105, 112-13, 119, 211, 293, 294, 367, 641n24, 650n13, 654n5, 656n28, 658n9, 668n18, 672n51 Redundancy, 2, 4-6, 7-8, 30-31, 132-34, 138, 139, 237, 240-41, 245, 263-67, 287, 288, 289-90, 298, 313-18, 320-21, 326-27, 339, 343-44, 368, 372, 418, 440, 441, 480, 483-84, 545, 609, 655n17, 659n3. See also Gaps and gap-filling; Language, ellipsis in; Repetition Reider, Joseph, 574, 599 Rembrandt, 200-201 Renaissance, 178, 564 Renan, Ernest, 68, 467, 547, 637, 638. See also Memory Rendsburg, Gary A., 668n18 Repetition: and difficult coherence, 122; dynamics of, 122-29, 145, 160, 237-78, 316-24, 330-31, 362-64, 373, 376-77, 405, 421, 494-519, 520-22, 539638; in law, 426-638 (see also Slave law, as synchronic network, poetic diachrony of, pre-textual diachrony of); miniatured in referring terms, 122-29, 259-78, 319-24, 426-638 passim (see also Hebrewgram, bivalence in, as microcosm, power axis of); and mishneh duplicity, 541-638; modality in, 529, 539-638;
multiphase, 122-29 (see also dynamics of); plots of (see dynamics of); of quoting verbs, 237, 241; in source criticism, 122ff., 261-62, 372, 383ff., 431-638 passim; and variation (see dynamics of). See also Allusion, Chiasm, Gaps and gap-filling, Memory, Quotation, Redundancy Reported discourse. See Quotation Revised Standard Version, 285, 387, 388, 671n42. See also Translation Rhetoric: analogy in, 494ff. (see also of identity); of deterrence, 472, 475, 476, 481-522, 531-32, 537, 539, 547, 549, 550-638 (see also Ethnocriticism; Hebrewgram, in bicultural stigmatizing); dissuasive (see of deterrence); of divide and rule, 102-105, 127, 151-52, 238-42, 243-44, 249-50, 417-18, 607, 613, 619 (see also of pretended solidarity, totalizing); divine, 259-69, 481-638; of grammatical person, 122-27, 148, 151-53, 168, 177, 182, 186-205, 199-201, 224, 238-42, 254, 260, 270-71, 274, 277, 293, 473-77, 485, 492-93, 495, 498, 500-503, 513, 514-15, 565, 566, 567, 570, 573, 585, 586, 607, 663nn10, 16 (see also Deixis, personal); of identity, 49, 72-75, 80, 131, 168, 294, 310, 311, 312, 429-30, 432, 434, 439, 443, 449, 504; in law and/as narrative, 481ff.; and mistranslation, 250, 251; of law, 481-639; necessity of, proved by exception, 259-78; neglect of, 472, 481-83 (see also necessity of; Hebrewgram, deliberate breach of, unwitting breach of; Translational mimesis, refusal of); of omnipotence, 146-56 (see also Master plot; God, omnipotent); overkill in, 509ff., 559; persuasive vs. dissuasive, 493, 500, 505-506, 631ff. (see also of deterrence); of pretended solidarity, 107, 114, 128, 206-12, 232-78, 280-82, 331, 423, 482, 500, 503, 581, 621 (see also of divide and rule, totalizing); as psychological warfare, 96-100, 102-103, 209-10; repertoire of, 73, 481-83; of self-explanation, 263-67, 276-77;
strategy vs. tactics in, 494-519, 539-638; totalizing, 182 (see also -Centricity vs. -centrism, Egyptians, Greek culture, Stereotype and metastereotype) Rib-Addi, 224, 650n12 Riesener, Irene, 478, 659n4 Risch, Barbara, 645n22 Rite of passage. See Eberites; Euphrates; Hebrews, as Crossers; Hebrewgram, bivalence in, geographical axis of; Jordan; River of Egypt River of Egypt, 97, 103-105, 118, 134, 141, 142-43, 210, 261, 297, 321, 340, 342, 356, 364-65, 404, 637. See also Eberites; Euphrates; Hebrewgram, bivalence of, geographical axis of; Jordan Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 32 Rohl, David M., 95-96, 641n23 Romanticism, 59, 161, 170 Rorty, Richard, 203
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Rosenzweig, Franz, 251, 516, 645n15 Rowley, H.H., 7, 36, 37-38, 39, 138, 231 Rowton, Michael B., 34, 95, 96, 150, 311, 398-99, 441-42, 640n9, 643n4 Russian Formalism, xviii, 228 S SA.GAZ. See Hab/piru, Hebrews as Hab/piru Said, Edward, 649n9 Samaritan Version, 127, 485, 493, 669n20. See also Masoretic Text Santayana, George, 638 Sargon, 256, 657n38 Sarna, Nahum M., 79, 235, 238, 334-35, 360, 365, 551, 556, 650n16, 657n38 Sasson, Jack M., 228, 643n3, 646n27, 652n30 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 186 Schenker, Adrian, 611-12, 668n19, 669n30, 670nn34, 35 Semitic, 35, 91, 369, 643n2, 653n35, 656n29 Septuagint, xxii, 80, 127, 207, 233, 310, 358, 359, 368, 385-88, 391, 392-93, 394, 395, 397, 402, 408-409, 459, 485, 583, 611-12, 646n24, 655n23, 657nn1, 2, 667n10, 669n20. See also Masoretic Text, Translation Sequence: allusive, 484-638 passim; ascending or descending (see correlated orders of, in hierarchical order, of judgment, of subjective priorities); of bicultural stigmatizing, 378-84, 404-34, 481-638; canonical (see esp. Masoretic Text; Slave law, poetic diachrony of (contrast fabricated)); of condemnation (see of judgment); correlated orders of, 272, 351-53, 406-11, 418-22, 508-15, 630; deictic (see Deixis, and sequence); of de-nomi-nation, 121-30; of de- to re-nomi-nation (see Master plot); of displacements, 142, 629-38;
of dyads, 236, 238-40, 255-56, 263-67 (see also Poetic justice, Repetition); of etymologies, 359-70 (see also Hebrewgram, bivalence in; Translational mimesis, chains of); fabricated, 8-77, 358-59, 382-402, 431-70, 656n30 (see also Hebrews as Hab/piru, in time and/or space; Narrative, and narrativicide; Slave law, pre-textual diachrony of; Source vs. discourse-oriented inquiry; Sources as discourse; and contrast canonical); of genres, 627-29; of hearings, 321-24, 405-11; in hierarchical order, 121-34, 236-37, 263-67, 288, 349-50, 362, 406-11, 500, 508-15, 520, 531-32, 611-12, 630 (see also Hebrews, power axis of; Master plot); and hindsight (see Anachronism, Hindsight fallacy); of judgment, 108-34, 418-22, 508-15, 629-38 (see also in hierarchical order, Master plot, Poetic justice); in language (see Language, word and world order); of and within laws, 426-638 (see also Slave law, temporal (dis)order in); and memory (see Memory); of psychocultural development, 259-78, 324-78, 403-25, 617-38; of reading, xxii and passim; of repetition (see Master plot; Poetic justice; Repetition, dynamics of); of (self-)vict-image, 121-34, 508-638 (see also in hierarchical order); of specificity, 349, 406-11; and stereotype, xxi-xxii, 157-58 (see also Stereotype and metastereotype, always open to destereotyping, against Bible's ideopoetics, against Proteus Principle); of subjective priorities, 279-377 passim, 511; theory of, xxii, 647n1, 658n6; tit-for-tat (see Poetic justice); of untypical deliverers, 232-78, 324ff.; zigzag, 327-78. See also Diachrony; Dynamics; Gaps and gap-filling; Hebrews, chronology, order, and series of; Language, ellipsis in; Narrative; Slave law, in medias legis, poetic diachrony of, temporal (dis)order in; Time Seters, John van, 670n35, 672n48 Settlement, 148, 169 Sexism, female, xviii, 183, 225, 645-46n22. See also -Centricity vs. -centrism; Heterogram; Stereotype and metastereotype, of Woman vs. Man Sforno, 235 Shakespeare, William, 5, 55, 63, 64, 131, 215, 255, 273, 306-307, 311, 414, 421, 458, 524
Shalmaneser, 48, 80 Shanks, Hershel, 13 Shapira, Anita, 42 Shasu, 641n24 Shechem, 47, 272, 312, 341-42 Shemites, 7-8, 10, 24, 112, 114-15, 117, 118-19, 120, 143, 145, 194, 244, 315-18, 456, 634, 638. See also Eberides; Hamites; Hebrewgram, ethnic axis of; Japhethites; Noahides; Primeval Scene; Table of Nations Shinar, 315 Sidon, 212-14, 272 Silence, ambiguous. See Gaps and gap-filling; Language, ellipsis in Simpson, David, 648n16
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Simpson, William Kelly, 112 Sinai, 47, 105, 118, 151, 354, 358, 367, 378-79, 455, 459, 467, 484, 492, 518, 521, 522, 523, 531, 547-48, 551-632, 664n1, 669n25, 672n51 Skinner, John, 288, 654n5 Slave law: against Bible's grain (see rhetoric of deterrence in, Hebrew as bicultural target in, Creation, Slavery); all-Oriental urtext of, 432, 434, 438, 439, 440, 448, 458, 462, 468, 659n7, 660n14 (see also Nuzi); allusion as narrative and normative commentary on, 484-638; audience of, 378-81, 473-77, 482, 483-519, 521-22, 525-30, 532, 533, 536, 538, 543, 550-53, 556, 559-638 (see also authoritative voicing of, pronominal reference in, rhetoric of deterrence in); authoritative voicing of, 378-81, 466, 471, 484, 487, 525-30, 538, 540, 563, 615-16, 623, 625 (see also audience of, oral vs. written, as speech-event, Pseudepigraphy); axes of change in, 572, 577-78, 588-96, 599-600; beautified, 6-7, 429-31, 434-71 passim, 479-80, 482-83, 484, 486, 609 (see also humanism in, pre-textual diachrony of, progress in, Censorship, Ethnocentricity); bicultural stigmatizing in (see Hebrew as bicultural target in); bidirectional motivation in, 608, 624, 626-29; bondman in (see marital status in, sexual (in)equality in); bondmaid in (see minors in); bondwife in (see foreign mate in, marital status in, sexual (in)equality in); bondwoman in (see marital status in, sexual (in)equality in); bridging drive in, 539-638 (see also evolutionary drives in); as cluster, 78-79, 309; casuistic vs. apodictic, 473ff. (see also pronominal reference in, Law, Modality); conservatism in (see as synchronic network); and Covenant Code, 455, 473-77, 501, 550-52, 553, 559, 560 (see also as mishpat, and Covenant/Code); and Covenant/Code, 550-638 (see also as intergenre, intergeneric allusion in, interlegal allusion in, narrative forces in, poetic diachrony of); crosscultural approach to, 9, 25-26, 38, 43-45, 47, 51, 55, 58, 67, 68, 69-70, 71, 75, 131, 137-38, 431-72, 474, 477, 478, 479-81, 483, 484, 486, 489, 490-92, 494-95, 504, 506, 518, 522, 524, 528, 552, 556, 557, 562, 575-76, 578, 581, 585, 587, 588-89, 591, 596, 597, 599, 600, 604-605, 615, 618, 625, 627, 628, 639n4 (see also pretextual diachrony of; as synchronic network; Culture, approaches to; Historical method; Nuzi);
culture hero (ine)s and villains in, xix-xx, 485, 505, 510, 514, 555, 557, 562, 577, 580-88, 607, 609-12, 672n51; dating of, 459, 460, 464-65, 496-97, 507-508, 521-22, 523, 537-39, 550, 626-29, 668n16, 672n48 (see also poetic diachrony of, pre-textual diachrony of); daughter in (see minors in); debt-slavery in, 138, 439, 441-42, 478-79, 480-81, 487, 489, 490, 491-92, 495, 498, 509, 605, 660nn10, 11; discourse of source in (see poetic diachrony of); disclosure and development in, 568-638; divided or mixed in group reference, 432, 434-38, 441-42, 444, 447-70, 495, 604 (see also pronominal reference in, subplots of, Middle ways, Nuzi); ear-piercing in, 515-19, 574, 578-79, 583, 586-87, 599, 601, 608, 618, 622; in Egypt, 289, 340-41, 660n19; enforcement of (see as fraternal test); ethnonational vs. universal brotherhood in, 429-638 (see also crosscultural approach to; as fraternal test; Hebrew as bicultural target in, unicultural approach to; Ethnocentricity); between evolution and devolution, 617-29; yet no sudden revolution, 447-638 (see also progress in, outdating drive in); evolution from Exodus to Deuteronomy, 444-45, 448, 453-58, 459, 462, 469, 494-519, 572-629 (see also between evolution and devolution; genesis in Exodus, poetic diachrony of, pre-textual diachrony of, successive co-eternities in); evolution from Exodus to Deuteronomy and Jeremiah, 4, 20-23, 26, 67-68, 432, 444-45, 448-53, 458, 459, 46267, 468-69, 519, 539-43, 551, 555, 557, 563-72, 578-79, 582, 583, 617, 620, 621, 622, 627 (see also genesis in Exodus, poetic diachrony of, pre-textual diachrony of, successive co-eternities in); evolution from Pentateuch to Jeremiah, 426-29, 432, 444-45, 453-58, 459, 460-62, 463, 468-69, 543-48, 629-38 (see also genesis in Exodus, poetic diachrony of, pre-textual diachrony of, successive co-eternities in); evolutionary drives in (see beautified, bridging, humanism in, outdating drive in, poetic diachrony of, pretextual diachrony of, progress in, successive co-eternities in, updating); foolproof communication
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in, 509, 515-16, 537, 552-53, 559-63, 565-66, 582ff., 603-604, 616-17, 628 (see also Law, esoteric and exoteric); foreign mate in, 485, 507-508, 510-14, 515, 531, 554-55, 562, 580, 582, 583, 586, 587-88, 599-601, 604-605, 608, 609-10; as fraternal test, 482-83, 497, 498-500, 502-503, 512, 514-15, 519, 567-68, 572-73, 630-38; freedom quantified in, 434, 445-47, 450, 463, 467; genarration in (see poetic diachrony of); genesis in Exodus, 4, 20-23, 26, 430, 432, 445, 446, 447, 453-54, 456, 457, 462, 466, 474-77, 484-93, 494-519 passim, 550-63, 580-86, 607 (see also evolution, poetic diachrony of, pre-textual diachrony of); in Hammurabi Code, 438-39, 440, 441, 442, 444, 478-79, 518, 527, 575-76; Hebrew as Abrahamite in, 6-7, 430-31, 432, 435, 471, 480; Hebrew as bicultural target in, 86, 380-82, 426, 428, 433-34, 444, 472, 475, 476, 481-521, 522, 531-32, 537, 539, 547, 549, 550-638 (see also beautified; crosscultural approach to; unicultural approach to; Hebrewgram, in bicultural stigmatizing; Ethnocentricity); Hebrew as debt-slave in (see debt-slavery in); Hebrew defined as temporary slave in, 440-42 (see also time limit in); Hebrew as Eberide in, 7, 471, 480; Hebrew as Hab/piru in, 431-72 (see also crosscultural approach to, Hebrew as Hab/piru, Nuzi); Hebrew interchanged with Israelite (see unicultural approach to); Hebrew as outsider in, 430, 480, 481 (see also as Abrahamite, as Eberide, as Hab/piru); humanism in, 448, 454-58, 497, 503, 596-605, 609, 618-19, 625-27 (see also beautified, progress in); in individual books (see Exodus 21:2-11, Leviticus 25:35-55, Deuteronomy 15:12-18, Jeremiah 34:8-17 in Index of Biblical Passages); in medias legis jump of, 435, 479, 483-84, 487-92, 496, 497-500, 514, 531, 535, 573, 579, 605, 665n7; as intergenre, 22, 522-39 and passim (see also intergeneric allusion in, narrative forces in); intergeneric allusion in, xix-xx, 484-638, 668n18, 670n36 (see also as intergenre, interlegal allusion in, narrative forces in, poetic diachrony of, as synchronic network); interlegal allusion in, 499-500, 557-59, 563-638 (see also intergeneric allusion in); and Jeremian coda, 492, 519, 543-48, 629-38; as law-tale and macrotale, 481-82, 492, 520-638 (see also narrative forces in; Hebrews, chronology, order, and series of);
and literary history (see narrative forces in, as paradigm of (lega)literary art and history, poetic diachrony of, pretextual diachrony of); on lifelong bondage, 430-31, 436-37, 440, 442-45, 456-58, 477-78, 479, 482, 496-97, 498, 503, 504-19, 531-32, 543-48, 552, 554-55, 557, 562, 566, 573-74, 578-79, 580-81, 583, 586-88, 598, 599, 600, 601, 608, 609-11, 612, 614, 618, 622, 624, 631-38 (see also subplots of, time limit in); marital status in, 445, 479, 485, 507-508, 510-14, 515, 531-32, 554, 555-57, 562, 580, 582-85, 586-88, 596-602, 604-605, 606, 608-15 (see also minors in); master plot in, 55, 64, 145-46, 426, 447, 469, 483, 496, 505, 509-19, 531-32, 537, 542, 543-50, 553-88, 592, 596-602, 604, 607, 629-38 (see also narrative forces in, subplots of, Master plot); memory and its arts in, 464-69, 484-522, 532-638; mimesis of genesis in (see poetic diachrony of); minors in, 445, 457, 476, 477-79, 498, 499, 507, 510-14, 515, 552, 554, 555-57, 558, 575, 578, 580, 582-83, 584-86, 597, 599, 606, 607, 609-10, 611-14 (see also sexual (in)equality in); and mishneh duplicity, 541-629; as mishpat, 533ff., 610-11; on modes of acquisition, 439, 441-42, 479-81,487-92, 497-500; narrative forces in, xi, xv, xvi, xix-xx, 22, 447-70, 481-82, 500-503, 508-638 (see also audience of, disclosure and development in, in medias legis jump of, as intergenre, intergeneric allusion in, intervals within, as law-tale and macrotale, master plot in, memory and its arts in, poetic diachrony of, as speech-event, subplots of, temporal (dis)order in); oral vs. written, 527-30, 537, 538, 543, 550, 553, 556, 559-62, 584, 585, 592-95, 623-24, 629, 637, 669nn22, 24; Oriental, 289, 432, 434, 438, 439, 440, 455-56 (see also all-Oriental urtext of, in Egypt, in Hammurabi Code, Nuzi); originators, speakers, and mediators of (see authoritative voicing of, genesis in Exodus, poetic diachrony of, pretextual diachrony of, as speech-event); outdating drive in, 540, 542, 588-600, 603, 606, 615-16 (see also evolutionary drives in); as paradigm of (lega)literary art and history, xix-xx,
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433-34, 449ff., 481ff., 504, 522-39, 569, 574-75, 577-78, 584, 588, 603-604 (see also Hebrewgram, as paradigmatic heterogram); parting gifts in, 454-55, 458, 497, 503, 507, 511-13, 532, 570, 575-77, 578-79, 591, 601, 606, 618, 622, 637; poetic diachrony of, xviii-xix, xx, 4, 22, 23, 26, 433-34, 448, 449, 452-53, 467, 486, 492, 494, 500-503, 520638, 669n25 (see also axes of change in, disclosure and development in, evolution, genesis in Exodus, in medias legis, and Jeremiah coda, as law-tale and macrotale, narrative forces in, pre-textual diachrony of, as speechevent, temporal (dis)order in, Diachrony, Intercultural poetics); poetic justice in, 490-91, 505, 517-18, 529, 532, 548, 554-55, 578-86, 594, 619-26, 629-38, 669n31 (see also Master plot, Poetic justice); polysemy for plurality in, 435-36, 477-79, 487-92, 497-500, 514, 516, 558, 605; pre-textual diachrony of, 25-26, 67-68, 431-32, 433-34, 438, 439, 447-70, 472-81, 486-87, 493, 494, 495-97, 500, 501,504, 507-508, 512, 515, 518-19, 521-23, 524-25, 528-30, 536, 537-40, 543, 550, 557, 562, 564, 570, 572, 573, 578-79, 586, 588-92, 596-600, 604, 609, 615, 618, 625, 626-29, 639n4, 665n7, 672n48 (see also dating of, crosscultural approach to, outdating drive in, Diachrony, Source- vs. discourse-oriented inquiry); progress in, 587, 590, 596-600, 618-26 (see also beautified, between evolution and devolution); pronominal reference in, 444-45, 457, 567, 473-77, 478, 481, 482, 485, 492-93, 496, 498-99, 500-503, 513, 51415, 523, 552, 558-59, 565-66, 567, 570, 573, 577, 582, 585, 586, 592-93, 601, 606-607, 611, 630, 632-33, 655n22 (see also audience in; rhetoric of deterrence in; sexual (in)equality in; Deixis, personal); pseudepigraphy in (see Pseudepigraphy); Rabbis on, 6-7, 429-31, 433, 436, 445, 448, 461, 472, 477-78, 479, 480, 481, 487, 489, 491, 494, 495, 517-18, 538, 541, 550, 556, 573, 574, 578-79, 585, 586, 588, 609, 639n2, 659n1, 660n17, 662n3, 664n1, 665n7, 669nn27, 28, 671n45; repetition in (see allusion; evolution; poetic diachrony of; pre-textual diachrony of; successive co-eternities in; as synchronic network; Repetition, in law); rhetoric of deterrence in, 481-521 (see also Hebrew as bicultural target in); self-sale in, 439, 477-78, 479, 489, 490-91, 495, 498, 514, 585 (see also Egyptians, as self-made slaves); sexual (in)equality in, xi, xv, xix-xx, 22, 443-45, 457-58, 461, 467, 476, 478-79, 498, 499, 508, 515, 518, 55257, 559, 567-68, 570, 571, 577, 578-88, 591, 596-98, 600-601, 604-26, 630, 638, 669n30, 670nn33, 34, 35, 671nn44, 45 (see also pronominal reference in, subplots of); source of discourse in (see pre-textual diachrony of); specialization of, 477-79, 487-92, 495 (contrast polysemy for plurality in); as speech-event, 521-22, 524, 525-30, 531, 533 and passim; statics in (see as synchronic network); subgrouping in (see subplots of); subplots of, 443-45, 457-58, 461, 467, 476-79, 485, 498, 499, 504-19, 531-32, 552-57, 562, 570, 580-629; between substantive and discoursive change, 434-638;
successive co-eternities in, 592-602, 605, 606, 608, 609, 614, 615, 616-17; as synchronic network, 428-47, 448-70 passim, 447-521, 525-26, 538-68 passim (see also poetic diachrony of, pre-textual diachrony of); as systematic (re)communication, 588-638 (see also as Covenant/Code); temporal (dis)order in, 435, 441, 456, 474-75, 480-81, 483-84, 486, 500, 508-15, 520-638 (see also disclosure and development in, evolution, genesis, in medias legis, intergeneric allusion in, interlegal allusion in, intervals within, narrative forces in, master plot in, memory and its arts in, poetic diachrony of, pre-textual diachrony of, subplots of, successive co-eternities in, as synchronic network); theft-slavery in, 477-78, 487, 489, 490, 491-92, 493, 495, 499-500, 516, 558, 585, 605; time limit in, 6-7, 431, 434-39, 440-41, 442-45, 446, 448, 455, 457-58, 461, 465, 477-78, 479, 482, 484, 495, 496-97, 509-19 passim, 543-48, 552-638 passim (see also on lifelong bondage); type-enumeration vs. generalization in, 605-26, 628, 630; unicultural approach to, 426, 428-31, 432, 433, 448, 452-53, 471-81, 483, 489, 490-97, 505-508, 528-30, 538, 545-50, 587-600, 609, 618-19, 625-26, 627-29, 661n29, 665n7 (see also beautified; crosscultural approach to; Hebrew as bicultural target in; poetic diachrony of; pre-textual diachrony of; Rabbis on, as synchronic network;
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Culture, approaches to); updating drive in, 539-550, 562-638 (see also evolutionary drives in). See also Genre, Law, Modality, Slavery Slavery: against divine image and Israelite destiny, 86, 96-153 passim, 193-96, 378-84, 403-26, 428, 430-31, 444, 471, 481-521, 543-638 (see also evil next to death; Hamites cursed with; imposed by Hamites; liberation of blessed; worst in perpetuity; Creation; Hebrewgram, in bicultural stigmatizing; Rhetoric, of deterrence); evil next to death, 481, 499-500, 504-19, 631-38; in extraBiblical world (see Amarna; America; Greek culture, vs. barbarian, Sparta in; Slave law, Nuzi, Oriental); with genocide and other abuses (see name-calling in, Genocide); in-group, 426-70 passim, 471-638 (see also self-made); of Hab/piru (see Nuzi; Slave law, crosscultural approach to); Hamites cursed with, by Noah, 109-21, 143-45, 193-96 (see also Hamites, Primeval Scene); imposed by Hamites on blessed (see Hamites cursed with; Egyptians, as enslavers and genocides; Hebrewgram, power axis of; Philistines, as enslavers); liberation of blessed by God (see Master plot); name-calling in (see Etymology, hostile; Greek culture, vs. barbarian; Hebrewgram; Heterogram; Nomination, de-, deformed, dehumanizing, erased, as power); self-made (see Hamites cursed with; Egyptians, as self-made slaves; Slave law, on modes of acquisition); worst in perpetuity (see Slave law, on lifelong bondage). See also Slave law Smith, Anthony D., 128, 133-34, 203, 453, 467 Smith, Henry Preserved, 387, 403 Smith, Morton, 664n2 Sociocentricity. See Hebrew as Hab/piru, in status. See also -Centricity vs. -centrism, Middle ways Soggin, J.A., 8 Solon, 271 Sonnet, Jean-Pierre, 669n22 Sophocles, 112, 256, 348, 450 Source- vs. discourse-oriented inquiry, xv, 50-89, 95-97, 122-25, 130-33, 136-38, 147-49, 162-68, 235-37, 258, 262, 268, 274, 284-85, 308-13, 334-37, 354, 372-73, 382-403, 415-16, 431-81, 493-97, 507, 528-30, 537-39, 543, 552, 562, 573, 583, 585, 588-600, 609, 640n14, 641n17, 642n27, 648n15, 653n36, 665n7, 672n51.
See also Censorship; Crosscultural approach; Culture, approaches to; Diachrony; Hebrew as Hab/piru; Historical method; Historiography; Low criticism; Masoretic Text; Middle ways; Narrative, and narrativicide; Pseudepigraphy; Rhetoric, of identity; Samaritan version; Septuagint; Sequence, fabricated; Slave law, beautified, pre-textual diachrony of, as synchronic network; Sources as discourse; Synchrony; Translation, as interpretation Sources as discourse, xv, xvii, xviii-xix, 56-78. See also Crosscultural approach; Culture, approaches to; Narrative, and narrativicide; Sequence, fabricated; Source- vs. discourse-oriented inquiry Soviet Union, 465-66 Spain, xi, 366 Spark, Muriel, 193 Sparta. See Greek culture Speiser, E.A., 36, 73, 79, 288, 312-13, 315 Stager, Lawrence E., 148 Stereotype and metastereotype: always open to destereotyping (see all listings below, Intercultural poetics, Proteus Principle); analytic definition of, as fixed image, xxi-xxii, 171ff.; and animal imagery, 136-37, 191, 250-54, 343, 645n21, 651nn24, 26 (see also of humanity); approaches to, 1-89, 101-103, 105, 155-205, 216-32, 647nn1, 8 (see also Culture, approaches to; Hebrews, approaches to; Proteus Principle); and attitude toward the (de)stereotyped, 96-106, 134-35, 173-76, 185-205 and passim (see also always open to destereotyping, approaches to; -Centricity vs. -centrism; Hebrewgram, in bicultural stigmatizing, bivalence in; Rhetoric, of deterrence, of pretended solidarity); between uni- and multi-valence, 155-205, 216-32 (see also and attitude toward the (de)stereotyped); against Bible's ideopoetics, xiii, xv, xxi-xxii, 87-89, 153-54, 155-205, 214, 216-58, 322-78 passim, 399-403, 426-34, 471-77, 481-83, 520-39, 621-26, 647n7 (see also always open to destereotyping, Creation, Ethnocriticism, Proteus Principle); breakdown under empirical test, 183 and passim; of cultural analysis (see Culture, approaches to); of Culture vs. Nature, xv, xxi, 81, 168-170, 182, 190, 193, 196, 199, 245, 250-54, 409, 446-47, 624-25, 647n6 (see also Creation, Lévi-Strauss); of direct discourse, 160,
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647n1; and drama of reading, 157-58 and passim; drives toward, 127-28, 131-32, 158-205, 216-32 (see also against Bible's ideopoetics, against Proteus Principle, Centricity vs. -centrism); in Egyptian culture, 127-28, 189-91, 238 (see also among Hamites, Egyptians); of Egypt as anticulture and antitype, 135, 153-54, 161, 174, 193-205, 214, 233, 238-42, 254, 256-57, 272-73, 314-29, 631-38 (see also in Egyptian culture, of Other within self, of self vs. antiself, Egyptians, Hamites; and see Midwives, Moses, Pharaoh, Pharaoh's daughter, Potiphar, Potiphar's wife in Index of Biblical Characters); of enemy (see in Egyptian culture, of Egyptians, in Greek culture, of Other within self, of self vs. antiself, Centricity vs. -centrism); etymology of, 172; foreign vs. native language, 189, 190, 194; of foreigner, 186-205 (see also Foreignness); of foundation narrative, xiii, 100-54, 232-78, 324-77, 484-638 (see also of war of independence, Ethnocentricity, Ethnocriticism; and see Exodus references in Index of Biblical Passages); of genocide, 129-30, 132-34, 232-59 (see also Genocide); as graven imagery (see against Bible's ideopoetics); in Greek culture, 127, 189-91; among Hamites, 96-154 and passim (see also Hamites; Hebrewgram, in bicultural stigmatizing, bivalence in, in foreign speech, in foreign or foreignized thought, in foreign thought); of Hamites, 193-205 (see also of Egypt as anticulture and antitype, of foreigner, Hamites); of Hebrews (see Hebrews, Hebrewgram); of Hebrews and/as Hab/piru, 8-89, 162-68, 171-72, 218-19, 220-26, 384, 393-99, 431-70 (see also Hab/piru, Hab/piru-gram, Hebrews as Hab/piru); heterogram as (see Hebrewgram, Heterogram); of historiography and (lega)literary history, 11-89, 447-470, 520-638; of humanity, 176-77, 188-91, 250-54 (see also Creation, of humanity in God's image; Ethnocentricity); and iconoclasm (see against Bible's ideopoetics); of ideology, 649n9; as idolatry (see against Bible's ideopoetics); of image, 171-81, 202-203, 216-20; inconsistent construction of, 155-205, 216-32, 401-404, 429-81;
of initiation/Bildung plot, 324-77; of legal discourse, 473-77, 481-638 passim; levels of, 158ff.; miniatured in naming and etymology (see Etymology; Hebrewgram, bivalence in; Heterogram; Narrative, nomi; Nomination); of narration, xxi, 12-17, 161, 171, 172, 401 (see also of foundation narrative, of historiography and (lega)literary history); of Nationalism, 127, 202-203; of national literature (see of foundation narrative); of Other (see Otherness); of Other within self, 324-84, 380-425, 484-638 (see also of self vs. antiself; Hebrewgram, in bicultural stigmatizing, in foreign or foreignized thought, in foreign-like speech; Rhetoric, of deterrence, of pretended solidarity); as package dealing, 158-205 and passim; of power, 129-30, 139-54 (see also Hebrew as Hab/piru, in status; Hebrewgram, power axis of; Master plot); of prophetic figure, 215, 324-77; against Proteus Principle (see against Bible's ideopoetics, Proteus Principle); and psychoanalysis, 101-103, 169, 173-74, 177-78, 202-203, 253, 322, 343, 353, 363; of quoting form, 284-86, 294-95, 297, 300-301 (see also Quotation, innovative, theory of); of representation, as invention, 107-108, 179, 219-26, 644n9, 649n8 (see also and truth); of royalty, 127-28 (see also Pharaoh in Index of Biblical Characters); of self vs. antiself, 81-254 and passim (see also and animal imagery of humanity; of other within self; -Centricity vs. -centrism; Hamites, as antitype and anticulture; Hebrewgram; Heterogram; Primeval Scene; and see Pharaoh in Index of Biblical Characters); of sexuality, 102-103, 105, 171, 644n9 (see also of Woman vs. Man; Egyptians, as sexual offenders, and sexdiscrimination; Hamites, sexual violence of); of stereotype, 171-81, 202-203, 216-220; among subject, object, and addressee, 179-81, 252-53, 281-82; syllogism in, 175-76, 177, 252-53, 605; and truth, xix-xx, xxi, 105, 171, 172-73, 176-80, 185, 203, 209, 216-26, 252-53, 263, 274, 289, 293, 322, 381ff., 654n6; of various literary figures, 178; and verbal cliché, 171-172;
of war of independence, 89-100, 283-86, 378-425 (see also of foundation narrative); of Woman vs. Man, xii, xix-xx, xxi, 16, 23, 182-83, 184, 189-90, 193, 197, 198, 202, 203, 229, 232-59, 263, 268, 275-76, 444-45, 552-626, 647n6, 663n11, 672n51 (see also of
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sexuality; Canaanites; Sodom as; -Centricity vs. -centrism; Culture, hero(ine), villain; Egyptians, as sexual offenders, and sex-discrimination; Feminism; Gender, grammatical; Hamites, sexual violence of; Hebrews, and Hebrewesses; Heterogram, of Male Chauvinist; Primeval Scene; Sexism, female; Slave law, sexual (in)equality in) Sterne, Laurence, 42, 72, 235-36 Stoebe, Hans Joachim, 390, 657n3 Stolz, Fritz, 7, 411, 657n3 ''The Story of Sinuhe," 355, 367 "The Story of Two Brothers," 111-12, 647n28 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 139 Structuralism, 37, 61 Suetonius, 97-98 Sumer, 9, 32, 33-34, 35, 39, 41, 51, 61, 73, 139, 641n21 Sumerian King List, 43 Sumner, William Graham, 196-97 Surprise, and plot of. See Dynamics, of retrospection; Peripety Suspense, and plot of. See Dynamics, of prospection Sutu, 71 Swift, Jonathan, 561 Synchrony: as bridge-building method, 9-76, 431-70 (see also Crosscultural approach; Hebrews as Hab/piru; Middle ways; Narrative, and narrativicide; Nuzi; Rhetoric, of identity; Slave law, crosscultural approach to, as synchronic network; Sources as discourse); as interpretive postulate (see Slave law; Rabbis on, as synchronic network; Unicultural approach); as network amid narrative, system amid sequence (see among pattern-making universals, as poetic force, Diachrony); among pattern-making universals, 448-70, 520-21; as poetic force for equivalence and simultaneity (see Allusion; Chiasm; Hebrewgram; Intercultural poetics; Master plot; Poetic justice; Repetition; Rhetoric, analogy in; Slave law, bridging drive in, successive coeternities in, as synchronic network); twinned with its diachronic opposite (see among pattern-making universals, Diachrony) Syria, 35, 49, 72, 167, 213 Syriac, 493, 669n20
T Table of Nations, 7-8, 14, 15, 20, 21, 78, 82, 91, 92, 100, 108, 109-10, 113, 114-15, 118, 130, 139, 141-45, 194-96, 203, 213-14, 132, 315. See also Babel, Noahides, Primeval Scene Taboo. See Egyptians, apartheid and taboo among Targum, 429-30, 479, 484, 574, 642n27, 645n15, 659n9. See also Aramaic, Translation Tarshish, 213 Temple, 117, 192 Terahides, 20-21, 194 Thackeray, H.St.J., 662n4 Thackeray, William Makepeace, 161, 200, 469 Theocentricity: vs. anthropocentrism, 186; and election, 110; with theocentrism, 110, 128-29, 130, 131, 176-80, 184, 186, 187, 188, 192, 197, 202, 203, 204-205, 330, 343, 366, 372-77, 530, 535; vs. ethnos-centeredness, 188; in Hebrew master plot, 145-56 (see also Master plot; God, omnipotent). See also Monotheism, Ontology Théodoridès, Aristide, 646n25 Thompson, J.A., 506, 574, 660n17 Thompson, Thomas L., 40, 51-52, 66, 74-75, 340, 641n19, 653n36 Thucydides, 161, 230, 642n29. See also Greek culture Thurian, the, 97-98, 104, 105. See also Augustus, Heterogram Tibet, 133 Time: bridges thrown over. See Master plot; Memory; Poetic justice; Repetition; Slave law, bridging drive in, poetic diachrony of, pre-textual diachrony of); and cultural (d) evolution, 105-54, 404-25, 447-72, 520-638; deictic (see Deixis, temporal);
narrated vs. narrative, 329, 406ff. (see also Focus of interest); and paradox of co-eternity (see Slave law, successive co-eternities in); in quotation, 520-638; remembered (see bridges thrown over); synchronized (see and paradox of co-eternity; Crosscultural approach; Hebrew as Hab/piru; Slave law, as synchronic network; Sources as discourse); telling/reading in, xxii and passim; and tempo (see narrated vs. narrative); and tense, 253-45, 290, 263-69, 355-72 passim, 386-91, 656n33, 658n13. See also Anachronism, Diachrony, Dynamics, Hindsight fallacy, History, Narrative, Sequence Tobiah, 333 Translation: anti-mimetic, 285, 340; anti-rhetorical, 250, 251; Aramaic (see Aramaic, Onkelos, Targum); among
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Babel's legacies, 642-43n30; Buber and Rosenzweig, 251, 516, 645n15; calque, 126, 244, 296; of dvarim title, 451; failure of, 267-78, 291 (see also Translational mimesis, refusal of); Greek (see Septuagint); as interpretation, xxii, 126, 243, 285, 340, 384-93 passim, 408-409, 429-30, 439, 479, 484, 485, 495, 574, 611-12, 662n4, 671n42; through interpreter, 35, 83, 111, 113-44, 208, 238, 269-70, 276, 369, 652-53n35; Latin (see Vulgate); and loanwords, 92, 113, 219, 642n30, 644n12; in quotation, 285; and the untranslatable, 243, 263-67. See also Authorized version, Babel, Hebrewgram, Heterogram, New English Bible, Revised Standard Version, Translational mimesis Translational mimesis: among Babel's legacies, 81-85, 113, 115, 130, 212, 266, 331, 642n30; of Aramaic, 2, 82-83; attributive, 2, 83, 101, 113, 642n29; in Austen, 155-57; between dialects, 82, 155-57, 213-14, 219, 263-67, 270, 276, 315-18, 643n2; and Biblical revolution, xiii, xxii, 88-89, 143-46 (see also Ethnocriticism; Hebrewgram, as laboratory, as microcosm, as paradigmatic heterogram); blend of elements in, 220; of Canaanites (see Canaanites, as Hebrew-elicitors, as Hebrew-thinkers); chains of, xiii, 85-86, 87-88, 91, 92, 99, 114, 206, 207-208, 213, 219, 249-55, 258, 270-71, 277, 281-82, 295308, 316, 369-71, 378-82; by characters in self-translation, 1-2, 82, 84, 86, 114, 128, 146-54, 155-57, 180, 188, 194, 201, 206-78, 280-82, 332-37, 351-53, 378-429, 481-638 passim (see also Rhetoric, of deterrence, of pretended solidarity; Hebrewgram, in bicultural stigmatizing); conceptual aspects of (see and worldview); and direct discourse fallacy, 160;
of Egyptians (see Egyptians, and bicultural stigmatizing, as Hebrew-callers, -elicitors, -thinkers); in El-Amarna letters, 221-26, (see also Hab/piru-gram); and etymology, 332-37 (see also Eberides; Eberites; Etymology, hostile, of Gershom, of Hebrews, of Moses, of Pharaoh; Hebrewgram, bivalence in); and expressive duplexity, 285-86; and forms of quotation (see Hebrewgram, four patterns of; Quotation); functions of, 88-89, 90, 101-107, 153-54, 140-54, 209-11, 482-83 (see also Rhetoric); by God, 258, 261-78, 299, 366, 374, 375-76, 378-80, 426-29, 481-638 passim (see also by characters in self-translation); in Greek literature, 88, 642n29, 644n10; of hearing, 263-78, 285, 317-24, 338, 384-86, 405-11, 424, 475, 517-18, 642n2, 655n16, 669nn22, 23, 24; of "Hebrews" (see Hebrewgram); and interpreter as mediator of (see Translation, through interpreter); and ideology (see and worldview); and interlingual punning, 145, 255, 334, 335-37 (see also Hebrewgram, bivalence in); ironic/parodic, 273, 277-78, 280, 412-13, 548, 653n28, 658n12; and language sensitivity, 82, 257-58, 270 (see also Unicultural approach); and multilingualism, 81-89, 113-14, 211-12, 213, 238, 247, 269-70, 273-74, 281, 297-308, 331-37, 341, 357, 369-72, 376-77, 378-80, 407 (see also Translation, through interpreter); in Nuzi contracts, 222-25 (see also Hab/piru-gram); overt vs. hidden, 82-94 (see also Quotation, ambiguity between narration and); of Philistines (see Philistines, and bicultural stigmatizing, as Hebrew-callers, -elicitors, -thinkers, language of); and poetics of (inter)culture, 81ff.; as quotation, 81-89 and passim (see also and forms of quotation); refusal of, 90-154, 211, 234, 256, 259, 269-78 (see also Etymology, hostile; Hebrewgram, power axis of; Master plot; Rhetoric, necessity, of, neglect of); reproductive, 82-83, 101; and rhetoric (see Hebrewgram, in bicultural stigmatizing, bivalence in; Rhetoric, of deterrence, of pretended solidarity); sense of foreignness in, 81-89 and passim; and sexual variation, 275-76 (see also Stereotype and metastereotype, of Woman vs. Man);
of speech, xiv, xvii-xviii, 82, 85-87, 90-154, 159-60, 171-72, 176, 178, 180, 186-87, 201, 206-78, 288, 298, 316, 378, 404, 414, 482, 486-87, 490, 491, 500, 506, 520, 566 (see also by characters in self-translation); between speech and thought, 90-91, 279-86, 402; theory of, 82; of thought, xvii-xviii, 82, 84, 86, 101, 109, 114, 150, 152, 153-54, 155-57, 159, 178, 221, 243-45, 247, 253, 263378, 403, 482, 484, 491, 526; in and of various extraBiblical languages (see Heterogram); and worldview, 84-85, 91, 97, 101, 146-53, 207, 211, 241-42, 244-45, 249-55, 257-78, 302-303 and passim (see also
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Monotheism, Polytheism). See also Babel; Culture, approaches to; Foreignness; Hebrewgram; Intercultural poetics; Language; Master plot; Otherness; Quotation; Rhetoric, of deterrence, of identity, of pretended solidarity; Translation Tribes: general, 2, 3, 311, 409, 622, 625, 640nn9, 14, 649-50n11, 651n24; Asher, 21; Benjamin, 3, 21, 622; in Conquest, 38-39, 46-47; Dan, 533, 587, 621; and detribalizing, 28, 95, 398-99, 441-42, 640n9; Ephraim, 414; Gad, 383, 386, 397, 414; Judah, 2, 95, 270, 398, 429-30, 459, 629-38, 670n36; Levi, 47, 192, 256, 258, 329, 338, 341-42, 345, 352, 359-60, 365, 366, 372, 565, 594, 657n38; Simeon, 47, 144-45; the Ten, 2 Trojans, 88, 644n10 Trudgill, Peter, 276 Tyler, Stephen A., 19 Tyre, 213 U Ubru, 64, 640n20, 641n24 Ugarit, 38, 71, 506, 660n14 Ullendorff, Edward, 212-13, 643n2, 648-49n3, 649n4 Uncle, Tom, 139. See also Heterogram Unicultural approach, xi-xvii, xix, xxi, 1-8, 11-79 passim, 88-89, 127-28, 135-36, 155, 178, 188-91, 211-13, 218, 226-33, 255, 257-58, 262-63, 270, 287, 308-10, 325, 332-33, 335-36, 342, 343, 344, 347, 356, 365, 372-73, 382-94, 399-403, 406, 412-13, 426, 428-31, 432-33, 448, 452-53, 471-81, 483, 489, 490-97, 505-508, 528-30, 538, 549-50, 588-91, 596-600, 609, 618-19, 625-26, 627-29, 645n20, 646n23, 652n29, 655n23, 665n7.
See also Anachronism; Archaism; Censorship; Culture, approaches to, pseudo-universals in; Diachrony; Ethnocentricity; Hebrews as Abrahamites, anachronized, as Eberides, as Jews; Historical method; Historiography; Israel, as interchangeable with Hebrews; Masoretic Text; Middle ways; Narrative, and narrativicide; Pseudepigraphy; Quotation, ambiguity between narration and; Rabbinic exegesis and literature; Slave law; Rabbis on, unicultural approach to; Synchrony Universals. See Culture, pseudo-universals in; Diachrony, among pattern-making universals; Focus of Interest, as discourse universal; Narrative, disclosure and development as universals of, and typology of change; Proteus Principle; Synchrony, among pattern-making universals Ur, 42 Ur Dynasty, 34 Urbach, Ephraim A., 648n14 Utopia, 1-2, 203, 455 V Vaux, Roland de, 32, 36, 42-44, 58, 78, 79, 209, 236, 290, 294, 309, 325, 440-41, 463, 639n4, 652n32, 658n15, 66061n19 Vergote, J., 104, 127, 293, 644n9, 646n25 Vict-image, 81-205 and passim. See also - Centricity vs. -centrism, Hebrewgram, Heterogram, Nomination, Stereotype and metastereotype Vulgate, 233, 485, 611-12, 670n34 W Wagner, Richard, 281 Wallenstein, Meir, 667n10 Weber, Max, 36, 124 Weems, Renita, 54, 256-57 Weinfeld, Moshe, 47, 503, 519, 596-98, 599, 603, 623, 662n3, 663n5, 671nn38, 40 Weingreen, J., 27, 95, 396-98, 434, 463, 464-67, 657n3, 660n14, 661n23, 662n30 Weippert, Manfred, 32, 62, 96, 132, 463, 660n14 Weisberg, Richard, 524 Wellhausen, Julius, 385, 387, 388, 390-91, 417, 627, 662n9, 668n16 Wenham, Gordon J., 312 Westbrook, Raymond, 478, 659n7 Westermann, Claus, 112-13, 287, 293, 294, 297, 301, 309, 654nn5, 14 Whitey, xviii, 144. See also Heterogram Whitman, Walt, 648n16
Williams, Ronald J., 113 Winckler, Hugo, 71 Wiseman, D.J., 440, 639n3 Wonderland. See Carroll, Lewis World War I, 104, 493 Wright, Christopher J.H., 32, 434, 446, 454, 478, 506, 659n3, 661nn22, 27, 667n15 X Xenophobia. See Antisemitism; Egyptians, apartheid and taboo among, as enslavers and genocides, exclusive selfequation with humanity; Ethnocentricity, with or without ethnocentrism; Genocide; Greek culture, vs. barbarian; Hebrews, dehumanized; Nazism; Stereotype and metastereotype, of self vs. antiself
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Xenophon, 200 Y Yacobi, Tamar, xxiii, 198, 647nn2, 8 Yehudah Halevi, 366 Yeivin, S., 43, 95, 311 Yid, 87. See also Heterogram Yiddish, 658n12 Yoffee, Norman, 643n4 Yuppy, 87. See also Heterogram Yurco, Frank J., 148 Index of Biblical Characters A Aaron, 146-47, 236, 269, 270, 341, 620-21, 622 Abel, 168, 341 Abimelech, the Philistine, 112, 211, 247-48 Abimelech ben Gideon, 47, 73, 165, 272 Abra(ha)m, xiii, 4, 6-7, 8, 10, 19-20, 22, 24, 28, 29, 30, 33, 34, 35, 41-43, 44-46, 50, 51, 57, 65, 69, 73, 78, 79, 9899, 104, 106-107, 109, 111, 112, 113, 115, 120, 132-33, 134, 141-42, 143, 145, 147, 165, 170, 194, 195-96, 208, 211, 215, 228, 237, 245-46, 247-48, 259-60, 261, 264, 265-66, 282-83, 285, 308-18, 321-24, 325, 339, 341, 342, 358, 359, 362-64, 366, 373, 382, 386, 391, 402, 408, 415, 430-31, 441, 456, 464, 506, 519, 526, 555, 563, 595, 630, 631, 637, 638, 639nn2, 3, 641n21, 642nn27, 28, 654nn10, 11, 14, 15. See also Abrahamites in Index of Names and Subjects Absalom, 192, 414 Achish, 8, 90, 92, 96, 214, 275-76, 286, 398, 404, 423-24, 505 Adam, 42, 101, 119-20, 128, 172-73, 174, 193-96, 216-18, 230, 451, 622 Ahab, 48, 81, 133, 248 Amram, 329, 372, 373, 583, 657-58n38 Asa, 145 Asenath, 289, 355, 357, 554, 668n18
B Balaam, 148, 228, 471, 642n27 Balak, 642n27 Bathshua, 670n36 Benjamin, 491-92, 493, 499, 500 Blasphemer, 533-34, 536, 544, 555, 587, 621, 628, 645n18, 670n36 C Cain, 20, 42, 61, 117, 124, 129, 134, 147, 168, 170, 251, 311, 341. See also Cainites in Index of Names and Subjects Chief Cupbearer, 119, 135, 153-54, 164, 206, 209-11, 214, 233, 249, 250, 276, 291, 307, 316, 321, 345, 634 D Dagon, 109, 150, 152 David, 8, 10, 30, 35, 44, 47, 50, 51, 66, 72, 74, 90, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 99, 138, 149, 150, 165, 169, 192, 237, 262, 27576, 286, 317, 380, 394, 398, 404, 409, 414, 423-25, 462, 466, 500, 505, 506, 642n28, 657n4 Deborah, 237 Dinah, 47, 302, 312, 341-42, 345, 483, 657n38 E Ebed-melekh, 634, 672n50 Eber, 7-8, 9, 20, 24, 33, 57, 78, 91, 99, 106, 112, 114-15, 120, 130, 141, 143, 207, 227, 313, 430-31, 639n3. See also Eberides in Index of Names and Subjects Eli, 92, 151 Eliezer ben Mosheh, 358-59, 361-62, 368, 370 Eliezer of Damascus, 506, 642n27 Elijah, 248 Elisha, 667n13 Ephraim, 292, 336, 383, 554, 580 Esau, 81, 497 Eve, 119, 256-57, 451, 621-22 Ezra, 200 G Gedaliah, 637
Gershom ben Levi, 359-60, 370 Gershom ben Mosheh, 355-72, 374-75, 656nn28, 29, 31-35, 37 Gideon, 237 Goliath, 93, 237, 446, 643n1 H Hagar, 196 Ham, 109-12, 113, 114-15, 118, 119-20, 128-29, 133, 134, 144-45, 194-96, 213, 243-44, 307, 379, 409, 623, 651n21. See also Hamites in Index of Names and Subjects Haman, 456, 645n17, 648n13 Hezekiah, 2, 144 Hiram, 213 I Isaac, 132, 259-60, 264, 265-66, 311, 313, 373 Isaiah, 1-2 Ittai, 192 J Jacob/Israel, 3, 5, 10, 15, 33, 34, 62, 77,
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78, 81, 82-83, 92, 98, 106, 107-108, 121-26, 128, 130, 146-48, 259-60, 264, 265-66, 280, 290, 292, 302, 303, 311, 313, 342, 345, 373, 415, 497, 576, 643n30, 651n24, 663n7. See also Hebrews, Israel in Index of Names and Subjects Japheth, 7, 8, 109-10, 112, 194, 243-44. See also Japhethites in Index of Names and Subjects Jephthah, 30, 47, 73, 165 Jeremiah, 66, 68, 79, 117, 185, 379, 380, 427-29, 459, 554, 633-39 Jethro, 239-40, 354, 355, 651n27 Jethro's daughters, 318, 355, 371, 669n31 Job, 185, 401, 446, 447 Jochebed, 3, 7, 10, 50, 135, 236, 255-59, 328-33, 338, 345, 373, 581-83, 585 Jonah, 3, 7, 10, 27-28, 31, 39, 44, 45, 50, 66, 79, 80, 86, 137, 138, 160, 206-16, 223, 225, 226-27, 232, 244, 275, 27677, 309-10, 316, 379, 402, 440, 441, 520 Jonathan, 35, 50, 90, 92-93, 94, 98-99, 383, 391-92, 394, 404, 405-406, 408, 409, 410, 414, 420, 423 Jonathan ben Gershom, 365 Joseph, xii, xiii, 3, 6-7, 10, 21, 22, 26, 27-28, 35, 37-38, 39, 40, 44, 45, 47, 50, 51, 54, 64, 67, 72, 78, 79, 83, 86, 102107, 111-13, 114-18, 119-20, 121, 123, 124, 126, 130, 134, 135, 138, 140-41, 142, 147, 153-54, 164-65, 171, 174, 175, 176, 178, 180, 196, 206-16, 218, 219, 223, 225, 226-27, 232, 234, 244, 249, 250, 257, 258, 259, 268-69, 276, 281, 286-308, 309-10, 313, 318-24, 325-26, 327, 336, 339, 341,342, 343, 347, 350, 354, 355, 356-59, 362, 363, 364, 366, 367, 368-69, 370, 371, 372, 374, 378, 379, 386, 402, 429, 440, 441, 482, 484, 486-92, 493, 497-500, 505, 509, 511, 520, 553-54, 556, 557, 558, 560, 572-73, 579, 580, 585, 587, 631-32, 633-38, 644n6, 645n14, 648n1, 652n29, 654nn7, 10, 14, 656n29, 660nn10, 19, 663nn9, 16, 668nn18, 20, 670n36, 672n51. See also Zaphenat-pane'ah Joseph's brothers, 35, 37-38, 83, 108, 113, 114-18, 208, 210, 286-308, 325-26, 339, 341, 347, 354, 355, 363, 368, 369, 371, 372, 486, 490, 498-500, 553, 572-73, 631-32, 633-38 Joshua, 34, 38-39, 46-47, 73, 98, 261, 546, 548, 566, 593 Josiah, 519, 589 Judah, 90, 284-86, 491, 498-500, 554, 558, 587, 633-38, 668n18, 670n36 K Korah, 285-86, 621 L Laban, 82-83, 185, 497, 576, 663n7 Leah, 497
Levi, 341-42, 345, 359-60, 370, 456, 657n38 Lot, 20, 43, 79, 112, 168, 194, 308, 311, 314-18, 321-24, 325, 341, 349, 362 Lot's daughters, 112, 194 M Manasseh, 336, 557-58, 580 Manoah, 264 Melchizedek, 323 Mesha, 48, 49, 80, 231 Michal, 35 Midwives, 4, 101-102, 111, 121, 126-27, 128, 132-33, 227, 232-59, 262-63, 268-69, 273, 275-76, 280-82, 299, 300, 302, 313, 316, 323, 327, 328, 334, 338, 342, 343, 344, 347, 348, 351-53, 379, 381, 423, 430, 482, 500, 581-83, 585, 607, 634, 650nn17, 18, 19, 651nn24, 26, 652n29, 669n31, 672n51 Miriam, 3, 7, 86, 114, 135, 141, 227, 236, 255-59, 263, 268-69, 273, 275-76, 280-82, 297, 298, 328-31, 342, 343, 345, 347, 348, 352-53, 369-70, 379, 381, 482, 500, 550, 581-83, 585, 607, 620-21, 622, 672n51 Mordecai, 3, 185 Moses, xiii, xvii, 20, 21-22, 26, 27, 31, 40, 47, 51, 65, 67, 68, 72, 86, 114, 115, 117-18, 128, 146-47, 151, 153-54, 169, 170, 185, 225, 227, 234, 236, 239-40, 246, 247, 255-78, 279, 282, 299, 302, 306, 307, 324-77, 378-79, 381, 395, 397, 402, 404, 406-407, 409, 411, 420, 421, 423-44, 426-27, 428, 439, 447, 455, 466, 469, 471, 474, 482, 484, 48587, 492, 496, 499, 501, 502, 503, 505, 510, 512, 521, 522, 525, 527, 528-30, 533-35, 539, 540, 541, 550-629, 632, 634, 635, 637, 650-51n19, 651nn24, 27, 652-53n35, 655n18-27, 656nn28, 30-38, 664n2, 666-67n7, 668n17 Murmurers, 81, 304, 485, 505, 555, 620-21 N Naboth, 133 Nahash, 407, 422 Nahor, 34 Nebuchadnezzar, 80, 117, 635, 646n13 Noah, 7, 15, 42-43, 65, 107, 109-12, 113, 114-15, 118-19, 120, 141, 144-45, 170, 174, 215, 243-44, 409, 456, 490, 491, 661n25. See also Noahides in Index of Names and Subjects
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O Og, 314 Omri, 48 P Peleg, 115 Pharaoh: in Genesis, of the Patriarchal age, 104, 111, 112, 113, 115, 119, 133, 145, 153, 210, 257, 289-90, 292, 322, 336, 355, 357, 363, 490, 497, 498, 500, 554, 555, 634-35, 644n9, 668n18, 672n50; of the Oppression, 4, 5, 81, 101, 105, 107-109, 111, 120-35, 140-41, 142, 148, 153-54, 161, 166-67, 174, 176, 204, 211, 227, 232-61, 262, 265, 272, 273, 280-82, 290-91, 293, 306, 313, 316, 324-25, 326, 327, 334, 336, 337, 342, 343, 345-47, 349-53, 355, 358, 366, 371, 375, 417, 423, 482, 486, 487, 491, 492, 493, 500, 503, 505, 509, 510, 514, 539, 555, 559, 573, 576, 583, 585, 587, 607, 611, 619, 645n17, 646n27, 651n26, 654n4; of the Exodus, 5, 21-22, 80, 81, 117-18, 119, 146-53, 167-68, 194, 214, 234, 261-78, 280, 290-92, 302, 327, 335, 360-61, 375-76, 378, 485, 486, 491, 509, 525, 529, 549-50, 554, 556, 573-74, 576-77, 580-82, 600, 611, 619, 634, 636, 646n27, 652n33, 655n26 Pharaoh's daughter, 7, 86, 135, 140, 153-54, 174, 214, 227, 233, 255-59, 273, 279, 280, 298, 316, 323, 328-37, 343, 345, 352-53, 355, 360, 368-71, 373, 374, 381, 607, 634, 645n20, 652n29 Potiphar, 102-105, 285, 289-90, 298, 306, 319-24, 327, 339, 386, 408, 410, 484, 486, 488, 493, 498, 573, 598, 634, 665n17, 663n16, 668n18 Potiphar's wife, 102-107, 113, 115, 123, 124, 126, 135, 138, 140-41, 153, 174, 176, 180, 211, 214, 250, 276, 285, 289-91, 293, 319-24, 327, 351-52, 378, 410, 429, 482, 484, 485, 486-87, 554 Potiphera, 289, 355, 357, 554, 587, 668n18 Q Queen of Sheba, 646n26 R Rabshakeh, 2, 83, 136, 270, 271 Rachel, 185, 292, 497 Rahab, 239 Rebekah, 237, 256-57 Reuel. See Jethro Ruth, 187, 188, 489, 523 S Samson, 93 Samuel, 262
Sarah (Sarai), 33, 111, 132-34, 195-96, 245, 247-49, 314, 322, 542, 555, 644n10 Saul, 8, 21-22, 40, 81, 90, 93, 185, 232, 378-79, 383-425, 464, 465, 466, 475, 482, 492, 638, 650n16, 657n4, 658nn8, 13, 16, 661n23, 663n10 Serpent, 81 Shalmaneser, 48, 80 Sheba ben Bikhri, 73 Shelah, 284-85 Shem, 7-8, 9, 24, 109-11, 112, 113, 118, 120, 128, 142, 194, 143-44, 315, 409, 638. See also Shemites in Index of Names and Subjects Sheshan, 670n36 Shiphrah and Puah. See Midwives Shlomit, 553, 587, 621 Sidon, 217 Simeon, 341-42 Sisera, 497 Solomon, 117, 134, 169, 170, 213, 329, 523, 534, 646n26, 670n36 Sons of Israel. See Jacob/Israel, Joseph, Joseph's brothers T Tamar, 284-85, 587, 668n18 Terah, 20, 34, 43 U Uriah, 317 W Wood Gatherer, 536 Y Yael, 237 Z Zaphenat-pane'ah, 104, 284, 292, 336, 667n14. See also Joseph Zedekiah, 4, 6, 170, 427, 458, 491, 505, 506, 519, 521, 536, 544, 632, 634-35, 637, 642n28, 650n16, 667n14
Zipporah, 355 Index of Biblical Passages Genesis xvi, 22, 54, 58, 62, 69, 76, 100, 105, 116, 117, 111, 112, 113, 115, 117, 118, 119, 120, 130-32, 135, 141, 142, 145, 150, 193-96, 201, 209, 214, 215, 218, 232, 244, 260, 290, 292-93, 294, 303, 312, 313, 323-24, 325-26, 362-63, 395, 462, 470, 472, 520, 538, 569, 642n28, 672n51; 1 to 11, 42-43, 82, 90, 109-11, 113, 120, 204; 1, 441; 1:1, 169; 1:4, 186; 1:21, 252; 1:26-27, 119-20, 128, 169, 172-73, 193-96, 216-18, 230, 244-45, 246, 266, 267-68, 307, 323-24,
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Document Page 725 409, 426, 471, 621-22, 625-26, 649n7, 652n29; 1:28, 252; 2:18, 516; 3, 622; 3:15, 497; 3:16, 485; 3:20, 621; 4:1-17, 168; 4:1, 489; 4:6-7, 426; 4:9, 341; 6 to 8, 122; 8:21, 625; 9:1-8, 112, 194, 526; 9:6, see 1:26-27; 9:18-11:9, 113; 9:18, 144; 9:18-27, 15, 109-11, 113, 119-20, 125, 129, 133, 139-40, 144-45, 174, 194-95, 215, 243-44, 307; 9:21, 144; 9:22-23, 144, 243-44; 9:24, 144; 9:25-27, 144-45, 490-91, 661n25; 9:25, 145, 170, 174, 214, 379, 409, 456-57, 490-91; 9:27, 144; 10:1-32, 7-8, 14, 15, 20, 21, 78, 82, 91, 92, 100, 108, 109-10, 113, 114-15, 118, 130, 141-45, 203; 10:2, 7, 112, 231; 10:3, 331; 10:6-7, 145; 10:6, 111, 634;
10:10, 315; 10:13-14, 92, 100; 10:15, 213; 10:19, 145; 10:21-22, 315, 639n3; 10:21, 7, 114; 10:25, 115, 130; 11:1-9, 35, 42, 75-89, 113, 114-15, 116-17, 118, 120, 123, 124, 125, 127, 129, 130, 147, 170, 183, 203, 212, 251, 266, 315, 331, 642-43n30, 644-45n12, 645n13, 652n29; 11:1, 125; 11:2, 315; 11:3, 125; 11:6, 123; 11:10-27, 19, 34; 11:26-12:5, 42, 313-14; 12, xiii, 142, 274; 12:1-3, 22, 45, 99, 118-19, 142, 149, 260, 637, 638; 12:6, 313; 12:10-20, 111, 112, 118, 119, 134, 195, 274, 322, 555; 12:12, 132-33, 245-46; 12:17, 112; 12:18, 248; 13:13, 349; 14, 19, 308-18, 323, 341; 14:5, 314; 14:11-14, 316-18; 14:13, 4, 6, 8, 19, 20, 22, 24, 28, 29, 30, 34, 35, 42-43, 44-46, 50, 51, 79, 86, 108, 111, 113, 120, 132, 134, 145, 228, 245, 261, 282-83, 285, 308-18, 321-24, 325, 339, 341, 342, 359, 362, 382, 386, 391, 402, 408, 415, 430-31, 441, 456, 464, 519, 526, 555, 595, 630, 639n2, 641n41, 642nn27, 28, 654nn11, 12, 13, 14, 15; 14:19, 489; 14:22, 489; 15:13, 362-64, 367, 441, 563;
15:14, 503; 15:16, 366; 15:18, 210; 15:20, 314; 16:1-5, 196; 17:5, 313; 18:12, 485; 18:13-15, 248-49, 542; 19, 15, 112, 168, 194, 234, 239, 349, 456; 19:4-9, 349; 19:11, 112; 19:31, 112; 20, 195; 20:10-11, 247-49; 20:11, 113, 132, 245-46, 352; 20:13, 211; 20:17-18, 112; 21:9ff., 575; 23, 109, 248, 645n10, 669n23; 24, 237; 24:6-8, 366; 25:1-11, 237; 25:6, 575; 25:9-10, 260; 25:34, 497; 29 to 31, 313, 663n7; 29:19, 185; 30:24, 185, 292; 31:42, 576; 31:47, 82, 643n30; 32:22-30, 5, 34, 92, 98, 126, 128, 130, 146-47, 280, 410, 415;
32:29, 264; 32:32, 302; 34, 47, 312, 483, 663n11; 34:1, 341; 34:7, 302, 312; 34:25-26, 341, 657n38; 37 to 50, xiii, 22, 26, 40, 86, 106, 107, 114, 118, 121, 129, 130, 134, 166, 176, 226-27, 244, 276-77, 287-308, 309, 327, 347, 354, 356-58, 372, 489, 490, 553-54, 637, 638, 654n14, 660n19, 663n9, 672n50; 37:2, 634; 37:5-11, 634; 37:12-17, 326; 37:18-19, 634; 37:24, 489, 490, 500, 634; 37:25, 21; 37:26-36, 498-500, 509, 558; 37:26-28, 497, 579, 631-32, 633, 634, 668n20; 37:27, 21; 37:28, 21, 347, 367, 489, 490, 491, 500, 553-54, 573, 634; 37:36, 21, 367, 497, 579, 634, 644n9, 668n20; 38, 554; 38:11, 90, 284-86; 38:14-28, 634; 38:21, 587, 668n18; 39, 118, 135, 207, 210, 215, 355, 486, 489, 634, 655n17; 39:1, 21, 488-91, 497, 498, 500, 573, 579, 644n9, 668n20; 39:2-6, 488; 39:3, 276; 39:5-6, 103, 115-16, 289, 298; 39:7-20, 118, 124, 140-41, 488, 554, 663n16; 39:8-9, 103, 113, 115-16; 39:11-20, 319-24, 327; 39:11, 208, 238;
39:14-18, 6-7, 102-107, 124, 126, 140, 180, 208, 210, 289-91, 313, 320-24, 351-52, 482, 488; 39:14, 38, 44, 67, 79, 102-107, 111, 114, 123, 135, 138, 164, 171, 175, 180, 196, 227, 250, 289, 293, 298, 306, 320, 355, 486-87, 644n6, 655n17, 663n16; 39:17, 6-7, 35, 38, 44, 67, 79, 102-107, 111, 114, 115-16, 123, 135, 138, 139, 140, 164, 171, 175, 180, 196, 227, 250, 276, 285, 289-90, 293, 298, 306, 320-24, 327, 342, 347, 371, 378, 410, 429, 441, 484-91, 553-54, 557, 572, 633, 644n6, 655n17, 660n10, 663n16; 39:19, 320-24, 327, 338, 386, 408, 410, 484, 598, 634, 663n16; 39:20, 320-24, 489, 634; 40 to 41, 135, 276, 291; 40, 119; 40:2, 644n9; 40:8, 276; 40:12-14, 634; 40:15, xii, 3, 27-28, 38, 45, 79, 86, 99, 103, 107, 134, 142, 180, 206-16, 218, 219, 225, 227, 232, 249, 258, 26869, 276, 281, 290, 298-99, 342, 356, 364, 366, 374, 379, 482, 490, 491-92, 505, 637, 648nn1, 2; 40:23, 291, 307; 41, 634; 41:10, 634; 41:12, 6-7, 38, 47, 67, 79, 104, 107, 111, 135, 138, 153-54, 164-65, 171, 196, 206, 227, 250, 259, 276, 306, 316, 321, 327, 345, 379, 440, 585; 41:14, 119, 489, 490, 500, 634; 41:15-16, 119, 276, 634; 41:38-40, 113, 276; 41:39, 257, 292, 645n14; 41:40, 289; 41:42, 290; 41:45, 104, 289, 292, 336, 355, 511, 554, 587, 668n18, 670n36; 41:50-52, 336, 356-59, 362, 363, 368-69, 370, 371, 374, 511, 587; 41:51, 289-90, 357-58, 368; 41:52, 292, 357-58; 42:7, 648n1; 42:9-17, 210, 371; 42:13, 299, 648n1;
42:18, 113, 244-46, 276, 352, 652n29; 42:23, 35, 83, 113-14, 208, 238, 276, 369; 42:30, 298; 42:33, 355; 43:16, 297-98, 654n10; 43:25-34, 286-308, 318-19; 43:32, 35, 79, 103, 113, 114-16, 282, 286-308, 310, 312-14, 315, 318, 323-
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Document Page 726 24, 325, 339, 355, 357, 402, 482, 491, 654nn5, 6, 7; 43:33, 298; 44, 347, 491-92, 493, 499, 509, 553; 44:5, 491, 579; 44:9-17, 500; 45 to 50, 276; 45:4-5, 21, 347, 367, 491, 553-54, 573; 45:7, 638; 46:11, 359, 370; 46:34, 116, 287, 298, 306, 363; 47:13-26, 119-120, 125, 145, 174, 195, 219, 234, 241, 404, 490-91, 493, 497, 498, 509, 579; 47:19, 145, 500; 47:20, 497; 47:23, 489; 47:25, 145, 491; 49:6, 342, 345, 657n38; 50, 653-54n4; 50:4-14, 290; 50:24-25, 292, 364, 415, 637, 638 Exodus xiii, xx, 2, 3, 5, 8, 20, 34, 46, 53, 62, 72, 100, 103, 106, 111, 118, 119, 129-32, 136, 145, 147, 151, 195, 214, 218, 236, 268, 292-93, 294, 303, 313, 345-46, 362-63, 394, 421, 426, 429, 458, 459, 469, 482, 520, 524, 565, 569, 581, 587-95, 619, 621, 631, 666n7, 668n16; 1 to 12, 21-23, 26, 47, 50-51, 53, 64, 67, 68, 71, 78, 79, 85, 86, 91, 99, 102, 106, 111, 113, 114, 115-16, 120, 146-53, 161, 195, 196, 204, 226-27, 262, 277-78, 287-308, 309, 324, 341, 344, 345-46, 347, 375, 376-77, 395, 409, 423-25, 426, 428, 440, 441, 456, 459, 467, 470, 474, 475, 485, 489, 491, 517, 519, 529, 539, 542, 543, 545, 546, 547, 549-629, 635-36; 1 to 2, 23, 71, 106, 119, 140, 147, 228, 232-59 passim, 291-92, 326, 343-44, 350-53, 357, 371, 395, 409, 440, 456, 500, 577, 581-83, 585, 610, 613, 619, 620, 621, 624, 669n31; 1, 672n51; 1:1-7, 108, 122-23, 235-37, 245, 251-52;
1:6, 291, 294, 306, 358, 557; 1:1-9, 5, 293, 325-26; 1:8-22, 107-109, 119, 120, 135, 140-41, 145, 148, 166-67, 168, 174, 204, 215, 250, 275, 320, 326, 371, 440, 456, 500, 509-10, 555, 585, 645n15, 671n42; 1:8-16, 121-35, 236-37, 250, 260-61, 265, 306, 320; 1:8, 123, 147, 272, 291-92, 294, 306, 350, 357, 557, 559, 636, 645n14, 657n38; 1:9-10, 4, 54-55, 99, 122-24, 126, 127, 128, 130, 134, 142, 147, 148, 150, 166, 238-41, 246, 257, 258, 260-61, 262, 269, 278, 291-92, 293, 313, 324, 325-26, 337, 342, 348, 351-53, 355, 366, 373, 375, 379-80, 381, 409, 415, 417-18, 423, 429, 458, 469, 554, 565, 566, 613, 645n14; 1:11-12, 124-25, 126, 127, 235, 238, 245, 278, 337, 349, 632; 1:13-14, 125-26, 127, 145, 235, 632, 669n25; 1:15-21, 105, 108, 111, 114-15, 119, 120, 132-33, 140-41, 144, 232-59, 273, 280-82, 302, 313, 323, 338, 342, 343-44, 347, 348, 351-53, 358, 423, 482, 487, 554, 585, 607, 634, 650nn17, 18, 19; 1:15-16, 126-27, 232-47, 280-82, 300, 302, 316, 326, 327, 338, 343-44, 346, 348, 430, 444, 482, 554, 567, 58183, 585, 607, 611, 613, 626, 651n21; 1:16, 4, 101-102, 147, 164, 227, 249-55, 258, 262, 293, 379; 1:17, 242-55, 281, 347, 352, 607, 651n21, 652n29; 1:18, 246-255; 1:19, 128, 133, 134, 227, 247-55, 262-63, 268-69, 275-76, 280-82, 299, 300, 342, 343, 344, 353, 379, 381, 444, 482, 500, 567, 585, 651n24; 1:21, 246, 255, 334, 583, 584, 669n31; 1:22, 111, 119, 120, 127, 128, 132-33, 140-41, 144, 238, 241, 245, 255, 585, 645n16; 2:1-10, 114, 128, 135, 140, 141, 247, 255-59, 299, 326, 328-78 passim, 395, 397, 607, 656-57n38, 669n31; 2:1-3, 255-56, 328-30; 2:1, 258, 329, 372, 373; 2:2-3, 329-30, 331, 338; 2:3, 331; 2:4, 256, 329; 2:4-9, 255-59, 273, 298, 316, 323, 329-31, 333-37, 348, 352-53, 358, 482, 554, 581-83, 607, 621, 634; 2:5-6, 329, 330, 338, 381; 2:6, 79, 135, 153-54, 227, 258, 261, 280-82, 331, 340, 343, 345, 352, 369-70, 374, 379; 2:7, 3, 7, 86, 135, 141, 227, 258-59, 263, 268-69, 280-82, 330, 331, 333, 343, 345, 369-70, 379, 381, 444, 482, 500, 567, 585;
2:8, 135, 258-59, 275-76, 330, 331, 373, 585; 2:8-9, 241, 258-59, 330-31; 2:9-11, 328-38; 2:10, 114, 259, 330-38, 339, 342-43, 346, 353-54, 355-56, 359-60, 368-71, 373, 374, 655nn18, 19, 20, 656n37; 2:11-15, 21, 27, 31, 67, 72, 79, 86, 225, 261, 324-77, 379, 381, 395, 397, 402, 403, 411, 412, 421-25, 459, 482, 485, 487, 598, 632, 655n23, 659n3; 2:11, 326, 331, 338-53, 364, 374, 558, 567, 573; 2:12, 344, 349, 355, 374, 406, 408, 423, 566, 573, 655n24; 2:13-14, 246, 340, 341, 344, 349-53, 370, 404, 406-407, 420, 485, 505, 510, 511, 514, 535, 555, 557, 562, 566, 580, 610, 620, 632, 633, 637, 655n25; 2:15-22, 353-77, 634, 669n31; 2:15, 329, 336, 350, 358, 361, 362, 366-67, 371, 375, 406, 466; 2:16-17, 371; 2:17, 360, 361; 2:19, 318, 355, 371, 471; 2:20-21, 355, 361, 362, 371; 2:22, 355-72, 374-75, 485-86, 637, 656n30; 2:23, 358, 361, 369, 371, 374; 2:24, 371; 3 to 4:17, 20, 79, 80, 114, 151, 152, 259-78, 299, 327-28, 329, 338, 344, 353, 354, 356, 359, 361, 369, 371, 37278, 395; 3:1, 371; 3:6-17, 262; 3:6-10, 259-61, 263, 264, 266, 372; 3:6, 329, 656n38; 3:8, 20, 366, 374, 375; 3:9, 374; 3:11, 376-77; 3:13-15, 263-67, 269, 273, 274, 315, 375-76, 633, 652n32, 656n32; 3:17, 375; 3:18, 79, 80,
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Document Page 727 114, 151, 152, 259, 261-78, 299, 327-28, 344, 354, 376-77, 391, 413, 500, 518, 548, 607, 633, 639n2, 640n10, 652nn33, 34; 3:19-22, 269; 3:21-22, 151, 259, 335, 576-77, 665n7, 668n17; 4:1, 354; 4:2-9, 354; 4:10-16, 269, 273-74, 369, 652-53n35; 4:13, 264; 4:24-26, 261, 370; 4:27-31, 266, 268; 5:1-3, 20, 80, 114, 152, 167, 234, 259, 262, 270-78, 302, 376-79, 634, 652n35, 656nn36, 37; 5:1, 151, 270-78, 279, 327-28, 378-79, 503; 5:2, 147-49, 152, 271-78, 280, 292, 548, 559, 633, 636, 657n38; 5:3, 274-78, 279, 379, 518, 548, 607, 633, 636, 639n2, 640n10; 5:6ff., 236, 274; 5:20-21, 580-81; 6:1, 360-62; 6:2-3, 272, 652n32; 6:6-7, 373; 6:12, 269, 273-74; 6:16-20, 359, 583; 6:30, 269, 273-74; 7 to 12, 85, 91, 115, 117-18, 130, 131, 144, 146-49, 150, 241, 277-78, 290, 366-67, 447, 517, 519, 546-47, 54950, 576-77, 634; 7:3, 573-74; 7:16, 21, 50, 115, 119, 268, 277-78, 376, 391, 413, 518, 548, 633, 640n10; 8:14-15, 151; 8:21-23, 117-18, 140, 167, 194, 268, 272, 298, 303, 306; 9:1, 21, 50, 115, 119, 262, 268, 277-78, 376, 391, 413, 518, 548, 633, 640n10; 9:11-12, 151;
9:13, 21, 50, 115, 119, 268, 277-78, 376, 391, 413, 518, 548, 633, 640n10; 9:20-21, 151; 10:2, 147, 518, 559-61, 592; 10:3, 21, 50, 115, 119, 268, 277-78, 376, 391, 413, 518, 548, 560, 633, 640n10; 10:7-11, 554, 580, 582, 607, 611, 613, 654n4; 10:7-8, 151; 10:9, 613; 10:10-11, 645n18; 10:11, 360-62; 10:24-26, 576-77, 613, 654n4; 11:1, 645n18, 672n42; 11:2-3, 151, 575, 576-77, 607; 11:8, 151; 12:1ff., 475, 551; 12:12, 277-78, 391, 517; 12:23, 277-78, 517; 12:24-13:16, 560-61; 12:27-29, 255; 12:29-32, 146-48, 151, 152-53, 347, 421; 12:30-36, 151; 12:32, 576-77; 12:35-36, 259, 276, 335, 575, 577, 607; 12:38, 21, 554-55, 576-77, 621; 12:39-51, 23, 46-47, 145-49, 255, 341, 361, 375, 412, 421, 429, 466, 484, 489, 505, 509, 522, 524, 548-49, 551, 557, 563, 592, 635, 638, 668n17; 12:39, 360-62; 12:51-13:17, 525-26; 13:1-16, 551, 671n38; 13:14, 592; 13:15, 572-75; 13:19, 292, 364, 415, 637, 638;
14, 134, 167, 168, 453, 636; 14:5, 633, 635, 636; 14:10-12, 485-86, 551, 580-81; 15:1-19, 622; 15:16, 489; 15:20-21, 632; 16 to 17:7, 580-81; 16:2ff., 485-86, 508, 620, 637-38; 16:20, 414; 17:1ff., 485-86; 17:15, 186; 18, 239-40, 354; 18:3-4, 358-59, 361, 368, 370, 656n30; 18:14-26, 239-40, 565-66, 651n27, 652n31; 18:26, 584, 616; 19:1, 522, 550-51, 563, 571; 20:1-17, 22, 441, 474, 492, 528, 558-59, 560, 590; 20:2, 558; 20:3-4, xxi-xxii, 155, 157-58, 205, 216-18; 20:9-10, 558-59, 565; 20:13, 530; 20:24ff., 473; 21:1, 473, 474, 510, 550-51, 553; 21:2-22:16, 475; 21:2-11, 3, 4, 9, 20-22, 25-26, 27, 28, 38, 64, 65, 67, 75, 79, 136, 176-77, 353, 378-81, 384, 397, 426-525, 53132, 534-35, 536-638, 639n4; 21:2-6, 3, 4, 6, 9, 12, 38, 47, 50, 58, 80, 86, 136, 138, 139, 193, 268, 353, 378-79, 426-638 passim, 662n3, 663nn6, 7, 14, 668n16, 669n25, 670n33, 672n48; 21:2-4, 440-41, 443-44, 477, 479, 480, 482, 484, 497, 509-11, 512, 514, 515-16, 519, 580, 668-69n20; 21:2, 3, 4, 6, 9, 12, 38, 47, 50, 58, 80, 86, 136, 138, 139, 193, 268, 353, 378-79, 426-504, 509, 514-15, 516, 517, 531, 543, 550-51, 552, 553, 555, 557, 558-59, 561-62, 563, 567-70, 572-75, 578, 579, 582, 583, 585, 591, 599, 603, 605-606, 613, 614, 616, 617-18, 630, 632-33, 639n2, 659n9, 660nn10, 16, 17, 18, 661-62n29, 662nn4, 8, 670n33;
21:3-4, 596, 599-605; 21:3, 445, 479, 507, 510-11, 580, 582, 583, 586-87, 599-602, 604-605, 608, 610, 613, 614, 670n33; 21:4, 485, 507, 510-11, 514, 554-55, 557, 580, 581, 582, 583, 586-87, 599-602, 604-605, 608, 609, 610; 21:5-6, 440-41, 443-44, 477, 479, 480, 482, 484, 497, 503, 504-19, 557, 587-88, 609-11, 624, 638, 663n15, 664n17, 668-69n20; 21:5, 447, 507, 508, 509, 510-11, 513, 514, 516, 517, 580, 583, 586, 587-88, 599, 601, 609-11, 663n14; 21:6, 430, 509, 513, 514-19, 566, 574, 583, 591, 598, 615, 617, 664n1; 21:7-11, 445, 457, 477-78, 552, 555-57, 558, 578, 581-83, 584-86, 596, 611-15, 662nn31, 3, 668n19, 669n30, 670nn33, 35; 21:7, 476, 477-78, 498, 556, 583, 586-87, 611-14, 630, 662n31, 670nn33, 34, 671nn44, 45; 21:8, 499, 552, 556, 561, 606, 612, 613, 647n11, 668n19, 670n34; 21:9-11, 552, 557, 587; 21:10, 185, 613; 21:11, 575; 21:12-22:17, 475; 21:13, 475, 476; 21:14, 475, 476; 21:16, 490, 499-500, 558, 631-32, 633; 21:20-21, 582, 670n33; 21:23, 475; 21:26-27, 444, 447, 582, 670n33, 672n45; 21:32, 582, 670n33; 22:2, 477-78, 487, 489, 491, 495, 499, 516, 605; 22:12, 475; 22:17, 475; 22:18, 475; 22:20, 364, 551; 22:21ff., 475; 22:28-29, 551, 565; 23:4-5, 602-604, 606, 611, 613, 671n43; 23:9, 551; 23:10-12, 441, 565;
23:14-19, 565; 24:3-8, 560; 28:32, 186; 31:18-34:32, 528, 560; 32:2-4, 621; 32:2, 620; 32:6, 620;
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Document Page 728 32:19, 620; 32:26-28, 637n38; 34:11-17, 580; 34:14, 185; 35, 621 Leviticus 434, 534, 664nn1, 5, 668n16, 669n25; 18, 307, 623; 18:23, 623; 20:27, 623; 22:11, 489; 24:10-23, 533-34, 536, 544, 557, 587, 670n36; 24:10-13, 645n18; 24:10-11, 587, 621, 628; 25:14-16, 436; 25:23, 436; 25:25-28, 436; 25:29, 436; 25:33-34, 436; 25:35-38, 435, 479; 25:39-46, 431, 434-38, 439, 474, 479; 25:39-43, 434-38, 439, 447, 448, 454, 464, 465, 477-79, 483, 490, 495, 496-97, 499, 506, 507, 514, 548-50, 570, 585, 588, 659nn5, 6, 661n22, 663n7, 668n16, 669n25, 670n35, 672n45; 25:39-41, 436; 25:39, 435-36, 454, 477-79, 480, 495, 496-97; 25:40, 436, 497; 25:42-43, 435-36, 549, 669n25; 25:44-46, 436-37, 456, 604, 669n25; 25:47-55, 442, 474, 499;
25:47-51, 436; 25:55, 549 Numbers 5:1-4, 623; 5:5-10, 623; 6:1-21, 623; 11:4-6, 304, 505, 508, 555, 637-38; 11:12-15, 240; 11:24-30, 651-52n27; 12, 620-21, 622; 12:1, 634; 12:10, 297; 14:26-35, 563, 571, 581; 15:32-36, 536; 16:27, 621; 16:34, 285-86; 18:8ff., 623; 20:1, 620; 20:7-13, 271, 364, 378; 22 to 24, 148, 228, 471; 25, 587; 26:57-58, 359; 26:63-65, 563, 571, 581; 27:1-11, 623; 30, 670n32; 30:2-16, 623; 36:1-12, 623 Deuteronomy 407, 410, 454, 455, 457, 459, 474, 501, 502, 522, 528, 540-41, 565, 587-95, 596-98, 604, 615-17, 618-26, 631, 664n2, 666-67n7, 668n16, 671n38; 1:1-2, 522, 623; 1:5, 565, 616, 618-19;
1:15-17, 565-66; 1:34-39, 563, 571, 581; 2:10-11, 314; 2:14-16, 563, 571, 581; 3:9, 214; 3:11, 314; 4:1, 671n38; 4:2, 615-17; 4:5, 671n38; 4:9-14, 590, 592-95; 5:2ff., 590, 592-95; 5:6-18, 22, 441, 474, 492, 590; 5:7-8, xxi-xxii, 155, 157-58, 205, 216-18; 5:17, 530; 5:28, 671n38; 6:1, 671n3; 6:6-9, 594, 671n38; 6:7, 372, 593-94, 670n37; 7:1-6, 457, 590; 8:3, 120, 508; 9:1, 407; 9:24, 350; 10:19, 364; 11:2-10, 592; 11:18-20, 594, 671n38; 12:1-3, 590; 12:29-31, 307; 13:1, 615-17; 13:17, 623; 14:12, 192; 15:1-11, 479, 492, 498, 565;
15:1, 667n10; 15:2-3, 192; 15:7-11, 435; 15:9, 667n10; 15:12-18, 3, 20-23, 26, 27, 28, 44, 64, 65, 67, 75, 79, 352, 378-81, 384, 397, 426-474, 477-83, 494-525, 531-32, 534-35, 536-50, 551, 555, 557, 562, 563-80, 586-633, 639n4, 663n6, 668n16, 670n33, 672n48; 15:12-15, 440, 443-44, 477, 479, 482, 497, 509-10, 511-13, 514-16, 532, 580, 609-11; 15:12, 4, 47, 50, 80, 151, 340-41, 346, 352, 364, 378, 428-74, 476, 477-83, 494-504, 509, 512, 514, 517, 531, 552, 558, 567-68, 570, 572-76, 577, 578-79, 582, 583, 586, 587, 588, 591, 597, 598, 601, 603, 604, 608-609, 611-15, 617-26, 630, 632-33, 655n22, 659nn3, 9, 660n10, 661-62n29, 662n31, 662nn3, 4, 7, 8, 14, 672n45; 15:13-15, 574-77; 15:13, 151, 434, 445-47, 450, 463, 467, 512, 575-77; 15:14, 448, 454-55, 458, 461, 497, 503, 506, 507, 512, 513, 519, 570, 576-77, 578, 579, 591, 598, 601, 606, 615, 618, 622, 624, 637, 665n7, 669n27; 15:15, 466, 512, 514, 519, 549, 551, 565, 566, 592, 598, 618, 628, 630; 15:16-17, 440, 443-44, 445, 477, 479, 482, 497, 503, 504-19, 532, 578-79, 583, 588, 601, 609, 638, 663n15, 664n17; 15:16, 498, 508, 509, 513-15, 516, 517, 580, 586, 599, 611, 663n14; 15:17, 430, 509, 515-19, 566, 574-75, 576, 583, 586-87, 588, 591, 598, 599, 601, 609, 614, 615, 617, 618-26, 630; 15:18, 434, 440, 445-47, 450, 463, 467, 503, 512-13, 515, 519, 532, 534-35, 546, 573-74, 598, 618, 622, 630; 15:19-20, 565; 16:1-8, 565; 16:9-12, 565; 16:13, 565; 16:18-20, 565-66; 17:2, 623; 17:5, 623; 17:8-20, 565-66; 17:15, 192, 462; 17:16, 637; 17:18-20, 541, 594; 17:18-19, 528, 541-42, 578, 590, 591, 592-93, 617, 637; 18:9-15, 307;
20:7, 185; 20:16-18, 457; 21:15-17, 623; 21:16, 187, 188; 21:18-21, 623; 22:1-4, 602-604, 606, 611, 613; 22:5, 623; 22:18, 623; 23:7, 307; 23:8, 364, 670n36; 23:21, 192; 24:7, 499-500, 558, 631-32, 633; 24:9, 621; 28:30, 185; 28:37, 594; 28:68, 637; 28:69, 595, 596, 606, 608, 609; 29:10-15, 623-24; 29:14-15, 593; 29:17, 623; 29:19, 528; 30:11-14, 616; 31:9-13, 528, 593-95, 616, 624; 31:24-26, 151; 32:6, 489; 32:21, 185; 32:48-52, 364, 378; 33:9, 657n38 Joshua 9, 38-39, 46-47, 73-74, 148, 520, 642n28, 646n27; 1:7-8, 594;
2, 234; 3 to 4, 412, 415; 5:2-9, 261,518, 546, 548, 652n30; 5:9, 261, 518, 652n30; 5:13, 302, 408; 8:32, 541-42, 578, 590, 591, 592-93, 617; 9:22-27, 661n25; 15:4, 210; 15:9, 148-49; 15:47, 210; 18:15, 148-49; 24:2-3, 24, 34, 41, 98, 143, 391; 24:32, 364, 415, 637, 638
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Document Page 729 Judges 38, 46-47, 73-74, 93, 118, 520; 3 to 4, 151; 4 to 5, 237; 4:9, 497; 6 to 8, 237; 9, 47, 73, 165; 9:28, 272; 10:11-14, 277; 11, 30, 47, 73; 13 to 16, 93; 13:17-18, 264; 17:7, 365, 368; 18:30, 365, 368; 19:12, 186-87, 192, 647n10; 19:26, 485 Samuel 3, 8, 26, 66, 95, 96, 100, 103, 106, 108, 113, 141, 142, 196, 209, 214, 261, 422-25, 426, 650n16 I Samuel 4, 21-22, 26, 27, 34, 44, 47, 62, 65, 69, 72, 78, 79, 90, 95, 96, 100, 106, 108, 113, 118, 130, 141, 142, 226, 232, 261, 284, 303, 309, 326, 381, 391-425, 426, 428, 429, 482, 607, 672n51; 4 to 6, 118, 141, 149-53, 394, 422-25, 549; 4:5, 92; 4:6-9, 83-85, 90, 91, 93, 94, 95, 99, 106, 142-43, 392, 396, 398; 4:8-9, 4, 95, 96, 97, 101, 107, 135, 140, 150-51, 267-68, 284, 286, 327, 332-33, 392, 396, 398, 404, 418, 482, 566, 658n8; 4:10-6:18, 118, 149-53, 347; 4:17-22, 151; 5:1-6:18, 150-53; 5:1-5, 152;
5:6, 142-43; 5:7-8, 96, 404, 421; 5:10, 96, 404, 421; 5:11, 96, 136-37, 404, 421; 6:3-9, 4, 404, 421; 6:3, 96, 151, 576; 6:5, 96; 6:6, 97, 150, 152, 566; 7:14, 329-30; 8, 666n7; 8:11-18, 119; 9:9, 542; 10:9, 185; 10:21-24, 414; 10:25-27, 407; 10:25-11:15, 407, 409, 415, 421-22; 11:1, 407; 11:7, 407; 11:13, 422; 13 to 14, 27, 40, 67, 141, 378-425, 426, 428, 429, 449, 461, 464, 465, 466-67, 472, 473, 479, 481-83, 492, 504, 522, 539, 546, 566, 569, 632, 633, 638, 657nn1, 2, 3, 4, 658nn7, 8, 12-17, 661n23, 662n30; 13:2, 407; 13:3-4, 381-86, 391-93, 405-13, 415; 13:3, 80, 378, 381-86, 475, 482, 492, 566, 657n1, 658nn7, 8, 12; 13:5-7, 658n13; 13:5, 386, 397, 408, 415; 13:6-9, 397; 13:6-7, 386-91; 13:6, 386-91, 397-98, 413-15; 13:7, 80, 313, 378, 380-84, 386-405, 408, 413-15, 416-25, 517, 566, 658nn7, 8, 12, 13; 13:19-20, 394;
13:19, 90, 92, 95, 97, 101, 116, 140, 282-86, 299-300, 392, 396, 404, 482, 653n3; 14:6, 93; 14:11, 35, 90, 94, 135, 136-37, 251, 392, 394, 402, 404, 409, 414, 420, 482; 14:12, 92-93, 98-99, 414, 420; 14:20, 658n17; 14:21-23, 383, 414, 415, 421, 505; 14:21, 58, 80, 313, 378, 380-84, 391-405, 408, 415, 416-25, 505, 566, 633, 658nn5, 7, 12, 15, 17; 15, 663n10; 16:1-3, 262-63; 17, 237; 17:5-7, 643n1; 17:25, 446; 17:26, 93; 17:36, 93; 18:25-27, 93; 21:1, 398; 22:5, 398; 25:42, 398; 27:11, 424; 27:12, 95, 96, 141, 398, 423-24, 505, 506; 28 to 31, 141; 29:1, 92; 29:3-10, 398, 423-24; 29:3, 35, 47, 90, 92, 94, 95, 96, 101, 138, 140, 150, 275-76, 286, 394, 398, 404, 409, 423, 425, 462, 466, 482, 506, 642n28, 657n4; 29:4-5, 141, 275-76, 398; 29:6-7, 92, 141; 29:8, 275-76, 500; 30:26-31, 95, 398; 31:4, 93, 379 II Samuel 100, 103, 423-25;
1:19-27, 93, 412; 3:14, 93; 4:17-25, 141; 7:23, 188; 11, 317; 15:19-20, 192; 20, 73; 22:26-27, 269 Kings 147, 194, 201,538, 642n28 I Kings 3:16-28, 534; 3:27, 523-24; 5:16-25, 213; 8:4, 187; 8:65, 210; 9:16, 134; 11 to 12, 117, 170; 18:17-18, 248; 21:19, 133 II Kings 4:1-7, 492, 613, 667n13; 7:6, 136; 18:19-35, 270, 271; 18:21, 136; 18:26-28, 2, 83, 270; 22 to 23, 519, 526, 589; 24:7, 210 Isaiah 11:8, 645n21; 19:2, 347;
19:18, 1-2, 147, 194, 213, 316, 347, 643n2, 649n4; 27:12, 210; 36:11, 2; 45:19, 330; 49:17, 419-20; 50:1, 492; 52:3, 497; 56:3-7, 192, 194; 58:6, 447; 59:16, 374; 63:11, 655n19 Jeremiah xvi, 22-23, 58, 66, 69, 76, 151, 164, 230, 280, 642n28, 643n23, 650n16, 668n16; 1:13-16, 638; 34 to 52, 633-39, 672n51; 34:1, 522; 34:7, 523, 541-45, 633; 34:8-17, xiii, 3, 4, 6-7, 20-22, 26, 27, 44-46, 50, 62, 64, 65, 67-68, 69, 79, 80, 88, 151, 196, 204-205, 228, 230, 378-81, 384, 426-30, 432, 436, 437, 438-72, 478-83, 491, 492, 494, 505, 506-507, 509, 514, 517, 519, 520-25, 528, 532, 534, 536-48, 549, 550, 551, 555, 557, 562, 563-72, 578-80, 609, 613, 614, 617, 618, 619, 620, 621, 622, 626, 627, 629-38, 639n4, 642n28, 646n23, 661n27, 662n30, 668n16, 672n51; 34:8-11,445, 544-48, 633; 34:8, 544-45; 34:9, 4, 44, 49, 50, 68, 71, 427, 428-30, 434, 442, 445-47, 449, 450, 461-63, 467, 468, 471, 545, 547, 548, 552, 567-68, 570, 578, 579, 582, 583, 617, 619, 626, 633; 34:10, 434, 445-47, 450, 463, 467, 505; 34:11, 434, 445-47, 450, 463, 467, 505, 546, 548, 633; 34:12-17, 428-29, 466,
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543-44, 546-48, 566, 571, 630-31; 34:12-14, 378-79; 34:13-14, 672n50; 34:13, 68, 551, 566, 632; 34:14, 4, 44, 68, 428-30, 434, 442, 445-47, 450, 459, 463, 467, 494, 501, 502, 509, 520, 521, 526, 532, 534, 536, 543-44, 547, 566, 579, 590, 630, 632-33, 667nn10, 13; 34:15, 547; 34:16, 432, 445-47, 450, 463, 467, 548, 633; 34:17, 445, 442, 450, 459, 519, 528, 547, 548, 632, 635; 34:19, 637; 34:22, 637; 36:32, 185; 37:4, 634; 37:5-10, 633; 37:12-14, 634; 37:15-16, 634; 37:18, 634; 38:1-3, 634; 38:4, 634; 38:6, 634; 38:7-13, 634; 38:7, 634, 672n50; 39:5-10, 637; 39:10, 505, 637; 39:11 to 40:5, 634-35; 40:10, 505, 637; 42:14ff., 637; 42:17-18, 638; 43:10-13, 117, 170; 44:14, 638;
44:28, 638 Ezekiel 16:3, 471, 492; 16:45-58, 471, 492; 21:5-10, 548; 23, 670n36; 33:30-33, 548 Joel 3:3, 497 Amos 2:6, 497; 3:3, 41, 66; 8:6, 489, 497; 9:7, 194, 634 Obadiah 1:11, 192 Jonah 1:8-9, 3, 7, 27-28, 31, 44, 45, 66, 67, 79, 80, 86, 137, 138, 160, 206-16, 223, 225, 226-27, 228, 232, 244, 275, 27677, 309-10, 316, 402, 440, 441, 520 Nahum 2:13, 645n21; 10:28, 648n13; 13:3, 648n13 Malachi 3:17, 330 Psalms 202 8:2, 331; 18:26-27, 269; 78:51, 144; 81:6, 114; 93:15, 152;
103:13, 330; 105:13, 186; 105:17, 498; 105:23, 144; 105:27, 144; 119:13, 530; 137:4, 192 Proverbs 195, 489, 647n11; 2:16, 185; 14:26-27, 245; 22:7, 492; 23:23, 497; 24:17, 53; 27:2, 192-93, 462; 30:21-23, 195-96, 202, 668n19; 31:29, 252 Job 1:4-5, 610; 3:19, 447; 21:10, 235, 251; 31:10, 185; 39:5, 446 Ruth 629; 2:8, 187; 2:10, 187, 188; 4, 489; 4:7, 523-24, 542 Ecclesiastes 3:1-8, 25;
4:12, 523-24, 542 Esther 2:5, 2; 3:8, 456, 648n13; 4:14, 185 Ezra 4:7ff., 83; 10:10, 192 Nehemiah 5:1-5, 617; 5:4-13, 492; 5:5, 185; 13:3, 555; 13:23-24, 2, 643n2 Chronicles 520 I Chronicles 1:8, 145; 1:12, 144; 2:3-4, 670n36; 2:34-35, 670n36; 4:39-41, 144-45 II Chronicles 1:4ff., 144; 7:8, 210; 14:12-15, 145; 32:18, 2
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MEIR STERNBERG is Artzt Professor of Poetics and Comparative Literature at Tel Aviv University, the editor of Poetics Today, and Israel Prize laureate. His works include Expositional Modes and Temporal Ordering in Fiction and The Poetics of Biblical Narrative.
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