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125 4 2006
Voyages with John
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Robert Kysar
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VOLUME 125, NO. 4
Bishlam’s Archival Search Report in Nehemiah’s Archive: Multiple Introductions and Reverse Chronological Order as Clues to the Origin of the Aramaic Letters in Ezra 4–6 Richard C. Steiner 641–685 Proverbs 8:22–31: Three Perspectives on Its Composition Alan Lenzi 687–714 Analogical Reasoning in Romans 7:2–4: A Woman and the Believers in Rome Peter Spitaler 715–747 Taming the Shrew, Shrike, and Shrimp: The Form and Function of Zoological Classification in Psalm 8 Richard Whitekettle 749–765 What Becomes of the Angel’s “Wives”? A Text-Critical Study of 1 Enoch 19:2 Kelley Coblentz Bautch 766–780 Did Paul Loathe Manual Labor? Revisiting the Work of Ronald F. Hock on the Apostle’s Tentmaking and Social Class Todd D. Still 781–795 Book Reviews
797–831
Annual Index
845–848 US ISSN:0021-9231
th anniversary issue
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JOURNAL OF BIBLICAL LITERATURE PUBLISHED QUARTERLY BY THE
SOCIETY OF BIBLICAL LITERATURE (Constituent Member of the American Council of Learned Societies) EDITORS OF THE JOURNAL General Editor: JAMES C. VANDERKAM, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN 46556 Book Review Editor: CHRISTINE ROY YODER, Columbia Theological Seminary, Decatur, GA 30031 Associate Book Review Editor: TODD C. PENNER, Austin College, Sherman, TX 75090
EDITORIAL BOARD Term Expiring 2006: THOMAS B. DOZEMAN, United Theological Seminary, Dayton, OH 45406 PAUL B. DUFF, George Washington University, Washington, DC 20052 CAROLE R. FONTAINE, Andover Newton Theological School, Newton Centre, MA 02459 JUDITH LIEU, King’s College London, London WC2R 2LS United Kingdom MARTTI NISSINEN, University of Helsinki, FIN-00014 Finland KATHLEEN M. O’CONNOR, Columbia Theological Seminary, Decatur, GA 30031 EUNG CHUN PARK, San Francisco Theological Seminary, San Anselmo, CA 94960 TURID KARLSEN SEIM, University of Oslo, N-0315 Oslo, Norway BENJAMIN D. SOMMER, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL 60645 VINCENT L. WIMBUSH, Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, CA 91711 2007: MOSHE BERNSTEIN, Yeshiva University, New York, NY 10033-3201 JOHN ENDRES, Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94709 JO ANN HACKETT, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138 MATTHIAS HENZE, Rice University, Houston, TX 77251 ROBERT KUGLER, Lewis & Clark College, Portland, OR 97219 TIMOTHY LIM, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh EH1 2LX Scotland STEPHEN MOORE, Drew University, Madison, NJ 07940 STEPHEN PATTERSON, Eden Theological Seminary, St. Louis, MO 63119 EMERSON POWERY, Lee University, Cleveland, TN 37312 ADELE REINHARTZ, Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, ON N2L 3C5 Canada RICHARD STEINER, Yeshiva University, New York, NY 10033-3201 SZE-KAR WAN, Andover Newton Theological School, Newton Centre, MA 02459 2008: ELLEN B. AITKEN, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec H3A 2T5 Canada MICHAEL JOSEPH BROWN, Emory University, Atlanta, GA 30322 TERENCE L. DONALDSON, Wycliffe College, Toronto, ON M5S 1H7 Canada STEVEN FRIESEN, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO 65211 JENNIFER GLANCY, Le Moyne College, Syracuse, New York 13214 A. KATHERINE GRIEB, Virginia Theological Seminary, Alexandria, VA 22304 ARCHIE C. C. LEE, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin New Territories, Hong Kong SAR DANIEL MARGUERAT, Université de Lausanne, CH-1015 Lausanne, Switzerland RICHARD D. NELSON, Perkins School of Theology, So. Methodist Univ., Dallas, TX 75275 DAVID L. PETERSEN, Candler School of Theology, Emory University, Atlanta, GA 30322 YVONNE SHERWOOD, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, Scotland, G12 8QQ, United Kingdom LOREN T. STUCKENBRUCK, University of Durham, Durham, England, DH1 3RS, United Kingdom PATRICIA K. TULL, Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, Louisville, KY 40205 Editorial Assistant: Monica Brady, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN 46556 President of the Society: Robert A. Kraft, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104-6304; Vice President: Katharine Doob Sakenfeld, Princeton Theological Seminary, Princeton, NJ 08542; Chair, Research and Publications Committee: Benjamin G. Wright III, Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA 18015; Executive Director: Kent H. Richards, Society of Biblical Literature, 825 Houston Mill Road, Suite 350, Atlanta, GA 30329. The Journal of Biblical Literature (ISSN 0021–9231) is published quarterly. The annual subscription price is US$35.00 for members and US$150.00 for nonmembers. Institutional rates are also available. For information regarding subscriptions and membership, contact: Society of Biblical Literature, Customer Service Department, P.O. Box 133158, Atlanta, GA 30333. Phone: 866-727-9955 (toll free) or 404-727-9498. FAX: 404-727-2419.E-mail:
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JBL 125, no. 4 (2006): 641–685
Bishlam’s Archival Search Report in Nehemiah’s Archive: Multiple Introductions and Reverse Chronological Order as Clues to the Origin of the Aramaic Letters in Ezra 4–6 richard c. steiner
[email protected] Yeshiva University, New York, NY 10033
)t%;#o;#$ax;t%ar:)a-l(a wtfw$nFk%; r)f#$;w% l)'b;+f tdFr:t;mi Mlf#$;b%i btak%f )t%f#o;#$ax;t%ar:)a ym'ybiw4:7 , p .tymirF)j Mg%fr:tum;w, tymirF)j bw,tk%f NwFt%;#$;n,Iha btfk;w, srFp%f K7leme )t%;#o;#$ax;t%ar:)al; Mle#$;w,ry:-l(a hdFxj hrFg,:)i w,btak%; )rFp;sf y#$am;#$iw: M('+;-l('b%; Mw,xr:8 .)mfn"k%; )k%fl;ma )y"lfp;r@ :+a )y"kft;sar:pa)jwA )y"nFyd%I NwOht;wFnFk%; r)f#$;w, )rFp;sf y#$am;#$iw: M('+;-l('b%; Mw,xr: NyIdA)9V .)y"mfl;(' ()whd) )y"hfd%E )y"kfn:#$aw,#$ )y"lfb;bf y"wFk%;r:)a )y"sfr:pf)j r)f#$;w, NyIrFm;#$f yd%I hyFr:qib%; w$m%hi bt'w$hw: )rFyq%iyAw: )b%frA rp@anAs;)f ylig;ha yd%I )y,Fm%a)u r)f#$;w10 , .tnE(ek;w, hrFhjnA-rba(j #$nF)V K7ydFb;(a )k%fl;ma )t%;#o;#$ax;t%ar:)a-l(a yhiw$l(j w,xla#$; yd%I )t%fr:g%A)i NgE#$erp : %a @ hnFd11 %: .tnE(ek;w, hrFhjnA-rba(j 4:7And
in the days of Artaxerxes, Bishlam (together with) Mithredath, Tabeel and the rest of his colleagues wrote to Artaxerxes, king of Persia; the letter was written in Aramaic and translated into Aramaic:
This article is dedicated to the librarians of Yeshiva University, who have worked tirelessly to assist me in preparing it. They are truly worthy heirs of the ancient bibliophylakes discussed below. I am very grateful, as well, to Sara Japhet and Bezalel Porten for their many incisive comments on earlier versions of this article. They are not responsible for the mistakes that remain. Finally, I would like to thank Paul-Alain Beaulieu, Willy Clarysse, Barry L. Eichler, Menachem Jacobowitz, Janet H. Johnson, Aaron J. Koller, and S. Z. Leiman for their generous help.
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Journal of Biblical Literature 125, no. 4 (2006) 8Rehum the commissioner and Shimshai the scribe wrote a letter about Jerusalem
to King Artaxerxes as follows: Rehum the commissioner and Shimshai the scribe and the rest of their colleagues, the Dinaites, the Apharsathchites, the Tarpelites, the Apharsites, the Archevites, the Babylonians, the Susanchites, the Dehavites, the Elamites,1 10and the other peoples whom the great and glorious Asenappar deported and settled in the cities of Samaria and the rest of Across-the-River—and now, 11this is a copy of the letter which they sent him: To King Artaxerxes (from) your servants, the men of Across-the-River. And now . . . 9Then
The first Aramaic section in Ezra (4:8–6:18), consisting of four letters (letters to and from Artaxerxes I together with letters to and from Darius I) plus narrative, presents several literary problems. One is the order: the Artaxerxes I correspondence is presented before the Darius I correspondence, even though Darius I is the earlier king. This “incorrect” (reverse chronological) order stands in striking contrast to the “correct” (chronological) order in 6:14: “by the decree of Cyrus and Darius and Artaxerxes.” What is the reason for this discrepancy? Another problem is the lack of coherence at the beginning of the section. From ancient times to the present day, exegetes have struggled to understand how the first four Aramaic verses, Ezra 4:8–11, relate to Ezra 4:7 and to each other. Kurt Galling called this “an old crux interpretum.”2 Loring W. Batten threw up his hands in despair: It would be difficult to find a more corrupt text than vv. 7–11. At first sight the case seems quite hopeless, for while there can be but a single letter, there are two sets of complainants, and there are three different introductions. The whole is so confused in MT. that we seem balked at every point.3
In this article, I shall argue that Ezra 4:7–11, with its “three different introductions,” preserves traces of four documentary strata—a quotation within a quotation within a quotation set within a Hebrew-Aramaic narrative framework. In other words, I hope to show that the appearance of multiple introductions is the telltale sign of a complex literary tell. Patient excavation of this tell (in reverse chronological order, of course!) will unearth two archives, one belonging to Nehemiah and the other belonging to Bishlam and his colleagues. Buried deep in these archives is a new solution to the aforementioned problems of Ezra 4:7–6:18, a solution that also makes good sense of two expressions labeled “senseless” by scholars: tymr) Mgrtmw tymr) bwtk Nwt#nh btkw in 4:7 and Nyd) in 4:9.
1 The
translation of 4:9b follows AV; see Appendix 1 below. Galling, “Kronzeugen des Artaxerxes? Eine Interpretation von Esra 4,9 f.,” ZAW 63
2 Kurt
(1951): 70. 3 Loring W. Batten, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Books of Ezra and Nehemiah (ICC; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1913), 166.
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I. Authenticity Before beginning our tale of two archives, it is necessary to say a word about the authenticity of the four Aramaic letters in Ezra 4–6, in view of the claim of some scholars that they are Hellenistic fabrications.4 A simmering debate over this issue came to a boil in 1896, when Eduard Meyer argued in Die Entstehung des Judentums that the Aramaic letters in Ezra are copies of official documents.5 Though sharply criticized by Julius Wellhausen, Charles C. Torrey, and others, Meyer lived to see the publication of a Babylonian cuneiform tablet from year 20 of Darius (502 B.C.E.) containing a reference to Tattannu pih…āt6 Ebir Nāri, clearly identical to txp yntt hrhn rb(, whose letter (Ezra 5:6–17) is from year 2 of Darius (520 B.C.E.).7 This tablet is far from the only subsequent discovery to support Meyer’s case. Ten years after his book appeared, Imperial Aramaic documents were discovered at Elephantine. Meyer hailed this discovery in a new book, asserting that the striking agreement in style and wording between the Elephantine documents and the Aramaic documents in Ezra made any further doubt about the authenticity of the latter impossible.8 Meyer could have added that the Elephantine papyri shed new light on some of the Aramaic phrases in Ezra 4–6 that he had discussed. Take, for example, the phrase hm# rcb##, “a man named Sheshbazzar,” in Tattenai’s letter (5:14). This phrase, whose literal meaning is “Sheshbazzar his name,” exhibits a distinctive idiomatic construction that “appears at the first mention of a proper name which is supposed to be unknown to the reader.”9 In other words, it has what we may call 4 See
also Appendix 2 below. For a similar debate concerning the Aramaic letter in Ezra 7, see Richard C. Steiner, “The Mbqr at Qumran, the Episkopos in the Athenian Empire, and the Meaning of lbqr< in Ezra 7:14: On the Relation of Ezra’s Mission to the Persian Legal Project,” JBL 120 (2001): 623–46; and Bezalel Porten, “Elephantine and the Bible,” in Semitic Papyrology in Context (ed. L. H. Schiffman; Leiden: Brill, 2003), 59–62. 5 Eduard Meyer, Die Entstehung des Judentums: Eine historische Untersuchung (Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1896), 8–71; cf. Franz Rosenthal, Die aramaistische Forschung seit Th. Nöldeke’s Veröffentlichungen (Leiden: Brill, 1939), 63–71. 6 Better: pah…at. 7 The text was published already in 1907, but its significance was not pointed out until 1923, seven years before Meyer’s death. See Walther Schwenzner, “Gobryas,” Klio 18 (1923): 246; A. Ungnad, “Keilinschriftliche Beiträge zum Buch Esra und Ester,” ZAW 58 (1940): 240–41; A. T. Olmstead, “Tattenai, Governor of ‘Across the River,’” JNES 3 (1944): 46; Anson F. Rainey, yntt, in Encyclopedia Miqrait 8:962–64; Matthew W. Stolper, “The Governor of Babylon and Across-the-River in 486 B.C.,” JNES 48 (1989): 289, 292. 8 Eduard Meyer, Der Papyrusfund von Elephantine (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1912), 4; cf. Porten, “Elephantine and the Bible,” 51. 9 E. Y. Kutscher, “New Aramaic Texts,” JAOS 74 (1954): 241, reprinted in idem, Hebrew and Aramaic Studies (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1977), 45. The phrase “to the reader” deserves to be emphasized; the knowledge of the writer or speaker is irrelevant. One can use hm# after the name of one’s own
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a “de-definitizing” function, making proper names (which are inherently definite) indefinite or quasi-indefinite. Meyer compared hm# rcb## to Old Persian Vidarna nâma and Akkadian Umidarna šumšu, both appearing in Darius’s trilingual Behistun inscription. He conjectured that this construction was used in Imperial Aramaic as well and that it was therefore evidence for the antiquity and authenticity of the letter(s). This bold conjecture was confirmed through the publication of an Aramaic version of the Behistun inscription discovered at Elephantine. That text and others from Elephantine contained numerous examples of the hm# rcb## construction.10 However, that is not the end of the story. With time, it became clear to Aramaists that the construction had a short life span within Aramaic. In 1954, in discussing the possibility of a Persian origin for this construction, E. Y. Kutscher noted that “in Aramaic it is not known in the preceding periods . . . nor in the following ones.”11 In 1995, M. L. Folmer wrote that “this use of šmh is not known from other Aramaic dialects, be it earlier or later. . . .”12 (The last words of the sentence are “with the exception of the inscriptions of King Asoka”; however, the alleged exceptions are illusory, because they do not exhibit the same syntactic construction as hm# rcb##.)13 During the past ten years, child or father, and even after one’s own name; see M. L. Folmer, The Aramaic Language in the Achaemenid Period: A Study in Linguistic Variation (Leuven: Peeters, 1995), 676–77 (child: (m#yhy yrb ,hm#), 678 (father: yb) ,hm# Nwmp), 679 (self: . . . hm# [hyr]mg rb hyndy Kydb(), and add Ah\iqar col. 2, line 18 (child: yrb ,hm# Ndn). For the view that indefiniteness in English implies unfamiliarity to the hearer rather than the speaker, see Christopher Lyons, Definiteness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 254. See also Jae-Il Yeom, A Presuppositional Analysis of Specific Indefinites (New York: Garland, 1998), 101: “When [the speaker] thinks that the audience does not know who the name refers to, he must use an indefinite. . . .” Kutscher’s use of the word “supposed” is also accurate; the use of the construction depends on what the writer/speaker believes about the addressee’s knowledge. Would the average reader in fifth-century Egypt have heard of Esarhaddon, who ruled Assyria for a decade more than two centuries earlier? In Ah\iqar col. 1, line 5, the word hm# did not originally appear after Esarhaddon’s name, but it was added later between the lines. (Ada Yardeni informs me that it was added by the scribe who wrote the rest of the text.) Is this correction a scribal emendation, indicating that Esarhaddon was no longer a household name in that time and place? 10 Eduard Sachau, Aramäische Papyrus und Ostraka aus einer jüdischen Militär-Kolonie zu Elephantine (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1911), 31; 148 and 151 (Ah\iqar); 187 and 191 (Behistun). Batten (Ezra and Nehemiah, 140), unaware of these parallels, thought that the phrase was the product of dittography: “hm# hxp yd hm# can scarcely be right. . . . hm# may be an accidental anticipation of hm# . . . and its omission seems necessary.” 11 Kutscher, “New Aramaic Texts,” 241 = Hebrew and Aramaic Studies, 45. 12 Folmer, Aramaic Language, 683. See also Dictionary of the North-West Semitic Inscriptions (ed. J. Hoftijzer and K. Jongeling; Leiden: Brill, 1995), 1157; Klaus Beyer, Die aramäischen Texte vom Toten Meer (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1984–94), 1:712. 13 Hans Bauer and Pontus Leander (Grammatik des Biblisch-Aramäischen [Halle: M. Niemeyer, 1927], 358) analyze hm# rcb## as a substantivized asyndetic relative clause, that is, as roughly equivalent to hm# rcb## yd rbg, “a man whose name was Sheshbazzar.” This fuller form has nearparallels in Zech 6:12; Dan 2:26; etc. Those parallels make it unlikely that hm# rcb## exhibits
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another example of the construction has turned up, in an Aramaic ostracon from Idumea. It too is from the Achaemenid period (first half of the fifth century B.C.E.).14 In short, it is still the case that the construction is unattested after the Achaemenid period.15 With more than a century of hindsight, we may say that Meyer’s argument from the phrase hm# rcb## has been confirmed beyond his wildest expectations. Even so, it is possible to take Meyer’s argument a step further. In Tattenai’s letter, hm# rcb## (5:14) is followed by Kd rcb##, “that Sheshbazzar” (5:16). Meyer pointed out that the anaphoric attributive use of Kd (“the aforementioned”) is unusually frequent in these letters, and he noted that this stylistic feature has a parallel in the Old Persian inscriptions.16 However, he did not point out the interesting relationship between hm# rcb## and Kd rcb##. Here we have “de-definitizing hm#” followed by a “re-definitizing Kd.” Even this detail is paralleled at Elephantine. For example, in TAD B3.9 Kraeling 8, a lad named Jedaniah b. Tah\wa is adopted by Uriah b. Mahseiah.17 In line 3, Jedaniah is introduced as )wxt rb ,hm# hyndy; subsequently, in lines 7 and 8, he is referred to as Kz hyndy. This parallel adds a new dimension to Meyer’s argument. Another phrase discussed by Meyer that subsequently turned up at Elephantine is M(+ l(b (Ezra 4:8–9). Meyer observed that this administrative term was sometimes transliterated by the Greek translators (e.g., 1 Esdr 2:12 Raoumo" kai; Beeltevemo", as if the Aramaic text had M(+l(bw Mwxr), indicating that it was no longer understood by them.18 Here again, a century of research makes it possible to go further. We now have evidence that this term was in use in the Achaemenid period, but no evidence that it was used later. It is attested in an Elephantine papyrus from 411 B.C.E. (TAD A6.2 Cowley 26 line 23) and (as bēl t\ēmu) in two
apposition, as more recent scholars believe; see Stanislav Segert, Altaramäische Grammatik (Leipzig: Verlag Enzyklopädie, 1986), 413; Takamitsu Muraoka and Bezalel Porten, A Grammar of Egyptian Aramaic (Leiden: Brill, 1998) 252–53. Either way, it should be obvious that hm# rcb##, governed by the preposition -l, is a noun phrase—not a clause. However, if hm# ytwh) )rwt hnz means “this crag (or: mountain)—A:hwati: (is) its name” (with )rwt for )rw+), as Folmer (Aramaic Language, 684 n. 421) believes, then hm# ytwh) is not a noun phrase but a clause. Similarly, rmdt hmt hnz hm# probably means “that (place) there—Tadmor is its name.” Folmer has muddied the waters by defining the construction too loosely: “proper nouns . . . are sometimes followed by the word šmh” (Aramaic Language, 674). 14 Israel Eph>al and Joseph Naveh, Aramaic Ostraca of the Fourth Century BC from Idumaea (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1996), 92 no. 201. 15 For a possible attestation before the Achaemenid period, in an unpublished tablet of the seventh century B.C.E., see É. Lipiński, “Araméen d’Empire,” in Le Langage dans l’Antiquité (ed. P. Swiggers and A. Wouters; Louvain: Peeters, 1990), 104. 16 Meyer, Entstehung, 29; cf. Porten, “Elephantine and the Bible,” 58–59. 17 Bezalel Porten and Ada Yardeni, Textbook of Aramaic Documents from Ancient Egypt (Jerusalem: Hebrew University, 1986–99) (henceforth: TAD), B3.9 Kraeling 8. 18 Meyer, Entstehung, 33–34. 1 Esdras 2:13 has Raoumo" oJ ta; prospivptonta, and 2:19 has Raouvmw/ tw'/ gravfonti ta; prospivptonta kai; Beelteevmw/.
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Babylonian tablets, one from the time of Cyrus or Cambyses and the other from the time of Darius (486 B.C.E.).19 The absence of attestations after the fifth century can now be added to Meyer’s observation as evidence for the authenticity of Rehum’s letter. In the 1930s, two new defenses of the authenticity of the letters were presented by Hans Heinreich Schaeder and Roland de Vaux.20 After a thorough study of the Achaemenid Sitz im Leben of the term #rpm, “in translation,” Schaeder concluded that the occurrence of that term in Artaxerxes’ letter (4:18) dispels all doubt about the authenticity of that letter, thereby establishing the authenticity of the letter to which it replies (the letter of Rehum and Shimshai), as well.21 Some details of Schaeder’s treatment of #rpm have been challenged, but, in general, it has stood the test of time.22 De Vaux took up the arguments of the skeptics one by one, for example: “It is unlikely that the public treasury would have contributed to the restoration of the Temple (Ezr 6:4 and 8–9).” This is a claim that can be found in recent works as well: “Most suspect is the statement that the expenses of building are to come from imperial funds (6:8-10).”23 De Vaux responded by pointing to the temple restoration projects of Cyrus in Babylonia and Darius in Egypt.24 Darius’s patronage of Egyptian religion is even better known today: The Great King’s protection of Egyptian worship and its priesthood was . . . expressed in the building of a grandiose Temple to Amon-Ra in the Oasis of ElKhārga. Proof of Darius’ building activity in Egypt is given by the inscriptions in the caves at Wādī Hammāmāt; and blocks bearing his name have been found at El-Kāb in Upper Egypt and at Busiris in the Delta. A great number of stelae from the Serapeum can be dated to between the third and fourteenth year of Darius. A stela from Fayyūm is dedicated to Darius as the god Horus; and we know from the statue of Udjahorresne that Darius gave orders for the restoration of the “house of life” at Saïs.25 19 Stolper, “Governor,” 298–303; M. Heltzer, “A Recently Published Babylonian Tablet and the Province of Judah after 516 B.C.E.,” Transeuphratène 5 (1992): 57–61; Pierre Briant, From Cyrus to Alexander: A History of the Persian Empire (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2002), 447. 20 Hans Heinreich Schaeder, Iranische Beiträge I (Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1930); Roland de Vaux, “The Decrees of Cyrus and Darius on the Rebuilding of the Temple,” in The Bible and the Ancient Near East (trans. Damian McHugh; Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1971), 63–96; originally published in RB 46 (1937): 29–57. 21 Schaeder, Iranische Beiträge, 14. 22 See Jonas C. Greenfield and Joseph Naveh, “Hebrew and Aramaic in the Persian Period,” in The Cambridge History of Judaism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984–), 1:116, and the literature cited there in n. 3. 23 Lester L. Grabbe, Ezra-Nehemiah (Routledge: London, 1998), 131–32. 24 De Vaux, Bible, 92–93. 25 E. Bresciani, “The Persian Occupation of Egypt,” in The Cambridge History of Iran (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968–91), 2:508. See also I. Eph>al, “Syria-Palestine under Achaemenid Rule,” CAH 4:151.
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Another important defense of the letters was published in 1978–79 by Bezalel Porten.26 Porten showed that there are literally dozens of stylistic parallels between the Imperial Aramaic documents from Egypt and the Aramaic letters in Ezra. Some of these are so striking that had the papyri been discovered today they would surely have been branded forgeries! I shall mention only a few examples, drawn from letters in the archive of Jedaniah, head of the Jewish community at Elephantine. In TAD A4.7 Cowley 30 lines 28–29, we find the phrase N(dwh Nxl# hnz l(, “because of this we have sent (and) informed (you)”; it is virtually identical to the phrase )n(dwhw )nxl# hnd l( in the letter of Rehum and Shimshai (Ezra 4:14).27 In TAD A4.9 Cowley 32 lines 3–5, we have Nmdq Nm hwh hnb )tryb byb yz . . . )xbdm tyb yzwbnk Mdq, “the altar-house . . . which in Elephantine the fortress was standing [lit., built] formerly, before (the time of) Cambyses”; it closely resembles the phrase N)yg# Nyn# hnd tmdqm hnb )wh yd )tyb, “the house which was standing [lit., built] formerly, for many years” (or: “was standing many years ago”) in Tattenai’s letter (Ezra 5:11). Later in the same two letters, we have another pair of parallel phrases: hrt)b hynbml, “to rebuild it in its place” (TAD A4.9 line 8), and hrt) l( )nbty, “shall be rebuilt on its place” (Ezra 5:15).28 Finally, a general consideration. The Artaxerxes correspondence is highly unfavorable to the Jews. The letter of Rehum and Shimshai characterizes Jerusalem as a “rebellious and wicked city” (Ezra 4:12) which is “harmful to kings” and in which “sedition has been rife . . . from early times” (4:15). Artaxerxes replies that, from a search of the archives, “it has been found that this city has from earliest times risen against kings and that rebellion and sedition have been rife in it” (4:19). The claim that these letters are Jewish fabrications makes little sense. Why would Jews invent letters so prejudicial to their cause?
II. Archives If the Aramaic letters in Ezra are copies of official documents, it is reasonable to assume that they derive from government archives, and that is indeed what Meyer assumed.29 Today we know that there were royal and satrapal archives scattered throughout the Persian Empire.30 26 Bezalel Porten, “The Documents in the Book of Ezra and Ezra’s Mission” (in Hebrew), Shnaton 3 (1978–79): 174–96; see also idem, “Elephantine and the Bible,” 58–59. 27 Porten, “Documents,” 178. 28 Only this second parallel (or, rather, a similar one) is noted by Porten (“Documents,” 186). It is discussed by Baruch Halpern (“A Historiographic Commentary on Ezra 1-6: Achronological Narrative and Dual Chronology in Israelite Historiography,” in The Hebrew Bible and Its Interpreters [ed. W. H. Propp et al.; Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1990], 88). 29 Meyer, Entstehung, 26. So too A. van Selms, Ezra en Nehemia (Groningen: Wolters, 1935), 74. 30 Deniz Kaptan, The Daskyleion Bullae: Seal Images from the Western Achaemenid Empire (Leiden: Nederlands Instituut voor het Nabije Oosten, 2002), 17–23; Olof Pedersén, Archives and Libraries
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The book of Ezra itself, in the first Aramaic section, mentions chancery officials, archives, and archival records. Rehum’s title, M(+ l(b (Ezra 4:8–9), is a chancery term.31 The biblical author-historian’s introduction to Darius’s letter refers explicitly to a )yrps tyb, “house of documents,”32 at Babylon (Ezra 6:1) and hints at the existence of another archive at Ecbatana (6:2). In 2 Esdr 6:1, )yrps tyb is rendered by the term biblioqhvkh. The use of this term in Greco-Roman Egypt is discussed by Ernst Posner: A biblion, it should be remembered, signifies a roll of papyrus regardless of the content of the writing that appears on it; hence a bibliothêkê33 is a container for papyrus rolls and, in a wider sense, an institution or agency that preserves such rolls, whether of literary or business character. Thus a bibliothêkê may be a repository for books, that is, a library, or a repository for records. In our context it is the latter: a record office or archival agency.34
One type of biblioqhvkh has special relevance to our topic: A second bibliothēkē, the bibliothēkē dēmosia (“public registry office”), kept copies of all public documents, which were provided to it by the stratēgos and the royal scribe, the main officials of the nome. These were of many kinds: diaries of officials, official correspondence, census declarations and lists of taxpayers, tax returns, petitions, etc. Both officials and private persons could consult the archive and receive abstracts from it.35
2 Esdras 6:1 is not the only place in the Septuagint where the term biblioqhvkh appears. In the Greek version of Esth 2:23, we find it used of the archive where a
in the Ancient Near East 1500–300 B.C. (Bethesda, MD: CDL, 1998), 213–23, and passim; Briant, From Cyrus, 6, 66, 422–24, and passim. The entries for “archive, royal” and “archive, satrapal” in Briant’s index (p. 1180) contain dozens of references. See also André Lemaire, “Writing and Writing Materials,” ABD 6:1004–5. 31 See the references in n. 19 above. 32 Cf. Egyptian pr-md˜Ät, “house of book-rolls.” For differing views on whether the Egyptian term was used also of archives, libraries, or both, see Günter Burkard, “Bibliotheken im alten Ägypten,” Bibliothek 4 (1980): 85–87; Vilmos Wessetzky, “Bibliothek,” LÄ 1:783; and J. A. Black and W. J. Tait, “Archives and Libraries in the Ancient Near East,” CANE 4:2198. For similar terms in Sumerian and Akkadian, see Mogens Weitemeyer, Babylonske og assyriske arkiver og biblioteker (Copenhagen: Branner og Korch, 1955), 71; idem, “Archive and Library Technique in Ancient Mesopotamia,” Libri 6 (1956): 220; and M. A. Dandamayev, “The Neo-Babylonian Archives,” in Cuneiform Archives and Libraries (ed. K. R. Veenhof; Istanbul: Nederlands Historisch-Archaeologisch Instituut, 1986), 276. 33 From this term, we get Mishnaic Hebrew rpsh qt%' (m. Šabb. 16:1, so vocalized in reliable manuscripts), “scroll container”—not to mention English discotheque! 34 Ernst Posner, Archives in the Ancient World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972), 141. 35 Willy Clarysse, “Tomoi Synkollēsimoi,” in Ancient Archives and Archival Traditions: Concepts of Record-Keeping in the Ancient World (ed. M. Brosius; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 347.
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memorandum concerning Mardochaios was stored. In the second Hanukkah letter at the beginning of 2 Maccabees (2:13), we find mention of a biblioqhvkh established by Nehemiah.36 There is certainly no reason to doubt that Nehemiah had an archive/library when he was governor of Judah; bullae from the archive of an earlier Persian governor of Judah named Elnathan have been published by N. Avigad.37 Nehemiah’s biblioqhvkh contained not only “the books about the kings and the prophets and the books/writings of David” (ta; peri; tw'n basilevwn bibliva kai; profhtw'n kai; ta; tou' Dauid) but also “letters of kings38 concerning votive offerings” (ejpistola;" basilevwn peri; ajnaqemavtwn).39 This last phrase is generally understood to be a reference to two royal letters, Darius’s letter to Tattenai and Artaxerxes’ letter to Ezra, both of which deal with votive offerings (Ezra 6:9 and 7:22).40 Clearly Meyer was not the first one to associate these letters with the archive of a Persian official in Jerusalem! As the source of his knowledge about Nehemiah’s biblioqhvkh, the author of the second Hanukkah letter41 cites “records and memoirs of the time of Nehemiah” (2 Macc 2:13), but he does not mention that they themselves were housed in the biblioqhvkh. This is a striking omission because at least some of those records and memoirs can be found today in Chronicles and, presumably, Ezra-Nehemiah.42 It makes the mention of “letters of kings concerning votive offerings” alongside of “the books about the kings and the prophets and the books/writings of David” all the more remarkable. One gets the impression that the letters were considered to have great legal and/or historical value and perhaps that they were (or were thought to have been) preserved for some time separate from the “memoirs of the time of Nehemiah.” We shall return to this point later.
36 See Jean Louis Ska, “‘Persian Imperial Authorization’: Some Question Marks,” in Persia and Torah (ed. J. W. Watts; SBLSymS 17; Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2001), 172–73. 37 Nahman Avigad, Bullae and Seals from a Post-Exilic Judean Archive (Jerusalem: Hebrew University, 1976), 32–35. Avigad (pp. 6–7) assumes that Elnathan’s title, )wxp, is equivalent to hxp, “governor.” If )wxp refers to a lower official, as some have suggested, then the fact that Elnathan had an archive makes it even more likely that Nehemiah had one too. 38 Note indefinite “kings” (Persian) contrasting with “the kings” (Jewish) in the previous phrase. 39 For a sample of views on the meaning and historicity of the passage, see Sid Z. Leiman, The Canonization of Hebrew Scripture: The Talmudic and Midrashic Evidence (New Haven: Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1976), 28–29; Lemaire, “Writing,” 1005; Menahem Haran, “Archives, Libraries, and the Order of the Biblical Books,” JANES 22 (1993): 59; Philip R. Davies, Scribes and Schools: The Canonization of the Hebrew Scriptures (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1998), 87. 40 Jonathan A. Goldstein, II Maccabees: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (AB 41A; Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1983), 156, 186–87. 41 The identity of the author is controversial. For a claim that it was Judas Maccabeus himself, see Thomas Fischer, “Maccabees, Books of; First and Second Maccabees,” ABD 4:444a. 42 The “records and memoirs of the time of Nehemiah” are said to contain an account of Solomon’s eight-day celebration “in honor of the dedication and completion of the Temple” (see 1 Chr 7:9) and of fire descending from heaven to consume Solomon’s sacrifice (see 1 Chr 7:1).
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III. Archival Searches and Search Reports Governments preserve documents in archives in order to be able to consult them at a later date. Thus, one of the main services provided by government archivists is reference service.43 They search the archives at the request of government officials, and they report their findings to those officials. Archival searches are well documented in fifth-century Athens: In addition to making copies, secretaries also consulted and conducted searches through their own records and those of their predecessors for a variety of reasons. . . . The frequency with which secretaries conducted such searches is difficult to gauge, but the attested cases need not be taken as isolated events; searching for, copying, and erasing uninscribed texts may have occupied much of a secretary’s time.44
Archival searches are known also from ancient Near Eastern texts. (1) In two instances mentioned in the Mari letters (eighteenth century B.C.E.), the king sends an emissary to retrieve specific baskets of tablets from a sealed storeroom.45 (2) In the Egyptian inscription of Mes (thirteenth century B.C.E.), one of the litigants describes an earlier lawsuit in which the judge was asked to bring registers from two archives: Then Nubnofret said to the Vizier: “Let there be brought to me the [two registers from the Treasury and likewise from the Department of the Granary(?). And the Vizier] said to her: “Very good is that which thou sayest.” Then they brought us(?) downstream to Per-Ramessu. And they entered into the Treasury of Pharaoh, and likewise into the Department of the Granary of Pharaoh, and they brought the two registers before the Vizier in the Great Qenbet.46
(3) In the Egyptian Report of Wenamun (eleventh century B.C.E.), Wenamun tells the prince of Byblos, “What your father did, what the father of your father did, you too will do it.”47 The prince of Byblos responds by having the “day-books of his ancestors” (cf. the “record-book[s] of your ancestors” in Ezra 4:15) brought and read aloud before Wenamun. (4) In a letter from the Seleucid king Antiochus I to his stratēgos, he orders him to make an inquiry that was “almost certainly conducted 43 Posner,
Archives, 84–85, 113, 141, 146, 176, 197. P. Sickinger, Public Records and Archives in Classical Athens (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 80. 45 J. M. Sasson, “Some Comments on Archive Keeping at Mari,” Iraq 34 (1972): 55–67; Black and Tait, “Archives,” 2198. 46 Alan H. Gardiner, The Inscription of Mes: A Contribution to the Study of Egyptian Judicial Procedure (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1905), 8–9. I have refrained from modernizing Gardiner’s transcriptions. 47 Miriam Lichtheim, “The Report of Wenamun,” COS 1:91; cf. ANET, 27; and Black and Tait, “Archives,” 2203. 44 James
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in the royal archives of Sardis (basilikai graphai . . .), comparable to the archives known in Achaemenid Babylonia. . . .”48 The archival search is a leitmotif of the Aramaic letters preserved in Ezra 4– 6. We find references to it in 4:15 (Kthb) yd )ynrkd rpsb rqby), 4:19 (wrqbw wxk#hw), 5:16 ()klm yd )yzng tybb rqbty), and 6:1 ()yrps tybb wrqbw)—one in each letter. In 4:15, officials in the time of Artaxerxes appear to be calling for a search of records going back to the time of Nebuchadnezzar.49 Similar archival searches were requested during the reign of Cambyses by a chief of temple slaves in Uruk in an attempt to prove the inadequacy of the temple administration’s current quota of supplies for his workers. In one cuneiform letter, he writes: “Consult the writing boards of Nebuchadnezzar, Neriglissar, and Nabonidus.”50 It appears that the Achaemenids viewed archival records as being of critical importance for good governance and consulted them on a regular basis (see Esth 6:1–2). Contemporary documents show that even minor decisions could require a review of past correspondence. A letter from Prince Arsames in 411 B.C.E. authorizing the repair of a boat at Elephantine (TAD A6.2 Cowley 26) begins with “detailed repetition of previous communication between all parties on the subject.”51 James M. Lindenberger writes: “The chancery scribes’ habit of giving an epitome of earlier correspondence allows us to see in this letter the operation of the Achaemenid bureaucracy at its most convoluted. Four levels of previous administrative action are summarized before getting down to the business at hand.”52 Pierre Briant’s description of the Achaemenid bureaucracy as a “paper-shuffling” system53 seems quite apt. In such a bureaucracy, informal oral reports were probably discouraged. Indeed, the distances involved often made oral reporting impossible. When a Persian king ordered a search of several archives in his far-flung empire, the only practical way of conveying the results was through a written report, delivered by the storied Persian postal system. This is especially true if he ordered the archivists to search for all records pertaining to a certain topic. The records that turned up would have been copied over onto a new roll and forwarded to him. 48 Briant,
From Cyrus, 414. G. M. Williamson, Ezra, Nehemiah (WBC 16; Waco: Word Books, 1985), 63; Joseph Blenkinsopp, Ezra-Nehemiah: A Commentary (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1988), 114. 50 Grant Frame, “Nabonidus, Nabû-šarra-us\ur, and the Eanna Temple,” ZA 81 (1991): 64; Matthew W. Stolper, “‘No-one Has Exact Information Except for You’: Communication Between Babylon and Uruk in the First Achaemenid Reigns,” Achaemenid History 13 (2003): 277, 284–85. I am indebted to Paul-Alain Beaulieu for calling this passage to my attention and for providing the latter reference. 51 John David Whitehead, “Early Aramaic Epistolography: The Arsames Correspondence” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1974), 123. 52 James M. Lindenberger, Ancient Aramaic and Hebrew Letters (2nd ed.; SBLWAW 14; Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2003), 84. 53 Briant, From Cyrus, 8 and 424. 49 H.
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IV. Archival Headings In a well-run archive, records will have some sort of heading (or docket or endorsement) to make searches more efficient and to preserve information not found in the record itself. A heading is especially necessary for an archival record that is copied onto a new roll with other records. In Egypt, the copying of records onto rolls is attested already in the temple archive from Kahun (nineteenth century B.C.E.).54 For the Achaemenid period, we have a number of papyri from Elephantine that appear to be ledgers containing copies of individual records.55 The practice continued down to the Roman period, when “official correspondence was usually copied out on a new roll.”56 In the Bible, the Aramaic term )ynrkd rps, “book of records” (Ezra 4:15), and its Hebrew counterpart, twnrkzh rps (Esth 6:1),57 may indicate that each book or scroll contained many records.58 The scroll found at Ecbatana containing a hnwrkd from year 1 of Cyrus (Ezra 6:2–3) is generally believed to be just such a register roll.59 When a record is copied onto a new roll with other records, its heading becomes a subheading. In TAD C3.13 Cowley 61–62 lines 10–12, after a vacat, we find: ***] tn# Pp) xryb [***] hyrz( rb Mxnm [dyl] tbhy yz [***]x) yn)[m ]Nrkz [#]why[rd, “record of the [ve]ssels of Ah\[...] which she/I gave [into the hand of] Menahem son of Azariah [...] in the month of Epiph, year [x of Dar]iu[s].” TAD C3.28 Cowley 81 is an “account of sales, income, and inventory” arranged in columns. At the top of column 7, we read: yhb)l tntn[w] tbtk yz )rwb( Nb#x, 54 Wolfgang
Helck, “Archive,” LÄ 1:422–23.
55 See below. Cf. Alan Millard, “Aramaic Documents of the Assyrian and Achaemenid Periods,”
in Ancient Archives and Archival Traditions, ed. Brosius, 236: “It is easy to imagine a clerk collecting the ostraca in a basket at the end of a day or a week and transcribing the entries into a papyrus ledger, like those from Elephantine.” 56 Clarysse, “Tomoi,” 355. Less commonly, the original documents were pasted together to form a tomos synkollēsimos (ibid.). See Harold Idris Bell, “The Custody of Records in Roman Egypt,” Indian Archives 4 (1950): 119. For the Ptolemaic periods, see Clarysse, “Tomoi,” 356. 57 The full phrase is Mymyh yrbd twnrkzh rps, in which the old Hebrew term Mymyh yrbd stands in apposition to the new term twnrkzh, translated from )ynrkd. 58 Contrast Nwrkz rps (Mal 3:16), presumably referring to a document containing a single memorandum, such as TAD A4.9 Cowley 32, discussed below. However, Charles C. Torrey (Ezra Studies [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1910], 188), followed by Bauer and Leander (Grammatik, 310) and Williamson (Ezra, 56), takes )ynrkd rps as a plural, that is, equivalent to yrps )ynrkd, “the books of records.” According to him, it is “virtually a compound word” and therefore takes the plural ending on the nomen rectum instead of the nomen regens. 59 See A. T. Olmstead, History of the Persian Empire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), 140; Posner, Archives, 126; Jonas C. Greenfied, “Aspects of Archives in the Achaemenid Period,” in Cuneiform Archives and Libraries, ed. Veenhof, 290; Haran, “Archives,” 53 n. 7; Millard, “Aramaic Documents,” 238.
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“account of the grain which I wrote [and] gave to Ab(i)hi.” There is also a shorter type, without a classifying noun such as Nrkz, “record,” or Nb#x, “account.” Thus, at the top of column 8, we have hn)w Ntnwy dyb )yr+#, “documents in the possession of Jonathan and me,” instead of ***)yr+# Nrkz/Nb#x, “account/record of the documents. . . .” And in the Elephantine customs account (TAD C3.7 Ah\iqar Palimpsest), the subheadings have the form l( dyb(w (M)hnm ybg yz (Nrx)w) )r#(m/)tdnm (lk) )klm tyb, “(all) the tribute/tithe (et alia) which was collected from it/them and made over to the palace,” rather than ***)r#(m/)tdnm (lk) Nrkz/Nb#x, “account/ record of (all) the tribute/tithe. . . .” We shall shortly see evidence suggesting that, in headings lacking an explicit occurrence of a classifying noun, such a noun may have been understood. The form of the headings cited above is very familiar. Like modern headings, they consist solely of a noun phrase. The noun phrase contains some or all of the following components: (1) a noun specifying the document type (letter, memorandum, account); (2) a noun specifying the subject of the document; (3) a relative clause, syndetic or asyndetic, modifying one of the previous nouns.60 Occasionally, we find a slightly fuller type of heading. Instead of a mere noun phrase, it is a complete sentence in which the subject is a demonstrative pronoun (“this/these,” referring to the text that follows) and the predicate is a noun phrase like the headings described above. For example, in a collection account from Elephantine (TAD C3.15 Cowley 22), we have: )lyx thm# hnz 5 tn# Ptxnmpl 3-b ***Psk bhy yz )ydwhy. H. L. Ginsberg translates: “On the 3rd of Phamenoth, year 5. This is (sic!) the names of the Jewish garrison which (sic!) gave money. . . .”61 Ginsberg’s first “sic!” calls attention to the lack of agreement between singular hnz, “this,” and plural thm#, “names.” This lack of agreement would seem to be evidence that a noun is to be understood, e.g., Psk bhy yz )ydwhy )lyx thm# (Nrkz) hnz, “this is (a record of) the names of the Jewish garrison which gave money. . . .” Cowley’s translation is similar: “this is (a list of) the names of the Jewish garrison who gave money. . . .”62 We may also note that the formatting of this heading differs from that of the subheadings cited above; it stretches across the top of two columns of writing. Meyer argues that archival headings are preserved in Ezra. The clearest one is in Ezra 5:6: yd )yksrp) htwnkw ynzwb rt#w hrhn rb( txp yntt xl# yd )trg) Ng#rp )klm #wyrd l( hrhn rb(b, “copy of the letter that Tattenai, governor of Acrossthe-River, and Shethar-bozenai and his colleagues, the officials in Across-the-River, sent to King Darius.” In Meyer’s view, the presence of the Iranian loanword Ng#rp, “copy,” in this heading should be explained on the assumption that the latter is a same form is used in endorsements written on the back of contracts, e.g., yz qxrm rps ***hyndy btk, “document of withdrawal which Jedaniah wrote . . .” (TAD B2.10 Cowley 25), and ***hynn( btk yz wtn) rps, “document of wifehood which Ananiah wrote . . .” (TAD B3.8 Kraeling 60 The
15). 61 H. 62 A.
L. Ginsberg, “Aramaic Letters,” in ANET, 491. Cowley, Aramaic Papyri of the Fifth Century B.C. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1923), 71.
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chancery notation (Kanzleivermerk) borne by the letter already in the Jerusalem archive.63 He conjectures that the letter of Rehum and Shimshai originally bore a similar chancery notation, something like *** Mwxr xl# yd )nwt#n/)trg) Ng#rp* )klm ts#xtr) l(, but that its parts became detached and dislocated, leaving the passage in disarray.64 Good parallels for this type of archival heading have been found in Egypt. A Middle Kingdom tax assessor’s day-book has rubrics such as “copy of the document brought to him as a dispatch from the fortress of Elephantine” and “copy of the writing sent to [...].”65 A day-book of the King’s House of Sobekhotpe III contains a rubric that begins “copy of the document.”66 The inscription of Mes has a heading that begins with a date followed by “copy of the examination which . . . .”67 A Greek report from Tebtunis (115 C.E.) has four headings that begin with the words !Antivgrafon ejpistolh'", “copy of letter.”68 Also relevant here is the word hnwrkd, “memorandum,” at the end of Ezra 6:2.69 It is usually understood as the heading of the document that follows, copied from the royal archive at Ecbatana. So too at Elephantine, one papyrus of the Jedaniah archive (TAD A4.9 Cowley 32) begins with the heading yl wrm) hyldw yhwgb yz Nrkz, “memorandum of what Bagohi and Delaiah said to me.” We shall return to these documents below. Meyer’s archive theory has been almost completely ignored in recent scholarship. It is telling that, even though H. G. M. Williamson views the letter of Rehum and Shimshai as deriving from an “unedited collection of official documents,”70 he does not mention the possibility that Ezra 4:9–10 is based on an archival heading. Instead he writes: it is known from numerous contemporary examples that Aramaic letters could include subscripts, summaries of contents and addresses, all separate from the main text of the letter. It seems probable that our author may have used this material too in his compilation (e.g., in vv 9–10). . . .71 63 Meyer,
Entstehung, 22, 26. 26–28. 65 Donald B. Redford, Pharaonic King-lists, Annals and Day-books (Mississauga, ON: Benben, 1986), 104–6. 66 Ibid., 107. 67 See below. 68 See below. 69 For a discussion of the term, see Willy Schottroff, ‘Gedenken’ im Alten Orient und im Alten Testament: Die Wurzel zākar im semitischen Sprachkreis (WMANT 15; Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1964), 300–302 and passim. 70 Williamson, Ezra, 59. 71 Ibid. The idea was proposed two years earlier in Bezalel Porten, “The Address Formulae in Aramaic Letters: A New Collation of Cowley 17,” RB 90 (1983): 400: “We thus wish to suggest that the apparent interpolation that is Ezra 4:9-10 is in fact based upon the expansive external address of the letter whereas 4:11b preserves the essence of the conventional terse internal address.” 64 Ibid.,
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The only recent article to mention Meyer’s archive theory is by Porten. Porten cites Meyer’s view that the headings of the letters in Ezra come from chancery notations, but he gives the idea short shrift, since the notations on the Elephantine papyri do not contain words like Ng#rp, “copy,” and Nwt#n, “letter.”72 Accordingly, Porten prefers to seek the origin of Ezra 4:9–10 in an external address.73 I submit that Porten’s view can and should be reconciled with Meyer’s. If 4:9– 10 originates in an external address, it is not because the biblical author copied it directly from the original letter (which he probably never saw), but because an archivist drew on it in preparing the archival heading for the copy in the archival register. In this matter, the Elephantine papyri are misleading, because they are original letters, and so naturally they do not have headings/notations containing the words for “copy” and “letter.” Such headings/notations are added when the letters are copied into official registers (day-books, letter-books, etc.), such as the ones cited above.
V. The Controversy Surrounding Ezra 4:7 Another question concerns 4:7 and its relationship to 4:8–16. Is 4:7 an introduction to what follows or does it speak of a separate letter? Is the Nwt#n of Bishlam, Mithredath, and Tabeel (4:7) the same as the hrg) of Rehum and Shimshai (4:8) or different? Already in antiquity, there was no agreement on these questions. 1 Esdras (2:12) signals a one-letter interpretation by combining the names in Ezra 4:7 and 4:8 into a single list: Beslemo" kai; Miqradavth" kai; Tabellio" kai; Raoumo" kai; Beeltevemo" kai; Samsai'o" oJ grammateuv".74 The Peshitta, on the other hand, signals a two-letter interpretation by adding the conjunction w- at the beginning of Ezra 4:8. The same controversy exists in the Middle Ages. The commentaries attributed to R. Saadia Gaon (really R. Benjamin Anau) and to Rashi adopt a one-letter position, asserting that the letter of Rehum and Shimshai was written at the behest of and/or in the name of Mithredath-Tabeel.75 R. Isaiah of Trani, by contrast, adopts a two-letter position, commenting on )rps y#m#w M(+ l(b Mwxr that “they too, for their part, wrote another letter, concerning Jerusalem.”76 72 Porten,
“Elephantine and the Bible,” 55. 56–57; see also the article cited in n. 71 above. 74 According to most scholars, this translation reflects not a different textual tradition but rather an attempt to solve the exegetical problem. 75 For the editions of the former commentary, see Menahem M. Kasher and Jacob B. Mandelbaum, Sarei Ha-Elef (Jerusalem: Beit Torah Shelemah, 1978), 1:154 (§§294 and 296). The latter commentary, in the Rabbinic Bible, has l)b+w tdrtm, but the waw cannot be correct, since this commentary, like other medieval commentaries, takes l)b+ tdrtm as the name of a single individual. 76 Isaiah b. Mali di Trani, Commentary on Prophets and Hagiographa (in Hebrew; ed. A. J. Wertheimer; Jerusalem: Ketab yad wasepher, 1965–78), 3:243. 73 Ibid.,
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In the nineteenth century, we find C. F. Keil still struggling with these two possibilities: This letter, too, of Bishlam and his companions seems to be omitted. There follows, indeed, in ver. 8, etc., a letter to King Artachshasta, of which a copy is given in vers. 11–16; but the names of the writers are different from those mentioned in ver. 7. The three names, Bishlam, Mithredath, and Tabeel (ver. 7), cannot be identified with the two names Rehum and Shimshai (ver. 8). When we consider, however, that the writers named in ver. 8 were high officials of the Persian king, sending to the monarch a written accusation against the Jews in their own and their associates’ names, it requires but little stretch of the imagination to suppose that these personages were acting at the instance of the adversaries named in ver. 7, the Samaritans Bishlam, Mithredath, and Tabeel. . . .77
Keil offers several arguments against the view that 4:7 is separate from 4:8: with regard to the letter of ver. 7, we should have not a notion of its purport in case it were not the same which is given in ver. 8, etc. Besides, the statement concerning the Aramæan composition of this letter would have been utterly purposeless if the Aramæan letter following in ver. 8 had been an entirely different one. The information concerning the language in which the letter was written has obviously no other motive than to introduce its transcription in the original Aramæan. This conjecture becomes a certainty through the fact that the Aramæan letter follows in ver. 8 without a copula of any kind. If any other had been intended, the w copulative would no more have been omitted here than in ver. 7. . . .78
These arguments against the two-letter theory have not received sufficient attention. Most proponents of that theory ignore them.79 Others respond by simply emending the text.80 It is therefore not superfluous to revisit Keil’s arguments. The problem in v. 7 becomes clearer when we compare it with v. 6: twklmbw Ml#wryw hdwhy yb#y l( hn+# wbtk wtwklm tlxtb #wrw#x), “and in the reign of 77 C.
F. Keil, The Books of Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther (trans. S. Taylor; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1873), 63–64. 78 Ibid., 64. 79 E.g., Herbert Edward Ryle, The Books of Ezra and Nehemiah (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1893), 54; Alfred Bertholet, Die Bücher Esra und Nehemia (Tübingen: Mohr, 1902), 13; P. Andrés Fernández, Comentario a los libros de Esdras y Nehemias (Madrid: Consejo superior de investigaciones científicas, 1950), 112; Jacob M. Myers, Ezra. Nehemiah: Introduction, Translation, and Notes (AB 14; Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1965), 37; F. Charles Fensham, The Books of Ezra and Nehemiah (NICOT; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1982), 71; D. J. A. Clines, Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther (NCB; London: Marshall, Morgan & Scott, 1984), 77; Williamson, Ezra, 61; Blenkinsopp, Ezra, 111; and Joachim Becker, Esra/Nehemiah (NEchtB; Würzburg: Echter Verlag, 1990), 30. 80 W. Rudolph, Esra und Nehemia (HAT 20; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1949), 34, 42; J. J. Koopmans, “Het eerste Aramese gedeelte in Ezra (4:7-6:19),” GTT 55 (1955): 153; Bernard Chapira, The Books of Ezra and Nehemiah and the Period of the Return to Zion (in Hebrew; Jerusalem: KiryatSefer, 1955), 42.
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Ahasueras, at the beginning of his reign, they wrote an accusation against the inhabitants of Judah and Jerusalem.” Here too the reference to a letter is very brief; even so, in this case there is enough information to convey the tenor of the letter. Verse 7, on the other hand, tells us nothing substantive about the letter to which it refers; it cannot possibly stand on its own. Some modern scholars argue that the biblical author was unable to say anything more about the letter because he did not have access to it. But if he could not even surmise its content, why did he bother to mention it? Why should this unknown letter be more noteworthy than hundreds of other unknown letters? In short, this interpretation creates a literary absurdity—a vacuous reference to an irrelevant document. No wonder that ancient and medieval exegetes (2 Esdras, Peshitta, “Rashi,” Benjamin Anau) turned the name Ml#b into a description of the content of the letter by taking it to mean “in peace”—even though that interpretation is linguistically anomalous in several respects and, in its simplest form, would seem to undermine the authors’ point about the hostility of the people of the land.81 Another literary absurdity created by this interpretation concerns the notice that the letter was written in Aramaic (Ezra 4:7b).82 If the author did not have access to the letter, how did he know what language it was written in?83 And why was the language significant? Why did the author mention it in 4:7 but not in 4:6? In other words, 4:7b is pointless unless it serves to introduce the next letter.84 It can hardly be a coincidence that the statement that the letter was in Aramaic is followed by a letter in Aramaic.
VI. Ezra 4:7: Introduction to an Archival Search Report from Nehemiah’s Time In my opinion, there is some truth in both the one-letter theory and the twoletter theory. The Nwt#n of 4:7 is neither identical to the hrg) of 4:8–16 nor completely distinct from it. There is a third possibility: the Nwt#n of 4:7 includes the letter of Rehum and Shimshai in 4:8-16, but it also includes the other three letters in chs. 4–6. 81 See
my article, forthcoming in JBL, on the origin of the name “Bishlam.” further below. 83 See already Ernst Bertheau, Die Bücher Esra, Nechemia und Ester (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1862), 7. 84 Scholars have rightly compared tymr) Mgrtmw tymr) bwtk Nwt#nh btkw (Ezra 4:7b) with tymr) Klml Myd#kh wrbdyw (Dan 2:4a). Both are literary devices designed to prepare the reader for the change of language. Some scholars put a period before tymr) in one or both of these passages, but, to my taste, this is an act of literary vandalism. In both places, it turns a smooth, elegant transition into an abrupt, awkward one, leaving a gaping hole before the period and an incongruous linguistic label after it. See further below. 82 See
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Journal of Biblical Literature 125, no. 4 (2006) The fourfold-Nwt#n theory is not new. Seventy-five years ago, Schaeder wrote: The fact that, contrary to what one would expect, the introduction to Tab<el’s letter—address and greeting formula—is not given, but instead there follows immediately a new document, the petition of the Samaritan officials, ought not lead to the view that the author has already moved on from Tab<el’s letter to another. The only admissible conclusion is rather that the petition of the two officials was included in Tab<el’s letter as an important component.85
Indeed, the same view is implicit in a nineteenth-century encyclopedia article by A. Klostermann.86 However, Klostermann and Schaeder combined it with a bold new theory, viz., that 4:8–6:18 is a response to the accusation of Rehum and Shimshai, an apology written by a Jew named Tabeel.87 The problems with the apology theory have been noted by many scholars and need not be rehearsed here. From our point of view, the only important point is that the fourfold-Nwt#n theory and the apology theory were treated as inseparable by scholars on both sides of the debate. Thus, when the apology theory was eventually discarded by scholars, the baby got thrown out with the bathwater. The fourfold-Nwt#n theory can and should be detached from the KlostermannSchaeder apology theory and joined instead to Meyer’s archive theory. The collection of Aramaic documents88 in chs. 4–6 constitutes not a partisan apology but a dispassionate report conveying the results of an archival search. The officials named in 4:7 were apparently the keepers of a major archive (or perhaps the keepers and their secretary) in Across-the-River or Babylon.89 They had been asked by Arta85 Schaeder,
Iranische Beiträge, 17. Klostermann, “Esra und Nehemia,” RE, 5:516–17. 87 Not Bishlam, Mithredath, and Tabeel. According to them, l)b+ tdrtm Ml#b btk means “Tabeel wrote with the approval of Mithredath,” but this philologically problematic interpretation is quite unnecessary; see again my forthcoming article on the origin of the name “Bishlam.” 88 For the later connecting narrative, see below. 89 In Greco-Roman Egypt, district archives had two keepers (bibliofuvlake") and a secretary (grammateu;" bibliofulavkwn), who was the real administrator; see B. A. van Groningen, A FamilyArchive from Tebtunis (Papyrologica Lugduno-Batava 6; Leiden: Brill, 1950), 106–7. For the bibliofuvlake", see also Briant, From Cyrus, 412; Posner, Archives, 134, 141, 147, 151, 154; and Erwin Seidl, Rechtsgeschichte Ägyptens als römischer Provinz (Sankt Augustin, Germany: H. Richarz, 1973), 73– 77. A more revealing title is given in Strabo’s Geography (2.1.6 §69). There we learn that Xenocles, the treasurer (gazofuvlax) of Alexander the Great made the latter’s description of India available to the Macedonian general Patrocles. It is generally accepted that Xenocles was the keeper of the royal archives in Babylon (PW, 1508, s.v. Xenokles; Posner, Archives, 128). The use of the term gazofuvlax for an archivist is explained by Ezra 5:17, 6:1, where we learn that at Babylon the royal archives were in the treasury ()yzng tyb = oi\ko" th'" gavzh" in 2 Esdras); cf. the treasury (gazofulavkion) of 1 Macc 14:48–49, where copies (ajntivgrafa) of a decree were deposited. Since gazofuvlax is just the Greek equivalent of rbzg (see 1 Esdr 2:8; 8:19 = Ezra 1:8; 7:21), it seems likely that the keeper of the Babylon archives who searched for Cyrus’s edict at the behest of Darius bore the title rbzg. It is possible that Bishlam had the same title, especially if he was in Babylon rather than Across-the-River. 86 A.
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xerxes to search their archive for records relating to the rebuilding of Jerusalem. I suggest that this was around the time when Nehemiah reopened the question of Jerusalem’s wall. The issue had been left hanging by Artaxerxes’ decree that the work on the wall be stopped—that is, suspended—“until I give the order.”90 Before issuing that decree, Artaxerxes had ordered a search of the archives (Ezra 4:19), and it seems reasonable to assume that a new search would be necessary before a new decree could be issued allowing the work to resume. In the course of their search, Bishlam and his colleagues found four relevant letters.91 They copied them onto a new roll, which they sent to the king.92 As noted above, each of the four letters contains a reference to the searching of archives (4:15; 4:19; 5:16; and 6:1), and so it is somewhat surprising that the collection of these letters has not previously been identified as an archival search report. One of the great virtues of our theory is that it (and only it) allows us to make sense of a very obscure clause: tymr) Mgrtmw tymr) bwtk Nwt#nh btkw. The problems are obvious: Nwt#nh btk seems to be a pleonasm, a genitive phrase composed of two near synonyms;93 tymr) Mgrtmw tymr) bwtk seems to be a tautology or an oxymoron. As a result, Meyer viewed the clause as “completely senseless” and corrupt, and he emended it to tymr) Mgrtmw tysrp bwtk Nwt#nhw.94
90 Cf. Blenkinsopp, Ezra, 115: “Unlike ‘the laws of the Medes and the Persians, which cannot be revoked’ (Dan. 6:8; cf. Esth. 1:19; 8:8), the decree allows for a future abrogation. . . .” 91 The earlier correspondence was, of course, less relevant insofar as it dealt with the rebuilding of the temple rather than the city wall. Nevertheless, even the rebuilding of the temple had strategic ramifications, for, in the words of Josephus, “the Temple lay as a fortress over the city” (War 5.5.8 §245). According to Olmstead (History, 139–40), Tattenai hinted at the danger by referring to “hewn stones” and “timbers . . . being set in the wall”: “This was an unusually strong construction; the temple mount could serve as a fortress in time of revolt. . . .” Thus, the decision of Cyrus and Darius to encourage the rebuilding of the temple was a valid precedent for Artaxerxes. Moreover, as Porten (“Documents,” 184, 195) has noted, both sets of correspondence deal with an important underlying issue: Why was Jerusalem—and its temple—destroyed in the first place (4:15 vs. 5:12)? In any event, the archivists undoubtedly preferred to err on the side of providing too much information rather than too little; judgments of relevance were best left to the king. 92 My first encounter with this type of document came when I was researching the history of papyrus Amherst 63 (the Aramaic text in Demotic script). One of the records in the archive of the Pierpont Morgan Library was a “copy of all correspondence found in Estate files, relating to the AMHERST PAPYRI” prepared by a secretary in 1922 at the behest of Belle da Costa Greene, the head of the Library. 93 Elsewhere in the Bible, this construction has a rhetorical function, expressing “poetic hyperbole”; see Yitzhak Avishur, Stylistic Studies of Word-Pairs in Biblical and Ancient Semitic Literatures (AOAT 210; Kevelaer: Butzon & Bercker, 1984), 182. In our case, no rhetorical function is apparent. According to Meyer (Entstehung, 18), btk is an old gloss to the Persian word Nwt#n. Blenkinsopp (Ezra, 110), while agreeing with Meyer, confuses the issue by implying that btFk; can be a verb despite the vocalization with qames\: “MT reads, ‘and he wrote the letter written in Aramaic,’ which is impossible.” 94 Meyer, Entstehung, 18; idem, Papyrusfund, 18–19 n. 3.
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Meyer was unable to make sense of all this verbiage, because he assumed that 4:7 refers to a simple letter written in Aramaic. I suggest that the complexity of the verbiage is a reflection of the complexity of the document to which it refers. The Nwt#n, “letter,” of Bishlam and his colleagues contains a btk, “written document,” consisting of four letters. Of those four, the letter of Rehum and Shimshai was no doubt written (i.e., composed) in Aramaic from the outset, while the letters of Artaxerxes and Darius (and perhaps the letter of Tattenai as well) were translated into Aramaic from Old Persian. We can thus translate without doing any violence to the text: “The document (embedded) in the letter was (in part) written in Aramaic and (in part) translated into Aramaic.”95 It is no longer necessary to break up the clause or emend it or twist the meaning of its words. It is tempting to try to determine more precisely when Bishlam, Mithredath, and Tabeel sent their report. Was it after Nehemiah spoke to the king (year 20) or before? And if the latter, was it after Nehemiah’s brother Hanani96 arrived with Jews from Jerusalem (Neh 1:2) or before? In this connection, we may mention Schaeder’s conjecture that Tabeel’s letter was delivered to Nehemiah by the Jews from Jerusalem before Nehemiah went in to see Artaxerxes.97 Whatever the precise sequence of events, it seems fair to say that the archival search report cleared the way for Nehemiah’s mission. The report made several things crystal clear: (1) the king had ordered a suspension of work on Jerusalem’s wall “until I give the order,” not a permanent cessation; (2) the sole reason for the suspension was an allegation that the Jews had been rebellious in the distant past and hence could not be trusted now; and (3) in the more recent past, the king’s ancestors had decided to trust the Jews to build a fortress-like98 temple, and yet the enemies of the Jews were unable to cite a single adverse consequence of that decision. In short, the report showed that the king’s former concerns had been baseless, and that it was safe to allow the rebuilding of Jerusalem’s wall to resume—especially if the work was supervised by a man like Nehemiah, whom the king knew and trusted.99 All of this raises further questions. What was Nehemiah’s role in the commis95 I found a similar heading on the Internet: “Manx hymns or songs for the use of temperance meetings, and several pieces of poetry suitable on other occasions. Partly composed originally in Manx and partly translated from the English language, by John Quirk, parish of Patrick.” 96 This name seems to have been very popular during the reign of Artaxerxes I. The Bible mentions three contemporaries of Ezra and Nehemiah named ynnx. There are twelve to thirteen individuals named H…a-(an-)na-ni-< in the Murašū archive from Nippur (Artaxerxes I–Darius II); see Michael David Coogan, West Semitic Personal Names in the Murašū Documents (HSM 7; Missoula, MT: Scholars Press, 1976), 24–25; and Ran Zadok, The Jews in Babylonia in the Chaldean and Achaemenian Periods in the Light of the Babylonian Sources (Tel-Aviv: Mifal Hashichpul, 1976), 11. 97 Schaeder, Iranische Beiträge, 19–20. 98 See n. 91 above. 99 It is telling that Artaxerxes did not stop the work again when Nehemiah’s enemies spread rumors that he was rebuilding the wall in order to rebel (Neh 6:6–7).
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sioning of the archival search? Did Nehemiah push for it, openly or behind the scenes, as part of a policy review? Did he send Hanani, his brother and right-hand man (cf. Neh 7:2), to get the report and/or a first-hand look at the situation on the ground? Did he bring a copy of the report with him to Jerusalem when he was sent there as governor? It is only to the last question that can we give an answer supported by evidence. As we have seen, the author of the second Hanukkah letter at the beginning of 2 Maccabees (2:13) makes the not unreasonable claim that Nehemiah had “letters of kings concerning votive offerings” in his biblioqhvkh.
VII. Reverse Chronological Ordering Scholars have long been puzzled by the internal arrangement of the first Aramaic section of Ezra, specifically the fact that the Darius correspondence comes after the Artaxerxes correspondence.100 It is clear that the Darius in question is Darius I,101 who preceded Artaxerxes I. If so, the documents are not in chronological order. Why not? According to Jacob Liver: One common explanation is that the writer did not understand his sources and did not know the chronology of the period whose history he was writing. . . . But even if we assume that . . . the author was not well versed in the history of the time, what reason did he have to change the order that he found in his sources?102
Porten answers this question by arguing that the biblical author arranged 4:8–7:26 thematically, proceeding from the least favorable (the letter of Rehum and Shimshai) to the most favorable (Ezra’s letter of appointment).103 However, he does not explain why the author decided to shift abruptly from chronological order to thematic order. Nor does he account for what is almost certainly a resumptive repetition in 4:24.104 The internal arrangement of Ezra 4–6 is a serious problem for the view that it is based on an Aramaic chronicle.105 It is not a problem for our proposal that Ezra 100 See, for example, the discussion in David A. Glatt, Chronological Displacement in Biblical and Related Literatures (SBLDS 139; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1993), 125–31, and the references cited there. I am indebted to Barry L. Eichler for this reference. 101 See Jacob Liver, “On the Problem of the Order of the Persian Kings in the Books of Ezra and Nehemiah” (in Hebrew), in Studies in Bible and Judean Desert Scrolls (Jerusalem: Bialik, 1971), 271; and the literature on Tattannu = Tattenai cited in n. 7 above. 102 Liver, “Problem,” 270. See also Hans H. Mallau, “The Redaction of Ezra 4–6: A Plea for a Theology of Scribes,” PRSt 15 (1988): 78: “it is . . . unlikely that the redactor would have changed the original chronological sequence of a collection of written documents.” 103 Porten, “Documents,” 194; idem, “Theme and Structure of Ezra 1–6: From Literature to History,” Transeuphratène 23 (2002): 36–37. 104 See below. 105 This is the view of Bertheau, Esra, 6–7 (“in chronologischer Ordnung”); Ryle, Ezra, 54; Chapira, Ezra, 42; and Clines, Ezra, 8.
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4–6 is based on an archival search report. Outside of chronicles and day-books, reverse chronological order is not as uncommon as one might think. Among the texts from Egypt dealing with archives, I have found several judicial reports containing documents arranged in that way. The inscription of Mes, inscribed on the walls of his tomb at Saqqara, is “the official verbatim report of a single lawsuit brought by Mes against a man named Khay.”106 This lawsuit, through which Mes won back his ancestral estates, took place in the time of Ramesses II (thirteenth century B.C.E.). Alan H. Gardiner believes that it was the fifth of a series of lawsuits stretching back to the reign of Horemhab (late fourteenth century B.C.E.).107 We have already seen that one section of the report contains a description of an archival search. The final section of the report, inscribed on the south wall of the tomb, consists of two documents, apparently submitted in evidence at the trial by Mes.108 According to Gardiner, the first of these documents is a “fragment of the procès verbal belonging to the third lawsuit,” while the second (which has a heading that parallels the heading in Ezra 4:9–11a)109 is a “report made by the commissioner Iniy to the Great Qenbet, relative to the second lawsuit.”110 Thus, the documents are presented in reverse chronological order. Three additional examples of reverse chronological order are found in a family archive from Greco-Roman Egypt (Tebtunis). One is a long Greek text from 115 C.E. labeled “copy of report with annexed documents” by its editor.111 This is a report ordered by a judge in a case about an archive and its keepers. As noted above, four of the appended documents have headings that begin with the words !Antivgrafon ejpistolh'", “copy of letter,” recalling )trg) Ng#rp in Ezra 5:6. Another has a heading that begins with the words !Antivgrafon uJpomnhmatismw'n, “copy of memorandum/record,” reminiscent of the heading )nwrkd in Ezra 6:2. The document is described by Willy Clarysse: How, then, was order kept in the archives of government offices in GraecoRoman Egypt? We get a vivid picture of state record-keeping because of a dispute which dragged on from AD 90 to 124 as a result of bad record-keeping in the Arsinoite nome. The situation is described as follows by the former keepers of the public archives (bibliofuvlake" th'" dhmosiva" biblioqhvkh"): “Of the acts some have been lost, being torn and worn by age, others have been partly damaged, and several have been eaten away at the top because the places are hot.” In AD 98 the prefect Junius Rufus ordered that the new keepers of the record office (biblioqhvkh) should accept the damaged rolls and have them pasted together at their predecessors’ expense. Finally, after a series of lawsuits, the cost of repairing the 106 Gardiner,
Inscription of Mes, 24. 32. 108 Ibid., 24. 109 See below. 110 Gardiner, Inscription of Mes, 31. 111 Groningen, Family-Archive, 46–61 text 15; cf. 97–106. 107 Ibid.,
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rolls was paid from the sequestrated property of the heirs of the record-keepers and their secretary.112
We may display the structure of the text as follows: 1. Report on the cost of repairing archival records. 115 C.E. “Here follow the copies of all the documents.” 2. Letter of Sulpicius Similis, prefect of Egypt. 108 C.E. “I have sent you a docketed petition.” 3. “And of the petition: To Servius Sulpicius Similis. . . .” [undated, but clearly earlier than 2 and later than 4]. “A copy of [a letter to Junius Rufus, prefect of Egypt] is subjoined. 4. “Copy of letter: To Junius Rufus . . .” 98 C.E. “We also subjoined for you a copy of a letter concerning a similar case.” 5. “Copy of a letter in a similar case.” 83 C.E. 6. “Copy of the letter written in answer to those above. Junius Rufus to . . .” 98 C.E. 7. “Copy of letter.” 103 C.E. 8. “Copy of record in the journal of Leonides . . .” 109 C.E. It will be noted that documents 1–5 appear in reverse chronological order. It is true that the order here is attributable to a structural feature that is not present in Ezra 4–6: each document is included in an appendix of the previous one.113 Even so, the text is quite important for us. Taken together with the inscription of Mes, it shows that reverse chronological order is at home in ancient reports containing multiple documents. The second example of reverse chronological order from the Tebtunis family archive is a petition to the nomarch containing three documents.114 The first document is dated 26-vii-182 C.E., the second 17-vii-182 C.E., and the third 26-xii-181 C.E. In this case, too, each document is included in an appendix of the previous one. The third example from the archive has two preserved documents, a “copy of petition” dated 10-xi-189 C.E. followed by a “copy of census-return” dated 188–189 C.E.115 In this example, the documents are independent of each other, as they are in Ezra 4–6. 112 Clarysse,
“Tomoi,” 344–45; cf. Bell, “Custody,” 122–23. other words, the ordering originates in a bureaucratic/legalistic habit: each writer felt the need to append a complete copy of an earlier letter, even if it itself had an appendix. Thus, the writer of 4 appended 5; then the writer of 3 appended 4-5; after that the writer of 2 appended 3-4-5, finally the writer of 1 appended 2-3-4-5. This is, therefore, an example of iterative literary embedding, for which see below. The structure of many e-mail messages today is similar, except that in them the appended letter is normally the one to which the writer is replying. 114 Groningen, Family-Archive, 145–49 text 43. 115 Ibid., 149–52 text 44. 113 In
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Reverse chronological order in an archival search report may reflect the order in which the search was carried out. One factor that may cause the archivist to search in reverse chronological order is accessibility. Old records are often less accessible than recent ones, either because they are at the bottom of a pile or because they have been moved to a remote storage facility for inactive files. If the search begins with the more accessible recent records, and the relevant records are copied onto a new scroll as they are found, the result will be reverse chronological order, as in the field notes from the excavation of a tell. Another factor that may cause the archivist to search in reverse chronological order is relevance. A search for documents relevant to the present naturally begins with recent records and works backwards. This is a commonsense principle familiar to the present-day heirs of the ancient archivists. A recent article by a reference librarian lists “Ten Skills Needed by Graduate Students Conducting Research in the Information Age,” including: “Work in Reverse Chronological Order, searching the newest information first.”116 The designers of the Harvard OnLine Library Information System (HOLLIS) evidently agree; in default mode, it displays the results of searches in reverse chronological order. It is impossible to know how common this order was in archival searches and search reports of the Persian period. I know of only one example from that period. According to Ezra 6:1–2, the search for Cyrus’s decree began in Babylon and concluded in Ecbatana, where Cyrus had stayed before his first official year.117 Clearly, this particular search proceeded in reverse chronological order. That order is not reflected in the report, since only one record was found. In our case, considerations of accessibility and relevance would have conspired to generate reverse chronological order. Certainly, Artaxerxes’ records would have been more accessible to Artaxerxes’ archivists than Darius’s records. They would also have been more relevant than Darius’s records. The archivists can hardly have been unaware of the fact that all of the events that led to the suspension had occurred during Artaxerxes’ reign, within the previous two decades.118 Indeed, they were probably instructed to look for Artaxerxes’ stop-work order plus any other documents that seemed relevant to them. It is therefore reasonable to assume that, in carrying out the new search, the archivists first looked for and found the Artaxerxes correspondence and that, after those letters were copied onto a leather or papyrus roll, the earlier correspondence involving Darius turned up and was copied onto the same roll. Even if they didn’t find the Artaxerxes correspondence first, they would still have had good reason to 116 Christy
A. Donaldson, “Information Literacy and the McKinsey Model: The McKinsey Strategic Problem-Solving Model Adapted to Teach Information Literacy to Graduate Business Students,” Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal) 6, no. 2 (Spring 2004): 2. 117 Olmstead, History, 140. 118 For the view that the events occurred at the beginning of Artaxerxes’ reign, see Mordechai Zer-Kavod, The Books of Ezra and Nehemiah (in Hebrew; Jerusalem: Reuben Mass, 1949), 47.
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put it first in their report. As we have noted, it was more relevant, inasmuch as it dealt with rebuilding Jerusalem’s wall rather than its temple. Either way, reverse chronological order is quite natural.
VIII. Multiple Introductions and Iterative Embedding It has often been noted that Ezra 4:9–11a does not continue from the point where v. 8 leaves off; these verses have the appearance of a second introduction that partially overlaps the first. D. J. A. Clines writes: “The letter is prefaced, rather awkwardly, by two introductions.”119 L. H. Brockington goes further: “there are virtually three introductions or prefaces to the letter.”120 A single introduction, conveying the same information, might have looked something like this:
)yktsrp)w )ynyd—Nwhtwnk r)#w )rps y#m#w M(+ l(b Mwxr Nyd)* ylgh yd )ym) r)#w )yml( )whd )ykn#w# )ylbb ywkr) )ysrp) )ylpr+ wbtk—hrhn rb( r)#w Nyrm# yd hyrqb wmh btwhw )ryqyw )br rpns) wxl# yd )trg) Ng#rp hnd *)klm )t##xtr)l Ml#wry l( hdx hrg) *yhwl( It has not been noted that the redundant introductions of Rehum’s letter are paralleled at Elephantine, in a document of the Jedaniah archive mentioned above (TAD A4.9 Cowley 32). The document is a memorandum, believed to have been composed by the messenger who carried the letters of Jedaniah to Bagohi and Delaiah, governors of Judah and Samaria.121 It appears that Bagohi and Delaiah gave the messenger an oral reply, which he recorded in a memorandum. The document begins as follows:
wrm) hyldw yhwgb yz Nrkz1 rmml Nyrcmb Kl ywhy Ml Nrkz yl2 ****M#r) Mdq3 Porten translates: “Memorandum. What Bagavahya and Delaiah said to me. Memorandum. Saying, ‘Let it be for you in Egypt to say before Arsames. . . .’”122 The repetition of the word Nrkz, “memorandum,” shows that this is a double heading. Pierre 119 Clines,
Ezra, 78. H. Brockington, Ezra, Nehemiah and Esther (London: Nelson, 1969), 74. This sounds like the view of Batten quoted above, but, unlike Batten, Brockington begins counting with the introduction in v. 8! See also Blenkinsopp, Ezra, 112. 121 Pierre Grelot, Documents araméens d’Égypte (Paris: Cerf, 1972), 415. 122 Bezalel Porten, The Elephantine Papyri in English (Leiden: Brill, 1996), 148 = COS 3:130. 120 L.
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Grelot explains that the document “bears traces of alteration, notably the addition of a heading at the moment when the document was deposited in the archives.”123 In other words, the original heading written by the messenger in the field was simply “Memorandum”; subsequently, before depositing the document in the archive, he added a longer, more informative, heading: “Memorandum of what Bagohi and Delaiah said to me.”124 We see, then, that archival documents can have multiple headings, because archival headings are added to documents that may already have a heading. Now Ezra 4:7–11 is a much more complex case, since the archival record at its core has been incorporated into other documents. Nevertheless, I suggest that the same principle is at work there, together with a second, more general principle: multiple headings and introductions can be a by-product of iterative embedding. My contention is that the multiple introductions of Ezra 4:7–11 belong to documents embedded one within the other, that is, quotations within quotations. To clarify this point, let us first examine the literary structure of Gen 32:5: wcyw ht( d( rx)w ytrg Nbl M( bq(y Kdb( rm) hk w#(l ynd)l Nwrm)t hk rm)l Mt), “and he commanded them as follows, ‘Thus shall you say to my lord Esau, “Thus says your servant Jacob: ‘I have been staying with Laban, tarrying until now. . . .’”’” Here a single message has three introductions, as a by-product of iterative embedding.125 In this case, all of the embedded quotations end at the same point, as shown by the clustering of quotation marks at the end. We may display the levels of embedding as follows:
rm)l Mt) wcyw .I ynd)l Nwrm)t hk .II bq(y Kdb( rm) hk .III .ht( d( rx)w ytrg Nbl M( .IV 126w#(l
There are three verbs of speaking here (wcyw, Nwrm)t, and rm)), each introducing the speech that begins one level below. The verb wcyw on level I belongs to the narrator’s introduction; Nwrm)t on level II belongs to Jacob’s introduction; and rm) on level III belongs to the messengers’ introduction. Level IV is the message itself. A more instructive example of embedding is found in 2 Sam 11:25: dwd rm)yw whqzxw hsrhw ry(h l) Ktmxlm qzxh * * * b)wy l) rm)t hk K)lmh l). At first read123 Grelot,
Documents, 415. a fuller discussion of the literary history of this document, see Appendix 3 below. 125 We are discussing a literary phenomenon here, but it has a parallel in the syntactic constructions that generative grammarians classify as “left-branching,” for example, John’s friend’s uncle’s yacht. Here too an iterative process yields “multiple introductions.” In a generative literary theory, Gen 32:5 would be the output of a recursive rule like letter → introduction + letter. 126 Some translations and commentaries assign w#(l ynd)l to level III. This does not affect our point in any way. 124 For
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ing, one may be misled into translating: “David said to the messenger, ‘Thus shall you say to Joab: “. . . strengthen your attack against the city and destroy it and strengthen it.”’” In this reading, whqzxw, “and strengthen it,” seems either redundant (coming after Ktmxlm qzxh, “strengthen your attack”) or incoherent (coming after hsrh, “destroy it”)—not to mention ungrammatical (with its masculine suffixed pronoun referring to a feminine noun). The problems vanish once we become aware of the embedding:
K)lmh l) dwd rm)yw .I b)wy l) rm)t hk .II hsrhw ry(h l) Ktmxlm qzxh * * * .III .whqzxw .II As shown in the diagram, whqzxw belongs not to level III but to level II, where it continues b)wy l) rm)t hk and refers to the strengthening (i.e., encouraging)127 of Joab. In my view, the problems of Ezra 4:7–11—ostensible redundancy and lack of coherence—that have puzzled readers since ancient times have a similar origin. They are by-products of literary embedding—or, rather, of a failure to perceive this embedding. Once we activate our literary depth perception, four levels become visible:
l( wtwnk r)#w l)b+ tdrtm Ml#b btk )t##xtr) ymybw .I .tymr) Mgrtmw tymr) bwtk Nwt#nh btkw srp Klm )t##xtr) Ml#wry l( hdx hrg) wbtk )rps y#m#w M(+ l(b Mwxr .II .)mnk )klm )t##xtr)l Nwhtwnk r)#w )rps y#m#w M(+ l(b Mwxr Nyd) .III )ylbb ywkr) )ysrp) )ylpr+ )yktsrp)w )ynyd ylgh yd )ym) r)#w .)yml( ()whd) )yhd )ykn#w# r)#w Nyrm# yd hyrqb wmh btwhw )ryqyw )br rpns) . * * * hrhn rb( yhwl( wxl# yd )trg) Ng#rp hnd — yhwl( wxl# yd )trg) Ng#rp hnd .tn(kw .II rb( #n) Kydb( )klm )t##xtr) l( .IV .tn(kw hrhn Level I (v. 7) is the biblical author’s Hebrew introduction to the core of the Aramaic section that follows, viz., the archival search report sent by Bishlam, 127 Cf.
whqzxw in Deut 3:28.
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Mithredath, and Tabeel to Artaxerxes (without the added narrative). Level II (v. 8) is the introduction of Bishlam, Mithredath, and Tabeel to the first document in their report, the letter of Rehum and Shimshai. Level III is the heading of the letter of Rehum and Shimshai in the archival register-roll. We shall argue below that that heading originally began with a date instead of Nyd). Moreover, it originally had the form of a casus pendens construction, encompassing vv. 9–11aα.128 However, Bishlam and his colleagues broke up that construction by inserting tn(kw, thereby detaching the words yhwl( wxl# yd )trg) Ng#rp hnd from the preceding noun phrase and, in effect, “bumping” them up to level II (as shown by the arrows in the diagram). Level IV is, of course, the letter itself, beginning with the address formula. To some extent, the literary complexity of our passage is a reflection of bureaucratic complexity, with the four levels corresponding to three layers of bureaucracy. Readers in the Achaemenid period would have had far less difficulty than modern scholars in perceiving the layered structure of Ezra 4:7–11, because they were accustomed to such structures. We can demonstrate this with two examples from that period. The first example is an Elamite letter from the royal archives at Persepolis: “Speak to Harrena, the chief of livestock: ‘Parnaka says: “King Darius has given me a command, saying: ‘Give Princess Irtashduna (Artystone) one hundred sheep from my house.’”’”129 As in Gen 32:5, the four quotation marks at the end of this translation correspond to four levels: I. Speak to Harrena, the chief of livestock: II. Parnaka says: III. King Darius has given me a command, saying: IV. Give Princess Irtashduna (Artystone) one hundred sheep from my house. Here too the four levels correspond to three layers of bureaucracy. 128 So Arnold B. Ehrlich, w+w#pk )rqm (Berlin: M. Poppelauer, 1899–1901), 2:408 lines 1–2. Keil’s view is similar: “The verb to NyId) A V is wanting; this follows in ver. 11, but as an anacoluthon, after an enumeration of the names in 9 and 10 with w,xlA#”$; (Ezra, 65). We may compare the casus pendens construction in 6:13: )klm #wyrd xl# yd lbql—Nwhtwnkw ynzwb rt# hrhn rb( txp yntt Nyd) wdb( )nrps) )mnk, “Then Tattenai, governor of Across-the-River, Shethar-bozenai and their colleagues—as King Darius wrote, so they did diligently.” If the original archival heading had the form of a casus pendens construction, tn(kw (v. 10) must have been added at a later stage. And if the original heading contained no referent for the pronoun of yhwl( (v. 11), that word must replace an original )klm )t##xtr) l(, as assumed in the diagram on p. 673 below. The second point is a minor detail which I have ignored in the diagram on p. 667 (with its accompanying discussion) in order to avoid unnecessary complications. 129 George G. Cameron, “Darius’ Daughter and the Persepolis Inscriptions,” JNES 1 (1942): 216; Briant, From Cyrus, 425–26, 446, 920, 939–40.
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The second example, Prince Arsames’s boat repair authorization,130 is more complex. John David Whitehead has argued that this order is part of a five-stage administrative process, with each stage involving three to four layers of bureaucracy.131 The structure of the first stage is somewhat controversial owing to a lacuna. Here is Porten’s translation: “From Arsames to Wah\premakhi. And now, ...[...] to us, saying ‘Mithradates the boatholder thus says: “Psamsinei[t ... and PN ... all (told) two, the boatholders of] the Carians, thus said: ‘The boat which we hold-inhereditary-lease—time has come its NEEDS to d[o].’”’”132 Here again, the four quotation marks at the end correspond to four levels: I. From Arsames to Wah\premakhi: And now, ...[...] to us, saying: II. Mithradates the boatholder thus says: III. Psamsinei[t ... and PN ... all (told) two, the boatholders of] the Carians, thus said: IV. The boat which we hold-in-hereditary-lease—time has come its NEEDS to d[o]. In level I, Arsames introduces the report of a subordinate whose name is lost;133 in level II, the subordinate introduces Mithradates’ report; in level III, Mithradates introduces the report of Psamsineit and another boatholder; in level IV, we finally get to the heart of the matter: the report of Psamsineit and his partner that their boat needs repair. These four levels correspond to four layers of bureaucracy in reporting the need for repair. The boatholders of the Carians (Psamsineit and partner) report the problem (the need for repair) to their superior (Mithradates, the chief boatholder), who informs his superior (name unknown), who reports to the satrap (Prince Arsames).134
IX. The Syntax of Dates and the Date-Substitute “Then” It has frequently been noted that the use of the adverb Nyd), “then,” at the beginning of 4:9 is highly problematic. Following Nyd) we expect a clause informing us what happened after Rehum and Shimshai wrote the letter mentioned in v. 8, but instead we find a long noun phrase extending from M(+ l(b Mwxr to rb( r)#w hrhn. The problem is not solved by taking that noun phrase as part of a casus pendens construction;135 Nyd) still seems out of place.136 130 See
also above. “Epistolography,” 124. 132 Porten, Elephantine Papyri in English, 115–16. 133 Whitehead (Epistolography, 130) believes that the name is Bel-ez variants. The task is a worthy one. We have the opportunity to take up a provocative textcritical issue, one that has not been addressed at length by contemporary exegetes, by examining the interpretative possibilities for the Greek and Ge>ez manuscript readings and their fit within the narrative. In this context we also explore a third possibility for the text of 1 En. 19:2, an Aramaic reading prior to both the Greek and Ge>ez that is now lost to us. Further, the study also calls attention to the depiction of female characters in the narrative, an aspect of the work that in turn might provide further information about the role I wish to thank Drs. Toni Craven and James VanderKam for reading and commenting on this paper; I alone bear responsibility for the judgments expressed herein. In coming to terms with issues in this paper I have benefited from the counsel of Drs. Takamitsu Muraoka, Bezalel Porten, and Eugene Ulrich as well, and am grateful to them for sharing their expertise with me. I also wish to recognize St. Edward’s University for its generosity in supporting research for this project through a Presidential Excellence Scholarly Research Grant. 1 Enochic works may, in fact, preserve and combine up to three stories concerning the origin of evil. For further discussion of these stories and their merger, see James C. VanderKam, Enoch and the Growth of an Apocalyptic Tradition (CBQMS 16; Washington, DC: Catholic Biblical Association of America, 1984), 122–25; and also George W. E. Nickelsburg, 1 Enoch: A Commentary on the Book of 1 Enoch, vol. 1, Chapters 1–36, 81–108 (ed. Klaus Baltzer; Hermeneia; Minneapolis: Fortress, 2001), 171–72.
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of women or the status of women in the community that preserved such literature. It is of interest that the wives’ outcome has been curiously ignored in Second Temple and late antique works that do offer colorful expansions of Enochic texts and traditions, many of which concern the fate of the fallen watchers. What becomes of the watchers’ wives, and how does the matter affect our reading of the narrative and the view of women in this Enochic booklet? Discussion of these text-critical matters merits a review of the book’s history. Since the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, scholars know that the work we refer to as the Book of the Watchers was originally produced in Aramaic.2 Indeed, based on the number of copies of this text and others from the Enochic corpus, the literature attributed to or associated with Enoch was apparently quite popular at Qumran.3 Although the Aramaic text is extant for much of the Book of the Watchers, nothing from 1 Enoch 19 has been recovered from Qumran.4 1 Enoch 19 was preserved, however, in Greek in a codex found in the grave of a Coptic monk; we refer to this manuscript tradition, from the fourth or fifth century, as Panopolitanus, after the codex’s provenance in Egypt.5 The consensus view is that the Greek of 1 Enoch is a translation of an Aramaic copy.6 The Book of the Watchers and the whole of the corpus commonly referred to as 1 Enoch are also preserved in Ge>ez. There are, in fact, several manuscript traditions in Ethiopic, primarily related to one of two families.7 Though there has been some robust dis2 See Erik W. Larson, who notes that while it is possible that Enochic literature once existed in Hebrew, the evidence at present indicates only an Aramaic Grundschrift (“The Translation of Enoch from Aramaic into Greek” [Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1995], 21–27). See also Nickelsburg, 1 Enoch, 9. 3 Eleven manuscripts of works familiar from the corpus known as 1 Enoch were recovered from Cave 4 at Qumran. On the fragmentary Enochic texts, see J. T. Milik with the collaboration of Matthew Black, The Books of Enoch: Aramaic Fragments of Qumrân Cave 4 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1976); and Klaus Beyer, Die aramäischen Texte vom Toten Meer samt den Inschriften aus Palästina, dem Testament Levis aus der Kairoer Genisa, der Fastenrolle und den alten talmudischen Zitaten (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1984), 225–41. 4 From that same literary unit, however, portions of 1 En. 18:8–12 and 18:15 were recovered in Cave 4. Milik dates 4QEnc (for 18:8–12) from the Herodian period or the last third of the first century B.C.E. (Books of Enoch, 178). 4QEne (for 18:15), a fragment Milik is tentative in identifying, dates to the Hasmonean period, perhaps from the first half of the first century B.C.E. (ibid., 225, 228). 5 Larson, it would seem, favors a fourth- or fifth-century date, especially on the basis of paleographical comparison. See Erik W. Larson, “The Relation between the Greek and Aramaic Texts of Enoch,” in The Dead Sea Scrolls: Fifty Years after Their Discovery; Proceedings of the Jerusalem Congress, July 20–25, 1997 (ed. Lawrence Schiffman, Emanuel Tov, and James C. VanderKam; Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 2000), 434–44; esp. 437. Milik (Books of Enoch, 70) and Nickelsburg (1 Enoch, 12) date Codex Panopolitanus to the end of the fifth or sixth century. 6 Larson, “Relation between the Greek and Aramaic Texts of Enoch,” 439. This does not preclude, however, Panopolitanus in particular being a copy of a previously translated Greek text. Thus, Nickelsburg, 1 Enoch, 18. The Book of the Watchers has also been preserved in Greek in the form of excerpts in Syncellus’s work; 1 En. 19:1–2 was not among the selections represented by the Byzantine chronographer, however. 7 Both Johannes Flemming (Das Buch Henoch: Äthiopischer Text mit Einleitung und Commentar [Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1902]) and R. H. Charles (The Book of Enoch or 1 Enoch [Oxford: Clarendon,
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cussion as to whether the Ethiopic translators had access to Enochic literature in Aramaic, it is widely acknowledged that a Greek copy was the primary textual basis for the Ge>ez.8 Since the Aramaic for 1 En. 19:2 is not extant, I necessarily rely on Panopolitanus and various Ethiopic manuscript traditions. Inasmuch as the Greek version of the Book of the Watchers offers the earliest, most complete text, one might be inclined to prefer its readings.9 Yet Panopolitanus was not merely the product of scribes who went about the task of providing word-for-word correspondences for the Aramaic.10 As Erik Larson demonstrates, the translation of Panopolitanus often shows omissions and corruptions, as well as stylistic modifications and cultural adaptations.11 Hence, the tendencies of Panopolitanus’s scribes must also be considered in any discussion of text-critical matters. 1912]) sorted the Ethiopic manuscripts into two groups (1) an older recension based on a Greek version (which, following Flemming, we will refer to as Group I) and (2) a later recension of the Ethiopic (Group II). While textual traditions of Group I manuscripts are frequently, but not exclusively, favored (see Michael A. Knibb, The Ethiopic Book of Enoch: A New Edition in the Light of the Aramaic Dead Sea Fragments [2 vols.; Oxford: Clarendon, 1978], 2:32, who bases his translation on Rylands Library Ethiopic MS 23, a Group II MS), contemporary Enochic scholars work from a broader base of manuscripts than Flemming or Charles. Tana 9 and unpublished manuscripts of the Hill Monastic Manuscript Library collection, such as EMML 1768, EMML 2080, and EMML 6281 (all representative of Group I), are among the additional manuscripts that have come to light and are highly regarded; see Matthew Black, The Book of Enoch or I Enoch: A New English Edition with Commentary and Textual Notes (SVTP 7; Leiden: Brill, 1985), 6; and Ephraim Isaac, “New Light upon the Book of Enoch from Newly-Found Ethiopic Mss,” JAOS 103 (1983): 399–411, esp. 407. 8 See James C. VanderKam, “The Textual Base for the Ethiopic Translation of 1 Enoch,” in Working with No Data: Studies in Semitic and Egyptian Presented to Thomas O. Lambdin (ed. David M. Golomb; Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1987), 247–62; and Nickelsburg, 1 Enoch, 15. Though the Ethiopic agrees at times with the readings from Qumran against Panopolitanus, one need not assume that the Ethiopic translator(s) worked from an Aramaic text. One can make the argument that the translator(s) had access to a pristine Greek copy of the text, one not as defective or subject to as much revision as is observed in the case of Panopolitanus. Thus, Larson, “Relation between the Greek and Aramaic Texts of Enoch,” 440. 9 Nickelsburg notes that while he is aware of forty-nine pre-1900 manuscripts of Ethiopic 1 Enoch, only twelve of these can be dated to the seventeenth century or earlier (1 Enoch, 16). EMML 2080 may prove increasingly important to Enochic scholarship, since there is a claim that it is a twelfth- to thirteenth-century manuscript. See Getatchew Haile and William F. Macomber, A Catalogue of Ethiopian Manuscripts Microfilmed for the Ethiopian Manuscript Microfilm Library, Addis Ababa and for the Hill Monastic Manuscript Library, Collegeville, vol. 6, Project Numbers 2001–2500 (Collegeville, MN: St. John’s Abbey and University, 1982), 147. 10 Codex Panopolitanus preserves the work of two scribes for the Enochic material who, Larson observes, are contemporaneous (“Translation of Enoch from Aramaic into Greek,” 67–68). It is the second of these two who is responsible for the extant Greek of 19:2, and thus our comments pertain primarily to this scribe alone. 11 Larson notes that some material in Panopolitanus was lost through homoioteleuton; while at least seven instances may emerge through comparison with the Ethiopic, three are confirmed by Aramaic manuscripts from Qumran. Thus, Larson adds: “The foregoing analysis of the text of GPan (the Greek text of Panopolitanus) reveals the judgment of Milik, who thought that the scribes who produced the manuscript performed their work ‘creditably,’ cannot stand. On the contrary, the manuscript has been shown to contain many misspellings, omissions, and corruptions” (“Translation of
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We return to the matter of the variants. Since the Book of the Watchers is often characterized as an apocalyptic text, one expects it to treat end-time punishments or the promises of a new era alongside its account of the origin of evil. After Enoch has been shown extraordinary sites (1 Enoch 17–18), he learns from the angel Uriel that one of the places will serve to detain the angels who mated with women. As if the forbidden union was not problematic enough in terms of the cosmic order, Uriel reveals that the spirits of the fallen angels will lead humankind astray so that they will sacrifice to demons.12 Though the fallen watchers appear to be subject to some sort of physical containment and punishment (see 1 En. 10:4–6, 12–14; 18:9–12; cf. 21:7–10), their spirits are allowed to afflict humanity until the day of great judgment by leading people to acts of idolatry (19:1).13 Uriel then communicates to Enoch information about the women who partnered with the angels. According to the Greek manuscript tradition Panopolitanus, Uriel reveals that the wives of the angels who transgressed will become sirens. Panopolitanus 19:2 reads: kai; aiJ gunai'ke" aujtw'n tw'n parabavntwn ajggevlwn eij" seirh'na" genhvsontai (“and the wives of the transgressing angels will become sirens”).14 Ethiopic manuscripts preserve another reading: the wives of the angels will become peaceful (wa-ez) featured the preposition eij". Could it be that wJ" appeared in the received Greek text, having been used to render the Aramaic k? While we typically translate kama and wJ" as “like” (or “as”), the preposition hardly seems necessary in the proposed reconstruction or in the reading of the Ge>ez manuscripts. In the context, however, the Aramaic k could have functioned as an emphatic or asseverative kaf, where the particle indicates emphasis or the degree to which; the emphatic kaf may be translated as “truly” or it may be ignored altogether in a translation.57 The point of the emphatic kaf would have been to accentuate 54 When
compared to the reading of Panopolitanus, one might find the Ge>ez the more likely in accord with the principle of lectio difficilior probabilior. 55 While the examples cited from the Astronomical Book and the Damascus Document feature Ml#$ with the sense of “bring to completion” or simply “complete,” one finds instances outside of the Dead Sea Scrolls where the verb also signifies bringing a life to an end. See Tanh\. Mishp. 19, where the verb in the niphal indicates that an individual must die. Further Mark 15:37 and Luke 23:46 of the Peshitta furnish examples of $šin-lamad-mim with the sense of bringing a life to an end. My gratitude to Dr. Muraoka for bringing these examples to my attention. Examples of Ml#$ conveying “to come to an end” or “to be finished” are plentiful in the Hebrew Bible and include the Aramaic Ezra 5:16 and Dan 5:26. For use of the verb in this manner in rabbinic literature, see Jastrow (1996), 1585; and Michael Sokoloff, A Dictionary of Jewish Palestinian Aramaic of the Byzantine Period (Dictionaries of Talmud, Midrash, and Targum 2; Ramat Gan: Bar Ilan University Press, 1990), 554–55. 56 See IBHS, 628–29. See Neh 13:22. As for the form of hwh, one might expect Nywhl, the imperfect third feminine plural form. 57 For examples of the emphatic kaf in Aramaic texts, see Takamitsu Muraoka and Bezalel
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the end to which the wives are brought.58 Yet the sense of the emphatic kaf may have been misunderstood and translated in a wooden manner by an initial Greek scribe (thus wJ") only to be revised by Panopolitanus, which opts instead for eij" to accompany genhvsontai. The scribe of the Ge>ez translates wJ" as kama, retaining a form of “like” or “as.” A possible reconstruction of the Aramaic for 1 En. 19:2 would be, therefore, as follows: Nmyl#$k Nywhl w+x yd )yk)lm yd Nwhy#$nw, “and the wives of the transgressing angels will be brought to an utter end.”59 One might make the case, likewise, that Panopolitanus’s text shows awareness of this proposed reading and that the scribe chose to communicate something of the sense of 19:2 in a more stylized fashion. That is to say, we recall that sirens could function as symbols of mourning and be associated with the realm of the dead. Rather than simply have the wives of the angels in 1 En. 19:2 be eliminated, the Hellenistic scribe chose an evocative term, “sirens,” which would at once be meaningful to his audience and convey the demise of the women. In order to answer the question of what became of the watchers’ wives, we have examined the Greek and Ge>ez readings and have proposed a challenge to the scholarly consensus that Panopolitanus is to be preferred over the reading in the Ethiopic manuscripts. Specifically, we propose that a Greek Vorlage utilized by Ethiopic translators did not alight upon the meaning of Ml#$ required for the narrative. The tendency of Panopolitanus’s scribe to transform the text before him into literate Greek and to use expressions such as “Tartarus” that were familiar in a hellenized environment make it likely that the reading of “sirens” was an attempt to improve a precursor. Even so, we have explored two possible Semitic candidates for the Greek “siren”: the bat ya>ănâ, a creature associated with mourning and desolate places and the lîlît as succubus. With the narrative context providing scant illumination as to what was intended by “sirens,” “bĕnôt ya>ănâ,” or “liliths,” we concluded that Ml#$$ presents an option that accords better both with textcritical reconstructions and with the sparse details of the narrative. Though not a sensational ending, the women are merely terminated and removed from the exposition. The question of which is the correct reading of 1 En. 19:2 becomes a significant one, for it contributes to the cumulative portrait of women in the Book of the Watchers. If Porten, A Grammar of Egyptian Aramaic (HO 32; Leiden: Brill, 1998), 331 (see also 179 n. 798); and Ernst Vogt, Lexicon linguae aramaicae veteris testamenti documentis antiques illustratum (Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute, 1971), 79. With regard to the emphatic kaf in Hebrew, see Takamitsu Muraoka, Emphatic Words and Structures in Biblical Hebrew (Leiden: Brill; Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1985), 158–64; and Joüon, 2:616–18 (§164b). The emphatic kaf is not a grammatical proposition that is agreed to universally. See, e.g., Ernst Jenni, Die hebräischen Präpositionen: Die Präposition Kaph, vol. 2 (Stuttgart/Berlin/Cologne: Kohlhammer, 1994), 120–22. 58 I wonder if we might not observe the emphatic kaf as well in a variant reading from 1QIsaa 34:12. Whereas the MT reads sp) wyhy hyr#-lkw w)rqy hkwlm M#-Ny)w hyrx, 1QIsaa has k prefixed to the last word (sp)k) to read: “will be utterly destroyed.” It appears that a later scribe thought to emend/remove the kaf as the letter has a scribal marking above and below it, one that typically conveys the need for correction. A later scribe, most likely after comparing the text with another copy, sought to remove the kaf from 1QIsaa. 59 The first part of my reconstruction of the Aramaic builds on that of Charles (Book of Enoch, or 1 Enoch, 43). I thank Dr. Porten for confirming the likelihood and placement of the kaf in this reconstruction.
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“sirens” served as a substitute for mythical creatures like the bat ya>ănâ or the lîlît (creatures associated with wailing, death, or demonic activity), the text presents a negative assessment of or unfortunate outcome for the angels’ wives. In this light, as later traditions (like the Testament of Reuben) would conclude, the women appear guilty of seduction, deserving of a type of punishment, and culpable still for luring men. Following the Ge>ez of 1 En. 19:2, the women appear to be the victims of the watchers’ affections, as is suggested by 1 Enoch 6. If we follow the reconstruction of the Aramaic I am proposing, the wives are simply dispatched. Rather than offering an excessively positive or negative evaluation of the wives, this proposed reading of 19:2 makes a statement about the relative unimportance of the wives in the account. In fact, in this light, the focus of 1 En. 19:2 may not be the wives at all. Their fate merits mention only inasmuch as it pertains to the angels’ punishment. Not only will the fallen watchers be imprisoned, but their wives will be vanquished or put to an end. In this respect, the text, though androcentric, is hardly misogynist in its depiction of the wives. Reconstruction of ancient texts is risky business, because a discovery or identification of a manuscript could easily disprove one’s theory. Thus, the reader should not see in this work definitive claims about the Aramaic original of 1 En. 19:2. This exercise (providing a plausible reconstruction) seems desirable, nonetheless, in light of the fact that one is hard-pressed to find a conclusion for the wives of 1 En. 19:2 that fits well with the narrative context. In its defense, the foregoing reconstruction—doubtfully the only one possible—does accomplish some important aims vis-à-vis our understanding of this troublesome text. The explanation allows us to make sense of how the Greek and Ge>ez manuscripts come upon their different readings for 1 En. 19:2. Moreover, the proposed reconstruction reflects an awareness of the narrative context and is consistent with the fact that even though the wives of the watchers are demonized in later traditions as having seduced the watchers in the first place, they are never represented in these traditions as becoming demons themselves or mythological creatures of some sort. They simply vanish from the tradition, are seemingly disposed of. Kelley Coblentz Bautch
[email protected] St. Edward’s University, Austin, TX 78704
Did Paul Loathe Manual Labor? Revisiting the Work of Ronald F. Hock on the Apostle’s Tentmaking and Social Class
According to Acts 18:3, Paul, along with Aquila and Priscilla, was a skhnopoiov" by trade. Although this specific claim is not corroborated by Paul in his letters, interpreters tend to accept this particular Lukan tradition at face value.1 There is scholarly dispute, however, regarding the precise nature of the apostle’s handcraft. In short, scholars differ over whether Paul was a weaver who made tentcloth from cilicium (i.e., goats’ hair) or if Paul was a leatherworker who crafted leather products, including tents.2 Notable exceptions notwithstanding, a sizable majority now espouse the latter view,3 although Jerome Murphy-O’Connor has proposed that Paul would have been equally adept in working with both leather and canvas.4 This piece had its origins as a simultaneous short paper delivered at the British New Testament Conference hosted by the University of Edinburgh in September 2004. I would like to express my appreciation to those who responded to my presentation at that gathering as well as to the three anonymous reviewers for JBL who evaluated an earlier version of this essay. Their thoughtful critiques and valuable suggestions enabled me to improve this article. 1 See, e.g., Gerd Lüdemann, who declares that “we should not doubt this report” (Early Christianity according to the Traditions in Acts: A Commentary [trans. John Bowden; London: SCM, 1989], 202). Cf. Ernst Haenchen, who contends that in 18:2–3 one finds “reports of the greatest historical reliability” (The Acts of the Apostles: A Commentary [rev. trans. Robin McL. Wilson; Philadelphia: Westminster, 1971], 538). Note also Jürgen Becker, who credits Luke with offering “historical truth in this case” (Paul: Apostle to the Gentiles [trans. O. C. Dean, Jr.; Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1993], 37). 2 For representative bibliography, see Joseph A. Fitzmyer, The Acts of the Apostles: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (AB 31; New York: Doubleday, 1998), 626. 3 Whereas Peter Lampe (“Paulus-Zeltmacher,” BZ 31 [1987]: 256–60) propounds that Paul was a linen worker who made tents for the wealthy (see, e.g., F. F. Bruce, Paul: Apostle of the Free Spirit [Exeter: Paternoster, 1977], 36; and Rainer Riesner, Paul’s Early Period: Chronology, Mission Strategy, Theology [trans. Doug Stott; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998], 148), most Pauline scholars would affirm Martin Hengel’s conclusions: “Presumably as a ‘tentmaker’ he [i.e. Paul] worked in leather. . . . We should not understand the designation ‘tentmaker’ in too narrow a sense. The goods produced in this trade may have included a variety of leather articles or comparable products, just as a ‘saddler’ does not produce only saddles” (The Pre-Christian Paul [trans. John Bowden; London: SCM; Philadelphia: Trinity Press International, 1991], 17). 4 See Jerome Murphy-O’Connor, Paul: A Critical Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 86–89, esp. 86. Morna Hooker supports Murphy-O’Connor’s proposal (Paul: A Short Introduction
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Turning to Paul’s epistles, one discovers a number of texts where the apostle speaks of his manual labor in general terms (see esp. 1 Thess 2:9; 1 Cor 4:12; 9:6; 2 Cor 11:27; cf. 2 Thess 3:8; Acts 20:34–35). Taken together, these passages suggest that Paul supported himself in the midst of his ministry by plying a trade. Even if he occasionally received material assistance from given congregations and persons (note 2 Cor 11:9; Phil 4:15–16; Rom 16:1–2, 23), it was Paul’s stated missionary policy and practice to be fiscally independent (see esp. 1 Cor 9:12, 15, 18). Contemporary interpreters of Paul concur that the apostle worked as an artisan in conjunction with his mission. They are also agreed that his toil as a tentmaker marked not only his missionary activity but also his apostolic self-understanding.5 Pauline scholars have rarely asked, however, how the apostle regarded his labor as a leatherworker. Roughly a quarter of a century ago, Ronald F. Hock called into question the common scholarly assumption that Paul viewed (his) work favorably. In contradistinction, he posited “that Paul’s view of his trade and of work in general was not as positive as is often assumed.”6 Although Pauline interpreters have sometimes questioned this provocative proposal in passing, I am not aware of a sustained response to Hock on this particular issue.7 This essay examines Hock’s contention, which cuts against the grain of interpretive tradition.8
[Oxford: Oneworld, 2003], 19 n. 18). Cf. Udo Schnelle, Apostle Paul: His Life and Theology (trans. M. Eugene Boring; Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005), 62–63. 5 See, e.g., Wayne A. Meeks, The First Urban Christians: The Social World of the Apostle Paul (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 1983), esp. 9, 27, 29; David G. Horrell, The Social Ethos of the Corinthian Correspondence: Interests and Ideology from 1 Corinthians to 1 Clement (Studies of the New Testament and Its World; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996), 76; and Justin J. Meggitt, Paul, Poverty and Survival (Studies of the New Testament and Its World; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1998), 75– 77. 6 So Ronald F. Hock, The Social Context of Paul’s Ministry: Tentmaking and Apostleship (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1980), 66–67. Note also Hock’s “Paul’s Tentmaking and the Problem of His Social Class,” JBL 97 (1978): 555–64, esp. 560–62, 564; and “Paul and Greco-Roman Education,” in Paul in the Greco-Roman World: A Handbook (ed. J. Paul Sampley; Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2003), 198–227, here 218 n. 1. See similarly Abraham J. Malherbe, Paul and the Thessalonians: The Philosophic Tradition of Pastoral Care (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987), 55–56; idem, The Letters to the Thessalonians: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (AB 32B; New York: Doubleday, 2000), 161. 7 See, among others, John C. Lentz, Luke’s Portrait of Paul (SNTSMS 77; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 102; and Richard S. Ascough, “The Thessalonian Christian Community as a Professional Voluntary Association,” JBL 119 (2000): 311–28, here 314. Meggitt (Paul, 88) maintains, “[Hock’s] accusation that Paul demonstrates a ‘snobbish’ attitude to his own toil is extremely ill thought out.” The scope and focus of Meggitt’s monograph, however, preclude him from developing this criticism in any degree of detail. 8 To wit, Arthur T. Geoghegan writes, “St. Paul had a high regard for labor and sought by his example and his teaching to inculcate in others a genuine esteem for it” (The Attitude towards Labor in Early Christianity and Ancient Culture [Catholic University of America Studies in Christian Antiquity 6; Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1945], 119). See also Miroslav Volf, Work in the Spirit: Toward a Theology of Work (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991; repr., Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2001), 71–73.
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At least two related working hypotheses appear to support Hock’s view that Paul possessed a “snobbish and scornful attitude” toward work.9 First is the observation that upper-class Greeks and Romans regarded manual labor as something “slavish and demeaning.” Second is the suggestion that Paul hailed “from a relatively high social class.”10 If both of these suppositions are correct, then one only needs to take a small syllogistic step with Hock in order to conclude that Paul, like any self-respecting aristocrat of his day, viewed work with an upper-crust disgust.11 In this critical note we will discover what taking this step entails and will consider where such an interpretive trail leads. Although Justin J. Meggitt has noted primary sources that demonstrate “the equivocal nature of attitudes towards physical labour amongst all elements in first-century society,”12 for the purposes of this essay I will grant the point that in Greco-Roman antiquity the wealthy looked disparagingly upon work.13 I will not, however, presuppose with Hock (and a number of other contemporary Pauline scholars) that Paul was “born with a silver spoon in his mouth.”14 Nor will I maintain with Meggitt that Paul was “a real leatherworker from the cradle to the grave (and not some kind of financially embarrassed aristocrat or the like).”15 Rather, without positing a particular social class from which the apostle arose, I will seek to ascertain how he viewed (his) manual labor by examining pertinent texts from the Thessalonian and Corinthian letters.16 Before analyzing these particular passages, 9 Hock,
“Paul’s Tentmaking,” 562. ibid., 564. 11 Those who follow Hock on this point include Peter Marshall, Enmity in Corinth: Social Conventions in Paul’s Relations with the Corinthians (WUNT 23; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1987), 359; John B. Polhill, Paul and His Letters (Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 1999), 190; and MurphyO’Connor, Paul, 86. See similarly Goran Agrell, Work, Toil and Sustenance: An Examination of the View of Work in the New Testament, Taking into Consideration Views Found in the Old Testament, Intertestamental and Early Rabbinic Writings (Lund: Verbum Håkan Ohlssons, 1976), 104, 115. 12 Meggitt, Paul, 88 n. 64. See also Timothy B. Savage, Power through Weakness: Paul’s Understanding of the Christian Ministry in 2 Corinthians (SNTSMS 86; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 84–86. 13 As maintained by Hock in “Paul’s Tentmaking,” 560; idem, Social Context, 35. Longtime Yale University Roman historian Ramsay MacMullen questions whether the wealthy in the empire were as averse to and as jaundiced toward work as modern scholarship is wont to claim. See MacMullen’s Roman Social Relations, 50 B.C. to A.D. 284 (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 1974), 120, 202 n. 105. For pertinent bibliography on this subject, see Ascough, “Thessalonian Christian Community,” 314 n. 19. 14 Ernest Best, Paul and His Converts (James Sprunt Lectures 1985; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1988). For representative lists of scholars who maintain that Paul was and was not from an affluent background, see Hock, “Paul’s Tentmaking,” 555–58; and Meggitt, Paul, 80 n. 26. To these two listings, one may now add Morna D. Hooker (Paul, 19) and Calvin J. Roetzel (Paul: The Man and the Myth [Studies on Personalities of the New Testament: Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998], 22–23) to those who think that Paul did (Hooker) and did not (Roetzel) come from a well-to-do family. 15 Meggitt, Paul, 96. 16 If this is a cautious approach, it is also, in my judgment, warranted. Even Steven J. Friesen (“Poverty in Pauline Studies: Beyond the So-called New Consensus,” JSNT 26 [2004]: 323–61), who not unlike Meggitt maintains that poverty characterized Paul’s converts and associates, speculates that 10 So
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however, an overview of Hock’s groundbreaking work on Paul and tentmaking is in order. Placing our specific inquiry into a broader frame will allow for a clearer view of both the contextual forest and the exegetical trees.
I. The Centrality of Paul’s Trade in His Life and Ministry To the extent that Pauline interpreters are presently apprised of the apostle’s work as an artisan in the Mediterranean milieu in which he lived and ministered, academic credit should be given and scholastic gratitude expressed to Professor Hock. Beginning in 1976 and continuing until 1980, Hock produced a steady stream of studies on Paul’s tentmaking and the sociohistorical context thereof. Following the publication of an article on a laboring Cynic philosopher Simon the shoemaker, Hock wrote essays that probed the relationship between Paul’s handcraft and social class, on the one hand, and the apostle’s tentmaking and missionary preaching, on the other.17 Building upon his previous publications as well as his doctoral dissertation, in 1980 Hock completed a slender, yet substantive, monograph.18 In the span of 112 pages (including front matter, notes, bibliography, and a source index), Hock examined Paul’s work in greater detail and with finer precision than any other scholar before or since.19 A brief summary of and response to this highly influential and rightly heralded volume is now in order. After introducing his study and the need for such (ch. 1), Hock considers Paul’s trade as a leatherworker and how he came to learn this craft (ch. 2). He then turns in ch. 3 to consider Paul’s work as a tentmaker in conjunction with his Gentile mission. In doing so, Hock describes the apostle’s travels, toil, and work environment in some detail. Next, Hock examines the identifiable tension that developed between Paul and the Corinthians because of the apostle’s refusal to set aside his trade and become their client (ch. 4). In chs. 3 and 4, which constitute the heart of the volume, Hock situates and interprets the apostle and his labor within a Greco-Roman framework.20 By way of conclusion (ch. 5), the apostle “may have chosen a life of downward mobility” (p. 359). See also Horrell, Social Ethos, 203. With respect to the economic conditions of Paul’s converts, John M. G. Barclay comments, “I doubt we will ever be able to reach more than tentative and imprecise conclusions” (“Poverty in Pauline Studies: A Response to Steven Friesen,” JSNT 26 [2004]: 363–66, here 365). The same might be said of the (socio-)economic circumstances into which Paul was born. On the choice of the Thessalonian and Corinthian letters for this study, see Hock, “Paul’s Tentmaking,” 555. 17 Hock, “Simon the Shoemaker as an Ideal Cynic,” GRBS 17 (1976): 41–53; idem, “Paul’s Tentmaking” (see n. 6 above); and idem, “The Workshop as a Social Setting for Paul’s Missionary Preaching,” CBQ 41 (1979): 438–50. 18 Ronald F. Hock, “The Working Apostle: An Examination of Paul’s Means of Livelihood” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1974). See further nn. 6 and 17 above. 19 See now, however, Helenann Hartley, “‘We Worked Night and Day That We Might Not Burden Any of You’ (1 Thessalonians 2:9): Aspects of the Portrayal of Work in the Letters of Paul, Late Second Temple Judaism, the Graeco-Roman World and Early Christianity” (Ph.D. thesis, Oxford University, 2005). 20 One of the distinguishing features of his work to which Hock often draws attention is his effort to consider Paul’s trade “not merely in terms of a Jewish history-of-religions context” but “in
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Hock highlights three potential contributions of his study. First, he suggests that his work establishes beyond reasonable doubt that Paul made tents from leather and not goats’ hair. Second, Hock maintains that it is an interpretive misstep to view Paul’s work from a Jewish point of reference. Instead, Hock contends that Paul’s outlook on work in general and his own toil in particular was more in sync with his Cynic contemporaries than with secondcentury rabbis. Additionally, it is suggested that the apostle viewed work more negatively than his interpreters typically assume. Finally, Hock reiterates that Paul’s work as a tentmaker was central, not peripheral, to his mission and self-conception. In sum, Hock conceives of his study as one that retrieves Paul from the margins of religious and theological history and places him in “the social and intellectual milieu of the urban centers of the Greek East of the early empire.”21 Along with a number of others (see n. 3 above), I am inclined to agree with Hock’s proposal that the apostle would have worked with leather. I also concur with his view that Paul’s manual labor was integral to his life and ministry. Furthermore, Hock is clearly correct to insist that Paul was in no way immune to the hardships of living as an ancient artisan in and en route to urban settings. As intimated in my introductory remarks, however, I have yet to be persuaded by Hock’s claim that Paul, like an upper-class Greek or Roman, looked at work askance. In what follows, then, we will examine this particular contention. To begin, let us consider the relevant textual data in the Thessalonian and Corinthian letters.
II. Paul’s Remarks Regarding His Physical Labor 1 Thessalonians Despite scholarly speculation, it is now impossible to determine when, where, and from whom Paul learned his craft.22 What one can say with confidence is that at least by the time of his initial visit to Thessalonica Paul was simultaneously engaged in plying his terms of the social and intellectual milieu of the Greek East of the early Roman Empire” (Social Context, 17). 21 Hock, Social Context, 68. 22 So also Hengel, Pre-Christian Paul, 16. There are at least three viable options. Paul could have learned his trade from his father as a child in Tarsus (so Hock, Social Context, 24; see also C. J. den Heyer, Paul: A Man of Two Worlds [trans. John Bowden; Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2000], 30), as a rabbinical student in Jerusalem under Gamaliel (see Polhill, Paul, 9), or at some point after his conversion/call prior to his far-flung missionary travels (so Klaus Haacker, “Paul’s Life,” in The Cambridge Campanion to St Paul [ed. James D. G. Dunn; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003], 19–33, here 25; and Murphy-O’Connor, Paul, 86; see also Riesner, Paul’s Early Period, 149). Although it is frequently suggested that Paul learned his trade in conjunction with his theological training in Jerusalem (so, e.g., Günther Bornkamm, Paul [trans. D. M. G. Stalker; New York: Harper & Row, 1971], 12), Hock speculates that Paul learned the tentmaking trade while serving as his father’s apprentice (Social Context, 24). As it happens, this suggestion stands in tension with Hock’s claim that Paul “was by birth a member of the socially elite” (Social Context, 35), as Meggitt (Paul, 87) has also noticed.
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trade and preaching the gospel.23 As the apostle reflects on his Thessalonian mission, he remarks, “For you remember, brothers and sisters, our labor and toil; working night and day in order that we might not be a fiscal burden upon any of you as we preached to you the gospel of God” (1 Thess 2:9). Based on the literary context of this comment, it is clear that Paul regarded his work as an artisan in Thessalonica to be an expression of his affection for the Thessalonians (2:8) as well as a sign of his unimpeachable character (2:10; cf. 1:5b). Earlier in the same chapter of the letter, Paul reiterates that his ministry in their midst was neither motivated by greed (2:5) nor marked by his becoming a (financial?) burden (2:6; cf. 1 Cor 9:4-6).24 Later in 1 Thessalonians, apparently Paul’s oldest surviving letter,25 the apostle reminds his converts of the way that he and his fellow missioners lived out their faith before them (4:1). He also reiterates the instruction they gave to the Thessalonian congregation regarding work (4:11). In sum, Paul’s remarks about (his) labor in 1 Thessalonians are anything but negative. On the contrary, as Richard S. Ascough has rightly observed, “In 1 Thessalonians Paul’s language about work reflects a more positive attitude.”26
The Corinthian Correspondence Even though Hock incorporates texts from 1 Thessalonians into his writings on Paul’s tentmaking, it is from the Corinthian letters that Hock seeks to build his case that the apostle possessed an elitist attitude toward labor. That being the case, we will now turn to treat in greater detail those verses in 1 and 2 Corinthians that are most pivotal to Hock’s argument. To begin, it is in the course of a passage replete with satire and irony, where Paul is depicting his apostolic existence in stark, contrastive tones (i.e., 4:8–13), that one encounters the first of five peristasis catalogues in the Corinthian correspondence (1 Cor 4:11– 23 Dates for Paul’s sojourn in Thessalonica range from the late 30s (so, e.g., Gerd Lüdemann, Paul, Apostle to the Gentiles: Studies in Chronology [trans. F. Stanley Jones; London: SCM, 1984], 238) to the late 40s (so, e.g., Malherbe, Letters to the Thessalonians, 73). I regard the latter as more likely. For a discussion of these chronological issues, see the still useful summary of Robert Jewett, The Thessalonian Correspondence: Pauline Rhetoric and Millenarian Piety (FFNT; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1986), 49–60. 24 Is the word bavro" in 2:7 (GNT) to be taken as (1) “burden, weight,” (2) “authority, dignity,” or (3) both? See, e.g., F. F. Bruce (1 & 2 Thessalonians [WBC 45; Waco: Word Books, 1982], 31); Charles A. Wanamaker (The Epistles to the Thessalonians: A Commentary on the Greek Text [NIGTC; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans; Exeter: Paternoster, 1990], 99); and George Milligan (St. Paul’s Epistles to the Thessalonians [London: Macmillan, 1908; repr., Old Tappan, NJ: Revell, n.d.], 20–21) respectively. Although double entendre is not without parallel in Paul (option 3) and context allows for option 2, given the way Paul employs cognates of bavro" elsewhere (note esp. 1 Thess 2:9 and 2 Thess 3:8; cf. 2 Cor 12:16 and 2 Cor 11:9), I am presently inclined to see a financial connotation. 25 In addition to various commentators on the letter, see Raymond F. Collins, The Birth of the New Testament: The Origin and Development of the First Christian Generation (New York: Crossroad, 1993), esp. 1–4. 26 Ascough, “Thessalonian Christian Community,” 314.
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12a; cf. 2 Cor 4:7–12; 6:4–5; 11:23–29; 12:10; note also Rom 8:35–36).27 In this particular list of hardships, Paul not only speaks of his being hungry, thirsty, poorly clothed, beaten, and homeless, but he also refers to the fact that he labors with his own hands (4:12a). Some have taken Paul’s depiction of his labor in this passage as a clear indication of a privileged past.28 Correlatively, Paul’s incorporation of his manual labor into this catalogue has been understood to indicate the apostle’s espousal of a “traditional Greco-Roman view of labor [i.e., a negative view].”29 To be sure, Paul does not cast his arduous labor as an artisan in the most positive of lights in 1 Cor 4:12; rather, he places his exhausting toil alongside other apostolic perils. But does the fact that Paul was often, if not always (see Phil 4:12), subject to physical exhaustion, social devaluation, and grim working conditions necessarily suggest that he despised manual labor? It is worth asking whether Paul’s terse remark regarding his work in this rhetorically charged passage should be construed to indicate that the apostle held a negative view of his trade. Is it not as plausible to view Paul’s comment about working with his hands in 1 Cor 4:12 as descriptive of his toil? That Paul would speak about and even conceive of his labor as an unenviable, if volitional, part of his apostolic remit does not require a reader to perceive him as a former aristocrat who abhorred (his) work. Although Hock appeals to 1 Cor 4:12 to support his argument that Paul “viewed his working at a trade none too positively” (also noted in passing are 1 Cor 4:10 and 2 Cor 2:17), he puts the burden of proof for making his case squarely on the textual shoulders of 1 Cor 9:19 and 2 Cor 11:7.30 The critical question is if these two verses can bear up under the considerable weight that Hock has placed on them. In 1 Corinthians 9 Paul both claims and renounces his rights as an apostle, particularly his right to be supported by the gospel (9:14). Instead of viewing the gospel as a ticket to entitlement and/or support, Paul perceives it as an obligation with which he has been laden and a commission with which he has been entrusted (9:16–17). Therefore, Paul preaches the gospel gratis (9:18). In 9:19 in particular, Paul asserts his liberty from all, yet his slavery to all, so that he might win many people over to the gospel. The apostle’s remark in v. 19 that “he has enslaved himself to all” (pa'sin ejmauto;n ejdouvlwsa) is of particular interest and import to Hock. Reading the liberty and the slavery of which Paul speaks in 27 On
these lists in general, as well as in 1 Corinthians 4 and 2 Corinthians 4; 6 in particular, see John T. Fitzgerald, Cracks in an Earthen Vessel: An Examination of the Catalogues of Hardships in the Corinthian Correspondence (SBLDS 99; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1988). See also David E. Fredrickson, “Paul, Hardships, and Suffering,” in Paul in the Greco-Roman World, 172–97. 28 For example, Hooker interprets Paul’s comment that he worked with his hands to indicate that this “was not something he would normally have expected to do: in other words, he was not what we would term ‘working-class’. He gave up a comfortable life-style for the sake of the gospel” (Paul, 19). See similarly E. P. Sanders, Paul (Past Masters; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 11; and A. D. Nock (St. Paul [London: Butterworth, 1938; repr., New York: Harper & Row, 1963], 21–22), who approvingly quotes C. H. Dodd with special reference to 1 Cor 4:12: “A man born to manual labor does not speak self-consciously of ‘labouring with my own hands.’” 29 So Dale Martin, Slavery as Salvation: The Metaphor of Slavery in Pauline Christianity (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 1990), 123. 30 The quotation appears in Hock, Social Context, 67. Support for the substance of this sentence may be found in Hock, “Paul’s Tentmaking,” esp. 558–62; see also Social Context, 36, 59–65.
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a strictly economic sense and referring to passages from Xenophon and Cicero for support, Hock writes: “Paul’s working at a trade had, on the one hand, allowed him to be selfsupporting and so free, but his very trade had, on the other hand, also made him appear slavish.” With further appeal to Cicero and then to Plutarch as well, Hock concludes that Paul, like a member of the upper class, regarded his work with disdain. For Hock, Paul’s prejudice against manual labor would have been “readily understood and shared” by that small, yet significant, cross-section of the Corinthian congregation drawn from the upper classes (cf. 1 Cor 1:26–29).31 Before considering Hock’s interpretation of 2 Cor 11:7, a brief response to his reading of 1 Cor 9:19 is in order. First, one may wonder if Paul’s metaphorical depiction of himself as a slave may be forced into the exegetical straitjacket that Hock has fitted for it. Given the broader context in which this verse appears, economics should certainly be factored into the interpretive picture. However, an exclusively economic explanation fails to fill out the frame (cf. 1 Cor 6:22; 2 Cor 4:5). In 1 Cor 9:20–23, for example, Paul raises a number of extra-economical issues that were part and parcel of his self-enslavement for the good and the growth of the gospel.32 In brief, it would appear that Hock has done too much with too little and too little with too much.33 Additionally, Hock’s criticism of Pauline interpreters for appealing to texts elsewhere in Paul to clarify the meaning of doulou'n in 9:19 rings especially hollow in light of the fact that Hock himself turns to the likes of Xenophon, Cicero, and Plutarch for lexicographical and ideological aid.34 If Pauline parallels can themselves be problematic, the same may be said, and then some, of the Greco-Roman texts that Hock marshals. Furthermore, if Hock is correct in claiming that Paul’s view of work as something slavish would have been “readily understood and shared” by well-heeled Corinthian congregants, then Paul was anything but pastorally adroit in dealing with the church’s (class) divisions.35 By confirming and even affirming the wise, powerful, and noble in their aristocratic arrogance and upper-class snobbery, Paul would have been shaking the very hands he was seeking to slap in Corinth! Far from puncturing their pride and placing their feet back on spiritual terra firma, by sharing the Corinthian elite’s jaundiced view of work(ers) he would have only widened the chasm he was seeking to bridge. Stated otherwise, by 31 Hock,
“Paul’s Tentmaking,” 559, 560–61.
32 See now more fully John Byron, Slavery Metaphors in Early Judaism and Pauline Christianity
(WUNT 162; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003), esp. 249–57. 33 See similarly Gordon D. Fee, The First Epistle to the Corinthians (NICNT; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1987), 425 n. 17. Note also John Elliott, review of Ronald F. Hock, The Social Context of Paul’s Ministry: Tentmaking and Apostleship, Horizons 9 (1982): 132–33, here 132. 34 Hock, “Paul’s Tentmaking,” 559–60. 35 Ibid., 561. The social composition of and the division within the Corinthian congregation are complex issues beyond the purview of this article. For our present purposes, it will suffice to note that in the work of Gerd Theissen (“Soziale Schichtung in der korinthischen Gemeinde: Ein Beitrag zur Soziologie des hellenistischen Urchristentums,” ZNW 65 [1974]: 231–72), to which Hock appeals (“Paul’s Tentmaking,” 561 n. 35), the Corinthian church is thought to be divided along the lines of social class and that the wealthy and “wise” in the church, though a small group numerically, are seen as wielding a disproportionate amount of influence.
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supporting the “haves” in their prejudice against the “have-nots,” he would have been building up precisely those whom he was seeking to tear down elsewhere in the letter (cf. Gal 2:18). That Paul could be inept and contradictory in his epistolary counsel to the Corinthians is possible; that Paul would have wittingly employed a derisive, upper-class description of work (doulou'n) that would have in effect degraded lower-class Corinthians, the ones for whom he was advocating, is implausible. The other verse on which Hock focuses is 2 Cor 11:7.36 In the course of excoriating those whom he sarcastically dubs “superlative apostles” (11:5; cf. 12:11, 23), Paul puts to the Corinthians the following question with respect to his refusal to receive remuneration from them: “Did I commit a sin by humbling [abasing or humiliating] myself in order that you might be exalted, because I preached to you the gospel of God without payment?” Hock hones in on the phrase ejmauto;n tapeinw'n, which he renders “by demeaning myself.” He eschews understanding tapeinou'n in a “narrowly religious sense”; rather, he advocates apprehending the term in a social sense, more specifically, as a word “used to express upper-class attitudes toward work.” To support the meaning he ascribes to and the milieu he envisions for tapeinou'n, Hock appeals to a passage from Lucian’s Somnium and notes similar usages for the word in Aristotle, Athenaeus, and Plutarch. Having done so, Hock reiterates that Paul employs tapeinou'n socially in 2 Cor 11:7 and contends that this verse, along with 1 Cor 9:19, reveals the apostle’s aristocratic disregard for work. It is with good reason that Hock views the self-abasement of which Paul speaks in 2 Cor 11:7 in conjunction with his work as an artisan. It is worth noting, however, how Paul employs tapeinou'n elsewhere in his letters, including 2 Corinthians. Although Paul clearly uses the term with specific reference to his trade in 2 Cor 11:7, he can use nominal and verbal cognates of tapeinou'n more broadly, as he (arguably) does in Rom 12:16; 2 Cor 7:6; 10:1; 12:21; and Phil 2:3, 8; 3:21; 4:12. Therefore, it seems both unwarranted and unnecessary to delimit so narrowly the lexical range of tapeinou'n in 2 Cor 11:7.37
The (Ir)relevance of 2 Thessalonians 3:6–15 to This Study Although Hock, along with a majority of contemporary Pauline scholars, regards 2 Thessalonians as deutero-Pauline,38 it may prove to be of some probative value at this point in the study to consider how the topic of work is dealt with in the letter. If 2 Thessalonians were in fact written by a later Paulinist, then it will at least be interesting to 36 In
this paragraph, I am interacting with Hock, “Paul’s Tentmaking,” 561–62.
37 Ralph P. Martin rightly draws attention to the theological meaning of multiple terms in 11:7,
including tapeinou'n (2 Corinthians [WBC 40; Waco: Word Books, 1986], 345). 38 On the scholarly discussion regarding the (in)authenticity of 2 Thessalonians, in addition to the critical commentaries, see my Conflict at Thessalonica: A Pauline Church and Its Neighbours (JSNTSup 183; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1999), 46–60. Since writing Social Context, Hock may well have altered his view on the authorship of the letter. In his review of Malherbe’s commentary on the Thessalonian letters (RelSRev 29 [2003]: 43–46, here 45), Hock maintains that Malherbe’s defense of the authenticity of 2 Thessalonians (see Malherbe, Letters to the Thessalonians, 349–74) “should persuade many scholars to add 2 Thessalonians to the seven authentic letters of Paul when reconstructing his life and theology.”
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observe how the writer understood and appropriated Paul’s earlier instruction to the Thessalonians on the subject.39 If, as it happens, 2 Thessalonians were written by Paul, then the remarks that the apostle makes in the letter may be compared with his statements regarding work in 1 Thessalonians.40 In 2 Thess 3:6–15 one encounters a protracted passage directed against those who are living ajtavktw" (i.e., idly and/or unruly).41 From all appearances and for whatever reasons, certain persons in the congregation had stopped working and had started sponging off other believers. In response to this situation, the author admonishes the assembly to steer clear of the persistently work-shy (3:14). As for those who were not working, they are instructed to work quietly and to eat their own bread (3:12). These injunctions are based on apostolic teaching and living (3:6–10). Although “Paul and his coworkers” arguably had the power and the privilege to forgo labor and to receive support from the church, they chose not to exercise such rights. By laboring and toiling night and day, they were not only able to pay their own way, but they were also able to set forth an example that the apostle deemed worthy of imitation. The missioners’ precepts on work were reinforced by the practice of work. Additionally, it is quite plausible that the admonition “not to be weary in well-doing” (3:13) entails the work to which the congregation is called in 3:6–12.42 In commenting on 2 Thess 3:6–15 (or portions thereof), Hock notes that work in general is viewed favorably and that Paul’s labor in particular is regarded as paradigmatic.43 I would concur with Hock on these two points and would further posit that the remarks on labor in 2 Thess 3:6–15 are not incongruent with the positive remarks that the apostle makes on the subject in 1 Thess 2:5, 8–10 and 4:11–12. (See further under “1 Thessalonians” above.)
III. Concluding Comments In seeking to establish that Paul viewed work more like a Greco-Roman aristocrat than a “typical” artisan or laboring rabbi, Hock argues along the following lines: (1) Despite being born and reared in an upper-class family, Paul plied a trade (that he learned from his socially elite father!) while conducting his ministry. (2) Herein, Hock notes, lies an apparent incompatibility, given that Greco-Roman aristocrats were all but unanimous in their disdain of manual labor. (3) Nevertheless, Hock reasons that this tension, though considerable, is not insurmountable, for when read with care and against a Greco-Roman philosophical backdrop, one can see Paul’s true aristocratic colors bleeding through the 39 In
2 Thess 2:15 the author appeals to an earlier letter, presumably 1 Thessalonians.
40 If 2 Thessalonians were written not long after 1 Thessalonians, as most scholars who espouse
the authenticity of both letters maintain (so, e.g., Malherbe, Letters to the Thessalonians, 375), then one might anticipate a greater degree of coherence on this subject. 41 On the meaning of ajtavktw" in the Thessalonian letters, see, among others, my Conflict at Thessalonica, 275–80. 42 So also Beverly Roberts Gaventa, First and Second Thessalonians (IBC; Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1998), 130. 43 See esp. Hock, Social Context, 17, 48.
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snobbish statements that he makes regarding his work. (4) Therefore, apostolic appearances notwithstanding, Adolf Deissmann et al. are wrong and William Ramsey et al. are right—Paul’s blood really did run blue.44 Hock’s working assumption that Paul was cut from an aristocratic bolt of cloth predisposes him to conclude that the apostle thought ill of work. In my estimation, however, Hock tries to weave a considerable garment from an unestablished, if not unestablishable, supposition (i.e., Paul’s upper-class origins) and a few textual threads (esp. 1 Cor 4:12; 9:19; 2 Cor 11:7). To be sure, Hock notes Paul’s pride regarding the economic independence his work afforded him as well as the impact his manual labor had on his apostolic selfunderstanding.45 Nevertheless, Hock consistently detects and contends that an upper-class residual remained in Paul and that elitist traces may be observed through what he says and fails to say about work. The interpretive approach Hock utilizes is to read occasional comments that Paul makes about his labor against an aristocratic Greco-Roman backdrop and then to sharpen such remarks into a normative apostolic attitude regarding work.46 This essay has demonstrated, however, that upon closer examination Hock’s contention that Paul loathed manual labor like a typical Greek or Roman aristocrat is untenable. Beyond my exegetical misgivings indicated above, Hock may be fairly criticized for his selective use of texts in mounting his case. While making copious use of Greco-Roman parallels, he all but excludes Jewish sources.47 Even though Hock, drawing on Jacob Neusner, regards later rabbinic materials as anachronistic and therefore irrelevant for understanding how Paul viewed work,48 it is historically plausible that subsequent rabbinic perspectives and practices may well reflect earlier realities of (Pharasaic) Judaism.49 What is more, work is consistently affirmed in the Hebrew Scriptures, with which Paul shows himself to be intimately acquainted in his letters (e.g., Gen 2:15; Exod 20:9–10; Prov 6:6– 44 Hock (“Paul’s Tentmaking,” 555-58) cites Adolf Deissmann and William Ramsey as representative of Pauline scholars who do (Ramsey) and do not (Deissmann) think that Paul was born into a privileged family. 45 See, e.g., Hock, Social Context, 67. 46 Lincoln (Ephesians, 305) levels a similar criticism against Agrell (Work). Lincoln contends that the elevation of some verses to the neglect of others “evidences an atomistic and dogmatic approach . . . [that] presses occasional paraenetical texts for a whole theology of work which they are incapable of providing.” 47 See, e.g., Hock, “Paul’s Tentmaking,” 557; idem, Social Context, 18, 22–24; also noted by Kathleen O’Brien Wicker, review of Ronald F. Hock, The Social Context of Paul’s Ministry: Tentmaking and Apostleship, JBL 101 (1982): 466–67, here 467; and Carolyn Osiek, review of Ronald F. Hock, The Social Context of Paul’s Ministry: Tentmaking and Apostleship, CBQ 43 (1981): 296–97, here 297. Hartley’s Oxford Ph.D. thesis (“Portrayal of Work”) goes some way in remedying this imbalance. See also Geoghegan, Attitude towards Labor; and Agrell, Work. 48 See Hock, Social Context, 23, 66–67, 77 nn. 26–30. The work of Jacob Neusner on which Hock depends is The Rabbinic Traditions about the Pharisees before 70 (3 vols.; Leiden: Brill, 1971). 49 While NT scholars should not facilely assume congruity between Second Temple and rabbinic Judaism, neither should they dismiss out of hand the possibility of continuity between pre-70 and post-70 Judaism. For the perspective that there is both unity and diversity within Judaism from place to place and time to time, see esp. Shaye J. D. Cohen, From the Maccabees to the Mishnah (LEC 9; Philadelphia: Westminster, 1987).
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11; 10:4–5; 24:30–34; 31:13–27; cf. Sir 7:15; 38:24–34; 51:30).50 It does, in fact, seem unlikely that biblical affirmations of and instruction about labor would be wholly lost on or completely disregarded by one who was in his own estimation a Jew through and through (see esp. Phil 3:4a–6; cf. Rom 9:3; 11:1; 2 Cor 11:22; Gal 1:13–14), at least prior to his Damascus experience. Even after his conversion and call, however, Paul’s surviving correspondence indicates that his theological sensibilities and ethical sensitivities remained distinctly Jewish.51 In his important work Jews in the Mediterranean Diaspora, John M. G. Barclay compares Paul’s education with that of other Diaspora Jews such as Aristeas and Philo and concludes that “the evidence points to [Paul’s having been the recipient of] a Greek-medium Jewish education, in which the broad spectrum of Hellenism entered Paul’s mind only through the filter of his conservative Pharisaic environment.”52 Elsewhere, in contrast to Hock’s position that Paul was thoroughly conversant with popular philosophic topoi to the extent that the apostle’s view of work “was the same as the moral reflection of Greco-Roman philosophers like Dio Chrysostom,”53 Barclay suggests that the apostle’s knowledge of and appreciation for mainstream Hellenistic thought was minimal when set alongside the Wisdom of Solomon and even 4 Maccabees, not to mention Aristeas, Aristobulus, and Philo.54 Although this is not the place to explore in detail the complicated and controverted issue of the various and relative Hebraic and Hellenistic influences on the apostle,55 it is fitting to note here that a full study of Paul’s (dis)regard for work would need to take into account probative Jewish parallels. At the least, careful treatment of ancient Jewish sources 50 For
a still useful sifting of the OT evidence (including Sirach), see Geoghegan, Attitude towards Labor, 59–73. For additional Jewish parallels both inside and outside of the OT, see, e.g., Savage, Power through Weakness, 86 n. 131; and David E. Garland, 2 Corinthians (NAC 29; Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 1999), 477 n. 228. For rabbinic texts pertaining to work, see Geoghegan, Attitude towards Labor, 73–84; and C. G. Montefiore and H. Loewe, A Rabbinic Anthology (1938; repr., New York: Schocken, 1974), 440–50. See also David J. Schnall, By the Sweat of Your Brow: Reflections on Work and the Workplace in Classic Jewish Thought (New York: Yeshiva University Press, 2001); and more generally, Herbert Applebaum, The Concept of Work: Ancient, Medieval, and Modern (New York: State University of New York Press, 1992). 51 One is left to wonder whether Paul was aware of Jesus’s occupation as a tevktwn (Mark 6:3; cf. Matt 13:55) and was influenced by his example. Alfred Plummer thinks so (A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Second Epistle of St Paul to the Corinthians [ICC; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1915], 303). As it happens, Paul was privy to a tradition of Jesus regarding the right to get a living from the proclaiming of the gospel (1 Cor 9:14; cf. Matt 10:10; Luke 10:7). For various congruities between Jesus and Paul in thought and practice, see the essays contained in Jesus and Paul Reconnected: Fresh Pathways into an Old Debate (ed. Todd D. Still; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, forthcoming). 52 John M. G. Barclay, Jews in the Mediterranean Diaspora: From Alexander to Trajan (323 BCE–117 CE) (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996), 384. 53 Hock, Social Context, 67. 54 John M. G. Barclay, “Paul among Diaspora Jews: Anomaly or Apostate?” JSNT 60 (1995): 89– 120, here 105–6. 55 For essays seeking to illustrate that the “Jewish” Paul or the “Hellenistic” Paul is an unnecessary and forced dichotomy, see Paul beyond the Judaism/Hellenism Divide (ed. Troels EngbergPedersen; Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2001).
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would temper Hock’s categorical claim that the apostle’s view of work mirrored various Hellenistic moralists; at the most, due diligence with respect to relevant Jewish evidence would compromise Hock’s assertion that Paul and Dio Chysostom saw labor in the same light. Turning to Paul’s letters, even if one follows Hock in leaving a potentially illuminating text like 2 Thess 3:6–15 to one side (cf. Col 3:17; Eph 4:32; Acts 20:34-35), one cannot help but note how poorly pertinent passages from 1 Thessalonians fit into his argument that Paul possessed an aristocratic aversion to work. Indeed, it is telling that when Hock employs Pauline passages to support his claim that Paul held a less-than-positive view of work he appeals exclusively to the Corinthians letters.56 But even if one were to focus solely on the intensely occasional and highly rhetorical Corinthian correspondence when seeking to ascertain the apostle’s thoughts regarding work, one would surely want to observe that Paul’s instructions regarding the collection for impoverished saints in Jerusalem presupposes that surplus income generated by church members through their labor could be used for decidedly positive purposes (1 Cor 16:1–4; 2 Corinthians 8–9). In fact, it is hard to imagine that the relative merits of earning a living wage, and then some, were lost on the apostle as he labored and toiled. Paul not only valued financial liberty from his churches; he also encouraged sacrificial, voluntary generosity among his churches (see 2 Cor 8:1–7, 17; 9:7, 11, 13). Spendable and surplus income garnered through skillful hands hard at work made independence and interdependence possible for both the apostle and his converts. A final, if unintentional, implication of Hock’s ascribing to Paul a snobbish attitude toward his trade is that it portrays the apostle as a deeply conflicted and decidedly hypocritical individual. On Hock’s reading, even as Paul enjoined his converts to lead a life of humility as graphically exhibited by Christ and himself (see esp. 2 Cor 11:7; Phil 2:3, 8), he harbored an aristocratic hubris against manual labor and, by extension, manual laborers. As it happens, the Paul that Hock gives us is not so much a servant at work as a snob toward work; he is not so much an apostle who condescends as a condescending apostle. It is, of course, possible that Paul’s preaching and praxis did not cohere. It would be both ironic and tragic, however, if he who presented himself as an apostle of weakness (2 Cor 12:5–10), proclaimed a theologia crucis (1 Cor 1:17–18, 23; 2:2; Gal 3:1), and lauded a rich Lord who became poor (2 Cor 8:9; cf. 6:10) harbored “a better than thou” attitude toward nonelite others. Adding insult to injury would be the fact that Paul roundly and routinely denounces this mentality in his letters, especially in 1 Corinthians (e.g., 8:1– 11:1; 11:17–34; 12:31b–13:13; cf. Rom 12:3; 14:1–15:6). If Paul’s rhetoric and commitments were incongruous, then he was clearly not, at least not at this point, worthy of the imitation to which he calls the Corinthians (1 Cor 4:16; 11:1; cf. Phil 3:17; 4:6).57 Might it be, how56 See
esp. Hock, “Paul’s Tentmaking,” 560, 562.
57 Although Pauline interpreters have drawn attention to the problematic nature of Paul’s very
call for his churches to imitate him (see esp. Elizabeth A. Castelli, Imitating Paul: A Discourse of Power [Literary Currents in Biblical Interpretation; Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1991]; Sandra Hack Polaski, Paul and the Discourse of Power [Biblical Seminar 62/Gender, Culture, Theory 8; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1999]; Cynthia Briggs Kittredge, Community and Authority: The Rhetoric of Obedience in Pauline Tradition [HTS 45; Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International,
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ever, that if Paul ever had been an aristocrat who thought ill of labor, he subsequently changed his view about work? When compared to some of the other paradigm shifts the apostle made, this one could be described as relatively minor (see, e.g., 2 Cor 5:16; Gal 3:13; Phil 3:7).58 I would like to emphasize here that I am in no way seeking to cast Paul as a Weberian Puritan who possessed and displayed a Protestant ethic and a capitalistic spirit.59 As I read Paul, his christological obsession and eschatological orientation would not allow him to regard work, be it his own or others, as more than a means to what he saw as a greater and nobler end (see, e.g., 1 Cor 7:25–31; 2 Cor 5:14–15; Gal 2:19–20; 6:14; Phil 3:7–11). Nevertheless, to the extent that his work enabled him to share the gospel of God, which Paul viewed as the ultimate good, he could certainly view his and others’ work as a lesser good.60 While Archibald Robertson and Alfred Plummer may well be guilty of hyperbole when they exclaim that Paul, in contradistinction to the Greeks, gloried in his work,61 Hock is no less overstated in maintaining that the apostle despised his tentmaking trade. As is often the case, the truth may lie somewhere in the muddle that is the middle. If I were forced to put down my tent pegs, however, I would say, against Hock, that Paul perceived (his) work as more of a friend than a foe.62 Making qualitative judgments from ancient documents with little evidence to hand is as perilous as it is painstaking. That being the case, I am willing to concede that Paul may have viewed (his) labor with a certain degree of ambiguity.63 For one whose life and hermeneutic were marked with contrast and tension, it would stand to reason that a certain degree of dissonance might well be present in his perception and portrayal of manual 1998]; and Kathy Ehrensperger, “That We May Be Mutually Encouraged”: Feminism and the New Perspective in Pauline Studies [London/New York: T&T Clark International, 2004]), my point here is that it would be particularly egregious for Paul to enjoin the Corinthians to emulate a perspective that he merely espoused and did not seek to embrace. 58 Among other possible cognitive changes, Haacker suggests, for example, that Paul’s “hostile attitude toward the Gentiles” would have undergone significant alteration as a result of his call/commission to take the gospel to the nations (see esp. Gal 2:2, 7) (“Paul’s Life,” 26). 59 I allude, of course, to Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904; trans. Stephen Kalberg; repr., Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2001). 60 So also Wicker, review of Hock, 467. Margaret E. Thrall rightly observes that Paul “engaged in manual labour, not to accumulate wealth and thus to achieve status elevation, but to keep himself in economic necessities whilst he pursued his main tasks of evangelism and pastoral nurture” (A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Second Epistle to the Corinthians [2 vols.; ICC; London/ New York: T&T Clark, 2000], 2:704). 61 Archibald Robertson and Alfred Plummer, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the First Epistle of St Paul to the Corinthians (2nd ed.; ICC; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1914), 87. Cited in Hock, “Paul’s Tentmaking,” 560 n. 32. 62 Cf. Savage, who notes that although Paul can speak of his labor in “harsh terms,” “he always stops short of disparaging work itself ” (Power through Weakness, 86). Savage contends that Paul “follows a line of Jewish tradition by maintaining that while work can be exhausting it is never demeaning.” 63 As Meggitt notes, Paul frequently speaks of his ministry in terms of toil and labor (Paul, 89 n. 65). See, e.g., Rom 16:6, 12; 1 Cor 3:13, 14, 15; 15:10, 58; 16:16; Phil 1:6; 2:16, 30; 1 Thess 1:3; 5:12, 17.
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labor.64 What is more, Paul would have been neither the first nor the last to experience ambivalence with regard to work! Necessary nuancing notwithstanding, this study has shown Hock’s claim that the apostle looked upon his handicraft with an elitist antipathy to be unlikely. Put succinctly, Hock’s long-standing, if largely unexamined, argument that Paul, the one-time aristocrat, evinces in his letters a markedly negative attitude toward work positively will not work. Todd D. Still
[email protected] George W. Truett Theological Seminary, Baylor University, Waco, TX 76798
64 For the stimulating proposal that Paul is an antithetical hermeneutician aware of and alive to “fundamental and irreducible duality,” see Francis Watson, Paul and the Hermeneutics of Faith (London/New York: T&T Clark International, 2004), 54.
Illuminating Leviticus A Study of Its Laws and Institutions in the Light of Biblical Narratives Calum Carmichael In this original and provocative study, Calum Carmichael—a leading scholar of biblical law and rhetoric— suggests that Hebrew law was inspired by the study of the narratives in Genesis through 2 Kings. Discussing particular laws found in the book of Leviticus—addressing issues such as the Day of Atonement, consumption of meat that still has blood, the Jubilee year, sexual and bodily contamination, and the treatment of slaves—Carmichael links each to a narrative. He contends that biblical laws did not emerge from social imperatives in ancient Israel, but instead from the careful, retrospective study of the nation’s history and identity. $55.00 hardcover
The Johns Hopkins University Press • 1-800-537-5487 • www.press.jhu.edu
The Development of Greek and the New Testament MORPHOLOGY, SYNTAX, PHONOLOGY, AND TEXTUAL TRANSMISSION
Chrys C. Caragounis 080103230X • 752 pp. • $69.99p
j
“The Development of Greek and the New Testament is a magisterial work that must be on the bookshelf of every scholar working with the Greek language. It is a treasure trove of information on all aspects of the historical development of Greek (the evidence presented on Phrynichos, Moiris, and the Atticistic reaction, e.g., is invaluable). Especially significant is the attention paid to Byzantine-Medieval Greek (AD 600-1500) and its place in the development of Neohellenic. While Caragounis has his own views on a number of issues, his approach is in no way idiosyncratic, building as it does on the foundational work of Hatzidakis and Jannaris.”—James W. Voelz, Concordia Seminary
Av a i l a b l e a t y o u r l o c a l b o o k s t o re , w w w. b a k e r a c a d e m i c . c o m , o r b y c a l l i n g 1 - 8 0 0 - 8 7 7 - 2 6 6 5 S u b s c r i b e t o B a k e r A c a d e m i c ’s e l e c t ro n i c n e w s l e t t e r ( E - N o t e s ) a t w w w. b a k e r a c a d e m i c . c o m
JBL 125, no. 4 (2006): 797–831
Book Reviews Book reviews are also published online at the Society of Biblical Literature’s WWW site: http://www.bookreviews.org. For a list of books received by the Journal, see http://www.bookreviews.org/books-received.html.
Blood Sacrifice in the Hebrew Bible: Meaning and Power, by William K. Gilders. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2004. Pp. 272. $55.00 (hardcover). ISBN 0801879930. Purity, Sacrifice, and the Temple: Symbolism and Supersessionism in the Study of Ancient Judaism, by Jonathan Klawans. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Pp. 384. $74.00 (hardcover). ISBN 0195162633. Reading Ritual: Leviticus in Postmodern Culture, by Wesley J. Bergen. Library of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Studies. London: T&T Clark International, 2005. Pp. 160. $120.00 (hardcover). ISBN 056704081X. Wholly Woman, Holy Blood: A Feminist Critique of Purity and Impurity, edited by Kristin De Troyer, Judith A. Herbert, Judith Ann Johnson, and Anne-Marie Korte. Studies in Christianity and Antiquity. London: T&T Clark International, 2003. Pp. 264. $34.95 (paper). ISBN 1563384000. Soon after I began writing this review, I was making small talk with an acquaintance who asked politely what I was working on. I told her that it was a review essay on biblical sacrifice. She blinked uncomprehendingly. “You know,” I said lamely, “in the ancient world, they would kill animals. For God.” She shook her head, appalled. Uneasily, I changed the subject. Given the constant use of the word “sacrifice” in today’s media, it never occurred to me that an intelligent young woman might not have heard of real sacrifice, the sacredmaking slaughter that characterized so many religions in the ancient Mediterranean and elsewhere. And though this same woman might not think twice about the use of the word “sacrifice” to describe, say, what is currently taking place in Iraq, and though I happen to know that she is willing to eat meat and wear leather, she experienced confusion and revulsion when presented with the idea of killing animals in a sacred context. In popular culture today, animal sacrifice is the purview of Satanism and “voodoo,” and has nothing to do with our own religious legacy. Why is that the case? The author of one of the books under review asks the question
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even more pointedly: Why is our culture more comfortable with the idea of human sacrifice (soldiers, firefighters) than with animal sacrifice? (Bergen, Reading Ritual, 83). Part of the answer can be found in the grim history of Christian supersessionism, which, taking its cue from the NT Epistle to the Hebrews, declares animal sacrifice to be useless routine, a temporary practice that the true children of Israel have now outgrown. Another part of the answer can be found in the history of Judaism itself, which was forced by the destruction of the Jerusalem temple to reimagine the human being’s relationship with God in ways that did not depend on an altar. Finally, we must look to the roots of our own academic discipline, particularly among the anthropologists and biblical scholars of the nineteenth century, who saw sacrifice as little more than a quaint reminder of the curious literality with which ancient people understood the concepts of food or gift. And yet, even knowing all this, the problem has not gone away. The lengthy instructions that the Pentateuch provides for sacrificing animals feel, to the modern reader, somehow both gory and oddly abstract, both tedious and sparse. The authors of Exodus and Leviticus do not provide any interpretations for their instructions, nor do they offer any justification for the work that they describe as so important. This has not stopped generations of Christian, Jewish, and secular scholars from trying to explain what it all “means,” of course, but it does make an emic interpretation of the data unusually difficult. William Gilders’s book, Blood Sacrifice in the Hebrew Bible, addresses this problem by trying to understand specifically what assumptions the priestly writers had about blood (although the relative dating of the Priestly [P] and Holiness [H] sources in Leviticus are important for Gilders’s argument, this textual analysis does not bear directly on the broader themes that I am discussing here, so I will speak more generally about the “priestly” writers without addressing the significance of the relationship between P and H). In his introduction, Gilders summarizes the different kinds of “ritual blood manipulations” that can be found in the Hebrew Bible. According to the priestly writers, these manipulations (pouring blood, tossing blood, smearing blood on things) can bring about a variety of effects, including purification from sin, consecration of a priestly authority, transformation of identity or status, and protection from destructive forces (Judith Herbert and her co-editors would no doubt take issue with this narrowness of focus; the essays in their book make the case that the blood that flows in menstruation and childbirth serves, for the biblical authors, as a mirror image of the blood that flows in animal sacrifice, and that the one phenomenon therefore cannot be understood without the other. I will return to this issue below). Gilders thinks that earlier scholarship on biblical sacrifice went astray by seeking to understand sacrifice symbolically, even though the biblical authors themselves do not. Even today, scholars tend to fixate on Lev 17:11 (“For the life of the flesh is in the blood; and I have given it to you for making atonement for your lives on the altar” [NRSV]), which is the only place anywhere in the Pentateuch that seems to describe the “meaning” of sacrificial rituals. Armed with that single verse, and thinking much more theologically than the priestly authors ever seemed to, modern readers mechanically apply the blood– life–atonement association to every other reference to sacrificial practice in the Bible. Though Gilders recognizes the importance of Lev 17:11—and indeed he devotes an entire chapter to its analysis—he thinks that the abstract concepts of “blood as life” and “blood
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as atonement” have received far too much attention in the literature, at the expense of more direct and practical understandings of ritual that would have come more naturally to the Israelites. The most penetrating observation in Gilders’s book is, unfortunately, also the most poorly developed. Gilders suggests in his introduction that blood ritual should be seen as an “index” rather than as a symbol (8). The term “index” is borrowed from Charles Sanders Peirce, who famously distinguished arbitrary signs (such as the red octagon of a stop sign or the string of phonemes that give us the word “dog”) from signs that have an existential relationship with what they signify (such as a pointing finger or a flare). Nobody would deny that killing and eating an animal brings a person into an existential relationship with that animal. Further, for someone who believes that God’s presence dwells in the temple, the actions that take place in that temple will never be completely arbitrary signifiers. I think this is an important direction for the study of sacrifice and, indeed, ritual studies as a whole to pursue. But Peirce appears nowhere in Gilders’s bibliography, despite the fact that Gilders repeatedly applies Peircean insights about indices to biblical ritual: Moses collecting blood in bowls in Exodus 24, Ahaz constructing an altar in 2 Kings 16, Aaron’s sons bringing blood to their father in Leviticus 7, along with dozens of other characters and actions, are all said by Gilders to “index” various social relationships (see 38, 52, and 95, respectively; the subject index of Gilders’s book contains twenty-eight other references to indexing). And yet Gilders’s analysis is entirely dependent on a brief summary of Peirce originally written by Nancy Jay—who herself is cited only a handful of times in the book, and who, for all her important contributions to the study of blood ritual, is not a semiotician. Peirce has much to offer the study of the Bible, but that means his insights deserve to be read much more closely and applied with much more care. This reluctance to engage with secondary literature outside the immediate purview of biblical studies is, in my view, the greatest weakness of Gilders’s book. The review of the literature in his introduction is competent, and he is conversant with current issues in anthropology and ritual theory, but generally Gilders is more committed to meticulous readings of biblical texts than the broader issues of “meaning and power” alluded to in the book’s subtitle. Once he completes the methodological introduction, he rarely ventures beyond the biblical texts themselves in his attempt to understand priestly attitudes toward blood. (To his credit, he does venture beyond Leviticus; in my opinion, the strongest chapter of Blood Ritual is the sixth [142–57], which argues persuasively that references to blood in Ezekiel and 2 Chronicles, despite their “literary” nature, are directly relevant for the study of temple sacrifice.) I hasten to add that this focused approach is, to some extent, deliberate and certainly defensible: Gilders seems to mistrust cross-cultural comparisons, and I have some sympathy for this view after reading far too many superficial, totalizing accounts of “sacrifice around the world.” Nevertheless, I think Gilders’s caution leads to a lack of richness and explanatory power. When he analyzes the differences between the Hebrew verbs for strewing and sprinkling and scattering in the first appendix (25–32), or when he wonders where Moses is standing when flinging blood onto the people (39), or when he tries to imagine which way the blood splashes when it is tossed “round about” the altar (66), he does not
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link his questions with any bigger picture. What is at stake here? Why do the answers to these questions matter? What does it say about the priestly authors that they left what seem to be crucial details out of their text? What do we have to gain by filling in those gaps—or, to put the question another way, why are we so worried about leaving those gaps unfilled? Gilders’s point that we cannot always trust official or native interpretations of a ritual (6) is well taken, and I share his frustration with modern exegetes who are much too quick to theologize everything. But sacrificial materials in the Bible, particularly in Exodus and Leviticus, so stubbornly resist interpretation that we modern readers simply have to take risks as we wrestle with the text. If anything, Gilders’s book proves that if we limit ourselves to the barest meaning that the biblical texts offer us, and if we read what little we have with a healthy amount of suspicion, then we are left not knowing very much about Israelite blood ritual at all. Wesley Bergen’s book can be seen as the polar opposite to Gilders’s Reading Ritual is a lively and ambitious monograph that tries to understand Leviticus through the lens of Monday Night Football, modern slaughterhouses, contemporary African religion, television advertisements, and the war in Iraq. Where Gilders avoids drawing comparisons even with the Israelites’ closest neighbors, Bergen considers the possibility that Midwestern meat-packing plants or ancestor worship in Ghana can tell us more about Leviticus than Second Temple rabbis can. Bergen’s book will probably infuriate a lot of its academic readers and perhaps many of its nonacademic ones as well. The entire project might strike a more conservative audience as dilettantish or needlessly provocative. When Bergen closes his introduction by saying that one of his goals is “to produce a truly interesting book about Leviticus,” since “[w]riting a dull book about Leviticus would only add to people’s perception that Leviticus is itself dull” (12), one might wonder whether he really believes that the remedy for the existence of boring books about Leviticus is to write a flippant one. First impressions notwithstanding, however, this book is quite serious. Bergen is making a critical point, a point that, in my opinion, needs to be stated in every single course on religious studies that we teach. Namely, our category of “religion” does not overlap perfectly, or even particularly well, with the material that Leviticus covers, and that this can and has led us to badly warped understandings of what is going on in the ancient texts. Bergen’s first example is a tour de force, and it sets the tone for the rest of the book: I used to work on the killing floor of a modern meat packing plant. This means that I spent my day within sight and hearing of the gun that killed an animal every twenty seconds. . . . The person who worked beside me on the killing floor spent his day using a long stainless-steel rod to separate the tracheae from the esophagus of the carcasses going past on the assembly line. He certainly would not have thought of his work as ritual activity. . . . Yet his actions met most of [Catherine] Bell’s criteria for ritualized action. (14–15)
Does the factory floor have more in common with the setting of Leviticus than the church pew? Is that where we need to look to find answers about ancient religion? It is a productive question, and Bergen asks it sensitively, with the full awareness that the differences (such as the lack of an “audience” in a modern factory) are just as important as the
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similarities. His personal experience with slaughter also injects some reality into misguided discussions about how Moses’s dashing blood on an altar ought to serve some lofty theology: “We arrive at theological explanations,” he writes, “because most of us have never witnessed how much blood can pour from an animal” (18). Bergen proceeds to compare Israelite blood sacrifice to other cultural phenomena, picking a theme for each chapter and exploring how Leviticus can be understood through that lens. In the third chapter (27–43), he sketches out the relationships between the participants in modern sports (players, coaches, fans in the stadium, fans watching TV) and draws structural parallels with the figures described or implied by the text of Leviticus (the offerer, the priest, the assembly of elders, the readers of the book). In the fourth chapter (44–68), he looks to Africa as a context with a substantial Christian population where animal sacrifice still regularly takes place, and where the instructions in Leviticus do not necessarily feel as alien and irrelevant as they do to Christians and Jews in the West. In the fifth chapter (69–81), he considers the way the Western media uses the word “sacrifice,” pointing out that the common portrayal of soldiers as “sacrificing their lives for our country” would have made no sense to the Israelites. Though the Bible describes many bloody battles, none of the biblical authors thought to draw a comparison between the death of human warriors and the death of sacrificial animals, thus casting our own “easy” metaphors into question. Reading Ritual is an important and refreshing book; however, like any wildly ambitious project, it has some serious flaws. Bergen is much more willing than Gilders is to look beyond the Bible for insight about Israelite culture, but, like Gilders, he does not steep himself in the scholarship on those other materials. For instance, the chapter on Monday Night Football makes numerous sweeping claims about gender and violence without citing the work of a single sociologist or cultural anthropologist, leading me to wonder, for example, why Bergen is so sure that “the role of women [in football] is supportive: they are to prepare the food and keep it coming” (41). The chapter on Africa is prefaced with a disclaimer saying that not all African religions are the same, but the rest of the chapter basically treats African religions as if they are all the same; rarely does Bergen even bother to mention which African country, much less tribe, he refers to. And the chapter on war expresses a great deal of frustration with the “War on Terror” and the current political climate in the United States, but it does not use any concrete examples to make its case, citing no newspapers, opinion surveys, or political speeches. In the end, it reads more like an angry blog entry than a scholarly analysis of the issues. My point is that if football or Africa or the Bush administration have anything to teach us about ancient Israelite religion, then we need to get into serious and respectful dialogue with the people who study those phenomena, and we need to pay close attention to their “primary sources,” such as they are. Bergen ably demonstrates that our disciplinary boundaries need to be redrawn. Going on to treat history or politics as nothing more than a free-association exercise does a grave disservice to his argument. In this respect, Jonathan Klawans’s Purity, Sacrifice, and the Temple provides a greater sensitivity to the theoretical issues that complicate the academic study of religion today. Where Gilders focuses on close reading and word study, and where Bergen seeks answers to his questions in popular culture, Klawans engages directly with the academic literature on sacrifice (Bergen does this to some extent in his sixth chapter, titled “The Afterlife of
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Leviticus 1–7 in the Church” [82–106], but this chapter merely introduces the reader to various issues regarding the historical Jesus and the split between church and synagogue in late antiquity. Bergen appears to have little interest in the debates surrounding the theories of Walter Burkert, René Girard, Jonathan Z. Smith, and their interlocutors). Ironically, this means that Klawans may be the author (of those considered in this review) closest to answering the question I posed at the very beginning of this essay, since theologians and historians must take some responsibility for the revulsion that people like my friend feel whenever they hear mention of animal sacrifice. As the subtitle of his book makes clear, Klawans is concerned with the supersessionist assumptions that have marred biblical scholarship and anthropology over the past two centuries. The Christian tradition teaches that animal sacrifice has been superseded by the death of Jesus, while Judaism takes as axiomatic that animal sacrifice was replaced by prayer and Torah study after the destruction of the Second Temple. For both Christians and (liberal) Jews today, animal sacrifice is assumed to be barbaric and outmoded, a transitional phase in God’s plan for the world. Since even religiously committed scholars betray a lack of sympathy for the sacrificial practices of their spiritual ancestors, secular scholars find no reason to take it seriously at all: nothing in our culture provides any compelling reason to support animal sacrifice, even in an abstract way. Instead of engaging with the already developed sacrificial system of ancient Israel within its social and literary context, Klawans notes, modern anthropologists and historians of religion have constantly tried to dig back through prehistory to find the beginnings of sacrificial practice everywhere, collapsing Greco-Roman, Israelite, and Vedic materials into some prehistoric Big Bang. Perhaps there is nothing wrong with this approach in and of itself, but Klawans argues that nobody has taken any other approach to sacrifice since William Robertson Smith wrote The Religion of the Semites in 1889. Klawans points out that not every book on Jewish circumcision searches for the origins of all body modifications across all cultures. Why is sacrifice in particular treated in this way? In a thoughtful aside (40), Klawans ventures some possible answers to that question, suggesting that many post-industrial writers and readers feel a deep-rooted anxiety about environmental degradation, animal abuse, capitalist excess, and consumerism. Those anxieties leak into their analysis, just as Victorian obsessions with sex can be detected in innumerable books about phallic cults. (Bergen’s striking description of a modern slaughterhouse suggests that he shares the same suspicion; both authors explicitly state that, as Bergen puts it, “Leviticus can form part of a larger discussion on the place of sacrifice in our own society” [81]). For a generation now, historians have been aware that sacrifice is often yoked into the service of totalizing, reductionist theories about religion. Klawans singles out René Girard for particularly brutal critique, though no author before Mary Douglas—and only a few after her—come off especially well in his review of the literature. Purity, Sacrifice, and the Temple goes even further, however, arguing that criticisms of sacrifice in modern scholarship arise out of stubborn, and surprisingly consistent, misreadings of ancient texts. Scholars who see sacrifice in terms of divine food (following Robertson Smith), or gift exchange (following Marcel Mauss), or the management of violence within a society (fol-
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lowing Girard), simply cannot justify any of those perspectives from within the biblical or rabbinic traditions, since the original texts never interpret what is going on in those terms. Freudians and neo-Freudians, like Girard, get around this problem by claiming to “read between the lines” in order to find the “unconscious motivations” of the text. Klawans has no patience for this approach. I think this is unfortunate, since reading against the grain can be a very productive hermeneutical strategy, as can be seen in the work of scholars who seek to understand minority viewpoints on, say, heresy or gender. Nevertheless, I agree with him when he says that sacrificial texts are frequently read with a peculiar lack of charity and with an aggressive theoretical agenda. The rest of Klawans’s book is made up of case studies. In order to break free of evolutionist assumptions, he treats his material thematically rather than chronologically, which serves his argument well. The only chronological division occurs between the two halves of the book, the first of which deals with biblical sources and the second with late antique material. Within those sections, he treats sacrifice and purity in light of broad themes such as prophecy, cosmos, and priesthood, with a final chapter on the way these ideas were addressed in early Christian texts. Some of these chapters are very strong. I was impressed by Klawans’s treatment of prophetic indictments of sacrifice within the Hebrew Bible (75–100), so often used by Christian apologists as a stick with which to beat Judaism, and also used by modern Jews to justify liturgical and theological reforms that exclude sacrifice even from the text of prayers. The academic left has traditionally defended the position that a person can be a fervent patriot even as she criticizes a governmental policy with which she disagrees. It is an argument that has a special urgency in today’s political climate, and it is a shame that the same logic is so rarely applied to the Jews who loved their temple but hated the hypocrites who, in their view, misunderstood or abused it. At the end of the book, Klawans claims that Jesus and Paul were no different from these other Jews. The anti-priestly and anti-temple material in the NT is all late (Revelation and Hebrews) and unconcerned with the historical Jesus. I found Klawans’s overarching argument quite persuasive. There is much in this book to consider and much to admire. I particularly enjoyed reading it alongside the other books discussed in this review since many of Klawans’s arguments address similar questions from different angles. For instance, his theory about the predication of the sacrificial system on ownership and property (84–89), combined with Bergen’s sly comparison between the book of Leviticus and advertisements for fast-food restaurants (19), could make for some excellent conversation at a conference panel or graduate seminar. And Klawans’s plea for a sympathetic, emic engagement with the texts serves as a useful counterpoint to Gilders’s insistence that we discard our abstractly theological interpretations of what are, at base, practical instruction manuals. Unfortunately, Klawans’s book also shares one of the weaknesses of Bergen’s: a frustrating lack of close readings and too many superficial glosses of relevant ancient texts. Josephus certainly deserves more than five pages of commentary, and Leviticus itself needs to be analyzed rather than simply invoked. The final book under consideration is Wholly Woman, Holy Blood, edited by Kristen De Troyer, Judith Herbert, Judith Ann Johnson, and Anne-Marie Korte. This book is quite different from the other three, and most of the essays in it do not address the topic of sac-
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rifice directly. However, its project dovetails well with elements of the others while providing an important corrective for some of their assumptions about the state of the question. The authors of the essays in Wholly Woman are interested in a constellation of issues surrounding gender, purity, and pollution, paying particular attention to the role of menstruation and childbirth in biblical purity law and in modern Jewish and Christian practice. Grietje Dresen begins her essay (“The Better Blood: On Sacrifice and the Churching of New Mothers in the Roman Catholic Tradition”) on Roman Catholic churching rituals with a comment on the embarrassment about menstrual blood that still permeates our culture; to this day, advertisements for sanitary pads fill eyedroppers with blue liquid, not red, when demonstrating the effectiveness of their product. Dresen continues: “In contrast to these often negative assessments of feminine blood loss stands the awe with which the masculine confrontation with blood is frequently clothed. Much more than women, men have the power to intentionally shed blood: as soldier, sacrificial priest, first lover, ‘blood brother,’ executioner, perpetrator of violent offenses, or as physician” (143). Put another way, it is not just in the case of animal slaughter that the spilling of blood is positively or negatively valorized in the biblical and postbiblical tradition. The authors of these essays inquire how the “holiness” of the Israelite priest (whose ear, thumb, and toe are smeared with blood), or indeed of the circumcised baby boy, compare with other ontological states that are marked by the absence or presence of blood, including virginity, illness, war wounds, and childbirth. In Purity, Sacrifice, and the Temple, Klawans makes the point that sacrifice and purity are intimately connected in biblical texts and that they cannot be studied separately. This invites a fruitful conversation with Kathleen O’Grady, who argues, in her essay “The Semantics of Taboo,” that concepts of blood and purity in the Bible are fraught with tensions and contradictions that are often lost in modern translations of the texts. For example, in O’Grady’s opinion, interpreters have been far too quick to call the nazir of Numbers 6 “pure” and the niddah of Leviticus 15 “impure,” even though the word nazir could occasionally be used to describe a curse, and a niddah was sometimes a lustration (19). She adds, perceptively, that Num 6:2 explicitly permits women to become Nazirites, and presumably a woman could take those vows even if she happened to be menstruating at the time. Clearly, then, the relationship between blood and purity is more complex than it may seem at first glance. The essays in Wholly Woman speculate on possible hidden motivations that may have led the biblical writers to form their opinions about blood. Primary among these motivations are concerns about establishing paternity and policing the boundaries of the body and the self. The analyses in this book tend to be more philosophical and speculative than I imagine Gilders and Klawans would be comfortable with, since the essays sometimes leave the biblical text behind in favor of broad cross-cultural comparisons. For example, Judith Ann Johnson compares the red heifer of Num 19:2 with a child sacrifice in an Aztec fertility ritual (using Frazer, of all people, as her source on the Aztecs). The redness and femaleness in both phenomena are an interesting coincidence, but I am not sure whether an analysis of Israelite culture can rest all its weight on it. So far as I could detect, mentions of menstruation and childbearing are totally absent from the other three books that have been discussed in this review. Dresen’s critique of reli-
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gious literature could well be applied to the scholarly literature too. None of this is to say that the authors of the other three books are uninterested in gender, however. Bergen, for instance, discusses the tension between the implicit exclusion of women from the text of Leviticus and the necessity of women’s involvement in the overall sacrificial system (35). Be that as it may, the focus on animal sacrifice that is in evidence in these books, along with the pull toward “violence” and “contagion” that modern scholars have inherited from Burkert and Girard (even as they struggle against both Burkert and Girard) may be our own generation’s blind spot, one that a new generation of authors will need to overcome. Ayse Tuzlak University of Calgary, Calgary, AB, Canada T2N 1N4
The So-Called Deuteronomistic History: A Sociological, Historical, and Literary Introduction, by Thomas Römer. London: T&T Clark, 2006. Pp. x + 202. $100.00. (hardcover). ISBN 0567040224. For some time now there has been a need for an up-to-date, comprehensive treatment of the Deuteronomistic History that both deals with the confusion of recent views in the debate over this corpus of texts from Deuteronomy to 2 Kings and offers a clearly articulated and balanced presentation of its critical analysis as a whole. This introduction fulfills all of those expectations very well. Thomas Römer has been actively engaged in research and publication in this field for over two decades, and this particular work, which has been in the making for some time, has finally appeared. After a short introduction for the uninitiated reader or student, followed by a brief survey of the content of the biblical corpus under examination, Römer gives us a concise review of past scholarship on the Deuteronomistic History down to the present state of the discussion, with special focus on the seminal work of Martin Noth and the subsequent reactions and modifications to his work, and in some cases its outright rejection. Römer examines the key issues of what it means to label this corpus “Deuteronomistic” and whether or not it is appropriate to call it a “history.” With these preliminaries addressed, Römer sets forth his thesis of a Deuteronomistic “school” or “scribal guild” whose work extended from the time of Josiah, through the Babylonian exile, to the restoration in the early Persian period, producing in stages the literary corpus that now makes up the texts of Deuteronomy to 2 Kings in three successive “editions.” While the Deuteronomistic ideology originated in the cultic reform of Josiah, each new historical set of circumstances led to modifications in viewpoint that are now reflected in the additional “redactional layers.” Römer finds these three successive editorial layers already evident within the centralization law in Deuteronomy 12 and sets out to apply this observation to the rest of the Deuteronomistic corpus in the following chapters. In ch. 4 Römer lays out the social and historical context of the Neo-Assyrian period, which scholars find so strongly reflected in cultural and ideological imitation in parts of Deuteronomy and Joshua, but not in Judges, and in parts of the stories of David and Solomon, as well as the history of the monarchies down to the time of Josiah. From these
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clues Römer reconstructs a small Deuteronomistic library collection consisting of a first edition of Deuteronomy, a story of the conquest by Joshua found primarily in Joshua 6– 12, and a first history of the monarchy from David to Josiah. The function of these works was primarily as propaganda to offer “ideological support for the politics of centralization and for the claim that the kingdom of Judah was the ‘real Israel’ ” after the demise of the northern kingdom. Likewise, in ch. 5 Römer describes the social and historical conditions of the NeoBabylonian period and the exile as the context in which he sees the next edition of the Deuteronomistic History. This edition reflects a “mandarin” scribal group of former royal bureaucrats who created an ideology of exile (in contrast to the perspectives of priest and prophet) and who constructed a comprehensive history of Israel and Judah from Moses to the end of the monarchy with an attempt to account for the great disaster as divine punishment. This led not only to extensive supplementation of Deuteronomy and Joshua, making them part of the larger history, but also to the creation of the period of the judges out of old northern hero tales to bridge the gap to the time of the monarchy. Key ideological passages were added at appropriate points of the history, but most extensively in Deuteronomy, and were made specially for the audience of the Golah. It is apparently only at this time that the royal edict of Josiah inaugurating cultic reform became the law of Moses against which the whole history of the people was judged. By far the largest bulk of texts that are considered Deuteronomistic belong to this “edition,” with the result that Römer spends much more time in his treatment of texts in this layer. This leaves a rather brief discussion of the final phase of Deuteronomistic editing in the Persian period, in which the main concerns became separation from “the nations” as ideological segregation from those who did not adhere to the law of Moses, a shift to monotheism in which Israel’s God is the only true deity, and the book of the law that became the central focus of religious concern, especially for the Diaspora. This is highlighted in the story of the discovery of the book in 2 Kings 22 and 23, added to the account of the reform by this late edition. Beyond these Deuteronomistic editions there were other non-Deuteronomistic additions made to the corpus that tended to obscure its role as a history of the people and yield to a wide range of ideological and didactic concerns. This proposal of a three-stage development of the Deuteronomistic History is presented as a compromise among the various theories, in which the first edition reflects the Cross/Harvard school, which advocates a preexilic first edition, while the major exilic second edition corresponds largely to the original thesis of Noth, and the final postexilic edition emphasizes the DtrN edition of the Smend/Göttingen school. Yet the problem remains as to whether one can convincingly correlate the various strata of the text with the appropriate criteria that are thought to distinguish the different editions. This may be illustrated with a few examples. The first case is the correlation of the first edition of Deuteronomy, reflecting strong Assyrian influence on its use of the covenant/treaty form, with the account of the cultic reform in 2 Kings 22–23. Römer assigns to this edition 2 Kgs 22:1–7*, 9, 13aα; 23:1, 3–15*, 25aα. This reconstructed account by itself is quite incoherent. It begins, after the introductory formula for Josiah’s reign, with the inauguration of a renovation of the temple (22:3–7, 9), which is then abruptly interrupted by an assembly of the people to announce a covenant between king and deity that included the people, based on
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the content of a book (23:1, 3). This presumably correlates with the covenant/treaty language of Deuteronomy 13 and 28 that is part of Römer’s first edition. The “words of the covenant that were written in this book” (23:3) have reference to “the words of the book of the covenant that were found in the house of Yahweh” that were read out to all the people as a necessary part of the covenant ceremony (23:2), but Römer relegates the discovery of the book to the third edition, so this verse must not be included in this stage. Römer adds to the exilic edition the account of the consultation of Hulda the prophetess in 22:14– 20 but eliminates from it all references to the book as belonging to the third edition; however, this eliminates the motivation for the consultation in the first place. This seems to me a case of special pleading. The description of the cultic reform in 2 Kgs 23:4–14 seems to be directed primarily at the elimination of all foreign cults and the purification of the worship of Yahweh (see also 22:17), but it does not seem to be specifically concerned with centralization, which may be only a by-product of such activity. What is striking is that the specific language referring to centralization of worship in Deuteronomy 12 is not found in this unit, although it certainly occurs elsewhere in Kings. Instead, we have the language of Deut 12:2–3, which is regarded by Römer as belonging to the latest edition. The negative remarks about Solomon in 2 Kgs 23:13 also fit with Römer’s second edition of Kings, not his first (see Römer, 151). One could go through the unit and eliminate all of these interconnections as “redactional” additions, but this would make the report of the reform less and less Deuteronomistic. The fracturing of the account in 2 Kings 22–23 into three strata seems to rest entirely on the need to reflect three editions in this text. Furthermore, the motivation for the consultation of Hulda, the covenant making, and the reform that follows are a complete enigma without the discovery of the book with its dire threats in the curses of Deuteronomy 28 as reflected in 2 Kgs 22:13, but this is attributed to the third edition. Now, Römer is aware of the fact that there are Near Eastern parallels to this feature in the story of finding ancient documents in temples, which are then used to justify royal activity, and he cites some examples of these, although none from the Persian period, which is his date for this episode in Kings. However, he does not cite the best example, the Shabaka Stone, which contains the so-called “Memphite Theology.” King Shabaka of the Twenty-Fifth Dynasty (ca. 710 B.C.E.) claims to have found this document in worm-eaten condition, which he then restored and inscribed in stone. It purports to be a very ancient text, “a work of the ancestors,” written in very archaic language that scholars for a long time thought was dated to the Old Kingdom but was actually composed in Shabaka’s own time. This king clearly intended it to serve his own ideological and propagandist purposes: “in order that his name might endure and his monument last in the house of his father Ptah-South-of-his-Wall throughout eternity” (see M. Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature [Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1975– 80], 1:51–57; 3:5). Based on this and other parallels, it makes the best sense to see this “discovery” of the book as belonging to the time of Josiah and used for similar political and religious purposes of his own day. If this is the case, it would largely dissolve all the arguments for a third DtrN edition. The application of the criteria of Assyriological parallels for dating purposes can be used rather selectively, applied when it is useful or ignored when it is not. Thus, Römer
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advocates an early preexilic version of Joshua in Joshua 6–12 because it so nicely corresponds to Assyriological conventions. This also allows Römer to view this early version of the conquest as quite separate from Deuteronomy in which Joshua is the successor to Moses. The commissioning of Joshua would then be seen in the account in Josh 5:13–15, a scene that also has its Assyrian parallels. However, in Assyrian texts it does not have the function of investiture but rather serves as a divine revelation given to the king before an important battle, and that is clearly the function in Joshua. On the other hand, Joshua 3– 4, which deals with the crossing of the Jordan before the beginning of the campaign against Jericho, is a vital component in the whole conquest narrative. As I indicated in my earlier study of the parallels in Assyrian royal inscriptions, which Römer cites (“Joshua’s Campaign of Canaan and Near Eastern Historiography,” SJOT 2 [1990]: 1–12), an account of the crossing of a river at flood stage before the beginning of a campaign is a very frequent component of Assyrian inscriptions. And the crossing of the Jordan in chs. 3–4 is preceded by the mustering of the troops in ch. 1, which takes us back to the actual investiture of Joshua in Deut 31:7–8 as Moses’s successor. The parallel Assyrian texts make quite clear that there is no version of the conquest earlier than the one that makes the connection with Deuteronomy and that Römer identifies as the exilic Deuteronomist. Another significant parallel to Near Eastern texts occurs in the Solomonic account of the building of the temple, which Römer again compares with Assyrian building inscriptions, following the work of Victor Hurowitz (I Have Built You an Exalted House: Temple Building in the Bible in Light of Mesopotamian and Northwestern Semitic Writings [JSOTSup 115; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1992]), who also concludes that the Assyrian building accounts represent the closest parallels. However, anyone consulting this important collection of texts will discover that it is in fact the Neo-Babylonian period that provides the closest parallels to temple building. It was the Babylonian kings who were obsessed with building temples, describing their work in great detail and giving rather scant attention to their palaces, just as in the biblical account in 1 Kings 5–8, whereas the Assyrian kings were quite the reverse, with much to say about their palaces but giving little information on temple building. Hurowitz gives only one example of Assyrian temple building (ibid., 76–78), but several by Babylonian kings (ibid., 91–96). In fact, one can find very many accounts of temple restoration from the Neo-Babylonian period with many features similar to those of the Solomonic temple project. (P.-A. Beaulieu in The Reign of Nabonidus, King of Babylon 556–539 [Yale Near Eastern Researches 10; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989], 42, lists seventeen inscriptions that deal with temple building in the time of Nabonidus; for numerous additional examples in the time of Nabopolassar and Nebuchadnezzar, see S. Langdon, Die Neubabylonischen Königsinschriften [VAB 4; Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1912].) Another consideration for dating the biblical account of the temple construction to the exilic period is the fact that for Dtr the primary function of the temple is to house the ark, which Dtr regards as a repository for the two tables of the Decalogue. The temple represents the climax of the ark’s journey from the wilderness period to the special place in Jerusalem, which is synonymous with the place where the deity has set his name (2 Sam 7:1–13; 1 Kgs 8:6, 9, 15–21). The placing of the ark of the covenant in the temple with great pomp and procession is the direct equivalent of the placing of the gods of the Babylonians in their temples, and in both cases this is followed by much celebration. There is
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also the same emphasis on the king’s piety. It seems to me that the whole point of this elaborate temple-building narrative, in imitation of the Babylonian model, is to articulate an understanding of divine imminence in the words of the Horeb covenant, in contrast to the iconographic representations of Assyria and Babylonia. Consequently, there appears to be little left that one can attribute to the preexilic Dtr in Joshua to 2 Kings. There are still a large number of problems about which there could be endless debate. (1) What is the nature of the sources used by Dtr? Römer mentions “annals” and “chronicles,” but Assyrian annals record wars of conquest by an imperial power, which is hardly the case for Israel or Judah, and chronicles are the invention of the Babylonians in the Neo-Babylonian period. (2) What is the relationship of Deuteronomy and Dtr to the Pentateuch? to the Yahwist? to the Priestly writer? Römer briefly states at the outset where he stands on these questions, but they are still strongly contested issues, and he is very much aware of that fact. (3) Is the work of Dtr a history, and is Greek historiography an appropriate model for comparison? Römer, among others, expresses some reservations about making such comparisons, reservations that I do not share, but he has little reticence about employing what to my mind is the more dubious and highly anachronistic notion of editor or redactor in connection with his Deuteronomistic writers. The limitations of a review such as this do not allow one to delve into any of these matters. I am merely suggesting that many issues remain on both the larger questions and the smaller details that will require extensive and sustained discussion. Given the great complexity of the biblical text’s literary history and the vast accumulation of scholarship with its widespread disagreements, it is little wonder that there is no easy and broad consensus. Nevertheless, these remarks should not detract from the excellence of Römer’s book. It remains a very thoughtful and well-informed study that may serve as a good starting point for further discussion on matters such as I have suggested above, and I warmly recommend it to students and scholars as an introduction to this field of study. Unfortunately, the price of the book is way out of line with its modest size and is a serious detriment to its academic purpose. John Van Seters Waterloo, ON N2L 6L1, Canada
Writing on the Tablet of the Heart: Origins of Scripture and Literature, by David M. Carr. New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Pp. xiv + 330. $65.00 (hardcover). ISBN 0195172973 This is a remarkable analysis and critical discussion of the interrelation in antiquity of literacy and orality in the formation of the literatures of the peoples of the ancient Near East, including the Sumero-Akkadian, Egyptian, West Semitic, Early Jewish, Greek, and Hellenistic, with references to relevant manuscripts from Qumran. It is probably the most complete gathering in one place of data culled from recent scholarly literature on the West Asian and Eastern Mediterranean cultures relating to modes of education of the young in biblical antiquity. It will undoubtedly be the touchstone of reference to such studies in the foreseeable future.
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Carr is excellent at perceiving the importance of “schools” in antiquity as the vehicle for the development of literature of various cultures. Schools were of various types from “home schooling” in priests’ families to later priestly and scribal schools where the elite were trained in the traditions that gave a culture its memory and identity (17–173). Temple-based education in Early Judaism was central until around the first century C.E. especially when Sabbath gatherings at early synagogues provided the opportunity for trans-temple textuality and education (177–285). Carr does a convincing job of showing the interplay between memorization and writing in the enculturation process of a people and its development of a distinct body of literature that preserved the memory essential to continuing identity. That process was dependent on the younger generation’s bearing the trappings of the culture in memory, “on the tablet of the heart,” or on recording it for public display and recitation, and it was a process that was similar across the cultural boundaries as diverse as the peoples of the whole area under study. This is the widest range of cultures, to my knowledge, ever brought under one prism for study of education, the mode whereby various peoples maintained cultural identity and continuity—a continuing, vital function of education today. The method Carr uses is to look synoptically at the various ancient venues of traditioning, teaching, and learning. Occasionally he shows how the traditioning worked in specific cases in one of the bodies of literature under purview, but his method is a comparative study of the vehicles of traditioning/education in the several cultures as reported in recent critical literature. Education of the young in a society was in effect “gaining humanity at the hand of the gods,” that is, from their teachers, and the prime teacher or human of a society was its king, the figure in ancient cultures who had contact with the divine and drew on its authority (hier-archy). Carr understands midrash as drawing on tradition to understand the new and intertextuality as the means whereby “new” literature was created out of older works. These are the essential ways to comprehend the creation of literature in antiquity. Those in a society who knew earlier tradition “by heart” were able to create the new out of pastiches of the old. Writing was a means of aiding memory. Literature was an oral/written phenomenon. Literacy was expressed in the various cultures at different levels—vulgar, functional, and “higher literacy.” The Greeks, having a relatively simple alphabetic system, probably attained a rather broad level of “vulgar literacy”; a polis was in part a “school” for learning and sharing the standard works of traditions that rendered a diverse, urban people functionally literate. This was an essential part of the development of the Greek idea of democracy. The Hellenistic education system shaped citizens of a polis into citizens of the world (285). While Carr devotes considerable space to appreciation of the Greek attainments of literacy, he is quite aware of the differences in the ways authority was expressed and recognized in the non-Greek cultures he studies. (Norbert Lohfink over twenty-five years ago noted the role of wisdom schools in canon formation in his Kohelet [Echter, 1980].) Carr is aware of the differences between ancient Greek and Greek-derived societies and the world to the south and east in understanding authority, the former individual and the latter societal. This accounts for the anonymity of authorship both of communal literature and of traditional art that is so much a part of the Orient, near and far, while Greek and western authority were lodged in individuals and their reputations in a community (102–9)—a form of pseudepigraphy that developed in Judaism after hellenization had required it.
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One of the strongest concepts at work in Carr’s reasoning is that of understanding how resistance to a foreign, dominant culture was largely expressed in the terms of that culture (253–72). This principle can be illustrated throughout most literature, and Carr does well in showing in a number of cases how using a foreign cultural trait to resist it worked for the purpose intended. The principle was operative even at Qumran, a sect of early Judaism that sought the purity of its religious observance by isolating itself out in the Judean Desert in protest against the increasingly hellenized culture of Hasmonean Jerusalem (215–39). The principle was denied in the early years of study of the Scrolls to the point that there was vehement opposition on the part of some older scholars in the 1960s and 1970s who had made up their minds that the Qumran community was so antiHellenistic that they would not admit that the original Hebrew of Psalm 151, found in the large Scroll of Psalms from Cave 11, depicted David’s musical ability in Orphic terminology—clearly the reason for the omission of the two verses which so expressed it in the more orthodox LXX/Syr form of Psalm 151 (Sanders, The Dead Sea Psalms Scroll [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967], 94–103; and Sanders, “A Multivalent Text: Psalm 151:3– 4 Revisited,” HAR 8 [1984]: 167–84). Since that time scholarship has found much at Qumran to have been Hellenistic in expression and thought. Carr offers the felicitous expression: “Hellenized Anti-Hellenistic Torah Judaism” (258). What came later to be called “canon” was probably “a collection of scriptures to resist Hellenism,” a curriculum designed to maintain Jewish identity (276) in a larger, foreign environment. Carr suggests that a nascent canon of Jewish literature probably developed out of the need for a curriculum to teach Torah and Jewish tradition to observant Jewish households. He suggests that there were “Torah schools” after hours when children had completed a day in the regular “gymnasium”—much like the current practice, one supposes, of “release-time” from public schools so that children from religious families can go after school to their mosque, synagogue, or church to learn their faith tradition (254–72, 294). Carr dates the beginnings of the expression “the Law and the Prophets” to the Hasmonean period, especially the literary activity attributed to Judas’s administration, when there was a strong enough central government as well as temple authority to effect the beginnings of the Jewish canon when Jewish identity needed strong central support because of the level of Hellenization in Jerusalem. It would have been the curriculum for the aftergymnasium Torah schools. In contrast, however, to others who see Judas’s literary interests as setting the whole Jewish canon (Leiman, Beckwith, Davies [253–54, 262]), Carr affirms with a growing number of us that the Ketuvim were added after the fall of the temple in 70 C.E., some choosing a date after the Bar Kokhba Revolt of the early second century C.E. (cf. several contributions to the question in The Canon Debate [ed. Lee McDonald and James Sanders [Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2002]). Carr resists applying the word “canon” yet to this early collection of Torah and Prophets. It is worth noting how Carr puts his point, “the emergent Hebrew collection . . . of ‘scriptures’: numinous, divinely inspired writings that were a crucial part of a process of education-enculturation, writings to be kept on the mouth and written on the heart, so that Jews from Judas to Josephus could remain Torahobservant and resist the onslaught of the Greco-Roman world” (276). He might have gone on to say that the new rabbinic Judaism that emerged after the Jewish War, and especially after the disastrous failure of the messianic Bar Kokhba Revolt, gradually withdrew into
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closed communities in order to be able to be Torah-observant, in-but-not-of the GrecoRoman (and then Christian) world around it. Carr rightly stresses the role of education, but one misses any serious recognition of the role of rite and ritual in the canonical process. The Torah once shaped by Ezra in the Diaspora and introduced to the remnant in Jerusalem (Nehemiah 8) would have been shaped in part by the requirements of ritual recitation. This was the case especially in the development of the Ketuvim. It has been well argued that the recitation of the “five scrolls” at the stated feasts and fasts in the Jewish calendar was a vehicle in the process of their becoming a part of the eventual Jewish canon and grouped together in the Ketuvim (in contrast to their being located in the historical and prophetic corpuses in Christian canons). Other books and sections of the Jewish canon may also have been included because of the demands of the observance of the calendar. (See Donn Morgan, Between Text and Community: The Writings in Canonical Interpretation [Minneapolis: Fortress, 1990]; and Sanders, Torah and Canon [2nd ed.; Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2005], 111– 35; see also James W. Watts, “Ritual Legitimacy and Scriptural Authority,” JBL 124 [2005]: 401–17.) In the case of the early church, as in the case of early Judaism as Carr has earlier shown (see Carr’s “Canonization in the Context of Community: An Outline of the Formation of the Tanakh and the Christian Bible,” in A Gift of God in Due Season: Essays on Scripture and Community in Honor of James A. Sanders [ed. Richard Weis and David Carr [Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1996], 22–64), there were quite different views of what should be included in a Christian canon until the dramatic, forced integration of the Christian movement by Constantine in the first half of the fourth century after which there was but one, basic “catholic” expression of the faith in the west. (See David Laird Dungan, Constantine’s Bible: Politics and the Making of the New Testament [Minneapolis: Fortress, 2006].) What the destitution of the Babylonian exile did for the beginnings of a collection of Scripture apparently accepted by all forms of early Judaism in the “Law and the Prophets,” the fall of the temple and the destruction of Jerusalem did for the shaping of the Tanak as a whole after “the great divide,” Constantine’s solidification of the Roman Empire did for the Christian canon. These were the three major historical/political factors that had tremendous generative power, except that in the case of the Jewish canon destitution was the determining factor while in the case of the Christian Second Testament Constantinian triumph was the operative factor; persecution had had the opposite effect on the churches during the preceding three centuries when Christianity was highly diverse. The alphabet in such ancient societies was deeply formative for development of modes of education and of enculturation. An alphabet was revered as sacred. Each letter or sign had numinous qualities. Almost mysteriously thought could be reduced to scratchings arranged in grammatical (verbal and syntactic) ways and through them communicate to others and to the future, those not yet born. Carr notes that the figure “twenty-two” in Josephus’s discussion of the number of books in a Jewish canon in the late first century C.E. came from the fact that the Hebrew alphabet has twenty-two letters (in the traditional mode of counting them). He might have gone on to note that Homer’s division of both the Iliad and the Odyssey into twenty-four books each was undoubtedly because the Greek alphabet has twenty-four letters. The alphabet itself had sacred and numinous qualities.
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Notable is Carr’s succinct statement about the alphabetic principle: “anchored at the early end by learning the alphabet and extending ultimately to mastery of a Hebrew Corpus defined by the alphabet’s numbering” (270). Carr notes that memory worked hand in hand with writing so much that each manuscript was a scribal “performance” or an “Einheit für sich.” This variable scribal “performance” of texts makes it virtually impossible to get a text-critical fix on an Ur-text. “Scribal performances of traditions would have been corrected as often from parallel performances within a network of scribal masters as from consultation of a written version of a tradition” (44, 292). Scholars whose major focus is textual criticism had earlier arrived at the same conclusion (see Sanders, “Stability and Fluidity in Text and Canon,” in Traditions of the Text [ed. G. Norton and S. Pisano; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1991], 203–17; and Emanuel Tov, “The Status of the Masoretic Text in Modern Text Editions of the Hebrew Bible,” in The Canon Debate, 217.). Carr attributes a large part of what text critics call “fluidity” in pre-Masoretic texts (largely the Scrolls and early Greek translations) to dependence on “an oral-written process of memorization-education” (234–39). This underscores the importance of the early history of the transmission of the text of biblical literature which came to a halt at “the great divide” (Shemaryahu Talmon’s apt expression) that occurred after the destruction of the temple by the Romans in 70 C.E. (see Talmon, “The Textual Study of the Bible—A New Outlook,” in Qumran and the History of the Biblical Text [ed. F. M. Cross and S. Talmon; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975], 321–400; and Talmon, “The Crystallization of the ‘Canon of Hebrew Scriptures’ in the Light of Biblical Scrolls from Qumran,” in The Bible as a Book: The Hebrew Bible and the Judaean Desert Discoveries [ed. E. Tov and E. D. Herbert [New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Books, 2002], 5–20). The pre-Masoretic gave way to the proto-Masoretic period, and finally the Masoretic period by the end of antiquity in the classical Tiberian codices and their derivatives. In personal correspondence Carr has indicated to me that he would like to probe more deeply into the current situation in textual criticism of the Hebrew Bible and Septuagint. And rightly so. There are a number of junctures in his argument that could be considerably informed by doing so. Carr is quite right to critique those who seek an original or Ur-text through the art of textual criticism; he astutely points out that such is a “moving target” and very difficult to attain precisely because of the fluidity he rightly perceives between written and oral recitation of early texts. This is the principal reason textual critics seek the stage in the history of transmission of each biblical book or large section at which to aim a critically responsible text to recommend—the “aim” of textual criticism. To write this book, Carr read as widely in the pertinent secondary literature as any scholar I have read in the field, covering the best of recent treatises on ancient modes of education in ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, West Semitic cultures, Greece, and the Hellenistic world. And with critical imagination Carr has made good sense of where the field should be and what subsequent work should be undertaken. This is clearly the strength of this remarkable, comparative study. For his early post-doctoral work Carr received a coveted Humboldt Grant and studied for a year in Heidelberg. His earlier work, From D to Q (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1991) was based directly on his doctoral work (“Royal Ideology and the Technology of Faith: A Comparative Midrash Study of 1 Kings 3:2–15”
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[Claremont Graduate University, 1988]; his Erotic Word; Sexuality, Spirituality and the Bible [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003] then pressed the method of comparative midrash to full effect). There is a limit, however, to working almost entirely in the secondary literature and on the externals of the process of canon formation as Carr’s present book largely does. Of this work one could rightly say that what Carr has done here and the perspective it offers are contribution enough to the field. Carr’s focus on the function of schools and their curricula in the formation of canons is compelling, especially his understanding that most of the books in the curricula were chosen for their ability to help early Jews retain their Jewish identity within foreign cultures and hegemony. But one misses serious discussion of how the curricula were chosen and why. Carr rightly notes that such curricula were in large part chosen because of the desire not to lose Jewish identity in a Hellenistic environment. The observation is right, and it is important to see the crucial role of priests and scribes in the selection process. What Carr does not address, however, are the varying needs of communities in the selection process, just as there has generally been a lack of appreciation of the needs of communities in the study of intertextuality generally. Modern scholars still focus largely on their counterparts in antiquity, the individual leaders and their work. But leaders need followers as much as followers need leaders, and they as a community had needs which some literature met and which other literature apparently did not meet, that is, were not shared or picked up again. Carr notes that work now needs to be done on “a broader study of Bible as scripture and of scripture as a particular instance” (295). It is only by tracing the midrashic Nachleben of passages, events, or figures in biblical texts that one can discern the hermeneutics the sequential communities used to re-read and reapply the traditions that one can see how the canon took shape and why—norma normans. Focus on the final stage of that process, that of the closure of a canon—norma normata—fails to appreciate what a canon is and how it works. Only by working through particular trajectories in the formation and transmission of bodies of literature, as Carr does in his previous work but does not do here, can one see the limits of focusing almost solely on the externals of the canonical process. What Carr says is right as far as it goes, but appreciation of the multifarious ways in which intertextuality worked in the formation of all literature, from the earliest to the latest, is necessary to go beyond the dynamic interrelation of memorization and writing, schools and their curricula. With students I developed over the years the subdiscipline of comparative midrash in order to study as thoroughly as possible the Nachleben of biblical passages, figures, and events from inception up to the point of emergence of clear and discernible canons within Judaism and Christianity. This is painstaking work and required co-operative efforts of many students over a period of time to locate and even create Scripture indices to all early Jewish literature so that we could trace the function of a biblical passage or figure in all the available literature (see Craig Evans, Ancient Texts for New Testament Interpretation [Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2005]). The focus had to be on canon as function, that is, how earlier biblical literature functioned in the later, since there were no clear indications of a literary shape of those traditions until they emerged as functional “canons”—Torah and Prophets and “other literature.” The phrase “Torah and Prophets” probably originally
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referred to the Pentateuch and Early Prophets—the basic Torah story line that governed the formation and sequence of books from Genesis through Kings. The fifteen books of the Latter Prophets were then gradually added to explain the uses of adversity in the hands of One God and to substantiate the basic point of the full Torah story: that Israel and Judah were at fault for the disasters that befell the people in the late Iron Age, and not God; for God was now understood as both creator and redeemer and would be the restorer or “transformer” of the old national cults of North and South into the new Judaism that arose out of the disasters. Carr here proffers an in-depth look at the pertinent scholarly literature that discusses the external cultural vehicles by which a people’s literature became “canon” or “scripture” for that people. As such, it is a highly reliable and valuable summary of the best current thinking in several fields of study of the ancient Near Eastern and eastern Mediterranean cultural institutions and modes by which some of the literature from those areas became enduring reading for following generations. There is little here, however, that offers specific cases of what actually happened to Scripture in the process, and little from the Bible itself, as Carr recognizes (295). And there is little here about how certain traditions or writings were shared from community to community or from generation to generation— the work of comparative midrash which Carr earlier had done so well. And there is little that helps understand the force and power of Torah in all subsequent Jewish literature (290) in comparison to the influence of Homer on later Greek literature. Carr recognizes that there was a difference in the central and centrifugal force of Torah in the ever-changing challenges to the identity of the Jewish people, but he fails to state what the difference was or is in his search for the “origins of scripture and literature.” Torah is Judaism and Judaism is Torah, and until that equation is addressed seriously one cannot know Judaism. The formative function of Homer throughout subsequent Greek literature, including the NT, cannot be denied, but there can be no comparison to the iconic importance of Torah as definitive and constitutive in the formation of Early Jewish literature, including the NT. If Carr had made clear that he viewed his work in this remarkably helpful book as providing the externals of the process by which some curricula became canons, I would have no problem. But, with regard to internal processes, he too quickly dismisses work in canonical criticism as Protestant theology. One cannot possibly work on the internals of biblical literature itself without seeing the central role of “God” through it all, even with “the seventy names” the Bible gives the deity. The Hebrew Esther is a brilliant example of how to monotheize without mentioning God. Careful work in textual criticism requires that one allow that the passage under study referred to the role of God in the events depicted without mentioning God. (See the parade examples in Deut 34:6; and 1 Sam 1:23 where MT refers to God but LXX does not.) To dismiss work on the canonical process as an effort at Protestant theology like that of Brevard Childs is to misunderstand and to reflect mistaken opinions in some secondary literature. Nor does it account for the fact that canonical criticism has been as well or better accepted in Jewish and Catholic scholarship than in Protestant. What Carr has done is provide the field with a very valuable and authentic look at important major externals of the canonical process by which some literature became the curricula (and, I think Carr would add, cultic recitations) and eventually the canons of
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ancient cultures. No one to my knowledge had done this so well, and we should be very grateful to Carr for providing understanding of how such external vehicles of the canonical process worked. I hope he will now devote his attentions to helping further develop the internals of the canonical process for which he has provided such acute insight on the externals in this excellent treatise. James A. Sanders (Emeritus) Claremont School of Theology and Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, CA 91711
Studies in Matthew: Interpretation Past and Present, by Dale C. Allison, Jr. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005. Pp. 288. $34.99 (hardcover). ISBN 0801027918. Studies in Matthew, by Ulrich Luz. Translated by Rosemary Selle. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005. Pp. 397. $30.00 (paper). ISBN 0802839649. These recently published collections of essays by Dale Allison and Ulrich Luz display the significant interest in historical-critical issues, the history of interpretation, and the narrative, synchronic dimensions of Matthew’s Gospel found in their commentaries. Allison’s essays are either new or significantly revised, whereas most of Luz’s are English translations of prior work. Allison divides his thirteen essays into “The Exegetical Past” (Part I), consisting of six new pieces, and “Literary and Historical Studies” (Part II), consisting of three new and four revised essays. The essays in Part I generally provide substantive discussions of exegetical history involving both giants like Chrysostom and lesser-known figures like Cosmas Indicopleustas. Allison’s mastery extends also to Reformation and post-Reformation theologians and scholars as well as figures from other fields such as English author Thomas de Quincey (1785–1859). Allison’s references are intrinsic to his arguments and often aid in subverting unhelpful interpretive assumptions. The results are fresh, compelling readings of selected Matthean texts. Further, Allison displays newfound postmodern interpretive sensibilities. In “The Magi’s Angel (Matt. 2:2, 9–10),” Allison maintains that one should not understand the star of Matt 2:2 as a heavenly phenomenon, as does most modern exegesis. Exegetical history largely excludes this option in light of the star’s odd behavior. Positively, ancient interpretation explains Matthew’s star: “Quite simply, Matthew’s idea of a star was not our idea of a star” (21); ancient texts relating and equating angels and stars support the conclusion that “the guiding star was a guiding angel” (29). In “Seeing God (Matt. 5:8),” Allison draws on exegetical history to investigate the neglected phrase “they will see God,” concluding that “[Matthew] and his early readers . . . probably hoped one day to share the experience of the angels in heaven and to see a somatic God face to face” (61)—a reading counterintuitive to modern interpreters. Allison’s interest, however, is here less exegetical and more theological and theoretical. Allison concludes with a section entitled “The Theological Value of Exegetical History,” in which he sounds positively postmodern. First,
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exegetical history shows that a verse is “only a station on the way” whose “full meaning can only be pondered by retracing the paths that led to it and by uncovering the paths that have gone out from it” (61). Second, that readers are situated means that interpretations are constantly changing; the plain sense may supply a modicum of interpretive certitude, but “we may be equally grateful that such stability does not prevent the ceaseless and creative reapplication of the Scriptures, from which we can bring forth treasures new as well as old” (62). Third, multiple meanings need not be mutually exclusive. Fourth, revelation is a process—given the first three points, “it makes little sense to confine revelation to the words on a biblical page. Exegetical history in its entirety rather confronts us with an ongoing, evolving divine disclosure” (63). Coming from the de facto author of the ICC commentary on Matthew (with W. D. Davies, The Gospel according to Saint Matthew; 3 vols.; ICC; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1988–97) and a heretofore fervent defender of the historical-critical paradigm, this chapter signals a significant change in course. The third essay, “Murder and Anger, Cain and Abel (Matt. 5:21–25),” is less theoretical but equally intriguing. Allison draws on inter- and intratextual connections to contend that this passage “is designed to send informed readers back to Gen. 4, to the story of Cain and Abel” (66), a rhetorically effective move. Allison’s eye and ear for intratextual links and thematic connections in this essay are impressive and foreshadow much of what he will do in Part II. The fourth essay, “Darkness at Noon (Matt. 27:45),” involves approaches found in the previous essays: promising inter- and intratextual connections are detailed; exegetical history is explored; several avenues of interpretation are suggested. Allison again reflects on “Lessons from the Exegetical Past” (103), and argues, in essence, that there is nothing new under the sun: “Because the exegetical present confronts the selfsame text as the exegetical past, repetition must be the rule, novelty the exception” (104). Multiple meanings are often complementary, not exclusive; the hearing of “the voices of the interpretive tradition” is “not a misfortune to be undone but a boon to be appreciated” (105). In “Touching Jesus’ Feet (Matt. 28:9),” Allison explores four possibilities from exegetical history. Why do the two women grasp Jesus’ feet? Out of joy and affection? To signal submission? To worship? To indicate that Jesus’ resurrected body is physical? Drawing on psychiatric research and modern tales of the paranormal, Allison opts for the last as the best option but emphasizes, however, the complementary nature of interpretations: “Who passed the hermeneutical law that a text must, like a one-way street sign, send us in one direction only?” (115). In the sixth essay, “Reading Matthew through the Church Fathers,” Allison contends that neglect of patristic exegesis is “a condescending attitude towards the past” which “impoverishes exegesis” (117), and discusses four areas in which patristic sources have influenced his scholarship: (1) intertextuality: given the fathers’ intimate familiarity with Scripture, if one finds “an allusion . . . that the Fathers’ did not find, the burden of proof is on us; and if they detected an allusion which modern commentators have not detected, investigation is in order” (119); (2) culture: the church fathers’ closeness to the culture in which Matthew’s Gospel was first composed and heard guards against eisegesis; (3) theology: ancient theologians may provide compelling answers to modern theological conundrums; Gregory’s “innovative doctrine of perpetual progress” may solve our unease over
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the Matthean Jesus’ demand to be perfect (127), and (4) rhetoric: “The Fathers often said the right things in ways that have not been surpassed” (130). Part II largely concerns Allison’s interest in the synchronic, narrative dimensions of Matthew. In “Structure, Biographical Impulse, and the Imitatio Christi,” Allison declares a change of position and asserts that Matthew is indeed Greco-Roman biography. Biography explains Matthew’s structure: the fivefold alteration of discourse and narrative sections functions to promote the imitation of Jesus, who fulfills his own commands and whom the disciples imitate. In “Matthew’s First Two Words (Matt. 1:1),” Allison surveys various translations of bivblo" genevsew" and six interpretive options for their scope and import, arguing that English translations should leave the phrase vague so that readers might identify all six options and hear echoes of Genesis. In “Divorce, Celibacy, and Joseph (Matt. 1:18–25),” Allison contends on narrative grounds that porneiva in Matt 5:32 and 19:9 refers to adultery; Joseph’s resolve to leave Mary coheres with this. Instead of having sought the rationale for the exception clauses outside the text, “we should have been looking for an explanation from within Matthew itself: the exception clauses allow for harmony with the conduct of the righteous Joseph in 1:18–25” (166). In “The Configuration of the Sermon on the Mount and Its Meaning,” Allison offers a convincing outline of the Sermon, noting that 4Q525 and Ps.-Ephraem Beat. 55 support the idea that the Beatitudes (Matt 5:3–12) and Matt 7:13–27 form an inclusio. Further, the triadic structure is important; in fact, the triadic form and triadic content of the Sermon (i.e., the concerns of Torah, cult, and social issues) may confirm W. D. Davies’s thesis that the Sermon on the Mount is a response to Simeon the Just’s three pillars of Torah, temple service, and deeds of loving kindness. In “Foreshadowing the Passion,” Allison details impressive verbal and conceptual clues linking Matthew 1–25 with the events of 26–28. Most scholars have missed them because “[t]he historical-critical method has trained us to relate the First Gospel to texts other than itself.” Matthew, however, “created a work designed to be read and heard again and again” and thus “anticipated listeners who would appreciate intratextual allusions” (234). In “Deconstructing Matthew” Allison discusses instances in which the Gospel “seems to speak against itself ” (237), exploring tensions to the end of offering “a rough typology of the responses of exegetes to the problem” and evaluating them. Allison notes, on the one hand, that many problems would not be problems to Matthew but, on the other, also refuses to ignore genuine difficulties. The final essay, “Slaughtered Infants,” is an exploration of the substructure of Matthean theodicy, a wonderful exploration of five ways Matthew may respond to the problem of evil. This wonderful collection is certainly worth the purchase price. Several issues may be raised, however. First, Allison uses critical terminology such as “intertextuality” and “deconstruction” with little awareness of the terms’ origins, history, and functions. Second, his newfound postmodern sympathies are somewhat at odds with his practice and certain implied assumptions; Allison frequently reveals a fundamental orientation toward traditional author- and source-centered methodology. Allison could profit from exploring critical and literary theory in greater depth, sorting, sifting, learning, and holding fast to the good, much as he has done with ancient and modern interpreters. Third, one might wish that Allison would enrich his natural theological sensitivity through more reading of historical and contemporary theology. That is, Allison’s work contains some theoretical dissonance, and one hopes that his facility in theory and theology might one day match his
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unmatched expertise in ancient texts and exegetical history. These critiques should not detract from the fundamental value of this collection of essays or one’s opinion of Allison as a brilliant, erudite scholar. Sixteen of the eighteen essays in Luz’s collection are previously published and unrevised, most appearing in English for the first time. There is little one cannot find in Luz’s magisterial commentary. The essays range from the late 1970s to the immediate past; the collection simply “document[s] my exegetical journey with Matthew” (vii). Divided into eight sections, the book falls naturally into two parts: essays 1–12 are chiefly exercises in historical-critical exegesis, while 13–18 concern “Hermeneutics with Matthew in Mind.” The halves are distinct but not discrete. Several fundamental approaches and ideas appear repeatedly: (1) a source- and redaction-critical approach; (2) understanding Matthew’s Gospel as a “two-level” story involving the risen Jesus present to Matthew’s community; (3) understanding Matthew’s sources as Mark and Q, the latter brought to Syria by members of the Q community in the aftermath of the Jewish War and the failure of the mission to Israel; (4) interest in patristic exegesis and the broader history of interpretation; (5) investment in Gadamer; and (6) a “meant-means” hermeneutical stance that relies largely on (a) the overarching story of Jesus and (b) the Augustinian principle of love from De Doctrina Christiana. In short, Luz’s fundamental exegetical and hermeneutical perspective is largely that of a classic modern liberal Protestant. Several essays are particularly worthy of note. In “Fictionality and Loyalty to Tradition in Matthew’s Gospel in the Light of Greek Literature,” Luz examines fictionality in the latter and, in contrast to Allison, concludes that Matthew is not biography but fictional narrative: unlike biography, Matthean fictions “create a new historical course of events, corresponding to the historical experiences of his own community” (76). Ancient historians would find Matthew’s fictions unacceptable, but Matthew was unaware of any problem; the issue is the community’s experience of the risen Jesus, and the Gospel is better compared to Deuteronomy and Jubilees than Greco-Roman literature in any case. In “Discipleship: A Matthean Manifesto for a Dynamic Ecclesiology,” Luz examines the oft-neglected mission discourse, which reflects “the salvation history experience of his community in their own story” (147–48) and is “Matthew’s basic manifesto for his view of the church” (149). Matthew’s church should be engaged in mission and proclamation, consist of “potential itinerant radicals” (151), and have kingdom-oriented poverty and suffering as marks of discipleship. Luz’s reading is intriguing, and the essay becomes even more so when Luz brings his analysis into conversation with Reformation and Catholic ecclesiology. Yet Luz simply concludes that “Matthew’s ecclesiology approach offers an opportunity for both Roman Catholics and Protestants to bring movement into the fixed basic concepts of church we have inherited” (164). Hermeneutical concerns are paramount in “The Primacy Saying of Matthew 16:17– 19 from the Perspective of Its Effective History.” Luz notes the exegetical consensus against the traditional papal interpretation and then examines its reception history, noting that “the original sense of a text cannot regulate its later applications” (172). But Luz then launches directly into traditional exegesis. Luz asserts that Gadamer’s significance for interpretation implies interpretive freedom, but writes, “Freedom of application must have its limits, or there can be neither church nor agreement within society” (179). Luz thus proposes two interpretive truth criteria: (1) correspondence to “the basic line of Jesus’
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story” (179); and (2) an Augustinian criterion of effects: Does an interpretation build up love? Luz suggests that the papal interpretation of Matt 16:17–19 does neither. Reception history “draws our attention to how this potential for freedom was often destroyed when the texts were used as biblical legitimations [sic] of a doctrine or institution” (181–82). The essay titled “Reflections on the Appropriate Interpretation of New Testament Texts” is similar. Historical-critical pursuit of the original sense, Luz argues, “actually makes it difficult or even impossible to answer the question of its present-day meaning” (266). Gadamer’s insights, however, imply freedom in interpretation and the ability of the Bible “to speak, time and time again, to new people in new situations and to be interpreted in new ways in their lives” (276). Luz again suggests the story of Jesus and the love criterion as interpretive criteria, although with awareness of the limitations and problems inherent in each. In “The Significance of the Church Fathers for Biblical Interpretation in Western Protestant Perspective,” Luz notes that the Fathers have been neglected in Western, Protestant exegesis due to the principle of Sola Scriptura and the academic quest for the original sense. The fathers are useful, however; exegetically, they may give insight into the sense of a text, and, hermeneutically, they show how the Bible functions as a coherent, Christocentric unity within the community. The latter is decisive: “The hermeneutical impetus they can give us seems much more important to me than the exegetical, however useful this may be” (311). The book closes with two new pieces. In “Hermeneutics of ‘Effective History’ and the Church,” Luz brings Gadamer into conversation with Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox interpretation. Effective history challenges facets of each and also “remind[s] ecclesial exegesis that the effect of the Bible reaches far beyond the church” (367). In “The Significance of Matthew’s Jesus Story for Today,” Luz, speaking explicitly as a Swiss Western European, asserts that Matthew’s Gospel, as an open story, presents God and enables an experience of God that is both congenial and challenging to those in a post-Christian society. Luz is rightly renowned, and every student of Matthew must own his commentary. This makes this particular collection of essays somewhat disappointing, however. The older essays are simply outdated; serious Matthean scholars should already be familiar with the essays in their original languages; there is little value for beginning students of Matthew or scholars whose specialties lie outside Matthew. Further, the topical organization defeats the stated purpose of providing an overview of Luz’s Matthean journey. Moreover, many of the essays have a certain superficiality; they were composed as essays and outlines and thus lack argumentative depth. Again, Luz is a wonderful scholar, but one’s money would be better spent on his magisterial commentary, the first volume of which was recently revised and republished (2002). Most of the insights in these essays will be found there. Beyond this, one notes significant methodological incoherence; Luz often mixes modernist historical criticism with postmodern emphases on hermeneutics, narrative, and readers. For instance, in “The Miracle Stories of Matthew 8–9,” Luz appropriates Seymour Chatman’s Story and Discourse (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978) while also examining Matthew’s reworking of his sources. Certain scholars can skillfully employ aspects of literary and critical theory as heuristic tools; Luz, however, appears ill-at-ease in attempts to do so.
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This incoherence extends further to Luz’s interest in Gadamer and the history of interpretation. These essays display a fundamental if tacit commitment to classical liberal Protestant and Enlightenment historiography and theological values, and, as a result, Luz functions with a fundamental meant/means framework. He thus cannot follow Gadamer’s insights or those of the fathers very far. Exegesis remains fundamentally divorced from hermeneutics; there is no real “fusion of horizons.” The fathers may be hermeneutically useful, but Luz divorces this from their exegetical usefulness and, in any case, does not finally permit their hermeneutics to influence contemporary exegesis or hermeneutics. Finally, Luz’s own theological values govern the hermeneutical criteria of the “story of Jesus” and “love.” In practice, the appropriation of Gadamer enables Luz as historical interpreter to become theological arbiter, to judge the contemporary relevance of texts and interpretations on the basis of his Enlightenment-derived Protestant commitments, revealed in critical comments like “fossilized Christian traditionalism” (179), “Stories are not the basis of orthodoxies” (375), and “Jesus was delivered into the hands of theologians and teaching authorities that defined who he is” (375). For instance, Luz asserts not only that the papal interpretation of Matt 16:17–19 “can hardly be justified from the text itself ” (180), but also that the papal interpretation fails the story and love test—history demonstrates that “the papal interpretation of Matt. 16:18 has to a high degree been the interpretation and self-legitimation of church rulers” (181), ostensibly a bad thing. The obvious problem is that the criteria are famously pliable; other Christians could simply construe the Jesus story differently, concluding that an important part of the story is the founding of a church with Peter and his successors at its head, and understand the legitimization of the papacy and the exercise of papal authority as expressions, not failures, of love. In short, mainline Protestants will likely find Luz’s hermeneutics congenial, but they may be received with less enthusiasm by traditional Catholics and Protestants as well as evangelicals. Leroy Andrew Huizenga Wheaton College, Wheaton, IL 60187 My Name is ‘Legion’: Palestinian Judaic Traditions in Mark 5:1–20 and Other Gospel Texts, by Roger David Aus. Studies in Judaism; Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2003. Pp. 337. $45.50 (paper). ISBN 076182267X. Matthew 1–2 and the Virginal Conception in Light of Palestinian and Hellenistic Judaic Traditions on the Birth of Israel’s First Redeemer Moses, by Roger David Aus. Studies in Judaism; Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2004. Pp. 99. $23.00 (paper). ISBN 0761830383. Imagery of Triumph and Rebellion in 2 Corinthians 2:14–17 and Elsewhere in the Epistle: An Example of the Combination of Greco-Roman and Judaic Traditions in the Apostle Paul, by Roger David Aus. Studies in Judaism; Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2005. Pp. x+94. $21.95 (paper). ISBN 0761833218. Roger Aus is pastor emeritus of Luthergemeinde in Berlin-Reinickendorf, Germany, and is the author of numerous books on the haggadic background of gospel traditions
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(some published by Scholars Press but still in print through University Press of America). In my opinion, he has never been given the full credit he deserves for his scholarly work. Aus’s research represents the most detailed and knowledgeable work currently available in what should be an important area of the study of Christian origins, yet this work is often criminally neglected in some literary and historical approaches to the Gospels. This is unusual given the massive amount of attention the Semitic background of the Gospels has received in the past thirty or so years, along with the weighing of historical reliability that continues to dominate Gospel scholarship. The lack of a more widespread dissemination of Aus’s work may be due to the fact that his high degree of expertise in rabbinic Judaism is not something most NT scholars can honestly claim to share. Previous generations of scholars were (rightly) rebuked for getting their knowledge of Judaism from secondary literature, and I suspect that there has not been such a dramatic change despite all the rhetoric of acknowledging the Jewish nature of much of Christian origins. Naturally, there are criticisms that can be leveled at Aus’s work. Aus is prepared, though not without qualification (e.g., some very careful linguistic paralleling), to use late rabbinic texts. Individually this can be a problem, though it has to be said that Aus’s arguments tend not to rely on specific instances but rather collective weight. A more significant criticism is that there is a tendency in Aus’s publications to see secondary haggadic practice behind every Gospel tree and this is problematic in instances where a good case for historicity can be made (see Aus’s treatment of Mark 6.1–6 in Samuel, Saul and Jesus [Atlanta: Scholars Press/University Press of America, 1994]). Conversely, Aus is particularly illuminating when it comes to passages that have little basis in history or are obviously ahistorical literary devices (e.g., parables). Thus, in books under review here, Aus’s approach functions particularly well for dealing with the Matthean infancy story, a Pauline passage, and the Gerasene demoniac, not to mention several related bonus passages. In My Name is “Legion” Aus provides masses of detail on the Semitic background of Mark 5:1–20. He looks at the linguistic background of insanity and how the interpretation of Psalm 91 influenced the Markan passage, alongside the connotations of uncleanness associated with the term “legion.” Aus then shows how traditions relating to the interpretation of Samson (along with supplementary traditions) are a key influence on the passage as a whole. Aus additionally offers reasons for an original Semitic (probably Aramaic) underlying tradition. The purpose of the story is to show Jesus’ great power over many demons (even stronger than Samson and the demoniac). Furthermore, the story is designed to ridicule idolaters and the unclean but then also to provide a particular Christian spin by stressing the beginning of the Christian mission in the Decapolis. Aus also provides a creative and plausible solution to an old geographical problem: the land of the Gerasenes in relation to the Sea of Galilee and the unusually long distance the possessed pigs traveled. Following a variety of commentators in choosing Kursi as the probable location of the exorcism, he then suggests that the different pronunciations of yy)srwk, along with interchanges between k and g, could point to the Aramaic area of yy)srwg underlying Mark 5:1 (73–80). My Name is “Legion” also offers a variety of other interpretations of Gospel texts in haggadic contexts, including catchword connotations and Day of Atonement imagery in
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Luke 4:16–30; Judas “Iscariot” and Ahithophel; Luke 19:41–44 and David’s weeping over the destruction of Jerusalem; Abraham’s prophetic vision of the Messiah and John 8:56– 58; the Messiah as a vulture in Matt 24:28/Luke 17:37b; and the rejection of the mother bird Messiah in Luke 13:34b/Matt 23:37b. In Matthew 1–2 and the Virginal Conception, Aus follows the widely held view that the Matthean infancy story is based on Mosaic motifs, but he adds several new pieces of evidence, largely from rabbinic literature. He argues that the story is based on a specifically Palestinian Judaic haggadic version of Moses’s birth and infancy before being supplemented by Hellenistic Jewish concerns related to heroic Israelite women as born-again virgins. One aspect of Aus’s overall aim is to show that the Matthean story is part of a wider developing Son of God christology, a title Matthew wishes to prove was present at Jesus’s birth. Aus does all of this by paralleling the haggadic traditions with the flight to, and return from, Egypt; the astrologers’ announcement; searching for the newborn child; the child’s age; Mary/Miriam and the holy spirit; Jesus as savior; and the marriage of Mary and Joseph. There are further discussions as well, including the significance of the deification of Augustus and a particularly devastating critique of the naïve and misguided scholarly view that the infancy narrative reflects historical facts. In Imagery of Triumph and Rebellion, Aus leaves behind the gospel tradition of much of his work to look at 2 Cor 2:14–17. Aus also combines Greco-Roman material with Jewish haggadic material. Aus’s overall argument provides another useful contribution to the recent scholarly developments of placing Paul “beyond the Judaic-Hellenistic divide.” Through the catchword “Macedonia,” Paul recalled Paulus’s victory over the Macedonians in 168 B.C.E. and the dramatic triumphal procession that followed. Aus also offers further examples of triumphal processions in the Greco-Roman world as supplementary evidence. This is combined with more Jewish evidence such as the language of God as the Lord of hosts who is at the head of the Christianized, “spiritualized,” and, to some extent, pacified triumphal procession of triumphant missionary “soldiers.” Aus also analyzes the “religious” backgrounds (e.g., the offerings given to the divine at the end of the processions with their use of incense and wine as a part of thanksgivings). This, Aus argues, explains the combination of triumph and thanking God in 2 Cor 2:14, along with the language of 2:14–16 as a whole. This also explains the “Macedonian” literary context, and so there is no abrupt shift from 2:13 to 2:14. For Aus, Paul is also reversing standard Roman ideology through the Christianization of the traditions. Aus shows similar uses of warfare imagery elsewhere in Paul’s letters (e.g., 2 Cor 6:7; 10:3–4; Phil 2:25; Phlm 2), suggesting that this may even have influenced Paul’s ministry (e.g., the Jerusalem collection, boasting, missionary fields, family background). Further, Aus suggests that rebellion against Paul’s apostolic authority also underlies the imagery in 2 Cor 2:14–17. As this was effectively perceived as rebellion against the Lord, Paul could recall the revolt of Korah (Numbers 16; cf. 1 Cor 10:10) and the reaction of Aaron. Paul could then develop the language of incense, alongside the strange use of “those who are being saved, “those who are perishing,” and “being sufficient.” In this context Paul and his fellow missionaries are like Aaron, standing between life and death. Which option is chosen depends on the response of Paul’s audience. There are inevitably some quibbles with specifics. Again the use of some late rabbinic
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sources in particular might be mentioned, though, Aus’s linguistic paralleling makes a stronger case than might be expected. To give a specific exegetical quibble, Aus needs to give some more detailed evidence for the Gerasene demoniac as a Gentile proclaiming to Gentiles: I am not so sure (in a point I owe to Daniel Cohen) there is enough literary, historical, or demographical evidence to back up such suggestions. One thing sometimes lacking in Aus’s work overall is a detailed examination of how the haggadic traditions functioned, changed, and developed in specific historical and social circumstances. Of course, this is not always possible to do without being overly speculative, but this problem comes through in the ways in which Aus views the NT texts, with the obvious exception of his reading of 2 Cor 2:14–17 wherein the sociohistorical contextualization is one of the book’s many strengths. Given the Semitic background of “legion” and its connections with imperial armies, more discussion on how the demoniac story functioned in early Christian interactions with Rome would be worth pursuing further. There is, in fact, great potential for someone to bring Aus’s work together with more detailed social history. But Aus makes a generally persuasive argument in most instances. As ever with Aus, there are always plenty of new things for the reader to learn, especially with his typically impressive array of rabbinic interpretations. A good example of this is his handling of the virgin birth material, where many will recognize fascinating and knowledge-advancing discussions even on such a well-worn passage, such as the application of Jer 31:15 in various contexts related to the Matthean narrative (25–29) and the interpretation of various great Israelite women being miraculously restored to a state of virginity, coupled with divine intervention in conception (52–70). Ultimately, there are very few scholars who can match Aus’s proficiency in both rabbinic sources and the NT texts, coupled with a genuinely critical attitude. No doubt readers will find specific problems and faults in this or that detail, and the late dating of some of the rabbinic material is always going to be a tricky problem for anyone to resolve, though that does not mean that those as qualified as Aus should not try. But ignoring Aus’s learned work on the haggadic background of the NT will mean losing out on an encyclopaedic knowledge of rabbinic parallels, much of it unavailable in commentaries, not to mention such knowledge being creatively and painstakingly applied to early Christian texts. In the light of Aus’s work it should now be undeniable that haggadic traditions were deeply embedded in the cultural world of the first followers of Jesus and, on analogy with nonChristian ancient literature, it should always have been undeniable that the first followers of Jesus invented stories about their figurehead. Is it really worth the risk for historically and literary minded scholars to ignore Aus’s profound expertise in such areas any longer? James G. Crossley University of Sheffield, Sheffield S10 2TN UK Die antike Historiographie und die Anfänge der christlichen Geschichtsschreibung, edited by Eve-Marie Becker. BZNW 129. Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2005. Pp. xiii + 308. €88.00/$123.50 (hardcover). ISBN 9783110182088. This collection of essays represents a cross-disciplinary collaboration by German scholars from the fields of classics and biblical studies on the topic of ancient historiog-
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raphy. It is the product of the conference held January, 23–24, 2004, in Erlangen, Germany, on the theme of the beginnings of Christian historiography. The introductory essay by Eve-Marie Becker, entitled “Historiographieforschung und Evangelienforschung: Zur Einführung in die Thematik,” states the volume’s central question, sketches its background, and outlines a strategy to address it. Scrutinizing origin quests in general, the present investigation is framed by Becker as an attempt to understand ancient historiography’s “structural hermeneutic”—a way forward from binary approaches such as history versus textual legacy (3), thought versus production (4), event versus narration (5), speech versus writing (5), myth versus history (6), and past and present (7). As a means of organizing the material presented in the papers, Becker divides historiographical approaches to the canonical Gospels into five parts: (1) early research on the historical Jesus (9–10); (2) the question of genre designation from the work of Franz Overbeck (1882) and F. Leo (1901) to the latest assessments of this question (10–14); (3) the debate about myth versus history (14–15); (4) concerns represented in modern research on historiography; and, (5) the influence of contemporary history on the writings of the evangelists. Although each essay cannot be treated fully here, highlights follow, emphasizing the contributions by Becker and Schröter that address the volume’s topic most directly. The first two pieces are theoretical in nature, offering general perspectives on ancient historiography. As an apt way to begin, Martin Mulsow’s essay, “Zur Geschichte der Anfangsgeschichten,” petitions for greater clarity with regard to the volume’s foundational question. Mulsow states: “Der Anfang der Geschichte der Frage nach den Anfängen der Geschichtsschreibung liegt sicherlich weit zurück” (19). Beginnings, according to Mulsow, lie in the distant past if we seek, for example, the first in a long list of historians or the inventor of the discipline itself. Beginnings are less distant, however, if apprehended in the modern sense of the formation of the concept of history or historical awareness (19). Hans-Joachim Gehrke’s essay, “Die Bedeutung der (antiken) Historiographie für die Entwicklung des Geschichtsbewußtseins,” takes up foundational questions for pursuing the meaning of ancient history for the construction of historical consciousness, asking how, for example, scientific classifications such as truth versus legend or history versus myth might apply. Canvassing theories regarding the origins of historiography in ancient epic and related genres, Gehrke focuses on the impact of social history on historical consciousness. Gehrke’s conclusion lists what he views as differences between Greek and early Christian historiography, such as that Greek historiography relies less on canon than Christian literature and that in Greek historiography the distance between past and present and present and future is negligible (50–51). In the end, Gehrke opts against comparative approaches in favor of viewing texts on a case-by-case basis. He concludes: “Und wir? Ich denke, wir können das mit einem lachenden und einem weinenden Auge sehen. Jedenfalls können wir uns darüber wundern and freuen, daß die uns erhaltenen Autoren womöglich nicht repräsentativ waren, sich aber zu einem Ethos der Wahrheitssuche im Sinne ihrer eigenen Tradition bekannten” (51). Markus Witte’s essay, “Von den Anfängen der Geschichtswerke im Alten Testament—Eine forschungsgeschichtliche Diskussion neuerer Gesamtentwürfe,” takes up the question of the beginnings of historiography in the Hebrew Scriptures, tracing them chronologically through the events of Israel’s history. Burkhard Meissner’s “Anfänge und
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frühe Entwicklungen der griechischen Historiographie” revisits some of the ideas of Gehrke’s essay but uses a less theoretical approach, tracing the origins of Greek historiography in Hekataios’s forerunner, Anaximander, through Hecateus of Miletus, Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon and others. (This essay contains an extensive bibliography on these authors [107–9, n. 78]). Andreas Mehl’s contribution, “Geschichtsschreibung in und über Rom,” accomplishes parallel work to Meissner’s for early Roman historiography, treating mainly Quintus Fabius Pictor (117–23) and Marcus Porcius Cato (123–28), closing with a discussion of two important questions: (1) How and to what extent was Roman history world- and universal-history? (2) To what extent was Roman history oriented to a purpose? Franz Römer’s “Biographisches in der Geschichtsschreibung der frühen römischen Kaiserzeit” treats the relationship between biography and historiography in the early Roman Empire, a question frequently considered of importance for understanding the generic strategy of the four Gospels. Proceeding roughly chronologically, Oda Wischmeyer’s “Orte der Geschichte und der Geschichtsschreibung in der frühjüdischen Literatur,” Beate Ego’s “Vergangenheit im Horizont eschatologischer Hoffnung: Die Tiervision (1 Hen 85–90) als Beispiel apokalyptischer Geschichtskonzeption,” and Hermann Lichtenberger’s “Geschichtsschreibung und Geschichtserzählung im 1. und 2. Makkabäerbuch” all address historiography in terms of different Jewish texts. Wischmeyer references not only authors such as Philo and Josephus, but also Demetrius, Eupolemus, Artapanus, and Pseudo-Eupolemus. Ego takes up the very promising topic of history in terms of the eschatological horizon of hope in 1 Enoch 85–90. Finally, on the basis of eight observations, a common element of which is theology (e.g., miracle, martyrdom, atonement [211]), Lichtenberger problematizes the thesis that 1 and 2 Maccabees represent historiography: “Dies alles zusammengenommen weckt erhebliche Zweifel, ob hier tatsächlich Geschichtsschreibung vorliegt” (211). He highlights in particular a difficulty with miraculous events that he supports with a citation by Aristotle on tragedy (i.e., Poet. 15.54b; 211 n. 30). Clearly the operative definition of historiography in this article is narrow. An excursus entitled “Jason von Kyrene und der Epitomator” entertains specific questions concerning the authorship of 2 Maccabees (208–11). Eve-Marie Becker’s “Der jüdisch-römische Krieg (66–70 n. Chr.) und das MarkusEvangelium: Zu den ‘Anfängen’ frühchristlicher Historiographie” and Jens Schröter’s “Lukas als Historiograph: Das lukanische Doppelwerk und die Entdeckung der christlichen Heilsgeschichte” are the only two essays in the volume that address the book’s central question of the beginnings of early Christian historiography directly and substantially. On the basis of a post-destruction date for the Gospel of Mark, Becker argues that the extant Gospel of Mark represents the beginning of early Christian historiography. It is, according to Becker, the immediate result of the destruction of the temple, which, like other historical events of such magnitude (she makes an argument for this scale), had institutional, cultic-ritualistic, theological, and literary effects (225). On the literary effect of the Jewish war with Rome, Becker cites Fergus Millar that this war “gave rise to by far the most important historical works written in the first century AD, the Jewish War, Antiquities and Autobiography” (The Roman Near East: 31 BC—AD 337 [Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press, 1993], 234). Becker borrows Millar’s idea for early Christianity, arguing that, likewise, the Jewish war with Rome—specifically the subsequent
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decoupling of Judaism and earliest Christianity and the loss of authority on the part of the earliest Christian witnesses—gave rise to the earliest Christian historical work, the Gospel of Mark (236). A minor criticism is Becker’s contrast, “Markus arbeitet nur nicht historiographisch, sondern durch die Komposition und Redaktion seiner Quellen deutet und bewältigt er die Geschichte seit Jesu Tod” (235)—which makes little sense in terms of ancient historiographical practice. Schröter’s esssay begins by presenting the communis opinio of Luke-Acts as a unified two-volume work (237). He notes the difficulty (past and present) of designating one genre (e.g., historiography or biography) for both parts, arguing that the author of LukeActs adopts (and adapts) the Markan Jesus narratives as a single part of a more encompassing historical work. Schröter stresses the value of Luke-Acts as “story” over “discourse” (244), often opting for “Geschichtsdarstellung” as a descriptive term (e.g., 261). He makes the case that both parts of the double-work have the other in view, claiming that is precisely how Luke-Acts is historiography. That said, Schröter subscribes to no sharp boundary between historiography and other genres, such as poetry and fable. He concludes the essay with his belief that Luke-Acts—events in the lives of early Christians—represents “theological historiography” from an “israelitisch-jüdischer Perspektive” comparable to 2 Maccabees and Josephus (261). All too common in German New Testament scholarship today, the impact of Hellenistic and early-Roman-period culture is largely overlooked. The essays conclude with two short pieces on post-NT historiography. Wolfgang Wischmeyer’s “Wahrnehmungen von Geschichte in der christlichen Literatur zwischen Lukas und Eusebius: Die chronographische Form der Bischofslisten” contains interesting observations on the relationship between, and understandings of, time and history. Jörg Ulrich’s “Eusebius als Kirchengeschichtsschreiber” takes Eusebius’s church history as only one aspect of his greater apologetic enterprise, involving logos theology and its role in cosmic history (277). This volume is to be recommended to scholars pursuing the current conversation about ancient historiography and the NT. It provides excellent scope and coherence and reflects up-to-date research. If there is any hesitation, it has to do with synthesis: whether the relationship between the volume’s central question about the beginnings of Christian historiography is ever really negotiated in terms of the rich background of ancient historiography provided. That said, the book remains an important new tool for future investigations of the topic. Clare K. Rothschild Lewis University, Chicago, IL 60615
The Provenance of the Pseudepigrapha: Jewish, Christian, or Other? by James R. Davila. JSJSup 105. Leiden: Brill, 2006. Pp. vi + 278. $142.00 (hardcover). ISBN 9004137521. This innovative work by James Davila focuses on the tricky problem of the religious origins of “Old Testament pseudepigrapha.” It provides scholars and students of pseudepigraphic literature not only with a new, well-thought-out methodology in order to
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approach these texts but also important case studies. However, the interest of this book exceeds the scope of the pseudepigraphic corpus. Indeed, it offers important insight into the difficult (and occasionally painful) question of how to categorize late antique religious forms of identity and community. The issue of the provenance has been addressed in the past, for example by Marinus De Jonge and Robert Kraft. Elaborating on his predecessors’ works, Davila questions two widespread assumptions: (1) that a lack of explicitly Christian features (e.g., references to Christ) in an OT pseudepigraphon indicates that it is Jewish; and (2) that Christian features that can be removed from an OT pseudepigraphon without damage to the sense should lead us to consider them Christian interpolations in a Jewish work. According to Davila, who follows Kraft’s line of argument, the study of the origin of these pseudepigraphic works should begin with the earliest physical evidence for these works, namely, the earliest manuscripts and quotations (as Davila rightfully adds). Elaborating on these insights, in the first part of the book Davila offers a carefully thought out methodology aiming to identify the possible religious origins of OT pseudepigrapha. This methodology is largely based on the recognition of the presence of what he labels “signature features” as well as a rejection of the lack of such signature features as a relevant criterion of identification. In the second part, he implements this methodology to examine a number of these pseudepigrapha. Some readers will perhaps be tempted to understand Davila’s book as an attempt to identify as Christian a certain amount of pseudepigrapha that are usually considered Jewish. Indeed, according to Davila, a pseudepigraphon should be studied primarily in the light of the earliest context in which it is found, and since the earliest evidence in most cases is found in Christian manuscripts, several of these pseudepigrapha, according to Davila, prove to be Christian. As he points out in a footnote, his working hypothesis may appear to conceal “a form of Christian hegemony and [a] Christian expropriation of Jewish traditions” (6 n. 10, quoting Ross Kraemer’s When Aseneth Met Joseph [New York: Oxford University Press, 1998]). Yet Davila’s intellectual rigor should allay anyone’s suspicions of a hidden agenda. First of all, he does not suggest taking the earliest Christian evidence for these pseudepigrapha as a proof of their Christian origins but rather as the starting point from which to work backwards. Second, by laying out a new methodology in order to identify the religious origins of a pseudepigraphon, he in fact contributes to a healthy reassessment of our textual evidence for early Judaism—a central assumption behind his work is that “for the purpose of reconstructing ancient Judaism a false negative is less harmful than a false positive” (7). Needless to say, the use of categories such as “Jewish” and “Christian” in a late antique context poses many problems that are addressed in ch. 1. This chapter is probably the most important one from a methodological point of view. It consists of a discussion of the different religious categories of late antiquity that should be of interest not only to the students of pseudepigraphic literature but also to historians of religion. The questions raised in this chapter focus on a number of issues: What kind of reality do “Judaism” and “Christianity” cover during this period, given the multiplicity in their forms? How can we tell them apart? What are we to do with groups that are close to but not part and parcel of Judaism or Christianity (e.g., sympathizers and God-fearers)? In all cases, Davila is
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careful to insist on the existence of a continuum between “Judaism,” “Christianity,” and “polytheism.” As far as Judaism is concerned, Davila adopts Jonathan Smith’s “polythetic” classification: instead of using an essentialist definition of Judaism, he provides a certain number of criteria from which no single one need be present in every form of Judaism (20). Another section (23) is devoted to “Jews and non-Christian Gentiles.” Admitting that his choice of categories is “to some degree arbitrary,” Davila works with four groups: “proselytes,” “God-fearers,” “sympathizers,” and “syncretistic Jews.” Proselytes as potential authors of OT pseudepigrapha are rightfully regarded by him as Jewish, since the difference is undetectable; God-fearers are taken as potential authors of OT pseudepigrapha; sympathizers can include Hypsistarians, the author of the Poimandres, and authors of Greek magical papyri; and, finally, syncretistic Jews may be represented, albeit with some caution, by Artapanos. This last category seems to me to be incorrect and irrelevant to Davila’s purpose. The idea of a continuum between Jews and polytheists also makes it useless. In my view, just as a Jewish proselyte should be viewed as a Jewish author, a syncretistic Jew should be seen as a Jewish author. As for Jewish-Christians, Davila adopts E. Brown’s suggestion that we must think in terms of a continuum between (Mosaic law) observant and nonobservant Christians rather than between Jewish and Gentile Christianity. Indeed, in this case, too, the various forms of Jewish Christianity and judaizing Gentile Christianity make it epistemologically impossible to identify a work as “Jewish-Christian.” In addition, Davila discusses possible Samaritan and Galilean authorship (based on Richard Horsley’s views of the survival of Israelite culture in Galilean culture of the Hasmonean period, which Davila rejects). Choosing the “continuum” as a model in order to understand the various religious groups that could have authored OT pseudepigrapha, Davila emphasizes the complexity of the religious phenomenon of this period. This complexity makes it highly difficult (impossible?) to identify the origin of a pseudepigraphon. We are thus left with the question of whether it is epistemologically and methodologically relevant to even try to determine the religious provenance of this literature. It seems that Davila’s main problem is that the “real,” “historical” religious identity of the author is, in many cases, not adequately reflected in the text she or he has written. Only works by “boundary-maintaining” authors (as Davila puts it) may be identified. Yet even in this case this endeavor may prove to be difficult. For example, Davila shows in ch. 2 how a “boundary-maintaining” Christian author such as Augustine could produce a text that may look authentically Jewish. He shows that undeniably Christian authors, such as Ephrem, dealing with OT topics and characters felt no need to insert Christian signature features into their productions. Although Davila uses this demonstration as an argument to question the identification of a number of pseudepigrapha as Jewish, I think it points even more to the difficulty of attempting to solve the question of the provenance. Regarding this question, it seems to me that Davila’s book faces two main difficulties, and I am not sure they can be solved. First of all, there is a discrepancy between the “historical” religious continuum analyzed by Davila and the manner in which the beliefs and practice of the different communities and individuals included in this continuum are reflected in their literary production. In addition, a literary production reflects not only
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the supposed religious identity of its author but also the sources used, which may not belong precisely to the same religious sphere (cf., e.g., the case of the Christian authors who used Jewish sources). Second, there is a contradiction between Davila’s use of the model of the continuum in order to describe the religious world of late antiquity and the use of fixed religious categories (e.g., Jewish, Christian, sympathizer, Gentile judaizing Christian, etc.) required by his endeavor to identify the religious origin of the OT pseudepigrapha. Indeed, the concept of a continuum implies that there are many nuances in the late antique religious experience and that they hardly let themselves be pigeonholed. In contrast, the process of provenance identification necessitates clear categories. These problems occasionally appear in the practical cases exposed in the second part of the book (see below). In the second part of the book Davila turns to a number of examples of pseudepigrapha in which he applies his methodology. First he confirms the Jewishness of several writings that are usually accepted as Jewish, such as the Letter of Aristeas, and the Philonic and Josephan corpus. This theoretical exercise serves to legitimize the methodological principles laid out in the previous chapters. In addition to these texts, the Jewish provenance of other writings is on some occasions asserted and on others denied. For instance, Davila raises doubts about the Jewish origin of sections from the Sibylline Oracles 3 and 5 and from the Story of Sozimus and of the full text of Pseudo-Phocylides, Testament of Job, Testament of Abraham, and Wisdom of Solomon. I do find some discrepancies between theory and practice when it comes to Davila’s analysis of various texts. Let us take the example of 2 Baruch. Davila argues, against Rivka Nir’s new study (The Destruction of Jerusalem and the Idea of Redemption in the Syriac Apocalypse of Baruch [Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2003]), that 2 Baruch should be considered Jewish because of the central importance it gives to the law and its “robust nationalist identity.” Davila also uses the argument of the lack of Christian signature features (128–30) to claim the Jewish origin of 2 Baruch. I find these arguments problematic because Davila’s reasoning contradicts his methodology. For instance, he argues that a lack of Christian signature features is not a valid argument to identify a text as Jewish. Moreover, it seems to me that by discussing this work in the framework of the clear-cut categories of Judaism versus Christianity, he contradicts his discussion of the religious continuum connecting Judaism, Christianity, and polytheism. This indicates, in my opinion, the difficulty of (1) avoiding the use of the argument e silentio, and (2) escaping arbitrary categories constructed in light of our contemporary knowledge of religious experience. Despite his discussion of the ancient religious continuum mentioned above, Davila seems, as it were, stuck in the everlasting debate of “Jewish” versus “Christian” origin. Nevertheless, it should be pointed out that Davila significantly enriches the discussion of the religious origins of the pseudepigrapha by attempting to think “outside” of these categories. Indeed, he offers one of the only serious methodological discussions of the possibility that some pseudepigrapha were authored by God-fearers or Gentiles, proselytes and sympathizers to Judaism. Although a lack of evidence makes it impossible to reach any definite conclusions in most cases, it is certainly worth taking his hypotheses into consideration.
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There are many other reasons Davila’s book deserves the attention of the scholarly community. Indeed, the methodology proposed in his book lays the groundwork for new research on the pseudepigrapha. Moreover, as Davila rightly puts it, “the approach in this book allows us to articulate more clearly what we know and do not know, and how we know what we know and why we do not know what we do not know” (233). However, the subject he tackles is a very complicated one because it is closely related to our (re)construction of religious categories. As I pointed out earlier, the discrepancy between the “historical” religious identity of an author (or community) and the manner in which this identity is reflected in pseudepigraphic texts should lead us to change the way we study this literature. It is very difficult to determine the origin of this literature, even if we start from the earliest material evidence, that is, in most cases, Christian manuscripts. A more secure approach may be to focus on the reception of pseudepigraphic literature in Christianity. Indeed, this is a fascinating story that stands on firmer ground. Sabrina Inowlocki L’Université Libre de Bruxelles, B-1050 Brussels, Belgium
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Pieter W. van der Horst Jews and Christians in Their Graeco-Roman Context Selected Essays on Early Judaism, Samaritanism, Hellenism, and Christianity
Karl-Heinrich Ostmeyer Kommunikation mit Gott und Christus Sprache und Theologie des Gebetes im Neuen Testament
2006. X, 352 pages (WUNT 196). ISBN 3-16-148851-2 cloth $125.00
2006. XVI, 466 pages (WUNT 197). ISBN 3-16-148969-1 cloth $125.00
Eve-Marie Becker Das Markus-Evangelium im Rahmen antiker Historiographie
Prices vary according to exchange rates.
2006. XVII, 516 pages (WUNT 194). ISBN 3-16-148913-6 cloth $163.00
Mohr Siebeck Tübingen
[email protected] www.mohr.de
JESUS – History & Meaning Jesus & Utopia Looking for the Kingdom of God in the Roman World MARY ANN BEAVIS
Offering a dramatic new direction to old questions in the historical-Jesus quest, Mary Ann Beavis examines biblical contexts as well as ancient utopian thought and communities to define the road from Basileia to Ekklesia. 0-8006-3562-0 224 pp paperback $22.00
Paul on the Cross Reconstructing the Apostle’s Story of Redemption DAVID A. BRONDOS
Brondos maintains that Jesus’ death and its meaning form part of the larger story that culminates in the redemption of Israel and the world. It is this larger story and, in particular, what precedes and follows Jesus’ death on the cross, which makes Jesus’ death redemptive for Paul. 0-8006-3788-7 256 pp paperback $20.00
At bookstores or call 1-800-328-4648 fortresspress.com
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