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

TEXT IN CONTEXT

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

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

OXPORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

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OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

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

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

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

ix xi xv

3 35 63 86 116

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

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

141 171 200 223 253

289 323 348 376

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

403

Index of Biblical References Author Index General Index

455 466 475

428

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

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Abbreviations AASF AASOR AAT AB ABD AGAJU

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NICOT

New International Commentary on the Old Testament

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

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

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

xiii

xiv

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

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

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

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INTRODUCTION

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

INTRODUCTION

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

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PART I The Old Testament and the Reader

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1

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

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

4

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

THE R E A D E R AND THE TEXT

5

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

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

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R. P. CAR ROLL

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cf. Evans (1971), 21-36.

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

McConnell (1986), 35.

10

Cf. Handelman (1982).

" Cf, Fackenheim (1990).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

w 21

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

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

23

See Castelli (1995).

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

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

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

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

2?

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

2

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

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

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

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

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

Hassan (1987), 93-4.

3lS

Bauman (1992), 187-8.

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

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

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

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

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

See Prior (1997).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is Ricoeur's second naivete6*1 in which the text has restored to it 'its ability to project itself outside itself in the representation of a world that I could inhabit'65 and Grafton's sense of the 'continued power of texts . . . to inspire challenges to intellectual and political authority'.66 Such a subversive reading of literature is liable to upset many conventional applecarts and disturb traditional reading communities, especially in relation to the communities which have for so long cherished reading the Bible, so I recommend it here with trepidation.67 To anticipate a future of such read« Gadamer (1995), 268. « Schneidau (1976), 305. M *3 Aitieri (1990), 46. (1967), 351. 65 Ricoeur (1991), 18. 9 Tolbert (1983); (1990). 2) Hackett (1987). 21 2 (1989). - (1993). 23 See especially Trible (1978); Meyers (1988); Lanser (1988); Bal (1987a); and now Kimelman(1996)." 24 Fewell (1987); Milne (1992). 25 K (1991). (1993c). " (1983) (ed.). 28 2 x (1985) (ed.). » (1983) (ed.). (1990) (ed.).

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

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

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

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

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

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

« Bird (1989a), 79. '* Ibid., 107.

« Bird (1989c), 283.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Galambush (1992), 161.

- Lieberman (1950).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3!t

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

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

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

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

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

42

Tov (1992), 320-49.

« Ant. VI, 68-71.

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

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

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

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

It could not have escaped the tradents' attention that this unsustainable reading probably resulted, from a concatenation of scribal mistakes, possibly when transmitted in Palaeo-Hebrew: the construct HIIISD ~f2h, was divided into three words, with yod of TO1/ being read as waw and taw being doubled. Misread as 'alep, taw became the final letter of stft, and read as tea; it was taken as the first character of the next word. In the letter combination ~son sade was misread as yod,*1 and the resulting letter sequence TOP was vocalized TOR, 'forever'. The ensuing word rra was probably made up from the letter string rrs, jrnjs or rrrej. The transmission of incomprehensible readings can also be observed in 'established' translational versions. In Jer, 31: 8: nosi iis 03, '(I will gather them from the ends of the earth) among them blind and lame,' the letter string RDBTTOC3 in scriptio continua, before the differentiation between a Inal and a medial form of mem and with the substitution of dalet for resh, was wrongly divided into two words with the resulting absurd Greek rendition: & eoprfj