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Down with History, Up
with Reading: The Current State
of Biblical Studies[1]
..........
By Gary
A. Rendsburg, Cornell
University
The simplest way for me to illustrate the title of my talk "Down with
History, Up with Reading"
is to present the state of biblical studies then, meaning thirty years ago
when the McGill Jewish Studies Program was founded, and the state of the
field today. In a word, biblical studies has gone from consensus to crisis.
Thirty years ago there was general agreement in the field of biblical
studies, then dominated by the towering figure of W. F. Albright, but with a
host of other luminaries, now all deceased, in accord: Theodor Gaster, H. L.
Ginsberg, Harry Orlinsky, G. R. Driver, Roland de Vaux, Otto Eissfeldt,
Benjamin Mazar, Yigael Yadin, and others. Of that generation of giants, the
only one still alive today is my own teacher, Cyrus Gordon, still active,
though finally slowing down at the age of 91.
The consensus was formed around three general issues: a) the history of
ancient Israel,
b) the sources of the Torah, and c) the biblical text. First, and most
importantly, the history. The consensus believed that the Bible is a reliable
guide to the history of ancient Israel. Everything from the
Patriarchs to Ezra was real. So real in fact, that if something in the
archaeological record did not quite mesh with the biblical record, then the
former was accommodated to fit the latter (see below for the parade example
concerning the Conquest and the book of Joshua). Some specifics:
The Patriarchs were real life people, a point which could be proved by the
striking parallels forthcoming from the Nuzi tablets, a collection of legal
texts from the 14th century Mesopotamian site of Nuzi, which include
socio-economic and legal parallels to the stories in Genesis. A childless man
could adopt a younger man as his son and heir, in the manner of Abraham and
Eliezer. It was the legal responsibility of a barren woman to supply her
husband with a maidservant with whom to have intercourse, thus to produce an
heir, in the manner of Sarah and Hagar. One brother could sell his birthright
to another brother, in the manner of Jacob and Esau. Men could enter into
herding contracts, in the manner of Jacob and Laban. And so on.
Joseph was real. A great amount of Egyptological evidence was put forward
to demonstrate that the customs reflected in Genesis 37-50 are an accurate
reflection of life in Egypt.Semites could achieve high levels in the
government of Egypt, including rising to the title of vizier. When elevated,
the individual was adorned with fine linen, gold jewelry about the neck, and
a signet ring for the finger. אברך was a real
Egyptian word meaning "Hail to you."[2] And so on.
The Slavery and the Exodus were real. Egyptian texts referring to the >
Apiru building Rameses and Pithom for Rameses II were understood as the
עברים, and note that specifically this word
occurs repeatedly in Exodus 1-2. The Merneptah Stele proved beyond doubt that
the Israelites were in the land
of Canaan by c. 1210
B.C.E., thus enabling scholars to fix the date of the Exodus to either late
in the reign of Rameses II or early in the reign of Merneptah. And so on.
The Conquest was real. Archaeological work at Bethel,
Hazor, Lachish,
and Tell Beit Mirsim, among others, revealed the destruction of a series of
Canaanite cities in the latter half of the 13th century B.C.E., clearly the
work of the Israelites. No matter that the first two cities mentioned in the
conquest account in the book of Joshua, namely, Jericho and Ai, revealed no settlement
layer from this period. At Jericho there must have been a small settlement,
the consensus held, undetected by the archaeologists, and most likely
undetectable, still using earlier 15th century walls, thus explaining why
tremors caused by encircling Israelites marching on foot and blasting the shofarot
caused the walls to collapse. Ai existed in the early Bronze Age only, and
had been in ruins for a millennium at the time of Joshua. No problem;
Albright had an ingenious solution.[3] The battle described in the Bible
actually occurred at Bethel, which Albright himself had excavated and which
showed a clear violent destruction in the late 13th century. Over the course
of time, ancient Israelite tradents had transferred the story from Bethel to Ai, given the
inviting name of the latter, actually העי, literally
"the ruin," equivalent to its Arabic name et-Tell. But the location
of the actual historical event had not been totally forgotten, for within the
Ai account in Joshua 8:17 we read, ולא
נשאר איש בעי
ובית אל אשר
לא יצאו אחרי
ישראל
ויעזבו את
העיר פתוחה
וירדפו אחרי
ישראל "Not a man was left in Ai or Bethel
who did not go out after Israel; they left the city open, and they pursued
Israel." That is to say, Bethel
is directly involved in the story.
It goes without saying that all later biblical material was seen as
reflecting real history as well. David and Solomon ruled over a large and
powerful empire; the star witness thereto was the identical gate system at
Hazor, Megiddo, and Gezer, in accord with 1 Kings 9:15, as
studied by Yadin in particular. The kingdoms of Israel and Judah are well
attested from Assyrian and Babylonian sources, and the Mesha Stele from
neighboring Moab coordinated well with events related in 2 Kings 3. And
finally, even if the Persian period documentation is relatively silent
vis-à-vis the Jews of the empire, enough evidence is present to once more
confirm the biblical material.
Thus the first part of the consensus, and indeed it was
"canonized" in the standard histories of Israel authored by John
Bright,[4]
himself a student of Albright, and Martin Noth,[5] even though the latter
parted company on some crucial issues such as the Conquest.
The second part of the consensus dealt with the development of the
biblical books, especially the books of the Torah. As is well known, biblical
scholarship in the 20th century saw the well nigh universal acceptance of the
Documentary Hypothesis that had been fashioned mainly by German scholars in
the 19th century. An occasional serious protestation by Umberto Cassuto had
no major effect on the common opinion.[6] The theory proposes that the
Torah is comprised of four major documents, at one time existing
independently of one another, but brought together by an exilic or
post-exilic redactor to produce the final product of Genesis through
Deuteronomy. The standard approach holds that the four documents were the
Yahwist source from the 10th century, the Elohist source from the 9th century,
the book of Deuteronomy from the 7th century, and the Priestly source from
the 5th century, or to use their abbreviations, J, E, D, and P. An
alternative approach, associated mainly with the name of Yehezkel Kaufmann
reversed the order of the last two sources to create the sequence J, E, P,
and D, with the Priestly source earlier than Deuteronomy, and with the entire
Torah the product of pre-exilic times.[7] The theory neatly explains
the innumerable difficulties and duplicates that appear in the Torah:
they are the result of the compilation of the diverse sources by a
redactional process that did not eliminate such problems. If Genesis 37
contradicts itself by mentioning three separate ethnic groups involved in the
transporting of Joseph to Egypt—Ishmaelites, Midianites, and Medanites—then
clearly there must be different sources. Assuming that Midianites and
Medanites are variants of one another, scholars assume two sources, one
attributed to the Yahwist and one attributed to the Elohist, each with its
own tradition. The redactor did not attempt to dovetail the two, but rather
he let the divergent data stand as he found them in his sources.
And thirdly, the text of the Bible was viewed as the product of
generations of scribal activity, a process which resulted in the introduction
of numerous errors in the text. If something did not look quite right, the
typical reaction was simply to emend the text to make it read as it should in
the eyes of scholar X, Y, or Z. If support could be found in the Septuagint,
as often it could, even better. But even without versional support, scholars
felt free to handle the biblical text in any way they saw fit.
So, notwithstanding the fact that the sources themselves date from
centuries later than the events that they describe, and notwithstanding the
fact that the text often is in error, the Bible contains reliable historical
information that had been passed down accurately from the time of Israel’s
proto-history to the time of the texts’ achieving their final written form.
If there are contradictions, that is a result of the variant traditions
having accrued over time; such minor problems have no effect on the larger
picture, for the basic storyline is trustworthy.
Thus, to continue our above example, the vacillation between Ishmaelites
and Midianites is insignificant in the long run, for both groups are denizens
of the desert fringe and it is easy to see how the two could have been
confused (see Judg 8:24 for the classic source relevant to this problem).
What is important is that both J and E know of Joseph in Egypt—and indeed of all Israel in Egypt—and that picture is
historically accurate.
Thus far the consensus.[8] Now the crisis. If all is so clear, what
happened? Obviously, the pendulum of intellectual trends swings
continually. The positive historicism of Albright and the others gave way,
not only in biblical studies, but in the humanities in general, to the
relativism, skepticism, and indeed nihilism which now dominates. Chinks in
the Albrightian armor already were visible thirty years ago, and I alluded to
one of them earlier, namely Martin Noth’s demurral concerning the
Conquest. But the chinks became cracks and the cracks developed into
fullscale breaks.
The Conquest affords us the best example to see the process at work.
Already in the 1920’s, Noth’s teacher, the great Albrecht Alt, had challenged
the idea of an Israelite military conquest of the land of Canaan.[9]
There simply was no archaeological evidence to confirm the scenario depicted
in the book of Joshua. The passage of time had done nothing to
change Alt’s view, nor that of his disciples, Noth and others. The
clever solutions to the problems of Jericho
and Ai that I presented earlier were simply that: clever solutions,
indeed too clever to be correct. If there was no archaeological evidence at
these sites to confirm the portrayal in the book of Joshua, then the latter
could not be historically accurate. Joshua must be nothing more than the
literary creation of a later Israelite author desirous of presenting to his
audience a piece of propagandistic material, for some political or religious
end that could be debated among scholars. So if there was no conquest, then
how did the Israelites emerge in the land of Canaan?
Alt proposed an alternative approach, called the peaceful infiltration or
peaceful settlement model. The main tradition of the Bible is accurate,
the Israelites entered the land from the outside, from the desert fringe
region, but there was no military conquest. Instead, one must speak of
Israelites entering and peacefully settling open territory. As I said, the
approach of Alt and Noth was but a chink in the Albrightian armor, but it set
the stage for more drastic departures.
A third model developed, much more radical in its approach. The
archaeological evidence now was interpreted to demonstrate that the
Israelites did not originate outside the land, but were in origin Canaanites
who had shifted gears. Israelite pottery was indistinguishable from
Canaanite pottery; Israelite architecture was indistinguishable from
Canaanite architecture; Israelite water systems were indistinguishable from
Canaanite water systems; and so on. All of this meant that the Israelites
were Canaanites, most likely former Canaanite rural peasants who had thrown
off the yoke of their Canaanite urban overlords. Class struggle, not
religious revolution, is what gave rise to Israel. The arm of Marxism had
spread to biblical studies.
As such, the Israelites had never been to Egypt
(well, perhaps a small number of them had, but they were insignificant in the
ethnic composition of the new people of Israel). The Bible’s foundational
story about the Israelites as slaves in Egypt
is not a reflection of any historical reality, but rather a reflection of the
fact that Israel had been
slaves in the land of Canaan, slaves to Canaanite urban centers, which in
turn were puppets of the Egyptian empire during the New
Kingdom 18th and 19th Dynasties. That is to say, the Israelites
were not slaves in Egypt,
but to Egypt.
The fact that the Israelites originate as Canaanites explains why there is
so much polytheism present in the Bible’s description of the people of Israel.
Israel was not a monotheism or a monolatry fighting polytheistic tendencies
among its people under the influence of their Canaanite neighbors, but rather
just another group of Canaanite polytheists, albeit one with a small but
vocal and in the end successful group of radical thinkers conceiving of the
idea of one god.
Stretching further back in the Bible, if there was no Conquest, and there
was no Exodus, and there was no Slavery, then clearly there was no
Patriarchal Period either. Indeed, further investigation of the Genesis
stories claimed that there are closer parallels to the Abraham and Jacob
episodes in 1st Millennium Neo-Babylonian legal texts than in the 2nd
Millennium Nuzi documents.[10] Accordingly, the Genesis stories are the
inventions of Jews during the Babylonian exile when such customs were the way
of life. And why have patriarchal stories at all? Why have Abraham
originating in Mesopotamia and emigrating to Canaan?
Because this was part of early Zionist propaganda to get Jews to leave their
homes in comfortable Babylon
to make the long journey to begin a new and arduous life in the land of their
forefathers. It is clear from Second Isaiah and Ezra and Nehemiah, and
from Babylonian textual remains—I refer here to the Murashu documents which
describe affluent Jewish businessmen in Mesopotamia during this period—that
not all Jews wanted to return to Israel. Thus was Abraham invented. He had
left his home in Ur for the brave new world of
Canaan, and so should you.
But wait, the reference to Ur
in Gen 11:28-32 is part of the Yahwist source, supposedly from the 10th
century. Not any more. The new model of Israel’s history calls for a
reevaluation of the Documentary Hypothesis. There still may be a J
source, but it no longer is the product of the 10th century, within striking
distance of purported Israelite memory of real live patriarchs. Instead, it
is a document of the exilic period. If this is true of J, how much more
so for the whole Torah.[11]
I am not done. This approach is only mildly radical. For the approach that
I have just outlined at least recognizes that the Israelites, even if they
originated as Canaanites, at least existed before 586 B.C.E. First they
were organized as tribes, but eventually changed their polity to that of a
monarchy. Under David and Solomon they achieved some success, then
receded in power to the minor kingdoms of Israel
and Judah.
The extreme radicals go so far as to deny the existence of Israel and/or Judah before 586. Certainly there
never was a David or a Solomon. If after two hundred years of
archaeological research, from Napoleon’s men discovering the Rosetta Stone in
1799 to the present day, there is not a single shred of evidence that David
or Solomon ever existed, then they too must be fictional inventions. The Jews
of the 6th and 5th centuries B.C.E. lived in world empires, under Babylonian
and Persian domination, with the former Assyrian empire still a recent
memory. In an effort to show that the Jews too once had power, thus was born
the United Kingdom of David and Solomon ruling over conquered peoples.
The full extent of this nihilism came to the fore in 1993. That
summer, an Aramaic inscription dated to the 9th century B.C.E. was found at
Tel Dan in the far north of the country, mentioning both
מלך ישראל "king of
Israel" and ביתדוד "house of
David."[12] The Aramean king who had erected this stela to commemorate
his victory over the northern part of Israel
and his direct rule over the city of Dan, knew
of the two kingdoms of Israel
and Judah,
referring to the latter in fact as the "house of David." Never at a
loss for creative explanations, these nihilists—once their claims of forgery
were shown to be totally without foundation—began to interpret the phrase in
every possible way but the obvious. Suggestions included "house of
the beloved," "house of the uncle," "house of the
kettle," "house of a god named Dod," anything but "house
of David." There could be no Judah, no reference to David, no
biblical history that could be confirmed by any archaeological discovery.[13]
In short, the paradigm has shifted from a maximalist stance to a
minimalist one. A few definitions of these terms. The maximalist holds that
since so much of the biblical record has been confirmed by archaeological
work and by other sources from the ancient Near East, for example, the
aforementioned Mesha Stele, that even when there is no corroborating
evidence, we can assume that the Bible reflects true history, unless it can
be proved otherwise. The minimalist approach is exactly the opposite.
Because so much of the biblical record is contradicted by archaeological work
and by other sources from the ancient Near East, for example, the lack of any
conquest at Jericho
and Ai, we must assume that the Bible is literary fiction, unless it can be
proved otherwise.
How could we possibly have come to this present state in the field of
biblical studies? And who are these people, these minimalists? As I stated
earlier, the pendulum of intellectual ideologies is constantly shifting, and
the last thirty years have seen the decline of positive historicism and the
rise of relativism and skepticism. In my estimation, what began as a healthy
and constructive enterprise, questioning the teachings of our teachers,
exploring new methods, and in many cases demanding more explicit evidence
before jumping to conclusions, soon devolved into an unhealthy and deconstructive
project, resulting in a classic case of throwing out the baby with the bath
water. It is now clear that Albright overstated the case, but just because
his vision of the conquest no longer holds that water, we need not discard
the Israelite baby therewith. There clearly was an entity called Israel
in the Early Iron Age, and there still is plenty of evidence to support that
claim.[14]
To answer my second question, who are these people, these revisionists,
these nihilists? What drives them? To give you the names of the four
best known among them, they are Thomas Thompson, Philip Davies, Niels Lemche,
and Keith Whitelam. Some of them are driven, as I indicated above, by Marxism
and leftist politics. Some of them are former evangelical Christians who now
see the evils of their former ways. Some of them are counterculture people,
left over from the 60s and 70s, whose personality includes the questioning of
authority in all aspects of their lives.[15] But the two most
important elements in the profile of these scholars are the following.
First, almost without exception, these individuals have no expertise in the
larger world of ancient Near Eastern studies. The luminaries whom I mentioned
at the outset all had masterful control over a wide variety of languages and
literatures, or they were the leading field archaeologists of their day. They
made major contributions in the fields of Ugaritic studies, Assyriology,
Egyptology, pottery analysis, stratigraphy, and so on. That is to say, their
firsthand experience working with "real life" texts and "real
life" material culture from the ancient world allowed these scholars to
develop a true sense of how biblical texts were cut from the same cloth as
ancient Near Eastern texts. True, this group later would come under attack by
what their detractors would term "parallelomania," and true some of
these great scholars often went too far in making connections between the
Bible and the ancient world. But at the same time, their extensive and direct
familiarity with the history, religion, literature, and scribal traditions of
the ancient Near East in general allowed
them to see, correctly in my view, that the inner workings of the Bible
correlate perfectly into this picture. By contrast, as my colleague Anson
Rainey of Tel Aviv University has noted, Thompson, Davies, Lemche, and
Whitelam have never excavated an Israelite or any other archaeological site
and they have no experience in dealing with an archive of ancient Near
Eastern texts such as those of Ebla, Mari, Nuzi, Amarna, Ugarit, and so on.[16]
In short, the academy has created an intellectual environment which permits
the untrained to operate on an equal par with the trained.[17]
Second, as you may have gathered, almost without exception, the scholars
of this group are not Jewish. (Note that I do not call them Christians
either, for most of them, I believe, would not classify themselves as such.
Rather, they are part of the general secular world.) Now, at first glance,
one might think that one’s religious or ideological identification would have
no effect on one’s scholarship, and I too once naively thought this to be
true. Frankly, I feel a bit of discomfort even mentioning the religious
affiliations of individual scholars. For one would have hoped that such issues
no longer mattered. But with the current group of revisionists, as I
intimated earlier, ideology, not objective scholarship, governs. If it
is not actual Marxism, it is leftist politics in general. If it is not
revolution against the sins of one’s youth, the sin being once having
identified as an evangelical Christian, then the issue is anti-authority
culture in general. Furthermore, and I do not hesitate to use the terms,
these scholars are driven by anti-Zionism approaching anti-Semitism.[18]
By denuding Israel of any ethnic identity, and by denying the existence
of Israel in the land at an early time, and by reading the Bible as a Zionist
plot by 6th century Jews in Babylonia, the picture is very clear. Ironically,
the world has shown signs of progressing away from the anti-Zionism ideology
that dominated U.N. politics in the 1970s, but these scholars are stuck in
that several-decades-old mud.[19]
Now you may ask: why not simply ignore this bunch? The answer is, I would
prefer to, and when these scholars began to revise all of biblical studies,
that is exactly what I and many others like me did. I published a short
article on the Tel Dan ביתדוד inscription
in the Israel Exploration Journal in 1995.[20] Soon after the
article was accepted, the minimalists began their attack on the
authenticity and reading of the crucial phrase, so I sent an e-mail to the
editor, my dear friend and mentor, the late lamented Jonas Greenfield, asking
whether or not I should add a final footnote responding to the nonsense spewing
forth from the pen of these scholars. Greenfield wrote back that my article
should stand as is, that the minimalists may dominate the dialogue now, but
that one day their rhetoric would pass, and sound scholarship such as my
short piece would endure the test of time. So I followed his advice, which
was my inclination to begin with, and the article appeared as submitted. Five
years later, I am not sure that I would follow the same path again. The
minimalists dominate both in the noise that they make and in the quantity of
their books. Volume after volume appears from their pens, all of it recycling
the same views, all of it suspended על בלי
מה "on nothingness," to quote Job 26:7.
Where have Jewish scholars been in this mix? Many of them, as you may have
noted from my listing at the outset, were part of the consensus, if not
officially part of the Albright school, then certainly fellow travelers:
Gaster, Ginsberg, Orlinsky, Gordon, Mazar, Yadin, and others. Very few of the
younger generation of Jewish scholars joined the minimalist revolution,[21] no
surprise given the political agenda behind their scholarship. But this
does not mean that younger Jewish scholars have held to the old consensus
either, or that they are active participants on the maximalist side
battling the minimalists.
Jewish scholars over the last thirty years have moved in an altogether
different direction. But first some background. The twentieth century saw the
arrival of Jewish intellectuals on the American university scene, especially
in the area of literary study. The names are well known: Lionel Trilling,
Irving Howe, Harry Levin, Harold Bloom, Stanley Fish, and on and on. The
people of the book brought new vigor to the study of literature.[22]
And while these individuals—many associated with America at mid-century,
others still active today—did not turn their eyes to the book of the people,[23]
that is, the Bible,[24] eventually a new generation of scholars,
almost all of them Jewish, did.
Indeed, right around the time that Albright and his contemporaries were
passing from the scene, the literary study of the Bible began to develop
among younger scholars. Since the generation of giants had done so much to
elucidate the history of the biblical period, in conjunction with all the new
information produced by archaeological discovery, and had mined ancient Near
Eastern texts for parallel after parallel, there was little left for their
students to do along the same lines. So the two factors just described,
the entrance of Jews into the field of literary study, and the desire for a
new approach to the Bible, combined to create the field of biblical literary
criticism. This development had a tremendous effect on biblical studies.
Prior to this development the term "literary criticism" was used
in the field of biblical studies, but it meant something else entirely.
Mainly it referred to what we now call source criticism, the search for the
sources of the Torah, the JEDP Theory that I described earlier, and related
issues. For example, did any of the four sources extend into the Former
Prophets? Source criticism also dealt with other books. For example, scholars
assumed that the books of the prophets were created over time; the goal of
research was to uncover the actual material of Isaiah or Amos or Ezekiel, and
to distinguish the later material that had accrued in the ensuing generations
or even centuries and somehow had come to be associated with these men.
In short, the whole enterprise was diachronic in its scope, that is, research
focused on the development of texts over time.
With the rise of literary analysis, the paradigm shifted away from a
diachronic analysis, that is, from worrying about different sources and how,
when, and where they were written, transmitted, and redacted, to a synchronic
one, that is, to an understanding that in the end the texts are exactly that,
texts. And in some way, whatever it may have been, these texts
eventually achieved their final form: someone somewhere formed them as such,
while others read them as such. Accordingly, since so much of diachronic
analysis was so hypothetical—after all, no one had ever produced a Yahwist
source, and not even those who propounded its existence could agree on its
exact scope and dimensions—the enterprise took a back seat to synchronic
readings.[25]
The seeds of this approach are to be found in the work of Martin Buber.
This singular scholar, better known for his I and You philosophy,
produced numerous studies on the Bible as literature,[26] and his monumental
translation of the Bible into German (begun in partnership with Franz
Rosenzweig, completed by Buber after his colleague’s early demise) reflected
the same literary concerns.[27] Buber had little influence on the
European and North American scenes, but his work struck a chord in Israel
among such scholars as the recently deceased Meir Weiss[28] and the recently retired
Shemaryahu Talmon.[29]
Whether influenced by Buber directly, indirectly, or not at all, other
scholars adopted the same literary approach to the Bible. On this side of the
ocean, the most senior practioner of this method has been Robert Alter, who
possesses both a knowledge of Hebrew literature from antiquity to the present
and a comparative literature background. To complete the picture, I should
mention Meir Sternberg in Israel, who is closer to Alter in his professional
status, that is to say, he is professor of English at Tel Aviv University,
with major studies on Henry James, Ian Fleming, and other figures; Jan
Fokkelman in Holland; and Adele Berlin in the U.S.
I wish to illustrate this shift in biblical studies by focusing on a
single chapter in the book of Genesis. My point of departure will be E. A.
Speiser’s Anchor Bible commentary on Genesis, published in 1964.[30]
I did not mention Speiser earlier, because he died a few years before
1969, that is, the year of the establishment of the McGill program, but he
certainly belongs to the same group as the aforementioned scholars. Speiser’s
commentary, the first to appear in the Anchor Bible series (launched under
the general editorship of Albright and his disciple David Noel Freedman), was
a tour de force in its day, epitomizing the trends that I referred to above,
especially in its adherence to the JEDP Theory and in its use of cuneiform
texts to support the essential historicity of the patriarchal
narratives. But there is nothing in that book which one would call
literary by today’s standards. Speiser was totally uninterested in the
literary devices and techniques which make the book of Genesis the great
literary work that it is, as we shall presently see.
If one opens Speiser’s volume to Genesis 34,[31] one finds two discussions: a) a
defense of the view that the chapter as a whole is a "J" text (for
many scholars had suggested that there were numerous "P" and
perhaps some "E" intrusions), and b) a presentation of the history
underlying the story. On the former, Speiser summarized as follows:
"The whole may be attributed to J with moderate confidence,
beyond such minor blemishes as are to be expected in the transmission of very
old tales." On the latter issue, Speiser wrote these words: "The
actual events behind the story would have to go back far enough in time to
allow for the transformation into the personalized version that was handed
down to J. . . . Shechem was inhabited at the time by Hurrian
elements. . . . Cuneiform records from the region of Central
Palestine have shown that Hurrians were prominent there during
the Amarna age (ca. 1400 B.C.). . . . In later sources, Simeon is a rudimentary
tribe settled in the south of Judea, a long
way from Shechem; and Levi has no territorial holdings whatsoever. Evidently,
therefore, a pair of once vigorous tribes had suffered critical losses in
their attempt to settle in Central Palestine,
losses which they were never able to recoup. Standard tradition
retained no memory of that remote event, except for the faint echo in the
Testament of Jacob (xlix). . . . The period in question should thus be dated
before the Exodus, and very likely prior to Amarna times." In short, for
Speiser, the story is a unified whole, notwithstanding some unspecified
blemishes; the locals are Hurrians, even though the text itself calls them
only Hivites[32] (you need to know here that Speiser wrote the first standard
grammar of Hurrian[33] and devoted his life to the study of these
people in northern Mesopotamia); and the story, stripped of the traditions
which accrued over centuries, reflects true history of the Late Bronze Age.
Incidentally, Gordon offered something quite specific to further the view
that the text was an accurate reflection of the Late Bronze Age, though
Speiser did not cite his work. Gordon noted that an Akkadian text from Ugarit
presents the results of a trade agreement between the merchants of Ugarit and
the merchants of Ur negotiated by the king of the Hittites, as both cities
were under his sway (the latter is not the famous Ur of Sumer, but a northern
Ur, most likely to be identified with Urfa in southern Turkey, the
traditional birthplace of Abraham).[34] In this text, the
merchants of Ur are granted the right to trade in the city of Ugarit, but
they are not permitted to acquire real estate there, nor are they allowed to
settle permanently there. These are the same three rights that the people of
Shechem offer Jacob and his family in Genesis 34:10:
ואתנו תשבו
והארץ תהיה
לפניכם שבו וסחרוה
והאחזו בה "Settle with
us, and the land is before you; settle, trade in it, and acquire real estate
in it." Thus, for Gordon, as for Speiser, the study of Genesis 34 focuses
on real history.
A generation later, a whole new approach is visible. No one speaks of
Genesis as representing history any more, certainly not the minimalists and
not even the maximalists. Instead, the focus is on how these stories
operate as literature. In contrast to Speiser’s interests, let me present the
work of Sternberg and Berlin, both of whom have written on Genesis 34 from a
literary perspective.[35] Both scholars take it for granted that
the story is a literary whole; they neither enter into a discussion of
the JEDP Theory, nor do they consider that the text could have any
"blemishes," to use Speiser’s word, either major or minor. Instead,
the story is presented as a literary masterpiece.
Emphasis is placed on the negotiations. When Hamor, the king of Shechem,
offers Jacob’s family a sweet deal, he says
והתחתנו
אתנו בנתיכם
תתנו לנו ואת
בנתנו תקחו
לכם "marry us; your daughters you will give to us, and
our daughters you will take for yourselves" (v. 9), after which occurs
the aforecited passage concerning trading rights. The brothers reply that
they will agree on the condition that the Shechemites circumcise themselves.
If this condition is filled,ונתנו
את בנתינו לכם
ואת בנתיכם
נקח לנו
וישבנו אתכם
והיינו לעם
אחד "we will give our daughters to you, and your
daughters we will take for ourselves; we will settle with you, and we will
become one people (v. 16). Shechem and Hamor agree and then present the case
to their fellow townsmen. But note their words:
האנשים האלה
שלמים הם
אתנו וישבו
בארץ ויסחרו
אתה והארץ
הנה רחבת
ידים לפניהם
את בנתם נקח
לנו לנשים
ואת בנתנו
נתן להם "These men are upright with
us, and they will settle in the land, and trade in it, and the land, behold,
it is wide enough before you; their daughters we will take for ourselves as wives,
and our daughters we will give to them" (v. 21). This is rhetoric at its
best. In this go-round, the Shechemite royal pair paint the picture in the
most positive terms possible, including the mention of the uprightness of the
Israelites and the fact that there is plenty of land for everyone. They
conveniently omit the fact that they have offered the Israelites the right to
acquire real estate in the city. And most importantly of all, note the
reversal of the verbs "give" and take." The agreement forged
between the two parties was that the Israelites would be the active
"givers" and "takers," giving their own daughters to the
Hivites, and taking the Hivite girls that they desired. But in the
presentation to their kinfolk, Shechem and Hamor reverse the situation,
making the Hivites the active "givers" and "takers"; it
is they who will control which Israelite daughters are taken and which Hivite
girls are given. Finally, only after all this wonderful build-up, do Hamor
and Shechem add the fact, almost matter-of-factly, oh yes, we also need to
circumcise ourselves for this deal to work (v. 22). And for closers, just for
good measure, the king and the prince tell their people:
מקנהם
וקנינם וכל
בהמתם הלוא
לנו הם "their livestock and their
substance and all their animals will be ours" (v. 23). Not Speiser nor
any other modern commentator ever noticed this remarkable twisting of words
in the repeated speeches between the different parties. Only with the work of
Sternberg and Berlin, and others like them, with eyes trained for close
reading, to use the hackneyed expression, did scholars come to realize the
sophisticated nature of biblical prose storytelling.[36]
The nihilists by and large have little interest in literary matters.
But they are quick to utilize the literary approach to Bible for their own
purposes. That is, they capitalize on the fact that biblical narrative prose
is viewed as highly sophisticated literature, to further their view that the
Bible has little historical value. But such an approach clearly is wrong. The
fact that a literary work is a literary work first and foremost, with its own
agenda, does not automatically mean that it lacks any historical value
altogether.
The Old English poem Beowulf works well as an analogy. It is based on
historical events that can be dated to the 6th century C.E., though the poem
itself was written in the 8th century C.E.[37] My colleague Robert
Farrell has written as follows:
Beowulf is a work of heroic history, i.e. a poem in which facts and
chronology are subservient to the poet's interest in heroic deeds and their
value in representing the ethics of an heroic civilization. A poet writing in
this mode does not disregard absolute historical fact, history, that is, as
we know it. He rather sees it as less important than other considerations. .
. . His account will sometimes mesh reasonably well with history, as in the
episode of Hygelac's raid on the Frisian shore. But more often, his work will
be a freely woven structure in which the characters and actions of the past
will be part of an ethically satisfying narrative.[38]
The same words could apply to the Torah. The narrative is based on
historical facts known to the author, but the author is more interested in
presenting an "ethically satisfying narrative." So while the author
"does not disregard absolute historical fact, history, that is,"
these facts take a back seat to the main thrust of the story.[39]
And of course additional parallels are present every where one
looks. Shakespeare’s histories are literary creations, but one would
not deny the actual existence of the kings themselves. Arthur Miller’s
"The Crucible" has a 1950s agenda, but the basic story line of the Salem witch hunts of colonial Massachusetts is historically accurate.
And Robert Altman’s film "M*A*S*H" and the television series which
followed speak clearly to the 1960s and 1970s anti-Vietnam War generation,
but this does not mean that the Korean War is a fictional invention of the
writers.
The point is that the presence of literary style in an ancient text does
not translate into fictional creation. There still can be history in these
texts, even if we would not wish to create true history based on these texts
alone.Obviously, the narrative cannot be taken at face value for the recovery
of ancient Israelite history, and here you can see that I and many others in
the field today part company with the former consensus. But at the same
time, especially when a variety of sources from the ancient Near East
confirms elements of the biblical narrative, we are absolutely justified in
using the Bible as a source for recovering the early history of Israel.
I want to end by taking the literary approach to Bible one step
further. As I stated at the outset, a generation ago the norm for
scholars was to emend any text that did not fit into the preconceived notion
of what was regular. By contrast, the literary approach has sensitized us to
the workings of biblical narrative, so that today’s scholars are much more
respectful of the Masoretic Text. Emendation is no longer the first resort;
instead scholars seek other explanations, often tied to the literary concerns
of the story.
As an example, I present to you 1 Samuel 17:38 where we read how Saul
dressed David with his armor: וילבש
שאול את דוד
מדיו ונתן
קובע נחשת על
ראשו וילבש
אתו שריון. Note that
only the first and the third verbs are the standard wayyiqtol form
used in biblical storytelling, while the second verb very strangely is in the
weqatal form. In former days scholars regularly emended
ונתן to ויתן, representing a
change of but one letter, nun to yod. Today, scholars
prefer other solutions. While considering this passage, it occurred to
me that most likely the order of donning armor was first the
מדים, or body-suit, then the
שריון, or breastplate, and finally the
קובע, or helmet.[40] I checked with an
authority on the subject, Pierre Terjanian, Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial
Fellow in European Arms and Armor at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and he
confirmed my hunch beyond doubt. In the entire history of human
armor, the last item to be donned is always the helmet. One of the overall
goals of the author of 1 Samuel, as many scholars have noted,[41] is
to show the inadequacy of Saul. The present passage should be understood as
part of the portrayal. Saul cannot even dress another soldier
properly. The verb form ונתן "he placed"
serves a highlighting function here. Far from in need of emendation, it is a
clever literary device, a red flag, as it were, guiding the reader to see
Saul’s failings, even in so regular an activity as dressing another man for
battle.[42]
And with that I shall close, having begun with the Albrightian armor and
ending here with Saul’s. Thank you.[43]
..........
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