Ajs Review, Fall 1990

174 Pages·1990·14.119 MB·English

by  Norman A. Stillman,

Front Matter
Source: AJS Review, Vol. 15, No. 2 (Autumn, 1990)
Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Association for Jewish Studies
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1486891 .
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AJS
VOL. XV, NO. 2
FALL1 990
TheJ ournalo f the Associationf or JewishS tudies
'EI
OREIE
VolumeX V, Number 2, Fall
1990
ASSOCIATION FOR JEWISH STUDIES
CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS
AJS Review
EDITOR:
Norman A. Stillman, State University of New York at Binghamton
ASSOCIATE EDITORS:
Nehama Aschkenasy, University of Connecticut, Stamford
Robert Goldenberg, State University of New York at Stony Brook
Paula E. Hyman, Yale University
Alfred L. Ivry, New York University
Benjamin C. I. Ravid, Brandeis University
S. David Sperling, Hebrew Union College-
Jewish Institute of Religion
CORRESPONDING EDITOR:
Lloyd P. Gartner, Tel-Aviv University
BOOK REVIEW EDITOR:
Gary A. Rendsburg, Cornell University
EDITORIAL ASSISTANT
Susan O. Savitch
The AJS Review (ISSN 0364-0094) is published twice annually by the Association
for Jewish Studies.
Manuscripts for consideration should be sent to Prof. Norman A. Stillman, Judaic
Studies Program, State University of New York at Binghamton, Binghamton, N. Y.,
13901. Books for review should be sent to Prof. Gary A. Rendsburg, Dept. of Near
Eastern Studies, 360 Rockefeller Hall, Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y. 14853-2502.
? 1990 by the Association for Jewish Studies
MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
AJS
REVIEW
THE JOURNALO FT HEA SSOCIATIONF ORJ EWISHS TUDIES
VOLUMEX V, NUMBER2 , FALL, 1990
Articles
151 EDWARD L. GREENSTIEN
The Formation of the Biblical Narrative Corpus
179 RICHARDK ALMIN
Saints or Sinners, Scholars or Ignoramuses? Stories About the
Rabbis as Evidence for the Composite Nature of the Babylonian
Talmud
207 JACOB LASSNER
The Covenant of the Prophets: Muslem Texts, Jewish Subtexts
239 ARNOLD EISEN
Divine Legislation as "Ceremonial Script": Mendelssohn on the
Commandments
269 KEN FRIEDEN
New(s) Poems: Y. L. Teller's Lider fun der Tsayt(ung)
Book Reviews
291 Arye Maimon, in collaboration with Yacob Guggenheim. Germania
Judaica. Vol. 3, 1350-1519
JOSEPH SHATZMILLER
293 R. Po-chia Hsia. The Myth of Ritual Murder: Jews and Magic in
Reformation Germany.
JOSEPH DAVIS
295 Michael Stanislawski. For Whom Do I Toil? Judah Leib Gordona nd
the Crisis of Russian Jewry.
299 CollectedS tudies
305 Books Received
Publication of this volume of the AJS Review has been made possible by
grants from the National Foundation for Jewish Culture, the Lucius N.
Littauer Foundation, the S. H. and Helen R. Scheuer Family Foundation,
and the Dorot Foundation. The Association is grateful for their support
and encouragement.
The Formation of the Biblical Narrative Corpus
Author(s): Edward L. Greenstein
Source: AJS Review, Vol. 15, No. 2 (Autumn, 1990), pp. 151-178
Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Association for Jewish Studies
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1486892 .
Accessed: 02/07/2011 16:35
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at .
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless
you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you
may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.
Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at .
http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=cup. .
Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed
page of such transmission.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].
Cambridge University Press and Association for Jewish Studies are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize,
preserve and extend access to AJS Review.
http://www.jstor.org
THE FORMATIONO F THE
BIBLICAL NARRATIVE CORPUS
by
EDWARD L. GREENSTEIN
Following the lead of Spinoza,' most of us have come to regard the
sequence of Hebrew narrative from Genesis through Kings as a unified liter-
ary composition. It tells the story of Israel and its God from the creation of
sky and land through the exile of Israel from its particular land. Although
the anonymous narrator focuses on the fate of his people, he virtually
always tries to identify with YHWH's point of view. For this reason, and
possibly others, the narrator submerges his own identify and background.2
This essay was originally presented at "The Hebrew Bible in the Making," a conference held
at the National Humanities Center, April 27-29, 1988. I am grateful to Professor Shemaryahu
Talmon for inviting the paper; to my thoughtful respondents, Professors David Daiches and
Regina Schwartz; to the several participants in the conference who made helpful suggestions;
and to my colleague David Marcus, who provided food for thought and material in composing
this paper.
1. Benedict de Spinoza, Theologico-Political Treatise (New York: Dover Books, 1951),
chap. 8 (pp. 120-132).
2. Cf. Meir Sternberg, The Poetics of Biblical Narrative (Bloomington: University of
Indiana Press, 1985), esp. pp. 89-90.
151
152 EDWARD L. GREENSTEIN
Unlike his near-contemporary Herodotus, who begins his Histories by
introducing himself and his explicit agenda, the Hebrew author speaks from
a perspective as wide as the cosmos. He would seem to assume the authority
of God and give voice to a divinely certified account of his people's his-
torical experiencet o (one assumes)h is own community.
There is a broad consensus that the entire narrative took something like
its present shape in the sixth to fifth centuries B.C.E.N o one imagines that
the author composed the whole from scratch, but when we begin to specu-
late on what exactly lay before the author and where those materials came
from, we find a wide array of literary historical models. Some posit a process
of several centuries, from as far back as the mid-second millennium to the
fifth century.3 Others see intense literary activity toward the end of this
period, utilizing documents of some antiquity, but composing the bulk of
the work de novo.4W ithin this rough scheme lie a large variety of positions.5
Confronted by many alternatives, one might conclude that it is best to give
up the search. Gunkel had warned decades ago:
3. Cf., e.g., E. A. Speiser, "The Biblical Idea of History in Its Common Near Eastern Set-
ting," in The Jewish Expression, ed. Judah Goldin (New York: Bantam Books, 1970), pp.
1-17, esp. p. 8, who maintains that the Hebrew "canon" began to "emerge"-"no doubt in
oral form at first"-in the mid-second millennium, "close to the age of the patriarchs." In his
Anchor Bible Genesis (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1964), pp. 105-109, Speiser argued that
the Genesis 14 tale about Abraham's warring is based on an early-second-millennium Akka-
dian source. Alexander Rof6, "The Story of Rebekah's Betrothal (Genesis 24)," Eshel Beer-
sheva 1 (1976): 42-67, esp. p. 45 [in Hebrew], represents a more moderate position, according
to which some biblical texts may have second-millennium origins, while others, like Genesis 24,
may derive from the postexilic period. Shemaryahu Talmon, "Kingship and the Ideology of the
State," in World History of the Jewish People, ed. Abraham Malamat and Israel Eph'al (Jeru-
salem: Massada, 1979), vol. 4/2, pp. 3-26, may not attribute historical Israelite sources to as
far back as the second millennium B.C.E.,b ut he views the literary growth of biblical historio-
graphy as a centuries-long process (esp. p. 3).
4. Cf., e.g., John Van Seters, In Search of History: Historiography in the Ancient Worlda nd
the Origins of Biblical History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983). For an only some-
what more moderate view, cf. Klaus Koch, The Growth of the Biblical Tradition: The Form-
Critical Method, trans. S. M. Cupitt, 2nd ed. (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1969), who
posits early oral traditions but holds that they were given written form only "relatively late"
(pp. 84-85). The exilic Deuteronomist, writes Koch (p. 85), "had some sources at his disposal,
but apparently only some."
5. For a survey of recent scholarship, see Douglas A. Knight, "The Pentateuch," and Peter
R. Ackroyd, "The Historical Literature," in The Hebrew Bible and Its Modern Interpreters,e d.
D. A. Knight and Gene M. Tucker (Chico, Calif.: Scholars Press, 1985), pp. 263-305; and cf.
Simon J. De Vries, "A Review of Recent Research in the Tradition History of the Pentateuch,"
in Society of Biblical Literature 1987 Seminar Papers, ed. Kent H. Richards (Atlanta: Scholars
Press, 1987), pp. 459-502.
FORMATION OF THE BIBLICAL NARRATIVE CORPUS 153
It is clear that [becausew e don't know the historicalc ircumstanceso f the
Hebrew sources' composition] a history of Hebrew literature,m eaning an
indicationo f the chronologicalo rder of the Old Testamentw ritingsa nd an
exposition of each writingi n the light of the personalityo f the author of it,
cannot possibly be written.6
Most of us, however, will not close the door altogether on the historical
question. Too much is at stake. To say anything at all about ancient Israelite
history, one must have some theory of how the Bible and its sources were
formed. What world, or piece of a world, does the literature represent? Even
to read the text as literature, one must have some idea of its historical set-
ting.7 Certainly the historical dimension enriches the reading experience.
Everyone who reads the Bible presupposes a historical context. Some are
curious enough to ponder the historical development of the Bible carefully
and articulate their views. In what follows, I shall describe some types of
literary historical reconstruction. I shall try to indicate the sorts of evidence
and argumentation that are adduced in support of the various models. I
shall then tackle the question of the origins of the narratives that constitute
the Bible's primary history (Genesis-Kings)8 by examining certain kinds of
evidence in detail, assessing the power of different historical theories to han-
dle such evidence.
When I consider the various models by which the primary biblical narra-
tive was formed, I think of the story of the blind men and the elephant.9 You
will recall that each of five blind men approaches a different part of an ele-
phant's anatomy. Perceiving only part of the elephant, each man draws a
different conclusion as to the identity of what he encounters. I do not mean
6. Hermann Gunkel, What Remains of the Old Testament and Other Essays, trans. A. K.
Dallas (New York: Macmillan, 1928), p. 58 (= Reden und Aufsdtze [Gbttingen: Vandenhoeck &
Ruprecht, 1913], p. 30).
7. Cf. Sternberg, Poetics of Biblical Narrative, esp. p. 17.
8. David N. Freedman, "The Earliest Bible," in Backgroundsf or the Bible, ed. Michael P.
O'Connor and D. N. Freedman (Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 1987), pp. 29-37; cf. S. R.
Driver, An Introduction to the Literature of the Old Testament (Cleveland: Meridian Books,
1956), p. 4.
9. On theoretical models in biblical criticism, see Luis Alonso Sch6kel, "Of Methods and
Models," Vetus TestamentumS upplements 36 (1985): 3-13; and my "Theory and Argument in
Biblical Criticism," Hebrew Annual Review 10 (1987): 77-93 (slightly revised in my Essays on
Biblical Method and Translation [Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1989], pp. 53-68). Cf., too, Norman
K. Gottwald, The Hebrew Bible: A Socio-Literary Introduction (Philadelphia: Fortress Press,
1985).
154 EDWARD L. GREENSTEIN
to imply that Bible scholars are blind, but I do suggest that the literary his-
tory of Hebrew narrative is at least as bulky and complex as an elephant and
that without an explicit historical context we find ourselves in the dark.
Although no model I know does full justice to the diverse data-to the
entire elephant, as it were-each theory makes a reasonable hypothesis
about some aspect of the phenomenon.
Take first the classical form of the Documentary Hypothesis-the
theory that a redactor compiled a text from preexisting documents.'0 Its
subscribers respond most acutely to what they regard as unwarranted repeti-
tion and consistent variation. In the words of A. Lods:
It will be understoodt hat by carefulo bservationo f doublets,a bruptc hanges,
differenceso f vocabularya nd style, referencetso earliera ccounts,i t is possible
to distinguisht he differenth andsw hich have helpedt o producet he books as
we read them today."
The documentary model provides a straightforward solution to such data
as: similar stories that appear at least twice, laws that occur in different
places with distinctive vocabulary and sometimes variant content, and re-
petitive passages (that can be explained as conflations of discrete sources,
such as the Genesis flood story). Lods saw evidence for the documentary
model within the Bible itself, especially in the Chronicler's use of Samuel
and Kings.'2 The so-called Deuteronomistic History was composed, in
Lods's scheme, by editing sources such as those that lay behind the Torah
narratives, and by adding both oral traditions from later history and pri-
mary documents from the royal court.'3
10. For recent evidence that this theory is alive and well, cf. Richard E. Friedman, Who
Wrote the Bible? (New York: Summit, 1987).
11. Adolphe Lods, Israel from Its Beginnings to the Middle of the Eighth Century, trans. S.
H. Hooke (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1932), p. 11.
12. Lods, loc. cit.; cf., e.g., H. H. Rowley, The Growth of the Old Testament, 3rd ed. (Lon-
don: Hutchinson University Library, 1967), pp. 25-26. One may also compare the hypothe-
sized use by the Torah's redactor of the Numbers 33 itinerary in providing a framework for the
exodus and wilderness trek narratives; see Frank M. Cross, Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973), pp. 308-317; cf. George W. Coats, "The
Wilderness Itinerary," Catholic Biblical Quarterly 34 (1972): 135-152.
13. Lods, Israel from Its Beginnings, p. 13; cf., e.g., Julius A. Bewer, The Literature of the
Old Testament, 3rd ed., rev. by Emil G. Kraeling (New York: Columbia University Press,
1962), esp. pp. 47-48; Jared J. Jackson, "David's Throne: Patterns in the Succession Story,"
Canadian Journal of Theology 11 (1965): 183-195, esp. 183-184.