, “tribe,” and such a reading would only strengthen this argument; however, it should be noted that šebe often meant “leader”—indeed, sometimes it was confused with šofe. See Falk (1966).11. This is a well-known topos from rabbinic literature, but it is found earlier as well: See Murphy (1958); Seitz (1960); Wernberg-Moller (1961–62); Charlesworth (1972: 76–89); as well as Kugel (1998: 850–52, 880–81).
12. The weakening of aleph to phonetic zero in late and post-biblical Hebrew is well attested; it turned me’od into mod. M. Bar Asher (2000) has suggested that this is the reason for the rise of adverbial moda (= me’od) in Qumran Hebrew. Given this reduction of aleph, R. Akiba’s reading of Deut. 6:5 seems, more precisely, to have divided the verse in two: you shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and all your soul; and in all things [say: “I] give thanks to You,” that is, ubakkol [’ani] modekka.
13. Note that this does not necessarily mean that “these words” should be recited, but simply some part of the divine legislation; the same is true of the next two passages. Rabbinic texts are unanimous that the Shema was recited in the Jerusalem temple; it is certainly possible that these writers are being intentionally vague.
14. These tefillin are actually of different types, suggesting they may have belonged to two different halakhic schools, each of which, however, accepted the basic idea that attaching “these words” to the body was precisely what Scripture meant. See Tov (1997).
15. A thorough exploration of the transformation of the Exodus Covenant Code in the laws of Deuteronomy: Levinson (1997).
16. See Greenberg, “Decalogue Tradition Critically Examined,” 109–10 and references there.
17. See on this S. Japhet (1978), 158–63.
18. Wiseman (1958: 1–99); cited in Weinfeld (1972: 117).
19. From the bilingual inscription of Tell Fakhariyeh. See J. Greenfield and A. Schaffer (1983) and Greenfield (1985).
20. For that reason, Deuteronomy asserts that the only thing that was revealed to Israel at Mount Sinai were the “ten words” of the Decalogue. After having repeated them, Deuteronomy adds: “These are the words the LORD spoke to your whole assembly . . . in a loud voice, and He added no more. Then He wrote them upon two stone tablets and gave them to Me” (Deut. 5:22). By the indicated words, “this text’s Deuteronomistic author seeks to displace the divine speech of the Covenant Code and leave room for the Mosaic mediation of divine speech in the legal corpus of Deuteronomy. Deuteronomy’s polemic rewrites literary history”—B. Levinson (2004: 284).
21. These first words of the sentence are missing in the traditional Hebrew text but are preserved in the Old Greek (Septuagint) translation.
22. See on this my essay on “starkness” in the Bible in Kugel (2003: 137–68).
23. Moran (1963).
24. Later, he moved to Harvard University as a professor of Assyriology. A gentle soul and a lover of the ancient world, he is sorely missed.
25. Moran (1963: 87).
26. The very fact that Moses had to be told so many times gave rise to the interpretive motif of Moses’ refusal to die; Kugel (1998: 856–59, 885–87).
27. The traditional Hebrew text reads “according to the number of the Israelites,” but this hardly makes sense in context; a manuscript from the Dead Sea Scrolls as well as the Septuagint tradition offer a variant reading, “according to the number of the sons of God/El,” that is, lesser divine beings. Alexander (1972); Kugel (1998: 701–3).
28. Nicol (1980: 536–39); Cogan (1979: 37–39); Cross (1999: 53–54).
29. Cross, Ibid., 54.
30. An apparent reference to the water-from-a-rock incident narrated in both Exodus 17 and Numbers 20—though here the incident is presented as a “test” of the whole tribe.
31. Some scholars have expressed doubt about the historicity of this number and the overall picture of the Levites’ holdings, though not of the underlying geopolitics. See among others, M. Haran (1985: 112–31); Barmash (2004).
32. Scholars further note the lavish blessing accorded to Joseph (vv. 13–17), the progenitor of the northern tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh. Joseph’s blessing is longer and considerably more generous than that accorded to Judah (v. 7), a fact which has led many to hypothesize a northern provenance for this entire chapter. Despite the claims of some, it clearly belongs to the period preceding the Assyrian conquest of the north in 722.
33. On this passage in its broader setting: Rhu (1990).
34. Indeed, some contemporary scholars see in the Pentateuch two originally quite distinct “foundation myths”—the first presenting Israel as the descendents of a set of beloved ancestors to whom God promised the land of Canaan, the second depicting them as an enslaved people in Egypt chosen by God to enter a land to which they had no prior claim. It was only later that these two “foundation myths” would be combined. In regard to the call of Moses in Exodus 3–4, Rolf Rendtorff observed: “The land is introduced here as an unknown land . . . there is not a word which mentions that the patriarchs have already lived a long time in this land and that God has promised it to them and their descendants as a permanent possession . . .”—cited in Römer (2006: 19). This subject is explored in depth in K. Schmid (1999).
35. As noted earlier, some scholars have argued that it was Persian imperial policy to use local laws in combination with Persian statutes for governing the different populations they ruled—and to demand, therefore, an official copy of those local laws. Thus, in the year 518 BCE, Darius I wrote to his satrap in Egypt to send him Egyptian scholars who might write down “the former law of Egypt.” See Bickerman (1988: 30). It has thus seemed likely to these scholars that something similar happened with the Jews; the Pentateuch was presented to the Persian emperor as the “former law of the Jews,” and thereafter it acquired the full authority and backing of the Persians. The Bible actually says as much, quoting the Persian emperor Artaxerxes I (who ruled from 465 or 464 to 424 BCE) as ordering Ezra to implement “the laws of your God” as the civil and criminal code of the Persian province of Judah (Ezra 7:25–26). Some scholars have therefore supposed that the final redaction of the Pentateuch may have been made specifically in preparation for this official presentation of Israel’s law code to the Persian emperor. This line of argument has been contested in Watts (2001). Most of the essays in this collection successfully highlight the lack of supporting evidence for this contention, which, incidentally, had been vigorously endorsed and promoted by Peter Frei. (Frei has reiterated his position in the essay that opens this collection.) It may well be that the other essayists are right in suggesting a more complex, and more purely infra-Judean, process: the Persians really did not care that much about the internal legal systems of their satrapies, and the Torah’s final editing may not have coincided with the start of Persian rule. Even if the details cannot be filled in by the current historical data, however, the imposition of the laws of the Pentateuch and the intense scrutiny of the Torah as a whole certainly seem to belong to the beginning of this period rather than later on; perhaps that is the most that can be said at present. It should be noted that the argument for a late, and gradual, final editing of the Torah dovetails somewhat with the “minimalist” approach to its composition as a whole; see on this P. Davies (1998). For a telling critique: Leiman (2000).
36. Kugel (1998: 11–14, 22); also, Kugel (2001a).
37. Thus, the wisdom tendency to divide all of humanity into the righteous and the wicked found expression in the interpretive recasting of different biblical figures as altogether good (sometimes despite the evidence: Abraham, Jacob) or altogether bad (ditto: Esau, Balaam). Ancient wisdom had no real author, since wisdom itself was of divine origin, part of the great plan by which the world operated. Similarly, the Pentateuch now had no author other than God, who had entrusted His supernal wisdom to a single tradent, Moses. See Kugel (2001a).
22. Joshua and the Conquest of Canaan
1. Joshua’s words came to be called the “song of Joshua,” listed among the ten canticles sung by heroes of the Hebrew Bible. See Kugel (1982). Scholars point out, however, that the city of Gibeon does not seem to have existed at the time of Joshua. Excavations there led by James Pritchard turned up some items from the Late Bronze Age in reused tombs, but they uncovered no evidence of the existence of a city during that period. What place could Joshua have been referring to when he said, “O sun, stand still at Gibeon”? See Pritchard (1962).
2. Her standing as a prophet was proven by the fact that she said, “I know that the LORD is giving you this land.” How could she know (rather than merely think or fear or suspect) unless God Himself had informed her?
3. See Kugel (1998: 415–17).
4. See the thorough inventory of characteristic phrases in Weinfeld (1972: 320–65).
5. Kaufmann’s History of the Israelite Faith was printed in Hebrew in four separate volumes (in the years 1937, 1938, 1947, and 1956), but the English abridgment appeared only decades later (Kaufmann 1972). A number of scholars have written on the specific matter of the brief summations of kings’ reigns cited above (called “regnal formulae” or “judgment formulae” by scholars); the variations among these formulae have been used as a basis for distinguishing different editions of the Deuteronomistic history. See Weippert (1972); Halpern and Vanderhooft (1991); Knoppers (1993).
6. M. Noth (1943).
7. Today’s scholars would define the original core somewhat differently: above, chapter 19, note 31, and following note.
8. Noth actually distinguished between two authors, that of the central law code of Deuteronomy (D), comprising Deut. 4:44—30:20, whom he referred to as the Deuteronomic writer, and the author/redactor of the other parts of Deuteronomy as well as of the long history of Israel stretching from Joshua–2 Kings; he called the latter writer the Deuteronomistic historian. Subsequent scholars have proposed various editions of this history, and the distinction Deuteronomic/Deuteronomistic has become rather muddled. Some scholars have therefore abandoned the term “Deuteronomistic” and the now too-simple distinction it implies. See the essays in L. S. Schearing and S. L. McKenzie (1999); also Person (2002: 4–7). Nevertheless, I have preferred the term “Deuteronomistic” since it more clearly designates someone or some group who are “Deuteronomy-like.”
9. As mentioned, numerous scholars have suggested that a plurality of historians is involved—perhaps a school, perhaps simply a succession of editors. See below.
10. A compendium of recent views: T. Römer (2000). For what seems a well-balanced assessment of the arguments, see G. Knoppers (1999 and 2000).
11. Among other studies touching on this question: Nicholson (1967); Cross (1973: 274–89); Levenson (1975); Friedman (1981); Nelson (1981); Weinfeld (1992), Knoppers, (1993–1994); Halpern (1996).
12. See Cross (1968 and 1973: 274–89). His approach contrasts with that of the “Göttingen School” represented by Rudolph Smend, Walter Dietrich, and others. See Person (2002: 2–4); note also the new study of Römer (2006), which sees three separate editions of this literary work, the first dating back to the time of Josiah (Cross’s proposal), the second located in the period of neo-Babylonian ascendancy and the exile, and the third in the time of the return from exile under Persian rule.
13. Some have questioned the etiological understanding of this narrative on the grounds that there are no other biblical references to any Rahab entity in Canaan; this is certainly troubling, but hardly decisive. The descendants of other eponymous figures among Israel’s neighbors (Esau, Lot) had long since disappeared in later biblical times or been merged with other entities; were it not for extra-biblical evidence, the eponymous character of such names as Terah or Serug would probably not be recognized today. Note that the etiological reading of this story is followed by Tucker and Muller (1973: 29–30).
14. This does not, on the face of it, even sound like a woman’s name in Hebrew.
15. No doubt the inspiration for Woody Allen, “The Whore of Mensa,” in Allen (1975).
16. Kenyon nevertheless sought to defend the historicity of Joshua 5–6; see her article in Avi-Yonah (1975: vol. 2, 563–64). Subsequent analysis has, however, only tended to strengthen the case against the accuracy of the biblical account. “[T]he only evidence of any occupation from the closing centuries of the Late Bronze Age is the remnant of one corner of a small mudbrick house, built on top of the ruins of the city destroyed in about 1560 BCE. A juglet found on the packed earth floor of the 3-foot-square remnant can be dated to about 1325 BCE. The location of the hut on the mound’s eastern slope suggests that squatters lived on top of the ruins of the ancient city”—Calloway and Miller (1999: 66).
17. On the similarity of this conquest account to others from the ancient Near East: Younger (1990).
18. On this vast subject see the recent surveys of scholarship in Weippert (1971); W. Dever (1991 and 1995); also N. Naaman (1994), Callaway and Miller (1999), and works referred to below.
19. Following John Garstang’s excavations at Ai (1928) and those of Judith Marquet-Krause (1933–35), Joseph Callaway excavated Ai from 1964 to 1976. See Callaway (1976). Confirming the conclusions of Marquet-Krause, Callaway asserted that there was no walled city at Ai after 2400 BCE; the only evidence of occupation of the site thereafter was a small, unfortified village built over the earlier ruins. The village was constructed around 1200 BCE and survived until around 1050 BCE, after which it was abandoned and never rebuilt; see Josh. 8:28. Ai was apparently closely connected with Bethel, about two miles away; perhaps this unfortified town was part of the city-state of Bethel during the Late Bronze age and continued to be associated with it in later times (see Josh. 8:17; also Neh. 7:32, Ezra 2:28). More recently, Zevit (1984) has sought to reconstruct a series of stages through which the biblical account might have been created. See also below, note 23.
20. Moreover, the destruction of even these two seems to be out of sync with each other: see Callaway and Miller (1999: 68–69. Bethel is not mentioned as a conquered city in the book of Joshua.
21. Noted by Wright (1946). Note further 1 Kings 9:20–21, which, reporting on the period of Solomon’s rule, mentions “all the people who were left of the Amorites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, who were not of the people of Israel—their descendants who were still in the land, whom the Israelites were unable to destroy completely—these Solomon conscripted for slave labor, and so they are to this day.”
22. The inhabitants of Shechem were reported to have been killed by Simeon and Levi in revenge for the rape of Dinah (Gen. 34); Jacob likewise speaks of having captured Shechem “with my sword and bow” (Gen. 48:22). One might thus claim that there was no need for Shechem to be captured by Joshua—the city had been destroyed long before. But archaeologists find it difficult to support such a claim, and, even if Shechem had been attacked and briefly subdued in patriarchal times, there is nothing to support the notion that Shechem remained a ghost-town thereafter until the arrival of Joshua—this is in fact quite counter to the archaeological evidence as well as the testimony of the Amarna letters (see below). On the other hand, there was also no conquest of Shechem in the time of Joshua: there is no evidence of destruction there in the Late Bronze age; its temple, defensive walls, and city gate provide evidence of continued, peaceful occupation. L. E. Toombs, “Shechem,” in Freedman (1992).
23. Gottwald (1979: 153).
24. See M. Noth (1972: 175–77).
25. Indeed, there are some who suggest a true history of ancient Israel can never be written, or should never be written (though most scholars reject such an extreme position). Note the essays in Grabbe (1997); also chapter 1, note 76.
26. Bethel is, somewhat surprisingly, not mentioned among the cities conquered by Joshua. However, since modern Beitin, identified as the site of ancient Bethel, is only two miles from modern et-Tell, identified as the site of Ai, and since the people of Bethel are said to have joined with inhabitants of Ai in opposing the Israelites (Josh. 8:12–17), Albright suggested that it was the conquest of Bethel, and not Ai, to which the narrative in Joshua refers.
27. See the discussion to follow; note also Cross (1999: 50–70); Zevit (2001: 84–121).
28. On these, see below.
29. Numerous scholars have studied the linguistic side of the El Amarna letters and their implications for Hebrew; see briefly Kutcher (1982: 77–79) and the more detailed treatments by W. L. Moran, his (1965) and (1975); also Rainey (1973) and (1975). The situation is summarized in Moran (1992: “Introduction”).
30. The capital city of the writer, Rib-Addi.
31. First advanced by an Albright student, George Mendenhall (1961; see also his 1973). A similar approach, but with a somewhat different coloring, was adopted; Gottwald (1979: esp. 210–19). Critics often connect Gottwald’s account with his own Marxist sympathies, openly announced in that book. Personally, I find this regrettable. I doubt that Gottwald’s ideology has been any more decisive in the formation of his scholarship than, say, Lutheranism has been in shaping the ideas of a number of other scholars mentioned in this book (nor, I might add, than Judaism has been in shaping my own outlook). Indeed, ideological or confessional influences tend to be invoked only in the case of people perceived as outsiders; such influences are least likely to be recognized when they are shared by a majority of scholars in the field—but this, of course, is where recognition is most crucial.
32. Gottwald (1985: 272).
33. On this stele see recently L. Stager (1985), Singer (1988) Görg (1997: 58–63); Lemche (1998: 35–38).
34. Much has been made of the fact that the name “Israel” on this stele is preceded not with a locative marker (name of a foreign place) but with one designating a foreign people. However, as Ahlstrom has stressed, the Egyptian use of determinatives is inconsistent; it would be unwise to build on this one detail any larger hypothesis of what “Israel” might have referred to at the time. See the discussion in Lemche (1998: 35–38). Moreover, although Merenptah came be known as the “subduer of Gezer,” there is no indication that his forces actually came into contact with Israel on the occasion commemorated by this stele. Perhaps Israel (again: whatever Israel was at the time) was simply included to round out a list of names representative of the inhabitants of the land. See also Stager (1985); Redford (1992).
35. The change was apparently instituted by the Persian ambassador to Germany, at the encouragement of the Nazis; Iran, cognate with Aryan, was a way of signaling the country’s superior racial makeup as well as its clean break with the colonial past. See Yarshater (1989).
36. On the reinterpretation of this evidence: A. Mazar (1985); Finkelstein (1988: 280–85); W. Dever (1991 and 2003: 124–25).
37. See on this Finkelstein (1988: 237–59); Giv‘on (1995); Dever (2003: 76–78, 102–103).
38. Callaway (1984); D. Hopkins (1985); Ahlstrom (1992: 334–70).
39. More bluntly: how could a bunch of seminomads be responsible precisely for those features held to be characteristic of the earliest proto-Israelite settlements, the four-room house, the collared-rim jar, and terrace farming (on this, see below)? N. P. Lemche (1998: 72) has put the case well: “What scholars ask early Israelite ingenuity to have produced is simply amazing: first of all they [despite their] being nomads, should have introduced a new style of [permanent] housing. Second, they should have started producing rather cumbersome types of pottery such as the collared-rim jars, quite unsuitable for nomads on the move; and, finally, they should almost at once have become engaged in technical highland agriculture.”
40. This widely held view comes in various formulations: see inter alia Fritz (1981 and 1987); Finkelstein and Na’aman (1994: 150–78); Albertz (1994); and the voluminous writings of W. G. Dever, most recently (as of this writing) (2003); as well as other works cited below. See also note 21 above.
41. The pattern of building in these new settlements and its correlation with Judges 5 (Song of Deborah) and other biblical texts was first explored by Stager (1985).
42. Gonen (1984) estimates that the urban population of Canaan at this time declined by more than 50 percent. Also: Finkelstein and Silberman (2001: 86–90, 118). Scholars have noted a general depopulation of cities throughout the eastern Mediterranean in the Late Bronze period—possibly connected to outbreaks of plague in urban centers; see Mendenhall (1973: 106–7).
43. See previous notes; also, Coote and Whitelam (1986). Note that Whitelam’s position has subsequently been modified somewhat—see his (1996); note also Lemche (1988 and 1998).
44. Lemche has proposed an opposite scenario: the late thirteenth century was a time when Egypt tightened its grip over the area. The Egyptians themselves, or the new domestic regime that their strengthened presence created, would therefore have controlled trade more tightly and imposed heavier taxation, leading to worsening economic conditions inside the cities; the Egyptians may also have regularly deported parts of the urban population of Canaan. (On this: Ahituv (1978); Na’aman (1981); Redford, (1992: 207–14.) Certainly policies such as these might have encouraged large numbers of former city-dwellers to head for the hills and settle in little, isolated, unprotected villages. See Lemche (1998: 76–77).
45. Stager (1985: 5–9).
46. Ibid., 9–11.
47. The “fringe-area pastoralists” explanation is basically Israel Finkelstein’s position: see, inter alia, his (1988); Finkelstein and Na’aman (1994: 150–78); Finkelstein and Silberman (2001: 106–18). For a partial critique of this position: Dever (2003: 153–66). Cross, relying more on the biblical evidence, sees an entrance of pastoral nomads from the southeast: (1999: 51–52, 68–70). As various scholars have argued, while the pottery associated with these sites is similar to Canaanite pottery, it is not identical; see most recently Killebrew (2005: esp. 110–35, 177–80).
48. Finkelstein and Silberman (2001: 119–20).
49. Some have expressed reservations about the ethnic explanation: See Hesse and Wapnish (1997).
50. A. Zertal (1991 and 1994: 53–100); also, Finkelstein (1998: 185–200).
51. In this connection, scholars have noted that, when Israel’s eighth-century prophets intoned against those who worshiped Baal or other foreign deities, they never accused the guilty parties of being non-Israelites, “sojourners,” or resident Canaanites who worshiped other gods; they did not even speak of them as peoples who were at one point joined to Israel but who had subsequently reverted to their old faith. Nor, for that matter, did Deuteronomy or the historical books that follow it ever present worshiping other gods as some sort of reversion to a faith once espoused by elements of Israel. This is certainly strange, since “Blame the foreigners” is a universal reflex, and, by the Bible’s own account, a “mixed rabble” of foreigners (Exod. 12:38, Num. 11:4) had indeed accompanied the Israelites out of Egypt, and after the conquest, some Canaanites and others nonetheless remained in Israel’s midst. The absence of any hint that foreigners were to blame for Israel’s religious lapses might thus suggest that, from a relatively early period, the memory that any part of Israel had once belonged to the peoples of Canaan had been programmatically purged from Israelite consciousness. Apparently, any hint of this idea was simply verboten for quite some time. (True, Ezekiel could say of Jerusalem, “Your mother was a Hittite” [Ezek. 16:3], but that was in another century, and besides, the wench was dead.) This in turn might lead one to believe (though it may seem paradoxical at first) that the number of Canaanites involved was not negligible. After all, a small number could be countenanced, admitted, reckoned with. But if nearly all of Israel came from Canaanite stock, then nothing but an absolute denial of history, repeated by common accord for generations and centuries, would erase this embarrassing truth. See on this Zevit (2001: 120).
23. Judges and Chiefs
1. Weber borrowed the term from Rudolf Sohm, but it ultimately goes back to early Christian literature; for Weber, it refers to “a certain quality of an individual personality by virtue of which he is set apart from ordinary men and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities,” Weber (1964: 363). See on this Blenkinsopp (1977: 148–51). For Weber’s application of this approach to the Hebrew Bible: Weber (1952: 11, 97–98). On the question of Weber’s anti-Semitic sentiments and such role as they may have had in his scholarship, see H. Gerth and D. Martindale, “Preface” in Weber (1952: esp. xiv–xxvii).
2. Thus, the moreh of the “oak tree of Moreh” (Gen. 12:6, cf. Deut. 11:30) may mean “[divinely guided] teacher”; note as well the “oak tree of the diviners” (’elon me‘onenim) in Jud. 9:37. W. Richter (1963) argued that Deborah’s “palm-tree” was originally not a palm at all but, like these others, an oak tree. In fact, it was none other than the oak tree mentioned in Gen. 35:8, not specifically called there the “oak of Deborah” but suspiciously linked with the cameo appearance of an otherwise unknown nurse of Rebekah’s, Deborah. Richter also identified this tree with the “oak of Tabor” in 1 Sam. 10:3, “Tabor” being an error for “Deborah.” Oddly, he did not go one step further: the “Deborah” associated with this tree is neither Rebekah’s nurse nor Barak’s comrade in arms, but the generic word daborah, “[female] speaker” or “prophetess.” (Such qatol active agentives are relatively rare in biblical Hebrew, but they certainly exist; see GKC 84a, k [= p. 231]. Indeed, the traditional vocalization of shadud in this same song (Jud. 5:27), along with the same word in its feminine form shadudah in Ps. 137:8, should both be repointed to the qatol form to reflect their active meaning of “despoiler.” That the vocalization daborah is correct might seem to be supported by its confusion with “Tabor” in 1 Sam. 10:3.) The person named “Deborah” is thus actually a creation of the Deuteronomistic historian, who misunderstood “Up, up, O daborah, up, up, sing a song!” (Jud. 5:12) as containing a proper noun, “Deborah.” Actually, the prophetess in the song is quite anonymous; indeed, even this anonymous but specific prophetess may herself be a back-formation from the “oak of the prophetess,” originally quite unconnected to the battle of Barak against Sisera. At a certain point, however, the popular imagination, or perhaps theology, demanded that Barak’s victory be somehow connected to a divine oracle: a daborah was invented, or rather, imported from the “oak of the daborah.” Note further that most modern scholars parse Jud. 5:7 as a second person verb, in which case it would be addressed to the anonymous prophetess, “Until you arose, O daborah”—that is, until you could deliver the crucial divine oracle, things were going sour in Israel. This is altogether possible, but it also may have been an archaic third-person or may have been changed to conform with the second-person address that appears later in the song, “Up, up, daborah, up, up, sing a song!” Further: Kugel (1999: 133–46).
3. This point, like many to follow, is made explicitly in B. Halpern’s treatment (1983) of the Song of Deborah, reprinted in Halpern (1996; see p. 78). On this song see also (inter alia multa) Globe (1975); Coogan (1978); Stager (1988); Schloen (1993: 18–38).
4. This was asserted even by Wellhausen (1957: 241), who concluded that chapter 4 was therefore altogether dependent on the song in chapter 5. However, as subsequent scholars have pointed out, the two chapters differ on a number of other details (precise location of the battle, participating tribes, numbers of troops, and so forth). Apparently, while the line “She put her hand to a stick, [and] her right hand to a workman’s club” may have been the same, the song known to the prose author was, according to many scholars, slightly different. Halpern (1996: 95) however, seeks to argue through clever exegesis that “virtually every element of the prose account stems directly, or by a dialectical process, indirectly, from the Song of Deborah.”
5. Iron, Lemche argued, began to be used in the Iron Age not because it was previously unknown, but because the tin needed to make bronze, which is not found in any abundance in the region, became difficult to import in the political chaos of the Late Bronze Age. Iron “is in fact a metal found all over the place [and] was known already before the coming of the Iron Age. It was, however, not used to produce weapons and utensils for the simple reason that it was brittle and not in any way comparable to weapons and utensils made of bronze, not, at least, before smiths learned to produce steel. That hardly happened before the beginning of the first millennium BCE. Iron was in fact inferior to bronze before steel was invented”—Lemche (1998: 66–67). See also Negbi (1974: 159–72), and Fritz (1996: 101–2). (References are from Lemche 1998.)
6. A vast scholarly literature surrounds the identity of the Sea Peoples. See recently: Niemeyer (1998) as well as material cited below. As to the name itself, “Sea Peoples” is now widely conceded to be somewhat inaccurate; the ancient Egyptian sources that refer to them actually depict them moving both overland and by sea. On this point: Mendenhall (1973: 142).
7. On this: A. Mazar (1980); Dothan (1982: and 1982a: 33).
8. Here I am paraphrasing a conversation with Frank Cross some years ago.
9. There are two apparent exceptions to this generalization, but they both turn out badly. The first is David, whose lust for Bathsheba leads him to have Uriah killed; he gets the girl but is then punished by God—nothing celebratory here. On Amnon and Tamar, see below, chapter 28.
10. Halpern (1996: 125).
11. For a different explanation: Greenstein (1981).
12. On the territories occupied by Dan in biblical times: A. Demsky (2004: 284). Indeed, the name of this Israelite tribe has been connected with that of the Danuna, who were themselves one of the Aegean Sea Peoples that settled along the eastern Mediterranean coast. See Yadin (1965). If so, then Samson might be an altogether Aegean hero.
13. Note, however, the clear assertion of Leviticus Rabba 1:2–3 that such a change of names is unnecessary, since, from God’s standpoint, “the [original] names of converts are as pleasing to Me as libation wine [intended for pagan ceremonies] that is offered instead on My altar.”
14. This feature is highlighted in Ackerman (1998).
15. To be sure, the issue had been raised earlier, particularly in the classic of late nineteenth-century feminism, Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s The Woman’s Bible (reprinted Stanton, 1986). Stanton’s famous conclusion was that “the Bible in its teachings degrades Women from Genesis to Revelation.”
16. Reuther (1974); Wegner (1988).
17. On the phenomenon of anonymity in general: Reinhartz (1992). For a catalogue of unnamed female figures: C. Meyers (2000: 145–475).
18. Plaskow (1989).
19. Among many: Fuchs (2000).
20. Frymer-Kensky (1992). On Asherah, see below, chapter 24, note 9.
21. Keel and Uehlinger (1998: 19–48, 397).
22. C. Myers (1978: 98–103).
23. Ibid.
24. C. Myers (1988: 190).
25. Trible (1976: 965).
26. Schüssler-Fiorenza (1983); also Brooten (1982). Note, however, Peleg (2002).
27. Kugel (1999: 129–58).
28. From the bilingual (Phoenician and Luwian) Karatepe inscription, column 2, 4–5. A similar boast is found in a bilingual tablet of royal correspondence unearthed at Susa, “A man walks wherever his heart desires, and [even] a woman with her spindle and distaff.” The closeness of the two formulations may indicate that this was the somewhat standardized boast of a monarch, a boast whose actual relation to reality remains to be otherwise attested.
29. Trible (1984: 87).
30. The period of the judges ought to have lasted about 200 years—from the first, identifiably “Israelite” settlements to the beginning of David’s reign, that is, from roughly 1200 to 1000 BCE. “When, however, the periods of time given for each episode in the book of Judges are added together, the total far exceeds 200 years. It even exceeds the 480 years the Bible says elapsed between the Exodus and the founding of Solomon’s temple (1 Kings 6:1). This is because the episodes are not to be joined as consecutive events; some undoubtedly occurred simultaneously” (Callaway and Miller 1999: 88). Another explanation might be that much of the material is legendary, indeed, going back even before the existence of any distinctly Israelite settlements.
31. Scholars have backed off some of Frankfort’s writings about Egyptian kings as divine beings; see Silverman (1995).
32. Wellhausen and his followers were initially skeptical about the authenticity of this antimonarchic theme, dating it to the time of the Babylonian exile and the disenchantment with dynastic rule; others connected it to the time of Hosea and the Assyrian conquest of the northern kingdom. Subsequently, many scholars have come to accept the antiquity of this antimonarchic material and the political reality that lay behind it. See briefly M. Weinfeld in Friedman (1983: 86–87).
33. Frankfort (1948: 3).
34. Of course the connection between the gods and the king’s authority to rule is found throughout the ancient Near East; the god is sometimes conceived elsewhere as the image of the earthly king, or the earthly king as an embodiment of the god’s rule. But such notions are quite different from the Israelite idea of divine kingship. See on this point Weinfeld (1972: 82–83), Halpern (1981: 71). Indeed, “divine kingship” itself is a somewhat ambiguous item in scholarship, referring both to God’s enthronement in heaven above all other divine beings and, at the same time, to the theme examined here. See M. Brettler (1989).
35. On this commandment, see above, chapter 15.
36. Whether they did—or even, whether this commandment was actually intended to be enforced as monolatry—is an entirely different question; see below.
37. The received text says šebe, “tribe,” and such a reading would only strengthen this argument; however, it should be noted that šebe often meant “leader”—indeed, sometimes it was confused with šofe. See Falk (1966).
38. Hebrew ‘am, usually “people,” sometimes has the more specific meaning of “army,” Num. 20:20; 31:32; Josh. 8:1, 3, 11; 10:7; 11:7; Jud. 5:8; 1 Sam. 11:11, etc. The JPS translation of this verse thus reads: “army.”
39. Heb. mippenei, that is, “confronted by.”
40. The history of research into this subject is long and complicated. For a good summary: Longman and Reid (1995: 19–26). Among many works see especially P. D. Miller (1973).
41. “Arise Barak . . .” is the oracle that the daborah produces after having been ordered to “awake, awake.”
42. See Judges 20–21. Not only (as already mentioned) does the Song of Deborah fail even to mention any tribe south of Benjamin—as if Judah were simply out of consideration, off the map—but the book of Judges as a whole pays relatively little attention to Judah. What is more, the fact that the “Benjaminites” (a term that can mean simply “southerners”) are sometimes presented in a negative light may reinforce the impression that this is basically a collection of northern tales.
43. Cross tried to reckon with this (1999: 55n), somewhat unconvincingly.
24. The Other Gods of Canaan
1. This follows the classic formulation of St. Anselm (1033–1109). A later try: “A working definition of God will help to focus both the claims of theologians and the problems of establishing the existence of this God: God is an omnipotent, omniscient, and eternal person who is pure spirit. He is both transcendent and immanent. He created the universe and human beings are his special creation. He loves them, interacts with them, and desires their love”—Diamond (1974: 4). By citing this I do not mean to imply that this definition would meet with universal approval nowadays; many contemporary theologians would object to the use of the male pronoun, others to His being described as a “person,” interacting with or reacting to humans, still others to humans being thought of as His “special creation.” (A reasonable person might be forgiven for asking at this point, “What’s left?” But that is not our concern here.)
2. One such attempted reconstruction is Jacobsen (1976), but see the reservations of Oppenheim (1964); Bottéro (1993 and 1998).
3. This was the starting point of Albrecht Alt’s seminal essay, “Der Gott der Väter” (Alt 1929). See below.
4. That is how, in texts attributed to E, God is referred to before the time of Moses—and in fact ’elohim occurs elsewhere, either alone or in combination (the “’elohim of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob”). The precise relationship of ’elohim to ’el remains a matter of speculation. It is certainly significant that peripheral Akkadian construes il
nū ([the] gods) as a singular noun, since this would seem to be an evident precedent for the biblical usage. See Burnett (1999: 7–24). Note also: Pagolu (1998: 185) and references there.
5. Note the entry El Elyon in Hastings, ed. (1903: vol. 2, 682): “It is probably a proper name, the appellation of a Canaanite deity.”
6. Alt (1929). The bulk of Alt’s essay was not, however, devoted to this subject but to the deity or deities called the “God of Abraham (perhaps also the “shield [or “benefactor”] of Abraham”; this name is deduced from Gen. 15:1; see Dahood (1966: 16–17), the “Fear [or possibly “kinsman”] of Isaac” (Gen. 31:42, 53) and the “Mighty One of Jacob” (Gen. 49:24, etc.). What was striking about them to Alt was that the epithet of the deity was connected with a particular person or tribal founder. The deity himself had no name, nor any connection with a cultic site; his identity was essentially that of the divinity associated with a particular group. In fact, Alt suggested that these gods of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were originally distinct clan deities that were ultimately merged into a single God, “the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob” (Exod. 3:14); they became one God and, as a result, these three founders were (artificially, said Alt and others) linked as grandfather, father, and son. Finally, what struck Alt as particularly significant about the form of reference “god of PN” was that, since such a deity was not attached to a particular local shrine (like the Canaanite numina) but to a person or clan, such a deity would be by definition mobile. A seminomad—like those that Alt felt had first begun to frequent the rugged Canaanite hilltops—might indeed worship such a deity, traveling with him wherever he went. Then, once settled in Canaan, those who worshiped the previously nameless “God[s] of the Fathers,” might ultimately have unified them, emerging finally as devotees of YHWH.
7. The only exception was the glottal stop corresponding to Hebrew aleph, which was represented in three distinct configurations to indicate the vowel accompanying it.
8. On Psalm 29 see chapter 29.
9. See the recent summary of the discussion by Mastin (2004); also Kugel (2003: 232–34) and sources cited there. Note that mention of Kuntillet ’Ajrud was mistakenly omitted from my book, p. 232, line 23; reference also should have been made there to the article of P. Xella (2000) that argues for the use of pronominal suffixes with proper names at Ugarit. Given the great distance in time and space between Ugarit (not to speak of Ebla) and Kuntillet ’Ajrud, however, this argument on its own strikes me as less than overwhelming, though in combination with the (admittedly ambiguous) painting found at the site, the claim must be considered seriously. On both see S. H. Horn and P. K. McCarter in Shanks (1999: esp. 157–58). Whatever one concludes about these inscriptions, many recent scholars have suggested that the worship of Asherah continued long into monarchic times: Dever (1982); McCarter (1987); P. D. Miller (1986 and 2000: 35–40); Olyan (1988); Ackerman (1992).
10. Moses’ in-laws are identified as Kenites, not Midianites, in Judg. 1:16 and 4:11 (cf. 5:24). The Kenites were of course from the same general region as the Midianites.
11. The Amalekites are usually depicted as Israel’s blood enemies, save in what may be the very earliest reference to Amalek in the Hebrew Bible, “From Ephraim [came] those whose roots are in Amalek” (Judg. 5:14). This positive note commends itself precisely because of its uniqueness. See Coogan (1978: 49) and M. Smith (2001: 145).
12. On these see also de Vaux (1969) and Schloen (1993).
13. Rowley (1950: 149–56.
14. M. Weippert (1971: 105–6); Cross (1999: 97); L. Stager (1998). See also van der Toorn (1993).
15. M. Weippert (1974); Astour (1979); Ahituv (1984: 169).
16. On this Levenson (1985: 19–23, 89–93).
17. See in this connection: Schloen (1993).
18. This is the view adopted by Fritz (1987: 84–100 and 1981: 61–73); Mettinger (1988: 78–79) and (1990), as well the various works cited in Mettinger (1995: 168, n. 138); Albertz (1994: esp. 87–94). Scholars have sometimes claimed that the name YHWH is attested elsewhere, but this claim has not been widely accepted. G. Pettinato (1980) claimed that the name was found in apocopated form at Ebla, but see H-P. Mueller (1981). More recently, S. Dalley (1990) has advanced a similar case for Syria; see van der Toorn (1992).
19. An apparent exception is Joshua, to be dealt with presently, and Jochebed (Exod. 6:20, Num. 26:59).
20. In both these examples, the name YHWH has been abbreviated to YW; these are referred to as hypocoristic names. See in general: Tigay (1986); Pike (1989).
21. On the apparent exception ‘nnyh in Neh. 11:32, see Z. Zevit (2001: 594).
22. Ibid, 592–94.
23. Kugel (2003: 96); see also Dearman (1993).
24. Influential in this approach was Ahlstrom (1963: 9–88); see also Lemche (1985: 209–57); Mark Smith (1990); P. D. Miller (2000: 57–62). The term syncretism has sometimes been criticized by scholars as implying the existence of a “pure” form of the religion that was then corrupted by syncretists—a notion judged to be particularly inappropriate for the Bible. But the term itself (originally coined, incidentally, to describe an alliance of different inhabitants of Crete against a common foe) need not imply any process of corruption of an earlier, purer state of things; certainly the examples cited above do not.
25. On the much discussed Khirbet el-Qom and Kuntillet ’Ajrud inscriptions, see above, note 9. To repeat an observation from there: Whatever one concludes about these inscriptions, many recent scholars have suggested that the worship of Asherah continued long into monarchic times: Dever (1982: 37–43); McCarter (1987); P. D. Miller (1986 and 2000: 35–40); S Olyan (1988); Ackerman (1992).
26. This seems to be the case of the twelfth-century temple at Shechem that was in use from the Late Bronze age on; it may be true as well of later examples, such as the Arad sanctuary (tenth or ninth century), the Dan temple complex (tenth-ninth century), and others. On the latter: Biran (1994); note also the discussion in Zevit (2001: 156–70; 181–96).
27. Many scholars have contributed to this subject since the pioneering work of Morton Smith, especially (1952) and (1971). Among others: Albrektson (1967: 1–122); Roberts (1976: 181–90); Lang (1983: 13–56); Albertz (1994).
28. Keel and Uehlinger (1998) and the discussion and other works cited in Kugel (2003: 217–234).
29. Albertz (1994: 146–56). On the cult of Asherah, see three notes above, note 9.
30. See in general the arguments for an early, exclusive devotion to the God of Israel in P. Miller (2000: esp. pp. 40–45); the opposite claim is surveyed in Zevit (2001).
31. For Morton Smith and others, above n. 27. Also Lang (1983).
32. Indeed, the written records of a community of Jewish soldiers stationed at a military colony at Elephantine (in Egypt) seem to indicate that they were still polytheistic in the fifth century BCE—long after the laws of Deuteronomy had been adopted and the “strict monotheism” of the latter part of the book of Isaiah had been preached and accepted. On the Elephantine colony in general: G. R. Driver (1965). On the complicated problem of the religious beliefs reflected in the Elephantine documents: Porten (1969) and (1974); van der Toorn (1986); Dalglish (1992).
33. Here I am relying principally on Stager (1985).
34. Ibid., 18–23; also King and Stager (2001:) 12–15.
35. Stager (1985: 22).
36. Ibid., 6–9.
37. Stager (1985: 25–28).
38. Stager (1985: 9).
39. Albright (1943).
40. See on this Mazar (1982). The identification of this as an Israelite site has been questioned: Coogan (1987); see also Zevit (2001: 176–80), King and Stager (2001: 322–23).
41. See above, chapter 16, note 5.
42. Kugel (2003: 71–107, 217–34) and sources cited.
43. That is, Alt’s classic distinction between apodictic and casuistic laws.
44. This of course runs counter to the claim of minimalist historians and even more “mainstream” views; Albertz (1994), for example, prefers to see in these narratives a reflection of rural, “popular” religiosity, as opposed to the urban way of life and its “official” forms of worship. Still, such an approach fails to account for some of the major singularities in the patriarchal narratives that set them off from later practice; see the arguments in Grintz (1983).
25. Samuel and Saul
1. The distinction between northern and southern prophets was highlighted in R. R. Wilson (1980) and D. Peterson (1981). See also chapter 29.
2. Alternately “word [dbr] of the LORD,” “utterance [n’m] of the LORD” see Westermann (1967).
3. This point was stressed by Gunkel in his form-critical analysis of prophecy, as well as by his student Sigmund Mowinckel; see Blenkinsopp (1983: 30–31).
4. On this pattern in the utterances of prophets from the eighth to the sixth century BCE: P. D. Miller (1982a).
5. Biblical prophecy is explored in this broad (and comparative) context by Grabbe (1995: 85–118). See also Wilson (1980: 21–88).
6. Within the Mari corpus have been found two ritual texts, twelve economic documents, and approximately fifty letters, all of which describe or allude to prophetlike figures. The subject of Mesopotamian parallels to biblical prophecy has been studied by a number of scholars, particularly by H. Huffmon in a series of works stretching back to the 1960s. See his recent assessment, Huffmon (2000); also, the brief treatment and bibliography in Grabbe (1995: 87–91).
7. For these, S. Parpola (1999).
8. The first two figures are known from Mari; the latter two (with the variant spelling ma
u/mautu) from Assyria. The two forms indicated are masculine and feminine. Again, see Huffmon (2000: 49–57).
9. The term nabi’ seems to have been favored especially in northern texts; see Wilson (1980: 136, 256). Scholars have argued that the Hebrew term designates one who “calls out” or, alternately, one who has been “called.” See Fleming (1993); Huehnergard (1999).
10. See on this Wilson (1980); J. R. Porter (1982). I find it difficult to accept Grabbe’s assertion that “[t]here is no qualitative distinction between OT prophets and those known in Mesopotamia or other pre-modern cultures” (1995: 117).
11. Cross (1973: 223).
12. The Bible is somewhat inconsistent about Saul’s actual title; sometimes he is being made king (melekh) (1 Sam. 8:5–6, 10:19, 25), while at other times he is referred to as nagid (9:16, 10:1, 123:14). The inconsistency derives from the combination of different sources (see below). Scholars are still divided about the precise nuance of the term nagid; for a time, exegetes saw this as a military post, perhaps “commander-in-chief.” That theory has now been largely rejected. The term may mean something like “king designate,” or it may be a more general term for a kinglike leader (governor, ruler) perhaps used of Saul to classify him as a forerunner of what the Deuteronomistic History considered the “true” kingship given to Israel, namely, the house of David. On other ideas: Halpern (1981: 1–11). (It is noteworthy that, starting in 1027 CE, the governor of Spain’s semiautonomous Jewish community was called the nagid: see, for example, Cole, 1996: xvii.)
13. Literally, the text reads, “Is it not so that . . . ?” But this is how courtiers typically addressed the king (since court etiquette dictated that the courtier pretend that the king already knows whatever it is that the courtier wishes to tell him). “Your Majesty” is thus really the most accurate English equivalent of this phrase in context.
14. For a review, Halpern (1996: 186–94) and at greater length (1981: 149–74).
15. Halpern (1996: 194).
16. Ibid., 183–86.
17. See F. M. Cross (1983).
18. B. M. Levinson in M. D. Coogan, ed. (2001: 256n; ad Deut. 7:1). On the biblical institution of 
erem see: Gottwald, The Tribes of YHWH (1979); von Rad (1991: 49–51; P. D. Stern (1991); Niditch (1993: 28–77). 
erem could be commanded by God or could be taken on as a vowed obligation—the latter seems to be the priestly idea of this institution (Love: 27:21, 28; Num. 18:14; Ezek. 44:29).
19. Many scholars have written about the extraordinarily moving presentation of Saul’s fall from grace. See inter alia: Gunn (1980); Humphreys (1982: 95–116); Edelman (1991).
20. Commentators often point out that being a shepherd of sheep is, in the biblical world, preparation for being a shepherd of men—hence, Moses, David, and others are presented as shepherds. This is certainly true, but it is well not to lose sight of the fact that caring for the sheep was (and is) often an occupation given to fairly young children, boys or girls (so long as they did not need to be absent from home overnight).
21. Scholars have long noted the heavy Deuteronomistic hand in this story, as well as the significant differences between the version preserved in the traditional Hebrew text (MT) and the Septuagint version; the latter is held by Tov and others to represent an earlier stage in the redaction of the Deuteronomistic history. See Tov, “The Composition of 1 Samuel 16–18,” in J. Tigay (1985: 97–130) and (1986); Rofé (1987: 117–51). (Note also: McCarter (1980: 306–7); Lust (1986). These studies in turn suggest that a final (post-exilic?) editor of the Deuteronomistic history produced the MT text of 1 Samuel 16–18 by combining two separate David and Goliath narratives. But Baruch Halpern may be right in suggesting the opposite: “The omissions in the Greek contain all the verses suggesting that David was unknown to Saul when the confrontation with Goliath took place. So it looks as though the Greek text was harmonizing contradictions” (2001: 7).
22. See Knoppers (1995).
23. See the excellent summary article of V. H. Matthews s.v. “Perfumes and Spices” in Freedman (1992).
24. The interdiction found in the Aramaic floor inscription of the Ein Gedi synagogue, calling on worshipers not to reveal “the secret of the city” (raza’ di qarta’) may thus refer to the manufacturing process used for the manufacture of storax (s ori), since tanks for its production appear to have been hidden in some structures that have been excavated uphill from the synagogue.
25. See, for example, 2 Sam. 14:2. Anointing is thus forbidden on the Day of Atonement in rabbinic practice, and this association with mourning goes back at least as far as the Elephantine papyri: the Jewish soldiers garrisoned there report that their mourning for a destroyed temple included “wearing sackcloth and fasting, making our wives as widows, not anointing ourselves with oil or drinking wine”; Cowley (1923), no. 30.
26. Scholars used to argue that the anointing of high priests is a late element in the Hebrew Bible. For example, Noth (1967: 237–38) claimed that the anointing of priests is an entirely postexilic phenomenon, taken over by analogy from the anointing kings, and this argument has been followed by many subsequent scholars. See, however, Fleming (1998), which offers a plausible refutation of this argument.
27. Often mistranslated as if a noun, “light,” but this is the adjectival form, like ’orah in the next sentence.
28. I have discussed this in greater detail in Kugel (1990c).
29. Literally, “I can say to you confidently,” that is, without fear of contradiction.
30. Anastasis here probably means “rise” and not “resurrection,” unless it refers to David’s resurrection in the coming of Jesus.
31. It seems possible that Peter’s original point may have gotten a bit garbled in transmission. The intended sense may have been this: Although we all know that David lies dead and buried, we also know that he said in Psalm 15, “You will not abandon my soul in Hades, nor will You let my flesh experience corruption” (a paraphrase of the biblical verse). But how can this be true if David indeed is dead and buried? David was not talking literally about himself, but about the coming of the messiah, in whom his soul and his flesh will come back to life.
26. The Psalms of David
1. On this phenomenon see the essay by W. Holladay, “How the Twenty-Third Psalm Became an American Secular Icon” in Holladay (1993: 359–71).
2. Davidic authorship of the psalms is admirably surveyed in Cooper (1983).
3. Kugel (1998: 366–67).
4. On the history of this psalm’s interpretation: Kugel (1990: 173–213).
5. This hypothesis was adopted by Mowinckel (1962: 77).
6. Cooper (1983: 129).
7. The role of such headings has been studied in a comparative context: Driver (1926); Sawyer (1967–68); Lambert (1957) and (1962); Gevaryahu (1975); see also Childs (1971).
8. By 1900, the Davidic authorship position was in full retreat. In that year, for example, Alexander Wright (1900) sought to prove that “it is reasonable to suppose that David at least wrote certain of the psalms to which his name as author is prefixed.”
9. See Childs (1971).
10. See on this the Oxford English Dictionary (Murray, 1970: 1300). Apparently tornado was originally a mariner’s term for a circular sea storm on the Atlantic (including, but not limited to, hurricanes); gradually the word came to be applied to various sorts of land-storms as well. W. S. Gilbert pulled it out of his back pocket to rhyme with “mikado,” but earlier in the nineteenth century the word cyclone had been created, presumably as a more scientific-sounding general term for any circular storm of atmospheric disturbance. As such it certainly appealed to Oz’s creator, L. Frank Baum, as well as others, although eventually the swarthy, eye-patched tornado returned.
11. Note that this verse is thus mistranslated in both the NRSV and JPS versions.
12. See on this G. Rendsburg (1990: 51–53, 59n).
13. It disturbed scholars that Pentateuch itself had made no mention of such hymns in describing worship in the tabernacle; to some this suggested that temple hymnody was a postexilic innovation. See Kugel (1986).
14. See P. D. Miller (1983: 34).
15. As Claus Westermann correctly observed, Gunkel was hardly the first to set himself to classifying different types of psalms; rather, his Introduction stands at the “end” of a long process carried out largely by German scholars: Westermann (1981: 16).
16. First argued by R. Smend (1888).
17. See in general, Westermann (1981).
18. See on this: Kugel (2003: 109–36). In addition to the psalms, the book of Job also describes suffering in great detail—but its exception to the rule of silence is certainly a product of the book’s unique theme.
19. Often translated as “my blood,” “my death,” and so forth, because the Masoretic text has been mis-pointed. The whole point is “my silence,” that is, my not being able to praise.
20. For example, Westermann (1981: 75).
21. For the psalm as a whole: Kugel (2003: 121–24, 235–37) and sources cited there.
22. These have been studied in detail by, among others, M. Dahood (1972), (1975), and (1981); note also Gevirtz (1973) and Avishur (1984). However, as I argued some time ago (and others more recently) there is really nothing surprising in this apparent overlap of Ugaritic and biblical poetry, nor is there any indication that it derives from Semitic “poet-performers” having memorized lists of standard pairs of words as ancient Greek or more recent south Slavic bards memorized their standard formulae. These “fixed pairs” are simply part of the normal competence of any native speaker: Kugel (1981: 33–34).
23. This same meaning of rain appears in Jer. 17:6 (“They shall be like a shrub in the desert and shall not see when the rain comes”), Amos 4:7, and other texts. See the discussion in Dahood (1965: 25–26).
24. Morton Smith (1984); Sarna (1979).
25. See Kugel (1999: 250–70).
26. See Holladay (1993: 359–61), who locates this relatively late, at least in America.
27. Scholars have known for some time the Akkadian root 
almu, “be dark,” as well as the Arabic and Ethiopic cognates with the same meaning. It thus seems most likely that the original text had a single word, almut or almot (“darkness, obscurity”), which was subsequently divided—by mistake or perhaps on purpose—into two words, al mawet (“shadow of death”). (Cf. Ps. 48:15, which appears in the MT as two words, ‘l mwt [“over death’], but was doubtless a single word, ‘lmwt, “forever,” as in the LXX version.) Among the problems associated with this two-word compound is the fact that a “shade” or “shadow” in the world of the ancient Near East usually represents protection from the burning sun, hence more generally “shelter,” though shadows also are metaphorically fleeting; neither meaning, however, could be appropriately combined with “death.” Some modern scholars have sought nevertheless to salvage the old understanding, without, however, convincing many of their colleagues. An excellent summary: Chaim Cohen (1996).
28. Technically, šbty should be “return” rather than “stay” [yšbty], but this may be a copyist’s error, since in Hebrew as in English, one does not return “in” but “to.” What is more, the sentiment here parallels Ps. 27:4; remaining in the temple was a figure of being blessed. Alternately, the text might mean: “And I will return in [= to] the house of the LORD after a length of days.”
29. In a delightful essay, W. L. Holladay shows how the meaning of this psalm (assuming heuristically that it does go back to David’s times) would have changed its meaning several times even within the biblical period. After a while, “The LORD is my shepherd” would no longer appear to be singling out the God of Israel among other possible divine shepherds, although that is probably how the verse would have been understood in the tenth century BCE. Later on, the shepherd certainly changed for Christians in the light of John 10:11 (“I am the good shepherd”) and other verses. The “house of the LORD” would have changed its sense several times depending on whether there was only one such house and whether it was standing at the time; the “table” spread before the psalmist’s enemies was, for later Christians, the Eucharist, the still waters represented baptism, and so forth. Holladay’s concluding question is worth citing: “As we survey the journey of the Twenty-third Psalm from then to now, it is clear that some of its original implications are lost on us and that it has taken on the baggage of later implications. How much of this loss and gain is legitimate, to be encouraged? How much of it is illegitimate, to be fought against? To put it in the strongest terms: Is it possible that the Holy Spirit urged on the original poet, in pre-exilic Israel, words whose true import is only to be understood in later centuries, in the light of further revelation?” Holiday (1993: 13).
30. See Kugel (1983).
31. My thanks to Professor Carol Newsom for this point.
1. This is a very rich topic, which extends from the earliest patristic writings through Cassiodorus and Augustine’s De Doctrina Christiana and on into later medieval sources. I have dealt with some of them in Kugel (1981, esp. 135–70). See also: Roger (1938); McKitterick (1992). Note that a number of apologetic arguments were marshaled in favor of the classics: they presented a somewhat garbled form of Christian teaching since their authors had borrowed ideas liberally from the ancient Hebrews; they too contained hidden teachings of which their authors were unaware; they aided in education and so helped prepare Christians for sacred study. (On the latter two arguments, see next note and below.)
2. For Virgil in particular, a mitigating circumstance was often invoked: he was, like the Greek Sibyl, a pagan prophet who had foreseen the coming of the Messiah. See Clausen (1990: 65–74).
3. Kugel (1981: 164–67).
4. This is a much studied topic, and the situation varied widely from place to place and from century to century. It would seem foolish even to try to generalize about it in a paragraph, but omitting all mention of Jewish education would certainly be worse. On various aspects, see Goitein (1972: 173–90); Kanarfogel (1992); de Lange (1994: 115–28).
5. An important instance is the introduction by Profiar Duran (1350–1414) to his Ma‘aseh Efod, where he outlines a curriculum for the broader study of biblical texts by his contemporaries. On the Talmudic complaint and this work, see Leslie (1993: 212).
6. Scholars in general have their doubts about the story of David’s ascension to power as presented in 1 and 2 Samuel. Some see in it a largely apologetic account (written, perhaps, shortly after the monarchy split apart) designed to legitimate David and whitewash him of any hint of strong-arm tactics and, in particular, any role in the defeat or death of Saul, as well as in the death of Abner and Ishboshet. On this: McCarter (1980: 439–504 and 1981: 355–67); Whitelam (1984: 61–87); and Ishida (1999: 159–61)—he rejects, however, the characterization of the Abner account as apologetic. See also: Campbell (2003: 310–11 and references there); Brettler (1998: 91–111). Two recent book-length studies of David are particularly important, and persuasive, in their depiction of David as a tyrannical and ruthless leader: MacKenzie (2000) and Halpern (2001). In contrast to these scholars, those adopting the “minimalist” approach tend to see the entire Davidic empire, along with David himself, as a later fiction; see below. For a decent attempt at defending the historical David against the suspicions of modern historians: Bosworth (2006: 191–210).
7. On this chapter as well as the biblical prohibition of necromancy and other aspects of the world of the dead, see Kugel (2000: 169–200) and the sources cited 247–51.
8. For the complete text and commentary, Kugel (1999: 98–104).
9. See note 6.
10. See VanderKam (1980: 521–39).
11. See on this: Na’aman (1996: 17–27 and 1998: 42–44).
12. R. Shapira, “A Debate of Biblical Proportions,” Haaretz, August 5, 2005. Cf. E. Mazar (1997: 50–57 and 2006: 16–27, 70).
13. See the judicious review of the evidence by Knoppers (1997: 19–44). He concludes: “Revisionist treatments have been more successful in attacking the case for a Davidic-Solomonic empire than they have been in justifying the nihilist position on the existence of Solomon and the united kingdom. My own position . . . is to accept David and Solomon as historical figures and to acknowledge the domains they governed as ‘states,’ rather than as chiefdoms.’” (p. 42).
14. The literature on, and controversy surrounding, this inscription is quite extensive; scholars have disputed the dating of the inscription[s], the sense of bytdwd, as well as the unity of the two fragments found. See Biran and Naveh (1993: 81–98 and 1995: 1–18); Tropper (1993: 395–406); Cryer (1994: 3–19). B. Halpern (1994: 63–80) provided a careful analysis of the editio princeps, suggesting that the inscription belongs to the end, rather than the beginning, of the ninth century. Note also: Demsky (1995: 29–35); Lemche and Thompson, (1994: 3–22); Sasson (1995: 11–30); Knoppers (1997: 36–40 and the further bibliography there); also, Lemche (1998: 38–43 and passim). On the absence of a word divider in byt dwd, hold to be crucial: Ben Zvi (1994: 29–32); Rendsburg (1995: 22–25); and Athas (2002).
15. Lemaire (1994: 30–34).
16. See on this Noth (1960: 189–91); Kenyon (1971: 12); Hermann (1981: 154–57).
17. That David surrounded himself by “a foreign bodyguard with no loyalties but to David” was observed by Cross (1973: 230). It is certainly possible that Jebusites were incorporated into David’s army or personal guard, perhaps those identified elsewhere as Hittites; see on this Licht (1958). On the reaction of David’s wife Michal to his behavior in transferring the Ark, David Wright (2002: 201–25) has suggested that this element may be a later addition to the narrative intended to underscore her family’s opposition to David’s rule.
18. See Weinfeld (1983: esp. 104–14).
19. On the text of this passage, see McCarter (1984). Many scholars date the passage quite early. For example, Cross (1973: 255): “There is no reason to doubt, in view of the antitemple sentiment of the old oracle, that in poetic form it goes back to Davidic times”; see also Schniedewind (1999), who dates the original oracle to the time of David. One argument for the antiquity of the passage cited (apart from some archaic features of its language) is that it seems to take no cognizance of the coming split between north and south; were its author aware of the split, would he not have included some allusion to it in formulating God’s promise? But such an argument from silence is relatively weak. One might equally claim that, by the time these words were written, the split (and perhaps even the northern kingdom’s fall) were such an established fact that they were, as it were, “off the radar” of the writer; his whole concern was to account for the Davidic dynasty’s legitimacy and longevity. As for its “antitemple sentiment” (Cross), this may be less a sentiment against the institution of the temple than a straightforward attempt to reconcile the divine choice of David with the (by then) widespread attribution of the Jerusalem temple’s founding to David’s son Solomon; cf. that other attempt, 1 Chronicles 22–29. But the whole question must be considered in light of the various other references to this same promise, some of which present it rather differently (inter alia: I Kings 2:3–4; 8:25; 9:2–9; 2 Kings 21:7–8; and Psalm 132). See among many others the discussion in McCarter (1984) as well as R. E. Friedman (1981: 10–13); Halpern (1996: 144–80); Levenson (1984: 353–61).
Scholars have long identified in the Davidic covenant a central theme in the Deuteronomistic history and other parts of the Hebrew Bible, one with great resonance for later, messianic themes, See, inter alia, Mowinckel (1955), Mettinger (1976); and the recent essays in Day (1998). The promise of Davidic rule “forever” is not conditional on the people’s obedience to divine law, or anything else, for that matter; in keeping with this, scholars have contrasted two “covenant” types in the Bible, “conditional” and “unconditional.” Weinfeld (1970: 184–203 and 1972: 73–81) explored ancient Near Eastern parallels to the two sorts of agreements. Actually, the distinction between “conditional” and “unconditional” covenants goes back at least to Mendenhall (1954: 50–76), who, in this seminal article, contrasted the Mosaic covenant with the covenants of Abraham in Genesis 15 and 17: “It is not often enough seen that no obligations are imposed on Abraham. Circumcision is not originally an obligation, but a sign of the covenant, like the rainbow in Gen. 9 . . . The covenant of Moses, on the other hand, is almost the exact opposite. It imposes specific obligations” (p. 62). In what follows, Mendenhall goes on to elaborate the connection of the (unconditional) Davidic covenant with Christianity. Two brief passages are worth quoting: “[D]uring the monarchy and according to every indication we have in the time of David, the tradition of the covenant with Abraham became the pattern of the covenant between YHWH and David . . . The covenant with Abraham was the ‘prophecy’ and that with David the ‘fulfillment.’ . . . It is likewise not surprising that J does not seem to emphasize the Mosaic covenant—the important one was that which YHWH gave to Abraham. The Mosaic legal tradition could hardly have been more attractive to Solomon than it was to Paul. [p. 72] . . . The New Covenant of Christianity obviously continued the Abraham-Davidic covenant with its emphasis on the Messiah, Son of David. . . . The new stipulations of the covenant are not a system of law to define in detail every obligation in every conceivable circumstance, but the law of love” (75–76, italics mine). As some later scholars have suggested, the distinction has probably been drawn too sharply, perhaps for apologetic purposes. Nevertheless, many writers have seen a conflict between the account of a great covenant of laws at Sinai—upon which Israel’s connection with its God and, consequently, its continued presence in its land, is conditioned—and a divine promise to David that he and his descendants will rule Israel forever.
In place of “conditional” and “unconditional” covenants, Jon Levenson (1975: 203–33, esp. 225–27) proposed to substitute “contemporary” vs. “ancestral” covenants. This article’s argument is, however, far broader: Levenson suggests that the original Deuteronomistic history did not include the legal core, since that history’s covenant was the divine grant of kingship to David and his descendants, a covenant that precluded any conditional grant of the land based on the people’s adherence to the laws given at Sinai (and reiterated and elaborated in the legal core of Deuteronomy). (Levenson cites M. Tsevat: “If the existence of the confederacy, which is conditional, is the body, then kingship, which is an organ, cannot be unconditional,” p. 227). Levenson later elaborated this theme (1985). In his view, the “subordination of the Davidic covenant to the Sinaitic in I Kings 8:25 . . . must be seen as a reinterpretation of the pristine Davidic covenant material, a reinterpretation that reflects the growing canonical status of the Sinaitic traditions that will become the Pentateuch. I Kings 8:25 is the vengeance of Moses upon David, of the ‘kingdom of priests’ upon the hubris of the political state, for it resolves the clash between the two covenants in favor of the Mosaic one.” Levenson (1985: 211).
20. One scholar has recently argued the opposite, claiming that the books of Samuel and Chronicles draw on a common source, and that the Bathsheba incident was inserted into the former as a bit of antimonarchic propaganda: Auld (1994).
21. On this psalm: Kugel (1999: 147–58).
22. This approach was first put forward in Rost (1926). Gunn’s study (1978) actually argued against Rost, suggesting that what Rost had identified as an isolatable literary unit was merely part of a larger composition. See below.
23. This was the theme of von Rad’s famous essay, “The Beginnings of History-Writing in Ancient Israel” (1965: 166–204). Lately, this idea has been strongly challenged. See, for example, the essays by Erhard Blum, John Van Seters and others in de Pury and Römer (2000); also Gunn (1978). From a rather different angle, Friedman (1998) has also argued against the “Succession Narrative” thesis. Without adopting Rost’s (or von Rad’s) thesis, John Barton (2004: 95–106) has, I believe, presented a series of strong arguments against those who would date the David narratives to post-exilic times and see in them a work of pure fiction.
24. See note 23.
28. Solomon’s Wisdom
1. Thus many commentators and historians take its account at face value; as noted earlier, von Rad (1965) even distinguished the “Succession Narrative” from earlier sagas and stories of heroes, calling it the “oldest specimen of ancient Israelite historical writing” (176); see above, chapter 27, note 23. See also Hermann (1982: 145–73).
2. Whybray (1968: 10); although he, like Hermisson (1971: 136–54) and others, finds traces of the “wisdom ideology” in this narrative.
3. On David’s last words and similar biblical scenes: Kugel (1999: 176–79).
4. See Weinfeld (1972: 246), for the obvious bits of Deuteronomic wording. Some scholars, including Weinfeld (1972: 248–51), have argued that this is a reworking of an “ancient and genuine” tradition; see also Hermann (1953–54: 51ff) (reference from Weinfeld). Note also Halpern (1996: First Historians, 146, 176 notes 6 and 8).
5. G. von Rad (1984: 203) connected the rise of wisdom in Israel with the time of Solomon himself, a period when the “blossoming of economic life was naturally followed close behind by an intensive interchange of spiritual ideas . . . In short, the time of Solomon was a period of ‘enlightenment,’ of a sharp break with the ancient patriarchal code of living.” A similar line was followed by Heaton (1974). See also Lemaire (1995: 106–18). This argument, theoretically plausible, has been challenged by many scholars, including Weeks (1994: 110–31). It is obviously rejected as well as by those who deny the historicity of Solomon’s great empire or wide-ranging commercial contacts—all a much later pipe-dream, according to revisionist historians. On the latter phenomenon: Knoppers (1997). Thus, the jury is still out.
6. Weinfeld (1972: 254–557) judges it “pre-Deuteronomic”; see also Halpern (1996: 147 and n.).
7. Particularly problematic was Solomon’s imposition of the mas, or conscription of forced labor; see 1 Kings 5:13 (some texts: 5:27).
8. Above, note 5. In any case, M. K. Fox’s study (196: 239) of the social environment reflected in the book of Proverbs points (as earlier studies had) to the court as the apparent location of Israelite wisdom. “The generations of readers who interpreted Proverbs as the wisdom of one man, Solomon, went too far, but they were going in the right direction.”
9. This principle is attested in the Mishnaic law in Baba Metzi‘a 1:1, but it is doubtless considerably older.
10. On ancient Near Eastern wisdom: Kugel (1999: 107–28).
11. Indeed, the whole concept of wisdom as described in the foregoing owes much to the ancient Egyptian ma‘at, justice and the divine order; See Volten (1963: 72–102); Wuertwein (1976: 113–33). This international effort is extremely ancient. From Old Kingdom Egypt (third millennium BCE) comes such collections as the “Instructions of Ptah-hotep” and the “Instructions from Kagemni”; see Faulkner (1972). Old Sumerian proverbs survive from early in the second millennium BCE: Kramer (1959: 119–26).
12. On the mashal: Kugel (1999: 159–80).
13. This section’s structure has been much discussed: P. Skehan (1971: 9–45); Kayatz (1966): Lang (1972).
14. The Egyptian origin of Proverbs 22:17—23:11 (or possibly up to 24:22) was first argued by Erman (1924: 241–52); see also Romheld (1989); see also Shupak (1993).
15. See Kugel (2004: 32–52).
16. It has been argued that this is a uniquely Israelite feature; see van der Toorn (1985: 100–13); on the phenomenon in Ecclesiastes, see also Loader (1979).
17. For a fuller description of this book: Kugel (1999: 305–23).
18. See below, chapter 34, as well as Kugel (1999: 105–28).
19. Whitley (1979) presents a careful linguistic analysis of key verses; still better: Davila (1990: 69–87).
20. Ullendorff (1962: 215).
21. Ancient interpreters associated the root of this name with another meaning of qhl, “assemble” or “gather”; perhaps, they thought, he referred to himself that way because he had “assembled gatherings” of sages. As a result, when the book was translated into Greek it was called ekklesiastes, the “man of the assembly.” Still later, when ekklesia came to refer specifically to the Christian churches (cf. Latin ecclesia, French église, etc.), ekklesiastes became “the preacher,” as the book is still known in some vernaculars.
22. Again, sec Kugel (1999: 307–23).
23. The opening word of this line, yašqeni (“Let him cause me to drink”) has long been mispointed as yešaqqeni, hence the tautological mistranslation, “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth.” On the contrary, drinking is the common element joining parts A and B; it is the whole point of the mashal.
24. The rustic figures of this song are reminiscent of those in classical Greek and Roman pastoral; this is not to argue any direct influence, but to suggest that the impulse of urban poets to glorify the simple life of the country and all that goes on there may arise in more than one setting.
25. See Tosefta Sanhedrin, 12:10.
26. Marvin Pope (1978) sought to associate the song with funeral rites in the beit marzeah, but this suggestion has attracted few adherents. His commentary remains an outstanding (and exhaustive) contribution to scholarship.
27. It is strikingly symptomatic of modern scholarship’s romance with original meaning that some scholars have in fact sought to suggest that the Song of Songs might have become part of Israel’s sacred library before it was ever understood as a divine allegory: it was a liturgy for the mourning revel, it was Solomonic propaganda, and so forth. I do not find the slightest merit in any of these arguments, most of which are contradicted by the text of the Song itself.
28. That is, the shekhinah or divine presence, whose female-ness was lovingly elaborated by Jewish mystics throughout the ages.
29. Ginzbcrg (1998: 43–47, esp. notes 127, 129, 136); Hollander (1993: 218–19).
30. M. Yadayim 3:5; see on this Lieberman (1965: 118–26). On Akiba’s role see Kugel (1999: 276–78).
29. North and South
1. On this see Monson (2000: 20–35).
2. See 1 Kings 22:10.
3. See on this m. Baba Batra, 2:8; note also Hosea 13:3, Jer. 51:33.
4. Rupprecht (1977).
5. On this translation see Weinfeld (1982: 27–53).
6. On Shoshenq and the Karnak inscription: Kitchen (1973: 293–300). Scholars disagree on the question of whether there may be a direct, literary relationship between the inscription and the biblical account: Na’aman (1999: 13–17); Parker (2000: 357–78).
7. See the discussion in Cross (1973: 198–99); for the bronze statue of a bull at a twelfth-century BCE site, see above, chapter 16, note 9. The cherubim iconography is attested, for example, in the Ahiram sarcophagus from Byblos (Pritchard, 1975: vol. 1, illustration 126), where the king is represented sitting on a cherub throne before an offering table.
8. Geneva Bible (1560), iiii.
9. Ahab and his wife Jezebel are the conventional “bad monarchs” and seem to have been framed so as to conform to an existing type; they stand in contrast to the strictly moral, unbending prophet (in their case, Elijah). The Ahab-Elijah story shows many parallels to the Saul-Samuel narrative; see Campbell (1986).
10. If the onomasticon is any guide, Ahab was certainly not an opponent of the worship of YHWH: the names of his sons Y[eh]oram and Ahaziyah[u] would seem to indicate his allegiance. But if the narrative has any historical reality, he seems not to have backed the monolatrous devotion to this deity—that, for Elijah, was his crime. The eighth-century Samarian ostraca (discovered in 1910 in the capital of the Northern Kingdom), document a host of personal names, some constructed with the divine name Baal and some with YHWH; this too might seem to indicate a somewhat syncretistic society, but see above, chapter 24, “Named for God.”
11. See Pritchard (1969a: plate 490).
12. Thus the Jewish Publication Society (1985) version, “The LORD alone is God.”
13. For this translation: Kugel (1999: 69); Burnett (2001: 118).
14. Most translations read, “The voice of the LORD . . .”; Hebrew qol can indeed mean both “listen” (as an imperative) and the noun “voice.” In the case of this psalm, the “voice of the LORD” would presumably be a reference to the thunder accompanying the storm. But if so, then the “voice of the LORD” ends up doing a lot of things one would not normally expect voices, even divine voices, to do, such as shattering trees and shooting forth sparks. “Listen!” thus seems a better translation.
15. Ginsberg (1935: 472–76 and 1936: 129–35); Gaster (1946–47: 55–65); Cross (1950: 19–21 and 1973: 151–52 and n. 23); Day (1979: 143–51). Some have dissented: Margulis (1970: 332–48); Craigie (1972: 143–51); Loretz (1984); see the latter for further bibliography.
16. See Gaster (1946–47: 58).
17. Herdner (1963: 1.4 v 6–7; vii 27–35).
18. Music by Ben Weisman, with lyrics by Al Stillman.
19. See on this Wuerthwein (1993: 152–66).
20. In this connection: Cross (1973: 194); Miller (1986: 239–48).
21. This is not a strictly northern feature, of course. Still, it does seem more characteristic of prophets in the north than in the south: Miller (1986a: 82–95).
22. Wilson (1980: 135–251).
23. For Elisha’s secret, see Graves (1925).
24. On Jesus as miracle-worker, see the pioncering work of Morton Smith (1998, originally published 1978), followed by Vermes (1982: 20–22, 182, 239–44) and Meier (1994: 535–50).
25. Note the description of Elijah in Blenkinsopp (1983: 71–72).
26. On the reading “Israel” see Ben-Hayyim (1973: 60); Skehan and Di Lella (1987: 531).
27. This is true of the Masoretic text; the Septuagint reports Phinehas’s death at Josh. 24:33.
28. Further: Kugel (1998: 811–14, 824–25).
29. Levenson (1993: 179–80) surveys the extensive biblical and extra-biblical evidence for the institution child sacrifice in the ancient Near East. In connection with the Mesha Stone, see also Horn (1986: 62–63).
30. Some light was shed on the missing part of this name by the discovery of a ninth-century inscription at Kerak (Jordan) that referred to a certain [K]mšyt. See Reed and Winnett (1963: 1–9). They analyze the name as kmš + šyt, that is, “Chemosh has established (him over the land)” (7).
31. As appropriate for such a long and detailed inscription, a large scholarly literature has grown up around the Mesha Stone. One recent collection of essays: Dearman (1989).
30. The Book of Isaiah(s)
1. Haran (1982: 163 and 1985: 1–11).
2. The chronology is not quite certain; some scholars have suggested the lower date of 733. Starting with Kaplan’s article (1926: 251–59), scholars have expressed skepticism about Isa. 6:1–8 being Isaiah’s “call,” in part because of its placement in the book: if it were really his first summons to prophecy, why is it not at the head of the book? In addition, there is the striking resemblance between Isa. 6:1–8 and the prophet Micaiah’s account of a certain vision of his, “I saw the LORD sitting on his throne, with all the host of heaven standing beside him to the right and to the left of him. And the LORD said, ‘Who will entice Ahab, so that he may go up and fall at Ramoth-gilead?’ Then one said one thing, and another said another, until a spirit came forward and stood before the LORD, saying, ‘I will entice him.’” (1 Kings 22:19–21). Since this vision does not announce Micaiah’s inauguration as a prophet, why should the similar vision in Isaiah 6 be taken as his inauguration? On such grounds, J. Blenkinsopp (2000: 223) and earlier scholars have suggested that the passage represents Isaiah’s “commissioning for a special political mission in connection with the threat of a Syrian Samarian invasion in or about the year 734.” This argument seems ill-conceived. On form-critical grounds, there is no reason not to see the fundamental similarity of Isaiah 6 to other call narratives; indeed, Jeremiah seems to have seen it as such since he echoes its principal gesture, the seraphim touching the prophet’s lips, in his own call narrative (Jer. 1:9). Did the authors of these narratives all misunderstand the original function of the Isaiah passage? Moreover, there is the mīs-pî connection, on which see below and note 10. As for the literary resemblance between Isaiah’s vision and Micaiah’s, it is certainly remarkable, but it hardly sheds light on the significance of Isaiah’s vision: its connection to the latter can only be addressed once the literary-critical problem of their common material has been resolved. Finally, some scholars have suggested that the whole passage is post-exilic: Kaiser (1983); Gosse (1992: 340–49). However, the arguments have hardly been accepted as persuasive; see Williamson (1994); Barthel (1997: 79–82).
3. This might be suggested by his presence in the “temple” in the passage cited below. Some have seized on this detail to suggest that the vision was brought on by a temple incubation (the practice of sleeping in a temple or other sacred site for oracular purposes: cf. 1 Samuel 3). For a review of the evidence see Wildberger (1972: 230–45).
4. Greenfield (1985: 193–98) adduced comparative evidence to suggest that the reference to the throne’s height as well as the deity’s stature—His train filling the temple—derive from the iconography of the enthroned Baal as well as Marduk iconography. R. Knierim (1968: 47–68) had earlier pointed to the dependence of this throne image on the Baal iconography.
5. On this there is a vast bibliography; note inter alia Aptowitzer (1931: 137–53, 257–87); for Qumran, Strugnell (1960: 318–45), and Newsom, (1985: 39–58, 79–80); and Kugel (1998: 54, 58–59, 713–15, 730–31 and the bibliography cited there).
6. On the appearance of this motif in the Apostolic Constitutions, see Newman (2004). Direct citation of Isa. 6:3 is puzzlingly absent in the Dead Sea Scrolls (as is that of Ezek. 3:12). though allusions to both have been found. See Chazon (2003: 35–47).
7. Note the slight changes: “triumphal song” (it is hardly so described in Isaiah); “never-silent” (this is the theme of laus perpetua, part of the larger angelic topos of “Tireless Angels,” Kugel (1998: 76–77); and “the heaven and the earth are full of Your glory”—since, if God is omnipresent, then surely that includes heaven as well.
8. On this psalm, see Kugel (2003: 120–25). On the divine council: Mullen (1980); De Moor (1970: 195–220); Miller (2000); Handy (1994); Mark Smith (2001: 41–53).
9. My student S. Z. Aster argues in a forthcoming article that the six-winged creatures in Isaiah’s vision are paralleled by multiwinged creatures in Assyrian iconography who guard the entrance to the king’s throne-room. Note that the Ahiram sarcophagus from Byblos represents the king seated on his throne and flanked by cherubim.
10. The connection of Isaiah 6 with mīs-pî was first suggested by Egnell (1949: 40–41). The matter is treated fully in Hurowitz (1989: 39–89).
11. For Assurnasirpal II’s account: Pritchard (1969: 275–76); also Grayson (1972–76, vol. 2: 153–56).
12. See, briefly, Lambert (2004: 352–65).
13. On the image of Assyria in biblical sources from this time, see Machinist (1983: 719–37), who shows the sometimes striking resemblance between Isaiah’s descriptions and those found in neo-Assyrian propaganda, for example, Isa. 37:24 (2 Kings 19:23) and the royal boasts of Shalmaneser III and Sennacherib.
14. On the actual fate of the deportees: Zadok (1979 and 2003), Na’aman (2000).
15. On some of the problems arising from the usual explanation of the Syro-Ephraimite war, see Cazelles (1978: 70–78); and Cazelles in Garrone (1991: 31–48); also Tomes (1993: 55–71) and Barthel (1997).
16. Scholars are divided about the references in chapter 7 and their connection to Isaiah’s ipsissima verba. See, for example, Clements (1980: 78–103). Some scholars view the material in 7:1—8:18 (or, according to others, 9:7) as a “memoir” detailing the prophet’s role in advising the king and penned by Isaiah himself or his followers; to such an account chapter 6 was, they argue, appended as a kind of introduction and then the whole complex inserted into the larger bloc of material extending from 5:1 through 12:6.
17. This is described in the text as an ’ot, usually translated as a “sign,” but as we have seen earlier in the cases of Cain and Moses, the word ’ot sometimes means a solemn promise or pledge. It does here as well. See above, chapter 13, note 23.
18. The next verse, “The LORD will bring on you and on your people and on your ancestral house such days as have not come since the day that Ephraim departed from Judah—the king of Assyria,” seems to be a non sequitur and has long troubled scholars. Perhaps Isaiah is quoting an earlier oracle given to or about the Kingdom of Israel (Ephraim)—you are about to undergo the worst event in your history.
19. In so saying, Ahaz was proposing a formal suzerainty treaty (or perhaps invoking one that was already in existence) between Assyria and Judah. As Judah’s suzerain, Assyria would be obliged to come to its vassal’s aid. On the formula “servant [or “vassal”] and son,” see Loewenstamm (1969: 148).
20. On his return to Jerusalem, Ahaz is said to have replaced the altar in the Jerusalem temple and introduced other changes (2 Kings 16:7–18). The reason for these changes is not explicit in the biblical text, but earlier scholars suggested that this as well was some sort of kowtowing to Assyria; see, for example, Gray (1963: 576). Cogan (1974: 73–77), however, argued that imposing syncretistic worship was not a characteristic of Assyrian policy. He therefore endorsed the suggestion that the model for the altar was Syrian, not Assyrian, and that the change was prompted by “aesthetic reasons”; the new altar “served only a legitimate YHWH cult,” in keeping with 2 Kings 16:15.
21. “Samuel took the [not mentioned previously] cruse of oil . . .” [1 Sam. 10:1); “This lowly man called out and the LORD heard him . . .” (Ps. 34:7).
22. On this topic there is, understandably, an enormous scholarly literature; most recent surveys, citing (inter alia) the use of the Ugaritic cognate ġlmt, suggest that the term does not reflect virginity or the absence thereof. On the other hand, in this particular semantic field changeability seems to be the rule: Ugaritic btlt does not necessarily mean virgin, although the cognate in Hebrew did acquire that meaning; French pucelle moved in the same direction, while English maid, which used to imply virginity, now designates a domestic helper. See also chapter 1, note 64.
23. A more extended treatment of this passage: Kugel (1999: 181–91).
24. Allen (1983).
25. Some scholars have suggested that the Deuteronomistic history was originally created in the time of Hezekiah and then revised and expanded in Josiah’s time; that might account for the attention lavished on Hezekiah. See Peckham (1985); Halpern (1996: 111–17).
26. See further: Pritchard (1969: 287–88), as well as the more recent translation and discussion of Fuchs (1998).
27. Tadmor (1985: 74–78). Note also Ben Zvi (2003: 73–105).
28. Scholars have long been troubled by what appears to be chronological incompatibility in the dates contained in the biblical account (see 2 Kings 18:13—19:37 [= Isaiah 36–37] and 2 Chr. 32:1–23) with the Assyrian record. Some have sought to reconcile the dates by positing two separate campaigns of Sennacherib, others have rejected this approach. For the latter see Cogan and Tadmor (1988: 246–51) and Gallagher (1999). Scholars have also debated the relationship between Isaiah 36–27 and 2 Kings 18:13—19:37; see Williamson (2004: 184–86).
29. Paying such tribute might seem to be inconsistent with the report of Hezekiah’s successfully resisting a siege; this has led some scholars to suggest that there were in fact two invasions of Judah. Such a conclusion hardly imposes itself, however.
30. These include all the direct citations, but certainly other passages—for example, Mark 9:12, 15:28 and 1 Cor. 15:3; 1 Pet. 2:21–25—have also been included. Further: Zimmerli and Jeremias (1965: 88–106).
31. The questioning began with the rise of modern biblical scholarship and was debated for some time. Most modern scholars today reject the identification of the “servant” with Jesus and even the isolation of the “servant songs” as such: see in particular the brief monograph of Mettinger (1983) and the extensive bibliography there (pp. 48–50); see also this volume’s Appendix 1, “Apologetics and Biblical Criticism Lite,” on the Web site jameskugel.com.
32. For a brief history of the research into such oracles: Mettinger (1983: 2–9), as well as chapter 33. For Isaiah, see also Miller (1982a: 37–59).
33. This passage has been much discussed by commentators, who disagree as to who the “voice” belongs to and whether “Humanity is only grass . . .” is the prophet’s response to the summons to speak or (as I once preferred) the message that the prophet is to deliver, followed by his own response. Cross (1953: 274–77) saw in chapter 40 a recrudescence of the divine council motif: the plural imperatives “Comfort . . . speak . . .” in 40:1–2 are directed to the members of the council, and the voice that speaks in 40:3 and 6 belongs to one of these members. This has seemed convincing to many.
34. More on this theme: Kugel (1999: 288–304).
35. Note the excellent history of scholarship in Seitz (1996).
36. One particularly important recent study is Sommer (1998), which carefully examines allusions to earlier Scripture in these chapters. The author demonstrates that the form of allusion and its overall style is rather uniform throughout chapters 40–66, supporting the idea that they are the work of a single author. See in particular his review of scholarship on the question of Trito-Isaiah (187–95). Sommer also shows that, quite surprisingly, the clearest allusions in chapters 40–66 (along with Isaiah 35) are to passages from Jeremiah, which might imply (contra several other recent studies) that chapters 40–66 were not originally intended to supplement “First Isaiah.”
37. For the characteristics of the call narrative: Habel (1965: 297–323). Habel suggests that the genre may have originated in imitation of a diplomat presenting his credentials. Also: Long (1977).
38. Von Rad (1972: 27). Von Rad’s focus on the Hcxateuch (rather than the Pentateuch) was both historical and theological; it was the book of Joshua, he argued, that originally closed the circle of the promises made to Israel’s ancestors in Genesis. But if so, scholars properly asked, then why had the final form been the Pentateuch rather than the Hexateuch? What sense did it make for the Pentateuch to end with the death of Moses, instead of ending with the book of Joshua and Israel’s triumphal entrance into the land? And, for that matter, who juxtaposed one thing to another within the Pentateuch—why were laws mixed in with historical records, in fact, what were all these priestly laws doing in a book apparently intended for a much wider audience than the priests? It might well be argued that the present form of the Pentateuch was simply a matter of happenstance—bits and pieces had been added to an original text in haphazard fashion. (See, in a broader context, Haran: 1996–2003.) But the apparent disorder might also be the result of conscious design: an editor may have purposely decided to separate the era of Moses from everything that followed. It was thus that tradition history and redaction criticism ultimately led to canonical criticism and the focus on the text’s final, canonical form. “None of the ancient witnesses within the Bible itself . . . provide the slightest hint that the Torah story in any form ever ended where the Pentateuch ends . . . When one fully understands that it was the Torah story which gave divine authority to the various customs and laws which are included in the Pentateuch—i.e., that Judaism’s authentic laws were understood to derive their authority from the fact that they were inherited from the Torah story period, or as we later came to say, from Sinai—then one understands why, in its final form, all laws had to be read back into that period” (Sanders (1972: 25–26)—a most important point, to which 1 return in chapter 36. Sanders and other canonical critics have likewise highlighted the fact (also seen herein) that some of the laws in Exodus or Leviticus seem to be contradicted by laws on the same subjects in Deuteronomy. If these contradictions were left to stand, it was not because some later editor had failed to notice them. Rather, the present form of the Pentateuch argues that these laws were given in a certain sequence: some were first promulgated at Mount Sinai, others thereafter, and then, forty years later, Moses “expounded” the Torah in the plains of Moab just before his own death (Deut. 1:1–5), introducing some new statutes and revising some of the old ones in the process. This sequence, scholars now said, was quite purposely created to account for the contradictions in what were originally separate law codes. For this same reason Deuteronomy had been connected to the books that preceded it and separated off from the book of Joshua that followed it, since this made the resultant Pentateuch into what is was for later Jews, the one, single corpus of divine law.
39. An important first step was Mowinckel (1933: 267–92), followed by Scott (1950: 175–86); Jones (1955: 226–46) and subsequent works; see below.
40. See his compendium (1979: 330–33).
41. Milgrom (1964: 164–82) answered the question of his title with a yes; he finds the historical background, pattern of repentance proffered and refused, along with what he sees in 2:10 ff. as an eyewitness description of the earthquake that took place in Uzziah’s time and which was mentioned also in Amos 1:1 and Zech. 14:4. If so, then at least some of the material in chapters 1–5 might indeed precede chapter 6 chronologically; but the argument is weak.
42. Scholars have long been aware of the parallel to Isaiah 6 in 1 Kings 22: 19–21. See above, chapter 30, note 2.
43. Clements (1982: 117–29 and 1985: 95–113); Rendtorff (1984: 295–320); Sweeney (1988); Seitz (1991); and Carr (1993). See, however, Sommer (1998) and note 35 above.
44. Childs’ position has been attacked on such grounds by several scholars, and this is not the place to review the arguments; see, inter alia, Barr (1983) and the sources cited in chapter 36.
45. See the discussion in Barr (1983: 23–26).
46. Moreover, it is often unclear what an editor intended us to understand. Levenson (1993: 62–81) has made this point well with regard to the Pentateuch. As is well known, the laws for the release of slaves are significantly different in different parts of the Pentateuch. Thus, in Exod. 21:20–26, release is quite unconnected to the sabbatical year: “six years shall he serve, and in the seventh year he shall go free.” The same “seventh year” provision appears in Deut. 15: 12, but its juxtaposition to the law of remission of debts in the seventh year (Deut. 15:1–11) suggests that here the old law’s phrase “seventh year” has been reinterpreted as the sabbatical year, no matter how long the slave has served. Meanwhile, in the Leviticus law of slaves (Lev. 25:8–17, 29–34) release is said to come in the jubilee year. There are other differences as well. Leviticus has no provision for a slave opting to stay with his master in perpetuity, while Exodus and Deuteronomy do. Exodus specifies that manumission of female slaves is to be different from that of males, while Deuteronomy explicitly denies this. So what was an ancient Israelite to do? Some scholars have argued that Deuteronomy’s position at the end of the Pentateuch was meant to suggest that its position on manumission and other matters was to be regarded as God’s “last word.” But how is one to know? Perhaps an editor’s inclusion of these discordant laws in the final version of the Pentateuch represents his unwillingness (or political inability) to give preference to one version over the others. Or may it perhaps indicate that, even at that relatively early stage, some sort of harmonistic exegesis was already being practiced? Such harmonizing was, in any case, practiced later on. Rabbinic exegesis—in keeping with the Four Assumptions—seeks to wrest a single meaning from these disparate passages, but in so doing, as Levenson points out, “the rabbis produce a law for which no one passage in the Torah provides no evidence.”
47. Hobbes (1968: 453 = p. 223 of 1651 edition).
48. Hobbes (1968: 425 = p. 205 of 1651 edition). See the discussion in Malcolm (2002: 423–25).
49. Barton (1986). To begin with, Barton notes, prophecy itself was generally understood as applying to distant or even eschatological times rather than the immediate future (which, by their time, was long past; see esp. pp. 179–213). Nor was prophecy limited to that which is identified as such in the text: psalms, songs, laws, and other genres might be equally prophetic. Hence, a New Testament writer “could say in a vague, summarizing way that ‘God spoke of old to our fathers by the prophets’ (Hebrews 1:1) and then go on to quote verses from the prophets, the psalms, the Pentateuch even, without any sense of incongruity” (95). What is more, prophetic texts were held to contain all sorts of teachings quite apart from the announcement of God’s judgments or imminent interventions: prophets were conceived to teach about matters of halakhah or ethical instruction, or to transmit information about God’s very nature or the ways of heaven. His conclusions accord altogether with those bits of ancient biblical interpretation examined in this and the preceding chapters.
50. Kugel (1999: 288–304).
51. Nor, for Christians, does the matter end there. The first Christians who adopted and accepted Isaiah as Scripture not only thought of it as one single book à la today’s canonical criticism. They also thought that the “servant of the LORD” passages, along with Isaiah’s references to the coming offspring “from the tree trunk of Jesse” and the little baby “born to us” were all about Jesus—indeed, such passages had not a little to do with Christianity’s whole acceptance of Jewish Scripture as their own. If the authority of Scripture derives from the community that accepted it as such, then can this aspect of Christian Scripture’s meaning really be shrugged off? Are Christians not bound by what the Bible was thought to mean in the decisive moment in which it was accepted? B. Childs (2004) has himself wrestled with this question in a recent work.
31. Jeremiah
1. An important body of evidence was amassed by Herbert Huffmon; see his summary in Freedman (1992: 5:477–82; also Barstad (1993: 39–60); Weippert (1997: 196–230); van der Toorn (1998: 55–70); Nissinen (1998: 4–9).
2. This may be connected with the absence of lengthy written records of prophetic speeches, and what that may (or may not) reflect about their standing in society. See on this the essays by van der Toorn and Nissinen (2000: 234–77).
3. Overholt (1989); Wilson (1980); see also Grabbe (1995).
4. Huchnergard (1999: 88–93).
5. Poignantly described by one great initiate: “Poet appointed dare not decline/ to walk among the bogus, nothing to authenticate/ the mission imposed, despised by toadies, confidence men, kept boys.” Bunting (1966).
6. Some of these issues are discussed in the various essays in Kugel (1990).
7. See on this Kugel (1981: 140–48 and 1990: 1–25).
8. This feature he described as parallelismus membrorum, “the parallelism of the clauses.” but his—and even more, later scholars’—focus on paralleling as the generative feature of Hebrew verse was a mistake. See O’Connor (1980), Kugel (1981: 1–58).
9. Lowth (1829: 176).
10. Some uncertainties persist in the precise dating of this and related events, although they are minor compared to other problems in biblical and ancient Near Eastern chronology. In general: Hughes (1990).
11. The subsequent Babylonian attempt to invade Egypt, in 601 BCE, was, however, frustrated; see below, note 25.
12. On this passage, as with the call of Isaiah, there is a vast scholarly literature. For an interesting analysis and review of recent scholarship: Sharp (2000: 421–43). One treatment of Jeremiah’s call suggesting that the passage is a secondary addition is that of Nicholson (1970: 114–15). Note also: Berquist (1989: 129–33). In general, scholars going back to Duhm have been quite reluctant to attribute much of the book of Jeremiah to the prophet himself (see next note), and this tendency has continued, with some modifications, into today’s commentaries and monographs. In particular, Carroll (1986) expressed profound doubts about the authenticity of much of the material contained in the book, and even about the figure of Jeremiah himself (largely the creation of Deuteronomic historians, he said); his work has been highly influential on subsequent criticism. For a recent reassessment: Reimer (2004: 207–24).
13. Mowinckel, Gunkel’s student, adopted Duhm’s overall approach in his own study of Jeremiah (Mowinckel, 1914). He held that the first-person sermons were composed by Deuteronomic editors no earlier than 400 BCE. Some subsequent critics have retreated from this late dating as well as the disconnection of these sermons from some things the prophet himself might have said. See inter alia: Bright (1951: 15–35) and Weinfeld (1972: 27–32), as well as the more recent commentaries and monographs cited below.
14. On the contrary, this style seems to be a stylistic development that emerges precisely in Jeremiah’s time: see Kugel (1981: 59–95 and with regard to Jeremiah, esp. 77–80). Note in this connection Weippert (1973), who, however, sees this “artistic prose” as a recasting of Jeremiah’s original poetic oracles.
15. Lundbom (1999: 252) notes that “most translators omit” the word lakh. This is true, but Lundbom’s own translation, “I remember about you your bridal devotion” only makes things worse. The idiom zkr l- is found as well in the positive sense of “remember to X’s credit” in Lev. 26:45 and Ps. 132:1. and in the negative sense in Pss. 79:8 and 137:7.
16. Vocalizing hēnnh, cf. Gen. 21:23.
17. On this: S-M. Kang (1996: 157). On this and the other Deuteronomic stereotypical expressions cited, see also Weippert (1973: 42, 215–22).
18. R. E. Friedman (1987) argued that Jeremiah himself was the Deuteronomistic historian (145–48), but this claim has not met with wide approval. On the other hand, the Deuteronomistic authorship of Jeremiah’s “prose sermons” has also been sharply questioned. Blenkinsopp (1977: 35–39) has noted some obvious instances of dissonance between Jeremiah’s preaching and Deuteronomy’s laws. Moreover, the language and characteristic expressions of Jeremiah, while similar to those of Deuteronomy, are in some ways distinct: Holladay (1984: 213–28). On this question see also Carroll (1986a: 38–50); Nicholson (1970: 1–138). On the specific matter of the “Temple sermon,” Reimer (2004: 215) argues persuasively that, precisely because of the changed status of the Jerusalem temple in post-exilic times, the “sermon” underlying both Jeremiah 7 and 26 “demands a pre-exilic setting, even if it was subsequently elaborated in different ways.”
19. The scholarly search for Jeremiah’s ipsissima verba was not exactly carried out in a vacuum. The same Protestant scholars who pursued this quest were well aware of a similar search for the ipsissima verba of Jesus in the New Testament. This was, of course, a much older undertaking—and for Christians, a far more consequential one. Four canonical gospels purport to set forth the very words that Jesus spoke, and, especially in the first three, there is a great deal of overlap. For centuries the slight differences between one gospel and the next were actually comforting. After all, four witnesses to the same events had reported substantially the same message, with slight variations; was this not proof of the fundamental veracity of all four? As New Testament scholarship advanced, however, a different explanation emerged, especially for the overlap of the first three gospels: Matthew and Luke had in fact copied a good deal of what they said from the gospel of Mark, supplementing it with their own additions, while the other common material shared by Matthew and Luke had come from a now-lost source, Q. In either case, the overlap proved nothing about the authenticity of what was being reported, only about the inauthenticity of their additions. So what had Jesus actually said? The last century of New Testament scholarship has gradually whittled away all or part of a great many of the sayings attributed to Jesus in the gospels. Some things have been clearly identified as later inventions, and internal contradictions and doctrinal inconsistencies in others have suggested that they too may not even be close to the ipsissima verba of Christianity’s founder. These researches, along with many others (too numerous to mention here), have raised the most troubling questions for devout Christians: To what extent can Christian teaching be identified with the things actually taught by Jesus of Nazareth? What is the historical reality that stands behind the things recounted in the New Testament? Where does the religion of Christianity come from, and what is it really? This in turn has served to shift the focus from the Scripture’s words to the real-life events that stand behind them. See above, chapter 1, note 65, as well as chapter 36.
20. Again, see Carroll (1986).
21. See the discussion in Holt (1986: 73–87); and Sharp (2003: 44–62). In general, opinion is still divided on Duhm’s basic attribution of the book to different sources, some scholars still maintaining a strict separation between the third-person biographical passages and the so-called prose sermons, others rejecting it. See, inter alia, the recent commentaries by Weippert (1973); Thiel (1973); Carroll (1981).
22. As many scholars suggest, the “enemy from the North” may have long before acquired a stereotypical character. On the passage, see also Harris (1983).
23. Jeremiah’s confessions continue to be extensively studied, from the standpoint of their authorship, genre, and relationship to the rest of the book. Generally included in the confessions are Jer. 11:18—12:6; 15:10–21; 17:14–18; 18:18–23; 20:7–13. Their Jeremianic authorship has been maintained by, for example, O’Connor (1988); contrast Pohlmann (1989). See also Diamond (1987) and Smith (1990, esp. 12–14, 24–28) for an analysis of the two passages cited.
24. See Nelson (1983: 177–89).
25. Egypt always had the tactical advantage of the Sinai desert: any invader seeking to cross the desert and enter Egypt would need fresh water for the troops—no minor concern in those days. Moreover, even after managing the crossing, the invader would be running a considerable risk: if he was defeated in battle, his army faced total annihilation, since any tactical retreat was blocked off by the same desert. See Eph’al (1993: 180–83).
26. Published by Wiseman (1956); see also Grayson (1975) and Glassner (2004).
27. Translation from: Glassner (2004: 228–29).
28. Ibid.
29. An alternate theory is that these ostraca were actually drafts of letters to be sent from Lachish to elsewhere—possibly Jerusalem—in which case Yaush would have been the commander there. See Yadin (1984: 179–86).
30. Others have suggested that this letter actually contradicts the biblical account, since the verse cited says that Azekah had not yet fallen, or that the letter originated in a different locale; most likely, however, the letter and the biblical verse represent two different moments in the deteriorating situation. See Begin (2002: 166–74).
31. A synthetic overview of warfare in biblical times: King and Stager (2001: 223–58).
32. Jerusalem’s two walls are apparently referred to in Isa. 26:1 and Lam. 2:8; cf. Ps. 48:14.
33. See further: Kugel (1999: 221–32).
34. A description of the site and the bullae: Shiloh and Tarler (1986: 196–209).
35. See Avigad (1986). The text reads: lbrkyhw bn nryhw hspr (“To Berekhyahu son of Neriyahu the scribe”); Berekhyahu, a common name in biblical times, might have been a more official form of Baruch’s name. The problem, however, is that this bulla was not found in situ and might thus be a forgery (many scholars have so concluded). Incidentally, Avigad questioned Shiloh’s identification of the Germaryahu bulla (which was found in situ) with the scribe mentioned by Jeremiah since the seal contained no mention of his title (Avigad 1986: 129). This, however, may not be sufficient ground for rejecting the identification.
36. 2 Kings 24:6 implies that Jehoiakim actually died a natural death: “So Jehoiakim slept with his fathers; then his son Jehoiachin succeeded him.” That this description is apparently at odds with Jer. 22:13–10 would seem to argue that this passage was written before Jehoiakim’s actual death, since there would be no point in having Jeremiah “predict” after the fact a dishonorable death that did not take place. See Reimer (2004: 217).
37. Note also that its placement makes a significant difference. In the shorter version of the book of Jeremiah found in the Septuagint text (on which see below), this prediction precedes the oracles against foreign nations, including those against Babylon, which do not appear in the traditional Hebrew text until chapters 50–51.
38. Luckernbill (1927, vol. 2: 243). See on this: Holladay (1986, vol. 1: 668–69); note also Zech. 1:12, 2 Chron. 36:21, and Dan. 9:2, 24–27. Professor Israel Eph’al suggested to me orally that this typological number influenced subsequent events, dictating the start of the rebuilding of the Jerusalem temple; see Israel Eph’al (forthcoming).
39. Like so many things, the historicity of this edict has at times been questioned, but a surviving cylinder inscription of Cyrus reports of the cities west of Mesopotamia, “I gathered all their [former] inhabitants and returned [them to] their habitations,” Pritchard (1969: 316). See on this I. Eph’al (1984) and Berquist (1995: 24–26).
40. This passage, taken from the section of Jeremiah known as the “Book of Consolation” (chapters 30–33), touches on a theme witnessed elsewhere as well in this section, the idea that Israel, Judah’s erstwhile northern neighbor, will also be restored to its ancient homeland. (Thus, “when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah . . .”) Of course, Israel’s restoration never took place. An earlier generation of scholars held that such references tell us nothing about when the passage was composed. After all, even Ben Sira in the second century BCE still hoped for Israel’s restoration: Elijah, he wrote, waits in heaven for the time “to calm the divine wrath before it bursts forth, to turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and to restore the tribes of Jacob” (Sir. 48:10; fragmentary Hebrew text of MS.B completed on the basis of the Greek). Many scholars have, accordingly, dated this passage (or at least the “new covenant” part) to a period somewhat later that of the historical Jeremiah; see, for example, Levin (1985). Still, of late some researchers have maintained that the fact that this is another unfulfilled prophecy suggests that it may indeed go back to Jeremiah’s own time. W. Rudolph (1968: 189) actually dated this passage to the period preceding Josiah’s death. Marvin Sweeney (1996: 569–83) similarly finds some references to Israel’s eventual restoration reflective of Josiah’s program, hence early, although the above-cited passage has, according to his analysis, redactional formulae indicating that it is later than the passages that immediately precede and follow it.
41. The “newness” question has been much debated: Swetnam (1974); Potter (1983: 347–57).
42. Tov (1972: 189–99 and 1984: 211–37) pioneered the thesis that the shorter version of the book of Jeremiah in the Old Greek translation preserves an earlier form of the text than that of the traditional Hebrew text.
43. On this subject see the recent dissertation of Hillel Newman (1997).
44. See J. R. Lundbom, s.v. “Jeremiah, book of,” in Freedman (1992).
45. On this idea and its relation to “strict verbal inspiration,” Gnuse (1985: 24).
32. Ezekiel
1. The term appears some 93 times in Ezekiel and nowhere else in the Hebrew Bible except for Dan. 8:17. The New Testament usage seems to be a modest form of self-reference.
2. See the various treatments of Gershom Scholem (1960: 42–67 and 1990: 20–21).
3. See Mishnah Hagigah 2:1, Tosefta Hagigah 2:1, Bab. Hagigah 13a; on the age limits imposed, see Scholem (1960: 42 and 1965: 36–42).
4. See Elbogen (1972: 49).
5. Alternately, the vague reference “from its/His place” might be taken as implying that the exact place is unknown. In one form or another, this reading seems to underlie b. Hagigah 13b, where this verse is adduced to support the contention that “there is no one who knows it,” that is, the place of God’s glory. It is even grammatically possible that the verse was read as a comparative: “More blessed is His glory than its source,” that is, do not concern yourselves with the place of the glory’s emanation. Indeed, understanding the verse in this comparative sense might illuminate the targum’s rendering, m’tr byt škntyh. This phrase might be taken as a reference to the temple, making the meaning of the two-verse sequence: God’s glory is everywhere (Isa. 6:3), indeed, His glory is more blessed than the [now destroyed] place of His dwelling (Ezek. 3:12).
6. Horowitz (2005).
7. This was first noted independently by two scholars, F. Hitzig in 1874 and S. D. Luzzatto in 1876. See Greenberg (1983: 70); cf. Ezek. 10:7.
8. See on this: Zimmerli (1979, vol. 1: 106); Greenberg (1983: 39–125, esp. 94). Uffenheimer (1995: 32). Odell (1998: 229–48) offers a somewhat different interpretation: He suggests that the eating is a kind of ordeal of prophetic initiation, whereby the prophet takes on (by internalizing, eating) the fate of his people.
9. On this, see Milgrom (1971): sin is a “miasma” that gathers in the sanctuary and must be purged; also, Schwartz (1995: 3–21).
10. Schwartz (1995: 4–5). Much has been written of late about the apparent distinction between ritual and moral impurity, starting with the study of Klawans (2000). My own feeling is that this distinction was not as sharp as Klawans and others have maintained, but in the present context, the precise degree of distinctness is immaterial: the main point is the fundamental analogy between the two in the priestly world.
11. The similar messages of Jer. 31:29–30 and Ezekiel 18 have been studied by numerous scholars. Particularly suggestive is the recent discussion by Kaminsky (1995: 139–78), which also surveys previous scholarship (155, n. 40). Kaminsky, who holds that Ezekiel 18 probably preceded the Jeremiah passage (159), sees the Ezekiel material in explicit dialogue with Deut. 24:16 (“Let not fathers be put to death for the children, and the children not for their fathers, but let each person be executed [only] for his own sin”): “Ezekiel creates a hypothetical drama to explore the theology found in the first two clauses of Deut. 24:16 . . . by constructing a tri-generational scheme with a wicked middle generation. Although he speaks about the first generation, his interest is not at all focused on the question of a vertical transference of sin from the wicked middle generation back to the father. In fact, nowhere in the Hebrew Bible is there an instance in which guilt works backward” (164–65). As for the apparently individual language of verses 1–20, Kaminsky suggests that this too may be a reflection of the precise formulation of the Deuteronomy passage; in Ezekiel 18, “the focus all along is on generations of people, not on individuals.” It thus has little to do with the “emergence of the concept of the individual” or other such themes often associated with it. Instead, its message is a rejection of “the notion of trans-generational retribution when the current generation is innocent: it abolishes the idea that a generation could live off its previous merits, or is completely doomed because of its earlier misdeeds” (177).
12. In a sense, Ezekiel’s vision of the dry bones plays on one of the most ancient observations—and hopes—of humanity. Human beings, everyone knew, arc formed in their mothers’ wombs, but exactly how they come alive was something of a mystery: “Just as you do not know how the spirit gets into the bones inside a pregnant woman’s belly,” says Koheleth. “so you do not understand [any of] God’s deeds, the creator of all” (Eccles. 11:5). Still more mysterious was the end of life. People stop breathing—the spirit departs—and soon all their flesh rots and melts away. But the bones stay on. Why would God have arranged things like that, instead of having the last traces of each person disappear? From very ancient times, people came to believe that the physical survival of bones might betoken some future purpose or use: presumably that is one reason why people treated the bones of their long-departed relatives with such care. On other aspects of this matter: Kugel (2003: 169–79) and the sources cited there (pp. 247–53).
13. Ibid. See also Greenspoon in Halpern and Levenson (1981: 247–321).
14. All of the texts cited are being presented as examples of the Bible’s support of martyrdom and the related belief in resurrection. Thus, Abel was a martyr killed by his wicked brother (yet even after his death, his blood could still “cry out” from the ground): on the death and resurrection of Isaac, see Spiegel (1979: 28–37); Joseph’s going down into the pit (of prison) could be taken as a figure of death, followed by his resurrection; Isaiah’s verse is being interpreted as a reference to human survival through the “flame” of death; the continuation of the psalmist’s verse (Ps 34:20) is “and the LORD will save him from all of them,” presumably after death; Solomon’s “tree of life” is the Torah (so called, apparently, because through it one gains eternal life); Moses’ citation of God’s words “I kill and bring to life” [Deut. 32:39] seemed to imply, by reversing the natural order, that God brings people to life after their death; while the phrase “life and length of days” (Deut. 30:20), if not pleonastic, must refer to two things, life on earth and length of days in the world to come.
15. See three excellent commentaries: Zimmerli (1979: 3–9); also Greenberg (1983): and in Hebrew, Kasher (2004).
16. On this whole phenomenon: Fishbane (1985), esp 458–99.
33. Twelve Minor Prophets
1. See above, chapter 20, n. 1.
2. About this the Mishnah notes: “She uncovered herself for purposes of sinning, God uncovered her [as a fitting punishment]” (m. Sotah 1:7).
3. See the discussion in Wolff (1974: xxi–xxix). Interestingly, Wolff’s analysis of the book of Amos (1977) still seeks to separate a basic “core” (attributable to the prophet himself) from a wealth of later accretions, whereas the more recent commentary of Paul (1991) holds that the great bulk of the book can be traced back to the prophet’s own speech.
4. Because of the unusual order, “I kill and [then] bring to life” seemed to imply resurrection: the rest of Balaam’s verse is “Let my soul die the death of the righteous and let my aarit be like him,” where aarit is being understood not as “progeny” (which is certainly what it means here) but “afterlife”; when Moses uttered “Let Reuben live,” the individual named Reuben had been long dead.
5. De Doctrina Christiana. 4:7.15–16.
6. On Israelite society at the time, as reflected in archaeological evidence: Barkay (1992: 302–73); also Dever (1995: 416–31). Particularly eloquent is the cache of elaborate ivory carvings and what they say about social stratification; see Dever, loc. cit. Some have nevertheless expressed skepticism about using Amos’s words as any indication of the true state of northern society: see Grabbe (1995: 103).
7. Terrien (1962: 108–15); Wolff (1973); Crenshaw (1967: 42–53); Soggin (1994: 119–23). See also: Dell (1997: 135–51).
8. Gottwald (1964: 49); cited in Christensen (1975: 5–6).
9. The former, presently the common understanding, goes back to rabbinic sources (on which Jerome apparently drew in his commentaries, but not in the Vulgate, which translated this word as “ivy” [hedera]). The Septuagint rendered the word as kolokunthē (“gourd”), an understanding reflected in other translations. Aquila, Theodotion, and Targum Pseudo-Jonathan give up and simply transliterate. See Zohari (1976: 176).
10. Weitzman (1997).
11. Wisd. 7:27; Philo, Quis Haeris, 259; 1 Cor. 12:7–10, 14:4–5; Josephus, Jewish Antiquiries 13:311–13, 20:97, 169, etc. Also: Blenkinsopp (1974: 239–63); Aune (1983); Horsely (1985: 135–63); Feldman (1990: 402–11).
12. Van Rooy (1994: 163–79).
13. Begg (1988: 100–107).
14. Blenkinsopp (1983: 255). This tradition, as Blenkinsopp notes, may be reflected in Josephus’ famous characterization of Israel’s historians as being exclusively prophets in Against Apion 1:37.
15. Van Rooy (1994: 175).
16. Van Rooy (1994).
17. On this: Urbach (1946: 1–27); Vermes (1973: 69–82); Greenspahn (1989: 37–49); Milikowsky (1994: 83–94).
18. Exod. 4:15; Num. 23:5, 16, etc.
19. See on this Davis (1989). Note also Kugel and Greer (1986: 19).
34. Job and Postexilic Wisdom
1. See in general the recent survey by Dell (2004: 251–71). Note also Whybray (1982: 181–99).
2. See above, chapter 33, note 6.
3. Macintosh (1994: 124–32).
4. McKane (1965); Whedbee (1971); Fichtner (1976: 429–38)
5. Perdue (1977).
6. Kugel (1987: 43–61, esp. 43–47 and n. 10).
7. Weinfeld (1972).
8. Gese (1984: 190–99).
9. Kugel (1999: 123–24).
10. But the matter was far from clear, see m. Sota. 5:5, b. Baba Batra 15b. On this: Glatzer (1966: 197–220).
11. As Glatzer (1996) points out, this line really begins with the apocryphal Testament of Job (first century BCE?), wherein Job/Jobab, king of Edom, incurs Satan’s wrath by destroying a precious idol people are worshiping. He is thus saintly from the start, and his sufferings derive not from any satanic challenge to God, but as Satan’s revenge for his anti-idolatry campaign.
12. In McHugh (1972: 374).
13. Lewalski (1966).
35. Daniel the Interpreter
1. The actual geographic dimensions of this province are nowhere delineated, and the population figures given for it in the Bible are somewhat at odds with the archeological evidence; see Carter (1994: 106–45). Carter estimates the population at approximately 11,000 in the late sixth and early fifth centuries, moving to a high of 17,000 in the late fifth and early fourth centuries. This is far lower than the biblical traditions of Ezra 2 and Nehemiah 7, both of which record approximately 42,000 exiles leaving Babylon for Yehud.
2. On the historical background of Cyrus’ decree and the subsequent waves of emigration, see Berquist (1995: esp. 24–29).
3. On this translation: Kugel (1989: 38).
4. Japhet (1982: 89–105 and 1989: 395–504).
5. The chronological difficulties within Ezra-Nehemiah as well as between these books and extra-biblical sources are notorious. With regard to Ezra himself, he is said to come to Jerusalem “in the seventh year of Artaxerxes” (Ezra 7:1–7), while Nehemiah is said to have arrived in the twentieth years of Artaxerxes (Neh. 2:1), putting the Nehemiah’s arrival after that of Ezra. There were, however, three Persian kings named Artaxerxes: Artaxerxes I (465–424 BCE), Artaxerxes 11 (405/404–359/358 BCE), and Artaxerxes III (359/8–338 BCE), and, while Nehemiah’s connection with Artaxerxes I seems certain, it may be that Ezra’s arrival is to be dated in the period of Ataxerxes II. On this: Williamson (1985). Note also Japhet (1994: 189–216).
6. An equally interesting phenomenon is that this collection of Scriptural allusions is actually a prayer, since prayers now regularly involve elements from Scripture. See Newman (1999), esp. 65–95; also Kugel (ed.), (2006a).
7. Kugel (1998: 634–36).
8. Chapters 1–6 are written in the third person, whereas 7–12 are in the first person; while the foreign court is a potentially dangerous place in 1–6, a wise courtier can make out well there; in 7–12, by contrast, foreign rule is hostile, even demonic. Many scholars have discussed these differences; see Collins (1993); Wills (1990).
9. Many scholars have observed that the Four Kingdoms motif was apparently borrowed from earlier models. The sequence of four metals appears earlier in Hesiod (ca. 700 BCE) as well as in a late Persian text, the Bahman Yasht. The latter may be based on much earlier tradition and hence indirectly related to Daniel; see Collins (1993: 30). Note also Hadas-Lebel (1986: 297–312); Flusser (1988: 317–44); Lucas (1988: 185–202).
10. Of course there was no Darius the Mede; Darius (ruled from 522–486 BCE) was a Persian: see on this Berquist (1995; 51–53). This is one of many indications that the courtier tales are not contemporaneous with the events described.
11. It was to explain this odd situation that the author of Jubilees—a contemporary of the author/redactor of Daniel—wrote chapter 23 of his book. See Kugel (1994: 322–37).
12. Again, the scholarly literature on the affinities of apocalyptic is quite extensive. Two classical studies: Hanson (1975) and Collins (1984). Note also: Peterson (1977: 1–54); Gruenwald (1979: 89–118); Knibb (1982: 155–80).
13. Note in this connection von Rad (1972: 263–83).
14. On this: Finkel (1963/64: 357–70).
15. Studied in detail by Japhet (1989).
16. See on this: Hartmann and Di Lella (1978); Collins (1995: 352–55).
17. The specific historical event being alluded to here is described by Josephus (Jewish Antiquities 13:372–83; Jewish War 1:90–98). He reports that, during the reign of Alexander Yannai, the Jewish king who ruled in Judah 103–76 BCE, a civil war broke out that pitted Alexander against a rebel faction supported by the Pharisees. This war continued from 93 to 88 BCE. Then, in the year 88, the desperate rebels appealed to the Syrian king Demetrius for help, and he responded by invading and defeating the forces of Alexander Yannai at Shechem. However, Demetrius and his army did not go on to enter Jerusalem—apparently his Jewish allies went over to the other side to prevent him from doing so, and he went back to Syria. The civil war was not over, however; Alexander continued to battle the rebels and, in the end, killed a great many of them. In fact, some eight hundred Jews who had been taken prisoner, Josephus says, were subsequently crucified by the cruel king.
18. See Kugel (1998: 366–67).
19. Particularly important has been the work of two scholars who have worked extensively on the subject, L. Schiffman and J. Baumgarten. On the general neglect of the subject early on: Schiffman (1994).
36. After Such Knowledge
1. Considered at a distance, Briggs’s view of the Bible sounds somewhat similar to the sixteenth-century Reformers’ view of Christianity—first there was something pristine, then it became corrupted, now we have to go about restoring it. Beyond this rather obvious point, however, lies a somewhat subtler one. The whole attempt to free the Bible of its traditional interpretations also carries with it the privileging of the unmediated encounter which is also prominent in early Protestant thought. That is to say, between God and the individual human will stand no intercessory saints, no pardoners or confession-hearing clergy—in the view of some, no other person whatsoever. Similarly, between God’s word and the individual human reader will stand no authorized interpreter or church official, not even the most hallowed exegetical tradition from the past, since nothing should be allowed to intercede in the flush encounter between the book and the reader. As Luther was cited earlier (chapter 1), “Scripture is to be interpreted only by the Spirit through which Scripture was written, because the Spirit is never to be found more present and lively than in the sacred writings themselves.” Of course, such a stance was in danger of leading to the chaos Dryden described, “The spirit gave the doctoral degree” and so forth (also chapter 1); soon, this unmediated encounter had to be tempered. Nor, more broadly, do I wish to imply that Reformation thought alone was responsible for the making of modern biblical scholarship—the Enlightenment was certainly not a Protestant plot, nor was the scientific revolution. Still, it seems to me that both of these connections between Protestantism and modern scholarship were not a negligible factor in the latter’s unfolding: certainly no one would deny that specifically Protestant theological faculties and other institutions were the ones that fostered the rise of modern biblical scholarship and that have been, right up to the present, its principal sponsors (while Catholic and Jewish institutions have been, until recently, indifferent or openly hostile to it). Was it not because, until recently, there was every reason to hope that, with Scripture as earlier with Christianity itself, sweeping away the accumulated corruption of centuries and eliminating the popish intermediaries would indeed yield something purer and truer, “the real Bible”?
3. Ibid.
4. Herder (1877–1913, vol. 10: p. 7); see on this passage Frei (1974: 184).
5. Indeed, Augustine himself went further: “Whatever in the [biblical] text has nothing to do with right conduct or questions of faith . . . must be understood figuratively,” De Doctrina Christiana 3.10; 14. See Marrou (1938: 478). This is an extension of the earlier doctrine, “Whatever contradicts right conduct . . .”
6. See on this Appendix 1, “Apologetics and Biblical Scholarship Lite.”
7. Geneva Bible (1560): iiii.
8. On the change in the way in which Scripture came to be perceived there is an extensive literature, part of it seeking to document that change through what is called “inner-biblical exegesis” (later parts of the Bible that interpret earlier parts). Much of this work has centered on the book of Chronicles; see, inter alia: Willi (1972); Seligmann (1979–80: 14–32); Japhet (1989); Williamson (1982). In addition, a considerable body of research has emerged on the subject of legal reinterpretation within the Bible; see Levinson (1988), whose central claim is that Deuteronomy “represents a radical revision of the Covenant Code.” On the editing and reshaping of prophetic collections see below, and on the change in the entire perception of prophecy see in particular Barton (1986). Y. Zakovitch (1993) has published a great number of studies (mostly in modern Hebrew) of inner-biblical exegesis, particularly in biblical narrative. A much-cited work on the entire phenomenon of inner-biblical interpretation is Fishbane (1985). (I expressed my admiration for, but also some misgivings about this book in a review [1987]). More generally, however, a difficult matter, but an important one for our discussion, is the extent to which the recasting or reinterpretation of earlier material in the later parts of the Bible can be informative about a change in attitude about the biblical texts. To put it another way, “inner-biblical exegesis” ought not to be automatically equated with the appearance of a new set of conventions about how to read Scripture, nor is it, often, exegesis at all. If the laws of Deuteronomy recast those of the Covenant Code, for example, this may tell us that the Covenant Code was perceived as an authoritative document at the time, so that its laws could not simply be abrogated; as Levinson puts it, Deuteronomy represents “the deliberate attempt to rework prestigious texts in light of the innovation of centralization [of worship at a single sanctuary]” (p. 6). But this does not derive from a change in attitude about how to read Scripture, nor even from a new understanding of what the Covenant Code means. It derives instead from the desire to create a fundamentally new set of laws (centralization of worship was only one issue) while seeking wherever possible to respect the “prestigious” text of the Covenant Code and so act as if the Deuteronomy laws were really not innovations (or at least not significantly different). Similarly, the Chronicler’s recasting of material from Samuel and Kings reflects (as Japhet and others have shown) the definite theological and political program of the Chronicler; it does not, however, necessarily reflect a change in the way Scripture (that is, Samuel and Kings) was approached or understood at the time. Such a change is indeed reflected here and there in the Bible (including in the books of Chronicles), but these cases are relatively minor and often ambiguous. The great change in attitude is witnessed extensively only outside of the Bible, in Jewish writings from the third century BCE on.
9. This would seem to indicate that the Psalm heading le-dawid was an attribution of authorship; see above, chapter 26.
10. The omission of the Bathsheba incident and, more generally, the pervasive idealization of David might (but only might) indicate the belief that the history of David’s life should embody moral lessons for the reader thereof; on the other hand, it might simply be propaganda for the reestablishment of the Davidic monarchy.
11. On this phenomenon in general, Kugel (1998). As noted above, this assumption is occasionally witnessed within the canon of the Hebrew Bible: on Daniel, see chapter 35.
12. The case of the Nahum Pesher has been extensively studied; see the recent edition, commentary, and bibliography by Doudna (2001).
13. See chapter 34.
14. See on “And thus it shall not be done” in chapter 11, “God Was in Favor.”
15. As an aside, it might be worthwhile to summarize here what this great body of interpretations ultimately led to. What did the Interpreted Bible of Judaism and Christianity consist of—from the first century CE to, almost, the twentieth?
To put it in a phrase, the Hebrew Bible was the great and infinitely subtle story of God’s ways with Israel and all of humanity, which brought with it His detailed instructions for everyone to follow. This story began in the Garden of Eden, with the Fall of Man and the loss of immortality. From there, humankind began its steady decline, with the diabolical Cain, the world’s first murderer, and his offspring leading inevitably to the great Flood, whose proximate cause was, however, the mating of lustful angels with earthly women and the generation of divine-human hybrids thus produced. Noah, preacher of righteousness, survived the Flood, and from his descendants at last arose Abraham, the iconoclast astronomer from Ur. God loved Abraham for his rejection of idolatry and his belief in the one, true God—a devotion that was rewarded with the grant of the land of Canaan to him and his children. Though sorely tried by life, Abraham never lost his faith, and he in turn was blessed with virtuous offspring—Isaac, a volunteer for martyrdom, and Jacob, a model of scholarly virtue who overcame his wicked brother. From this man and his equally virtuous wives would spring the people of Israel. Cast into slavery and subjection in Egypt, the Israelites were freed by the efforts of the world’s greatest prophet, Moses, a Godlike man who led them to Mount Sinai to receive God’s laws. God spoke the first two of His commandments directly to the people; then Moses ascended into heaven on the mountain’s peak to receive the rest, which he duly delivered to his countrymen. Ever afterwards, these laws—supplemented by the additional information passed on to the prophet—have guided Israel on the proper path.
Arrived at the edge of the Promised Land, Moses passed the leadership to his protégé, Joshua, who led the people into battle with the Canaanites, ultimately securing the entire territory for God’s chosen people. Things were not always smooth, but eventually David was selected as king and founder of the royal dynasty. A sweet psalmist and prophet-king, David was also a valiant warrior who overcame Israel’s enemies and brought peace and prosperity to the land. His son Solomon became, thanks to his pious prayer, the wisest of men and the author of three great books of wisdom: Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Songs. When the northern tribes split off and rejected the Davidic line, they survived for a time, thanks to the ministrations of the immortal Elijah (Phinehas redivivus) and his successor, Elisha. But ultimately the sin of Jeroboam was punished with conquest and exile, and all that remained was the Kingdom of Judah. The prophet Isaiah was sent to guide them during this difficult time; he ascended to the heavenly sanctuary and heard the exquisite harmony of the seraphim singing “Holy, holy, holy.” Back on earth, he tried to guide Judah’s kings along the proper path; he was followed by other prophets, notably Jeremiah, but human weakness eventually overcame the best of divine guidance. Despite Jeremiah’s warnings, the people continued to sin and were punished for their apostasy—Jeremiah himself composed five mournful lamentations for the fallen city before his own death. Seventy years later, God punished the Babylonians for their conquest of Jerusalem, and Israel joyfully returned to its homeland, just as Isaiah and David had foreseen centuries earlier. Reestablished in Judah, they fervently observed God’s laws and waited for the fulfillment of biblical prophecy and the arrival of the Messiah.
This overview—which has given no more than the broadest glimpse of the Interpreted Bible—may serve to illustrate some of the great gap that separates the Bible as it existed for twenty centuries from the Bible as it looks to scholars nowadays. But it fails, I am afraid, to capture much of the flavor that the Bible had for different religious communities over all those years. What is missing, for Christians, is the basic secret of the Old Testament—its hidden lessons and its teachings about the path to salvation—and in particular all its detailed allusions to the founding events and doctrines of Christianity: the “first Adam” whose fall was healed by the crucifixion and resurrection of the second Adam; the three-personed God who visited Abraham’s tent and shared in the Eucharist there with him; the aged Jacob, who foretold the Messiah’s triumph; the Old Testament Jesus (that is, Joshua) who defeated the devil while his teacher and predecessor, Moses, stood on the sidelines and made the sign of the cross; the prophet Isaiah, who heard the Trinity preached by the seraphim in God’s heavenly temple; and so on and so forth, including Abel and Isaac and Jacob and Moses and Joshua and all the other foreshadowings of Christ. For Jews what is missing is the whole, detailed exegetical process (whose retracing was and is itself the stuff of Jewish study and piety) and its results: the great body of midrash that offered detailed insights into biblical figures and their stories—pointing up crucial aspects only hinted at in the Bible’s own words—as well, of course, as the exposition of the 613 commandments which were at the very heart of the Torah, from the laws of reading the Shema morning and night to the detailed instructions concerning the keeping of the sabbath and laws of repentance and cooking on festivals and what to do with lost objects found in the street, along with the blessings recited before and after the meal and the rules of kosher food and getting rid of leaven on Passover and on and on, a whole, detailed way of life rooted in the subtlest hints and turns of phrase found in Scripture.
This was the Bible for twenty centuries. In hundreds of ways, little and great, its original meaning was transformed by ancient interpreters. It became a different book. Then, along came modern scholarship with its own (1 say this with no intended irony) altogether laudable agenda: to get rid of stale doctrines that strained credibility, to throw out the traditional ways of interpreting and all the specific interpretations that went with them, getting down to the “real Bible.” This was hardly an evil program—on the contrary! But where it would lead was not visible at first; its results have worked themselves out slowly, and it is really only now that they have come into focus. Gradually, the Bible has ceased—at least for those who know modern scholarship and reckon honestly with its findings—to be the great divine guidebook it once was. Instead, it has come to look more and more like any other human work, indeed, another piece of ancient Near Eastern literature, or rather, a hundred pieces often quite unrelated to each other. In place of the seamless and perfect, often cryptic word of God, scholars have shown the Bible to be the sometimes seamy and all-too-imperfect, usually obvious words of men from different periods and social strata and ideological affiliations.
16. Again, see on all these Barton (1986).
17. See the nuanced discussion of the relation between apocalyptic and such verses in Barton (1986: 202–10).
18. To this might be added the many contradictory statements in Ecclesiastes, on which Kugel (1999: 305–23).
19. For a longer account, see Kugel (2001: 1–26).
20. But if a text’s meaning change, can it change only once? The very point I am making, it seems, can now be turned against me. “True, that was the Bible, but it no longer is. Now that we know everything that modern scholars have discovered, the text has changed again, whether you like it or not. It’s gone back to what it originally meant.” Indeed. To this observation, however, should be added another: in historical terms, this Bible of modern scholarship is not so much the Bible as the pre-Bible, the material out of which the first Bible was fashioned. So if indeed the Bible has changed again, it has actually turned into something that never was the Bible. People nowadays may still call this book the Bible, and they may, by various apologetic strategies, still try to have it play the role it always used to play; things change slowly, after all, especially things connected with religion. But as the lessons of modern biblical scholarship sink in and become more widely known, people will, I think, inevitably find it more and more difficult to talk and think about the Bible as they have in the past.
21. Of the many treatments of this subject, I have in mind here James Barr’s Fundamentalism (1977), to which these brief observations are intended as a supplement of somewhat different orientation.
22. In fact, even before The Fundamentals were issued, a group of conservative biblical scholars had gathered at Niagara-on-the-Lake. Ontario, starting in 1883, and ended up hammering out a statement of basic principles similar to The Fundamentals. The very first article the Niagara Bible Conference Creed asserted: “We believe ‘that all Scripture is given by inspiration of God’ [2 Tim. 3:16], by which we understand the whole of the book called the Bible; nor do we take the statement in the sense in which it is sometimes foolishly said that works of human genius are inspired, but in the sense that the Holy Ghost gave the very words of the sacred writings to holy men of old; and that His Divine inspiration is not in different degrees, but extends equally and fully to all parts of these writings, historical, poetical, doctrinal, and prophetical and to the smallest word, and inflection of a word, provided such word is found in the original manuscripts.”
For liberals, statements like this one and, more generally, the conservative refusal to countenance everything modern scholars have discovered about the Bible seem, at bottom, profoundly anti-intellectual. Blind faith is not a happy posture for anyone who believes in the human capacity to figure things out. For that reason, liberals have been eager to redefine the inspiration of Scripture and the extent and basis of its authority in such a way as to accommodate everything scholars have discovered about the origin and development of biblical texts. (The issues are laid out clearly in Achtemeier, 1999.) Often, of course, such accommodation leads to the “Yes, but still . . .” sort of biblical commentaries, on which see Appendix 1, “Apologetics and Biblical Criticism Lite” on the Web site: jameskugel.com.
23. See, recently: Enns (2005).
24. On this: Enns (2005: 132–63). One example of the transmission of midrashic traditions in New Testament texts is Stephen’s speech in Acts 7; see Kugel (2004: 206–18).
25. The early stages of this retreat are charted in Frei (1974).
26. The roots of what was to become a major theme in twentieth-century Protestant neo-orthodoxy, the Bible as Heilsgeschichte or a “history of salvation.” can be traced back to the seventeenth century; again, see Frei (1974: 46–47, 173–82). In its later manifestation, however, it has introduced a fundamental theological contradiction: see Langdon Gilkey’s essay on the theological assumptions of G. Ernest Wright and other exponents of the “mighty acts of God”: Gilkey (1961: 194–205), and chapter 14, note 9. See also Gnuse (1989 and 1994: 893–918).
27. Brown (1955 and 1981).
28. The notion of such a “center” (Mitte) was made explicit in W. Eichrodt’s promotion of covenant as the central concept of the Old Testament, but its roots are deeper, identifiable even in Spinoza’s assertion that it was only the items of which all biblical books agree, such as monotheism or ideas about governance, that had prescriptive value today. See Hasel (1972: 77–103). About this assumption Gerhard von Rad wrote: “What’s it all about with this almost unisono-asked question about the ‘unity,’ the ‘center’ of the Old Testament? Is it something so self-evident [that] its proof belongs, so to speak, as a conditio sine qua non to an orderly Old Testament theology?” (cited in Collins (2005: 135)]. The answer is that it is all about getting the Bible to continue having some theologically valid teachings to offer despite its many now-unacceptable particulars.
29. Monotheism as part of Scripture’s central messager (previous note) was stressed in Spinoza’s Tracratus (along with the Bible’s teachings on government); the theme of Israel’s rigorous monotheism was taken up again by the Israeli theologian Yehezkel Kaufman—not particularly convincingly, as it turned out.
30. See in greater detail Appendix 1 to this volume, located on the Web site: jameskugel.com.
31. See Appendix 1.
32. See the useful short survey by Gnuse (1985: 14–65). Among other treatments: Achtemeier (1999: 28–63). For a thoughtful evangelical perspective on the question of inspiration: Enns (2005).
33. Childs (1970).
34. Morgan (1988: 44–61); cited in Collins (2005: 6).
35. Suspending, for the sake of argument, the text-critical question of which final form is intended.
36. “This is the chief practical danger that the rise of canonical criticism has brought about: it has been quick to produce a strong zealotic legalism of the final text, that insists; you must must must work from the final form of the text. I think this is completely wrong, and that the preacher is perfectly free to work with a portion representing an earlier stage of the text. He is free to expound the creation story of Genesis 1 without tying it by links of meaning to the quite different story of chapter 2; he is free to expound the pericopes that represent Amos’s original message without being forced to integrate them with the quite different message of the book’s conclusion . . . This is not because what is early and original is authentic and therefore authoritative. What is earlier was the text at one time, it was thus ‘canonical,’ if we must call it so, in the biblical period itself” [Barr (1983: 92–3)]. But was it canonical, and what exactly, in that case, does canonical mean? There is no indication that Genesis 1 ever existed apart from Genesis 2, but even if Barr were to reverse the example and assert that Genesis 2 was ‘canonical’ before Genesis 1 was appended to it, he would be on very shaky grounds. Perhaps the story of Adam and Eve was preserved for centuries only because it was an entertaining folktale, like Goldilocks and the Three Bears. It may have begun to be read as Scripture only after it had been included in the book of Genesis, indeed, only after the book of Genesis and the rest of the Bible had begun to be read in accordance with the Four Assumptions of ancient interpreters. The position that Barr is arguing against (that of Brevard Childs) is thus quite correct, even if (as I shall argue presently) Childs does not go far enough: Barr’s belief that there was something “canonical” about anything before the final form lacks any supporting evidence other than the somewhat ambiguous fact that the ancient texts themselves survived. They were preserved, but by whom, and for what purpose, and how they were read are all a matter of speculation. (I find odd, to say the least, Barr’s use of the phrase “strong zealotic legalism” in the above-cited passage, and odder still the fact that it was actually cited with favor by Nicholson [1998: 267]. What exactly is it supposed to suggest?)
37. This is the position of De Vries (1995). De Vries criticizes Childs, Sanders, and others precisely for favoring the final form of the text, which he actually sees as a degenerate stage, the moment when, at last, prophecy had ceased to be an active force in Israel. “Among contemporary scholars, Brevard S. Childs has been the most effective champion of the view that the ultimate ‘canonical’ message of a particular biblical book might possess greater importance than the ideas coming to expression at individual stages in the growth of the book,” De Vries writes; but he himself rejects this position: “To be sure, canonization might have been inevitable in the sense that what is dynamically expanding [that is, biblical prophecy] will, in the end, need to be closed off, once the forces empowering it have faded away.” And why did prophecy “fade away”? Because “it had become more a threat than a help to the increasingly institutionalized, that is nomistic, community.” He adds: “To equate inner-scriptural and extra-scriptural development confuses a process of unrestrained creativity with a subsequent process of institutionally bound rationalizing,” the latter certainly including the exegetical traditions that accompanied Scripture at the moment of its canonization and thereafter. (All De Vries quotes are from 1995: 266–67). Actually, most of this argument had been refuted before it was made, principally by the Dead Sea Scrolls and other Second Temple texts, which well illustrate that creative exegesis was not a post-biblical phenomenon but was already in full flower by the third century BCE; indeed, its beginnings go back at least to the start of the post-exilic period, if not earlier (Fishbane. 1985). Moreover, as many scholars have argued, it was the dynamism of post-exilic exegesis, and not any petering out of prophecy itself, that allowed the former to displace the latter in that period. Far from being institutionally bound, nomistic, or any of the other things that De Vries calls it, biblical exegesis became, in the closing centuries before the common era, a force infinitely more daring and dynamic than anything the glossators, scribal annotators, and chapter-rearrangers he champions could have dreamt of. A far more level-headed view of the ancient interpreters’ role in canonization and thereafter is that of John Barton (1986).
38. The leading exponent of this school (though he does not particularly identify with its name or some of the claims made for it) has been Brevard Childs of Yale. It is no pleasure for me to have to disagree on this point with Childs, whose analysis of the theological problems posed by the attempted synthesis of modern scholarship and theological concerns was set out systematically in his landmark study, Childs (1970). The application of a new way of talking about biblical texts was exposed a few years later in his commentary Exodus (1974), and then in a major synthetic work, his Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture (1979). His views have often been attacked and sometimes distorted by various writers, including some of those cited in this chapter. A somewhat dissenting but more balanced account is to be found in Barton (1984: 77–103, 208–11 and passim).
39. These were at first known by various names: the “sages” or “bookmen” [soferim], the “Pharisees,” but then, starting in the first century CE, the “rabbis.” On these names and the beginnings of these traditions: Urbach (1984: 7–10, 35–45).
40. On the various ways that authority was claimed by different groups in this period: Najman (2003).
41. For the forerunners of this stance, Najman (2003: 108–37). This position was not without its problems; see below, note 50.
42. “It happened that some stood before Shammai and said to him: ‘Rabbi, how many torahs do you have?’ He said: ‘Two, one that is written and one that is oral’” (Abut deR. Natan [A] 15). On this theme Kugel (1998: 657–60, 700–701).
43. See van der Toorn (1997: 229–48).
44. It is of course true that the rabbinic corpus of interpretation was not the end of Jewish biblical interpretation; one might point to the rise of peshat exegesis in the Middle Ages, or, for that matter, the emergence of Kabbalistic and philosophical exegesis in this same period. But these and similar instances actually support rather than undermine my generalization, since what is remarkable about all these later forms of interpretation is the extent to which they adhere to the Four Assumptions and extend their basic approach. Several scholars have thus aptly criticized the contention of Nahum Sarna that Abraham ibn Ezra and some of those who followed him were modern biblical scholars in medieval dress. See: Levenson (1993: 62–81 and passim); also, Simon (1985: 257–71); M. Haran (1985); Hoffman (1997). On the contrary, the noteworthy thing in these medieval commentators is not the “modern” insight they occasionally present, “but the way in which that dangerous foreign body was then instantly sealed off by the commentator’s own efficient immune system,” Kugel (1990b: 151). The deference of ibn Ezra, Rashbam, and others to the Oral Law in matters of halakhah is well known. Noteworthy as well is their deference to the textus receptus, including vocalization and accents. Even a commentator who saw himself as offering a radically different reading of the text—such as Yosef ibn ‘Aqnin in his commentary on the Song of Songs, which, he claims to have discovered, is really about the union of the human soul with the Active Intellect (see Halkin 1964)—was consistently deferential to the established tradition of interpretation, in this case, the targum of Song of Songs, which explains the song as an allegory of God and Israel in various periods of history.
45. Numerous writers in the past have considered this question. For Orthodox Judaism, see the survey by Rosenberg (1979). Among contemporary scholars, note in particular Lamm (1971), the writings in Hebrew by Breuer (esp. 1999), as well as the thoughtful essays in Jon Levenson (1993). The other articles in the Simon volume are likewise of interest in this connection, as are those in a more recent collection, Carmy (1996), especially the contributions of B. Eichler and S. Z. Leiman (181–87).
46. Scholars are uncertain as to what that intention was. The song goes back to nineteenth century Appalachia, and was later popular among work gangs building the railroad network in the American midwest. Some have ventured that the “she” is none other than “Mother Jones,” the famous union organizer who sought to unionize the Appalachian mine workers, while others suppose the “she” might simply be a train coming down the tracks. But my putative adults singing it with religious fervor may actually have returned to the song’s original source of inspiration, since according to musicologists “She’ll Be Coming ’Round the Mountain” is loosely based on the Negro spiritual “When the Chariot Comes,” which describes a series of events leading up to the eschaton.
47. This sense, incidentally, is often missed in translations of the famous description of Moses in Num. 12:7: he is the ne’eman bayit, the trusted slave who is, therefore, allowed to go into any room of the divine house.
48. I fear that, at this point, some of my learned readers may object that my description is one-sided. Surely there was more to Judaism in this period than seeking to do God’s will. What, for example, of the whole period’s apocalyptic temper and its yearning for the restoration of Israel’s fortunes, a yearning that blossomed into the fervent messianism of later times and, with it, the rise of Christianity? With such observations I have no argument whatsoever. My point is not about Judaism but about Scripture, and here I think there is good reason to be fairly one-sided. It is true that the Dead Sea covenanters, for example, sometimes sought to read biblical prophecies, psalms, and even passages of the Pentateuch (the “Song of the Well” in Num. 21:17–18) as references to themselves and the events of their own day (the same is true of the first Christians). But I am quite sure that members of the Dead Sea Scrolls community would nonetheless have asserted that the primary purpose of Scripture was to tell people what God wished them to do: indeed, this community’s overriding concern with legal exegesis hardly needs glossing. (Among many discussions: Sussman 1994: 179–200). The same is true of their rivals, the interpreters of halakhot/alaqot who led eventually to rabbinic Judaism. Even Philo of Alexandria, whose main interest was in the allegorical interpretation of Scripture, devoted a hefty portion of his exposition to the practical application of the Pentateuch’s laws. Josephus, although he alleges his purpose in writing the Antiquiries was to relate the Jewish nation’s past, similarly could not refrain from giving Scripture’s laws a lengthy and detailed exposition. More generally—for him as for Philo and all the interpreters mentioned—even the recounting of history or lofty ideas was closely tied to Scripture’s essential part, its laws: “The main lesson to be learned from this history by any who care to peruse it,” writes Josephus, “is that men who conform to the will of God, and do not venture to transgress laws that have been excellently laid down, prosper in all things beyond belief and are granted happiness by God as their reward” (Ant. 1:14). Beyond this point, however, I should make it clear that I am not claiming that carrying out God’s laws is in fact the great, central theme of Scripture. Rather, it was the great, central theme that the ancient interpreters found in it. (Actually, Scripture is full of all sorts of things besides what-to-do—indeed, the apprehension of God underlying this view is hardly the only one found in Scripture.) Thus, the ancient interpreters were the first people to be guilty of searching for Scripture’s Mitte, and this search was prompted by the specific apprehension of God that they had inherited from their forebears.
49. In so doing, interpreters were in a sense (though certainly not knowingly) following the same fast-and-loose approach to sacred utterances (not just the Pentateuch, but prophetic and historical writings as well) that had been followed by earlier editors and glossators and interpolators. This approach, in other words, has deep biblical roots. See Fishbane (1985:19).
50. True, one response to this question has been to assert that these changes were not the work of “mere humans” at all—that they were given by God to Moses on Mount Sinai, or (a somewhat different answer) that later, historical figures, from Rashi to the late Rabbi Moshe Feinstein z”I, were guided by divine inspiration. The former position has not been without its problems: was Moses truly given the laws governing the holiday of Purim contained in the Mishnaic tractate Megillah, even though the events that were to inspire that holiday did not occur until centuries after Moses’ death? And if they were given to him at that time, why was there no hint of them in the written text of the Torah, which otherwise does contain allusions to events far in the future as well as laws that could not be carried out at the time of their transmission? Moreover, while the Babylonian Talmud and other rabbinic texts sometimes assert that the Oral Torah goes back to Moses and is thus not interpretation but an independent body of teachings, this assertion is gainsaid on nearly every page of the Talmud by the question “Whence do we know this?”—that is, what is the verse in Scripture from which such-and-such a rabbinic teaching is derived? Such a question clearly implies the priority of Scripture as well as the derivative nature of the halakhah in question. The history of this assertion has been aptly explored in J. Harris (1995). As for the second response—that later interpreters were themselves divinely inspired—it may well be so; see below, note 54. However, numerous rabbinic texts specifically gainsay this approach, from the ancient interpretation of Deut. 30:11–14 (“It is not in heaven . . .”)—on which see Kugel (1998: 846–48)—to the famous story of the oven of Achnai, whereby a heavenly voice is not permitted to overrule the decision of human authorities (b. Baba Metzi‘a 59b).
51. In fact, a great deal of what constitutes God’s service in Judaism today will be found to have little or nothing to do with Scripture. Religious Jews get up in the morning and recite obligatory prayers never mentioned in the Torah; they obey dietary laws strikingly different from the ones listed in Scripture; they wash their hands and recite blessings before eating, but this is not commanded in Scripture. Many Jews today attend yeshivot or other institutions of Jewish higher learning in which, as a matter of fact, not Scripture, but the Babylonian Talmud, is the main text studied. On Passover, although Scripture has unambiguously told them to rid their houses of any leaven or leavened product, a great many observant Jews spend the holiday—thanks to a post-biblical legal procedure that need not be detailed here—in the intimate company of significant quantities of such leaven. In all these ways and many more, it is possible to glimpse the “deep structure” (I know the metaphorical use of this term has become somewhat hackneyed nowadays, but here I mean it very much as Noam Chomsky first used it) underlying the surface expression of the Jewish allegiance to Torah. It is ultimately not the words of Scripture themselves that are foremost in Judaism, but the idea that underlies them, namely, the service of God.
52. See on this Levinson (2005) as well as Kugel (2002: 139–51). I admit that the comparison is imperfect, but one might compare this circumstance to that of a foundational legal document of human origin, such as, for example, the U.S. constitution. New situations or particular cases soon arise that require the foundational document’s lofty and revered words to become subject to the generally less lofty and revered interpretations and applications of subsequent generations. The fact that they are not the words of the Original Framer can hardly invalidate them; on the contrary, they are deemed to be the natural and necessary continuation of the trajectory establish by the original document, even when, as sometimes is the case, they go well beyond, or even contradict, what might be identified by others as the document’s original intent.
53. See chapter 17, “Christianity and the Laws of the Bible”: also Preus (1969).
55. “And God spoke all the[ese] words, saying ‘I am the LORD your God . . .’” [Exod. 20:1]. Said Rabbi Isaac: “Even the things that the prophets were later to prophesy were likewise given to them at Mount Sinai. Whence do we know this? [From what God said later about His covenant with Israel,] ‘Not with you alone do I conclude this covenant, but both with those who are standing here with us today [and with those who are not with us today]’” (Deut. 29:14–15). Someone who has already been created is someone who already exists in the world. But “those who arc not” refers to those who are yet to be created, and thus are “not with us today.” . . . Not only were the prophets [present at the covenant, although they were not yet born], but also all the sages who were yet to be [born were also present then]. Thus it says, “The LORD spoke all these words to your assembly with a mighty voice, and said no more [we lo’ yasap]” (Deut. 5:19) [Midrash Tanhuma, Yitro 11]. God “said no more,” this exegete claims, because there was essentially only one, great revelation in all of human history. The essential content of all the prophetic writings, and all the Oral Law, right down to yesterday’s ruling by a Talmudic sage in Jerusalem or Monsey or Gateshead, was contained in the one great revelation at Mount Sinai. See, in somewhat the same spirit (and with a decidedly Conservative Jewish coloring), Milgrom (2000: 1368–71).
56. Cited in Hallo (1980: 1).