TRINITY WESTERN UNIVERSITY READING THE TEXT WITH ITS ANCIENT AUDIENCE: THE AMNON AND TAMAR NARRATIVE AS A TEST CASE A THESIS SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF TRINITY WESTERN UNIVERSITY FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTERS IN BIBLICAL STUDIES BY JONATHON M. RILEY LANGLEY, BC SEPTEMBER 2018 TABLE OF CONTENTS TABLE OF CONTENTS ............................................................................................................. 1 I. INTRODUCTION TO NARRATIVE CRITICISM AND ITS CHALLENGES ............... 1 II. NARRATIVE CRITICISM .................................................................................................. 22 III. JEDTRH................................................................................................................................ 30 JE ............................................................................................................................................... 30 DTRH ......................................................................................................................................... 36 JEDTRH ..................................................................................................................................... 40 IV. READING THE TEXT WITH ITS ANCIENT AUDIENCE ......................................... 50 V. INFERRED INNER-BIBLICAL ALLUSION IN ANCIENT TEXTS ............................. 63 THE RABBIS ............................................................................................................................... 63 AUGUSTINE ................................................................................................................................ 74 PHILO ......................................................................................................................................... 76 THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS ............................................................................................................ 79 BEN SIRA ................................................................................................................................... 79 THE SEPTUAGINT ....................................................................................................................... 80 THE CHRONICLER ....................................................................................................................... 81 THE PRESERVATION OF OLDER MATERIAL IN THE RABBIS ......................................................... 82 VI. WHERE WILL I CAUSE MY SHAME TO GO?: PERCEIVED ALLUSIONS TO THE JOSEPH AND DINAH NARRATIVES IN THE AMNON AND TAMAR NARRATIVE .............................................................................................................................. 87 COMPOSITION OF THE JOSEPH NARRATIVE ................................................................................. 87 ALLUSIONS TO GEN 37 IN GEN 42–45 ........................................................................................ 89 ALLUSIONS TO GENESIS 34 IN 2 SAM 13 ..................................................................................... 92 ALLUSIONS TO THE JOSEPH NARRATIVE IN 2 SAM 13 ................................................................. 96 IMPLICATIONS FOR UNDERSTANDING THE PERICOPES .............................................................. 101 VII. CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS FOR FURTHER RESEARCH ................. 104 BIBLIOGRAPHY ..................................................................................................................... 108 I. INTRODUCTION TO NARRATIVE CRITICISM AND ITS CHALLENGES In the 1980s, an important change took place in the field of biblical studies. Biblical studies had previously focused on things like the history, sources, and authors behind the biblical text.1 However, in 1981, a comparative literature scholar named Robert Alter published a book called The Art of Biblical Narrative, which looked at the Bible in a different way. Alter’s book focused on the artistry of biblical narrative, and how the author brought meaning to the text through this artistry. However, as Steven Weitzman has noted, the work of many other authors over the years led up to Alter’s ground-breaking study.2 Weitzman has noted that as far back as the eighteenth century, scholars were examining the Bible in this way, using the works of the ancient Greek writer Longinus as a model.3 Matthew Arnold, in the nineteenth century, would be the first to actually refer to this approach as “the Bible as literature,” and near the end of that century, in 1895, Richard Moulton produced his influential work, The Literary Study of the Bible, discussing the literary forms of the Bible.4 Although many of the ideas he laid out in his book would likely not be accepted today, his work laid an important foundation for what would follow. Around the same time, the public also began to see collections of biblical texts created to highlight the Bible’s sophistication and beauty, such as Passages of the Bible Chosen for the Literary Beauty and Interest, published by James Frazier in 1909.5 Weitzman has also observed that as the 20th century progressed, Jewish scholars like Michael Heilprin, Simon Bernfeld, and Morris Jastrow, Jr, “began to classify biblical texts according to genre or to seek to identify its aesthetic 1 Steven Weitzman, “Before and After The Art of Biblical Narrative.” Proof 27.2 (2007): 191–210. 2 Ibid., 191. 3 Ibid. 4 For more on these developments, see David Norton, From 1700 to the Present Day, vol. 2 of A History of the Bible as Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 276–300. 5 Ibid. 1 2 properties.”6 Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig used the literary approach to the Bible to make it more relevant to German Jews of their own time.7 Alter would eventually draw heavily on their concept of Leitwortstil, or using repeated words or phrases to draw out more meaning from a text than might immediately be apparent.8 By the 1980’s, influences like these had come together to create the conditions necessary for the rise of narrative criticism as it is today. According to Weitzman’s history of the sub-discipline, another influence on narrative criticism was “New Criticism,” which became one of the most common forms of literary criticism in the middle of the 20th century. When it fell out of favor in the 1960’s, the types of literary criticism that replaced it had rekindled people’s desire to study the Bible as literature. 9 As Weitzman has observed, Russian formalism, structuralism and semiotics, and the ”linguistic turn” in fields related to historiography all meant that people besides English professors were interested in literary analysis.10 In addition, some biblical scholars during that time were beginning to determine whether or not it might be possible to use modern critical scholarship to make the relationship between the Bible and rabbinic literature useful again as sources for religious ideas that could be applied to modern life. One example of this is the article “Can Modern Biblical Scholarship Have a Jewish Character?” published by Moshe Greenberg in the early 1980s. In this article, Greenberg discussed the possibility of creating biblical scholarship that was open to new evidence and ideas, while still respecting the text of the Bible as well as the traditions of Judaism.11 Weitzman’s claim that this was Greenberg’s response to “the inherent 12. 6 Weitzman, “Before and After,” 192. 7 Ibid., 204. 8 Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative (New York: Basic Books, 1981), 92–95. 9 Weitzman, “Before and After,” 192. 10 Ibid. 11 M. Greenberg, “Can Modern Biblical Scholarship Have a Jewish Character?” Immanuel 15 (1982/83): 7– 3 tension between a historical–contextual approach to the Bible and a religiously engaged reading of it,” may be overstated, as the tension need not be inherent, but Greenberg’s article does appear to have been his attempt at balancing historical criticism and an inherently religious approach to the text.12 This paved the way for modern narrative criticism by suggesting the possibility that studying the final form of the Bible could be a valuable avenue of study, even for scholars. By studying the artistry of the Bible, one could both engage in critical, secular biblical scholarship while still doing work that would be valuable for the scholar’s faith communities. It is true that many scholars of narrative criticism were never motivated by such religious concerns and were simply interested in the intersection of biblical studies and literary theory because of the popularity of literary theory at the time. However, the obvious religious advantages of the approach meant that people from many walks of life, both religious and secular, were interested in narrative criticism in the 1980s.13 Another thing that paved the way for modern narrative criticism was the work of scholars such as Erich Auerbach, Luis Alonsoe Schokel, Meir Weiss, Samuel Sandmel, Uriel Simon, Jacob Licht, and James Ackerman, whose approach to the Bible began to refine the study of the Bible as literature.14 Meir Sternberg and Menakhem Perry may be some of the most significant precursors to Alter, as they applied the poetics of narrative criticism, drawn from literary studies, to the Bible. Sternberg’s The Poetics of Biblical Narrative, along with the work of Perry, was an important predecessor to The Art of Biblical Narrative, and Alter has acknowledged his debt to both these scholars.15 David Gunn’s books King David and The Fate of King Saul, and well as 12 Weitzman, “Before and After,” 193. 13 Ibid., 192. 14 Ibid., 196. 15 See, for example, Alter, Biblical Narrative, 18. 4 Absalom, Absalom, by Charles Conroy, all published shortly before The Art of Biblical Narrative, also exemplify the approach that could come to be known as narrative criticism.16 This intellectual backdrop helps to explain, in part, the remarkable success of The Art of Biblical Narrative. According to Weitzman, “by the most conventional measures—number of books sold, favorable reviews, frequency of citation—it is hard to imagine a more successful academic book than Alter’s The Art of Biblical Narrative.”17 Yet even in the early days of narrative criticism, people raised objections to Alter’s approach, questioning even his basic assumptions. James Kugel, in a critique of Alter’s work that he published before The Art of Biblical Narrative was published, suggested that one could not treat the Bible as a work of literature.18 The reason for this, according to Kugel, was that literary readings of the Bible take modern categories like poetry and narrative and apply them to an ancient text that may or may not have seen categories as rigidly as modern readers might. 19 In addition, these readings, according to Kugel, take modern aesthetics, properties such as ambiguity or irony, and superimposes these properties onto ancient texts that may or may not been seen to contain such properties in ancient times.20 Thus, according to Kugel, such readings can be valuable, but not if one assumes that these readings are at all native to the text itself.21 Kugel asserted that the literary approach to the Bible gives a distorted reading of the text in which the interpreter sees things that are not actually there. The patterns of repeated words and intertextual connections between texts are, in Kugel’s view, simply superimposed on the text by David G. Firth, “Reflections on Current Research on Samuel,” (paper presented at the Annual Meeting of SBL, Boston, MA, 14 November 2017). 16 17 Weitzman, “Before and After,” 196. 18 James Kugel, “On the Bible and Literary Criticism,” Prooftexts 1, no. 3 (1981): 217–36. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid. 5 the interpreter.22 Kugel proposed that scholars instead pay more attention to how various communities have seen these texts at various times, the text’s reception history, rather than narrative criticism.23 The reception history of the Bible eventually became another sub-field of biblical studies, with Kugel as one of its leading scholars.24 Kugel’s assertions here may be overstated, as the Bible does often exhibit a surprising amount of subtlety. However, as one performs more in-depth narrative critical readings, it becomes difficult to know whether the interpreter is finding subtlety where none exists, or whether they are actually finding something that is indeed native to the text. In this vein, reception history operated under assumptions that differed from the assumptions one brought to narrative criticism. These scholars, as Weitzman states, “assigned agency not to the text or its author but to readers who construct the text in the act of reading it.”25 Burke Long, for example, asserted in 1991 that Alter’s overall premise, which assumes a certain level of objectivity, was fundamentally flawed.26 Not only is this level of objectivity impossible to achieve, according to Long, but Long also states that Alter’s approach marginalizes other ways of reading the text and the people that do such readings. This is perhaps an unfair judgement, as attempting to ascertain what the author was trying to say does not inherently marginalize other readers, it simply does not address those readers. One of Long’s major accusations against Alter was that Alter seemed comfortable with setting aside other interpretive approaches that challenged his supposed objectivity, meaning that he largely dismissed 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid. 24 Weitzman, “Before and After,” 198. 25 Ibid. Burke O. Long, “The ‘New’ Biblical Poetics of Alter and Sternberg,” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 51 (1991): 71–84. 26 6 approaches such as deconstruction and feminism, which do not fit neatly into his approach.27 Ultimately, for Long, there can be no objectively understood intention of an author or redactor, or even an objectively understood artistic design that Alter could appeal to.28 For Long, there was simply a search for objectivity that marginalized other readers and ways of reading.29 These critics stated that Alter’s approach was fundamentally flawed because it assumed that scholars could objectively describe what a text was trying to convey to its readers.30 According to Long, what was really needed was a kind of biblical criticism that could examine itself in a critical way and become aware of the flaws inherent in the act of criticism itself, and in 1993, Cheryl Exum and David J. A. Clines edited a volume entitled The New Literary Criticism and the Hebrew Bible where they performed analysis that took this approach.31 For many, this attempt at objectivity was not the only problem with narrative criticism. Alter’s focus on the unity of the text, and his insistence that it could be read as a coherent whole, also clashed with traditional biblical scholarship that saw the Bible as an amalgamation of sources. Yet, at the same time, it assumed a high level of control by either an author or redactor, and a significant amount of authorial or redactional intent, which similarly clashed with trends in literary scholarship that emphasized the role of the reader over the role of an author. Despite all this, Alter still asserted that his approach was valid, and that it could exist side-by-side with biblical scholarship at large. In his 1989 book The Pleasures of Reading in an Ideological Age, something of a response to the trends noted above, he stated that there is such a 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid. 31 J. Cheryl Exum and David J. A. Clines, eds., The New Literary Criticism and the Hebrew Bible (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1993). 7 thing as correct interpretation of texts, and that the skills of correct reading can be taught and acquired.32 According to Alter, the reason texts can be read in so many different ways is not because no one can every know the text’s meaning, but simply because texts are complex and can be read on different levels.33 Alter asserted that there are some readings that just cannot be supported by a given text.34 The same year, Shimon Bar-Efrat’s work Narrative Art in the Bible continued in Alter’s footsteps and is a classic in the sub-field of narrative criticism.35 V. Philips Long’s The Reign and Rejection of King Saul: A Case for Literary and Theological Coherence also came out that year, and conforms closely to Alter’s style.36 However, JP Fokkelman’s fourvolume work Narrative Art and Poetry in the Books of Samuel, published between 1981 and 1993, complicated Alter’s picture. Fokkelman employed Alter’s style of narrative criticism in his work, and yet managed to write 2400 pages about a book that is only 113 pages in the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia. As David G. Firth noted in 2017, Fokkelman sometimes seemed to be analyzing Samuel with a depth and sophistication that went well beyond the sophistication with which any author could have written Samuel in the first place.37 Fokkelman’s work suggests that, contrary to Alter’s assertions, narrative criticism can sometimes produce results that are not native to the text. At roughly the same time Fokkelman was writing his commentary, another scholar, Robert Polzin, was trying to grapple with the methodological issues inherent in narrative criticism. His books Moses and the Deuteronomist, Samuel and the Deuteronomist, and David 32 Robert Alter, The Pleasures of Reading in an Ideological Age (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989). 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid. 35 Firth, “Reflections on Current Research on Samuel.” 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid. 8 and the Deuteronomist, published between 1980 and 1993, incorporated Brevard Child’s insights concerning reading texts within a canonical community, along with classic narrative criticism.38 He also applied many ideas from the Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin, the father of the modern notion of intertextuality, to narrative criticism as a first step in dealing with some of narrative criticism’s methodological problems.39 Lyle Eslinger, also began to consider methodological issues during this period with his books Kingship of God in Crisis: A Close Reading of 1 Samuel 1–12, published in 1985, and House of God or House of David?: Rhetoric of 2 Samuel 7, published in 1994. Polzin and Eslinger’s main contributions were that they began to consider how larger works can be read as a unity through the lens of narrative criticism.40 Barbara Green’s works How are the Mighty Fallen? and King Saul’s Asking, both published in 2003, also incorporate Bakhtin’s insights into narrative criticism.41 Dealing with another facet of the methodological problem created by narrative criticism, Adele Berlin’s 1994 work Poetics and Interpretation of Biblical Narrative built on Alter’s work while attempting to grapple with the issues posed by the conflict between narrative criticism and the historical-critical method.42 Then, in 2007, the journal Prooftexts published a special issue of their journal celebrating The Art of Biblical Narrative and attempting to grapple with the methodological issue of narrative criticism.43 In this special issue, Menakhem Perry, one of the scholars that inspired Alter’s work with narrative criticism, contributed a paper arguing that any act of interpretation 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid. 40 Ibid. 41 Ibid. 42 Ibid. Steven Weitzman, ed., “Special Issue: Before and After The Art of Biblical Narrative,” Proof 27.2 (2007): 191–370. 43 9 simply creates the text the interpreter claims to describe.44 Perry argued that one should simply respond to the text, trying to describe it.45 This continues to emphasize the response to narrative criticism that the nuances found through narrative criticism are not inherent in the text itself but are created by the reader. Robert Kawashima countered this view, asserting that scholars can indeed discern the true nature of biblical texts.46 He compared biblical narrative to the modern novel, arguing that some elements of literary analysis are universal, and are simply inherent in written texts themselves.47 He used the modern novel as a point of contact to show how biblical authors took advantage of the possibilities inherent in written texts.48 Kawashima argued, against Kugel, that one could not use reception history to make all biblical interpretation relative.49 He argued that scholars could look beyond the subjectivity created by their environments and understand something objectively true about texts.50 In other words, he asserted that scholars could actually understand the text as it was meant to be understood. Considering these methodological difficulties, there was some question as to whether narrative criticism would even survive as a sub-discipline of biblical criticism. In 1985, a new monograph series completely dedicated to the literary study of the Hebrew Bible, edited by Robert Polzin and Herb Marks was released by Indiana University Press.51 It was successful at first, with many works published early on, but by 1999, it was almost discontinued. Although it 44 Ibid., 204. 45 Ibid., 205. 46 Ibid. 47 Ibid. 48 Ibid. 49 Ibid. 50 Ibid. 51 Ibid. 10 still survives, much of it deals with reception criticism, with only brief forays back into narrative criticism.52 Other recent works also show how people are grappling with the issues of narrative criticism. Uriah Kim, in articles such as “Is There an ‘Anticonquest’ Ideology in the Book of Judges?” in the volume Postcolonialism and the Hebrew Bible: The Next Step, from 2013, used Robert Alter’s style of narrative criticism in the service of a postcolonial reading of the Bible.53 Matthew Newkirk’s 2013 Ph.D. dissertation “Just Deceivers: An Investigation into the Motif and Theology of Deception in the Books of Samuel,” employed Alter’s method of narrative criticism in a more traditional form.54 Benjamin J. M. Johnson’s Reading David and Goliath in Greek and Hebrew: A Literary Approach, from 2015, moved away from the employing narrative criticism on “the text as it is,” and focused on textual pluriformity, stating that each version can be read in a narrative-critical way and has something different to contribute.55 Say It Again, Sam: A Literary and Filmic Study of Narrative Repetition in 1 Samuel 28 by Grenville J.R. Ken, from 2015, combines narrative criticism with filmic narrative theory.56 Samuel Sangshik Han’s books, One of the first works published in Meir Sternberg’s 1985 work The Poetics of Biblical Narrative, mentioned earlier, was the first book in this series, and sold more than 8,500 copies. 52 Mieke Bal’s book Lethal Love was also successful, but it soon became apparent that there was simply less of an audience for narrative criticism than there used to be, and the series began to put out fewer books throughout the 1990’s. 52 Sternberg published another book for the series in 1999, Hebrews Between Cultures, but it was not well received, and the series was nearly discontinued.52 Between 1999 and 2007, only one other book was published for the series: Robert Kawashima’s Biblical Narrative and the Death of the Rhapsode.52 The series continued to exist in some form, but began to incorporate reception criticism. Shaul Magid’s From Metaphysics to Midrash: Myth, History, and the Interpretation of Scripture in Lurianic Kabbala, published in 2008, was more of an example of reception criticism than narrative criticism, and although Carolyn J. Sharp’s Irony and Meaning in the Hebrew Bible returned the series to its roots in some ways, Brennan W. Breed’s Nomadic Text: A Theory of Biblical Reception History was, as the name implies, self-consciously concerned with reception history rather than narrative criticism. 52 However, the most recent installment in the series Jonah in the Shadows of Eden by Yitzhak Berger, published in 2016, shows that traditional narrative criticism still continues to persist. 53 Firth, “Reflections on Current Research on Samuel.” 52 54 Ibid. 55 Ibid. 56 Ibid. 11 Re-Reading the Old Testament and Israel and Biblical Interpretation, published in 2016, combine redaction criticism with narrative criticism, and 'And He Will Take Your Daughters...': Woman Story and the Ethical Evaluation of Monarchy in the David Narrative by April D. Westbrook, published in 2016, uses narrative criticism in the service of examining women in the Hebrew Bible.57 These varied approaches pose the questions: have the changes in the practice of literary interpretation over the last forty years invalidated narrative criticism? Has the rise of deconstruction, and what Weitzman calls, “subversive reading strategies that sought to emphasize the elusiveness, ruptures, and self-contradictions of literary language or of the self in its relationship to language” made narrative criticism irrelevant?58 Has reception theory changed how people look at texts to the extent that narrative criticism is no longer useful? Many opponents would answer these objections to narrative criticism in the affirmative. Alter’s approach primarily focused on looking at the text itself, but reception criticism has forced critics to realize that readers import their own meaning into a text.59 Barbara Johnson and others still perform close reading but do so in the service of deconstructionism.60 Robert Alter’s style of close reading which, as Weitzman put it, “assigned to texts a large measure of control over their meaning and saw as its chief objective the elucidation of their artistic design” has simply become less attractive to scholars who are less sure about whether such interpretation is native to the text, or whether it is simply an example of scholars importing their own ideas onto the text.61 57 Ibid. 58 Weitzman, “Before and After,” 195–96. 59 Ibid., 196. 60 Ibid. 61 Ibid. 12 Some of these objections to narrative criticism come from scholars who, as has been noted above, affirm that absolutely no intentionality can ever be ascribed to authors, and that to do so is to commit the intentional fallacy. This assertion may take things too far. It seems reasonable to assume that exegesis can indeed reveal some basic facts about what an author probably intended. Yet, as seen in the example of J. P. Fokkelman, narrative criticism presents readings of the text that are immensely more complicated and nuanced than what one could come to from basic exegesis, and it is in the case of these narrative-critical readings that the intentional fallacy is more applicable.62 Based on a basic exegesis of the text of 1 Sam 17, for 62 This is part of the reason the commentaries written by narrative critics differ so markedly from the commentaries written by other scholars. For some examples of the narrative-critical approach to the material covered by JEDtrH, see Robert Polzin, David and the Deuteronomist: A Literary Study of the Deuteronomistic History, Part Three: Second Samuel, (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993); Robert Alter, Ancient Israel: The Former Prophets: Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings (New York: Norton, 2013); Robert Alter, Genesis: Translation and Commentary (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996); Alter, Biblical Narrative; Alter, Biblical Poetry; Robert Alter, The David Story: A Translation with Commentary of 1 and 2 Samuel (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999); J. P. Fokkelman, The Crossing Fates, vol. 2 of Narrative Art and Poetry in the Books of Samuel (Assen, Netherlands: Van Gorcum, 1986); J.P. Fokkelman, Throne and City, vol. 3 of Narrative Art and Poetry in the Books of Samuel (Assen, Netherlands: Van Gorcum, 1990); J. P. Fokkelman, Vow and Desire, vol. 4 of Narrative Art and Poetry in the Books of Samuel (Assen, Netherlands: Van Gorcum, 1993); the Berit Olam Commentary series (eds. Walsh and Franke) is also excellent when it comes to narrative analysis. For more standard kinds of commentaries of the material covered by JEDtrH, as a point of comparison, see Gina Hens-Piazza, 1–2 Kings, ed. Patrick D. Miller, Abingdon Old Testament Commentaries (Nashville: Abingdon, 2006); Ralph W. Klein, 1 Samuel, vol. 10 of Word Biblical Commentary (Waco, TX: Word, 1983); Nehama Leibowitz, Studies in Bereshit (Genesis): In the Context of Ancient and Modern Jewish Bible Commentary, trans. Aryeh Newman, 4th ed. (Jerusalem: Hemed Press, 1981); Peter J. Leithart, 1 & 2 Kings, ed. R. R. Reno, Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2006); P. Kyle McCarter, Jr., 1 Samuel: A New Translation with Introduction, Notes, and Commentary, AB 8 (Garden City, NY; Doubleday, 1980); P. Kyle McCarter Jr., II Samuel: A New Translation with Introduction, Notes and Commentary. AB 9 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1984); E. A. Speiser, Genesis, AB 1 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1964); Newsom and Ringe, Women’s Bible Commentary; Marvin A. Sweeney, I & II Kings: A Commentary (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2007); Waltke, Genesis; Barry G. Webb, The Book of Judges (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2012); Gordon J. Wenham, Genesis 1–15, vol. 1 of Word Biblical Commentary (Waco, TX: Word, 1987); Claus Westermann, Genesis: A Practical Commentary, trans. David E. Green (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1987); A. A. Anderson, 2 Samuel, vol. 11 of Word Biblical Commentary (Waco, TX: Word, 1989); Robert G. Boling, Judges, AB 6A (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1975); U. Cassuto, From Noah to Abraham: A Commentary on Genesis VI9–XI32, vol. 2 of A Commentary on the Book of Genesis, trans. Israel Abrahams (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1984); Robert Davidson, Genesis 12–50 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); David Toshio Tsumura, The First Book of Samuel (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007); Volkmar Fritz, 1 & 2 Kings: A Continental Commentary, trans. Anselm Hagedorn (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress, 2003); Mordechai Cogan, 1 Kings: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, AB 10 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 2001); Dale C. Allison, Jr. et al., eds., Encyclopedia of the Bible and its Reception, vol. 9: Field-Gennesaret (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2014). 13 example, one might reasonably conclude that David’s defeat of Goliath taught the truth that God would fight on behalf of the tiny nation of Israel against its larger neighbors. A reading this basic is probably a reasonable one, and it can reasonably be assumed that either the author meant to convey this meaning or, at the very least, this reading is native to the text. However, if one were to do a more complex narrative-critical reading of the text, seeing it as an allusion to events later in David’s life, one could never be sure if the author meant for such meanings and connections to be there. Thus, this kind of literary interpretation would be an example of the intentional fallacy. Therefore, even though the idea that it is impossible to ascribe intentionality to an author may well be an overstatement, ascribing the complex and nuanced findings of narrative criticism to the author, or even stating that such readings are “native to the text” may be claiming too much. As Stephen A. Geller’s review of The Art of Biblical Narrative stated, Alter’s “offense may be defined as circularity, deductive eisegesis: the delusion that one has found in a text what has really been placed there unwittingly by oneself.”63 This problem is “magnified by a further illusion: the conviction that texts can ‘speak for themselves,’ that meaning simply emerges from them fully grown, like Athena from Jove's brow. The latter is a crime of narrow formalism, the conviction that mere examination of form will reveal the meaning of texts.”64 There is little question, according to Geller, that a certain amount of circular argumentation, the "hermeneutical circle" is a part of all interpretation.65 As he states, “Pre-understandings, preliminary a priori assessments, determine even the framework of formal ‘facts’ for literary analysis.”66 Yet, for Geller, it may be that Alter’s approach contains too much circularity; that Alter has imposed too 63 Stephen A. Geller, “Some Pitfalls in the ‘Literary Approach’ to Biblical Narrative,” review of The Art of Biblical Narrative, by Robert Alter, JQR 74.4 (1984): 408–15. 64 Ibid., 409. 65 Ibid., 409. 66 Ibid. 14 much of himself onto the text.67 For him, uncovering the intention of the ancient authors or editors, or even elements that these authors and editors may have somehow unconsciously included in the text, is simply not possible.68 This summary of the history of narrative criticism demonstrates two of the main objections to narrative criticism: 1. Because narrative critics read the text as it is in its final form they often ignore many of the conclusions of the historical-critical method. 2. Using narrative criticism to determine authorial intent or what is “native to the text” may simply not be possible. Phillip F. Esler, gives a possible answer to these questions in his book Sex, Wives, and Warriors: Reading Old Testament Narrative with its Ancient Audience, in which he notes that there has been a shift from a “focus on history unconcerned with final literary form to a recent interest in final literary form that is largely insouciant to history.”69 He then asks, “How did this come about, and is there an alternative to this strange polarization of research?”70 Esler’s answer to this question that one should examine the literary form of the text not in an attempt to understand what the author or redactor meant, but simply as a means to understand a range of ways in which the earliest audience of the text might have understood it.71 This thesis will now review Esler’s approach, followed by possible refinements that will constitute the approach this thesis will pursue. 67 Ibid. 68 Ibid. 69 Phillip F. Esler, Sex, Wives, and Warriors: Reading Old Testament Narrative with Its Ancient Audience, (Cambridge: James Clarke and Co Ltd, 2011), 16. 70 Ibid. 71 Ibid., 20–21. 15 Esler’s work attempts to explore how an ancient Israelite audience would have understood certain narratives around the time the text that would eventually be known as the Masoretic Text was taking shape.72 Esler therefore ignores the versions, such as the LXX or the Targumim, as well as the history of the composition of the text.73 He does not seek to identify a specific audience, and is only concerned about a more general one because, as he puts it, the overall outlines of “the social context that will concern us are general enough to have been familiar to an ancient Israelite at any time from 900 to 100 BCE.”74 He does not tie any of his points about the ancient Israelite context of the text to a specific historical period.75 Rather, he seeks to examine the cultural and social characteristics of society that existed over centuries.76 Thus, for Esler, changes in social structure and writing style between the pre- and postexilic periods are less important than broader societal relationships.77 This is because these relationships “persisted throughout this period in general form, whatever local variation they may have received.”78 Esler is similarly unconcerned with whether these texts were read publicly around the time they were composed.79 As he admits, this approach is similar to work that has been done in New Testament studies since the 1940s.80 However, unlike this work in New Testament studies, Esler’s approach makes narrative a primary concern, and this emphasis on narrative is what makes his work 72 Ibid., 22. 73 Ibid., 23. 74 Ibid., 24. 75 Ibid. 76 Ibid. 77 Ibid. 78 Ibid. 79 Ibid. 80 Ibid. 16 relevant to this thesis.81 Esler states that “exploring how the first audience of a biblical narrative, listeners rather than readers, would have understood and related to it means paying close attention to the details of the story.”82 In Esler’s view, the practice of “close reading” is the literary critical approach that has had the greatest impact on biblical studies, and he sees some form of close reading as essential to understanding how this audience might have understood these narratives.83 He focuses less on the style of the text and is more interested in elements like plot and character portrayal, as he feels that these are the elements that can best be illuminated by the process of reading the text in the context of its ancient Israelite audience.84 In doing this, he does not propose that employing some kind of narratological theory is helpful, as it can sometimes make the analysis more difficult to understand.85 He also attempts to employ folklore studies to examine biblical narrative, comparing narratives from the Hebrew Bible with narratives found across the world.86 Esler asserts that modern readers “can realistically aim for a general approximation of the culture in which ancient Israelites were immersed, and that is everywhere presupposed in the literature they have left behind, that is quite sufficient for the purpose of reading the narratives with their original audiences.”87 Esler has no illusions that modern readers could somehow completely understand the culture of ancient Israel, but he does assert that moderns can understand enough about this culture to have some sense of how that earliest audience would 81 Ibid. 82 Ibid., 25. 83 Ibid. 84 Ibid. 85 Ibid., 26. 86 Ibid., 34. 87 Ibid., 36. 17 have understood the text.88 These readings, he is convinced, would be radically different from the way modern readers often understand the text today.89 Esler asserts that the way scholars have traditionally attempted to do this, by examining all the archaeological and textual evidence and using this data to get a picture of what ancient Israel was like, still involves interpreting data, and this data is sometimes interpreted through a modern lens.90 According to Esler, the only way to avoid this importation of modern ideas into the text is to use resources gleaned from anthropology to compare the social systems in ancient Israel to those of a society that is closer to ancient Israel than the North American or Northern European societies many biblical scholars live in.91 Such a comparative approach is essential for Esler because there is comparatively little information available about ancient Israelite culture.92 Although he fully understands that families and societies differ throughout time and place, some basic similarities still persist, and it is these similarities that he claims are significant for the analysis of the Hebrew Bible.93 This approach gives people a way to escape their modern assumptions about texts and societies that they might otherwise import into the text.94 The ethnographic data and anthropological models taken from this field cannot somehow fill holes in the data from ancient Israel directly, for obvious reasons.95 However, this approach might cause the reader to examine data that might otherwise be overlooked. If a seemingly insignificant detail from an ethnographic study proved to be important in an anthropological model, one might look for similar details in the Hebrew 88 Ibid. 89 Ibid. 90 Ibid. 91 Ibid., 37. 92 Ibid. 93 Ibid. 94 Ibid., 38. 95 Ibid. 18 Bible to determine if they might be significant as well.96 It also allows readers of the Bible to organize data in a more realistic way.97 Although Esler’s work is useful in many ways, some modifications might make it a slightly stronger methodology. Working only with how the text would have been understood at the time of the finalization of the Masoretic Text seems like an unnecessary constraint. If the understanding of this particular audience is worth understanding, one wonders why other possible audiences would not be worth understanding as well. Benjamin J. M. Johnson’s work on the LXX, noted earlier, suggests that considering how the earliest audience of the LXX might have understood a text could prove fruitful. Similarly, understanding a range of ways in which the earliest audience of the Targumim might have understood those texts could also be interesting. Eventually, determining how the earliest audience of the canon as a whole could have understood the canon together may be instructive. In this way canonical criticism is a subset of this approach.98 As one extends earlier in time from the finalization of the Masoretic Text, considering possible ways in which hypothetically reconstructed texts such as JE or JEDtrH (a collection including J, E, D, and the first edition of the Dueteronomistic History, in the years shortly before the Exile before P was added to the collection) might have been understood may also have value. This type of analysis would require determining a date for these texts, however, and Eslinger may be somewhat hesitant about the possibility of dating texts.99 However, dating the texts and determining a more specific audience would allow the reader to be more precise, 96 Ibid. 97 Ibid., 39. 98 For more on Canonical Criticism, see Brevard S. Childs, Old Testament Theology in a Canonical Context (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1986), 6–8. See Lyle Eslinger, “Inner-Biblical Exegesis and Inner-Biblical Allusion: The Question of Category,” VT 42 (1992): 47–58. 99 19 rather than assuming that a Hellenistic Period audience would understand the text in the same way a pre-exilic audience would. This may be true in many cases, but precision may sometimes be helpful, especially when considering writing style and cultural context, and a refinement of Eslinger’s approach allows for more precision. Therefore, this thesis will seek to identify what the form of the text would have been in a certain time and place and analyze how the audience in that time and place might have understood the form of the text. In this way, this approach is a subset of reader-response criticism. However, as S. Phillip Nolte has noted, reader response criticism “accommodates a wide variety of techniques and methods,” and is more of a description of a few methodologies rather than a methodology itself.100 Another element of Esler’s approach that could be refined is that he is not concerned with whether these texts were read publicly at any point. However, if one is to understand how an audience might have understood a text, knowing how that audience experienced that text is essential. His emphasis on narrative is important, as it allows the reader to understand narrative criticism better, but despite his general unconcern with whether the text was read out loud to an audience or not, he still asserts, as noted earlier, that “exploring how the first audience of a biblical narrative, listeners rather than readers, would have understood and related to it means paying close attention to the details of the story.” Thus, understanding oral performance of texts in ancient Israel is important for this type of analysis. Understanding how an ancient audience, listening to the text, might have performed some kind of “close reading” or, more accurately, “close listening” is an important part of this analysis. Because his focus is less on the style of the text and more on plot and character portrayal, he may miss some details that a more focused approach could yield. Thus, this thesis will seek to understand how this ancient audience might S. Philip Nolte, “One Text, Many Stories: The (Ir)Relevance of Reader-Response Criticism for Apocryphal Literature in the Septuagint,” HTS 68.1 (2012): 1–10. 100 20 have performed a “close reading” of the text by examining how texts were performed in ancient Israel, and determining how the audience might have done such a “close reading.” His approach to the ethnographic data may also be too broad for the scope of this thesis. Rather than examining similar societies and cultures and comparing them to ancient Israel, this thesis will examine simply oral performance in cultures similar to ancient Israel, as well as whatever can be gleaned from ancient sources, to understand how the text might have been understood at the time it was being performed. One last modification of Eslinger’s approach is also in order. If one is to posit ways in which an ancient audience may have performed a “close reading” of an ancient text, one should determine whether such “close reading” practices can be traced back to ancient Israel. This will allow the reader to avoid importing later methods onto the text, which is something he explicitly seeks to avoid. Thus, this thesis will demonstrate that the methods of narrative criticism can still be employed in a modified way that addresses some of the problems with narrative criticism mentioned earlier. One could first use the historical-critical method to reconstruct a text, such as JEDtrH. One could also use reception criticism to determine the ways in which the earliest audience of JEDtrH could have understood the text. Finally, the interpreter could then use narrative criticism to examine not authorial intent or what is “native to the text” but simply to present one way in which one member of its earliest audience could have understood one pericope within the text. This thesis will demonstrate this by examining the Amnon and Tamar narrative in the context of a Josianic audience, because this is likely the period when it was placed into a larger text, JEDtrH. This thesis will do this by 1) providing context for this approach by giving a summary of some of the major methodologies within narrative criticism, 2) 21 defining JEDtrH, 3) examining oral readings of texts in ancient Judah to demonstrate how the Amnon and Tamar narrative within JEDtrH would likely have been experienced by the listener 4) examining ancient interpretive styles to demonstrate one possible way in which a part of its earliest audience might have understood the pericope through an ancient style of close reading, and 5) use these methods to examine the Amnon and Tamar narrative as a test case in order to determine one possible way in which one member of JEDtrH’s earliest audience could have understood it. II. NARRATIVE CRITICISM One significant element of narrative criticism, the element this thesis will be exploring the most, is inner-biblical allusion.101 This is an occasion when one part of the Hebrew Bible uses distinctive words102 or phrases to allude103 to another part of the Hebrew Bible.104 Robert Alter states that, “When one biblical story alludes to an earlier one, as often happens, clear textual signals are given in the citation of key words or phrases, sometimes even whole statements, from the antecedent story (the line-by-line citation of the Sodom story in the grisly tale of the concubine at Gibeah, Judg 19, is the most extreme instance of this procedure).”105 The line between inner-biblical allusion, inner-biblical echoes, and the more general relationships between texts studied in “influence theory,” can be thin at times, and this thesis will not attempt to parse the exact differences between an allusion, an echo, and general influence. But regardless The reason for my use of the phrase “inner-biblical allusion” instead of “intertextuality” is because, in its original form, intertextuality tends to be a broader, more philosophic field that studies the general relationship between ideas. It addresses the concept that humans only know things in terms of other things, as discussed by Michael Bakhtin in the 1920s and Julia Kristeva who built up the idea in the 1960s. In some iterations of intertextuality it is the reader that determines where one text ends and the other begins, and this thesis will rely on possible interpretations of the original audience in discussing these connections. In that way this thesis will bring up intertextuality periodically. However, I resisted simply using the term “intertextuality” because I will often be dealing with issues that are more concrete than what the concept has meant in most of its iterations. This thesis will be addressing perceived inner-biblical allusion, which is much more concrete: one must be able to show that a segment of the text’s early audience could have thought that one passage in the text was alluding to another passage in the text. For a good discussion of this see: Thomas R. Hatina, “Intertextuality and Historical Criticism in New Testament Studies: Is There a Relationship?” BibInt 7 (1999): 28–43. 101 102 “Single words from [JE] thus functioned metonymically for Dtr, conjuring up as they did complete [JE] narratives—and worlds of meaning within them,” John E. Harvey, Retelling the Torah: The Deuteronomistic Historian’s Use of Tetrateuchal Narratives, JSOTSup 403 (New York: T&T Clark, 2004), 61. “Another type of repetition appears when two independent scenes, events, or characters are linked allusively, so that the reader is led to see similarities between them and to interpret one in light of the other,” Jerome T. Walsh, Old Testament Narrative: A Guide to Interpretation (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2009), 92. 103 104 A good example of this can be seen when one compares 1 Sam 19 with Gen 31. In 1 Sam 19, Michal, David’s wife, makes a dummy to deceive her father out of a terafim covered with a cloth with some goat hair for a head. This is likely an allusion to Rachel, who, while similarly running from her father steals his terafim and hides them under a pillow when he comes to search her tent. This causes the reader to be more confident that Michal has disowned her father in favor of her husband. Alter, Biblical Narrative, 76. See also Yitzhak Berger, “Ruth and Inner-Biblical Allusion: The Case of 1 Samuel 25,” JBL 128 (2009): 253–72. 105 22 23 of the nomenclature, this is an important part of narrative criticism. Alter states that “to understand a narrative art so bare of embellishment and explicit commentary, one must be constantly aware of … the repeated use of narrative analogy, through which one part of the text provides oblique commentary on another.” As one might imagine based on Alter’s comments concerning inner-biblical allusion, a common thread that runs through narrative approaches to the Hebrew Bible is that biblical narrative is extremely subtle and understated.106 Alter puts it well when he states that one of the objectives of the authors of biblical narrative was to “produce a certain indeterminacy of meaning, especially in regard to motive, moral character, and psychology.” He states that “meaning, perhaps for the first time in narrative literature, was conceived as a process, requiring … continual suspension of judgment, weighing of multiple possibilities, brooding over gaps in the information provided.”107 Erich Auerbach argues that Biblical narrative is intentionally spare and is “fraught with background.”108 In his work Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel, Michael Fishbane operates under the assumption that even a cluster of common words, when used in close proximity, can be an indication that one text is alluding to another text.109 Even Hermann Gunkel noted, in relation to the spare nature of biblical narrative, that, “In very many situations where the modern writer would expect a psychological analysis,” the biblical author 106 Yairah Amit, Hidden Polemics in Biblical Narrative, trans. Jonathan Chipman, BibInt 25 (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 42. Alter, Biblical Narrative, 12. See also Elliott Rabin, Understanding the Hebrew Bible: A Reader’s Guide (Jersey City, NJ: KTAV Publishing House, 2006), 22–25. 107 Erich Auerbach’s delightful essay, “Odysseus’s Scar,” in The Bible Read as Literature: An Anthology, ed. Mary Esson Reid (Cleveland, OH: Howard Allen, 1959), 209–29, argues this point well, comparing biblical narrative to The Odyssey. 108 109 Michael Fishbane, Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985), 301. I think Fishbane periodically relies too much on later Jewish ideas of interpretation, a problem I discuss at another point in this thesis. However, elements of Fishbane’s work are still valid, and I will cite him periodically throughout this thesis. 24 “simply presents an action.” The text does not state that “Tamar remained faithful to her husband even beyond the grave, but that she took measures to rear up children from his seed.”110 Because of this style of writing, one sometimes even encounters texts that some narrative critics have understood in two completely contradictory ways.111 In connection with an analysis of the Saul narrative, Alter notes that if his “interpretation seems to exert too much pressure on half a dozen words of the Hebrew text, one must keep in mind the rigorous economy of biblical narrative.”112 He also states that “though biblical narrative is often silent where later modes of fiction will choose to be loquacious, it is selectively silent in a purposeful way.”113 He then lays out the principle, now common to the literary analysis of the Bible,114 that one must always consider how an author/redactor could have written a text, and then look at how the author/redactor actually crafted the text, a process known a creating a counter-text: If the Saul narrative were not using or referring to the betrothal type-scene, for example, “the particular detail of an encounter on unfamiliar territory with maidens by a well would otherwise be gratuitous. Saul could have 110 Hermann Gunkel, The Legends of Genesis: The Biblical Saga and History, trans. W. H. Carruth (New York: Schocken Books, 1975), 60–61. 111 One can see such narrative subversion in the Solomon narrative. If one pays careful attention to the subtleties of the Solomon story, one can read it as polemic rather than praise. See Bruce A. Power, “‘All the King’s Horses . . . ’: Narrative Subversion in the Story of Solomon’s Golden Age,” in From Babel to Babylon: Essays on Biblical History and Literature in Honour of Brian Peckham, eds. Joyce Rilett Wood, John E. Harvey, and Mark Leuchter, LHBOTS 455 (New York: T&T Clark, 2006), 111–23. 112 Alter, Biblical Narrative, 73. Because of this “rigorous economy” even seemingly common words, when used in conjunction with each other, can be used to make a point. See Alan J. Hauser, “Yahweh Versus Death: The Real Struggle in 1 Kings 17–19,” in From Carmel to Horeb: Elijah in Crisis, eds. Alan J. Hauser and Russell Gregory, JSOTSup 85 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1990), 9–89. Alter, Biblical Narrative, 144. See also Meir Sternberg, “The Bible’s Art of Persuasion: Ideology, Rhetoric, and Poetics in Saul’s Fall,” in Beyond Form Criticism: Essays in Old Testament Literary Criticism, ed. Paul R. House, Sources for Biblical and Theological Study 2 (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1992), 234–71. 113 114 Shimon Bar-Efrat, Narrative Art in the Bible, JSOTSup 70, BLS 17 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 2000), 241, notes that Amnon and Tamar could have been introduced quite differently, even rephrasing the verse to show an alternative, but then notes that by placing Absalom at the beginning of the verse, the author is foreshadowing what will happen much later on. Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Poetry (New York: Basic Books, 1985), 161; Alter literally reworks some of Deutero-Isaiah into prose to emphasize the significance of how things are said compared to how they could have been said in the Hebrew Bible. 25 easily been made to proceed directly to find Samuel … The fact that instead the author chose to have him meet girls by a well on foreign ground … is in all likelihood a clue of meaning.”115 Another example is the Elijah narrative in 1 Kgs 19, which could simply have stated what was conceived to be the historical facts of the case: Elijah is threatened by Jezebel, heads into the desert and wishes to die, is preserved by an angel, goes to Horeb, has an encounter with God, and finds a successor. It could have been a short and concise report of the story as the author/redactor knew it. However, other details are mentioned, and for narrative critics, these details paint the events in a certain light, as Alter notes: In all this, as I have said, it is quite possible that the writer faithfully represents the historical data without addition or substantive embellishment. The organization of the narrative, however, its lexical and syntactic choices, its small shifts in point of view, its brief but strategic uses of dialogue, produce an imaginative reenactment of the historical event, conferring upon it a strong attitudinal definition and discovering in it a pattern of meaning. It is perhaps less historicized fiction than fictionalized history—history in which the feeling and the meaning of events are concretely realized through the technical resources of prose fiction.116 In other words, in narrative criticism, it is through the more subtle elements of the Hebrew Bible that much of its meaning can be inferred. Alter hits on a small detail elaborated later by Meir Sternberg117 when he says that “an elaborate system of gaps between what is told and what must be inferred has been artfully contrived to leave us with at least two conflicting, 115 Alter, Biblical Narrative, 73. P. Fokkelman, Narrative Art and Poetry in the Books of Samuel: The Crossing Fates, vol. 2 (Assen, Netherlands: Van Gorcum, 1986), 6–9, discusses the theoretical justification behind this method. 116 Alter, Biblical Narrative, 47. Bruce K. Waltke, Genesis: A Commentary (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2001), 303. 117 Meir Sternberg, The Poetics of Biblical Narrative: Ideological Literature and the Drama of Reading (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 186–229. An excellent example of this is the statement about Michal’s barrenness, a quintessentially ambiguous text found in in 2 Sam 6:23, ‫ולמיכל בת־ׄשאול לא־היה לה ילד עד יום‬ ‫“ מותה‬And Michal the daughter of Saul had no child unto the day of her death.” In light of the fight with David that just preceded this statement, one can understand it to mean that Michal was punished by God “for rebuking His anointed king over an act of royal and cultic ceremony. A reader attending more to the personal drama that has been enacted between Michal and David might justifiably conclude that after this furious exchange, David simply ceased to have conjugal relations with Michal and so condemned her to barrenness.” Alter, Biblical Narrative, 157. 26 mutually complicating interpretations of the motives and states of knowledge of the principal characters.”118 According to Alter, one frequently sees, “the Bible’s artful procedure of variously stipulating or suppressing motive in order to elicit moral inferences and suggest certain ambiguities.”119 Continuously assessing how the text could have been written and then analyzing how it was actually written through a close reading of the text is key to this approach. Closely attending to the details of a narrative may be foreign to many modern readers but: . . . accustomed as we are to reading narratives in which there is a much denser specification of fictional data, we have to learn … to attend more finely to the complex, tersely expressive details of the biblical text. Biblical narrative is laconic but by no means in a uniform or mechanical fashion. Why, then, does the narrator ascribe motives to or designate states of feeling in his characters in some instances, while elsewhere he chooses to remain silent on these points? Why are some actions minimally indicated, others elaborated through synonym and detail? What accounts for the drastic shifts in the timescale of narrated events? Why is actual dialogue introduced at certain junctures, and on what principle of selectivity are specific words assigned to characters? In a text so sparing in epithets and relational designations, why are particular identifications of characters noted by the narrator at specific points in the story? 120 For narrative critics, one should also be aware of possible assumptions that may lie underneath the question of whether or not the Hebrew Bible contains subtlety like this. One may be operating under an assumption that because the Bible is ancient, it is necessarily primitive. However, narrative critics assert that just because the text is ancient and its narrative style is different from modern texts, one should not assume that the text is therefore primitive. When one studies ancient texts, one realizes that simply resigning them to the intellectual dustbin as “primitive narrative” is a simple example of modern intellectual snobbery. As one examines such 118 Alter, Biblical Narrative, 19. Walsh, Old Testament Narrative, 65–80, discusses gaps and ambiguities in the text in great detail, highlighting the subtlety of Biblical Narrative. Alter, Biblical Narrative, 50. See also Paul R. Raabe, “Deliberate Ambiguity in the Psalter,” JBL 110 (1991): 213–27. 119 120 Alter, Biblical Narrative, 22. See J. P. Fokkelman, Narrative Art and Poetry in the Books of Samuel: Throne and City, vol. 3 (Assen, Netherlands: Van Gorcum, 1990), 114. 27 texts carefully, as Alter states, one is “compelled to recognize the complexity and subtlety with which it is formally organized and with which it renders its subjects.” He also states that some modern scholars impose “a naive and unexamined aesthetic of their own” onto the text, and then come to the conclusion that “certain parts of the ancient text could not belong with others: the supposedly primitive narrative is subjected by scholars to tacit laws like the law of stylistic unity, of noncontradiction, of nondigression, of nonrepetition, and by these dim but purportedly universal lights is found to be composite, deficient, or incoherent.”121 Because of this assumed subtlety, narrative critics assert that one significant unusual word or phrase could signal something to the reader. Often this signal is that the reader should read one text in light of another text.122 In narrative criticism, if one finds an unusual word or phrase in two places in the Hebrew Bible, one should at least check to see if there are any other parallels between the texts.123 This approach is now so common in the literary approach to the Bible that it is practically assumed.124 Because it is often asserted that the artistry of biblical 121 Alter, Biblical Narrative, 23. Of course, one must realize that what one might identify as the careful crafting of a text by the author/ redactor may simply be an example of apophenia in the mind of the reader. I once read a book on the Roman Empire shortly after finishing a book on the origins of the Cold War. As I read about Roman jockeying with the Parthians over Armenia (J. B. Bury, A History of the Roman Empire: From its Foundation to the Death of Marcus Aurelius (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1893, 305–307), I immediately thought the author was tailoring his discussion of this historical situation to comment on US and Soviet jockeying over the “third world.” However, when I looked at the publication date, I found that the book was published in 1893, nearly sixty years before the Cold War began. Sometimes coincidences happen, and one needs to have the humility to acknowledge this. And yet, one should consider the possibility that seemingly insignificant parts of a narrative, even single words in a phrase, could make the reader think of another text. Sometimes this was likely intentional, and sometimes it was likely unintentional, as in my anecdote about the Roman Empire and the Cold War. Another anecdote may be instructive. When I read to Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows for the first time, I noticed early on that the text begins in medias res and one is not introduced to the character that would really drive the plot, Toad, until a little later in the book. I shrugged off this similarity to The Odyssey as a coincidence and continued reading. As the book went on, however, I noticed things that were difficult to account for if one did not have The Odyssey in mind, like a seemingly inexplicable encounter with a Greek god, Pan. The I began to suspect that whole book was a loose retelling of The Odyssey, but was still not completely sure, until I got to the chapter that was actually entitled The Return of Ulysses. Thus, one word, one specific reference, along with many other looser parallels, convinced me that I was dealing with a larger scheme of allusion. 122 123 124 Berger, “Ruth and Inner-Biblical Allusion,” 254–55. See, for example, Ken Stone, Sex, Honor, and Power in the Deuteronomistic History, JSOTSup 234 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1996), 122. Amit, Hidden Polemics, 179–81, brings up the notion that even 28 narrative is “finely modulated from moment to moment, determining in most cases the minute choice of words and reported details, the pace of narration, the small movements of dialogue, and a whole network of ramified interconnections in the text,”125 one could assert with some confidence that even single words or phrases could have significance to signal the reader that an allusion is taking place.126 Alter asserts that “parallel acts or situations are used to comment on each other in biblical narrative.”127 To a narrative critic, unusual words and phrases indicate allusion. As Jerome T. Walsh has stated in his book, Old Testament Narrative: A Guide to Interpretation, “A more subtle and easily overlooked link by repetition occurs when a single word or phrase—one that is particularly noticeable, usually because of its rarity—appears in two different contexts.”128 For narrative critics, rare words have a way of “grating on the ear” as noted above. If a word only appears a few times in the canon, a reader is much more likely to associate it with other occasions where the word appears. The word, ‫ פסים‬which is used to describe both Joseph’s and Tamar’s coat, only appears four times in the Hebrew Bible,129 and only appears in conjunction within these two narratives. The comparatively small number of occurrences of this word in the text might cause a narrative critic to compare the two narratives simply because it appears so rarely, and so stands out to the reader. Thus, the less common a word is in the text, the more likely the reader is to connect it to other narratives where the word is used, especially if other perceived similarities appear. place names, if uncommon, can be used as a signal to say things to the reader. Phyllis A. Bird, Missing Persons and Mistaken Identities: Women and Gender in Ancient Israel (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress, 1997), 198, discusses the weight that can and should be placed on even one word or phrase because of the understated nature of the Biblical text, as opposed to the modern novel. Alter, Biblical Narrative, 9. 125 Alter, Biblical Narrative, 1. 126 Walsh, Old Testament Narrative, 92. 127 Alter, Biblical Narrative, 6. 128 Walsh, Old Testament Narrative, 92. 129 Davidson, Genesis 12–50, 218. 29 Even distinctive vocabulary and phrases spread throughout one portion of the text that appear close together in a short narrative may signal something to a narrative critic, who compares the shorter section with the larger section from which the vocabulary was taken. Some have assumed that similarities between texts imply a very strong, almost allegorical, connection between the texts, and this is not how most narrative critics see things.130 When one text has significant verbal parallels with another text, this would simply invite the reader to compare the two texts as a whole, not necessarily to compare the character making a statement in one text to a character making the same statement in another text. The problems with this approach, described in the introduction, are fairly obvious. It is impossible now to say whether or not most of the allusions discovered using narrative criticism are actually intentional or not. However, the idea that one portion of the Hebrew Bible should be read in light of other portions of the Hebrew Bible, as well as the idea that each word of the text may be important, may have been an assumption of some part of the earliest audience of the text, as will be demonstrated in the following chapters. 130 Paul R. Noble discusses the problems in viewing the text this way, and of taking this approach to innerbiblical allusion, see his article “Esau, Tamar, and Joseph: Criteria for Identifying Inner-Biblical Allusions.” VT 52 (2002): 219–52. III. JEDTRH In order to explore various ways in which a person hearing JEDtrH for the first time could have understood it, one must first establish that such a collection ever existed and when it dates from. This chapter will seek to argue that JEDtrH existed as a compilation at some point, and that a version of this text existed in the time of Josiah. The first step in this process is to establish the existence of JE. JE In his book The Composition of the Pentateuch: Renewing the Documentary Hypothesis, Joel S. Baden states that from Wellhausen to the present, nearly all supporters of the Documentary Hypothesis “have posited three distinct redactions: J and E into ‘JE,’ by a redactor ‘RJE’; ‘JE’ and D into ‘JED’ by a redactor ‘RJED’; and JED and P into the canonical Pentateuch by the final redactor, ‘R.’”131 The argument for the existence of a JE redaction stems ultimately from the close similarities between both J and E. As Wellhausen observes “Das Endergebnis ist, dass JE zwar auch in diesem Abschnitt aus J und E bestehen muss, dass aber eine durchgeführte Scheidung unmöglich ist” or “the end result is that while JE in this section also must obviously be comprised of J and E, it is still impossible to divide.”132 Although other scholars have been able to divide the J and E in the section Wellhausen was referring to (Gen 27–36) his observation that J and E are closely intertwined is a cogent one. Richard Elliot Friedman may have explained why J and E are so difficult to separate. He has identified differences between the redaction of JE 131 Joel S. Baden, The Composition of the Pentateuch: Renewing the Documentary Hypothesis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 218. 132 Wellhausen, Die Composition des Hexateuchs und der historischen Bücher des Alten Testaments (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1963), 35. 30 31 and the redaction of the rest of the Pentateuch based on how the work of redaction was done.133 According to Friedman, the redactor of JE was more willing to delete material from both J and E than the later redactor was, suggesting that there was a separate redaction of JE.134 Such a redaction would indeed make the two sources very difficult to separate, accounting for the difficulties Wellhausen observed. A careful examination of both J and E suggests that Friedman is right about the differing redaction styles of the JE redactor compared to the other redactor or redactors. For example, J is missing the birth of Isaac and the death of Abraham.135 The birth narratives of Naphtali, Dan, Issachar, Zebulon, Gad, Benjamin, and Asher are also missing from J, even though it is likely that they contained these narratives at some point.136 Joseph’s rise from prisoner to high-ranking Egyptian official was surely contained in J at some point, because the story makes little sense without this, yet it is missing from J.137 Jacob’s death,138 the oppression of the Hebrews in Egypt,139 the plagues and the Hebrew’s exodus from Egypt,140 and the arrival at Sinai,141 all of which are essential elements of the J narrative, are missing. In addition, the beginning of the Jacob story, as well as the entire beginning of the source itself, are all missing from E. 142 By contrast, P is missing only the births of Jacob and Esau, Jacob’s marriages, and the descent of 133 Richard Elliott Friedman, “Three Major Redactors of the Torah,” in Birkat Shalom: Studies in the Bible, Ancient Near Eastern Literature, and Postbiblical Judaism Presented to Shalom M. Paul on the Occasion of his Seventieth Birthday, eds. Chaim Cohen et al. (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2008), 38-39. In The Bible with Sources Revealed, 95, he goes so far as to identify cases where the redactor of JE has added something. 134 Richard Elliott Friedman, The Hidden Book in the Bible (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1998), 53. 135 Baden, The Composition of the Pentateuch, 127. 136 Friedman, The Hidden Book, 102. 137 Ibid., 113. 138 Ibid., 126. 139 Ibid., 127. 140 Ibid., 129. 141 Ibid., 131. 142 Baden, The Composition of the Pentateuch, 127. 32 Joseph to Egypt, while D arguably has no gaps in it.143 If JEDP were all compiled by the same redactor, one would expect more to be missing from D and P or less to be missing from J and E. This strongly suggests that there was indeed a JE redactor who was more willing to remove parts of either J or E as he went through the redaction process, and whose redaction style thus differed from the redactors of D and P. One might think that such arguments do not have to be made, as this approach is commonly accepted in the field, and indeed, some authors do not argue for it. In 1982, Avi Hurvitz, for example, could simply state that he “accepts in principle the usual division between JE, D, and P.”144 However, in his book The Composition of the Pentateuch: Renewing the Documentary Hypothesis, Joel Baden has argued against multiple redactions, and his objections require a response. Baden first major argument against multiple redaction is that a heavy redaction of JE, posited above, would have left the final JE document with fewer contradictions than it currently has.145 However, this is not necessarily the case. One redactor can be a less preservation-minded editor than another without necessarily smoothing out all the gaps in a narrative. The redactor of JE could well have been such an editor, as the evidence from the text itself suggests, as noted above. Baden has also argued that, because there are some occasions when portions of P and JE have been eliminated in the redaction process, such as Isaac’s birth, Abraham’s death, and Jacob’s marriages, that there is no difference between the redactions.146 However, once again, this view may not reflect all the data. Just because the JE redactor was not as heavy-handed with his sources as he might have been, and the other redactor or redactors were 143 Ibid. 144 Avi Hurvitz, A Linguistic Study of the Relationship Between the Priestly Source and the Book of Ezekiel: A New Approach to an Old Problem, CahRB 20 (Paris: Gabalda, 1982), 20. 145 Baden, The Composition of the Pentateuch, 219. 146 Ibid., 220. 33 not as cautious as they might have been, this does not necessarily mean that there is not a fairly clear difference between the redaction of JE and the redaction of the rest of the Pentateuch. These redactors were, more likely, simply some distance apart on a spectrum of editing style, not representatives of the opposite ends of this spectrum. One of Baden’s other arguments against the redaction of JE is that D alludes to J and to E as separate sources but never to a combined JE.147 He claims, for example, that D used the E stories of Num 11, including the Horeb pericope, while never using the J texts with which E had been combined.148 While his argument is persuasive (one can hardly imagine the author of D somehow unraveling JE well enough to only use E) it assumes certain things about the text that are not necessarily supported by evidence. It assumes, for example, that a combined JE never existed side-by-side with independent copies of J and E. However, the author of Deuteronomy may well have had access to copies of both J and E, as well as the combined JE, and simply chose to draw on E sometimes and on J at other times, simply ignoring JE. A parallel from New Testament studies may lend this idea plausibility. If a Christian author was seeking to write a work based on the life of Jesus, and had the four canonical gospels and the Diatessaron available to him, he may be just as likely to draw from the individual gospels as the combined work. Another possibility is that the core of D was written before J and E were combined. As early as 1805, when W. M. L. de Wette argued that Deuteronomy was the “book of the Torah” discovered during the time of Josiah, many source critics have argued for an Urdeuteronomium, an older core of Deuteronomy that existed before the time of Josiah and was simply edited 147 Here he is arguing against scholars like Richard Elliot Friedman, who assumes that D draws much from JE and fits well with it, see The Exile and Biblical Narrative: The Formation of the Deuteronomistic and Priestly Works. HSM 22. (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1981), 133. Even Wellhausen posits a JE with significant connections to D. See Julius Wellhausen, Prolegomena to the History of Ancient Israel (Berlin: Druck und Verlag von G. Reimer, 1878; repr., Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1973), 32. 148 Baden, The Composition of the Pentateuch, 219. 34 during his reign. 149 As Nathan Macdonald has noted, “it is apparent that much of the book’s framework is superfluous to the aspirations of the seventh-century reformers. This recognition, together with other indications of the framework’s composite nature, has led to industrious attempts to distinguish Urdeuteronomium and its various redactional layers.”150 It seems unlikely, for example, that someone writing in Josiah’s time would cause so much of the action to revolve around Mt. Gerizim, and Mt. Ebal in the north (see Deut 11:28–29; 27:4,12–13) rather than some location in the south, such as Jerusalem. Thus, although an edited version of the D may date to the time of Josiah, the core of Deuteronomy may be date from much earlier, perhaps even from before the time J and E were combined. It is true that many of the arguments for a JE redaction are weak. As Baden has noted, the notion that JE was the earliest redaction because J and E are inherently difficult to separate does not necessarily follow from the evidence.151 He argues that the difficulty in separating J and E does not suggest an earlier redactor, as J and E could have been woven together intricately enough to make separation difficult at any point in time.152 As noted above however, contra Baden, this evidence does seem to argue for a separate redaction by a redactor who removed more than the other redactor/ redactors. Based on this evidence, JE does appear to have been the first redaction, but the inseparability of J and E is not the strongest argument in support of that position. Another weak argument for JE is the now dated notion that Israelite religion evolved in an orderly manner from “primitive” to “complex.” As Baden notes, “When Israelite religion is 149 See Paul B. Harvey, Jr. and Baruch Halpern, “W. M. L. de Wette’s ‘Dissertatio Critica …’: Context and Translation,” ZABR 14 (2008): 47–85. 150 Nathan MacDonald, “The Date of the Shema (Deuteronomy 6:4–5),” JBL 136.4 (2017): 766. 151 Baden, The Composition of the Pentateuch, 219. 152 Ibid. 35 reduced to a monolith, the entire culture developing in lockstep with a single concept of religion at any given moment,” then only the text that represents that stage of the religion can exist at a time.153 Texts that represent other ideas could not have overlapped. Thus, even though each document was mean to replace the earlier one, the earlier document was still authoritative and could not simply be eliminated.154 Yet, in the evolutionary view, one could hardly have two competing religious worldviews existing side-by-side at the same time. Thus, the redactor combined the later sources with the earlier sources, preserving both the current form of the religion as well as its earlier iterations.155 Obviously, such a neat, clean, view of the evolution of religion is not supported by the evidence. Baden continues by noting that such as idea was “highly conditioned by the period in which it arose, and it assumes a theory of religious development that is largely unattested in societies ancient or modern. We can no longer assume that disparate religious views could not have existed side by side at a single moment in ancient Israel.”156 Because these arguments are somewhat weak, some have assumed that the whole argument for the redaction of JE is invalid. However, these weak arguments do not destroy the most significant argument, noted above, that there is a discernably different redaction style between the redactor of JE, and the other redactor/ redactors. Thus, weak arguments notwithstanding, there are enough solid arguments for JE that one can feel confident operating under the assumption that JE existed at some point in Israel’s past. 153 Ibid., 218. 154 Ibid. 155 Ibid. 156 Ibid. 36 DtrH The next point that must be established in order to posit a JEDtrH is that there was a DtrH, or Deuteronomistic History, which was comprised of Deuteronomy through Second Kings. The existence of the Deuteronomistic History was posited by Martin Noth in his 1943 work, Überlieferungsgeschichtliche Studien (The Deuteronomistic History).157 In this work, he noted the many similarities between ideas contained in Deuteronomy and the books of Joshua–2 Kings that follow it. Because of these similarities, Noth asserted that there was a redactor or school of redactors that redacted the various sources available to them into a long work, consisting of Deuteronomy–2 Kings, using the teachings of Deuteronomy as its framework. Over the years, others have refined his ideas, but even today, many scholars still hold to Noth’s theory. As recently as 2015, Thomas Römer could say, following Noth, that “stylistically, many texts in the ‘Former Prophets’ contain a style that is comparable to that of Deuteronomy and was thus designated relatively early on as ‘Deuteronomistic.’ Yet Deuteronomy also prepares its audience for the history that follows in terms of its content and theology.”158 Romer notes, for example, that in Deuteronomy, Moses mentions crossing the Jordan and possessing the land (Deut 4:1, 14; 7:1; 9:1, etc.), events that will take place in the book of Joshua.159 But these are not the only connections. Römer notes that there are many points of contact between Deuteronomy and later books within the Former Prophets as well. Deuteronomy 6:12, for example, states: ‫“ השמר לך פן־תשכח את־יהוה אשר הוציאך מארץ מצרים‬Watch yourselves, lest you forget the Lord who brought you out of the land of Egypt.” This is remarkably like Judg 2:12 which states, ‫“ ויעזבו את־יהוה אלהי אבותם המוציא אותם מארץ מצרים‬And they abandoned 157 Martin Noth, The Deuteronomistic History, JSOTSup 15 (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1981). Thomas Römer, “The Invention of History in Ancient Judah and the Formation of the Hebrew Bible,” WO 45.2 (2015): 255–72. 158 159 Ibid., 272. 37 the Lord, the God of their fathers, the one who had brought them out of the land of Egypt.” Deuteronomy 6:14 then commands ‫לא תלכון אחרי אלהים אחרים מאלהי העמים אשר סביבותיכם‬ “Don’t walk after other gods, of the Gods of the people that surround you.” Judges 2:12 continues by stating, ‫“ וילכו אחרי אלהים אחרים מאלהי העמים אשר סביבותיהם‬and they walked after other gods, of the gods of the people that surrounded them.” Deuteronomy 6:15 concludes, ‫(“ כי אל קנא יהוה אלהיך בקרבך פן־יחרה אף־יהוה אלהיך ּבך והשמידך מעל פני האדמה‬Because the Lord your God, who is among you, is a jealous God) lest the anger of the Lord your God be kindled against you and he destroys you from off the face of the earth.” Judges 2:14 similarly concludes, alluding strongly to this verse from Deuteronomy, by stating that ‫ויחר־אף יהוה‬ ‫“ בישראל‬and the anger of the Lord was kindled against Israel,” and proceeding to explain the precise ways in which God was bringing other nations against Israel to destroy them from the earth if they did not repent, as Deuteronomy stated he would. There is also a significant connection between 2 Kgs 25:21 and Deuteronomy. Deuteronomy 28:63 warns the Israelites that they will be ‫“ נסחתם מעל האדמה אשר־אתה בא־שמה לרשתה‬torn from off the land you are going to in order to possess it.” 2 Kings 25:21 describes this event: ‫“ ויגל יהודה מעל אדמתו‬and Judah was exiled from off their land.” Because he was building on the work of scholars like Wilhelm M. L. de Wette, Heinrich Ewald, and Julius Wellhausen, who had already commented on Deuteronomistic redactions in the books of Joshua through Kings, he began with these redactions as a starting point, but proceeded to argue that there was only one Deuteronomist. In his view, shortly after 560 B.C.E., somewhere near Mizpah, this historian sat down and wrote the history of Israel and Judah down to the time of the destruction of Jerusalem, arranging and editing his sources in an attempt to explain what had happened to his people. His work depicted the Babylonian captivity as God’s 38 punishment against Judah for their sins, particularly violations of laws relating to the centralization of the Israelite cult. Noth’s ideas are still widely assumed today. However, an important modification has been made to the theory. Once the existence of the Deuteronomistic History has been established, one must also establish that a version of this text was composed during the time of Josiah. This idea may at first seem strange, as 2 Kings ends with the Babylonian conquest of Jerusalem, which took place after the death of Josiah. However, there appears to have been more than one redaction of the Deuteronomistic History, one during the time of Josiah, and one during the Babylonian exile.160 The evidence for the double-redaction of the Deuteronomistic History can be seen mostly from the differences between the end of 2 Kings and the rest of the Deuteronomistic History. Gary N. Knoppers, for example, observes that much of the Deuteronomistic history seems to lead up to the first part of Solomon’s reign as the apex of Israelite History, and concludes with Josiah, while the material after Josiah does not seem to fit into the structure of this narrative.161 Thomas C. Römer, explains this overarching narrative structure as follows: “It is reasonable that Deuteronomy – (most of) 2 Kings would have been written as propaganda of sorts to legitimize ‘Judah’s possession of the land in the name of Yahweh himself,’ (Deuteronomy and Joshua) and also to present [Josiah] as the true successor to David.”162 One would not expect these themes, which are clear throughout the text, to appear in a text that was written during or after the exile, 160 Gerald Eddie Gerbrandt, Kingship According to the Deuteronomistic History, SBLDS 87 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1986), 91–92, discusses the double redaction of the Deuteronomistic History. For a more recent assessment of the evidence, see Marvin A. Sweeney, King Josiah of Judah: The Lost Messiah of Israel (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 9–10. 161 Gary N. Knoppers, Two Nations Under God: The Deuteronomistic History of Solomon and the Dual Monarchies, vol. 1 of The Reign of Solomon and the Rise of Jeroboam, HSM 52 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1993), 59. 162 Thomas Römer, The So-Called Deuteronomistic History: A Sociological, Historical and Literary Introduction, (New York: T&T Clark, 2005), 43. 39 when Judah lacked both their land and a Davidic king. However, during the time of Josiah, such a text makes sense. Richard D. Nelson, besides arguing for the double redaction on structural and literary grounds, also notes that it would be odd for an exilic or post-exilic redactor to include a text like 2 Sam 7:16, in which David is promised, that his “house and kingdom will be established forever before you: your throne will be established forever” (2 Sam 7:16).163 During the time of Josiah, such a promised would not be out of place, but during or after the exile, when the kingdom with its Davidic king no longer existed, such a promise would likely have seemed painful. In addition, Jeffrey C. Geoghegan, in his book The Time, Place, and Purpose of the Deuteronomistic History: The Evidence of “Until This Day,” brings up another incongruity that points to a double-redaction of the Deuteronomistic history. The Deuteronomistic history sometimes refers to something staying a certain way “until this day” that could not have been that way after the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem.164 1 King 8:8 states, for example, that the staves used to carry the ark of the covenant were inside the temple “unto this day.” One can hardly imagine anyone writing these words after the destruction of the temple. Finally, one needs to consider a sudden change in style. Richard Elliot Friedman noticed that one of the standard points the Deuteronomistic History consistently mentions as part of their assessment of each king is whether or not he removed the high places and centralized worship (see for example, 1 Kgs 15:14 and 2 Kgs 15:4).165 Suddenly, at the end of Josiah’s reign, this 163 Richard D. Nelson, The Double Redaction of the Deuteronomistic History, JSOTSup 18 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1981), 27–28. 164 Jeffrey C. Geoghegan, The Time, Place, and Purpose of the Deuteronomistic History: The Evidence of “Until This Day,” BJS 347 (Providence, RI: Brown Judaic Studies, 2006), 94–95. 165 Richard Elliott Friedman, Who Wrote the Bible? (New York: HarperCollins, 1997), 114. 40 assessment of each king completely stops.166 This point that had been consistent throughout the book, and suddenly stops with King Josiah’s death. Similarly, the references comparing these kings to King David, a consistent feature of the Deuteronomistic History, stops at King Josiah’s death as well.167 These changes provide one more piece of evidence supporting the idea that there was indeed a double-redaction of the Deuteronomistic History: one written during his lifetime, and one after the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem.168 JEDtrH If, as seems likely, there was a JE redaction at some point, as well as a Josianic Deuteronomistic History with Deuteronomy as its introduction, is it possible that JE and DtrH were combined together at some point into one text? As noted earlier, many scholars agree that, at some point, D was attached to JE to create JED. If a Deuteronomistic History also existed, then attaching D to JE would have created JEDtrH. However, if such a document existed, one would expect this document to have a certain amount of continuity, with later portions of it alluding to earlier portions of it. It appears that the Deuteronomistic History contains such connections. One good example of this comes from the Book of Judges. As one reads Judg 19, one is immediately struck by its similarities to Gen 19. The connections are fairly obvious,169 but the relationship between the two narratives must be 166 Ibid. 167 Ibid., 115. 168 For more on this point, as well as an in-depth assessment the history of research as it relates to this topic, see the article by Thomas Römer and Albert de Pury, “Deuteronomistic Historiography (DH): History of Research and Debated Issues,” in Israel Constructs its History: Deuteronomistic Historiography in Recent Research, eds. Albert de Pury, Thomas Römer, and Jean-Daniel Macchi, JSOTSup 306 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 2000), 24– 141. 169 For a note on others who have made similar connections see Gregory T. K. Wong, Compositional Strategy of the Book of Judges: An Inductive, Rhetorical Study, VTSup 111 (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 104. 41 established in order to show the continuity between JE and the DtrH. Thus, this thesis will briefly summarize the salient points, summarized by the following chart.170 TABLE 1. Genesis 19 and Judges 19 Genesis Judges The men who will soon go to Sodom are told The men who will soon go to Gibeah are told to “strengthen their hearts” with “a bit of to “strengthen their hearts” with “a bit of bread.” bread.” Abraham urges his guests to receive his The Bethlehemite urges his guest, the Levite, hospitality. to receive his hospitality. Abraham “saw” ‫ וירא‬the messengers and ran The Bethlehemite “saw” ‫ וירא‬the Levite and “to meet” them. was happy “to meet” him. There are two men that are entertained by a There are two men that are entertained by a host before going to Sodom. host before going to Gibeah. Someone “staying” in Sodom (Lot) takes Someone “staying” in Gibeah (the old man compassion on the visitors. from the hill country of Ephraim) takes compassion on the visitors. Lot begs the men not to “stay all night in the The old man tells them not to “stay all night street.” in the street.” In Genesis, Lot says to the angels, “Turn . . . In Judges the travelers “turned to spend the and spend the night.” night.” Gen 19:4–8 (see chart below) Judg 19:22–24 (see chart below) 170 Friedman, The Hidden Book, 18, makes some of these same connections, but uses these connections in the service of recreating J. See also John E. Harvey, Retelling the Torah, 36–37, 90–93. 42 The crowd gathered to abuse Lot’s visitors do The crowd gathered to abuse the old not respond to him. Ephraimite’s visitors do not respond to him. Lot narrowly avoids being raped by the The concubine is raped by the crowd. crowd, but is raped by his daughters. The word ‫ ךפה‬recurs, even though it used The word ‫ ךפה‬recurs, even though it is used only one other time in Genesis. only one other time in Judges. Lot’s wife “looks behind” her at the ruins of The Benjaminites “look behind” them at the Sodom. ruins of Gibeah. Sodom “ascends up” in the flames. Gibeah “ascends up” in the flames. Lot’s wife turns into a “pillar” of salt when When the Benjaminites look back, they see a she looks back at the city. “pillar” of smoke from the city. Some travelers arrive in a city. One man Some travelers arrive in a city. One man shows them hospitality, but the people of the shows them hospitality, but the people of the city surround the house and demand that he city surround the house and demand that he send the guest out to the crowd. send the guest out to the crowd. In Genesis, Lot “pressed” the men to spend In Judges the concubine’s father “pressed” his the night. son—in—law to spend the night. Genesis says, “and they came to his house.” Judges says, “and he had him come to his house.” In Genesis, Lot offers the visitors the washing of feet. In Judges, “they washed their feet.” 43 Lot offers his virgin daughters to the crowd. The old man offers his virgin daughter to the crowd. Lot “delays.” The man and the concubine “delay.” The narrative ends with a warped attempt at The narrative ends with a warped attempt to repopulating the area (Lot’s encounter with repopulate the area (the kidnapping of the his daughters.) “daughters of Shiloh.”) The messengers ‫“ ויחזק‬seize” Lot by the hand The Levite ‫“ ויחזק‬seizes” his concubine and and ‫“ יצא‬send” him out of the city. ‫“ יצא‬sends” her out to the crowd. The messengers tell Lot to ‫קום קח את־אשתך‬ The Levite tells his woman to ‫“ קומ‬arise” and “arise, take your woman.” then it states that ‫“ יקחה‬he took her.” The first similarity between the Gen 18 and Judg 19 is found in Judg 19:5 and Gen 18:4– 5. In Genesis, the pair that will eventually visit Sodom are being entertained as guests of Abraham, and Abraham says he will take a ‫“ פת־לחם וסעדו לבכם‬bit of bread and strengthen your hearts.” In Judg 19:5, the pair that will visit Gibeah are being entertained as guests of the Levite’s father-in-law first, and one sees, ‫“ סעד לבך פת־לחם‬strengthen your heart with a bit of bread.” These are the only occurrences of any reference to “strengthening” the “heart” with “a bit of bread” in the entire Hebrew Bible.171 This is likely an example of something called Siedel’s Law, which states that when phrases from one portion of the Hebrew Bible are quoted in another 171 Friedman, The Hidden Book, 338. 44 portion of the Hebrew Bible, the elements of the phrase will appear in reverse order,172 and demonstrates the first major point of contact between the texts.173 Another point of contact comes in Judg 19:10–14, which indicates that there were two men, the Levite and his “servant,” that enter into Gibeah, just as there were “two messengers” who entered into Sodom and were entertained by Lot in Gen 19:1–2. Although the concubine is with the two men in the Judges narrative, Judg 19:10 seems to depict her as something of an afterthought, even less important than the donkeys: ‫“ ועמו צמד חמורים חבושים ופילגשו עמו‬and there was with him a pair of donkeys with saddles, and his concubine was with him.” Thus, the text depicts only two men entering Gibeah, just as there are only two men who enter Sodom in Gen 19. Another similarity between the texts is found in the identity of the person who takes compassion on the travelers. In Genesis, it is Lot, who is not from Sodom, who takes pity on the two men who are visiting his town. Judges 19:16 states that, in Judges as well, it is also a foreigner who has compassion on the travelers and ultimately decides to take them in for the night: ‫איש זקן בא מן־מעשהו מן־השדה בערב והאיש מהר אפרים והוא־גר בגבעה ואנשי המקום בני‬ ‫“ ימיני‬An old man came from his work from the field in the evening, and the man was from mount Ephraim, and he stayed in Gibeah, and the men of the place were Benjamites.” This nonBenjaminite man staying in Gibeah is the man who shows hospitality to the travelers, just like Lot in Genesis, who is similarly noted as being someone who came to ‫“ גור‬stay” with them, in Gen 19:9, which is also how the old man is described. In addition, the hospitality of these foreign men looks similar in both cases. In both Gen 19 and Judg 19 they want to spare their guests from 172 173 See M. Seidel, Studies in Scripture (Jerusalem: Mosad Harav Kook, 1978). For more on this, see Phyllis Trible, Texts of Terror: Literary-Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives, OBT 13 (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984), 88. 45 ‫“ ברחוב אל־תלן‬staying” in the “street,” all night and in both cases ‫“ ירחצו רגליהם‬washing” their “feet” is discussed. Another similarity is what happens to the visitors, as noted in table 2 below: TABLE 2. Verbal Similarity Between Genesis 19 and Judges 19 Gen 19:4–8 Judg 19:22–24 …The men of the city, even the men of The men of the city, certain worthless ones, Sodom, surrounded the house, both old and surrounded the house, and beat at the door, young, all the people from all the city: and said to the master of the house, the old And they called to Lot, and said to him, man, saying, Where are the men who came in to you this Bring out the man that came into you house, night? Bring them out unto us, so we can so we can know him. know them. And Lot went out … to them, and shut the And the man, the master of the house, went door after him, out to them, And said, please, my brothers, don’t do such and said unto them, No, my brothers. No. a terrible thing. Please, don’t do such a terrible thing… Look now, I have two virgin daughters; let Look, here is my virgin daughter, and his me, please, concubine; bring them out to you, and I will bring out now, and humble them, and do to them what is good in your eyes: only do to them what is good in your eyes: but to these men do nothing. to this man do not do so vile a thing.174 174 Friedman, The Hidden Book, 18. 46 Then, Judg 19:25 states, “the men would not listen to him.” Which is a fitting summary of Gen 19:9, when the men of the city vow to treat Lot badly and try to grab him. The similarities appear to end there, as Lot seems at first to escape the fate of the Levite’s concubine, thanks to the intervention of his guests. However, in Gen 19:33–35, Lot is raped after all,175 not by the townspeople but by his own daughters.176 Note how verse 33 puts it: “And they made their father drink wine that night, and the firstborn went in, and lay with her father, and he didn’t know when she lay down, nor when she got up.” The context here seems to demonstrate that their father is not a willing partner in the event. 177 This is strengthened by the detail from Lot’s altercation with the men of Sodom that he offered his daughters to the men who came to abuse his guests.178 Lot has offered his daughters to be raped by the crowd, and is, in turn, raped by these same daughters.179 The contrast is still stark, however, as Lot is raped by his daughters in an orderly fashion, one each night, and is depicted as being so inebriated as to be unaware of the incident, It has been suggested that the narrator has told the incest story of Lot’s daughters to cancel out Lot’s offer to the men of the city. However, I think that one could read it the opposite way, having Lot offer his daughters so that when they date rape him, it comes across like a sick sort of justice. See Danna Nolan Fewell and David M. Gunn, Gender, Power, and Promise: The Subject of the Bible’s First Story (Nashville: Abingdon, 1993), 64. 175 176 It is significant to note the parallels between Lot’s experience of rape and his daughters near rape. See Carol Smith, “Challenged by the Text: Interpreting Two Stories of Incest in the Hebrew Bible,” in A Feminist Companion to Reading the Bible: Approaches, Methods and Strategies, eds. Athalya Brenner and Carole Fontaine (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1997), 114–35. 177 Tammi J. Schneider, Mothers of Promise: Women in the Book of Genesis (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008), 189–90. 178 This is an uncomfortable reversal because, as is mentioned in Deut 22, women are expected to remain virgins until they are given in marriage to someone of their father’s choosing. Lot chooses the crowd for them, but this does not come to pass, so the women choose their father as the one to have offspring with. Ironies abound. See Tikva Frymer-Kensky, “Virginity in the Bible,” in Gender and Law in the Hebrew Bible and the Ancient Near East, eds. Victor H. Matthews, Bernard M. Levinson, and Tikva Frymer-Kensky, JSOTSup 262 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1998), 79–96. 179 Robert Ignatius Letellier, Day in Mamre Night in Sodom: Abraham and Lot in Genesis 18 and 19, BibInt 10 (Leiden: Brill, 1995), 186. 47 while the Levite’s concubine is gang-raped to death,180 but the connections between the narratives are evident.181 The above parallels have often been commented on, as noted above. However, what commentators appear not to have noticed is that the parallels continue into Judg 20. In this chapter, a continuation of the narrative from Judg 19, the Israelites have gone to war against the Benjaminites because of what the men of Gibeah did to the Levite’s concubine in Judg 19. The Sodom and Gomorrah imagery continues in this chapter, and the destruction of Gibeah by the Israelites is suggestive of the destruction of Sodom by God. For example, Judg 20:39 states, ‫“ ויהפך איש־ישראל במלחמה‬And the men of Israel turned in the battle.” The word ‫ הפך‬in this verse, translated as “turned” here, appears three times during the description of the destruction of Sodom, in Gen 19:21, 25, and 29, referring to the overthrow of Sodom, and twice in the description of the destruction of Gibeah, verses 39 and 41, referring to Israel turning back in the battle. Yet, in the rest of Genesis the word only appears in one other verse; the same is true of Judges. In Judg 20:40, the parallels become more striking: ‫והמשאת החלה לעלות מן־העיר עמוד‬ ‫“ עשן ויפן בנימן אחריו והנה עלה כליל־העיר השמימה‬But when the flame began to rise up out of the city with a pillar of smoke, the Benjaminites looked behind them, and the flame of the city rose up to heaven.” Just as there is a pillar of smoke in this verse, Lot’s wife becomes a pillar of salt 180 The Hebrew is ambiguous, and it is difficult to tell whether the concubine is already dead when the Levite cuts her up, or if he kills her in the process. See Trible, Texts of Terror, 80. 181 The chronological priority of the texts is difficult to determine here. One might assume that the Sodom narrative is a comment on the Saul narrative, and so was written later. However, one could just as easily see the Judges narrative as being more elaborate, which might suggest that the Genesis narrative is indeed first. Either way, in the text as it stands, the reader encounters Sodom first and Gibeah second and likely reads the Gibeah account as a disparaging comment on life under the Judges; a comment made by comparing Gibeah to Sodom. Letellier, Day in Mamre Night, 159. 48 in Gen 19:26. Just as the Benjaminites look ‫“ אחר‬behind” them in this verse, so Lots wife looks ‫“ אחר‬behind” her when she becomes a pillar of salt. Finally, in both cases, it mentions the smoke ascending up. In Gen 19:28, it reads, ‫“ עלה קיטר הארץ‬the smoke of the land ascended up,” and in Judg 20:40, after mentioning the smoke, it elaborates by stating that, ‫“ עלה כליל־העיר‬the whole of the city ascended up.” Significant parallels like these suggest that JEDtrH did indeed exist and were meant to be read together as a unified work or as part of an acknowledged collection, with material from the Deuteronomistic History alluding back to JE. If one could find significant parallels between P material and the Deuteronomistic History, then one might argue that the Deuteronomistic History was meant to be attached to the end of JEDP. However, no such parallels are readily apparent. Despite all this, it should be noted that even something as seemingly clear-cut as the existence of JEDtrH should be approached cautiously, 182 as it is difficult to say which portions of the text were written at which period,183 and it is therefore difficult to say which portions of the text were written after J and E were combined.184 It is also impossible to know how much the Deuteronomist actually influenced his text.185 It should also be noted that some scholars are 182 The text of the Hebrew Bible is messy, and has influences from many different periods, so just picking one period to look at is difficult, maybe impossible, so one must do such things very cautiously. James Barr, “The Synchronic, the Diachronic and the Historical: A Triangular Relationship?” in Synchronic or Diachronic? A Debate on Method in Old Testament Exegesis, ed. Johannes C. De Moor, OtSt 34 (Leiden: Brill, 1995), 1–14. 183 It is possible, for example, that the core of the Samuel narrative is written during the time of Hezekiah, with only a small amount of editing later, this may put it at the same time as JE. Andries Breytenbach, “Who is Behind the Samuel Narrative?” in Past, Present, Future: The Deuteronomistic History and the Prophets, eds. Johannes C. De Moor, and Harry F. van Rooy (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 50–61. 184 There may, for example, be an older section Josh 24–1 Sam 12 that was later included in the Deuteronomistic History. Alexander Rofé, “Ephraimite versus Deuteronomistic History,” in Reconsidering Israel and Judah: Recent Studies on the Deuteronomistic History, eds. Gary N. Knoppers, and J. Gordon McConville, Sources for Biblical and Theological Study 8 (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2000), 462–74. Edward F. Campbell Jr., “A Land Divided: Judah and Israel from the Death of Solomon to the Fall of Samaria,” The Oxford History of the Biblical World, ed. Michael D. Coogan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 206–41, states that “the DH especially chose the path of adaptation, not fabrication,” but this has been challenged. See, for example, Harvey, Retelling the Torah, 96–97. 185 49 skeptical of source criticism altogether,186 but I propose that it can, and should, be used cautiously.187 However, the dating question is so difficult that I approach it only with caution, and some ignore it completely.188 Linguistic evidence strongly suggests that both narratives were written in pre-exilic Hebrew, but beyond that, it is difficult to date the texts exactly.189 Yet for the purposes of this thesis, determining what the text would have looked like at a given time is important because it allows the modern reader to experience a pericope in the same overall context as the audience of that text at a certain point in history. If the reader wishes to know how a pericope was understood at the time of Josiah, yet analyzes it in light of texts that were perhaps not even written yet, the reader will get a false view of possible connections between texts that such a Josianic reader might have made. With this Josianic JEDtrH in mind, this thesis will now examine how a pericope within such a text might have been understood and experienced by its earliest audience. 186 Some people think that using source criticism in order to actually do inner-biblical allusion should be completely abandoned because texts can never be dated reliably, but this is not necessarily the case. Jeffery M. Leonard, “Identifying Inner-Biblical Allusions: Psalm 78 as a Test Case,” JBL 127 (2008): 241–65. 187 Pauline A. Viviano, “Source Criticism,” in To Each its Own Meaning: An Introduction to Biblical Criticisms and Their Application, eds. Steven L. McKenzie and Stephen R. Haynes (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1999), 35–57. This book notes that much of source criticism is speculative and gives and excellent discussion of the failings of source criticism. 188 Eslinger, “Inner-Biblical Exegesis,” 47–58. 189 Marvin A. Sweeney, “Davidic Polemics in the Book of Judges,” VT 47 (1997): 519–29. IV. READING THE TEXT WITH ITS ANCIENT AUDIENCE Once it has been established that JEDtrH existed during the time of Josiah, one then needs to determine how the audience of a given narrative might have experienced this narrative as part of the Josianic JEDtrH. Many people today, when reading the bible, read through only a few chapters at a time, and tend to read the Bible silently to themselves. However, this does not seem to have been the case in ancient Israel.190 In his book Orality and Literacy, Walter Ong states that “in antiquity, it was taken for granted that a written text of any worth was meant to be and deserved to be read aloud, and the practice of reading texts aloud continued, quite commonly with many variations, through the nineteenth century.”191 In his paper, “Hebrew Culture at the Interface Between the Written and the Oral,” Joachim Schaper has argued that orality remained important throughout antiquity, including in ancient Israel: “Just like in any other ancient culture, literacy—or rather, precisely speaking, textuality—forever remained auxiliary to orality.”192 Schaper asserts that one reason for this is simply the cost of producing written texts. In a world where written documents were prohibitively expensive objects that had to be produced by hand, one letter at a time, most people would not have personal copies of a text that they could read silently to themselves.193 He 190 According to Charles Perrot, the biblical books were committed to writing so they could be read publicly, as will be explored more throughout this chapter. As shall shortly be seen, “Writing calls for reading, and in ancient times reading was done out loud before a group.” See the beginning of this article, which addresses ancient Israel before moving to synagogues: Charles Perrot, “The Reading of the Bible in the Ancient Synagogue” in Mikra: Text, Translation, Reading & Interpretation of the Hebrew Bible in Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity, eds. Martin Jan Mulder and Harry Sysling (Assen, Netherlands: Van Gorcum, 1988), 149. 191 Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (New York: Routledge, 1982), 115. J. L. W. Schaper, “Ancient Hebrew Culture at the ‘Interface Between the Written and the Oral’,” in Literacy, Orality, and Literary Production in the Southern Levant: Contextualizing the Creation of Sacred Writing in Ancient Israel and Judah, ed. Brian B. Schmidt (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2015), 333. 192 193 Ibid. 50 51 asserts that, in ancient Israel, it is likely that “most members of society came into contact with written texts only when they were read out to them.”194 Schaper contends that even fairly literate ancient Israelites might have sometimes had a problem reading ancient texts because they were unvocalized.195 Thus, “it is no overstatement to say that written texts served an auxiliary purpose; they provided the basis on which literate Israelites ‘performed’ texts on significant occasions.”196 As Schaper has noted, one finds an example of this in the Hebrew Bible itself, in Neh 8.197 Nehemiah 8:1 states that all the people gathered together ‫ויאמרו לעזרא הספר להביא את־‬ ‫“ ספר תורת משה‬and said to Ezra the scribe to bring the scroll of the Torah of Moses.” Ezra apparently obliges in verse two: ‫ויביא עזרא הכהן את־התורה לפני הקהל מאיש ועד־אשה וכל מבין‬ ‫“ לשמע‬and Ezra the priest brought the Torah before the gathering of both men and women and all those with enough intelligence to understand.” Verse three then states that Ezra read the Law of Moses to the people, ‫מן־האור עד־מחצית היום נגד האנשים והנשים והמבינים ואזני כל־העם אל־‬ ‫“ ספר התורה‬from dawn to the middle of the day, in front of the men and women, and those who could understand, and the ears of all the people heard the book of the Torah.” This scene demonstrates Schaper’s point, that written texts were used as the basis for the oral “performance” of the text; the act of reading the text to the audience. This suggests that the ancient Israelites would have experienced this text not by sitting down and reading it, but as part of an audience in which they would hear the texts being read to them. One sees something similar in Exod 24:7, in which Moses is depicted as reading to the people: ‫ויקח ספר הברית ויקרא‬ ‫“ באזני העם‬and he took the scroll of the covenant and read it in the ears of the people.” It is hard 194 Ibid. 195 Ibid. 196 Ibid. 197 Ibid. 52 to say how long the “scroll of the covenant” was, and it may have been a much shorter text than the one Ezra read to the people, perhaps only Exodus 20 through 23, but it still demonstrates the importance of reading texts out loud to an audience in ancient Israel. Rather than making many copies, or having one copy circulate, and having everyone read it, the people gathered together to listen to the text being read out loud to them. Joshua 8:35 similarly states that ‫לא־היה דבר מכל אשר־צוה משה אשר לא־קרא יהושע נגד‬ ‫“ כל־קהל ישראל‬there was not a word of all that Moses commanded that Joshua didn’t read out before all the multitude of Israel.” Although this may not be strictly historical, the text is still depicting Joshua as reading a text out loud to an audience. Once again, this text may not have been a long one, as the context suggests that this was simply the text that was directly related to the blessings and curses referred to in Deut 27. However, Deut 31:10–12 suggests that at the end of each seven-year cycle, the people were to all gather together for a special Feast of Booths. During this Feast of Booths, ‫“ בבוא כל־ישראל לראות את־פני יהוה אלהיך במקום אשר יבחר‬when all Israel has come to see the face of Yahweh your God in the place that he will select,” they were instructed that they must ‫“ תקרא את־התורה הזאת נגד כל־ישראל באזניהם‬read out this law before all Israel in their ears.” Everyone was supposed to be present to hear the law read. This passage suggests that Deuteronomy itself, a fairly long text, was meant to be read out in the presence of the people when they were gathered together for the purpose. 2 Kgs 23:2 suggests that Josiah did indeed read Deuteronomy to the people: ‫ויעל המלך‬ ‫בית־יהוה וכל־איש יהודה וכל־ישבי ירושלם אתו והכהנים והנביאים וכל־העם למקטן ועד־גדול ויקרא‬ ‫“ באזניהם את־כל־דברי ספר הברית הנמצא בבית יהוה‬And the king went up to the house of the Lord, and all the men of Judah and all the inhabitants of Jerusalem with him, and the priests and the prophets, and all the people, from the smallest to the greatest, and he read out in their ears all 53 the words of the book of the covenant that had been found in the house of the Lord.” This passage suggests that Josiah did indeed read some version of the book of Deuteronomy to the people as they were all assembled together, once again showing the importance in ancient Israel of reading texts out loud to an audience. In the article “The Performance of Oral Tradition in Ancient Israel,” Robert D. Miller II notes historical parallels to this style of oral performance. In Ancient Egypt it is clear that written works were meant to be performed orally to an audience.198 In the Egyptian text, “The Song From the Tomb of King Intef,” one finds a long series of short songs sung by a bard on the occasion of a banquet.199 In many of the Pyramid Texts, each column begins with the phrase “to be spoken,” indicating that these texts were meant to be read aloud.200 Similarly, in later Egyptian wisdom literature, one finds fictional audiences described in the text.201 These fictional audiences are generally groups of people. This strongly suggests that these texts were meant to be read aloud to a group, not silently. Miller has also noted that, in Mesopotamia, texts were written to be performed. Some ancient Mesopotamian literature specifically noted that it had been written “ana zamāri” or “for singing.”202 Within its own text, Atrahasis is specifically referred to not just as a story, but as a ballad.203 The Song of Erra similarly refers to “bards” who perform texts.204 As Miller has observed, oral and written texts generally exist side-by-side, and in ancient Israel, as in Egypt and Mesopotamia, people expected to experience literature orally, Robert D. Miller II, “Performance of Oral Tradition in Ancient Israel,” in Contextualizing Israel's Sacred Writing: Ancient Literacy, Orality, and Literary Production, ed. Brian B. Schmidt (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2015), 181. 198 199 “The Song From the Tomb of King Intef,” trans. Miriam Lichtheim (COS 1.30:48–49). 200 Miller, “Performance of Oral Tradition in Ancient Israel,” 181. 201 Ibid. 202 Ibid. 203 Ibid. 204 Ibid. 54 not by sitting down and reading it.205 Even Rev 1:1–4, written many years later than the texts under discussion, assumes one person reading the text to a gathered audience.206 This data suggests that the main way in which people would have experienced JEDtrH was by gathering together, perhaps on significant occasions, to have the text read out loud. This evidence also suggests other possibilities for how people may have experienced text in ancient Israel. The view that texts in ancient Israel circulated orally for a time until they were finally written down, after which they stopped circulating orally, does not appear to be tenable.207 As Miller has observed, “There is no simple progression from oral lore to written biblical text. The process is not nearly so linear.”208 Many scholars have replaced this neat progression with the notion that oral and written texts existed side-by-side in ancient Israel.209 As Miller states, “a literary text circulating by text only was virtually unknown in ancient Israel.” Aaron Demsky has noted that, in ancient Israel’s texts, such as Exod 24:12, 32:15–16 and 34:27– 28, God writes a document with his own hand, yet expects that this will be delivered orally to the people. This concept persisted, even when literacy began to become more common.210 With this in mind, one can examine how the Bible may have been performed in ancient Israel, a culture that was not just an oral culture, but one that used both oral and written texts.211 Written texts likely continued to be passed along in oral form for many years after they had been written down, and these texts, passed along orally, also likely lead to the creation of other oral 205 Ibid., 182. 206 Ibid. 207 Ibid. 208 Ibid. 209 Ibid. Aaron Demsky and Meir Bar-Ilan, “Writing in Ancient Israel and Early Judaism,” in Mikra: Text, Translation, Reading & Interpretation of the Hebrew Bible in Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity, eds. Martin Jan Mulder and Harry Sysling (Assen, Netherlands: Van Gorcum, 1988), 18–19. 210 211 Miller, “Performance of Oral Tradition in Ancient Israel,” 182. 55 forms of the text, some of which were also eventually written down.212 In other words, the relationship between oral texts and written texts was fluid for much of ancient Israel’s history, as was the relationship between those that read texts aloud and the bards that performed the oral versions of texts they had learned.213 As Miller puts it, “Oral texts that circulated from bard to audience or bard to bard could be recorded in writing, could be consulted by writers, and could be consulted by bards of other stories.”214 This strong oral component of biblical literature compels the reader to look at the text in light of how it might have been performed, through the lens of “performance criticism.”215 According to Miller, this way of looking at the text, “looks for aural, kinetic, and visual aspects of performance—that is, for matters of voice and instrumentation, gesture, and setting and performer identity (gender, status, kinship, adornment).”216 This way of approaching the text allows the modern reader to understand the implicit audiences of the text as well as the identity of the performer, and how these elements interact to shape how the text would have been experienced by both the person performing it, and the audience who was experiencing it, which was partially already set by the cultural and social assumptions people would have brought to the text.217 When read through this lens, one cannot divorce the text from the time and place of performance because this type of analysis depends on understanding the interaction between the bard or reader of the text with his or her audience in a given time and place.218 As Miller states, “governing conditions of performance 212 Ibid. 213 Ibid. 214 Ibid. 215 Ibid., 183. 216 Ibid. 217 Ibid. 218 Ibid. 56 shape the kinds of performative schemes a society—not the individual innovating bard—will generate.”219 If there is not a rigid line between the performance of written and oral texts, one might be able to examine how both written and oral texts have been performed in the Near East, and use this information to infer how ancient Israelites might have experienced their texts. In ancient Egypt, for example, bards would perform various kinds of texts, and some accounts describe that they would “recite” such texts to the accompaniment of harps.220 These texts are described as being performed for the court, with interaction between the bard and the audience being an important part of the composition.221 One description of the context in which a text would be performed comes from a Middle Kingdom text called King Cheops and the Magicians.222 This story states that one day, in the King’s court, the crown prince rises up and tells a story that took place during the reign of his grandfather.223 Then, another member of the court, named Bauefre, also gets up and tells an even more fantastic story.224 This continues multiple times, with the king responding to each tale.225 Although one cannot know if such exchanges actually occurred or not, it does demonstrate that reading texts in a court audience as well as storyteller-audience interaction is assumed when a text is performed.226 Jeremiah 36:21 also designates a court setting for the reading of a document. As Miller has noted, one finds the same things in Mesopotamian texts as well. Some begin with the phrase 219 Ibid. 220 Ibid., 184. 221 Ibid., 185. 222 Ibid. 223 Ibid. 224 Ibid. 225 Ibid. 226 Ibid. 57 “I will sing …” and others end with the words “This is a ballad in praise of…” or references to the person “reciting” the text. 227 Atrahasis was written “for singing,” as noted above. Various stringed instruments, apparently used to accompany oral performance, appear in iconography throughout ancient Mesopotamia.228 Similarly, one finds that some Hittite texts are referred to as “ballads.”229 One song, the Song of Illuyanka may even have been performed as part of an ancient Hittite festival.230 Another Hittite song, the Song of the Ullikummi was also sung before an audience, with musical accompaniment.231 The Baal Cycle, from Ugarit, also implies the singing of an epic poem. In one scene, (KTU 1.3:1:18–22) a figure, perhaps divine, stands to chant and sing, while playing drums.232 The song he sings is apparently an epic poem about Baal.233 Miller has also noted that one also sometimes finds oral performance of narrative in the Bible itself.234 One sometimes finds celebrations after a battle, during which a person sings a song narrating what has happened, such as the Song of the Sea, or the Song of Deborah.235 But laments after battle, such as 2 Sam 1:19–27 serve a similar purpose as well, relating what has happened in a stylized narrative form.236 These examples are not unlike what one finds in the Baal Cycle, examined earlier.237 In this text, Baal wins a great victory in battle, and during the post-battle feast, someone sings a long narrative-song recounting the events of the battle.238 227 Ibid. 228 Ibid. 229 Ibid., 186. 230 Ibid. 231 Ibid. 232 Ibid. 233 Ibid. 234 Ibid., 189. 235 Ibid. 236 Ibid. 237 Ibid., 186. 238 Ibid. 58 As noted earlier, one should also consider the evidence from Neh 8:3, in which a longer text, the Torah, is read out loud to an audience for an extended period of time, ‫מן־האור עד־מחצית‬ “from morning until noon.” The text also notes that these ancient Israelites gathered together ‫ביום‬ ‫“ השנִ י‬on the second day” as well to hear the Torah read to them (Neh 8:13), and that Ezra also ‫“ ויקרא בספר תורת האלהים יום ּביום מן־היום הראשון עד היום האחרון‬read in the scroll of the Torah of God day by day, from the first day to the last day,” reading the Torah to the gathered people every day of this seven-day feast (Neh 8:18). Miller has noted that all this evidence, taken together, suggests (1) a court setting with royal audiences.239 However, it should also be noted that there appears to have been exceptions to this, as in Neh 8. (2) It also seems that some of these would have been performed serially, as one sees in Neh 8, when the people meet together seven days in a row to hear the Torah read to them.240 (3) According to Miller, interaction between the performer and the audience, as well as (4) musical accompaniment, appears to have been important.241 These details resonate with what the scholar Milman Perry noticed when he was observing bards performing texts in the Balkans in the 1930’s. In Milman Perry and Albert Lord’s classic work, The Singer of Tales, Perry noticed that different versions of a text would circulate side-by-side in both written and oral forms. He found that there were various books that contained songs that were versions of the songs being sung by the bards that he was observing.242 Some recited the songs from the books, and some recited the songs in the conventional way, with 239 Ibid.,189. 240 Ibid. 241 Ibid. 242 Albert B. Lord, The Singer of Tales, 2d ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 23. 59 both kinds of bards existing side-by-side.243 Perry also found that, until shortly before he arrived, it had been common for bards to perform epic poems in the royal courts of the Ottoman officials, called “beys.”244 However, in Perry’s time it was more common for bards to perform in taverns for general audiences every night of Ramazan, the south Slavic equivalent of Ramadan.245 This suggests a mix of possible audiences, both royal and popular, as suggested by the ancient Near Eastern and biblical evidence. One also sees performing tales accompanied by instruments in both the ancient Near East and the modern Balkans. In the Balkans, bards performed with a stringed instrument called a “gusle,” and recited their tales to the accompaniment of this instrument.246 In the ancient Near East, various instruments, such as drums and stringed instruments, appear to have served as accompaniment, as noted above. The Balkan bards also performed multiple days in a row, sometimes performing every night during the month of Ramazan.247 Similarly, in the Egyptian evidence as well as Neh 8, bards appear to have performed multiple days in a row, allowing them to perform works serially, as Miller noted above. The close connection between the ancient evidence and the modern ethnographic data confirm the idea that there was a significant amount of similarity between people reading texts out loud and people performing oral texts in ancient Israel. This suggests the possibility that one might be able to use the ethnographic evidence from the eastern Mediterranean, despite that fact that it comes from bards delivering oral texts, to fill in gaps in our knowledge, analyzing both the 243 Ibid. 244 Ibid., 16. 245 Ibid., 15. 246 Ibid., 18. 247 Ibid., 15. 60 ethnographic and the historical evidence together to reconstruct on possible way in which the audience of JEDtrH could have experienced the text. The Hebrew Bible (Deut 31 and Neh 8) the Hittite and Egyptian evidence (noted above), and the evidence from the Balkans all suggest that texts were recited or read during a festival of some kind in ancient Israel. This strongly suggests that JEDtrH would have been performed during some kind of festival in which a large group of people would have been gathered together. This is strengthened by the ancient Near Eastern evidence which suggests that treaties were periodically read out loud to the people throughout the ancient Near East. Aaron Demsky has noted that “Periodic public readings (a reflex of the political treaty model) at the end of the sabbatical cycle were instituted in order to fulfill the imperative to teach the Torah to the masses,”248 and this appears to be confirmed by the biblical evidence, noted above. In addition, the combined evidence from these regions and times also suggests that the text might sometimes have been performed at the royal court, but also sometimes in other settings. It also seems reasonable that, as Miller has observed, JEDtrH might have been performed serially, with the text being performed multiple days in a row to the gathered audience, royal court or otherwise, during a festival. The evidence from the Balkans suggests this, as Parry noticed that Yugoslav bards used to compose/recite at a rate of ten to twenty ten-syllable lines a minute,249 and that during the month of Ramazan, the south Slavic equivalent of Ramadan, bards used to recite all night long, and do this every night, for thirty nights in a row.250 The evidence from Nehemiah similarly shows the text being read at least two days in succession. The fact that texts were read during festivals in ancient Egypt and the Hittite Empire, 248 Demsky and Bar-Ilan, “Writing in Ancient Israel and Early Judaism,” 20. 249 Lord, The Singer of Tales, 17. 250 Lord, The Singer of Tales, 15. 61 and that texts were to be read during ancient Israelite festivals as well, as noted earlier, all suggest that the original audience of JEDtrH may well have heard the text read to them, over the course of a few days, perhaps during a festival. If this is the case, then the audience might have understood the text differently than the way we understand it today. It is likely that they would have made multiple connections between portions of the same text. This is because, unlike modern readers who generally only read small portions of a text at a time, they likely listened to much of the text being read at once. This means that some narratives that seem very far removed from other narratives to modern readers would simply have been read one or two days prior. Thus, a part of the ancient audience of JEDtrH comparing a portion of Genesis to a portion of 2 Kings, for example, would not have been strange, even though they seem remote from each other to modern readers.251 Even when one is going at a stately pace, JEDtrH only takes about 28 hours to read,252 which means that if it was read for only roughly five hours a day, as noted in Neh 8:3, “from sunrise until noon” one could hear the entire thing in six days,253 bringing much of this material closer together than the way modern readers generally experience it. These texts would have been even closer together than the way we experience them, simply because P would be removed from the picture, making the text a full four hours shorter, by my own calculations. I should note that the vast majority of the connections between pericopes that I make in the Tamar narrative I made without the aid of electronic searches, lexicons, or secondary literature. I simply attempted to replicate something David M. Carr, “Orality, Textuality, and Memory: The State of Biblical Studies,” in Contextualizing Israel’s Sacred Writings: Ancient Literacy, Orality, and Literary Production, ed. Brian Schmidt (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2015), 161–73. 251 “Book-by-Book MP3 Recordings of the Hebrew Bible,” http://www.mechonmamre.org/p/pt/pt00.htm#mp3. 252 253 Genesis through 2 Kings is only around 150,000 words long. David Noel Freedman, The Unity of the Hebrew Bible, (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991), 5. 62 like this ancient listening experience by listening to large portions of the Hebrew Bible, both in Hebrew and in English translation. It was through repeating this process multiple times, listening to multiple hours a day, that I made the vast majority of the connections between the pericopes that I made in this thesis. This has persuaded me that a native speaker of the language might have made similar connections under similar circumstances. It should also be noted that reading the text also makes a difference compared to listening. It is my experience that when one is reading, one is less likely to be struck by unusual words or phrases because they do not grate on the ear, as they do when one listens to a text. Michael Riffaterre notes that texts can sometimes exhibit what he calls “ungrammaticality.” Ungrammaticality is a moment in a text that is slightly awkward, and that, through its awkwardness, points to another text to help explain the oddity. One example of this is known as a “dual sign.” A “dual sign” is a word that exhibits this awkwardness, or “ungrammaticality,” but which has a counterpart in another text where the word is used “grammatically.” Thus, one can look at the “grammatical” use of the word and use it to explain the “ungrammatical” use of the word.254 Thus, experiencing the text this may have allowed readers to notice, or infer, subtle allusions between pericopes both because they would be more obvious because the audience was listening to the text and not reading it, and also because they were experiencing the text over a short period of time, making it easier to forge connections between texts. This poses the question as to whether or not ancient audiences actually inferred such connections between texts. Although we do not have evidence of this from pre-exilic times, there is abundant evidence from the ancient world that people did indeed make such connections between different parts of the text. It is to these examples that this thesis will now turn. 254 1990), 57. Daniel Boyarin, Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, V. INFERRED INNER-BIBLICAL ALLUSION IN ANCIENT TEXTS As noted in the previous chapter, it was likely common in ancient Israel for large blocks of a text to be read out loud to an audience, allowing an audience to listen to an entire long text in a matter of a few days. This might have permitted audience members to make connections between different parts of a text based on distinctive words or phrases that were common between two parts of the text. Although there is no direct evidence that this happened in preexilic times, this chapter will demonstrate that this style of interpretation was relatively common in the ancient world over a large geographic area (from Tunisia to Iraq) and over a long range of time (from the Persian Period to well into the first millennium CE). Because this way of making connections between texts was so common, one may well be able to infer that, rather than simply being a quirk unique to the Rabbis operating in Babylon in Late Antiquity, one that was simply adopted as part of narrative criticism, this may well have been a common ancient mode of interpretation, and one way in which the earliest audience of JEDtrH may have understood the text. This chapter will explore how the style of interpretation was employed in various eras and locations throughout the ancient Near East to demonstrate the feasibility of this possibility. The Rabbis The ancient interpretive style that most closely resembles the modern literary approach to the Bible is the one employed by Rabbinic Judaism.255 This approach is obviously not exactly the Some scholars refer to this method of interpretation as “midrash.” However, this term has been famously difficult to define, and most scholars choose not to do so. For this reason, I will simply refer to the method of interpretation as “rabbinic interpretation.” This is also problematic, as the method appears to predate rabbinic Judaism, as this piece will soon argue, but it is the best term available at present. See Boyarin, Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash, viii. Eliezer Segal has similarly stated that, “In both the ancient rabbinic texts and the accepted usages of academic study, the term midrash encompasses a diverse range of meanings. Almost all these meanings share a historical component, limiting its use to a specific era of ‘late classical Judaism,’ roughly coextensive with the era that produced the Mishnah and Talmuds. As far as its substance is concerned, the decisive factor is its connection to scripture. Unlike other domains of the rabbinic oeuvre, midrash is restricted to items that relate explicitly to the text of the Hebrew Bible. In spite of the apparent consistency and precision of this definition, it 255 63 64 same as the modern literary approach to the Bible, and some people have overstated the connection,256 but there is a fairly close connection between the approaches, such that it warrants investigation. One of the basics of the rabbinic interpretation of the Bible is that one verse can have multiple meanings. A fourth-century Babylonian biblical interpreter, for example, used Ps 62:12 in support of this position, interpreting the line “God has spoken once; twice have I heard,” to mean that a single verse of scripture can have several meanings. He did this by interpreting the verse to mean that God spoke something once, the verse of scripture, but twice the interpreter “heard,” which is to say that there are two interpretations of the verse.257 The school of Rabbi Ishmael used Jer 23:29 in the same way. They read “behold, my word is like a fire, saith the Lord; and like a hammer that breaks the rock in pieces,” to mean that just as a hammer makes multiple “fires” or sparks, when it strikes a rock, so a single verse can have multiple meanings.258 Ironically, these interpretations of these two verses are not how one would initially understand the verses when reading them in context, thus providing an example of, as well as a justification becomes quickly apparent that its scope is still too general to serve all the needs of scholarly exactness. For one thing, its connection with the Bible can take numerous guises. Standard classifications of midrash divide it into exegetical (parshani) and homiletical (darshani) types. The former type, which is most recognizable when applied to the study of halakhah (legal discourse), involves detailed analysis of the meanings and implications of words and phrases; the latter type is characterized by the incorporation of biblical verses into rhetorically crafted sermons. The term midrash may be employed also with reference to the incidental citation of Scripture in the context of an otherwise non-exegetical discussion, or the redactional arrangement of material (including units that deal with nonbiblical laws or narratives) according to the sequence of a biblical book. It might be argued that subsuming these varied phenomena under a single terminological category demonstrates that the Jewish sages who produced midrash regarded them all as a single phenomenon. Nevertheless, a nuanced appreciation of the finer distinctions among various uses of midrash is crucial for explaining some incongruities in the development of rabbinic literature, particularly if we take into account the lengthy historical period during which the literature was produced and the fact that ancient rabbinic Judaism flourished in at least two major centres with vastly different cultural profiles.” (Eliezer Segal, From Sermon to Commentary: Expounding the Bible in Talmudic Babylonia, Studies in Christianity and Judaism 17 [Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2005], 1). 256 Devora Steinmetz, “Beyond the Verse: Midrash Aggadah as Interpretation of Biblical Narrative,” AJS Review 30 (2006): 325–45. 257 David Stern, Midrash and Theory: Ancient Jewish Exegesis and Contemporary Literary Studies (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 17–18. 258 Ibid. 65 for, giving multiple interpretations of the same verse. One sees this often in rabbinic texts, such that the phrase “another interpretation could be…” is a commonplace.259 A passage attributed to Rabbi Hoshaya gives five separate interpretations of Prov 8:30: “I was with him as a tutor,” “I was covered to him,” “I was hidden from him,” “I seemed great to him,” and “I was with him as an artisan.”260 Another important element of the rabbinic interpretation of the Bible is that every word of the biblical text is necessary as well as significant. As Howard Schwartz has put it, “The ancient rabbis, the authors of the Talmud and the Midrash, firmly believed that the Torah – the first five books of the Bible – had been dictated by God to Moses on Mount Sinai, that every word and letter of the Torah – even the crowns of the letters – were meaningful.”261 This meant that, for example, both of the similes in Jer 23:29, mentioned above, were significant, and needed to be reconciled in some way. They reconciled the idea of God being both a fire and a hammer by taking up the image of sparks, or “fires” flying up when a hammer strikes stone. This interpretation gave what the rabbis considered to be the proper weight to each part of the verse by simply combining the two parts of the verse into one image.262 The notion that every word of the text is significant also led the rabbis to compare what the text could have said to what the text actually does say, giving weight to every word of the text. Genesis Rabbah 1:1, for example, states, “The unity of God is at once set before us in the history of creation, where we are told He, not they, created.” Here, the rabbis compare what the author of Genesis could have said, “they created the earth,” with what the author did say, “he created the earth,” and uses this reading to 259 Ibid. 260 Ibid., 27. 261 Howard Schwartz, Reimagining the Bible: The Storytelling of the Rabbis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 3. 262 Stern, Midrash and Theory, 17–18. 66 support their position that there is only one God and that he created the earth. As Howard Schwartz has noted, the Rabbis belief in the Torah as the “repository of all truth” led them to believe that a literal reading of the Torah was just the beginning of the interpretive process. According to them, many other meanings should be sought for. If every seemingly insignificant word of the text was actually significant, then many interpretations could be gleaned from one verse.263 The rabbis also considered the entire text of the Bible to be a fabulously complex unity. Because the rabbis saw the text as coming from God, it could be infinitely complex, with one verse potentially relating to all others, not just to the verses on either side of it.264 This means that rabbinic analysis of a verse is just as likely to use a verse five books away to inform their chosen text as they would be to use the verses immediately preceding or following the verse under investigation.265 The Gen. Rab. explained Gen 22:1 using at least 11 verses scattered across the canon, but never so much as alluded to Gen 22:3.266 One almost gets the impression that, for the rabbis, the Bible was more than just a book, it was a giant database of connections that ranged through the whole text.267 This meant that a given verse could connect to many other verses. As Eliezer Segal has noted, according to the Rabbis, “A pivotal feature in the aesthetics of a wellcrafted sermon is the ability to create transitions between biblical quotations and other components, often by means of word-associations.”268 Thus, Rabbinic “insights are typically 263 Schwartz, Reimagining the Bible, 35. 264 Benjamin D. Sommer, Jewish Concepts of Scripture: A Comparative Introduction (New York University Press, 2012), 67. 265 Ibid. 266 Ibid., 68. 267 Ibid. 268 Segal, From Sermon to Commentary, 5. 67 inspired by encounters ... between two or more verses, so that the homiletical point is produced by ... interpreting one verse on the basis of the other.”269 However, this poses the question of how they determined which verses were actually connected to which other verses. Because the rabbis considered every word of the Biblical text to be significant,270 a rare or unusual word of phrase could act as a guide, as noted in the previous chapter. If the same textual oddities appeared in another verse, this suggested to the rabbis that the verses were connected to each other, and that one text could inform the other. In many cases, yet another verse was required, and these scriptures were used to explain the first.271 For the rabbis, a textual oddity therefore acted as a “red flag” in the text, signaling that if there was another verse with a similar oddity, they were meant to be connected. This approach was so common that there is actually a name for it. This interpretive style is known as gezera shava, or as Moshe Bernstein and Shlomo Koyfman have put it, argument from analogous expression.272 This suggests that the inference, from the previous chapter, that the earliest audience of JEDtrH could have understood certain pericopes in light of other pericopes is born out in at least this one time and place: among the Rabbinic sages of late antique Babylon. Obviously, the rabbinic approach sometimes understands the text in a way that differs from the way the text’s original audience would have understood it. The Hebrew Bible, for example, often reduplicates terms for emphasis, especially within its more poetic passages. Yet the rabbis often assumed that such reduplication indicated two separate events, something a part 269 Ibid., 6. Eugene B. Borowitz, The Talmud’s Theological Language-Game: A Philosophical Discourse Analysis (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006), 69. 270 271 Sommer, Jewish Concepts of Scripture, 69. Moshe J. Bernstein and Shlomo A. Koyfman, “The Interpretation of Biblical Law in the Dead Sea Scrolls: Forms and Methods,” in Biblical Interpretation at Qumran, ed. M. Henze (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005), 84. 272 68 of the original audience likely would not have assumed.273 A rabbinic interpretation of Exod 15:16, found in the Berachot, interprets “till your people pass over, Lord, till the people pass over,” to refer to both the Exodus and the time of Ezra.274 Yet this is not how any part of the text’s original audience could have understood it. What modern scholars have identified as parallelism, presumably something the earliest audience of the Hebrew Bible would have recognized as a literary device, is seen by some rabbinic interpretation to refer to two separate events.275 One good example of this is Ps 104:35, which states, ‫יתמו חטאים מן־הארץ ורשעים עוד‬ ‫“ אינם‬Let the guilty be consumed from off the earth, and let the wicked be no more.” Yet because the verse refers to both the ‫“ חטאים‬guilty” and the ‫“ רשעים‬wicked” the authors of the Berachot understood this verse to be referring to two separate groups of people, rather than seeing it as a classic biblical parallelism.276 Once again, it seems unlikely that the original audience of the Psalms would have understood the text this way. Even the use of verbal similarity to connect verses is sometimes so creative among the Rabbis that one wonders whether anyone in the original audience would have associated certain texts with each other that the Rabbis connect. Job 5:7, ‫כי־אדם לעמל יולד ובני־רשף יגביהו עוף‬ “because man is born to trouble, and sparks fly upward,” for example, is connected by the rabbis to Prov 23:5, which reads ‫“ כי עשה יעשה־לו כנפים כנשר ועיף השמים‬Because it makes itself wings; it flies like an eagle toward heaven.” The reason for this connection seems to simply be the word ‫עוף‬, which means “to fly.” According to the rabbis, these two verses, when read together, taught that studying the Torah on your bed helps to chase away demons.277 Because 273 Borowitz, The Talmud’s Theological Language-Game, 69. 274 Ibid., 219, n. 24. 275 Ibid., 69. 276 Ibid., 219, n. 25 277 Ibid., 219, n. 22. 69 nothing else in the immediate context of these verses match each other, it is unlikely that anyone in the original audience of Job or the Psalms understood the verse this way, as the word is relatively common, such that there does not seem to be any discernable reason for connecting these specific usages of the word. Yet sometimes, connections made by the Rabbis are more likely to have been made by a more ancient audience. For example, both the phrase ‫( בקנאו את־קנאתי‬Num 25:11) and ‫ קנא קנאתי‬relate to being “zealous” for Yahweh, and Phinehas and Elijah are the only two characters in the Hebrew Bible described this way.278 James Kugel has noted that this is likely the reason why the later Rabbis assumed that Elijah was simply a very old (basically immortal) Phinehas.279 As will shortly be seen, other ancient readers did not come to conclusions about real events in the lives of biblical characters based on such connections, but many people listening to Genesis–2 Kings being read may well have made the connection between the Phinehas and Elijah narratives, because of correspondences between some of the surrounding material in the Phinehas and Elijah narratives. In the Phinehas narrative in Num 25:6–15, the people are experiencing widespread disaster, and Phinehas ends the disaster by killing the adulterous couple. In Elijah’s encounter with the priests of Baal in 1 Kgs 18–19, there is similarly a widespread disaster, a drought, and Elijah similarly brings the disaster to an end through his encounter with the priests of Baal (1 Kgs 18:41). Phinehas kills someone from another religious tradition that was partially responsible for the disaster, a Midianite woman, and the death of the person brings an end to the plague (Num 25:6– 8). Elijah, similarly kills people from another religious tradition that are partially responsible for the disaster, and immediately after their deaths, the disaster is reversed (1 Kgs 18:40–41). In the 278 James L. Kugel, How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now (New York: Free Press, 2007), 534–53. 279 Ibid. 70 case of Phinehas, it is a woman (named Cozbi) is partially responsible for the trouble (Num 25:15), and in the case of Elijah a wicked woman (Jezebel) is also partially responsible for the disaster (1 Kgs 18:13, 19). Based on these similarities, it is possible that someone hearing Genesis–2 Kings being read might have noticed the phrase that was unique to these two narratives, considered the context of both, and the connected the two narratives based on these similarities. The earlier audience would have been less likely to make such connections between the scriptures from Job and Proverbs, because there is little in the surrounding context to suggest the connection, and the word used to make the connection is more common. Connections like this may have been more likely for literate people to make rather than people listening to the text being read. However, in the case of Elijah and Numbers, it seems likely that a more ancient audience could have made these connections. Another example will help clarify this. In Gen 37:32, when Jacob’s sons are deceiving him about the death of Joseph, they ask him to “please recognize” ‫ הכר־נא‬whether or not the coat that the covered in blood was Joseph’s. Similarly, in Gen 38:25, when Tamar has deceived Judah, is pregnant with his child, and is being led to her execution for prostitution, she asks Judah to ‫“ הכר־נא‬please recognize” the collateral he left with her in lieu of payment.280 These are the only two times this phrase appears in the Hebrew Bible, and the authors of the Midrash pick up on this. Genesis Rabbah 85:11 states: “The Holy One, blessed be He, said to Judah: ‘You said to your father, Know, please; as you live, Tamar will say to you, Know, Please.’” However, it also seems possible that, having been drawn to possible similarities between the texts based on the more obvious occurrence of similar vocabulary, they then pick up on smaller similarities, as this thesis will do. They also note in Gen. Rab. 84:21 that Jacob refused to be “comforted” ‫נחם‬ 280 Alter, Biblical Narrative, 10. 71 after the apparent death of Joseph in Gen 37:35, but that Judah, in Gen 38:12, was “comforted” ‫ נחם‬after the death of his wife. Genesis Rabbah 85:9 also notes the other more subtle similarity that in Gen 37:31 Judah and his brothers deceive Jacob with a goat, by using its blood to make it look like Joseph was dead, but that in Gen 38:17–20, Judah is similarly deceived in connection with a goat, as he promises to pay a goat to Tamar, but when he returns to pay her and retrieve his collateral, she is gone. Connections between texts noted in this fashion likely make some readers uncomfortable; after all, one might assume modern biblical scholarship had moved beyond such an approach. James Kugel has argued that the ancient interpretation and the modern interpretation of scripture are completely irreconcilable and that readers should, in effect, just enjoy both kinds of interpretation separately, one interpretation as what the Bible meant when it was composed, and another interpretation as what the Bible came to mean over time.281 However, I would argue that, every now and then, the ancient and modern ways of reading are not completely irreconcilable, and can still be cautiously employed with some modifications. With Alter, I assert that there are some differences between the Midrashic approach and the approach taken in this thesis: “First, although the Midrashists did assume the unity of the text, they had little sense of it as a real narrative continuum, as a coherent unfolding story in which the meaning of earlier data is progressively, even systematically, revealed or enriched by the addition of subsequent data.” In other words, “the Midrash provides exegesis of specific phrases or narrated actions but not continuous readings of the biblical narratives: small pieces of the text become the foundations of elaborate homiletical structures that have only an intermittent relation to the integral story told by 281 Kugel, How to Read the Bible, 687. 72 the text.”282 The approach this work will be pursing will make observations about thematic and lexical linkages that are similar to the approach of the Midrash, but rather than approaching these similarities atomistically or in isolation, these observations will be used to further a broader literary understanding of larger portions of the Hebrew Bible, entire pericopes in the case of this work. As noted earlier, according to the Rabbinic approach to scripture, one needs to constantly ask why the text was written the way it was. This involves considering alternative ways the verse could have been written, and then asking why it took the form it did. When considering the placement of Gen 38, for example, Genesis Rabbah 85:2 notes, “The verse only needed to state, “And Joseph was brought down to Egypt” (Gen. 39:1). 283 In other words, the text could have simply jumped from Gen 37 to Gen 39 and continued with the Joseph narrative. In other words, the Genesis Rabbah asks why the material about Judah and Tamar in Gen 38 was included where it was. Thus, at times, the rabbinic approach demands that one examine the text carefully and considering what came before and after the pericope in question. Jacob Neusner has noted that in the Rabbinical approach, context is a key factor. However, it is not simply the immediate narrative context that is important, although that plays a role. The entire Bible can prove to be important context in the rabbinic interpretation of the Bible.284 In the years immediately following The Art of Biblical Narrative, many scholars began to employ midrash in the service of a literary reading of the Bible.285 However, some equated the 282 Alter, Biblical Narrative, 11. 283 Jacob Neusner, Genesis and Judaism: The Perspective of Genesis Rahhah. An Analytical Anthology, BJS 108 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1985), 5. 284 285 Ibid., 8. Irving Jacobs, The Midrashic Process: Tradition and Interpretation in Rabbinic Judaism. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 1, and footnote 1. See also Ithamar Gruenwald, “Midrash and ‘The Midrashic Condition’: Preliminary Considerations” in The Midrashic Imagination: Jewish Exegesis, Thought, and History, ed. 73 Rabbinic approach this postmodernism, which is not necessarily a good fit. Susan Handelman’s book The Slayers of Moses, stated that scholars of early rabbinic literature should replace their historicist, philological, and formalistic concerns when analyzing the text the “protopostmodernism” of rabbinic interpretation.286 Because the rabbinic approach to scripture allows for extraordinary freedom of interpretation as well as multiple meanings for one text, and deconstructionism rejects that texts have stable meanings at all, one can see a relationship between these two modes of interpretation.287 If texts contain any number of multiple meanings, then the interpretive freedom of the rabbinic approach makes sense. However, there is a crucial difference between indeterminacy and the rabbinic approach to scripture. Indeterminacy necessarily involves a certain resistance to closure that is not present in the rabbinic approach.288 Indeterminacy states that texts do not have stable meanings, but the polysemy of the rabbinic approach simply suggests that texts have multiple meanings that can all be traced back to God, or at least to the interpretive community.289 One good example of how the rabbinic approach goes beyond the text of the Bible and yet still has something to constrain interpretation is a text from the Talmud (Bava Mezia 59b) which records an argument between Rabbi Eliezer and some other sages where God is called upon to settle the issue: A voice went out from heaven and said, “What are you next to Rabbi Eliezer, according to whom the law is in every place?” Then R. Yehoshua stood on his feet, and said, “‘It is not in heaven!’” What did he mean by quoting this? Said Rabbi Jeremiah, “He meant that since the Torah has been given already on Mount Sinai, we do not pay attention to a Michael Fishbane (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 6–22; and Boyarin, Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash, 57–79. 286 Borowitz, The Talmud’s Theological Language-Game, 160. 287 Ibid., 162 288 Ibid. 289 Ibid. 74 heavenly voice, for you have written in your Torah, ‘Decide according to the majority’.” Rabbi Nathan met the prophet Elijah. He asked him, “What was the Holy One, Blessed be He, doing in that hour?” Said Elijah, “He was laughing and saying, ‘My children have defeated me, my children have defeated me.’”290 This narrative assumes that there is something to constrain interpretation. In this case, the majority opinion on a matter is what constrains interpretation, hence the use of the quotation “decide according to the majority.”291 With this approach firmly established, one can determine if something like this approach appears in other places and times and among other people in the ancient Near East. These other examples will be explored below. Augustine Because Augustine was operating at around the same time as the Rabbis (the fifth century) but was from a slightly different religious tradition (Christianity) and was living more than 2,000 miles away, he makes a good point of comparison with the Rabbis. If Augustine has certain interpretive techniques in common with the Rabbis, this demonstrates that such techniques are not just a quirk of the Rabbis and are part of a broader ancient interpretive style. Just like the Rabbis, Augustine appears to consider every word of the text to be important, considers a counter-text, and compares the use of a rare word in one verse to the same word in another verse. In his work, City of God he states, referring to the psalmist “‘My heart and my flesh,’ he says, ‘fail, O God of my heart.’ Happy failure, from things below to things above!”292 This idea of failing from “things below to things above” comes from connecting this usage of the word fail, in Ps 73:28, to another usage of the word in Ps 84:2 that he notes in the next sentence: “And Edition. 290 Boyarin, Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash, 34. 291 Ibid., 35–36. 292 Augustine, The City of God, ed. Philip Schaff (Veritatis Splendor Publications, 2012), 255. Kindle 75 hence in another psalm He says, ‘My soul longeth, yea, even faileth, for the courts of the Lord.’”293 Here, Augustine appears to have noticed the word fail in both psalms, and then compared the two passages. Perhaps based on the similarity that in both psalms the supplicant is failing in some way, he connected the two Psalms and used one to inform the other. In doing this, the more generic reference in Ps 73:28 to the supplicant’s flesh and heart failing was provided with an explanation for why it was failing: it was failing for the courts of the Lord. His explanation that it was failing from things below to things above likely stems from the notion that the heart and flesh is earthly, while the courts above are heavenly. He suggests this in the next sentence “Yet, though he had said of both his heart and his flesh that they were failing, he did not say, O God of my heart and my flesh, but, O God of my heart; for by the heart the flesh is made clean.”294 Yet this verse is significant for another reason as well. It provides a counter-text, just as the Rabbis did. When taken together, these details in this passage by Augustine shows many of the same interpretive assumptions that one finds in Midrash. Yet Augustine was not the only Christian to use such a method. According to Marcellino D'Ambrosio, the church father Origen also thought that an interpreter “should compare spiritual things in Scripture to other spiritual things in Scripture, thus clarifying one part of Scripture by another. This becomes a classic interpretive principle from Origen onward.”295 This evidence from Christianity suggests that, far from being unique to the Rabbis, this interpretive style was more widespread in the ancient world. Although the previous examples are more obvious, as one moves back farther into the 293 Ibid. 294 Ibid., 256. 295 D'Ambrosio, Marcellino, When the Church Was Young: Voices of the Early Fathers (Cincinnati: Servant Books, 2014), 97. 76 past, one can still find examples of this approach as well. Another North African scriptural interpreter from an earlier time, Philo of Alexandria, suggests that this approach was not limited to the fourth century CE, but can be found earlier as well.296 Philo The ancient Jewish philosopher and exegete Philo was from Alexandria, Egypt, and this location influenced his scholarship. Alexandria was well known as a center of learning in the Hellenistic world, and was, more specifically, well-known for its Homeric scholarship.297 Alexandria was also home to a large Jewish community, and these Jews appear to have studied Homer alongside their neighbors.298 However, they also studied the Greek translation of their own religious texts, the Septuagint, and seem to have applied many of the methods of Homeric scholarship to their study of this text.299 Philo enthusiastically embraced one of these methods, the allegorical approach, and that is probably the exegetical approach most people associate with Alexandria. However, other exegetical methods were employed in Alexandria besides simply the allegorical method. Some compared the Torah and Greek mythology.300 Others took a more historicalcritical approach, looking at the binding of Isaac in light of ancient human sacrifice, for example.301 Others still performed an early kind of textual criticism.302 Yet others took a literal 296 Reading City of God and the surviving works of Philo back-to-back is a fascinating endeavor that I would recommend to any biblical scholar simply for its own sake. The fragments of Philo preserved in Armenian are especially interesting. Comparing the work of these two scholars more carefully would likely be a fruitful endeavor. 297 Niehoff, Maren R. Jewish Exegesis and Homeric Scholarship in Alexandria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 2. 298 Ibid., 3. 299 Ibid., 4. 300 For a thorough discussion of this approach, see ibid., 77–94. 301 For a thorough discussion of this historical-critical approach, see ibid., 95–111. 302 For a thorough discussion of this textual approach, see ibid., 112–29. 77 approach to the text.303 Philo was surely exaggerating when he said that there were thousands of Jewish schools that opened up every Sabbath to teach the inhabitants of Alexandria, but the available textual evidence suggests that Alexandria did indeed represent a wide array of approaches to the Jewish Scriptures. This diversity suggests the possibility that Philo and his fellow Jewish exegetes in Alexandria would have been familiar with, and occasionally would have preserved, glimmers of various kinds of interpretive approaches in their own works.304 One possible example of this preservation can be seen in Philo’s work On the Unchangeableness of God. In this work one finds, in the middle of an allegorical discussion of the Joseph story, an observation where Philo seems to mix his usual allegorical approach with something that seems more like the examples examined so far from the Rabbis and Augustine.305 He notes that Gen 37:2 states that Joseph was tending his father’s sheep, not simply “with his brothers,” or “with the sons of their father Israel” as the author could have said, but with “the sons of Bilhah, and with the sons of Zilpah, his father’s wives.”306 Although Philo interprets this description of Joseph’s brothers allegorically, the observation itself is similar to the kind of close reading one sees in rabbinic texts. Philo carefully examines the Jewish Scriptures, compares what the author could have written to what the author actually did write, and then analyzes the text based on the premise that the exact wording of the text is significant, like the rabbis did. Similarly, in On Mating With the Preliminary Studies, 14:73, Philo noted that, “And here it is worthwhile to ask why Moses is now, once again, stating that the wife of Abraham was Sarah, when he had already 303 Philo actively responds to this literal approach in his Allegorical Commentary, yet he also appears to integrate elements of the literal approach into his allegorical readings of the text. Ibid., 133–51. 304 Ibid., 5. Peder Borgen and Naomi Cohen have discussed the relationship between Philo’s work and rabbinic interpretation at some length. See Kenneth Schenck, A Brief Guide to Philo (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2005), 4. 305 306 Philo, Unchangeable, 25:121. 78 told us repeatedly what her name was earlier, because he was not a writer who ever allowed himself that worse kind of wordiness, saying the same thing twice. What, then, are we to say?”307 In this example, Philo once again shows his assumption that every word of the text is important, as seen above. In addition, Philo sometimes linked verses by using a unique word or phrase, and interpreted one verse in light of the other. This is less obvious in Philo than in the Rabbis, but it is still present. In his Allegorical Interpretation II 14:51, for example, he explains Gen 2:24 in light of Deut 33:9, reading Gen 2:24 allegorically to mean that people need to leave their mortal mind and body behind in order to receive God as an inheritance. The reason Philo connected these verses is likely that they both refer to someone’s relationship with their “father and mother.” Genesis 2:24 LXX states, ἕνεκεν τούτου καταλείψει ἄνθρωπος τὸν πατέρα αὐτοῦ καὶ τὴν μητέρα αὐτοῦ “because of this, a man will leave his father and his mother,” while Deut 33:9 LXX states, ὁ λέγων τῷ πατρὶ καὶ τῇ μητρί Οὐχ ἑόρακά σε, “the one who says to his father and his mother, I have not seen you.” However, this phrase in itself is not the only thing the two verses have in common. Genesis 2:24 refers to a man leaving his father and mother, while Deut 33:9 implies that someone is leaving their father and mother, as someone who has left their father and mother could then reasonably say to them “I have not seen you.” Thus, not only the actually reference to “father and mother” but also the context may have caused Philo to connect these scriptures, which is similar to what one sees in the earlier examples. 307 Philo, The Works of Philo: Complete and Unabridged, translated by C. D. Yonge (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 1993), 310. 79 The Dead Sea Scrolls The Dead Sea Scrolls community, from a slightly different time and place than Philo, are best known for their Pesher style of interpretation. Pesher commentary leaves little room for multiple interpretations because it sees events in the scripture as referring to actual individuals in the interpreter’s own time.308 In addition, this interpretive style relies only on the text in question, not on any other text, while midrash is interpreting a text in light of other texts.309 Yet even the Dead Sea Scrolls community sometimes demonstrated an interpretation style similar to the Rabbis. One good example of this can be found in the Temple Scroll in QT 51:11–18 (11Q19 51:11–18) where the death penalty is stated as the required punishment for judging a case unfairly. This offense is not punishable by death in Deuteronomy. However, the only two places where the phrase ‫“ אל ורוגת‬you shall not fear” appears in the Pentateuch is in Deut 1:17, the law about judging fairly, and Deut 18:22, the law about false prophets. It was assumed that the unique phraseology was meant as a cue that one text should be read in light of the other, so the death penalty was employed against unfair judges because of its use against false prophets, under the assumption that the similar word was meant as a cue that the reader should associate the verses with each other.310 Ben Sira Ben Sira, dating even earlier than the Dead Sea Scrolls, from roughly 200 BCE also shows a similar approach to that seen above. Genesis 2:7 states that ‫מן־ עפר את־האדם אלהים יהוה ייצר‬ ‫“ האדמה‬Yahweh God formed man from the dust of the ground.” The word ‫ייצר‬, formed, is very 308 Stern, Midrash and Theory, 23. 309 Bernstein and Koyfman, “The Interpretation of Biblical Law in the Dead Sea Scrolls,” 75. 310 Bernstein and Koyfman, “The Interpretation of Biblical Law in the Dead Sea Scrolls,” 84. 80 similar to the word for potter, ‫יוצר‬, found throughout Jer 18–19. Jeremiah 18:6, for example, states ‫“ כחמר ביד היוצר כן־אתם בידי בית ישראל‬like the clay in the hand of the potter, in that way will you are in my hand, house of Israel.” Perhaps because of this similarity, Ben Sira connects these scriptures together. Ben Sira 33:10 states, καὶ ἄνθρωποι πάντες ἀπὸ ἐδάφους, καὶ ἐκ γῆς ἐκτίσθη Αδαμ· “and all human beings come from the ground, and from the earth Adam was made” but then shortly thereafter, in verse 13, states, ὡς πηλὸς κεραμέως ἐν χειρὶ αὐτοῦ πᾶσαι αἱ ὁδοὶ αὐτοῦ κατὰ τὴν εὐδοκίαν αὐτοῦ, οὕτως ἄνθρωποι ἐν χειρὶ τοῦ ποιήσαντος αὐτοὺς ἀποδοῦναι αὐτοῖς κατὰ τὴν κρίσιν αὐτοῦ. “Like the clay of a potter in his hand, to make it the way he wants, so are humans in the hand of him that made them, to pay them back according to his decision.” The Hebrew text of Ben Sira makes this connection even more obvious, as the beginning of the Hebrew text of Sira 33:10, according to SirE 1r:18, mentions ‫“ כלי חמר‬vessels of clay” and then refers to made being formed from the dust. In the surviving Hebrew manuscripts, the word used to refer to the creation of Adam is indeed, ‫יוצר‬, while the word used for the potter is ‫יוצר‬. It is therefore likely that Ben Sira connected these verses based on the common words, and then interpreted the verse in Genesis in light of Jeremiah. The Septuagint Emanuel Tov has argued that one even finds elements of rabbinic interpretation in the Septuagint.311 Isaiah 65:22, for example, ‫“ כי־כימי העץ ימי עמי‬Because, as the days of the tree are 311 One interesting kind of rabbinic interpretation in the Septuagint that is tangentially related to the matter at hand is the attempt to clarify a law from the Pentateuch. Exodus 22:28, for example, states, ‫מלאתך ִודמעך ל ֹא‬ ‫“ תאחר בכֹור בניך תתן־לי‬Don’t delay in giving your ripe fruit and your juice: the firstborn of your sons you will give to me.” The Septuagint translators may have been attempting to clarify this verse with the translation ἀπαρχὰς ἅλωνος καὶ ληνοῦ σου οὐ καθυστερήσεις· τὰ πρωτότοκα τῶν υἱῶν σου δώσεις ἐμοί. “Don’t delay in giving the first fruits of your threshing floor and your press: the firstborn of your sons you will give to me.” Here, the agricultural produce is designated as grain and the oil and wine from the presses, rather than being more general, as in the Hebrew. Emanuel Tov, “The Septuagint.” in Mikra: Text, Translation, Reading & Interpretation of the Hebrew Bible in Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity, eds. Martin Jan Mulder and Harry Sysling (Assen, Netherlands: Van Gorcum, 1988), 177. 81 the days of my people,” is rendered by the Septuagint translators as κατὰ γὰρ τὰς ἡμέρας τοῦ ξύλου τῆς ζωῆς ἔσονται αἱ ἡμέραι τοῦ λαοῦ μου “Because, as the days of the tree of life are the days of my people.”312 The transformation of a simple tree into the tree of life by the Septuagint translators suggests the kind of rabbinic interpretation that one often sees: using a verse of scripture far removed from the text at hand, Gen 2:9, and using it as the primary context for the verse. Another example of this is Josh 5:2, ‫“ עשה לך חרבות צרים‬make yourself flint knives,” which is rendered in the Septuagint as Ποίησον σεαυτῷ μαχαίρας πετρίνας ἐκ πέτρας ἀκροτόμου “make yourself stone knives of sharp rock.” The second, seemingly unnecessary, part of this doublet appears to be a reference to Deut. 8:15, where ‫“ מצור החלמיש‬flinty rock” is rendered as πέτρας ἀκροτόμου “sharp rock,” exactly the same as the second half of the doublet in Joshua.313 Once again, the Septuagint translators appear to be employing this method of rabbinic interpretation in their translation of the text. The Chronicler Although less certain, one may even see something similar to the Rabbinic approach in portions of the biblical text that date from the Persian period. In his classic work, From Genesis to Chronicles: Explorations in Old Testament Theology, Gerhard Von Rad notes that the Chronicler combines a verse from 1 Samuel and a verse from Exodus in constructing a speech to put into the mouth of a Levite on the eve of a significant battle between Israel and its enemies.314 2 Chronicles 20:15 states, ‫אל־תיראו ואל־תחתו מפני ההמון הרב הזה כי לא לכם המלחמה כי לאלהים‬ “do not be afraid or worried because of this great horde; because the battle is not yours, but 312 Tov, “The Septuagint,” 177. 313 Ibid., 178. 314 Gerhard von Rad. From Genesis to Chronicles: Explorations in Old Testament Theology. Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress, 2005), 237. 82 God’s.” The phrase “the battle is not yours, but God’s” is similar to 1 Sam 17:47 ‫כי ליהוה‬ ‫“ המלחמה‬because the battle is the Lord’s.”315 Shortly thereafter, in 2 Chr 20:17, however the speech refers to another verse. It states, ‫התיצבו עמדו וראו את־ישועת יהוה עמכם יהודה וירושלם אל־‬ ‫“ תיראו‬stand still, remain there, and see the salvation of the Lord with you, Judah and Jerusalem, do not be afraid.” This is remarkably similar to Exod 14:13, ‫אל־תיראו התיצבו וראו את־ישועת‬ ‫“ יהוה אשר־יעשה לכם היום‬do not be afraid, stand still, and see the salvation of the Lord, which he will show you today.”316 The appearance of a verse from 1 Samuel and a verse from Exodus near each other in the same speech may possibly be explained in a similar way to some of the other instances explored in this chapter. The phrase from 1 Sam 17:47 ‫“ ליהוה המלחמה‬the battle is the Lord’s” referred to in 2 Chronicles, is similar to a phrase found in Exod 14:14, immediately after the portion quoted in the speech: ‫“ לכם ילחם יהוה‬the Lord will fight for you.” In both the examples from Exodus and Samuel, the root ‫“ לחם‬fight” is used in conjunction with the name of the Lord to describe the Lord doing battle on behalf of someone else.317 This may have been enough to cause the Chronicler to connect these two verses, in a manner similar to what has been noted above. The Preservation of Older Material in the Rabbis If the Rabbinic approach to scripture were just found among the Rabbis in the Parthian Empire in the fifth century, one might conclude that it was an approach that was somehow unique to their time and place. However, because the rabbinic approach to scripture is found among various groups of people in various times and places throughout the ancient Near East, it is possible that this approach to the text may have existed among some people in pre-exilic times, and simply is 315 Ibid. 316 Ibid. 317 Ibid. 83 a reflection of an ancient way of reading texts. In his book Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash, Daniel Boyarin asserts that the rabbinic way of reading scripture goes back to the ancient Near East.318 Such an assertion may seem strange at first. After all, the Talmud, as it known today, likely dates from 500 C.E. Yet rabbinic texts sometimes preserve elements that are surprisingly old. In his book The Midrashic Process, Irving Jacobs has noted that some ideas preserved in Rabbinic texts date back to at least the Assyrian period,319 and some things preserved in Rabbinic texts seem to go back farther still. Job 26:12 is a good example of this. The verse itself reads, ‫בכחו רגע הים ובתובנתו מחץ‬ ‫“ רהב‬With strength he stills the sea, and with understanding he crushes Rahab.” To a modern reader familiar with Ugaritic texts, this can be read as an allusion to the clash between the creator god and the embodiment of the sea, Yam, called Rahab here. Yet when the Rabbi Rav analyzed this verse in the third century C.E., he seems to have still been familiar with the Ugaritic material, as he specifically uses a uniquely Ugaritic title for the embodiment of the sea that is not preserved in the Bible: the “Prince of the Sea,” a fairly literal rendering of the Ugaritic, ZBL YM.320 When God desired to create the world, He said to the Prince of the Sea: ‘Open your mouth and swallow up all the waters of the world.’ The latter answered, ‘Lord of the universe, I have enough with my own!’ Whereupon God trampled on him and slew him, 318 Boyarin, Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash, 2. 319 Jacobs, The Midrashic Process, 154. 320 One might initially assume that this is a reference to the Babylonian creation myth, as it came into the Palestinian Midrash through the Babylonian Talmud. However, the specific reference to the “Prince of the Sea” suggests a direct connection to the Ugaritic material, not the Babylonian material. Ibid., 155–56. 84 as it is said, ‘By his power he beat down the sea, and by His understanding He smote Rahab.’321 Yet the Ugaritic material does not seem to be the only extra-biblical ancient material preserved in Rabbinic texts. In the Babylonian creation myth, Marduk tramples the body of Tiamat, and uses the carcass to create the sea. Job 9:8 appears to allude to this ‫נטה שמים לבדו‬ ‫“ ודורך על־במתי ים‬Who alone spread out the heavens, and trampled on the waves of the sea.” The rabbis who created the Palestinian midrash appear to have been aware of the Babylonian tradition and its relationship to Job 9, as they seem to draw directly from it. In fact, the rabbinic sources even use the word ‫ כבש‬to describe the event, a word that never appears in biblical allusions to the subduing of the sea, but has a close parallel in the Enuma Elish, which uses the cognate root KABASU.322 The Palestinian midrash notes, “What did God do? He trampled on [the waters], and trod on them, and thus the sea received them, as it is said, ‘He trod on the back of the sea’.”323 Although slightly altered by the rabbis, one can also see preservation of ancient material in the rabbinic discussion of the battle between God and Leviathan. In Job 40:25–41:26 one finds a long description of Leviathan, a discussion of all the weapons that are worthless against him, and an exhortation to Job to ‫“ זכר מלחמה אל־תוסף‬remember the war, don’t do it again.” (Job 40:32)324 There is even an allusion to the gods being afraid of Leviathan, ‫משתו יגורו אלים‬ ‫( משברים יתחטאו‬Job 41:17)325 “When he lifts himself up the gods are afraid, at his thrashing they retreat.” These elements all have parallels in Ugaritic and Akkadian sources, and these 321 Ibid., 155, quotation from Rabbi Rav. 322 Ibid., 156. 323 Ibid., 157. 324 This verse is 41:8 in most English versions. 325 This verse is 41:25 in most English versions. 85 parallels seem to have been known to the rabbis.326 One sees terrified angels in the rabbinic texts who, just like the terrified Ea and Annu in the Babylonian myth, are sent down to fight the beast. When they fail, the head God opts for a stronger champion to fight the monster, just as in the Babylonian epic.327 This is not to say that the Rabbis are somehow preserving texts from ancient times, they may simply be preserving these traditions. Yet if they could preserve traditions like the ones noted above they might also have preserved elements of a more ancient interpretive style. 328 Thus far, this thesis has attempted to establish that (1) JEDtrH actually existed, (2) this text was read out loud to an audience over a short period of time and (3) at least some small part of the earliest audience of this text might have considered every word of the text to be important and compared the pericope they were hearing at the time to a pericope they had heard a day or two earlier based on unusual words or phrases they had in common. Based on this possibility, this thesis will now analyze the Amnon and Tamar narrative in 2 Samuel with this idea in mind, 326 Jacobs, The Midrashic Process, 158. 327 Ibid., 159. 328 One also cannot assume that everything in rabbinic texts stems from much more ancient times. The reality is likely more complicated than that. On one hand, the Pirke Avot insists that Moses taught the oral law to Joshua, who taught it to the Elders, who taught it to the prophets, who taught it to the Great Assembly, yet the rabbinic texts also show that the Rabbis knew they were doing more than simply transmitting these texts intact. One example of this is Menachot 29B, from the Babylonian Talmud, which states that Moses went up to heaven to receive the Torah, and saw God embellishing the top of each letter of the Torah with calligraphy “crowns.” When he asked God why he was doing this, God replied, that he was doing this so Rabbi Akiva could derive meaning from the marks many years later. Moses asked God if he could see Rabbi Akiva, and God consented. It continues, “So, Moses went and sat in the back of Rabbi Akiva’s class, where Rabbi Akiva was explaining a point of the Torah. Moses listened carefully, but became weak and tired. Eventually, a student asked, ‘Rabbi, how do we know about this ruling?’ He said, ‘We know this from what Moses learned at Mt. Sinai.’ Moses was relieved.” Even Maimonides noted that one class of people holds midrash “in slight esteem and holds them up to ridicule, since it is clear and manifest that this is not the meaning of the [biblical] text in question.” Yet despite their self-conscious alteration of what they received, some elements of the Rabbinic interpretive style may have been used, at least by small groups of people, in pre-exilic times. Schwartz, Reimagining the Bible, 7. See also Boyarin, Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash, 1, quotation of Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed. 86 presenting one possible way that someone in JEDtrH’s earliest audience might have understood the text. VI. WHERE WILL I CAUSE MY SHAME TO GO?: PERCEIVED ALLUSIONS TO THE JOSEPH AND DINAH NARRATIVES IN THE AMNON AND TAMAR NARRATIVE The phrase “coat of many colors” (‫“ )כתנת פסים‬coat of many colors,” is probably best known because of its appearance in Gen 37:3 as part of the Joseph cycle. However, it also appears in 2 Sam 13:18.329 Because it is used in only these two narratives in the entire Hebrew Bible, some members of the original audience of the text likely would have connected these two pericopes together, based on this unusual phrase. Understanding points of contact between the Joseph cycle and the Absalom narrative, particularly its beginning, helps to inform both narratives. Reading these narratives in light of the narrative about the sexual assault against Dinah, also helps to make sense of them. Together with this narrative, the account of Joseph revealing himself to his brothers, the account of Joseph being sold into slavery, and the narrative about the assault against Tamar can all be read in light of each other to understand these narratives better. An innerbiblical reading helps to shed light on how the audience is to view Absalom, as well as how the audience is to understand how the irresistibility of fate is depicted in the narrative. Composition of the Joseph Narrative It is difficult to know exactly how the Joseph narrative was composed; some scholars have even argued that it is a Persian period novella.330 However, it is generally assumed today that the 329 The Anchor Bible Commentary, among others, discusses what exactly a coat like this may have been. However, it does not note that the coat, regardless of its appearance or significance, may have been seen by some people as a connection between the two pericopes. McCarter, II Samuel, 325–26. See also Speiser, Genesis, 289–90, who simply states that the “coat of many colors” may have been related to the robes put on statues of goddesses in Ancient Mesopotamia. See, for example, Hyun Chul Paul Kim, “Reading the Joseph Story (Genesis 37–50) as a Diaspora Narrative,” CBQ 75 (2013): 219–38. See also von Rad, From Genesis to Chronicles, 75, in which he states that the Joseph narrative is a Persian-period novella, unrelated to the other narratives, and to JE. Martin Noth, A History of Pentateuchal Tradition, trans. Bernhard W. Anderson (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1981), 208–13. 330 87 88 Joseph narrative is comprised of various strands, and may well have been part of JE.331 Richard Elliott Friedman has argued that the Joseph narrative was composed by combining strands of J and E, just like much of the rest of the text surrounding it, and proceeds to separate the work into its component sources. His theory is strengthened by his observations of thematic unity between the elements of the Joseph narrative attributed to J and earlier portions of J. He notes, for example, that in an earlier portion of J, Jacob deceives his father into giving him the blessing meant for Esau by using his brother’s clothes along with the hide and meat of a goat. Now, however, the deceiver is himself deceived when his children similarly bring their brother’s clothes (Joseph’s coat of many colors) along with the blood of a goat to convince their father that Joseph is dead. He also points out J’s propensity to use the motif of ironic payback within the Joseph narrative itself. In J, when the brothers sell Joseph into slavery, they charge twenty pieces of silver for him. When the brothers come to Egypt, Joseph sends them back with twenty pieces of silver (nine pieces on the first return trip and eleven on the second trip), playing on that ironic payback motif. Friedman suggests that elements like these, as well as many others in the narrative, argue that the Joseph narrative is made up of strands from J and E. Even if this is too much to say, it is generally agreed that the work was composed in stages and contains various threads within it.332 In addition, the notion that the Joseph narrative is a Persian-Period composition is weakened by the lack of post-exilic biblical Hebrew within it, as noted in chapter 3 about JEDtrH generally. This becomes significant when investigating the Absalom narrative in 2 Samuel because both texts would have been part of JEDtrH.333 Because Genesis was placed first in this text, the 331 332 Westermann, Genesis, 264–65. Wenham, Genesis 1–15, xxxvii. Friedman, The Hidden Book, 39; Friedman, The Bible with Sources Revealed, 94–95. Strictly speaking, this narrative is part of the Succession Narrative, which is, itself, part of the Deuteronomistic History. Even assuming the existence of the Succession Narrative is somewhat problematic, and 333 89 audience would have seen the Samuel material as echoing Genesis, even if the Samuel material was, in reality, written first.334 Allusions to Gen 37 in Gen 42–45 To begin this discussion of allusions to JE in the Deuteronomistic History, one must first discuss points of contact between narratives within the Penteteuch itself. It is possible that parts of the earliest audience of JEDtrH could have seen connections between the narrative of Joseph testing his brothers and Gen 37. In Gen 42–44, Jacob realizes that the famine that has struck Canaan is too severe to weather without food from Egypt, so he sends ten of his sons to buy some food. But when they get there, they meet Joseph, who has become a leading official in the Egyptian government. Joseph recognizes them immediately, but his brothers have no idea it is him. Joseph accuses them of being spies and asks them about their family. They say they have another brother at home, and Joseph forces them to prove it by going to get him. He sends them back with some food (hiding their payment for it in their bags) and keeps Simeon as collateral. The brothers run out of food and are forced, much to their father’s chagrin, to bring Benjamin down to Egypt to get more food (and Simeon). When they come back, Joseph dines with them, and gives them more food, but then plants his silver cup in Benjamin’s sack. As they are leaving, Joseph sends his steward to confront them and to “find” the cup. When he does so, they all go back to Egypt together and ask Joseph to take them all as slaves instead of taking Benjamin, and the debate rages on as to what it was and when it was written. However, because my primary point here is less about the early compositional stages of the Succession Narrative and more about its final inclusion in the Deuteronomistic history, I will simply state that this piece assumes that the Succession Narrative may have been edited to some degree when it was included in the Deuteronomistic History. See John Van Seters, “A Revival of the Succession Narrative and the Case Against It,” JSOT 39 (2014): 3–14; as well as Joseph Blenkinsopp, “Another Contribution to the Succession Narrative Debate (2 Samuel 11–20; 1 Kings 1–2),” JSOT 38 (2013): 35–58. 334 Yairah Amit, The Book of Judges: The Art of Editing, eds. R. Alan Culpepper and Rolf Rendtorff, BibInt 38 (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 14. 90 plead on their father’s behalf that he release Benjamin. Joseph then reveals himself to them, and they go to get Jacob. In Gen 37, Joseph, the favorite of his father, has dreams that his family will all bow down to him. His brothers hate him for this, and when Joseph comes to meet them while they are out grazing their flocks one day, they decide to kill him. They change their minds, however, and throw him in a pit, because of a plan that Reuben put in place so he could secretly return Joseph to his father. Judah, however, sees some merchants passing and, wanting to make some money from the venture, recommends they sell him. They do so, and when Reuben comes back to get his brother, mourns that he has been sold. They tear his “coat of many colors,”335 (‫)כתנת פסים‬ and cover it in goat blood, tricking Jacob into thinking his son has been killed. The parallels between Gen 37 and Gen 42–45 have been addressed before by others, but they bear repeating here.336 Genesis 37:10, describes Israel’s response to Joseph’s dream, asking if Joseph’s “brothers will indeed come to bow down ourselves to you to the earth?” Genesis 42:6 answers this question, stating, “and Joseph’s brothers came, and bowed down themselves before him with their faces to the earth.” Genesis 42:9 specifically states that Joseph remembered the dreams that he had about them, which is what ties these scenes together. The action of both narratives also begins in a similar way. Genesis 37:12 notes, “And his brothers went to feed their father’s flock in Shechem.” Genesis 42:3 states, “And Joseph’s ten brothers went down to buy grain in Egypt.” Both verses refer to Joseph’s brothers going to get food in a specifically named location; in one verse it is food for the family, in the other verse it is 335 One could translate this phrase any number of ways, but I am rendering it with the more traditional “coat of many colors” because I am not concerned with the coat itself, I am concerned with the fact that both Joseph and Tamar are depicted as having one. Arieh Ben Yoseph in his article, “Joseph and his Brothers,” JBQ 21 (1993): 153–58, explores a few of these relationships. 336 91 food for the animals. This is an unremarkable occurrence that many members of the original audience might not have connected, but another similarity that a small part of the original audience might have noticed is the number of silver coins that changes hands. The first time the brothers return to Canaan, Joseph puts the silver in the mouth of each man’s sack. However, since Simeon stays behind the first time, that means nine pieces of silver return to the brothers on the first trip. On the second trip however, all of the brothers, including Benjamin and Simeon, get their silver back, making eleven pieces total. The combined total of silver pieces returned to the brothers between both trips is twenty silver pieces, the exact price Joseph was sold for.337 Because the author never explicitly mentions this fact, it may perhaps be a coincidence, but some members of the earliest audience may have seen it as significant. In Gen 37:25, the brothers sell Joseph to “Ishmaelites coming from Gilead with their camels bearing spices and balm and myrrh, going to carry it down to Egypt.” The brothers similarly bring a little spices, balm, and myrrh with them down into Egypt when they go back to bring Benjamin to meet Joseph (43:11). In addition, deception plays a role in both narratives. In the first narrative, Reuben deceives his brothers by having them throw Joseph in a pit instead of killing them so that he could come get him later and return him to his father. In the second narrative, Joseph deceives those same brothers by not revealing his identity, and throws them in prison instead of killing them, in much the same way.338 Finally in Gen 44:16, Judah offers himself as a slave, while in 37:26–27, he was the one who proposed that Joseph be made a slave.339 Overall, the two narratives are similar in that this pericope serves as the realization of 337 Friedman, The Bible with Sources Revealed, 94–95. 338 Mignon R. Jacobs, Gender, Power, and Persuasion: The Genesis Narratives and Contemporary Portraits, (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007), 182–83. Yiu-Wing Fung, Victim and Victimizer: Joseph’s Interpretation of his Destiny, eds. David J.A. Clines and Phillip R. Davies, JSOTSup 308 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 2000), 89. 339 92 what Joseph saw in his dreams, but also, in some respects, “undoes” what occurred when Joseph was sold into slavery. Thus, part of the early audience might have seen some of these connections between these narratives. Allusions to Genesis 34 in 2 Sam 13 In the same way, part of the early audience might have seen a connection between Gen 34 and 2 Sam 13. In Gen 34,340 Dinah, the daughter of Jacob, goes out to meet the “daughters of the land” and is sexually assaulted by Shechem, the son of the local chief. Shechem falls in love with Dinah and wants to marry her, so the Shechemites have a meeting with Jacob’s family to make the necessary arrangements. Dinah’s brothers, however, trick the locals by telling them they will allow Dinah to marry Shechem if the Shechemites are circumcised. All the inhabitants of the town are circumcised, in hopes of wider intermarriage possibilities, and while they are still recovering, Simeon and Levi kill them all. Jacob scolds them for this, and the family is forced to move on. In 2 Sam 13, Amnon, the son of David, falls in love with Tamar, his half-sister and the sister of Absalom.341 He pretends to be sick and gets Tamar to come and tend to him. When she comes in to make him food, he sexually assaults her, and then sends her away in disgust. She rends her clothes in mourning, and goes to stay with her brother, Absalom. This event spurs Absalom into plotting to kill Amnon, and can be seen as the beginning of the tensions between Absalom and David, which will eventually lead to Absalom’s attempt to take the throne. 340 The Dinah narrative, despite its concern with intermarriage and circumcision, is likely pre-exilic. Mark E. Biddle, “Ancestral Motifs in 1 Samuel 25: Intertextuality and Characterization,” JBL 121 (2002): 617–38. 341 This piece will not address the relationship between the Tamar of Genesis and the Tamar of 2 Samuel, although there are certainly points of contact between the two. 93 However, as I noted earlier, this pericope is unusual, especially as Tamar has a “coat of many colors” and is the only other individual in the Bible besides Joseph to have this particular article of clothing.342 Because of this, it is possible that part of an early audience of this narrative might have noticed connections between the three narratives discussed above and the Amnon/ Tamar/ Absalom narrative. 343 The main similarities between the texts that part of an early audience might have noticed is laid out in the chart below:344 TABLE 3. Shechem and Amnon Genesis 2 Samuel Shechem, a prince, takes Dinah, “and he lay Amnon, a prince, takes Tamar, “and he with her and he degraded her.” (Gen 34:2) degraded her and he lay with her.” (2 Sam 13:14) Shechem “had done folly in Israel…and such Tamar tells Amnon, “Such a thing should not a thing should not be done.” (Gen 34:7) be done in Israel” and “Do not this folly.” (2 Sam 13:12) Dinah marrying Shechem is described as Tamar says that it would be a “disgrace” for “disgrace.” (Gen 34:14) her. (2 Sam 13:13) 342 Friedman, The Hidden Book, 15, discusses this similarity, and attributes it to similarities between J and the Succession Narrative, which he sees as part of the same literary unit. However, one can also see unity not just between the Joseph narrative in J and the succession crisis in J, but also between E’s contribution to the Joseph narrative and the succession crisis as well, which demonstrates that the Deuteronomistic History has to be read with JE in mind. See John Van Seters, “Silence of Dinah (Genesis 34),” in Jacob: A Plural Commentary of Gen. 25–36. Mélanges offerts à Albert de Pury, eds. J.-D. Macchi and T. Romer, MdB 44 (Geneva: Labor et Fides, 2001), 239– 47. 343 344 The references in this chart are from Harvey, Retelling the Torah, 56–57. 94 Dinah’s father, Jacob, “kept quiet.” (Gen Absalom tells Tamar, “Keep quiet.” (2 Sam 34:5) 13:20) The man who degrades Dinah dies is killed by The man who degrades Tamar is killed by her her brothers. brother. Dinah’s father, Jacob, knows but is passive, Tamar’s father, David, knows but is passive, his sons take vengeance, and he is angry his son takes vengeance, and he is angry afterward. (Gen 34:30) afterward. (2 Sam 13:21) In Gen 34:7, it states that the brothers were angry with Shechem because he had, ‫נבלה‬ ‫“ עשה בישראל לשכב את־בת־יעקב וכן לא יעשה‬done folly in Israel by lying with Jacob’s daughter; which thing should not be done.” Similarly, 2 Sam 13:12, states, ‫לא־יעשה כן בישראל אל־תעשה‬ ‫“ את־הנבלה הזאת‬for such a thing should not be done. In Israel do not this folly.” In both these cases, “folly in Israel” is described as something that “should not be done.” As far as I have been able to find in the Hebrew text, these two narratives are the only occasions where these phrases appear together. Distinctive elements like this, intentional or not, may have served as “red-flags” for hearers, prompting early audience members to look for similarities between the two narratives, as discussed above.345 This appears to be borne out in this case, as an early audience member might have detected many similarities between this narrative and the Dinah narrative. For example, Gen 34:3 states that Shechem ‫“ ויאהב את־הנער‬loved the girl,” and that he ‫וידבר על־‬ ‫“ לב הנער‬spoke kindly to the girl,” immediately after he assaults her, while the text states the exact opposite in 2 Sam,346 that, immediately after assaulting Tamar, ‫“ וישנאה אמנון‬And Amnon 345 Harvey, Retelling the Torah, 59–60. Susanne Scholz, “Through Whose Eyes?: A ‘Right’ Reading of Genesis 34,” in Genesis: A Feminist Companion to the Bible (Second Series), ed. Athalya Brenner (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1998), 150–71. 346 95 hated her,” as well as ‫“ ויאמר־לה אמנון קומי לכי‬And Amnon said to her, Get up, be gone.”347 The parallels continue throughout the pericopes. In Genesis, Shechem takes Dinah, and Gen 34:2 states, ‫“ ויׁשכב אתה ויענה‬and he lay with her and he degraded her.” In 2 Sam 13:14, Amnon similarly takes Tamar, ‫“ ויענה ויׁשכב אתה‬and he degraded her and he lay with her.” 348 As the pericopes continue, Gen 34:14 depicts Dinah’s brothers as saying that mixing with the men of Shechem’s city would be a ‫“ חרפה‬disgrace.” Tamar uses exactly the same word in 2 Sam 13:13, saying that what Amnon is going to do to her would be a “disgrace” for her. Another semantic similarity is the reference to Jacob in Gen 34:5, that he ‫“ חרש‬kept quiet. In 2 Sam 13:20, Absalom tells Tamar to ‫“ חרש‬Keep quiet.” In Genesis the man who degrades Dinah dies violently at the hands of her brothers, and the man who degrades Tamar dies violently at the hands of her brother as well. Finally, Dinah’s father, Jacob, knows about the event but does nothing, and when his sons take vengeance, he is angry afterward, and Tamar’s father, David, knows about the event349 but does nothing, and when his son takes vengeance, he is angry afterward.350 I agree with Marti J. Steussy’s assessment of the situation: that the text seems to treat Tamar very sympathetically in this narrative. See Marti J. Steussy, David: Biblical Portraits of Power (Columbia: University of South Carolina, 1999), 78. 347 348 One might initially suppose that this similarity indicates little, as the words in the phrase in Genesis appears in reverse order from their use in 2 Samuel. However, this is likely a reflection of something called Seidel’s Law, which states that when phrases from one portion of the Hebrew Bible are quoted in another portion of the Hebrew Bible, the elements of the phrase will appear in reverse order. This element was also manifest in the relationship between Gen 34:7 and 2 Sam 13:12, with the reversal of the elements “in Israel do not this folly” and “such a thing should not be done” as noted above. See Seidel, Studies in Scripture. One might wonder whether someone listening to a text might pick up on Seidel’s Law. However, in my experience of listening to the Hebrew Bible being read, Seidel’s Law is surprisingly easy to notice. In addition, Albert Lord noted that this law was a common feature of oral poetry in the Balkans as well, which was clearly oral. See Lord, The Singer of Tales, 122. 349 One might even say that David is warned about the rape of Tamar by Amnon’s Freudian slip, instead of asking for healing food, like Jonadab suggests, he asks his father for “love cakes.” It might just be a small textual error, or it could be a subtle use of uncomfortable foreshadowing on the part of the author/redactor. See van DijkHemmes, The Double Voice, 73. 350 K. L. Noll, The Faces of David, eds. David J. A. Clines and Phillip R. Davies, JSOTSup 242 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1997), 179. 96 In the cases of both David and Jacob, their failure to respond to the rape of a daughter and the decision of sons to respond violently to the problem is a turning point in his life,351 such that his sons begin to push their father around ever after.352 None of these parallels would be significant by themselves, but because there are so many of them, it is possible that a small part of the early audience might have seen a connection between Gen 34 and 2 Sam 13. Allusions to the Joseph Narrative in 2 Sam 13 Second there are parallels between the Joseph narrative and 2 Sam 13, outlined in the chart below:353 TABLE 4. Joseph and Tamar Genesis 2 Samuel Joseph, the innocent victim of violence by his Tamar, the innocent victim of violence by her brothers, wears a “coat of many colors” which brother, wears a “coat of many colors” which is torn. is torn. Jacob “mourned over his son many days.” David “mourned over his son [Absalom] all the days.” Joseph says “have all men out from me.” Amnon says “have all men out from me.” (45:1) Potiphar’s wife says to Joseph “lie with me.” Amnon says to Tamar “lie with me.” (39:12) Both David and Absalom’s silence upon the rape of Tamar is noted by the narrator. “For the king, the failure to speak is a sign of domestic and political impotence, leading directly to the calamities that will assail his household and his reign from this point onward.” Alter, Biblical Narrative, 100. See also Anderson, 2 Samuel, 176, notes that it is likely that 2 Sam 13:21 originally states that David favored Amnon because he was his firstborn and did not curb his excesses, as is preserved in the LXX. 351 352 Alter, Genesis: Translation and Commentary, 194, note 31. 353 Harvey, Retelling the Torah, 56–57. 97 Reuben says “and I, where will I go” (37:30) Tamar says “and I, where will I cause to go my shame.” Joseph is abused by his half-brothers. Tamar is abused by her half-brother. Joseph is authorized by his father to perform a Tamar is authorized by her father to perform a service, but in the process is abused and cast service, but in the process is abused and cast out by his brothers. out by her brother. Jacob allows Joseph to go see his brothers David allows Amnon to go see Absalom while they are keeping sheep even though he during sheep-shearing even though he knows knows they hate him. he hates him. Joseph refers to his attempted rape by Tamar refers to Amnon sending her away Potiphar’s wife as ‫“ הרעה הגדלה הזאת‬this after her actual rape as ‫הרעה הגדלה הזאת‬ great evil.” “this great evil.” As one can see from the above chart, the similarities between these narratives are spread out in Genesis, while they are compressed in Samuel. In addition, the order is different in Samuel than in Genesis. However, enough similarities exist that part of the ancient audience may have connected the pericopes. One of the major similarities between these narratives is the element that prompted the writing of this study. In Gen 37:23, Joseph’s ‫“ כתנת הפסים‬coat of many colors” is torn by his brothers after he is sold into slavery, a scene which, as noted earlier, is already depicted as being similar to a sexual assault. Tamar’s “coat of many colors” is similarly torn after she is attacked, but she tears it herself in grief, as noted in 2 Sam 13:19. Once again, it is possible that this phrase might have served as a red flag for a segment of the early audience, prompting them to compare the two narratives. The reason this might have triggered something 98 in the mind of the reader is because they are the only two characters who are depicted as having a “coat of many colors” in the entire Hebrew Bible. This might have prompted a small part of the early audience to look for other parallels throughout the pericopes, which are forthcoming. Genesis 37:34 states that Jacob ‫“ תאבל על־בנו ימים רבים‬mourned over his son many days,” (referring to Joseph) while in 2 Sam 13:37, David ‫“ יתאבל על־בנו כל־הימים‬mourned over his son all the days,” (referring to Absalom.)354 One might also note that in Gen 45:1, Joseph says ‫“ הוציאו כל־איש מעלי‬have all men out from me” before he reveals himself to his brothers. In 2 Sam 13:9, Amnon similarly says ‫ויצאו‬ ‫“ כל־איׁש מעליו‬have all men out from me,” before he also reveals himself to his sister, but in a negative way. This phrase only appears in Gen 45:1, when Joseph is asking all people to be escorted out of the room before he reveals his true nature to his brothers, and in 2 Sam 13:9, when Amnon is asking everyone to be removed from the room before he similarly “reveals himself,” in a negative light, to Tamar. In Genesis, when Joseph tricks his brothers, this phrase is used, and then Joseph reveals his true identity to them. In the Amnon narrative, however, Amnon tricks his sister, this phrase is used, and as noted earlier, he then reveals his true “identity” to his sister.355 One should also recall that the Joseph narrative contains a scene of near-sexual assault that seems to be taken up in 2 Sam. In Gen 39:7, Potiphar’s wife says to Joseph ‫“ שכבה עמי‬lie with me, while Amnon says the same thing to Tamar: ‫“ שכבי עמי‬lie with me.” Alter notes that 354 Friedman, The Hidden Book, 17. “The dialogue in the story of Amnon and Tamar (2 Sam 13) looks like a conscious allusion to the technique, and also to the language, used in the episode of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife. Amnon addresses to his halfsister exactly the same words with which Potiphar’s wife accosts Joseph—‘lie with me’—adding to them only one word, the thematically loaded ‘sister’ (2 Sam 13:11). She responds with an elaborate protestation, like Joseph before her.” Alter, Biblical Narrative, 92. 355 99 Amnon’s “have all men out from me,” “lie with me” and “coat of many colors” appears in reverse order to how those phrases appear in the Joseph narrative.356 However, there are other elements that a small part of an early audience might have noticed. In Gen 37:30, when Reuben comes back and finds Joseph missing, he mourns with the words, ‫“ ואני אנה אני־בא‬and I, where will I go?” Then, in 2 Sam 13:13, Tamar protests to Amnon with the words, ‫“ ואני אנה אוליך את־חרפתי‬and I, where will I send my shame?” The phrase “and I, where” only appear in these two places in the Hebrew text. Although it is a mundane phrase, this is another one of the phrases that was immediately apparent to me as I listened to JEDtrH. As one continues through the text, more general parallels appear. In both of these cases, both Joseph and Tamar are abused by half-siblings, and the brother or brothers of the offended party responds inappropriately. In addition, both texts refer to the relationship between the siblings by mentioning that they are only half-siblings. Joseph’s brothers are identified in Gen 37 not as Joseph’s brothers or even as Jacob’s sons, but as “the sons of Bilhah, and the sons of Zilpah, his father’s wives.”357 Just as Tamar is identified simply as “the sister of Absalom,” reminding the reader of the half-brother relationship between attacker and victim from the outset, so some listeners might have noticed the half-brother relationship from the beginning of the Joseph narrative as well as the Absalom narrative. Thus, Joseph is abused by his half-brothers and Tamar is also abused by her half-brother. In addition, both Joseph and Tamar are authorized by their fathers to perform a service and, while performing this service, they are both abused and cast out by their own brothers.358 Joseph is authorized by his father to go check on his brothers in 356 This is likely a reflection of something called Seidel’s Law, in which elements used in a narrative are often used in reverse order when they are being alluded to. Alter, The David Story, 267. 357 Philo, Unchangeable 25:121, notes this. Philo, predictably, derives an allegorical meaning from this, but the observation itself is interesting from a modern literary perspective. Lillian R. Klein, “Bathsheba Revealed,” in Samuel and Kings: A Feminist Companion to the Bible: Second Series, ed. Athalya Brenner (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 2000), 47–64. 358 100 Gen 37:13–14, where he is told “please go” ‫לך־נא‬. In 2 Sam 13:7, Tamar is sent by David to go tend to Amnon with the same words, ‫“ לכי נא‬please go.” Also, in Gen 37:13–14, Jacob allows Joseph to go see his brothers while they are keeping sheep even though he knows they hate him. Similarly, in 2 Sam 13:23 David allows Amnon to go see Absalom during sheep-shearing even though he knows he hates him, and in both cases, the sheep are specifically mentioned.359 Once again, it should be noted that these parallels do not necessarily demonstrate that the author intended for any of these connections to exist, but a small part of an early audience of the text could have made these connections between the narratives. As one steps back from these details, one sees larger similarities between David and Jacob that can also be instructive, as Richard Elliot Friedman360 notes: In the first place there were the parallels in the stories themselves. Consider the story of Jacob in J and the story of King David in the Court History. Both show an obvious concern with the succession of sons to the place of their father. In J, four of Jacob’s sons are contenders: Reuben, Simeon, Levi, and Judah. In the Court History, likewise, four of David’s sons are in the running: Amnon, Absalom, Adonijah, and Solomon. And in both stories the fourth son is the victor. And the offenses that eliminate Reuben, Simeon, and Levi in J are the same offenses that eliminate Absalom from the succession in 2 Samuel: Reuben sleeps with his father Jacob’s concubine; Absalom takes ten of his father David’s concubines! Simeon and Levi avenge a sexual injury to their sister, Dinah, by murdering the man who did it; Absalom avenges the rape of his sister, Tamar, by murdering the man who did it. And both stories have a formerly strong, now comparatively weak father, who hears about the injury to his daughter but does not act: Jacob in J, David in the Court History … David, like Jacob, has twelve sons in Jerusalem.361 Baruch Halpern, David’s Secret Demons: Messiah, Murderer, Traitor, King (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001), 358–60. 359 360 Although Richard Elliot Friedman has a tendency to make claims that are not as well-supported as one might like, and with books like Who Wrote the Bible?, The Hidden Book in the Bible, and The Bible with Sources Revealed, he sometimes overplays his hand, the evidence he presents can still be used, as long as one is using it more cautiously to discuss how a small segment of the original audience may have understood the text. Many of the connections between texts that I will be discussing in this thesis are connections I made on my own by simply reviewing the text carefully, but then found, much to my surprise, that Friedman had made the same connections I had. This has persuaded me that at least some small part of the audience could have seen these texts the same way, and not that the conclusions Friedman draws from these connections are necessarily valid. 361 Friedman, The Hidden Book, 8–9. 101 The parallels continue throughout the narratives surrounding these two men: “Jacob’s deathbed blessings results in his eliminating the first—, second—, and third—born sons, resulting in the preeminence of Judah, which becomes David’s tribe. And the J story of Judah and Tamar culminates in the birth of their son Perez (Gen 38:29), whose descendants are destined to become the major clan of Judah—which is fulfilled in David, who was understood to be from Perez.”362 Implications for Understanding the Pericopes Reading 2 Sam 13 in light of the narratives from Genesis examined in this piece can help to answer questions about the narrative. An inner-biblical reading helps to answer one of the most pressing questions about the narrative: what is the reader to think about Absalom? Is he simply an arrogant usurper, or is he being depicted as a more sympathetic character? An appeal to the inner-biblical allusions cited above may be able to answer this question. Both Joseph and Dinah are depicted in Genesis as innocent victims who suffer at the hands of others, but in both cases their father, Jacob, does nothing to help; in the case of Dinah he appears to simply refuse to act, and in the case of Joseph he is deceived in the same way he tricked his own father years before. Both instances emphasize his powerlessness, causing the reader to expect someone to solve the problem. In the case of Dinah, Simeon and Levi avenge her, but in the case of Joseph, one is left dissatisfied, as nobody comes to the aid of the protagonist immediately. It is only God who will help Joseph, and this help does not come until later. The similarities between this narrative and the Tamar narrative present a reading that depicts David as powerless as Jacob to help his own family members. In addition, this reading suggests that David is unfit to rule and subtly makes 362 Ibid., 43. 102 the reader sympathize with Absalom.363 Thus, this reading may make the reader more sympathetic towards Absalom because, although overeager perhaps, he at least addresses a problem that his father refuses to address.364 In addition, the parallels to the Joseph narrative can also remind the reader of the impossibility of resisting events that God has set into motion. In Genesis, it seems as though nothing can keep Joseph from succeeding, and Joseph states that God was the one that put the events that happened to him into motion, as noted in Gen 45:7–8, “And God sent me ahead of you to preserve descendants for you on the earth, and to save your lives by a great deliverance. So now it was not you that sent me here, but God, and he made me a father to Pharaoh, and lord of all his household, and a ruler in all the land of Egypt.” This seems to suggest that God has set certain things in motion and that his plans cannot be thwarted. If one reads 2 Sam with this in mind, one sees this motif in 2 Sam 13. In 2 Sam 12, when Nathan tells David the parable of the rich man and the lamb, David responds, in 2 Sam 12:5–6, “As Yahweh lives, the man who has done this will certainly die, and the lamb he will make amends for four times over, because he did this thing, and because he had no compassion.” Nathan informs him in the next verse that he is the man described, implying that this judgement, death and fourfold restitution, has fallen on him. In verse 10, Nathan tells David that “the sword will never depart” from his house, and it never does, as David experiences calamity after calamity throughout the succession narrative. However, in 2 Sam 12:13, he is told that he will not die, but in the next verse is informed that his child will be killed. This seems to imply that even though one half of David’s sentence 363 Greger Andersson, Untamable Texts: Literary Studies and Narrative Theory in the Books of Samuel, eds. Claudia V. Camp and Andrew Mein, LHBOTS 514 (New York: T&T Clark, 2009), 246–50. 364 Even if not technically complicit in the rape of Tamar, David still allows his favoritism for his oldest son to blind him to any possible problems. Jacob does the same thing. Jonathan Kirsch, King David: The Real Life of the Man Who Ruled Israel (New York: Ballantine Books, 2000), 218. 103 will not be fulfilled, and he will not die, he will still have to “pay back” fourfold. He will make this fourfold restitution over the course of the rest of 2 Sam and 1 Kgs, through the death of four if his children: the unnamed first child of Bathsheba, Amnon, Absalom, and Adonijah will all die untimely deaths. David appears to acknowledge this is 2 Sam 18:31, where he says, “Oh my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! I wish I could have died for you, oh Absalom, my son, my son!” In other words, David wishes that his first sentence passed against the man who stole the lamb, “he will certainly die” had been fulfilled rather than the second sentence, “he will pay back fourfold.” These events, as in the Joseph narrative, appear to have been put in place by God through Nathan and are inexorably to come to pass, just as the events in the life of Joseph in Genesis.365 Upon inspection, one realizes that the Joseph narrative in Gen 37–50 and the Dinah narrative could be used to inform the Tamar narrative in 2 Samuel. This allows the somewhat unusual phrase ‫“ כתנת פסים‬coat of many colors,” in 2 Sam 13:18, to be understood, but also helps the entire 2 Samuel narrative to be understood. It helps to explain how one is to understand the depiction of Absalom and David in the narrative and brings unity to much of the material that follows. 365 One should certainly not think that these are the only parallels in 2 Sam 13, as there are significant connections between the rape of Tamar and the rape of the Levite’s concubine, “no brothers, no” is repeated only in these two places, for example, but I have limited the scope of this study to the most pertinent connections. Polzin, David and the Deuteronomist, 137–38. VII. CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS FOR FURTHER RESEARCH The methodological approach proposed and demonstrated in this thesis helps to solve some of the problems inherent in narrative criticism, allowing scholars to employ many of the methods of narrative criticism without committing the intentional fallacy. It also allows practitioners of this modified form of narrative criticism to marry their approach with the historical-critical method. Finally, it allows for a melding of narrative criticism and reception criticism, two areas of biblical criticism that seemed utterly opposed to each other in the wake of the publication of The Art of Biblical Narrative. This approach, which builds on Phillip Esler’s work, allows the reader to consider how the first ancient audience of a text would have read the text of the Bible at various stages of its development, from the first people to listen to JE being read, to the first people to hear the LXX read, to the first people to have the biblical canon read to them, as mentioned in the introduction. However, in order to do this, one must consider the form of the text the audience would have been hearing. If one wants to examine how JE was understood when it was first compiled, one must determine what texts were actually in JE. This involves delving into source criticism to determine what would have been in the text at which point in time. This thesis attempted to give the outlines of a reconstructed version of JEDtrH in order to look at the Amnon-Tamar pericope as it might have been heard by the earliest audience of JEDtrH. Based on subtle differences between redaction styles in the Pentateuch, this thesis reconstructed first the text of JE. Next it argues for a DtrH written and compiled around the time of Josiah, and then used similarities between the JE and DtrH to argue for the existence of a Josianic JEDtrH. Next, this thesis illustrated how the text of JEDtrH would have been experienced by its earliest audience by examining how people interacted with texts in the ancient Near East, using 104 105 both historical and ethnographic evidence. This evidence demonstrated that people likely had texts read to them, perhaps in the context of festivals. This changes how some of these people might have understood the text, since they experienced large amounts of the text within a short period of time, making it more likely that they could have made connections between various parts of the text that moderns might not associate with each other without the aid of computer programs. This thesis then proceeded to show how some ancient readers of the Bible, from various times and places, may have associated certain passages with each other, based on unusual words or phrases in the text. It also suggested that such an interpretive style may have been present before the Babylonian exile. Finally, this thesis used the Amnon and Tamar narrative from 2 Samuel as a test case to demonstrate how some member of the earliest audience of JEDtrH might have understood the text, seeing Absalom as a more sympathetic character who is simply avenging his sister when his father refused to, as well as reminding the reader of the impossibility of resisting events that God has set into motion. This approach to the biblical text presents new possibilities for the study of biblical narrative. As noted in the introduction, it can sometimes be hard to detect the voices of children, women, or slaves, among others, in the biblical text, because these people likely wrote little to none of the biblical text. However, this approach would allow readers to consider how a member of each of these groups might have seen the biblical text. If one were so inclined, this would allow a scholar to write a book on a given pericope, looking at it from multiple perspectives, based on how people from each of these groups could have understood the text. One could also follow how a certain group of people in the earliest audience of the book might have understood 106 it, and use this approach to write a commentary from a given perspective. This would require understanding how these people lived, and one would likely have to reference books like Life in Biblical Israel by Philip J. King and Lawrence E. Stager to determine how people from various groups lived, but once a scholar had familiarized themselves with this material, one could then present analyzes based on how some member of that original audience could have understood the text.366 For example, a slave listening to the narratives surrounding Hagar in Gen 16 and 21 might have seen the text differently than a child or a male landowner might have seen it. Considering questions like these would allow groups of people whose perspectives are underrepresented in a given biblical narrative to have more of a voice. It also would allow people to see these narratives from a variety of new perspectives, and make it easier for people from these various groups to identify with what is happening in the narrative. Such specificity is not necessary, as one can take the approach of this thesis and examine a more general view of how an average audience member might have understood the text, but one could opt for more specificity if desired. Another possibility for future research would be to examine more carefully which of all the various methodologies within narrative criticism can be found in ancient sources. This thesis examines two crucial elements of narrative criticism 1) the notion that every word of the text is significant, and 2) connecting passages based on unusual words or phrases. However, there are other types of analyses performed within narrative criticism, as found in the work of authors like Sternberg, Alter, and Fokkelman. Another important step in refining this approach to the Bible would be to examine these methods and determining which likely go back to antiquity, and which are simply modern ideas being superimposed upon the text. 366 2001). Philip J. King and Lawrence E. Stager, Life in Biblical Israel, (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 107 One potential drawback of this proposed methodology is that it requires scholars to be familiar with a broad range of topics within biblical studies, such source criticism, redaction criticism, and narrative criticism. Because of the significant demands on a professor’s time that scholars experience at most universities, proficiency beyond a fairly limited sub-section of biblical studies is sometimes hard to achieve. However, this potential drawback could become a strength, as it would encourage cooperation between scholars. A collaborative effort between source critics, reception critics, and narrative critics could make it easier to practice this approach. Within the field of biblical studies, it is not uncommon to find scholars collaborating on longer books with each scholar writing one chapter about their particular area of expertise. If someone were to bring scholars from various sub-disciplines of biblical studies together, such as advocates of reader-response criticism, canonical criticism, source criticism and reception criticism to simply write a chapter each, it would be comparatively simple to create books employing this method without one scholar having to become an expert in multiple subdisciplines of biblical studies. Having scholars who have developed a wide-ranging knowledge of the field, and who could do such work by themselves would perhaps be ideal, although this may be unrealistic. Regardless of the exact details of how the approach was practiced, it is hoped that this thesis has demonstrated not only that such an approach is possible, but that it helps to solve various problems in the field of narrative criticism. Although narrative criticism is, by no means, a dead discipline, there have been some serious objections to the approach from various sides. It is hoped that this approach could help to reinvigorate narrative criticism, allowing it to overcome what some has seen as its methodological challenges, and continue to function as a living subdiscipline of biblical studies through the 21st century. BIBLIOGRAPHY As noted in the concluding chapter, there are many possible avenues for utilizing the approach described in this thesis. Below are some of the resources that I drew upon in doing further work on this topic that might be of use to people who wish to use the approach advocated in this thesis when analyzing biblical texts. Aejmelaeus, Anneli. “The Septuagint of 1 Samuel.” Pages 109–29 in VIII Congress of the International Organization for Septuagint and Cognate Studies, Paris 1992. Edited by Leonad Greenspoon and Olivier Munnich. SCS 41. Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature, 1995 Allison, Dale C., Jr., Christine Helmer, Volker Leppin, Choon-Leong Seow, Hermann Spieckermann, Barry Dov Walfish, Eric Ziolkowski, eds. Encyclopedia of the Bible and its Reception. Vol. 9: Field-Gennesaret. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2014. Alter, Robert. Ancient Israel: The Former Prophets: Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings. New York: Norton, 2013. ———. Genesis: Translation and Commentary. New York: W. W. Norton, 1996. ———. The Art of Biblical Narrative. New York: Basic Books, 1981. ———. The Art of Biblical Poetry. New York: Basic Books, 1985. ———. The David Story: A Translation with Commentary of 1 and 2 Samuel. New York: W. W. Norton, 1999. Amit, Yairah. Hidden Polemics in Biblical Narrative. Translated by Jonathan Chipman. BibInt 25. Leiden: Brill, 2000. ———. The Book of Judges: The Art of Editing. Translated by Jonathan Chipman. BibInt 38. Leiden: Brill, 1999. Anderson, A. A. 2 Samuel. Vol. 11 of Word Biblical Commentary. Waco, TX: Word, 1989. Anderson, Cheryl B. Women, Ideology, and Violence: Critical Theory and the Construction of Gender in the Book of the Covenant and the Deuteronomic Law. JSOTSup 394. New York: T&T Clark, 2004. Andersson, Greger. Untamable Texts: Literary Studies and Narrative Theory in the Books of Samuel. Edited by Claudia V. Camp and Andrew Mein. LHBOTS 514. New York: T&T Clark, 2009. 108 109 Auerbach, Erich. “Odysseus’s Scar.” Pages 209–29 in The Bible Read as Literature: An Anthology. Edited by Mary Esson Reid. Cleveland, OH: Howard Allen, 1959. Augustine. The City of God. Translated by Marcus Dods. New York: Modern Library, 2000. ———. The City of God. Edited by Philip Schaff. Veritatis Splendor Publications, 2012. Kindle Edition. Bach, Alice. Women, Seduction, and Betrayal in Biblical Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Baden, Joel S. The Composition of the Pentateuch: Renewing the Documentary Hypothesis. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012. Baker, James R. Women’s Rights in Old Testament Times. Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1992. Bal, Mieke. Introduction to Anti-Covenant: Counter-Reading Women’s Lives in the Hebrew Bible. Edited by Mieke Bal. JSOTSup 81. BLS 22. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1989. Bal, Mieke. Femmes imaginaires: L’ancien testament au risque d’une narratologie critique. Paris, HES Publishers, 1986. ———. Lethal Love: Feminist Readings of Biblical Love Stores. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987. Bar-Efrat, Shimon. Narrative Art in the Bible. JSOTSup 70. BLS 17. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 2000. Barr, James. “The Synchronic, the Diachronic and the Historical: A Triangular Relationship?” Pages 1–14 in Synchronic or Diachronic? A Debate on Method in Old Testament Exegesis. Edited by Johannes C. de Moor. OtSt 34. Leiden: Brill, 1995. Barton, John. Reading the Old Testament: Method in Biblical Study. Rev. and enl. ed. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1996. Beattie, Tina. God’s Mother, Eve’s Advocate. New York: Continuum, 2002. Beavis, Mary Ann, and HyeRan Kim-Cragg. Hebrews. Wisdom Commentary Series 54. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2015. Beck, John A. Translators as Storytellers: A Study in Septuagint Translation Technique. StBibLit 25. New York: Lang, 2000. Bellis, Alice Ogden. Helpmates, Harlots, and Heroes: Women’s Stories in the Hebrew Bible. 2d ed. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2007. Benjamin, Mara H. “The Tacit Agenda of a Literary Approach to the Bible.” Proof 27 (2007): 254–74. 110 Berger, Yitzhak. “Esther and Benjaminite Royalty: A Study in Inner-Biblical Allusion.” JBL 129 (2010): 625–44. ———. “Ruth and Inner-Biblical Allusion: The Case of 1 Samuel 25.” JBL 128 (2009): 253–72. Bernstein, Moshe J., and Shlomo A. Koyfman. “The Interpretation of Biblical Law in the Dead Sea Scrolls: Forms and Methods.” Pages 61–87 in Biblical Interpretation at Qumran. Edited by M. Henze. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005. Biddle, Mark E. “Ancestral Motifs in 1 Samuel 25: Intertextuality and Characterization.” JBL 121 (2002): 617–38. Bird, Phyllis A. Missing Persons and Mistaken Identities: Women and Gender in Ancient Israel. Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress, 1997. ———. “‘To Play the Harlot’: An Inquiry into an Old Testament Metaphor.” Pages 75–94 in Gender and Difference in Ancient Israel. Edited by Peggy L. Day. Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress, 1989. Blenkinsopp, Joseph. “Abraham as Paradigm in the Priestly History in Genesis.” JBL 128 (2009): 225–41. ———. “Another Contribution to the Succession Narrative Debate (2 Samuel 11–20; 1 Kings 1– 2).” JSOT 38 (2013): 35–58. Blumenthal, Fred. “Samson and Samuel: Two Styles of Leadership.” JQR 33 (2005): 108–12. Bodner, Keith. The Artistic Dimension: Literary Explorations of the Hebrew Bible. LHBOTS 590. London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2013. Boling, Robert G. Judges. AB 6A. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1975. Borgman, Paul. David, Saul, and God: Rediscovering an Ancient Story. Oxford University Press, 2008. Borowitz, Eugene B. The Talmud’s Theological Language-Game: A Philosophical Discourse Analysis. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006. Boyarin, Daniel. Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990. Brenner, Athalya. “Identifying the Speaker-in-the-Text and the Reader’s Location in Prophetic Texts: The Case of Isaiah 50.” Pages 136–50 in A Feminist Companion to Reading the Bible: Approaches, Methods and Strategies. Edited by Athalya Brenner and Carole Fontaine. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1997. Brenner, Athalya, and Fokkelien Van Dijk-Hemmes. On Gendering Texts: Female and Male Voices in the Hebrew Bible. BibInt 1. Leiden: Brill, 1996. 111 Breytenbach, Andries. “Who is Behind the Samuel Narrative?” Pages 50–61 in Past, Present, Future: The Deuteronomistic History and the Prophets. Edited by Johannes C. de Moor, and Harry F. van Rooy. Leiden: Brill, 2000. Brodie, Thomas L. Genesis as Dialogue. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. ———. The Crucial Bridge: The Elijah-Elisha Narrative as an Interpretive Synthesis of Genesis Kings and a Literary Model for the Gospels. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2000. Brooks, Simcha Shalom. “Saul and the Samson Narrative.” JSOT 71 (1996): 19–25. Broyles, Craig C. “Traditions, Intertextuality, and Canon.” Pages 157–75 in Interpreting the Old Testament: A Guide for Exegesis. Edited by Craig C. Broyles. Grand Rapids: Baker Publishing Group, 2001. Brueggeman, Walter. David’s Truth in Israel’s Imagination and Memory. 2d ed. Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress, 2002. Camp, Claudia V. Wise, Strange and Holy: The Strange Woman and the Making of the Bible. JSOTSup 320. Gender, Culture, Theory 9. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 2000. Campbell, Antony F., and Mark A. O’Brien. Unfolding the Deuteronomistic History: Origins, Upgrades, Present Text. Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress, 2000. Campbell, Edward F., Jr. “A Land Divided: Judah and Israel from the Death of Solomon to the Fall of Samaria.” Pages 206–41 in The Oxford History of the Biblical World. Edited by Michael D. Coogan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. The Bollingen Series 17. New York: Pantheon Books, 1949. Campbell, Joseph, and Bill Moyers. The Power of Myth. Edited by Betty Sue Flowers. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Carr, David M. “Orality, Textuality, and Memory: The State of Biblical Studies.” Pages 161–73 in Contextualizing Israel’s Sacred Writings: Ancient Literacy, Orality, and Literary Production. Edited by Brian Schmidt. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2015. Cassuto, U. From Noah to Abraham: A Commentary on Genesis VI9–XI32. Vol. 2 of A Commentary on the Book of Genesis. Translated by Israel Abrahams. Jerusalem: Magnes, 1984. Champman, Cynthia R. The Gendered Language of Warfare in the Israelite-Assyrian Encounter. HSM 62. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2004. 112 Childs, Brevard S. Old Testament Theology in a Canonical Context. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1986. Claassens, L. Juliana. “The Woman of Substance and Human Flourishing: Proverbs 31:10–31 and Martha Nussbaum’s Capabilities Approach.” JFSR 32 (2016): 5–19. Clines, David J. A. “New Directions in Pooh Studies: Überlieferungs- und traditionsgeschichtliche Studien zum Pu-Buch.” Pages 830–840 in On the Way to the Postmodern: Old Testament Essays 1967–1998. Vol. 2. JSOTSup 293. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1998. Cogan, Mordechai. 1 Kings: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary. AB 10. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 2001. Coggins, Richard. “What Does ‘Deuteronomistic’ Mean?” Pages 22–35 in Those Elusive Deuteronomists: The Phenomenon of Pan-Deuteronomism. Edited by Linda S. Schearing and Steven L. McKenzie. JSOTSup 268. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1999. Collins, J. J. “Messianism and Exegetical Tradition: The Evidence of the LXX Pentateuch.” Pages 129–49 in The Septuagint and Messianism. Edited by M. A. Knibb. BETL 195 Leuven University Press, 2006. Cook, Johann. “Ideology and Translation Technique: Two Sides of the Same Coin?” Pages 195– 210 in Helsinki Perspectives on the Translation Technique of the Septuagint. Edited by Raija Sollama and Seppo Sipilä. PFES 82. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2001. Cotter, David W. Genesis. Edited by Jerome T. Walsh and Chris Franke. Berit Olam: Studies in Hebrew Narrative and Poetry Series. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2003. Cross, Frank Moore. Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic: Essays in the History of the Religion of Israel. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997. Currie, Gregory. “What is Fiction?” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 43 (1985): 385– 92. D'Ambrosio, Marcellino. When the Church Was Young: Voices of the Early Fathers. Cincinnati: Servant Books, 2014. Davidson, Robert. Genesis 12–50. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979. Davidovich, Tal. The Mystery of the House of Royal Women: Royal Pīlagšīm as Secondary Wives in the Old Testament. Studia Semitica Upsaliensia 23. Uppsala Universitet, 2007. Demsky, Aaron and Meir Bar-Ilan. “Writing in Ancient Israel and Early Judaism.” Pages 1–38 in Mikra: Text, Translation, Reading & Interpretation of the Hebrew Bible in Ancient 113 Judaism and Early Christianity. Edited by Martin Jan Mulder and Harry Sysling. Assen, Netherlands: Van Gorcum, 1988. Dennis, Trevor. Sarah Laughed: Women’s Voices in the Old Testament. Nashville: Abingdon, 1994. de Hoop, Raymond. “Saul the Sodomite: Genesis 18–19 as the Opening Panel of a Polemic Triptych on King Saul.” Pages 17–26 in Sodom’s Sin: Genesis 18–19 and its Interpretations. Edited by Ed Noort and Eibert Tigchelaar. TBN 7. Leiden: Brill, 2004. De Troyer, Kristen. “Septuagint and Gender Studies: The Very Beginning of a Promising Liason,” Pages 326–43 in A Feminist Companion to Reading the Bible: Approaches, Methods and Strategies. Edited by Athalya Brenner and Carole Fontaine. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1997. ———. “Translation or Interpretation? A Sample from the Books of Esther.” Pages 343–53 in X Congress of the International Organization for Septuagint and Cognate Studies, Oslo 1998. Edited by Bernard A. Taylor. SCS 51. Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature, 2001. Eco, Umberto. “Overinterpreting Texts.” Pages 45–66 in Interpretation and Overinterpretation. Edited by Stefan Collini. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. ———. The Limits of Interpretation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990. Edelman, Diana V. “Intertextual Allusion Using the Root ‫ גנן‬in Zechariah 9:13–15.” Pages 77–88 in Poets, Prophets, and Texts in Play: Studies in Biblical Poetry and Prophecy in Honour of Francis Landy. Edited by Ehud Ben Zvi, Claudia V. Camp, David M. Gunn, and Aaron W. Hughes. London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2015. Elliger, Karl, and Willhelm Rudulph, eds. Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia. New York: American Bible Society, 1997. Esler, Phillip F. Sex, Wives, and Warriors: Reading Old Testament Narrative with Its Ancient Audience. Cambridge: James Clarke and Co Ltd, 2011. Eslinger, Lyle. “Inner-Biblical Exegesis and Inner-Biblical Allusion: The Question of Category.” VT 42 (1992): 47–58. ———. Into the Hands of the Living God. BLS 24. Decatur: Almond Press, 1989. Exum, J. Cheryl. Fragmented Women: Feminist (Sub)versions of Biblical Narratives. JSOTSup 163. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1993. ———. “‘Whom Will He Teach Knowledge?’: A Literary Approach to Isaiah 28.” Pages 108– 39 in Art and Meaning: Rhetoric in Biblical Literature. Edited by David J. A. Clines, David M. Gunn, and Alan J. Hauser. JSOTSup 19. Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1982. 114 Feldman, Yael S. Glory and Agony: Isaac’s Sacrifice and National Narrative. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010. Fewell, Danna Nolan, and David M. Gunn. “‘A Son Is Born to Naomi!’: Literary Allusions and Interpretation in the Book of Ruth.” Pages 233–39 in Women in the Hebrew Bible: A Reader. Edited by Alice Bach. New York: Routledge, 1999. ———. Gender, Power, and Promise: The Subject of the Bible’s First Story. Nashville: Abingdon, 1993. Fiorenza, Elisabeth Schüssler. Wisdom Ways: Introducing Feminist Biblical Interpretation. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2001. Firth, David G. “Reflections on Current Research on Samuel,” Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of SBL. Boston, MA, 14 November 2017. Fishbane, Michael. Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel. Oxford: Clarendon, 1985. ———. Text and Texture: Close Readings of Selected Biblical Texts. New York: Schocken Books, 1979. Fokkelman, J. P. The Crossing Fates. Vol. 2 of Narrative Art and Poetry in the Books of Samuel. Assen, Netherlands: Van Gorcum, 1986. ———. Throne and City. Vol. 3 of Narrative Art and Poetry in the Books of Samuel. Assen, Netherlands: Van Gorcum, 1990. ———. Vow and Desire. Vol. 4 of Narrative Art and Poetry in the Books of Samuel. Assen, Netherlands: Van Gorcum, 1993. Fontaine, Carole R. “The Abusive Bible: On the Use of Feminist Method in Pastoral Contexts.” Pages 84–113 in A Feminist Companion to Reading the Bible: Approaches, Methods and Strategies. Edited by Athalya Brenner and Carole Fontaine. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1997. Freedman, David Noel. The Unity of the Hebrew Bible. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991. Friedman, Richard Elliott. The Bible with Sources Revealed. New York: HarperCollins, 2003. ———. The Exile and Biblical Narrative: The Formation of the Deuteronomistic and Priestly Works. HSM 22. Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1981. ———. The Hidden Book in the Bible. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1998. ———. “Three Major Redactors of the Torah.” Pages 31–44 in Birkat Shalom: Studies in the Bible, Ancient Near Eastern Literature, and Postbiblical Judaism Presented to Shalom M. Paul on the Occasion of his Seventieth Birthday. Edited by Chaim Cohen, Victor 115 Avigdor Hurowitz, Avi M. Hurvitz, Yochanan Muffs, Baruch J. Schwarts and Jeffrey H. Tigay. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2008. ———. Who Wrote the Bible? New York: HarperCollins, 1997. Fritz, Volkmar. 1 & 2 Kings: A Continental Commentary. Translated by Anselm Hagedorn. Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress, 2003. Frymer-Kensky, Tikva. Reading the Women of the Bible. New York: Schocken Books, 2002. ———. Studies in Bible and Feminist Criticism. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 2006. ———. “Virginity in the Bible.” Pages 79–96 in Gender and Law in the Hebrew Bible and the Ancient Near East. Edited by Victor H. Matthews, Bernard M. Levinson, and Tikva Frymer-Kensky. JSOTSup 262. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1998. Fuchs, Esther. “Men in Biblical Feminist Scholarship.” JFSR 19 (2003): 93–114. ———. Sexual Politics in the Biblical Narrative: Reading the Hebrew Bible as a Woman. JSOTSup 310. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 2000. Fung, Yiu-Wing. Victim and Victimizer: Joseph’s Interpretation of his Destiny. Edited by David J.A. Clines and Phillip R. Davies. JSOTSup 308. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 2000. Gabel, John B., Charles B. Wheeler, and Anthony D. York. The Bible as Literature: An Introduction. 4th ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Gallares, Judette A. Images of Faith: Spirituality of Women in the Old Testament. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1992. Garr, W. Randall. “The Paragogic Nun in Rhetorical Perspective” Pages 65–74 in Biblical Hebrew in Its Northwest Semitic Setting: Typological and Historical Perspectives. Edited by Steven E. Fassberg and Avi Hurvitz. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2006. Gaunt, David M. “The Creation-Theme in Epic Poetry.” Comparative Literature 29 (1977): 213– 20. Geller, Stephen A. “Some Pitfalls in the ‘Literary Approach’ to Biblical Narrative.” Review of The Art of Biblical Narrative, by Robert Alter. JQR 74.4 (1984): 408–15. Geoghegan, Jeffrey C. The Time, Place, and Purpose of the Deuteronomistic History: The Evidence of “Until This Day.” BJS 347. Providence, RI: Brown Judaic Studies, 2006. Gerbrandt, Gerald Eddie. Kingship According to the Deuteronomistic History. SBLDS 87. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1986. Gilmour, Rachelle. Juxtaposition and the Elisha Cycle. Edited by Claudia V. Camp and Andrew Mein. LHBOTS 594. New York: Bloomsbury, 2014. 116 Graetz, Naomi. Unlocking the Garden: A Feminist Jewish Look at the Bible, Midrash and God. Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias, 2005. Gruenwald, Ithamar. “Midrash and ‘The Midrashic Condition’: Preliminary Considerations.” Pages 6–22 in The Midrashic Imagination: Jewish Exegesis, Thought, and History. Edited by Michael Fishbane. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993. Guillaume, Philippe. Land and Calendar: The Priestly Document from Genesis 1 to Joshua 18. LHBOTS 391. New York: T&T Clark, 2009. ———. Waiting for Josiah: The Judges. JSOTSup 385. New York: T&T Clark, 2004. Gunkel, Hermann. The Legends of Genesis: The Biblical Saga and History. Translated by W. H. Carruth. New York: Schocken Books, 1975. Gunn, David M. “New Directions in the Study of Biblical Hebrew Narrative.” Pages 412–22 in Beyond Form Criticism: Essays in Old Testament Literary Criticism. Edited by Paul R. House. Sources for Biblical and Theological Study 2. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1992. ———. The Story of King David: Genre and Interpretation. JSOTSup 6. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1982. Gur-Klein, Thalia. Sexual Hospitality in the Hebrew Bible: Patronymic, Metronymic, Legitimate and Illegitimate Relations. Sheffield: Equinox, 2013. Halberstam, Chaya. “The Art of Biblical Law.” Proof 27 (2007): 345–64. Hallo, William W., ed. The Context of Scripture, 3 vols. Leiden: Brill, 1997–2002. Halpern, Baruch. David’s Secret Demons: Messiah, Murderer, Traitor, King. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001. Haran, Mehahem. “Behind the Scenes of History: Determining the Date of the Priestly Source.” JBL 100 (1981): 321–33. Harris, Wendell V. “What is Literary ‘History’?” College English 56 (1994): 434–51. Hartman, Geoffrey H. “The Struggle for the Text.” Pages 3–18 in Midrash and Literature. Edited by Geoffrey H. Hartman and Sanford Budick. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986. Hartman, Tracy Kemp. Letting the Other Speak: Proclaiming the Stories of Biblical Women. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2012. Harvey, Paul B., Jr. and Baruch Halpern, “W. M. L. de Wette’s ‘Dissertatio Critica …’: Context and Translation,” ZABR 14 (2008): 47–85. 117 Harvey, John E. Retelling the Torah: The Deuteronomistic Historian’s Use of Tetrateuchal Narratives, JSOTSup 403 (New York: T&T Clark, 2004), 61. Hatina, Thomas R. In Search of a Context: The Function of Scripture in Mark’s Narrative. JSNTSup 232. SSEJC 8. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 2002. ———. “Intertextuality and Historical Criticism in New Testament Studies: Is There a Relationship?” BibInt 7 (1999): 28–43. Hauser, Alan J. “Yahweh Versus Death: The Real Struggle in 1 Kings 17–19.” Pages 9–89 in From Carmel to Horeb: Elijah in Crisis. Edited by Alan J. Hauser and Russell Gregory. JSOTSup 85. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1990. Heimerdinger, Jean-Marc. Topic, Focus and Foreground in Ancient Hebrew Narratives. JSOTSup 295. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1999. Hens-Piazza, Gina. 1–2 Kings. Edited by Patrick D. Miller. Abingdon Old Testament Commentaries. Nashville: Abingdon, 2006. House, Paul R. “The Rise and Current Status of Literary Criticism of the Old Testament,” Pages 3–22 in Beyond Form Criticism: Essays in Old Testament Literary Criticism. Edited by Paul R. House. Sources for Biblical and Theological Study 2. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1992. Hurvitz, Avi. A Linguistic Study of the Relationship Between the Priestly Source and the Book of Ezekiel: A New Approach to an Old Problem. CahRB 20. Paris: Gabalda, 1982. Irwin, William. “What is an Allusion?” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 59 (2001): 287–97. Isser, Stanley. The Sword of Goliath: David in Heroic Literature. Edited by Dennis T. Olsen. Studies in Biblical Literature 6. Atlanta, GA; Society of Biblical Literature, 2003. Jacobs, Irving. The Midrashic Process: Tradition and Interpretation in Rabbinic Judaism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Jacobs, Mignon R. Gender, Power, and Persuasion: The Genesis Narratives and Contemporary Portraits. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007. Johnson, Benjamin J. M. Reading David and Goliath in Greek and Hebrew: A Literary Approach. FAT 2. Reihe 82. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2015. ———. “Reconsidering 4QSama and the Textual Support for the Long and Short Versions of the David and Goliath Story.” VT 62 (2012): 534–49. ———. “What Type of Son is Samson? Reading Judges 13 as a Biblical Type-Scene.” JETS 53 (2010): 269–86. 118 Junior, Nyasha. An Introduction to Womanist Biblical Interpretation. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2015. Kam, Rose Sallberg. Their Stories, Our Stories: Women of the Bible. New York: Continuum, 1995. Kawashima, Robert S. “Comparative Literature and Biblical Studies: The Case of Allusion.” Proof 27 (2007): 324–44. Kim, Hyun Chul Paul. “Reading the Joseph Story (Genesis 37–50) as a Diaspora Narrative.” CBQ 75 (2013): 219–38. King, Philip J., and Lawrence E. Stager. Life in Biblical Israel. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2001. Kirsch, Jonathan. King David: The Real Life of the Man Who Ruled Israel. New York: Ballantine Books, 2000. 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