Hebrew Union College Annual Volume 90 (2019) 0878201904, 9780878201907

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hebrew union college annual volume 90

David H. Aaron and Jason Kalman, Editors Sonja Rethy, Managing Editor Editorial Board of Directors Jordan Finkin, Joshua Garroway, Alyssa Gray, Ruth Langer, Laura Lieber, Michael Marmur, Haim Rechnitzer, Richard Sarason

HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ANNUAL Volume 90

Hebrew Union College Press 2019

©2020 by Hebrew Union College Press ISSN 360-9049 ISBN 978-9-87820-177-8 Typesetting by Raphaël Freeman MISTD, Renana Typesetting Printed in the United States of America

The editors thank Shelly Shor Gerson for her generous continued support of the Hebrew Union College Annual

Submissions Hebrew Union College Annual is a peer-reviewed journal that publishes scholarly treatments of all aspects of Jewish and Cognate Studies in all eras, from antiquity to the contemporary world. Unlike most journals, we particularly encourage large studies that will yield between 25 and 85 pages in print. We also welcome the publication of primary sources in most European and Semitic languages, as long as they entail commentary and are translated. For instructions on how to submit your article, please visit http://press.huc.edu/submissions.

Subscriptions For Libraries and Institutions: Electronic subscriptions to the Hebrew Union College Annual can be acquired through your chosen subscription agency or through JSTOR directly. For more information, visit http://about.jstor.org/content/ordering or contact [email protected]. Print subscriptions can be purchased through your chosen subscription agency or directly through ISD. Please call, email, or write to the following address and ask to establish a subscription to the Hebrew Union College Annual: ISD, 70 Enterprise Drive, Suite 2, Bristol, CT, 06010. Phone: 1-860-584-6546 Email: [email protected]. For Individuals: Print and e-book subscriptions can be purchased through ISD. Please call, email, or write to the above address and ask to establish a subscription to the Hebrew Union College Annual. Back Issues: Back issues of the Hebrew Union College Annual are available through ISD for most volumes back to 1924. Please use the contact information above.

Supplements Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi. The Lisbon Massacre of 1506 and the Royal Image in the Shebet Yehudah. 1976. Mark E. Cohen. Sumerian Hymnology: The Ershemma. 1981. William C. Gwaltney, Jr. The Pennsylvania Old Assyrian Texts. 1982. Kenneth R. Stow. “The 1007 Anonymous” and Papal Sovereignty: Jewish Perceptions of the Papacy and Papal Policy in the High Middle Ages. 1984. Martin A. Cohen. The Canonization of a Myth: Portugal’s “Jewish Problem” and the Assembly of Tomar 1629. 2002. Stephen M. Passamaneck. Modalities in Medieval Jewish Law for Public Order and Safety. 2009.

Contents

ix A Note from the Editors of the Hebrew Union College Annual



1 Ezekiel 20: A New Redaction-Critical Analysis David Frankel, Schechter Institute of Jewish Studies



27 Authorship, Attribution, and Authority: Jeremiah, Baruch, and the Rabbinic Interpretation of Lamentations Jason Kalman, Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion; University of the Free State, South Africa



89 Haredi Jewish Boys Choirs and the Performance of a Secure Future Gordon Dale, Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion

113 Introduction to “The Making of Moses” Mark Leuchter and Zev Farber



121 Moses the Transjordanian Prophet Zev Farber, Project TABS – TheTorah.com; The Shalom Hartman Institute, Jerusalem



141 Moses like David: Prototypes in the Deuteronomistic History Alison L. Joseph, The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization



163 Moses Between the Pentateuch and the Book of the Twelve Mark Leuchter, Temple University



185 The Apocalyptic Moses of Second Temple Judaism Alexandria Frisch, Ursinus College



209 “A King and a Scribe like Moses”: The Reception of Deuteronomy 34:10 and a Rabbinic Theory of Collective Biblical Authorship Rebecca Scharbach Wollenberg, University of Michigan



227 “A Prophet Like Moses”? What Can We Know About the Early Jewish Responses to Muḥammad’s Claims of Mosesness? Shari L. Lowin, Stonehill College



257 The End of Moses Rachel Havrelock, University of Illinois at Chicago vii

A Note from the Editors of the Hebrew Union College Annual The Editorial Committee of the Hebrew Union College Press, which is responsible for the publication of the Hebrew Union College Annual, regularly reviews the ever-changing landscape of journal and book publishing. This includes evaluating modes of publication and distribution, as well as curatorial practices. In the New York Journal of 2 June 1897, Mark Twain famously responded to reports of his demise: “The report of my death was an exaggeration.” Often misquoted with variants invented by biographers and orators, the stability of the archived printed word enables us to excavate the original quote. The custodians of the Hathi Trust, charged with creating the world’s largest data base of published material, make resolutely clear that preservation of print material today is as important as it was during Twain’s lifetime. Each book and journal digitized by the Hathi Trust is carefully preserved in archival bunkers at multiple facilities. Paper is still considered more stable than digital media, which can disappear in a flash. So it is that reports of print media’s demise have also been exaggerated over the years. Already in a 2013 opinion piece by Nicholas Carr in the Wall Street Journal (01.05), predictions of the dominance of digital sales and the alleged receding importance of print media were being reconsidered. While not true of every sector of publishing, the preference for holding a printed book, or reading an article on paper rather than on a screen, is shared even by a majority of those whose entire lives have unfolded exclusively during the digital era. Although we believe print is here to stay, the world of publishing has been radically restructured by the research possibilities intrinsic to digital media. Equally important are the implications of digitization to subscription and distribution practices. Traditional models can no longer be sustained. One significant change resulting from digital searchability is the trend for scholars to publish studies in less specialized and thus more widely circulating journals. Journals have also come to understand that digital search engines enable them to benefit from a broader spectrum of readers. While one might think that searchability yields a level playing field – making it irrelevant where you publish – tenure and promotion committees remain interested in seeing young scholars place their publications with peer reviewed journals commanding broad readerships. Thus, an article printed in a general history journal, rather than a journal exclusively for Jewish history, may be seen by some as preferable.

ix

x

A Note from the Editors

Simultaneously, the journal world is being reshaped by the arrival of numerous new publications. The low financial investment required for the publication of a digital journal – especially an open-access journal – has resulted in an increase in the number of periodicals competing for an ever-diminishing pool of humanities contributors. When combined with the widened spectrum of subjects entertained by each publication, pressure on editorial boards to find high quality contributions increases. The Hebrew Union College Annual, as a peer reviewed publication, distinguishes itself from other publications in a variety of ways. Most journals cap studies at twenty printed pages; we prefer articles that exceed twenty-five pages and do not hesitate to include within the Annual works that others would think of as “small books.” Additionally, the Hebrew Union College Press remains one of very few publishers committed to a rigorous editorial process, including developmental and copy-editing by an in-house editorial expert. The HUCA enjoys worldwide hardcopy and e-book distribution and additional digital accessibility through JSTOR and ATLA. Still, it has been important for the Editorial Board to entertain innovations and to experiment with different models to sustain the publication’s relevance and highlight its unique characteristics. In Volume 89, we published the translation of a short book on the Jews of Provence with an emphasis on their language (Armand Lunel, The Jews of the South of France, trans. Samuel N. Rosenberg). In addition to three substantive studies accepted through our standard peer review process, the present volume includes a series of articles that resulted from conference presentations organized by Mark Leuchter and Zev Farber, who served as guest editors for the segment titled, “The Making of Moses.” The HUC Press editorial board will continue to entertain and evaluate various innovated approaches to publishing the HUCA. We are committed to exploring advances made possible by digital media and distribution systems, as well as creative ways to solicit and organize scholarly creativity.

Ezekiel 20: A New Redaction-­Critical Analysis David Frankel

Schechter Institute of Jewish Studies Ezekiel 20 presents one of the most striking oracles in prophetic literature. Within the setting of an inquiry of the prophet by the elders of Israel in Babylon, the prophet rehearses a highly idiosyncratic and radically negative narrative of Israel’s early history. Particularly unprecedented are the assertions that the second exodus generation sinned in the wilderness just as did the first generation, and that YHWH determined the future exile in response to this. Further, it is asserted that YHWH gave Israel bad laws that would decimate them, including the sacrifice of firstborn children. The oracle concludes with the eschatological promise of a reconstitution of Israel in the land, but only after the rebellious Israelites, who want to remain in the diaspora, are forcibly brought into the wilderness and eliminated.

This essay focuses on inner tensions and inconsistencies in Ezekiel 20 and presents a new higher-critical analysis of this important chapter. It maintains that the entire section that describes the death of the exodus generation in the wilderness and the sins and punishments of the second generation (verses 15–27) is secondary. Also secondary is the wrathful promise of an eschatological eradication of sinners in the wilderness (verses 32–38). These materials, with their virulent depictions of divine wrath, derive from a late, post-exilic redaction that was centered in Jerusalem. The removal of this material allows for a new understanding of the original oracle, that was addressed to the exiles.

Introduction Ezekiel 20 is undoubtedly one of the most remarkable and challenging texts in prophetic literature.1 Dated to the seventh year of the exile of Jehoiachin (v. 1),

1 Aside from the critical commentaries, see Gili Kugler, “The Cruel Theology of Ezekiel 20,” Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 129 (2017): 47–58; Thomas Kruger, “Transformation of History in Ezekiel 20,” in Transforming Visions: Transformations of Text, Tradition and Theology in Ezekiel, ed. William A. Tooman and Michael A. Lyons (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2010), 159–86; Risa Levitt Kohn, “With a Mighty Hand and an Outstretched Arm: The

1

2

David Frankel

the chapter presents YHWH’s long response to the elders of Israel, who came to the prophet to inquire of the Lord. Within the framework of castigating the elders for imagining that they were worthy of receiving a divine response (vv. 3, 30–31), the deity, through his prophet, provides them (and us) with an elaborate history lesson. The history lesson highlights Israel’s continuing sinful behavior from the time of their stay in Egypt (vv. 5–10), through the wilderness period (vv. 11–27), and at the time of the settlement in the land (vv. 28–29). The only reason Israel survived this initial era and was not devastated by YHWH’s terrible wrath was his concern for his “name,” or reputation, amongst the nations (vv. 9, 14, 22). Since the elders, and presumably the exiles that they represent, are presently following in the ways of their ancient ancestors, YHWH refuses to answer their query (vv. 30–31). On the other hand, this refusal is not to be construed as an abandonment of the exiles. On the contrary, the deity insists that he will bring the exiles back to the land of their ancestors, out of concern, once again, for his holy name (v. 44). He will take them out of their exile with a strong hand and rule over them with outpoured wrath (vv. 33–34). The chapter raises a host of difficulties. The historical review diverges in significant ways from what we know from the Pentateuch.2 Nowhere in the Pentateuch, for example, are we told that the Israelites in Egypt worshipped the Egyptian gods and that YHWH, though to no avail, demanded that they eschew that worship before he took them out (vv. 7–8). On the contrary, according to the Book of Exodus, the demand of the Israelites to worship YHWH alone was first made at Sinai, after the exodus was already completed (Exod 20:1–2).



Prophet and the Torah in Ezekiel 20,” in Ezekiel’s Hierarchical World: Wrestling with a Tiered Reality, ed. Stephen L. Cook and Corrine L. Patton (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 159–68; Frank–Lothar Hossfeld, “Die Verteilung der Gesetze im Geschichtsaufriss von Ez 20,” in Gottes Wege suchend: Beiträge zum Verständnis der Bibel und ihrer Botschaft, ed. Franz Sedlmeier (Würzburg: Echter, 2003), 171–84; Lyle M. Eslinger, “Ezekiel 20 and the Metaphor of Historical Teleology: Concepts of Biblical History,” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 81 (1998): 93–125; Leslie Allen, “The Structuring of Ezekiel’s Revisionist History Lesson (Ezekiel 20:3–31),” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 54 (1992): 448–62. 2 For a sophisticated treatment of the issue of the divergence of Ezek 20, and other historical retrospectives, from the Pentateuchal narrative, see John H. Choi, Traditions at Odds: The Reception of the Pentateuch in Biblical and Second Temple Period Literature. The Library of Hebrew Bible/ Old Testament Studies 518 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2010), 105–81. Choi presents a strong case countering the presumed priority and authoritative status of the Pentateuchal materials and the concomitant assumption that the non-Pentateuchal retrospectives necessarily constitute exegesis thereof. With regard to Ezek 20 in particular, he nicely highlights the fact that some of its unique historical “events” must be seen as ideologically motivated “literary invention” rather than exegesis of the Pentateuch (ibid., 136–43, 202–5). His study builds upon the important work of David H. Aaron, Etched in Stone: The Emergence of the Decalogue (New York and London: T&T Clark, 2006).

Ezekiel 20: A New Redaction-­Critical Analysis

3

According to the Book of Exodus, YHWH took the Israelites out of Egypt in fulfillment of his oath to the patriarchs (Exod 6:2–8) to give their offspring the land of Canaan. But according to the plain implication of Ezekiel 20:5–6, the land promise was made to the Israelites in Egypt for the first time.3 And it was only because this promise was made in the sight of the nations that YHWH came to the conclusion that he had little choice but to honor it. Other striking divergences from the pentateuchal narrative include the divine decision to deny the exodus generation entrance into the land because they desecrated the Sabbath and abrogated the commandments (vv. 15–16), rather than because of the rebellion of the people in wake of the report of the spies (Num 13–14); the report of the rebellion against the commandments and desecration of the Sabbath by the second generation in the wilderness and the corresponding divine oath to exile their descendants (vv. 21–24); and, most disturbingly, the divine bestowal of death-dealing laws, including sacrifice of the firstborn, in order to decimate the rebellious people (vv. 25–26).4 It is not my intention to suggest some theological rubric that might help integrate all the unique elements of the chapter within a unified interpretation.5





3 This point was first highlighted by John Van Seters, “Confessional Reformulation in the Exilic Period,” Vetus Testamentum 22 (1972): 448–59. Contra, Choi, Traditions at Odds, 137–38, who asserts, on the basis of Ezek 33:24, that “the author certainly had access to some Abrahamic tradition that centered on his status as ethnic and covenantal ancestor.” In Choi’s view, the author of Ezek 20 avoids the Abrahamic covenant and begins his history with the people in Egypt in order to form a link between the fate of the exiles in Egypt and those in the present. Choi is undoubtedly correct in insisting that the author of Ezek 20 constructs his history to serve as a model for the present. This, however, does not imply that he was aware of a covenant with Abraham and chose to ignore it. We cannot simply assume that the author of Ezek 20:4–10 is also the author of Ezek 33:24. 4 For a discussion of this text, see Jon D. Levenson, The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son: The Transformation of Child Sacrifice in Judaism and Christianity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 3–9. 5 See, for example, the intriguing comparison of the theology of Ezek 20 with the Christian doctrines of original sin and sola gratia in Ronald M. Hals, Ezekiel. Forms of the Old Testament Literature 19 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1989), 141–42. Although the analogy is instructive, it must be emphasized that the material places great emphasis on the importance of the law not only for the wilderness period, but for the eschatological era as well. It is telling that in spite of the fact that YHWH gives not-good laws to Israel, he still responds negatively to their building of high places in the land just afterwards (vv. 27–29). Further, according to verse 40, YHWH will require Israel’s sacrificial offerings when he returns them to the land. It must also be remembered that YHWH will separate out the rebels for death in the “wilderness of nations” (vv. 35–38). In all likelihood, it is observance of the Sabbath and the commandments that allows the “good” Israelites to survive and enter the Promised Land. This coincides with the understanding of verse 37 as stating that YHWH will place the exiles under the “obligation of the covenant.” Although Moshe Greenberg interprets this to mean that he will bring the survivors of the purge back into the covenant, it seems to me that the function of the divine act is to facilitate the purge. See

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David Frankel

It is the conviction of this study that Ezekiel 20 is a composite text that has undergone extensive editing. Furthermore, the secondary sections within the chapter are best understood not only as elaborations on the earlier material but also as qualifications and even corrections thereof. Thus, a careful redaction-­ critical analysis of the chapter is a vital prerequisite for a proper evaluation of its diverse and distinct features. Of course, various scholars have applied their skills to this matter. Moshe Greenberg argued cautiously for the compositional unity of Ezekiel 20.6 John H. Choi discerned a “structural pattern” in the form of a “three-fold repetition of a single sequence – divine commandment, disobedience, divine wrath, and wrath abated.”7 Walter Zimmerli considered the two sections on redemption from exile, verses 32–38 and verses 39–44, successive supplements to an original core of verses 1–26, 30–31.8 In contrast, Walther Eichrodt affirmed the originality of the sections on redemption, but performed much more “invasive surgery” on the text as a whole, rearranging







Moshe Greenberg, Ezekiel 1–20. Anchor Bible 22 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1983), 372–73. See also n. 41 below. 6 Greenberg, Ezekiel 1–20, 376–88. In spite of Greenberg’s commitment to a holistic approach and his assertion that the chapter displays an impressive congruence of terms and concepts throughout, he concedes that its structural complexity and large variety of themes present a real challenge for the exegete pursuing an integrative exposition. In the end, he concedes: “It may be that this oracle comprises heterogeneous material, or that its composition proceeded in stages rather than from a single impulse” (388). Other scholars who see the chapter as a unified composition include Ellen F. Davis, Swallowing the Scroll: Textuality and the Dynamics of Discourse in Ezekiel’s Prophecy. Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement Series 78 (Sheffield, UK: Almond Press, 1989), 111–12; Daniel I. Block, The Book of Ezekiel, Chapters 1–24. New International Commentary on the Old Testament (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1997), 612–13. 7 Choi, Traditions at Odds, 139. For other analyses of the literary structure of the chapter see the literature cited in Choi, ibid., 139, n. 11. The stated or unstated purpose of these structural analyses is often to bolster the presumed unity of the material. This, however, is often achieved by glossing over elements that do not fit into the pattern. Choi, for example, fails to deal with verses 27–29, which present Israel’s behavior in the land and Yahweh’s reaction thereto in a manner that does not conform to his pattern at all. Furthermore, according to Choi, “each scene depicts, in nearly the same fashion, how Yahweh restrained himself from punishing Israel for the sake of his name in the sight of foreign nations.” However, it would be more precise to say that each scene depicts how Yahweh restrained himself from decimating Israel for the sake of his name. Choi’s formulation blurs the significant divergence and lack of symmetry in the material. Whereas in Egypt, the alternative to the decimation of Israel is simply to relent, in the case of the two wilderness generations, it involves the inflicting of severe punishment. We will return to this inconsistency below. 8 Walther Zimmerli, Ezekiel 1: A Commentary on the Book of the Prophet Ezekiel, Chapters 1–24, trans. R. E. Clements. Hermeneia (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress, 1979), 404–5, 413–14. See also Hals, Ezekiel, 140.

Ezekiel 20: A New Redaction-­Critical Analysis

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verses removing all references to idolatry and Sabbath observance.9 Additional analyses have been put forward as well, such as that of Franz Sedlmeier, who assigns verses 1–26, 30–31, 32–38, 39* to the basic text and verses 27–29, 39*, 40–44 to a supplementary layer.10 Rather than embarking on an intricate critique of these detailed and divergent analyses, I present arguments for my own distinct division of the material. Earlier analyses will intermittently be referred to within this context. The major focus of the ensuing analysis will center on verses 1–31. This will then be followed by a consideration of verses 32–44.

The Secondary Addition of Verses 15–27 The principle thesis of this study is that verses 15–27, that is, the entire section that describes the death of the exodus generation in the wilderness and the sins and punishments of the second generation, is secondary. This means that the radical assertions that YHWH determined the exile already in the wilderness and that he gave Israel “not-good” laws that would decimate them are not original to the prophetic oracle. They were added well after the final exile, and were artificially presented as part of the prophet’s address to the elders in the seventh year of the exile of Jehoiachin. In fact, in the original form of the text, there was no motif of punishment in the wilderness at all. Rather, the Israelites who entered the land were presented as those who left Egypt. Verse 28 originally followed directly after verses 13b–14, producing the following coherent continuity: (13b) Then I said I would pour out my fury on them in the wilderness, to consume them. (14) But I acted for my name’s sake, that it should not be profaned before the nations, in whose sight I had brought them out, (28) so I brought them into the land concerning which I had raised my hand in an oath to give them, and they saw all the high hills and all the



9 Aside from the attribution of verses 7–9, 12, 13bβ, 16, 18b, 20, 21aβ, 24, 29, 30aαb, 31a, 32bβ, 39* to either Priestly or Deuteronomistic editors, Eichrodt also placed verse 28 between verses 22 and 23 and removed the words “in the wilderness” from verse 23, thus placing the divine decree of exile and bestowal of not-good laws in the land after the sin of worship at the high places. See Walther Eichrodt, Ezekiel: A Commentary, trans. C. Quin. Old Testament Library (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1970), 258–84. 10 Franz Sedlmeier, Das Buch Ezechiel, Kapitel 1–24. Neuer Stuttgarter Kommentar, Altes Testament, vol. 21, no. 1 (Stuttgart: Verlag Katholisches Biblewerk GmbH, 2002), 270–73. See also the similar analysis of Dalit Rom-Shiloni, “Facing Destruction and Exile: Inner-Biblical Exegesis in Jeremiah and Ezekiel,” Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 117 (2005): 189–205. Rom-Shiloni locates the original composition in verses 1–26, 30–38.

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David Frankel thick trees and they offered their sacrifices there and provoked me with their offerings . . . 

Several considerations support this reconstruction:11 1. In verses 8b–9, YHWH considers pouring out his wrath on Israel in the land of Egypt, but then acts on behalf of his name so as not to desecrate it in the eyes of the nations. The concrete significance of the decision to act on behalf of the divine name is immediately explicated in the following verse (v. 10): YHWH takes the Israelites out of Egypt and into the wilderness. By analogy, when in nearly the very same words YHWH is said to have considered pouring out his wrath on Israel in the wilderness, but then acted on behalf of his name so as not to desecrate it in the eyes of the nations (vv. 13b–14), we might expect the meaning of YHWH’s determination to act on behalf of his name to again be explicated in a divine act of salvation, that of bringing the people into the land. This is precisely what is reported in verse 28. As shown above, verse 28 flows perfectly after verse 14. It flows much less evenly after verse 27.12 Verse 27 may thus be seen as an editorial attempt to facilitate the transition back into verse 28 after the direct continuity between verses 14 and 28 was severed by the interpolation. 2. The text in its present form is inconsistent insofar as it presents YHWH responding to the Israelites in the wilderness with punishment (vv. 15–16, 23–26), but to the Israelites who sin in Egypt (vv. 9–10) and the land (vv. 28–29) without punishment. The removal of verses 15–27 eliminates this inconsistency since it removes all reference to divine punishment. 3. The proposed supplement begins in verse 15 with the words ‫וגם אני נשאתי‬ ‫את ידי‬, “Moreover, I swore to them.” Michael Fishbane has pointed out that exegetical expansions often begin with particular formulae such as ‫ כן תעשה‬or ‫אך‬.13 And Yair Zakovitch pointed out that ‫ וגם‬is another term that frequently introduces secondary material.14 This evidence strengthens the suggestion that 11 Of course, not every one of the following considerations is fully compelling on its own. It is the weight of all of the considerations taken together that makes the thesis compelling, in my view. 12 In order to smooth out the text, NRSV renders 27: “Therefore, mortal, speak to the house of Israel and say to them, Thus says the Lord God: In this again your ancestors blasphemed me, by dealing treacherously with me. 28: For when I had brought them into the land that I swore to give them, then wherever they saw any high hill or any leafy tree, there they offered their sacrifices and presented the provocation of their offering; there they sent up their pleasing odors, and there they poured out their drink offerings” (my italics). The Hebrew text of verse 28 more naturally reads, “Then I took them into the land . . . ” 13 Michael Fishbane, Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986), 170–87. 14 Yair Zakovitch, ‫( מבוא לפרשנות פנים מקראית‬Even-Yehuda: Reches, 1992), 23. Zakovitch refers to

Ezekiel 20: A New Redaction-­Critical Analysis

7

Ezekiel 20:15, which begins with the word ‫וגם‬, introduces secondary material. Incidentally, we may deduce, in light of this, that verse 12, which refers to YHWH’s giving of “my Sabbaths,” is also secondary, as it begins with the words, ‫וגם את שבתותי נתתי להם‬. This confirms the suggestion of earlier scholars such as Eichrodt, that the Sabbath theme is secondary.15 Originally, the emphasis was on the “good laws” in general terms and without specification. The purpose of these laws was to enhance human life. After adding the new theme of the Sabbath, given as a sign of the special sanctification of Israel, the profanation of the Sabbath was then added in verse 13 (‫ )ואת שבתתי חללו מאד‬and highlighted in the secondary section of verses 15–27, in verses 16, 20, 21, and 24. This coincides with the findings of Israel Knohl and Jacob Milgrom, who have shown that the Sabbath law was secondarily added in various P or H sections of Exodus and Leviticus.16 4. Verse 28 states that YHWH brought the Israelites into “the land concerning which he lifted up his hand to give to them.” This formulation is not quite accurate in the present form of the text. YHWH lifted up his hand to give the land to the fathers living in Egypt (v. 6). He never made this oath to the second generation. Strictly speaking, then, verse 28 should have been formulated to state that he brought the Israelites of the second generation into the land he promised their fathers. This is not a formulation that the author would not have thought of. It is precisely what is employed in verse 42. The present formulation fits perfectly, however, if we assume, with the removal of verses 15–27, that YHWH was indeed presented as bringing the exodus generation into the land that he swore to give them. 5. As noted, the historical review of Ezekiel 20 in its original form did not contain a narrative of Israelite punishment in the wilderness. The straightforward Deut 7:20, Jer 26:20, 1 Chr 10:13, and 2 Chr 16:12. To his list of examples we may add 1 Sam 15:29, ‫וגם נצח ישראל לא ישקר ולא ינחם‬, “Moreover the Glory of Israel will not recant or change his mind,” which, as suggested by P. Kyle McCarter Jr., comes to correct the divine assertion of verse 11, ‫נחמתי כי המלכתי אל שאול‬, “I regret that I made Saul king.” See P. Kyle McCarter Jr., I Samuel. Anchor Bible 8 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1980), 268. 15 G. A. Cooke, The Book of Ezekiel. International Critical Commentary (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1985), 217; Eichrodt, Ezekiel, 268, 273. See also, in greater depth, Gnana Robinson, The Origin and Development of the Old Testament Sabbath: A Comprehensive Exegetical Approach. Beiträge zur bibleschen Exegese und Theologie 21 (Frankfurt: Peter Land, 1988), 205–7; Hossfeld, “Verteilung,” 176–78. 16 See Israel Knohl, The Sanctuary of Silence: The Priestly Torah and the Holiness School, trans. J. Feldman and P. Rodman (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1995), 14–19; Jacob Milgrom, Leviticus 23–27. Anchor Bible 3B (New York: Doubleday, 2000), 1954–55; Jacob Milgrom, “HR in Leviticus and Elsewhere in the Torah,” in The Book of Leviticus: Composition and Reception, ed. R. Rendtorff and R. A. Kugler. Supplements to Vetus Testamentum 93 (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 24–40.

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implication of its narrative is that the ancestors who entered the land were the same as those that left Egypt. As a few scholars have noted, this conception is indeed reflected in several biblical texts.17 It is the simple meaning, for example, of Psalm 105:43–44, which states, “He brought out his people with joy, his chosen ones with gladness. He gave them the lands of the nations, and they inherited the labor of the peoples.” The text moves seamlessly from the idea that YHWH brought the Israelites out of Egypt to the fact that he gave them, those same Israelites, the land. The same phenomenon is found in the famous “historical credo” of Deuteronomy 26:5–9. As noted by von Rad, even texts that make reference to a forty-year stay in the wilderness often reflect a positive understanding of this duration as a mark of the great extent of YHWH’s care, and not as a punishment involving the death and the replacement of the exodus generation. Thus, the prophet proclaims in Amos 2:10, “Also it was I who brought you up from the land of Egypt, and led you forty years through the wilderness to possess the land of the Amorite.”18 The forty-year wilderness period is cited as a sign of providence, not punishment. Another conception is reflected in Deuteronomy 8:2, which explains the forty-year wilderness wandering as a test of hardship endurance. The point of the test, according to verse 16, was to discipline the people and “to benefit you in the end.” In light of the strong emphasis in verses 7–10 of the chapter on the land’s beneficial qualities, it can hardly be doubted that the final benefit of the wilderness test is, first and foremost, the possession of the land. Thus, in contrast with the conception of the forty-year wilderness period as a punishment of death for sin, in the understanding reflected in Deuteronomy 8, this period was preordained for the purpose of preparing the Israelites of the exodus for the challenges of the land. A final text that is worthy of special citation is Deuteronomy 5:2–3, which presents the words of Moses to the people on the plains of Moab, right before they enter the land. Moses reminds them, “The Lord our YHWH made a covenant with us at Horeb. It was not with our fathers that the Lord made this covenant, but with us, the living, every one of us who is here today” (Deut 5:2–3). Here we have an emphatic affirmation that those who stood at Horeb were not the fathers from a previous generation who have meanwhile died 17 See David Frankel, The Murmuring Stories of the Priestly School: A Retrieval of Ancient Sacerdotal Lore. Supplements to Vetus Testamentum 89 (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 144–45; Richard Adamiak, Justice and History in the Old Testament: The Evolution of Divine Retribution in the Historiographies of the Wilderness Generation (Cleveland: J. T. Zubal, 1982), 43–75; Alexander Rofé, “The End of the Book of Joshua According to the Septuagint,” Henoch 4 (1982): 21–22; Gerhard von Rad, Old Testament Theology, trans. D. M. G. Stalker (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1962), 1:280–85. 18 G. von Rad, Theology, 281.

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out. Those who were at Horeb are all said to be alive, standing on the plains of Moab, and on the verge of entering the land. Though other interpretations of the passage have been given, this captures its most basic meaning.19 In sum, the conception reflected in the original form of Ezekiel 20 is not anomalous. It is reflected in a host of central biblical passages. 6. The secondary addition of verses 15–27 can be understood in light of what we find elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible, that is, the concern of late writers to introduce the conception of the death of the exodus generation in the wilderness into contexts that implicitly contravened it. The clearest example of this is provided by the story of the circumcision at Gilgal at Joshua 5:2–9.20 In Joshua 5:9, Joshua is said to have circumcised the Israelites at Gilgal, saying, “This day I have rolled away the reproach of Egypt from you.” As suggested by the early critics,21 and recently reasserted by Alexander Rofé,22 the simple implication of this statement, and in particular the emphatic phrase “this day,” is that the Israelites of the exodus were hitherto uncircumcised and that Joshua circumcised them at Gilgal for the first time. In so doing, Joshua removed the

19 A common approach maintains that the passage simply exhibits rhetorical flourish. See, e.g., Jack R. Lundbom, Deuteronomy: A Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2013), 267. A unique approach to the problem is presented by Bernard Levenson. According to him, “[T]he rhetoric of the text simultaneously erects fictions of past time and place and breaks down those same fictions.” Thus, on the one hand, Deuteronomy clearly distinguishes between the previous generation and the present one, and on the other hand, with Deut 5:2–3, he presents “an audacious denial of the facts.” The Deuteronomic author is being “boldly revisionary in his claims about the past.” This betrays the fact that the true audience of the text is late seventh-century Judah. The revisionary rhetoric allows the author to turn to his Judean contemporaries and address them as the true initiates into the covenant. See Bernard M. Levenson, Deuteronomy and the Hermeneutics of Legal Innovation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 151–52 and 152n14. However, the thesis that authors would audaciously deny narrational facts that they themselves labored to establish seems paradoxical. One must wonder why the Deuteronomic authors, seeking to bridge the gap between the ancient past and their own contemporaries, should have highlighted the gap between the exodus generation and the people on the plains of Moab to begin with. It thus seems preferable to understand Deut 5:2–3 as reflecting an early Deuteronomic conception that was later rejected. See Adamiak, Justice and History, 49–50. 20 Another example of this is what occurs in the Book of Deuteronomy as a whole. All Deuteronomic passages that speak of the death of the exodus generation appear to be secondary. I hope to demonstrate this in the future in another context. 21 See C. Steuernagel, Das Buch Josua. GHAT (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1923), 223; G. A. Cooke, The Book of Joshua. Cultura Biblica 7 (Cambridge: University Press, 1918), 33; A. Kuenen, An Historico-Critical Inquiry into the Origin and Composition of the Hexateuch, trans. P. H. Wicksteed (London: Macmillan, 1886), 133. 22 Rofé, “The End of the Book of Joshua,” 21–22, and in greater depth, Alexander Rofé, “‫יהושע בן‬ ‫נון בתולדות המסורת המקראית‬,” Tarbiẓ 73 (2004): 350–51.

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“reproach” or disdain with which the circumcised Egyptians looked upon the uncircumcised Israelites.23 Various stylistic considerations, especially deuteronomistic language, make it reasonably clear that verses 4–7 (and the word ‫ שנית‬in verse 2) constitute a late addition.24 The original text of Joshua 5:2–3, 8–9 was problematic not only because it presented the Israelites as uncircumcised in Egypt (in spite of what we would expect in light of the Abrahamic covenant of circumcision of Gen 17),25 but also because it implied that the Israelites at Gilgal had themselves experienced humiliation there. This stood in tension with the standard biblical conception of the death of the exodus generation in the wilderness. Verses 4–7 were supplemented at a secondary stage in order to alleviate these difficulties. The supplement “clarified” that the exodus generation was indeed circumcised, but died out in the wilderness in punishment for their sins. Only the next generation entered the land and it was that population that needed to be circumcised, since they could not be circumcised in the wilderness. In its new form, the text affirmed that the Israelites who underwent circumcision at Gilgal were the children of those who left Egypt and died in the wilderness. The development of the text of Joshua 5:2–9 is analogous to the development I am suggesting for Ezekiel 20. The addition of verses 15–27 converts the historical review from a report about one generation that sinned in Egypt, in the wilderness and in the land, to a report that adhered to the standard, two-generation conception. The implications of this analysis for the motivations of the supplementor will be elaborated on below. 23 For a summary of other interpretations of the “disgrace of Egypt” within the context of the text as a whole, see Trent C. Butler, Joshua 1–12. Word Biblical Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2014), 336–37; E. Noort, “The Disgrace of Egypt: Joshua 5.9A and its Context,” in The Wisdom of Egypt: Jewish, Early Christian and Gnostic Essays in Honor of Gerard P. Luttikhuizen, ed. Anthony Hilhorst and George H. van Kooten (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 3–19. 24 For a relatively recent affirmation of the secondary character of verses 4–7, see Volkmar Fritz, Das Buch Josua. Handbuch zum Alten Testament 7 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1994), 59. The material takes the form of a long, circuitous, parenthetical statement that is presented in non-narrative syntax. The narrative action picks up again from verse 3 only in verse 8. For the deuteronomistic coloring of the secondary verses, see the detailed annotation in Cooke, Joshua, 35; there is no reason to accept Fritz’s position that the original text of 2–3, 8–9 was also deuteronomistic. For the problem of ‫ ​שנית‬. . . ‫ שוב‬in verse 2, see the discussion in Thomas B. Dozeman, Joshua 1–12. Anchor Bible 6B (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015), 297. Dozeman follows many of the early critics who noted that the LXX renders ‫ שוב‬as “sit” (‫)שב‬, that it has no translation for ‫שנית‬, and that it preserves the original form of the verse. This position is strengthened by Eugene Ulrich who asserts that ‫ שנית‬is probably not reflected in 4QJoshuaa. See Discoveries in the Judaean Desert 14, 147. 25 The critical assumption, of course, is that the original report of the circumcision of the Israelites at Gilgal preceded the Priestly text of Gen 17.

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7. A unique theological difficulty arises from the text in its present form. First verse 6 reports that YHWH took an oath to give the land to the Israelites of Egypt, and then verse 15 reports that YHWH took a second oath not to give them the land. This, however, puts the worth and significance of divine oaths in serious question. Of what value is a divine oath if the deity can take another oath to dishonor it? One might also wonder why an author who is so concerned to explain the deity’s behavior in terms of his intense concern for his good name and reputation would at the same time seek to present him going back on his word. It is important to point out that the pentateuchal narrative is not enmeshed in this theological conundrum since it grounds the exodus and bestowal of the land in the oath to the patriarchs. Since YHWH promised to give the land to the offspring of the patriarchs, there is no problem with replacing the exodus generation with the following generation. The difficulty arises, however, in Ezekiel 20, since this text presents YHWH as taking an oath to give the land to the ancestors in Egypt (vv. 5–6). The problem is alleviated once we recognize that the exclusion of the exodus generation from the land belongs to a secondary addition.26 8. The unusual assertion of verses 25–26, that YHWH gave the Israelites laws designed to decimate them, including the law of the sacrifice of the first born, engenders various context-related difficulties. The condemnation of the ancestors for the offence of worshipping YHWH at the high places (vv. 27–29) seems minor and anticlimactic after the depiction of the continued sinning of the second generation, which elicits the declaration of national exile and the divine bestowal of death-dealing laws. Not a few readers have expressed a sense of surprise at hearing added accusations of Israelite sin following the dramatic pronunciation of such terrible and seemingly climactic judgements. Nor does the sin of worship at the high places continue smoothly after the discourse about the sacrifice of the firstborn. Are we to understand YHWH as protesting that the children that he commanded to be sacrificed should have been offered at a central sanctuary? These difficulties have led some scholars to posit the secondary character of verses 27–29.27 Verses 27–29 (or 28–29), 26 To the best of my knowledge, the commentaries fail to address this problem in their treatment of the chapter. 27 See Zimmerli, Ezekiel 1, 404; Sedlmeier, Ezechiel, 270–71; Dalit Rom-Shiloni, “Facing Destruction,” 200–201. Among the points in support of the secondary character of verses 27–29, Rom-Shiloni notes that the issue of bamot worship is a deuteronomistic theme. It is important to notice, however, that the conception reflected in verses 27–29 is very different than the Deuteronomic one. According to Deut 12:2–3, the cultic sites on the high mountains and under the leafy trees were established by the nations that originally lived in the land, and these must be destroyed by the conquering Israelites. Israel would be required to worship at the divinely appointed sanctuary only after the conquest was completed and Israel achieved “rest” from their enemies (vv. 8–11).

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however, raise a theme that is strongly emphasized later, in verses 40–41, viz., the worship of YHWH specifically at the holy mountain.28 Thus, it should not be removed from the depiction of Israel’s sins. Also, in light of verses 25–26, the charge of the prophet in verse 30, that the elders coming to him for divine instruction follow in the contaminating ways of their sinful ancestors, implies that they, or the exiles that they represent, continue to sacrifice their firstborn children. There is no evidence, however, that the exiles in Babylon indeed practiced this rite, and the very notion that they did, or even that they would have been so accused, strikes at least some scholars as strange and unlikely.29 (The reference to “giving over of children to the fire” in verse 31 is missing in the LXX and is clearly secondary.30) One may also question the likelihood that verse 30 would reprimand the exiles for contaminating themselves by sacrificing their firstborn while acknowledging that YHWH himself commanded them to defile themselves in this manner. Finally, the assertion that YHWH commanded this practice as a punishment stands in at least partial tension with Ezekiel 16:20–21; 23:36–39, where Jerusalem’s practice of child sacrifice is regarded as a grievous sin and not a divinely designated punishment.31 The removal of verses 15–27 as secondary allows us According to the assumption of Ezek 20:27–29, however, the bamot were prohibited or unacceptable to YHWH from the very moment Israel entered the land. There is no indication that the sites were already used for worship by the locals and that there were cultic structures that had to be destroyed. Rather, the Israelites were the ones who constructed the bamot upon entry in the land. This coincides with the fact that the land is never referred to as “the land of Canaan” or the like. It is only the land “that I raised my hand to give them” (v. 28). This also coincides with the fact that the military conquest is glossed over. Contrary to the highly militaristic Book of Deuteronomy, the narrative of Ezek 20 imagines the Israelites entering and settling the land without armed confrontation. 28 The theme of worship at illegitimate cultic sites is also treated in Ezek 6:13. 29 See, e.g., Cooke, Ezekiel, 220; Zimmerli, Ezekiel 1, 412. Eichrodt, Ezekiel, 274. George Heider concedes the unlikelihood that the exiles practiced child sacrifice, but suggests that the prophet does not distinguish between the exiles of 597 BCE and the Israelites in the land. He thus rebuffs the elders of the exile on the basis of a continuing Molek cult in Jerusalem. See George C. Heider, The Cult of Molek: A Reassessment. Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Series 43 (Sheffield: JSOT, 1985), 373–74. This, however, seems rather contrived. Heath Dewrell nicely points out that the deuteronomistic historian would surely have referred to a renewed Molek cult after Josiah’s contamination of the Tophet (cf. 2 Kgs 23:10), had it been known to have existed. At the same time, Dewrell leaves the issue of firstborn sacrifice in late Judah an open question. See Heath D. Dewrell, Child Sacrifice in Ancient Israel. Explorations in Ancient Near Eastern Civilizations (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2017), 177, 182. 30 See Zimmerli, Ezekiel 1, 402, 412; Timothy P. Mackie, Expanding Ezekiel: The Hermeneutics of Scribal Addition in the Ancient Text Witnesses of the Book of Ezekiel (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2015), 164–66; Dewrell, Child Sacrifice, 177. 31 The tension can be resolved if we assume that Ezek 20:26 refers to the offering of the firstborn to YWHW while Ezek 16:20–21; 23:36–39 refers to the offering of children in general to idols.

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to understand that the exiles were originally being accused in verses 30–31 of continuing the contaminating practice of idolatry (cf. v. 30 with v. 7, and v. 31 with vv. 7, 16, 18, 24, 43), not child sacrifice.32 The same verdict applies for verse 39. The text accuses the exiles of worshipping idols, not of child sacrifice. 9. The insertion of verses 15–27 can also be understood in light of another phenomenon that we find elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible – the concern to avoid allowing YHWH to appear too lenient and forbearing. In the original text of verses 1–14, 28–31, YHWH refrains from punishing the Israelites in spite of the fact that they sin in Egypt, the wilderness, and the land. To a certain degree, YHWH bears a share in the guilt insofar as his concern with his name prevented him from administering any disciplinary action, thereby encouraging Israel’s misbehavior. In the supplementary material, YHWH punishes the Israelites of the wilderness with exclusion from the land, and he punishes the second wilderness generation and their descendants with (future) exile and dispersion as well as with death-dealing laws. This clearly serves to present Israel in more negative terms. Israel, now including the second generation of the wilderness period, continued in their sinful ways in spite of the fact that they were continually confronted with harsh punishments. This process of intensifying While the first is a punishment, the second is a sin. See John Day, Molech: A God of Human Sacrifice in the Old Testament. University of Cambridge Oriental Publications 41 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 67. While this resolution of the tension is logical, it seems strained nonetheless. If YHWH earnestly sought to punish the Israelites and decimate them by having them offer him their firstborn, he should be pleased rather than outraged that they offered their other children to the fire of Molek. 32 It seems to me that the potential implication of verses 30–31 (again, without the gloss) when read in conjunction with verses 25–26, viz., that the exiles continued to observe the death-dealing YHWH commandments, including the offering of the firstborn as contaminating gifts, was not intended by the supplementor. The punishment of firstborn sacrifice is presented as given at the end of the wilderness period together with the decree of a future exile and dispersion. Since the exile would only take place in the distant future, the purpose of the not-good laws was apparently to punish Israel as severely as possible in the long interim. With the advent of the exile, the punishment of the not-good laws implicitly comes to an end. In other words, verses 25–26 function exclusively as part of an account of YHWH’s punishments of Israel in the past. It indicates that YHWH is a deity of great wrath who can be expected to exact punishment in the future as well for any continued misconduct. It is not meant, however, as an indictment of the present behavior of the exiles. As we will see below, the same supplementor is responsible for the addition of verses 32–38. In this section, YHWH promises to rule over the exiles, who seek to remain in exile and practice idolatry, by forcing them into the wilderness and destroying the rebels so that Israel will come know YHWH. If, however, the exiles are thought of as continuing to worship YHWH by offering him their firstborn, thereby decimating them so that they come to know that he is YHWH (v. 26), the punishment of verses 32–38 becomes inappropriate (they already “know” YHWH by offering him their firstborn) and unnecessary (they are already in the process of being decimated).

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Israel’s stubborn and rebellious character is also attested elsewhere.33 What is most important to note here is that the addition also allows the full weight of responsibility for Israel’s sin to fall squarely on the people and away from YHWH. Since YHWH took every disciplinary measure with Israel that was possible, Israel alone is to blame for its fate. Prophetic anxiety over YHWH’s overly yielding and conciliatory character is famously represented in the persona of Jonah, who seeks to avoid serving as the deity’s spokesman because of his penchant for forgoing foretold punishment (cf. Jonah 4:1–3). The concern to magnify YHWH’s volatile and vengeful side is also reflected in Exodus 32:9–14 and Numbers 14:11–25. Both of these texts present YHWH as settling on a relatively limited punishment for the sinful Israelites after being placated by Moses, who dissuades him from carrying out his initial intention of wiping the people out entirely. As many scholars have recognized, these passages are late additions to the narratives in which they are embedded.34 Originally, the limited punishments reflected YHWH’s initial intentions. He never intended to wipe them out entirely. Whatever other concerns the additions may reflect,35 that of amplifying the severity of YHWH’s wrath in the memory of his early dealings with Israel should not be overlooked. The additions imply that YHWH is not an even-tempered deity who can always be relied upon to balance his temper with his mercy (Ps 78:38). He is a jealous deity who takes fierce revenge (Nah 1:1–3). One offends YHWH’s honor at the greatest peril. If YHWH did not wipe Israel out entirely when they committed their first major sins in the ancient past, this was not because he had not ever intended to. Of course, the original form of Ezekiel 20 already contained the motif of the divine intention to wipe out the Israelites in his wrath (vv. 8, 13). Yet it also presented YHWH as in full control of himself. He did not need to be placated by a prophetic character as in the texts of Exodus 32 and Numbers 14, for his own internal psychological mechanisms led him to recalculate and restrain his wrath. What is more, in the original form of Ezekiel 20, YHWH’s careful recalculations led him to a complete forgoing of all punishment. The supplementation of the punishments in verses 15–26 was thus a real necessity. It showed that the suffering that Israel was now experiencing fit into a pattern of Israelite sin and severe divine punishment that was established from the very onset of the YHWH-Israel relationship. 33 For a detailed discussion of this process see Frankel, Murmuring Stories, 11–30. 34 For the secondary character of Exod 32:9–14, see Martin Noth, Exodus, trans. J. S. Bowden. Old Testament Library (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster, 1974), 244. For the secondary character of Num 14:11–25 see Frankel, Murmuring Stories, 160–64. 35 A recent treatment of this theme in Hebrew is Gili Kugler, “‫ מסורות‬:‫איום השמדת העם בנדודים במדבר‬, ‫תיאולוגיה ופרשנות‬.” PhD diss., The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2013.

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10. Notwithstanding some valiant scholarly efforts at harmonization, the theology of divine retribution reflected in Ezekiel 20:22–26 cannot be reconciled with that of Ezekiel 18.36 The prophet of Ezekiel 18 declares that a son will not bear the sins of his father. According to Ezekiel 20:22–26, the sins of the second generation of Israelites in the wilderness brought YHWH to punish all the generations with the devastating commandment of firstborn sacrifice and finally with the exile. The removal of verses 15–27 from Ezekiel 20 allows the two oracles to coincide theologically with one another.

The Future Ingathering of the Exiles: Verses 32–44 Let us now turn to the second part of the oracle, verses 32–44, which focuses on the future ingathering of the Israelites from the nations.37 As most scholars note, this section is made up of two subsections, verses 32–38, which we will refer to as section A, and verses 39–44, which we will designate section B.38 In A, YHWH declares that he will take the people out of exile by force, with a strong hand, an outstretched arm and outpoured wrath (vv. 33–34). He will bring the people into the wilderness of the nations in order to judge them “face to face,” as he did with their ancient ancestors (vv. 35–36). He will pass them under the shepherd’s staff and weed out all the sinners and rebels so that they die in the wilderness and do not enter the land. In this way, the people will come to know YHWH (vv. 37–38). Section B opens at verse 39 with a somewhat unclear call to the Israelites to worship their idols but desist desecrating YHWH’s holy name with their idolatrous gifts.39 In the following verses, YHWH asserts that the house of Israel will worship him – after he gathers them from the lands of their dispersion and brings them to the land – on his holy mountain. It is there and then that YHWH will look favorably on them and will respond positively to their gifts and offerings, and it is there and then that they will become sanctified in the sight of the nations (vv. 40–41). Israel will come to know YHWH 36 See Baruch Schwartz, “Repentance and Determinism in Ezekiel,” Proceedings of the Eleventh World Congress of Jewish Studies 11A (1993), 123–30. 37 For this section see, aside from the commentaries, Johan Lust, “Ezekiel Salutes Isaiah: Ezekiel 20:32–44,” in Studies in the Book of Isaiah: Festschrift Willem A. M. Beuken, ed. J. van Ruiten and M. Vervenne. Bibliotheca Ephemeridum Theologicarum Lovaniensium 132 (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1997), 367–82. 38 For this commonly accepted division see, e.g., Block, Ezekiel Chapters 1–24, 617; Greenberg, Ezekiel 1–20, 376–78. 39 For the interpretive difficulties of verse 39a, see Zimmerli, Ezekiel 1, 403; Greenberg, Ezekiel 1–20, 374. It may be noted that the MT reading, according to which YHWH calls on the house of Israel to go worship their idols, coincides poorly with verse 32, where YHWH promises the people that he will use force to prevent their worship of wood and stone.

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when YHWH brings them to the land of Israel (v. 42). At that point, they will remember the evil ways through which they became contaminated and will loathe themselves. They will come to know YHWH when he acts for the sake of his name (vv. 43–44). These two sections stand in marked tension with one another. In section A, the people come to know “that I am YHWH” when he judges them “face to face” and destroys the rebels in the wilderness (v. 38). In section B, they come to know this when YHWH gathers them from the nations, brings them to the land and responds positively to their offerings (v. 42). Knowledge of YHWH in section B comes as a result of redemption and a renewal of positive relations (see v. 41, ‫)ארצה אתכם‬, rather than punishment.40 There is no indication in section B that those gathered from the nations will be purged in the wilderness. Nor does YHWH take them out of the nations with a strong hand and outpoured wrath, that is, by force. Rather, they come out willingly, and freely worship YHWH upon their return to the land. If in section A, YHWH rules over Israel with outpoured wrath (v. 34), in full correspondence with the corruption of their ways, in section B he continues to restrain his wrath, acting “not in accordance with your evil ways” (v. 44). Finally, the idea in section B, that the redeemed Israelites will loathe themselves for their previous behavior, fits poorly with the affirmation of section A, that none of the sinners will arrive in the land. If all the rebels and sinners will die in the wilderness, why do those who reach the land need to loathe themselves? It seems clear, in light of our previous analysis of verses 1–31, that section B is relatively early and that section A was introduced as a preface thereto at a later stage.41 Section A, which bars the rebels of the exile from entering the land,

40 The contrast with section A is even stronger if we follow the suggestion of Tur-Sinai to read the first word of verse 41 as ‫ כריח‬instead of ‫בריח‬, thus producing, “As fragrant incense I will accept you when I take you out of the nations.” See N. H. Tur-Sinai, ‫ פירוש לסתומות שבכתבי‬:‫פשוטו של מקרא‬ ‫הקודש לפי סדר הכתובים במסורת‬, 6 vols. (Kiryat Sefer: Jerusalem, 1967), 3B:316. This reading is actually reflected in many modern English translations (e.g., NIV, NKJV, NRSV) presumably based on the MT. This should be contrasted with Greenberg (Ezekiel 1–20, 375), who renders, “With a soothing savor I will accept you,” and explains this to mean that the people will win YHWH’s favor by means of the sacrificial offerings properly made in the land. Thus, divine favor is won only after the reconstitution of proper sacrificial worship. The reading of Tur-Sinai implies, however, that YHWH’s favorable acceptance of Israel will come to expression in the ingathering of the exiles itself. Proper sacrificial worship in the land will ensue, but divine favor precedes it. This would seem to reflect a relatively positive view of the exiles. When the appointed time arrives, YHWH will renew his favor and return them to the site of proper YHWH worship. There is hardly room here for a purging of rebels in the wilderness. In fact, the verse also accords poorly with verses 43–44. This raises the possibility that verses 40–42 belong to an earlier core of tradition. See further on this n. 44 below. 41 Note how the working of verse 34 mimics the formulation of verse 41 while at the same time

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17

corresponds perfectly with the addition of verses 15–27, since that is where the sinning Israelites of the exodus are barred from entering the land (vv. 15–16). The death of the Israelites in the wilderness in verses 15–16 thus provides the paradigm for the eschatological punishment of the rebels and sinners in the “wilderness of the nations” (vv. 35–36). It is important to note that the sinners of the exile are not merely excluded from the return to the land. Rather, they are forcibly taken out of exile and killed in the wilderness, thus demonstrating that YHWH rules over them. This accords well with the secondary addition of the desecration of the Sabbath, since the punishment for this desecration in closely related P texts is karet (‫ )כרת‬and execution (Exod 31:14; Num 15:32–36).42 Further, just as the secondary section of verses 15–27 expresses the idea that by giving the people evil laws that bring them death, YHWH teaches them “knowledge of YHWH” (v. 26), so section A speaks of divine killing of the rebels in the wilderness as imparting “knowledge of YHWH” (v. 38). The manner of elimination of the rebellious Israelites in the “wilderness of the nations” by passing them “under the shepherd’s staff ” (v. 37) also parallels the elimination of the firstborn children (vv. 25–26), since both texts treat the Israelites like livestock destined for slaughter (cf. Lev 27:32). Finally, in both verses 15–27 and section A, the exodus theme is turned on its head and directed against the people of Israel. With the imposing of the law of firstborn sacrifice (vv. 25–26), the plague of the firstborn of Egypt is visited upon the Israelites. Similarly, in section A, YHWH’s “mighty hand and outstretched arm” (v. 34) is directed against Israel, forcing them out of their exile and leading them to their deaths in the wilderness. The eschatological material of verses 39–44 (section B), as already noted, is much less violent and vindictive, and follows well after the early material of



turning it on its head: “As a fragrant odor I will accept you when I take you out from the peoples and gather you from the lands in which you were dispersed. I will be sanctified through you in the sight of the nations” (v. 41); “I shall take you out from the peoples and gather you from the lands in which you were dispersed, with a strong hand and an outstretched arm and with poured out wrath” (v. 34). For the phenomenon of adding new prefaces as a redactional technique, see Sara J. Milstein, Tracking the Master Scribe: Revision Through Introduction in Biblical and Mesopotamian Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). 42 For a discussion of the meaning of karet, see Jacob Milgrom, Leviticus 1–16. Anchor Bible 3 (New York: Doubleday, 1991), 457–60. According to Milgrom, karet usually refers to sins done in private. The punishment is therefore from the deity, and may refer to the eventual cutting off of one’s family line, the denial of reunion with kin after death, or both. The phrase ‫מות יומת‬, in contrast, refers to judicial execution. It should be noted that the combination of the two forms of punishment here (and in Lev 20:2–3) is unusual. For the affinity between the references to the Sabbath in Ezek 20 and the Pentateuchal P or H Sabbath passages, see Robinson, Old Testament Sabbath, 206–7.

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verses 1–14, 28–31, with which it closely corresponds.43 Although the material of verses 1–14, 28–31 emphasizes the repeated sinfulness of the ancestors, it also emphasizes YHWH’s repeated determination to restrain his wrath out of consideration for his name. This non-punitive history of YHWH’s dealings with Israel served as an apt paradigm for the redemption of the exiles in section B. Though the exiles continue to follow in the way of their ancestors, YHWH will continue to restrain his wrath and will restore them to the land of the ancestors, all for the sake of his holy name (vv. 39, 44).

The Historical Setting of the Secondary Additions Let us now turn to the question of dating. If we may presume that the dating of the oracle to the seventh year of the exile of Jehoiachin (v. 1) is broadly accurate for the material of Ezekiel 20:2–14, 28–31, 39–44,44 we clearly cannot do so for 43 Possibly, verse 39 is editorial, added by the supplementor of verses 32–38. Verse 40 continues nicely after verse 31: “Am I to let you inquire of me, you Israelites? As surely as I live, declares the Sovereign Lord, I will not let you inquire of me. For on my holy mountain, the high mountain of Israel, declares the Sovereign Lord, there in the land all the people of Israel will serve me.” 44 In fact, it seems likely that an even earlier core of material is located in verses 1–3, 40–42. In 1888, M. Friedmann suggested that the repeated emphasis in verses 40–42 on YHWH’s future acceptance of Israelite sacrificial worship specifically at the sacred mountain in the land indicates that the elders came to the prophet to seek divine approval for establishing a cultic center for YHWH worship in Babylon. See M. Friedmann, ‫ הוא ביאור לנבואת יחזקאל סימן כ׳‬:‫( הציון‬Vienna: n.p., 1888). The basic idea was adopted by Otto Eissfeldt, The Old Testament: An Introduction, trans. Peter R. Ackroyd (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), 376; Walther Eichrodt, Ezekiel, 269, 282 and Yehuda Elizur, “‫מגמות מדיניות־אידיאולוגיות בימי גלות יויכין המשתקפות בנבואות יחזקאל וירמיהו‬,” in ‫עיונים בספר יחזקאל‬, ed. Y. Avishur (Jerusalem: Kiryat Sefer, 1982), 179–90. Actually, the fact that the Israelites are accused of following in the trespasses of their ancestors, one of which is the offering of sacrifices at the high places, (vv. 27–29) clearly implies that sacrificial worship of YHWH at illicit altars was already taking place in Babylon. The rhetoric of verses 40–42 only strengthens that implication. We might even deduce from the polemical thrust of verse 40, “there I will require your contributions and your choice offerings, with all your holy things” that YHWH prophets other than Ezekiel presented sacrificial worship in Babylon as a divine requirement. The difficulty that most of the abovementioned scholars struggle with is how the relatively minor issue of cultic worship outside the Temple Mount coincides with the virulent prophetic condemnations of the people to death because of their full-fledged idol worship. As noted above (n. 41), this difficulty is compounded following the reading of verse 41, “As fragrant incense I will accept you when I take you out of the nations,” which implies a critical yet sympathetic attitude toward the cultic worship of YHWH on the part of the exiles. I would thus raise the possibility that in the earliest layer of Ezek 20, the elders came to the prophet with their unidentified query after offering sacrifices to YHWH. For the offering of sacrifices as a means of inducing prophecy or eliciting a divine response, see Num 23:1–4, 14–16, 29–30. The prophet responded that YHWH refuses to accept their sacrifices or respond to their inquiries on foreign soil. He will respond to them positively when he brings them back to the land. The

Ezekiel 20: A New Redaction-­Critical Analysis

19

verses 15–27, 32–38, which surely reflects a substantially later time. Regarding the early material, the formulation of verse 40 may indeed indicate a preexilic setting. The prophet insists that the entirety of the house of Israel will worship at the sacred mountain. There is no sense that the temple and the city have been devastated and urgently need to be rebuilt before worship can be renewed.45 The conception of the early material, according to which Israel’s early history was one of continuous rebellions for which they were never really punished, also points to a relatively early setting.46 The same may be said with reference to the ignorance in the original material of the conception of the patriarchal covenant, a conception which came to prominence in the exilic period.47 The secondary material, on the other hand, is fully cognizant of the final destruction and exile. Surely, the intensification of the characterization of Israel’s rebelliousness, the addition of the terrible divine punishments that YHWH inflicted on Israel in the wilderness, and the new claim that the exile was already determined with the rebellion of the second generation all reflect a new attempt to grapple with the theological challenge of the final destruction.48 A further observation will allow us to arrive at a greater degree of clarity concerning the historical setting of the secondary material. Verse 40 of the original material emphasizes that the future worship of YHWH will involve “all of the entirety of the house of Israel.” I believe that this passage is particularly entire historical review of sin and rebellion may thus constitute a relatively early (exilic?) addition. Note that verse 31b may be taken as a Wiederaufnahme of verse 3, except that it adds the issue of following in the path of the ancestors that is not mentioned in verse 3. 45 It must be conceded, however, that this argument from silence cannot be conclusive. One could maintain that the failure to speak of the rebuilding of the temple is not significant, or indicates that the passage was written when the temple was already rebuilt. 46 See Frankel, Murmuring Stories, 30–31, 48–53. 47 See Van Seters, “Confessional Reformulation.” For a detailed study of the patriarchal tradition in relation to the exodus tradition see Konrad Schmid, Genesis and the Moses Story: Israel’s Dual Origins in the Hebrew Bible, trans. James D. Nogalski. Siphrut 3 (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2010). Another possible indication of the relatively early nature of the original material is the missing reference to the Sinai theophany. See John Van Seters, The Life of Moses: The Yahwist as Historian in Exodus-Numbers (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1994), 247–89; Aaron, Etched in Stone, 104–44. 48 Contra Choi, Traditions at Odds, 141, who understands verses 23–24 as a divine promise that the second generation will itself be scattered among the nations, even though, as he acknowledges, this is clearly contradicted by verse 28, which describes how YHWH brought the second generation into the land. For Choi, this is “convincing evidence of how, in portraying the past, the author eschews the production of a linear narrative in order to reinforce the paradigmatic nature of the past for the present.” He fails to note that the formulation of verse 23 is very close to that of Psalm 106:26–27, where it clearly refers to the dispersion of the distant descendants of the Israelites of the wilderness. In light of this, it seems best to understand Ezek 20:23 as similarly referring to the future descendants.

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important for determining the significance and purpose of the secondary additions. For it is surely against the backdrop of this emphasis that we must understand the later addition of verses 32–38, with its new theme of weeding out the sinners in the wilderness of the nations.49 By placing verses 32–38 before the more positive and all-inclusive eschatological vision of verses 39–44, the supplementor created the impression that these positive events will come about only after the initial purge is carried out. We have already noted that one of the effects of the addition in the first part of the oracle of verses 15–27 is to present the Israelites as that much more rebellious and corrupt. Severe punishments had no effect on them. This coincides with the new need, obviously reflecting a later perspective, to ensure that only a portion of the exiles, many of whom act just like their most sinful ancestors, will actually enter the land of promise. This phenomenon – the secondary removal of “sinners” from earlier oracles of redemption and salvation – is attested elsewhere in the Bible. For example, the collection of prophecies of consolation of Isaiah 40–48 ends with the poorly connected statement of Isaiah 48:22, “there is no peace, says the Lord, for the wicked.” This statement clashes abruptly with the immediately preceding call to Israel as a whole to leave Babylon and return to the land, and with the concomitant reference to the divine care and provision that the Israelites experienced during their ancient journey in the wilderness (vv. 20–21); it is surely secondary.50 Quite possibly, “the wicked,” who are doomed to a tormented fate, are the exiles of the early Persian era who failed to heed the call to return to the land.51 Another likely example of this is Isaiah 57:20–21.52 The oracle of Isaiah 57:14–19 offers a message of redemption and comfort to the exiles, who are treated collectively as YHWH’s downtrodden people. The oracle comes to a fine conclusion with the reassurance of verse 19, “Peace, peace, to the far and the near, says the Lord; and I will heal them.” To this all-inclusive promise of peace was added the qualifying clarification of verses 20–21, “But the wicked

49 The tension between verses 40 and 38 has not generally been noted. It is sometimes assumed that “all the entirety of the house of Israel” who will worship YHWH in the land according to verse 40 refers to all those who survive the purge in the wilderness. See, e.g., Y. Z. Moscovitz, ‫ספר יחזקאל‬. Da’at Miqra (Jerusalem: Mossad HaRav Kook, 1985), 139. Yet from verses 41–42 it emerges clearly that the future worshippers in the land are identical with those that are taken out of the nations. 50 See Claus Westermann, Isaiah 40–66, trans. David M. G. Stalker. Old Testament Library (London: SCM, 1976), 205; H. G. M. Williamson, The Book Called Isaiah: Deutero-Isaiah’s Role in Composition and Redaction (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994), 210–11; Joseph Blenkinsopp, Isaiah 40–55. Anchor Bible 19A (New York: Doubleday, 2002), 296; Shalom M. Paul, Isaiah 40–66. Eerdmans Critical Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2012), 320. The verse is apparently taken from Isa 57:21, where it may also be secondary. See below. 51 Paul, Isaiah 40–66, 320. 52 See Joseph Blenkinsopp, Isaiah 56–66. Anchor Bible 19B (New York: Doubleday, 2003), 172–73.

Ezekiel 20: A New Redaction-­Critical Analysis

21

are like the tossing sea that cannot keep still; its waters toss up mire and mud. There is no peace, says my God, for the wicked.”53 The comments of Joseph Blenkinsopp regarding the addition of Isaiah 48:22 are instructive: It [=the addition] reflects the situation described in the final sections of the book (corresponding with the final stages in the book’s formation), in which the former distinction between Israel and the nations has been replaced by the distinction between the righteous (Yahveh’s servants, those who tremble at his word, the repentant) and the reprobate (the sinners, those who rejoice in the present age) within Israel . . . ​there will be a day of redemption but also a settling of accounts.54 The new assertion of the secondary material in Ezekiel 20, that YHWH will forcefully take the rebels, who insist on assimilating, out of “the nations” and into the wilderness in order to destroy them, is indeed reminiscent of the kind of proto-sectarian orientation that clearly characterizes some of the traditions of Trito-Isaiah.55 This coincides with the new emphasis in the secondary material of Ezekiel 20 on the Sabbath.56 As is well known, the Sabbath became a prominent indicator of Jewish identity in exilic and postexilic times.57 Even Jacob Milgrom, who dated most of Priestly literature to preexilic times, dated the Priestly additions of the Sabbath prohibitions (which he attributed to “HR”) to the exilic period.58 In Trito–Isaiah (Isa 56:2–8), Sabbath observance entitles foreigners and eunuchs to be included among those that YHWH will gather in to his holy 53 Mention may also be made of Isa 66:24, which may also be an appendage. See Williamson, The Book Called Isaiah, 211; Blenkinsopp, Isaiah 56–66, 316–17. It is striking, in any event, that this passage uses the same term for the wicked who are condemned to death that we find in Ezek 20:38: ‫הפשעים בי‬, “those that rebel against me.” 54 Blenkinsopp, Isaiah 40–55, 296. In Blenkinsopp’s view, the sectarian aspects of Trito-Isaiah (Isa 56–66) reflect the time and, to a large extent, orientation of Ezra and Nehemiah in mid-fifthcentury-BCE Judah. See Blenkinsopp, Isaiah 56–66, 63–66, 299–301. 55 See especially Isa 57:3–13, 65:1–15, 66:1–5. See A. Rofé, “Isaiah 66:1–4: Judean Sects in the Persian Period as Viewed by Trito–Isaiah,” in Biblical and Related Studies Presented to Samuel Iwry, ed. A Kort and S. Morschauser (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1985), 205–17; Christophe Nihan, “Ethnicity and Identity in Isaiah 56–66,” in Judah and the Judeans in the Achaemenid Period: Negotiating Identity in an International Context, ed. O. Lipschits, G. N. Knoppers, and M. Oeming (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2011), 67–104. 56 See the discussion in Robinson, Old Testament Sabbath, 205–7. Robinson notes the correspondences between the Sabbath of Ezek 20 and the formulations in PH and Trito-Isaiah, and thus surmises that the Ezekiel material on the Sabbath belongs to “the early post-exilic period.” 57 See Choi, Traditions at Odds, 87–92; Robinson, Old Testament Sabbath, 195–338. 58 Milgrom, “HR in Leviticus,” 29–40. See also K. Grünwaldt, Exil und Identität: Beschneidung, Passa, und Sabbat in der Priesterschrift. Bonner biblische Beiträge 85 (Frankfurt: A. Hain, 1992), 122–219.

22

David Frankel

mountain.59 The implication of the secondary material in Ezekiel 20, that it was particularly the desecration of the Sabbath that elicited the decree of the exile, is a unique conception, which is otherwise attested only in Nehemiah 13:15, 17–18, and Jeremiah 17:19–27,60 a text which almost certainly has its setting in the postexilic period.61 This again coheres with the proto-sectarian character of Ezekiel 20:32–38. It should hardly be doubted that the Sabbath observers are the ones who are expected to survive the purge in the wilderness.62 Enforcement of Sabbath observance also plays a significant role in the sectarian-like efforts of Nehemiah.63 Finally, it is instructive to read the historical review of Ezekiel 20 in its final form against the backdrop of the somewhat similar historical review of Nehemiah 9. The basic affinity between these two texts is indicated by the fact that they are the only historical reviews in the Hebrew Bible that mention the giving of the commandments and the giving of the Sabbath amongst the special acts of grace that YHWH wrought for Israel in its early history. Further, according to Nehemiah 9:29, Israel “sinned against your ordinances, by the observance of which a person shall live.” This, of course, is a common refrain in Ezekiel 20. Possibly, the author of Nehemiah 9 was aware of the early form of Ezekiel 20, and the supplementor thereto was aware, in turn, of Nehemiah 9. Even if we cannot be certain that the author of the supplement to Ezekiel 20 was aware of 59 For an extensive discussion of this text see Blenkinsopp, Isaiah 56–66, 130–43. See also Robinson, Old Testament Sabbath, 223–25, who dates both this text and Isa 58:13–14 somewhat prior to the mid-fifth century BCE. 60 To be precise, both of these texts speak of the evil that befell Israel and the destruction of Jerusalem. The exile and dispersion are not explicitly mentioned. 61 See William McKane, Jeremiah, Volume 1. International Critical Commentary (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1986), 416–19; William L. Holladay, Jeremiah 1. Hermenia (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress, 1986), 509; Robinson, Old Testament Sabbath, 196–98. For a critical review of scholarship on the passage from the perspective that it is the authentic writing of Jeremiah, see Jack R. Lundbom, Jeremiah 1–20. Anchor Bible 21 A (New York: Doubleday, 1999), 802–4. See also Moshe Greenberg, ‫פרשת‬ ‫השבת בירמיהו‬, in Studies in Jeremiah 2, ed. B. Z. Luria (Jerusalem: Society for Bible Research in Israel, 1973), 25–37. 62 Some scholars see Ezek 20:25–26 as bearing a radically antinomian message. There is no indication, however, that the “not-good” laws given to the second generation of Israelites in the wilderness in any way corrupt or even cancel the authority of the life-giving laws given earlier; see above n. 5. 63 For the early sectarianism of Ezra-Nehemiah in general, see Joseph Blenkinsopp, Judaism: The First Phase, The Place of Ezra and Nehemiah in the Origins of Judaism (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2009), 189–230. Significantly, in the covenant ceremony of Neh 10 the commitment not to exchange women as wives with the local population (v. 31) is followed by a commitment not to purchase merchandise from them on the Sabbath (v. 32). The two issues are thus placed on the same footing. Similarly, the depiction of Nehemiah’s enforcement of Sabbath observance in Neh 13:15–22 is juxtaposed with his efforts regarding marriages to foreigners in Neh 13:23–29.

Ezekiel 20: A New Redaction-­Critical Analysis

23

the text of Nehemiah 9, it seems clear that, at least from a tradition-historical perspective, he extended the “narrative” that it reflects. According to Nehemiah 9, Israel continually rebelled and “did not heed your commandments” (v. 16). In spite of this, YHWH forgave them and continued to provide for their needs for forty years in the wilderness (v. 21). The supplementor extends this narrative in a negative direction by adding the new element, nowhere else mentioned in the Bible, of the rebellion of the second generation in the wilderness. This new element served to justify the divine decree of Israel’s dispersion among the nations (vv. 18–24),64 nowhere hinted at in Nehemiah 9. Again, Nehemiah 9 relates that YHWH gave Israel “regulations and laws that are just and right, and decrees and commands that are good (v. 13).” In what may well be a pointed reversal of this, the supplementor of Ezekiel 20 presents YHWH punishing the second generation and their descendants with a new set of laws that are “not good” (v. 25). Finally, according to Nehemiah 9:23, YHWH multiplies the children of the Israelites of the wilderness period “like the stars of the heavens.” In contrast, according to Ezekiel 20:26, YHWH commanded these Israelites to offer him their firstborn children “so that he might devastate them.” Thus, if we may assume with most scholars that the prayer of Nehemiah 9 is postexilic and not much earlier than the times of Ezra and Nehemiah,we must surely do the same for the supplements to Ezekiel 20.65 In view of all the above considerations, we should probably situate it somewhere in the first half of the fifth century BCE.66

Conclusion The message of the original material in Ezekiel 20 is essentially one of encouragement to the exiles. YHWH chose Israel in Egypt, made a public oath to give 64 According to Ps 106:27, YHWH took an oath to disperse the descendants of the first generation of rebels. Ps 106 appears to be earlier than the supplement to Ezek 20 in other respects as well. Most important, it has no major event of lawgiving, no mention of the Sabbath, and its rebellions have little to do with the commandments. 65 The literature on Neh 9 is extensive. See, e.g., Choi, Traditions at Odds, 143–46, who argues, following Aaron, Etched in Stone, 87–98, against the text’s dependence on the Pentateuchal narrative. For a recent treatment of the chapter as a whole, with a rich bibliography, see David Janzen, “Yahwistic Appropriation of Achamaenid Ideology and the Function of Nehemiah 9 in Ezra-Nehemiah,” Journal of Biblical Literature 136 (2017): 839–56. For the question of dating see 851 n 42. 66 For an accessible and insightful discussion of the issue of redaction criticism in the Book of Ezekiel see Michael A. Lyons, An Introduction to the Study of Ezekiel (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 49–114. See also the diachronically oriented essays in William A. Tooman and Penelope Barter, eds., Ezekiel: Current Debates and Future Directions. Forschungen zum Alten Testament 112 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2017).

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Israel the most beautiful of lands, as well as good laws that promote life. Though Israel was sinful and rebellious throughout its history, YHWH continually acted for the sake of his name and refrained from destroying the people he chose in the sight of the nations. The Israelites now in exile are no more meritorious than their sinful ancestors, and God refuses to answer them via oracle or prophet while they are in exile (cf. Hos 3:4). In spite of this, they are not without hope. On the contrary, they can expect YHWH to do the same for them as he did for their ancestors in Egypt and the wilderness. YHWH will contain his wrath and bring them all into the land that he swore to their fathers, again for the sake of his holy name (vv. 42–44). In the secondary material, in contrast, there is little that can be considered encouraging for the exiles. Here YHWH is presented as having made himself known to Israel not only by benefiting them but also by punishing them with death in the wilderness and by preventing them from entering the good land. Following further Israelite rebellion, he decreed exile and dispersion and gave laws that would kill them. In accordance with this, and contrary to the assertion of the earlier material, the present sinners in exile will not be redeemed because of YHWH’s name! That encouraging prophetic message applied only to the relatively good exiles. Those, however, who follow in the footsteps of the sinful ancestors and worship idols, violate the commandments, desecrate the Sabbath, and/or worship at illicit cultic sites will, like them, never enter the land. Rather, they will be taken out of the exile by force and annihilated in the wilderness. What we have here, then, is a radical reinterpretation of the original oracle. It seems rather unlikely that the text in this form, with its eager anticipation of a divinely orchestrated expulsion of the exiles into the wilderness where God would destroy the bulk of them, was actually addressed to an exilic audience. What practical purpose would this have served?67 The links between the secondary material and various passages in Trito-Isaiah and Nehemiah indicate that the actual target audience, now, is the Jerusalem community, although the 67 Admittedly, the implication for the exiles could have been that they had better renounce idolatry and start observing the Sabbath and the good commandments if they wish to survive the imminent purge that YHWH will enact in the wilderness. For this approach see Leslie C. Allen, Ezekiel 20–48. Word Biblical Commentary 29 (Dallas, TX: Word Books, 1990), 14; Zimmerli, Ezekiel 1, 406, 416. On the other hand, such an implicit call to “repentance” is never articulated in our chapter. Nor is it legitimate, historically speaking, to read our chapter in conjunction with the doctrine of repentance of Ezek 18. It seems, rather, that the oracle of judgment for the exiles is presented to the readers as a fait accompli rather than a threat. Its function, set in the bygone days of the exile of Jehoiachin, is to exclude the bulk of the exiles from the present and future community of Israel in Jerusalem. For the misinterpretation of prophetic literature as focused on repentance see the highly illuminating study of David A. Lambert, How Repentance Became Biblical: Judaism, Christianity, and the Interpretation of Scripture (New York: Oxford University, 2016), 91–118.

Ezekiel 20: A New Redaction-­Critical Analysis

25

oracle is still presented as addressed to the exiles of Jehoiachin. This community can look forward to the imminent disappearance of the exilic community. The sinful assimilationists will be destroyed in the wilderness and only the righteous survivors will return to the holy mountain. A new and unified house of Israel will worship YHWH properly together in the land and will be accepted on high as fragrant incense. Finally, the addition of the secondary material in Ezekiel 20, particularly in verses 15–27, must be understood within the context of the then emerging articulation of the national narrative in other texts, including the Pentateuch. While many, mostly earlier, iterations of the national narrative did not contain the theme of the death of the exodus generation in the wilderness and its replacement by the following generation, this theme did come to expression in relatively late parts of the Pentateuch (Num 13–14, 26:62–65, 32:615; Deut 1:34–40, 2:14–16) and in various other exilic or post-exilic passages (cf. Josh 5:2–8; Ps 95:8–11, 106:24–27 and Neh 9:17–24). There should be little doubt that the ascending prominence of this theme, and its clear articulation in important and influential texts, prompted our supplementor to introduce it into Ezekiel 20 as well, so that its historical narrative might conform to the other texts.68 At the same time, the supplementor’s extremely creative and original development of the new theme makes it abundantly clear that mere conformity is hardly his central concern. It is rather to utilize the newly emerging traditions in a way that promotes his strongly anti-exilic, ideological agenda.



68 Contra Choi, Traditions at Odds, 136–43; 202–5. Choi is correct in emphasizing that the Pentateuch, or proto-Pentateuch, did not attain the kind of authority that required close conformity. On the other hand, his claim that the author of Ezek 20 was completely ignorant of Pentateuchal literature in some penultimate state overstates the evidence. Thus, the reference in Ezek 20:33–34, to YHWH’s future offensive act of taking Israel out of the nations ‫ביד חזקה‬ ‫ ובזרוע נטויה ובחמה שפוכה‬is most likely an ironic expansion of the depiction of his redemptive act of taking Israel out of Egypt in Deut 4:34, 5:15, 26:8. The presentation of the Israelites in Egypt as idolaters may well reflect awareness and development of Deut 9:24 (perhaps in combination with Deut 29:15–16), where Moses states that the Israelites were rebellious with YHWH from the day he knew them. The use of the phrase ‫ אשר יעשה אותם האדם וחי בהם‬in verses 11, 13, 21 to refer to the commandments may well reflect awareness of Lev 18:5. The statement of verse 12 that YHWH gave Israel his Sabbaths ‫ להיות לאות ביני וביניהם לדעת כי אני ה׳ מקדשם‬likely reflects awareness of Exodus 31:13, which affirms with regard to the Sabbath, ‫כי אות הוא ביני וביניכם לדרתיכם לדעת כי אני‬ ‫ה׳ מקדשכם‬. Finally, the similarity in language between Ezek 20:26 and Exod 13:12, 13 is not likely to be, as Choi suggests, “coincidental” (ibid., 205). In sum, both the earlier author of Ezek 20 and the later supplementor had access to and were influenced by nascent Pentateuchal materials. None of this detracts from the fact that the authors of Ezek 20 were ideologically motivated and highly creative with their sources. At the same time, it seems unwise to deny that the sources exerted influence. It thus seems most likely that one of the concerns of the supplementor to Ezek 20 was to “update” its history in light of other materials.

 uthorship, Attribution, and A Authority: Jeremiah, Baruch, and the Rabbinic Interpretation of Lamentations Jason Kalman

Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion; University of the Free State, South Africa Although that the Hebrew Bible provides no explicit basis for attributing Lamentations to Jeremiah, the view is ubiquitous in rabbinic sources. This popular rabbinic assertion has led numerous scholars to the conclusion that the early rabbis canonized Lamentations precisely because Jeremiah composed it. The argument, however, does not hold. In attributing the Book of Lamentations to Jeremiah rabbinic sources made a conscious choice to either invent or perpetuate the assumption for strategic exegetical purposes. Rabbinic sources generally rely on a deutronomic theology, and Lamentations, on its face, appeared to undermine the rabbinic understanding of theodicy. They thus strategically ascribed the book to the Prophet Jeremiah, who, in their view, would never offer so radical a challenge to the preferred rabbinic image of God as just and merciful Because the Book of Lamentations came to be associated with Jeremiah in antiquity, it also came to be associated with his scribe Baruch ben Neriah, who is described as intimately involved with the production of Jeremiah’s writings. In antiquity a collection of materials attributed to Baruch, and now preserved as Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, were available, but the rabbis chose to reject the authority of these sources. They used the discussions of Jeremiah’s authorship of Lamentations as an opportunity to discredit Baruch and these “outside books” along with him.

“That the prophet Jeremiah wrote Lamentations is so firmly rooted in traditions about the Bible, in western literature, and even in art that even after the ascription to Jeremiah was challenged (first in 1712, by H. von der Hardt), discussion of the book’s authorship has tended to take the Author Note: This article revisits in a more substantive way my earlier “If Jeremiah Wrote it, it Must be OK: On the Attribution of Lamentations to Jeremiah in Early Rabbinic Texts,” Acta Theologica 29:2 (2009): 31–53.

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Jason Kalman form of listing reasons why Jeremiah could not have written the book, or why he must have, as though the tradition were unanimous.1”

Contemporary scholarship has largely rejected the possibility that Lamentations and Jeremiah were composed by the same author. Although the Book of Lamentations was once dated by biblicists to the Maccabean period, this dating has been generally rejected in favor of a time closer to the destruction of the Temple in 586 BCE, when a group of Temple singers might have composed it.2 However, ancient versions of Lamentations, including the Septuagint, Peshitta, and Vulgate, each open their versions of the book by attributing it to the prophet Jeremiah. By contrast, the Hebrew Bible leaves the book’s author anonymous. It may well have been the intention of the early adopters of Hebrew Lamentations, and even of those who later canonized it, to leave it without an identifiable author. Unlike the Septuagint, the Hebrew Bible also never places the Book of Lamentations in proximity to Jeremiah. 3 Despite the fact that the Hebrew Bible provides no explicit basis for attributing Lamentations to Jeremiah, the view is ubiquitous in rabbinic sources. The two Talmuds and numerous midrashic volumes collectively introduce a citation from Lamentations with the formula “Jeremiah said” more than fifty times (e.g., b. Gittin 58a; Songs Rab. 3:6). In multiple passages the rabbinic corpus contains references to Jeremiah lamenting Jerusalem and the people of Israel with verses from Lamentations (e.g., Lam. Rab. Proems 18 and 23, 1:51, 2:23, and b. Yoma 38b). Rabbinic sources almost universally adopted and maintained the position that Jeremiah composed Lamentations.4

1 Delbert R. Hillers, Lamentations: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary. Second edition. The Anchor Bible Commentaries, vol. 7a. (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 10–11. 2 For an overview of the debate, see C. W. Miller, “The Book of Lamentations in Recent Research,” Currents in Biblical Research 1, no. 1 (2002): 10–12. 3 Hillers, Lamentations, 8–13. 4 The rabbinic corpus includes materials produced between the second and tenth centuries in Palestine and Babylonia. Methodologically, lumping these materials together flattens the variety of rabbinic texts and hides transitions in thought over time. With regard to rabbinic perception(s) of Jeremiah and his relationship to the Book of Lamentations there is remarkable consistency throughout the corpus, including in the various midrashic collections, Tannaitic and Amoraic, as well as the Mishnah, Tosefta, and the Talmuds. As such, the date and location of creation of the materials is discussed here only when necessary for understanding a particular argument or interpretation. Unless otherwise noted, all biblical citations are quoted from the JPS Hebrew-English Tanakh. All citations of the Babylonian Talmud (indicated with b.) are quoted from The Babylonian Talmud, ed. Isidore Epstein (London: Soncino Press, 1935). All citations from Midrash Rabbah (Exod. Rab.; Lam. Rab.; Songs Rab., etc.) are from Midrash Rabbah, 10 vols., ed. Harry Freedman

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This popular rabbinic assertion has led numerous scholars to the conclusion that the early rabbis canonized Lamentations precisely because Jeremiah composed it. The argument, however, does not hold. Among Palestinian Jews in the period before the rabbis the Book of Lamentations was already authoritative, i.e., copied for study and cited in other documents to ground communal teachings. Such was the case for the Hebrew Book of Lamentations at Qumran, for example. Since it was already authoritative amongst Palestinian Jews when the rabbinic community formed, the need for the sages to ascribe it to an identifiable author in order to establish its authority was unnecessary.5 Delbert Hillers has suggested that establishing authorship for anonymous biblical books fulfilled a “natural desire in the early days of biblical interpretation . . . ”6 However, the issue at hand is not “natural desire” but strategic use. In attributing the Book of Lamentations to Jeremiah rabbinic sources made a conscious choice to either invent or perpetuate the assumption (if it were known from the LXX, for example) for strategic exegetical purposes. The reason earlier generations ascribed Lamentations to Jeremiah is lost, and it remains unknown if the rabbis knew of the ascription or the early reasons for it. Whether they did or did not originate the attribution is inconsequential, since perpetuating it for a new purpose in a new context functioned in a manner akin to creating it expressly for that purpose. Even if the attribution of Lamentations to Jeremiah was known to the Tannaim, its perpetuation by the rabbis of subsequent generations was always a choice. The rabbis could equally have left the text anonymous, as they did with the Book of Job until the fourth or fifth centuries.7 And, even if the attribution to Jeremiah was popular, the rabbis could have ascribed it to another biblical figure. In the case of Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Song of Songs it appears they did precisely that.





and Maurice Simon (London: Soncino Press, 1939). In all cases the citations have been checked against the original and have been corrected or adjusted for clarity and accuracy when necessary. 5 On the rabbinic myths concerning establishing the canon see Eric M. Meyers, “Jewish Culture in Greco-Roman Palestine,” in Cultures of the Jews: A New History, ed. David Biale (New York: Knopf Doubleday, 2002), 167. Meyers writes, “In sharp contrast to earlier groups, however, such as the Qumran Covenanters and the authors of the Book of Jubilees, the rabbis did not seek to add to Scripture itself. Although there is reason to believe that the canon of Scripture had essentially been established and closed before the end of the Second Temple Period, later talmudic tradition insists that it was at Yavneh and later that these decisions were taken. The sacred status of certain books of the Bible, including the Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes, Esther, Ezekiel, and Proverbs, is represented to have been debated at Yavneh.” 6 Hillers, Lamentations, 12. 7 On the attribution of Job to Moses in rabbinic sources see Michael Wogman, “Moses, Author of Job: Defending the Biblical God in the Roman East,” Judaica Ukrainica 2 (2013): 21–41, and my forthcoming “Both X and the Opposite of X: Moses as the Author of the Book of Job in Rabbinic Literature and Beyond.”

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Early rabbinic sources debated whether Ecclesiastes and Song of Songs were divinely inspired or merely Solomon’s own words (e.g, t.Yadayim 2:14, Seder ‘Olam Rabbah 15). In the list of authors of biblical books on b. Bava Batra 14b–15a, where Solomon’s name might be expected, King Hezekiah and his men appear in his place. An examination of all the extant rabbinic sources about the authorship of Song of Songs suggests that later generations wanted the books interpreted as if Hezekiah had written them. The later king’s righteousness was clear in rabbinic sources, while early Jewish readers appeared concerned, for example, about Solomon’s capacity to compose a love song to God while he chased foreign women and foreign gods.8 In the same way that the Babylonian Talmud attached these books to a more reliable author in place of the previous ascription to Solomon, they likewise could have identified someone other than Jeremiah as the author of Lamentations. Why then invent or adopt the idea that Jeremiah wrote the book? Rabbinic sources, generally, but not uniquely, rely on a deutronomic theology in which righteousness (individual and communal) leads to divine reward, sin leads to punishment, and God is merciful, allowing for repentance and restoration. Although rabbinic sources are not entirely consistent or coherent in their presentation of theology, Jacob Neusner has argued that this coherence was at the heart of the rabbinic project: Responding to the generative dialectics of monotheism, Rabbinic Judaism systematically revealed the justice of the one and only God of all creation. God is not only God but also good. Appealing to the facts of Scripture, the Written part of the Torah, in the documents of the Oral part of the Torah, the sages . . . ​in the first seven centuries of the Common Era constructed a coherent theology, a cogent structure and logical system, to expose the justice of God. That exposition constitutes their theodicy.9 To those sages responsible for the rabbinic sources, Lamentations, on its face, appears to undermine their primary understanding of the operation of theodicy. Lamentations never explains why Jerusalem lays barren, only that it does and that the destruction resulted from divine action. Additionally, a number of Lamentations’ verses often appeared both cynical and rebellious to early Jewish readers.10 This is apparent in rabbinic concerns about posing the

8 For more extensive discussion see my “The Beautiful Men of the Song of Songs?: Replacing and Erasing the Female Beloved in Ancient and Medieval Jewish Interpretation,” in A Companion to the Song of Songs in the History of Spirituality, ed. T. Robinson (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming). 9 Jacob Neusner, “Theodicy in Judaism,” in Theodicy in the World of the Bible, ed. Antti Laato and Johannes Cornelis de Moor (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2003), 685–86. 10 Recent scholarship shows strong disagreement about the question of the core theology of Lamentations. Alan Cooper, Michael S. Moore, Alan Mintz, Adele Berlin and a number of other

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question eikhah (How?) to God, and in the book’s final verses which suggest that God had permanently abandoned Israel. In order to mute or interpret away these apparent conflicts with Deuteronomic, and hence rabbinic, thought, the sages sought to harmonize Lamentations with Deuteronomy. To accomplish this, they strategically ascribed the book to the Prophet Jeremiah, who, in their view, would never offer so radical a challenge to the preferred rabbinic image of God as just and merciful. Similarly they ascribed the Book of Job to Moses.11 In promoting Jeremiah’s authorship rabbinic sources created a dynamic in which his credibility and piety as a prophet in Judah was used to vouch for Lamentations’ theological compatibility with the classical understanding of theodicy and the possibility of redemption delineated in Deuteronomy. By asserting that either Jeremiah would never have been so radical or that he was unique and therefore could say things others should not, these sources limited the capacity of these particular verses to undermine the rabbinic worldview. Additionally, if Lamentations and the Book of Jeremiah were understood to have been composed by a common author, they sages could argue for a common shared theology. Since they also presented Jeremiah as a Moses figure, or sometimes as a second Moses, rabbinic sources could then also strengthen the bond with the teachings found in books attributed to “the son of Amram” and thus reinforce a coherent theological claim across the literature attributed to the two prophets. Finally, as a prophet’s text, Lamentations could be read as foreshadowing future events (e.g., the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE). Rabbinic sources attributed Lamentations to Jeremiah, not because they worried about the question of historical authorship but because the attribution served a particular rabbinic agenda. No doubt midrash uses many tools to create coherence across biblical books; the wrangling of authorship attribution is but one strategy. Noteworthy is that they used a similar strategy when assigning anonymous rabbinic teachings to identifiable sages. According to b. Sanhedrin 17b, approximately a dozen stock phrases about groups of sages are to be taken as references to specific rabbis. For example, scholars have suggested that Lamentations has no core message at all. The book documents human suffering but does not argue for the meaning of this suffering. For a summary of the various views (and disagreement with them) see Elie Assis, “The Alphabetic Acrostic in the Book of Lamentations,” The Catholic Biblical Quarterly 69, no. 4 (2007): 716–17. Assis argues that the core message along with a coherent theology is attested by the acrostics so that form and content are intertwined. “The book’s intention is to impart the belief that the destruction does not mean that the people have been cast off by God, but rather that they must turn to God with their misfortunes and pray to God for salvation. Instead of the harsh description of the postdestruction reality deriving from despair in ch. 1, in ch. 5 the same reality is described, but this time it is addressed to God in prayer and with hope for salvation” (ibid., 723). 11 See the sources in note 9 above.

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the phrase “Our Rabbis who are in Babylonia” refers to Rav and Samuel, while “Our Rabbis who are in the land of Israel” refers to R. Abba. Jed Wyrick suggests “namelessness in the promulgation of authoritative teachings is deemed by this stratum of rabbinic culture as a condition to be remedied.”12 However, as in the cases of Lamentations and Jeremiah, Job and Moses, Song of Songs and Hezekiah, more is at stake than a rabbinic concern with authority. The attribution of anonymous teachings to identifiable sages, or biblical books to identifiable individuals, served an exegetical strategy since each of the anonymous passages could now be read and interpreted by referencing the teachings specifically identified as having originated with a particular figure. B. Sanhedrin 17b is really about how to provide context for understanding an anonymous source. Common authorship of multiple sources establishes a reason for reading the sources as mutually informing. In addition to their exegetical and theological concerns, rabbinic sources used the ascription of Lamentations to Jeremiah to reinforce the identity of the rabbinic community. Because the Book of Lamentations came to be associated with Jeremiah in antiquity, it also came to be associated with his scribe Baruch ben Neriah, who is described as intimately involved with the production of Jeremiah’s writings (e.g., Jer 36:4). In antiquity a collection of materials attributed to Baruch, and now preserved as Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, were available, but the rabbis chose to reject the authority of these sources. They used the discussions of Jeremiah’s authorship of Lamentations as an opportunity to discredit Baruch and these “outside books” along with him.

Is Lamentations in the Canon Because Jeremiah Wrote It? Concerning the Bible used by the rabbis of antiquity Robert Salters has suggested that “Unlike some other items in the Megilloth – Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, Esther – the canonical status of Lamentations does not seem to have been in question. This may be because of its early association with the prophet Jeremiah.”13 This is unlikely. Early rabbis received the Hebrew Book of Lamentations as an authoritative Jewish text, and did not select it for inclusion in the canon. Because Lamentations was an accepted part of the Hebrew corpus of Scripture before the rabbinic period, reasserting the claims of Jeremiah’s 12 Jed Wyrick, The Ascension of Authorship: Attribution and Canon Formation in Jewish, Hellenistic, and Christian Traditions. Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature 49 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 31. 13 Robert B. Salters, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on Lamentations. The International Critical Commentary on the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments (London; New York: T&T Clark, 2010), 3.

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authorship would not have granted it any additional authority. Authorship, in fact, was irrelevant to canonical status. Numerous anonymous books were included in the Hebrew Bible, while numerous books with named authors and apparent pedigree (e.g., Ben Sira) were excluded. In the case of Hebrew Lamentations the evidence from the Dead Sea Scrolls – the earliest and best available evidence – suggests that Lamentations was authoritative, that it had been copied and cited repeatedly to establish religious teachings, and that it held this status without any identifiable ascription to Jeremiah. Among the Dead Sea Scrolls, four manuscripts of Lamentations are extant attesting to all five chapters of the book. Further, several texts that cite or rework passages from Lamentations are also preserved, suggesting that the text was already treated as authoritative among Hebrew-literate Jews in the period leading to the rise of rabbinic Judaism.14 By contrast, no manuscript of Esther is preserved among the Dead Sea Scrolls nor is it ever cited. Ecclesiastes is preserved in two fragmentary manuscripts and never cited. Song of Songs is extant in four manuscripts; the two best show significant deliberate omissions of multiple verses (particularly erotic material), and the book is never cited elsewhere in the scrolls. At the very least, the citations and interpretive reworkings of Lamentations hint, based on engagement with it, that it held more authority at Qumran than the other three texts. This is consistent with the rabbinic debates noted by Salters.15 Many of the Hebrew Bible’s books include apparent authorship claims: The Song of Songs, which is Solomon’s (Cant 1:2); A Song. A Psalm of David (Ps 108:1); The words of Koheleth Son of David (Eccl 1:1); The word of the Lord that came to Hosea son of Beeri (Hos 1:1). Lamentations, however, found in the third section of the Hebrew Bible, the Holy Writings, sometimes following the Song of Songs and preceding Daniel, is anonymous. In different sources it is grouped with the other four scrolls used later for specific liturgical purposes (Ruth, Esther, Ecclesiastes, and Song of Songs). Never is the volume found anywhere in proximity to the Book of Jeremiah, which appears in the second section of the Hebrew Bible, among the prophetic books. This is not true, however, of other Bible versions. The Septuagint Lamentations (50 BCE–50 CE) begins with an explicit statement of authorship: “And it happened, after Israel was taken captive and Ierousalem was laid waste, Ieremias sat weeping and gave this 14 See Adele Berlin, “Qumran Laments and the Study of Lament Literature,” in Liturgical Perspectives, ed. Esther G. Chazon, Ruth A. Clements, and Avital Pinnick. Studies on the Texts of the Desert of Judah 48 (Leiden: Brill, 2003) 1–17. 15 For discussion see Armin Lange, “The Status of the Biblical Texts in the Qumran Corpus and the Canonical Process,” in The Bible as Book: The Hebrew Bible and the Judaean Desert Discoveries, ed. Edward D. Herbert and Emanuel Tov (London; New Castle, DE: British Library; Oak Knoll Press, 2002), 21–30, and Brian P. Gault. “The Fragments of Canticles from Qumran: Implications and Limitations for Interpretation,” Revue de Qumran 24, no. 3 (2010): 351–71.

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lament over Ierousalem and said: How the city sat alone. She who was full of peoples!”16 The Syriac Peshitta (1–2nd c. CE) likewise introduces Jeremiah as the author, using a heading reading: “The Book of Lamentations of Jeremiah the Prophet.”17 The Vulgate Lamentations (4th c. CE) opens: And it came to pass after Israel was carried into captivity and Jerusalem was desolate that Jeremiah, the prophet, sat weeping and mourned with this lamentation over Jerusalem, and with a sorrowful sighing and moaning, he said: Aleph. How doth the city sit solitary that was full of people? How is the mistress of nations become as a widow, the princess of provinces made tributary?18 Hillers has suggested that the opening lines of the Greek Lamentations mimic a Hebrew style which could suggest that the translator was working from a Hebrew Vorlage.19 In this case the attribution to Jeremiah is assumed to have been original to the Hebrew book. However, the earliest witnesses to the Hebrew do not provide evidence one way or the other. The only Dead Sea Scroll fragment of Lamentations to include the first verses of Lamentations (4QLam, Frag. 1., col. 1), begins with the second half of verse 1:1.20 It abuts the top margin of the scroll, which would suggest that the first half of the verse was at the bottom of the previous column or elsewhere since it would not fit above the extant writing.21 Gideon Kotzé has argued, Whether the missing first lines of 4QLam contained a form of the introductory paragraph is unknown. Most of the available textual evidence 16 Peter John Gentry, “Lamentations,” in A New English Translation of the Septuagint, ed. Albert Pietersma and Benjamin G. Wright, 1st edition (New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 935. On the dating of the material see Kevin J. Youngblood, “Lamentations,” in T&T Clark Companion to the Septuagint, ed. James K. Aitken (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015), 503–4. 17 On dating Peshitta Lamentations see Bertil Albrektson, Studies in the Text and Theology of the Book of Lamentations with a Critical Edition of the Peshitta Text. Studia Theologica Lundensia 21 (Lund: CWK Gleerup, 1963), 210–13. 18 Edgar Swift and Angela M. Kinney, eds., The Vulgate Bible, Volume IV: The Major Prophetical Books: Douay-Rheims Translation. Dumberton Oaks Medieval Library 13 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012), 586. 19 Hillers, Lamentations, 64. 20 4QApocryphal Lamentations (4Q179) cites Lam 1:1 in Frag. 2, Line 4 but not an ascription to Jeremiah. See Tal Ilan, “Gender and Lamentations: 4Q179 and the Canonization of the Book of Lamentations,” Lectio Difficilior 2 (2008): 1–16. 21 Martin G. Abegg, Peter W. Flint, and Eugene Charles Ulrich, The Dead Sea Scrolls Bible: The Oldest Known Bible, 1st ed. (San Francisco: HarperSan Francisco, 1999), 623. The authors also raise, but leave unanswered, the question of what book might have preceded Lamentations if Lam 1:1 began at the bottom of a column.

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for the Greek translation of Lamentations attests to this introductory paragraph . . . ​The addition of the introductory paragraph should therefore not be attributed to the work of a scribe during the transmission history of the Greek translation of Lamentations. Kotzé concludes, noting Hiller’s suggestion concerning a Hebrew original, It is indeed possible that the scribes responsible for the copying of the Hebrew textual tradition of which the translator’s Vorlage was a member could have added the introductory paragraph. However, this is improbable since the purported Vorlage of the Greek translation was not far removed from the present consonantal form of the MT . . . ​In theory, scribes could also have deleted the prologue during the process of copying, but it is difficult to explain why all mention of Jeremiah would be deliberately omitted from the texts they transmitted . . . ​This makes it all the more likely that the prologue to the Greek translation of Lamentations comes from the pen of the translator.22 Returning to the Qumran materials, since an actual ascription to Jeremiah is absent from the manuscripts of Lamentations, the remaining question is whether other preserved texts explicitly ascribe the book to Jeremiah or rely on this assumption. Kipp Davis has suggested that the Book of Ben Sira likely acknowledges Jeremiah’s authorship of Lamentations: In Ben Sira 49.7 (ca. 180 BCE) Jeremiah is lauded for his perseverance in the face of persecution, and this passage also contains an implicit allusion to his reputation for lament. The second stich of 49.6 reads: ‘They set fire to the chosen city of the sanctuary, and made desolate its streets’. This is a mild echo of Lamentations 1.4: ‘the ways of Zion mourn; no one is coming to the festivals, all her gates have been desolated’. Ben Sira appears most interested in the veracity of Jeremiah’s prophecies, but also seems to have embraced the notion that the contents of the first dirge in Lamentations at least were prophetically uttered by Jeremiah.23

22 Gideon Kotzé, “Short Notes on the Value of the Septuagint and Vulgate for the Interpretation of Lamentations 1:1,” Journal of Northwest Semitic Languages 36, no. 1 (2010): 77. For a fuller discussion of the significance of the Dead Sea Scroll texts of Lamentations see Gideon Kotzé, The Qumran Manuscripts of Lamentations: A Text-Critical Study. Studia Semitica Neerlandica 61 (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2013). I am grateful to Prof. Kotzé for reading and commenting on an earlier draft of this article. 23 Kipp Davis, “Jeremiah, Masculinity, and His Portrayal as the ‘Lamenting Prophet,’” in Men and Masculinity in the Hebrew Bible and Beyond, ed. Ovidia Creangă. The Bible in the Modern World 33 (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2010), 191. Davis provides a thorough discussion of the

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This single “echo” is too little evidence to substantiate Davis’s claim for Ben Sira’s assumption of the link between Jeremiah and Lamentations. His claim that Jeremiah’s authorship is evidenced in the Dead Sea Scrolls might be strengthened by reference to the Apocryphon of Jeremiah C (4Q385a 18 ii. 1–5), which Davis presents as the first text (circa 2nd century BCE) to explicitly depict Jeremiah as lamenting the destroyed city of Jerusalem: 1 in Tahpanhes w[hich is in the land of Egypt . . . ] 2 And they said to him, ‘Inquire [on our behalf of G]od[ . . . ​But] 3 Jeremi[ah did not listen] to them, not inquiring of Go[d] for them, [nor lifting up] 4 a song of rejoicing and a prayer. Jeremiah lamented [ . . . ​laments] 5 [ov]er Jerusalem. vacat24 If this text included a citation from Lamentations, Davis’s case concerning attribution would be sealed. At best the text shows a tradition of Jeremiah as a lamenter – not as the author of the Book of Lamentations. The tradition of Jeremiah’s authorship of Lamentations may simply have been different among Jews who relied on the Hebrew text and those who relied on the Greek. In addition to the specific ascription to Jeremiah used to introduce Lamentations in Greek, this attribution was reinforced by the location of Lamentations within the various (non-Hebrew) Bibles. Lamentations is found in the Septuagint following the Book of Jeremiah, as if an appendix to it, along with the apocryphal Book of Baruch (Jeremiah’s personal scribe) and the Letter of Jeremiah. It is similarly located in the Peshitta and in the Vulgate. Some have suggested that in the Hebrew Bible Lamentations was included in the Writings, rather than alongside Jeremiah, because of the history of the compilation of the Five Scrolls. However, in some ancient Jewish lists the Hagiographa are organized chronologically and Lamentations is placed directly before Daniel and Esther rather than among the Five Scrolls (e.g., b. B. Bat. 14b–15a) showing that in neither known case did rabbinic tradition try to show an association between Lamentations and Jeremiah by the sequencing of biblical books.25 That the Greek-speaking Jewish community had a long-standing tradition place of Jeremiah in Second Temple literature in “Re-Presentation and Emerging Authority of the Jeremiah Traditions in Second Temple Judaism.” PhD diss., University of Manchester, 2009. 24 The text is cited from Michael Owen Wise, Martin G. Abegg, and Edward M. Cook, The Dead Sea Scrolls: A New Translation, revized and updated (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 2005), 446. For Davis’s discussion see, “Re-Presentation and Emerging Authority of the Jeremiah Traditions in Second Temple Judaism,” 191–92. 25 For discussion of the arrangement and coherence of the five scrolls, see Timothy J. Stone, The Compilational History of the Megilloth: Canon, Contoured Intertextuality and Meaning in the Writings. Forschungen zum Alten Testament 2, 59 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013), 182–207.

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of Jeremiah’s authorship of Lamentations is absolutely clear. Davis is no doubt correct in asserting that Lamentations, at least in the Septuagint version, should be counted within a corpus of Jeremiah-related works including “the Epistle of Jeremiah and 1Baruch, clear references and supplements in Chronicles, Daniel, 2 Maccabees, . . . ​Ben Sira, and Lives of the Prophets, and a smattering of echoes and allusions in Deutero-Isaiah, Susanna, and the New Testament.”26 However, the evidence does not allow for the same claim to be made about Hebrew Bible-­ reliant Jewish communities. This collection of Scriptures remains unique: it neither claims Jeremiah’s authorship of Lamentations nor formally arranges the books of Jeremiah and Lamentations in proximity. While the early rabbis most certainly inherited Lamentations as authoritative, they did not necessarily inherit a tradition of Jeremiah’s authorship of the book. As such, their choosing him as author – a tradition they might, but not necessarily, have been aware of as a result of its appearance in Greek sources – was deliberate whether it was innovated or adopted.27 What is also clear is that the ascription appears both explicitly and implicitly throughout the corpus of rabbinic texts.

The Rabbinic Ascription of Lamentations to Jeremiah The rabbinic exegetical tradition which relies on the Hebrew text of the Bible makes the same assumption of authorship as do many of the earlier sources, although perhaps not relying on these earlier sources for the attribution. The Babylonian Talmud, edited in the sixth century, and the Aramaic Targum of Lamentations, a rabbinic composition dating from between the late fifth and the early seventh centuries, explicitly declare Jeremiah the author.28 B. Bava Batra 15a lists the authors of biblical books and reports, “Jeremiah wrote the

26 Kipp Davis, The Cave 4 Apocryphon of Jeremiah and the Qumran Jeremianic Traditions. Studies on the Texts of the Desert of Judah 111 (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2014), 9. For further discussion of these texts and a number of others see Christian Wolff, Jeremia im Frühjudentum und Urchristentum. Texte und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der altchristlichen Literature 118 (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1976). 27 The work of Emanuel Tov demonstrates rabbinic awareness of the LXX versions of the books of the Pentateuch (e.g., Emanuel Tov, “The Rabbinic Tradition Concerning the ‘Alterations’ Inserted Into the Greek Pentateuch and Their Relation To the Original Text of the LXX,” Journal for the Study of Judaism 15, no. 1–2 [1984]: 65–89). That the rabbis in any early period were aware of the Greek Text of Lamentations with its ascription is not possible to determine conclusively. 28 There is no clear consensus on this dating. Philip Alexander dates it to the late fifth or early sixth century. See Alexander, The Targum of Lamentations: Translated with Introduction, Apparatus and Notes. The Aramaic Bible: Vol. 17b (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2007), 89–90. For discussion of a seventh-century date see Christian M. M. Brady, “The Date, Provenance, and Sitz im Leben of Targum Lamentations,” Journal for the Aramaic Bible 1 (1999): 5–29.

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book which bears his name, the Book of Kings, and Lamentations (kinot).”29 The Targum, like the Greek text of Lamentations, includes an ascription before the first verse, Jeremiah the Prophet and High Priest30 told how it was decreed that Jerusalem and her people should be punished with banishment and that they should be mourned with ‘ekah.31 This authorship claim is found throughout rabbinic literature and grounds itself in 2 Chronicles 35:25: “Jeremiah composed laments for Josiah which all the singers, male and female, recited in their laments for Josiah, as is done to this day; they became customary in Israel and were incorporated into the laments [or Lamentations].”32 Louis Jonker has raised the question of the degree to which this passage shaped rabbinic views of the relationship between Jeremiah and Lamentations and whether the role of Chronicles was simply a textual hook to provide authority for the claim of Jeremiah’s authorship or more substantially shaped the discourse. The rabbis may not have based their claim of Jeremiah’s authorship of Lamentations on Chronicles; it was “rather that – on account of a presupposed relationship between the books – the rabbis saw 29 In addition to referring to Lamentations as Eikhah and Kinnot, rabbinic sources also use the generic term “scroll” [megillah] on occasion as in Lev. Rab. 15:4 and Lam. Rab 1:1. 30 The Targum is more interested in Jeremiah’s priestly status than are other sources. This is the only place where Jeremiah is explicitly described as the High Priest. For discussion of his priestly ancestry in rabbinic literature see Arnold Aaron Wieder, “Jeremiah in Aggadic Literature” (PhD diss., Brandeis University, 1962), 9–10. The assertion reappears in the Middle Ages (e.g., David Kimḥi to Jer 1:1). On Jeremiah’s ancestry in rabbinic sources see Alex Jassen, “The Rabbinic Construction of Jeremiah’s Lineage,” in Texts and Contexts of Jeremiah, ed. Karin Finsterbusch and Armin Lange (Leuven: Peeters, 2016), 3–20. For discussion of Jeremiah as Priest in Targum Lamentations see Alexander, The Targum of Lamentations: Translated with Introduction, Apparatus and Notes, 109. Davis has noted that the Targum, in demonstrating a significant concern with Jeremiah’s priestly role, picks up themes and concerns present in Second Temple Jewish sources but largely absent from other rabbinic materials. See Davis, “Re-Presentation and Emerging Authority of the Jeremiah Traditions in Second Temple Judaism,” 173–74. The absence of rabbinic interest in Jeremiah’s priestly role plausibly resulted from a general trend in rabbinic sources to deliberately diminish or perhaps even eliminate the contributions of the priestly class to biblical history. See Peter Schäfer, “Rabbis and Priests; or: How to Do Away with the Glorious Past of the Sons of Aaron,” in Antiquity in Antiquity, ed. Gregg Gardner and Kevin L. Osterloh. Texts and Studies in Ancient Judaism 123 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008), 155–72. 31 Christian M. M. Brady, The Rabbinic Targum of Lamentations: Vindicating God. Studies in the Aramaic Interpretation of Scripture 3 (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2003), 155. 32 For discussion of how Jeremiah became identified as the lamenting prophet despite limited biblical support for this description see Davis, “Jeremiah, Masculinity, and His Portrayal as the ‘Lamenting Prophet.’”

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Chronicles as an additional source for their interpretations of Lamentations.”33 That is to say, it provided evidence in support of their assumption, even if it did not trigger it. The earliest rabbinic reference to Jeremiah’s authorship of Lamentations is found in the Tannaitic source, Seder ‘Olam Rabbah 24: “Jeremiah composed a funeral dirge about him [Josiah]: The Spirit of our life, the anointed of the Eternal, was caught in the pits (Lam 4:20).”34 In the Tosefta, Ta’aniyot 2:10, another early source attributed to Tannaim, the sages also used Lamentations 4:20 to explain how Jeremiah lamented Josiah. 2 Chronicles 35:25 is the unique biblical source that provides this information and rabbinic sources clearly tied Jeremiah and Lamentations together by connecting the three pieces, Jeremiah, Josiah, and Lamentations.35 The relationship between Josiah’s death and Jeremiah’s authorship of Lamentations was promulgated quite early by rabbinic sources which were far more interested in Josiah than in other kings of the era. The fact that the only verse in the Book of Lamentations which makes reference to the king of Judah was seen as referring to Josiah rather than Zedekiah points to another characteristically aggadic attitude. The rabbis somehow saw in Josiah the end of the Davidic dynasty, despite the fact that four kings followed him.36 Various sages clearly relied on 2 Chronicles 35:25 as evidence in support of their claim concerning Jeremiah’s authorship of Lamentations. However, no evidence establishes that this verse was the inspiration for this association.37 33 Louis Jonker, “The Jeremianic Connection: Chronicles and the Reception of Lamentations as Two Modes of Interacting with the Jeremianic Tradition?,” Scriptura 110, no. 2 (2012): 177. Jonker’s work is a thorough engagement with an earlier version of this article (Kalman, “If Jeremiah Wrote It, It Must Be OK: On the Attribution of Lamentations to Jeremiah in Early Rabbinic Texts”) which uses the rabbinic reception of Jeremiah and Lamentations to explore the use of Jeremiah-related traditions by the authors of Chronicles. I am grateful for his critique which has significantly shaped this revision. 34 Heinrich W. Guggenheimer, Seder Olam: The Rabbinic View of Biblical Chronology (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, Inc., 1998), 201. On the dating of Seder ‘Olam Rabbah see Chaim Milikowsky, “Seder Olam,” in The Literature of the Sages, ed. Zeev Safrai et al., vol. 2. Compendia Rerum Iudaicarum Ad Novum Testamentum (Assen: Royal Van Gorcum, 2006), 233–34. 35 Note the important discussion of Mark Leuchter, who highlights that although Chronicles appropriates Jeremiah the character, it is less interested in the Book of Jeremiah as a source. See Leuchter, “Rethinking the ‘Jeremiah’ Doublet in Ezra–Nehemiah and Chronicles,” in What Was Authoritative for Chronicles?, ed. Ehud Ben Zvi and Diana Edelman (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2011), 193–96. I am grateful to Prof. Leuchter for reading and commenting on an earlier draft of this article. 36 Wieder, “Jeremiah in Aggadic Literature,” 38. 37 As Leuchter has noted, the precise content of lamentations uttered by Jeremiah and others for Josiah are not identified nor is Jeremiah identified as their author. The Book of Kings does not

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Rabbinic sources not infrequently try to explain how and when the Book of Lamentations was composed and locate its composition in the narrative of the Book of Jeremiah. According to a tradition preserved in b. Mo‘ed Qatan 26a, Lamentations was the book that Jeremiah composed and the king destroyed in Jeremiah 36. According to the talmudic teaching, a bystander should rend his garment as a sign of mourning if he witnesses the burning of a scroll of Scripture. The tradents support this rule with a discussion of the burning of Jeremiah’s scroll in chapter 36: What is the [Scriptural] source for this [rule]? – What is written: And it came to pass when Jehudi had read three or four columns that he cut it with a penknife and cast it into the fire that was in the brazier. [Jer 36:23] What is the point of saying ‘[had read] three or four columns’? – They told [King] Jehoiakim that Jeremiah had written a book of Lamentations, [and] he said to them: What is written there? [They quoted] ‘How doth the city sit solitary’. [Lam 1:1] – [The King] replied: I am the King. . . .  [They recited several more verses which upset the King] Forthwith he [began to] cut out all the names of God mentioned therein and burnt them in the fire; hence it is written [in the report there]: Yet they were not afraid, nor rent their garments, neither the King, nor any of his servants that heard all these words, [Jer 36:24] which implies that the [bystanders] should have rent [their clothes].38 In rabbinic sources, the Book of Jeremiah provided the historical details which explained how and when the Book of Lamentations was recorded. The talmudic text is paralleled in Lamentations Rabbah Proem 28. According to this version the original scroll contained only the first chapter of Lamentations: R. Hama b. Hanina opened his discourse with the text, Then took Jeremiah another roll, etc. (Jer XXXVI, 32). R. Hama said: And there added besides unto them: this refers to [the second chapter of Lamentations beginning with] How hath the Lord covered with a cloud. ‘Words’: this refers to [the fourth chapter beginning with] How is the gold become dim. ‘Many’: this refers to [the third chapter beginning with] I am the man. ‘Like’: this refers to [the fifth chapter beginning with] Remember, O Lord. The Rabbis, on the other hand, say: ‘And there added besides unto them’: this refers to [the second chapter beginning mention Jeremiah or lamentations of any sort in this context at all. The Chronicler, according to Leuchter following a suggestion by Jonker, uses Jeremiah the prophet as a symbolic figure to mediate between popular liturgical practice and priestly ideology, between non-priestly and priestly traditions. Leuchter, “Rethinking the ‘Jeremiah’ Doublet,” 195. 38 Italics, verse references, and description of omitted material added.

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with] ‘How hath the Lord covered with a cloud.’ ‘Words’: this refers to [the fourth chapter beginning with] ‘How is the gold become dim.’ ‘Many’: this refers to [the fifth chapter beginning with] ‘Remember, O Lord.’ ‘Like’: this refers to [the third chapter beginning with] ‘I am the man’ which is in alphabetical order with three verses to each letter of the alphabet. Leviticus Rabbah 11:7 likewise reports that the original scroll included chapter 1 of Lamentations, but does not suggest what other chapters it may have contained: And it came to pass in the days of Jehoiakim the son of Josiah (Jer I, 3). What misfortune was there in that instance? – I beheld the earth, and, lo, it was waste and void (ibid. IV, 33). This may be compared to the case of some edicts which were sent into the country. In every province which they reached, the people stood on their feet, bared their heads and read them in dread, fear, shaking and trembling. But when they reached the king’s province, the people there rose and tore them up and burnt them. People said, ‘Woe to us, should the king become aware of this.’ This is [a parallel to] what is written, And it came to pass, when Jehudi had read three or four columns (Jer XXXVI, 23) [of the scroll written by Baruch at Jeremiah’s dictation], and when they reached the fifth verse, [viz.] Her adversaries are become the head (Lam I, 5), He cut it with a penknife, and cast it into the fire that was in the brazier (Jer loc. cit.). When people saw this they began crying out ‘Woe, woe’ (wayy, wayy), as it is written, ‘And it came to pass (wayyehi) in the days of Jehoiakim.’ An additional text (see below for a citation) in Lamentations Rabbah 3:1 suggests chapters 1, 2, and 4 were in the original scroll with the replacement scroll expanding with the addition of chapters 3 and 5. Which chapters were in the original scroll and which were added when the new scroll was written was a matter of debate into the Middle Ages. As Wieder has noted, both Rashi (Solomon ben Isaac, 1040–1105) and Radak (David Kimḥi, 1160–1235) in their respective commentaries on Jeremiah 36:32 suggest that Lamentations chapters 1, 2, and 4 were in the original scroll and that chapter 3 was added when the scroll was rewritten.39 Wieder has suggested that Rashi and Radak appreciated the balance created by having the three alphabetic acrostics found in chapters 1, 2, and 4 counter-weighted by the three which appear in chapter 3.40 The attribution of Lamentations to Jeremiah was nearly unanimously 39 See Wieder, “Jeremiah in Aggadic Literature,” 184–85 n. 40. Wieder attributes their difference of opinion to their reliance on a variant manuscript of Lam. Rab. but provides no evidence for the variant reading. 40 Wieder, 184–85, n. 40.

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accepted by medieval Jewish scholars, but the seeds for challenging it were clearly planted in the commentary of Abraham ibn Ezra (1089–1167) who concluded that the scroll written by Jeremiah and burned in Jeremiah 36 could not have been Lamentations. For Ibn Ezra, as Robert Salters notes, the new scroll was essentially a rewritten version of the old one with a number of supplements. Therefore, the prophetic reproaches found in Jeremiah 36:2 and the discussion of Babylonia and its king should all be expected in Lamentations – yet none of these are in the text.41 Although Ibn Ezra’s comment here is quite critical, he does not reject outright Jeremiah’s authorship of Lamentations, only the midrashic explanation of how the text was composed. Precisely what concerns were being aired in the disagreement over original chapters versus later additions is not clear. That the bulk of sources regard chapter 1 as original may be because it makes the greatest case for classic theodicy; Jerusalem was destroyed by God for the sins of its inhabitants. Remarkably, what largely goes undiscussed in these sources is that while Jeremiah’s lamentations are for the fallen city, Jerusalem did not fall for another nine years and three chapters after the burning of the scroll. Lamentations Rabbah 1:1 is the single rabbinic source that takes note of this: When was the Book of Lamentations composed? R. Judah says: In the days of Jehoiakim. R. Nehemiah said to him, ‘Do we, then, weep over a dead person before he dies! When was the Book composed? After the destruction of the Temple; and behold proof is to be found in the words, How DOTH THE CITY SIT SOLITARY!’ Although the challenge receives no immediate response in the midrash, the fact that many rabbinic sources took Lamentations as prophecy concerning the future destruction of the Temple, rather than as a response to the building’s ruin, helps answer the question. This singular text also highlights a tension in rabbinic responses to the Book of Lamentations. For example, Lamentations Rabbah Petihta 2 has Jeremiah use Lamentations to mourn Israel for her abandonment of Torah (i.e., before the destruction and exile) while Lamentations Rabbah Petihta 14 has Jeremiah lamenting Israel after having been exiled. Thus, the debate about which chapters were included in the original scroll and which were added may be related to an underlying disagreement about which passages were prophetic and which were merely lament. The extant materials do not allow a clear-cut delineation.

41 Robert B. Salters, “Using Rashi, Ibn Ezra and Joseph Kara on Lamentations,” Journal of Northwest Semitic Languages 25, no. 1 (1999): 203.

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The Theology of Lamentations and the Problems it Caused In the Hebrew Bible the Book of Lamentations includes five chapters, each a poetic text. The first, second, and fourth are alphabetic acrostics, each line beginning with consecutive letters of the Hebrew alphabet – alef through taw. The third chapter is an alphabetic acrostic in which each letter is repeated for three lines before continuing with the subsequent letter. The final chapter is not an alphabetic acrostic, although some contemporary scholars have attempted to argue that its twenty-two stanzas should be understood as connecting it to the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet.42 As its name implies, the book is a collection of dirges lamenting the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple of Yahweh, the focus of Israel’s religio-national identity. Although not entirely consistent, the general theological message of the book builds on that of the Deuteronomist – God and Israel are bound by a covenant, wherein God rewards and punishes the nation on the basis of its observance or transgression of the divine law as revealed in the Torah given at Sinai. As Pesiqta Rabbati 29/30 presents the issue, Torah and Lamentations are of one substance. Although the issue of theodicy in Lamentations is somewhat more complex, rabbinic sources attest that sages sought out those passages which explicitly and literally reinforced the classical position and worked to reinterpret those passages which did not.43 The rabbinic texts explain the destruction of Jerusalem in light of this theological formulation: as divine punishment for the people’s transgressions. According to Lamentations Rabbah 1:20, the arrangement of the material in alphabetic acrostics was intended as a reminder that Israel had committed every sin from alef to taw, from A to Z: Why is the Book of Lamentations composed as an alphabetical acrostic? R. Judah, R. Nehemiah, and the Rabbis suggest answers. R. Judah said: Because it is written, Yea, all Israel have transgressed Thy law (Dan IX, 11), which is written [with all the letters] from alef to taw; therefore is this Book composed as an alphabetical acrostic, one corresponding to the other.44 42 See, for example, Hillers, Lamentations, 24–27; and Johan Renkema, Lamentations. Historical Commentary on the Old Testament. Leuven: Peeters, 1998, 44–50. On the question of how the acrostic form relates to the content of the book see Assis, “The Alphabetic Acrostic in the Book of Lamentations.” 43 The complexity of Lamentations’ theodicy is explored in Johan Renkema, “Theodicy in Lamentations,” in Theodicy in the World of the Bible, ed. Antti Laato and Johannes Cornelis de Moor (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2003), 410–28. 44 In a parallel text found in Lam. Rab. Proem 24 the letters of the alphabet personified are called before a divine tribunal to testify concerning the sins of the people of Israel. The patriarch

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Generally the biblical book sees the destruction as an appropriate act on the part of God and the punishment as deserved by the people: The Lord is in the right for I have disobeyed him . . . ​See, O Lord, the distress I am in! My heart is in anguish, I know how wrong I was to disobey . . . (Lam 1:18–20) Likewise, a redemptive note is frequently sounded; the destruction is not perceived as the end. Lamentations 4:22 declares: “Your iniquity, fair Zion, is expiated. He will exile you no longer . . . ” In light of Jeremiah’s prophetic role and of Lamentations’ apparent perpetuation of Deuteronomy-like theology, later generations of exegetes turned to the text with the sense that it not only mourned the loss of the First Temple, but could help explain the communal calamities of later generations. Since Jeremiah was a prophet, Lamentations could be read as prophecy. Here, the attribution fits a pattern common to early pseudepigraphy: Significantly, our earliest Israelite/Jewish examples of pseudepigraphy do not base their authority on the status of the chosen pseudonymous author – at least not in ancient Greek, late antique Christian, or modern Western senses of the term. Instead, such figures are primarily used to validate the status of a book as revealed literature . . . ​The appeal to Moses is thus framed as an appeal to his status as one known to have spoken with God and as the prophet chosen to receive divine revelations at Mt. Sinai . . . In other words, the early texts attributed to such figures appeal to them, not as authors with authority rooted in their own wisdom or virtue, but primarily as conduits for the transmission of divine knowledge to humankind. This may also be the case with the pseudepigraphy of later Jewish and Christian apocalypses, which may be best understood as an extension of the legitimization of prophetic books with reference to the divine commission and oral proclamations of prophets. In some cases, the pseudonymous writer is not so much creator or author as tradent and guarantor.45 Abraham serves in the role of advocate for the defense. The alef was set to testify that the people had transgressed the first commandment according to Jewish tradition, “I am [Heb.=anochi] the Lord your God.” The bet was set to testify that they had not observed the laws of the Torah which begins with the Hebrew word bereishit. Abraham questioned the gimel arguing that only the nation of Israel had observed the law of fringes [usually tzizit but here gedilim, see Deut 22:12]. When the remaining letters of the alphabet saw how Abraham challenged the first three, they refused to testify against Israel. 45 Annette Yoshiko Reed, “Pseudepigraphy, Authorship, and the Reception of the Bible in Late Antiquity,” in The Reception and Interpretation of the Bible in Late Antiquity, ed. Lorenzo

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Put differently, the sages who wanted to read Lamentations as prophecy of the same type they knew from the other books of the Hebrew Bible benefitted from having it already connected to Jeremiah. The attribution was self-justifying: because Lamentations was prophecy it must have been the work of a prophet. However, the reverse is not necessarily true. The attribution to Jeremiah made it possible for Lamentations to be read as prophecy but did not necessitate that it be read in this way. The sense of history evident in rabbinic readings of Lamentations relies heavily on the theological trope which resounds in Deuteronomy, Jeremiah, and Kings.46 Throughout history Jewish writers have seen all community calamities in light of this trope and Lamentations has been explored as a way to explain whatever contemporary woe a community faced. In Lamentations Rabbah 2:8, the rabbinic interpretation presents Lamentations 2:4 as prophetic: HE HATH BENT HIS BOW LIKE AN ENEMY [Lam 2:4]: this alludes to Pharaoh, as it is stated, The enemy said (Exod XV, 9). STANDING WITH HIS RIGHT HAND AS AN ADVERSARY (II, 4): this alludes to Haman, as it is said, An adversary and an enemy, even this wicked Haman (Esth VII, 6). Another interpretation of HE HATH BENT HIS BOW LIKE AN ENEMY: this alludes to Esau, as it is written, Because the enemy hath said against you: Aha! (Ezek XXXVI, 2) The midrash, at least initially, directs the reader back into history, comparing God’s actions in destroying the Temple to the pharaoh who enslaved the Israelites. However, the text – evidencing the prophetic voice of Lamentations – then directs the reader forward to the time after the Temple’s destruction: discussing Haman, who appears in the Book of Esther, set in the Persian exile, and then Esau, whom the rabbis identify with Rome.47 To the rabbinic mind, DiTommaso and Lucian Turcescu. The Bible in Ancient Christianity 6 (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 476–77. 46 Historian Yosef Haim Yerushalmi comments concerning this issue more generally: “For the rabbis the Bible was not only a repository of past history, but a revealed pattern of the whole of history, and they had learned their scriptures well.” (Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory. Samuel and Althea Stroum Lectures in Jewish Studies 1980 [Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1996], 21.) 47 On the relationship between Esau and Rome in the rabbinic imagination see, inter alia, Irit Aminoff, “The Figures of Esau and the Kingdom of Edom in Palestinian Midrashic-Talmudic Literature in the Tannaitic and Amoraic Periods.” PhD diss., Melbourne University, 1981; Gerson D. Cohen, “Esau as Symbol in Early Medieval Thought,” in Jewish Medieval and Renaissance Studies, ed. Alexander Altmann (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), 19–48, and Burton L. Visotzky, Golden Bells and Pomegranates: Studies in Midrash Leviticus Rabbah. Texts and Studies in Ancient Judaism 94. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003, 154–72.

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Lamentations, composed by Jeremiah in the wake of the destruction of 586 BCE, foretold events of the mid-fourth century BCE and of the late first century CE.48 In Lamentations Rabbah 3:2 the historical references are even more explicit: HE HATH BUILDED AGAINST ME, AND ENCOMPASSED ME WITH GALL49 (III, 5): this is Nebuchadnezzar of whom it is written, Thou art the head (reshah) of gold (Dan II, 38). AND TRAVAIL: this is Nebuzaradan. Another interpretation: GALL alludes to Vespasian and TRAVAIL to Trajan. In the first interpretation the rabbis attempted to historicize the allusions in Lamentations 3:5 in the context of the destruction of the First Temple. Nebuzaradan was the captain of the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar’s guard who burned the First Temple and carried off the treasures and the captives to Babylon (2 Kgs 25; Jer 39–41, 43, 52). By contrast, the second interpretation reads that text as prophecy concerning the destruction of the Second Temple and the squelching of later Jewish rebellions against Rome. (The Second Temple was destroyed in the early part of the reign of the Roman Emperor Vespasian by his son Titus, who controlled the Roman troops in Syria and Israel. Trajan was responsible for ending rebellions by Jews in Egypt and Mesopotamia.)50 While accepting Jeremiah’s authorship served the rabbis of multiple generations well in their efforts to read Lamentations as prophecy, it proved even more helpful in their efforts to come to terms with a number of verses which they found theologically disturbing. Some verses in Lamentations, at least to some rabbis, seemed to undermine covenantal theology. Although Lamentations generally confirms divine justice, it also contains cynical and rebellious verses. Lamentations 2:5 accuses God of acting as an enemy of Israel: “The Lord has acted like a foe, / He has laid waste to Israel; / Laid waste to all her citadels, / Destroyed her strongholds. / He has increased within Fair Judah mourning and moaning.” In 2:20 the accusations are much harsher. The narrator speaks to God as Jerusalem personified: “See, 48 For discussion of Haman see Lam. Rab. 2:1, 2:8, 3:11, 3:13, 3:23, and 4:25. For discussion of Esau see Lam. Rab. Proem 2, proem 24, 2:8, 2:12, 2:13, 3:1, 5:1. References to Lamentations foreshadowing the activities of Esau/Edom/Rome appear elsewhere in rabbinic literature. See, for example, Exod. Rab. 27:1: “In reference to Esau it is written, They have ravished the women in Zion (Lam V, 11).” Here it is important to note that Esau is singular, but the Lamentations verse is plural, indicating the symbolic nature of the use of Esau. 49 The Hebrew word rosh (gall/misery/bitterness) shares the same consonants [resh/alef/shin] as the Hebrew word for head, which sets up the wordplay that immediately follows. 50 Moshe D. Herr, “Trajan (Traianus), Titus Flavius,” in Encyclopaedia Judaica, ed. Fred Skolnik and Michael Berenbaum, 20:90 (Detroit, MI: Macmillan, 2007), and Abraham Schalit, “Vespasian, Titus Flavius,” ibid. 20:514.

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O Lord, and behold / To whom you have done this! / Alas, women eat their own fruit / Their new-born babes! / Alas, priest and prophet are slain / In the Sanctuary of the Lord! Prostrate in the streets lie / Both young and old. My Maidens and youths / Are fallen by the sword; / You slew them on your day of wrath; / You slaughtered without pity” [Emphasis added]. Finally, Lamentations concludes in 5:20–22 with the harshest challenge: “Why have you forgotten us utterly, Forsaken us for all time?”

Jeremiah the “Author” In addition to the ascription of the books of Jeremiah, Kings, and Lamentations to Jeremiah found on b. Bava Batra 15a, the prophet is also explicitly described as an author of more than one book in the Tannaitic midrash, Sifre to Deuternonomy Piska 1, And these are the words that the Lord spoke concerning Israel and concerning Judah (Jer 30:4). Did Jeremiah prophesy nothing but these words? Did not Jeremiah write two scrolls, as it is said, Thus far are the words of Jeremiah? (Jer 51:64)51 The difficulty with the passage is that precisely which two books the rabbinic tradent had in mind remains unclear. As Reuven Hammer has noted, this may refer to the books of Jeremiah and Lamentations but “the fact that the book [Jer 51:64] states Thus far indicates that this is the conclusion of one book.”52 Here, it is worth noting that Jacob Lauterbach argued that some Tannaitic sages suggested that the Book of Jeremiah contains two collections of prophecy. In discussing Mekilta Pisha 1 in which “And there were added besides unto them many like words” (Jer 36:32) is interpreted by the sages to mean that Jeremiah’s prophecy was doubled, Lauterbach explains, The phrase: “many like words,” is understood to mean as many new prophecies as were contained in the burned scroll. These new prophecies, according to this view, however, were not limited to chaps. 37–52, but in the copy made by Baruch were also interspersed among the older prophecies. Our present Book of Jeremiah, accordingly, contains two collections of prophecies by Jeremiah which were originally separate but of equal size. It is also assumed that the attitude expressed by Jeremiah in Lamentations which he wrote after the destruction of Jerusalem had been maintained 51 Reuven Hammer, trans., Sifre: A Tannaitic Commentary on the Book of Deuteronomy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), 23. 52 Hammer, 389 n. 3.

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Jason Kalman by him already in his early activity when he composed his first collection of prophecies. As a reward for his attitude his prophecy was doubled, i.e., he was favored with new prophecies which formed as large a collection as the first one.53

If Lauterbach’s interpretation of Mekilta Pisha 1 is correct, here is a case where the attribution of Lamentations to Jeremiah changed how Jeremiah was perceived rather than perceptions of Jeremiah shaping how Lamentations was understood. The relationship between the biography of the purported author and the interpretation of the text is bi-directional. Remarkably, the comparison of the text from Sifre with the passage from the Babylonian Talmud reveals a growth in the oeuvre attributed to Jeremiah; two (unidentified) books grew to three (identifiable) books. Perhaps this is a case where Sid Leiman is correct about early witnesses to the Palestinian canon and Sifre understanding Jeremiah-Lamentations as one book. See below, however, b. Bava Batra’s declaration that Jeremiah wrote the Book of Kings is the sole occurrence of the assertion and, by and large, the rest of rabbinic literature is unconcerned with the claim or its implications, exegetical or otherwise – which may further evidence the late date (ca. 4th c. CE) of the tradition and undermine its presentation as a baraita.54 That Kings and Jeremiah overlap in a number of cases (e.g., 2 Kgs 21:12 and Jer 19:3–9; 2 Kgs 21:14 and Jer 24:8) and also share almost verbatim texts (2 Kgs 24:18–25:21 and Jer 52:1–27; 2 Kgs 25:27–30 and Jer 52:31–34) was likely enough evidence to have convinced the sages of the connection between Jeremiah and Kings.55 Ascribing the book to Jeremiah, a late prophet who had witnessed the fall of the kingdom, was certainly reasonable, at least in the rabbinic mind. Wieder has summarized this view, noting that in rabbinic literature “Jeremiah is also seen as the seal and culmination, 53 Jacob Zallel Lauterbach, Mekilta De-Rabbi Ishmael: A Critical Edition with an English Translation, Introduction and Notes (Philadelphia, PA: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1933), 1:9 n. 12. 54 On the place of the Books of Kings in rabbinic literature see Karin Hedner-Zetterholm, “Elijah and the Books of Kings in Rabbinic Literature,” in The Books of Kings: Sources, Composition, Historiography and Reception, ed. André Lemaire and Baruch Halpern. Supplements to Vetus Testamentum 129 (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 585–606. For a more extensive discussion of the transformation of the character of Elijah see Kristen H Lindbeck, Elijah and the Rabbis: Story and Theology (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010). Rabbinic literature tends to show an interest in particular kings and their actions rather than “the Book of Kings” as a topic. See Richard Kalmin, “Portrayals of Kings in Rabbinic Literature of Late Antiquity,” Jewish Studies Quarterly 3, no. 4 (1996): 320–41. However, as Gary Porton has framed it, “from the rabbis’ point of view, Jeremiah’s relationship with the Royal House was uninteresting.” (Gary G. Porton, “Isaiah and the Kings: The Rabbis on the Prophet Isaiah,” in Writing and Reading the Scroll of Isaiah: Studies of an Interpretive Tradition, ed. Craig C. Broyles and Craig A. Evans, vol. 2. Supplements to Vetus Testamentum, 70,2 [Leiden: Brill, 1997], 694.) 55 For further discussion and more examples see Peterson, The Authors of the Deuteronomistic History, 291–92.

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as the concluding figure of prophetic history. He and Josiah are the last ideal representatives of prophetic and royal leadership in the First Commonwealth. Thus, Jeremiah is seen as having written the Book of Kings just as Samuel, at the end of the era of the Judges, is the author of the Book of Judges.”56 Although the rabbis cited throughout rabbinic literature may have actually believed that Jeremiah was the historical author of Lamentations, the issue of attribution and pseudepigraphy in rabbinic literature is complex to say the least. Marc Bregman has suggested that, While stressing the need to attribute statements and stories correctly, the sages were sometimes quite creative in inventing rabbinic attributions, just as they were creative in attributing extra-biblical statements to God and biblical personalities. An appreciation of the remarkable blend of fact and fiction, history and creative writing is essential . . . ​for a nuanced understanding of rabbinic literature in general and rabbinic pseudepigraphy in particular.57 For the purpose of exploring the rabbinic attribution of Lamentations to Jeremiah, thinking of the prophet as what philosopher Jorge Gracia calls the pseudo-historical author is useful: The pseudo-historical author is a mental construct that is believed by an audience – or constructed by someone (sometimes the historical author) to lead an audience to believe it – to be the historical author . . . ​The pseudo-­ historical author is a construct of an interpreter who wishes to know more about a text or wishes to pass judgment upon its author. Texts of literary, philosophical, religious, or scientific works, for example, elicit pseudo-historical authors. The reason is that they are subjects of interpretations or present characteristics of originality and value that lead to the development of propriety interests in them.58 Because Jeremiah was assumed to have authored Jeremiah and Lamentations, the rabbis of antiquity could also mine other biblical sources about the prophet to inform their reading of Lamentations. As noted, they used 2 Chronicles 56 Wieder, “Jeremiah in Aggadic Literature,” 122. For more recent discussion of Jeremiah in rabbinic literature see Ishay Rosen Zvi, “Like a Priest Exposing His Wayward Mother: Jeremiah in Rabbinic Literature,” in Jeremiah’s Scriptures, ed. Hindy Najman and Konrad Schmid (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 570–90 and the responses by Shlomo Zuckier (591–607) and Jordash Kiffiak (608–13). Wieder’s dissertation is absent from their respective discussions. 57 Marc Bregman, “Pseudepigraphy in Rabbinic Literature,” in Pseudepigraphic Perspectives: The Apocrypha & Pseudepigrapha in Light of the Dead Sea Scrolls. ed. Esther G. Chazon, Michael Stone, and Avital Pinnick. Studies on the Texts of the Desert of Judah 31 (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 41. 58 Jorge J. E. Gracia, “A Theory of the Author,” in The Death and Resurrection of the Author?, ed. William Irwin (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002), 180.

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35–36, where Jeremiah appears, for some of the historical data they needed to explain the context of particular passages in Lamentations. In so doing, rabbinic sources reflect a reading strategy already evident in Josephus’s claims concerning Jewish assumptions about the Bible in Against Apion 1:37–38: 37 Naturally, then, or rather necessarily – seeing that it is not open to anyone to write of their own accord, nor is there any disagreement present in what is written, but the prophets alone learned, by inspiration from God, what had happened in the distant and most ancient past and recorded plainly events in their own time just as they occurred – 38 among us there are not thousands of books in disagreement and conflict with each other, but only twenty-two books, containing the record of all time, which are rightly trusted.59 Whether or how Lamentations should be counted among the 22 is open to debate. According to Sid Leiman, Palestinian witnesses testify to pairings of Judges-Ruth and Jeremiah-Lamentations where these counted as single books.60 The fact that the rabbis’ Bible divided these books needs investigation, but there can be little doubt that rabbinic sources appear committed to the consistency of biblical books and to the message of their authors who were prophets. Claiming that an individual prophet wrote specific books allowed those books to be grouped for interpretive purposes. In this, rabbinic reading strategy mirrored Hellenistic approaches. As Jed Wyrick has documented, in an effort to distinguish between books reliably attributed to authors and others thought to be forgeries, Greek scholarship commencing with Aristotle intertwined knowledge of the life of the author with the interpretation of the book, while at the same time the books were used to establish biographical facts concerning the authors.61 This same bi-directional approach is evident in rabbinic exploration of Lamentations, although not for the purpose of establishing the religious authority of the book as much as for coherence as described by Josephus. Here it is worth citing Adele Berlin’s explanation for rabbinic uses of authorship attributions, Ancient traditions and modern scholars have different reasons for assigning authorship to biblical books. The rabbis, and presumably their forerunners, were interested in showing the divine or sacred nature of the biblical writings, and in order to do this they link the books with prophetic figures 59 John M. G. Barclay, Flavius Josephus: Translation and Commentary. Volume 10: Against Apion (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 28–29. 60 Shnayer Z. Leiman, The Canonization of Hebrew Scripture: The Talmudic and Midrashic Evidence (Hamden, CT: Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1976), 32. 61 Wyrick, The Ascension of Authorship, 282–91.

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or with other people who composed under divine inspiration (like David, Solomon, and Ezra). They make “logical” and “chronological” connections: the books written by Samuel are those set in the period in which Samuel lived; the books with superscriptions linking them to Solomon reflect Solomon’s attribute of wisdom; and so forth. In the process of ascribing books to authors, they make Scripture a more coherent unity, for even the small anonymous books in the Writings become integrated with earlier personalities and writings.62 Tying Jeremiah, Lamentations, and Kings together as b. Bava Batra 15a does serves the rabbinic agenda in two ways: First, the overlapping details about the lives of the kings and their subjects served to flesh out the narratives early rabbis created around the historical place of Lamentations ( i.e., when, how, and for what purpose was Lamentations composed). Second, bringing together the books of Jeremiah and Lamentations through common authorship created an opportunity for the rabbis of antiquity to operate with the assumption that the two texts discussed common issues and concerns and could therefore be used to explain each other. For example, Lamentations Rabbah 2:18 explains Lamentations 2:14: THY PROPHETS HAVE SEEN VISIONS FOR THEE OF VANITY AND DELUSION – TAFEL (II, 14). R. Eleazar said: In connection with the prophets of Samaria is unseemliness (tiflah) mentioned, as it is said, And I have seen unseemliness in the prophets of Samaria (Jer XXIII, 13); and in connection with the prophets of Jerusalem is unseemliness mentioned, as it is said, VANITY AND TAFEL. R. Samuel b. Nahmani said: In connection with the prophets of Jerusalem horror is mentioned, as it is stated, But in the prophets of Jerusalem I have seen a horrible thing (ibid. 14); and similarly in connection with the house of Israel is the same word mentioned, as it is stated, The virgin of Israel hath done a very horrible thing. (ibid. XVIII, 13) However, the relationship between Jeremiah and Lamentations was not perceived as bilateral. Rabbinic sources prioritized the Book of Jeremiah’s theological statements. The assertion of Jeremiah’s authorship of Lamentations provided the book with a rabbi-suitable theology compatible with other biblical books which it did not appear to have on its own. Lamentations would be interpreted by rabbinic readers as if the theological operating principals in Jeremiah were in play. Rabbinic sages were sensitive to an apparent consistency of theology across Deuteronomy, Kings, Jeremiah, and 62 Adele Berlin, Lamentations: A Commentary, 1st ed. The Old Testament Library (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002), 31.

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other prophetic books as well, and it was essential for substantiating rabbinic efforts to make Lamentations fit this mold. In this context, it is valuable to note that modern Biblicists argue for this same common theology.63 The need for rabbinic sources to make clear that Jeremiah was responsible for Lamentations was most likely shaped by their concern about a series of passages which suggested ideas they likely felt undermined the strongly held rabbinic commitment to the idea that God was just and merciful. By attributing these words to Jeremiah they created an opportunity for creative exegesis which could invert or at least soften these troubling passages and make Lamentations align with other biblical and rabbinic sources. Anthony Grafton has argued convincingly that “In some periods and traditions writers have ascribed religious texts to divine or semidivine figures not because they were preoccupied with matters of authorship but because they wished to stress the continuity of their writings with an original tradition or an orthodox doctrine.”64 Although Tannaim and Amoraim were not particularly concerned with the question of who wrote Lamentations, in assigning pseudo-historical authorship to Jeremiah they stressed the continuity of Lamentations with the “orthodox” understanding of theodicy. Jeremiah and Lamentations, at least according to rabbinic sources, each sustained the view that Israel would ultimately be redeemed because their sins were punished appropriately by a merciful judge. Jeremiah’s role as pseudo-historical author of Lamentations was, then, secured by its tremendous exegetical utility: “The pseudo-historical author does not create anything and is not the cause of a text; he functions rather as one of the causes of the understanding an audience derives from a text insofar as he regulates and influences the understanding an audience derives from it.”65 In order to understand rabbinic readings of Lamentations, a character sketch of Jeremiah is necessary. Who was the Jeremiah the rabbis understood composed Lamentations?

63 Donald E. Gowan, Theology of the Prophetic Books: The Death and Resurrection of Israel (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1998), 98–117. 64 Anthony Grafton, Forgers and Critics: Creativity and Duplicity in Western Scholarship (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 6. Grafton’s view stands in contrast to contemporary biblical studies’ preoccupation with questions of authorship, particularly with regard to the assumption that texts gain authority based on an assigned authorship. For an overview see Hindy Najman, Seconding Sinai. Supplements to the Journal for the Study of Judaism 77 (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 1–16. For additional concern with the authorship-authority entanglement see A. J. Berkowitz and Mark Lettany, “Authority in Contemporary Historiography,” and A. J. Berkowitz, “Beyond Attribution and Authority,” in idem, Rethinking ‘Authority’ in Late Antiquity. Routledge Monographs in Classical Studies (London: Routledge, 2018), 1–16 and 57–77. 65 Gracia, “A Theory of the Author,” 170.

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Jeremiah: A Rabbinic Character Sketch Jewish exegesis of Lamentations is directly related to the rabbinic perception of Jeremiah and is refracted through the lens of the rabbis’ descriptions of the character and personality of the assumed author.66 The attribution of the Book of Lamentations to Jeremiah helped qualify its contents in the same way the rabbinic attribution of the Book of Job to Moses (b. B. Bat. 14b) helped to soften and qualify its apparent theological rebelliousness.67 Just as Jeremiah 1:5 highlights that God assigned Jeremiah the task of the prophet before he was conceived, some rabbis found in Jeremiah’s name a portent of his role in revealing Lamentations. Braude argues that in the midrash that follows from Pesiqta de-Rav Kahana 13:8, the sages use a Greek etymology for the name Jeremiah, erēmos, void or destitute, to ground the interpretation:68 A Another interpretation [of the name] Jeremiah [The words of Jeremiah (Jer 1:1–13)]: B It69 is the lamentation of desolation [that is coming] . . .  C [Thus] how does this sit solitary? (Lam 1:1). How in his anger has he covered himself with a cloud? (Lam 2:1) How is the gold become dim? (Lam 4:1)70 According to rabbinic sources Jeremiah was a second Moses.71 Pesiqta de Rav Kahana 13:6 records: 66 For a more extensive discussion of Jeremiah through rabbinic eyes see Tomes, “The Reception of Jeremiah in Rabbinic Literature and in the Targum”; Neusner, Rabbi Jeremiah; Neusner, Jeremiah in Talmud and Midrash: A Source Book; and Levy, “Jeremiah Interpreted: A Rabbinic Analysis of the Prophet.” The most extensive survey of Jeremiah in rabbinic sources is found in Wieder, “Jeremiah in Aggadic Literature.” Alan Cooper reviews Lamentations in medieval and early modern Jewish sources in “The Message of Lamentations,” Journal of the Ancient Near Eastern Society 28 (2001): 1–18. 67 The rabbis were quite uncomfortable with the Book of Job. The book strongly suggests that a righteous person can suffer at the hand of God without justification. To bring the book in line with the theology of reward and punishment as laid out in the Pentateuch, the rabbis accused Job of a variety of sins demonstrating that his suffering was actually a divine punishment. See the sources in note 9 above. 68 William G. Braude and Israel J. Kapstein, Pesikta De-Rab Kahana: R. Kahana’s Compilation of Discourses for Sabbaths and Festal Days (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975), 225. 69 I.e., his name. 70 Jacob Neusner, ed., Pesiqta DeRab Kahana: An Analytical Translation, vol. 1. Brown Judaic Studies 122 (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1987), 225. This translation is used here in place of Braude and Kapstein because it attempts to translate what the other book paraphrases and summarizes. Compare Braude and Kapstein, Pesikta De-Rab Kahana: R. Kahana’s Compilation of Discourses for Sabbaths and Festal Days, 257. 71 The Book of Jeremiah is the only identifiably pre-exilic biblical text to explicitly cite Moses (Jer 15:1).

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In addition to the biographical similarities, Wieder has documented a rabbinic attempt to present Moses and Jeremiah as prophets who bookend a divinely determined historical sequence: The desert wanderings leading to the conquest of Israel is connected to the destruction of the Temple and the exile (see midrash on Psalms 36:7; PRK 13, 115b, and PRK 16, 121b).73 In accepting Jeremiah as a second Moses or a replacement for Moses rabbinic sources were heirs to a Jewish exegetical tradition with roots in the Second Temple period wherein a variety of sources parallel the two men as Torah instructors and intercessors on behalf of Israel.74 In equating Moses and Jeremiah the rabbis likewise equated the works attributed to them. Thus, for the rabbis, the theology expressed in Lamentations and Jeremiah must be compatible with, or even better, the same as, that which underlies the Torah. In describing the theology of Lamentations Rabbah, the most extensive rabbinic commentary on this material, Jacob Neusner has noted, “Deuteronomy and Jeremiah spell out the covenantal theology that accounts for Israel’s fate, both prospective, as in the closing remarks of Moses in Deuteronomy 33–34, and at the present age, as in Jeremiah’s theology of Israel’s coming disaster.”75 That theology relies on the classical rabbinic view that 72 Braude and Kapstein, Pesikta De-Rab Kahana: R. Kahana’s Compilation of Discourses for Sabbaths and Festal Days, 256–57. 73 Wieder, “Jeremiah in Aggadic Literature,” 110. 74 Davis, “Re-Presentation and Emerging Authority of the Jeremiah Traditions in Second Temple Judaism,” 194–95. 75 Jacob Neusner, “Lamentations in Lamentations Rabbati,” in The Encyclopaedia of Midrash, ed. Jacob Neusner and Alan J. Avery-Peck, vol. 1 (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 374.

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following God’s ways leads to reward and sin leads to punishment.76 Rabbinic sources attest that this theology, evident to them in Lamentations, operated on both individual and communal levels. Concerning the individual, Leviticus Rabbah 15:4 (cf. y. Shabbat 16:1/15c) records, Rabbi and R. Ishmael b. Jose were engaged in the study of the Scroll of Lamentations on the eve of the [Fast of the] Ninth of Ab which fell on a Sabbath, when it was growing dark, from Minḥah-time onwards, and omitted one alphabetical chapter, saying: We shall complete it tomorrow. When Rabbi left he suffered injury to his little finger, and applied to himself that passage, viz., ‘Many are the sufferings of the wicked.’ [Said R. Hiyya to him: ‘For our sins has this happened to you, as it is written, The breath of our nostril, the anointed of the Lord, was caught for their corrupt deeds’ (Lam IV, 20).]77 R. Ishmael b. R. Jose said to him: ‘Even had we not been engaged on this passage, I would have said so; now that we have been engaged thereon, there is so much the more reason to say so.’ With regard to communal sin and punishment, Galit Hasan Rokem claims that “Because they sinned, they were exiled; because they were exiled Jeremiah . . . ​ began to lament over them, Eikha” serves as the “motto” of Lamentation Rabbah’s proems.78 In fact, this idea is reinforced in the vast majority of rabbinic exegesis of Lamentations. Neusner concludes that the rabbinic interpretation of Lamentations repeatedly registers just a handful of theological propositions. All of them derive from Deuteronomy and Jeremiah. They comprise a systematic instantiation of the theodicy implicit in Deuteronomy and Jeremiah, that what happens to Israel happens by God’s plan and is meant to provoke the response of repentance for the sins of rebellion against the covenant that have brought about the present calamity. What [the rabbinic interpretation of Lamentations] does is patiently repeat in concrete terms that governing principle, justifying God’s actions in destroying the Temple in 586/70 and deriving from those events hope that Israel has the power to

76 For discussion of rabbinic understandings of divine reward and punishment see David Kraemer, Responses to Suffering in Classical Rabbinic Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), and Neusner, “Theodicy in Judaism.” 77 The insertion follows the parallel text on y. Shabbat 16:1/15c. 78 Galit Hasan-Rokem, Web of Life: Folklore and Midrash in Rabbinic Literature. Contraversions (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 13. For additional discussion of this “motto” see Shaye Cohen, who notes that this refrain ends fourteen of Lamentation Rabbah’s thirty-six proems. (“The Destruction: From Scripture to Midrash,” Prooftexts 2, no. 1 [1982]: 26.)

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The rabbis understood that the key to properly interpreting Lamentations was to harmonize it with Moses’s Torah. To give this a basis in fact, they attributed it to an author who they had accepted was cast from Moses’s mold. The theological difficulties with Lamentations posed in rabbinic sources are exemplified in texts which connect the Torah and Lamentations and therefore Moses and Jeremiah. According to Lamentations Rabbah 1:1, HOW (EKAH) DOTH THE CITY SIT SOLITARY! (I, 1). Three uttered prophecies using the word ekah, viz. Moses, Isaiah, and Jeremiah. Moses said, How can I myself alone bear your cumbrance! (Deut I, 12). Isaiah said, How is the faithful city become a harlot! (Isa I, 21). Jeremiah said, HOW DOTH THE CITY SIT SOLITARY! . . .  [The disciples] requested Ben ‘Azzai saying, ‘Master, expound to us something connected with the Book of Lamentations.’ He said to them: ‘Israel did not go into exile until they had repudiated the Divine Unity, circumcision which had been given to the twentieth generation, the Decalogue, and the Pentateuch. Whence have we this? From the letters constituting the word ekah.’ In this passage, Jeremiah is cast alongside Isaiah and Moses as one of only three men who legitimately asked, HOW? Moses’s “how” comes at the beginning of Israelite engagement with divine law. Isaiah’s “how” comes in the midst of Israelite waywardness. Jeremiah’s “how” testifies to the fall of the community. Similarly, Moses and Jeremiah are set as bookends on the Israelite narrative concerning the road to Jerusalem and the exile therefrom: Moses gave the Pentateuch and the Decalogue through which the Israelites sustained Jerusalem and Jeremiah attests to the city’s fall. The later rabbinic text, Pesiqta Rabbati 29/30, completely intertwines the Torah and Lamentations, Another comment: How doth the city sit solitary – forsaken! The entire world is astonished at her: Wherefore is the Land perished, and laid waste like a wilderness, so that none passeth through? And the Lord saith: Because they have forsaken My law (Jer 9:11–12). Here God speaks like the king who so loved his son that he made a golden necklace for him and hung 79 Jacob Neusner, A Theological Commentary to the Midrash: Lamentations Rabbati, vol. 5. Studies in Ancient Judaism (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2001), 111–12. For an overview of Lamentations Rabbah and its exegetical program see Jacob Neusner, “Lamentations Rabbati,” in Great is Thy Faithfulness, ed. Robin A. Parry and Heath A. Thomas (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2011), 77–82.

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it upon his neck. It was not long before the son made the father angry. Thereupon the father took away the necklace and made chains for his son and put them upon his son’s feet. Likewise the Holy One, blessed be He, made the letters of the Torah into a necklace and hung it about the neck of Israel, as it is said For they shall be a chaplet of grace unto thy head, and chains about thy neck (Prov 1:9); She will give to thy head a chaplet of grace; a crown of glory will she bestow on thee (Prov 4:9). But it was not long before the children of Israel forsook the Torah, as is said They forsook My Torah and rejected it (Jer 6:19). Thereupon He arranged the [twenty-two] letters of Torah into acrostics to indicate the grievious events befalling Israel, [the first acrostic beginning with ’alef, the first letter of the verse] How doth the city sit solitary!  80 Here Lamentations is presented as an inversion of the Torah. Lamentations binds Israel’s feet as the Torah once adorned her neck. In both instances the specific wording of the text was a divine statement in need of a prophet to share the message. In the case of Lamentations the same passage from Pesiqta Rabbati makes clear that the text chose Jeremiah: “What did the scroll of Lamentations see in Jeremiah that made it ascribe itself to him?”81 According to this passage, the choice was made based on the tradition already present in Mekilta Pisha 1 which describes the kind of prophet Jeremiah was. According to Mekilta, there are three types of prophets. One defends God and Israel; another defends God but not Israel, the third Israel but not God. Jeremiah was of the first type: Jeremiah insisted upon both the honour due the Father and the honour due the son. For thus it is said, “We have transgressed and have rebelled; Thou hast not pardoned” (Lam 3:42). Therefore his prophecy was doubled, as it is said: And there were added besides unto them many words.” (Jer 36:2)82 80 William G. Braude, Pesikta Rabbati: Discourses for Feasts, Fasts, and Special Sabbaths. Yale Judaica Series 18 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1968), 2:568–69. 81 Braude, Pesikta Rabbati, 2:569. 82 Lauterbach, Mekilta de-Rabbi Ishmael, 1:8–9. Bryna Levy has argued that this notion of being empathetic both to God and Israel is core to understanding the rabbinic presentation of Jeremiah. Classically, the triadic relationship between prophet, people, and God is clear. The prophet’s calling is established by God, and relates to the situation of his people. In the case of Jeremiah, the mechanism is different. His all-consuming empathy and hence his effectiveness as a prophet removes all barriers and allows him, or perhaps forces him, to identify powerfully with his people and/or with the Lord. (“Jeremiah Interpreted: A Rabbinic Analysis of the Prophet,” 66.) For Levy, these conflicting loyalties make for a conflicted prophet. That the rabbis were equally conflicted about their role as mediators of the divine word for Israel may explain their particular interest in Jeremiah. Like Jeremiah, who was forced to deal with the community after the destruction of the Temple cult, they understood themselves as functioning in similar

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Pesiqta Rabbati in point of fact reverses the logic of the much earlier text of the Mekhilta. Although the Mekilta presents Lamentations as proof that Jeremiah honored Israel and God, Pesiqta Rabbati suggests Jeremiah already behaved this way and God inspired him to write Lamentations as a reward. From the perspective of Pesiqta Rabbati the doubling of prophecy included the Books of Jeremiah and Lamentations. With regard to the specific issue of Lamentations inverting the Torah and choosing who would reveal it to Israel, in this sense Jeremiah matched Moses and revealed a text to Israel which offered Torah inverted. Roger Tomes has suggested the passage from Pesiqta Rabbati establishes that the rabbis were not of one mind in attributing the work to Jeremiah.83 If the rabbis could ask why the scroll ascribed itself to Jeremiah, they must have assumed that it could have been assigned to someone else. It is not clear that any rabbi necessarily had an alternative to present or even wanted to ascribe the book to another prophet, but rabbinic sages could imagine the book being ascribed to another and having to justify the ascription to Jeremiah. At least for Pesiqta Rabbati the idea that Jeremiah had to be the author of Lamentations (or the prophet who revealed it) was not taken for granted. The fact that so many of the early Bible versions and early rabbinic sources ascribe the book to Jeremiah suggests that later generations of rabbis did not have an entirely free choice in perpetuating this view, but clearly some thought the issue merited discussion. The inversion of the Torah in Lamentations and Jeremiah as Moses’s flipside appears in a number of texts but is perhaps most clearly presented in Pesiqta de-Rav Kahana 13:13. In this text verses attributed to Moses (largely the priestly benediction) which point to the glory of the past are counter-balanced by Jeremiah’s utterances in the books of Jeremiah and Lamentations showing circumstances. On the place of the Temple’s destruction in rabbinic thought see Baruch M. Bokser, “Rabbinic Responses to Catastrophe: From Continuity to Discontinuity,” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 50 (1983): 37–61; Cohen, “The Destruction”; Robert Goldenberg, “Early Rabbinic Explanations of the Destruction of Jerusalem,” Journal of Jewish Studies 33 (1982): 517–25; Dalia Marx, “The Missing Temple: The Status of the Temple in Jewish Culture Following Its Destruction,” European Judaism 46, no. 2 (2013): 61–78; David William Nelson, “Responses to the Destruction of the Second Temple in the Tannaitic Midrashim.” PhD diss., New York University, 1991; Jacob Neusner, How Important Was the Destruction of the Second Temple in the Formation of Rabbinic Judaism? (Lanham, MD: UPA, 2005). More recent discussion of the destruction and its impact on the thought of the rabbis distinguished by location (Palestine vs Babylonia), time (Tannaim and Amoraim), and genre (midrashic volumes and the talmudic literature) can be found in Paul Mandel, “The Loss of Center: Changing Attitudes towards the Temple in Aggadic Literature,” The Harvard Theological Review 99, no. 1 (2006): 17–35, and Dina Stein, “Collapsing Structures: Discourse and the Destruction of the Temple in the Babylonian Talmud,” The Jewish Quarterly Review 98, no. 1 (2008): 1–28. 83 Tomes, “The Reception of Jeremiah in Rabbinic Literature and in the Targum,” 235.

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desolation and destruction. Again, this passage is significant because the words of Lamentations are put directly in Jeremiah’s mouth. 13. Of (min) the priests that were in Anathoth (Jer 1:1) By min, “of,” in the phrase Of the priests that were in Anathoth, Jeremiah meant, according to R. Berechiah: Among the priests my name is deprived of the respect due it. In the days of Moses, priests were told to say, “The Lord bless thee” (Num 6:24); but in my days, said Jeremiah, I am told “Of them shall be taken up a curse” (Jer 29:22). In the days of Moses, priests were told to say, “and keep thee” (Num 6:24); but in my days, said Jeremiah, I am told “Such as are for death, to death” (Jer 15:2). In the days of Moses, “The Lord make His face to shine upon thee” (Num 6:25); but in my days, “He hath made me to dwell in dark places as those do that have been long dead” (Lam 3:6). In the days of Moses, “and be gracious unto thee” (Num 6:25); but in my days, “I will show you no favor” (Jer 16:13), [said God]. In the days of Moses, “The Lord lift up His countenance upon Thee” (Num 6: 26); but in my days, “A nation of fierce countenance, that shall not regard the person of the old, nor show favor to the young” (Deut 28:50). In the days of Moses, “and give thee peace” (Num 6:26); but in my days, “I have taken away My peace from this people, saith the Lord, even mercy and compassion.” (Jer 16:5)84 The identification of Jeremiah as a prophet encouraged rabbinic harmonizing and also allowed rabbinic sources to present Lamentations as if it spoke concerning future events. These same sources suggest that the rabbis were most concerned about the destruction of the Second Temple at the hands of Rome, but also found in Lamentations references to the messianic era. In these two matters, the rabbinic exegesis is consistent throughout.85 Neusner sees it in Lamentations Rabbah. Alexander finds it in the Targum to Lamentations: Two axioms would have dominated his [the Targumist’s] approach to the text. The first would have been that the text was saying the same thing in all its various parts . . . ​This urge to harmonize would have been driven not only by his doctrine of Scripture but also by his belief that Lamentations was the work of a single author, Jeremiah . . . 

84 Braude and Kapstein, Pesikta De-Rab Kahana: R. Kahana’s Compilation of Discourses for Sabbaths and Festal Days, 263. 85 Gwaltney’s conclusion that Lamentations Rabbah does not use the type of prophecy-fulfillment exegesis so prevalent in the Targum to Lamentations is most certainly overstated. See William C. Gwaltney, Jr., “Lamentations,” in Dictionary of Biblical Interpretation, ed. John H. Hayes, vol. 2 (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1999), 46.

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There is a second axiom that would have influenced how our Targumist read the biblical text: this was the need to universalize it and to apply it to the present . . . ​It would have seemed totally natural to him to find allusions in the text of Lamentations to the destruction of the Second Temple as well as the first (after all, Jeremiah, its author, was a prophet) . . . 86 In accepting Jeremiah’s authorship the rabbis could frame a meaningful response to the calamities of their own time. Jeremiah did not speak of a horrific event like the one the rabbis were facing, but addressed the specific calamity which confronted them. Simultaneously, and perhaps more importantly, they could do away with theological difficulties raised by Lamentations.

The Solution to the Problems of Lamentations: Jeremiah First and foremost, adopting Jeremiah as author meant that the rabbis could read the Book of Lamentations in light of the Book of Jeremiah. They assumed that the theological positions distilled from Lamentations and Jeremiah should therefore be consistent.87 Jack Lundbom describes the theology of the Book of Jeremiah as follows: Behind all of Jeremiah’s talk about sin and judgment lies a broken covenant. Jeremiah prayed that Yahweh on his part would not break the covenant (14:21); nevertheless it was broken and Israel bore the responsibility (2:20; 5:5; 11:10; etc.). Yahweh was innocent of any wrongdoing (2:5, 31). It is the people and the nation’s leaders who no longer “know” Yahweh (2:8; 4:22; 9:2 – Eng 9:3; 9:5 – Eng 9:6; cf. Hos 4:1), where knowing Yahweh means “knowing his way” (5:4–5), “knowing his ordinances” (8:7), and doing justice to the poor and needy (22:16). When Jeremiah talks then about the knowledge of Yahweh, he is talking about compliance with covenant stipulations.88 In light of this description of the Book of Jeremiah, how should those cynical and rebellious passages in Lamentations be understood? How does knowing 86 Alexander, The Targum of Lamentations: Translated with Introduction, Apparatus and Notes, 24. Alexander does not take the issue of harmonizing quite far enough. Yes, all the parts of Lamentations need to be harmonized, but so did all the works of Jeremiah including Lamentations. See similarly Christian M. M. Brady, “Targum Lamentations,” in Great is Thy Faithfulness, ed. Parry and Thomas, 72. Whether the Book of Lamentations is an anthology of texts or a consistent whole, the work of a single individual or group of authors, remain issues for modern scholarship. See, for example, Renkema, Lamentations, 44–50. 87 Lauterbach, Mekilta De-Rabbi Ishmael, 1:9. 88 Jack R. Lundbom, “Jeremiah, Book of,” in Anchor Bible Dictionary, vol. 3, ed. David Noel Freedman (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 718.

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that a prophet like Moses composed Lamentations change how the reader understands these challenges to the deity and the allegations against him? For a general statement, turning to Lamentations Rabbah 4:25 is helpful: “The Rabbis said:89 Better was the Book of Lamentations for Israel than the forty years during which Jeremiah inveighed against them. Why? Because in it Israel received full settlement for their iniquities on the day the Temple was destroyed. That is what is written, THE PUNISHMENT OF THINE INIQUITY IS ACCOMPLISHED, O DAUGHTER OF ZION.” The text here turns the problematic Book of Lamentations into the best of the works attributable to Jeremiah. Wieder understands this text to mean that the tradent “evaluates Jeremiah on the basis of his contribution to the improvement of Israel’s ‘legal position’ in relation to God. Writing Lamentations was ‘better’ than all the forty years of Jeremiah’s prophetic activity, for by it a ‘proof of settlement’ was given to Israel for his debt incurred by sin.” 90 This reading is reasonable, but the text does not say it was better for Israel that Jeremiah wrote Lamentations. What the text wishes to convey is that God’s persecution of Israel as documented in Lamentations contributed more to the Israelites’ turn to Him than all of Jeremiah’s reproof of them. What Jeremiah could not accomplish in forty years was accomplished by God in one fell swoop. This is evident from the earlier part of this midrash wherein the pharaoh’s persecution of the Israelites was more valuable in leading to their freedom than Moses’s protests, and Ahaseurus’s evil decree more valuable to the freedom of Persia’s Jews than the protestations of prophets. If the prophet’s admonition does not encourage Israel to change, then redemption requires that Israel bear the necessary punishment. This understanding of Lamentations through a Jeremiac lens is well grounded in the narrative of Jeremiah 12–15. The first chapters declare explicitly that God will destroy his people and Jerusalem for their sins. In 15:1 God promises that even if Moses and Samuel were to intercede on Israel’s behalf God would not be moved. However, He ultimately promises Jeremiah that after Israel has born her punishment, He will spare a remnant for a better fate (Jer 15:11). At the core here is the parallel between the awesome destruction of the people of Israel and Jerusalem which Lamentations testifies to and the fulfillment of the terrible prophecy of Jeremiah. In contrast to Lamentations though, the awesome punishment is not total annihilation; a glimmer of hope is preserved for restoration, for a better fate for some. As such, rabbinic sources understood Lamentations as sharing in the promise made to Jeremiah.

89 The Buber edition (Midrash Eicha Rabba, 154) identifies the tradent as Ishmael bar Nachman. 90 Wieder, “Jeremiah in Aggadic Literature,” 95.

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Lamentations 1:1: “Eikhah?” The rabbinic attitude to Jeremiah as a unique prophet carries through the Jewish exegetical tradition. Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, the voice of American Modern Orthodox Jews for a significant part of the twentieth century, noted in a public lecture for the holiday of Tisha b’Av that the Book of Lamentations, spoken by Jeremiah through divine influence, is the sole model for asking the question eikhah (How): A special license is granted Keneset Yisrael [the congregation of Israel] that allows them to ask eikhah on Tish’ah be-Av because Jeremiah wrote a book in the biblical canon that begins with the word eikhah . . . ​If Jeremiah had not written the Book of Eikhah [Lamentations] with divine inspiration, we would have been enjoined from asking the question eikhah.91 The discomfort Soloveitchik points to with the idea of challenging God – How could God allow this? How could God do this to us? – is certainly not novel and is already evident in early rabbinic sources. But, as Moshe Halbertal has remarked, this is not a “how” followed by a question mark but the “how” of protest, In the opening [of the] Scroll of Lamentations the Eikhah is . . . ​used by way of contrast: “How lonely sits the city, once great with people.” If the city hadn’t once been great with people, the sting of the bewildered cry – “how lonely” – would have been much less painful. It is the contrast that situates the lamenter in the stance of bewildered outrage, or perhaps bewildered brokenness.92 Soloveitchik correctly adduces that by putting the word in Jeremiah’s mouth it is in essence removed from general usage. In rabbinic sources, the use of the term is restricted to prophets with a rare exception. According to Lamentations Rabbah 1:1, HOW (EKAH) DOTH THE CITY SIT SOLITARY! (I, 1). Three uttered prophecies using the word ekah, viz. Moses, Isaiah, and Jeremiah . . . 93 91 Joseph Dov Soloveitchik, The Lord Is Righteous in All His Ways: Reflections on the Tish’ah Be-Av Kinot, ed. Jacob J. Schacter (Jersey City, NJ: Toras HoRav Foundation and KTAV, 2006), 89. 92 Moshe Halbertal, “Lament in Jewish Thought: Philosophical, Theological, and Literary Perspectives,” in Lament in Jewish Thought: Philosophical, Theological, and Literary Perspectives, ed. Ilit Ferber and Paula Schwebel (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2014), 4. 93 The three men are frequently grouped in rabbinic sources related to Lamentations. Whether this explains the choice of liturgical readings for Tisha b’Av or resulted from their selection is unclear, but the connection between liturgical practice and midrashic exegesis is quite evident in Pesikta deRav Kahana’s homilies for the day (Piskas 13–22). The earliest attestation to the

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R. Levi said: It may be likened to a matron who had had three groomsmen: one beheld her in her happiness, a second beheld her in her infidelity, and the third beheld her in her disgrace. Similarly, Moses beheld Israel in their glory and happiness and exclaimed, ‘How can I myself alone bear your cumbrance!’ Isaiah beheld them in their infidelity and exclaimed, ‘How is the faithful city become a harlot!’ Jeremiah beheld them in their disgrace and exclaimed, HOW DOTH THE CITY SIT SOLITARY! The text specifically notes that the prophets not only uttered the word eikhah but did so in the act of prophesying. The use of the questions is restricted to figures like Moses and Jeremiah who hold specific standing vis-à-vis God. Further, since prophesy is about conveying a message from God to the people rather than the reverse, any hesitancy the audience might have had about accepting a text that opened in this way would have been nullified. More important however, is a tradition found with minor variations in Genesis Rabbah 19.9, Lamentations Rabbah Petihta 4, Pesiqta de-Rav Kahana 15:1, and b. Sanhedrin 104a, that makes clear that the word eikhah is uniquely uttered by God to mourn for his people. God is the lamenter who cries out in “bewildered outrage.” According to Genesis Rabbah 19:9, R. Abbahu said in the name of R. Jose b. R. Hanina: It is written, But they are like a man (Adam), they have transgressed the covenant (Hos VI, 7). ‘They are like a man (Adam)’ means like Adam: just as I led Adam into the garden of Eden and commanded him, and he transgressed My commandment, whereupon I punished him by dismissal and expulsion, and bewailed him with ekah (how)! . . .  So also did I bring his descendants into Eretz Israel and command them, and they transgressed My commandment, and I punished them by sending them away and expelling them, and I bewailed them with ekah! I brought them into Eretz Israel, as it is written, And I brought you into a land of fruitful fields (Jer II, 7); I commanded them: And thou shalt command the children of Israel (Exod XXVII, 20), also, Command the children of Israel (Lev XXIV, 2); they transgressed My command: Yea, all Israel have transgressed Thy law (Dan IX, 11); I ruled that they should be sent away: Send them away out of my sight, and let them go forth (Jer XV, 1); by expulsion: I will drive them out of My house (Hos IX,

liturgical cycle for the festival dates to fifth- or sixth-century Palestine. On the intersection of liturgical practice for Tisha b’Av and biblical interpretation see Elsie R. Stern, From Rebuke to Consolation: Exegesis and Theology in the Liturgical Anthology of the Ninth of Av Season. Brown Judaic Studies 338 (Providence, RI: Brown Judaic Studies, 2004).

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15); and I bewailed them with ekah: Ekah (how) doth the city sit solitary. (Lam I, 1) The comparison between the Land and the Garden is remarkable. Where Adam was cast from Eden for transgressing a single command, do not eat the fruit, Israel was not exiled until the people had broken every rule from Alef to Tav. Who was Israel to complain that the punishment was incommensurate with the sin? This midrash likewise testifies to a divine pattern of not abandoning the people even after they are exiled: Adam did not return to Eden, but his descendants did not live without divine providence. God does not punish Adam or Israel with any pleasure; in both cases the punishment leads to the deepest of divine laments. Equally remarkable is the rabbinic debate that follows about the precise nature of these laments. In Pesiqta de-Rav Kahana 15:4 two alternative understandings are presented. The first suggests that the banishments of Adam and the Israelites are like a parable of a king with two sons. He beats and banishes the first, and then the second, recognizing that he, as their father, is in part to blame for their banishment. In the alternate parable the king beats and kills the first son, and does the same to the second. In the second example, God is presented as having to acknowledge, not just that the punishment was severe, but that it cannot be undone. The eikhah cried is not for having to administer the punishment but for the loss created by having gone too far. From this perspective the Jews, following the destruction of the Second Temple, are a third son. Their hope is that the king has learned a lesson from the deaths of the previous children, because, as Pesiqta de-Rav Kahana 15 comments, “the Holy One – if one dare say such a thing of Him – cried out: I have not strength left to mourn for these two.”94 The homily in Pesiqta de-Rav Kahana 15:4 ends with a third parable which mimics the second, The Rabbis told a parable of a king who had twelve sons. When two died, he proceeded to comfort himself with the ten left. When two more died, he comforted himself with the eight left. When two more died, he comforted himself with the six left. When two more died, he comforted himself with the four left. When two more died he comforted himself with the two left. But when all of them were dead, it was then he began mourning for them all: how doth [the Presence] sit solitary. (Lam 1:1)95 These sources challenge precisely whose Lamentations these are. They convey quite clearly that Lamentations is a divinely composed book shared by Jeremiah 94 Braude and Kapstein, Pesikta De-Rab Kahana: R. Kahana’s Compilation of Discourses for Sabbaths and Festal Days, 277. 95 Braude and Kapstein, 278.

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but not precisely authored by him. His authorship as described in b. Bava Batra is a rabbinic attempt to confirm the book’s status as divinely revealed. Further, Lamentations Rabbah 1:1 raises the question of whether eikhah is intended as rebuke or lament: R. Judah and R. Nehemiah comment. R. Judah says: “The word ‘ekah’ implies nothing else than reproof; as it is stated, How (ekah) do ye say: We are wise, and the Law of the Lord is with us? (Jer VIII, 8). R. Nehemiah says: The word ‘ekah’ implies nothing else than lament; as it is stated, And the Lord God called unto the man, and said unto him: Where art thou – ayyekah? (Gen III, 9), meaning, ‘woe unto thee’ (oi lekah). This source likewise relies on the wordplay between ayyekah and eikhah found in the previous source. It recognizes that the word eikhah is restricted to God’s use, and that God can use the term in two different ways. Certainly the former texts about Adam and Israel make up the bulk of the tradition, but Lamentations Rabbah 1:1 does evidence rabbinic concern that consolation is ended and only rebuke remains. However, since the same texts assure the readers that the Book of Jeremiah’s rebukes are counterbalanced by Lamentations’ consolations, the reader can take away that just as Adam’s exile did not prohibit his descendants from maintaining a relationship with God, those exiled to Babylonia, or who would escape to Egypt, would likewise have future restoration.

Lamentations 2:5: “The Lord has acted as a foe . . . ” With regard to the first passage in question, the identified tradents used a hyper-literal reading of the text to blunt the charge that the Lord had become Israel’s enemy.96 That they were troubled by the verse is evidenced by the fact of the midrash itself. Had they not been concerned, the midrash would be irrelevant. Lamentations Rabbah 2:9 records: THE LORD IS BECOME AS AN ENEMY (II, 5). R. Aibu said: They [the Israelites] did not go to the extreme of rebellion against the Attribute of Justice, and the Attribute of Justice did not go to the extreme in punishing them. They did not go to the extreme of rebellion against the Attribute of Justice, as it is written, ‘And the people were as murmurers’ (Num XI, 1) – ‘murmurers’ is not written here but ‘as murmurers’. ‘The princes of Judah are like them that remove the landmark’ (Hos V, 10) – ‘remove’ is not written here but ‘like them that remove’. ‘For Israel is like a stubborn heifer’ (ibid. IV, 96 On rabbinic hyper-literalism see B. Barry Levy, Targum Neophyti One: A Textual Study: Introduction, Genesis, Exodus, vol. 1. Studies in Judaism (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1986), 133–37,

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16) – ‘is a stubborn heifer’ is not written here but ‘is like a stubborn heifer’. Similarly the Attribute of Justice did not go to the extreme in punishing them, for it is written, THE LORD IS BECOME AS AN ENEMY – ‘the Lord is become an enemy is not written here’ but AS AN ENEMY. Clearly it would be sinful to declare God an enemy of Israel, but a close reading of the verse indicates that, at least according to R. Aibu, Jeremiah made no such accusation. God is like an enemy who destroys a city in war, but, unlike a foreign army, God acts out of justice. Note that had Israel rebelled completely it would have been completely destroyed, but God acted mercifully and with justification in punishing Israel for its transgressions. As an enemy is no more than a simile to indicate the intensity of the destruction. Further, a rabbinic teaching in the Mekilta (Shirata) makes clear that it is the people’s actions which caused God to act in this way: “But when the Israelites fail to do God’s will He fights against them, as it is said: ‘Therefore He was turned to be their enemy, Himself fought against them’ (Isa 63.10). And, what is more, they make the Merciful One cruel, as it is said: ‘The Lord is become as an enemy’ (Lam 2.5).” 97 A rabbinic hyperliteral reading of the verse does not require the assumption that Jeremiah authored the text. However, in this reading, like that of the Mekilta, Jeremiah honors the father and the son. In acting as an enemy God has not exceeded his capacity for mercy; in their sinfulness Israel has not exceeded its capacity for repentance and loyalty. Each is left with integrity. Lamentations Rabbah’s frequent acknowledgement of Jeremiah’s role in composing Lamentations thus sets a foundation for the exegesis that follows from it.

Lamentations 2:20–22: “Alas, women eat their own fruit, their newborn babes . . . ” Rabbinic sources attest to appropriate concern with the idea of God causing women to devour their own children. In order to resolve the problems in Lamentations 2:20–22, these sources transformed what appears to be a soliloquy into a dialogue, taking words out of Jeremiah’s mouth and placing them in the mouth of the Shekhinah (i.e., the mouth of God). Both the Babylonian Talmud and Lamentations Rabbah discuss a specific case of a mother eating her offspring. According to the former, the mother of Doeg ben Joseph was 97 Lauterbach, Mekilta De-Rabbi Ishmael, 2:41–42. Midrash Tanḥuma Beḥukotai includes a similar statement: “Now I was called (in Exod 34:6): A MERCIFUL AND GRACIOUS GOD, SLOW TO ANGER, but through their sins I have become cruel and changed my nature, as stated (in Lam 2:5): THE LORD HAS BECOME LIKE AN ENEMY.” (John T. Townsend, Midrash Tanḥuma. Volume 2: Exodus and Leviticus [Hoboken, NJ: KTAV, 1997], 360.)

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forced to eat him after the destruction of the Temple (b. Yoma 38b). According to the latter, the widow of Doeg ben Joseph was compelled to consume their son. In both cases, the parallel texts take what are general statements in the Bible and make them specific. B. Yoma 38b uses Lamentations 2:20–22 to script a conversation between Jeremiah and God about this particular case: Rabina raised an objection: The story of Doeg b. Joseph whom his father left to his mother when he was a young child: Every day his mother would measure him by handbreadths and would give his weight in gold to Heaven [She dedicated the gold to the service of God in the Temple]. And when the enemy prevailed, she slaughtered him and ate him, and concerning her Jeremiah lamented: Shall the women eat their fruit, their children that are handled in the hands? Whereupon the Holy Spirit replied: Shall the priest and the prophet be slain in the Sanctuary of the Lord? – See what happened to him.98 Here the theology is perfectly consistent with deuteronomistic and rabbinic worldviews. Although the widow was herself righteous, she was punished as part of a sinful community. In reading Lamentations 2:20–22 in as straightforward a manner as possible, it appears as a series of two questions, asked by a single orator in sequence: (1) Why should women have to cannibalize their young, and, (2) why should the priests and prophets be killed in the sanctuary? In other words, why should the invasion of the Babylonians, who were functioning as tools of divine punishment, create this situation? However, rabbinic sources present the first question as belonging to Jeremiah and the second as God’s reply; God answered Jeremiah’s question with a question. The communal suffering is explained as resulting from the people of Israel having created circumstances in which God’s loyal servants could be harmed and killed. According to the Lamentations Rabbah text, God’s statement refers to the death of Zechariah the son of Jehoiada. According to 2 Chronicles 24, during the reign of J(eh)oash King of Judah (ca. 835–801) the people began to leave the Temple of God to serve foreign deities. God sent prophets – just which ones is ambiguous – and His spirit came upon the priest Zechariah, the son of Jehoiada, who chastised the people (who should not be confused with the prophet Zechariah for whom the biblical book is named). In response, they stoned him to death in the Temple courtyard. The rabbinic text thus attributed the destruction of the Temple and the suffering of the community to an accumulation of transgressions by the community over centuries, as Zechariah 98 Italics added. Although the tale stands alone in the Talmud, in Lamentations Rabbah it is included among a series of martyrologies. For discussion of its significance see Hasan-Rokem, Web of Life, 119–20.

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perished more than two hundred years before the Temple’s destruction. The implication is that God had likewise acted mercifully for centuries. Over and over God showed mercy, but this time He reacted with justice. Accordingly, various rabbinic sources depict a scenario in which Jeremiah’s response to God’s question is more a description of the deity’s actions and a request for justification than a barbed accusation of divine misdeeds. Here Jeremiah plays the role of intercessor for Israel, mirroring the role previously filled by Moses. Equally, Jeremiah will have to deliver God’s response: after centuries of transgression during which He refrained from punishment and acted out of mercy, God has punished the people, causing the scenario in which “maidens and youths are fallen by the sword.” God has finally, and seemingly rightfully, “slaughtered without pity.”

Lamentations 5:20–22: “Why have You forgotten us utterly, Foresaken us for all time? Take us back, O Lord, to Yourself, And let us come back; RenEw our days as of old! For truly, You have rejected us, Bitterly raged against us.” This text from Lamentations raises some significant interpretive difficulties. The formulation kī ‘im (but instead?) which begins verse 22 is ambiguous. Hillers suggests four possible readings: first, the two words are to be read as retaining their independent meaning, “for if,” and the second part of the verse is to be understood as consequent upon the first. The verse would then be translated as: “For if you have utterly rejected us, you have been extremely angry with us.” Hillers rejects this reading because the second part of the verse appears more a restatement of the first than a consequence of it. The second possibility is that kī ‘im means “unless.” The passage would then be translated “Unless you have utterly rejected us, you have been extremely angry with us.” This he rejects because the passage does not follow the expected pattern wherein the first part of the statement is typically a condition which must be fulfilled for the situation described in the latter part of the verse to come to pass. Hillers’ third possibility is that the passage may be interrogative: “Or have you utterly rejected us? You have been extremely angry with us.” This is excluded as kī ‘im is not used in this way elsewhere in the Bible. Hillers adopts the fourth possibility, which translates kī ‘im as adversative in relation to the previous verse: “Bring us back to you, O Lord, and we will return. Make our days as they were before. But instead you have completely rejected us; You have been very angry with us.”99 99 This summarizes Hillers (Lamentations, 160–61). Translation of verses follows him. Robert Gordis suggests a fifth reading of kī ‘im as “even if ” or “although” (“The Conclusion of the Book

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This last reading, preferred by Hillers, seems to accord with the primary reading of the verse – the troubling one – found in rabbinic texts. That is, these sources present Jeremiah ending his prophecy with the declaration that God had rejected the people instead of giving them the opportunity to repent. They feared “that the God who reigns eternally might be angry for all time.”100 In light of rabbinic theological commitments, such a reading of the text could not stand. Rabbinic sources provide two ways to resolve the difficulties inherent in the last verses of Lamentations. In the first, they again adopted the idea that the biblical text was a dialogue in which Jeremiah and God were partners in conversation. In the second, they relied on Jeremiah’s special status vis-à-vis God as a prophet. With regard to the former solution, Exodus Rabbah 31:10 records: It is written, Refuse silver did men call them (Jer VI, 30). When Israel were driven from Jerusalem, their enemies took them out in fetters, and the nations of the world remarked: ‘The Holy One, blessed be He, has no desire for this people, for it says, “Refuse silver did men call them.”’ Just as silver is first refined and then converted into a utensil, again refined and turned into a utensil, and so many times over, till it finally breaks in the hand and is no more fit for any purpose, so were Israel saying that there was no more hope of survival for them since God had rejected them, as it says, ‘Refuse silver did men call them.’ When Jeremiah heard this, he came to God, saying: ‘Lord of the Universe! Is it true that Thou hast rejected Thy children?’ – as it says, Hast Thou utterly rejected Judah? Hath Thy soul loathed Zion? Why hast Thou smitten us, and there is no healing for us? (Jer XIV, 19) It can be compared to a man who was beating his wife. Her best friend asked him: ‘How long will you go on beating her? If your desire is to drive her out, then keep on beating her till she dies; but if you do not wish her [to die], then why do you keep on beating her?’ His reply was: ‘I will not divorce my wife even if my entire palace becomes a ruin.’ of Lamentations 5:22,” 291.) This leads to necessarily reading verses 20–22 as a single extended statement: “Why do you neglect us eternally, forsake us for so long? Turn us to yourself, O Lord, and we shall return; renew our days as of old, even though you had despised us greatly and were very angry with us” (293). For Gordis’s discussion of Hillers’ readings see 289–90. Recently Linafelt has suggested that kī ‘im should be rendered in it its “most natural sense of ‘for if. . . . ,’ and to understand all of v. 22 as the protasis of a conditional sentence in which the apodosis is understood rather than stated.” (“The Refusal of a Conclusion in the Book of Lamentations,” 343.) This leaves the statement incomplete and ends Lamentations with the hope that the apodosis might somehow be different than expected. 100 Stern, From Rebuke to Consolation, 37.

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This is what Jeremiah said to God: ‘If Thy desire be to drive us out [of this world], then smite us till we die,’ as it says, Thou canst not have utterly rejected us, and be exceeding wroth against us! (Lam V, 22); but if this is not [Thy desire], then ‘Why hast Thou smitten us, and there is no healing for us?’ God replied: ‘I will not banish Israel, even if I destroy My world,’ as it says, Thus saith the Lord: If heaven above can be measured . . . ​then will I also cast off all the seed of Israel, etc. (Jer XXXI, 37)101 There can be little doubt that a text of this sort helped to reinforce the rabbinic assertion of Jeremiah’s authorship of Lamentations. After all, in this reconstructed narrative the words of the books of Jeremiah and of Lamentations flow interchangeably from Jeremiah’s mouth. Initially this allows for a harmonizing of sorts. First, to resolve the concern about the implications of Lamentations 5:22 the midrash presented here recast what was apparently a declarative statement as an interrogative. The authority for this reading came from a parallel statement found in Jeremiah 14:19. There the prophet asks: “Have you utterly rejected Judah? Does your soul loathe Zion? Why did you strike us, and there is no healing for us?” The midrashic tradition understands the two clauses in 5:22 as being set in opposition – a group being completely rejected by God is incompatible with God being tremendously angry with the same group. According to Lamentations Rabbah 5:22, “R. Simeon b. Lakish said: If there is rejection there is no hope; but if there is anger there is hope, because whoever is angry may in the end be appeased.”102 Providing this is the understanding at play in the Exodus Rabbah tradition, Jeremiah was in fact raising a question derived from the ambiguity of the situation. Jeremiah asked God to clarify the circumstances: was the destruction of the Temple and the exile from Jerusalem an indicator that Israel had been rejected and the covenant broken or was it a sign of divine anger and that repentance and appeasement would be the correct response? Jeremiah sought to understand how to counsel the community. Since in the Book of Jeremiah the prophet asked for clarification, by placing the words of Lamentations into the same discourse the rabbis made its final verses function as part of the same rhetoric of investigation. According to this reading, Jeremiah asked God to reveal the explanation for the community’s suffering and the remedy for it, rather than declaring that the time for redemption had passed. However, in rabbinic sources the issue was not only that Jeremiah could have stated that God had rejected Israel, but that such a statement would come as a conclusion of his prophecy. Given the rabbis’ place as the inheritors of 101 This midrash appears as well in Tanḥuma (Warsaw) Mishpatim 11, and Pesikta Rabbati 31:3. 102 A parallel version is preserved in PRK 17:2.

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the biblical tradition and its covenant, they could not allow it to appear that a prophet declared the breakdown of the covenant. Jeremiah’s prophecy, in principle, could not actually end on this sour note. Pesiqta de Rav Kahana 13:14 presents a debate between Rabbi Eleazar and Rabbi Johanan concerning the pattern of biblical prophecy. The former insisted that all the biblical prophets began with words of rebuke but concluded with words of consolation, with the exception of Jeremiah who opened and concluded with words of reproof: “thus shall Babylon sink, and shall not rise again” (Jer 51:64). Johanan disagreed arguing: But Jeremiah also concludes with words of comfort, for since he keeps prophesying the Temple’s destruction, you might suppose that he would conclude with the Temple’s destruction. Not at all. Scripture brings his prophecy to a close with the verse “Thus far are the words of Jeremiah” (Jer 51:64), so that he concludes with prophecy of the downfall of those who destroyed the Temple.103 In principle, Johanan agreed that Jeremiah’s final statement consisted of words of rebuke. Because they were directed against the Babylonians, from his perspective they functioned as words of consolation to Israel – a sort of biblical Schadenfreude. But this did not satisfy Eleazar, who noted that Isaiah was another exception to the rule in that he too ended his prophecy with words of rebuke: “Does not Isaiah, too, conclude with words of reproof, saying “They shall be an abhorring unto all flesh” (Isa 66:24)?” Again, Johanan argued that these words were directed to the gentile nations and were heard by Israel as words of consolation. In discussing the nature of Jeremiah’s prophecy, the men eventually turned to the last verses of Lamentations, where, in 5:22, it appears that Jeremiah ended with words of reproof: [Returning to Jeremiah’s concluding prophecy], is it not a fact that he says therein “But Thou hast utterly rejected us” (Lam 5:22)? Yes, but directly after he says “Thou hast utterly rejected us,” he goes on to say comfortingly, “Turn Thou us unto Thee.” (Lam 5:21) The formulation of the homily’s conclusion is more ambiguous in the original.104 However, the passage may be the earliest allusion to what later became the well-established practice of repeating verse 5:21 when Lamentations is read as 103 Braude and Kapstein, Pesikta De-Rab Kahana: R. Kahana’s Compilation of Discourses for Sabbaths and Festal Days, 264–65. 104 The Hebrew original is somewhat ambiguous and Braude has here taken some poetic license in filling in an elliptical text. A more literal translation might read: And [concerning] the verse: “But Thou has utterly rejected us” (Lam 5:22). “Turn thou us unto thee” (Lam 5:21) replaces (Heb.=tahat) “Thou has utterly rejected us.”

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a part of the liturgy for the Jewish fast day of Tisha b’Av, so the public reading ends with words of consolation.105 The earliest reference to the formal public reading of Lamentations on the festival is found in Soferim (a minor tractate of the Babylonian Talmud, passages 14:2 and 18:5), although Lamentations Rabbah proem 17 and 3:5 suggest that it was a common practice to read Lamentations as part of the ritual for the day (at least individually) already in the earlier rabbinic period.106 In current practice (the exact source of which remains unclear) the reader of Lamentations chants the text through 5:20 in the melody reserved for the body of a liturgical reading of a scriptural scroll. The reader then chants 5:21–22 using this same melody rather than that typically used for the concluding verses of a liturgical scriptural reading. The congregation then recites 5:21 using the melody reserved for concluding and the reader follows chanting the verse with this same melody.107 The result is that to the ears of the congregation, Lamentations sounds as if it ends with “Turn Thou us unto You” rather than with the verse which actually concludes the written text. The discussion in Pesiqta de Rav Kahana may suggest that a similar practice was already in place when it was composed in the fourth century. Given limited literacy, the possibility that Johanan is relying on having heard the work rather than having read it must be considered.108 As such, for him the work ended with words of consolation. In this way, Jeremiah was not concluding with a claim that God had rejected the people outright but with an attempt to advocate on behalf of the people. In reversing the order of the verses, Jeremiah’s claim of rejection was blunted, and his prophecy ended with the hope of divine forgiveness and redemption. Once again, Jeremiah’s status as author helped to reshape the understanding of Lamentations. However, maintaining the idea that Jeremiah authored Lamentations also required that rabbinic sources eliminate other possibilities.

105 On the place of Lamentations in the Jewish liturgy see the brief overview provided in Elsie Stern, “Lamentations in Jewish Liturgy,” in Great is Thy Faithfulness, ed. Parry and Thomas, 88–91. 106 Generally Soferim is dated no earlier than the eighth century and Lamentations Rabbah to the early fifth century. See Hermann Leberecht Strack and Günter Stemberger, Introduction to the Talmud and Midrash, trans. Markus N. A. Bockmuehl (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1996), 228, 286. On the evolving reading practices for Tisha b’Av see Étan Levine, The Aramaic Version of Lamentations (New York: Hermon Press, 1976), 13. 107 Joshua R. Jacobson, Chanting the Hebrew Bible: The Art of Cantillation (Philadelphia, PA: Jewish Publication Society, 2002), 879. 108 On the oral performance of Sacred Scripture in rabbinic contexts see Martin S. Jaffee, Torah in the Mouth: Writing and Oral Tradition in Palestinian Judaism, 200 BCE–400 CE (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). On literacy in the early rabbinic world see Catherine Hezser, Jewish Literacy in Roman Palestine. Texts and Studies in Ancient Judaism 81 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2001).

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Jeremiah, Baruch, and the Authorship of Lamentations Given Baruch’s substantial role in the Book of Jeremiah, the groundwork was laid for the possibility that his contribution to Jeremiah’s works was more significant than those of a mere copyist. This view finds its most explicit expression in the medieval midrash, The Alphabet of Ben Sira. This work, which typically is dated to the gaonic period and perhaps as early as the eighth century, records a collection of proverbs arranged as an alphabetic acrostic and attributed to Ben Sira.109 Presenting the story of its composition, Ben Sira explains that his teacher asked him to repeat a letter of the alphabet and he, rather than simply repeating, added a proverb beginning with the letter. Thus, the student taught the teacher. The instructor argued that nature must have been turned on its head since students do not typically act this way, to which Ben Sira replied: “‘There is nothing new under the sun,’ ” . . . “For Jeremiah taught Baruch ben Neriyah the same way, and the laws of nature were not changed. “Jeremiah said to Baruch, ‘Say alef.’ “‘Alas!’ Baruch replied, ‘Lonely sits the city’ (Lamentations 1:1). “Jeremiah said, ‘Say bet.’ “‘Bitterly she weeps in the night’ (Lamentations 1:2), Baruch answered. “And so they continued through the entire alphabet, as you can see in the Book of Lamentations.”110 The Alphabet is frequently described as satire or parody, and this passage may in fact be either. However, it confirms that in the early Middle Ages, among Jews, the idea of Baruch as composer of Lamentations was plausible, and, because of the regard given his other works, was used to give a work the patina of credibility. Although no extant evidence supports the idea that The Alphabet of Ben Sira here relies on an earlier midrashic tradition, the idea that Baruch could 109 For discussion of the textual and reception history of the Alphabet of Ben Sira see Eli Yassif, The Tales of Ben Sira in the Middle Ages: A Critical Text and Literary Studies (Jerusalem: Hebrew University Magnes Press, 1984) [Hebrew]; David Stern, “The Alphabet of Ben Sira and The Early History of Parody in Jewish Literature,” in The Idea of Biblical Interpretation: Essays in Honor of James L. Kugel, ed. Hindy Najman and Judith H. Newman, 424–48. Supplements to the Journal for the Study of Judaism 83 (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2004), and Gili Orr, “The Medieval Alpha Beta DeBen Sira I (‘Rishona’): A Parody on Rabbinic Literature or a Midrashic Commentary on Ancient Proverbs?” Masters Thesis, Universität van Amsterdam, 2009. 110 Norman Bronznick, “The Alphabet of Ben Sira,” in Rabbinic Fantasies, ed. David Stern and Mark J. Mirsky. Yale Judaica Series (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 177. The punctuation here matches the original publication.

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have been meaningfully involved in creating the content of Lamentations had to have been believable to some Jews in the audience for the Alphabet of Ben Sira to be taken seriously even as a work of parody. The Babylonian Talmud is explicit in establishing that Jeremiah authored Lamentations and that the book was dictated by the prophet to his scribe. This explicitness served two rabbinic needs. The first, as previously discussed, was theological. The second was that it supported the rabbinic challenge to the place of Baruch and literary works attributed to him which remained available in rabbinic spheres. Although the biblical canon was firmly established, rabbinic sources show significant concern with the possibility of external books influencing Jewish religious thought. M. Sanhedrin 10:1 is clear to point out that reading books external to the canon would cost an Israelite his place in the world to come. The idea of Baruch as an author of his own books is well attested among Second Temple sources, and this idea likely continued to circulate among rabbinic Jews well into the early Middle Ages. For more than a century scholars have noted significant parallels between 2 Baruch (Syriac Apocalypse of Baruch) in which Baruch receives divine communication), and rabbinic material found in the two Talmuds, various midrashic volumes, and most extensively in Pesiqta Rabbati 26.111 While some have suggested that Pesiqta Rabbati was a marginal text, and have even argued that section 26 was a later invention or addition (perhaps by the compiler), Rivka Ulmer, who has edited the synoptic edition, has shown both the wide variety of “normative” Jewish sources which cite the work generally (e.g., Rashi’s Bible commentary) and that section 26 appears in multiple medieval manuscripts.112 However, even if 26 were an early medi 111 For an early survey see Louis Ginzburg, “Baruch, Apocalypse of. Haggada of the Apocalypse,” in Jewish Encyclopedia (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1901–1906). For more recent work see Pierre Bogaert, Apocalypse de Baruch: Introduction, Traduction Du Syriaque et Commentaire, vol. 1. Sources Chrétiennes 144 (Paris: Cerf, 1969), 222–41; Rivḳah Nir, The Destruction of Jerusalem and the Idea of Redemption in the Syriac Apocalypse of Baruch. Early Judaism and Its Literature 20 (Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature, 2002), 96–100. Bogaert’s work stands out for the exceptional quantity of material he surveys but his methods in treating rabbinic literature, as Gunter Stemberger has noted, are quite dated. See “Judaism Outside Rabbinic Sources: Non-­ Rabbinic Literature,” in Judaism in Late Antiquity: Part One: The Literary and Archaeological Sources, ed. Jacob Neusner and Alan J. Avery-Peck. Handbook of Oriental Studies 16 (Leiden: Brill, 1995), 21–23. Philip Alexander suggests parallels between 2 Baruch 10:6–19 and t. Sotah 15:101–15 in his “What Happened to the Jewish Priesthood After 70?,” in A Wandering Galilean: Essays in Honour of Seán Freyne, ed. Zuleika Rodgers, Margaret Daly-Denton, and Anne Fitzpatrick McKinley. Supplements to the Journal for the Study of Judaism 132 (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 5–33, and The Targum of Lamentations: Translated with Introduction, Apparatus and Notes, 81–82. 112 Rivka Ulmer, Pesiqta Rabbati: A Synoptic Edition of Pesiqta Rabbati Based upon All Extant Manuscripts and the Editio Princeps, vol. 1. USF Studies in the History of Judaism 155 (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1997), xxxviii–li.

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eval invention, it would still testify to the continued presence of Baruch as a significant figure amongst some rabbinic Jewish groups. Most recently Tzvi Novick has shown strong parallels between 2 Baruch and the poetry of the seventh-century Byzantine Jewish poet, Eleazar be-rabbi Qillir.113 Evidence of the public liturgical reading of 2 Baruch and other related texts (likely for the observance commemorating the destruction of the Temple on the 9th of Av), at least in Greek-speaking Jewish contexts, also survives, but is not conclusive.114 However, a caveat needs to be heeded. Although texts parallel to 2 Baruch suggest an ongoing influence on rabbinic materials, the Book of Baruch from the Apocrypha disappeared from Jewish focus altogether, as Steven Fraade has noted: Once excluded from the canon of the Hebrew Bible, 1 Baruch, even if based, and if only in part, on a Hebrew original, appears to have eventually disappeared from Jewish study and communal liturgical life. The church fathers Origen and Jerome (3rd and 4th centuries, respectively) are both unaware of any Hebrew versions of the text in their time, and the latter claims the book was not read any longer among the “Hebrews.” How much earlier it fell from Jewish use, in whatever language, is impossible to know. We have no record of its being cited or referenced by any Jewish author in a religious context. Nor is there any evidence for its having been translated into any Jewish dialect of Aramaic. No remnant of it has been found among the Dead Sea Scrolls . . . , nor is there any allusion to it in early rabbinic literature.115 The Babylonian Talmud’s statement that Jeremiah “wrote his book, the Book of Kings, and Lamentations,” can be understood as an attempt by sages, or at least the Talmud’s editors, to cut off any association between Baruch and the composition of the content of these books. Jed Wyrick has argued that the extended discussion concerning who wrote which biblical book found on b. Bava Batra 14b–15a is best understood as a discourse on who wrote down the

113 Tzvi Novick, “Between First-Century Apocalyptic and Seventh-Century Liturgy: On 4 Ezra, 2 Baruch, and Qillir,” Journal for the Study of Judaism in the Persian, Hellenistic and Roman Period 44 (2013): 356–78. On Qillir’s interaction with Lamentations in his poetry see Tod Linafelt, Surviving Lamentations: Catastrophe, Lament, and Protest in the Afterlife of a Biblical Book (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 117–32, and Stern, From Rebuke to Consolation, 113–54. All three works include English translations of Qillir’s poetry. 114 Alexander, The Targum of Lamentations: Translated with Introduction, Apparatus and Notes, 58–59. 115 Steven Fraade, “1 Baruch,” in Outside the Bible: Ancient Jewish Writings Related to Scripture, ed. Louis H. Feldman, James L. Kugel, and Lawrence H. Schiffman, vol. 2 (Lincoln and Philadelphia, PA: University of Nebraska Press and Jewish Publication Society, 2013), 1546–47.

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biblical book (i.e., created the physical artifact) and not who composed it.116 If Bava Batra is about the textualization of sources rather than their composition, as Wyrick suggests, why does it attribute the physical act of transcribing these books to Jeremiah when the Book of Jeremiah is explicit about the role of his scribe Baruch ben Neriah?117 Thus, that the talmudic text is uniquely about textualizing the books, as Wyrick argues, is unlikely. This is especially true given that only Jeremiah is mentioned on this list of “authors,” and that Baruch is mentioned in the subsequent talmudic paragraph only as Jeremiah’s copyist (that is, it highlights that Jeremiah did not write down his own book). Coupled with other rabbinic sources this shows an attempt on the part of much of rabbinic literature to denigrate the role of Baruch. Although he was little more than the prophet Jeremiah’s loyal amanuensis in the masoretic biblical tradition, Baruch ben Neriah received significant attention from Second Temple period writers and in the later Jewish exegetical tradition. The apocryphal and pseudepigraphal works attributed to Jeremiah and/or Baruch demonstrate “how Jewish communities in the Hellenistic Age looked back to the figure of Jeremiah (or his scribal confidant Baruch) for prophecies or homilies, beyond those contained within the Book of Jeremiah itself, that would speak to their own condition of continued ‘exile’ . . . ”118 Some five books are attributed to Baruch, but three stand out for the discussion here. The earliest version of the apocryphal Book of Baruch is found in Greek in the Septuagint, and is preserved in Latin, Armenian, Coptic, Syriac, Arabic, and Ethiopic. The opening of the book suggests that Baruch read its contents to a gathering of Judean exiles in Babylonia. He encouraged the exiles to raise funds for the temple in Jerusalem and helped restore the temple vessels. The second section is an anonymous prayer, which, through attribution to Baruch, makes him appear penitent and pious like Daniel.119 The book concludes with a poem to wisdom and words of consolation. Baruch appears as a sage encouraging 116 Wyrick, The Ascension of Authorship, 21–79. 117 Wyrick is clearly aware of Baruch’s role as he examines a rabbinic discussion of the parallels in the relationships between God and Moses and Jeremiah and Baruch. The text (b. Bava Batra 14b) compares God’s dictation of Torah texts to Moses who wrote them down to Jeremiah’s dictating to Baruch. Why Wyrick chose not to discuss the role of Baruch in more detail is not clear, especially since it is so significant to the issue of textualization of the biblical books. For a thorough discussion of Jeremiah, Baruch, and the production of biblical books see Chad Eggleston, “‘See and Read All These Words’: The Concept of the Written in the Book of Jeremiah.” Sifrut (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbraun’s, 2016). 118 Steven Fraade, “Letter of Jeremiah,” in Outside the Bible: Ancient Jewish Writings Related to Scripture, ed. Louis H. Feldman, James L. Kugel, and Lawrence H. Schiffman, vol. 2 (Lincoln and Philadelphia, PA: University of Nebraska Press and Jewish Publication Society, 2013), 1536–37. 119 J. Edward Wright, Baruch Ben Neriah: From Biblical Scribe to Apocalyptic Seer (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2003), 53.

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the exiles to obey God’s law and to prepare to return to the land. 2 Baruch (preserved in Syriac from a Greek original) presents Baruch as a prophet who received divine revelation prophesying the destruction of Jerusalem and its eventual redemption. The core apocalypse foreshadows the dark period following the destruction of the Second Temple and Israel’s eventual redemption in the messianic era. Baruch was told by God to warn the people concerning the future destruction and also to prepare for his assumption. In 3 Baruch, written originally in Greek but preserved also in two Slavonic versions, Baruch was the recipient of divine secrets when an angel of the Lord took him through the five heavens. These books are significant for a number of reasons. First, they are attributed to Baruch directly; he is not depicted copying down the words of another person. In receiving and copying down divinely revealed messages, or messages mediated by angels, he becomes a prophet like Moses and Jeremiah, and, as Davis has noted, “In the course of Baruch’s development from the early to midfirst cent. BCE until the late first to early second cent. CE, his authority takes a shape of its own that is distinct from the earlier traditions of Jeremiah . . . ​Baruch is transformed into a replacement figure of the Prophet of Jeremiah.”120 In this sense, the Massoretic text of the Hebrew Bible rejected both Baruch’s role as prophet and the books attributed to him. The rabbinic sources debate his role as prophet and make no explicit mention of any of these works. This was likely as much a polemical stance against the Christian adoption of Baruch as a prophet (and later a saint in Catholic and eastern Orthodox Churches) who prophesied the coming of Jesus. All extant manuscripts of works attributed to Baruch were preserved under Christian auspices.121 Whatever the reasons that prompted the rabbinic community’s rejection of Baruch and his writings, there is little doubt that justifying the claim that he was the author of Lamentations could be based on the text of the Book of Jeremiah, providing the reading was already committed to a relationship between the two books. As Kipp Davis has suggested, “The addendum to the original scroll [“And there were added besides unto them many like words” (Jer 36:32)] appears to have been supplied by Baruch, and is distinct from those words which were dictated directly by Jeremiah . . . ​In this Baruch has become an active part of the prophetic process . . . ”122 In Lamentations Rabbah 3:1 the 120 Davis, “Re-Presentation and Emerging Authority of the Jeremiah Traditions in Second Temple Judaism,” 178. Noteworthy, is Josephus’s exclusion of Baruch as a prophet despite his mention of numerous others. See Balázs Tamási, “Baruch as Prophet in 2 Baruch,” in Fourth Ezra and Second Baruch: Reconstruction After the Fall, ed. Matthias Henze and Gabriele Boccaccini. Journal for the Study of Judaism Supplement 164 (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 202–3. 121 Wright, Baruch Ben Neriah, 113–20. 122 Davis, “Re-Presentation and Emerging Authority of the Jeremiah Traditions in Second Temple

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question of authorship is open since the text could be read to imply either that Jeremiah dictated the content of both the Book of Jeremiah and Lamentations or just the former with Baruch adding the content of Lamentations. Lamentations Rabbah 3:1 locates the composition of Lamentations in the Book of Jeremiah. Baruch ben Neriah the scribe wrote down the material for the original scroll “from the mouth of Jeremiah,” and both it and the replacement for the burned scroll contained some chapters of Lamentations: R. Hama b. Hanina opened his discourse with the text, Then took Jeremiah another roll, and gave it to Baruch the scribe, the son of Neriah; who wrote therein from the mouth of Jeremiah all the words of the book which Jehoiakim king of Judah had burned in the fire; and there were added besides unto them many like words (Jer XXXVI, 32). There was no necessity for the word ‘like’; so what is the purpose of its addition? R. Kahana said: ‘And there were added besides unto them many like words’: ‘words’ refers to the first, second, and fourth chapters of Lamentations, ‘many’ to the fifth chapter, ‘like’ to the third chapter which consists of a series of three verses [each commencing with the same letter of the alphabet] . . .  The open question is whether the words “added besides” were supplied by Jeremiah and copied by Baruch or were composed by the scribe? In two parallel texts found in Proem 23 to Lamentations Rabbah and Ecclesiastes Rabbah 12:7 the respective roles of Jeremiah and Baruch in the literary productions attributed to the former appear to be at issue. Discussing the meaning of Ecclesiastes 12:6, “and the pitcher is broken at the fountain,” the rabbinic sources comment: “Two Amoraim [offer alternate explanations]. One said, the vessel of Baruch at the fountain of Jeremiah. The other said, the vessel of Jeremiah at the fountain of Baruch; and this is what is written, ‘He pronounced all these words unto me with his mouth’” (Jer 36:18). This Amoraic passage is somewhat ambiguous. Although the Book of Jeremiah is clear that it was produced by having Jeremiah speak and Baruch write down, the Book of Lamentations makes no such claim. Even if the structure of presenting two alternate renderings is merely talmudic rhetorical form, the text preserves the idea that Baruch was the source of the contents and Jeremiah the one who received it. Thus the idea that Baruch could have composed Lamentations could be read as plausible even if it were not the intention of the original source of the passage. The material preserved in Lamentations Rabbah and Ecclesiastes Rabbah may suggest that a tradition of this sort was known in an earlier period.123 In Second Temple literature Baruch is presented as a Jeremiah-like “lamenting Judaism,” 177–78. 123 This idea was first suggested by Wieder, “Jeremiah in Aggadic Literature,” 51.

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prophet” mourning the destruction of Jerusalem after Jeremiah has been sent into exile. 10.5 And he [Jeremiah] then went away with the people. But I, Baruch, returned and sat in front of the gates of the temple. And I made this lament over Zion and said, 10.6 “Blessed is he who was not born, or he who was born and died. 10.7 But to us who are living, woe to us, for we (are) see(ing) the afflictions of Zion, and what has happened to Jerusalem. (2 Baruch 10:5–19)124 The lament continues for an additional eleven verses and, as Matthias Henze writes, the “prayer is reminiscent of the biblical Book of Lamentations (especially Lamentations 1, 2, 4, and 5), which Baruch repeatedly re/appropriates . . . ”125 That early Bible manuscripts varied the order the books of Jeremiah, Lamentations, Baruch, and the Epistle of Jeremiah could well have added to confusion about the respective roles of Jeremiah and Baruch and buttressed early Jewish audiences’ perception of Baruch as a prophet Whereas Greek majuscules maintain the order of Jeremiah, Baruch, Lamentations, and Epistle of Jeremiah, there are notable differences in the non-Greek traditions (and in some Greek minuscules). For example, there is some variety in the Coptic tradition. Michigan ms 111 places Baruch directly after Jeremiah, the two books being divided by Jeremiah’s title as a postscript. Manuscript 826 (Zoega 1810, no. 26) also has Baruch following Jeremiah, and maintains the Greek ordering. Manuscript 827 (Zoega 1810, no. 27) only contains fragments of Jeremiah and Lamentations, suggesting that Baruch was either omitted or placed elsewhere. Codex 822 (P. Bod. 22) has a unique ordering of the corpus: Jeremiah, Lamentations, Epistle of Jeremiah, Baruch. The latter ordering has no parallels in any other extant manuscript. The Latin text tradition is even more complicated . . . ​The Vetus Latina takes the order Jeremiah, Baruch, Lamentations, Epistle of Jeremiah, although it appears that Baruch is appended to Jeremiah without a break. Jerome’s edition has Jeremiah and Lamentations, and omits Baruch and the Epistle of Jeremiah. The Bibles from Tours follow the same pattern, but they differentiate Lam 5 (Oratio) from the rest of Lamentations. The remaining traditions all contain Baruch and Epistle of Jeremiah in some 124 Daniel M. Gurtner, Second Baruch: A Critical Edition of the Syriac Text: With Greek and Latin Fragments, English Translation, Introduction, and Concordances. T&T Clark Jewish and Christian Texts Series 5 (New York: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2009), 39–41. 125 Matthias Henze, Jewish Apocalypticism in Late First-Century Israel: Reading “Second Baruch” in Context. Texts and Studies in Ancient Judaism 142 (Mohr Siebeck, 2011), 44.

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form, with the notable exception of family g (France), which includes Baruch, but excludes Epistle of Jeremiah.126 Finally, Jack Lundbom has suggested that within the Book of Jeremiah itself confusion about who wrote what is already evident. Examining the discussion of the deed of sale in Jeremiah 32:6–15 which conveyed to Jeremiah his cousin’s land in Anathoth, Lundbom notes: It is also not clear who actually wrote up the document because of uncertainty about the translation of v. 10. The Hebrew reads: ‫ואכתב בספר‬. The Jerusalem Bible translates, ‘I drew up the deed’, and is followed by the NAB. According to this reading Jeremiah wrote the deed, which makes him the source. But the RSV translates, ‘I signed the deed’, and it is followed by the NEB. If one accepts this reading, then we are left not knowing who wrote up the deed. But it seems reasonable to assume that it was either Jeremiah or Baruch. Since both are prominently mentioned in the passage we have in any case a source. I am inclined to follow JB and see Jeremiah as the one who wrote up the deed of purchase. Baruch would then be the one who adds the colophon. But as we have said, the details remain unclear.127 The various orders, exclusions, inclusions, and ambiguities in the Hebrew of Jeremiah could all very well have led readers and audiences to understand a mingling of the contributions of Jeremiah and Baruch, a problem that the majority of rabbinic sources attempted to clear away. Rabbinic interest in Baruch certainly did not match that of the Second Temple period writers.128 Whereas early traditions depict Baruch as disciple of a prophet but not a prophet himself (Mekh. Pisha 1), the Babylonian Talmud (Meg 14b) lists Baruch among the eight prophets who were also priests descended from Rahab, and the Jerusalem Talmud (y. Sanh. 1:2) presents him as a rabbinic-­type sage who intercalated the sacred calendar in the Babylonian exile. Among his disciples was Ezra, who studied the Torah with his mentor in exile before returning to the land of Israel (b. Meg. 16b). The elderly Baruch could not return to the land (Shir Rab. 5:5). 126 Sean A. Adams, Baruch and the Epistle of Jeremiah: A Commentary Based on the Texts in Codex Vaticanus (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 8. 127 Jack R. Lundbom, “Baruch, Seraiah, and Expanded Colophons in the Book of Jeremiah,” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 36 (1986): 98, https://doi.org/10.1177/030908928601103607. 128 For discussion of Baruch in rabbinic sources see Shlomo Zuckier, “Jeremiah in Rabbinic Theology and Baruch in Rabbinic Historiography. A Response to Ishay Rosen-Zvi,” in Jeremiah’s Scriptures, ed. Hindy Najman and Konrad Schmid (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 604–7. Zuckier astutely notes the apparent shift between early and late rabbinic sources with Baruch’s prophetic status more substantive in early texts from the land of Israel.

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The debate over Baruch’s status as a prophet continued in the Middle Ages. Maimonides rejected the assertion, suggesting that although Baruch merited prophecy, God withheld it from him (Guide 2:32).129 This is in contrast to Rashi, for example, who, commenting on the tradition on b. Megillah 16b that Ezra would not leave his teacher, added that Baruch prophesied in Babylonia in the second year of the reign of Darius.130 The need to present Lamentations as prophecy may also explain the rabbinic effort to distance the book from Baruch. Future redemption was too heavy an issue to be left to Baruch with his doubtful prophetic pedigree. Rabbinic concerns about the authority of written sources as against oral transmission are also likely in play. In distinguishing between the kind of prophetic authority attributed to Jeremiah and Baruch in the Hellenistic period Davis has argued that, in contrast to Jeremiah who received prophecy and communicated it directly to the people, Baruch’s most prevalent distinguishing feature is in his reputation as a scribe: He records and edits the prophecies of Jeremiah . . . ​his shift from the oracle-delivering prophet to the scribe who takes dictation directly from God and who preserves his own teachings for the encouragement of others indicates a heightened regard in the Baruch traditions for those things that have been written down.131 This shift stands in precise opposition to the direction of the rabbinic movement; reliable prophecy communicated in writing ceased with Jeremiah who was, at least in one rabbinic trend, the last prophet of this sort. Rabbinic authority would come to rest in oral traditions, as Reed has noted, The Rabbinic concept of the Oral Torah signals a sharp self-­consciousness about the fact that biblical tradition consists of much more than just the text of the Written Torah. At the same time, however, the association of authentic extrabiblical tradition with orality serves – perhaps deliberately – to rob biblical pseudepigrapha of any basis for authority, even as supplement to the Written Torah or as an aid to its interpretation. Rabbinic midrashim may preserve many motifs that have their ultimate origins in earlier Jewish pseudepigrapha, but the practice and products of biblical pseudepigraphy are excluded by early Rabbis, concurrent with the 129 Howard Kreisel, “Moses Maimonides,” in History of Jewish Philosophy, ed. Daniel Frank and Oliver Leaman (London: Routledge, 1996), 212. 130 Simon Rawidowicz, “Israel’s Two Beginnings: The First and Second House, in Studies in Jewish Thought (Philadelphia, PA: Jewish Publication Society, 1974), 422. 131 Davis, “Re-Presentation and Emerging Authority of the Jeremiah Traditions in Second Temple Judaism,” 202.

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In addition to the fact that Baruch presented as a replacement for Jeremiah might have troubled some rabbinic sages, recent scholarship has suggested that Baruch’s teachings as they appear in the books of the Pseudepigrapha were of a particular kind that may also have troubled rabbinic circles. In the Book of 2 Baruch the primary religious commitment is to Torah. While in the period before God destroyed Jerusalem, kings, prophets, and priests all served in helping Israel achieve divine redemption, for Baruch all that remained was Torah. Both the Temple and the land of Israel had been lost but the Torah endured.133 Although rabbinic sources from Palestine and Babylonia are committed to Torah as the dominant religious institution, the idea that any of the sages would have relinquished the notions of the return from exile and the reconstruction of the Temple is doubtful. As such, the theological-religious position propounded by the texts attributed to Baruch certainly would have given sages of multiple historic periods pause. The rabbinic disagreement over the status of Baruch may well have played a part in the Babylonian Talmud’s assertion of Jeremiah’s primary role in the production of the books of Jeremiah, Kings, and Lamentations. In deliberately excluding Baruch from the rabbinic tradition about who “wrote” which books, the Talmud denied Baruch his role as author, thus also marginalizing any other books attributed to him and maintaining their outsider status.134 Although the talmudic list of authors presents no authorial role for Baruch, b. Menaḥot 30a and b. Bava Batra 15a include Baruch, but make a subtle but important statement about his role. In comparing Moses’s role in writing down divine words to Baruch writing down those of Jeremiah, the Talmud offers, that with the exception of the last eight verses of Deuteronomy wherein the Torah describes the death of Moses, the process involved God speaking, Moses repeating God’s words, and then writing them down. Concerning the last eight verses the process changed, 132 Reed, “Pseudepigraphy, Authorship, and the Reception of the Bible in Late Antiquity,” 482–83. 133 Davis, “Re-Presentation and Emerging Authority of the Jeremiah Traditions in Second Temple Judaism,” 184–85, and Henze, “Torah and Eschatology in the Syriac Apocalypse of Baruch,” 201–15. 134 For further exploration of the Jewish reception of Baruch see Bogaert, Apocalypse de Baruch: Introduction, Traduction Du Syriaque et Commentaire, 1:104–119; Wright, “Baruch: His Evolution from Scribe to Apocalyptic Seer,” and Wright, Baruch Ben Neriah.

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We must say that up to this point the Holy One, blessed be He, dictated and Moses repeated and wrote, and from this point the Holy One, blessed be He, dictated and Moses wrote with tears [in his eyes], as it says of another occasion, Then Baruch answered them, He pronounced all these words to me with his mouth, and I wrote them with ink in the book. [Jer 36:18] The subtle change in process here is noteworthy. The talmudic sages recognized the oral repetition of the words as a qualitatively different kind of participation. It transforms the scribe who repeats into an active participant rather than a mere recipient of the words. Studies of scribal practice in the Second Temple period and Rabbinic eras repeatedly describe the importance of orality and aurality. While documents were ultimately written down, oral repetition was key in that it allowed the individual to internalize and take ownership of the text.135 As Martin Jaffee has noted concerning Second Temple literary culture, “The line between authorial creator of a book, its scribal copyists, and its interpretive audience was a rather blurry one and was often crossed in ways no longer retrievable by literary criticism of surviving texts.”136 This situation resulted from the way scribes were employed for text production. A scribe “could record the author’s words exactly in the way they were spoken, improve and edit the oral text in the process of writing, or compose and formulate the entire letter himself.”137 Additionally, some rabbis doubted the reliability of scribes. According to b. Eruvin, R. Meir was warned by R. Ishmael, “‘My son, what is your occupation?’ I told him, ‘I am a scribe’, and he said to me, ‘Be meticulous in your work, for your occupation is a sacred one; should you perchance omit or add one single letter, you would thereby destroy all the universe.’”138 Given rabbinic concerns about how scribes – even those who were also rabbis – could or would manipulate sacred texts, its easy to imagine how the participation of Baruch THE SCRIBE in the production of the Book of Lamentations could have caused consternation for the rabbis. B. Bava Batra 15a removes the words of Jeremiah, and perhaps the Book of Lamentations, from the mouth of Baruch altogether.139 Without the repetition he never takes ownership of the 135 Jaffee, Torah in the Mouth, 20–27. 136 Jaffee, Torah in the Mouth, 18. 137 Hezser, Jewish Literacy in Roman Palestine, 476. 138 For discussion of R. Meir’s scribal activity see Jonathan Paul Siegel, “The Scribes of Qumran: Studies in the Early History of Jewish Scribal Customs” (PhD diss., Brandeis University, 1972), 255–62. 139 The note in the Soncino Talmud translation (n. 10) suggests that as Moses did not repeat God’s words because of grief, Baruch did not repeat because of the grief caused him by the content of the Book of Lamentations. This appears to be an argument from silence, since the Book of Jeremiah is cited and Lamentations is not. However, if the sages here have in mind other rabbinic traditions, that this refers to Lamentations is possible.

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content in any way; he serves as the mechanism for converting words spoken orally into an identical written text. That this text appears juxtaposed with the rabbinic statement that Jeremiah wrote Lamentations only heightens the distinction between the two men. The number of times and the manner in which Baruch is discussed in rabbinic sources likewise strengthens the argument that rabbinic texts wanted him to be identified as a copier, and not as an author. In Seder ‘Olam Rabbah, the Tannaitic Midrashim, the two Talmuds and the volumes making up Midrash Rabbah, Baruch is mentioned just short of twenty times.140 In approximately ten cases his lineage, exile, halakhic and prophetic ability are discussed. The remaining references all discuss his role as Jeremiah’s scribe. Seven texts cite Jeremiah 36:18, “He pronounced all these words unto me with his mouth, and I wrote them with ink in the book.” Lamentations Rabbah 3:1 cites 36:32, “Then took Jeremiah another roll, and gave it to Baruch the scribe, the son of Neriah; who wrote therein from the mouth of Jeremiah all the words of the book which Jehoiakim king of Judah had burned in the fire: and there were added besides unto them many like words.” B. Mo‘ed Qatan cites Jeremiah 36:27, “After the king burned the scroll containing the words that Baruch had written at Jeremiah’s dictation, the word of the Lord came to Jeremiah.” In virtually every case where Baruch’s contribution to text production is discussed in rabbinic texts, Jeremiah is explicitly mentioned as the source of the content and Baruch as the copyist. Making the case for any more significant role for Baruch is near impossible. His prophetic abilities are challenged or denied in as many texts as confirm them and his ability as an author of texts is completely pushed aside. The rabbis’ Baruch is unlike the character promoted in Second Temple Jewish texts. The need for some sages to take this position may well have been part and parcel of debates concerning the cessation of prophecy. As L. Stephen Cook has shown, two competing trends are present in rabbinic sources. One promotes the idea that prophecy ended with the destruction of the First Temple and in essence makes Jeremiah the last of the prophets. The other has prophecy cease at the end of the Persian period.141 Those who preferred an end of prophecy with Jeremiah recognized that some reliable prophets did live after Jeremiah, which would undermine their case:

140 Seder ‘Olam Rabbah chs. 20 and 26; Mekilta Pisha 1; Sifre to Numbers 99:3; y. Sanh. 5b; b. Meg. 14b, 15a, 16b, and 19a; b. Menaḥ. 30a and 34a; b. Mo‘ed Qat. 26a; Num. Rab. 8:9, 10:5; Ruth. Rab. 2:1; Song. Rab. 5:5; Lam. Rab. Proem 23, 3:1, and Eccl. Rab. 12:7. 141 For discussion and rabbinic sources see L. Stephen Cook, On the Question of the “Cessation of Prophecy” in Ancient Judaism. Texts and Studies in Ancient Judaism 145 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011), 149–73.

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Another explanation of why Jeremiah’s portion was set in the land of Benjamin: as Benjamin was the last of all the Tribe Fathers, so Jeremiah was the last of all the Prophets. But did not Haggai, Zechariah, and Malkachi prophesy after him? On this question R. Eleazar and R. Samuel bar Naḥman differ. R. Eleazar said: Yes, but their periods of prophecy were brief. R. Samuel bar Naḥman said: [Though they did not utter their prophecies until after Jeremiah’s time], the prophecy they were to utter had already been entrusted [in his days] to the three – entrusted to Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi.142 Clearly the rabbis recognized that prophecy did not end with Jeremiah even while they argued it did. The text is important in that it restricts to these three men any prophecy after Jeremiah, which, as a result, eliminates Baruch as a reliable source of prophetic messages. Some scholars have suggested that such a position would allow for denigrating or dismissing prophetic pretenders in later periods including those identified with pagans, Christians, and other non-rabbinic Jewish groups. In fact, a text concerning Baruch reinforces the rabbinic tendency to blame the cessation of prophecy on the sins of Israel. In Mekilta, Pisha 1 Baruch complains that in not receiving prophecy himself he was treated differently from other disciples of prophets who had received the Holy Spirit (e.g., Joshua and Elisha). God’s reply makes clear that given the behavior of the Israelites prophets are no longer needed: “Baruch son of Neriah! There is no vineyard, what need is there of a fence? There is no flock, what need is there of a shepherd?” Why? “For, behold, I will bring evil upon all flesh, saith the Lord; but thy life will I give unto thee for prey in all places whither thou goest” (Jer 45:5). Thus you find everywhere that the prophets prophesy only because of Israel.143 This stands in contrast to the other Tannaitic volume, Seder ‘Olam Rabbah, which asserts in chapter 20 that Baruch, along with Daniel, prophesied in the days of Nebuchadnezzar. Mekilta Pisha is rather remarkable in that it shows Baruch receiving divine communication, i.e., a prophetic encounter, to explain why he is not really a prophet. Further, the presentation of Baruch as complaining directly to God because he is unhappy with his lot shows a character flaw. In this, Baruch is

142 PRK 13:14 (Braude and Kapstein, Pesikta De-Rab Kahana: R. Kahana’s Compilation of Discourses for Sabbaths and Festal Days, 264). For further elucidation of this passage see Wieder, “Jeremiah in Aggadic Literature,” 116. 143 Lauterbach, Mekilta De-Rabbi Ishmael, vol. 1, Pisha 1 lines 162–66, p.15.

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much more like Israel than Jeremiah. Like Israel, Baruch needs a prophet to guide him.

Conclusion The Book of Lamentations, regarding the prophet and prophecy – the point where God and Israel meet – stands at a midpoint within the exegetical tradition. Jeremiah’s work is that of mediator and Lamentations is a work of mediation. From the rabbinic perspective Lamentations served to remind Israel that its sins lead down the path of destruction at the hands of a just God; but it likewise sought to remind God that His justice must be tempered with mercy and that within the covenantal relationship atonement allows for redemption. The reversal of the final verses of the book in the liturgy and in the exegesis comes at least in part from the assumption that Jeremiah, as Israel’s advocate, would not have let the book end without the possibility of redemption. This same assumption seems to underpin many of the hermeneutical moves the rabbis made to soften the cynical passages found elsewhere in Lamentations. However, for some rabbis of antiquity, because Lamentations was composed by Jeremiah and he was a prophet of a unique sort, these statements could have stood without needing to be explained away or having their sharp edges smoothed According to the midrash on Psalms 90:2, Jeremiah was one of four prophets, along with Habakkuk, David, and Moses, distinguished by their love of Israel, which justified their lashing out at God: Jeremiah said: I prayed to the Lord (Jer 32:16) and began by saying Righteous art Thou, O Lord, when I plead with Thee (Jer 12:1); I who am here today and tomorrow in the grave, should I plead with Thee? Of what avail? Righteous art Thou, O Lord, when I plead with Thee. [Nevertheless, Jeremiah went on to chide, Yet let me talk with Thee of Thy judgments; wherefore doth the way of the wicked prosper? (ibid.)]144 By presenting Jeremiah this way rabbinic sources hoped to encourage readers to see the troubling passages in Lamentations not as challenging divine justice but as aggressive pleading on the part of a committed advocate for sinful Israel. The dual tone of Lamentations parallels that of the Book of Jeremiah. As a prophet, Jeremiah must announce the word of God and chastise Israel. As communal leader, Jeremiah must act as Israel’s advocate and fight divine prosecution – just as Moses had done. Since Jeremiah’s purpose, as Mekilta Pisha 1 presents it, was to defend God 144 William G. Braude, The Midrash on Psalms. Yale Judaica Series 13 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1959), 2:85–86.

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before Israel and Israel before God, it was not necessary to blunt the possibly troubling statements. The harsh statements Jeremiah made in Lamentations had to remain harsh or their efficacy in defense of Israel would be blunted. Although the notion that Jeremiah authored Lamentations served those who wished to reinterpret individual passages, it also opened the door for those who preferred to let them stand. Because Jeremiah was a special kind of prophet, his words, although harsh, were appropriate and necessary, and he was ultimately rewarded for them.

Haredi Jewish Boys Choirsand the Performance of a Secure Future Gordon Dale

Visiting Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion This article investigates Haredi boys choirs, a popular form of entertainment in contemporary American Orthodox Judaism, and the cultural work these choirs perform. I suggest that, in a broader cultural climate that many Haredim believe to be threatening to the continuity of their lifestyle, these choirs perform the successful transmission of core beliefs and practices, and thus stage a secure future for their community. Through an analysis of performances by three American Haredi boys choirs, I propose that Zygmunt Bauman’s theory of liquid modernity is, in important ways, a helpful framework for understanding Haredi discourses regarding cultural continuity, while I also offer ethnographic data to suggest adjustments to Bauman’s presentation of religion. While Bauman suggests that contemporary times are characterized by the melting of formerly stable institutions, I argue that the social ties of the Haredi community can be reinforced through their cultural productions. Seen in this context, children’s cultural productions, such as musical performances, perform a powerful function in contemporary American Haredi Jewish life.

In contemporary American Haredi Judaism, children become Haredi adults through a variety of identity cultivation processes, many of which involve the public performance of the community’s values and practices.1 These performances have value not only for the children who enact their absorption of communal norms, but also for the adults and children who consume these Author Note: I would like to thank the many individuals who have helped develop the ideas that are the foundation of this research. In particular, I wish to thank Samuel Heilman, Mark Kligman, Peter Manuel, and Jane Sugarman. I also wish to thank the many musicians who have taught me about music in the Haredi community, and the anonymous reviewers who contributed helpful feedback toward shaping this article. 1 The term “Haredi” (pl. Haredim) is Hebrew for “trembling,” a reference to their reverence for God. It may be used as both an adjective (“Haredi Jews”), and as a noun (“the Haredim”). While the phrase “Ultra-Orthodox” is commonly used to describe this population, many within the community dislike this language for its insinuation that these Jews are beyond the domain of normative practice and have crossed into the realm of extremism.

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cultural productions. In this essay, I study one exceptionally popular form of entertainment – Haredi boys choirs – to examine the cultural work that takes place through these performances. Through an analysis and contextualization of music videos from three boys choirs, I argue that these ensembles perform purity and cultural continuity, values that take on great importance in a wider social context that Haredi adults believe to be threatening to their lifestyle. To facilitate my study of Haredi boys choirs and the performance of purity and cultural continuity, I use the lens of “liquid modernity,” a theory first proposed by Zygmunt Bauman in 2000 that has gained significant momentum in recent years. As I explain below, the writings on liquid modernity are useful in the manner in which they, in key ways, mirror the concerns held by Haredi leadership regarding the instability of familiar institutions in contemporary times. To bolster the explanatory power of the theory, I use ethnographic research to point toward areas in which Bauman’s work would benefit from adjustments to better reflect the lived experiences of my interlocutors. Ultimately, I argue that boys choirs can be understood to be staging a secure future within a context in which liquid modern conditions threaten the social ties of the community. Additionally, this case study offers an opportunity to consider the role of children’s music-making in a religious community that, in some ways, acts contrary to the norms of youth in North America. I attempt to demonstrate the important role that children play in the communal project of religious continuity, and offer a consideration of the ways that young musicians have an impact on their community through their music. More than simply a description of musical enculturation, I present boys choirs as an intriguing meeting point in intergenerational transmission, where children come to be themselves culture-bearers of communal values, as they perform and convey these values to both children and adults in their community.2

American Haredi Judaism While a thorough examination of the history of Haredi Judaism is beyond the scope of this paper, for the purposes of this article a few brief historical notes are warranted to explain the present-day social taxonomy of the community. In Poland, around the year 1700, Israel ben Eliezer was born. A charismatic scholar of Jewish mysticism, according to Polish records he grew up to be a professional healer at a time when supernatural healing remedies were

2 Amanda Minks, “From Children’s Song to Expressive Practices: Old and New Directions in the Ethnomusicological Study of Children,” Ethnomusicology 46, no. 3 (2002): 379–408; Patricia Shehan Campbell and Trevor Wiggins, “Giving Voice to Children” in The Oxford Handbook of Children’s Musical Cultures (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).

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considered by many to be normative.3 He became known as the “Baal Shem Tov” (Master of the Good Name), a reference to his ability to use mystical names of God to perform miracles. The Baal Shem Tov preached a radical new form of Judaism that emphasized spirituality over talmudic scholarship, and ecstatic prayer over the sober style that was normative in synagogues. In the years following the Baal Shem Tov’s death in 1770, the nascent movement, which became known as Hasidism, was met with harsh critique from many of Europe’s greatest rabbis. This hostility came into full stride when Rabbi Elijah of Vilna (The Vilna Gaon [Genius]) released several strong polemics against the Hasidim, igniting a great deal of hostility between the two camps, particularly in Lithuania.4 Despite antagonism from the Mitnagdim (“Opponents,” in Hebrew), Hasidism spread, not only through its popular appeal among lay Jews, but also through the political savvy of the movement’s leaders, who were known as zaddikim (righteous ones).5 Tensions ultimately cooled, and the two communities came closer together, both due to the threat of the Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment), and the development of a new education system that, by the end of the nineteenth century, attracted children from both Hasidic and Mitnagdic families.6 In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, European, North African, and Middle Eastern Jews came face-to-face with one another in the United States and Mandatory Palestine, and the practices of each community impacted the others. Ashkenazi Jews have, in several ways, attained a hegemonic position, and as a result many Sephardic Jews have taken on Ashkenazi Haredi practices, such as dress, and consider themselves to be Haredi. Shas, the Sephardic Haredi political party in Israel, is a highly influential voice in the Israeli government, and Haredi Sephardic synagogues and religious schools can be found in American Orthodox communities. Thus, today one can identify three broad categories within Haredi Judaism: 1) Hasidic Jewry, 2) The intellectual and





3 Moshe Rosman, Founder of Hasidism: The Quest for the Historical Baal Shem Tov (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). 4 Biale et al. note that while the tensions were indeed high between the Hasidim and Mitnagdim, the conflict also should not be overstated. In certain locales, such as the neighboring towns of Pinsk and Karlin (in present-day Belarus), Hasidim and Mitnagdim co-existed harmoniously. Furthermore, many traditional Jews did not subscribe to either camp and preferred to maintain distance from these debates. David Biale, David Assaf, Uriel Gellman, Samuel C. Heilman, Murray Jay Rosman, Marcin Wodziński, Arthur Green, Benjamin Brown, and Gad Sagiv, Hasidism, A New History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017). 5 Glen Dynner, Men of Silk: The Hasidic Conquest of Polish Jewish Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). 6 David Biale, et al. Hasidism: A New History, 266–67.

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social lineage of the Mitnagdim, who are known today as Yeshivish or Litvish, and 3) the right wing of Sephardic/Mizrachi Jewry. According to the 2013 Pew Survey of American Judaism, approximately 10% of the 5.3 million American Jews who are age eighteen and above self-identify as Orthodox. That group can be further subdivided into two broad categories: Modern Orthodox (31% of American Orthodox Jewish adults), and Haredi (69% of American Orthodox Jewish adults). These numbers, though, do not tell the full story of the American Haredi community; Haredi families frequently have a large number of children, and are therefore becoming an increasingly greater percentage of the Jewish population. According to a 2011 study of the New York Jewish community commissioned by the UJA Federation of New York, Haredi women aged thirty-five through forty-four had an average of 5–5.8 children each. The two groups are somewhat diverse, and this variability of attitudes and practices makes the boundary between the groups imprecise. Speaking generally, though, an important distinction concerns each group’s approach to interactions with the host culture. While the Modern Orthodox generally participate in American culture to a high degree, study in universities, and believe that the demands that Judaism places on a person are fully compatible with these endeavors, Haredi Jews, generally speaking, attempt to remain within their own community and thereby caution against technologies, such as the internet and television, that can serve as portals to unsanctioned content and foreign ideas. This preference for carefully and minimally engaging with the host culture is especially pronounced in the realm of raising children to become Haredi adults.

Haredi Youth and Cultural Continuity In his book Defenders of the Faith: Inside Ultra-Orthodox Judaism, an ethnographic study of Haredi Jews in Israel, Samuel Heilman notes that “children were part of everything I encountered in the Haredi world.” He describes the ubiquity of children’s voices springing from the windows of schools, permeating the soundscape, stating, “These voices and the children from whom they came were the humming engine of the Haredi world. Although I had been looking at them only obliquely, as a secondary aspect of Haredi life, children were clearly at its center.”7 Indeed, Haredi life in contemporary America places great importance on young people, believing that educating them, not only in Torah scholarship, but also in proper conduct according to Haredi social conventions, is a religious and parental duty. Furthermore, though, it is essential to the

7 Samuel Heilman, Defenders of the Faith: Inside Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 169.

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successful sustaining and growth of the Haredi community. This establishes a paradigm in which the development of a young child into an adult who is firmly living according to Haredi values is a symbol of communal health. The opposite of this outcome – children leaving the Haredi lifestyle and community, known as OTD (off the derekh [Path]) – is among the highest concerns for the community. Given the Haredi community’s anxiety over children going “off the derekh,” images of young children behaving according to communal ideals are particularly powerful. In a cultural context in which the intergenerational transmission of Haredi life is a formidable challenge, successes in this endeavor are an important and ubiquitous component of “kosher” entertainment, that is, Haredi-produced alternatives to mainstream videos, books, theater, music, and more. The Haredi community maintains its own thriving popular entertainment industry for both adults and children, aimed to quench the public’s thirst for the same sorts of entertainment enjoyed by those outside of their community. Since much mainstream entertainment contains themes or images that are deemed to be immodest or otherwise inappropriate, it is generally not consumed by Haredim. While religious activities such as Torah study, prayer, and holiday observance are considered to be the most essential aspects of Haredi life, popular entertainment that is infused with religious messages forms another key aspect of daily life for contemporary Haredi Jews around the world. In these cultural productions, purity is performed, which in turn reinforces it among its viewers, and contributes to the sustaining of a secure future. In order to understand the importance of this form of cultural work, I wish to contextualize one key ensemble type, Haredi boys choirs, using the lens of liquid modernity.

Liquid Modernity and Haredi Judaism The concept of liquid modernity was first proposed by the influential sociologist Zygmunt Bauman (1925–2016). Dubbed the “prophet of postmodernity,” Bauman was a central figure in discussions of modernity and postmodernity, but ultimately felt that the debate “went astray.”8 Bauman was not alone in this assessment; for the past three decades, an important goal of social theory has been the search for a path leading beyond postmodernity. Once a veritable juggernaut that defined much research of the late twentieth century, scholars from a broad range of disciplines have lamented that excessive and diverse applications of the term “postmodernism” have rendered it “notoriously

8 Dennis Smith, Zygmunt Bauman: Prophet of Postmodernity (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1999); Anthony Elliott, The Contemporary Bauman (Hoboken, NJ: Taylor and Francis, 2013).

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slippery and indefinable.”9 Postmodernism has also been critiqued for containing contradictory expositions, being overly relativistic and anti-humanist, and for being merely an expression of the political frustrations of the “new middle class.”10 Others suggest that writings on postmodernity were unhelpfully deconstructive: “In most cases, the postmodernists highlight the problem without pointing [to] any solution.”11 Several alternatives to postmodernism have gained currency, including “multiple modernities,” “reflexive modernization,” and “liquid modernity.” More than a disagreement over metaphors, each of these three approaches “connotes a particular response to postmodernism and represents a different vision of what modernity entails.”12 The release of Bauman’s book Liquid Modernity in 2000 was his new proposal for how to best understand the contemporary world. Bauman’s theory launches from the famous diagnosis offered by Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto, “all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.” Bauman agrees that the first stage of modernity was the “melting” of all solid institutions, but that the second stage, the rebuilding of “new and improved solids” that were to be long lasting, has not occurred.13 This “disembedding” without “re-embedding” signaled the onset of the liquid modern era, in which familiar institutions are unable to retain their shape and social ties are fluid, leading to a general ethos of transience and mutability.14 With this theory, Bauman responds to postmodernism by focusing attention on the instability of contemporary society, and suggesting that modernity has not ended, but has merely transitioned from a solid to a liquid phase. Raymond L.M. Lee notes that Bauman’s portrayal of liquid modernity is strictly unidirectional, and asks about the possibility of “re-solidification.”15 He writes, “[Bauman’s] emphasis on liquidity as an irreversible condition seems plausible when we consider borderlessness as having become a norm 9 Brian Nicol, The Cambridge Introduction to Postmodern Fiction (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 10 Pauline Marie Rosenau, Post-modernism and the Social Sciences: Insights, Inroads, and Intrusions (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993); Brian Duignan, “Postmodernism,” in Encyclopedia Britannica (Chicago: Britannica Group, 2014); David Detmers, Challenging Postmodernism: Philosophy and the Politics of Truth (Amherst, MA: Humanity Books, 2003); Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist Critique (New York: Polity, 1991). 11 Dewan Mahboob Hossain and M.M. Shariful Karim, “Postmodernism: Issues and Problems.” Asian Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities 2, no. 2 (2013): 180. 12 Raymond L.M. Lee, “Reinventing Modernity: Reflexive Modernization vs Liquid Modernity vs Multiple Modernities. European Journal of Social Theory 9, no. 3 (2006): 355. 13 Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2000). 14 Bauman, Liquid Modernity, 32–37. 15 Raymond L.M. Lee, “Modernity, Solidity and Agency: Liquidity Reconsidered,” Sociology 45 no. 4 (2011): 651.

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and itinerancy a feature of social life everywhere. Yet if we construe disembedding as occurring within a context of continuing impermanence, then the liquidity resulting from it cannot be seen as continuing indefinitely but be subjected as well to the ongoing flux.”16 He goes on to suggest the application of recent research on religion, race, and class to Bauman’s work in order to further investigate this re-solidification. In this essay, I take up Lee’s call and use ethnographic data from my research among Haredi Jews in Brooklyn, New York to argue that Haredim do indeed feel threatened by liquid conditions, but cultural productions, such as music, help to re-solidify the social ties of the community. While it has now been nearly two decades since Bauman first introduced the concept of liquid modernity, in recent years scholars have found his theory to be a particularly helpful description of contemporary Western society, especially in the domain of religion. Recent studies of liquid modernity and Islam,17 Christianity,18 secularism,19 and global perspectives of religious change,20 have all found Bauman’s work to be a useful framework for their studies. Interestingly, religious leaders, such as the shaykh and scholar of Islamic Studies, Abdul Hakim Murad (also known as Timothy Winter),21 Catholic priest and scholar Edward Foley,22 and influential Orthodox Christian author Rod Dreher,23 are also finding explanatory power in Bauman’s theory of liquid modernity, and 16 Lee, “Modernity, Solidity and Agency,” 651. 17 Hew Wai Weng. “Consumer Space as Political Space: Liquid Islamism in Malaysia and Indonesia,” in Political Participation in Asia: Defining and Deploying Political Space, ed. Eva Hansson and Meredith L. Weiss (New York: Routledge, 2017); Paul Bagguley, and Yasmin Hussain, “Late Modern Muslims: Theorising Islamic Identities Amongst University Students,” in Muslim Students, Education and Neoliberalism: Schooling a ‘Suspect Community,’ ed. Máirtín Mac an Ghalil and Chris Haywood, (United Kingdom: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017); Mohammed Hashas, The Idea of European Islam: Religion, Ethics, Politics and Perpetual Modernity (New York: Routledge, 2018). 18 Kees De Groot, The Liquidation of the Church (New York: Routledge, 2017); Pete Ward, Liquid Ecclesiology: The Gospel and The Church (Boston: Brill, 2017). 19 Mika Lassander, “Grappling with Liquid Modernity: Investigating Post-Secular Religion,” in Post-Secular Society, ed. Peter Nynäs, Mika Lassander, and Terhi Utrainen (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2012); Christian Giordano, “Epilogue: Illusions of Universal Modernity and Delusions of Global Secularization,” in Fundamentalism: Ethnographies on Minorities, Discrimination, and Transnationalism, ed. Marcello Mollica (Zurich: LIT Verlag, 2016). 20 Simon Coleman and Peter Collins, Religion, Identity and Change: Perspectives on Global Transformations (New York: Routledge, 2017). 21 “Abdul Hakim Murad- Liquid Modernity,” published November 24, 2018, https://www.youtube​ .com/watch?v=y4WwXOVH-2g. 22 Edward Foley, “Reforming Liturgy in a Re-Forming Age” (Valparaiso, IN: Institute of Liturgical Studies Occasional Papers, Valparaiso University, 2017). 23 Rod Dreher, “Pope Francis: Chaplain of Liquid Modernity.” The American Conservative,

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are using his observations to develop new directions in their personal and institutional religious pursuits. These recent applications of Bauman’s work highlight the merits of studying contemporary society through the lens of liquid modernity, though others have critiqued Bauman’s perspectives as they relate to issues of class,24 Eurocentrism,25 and lack of attention to gender,26 among other concerns. Bauman’s work has been described as “nebulous but influential,” a phrase that could be applied to many writings on modernity.27 Therefore, it is a worthwhile endeavor to examine the extent to which his theories help explain behaviors among a group of people, in this case Haredi Jews, who in some ways seem to live in a manner that goes against the very grain that Bauman is so interested in explaining. In some ways, liquid modernity is a particularly useful framework for studying the Haredi community. As a society in which religious practice and the stability of the community are deeply intertwined, the integrity of social ties is of the utmost importance. In the Haredi worldview, the continuity of religious observance into the future is fundamentally integral to one’s reason for existing, and therefore, the very concerns that Bauman raises are shared by Haredim, often using strikingly similar language. Yoel Finkelman, in his book Strictly Kosher Reading: Popular Literature and the Condition of Contemporary Orthodoxy, offers an extreme example of this. He describes an elaborate cartoon found in a Haredi publication in which a woman is leaving a nursery with her new baby. Two paths lay ahead of her: ‘Olam Haba [the world to come], and ‘Olam Hazeh [this world]. While ‘Olam Haba is an idyllic representation of a Haredi community, ‘Olam Hazeh is its opposite, a land of immorality. “In one drawing [in this cartoon] a dog leads a man on a leash into the psychologist’s office, and in another corner a red-haired woman dressed in a bathrobe wheels what appears to be a dog in a baby carriage. She is so out of touch with her potential as a mother that she treats her pet as a child.” The operative understanding here is that those in ‘Olam Hazeh have, to their great detriment, lost all perspective, as they dismiss important values and institutions such as family and parenthood. Without these institutions, everything is permissible and social ties are fluid. Contrastingly, the Haredi November 9, 2017. https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/pope-francis-chaplain​ -of-liquid-modernity/ 24 Will Atkinson, “Not all that was Solid has Melted into Air (Liquid): A Critique of Bauman on Individualization and Class in Liquid Modernity,” The Sociological Review, 56 no. 1 (2008): 1–17. 25 Ali Rattansi, Bauman and Contemporary Sociology: A Critical Analysis (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017). 26 Rattansi, Bauman and Contemporary Sociology. 27 Charles Turner, Investigating Sociological Theory (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications Inc., 2010), 2.

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community is presented as a taste of heaven where people live according to the proper values, and an infrastructure exists to sustain this lifestyle. This attitude was encapsulated tersely in a 2018 television segment that aired on Fox News, titled “Community in Conflict: Hasidic Jews & Defection.”28 The segment opens with a representative of the Hasidic community being asked how he sees the secular world, a phrase meant here as anything other than the Orthodox Jewish community. He replies “Insane. Totally, totally insane.” While the television segment was inflammatory and lacked sufficient recognition of diversity within the Hasidic community, there are indeed some members of the Haredi community who view the world beyond their own in this way. This appraisal of a surrounding society as lacking structure and a stable sense of morality is reminiscent of Bauman’s work on liquid modernity, making this a helpful framework for this study. Bauman did, on several occasions, include religion in his writings on liquid modernity. He argues that, in general, religion no longer holds the same degree of importance that it once did, stating: I propose that the postmodern cultural pressures, while intensifying the search for ‘peak-experiences’, have at the same time uncoupled it from religion-prone interests and concerns, privatized it, and cast mainly non-religious institutions in the role of purveyors of relevant services. The ‘whole experience’ of revelation, ecstasy, breaking the boundaries of the self and total transcendence, once the privilege of the selected ‘aristocracy of culture’ – saints, hermits, mystics, ascetic monks, tsadiks or dervishes – and coming either as an unsolicited miracle, in no obvious fashion related to what the receiver of grace has done to earn it, or as an act of grace rewarding the life of self-immolation and denial, has been put by postmodern culture in every individual’s reach, recast as a realistic target and plausible prospect of each individual’s self-training, and relocated at the product of life devoted to the art of consumer self-indulgence.29 Bauman acknowledges another type of religious expression that trends in a different direction: “There is, though, a specifically postmodern form of religion, born of the internal contradictions of postmodern life, of the specifically 28 Available at https://www.foxnews.com/us/hasidic-defectors-find-challenges-isolation-in​ -pursuing-a-new-life. 29 Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodernity and Its Discontents (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1997). Note that this quote is taken from a source published in 1997, prior to Bauman’s introduction of the term “liquid modernity” in 2000. Bauman’s understanding of religion did not change when he introduced the phrase; in the 2015 book Of God and Man, a series of conversations between Bauman and former Jesuit priest Stanisław Obirek, Bauman expresses precisely this idea (see pp. 30–31 of that source for a representative description of the issues most relevant to this essay).

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postmodern form in which the insufficiency of man and the vanity of dreams to take human fate under human control are revealed. This form has come to be known under the English name of fundamentalism.”30 Bauman sees “fundamentalists” (among whom he specifically identifies Lubavitcher Hasidim, a Haredi subculture), as motivated by the anxiety of choice, similar to the “escape from freedom” Erich Fromm discussed in the 1940s. Bauman writes: The allure of fundamentalism stems from its promise to emancipate the converted from the agonies of choice. Here one finds, finally, the indubitably supreme authority, an authority to end all other authorities. . . . ​ Fundamentalism is a radical remedy against that bane of postmodern/ market-­led/consumer society – risk-contaminated freedom (a remedy that heals the infection by amputating the infected organ – abolishing freedom as such, in as far as there is no freedom free of risks).31 Bauman’s claims are intriguing and, on the surface might seem to explain the all-encompassing religious lifestyle of Haredi men and women. I have found, however, that Haredim do indeed exercise their freedom of choice, and frequently. While it is true that an idealized version of Orthodox Judaism would suggest that every question of consequence ought to be brought to a rabbi for consultation, the reality is that Haredim make their own decisions about how to behave properly, and not always purely on the grounds of Jewish law. Furthermore, Haredim, at times, disobey the calls of their leadership, yet remain part of the community. Perhaps even more important is the fact that Bauman’s characterization of religious people leaves little room for genuine theological beliefs. He understands religion largely as an excuse to escape the responsibilities of living in the complex contemporary world, rather than taking it seriously as a sturdy belief system. By and large, the Haredi Jews whom I have come to know are deeply religious, and their lifestyle is an expression of their convictions. Through acknowledging that religious communities and individuals, such as Haredim, are motivated by genuine belief, and that they frequently must make decisions about how to interact with the world around them, we can study the ways that Haredim reinforce the social ties and institutions that make up their religious worlds for the sake of pursuing the sacred. This feature of social life has been described well by sociologist Iddo Tavory, who, in his ethnography among Orthodox Jews in Los Angeles, notes that through encounters with those who are both within and outside of the community, Orthodox Jews are “summoned, brought into interaction and existence

30 Bauman, Postmodernity and Its Discontents, 182. 31 Bauman, Postmodernity and Its Discontents, 184.

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as inhabiting a specific identity category.”32 Being summoned into a religious identity category is directly related to the social element of Orthodox religious life. Through constant invitations to classes on religious texts, being asked to join a prayer quorum, or invited to a religious celebration in someone’s home, he “found something thick, almost palpable, in the quality of neighborhood life . . . ​living an Orthodox life in the Beverly-La Brea neighborhood was like swimming in honey.”33 It is this social thickness, compared to the liquidity that Bauman describes, that I call attention to in this paper. Haredi youth provide an interesting counterpoint to Bauman’s understanding of child-rearing in liquid modern times. Bauman writes, “Nowadays, youngsters are not hoped or supposed to be ‘on the way to becoming adult like us’ but viewed as a rather different kind of people, bound to remain different ‘from us’ throughout their lives.”34 This, he explains, is a result of the incredible speed at which the world changes today: “The radical acceleration of the pace of change characteristic of modern times, in stark opposition to centuries of interminable reiteration and sluggish change, allowed the fact of ‘things changing’ and ‘things being no longer as they used to be’ to be experienced personally and personally noted, in the course of a single human life. Such awareness implied an association (or even a causal link) between changes in the human condition and the departure of older generations and the arrival of newer ones.”35 Haredi Jews agree that the world around them is changing rapidly, but adults certainly do intend for their children to lead lives similar to their own. This is, quite explicitly, seen as a challenge, but successfully meeting it is an existential necessity. The alternative, having children leave Orthodox Judaism – going, as noted, “off the derekh,” often abbreviated as “OTD” – is a pervasive fear in Haredi communities. Rabbi Moshe Tuvia Lieff, the Haredi rabbi of a large synagogue in Brooklyn, discussed the rapidly changing world in a 2015 speech at the Agudath Israel of America conference titled “OTD: Why Is It Happening, and What Can We Do About It?” In a multi-lingual rhetorical style common among Haredi Jews, he discussed the present by rooting his points in teachings from respected rabbis of the past, in this case his teacher, Rabbi Shmuel Berenbaum: The Mir yeshiva was at its heyday. The beis medrash [Hebrew: study hall] was packed. There were three sets of chevrusas [Hebrew: study partners] that studied on the bima [Hebrew: platform] of the aron kodesh [Hebrew: 32 Tavory, Iddo, Summoned: Identification and Religious Life in a Jewish Neighborhood (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2016), 6. 33 Tavory, Summoned, 3. 34 Zygmunt Bauman, 44 Letters from the Liquid Modern World (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press), 12. 35 Bauman, 44 Letters, 11.

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Ark containing the Torah scrolls]. Six chairs and shtenders [Yiddish: lecterns] up there [because the main area of the study hall was too crowded to accommodate more students]. He [Rabbi Berenbaum] grabbed my hand and I can still feel it. He said, ‘Moshe Tuvia, do you think there’s one person in the yeshiva I can give mussar [Hebrew: discipline] to? That I can correct? I can admonish? Everything is round and about.’ He squeezed my hand, he said, ‘Itz an andere velt. Ken zayn zetz a brochene velt’ [Yiddish: It’s a different world. It could be that it is a broken world]. He told me this thirty-five years ago. It could be that it’s a broken-hearted world. So we have to realize . . . ​it’s a different world. It’s a totally different world. Rav Henoch Liebowitz used to say that generationally, normally a dor [Hebrew: generation] was ten years. Recently, it’s every six months there’s a new generation! The suggestion that a new generation begins every six months highlights an anxiety over preserving the Haredi lifestyle that is pervasive in their community. The quote emphasizes that, in considering the youth who leave Haredi Judaism, one must acknowledge the rapid pace of change, and the challenge this presents to the intergenerational transmission of the Haredi lifestyle. Lieff continued with an analysis of a biblical verse to further his point. In Genesis 45:28, the elderly Jacob learns, after decades of having thought he was dead, that his son, Joseph, is still alive. Jacob states, “I shall go and see him before I die.” The language here is curious: the phrase “before I die” does not seem to be necessary here, but because Orthodox Judaism asserts that every word of the Torah is deliberate, it must have significance. Lieff, again invoking a teaching from Berenbaum, states: Yaakov avinu [Hebrew: Jacob our father] was the Ish taam yoshvei haolah [Hebrew: perfect man sitting in his tent], he’s sitting and learning Torah every day. But Yosef hatzadik [Hebrew: Joseph the righteous]? Yosef hatzadik was called tzadik [Hebrew: righteous]. He was a righteous fellow because he was omed b’nisayon [Hebrew: tested]. The most difficult tests of the day. You think the yetzer hara [Hebrew: Evil Inclination] blinks? Says Reb Yankev avinu [Yiddish: Rabbi Jacob our father], elecha v’re’enu b’terem amus [Hebrew: I shall go and see him before I die]. Let me go see him before I die. Because in yener velt [Yiddish: in the world to come], where they understand what withstanding a test is all about, I may not even get to see him [because he will reside in a high Heavenly realm which I may not merit to reach]. Who am I compared – Rav Shmuel Berenbaum said this – to Yosef hatzadik? Do you know how our children today are assaulted?!

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We see then, that Lieff and Bauman agree that the rapidly changing world presents challenges to raising children with the expectation that they live similar lives to the previous generation. Unlike Bauman, however, Lieff is suggesting that this is a challenge that can, and must, be overcome. Where Bauman sees social ties melting as children’s lives drift further from those of their parents, Lieff sees an opportunity, and obligation, to re-solidify those ties.

Haredi Boys Choirs Boys choirs are a staple of Haredi popular music, and their recordings are enjoyed by both children and adults. These choirs range in size; I have seen choirs ranging from twelve to forty-nine members, with boys ages five through thirteen, at which point they age out after becoming a Bar Mitzvah, which puts them in a different social category. It is difficult to identify how many choirs are in existence, since many function simply as an extra-curricular activity, while others are semi-professional ensembles that release albums and music videos, and perform for audiences in the Orthodox Jewish community. Community members support these choirs by attending their concerts, purchasing their CDs and DVDs, and sending their children to audition for the choirs (often with costs associated with participating in the choir). In these ways, the sustaining of the choirs is a communal effort, though the musical and administrative tasks associated with running the choir are shouldered by one adult organizer. While boys choirs have a long history of synagogue performance, contemporary boys choirs that perform popular, non-liturgical music first began in the 1960s. Orthodox Jewish boys choirs in the UK and America began as a recreational activity, but quickly found an audience and began to release records. Early ensembles such as The London School of Jewish Song and Pirchei were led by an adult male musician who chose repertoire and arranged it for the choir to perform. This model has sustained itself, and today several such ensembles are famous in Haredi communities. Their recordings are sold in Judaica stores and kosher supermarkets, and today their music videos receive, in some cases, millions of views on YouTube.36 It is interesting to note that some of the singers come from Modern Orthodox, rather than Haredi, families. Nonetheless, while performing in the choirs they are expected to adhere to Haredi norms relating to dress; on stage, they are indistinguishable from those who come from Haredi backgrounds. 36 While the internet is frowned upon by many leaders in the Haredi community, most Haredi Jews, particularly younger people, use the internet regularly, both for business and recreation. This is one of several areas in which a gap exists between the calls of the leadership and the practices of the populace.

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While several Haredi girls choirs exist, their popularity does not approach the level of their male counterparts.37 There are several important considerations that explain the gender dynamics here. Firstly, in Haredi society, after very early childhood, boys’ and girls’ social lives are almost entirely separate, with the exception of interactions with family members. Schools, camps, and all recreational activities are gender-specific.38 While boys’ activities are more public and can be watched by male and female spectators, girls’ activities are generally reserved for all-female audiences. Girls’ musical theater, for example, is very popular among Haredi audiences, and women of all ages (but never men) will attend high school productions. These gender dynamics are rooted in concerns over modesty, a primary focus in Haredi life. While modesty regulations are explained in codes of Jewish law, Haredim typically go further than the basic legalistic requirements so as to not violate that which they believe is “the spirit of the law.” In addition, while Haredim do not expect young children to flawlessly observe Jewish law, adults attempt to teach and enculturate children as soon as the child reaches a level of cognition at which they are able to begin performing simple rituals and understanding certain fundamental concepts. Within the general category of modesty is the specific law of “Kol B’Isha Erva,” a precept that prohibits men from listening to the singing voices of women other than immediate family members. As ethnomusicologists have shown, Haredi Jews, both men and women, differ in their attitude toward these laws.39 Given the dominance of boys choirs, it is interesting to note that these ensembles serve as a culturally sanctioned point of interaction, albeit from a distance, between young male singers and young female listeners. One former member of a boys choir explained to me that certain boys become heart-throb figures in the community. Boys choirs, like all Haredi popular musicians, must be thoughtful about the musical aesthetic that they project, as the use of various sounds is interpreted as being closer to, or farther from, a Haredi ideal. There are, in fact, activists in the Haredi community who seek to censor any music that they believe to 37 For a discussion of Orthodox Jewish girls choirs, see Abigail Wood, “Pop, Piety and Modernity: The Changing Spaces of Orthodox Culture,” in The Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Jewish Cultures, ed. Laurence Roth and Nadia Valman (New York: Routledge, 2015), 286–96. 38 While there are some activist efforts to introduce ideas about non-binary gender, and to attempt to normalize sexuality other than heterosexual relationships, anything other than binary gender is, in general, considered deviant in Haredi society. 39 Ellen Koskoff, “Miriam Sings Her Song: The Self and the Other in Anthropological Discourse,” in Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship, ed. Ruth Solie (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993) 149–63; Ellen Koskoff, Music in Lubavitcher Life (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000); Kay Kaufman Shelemay, Let Jasmine Rain Down: Song and Remembrance among Syrian Jews (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

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be inappropriate; these determinations are often steeped in the race-based rhetoric of American “culture wars.” Those musicians who stick to a more conservative aesthetic, using musical instruments associated with Western classical music such as piano and strings, are understood to be “traditional,” and therefore spiritually beneficial. Acknowledging the importance of semiotic symbols in Haredi popular music, particularly when it comes to the youth, we can appreciate the role that boys choirs play in their society as they represent an image of the future. A common venue for boys choir performances – fundraisers – is helpful in understanding how boys choirs are doing the cultural work of representing the future of the community. Note the emphasis on the “Jewish future” in these quotes from advertisements for fundraising events at which boys choirs were scheduled to perform: “Atlantic Seaboard NCSY: presents The 37th Annual Isaac H. Taylor Jewish Music Festival featuring the Chevra and Yeshiva Boys Choir on Sunday January 8, 2012 at the Lyric at 7pm. Enjoy an entertaining evening while ensuring the continuity of the Jewish Future.” “Thank you for being an integral part in Inspiring the Jewish Future!” “We invite you to join us in celebrating our success and in reaffirming our commitment to helping ensure a proud Jewish future here in Calgary.” I turn now to three examples of music videos from boys choirs in order to analyze the ways that boys choirs, through performances of purity and absorption of culturally held values, project a secure future for the Haredi community and re-solidify the social ties they feel are threatened by liquid modern conditions.

The Atlanta Jewish Boys Choir The Atlanta Jewish Boys Choir is a relative newcomer to the Orthodox Jewish popular music industry, having presented themselves to the world with their first music video in June 2019. The choir is led by Rabbi Jake Czuper, a children’s entertainer whose dynamic performances “help children build a personal relationship with God and a love of Torah and mitzvot.”40 A native of Atlanta, Georgia, “Rabbi Jake” released several of his own recordings and performs for Orthodox audiences regularly. He explains that he and his wife “saw that during 40 Sandy Eller, “Atlanta’s ‘Rabbi Jake’ Takes Jewish Music World by Storm,” Five Towns Jewish Times, February 15, 2019. http://www.5tjt.com/atlanta-musician-rabbi-jake-takes-the-country​ -by-storm/.

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the concerts, whenever I called up kids to the stage, it really built them up, so why not make that its own program?”41 Based on this success, he and his wife started two choirs, one for boys and one for girls.

“Listen Talmidim” The boys choir’s music video “Listen Talmidim [Students]” presents the group’s cover of a song originally released by Uncle Moishy, a children’s entertainer who identifies with the Chabad-Lubavitch branch of Hasidism and is popular across the Orthodox community. The song is an exchange between a male teacher (referred to as a rebbe) and his students, acted out in this video with Czuper playing the role of teacher and the choir playing the students.42 The boys wear matching outfits of black pants, white shirts, tzitzis [biblically mandated fringes attached to an undergarment that is worn under the shirt by males beginning at the age of three], and gray sweater-vests. All of the boys wear kippot, most are the black velvet type associated with Haredi Jewry, and some boys have peyos of varying lengths. The video opens with Czuper, the teacher, ushering the boys from a school playground into a classroom. The boys sit at their desks, as Czuper sings, “Listen, talmidim, to what I have to say. If you learn the Torah and review it with a friend, you’ll be a talmid chacham one day.” The phrase “talmid chacham” refers to a Torah scholar, which is the highest aspiration in Haredi society. The boys have been listening intently, with their hands cupped around one ear to better hear their teacher’s words. The boys reply with gestures of anxiety, singing, “But there’s so much to learn, Rebbe, all the s’farim [holy books] in the library.” Their expressions change from anxiety to determination, and they look at their right wrists, as if to check the time, singing, “It may take some time, but I’ll learn every one, ’cuz I’m gonna be a talmid chacham.” When singing the words “talmid chacham,” the boys turn their right arms to create an upward facing right angle, and flex their bicep. The boys’ dedication to Torah study, and their anxiety over how to achieve their lofty and important goals, is a clear statement that they have absorbed the community’s appreciation of Torah scholarship, which is equated here with masculinity and strength. They trust in their teacher, an adult male who has succeeded in becoming a rabbi, which places him in an honored social category. In the following verse, the teacher lays out a plan for the boys to allay their anxiety: “First start learning Torah, then Mishnah and Gemara. Then get 41 Rachel Bachrach, “Have Song, Stay Strong,” Mishpacha, August 21, 2019. https://mishpacha.com​ /have-song-stay-strong/?fbclid=IwAR1NQmgxIgQ1fH0Lp0BvGAHuzRD ifSnRN_rFiTPrzkmikh9z9xRwosxlE3c. 42 One should not confuse this use of the term “rebbe” with an alternate use of the word referring to a leader of a Hasidic dynasty.

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a chevrusa [learning partner] and shteig [study intensely] with a friend, and always come out with halakhah [a Jewish legal ruling] in the end.” Here we see a learning regimen that outlines a path to successful adulthood. Through beginning with the text of the Torah (here referring to the Pentateuch, rather than a more expansive use of the term), studying the oral tradition, and ultimately deducing legal nuances of Jewish practice, the Haredi male’s life is on the proper course. In this four-minute video, the boys demonstrate their determination to undertake the lifelong task of learning Torah – they are prepared to devote their lives to the pursuit of becoming a scholar. This devotion to achieving greatness in Torah learning – unattached to finances, institutional affiliations, or professional success – is itself a strong performance of a secure future for Haredi Judaism, which prides itself on placing Torah study above all else. Social structures that preference men learning Torah, while women act as breadwinners, are predicated on precisely this prioritization, and it is within this social structure that the boys will succeed in their mission. As these children sing this message, and perform its successful transmission through this music video, the Haredi community’s priorities are displayed and broadcast to children and adults who share these values.

Yeshiva Boys Choir Yeshiva Boys Choir was founded in 2003 by Eli Gerstner, a celebrity in the world of Haredi popular music, and his life-long friend, Yossi Newman. The group has, to date, released eleven albums, including four live recordings, and their concerts in the greater New York region are very popular family entertainment for Orthodox Jewish families. While other choirs generally maintain a more conservative musical aesthetic, Yeshiva Boys Choir is known to push the envelope through their more energetic songs, though this sonic boldness is always balanced out with audio and visual clues that indicate propriety.

“Daddy Come Home” Yeshiva Boys Choir’s most famous piece is likely “Daddy Come Home,” which tells the narrative of a young boy whose father, a soldier, is away fighting in a war. The story takes place during the Chanukah holiday, which itself celebrates a military victory and a miracle that followed the battle. Eli Gerstner, the song’s composer, explained to me in an interview that although he had the American military in mind when writing the song, the song’s release coincided with military clashes between Israel and Lebanon and he decided to film a music video depicting an Israeli family as a gesture of support for those affected by the war. The narrator, a young boy, sings of the painful uncertainty of his

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father’s whereabouts: “Daddy’s been gone/ Gone for so long/ For him I pray/ He joined the Corps/ Fighting a war/ Somewhere far away.” The boy’s mother and siblings cry frequently, and they don’t know when, or if, the father will return. They light the Chanukah candles without him, hoping that he will return safely before the end of the holiday: “He promised me he’d return/ When the Chanukah candles burn/ So here I wait/ The blessings I recite/ By the candlelight/ But it’s getting late.” The video opens with Gerstner playing piano, with the young soloist standing behind him singing. We see the father in uniform leaving their home, and his young children crying because they miss him. The chorus enters, and the boy sings “Daddy come home/ stay with me/ let me hold your hand/ let me sit upon your knee.” Scenes of war are interspersed with the family’s story, and, as drums, guitar, and bass enter, the drama builds rapidly. After a brief electric guitar solo featuring an embellished version of the melody, the song reaches the bridge. In addition to hearing a new vocal melody with dramatic harmonic backing from the full choir, this new musical section represents a shift in the narrator’s thinking: In this moment of distress, he turns his thoughts to God and prays for his father’s return. “Where has he gone?/ How will I carry on?/Tell me what can I say?/ I need to pray/ Please hear my plea/ Send my daddy home to . . . ” The camera shows us the view outside the window of the family’s home, and sure enough, the father is seen approaching the entrance. The boy’s prayers have been answered; the father is now safely home, just in time to light the candles with the family on the final night of Chanukah: “Who’s that I hear/ Calling my name?/ I run into his arms/ Yes, my Daddy came home to me/ He’s on his knees/ Now he’s holding me/ For all eternity.” The song and music video are emotionally intense. The scenes of war juxtaposed against the distressed young singer are designed to tug at the heartstrings of the listener. The boy has behaved properly according to the Haredi worldview: In a moment of uncertainty and fear he has taken action by praying to God, showing that he has internalized the power of prayer and the practices of his community. The soloist, who is dressed in proper Haredi clothing while singing about prayer, family, and observance of a Jewish holiday, exemplifies the ideals of his community.

The Syrian Boys Choir The Syrian Boys Choir (SBC), conducted by Jack Braha, is a group of eighteen boys from Brooklyn’s Syrian Jewish community, though the choir also performs with smaller numbers. To my knowledge, prior to this choir, all boys choirs of this sort had been run by Ashkenazi Jews and focused on Ashkenazi music. The close proximity of diverse Jewish communities in Brooklyn has led

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to the exchange of musical styles, and in this case, ensemble types. The group debuted with an introductory YouTube video in 2015, in which the boys, clad in sharp suits and black velvet kippot, take over a Brooklyn musical instrument shop. The music that plays in the background is Elie Attieh’s pop stylized performance of “Inta Omri,” an important piece in the Arab classical music repertoire, famously sung by Umm Kulthum. In the SBC video, two Jewish men passing the shop hear the boys playing music and enter, dancing with hand motions that suggest their Syrian heritage. The short video is comical and made to introduce the group to the world. It is clear that the video strives to show their Syrian bonafides; rather than being just another Jewish boys choir, this one plans to proudly, and sonically, embrace their Syrian Jewish identity. This marker is significant, as it sets them apart from the Ashkenazi choirs who, as is often the case in the Brooklyn Jewish community, define and constitute a religious and cultural mainstream.43

Shema Yisrael Elokay In October 2016, the Syrian Boys Choir released a music video for their recording of “Shema Yisrael Elokay” [Hear, Israel, My God], a piece originally titled “K’shehalev Bokhe” [When the Heart Cries] that was written by Yossi Gispan and Shmuel Elbaz, and made famous by Sarit Hadad, a popular Mizrachi Jewish singer in Israel. The piece was written in response to the lynching of two Israeli reserve soldiers who were in Palestinian police custody in Ramallah in 2000, a significant moment in the Arab-Israeli conflict. The song carries nationalistic connotations in contemporary Israel, but for the Brooklyn-based Syrian Boys Choir, the song has both a religious message and an association with a famous Mizrachi singer, who frequently sings in Arabic. The Syrian Boys Choir’s music video for “Shema Yisrael Elokay” alternates between scenes of the singers sitting together and singing around a swimming pool while one boy strums a guitar, and scenes of two individual boys who appear to be coping with emotional distress in different ways. Images of candles flickering in a dark room appear sporadically, suggesting a recent death that the boys in the video are mourning. Soloists sing eight measures, then a new vocalist enters to carry the melody. In the opening lyrics, the boys sing “When the heart cries, only God hears.” Throughout the piece, the lyrics reinforce a 43 For book-length ethnomusicological analyses of the Syrian Jewish community, which in part situate the Syrian community amongst its neighbors, see Kay Kaufman Shelemay, Let Jasmine Rain Down: Song and Remembrance among Syrian Jews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).; Mark Kligman, Maqām and Liturgy: Ritual, Music, and Aesthetics of Syrian Jews in Brooklyn (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2009).

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spiritual response to distress, invoking religious notions of the soul and pleading before God: “When the heart is silent, the soul cries out.” In singing and performing this message of faith, expressed in liturgical language, the boys are displaying their absorption of the proper response to difficult circumstances, as they grieve according to the Haredi worldview. The video, composed of various scenes with a loose story line, highlights the two boys enacting their grief. One boy runs to the synagogue, reciting prayers from a prayer book and resting his head against the Aron Kodesh, the ark holding the Torah scrolls. While he reads from the prayer book, we see his fingers pointing out the words “Shema Yisrael,” the Jewish declaration of monotheism, a play on which is also the basis for the first line of the song’s chorus: “Sh’ma Yisrael Elokai, Ata hakol yachol,” (Hear, Israel, my God, you are the omnipotent One). We later see this boy, with his black suit, white shirt, and black velvet kippah, walking along Ocean Parkway, a large thoroughfare that cuts through the Syrian Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn. His eyes track a passing ambulance, at which point the video cuts to a scene of the boy in the waiting room of a hospital, reading from a book, likely a volume of psalms. The young child is behaving properly according to Haredi belief; in his moment of distress he is turning to God and petitioning for the well-being of his loved one. The second distressed boy is alone on the beach in Coney Island, just a short distance from the heart of Brooklyn’s Syrian Jewish community. His body language shows his sadness, and he clearly feels alone. He flies a kite by himself, and pensively walks along the beach. Later in the video, we see four other boys from the choir walking along the boardwalk and singing together. It appears that they are looking for their friend, who they find pacing back and forth on the beach. They each jump over the handrail and sit with him on the sand to console him. The five boys sing together on the beach; the distressed boy sings the melody, while the others support him with responsive vocal harmonies. It is important to note that the boy on the beach is joined by his friends who have come to support him, while the boy who ran to the synagogue is left alone with his thoughts and God. The boy on the beach seems to be lost and in need of guidance, which the other choir members provide, while the boy in the synagogue has sufficiently acted according to the community’s ideals and is therefore self-sufficient. Thus, firm social bonds within the religious community are an important mechanism for reinforcing proper social-religious practice. While there are similarities to other boys choirs in the sonic quality of the piece, particularly in the ways that it evokes drama through the combined children’s voices and the use of dynamics, there are also some aspects that make SBC different from the Ashkenazi choirs.44 First, the boys sing according to 44 The similarities can partly be attributed to the fact that the piece was recorded by Eli Gerstner, the

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the Sephardic pronunciation of Hebrew, with musical vocal inflections that are common in Mizrachi music.45 Second, we hear short, monophonic melodies (played by a keyboard, but mimicking a large string ensemble) that are interspersed between vocal lines, connoting conventions common to Arab music systems. Through the arrangement of the piece and these musical symbols, the Syrian Boys Choir is demonstrating their fidelity to their heritage, as well as to their religious community through their turn to God, the synagogue, and one another during a time of great personal challenge.

Performing a Secure Future As seen in the above descriptions, boys choirs perform both religious and social practices that suggest their intention to carry the Haredi community forward. By dressing in the garb of the community, singing of their trust in God (particularly in moments of distress), demonstrating their knowledge of religious texts and rituals, and showing social cohesion, they are providing a powerful counterpoint to the community’s anxiety over the future. While a great deal of energy and resources are directed toward ensuring that children will not go “off the derekh,” boys choirs’ performances provide a sense of relief regarding the community’s future. As Finkelman writes, “Delinquent youth represent a powerful and compelling ‘other’ against which to define normalcy and health.”46 With boys choirs, we see just the opposite: a model of social health that can allay anxieties about the community’s future. In addition, boys choirs function as positive role models, as seen in the novel written for children and teens, Chaverim Boys Choir: Live, which tells of an imaginary American boys choir’s trip to Israel to perform. Along the way, the boys in the choir encounter moral dilemmas, but always make the correct decision according to Haredi practice. In a conversation with Eli Gerstner, I asked him to explain the popularity of boys choirs. He replied, “I think that there’s something about kids singing that is just very innocent and very pure. They sing a song like nobody else can. There’s just a certain innocence . . . ​There’s just a certain purity when a director of the Yeshiva Boys Choir, though the musical characteristics found here are idiomatic to this music genre. 45 SBC’s pronunciation also differs from the Sarit Hadad recording in the sense that SBC sings “Elokai” instead of “Elohai” [My God]. This switch is made in order to avoid transgressing the command to not take God’s name in vain. Furthermore, this pronunciation is yet another way the choir demonstrates their religious identity and adherence to practices in the Orthodox community. 46 Yoel Finkelman, Strictly Kosher Reading: Popular Literature and the Condition of Contemporary Orthodoxy (Boston, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2011).

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kid sings a song.” This “innocence” and “purity” may indeed be the primary experience of many listeners, particularly adults. To appreciate the value of this performance of purity, one must understand the context – perhaps a liquid modern context – that makes this so powerful. In an environment in which social ties and continuity are perceived to be threatened, innocence and purity are important values, and are performed in very specific ways. The “purity” that Gerstner mentions is one that suggests a secure future for the community through performing its intertwined social and religious values, indicating that the Haredi lifestyle is safe in the hands of today’s youth. Choirs understand the place that they occupy in their society and acknowledge their role in carrying this form of Orthodoxy into the future. As guardians of their religious community’s continuity, they sound their devotion to this responsibility and perform its successful completion. This can be seen clearly in the piece “In a Song” by Yeshiva Boys Choir, in which they promise to “make our future bright,” in a spirit of brotherhood [achdus, in Hebrew]. This piece demonstrates how children’s music-making can function as an optimistic vision for the community’s future, as the choirs teach the message to children and reinforce it to adult listeners: In a song we’ll sing/ We’ll hear achdus ring We’ll walk together hand in hand/ Until we reach our promised land So that this is the year/ Moshiach [Hebrew: The Messiah] will appear Bimherah b’yameinu, amen [Hebrew: Quickly in our days, Amen] We’re a family/ Bound by history We are travelers hand in hand/ Destined for this promised land We must be the light/ To make our future bright Bimherah b’yameinu, amen

Conclusion Haredi boys choirs offer their community the performance of purity and a secure future by demonstrating that these children have absorbed the values that will enable them to perpetuate Haredi Judaism in the face of dangerous social conditions. Furthermore, the boys are not mere recipients of Haredi culture; they are agents who will fight for their community and who proudly proclaim its values and their religious belief. Their religious commitment and devotion to the Orthodox community reinforce social ties, indicating that liquid modernity is not unidirectional, and that certain strategies, such as the religious cultural productions described here, have the power to re-solidify social ties. Thus, boys choirs represent a rich window into the ways that children’s musical

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performances play an important role in carrying out, and representing to numerous segments of society, the successful intergenerational transmission of beliefs and practices.

Introduction to “The Making of Moses” Mark Leuchter and Zev Farber The figure of Moses looms large across the entirety of Jewish history in distinct and varied ways. Even in the oldest “classical” Jewish sources, Moses is remembered and deployed at symbolic and discursive cross-purposes; the reception and transmission of Moses traditions in later sources reflects the same multidimensional character. The articles in this collection examine the methods, themes, agendas and contradictions that attend the invocation of the figure of Moses in different historical, literary, and social contexts within and beyond the Jewish world.

The epitaph reportedly engraved on Maimonides’ tombstone reads: “From Moses to Moses, there was none like Moses,” a brief but powerful play on words that likened Maimonides to his famous biblical namesake. The biblical Moses is, of course, the central figure in Jewish tradition. His significance is tied to his two main roles in Jewish mnemohistory, namely, his freeing the Israelites from Egyptian bondage, and his acting as God’s conduit as lawgiver in the Sinai wilderness. These roles constitute static depictions of the Moses tradition in Judaism, based on the presentation of Moses in the final four books of the Pentateuch. These depictions, however, represent only a fraction of the role Moses played in ancient Israelite religion, and contain only limited information (important information, to be sure) concerning how the figure of Moses affected the religious traditions that formed during and in the wake of the Hebrew Scriptures’ long formation. One need not venture too far to see the ways in which Moses motifs were constantly evolving in antiquity. The prophetic traditions of the monarchic period are steeped in imagery, language, and concepts that invoke or echo Moses in different and even contradictory ways, well before most of the Pentateuch’s sources were textualized and fixed. And the abundance of post-biblical sources, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, shows no abatement in taking up and transforming the Moses mythology. Moses has a prehistory, before the composition of the Pentateuch as we know it, and he has had a reception history, reverberating throughout Jewish literature from the Second Temple period all the way to modern times. Even within the Pentateuch, the presentation of Moses varies: he is a priest, a prophet, a lawgiver, a sanctuary-builder, a prototype for monarchs, a scribe, an advocate for populism, an advocate for elite hierarchies, a

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Hebrew, an Egyptian, a Midianite, and a saintly figure who both submits to and strenuously argues with the divine. Moses is thus many things to many communities, already in the very document that claims to be the basis for defining his towering role in the Jewish world and beyond. Diversity and liminality are woven into his canonical presentation as well as in the way writers and thinkers who received that canonical material understood and re-imagined Moses. Yet the history of Jewish Studies in the last century (or so) has been characterized by a rift that sees the world behind the early shaping of the Moses traditions as somehow distinct from the Jewish traditions of the late Second Temple period, the Rabbinic period, and the medieval and modern eras. The complexity of the development of ideas, communities, and texts from the late Second Temple period down to – and through – the early modern period is widely recognized, but scholars working on reception often approach the biblical text two-dimensionally, without considering points of continuity between the contrasting voices in the Bible and similarly contrasting voices in the Second Temple period and after. This is not to say that Jewish Studies scholars have regarded the biblical material as beyond the scope of critical inquiry, or denied that it developed through complex historical and intellectual mechanisms. But the assumption that the canonized Hebrew Bible was the stepping-stone for subsequent discourses created a sort of partition between the biblical record and the Judaisms of later eras: the former was the authoritative “source” for the latter. Consequently, the study of the Hebrew Bible has largely received the short end of the proverbial stick in Jewish Studies more generally. It is often regarded as part of “Biblical Studies” (which, as is well known, was a largely non-Jewish intellectual enterprise for the better part of the last two centuries) or part of the study of the Ancient Near East, i.e., the civilizations of epochs that long preceded the emergence of Jews and Judaism. In recent years, however, the needle has begun to move in a different direction: scholars are beginning to include a study of the prehistory of the biblical text as part of the arc of development that leads not only to the biblical text itself but also to the reception history of the text and its characters. Moreover, what we often think of as the reception history of the Bible may at times have been influenced by traditions that did not make it into the canonized Bible. Reckoned differently: there was never only one collection of photographs in one photo album dedicated to Moses. At all points in the history of traditions about him, multiple photo albums were in a constant state of development.

Summary of Contents The following articles, informally titled “The Making of Moses,” offer a selection of detailed snapshots of Moses, from different periods of time and in different

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historical and sociological contexts. Our goal is not to be thorough – for a character as central and versatile as Moses, such an endeavor would require multiple volumes – but to offer readers a taste for the different ways Moses imagery and mythology have been used in Jewish literature over time.1

Tradition History (Pre-Pentateuchal) This collection opens with a discussion of Moses’s prehistory, before the formation of the Pentateuch. As is well known, in the Pentateuch Moses is presented as the most significant figure in Israel’s primordial history, as the great law-giver who communicated directly with YHWH, as well as the person whom YHWH sends to free Israel from Egyptian bondage and lead them to the Promised Land. Nevertheless, in the first article in the collection (“Moses the Transjordanian Prophet”), Zev Farber argues that a number of textual clues point to earlier versions of the Moses legend, in which he may have been a local Transjordanian holy man. Farber’s essay attempts to reconstruct Moses’s development from Transjordanian holy man to the great leader of a united Israel familiar from the Pentateuch. Penetrating the world behind the text of the Pentateuch is complex, since the Pentateuch only gives us curated access to the groups, cultures, and ideas that surrounded the Moses legend before its sources were composed. This requires taking into consideration the likelihood that material in the Pentateuch may not simply reflect the traditions, relics, and memories received by its editors, but that it sometimes represents deliberate choices and reformulations that were made in order to fit with the philosophy or viewpoint of its various authors.

Pentateuchal/Hebrew Bible The next two essays deal with Moses’s position in the Bible. Alison Joseph’s essay (“Moses like David: Prototypes in the Deuteronomistic History”) notes the anomalous role of Moses in the Deuteronomic History (DtrH). The historiographical style of the deuteronomistic historian (Dtr) has often been identified as unique within the Hebrew Bible. One of the tendencies of Dtr is to construct characters who fit into specific prototypes. This tendency is best seen in the Book of Kings, in which the kings of Israel and Judah, good and bad, are cast in the model of David and Josiah, the prototypical righteous kings. In Deuteronomy 18:15–22, the deuteronomistic author establishes a “prophetic

1 The idea for this collection began with an AJS symposium session organized by the editors in 2015, titled “‘Never Again Did there Arise in Israel a prophet like Moses . . . ’: The Problem of Moses’s Incomparability in Historical Perspective.” The session had five brief presentations. Three of those presentations (Farber, Leuchter, and Lowin) grew into papers for this collection.

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prototype” in the likeness of Moses. Nevertheless, with the exception of Moses himself, the prototype is not employed beyond this passage. Joseph’s article explores the presence of the “prophetic” prototype in DtrH, in contrast to that of the “righteous king,” and suggests why the prophetic model is proposed but not applied. Mark Leuchter’s essay (“Moses between the Pentateuch and the Book of the Twelve”) discusses contrasting pictures of Moses that emerge from a comparison between the Pentateuch and the Book of the Twelve (the “minor prophets,” i.e., Hosea through Malachi). The Pentateuch ends with the famous statement that no prophet ever arose in Israel to rival Moses (Deut 34:10–12). This redactional seal diminishes the potency of prophecy beyond what is recorded in the Pentateuch, relegating all other prophets and their works to a position subordinate to that of Moses and “his” book. The rhetoric of the Pentateuch’s redactional seal also implicitly empowered the Aaronide priests as the direct inheritors of Moses’s authority, positioning them as the arbiters of Israel’s prophetic literature. The Book of the Twelve challenges this by returning Moses to a literary context outside of the Pentateuch. Its references to Moses (Hos 12:14; Mic 6:4; Mal 3:21–22) align him with the prophets who become the bearers of his prophetic legacy and authority. Joseph and Leuchter each demonstrate how biblical writers reinvent Moses to fit with their particular worldviews. Joseph’s study shows how DtrH uses Moses like David to lend structure to history through the poetics of historiographic composition – imposing a decidedly learned/scribal perception of historical meaning upon the sources that were recruited to create the DtrH. Leuchter’s study shows how the redactors of the Book of the Twelve use the prophetic critique of institutions, kingship, and imperialism to emphasize that the (imperial) status quo sustaining Aaronide hegemony was open to question and even indictment. The placement of Moses at the beginning, middle, and ending of this work reinforces its rhetorical power. Both studies show how the biblical writers in question recognized and reinforced Moses’s epic stature in the religious cultures of their days, while actively reshaping and realigning extant sacral hierarchies and structures associated with him to create new avenues for transmitting tradition.

Second Temple and Rabbinic Literature The next two essays in the collection address the complex of Moses discourses from the late Second Temple and Rabbinic eras. In “The Apocalyptic Moses of Second Temple Judaism,” Alexandria Frisch surveys a wide variety of Second Temple period texts that take up the figure of Moses (3rd century BCE – 1st century CE), ranging from the sectarian Qumran texts to Hellenistic literature from the Egyptian diaspora. Despite the differences in their origins in very

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different religious and social milieus, these works all imbue Moses with apocalyptic characteristics. In a comparison with the Second Temple apocalypses of Daniel and 1 Enoch (which indeed might have served as inspiration for some of these Second Temple authors) this article demonstrates that the surveyed texts exhibit a number of the markers of the apocalyptic genre as defined by John J. Collins. The Second Temple Moses is a supernatural Moses, either interacting with angels or becoming one himself; his biblical prophecies have been replaced with visions of the eschatological future, and his sojourn on Mount Sinai has turned into an actual ascent into heaven. This widespread apocalypticizing of Moses attests not only to the profound shift towards apocalyptic thinking in the Second Temple period, but also to the enduring significance of Moses as a conduit to God even in social and theological contexts not strictly defined by (what would become) biblical tradition. Rebecca Wollenberg’s essay (“A King and a Scribe like Moses: The Reception of Deuteronomy 34:10 and a Rabbinic Theory of Collective Biblical Authorship”) looks to the collections of rabbinic texts that grapple with the place of Moses as against the prophecy that persisted beyond the “prophetic” era. In modern scholarship, Deuteronomy 34:10 is often imagined as the source of a rabbinic theory of biblical authorship in which each successive stage in Israelite history was marked by a decline in the level of prophetic guidance available to the people. According to this model, each new cohort of religious leaders was compelled to meticulously preserve and minutely study the written records of a prophetic experience to which they no longer had access. The early rabbinic materials analyzed in this essay, however, reveal that Deuteronomy 34:10 was closely tied in some early rabbinic traditions to a very different theory of biblical compilation. For these early rabbinic thinkers, Deuteronomy 34:10 was not a statement of prophetic decline but of prophetic change. If Moses was destined to bequeath the raw sacred materials of revelation to the world, other inspired figures would arise who would shape (and reshape) these materials into the biblical tradition as we know it. For as t. Sanhedrin 4:7, Song of Songs Rabbah 1.1.8, and b. Eruvin 21b each explain in different ways, the Mosaic revelation was believed to be all but incomprehensible to the people in its original form. Only with the additions and refinements of later sages and scribes did the Mosaic revelation acquire a shape in which “everyone began to discern its meaning” (Song of Songs Rabbah 1.1.8). Frisch and Wollenberg each draw attention to a shift in the deployment of Moses as a literary/rhetorical topos. Frisch’s discussion shows how the apocalyptic genre writes revelations about the future into the Moses lore. These apocalyptic Moses stories, such as we find in the Exagoge or the Testament of Moses, surround and supplement the biblical texts so that they no longer define the discourse around Moses or supply the final word. Wollenberg’s study

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similarly emphasizes that for the rabbis, the canonical texts were actually the first iteration of new and a self-generating revelation expressed and clarified by subsequent scribes who, like Moses, held a particular role in an ongoing process of divine disclosure through texts and teaching.

Jewish-Muslim Interactions around Moses (Medieval and Modern Discourses) The final two essays in the collection turn to the role of Jewish Moses traditions in the context of Jewish-Muslim interactions in the medieval and modern periods. Shari Lowin (“A Prophet Like Moses? What Can We Know about the Early Jewish Responses to Muḥammad’s Claims of Mosesness?”) observes that while Islam echoed the Jewish characterization and adoration of Moses as God’s messenger, interlocutor (al-kalīm), and right-hand man, Islam rejected the Jewish teachings regarding Moses’s everlasting prophetic uniqueness. For Islam, Moses was matched by a subsequent prophet whose life paralleled his but who ultimately superseded him: Muḥammad. Lowin analyzes the nature of the Jewish reaction to the Muslim claim of Muḥammad’s superiority over Moses and opens with a discussion of Jewish polemics against Muḥammad in the early Islamic era. Problematically for scholars working with this material, these polemics are preserved only in non-contemporaneous Islamic sources (the writings of Ibn Hishām and al-Wāqidī), where their historicity remains highly questionable. Lowin further compares these early Jewish responses to later medieval Jewish writings on Muḥammad’s Mosesness as found in the writings of Netanel ibn al-Fayyoumi, Maimonides, Daniel al-Qumisi, Ibn Kammuna, and Ibn Adret, among others. Intriguingly, we find that the ways (possibly) contemporary Jews reacted to Muḥammad – recognizing him as predicted in Jewish tradition, rejecting him for not measuring up to Moses, or mocking him outright – are the same categories of reaction found in the medieval sources. This finding suggests that perhaps the Muslim depiction of the early Jewish response was in fact rooted in some historical truth. Finally, Rachel Havrelock (“The End of Moses”) asks: what happens to the mortal/immortal prophet in the context of nationalism? More specifically, what effects do Jewish, Palestinian, and Jordanian nationalism have on the meaning of Moses and his end? The essay approaches these questions by surveying Jewish and Muslim texts regarding the death, or lack thereof, of Moses and finds an abiding shared ambivalence. These overlapping traditions harden and polarize in the context of twentieth-century national movements that enlist them in making political claims to territory. The immortally wandering prophet thus

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becomes part of a contested homeland. The apex of this process is the 1920 uprising at the Nabi Musa (Prophet Moses) Mosque outside Jerusalem. It marks a distinct moment of militarization and an articulation of hyper-nationalism by Al-Hajj Amin al-Husayni and Ze’ev Jabotinsky. The latter’s ideology served as one of the bases of the Zionist and then Israeli right, while the former’s positions served as the inspiration for the Palestine Liberation Organization. The essays by Lowin and Havrelock deal with one of the most ancient features of the Moses tradition: conflict. In these cases, the conflict emerges between Jews and Muslims both in centuries past and in more proximate epochs, but the motif is perennial in the evolution of the Moses tradition. These essays reflect how cultural tropes are reused over centuries (or longer), but are governed to some extent by the retention of memory regarding their earlier function and purpose. With these last two contributions, the present collection provides a longue durée glimpse at the Moses legacy, shedding light not only on Moses’s role in Near/Middle Eastern societies, but carrying implications for the place of other such figures in those societies as well. Remembered individuals, drawn from history and shaded by legend and myth, mediate the terms of social identity within and between groups who claim shares in their traditions. They become cornerstones of language and rhetoric, sources for ethics and action, and anchors of social structures that utilize the past to delineate trajectories for the future.

Moses the Transjordanian Prophet Zev I. Farber

Project TABS – TheTorah.com The Pentateuch contains more than one explanation for why Moses is buried in the Transjordan. This demonstrates both that the tradition is ancient and that later biblical authors had a problem with it. When we attempt to trace the contours of this ancient tradition, we find a Moses who was a local leader and holy man among the Reubenites and is credited with the conquest of their territory. A YHWH temple stood in the area of his tomb. Over time, as the Cisjordan became the dominant area for Israel, and the Transjordan lost its legitimacy, attempts to explain the anomaly that the greatest Israelite leader in history is buried outside Israel proper needed to be explained. This is the origin of the narrative concerning Moses’s sin.

Ortsgebundenheit When analyzing the figure of Moses, and where he fits into Israelite tradition-­ history, Martin Noth turns to the burial tradition, which he calls, “the most original element of the Mosaic tradition still preserved.” Noth bases this argument on a principle called Ortsgebundenheit (literally “binding to place”), and goes on to explain: “in other cases too, a grave tradition usually gives the most reliable indication of the original provenance of a particular figure of tradition.”1 Noth proposes that originally Moses was a minor local figure, with no part in any of Israel’s “big themes,” such as wandering in the wilderness or escape from Egypt. Instead, to quote Douglas Knight’s summary, “because his grave lay in the traditional path of the ‘Israelites’ on their way into Palestine, he was worked into the theme, ‘Guidance into Palestine’ by later narrators, and hence into other themes.”2 Although in my view Noth underestimates the early place of Moses in Israelite tradition, his argument that Moses’s tradition history originates in the Transjordan is compelling. A good proof for this comes from the Priestly story of Moses’s sin in Numbers 20, according to which Moses fails to





1 Martin Noth, A History of Pentateuchal Traditions, trans. B.W. Anderson (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1972), 169–70 (Original German: Überlieferungsgeschichte des Pentateuch, 1st ed. [Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1948]; 3rd ed., 1966.) 2 Douglas A. Knight, Rediscovering the Traditions of Israel, 3rd ed. SBL Studies in Biblical Literature 16 (Atlanta, GA: SBL, 2006), 116.

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sanctify God at Meribath-kadesh, when he was tasked with the job of getting water from a rock,3 and is thus punished with death outside the land.

Etiological Tales Ever since Hermann Gunkel’s work on biblical myths,4 which provided the foundation for form criticism, scholars have noted the prevalence of etiological tales in the Bible. Some of these are classic versions of what Rudyard Kipling called, “Just-So Stories.” This is especially true in the early parts of Genesis. For example, the implicit question, “Why do men love women?” is answered in Genesis 2:22–24 with, “because woman was made from man’s missing rib.” Similarly, “Why does childbirth hurt?” is answered in Genesis 3:16 with “because the first woman ate from the forbidden fruit,” while “Why don’t snakes have legs?” is answered in Genesis 3:14 with, “because the snake convinced the woman to eat from the fruit.” Other stories seem to be designed to explain local geographical features such as the saltiness of the Dead Sea region (“it was once beautiful, but the people were wicked and YHWH smote them with sulfur and brimstone from the sky,” Gen 19:24), or a particular mineral formation that looked like a woman (“it once was a woman, but she was punished and turned into a pillar of salt,” Gen 19:26). Etiological stories can also be designed to explain local traditions, customs, or just about any anomaly that people feel needs explaining. The account of Moses’s sin can be understood through this prism.

Moses’s Sin(s) The Priestly story of Moses’s sin in Num 20:1–13 explains why he may not enter the Promised Land.5 For those reading the Bible historically, this is simply “how it happened”; this “fact” had been part of Israel’s story for generations and



3 This story is a double of a non-Priestly story about getting water from a rock which appears in Exodus 17:1–7. That these seem like two versions of the same story was noted already by R. Joseph Bechor Shor in the 12th century. See the discussion in Jonathan Jacobs, :‫בכור שורו הדר לו‬ ‫( ר׳ יוסף בכור שור בין המשכיות לחידוש‬Jerusalem: Hebrew University Magnes Press, 2017), 230–44 [233–36]; idem, “Moses Strikes the Rock in Exodus and Numbers: One Story or Two?” TheTorah (2019). 4 Hermann Gunkel, The Legends of Genesis, trans. W.H. Carruth (Chicago, IL: Open Court Publishing, 1901). 5 Num 20:1–13 is a composite text, with a non-Priestly complaint story about the wilderness of Zin spliced in. Although scholars differ in some details exactly how to reconstruct the two texts, the storyline about Moses and the rock is almost certainly from P. For a detailed analysis of this account and its redaction, see David Frankel, The Murmuring Stories of the Priestly School: A

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needed to be included. From a tradition-historical (Überlieferungsgeschichte) perspective, however, the question persists: Why does Moses not enter the Promised Land? If Israelite tradition credits Moses with leading the Israelites out of Egypt, and he is understood to have been the greatest prophet in Israelite history, why not credit him with the taking of the Promised Land as well?6 The most obvious response would be that the conquest stories were already associated with other figures, such as Joshua (Josh 6–11), or even Barak (Judg 4–5) and David (2 Sam 5:6–10). This is only a partial answer, however, for two reasons. First, it is not uncommon for particularly prominent figures to cannibalize the traditions of other figures.7 Thus, even if others, such as Joshua, were associated with the conquest, groups that venerated Moses above others could have substituted him for them or added him to the story. Second, the stark ending of Moses dying outside the land because of his sin would not be the only way to make room for traditions regarding the other conquering heroes. One could envision a triumphant ending, in which the elderly man crosses over the Jordan with Joshua and is buried in one of the holy cities, such as Hebron or Shechem, just as Joseph is at the end of the Book of Joshua (Josh 24). Therefore, in keeping with Noth’s observation, I suggest that the Israelite storytellers had no choice but to have Moses die in the Transjordan, because that is where his grave was to be found. To clarify, although at least one of the various sources or redactions that make up Deuteronomy 34 states that no one knows the location of Moses’s grave, all have Moses dying in the Transjordan, whether it be on Mount Abarim (Deut 32:49–50), Mount Pisgah (Deut 3:27, 34:1), or the valley opposite Peor (Deut 34:6a).8 In other words, although his







Retrieval of Ancient Sacerdotal Lore. Supplements to Vetus Testamentum 89 (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 263–323. 6 Samuel Loewenstamm suggests that the etiological motivation for this story was to explain why Moses dies at all. See his “The Death of Moses,” in From Babylon to Canaan: Studies in the Bible and its Oriental Background, ed. Samuel E. Loewenstamm, trans. Baruch J. Schwartz (Jerusalem: Hebrew University Magnes Press, 1992), 136–66. Nevertheless, in my view, Loewenstamm is reading the older sources through the prism of Second Temple apocalyptic retellings. Instead, I would argue that the problem the story is trying to explain is why Moses dies in the Transjordan. 7 For other examples of this phenomenon, which I dub “tradition cannibalism,” see Zev I. Farber, Images of Joshua in the Bible and their Reception. Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 457 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016), 120; idem, “Jerubaal, Jacob, and the Battle for Shechem: A Tradition History,” Journal of Hebrew Scriptures 13.12 (2013): 1–26, esp. 23–24. 8 According to David Ben-Gad HaCohen (Dudu Cohen), the view that Moses died on Mount Abarim, glossed as Nebo, comes from P; the view that he died on Mount Pisgah (also glossed as Nebo in Deut 34:1), but that no one knows where he is buried, comes from J, and the view that he died in the valley opposite Peor and is buried there comes from E. D, however, does not record Moses’s death. See David Ben-Gad HaCohen, “The Unknown Yet Known Place of Moses’ Burial,”

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exact burial place being known (34:6a) or unknown (34:6b) may have been a matter of conflict,9 the overall geographic area where he died was not. Some Israelite storytellers, bothered by the dissonance between the picture of Moses as the greatest prophet and the fact that he was not buried in the “real” Promised Land, i.e., the Cisjordan, solved this dissonance by suggesting that he must have sinned and death outside the Cisjordan was his punishment; what other reason could prevent the great prophet Moses from entering the Promised Land? Using this etiological prism helps alleviate the classic problem that has bothered commentators for millennia: What exactly did Moses do to deserve his punishment?10 Putting aside the various readings of the text which have yielded a plethora of possible sins, once we understand that the punishment motif is a byproduct of the need to explain why Moses was buried in the Transjordan, we can understand that the specific sin is secondary.11 The story simply needed to end with Moses dying in the Transjordan, since that is where he is buried. TheTorah (2015). For an alternative source division, which includes a D death scene, see Philip Yoo, “The Four Moses Death Accounts,” Journal of Biblical Literature 131.3 (2012): 423–41. Yoo’s article brought about a lively debate in a follow-up volume of the Journal of Biblical Literature, featuring responses from Serge Frolov, David Carr, and Shawna Dolansky, and a rejoinder by Philip Yoo. See, Journal of Biblical Literature 133.3 (2014): 648–68. For a different approach to the composition of Deuteronomy 34, assuming a Dtr base text, see Thomas C. Römer and Marc Z. Brettler, “Deuteronomy 34 and the Case for a Persian Hexateuch,” Journal of Biblical Literature 119.3 (2000): 401–19. 9 One trend in traditional Jewish and Christian tradition suggests that Moses’s grave was kept secret to avoid his deification, and people therefore coming to worship him at his burial mound. See Origen, Selecta in Num., 578b; Midrash Lekah Tov, “Berakhah” 102. A similar trend in modern scholarship sees this as a polemic against the holy site in Nebo where a YHWH temple once stood, before it was conquered by Mesha of Moab. See Alexander Rofé, “‫ מקדש נבו ושאלת מוצא‬,‫ברכת משה‬ ‫”הלויים‬, in ‫מחקרים במקרא ובמזרח הקדמון מוגשים לשלמה א׳ ליונשטם במלאת לו שבעים שנה‬, ed. Yitschak Avishur and Joshua Blau (Jerusalem: E. Rubinstein’s Pub. House, 1978), 409–24; reprinted in Alexander Rofé, ‫ חלק ראשון ופרקי המשך‬:‫( מבוא לספר דברים‬Jerusalem: Akademon, 1988), 234–49 [241]. A wilder hypothesis, variations of which were suggested by a number of scholars, is that Phineas (or Joshua and Elazar) murdered Moses and hid the body, and the Torah is trying to cover this up. See, for instance, Ernst Sellin, “Hosea und das Martyrium des Mose,” Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 46 (1928): 26–33. Finally, another theory is that the unknown burial spot is a toning down of a tradition according to which Moses never died but ascended to heaven. See Loewenstamm, “The Death of Moses,” 147–63. 10 The literature on this question is too vast to survey here and the question is beyond the scope of this paper. For a good summary, see excursus 50 in Jacob Milgrom, Numbers. The JPS Torah Commentary (Philadelphia: JPS, 1998), 381–89. 11 Loewenstamm suggests that the Priestly story as we have it is a heavily revised version of an older story wherein the sin at Meribah is the reason the Israelites as a whole are forbidden to enter the land, and that originally Moses’s sin and punishment was simply part of the overall story about Israel’s rebellion. See Loewenstamm, “The Death of Moses,” 137–45. In this sense, it

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An Alternative Version of Moses’s Sin (D and J) Support for this contention – that the grave’s location gave rise to the development of the narrative – comes from the fact that Deuteronomy records an entirely different explanation for why Moses dies in the Transjordan. In Deuteronomy 1:37, Moses states that God became angry at Moses “because of you [the Israelites]” and that this is why Moses was forbidden to enter the land. Although Moses does not explain further, in context he is referring to the outcome of the story of the scouts described earlier in this same pericope (vv. 20–23). In the version reported in Deuteronomy, the Israelites suggest sending scouts, and Moses thinks the idea to be a good one and follows their advice. The mission ends in an Israelite rebellion: the people refuse to enter the land and conquer it. In context, God is angry with Moses for going along with the idea. Thus, whereas the Priestly text explains Moses’s death in the Transjordan resulting from the sin of the waters of Mei Meribah (whatever exactly that sin may have been), Deuteronomy explains it as a result of the sin of the scouts. As Deuteronomy’s source for the scouts story is J, David Ben-Gad HaCohen has argued that the alternative explanation for Moses’s death in the Transjordan originates in this source.12 An alternative approach was recently put forward by Gili Kugler, who argues that the explanation for Moses’s death here is not an integral part of Deuteronomy 1–4 at all, but constitutes a later supplement.13 The same is true, she argues, for Deuteronomy 4:21–22, which reflects the same idea that Moses is being punished for his part in Israel’s sin. Instead, she argues, the original explanation in Deuteronomy for Moses’s death was simply that he reached the end of his mission. Moses was 120 years old, no longer able to lead (Deut 31:2), and it was time for him to pass on and let the next generation enter the Cisjordan with a new leader. God expresses would be parallel to what we see in Deuteronomy’s retelling of J’s scouts story, in which Moses is punished together with Israel. 12 HaCohen also offers a reconstruction of the lost section of the J story, based on his idea that D preserves the contours of a fuller J account than what survived in Numbers. See David Ben-­Gad HaCohen, “Using the Torah to Fill in the Lacunae of the Numbers Spies Story,” TheTorah (2016). In this sense (though not in the reconstruction itself), HaCohen’s view overlaps with that of Joel Baden, who has argued for the likelihood of D having had access both to the E scroll and the J scroll, as separate but complete documents. See Joel Baden, J, E, and the Redaction of the Pentateuch. Forschungen zum Alten Testament 68 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009), 99–195, and see especially his discussion of the scouts story on pp. 114–30. 13 See Gili Kugler, “Moses Died and the People Moved on: A Hidden Narrative in Deuteronomy,” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 43.2 (2018): 191–204.

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anger at his request to cross over the Jordan in 3:26 because Moses is asking that God extend his life, which is inappropriate as it goes against the natural order and God’s plan. According to this construction, God’s intention was always that Moses would die in the Transjordan. The explanation based on Moses having sinned was added by a later editor, who was bothered by Moses not entering the Cisjordan. If Kugler is correct, this textual development likely reflects a change in attitude towards the Transjordan. In the older layer of Deuteronomy, the Transjordan was part of the Promised Land, and thus the tradition of Moses dying there did not pose a problem. By the time of the supplementor, the Transjordan had a secondary status, and thus an explanation was necessary. This is certainly the case in the Priestly Text, which does not consider the Transjordan to be Israel proper at all.14 What is important here, for our purposes, is not the existence of contradictory reasons for Moses’s punishment, but the fact that different Israelite sources understood that they needed a “sin story.” Why didn’t the later sources, instead of inventing a sin, simply move Moses’s death scene into the Cisjordan? It is because of the universal agreement that Moses is buried in the Transjordan.

The Sin of the Spies: Explaining the Conquest from the Transjordan The problem of Moses being buried in the Transjordan also seems to be at the base of the story of the scouts. This is best understood, argues Jacob Wright, when we look at the larger picture of the wilderness account,15 according to which the Israelites leave Egypt to enter the land of Israel. The best itinerary for such a story would be a walk up the coastal road, entering the Cisjordan 14 See Angela Roskop Erisman, The Wilderness Itineraries: Genre, Geography, and the Growth of Torah. History, Archaeology, and Culture of the Levant 3 (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2011), 223–32. 15 See Jacob L. Wright, “The Backstory of the Spy Account,” TheTorah (2015). Wright takes a supplementary approach and isolates a number of steps in creating the story. The core, he argues, begins with a less dramatic explanation – the routes from the coast and the south were too dangerous, since the inhabitants there were powerful. As over time it became religiously unacceptable to claim that YHWH was not powerful enough to deal with certain enemies, this practical explanation morphed into a story about sin, shifting the blame from external enemies to the Israelites themselves. Even so, the core verses about the power of the Philistines on the coast (Exod 13:17) and the Canaanites and Amalekites in the south (Num 14:25) were never erased.

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in the Gaza region. Exodus (13:17) explains, however, that this did not happen because God did not want to bring the Israelites face to face with the Philistines lest they (=the Israelites) panic. The next best route would be entering through the Negev and the Judean Hills in the south. But they don’t do this either; instead, they enter through the Transjordan. This is a very roundabout route. The story of the scouts in Numbers and Deuteronomy explains this roundabout route by positing that, originally, the Israelites were going to enter through the south, but they refused to do so after hearing the scouts’ account. In return for this rebelliousness, God forces the Israelites to wander through the wilderness until all the adults of that generation die. During this wandering, the Israelites end up in the Transjordan, and eventually enter the Cisjordan from this territory. Thus, the story of the scouts is best understood against the backdrop of a pre-existing tradition of entry from the Transjordan that Israelite storytellers needed to explain. Why would recently escaped slaves from Egypt be in the Transjordan in the first place if they were headed for the Cisjordan? The answer, at least for P, J, and D, was the sin of the Israelites’ response to the scouts. The etiological background to the story would go as follows: originally, the Israelites were going to enter from the south, but, because of their sin, they were forced to wander through the wilderness. At the end of this wandering, they were in the Transjordan, and proceeded from there to the Cisjordan.

Conquest from the Transjordan Because the idea of a conquest coming from the Transjordan is so entrenched in Israelite historiography, scholars have been prompted to look for historical explanations of why this is so. For example, Albrecht Alt suggested a peaceful infiltration model, wherein Israelite tribal elements living in the Transjordan crossed over into the Cisjordan over time, and eventually dominated the local Canaanite population.16 Conversely, Frank Moore Cross, who took the idea of a one-time military invasion as historical (a view generally rejected in contemporary scholarship), went so far as to establish the crossing of the Jordan River as the prototype for the later story of the crossing of the Sea of Reeds.17 Although Alt’s view that the settlers originate in the Transjordan has merit, and is still accepted by many scholars today, 18 I believe the point can be 16 See Albrecht Alt, Essays on Old Testament History and Religion, trans. R.A. Wilson (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor, 1968), 175–221. 17 Frank Moore Cross, From Epic to Canon: History and Literature in Ancient Israel (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 44. 18 Archaeology has shown that the Cisjordanian highlands were settled in the early Iron I, but the

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sharpened if we also take an etiological/mnemohistorical approach, and suggest the following development: over time, a number of independent tribal groups, starting in the Transjordan but afterwards living in the Cisjordan as well, merged their identities under the umbrella term Israelite. This was not a one-step process, but likely occurred in multiple stages.19 Because the Cisjordanian groups gained ascendency, with Samaria and Jerusalem forming the political centers, we can see how the Transjordan was slowly demoted in biblical texts from ancient Israelite territory, to grudgingly Israelite territory, to illegitimate territory where some Israelites lived. We can see some of these middle stages being worked out in Israelite historiography in the story of Reuben and Gad in Numbers 32. This tale, also etiological in nature, was written to explain why these two tribes live on the wrong side of the river. The text is clearly composite, containing two narrative strands.20 The earlier, non-Priestly, strand – identified as E by documentary question of the origin of the settlers (were they local nomads or settlers from the outside?) and the nature of the relationship between the settlers of Judah and Samaria remains a matter of debate in contemporary scholarship. See the discussion in Avraham Faust, Israel’s Ethnogenesis: Settlement, Interaction, Expansion and Resistance (London: Equinox, 2006); Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman, The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts (New York: Touchstone, 2002); William G. Dever, Who Were the Early Israelites and Where Did They Come From? (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003). For a sharp focus on the debate, see Israel Finkelstein, Amihai Mazar, and Brian Schmidt, eds., The Quest for the Historical Israel: Debating Archaeology and the History of Israel. Archaeology and Biblical Studies 17 (Atlanta, GA: SBL, 2007), 67–98. 19 As part of this process, there was a need to define the relationship between those Transjordanian groups who identified as Israelite (Reuben and Gad) and those who did not (Moab and Ammon). This is probably the origin of the Lot stories. See the discussion in Rachel Havrelock, The River Jordan: The Mythology of a Dividing Line (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2011), ch. 2 [loc. 848–1214]. See also her analysis of how this tension spawned the story of Sihon in “Inventing the Mythic Amorite Kingdom of Sihon,” TheTorah (2015). 20 The division of this composite text into its Priestly and non-Priestly sources is particularly tricky, and many different specific configurations have been suggested. See, for example, Samuel E. Loewenstamm, “The Settlement of Gad and Reuben as Related in Nu. 23:1–38 – Background and Composition,” in From Babylon to Canaan: Studies in the Bible and its Oriental Background, ed., Samuel E. Loewenstamm (Jerusalem: Hebrew University Magnes Press, 1992 [orig. Hebrew 1972]), 109–30; Horst Seebass, “Erwägungen zu Numeri 32:1–38,” Journal of Biblical Literature 118 (1999): 33–48; Ludwig Schmitt “Die Ansiedelung von Ruben und Gad im Ostjordanland in Numeri 32, 1–38,” Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 114 (2002): 497–510; Baden, J, E, and the Redaction of the Pentateuch, 141–53; Liane Marquis (Feldman), “The Composition of Numbers 32: A New Proposal,” Vetus Testamentum 63 (2013): 408–32; Jacob Wright, “Redacting the Relationship to the Transjordanian Tribes: Kinship versus Commandment,” TheTorah (2015). See, however, Erisman’s argument that the text is of one piece and is specifically making a claim for inclusion of the Transjordan as part of the Promised Land: Angela Roskop Erisman, “The

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scholars – sees the request to stay in the Transjordan as legitimate, and does not appear critical of the decision. The later, Priestly text (or layer), on the other hand, presents Moses rebuking these tribes for making the request to settle in the Transjordan, which he only grudgingly grants after certain provisios. Later biblical texts present an even more negative etiology. For example, Joshua 22 tells a story about the Transjordanians building an altar, which almost causes a civil war. However one understands the intention of these tribes in their actions, the subtext is that it should be clear to all that worshipping YHWH on foreign soil, i.e., the Transjordan, is illegitimate.21 An even more extreme example comes in Ezekiel’s reinvisioning of the tribal allotments (ch. 47–48), in which the Transjordan does not appear at all; Reuben, Gad, and half of Manasseh are moved into Cisjordanian plots. As Walther Zimmerli writes, “[I]t is remarkable that on the eastern boundary, the whole of the territory east of the Jordan, in which, after all, two and a half Israelite tribes settled and to which a judge like Jephthah belonged, is dispensed with.”22 In short, we see a trajectory from Transjordan as a natural part of Israel (E), to grudging acceptance of the territory’s secondary status (P, DR, Josh 22), to a total rejection of this land as Israel, at least ideally (Ezek). The story of Moses accepting the Transjordanian settlement as exceptional became necessary once the idea of Cisjordanian superiority became dominant, in the same way that Moses’s sin became a necessary part of Israel’s historical retelling once his burial in the Transjordan became problematic.

Moses: A Transjordanian Holy Man Turned Conqueror Once we understand that in the earlier sources the Transjordan is simply part of Israelite territory, we can try to explain why the account of Moses’s death in the Transjordan is so firmly rooted. As suggested above, the principle of Ortsgebundenheit implies that the area of a purported burial site is likely the Settlement of Reuben and Gad: A Rhetorical Case for Transjordan as Part of the Promised Land,” TheTorah (2019). 21 For some discussion of the ideology in this text and how it seems to have developed, see Philip Yoo, “Delegitimizing a Witness: Composition and Revision in Joshua 22,” Journal of Hebrew Scriptures 18 (2018): #8; David Frankel, The Land of Canaan and the Destiny of Israel: Theologies of Territory in the Hebrew Bible. Siphrut 4 (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2011), 177–94. A similarly negative stance can be found in the Chronicler’s description of the Assyrian conquest of the Transjordan, which uses harsh rhetoric about the behavior of these Transjordanians, claiming that they remain exiled until even his days (1 Chr 5:24–26). 22 Walther Zimmerli, Ezekiel 2, trans. James Martin. Hermeneia (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1983 [orig. 1969]), 531.

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area of origin for a given figure. If this is the case, then Moses may have begun as a Transjordanian from the area of the Northern Mishor, in the territory of Reuben and Gad.23Admittedly, Ortsgebundenheit is an insufficient reason in itself to recast Moses as a Transjordanian local. Nevertheless, supporting biblical evidence makes this suggestion particularly attractive: The etiological protest – The existence of an etiological story explaining the presence of Israelite tribes in the Transjordan, and more than one for why Moses is buried there, implies a strong need to explain this “reality.” In other words, Moses’s burial in the Transjordan, and his total lack of presence on the Cisjordan, was taken as a given. The story of the Reubenites: Datan and Abiram – In their rebellion against Moses, Datan and Abiram complain that Moses did not bring them to a land of milk and honey, as he had promised, nor did he give them an inheritance of fields and vineyards (Num 16:14). It seems strange to describe the barren wilderness as “not a land of milk and honey,” and even more so to add not “a land of fields and vineyards.” Noting this problem, David Frankel has suggested that the narrative has been redacted, and that at its core, it assumes that the Israelites are already in the land, which is why Datan and Abiram can evaluate it.24 The fact that Datan and Abiram are Reubenites works together with the concept that the Reubenites always saw the Transjordan as “their land.” An early story about sinning Reubenites rejecting the Promised Land (the Transjordan) would support the idea that Moses is an ancient Transjordanian figure. In the early period when the core of this account was written there would have been no need for any “explanation” for the Reubenites settling there or for Moses being buried there; the Transjordan is the Promised Land. Reuben is the First Born – Reuben is referenced in Genesis as the oldest son of Jacob/Israel. During most of Israel’s history, the tribe of Reuben was a virtual non-entity. It seems strange to imagine such an account being composed for the first time in the eighth century, for example, when the Ammonites entirely dominated the area. It is more likely that the tradition reflects a memory of Reubenites being the first or most senior Israelite clan. This would also help explain the extremely prominent place granted their own local holy man, Moses.25 23 Which tribe controlled which area varies between texts, and this, in turn, seems to depend on the period during which a given text was written and the reality at the time of the author. See discussion in Yigal Levin, “What Were Reuben and Gad’s Territories in the Transjordan?” TheTorah (2017). 24 See David Frankel, “Datan and Abiram: A Rebellion of Shepherds in the Land of Israel,” TheTorah (2016). 25 I am not the first to suggest that a connection between Moses and the tribe of Reuben stems

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The Merenptah Stele – The oldest reference to Israel as a people comes from the late thirteenth-century Merenptah stele. The stele does not offer an explicit geographical location for this tribal group which its inscription claims to be “no more,” but many scholars believe that the implication, based on the order of the enemy names listed and the toponyms, is that Israel was a group in the Transjordan.26 Moses conquest tradition: The Book of YHWH’s Battles – In describing the territory of Sihon, king of the Amorites (the purported ruler of the land of Reuben and Gad before the Israelite conquest under Moses), the Book of Numbers (21:14) quotes from a lost work called the Book of the YHWH’s Battles.27 The scribe quoting the work seems to treat it as authoritative. Although the entire book is not extant, thus making every attempt to describe it speculative, what is extant records events in the Transjordan.28 This works nicely with the fact that Moses is described in the Bible – in Numbers, Deuteronomy, and Joshua 13 – as the conqueror of the Transjordan.

Nebo, the YHWH Temple, and the Mesha Inscription In addition to these points, biblical evidence comes together with extra-biblical evidence in one very suggestive clue, which helps firmly connect Moses with the Transjordan, and even begins to explain the basis of the early association The place where Moses dies is twice glossed as Mount Nebo. The Priestly tradition has him die on Mount Abarim, which is glossed in Deuteronomy 32:49 as Mount Nebo, and the Yahwistic tradition has him die on Mount Pisgah, which is glossed in Deuteronomy 34:1 also as Mount Nebo. This is the only time we ever hear of such a mountain, but the Bible also records a city called Nebo,

from the most ancient of Israelite traditions. Frank Moore Cross notes many of the same texts but takes a different approach to explain the connection; see Cross, From Epic to Canon, 53–70. 26 See, e.g., Nadav Na’aman, “Yenoam,” Tel Aviv 4 (1977): 168–77 [reprinted in: Canaan in the Second Millennium B.C.E.: Collected Essays, vol. 2 (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2005), 195–203]; Anson F. Rainey, “Whence Came the Israelites and Their Language?” Israel Exploration Journal 57 (2007): 41–64; Israel Knohl, “Pharaoh’s War with the Israelites: The Untold Story,” Azure 41 (2010): 72–95. 27 This is the translation preferred by Ed Greenstein. See his “What Was the Book of Yashar?,” Maarav 21.1–2 (2014): 25–35. 28 For some speculation on this book, and its place in Transjordanian Israelite and Moabite politics, see David Ben-Gad HaCohen, “War at Yahatz: The Torah versus the Mesha Stele,” TheTorah (2015). For a different view of this book, arguing that “YHWH’s Battles” is merely the opening poem in the book, and not a summary of its contents, see Ed Greenstein, “What Was the Book of the Wars of the Lord?” TheTorah (2017).

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which is in the territory of Reuben near Mount Abarim (Num 32:37, 33:47), and which eventually becomes a Moabite city (Isa 15:2; Jer 48:1). This same Nebo is mentioned in the Mesha Inscription as a place which housed a YHWH Temple in the time of Omri and his son: .‫ נבה‬.‫ את‬.‫ אחז‬.‫ לכ‬.‫ כמש‬.‫ לי‬.‫ויאמר‬ .‫ ואלתחמ‬.‫ בללה‬.‫ ישראל | ואהלכ‬.‫על‬ | ‫ הצהרמ‬.‫ עד‬.‫ השחרת‬.‫ מבקע‬.‫בה‬ .‫ אלפנ‬.‫ שבעת‬.‫ כלה‬.‫ ואהרג‬.‫ואחזה‬ | ‫ ורחמת‬.‫ וגרת‬.‫ | וגברת‬.‫ וגרנ‬.‫גברנ‬ .‫ החרמתה | ואקח‬.‫ כמש‬.‫ לעשתר‬.‫כי‬ .‫ המ‬.‫ ואסחב‬.‫ יהוה‬.‫ א[ת כ]לי‬.‫משמ‬ | ‫ כמש‬.‫לפני‬

And Kemosh said to me: “Go take Nebo from Israel.” And I went at night and fought from the break of dawn until the afternoon, and I took it and killed everybody, seven thousand men and boys, women and girls, and concubines, and I made them cherem to Ashtar-Kemosh. And I took from there the [ves]sels of Yhwh, and brought them before Kemosh.

That two unrelated sources assume that Mount Nebo is a place of special import to Israelites appears significant. If Mount Nebo was a place of YHWH worship, perhaps this was connected to it being the purported burial spot of YHWH’s prophet, Moses. In fact, Alexander Rofé argues that Deuteronomy 33 preserves an origin story or “sacred history” (ἱερός λόγος) for this very temple.29 The poem opens with YHWH travelling north from Sinai and Seir, and ending up in Ashdot, likely a reference to Ashdot HaPisgah (e.g., Deut 3:17), which is described as being in the area of Reuben (Josh 13:20). Although Reuben was once the dominant tribe in this area, the poem dates from a time when Gad had expanded its power at Reuben’s expense, which is why the first blessing (Let Reuben live and not die . . . ”) expresses the hope that Reuben will survive, despite its small population (Deut 33:6). The key line highlighting Gad’s expanded power is in Moses’s blessing of Gad (33:20–21): ‫ָ ּברו ְּך ַמ ְר ִחיב ָ ּגד‬ ‫ְּכלָ ִביא ָׁשכֵ ן‬ .‫וְ ָט ַרף זְ רוֹ ַע ַאף ָק ְדקֹד‬ ֹ‫אשית לו‬ ִׁ ‫וַ ַ ּי ְרא ֵר‬ ‫ִּכי ָׁשם ֶחלְ ַקת ְמח ֵֹקק ָספוּן‬ ‫אשי ָעם‬ ֵׁ ‫וַ ֵ ּי ֵתא ָר‬ ‫שה‬ ׂ ָ ‫ִצ ְד ַקת יְ הוָ ה ָע‬ .‫ש ָר ֵאל‬ ׂ ְ ִ‫ו ִּמ ְׁש ּ ָפ ָטיו ִעם י‬

Blessed be He who enlarges Gad! Poised is he like a lion To tear off arm and scalp. He chose for himself the best, For there the portion of the chieftain lies, Where the heads of the people come. He executed YHWH’s judgments And His decisions for Israel.

According to Rofé’s reading, Gad expands in the areas that were once Reuben’s,



29 See Rofé, “‫ברכת משה‬.”

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perhaps due to Gad’s military might (like Judah in Gen 49, and Israel in Balaam’s blessings, Gad is compared to a lion). As part of this expansion, Gad chooses the best portion, namely, the place where the revered chieftain or lawgiver’s temple is built, likely in the vicinity of where the chieftain is buried. Although the song dates to a period of Gadite ascendency, the association of Ashdot haPisgah (and Nebo) with Reuben implies that in an earlier time the YHWH temple of Moses was located in this tribe’s territory. Putting the above together, the picture is suggestive. The Transjordan: is the home of the tribe of the eldest son of Israel (Reuben); is the burial place of the greatest prophet of Israel; has a YHWH worship site on the mountain upon which Moses is buried; has a sacred poem associated with it; and even has its own scroll, focusing on the wars of YHWH in the Transjordan.

Moses and the Exodus: The Development of the Moses Tradition We can see now that the earliest extant Moses traditions associate him with the conquest and settlement of the Transjordan.30 It is possible that this association arose independently of the story of the exodus from Egypt. However, it soon became an integral part of the story, with Moses as the leader of this exodus. This also fits with another aspect of the Moses tradition – his association with the Levites.31 The connection between the Levites and the exodus story is well established. The Levites are referenced specifically at the opening of the story (Exod 2), though the purpose here could be just to introduce Moses. More significant is the predominance of Egyptian names among Levite ancestor figures.32 Moshe is the name “son of ” but without the usual theophoric element, like Thut-Mose (Son of Thoth) or Ra-Mose (Son of Ra). The same is true of the name Mushi 30 For a detailed discussion of Moses traditions, see George W. Coats, Moses: Heroic Man, Man of God. Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Series 57 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1988). For a survey of Moses traditions with an eye towards theology, see Henri Cazelles, “‫מ ֶֹׁשה‬ (Mōšeh)” in Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament, vol. 9, ed. G. Johannes Botterweck, Helmer Ringgren, and Heinz-Josef Fabry (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999), 28–31. 31 For a discussion of early associations between Moses and Levites, see Geo Widengren, “What Do We Know about Moses?,” in Proclamation and Presence: Old Testament Essays in Honor of G.H. Davies, ed. J.I. Durham and J.R. Porter (Richmond, VA: John Knox Press, 1970), 21–47. 32 Richard Elliott Friedman, The Exodus: How It Happened and Why It Matters (San Francisco, CA: HarperOne, 2017), 31–32; Theophile J. Meek, Hebrew Origins (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1936). James K. Hoffmeier, “Egyptian Religious Influences on the Early Hebrews,” in “Did I Not Bring Israel Out of Egypt?”: Biblical, Archaeological, and Egyptological Perspectives on the Exodus Narratives, ed. James K. Hoffmeier, Alan R. Millard, and Gary A. Rendsburg (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2016), 3–36.

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(Exod 6:19), which is just a variant of Moshe.33 Miryam begins with the Egyptian word Meri, meaning beloved, with a possible theophoric ending. Merari has the same opening word, but with a different theophoric element, probably, beloved of Ra.34 Pinchas, the name of Aaron’s grandson as well as the son of Eli the Priest of Shiloh, is a version of Pa-Nehesi, which means “the dark one,” the Egyptian name for Kushites/Nubians.35 Hophni, the other son of Eli the priest, means tadpole.36 Hur is equivalent to the Egyptian name Horus. Though his tribe is never mentioned, he appears together with Aaron consistently (Exod 17:10, 12, 24:14).37 Assir (Exod 6:24), one of the sons of Koraḥ, is equivalent to the Egyptian name Osiris, the god of the dead.38 Aharon is less certain. Many scholars believe it to be Egyptian, but the derivation is debated. Possibilities such as aha-rw, “warrior lion,” aaru, “field of rushes,” or even “tent-dweller” (from Hebrew ‫אהל‬, but with an Egyptianization of l to an r) have been suggested.39 Why so many Levite and Priestly names are Egyptian is uncertain. Some have suggested that only this group came from Egypt.40 Another possibility is that cultic functionaries in the Levant were in fact Egyptian in origin, or took Egyptian names during the period when Egypt was a dominant presence. Whatever the reason or reasons, the story of an exodus from Egypt was closely tied to the Levites, who served as cultic functionaries perhaps in both the

33 See discussion in Donald B. Redford, Egypt, Canaan, and Israel in Ancient Times (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 417–18. 34 Propp is confident about Merari as Egyptian, though ambivalent about Miryam, for which he suggests alternatives based on Canaanite and Ugaritic roots. See William H.C. Propp, Exodus 1–18. The Anchor Yale Bible (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010 [orig. 1999]), 276, 546. Propp is bothered by the final mem, but this could simply be an enclitic mem or a shortened form of a longer name (Beloved of Amun?), or perhaps related to the Canaanite god of the sea (Beloved of Yam?). Redford sees no connection to Egyptian for either Miryam or Merari (Egypt, Canaan, and Israel in Ancient Times, 419, n. 121). To my mind, it is difficult to accept an ancient Hebrew name beginning with meri- not being Egyptian. 35 See HALOT, s.v., ‫פינְ ָחס‬,ִ ּ “ . . . ​Eg. pʾ-nḥśy the black people, Nubians . . . ​the dark-skinned.” 36 See HALOT, s.v., ‫ח ְפנִ י‬,ָ “Eg. ḥfn(r) tadpole . . . ,”; Hoffmeier, “Egyptian Religious Influences on the Early Hebrews,” 22. 37 Hoffmeier, “Egyptian Religious Influences on the Early Hebrews,” 25; Ernst Axel Knauf, “Hur.” Anchor Bible Dictionary, 3.334. There is also a Judahite ancestor-figure named Hur (Exod 31:2). 38 Hoffmeier, “Egyptian Religious Influences on the Early Hebrews,” 21–22. 39 Hoffmeier, “Egyptian Religious Influences on the Early Hebrews,” 20. Other possibly Egyptian names are Putiel (a hybrid name, since El is Hebrew), and Pashhur. 40 Richard Elliott Friedman, The Exodus: How It Happened and Why It Matters; idem, “The Historical Exodus,” TheTorah, (2014). See also Mark Leuchter, “Hosea’s Exodus Mythology and the Book of the Twelve,” in Priests and Cults in the Book of the Twelve, ed. Lena-Sofia Tiemeyer. Ancient Near Eastern Monographs 14 (Atlanta, GA: SBL, 2016) 31–50.

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Transjordan and the Cisjordan.41 These functionaries would have transmitted the story of the exodus from Egypt as well as an account of its leader, Moses.

Moses and His Transjordanian Siblings Biblical tradition associates Moses with two other figures, the priestly ancestor-­ figure, Aaron, and the prophetess, Miriam. The Book of Micah (6:4) presents them as a team: ‫יך ֵמ ֶ ֣א ֶרץ ִמצְ ַ ֔ריִ ם ו ִּמ ֵּב֥ית‬ ֙ ָ ‫ ִּכ֤י ֶה ֱע ִל ִ֙ת‬In fact, I brought you up from the land of Egypt, I ָ‫יתיךָ וָ ֶא ׁ ְש ַל֣ח ְל ָפ ֔ ֶניך‬ ֑ ִ ‫ ֲע ָב ִ ֖דים ּ ְפ ִד‬redeemed you from the house of bondage, And I ::‫ ֶאת־מ ׁ ֶֹש֖ה ַא ֲה ֥רֹן ו ִּמ ְריָ ֽם‬sent before you Moses, Aaron, and Miriam. The Priestly tradition sees these three figures as siblings, though in the earlier, non-Priestly texts, Moses is clearly an only child.42 Moreover, Miriam and Aaron, who are already associated with each other in E, probably began as independent figures as well. The core of the extant Miriam tradition – it is impossible to know what may have been lost43 – seems to be around the Song of the Sea, when she takes tambourines and leads the women in song and dance.44 This story may be a retrojection of an Israelite tradition in which women ritually performed this dance,45 reminiscent of the story of girls dancing in Shiloh (Judg 21), which likely reflects a similar practice.

41 It may be that the Levites did not begin as a tribe in the ethnic sense, but that the name was originally a technical term for cultic functionaries, perhaps because they accompany God. Note that the biblical term for someone who joins the Israelites is a ‫( נלוה‬Isa 14:1, 56:3, 6; Esth 9:27), from the same root as ‫לוי‬. For another suggestion of how the Levites became a tribe, see Mark Leuchter, “Who Were the Levites?” TheTorah (2017). Leuchter argues here that Moses’s identification as a Levite is a later development. Rofé, in contrast, believes that the Levites originated as a tribal group in the Transjordan in the area of Reuben and Gad, and that they served in the YHWH temple in Nebo (Rofé, “‫ברכת משה‬,” 243–49). 42 See discussion in Thomas Dozeman, Exodus. Eerdmans Critical Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2009), 342–43; Jacob L. Wright, “The Birth of Moses: Between Bible and Midrash,” TheTorah (2014) and Isaac Sassoon, “Moses, Aaron, and Miriam: Were They Siblings?” TheTorah (2015). 43 For some thoughts on this question, see Tamar Kamionkowski, “Will the Real Miriam Please Stand Up?” TheTorah (2015). 44 Cross and Freedman argue that this story began with Miriam and then moved to Moses, as it is hard to accept that the tradition could have been transferred in the other direction, considering the prominence of Moses. See Frank Moore Cross, Jr. and David Noel Freedman, “The Song of Miriam,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 14 (1955): 237–50. 45 See Hermann Gunkel, Einleitung die Psalmen: die Gattungen der religiösen Lyrik Israels, ed. Joachim Begrich (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1933), 15–16. But see the critical response in Samuel E. Loewenstamm, The Evolution of the Exodus Tradition, trans. Baruch J. Schwartz

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Aaron likely originates as the ancestor figure of a group of priests, the Aaronides. Eventually, Aaron becomes identified as the ancestor of all priests, just as Moses becomes identified as the leader of all Israel. How did these three figures come to be associated? First, it is worth noting that all three are Levites, all three have Egyptian names, and all three play a part in the story of the exodus from Egypt. Most significantly, though, I would argue, is the fact that all three have burial sites in the Transjordan: Miriam is buried in Kadesh, which evidence suggests should be identified with Petra, in the southern Transjordan.46 Aaron, according to the Elohistic tradition, is buried in Moserah (Deut 10:6), and according to the Priestly tradition, on Mount Hor (Num 20:22–28). The latter site is generally identified with Jebel Harun, slightly south of Petra (the Israelites go south upon leaving Kadesh in order to skirt Edom), while Moserah, though unidentified, would appear to be nearby.47 Moses, as noted above, is buried either in the valley opposite Peor (E), on Mount Pisgah (J), or on Mount Abarim (P), (the latter two glossed as Mount Nebo) all of which are in the same basic area of the Transjordan, namely the northern mishor, in the Reuben and Gad regions. Geographically, the burial sites of Aaron and Miriam are in close proximity; it is likely that both of these figures were venerated by the same group. Moses’s burial site is significantly farther north, though still in the Transjordan. At a later stage, these two figures entered the orbit of Moses and his traditions, and this began to shape the story of the exodus.48

The Deaths of the Siblings Compared The connection between the three is clear from their burial notices, especially if one removes the larger narrative expansions.49 (Jerusalem: Hebrew University Magnes Press, 1992), 256–57. For more on the centrality of women as dancing in celebration in biblical literature, see Carol Meyers, Exodus. New Cambridge Bible Commentary (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 117–19 (and further bibliography in the notes there). 46 The question of whether Kadesh and Kadesh-barnea are the same place or different places is debated. I follow here the view of HaCohen. See David Ben-Gad HaCohen’s Kadesh in the Pentateuchal Narratives. PhD diss., Hebrew University, Jerusalem 2010; “Locating Be’er-­Lahai-­ Roi,” TheTorah (2014); and “Solving the Problem of Kadesh in the Wilderness of Paran,” TheTorah (2015). 47 David Ben-Gad HaCohen, “Why Deuteronomy Has an Account of Aaron’s Death in the Wrong Place,” TheTorah (2015). 48 Clearly, in this merger, Miriam lost the most and Moses came out as the most significant of the three. A feminist critique would not be out of place here, but the outcome may also have to do with the relative strength of the Moses groups in comparison with the Aaron and Miriam group. 49 It is possible that this early layer represents a much shorter and more ancient core of narratives

Moses the Transjordanian Prophet Numbers 20:1

Numbers 20:22–29

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Deuteronomy 34:1–8

‫ל־ה ֵע ָ ֤דה‬ ָ֨ ‫ֽי־י ְ ׂש ָר ֵאל ָּכ‬ ִ ֠ ֵ‫וַ ּיָ ֣בֹא ּו ְבנ‬ ‫אשֹון וַ ּיֵ ׁ ֶ֥שב‬ ֔ ׁ ‫ִמ ְד ַּבר־צִ ֙ן ַּב ֣חֹ ֶד ׁש ָה ִֽר‬ ‫ָה ָע֖ם ְּב ָק ֵ ֑ד ׁש וַ ָּת ָ֤מת ׁ ָש ֙ם ִמ ְר ָ֔ים‬ ::‫שם‬ ֽ ָ ׁ ‫וַ ִּת ָ ּק ֵב֖ר‬

‫ *וַ ּיִ ָ ּק ֵבר וַ ּיִ ְס ֖ע ּו ִמ ָ ּק ֵ ֑ד ׁש וַ ּיָ ֧בֹ א ּו ְב נֵ ֽי־‬. . . ‫וַ ָּ֨י ָמת ׁ ֜ ָשם מ ׁ ֶֹש֧ה‬ ​ . . . ‫ל־ה ֵע ָ ֖דה ֥הֹר ָה ָהֽר‬ ָ ‫מֹואב ֖מוּל ֵּב֣ית יִ ְ ׂש ָר ֵא֛ל ָּכ‬ ֔ ָ ‫א ֹ֤תֹו ַב ַ ּג ְ֙י ְּב ֶ ֣א ֶרץ‬ ​ . . . ‫אש ָה ָה֑ר‬ ׁ ֹ‫ש ָר ֵא֧ל וַ ּיָ ֧ ָמת ַא ֲה ֛רֹן ׁ ָש֖ם ְּב ֣ר‬ ׂ ְ ִ‫ּיִב ּכ ּ֩ו ְב ֨ ֵני י‬ ְ ַ‫ ​ו‬. . . ‫ּ ְפ ֑עֹור‬ ‫ת־א ֲהרֹ ֙ן ׁ ְשל ׁ ִ ֹ֣שים יֹ֔ום‬ ַ ‫מֹואב וַ ְּיִב ּ֤כ ּו ֶ ֽא‬ ָ֖ ‫ֹש ה ְּב ַע ְֽר ֥בֹת‬ ֛ ֶ ׁ ‫ֶא ת־מ‬ ::‫ּ֖ ֹכל ֵּב֥ית יִ ְ ׂש ָר ֵ ֽאל‬  . . . ‫ׁ ְשל ׁ ִ ֹ֣שים יֹ֑ום‬

The Israelites arrived in a body at the wilderness of Zin on the first new moon, and the people stayed at Kadesh. Miriam died there and was buried there.

Setting out from Kadesh, the Israelites arrived in a body at Mount Hor . . . and Aaron died there on the summit of the mountain . . . All the house of Israel bewailed Aaron thirty days.

And Moses died there . . . ​ and *was buried50 in the valley in the land of Moab, near Beth-­peor . . . ​ and the Israelites bewailed Moses in the steppes of Moab for thirty days . . . ​

In his To Take Place, Jonathan Z. Smith discusses how in many cultures, especially tribal cultures which do not rely on writing, geography is the way ancient tales are concretized. The local tribes “recall the ancestral deeds and experience the ancestor’s continued presence” through the various holy sites associated with them.51 Applying this idea to Israelite mnemohistory, tribes who identified as Israelite in the Transjordan, visiting these holy sites and telling stories about the heroes buried there, could have woven together one overarching narrative that would include all three figures. In other words, as the story of Israel’s exodus from Egypt began to take root, whether because of a core of refugees that escaped to the Transjordan or as a reaction to Egypt’s disappearance as a regional power, it was only natural to connect these local holy figures with the story. upon which the Priestly Text was built. For a contemporary defense of this view, see David Frankel’s Murmuring Stories, which is dedicated to reconstructing pieces of this ancient Priestly text. 50 The verb was originally in niphal form, ‫“ וַ ִ ּי ָּק ֵבר‬he was buried,” as it is in the text describing the death and burial of Miriam. Once the verb was misread as a qal, this brought along with it the scribal addition of the accusative “him.” 4QDeut1 reads ‫ ויקברו‬, in the plural, as does the LXX, ἔθαψαν, i.e., “they buried him.” This differs from the singular used by Miriam, and may be a late adjustment to avoid the implication that YHWH buried Moses. This latter idea is a natural solution to the problem faced by the redactor of who buried Moses: if he went up the mountain alone and the location of his grave is therefore unknown. 51 Jonathan Z. Smith, To Take Place: Toward Theory in Ritual (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 12.

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Moses Conquers the Cisjordan . . . ​in Spirit Thus far, we have discussed how a local Transjordanian holy man came to be connected with the exodus story, and with other local holy people, whose burial places and, likely, regional centers, were further south. We must still ask: how does the Moses tradition cross the Jordan? Here I think we can isolate a few important clues. In the twelfth century, Israelites began settling the Cisjordanian hill country, and, by the tenth century, a short-lived kingdom of Israel was established there (though it extended farther in all directions).52 We have no contemporary sources from this period to tell us what this group called itself, but, by the next century, sources tell us that the kingdom of Omri – the first Israelite king of whom we know from outside sources – is known as Israel.53 Since this is also a term used by Merenptah, it is likely that it was used by the settlers from the beginning, and that it was certainly used by the United Monarchy. Second, the exodus tradition begins to take hold among Cisjordanians (tenth/ ninth c. BCE). It is unclear whether this would have occurred as a consequence of the adoption of the Israelite identity among the Cisjordanians, or whether this was a factor in that very process, but with the adoption of the exodus story, a common mnemohistory was formed. The adoption of the exodus story and the person of Moses as leader required the Cisjordanians to merge their own stories into this rubric. One particularly consequential example of this process was the merger of the stories of Moses and Joshua. Joshua begins as a local military leader in the Heres region of Ephraim.54 To create one storyline, Joshua is moved into the wilderness period, with a backstory of him having been the young protégé of Moses. Thus, although Moses does not end up as a conqueror of the Cisjordan, he receives a vicarious connection to this account through his relationship with Joshua.55 52 Some scholars debate whether such a kingdom ever existed, and argue that David and Solomon simply ruled a small “proto-Judah” in the south. See, for example, Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman, David and Solomon: In Search of the Bible’s Sacred Kings and the Roots of the Western Tradition (New York: Free Press, 2006). Nevertheless, other scholars still see the evidence for a United Monarchy as strong. See, for instance, William G. Dever, Beyond the Texts, An Archaeological Portrait of Ancient Israel and Judah (Atlanta, GA: SBL, 2017), 259–382. 53 Specifically, Mesha in the inscription and Shalmaneser III in his account of the battle of Qarqar (Kurkh Stela). Both texts date to the reign of Omri’s son, Ahab. 54 See Zev I. Farber, “Timnat Heres and the Origins of the Joshua Tradition,” in The Book of Joshua, ed. Ed Noort. Bibliotheca Ephemeridum Theologicarum Lovaniensium 250. Proceedings of the Colloquium Biblicum Lovaniense (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2010), 301–11. 55 For a different reconstruction of Joshua’s beginnings and how he becomes connected with Moses, see Alexander Rofé, “‫ ”יהושע בן נון בתולדות המסורת המקראית‬Tarbiẓ 73.3 (2004): 333–64. Rofé believes

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As the exodus gains in importance it becomes central to certain Israelite practices such as Pesach, where a once apotropaic ritual becomes a reenactment of God slaying the Egyptian firstborn and saving the Israelite firstborn.56 Over time, the covenant itself is framed as deriving from the relationship YHWH forges with Israel as their savior. On a parallel track, Israelite mnemohistory becomes more robust with the combination of the exodus story with the wilderness-wandering story. It has long been noted that these two explanations of Israel’s origin do not necessarily work together. One claims that God found Israel in the wilderness and brought them into God’s land, and the other, that God found them as slaves in Egypt, freed them, and brought them to God’s land.57 The idea that God finds them in Egypt, brings them to the wilderness where they wander for decades, and then brings them into the land is cumbersome, and best explained as the result of combining traditions. Once these two traditions were combined, Moses became, ipso facto, the leader in both accounts, thus expanding his reach. This is extremely significant for the emergence of what becomes Moses’s most significant role in Israelite religious thinking: as lawgiver. Over time, the entire corpus of Israelite laws is projected back into the wilderness period and associated with Sinai or Horeb (depending on the tradition), and, thus, Moses.

Summary: The Emergence of Israel’s Ultimate Leader from his Transjordanian Roots The character of Moses went through a number of transformations before he took his place as the greatest prophet of YHWH and the lawgiver for all Israelites. Despite the Cisjordan becoming Israel’s main territory, all sources that Joshua began as a holy man, not a military leader, and that in one tradition it is actually Joshua, not Moses, who takes Israel out of Egypt. 56 This has been suggested by a number of scholars. See, e.g., Propp, Exodus 1–18, 434–39; Diana Edelman, “Exodus and Pesah-Massot as Evolving Social Memory,” in Remembering (and Forgetting) in Judah’s Early Second Temple Period, ed. Christoph Levin and Ehud Ben Zvi. Forschungen zum Alten Testament 85 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2012), 161–93; Kristine Garroway, “The Origins of the Biblical Pesach,” TheTorah (2015); Zev I. Farber, “Israelite Festivals: From Cyclical Time Celebrations to Linear Time Commemorations,” Religions 10.5 [Special Issue: Archaeology and Ancient Israelite Religion, ed. Avraham Faust] (2019): 1–19, esp. 15–16. 57 This idea played an important role in the work of Martin Noth (A History of Pentateuchal Traditions), who identified various tradition-historical “themes” that were combined to create the narrative framework of Israelite historiography. For a recent discussion of the distinct nature of the wilderness theme in contrast to that of the exodus, see David Frankel, “Exodus: Not the Only Tradition about Israel’s Past,” TheTorah (2015).

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agree that it was in the Transjordan where Moses met his fate and died. It is only because of persistent traditions such as this that we have any ability to reconstruct who Moses may have been before he became the leader of all Israel, YHWH’s mouthpiece for communicating divine law, and the greatest prophet of all time, the like of whom “has never and will never come again” (Deut 34:10).

Moses like David: Prototypes in the Deuteronomistic History Alison L. Joseph

The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization The historiographical style of the deuteronomistic historian (Dtr) has often been identified as unique within the Hebrew Bible. One of the tendencies of Dtr is to construct characters who fit into specific prototypes. This is quite clear in the Book of Kings where the kings of Israel and Judah, good and bad, are cast in the model of David and Josiah. This is also true for the position of prophet. In Deuteronomy 18:15–22, Dtr establishes a “prophetic prototype” in the likeness of Moses, but it is not employed beyond this passage. This article will explore the use of the Davidic and prophetic prototypes in the Deuteronomistic History (DtrH) and will suggest why the prophetic model is proposed but not applied.

The deuteronomistic historian (Dtr) employs prototypes to depict his characters.1 In writing the history, his ultimate goal is to promote deuteronomistic theology, and the use of prototypes assists him in that aim. Two examples of prototypes in DtrH are the Davidic prototype in Kings and the prophetic prototype constructed in Deuteronomy 18:15–22 and 34:10–12.2 While characters continue to fill both modes of leadership, only the Davidic prototype is applied to others, throughout Kings; the prophetic prototype, on the other hand, is never used again after these verses. In fact, these verses are the only instances in which Moses is explicitly called nābî’, “prophet.” This paper will discuss the prophetic prototype in four stages. First, I will establish whether the words “like me/Moses” in Deuteronomy 18:15, 18 and Deuteronomy 34:10 constitute a prototype. Second, I will investigate how the prototype is applied, concluding that the most likely employments of the prototype are in the construction of Author Note: Many thanks to Jeffery Tigay for discussing the ideas included in this article and inspiring how to bring it all together, and to Jeffery Stackert for his thoughtful feedback. 1 See Alison L. Joseph, Portrait of the Kings: The Davidic Prototype in Deuteronomistic Poetics (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2015). 2 In another context, it would be interesting to explore whether the framing structure of the Judges cycle – people sin; they are punished; they cry out; Yahweh sends a judge; they are saved; judge dies; they sin – is a kind of prototype and further evidence of the use of prototypes by Dtr. The cycle begins in Judg 2:11, 3:7, 3:12, 4:1, 6:1, 10:6, 13:1.

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Joshua, Elijah, and the classical prophets, in particular Jeremiah. Third, I will describe the Davidic prototype strategy in order to compare the prophetic prototype with the Davidic prototype and establish the use of prototypes as an important element of Dtr’s historiographical poetics. Finally, I will show how Dtr deploys the prophetic prototype to disappoint the expectation that there could ever be a “prophet like Moses.”

The Prophetic Prototype Many scholars have identified the passage in Deuteronomy 18:15–22 as outlining a prototype of prophecy.3 It is often called the “Law of the Prophet,” parallel to the “Law of the King” found in Deuteronomy 17:14–20. These verses describe the criteria for the prophets who will arise after Moses, who will be “like Moses”: A prophet from your midst, from among your kindred, like me, Yahweh your God will raise up for you, to him you shall listen. Just as you all requested from Yahweh your God at Horeb, on the day of assembly, saying: “Let me no longer hear the voice of Yahweh my God, nor see this great fire, lest I die.” And Yahweh said to me, “They have done well speaking this. A prophet, I will raise up for them from among their brothers, like you, and I will put words in his mouth, and he will speak to them all that I command him. And if anyone does not heed my words, which he [the prophet] will speak in my name, I will seek him out, but the prophet who speaks presumptuously a word in my name that I did not command him to say or who speaks in the name of other gods, that prophet will die.” If you should say to yourselves, “How will we know such a word was not said by Yahweh?” When the prophet speaks in the name of Yahweh and the word does not happen or come true, that is an oracle that Yahweh did not speak, the prophet spoke presumptuously. Do not stand in dread of him. (Deut 18:15–22)4 The most pertinent verses to establish a model are found in 15 and 18. But these criteria seem thin to construct a prototype.



3 Patrick D. Miller, Jr., “The Many Faces of Moses: A Deuteronomic Portrait,” Biblical Research 4.5 (1988): 3; Gordon Oeste, “The Shaping of a Prophet: Joshua in the Deuteronomistic History,” in Prophets, Prophecy, and Ancient Israelite Historiography, ed. Mark J. Boda and Lissa M. Wray Beal (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2013), 25; Christophe Nihan, “‘Moses and the Prophets’: Deuteronomy 18 and the Emergence of the Pentateuch as Torah,” Svensk Exegetisk Årsbok 75 (2010): 22. 4 All Bible translations are the author’s.

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According to cognitive linguist George Lakoff, building on Wittgenstein and Rosch, “Prototypes act as cognitive reference points of various sorts and form the basis for inferences . . . ​. The study of human inference is part of the study of human reasoning and conceptual structure; hence, those prototypes used in making inferences must be part of conceptual structure.”5 Prototypes offer models to denote similarity, allowing the reader’s own cognition to connect them. The words “like me,” (i.e., Moses) in Deuteronomy 18:15 set up a model for future prophets. But unlike the prototypes that Lakoff discusses, the criteria for the model are ambiguous. The “reference points” are unclear. Key to the determination of why the prophetic prototype is included here is defining what the prototype exhibits and what it means to be like Moses. Stated first in the words of Moses and then repeated by Yahweh, the criteria for defining a prophet are fourfold: (1) a prophet must come from among the Israelites (Deut 18:15), similar to the king who will also “arise from their midst” (Deut 17:15); (2) Yahweh will “raise him up” (18:15, 18); (3) the prophet will speak words that Yahweh puts in his mouth (18:18); (4) and, he will be “like” Moses.6 This passage appears as something of a surprise to readers familiar with Moses since the Exodus narrative, where he has been doing the job of a prophet (i.e., talking to Yahweh and delivering Yahweh’s message), but has not yet been identified as a prophet.7 It is somewhat ambiguous in 18:15 whether Moses is even called a prophet, or if it simply means that a prophet will arise who is like him.8 Because Moses has not previously been referred to as “prophet,” the designation here seems puzzling. Some scholars suggest that the anomaly indicates that the Law of the Prophet is a late addition and therefore not present throughout the Pentateuch or even in the rest of the D source.9 Others contend it is an early







5 George Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 45. 6 Oeste, “The Shaping of a Prophet,” 25. 7 It is possible that this is only an issue to the modern critic. We don’t know whether the ancient reader would get hung up on whether the text used nābî’ or not, since the tradition regularly depicts Moses as a prophet. 8 David L. Petersen, “The Ambiguous Role of Moses as Prophet,” in Israel’s Prophets and Israel’s Past: Essays on the Relationship of Prophetic Texts and Israelite History in Honor of John H. Hayes, ed. Brad E. Kelle and Megan Bishop Moore (New York: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2006), 311. Jeffrey Stackert, A Prophet Like Moses: Prophecy, Law, and Israelite Religion (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 37. 9 Thomas Römer, “Moses, Israel’s First Prophet, and the Formation of the Deuteronomistic and Prophetic Libraries,” in Israelite Prophecy and the Deuteronomistic History: Portrait, Reality, and the Formation of a History (Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature, 2013), 131. Nihan, “Moses and the Prophets,” 22. H. L. Bosman, “From ‘Divination’ to ‘Revelation’?: A Post-Exilic

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tradition that was suppressed by later conceptions of prophecy.10 Still others argue that the goal is to highlight God’s role, as opposed to human initiative, in the election of the prophet,11 or that the designation here is an attempt to connect the legal Mosaic tradition with the prophetic tradition.12 While these explanations are far from definitive, it is clear that the variety of speculation illustrates that the text is ambiguous.

A Prophet like Moses? Deuteronomy 18 is especially vague in defining what it means to be a “prophet like Moses,” and intertextual contexts do not offer further clarification. In the entire Pentateuch, Moses is only called nābî’ in this single context. In fact, while in Exodus 7:1 Moses is said to be a “god,” his brother Aaron is appointed his prophet. Similarly, Miriam is called a prophet (Exod 15:20), but Moses is not. Furthermore, in DtrH Moses is most frequently referred to as the “servant of Yahweh/God,” not as a prophet.13 Nor does the designation of Moses as “prophet” continue outside the Pentateuch. In Judges 6:8, there is an indirect report that Yahweh sent a prophet to Israel who took them out of Egypt, but Moses is not named explicitly. Also, in the prophetic literature, Moses is referenced and compared to other prophets only four times, but he is still not called nābî’ (Isa 63:11–14; Jer 15:1; Mic 6:4; Mal 3:22). In fact, in Malachi, Moses is contrasted with Elijah the prophet: “Remember the Torah of Moses, my servant, the statutes and ordinances that I commanded him at Horeb for all Israel. Behold, I am sending you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and awesome Day of Yahweh” (Mal 3:22–23). Here, Moses is juxtaposed with Elijah and is called “servant,” in contrast to Elijah who is named “prophet.” Moses’s role, here, is more connected to revelation and the law code than to being a prophet. Furthermore, similar to Judges 6:8, in Hosea 12:14 Moses is alluded to as nābî’, but again is not named: “By a prophet Yahweh brought Israel up from Egypt, and by a prophet he was guarded.” The reference to the exodus makes it clear

Theological Perspective on the Relationship between Law and Prophets in the Old Testament,” Old Testament Essays 27.2 (2014): 381. 10 J.D. Atkins, “Reassessing the Origins of Deuteronomic Prophecy: Early Moses Traditions in Deuteronomy 18:15–22,” Bulletin for Biblical Research 23.3 (2013): 324. 11 Richard D. Nelson, Deuteronomy. The Old Testament Library (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2004), 236. 12 Reinhard Achenbach, “‘A Prophet like Moses’ (Deuteronomy 18:15), ‘No Prophet like Moses’ (Deuteronomy 34:10): Some Observations on the Relation between the Pentateuch and the Latter Prophets,” in Pentateuch: International Perspectives on Current Research, ed. Thomas B. Dozeman, Konrad Schmid, and Baruch J. Schwartz (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011), 442. 13 Nihan, “Moses and the Prophets,” 23.

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that Moses is intended. But this prophetic prototype does not make clear what it means to be “like Moses.” All the while trying to determine what it means to be “like Moses,” it is also conceivable that it is not actually possible to be like Moses. Deuteronomy 34:10, in fact, establishes that to be “like Moses” is unachievable. There, Moses is acclaimed as the greatest of all prophets: “Never since arose a prophet in Israel like Moses, whom Yahweh knew face to face (‫)פנים אל פנים‬.” So, is Moses the prototype, the model to be followed, as in Deuteronomy 18:15 and 18, or is he incomparable, and essentially inimitable? It is necessary to read these verses in relation to each other; the linguistic connections between them and their criteria for the definition of prophecy are clear. Deuteronomy 34:10 highlights the verb √‫קום‬, emphasizing Yahweh’s role in the choice of the prophet, as discussed above, and also highlights the comparative ‫כ‬.14 Moses is a true prophet who demonstrates signs and portents, in contrast with the false prophet, who delivers signs and portents in the name of false gods (Deut 13:2–4). But unlike the prophetic prototype in Deuteronomy 18, which suggests the potential for a Mosaic successor to be Moses-like, Deuteronomy 34:10 attests to a model that is unattainable: never since Moses has one arisen like Moses. Is it possible for Moses to simultaneously function as the prophetic comparandum and the prophet par excellence? Will future prophets arise in his likeness?15 Moses as the model to whom no one has lived up denies the primary function of a prototype from a theoretical sense – as a model to be replicated.16 Instead, Deuteronomy 34:10 sets up a standard whereby those compared to Moses will always be found wanting. The function of Deuteronomy 34:10 is perplexing. Is the goal to create an unachievable model, or is it a hyperbolic literary flourish to exalt Moses? This statement of incomparability is one among several in DtrH. Solomon (1 Kgs 3:12), Hezekiah (2 Kgs 18:5), and Josiah (2 Kgs 23:25) are each touted as incomparable. The statements about Solomon and Josiah both also contain √‫קום‬ verbs. Scholars have used these incomparability formulae to separate redactional layers; Cross, Friedman, and Nelson, among others, use the formulae to



14 Also, the triangular connections of ‫ פנים אל פנים‬in Deut 5:4 to Deut 34:10 to Deut 18:16, discussed below. 15 Hans M. Barstad, “The Understanding of the Prophets in Deuteronomy,” Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament 8.2 (1994): 248. Knud Jeppesen, “Is Deuteronomy Hostile Towards Prophets,” Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament 8.2 (1994): 252, n. 2. Also, Moses as “super-prophet,” Römer, “Moses, Israel’s First Prophet,” 144. Petersen, “The Ambiguous Role of Moses as Prophet,” 317. Joseph Blenkinsopp, Prophecy and Canon. A Contribution to the Study of Jewish Origins (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1977), 86. 16 Miller, “The Many Faces of Moses,” 3.

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support the idea of a Josianic redaction.17 Provan suggests that these formulae show a Hezekian redaction. Knoppers contends they are signs of a later (exilic) redactional hand who standardizes the heroes by highlighting “the exceptional accomplishments of major figures within his history.”18 Clearly, with so many opinions, the incomparability formulae are not decisive dating determinants. However, it is undeniable that the statements link the characters, at the very least in the final form of the text. Moses, as an incomparable figure, is like these great kings and/or the kings are like Moses, depending on the direction of influence. Yet, these kings are not employed to establish a prototype; their incomparability demonstrates that they are constructed in an already established prototype.19 Deuteronomy 34:10 suggests that Moses is incomparable because Yahweh speaks with him face-to-face (‫)פנים אל פנים‬. Deuteronomy 18:16 makes clear that Yahweh’s raising up of a prophet like Moses is linked to the Israelite’s experience at Horeb, where Yahweh spoke with the people directly: “Face to face (‫פנים‬ ‫ )בפנים‬Yahweh spoke with you from the fire” (Deut 5:4). They are terrified of this interaction and request a mediator: And now, why must we die, for this great fire will consume us; if we continue to hear the voice of Yahweh our God, we shall die. For who of all flesh can hear the voice of the living God speak from the fire as we have and live? You, go near and hear all Yahweh our God will say, and you tell us everything that Yahweh our God said to you, and we will listen and do it. (Deut 5:22–24) Deuteronomy 18 presents itself as a response to their appeal: “Just as you all requested20 from Yahweh your God at Horeb, on the day of assembly, saying: ‘Let me no longer hear the voice of Yahweh my God, nor see this great fire, lest I die’” (Deut 18:16). According to Deuteronomy 34:10, Moses is unique in his intimate relationship with God. Will those who succeed him, as suggested in Deuteronomy 18, also speak with Yahweh in this way? 17 Frank Moore Cross, “The Themes of the Book of Kings and the Structure of the Deuteronomic History,” in Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic: Essays in the History of the Religion of Israel (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), 274–89; Richard E. Friedman, “From Egypt to Egypt: Dtr1 and Dtr2,” in Traditions in Transformation, ed. Baruch Halpern and Jon Levenson (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1981), 167–92; idem, The Exile and Biblical Narrative: The Formation of the Deuteronomistic and Priestly Works (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1981); Richard D. Nelson, The Double Redaction of the Deuteronomistic History (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1981). 18 Gary N. Knoppers, “‘There Was None like Him’: Incomparability in the Books of Kings,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 54.3 (1992): 414. 19 Joseph, Portrait of the Kings, 160–61. 20 “This is exactly what you asked of Yahweh,” Nelson, Deuteronomy, 226.

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In Deuteronomy 18:18, Yahweh says, “I will put my words in his mouth (‫)בפיו‬.” Is this the same kind of intimacy and revelation as highlighted in Deuteronomy 34:10, of speaking face-to-face? Are ‫פה‬, “mouth,” and ‫פנים‬, “face,” to be equated? This question points to the ambiguous nature of the relationship between Deuteronomy 18 and 34:10. Are these verses in conflict or in agreement? Many suggest that the answer is both, that future prophets will be like Moses, but not completely.21 From a literary standpoint, incomparability denies the functionality of the prototype.

Identifying the False Prophet While Deuteronomy 18:15–19 offers an ambiguous definition of prophecy that Deuteronomy 34:10 further complicates, Deuteronomy 18:9–14 appears to propound a much clearer negative definition, focused on the ways that foreign peoples tried to use various modes of divination to access the deity and thereby illicitly obtain information. The Law of the Prophet (Deut 18:15–22) is the corrective to foreign practices. Three of seven verses deal with identifying a false prophet: one who speaks presumptuously in the name of Yahweh, or one who speaks in the name of other gods (18:20). In its focus on forbidden prophecy, Deuteronomy makes clear its rejection of the divinatory practices of the ancient Near East. The importance of identifying the false prophet illustrates an attempt by Dtr to define, negatively, how the people should communicate with Yahweh and which prophetic methods are forbidden.22 The text reflects the people’s uneasiness about their ability to distinguish true prophets from false ones. This is a reasonable concern, particularly since there are severe consequences to not following the message of a genuine prophet (Deut 18:19). False prophecy is a capital offense (Deut 18:20). Yahweh offers a “litmus test” of sorts: If you should say to yourselves, “How will we know such a word was not said by Yahweh?” When the prophet speaks in the name of Yahweh and the word does not happen or come true, that is an oracle which Yahweh did not speak, the prophet spoke presumptuously. Do not stand in dread of him. (Deut 18:21–22) On the surface, this seems like good advice, but, in reality, it is not. Yahweh tells the people to listen to his prophets, and not to listen to false prophets. The way you will know if they are false is if their prophecies do not come true. 21 Stackert, A Prophet Like Moses, 127. 22 Robert Wilson, Prophecy and Society in Ancient Israel (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1980), 161–62.

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This is an impractical recommendation for several reasons. First, if the prophet delivers a warning message, and they heed the warning, the doom prophecy will not come to pass. This may be the reason Jonah hesitates to complete his mission; if he warns the people of Nineveh that they will be punished and they repent, the punishment can be averted, and he, according to this criterion, will be seen as a false prophet.23 Second, the people cannot wait until they see what happens to know whether to follow a prophet. If the people are to obey the words of the prophet, they need to do it immediately. If they wait to see if it comes true, it will be too late. A prophet must be recognized before his predictions are realized.24 This is at the crux of how prophecy functions in DtrH (to be discussed more below); prophets warn and the people are supposed to heed their warnings. The test to determine true prophecy also relies on human cognition, which according to DtrH is often unreliable. Naturally, a person is more likely to endorse a prophet who speaks in their self-interest or shares their perspective.25 People might only listen to prophecies they like or they consider true; whether the prophecies are actually true is somewhat irrelevant. For example, this is the case with Micaiah and Ahab in 1 Kings 22. Before the battle of Ramoth-Gilead, Jehoshaphat suggests that they consult Yahweh. After asking approximately 400 prophets, Jehoshaphat wonders if there are any others to ask. Ahab answers, “There is still one man from whom we can inquire of Yahweh, Micaiah son of Imlah, but I hate him because he never prophesies for me any good, only bad” (1 Kgs 22:8). Jehoshaphat knows that this is not how prophecy is supposed to work, and responds, “Let the king not say such [a thing]!” (1 Kgs 22:8). When Micaiah prophesies a negative outcome of the battle, Ahab accuses him of lying (1 Kgs 22:16). Also, in 1 Kings 22:13, the messenger who fetched him prods Micaiah for a positive prophecy: “Look now, the words of the prophets with one accord are favorable for the king, let your words be as theirs and speak favorably.” This story further complicates the seemingly black and white definitions of true and false prophecy. The 400 prophets speak in the name of Yahweh and prophesy victory (1 Kgs 22:6), but Micaiah later reveals that Yahweh put a lying spirit in the mouths of the prophets and that the result will be certain death for Ahab (1 Kgs 22:22). The application of the criteria of Deuteronomy 18:21–22 would not help Jehoshaphat and Ahab evaluate the truth of the prophets. The 400 are legitimate, Yahwistic prophets. They speak the words Yahweh put in 23 I am not suggesting a textual relationship between Deuteronomy and Jonah, only that both may reflect a similar human tendency. 24 Sven Tengström, “Moses and the Prophets in the Deuteronomistic History,” Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament 8.2 (1994): 264. 25 Jeppesen, “Is Deuteronomy Hostile Towards Prophets,” 254.

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their mouths, in the name of Yahweh – among the criteria for the prophet like Moses – but they speak falsely. The many prophets prophesy by Yahweh, none encourages idolatry, and one produces a sign. These are 400 true prophets according to deuteronomistic criteria. Nothing seems suspicious about them, yet Yahweh causes them to speak falsely. It is impossible for the people to determine the will of Yahweh, especially if they are meant to use the words of the prophet in order to ascertain what is expected of them. This scene, and the echoes of it seen in the Job frame story, emphasize that there is no logical way to identify Yahweh’s prophets or Yahweh’s will. In Deuteronomy 18:15 and 18 prophecy is defined for the future by the example of Moses, which is ambiguous, and the criteria for determining false prophets in Deuteronomy 18:9–14, 20–22 is impractical. An additional passage on false prophecy found in Deuteronomy 13:2–6 is equally unhelpful, teaching that the Israelites should be wary of the prophet who uses his successful signs and portents to seduce them into the worship of other gods (13:3) – although the entire enterprise is intended as a test of the people’s loyalty to Yahweh (13:4). Yet the success of prophetic signs, if even for a nefarious end, is confusing as it is supposed to be an indicator of true prophecy. Several scholars comment that the definition of prophecy that we see in Deuteronomy 18:15–22, specifically in verses 21 and 22, represents a simplistic view that does not reflect “real-life” experience and knowledge of prophets.26 The account in 1 Kings 22 attests to the fact that prophecy can never be seen as absolute. There are three possibilities for why Deuteronomy 18 defines prophecy in an unrealistic way: (1) the first is that this is shoddy work, and Dtr did not fully consider what his definition lacked; (2) a second possibility, which is an older opinion held by scholars, is that the classical prophetic tradition post-dated Dtr and Dtr did not have real experience with prophecy; 27 (3) a third option is that Deuteronomy 18 and 34 depict an idealized, utopian view of prophecy wherein it is easy to distinguish between true and false prophets. This perspective was not intended to reflect reality, but is intended for literary effect. 26 Roy Heller, Power, Politics, and Prophecy: The Character of Samuel and the Deuteronomistic Evaluation of Prophecy (New York: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2006), 27; Jeffrey H. Tigay, Deuteronomy. The JPS Torah Commentary (Philadelphia, PA: The Jewish Publication Society, 2003); Jeppesen, “Is Deuteronomy Hostile Towards Prophets?,” 254; Barstad, “The Understanding of the Prophets in Deuteronomy,” 247. Stackert, A Prophet Like Moses, 151. 27 Both in the past and more recently, scholars have argued that DtrH does not mention the classical prophets (except Isaiah) because the prophetic books are seen as late and post-exilic, and that the deuteronomistic school was unaware of the classical prophetic tradition, which is unconnected to the pre-exilic prophetic literature found in DtrH. This does not necessarily have to be the case.

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I first want to discount the opinion that this is shoddy work. I tend not to blame inconsistencies or difficulties in the text as due to incompetence of the author/redactor. I view Dtr, as Noth did, as an “honest broker.”28 The biblical redactors were well-skilled tradents, and problems in the text usually reflect competing perspectives from the source documents. In this vein, it is also possible to see inconsistencies as reflective of the multivocality of the redactor’s sources. The second suggestion, that Dtr is unaware of the prophetic tradition, is also difficult to sustain. Even if the literature of classical prophecy were to post-date Dtr, prophecy, as a human enterprise, was an important part of life in the ancient Near East. Dtr and Israel would have experienced prophecy in various forms. And while Moses is hardly mentioned outside of the Pentateuch, prophets and prophecy are important, especially within the JE tradition.29 Also, many scholars argue that while the classical prophets, except for Isaiah, do not appear in DtrH, Dtr must have been familiar with written traditions about prophets, including those about Elijah and Elisha.30 The third option is the most likely; Dtr was looking to a utopian universe in which the differences between false and true prophets was strikingly clear – as obvious as their signs and portents. This is not a criterion at all, but instead acknowledges the epistemological anxiety induced by prophecy in general; when someone tells us that something is divinely authorized, but all we have to go on is their word, how do we really know? Dtr intentionally does not set out to construct a realistic, attainable model of prophecy. This is somewhat consistent with deuteronomistic poetics, which shares high standards similar to the Davidic prototype (discussed below). The definition of prophecy is purposely unrealistic because Dtr does not expect – or even want – anyone to inhabit the model. Moses and Mosaic law are exalted beyond comparison. The model of prophecy inhabited by Moses is based on revelation and his authority is focused on the law. The connection to Horeb, as discussed above, makes clear that Moses’s role as prophet is derived from his ability to speak with Yahweh “face to face.” The figure of Moses raises Israelite prophecy to a position of mediating the commandments and accentuates the importance of distinguishing legal textuality – i.e., the Book of Deuteronomy – from the magic-making of ancient Near Eastern and other prophets. Consistent 28 Martin Noth, The Deuteronomistic History (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1981), 128; Baruch Halpern, The First Historians: The Hebrew Bible and History (San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row, 1988), xxv. 29 Wilson and Stackert suggest that D replaces and rewrites E’s view of prophecy. Stackert, in particular, argues that E begins, and D continues, to limit prophecy and replace it with Mosaic law. Stackert, A Prophet Like Moses, chs. 3 and 4; Wilson, Prophecy and Society, ch. 4; Atkins, “Reassessing the Origins of Deuteronomic Prophecy,” 325. 30 Tengström, “Moses and the Prophets in the Deuteronomistic History,” 258.

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with deuteronomistic theology, Moses’s role as lawgiver is primary. This is a change from the attitude towards prophecy seen in the E source. According to Stackert, this is the goal of the Law of the Prophet: “D therefore seeks to rehabilitate prophetic practice against E’s claim of its demise, allowing for limited post-Mosaic prophecy that is nonetheless closely tied to Moses. Yet even with this concession, D follows E’s lead by significantly curtailing prophecy in favor of Mosaic legislation.”31 While not called prophet elsewhere, in DtrH, Moses as “the servant of Yahweh” is seen as conveying the teaching of the law, the Torah. In most of DtrH (after his death in the end of Deuteronomy), Moses is most frequently referenced in relation to the law. He is remembered for his Torah, ‫תורת משה‬, as in Joshua 23:6; 8:31, 32; 1 Kings 2:3; 2 Kings 14:6, 23:25.

Testing the Prototype? – Joshua and the Classical Prophets This leads us back to the question, does Deuteronomy 18:15–22 really establish a prophetic prototype if: (a) the text does not tell us what it means to be a prophet like Moses, and (b) it does not present a model that is followed by subsequent prophets? We know what it means to be a false prophet: one who speaks without Yahweh’s words, or in the name of other gods (18:20); one whose prophecy does not come true (18:22); or one whose prophecy does come true but uses it as a sign to urge you to follow other gods (13:3). Nonetheless, the 400 true prophets in 1 Kings 22 speak falsely due to the lying spirit Yahweh placed in their mouths. One way we can attempt to test the prophetic prototype is by considering whether it is used as a model. As early as Abraham ibn Ezra (1089–1167 CE), scholars have identified a “prophet like Moses” as Joshua, Moses’s successor.32 Narratively, Joshua is set up as the heir to Moses: after Moses’s death, Joshua will replace him as military leader, land divider, intercessor with God, and enforcer of the law. The expectation of Deuteronomy 18:15–19 is that God will raise up a prophet like Moses. Joshua is the first to follow him, and Yahweh will continue to support Joshua, as he did Moses. The texts that deal specifically with the transfer of leadership include Deuteronomy 1:37–38, 3:21–22, 28, 31:2–8, 14–15, 23, and Joshua 1:2–9. Joshua’s succession is affirmed by Yahweh: “No man will stand against you all the days of your life, just as I was with Moses I will be with you, I will not desert or leave you” (Josh 1:5); by Moses: “And he [Moses] said to them [the people], ‘I am now 120 years old. I am no longer able to come in

31 Stackert, A Prophet Like Moses, 126. 32 Ibn Ezra’s comment on Deut 18:15. Barstad, “The Understanding of the Prophets in Deuteronomy,” 243 n. 28.

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and go out,33 and Yahweh said to me, “You shall not cross the Jordan.” Yahweh your God crosses before you, he will destroy these nations before you and you will dispossess them. Joshua will cross before you, just as Yahweh said’” (Deut 31:2–3); and by the people themselves: “Just as we obeyed Moses in all things, so we will obey you. Only may Yahweh your God be with you, as he was with Moses” (Josh 1:17). It is unquestionable that Joshua is the literal successor of Moses, but is he also the literary successor? Is Joshua constructed in the model of the prophetic prototype? Joshua mostly fits the criteria of Deuteronomy 18:15–22, which we established as 1) from the Israelites; 2) chosen by Yahweh (he is chosen, but not “raised up”); (3) speaks words of Yahweh, put in his mouth; (4) is like Moses. Does Deuteronomy 18:15–19 simply present a prophetic syllogism of sorts? If Yahweh plans to raise up a prophetic successor, and Joshua is Moses’s successor, is Joshua then a prophet? But, this thinking is complicated by the question if Deuteronomy 18 coupled with Deuteronomy 34 even leaves room for a successor constructed in the model of Moses. While Joshua corresponds to the criteria and takes over the multifaceted leadership of Israel, leading the people to conquer Canaan, he is never called a prophet. He speaks with God, but we are not told how (i.e., face-to-face?). In Joshua 1:8, Yahweh says, “The book of instruction (‫ )ספר התורה‬will not depart from your mouth (‫)מפיך‬.” This statement alludes to Deuteronomy 18:18, where Yahweh says about the future prophet, “I will put my words in his mouth (‫)בפיו‬.” Does having the Torah in his mouth constitute Yahweh’s words?34 Is this the same kind of communication Moses participates in, speaking with God face-­ to-­face? (Deut 34:10). Joshua tells the people what to do, particularly in order to conquer the land and concerning how to observe the law, but he does not prophesy great oracles. The opinions regarding his status as a “prophet like Moses” are varied.35 Joshua is never said explicitly to be a “prophet like Moses.” These are the words that would activate the prototype, alerting the audience to its employment. It is through these references that the prototype works; the pattern is recognized and therefore the audience knows what to expect of a certain situation.36 The entire Hebrew Bible does not explicitly name any prophet as being like Moses. Neither Joshua nor anyone else is said to be “like Moses.” Deuteronomy 34:10 is the only instance where ‫ כמשה‬appears. But Moses 33 Nelson, Deuteronomy, 351. 34 Petersen, “The Ambiguous Role of Moses as Prophet,” 313. 35 Barstad, “The Understanding of the Prophets in Deuteronomy,” 157; Oeste, “The Shaping of a Prophet,” 23. 36 Joseph, Portrait of the Kings, 152–53; Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative (New York: Basic Books, 1981), 47–62.

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speaks in Deuteronomy 18:15 stating that Yahweh will raise up a prophet “like me” (‫)כמני‬. If Deuteronomy 18:15–22 does indeed establish a literary prophetic prototype, it does not seem that it is applied to Joshua. In contrast, while many have tried to fit Joshua into the prophetic prototype of Deuteronomy 18, Joshua also figures as something of a proto-king, partly fulfilling the royal prototype, especially in his similarities to the Davidic king par excellence, Josiah. Like Josiah, Joshua renews the covenant (Josh 8:30–35); is the only other leader who, fulfilling the command of the Law of the King in Deuteronomy 17:18–19, reads the Torah (Josh 1:7–8); and celebrates the Passover. These are the only two instances in DtrH in which the celebration of the Passover is mentioned. In fact, in the account of the reform of Josiah, it is said that “A Passover like this has not been celebrated since the days of the judges who judged in Israel and all the days of the kings of Israel and the kings of Judah. Only in the eighteenth year of the reign of Josiah was such a Passover of Yahweh celebrated in Jerusalem” (2 Kgs 23:22–23). These verses telescope the history beyond the period of David and Solomon, to the time of charismatic leadership. In Joshua 1:1–9, Joshua is installed like a monarch. It is a double installation, by Yahweh (Josh 1:1–9) and the people (Deut 31:7–8), as is done for kings who found dynasties – Saul, David, Solomon, Jeroboam, and Jehu.37 According to Nelson, Joshua is “pictured by Dtr as a royal figure.”38 While Joshua is constructed as a proto-king, Josiah is also compared to Joshua.39 It seems quite a literary burden to expect Joshua to fulfill both the prophetic prototype and the Davidic.

The Classical Prophets While Joshua is the literal, but not the literary, successor to Moses, the classical prophets are also not constructed in the prophetic prototype. If Moses were widely accepted as the model for prophecy, we would expect the prophets to be exalted by being compared to him. This is not the case. The corpus of prophetic literature refers to Moses and compares him to other prophets only four times. And he is never called nābî’. Isaiah 63:11–14 offers a retrospective look at the “olden days,” the days of “his servant Moses,” who took them out of Egypt, dividing the water. Jeremiah mentions Moses and Samuel, another figure who holds crossover roles of prophet, priest, and proto-king, mediating Yahweh’s messages. But Samuel is regularly referred to as a prophet and seer 37 Richard D. Nelson, “Josiah in the Book of Joshua,” Journal of Biblical Literature 100.4 (1981): 532. 38 Nelson, “Josiah in the Book of Joshua,” 534. 39 Sweeney, King Josiah of Judah, 105. Nelson, “Josiah in the Book of Joshua.”

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(Jer 15:1). Also, Micah speaks Yahweh’s words reminding the people of what Yahweh has done, including: “For I brought you up from the land of Egypt, and redeemed you from the house of slavery; and I sent before you Moses, Aaron, and Miriam.” Moses is grouped with his siblings, who have both been identified in earlier traditions as prophets, but in this context are not called such. And Malachi 3:22, as discussed above, reminds the people to “remember the teaching of my servant Moses.” Jeremiah is likely the closest figure we find to the fulfillment of the prophetic prototype. Jeremiah 1:9 states that Yahweh “put words in your mouth” (‫הנה‬ ‫)נתתי דברי בפיך‬.40 This alludes to Deuteronomy 18:18. Also, the deuteronomistic concerns in Jeremiah for textuality and the law fit the model.41 Still, Jeremiah is never compared to Moses. Yosefa Raz argues that Jeremiah is even presented as a contrast to Moses in his failure to live up to Moses’s example.42 She suggests that in DtrH and Deutero-Jeremiah Dtr creates a “phantasmagoric possibility of success.”43 The goal is to establish an office of “strong prophecy,” exemplified by Moses and Samuel, and “weak prophecy,” by everyone else. “According to the text’s logic, if strong prophecy once existed, even in a distant, unreachable past, its reality cannot be denied. Thus strong prophecy is preserved in Deutero-­ Jeremiah as a phantom possibility in order to save the entire prophetic enterprise.”44 Her point is clear, that even in the deuteronomistic parts of Jeremiah, Jeremiah is found wanting in comparison to Moses, and the prototype is only an aspiration. The so-called Law of the Prophet is curiously placed in Deuteronomy, where we do not meet many prophets. But prophets figure prominently in Samuel and Kings, where they are major characters in the plot and affect the direction of the story.45 According to Dtr, prophecy is valid, but it is also ambiguous; it has the potential to develop into something dangerous. Roy Heller suggests this as the reason Deuteronomy 13 is so critical of the prophets, and, instead of offering an extended positive description, is concerned with what happens 40 Achenbach, “A Prophet like Moses,” 447. 41 Mark Leuchter, “The Medium and the Message, or, What Is ‘Deuteronomistic’ about the Book of Jeremiah?,” Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 126.2 (2014): 208–27. 42 Yosefa Raz, “Weak Prophecy: Recasting Prophetic Power in the Classical Hebrew Prophets and in Their Modern Reception” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2013), 6. Also, “Jeremiah ‘Before the Womb’: On Fathers, Sons, and the Telos of Redaction in Jeremiah 1,” in Prophecy and Power: Jeremiah in Feminist and Postcolonial Perspective, ed. Christl Maier and Carolyn J. Sharp. The Library of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Studies 577 (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2013), 86–100. 43 Raz, “Weak Prophecy,” 21. 44 Raz, “Weak Prophecy,” 24. 45 Heller, Power, Politics, and Prophecy, 16.

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when false prophets come along.46 The stories of Micaiah in 1 Kings 22, and the Man of God from Judah and the old prophet from Bethel in 1 Kings 13, call into question what it means to be a true prophet, and how to identify a false one. While some argue that compositional chronology impacts the lack of references to Moses in the prophetic literature – meaning that the classical prophets pre-date Dtr – even within DtrH the many prophets are not compared to Moses or constructed in the prophetic prototype. Deborah in Judges 4:4 is called a prophetess (‫)אשה נביאה‬, but functions more as a judge. Samuel is essential to the end of the Elide priestly dynasty (1 Sam 1–4) and the establishment of kingship (1 Sam 8), and he functions as an intermediary figure in the leadership of Israel – charismatic, the last of the judges, priest, and prophet47 – but he is not compared to Moses. Of the classical prophets, only Isaiah is mentioned in the Book of Kings, but he serves more the role of foreteller and magician/healer than he occupies the role of the classical prophets found in the prophetic books. He encourages Hezekiah to defy Sennacherib, he tells him to pray, and he prophesies the end of Sennacherib and the siege on Jerusalem. The fulfillment of this prediction is a plague on the 185,000 Assyrian soldiers (2 Kgs 18). In Kings, prophecy plays a crucial role. Prophets deliver important messages that justify deuteronomistic theology through the consequences imposed on kings. This is clear in the investiture and rejection of Jeroboam by Ahijah (1 Kgs 11 and 14), the prediction of the downfall of Ahab (1 Kgs 22), the doom oracle against Israel in 2 Kings 17, and Huldah’s confirmation of the found book (2 Kgs 22). Prophecy and its fulfillment are an important structuring feature of DtrH.48 It is perhaps surprising that Amos, Hosea, and Jeremiah, whose messages of pending destruction of the kingdoms correspond with the deuteronomistic message, do not appear in Kings as Isaiah does. As discussed above, Kings seems not influenced by literary prophecy, but it is not necessarily because Dtr was ignorant of the classical prophets. Kaufmann argues, that if literary prophecy is ignored by the historical books, it is because it was not the product of the same scribal schools. He suggests that the prophets often focus on the social and moral decay of Israel. This is not present in DtrH, where Israel’s sin is cultic.49 Prophets in DtrH do not have moral missions, as do

46 Heller, Power, Politics, and Prophecy, 24. 47 Wilson, Prophecy and Society, 172. 48 Gerhard von Rad, “The Deuteronomic Theology of History in I and II Kings,” in The Problem of the Hexateuch and Other Essays, trans. E. W. Trueman Dicken (Edinburgh; London: Oliver & Boyd, 1965), 205–21. 49 Yehezkel Kaufmann, The Religion of Israel, from Its Beginnings to the Babylonian Exile, trans. Moshe Greenberg (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 160.

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many of the classical prophets.50 According to Kaufmann, “The literature of the Torah-group [Enneateuch] and the literary prophets must be regarded as distinct domains.”51 Instead, deuteronomistic prophets are teachers of the law and deliverers of doom.52 This is a subordination of the role of the prophets. In DtrH, the prophets are intended to encourage the observance of Mosaic law. Prophecies and their subsequent fulfillments are illustrative of the consequences of non-compliance. There is tension in the conflict of perspective in Deuteronomy 18 and 34 regarding the value of deuteronomistic prophets. They are important, but at the same time, ultimate authority is given to the Torah of Moses.53 The law rules supreme, even over Yahweh’s prophets. This is not the case in the prophetic literature. The prophetic prototype in Deuteronomy, which has Moses as its model, in contrast to the moral model of the classical prophets, is vested in the dissemination of Mosaic law.

Elijah The narrative of Elijah is the longest narrative of the prophets in DtrH (1 Kgs 17–21 and 2 Kgs 1–2). Unlike in the prophetic books, the Elijah narrative fully employs Moses as a model in the aim to establish Elijah as the prophet of the generation. Because of this, Elijah has been identified by some as a “second Moses.”54 Elijah performs similar functions to other prophets in DtrH, such as reproaching and anointing kings, delivering Yahweh’s messages, and promoting deuteronomistic theology. In addition, Elijah, like his disciple Elisha, is at times a magic maker, more similar to the prophets of the ancient Near East than to classical prophets. The different characterizations of Elijah are often attributed to the composite nature of the narrative.55 The comparison to Moses is accomplished on a narrative plot level, rather than in Elijah’s characterization. Marsha White states that “reformulated Mosaic traditions dominate the Elijah legends, constituting the bulk of I Kgs 17:2–6, 50 Kaufmann, The Religion of Israel, 161. 51 Kaufmann, The Religion of Israel, 165. 52 Römer, “Moses, Israel’s First Prophet,” 145. 53 Tengström, “Moses and the Prophets in the Deuteronomistic History,” 258. 54 R. P. Carroll, “The Elijah-Elisha Sagas: Some Remarks On Prophetic Succession in Ancient Israel,” Vetus Testamentum 19.4 (1969): 56–71. For bibliography see Marsha C. White, The Elijah Legends and Jehu’s Coup (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1997), 3, n.1. 55 Mordechai Cogan, 1 Kings: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary. Anchor Bible Commentary (New York: Doubleday, 2001), 93; Steven L. McKenzie, The Trouble with Kings: The Composition of the Book of Kings in the Deuteronomistic History. Supplements to Vetus Testamentum 42 (Leiden; New York: Brill, 1991), 90–98; Susanne Otto, “The Composition of the Elijah-Elisha Stories and the Deuteronomistic History,” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 27, no. 4 (2003): 487–508.

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19:1–21, and II Kgs 2:1–18, and appearing as isolated allusion elsewhere.”56 The connection between Elijah and Moses is made through a complex web of allusions to the complete biography of Moses, in Exodus–Deuteronomy. Like Moses, Yahweh speaks to Elijah, telling him what to do, beginning in 1 Kings 17:2: “The word of Yahweh came to him.” Also like Moses, Elijah provides sustenance in the wilderness during the drought (1 Kgs 17:2–6), and battles against foreign modes of worship. Also, Yahweh appears before Elijah (1 Kgs 19), and, like Moses, Elijah’s death is mysterious. In addition, Elijah has a clear disciple and successor in Elisha, parallel to the succession of Moses by Joshua.57 Yet, while exemplary, Elijah is one among many. He himself proclaims that “the Israelites have forsaken Your covenant . . . ​and put your prophets to the sword. I alone am left. . . . ” (1 Kgs 20:14). Despite the many similarities, it is questionable whether Elijah truly fits the prophetic prototype. I return to the criteria established above. He is from among the Israelites and speaks the words of Yahweh (#1 and #3). He is not “raised up” (#2) and doesn’t even have a proper commission, as we see among the classical prophets. It is never articulated explicitly that he will be “like” Moses (#4). The words used to describe the prototype are not employed to signal to the reader that the model is being used. In Malachi 3:22–23, as discussed above, Moses and Elijah are grouped together. But there, Moses is called ‘ebed (v. 22), while Elijah is called hannābî, with the definite article. White makes much of the opposite, claiming that Elijah is frequently called ‘ebed yhwh “the servant of YHWH” rather than hannābî “the prophet,” arguing that “this is a distinction that he shares primarily with Moses.” But the examples she cites, “II Kgs 9:36, 10:10; cf. I Kgs 18:36,” do not support this claim. Both 2 Kings 9:46 and 10:10 are retrospective, reflecting on Elijah’s role after his death, while in 1 Kings 18:36, the narrator calls him “the prophet Elijah,” while he describes himself as the ‘ebed: “When it was time for the meal offering, the prophet Elijah came forward and said, ‘Yahweh, God of Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, Let it be known that you are God of Israel and I am your servant . . . ’.” White’s commitment to this point is an attempt to characterize Elijah’s mode of communication with Yahweh as similar to that of Moses and unlike the other prophets: “The distinctive title of ‘ebed yhwh refers especially to Numbers 12:6–8, where Moses is distinguished from the other prophets as YHWH’s ‘ebed with whom YHWH speaks face-to-face (cf. the theophany in I Kgs 19:9–18). The prophets, on the other hand, are restricted to visions and dreams (i.e., indirect meditation).”58 But while Yahweh passes before Elijah (1 Kgs 19:11), Yahweh 56 White, The Elijah Legends, 3. 57 White, The Elijah Legends, 3. 58 White, The Elijah Legends, 11.

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does not speak to him “face-to-face,” as he does with Moses, or even put words “into his mouth,” as occurs in the Joshua narrative. Certainly, as White suggests, the goal of the allusions to Moses are “to portray Elijah as the unique intermediary of his time, bearing the definitive word of YHWH,”59 but Elijah falls short of the prophetic prototype. The Elijah narrative contains many similarities to the life of Moses, but Elijah is not another Moses. A glaring omission in the attempt to cast Elijah as a second Moses is the absence of the role of the law. Moses’s position as prophet is grounded in legal textuality, in part as a contrast to the magic of the ANE prophets. While narrating their similarities, Moses is also highlighted as superior and incomparable. While Elijah is characterized similarly, he is still inferior.

The Davidic Prototype in Kings I have argued above that Deuteronomy 18 and 34 establish an empty prototype, which makes it impossible to be “like Moses.” While the use of this empty prophetic prototype seems to flout the essential nature of a prototype, Dtr in Kings uses a real prototype, in the form of a royal model, portraying his kings through a Davidic prototype. This model is based on a literary construct of David, a portrait that is in fact modeled on the perceived character of Josiah, the king from whose court the primary pre-exilic edition of the history derives, and not – as one might have expected – from the David tradition depicted in Samuel.60 David as portrayed in Kings is faithful to deuteronomistic theology, carefully observing the statutes and commandments, laws and warnings.61 The prototype corresponds to the characteristics described by Lakoff as a “best example.”62 This Davidic prototype is the measure for Dtr’s kings, both good and bad: good kings (eight of them) “do what is right in Yahweh’s eyes”; a few (only 3) are given further praise for being like David; bad kings “do what is evil in Yahweh’s eyes” and are not like David. They are most regularly compared to Jeroboam and are accused of having continued Jeroboam’s sin of uncentralized worship. The construction of the Davidic prototype is introduced in the account of the reign of Solomon in 1 Kings 1–11. On his deathbed, David explicitly tells Solomon (2 Kgs 2:3–4) that to ensure success, the king must follow the instruction of Moses, observe the laws in keeping with deuteronomistic covenant 59 White, The Elijah Legends, 11. 60 Joseph, Portrait of the Kings. 61 For more, see Alison L. Joseph, “Who Is like David? Was David like David?: Good Kings in the Book of Kings,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 77 (2015): 20–41. 62 Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things, 45; Joseph, Portrait of the Kings, 56–57.

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theology, and walk in the way of Yahweh with all his heart and soul. To be a good king means to follow the law of Moses and be like David. Dtr’s account of Solomon’s reign illustrates the Davidic prototype. Solomon receives these specific directions in the beginning of his reign; by the end, he is punished for having not been like David. He has been unfaithful to the covenant and therefore the majority of the kingdom will be torn from the hands of his son Rehoboam. The words of punishment mirror those of instruction (1 Kgs 11:6, 11): Kings who follow the laws and are fully with Yahweh, like Asa, Hezekiah, and Josiah, are like David. And those who do not, are not like David. An anti-type also evolves. Jeroboam, who is readied to be a second David at the end of 1 Kings 11, is to be the vehicle for Solomon’s punishment. The prophet Ahijah gives Jeroboam the very same instructions that were given to Solomon (1 Kgs 11:29–39), but Jeroboam does not live up to his literary potential. Instead, just as Yahweh punishes Solomon, he also punishes Jeroboam (1 Kgs 14:7–9). Jeroboam is thus firmly inaugurated as the Davidic anti-type, the model of those bad kings who “do what is evil in Yahweh’s eyes.” Unlike the prophetic prototype where no figure is ever said to be “like Moses,” the Davidic prototype is activated explicitly, by saying a king is “like David,” in the cases of Asa (1 Kgs 15:11), Hezekiah (2 Kgs 18:3), and Josiah (2 Kgs 22:2), and implicitly, by using the specific phraseology connected to other instances of being like David, as in 1 Kings 2:3–4. The Davidic prototype in Kings is not modelled on the figure of David in Samuel; it seems more likely that Josiah serves as the paradigm.63 Josiah is the only king to fully inhabit, and even to surpass, the Davidic model. In the introduction to Josiah’s reign, Dtr reports that he “did what was right in the eyes of Yahweh, and he walked in all the way[s] of David his father. And he did not stray to the right or left” (2 Kgs 22:2). Josiah reads the Torah (23:2), reestablishes the covenant (23:3), and reforms the cultic practices of Israel and Judah, guided by the “found” scroll of the law (2 Kgs 22). His reform is focused on standardizing Israelite cultic practice to conform with the laws and theology of this law book, proto-Deuteronomy. At the close of his reign, the text reports, “And like him there was no king before him who turned back to Yahweh with all his heart and all his soul and all his might, as all the instruction of Moses. And after him, no one arose like him” (2 Kgs 23:25). Josiah’s accomplishments echo the injunction of loyalty in Deuteronomy 6:5: “Love Yahweh your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your might.” Josiah’s fulfillment of this injunction goes beyond the instructions given to Solomon in 1 Kings 2:2–3 – these instructions only include “all your heart and all your soul.” Other kings are compared to David; all fail to achieve the model, although some strive to do so. This highlights the 63 Nelson, “Josiah in the Book of Joshua,” 540, and Double Redaction, 125.

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preeminence of Josiah. He not only fulfills the model, but he also out-Davids even David in his obedience to the law (i.e., enacting reform) and loves Yahweh with all his heart and all his soul and all his might.64

When the Prototype is not Prototypical While the Davidic prototype is pervasive throughout Kings and many of the kings are fitted into the model, Dtr intentionally uses an empty prophetic prototype. The goals in the use of a prototype are the same – to promote deuteronomistic theology focused on the importance of and adherence to the law – but the means are different. Dtr reimagines the figure of David as a covenant adherent, faithful to Yahweh, in order to exalt the figure of Josiah. Dtr takes a well-known “historical” figure and casts him in the mold of Josiah. In so doing, he retrospectively rewrites the character of David in line with his strict theology. He then uses this portrayal of David to construct the portraits of his kings, with an eye on elevating Josiah above them all, even above David himself. Josiah is the king who cannot be matched. With the prophetic prototype, Dtr does something similar. Moses himself is the incomparable prophet. It is unquestionable that Deuteronomy 34:10 and 2 Kgs 23:25 echo each other, but the goal in creating the prophetic prototype is to demonstrate that no prophet can match Moses – unlike the David prototype wherein David is matched and even surpassed. Dtr uses the prophetic prototype in Deuteronomy 18 for the same reason he uses the Davidic prototype strategy in Kings, to promote his theology. There is a – rather successful – attempt to subordinate the prophets of DtrH to Moses and the importance of the law. But, the prophetic model is impossible to achieve. It is not a real model. Instead, as Stackert suggests, “D ensures that subsequent prophets ‘like Moses’ will be poor reflections of the master, if identifiable at all. But when undercutting other prophets, D is also careful to maintain their characterization as Mosaic, for in so doing, D ensures its own relation to them. This relation emphasizes and extends D’s own prophetic preeminence while simultaneously severely limiting potential prophetic challenges to its authority.”65 In the eyes of the royal court, prophets are dangerous: they are unstable and autonomous; they can tell the king to do things; they cannot be controlled. This is clear regarding the classical prophets, but, from the perspective of the court, they can at least be managed literarily. Throughout DtrH, the prophets who appear are merely messengers to deliver the deuteronomistic perspective. What better way to give deuteronomistic theology authority than by couching 64 Joseph, Portrait of the Kings, 148. 65 Stackert, A Prophet Like Moses, 166.

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it in the words of God, delivered by his servants the prophets? The prophets speak out against kings and accuse those who violate the deuteronomistic law (e.g., Ahab, Jeroboam). They produce oracles that promote the deuteronomistic program, including pronouncements of doom and certain punishment. Dtr intentionally does not want to construct prophets who are like Moses, because he does not want to give them that much authority. Although the Elijah narrative comes close, it is impossible to live up to the prophetic prototype of being “like Moses.” The unfulfilled prototype is intentional. We should question why Deuteronomy 18 even bothers with a prophetic prototype that is a non-model. One answer is that Dtr likes to use a prototype strategy; it is part of his historiographical poetics.66 As a literary technique, the prototype is exclusively deuteronomistic. We can see this in the contrast of Deuteronomy 18 and 34 with a parallel passage in Numbers 12 (E). In Numbers 12, Miriam and Aaron criticize Moses for his Cushite wife, and suggest that they are like him. After all, Yahweh has spoken to them as well as to Moses: “And they said, ‘Has Yahweh only spoken with Moses, did he not also speak with us?’” (Num 12:2). Yahweh is incensed: And he said, “Hear my words, when a prophet of Yahweh will be among you, in a vision I will make myself known to him, in a dream I will speak with him. Not so with my servant Moses. With all my house he is trusted, mouth to mouth (‫ )פה אל פה‬I speak with him, and plainly, not in riddles and he beholds the form of Yahweh. Why were you not afraid to speak against my servant Moses?” (Num 12:6–8) The idea here is clear; even though Yahweh also spoke to Miriam and Aaron, his relationship with Moses, and Moses alone, is unique. It is only with Moses that Yahweh spoke “mouth to mouth.” The connection to Deuteronomy 34:10 is obvious, including the exact phraseology of Yahweh and Moses meeting ‫פה‬ ‫אל פה‬ – the feature that is intended to set Moses apart from others, especially from other prophets. The sentiments of Numbers 12:6–8 are the same as those in Deuteronomy 18 and 34, but the method is different. In Numbers 12, Moses is exalted for being different, rather than being the model for other prophets. It is significant that in these verses Moses is called ‘ebed rather than nābî’. It is possible that Numbers 12, as Nihan suggests, is influenced by Deuteronomy 34:10–12, but it does not have the poetics of prototyping that we see in deuteronomistic composition.67 The empty prophetic prototype relates back to the use of the Davidic royal prototype. Moses is exalted in his own name. He is made incomparable, and 66 Joseph, Portrait of the Kings, 33–76. 67 Nihan, “Moses and the Prophets,” 39.

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therefore no one can match him. In contrast, Josiah is exalted in the name of David. Josiah is not the prototype but only a veiled model for the model. In this way, he can also be incomparable: he surpasses someone else’s model. In contrast, Moses is both the prototype and its realization. It is interesting to note that the prophetic prototype, while empty in the Hebrew Bible, is applied to Jesus in Acts 4. Peter quotes Deuteronomy 18 to exalt Jesus using the prophetic prototype. In this passage, Jesus is incomparable because he is cast in the prophetic model. Jesus is fitted into and surpasses the Mosaic model, just as Josiah is fitted into and surpasses the Davidic model. This passage does something that Deuteronomy 18 cannot. The goal of a prototype (see Lakoff ’s definition above) is that the prototype is not unique. The use of Moses as prophetic prototype is unique. Successive prophets do not receive revelation of the law. There is no other like him.

Moses Between the Pentateuch and the Book of the Twelve Mark Leuchter Temple University

The dominance of Moses in pre-Persian Jewish tradition is affirmed by the role he plays in the Pentateuch, the ultimate testament to his authority. Yet the Pentateuch was a product of the Aaronide priests of the Persian period, and uses Moses to rhetorically secure their positions as mediators of both ancient Jewish traditions and Persian imperialism. The Pentateuch’s closing verses recruit Moses to validate this effort, situating the Aaronide priests as the trustees of Moses’s own legacy and subordinating all other Israelite prophetic traditions in the process. The creation of the Book of the Twelve by Levite scribes in the late Persian period appears to constitute a response to this. It recruits the name of Moses at strategic points throughout its collection of prophetic oracles to challenge the rhetorical claims of the Pentateuch and the priesthood that work was created to benefit. Moses is thus caught between the Pentateuch and the Book of the Twelve, which together point to a larger network of Moses traditions beyond their literary boundaries that each authorial group sought to annex and deploy.

Although many scholars have identified monarchic-era Israel and Judah as the setting for the formation of major sources standing behind the Hebrew scriptures, it is generally recognized that the current form of these materials is in large part a result of their redaction and transmission during the Persian period. Imperial ideology and resources available to scribes in Jerusalem provided the opportunity to create comprehensive and synthetic literary works of powerful ritual and even mythological significance.1 The textual collections emerging from the Persian period preserved the sometimes fragmented and often partisan traditions of earlier eras, setting them in conversation with each other and simultaneously transforming them into cohesive and unified works. Much of this resulted from the adoption of the Aramaic intellectual culture

1 On the stabilization (though not standardization or canonization) of the textual traditions preserved in the biblical record during the Persian period (supported by the manuscript evidence from Qumran), see Reinhard G. Kratz, Historisches und biblisches Israel: Drei Überblicke zum Alten Testament (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013), 184–85.

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standardized throughout the empire: this was not simply a matter of the adoption of Aramaic language for diplomatic discourse, but also the conventional application of Aramaic script to Hebrew-­language texts and hermeneutical traditions imported from Mesopotamian sacral scholarship.2 The arbiters of this “Aramaic Transition” were the Aaronide priests who ruled over affairs in the Jerusalem temple. The Aaronide line had origins in the Israel of the Iron I period; one faction of this line (the Zadokites) served as priestly clients of the Davidic kings who reigned in Jerusalem until its destruction in 587 BCE.3 It was through Persian imperial fiat, however, that the Aaronide priesthood was able to reclaim sacral and political power in Yehudite affairs upon the return to the ancestral homeland. This power and influence survived for the duration of the Persian period and beyond.4 The literary works the Aaronides produced under the auspices of the Persian empire drew from Israelite/Judahite textual and oral precedents, but they also functioned as indications that the religion regulated by the Aaronides was a subset of the larger Persian imperial mythology. Hebrew-language documents textualized in Aramaic script and subjected to Aramaic hermeneutics were made newly meaningful through the mechanisms of the empire. The Aaronides thus laid claim to traditions that were not originally their own via retransmitting them in a new textual form and governing how they were taught or deployed. Earlier sources from other corners of the Israelite population fell into their hands and were made over to serve their agenda and vision for Jewish life within an imperial context, with the Aaronides standing at the apex.







2 I have discussed this in detail in “The Aramaic Transition and the Redaction of the Pentateuch,” Journal of Biblical Literature 136 (2017): 249–68. See also the analysis by Seth L. Sanders, “What If There Aren’t Any Empirical Models for Pentateuchal Criticism?,” in Contextualizing Israel’s Sacred Writings: Ancient Literacy, Orality and Textual Production, ed. Brian B. Schmidt (Atlanta, GA: SBL, 2015), 281–304 for the unique scribal cultural background standing behind the literary orchestration of monarchic and exilic era biblical sources. 3 On the Zadokites as an Aaronide subset, see the classic discussion by Frank M. Cross, Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), 205–15. While Cross’s view on the Levites requires greater nuance, his argument regarding the Zadokites still possesses a good deal of explanatory power, though certain caveats should be applied to some of the proof texts he uses (such as Judg 20:27–28; see my discussion in The Levites and the Boundaries of Israelite Identity [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017], 126–28) pointing to a more complicated process even characterizing the growth of the Zadokites within the Aaronide priestly circle. Menahem Haran emphasizes the Zadokite Ezekiel’s enculturation in the Aaronide priestly vernacular, despite the differences between the contents of his oracles and the contents of P in “Ezekiel, P, and the Priestly Tradition,” Vetus Testamentum 58 (2008): 211–18. 4 James W. Watts, Ritual and Rhetoric in Leviticus: From Sacrifice to Scripture (New York/ Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 143–72.

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Deuteronomy 34:10–12 as the “Seal” of the Pentateuch Although we may view various texts as artifacts of Aaronide hegemony, the outstanding testament to these texts’ power and ideology is certainly the Pentateuch. Critical scholars unanimously recognize that the Pentateuch’s diverse sources came together through an Aaronide redactional enterprise sometime in the mid-fifth century BCE as an expression of Aaronide power over the totality of Jewish life in Yehud and – possibly – beyond it as well.5 The Pentateuch served not simply as a charter myth for Jewish origins but for Aaronide priestly supremacy, with the divinely created order leading to the creation of the priesthood, their orders and ranks, their vast system of laws, their sophisticated cosmology, and the complex ritual culture that they alone could helm and direct with authority.6 The Aaronide Pentateuch came to represent the nexus between a developing sense of Jewish ethnicity and the place of that ethnicity within the empire. A strong indication that the Pentateuch was redacted for this purpose is the placement of the Priestly (P) source material directly at the heart of the document via the Book of Leviticus, rendering Aaronide rituals the centerpiece of the revelation at Sinai.7 The appearance of P material in the texts leading up to and away from this centerpiece symbolically extends the resonance of



5 On the possible application of the Pentateuch beyond the boundaries of Yehud, see H.G.M. Williamson, Ezra-Nehemiah. Word Biblical Commentary (Waco, TX: Word, 1985), 100. Williamson suggests that the characterization of Ezra in Ezra 7 places him in charge of Jewish affairs throughout the satrapy of Transeuphrates. This characterization should not be too firmly connected to historical circumstances, especially since the Artaxerxes Rescript in Ezra 7 shows signs of being a rather late composition with a particular religious/hermeneutical bent. (See Anselm Hagedorn, “Local Law in an Imperial Context: The Role of Torah in the (Imagined) Persian Period,” in The Pentateuch as Torah, ed. Gary N. Knoppers and Bernard M. Levinson [Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2007], 70–71.) But if this composition telescopes a variety of institutions, praxes, and memories associated with the mid-5th century BCE and whatever role the historical Ezra played at that time, among these is the idea that religious law applied beyond the provincial borders. The letter of Jedoniah to Bagohai in the Elephantine papyri (AP 31) may suggest something along these lines, insofar as Jedoniah seems to adopt a deferential position to the authority of the Aaronide priesthood in Jerusalem in roughly the same era. AP 31 does not specify that this included the adoption of Pentateuchal law in any way, but the Pentateuch may not have functioned in such a manner in the first few decades of its appearance. As Watts has suggested, it functioned primarily as an icon of power and authority rather than as a religious guidebook of theological curricula (though it obviously would come to hold such a position in time among the Jewish literati). 6 David L. Petersen, “Genesis and Family Values,” Journal of Biblical Literature 124 (2005): 10. 7 Leviticus is a unique part of the P tradition, insofar as the entirety of the book is presented as YHWH’s revealed word to Moses at Sinai; by contrast, the P material in both Exodus and Numbers is woven into a narrative context beyond the locus of Sinai.

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that revelation backward and forward into narrated time, with the implication that in historical time, Aaronide traditions in the Persian period sustained the centrality of that revelatory moment. Furthermore, the ritual reading of the Pentateuch reinforced not only the prestige of the priestly group that wrought it,8 but also the cult it had empowered to maintain holiness and cosmic order. It is ultimately the Pentateuch’s characterization of Moses, however, that solidifies Aaronide claims over the Israelite past for the Jewish present and future. No figure holds the same rank in the Pentateuch as Moses, whose presence dominates Exodus through Deuteronomy and is even anticipated in oblique ways in the Book of Genesis.9 Part of this must surely be a result of Moses’s towering stature in Israelite religion long pre-dating the formation of the Pentateuch or even its literary precursor sources. Based on various well-developed traditions that had obtained by the end of the pre-monarchic era, it is clear that Moses was already a figure of mythic and legendary proportions by the early monarchic period.10 Late-monarchic/exilic literary sources also presupposed Moses’s authority as the fountainhead of sacral legitimacy. Within P, Moses is the transmitter of all ritual and festival legislation empowering the priesthood and the cult, and within Deuteronomy, Moses is both the authoritative interpreter of earlier revelation and the authority behind its textualization and scribal transmission.11 Combining the P and Deuteronomic concepts of Moses, the Aaronide redactors of the Pentateuch wove together their sources to extend the parameters of Moses’s authority, done under the auspices of the aforementioned (Persian period) Aramaic Transition. Despite whatever role Moses played outside the literary boundaries of the Pentateuch, he becomes a facilitator of ideologies, praxes, and interpretive methods that benefitted the Aaronides in their construction of this document, which was of course a product of the imperial era in which they lived. For this reason, we must pay special attention to Deuteronomy 34:10–12, the incomparability statement that forms a sort of scribal “seal” which 8 Watts, Ritual and Rhetoric, 143–51. 9 Jeffrey C. Geoghegan, “The Abrahamic Passover,” in LeDavid Maskil: A Birthday Tribute for David Noel Freedman, ed. Richard E. Friedman and W. H. Propp (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2004), 47–62. 10 See further below on the place of Moses in an early northern-monarchic (e.g., late 10th century BCE) version of the Exodus narrative. On the very early point of origin for the formation of Moses lore (over against late monarchic development of the exodus tradition), especially in relation to the morphology of his name in Hebrew, see Bernd Ulrich Schipper, “Raamses, Pithom and the Exodus: A Critical Evaluation of Ex 1:11,” Vetus Testamentum 65 (2015): 272–75. 11 There is a general scholarly consensus that Deuteronomy was substantially composed sometime in the late 7th century BCE, and the exhaustive literature on the topic need not be rehearsed here. Though the P document was probably a product of the exilic period, major building blocks of that document were likely well known already by the late monarchic era.

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closes the Pentateuch – and which thus sets the terms by which Moses should be perceived in Persian period Judaism: Never since has there arisen a prophet in Israel like Moses, whom YHWH knew face to face. He was unequalled for all the signs and wonders that YHWH sent him to perform in the land of Egypt, against Pharaoh and all his servants and his entire land, and for all the mighty deeds and all the terrifying displays of power that Moses performed in the sight of all Israel. There is debate as to how this statement of incomparability originated (i.e., whether it derives from an earlier source or was composed for its current purpose). But irrespective of its compositional origins, what is of interest to the present study is the effect that this seal has on the document it closes, and on other documents in related collections or libraries (that is, other texts that possess lexical or rhetorical points of contact with the Pentateuch’s sources). Of equal interest are the sociological implications the seal carries regarding the Aaronide scribes responsible for placing it in its current context. The seal in Deuteronomy 34:10–12 presents the Pentateuch as the definitive literary monument to Moses, though not through an attempt to present Moses as its “author.” A statement such as Deuteronomy 34:10–12 actually undercuts the idea of Mosaic authorship: it looks back from a temporal distance at the legendary era of Moses,12 doing so as part of a later consideration of that era, and thus temporally dislocates the text from Moses himself. Already in Jewish antiquity, the rabbis recognized that these verses presented a challenge to the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch (Bava Batra 14b). While the rabbinic assignment of these verses to Joshua has little critical viability, it demonstrates that, even for them, the Pentateuch’s credibility as a holy document –the torat moshe – was not strictly dependent upon Mosaic authorship. The rhetoric of the Pentateuch blurs authorial boundaries between Moses and YHWH as its implied author,13 but it also deliberately obscures the very notion of authorship, instead shifting toward a concept of text as part of a larger sociological process where authorship is not the definitive hallmark of textual authority or authorization. 12 See the similar observations by Stackert, A Prophet Like Moses, 123–25, with regard to the view of Moses’s prophecy in light of subsequent prophetic phenomena in Israelite religion and literature. Stackert identifies this with the Pentateuchal E source for which Deut 34:10–12 functioned as the conclusion, but even if one does not adhere to the source-critical model, the traditions in the verses that Stackert discusses point to precisely this sort of divide between Moses and forms of prophecy surfacing in his wake reinforced through Deut 34:10–12. 13 James W. Watts, “The Legal Characterization of Moses in the Rhetoric of the Pentateuch,” Journal of Biblical Literature 117 (1998): 425–26.

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This rhetorical turn builds upon a developing paradigm in antiquity where an outstanding legendary figure was associated with a particular text, but not necessarily as its author or composer. Authorship was not the primary concern of ancient scribes, who regularly avoided claims of authorship in what they wrote (typically opting for anonymity).14 Major works preserved within the biblical record – the Books of Samuel, Kings, Chronicles, Ezra-Nehemiah, Ruth, Esther, etc. – conspicuously avoid claims of authorship. In other biblical works an authorizing figure may be invoked, but this is not the same as a claim of authorship. Deuteronomy contains the torah of Moses but is itself the written work of Levite scribes who do not overtly identify themselves,15 and though the Book of Jeremiah begins with the declaration that it contains the “words of Jeremiah,” this statement is the handiwork of anonymous scribes who pseudonymously assigned their work to the prophet. Similarly, collections of psalms are associated with, but not specifically attributed to, David, and the “proverbs of Solomon,” rather than asserting certain authorship, invoke Solomon as a figure through which wisdom might be understood more than as the book’s actual author.16 The Book of the Twelve (Hosea – Malachi; henceforth “the Twelve”) contains prophetic works associated with specific prophetic figures, but in its canonical form is the work of anonymous scribes who do not attempt to assign authorship of their literary masterpiece to any particular figure, prophetic or otherwise. Put differently, “the proverbs of Solomon,” “psalms of David,” or “words of Jeremiah” are not necessarily the proverbs, psalms, or words written by these figures, but are rather collections that provide an entry into the mythology surrounding these figures.17 Ancient writers and audiences saw these authorizing figures as patron saints of a given textual tradition, where they functioned in the formation of textual works that both possessed points of contact and overlapped with these figures. But these writers clearly shaped their traditions in a particular manner and were selective about how these patron saints’ mythologies were accessed or transmitted.18 Evidence within the biblical record points to the formation of these text traditions already in the monarchic era in some cases and the exilic era in others (e.g., Deuteronomy, Jeremiah, Ezekiel). In both eras, 14 Karel Van der Toorn, Scribal Culture and the Making of the Hebrew Bible (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 31–33. 15 Leuchter, The Levites and the Boundaries of Israelite Identity, 186–87. 16 Eva Mroczek, The Literary Imagination in Jewish Antiquity (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016) 19–85, esp. 53–56; see also chapter 6 in Jacqueline Vayntrub’s recent book Beyond Orality: Biblical Poetry on its Own Terms (London: Routledge, 2019). 17 See especially Jacqueline Vayntrub, “The Book of Proverbs and the Idea of Ancient Israelite Education,” Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 128 (2016): 112–13. 18 Mroczek, Literary Imagination, 114–55.

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named figures of historical memory are used to qualify and license a text as an outgrowth or expression of a scribal group’s worldview. It is therefore more profitable to consider the seal in Deuteronomy 34:10–12 from the aforementioned rhetorical-sociological perspective. On the one hand, it is an intertextual trope identifying the Pentateuch as a definitive collection similar to other texts with legendary authorizing figures associated with them. The reason for this is simple: if those earlier text collections already established the “patron saint” convention as a vehicle for self-legitimation, then a freshly produced document such as the Pentateuch – something clearly influenced by the prevailing imperial zeitgeist – would benefit from conforming to well-­ established literary devices. On the other hand, the later date and third person form of the seal implies the document’s power, or the power of the document’s redactors, to make historical evaluations regarding the intervening centuries between Moses’s death and the audience’s own time. Since the Pentateuch was an Aaronide-produced document, there can be little doubt that the subordination of all other prophets to Moses in Deuteronomy 34:10–12 articulated a perspective that the Aaronides cultivated: that alternative traditions of revelation were subordinated to the contents of the Pentateuch now licensed by Moses’s patronage.19 This empowered the Aaronide authors of the document, as the closing comment in Deuteronomy 34:10–12 was now part of the document licensed by Moses’s patronage. The ritualized reading of this text affirming Moses’s incomparable prophecy lent only further credibility to the priestly culture into which it figured.20 Another model for understating the Aaronide-Moses relationship created through the sealing of the Pentateuch may also be applied. As is well known, priesthood in ancient Israel – at least until the latter half of the eighth century BCE – was a fluid phenomenon.21 In the priesthood’s earliest iterations, members of the laity could be absorbed into priestly clans, and, as time went on, those priestly clans were absorbed into larger priestly lineages.22 This pro 19 Following Stackert, this same feature accompanied the pre-Pentateuchal function of these verses (A Prophet Like Moses, 123–25), although the Pentateuchal redactors have refocused the sociological and literary purpose of these verses. 20 Mark Leuchter, “The Politics of Ritual Rhetoric: A Proposed Socio-political Context for the Redaction of Leviticus 1–16,” Vetus Testamentum 60 (2010): 351. 21 Exod 2:1, part of a narrative penned either in the late 8th or early 7th century BCE (and dependent upon the Sargon legend produced during Sargon II’s reign), indicates a process of tribalization taking place among the Levites. But the variations in the Levite genealogies (as preserved in Exodus, Numbers, and Chronicles) points to changes and fluctuations in Levite lineage networks from earlier times. 22 Lawrence E. Stager, “The Archaeology of the Family in Ancient Israel,” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 265 (1985): 27–28; Jeremy R. Hutton, “The Levitical Diaspora (I):

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cess saw the adoption, and sometimes the reallocation, of founding priestly ancestors shared across these merging lineages.23 It is also well known that throughout most of the monarchic era and into the era of the exile, some priestly lineages had merged into a single caste – the Levites – who saw Moses as the symbolic founder of their order.24 Tension (persisting into the mid-fifth century BCE) had developed between the Levites and the Aaronides by the early Persian period.25 Affiliation with Moses may well have been the principle power claim of the Levites in the face of Aaronide socio-political hegemony in Persian Yehud: nobody at that time could deny the rhetorical and mythological potency of Moses’s name and memory, and playing that particular card could provide the Levites with some sacral leverage. Aaronides interested in increasing their basis of power could not allow for such a claim to be applied to their detriment.

The Rhetorical Effect of the Aaronide “Claim” over Moses The sealing of the Pentateuch in Deuteronomy 34:10–12 is in large part an Aaronide attempt to claim Moses for themselves – to make him, through their literary efforts, the patron of their priestly group. The Pentateuch not only projects Moses into Aaronide priestly tradition, it retrojects Aaronide conduct back onto Moses’s own deeds, making him the archetype for their own priestly culture in Persian Yehud. This plays upon the earlier fluidity of priestly lineages, and also is an example of what Zev Farber has called “tradition cannibalism” – where one story grows by claiming useful features of another, while silencing or otherwise excising features that do not serve a particular purpose.26 Farber observes this on the level of narrative production, but it also operates on the level of group identity formation–something that was very much in flux during the first half of the Persian period.27 By serving as the patron saint of the Pentateuch, Moses became the “founder” A Sociological Comparison with Morocco’s Ahansal,” in Exploring the Longue Durée: Essays in Honor of Lawrence E. Stager, ed. J.D. Schloen (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2009), 227–30. 23 Hutton, “Levitical Diaspora,” 229–30. 24 Van der Toorn, Family Religion, 303. See further my discussion in The Levites and the Boundaries of Israelite Identity, 86–90. 25 The evidence from the Nehemiah Memoir factors heavily here: Nehemiah demonstrably attempts to limit Aaronide power and rallies the Levites to his cause in the process (Leuchter, “Politics of Ritual Rhetoric,” 359–60). 26 Zev Farber, Images of Joshua in the Bible and their Reception. Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 457 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016), 120. 27 This is explored in detail by Dalit Rom Shiloni in Exclusive Inclusivity: Identity Conflicts between the Exiles and the People Who Remained (6th–5th Centuries BCE). The Library of Hebrew Bible/ Old Testament Studies (London/ New York: Bloomsbury, 2013).

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of the Aaronide priesthood behind that document. Because the Pentateuch concludes with the claim that Moses was an unparalleled prophet, Aaronide cultic conduct and instruction grounded in the Pentateuch’s rhetorical power became vehicles for revelation. Surely this conclusion is reinforced through the earlier tradition embedded in Exodus 7:1 identifying Aaron as Moses’s “prophet,” and also explains why later tradition periodically assigns to the High Priest revelatory experiences with the hypostasis known as the bat kol.28 Even if one disagrees with the assertion that Aaronide conduct became the substance of revelation, it was at the very least the exclusive vehicle for the transmission and execution of revelation. This is quite the proverbial “fence around the Torah” (m. Avot 1.1), and one that provides space for the handlers of this document to step into the breach as the successors of Moses. Like the rightly guided Caliphs in the Islamic tradition, the Aaronide priests became the divinely sponsored inheritors of the prophet’s literary legacy, empowered to teach, interpret and even enact its contents. Portraying the Pentateuch as the final, unassailable teachings of an incomparable prophet was a masterstroke. With this paradigm, the complicated history of prophecy between the days of Moses and the Persian period is surgically removed from the transmission of revelation – the seal in Deuteronomy 34:10–12 skips over the prophets beyond the Pentateuch, sidelining them and affirming that the true inheritors of Moses’s legacy were the Aaronide priests who redacted and read the document. At best, a prophet’s words could only be corollaries to those of Moses mediated and regulated by the priests. The final form of Ezra-Nehemiah (also redacted by Aaronide writers) supports this: prophecy is invoked solely to support the reconstruction of the temple and the eventual reading of the Pentateuch.29 It is no wonder that “classical prophecy,” if such a term can be used, faded by the mid-fifth century BCE.30 The independent voices of the prophets as sources for renewed revelation were

28 On the bat kol see Stephen L. Cook, On the Question of the “Cessation of Prophecy” in Ancient Judaism (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011), 159–73; E.A. Abbott, From Letter to Spirit (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1903), 129, 141–46. 29 This is affirmed in Ezra 1–6 (a late addition to the Ezra-Nehemiah corpus deriving from Aaronide redactional hands), where prophecy is repeatedly recruited to support the re-founding of the temple cult. On the late, priestly character of these chapters, see H.G.M. Williamson, “The Composition of Ezra i–vi,” Journal of Theological Studies 34 (1983): 1–30, though Williamson’s view that these chapters are Hellenistic in origin is predicated on his view of their dependence on the late, secondary addition material in Chronicles, a view that subsequent research has not supported. 30 On the fading of classical prophecy in the 5th century BCE, see Benjamin D. Sommer, “Did Prophecy Cease? Evaluating a Reevaluation,” Journal of Biblical Literature 115 (1996): 31–47.

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made redundant by the Aaronides; the Pentateuch secured the latters’ place as the exclusive executors of Moses’s authority.

The Levites in the Aaronide Paradigm Despite this attempt to reframe the place of the prophetic tradition, these ostensibly redundant prophets had strong connections to the Levites. By the late monarchic period, texts emanating from Levite writers and redactors had promoted a brand of “outsider” prophetic critiques (e.g., 1 Sam 8; 1 Kgs 11:29–39, 14; the oracles in Hosea and Jeremiah). This is not to say that all Levites were prophets, or that all prophets were Levites. But the Deuteronomistic History strongly implies priestly credentials for many of its prophets, and the Song of Moses (a Levite liturgy) exerted strong influence upon prophetic oracles in the major prophetic books (Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel).31 One must also consider the intimate relationship between Moses as a Deuteronomic prophet and the Levites as the transmitters of Deuteronomic tradition, as well as the Levite characterization of the scribal trustees of Jeremiah’s oracles.32 All of these considerations converge to point to Levites as the bearers of prophecy, a status that the Chronicler (ca. late fourth century BCE) affirms multiple times in his work.33 We should also remember that the Levites of the Second Temple period were entrusted with reading, teaching, and chanting/performing texts, including prophetic texts.34 Prophecy thus factored into the Aaronide superstructure, but the Pentateuch – and especially the seal in Deuteronomy 34:10–12 – ensured that these prophetic texts and the Levites who performed them remained 31 On points of contact between prophets and Levites, see Van der Toorn, Family Religion, 306, 313–14; on the Song of Moses as a Levite liturgy, see Mark Leuchter, “Why is the Song of Moses in the Book of Deuteronomy?,” Vetus Testamentum 57 (2007): 314–17. For the song’s influence on the abovementioned prophetic works, see T.A. Kaiser, “The Song of Moses as a Basis for Isaiah’s Prophecy,” Vetus Testamentum 55 (2005): 486–500; Jason Gile, “Ezekiel 16 and the Song of Moses: A Prophetic Transformation?” Journal of Biblical Literature 130 (2011): 87–108; William Holladay, “Elusive Deuteronomists, Jeremiah, and Proto-Deuteronomy,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 66 (2004): 63–66. 32 For a full discussion on the relationship between Moses and the Levites in Deuteronomy (with a review of scholarship on the matter), see Leuchter, Boundaries of Israelite Identity, 155–87. 33 For an overview, see David L. Petersen, Late Israelite Prophecy: Studies in Deutero-Prophetic Literature and in Chronicles. Society of Biblical Literature Monograph Series (Missoula, MT: Scholars Press, 1977), 55–87, although the assumption that Chronicles was primarily a product of the late 6th century BCE has largely been abandoned in contemporary research. 34 For the importance of this role in the formation of authoritative reading traditions in subsequent forms of Judaism, see M. Gertner, “The Masorah and the Levites: An Essay in the History of a Concept,” Vetus Testamentum 10 (1960): 241–72.

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supporting players in the Aaronide drama. In the Aaronide model promoted by the Pentateuch, Levites were not the inheritors of Moses’s authority but the Igor to the Aaronides’ Frankenstein, identified in various texts as subordinate to the Aaronides and subservient to them. In this paradigm, the Levites were forever relegated to tertiary responsibilities within that work and in the temple cult that it supported (Numbers 1–4, 8, 18). The Pentateuch’s seal in Deuteronomy 34:10–12 presents this as a dynamic licensed by Moses’s unquestioned authority. The Levites who had returned to Yehud would have eventually found it impossible to survive far beyond the reach of the temple hierarchy.35 An imperially supported rebuilt temple provided economic opportunity that was not available elsewhere in the homeland, and the degree of imperial influence this temple facilitated made it the most likely vehicle for sustaining the Levites’ distinctive religious/cultic traditions.36 But would the Levites have approved of the Aaronide appropriation of Moses and the Pentateuch’s restriction of their role? The answer would likely be “no,” especially by the mid-fourth century BCE. As the threat from Greece in the west had risen in pitch over the course of the previous century, there is reason to believe that many of these Levites seriously questioned the Persian hierocracy around which Aaronide theology and social authority revolved. Moreover, dissent and unrest in other parts of the empire had called into question the viability of imperial mythology promoting the Persian emperors and their realm as the fulfillment of all national destinies and traditions. It was this mythology that empowered the Aaronides, supported their ritual authority, and provided a basis for the literary charter myth they had created with the Pentateuch. But even as the Aaronides maintained the lion’s share of religious and social influence in Yehud, it is important to note that the empire supporting them by no means escaped criticism from other Jewish writers. One thinks, for example, of the implicit critique of the pax persica in the Book of Job: Michael Fishbane has observed that “the adversary” (ha-satan) in Job 1–2 reflects the agents of imperial surveillance who were the “eyes and ears” of the Persian emperors.37 Ed Greenstein further notes that in Job, YHWH is presented as akin to an emperor far more concerned with exercising power 35 On the stages of Levite incorporation into the temple culture over time, see Joachim Schaper, Priester und Leviten im achämenidischen Juda. Forschungen zum Alten Testament (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2000): 294–95. 36 The imperial sponsorship of the temple’s construction is presupposed in Ezra 1:1–4 and 7–8 (even if these texts elaborate the degree of imperial involvement or support). For a full examination of Persian promotion of the rebuilding of the temple, see James Trotter, “Was the Second Jerusalem Temple a Primarily Persian Project?” Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament 15 (2001): 277–94. 37 Fishbane, Biblical Interpretation, 451 n. 7.

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than with ruling justly.38 One might also consider the implications of the Book of Esther. The lampooning of the Persian emperor Ahaseurus in that work carries a decidedly threatening and violent tone: the ruler of the known world is given to unpredictable whims that could easily spell doom for the Jews. Even if Esther derives from Hellenistic-era authors, it preserves a concept of Persia that is all too familiar with a tradition of skepticism regarding imperial structures and institutions. There is every reason to see the Levites in the late Persian period as given to this type of skepticism and critique of imperial stability. Across a wide spectrum of sources and traditions from the early monarchic period through the exilic era, we find a consistent reluctance among Levite groups to place much trust in royal institutions. Monarchic-era Levite traditions testify to deep dissatisfaction with kingship and the groups affiliated with the royal court (the Golden Calf tradition,39 Deuteronomy 32, the oracles of Hosea), and the late seventh-century-BCE Deuteronomists (a Levite faction) deem every king of the north and most of the Judahite kings wholly unfit to govern YHWH’s people.40 Finally, the formation of the Book of Jeremiah among Levite scribes in exile assigns blame regarding the fall of Judah to the final Davidic kings, and also views the Babylonian empire as ultimately doomed to destruction as well (Jeremiah 51:59–64a). It is extremely unlikely that after centuries of disappointment with royal courts both domestic and foreign, the Levites saw anything but great potential for the encroachment of chaos on Jewish life in the final decades of the Persian empire.

The Book of the Twelve as a Levite Construct We should thus reconsider the symbolic shape and message of a document from the mid- to late fourth century BCE, namely, the book of the Twelve (henceforth, 38 Edward L. Greenstein, “The Problem of Evil in the Book of Job,” Mishneh Todah: Studies in Deuteronomy and Its Cultural Environment in Honor of Jeffrey H. Tigay, ed. Nili S. Fox, David A. Glatt-Gilad, and Michael J. Williams (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2009), 362. 39 Although the narrative housing the account of the Golden Calf in Exodus 32 bears the hallmarks of post-monarchic composition, the tradition behind it is considerably older and best viewed as forming before the mid-8th century BCE in the northern kingdom of Israel. See Stephen C. Russell, Images of Egypt in Early Biblical Literature: Cisjordan-Israelite, Transjordan-Israelite, and Judahite Portrayals. Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009), 42–43; Stephen L. Cook, The Social Roots of Biblical Yahwism (Atlanta, GA: SBL, 2004) 248–55. 40 On the Levitical allegiances of the Deuteronomists, see Jeffrey C. Geoghegan, The Time, Place and Purpose of the Deuteornomistic History: The Evidence of “Until This Day.” Brown Judaic Studies (Providence, RI: Brown University, 2006), 149.

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“the Twelve”).41 Scholars studying this work have noted that within it, once-independent prophetic books have been redacted to cross-reference each other, anticipating the words of subsequent oracles or recalling the words of earlier ones.42 Debate continues regarding the stages behind the development of the Twelve; alternative versions of the work raise questions about authoritative/ fixed editions and their historical backgrounds.43 But this does not preclude the emergence of the work in the fourth century BCE that is reflected in the canonical version in the Hebrew Bible. Alternate versions may provide departures from, reactions to, or rejections of the canonical version – one whose features reflect a deliberate rhetorical shaping that best matches a Jerusalemite scribal setting and, in particular, a Levite scribal enterprise operating in the shadow of Aaronide priestly dominance.44 Upon seeing the Twelve as a Levite-constructed document, cross-­references between its individual prophetic books take on a twofold character. They not only make each prophet appear to be a reader and teacher of other prophets’ words; they also create strong rhetorical associations between the titular prophets within the work and the Levite redactors of the work.45 That is, the Levite scribes who created the Twelve are hermeneutically identified with the prophetic figures within it – something consistent with traditions of scribalism-as-revelation prevalent in the second half of the first millennium BCE. The writing of texts was mantic, and textual media became not simply records of revelation but loci of revelation, brimming with numinous power and potency through the graphic representation of divine voices.46 With the Aramaic Transition, new ways of approaching these revelatory texts developed within Jewish scribal culture to which Levite scribes were certainly privy, which accounts for both the rhetorical shape of the Twelve and the interlacing of lemmas between books. The prophetic voices within those books model how 41 Virtually all researchers dealing with the Twelve place its primary production in the late Persian period, though some opt for the early Hellenistic era. In either case, the weight of Persian imperialism and its socio-political conventions affect the scribal group responsible for its production. See the collection of essays in Perspectives on the Formation of the Book of the Twelve, ed. Rainer Albertz, James D. Nogalski, and Jakob Wöhrle. Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012). 42 See inter alia Jakob Wöhrle, “So Many Cross References! Methodological Reflections on the Problem of Intertextual Relationships and Their Significance for Redaction Critical Analysis,” Perspectives on the Formation of the Book of the Twelve, 3–20. 43 Mika S. Pajunen and Hanne von Weissenberg, “The Book of Malachi, Manuscript 4Q76 (4QXIIa), and the Formation of the ‘Book of the Twelve’,” Journal of Biblical Literature 134 (2015): 731–51. 44 Mark Leuchter, “Another Look at the Hosea/Malachi Framework in the Twelve,” Vetus Testamentum 64 (2014): 249–65; idem, The Levites and the Boundaries of Israelite Identity, 241–47. 45 Leuchter, “Hosea/Malachi Framework,” 261–62. 46 Van der Toorn, Scribal Culture, 205–32.

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new revelation could be drawn from rereading existing prophetic texts. This is precisely what the Levite redactors of the Twelve did with their sources, in a textual space quite distinct from the role those texts may have played in the Aaronide temple cult. This last point is especially significant, for the Levites who created the Twelve reappropriated prophetic texts from Aaronide ritual use. Rabbinic sources indicate that temple rituals used only select passages from these prophetic works (e.g., m. Tamid 7.3–7.4), but, in the Twelve, one encounters the totality of these collections (or, at least, works that present themselves as the comprehensive collections of prophetic oracles), all of which contain perspectives highly critical of kingship and imperialism. Their combination into the Twelve resulted in a meta-curriculum that challenged Aaronide presuppositions regarding Persian hegemony. Blocks of liturgical material interspersed within the Twelve (the hymns in Hab 3; Mic 7:18–19; and Nah 1:2–8) furthermore drew the cult itself into the discourse of prophets who, to put it mildly, had serious misgivings about the durability of foreign empires. Liturgy thus served the prophetic message, rather than the other way around.47

The Levite Use of Moses within the Twelve In creating the Twelve, the Levites reappropriated Moses for themselves. The figure of Moses appears three times in the Twelve: in the opening oracles of Hosea (Hos 12:14), in Micah’s recollection of the nation’s infancy (Mic 6:4), and in the colophon that closes the Malachi oracles (Mal 3:22). That is, Moses appears at the beginning, middle, and end of the work, anchoring the book’s major oracular units.48 This rhetorically balanced usage of Moses in the Twelve favors the view that the canonical version was conceived as a self-contained and complete work, and that other textual versions do not necessarily represent better or earlier iterations of the redaction of these prophetic materials (though they may well represent coeval products or subsequent adjustments compiled by different scribal groups). In light of the seal in Deuteronomy 34:10–12, it seems likely that the use of Moses at such deliberate intervals within the Twelve was a conscious response to the role Moses played in the Pentateuch and its closing claim that all subsequent forms of prophecy paled by comparison. 47 See James D. Nogalski, “One Book and Twelve Books: The Nature of the Redactional Work and the Implications of Cultic Source Material in the Book of the Twelve,” in Two Sides of a Coin, ed. Thomas Römer (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2010), 1–46. 48 In addition, the hymn in Habakkuk 3 may contain some echoes of the Moses traditions. See James D. Nogalski, Redactional Processes in the Book of the Twelve. Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1993) 16–64, 179, although Moses is himself never mentioned.

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It is prudent to begin with Hosea because it is the first unit in the Twelve, because Hosea is among the earliest of the prophets whose oracles are preserved (or presented as such) in the Twelve,49 and because of how Levite discourse functions in Hosea’s oracles. Many scholars since Hans Walter Wolff have identified dimensions of Hosea’s oracles that intersect with Levitical traditions, and Stephen L. Cook has made a strong case for the prophet’s actual Levite lineage.50 The majority of commentators have also observed that Hosea’s oracles are set in a northern-Ephraimite context,51 and it is among Ephraimite circles that traditions about Moses initially took root, especially among Levites. As I have argued recently, the Levites of the northern monarchy protested against the early use of Moses and exodus traditions to support the royal state cult,52 and formed their own traditions with Moses at their center as a response.53 It is from this wellspring of tradition that Hosea forms his protests against 49 Scholars are divided on the antiquity of material in the Book of Hosea, with some seeing substantial compositions deriving from redactors/authors who long post-date Hosea’s time; for this view, see Martti Nissinen, Prophetie, Redaktion, und Fortschreibung im Hoseabuch. Alter Orient und Altes Testament (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener, 1991); Roman Vielhauer, Das Werden des Buches Hosea: Eine redaktionsgeschichtliche Untersuchung. Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2007), 178–79; James M. Bos, Reconsidering the Date and Provenance of the Book of Hosea: The Case for Persian-Period Yehud. The Library of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Studies (London/New York: Bloomsbury, 2013). However, as Marvin Sweeney has observed, the Book of Hosea does not make any references to the Babylonian exile, and other features in the book derive from sociological factors that a late redactor could not have invented (see further below). See his “A Form-Critical Re-Reading of Hosea,” Journal of Hebrew Scriptures 2 [1998]: 1.3.8–1.3.9; online at www.jhsonline.org. The position I adopt here is that while some of the material in Hosea arises from redaction and scribal transmission, most of the material in the book reflects a pre-721 BCE northern social setting. 50 Hans Walter Wolff, “Hoseas geistige Heimat,” Theologische Literaturzeitung 81 (1956): 83–90, 94, n. 71; idem, Hosea (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1974), xxii–xxiii; Joseph Blenkinsopp, A History of Prophecy in Israel (Louisville, KY/London: Westminster John Knox, 1996), 84–85; Van der Toorn, Family Religion, 314. On Hosea’s Levitical lineage see Cook, Social Roots of Biblical Yahwism, 233–61. 51 For a full treatment of the Book of Hosea as an artifact of northern Israelite society, see Adina Levin, “Hosea and North Israelite Tradition.” (PhD diss., University of Toronto, 2009), with an overview of scholarship on pp. 1–9. 52 Many scholars have noted that an early version of the Exodus narrative – replete with Moses as its central character – was composed as part of a charter myth for the northern monarchic state during or shortly after the reign of Jeroboam I. See Rainer Albertz, A History of Israelite Religion in the Old Testament Period, 2 vols. (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1994), 1:141–43; Van der Toorn, Family Religion, 300–301; John J. Collins, “The Development of the Exodus Tradition,” in Religious Identity and the Invention of Tradition. Papers Read at a NOSTER Conference in Soesterberg, January 4–6, 1999, ed. Jan Willem van Henten and Anton Houtenpen (Assen: Van Gorcum, 2001), 145–55; Michael Oblath, “Of Pharaohs and Kings: Whence the Exodus?” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 87 (2000): 23–42. 53 Leuchter, Boundaries of Israelite Identity, 118–29, 131–51.

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northern society. Its kings fall prey to his invectives, as do its people, but his criticism is aimed squarely at priests on the royal payroll who promote state mythology that used Moses to justify monarchic mores.54 Hosea’s oracles allude to a number of other traditions connected to Moses such as references to the Decalogue (Hos 4:2) and the Golden Calf tradition (Hos 8:1–6), but these build to a distinct rhetorical unit within the book, Hosea 12–14, where a final cosmic drama is played out.55 And it is here where a more focused reference to Moses is made: Jacob fled to the land of Aram;    there Israel served for a wife,    and for a wife he guarded sheep. But by a prophet (ubenabi’) the Lord brought Israel up from Egypt,    and by a prophet (ubenabi’) he was guarded. (Hos 12:13–14) There is broad scholarly consensus that the “prophet” (nabi’) in this passage is Moses, for no other figure in Ephraimite lore (monarchic or anti-monarchic) was more firmly associated with the exodus tradition. Hosea’s reference to Moses is typological: he is the prophet who sustained Israel as they emerged from Egypt, but Hosea’s Exodus mythology sees the emergence from Egypt as a mythic concept that informs Israelite identity across diverse historical epochs.56 For Hosea, the historical Moses is the prototype for other prophets who become the Moses of their own eras as they once again liberate Israel from whatever forces manifest the typology of the threat and oppression of Egypt.57 One should consider this in light of the northern state cult and its implications for kingship. Since the state cult was ultimately helmed by and accountable to the king (Amos 7:12–13), the rehearsal of its rituals constantly reaffirmed the king of the day as a Moses-figure in his own right, standing at the top of a system that perpetually liberated the population from “Egypt.”58 Hosea’s 54 See most recently my article “The Royal Background of Deut 18, 15–18,” Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 130 (2018): 364–83. In that study I discuss how Moses was mythologized into a figure of the northern royal cult until the end of the kingdom in the last quarter of the 8th century BCE. 55 On the divisions of Hosea 4–11 and 12–14, see Wolff, Hosea, xxix–xxxi; Dwight R. Daniels, Hosea and Salvation History. Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1990), 28–31. 56 Yair Hoffman, “A North Israelite Typological Myth and a Judean Historical Tradition: The Exodus in Hosea and Amos,” Vetus Testamentum 39 (1989): 169–82. 57 The Deuteronomic concept of a succession of Mosaic prophets (Deut 18:15–18) finds a point of origin in Hosea’s oracles. See Wolff, Hosea, 216; Blenkinsopp, A History of Prophecy in Israel, 50; Christophe Nihan, “‘Moses and the Prophets’: Deuteronomy 18 and the Emergence of the Pentateuch as Torah,” Svensk Exegetisk Årsbok 75 (2010): 33–34. 58 Leuchter, “Royal Background”, 372–78.

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rhetoric releases this model from its monarchic moorings and reclaims it for the Levite-prophets, following the lead of more ancient Levite groups who adopted the Moses typology for themselves even before the monarchic era.59 Hosea thus places himself in a mythopoeic continuum that the redactors of the Twelve subsequently build into their work. To begin the Twelve with the oracles of Hosea (especially when the superscription for Amos makes clear that Amos predated Hosea) is to declare that all the prophets within the work are prophets like Moses, whose words sustain the identity boundaries of Israel in different historical periods. This implies, consequently, that the Levites who forged the Twelve as a new prophetic work followed in their footsteps, taking up the Mosaic mantle through their scribal enterprise. We turn next to Micah, whose book is situated directly in the center of the Twelve. There is little in the Book of Micah that one might immediately identify as specifically “Levitical” in orientation. The superscription identifies Micah as the resident of a Judahite town (Moresheth), his language reflects Judahite agrarian life, and the most potent oracle in the book places the blame for Judah’s ills squarely on the shoulders of northern refugees (which included Levites) whose influence in Jerusalem has led to corruption and social ruptures.60 But two additional factors explain the eventual adoption of Micah’s oracles by the Levites who redacted the Twelve. First, many commentators have observed that the ideology informing Micah’s worldview has strong points of contact with that of Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomistic History, both of which are the products of Levite scribes residing in late monarchic Judah.61 The deuteronomistic embrace of Micah’s ideology involved the embrace of Micah’s oracles themselves: the Book of Jeremiah bears witness to this, regarding Jeremiah’s oracles as standing in conceptual continuity with those of Micah (Jer 26:17–19). Thus by the exilic period, which saw a substantial shaping of the Jeremiah tradition, Levite groups had accepted Micah’s worldview as consistent with their own and presented their literature as an expression of Micah’s value system. Second, Micah’s oracles repeatedly draw attention to the ancient era and to conditions that saw the rise of the Levites. Any reconstruction of this early era must remain tentative, but an assemblage of evidence suggests that in some corners of the emergent hinterland community, newly arrived priestly clans 59 Leuchter, Boundaries of Israelite Identity, 86–90. 60 William M. Schniedewind, How the Bible Became a Book: The Textualization of Ancient Israel (New York/Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 94–95. 61 On the overlaps between Micah and the deuteronomistic tradition, see Jack R. Lundbom, Deuteronomy: A Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2013), 35; Blenkinsopp, A History of Prophecy in Israel, 143–46. In at least one case, the Deuteronomists deliberately invoke the Micah tradition in an explicitly intertextual manner; see Keith Bodner, “The Locutions of 1 Kings 22:28: A New Proposal,” Journal of Biblical Literature 122 (2003): 533–43.

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secured power and influence through warfare, imposing religious standards upon existing lineages in a bid to regulate agrarian resources. The growth of the Levite caste is a result of these rural lineages devoting their sons to the service of the priestly clans for a variety of (economic) reasons, although these devotees eventually came to ensure that the interests of the lay lineages were represented at these hinterland sanctuary sites. In time, the Levites managed to eclipse and even displace some of these once-powerful priesthoods, positioning themselves as the inheritors of the latter’s sacral traditions but also as the representatives and trustees of clan-based agrarian ideals.62 In terms of social utility, much of this changed as Israel evolved into a monarchic society and Levite social location went through consequent adaptations. Nevertheless, as the deuteronomistic tradition affirms, Levites retained a memory of this earlier set of circumstances down to the exilic era. The foregoing points facilitated the Levite redactors’ adoption of Micah’s oracles within the Twelve. The placement of these oracles in the center of the work aligned it with the Jeremiah tradition’s citation of Micah and the deuteronomistic recruitment of Micah’s worldview. Cook has demonstrated that Micah’s language is carefully designed to invoke pre-state (and therefore pre-Jerusalemite) agrarian institutions as essential to Israelite identity;63 following the raw invective in Micah 3:9–12, the sequence of the oracles in the book build to a crescendo in the rîb found within Micah 6:1–4: Hear what YHWH says: Rise, plead your case before the mountains, and let the hills hear your voice. Hear, you mountains, the controversy of YHWH, and you enduring foundations of the earth; for YHWH has a controversy with his people, and he will contend with Israel. ‘O my people, what have I done to you? In what have I wearied you? Answer me! For I brought you up from the land of Egypt, and redeemed you from the house of slavery; and I sent before you Moses, Aaron, and Miriam. (Mic 6:1–4) The reference to Moses in this passage contrasts eighth-century-BCE Judah’s social reality with the remembered and idealized pre-monarchic past. Irrespective of whether these verses derive from Micah himself or from a later tradent, the appeal to Moses alongside both Aaron and Miriam is consistent 62 Leuchter, Boundaries of Israelite Identity, 81–86. 63 Cook, The Social Roots of Biblical Yahwism, 195–230.

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with the Book of Micah’s interest in pre-state institutions and social values. The mention of Moses, Aaron, and Miriam in Micah 6:4 does not indicate a hierarchy where Moses stands above either of these other figures. Rather, it suggests a time before such hierarchies were constructed, when each figure was equally and perhaps independently venerated. That an appeal such as Micah 6:4 is placed in the middle of the Twelve suggests that hierarchical constructs created by the Pentateuch do not represent the original nature of Moses’s place in Israelite religion. We finally now turn to the reference to Moses at the end of the Book of Malachi: Remember the teaching of my servant Moses (torat moshe ‘abdi), the statutes and ordinances that I commanded him at Horeb for all Israel. Lo, I will send you the prophet Elijah (‘elyah hanabi’) before the great and terrible day of YHWH comes. He will turn the hearts of parents to their children and the hearts of children to their parents, so that I will not come and strike the land with a curse. (Mal 3:22–24 [ESV 4:4–6]) This invocation of Moses – specifically, to torat moshe ‘abdi – is read by some as a reference to the Pentateuch as part of a legitimizing process or even, as Van der Toorn suggests, as a proto-canonizing move.64 I am more hesitant than Van der Toorn to see something resembling canonization involved in the Malachi passage, as recent scholarship has drawn attention to the problems in projecting a “canon” model into pre-Hellenistic periods.65 Nevertheless, it does seem likely that scribes behind these verses were interested not simply in completing a collection of Malachi oracles but, rather, in providing a seal of sorts to the entire Twelve similar to that in Deuteronomy 34:10–12. Yet this goes one step further: Moses was used to seal the Pentateuch, but the Pentateuch is used to seal the Twelve! We must also note that while Malachi 3:22 alludes to the Pentateuch in this manner, the locution of the verse dislodges Moses from the literary strictures of that document. The addition of the term ‘abdi emphasizes Moses the man in social, historical, and mythological context rather than as a patron saint, as he is portrayed in the Aaronide document. As with Hosea, Moses once again becomes a prophet in a series of other prophets; the invocation suggests that the Pentateuch is not a stand-alone charter myth that empowers the Aaronides by altogether skipping over a history of prophecy.66 Rather, Moses’s identification as an ‘ebed of YHWH in Malachi 3:22 is immediately followed by the reference 64 Van der Toorn, Scribal Culture, 25355. 65 Mroczek, Literary Imagination. 66 For other resonances in Malachi that are designed to recall Hosea, see David L. Petersen,

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to Elijah the prophet (‘elyah hanabi’) in the following verse – suggesting that what makes Moses YHWH’s ‘ebed is his status as a prophet, and that this typology extended beyond his lifetime. The closing verses of the Twelve “unseal” the verses that close the Pentateuch and reintroduce other voices that sustain and extend the vital tradition of Mosaic prophecy.

Conclusion When considering the Moses references in the Twelve, we may conclude that this document was conceived to take down the proverbial fence around the Torah constructed by the Aaronides. Moses is no longer an archetype of the distant past whose authority is directly transferred to the Aaronides solely through the Pentateuch. Instead, he appears among a plethora of prophets who repeatedly cite each other even as they appear to cite him.67 These are indeed prophets like Moses – they take up his status and authority in his wake. What is more, the scribal authority of the Levite redactors of the book made them the living embodiments of the prophetic legacy they had shaped. This was, in fact, already anticipated within the Pentateuch’s deuteronomistic sources: Deuteronomy 31–32 presents Levite scribalism as a vehicle for revelation, modelled by no less than Moses himself.68 The final verses of the Pentateuch added by the Aaronides obscure this by attempting to create an unbridgeable rift between Moses and the intercessory types that followed after him. By contrast, the Twelve eliminates the rift by making Moses’s torah a still-living process that operated beyond ritual and imperial mythologies.69 What I have discussed here just scratches the surface of the polemical, Zechariah 9–14 and Malachi. Old Testament Library (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1995), 233. 67 Aaron Schart, “The First Section of the Book of the Twelve Prophets: Hosea – Joel – Amos,” Interpretation 61 (2007): 146–47, observes that the opening section of the BT places material from the Pentateuch in the mouths of the first few prophets within the work. 68 Leuchter, The Levites and the Boundaries of Israelite Identity, 180–87. 69 The divine attribute formula from Exod 34:6–7 found throughout the BT (Joel 2:3; Jonah 4:2; Mic 7:18–19; Nah 1:3) is another example of this “unlocking” of the Pentateuch as a closed literary system. While it is often assumed that the allusion to this formula signals a reliance upon the Pentateuch’s authoritative status, the presence of the same formula in the Levites’ prayer in Neh 9:17 – by most scholars’ reckoning, an exilic-era tradition already put to use in the late 6th century BCE – suggests that the formula appears in the Twelve not as an affirmation of the Pentateuch’s unique status but, rather, as an appeal to pre-Pentateuchal traditions that served as a common source. On Nehemiah 9, see H.G.M. Williamson, Studies in Persian Period History and Historiography. Forschungen zum Alten Testament (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2004), 274–75; Mark J. Boda, Praying the Tradition: The Origin and Use of Tradition in Nehemiah 9. Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1999).

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inter-textual, inter-traditional, inter-political, and inter-phenomenological dimensions of what went into creating the Pentateuch in the mid-fifth century BCE and the Twelve roughly a century later. What is clear is that Moses is caught between these two works, a figure claimed by the different priestly groups who refracted his memory and authority through their own conceptual prisms. The implications of this are far reaching, for they anticipate other refractions that must have been going on during this time as well, not only of Moses but of other figures such as Abraham, David, Samuel, Jeremiah, Solomon, Hezekiah, and more. That Moses remained suspended between the Pentateuch and the Twelve suggests that perhaps he and figures like him survived not because they were claimed by this or that work, but because they occupied the liminal space between these works, the way carbon connects other molecules to create the building blocks of life. Here we begin to enter a larger discussion involving the nexus between scribe, audience, and mythopoesis, with implications for the development of both written and oral traditions as Judaism – and Judaisms – continued to evolve into the Hellenistic age, recruiting luminaries of the past to navigate the uncertainties of the future.

The Apocalyptic Moses of Second Temple Judaism Alexandria Frisch Ursinus College

This article surveys a wide variety of Second Temple period texts dating from the third century BCE to the first century CE and ranging from the sectarian Qumran texts to Hellenistic literature from the Egyptian Diaspora. Despite the differences in provenance, these works exhibit a striking similarity in regard to Moses – they imbue Moses with apocalyptic characteristics. In a comparison with the Second Temple apocalypses of Daniel and 1 Enoch, which indeed might have served as inspiration for some of these Second Temple authors, this article demonstrates that the surveyed texts exhibit a number of the markers of the apocalyptic genre as defined by John J. Collins. The Second Temple Moses is a supernatural Moses, either interacting with angels or becoming one himself; his biblical prophecies have been replaced with visions of the eschatological future; and his sojourn on Mount Sinai has turned into an actual ascent into heaven. This widespread apocalypticizing of Moses attests not only to the profound shift towards apocalyptic thinking in the Second Temple period, but also to the enduring significance of Moses as a conduit to God even in the post-biblical world.

Despite the Maccabean victory against the Syrian Greeks, Judas’s death in 160 BCE left a leadership gap that allowed the enemies of Israel to gain strength, so much so that there “was great distress in Israel, such as had not been since the time that prophets ceased to appear among them” (1 Macc 9:27).1 This acknowledgement of the disappearance of biblical prophecy appears elsewhere in 1 Maccabees as well as in other early Jewish sources.2 Perhaps the most notable mention is in the rabbinic text Seder ‘Olam Rabbah 30, a Tannaitic text dating to the second century CE, which declares that the spirit of prophecy departed with Alexander the Great’s conquest of the Near East. This religiously based assertion is, in a surprising way, corroborated by scholars who note that the Second Temple period is characterized by the end of prophecy as the

1 Unless otherwise stated, all biblical translations are that of NRSV. 2 See also 1 Macc 4:45–56 and 14:41. For more detailed studies of the Second Temple view that prophecy had ceased, see L. Stephen Cook, On the Question of the “Cessation of Prophecy” in Ancient Judaism (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009); and Benjamin D. Sommer, “Did Prophecy Cease? Evaluating a Reevalution,” Journal of Biblical Literature 115 (1996): 31–47.

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predominant form of divine revelation in Jewish literature and its replacement by apocalyptic revelation. In turn, the Jewish belief in the cessation of prophecy, as well as its actual end as a literary genre, brings up a related question: did the Second Temple period view that prophecy had come to an end alter the memory of the greatest biblical prophet of all – Moses? This article answers the question in the affirmative. Just as prophecy turned into apocalyptic narrative, so too did Moses’s persona as a prophet acquire familiar apocalyptic motifs in a variety of Second Temple texts ranging from the Dead Sea Scrolls to Jewish Hellenistic works. In the minds of many post-biblical writers, both Jewish and non-Jewish, Moses was not exclusively a prophet. Dating to early second-century-BCE Judea, the work of Eupolemus, for example, proposes that, in addition to his biblical role as lawgiver, Moses was an inventor, having devised the alphabet.3 Similarly, but more extensively, Artapanus, a Hellenistic Jewish writer of the Egyptian diaspora, depicts Moses as the inventor of boats, building tools, various weapons, implements for drawing water, and nothing short of philosophy itself. In a cultural twist, Moses is also said to have established Egyptian animal cults.4 While these portrayals of Moses reflect extensive departure from the biblical text, their obvious intent was to show, through Moses, that the Jews’ history was an illustrious one marked by impressive leadership. This “competitive historiography”5 intended to counter the anti-Jewish sentiments of writers such as Manetho, a third-century-BCE Egyptian priest, who claimed that Moses’s leprosy was the reason for the expulsion from Egypt,6 and Alexander







3 This fragment of Eupolemus’s text, On the Jews, was quoted by the historian Alexander Polyhistor (105–30 BCE), whose own work was, in turn, preserved in Eusebius’s Praeparatio Evangelica 9.26. See discussions of this text in John J. Collins, Between Athens and Jerusalem: Jewish Identity in the Hellenistic Diaspora (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2000), 46–47; Erich S. Gruen, Heritage and Hellenism: The Reinvention of Jewish Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 153–55; and John R. Bartlett, Jews in the Hellenistic World: Josephus, Aristeas, the Sibylline Oracles, Eupolemus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 56–60. 4 This fragment of Artapanus’s text is found in Eusebius’s Praeparatio Evangelica 9.27 via Alexander Polyhistor and has a parallel in Clement’s Stromateis 1.23.154, 2–3. According to Collins, the possible dates of Artapanus’s work are rather broad, and can only be narrowed to sometime between 250–100 BCE (Between Athens and Jerusalem, 37–39). 5 Collins, Between Athens and Jerusalem, 40, 43–44. In contrast to this idea of a serious competition, Gruen sees the work of Jewish Hellenistic writers as reflecting “a caprice and whimsy that tampered liberally with the Scriptures and inverted or transposed Gentile traditions to place the figures of Jewish legend in the center” (Heritage, 160). This humorous approach, in turn, was meant to make the Jewish writer appear disengaged with polemics and therefore more authoritative (ibid., 155–60). 6 This passage is preserved in Josephus’s Against Apion 1.279. Manetho’s writing is considered to be an Egyptian response to the Exodus story. See Russell Gmirkin, Berossus and Genesis, Manetho

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Polyhistor, a first-century-BCE Greek historian who went so far as to refer to Moses as in fact a woman.7 New and exaggerated images of Moses were not only polemical reactions to Greco-Roman views, but were also purely apologetic responses. Josephus, in his Antiquities of the Jews, for example, goes to great lengths to depict Moses in a way that would appeal to his non-Jewish audience.8 Sometimes this meant removing potentially shameful episodes in Moses’s life, such as the murder of the Egyptian taskmaster (Exod 2) or the smashing of the rock (Num 20), events which might make Moses seem quick to anger.9 Conversely, Josephus embellishes certain characteristics to make Moses fit with the heroes of classical literature. For example, his physical appearance is praised from the very beginning of his life, when Pharaoh’s daughter describes him multiple times as beautiful (Ant. 2.224, 232).10 While Eupolemus, Artapanus, and Josephus use Moses to formulate a response to non-Jewish views of the Jews, this essay will explore a phenomenon internal to the Jewish world; namely, how Moses’s role as a prophet changes in response to the rise of Jewish apocalypticism.11 In the Pentateuch, Moses and Exodus: Hellenistic Histories and the Date of the Pentateuch (New York: T & T Clark, 2006), 170–91. 7 As preserved in the Byzantine Encyclopedia, the Suda, s.v. Alexander the Milesian. 8 Josephus, while in Rome and supported by the Flavian dynasty, wrote his Antiquities toward the end of the first century CE for an audience of both Jews and non-Jews. For more on the complexity of Josephus’s in-between position as a Jew in Rome, see Per Bilde, Flavius Josephus Between Jerusalem and Rome: His Life, His Works, and Their Importance. JSPSup 2 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1988), 147–50, 187–88. For an examination of who actually read Josephus, see Jonathan Price, “The Provincial Historian in Rome,” in Josephus and Jewish History in Flavian Rome and Beyond, ed. Joseph Sievers and Gaia Lembi. Journal for the Study of Judaism Supplement 104 (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 101–20. Price makes the case that, while Josephus was writing for upper-class Roman circles and for educated Jews, his work was read primarily by a Jewish audience. 9 For more examples of events in Moses’s life that Josephus has left out, see Louis H. Feldman, “Josephus’ Portrait of Moses,” The Jewish Quarterly Review 82 (1992): 289. 10 Feldman, “Josephus’ Portrait,” 308. Feldman, in Josephus’s Interpretation of the Bible (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), also examines other qualities such as leadership, 386–97; wisdom, 397–401; courage, 401–11; and temperance, 412–14. 11 Since the scholarly consensus is that apocalyptic thinking was established by the Second Temple period and characterizes a number of Second Temple texts, this article will not enter into the discussion about the rise of apocalypticism (for example, scholars have debated whether it was a vestige of post-exilic prophecy or a response to the influence of Persian dualism). In addition to the work of John J. Collins, see also Paul D. Hanson, The Dawn of Apocalyptic: The Historical and Sociological Roots of Jewish Apocalyptic Eschatology (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1975); M. A. Knibb, “Prophecy and the Emergence of the Jewish Apocalypses,” in Israel’s Prophetic Tradition: Essays in Honour of Peter Ackroyd, ed. R. Coggins et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 155–80; James C. VanderKam, Enoch and the Growth of an Apocalyptic

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embodies a great number of different roles.12 He is the deliverer of individuals, such as an Israelite slave and his future wife and her sisters (e.g., Exod 2:11–15, 17), and of his entire people from Egypt (e.g., Exod 3:7–12, 14:3). He is a miracle worker (albeit with God’s help), bringing plagues upon Egypt and splitting the sea (e.g., Exod 7–11, 14), and he is a lawgiver, giving the people God’s commandments (e.g., Exod 20–31). He also serves as a mediator between God and the people, negotiating for lesser or greater punishments (e.g., Exod 32:11–14). Although Joshua serves as the primary commander in battle, Moses is the ultimate military leader during the people’s wandering (e.g., Exod 17:8–12). And he is a judge who settles disputes and organizes a judicial system (e.g., Exod 18:13–27; Num 27:1–11). Ultimately, however, all of these roles are subsumed into one – that of prophet. Upon his death, the biblical text declares: Never since has there arisen a prophet in Israel like Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face. He was unequaled for all the signs and wonders that the Lord sent him to perform in the land of Egypt, against Pharaoh and all his servants and his entire land, and for all the mighty deeds and all the terrifying displays of power that Moses performed in the sight of all Israel. (Deut 34:10–12) With this statement, the pentateuchal narrative renders Moses as the prophet par excellence and makes clear to the reader that it is precisely in that capacity that he was able to fulfill his other roles. This Deuteronomic passage also provides us with a useful condition of prophecy: that a human knows God directly.13 In contrast to prophecy, an apocalyptic revelation, as defined by John J. Collins, occurs in: A genre of revelatory literature with a narrative framework, in which a revelation is mediated by an otherworldly being to a human recipient, disclosing a transcendent reality which is both temporal, insofar as it

Tradition (Washington, DC: Catholic Biblical Association of America, 1984); and Helge S. Kvanvig, Roots of Apocalyptic: The Mesopotamian Background of the Enoch Figure and of the Son of Man (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchner Verlag, 1988). 12 For a similar list of roles see Pentateuch/Torah, ed. Watson E. Mills and Richard Francis Wilson (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1998), xlii–xlix. More folkloric roles such as the young man as hero, the paladin, and the doomed leader are discussed in Robert D. Miller II, “The Roles of Moses in the Pentateuch,” in Illuminating Moses: A History of Reception from Exodus to the Renaissance, ed. Jane Beal (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 19–36. 13 For more in-depth discussions of biblical prophecy see Paul L. Redditt, Introduction to the Prophets (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008), 1–18; Joseph Blenkinsopp, A History of Prophecy in Israel (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1996), 7–39; and David Petersen, The Roles of Israel’s Prophets (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1981).

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envisages eschatological salvation, and spatial insofar as it involves another, supernatural world.14 The key difference between prophecy and apocalypse, therefore, is the introduction of the intermediary – an otherworldly being – who facilitates the delivery of the divine message from God to an individual human. Alongside this supernatural being there is also increased awareness of a supernatural world via visions or heavenly journeys.15 As we shall see, it is this focus on the supernatural that imbues many of the images of Moses in the following Second Temple texts.

Artapanus: Parallels to the Apocalyptic Visions of Daniel Returning to Artapanus’s account of Moses, the supernatural element is evident alongside the reframing of Moses as an inventor and cultural innovator. Artapanus recounts an interaction between Moses and Pharaoh: But when night came, all the doors of the prison opened of themselves, and some of the guards died, while others were relaxed by sleep and their weapons were broken. Moses came out and went to the royal chambers. He found the doors open and went in. There, since the guards were relaxed, he woke the king. The latter was astonished at what had happened and bade Moses say the name of the god who had sent him, mocking him. But he bent forward and pronounced it into his ear. When the king heard it, he fell down speechless but revived when taken hold of by Moses. (Praeparatio Evangelica 9.27.23–25)16 Something more than human is at work here. First, everyone in the prison is mysteriously killed or put to sleep, allowing Moses to go free. Second, Moses has the power to incapacitate Pharaoh and then to revive him. 14 John J. Collins, Apocalypse: The Morphology of a Genre. Semeia 14 (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1979), 9. 15 Collins, in The Apocalyptic Imagination: An Introduction to Jewish Apocalyptic Literature (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998), 6, categorically states that “the revelation of a supernatural world and the activity of supernatural beings are essential to all apocalypses.” Not all apocalypses, however, include a heavenly journey: “It would seem that there are two strands of tradition in the Jewish apocalypses, one of which is characterized by visions, with an interest in the development of history, while the other is marked by otherworldly journeys with a stronger interest in cosmological speculation.” (Collins, Apocalyptic Imagination, 6.) 16 Translation from John J. Collins, “Artapanus,” in Expansions of the “Old Testament” and Legends, Wisdom and Philosophical Literature, Prayers, Psalms, and Odes, Fragments of Lost Judeo-Hellenistic Works. Vol. 2 of The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, ed. James H. Charlesworth (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 2010), 901.

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Although not an apocalypse itself, Artapanus’s account of Moses bears some striking similarities with one of the earliest apocalyptic texts, the biblical Book of Daniel. Each of the apocalyptic visions in Daniel 7–12 indicates that the author had knowledge of Antiochus IV’s persecutions and the desecration of the Temple, but not of the success of the Maccabean revolt – meaning the final redaction of the text must be dated to the years 167–163 BCE.17 Given this dating, “Daniel was understood to be the earliest of the apocalypses. Thus it could be treated implicitly or explicitly as the apocalypse that defined the entire corpus.”18 Parallels to the supernatural components in Moses’s encounter with Pharaoh in Artapanus are apparent in Daniel 10. Just as Moses is the only one awake, Daniel is the only one aware of what is going on in the narrative: “I, Daniel, alone saw the vision; the people who were with me did not see the vision, though a great trembling fell upon them, and they fled and hid themselves. So I was left alone to see this great vision” (vv. 7–8). Both Moses and Daniel are the only actors. The vision then causes Daniel’s strength to leave him, his complexion to grow pale, and a trance to overcome him so he falls to the ground (vv. 8–9). In a twist, here we have a parallel with what happens to Pharaoh; in both texts, a message is delivered – the name of God or the vision itself – which causes the recipient to collapse. Just as Pharaoh is revived by Moses’s touch, Daniel is revived by an angel. As Daniel recounts, “then a hand touched me and roused me to my hands and knees” (v. 10) and, later, “again one in human form touched me and strengthened me” (v. 18). When compared to Daniel, Moses, in Artapanus’s work, has undergone a startling transformation – he has come to simultaneously embody characteristics of both the angelic messenger and the human recipient in the apocalypse.19

The Animal Apocalypse: Angelization of Moses The same merging of human and angelic that we see in Artapanus is also present in the Animal Apocalypse (AA), 1 Enoch 85–90, a Palestinian text which dates 17 For instance, Dan 11:31 refers to forces that will “occupy and profane the temple and fortress. They shall abolish the regular burnt offering and set up the abomination that makes desolate.” This historical allusion confirms the terminus ad quem of the visions with the Temple’s defilement. Daniel 10–12 include even more detailed references to the Ptolemies and Seleucids. See, for example, Richard J. Clifford, “History and Myth in Daniel 10–12,” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 220 (1975): 23. 18 Martha Himmelfarb, Ascent to Heaven in Jewish and Christian Apocalypses (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 6. 19 Crispin Fletcher-Louis argues that Artapanus depicts a divine Moses, focusing on his “transformed, angelic identity” and the description of Moses as “the messenger of his God.” Fletcher-Louis, “4Q374: A Discourse on the Sinai Tradition: The Deification of Moses and Early Christology,” Dead Sea Discoveries 3 (1996): 245.

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to 164–160 BCE, making it contemporaneous with Daniel.20 This apocalypse is part of a larger section of the Book of Dreams (1 Enoch 83–90) and details the visions of Enoch, the antediluvian ancestor of Noah. In the biblical account, Enoch does not die but is mysteriously taken away by God (Gen 5:24), an event which the author(s) of 1 Enoch understands as meaning he is privy to insights into the true workings of heaven and earth.21 The AA vision encompasses the entire course of history, from creation to the future, eschatological age. Moses first appears in the following passage: Then one sheep which had been saved from the wolves fled and escaped to the wild asses. But I saw the sheep continuing to lament and cry aloud; and they kept praying to their Lord with all their strength until the Lord of the sheep descended at their entreatment, from a lofty palace, arriving to visit them. (89:16–17)22 The AA uses a series of symbolic figures, mostly in the shape of various animals, to represent historical persons and peoples. The Israelites, and Moses, are sheep, the Egyptians are wolves, and the Midianites are wild asses. The Exodus is then recounted, and Moses ascends and descends from “the summit of that lofty rock,” or Mount Sinai, and punishes the sheep that have gone astray (89:17–36). Enoch next states, “I continued to see in that vision till that sheep was transformed into a man and built a house for the Lord of the sheep, and placed the sheep in it” (89:36). This seems to be a retelling of the building of the Tabernacle, but what does it mean that the sheep became a man? This idea is reiterated a few verses later when Moses dies: “that sheep who was leading them – the one who had become a man – departed from them” (89:38–39). Within the imagery of the AA, all humans are symbolized as animals; thus this man cannot represent Moses’s human status. Angels, however, in the AA, are symbolized as humans. For example, in the beginning of the AA, in an interpretation of 20 The consensus for this provenance stems from: 1) references to the Maccabean war (see, for example, the “ram with a large horn” in 1 En 90:9, which is thought to represent Judah Maccabee); 2) the evidence of Aramaic fragments found at Qumran (based on paleography, 4QEnf is the oldest, dating to the third quarter of the second century BCE); and 3) the Apocalypse’s incorporation of the earlier, third-century-BCE Book of Watchers. See Patrick Tiller, A Commentary on the Animal Apocalypse of I Enoch. Society of Biblical Literature, Early Judaism and Its Literature Series 4 (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1993), 61–82. 21 1 Enoch is extant in Ethiopic and consists of 108 chapters and five books: the Book of the Watchers (1–36), the Parables of Enoch (37–71), the Astronomical Book (72–82), the Book of Dream Visions (83–90), and the Epistle of Enoch (91–108). 22 All translations of 1 Enoch are from E. Isaac, “1 (Ethiopic Apocalypse of) Enoch,” in Apocalyptic Literature and Testaments. Vol. 1 of The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, ed. James H. Charlesworth (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 2010).

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Genesis 6:1–4, seven angels, depicted as men, come to punish the rebellious Watchers and giants and to take Enoch up to heaven (87:1–4). Moses becoming a man would indicate that he has turned into an angel.23 Some scholars have attributed this “angelization”24 to an interpretive maneuver based on Exodus 34:29–35, where Moses’s face shines after speaking with God on Mount Sinai.25 While the idea that Moses’s appearance was physically altered by his encounter with God certainly lends support to an angelic transformation, we should not ignore the fact that this is an apocalyptic text. From the very beginning of Enoch’s vision, angels play an important role in the historical scheme of the world. They initially come down from heaven to punish the Watchers and giants (87:2), but also, as Enoch recounts, they “grasped me by my hand and took me up, away from the generations of the earth, and raised me up to a lofty place,” (87:3) from whence Enoch will see history unfold (87:4). Subsequently, the angels punish the Watchers by throwing them into a deep abyss (88:1), as heaven is the proper abode of good angels. Recalling Collins’s emphasis on the spatial aspect of apocalypses, it seems no mere coincidence, then, that the references to Moses’s angelic status in AA occur immediately after what would be the two ascents in the original Exodus narrative – namely, after he goes up onto Mount Sinai to receive the commandments (Exod 19:20, 24:12–13, 18, 34:1–4) and after he ascends Mount Nebo prior to his death (Deut 34:1).26 The fact that Moses, in both these cases, has gone upward on his own – mirroring the movement of angels – suggests this is the reason he is considered to be angelic. Enoch, because he requires an angelic 23 Anathea E. Portier-Young, Apocalypse Against Empire: Theologies of Resistance in Early Judaism (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2011), 301. Acquiring this status is rare in AA. For example, Noah turns from a white bull into a man (89:1, 9). However, it is possible that this is a later insertion in AA, because the Qumran Aramaic fragments of the text, 4QEnc4, do not contain this detail about Noah (see Tiller, A Commentary, 259, 267). 24 Fletcher-Louis, “4Q374,” 241. 25 James VanderKam and Dulcinea Boesenberg, “Moses and Enoch in Second Temple Jewish Texts,” in Parables of Enoch: A Paradigm Shift, ed. Darrell L. Bock and James H. Charlesworth (New York: T&T Clark, 2013), 129. Tiller, in addition to Exod 34:29–35, also points to “Moses’ ability to speak with the Lord face to face (Exod 33:11); his having seen the back side of God (33:18–23); and his role as spokesperson for God” as the biblical basis for transforming Moses into an angel (Commentary, 295–96). 26 My explanation hinges on the transformation within the narrative’s events and bears a similarity to another popular explanation, which makes note of the juxtaposition of building projects and the reference to Noah and Moses as men (i.e., the ark and the tabernacle in 89:1 and 89:36, respectively). The latter explanation supposes that AA’s writer thought that animals as builders was too far-fetched an image and therefore changed Noah and Moses to men. However, this argument fails because of the appearance of sheep who build the Temple (89:72–73). See the discussion of this theory in Daniel C. Olson, A New Reading of the Animal Apocalypse of 1 Enoch (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 158–59.

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escort and retains a human status, has replaced Moses as the recipient of divine revelation.27 In other words, the importance of angelic, heavenly ascent that marks the genre of apocalypse is evident in this apocalyptic writer’s reading of Exodus: Moses’s ascent must be considered an angelic movement.

Ezekiel the Tragedian: An Enochic Moses The significance of Moses’s ascent up Mount Sinai as an example of apocalyptic revelation can be seen in another Hellenistic Jewish text: Ezekiel the Tragedian’s The Exagoge, a dramatic rendering of the Exodus account.28 Despite its theatrical genre, parallels with the apocalyptic Book of Watchers are clear.29 The Book of Watchers, or 1 Enoch 1–36, which dates to the third century BCE, details the otherworldly journeys and visions of Enoch. Moses experiences an Enochic-like vision in Ezekiel’s play: Moses: I had a vision of a great throne on the top of Mount Sinai and it reached till the folds of heaven. A noble man was sitting on it, with a crown and a large sceptre in his left hand. He beckoned me with his right hand, so I approached and stood before the throne. He gave me the sceptre and instructed me to sit on the great throne. Then he gave me the royal crown and got up from the throne. I beheld the whole earth all around and saw beneath the earth and above the heavens. A multitude of stars fell before

27 George W. Nickelsburg, “Enochic Wisdom and Its Relationship to the Mosaic Torah,” in The Early Enoch Literature, ed. Gabriele Boccaccini and John J. Collins (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 89 (as cited in Portier-Young, Apocalypse Against Empire, 301). 28 Since only fragments of this play are extant in the works of Eusebius and Clement, their provenance is not entirely certain. Most likely Ezekiel wrote sometime between the third century and the early first century BCE in Alexandria because, like Artapanus and Eupolemus, he was known to Alexander Polyhistor (Collins, Between Athens and Jerusalem, 224–25). 29 Given the dates of the texts, the Exagoge can be taken as witness to second-century-BCE traditions, including 1 Enoch. See Wayne A. Meeks, The Prophet-King: Moses Traditions and the Johannine Christology (Leiden: Brill, 1967), 149. Andrei Orlov gives greater context to Ezekiel’s reasons for depicting Moses as he does, situating them within a pro-Mosaic polemic: “In the biblical account the Lord descends to Moses’ realm to convey his revelation to the seer, while Enoch is able to ascend to the divine abode and behold the Throne of Glory. The advantage here is clearly on the side of the Enochic hero. Within the context of an ongoing competition, such a challenge could not remain unanswered by custodians of the Mosaic tradition. The non-biblical Mosaic lore demonstrates clear intentions of enhancing the exalted profile of its hero.” Orlov, “In the Mirror of the Divine Face: The Enochic Features of the Exagoge of Ezekiel the Tragedian,” in The Significance of Sinai: Traditions about Sinai and Divine Revelation in Judaism and Christianity, ed. G. Brooke, H. Najman, and L. Stuckenbruck (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 184.

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my knees and I counted them all. They paraded past me like a battalion of men. Then I awoke from my sleep in fear. (Exagoge 67–82)30 Enoch, like Moses, has a terrifying vision of a throne room filled with flaming fire and thousands of attendants (vv. 18–24). God inhabits the throne in heaven and interacts directly with Enoch, just as the Lord – the noble man – interacts with Moses in the Exagoge.31 Even more striking is Ezekiel’s interpretation of the Mount Sinai ascent. Unlike a usual mountain, Sinai reaches to the heavens, enabling Moses to see the whole earth, beneath the earth, above the heavens, and falling stars (Exagoge 77–79). Similarly, Enoch takes heavenly journeys to the west (1 Enoch 17–19), the east (1 Enoch 28–33), and to the four corners of the earth (1 Enoch 34–36). More specifically remarkable, on his journey to the throne room Enoch relates that “the course of the stars and the lightnings sped and hastened” him (v. 8) and, as he enters the throne room, that there are more stars above the floor (v. 17).32 This comparison between 1 Enoch 14 and the Exagoge further supports apocalyptic influence, especially considering that “this profile of Moses as a traveler above and beneath the earth is unknown in biblical accounts and most likely comes from the early Enochic conceptual developments.”33 An Enoch-like Moses is further confirmed by what follows. Moses’s vision is interpreted by his father-in-law, Raguel. A human interpreter, however, is 30 Translation is from Howard Jacobson, The Exagoge of Ezekiel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). 31 For the “man” of the Exagoge as God, see Meeks, The Prophet-King, 148; VanderKam and Boesenberg, “Moses and Enoch,” 147; and Pieter van der Horst, “Moses’ Throne, Vision in Ezekiel the Dramatist,” Journal of Jewish Studies 34 (1983): 25. For an alternative reading, see Andrei Orlov, “Moses’ Heavenly Counterpart in the ‘Book of Jubilees’ and the ‘Exagoge’ of Ezekiel the Tragedian,” Biblica 88 (2007): 165, who considers the man in the vision to be a heavenly counterpart of Moses. 32 There are also more references to the divine throne during these many journeys. See 1 En 18:6–8, 24:3, and 25:3. Enoch also sees seven stars imprisoned for their sinfulness in 1 En 21. 33 Orlov, “In the Mirror of the Divine Face,” 189. Although van der Horst notes a comparison with 1 Enoch 14, he characterizes Ezekiel’s description of the vision as “much more sober” (“Moses’ Throne,” 29). While Jacobson does cite 1 Enoch 33:3, 72–82 as a possible parallel, he gives more consideration to biblical sources such as Gen 15, Ps 147:4, Job 25:3, Isa 40:26 (The Exagoge, 91–92). In “Mysticism and Apocalyptic in Ezekiel’s Exagoge,” Illinois Classical Studies 6 (1981): 275, Jacobson discounts the similarities between 1 Enoch and Exagoge, concluding, “Ezekiel’s version of the ascension-type vision is a demythologization of the Enoch-type.” Yet, to claim “demythologization” still implies an engagement with apocalyptic literature, even if to negate it. While I am arguing for apocalyptic influences on this text, I do not mean to exclude other possible influences. For example, scholars have noted classical influences, especially stemming from Greek tragedies and epic literature. See Jane Heath, “Homer or Moses? A Hellenistic Perspective on Moses’ Throne Vision in Ezekiel Tragicus,” Journal of Jewish Studies 58 (2007): 1–18; and Howard Jacobson, “Two Studies on Ezekiel the Tragedian,” Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 22 (1981): 175–78.

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unusual in 1 Enoch.34 The angel Uriel, for example, is Enoch’s interpretive aid (e.g., 1 Enoch 21). But, in a further parallel, Raguel is one of the interpretive angels in 1 Enoch 20:4. This would suggest that Raguel is viewed as an angelic figure.35 Thus, unlike Artapanus’s text and the AA, Ezekiel the Tragedian’s text has incorporated apocalyptic motifs without transforming Moses into an angel. But does he deify Moses? Some scholars have understood the vision of Moses sitting on the divine throne and being handed the crown and scepter to indicate that Ezekiel wished to depict Moses’s deification.36 A comparison with the apocalyptic vision of Daniel 7 suggests otherwise. There are many parallels between Daniel 7, 1 Enoch 14, and the Exagoge, one of them being a throne vision.37 Daniel recounts, “As I watched, thrones were set in place, and an Ancient One took his throne” (v. 9).38 The Ancient One represents God, whose power is evident via the thousand thousands who serve him and the ten thousand times ten thousand who stand in attendance (v. 10), just as divine power is symbolized in the play by the throne, crown, and scepter. Both visions take place in heaven – Moses sees that the throne reaches “till the folds of heaven” (l. 67) and Daniel sees the 34 As Jacobson points out, when a non-Jew needs a vision to be interpreted a human interpreter suffices. This is the case when, for example, Daniel interprets Nebuchadnezzar’s dream in Daniel 2. However, when a Jew has a dream, an angelic interpreter is necessary (The Exagoge, 92–93). 35 See Orlov, “In the Mirror of the Divine Face,” 189–90; and Kristine J. Ruffatto, “Raguel as Interpreter of Moses’ Throne Vision: The Transcendent Identity of Raguel in the Exagoge of Ezekiel the Tragedian,” Journal for the Study of Pseudepigrapha 17.2 (2008): 121–39, esp. 125. 36 Fletcher-Louis, “4Q374,” 245–46. Van der Horst, for example, writes: “In Moses’ vision, there is only one throne, God’s. And Moses is requested to be seated on it, not at God’s side, but all alone. God leaves his throne. This scene is unique in early Jewish literature and certainly implies a deification of Moses (“Moses’ Throne,” 25). See, also, Gregory E. Sterling, “From the Thick Marshes of the Nile to the Throne of God: Moses in Ezekiel the Tragedian and Philo of Alexandria,” in Studia Philonica Annual XXVI, ed. David T. Runia et al. (Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature, 2014), 130, who proposes that the dream’s implication of Moses’s divinity most likely stems from the statement in Exod 7:1 that God has set Moses “as a god to Pharaoh.” 37 Scholars have previously noted this parallel between 1 Enoch 14 and Daniel 7. See John J. Collins, A Commentary on the Book of Daniel. Hermeneia (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1993), 300. Helge S. Kvanvig, in “Throne Visions and Monsters: The Encounter Between Danielic and Enochic Traditions,” Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 117 (2005): 253–59, argues, in particular, that Enoch influenced Daniel. In contrast, Loren Stuckenbruck argues for the opposite direction of influence in “The Throne-Theophany of the Book of Giants: Some New Light on the Background of Daniel 7,” in The Scrolls and the Scriptures: Qumran Fifty Years After, ed. S. E. Porter and C. A. Evans (Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997), 220. 38 Jacobson briefly draws a comparison between Moses’s vision and Daniel 7’s throne scene (The Exagoge, 91). Van der Horst also cites Daniel 7 as a possible influence in “Moses’ Throne,” 24. He also notes that the vision was probably influenced by the theophany in Exodus 24 that presents God in anthropomorphic terms. The influence of Exodus 24 is also noted by VanderKam and Boesenberg in “Moses and Enoch,” 147. Sterling, “From the Thick Marshes,” 130, also focuses on the theophany of Exodus 24 (as well as those in Exod 19:3–14, 19:20–25, 32:30–34, 34:1–18).

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human figure “coming with the clouds of heaven” (v. 13). Then, in both visions, the power in the scene shifts: Moses is given the instruments of power and sits on the throne, and Daniel sees one like a human being granted “dominion and glory and kingship that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him” (v. 14). This comparison can be seen to lessen the air of divinity around Moses. Daniel’s Son of Man, who will reign and will be served, sets the precedent for a human to have divinely granted sovereignty.39 Finally, there is the interpretation of Moses’s vision to consider.40 Raguel tells him, “My friend, this is a good sign from God. May I live to see the day when these things are fulfilled. You will establish a great throne, become a judge and leader of men. As for your vision of the whole earth, the world below and that above the heavens – this signifies that you will see what is, what has been, and what shall be” (Exagoge 83–90). Raguel looks to Moses’s future reign, and ends with an emphasis on Moses’s prophetic powers. Ezekiel goes further, and has endowed that prophecy with a cosmic character, as Moses’s vision extends endlessly both temporally and spatially. Thus, even though Moses himself does not transform into an angelic being as in the work of Artapanus and the Animal Apocalypse, his Sinaitic ascent has become an apocalyptic ascent.41

The Dead Sea Scrolls: Moses’s Angelic Ascent up Mount Sinai The ascent of Mount Sinai likewise serves as a pivotal moment for the depiction of Moses in a number of Dead Sea scrolls. A Qumran text, 4Q377 Frag. 1 col ii, alludes to the moment of Moses’s sojourn up Mount Sinai:42 39 For the “Son of Man” as human, see Collins, Commentary, 304–10. Although God does not hand dominion over to Enoch, he does give him power of a sort; Enoch, a human, is charged with delivering a message of punishment to divine beings, the rebellious Watchers (1 Enoch 15–16). 40 Daniel’s need of an interpreter for his visions is another parallel with the Exagoge. In Daniel 7, Daniel “approached one of the attendants to ask him the truth concerning all this” (v. 16); in later chapters it is the angel Gabriel who serves this function (Dan 8:16, 9:21). 41 The same is true of Pseudo-Philo’s account (ca. 135 BCE–100 CE) of Moses’s time on Mount Sinai in Biblical Antiquities 12:1: “Moses came down. Having been bathed with light that could not be gazed upon, he had gone down to the place where the light of the sun and the moon are” (trans. Howard Jacobson, A Commentary on Pseudo-Philo’s Liber Antiquitatum Biblicarum [Leiden: Brill, 1996], 1.110). My understanding of Pseudo-Philo’s explanation of Moses’s radiance in Exod 34:29–35 is that it is based on Moses passing by the sun and moon, which would indicate that the top of the mountain was somewhere above the heavens. Further support for this reading is that while on the mountain God shows Moses the tree of life (ch. 11) and, prior to his death while he is on Mount Abarim, Moses is privy to the paths of paradise, the source of manna, and the sources of water for clouds, rivers, and the Holy Land (ch. 19). Moses’s journeys heavenward allow him to gain the same insights into the workings of natural phenomena as do Enoch’s. VanderKam and Boesenberg draw this comparison in “Moses and Enoch,” 156. 42 This fragment dates to 150–100 BCE. See Phoebe Makiello, “Was Moses Considered to be an

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[And all] 9 the assembly [ . . . ] answered, and trembling seized them before the Glory of God and the wonderful thunders 10 and stayed at a distance. (vacat) But Moses, the man of God was with God in the cloud, and there covered 11 him the cloud for [ . . . ] when he was sanctified and he spoke as an angel from his mouth, for who was a messen[ger] like him, a man of the pious ones?43 This is a clear reference to Exodus 24:15–18 and 33:7–11, wherein a cloud envelopes Moses for forty days and nights.44 What is notably different from the biblical text, however, is the fact that Moses speaks as an angel.45 Moreover, in line 11, “for who was a messenger (mevaser) like him” can also be translated as “who from flesh (mevasar) was like him,” meaning that “it is also possible that Moses is viewed as a transformed human who is no longer confined to the realm of flesh.”46 Even if ontological transformation into an angel is not intended,47 this text offers a Moses who is unique among humans because of his angel-like, or angelomorphic,48 abilities and connects these abilities to the act of going up Mount Sinai. In another Qumran fragment, that has become known as “Discourse on the Exodus/Conquest Tradition,”49 there is a parallel account of an angelomorphic Moses. Like 4Q377, it is a rewriting of Moses’s experience at Mount Sinai, and

Angel by Those at Qumran?” in Moses in Biblical and Extra-Biblical Traditions, ed. Axel Graupner and Michael Wolter (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2007), 117. 43 Text and translation are found in Discoveries in the Judaean Desert XXVIII, 205–18. 44 For an extensive list of all the biblical allusions, see Wido van Peursen, “Who Was Standing on the Mountain? The Portrait of Moses in 4Q377,” in Moses in Biblical and Extra-Biblical Traditions, ed. Axel Graupner and Michael Wolter (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2007), 101–3. 45 There might also be an association between the clouds surrounding Moses on Mount Sinai and the clouds that accompany the Son of Man in Dan 7:13. See Crispin H. T. Fletcher-Louis, All the Glory of Adam: Liturgical Anthropology in the Dead Sea Scrolls (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 142. 46 Fletcher-Louis, All the Glory, 142. In contrast, Makiello argues that “from flesh” only signifies that Moses was chosen from among all of humanity, not that his flesh ontologically changed from that of human to angel (“Was Moses Considered,” 124–25). 47 This is at the crux of the disagreement between Fletcher-Louis, who sees this text as portraying a divine Moses (All the Glory, 141–48), and Makiello (“Was Moses Considered,” 125) and van Peursen (“Who Was Standing,” 113), who both view this fragment as merely depicting a glorified human being. 48 Makiello makes a point to use the term “‘angelomorphic’ to denote the descriptions of humans as appearing in the form of angels,” not humans who are angels (“Was Moses Considered,” 115). On this distinction, see the work of Kevin Patrick Sullivan, Wrestling with Angels: A Study of the Relationship Between Angels and Humans in Ancient Jewish Literature and the New Testament. Arbeiten zur Geschichte des antiken Judentums und des Urchristentums 55 (Leiden: Brill, 2004). 49 Carol Newsom, “4Q374: A Discourse on the Exodus/Conquest Tradition,” in The Dead Sea Scrolls: Forty Years of Research, ed. D. Dimant and U. Rappaport (Leiden: Brill, 1992), 40–52.

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gives a stronger sense that this experience has somehow enabled Moses to at least act as an angel, if not become one. 6 [And] he made him as God to the mighty ones and a cause of reeli[ng] to Pharaoh [ . . .  7 [they] melted and their hearts trembled and th[ei]r inward parts dissolved [But he had compassion upon [ . . . ​8 And when he caused his face to shine upon them for healing, they strengthened [their] hearts again, and knowledge [ . . . ​9 And though no one had known you, they melted and tre[m]bled. They staggered at the s[ound of [ . . . (4Q374 Frag. 2 col. ii)50 The fact that the person changes from third person to second person in line 9 has led to a debate as to who the subject of this fragment is. If it is God, which seems natural given the theophanic elements of lines 7–8, then how is it that no one had known “you” in line 9? Conversely, if we consider that line 6 seems to be an allusion to Exodus 7:1, in which God tells Moses, “I have made you like God to Pharaoh,” then perhaps the actor throughout is Moses,51 which, in turn, would mean that Moses has some sort of supernatural, or angelic, powers. Although the text is too fragmentary to determine whether Moses ontologically becomes an angel, the description of Moses’s power is consistent with that of angels, for example, when compared with Daniel.52 First, there is the fear, or “trembling hearts,” of the witnesses in 4Q374, similar to how Daniel became “frightened and fell prostrate” when approached by Gabriel (8:17). Second, there is Moses’s countenance, which shines. While this attribute comes from Exodus 34:29–35, “we actually have the reverse of the sequence in Exodus 34. In 4Q374, the people tremble in fear and are comforted and strengthened by the light of the face shining upon them. In Exodus 34:30–31 it is the shining face of Moses which causes the fear.”53 A possible solution to this discrepancy appears if we consider who else has the ability to shine and heal? The angel in Daniel 10 not only has a “face like lightning,” but “eyes like flaming torches” and “arms and

50 Translation is found in Discoveries in the Judaean Desert XIX, ed. with notes by Charlotte Newsom (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 99–110. Based on paleography, the date of this scroll is 30–1 BCE. 51 This is the argument of Fletcher-Louis, All the Glory, 136. Fletcher-Louis disagrees with Newsom in “4Q374,” who argues that God is the subject of this passage. For a subsequent argument against Fletcher-Louis, and in favor of seeing God as the actor, see Makiello, “Was Moses Considered,” 118–19. She explains that “it would be rather strange if the subject were to change without explicitly being mentioned, from God in line 6 to Moses in line 7” (119). 52 Fletcher-Louis similarly cites parallels in Daniel and Artapanus (All the Glory, 138). 53 Fletcher-Louis, “4Q374,” 249. Fletcher-Louis considers the entire fragment to be an interpretive expansion of Exod 7:1 and 34:29–35 (All the Glory, 136).

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legs like the gleam of burnished bronze” (v. 6)54 – glittering arms that heal when the angel touches Daniel (Dan 10:10, 18). Finally, there is some sound that makes the listeners stagger. Although it is not clear if Moses creates this sound, a similar overwhelming sound does appear in Daniel 10, in which the angel’s words sound “like the roar of a multitude” (v. 6). Another example of Moses’s angelic appearance can be found in the Aramaic fragments of the Vision of Amram (4Q543–547),55 which refer to a brother of Aaron by the name Mal’akyah(u), or messenger/angel of Yahweh (4Q545 Frag. 1 col I, line 9). The obvious assumption here would be that this would be Moses.56 While the text is too fragmentary to discern whether this individual exhibits any angelic powers, the name could indicate an angelic affiliation. Similarly, two other fragments of the Vision reveal: “you will be God, and angel of God you will be cal[led . . . ] [ . . . ] you will do in this land and a judge” (4Q543 Frag. 3, lines 1–2 = 4Q545 Frag 1).57 It is unclear who should be called angel here, but the inclusion of the status of judge makes Moses a likely candidate.58 More significantly, the rest of the fragments of the Vision have apocalyptic characteristics. First, they reflect the vision of Amram, Moses’s father (4Q544 Frag. 1, line 10). Second, Amram’s vision is of two angels: an angel of darkness, and an angel of light who will eventually overcome the angel of darkness (lines 11–14). This idea not only displays the Qumran sectarians’ dualistic worldview,59 but also echoes the apocalyptic insights into the future workings of the world 54 Consider also the chief angel, Uriel, from 1 Enoch, whose name means, “God is my light” (e.g., 1 En 9:1, 10:1). 55 Émile Puech dates this text to 200 BCE (“Messianism, Resurrection, and Eschatology at Qumran and in the New Testament,” in The Community of the Renewed Covenant, ed. Eugene Ulrich and James VanderKam [Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994], 247). 56 Robert Duke, “Moses’ Hebrew Name: The Evidence of the ‘Vision of Amram,’” Dead Sea Discoveries 14 (2007): 41. Duke is the first to identify this individual as Moses. In the context of the passage, Amram gives his last words and instructs Aaron to call “Mal’akya(u), your brother” (ibid., 37). In contrast, Émile Puech translates this as “the messengers, your brothers,” based on a different reconstruction of the text (Discoveries in the Judaean Desert XXXI, 335–37). The text and translation remain in the singular (“call my son Malachiyah”) in The Dead Sea Scrolls Study Edition, ed. Florentino García Martínez and Eibert J. C. Tigchelaar (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 1088–89. 57 Translation of García Martínez and Tigchelaar. The Dead Sea Scrolls Study Edition, 1085. 58 Although Joseph Angel, in Otherworldly and Eschatological Priesthood in the Dead Sea Scrolls (Leiden: Boston, 2010), 55, raises the possibility that the “angel of God” refers to Moses based on Moses’s judicial role and Exod 4:16, he ultimately concludes that it is most likely Aaron who fits this designation in the text. Fletcher-Louis, “4Q374,” 241, agrees that it is Aaron. 59 The two prime examples of this dualism are the War Scroll (1QM), which envisions a cycle of seven battles taking place between Michael and Belial – the Prince of Light and Prince of Darkness – and the Treaties of Two Spirits (1QS 3–4), which similarly understands humanity as divided into two camps, sons of light and sons of darkness.

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that we have seen in Daniel and 1 Enoch.60 In fact, this should come as no surprise given that both of these apocalypses are well represented among the Qumran corpus, which includes eight copies of the biblical book and ten other texts that have some relevance to Daniel, either mentioning Daniel or using Danielic imagery and language.61 Similarly, Aramaic fragments of four of the Enochic books (the Parables are absent) were discovered at Qumran along with a previously unknown Book of Giants.62 Moreover, the sectarians believed that angels were an integral part of their community – so much so that their goal was to keep stringently pure and to live “an angelic form of life.”63 According to the Rule of the Congregation, disabled persons “may not en[ter] to take (their) stand [among] the congregation of the [me]n of renown for holy angels [are in their coun]cil” (1QSa 2:8–9).64 The 60 Torleif Elgvin points out that the Vision of Amram shares with the Animal Apocalypse and Daniel the idea of predetermined periods of history moving towards the annihilation of evil. See his “Wisdom With and Without Apocalyptic,” in Sapiential, Liturgical & Poetical Texts from Qumran: Proceedings of the Third Meeting of the International Organization for Qumran Studies, Published in Memory of Maurice Baillet, ed. D. K. Falk, F. García Martínez, and E. M. Schuller (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 35–36. 61 Copies of the book of Daniel include: 1Q71, 1Q72, 4Q112, 4Q113, 4Q114, 4Q115, 4Q116, and 6Q7. Every chapter of Daniel is represented in the Qumran texts except for Daniel 12. Texts that allude to Daniel include: 4Q174, 4Q242, 4Q243, 4Q244, 4Q245, 4Q246, 4Q489, 4Q551, 4Q552, and 4Q553. It appears, therefore, that the sectarian community at Qumran, “awaiting the end of the age and the final battle between good and evil [was] drawn to this enigmatic book with its dreams and symbols and tales of triumph over persecution” (Peter W. Flint, “The Daniel Tradition at Qumran,” in The Book of Daniel: Composition and Reception, ed. John J. Collins and Peter W. Flint. Supplements to Vetus Testamentum 83 [Leiden: Brill, 2001], 329). 62 See George W.  E. Nickelsburg, 1 Enoch 1: A Commentary on the Book of 1 Enoch. Hermeneia (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2001), 7–8. 63 Collins, Apocalyptic Imagination, 176. To prepare themselves to fight alongside angelic warriors, members of the Qumran sect had to uphold rigorous purity standards. If any man did not cleanse himself on the day of battle he would not be allowed to join in. Purity was of the utmost importance to all members of the sect. Initiates had to be pure to enter the sect and, once they were members, had to maintain purity to participate in communal meals. See, for example, CD 6:17, 7:3, for general statements about the priority of purity among the community. For laws related to the maintenance of purity within the group, see 1QS 6:16ff. The focus on purity is also echoed in Josephus’s description of the Essenes (e.g., Ant. 18:19) and is one of the reasons that scholars so often associate the two groups. For a discussion of the sectarian penal code’s focus on purity, see Lawrence H. Schiffman, Sectarian Law in the Dead Sea Scrolls: Courts, Testimony and the Penal Code (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1983), 161–68, 215–16. For a full study of purity in the DSS, see Hannah Harrington, The Purity Texts (New York: T&T Clark International, 2004). Harrington unequivocally argues that “the many purity texts found at Qumran reveal an approach to purity that is stringent. The biblical prescriptions for purity are often increased and impurity is regarded as a more potent force than it is by any other ancient Jewish group in antiquity” (12). 64 Trans. Lawrence H. Schiffman, Eschatological Community of the Dead Sea Scrolls (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1989), 38.

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Damascus Document also prohibits admission to the “midst of the community, for the holy angels [are in the midst of it]” (CD-A 15:17).65 Likewise, in the War Scroll, during the battle, “holy angels are together with their armies” (1QM 7:6),66 fighting alongside the Sons of Light to their ultimate victory over the forces of evil.67 There are also indications that humans could become like angels. Most straightforward is a blessing to the high priest: “may you be like an angel of the face in the holy residence for the glory of the God” (1QSb 4:24–25), which “underscores the blurring of ontological boundaries.”68 With angels and apocalypses at the forefront of sectarian thinking, it would not be surprising that otherworldly images of Moses would have appealed to them.69

Testament of Moses: Moses as an Intercessory Angel Dating to the turn of the Common Era, the Testament of Moses (TOM) purports to be a farewell speech by Moses to Joshua before Moses’s death.70 In contrast to Deuteronomy, however, it covers future events the Jewish people will experience, including in an eschatological period. In the end the Devil, zabulus,71 will be no more and, instead: 65 Trans. Schiffman, Eschatological Community, 48. 66 Trans. Schiffman, Eschatological Community, 50. 67 See also 1QM 12:4, which reads, “muster the arm[ies] of your [ch]osen ones according to its thousands and its myriads, together with your holy ones [and with] your angels.” 68 Elliot R. Wolfson, “Seven Mysteries of Knowledge: Qumran E/Sotericism Recovered,” in The Idea of Biblical Interpretation: Essays in Honor of James L. Kugel, ed. Hindy Najman and Judith Newman (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 210. Translation of García Martínez and Tigchelaar, The Dead Sea Scrolls Study Edition, 107. 69 Moses’s importance at Qumran is underscored by the prominence of “large works such as the Reworked Pentateuch (4Q158, 4Q36467), the Temple Scroll (11Q19–20), and Jubilees [which] may be classified as Moses texts” (James VanderKam and Peter Flint, The Meaning of the Dead Sea Scrolls: Their Significance for Understanding the Bible, Judaism, Jesus, and Christianity [London: T&T Clark, 2002], 229). In fact, John C. Poirier, in “The Endtime Return of Elijah and Moses at Qumran,” Dead Sea Discoveries 10 (2003): 236–42, has even gone so far as to argue that Qumran messianism envisioned Moses as the end-time prophet. This conclusion leaves aside the question as to whether the Dead Sea Scrolls that I have surveyed originated in Qumran or not. For example, Makiello makes the case that the use of the Tetragrammaton in 4Q377 argues against it having a sectarian provenance (“Was Moses Considered,” 116). Instead, I would argue that the fact that these fragments are preserved in the Qumran library indicates that the community found their ideas valuable. 70 For a discussion of the dating of the text, see Adela Yarbro Collins, “Composition and Redaction of the Testament of Moses 10,” Harvard Theological Review 69 (1976): 183. 71 The devil is more common in the New Testament than in early Jewish sources. In the Hebrew Bible, Satan is strictly a divine “adversary,” not imbued with any sort of innate evil but serving in the role of a legal prosecutor (see Job 1–2). The Greek word for devil, diabolos, is synonymous

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Then will be filled the hands of the messenger, who is in the highest place appointed (= Dan 12:1). Yea, he will at once avenge them of their enemies. For the Heavenly One will arise from his kingly throne (= Dan 7). Yea, he will go forth from his holy habitation with indignation and wrath on behalf of his sons (Testament of Moses 10:2–3) . . . ​God will raise you to the heights. Yea, he will fix you firmly in the heavens of the stars. (= Dan 12:3) (Testament of Moses 10:7, 10)72 There are clear echoes here of Daniel 7–12, indicating that “it is probable that the author of the Testament of Moses was acquainted with the book of Daniel.”73 There is another significant parallel between the two texts – the enemy of Israel is both imperial and supernatural. The vision of Daniel 7, for example, depicts empires (Babylonia, Media, Persia, and Greece) in beastly forms and predicts their eventual deaths. In Daniel 8, a he-goat, representing Greece, overpowers a ram, representing Media/Persia (vv. 20–21).74 Similarly, in the TOM, there is an allusion to the Romans, also symbolized by an animal: “Then you, O Israel, shall be happy, and you shall mount upon the necks and wings of the eagle, and they shall be ended” (10:8).75 The eagle was a major symbol of Rome76 and has been added to the base text of LXX Deuteronomy 33:29, with Satan in the New Testament, and this figure has become the enemy of God as he attempts to tempt Jesus (e.g., Matt 4:1–11). Elsewhere, Satan rules over other demons (e.g., Luke 11:18; Eph 1:21, 2:2, 6:12). While the terms Satan or Devil are not used, the idea of an angelic power that rules over evil forces does exist elsewhere within Second Temple thought. See, for example, the role of Belial in the Dead Sea Scrolls (e.g., 1QM 13:4–5, 15:1–3) and Jubilees (1:19–21). 72 Translation from J. Priest, “Testament of Moses,” in Apocalyptic Literature and Testaments. Vol. 1 of The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, ed. James H. Charlesworth (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 2010), 932. These parallels are noted in Klaus Koch, “Stages in the Canonization of the Book of Daniel,” in The Book of Daniel: Composition and Reception, ed. John J. Collins and Peter W. Flint. Supplements to Vetus Testamentum 83 (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 433. 73 Priest, “Testament of Moses,” 924 (although Priest does not think it possible to assert definite dependence). Assigning an earlier Maccabean-period date to the first version of the text, David C. Carlson, in “Vengeance and Angelic Mediation in Testament of Moses 9 and 10,” Journal of Biblical Literature 101 (1982): 85, assumes that the Testament was “written within similar circles as was Daniel.” Koch also suggests that the Testament’s author employed “Danielic patterns” (“Stages in the Canonization,” 433). 74 Daniel 10–12 is likewise focused on multiple empires. In particular, Daniel 11 details the constant warfare between the kings of the Ptolemies in the south and those of the Seleucids in the north until the time of Antiochus IV. 75 See Yarbro Collins, “Composition and Redaction,” 186. 76 For example, Jupiter, the grandfather of Romulus and Remus, was patron deity of the Roman state, and the eagle was the carrier of his thunderbolts. In this role the eagle often served as an omen, as seen in Pliny (Nat. 15.136–37; cf. 15.130), Suetonius (Gal. 1), and Cassius Dio (48.52.3–4; cf. 63.29.3). In 106 BCE, Consul Marius, as part of his military reform, established the eagle as the sole symbol of the Roman army’s legions, which Josephus describes: “Next the ensigns

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which reads, “Happy are you Israel . . . ​your enemies shall dwindle away before you, and you will mount upon their necks.”77 The author of the Testament has purposefully inserted the eagle into this phrase of promise to signal the ultimate defeat of the Romans.78 At the same time, however, the imperial forces in both the TOM and Daniel have supernatural agents. For example, in Daniel 10, an angelic figure visits Daniel after taking leave from a battle in heaven: “The prince of the kingdom of Persia opposed me for twenty-one days, and behold Michael, one of the chief princes, came to help me, and I left him there with the prince of the kingdom of Persia” (10:13). And, when the angel departs, he does so to reenter the battle to fight the prince of Greece (v. 20). Michael is Israel’s patron angel and, in this role, he fights against the patron angels of empires. Similarly, in the TOM 10 there is a supernatural force opposing God; here however, instead of patron angels, it is the Devil: “Then his kingdom will appear throughout his whole creation. Then the devil will have an end. Yeah, sorrow will be led away with him” (10:1). The association between the devil and “sorrow” (10:1) indicates that he, like the empires, is evil. Moreover, the fact that the appearance of God’s kingdom will lead to his end (10:1) indicates that the Devil is associated with earthly empires. Given these parallels with Daniel, the “messenger” (nuntius) who will avenge God against the Devil is most likely also supernatural – an angel. We can also find a significant parallel with the Book of Watchers. In the Book of Watchers the huge and violent giants, born from the angelic Watchers and human women, begin to devour the earth and each other (1 En 7:3–5). As a result, the earth cries out for vengeance and is heard by a group of angels – Michael, Sariel, Raphael, and Gabriel – who “looked down from the sanctuary of heaven upon the earth and saw much bloodshed upon the earth” (1 En 9:1). They petition God to intervene (1 En 9:4–6), after which God orders the imprisonment of the Watchers and the destruction of the giants (1 Enoch 10). This is this same sequence of victimhood, a cry for vengeance, mediation, surrounding the eagle, which in the Roman army precedes every legion, because it is the king and the bravest of all birds; it is regarded by them as the symbol of empire, and whoever may be their adversaries, an omen of victory” (J.W. 3.123). 77 See Yarbro Collins, “Composition and Redaction,” 179–86. 78 This discussion of the TOM 10:8 is found in Alexandria Frisch, “Matthew 24:28: ‘Wherever the Body Is, There the Eagles Will Be Gathered Together’ and the Death of the Roman Empire,” in The Gospels in First Century Judaea, ed. R. Steven Notley and Jeffrey P. Garcia. Jewish and Christian Perspectives Series 29 (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 67–68. Imperial allusions are also found in earlier chapters of the TOM. For example, Nebuchadnezzar the Babylonian is referred to as “a king against them from the east” who will “burn their city with the holy Temple of the Lord” (3:1–2), and the Persian Cyrus is the king who will “have pity on them and send them home to their own land” (4:6).

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and divine judgment that we see in the TOM and which supports the notion that the mediation comes at the hands of an angelic being like Michael, Sariel, Raphael, or Gabriel.79 While some scholars have identified the “messenger” (nuntius) in the TOM as an angel similar to Michael in Daniel 12, a better choice is to view the messenger as an angelic Moses.80 One support for this conclusion is a terminological parallel with the next chapter in which Moses is called the “great messenger” (nuntius).81 There is an even stronger argument for this association based on the Enochic parallel above. When the angels intervene with God against the Watchers and giants, they do so by praising God and declaring that God sees all things (1 En 9:4–6). Moses is called the “great messenger” in the TOM because he was the one who “every hour day and night had his knees fixed to the earth, praying and looking for help to Him that rules all the world with compassion and righteousness, reminding Him of the covenant of the fathers and propitiating the Lord with the oath.” (11:17). In other words, Moses uses the same liturgical method of intervention. Thus, under the influence of Daniel and 1 Enoch, the author of the Testament of Moses has rewritten Deuteronomy, subtly infusing the eschatological depiction with apocalyptic elements so that Moses behaves as an intercessory angel.82 79 Carlson, “Vengeance,” 88–89, identifies this parallel sequence. The cry for vengeance in the TOM is highlighted in chapter 9, in which a pious Levite named Taxo and his sons fast in a cave in order to insure God’s revenge. 80 Kenneth Atkinson, in “Taxo’s Martyrdom and the Role of the Nuntius in the Testament of Moses: Implications for Understanding the Role of Other Intermediary Figures,” Journal of Biblical Literature 125 (2006): 472, concludes that the messenger is an angel based on a comparison with other examples of fifth- and sixth-century-CE Latin. Yarbro Collins, “Composition and Redaction,” 180, counters the conclusion of Charles and Nickelsburg and argues that the use of the Latin nuntius, rather than angelus, would suggest that this is most likely a human messenger. Those scholars who think the angel is Michael include R. H. Charles, The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Tesatment (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1913), 2:421, and George W.  E. Nickelsburg, Resurrection, Immortality and Eternal Life in Intertestamental Judaism. Harvard Theological Studies 26 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1972), 28. 81 Fletcher-Louis, “4Q374,” 246; Meeks, The Prophet-King, 160–61; and Jan W. van Henten argue that the messenger is Moses, who ascended to heaven and then is able to act on Israel’s behalf (“Moses as Heavenly Messenger in Assumptio Mosis 10:2 and Qumran Passages,” Journal of Jewish Studies 54 [2003]: 216–17). 82 There are other indications that Moses is somehow different than other humans. In the beginning of the Testament, Moses asserts that God “did design and devise me, who (was) prepared from the beginning of the world, to be the mediator of his covenant (1:14). Some scholars have argued that this means Moses was pre-existent (see, for example, Fletcher-Louis, “4Q374,” 246). Silviu N. Bunta, in “Too Vast to Fit in the World: Moses, Adam, and Tzelem Elohim in the Testament of Moses 11:8,” Henoch 26 (2004): 258–78, argues that the TOM 11:8 depicts Moses’s sepulcher as encompassing the entire world in order to portray Moses as a physically enormous being.

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Conclusion Given the prominence of Moses in the Pentateuch, it is not surprising that we have encountered him so often in Second Temple literature, especially in that literature which rewrites or interprets the biblical text. But it is not just that references to Moses abound; Moses’s persona and life are imbued with apocalyptic characteristics, which, as we have seen, become readily apparent when compared with the apocalyptic texts of Daniel and 1 Enoch. In some texts – Artapanus’s Concerning the Jews, the Animal Apocalypse, the Testament of Moses, and a few Qumran fragments – Moses takes on angelomorphic traits: shocking humans like an angel, ascending to heaven like an angel, speaking like an angel, shining like an angel, healing like an angel or fighting against enemies like an angel. In these works, the closeness that the biblical Moses had with God in his prophetic role has been translated into a different sort of closeness – Moses has become more divine, more supernatural. Following Collins’ definition of apocalypse, Moses is both spatially and temporally altered. Spatially, Moses is described as being above or in heaven. This is the reason that his ascent up Mount Sinai is highlighted in the Animal Apocalypse and the Dead Sea fragments. Temporally, Moses remains a part of God’s plan, even in the eschatological future. Thus, for example, in the Testament of Moses, Moses the messenger will defeat the Devil or, as in the Animal Apocalypse, Moses does not die but becomes an angel. In Ezekiel’s Exagoge, we see another avenue of apocalyptic influence – Moses the prophet has become Moses the visionary. Again, the ascent up Mount Sinai plays a role in that it allows him to see into heaven much like Enoch does. In addition to Moses’s spatial change of location, his vision looks temporally forward to an eschatological time. Of course, this survey of Second Temple literature is not exhaustive. For example, I have not delved into the works of Philo or the Book of Jubilees, in which Moses figures prominently, but which do not exhibit the same spatial and temporal shifts. In Philo’s extensive body of literature Moses does indeed undergo a distinctive change, as Philo often refers to him as God.83 This interpretation is mostly based on Exodus 7:1, which is mentioned or alluded to more than ten times throughout Philo’s writings.84 In this vein, the Sinaitic ascent prompts M. David Litwa to write:

83 See, for example, De Sacra. 9, QE 2, De Vita Mosis 1:155–58, De Somniis 2:188. 84 Sarah Pearce, The Land of the Body: Studies in Philo’s Representation of Egypt (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1997), 158–59.

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Philo presents Moses’s ascent on Sinai as a proleptic experience of deification. The divine Spirit purged Moses in preparation for his priestly initiation in heaven. For his initiation, Moses had to be clean in body and soul. That is, he had to cut away all passions, and sanctify himself “from all the things that characterize mortal nature,” including eating, drinking, and sexual intercourse (Mos. 2.68). Moses had to transcend the limits of his mortal nature in order to come into his true, divine (i.e., purely noetic) nature. 85 Despite the importance of Sinai, however, this is not an apocalyptic ascent such as Enoch experiences. Instead, Moses’s going up is a metaphor for the mind’s superiority over the body – Moses is “the divinized mind.”86 In Jubilees, Moses hears a retelling of part of the pentateuchal narrative (i.e., from Genesis through Exod 24:18).87 Although this retelling takes place on Mount Sinai, there is no sense from the text that the mountain is anything other than a mountain. In other words, there is no apocalyptic ascent. Yet, the one doing the retelling is an angel of the presence. Thus, even though Moses himself does not take on angelic characteristics, the presence of an angel in the story echoes apocalyptic narratives and aligns Moses somewhat with the visionary role of Daniel or Enoch.88 Similarly, Philo shifting Moses towards the divine end of the divine-human spectrum is not wholly unlike the trend towards angelomorphizing Moses in the texts we have surveyed (although Philo moves Moses further towards the divine than any author we have seen). Thus, while this article has not explored every reference to Moses in Second Temple literature, the varied nature of those Second Temple texts that I have examined is significant. These sources have different provenances, from Egypt to Judea. They are extant in different languages, from Ethiopic to Greek to Aramaic. And they date from the third century BCE to the first century CE. 85 M. David Litwa, “The Deification of Moses in Philo of Alexandria,” in The Studia Philonica Annual: Studies in Hellenistic Judaism, vol. XXVI, ed. David T. Runia and Gregory E. Sterling (Atlanta, GA: SBL Press, 2014) 14–15. See also Fletcher-Louis, “4Q374,” 242. 86 Litwa, “The Deification,” 3, 18. See also Meeks, The Prophet-King, 102–6; and Sterling, “From the Thick Marshes,” 131–32. 87 The majority of scholars prefer a date between 161–140 BCE. See the overview in Michael Segal, The Book of Jubilees: Rewritten Bible, Redaction, Ideology and Theology. Journal for the Study of Judaism Supplement 117 (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 35–41. 88 There is some debate as to whether Jubilees should be considered an apocalypse. On the one hand, it is “a revelation mediated by an angel to a venerable figure of the past” and shares themes with other apocalyptic literature, such as “ideas of revelation, eschatology and the good and evil spirits” (Collins, Apocalyptic Imagination, 104). On the other hand, it lacks symbolic dreams: see Armin Lange, “Divinatorische Träume und Apokalyptik im Jubiläenbuch,” in Studies in the Book of Jubilees, ed. M. Albani, J. Frey, and A. Lange (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1997), 25–38.

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Although Deuteronomy 34:10 deems Moses to be the greatest of all the prophets, these writers have all gone one step further and given Moses’s prophecy an apocalyptic character. The similarities in their treatment of Moses indicate that the apocalyptic trend was both far-reaching and enduring.89

89 My conclusion offers more similarities between texts with different geographic origins than the conclusion of VanderKam and Boesenberg, in “Moses and Enoch,” 156, that “Diasporic Jewish writers enhance the image of Moses according to different models and with different motives than the writers in the Land . . . ​the Diasporic authors transform Moses into an Egyptian or Greek figure to make him viable in their Hellenistic context.”

“A King and a Scribe like Moses”: The Reception of Deuteronomy 34:10 and a Rabbinic Theory of Collective Biblical Authorship Rebecca Scharbach Wollenberg University of Michigan

“Never again in Israel would a prophet arise like Moses, who knew God face to face” (Deuteronomy 34:10) In modern scholarship, Deuteronomy 34:10 is often imagined as the source of a rabbinic theory of biblical authorship in which each successive stage in Israelite history was marked by a decline in the level of prophetic guidance available to the people so that each new cohort of religious leaders was compelled to meticulously preserve and minutely study the written records of a prophetic experience to which they no longer had access. The early rabbinic materials analyzed in this essay, however, reveal that Deuteronomy 34:10 was closely tied in some early rabbinic traditions to a very different theory of biblical compilation. For these early rabbinic thinkers, Deuteronomy 34:10 was not a statement of prophetic decline but of prophetic change. If Moses was destined to bequeath the raw sacred materials of revelation to the world, other inspired figures would arise who would shape (and reshape) these materials into the biblical tradition as we know it. For as t. Sanhedrin 4:7, Song of Songs Rabbah 1.1.8 and b. Eruvin 21b each explain in different ways, the Mosaic revelation was all but incomprehensible to the people in its original form. Only with the additions and refinements of later wise men and scribes did the Mosaic revelation acquire a shape in which “everyone began to discern its meaning” (Song of Songs Rabbah 1.1.8).

In modern scholarship on rabbinic Judaism, the reception history of Moses as a character has become almost inextricably intertwined with the study of canonicity and the history of prophecy.1 The statement of Mosaic uniqueness

1 For some recent examples of this phenomenon, see Steven Fraade, “Moses and the Commandments: Can Hermeneutics, History, and Rhetoric Be Disentangled?,” in The Idea of Biblical Interpretation: Essays in Honor of James L. Kugel, ed. H. Najman and J.H. Newman (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 299–422; Howard (Haim) Kreisel, “The Prophecy of Moses in Medieval

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in Deuteronomy 34:10, for instance, is often identified as a key source in an early rabbinic theory of prophetic decline, wherein each new cohort of religious leaders was called upon to safeguard and interpret an expanding set of inspired writings that preserved a level of interaction with the divine to which they no longer had access.2 The biblical image of Moses as sui generis has thus become almost inextricably imbricated with a scholarly view that early rabbinic Judaism foreclosed notions of progressive scriptural revelation that were widespread in the Second Temple period.3





Jewish Philosophy,” in Illuminating Moses: A History of Reception (Leiden: Brill, 2013), ed. Jane Beal, 117–41, and Jacob Neusner, Rabbi Moses: A Documentary Catalogue (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2013) and the literature cited there. 2 The early rabbinic reception history of Deut 34:10 has generally been investigated in modern scholarship not by examining early rabbinic citations of the verse in question but rather by tracking the development of the early rabbinic idea that prophecy ceased in Israel. In this reading tradition, biblical statements such as, “Joshua was full of the spirit of wisdom . . . ​but a prophet like Moses would never arise in Israel again” (Deut 34:9–10)” are extrapolated into a broader history of prophetic decline that includes the sages themselves: “from the moment the latter prophets, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi, died, the ruach hakodesh (spirit of holiness) was cut off in Israel. Even after this, however, they would be made to hear a bat kol (heavenly voice)” (t. Sotah 13:3; cf. y. Sotah 9:13, b. Yoma 9b, b. Sotah 48b, b. Sanhedrin 11a, and b. Bava Batra 12b). According to many scholars, the purpose of this version of prophetic history was to solidify the religious leadership of the early rabbinic sages, whose authority was founded on the interpretation of a closed canon that could never again be added to in a prophetic voice that might compete with the authority of the exegete. For surveys of the scholarly literature on this question, as well as qualifications to this account, see the classic surveys of Fredrick Greenspahn, “Why Prophecy Ceased,” Journal of Biblical Literature 108.1 (1989): 37–49; Thomas Overholt, “The End of Prophecy: No Players without a Program,” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 42.3 (1988): 103–15, and Benjamin Sommers, “Did Prophecy Cease? Evaluating a Reevaluation,” Journal of Biblical Literature 115.1 (1996): 31–47. 3 In recent years, the work of several authors on the biblical and Second Temple religious imagination has fundamentally reshaped our understanding of how ancient practitioners understood the category of sacred writing – emphasizing the unbounded and cumulative vision of sacred knowledge that held sway in many ancient communities. Jacqueline Vayntrub has argued, for instance, that paratextual attributions in biblical texts themselves were not intended to indicate authorship as we understand that term, but rather to “imaginatively stage the text in a broader literary tradition” (Jacqueline Vayntrub, “Before Authorship: Solomon and Proverbs 1:1,” Biblical Interpretation 26(2) [2018]: 182–206). Hindy Najman, in Seconding Sinai: The Development of Mosaic Discourse in Second Temple Judaism (Leiden: Brill: 2003), 117, has demonstrated, moreover, that “Mosaic Discourse” remained an open-ended project for many practitioners well into the Second Temple period, inasmuch as “there was no clear distinction between citing and interpreting . . . ​no clear distinction between interpreting and interpolating.” In addition to showing that for many Second Temple authors pseudepigraphic “attribution . . . ​was about developing and celebrating a character by staging him in another text” (Eva Mroczek, The Literary Imagination in Jewish Antiquity [New York: Oxford University Press, 2016], 53) Mroczek, ibid., 187, has emphasized “The perpetually unfinished nature of writing as it seemed to some of its ancient

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A survey of early rabbinic citations of this verse, however, reveals a very different vision of Mosaic uniqueness – and with it a very different theory of biblical revelation. As we will see in the coming pages, some early rabbinic traditions read Deuteronomy 34:10 as a qualifying statement: no prophet would ever again take on the specific prophetic role that had been assigned to Moses as the original recipient of the Sinaitic revelation, but inspired spiritual leaders of Moses’s stature would arise in the future who would contribute to the final form of the Pentateuch in other ways. These rabbinic traditions imagined the biblical text as a collective project in which the Pentateuch was gradually refined and completed by a series of inspired editors. As b. Rosh Hashanah 21b puts it, using the words of the Psalmist, “the sayings of God are pure” like pure “silver smelt in a furnace on the earth, which has been refined seven times” (Ps 12:17). According to this school of thought, Moses was so unique as a prophetic conduit that “no person could understand the words of the Torah” as he had received it – other figures were required to progressively process the Mosaic revelation until “everyone began to discern its meaning” (Song of Songs Rabbah 1.1.8).

“A Book Which Many Mouths Spoke” (Song of Songs Rabbah 4:4): An Expansive Reading of b. Bava Batra 14b–15b4 Many readers will already be familiar with a talmudic tradition that links Deuteronomy 34:10 to a story about collective biblical authorship. Contemporary scholars frequently cite the claim put forward on b. Bava Batra 14b that “Joshua wrote [the last] eight verses in the Torah” as an example of the limited text-­critical stance permitted by early rabbinic Judaism.5 This statement is generally understood to affirm the bulk of the Pentateuch as a pristine record of the Sinaitic revelation while expressing technical doubts concerning the authenticity of the work’s coda.6 And yet, the critical questions that undergird





creators.” The coalescence of the rabbinic canon has generally been understood to represent the termination of this fluid and cumulative vision of scripture. Eva Mroczek reads the Oven of Akhnai story (b. Bava Metzi‘a 59b), for instance, as a rabbinic statement that “all the revelation that matters has been revealed on Sinai and is contained in scripture” which was “once revealed by inspired prophets, but [is] now complete” (Mroczek, Literary Imagination, 185). 4 For reasons that will become clear at the end of this section, the association of rabbinic texts in this subheading was inspired by Mroczek, Literary Imagination, 70. 5 Cf. b. Menaḥot 30a. For an extended discussion of this position, see Moshe Greenberg’s classic study, “Jewish Conceptions of the Human Factor in Biblical Prophecy,” in Justice and the Holy: Essays in Honor of Walter Harrelson, ed. Douglas Knight and Peter Paris (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1989), 145–62. 6 For a reception history of this idea from the Second Temple period through modern scholarship, see Eran Viezel, “Moses’ Role in Writing the Torah: The History of a Fundamental Jewish Tenet,”

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this exegetical tradition are not nearly as trivial as this formulation might imply. This quandary is outlined in b. Bava Batra 14b–15b: if we understand Deuteronomy 34:10 as a declaration that enshrines the Pentateuch as the untouchable and unparalleled work of Israel’s supreme prophet, it is difficult to understand how to interpret the fact that this declaration appears in a portion of the work that describes the death of that prophet. Did the prophetic author inscribe a prospective description of his own death before he died, as suggested in b. Bava Batra 15a? If this is the case, Moses has subtly undermined the stringent historicity of the account that he leaves for posterity. Or, as proposed on b. Bava Batra 14b and repeated on b. Bava Batra 15a, did someone else write the final lines of the prophet’s masterpiece? In this case, the Mosaic origins of the tome are called into question in a circumscribed but nonetheless vital way. As b. Bava Batra 15a puts it, “Can we say that the book of the Torah lacked even a letter [in Moses’s lifetime] when it is written “[Moses said] ‘Take this book of the Torah’ (Deut 31:26)?” These questions are not ultimately put to rest by the formulators of this passage. Since it is never stated if one of the solutions is correct, the difficulties the questions grapple with are left to haunt the passage without resolution. As the passage concludes its discussion of Deuteronomy 34: “however the[se verses] came to be different, they are different (‫”)אשתנו אשתנו‬ (b. Bava Batra 15a). I would argue, in fact, that b. Bava Batra 14b–15b represents an extended reflection on the critical questions concerning the nature of biblical authorship raised by Deuteronomy 34, for the talmudic passage goes on to identify a significant number of biblical books that were not authored by those who appear to speak through them, and suggests that more than one biblical composition was finished by others than the individual to whom the work was formally attributed: Moses wrote his book, and the portion of Balaam, and Job. Joshua wrote his book and eight verses that are in the Torah. Samuel wrote his book and Judges and Ruth. David wrote the Book of Psalms at the hands of ten elders: Adam, Melkizedek, Abraham, Moses, Heman, Yedutun, Asaph, and the three sons of Koraḥ. Jeremiah wrote his book and the Book of Kings and Lamentations. Hezekiah and his entourage wrote Isaiah, Proverbs, the Song of Songs, and Ecclesiastes. The men of the great assembly Ezekiel, the Twelve Prophets, Daniel and the scroll of Esther. Ezra wrote his book and the genealogy of Chronicles up to himself. . . . ​And who took it upon himself [to finish it]? Nehemiah. Journal for the Study of Religions and Ideologies 13.39 (2014): 3–44. For a recent exception to this trend, see Mroczek’s reading of b. Bava Batra 14b in light of other late antique conceptions of biblical authorship in Literary Imagination, 70.

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“Joshua wrote his book?” But it is written [in the Book of Joshua], “Joshua ben Nun, servant of God, died” (Josh 24:29). This is the work of Eleazar. But it is [also] written, “Eleazar b. Aaron died” (Josh 24:33). This was the work of Pinḥas. “Samuel wrote his book?” But it is written [in the Book of Samuel], “Samuel died” (1 Sam 25:1). This is the work of the Gad the Seer and Nathan the Prophet . . .  If you say Moses wrote his book and the portion of Balaam and Job, this would seem to support the claim of R. Levi b. Laḥma who said that Job was from the time of Moses . . . [Proof texts omitted.] But on the basis of such literary proof, I might equally say he was from the time of Isaac . . . [Proof texts omitted] . . . ​Or it might be from the days of Jacob . . . ​Or the days of Joseph . . . ​One of the rabbis who was studying with R. Samuel b. Naḥmani said to him, “Job didn’t exist [lit: he never was and never was created], he was just a parable.” [R. Samuel] said to him “It says in scripture, ‘A man was in the Land of Uz, Job was his name’ (Job 1:1) [which implies he was a historical figure].” “But if so,” [his student answered, the same could be said of the statement]: ‘But the poor man had only one small ewe lamb which he had bought and raised’ (2 Sam 12:3) and we know this is a parable for certain [from its narrative context]. Just as this is a parable, so that is a parable.” [R. Samuel responded] “But if so, why are we told his name and the name of his city?” [And yet, to return to the previous discussion, do we really know who Job was or where he was from?] R. Yohanan and R. Elazar used to say Job was one of the exiles that returned from Babylon and founded a study house in Tiberias. Some countered that [this account could not be true because] Job lived during the time of the Egyptian exile . . . ​ Still others objected that [this account could not be true because Job was a gentile from among the] seven prophets that prophesied to the gentiles . . . ​ R. Eliezer used to teach that Job was in the time of the judges . . . ​R. Joshua b. Korḥa said Job was from the days of Ahaseurus. [And so forth.]7 Counter to the message sometimes attributed to this passage in modern scholarship, b. Bava Batra 14b–15b clearly does not paint a picture of the Hebrew Bible as a series of pristine revealed texts with one minor textual aberration. On the contrary, this passage undercuts on several fronts a vision of the Hebrew Bible as a series of cleanly delineated prophecies meticulously transcribed by their recipients. At the most basic level, the passage suggests that numerous biblical books were not “written” by the individual to whom they are attributed. Such a claim could be read in two ways, and I would suggest that both readings receive indirect support on b. Bava Batra 14b–15b. The most

7 Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.

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radical reading of this suggestion of multiple or unknown authors reduces the biblical books of Isaiah, Proverbs, Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes, and Ezekiel to pseudepigraphy. That is, one could argue that when the Talmud says that “Hezekiah and his entourage wrote . . . ​the Song of Songs,” it means to suggest that the text’s own claim that it “belongs to Solomon” is a rhetorical fiction and that the work is actually the invention of a much later king and his royal scribes. Interestingly, the recent work of Eva Mroczek and Jacqueline Vayntrub on the rhetoric of attribution in Second Temple and earlier biblical literature suggests that this “radical” reading of the statement would actually represent a point of conservative continuity with older conceptions of biblical authorship and pseudepigraphic attribution.8 The possibility that the biblical works in question are pseudepigraphy is given imaginative space in this passage by the origins that are ascribed to the Book of Job. By identifying Moses as the author of Job and imagining the book to be set in a wide variety of distant lands and remote historical periods, the passage would seem to render the composition of Job suspiciously close to the writing of fiction. Or as an anonymous sage said in the idiom of late antiquity: “Job never was and he was not a real person [lit: he was not created] but rather he was a parable” (b. Bava Batra 15a). While many of the writer-prophet pairings in this passage leave open the possibility that the essential contents of a given work were transmitted from the purported recipient to its historical inscriber, b. Bava Batra 15a–15b’s ever-changing, ever-negated, and ever-more-exotic account of the setting of the Book of Job opens up the radical possibility that at least one ancient author composed a biblical text set in an imagined literary landscape – either in a future period or in a time and place very distant from his own. This potent example of a (potentially) fictionalized biblical text opens up the possibility that even those biblical works attributed to more historically plausible prophet-author pairs were also fictionalized in some way. The fact that this imaginative fiction is attributed to Moses, moreover, subtly raises questions concerning the nature of the Mosaic Pentateuch. Even the most conservative reading of the claim that many biblical traditions were written down by historical figures other than their original recipients

8 On what this sort of pseudepigraphical attribution might have meant to early rabbinic thinkers, see Mroczek’s discussion of the pseudepigraphical attribution of the Book of Psalms on b. Bava Batra 14b and Song of Songs Rabbah 4:4 in Literary Imagination, 69–70. On Second Temple and late antique understandings of pseudepigraphical attribution in biblical texts more generally, see Mroczek, Literary Imagination, 52–85. On the function of such ascriptions in biblical literature itself, see Jacqueline Vayntrub, “The Book of Proverbs and the Idea of Ancient Israelite Education,” Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 128/1 (2016): 96–114, especially 105–15, and Jacqueline Vayntrub, “Before Authorship: Solomon and Proverbs 1:1,” in Biblical Interpretation (forthcoming).

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undermines any possibility of imagining the biblical text as a direct prophetic transcription, as the traditions collected here pointedly divorce the prophetic recipient of a given biblical tradition from the written form of his revelation. In some cases, the alienation is merely institutional, as when Hezekiah’s court collects and orders the pronouncements of a contemporary, the prophet Isaiah. In other cases, however, the prophet in question is long-dead before his book is written. According to the passage from b. Bava Batra, for instance, the prophet Ezekiel was separated from the committee of men who “wrote the Book of Ezekiel” by at least fifty tumultuous years marked by military losses and national displacement. In this case, and the others like it, one cannot help but wonder what changes the prophetic tradition incurred before being put to paper by its scribal redactors. This second reading of the tradition (seen as a statement about the exigencies of scribal redaction) finds implicit support in the emphasis on collective authorship that emerges elsewhere in the passage. Read as a separate assertion, the claim that Joshua finished the Book of Deuteronomy after the death of Moses does not imply a general claim concerning the nature of biblical composition. Because, however, this assertion is positioned as the first of many instances of an earlier biblical work being completed by one or more additional authors – or even put to parchment in committee by multiple religious leaders working together – a more general portrait of biblical authorship does begins to emerge.9 If Joshua added a portion to Moses’s book and Joshua’s own book was then added to first by Eleazar and then by Pinchas, and so on through the generations, we are left with a portrait of biblical composition as a progressive and collective project – an endeavor in which each generation completed the work of the previous generation, and individual contributions were transformed by the redactional activities of later recipients. As Eva Mroczek highlights in The Literary Imagination in Jewish Antiquity, this vision of collective biblical authorship is given a particularly stark expression on b. Bava Batra 14b’s account of the Book of Psalms.10 Here we are told that David “wrote the Book of Psalms at the hand of ten elders.” That is, this passage maintains that David produced the Book of Psalms as we know it by drawing together the work of ten ancient sages with his own work in a single composition. The final textual product can thus be said to have been written simultaneously by David and “at the hands” of those who composed the ancient materials with which he worked. Like the works described in the previous 9 As in the case of Hezekiah’s entourage or the scribal partnership of Gad and Nathan. 10 For a slightly different account of the rabbinic understanding of the multivocality of Psalms and the problem of Davidic authorship that contextualizes that account in a wider late antique literary culture, see Mroczek, Literary Imagination, 69–70.

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paragraph, the Book of Psalms is thus imagined as a collective product, a “book spoken by many mouths,” as Eva Mroczek puts it, quoting from Song of Songs Rabbah 4:4.11 I would argue, moreover, that this account of the Book of Psalms is positioned in the passage to reverberate through the broader discussion of biblical authorship inspired by Deuteronomy 34 to represent the Hebrew Bible as a whole, and possibly even the Pentateuch itself, as a sacred “book spoken by many mouths.”

“It was also given by [Ezra], language and script”: t. Sanhedrin 4:7 on the Authorship of a Redactor12 B. Bava Batra 14b–15b destabilizes the assertion that “a prophet like Moses never arose again in Israel” by painting a picture of gradual and collective biblical composition. Other early rabbinic traditions make resistance to the idea of prophetic capsulation more explicit by declaring that other major figures in the biblical project held a revelatory status similar to Moses. One series of early rabbinic traditions preserved on t. Sanhedrin 4:7, y. Megillah 1:9, and b. Sanhedrin 21b–22a, for instance, portray Ezra as a second Moses: Ezra was worthy that the Torah should have been given at his hand, if it hadn’t been that Moses preceded him. [For we see that] it was said concerning Moses “going up” and it was said concerning Ezra “going up.” It was said concerning Moses, “going up” [Exod 19:3]: “And Moses went up to God [on Mount Sinai].” And it was said concerning Ezra “going up” [Ezra 7:6]: “Ezra himself went up from Babylon.” [Actually] just as in connection with Moses the phrase “going up” means that he taught Torah to Israel (as we see in the verse, “and at that moment, God commanded me to teach you” [Deut 4:5]), so in connection with Ezra the phrase “going up” means that he taught Torah to Israel (As we see in the verse, “at which point, Ezra prepared his memory [lit.: his heart] to expound the Torah of God and to make and to teach in Israel statutes and laws” [Ezra 7:10]). For it13 was also given by Ezra [lit: at his hands], language and script. As it is said “The writing of the message was Aramaic script and its interpretation was Aramaic” (Ezra 4:7). What does mean, “Its interpretation was Aramaic?” That the writing [of Ezra’s text] was Aramaic. And it says, “They could not read the writing” 11 Mroczek, Literary Imagination, 69. 12 The sources discussed in this section are read slightly differently in Rebecca Scharbach Wollenberg, “The Book that Changed: Tales of Ezra Authorship as a Form of Late Antique Biblical Criticism,” Journal of Biblical Literature 138.1 (2019), 143–60.” 13 Using the masculine pronoun here to echo the grammar of the preceding quotation.

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(Dan 5:8) – which teaches that [this writing] was only given [to them] on that very day, as it is written, “He shall write for himself this mishneh torah” (Deut 17:18). [Mishneh Torah means] a Torah that is destined to change (‫)לשתנות‬. Why is it called ‘Aramaic’ [Ashuri]? Because it came back with them from [the exile in] Babylon [here: Ashur]. Rabbi [Judah the Prince] says: [This is not quite true.] The Torah was [originally] given to Israel in Aramaic writing but when they sinned its language changed for them. Then when they repented in the days of Ezra, it returned for them to Aramaic writing. As it is said, “Return to the stronghold, (prisoners of hope, lo today I tell you I will restore to you a double-change [mishneh]).” (Zech 9:12) (t. Sanh. 4:7; Zuckermandel 421–22) This tradition is sometimes seen in modern scholarship as stating that Ezra was a supreme interpreter of the Mosaic Torah.14 That is, this passage is read as a parallel to traditions from the Babylonian Talmud that compare the inspired insight of various early rabbinic sages to that of Moses.15 I would suggest, however, that this passage is better read as a refraction of a slightly earlier set of late antique traditions which center on Ezra and his relationship to the Torah of Moses. That is, I would propose that this passage should be read as a response to a strain of late antique anti-Christian, inner-Christian, and anti-Jewish polemic that claimed it was Ezra rather than Moses who inscribed the Pentateuch as we know it.16 As Porphyry of Tyre (3rd c. CE) purportedly remarked, for instance, in his (now lost) work Against the Christians: 14 In one frequently cited passage Hava Lazarus-Yafeh, in Intertwined Worlds: Medieval Islam and Bible Criticism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 59, characterized a parallel tradition in b. Sanhedrin 21b as an “extravagant expression of admiration for Ezra.” See also Lizbeth Fried, Ezra and the Law in History and Tradition (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2004), 142–43 and the works cited there. A famous exception to this trend is offered by David Weiss Halivni, Revelation Restored: Divine Writ and Critical Response (New York, NY: Avalon Publishing, 1997), who argued that the Babylonian Talmud’s version of this passage represented “some memory of the consolidation of the Pentateuch in the return from exile” (16). 15 See, for instance, Menachem Kellner’s discussion of this phenomenon in Maimonides on the “Decline of Generations” and the Nature of Rabbinic Authority (Albany: State University of New York, 2012), 7–26. 16 On which, see, for instance, Willian Adler, “The Jews as Falsifiers: Charges of Tendentious Emendation in Anti-Jewish Christian Polemic,” in Translation of Scripture: Proceedings of a Conference at the Annenberg Research Institute. Jewish Quarterly Review Supplement (1990), 1–27; Lizbeth Fried, Ezra and the Law, 118–47; Hava Lazarus-Yafeh, Intertwined Worlds, 50–74, and Gabriel Said Reynolds, “On the Qur’anic Accusation of Scriptural Falsification (tahrif) and Christian Anti-Jewish Polemic,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 130.2 (2010): 189–202.

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Nothing Moses wrote has been preserved for all his writings are said to have been burnt with the temple. All those written under his name afterwards were composed inaccurately (συνεγράφη)17 one thousand one hundred and eighty years after Moses’ death by Ezra and his followers.18 According to such accounts, the text of the Mosaic Pentateuch had been lost to the ravages of war and this irretrievable loss had been covered up with a pseudepigraphic forgery. In such traditions, Ezra is thus identified as a second Moses in a negative way. That is, Ezra is imagined as a false Moses – a forger of Mosaic prophecy. Some early Christian authors would respond to this attack on the extant text of the Hebrew Bible with a narrative that bore a marked resemblance to t. Sanhedrin 4:7. These authors countered that Ezra did indeed restore the text of the Pentateuch (and other biblical books) after the destruction of the First Temple, but maintained that the scribe performed his restorative work under the influence of divine inspiration. Irenaeus (2nd c. CE), for instance, is remembered as suggesting: During the captivity of the people under Nebuchadnezzar the Scriptures had been ruined by corruption (διαφθαρεισῶν; corruptis) . . . ​But when seventy years later the Jews had returned to their own land in the times of Artaxerxes, king of Persia, Ezra the priest of the tribe of Levi was inspired (ἐνέπνευσεν; inspiravit) to order in his mind (ἀνατάξασθαι; rememorare) all the words of the former prophets and to reestablish (ἀποκαταστῆσαι; restituere) the Mosaic legislation (μωσέως νομοθεσίαν; legem quae data est per Moysem) for the people.19 Like their opponents, the early Christian authors of such Ezra traditions understood textual degradation and loss as a very real threat to sacred writings. Even inspired texts could be corrupted by the ravages of history and the passing of time. In the view of these later authors, however, the problem of textual degradation was not insurmountable, as these authors maintained that an “inspired” scribe could do much to restore corrupted prophecies to their 17 Here, it seems, the translator understands the term’s emphasis on composing from scratch and working collectively [composing a new entity and working together with others] to represent a description of an all-too-human process resembling forgery. 18 Frag. 465e as reproduced in Macarius Magnes, Apokritikos 3.3. Quoted here as translated in Robert M. Berchman, trans., Porphyry Against the Christians (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 198. Greek interpolations are taken from Makarios Magnes, Apokritikos: Kritische Ausgabe mit deutscher Uebersetzung, ed. Ulrich Volp (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013), 108. 19 Ireneaus, Against Heresies, 3.21.2, translation my own. Greek and Latin taken from Sancti Irenaei episcopi Lugdunensis Libros quinque adversus haereses, ed. William Vigan Harvey, (Typis Academicis: 1857), 2.114.

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former glory. The resulting text would never be identical to the original revelation (that iteration of revelation had in some sense been irretrievably “ruined” when it was corrupted). But the restored revelation would maintain the same basic identity as the lost work. Like a famous painting that has been touched up by a trained restorer, Ezra’s reissued revelation could still be identified as “the Mosaic legislation.” These early Christian authors did not understand sacrality to dissipate in the face of textual degradation. Instead, a restored text was thought to bear the fingerprints of two moments of divine revelation – the vestiges of the original prophetic revelation and the revelatory scribal “inspiration” that guided its reconstruction. In the face of such inspired restoration, thinkers who embraced this vision of textual restoration could thus remark with Jerome (4th–5th c. CE) that “it doesn’t much matter [lit: I don’t object (non recuso)] whether you want to call Moses the ‘author’ (auctorem) of the Pentateuch or Ezra its ‘restorer’ (instauratorem).”20 According to this account of biblical authorship, Moses and Ezra had each bestowed an inspired sacred text upon Israel in his own way – the Pentateuchal revelation had essentially been given twice. The fact that these two moments of biblical revelation had survived as a single extant text does not seem to have bothered proponents of this history.21 Like the authors of b. Bava Batra 14b–15a, they appear to have accepted the collective authorship of the biblical writings in their own hands. Read in this light, t. Sanhedrin 4:7 emerges as a reflection on the status of scribal redaction and rewriting. Like the accounts of the most strident anti-biblical proponents described above, the passage’s first description of Ezra’s activities suggests that Ezra wrote the Pentateuch (and other biblical books) anew. When t. Sanhedrin 4:7 opens by asking what it means that the biblical text describes Ezra’s work using phrases that echo the process of Mosaic revelation, the passage answers: this pattern reflects the reality that “[The Torah] was also given at [Ezra’s] hands, language and script” – that is, in its entirety. According to this account, Ezra “gave” the biblical tradition not only in a new “writing” (that is, a new textual form) but even in a new “language” – a phrase that may denote a foreign language,22 but was used with equal frequency in 20 Jerome, De perpetua virginitate B. Mariae adversus Helvidium. Patrologia Latina, vol. 23 col. 190A. Whether this treatise was actually authored by Jerome is uncertain. 21 For an extended analysis of how such a cultural logic might work, see Raymond F. Person, “Self-­Referential Phrases in Deuteronomy: A Reassessment Based on Recent Studies Concerning Scribal Performance and Memory,” in Identity, Memory, and Scribalism: The Deuteronomistic History and Its Context, ed. Johannes Unsok Ro (London: T & T Clark, forthcoming). 22 After the composition of the early medieval Aramaic targums (Bible translations), it can be tempting to imbue this version of the statement with a very limited sense, as an etiology of those translations. By linking this tale to the Aramaic portions of Daniel, however, t. Sanhedrin

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the early rabbinic lexicon to describe a change in the spoken language (that is, the basic meaning) of language.23 Nor is this radical account of Ezra’s scribal project necessarily defused in the remainder of the passage, which vacillates linguistically between the more substantive claim that “the language [of the Pentateuch] changed for them” and the more limited suggestion that “the writing” changed. Unlike the philosophical and Christian authors discussed above, however, t. Sanhedrin 4:7 does not present this particular narrative as an uncontested account of Ezra’s editorial activities. Like their contemporaries, each of the early rabbinic opinions collected in this passage appears to accept the basic principle that sacred text is vulnerable to the vicissitudes of time and history. As t. Sanhedrin 4:7 puts it, the Pentateuch was a text “that was destined to change.” Precisely how and why this happened, however, is left a matter of debate. One possibility advanced by the passage is that the biblical text “changed its language” during the years of disloyalty to the Hebrew tradition that preceded the destruction of the First Temple. (That is, when the people “sinned” before the first exile.) According to this account, as in the Christian narratives cited above, Ezra’s new edition of the Pentateuch represented a form of scribal



4:7 implicitly associates Ezra’s rewriting project with a more unsettling intersection of Hebrew and Aramaic in the biblical tradition: the jagged edges left in the biblical text by the inclusion of Aramaic passages in the books of Ezra, Daniel, and elsewhere. In this version of the story (elaborated in the Babylonian Talmud’s version of the tradition), these suggestive editorial fractures in the biblical text are refigured as vestiges of an ancient scribal project in which Ezra produced a second version of the biblical text. According to this account, the shards of Ezra’s project are visible in the imperial square script of the extant Hebrew text and in the small portions of Ezra’s Aramaic edition which still jut up here and there through the surface of the extant Hebrew text because later transmitters of the biblical text would pick and choose among the textual editions available to them. As the Babylonian Talmud’s continuation of this passage makes explicit: “In the beginning, the Torah was given to Israel in Hebrew writing and the Holy Language, then it was given to them again in the days of Ezra in Assyrian script and Aramaic language. [In the end] Israel chose for themselves Assyrian script and the Holy Language and they left the Hebrew writing (‫ )רועץ‬and the Aramaic language for the lay folks. Who are the lay folks? Rav Ḥisda said: they are the Samaritans (‫)כותאי‬. What is Hebrew script? Rav Ḥisda said it is “brick writing” (‫[ )כתב ליבונאה‬i.e., the writing of the ostracons].” 23 y. Megillah 1:11, for instance, moves back and forth between these two meanings: “Only four languages are suitable for use and these are: Greek for song, Latin for battle, Syriac for ululating, and Hebrew for the spoken word. And there are some who say also Assyrian for writing. Assyrian has a written manifestation (‫ )כתב‬but it doesn’t have a spoken language (‫)לשון‬. Hebrew has a spoken language but it doesn’t have a written manifestation. [Thus,] they chose for themselves Assyrian writing and Hebrew spoken language . . . ​The Torah was given its writing (‫ )כתב‬and spoken language (‫ )לשון‬at the hands of Ezra.” This radical account of Ezra’s scribal project is not defused in the remainder of the passage, which vacillates linguistically between the more substantive claim that “the language [of the Pentateuch] changed for them” and the more limited suggestion that “the writing” changed.

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housekeeping – an attempt to return the biblical text to its original state after a period of neglect and degradation. In the words of t. Sanhedrin 4:7, this scenario describes a “double change,” in which the biblical text first moved away from its original form and then back again. Elsewhere in the passage it is suggested that the biblical language changed around the period of the Babylonian exile. According to this second explanation, the people became sufficiently assimilated to the surrounding culture during their time in Babylon (called here Ashur) that Ezra reworked the Pentateuch to bring it in line with the majority culture’s imperial writing conventions (identified here using the metonymy of the imperial Aramaic square script, Ashurit). As the linguistic echoing between the terminology of Ashur and Ashurit emphasize, this account identifies changes in the biblical tradition with the cultural assimilations that arise in shifting historical and linguistic circumstances. Whatever the exact nature of Ezra’s intervention in the biblical text, the passage suggests that Ezra’s scribal project conferred on him the status of a second Moses, for the formulators of this passage insist that, in some sense, Ezra also gave the Torah. What this might mean is interestingly complicated by the description of the parallels between Moses and Ezra that is offered at the beginning of the passage. Here the identity between the original Moses and the second Moses is portrayed as one of analogy rather than equation. We are told, for instance, that where Moses went “up” to receive inspiration at Sinai, Ezra went “up” by returning to the homeland. Whereas Moses gave the people a Torah by relaying what “God had commanded Moses to teach,” Ezra gave the people a Torah by drawing on his “memory” to “make and teach” the law. The first line of the passage encapsulates this imperfect identity between Ezra and Moses: Ezra was as “worthy” of revelation as Moses but “Moses preceded him.” In other words, Ezra could never be a legislative prophet like Moses because the Sinaitic legislation had already been given. However, as an inspired editor and restorer of Torah, Ezra could be a scribe as Moses was a prophet – as the supreme example of his own craft and an inspired revealer of Torah in his own way. To adapt the phrasing of b. Rosh Hashanah 21b (analyzed below), “among the prophets no one [like Moses] arose . . . ​but among the [scribes] one did.”

“Among the prophets no one [like Moses] arose . . . ​but among the kings one did”: b. Rosh Hashanah 21b and the Solomonic Contribution to the Pentateuch Once one recognizes such early rabbinic passages as descriptions of a form of collective or progressive biblical authorship, other early rabbinic traditions

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begin to emerge as possible examples of this train of thought as well. Many readers will be familiar with an early rabbinic statement cited with some frequency in medieval Jewish literature: “[What does it mean] ‘No prophet like Moses arose again in Israel?’” [It means] [no prophet like Moses] arose in Israel but among the nations of the world one did arise. Who was this? Balaam.” (Sifrei Deuteronomy, Zot HaBrakha 357) Rather than reading Deuteronomy 34:10 as declaration that no more prophets arose of Moses’s stature, this tradition reads the verse as a declaration that no more prophets arose of Moses’s type. Israel would never receive another Sinaitic revelation, but prophets of an equivalent stature would emerge in other communities – speaking God’s message in a different way. I propose that we can read similarly-worded rabbinic traditions about Solomon as an expression of this same exegetical principle. Consider, for instance, the following discussion on b. Rosh Hashanah 21b: R. Abahu said, “Scripture says, ‘the sayings of God are pure, silver smelt in a furnace on the earth, refined seven times.’” (Ps 12:7 [English 12:6]). R. Shmuel [commented on this statement saying]: “One has said [on this question],24 ‘Fifty gates of insight were created in the world, and all but one [lit: lacking one] of them were given to Moses,’ as it says in scripture, He lacked little from God. [Thus, we learn that when] ‘Solomon the Collector [Heb: Kohelet]25 sought to find words of delight’ (Eccl 12:10), Solomon the Collector sought to be like Moses. [But] a heavenly voice called out and said to him [the rest of the verse]: [you already have] ‘upright writing and words of truth’ [in the Pentateuch] (Eccl 12:10) and ‘a prophet like Moses will not arise in Israel again’” (Deut 34:10). But another has said on this question: “[It says only] [another like Moses] will not arise ‘among the prophets’ (Deut 34:10). [One like Moses] did arise among the kings [in Solomon].” This passage interprets Psalms 12:7 as a proposition that the biblical revelation (“the sayings of God”) has undergone several iterations (been “refined seven times”) in its earthly history (“smelt in a furnace on the earth”). What this might mean is explored in relation to Solomon, who is remembered along with Ezra as having “again taught knowledge to the people” (Eccl 12:9) – a phrase



24 I interpolate this retrospective phrase because the terminology ‫ חד אמר‬is used so frequently referring to a previous portion of the discussion. 25 Translated here in light of Ecclesiastes 1:1 and Ecclesiastes 12:9.

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adapted in the traditions discussed in the previous section to describe various modes of “giving the Torah” throughout Jewish history. Two apparently contradictory reactions to the notion of progressive revelation are outlined on b. Rosh Hashanah 21b in the form of opinions ascribed to two anonymous sages. The first sage interprets the biblical statement that Solomon “sought to discover words of delight” (Eccl 12:10) to mean that Solomon sought “to be [a prophet] like Moses” and produce a new biblical revelation to rival the Pentateuch. Like Ezra in the previous tradition, however, Solomon is denied this honor on the grounds that virtually all of the revealed wisdom in the world had already been vouchsafed to Moses26 and recorded in his “upright writings and words of truth” (Eccl 12:10). A “prophet like Moses will never arise in Israel again” (Deut 34:10), the first sage reasons, on the simple grounds that God has (almost) nothing new left to give. Whatever the Psalmist meant, this first sage argues, it was certainly not that major revelations would be repeated throughout Jewish history. The second sage imagined in this passage denies the notion that Moses had a monopoly on sacred knowledge. In keeping with the exegetical tradition advanced in the passage from Sifre Deuteronomy quoted above, this second sage argues that Deuteronomy 34:10 should be read as a limiting statement that no other prophet with Moses’s role would arise again. However, he suggests, other types of divine representatives would arise in Israel who would equal Moses in revelatory stature. As the Talmud expresses this idea, a prophet like Moses “would not arise ‘among the prophets’ (Deut 34:10), but among the kings one did arise.” How each of these two schools of thought would imagine the history of biblical composition is not immediately clear. If we leave aside the opening line of the passage, perhaps the simplest reading of the dispute between these two sages is that the first sage would not elevate the biblical books attributed to Solomon to a level equal to the Mosaic revelation while the second sage identified at least some of these works (perhaps the Song of Songs) as revealed truths on par with the Pentateuch – if very different from it in form and substance. That is, this passage might be read as a dispute over a radical version of Rabbi Akiva’s famous statement, “all the sacred writings are holy but [Solomon’s] Song of Songs is the holy of holies” (m. Yadayim 3:5).27 If we trace the motifs in this passage through other early rabbinic traditions, 26 As the passage puts it in the idiom of its historical period, “Fifty gates of insight were created in the world, and all but one of them were given to Moses.” 27 For more on a radical reading of m. Yadayim 3:5, see Marc Hirschman, Rivalry of Genius: Jewish and Christian Biblical Interpretation in Late Antiquity (Albany: State University of New York, 2012), 83.

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however, a more complex reading of this passage begins to emerge. For much like the Ezra figure imagined in the previous section, Solomon is described in classical rabbinic traditions as rendering the Pentateuch comprehensible in a new way. In the words of the refrain from Song of Songs Rabbah 1.1.8, “Until Solomon arose, no person could understand words of Torah (‫)להשכיל דברי תורה‬. But after Solomon everyone began to discern its meaning.” Thanks to the work of David Stern and Daniel Boyarin, many readers will be familiar with a reading of this tradition that suggested the Solomonic writings provided a hermeneutic key to the Pentateuch – allowing the meaning of the Pentateuchal text to be revealed fully for the first time.28 However, the phrase ‫ להשכיל דברי תורה‬can also be interpreted another way, according to which the refrain means “until Solomon, no person could complete the utterances of the Torah.” This second reading of the phrase evokes another, lesser-known, facet of this early rabbinic Solomon tradition. According to this version, Solomon added the recitation melody that gave the undifferentiated consonantal text a fixed phrasing and punctuation. As b. Eruvin 21b explicates: What does it mean “Solomon the Collector was not only wise but also taught knowledge to the people and he gave ear, and researched, and fixed many proverbs?” (Eccl 12:9)? [The phrase] “He taught knowledge to the people” [means] that he completed the accentuation-punctuation marks [for liturgical recitation] and clarified what should be assimilated to what. [Regarding the phrase] “He gave ear [‫]אזן‬, researched, and fixed many parables,” Ulla said in the name of R. Eliezer: “In the beginning, the Torah was like a basket that didn’t have handles [literally: ears (‫])אזנים‬, until Solomon came and made handles for it [‫]אזנים‬. In other words, this passage suggests that Solomon had a hand in giving the Pentateuch its final shape by belatedly adding an indispensable facet of the biblical tradition. For until the oral-aural (‫ )אזן‬tradition of recitation phrasing had been revealed, the passage claims, the Mosaic text was virtually unusable – a basket without handles [literally: ears] (‫)אזנים‬, as the Talmud puns.29 Much like Ezra in the passages discussed above, Solomon is thus imagined here as a (secondary) co-author of the biblical text – exerting an inspired influence on the shape of the biblical text as it would be conveyed to posterity. If we read b. Rosh Hashanah 21b in light of traditions such as b. Eruvin 21b, 28 David Stern, Parables in Midrash: Narrative and Exegesis in Rabbinic Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 63–67; Daniel Boyarin, Sparks of Logos: Essays in Rabbinic Hermeneutics (Leiden: Brill: 2003), 91–106. 29 For a series of similar metaphors concerning the illegibility of the Mosaic Pentateuch, see Song of Songs Rabbah 1.1.8.

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the two apparently contradictory positions given voice in the passage resolve into a progressive argument that defines a theory of collective revelation in connection with Solomon. According to this reading of the passage, b. Rosh Hashanah 21b opens by introducing a claim attributed to Psalms 12:7: the notion that the Pentateuchal revelation was refined repeatedly throughout human history. This principle is then explored in connection with Solomon (who has been chosen, presumably, because of his unparalleled status as a representative of human wisdom in texts such as 1 Kgs 4:31). The first speaker on b. Rosh Hashanah 21b opens the reflection by clarifying that whatever Solomon contributed to the biblical tradition, it was not another revelation of the same type as that produced by Moses. As the passage puts it in the narrative idiom of early rabbinic literature: Solomon was denied the privilege of producing another Pentateuch because there was simply no more raw material left to reveal in his lifetime – forty-nine of the fifty gates of wisdom had already been opened to Moses. In support of this claim, the first speaker cites Deuteronomy 34:10, “A prophet like Moses would not arise in Israel again.” In response to this opening gambit, the second speaker proffers an exegetical clarification – explaining that Deuteronomy 34:10 only limited the type of prophet that could arise in the future, not the stature of that prophet. For Moses’s equal would arise “among the kings.” The second speaker suggests that Solomon was allowed to participate in the process of revelation but in a different mode than Moses. That is, Solomon would contribute to the revelation as a “king” (a latter-day leader in Israel) rather than as a legislative “prophet.” Or to elaborate this notion in light of b. Eruvin 21a, Solomon was allowed to complete the Mosaic revelation by introducing a tradition of phrasing and punctuation – giving the Pentateuchal revelation a new shape that would render its raw form useable to the people in a way that the naked revelation of Moses had not been. In this sense, the Solomon of b. Rosh Hashanah 21b, like the Ezra of b. Sanhedrin 4:7, functions as a co-author of the rabbinic Pentateuch.

Concluding Remarks In the early rabbinic exegetical traditions analyzed in this essay, Deuteronomy 34:10 is understood to reflect Moses’s unique historical position as the original revealer of the sacred legislation – a historical role that could never be duplicated. As b. Bava Batra 15a adapts the biblical verse to apply to Moses, “he reserved the first portion for himself since the legislator’s portion was there” (Deut 33:21). Or, as t. Sanhedrin 4:7 expresses this idea in temporal terms, other prophets might have merited to give the Sinaitic revelation but “Moses preceded [them].” As b. Rosh Hashanah 21b explains, “Fifty gates of insight were created in the world and all but one was given to Moses [for the Sinaitic revelation].”

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The early rabbinic thinkers cited here do not, however, appear to have understood Deuteronomy 34:10 as a statement that Pentateuchal revelation was finished and closed upon the death of Moses. All the traditions analyzed here express a conviction that the Pentateuchal tradition continued to change and develop (however subtly) throughout the sacred history of Israel. As t. Sanhedrin 4:7 puts it, the “Torah was destined to change” (‫)תורה עתידה להשתנות‬. Or as b. Rosh Hashanah 21b adapts the verse from Psalms: “the sayings of God . . . ​ are silver smelt in a furnace on the earth, refined seven times” (Ps 12:7). Read in light of these parallel traditions, even b. Bava Batra 15a’s pithy statement “‫אשתנו‬ ‫( ”אשתנו‬translated above as “however [these verses] came to differ, they differ”) could be interpreted to mean “however they changed, they changed.” For these early rabbinic thinkers, Deuteronomy 34:10 was not a statement of prophetic decline but of prophetic change. If Moses was destined to bequeath the raw sacred materials of revelation to the world, other inspired figures would arise who would shape (and reshape) these materials into the biblical tradition as we know it. For as t. Sanhedrin 4:7, Song of Songs Rabbah 1.1.8, and b. Eruvin 21b each explain in different ways, the Mosaic revelation was all but incomprehensible to the people in its original form. Only with the additions and refinements of later wise men and scribes did the Mosaic revelation acquire a shape in which “everyone began to discern its meaning” (Song of Songs Rabbah 1.1.8). Certainly, these inspired scribes and seers would have participated in the biblical revelation in a different capacity than the original legislator. B. Rosh Hashanah 21a expresses this distinction in terms of social position: “a prophet like Moses would not arise among the prophets, but among the kings one did arise.” And yet, like Moses, these later contributors were understood to have participated on some essential level in the giving of the Pentateuch to the people of Israel. As t. Sanhedrin 4:7 phrases this conviction, “[The Pentateuch] was also given at [Ezra’s] hands.”

“ A Prophet Like Moses”? What Can We Know About the Early Jewish Responses to Muḥammad’s Claims of Mosesness? Shari L. Lowin Stonehill College

While Islam echoes the Jewish characterization and adoration of Moses as God’s messenger, interlocutor (al-kalīm), and right-hand man, Islam rejects the Jewish teachings regarding Moses’s everlasting prophetic uniqueness. For Islam, Moses was matched by a subsequent prophet whose life paralleled his but was ultimately exceeded by him: Muḥammad. This study analyzes the nature of the Jewish reaction to the Muslim claim of Muḥammad’s superiority over Moses. The analysis opens with a discussion of Jewish polemics against Muhammad in the early Islamic era. Problematically, these polemics are preserved only in the Islamic sources themselves, specifically in the writings of Ibn Hishām and al-Wāqidī. As these are non-contemporaneous to Muḥammad’s lifetime, their historicity remains highly questionable. The analysis then compares these early Jewish responses to later medieval Jewish writings on Muḥammad’s Mosesness, as found in the writings of Maimonides, Samaw’al al-Maghribi, Netanel ibn al-Fayyumi, Daniel al-Qumisi, Maimonides, Ibn Kammuna and Ibn Adret. Intriguingly, we find that the ways in which the (possibly) contemporary Jews are reported to have reacted to Muḥammad – recognizing him as predicted in Jewish tradition, rejecting him for not measuring up to Moses, or mocking him outright – are the same categories of reaction found in the medieval sources. This finding suggests that, contrary to scholarship that denies any historical value to the early Islamic texts, perhaps the Muslim depiction of the early Jewish response was in fact rooted in some historical truth. And perhaps we can thus know more about the Jews who interacted with Muḥammad than was earlier thought.

A widely recognized teaching of Judaism regarding prophecy is the idea that never again will there arise a prophet like Moses. This notion traces back to the very last verses of the books of Moses, Deuteronomy 34:10–12. After Moses’s death, the narrator steps in and states, “Never since has there arisen a prophet in Israel like Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face. He was unequaled for all the signs and wonders that the Lord sent him to perform in the land of

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Egypt . . . ​and for all the mighty deeds and all the terrifying displays of power that Moses performed in the sight of all Israel.”1 This teaching took on a more official character in the medieval period when Maimonides (d. 1204) included it as one of his thirteen fundamental principles of Judaism. Principle #7 asserts that Jews are to believe that Moses “was the chief of all other prophets before and after him, all of whom were his inferiors.”2 For those Jews who lived in the realm of Islam such insistence on Moses’s uniqueness and superiority was not a teaching that went unchallenged. On the one hand, Islam echoed the Jewish characterization and adoration of Moses as God’s messenger and His right-hand man. At the same time, however, Islam insisted that not only was Moses matched by a subsequent prophet, whose life and role paralleled his, but one who surpassed him. This, of course, was the prophet of Islam, Muḥammad b. ‘Abdallāh. While there is a fair amount of scholarship on the medieval and pre-modern Jewish conceptions of Muḥammad and his claims to prophecy,3 far less work has investigated the thoughts and reactions of the Jews among whom Muḥammad actually lived. How did the Jews of Arabia at the time of Muḥammad react to such assertions? Were they convinced by such claims? Did they engage in any polemics? Did they simply stay silent and mind their own business? Scholars have generally maintained that because of a lack of historical sources, we can know little about Jewish reactions to Muḥammad in his own time. However, if we compare the information we do have, information from the Islamic tradition itself, to the reactions of medieval Jews, we may just find we know more than originally thought.





1 All Bible citations are from The New Oxford Annotated Bible (4th ed.), ed. Michael D. Coogan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 2 The Thirteen Principles appear in Maimonides’ Introduction to Perek Ḥelek (an introduction to the Mishna Sanhedrin, ch. 10). English translation from Isadore Twersky, A Maimonides Reader (Springfield, NJ: Behrman House, 1972), 419. For a discussion of these principles, see Marc Shapiro, “Maimonides’ Thirteen Principles: The Last Word in Jewish Theology?” The Torah U-Madda Journal, vol. 4 (1993): 187–242. 3 For example, Reuven Firestone, “The Prophet Muhammad in Pre-Modern Jewish Literatures,” in The Image of the Prophet between Ideal and Ideology, ed. Christiane Gruber and Avinoam Shalem (Boston; Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2014), 27–44; Reuben Ahroni, “Some Yemenite Jewish Attitudes towards Muhammad’s Prophethood,” Hebrew Union College Annual 69 (1998): 49–98; Norman Solomon, “Muhammad from a Jewish Perspective,” in Abraham’s Children: Jews, Christians, and Muslims in Conversation, ed. Norman Solomon, Richard Harries, and Tim Winter (London: T &T Clark, 2005), 132–43; Haggai Ben-Shammai, “The Attitude of Some Early Karaites Toward Islam,” in Studies in Medieval Jewish History and Literature, ed. Isadore Twersky (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 3–40; and Norman Roth, Jews, Visigoths and Muslims in Medieval Spain: Cooperation and Conflict (Leiden: Brill, 1995), esp. 205–34.

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Islamic Teachings on Moses’s Prophecy Before one can discuss contemporaneous Jewish reactions to the Muslim claim of Muḥammad’s Mosesness, one must first get a sense of the Islamic teachings on both Moses and Muḥammad. Of all the biblical prophets to appear in the Qur’ān, Moses appears most frequently, and his life is related in the greatest detail.4 Qur’ānic narratives begin with Moses’s birth and stretch across his life, recounting his experiences in Egypt fighting Pharaoh, leading the Israelites, and speaking with God, with most of the stories familiar to readers of the Bible, at least in their broad strokes. Other less biblically-familiar Qur’ānic narratives expand on Moses’s character, such as in an account of his travels with an unnamed servant of God (Q 18:60–82).5 This narrative attention is not surprising given the Qur’ān’s characterization of Moses as bearing a unique status not shared with other prophets. Q 4:163–4 reports that God gave revelation (awḥiya) to a number of prophets and messengers before Muḥammad, including Noah, Abraham, Ishmael, Isaac, Jacob, the tribes, Jesus, Job, Jonah, Aaron, Solomon, and David, as well as to others who are unnamed. However, as the verse states, “wa-kallama Allāhu Mūsā takliman,” “unto Moses God spoke directly.”6 The Qur’ān does not explain whether this means that God spoke to Moses while he was awake, and not in a dream, or through an angelic intermediary. What is clear is that Moses’s communication with God was more intimate and connected than that of any other prophet, seemingly including Muḥammad. Islamic tradition thus bestows upon Moses the high status and singular title, kalīm Allāh (God’s interlocutor).7 Yet despite the insistence on Moses’s inimitability and unique closeness to







4 The name Mūsā appears 136 times. The next closest is Ibrāhīm (Abraham) at sixty-nine mentions. Muḥammad appears only four times, which is not surprising considering that the Qur’ān is directed to him and is not about him. 5 These stories are expanded upon and discussed at great length in the Qur’ān commentaries, the ḥadīth collections, and the Stories of the Prophets literature. See Brannon Wheeler, Moses in the Quran and Islamic Exegesis (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2002), ch. 1. 6 Similarly, in Q 7:144 God declares that His speaking with Moses signifies His preference for Moses over other humans. “O Moses!” says God, “Verily I have chosen thee above mankind through my messages (bi-risālātī) and My speaking (wa-bi-kalāmī) [unto thee].” Q 2:253 appears to refer to Moses though without naming him outright: “Those are the messengers. We have favored some above others. Among them are those to whom God spoke (minhum man kallama Allāh) and some He raised up in ranks . . . ” The Arabic can also be translated in the singular, as “the one with whom God spoke.” Cf. Exod 33:11. Unless otherwise noted, all Qur’ān translations are taken from The Study Quran: A New Translation and Commentary, ed. Seyyed Hossein Nasr (New York: HarperOne, 2015). 7 Only two other Qur’ānic prophets are given honorific titles in the Qur’ān. Abraham is al-khalīl or khalīl Allāh (God’s friend, Q 4:165) and Jesus is referred to as al-masīḥ (the messiah, Q 5:75).

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God, the Qur’ān simultaneously asserts there is no distinction between any of God’s various prophets. All are equal, with Moses no better than any other. In Q 2:136, for example, God (or the angel Gabriel) instructs Muḥammad to say, “We believe in God, and in that which was sent down to us, and in that which was sent down unto Abraham, Ishmael, Isaac, Jacob, and the Tribes, and in what Moses and Jesus were given, and in what the prophets (al-nabiyyūn) were given from their Lord. We make no distinction among any of them, and unto Him we submit.”8 Similarly, in Q 33:7 God reminds Muḥammad that while He has made a covenant (mīthāq) with Muḥammad, He made the same covenant with any number of prophets. The verse singles out Noah, Abraham, Jesus, and Moses, thereby establishing a measure of equality between them. Other verses downgrade Moses’s uniqueness in relation to one prophet alone – Muḥammad – and they do so by comparing Moses and Muḥammad’s revelations as recorded in the Qur’ān. In Q 46:10 God commands Muḥammad to lay out what sounds like an early version of Pascal’s Wager to those who refuse to believe in him and accuse him of forging the Qur’ān. Muḥammad, God instructs, is to say to those disbelievers, “Have you considered if it is from God and you disbelieve in it, though a witness from the Children of Israel bore witness to the like thereof (ʿala mithlihi), then believed in it, while you waxed arrogant? Surely God guides not wrongdoing people.” Islamic tradition understands the “witness from the Children of Israel” as Moses. According to the Qur’ānic verse, then, God instructs Muḥammad to warn his detractors that the earlier and most esteemed prophet, Moses, already testified that Muḥammad’s revelation is equivalent to his own (a possible reference to Deut 18:18). It would therefore be unwise not to believe in him and his prophecy.9 Not only is Muḥammad’s revelation similar to Moses’s according to this verse, so too Muḥammad himself resembles Moses. The grammar of the verse allows for two readings of what Moses testifies to: either to the fact that Muḥammad’s revelation resembles his own, or to the notion that the later Arabian prophet resembles the earlier Israelite. Muslim readers understood both ideas at work; Moses testifies not only that Muḥammad’s revelations are like his own, he also acknowledges that the man himself is his equivalent. Muḥammad therefore should be followed and respected as Moses was. Other Qur’ānic verses go one step further, indicating that Muḥammad surpasses Moses. Q 7: 157 teaches, “those who follow the Messenger (al-rasūl), the ummī prophet,10 whom they find inscribed in the Torah and the Gospel

8 Similar comparisons appear in Q 42:13, 33:7. 9 See also Q 46:2–30, in which even the jinn testify that Muḥammad succeeds Moses and that his book confirms Moses’s prophecies. 10 How one should understand this phrase has led to some controversy. Some insist the Qur’ān

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that is with them, who enjoins upon them what is right, and forbids them what is wrong . . . ​Thus those who believe in him, honor him, help him, and follow the light that has been sent down with him; it is they who shall prosper.” The terms “ummī prophet” and “rasūl” refer to Muḥammad who, the Qur’ān here reveals, is foretold in Moses’s (and Jesus’s) earlier revelation.11 But Muḥammad is not presented here simply as Moses’s Arab equivalent, sent to the Arabs alone. Rather, the verse maintains that the ones who will prosper are those who recognize Muḥammad as mentioned in their scripture – meaning Jews and Christians. If they follow him, and not the earlier revelation-bringing prophets of their own traditions, they will prosper. Such doubled assertions regarding Muḥammad’s prophetic nature made their way into the ḥadīth texts as well. One stream which presents Muḥammad as Moses’s equal relates that an unnamed Jew complained to Muḥammad after a Muslim slapped him across the face. Muḥammad questioned both parties and learned that the fracas began when the Jew swore aloud, “By Him Who gave Moses superiority over all the people!” Insulted on behalf of his prophet, the Muslim slapped the Jew and swore, “By Him Who gave Muḥammad superiority over all people!” Rather than rule in favor of the Muslim, as one might expect, Muḥammad cautioned his followers never to attribute superiority to one prophet over another. On the Day of Resurrection, he explained, all people will fall unconscious before God and he, Muḥammad, will be the first to regain consciousness. When he does, he acknowledged, he will find Moses already standing and holding onto one of the legs of the divine throne. Yet Muḥammad will not be able to tell whether Moses had simply recovered first or if God had allowed Moses to remain conscious throughout the experience.12 Thus it is intends that Muḥammad was illiterate, a claim that defends Muḥammad against charges of having borrowed from earlier religious traditions. Indeed, The Study Qur’an uses the word “unlettered.” Others maintain that ummī means “of the people,” i.e., Muḥammad was not a foreigner but an Arab prophet for the Arabs. Yet others have translated the term as “gentile,” meaning not Jewish (though predicted in the Torah). See Sebastian Günther, “Muḥammad, the Illiterate Prophet: An Islamic Creed in the Qur’ān and Qur’ānic Exegesis,” Journal of Qur’ānic Studies, vol. 4, no. 1 (2002): 1–26; Uri Rubin, The Eye of the Beholder: The Life of Muḥammad as Told by the Early Muslims (Princeton, NJ: The Darwin Press, 1995), 23–28. 11 Other verses likewise insist that Muḥammad is foretold in the Bible. See for example Q 61:6, where Jesus is said to have prophesied about this to his fellow Jews. 12 For example, in Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī, ed. and trans. Muḥammad Muḥsin Khān (Beirut: Dār al-­ ʿArabiyya, 1985), v. 3, bk. 41, nos. 594, 595. In Ibn Hishām, the altercation takes place in the Jewish House of Study; Abū Bakr slaps a rabbi named Finḥāṣ for having declared that Allah is poor and humbled compared to the Jews (see Q 3:181). See Ibn Hishām, The Life of Muḥammad: A Translation of Ibn Isḥāq’s “Sīrat Rasūl Allāh,” ed. and trans. Alfred Guillaume (Pakistan Branch: Oxford University Press, 1955), 263, Arabic in Ibn Hishām, “Kitāb Sīrat Rasūl Allāh.” Das Leben Muhammad’s nach Muhammad ibn Ishâk bearbeitet von Abd el-Malik ibn Hischâm, ed. Ferdinand

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better, cautions Muḥammad, not to make any claims about the superiority of one prophet over another. Nonetheless, a conflicting ḥadīth records Muḥammad doing precisely this – declaring himself to be above Moses. According to Sunan al-Dārimī, ‘Umar b. al-Khaṭṭāb once brought a copy of the Torah before Muḥammad. Surprisingly, Muḥammad had no reaction. ‘Umar then began reading. As he did, Muḥammad’s face became angrier and angrier. ‘Umar noticed, stopped, apologized, and immediately declared fealty to God, Islam, and to Muḥammad as God’s prophet. Muḥammad chastisingly responded, “By the One in Whose hand is Muḥammad’s soul, if Moses appeared to you (now) and you followed him and abandoned me, you would thus stray from the right path into error.” If declaring that following the laws of Moses was equivalent to straying from the path of God weren’t a strong enough statement of his own supremacy, Muḥammad then added, “And if he [Moses] were alive and became aware of my prophethood, he would follow me.”13

Early Jewish Reactions to Muḥammad Unfortunately, if there were ever any historical or literary sources from the seventh-century Jews of Arabia, namely the Jews of Medina and Khaybar, which could provide insight into the Jewish reaction to such claims of Muḥammad’s “Mosesness,” none have survived. As Robert Hoyland wrote, “the seventh and eighth centuries remain woefully deficient in sources for Jewish history.”14 Contemporaneous Jewish sources from Babylonia or the land of Israel likewise Wüstenfeld (Göttingen: Dieterischsche Universitäts-Buchhandlung, 1860), 388–89. References to both will be used throughout, with Guillaume’s page number followed by Wüstenfeld’s in brackets. 13 ʿAbdallāh ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Dārimī (d. 869), Musnad al-Dārimī al-maʿarūf bi-sunan al-Dārimī, ed. Ḥusayn Salīm Asad (Riyad: Dār al-Mughnī lil-nashr wa-l-tawazīʿ, 1420 [c. 2000]), vol. 1, 403 (#449). Although the sunnah collection of al-Dārimī (d. 869 CE) is considered one of the nine authentic collections, there is much about this report that is puzzling. Most basically, neither Muḥammad nor ʿUmar are said to have understood Hebrew, and the first translation of the Torah into Arabic, as far as we know, was made by Sa’adia Gaon (d. 942 CE). Other sources explain that ʿUmar had asked a Jew from the Banū Qurayẓa to copy down summary chapters of the Torah, presumably in Arabic. Interestingly, in other reports Muḥammad permits his followers to read both the Qur’ān and the Torah with no objection. See M. J. Kister, “Ḥaddithū ʿan banī isrā’īla wa-lā ḥaraja: A Study of an Early Tradition,” Israel Oriental Society 2 (1972): 215–39, esp. n. 151; Camilla Adang, Muslim Writers on Judaism and the Hebrew Bible: From Ibn Rabban to Ibn Hazm (Leiden: Brill, 1996), 6–8. 14 Hoyland, Seeing Islam as Others Saw It: A Survey and Evaluation of Christian, Jewish, and Zoroastrian Writings on Early Islam (Princeton, NJ: The Darwin Press, 1997), 238. One should not think that there was a complete dearth of Jewish scholarship in this period, as Hoyland points out. Rather, Jews produced works on the Hebrew language, liturgical poetry, legal and

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make no mention of either the Arabian prophet or the abysmal fate of the Arabian Jews with whom he came into contact. Our earliest (and only) contemporary sources for the Jews’ reactions to the rise of Muḥammad and to their interactions with him come from the Islamic materials themselves.

In the Qur’ān The earliest of the Muslim sources to report on Jewish reactions to Muḥammad remains the Qur’ān itself which, according to Muslim tradition, dates to Muḥammad’s lifetime. Scholars have supported this assessment to varying degrees. In Muhammad and the Jews of Medina, A. J. Wensinck maintains that the Qur’ān, a document that “has been spared manipulation,” reflects the actual words of Muḥammad.15 He calls the Qur’ān, “the most important mirror of Muḥammad’s psychology and the sensitive document which reflects nearly all moods and events in his life.”16 Although subsequent scholars are somewhat less strident regarding the lack of “manipulation” of the Qur’ānic text, many support Wensinck’s view of the Qur’ān as testifying to the historical reality in which Muḥammad lived.17 More recent scholars have generally not viewed the Qur’ān as completely co-terminus with Muḥammad; nonetheless, they have generally assigned the Qur’ān a relatively early closure date. On the earlier end of the spectrum, Fred Donner dates the closing of the Qur’ān to around 666 CE, only thirty-four years after Muḥammad’s death.18 While such an early date should give us a fairly good window onto the Jews’ reactions to Muḥammad’s claims, problematically, the Qur’ānic references to Jews are neither clear nor consistent. Perhaps the most famous allusion to the Jews in the Qur’ān is as ahl al-kitāb, “People of the Book.” Perplexingly, however, the term often refers also to Christians and, moreover, it is not always clear when eschatological literature, and midrash. However, none of this provides us with good historical insight into the goings on of the Jewish community at the rise of Islam vis-à-vis Islam. 15 Muhammad and the Jews of Medina, ed. and trans. Wolfgang Behn (Freiburg im Breisgau: Klaus Schwarz Verlag, 1975), 72. 16 Behn, trans., Muhammad and the Jews, 47. 17 For example, Reuven Firestone maintains that the references in the Qur’ān, the commentaries, the ḥadīth, and the biographical materials on Muḥammad do point to historical Jewish attempts at satirizing Muḥammad during his lifetime, even if the details are unclear. See his “The Failure of a Jewish Program of Public Satire in the Squares of Medina,” Judaism 46, 4 (1997): 449. 18 Fred M. Donner, Narratives of Islamic Origins: The Beginnings of Islamic Historical Writing (Princeton, NJ: The Darwin Press, 1998), 35–63. Carlos Segovia has recently argued that some of the portions of the Qur’ān may be as late as the reign of the Marwanid caliph al-Walīd (r. 705–715 CE). See his “A Messianic Controversy Behind the Making of Muḥammad as the Last Prophet?” Paper presented at the 4th Nangeroni Meeting of the Enoch Seminar/1st Nangeroni Meeting of the Early Islamic Studies Seminar, Milan. June 15–19, 2015 (esp. p. 22).

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the phrase designates one community, or the other, or both together. Moshe Sharon has posited that term may refer to a particular sect of Jews with a messianic doctrine.19 The Qur’ān also uses the appellation “banū isrā’īl,” which many understand as a reference to biblical Jews (the Children of Israel). Wensinck, however, maintains these are the Medinian Jews Muḥammad encountered.20 Adding to the confusion, “banū isrā’īl” sometimes also includes Christians.21 In addition, the Qur’ān also speaks of Jews as “al-Yahūd” (2:120) and more frequently as “alladhīna hādū” (those who profess Judaism).22 While these terms do mostly appear to indicate the Medinian Jews, that precise designation is never mentioned outright in the Qur’ān itself. Given the variety of terms by which the Jews are known, it can be a difficult task to obtain a clear and full picture of their interaction with or responses to Muḥammad. Even with a clearer usage of terminology, the Qur’ān would still be a problematic source for accurate historical information. More frequently than not, the Qur’ān alludes to the historical event behind a given account or statement only in generalities. Muslim sources known as asbab al-nuzūl literature (“occasions of revelation”) arose in an attempt to link revelations to historical events. Yet sources sometimes disagree as to the reason a particular verse was revealed and, more frequently, on the details of the particular “occasion.”23 As Michael Cook wrote, “Identifying what the Koran is talking about in a contemporary context is therefore usually impossible without interpretation.”24 Andrew Rippin echoed this sentiment when he wrote that in no sense can the Qur’ān be assumed to be a primary historical source for Muḥammad’s life and that “its shifting referents leave the text a conceptual muddle for historical purposes.”25 Thus, while the Qur’ān certainly contains references to and reports about actual historical events, identifying these with any certainty frequently proves impossible.

In the Sīrā More detailed and contextualized information about the Jews and their response to Muḥammad can be found in the classical sīrā compilations – traditions and historical reports that were collected into biographies of Muḥammad. The earliest of these to survive in a mostly complete form, and which will supply 19 Encyclopaedia of the Qur’ān, ed. Jane Dammen McAuliffe (Leiden: Brill, 2001–2006), s. v. “People of the Book,” by Moshe Sharon. 20 Wensinck, 31. 21 Encyclopaedia of the Qur’ān, s. v. “Children of Israel” and “Jews and Judaism,” by Uri Rubin. 22 See Wensinck, 31. 23 Encyclopaedia of the Qurʾān, s. v. “Occasions of Revelation,” by Andrew Rippin. 24 Michael Cook, Muhammad (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 70. 25 Andrew Rippin, “Muḥammad in the Qur’ān: Reading Scripture in the 21st Century,” in The Biography of Muḥammad: The Issue of the Sources, ed. Harald Motzki (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 307.

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the majority of our information here, comes from the Muslim historian Muḥammad b. Isḥāq (704–768 CE), and was later edited by his student, Ibn Hishām (d. 833). Ibn Isḥāq’s work will be supplemented somewhat by the only slightly later Kitāb al-Maghāzī of al-Wāqidī (Medina, 727–823 CE), which focuses on Muḥammad’s life after his move to Medina.26 As we will see, the reaction of the Jews to Muḥammad as presented in these biographical materials falls largely into three categories: recognition based on Jewish knowledge; negative comparisons of Muḥammad to Moses; and outright mockery. Recognition Not surprisingly, since the Qur’ān claims that Muḥammad is the prophet whose arrival was predicted in the Hebrew Bible (in Q 7:157, for example), the sīrā frequently describes the Jews locating their predictions of Muḥammad’s arrival in Jewish religious texts and teaching.27 Interestingly, the sīrā does not detail or identify the sources, scriptural or otherwise, that form the basis of the Jews’ knowledge on the topic.28 Many of these forecasts are said to have taken place around the time of Muḥammad’s birth or election. However, in at least one instance presented in the sīrā the Jews begin their predictions as much as a century in advance. Ibn Isḥāq attributes the conversion to Judaism of the early fifth-century king (Tubbaʿ) of Ḥimyar (Yemen) to the “hidden knowledge” of two rabbis from the Jewish Banū Qurayẓa tribe.29 When the king began fighting against Yathrīb (Medina), these two rabbis revealed to him that a prophet 26 See al-Wāqidī, The Life of Muḥammad: Al-Wāqidī’s Kitāb al-Maghāzī, ed. Rizwi Faizer (London and New York: Routledge, 2011). According to Rippin and Faizer in the Introduction, since Ibn Isḥāq’s text was later edited by Ibn Hishām, a younger contemporary of al-Wāqidī, the latter’s text might be seen as the earlier one when looking at material on the last ten years of Muḥammad’s life. However, Ibn Isḥāq’s text was the more popular one in its day. 27 The exact biblical source however is never given. See for example Ibn Hishām, 90 [130]. On the Muslim claims of the biblical annunciation of Muḥammad, see Hava Lazarus-Yafeh, Intertwined Worlds: Medieval Islam and Bible Criticism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 75–110; Rubin, The Eye of the Beholder, 21–43. 28 While the classical Islamic sources insist that the Jews’ reactions to Muḥammad and his claims are based on Jewish scripture, the Islamic sources do not name or cite from any particular Jewish source; instead, the classical Islamic sources simply insist this is the case without referring to anything specific. Locating the claims attributed to the Medinian Jews in actual Jewish sources happens only much later, in the medieval period. This will be discussed further on. 29 Medina boasted three main tribes of Jews: Banū Naḍīr, Banū Qaynuqā’, Banū Qurayẓa. As is evident in the Constitution of Medina, smaller Jewish tribes or clans also seem to have resided in and around Medina. On the Jewish tribes of Medina, see the entries in Encyclopedia of Jews in the Islamic World, ed. Norman Stillman (Leiden: Brill, 2010), s. v. “Banū Naḍīr,” “Banū Qaynuqāʿ,” and “Banū Qurayẓa,” by Shari L. Lowin. For a discussion of the different Jews involved in the Constitution of Medina, see Moshe Gil, “The Constitution of Medina: A Reconsideration,” Israel Oriental Studies 4 (1974): 44–65; Michael Lecker, The Constitution of Medina: Muhammad’s First

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from the Quraysh would in the future establish his home in the city; for that reason, they insisted, the king should not destroy it.30 Chronologically closer to Muḥammad’s arrival is the experience of Ḥassān b. Thābit, an early convert to Islam from the Medinian Arab Banū Khazraj tribe. Ḥassān related that when he was seven or eight years old, he heard a Jew calling out to the rest of the Jews from the top of a fort in Yathrīb.31 Eventually the Jews gathered and asked the yelling Jew what it was that was animating him so. He replied, “Tonight has risen a star under which Aḥmad is to be born.”32 Since Aḥmad, according to Muslim tradition, is an alternate name for the prophet Muḥammad,33 the Jew was thus clearly predicting the birth of God’s final prophet. The Jewish recognition of Muḥammad’s arrival, as reported in the Islamic tradition, was not all academic. According to the sīrā, a fair number of Jews were convinced by what they saw in their scriptures – though the sīra does not identify these verses – and joined Muḥammad’s new faith as a result. This was the case with the wealthy date-­owning Medinian Jew Mukhayriq of the Banū Thaʿlaba, a man whom Muḥammad called “the best of the Jews.” According to Ibn Isḥāq, Mukhayriq was a rabbi of great learning, and came to understand Muḥammad as the one he believed to be predicted in the Jewish scriptures.34 Later, when the Battle of Uhud broke out between the Muslims and the Meccan pagans in 625 CE, the Jews, though allies of the Muslims, refused to fight on the Sabbath. So great was Mukhariq’s commitment to his new faith that not only did he fight, he also died in battle for Muḥammad that day, having first deeded his property to his new prophet. While it is not clear whether Mukhayriq ever formally converted to Islam, Ibn Isḥāq elsewhere describes Mukhayriq as a “rabbi who became a Muslim.”35 Legal Document (Princeton, NJ: Darwin Press, 2004); Uri Rubin, “Constitution of Medina: Some Notes,” Studia Islamica, 62 (1985): 5–23. 30 Ibn Hishām, 7 [13–14]. See also Lecker, “The Conversion of Himyar to Judaism and the Jewish Banū Hadl of Medina,” Die Welt des Orients, 26 (1995): 129–36. 31 The Jews of Yathrīb (Medina) owned various fort-storehouses. 32 Ibn Hishām, 70 [102]. 33 This account clearly references Jesus’s prediction in Q 61:6 of a prophet to come after him named Aḥmad. In a number of ḥadīth reports Muḥammad informs his followers of the different names by which he is known, with Muḥammad always first and Aḥmad second, as in Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī, vol. 4, bk. 56, n. 732. On the connection between Aḥmad, Muḥammad, and the paraclete in the New Testament, see Geoffrey Parrinder, Jesus in the Qur’ān (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 96–100; Sean W. Anthony, “Muḥammad, Menaḥem, and the Paraclete: New Light on Ibn Isḥāq’s Arabic Version of John 15:23–16,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 79.2 (2016): 255–78; Rubin, The Eye of the Beholder, 22–23. 34 Ibn Hisham, 241 [354]. According to other sources, Mukhayriq was either of the Banū Naḍīr or Banū Qaynuqāʿ. Again, the sīrā does not explain in what sources Mukhayriq read any such predictions; instead, the sīrā simply insists that he did. 35 Ibn Hishām, 239 [351]. Al-Wāqidī never mentions any conversion outright. See al-Wāqidī, 128

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A similar conversion based on the teachings of Judaism is said to have occurred with three prominent members of another group of Medinian Jews, the Banū Qurayẓa. According to an unnamed shaykh of the Banū Qurayẓa, years before the arrival of Islam a Syrian Jew named Ibn Hayyabān moved to Medina and established residence there, impressing people with his piety. At the end of Ibn Hayyabān’s life, he explained his seemingly illogical move out of fertile Syria to the desert of Arabia; he was, he related, expecting the emergence of a prophet whose time had come. He wanted to follow this prophet and knew the prophet would migrate to Medina. Sadly, Ibn Hayyabān did not live to see that happen. However, when Muḥammad later besieged the Banū Qurayẓa, three Qurayẓa brothers recalled the pious and erudite Ibn Hayyabān’s words and reminded the other Jews of them. A fair number of Jews, including the three brothers, agreed that Muḥammad fit Ibn Hayyabān’s prophetic description and became Muslims.36 In some cases, relates the sīrā, Jews converted to Islam because they recognized Mosesness in Muḥammad. So we find in the case of the famed ʿAbdallāh ibn Salām of the Jewish Banū Qaynuqāʿ, a “learned rabbi” in Medina and one of the earliest Jewish converts to Islam. ʿAbdallāh explained that from the first time he heard of Muḥammad – his description,37 name, and the predicted timing of his arrival – he knew that Muḥammad was the one for whom the Jews were waiting. ʿAbdallāh was working in a palm tree38 when he heard the news that Muḥammad had arrived, and called out “Allāhu Akbar [God is greatest]!” His aunt, sitting below, remarked that ʿAbdallāh could not have made more fuss if he had just heard that Moses himself had arrived. ʿAbdallāh replied, “Indeed, Aunt, he [Muḥammad] is the brother of Moses and follows his religion, being sent with the same mission.” Convinced by the new Moses-like apostle, ʿAbdallāh went straight to Muḥammad and became a Muslim, and ordered his family to do the same.39 [262–63], 185 [377]. Other writers attach Mukhayriq to different Jewish tribes. See Wensinck, 26 n. 12. 36 Ibn Hisham, 94–55 [135–36]. The account relates that not all the Jews converted. Many simply denied that Muḥammad was the prophet of whom Ibn Hayyabān spoke. 37 Wensinck, 40–41. In the recension of Ibn Isḥāq by Ibn Bukayr, Kaʿb al-Aḥbār explains that the Bible describes Muḥammad as the one who “is not crude nor cross, and he does not raise his voice in the streets. He has been entrusted with the keys, that by him God may make blind eyes see, and deaf ears hear, and stammering tongues speak rightly, that they may testify that there is no God but Allāh . . . ” Compare this to Isa 42:2. See Ibn Bukayr 141–42, as cited and translated by Rubin in The Eye of the Beholder, 30 (f. 42). See also A. Guillaume, “New Light on the Life of Muḥammad,” Journal of Semitic Studies, monograph 1 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1960), 32. 38 The Jews of Medina owned date palm groves. 39 Ibn Hishām, 240–41 [353].

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But not all cases of Jewish prediction went so well for the new prophet. More frequently, the sīrā reports that Jews knew that a Mosaic prophet would arrive shortly but denied that Muḥammad was he. One report attesting to such behavior comes from ʿĀṣim b. ʿUmar b. Qatāda of the Medinian Banū Khazraj, an Arab client tribe of the Jewish Banū Qaynuqāʿ. ʿĀṣim explained that they used to hear from the Jews that a new prophet was on the horizon. Now the Jews, ʿĀṣim recalled, had knowledge of God’s revelation which gave them information that others could not access. When Muḥammad subsequently arrived in town, the Khazraj rushed to join him. The Jews who had predicted him, relates the sīrā, denied him.40 In a similar account, Salama b. Salāma b. Waqsh reports that a Jewish neighbor one day regaled the Arab tribe among whom he lived with a description of the end of times, Judgement Day, and the resurrection of the dead – information he accessed from Judaism. When the Arabs asked for a sign confirming that all he described was going to materialize, the Jew waved in the direction of Mecca and Yemen and said, “A prophet will come from the direction of this land.” When Muḥammad arrived in Medina barely twenty-four hours later, the formerly pagan Arabs accepted him and his prophetic claims right away. The Jew who had accurately predicted Muḥammad’s arrival denied that Muḥammad was the man of whom he spoke.41 Other Jews, as reported in the Islamic sources, did not simply deny Muḥammad, they chose to actively fight against him even though they admitted he was the scripturally predicted prophet of God. So related Ṣafīyya, daughter of the leader of the Jewish Banū Naḍīr tribe and eventual wife of Muḥammad. According to Ṣafīyya, when she was a child, her father Ḥuyyay and her uncle Abū Yāsir went to meet with Muḥammad after his arrival in Medina. When they returned, they were so devitalized that when she, their favorite child, came out to greet them they took no notice of her. She overheard her uncle ask her father if he recognized the man they had just met as “the one,” i.e., the predicted one. Ḥuyyay answered in the affirmative. Abū Yāsir then asked his brother how he felt about this. Although Ḥuyyay had already confirmed that Muḥammad was the predicted prophet of God, he answered, “By God, I shall be his enemy as long as I live!”42 Negative Comparisons to Moses and His Law While according to the Islamic sources some Jews rejected Muḥammad despite having found him mentioned in Jewish scripture and religious teachings, others 40 Ibn Hishām, 93 [134]. Cf p. 197 [286–87]. 41 Ibn Hisham, 93–94 [135]. 42 Ibn Hishām, 241–42 [354–55].

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rejected him precisely because they could find no mention of him in these sources at all. Sukayn and ʿAdīy b. Zayd of the Jewish Banū Qaynuqāʿ replied to Muḥammad’s call to follow him by saying this outright. “We do not know,” they retorted, “of God’s having sent down to mortals anything after Moses.”43 Rāfiʿ b. Ḥuraymila of the Banū Qaynuqāʿ and Wahb b. Yahūdhā of the Banū Qurayẓa, both Jewish tribes, maintained that to the best of their knowledge not only has there been no subsequent divinely revealed book after Moses but there has also been no divinely sent herald (bashīr) or warner (nadhīr).44 Abū Ṣalūbā al-Fiṭyūnī45 similarly rejected Muḥammad because, he said, not only was what Muḥammad brought completely unrecognizable to the Jews, but God had not sent the Jews any sign that they were to follow him.46 Nor, noted Mālik b. al-Ṣayf, did God make a covenant with the Jews regarding Muḥammad, as He had with previous prophets whom they did follow.47 Al-Wāqidī notes a similar reaction on the part of Khaybar’s Jews. When the Muslims attempted to get them to surrender, the Jews called out, “We will not act or leave the covenant of Moses and the Torah that is among us!”48 As these reports show, the Jews used their traditions by and about Moses as a measuring stick against which Muḥammad fell short. Some Jews denied Muḥammad’s claims out of an understanding that prophecy belongs to the Jews alone. As an Arab, Muḥammad could not therefore possibly be a prophet, especially not one like Moses. Thus, when the rabbi ʿAbdallāh b. Salām converted to Islam, a band of leading Jews from the three major Jewish tribes refused to join him. They were willing to recognize Muḥammad as a political ruler, they said. But, they insisted, he could not be a prophet because there was no such thing as prophecy among the Arabs.49 This claim 43 Ibn Hishām, 265 [392]. 44 Ibn Hishām, 266 [393]. 45 Presumably, based on his name, he is of the Banū Thaʿlaba b. al-Fiṭyūn, a possible sub-group of the Jewish Banū Naḍīr. 46 Despite what the Jews above claim. Ibn Hishām, 257 [379]. 47 Ibn Hishām, 257 [379]. According to this tradition, God did make a covenant with them but they set it aside. See Q 2:100 and Ibn Hishām, 268 [397]. Regarding the Islamic claim about a divine covenant with Muḥammad, see above, p. 230. 48 Al-Wāqidī, 321 [653]. 49 Ibn Hishām, 270 [400]. See also Kināna b. al-Rabī‘ of the Banū Naḍīr calling Muḥammad mālik al-Ḥijāz (the king of the Hijaz), 515 [763]. The Jews were not the only ones to refer to Muḥammad as king rather than prophet. Christian sources from the 7th century do so as well. See Robert Hoyland, “The Earliest Christian Writings on Muḥammad: An Appraisal,” in The Biography of Muḥammad, 282. Ella Landau-Tasseron found that later Muslims rejected the prophethood of a pre-Islamic prophet named Khālid b. Sinān for a similar reason: he was a Bedouin and Bedouins could not be prophets. See her “Unearthing a Pre-Islamic Arabian Prophet,” Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 21 (1997): 45.

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appears even among Jews who believed that Muḥammad’s claim to prophecy was authentic. Ibn Isḥāq reports that “the rabbis” knew that Muḥammad was God’s chosen apostle. However, because he was chosen from the Arabs, and not from among the Jews, they were full of envy, animosity, and meanness, and therefore refused to follow the new Arab prophet.50 According to Ibn Isḥāq, sometimes the Jewish rejection entailed testing Muḥammad’s claims of being like Moses by testing his familiarity with Mosaic law. After all, explained a group of leading Medinian Jews, if Muḥammad were a true instrument of divine revelation, he would know the laws as set out in the previous revelation. They determined to ask him to rule in a case in which a Jewish man and woman had been caught committing adultery. If he ruled according to the Torah’s teachings, they said among themselves, they would know he was a prophet.51 If not, they would accept him as king only. Muḥammad ruled that the punishment for adultery was stoning, which ʿAbdallāh b. Ṣūriyā, the most Torah-learned of the Jews, conceded was in accordance with Torah law. Yet even though Muḥammad ruled correctly, ʿAbdallāh refused to follow him.52 In an alternate version of this episode, after Muḥammad issued his verdict he called for a Torah scroll to be brought in order to prove the accuracy of his ruling. A rabbi began reading the appropriate passage but placed his hand over the stoning verse to hide it. ʿAbdallāh b. Salām, the rabbinic convert to Islam from the Banū Qurayẓa, struck the rabbi’s hand. He then informed Muḥammad that the rabbi was covering up the verse so the Jews would not have to admit to Muḥammad’s accurate verdict and thus to his prophetic status.53 Jews also rejected Muḥammad’s prophetic claims because they found him in violation of specific Mosaic laws, notes the Islamic tradition. After all, they could not follow a prophet who claimed to be like Moses yet violated the divine word revealed through Moses. According to a number of Islamic sources, Jews were particularly up in arms about Muḥammad permitting his followers to consume camel meat and camel milk; these items, they explained, had been 50 Ibn Hishām, 239 [351]. 51 Ibn Isḥāq attributes this part of the account to Ibn Shihāb al-Zuhrī (d. 741/2), one of the earliest of sīrā compilers. See Ibn Hishām 266 [393–94]. 52 Ibn Hishām, 266–67 [393–95]. Despite the sīrā’s claim, the Bible does not mandate stoning for adultery. It does not specify what the punishment is, beyond the fact that the couple are to be put to death. See Lev 20:10 and Deut 22:22. According to the Babylonian Talmud (6th century CE), all unspecified death penalties in the Torah are to be understood as strangulation. See Babylonian Talmud (Vilna: Ram Publishers, 1927), Sanhedrin 52b. Stoning is prescribed for the couple when a man is caught having sexual intercourse with a virgin who is betrothed – though not yet married – to another man. See Deut 22:24. 53 Ibn Hishām, 684 [1014].

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prohibited for consumption since the time of Adam and are prohibited by Moses’s Torah.54 Ibn Isḥāq alludes to this Jewish stance when he writes of Muḥammad’s aunt requesting that Muḥammad spare the life of Rifā’a al-Quraẓī, a Jewish family friend, because he had already agreed to eat camel meat.55 In other words, he had already rejected Moses’s laws and embraced Islam. Other Jews rejected Muḥammad for having changed the direction of prayer (qibla) from Jerusalem to Mecca.56 Although the Torah does not command praying in a particular direction, praying in the direction of Jerusalem is a well-established Jewish practice.57 Sometimes the Jewish problem with Muḥammad is presented as resting not on the content of his revelations but on the stylistic differences between his Qur’ān and Moses’s Torah. Five men from the Jewish Banū Qaynuqāʿ, possibly rabbis, approached Muḥammad and asked him if it was true that his revelation came from God. After all, they said, they could see that it is arranged as is the Torah, the word of God. Muḥammad replied that they knew quite well that the Qur’ān was from God, since their own Torah testified to this truth and neither men nor jinn could produce a work like it. This response appears to have been a misstep on Muḥammad’s part. As soon as he uttered it, other Jews standing nearby immediately accused him of having heard such a claim from precisely men and jinn.58 Mockery and Satire Not all Jews took such a serious approach in their rejection of Muḥammad. Many reports in the Islamic sources describe the Jews reacting as Jews often have when a post-biblical prophet arises in whom they place no faith: they embarked upon a policy of mockery. One well-known mocker was the leader of the Jewish Banū Naḍīr tribe, Kaʿ  b al-Ashraf. He not only sided with the enemy 54 Lev 11:1–4 vs. Q 22:36. See Brannon M. Wheeler, “Israel and the Torah of Muḥammad,” in Bible and Qur’ān: Essays in Scriptural Intertextuality, ed. John C. Reeves (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 73. 55 Ibn Hishām, 466 [692]. Muḥammad acquiesced to the request. 56 Ibn Hishām, 258–59 [381], 269 [398–89] (“How can we follow you when you have abandoned our qibla?”). 57 Interestingly, the Jews here do not claim Muḥammad is violating a Torah law. Rather, they specifically call their direction of prayer part of the “religion of Abraham.” Maimonides (1138–1204 CE) also credits Abraham with establishing Jerusalem as the direction of prayer. See Maimonides, Moreh ha-Nevukhim, ed. and trans. into Hebrew by Joseph Kapaḥ (Jerusalem: Mossad HaRav Kook, 1977), part 3, ch. 45. English in Moses Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed, trans. and notes Shlomo Pines (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1963), vol. 2, part 3, ch. 45. Rabbinic statements about praying toward Jerusalem and the Temple appear as early as the Mishnah (2nd cent. CE), Berakhot 4:4–5, and in the Babylonian Talmud, Berakhot 30a. See Mishna, ed. R. Pinhas Kehati (Jerusalem: Heikhal Shelomo, 1992). 58 Ibn Hishām 269 [399].

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Quraysh against the Muslims, in violation of a treaty, but grieved in verse for the Qurayshis subsequently slain by the Muslims.59 More concerning for the Muslims, Kaʿb composed racy poems about Muslim women. He appears to have taken particular pleasure in writing about the hind quarters of Umm al-Faḍl (Lubāba bint al-Ḥārith), one of the earliest women to become a Muslim and Muḥammad’s aunt by marriage, as well as his sister-in-law.60 Al-Wāqidī insists that Kaʿb also wrote poems which satirized and criticized Muḥammad himself.61 Other Jews took it upon themselves to mock Muḥammad both bilingually and scripturally. This mockery is noted in the Qur’ān itself. In 4:46, the Qur’ān accuses the Jews (alladīna hādū) of “twisting words.” For example, they replied to Muḥammad’s calls to follow him by saying, among other things, “We hear and disobey” (samiʿnā wa-aṣaynā) instead of “We hear and obey” (samiʿnā wa-ataʿnā). As Reuven Firestone has explained, the pun likely refers to Deuteronomy 5:23, where the Israelites submit to God by saying ‫שמענו ועשינו‬, “shama‘nu ve-‘asinu,” “We hear and will do.” In replacing the Hebrew letter sin of ‘asinu with the Arabic ṣad (ʿaṣayna), the mocking Jews of Medina turned the Hebrew “do” into the Arabic “disobey.”62 According to Ibn Isḥāq, the author of this mockery was a notable Jew named Rifāʿa.63 Jewish mockery consisted not only of taunting but also of pestering Muḥammad in an almost stereotypical Jewish fashion: with questions. As Ibn Isḥāq writes, “It was the Jewish rabbis who used to annoy the apostle with questions and introduce confusion so as to confound the truth with falsity.”64 One example of this concerns some unnamed rabbis who came before Muḥammad with questions which, they claimed, if he answered correctly would prove his prophetic status and cause them to follow him. The questions included: Why does a boy resemble his mother when semen comes from a man?;65 Tell us about 59 Ibn Hishām, 364–65 [548–50]. 60 Kaʿb’s poem includes this line: “What lies ’twixt ankle and elbow is in motion/when she tries to stand and does not.” Ibn Hishām, 366–69 [550–53]. Kaʿb was not the only Jewish satirist to plague Muḥammad. Ibn Isḥāq mentions also Abū ʿAfak and ‘Aṣmā’ bint Marwān (Ibn Hishām, 675–76 [995–97]). 61 Al-Wāqidī, 91 [184]. Jews were not the only ones to produce anti-Muḥammad satirical poetry, and to be killed for doing so. The satirical singing girl Fartanā met a similar end in Ibn Hishām, 551 [819]. 62 The bilingual pun of Q 4:46 is actually a three-parter. The first is as above. In the second part, the Jews said “asmaʿ ghayr musmaʿin” instead of “asmaʿ.” In the third, they said “rāʿinā” instead of “anẓurnā.” Firestone discusses what the second two puns might refer to and what biblical verses might lie behind them in “The Failure of a Jewish Program of Public Satire in Medina.” The Qur’ān accuses the Jews of general scriptural distortion in a number of places, such as in Q 2:93. 63 Ibn Hishām, 264 [390]. 64 Ibn Hishām, 239 [351]. See also p. 256 [377]. 65 The Babylonian Talmud on Bava Batra 110a states: “It was taught: Most children resemble the brothers of the mother.”

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your sleep; Tell us about what Israel [Jacob] voluntarily forbade himself; Tell us about the Spirit.66 Although Muḥammad answered correctly, and the rabbis had sworn an oath to follow Muḥammad, they do not appear to have done so.67 An episode of Jews questioning Muḥammad appears in his pre-Medina phase as well. When Muḥammad was still in Mecca, two Meccan pagans, al-Naḍr b. al-Ḥārith and ʿUqba b. Abū Muʿayṭ, consulted rabbis in Medina for advice; they desired to know how to tell if Muḥammad was a prophet or a fairy-tale teller. Since the rabbis knew the Torah, reasoned the Meccans, they would know. The rabbis told the pagans to ask Muḥammad three questions; if he gave the correct answer, he would prove himself a prophet. Ask him, advised the rabbis, what happened to the young men who disappeared in ancient days; ask him about the traveler who reached the ends of the East and West; and, ask him what the Spirit is.68 The rabbis seem to have gotten word about Muḥammad’s answers because when he later arrives in Medina, they ask him follow-up questions.69 In one case, the Jewish questions become so irritating to Muḥammad that he almost comes to blows. Jewish questioners posed questions that seem designed to simultaneously mock the Qur’ān and trap Muḥammad in a net of sacrilege. They began by asking Muḥammad about the infinite nature of God Himself. “God created creation,” they asked. “But who created God?” Muḥammad rushed at them in anger, but was restrained by the angel Gabriel. They continued with a query that points to a possible Qur’ānic denial of God’s incorporeality. “Describe His shape to us,” they teasingly asked Muḥammad. “His forearm, and his upper arm, what are they like?”70 Again Muḥammad was so overcome with anger that he rushed at them. Once again, only the quick thinking of the angel Gabriel prevented violence from breaking out.71 Included on Ibn Isḥāq’s list of rabbis who pester Muḥammad this way is 66 The issue of sleep seems to be concerned with the condition of the soul during sleep; the Jacob question refers to Jews not eating certain foods because Jacob restricted their consumption even though they were originally permitted (Ibn Isḥāq presents this as camel meat and milk); the Spirit refers to the identity of the spirit transmitting Muḥammad’s revelations. 67 Ibn Hisham, 255 [375]. In a version that appears in Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī (c. 854 CE), the questioner is ʿAbdallāh b. Salām, who converts at the end. See vol. 4, bk. 55, n. 546. 68 The men who disappeared are the Men of the Cave (Q 18:9ff, usually identified as The Seven Sleepers of Ephesus), the traveler is Dhū al-Qarnayn (Q 18:83ff, often identified with Alexander the Great), and the Spirit refers to the question of the Spirit of God vs. God Himself. 69 Ibn Hishām, 136–40 [192–98]. 70 While the Qu’rān insists that God cannot be seen (as in 6:103), it also refers to yad Allāh (the hand of God, as in Q 48:10 and 57: 29). This ranks as a hypocritical question since the Hebrew Bible similarly describes God’s power by referring to God’s “strong hand” (‫יד חזקה‬, yad ḥazaqa) and “outstretched arm” (‫זרוע נטויה‬, zeroʿa netuya), as in Deut 4:34. 71 Ibn Hishām, 270 [400].

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one intriguing name, Labīd b. Aʿṣam from the Banū Zurayq. According to Ibn Isḥāq, Labīd did not simply pester Muḥammad; he bewitched him. If being bewitched were not embarrassing enough for the prophet of God, the way he was affected brought his humiliation to another level. Although the event is not described in detail, Ibn Isḥāq does inform his readers that Labīd rendered the Muslim prophet temporarily impotent and unable to approach his wives.72 Mockery was not practiced only by Jews who rejected Islam; those who became Muslims continued to mock Muḥammad post-conversion, we are told. Since these folks appear to have converted for other than theological reasons, they earned for themselves the epithet “hypocrites.” In one case, a group of such “hypocrites” takes to standing in the back of the mosque where they laugh, and deride the religion of the Muslims, like a group of obnoxious rowdy teenagers.73 Their sarcasm and mocking ultimately get so bad that Muḥammad has them forcibly removed from the mosque. A repeating trope in the mockery of the Jewish “hypocrites” takes the form of sarcastic challenges to the actualization of Muḥammad’s prophetic powers. For example, on one occasion Muḥammad lost his camel and set out searching for it. The “hypocrite rabbi” Zayd b. al-Luṣayt of the Banū Qaynuqāʿ mockingly noted that if Muḥammad’s claims to receive revelations from heaven were true, he should be able to locate the missing beast.74 Similarly, a “noted Jew” named Rāfiʿ, possibly Rāfiʿ b. Ḥuraymila of the Banū Qaynuqāʿ, challenged Muḥammad to have God speak with them so they could hear His voice; if Muḥammad were a true apostle of God, Rāfiʿ reasoned, he’d be able to meet the challenge.75 So too, Jabal and Shamwīl of the Banū Qurayẓa came to Muḥammad requesting that he tell them when the Day of Judgement would arrive, something he should know given his claim to be a prophet of God.76 Such sarcastic challenges seem to have been shared by converted and unconverted Jews alike. Regarding the latter, Ibn Isḥāq relates that a large group of Jews engaged in disputing Muḥammad at one point insisted that if he were truly 72 Sūrā 113 is said to have been revealed in response and as the cure. Ibn Hisham, 240 [352]. See Michael Lecker, “The Bewitching of the Prophet Muḥammad by the Jews: A Note à Propos ʿAbd al-Malik b. Ḥabīb’s Mukhtaṣar fī al-Ṭibb,” Al-Qantara 8 (1992): 561–69; David Cook, “The Prophet Muḥammad, Labīd al-Yahūdī and the Commentaries to Sūra 113,” Journal of Semitic Studies XLV/2 (Autumn 2000): 323–45. 73 Ibn Hishām, 246 [362]. Guillaume thinks these are either not Jews or, at the very most, “half-­ converted to Judaism.” See Ibn Hishām 246, n. 4. 74 He does. Ibn Hishām, 246 [361]. See also 605–6 [900–901]. It is interesting to note that the Bible’s first introduction to Saul, the first King of Israel and God’s chosen royal representative, depicts Saul searching for his lost donkeys and consulting a prophetic seer (Samuel) in order to find them (1 Sam 9). 75 Ibn Hishām, 258 [380], related to Q 2:118. 76 Ibn Hishām, 269 [398], related to Q 7:187.

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God’s apostle, he should be able to get from God another revealed passage on the spot. Otherwise, taunted the Jews, they would try their hands at creating a text just like the Qur’ān.77 This appeared to be a feat they seemed convinced they would be able to complete, thereby proving Muḥammad a fraud. Such Jewish sarcasm regarding Muḥammad’s claim to prophecy was apparently so common that Muḥammad came to expect it before Jews actually said anything. After the death of Muḥammad’s friend Abū ʿUmāma (Asʿad b. Zurāra), one of the earliest of the Medinian converts to Islam, Muḥammad declared, “How unfortunate is the death of Abū ʿUmāma! The Jews and the Arab hypocrites are sure to say, ‘If he were a prophet, his companion would not die.’”78

Reliability of the Sources While all this is tantalizing material for understanding how contemporaneous Jews reacted to Muḥammad, problematically none of it constitutes reliable historical evidence, as scholars have long noted. Whereas parts of the Qur’ān may have been coterminous with Muḥammad’s life, Ibn Isḥāq’s text was compiled – at its earliest – approximately a century after Muḥammad’s death. In addition, the version of the text we have does not come straight from Ibn Isḥāq’s pen. At least four recensions of Ibn Isḥāq’s work remain, all of them orally transmitted to his students, and all fragmentary. The most complete version, that of Ibn Isḥāq’s student al-Baqqā’ī, was subsequently revised by another student, Ibn Hishām (d. 833 CE), who lived 150–200 years after Muḥammad (d. 632 CE). While some historical information about Muḥammad’s pre-Medina life likely made it into the text, this appears more like “hazy memories”79 than hard historical facts. An additional problem with historical accuracy rests in the fact that the Qur’ān and the sīrā are Muslim sources, oriented more toward a theological end than toward history, and reflecting a polemical goal wherein Islam must reign supreme. Thus, what the Muslim sources present in a historical wrapper instead may be part of the Muslim polemic against the Jews for having denied and continuing to deny Muḥammad’s prophecy. Indeed, in each of the mockery cases, Muḥammad comes out the victor: the Jewish satirists are killed; Muḥammad 77 Ibn Hishām, 269–70 [399]. Q 17:88. 78 Ibn Hishām, 235 [346]. 79 Ibn Hishām, xviii. Biographical works on Muḥammad are usually divided into two parts: the sīrā (the biography of Muḥammad’s life) and the maghāzī (accounts of the military campaigns after Muḥammad’s arrival at Medina). Guillaume maintains that the maghāzī narratives, unlike those in the sīrā, “rest on the account of eyewitnesses and have every right to be regarded as trustworthy” (Ibn Hishām, xix).

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locates his missing camel; the questioners are bested; the hypocritical scoffers are ejected from the mosque and summarily beaten. Similarly, the Jewish tribes who refused to follow Muḥammad, out of loyalty to Judaism, nastiness, or evil, end up either exiled (Banū Naḍīr, Banū Qaynuqāʿ, and the Jews of Khaybar) or destroyed (Banū Qurayẓa). Only those who recognized Muḥammad’s truth and followed him found success and praise. Similarly, one cannot ignore that many of the interactions with Jews are presented in the Islamic sources as the causes for the revelation of particular Qur’ānic verses. For example, regarding Rāfīʿ’s challenge to Muḥammad to ask God to speak, Ibn Isḥāq writes, “So God revealed concerning that: “Those who do not know say ‘Why does God not speak to us or a sign come to us?’” (Q 2:118). Andrew Rippin therefore understands the entire genre of sīrā not as history but as an attempt to render the opacity of the Qur’ān more intelligible to the Muslim religious community. Sīrā, he theorizes, was based on “imaginative readings of the Qur’ān” alongside possibly some pre-existent actual biographical materials.80 Teasing these two strands apart remains an exceedingly difficult task. Similar issues remain at play in al-Wāqidī’s work, which relies heavily on Ibn Isḥāq, though without crediting him. According to Faizer and Rippin, the goal of al-Wāqidī’s Kitāb al-Maghāzī was to showcase Muḥammad as God’s chosen messenger and the fulfillment of His will. Al-Wāqidī therefore often mixes disparate accounts together in order to make a better narrative about Islam’s prophet. Like Ibn Isḥāq, al-Wāqidī creatively weaves the Qur’ān into his text, giving it a historical context and grounding which allowed it to be interpreted and accepted.81 Even more troublingly, the ways in which the Muslim sources present the Jews as a religious community make it difficult to assess precisely who these Arabian Jews were, the same difficulty encountered in the Qur’ānic presentation. On the one hand, much about these Jewish “tribes” is identifiably Jewish. They refuse to consume camel meat; they refuse to participate in a non-defensive war on the Sabbath; they insist the Torah is the only true revelation of God; they are protective of their holy Torah scrolls;82 they show familiarity with both the Bible and Hebrew; they have a House of Study and rabbis; and they insist on praying in the direction of Jerusalem. On the other hand, their beliefs sometimes appear peculiar to the modern Jewish reader. In one case, a rabbi 80 Rippin, “Muḥammad in the Qur’ān,” 308. 81 As Faizer and Rippin note in the Introduction to al-Wāqidī’s text. 82 After the conquest of Khaybar, the Torah scrolls of the Jews fell into the possession of the Muslims as part of the booty. The Jews asked for them to be returned and Muḥammad agreed. See Wensinck, 37.

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wonders at Muḥammad’s declaring King Solomon a prophet since Jews know that he was but a sorcerer.83 Most famously, according to the Qur’ān the Jews say that Ezra is the son of God (Q 9:30). The sīrā explains that this is such a deeply embedded Jewish belief that the Jews refused to follow Muḥammad when they learn that he preaches otherwise.84 However, Judaism teaches neither that Solomon was only a sorcerer nor that Ezra was the son of God. Did the Muslims simply misunderstand what the Jews actually said? Are there now-lost Jewish texts, or apocryphal/pseudepigraphal sources, which do state such beliefs? Or, in the case of the Ezra statement, do we have here a polemical extension to the Jews of the polytheistic sin of the Christians in their beliefs about Jesus? And, if the Jews of Medina did say these things, does this hint that they might not have been normative Jews, but perhaps a Judaized Arab group, as some have suggested?85 Due to all of these issues, scholars have generally dismissed the “testimony” of the early Islamic materials when it comes to historical discussions of the Jewish reactions to Muḥammad’s claims of being “a prophet like Moses.” Yet it seems that perhaps we should not dismiss these sources in their entirety. For despite the problems with the historicity of these reports, there nonetheless remains something recognizably Jewish about the reactions. This becomes apparent when we compare these early materials to the responses of medieval Jewish authors to the same Muslim claims about Muḥammad’s Mosesness. Namely, the later authors respond in precisely the same ways as Muḥammad’s Jews did: They both accept and reject the idea that the Bible predicts Muḥammad’s prophecy; 83 Ibn Hishām, 255 [37–76]. 84 Ibn Hisham, 269 [399]. See, among others, Lazarus-Yafeh, Intertwined Worlds, 50–74 (“Ezra-­ Uzayr: The Metamorphosis of a Polemical Motif ”); Mahmoud Ayoub, “   ʿUzayr in the Qur’ān and Muslim Tradition,” in Studies in Islamic and Judaic Traditions, ed. W. M. Brinner and S. D. Ricks (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1986), 3–18. The problematic nature of this Qur’ānic claim seems to have been recognized by at least two Muslim commentators. ʿAbdallāh b. ʿUbayd b. ʿUmayr (d. c. 730) maintains that Q 9:30 refers to the utterances of a single man, Finḥās. He is also the one who said God is poor (Q 3:181). Al-Qurṭubī (d. 1273) later cites Naqqāsh who said that all the Jews who claimed this died out (thereby explaining why contemporary Jews deny such a teaching). He adds that others say that only one Jew, Finḥās, ever said this. See Brannon Wheeler, Prophets in the Quran: An Introduction to the Quran and Muslim Exegesis (London and New York: Continuum, 2002), 286. Perhaps this is the same Finḥas whom Abū Bakr slaps, see above n. 12. 85 Wensinck warns we cannot exclude possibility that the some of the Jewish tribes of Arabia “were of Arab stock,” echoing a claim by the Muslim historian al-Yaʿqūbī (d. 897 CE). However, Wensinck theorizes that these converts ultimately mixed with Jews who originated in Palestine. See Wensinck, 30–32. Goitein posited the existence of a sect of Arabian Jews whom he names “Bene Moshe” for their supposed focus on Moses. See S. D. Goitein, Jews and Arabs: Their Contacts through the Ages (New York: Schocken Books, 1955), 58. See also Lecker, “The Conversion of Himyar.”

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they negatively compare Muḥammad to Moses; and they taunt Muḥammad, as well as mock him through the use of bilingual and biblically-based puns.

Medieval Jewish Reactions to Muḥammad Predictions We recall that in the sīrā a number of Jews convert to Islam when they come to believe that the Bible testifies to him and his Moses-like prophethood. In the medieval period, we find the well-known case of the Baghdadi scholar, physician, and mathematician Samaw’al al-Maghribī (1130–1180), son of Judah b. Abūn, a Jewish convert who, like the believing sīrā Jews, saw convincing reference to Muḥammad in Moses’s revelation. In his polemical treatise Ifḥām al-Yahūd (Silencing the Jews), penned the day after his conversion, Samaw’al points to many biblical verses which he interprets as predicting Muḥammad. Perhaps the most well known of these comes from Deuteronomy 18:18 where God tells Moses, “I will raise up for them a prophet from among their brethren like you and they will listen to him.” The brethren of the Jews, says Samaw’al, are the children of Ishmael, the Arabs. And who but Muḥammad is the Moses of the Arabs? In case this is not convincing enough, Samaw’al also claims that Muḥammad’s name appears in the Bible, though in code. In Genesis 17:20, God says that He will multiply Ishmael exceedingly, ‫במאד מאד‬, bi-me’od me’od. Using the rabbinic method of interpretation through numerical calculation (gematria), Samaw’al explains that “bi-me’od me’od” equals “Muḥammad,” thereby demonstrating biblical predictions of his arrival.86 Recognition of biblical attestation to Muḥammad appeared in the sīrā also on the part of Jews who refused to convert. We find the same phenomenon in the medieval period. In the sīrā, the main reasons for the continued Jewish rejection despite biblical recognition appear to be, as noted, stubbornness, tribalism, or nastiness on the part of the Jews. In the medieval texts we find more sophisticated responses. One of these comes from Netanel ibn al-Fayyumī (c. 1090–c. 1165), philosopher and leader of the Yemenite Jewish community, who in 1164 composed a popular introduction to Jewish theology, Bustān al-ʿUqūl (The Garden of Wisdom). In a comparative discussion on prophecy, Netanel acknowledged that Muḥammad was in fact a prophet. However, Netanel pointed out, Muḥammad’s 86 Samu’al al-Maghribī, Ifḥām al-Yahūd, ed. and trans. Moshe Perlmann (New York: American Academy for Jewish Research, 1964), 45–47, Arabic pp. 29–34. According to Perlmann, Samaw’al’s arguments do not provide much that Muslim polemicists and Bible interpreters had not already offered, though Samaw’al claims that the earlier polemics lacked the insider information that he had (pp. 18–21). He does quote from the Bible mostly in Hebrew.

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prophecy was for the Arabs only. Intriguingly, Netanel quotes from the Qur’ān as proof of this point, a move that indicates that he viewed the Qur’ān as containing at least a measure of divine revelation. According to the Qur’ān, wrote Netanel, God sends prophets to every people according to their own language (Q 14:4). The Qur’ān also teaches that Muḥammad was sent to warn an oblivious people whose fathers God had not already warned (Q 36:3–6). This does not include the Jews, insisted Netanel. In the first place, the language of the Jews is not Arabic. Additionally, the Jews and their forefathers had the benefit of the Torah as divine guidance and were thus not among the unwarned.87 Moreover, he wrote, the revelation that is the Torah has remained unchanged since Moses first brought it, and the arrival of Muḥammad – a non-Moses-like prophet – can do nothing to change it. Instead, he explained, because other nations (Arabs) needed divine guidance, God sent them a prophet of their own, Muḥammad.88 Earlier medieval Jewish texts also located Muḥammad in the Bible, but these saw biblical prophecies about his arrival in a negative light, and as more oriented toward the Jews themselves. About a century before Netanel, the ninth/tenth-century Karaite scholar Daniel al-Qūmisī wrote that the arrival of Muḥammad was predicted in the Bible and served to usher in the messianic era. Al-Qūmisī located these predictions in Daniel 7, where Daniel dreams of four beasts who rise and fall, after which a human-like creature appears and receives everlasting dominion from God. According to the dream’s interpreter (vv. 23–27), each of the four beasts stands for a kingdom which has risen and fallen. The ten horns of the fourth beast signify that kingdom’s ten kings, with the final king, the “littlest,” temporarily conquering the holy ones of the Most High and working to change sacred law until the Most High destroys him (vv. 25–26) and sends the Messiah.89 Al-Qūmisī refers to Muḥammad as the “little horn,” a reference to the smallest horn on the ten-horned fourth beast, not insignificantly a horn with eyes and “arrogant speech” (7:8).90 In so doing, 87 Netanel ibn al-Fayyumī, The Bustan al-Ukul, ed. and trans. David Levine (New York: Columbia University Press, 1908), ch. 6, esp. p. 109. 88 The Bustan al-Ukul, ch. 6, esp. p. 109 89 In Dan 2:44, Daniel interprets the king’s dream as predicting the rise of a kingdom which will never be destroyed. Islamic interpretations understand this to refer to the rise of Muḥammad. See Rubin, The Eye of the Beholder, 26–27. 90 For other derogatory Karaite assessments of Muḥammad and Islam, see Ben-Shammai, “The Attitude of Some Early Karaites.” Maimonides uses this same argument and Daniel reference in his Epistle to Yemen. See Moses Maimonides’ Epistle to Yemen: The Arabic Original and the Three Hebrew Versions, ed. Abraham S. Halkin and trans. Boaz Cohen (New York: American Academy for Jewish Research, 1952), 20–21. A number of early Muslim transmitters of Jewish traditions, some of them converts from

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al-Qūmisī teaches that not only is Islam’s reign part of God’s plan, revealed in Daniel, but it is destined to be temporary rule only. Eventually the Islamic dominion will be destroyed, after which the messiah will arrive. It was not the Karaites alone who wove Muḥammad into the prophecies of messianic redemption. In the Mishneh Torah, Laws of Kings, Maimonides (1138–1204) maintains that both Jesus and Muḥammad (whom Maimonides calls here “the Ishmaelite”) should be viewed as paving the way for the messiah. After all, he wrote, through them the nations of the world have become familiar with biblical prophecies and God’s laws. All this, he maintained, is in accordance with Zephaniah 3:9, where the prophet quotes God saying, “For then will I turn to the peoples a pure language, that they may all call upon the name of the Lord to serve Him with one consent.”91According to Maimonides, Zephaniah’s prophecy indicates that all the peoples of the world must “call upon the name of the Lord” before redemption; Muḥammad, expediting redemption, has proved himself to be a cog in the messianic plan. Jewish reading of the rise of Muḥammad and the spread of Islam as part of a divine plan appears in texts thought to be as early as, and roughly co-terminus with, Ibn Isḥāq’s sīrā. In the eighth-century apocalyptic Nistarot R. Shimon bar Yoḥai, God reveals to the second-century sage R. Simeon that the “kingdom of Ishmael” will arise and rule over Israel. R. Simeon complains that such an oppression seems excessive, especially as it comes on the heels of the injuries inflicted by the “kingdom of Edom” (Christianity). The archangel Metatron explains that God will send the kingdom of Ishmael precisely in order to defeat Edom and thereby usher in the messianic age. Metatron notes that this is all predicted in the Torah itself, in Isaiah’s vision (21:7) of “a chariot with a pair of horsemen, a chariot of asses and a chariot of camels.” The Messiah (who will ride on an ass), must come after the Arabs, who are indicated by the chariot of camels.92

Judaism, referred to the caliph and conqueror ʿUmar b. al-Khaṭṭāb as qarn min ḥadīd (iron horn), a title they claim to have found in Scripture. See Avraham Hakim, “The Biblical Annunciation Made to ʿUmar b. al-Khaṭṭāb: The Religious Legitimation of the Early Islamic Conquests,” Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 42 (2015): 139–45. 91 Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, ed. Philip Birnbaum (New York: Hebrew Publishing Company, [1967]), Hilkhot Melakhim, 11:11. For English, see Twersky, A Maimonides Reader, 226–27. 92 In Bet ha-Midrasch, ed. Adolph Jellinek (Jerusalem: Wahrmann Books, 1967), 3:78–82. See also John C. Reeves, Trajectories in Near Eastern Apocalyptic: A Post-Rabbinic Jewish Apocalypse Reader (Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature, 2005): 34–44. As scholars note, while the core of the Nistarot dates to the 8th century, the text was edited and closed only in the medieval period.

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Negative Comparisons to Moses and his Law The medieval Jewish denial of Muḥammad as Moses’s successor and surpasser resembles the second category of the sīrā Jews’ response as well. Like the Jews of the sīrā, medieval Jewish writers rejected as a proper prophet one who did not follow the laws and revelations brought by Moses. In his Iggeret Teiman (Epistle to Yemen) of 1172, Maimonides pointed out that Muḥammad, like Jesus, desired to destroy the Law. However, he noted, Judaism teaches that a prophet cannot add to or diminish the religion set up by Moses. Thus, Muḥammad’s very claims to prophecy and his subsequent teachings – which encouraged new laws and discouraged observance of certain Torah laws – revealed themselves and him as patently false. Indeed, Maimonides states in no uncertain terms that unlike the religion of Moses, the religion taught by Muḥammad was nothing other than a human invention, which Muḥammad developed as a means of self-aggrandizement.93 Slightly after Maimonides, the Baghdadi Jewish philosopher Ibn Kammūna (1215–1284) rejected the validity of the Qur’ān by comparing its narrative contents and messages to the Torah. Too many of the stories told in the Qur’ān about biblical personages, he pointed out, do not reflect the biblical version. Thus, the Qur’ān shows that it does not transmit the truth. Furthermore, he noted, a true prophet’s laws engender justice and build a balanced and just society.94 Islamic law as laid out in the Qur’ān and Islamic tradition does not do this, as Torah laws do. According to Ibn Kammūna, we see this in the fact that Muslim governors alter Islamic law when running their societies; Islamic law on its own leads to evil and corruption.95 For Ibn Kammūna, not only do Muslim scriptures not stand up to a comparison with the Bible, but the Muslim prophet himself falls down when compared to Moses. In Ibn Kammūna’s estimation, miraculous divine utterances must be exceptional, teaching people that which cannot be grasped through mere reason.96 This is the case with Moses and his revelations. In Ibn Kammūna’s assessment, most of what Muḥammad says in the Qur’ān is vague: platitudes, hazy predictions, cheerleading for his supporters, and the rehashing of materials he heard from Jews and Christians.97 Ibn Kammūna also noted that any prophet who issues commandments that would permanently annul a law from 93 Epistle to Yemen, 14, 52–53, 56. 94 Ibn Kammūna’s Examination of the Three Faiths, trans. Moshe Perlmann (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 13–33, 148–49. According to Perlmann (p. 7), the section on Islam was written for a Muslim audience. 95 Ibn Kammūna, 32 (#10, #11). 96 Ibn Kammūna, 36. 97 Ibn Kammūna, 129–31.

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Moses’s Torah cannot be a prophet, for Torah laws cannot be abrogated. Yet Islam’s very existence relies on the abrogation of the “religion of Moses.”98 Thus, according to Ibn Kammūna, Islam’s raison d’être disproves its truth claims and that of its prophet. Solomon ibn Adret (1235–1310) – El Rab d’España (“the Rabbi of Spain”) and Ibn Kammūna’s Spanish contemporary – similarly denied Muḥammad’s claims by comparing him to Moses, although in a subtler manner. According to Ibn Adret, one must not rely on a single person’s claim to prophecy and revelation, for that person may simply be fabricating his claim and no one but he can testify to its truth. Even true prophets, conceded Ibn Adret, can turn into lying prophets when their prophecy is not experienced by the masses, such as occurred with Hananiah ben Azor.99 Since Moses’s prophecy was experienced by the assembly of the Children of Israel at Sinai, we can rest assured that Moses was a true prophet, he explained.100 Although Ibn Adret did not name names, it seems certain that he here intended Muḥammad – whose prophecies occurred in private – as Moses’s foil.

Mockery and Satire Like the Jews of the sīrā, medieval Jews also engaged in our third category – mocking Muḥammad and his claims. Some of this medieval mockery takes the form of bilingual and biblical plays on words, just as it did among the Jews of the Qur’ān and sīrā. Perhaps the most negative of these hits appears in Maimonides’ Iggeret Teiman (Epistle to Yemen) of 1172, where he replied to a query from R. Jacob b. Netanel al-Fayyumī, who wrote on behalf of the Jews of Yemen. Among R. Jacob’s questions was: how should the Jews respond to a Jewish convert to Islam who claimed that the Torah confirmed the prophethood of Muḥammad? In his reply, Maimonides disputed the claims of Islam in no uncertain terms. In the course of this discussion, he refers to Muḥammad as al-pasul (Hebrew, the invalid or damaged one), a straightforward and insulting bilingual play on words, since the Muslims claim Muḥammad is al-rasūl (Arabic, messenger, specifically a prophet with a new message).101 More frequently, though less cleverly, Maimonides refers to Muḥammad, whose name means praised, by

98 Ibn Kammūna, 72. 99 See Jer 28. Jeremiah depicts Hananiah as a false prophet. The Jerusalem Talmud sees him as a once-true prophet gone bad (as Ibn Adret wrote). See Talmud Yerushalmi (Berlin: Hotsa’at Sefarim, 5685 [1925]), Sanhedrin, ch. 11, halakhah 5. 100 Perles, R. Salomo b. Abraham b. Adereth: Sein Leben und seine Schriften (Breslau, 1863), 2 [Hebrew]. 101 Epistle to Yemen, 38 (for example).

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the Hebrew term ha-meshuggaʿ, ‫המשוגע‬, meaning the madman.102 Scholars have suggested that a biblical verse underlies this insult, as in the case of the Qur’ānic “samiʿna wa-ʿaṣayna” jab.103 In Hosea 9:7, Hosea warns, “The prophet is a fool, the man of the spirit is mad (meshuggaʿ)!” In calling Muḥammad ha-meshuggaʿ, Maimonides reminds his readers of the biblical warning against following false prophets, who are foolish, or worse, insane. It also recalls the charges of insanity against Muḥammad that appear in the Qur’ān (68:2, 81:22, etc.).104 In the same letter Maimonides also addresses the Muslim claim that Muḥammad was foretold in the Bible. This is so ridiculous an idea, he insists, that not even the Muslims believe it.105 A more serious Jewish satirizing of Muḥammad takes the form of claims that Jews – and not the “prophet” of Islam – were responsible for composing the Qur’ān and inventing the Muslim religion. Muḥammad is depicted in such texts as a fraudulent power-seeker or an easily duped simpleton. One of the earliest texts to present such a scenario is a Geniza document Moshe Gil ascribes to the tenth-century sage, Sa‘adia Gaon. This text relates that when Muḥammad began claiming he was transmitting prophecy from God, ten Jewish sages subversively embraced Muḥammad’s faith because they understood that Muḥammad’s false claims and invented religion would bring about only evil to the Jews. Intending to prevent Muḥammad and his believers from harming the Jews, these sages concocted the entire Qur’ān for him, secretly encoding their names and an anti-Muḥammad message into the Qur’ān.106 Thus, like the

102 Epistle to Yemen, 14. Solomon ibn Adret later uses the term ha-meshuggaʿ to refer to Ibn Ḥazm (994–1064), the author of an anti-Jewish polemical treatise to which Ibn Adret was responding. See J. Perles, R. Salomo b. Abraham b. Adereth 2. 103 Discussed above. 104 According to the three medieval Hebrew translations, one of which is by Maimonides’ regular translator Samuel ibn Tibbon, Maimonides refers to the Qur’ān as ha-qalon (the shame, disgrace). In his notes, Halkin writes that the term does not appear in either of the Arabic manuscripts of Maimonides’ Epistle before him (Halkin). According to Halkin, there is no evidence that Maimonides himself used that term. See Epistle to Yemen, 38 n. 52. 105 Epistle to Yemen, 38. Firestone writes that other satirical code names for Muḥammad appear in Jewish texts, such as Mastemah (animosity, hatred), from the end of Hosea 9:7. See Firestone, “The Prophet Muhammad in Pre-Modern Jewish Literatures,” 27–44. 106 Moshe Gil, “‫מעשה בחירה וגרסאותיו היהודיות‬,” in ‫חקרי עבר וערב מוגשים ליהושע בלאו‬, ed. Haggai Ben-­ Shammai (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University, ha-Faḳulṭah le-madaʿe ha-ruaḥ, Bet ha-sefer le-madaʿe ha-Yahadut ʿal shem Ḥayim Rozenberg, 1993), 193–210. Shimon Shtober maintains that the motif of Jewish sages converting in order to save the Jews from Muḥammad appears also in Nistarot Shimon bar Yohai. See Shtober, “Present at the Dawn of Islam: Polemic and Reality in the Medieval Story of Muhammad’s Jewish Companions,” in The Convergence of Judaism and Islam: Religious, Scientific, and Cultural Dimensions, ed. Michael Laskier and Yaacov Lev (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2011), 70. The Nistarot pericope is quite brief and does

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“hypocritical” Jews in the sīrā, Saʿadia’s sages converted with ulterior motives and engaged in continued mockery of the “prophet” even after doing so.

Conclusions What can we learn about the reactions of the sixth–seventh century Medinian Jews to Muḥammad and his claims of Mosesness? On the one hand, as noted, we can uncover very little that will stand up to scholarly scrutiny since neither the Qur’ān nor the sīrā – from which our information comes – are reliable reporters of history. The Qur’ān reports Muḥammad’s teachings rather than his biography and, as F. E. Peters has written, is not accompanied by any “appropriate contemporary or contopological setting against which” it can be read for historical insight and context.107 As for the sīrā, where traditionalist scholars took Islamic historiographical materials at face value despite the obvious problems with doing so, modern skepticist historians have insisted there is little to nothing of any real historical accuracy uncoverable in the Islamic reports of its origins.108 Indeed, Patricia Crone famously characterized Islamic historiography as largely the “debris of an obliterated past.”109 Adding to the difficulty in determining the historicity of the Jewish reactions to Muḥammad, no contemporaneous Jewish sources have yet been uncovered. And yet, when we compare the Islamic depictions of the Medinian Jewish reactions to those of medieval Jewish scholars writing about Muḥammad, we find tantalizing information that may allow us to open a window, though small, onto the history of the early period and shed some light on the nature of the Jews of Medina. Namely, the later Jews reacted to Muḥammad and his claims in much the same fashion as the early Jews are said to have done. Both groups mock, question, test, and reject Muḥammad. More significantly, both use the Bible, Jewish tradition, and the Jewish understanding of Moses to do so. This might indicate only that medieval Jews were familiar with the Muslim texts,110 and rehashed and updated the stances taken by their ancestors. Yet, not explicitly state the motivation for the conversion, stating that “great men of Israel will join him and give him a wife from amongst them” (a reference to Ṣafīyya). 107 F. E. Peters, “The Quest of the Historical Muhammad,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, vol. 23, n. 3 (1991): 292. 108 For an overview of these trends and stances, see Irving M. Zeitlin, The Historical Muhammad (Cambridge, UK; Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2007), “Introduction and Overview of the Life of Muhammad”; Peters, “The Quest of the Historical Muhammad,” 291–315. 109 Patricia Crone, Slaves on Horses: The Evolution of the Islamic Polity (Cambridge [U.K.] and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 10. 110 Hava Lazarus-Yafeh has shown that despite the Muslim prohibition against non-Muslims reading the Qur’ān, some Jewish scholars clearly did. See Intertwined Worlds, 143–60.

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this strikes me as not entirely convincing, or as only a partial explanation for the similarity of the Jewish responses across the centuries. Reuven Firestone has pointed out that medieval Jews were familiar with Muslim polemics against them and reacted to these charges by composing their own polemical responses in which they turned the Islamic claims into oral counter-histories.111 Yet those polemics largely concerned the Muslim charge that the Jews had altered their own Scripture in order to delete Muḥammad from it. In the early Islamic depictions discussed here, the Jews are not portrayed as deleting Muḥammad from Scripture but as rejecting him through interactions with him and using Scripture – albeit unidentified Scripture – to do so, much as their medieval descendants did. What’s more, in these Islamic texts the Jews are always bested, by both Muḥammad and God. It would seem a less than desirable move for the later Jews to repeat behavior and claims clearly depicted by the Islamic sources as unsuccessful if these were not internally meaningful ways of responding. Perhaps then it is not accurate to insist that we can know nothing of historical value about the contemporaneous Medinian Jewish reactions to Muḥammad and his claim of being like Moses. Fred Donner has observed that, despite the skeptics’ claims, the Islamic accounts of the early years do contain “vestiges of very early theological and historical matters.”112 F. E. Peters has similarly insisted, “It is inconceivable that the community should have entirely forgotten what Muḥammad did or said at Mecca and Medina.”113 Even though many of the reports from the early years are now “overcast with myth and special pleading,” Peters maintains that a patient reader might be able to extract what he terms the “priceless ore from the redactional rubble in which it is presently embedded.”114 In the case of the early Jewish reactions to Muḥammad’s claim of Mosesness what we appear to have is not a complete Muslim fabrication of particular Jews and a polemical depiction of their engagement with the prophet of Islam. Rather, a comparison of the early Muslim depictions of the Medinian Jewish response to Muḥammad’s claims of Mosesness with later Jewish rejections of this same claim indicates that perhaps in the sīrā we have vestiges of genuine Medinian Jewish reactions to the prophet of Islam as he attempted, but failed, to appeal to their religious sensibilities regarding their own most esteemed prophet, Moses.

111 See Reuven Firestone, “Muhammad, the Jews, and the Composition of the Qur’an: Sacred History and Counter-History,” Religions 2019, vol. 10, no. 63. An example of this is discussed above, pp. 244–45. 112 Fred M. Donner, Narratives of Islamic Origins: The Beginnings of Islamic Historical Writing (Princeton, NJ: Darwin Press, 1988), 29. 113 Peters, 307. 114 Peters, 307.

The End of Moses Rachel Havrelock

University of Illinois at Chicago

“Holy Moses, Can We Live in Peace?” Aretha Franklin, “Border Song [Holy Moses]” Does Moses meet his end? The question doesn’t yield an easy or immediate answer. Instead, this uncertainty in Moses’s biography launches rich interpretive inquiries in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam that involve meditations on the possibility of immortality. Much is lost – including commonalities – in limiting these meditations to positions, but I will begin by stating that Judaism imagines Moses’s immortality through Jewish history entwined with study of the Five Books of Moses; Christianity sees his final days as suggesting a form of translation that prefigures resurrection; and Islam interprets this uncertainty in terms of a prophetic realm accessed by Muḥammad during his revelation. To further simplify, all of the traditions that embrace Moses imagine him as both dying and enduring. In this way the traditions are faithful to the text of Deuteronomy, which also hedges its bets on the death of Moses. The question of Moses’s afterlife in Christian and Islamic traditions folds into the notion of Jewish revelation as both foundational and incomplete. As we explore these traditions, a modern question can come into view: what happens to the mortal/immortal prophet in the context, not just of religious interpretation and tradition, but of nationalism? More specifically, what effects do Jewish, Palestinian, and Jordanian nationalism have on the meaning of Moses and his end, and how do persistent interpretations of Moses’s end undergird nationalistic narratives?

The Torah leaves open the question of whether Moses dies or lives forever. If the prophet lives forever, then there is no set definition of what this means. Biblical sources provide at least three reasons for the position that Moses’s life reaches a definitive end. Numbers 20:12 accounts for the prophet’s death as a punishment for bungling the extraction of water from a rock.1 In Deuteronomy 1:37, Moses blames the people for his untimely end – it is guilt by association

1 God instructs Moses and Aaron to speak to a rock in order for it to bring forth water. Contravening the instruction, Moses challenges the people, “Listen up you rebels, should we bring water for you out of this rock?” and strikes the rock twice with his staff (Num 20:7–11). After water gushes forth from the rock, God forbids Moses and Aaron from leading Israel into the Promised Land. God repeats the injunction as He calls Moses to Mount Abarim to meet his death (27:14).

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that keeps him out of the land. This touches upon the implied reason for his death as a member of a traumatized, cowed generation of slaves barred from entering a land that requires conquest. Unable to convince God otherwise, Moses dies east of the Jordan after a longing gaze into the Promised Land. The third reason given for Moses’s death is that it occurred “at the command of God” (Deut 34:5). God then buries him at a site both ignominious and mysterious, somewhere in Moab near Beit Peor, the site of Israel’s apostasy (Deut 31:6; Num 25). Thus, Moses’s unknown grave has both sublime and transgressive connotations.2 And, just as the cause of Moses’s death remains uncertain, so too does the question of whether he actually dies – the unmarked grave suggests that Moses may have transcended mortality. Other details advance the suggestion: when Moses disappears at the age of one hundred and twenty, his eyes retain their moisture and he remains vigorous (Deut 34:7), and Elijah the prophet, who ascends to heaven in a chariot of fire, similarly takes his leave in the Jordan Valley, a location which may function as a kind of threshold (2 Kgs 2:11).3 Moses’s departure from Israel is definitive and appropriately mourned (34:8), but the question remains open as to whether, as he ascends Mount Nebo, Moses in fact dies. Does his life end as his narrative concludes? The five books attributed to Moses certainly live on, sustained by recitation, reading, and reference (Deut 31:11–13), so, in this secondary sense, his immortality is certain4 in that his death generates Torah (Deut 31:19, 22, 24, 26, 32:46). Jewish tradition accentuates the ineffability of Moses’s demise with the important caveat that the mountain where he met his end not become a holy site. Just east of the Jordan River, Mount Nebo falls outside standard definitions of the Promised Land. Aiming to discourage pilgrimage beyond the land of Israel, Jewish sages and interpreters downplayed the geographic importance of Mount Nebo, as well as of Mount Sinai where Moses experienced his revelations. Throughout history, Jewish pilgrims have indeed visited both locations, but without sanctioned practices or recognition of religious merit gained thereby. The relationship to these locations changed significantly in the wake of the Zionist movement, which approached religious texts with a new literalism intended to establish national-territorial claims. Prior to the British Mandate in Palestine, Zionist pioneers embraced the eastern bank of the Jordan as part of a biblical homeland. Under Ottoman



2 George Coats reads the presentation of Moses as “the sinner who cannot enter the Promised Land” as a contradiction of the tradition that presents Moses as a hero, in “Legendary Motifs in the Moses Death Reports,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 39 (1977): 38–39. 3 For the similarities shared by Moses and Elijah, see Havrelock, River Jordan: The Mythology of a Dividing Line (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2011). 4 The famous talmudic story of Moses sitting in on Rabbi Akiva’s lesson imagines him alive along with his books.

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rule, both banks fell under the jurisdiction of Vilayet Damascus. Ottoman geography influenced Zionist leaders from 1917–1920 to “put forward their own maximalist interpretation of the Balfour Declaration” wherein the Jewish homeland included “East Israel.”5 Working toward this interpretation, they opened negotiations with Emir Abdullah and Bedouin sheikhs regarding the purchase and development of east bank lands.6 However, despite the fact that Transjordanian leaders were more amenable to Jewish settlement than were the Palestinians, no such arrangement came to pass due to insufficient Jewish funds, growing Arab resistance, and British opposition.7 All the same, individual Zionists continued their romance with the lands east of the Jordan. Degania, the first kibbutz, founded in 1910, sits just on the eastern shore of the river. Its members and those of neighboring collectives often undertook expeditions to find signs of the Jewish past further east.8 Reading the Book of Deuteronomy as a kind of proto-constitution, early Zionists celebrated the eastern bank of the Jordan River as the place where Moses delivered this “constitution.” Such territory-expanding aspirations effectively ended in 1922 when the British White Paper severed Transjordan from the Mandate, rendering it separate from Palestine. After the White Paper bestowed Transjordan on Emir Abdullah, the Zionist leadership acquiesced and concentrated its efforts west of the Jordan. Only Ze’ev Jabotinsky resisted, splitting from the mainstream Zionist movement to found the World Union of Zionist Revisionists that insisted, in the words of its popular song, “there are two banks to the Jordan, this one is ours and so is the other.”9 With the exception of the Revisionists (who would later come to power as the Likud party), Zionists then operated under the assumption that the Jordan had been and would be the land’s eastern border, and that there was a qualitative difference between the two riverbanks. The notion of an indelible biblical land was thereafter enlisted to justify expansionist tendencies that halted at the Jordan.10 The cultural reaction to these political shifts involved a downgrading of Moses’s stature. Instead of the founder of an ancient state and its constitution, Moses now figured as a visionary who anticipated – but did not 5 Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (New York: W.W. Norton, 2001), 8. 6 An article in Al-Jazeera, October 23, 1921, expressed the impatient wish of many Arab landowners on the East Bank to sell their lands to Jews. The article also alerted certain readers about the “new danger” that they faced. Zvi Ilan, 1947–1871 ‫( הכמיהה להתיישבות יהודית בעבר־הירדן‬Jerusalem: Yad Yitshak Ben-Tsvi, 1984), 363. 7 Yitzhak Gil-Har, “‫ ”הפרדת עבר־הירדן המזרחי מארץ־ישראל‬Katedra 12 (1979): 47–69. 8 Rachel Havrelock, River Jordan, 246–61. 9 The refrain rhymes in Hebrew. 10 See Havrelock, River Jordan. For the invocation of this map following the Six Day War by Rabin, Eshkol, Begin, and Dayan, see Shlaim, The Iron Wall, 246, 255, 256, 316.

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achieve – national liberation. According to Zionist periodization, Moses represented an older era of exile and longing, whereas Joshua, who fought wars and settled tribes, was the actual founder of Israel. No early Zionist figure was more invested in biblical precedent than David Ben-Gurion, who evocatively described Theodore Herzl as the visionary Moses of his time. After hearing Herzl speak in Ben-Gurion’s hometown of Plonsk in Russian Poland, Ben-­ Gurion recalled, “one glimpse of him and I was ready to follow him then and there to the land of my ancestors.”11 Ben-Gurion further analogized affluent Jews who attained success in European cities with the Hebrews in Egypt: “Among this privileged group of immigrants, which lost its influence, was born a child of genius, Moses, son of Amram, who along with his tradition of belief in one God absorbed all of the rich Egyptian culture, and was unable to accept the bondage which had been imposed on the members of his family and his people.”12 The Hebrews in Egypt, like the Jews integrated into German culture, were privileged, yet watched their influence wane when “a new pharaoh rose in Egypt.” A “child of genius” – Moses/Herzl – refused, however, to accept the precarious status of the outsider. This rejection of empire, in both cases, paved the way toward national realization.13 However, these great visionaries could not serve as founders of the states they envisioned. Establishment fell to their successors, the “Joshuas” prepared to fight wars and settle territory. Herzl may not have commissioned Ben-Gurion as Moses did Joshua, but nonetheless Ben-Gurion saw himself as his disciple par excellence.14 As a true follower of Herzl who presided over a founding war and settled the tribes, Ben-Gurion identified with Joshua. Haim Gevaryahu, a biblical scholar and associate of Israel’s first Prime Minister, stated flatly, “Ben-Gurion saw himself as a second Joshua.”15 Ben-Gurion recognized himself in the Book of Joshua and understood it through the events of his own life, going further to promote the Book of Joshua as a narrative through which Israelis and the world at large could understand the events of the 1948 war and its aftermath. Having introduced the Joshua typology to Israeli political life, Ben-Gurion faced younger “Joshuas” who wished to lead the people. After General Moshe Dayan brought Israel right up to the west bank of the Jordan in the 1967 Six Day War, he assumed the mantle of Joshua and bumped Ben-Gurion back to the position of Moses. Dayan enunciated the political shift with the backhanded 11 David Ben-Gurion, Recollections (London: MacDonald and Co. 1970), 34. 12 David Ben-Gurion, “The Antiquity of Israel in Its Land,” Ben-Gurion Looks at the Bible, trans. Jonathan Kolatch (Middle Village, New York: Jonathan David Publishers), 73. 13 Ben-Gurion Looks at the Bible, 73. 14 Ben-Gurion Looks at the Bible, 73. 15 Haim Gevaryahu, “‫זכרונות מהחוג לתנ״ך בבית דוד בן־גוריון‬,” in M. Cogan ‫ עם וארצו‬:‫בן־גוריון והתנ״ך‬ (Be’er-Sheva: Ben-Gurion University of the Negev Press, 1989), 70–74.

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compliments that Ben-Gurion was “the Moses of our time,” and the Palestinian leaders whom he met when patrolling, and acquiring antiquities, in the West Bank were like the tribal leaders of the Bible.16 Moses/Ben-Gurion should be lauded for “his mission of leading the nation, the entire House of Israel,” but Dayan was the redeeming Joshua who unified the land and the people through a final stage of conquest.17 With this move, Dayan annulled the association between Joshua and the pre-state pioneers who had “crossed the Jordan” in order to settle the land, and instead forged a link between Joshua and the military might of native-born sabras. Importantly, what holds even in the case of Dayan is the belief that the Jordan River marks a legitimate and necessary boundary of Israel. This modern sense of geography colors biblical interpretation through a strong reading that Moses, who represents exile, expires in exile. Thereafter, Moses resides at the border of homeland and exile. In Israeli thought the precarious character of exile inevitably resonates with the Shoah, as well as with a feeling of existential threat from Muslim countries to the east. Moses’s death thus becomes a warning of sorts, about both the perils of exile and the threats posed by regional neighbors. For Palestinians, exile is more immanent and more multidirectional – ancestral homes are remembered to the east and to the west, while the Jordan River marks the most significant location of Palestinian separation from their homeland during the wars of 1948 and 1967. In Palestinian thought, Moses – whose body, according to some local traditions, is transported across the Jordan by God – models the return home.18 Teachings about Moses’s death in the Qur’ān’, as well as distinctly Palestinian traditions, lend importance to the sacred Maqam al-Nabi Musa (burial place of the Prophet Moses) near Jericho in the West Bank. When considering the traditions pertaining to Moses in the Qur’ān, readers should note that the central (male) figures in the Tanakh are recognized in Islam as prophets. Within their rank, Moses holds an elevated status as the transmitter of revelation and thus as a forerunner to the Prophet Muḥammad. The Qur’ān does not mention the grave or the death of Moses, keeping with its silence regarding the death of prophets. This should not immediately be taken to mean that the prophets attained immortal status. Sura 21:8 states explicitly: “We did not make them as mere bodies that did not eat food, nor were they immortal.” According to 16 Moshe Dayan, Living with the Bible (New York: William Morrow & Company), 1978, 77. 17 Dayan, Living with the Bible, 53. 18 In the words of Ibrahim Haj Mousa, a refugee in his 80s: “There’s never despair. And, if we can’t go back alive, then we’ll return in a casket to be buried there next to our ancestors,” http://​ www.thearabweekly.com/Special-Focus/5084/Exiled-Palestinians-in-Jordan,-Lebanon-yearn-to​ -return-home.

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the sura, prophets are neither angels nor eternal beings, but instead resolutely human. And yet, the question of whether prophets actually die yields ambiguous responses and doctrinal debates.19 As human as they may be, prophets certainly attain stature before God. Seemingly referring to martyrs, sura 2.154 explains, “Do not say of those who are killed for the cause of Allah that they are dead. They are alive, but you are unaware [of them].” Some interpreters have taken this to mean that prophets who served Allah might persist in a realm on high or remain alive in their graves. Accounts of Moses’s continued existence advance both possibilities. The Ḥadīth, or the reported sayings of Muḥammad, make the connection between Moses and Muḥammad more explicit. In the Ḥadīth of Muslim, the prophet Muḥammad recounts that during his visionary Night Journey (al-isra’) he passes Musa (Moses) “by a red sand hill” where “he was standing in prayer in his grave” (Muslim 2375). Taken with sura 2.154 –which assures the continued existence of martyrs – the ḥadīth informs an Islamic tradition that Moses, and perhaps all prophets, remains alive in his grave, explaining what it means that “they are alive, but you are unaware [of them].” The location of Moses’s grave on a red sand hill intersects with a related commentary depicting Moses as able to match forces with death. When the Angel of Death approaches him, Moses punches him in the eye. The unsuccessful angel returns to God saying, “You have sent me to a Servant who does not wish to die.” Recognizing Moses’s temporary victory, God instructs him to place his hand upon an ox and grants him a year of life for every hair covered. When the years inevitably wane, God grants Moses a final wish of seeing the Holy Land from the distance of a stone’s throw. He dies and is buried, according to the tradition, east of Jordan on a red sand hill.20 The site of Moses’s grave remains unknown, revealed only to the Prophet Muḥammad during his Night Journey (al-isra’) when he encounters Moses

19 The debate about whether prophets die centers on the question of Jesus’s death and the word “mutawaffi” used in the Qur’ān to characterize his end. “Mutawaffi” is typically used to refer to death in normal cases. In sura 3.55, God addresses Jesus: “I will cause you to die (mutawaffi), lift you up to Me, purify you from those who have disbelieved . . . ​Then unto Me is your return, so that I may judge between you regarding what you were disputing.” Some commentators take it (mutawaffi) to mean “He caused him to die” and others “He gathered him up.” Gathering him up would entail removal from the world, but not necessarily death. Certain commentators envision a form of sleep. In contrast, the Ahmadi interpretation insists on “caused him to die,” with the explanation, “Thus every prophet had a mortal body needing food for its support, and every one of them tasted of death.” Maulana Muhammad Ali, The Holy Quran. Arabic Text, English Translation and Commentary. Seventh Edition (Columbus, OH/Lahore, Pakistan: Ahmadiyyah Anjuman Isha’at Islam, 1991), 629. 20 Ḥadīth of Bukhari 4:619, narrated by Abu Huraira.

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standing in prayer in his grave above the red sand hill (al-Kathib al-Ahmar).21 Not only does Muḥammad see the burial site, but he also seemingly receives proof of Musa’s continued existence. The prayerful vision is a moment at which Moses’s prophetic mission becomes fused with that of Muḥammad. Likewise, Muḥammad appears to succeed Moses and to extend his revelations in a new era. During the second part of Muḥammad’s revelatory journey –ascent to the seven levels of heaven (miraj) – he meets Moses in the sixth sphere where, like other prophets, Moses greets him with the words, “You are welcomed, O pious brother and pious Prophet.” In their subsequent interaction, the ḥadīth articulates its sense of Islam’s superiority to Judaism. Weeping, Moses explains that his tears result from the fact that a prophet has arrived “whose followers will enter Paradise in greater numbers than my followers.” After visiting Paradise himself, Muḥammad receives fifty prayers a day to bequeath to his followers. As Muḥammad descends, again passing Moses in the sixth level of heaven, Moses instructs Muḥammad to return to God in order to lessen the burden of obeisance on Muḥammad’s followers. On Moses’s urging, Muḥammad revisits God until he feels that he can ask no more, and accepts five prayers per day as incumbent upon Muslims. Insofar as Judaism stipulates three prayer services per day, another polemical sense of religious superiority is expressed. Of relevance to this discussion, the ḥadīth portrays Moses as continually animated and vital in his sixth sphere of heaven, irrespective of whether he is alive or dead in his grave. Taken together, the tradition of Moses’s red sand hill grave and his continued existence on high suggests that the prophet both expires and persists. The Islamic commemoration of Moses on earth reflects the duality. Salah al-Din is said to have learned in a dream the correct site to honor Moses, subsequently building a mosque there, between the Jordan River and Jerusalem. In 1269 the Mamluk Sultan Beibars established a shrine for pilgrims at the site. Some suggest that the location was inspired by the identification of Moses’s red sand hill grave with the red crusader fort Turris Rudea (Castellum Rouge) on the Jerusalem-Jericho road.22 Local traditions domesticated the tomb through an account of a redemptive burial. According to these traditions, the Prophet Moses died east of the Jordan River, forbidden from setting foot in the land of 21 Amikam El’ad writes of a competing tradition that locates Musa’s grave near Damascus. Apparently, a rivalry between the site near Jericho and that near Damascus developed. Amikam El’ad, “Some Aspects of the Islamic Traditions Regarding the Site of the Grave of Moses,” Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 11 (1988): 1–15. 22 “Consequently the tomb of Moses (called Maqam Nabi Musa) was located a few miles to the south east, on the other side of the road.” Amikam El’ad, “Some Aspects of the Islamic Traditions Regarding the Site of the Grave of Moses,” 8.

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God’s promise. To reward his virtue, however, Allah conveyed his body across the Jordan and buried him on a hill west of the Jordan. Indicating, it seems, a manner of homecoming, the West Bank gravesite stands as an exalted place of Palestinian Muslim burial, as well as a place to pray for the health of sick relatives.23 Palestinian experiences of exile seem to reinforce this tradition. The notion that Allah redeemed Moses by conveying his body out of exile to sanctified ground implies the possibility of collective redemption and even symbolic justice for those who died in exile. Thus, the hallowed religious site figures as significant in terms of national destiny, and the end of Moses offers hope for collective restoration. A conflicting account of Maqam Nabi Musa, however, points to the degree to which God’s loving restoration of Moses serves as a narrative of national hope. This account explains that Nabi Musa is not in fact the grave of Moses – this is to be found east of the Jordan on Mount Nebo – but is rather a place from which one can see across to Moses’s final resting place. Offering a clear line of vision across the river, Maqam Nabi Musa connects its banks geographically, as well as in terms of religious history. That is, prophetic history prior to Moses becomes linked with his career, and Moses’s revelation has impact far beyond his death. Moses, in this account, may not make it across the river, but the faithful can look across and remember him. In Palestinian national terms, this suggests how a past prior to the establishment of the State of Israel links to the trials of the present and a desired future of liberation. In modern history the Nabi Musa tomb has been a focal point for nationalist conflict. Following the tomb’s establishment in the thirteenth century, pilgrims ventured to the site and informal traditions developed. (The current structure was built in the sixteenth century.) In the nineteenth century, Ottoman officials restored the building and codified a seven-day pilgrimage involving a procession from the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem to Nabi Musa.24 Beginning before Palm Sunday and concluding just as Christians streamed into Jerusalem for Good Friday, the Nabi Musa festival asserted the sanctity of Jerusalem 23 Interviews conducted at Nabi Musa, February 11th, 1998, names withheld as requested by interviewees. In his study of intersections of religion and Palestinian nationalism, Glenn Bowman observes Nabi Musa’s change between 1992–2007 from “a waqf-run drug rehabilitation center (under Israeli occupation), to a religious site strongly marked with PNA nationalism, to a site of Islamic pilgrimage and festival.” “Nationalizing and Denationalizing the Sacred: Shrines and Shifting Identities in the Israeli-Occupied Territories,” in Sacred Space in Israel and Palestine: Religion and Politics, ed. Yitzhak Reiter, Marshall J. Breger, and Leonard Hammer. Routledge Studies in Middle Eastern Politics (London: Routledge, 2012), 70. My 1998 visit coincided with the stage of PNA nationalism. 24 Awad Eddie Halabi describes the festival during Ottoman rule as “the largest Islamic festival in the region.” “The Nabi Musa Festival under British-Ruled Palestine,” ISIM Newsletter 10/02, 27.

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and its environs – in the very period when colonial powers began to leverage Christian connections to the Holy Land as a means of staking their claims.25 This tension came to a head as it intersected with Jewish national efforts at the 1920 commemoration. To some degree, the status of Palestine, as well as of the Middle East, was still open in 1920. With their eyes always on the prize of petroleum and its potential routes of export, the colonial powers had issued wartime pledges of self-­determination to the Arabs – the Hussein-McMahon Correspondence – and to the Jewish nationalists – the Balfour Declaration. Yet, by the end of 1920, the promise of national self-determination was purely aspirational. Imperial Mandates conferred executive power on the French in Syria-Lebanon and the British in Iraq, Jordan, and Palestine. As the 1920 Nabi Musa festival convened in April, the Mandate in Palestine (which began in July 1920) had yet to be established and national sovereignty remained an open question. To the north, the Syrian National Congress had crowned Faysal king of Greater Syria and – still under the influence of T.E. Lawrence – struggled to fend off the French, while Jerusalem awaited its fate under the Occupied Enemy Territory Administration South established by General Edmund Allenby. Zionist leaders meanwhile worked tirelessly to ensure that any political order would advance the promise of the Balfour Declaration. Chants of “‘Long Live King Faysal’ and ‘Down with Every Nation which Helps the Jews’” intermixed at the 1920 festival.26 By 1920, the British had enmeshed themselves in mawsim al-Nabi Musa (the Nabi Musa festival) assuring the pilgrims that the top brass surveying the festivities simply filled in for Ottoman overlords.27 Fearing an outbreak of Muslim rebellion against the British Empire stretching to India, colonial officials welcomed the focus on Jewish immigration and political Zionism as a preferable outlet for Muslim frustration. Thus, although the 1920 Nabi Musa festival is often held up as an inaugural moment of Jewish and Palestinian national clash, it was also a founding episode in the colonial history of the Middle East. No matter the applied context, it marks a distinct moment of militarization and the articulation of hyper-nationalism by both Al-Hajj Amin al-Husayni and Ze’ev Jabotinsky – a moment in which Jews were targeted as representatives of the very colonial order that alternately advanced and sacrificed them. All the same, British support offered the key to realizing Jewish national autonomy, and colonial officials did not hold uniform views – some were pro-Zionist and some pro-Arab nationalist – so the moment was ripe. The picture has been further complicated by recent studies proving German colonial support for 25 Havrelock, “The Ancient Past that Oil Built,” The Bible and Critical Theory 11:2 (2015): 51–60. 26 Awad Eddie Halabi, “The Nabi Musa Festival under British-Ruled Palestine,” 27. 27 Habali, “The Nabi Musa Festival,” 27.

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incitement by Amin al-Husayni, and French support for Jabontinsky and his Etsel militia.28 Keeping this in mind, the escalation of violence appears as part of an ongoing proxy war. In their important essay, “The Pilgrimage to Nebi Musa and the Origins of Palestinian Nationalism,” Roger Friedland and Richard D. Hecht focus on the ways in which Amin al-Husayni used the festival as a means of promoting national unity and leveraging his own power. Primarily, they advance the argument that al-Husayni relied on religious institutions including Nabi Musa “to establish an effective mechanism and network of patronage which subordinated other centers (especially Nablus and Hebron) to Jerusalem as well as powerful and rival families.”29 In the name of overcoming local affiliations and even distracting from Faysal’s aspirations for a Greater Syria encompassing Palestine, al-Husayni publicly articulated a nationalist vision for Palestine at the 1919 Nabi Musa festival.30 As persuaded as I am by Friedland and Hecht’s evidence that al-Husayni turned to Nabi Musa, much as did King David to Jerusalem or America’s founding fathers to Washington DC, as a site not associated with any form of local power and therefore fitting as a nationalist symbol, I believe they miss an essential nuance. Describing how the future mufti exploited the pilgrimage “to forge a Palestinian nation,” they see a positive move “to overcome the localism that to this day continues to plague the Arab population living in the lands that composed the original British Mandate.”31 However, if we correctly understand the transition from Ottoman to Western colonial rule, we see that national self-representation was the precondition for colonial recognition of a sovereign claim. In other words, neither the British nor the French (or the Germans for that matter) would countenance a program of self-rule if it were not presented in national terms. It did not matter, furthermore, whether the colonial powers intended to actualize the proposed self-rule or not – they would only grant an audience to representatives of allegedly nationalist groups. And yet no group at the time was organized in this manner. The scenario was one of localism – tribal regions and cosmopolitan cities – with weak Ottoman oversight in which pilgrimage was a largely safe, interreligious affair. What has continued to plague Middle Eastern countries is not localism, but rather a 28 On Germany and the Mufti, see Sean McMeekin, The Berlin-Baghdad Express: The Ottoman Empire and Germany’s Bid for World Power (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), and on France and Jabotinsky, see James Barr, A Line in the Sand: The Anglo-French Struggle for the Middle East, 1914–1948 (New York: W.W. Norton & Company), 2012. 29 Roger Friedland and Richard D. Hecht, “The Pilgrimage to Nebi Musa and the Origins of Palestinian Nationalism,” in Pilgrims & Travelers to the Holy Land, ed. Bryan F. Le Beau and Menachem Mor (Omaha, NE: Creighton University Press, 1996), 92. 30 Friedland and Hecht, “The Pilgrimage to Nebi Musa,” 104. 31 Friedland and Hecht, “The Pilgrimage to Nebi Musa,” 109.

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legacy of militarism instituted by colonial powers to facilitate the export of oil and to destabilize opposition. Where the British failed to militarize the local population – as in the cases of Al-Husayni and Jabotinsky – the Germans or the French were happy to do so. Al-Husayni may have promoted patronage, but he was also a client of Deutsche Bank, the German firm that lost its oil concessions with Ottoman defeat.32 And Jabotinsky, for all his separatism, was collecting from the French in order to attack British assets. Palestinian protest against both the British Mandate and Jewish immigration mounted in March 1920 as French colonial forces fought against Arab nationalists in Syria (the attack on the Jewish community in Tel Hai figured into this struggle). As the Nabi Musa festival approached, Jewish leaders reported warning signs and Ze’ev Jabotinsky took the opportunity to arm and train Jews with the help of Pinchas Rutenberg, engineer and Jewish Legion booster. Official Jewish requests for protection from the British army were denied, so attacks on unarmed Jews commenced as the festival began in Jerusalem. With Hajj Amin al-Husayni stirring up the crowd with fiery rhetoric, the attacks reached riot level. To stop the spread of violence the British army sealed off the Old City and declared martial law, only to then evacuate its soldiers and abandon the defenseless Jews trapped within the walls. Jabotinsky’s armed men could not penetrate the British blockade. Despite British mishandling of the violent outbreak, similar policies of control and abandonment persisted throughout the Mandate. Jabotinsky and his would-be fighters were arrested for violating the law forbidding Jews to carry weapons. Amin al-Husayni was likewise arrested for incitement, but fled to Syria after being released on bail. Rather than diminishing their militaristic influence, the arrests elevated both Jabotinsky and al-Husayni as national heroes. Cosmopolitan as well as mainstream nationalists in both camps looked on the two leaders as extremists whose propagandistic ethnic caricatures did not reflect daily experiences; nonetheless, the events of 1920 convinced many that violent contest was the only way to achieve national goals. Experience under the British Mandate convinced many more that this sadly was the case. Militarized nationalism would increasingly emerge as the official position of the respective movements, with Jabotinsky’s ideology serving as the basis of the Zionist and then Israeli right wing, and al-Husayni’s position as the inspiration for the Palestine Liberation Organization. The Nabi Musa festival would thereafter be a nationalistic event for Palestinians, as well as for their Jewish neighbors who associated it with the European pogroms often perpetrated on Easter. Paradoxically, Hajj Amin al-Husayni was elevated as a result of the March 1920 outbreak, gaining the position of Grand 32 McMeekin, The Berlin-Baghdad Express, 38–53.

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Mufti as well as an official pardon from Herbert Samuel, High Commissioner to Palestine.33 The British hoped that al-Husayni would then work in tandem with their rule in Jerusalem – but this proved not to be the case. Throughout the 1920s and 30s, the Grand Mufti did everything in his power to stoke a centralized Palestinian national movement, including asserting the Nabi Musa festival as an essential expression of Palestinian identity. Just before Israel gained recognition as a nation-state, the Nabi Musa festival came to an end due to food shortages and lack of financial support. Subsequently, “the Jordanians suppressed the pilgrimage between 1948 and 1967, and the Israelis followed for the first two decades of their rule of the West Bank of the Jordan.”34 Friedland and Hecht describe an evidently different form of militarization when the festival was next celebrated in 1987: “seven youth movements . . . ​dressed in paramilitary scouting uniforms, carried the traditional flags and banners” but with Islamic – rather than local symbols.35 In retrospect, they see here the seeds of not only the First Intifada, but also of the shift in power from the more nationalist PLO to the pan-Islamic Hamas and Islamic Jihad. As Israel granted jurisdiction over Nabi Musa to the Palestinian National Authority in 1993–94, and quickly developed the neighboring settlements of Ma’ale Adumim, Mitzpe Yeriho, and Vered Yeriho, a sacred site commemorating the mediation of homeland and exile found itself at the crossroads of military zones. In the Jordanian national context, Jebel Musa, or Moses’s mountain – also known as Mount Nebo – has predominated. After all, Scripture can verify this as Moses’s final station, and Hashemite kings asserted themselves its proper custodians. From 1948–1967, when both banks of the Jordan fell under Jordanian control, the mountain of Moses’s final ascent was integrated with the Maqam Nabi Musa and Jerusalem. One site among many holy places, Mount Nebo was important largely to local Christian communities or international Christian visitors. Similar to the ambiguity in Judaism and Islam’s interpretations of Moses’s death, Christian exegetes also debate the question of whether Moses perished. For example, Moses, along with Elijah the Prophet, appears with Jesus at the Mount of Transfiguration, but it remains subject to debate whether the prophets are manifest in spiritual or physical form (Matt 17:1–9). Putting such debates aside, Hashemite kings were happy to pronounce that Moses had died on Mount Nebo and to have the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities invite Christians to commemorate the event in Jordan. After Israel occupied the West Bank in 1967, Jordanian control of religious 33 Halabi, “The Nabi Musa Festival under British-Ruled Palestine,” 27. 34 Friedland and Hecht, “The Pilgrimage to Nebi Musa,”110. 35 Friedland and Hecht, “The Pilgrimage to Nebi Musa,” 111.

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sites assumed new importance as compensation for the loss of Jerusalem. King Hussein made the pursuit of Christian recognition a priority, often developing holy sites as a sign of his commitment to a pluralistic Jordan. Attention to Mount Nebo further increased with the 1994 peace treaty between Jordan and Israel, after which Christian and Jewish tourists visited Jordan in increasing numbers. King Abdullah II continued his father’s investments in bolstering Christian tourism and the support of Christian countries. Nationalist motivations operated here as well, insofar as international support is vital to Jordan’s economy and stature. It is, after all, a delicate balancing act for Jordan to maintain stability while absorbing refugees from Palestine, Iraq, and Syria. Custodial oversight of religious sites is an important way Jordan signals to the world its ability to reconcile different cultural forces in a peaceful country. Infrastructure around the Mount Nebo basilica – first described by the fourth-century Christian pilgrim Egeria – was renovated to serve as Pope John Paul II’s inaugural site of prayer during his Jubilee Year visit in 2000. Although Pope Francis did not ascend Nebo during his 2014 visit, he did travel to the Jordan River and was accompanied throughout his trip to Jordan, Palestine, and Israel by both a rabbi and a Muslim religious leader. The interfaith group signaled the possibility of religious reconciliation, yet did not visit either site commemorating Moses, although there may have been no intention behind this. Pope Francis addressed the plight of Syrian refugees and the strain their absorption places on Jordan, visited the diminished Jordan River, and invited Palestinians and Israelis to join in prayer for peace. Unfortunately, prayers have not helped in Moses’s valley. Flanked by Jewish settlements, Nabi Musa is cut off from proximate Jericho and subject to thorough surveillance. In light of attacks on Christian communities in Iraq and Syria by the so-called Islamic State (ISIS), the Christians of Jordan harbor trepidation. A number of clergy and interfaith groups look to shared figures for models of coexistence, but systemic militarization and extensive violence detract from their example. Despite the multiple sites of his commemoration, Moses the prophet and lawgiver seems absent from the Jordan Valley. As grievous as this situation is, perhaps it affords the opportunity to look at Moses in a different light. Instead of a national hero, perhaps we should remember Moses as a leader who miraculously provided his people with their more material needs such as food and water. By bringing water from a desert rock, Moses sustained his people and quieted their fears (Exod 17:6).36 Similarly, the hope for physical and social survival in the Jordan Valley rests in providing the

36 For accounts of this miracle in Islam, see Brannon M. Wheeler, Moses in the Quran and Islamic Exegesis (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2002), 105–6.

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residents of this parched landscape with the water required for health, human dignity, and economic well-being. One should pause to note that the people in this river valley are in desperate need of water, and take issue with the diversions by Israel, Syria, and Jordan that have left the Jordan River at a mere four percent of its historical flow. These diversions, in conjunction with climate change, have an outsized effect on the poorest residents of the valley. Many Palestinian farmers, for example, have had to abandon their fields and their work due to insufficient water supply.37 The miracle needed at this point is one of political will. Israel leads the world in water recycling and desalination technology, and supplies West Bank settlements with enough water for swimming pools, dairy farms, and lush landscaping.38 These same water pipelines could supply Palestinian and Jordanian communities with necessary water, which would help to stabilize them economically and politically. Along with Jordan and Israel, Palestine could be recognized as a riparian to the Jordan River, and all parties could engage in a coordinated attempt to save the river that the three religions regard as holy. Nationalist competition, which has exacerbated the water crisis, does not provide the way out. Instead, we need a Moses-like unification of tribes in the name of deliverance and continued survival. An equitable, long-term water policy that includes representatives of all communities in the Jordan River watershed seems the perfect commemoration for a prophet who drew water from a rock.39

37 “Currently, agricultural and grazing land is not accessible to Palestinians, which results in 60% of Palestinians in the Jordan Valley living under the poverty or abject poverty line.” Palestinian NGO Master Plan for Sustainable Development of the Lower Part of the Jordan River Basin, May 2015, 9. http://foeme.org/uploads/14640893341~^$^~Palestinian_National_Master_Plan​ .pdf. 38 “Israeli settlers in the Lower Jordan River consume approximately 6.6 times more water per capita annually than all Palestinian residents.” Palestinian NGO Master Plan for Sustainable Development, 11. 39 See Ecopeace Middle East’s integrated trans-boundary plan for the Lower Part of the Jordan River basin: http://foeme.org/www/?module=projects&record_id=49