Scripture in Its Historical Contexts: Volume I: Text, Canon, and Qumran (Forschungen Zum Alten Testament) 9783161557569, 9783161559679, 3161557565

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Forschungen zum Alten Testament Edited by Konrad Schmid (Zürich) · Mark S. Smith (Princeton) Hermann Spieckermann (Göttingen) · Andrew Teeter (Harvard)

118

James A. Sanders

Scripture in Its Historical Contexts Volume I: Text, Canon, and Qumran

edited by Craig A. Evans

Mohr Siebeck

James A. Sanders, born 1927; sometime professor at Union Theological Seminary and Columbia University. Unrolled and published the large Scroll of Psalms from Qumran cave eleven; Professor of Biblical Studies emeritus at Claremont School of Theology in California; founder and long-time president of the Ancient Biblical Manuscript Center. Craig A. Evans, born 1952; 1983 PhD; 2009 D. Habil; has taught at Universities in ­Canada for 35 years; since 2016 he is the John Bisagno Distinguished Professor of Christian Origins at Houston Baptist University.

ISBN 978‑3‑16‑155756‑9 eISBN 978‑3‑16‑155967‑9 ISSN 0940‑4155 (Forschungen zum Alten Testament) Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliographie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de abrufbar. © 2018  Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen, Germany.  www. mohr.de This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, in any form (beyond that permitted by copyright law) without the publisher’s written permission. This applies particularly to reproductions, translations, microfilms and storage and processing in electronic systems. The book was typeset and printed by Laupp und Göbel in Gomaringen on non-aging paper and bound by Buchbinderei Spinner in Ottersweier. Printed in Germany.

Table of Contents Prologue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

VII

Abbreviations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . XIII Permissions and Publication History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . XVII

Part 1: Text and Canon   1. Hebrew Bible and Old Testament: Textual Criticism in Service of Biblical Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

3

  2. What’s Critical about a Critical Edition of the Bible? . . . . . . . . . . . . .

22

  3. Hermeneutics of Text Criticism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

27

  4. Text and Canon: Concepts and Method . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

51

  5. Stability and Fluidity in Text and Canon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

78

  6. Adaptable for Life: The Nature and Function of Canon . . . . . . . . . .

93

  7. Canonical Criticism: An Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

127

  8. Canon as Shape and Function . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

145

  9. Canonical Context and Canonical Criticism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

155

10. The Exile and Canon Formation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

176

11. The Stabilization of the Tanak . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

197

12. The Integrity of Biblical Pluralism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

222

13. Text and Canon: Old Testament and New . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

240

14. Torah and Christ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

254

15. Torah and Paul . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

274

16. The Gospels and the Canonical Process: A Response to Lou H. Silberman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

289

17. The Bible and the Believing Communities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

304

18. Scripture as Canon in the Church . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

315

19. Canon as Dialogue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

336

20. The Issue of Closure in the Canonical Process . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

354

VI

Table of Contents

Part 2: Qumran 21. Habakkuk in Qumran, Paul and the Old Testament . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

371

22. The Old Testament in 11Q Melchizedek . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

387

23. The Qumran Psalms Scroll (11QPsa) Reviewed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

398

24. Cave 11 Surprises and the Question of Canon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

416

25. The Modern History of the Qumran Psalms Scroll and Canonical Criticism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

430

26. Psalm 154 Revisited . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

446

27. The Dead Sea Scrolls and Biblical Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

457

28. The Judean Desert Scrolls and the History of the Text of the Hebrew Bible . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

471

29. The Impact of the Scrolls on Biblical Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

482

30. The Scrolls and the Canonical Process . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

492

Appendix The History of the Ancient Biblical Manuscript Center 1976 – 2003 . . . .

511

Index of Modern Authors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

529

Index of Ancient Sources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

539

Prologue I am deeply grateful to Prof. Craig Evans, the editor of this collection, to the copy-editor, Dr. Lois Dow, and to the outside proof reader, Dr. James Dunkly, for their dedicated work in bringing these essays into a form accessible to current students and future generations of scholars. I very much hope that it will be helpful to see how a (late) first-generation student of the Dead Sea Scrolls perceived the new situation their discovery and study have affected in two areas of critical study of the Bible: (1) the art and practice of textual criticism of the Hebrew Bible; and (2) the rise and development of canons of Scripture in the various believing communities, Jewish and Christian, in antiquity. Interest in the Dead Sea Scrolls (also known as the Judean Desert Scrolls) was piqued for the writer upon the first publication of them in the spring of 1950 when Vanderbilt University School of Religion (now Divinity School) Prof. James Philip Hyatt brought to our advanced Hebrew class Vol. 1 of The Dead Sea Scrolls of St. Mark’s Monastery, edited by Prof. Millar Burrows of Yale University Divinity School, under whom Hyatt had studied. Though Burrows had transcribed the text column by column into modern printed Hebrew, Hyatt opened the volume to the Plate XXXII photograph of the ancient scroll itself, set it in front of the three of us, pointed to the bottom line of the ancient column where Isaiah ch. 40 began, and said, “Read!” I was hooked! Hyatt later informed me of a new federal-government program instigated by Arkansas Senator William Fulbright that I should apply for. He knew that I taught French in Vanderbilt undergraduate classes and suggested I apply for a year’s study in Paris as my third year of seminary. At the Faculté Libre de Théologie Protestante and the École des Hautes Études of the University of Paris I continued study of the DSS in 1950 – 51 under André Dupont-Sommer and Oscar Cullmann, and thereafter in the doctoral program at the Hebrew Union College during 1951 – 54 under several scholars there. During eleven years teaching at Colgate Rochester Divinity School (1954 – 65) I diligently studied the early publications of the various scrolls as they appeared and published a paper tracing the understandings of Hab 2:4 at Qumran, in the LXX, and in the New Testament, comparing them with current scholarship’s understanding of the verse. No two understandings were alike! On the contrary, each clearly functioned to serve the needs of the later communities, religious or scholarly.1 This was later to be called “reception history,” but there was none 1

  See below, essay 21.

VIII

Prologue

such at the time. It clearly indicated that any understanding of a text largely depends on the reader. As the studies collected in these volumes indicate, the work continued while I was on the faculties of the Union Theological Seminary / Columbia University (1965 – 77) and The Claremont School of Theology / Claremont Graduate University (1977 – 97), and thereafter during “retirement.” While still in Rochester I had the honor of being invited to unroll and publish the large Scroll of Psalms from Qumran Cave 11 (11QPsa = 11Q5). The work appeared in two different publications: The Psalms Scroll of Qumran Cave 11 (11QPsa) (DJD 4. Clarendon, 1965), and in The Dead Sea Psalms Scroll (Cornell University Press, 1967). The latter, though intended for a lay readership, included critical responses to reviews and critiques of the earlier publications. Soon after joining the faculties in New York City I was invited to join the Hebrew Old Testament Text Project (HOTTP) in Germany, sponsored by the United Bible Societies of Stuttgart and New York, that continued for me until 1990. Those two experiences cast me deeply into the discipline of textual criticism of the First Testament (especially of the so-called Hebrew Bible), while critical study of the Psalms Scroll and related psalms fragments caused me to see that the field needed a new sub-discipline of canonical criticism that was woefully lacking. The first, textual criticism, was in need of considerable reconceiving, and the second, canonical criticism, needed launching. Canonical criticism needed to be created in order better to understand how, when, and why the concept of canon, or a group of ancient texts shared by various early believing communities viewed as normative by them, arose and developed. Up to the discovery of the Judean Desert Scrolls the common view was that the concept of “canon” was developed out of the deliberations of the surviving rabbis at Jamnia (Yavneh) around 90 CE, who supposedly decided what would constitute the third section of the Tanak, the Ketuvim or Writings. There was also a search on the part of some scholars for a similar gathering of authoritative leaders that focused on earlier Maccabean / Hasmonean efforts at “canonizing” ancient writings. Careful study of the texts that mention the gathering at Jamnia showed that it had nothing to do with what was in and what was out of a “canon.” Further study of the few texts available concerning the reign of Judas Maccabeus indicated the same misconception.2 It became more and more clear that the concept of a “canon” arose out of the needs of the communities that found their identity and ethos in certain groups of common texts. Critical study of the biblical manuscripts (about a third) among the Judean Desert Scrolls showed the need for a complete revision of the history of the transmission of the text of the Tanak, while study of a number of the biblical scrolls and fragments showed the need to rethink the traditional view of the origins of the concept of a canon of Scripture.

2   See now the masterful review of the whole issue in McDonald, Formation of the Biblical Canon, vol. 1.

Prologue

IX

One’s understanding of the history of transmission of the text is of necessity the basis of one’s work in the art of textual criticism. A new understanding of the history of transmission came about because of the importance of Fr. Dominique Barthélemy’s study of the Greek Minor Prophets Scroll, discovered in 1952 in the Wadi Habra (Nahal Hever) not far from the Wadi Qumran, and how ˙ the field to write a new history of transit impinged on that history.3˙ It caused mission that allowed for the gradual shift from limited fluidity of the text in the early periods of transmission to the markedly stable texts (Aquila and Theodotion) that preceded by centuries the amazingly stable Masoretic Text of the classical, medieval Tiberian codices (Leningradensis, Aleppensis) that had themselves, along with the Samaritan Pentateuch, gradually come to light during the first half of the twentieth century.4 This new history, with an apparent “Great Divide” at the end of the first century CE5 between fluidity and stability of text, allowed for the re-dating of a number of ancient witnesses to the text and a new understanding of the value of them for establishing the critically most responsible text of the Hebrew Bible. It also led to a new appreciation of the work of Origen’s late second-century CE Hexapla, as well as the need to appreciate the value of “rivulets” of true variant texts alongside the standard Masoretic Text.6 It also showed that even the very stable medieval Masoretic Texts still had variables in the order of the books in the Ketuvim of the Hebrew Bible (Tanak). It in effect showed that there is no such thing as “a final form” of the text. The work of collating and publishing the texts and true variants fell on two major text-critical projects, the HOTTP in Europe, and the Hebrew University Bible Project (HUBP) in Jerusalem. The former instigated the current compiling of the Biblia Hebraica Quinta (BHQ) using Leningradensis as base text, and the latter the current compiling of the Hebrew University Bible (HUB) using Aleppensis as base text. The older view, that permits of an eclectic text of the Hebrew Bible that attempts to reach back to a common origin, is being pursued at the same time in the current compiling of the Oxford Hebrew Bible (OHB). All three are still in progress at this writing.7 The launching of the sub-discipline of canonical criticism was intended also as an attempt to separate study of the history of the formation of the text from the rise of the idea of a “canon,” the sharing of common texts by ancient communities. The earlier view of the rise of a canon of Scripture was that it was in essence the final stage in the history of the formation of the text. Close study of the scrolls indicated that a more reliable view was needed and the new understanding of the history of transmission of the text was instigated that also clarified 3  Barthélemy, Les devanciers d’Aquila. The full text is published in Tov, Greek Minor Prophets Scroll. 4   See the English translation of Barthélemy’s history of the transmission of the text in “Text, Hebrew, History of.” 5   See Talmon, “Textual Study of the Bible.” 6   See Goshen-Gottstein, Isaiah: Sample Edition, 17. 7   See below, essay 2.

X

Prologue

the origins of the concept of canons of Scripture. The work was not intended to offer a mode of interpreting Scripture in canonical context, as was that of Brevard Childs. Childs’s purpose was to enhance the older Barthian understanding of Scripture as the Word of God over against strictly historical interpretations of Scripture. Mine, on the contrary, was to enhance historical interpretations of Scripture that gave rise to the concept of canons of Scripture in the process of the shift of various biblical texts from the province of editors and schools to the advent of shared Scriptures – the “aim” of textual criticism – within varying ancient communities. The text critic’s “aim” is crucial to his / her understanding of when to establish the critically most responsible text for scholars and translators to use in their work. The older view was / is that the aim for the Torah and the Prophets may for some texts pierce back as far as the exilic period. The newer is that the aim should be whenever the various texts became functionally “canonical” for whole communities (Gruppentexte), understanding that up to that point biblical texts were essentially still in formation under the aegis of schools and editors. The Torah became “canonical” at the point that Ezra brought it to Jerusalem from the large Babylonian Jewish community and read it about 445 BCE to the Palestinian Jewish community in the Water Gate (Neh 8) in Jerusalem.8 For the various prophetic books and some of the Writings it would have been the point at which each would have become Gruppentexte sometime during the Persian or later Greco-Roman period. The following studies are not offered in chronological order of their appearance but rather in an order hopefully helpful to current and future students interested in how these two fields of study have been shaped by critical study of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the recovery in the same time period of the classical Tiberian Masoretic codices. Included in the collection (especially volume 2) are also exegetical studies based on the newer understandings of text and canon, including those that explain the recovery of the biblical launching and development of the monotheizing process – the Bible’s prime and urgent message for all generations.9 The essays are reproduced here basically as previously published, though style conventions have been harmonized; however, where it has been felt necessary to add updating, current information has been added inside square brackets. Note that the bibliographies for the essays do not reflect the republication of essays in the current two volumes. For this information, please consult the Tables of Contents. Bibliography Barthélemy, Dominique. Les devanciers d’Aquila: Première publication intégrale du texte des fragments du Dodécapropheton. Leiden: Brill, 1963. Barthélemy, Dominique. “Text, Hebrew, History of.” IDBSup 878 – 84. 8

  See Sanders, Torah and Canon.   See Sanders, Monotheizing Process.

9

Prologue

XI

Goshen-Gottstein, Moshe H. The Book of Isaiah: Sample Edition with Introduction. Jerusalem: Magnes, 1965. McDonald, Lee. The Formation of the Biblical Canon. Vol. 1. London: Bloomsbury, 2017. Sanders, James A. The Monotheizing Process. Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2014. Sanders, James A. Torah and Canon. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1972. 2nd ed., Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2005. Talmon, Shemaryahu. “The Textual Study of the Bible – A New Outlook.” In Qumran and the History of the Biblical Text, edited by Frank M. Cross and Shemaryahu Talmon, 321 – 400. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975. Tov, Emanuel. The Greek Minor Prophets Scroll from Nahal Hever (8HevXIIgr). DJD 8. Oxford: Clarendon, 1990.

Abbreviations AB ABD ABMC ACF ANE AOAT ARNA ASOR AT BA BAR BASOR BBB BBET BHK BHK3 BHQ BHS BHT Bib BJRL BJS BRev BTB BZ BZAW BZNW CBQ CBQMS CRINT CTAT CTM CurBS DBSup DJD DSD

Anchor Bible Anchor Bible Dictionary. Edited by David Noel Freedman. 6 vols. New York: Doubleday, 1992. Ancient Biblical Manuscript Center, Claremont, California Annuaire du Collège de France Ancient Near East Alter Orient und Altes Testament Abot de Rabbi Nathan (version A) The American Schools of Oriental Research Alte Testament or Ancien Testament Biblical Archaeologist Biblical Archaeology Review Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research Bonner biblische Beiträge Beiträge zur biblischen Exegese und Theologie Biblia Hebraica. Edited by Rudolf Kittel. Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1905 – 6. BHK, 3rd ed. Completed by Albrecht Alt and Otto Eissfeldt. Stuttgart: Privilegierte Württembergische Bibelanstalt, 1937. Biblica Hebraica Quinta Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia. Edited by Karl Elliger and Wilhelm Rudolph. Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1983. (= BHK4) Beiträge zur historischen Theologie Biblica Bulletin of the John Rylands Library Brown Judaic Studies Bible Review Biblical Theology Bulletin Biblische Zeitschrift Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft Catholic Biblical Quarterly Catholic Biblical Quarterly Monograph Series Compendia Rerum Iudaicarum ad Novum Testamentum Critique textuelle de l’Ancien Testament. Edited by Dominique Barthélemy. 5 vols. OBO 50. Fribourg: Éditions universitaires; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1982 – 2016. Concordia Theological Monthly Currents in Research: Biblical Studies Dictionnaire de la Bible: Supplément. Edited by Louis Pirot and André Robert. Paris: Letouzey & Ané, 1928 – . Discoveries in the Judaean Desert Dead Sea Discoveries

XIV DSS ET ExpTim EvQ EvT f. (pl. ff.) Folio FOTL G HB HBT HKAT HOTTP HSS HTR HTS HUB HUBP HUCA IB

IDB IDBSup IEJ Int IOSOT ISBE JAAR JAOS JBL JBR JJS JNES JNSL JQR JR JSJ JSJSup JSNTSup JSOT JSOTSup JSPSup JSS JTC

Abbreviations

Dead Sea Scrolls, also referred to as Judean Desert Scrolls English Translation Expository Times Evangelical Quarterly Evangelische Theologie and following page(s) The Folio: The Bulletin of the Ancient Biblical Manuscript Center for Preservation and Research The Forms of Old Testament Literature Old Greek First Testament Hebrew Bible Horizons in Biblical Theology Handkommentar zum Alten Testament United Bible Societies’ Hebrew Old Testament Text Project Harvard Semitic Studies Harvard Theological Review Harvard Theological Studies Hebrew University Bible Hebrew University Bible Project Hebrew Union College Annual The Interpreter’s Bible: The Holy Scriptures in the King James and Revised Standard Versions with General Articles and Introduction, Exegesis, Exposition for Each Book of the Bible. Edited by George Arthur Buttrick et al. 12 vols. Nashville: Abingdon, 1951 – 67. Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible. Edited by George A. Buttrick. 4 vols. Nashville: Abingdon, 1962. Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, Supplementary Volume. Nashville: Abingdon, 1976. Israel Exploration Journal Interpretation The International Organization for the Study of the Old Testament International Standard Bible Encyclopedia. Edited by Geoffrey W. Bromiley. 4 vols. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1979 – 88. Journal of the American Academy of Religion Journal of the American Oriental Society Journal of Biblical Literature Journal of Bible and Religion Journal of Jewish Studies Journal of Near Eastern Studies Journal of Northwest Semitic Languages Jewish Quarterly Review Journal of Religion Journal for the Study of Judaism in the Persian, Hellenistic, and Roman ­Periods Supplements to the Journal for the Study of Judaism Journal for the Study of the New Testament Supplement Series Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement Series Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha Supplement Series Journal of Semitic Studies Journal for Theology and the Church

Abbreviations

JTS KKTS LHBOTS LQ LTQ LXX McCQ MS MT NAB NEB NorTT NovTSup NRSV NT NTA NTS OBO OLZ OstKSt OT OtSt PEQ RB RevQ RGG RSV RTP SBL SBLDS SBLMS SBLSS SBLSBS SBS SBT SE SJSJ SJT SOTSMS SSEJC ST STDJ Textus TDNT ThTo TLZ TOB TP

XV

Journal of Theological Studies Konfessionskundliche und Kontroverstheologische Studien The Library of Hebrew Bible / Old Testament Studies Lutheran Quarterly Lexington Theological Quarterly Septuagint, Greek Old Testament McCormick Quarterly manuscript (plural MSS) Masoretic Text New American Bible New English Bible Norsk Teologisk Tidsskrift Supplements to Novum Testamentum New Revised Standard Version New Testament New Testament Abstracts New Testament Studies Orbis Biblicus et Orientalis Orientalistische Literaturzeitung Ostkirchliche Studien Old Testament Oudtestamentische Studiën Palestine Exploration Quarterly Revue biblique Revue de Qumran Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart. Edited by Kurt Galling. 3rd ed. 7 vols. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1957 – 65. Revised Standard Version Revue de théologie et de philosophie Society of Biblical Literature SBL Dissertation Series SBL Monograph Series SBL Symposium Series SBL Sources for Biblical Study Stuttgarter Bibelstudien Studies in Biblical Theology Studia evangelica Supplements to the Journal for the Study of Judaism Scottish Journal of Theology Society for Old Testament Studies Monograph Series Studies in Scripture in Early Judaism and Christianity Studia theologica Studies on the Texts of the Desert of Judah Textus: Annual of the Hebrew University Bible Project Theological Dictionary of the New Testament. Edited by Gerhard Kittel and Gerhard Friedrich. Translated by Geoffrey W. Bromiley. 10 vols. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1964 – 76. Theology Today Theologische Literaturzeitung Traduction oecuménique de la Bible. Paris: Éditions Cerf, 1975. Theology and Philosophy

XVI TZ UBS USQR UUÅ VT VTSup WMANT YJS ZAW ZTK

Abbreviations

Theologische Zeitschrift United Bible Societies Union Seminary Quarterly Review Uppsala Universitetsårskrift Vetus Testamentum Supplements to Vetus Testamentum Wissenschaftliche Monographien zum Alten und Neuen Testament Yale Judaica Series Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche

Permissions and Publication History 1. “Hebrew Bible and Old Testament: Textual Criticism in Service of Biblical Studies.” In Hebrew Bible or Old Testament? Studying the Bible in Judaism and Christianity, edited by Roger Brooks and John J. Collins, 39 – 68. Christianity and Judaism in Antiquity 5. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990. Used by permission of University of Notre Dame Press. 2. “What’s Critical about a Critical Edition of the Bible?” by David Marcus and James A. Sanders. From Biblical Archaeology Review 39, no. 6 (November 2013) 60 – 65. Used by permission of Biblical Archaeology Review and David Marcus. 3.  “Hermeneutics of Text Criticism.” Textus: Studies of the Hebrew University Bible Project 18 (1995) 1 – 26. Used by permission. 4. “Text and Canon: Concepts and Method.” The Presidential Address delivered 19 November 1975, at the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature, held at the Marriott Hotel, New Orleans, Louisiana. JBL 98 (1979) 5 – 29. This version from From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, by James A. Sanders, 125 – 51. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987. Used by permission of Journal of Biblical Literature, and of Fortress Press. 5. “Stability and Fluidity in Text and Canon.” In Tradition of the Text: Studies Offered to Dominique Barthélemy in Celebration of His 70th Birthday, edited by Gerard J. Norton and Stephen Pisano, 203 – 17. OBO 109. Fribourg: Presses universitaires; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1991. Used by permission. 6. “Adaptable for Life: The Nature and Function of Canon.” In Magnalia Dei: The Mighty Acts of God: Essays on the Bible and Archaeology in Memory of G. Ernest Wright, edited by Frank M. Cross, Werner E. Lemke, and Patrick D. Miller, 531 – 60. New York: Doubleday, 1976. Introduction from From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, by James A. Sanders, 9 – 10. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987. Used by permission of Fortress Press. 7.  “Canonical Criticism: An Introduction.” In Le canon de l’Ancien Testament: Sa formation et son histoire, edited by Jean-Daniel Kaestli and Otto Wermelinger, 341 – 62. Geneva: Labor et Fides, 1984. Used by permission. 8. “Canon as Shape and Function.” In The Promise and Practice of Biblical Theology, edited by John Reumann, 87 – 97. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991. Used by permission of Fortress Press. 9. “Canonical Context and Canonical Criticism.” Horizons in Biblical Theology 2 (1980) 173 – 97. Reprinted in From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, by James A. Sanders, 153 – 74. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987. Used by permission of Koninklijke Brill NV and Fortress Press.

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10. “The Exile and Canon Formation.” In Exile: Old Testament, Jewish, and Christian Conceptions, edited by James M. Scott, 39 – 61. JSJSup 56. Leiden: Brill, 1997. Used by permission. 11. “The Stabilization of the Tanak.” In A History of Biblical Interpretation. Vol. 1, The Ancient Period, edited by Alan J. Hauser and Duane F. Watson, 225 – 52. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003. Used by permission. 12.  “The Integrity of Biblical Pluralism.” In “Not in Heaven”: Coherence and Complexity in Biblical Narrative, edited by Jason P. Rosenblatt and Joseph C. Sitterson Jr., 154 – 69. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991. Used by permission of Indiana University Press. 13. “Text and Canon: Old Testament and New.” In Mélanges Dominique Barthélemy: Études bibliques offertes à l’occasion de son 60e anniversaire, edited by Pierre Casetti, Othmar Keel, and Adrian Schenker, 373 – 94. OBO 38. Fribourg: Presses universitaires; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1981. Used by permission. 14. “Torah and Christ.” Interpretation 29, no. 4 (1975) 372 – 90. This version republished in From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, by James A. Sanders, 41 – 60. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987. Used by permission of Fortress Press and SAGE Publications (http://journals.sagepub.com / doi / pdf / 10.1177 / 002096437502900403). 15. “Torah and Paul.” In From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, by James A. Sanders, 107 – 23. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987. “Torah: A Definition” section from “Torah,” IDBSup 909 – 11. “Paul and the Law” section from “Torah and Paul,” in God’s Christ and His People: Studies in Honour of Nils Alstrup Dahl on the Occasion of His Sixty-Fifth Birthday, edited by Jacob Jervell and Wayne A. Meeks, 132 – 40. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1977. Used by permission of Fortress Press. 16. “The Gospels and the Canonical Process: A Response to Lou H. Silberman.” In The Relationships among the Gospels: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue, edited by William O. Walker Jr., 219 – 36. San Antonio, TX: Trinity University Press, 1978. 17. “The Bible and the Believing Communities.” In The Hermeneutical Quest: Essays in Honor of James Luther Mays on his Sixty-Fifth Birthday, edited by Donald G. Miller, 145 – 57. Allison Park, PA: Pickwick, 1986. Used by permission. 18. “Scripture as Canon in the Church.” In L’Interpretazione della Bibbia nella Chiesa: Atti del Simposio promosso dalla Congregazione per la Dottrina della Fede, 122 – 43. Rome: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1999. 19.  “Canon as Dialogue.” In The Bible at Qumran: Text, Shape, and Interpretation, edited by Peter W. Flint with assistance of Tae Hun Kim, 7 – 26. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001. Used by permission. 20.  “The Issue of Closure in the Canonical Process.” In The Canon Debate, edited by Lee M. McDonald and James A. Sanders, 252 – 63. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2002. Used by permission of Baker Publishing Group.

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21. “Habakkuk in Qumran, Paul, and the Old Testament.” In Paul and the Scriptures of Israel, edited by Craig A. Evans and James A. Sanders, 98 – 117. JSNTSup 83. SSEJC 1. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1993. A revised form of JR 39 (1959) 232 – 44. 22. “The Old Testament in 11Q Melchizedek.” The Journal of the Ancient Near Eastern Society of Columbia University 5 (1973) 373 – 82. (The Gaster Festschrift). Used by permission. 23.  “The Qumran Psalms Scroll (11QPsa) Reviewed.” In On Language, Culture, and Religion: In Honor of Eugene A. Nida, edited by Matthew Black and William A. Smalley, 79 – 99. The Hague: Mouton, 1974. Used by permission of De Gruyter. 24.  “Cave 11 Surprises and the Question of Canon.” In New Directions in Biblical Archaeology, edited by David Noel Freedman and Jonas C. Greenfield, 113 – 30. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1971. Originally published in McCormick Quarterly  21 (1968) 1 – 15 (284 – 98). Used by permission of McCormick Theological Seminary. 25. “The Modern History of the Qumran Psalms Scroll and Canonical Criticism.” In Emanuel: Studies in Hebrew Bible, Septuagint, and Dead Sea Scrolls in Honor of Emanuel Tov, edited by Shalom M. Paul, Robert A. Kraft, Lawrence H. Schiffman, and Weston W. Fields, with the assistance of Eva Ben-David, 393 – 411. Leiden: Brill, 2003. Used by permission. 26. “Psalm 154 Revisited.” In Biblische Theologie und gesellschaftlicher Wandel: Für Norbert Lohfink SJ, edited by Georg Braulik, Walter Groß, and Sean McEvenue, 296 – 306. Freiburg (im Breisgau): Herder, 1993. 27. “The Dead Sea Scrolls and Biblical Studies.” In “Shaʿarei Talmon”: Studies in the Bible, Qumran, and the Ancient Near East Presented to Shemaryahu Talmon, edited by Michael Fishbane and Emanuel Tov, with the assistance of Weston W. Fields, 323 – 36. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1992. Used by permission. 28. “The Judean Desert Scrolls and the History of the Text of the Hebrew Bible.” Published as “The Judaean Desert Scrolls and the History of the Text of the Hebrew Bible.” In Caves of Enlightenment: Proceedings of the American Schools of Oriental Research Dead Sea Scrolls Jubilee Symposium (1947 – 1997), edited by James H. Charlesworth, 1 – 17. North Richland Hills, TX: Bibal, 1998. Used by permission of James H. Charlesworth and ASOR. 29. “The Impact of the Scrolls on Biblical Studies.” In The Provo International Conference on the Dead Sea Scrolls: New Texts, Reformulated Issues, and Technological Innovations, edited by Donald W. Parry and Eugene Ulrich, 47 – 57. STDJ 30. Leiden: Brill, 1999. Used by permission. 30. “The Scrolls and the Canonical Process.” In The Dead Sea Scrolls after Fifty Years: A Comprehensive Assessment, edited by Peter W. Flint and James C. VanderKam with the assistance of Andrea E. Alvarez, 2:1 – 23. Leiden: Brill, 1999. Used by permission.

Part 1: Text and Canon

1 Hebrew Bible and Old Testament: Textual Criticism in Service of Biblical Studies The title of this book, Hebrew Bible or Old Testament?, presents us starkly with the basic problem of what we study. The thinking world at large seems to be settling on the expression “Hebrew Bible” (Biblia Hebraica). One sees it now in Christian seminary catalogs. Yet Jews among themselves simply say “Bible” or use the acronym Tanak. Christians have become uncomfortable with “Old Testament,” largely because we think Jews are uncomfortable with it, but also because some Christian scholars are reaching for a hermeneutic other than the traditional ones of Christocentrism or promise-fulfillment. A few Christian scholars and even a few Jewish scholars have recently focused exclusively on a theology of the Hebrew Bible.1 And yet Jacob Neusner has persuaded not a few other scholars that the real canon of Judaism is in the rabbinic corpus of formative Judaism and not in the Bible.2 The board of editors of the Biblical Theology Bulletin decided a few years ago to experiment with the expressions “First Testament” and “Second Testament,” noting that the solution is not without its own problems, but that it might offer a viable alternative.3 After all, while Hebrew Bible may vaguely suffice as reference to the First or Old Testament of Protestants and to the Bible of Jews, it is inadequate for Catholics and Orthodox Christians. And those whose work includes focus on the Septuagint cannot use the expression “Hebrew Bible” everywhere they used to say “Old Testament.” And we all feel a little discomfort when we ignore the Aramaic portions of the thing! Emanuel Tov recently remarked that we work in a field that has no database. He, Johann Cook, and the Ancient Biblical Manuscript Center have begun to rectify the situation by constructing computerized databases of the Judean Desert Scrolls.4 And that is in large measure the reason for the establishment of the Ancient Biblical Manuscript Center, to provide at least a raw but highly accessible data base on which we can all work and no longer be dependent, as Barbara *  First published 1990. 1  See Knierim, “Task of OT Theology”; the responses by Harrelson, “Limited Task”; Towner, “Is OT Theology Equal”; and Murphy, “A Response”; and Knierim’s response to them, “On the Task.” See also Rendtorff, “Biblical Theology,” 40 – 43; and Tsevat, “Theology of the OT.” See as well Levenson, “Why Jews Are Not Interested.” 2   See Neusner, Formative Judaism. Orthodox Jews probably take the Responsa as functionally canonical and Reform Jews only the Bible. 3   Sanders, “First Testament and Second.” 4   Tov and Cook, “Computerized Database”; Tov, “Hebrew Biblical Manuscripts.”

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Aland of the Hermann Kunst Stiftung recently wrote, on “chance knowledge” of manuscripts.5 This is a point to which we shall return, but one might well ask: How does the question of what to call the very elastic book we study relate to issues of textual criticism? A beginning to an answer lies in the observation that even if we should someday attain something like a complete raw database in our field, with films of all extant biblical manuscripts available at Münster (in the case of the Second Testament) or at Claremont (in the case of both Testaments), we shall still have only apographs with which to work. There is no such thing as a monograph, or an Ur-text, of any biblical literature, a point underscored by the sensationalism attached to the Greek papyri found in Qumran Cave 7.6 This observation obtains whether the reference is to texts or versions. I suggest this as a starting point for what to call pre-Christian Scripture, in part because that was where Martin Luther found himself when in 1523 he began his program of translation of the Old Testament. It is very interesting to start with Luther because the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries marked the beginnings of biblical criticism in which there was still some dialogue, or at least open disputation, between Protestants and Catholics and a few Jews – a situation that would not return until a century ago. Luther’s principle of sola Scriptura began almost immediately to become problematic for him.7 Without the magisterium and traditions of the church to fall back on, following Jerome’s principle of Hebraica veritas forced him to elaborate a hermeneutic of textual criticism and translation that, it would appear, he had not yet thought necessary. The hermeneutic, which he called res et argumentum, would provide for him the key both to choice of words, in the case of variants, and to choice of meaning of crucial words.8 Words, he insisted, must be in service of meaning, not meaning in service of words. Res for Luther was the gospel of Jesus Christ. Argumentum included three themes: oeconomia, politia, and ecclesia. If a passage did not accord with ecclesia, or the gospel, then one dealt with it in terms of the political or economic systems of antiquity. Luther had great respect for Hebrew grammar and the great Jewish grammarians through the work of Elias Levita, but if a word in the text was multivalent, then the meaning that accorded with the res of the gospel was to be chosen. If the Jewish grammarians and commentators gave the word a meaning not in accord with the gospel, the Christian interpreter and translator was to reject it and work with the grammar, altering vowel points where necessary, to make it do so. By 1541 Luther had come to view some texts as corrupt.9 Luther thus came to a basic hermeneutic of suspicion with regard to the Hebrew text as received 5

  Aland, “New Instrument and Method.”   See Fitzmyer, “New Testament at Qumran,” 119 – 23. 7   Apparently first stated clearly in the preface to the 1522 publication of his translation of the New Testament. See Luther, D. Martin Luthers Deutsche Bibel 1522 – 1546, 2 – 11. 8   See Barthélemy, Critique textuelle, 1:*4 – *9. An English translation of the first five volumes of OBO (50 / 1 – 5), including Critique textuelle (vol. 1), is in process [Barthélemy, Studies in the Text]. 9   See Luther, “Vom Schem Hamphoras,” 646 – 48; and Barthélemy, Critique textuelle, 1:*5. 6

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and transmitted in Judaism. His suspicion of the work of the Masoretes he also learned in part from Levita.10 He finally advised that Christian students of the text should modify vowel points, accents, conjugations, constructions, and meanings – in fact, anything outside Hebrew grammar itself – and turn it from Jewish interpretations toward accord with the gospel. It became his view that Jews had for fifteen hundred years turned the Bible away from witness to “our Messiah and our faith.”11 While he allowed for textual corruptions due to the incompetence of scribes and to the deformity of letters, as some earlier Christians had said, his suspicions of the history of transmission of the text since the first century deepened. A much more moderate hermeneutic of suspicion had been evident already in medieval Jewish exegesis. As early as the ninth century Ismail al-Ukbari (ca. 840) suggested that there was a scribal error at Gen 46:15.12 While Ibn Ezra appeared scandalized at the suggestion of an earlier grammarian that there were more than one hundred places in Scripture where a word should be replaced by another, he himself cited six of the same hundred. By the time of Yefet ben Ely, and certainly by the time of Judah Hayyug and David Qimhi, the principle of substitution of ˙ one word for another was accepted practice where the text seemed otherwise to 13 be incomprehensible. Sanctes Pagnini, toward the beginning of Luther’s program of translation (1526 – 29), published a grammar and a thesaurus refining the method. These were the great grammarians whom Luther and other Christians respected, to the degree that they respected the Hebrew grammar they had analyzed. The next two centuries would see almost complete denigration among Christians of the work of the Masoretes, especially the vowel points and the accents (K‫טעמים‬K). But among serious students of the text, Hebrew grammar, based precisely upon the transmitted text, was held in high regard. As Richard Simon went to pains to point out, the rabbinic and Qaraite grammarians had learned their art from their Arab neighbors; indeed, the greatest ones wrote their grammars and discourses in Judeo-Arabic.14

The Seventeenth Century J. Buxtorf Sr., in 1620, challenged Levita’s thesis that the work of the Tiberian Masoretes, especially in regard to the vowel points, had little historical value and was not authoritative.15 He blamed the 1539 translation of Levita for Luther’s attitude toward the vowel points. Buxtorf defended the Masoretes, claiming that while the vowel points did not have divine or prophetic authority, they were 10

 Simon, Histoire, 132.  Barthélemy, Critique textuelle, 1:*5 – *7. See Greenspahn, “Biblical Scholars.”  Barthélemy, Critique textuelle, 1:*2; Simon, Histoire, 166. 13  Barthélemy, Critique textuelle, 1:*2 – *3; Simon, Histoire, 167 – 69. 14  Simon, Histoire, 166 ff. Aspiring students of First Testament textual criticism would be well advised to learn Judeo-Arabic in depth. 15  Simon, Histoire, 6, 136 ff. 11 12

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received by tradition from high antiquity and should be respected lest Scripture become as malleable as wax.16 Louis Cappel, in his Critica Sacra of 1634, responded that the points had been invented five hundred years after Christ, and that the danger in ignoring them would be limited by literary context. J. Buxtorf Jr. then took up where his father had left off and in his Anticritica of 1653 further defended the Masoretes as traditionalists of the first order. Jean Morin, in a letter of 1653, in turn defended Cappel, not for being the Protestant heretic that he clearly was, but because his work showed precisely the importance of the church’s magisterium and the falsehood of Luther’s principle of sola Scriptura.17 Morin’s hermeneutic, stated in his Exercitationum, would put Hebrew manuscripts at the service of the church’s translations in order to clarify text and meaning but not to dominate or obfuscate their clear meaning. Hence, traditional versions should not be corrected on the basis of the Masoretic Text since the Masoretic Text may have become corrupt (after all, the Septuagint is much older), and the defects of the texts on which the traditional versions were made have since been authenticated by church usage. Errore hominum providentia divina, indeed! Cappel, on the Protestant side, was consistent in stressing the importance of literary context. Not only would this not leave the unpointed consonantal text mere wax; contextual reading, on the contrary, should be the final arbiter of meaning of obscure words and passages. Whatever rendered “the most appropriate and useful sense” would always be the preferred variant to choose. Warnings even from fellow Protestants that criticism had always followed the principle of lectio difficilior went unheeded. Cappel’s principle of facilitating readings, it may be said, has been a mainstay of textual criticism until recently. While one may not finally agree with the younger Buxtorf, he needs to be heard, even today, in his challenge to Cappel: One would eventually come to the point that when a certain passage will not appear clear enough to a translator, to a professor, or to some critic, the latter will start to look about him to see if he could not find something whatever more appropriate, whether in the versions or in his own mind and capacity to invent conjectures. And thus will one become further removed from the traditional Hebrew reading for no matter what motive, or even without the least motive.18

Cappel followed the very carefully wrought arguments in the second part of Buxtorf Jr.’s Anticritica, as seen in his posthumously published Notae Criticae, and he was sometimes convinced by them. The remarkable thing is that much textual criticism, at least until quite recently, has not followed them. One need not agree with some of Buxtorf’s basic suppositions and principles, as Simon indeed did not;19 but one must agree that his warning to Cappel rings true as a prediction of what was to follow in much text-critical work for three centuries to come. 16

 Barthélemy, Critique textuelle, 1:*10 ff.; Simon, Histoire, 9.  Barthélemy, Critique textuelle, 1:*17 – *20. 18   Buxtorf Jr., Anticritica, 258; Barthélemy, Critique textuelle, 1:*22. 19  Simon, Histoire, 9 and passim. 17

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It might be noted that while Catholics on the whole felt secure in their second ground of truth, the church and its magisterium, over against the Protestants’ focus on Scripture, it is difficult to draw clear lines in all these debates between individual Protestant and Catholic scholars. What George Lindbeck has recently called the classic hermeneutics – what prevailed in the premodern period before the advent of rationalism and empiricist literalism – bound all Christians together. Scripture was constitutive of Christian communities by a kind of sensus fidelium. They read Scripture “as a Christ-centered narrationally and typologically unified whole in conformity to a trinitarian rule of faith.”20 But, according to Lindbeck, the Reformed churches after Calvin so focused on finding “a single, all-embracing, and unchanging system of doctrine in the Bible,” that they became ritually impoverished over against not only Catholics but also Lutherans. Their disciplined reading and study of Scripture, and skill in its uses, probably made them the most influential single group in shaping what Lindbeck calls modernity.21 What emerges then out of the seventeenth-century debates is a more or less clear distinction between Lutherans and Calvinists, or those of the Reformed faith. The Reformed churches of Zurich, Basel, Bern, and Geneva published in 1675 the Formula Consensus Ecclesiarum Helveticarum Reformatarum, directed specifically, apparently, at Cappel’s school at Saumur. In it the vowel points were said to be included also in the inspiration of Holy Scripture. What God gave Moses and the prophets to write, God guarded over with paternal affection, consonants and vowels, to the very hour of the creation of the Formula Consensus. While they had eventually to back down from such a rigid stance, it should be noted that Lutherans, following Luther’s own differentiated views of the various portions of Scripture, never approached such rigidity in defense of Luther’s own principle of sola Scriptura. By the middle of the seventeenth century, critics and anticritics alike had agreed that, if the autographs of Moses and the prophets were available, they would be the norm, or true canon, for the text of the Hebrew Bible, indeed, of the Old Testament as well. The anticritics held that by a special divine assistance the Masoretic Text had been preserved identical, or nearly so, to the autographs. The critics maintained that the available apographs contained serious errors and corruptions in a number of readings; some also held that there was evidence of different Vorlagen behind the Masoretic Text and Septuagint traditions. Benedict de Spinoza A major contribution of the seventeenth century had been that of Benedict de Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670).22 His was a free spirit indeed, condemned both by synagogue and church. In the background of his thinking 20

  Lindbeck, “Scripture, Consensus, and Community,” see esp. 7.   Ibid., 10.  Barthélemy, Critique textuelle, 1:*40 – *46.

21 22

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were Thomas Hobbes and Isaac de La Peyrère. While Hobbes focused on what of the Pentateuch Moses actually contributed, de La Peyrère, a Calvinist who converted to Catholicism and knew Simon at the Oratoire, dismissed any hope of finding biblical autographs and stressed that critics must be content with copies of copies of literature that represented but abstracts and abbreviations of originals in the first place. De La Peyrère clearly wanted to diminish the authority of Scripture in order to put the Messiah and the salvation of the church in bold relief. In this he followed Jean Morin’s hermeneutic, and searched for prooftexts to support his messianic and christological views. Spinoza reacted not only to de La Peyrère but to all theologians who, according to Spinoza, for the most part extorted from Scripture what passed through their heads. He insisted that true critics must liberate themselves from theological prejudices and develop a valid method for expositing Scripture, and that required elaborating an exact history of the formation of the text so that the thoughts of the original authors within their ancient contexts could be discerned. Spinoza was not the first to focus on original authorial intentionality, but he did so in such a way that his influence has been felt ever since. Out of those individual authors’ ideas could be extrapolated those doctrines and teachings on which they all agreed. Authority, for Spinoza, clearly rested in the intentions of the authors, much of which was lost in obscurity. Only what is intelligible remains authoritative, but this must be deemed sufficient for the salvation, or repose, of the soul. The rest is not worth the bother. Until such a history could be written, and he seriously doubted if one would ever be complete, Spinoza deemed the double commandment of love of God and love of neighbor to be the true Torah of God, and to be the common religion of all humankind. That was what was incorruptible, not some books called holy. Richard Simon Richard Simon took Spinoza seriously and wrote the Histoire critique du Vieux Testament, published in Paris in 1678. Though Simon mentions Spinoza’s name only a few times in the “Préface de l’auteur,” it is clear from the first ten or so chapters that Simon was addressing issues that Spinoza had raised. Simon had access to all the efforts that had gone before and to the rich resources of the Oratoire and of the royal library. His was the mind needed at the end of the seventeenth century to make sense of all that had gone before in the abrupt starts and stops of attempts to establish biblical criticism as a fine art and a science. Spinoza’s call for a critical history of the formation of the text was heeded by the man who could do the most about it at the time. I disagree with Henri Margival that Simon was the father of biblical criticism.23 He could have been, but he was not, simply because some of his major points were lost in the battles he had to fight with Bishop Bossuet and against the rationalist optimism of the eighteenth century. We cannot today agree with all his principles, but we can regret that some 23

 Margival, Essai sur Richard Simon, viii, passim. See Auvray, Richard Simon.

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of the major ones have been largely overlooked in the three centuries since he wrote. Johann David Michaelis might rather be seen as the father of the kind of biblical criticism that has been practiced until quite recently.24 Simon responded to Spinoza’s pessimism about recovering the history of the formation of the Bible with a two-fold hermeneutic. First, authority lies not in the intention of the individual authors, which one might then appropriate through a harmonizing reductionism, but in the inspiration of Scripture by God’s Holy Spirit continuing from the very beginnings of the creations of Scripture in all its parts, through to the closure and fixation of text. Second, while the Holy Spirit used the imagination and the intention of the prophets in their original settings, there were second and further meanings available for later times. These two points in his hermeneutic require considerable unpacking.25 Simon expressly did not agree with the Calvinists and anticritics that the Holy Spirit guarded with parental providence what the autographs had contained. His point was totally other. Simon spoke of the inspiration of “public scribes” who contributed to the texts in the process of their transmission; theirs was a prophetic authority equal to the original authors’ authority.26 The Spirit can valorize the ignorance of original authors beyond their limited intentions. (If some of this sounds like postmodern literary criticism, it is, nonetheless, from Simon and from the late seventeenth century.)27 Two senses of a passage may be discerned, the literal / historical and the spiritual, a further meaning. Some of this is recognizable in the concept of the sensus plenior of Scripture. A psalm was intended for an original Sitz im Leben, but it was valid for totally different situations in later times. In canonical criticism this is called the resignification of a passage; and while Simon often wrote of the possibility of two senses of a passage, there were other, further meanings beyond authorial intentionality that were made valid in believing communities. Simon stressed that it is impossible fully to understand Christianity without a knowledge of Judaism and its history. In addressing the issue of the value of consulting Jewish understandings of Scripture, Simon boldly stated that the authority God had given the Hebrew Republic through Moses and the eighteen judges had never been withdrawn. In one stroke Simon dealt with the problem of supersessionism, and of the need of comparative Midrash. Comparative Midrash is the exercise whereby one may discern the latitude early believing communities allowed themselves in understanding or resignifying a figure or passage of Scripture and the hermeneutics whereby they did so. When then one reaches the Sec24   I am very much tempted to nominate Simon as the godfather of canonical criticism (as I understand it). 25  Simon, Histoire, “Préface de l’auteur,” and passim. 26   Adumbrating the important statement about biblical scribal activity as a part of the canonical text in Talmon, “Textual Study of the Bible,” as well as the view of canonical criticism held by the present writer (see Sanders, Canon and Community; Sanders, “Canonical Context and Canonical Criticism”). See also Talmon, “Heiliges Schrifttum.” 27   See, e. g., Fowler, “Post-Modern Biblical Criticism,” 8. And see Lindbeck, “Scripture, Consensus, and Community.”

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ond Testament and how Scripture, Septuagint or Hebrew, functioned there, one has already a perspective on the function of that passage in Jewish believing communities up to that point. One can then truly discern so-called similarities and dissimilarities because one has built a database of function of that passage up to its appearance in the New Testament. Simon’s emphases on the continuing work of the Holy Spirit all along that path, and on the continuing authority within the Hebrew Republic, provide the base for the hermeneutic of canonical criticism when it focuses on canon as norma normans and not only as norma normata. We must know, he wrote, both the literal and the developed meanings within Judaism and then within Christianity. When faced with the question of whether the Sanhedrin had divine authority to condemn Jesus, his response was that God can indeed use what we call corruption. Once more, errore hominum providentia divina, but this time much more fully thought through than by Morin. In the monotheizing hermeneutic of canonical criticism (as I understand it), Simon’s point would be understood as perceiving that God is the God of life and death, risings and fallings, victories and defeats, protagonists and antagonists.28 While I would disagree that it is “inutile de rechercher qui ont été les auteurs,” canonical criticism (as I understand it) would applaud this significant challenge to Spinoza’s idea of resting authority solely in the intentionality of the original individual authors. Simon’s understanding of the further authority of the public scribes, who also contributed to the text and adapted it in some measure to their later situations, is also our understanding of the need to see canon and community in the same light and as inseparable.29 The variants functioned in some believing communities though not in others, and it is important to know as many as there were, if possible, and to understand them in their textual contexts – another point that canonical criticism stresses, the need to appreciate the integrity of each manuscript or family of manuscripts before pillaging it or them to correct what appears to be a corruption or error in another. Thus Simon’s respect of the Septuagint witness brought him to criticize even Jerome: “Je n’excuse pas même Saint Jérôme, qui n’a pas rendu aux Septante toute la justice qu’il leur devoit.”30 Finally, Simon disagreed with Spinoza’s distinction between reason and enthusiasm. Spinoza viewed prophetic authority, that is genuine authority, as practically devoid of reason. Whereas Spinoza minimized the contribution of individual reason and imagination, Simon stressed how the Holy Spirit used such gifts first in the so-called original contributors and then all along the path of the formation of the Bible, and, to be sure, all along the church’s understanding of Scripture in the magisterium since canonization. This was the reason he agreed with Spinoza that a critical history of the formation of the biblical texts had to be attempted. While canonical criticism must disagree with Simon’s understand28

  See Sanders, “Canon, Hebrew Bible,” and Sanders, “Deuteronomy.”   See Talmon, “Textual Study of the Bible”; Sanders, Canon and Community; Sanders, “Canonical Context and Canonical Criticism.” 30  Simon, Histoire, 232. 29

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ing of the goal of the Spirit being only the New Testament’s messianic, second meaning, making the New Testament in effect the key to understanding what the Spirit was doing, Simon alone provided an adequate response to Spinoza in his stress on the continuing work of the Spirit all along the path of formation of the texts, not guarding original readings in their purity, but inspiring the “public scribes” who added to texts as well as subtracting from them, adapting them in various though limited ways for their later communities. Of course, there is a sense in which Luther and Simon were right that Christians would read the First Testament in terms of its goal being the gospel, if that means that we grant that rabbinic Jews would read it in terms of its goal being rabbinic Judaism.31 In that case we would need to say “Hebrew Bible and Old Testament.”

The Eighteenth Century The eighteenth century began with the rationalist optimism in these matters for which it is noted otherwise. Hard work combined with intelligence and reason would open a clear path to the establishment of the best text possible. Numerous German scholars worked on as many manuscripts as were available to them. Johann H. Michaelis studied manuscripts in and around Erfurt and published his results in a Biblia Hebraica with critical apparatus published in Halle in 1720; Theodor Christoph Lilienthal worked on those in Königsberg, which he published in 1770; Georg Johann Ludwig Vogel worked on those available in Helmstadt, which he published in 1765; and then entered the probable father of textual criticism as we have known it since, Johann David Michaelis, who published his work on the manuscripts available in Kassel beginning in 1771.32 Simon had noted that while nearly anyone could amass variants from the various printed editions of the Hebrew Bible, very few people had the resources available to consult “les vieux manuscrits.”33 Cappel had worked almost exclusively, apparently, on printed editions for his Critica Sacra; and Morin, who had access to the rich library of the Oratoire in Paris, consulted very few manuscripts and did so only with negligence. It was Charles François Houbigant who exploited in depth the holdings of the Oratoire, as well as other scattered manuscripts, to publish his magnificent Biblia Hebraica in four folio volumes in 1753.34 Houbigant, of course, had the polyglots of London (Walton) and of Paris, which provided him comparisons with the Samaritan Pentateuch and its targum, as well the Peshitta. But Houbigant largely disregarded vowel points, the accents, and the masorah, arguing that human faculties of memory were incapable of retaining all the 31   See Barr, Old and New in Interpretation, 26 – 33; Sanders, “Adaptable for Life”; Sanders, “Text and Canon: Concept and Method.” 32  Barthélemy, Critique textuelle, 1:*28. 33  Simon, Histoire, 117. 34  Barthélemy, Critique textuelle, 1:*24 – *28.

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minutiae. The Buxtorfs had agreed, ironically, on this point, arguing that they must therefore have come from sacred authors, at least from Ezra. Houbigant took the other position that they derived only from the Masoretes who invented all but the consonants. This was the stage onto which the young Oxford scholar, Benjamin Kennicott, entered to begin his work of collation. His first publications (of 1753 and 1759) were limited to the manuscripts available in Oxford, Cambridge, and the British Museum. He then sought royal patronage and traveled broadly in Europe engaging collaborators, and he finally published in 1776 and 1780 the two volumes that continue to be consulted in textual criticism today.35 Kennicott’s work came under severe criticism, especially from Johann David Michaelis.36 Not only had Kennicott disregarded the vowel points and accents, he also showed preference for facilitating readings. He had been persuaded, apparently, not only by the arguments of Cappel and Houbigant. He also agreed with Morin. G. B. de Rossi published in 1784 – 88 four volumes on some 1,793 codices that Kennicott and his team had missed.37 Still, little work would be done on oriental manuscripts until the work of Paul Kahle on Leningradensis, the Cairo Codex of the Prophets, and Orientalis 4445. Kahle, by the way, apparently agreed with Levita and Cappel on the late date of the vowel points. Then came the discovery of the Qumran manuscripts, which seemed to confirm the opinion of Morin and Cappel that the Vorlage of the Septuagint represented a different textual tradition from that of the Masoretic Text.

Apographs and the Text We indeed have but apographs with which to work. This is but a part of what Reinhold Niebuhr called the ambiguity of human reality. For one suspects that if an autograph were to be found two things would happen. First, its authenticity would be immediately disputed. And second, by some criteria, some critics would find it inferior to what we already have. This will not deter us in efforts to try to identify autographs, as in the case of Qumran Cave 7. But what we actually have are apographs of texts and versions, each having its own story, each having a history of textual and literary transmission lying back of it and its many Vorlagen. But there is a new situation today in which to view those apographs. For now we have copies of copies in a new sense, that is, there is now the possibility of having image-enhanced photographs gathered and collected in one place so that comparative study can be carried out in ways never done before. In addition, 35  Kennicott, Vetus Testamentum Hebraicum. See Goshen-Gottstein, “Hebrew Biblical Manuscripts.” 36   In the periodicals, Göttingische Anzeigen von gelehrten Sachen (1760) and Orientalische und exegetische Bibliothek (1771); Barthélemy, Critique textuelle, 1:*30 – *32. 37   de Rossi, Variae Lectiones Veteris Testamenti.

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computer technology permits more and more accurate collating of the manuscripts to form a significant database on which to make more sound judgments. When we began our work in Freudenstadt on the some five thousand textual problems given us by the United Bible Societies, we developed an understanding of what we were doing in terms of the calls enunciated by Johann David Michaelis, Paul Volz, Henrik Samuel Nyberg, and Rudolf Kittel for an international and interconfessional team to work out concepts and methods for textual criticism.38 The United Bible Societies had brought us together for one reason: however, we set about our work not only to do the task asked of us, but also to attempt precisely to answer the call Michaelis had made some three hundred years earlier. It is clear from the various reviews of our work that it has not created a consensus.39 And I will not make this the occasion to mount a defense of what we have done. On the contrary, we continue to learn. One of the lessons we can learn from the history of textual criticism since Luther is the respect that scholars aware of their work have had for the rabbinic and Qaraite grammarians; and the work of our colleague Dominique Barthélemy in that regard may well be the strongest contribution we shall have made. I think it safe to say that no prior effort has probed so deeply into the great grammarians on so many problems.40 It requires an in-depth working knowledge of Hebrew and Aramaic in all their phases and of Judeo-Arabic. Very valuable also was the work of Norbert Lohfink and his assistant on the committee, Clemens Locher, in terms of more recent critical work on the passages dealt with, as well as all the accumulated knowledge from archaeology, architecture, geography, ancient Near-Eastern military history, flora and fauna, metallurgy, etc. No stone was consciously left unturned in any of these areas. And we had the cooperation of the scholars working on the Judean Desert Scrolls and fragments, especially Frank Cross, Patrick Skehan, and Eugene Ulrich. A direct result of our labors was the decision in 1977, before we had completed our basic work in Freudenstadt, for me to leave New York to go to Claremont to help found the Ancient Biblical Manuscript Center. It was clear that there had to be a place where image-enhanced films, and eventually computerized and digitized databases of all the manuscripts, texts, and versions, could be well preserved and available and accessible for full comparative study. The technology is there, both in photography and climate control [and digitization], for indefinite preservation of film [and text]. The observations made earlier about how 38  Barthélemy, Critique textuelle, 1:*60 – *70. See Greenberg’s perceptive Review of Critique textuelle, “Since biblical literature was produced by, and transmitted in faith communities, it is not permissible to ignore that fact in reconstituting its text. This work . . . will serve its highest purpose if it compels the critic, who alone can appreciate it and judge it, to confront the elementary questions of his profession” (140). 39   See, e. g., Albrektson’s critique, “Difficilior lectio probabilior”; Ulrich’s notice “News and Notes,” 5; and his “Canonical Process.” The last would provide a good base on which to have a genuine dialogue about where textual criticism should go now, and especially about its relation to higher criticism. 40   So Greenberg, Review of Critique textuelle, 138: “Jewish scholarship has not canvassed Jewish exegesis for text-critical purposes on this scale.”

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collations and apparatus have been compiled still obtained; the scholar worked on the manuscripts available. Even Kennicott and de Rossi collated only European manuscripts, and Kahle’s work early in this century on the Oriental was only a beginning. The discovery of the Judean manuscripts made it mandatory to broaden the database as far as possible, and modern technology was developing the means for doing so. Barbara Aland of Münster has stated the case very well: In the history of our field of scholarship, by now a very long history, all work done in textual criticism of the New Testament has encountered a problem that still remains unsolved today. Each editor . . . could choose for the basis of his edition only those manuscripts which he knew by chance. Starting with the first editors, Erasmus and Ximenes, and continuing up to the great ones of our discipline, Tischendorf, Westcott and Hort, and von Soden, it was the general practice to use what was individually known . . . Up to our times the following unquestionably holds true: the selection of manuscripts on which we base our work – especially in the field of the minuscules – is founded on our chance knowledge of these codices.41

While textual criticism of the First Testament is configured differently from that of the Second, the same observations hold true. At the Manuscript Center we intend to correct that situation. We have the intention, and the acquisition program in place, whereby eventually, as funds are available, to make accessible all the manuscripts, texts, and versions pertinent to the task of textual criticism. The Biblisches Institut in Münster has collected some fifty-three hundred Greek New Testament manuscripts; that category grows as each new papyrus is discovered.42 The Manuscript Center by the close of the millennium [2000] hopes to have twenty thousand manuscripts, mainly texts, of both Testaments, as money becomes available. It will take perhaps another twenty years thereafter to come anywhere close to having substantially what is extant, but there are already core collections in both Testaments. And whenever a scholar proposes a project of research on nonbiblical but cognate manuscripts, we interrupt the basic acquisition program to collect what is specifically needed. The present situation of scholars being dependent on prior collations and apparatus, or even on critical editions that have been shaped and formed by variable biases, competences, and interests of earlier editors can be corrected. The day of perpetuating earlier errors and biases can be brought to a close. The lesson learned from the work of our United Bible Societies committee that impressed me the most is the need to respect the integrity of each manuscript, or at least family of manuscripts, before pillaging it to correct a different one. The relative textual fluidity characteristic of the manuscripts, texts, and versions (and presumably their Vorlagen) that date before stabilization of text and canon requires keeping in mind the communities from which they came and the needs they served.43 This is the case in New Testament textual criticism as well, 41

  See Aland, “New Instrument and Method.”   Aland and Aland, Text of the NT, 72 ff. 43   Note the common emphases in Simon, Talmon, and Sanders: Simon, Histoire; Talmon, “Textual Study of the Bible”; Sanders, Canon and Community; Sanders, “Canonical Context and Canonical Criticism.” 42

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where relative fluidity is also a characteristic of the textual situation before the fourth century.44 Thinking in terms of scribal errors and corruptions should be a final resort and should come only after careful work on the literary and historical context of the text in which the variants occur. Respect should precede suspicion. Where possible, the fuller contexts of each variant textual reading, including the community from which it came, if that is at all possible, should be studied to see whether a seeming variant was a true one or a reading engendered for other reasons, such as the hermeneutics of the tradent or translator, his or her conceptuality of what was going on in the larger context of the text, and his or her desire to serve the need for understanding by the community for which the copy or translation was being made.45 Three factors need to be identified, where possible: hermeneutics, conceptuality, and community needs. Ancient copyists and translators, like their modern counterparts, wanted their work appreciated. They wanted their communities to understand the text; that was why they took on such labor. Of course it was their understanding of the text they tried to convey. Modern critics and translators have the same aspirations. In the case of modern scholarship, a sociology of knowledge may be necessary for us to be able to discern whether the community for which we ultimately labor is the scholarly guild or the faith community. The self-identity of the scholar is a factor in the work we do; the current debates in this regard are not merely academic exercises.46 In order to appreciate communities’ understanding of the text, full literary contexts of texts or translations must be studied to see the role that the apparent variant played in the whole passage and to understand how it served the larger conceptuality lying back of the text, as well as the hermeneutic at play in the recreation of the text in the receptor language, or in the new copy being made. Discernment of the conceptuality of the larger literary context can be arrived at by the steadily improving methods of structural analysis being developed by my colleague, Rolf Knierim, and by his colleagues in the Forms of Old Testament Literature (FOTL) project.47 What was learned on the text-critical project of the United Bible Societies has been matched by what has been learned since the move to Claremont. My students are required to do careful macro- and microstructural analyses of their work in comparative Midrash. A student who recently defended his dissertation on a detailed comparison of the three forms in which the book of Esther is available in Greek (Gʹ, L, Jos) did detailed liter44   See Aland, “New Instrument and Method,” 42: “The early manuscripts also have a higher degree of independence than the texts copied very strictly in Byzantium later on.” The same point was made in Sanders, “Text and Canon: Old Testament and New.” 45   This should be as much a concern in the ongoing work of establishing the history of the text as that of discerning original intentions. Simon’s Histoire truly initiated this continuing task. Objections that there are dark periods must be steadily addressed by further work, such as the project now proposed by Talmon to write a history of Judaism in the Persian period. 46   Fowler, “Post-Modern Biblical Criticism,” 8; Lindbeck, “Scripture, Consensus, Community.” 47   Rolf Knierim and Gene Tucker are editing it, published by Eerdmans, 24 volumes projected, 5 published so far (end of 1988) [19 by 2017].

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ary analyses of G’ and L and was thereby able to account for almost every plus, minus, and so-called variant among them. These were then compared with the Masoretic Text of Esther with the question left open as to whether it represented a form of Esther earlier than those in Greek, or not.48 Another student did a tradition analysis of the components of the Gibeon story of Solomon’s dream (1 Kgs 3:2 – 15) and then a study of its Nachleben through Chronicles, the Old and later Greek versions, the targumim, the Peshitta, and the Vulgate, then its pilgrimage into Qohelet, Wisdom of Solomon, and Q (Luke). He did a careful structural analysis of each, noting the hermeneutics involved in each resignification.49 Stanley Walters has recently defended the integrity of the two stories of Hannah, the one in the Septuagint and the other in the Masoretic Text.50 Once one has discerned the integrity of each, it becomes very difficult to pillage one to “correct” the other. The recent publication of the correspondence and debate among four textual scholars of the two accounts of the encounter between David and Goliath is an example of the kind of respect needed in such cases before pillaging begins.51 Johan Lust concluded for the four that “both versions are valuable ones and stand in their own right. The one should not be corrected by the other.”52 A number of modern versions now translate the Hebrew Esther in the canonical section and a full Greek Esther in the Apocrypha. Whether the case must rest there or not depends on further consideration and on other factors. Theoretically, one must allow for a later, completely unknown author / editor to have had the true literary genius that a given structural analysis exposes. Then one must go on to a macrostructure of the fuller contexts of each of the variant accounts to see if that same genius was at work elsewhere. Often, we shall have to confess that we do not know whether the literary genius we can perceive in our present context is the one that our students, or theirs, will perceive. William F. Albright is quoted as saying that the archaeologist should leave more of a tel undug than dug, because the next generations will have sharper tools to use and better questions to ask of the tel with all its ancient secrets. My colleague, Eugene Ulrich, has pondered some of these issues in a recent study, “Double Literary Editions of Biblical Narratives.” And he poses good questions. I am not sure whether simply translating for a community of faith will decide the issue. In that case, conceivably, the Greek Esther only should be translated for Christian Bibles and the Hebrew Esther only for Jewish Bibles; but that would be an impoverishment for both at this late stage. The Western churches, Catholic and Protestant, all inherit Jerome’s principle of Hebraica veritas and must work with it in the best and most improving text-critical mode possible. One might ask whether, as we move into the twenty-first century, those churches are not ready 48   Dorothy, “Books of Esther.” Another dissertation, McCrory, “Composition of Exodus 35 – 40,” indicates a possible break in the impasse of the history of formation of both the Masoretic Text and the Septuagint version of Exod 35 – 40. 49   Carr, “Royal Ideology.” 50   Walters, “Hannah and Anna.” 51   Barthélemy, Gooding, Lust, and Tov, Story of David and Goliath. 52   Ibid., 156.

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for a pluriformity of texts where double editions are available, even in translations. We have the Masoretic Text pluriformity of two sets of Ten Commandments, as well as Samuel–Kings and Chronicles in the First Testament (besides numerous doublets in prose and poetry), and four Gospels in the Second. The United Bible Societies in Stuttgart has entertained a proposal to provide modern, critically based translations of the Septuagint. Marguerite Harl and others have begun to do so in French.53 The work of the United Bible Societies’ committee is well suited to establish a conservatively based “best critical text” for translations of the First Testament. We chose to work only on the Hebrew of Esther, Jeremiah, Proverbs, Exod 35 – 40, and Ezek 40 – 48 precisely because of the quite different inner-literary developments in the Greek and Hebrew of those quite obvious cases. And where there were double literary editions we tended to respect each, and hence usually chose the Hebrew form with its own Wortschatz.54 Thus our work has a conservative cast as Albrektson and Greenberg have noted – conservative in the sense not of Christian theological Tendenz (in that case we might have chosen many more Septuagint readings), but conservative in the masoretic sense. One must concede that where such considerations did not come into play, we chose a fair number of non-Masoretic Text readings.

Conclusions I conclude these observations by noting that there is a new day in textual criticism marked by (a) the availability and accessibility, due to modern technology, of as much as there is extant of texts to work on; (b) revisions in the history of transmission of the Hebrew and Greek texts; (c) full respect for the integrity of differing manuscript traditions and the ancient believing communities from which they come; and (d) new techniques such as literary and structural analysis whereby to discern as much as is possible the reality and conceptuality lying back of the work of our tradent ancestors, both copyists and translators, and of their Vorlagen. The new day and the new skills do not preclude some basic questions that will still plague us, such as how close to some kind of autograph all these apographs and our carefully wrought and improving text-critical methods will permit us to approximate. We will and must have a continuing passion to hear original voices where possible, but we will need to ask what authority we attribute to each layer of textual formation and transmission.

53

 Harl, La Genèse, the first in the series La Bible d’Alexandrie.   There are portions of the Septuagint that are targumic translations based on an apparently proto-masoretic text, as in the case of Isaiah and some of the Minor Prophets; other portions are formal-equivalence translations (e. g., the Pentateuch), even literalist or Theodotionic (e. g., Qohelet); the so-called double editions, of course, involve literary as well as textual histories, as well as a case like the Septuagint version of Proverbs. 54

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One might envisage a round table, in the center of which would be a biblical text, perhaps Isa 28:16. Around the table one might imagine numerous readers: first there would be the First Isaiah as discerned by biblical historical criticism, then members of the school of Isaiah such as Deutero-Isaiah and Habakkuk, there would be the Septuagint and Old Latin Isaiah, and the Vulgate Isaiah, the Syriac Isaiah, and the targumim, all those who quote and allude to the passage in early Judaism, including Qumran and the apostle Paul, indeed any who quoted or alluded to Isa 28:16 within the period of early canonical process. That should be quite a conversation! And it would afford a good perspective on the breadth of resignification that a canonical passage may support. Even so, I would want to give a weighted vote to the meanings of Isa 28:16 itself as discerned by scholarship since the Enlightenment – as many as that might be; for so-called original meanings often change as scholarship evolves in its increased knowledge of the Iron Age and in the methods it uses in exegesis. But everyone should be heard, or at least not be ridiculed, as succeeding generations of scholars come and go. We must at the very least put respect for the work of our ancestors (even recent ones!) in the “traditioning process” before suspicion. We may end up with more pluriformity than ecumenism can bear, or we may arrive at a state of humility and respect for one another and our various current traditions. Whether we restrict our understanding to the Hebrew Bible and the best readings of that we can achieve, or if we think of the more elastic Prime or First Testament in its various forms and with its greater pluriformity, we need to adopt a posture of learning and listening to others’ stories, texts, and traditions, familiar perhaps to each in other forms, which can mean enrichment for all. The theological ground of such a state might well be the recognition that the true Reality that lies behind all of our apographs is beyond the grasp or comprehension of any one line of tradition, but has spoken in many and sundry ways to our ancestors of old.55 We already have modern translations that put the Masoretic Text of Esther in the Old Testament and a Greek Esther in the Apocrypha or deuterocanonical section. Why not also have the Masoretic Text of Daniel in the Old Testament and a Greek Daniel in the Apocrypha?56 We could go further and supply translations of the differing stories of Anna and Hannah, the latter in the text and the former in the margin (as is done in some translations for John 8:1 – 11 and the long ending of Mark); the same could be done with selected cases of literary doublets such as those in the so-called Lucianic Samuel, the night vision of Solomon in 1 Kgs 3, the death of Josiah perhaps, and even of significant portions of Septuagint Isaiah where it differs considerably, as in Isa 6. These could be judiciously and carefully chosen so that faithful Jews and Christians, as well as secular readers, could see the pluriformity we truly inherit instead of only what some 55

  See Sanders, “Challenge of Fundamentalism.”   Along with Jerome’s principle of Hebraica veritas we have also inherited his unfortunate solution of putting the larger pluses of the Greek Esther and Daniel in the Apocrypha as “additions,” almost eliminating respect for the Septuagint, as Richard Simon lamented. See Simon, Histoire, 232. 56

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scholars think most approximates a supposed original. Again, such respect for the pluriformity we inherit would not eliminate but would include a continuing passion to strive for original readings. What is needed is a new phronesis for the twenty-first century. I have called that phronesis “monotheizing pluralism” – God is One: that is, reality has ontological and ethical integrity, even while we humans are many, separated by differing identities and traditioning processes. That phronesis might be expressed by stressing reading our texts in a global context instead of denominational contexts. A beginning would indeed be made by reading any of our texts, even when alone, as though Jews and Christians were present. But that context should be expanded globally so that Muslims and Buddhists, men and women, and all races would become the context in which we seek understanding of our texts and traditions, and of ourselves in them. Can we not at least pretend that God is One? If we do so enough, we might come truly and significantly to believe that God is One, with all that that could mean for living in the twenty-first century’s global village. That would be a hermeneutic of respect indeed! Bibliography Aland, Barbara. “A New Instrument and Method for Evaluating the Total Manuscript Tradition of the New Testament.” In Bericht der Hermann Kunst-Stiftung zur Förderung der neutestamentlichen Textforschung für die Jahre 1985 bis 1987, edited by Hermann Kunst, 33 – 50. Münster: Hermann Kunst-Stiftung, 1988. Aland, Kurt, and Barbara Aland. The Text of the New Testament. Translated by Erroll F. Rhodes. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans; Leiden: Brill, 1987. Albrektson, Bertil. “‘Difficilior lectio probabilior’: A Rule of Textual Criticism and Its Use in Old Testament Studies.” OtSt 21 (1981) 3 – 18. Auvray, Paul. Richard Simon: 1638 – 1712. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1974. Barr, James. Old and New in Interpretation: A Study of the Two Testaments. New York: Harper & Row, 1966. [Rev. ed. 1985] Barthélemy, Dominique. Critique textuelle de l’Ancien Testament. 2 vols. OBO 50. Fribourg: Presses universitaires; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1982 – 86. [Now 5 vols. to 2016. ET Studies in the Text of the Old Testament: An Introduction to the Hebrew Old Testament Text Project. Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2012.] Barthélemy, Dominique, David W. Gooding, Johan Lust, and Emanuel Tov. The Story of David and Goliath: Textual and Literary Criticism. OBO 73. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1986. Buxtorf, Johannes, Jr. Anticritica Seu Vindiciae Veritatis Hebraicae, adversus Ludovici Cappelli Criticam quam Vocant Sacram Eiusque Defensionem. Basel: Regis, 1653. Carr, David M. “Royal Ideology and the Technology of Faith: A Comparative Midrash Study of 1 Kgs 3:2 – 15.” PhD diss., Claremont Graduate School, 1988. de Rossi, Giovanni B. Variae Lectiones Veteris Testamenti. 5 vols. Parma: Bodoni, 1786 – 98. Dorothy, Charles V. “The Books of Esther: Structure, Genre, and Textual Integrity.” PhD diss., Claremont Graduate School, 1989. [Now JSOTSup 187. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1997.]

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Fitzmyer, Joseph A. “The New Testament at Qumran?” In The Dead Sea Scrolls: Major Publications and Tools for Study, by Joseph A. Fitzmyer, 119 – 23. SBLSBS 8. Missoula, MT: Scholars, 1977. Fowler, Robert M. “Post-Modern Biblical Criticism: The Criticism of Pre-Modern Texts in a Post-Critical, Post-Modern, Post-Literate Era.” Forum 5 (1989) 3 – 30. Goshen-Gottstein, Moshe H. “Hebrew Biblical Manuscripts: Their History and Their Place in the HUBP Edition.” Bib 48 (1967) 243 – 90. Greenberg, Moshe. Review of Critique textuelle de l’Ancien Testament, by Dominique Barthélemy. JQR 78 (1987) 137 – 40. Greenspahn, Frederick E. “Biblical Scholars, Medieval and Modern.” In Judaic Perspectives on Ancient Israel, edited by Jacob Neusner, Baruch A. Levine, and Ernest S. Frerichs, 245 – 58. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987. Harl, Marguerite, and Monique Alexandre, trans. La Genèse. La Bible d’Alexandrie 1. Paris: Cerf, 1986. Harrelson, Walter J. “The Limited Task of Old Testament Theology.” HBT 6 (1984) 59 – 64. Kennicott, Benjamin, ed. Vetus Testamentum Hebraicum cum Variis Lectionibus. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon, 1776 – 80. Knierim, Rolf P. “On the Task of Old Testament Theology: A Response to W. Harrelson, S. Towner, and R. Murphy.” HBT 6 (1984) 91 – 128. Knierim, Rolf P. “The Task of Old Testament Theology.” HBT 6 (1984) 25 – 57. Levenson, Jon D. “Why Jews Are Not Interested in Biblical Theology.” In Judaic Perspectives on Ancient Israel, edited by Jacob Neusner, Baruch A. Levine, and Ernest S. Frerichs, 281 – 307. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987. Lindbeck, George. “Scripture, Consensus, and Community.” This World 23 (Fall 1988) 5 – 24. Luther, Martin. D. Martin Luthers Deutsche Bibel 1522 – 1546. Weimarer Ausgabe 6. Weimar: Böhlau, 1929. Luther, Martin. “Vom Schem Hamphoras (1543).” In D. Martin Luthers Werke: Kritisch Gesamtausgabe. 1. Abteilung. Schriften 1542 – 43, 573 – 648. Weimarer Ausgabe 53. Weimar: Böhlau, 1920. Margival, Henri. Essai sur Richard Simon et la critique biblique au XVIIe siècle. Paris: Maillet, 1900. McCrory, Jefferson H. “The Composition of Exodus 35 – 40.” PhD diss., Claremont Graduate University, 1989. Murphy, Roland E. “A Response to ‘The Task of Old Testament Theology.’” HBT 6 (1984) 65 – 71. Neusner, Jacob. Formative Judaism. 2 vols. BJS 37, 41. Chico, CA: Scholars, 1982, 1983. Rendtorff, Rolf. “Must ‘Biblical Theology’ Be Christian Theology?” BRev 4, no. 3 (1988) 40 – 43. Sanders, James A. “Adaptable for Life: The Nature and Function of Canon.” In From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, by James A. Sanders, 9 – 39. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987. [Original in Magnalia Dei: The Mighty Acts of God: Essays on the Bible and Archaeology in Memory of G. Ernest Wright, edited by Frank M. Cross, Werner E. Lemke, and Patrick D. Miller, 531 – 60. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1976.] Sanders, James A. Canon and Community: A Guide to Canonical Criticism. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984. Sanders, James A. “Canon. Hebrew Bible.” Forthcoming [in ABD 1:837 – 52]. Sanders, James A. “Canonical Context and Canonical Criticism.” In From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, by James A. Sanders, 153 – 74. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987. [Original HBT 2 (1980) 173 – 97.] Sanders, James A. “The Challenge of Fundamentalism: One God and World Peace.” Impact 19 (1987) 12 – 30.

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Sanders, James A. “Deuteronomy.” In The Books of the Bible. Vol. 1, The Old Testament  / The Hebrew Bible, edited by Bernhard W. Anderson, 89 – 102. New York: Scribner’s, 1989. Sanders, James A. “First Testament and Second.” BTB 17, no. 2 (1987) 47 – 49. Sanders, James A. “Text and Canon: Concepts and Method.” In From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, by James A. Sanders, 125 – 51. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987. [Original JBL 98 (1979) 5 – 29.] Sanders, James A. “Text and Canon: Old Testament and New.” In Mélanges Dominique Barthélemy: Études bibliques offertes à l’occasion de son 60e anniversaire, edited by Pierre Casetti, Othmar Keel, and Adrian Schenker, 373 – 94. OBO 38. Fribourg: Presses universitaires; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1981. Simon, Richard. Histoire critique du Vieux Testament. Rotterdam: Leers, 1685. Reprint, Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1971. Spinoza, Baruch. Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. Hamburg: H. Künrath, 1670. Talmon, Shemaryahu. “Heiliges Schrifttum und kanonische Bücher aus jüdischer Sicht – Überlegungen zur Ausbildung der Grösse ‘Die Schrift’ im Judentum.” In Mitte der Schrift? Ein jüdisch-christliches Gespräch: Texte des Berner Symposions vom 6. – 12. Januar 1985, edited by Martin Klopfenstein et al., 45 – 79. Bern: Lang, 1987. Talmon, Shemaryahu. “Textual Study of the Bible – A New Outlook.” In Qumran and the History of the Biblical Text, edited by Frank M. Cross and Shemaryahu Talmon, 321 – 400. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975. Tov, Emanuel. “Hebrew Biblical Manuscripts from the Judaean Desert: Their Contribution to Textual Criticism.” JJS 39 (1988) 5 – 37. Tov, Emanuel, and Johann Cook. “A Computerized Database for the Qumran Biblical Scrolls with an Appendix on the Samaritan Pentateuch.” JNSL 12 (1984) 133 – 37. Towner, W. Sibley. “Is Old Testament Theology Equal to Its Task? A Response to a Paper by Rolf P. Knierim.” HBT 6 (1984) 73 – 80. Tsevat, Matitiahu. “Theology of the Old Testament – A Jewish View.” HBT 8, no. 2 (1986) 33 – 59. Ulrich, Eugene C. “The Canonical Process, Textual Criticism and Latter Stages in the Composition of the Bible.” In “Shaʿarei Talmon”: Studies in the Bible, Qumran, and the Ancient Near East Presented to Shemaryahu Talmon, edited by Michael A. Fishbane and Emanuel Tov, with Weston W. Fields, 267 – 91. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1992. Ulrich, Eugene C. “Double Literary Editions of Biblical Narratives and Reflections on Determining the Form to be Translated.” In Perspectives on the Hebrew Bible: Essays in Honor of Walter J. Harrelson, edited by James L. Crenshaw, 101 – 16. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1988. Ulrich, Eugene C. “News and Notes.” Bulletin of the International Organization for Septuagint and Cognate Studies 16 (1983) 5. Walters, Stanley D. “Hannah and Anna: The Greek and Hebrew Texts of 1 Samuel 1.” JBL 107 (1988) 385 – 412.

2 What’s Critical about a Critical Edition of the Bible? David Marcus and James A. Sanders Although it is not widely known, all printed Hebrew Bibles in common use today contain textual difficulties, corruptions, and – yes – even errors. Modern translations tend to smooth out difficulties in the original Hebrew. Occasionally some translations, such as the New Jewish Publication Society translation, tell the reader in a footnote that the Hebrew is difficult or that the meaning of the Hebrew is unknown, but this only emphasizes that the text is not perfect. How can there be errors in a text that is venerated as the inspired word of God and carefully transmitted for centuries? The answer is that most texts, ancient and modern, that are transmitted from one generation to the next get corrupted in one way or another. For modern compositions, the process of textual transmission from the writing of the original to its final printing is relatively short, thus limiting the possibilities of corruption. But even so, every student of English literature knows, for example, that many mistakes were inserted into editions of James Joyce’s Ulysses as a result of misunderstandings of the author’s corrections in the book’s proof sheets. Our earliest complete manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible postdate their composition by more than a thousand years. All of these manuscripts, including the famous Leningrad Codex and the Aleppo Codex, contain errors suffered during the long process of transmission. Scholars have endeavored by various means to correct these errors and ascertain the best possible Hebrew text. Such a text is called a critical edition because it includes a critical apparatus explaining the reasons for the textual decisions.1 The current critical edition of the Hebrew Bible that is used by most students and scholars of the Hebrew Bible throughout the world is the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia (BHS). This edition is now being revised by an international and interconfessional team of scholars under the auspices of the United Bible Societies. This new edition, called Biblia Hebraica Quinta (BHQ), is being produced in stages, and to date six volumes have appeared. The rabbis long ago recognized the possibility of human error when a text was being copied. They warned scribes of the dangers of confusing similar letters like beth and kaph (K‫ב‬K / K‫כ‬K) or resh and dalet (K‫ר‬K / K‫ד‬K) or yod and waw (K‫י‬K / K‫ו‬K). They recognized that haplography (omission of a letter or a word) or dittography (duplication of a letter or word) sometimes occurred. A scribe could make an incorrect *  First published 2013. 1   See Sanders, “Art and Science of Textual Criticism.”

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division of letters, especially in a text where letters were written close together, thus producing different words. An ancient scribe, like a modern one, could make an error of metathesis, that is, transposing letters within a word, writing cavalry instead of calvary or brid instead of bird. Working largely in Tiberias in the early Middle Ages from around the seventh to the tenth centuries, a group of rabbinic scribes later called Masoretes made valiant efforts to protect the text, safeguarding it by supplementing the text with thousands of notes called masorah written on the top, bottom, and sides of manuscripts. Their effort became known as the Masoretic Text and is the standard Jewish text of the Hebrew Bible to this day.2 Yet despite the labors of the Masoretes, the text still contains corruptions, changes, and erasures. The reason for this is primarily that the Masoretes made their contribution at a relatively late stage in the development of the biblical text. At that time, the text already contained corruptions. Paradoxically, the Masoretes carefully preserved a text that was already corrupted, and no changes or corrections were permitted. Why didn’t the Masoretes start from a better text? The answer is that the text the Masoretes chose to work from was itself selected toward the end of the first century. At that time there were many texts circulating (see the Dead Sea Scrolls), none of which was letter perfect. The Dead Sea Scrolls include more than 200 biblical manuscripts (mostly small scraps), evidencing different types or categories of Hebrew texts, many of which contain scribal corrections or additions written on the manuscripts themselves. The people of Qumran (where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found) who created these texts certainly believed their texts contained the meaningful words of a living God, but their belief was not dependent on any notion of a letter-perfect text. The variety of biblical texts among the Dead Sea Scrolls may seem astounding to modern readers. These texts even tend to fall into groups. Some conform in general to the Masoretic Text and are referred to as pre-masoretic. Others seem to conform more closely to other ancient biblical text traditions. Hebrew biblical texts were translated into Greek as early as the third century BCE. This ultimately complete Greek text is known as the Septuagint (or LXX) because tradition has it that 70 translators of the Hebrew text came up with exactly the same Greek translation. Some of the Bible texts among the Dead Sea Scrolls provide the Hebrew base text of the Septuagint, comprising another group of Dead Sea Scroll texts of the Bible. Still other biblical texts from Qumran seem to conform more closely to the pentateuchal text that was preserved by the Samaritans and is known as the Samaritan Pentateuch. And still other biblical texts from Qumran preserve texts that seem to combine more than one of these traditions. After the Roman destruction of the temple in 70 CE, this array of texttypes gradually disappeared in rabbinic Judaism; the masoretic-type text alone remained, errors and all. But other text-types did not disappear completely. They 2

  See Brettler, “Masoretes at Work.”

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can be found in the Hebrew texts (what scholars call the Vorlagen) underlying translations into Greek, Latin, and other languages (i. e., in the Greek, Latin, and Syriac Aramaic translations known respectively as the Septuagint, the Vulgate, and the Peshitta). The Vorlagen of these translations differs from the Masoretic Text in many respects, some minor and others quite significant. A critical Bible translator tries to survey and evaluate all these surviving witnesses to the Hebrew text, ascertain the best possible Hebrew text, and justify the results in the form of a critical apparatus that is usually found in the bottom margin of each page. At the present time, three different critical Bible projects in various stages are trying to do this. One, the Oxford University Bible, sponsored by Oxford University Press, is still in its formative stages. Another at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem is the Hebrew University Bible Project, HUBP, which has so far issued three volumes containing the Major Prophets. The third, with which the two authors of this article are associated, is the Biblia Hebraica Quinta (BHQ), which has so far issued six volumes. While there are many similarities among these three projects, they differ in conception, scope, and editorial control. The HUBP is based on the oldest text of the complete Bible, the Aleppo Codex, dated to about 950 CE, though unfortunately about one third of it is missing.3 BHQ is based on the Leningrad Codex, which is dated a little later than the Aleppo Codex (to 1008 CE). HUBP is a major critical edition that compares not only all Hebrew manuscripts, but also quotations from rabbinic sources not covered by BHQ. For its part, BHQ is intended to be a handbook, literally to be able to be held in one’s hand. HUBP operates on a team approach with individual scholars responsible for all its specialized areas under the guidance of an overall editor. BHQ, on the other hand, assigns books to individual authors who are responsible for every aspect of the book, including preparing the masorah, the Hebrew manuscripts, and all the other various witnesses. An editor of BHQ, not being an expert in all these subjects, literally has to learn all these areas on the job, so to speak. BHQ is the latest edition in the Biblia Hebraica series. Biblia Hebraica (BH), Latin for “Hebrew Bible,” is a term denoting all printed editions of Bibles in Hebrew, but in a more specific sense it denotes the series of critical Bible editions published in Germany since 1905. The main innovator of this critical Hebrew Bible series was the German biblical scholar Rudolf Kittel of the University of Leipzig. The first edition of BH appeared in 1905 – 6, the second in 1913. Both were published by the Württemberg Bible Institute, a predecessor of the German Bible Society, which had taken upon itself the responsibility of producing scholarly Bibles and has continued with this duty to this day. The base text for these two editions of BH was the Second Rabbinic Bible of Jacob ben Hayyim (1524 – 25), which, with improvements over the years, had become the textus receptus for students of the Hebrew Bible for nearly 500 years. However, with 3

  See Ofer, “Shattered Crown.”

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the third edition of BH, which commenced publication in 1929, Kittel used as the base text the Leningrad Codex. The reader will recall that we earlier said that the Masoretes preserved in the Masoretic Text of the tenth century thousands of notes on the text written on the top, bottom, and sides of manuscripts, called masorah. A small or short masorah is referred to as a masorah parva (or mp); a large masorah or masorah magna is abbreviated mm. The third edition of BH was completed in 1937 and for the first time included the masorah parva (mp) written in the side margins of the Leningrad Codex. The fourth edition of BH, the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia or BHS, uses the name of its publishing place Stuttgart, rather than the number four. BHS includes the mp (masorah parva) from the Leningrad Codex but relegates the mm (masorah magna) to a separate volume. Biblia Hebraica Quinta (Quinta = 5; BHQ) is the latest revision of BH. It is being edited by a committee of scholars under the editorship of Adrian Schenker of the University of Fribourg. This project, unlike its predecessors, is international and interconfessional. For the first time in the history of the BH project, Jewish editors are included. Instead of being entirely composed of primarily German Protestant scholars, there are now Catholics as well as Jews among the 22 editors. These scholars come from Switzerland, Italy, the Netherlands, Germany, Ireland, Spain, England, Norway, Finland, France, the United States, and Israel. BHQ includes careful study of color transparencies, the use of a new facsimile edition of the Leningrad Codex and all of the biblical texts among the Dead Sea Scrolls, as well as new editions of the Septuagint (Göttingen), Vulgate, and the Peshitta (Leiden). The language of discussion is English, not, as in previous editions, Latin or German. And the sigla that are used are English sigla, not the Gothic letters that often puzzled American students. The critical apparatus of BHQ also represents a major change. Witnesses from the Septuagint, the Peshitta, and the targum are given in their original language scripts (thus Greek for the Septuagint, Syriac for the Peshitta, etc.) rather than using modern retroversions to an assumed original. Witnesses that agree with the MT are listed first. The preferred text is usually the MT, and witnesses that, in the editor’s opinion, do not represent the preferred text are given critical evaluations. Where the MT is not the preferred text, it too is given an evaluation, and the case is discussed in the accompanying commentary. BHQ also contains separate commentaries for problematic passages. In-depth study of the Dead Sea Scrolls caused a basic revision in the history of the transmission of the text and hence more respect for the MT than earlier editions had shown, so that BHQ delves deeply into classical Hebrew grammar and syntax and does not resort so easily to emendations in the Hebrew text. Finally, BHQ includes the mm (masorah magna) on the same page where the masoretic note occurs. By this placement of the mm, the reader can see quite clearly the relationship of the mm to the mp.

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This new critical edition is likely to open up for nonexperts exciting new dimensions to the textual criticism of the Hebrew Bible. Bibliography Brettler, Marc. “The Masoretes at Work: A Tradition Preserved.” Sidebar in “The Leningrad Codex: Rediscovering the Oldest Complete Hebrew Bible,” by James A. Sanders and Astrid Beck. BRev 13, no. 4 (1997) 32 – 41, 46. Ofer, Yosef. “The Shattered Crown: The Aleppo Codex Sixty Years after the Riots.” BAR 34, no. 5 (2008) 39 – 49. Sanders, James A. “The Art and Science of Textual Criticism.” Review of Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible, by Emanuel Tov, 3rd ed., 2011. BAR 38, no. 3 (2012) 61 – 63.

3 Hermeneutics of Text Criticism Today, as not since the seventeenth century perhaps, biblical text critics and translators are finding their consciousness raised about the hermeneutics operative in their work. By hermeneutics is meant conscious understanding of what the nature, or ontology, of the Bible is, and the effect text-critical decisions have in view of that understanding. In postmodern terms, one realizes that different hermeneutics are operative according to what one, or one’s identity community, believes or thinks the text actually is; and different communities, including schools of thought, may hold quite different views about the nature of the text. It was when Martin Luther started translating Hebrew biblical texts in 1523 that he began to realize the problems involved in the principle of sola Scriptura. Out of wrestling with the text-critical problems that have to be addressed before wrestling with the equally difficult problems in rendering a responsible translation of the textual readings chosen, Luther came up with the hermeneutic principle of res et argumentum. Words, he said, must be in the service of meaning and not meaning in the service of words.1 Res for Luther was the gospel of Jesus Christ, while argumentum had three themes, oeconomia, politia, and ecclesia. If a passage did not accord with ecclesia, then it belonged to the category of either the politics or the economy of the time from which the text arose. Where there was multivalency in a word or text, even after grammar had been fully respected, one chose the possibility that accorded with the res. Wherever the rabbis gave a meaning not in accord with the res, one rejected it; and if the translator could work through the rules of grammar or with vowel points to make a passage accord with the res, he was to do so. Thus, Luther’s hermeneutic led eventually to the denigration of the authenticity of vowel points and to the long debate that would endure through the eighteenth century, at least, about the authority of vowel points. Luther was convinced that the vocalization of the consonantal text was a masoretic invention designed in part to thwart “original” readings favorable to New Testament understandings of them. With some variations among the various reformers, Luther’s hermeneutic became the attitude held by most Christian scholars toward the text of the Hebrew Bible. This eventually led the young Oxford scholar, Benjamin Kennicott, inspired in part by Houbigant, to make his collations in the latter half *  First published 1995. 1  Barthélemy, Critique textuelle, 1:*4 – *9; Sanders, “Hebrew Bible and Old Testament,” 49 – 50.

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of the eighteenth century without regard, for the most part, to vowel pointing. As Luther continued his program of translation, especially in the years 1529 to 1541, he came to view some texts as inherently corrupt. A result of Luther’s hermeneutic may be seen in the Latin translation of the Bible in 1551 by Sebastien Chateillon (Castalio, Castellio); wherever the Hebrew seemed to Chateillon corrupt, he retroverted a Hebrew text from Greek or Latin witnesses, or simply emended by conjecture. Modern text criticism, as practiced by many scholars until recently, was thereby launched. Luther’s attitude toward masoretic vocalization, and even his view of the extent of corruption in transmission of the text, have persisted into modern scholarship long after Luther’s basically Christian hermeneutic was abandoned. Chateillon’s conjectures were followed in nine specific textual cases by Louis Cappel (Cappelus), sixteen by Charles François Houbigant, and some also by Wellhausen.2 In most cases those indebted to Chateillon did not acknowledge the debt but simply perpetuated the new reading, and another aspect of modern text criticism was initiated: perpetuating unattributed conjectural readings, and even errors in actual readings, from one apparatus to another as though they had somehow become a part of the textual tradition. The debates precipitated by Luther’s hermeneutic, as well as his attitudes toward the textual situation of the First Testament, would continue to flare up from time to time, especially into the eighteenth century but also until recently. By the time of Johann David Michaelis in the latter part of the eighteenth century, the concept of text criticism and its methods were fairly well set for two centuries to come. Text criticism had as its task to establish a Hebrew text as close to what could be thought the original as possible, but without regard to a res in either the Second Testament or in non-Christian Jewish literature. The hermeneutic of Louis Cappelus in his seventeenth-century Critica Sacra was by Michaelis’s time adopted in the field generally: one should study Scripture as one would any ancient secular literature, that is, one should work toward establishing a text that reflected the thought of the original author as closely as possible, without regard to a sensus plenior or a “messianic second sense.” Clearly the shift in hermeneutics enunciated by Luther had been critically modified, though not abandoned. The difference was in the fact that most Christian text critics, whether they cited him or not, had clearly heard Baruch Spinoza’s call of 1670 to write a history of formation of the biblical text – because therein only, he insisted, would the truth of the Bible be found, namely in the original thoughts and intentions of ancient biblical authors.3 Confidence in scholarly ability to reconstruct the history of formation of the biblical text, and with it, authorial intentionality (“truth”), became an integral part of “modern” modes of thought. Biblical “higher criticism” as a modern discipline was thereby launched.

2

 Barthélemy, Critique textuelle, 1:*9; Sanders, “Task of Text Criticism.”  Spinoza, Tractatus, 87 – 88.

3

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Before the discovery of the Judean Desert Scrolls, which have by now affected nearly every aspect of text criticism, the basic scholarly hermeneutic at work in text criticism had begun to come under scrutiny. The so-called history of the formation of the text was constantly under revision, with the intentions of ancient biblical authors varying according to the scholar, or the school of thought of which he or she was a part, or on external information concerning a historical period or site. One scholar’s or one school’s attitude or conviction about what a biblical author “surely intended” would differ considerably from that of another, and it was that attitude or hermeneutic that influenced the way by which a textual or versional witness was selected, or a conjecture proposed. Every tradent of the text, past and present, brings his or her hermeneutics to the text.4 In effect, there has not been a clear differentiation between higher and lower criticism, that is, between a history of the formation of texts and a history of the transmission of texts. The former has tended to overshadow the latter, if not overwhelm it. There can be little question that exegesis plays an important though limited part in text criticism, but by the beginning of the twentieth century exegesis had begun to dominate text criticism. The attempts at reform of BHS over against BHK1 – 3, even by some of the same editors, reflected the newer, more sober attitude. The number of outright conjectures suggested in the apparatus was considerably reduced. And with the introduction of Gérard Weil’s masorah there was in evidence a growing respect for the text of Leningradensis, and of the Tiberian Ben Asher traditions, but still almost total disregard of the te’amim, particularly in the parsing of poetry, as may be seen in the page layout of anything construed to be poetry.5 The history of transmission of the text has been dominated in this century by the debate between Kahle and de Lagarde, and whether that history demonstrated a move from the one to the many (de Lagarde) or from the many to the one (Kahle). Early decisions based on the plurality of text forms, particularly from Qumran Cave 4, were based on the Kahle-Lagarde debate; one or the other was declared to have been right.6 But by the late 1960s the scene had considerably changed: the history of transmission of the text of the First Testament was being reviewed, revised, and rewritten, so that the two current principal First Testament text-critical projects are based firmly on that revision, the Hebrew University Bible Project (HUBP) and the Hebrew Old Testament Text Project (HOTTP) of the United Bible Societies.

4   This is an important aspect of intertextuality; see Boyarin, Intertextuality, 12, and Sanders, “Intertextuality and Dialogue.” 5   The whole issue of constraints entered into a text needs full discussion. Every presentation of a text, including word spacing, open and closed line spacing, paragraph division, vowels, accents, superscriptions, paragraph headings, titles, stichometric arrangements, etc., whether in antiquity or in more recent modes of mis-en-page (page layout), stems from an understanding of the text. 6   See the considerably different contributions by Cross and by Talmon in Cross and Talmon, Qumran and the History of the Biblical Text; Tov, Textual Criticism, 164 – 97.

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Two Projects The Hebrew University Bible Project was instigated by the recovery of Aleppensis in 1948, but also in part by the recovery of Qumran Cave 1 at about the same time, the period of the Israeli War of Independence. Moshe Goshen-Gottstein, Shemaryahu Talmon, and Chaim Rabin formed the HUBP and launched the journal Textus.7 The United Bible Societies’ HOTTP was launched in 1969 when Eugene Nida formed a six-person committee to deal with the new situation in First Testament text criticism comparable to the four-person committee he had formed in 1955 to work on Second Testament text-critical problems of particular concern to the translation program of the UBS. The principal reason for the formation of the two UBS projects stemmed from problems encountered by the hundreds of translation committees around the world, especially committees made up largely of nationals in the so-called third-world countries. In historical perspective, the problems the translation committees faced were a direct result of the lack of clear distinction in Western scholarship between the two histories, the history of formation of the texts of the Bible and the history of transmission of the texts. This is not a criticism leveled at any one group or school of thought but is basically an observation of what had been happening for at least a century and a half. The distinction between the literary history of the formation of a given text and its history of transmission is rarely neatly drawn. But it is equally clear that some text critics allow the lack of clear distinction to permit exegesis to affect text-critical judgments considerably more than should be. When difficult texts were encountered, the national translation committees would inevitably turn to recent Western translations of either Testament and immediately run into the confusion. In the cases of the problematic textual problems they needed help on, the translations consulted would almost always reflect different text-critical solutions, which resulted in widely varying translations based on them. The situation engendered confusion among the committees, especially those who had been led to believe in the “objectivity” of Western scholarship. They needed help and Gene Nida and the UBS tried to provide it by establishing the two text-critical projects. The basic reason they needed help stemmed from the fact that the confusion was patent in the popular Western translations done around mid-century. Whereas the RSV (1952) was still basically a formal-equivalence translation based on its being the authorized heir in the USA of the King James Version, and hence constrained by the latter’s hermeneutic of translation based on the received MT, the first two editions of the Bible de Jerusalem, the Revidierte Luther Bibel, and the New English Bible, among others, tended to present translations based on a high percentage of variant readings, and especially conjectures. And, of course, these varied widely according to the text-critical views of the translators as to what a passage “ought to have said,” given “modern” attitudes about consistency 7   See Ben-Zvi, “Codex of Ben Asher”; Goshen-Gottstein, “Authenticity of the Aleppo Codex.”

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and coherency in ancient compositions, and the ability (or lack of it?) of modern scholars to discern what the “original” text should have said. The situation multiplied the problems that indigenous committees encountered when they turned to the recent translations in the old colonial languages of their newly independent countries, where they often found translations of biblical passages only recently composed. Fortunately, translations by the 1970s had begun to become considerably more sober and text-critically responsible; note especially the third edition of BJ (the New Jerusalem Bible) and now the Revised English Bible. In a strange turn of history, the NRSV went in the opposite direction and abandoned the formal-equivalence type translation of the KJV that had been retained by the RSV. The NRSV changed character essentially, and incorporates translations of a much higher percentage of emended and conjectured texts than its predecessor. This was undoubtedly due to the considerable influence in the USA, and on the NRSV committee, of a current school of text-critical theory that is centered in “modern” efforts to reconstruct history based on a text-critical method that seeks to establish, as far as possible, “original” biblical texts. The first discussions we had on the HOTTP, beginning in 1969, indicated the need to arrive at a consensus on the history of transmission of the text, which would then be the foundation of everything else we did. The amazing thing, as I look back, is how soon the consensus emerged. Dominique Barthélemy had been working on the history of the stabilization of the Hebrew text since well before the publication of his Les devanciers d’Aquila (1963) based on his early work on the Greek Dodecapropheton from Nahal Hever.8 ˙ ˙with his work but did not accept its The committee was, of course, familiar consequences for understanding the history of transmission of the text without some initial resistance; there was considerable debate. I am convinced that the similar reconstruction on the part of the HUBP played a minor role in the consensus; we had to work it through ourselves.9 With no collusion or direct influence, the two groups arrived at similar conclusions based on the data available to both.

History of Transmission The history of transmission of the text falls into four periods: (1) that of the so-called Ur-text; (2) that of accepted texts; (3) that of the received text; and (4) that of the Masoretic Text. 8   See Tov, Greek Minor Prophets Scroll, ix: “Scholars will always associate the name of R. P. Dominique Barthélemy, OP, of Fribourg with the Minor Prophets Scroll because of his masterly treatment of its contents in Devanciers, a book which in many ways has revolutionized scholarship.” See Sanders, “Stability and Fluidity,” esp. 202 – 6. 9   See Barthélemy, “Histoire du texte hébraïque”; an abbreviated form had appeared earlier in English: Barthélemy, “Text, Hebrew, History of.” For the same history as understood by the HUBP, see Goshen-Gottstein, Isaiah: Sample Edition, 12 – 13; Talmon, “Old Testament Text,” and his earlier observations in Talmon, “Aspects of the Textual Transmission.”

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Both groups agree that Period 1 falls outside the province of text criticism in sensu stricto. There are no autographs of any portion of biblical literature, and even if there were, there would undoubtedly be radical discussion about their status as witnesses, and that would depend directly on one’s hermeneutic of text criticism. While the text critic needs to be aware of everything that goes on in discussions of so-called original texts, as well as aware of all the disciplines of biblical criticism and their ever-changing results, it is not the province of text criticism to reconstruct original texts before they became the kind of community property that repetition and recitation create. Period 2 begins with the earliest extant biblical manuscripts and extends through to the completion of the first phase of stabilization of the text, that is, the destruction of the Second Temple and the conquest of Jerusalem, what Talmon has called “The Great Divide.” These are texts accepted by believing communities as authoritative and functionally canonical for them. They are no longer in the province only of schools or other narrowly defined groups responsible for their preservation and existence. This period is marked by a limited degree of textual fluidity. Even within groupings of texts (not to say families or recensions) there is a measure of textual fluidity, including inner-Hebrew and inner-Greek literary developments. This is the period of the Qumran literature, the Greek translations of various books (so-called Septuagint), citations and quotations of Scripture in early Jewish and Christian literature. It is crucial to the whole text-critical enterprise to understand the nature of the witnesses in Period 2, and their relative fluidity. Tradents of all sorts, copyists, midrashists, translators, teachers, and preachers had and have two equally important responsibilities, the one to the past and the other the present – the one to the Vorlage and the other to the community the tradent serves. In the period from which we now have so many manuscript witnesses, the second period, the interest Scripture and tradition held for the people of the time was in their relevance to their hopes and fears in the culturally strange, enticing and yet threatening Hellenistic-Roman world. Tradents were not simply academic types who had some time on their hands. Their interest was in tapping wisdom and light from the past, specifically the “prophetic past,” to understand the present. Tradents wanted their communities to understand what they were copying or translating for them. Paraphrases and facilitating translations of texts, accepted by the community as authoritative, or truly derived from that “prophetic past,” were common in the period. These are what the text critic calls intentional changes. The tradent knew the text was relevant to community problems and concerns and wanted the people to understand the text being transmitted. And, of course, it was the tradent’s understanding of the relevance of the text that would be conveyed. What other understanding would he or she have shared? On the other hand, such textual fluidity was of necessity limited. If, in order to make a text sound relevant, that text was altered to the point of obscuring recognition of it by the community, the whole point would have been lost. What one sees in preexilic references to earlier authoritative traditions, such as the exodus wanderings – entrance traditions, the Davidic traditions, the patriarchal tra-

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ditions, etc., is sufficient fluidity to be easily adaptable in the newer speech or composition, but also sufficient stability to be recognizable by the community as their own authoritative identity-granting traditions.10 No two recitals in the prophets, for instance, of the exodus event are alike, and yet they all are clearly recognizable for what they are. It is no different from the balance the modern tradent must strike in current similar traditioning processes such as preaching, writing a commentary, or translating. In fact, one of the major aspects of canonical criticism, in its emphasis on canon as function (norma normans), is recognition of the similarities, as well as differences, between ancient tradents and more recent ones.11 What goes on in modern believing communities with regard to the traditioning process is not unlike what went on in antiquity. This kind of fluidity continues even after stabilization of the text, as can be seen in dynamic- and functional-equivalent translations as well as in homilies and commentaries. The difference is that stabilization induced different modes of adapting the stable text to render it once more relevant and fluid, with the concomitant rise in generally accepted hermeneutic rules to gain some control over the exercise.12 Period 3, the era of the received text, was characterized by the remarkable stability of all extant witnesses by the end of the first century of the common era. These are the biblical manuscripts from the non-Qumran caves (and a few from Qumran such as 1QIsab), which date from late in the first century into the second, and from Masada, as well as Aquila and Theodotion, and citations in rabbinic literature (in contrast to those in the Second Testament and other early Jewish literature). These mark the beginnings of formative Judaism, in Jacob Neusner’s terms. This is also called the proto-masoretic period in text-critical terms, in contrast to the earlier pre-masoretic manuscripts. It extended until the ninth century when we begin to have codices extant from the Ben Asher family.13 In the gap between the second-century witnesses and the Tiberian, there is precious little, mainly Jerome’s work and citations in rabbinic and patristic literature. The stabilization process of rectifying fluid texts to the proto-masoretic, which one sees so clearly in the Dodecapropheton from Hever, continues in Jerome’s belief ˙ in Hebraica veritas. Period 4 is then the period of the Masoretic Text proper, especially the remarkable work in the five generations of the Ben Asher family. There are some 31 MT manuscripts that date up to 1100.14 The trajectory from limited fluidity 10   See Sanders, Torah and Canon, 15 – 30; Sanders, Canon and Community, 21 – 45; Fishbane, Biblical Interpretation; Hays, Echoes of Scripture; Boyarin, Intertextuality; Evans and Sanders, Luke and Scripture; Sanders, “Hermeneutics.” [See now Sanders, Monotheizing Process, 12 – 25.] 11   See Sanders, “Canon. Hebrew Bible,” esp. 847 – 51. 12   See Sanders, “Adaptable for Life”; Sanders, “Text and Canon: Concepts and Method”; Sanders, “From Sacred Story.” See the earlier perceptive study in this regard by Rabin, “Translation Process.” See as well Bickerman, Studies in Jewish and Christian History, 1:190: “Every translation was an adaptation of the original to the needs of its new readers.” 13   A convenient list of the classical Tiberian MSS is provided in Yeivin, Introduction to the Tiberian Masorah, 15 – 31. 14   This figure will be considerably expanded in the light of the work currently being done by M. Beit-Arié and his team in the National Public Library in St. Petersburg (Leningrad) where

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in text form, in the second period, to almost complete stability in the third, is amazing to behold.15 There is no other literature in any culture quite like it. Constraints inserted into the text, both for understanding and for stability, make it truly unique as a body of literature. The Masoretes, despite Luther’s and most Christian exegetes’ doubts, clearly inherited a system of reading the text that reached back into antiquity.16

Modus Operandi Our UBS committee worked almost from the start with the dual perspective of the history of stabilization of the text and the history of stabilization of canon. We always started with the assumption that the MT meant something intelligible, whether or not it was anywhere near what an “original” reading supposedly had been; and we obligated ourselves first to understand what meaning the MT conveyed, whether we finally accepted the MT or a variant.17 We formed the distinct impression that modern preference for a variant or conjectured reading often had led scholars to rush to the judgment that a MT reading was corrupt or unintelligible. Then we would do the same for other witnesses, especially the Judean Desert Scrolls and the versions. We respected each witness enough that we were reluctant to judge a reading corrupt or “uncertain” until we had exhausted every other possible avenue. We attempted to discern the conceptuality lying back of a variant text or reading in each witness we deemed of value. This sometimes required doing a structure analysis of the pericope in which a variant apparently lurked. The basic tenet of canonical criticism works in text criticism as well: respect for the conceptual world on which a supposed variant is based, not only the concept of the individual scribe or translator, or later writer citing the text in question, but also the conceptual world of the community for which the text copied or translated was intended. Because we dealt with problems referred to us by the UBS translations department, our first task was always to trace in modern scholarship the origins of sug-

there are apparently thousands of uncatalogued manuscripts, many fragmentary, of the MT. Beit-Arie claims that it should now be possible to write a detailed history of the masoretic movement; see “Exhuming the Hebrew Secrets.” 15   M. J. Mulder is, however, undoubtedly correct to point out that even so the process of stabilization is not yet totally complete; see Mulder, “Transmission of the Biblical Text,” 132. This observation should be made in conjunction with Goshen-Gottstein’s landmark study “Hebrew Biblical Manuscripts,” which clearly showed that the later MSS, with precious few exceptions, of the sort collated by Kennicott and de Rossi, have little text-critical value. 16   One of the unexpected results of our work on the HOTTP was the gradual realization that in some of the Tiberian MSS the masoretic contributions are more reliable than those of the scribe who penned the consonants; see Barthélemy, Critique textuelle, 3:ccxxviii – ccxlii. This evaluation will be reflected in the current preparation of BHQ by our successor committee. Note also our observation that while the Masoretes were rabbanite, they enjoyed close relations with and underwent influence by Qaraites in the Galilee at the time. 17   There are, of course, some generally recognized improbabilities in the MT.

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gested emendations and conjectures in the translations the UBS nationals consulted. These were usually found already in seventeenth- to nineteenth-century criticism. After researching the scholarly reasoning offered for rejecting a MT reading and accepting a variant or conjectured text, we then turned to the ancient witnesses to discern as well as possible why a supposed variant appeared in those cases. This sometimes led to a judgment as to whether we were dealing with a text-critical or an ancient literary problem. In conjunction with that work we researched pertinent modern studies that involved archaeological, philological, and other data relating to the passage at hand. At the same time, we also turned to the great rabbinic and Qaraite commentators of the Middle Ages to see their judgments about the morphological and syntactic situation of the text. We came to have especially high regard for the Qaraite lexicographers, especially those who wrote in Judeo-Arabic. Because they had learned the basic concepts and principles of grammar from Arabic grammarians (and not from classical Greek / Latin grammarians, as European scholarship has) they often had far sharper observations to make about a word or phrase than scholars since the Renaissance. Their knowledge of the Hebrew language was based on a CD‑ROM-like knowledge of the entire text of the Tanak – which Western scholars simply do not have. Since we operated as a team, different members of the committee and their assistants took on the research work necessary to come up with all these data. We agreed from the start that printed critical editions of texts often betray the biases of competence, interest, and hermeneutics of the modern editor, no matter how renowned.

An Analogy A major problem in text criticism was one addressed every time the committee met. Since we eschewed purely scholarly conjectures with no basis in the witnesses, but obligated ourselves to suggest for translators only what can be found in actual ancient and medieval manuscripts of texts and versions bequeathed to us by ancient believing communities, we could only work with extant texts from Period 2 through Period 4, that is, the Judean Desert Scrolls and the Greek and other witnesses through to the great Tiberian codices. The policy that we adopted was that we would attempt, by the most scrupulous text-critical methods possible, to arrive at suggesting the most responsible extant reading, that is, from when the texts had become functionally canonical for believing communities in early Judaism, and were no longer the peculiar province of individuals or schools. This meant, as noted above, that we needed to know as much about the history of formation of the text, that is, what scholarship since Spinoza could tell us about the text, as we knew about the history of transmission of the text. But in truth, we found that the best we could do, or any current scholarship could do, in discerning the intention of “original authors” was elusive and fraught with indeterminacy. Because of what we had learned about early Judaism from study of the Judean Desert Scrolls, we found ourselves in a postmodern frame of mind

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fully conscious of the fact that observers, like ourselves, are always a part of the observed. We sought rather to choose the most critically responsible available reading that had become functionally canonical for early Judaism. In fact, we all brought all we knew about current scholarship on the problems addressed to bear on our discussions, but only after we had done all the necessary work of a text-critical nature. We tried to make judicious judgments about what seemed really valuable for us in modern scholarly study. When potentially true variants loomed on the horizon, we obligated ourselves to debate issues and take sides, to make sure we had before us the full data and the strongest arguments possible about them. This was the reason we finally voted on each evaluation. This was in part to make sure we did not perpetuate the tendency in scholarship to arrive at a reading attractive to a particular hermeneutic, or view of the text, and make hasty judgments about which readings were “corrupt” or “genuine.” We all had the experience of arriving at our annual four-week sessions with a clear view about some of the readings we had prepared work on, only to be persuaded in session of quite a different view, precisely because we obligated ourselves collectively to build up arguments as strong as possible on both sides of a variant reading (after eliminating pseudo-variants), often to the point of seeing the legitimacy of both, but having to make a decision. Not a few times we decided on a particularly difficult reading as text-critically responsible but suggested to the translators the wisdom of an early and frequent facilitating option for current believing communities that had well served ancient (or medieval) such communities. The best way to illustrate the exercise is by analogy to an archaeological dig. Sometimes we came to the point of admitting that what were left, in the MT and / or other witnesses, were but “beautiful ruins” of what we could judge was probably the “original” literary composition in question. After we had probed as far back into the beginning of Period 2 as our data permitted, we would then reconstruct from those ruins what we felt might have been the original literary structure – just as an architect on a dig does from the surviving ruins of an ancient monument, in the light of the available pertinent history involved. But once we had looked at the proposed conjectured “drawing” of what might have been, we would prescind from the retrojection to look once more at what ancient believing communities had actually bequeathed us, that is, at what could be called functionally canonical, and on the basis of that and rigorous text-critical method, make our judgment on what reading to choose. We admitted on occasion that if we were working alone as scholars in the historian’s workshop we might not be so constrained. But in such commentaries or studies we would make it clear that we were working as historians, attempting with imagination to reconstruct “original” moments, and not as text critics. This, of course, induces comments about what history means in postmodern terms.18

18

  For an overview of the current situation, see Perdue, Collapse of History.

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Parallel Texts Such discussions were informed by the observation that we not infrequently have among early witnesses parallel texts that recount the same story but are quite different in conceptuality, each with its own integrity. Because Emanuel Tov targets a much earlier date than we as the aim of text criticism, that is, the sixth century BCE, he deemphasizes the number of parallel texts among the witnesses.19 I have elsewhere argued that structure analysis of passages containing variants that have been otherwise tested as true may reveal quite different concepts lying back of the two or more witnesses, concepts that support the variants in the different witnesses where found, but not necessarily in a projected Vorlage or “original.”20 A prime example of such a “true” variant is in the almost universal acceptance of the Septuagint (and 1QIsaa?) reading K‫ואומר‬K in Isa 40:6. However, structure analyses of Isa 40:1 – 11 in MT (Qumran?) and in the Septuagint indicate two quite different concepts of what is going in the Isa 40 text. It is a good example of disregarding the integrity of the two witnesses in order to pillage one to correct the other. The MT presents itself as minutes of a meeting of the heavenly council with reports about what was said (40:3 and 6) in council in response to the commission given by God to the council (40:1 – 2), followed by specific commands to a single member (40:9). In that context, MT Isa 40:6 clearly reports that after one voice had cried, “Proclaim,” another voice asked what he should proclaim. The Septuagint, on the other hand, reports a totally different scene in which the deity addresses priests in 40:2, one of whom apparently speaks up in the first person in 40:6. Modern scholarship brings to Isa 40 the modern critical knowledge that this is where the Second Isaiah begins, a prophet distinct from the First Isaiah; therefore, he should have a personal prophetic “call” passage recorded as well.21 Some scholars who otherwise follow the work of Frank M. Cross in seeing in Isa 40:1 – 8( – 11) a report of a meeting of the heavenly council, still see within it, as in Isa 6:1 – 13, a “prophetic call” to the exilic prophet that scholarship since the late eighteenth century has come to call the Second Isaiah.22 But neither MT nor Septuagint, in and of itself, supports such a concept. This has led other scholars to deny that a call passage is even hinted at within the report of the heavenly council deliberations of Isa 40.23 Christopher Seitz has offered the most probing study of Isa 40:1 – 11 to date, reading it in the full con-

19

 Tov, Textual Criticism, 313 – 49.   Sanders, “Stability and Fluidity,” esp. 211 ff., where I also argue for a pluriform Bible. Similar arguments have recently been advanced by others: Barthélemy, “L’enchevêtrement de l’histoire textuelle,” 39; Aejmelaeus, “Translation Technique,” 30 – 31. 21   See Habel, “Form and Significance of the Call Narratives,” esp. 314 – 16. 22   Cross, “Council of Yahweh in Second Isaiah,” following Rowley, “Council of Yahweh”; Westermann, Isaiah  40 – 66, 32; Westermann, Sprache und Struktur, 82 – 84; Clifford, Fair Spoken and Persuading, 71 – 76; Melugin, Formation of Isaiah 40 – 55, 84 – 86. 23  See Vincent, “Jesaja 40,1 – 8”; Petersen, Late Israelite Prophecy, 20; Ackroyd, “Isaiah 36 – 39,” 6, translates 40:6b in acceptable British idiom, “And one said, ‘What should one cry?’” 20

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text of the sixty-six chapters of the book of Isaiah, and in a redactional-critical mode without resorting to pre-critical views.24 An equally critical probe with structure analysis of Isa 40:1 – 11 in the Septuagint and Qumran (1QIsaa) witnesses shows that those texts also exhibit concepts of what their tradents thought was going on in the text. The crux reading in 1QIsaa 40:6, K‫ואומרה‬K, is indeterminate. It can be read like the Septuagint at that point, “And I said.”25 Or it can be read in a postexilic mode as a feminine singular participle referring appositionally to the herald, Zion or Jerusalem (40:9).26 A structure analysis of the Qumran witness, whether including only the first scribal hand at vv. 7 – 8, or including the insertion by the second hand that brought it into agreement with the MT at that point, would indicate no difference in concept from that perceived in the MT, except for how one reads the indeterminate K‫ואומרה‬ K in 40:6. These observations do not necessarily invalidate a text-critical judgment that a scribal error has occurred in the MT reading. But they place burdens of proof on arguments no one has yet convincingly advanced: and that is, first, how the MT “error” came about, and, more importantly, second, why the concept lying back of the MT text should be cast aside in emending the text on the basis of other witnesses exhibiting their own conceptualities. Since the Qumran witness is indeterminate, the emendation basically rests on the Septuagint reading in a context that deserves to be heard in its own right before it, too, is pillaged and then set aside. There are many passages in the Bible, not just those usually listed,27 that, when probed carefully, exhibit different understandings of what was going on in the passage. This does not necessarily mean that the different witnesses (usually MT, LXX, and Qumran) had different Vorlagen. On the contrary, the likelihood is that the ancient tradents did what modern ones do: they transmitted what they and their communities understood the passage was about and chose the appropriate language to convey it. Not until the stabilization process was basically accomplished by the beginning of the second century of the common era did tradents intertextually restrain themselves to the point of accurate copying without regard to story line.28

24   Seitz, “Divine Council,” shows clearly how the MT reports a meeting of the heavenly council without a call narrative in ch. 40, but fails to probe what is going on in the Septuagint account. It would have strengthened his case. Exemplary of current studies of the book of Isaiah as a whole by two former students are Sweeney, Isaiah  1 – 4, and Carr, “Reaching for Unity in Isaiah.” 25   With Kutscher, Language and Linguistic Background, 39, 326, 357, and Qimron, Hebrew of the Dead Sea Scrolls, 44. 26   D. McBride, following Petersen, Late Israelite Prophecy, 20. Both Cross and Westermann also see the feminine participles in 40:9 as appositional with Zion or Jerusalem as the herald. 27   Ulrich, “Double Literary Editions,” 113 – 14; and Tov, Textual Criticism, 316 ff. 28   Sanders, “From Sacred Story.”

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Hermeneutics Since my thesis, in postmodern terms, is that one’s understanding of the biblical text, or of a passage within it, is affected by the hermeneutics brought to it, I feel obligated to be clear about my own. When Jerome pursued his regard for Hebraica veritas he created a situation that has yet to be resolved. When the Reformers then accepted his position, and tried to validate the idea of sola Scriptura, the situation became exacerbated. As long as there was the magisterium and tradition of the church to fall back on, the situation was quite tolerable. When that was removed, for Protestants, all sorts of anomalies were created. This was apparently the reason a person like Isaac de La Peyrère reverted to Catholicism after having converted to Protestantism. The Western churches were left with a text based principally on the Hebrew, but with an order of books based vaguely on Septuagint tradition, creating a section called the Apocrypha. The MT order of books made sense for Judaism. There was a theological history that went from creation in Genesis to the failures of the United Kingdom, the Northern Kingdom, then the Southern Kingdom by the close of 2 Kings. The story that started with two promises to Abram and Sarai saw them gloriously fulfilled by 1 Kgs 10, after which everything went downhill to complete defeat by 2 Kgs 25. As the great anthems of the Torah (Exod 15 and Deut 32) declaim, and as the Song of Hannah stresses (1 Sam 2), God is the God of risings and fallings, what humans call success and what they call failure, what they call good and what they call bad. The one really stable part of the Bible in terms of sequence of books, Genesis to 2 Kings, is a radical presentation of that view of Reality. Then follow the Prophets, the books of the Three and the Book of the Twelve, to explain the (hi)story just recited. (1) It is not God who let us down; (2) it is we who let God down by all sorts of idolatry; (3) God sent prophets early and late to tell us how it really is in the divine economy; and (4) we have another chance if in exile we take it all to heart that this is indeed the case as stressed in Deut 29 – 33 and finally in most of the prophetic books themselves.29 Thereupon follows Chronicles as the first book of the Ketuvim, with its new, optimistic attitude about the opportunities for individual responsibility in the New Israel, or Judaism. Chronicles presents a revisionist history that offers hope for obedience and repentance, even the repentance of a Manasseh who was the scapegoat in the Deuteronomic history (2 Chron 33:12 – 13; see Prayer of Manasseh in some Apocrypha).30 Not only does it, in contrast to Kings, end on the optimistic note of the edict by Cyrus, thus stressing the continuing covenant relationship with the people corporately, it also suggests that some of the individual characters in the earlier drama were not totally without redeeming qualities. The Psalter then follows Chronicles with its opening declaration that the person whose delight is

29

  See Sanders, “Deuteronomy,” esp. 91.   See Sanders, introduction and notes to the “Prayer of Manasseh.”

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in Torah and not in the way of the wicked is blessed indeed.31 Jubilees and Sirach move even further in the direction of emphasis following Ezek 18 on individual responsibility. A Jew is called to the service of God, and Judaism is the expression of that service. A major tenet of Judaism became the belief that it is possible to obey and please God, even though the primary history in Genesis to Kings (and eventually a theologian from Tarsus) leaves the clear impression that none was righteous, no not one. This was a new day; there was a new chance to be God’s people. The old Abram-Sarai promises were still operative, but now God’s Israel had had its heart circumcised by God (Deut 30:6), effecting what the people had not been able to do themselves despite prophetic pleas to do so (Jer 4:4; Deut 10:16). God, as great physician, through the pain and adversity wrought by the power flows of the eighth to sixth centuries BCE, conducted open-heart surgery on the people corporately (Jer 30:12 – 17; 31:33; Ezek 36:26 – 27; cf. Exod 15:26). This mode of signifying the defeat and the suffering of the people corporately was accompanied by the new possibility of individual responsibility (Jer 31:29; Ezek 18). After the Psalter usually comes the book of Job, which stands as a monument to the poet’s exposure and refutation of the friends’ attempts to apply the old prophetic principles of corporate responsibility to an individual’s suffering. And then comes Proverbs, with its many suggestions as to how to live under One God in all those nooks and crannies of life unaddressed in the laws of Torah. And then before the upbeat “new history” is resumed at the end of the codex in Daniel and Ezra – Nehemiah, in which individual responsibility within the corporate is demonstrated dramatically, there are the five scrolls to be read at the special feasts and a fast, that relate the faith of individuals, and of the people as a whole, to the joys and sorrows of existence under One God. When the tripartite canon as indicated by the great Tiberian MSS became stabilized, it all cohered and made a clear statement about the nature of Judaism as understood by surviving Pharisaic-rabbinic Jews.32 The Septuagint, according to most surviving codices, exhibits quite a different understanding of the Bible’s theological history. Instead of the prophetic corpus coming after the Deuteronomic history, where it gives case after case history of God’s having indeed sent prophets to tell the people well in advance what the divine economy was all about, most Septuagint MSS put Chronicles, Esdras, Ezra – Nehemiah, Esther, Judith, Tobit, and the Books of Maccabees right after Kings. The Septuagint thus presents a theological history that goes from creation through to the Hellenistic period just before Roman domination. And it was to that long stretch of theological history that the early church understood the

31   While in some LXX MSS the Psalter at least follows close on Chronicles after Ezra – Nehemiah, the sequence is entirely lost in most Christian Bibles, and of course, finally also in the Baba Bathra 14b listing, hence the Second Rabbinic Bible. In the NRSV’s drive to use gender-inclusive language for humans it obscured the celebration of individual responsibility in Ps 1. 32   See the not dissimilar sketch by Rofé, “Nomistic Correction.” Cf. Morgan, Between Text and Community.

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Gospels, Acts, and Epistles to be attached.33 Whereas the distinct section called Ketuvim in the basic MT order provided a canonical base for the New Israel Judaism to live lives of obedience in stasis whether in Palestine or diaspora, the Septuagint, on the contrary, was still presenting God as very active on the international scene, very much as God had been since creation in the biblical story. The Prophets were placed after the Psalms and various types of wisdom books to explain how God signifies history and how God’s people can live through it and still have hope. The function of the very same books of the Bible became quite different in the different canonical contexts as rather dramatically is the case with the differing placements of Daniel.34 Augustine did well to ask his friend, Jerome, why he went to such pains as he did to provide a Latin text of the Bible based on the (proto-MT) Hebrew text in the MSS of his rabbinic tutor in Bethlehem. The Holy Spirit, Augustine claimed, had used the Septuagint throughout the history of the church and had done quite well thank you. But Jerome did indeed provide the church a direct translation from the Hebrew, which eventually replaced the Vetus Latina based on the Septuagint. Of course, Jerome knew that he would have to retain certain familiar phrases and passages to gain acceptance. Clearly the largely independent integrity of books such as Samuel, Jeremiah, Esther, and Proverbs, as well as portions of other books, needs to be respected. I suspect that when further study is done we shall see the Greek forms of these books casting their light on a fuller Septuagint context than has heretofore been seen. And that again puts the focus on hermeneutics. Jesus’ answer to the expert’s question in Luke 10:26 about how to inherit eternal life is to the point; the answer was a double question: “What is written in Torah, and how do you read it?” One selects the pertinent passage to the issue at hand, but then it is a question of the hermeneutics by which one reads the selected passage. While the Pentateuch shares in part the form of a biography of Moses, it is caught up into a much larger theological history whether in its MT guise or its Septuagint version, just as what looks like a biography of Jesus is caught up into a genre called “gospel.” Judaism set the Pentateuch apart as Torah, and it has been the Written Torah for Judaism ever since. Whether the Pentateuch is viewed as Torah, or as the beginning of a longer Deuteronomic theological history, or an even longer Septuagint “history,” the various human biographies are caught up into something much larger than themselves. Hermeneutically it makes a difference which way one reads the Pentateuch: as a collection of laws embedded in a narrative, or as a narrative with laws contained

33   What order of books (scrolls) the pre-Christian Greek versions had we may possibly never know. Since the church preserved the LXX, and its basic order in extant LXX MSS served the church so well, it is likely that it is a result of early Christian interest. See Swartley, Israel’s Scripture Traditions. 34   See Talmon, “Oral Tradition.” Talmon makes the very engaging point that while comparison of the Gospels with rabbinic literature is questionable, comparison with other forms of Judaism, as represented in the Judean Desert Scrolls, may be very fruitful.

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in it.35 The concept one has in mind of what a text is and does makes a difference in how one makes text-critical decisions. Luther counseled that where there are multivalencies one should choose the text that leads to the res, or the gospel as Luther understood it. The translator’s choice of words, then, is inevitably determined by the translator’s hermeneutics, or understanding of what the text is and conveys.

Two Recent Publications The year 1992 saw the publication of two major contributions to First Testament text criticism, Emanuel Tov’s Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible, and Dominique Barthélemy’s Critique textuelle de l’Ancien Testament, vol. 3. The former is the result of years of text-critical study by one of the most respected and widely read scholars in the field. The latter is the third in a projected set of five volumes of which Barthélemy is author, based on the work done by the UBS HOTTP since 1969. The latter is the result not only of our committee but of the mind of one of the most arresting geniuses in the field of text criticism. The latter resonates well with the concepts and method of the HUBP; the former reflects less of Tov’s early roots of study at Hebrew University in favor of his later work at Harvard. The two move in quite distinct directions in terms of concept and method. Tov’s book is a model for how to present some of the best of recent work in text criticism. It can be read with great profit by a beginning university student and by the most seasoned text critic. It is clear and lucid, and moves through the basics of text criticism to the more complex aspects of it. There are constant very helpful cross-references throughout the book to earlier or later portions that explain terms and concepts. Tov, however, does not wrestle seriously with the interrelation between text and canon, nor indeed with most of what is presented and argued in Critique textuelle.36 While Barthélemy is cited in bibliographies to almost every section, large 35   See Sanders, Review of The Garments of Torah. Fishbane claims that the theophany on Sinai is that which gives authority to the whole of Torah. My question is why he selects that particular theophany as the authorizing moment. Why not the pastoral call on Abraham and Sarah in Gen 12? For Christians, the Torah is the beginning of a wondrous gospel story that reaches its climax in God’s work in Christ. For Jews, it is the beginning of a wondrous halakic traditioning process that continues in Oral Law, responsa, etc., all celebrations of the belief that it is possible to obey and to please God. See Sanders, “Torah and Christ.” Recognition of this basic difference in hermeneutics in reading the same text provides a firm basis for interfaith dialogue; again, see Sanders, “lntertextuality and Dialogue.” 36   There seemed to be more recognition of the importance of understanding the text as canon in Tov’s earlier work, such as “Original Shape of the Biblical Text,” 355 – 57; even so, like Cross, he defends in all his work the position of de Lagarde and therefore argues strongly for making the attempt to recover where possible the single textual form that stood at the beginning of textual transmission (not, of course, “the” original). See his carefully wrought discussion of the development of the biblical text, Tov, Textual Criticism, 187 – 97 (“A New Description”), for how he understands text as canon.

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and small, of the book, there is precious little dialogue with his or our position. Tov ignores the implications of the history of transmission of the text espoused by both the HUBP and the HOTTP, but instead, following the Albright / Cross school, rests discussions of the task and aim of text criticism on the old debate between Kahle and de Lagarde that informed the field before the discovery of the Judean Desert Scrolls. In doing so he departs from most text critics in making the “aim” for establishing the critically most responsible text of a majority of biblical books the fourth- to third-century BCE stage, and argues instead for the aim being the sixth century BCE in many cases. Doing so permits Tov to admit of, or allow evaluations of, the historical worth of certain texts to influence his text-critical decisions, a continuing interest of the Albright / Cross school. Such a position causes Tov to brush aside certain criticisms and to fail to dialogue seriously with differing positions, such as those of the HOTTP and even the HUBP. As judicious as most presentations in Tov’s book are, there is a general lack of wrestling with those positions. To illustrate the importance of recognizing the issue of hermeneutics of text criticism and translation, it might be well to conclude with a comparison of Tov’s treatment of an important text-critical problem, with ours. The problem is in the last verse of 1 Sam 10 and the beginning of 1 Sam 11. “The original, longer text of 1 Samuel 11 is probably preserved in 4QSama, while the text of the MT, Aramaic, Theodotion and Vulgate is based on a scribal error, the omission of an entire section. According to this view, 4QSama preserves not an early stage in the growth of the book but what appears to be the original text, which was subsequently corrupted in the MT, Aramaic, Theodotion and Vulgate.”37 The Qumran witness has about five and a half lines found nowhere else, but they appear to explain what appears to be an abruptness in the MT and daughters. The MT (10:27 – 11:1) reads, “But some ne’er-do-wells asked, ‘How can this one save us?’ and they reviled him (Saul) and did not bring him a gift; but the latter made like he did not hear. Then Nahash, the Ammonite, went up and encamped at Yabesh Gilead . . .” The Septuagint reads, “But some ne’er-dowells asked, ‘How can this one save us?’ and they reviled him and brought him no gifts. And it came to pass about a month later that Naas the Ammonite went up and encamped against Yabis Galaad . . .” The plus in 4QSama provides an introduction to Nahash’s proposal of gouging out the right eyes of all the able-bodied men of Yabesh Gilead as a condition of a treaty that would spare Yabesh Gilead from probable total destruction (11:2). The introduction says Nahash had already gouged out the right eyes of the children of Gad and the children of Reuben, thus striking terror in all the children of Israel beyond the Jordan who still had their right eyes, namely seven thousand who had fled the Ammonites and found refuge in Yabesh Gilead. It goes on to say, presumably in 11:1, that “About a month later” Nahash went up and besieged Yabesh-Gilead . . .” What had seemed too brutal a condition for 37

 Tov, Textual Criticism, 342.

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the proposed treaty between Nahash and the people of Yabesh Gilead now has a fitting explanation in that it was a policy of Nahash’s toward archenemies or rebels, apparently a punishment well known from ancient documents. Nahash thus demands the same treatment for the men of Yabesh Gilead who had earlier escaped. Tov then gives four data that indicate the originality of the 4Q plus: (1) it was apparently known to Josephus as were some other 4Q Sam texts; (2) the 4Q text introduces Nahash in a more typical and formal manner than MT, or any other witness; (3) the 4Q text eliminates the “contextually difficult” phrase at the very end of 10:27 relating Saul’s pretending not to hear the taunts and reviling of the “ne’er-do-wells” by having a graphically similar expression serve as the first words of 11:1, “About a month later,” very similar to the Septuagint reading; (4) 4QSama reflects a reliable text generally while MT Samuel has many corruptions generally. Tov denies that the 4Q plus could be composed out of similar passages elsewhere, a phenomenon that was common in early Jewish literature.38 The 4Q plus would have been accidentally omitted at a very early stage since it is preserved in only one witness. Its omission would have been accidental. Critique textuelle vol. 1 was published in 1982. The problem of 1 Sam 10:27 –  11:1 is dealt with in six tightly composed pages. The presentation starts as usual with the modern history of the problem and the provenance of variants and conjectures. Cappellus was the first to suggest that K‫כמחדש‬K was what the Septuagint had read instead of K‫כמחריש‬K of MT. This was picked up by Ewald. Graetz ridiculed the conjecture as a grammatical monster. Driver felt it justified by a similar expression in Gen 38:24, but this has been seriously questioned. H. P. Smith conjectured K‫כמו חדש‬K, the reading in 4Q. But Budde had objected to Smith’s conjecture since it does not conform to Hebrew prose Neh 9:11 being a quotation of Exod 15:5, and the phrase in Gen 19:15 being conjunctival. F. M. Cross calls the expression archaic, where K‫כמחדש‬K was paraphrased and “modernized” in 4Q to K‫כמו‬ ‫חדש‬K. Cross cites km in Ugaritic as often written with the noun that follows without word divider, but gives no example.39 Cyrus Gordon cites a number of examples in Ugaritic where it is linked to pronominal suffixes. But when it precedes a noun it is regularly separated by a divider. There is one example without a divider with a noun, but it is probably a scribal error. These observations make it difficult to accept Cross’s affirmation on the face of it; his citation of Gen 38:24 as the only example in the Hebrew Bible has its own problems. It is uncertain whether Josephus (Ant. 6.68) read a text with the word as it is in 4Q or in the Septuagint. But all three read it as the beginning of 11:1 rather than the end of 10:27. Josephus apparently also knew of the introduction offered in 4Q, but the latter, not Josephus, includes information about the 7000 escaping to Yabesh. All four witnesses pick up with 11:1, but Josephus places the introductory material (4Q plus) between Kʹ‫ויהי כ‬K and Kʹ‫ויעל נ‬K, whereas 4Q places it before the first of the two elements. Actually then, all four of the witnesses have distinc38

  Rofé, “Acts of Nahash,” sees the 4Q plus as a relatively late midrashic composition.   Cross, “Ammonite Oppression.” Cross’s and Tov’s interest in the historical value of the text is clear. But see Pisano, Additions or Omissions, 91 – 98. 39

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45

tive and different elements. Cross thinks that 4Q is the primitive witness, and that Josephus’s Vorlage had a double accident, a vertical dittography in which K‫ויהי‬ ‫כמחדש‬K occurred before the 4Q plus, and a homoeoteleuton (homoeoarchton?) resulting from the first accident. Josephus would have been personally responsible for putting the phrase before the plus or introductory material. This seems to be quite a complicated theory to explain how to move from the 4Q text to Josephus. Cross does not offer an explanation as to why the MT and G lack the plus. Ulrich has explained that the Old Greek had the plus, which was then excised under influence of the MT, purely a conjecture.40 Kyle McCarter explains the lack as an extraordinary case of scribal inadvertence; there would have been no haplography, nothing in the text would occasion it. The scribe simply skipped a paragraph.41 The Cross / Ulrich / McCarter / Tov hypothesis could be argued thus: The Old Greek would have had the plus, followed by the archaic expression ‫ל‬K ‫ויהי כמחדש ויע‬K :K‫יבש גלעד‬K. 4Q would have modernized the crucial phrase to K‫ויהי כמו חדש‬K. Josephus somehow acquired the 4Q plus mutilation after a dittography, and then arbitrarily displaced the element in the Greek account that had occasioned the dittography. In the pre-masoretic text, the whole introductory plus of 4Q preceding the K‫ויהי כמחדש‬K would have been extirpated by inadvertence, without any pretext of a textual accident or clear motive for the extirpation. All the actually extant Greek witnesses derive from a Greek textual situation in which the extirpation had taken place, based on the pre-masoretic text. Finally, the proto-masoretic text would have undergone a corruption from K‫כמחדש‬K to K‫כמחריש‬K and a transfer of this word (with its preceding phrase) to the end of the preceding verse. This corrupt form would have penetrated as a doublet into the Antiochian recension of G. Cross views 1 Sam 11:1 – 11 as an independent narrative that has as motive the installation of the monarchy at Gilgal. McCarter well notes that the narrative is bracketed by textual flags (10:16 – 27a and 11:12 – 15) bearing on the reaction of the people to the choice of Saul as king. What we have is an old narrative integrated by Deuteronomic redaction into its account. Cross then underscores two arguments in favor of the “originality” of the introductory plus attested by 4Q and by Josephus. (1) There is no parenetic or theological motive involved, just history: Nahash threatened the folk of Yabesh because they had given refuge to 7000 fugitives; (2) the style of the introductory plus accords with the Deuteronomic historian’s style, and he gives three expressions of the sort. The response of the committee, enhanced by Barthélemy’s own searches, was as follows. First Samuel 11:2b gives Nahash’s motive as a gratuitous threat designed to put fear into all Israel. Adding a story about Gad and Reuben would not have increased the threat. Judges 10:8, 17, and 11:4 had already stressed the aggressive attitude of the Ammonites toward Gilead. It is quite possible that Nahash arrogated to himself the right to punish Yabesh, which had earlier 40

 Ulrich, Qumran Text of Samuel and Josephus, 169 – 70. G indicates the Old Greek text.  McCarter, 1 Samuel, 202.

41

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belonged to the Ammonites. These may be the ties uniting Yabesh to Benjamin (Judg 21:8 – 12) that drove Nahash to choose Yabesh as ideal for targeting a threat generally to all Israel. Cross’s second argument could be turned the other way around; the 4Q plus could have been added by a later editor. Tov stresses Deuteronomic amplifications that characterize Edition II of Jeremiah (MT). Since current criticism has the tendency to see multiple redactional levels in the Deuteronomic history, nothing would hinder seeing the introductory plus of 4Q as added even after MT, and G. That tradent simply would have wanted to facilitate the passage from ch. 10 to ch. 11. Such Deuteronomic amplifications are done in the style of what was already there. The late and unstable character of the gloss could, therefore, be seen attested by two witnesses who differ on its point of insertion. G would have put K‫כמחדש‬K from the end of ch. 10 to the beginning of ch. 11 to provide a smoother transition.42 There are five arguments in favor of the MT. (1) C. F. Keil stressed the syntactic relations between 10:26ab and 27ab: they form contrasting statements about loyalty to Saul of most of the army but the disdain of the ne’er-do-wells. (2) The expression Kʹ‫היה כ‬K before a participle, or a nomen agentis, usually indicates a description of a manner or mode of action of the subject person. A number of examples can be given in which the word introduced by kaf does not indicate an object of comparison but the formal mode of the action (Exod 22:24; Hos 5:10; Job 24:14; Hos 11:4). (3) The hiphil of K‫חרש‬K most often has the meaning of “control oneself, keep silence” (2 Sam 13:20; 2 Kgs 18:36 = Isa 36:21; Isa 42:14; Jer 4:19; Ps 32:3; 50:21; Prov 11:12; 17:28). This meaning is quite in place here: “And when the ne’er-do-wells said, ‘How can this guy save us?’ and when they showed him their contempt in not bringing him a present, he conducted himself as one who keeps silent.” (4) Saul then in 11:12 – 13 complements the disdain of his silence by refusing to take vengeance on the ne’er-do-wells; he would be king of all the people, even pre-election opponents, when installed. The theme of salvation of all Israel from the aggressiveness and enmity of Ammon is the link between the two passages, 10:17 – 27a and 11:12 – 14. Scholars have seen the hand of the Deuteronomists in the two passages. The redactor who inserted 11:1 – 11 in the course of his account interpreted it as a response to those who had doubted Saul’s ability to save them. And it was by Saul that Yahweh effected K‫תשועה‬K (11:13) in Israel. His detractors have been confounded. (5) The principal argument in favor of the MT, finally, is in its arresting heterogeneity. G facilitated the account somewhat; then 4Q and Josephus went further in the same direction. With recent German exegetes (Rehm, Hertzberg, Revidierte Lutherbibel 1967, Stoebe [1973], and Die Bibel, Einheitsübersetzung [1980])43 the committee decided rather decisively that MT should be retained. I use this as an example, not only because of the fact that Tov nowhere in his otherwise very impressive book takes seriously what the UBS HOTTP commit42

  See Goshen-Gottstein, “Book of Samuel.”  Rehm, Die Bücher Samuel; Hertzberg, Die Samuelbücher; Stoebe, Das erste Buch Samuelis, etc. 43

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47

tee and Barthélemy in Critique textuelle have done, but also because the hermeneutic operative in his concept of text criticism determines his choices as well as his view of the basic aim of the discipline. In postmodern terms, the latter comment must be made of all positions, including one’s own.44 Tov, however, does not openly wrestle with it, or clearly state his hermeneutical position vis-à-vis other positions, even though it emerges as evident in his concern for the historical value of the biblical text and the effect that has on the views he holds and the decisions he makes. Tov’s is a very important contribution to the history of text criticism in this century. It represents in effect a compromise between the views of the HUBP and of the Albright / Cross school. It will be influential throughout the discipline for decades to come, even though it virtually ignores other positions, as well as the possibility that a paradigm shift is currently taking place in the history of the concept, and hence the hermeneutics of text criticism. Bibliography Ackroyd, Peter R. “Isaiah 36 – 39: Structure and Function.” In Von Kanaan bis Kerala: Festschrift für Prof. Mag. Dr. Dr. J. P. M. van der Ploeg OP zur Vollendung des siebzigsten Lebensjahrs am 4. Juli 1979: Überreicht von Kollegen, Freunden und Schülern, edited by W. C. Delsman et al., 3 – 21. AOAT 211. Neukirchen Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1982. Aejmelaeus, Anneli. “Translation Technique and the Intention of the Translator.” In Seventh Congress of the International Organization for Septuagint and Cognate Studies, Leuven, 1989, edited by Claude E. Cox, 23 – 36. Septuagint and Cognate Studies 31. Atlanta: Scholars, 1991. Barthélemy, Dominique. Critique textuelle de l’Ancien Testament. OBO 50. Fribourg: Presses universitaires, 1982, 1992. [Now 5 vols. 1982 – 2016]. Barthélemy, Dominique. “Histoire du texte hébraïque de l’Ancien Testament.” In Études d’histoire du texte de l’Ancien Testament, by Dominique Barthélemy, 341 – 64. OBO 21. Fribourg: Éditions universitaires; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1978. Barthélemy, Dominique. “L’enchevêtrement de l’histoire textuelle et de l’histoire littéraire dans les relations entre la Septante et le Texte Massorétique.” In De Septuaginta: Studies in Honour of John William Wevers on His Sixty-Fifth Birthday, edited by Albert Pietersma and Claude E. Cox, 21 – 40. Mississauga, ON: Benben, 1984. Barthélemy, Dominique. “Text, Hebrew, History of.” In IDBSup 878 – 84. Beit-Arie, Malachi. “Exhuming the Hebrew Secrets of St. Petersburg.” The Jerusalem Post International Edition (Week ending 12 Oct 1991) 1. Ben-Zvi, Itzhak. “The Codex of Ben Asher.” Textus 1 (1960) 1 – 16. Bickerman, Elias. Studies in Jewish and Christian History. 2 vols. Leiden: Brill, 1976. Boyarin, Daniel. Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990. Carr, David M. “Reaching for Unity in Isaiah.” JSOT 57 (1993) 61 – 80. Clifford, Richard J. Fair Spoken and Persuading. New York: Paulist, 1984. Cross, Frank M. “The Ammonite Oppression of the Tribes of Gad and Reuben: Missing Verses from 1 Samuel 11 Found in 4QSamuela.” In The Hebrew and Greek Texts of Samuel, edited by Emanuel Tov, 105 – 20. Jerusalem: Academon, 1980. Reprinted in 44   As stated above; see also the clear statements to the point in Barthélemy, Critique textuelle, 1:*67 – *114, and more explicitly, perhaps, Critique textualle, 3:i – vii.

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History, Historiography and Interpretation: Studies in Biblical and Cuneiform Literature, edited by Hayim Tadmor and Moshe Weinfeld, 148 – 58. Jerusalem: Magnes, 1983. Cross, Frank M. “The Council of Yahweh in Second Isaiah.” JNES 12 (1953) 274 – 77. Cross, Frank M., and Shemaryahu Talmon, eds. Qumran and the History of the Biblical Text. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975. Evans, Craig A., and James A. Sanders. Luke and Scripture: The Function of Sacred Tradition in Luke–Acts. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993. Fishbane, Michael A. Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel. Oxford: Clarendon, 1985. Goshen-Gottstein, Moshe H. “The Authenticity of the Aleppo Codex.” Textus 1 (1960) 17 – 58. Goshen-Gottstein, Moshe H., ed. The Book of Isaiah: Sample Edition with Introduction. Jerusalem: Magnes, 1965. Goshen-Gottstein, Moshe H. “The Book of Samuel – Hebrew and Greek – Hindsight of a Century.” Textus 14 (1988) 147 – 61. Goshen-Gottstein, Moshe H. “Hebrew Biblical Manuscripts: Their History and Their Place in the HUBP Edition.” Bib 48 (1967) 243 – 90. Habel, Norman C. “The Form and Significance of the Call Narratives.” ZAW 77 (1965) 297 – 323. Hays, Richard B. Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989. Hertzberg, Hans Wilhelm. Die Samuelbücher. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck  & Ruprecht, 1960. Kutscher, Eduard Y. The Language and Linguistic Background of the Isaiah Scroll (1QIsaa). Leiden: Brill, 1974. McCarter, P. Kyle. 1 Samuel. AB 8. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1980. Melugin, Roy F. The Formation of Isaiah 40 – 55. BZAW 141. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1976. Morgan, Donn. Between Text and Community: The Writings in Canonical Interpretation. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1990. Mulder, Martin J. “The Transmission of the Biblical Text.” In Mikra: Text, Translation, Reading and Interpretation of the Hebrew Bible in Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity, edited by Martin J. Mulder, 87 – 135. CRINT 2. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1988. Perdue, Leo G. The Collapse of History. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1994. Petersen, David L. Late Israelite Prophecy: Studies in Deutero-Prophetic Literature and in Chronicles. SBLDS 23. Atlanta: Scholars, 1977. Pisano, Stephen. Additions or Omissions in the Books of Samuel: The Significant Pluses and Minuses in the Massoretic, LXX and Qumran Texts. OBO 57. Fribourg: Universitätsverlag; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1984. Qimron, Elisha. The Hebrew of the Dead Sea Scrolls. HSS 29. Atlanta: Scholars, 1986. Rabin, C. “The Translation Process and the Character of the Septuagint.” Textus 6 (1968) 1 – 26. Rehm, M. Die Bücher Samuel. Würzburg: Echter, 1949. Rofé, Alexander. “The Acts of Nahash according to 4QSama.” IEJ 32 (1982) 129 – 33. Rofé, Alexander. “The Nomistic Correction in Biblical Manuscripts and Its Occurrence in 4QSama.” RevQ 14 (1989) 247 – 54. Rowley, Harold H. “The Council of Yahweh.” JTS 45 (1944) 151 – 57. Sanders, James A. “Adaptable for Life: The Nature and Function of Canon.” In Magnalia Dei: The Mighty Acts of God: Essays on the Bible and Archaeology in Memory of G. Ernest Wright, edited by Frank M. Cross, Werner E. Lemke, and Patrick D. Miller, 531 – 60. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1976. Reprinted in From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, by James A. Sanders, 9 – 39. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987.

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Sanders, James A. Canon and Community: A Guide to Canonical Criticism. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984. Sanders, James A. “Canon. Hebrew Bible.” In ABD 1:837 – 52. Sanders, James A. “Deuteronomy.” In The Books of the Bible. Vol. 1, The Old Testament  / The Hebrew Bible, edited by Bernhard W. Anderson, 89 – 102. New York: Scribner’s, 1989. Sanders, James A. “From Sacred Story to Sacred Text.” In From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, by James A. Sanders, 175 – 91. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987. Sanders, James A. “Hebrew Bible and Old Testament: Textual Criticism in Service of Biblical Studies.” In Hebrew Bible or Old Testament? Studying the Bible in Judaism and Christianity, edited by Roger Brooks and John J. Collins, 41 – 68. Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1990. Sanders, James A. “Hermeneutics.” In A Concise Encyclopedia of Preaching, edited by William H. Willimon and Richard Lischer, 175 – 82. Louisville, KY: Westminster / John Knox, 1995. Sanders, James A. “Intertextuality and Dialogue.” BTB 29 (1999) 35 – 44. Sanders, James A. The Monotheizing Process. Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2014. Sanders, James A. “Prayer of Manasseh.” In The HarperCollins Study Bible, edited by Wayne A. Meeks et al., 1746 – 48. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1993. rev. ed. Edited by Harold W. Attridge et al, 1568–70. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2006. Sanders, James A. Review of The Garments of Torah: Essays in Biblical Hermeneutics, by Michael A. Fishbane. ThTo 47, no. 4 (1991) 433 – 35. Sanders, James A. “Stability and Fluidity in Text and Canon.” In Tradition of the Text: Studies Offered to Dominique Barthélemy in Celebration of His 70th Birthday, edited by Gerard J. Norton and Stephen Pisano, 203 – 17. OBO 109. Fribourg: Presses universitaires; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1991. Sanders, James A. “The Task of Text Criticism.” In Problems in Biblical Theology: Essays in Honor of Rolf Knierim, edited by Henry Sun and Keith L. Eades, 315 – 27. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997. Sanders, James A. “Text and Canon: Concepts and Method.” JBL 98 (1979) 5 – 29. Reprinted in From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, by James A. Sanders, 125 – 51. Philadelphia: Fortress 1987. Sanders, James A. Torah and Canon. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1972. [2nd ed. Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2005.] Sanders, James A. “Torah and Christ.” Int 29 (1975) 372 – 90. Reprinted in From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, by James A. Sanders, 41 – 60. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987. Seitz, Christopher R. “The Divine Council: Temporal Transition and New Prophecy in the Book of Isaiah.” JBL 109 (1990) 229 – 47. Spinoza, Baruch. Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. Edited by Günter Gawlick and Friedrich Niewöhner. Opera, Werke lateinisch und deutsch 1. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1979. Stoebe, H. J. Das erste Buch Samuelis. Gütersloh: Gerd Mohn, 1973. Swartley, Willard M. Israel’s Scripture Traditions and the Synoptic Gospels. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1994. Sweeney, Marvin A. Isaiah 1 – 4 and the Post-Exilic Understanding of the Isaianic Tradition. BZAW 171. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1988. Talmon, Shemaryahu. “Aspects of the Textual Transmission of the Bible in the Light of the Qumran Manuscripts.” Textus 4 (1964) 95 – 132. Reprinted in Qumran and the History of the Biblical Text, edited by Frank M. Cross and Shemaryahu Talmon, 226 – 63. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1975.

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Talmon, Shemaryahu. “The Old Testament Text.” In The Cambridge History of the Bible. Vol. 1, From the Beginnings to Jerome, edited by Peter R. Ackroyd and C. F. Evans, 159 – 99. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970. Pp. 164 – 70 reprinted in Qumran and the History of the Biblical Text, edited by Frank M. Cross and Shemaryahu Talmon, 8 – 12. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975. Talmon, Shemaryahu. “Oral Tradition and Written Transmission in Judaism, or the Heard and the Seen Word in Judaism of the Second Temple Period.” In Jesus and the Oral Gospel Tradition, edited by Henry Wansbrough, 121 – 58. JSNTSup 64. Sheffield: JSOT, 1991. Tov, Emanuel, ed. The Greek Minor Prophets Scroll from Nahal Hever (8HevXIIgr). ˙ ˙ DJD 8. Oxford: Clarendon 1990. Tov, Emanuel. “The Original Shape of the Biblical Text.” In Congress Volume: Leuven 1989, edited by John A. Emerton, 345 – 59. VTSup 43. Leiden: Brill, 1991. Tov, Emanuel. Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992. Ulrich, Eugene C. “Double Literary Editions of Biblical Narratives and Reflections on Determining the Form to be Translated.” In Perspectives on the Hebrew Bible: Essays in Honor of Walter J. Harrelson, edited by James L. Crenshaw, 101 – 16. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1988. Ulrich, Eugene C. The Qumran Text of Samuel and Josephus. Atlanta: Scholars, 1978. Vincent, Jean M. “Jesaja 40,1 – 8: Berufungsbericht des Propheten Deuterojesajas?” In Studien zur literarischen Eigenart und zur Heimat von Jesaja, Kap. 40 – 55, by Jean M. Vincent, 197 – 250. BBET 5. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1977. Westermann, Claus. Isaiah  40 – 66. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1969. Westermann, Claus. Sprache und Struktur der Prophetie Deuterojesajas. Stuttgart: Calwer, 1981. Yeivin, Israel. Introduction to the Tiberian Masorah. Translated and edited by Ernest J. Revell. Atlanta: Scholars, 1980.

4 Text and Canon: Concepts and Method Introduction (1987) The following chapter was delivered as the presidential address at the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) that convened in New Orleans in November 1978. In it I tried to pull together my two major interests in an attempt to describe how I understood them to relate to each other, and how the two disciplines – study of texts and versions and study of the Bible as canon – had changed over the course of the previous twelve years. I turned fifty-one during the conference and was attending my twenty-fourth annual meeting of the society, but I felt as excited about the occasion as I had when, exactly seventeen years earlier, I unrolled the large Psalms Scroll from Qumran Cave 11! The earlier experience opened up a treasure of raw primary material; this one would hopefully provide an evaluation of their value in these two areas. Both fields, text and canon study of the OT, have changed considerably since the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and I wanted both to explain those changes and to celebrate them. I wanted to share my view that there had come a much earlier change in ontology of canon in the two centuries prior to the Common Era that would explain many phenomena in both Judaism and Christianity.

Introduction (1979) Study of text and canon of the OT has taken on new life and direction over the past twenty-five years, and especially in the last ten (1968 – 78). Concepts and method for study of text and canon have changed rather dramatically in that time. Manuscript discoveries have contributed to rephrasing of old questions as well as to discovery of new questions. We are now far enough into the history of modern biblical criticism that we are able, with or without the tools of the sociology of knowledge, to see with some clarity why earlier generations of biblical students asked certain questions and viewed the evidence in certain lights, but failed to ask other questions, nor saw even the evidence they already had in ways we now have of looking at it. To make such an observation is not to belittle the work of our predecessors; it is rather to try to account for what is happening to us now. We are in quite a new day in both fields, and I have suggested that they might each be grouped with other biblical disciplines rather than together.1 *  First published 1979. 1   See Sanders, Torah and Canon, ix.

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I would like instead to argue now that they still belong together in certain aspects of biblical study, and in fact, study of one throws considerable light on the other in ways perhaps not thought of when they were paired in introductory handbooks or lectures as perhaps the most boring class or chapter to endure. Scholarship, in order to meet its own needs, had made of textual criticism a first stage of literary criticism, and had made of study of canon a final stage of literary criticism. Text criticism was either something to settle before getting on with the important business of original source, provenance, and shape of a passage, or was used to reflect the latter; and study of canon was viewed as the last stage in a literary history of how the larger literary units of the Bible (discrete books thereof) got together in a given order.

I The very ground of concept in OT text criticism, the history of transmission of the text, has recently had to be rewritten,2 and this has been due in large measure to new viewpoints gained from study of the so-called Dead Sea Scrolls, of provenance from Qumran south to Masada. The first stage of revision of OT text history due to the scrolls came in the mid-1950s with the work of Moshe Greenberg, who argued convincingly from study of the early publications of biblical texts among the scrolls that a process of stabilization of biblical texts took place with increasing intensity between the first centuries BCE and CE, a process largely complete by the beginning of the second century CE.3 The work of M. Goshen-Gottstein, S. Talmon, F. M. Cross, and D. Barthélemy on the same and other texts supported the thesis.4 But it received its greatest boost in 1963 from the work of Barthélemy on the Greek Dodecapropheton, Les devanciers d’Aquila: the more or less literalist translations of Theodotion and Aquila had apparently had antecedents in a process extending back into the first century BCE.5 The gathering data suggested to Cross a theory of three text families.6 One was now able to range the newly discovered biblical texts on a spectrum from fluid to fixed, placing the earliest Qumran fragments at one end and the biblical texts from Murabbaʿat, Hever, and Masada at the other. Whether there were three basic local families of ˙texts or there were numerous types of texts,7 it 2   Barthélemy, “Text, Hebrew, History of.” See the unabridged version of his original French typescript in Barthélemy, Études, 341 – 64. 3   Greenberg, “Stabilization of the Text.” 4   The pertinent essays by these four scholars are conveniently published together in Cross and Talmon, Qumran and the History of the Biblical Text. 5  Barthélemy, Les devanciers d’Aquila. 6   First expounded by Cross in “History of the Biblical Text”; see also the other essays by Cross in Qumran and the History of the Biblical Text, especially “Evolution of a Theory of Local Texts,” 306 – 20. 7   For a viable alternative to Cross’s theory, see the incisive essay by Talmon, “Textual Study of the Bible”; see also the “central stream” theory of Goshen-Gottstein expounded in Isaiah: Sample Edition.

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became quite clear that up to and including most of the Herodian period the text of the Hebrew-Aramaic Bible was relatively fluid. Running parallel to and congruous with study of the text in this same period was study of ancient biblical interpretation. Making many of the same observations as the text critics but studying all the various texts available from the scrolls as well as many known previously, some students of biblical interpretation formulated new questions and a new sub-discipline that has come to be called comparative midrash.8 One of the basic interests of the new students of biblical interpretation in the period was in how the biblical text was adapted to the needs of the context in which it was cited. Observations about the text’s adaptability matched what text critics at the same time were calling the text’s fluidity. They, too, noticed that the biblical text where it surfaced in documents of biblical interpretation appeared to become more standard, as it were, in literature datable to the end of the period in question. By contrast, interpretive literature from earlier in the period seemed free to remold or reshape a biblical text in light of the need for which it was cited, not only in allusions to a text but even in citation of the text. The common body of relatively new observations between the disciplines, OT text criticism and comparative midrash, was growing. Study of the one in some ways involved study of the other and a few scholars saw how each discipline needed the other.9 The next development came about as almost a single-handed achievement. In 1967 Goshen-Gottstein published a pivotal study in which he argued that the medieval manuscripts collated by Kennicott and de Rossi, and so often cited by text critics to support textual emendations, were essentially derivative of the masoretic tradition, often reflecting late ancient and medieval midrashic interpretations of Scripture, and had little value for reconstructing pre-masoretic text forms.10 The challenge of Goshen-Gottstein’s essay was directed at the very concept of text criticism as understood in biblical criticism until recently.

II It might be well here to signal the rather radical shift in concept that has taken place in OT text criticism in the twenty years just past, before turning to look at the two major projects currently active in the discipline. It has long been agreed  8   The bibliography is already quite extensive: see Miller, “Targum, Midrash,” as well as his more recent and more general article, “Midrash.” It is generally agreed that there was a new departure in study of midrash with the work of Renée Bloch, especially her article “Midrash.”  9   See Barthélemy, “Problématique.” This essay evolved directly out of our work together for ten years on the UBS Hebrew OT Text Project. I agree with his statement of the issues. In fact, the present paper in a manner presupposes what Barthélemy there says and attempts to go back behind the issues to the reasons one must state the problematic in that way. I want to express my profound gratitude to Fr. Barthélemy for reading the manuscript of the present chapter in first draft form and for his helpful suggestions in doing so. Indeed, I owe the idea of the topic of the address to a suggestion from him during our session in Freudenstadt in August 1977. 10   Goshen-Gottstein, “Hebrew Biblical Manuscripts.”

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that the task of text criticism is “to establish the text.” This means that it is the province of text criticism to determine the best readings of texts and versions of the Bible, whether OT or NT, from which translators render the text into current receptor languages. Such may still be said to be the task of text criticism. In the case of the OT the almost universal practice has been to use a basic single text such as that of Jacob ben Hayyim, Leningradensis (L), or now Aleppensis (A). In the case of the NT the common practice since the eighteenth century has been to establish an eclectic text for printed editions. In the case of the OT, the apparatus of a critical edition has had the purpose of considering and evaluating ancient variants in texts and versions and proposing emendations even where variants did not exist. In the case of the NT, the apparatus of a critical edition has had the purpose of defending the reading chosen in the eclectic text above, and also offering conjectures proposed by modern scholars. BHK stands as the great exemplar of this understanding of text criticism. In BHK there are two apparatus. The first signals interesting variants in ancient manuscripts which are not considered superior to the L text. The second signals variants and modern scholarly conjectures that the editor considers more or less preferable to the reading in L. BHS differs to no great degree even though it (1) has combined these two into one apparatus, and (2) has eliminated some of the rather private and particular conjectures of scholars of the latter part of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The really significant difference between BHK and BHS is in the apparatus keyed to the masorah magna added in the bottom margin of BHS as well as in the masorah parva in the lateral margins. All of this is the work of Gérard Weil to which we shall return later. The essay of Goshen-Gottstein addressed itself to the practice exemplified and most effectively propagated in BHK – and not greatly changed in BHS – that of citing a medieval Jewish manuscript to support an emendation arrived at by scholarly conjecture based on scholarly disciplines outside the province of text criticism. Because one could felicitously point to one or more manuscripts collated in Kennicott or de Rossi, or lesser-known sources, to support a reading that had actually been arrived at by other means altogether, such as philology, form criticism, or poetic analysis (or simply what the ancient author in his or her right mind ought surely to have said), it was felt that scientific confirmation had been offered from another quarter, the medieval manuscripts. It was this practice on which Goshen-Gottstein shone a rather harsh and revealing light. The light of Goshen-Gottstein’s essay shed its broad beams on the larger concept and practice of text criticism, that of the abuse of text criticism for purposes of rewriting the Bible. The scholars cited above, and a few others, were arriving at the same observations as Goshen-Gottstein, but it was he who provided the clear voice of the time. Text criticism was being called upon to do tasks outside its competence to do, nor was it doing well the job it should do: it is a considerably more limited discipline than indicated in practice and capable of being far more precise than most work in it had to that point indicated. This is the position taken now by the two current, active OT text-critical projects: the Hebrew University Bible Project and the United Bible Societies’

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Hebrew Old Testament Text-Critical Project.11 The former is the older of the two and was given impetus by the accessibility after 1948 of the Tiberian manuscript recovered from the burning of the synagogue in Aleppo, a magnificent facsimile edition of which was recently published by Magnes Press.12 The recovery of Aleppensis was only an initial impetus. The discovery of the Judean Desert Scrolls and the newer attitudes mentioned above caused the launching of the project, which has to its credit not only the beautiful facsimile edition of photographs of A just noted, but also the thirteen (to 1986) volumes of the annual Textus founded as a forum for the newer work being done as a result of the new finds, as well as sample editions based on the text of Isaiah of what Goshen-Gottstein and Talmon hope to do in a fully critical edition (with four [five?] separate apparatus) of the Hebrew Bible using Aleppensis as text.13 The younger of the two projects is that of the UBS committee. This committee was established by Eugene Nida for the same purpose for which the companion NT committee had been formed and from which we now have a fourth edition of the UBS Greek New Testament in preparation.14 The OT committee began its work in 1969 and completed in August 1978 its tenth annual session. The scope of its work is less ambitious than that of the HUBP: its principal raison d’être is to offer help to the scores of translation committees sponsored by or affiliated with the UBS. But, nonetheless, to do such a task well the UBS committee has had to work just as much in depth on the questions of concepts and method of text criticism as their colleagues in Jerusalem. The younger committee has benefited considerably from the published work of the members of the HUBP, whether in Textus or elsewhere, but it has consistently done its own work forging its own concepts and method in the light of the new developments. To its credit are five volumes of preliminary and interim reports of decisions taken on specific passages. After completion of that preliminary series, it will, under the direction of Barthélemy, publish five volumes of in-depth discussion of all the major aspects of text criticism, as a scholarly and scientific discipline today, as well as detailed reports of the data considered and evaluated in arriving at its decisions. It plans eventually to publish a successor to BHK and BHS using L and Weil’s work on the masorot but constructing a totally new apparatus otherwise [BHQ]. The two projects agree completely on three basic concepts in OT text criticism: (1) limitation of its work to textual options actually extant in ancient texts 11   The HUBP is explained in the introduction to Goshen-Gottstein, Isaiah: Sample Edition, 11 – 45. The UBS-HOTTP is explained in the introductions to vols. 1 – 5 of Barthélemy, Preliminary and Interim Report; see also Barthélemy, “Problematique,” and Barthélemy, Critique textuelle. [The Oxford Hebrew Bible had not yet been proposed.] 12  Goshen-Gottstein, Aleppo Codex. 13   Textus is published irregularly by Magnes Press. In addition to Goshen-Gottstein, Isaiah: Sample Edition, see also Goshen-Gottstein, Isaiah, Parts One and Two, which extends the “sample” and includes Isa 1:1 – 22:10 (almost). 14   The first edition of the UBS Greek New Testament appeared in 1966. The fourth edition (1990) will include corrections and modifications in versional evidence and in citations of the Fathers [5th ed. 2014].

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and versions with the concomitant elimination of modern scholarly conjectures from consideration in text criticism; (2) a four-stage history of the transmission of the Hebrew text; and (3) a revised and renewed appreciation of the process of stabilization of the text begun in the first century that culminated in the work of the Tiberian Masoretes. Each of the three areas is very important to understanding what is going on currently in OT text criticism. I shall attempt to signal the importance of each before noting less important areas of disagreement between them. I shall discuss the masoretic phenomenon and its historical antecedents and background, and finally focus on the second period of the history of text transmission and some basic concepts necessary to understand the data available from that period. It is at this last point especially that one must relate basic concepts of text and canon: each illumines the other.

III The new appreciation of the limits of text criticism goes hand in hand with the need for the discipline to be considerably more thorough and precise in its work. Here the HUBP is very clear. This point perhaps characterizes its purpose and goals better than the others. An apparatus should note only the genuine variants in ancient texts, versions, and citations, and it should be arranged in such a way as to exhibit the genuine variants in the several categories of ancient literature in which they appear. The apparatus should be as neutral as possible and as thorough and as precise as possible. The importance here of working with photographic [and digital] images is stressed. For not only the expert but even a good beginning student who has access to the actual manuscripts, in one form or another, is able to make significant corrections in the apparatus of both BHK and BHS. John Wevers’s report in Göttingen on the unreliability of the apparatus in BHS to LXX Deuteronomy came as no surprise to critics who work with the manuscripts themselves. HUBP, as can be seen in the facsimile editions of Isaiah already published, plans to be as exhaustive as possible in reporting variants in ancient texts, versions, and citations, and it plans to group the variants according to the ancient literature where found. The apparatus of Biblia Hebraica (up to BHS) is not only often inaccurate in terms of what is there but cites only what it deems necessary and does so in such a way as to confuse evaluation of the sources cited. HUBP will consciously refrain from specific evaluation but will provide clear information as to the provenance and type of provenance of the ancient variant. The UBS project agrees in concept with this procedure but will, in its final scholarly publications, show how significant variants were evaluated in the terms of the problems treated. HUBP will rest its case simply in the format of the four apparatus projected. Our base of agreement here is so strong that I shall not elaborate this point further, except to stress the need now to have available, on as wide a base as possible, photographic facsimiles, in one form or another, of the actual ancient manuscripts. This is the reason, in part, that we have founded in Claremont the

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Ancient Biblical Manuscript Center for Preservation and Research. We plan there eventually to collect and make available, on as wide a base as possible, microforms of all manuscripts pertinent to biblical study, not only actual biblical texts but those texts from the Bronze Age to the close of antiquity necessary for full biblical study. This is admittedly ambitious, and we recognize that; but we hope that with the cooperation of similar centers in this country and in Europe, and of our blue-ribbon board of advisors, we will be able to amass an internationally visible and significant collection. The importance of scholars being able to do comparative work on as many different texts and versions as possible without reliance on prior apparatus and footnotes is gaining wide recognition. The importance of working on the ancient manuscripts themselves need not be belabored. And yet I wish I had the time to tell what I have learned personally in the past year by simply being able now to compare the facsimile editions of L and A, thanks to the Maqor and Magnes Presses, the Israeli government, and Goshen-Gottstein. Working on them, and on similar documents, underscores the point that critical editions of texts are filtered through the interests and questions of the editor, no matter how scrupulous or ingenious he or she may have been. If one’s work gives rise to new questions one must have the original to turn to, to seek the answers; and turning to them gives rise to more questions. Goshen-Gottstein, Weil, and others had written many important things about A, but it was not until I opened the new facsimile edition of A a year ago that I was able to formulate hundreds of questions the manuscript itself gives rise to. This observation underscores also the absolute need for the scholarly community to reform itself and revise its attitudes about dissemination of photographs of new finds. I thoroughly agree with my colleague James Robinson, in his address in San Francisco last year, and with David Noel Freedman (also a member of the board of trustees of our center in Claremont), who has written in a similar vein in a Biblical Archaeologist editorial.15 We must no longer permit ourselves, for whatever refined reasons, to withhold publication at least of microfilms of new finds. When one thinks of the great minds deprived of working on texts discovered since World War II, who have since died, never to be able to share their observations about the texts, withholding of publication of at least photographic reproductions becomes morally questionable. A final point needs to be made about the focus of text criticism and the limitations of the discipline. Conjectures about what might have been the original text have no place in textual apparatus and only a limited value in a final stage of text-critical method. Conjectures about a nonextant Ur-text of any biblical passage have their place elsewhere in biblical study  – form criticism, philology, perhaps archaeology, the general domain of “higher criticism” – but not in 15   See the entire issue of BA 40 (1977), esp. Freedman, “Letter to the Readers,” where he says, “Therefore I propose that newly discovered inscriptions and documents be presented in a suitable format – namely, photographs, handcopies, and preliminary transcriptions as soon after discovery as is physically feasible” (97). We heartily concur and offer the services of the Ancient Biblical Manuscript Center in Claremont to scholars for that purpose.

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text criticism in the strict sense. The one area of function of such higher critical method in the work of text criticism is at the final stage, if very pragmatically the text critic must come up with a relative evaluation of which ancient reading he or she would recommend to translators. But even there, the text critic should be constrained to enter into discussions of literary form of the original, or even philology or geography, only after all the other work is done and only in the most circumspect way using only the most widely accepted observations out of those other fields. This is an area of difference between the groups in Jerusalem and in Freudenstadt: the HUBP apparently will not enter this realm at all! But, then, they are not related to a translation project. We in the UBS project have to do so because our basic mandate, when all our other work is said and done, is to provide finally some kind of Hinweis für die Übersetzer (suggestions for translators), but we do so only in constraint and circumspection, usually insisting that the other options be left open if the text-critical work properly speaking indicates so.

IV The work of OT text criticism centers primarily in the second phase of the fourstage history of the Hebrew text. The third and fourth phases receive due attention where need be and in perspective, but the first phase is left to the other disciplines of biblical research. The four phases are: (1) the Ur-text; (2) the accepted texts; (3) the received text; and (4) the Masoretic Text. This is the second area of basic agreement between Jerusalem and Freudenstadt. While Goshen-Gottstein published his historical schema a short while before we began our own work, we started from scratch, as it were, and arrived at almost an identical view of the history of text transmission.16 Reconstruction of the Ur-text entails most of the biblical-critical disciplines developed up to about 1960, for biblical criticism since its inception in the seventeenth century has been primarily interested in reconstructing biblical points originally scored. This is especially the case with philology and form criticism as they have been generally practiced, but also to a great extent with source criticism, tradition criticism, and even to some significant degree with redaction criticism. Certainly, all those disciplines are properly concerned with what text critics now call the first period. The fact that biblical criticism for some two hundred years has mainly been concerned with the most primitive aspects of biblical study – the so-called ipsissima verba (the very words) of authors at the first stages of the Bible’s formation and development – interests students of canonical criticism today, as we have tried to state elsewhere in other contexts.17 Since the 16   See the introduction to Goshen-Gottstein, Isaiah: Sample Edition, 12 – 18, and Talmon, “Old Testament Text”; see also Sanders, “Text Criticism and the NJV Torah.” Talmon’s four periods are only apparently different from ours; they actually fit into the same basic scheme. 17   In Sanders, “Adaptable for Life.”

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late 1950s a few scholars, in increasing numbers, have been turning their attention to the Nachleben of biblical passages and the fact that the nature of canonical literature lies in its adaptability as well as its stability, and certainly as much in the later resignification of biblical images, traditions, and textual passages as in their most primitive meanings. When one turns toward use of a biblical tradition within the Bible, interest is roused by the function of the tradition in the new context and the modes whereby the tradition was conveyed to and applied to the later biblical contexts.18 And those modes are evident even in the first repetition or copying of a literary unit that later ended up in the Bible. We do not have biblical autographs. Everything we have went through the experience of the need of an early community, Jewish or Christian, to hear or see again what had been heard or seen by the parents or ancestors of that community. There is no early biblical manuscript of which I am aware, no matter how “accurate” or faithful it is thought to be to its Vorlage (the text before it), that does not have some trace in it of its having been adapted to the needs of the community from which we, by archaeology or happenstance, receive it. Such observations are relative and pertain not to method in text criticism, but to the concepts on which method is based. All versions are to some extent relevant to the communities for which translated: it was because the Bible was believed relevant that it was translated. Much of the so-called Septuagint is midrashic or targumic.19 But even biblical Hebrew texts are to some extent, greater or less, adapted to the needs of the communities for which they were copied. Again, I stress that these are relative observations. Their pertinence for text criticism lies in the fact that the earlier the date of biblical manuscripts the greater variety there are in text types and text characteristics. One of the salient observations we have to make about the significance of the Dead Sea Scrolls is that though they are approximately a thousand years older than the Hebrew Bible manuscripts we had had before (except the Nash Papyrus?), they have by no means displaced the great masoretic manuscripts from the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries. The older the biblical manuscripts are, the more fluidity they seem to exhibit in actual text. Hence, the period from which we actually have the oldest handscripts is characterized by the textual fluidity of the period of the accepted texts (period 2 in the historical schema arrived at independently by both projects). The standardization process that took place in the first centuries BCE and CE was apparently so pervasive and complete for Hebrew texts of the Bible that variants in biblical manuscripts, and even in rabbinic citations after the event, drop dramatically to the point of underscoring this prime characteristic of the second period. The manuscripts deriving from the second period, that of relative textual fluidity, may possibly have readings superior to anything in any Tiberian manuscript: that judgment has to be made 18

  See, e. g., Ackroyd, “Original Text and Canonical Text.”   Cf., e. g., Seeligmann, Septuagint Version of Isaiah, and more recently the work of Gooding, e. g., Relics of Ancient Exegesis; cf. Gordon, “Second Septuagint Account of Jeroboam”; and Bogaert, “Les rapports du judaïsme.” 19

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ad hoc in each case and cannot be prejudiced by observations dealing with basic concepts, such as historical schema. The matter of method in text criticism has come to the fore quite dramatically in part because of the new sense of how fluid the text of the Bible was in the second period, that of the earliest manuscripts. And it is largely because of having to develop those methods to a fine point that we have now to be very careful in using work in text criticism since the seventeenth century. The third period in the history of OT text transmission is called the period of the received text. It is not improper to use the singular “text” here, as the stabilization that had begun in the first century BCE seems by 100 CE to have been essentially complete. As Goshen-Gottstein puts it, only “a thin trickle continues” of non-proto-masoretic texts.20 The salient observation here is the amazing uniformity of consonantal text form in the biblical manuscripts dating from the end of the first century CE through the second Jewish revolt. In contrast to texts datable before 70 they are almost consistently proto-masoretic. The biblical texts from Murabbaʿat, Hever, Mishmar, Seʾelim, and Masada present minimal vari˙ masoretic manuscripts of the fourth period. The process ants against the great of stabilization that had begun in the first century with the cessation of scribal changes of the sort called tiqqunê soferîm (the errors of the scribes) as indicated in the work of Barthélemy,21 or of the sort brilliantly studied by Talmon,22 in the Qumran manuscripts, was essentially complete by the end of the first century CE. Barthélemy’s work on the Dodecapropheton has shown some of the process by which the standardization took place leading to the Greek texts of Theodotion and Aquila.23 As Goshen-Gottstein puts it, “. . . the period of the Destruction of the Temple – that is, the last third of the first century CE and the first third of the 2nd century – is the main dividing line in the textual history . . .”24 We shall return to further observations about the phenomenon of stabilization after consideration of the fourth period of text transmission and the masoretic phenomenon.

V The third area of basic and fundamental agreement in concept between the Jerusalem and Freudenstadt projects is appreciation of the process of standardization of text form that finally culminated in the work of the Masoretes. There is an interesting difference between us in the value attached to the masorot parva (mp) and magna (mm). While the HUBP dutifully records the corrected mp and mm of A in the proper margins, no coordinating apparatus is provided for the 20

  See Goshen-Gottstein, Isaiah: Sample Edition, 17.   Barthélemy, “Les tiqquné sopherim”; McCarthy, Tiqqune Sopherim. 22   Talmon, “Textual Study of the Bible.” 23  Barthélemy, Les devanciers d’Aquila. 24  Goshen-Gottstein, Isaiah: Sample Edition, 15. 21

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masorah.25 By contrast, the UBS committee makes careful and judicious use of the masorah wherever it is pertinent. The great contribution of BHS is in Weil’s work connected with it. After the facsimile edition of L was published I offered a reward to any student who could discover in the masorah parva (mp) of BHK any discrepancy between the mp in the lateral margins of L and BHK.26 Even beginning students of the Hebrew Bible often observe how blurred the mp seems in recent printings of BHK; but 99 percent of them can tell you that their teachers never refer to the mp any more than they refer to the masoretic teʿamin. The point in these observations is that throughout the history of BHK in the first two-thirds of this century few Western scholars were interested in the masorot of Hebrew manuscripts, even of L, those Aron Dothan calls “keepers of the flame” and Harry Orlinsky calls “Masoretes of our time.”27 As every historian knows, in those periods when there is little interest in a form of literature, that literature has a chance of being copied accurately, that is, no one attempts to make it relevant to the needs of those periods. So, through most of the history of BHK, editions 1 to 3, the mp in Kittel is printed quite accurately, from the margins of L. If one wants to know what is in the mp of L, one for the most part has but to check the lateral margins of BHK (in contrast to BHS). A few like Paul Kahle and his students, among them Weil, now of the University of Nancy II, were interested in the masorot. If one compares the mp as it appears in BHS with the mp of any ancient MT manuscript one will find many differences. It is basically the mp of L, but Weil is, in fact, a latter-day Masorete! He has considerably edited the various entries of mp in L in the light of other mp entries and of the mm of L, and of his own study of the discrepancies between the two and the text itself.28 Weil well points out that there was no canon of the masorah. In fact, he has proved that the masorah in L was added by a hand (Samuel ben Jacob) later than that of the basic consonantal text. Traditions contributing to the great masorot, especially of L, extended considerably back into masoretic history; but as C. D. Ginsburg frequently reminded S. Baer and H. L. Strack, there was never a process of standardization of the masorah as there had been earlier of the consonantal text. There are no two masorot that are the same. Hence Weil composed the mp for the lateral margins of BHS in the best and finest tradition of the Masoretes themselves. He did his own basic work in order to render the mp of L in BHS really usable.29 It has a few errors in it30 but it is essentially a rich source of information for anyone who will take the little amount of time necessary to learn 25

  Ibid., 20 – 21.   See Weil’s own comment in “Foreword II,” xiii. 27   Such as S. Baer, S. Frensdorff, C. D. Ginsburg, and Paul Kahle. See Aron Dothan’s prolegomenon in Ginsburg, The Massorah, xix; and Orlinsky’s prolegomenon in Ginsburg, Introduction to the Massoretico-Critical Edition. See as well the proof by Dothan that neither Moses nor Aaron ben Asher was a Qaraite, in Ben Asher’s Creed. 28   Cf. Weil, Initiation à la Massorah; Weil, “Foreword II,” xiii – xviii, and Weil, Massorah Gedolah, xiii – xxvii. 29   See Weil, “La nouvelle édition.” 30   See, e. g., Lam 3:20, where the mp qere should read wĕtā-shôah. ˙ 26

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how to read it. It makes the masorah available to students less expert than those who could use Solomon Frensdorff or Christian Ginsburg.31 By contrast, as Weil makes clear in the introduction of volume 1 of his Massorah Gedolah (MG), the lists he provides there are essentially the mm lists provided in L in the top and bottom margins of the manuscript.32 Here his restraint is clear: he omits from the lists only the obvious repetitions and he does that only because the printed mode employed to publish the lists and key them to the mp makes exact duplication of all the lists costly and useless. No one can fault him in this. Volume 1 of MG is a rich mine of information much more accessible to most students of the Bible than ever before, simply because of the mode of keying the lists to the mp in BHS. Weil has corrected the errors of the scribe of the mm in L, but made, so far as I have been able to detect, very few of his own. Volume 2 of Weil’s MG will compare the masoretic marginal commentaries in L with other great manuscripts such as others from Cairo and the Aleppo manuscript and provide a paleographic and philological commentary on the mm lists. As noted above, there was no canon of masorah, and volume two will explore and study the differences among the masorot themselves. Volume 3 will analyze and study the divergences between the mp and mm, and between the masorah and the consonantal text. Volume 4 will discuss the final masorah (mf) and will include a general introduction and history of the masorah. The debt that we owe Weil for this work is considerable. He has by his mode of presentation and publication made study of the masorah available to all students, and he has focused attention on a heritage of biblical study that only a few have heretofore carefully studied. It brings us to appreciation of the real contribution of the Masoretes to textual study. It is often said in the introductions and handbooks that their great contribution was in the system of vocalization that they appended to the consonantal text of the Hebrew Bible. As great as that contribution was, and as great as the contribution of the teʿamim to understanding how the Masoretes inherited their reading of the text, these pale beside the outstanding fact that the masorot parva and magna stand on all sides of the text, right margin, left margin, top margin, and bottom margin, as sentinels to guard the particularities of the text. They provide not only a fence around the Torah, they constitute an army guarding the integrity of the text. Our appreciation of this fact simply must increase to the point of realizing our immense debt to the whole tradition that began at the end of period two and increased through period three culminating in the masorot in the great Tiberian manuscripts. 31   See Frensdorff, Das Buch Ochlah Wochlah, and Frensdorff, Massoretisches Wörterbuch; Ginsburg, The Massorah; Ginsburg, Introduction to the Massoretico-Critical Edition of the Hebrew Bible, Ktav reprint including Orlinsky, “Prolegomenon.” Orlinsky observes that the rise of archaeology pushed out the classical approach to the study of the text of the Bible but that discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls has helped restore it. While we disagree with Snaith, “Ben Asher Text,” 10, that Ginsburg’s herculean labors are largely a monument of wasted effort, his The Massorah is indeed difficult to use: Barthélemy calls it “le cocktail de Ginsburg” (in a private note). And Frensdorff’s work was but a beginning of what he had wanted to do. 32  Weil, Massorah Gedolah, xiii – xxvii.

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A lamed in the mp, keyed by the Masoretes to a word in the line indicated, stands like a soldier to remind the next scribe that the word in question must be copied precisely as written or corrected in the Vorlage. The text critic who takes the masorot seriously and pursues each case far enough soon realizes that there was often good reason for them. The word in question with a lamed in mp is a hapax in the detailed form in the text. There is no other quite like it anywhere else in the Bible and it must be guarded in its particularity; it must retain its peculiarity and not be assimilated to another form of the word more common in the Bible or elsewhere. In the Psalter, the mp in Weil’s BHS has a yod-alef in each case beside each hallelujah at the end of a psalm. That means that the next scribe had better not start or complete any other psalms with hallelujah than those so marked.33 This may well illustrate the point someone made that “not a jot or a tittle shall pass away . . .” Pursuit of such cases will usually result in the observation that some other manuscript tradition may have had more or fewer hallelujahs – as indeed is the case in the Qumran Psalter and in the LXX – and that the masoretic tradition insists that the next scribe not be seduced by such variant texts or traditions. Often one can find in the LXX or the Syriac a variant that the masorah warns the next scribe to be cautious not to emulate. Not infrequently the scrolls will indicate the kind of text the masorah wants to insulate the standardized masoretic text against, sometimes a later midrash or a targum reading will indicate the kind of reading guarded against. In many cases, of course, we simply do not know what specific problem scribes might have faced, but herein is the invaluable aid of the masorah to the text critic. Even the beginning student trained to see the circellus over a word or phrase in the MT notes how often they appear precisely over words emended in the apparatus of BHK or BHS! One day in a class in Deutero-Isaiah I noticed, while a student was translating Isa 43, that there was a gimmel in the mp keyed to the expression ʿam zu in v. 21, “this people.” I had never before noticed the gimmel. Of course, it means that the expression ʿam zu appears three times in the Bible and the next scribe had best watch carefully that he or she not put four into the Bible, or indeed omit one of the three. I thought to myself: I do not have a masorah magna here to see the full list of where the three occurrences are, but I know where one of them is myself. And while the student continued to recite I turned to Exod 15 and began to compare the text there with the one in Isa 43. Not only did I note that the other two occurrences are precisely in Exod 15:13 and 16, but I began to see, as I had never seen before, that the pericope in Isa 43:16 – 21 was a beautiful contemporizing midrash done by the prophet of the exile on the great Song of the Sea. The prophet was resignifying the great anthem of the liturgy of redemption in the exodus tradition for his people in his day. He was claiming in good midrashic fashion that God was doing for ʿam zu another mighty act in their day comparable to the one the people sang about in celebration of the exodus. 33   This, incidentally, is Weil’s own mp. Note the inexact notation at Ps 135:3; there are, in fact only ten masoretic psalms in L that begin with hallelu-jah.

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When the student had finished his laborious translation, I gave a lecture on Isaiah’s mode of midrash in Isa 43 on the Song of the Sea, a lecture I had only that moment perceived – all due to the fact that the Masoretes put a gimmel in the margin of the Isaiah text.34 The lists in the mm fill out the knowledge of the text as a whole which the mp instigates and signals. The integrity of the text is safeguarded. Why? What lies back not only of the masorot parva and magna but also of the lists of numbers of letters, words, verses, sedarim, parashot, petuhot, and setumot provided in some MT manuscripts at the ends of the several books, as well as at the ends of the several sections of some manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible? What lies behind all this madness for scrupulous count of words in the masoretic tradition? One of the reasons few modern scholars since the eighteenth century have been interested in the masorah is that it seems to run counter to their own interests. Modern scholarship’s great interest in the Ur-texts of the Bible, in what this or that great thinker-contributor of the Bible actually said, has meant that most of us over the past two hundred years have been doing what the Masoretes themselves feared most: we have been changing the text because of our knowledge of other matters. For instance, our tendency has been to assimilate 2 Sam 22 and Ps 18 in our attempts to get back of both to an Ur-text:35 the apparatus in BHK and BHS attest to the tendency. Because of the criteria we bring to bear upon these texts in search of their common origin, we choose a word or phrase in the one or the other, according to the best lights we have from philology, form criticism, poetic analysis, archaic speech, archaeology, geography, extrabiblical literature, etc., in order to reconstruct a semblance of what might have been the original. The apparatus in each case tends to homogenize the two into one psalm. Translators then use the apparatus and try to present the same psalm in both Samuel and the Psalter. It is precisely this result that would have horrified the Masoretes – no matter our noble motivation. In antiquity a scribe might assimilate two such passages out of an innocent but intimate knowledge of the one while copying the other. Today we apparently do so out of an innocent but intimate knowledge of what we think an early form of such a poem ought to have been like. The result is much the same. Before we ask the obvious question why the Masoretes were so intent on preserving the integrity of each individual text – nay, each individual verse, word, and letter in place – let us first ask why we moderns like to press back to some supposed original. Such questions almost invariably open up into the question of authority as it is framed and posed by any given generation. The attempts of the secularized mind to devalue the question of authority require perhaps the greatest skill of the sociologist of knowledge, but it is perhaps an attempt to evade looking at what the so-called secular scholar really holds dear. The modern period since the 34   Anderson, “Exodus Typology,” notes Exod 15 in passing, parenthetically on p. 183, but fails to see how Isa 43:16 – 21 is a poetic midrash on Exodus. 35   Cross and Freedman, Studies in Ancient Yahwistic Poetry.

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Enlightenment has apparently been as interested in the ipsissima verba of the origin of a biblical text as the Masoretes were interested in the ipsissima verba of the received text. One of the reasons that Johann Salomo Semler’s attempt to devalue the concept of canon in the eighteenth century to a kind of final stage in a literary-historical process was so successful was that he was willing to shift ground in precisely the question of authority. He and his Enlightenment colleagues needed what Semler did to continue their then exciting work viewing the whole process of formation of the Bible in one literary-historical light from beginning to end.36 Once they had reduced the question of canonization of the Bible to study of lists of books and councils where big decisions would have been made, they had the question of authority reduced to what the historian could cope with. The bottom end of the canonical process could then be bracketed so that focus could continue on the earliest (and hence really authoritative?) biblical forms and content. A part of this attitude emerges in our use of the words “secondary” and “spurious.” To call a passage in Amos or Paul secondary is to diminish its importance in some measure. We tend to think of it as less important, for our purposes – whatever the purposes might be – than passages we call “genuine.” Notice the choice of words. It might be one thing to call a passage genuine with regard to reconstructing as historians what we think Amos might actually have said, but it is quite another matter to leave the impression with students that what is “secondary” has no authority otherwise. And yet that is what has been taught, innocently or otherwise, in most seminaries and departments of religion. Until recently even the historian found it less interesting to give so-called spurious passages their just value. This attitude is fortunately being corrected in many ways. Yet still, the legacy of Enlightenment biblical scholarship includes a fairly clear system of values: one of these is that the most primitive is the most authentic.37 Among the students of W. F. Albright there was a tendency to revalue much of what the liberals had called secondary and to view as authentic or primary much that had earlier been devalued. But that tendency only underscored the basic view that the first or earliest was best. There is a clear line between our modern attitude toward secondary passages and our attitude toward the masorah: we have tended to ignore both in our concern for the most primitive values in the text. The basic Enlightenment tenet that “nothing is spurious to the scholar” has not always been observed.

36   See Childs, “Canon and Criticism,” his Sprunt lectures of 1972, as yet unpublished. Much of this appears in his Introduction to the OT as Scripture. See also Sanders, “Adaptable for Life”; Sanders, “Biblical Criticism and the Bible as Canon,” esp. 160 – 64. 37   This is seen especially in the work of philologists, and in bold relief in that of Mitchell Dahood; cf. Barr, Comparative Philology. For a critique of the position, see also the discussion of the two sides of the issue, as well as of what the expression “original meaning” may itself connote, in Sawyer, “Original Meaning of the Text”; the debate by Dahood and Barr is resumed in the same volume: Dahood, “Northwest Semitic Texts,” and Barr, “Philology and Exegesis.”

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VII The answer to the question why the Masoretes were so intent on preserving the integrity of the text down to the least detail lies in a careful study of what happened in the history of the transmission of the text during the course of the second period, that of relative textual fluidity, from the Persian Period till late in the first century CE. In 1961 an essay appeared in our journal titled “Matthew Twists the Scriptures.”38 The author expressed the consternation of many excellent OT and NT scholars of the period over how the NT seems to “distort” the OT texts it cites. But the same can be said of nearly all Jewish and Christian literature in the NT period. While there was a certain measure of respect for the constraints inherent in the text,39 the hermeneutics of the second period were quite different from those that characterize use of Scripture after the first century. The remarkable thing in the NT is the high respect for the text of the LXX in the Epistle to the Hebrews, not the other way around. The so-called Apocrypha, Pseudepigrapha, and all sectarian literature clearly datable to the pre-70 CE period may all be seen in the same light with regard to their attitude to biblical texts. I include in the category of sectarian also the so-called proto-rabbinic literature of the period: the great problem is, as Jacob Neusner has brilliantly shown, that there is very little there that can be dated early enough in the form received to include it in the second period.40 Most ancient rabbinic literature, on the contrary, is a prime example of the attitude toward and use of Scripture in the third period, that of the basically stabilized text after 70 CE.41 Whether it was a matter of copying an actual biblical text, citing a biblical text for comment, rewriting a whole segment of the biblical story as in the case of Chronicles, the targumim, Jubilees, or the Genesis Apocryphon, the inherent constraints of the text were balanced over against another factor that was apparently equally important – the utter conviction of the time in the immediate relevance of Scripture. What they perceived God was doing in their time had as great a bearing on their thinking as the text that reported what God had done in earlier times. They knew how to identify God’s dealings with them because they had Scripture, but most of that Scripture had not yet become “sacred text.” The colophonic character of the prohibitions stated in Deuteronomy against adding to or subtracting from the text of that book was still far from the same as the utter taboo later to arise when the concept of sacred text became the dominant 38

  McCasland, “Matthew Twists the Scriptures.”   Miller’s apt phrase in “Directions.” 40   Much of what Jacob Neusner has written would illustrate the point: it is clearly stated in his Development of a Legend. See also Neusner, Redaction and Formulation. 41   Goshen-Gottstein uses the metaphor of “central current” for the proto-masoretic text before 70, “with rivulets flowing side by side with it.” After the destruction of the temple “the rivulets that flow by its side are almost dried up . . . but a thin trickle continues . . .” Isaiah: Sample Edition, 17. Robert A. Kraft finds a parallel phenomenon in Greek Jewish Scriptures: “As a rule tendencies to tamper with the texts would tend to date from relatively early times . . .” “Christian Transmission of Greek Jewish Scriptures,” 221. 39

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concept. The period bracketed by the fall of the First Temple and the fall of the Second, from the sixth century BCE to the end of the first CE, precisely from the time of Deuteronomy to the time of Rabbi Meir and the beginnings of the oral codification of the Mishnah, was marked by a coexistence of two distinct ideas about the Word of God, the idea of the living word of God ever dynamically new and fresh, and the idea of traditions that were becoming stabilized into certain forms but were generation after generation in need of being adapted to and heard afresh in new historical contexts. Traditionally, the spirit of prophecy ended sometime between the time of Ezra and the men of the Great Synagogue, and the time of the Era of the Contracts, that is, the time of the Seleucids.42 Such efforts to account for the shift of which we speak in understanding the very concept of the Word of God testify to the ambiguity of attitude held toward Scripture in the period. Barthélemy has shown that the phenomenon of the cessation of scribal changes in the early first century CE, those called tiqqunê soferîm, was a stage in the development of the shift in basic concept of Scripture in the period.43 This is surely correct. Talmon has capably shown that other kinds of scribal activity, actually adding to the biblical text poetic doxologies and other types of biblical literary forms, extended down to approximately the same time frame.44 Talmon remarks that such scribes considered themselves to be contributing to the biblical process. All of this scribal activity came to a halt sometime in the first century CE. The shift from understanding Scripture as sacred story to sacred text45 was long and gradual; but it took place precisely in what in text criticism we call period two, that of the accepted texts. And we say texts for the time precisely because of the pluralistic character of the texts in the period before the standardization process took place. I have called these different understandings of the nature of Scripture a question of the ontology of canon.46 It was apparently not until the first century BCE that the concept of the verbal inspiration of Scripture either arose or began to take hold in Jewish thinking. Prior to that time there had been various mantic or shamanistic concepts of inspiration of tradition and early Scriptures, such as attributed to the words of a dying patriarch (the very form of the book of Deuteronomy [and hence the Torah?]); but the concepts of verbal, and soon thereafter literal, inspiration did not become operative for the function of Scripture in Judaism until the first century BCE, and that at about the time of the cessation of the two kinds of scribal activity in changes and alterations in the texts of which Barthélemy and Talmon speak in the first century BCE. Phenomenologically, this new view of inspiration was linked to the concurrent conviction of the demise of prophecy. Even so, the older attitudes still held on and did not 42

  Cf. Weil, “La nouvelle édition,” 329.   Barthélemy, “Les tiqquné sopherim.” 44   Talmon, “Textual Study of the Bible.” 45   Miller, “Directions.” 46   Sanders, “Biblical Criticism and the Bible as Canon.” 43

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completely die out until the final period of textual standardization after 70 CE. Those attitudes were in point of fact the salient and characteristic ones of the second period, that of fluidity and flexibility. For them, as seen in Qumran and Christian literature for example, the greater piety was expressed in moderately reshaping the text within the limits of their view of textual constraints in the light of the greater conviction of what God was doing in their time. Once the concept of verbal inspiration arose, those adhering to it needed a whole new set of hermeneutic axioms and techniques to render the stable text adaptable to new situations. And it was these very proto-rabbinic circles in which the scribal activity of alteration of text ceased in the first century that the first efforts were made in developing the new rules of the game. And one can see some of the new techniques coming to play to a limited extent in Qumran commentaries (most of which came late in the history of the sect) and in the NT. But it was in the proto-rabbinic denominations and groups that the so-called seven hermeneutic rules of Hillel were developed supposedly by the end of the first century BCE. These were extended and developed considerably by the end of the first century CE into the thirteen rules of Ishmael and finally into the traditional thirty-two rules by the time of Judah ha-Nasi in the second century CE. Such rules could not have arisen and would not have done so except that the very ontology of Scripture had changed from sacred story to sacred text as well as the fundamental understanding of its inspiration or authority. What happened and why?

VIII The answer to these questions lies in an understanding of Torah. Increasingly in the exilic and postexilic periods Torah came to have a very special meaning and a very special function in Judaism. There is a manner of speaking in which one may say that Torah was Judaism and Judaism was Torah.47 The very concept of Torah shifted from that of being the story of God’s dealings with the world and with his people Israel (with legal suggestions included within it as to how the people should shape their society and their lives) to being a quite stable and discrete body of literature. But the function of Torah remained the same as it had been in its process of literary formation, the source of the believers’ knowledge of who they were and what they should do with their lives. What changed was a shift from highly adaptable living traditions such as those to which the early biblical writers themselves referred in whatever manner and mode they needed to do so, to a highly stable body of literature. If, however, the function was to remain the same then methods had to be developed to render the stable adaptable, to make it relevant to ever-changing situations, and that at a time when Judaism was becoming more and more pluralistic due to the fact of dispersion and the fact of 47   See Sanders, Torah and Canon, 52; and Sanders, “Torah: A Definition.” See also Neusner, First-Century Judaism in Crisis.

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Jewish communities facing widely differing problems according to where and when they lived.48 If nothing now was to be added to or subtracted from the text of Torah – in that colophonic sense to which we referred in looking at Deuteronomy – how could the old Bronze Age and Iron Age legal systems be made relevant to all the new problems? We sophisticated children of the Enlightenment know that those legal systems embedded within the Torah story were actually already adapted much earlier from the codes of Hammurabi and of Shamshi Addad of Eshnunah, and from the Hittite legal system. But how were our friends in the postexilic age to manage if they could not adopt legal systems much closer to their own needs (whether homegrown Jewish laws or the best of their neighbors’) right into the text of the Torah as their ancestors had done? As long as Persia was the dominant political and cultural force surrounding them, the problem was not too bad.49 But once Judaism faced the Hellenistic challenge something had to be done, for here was truly the first really serious threat to the suppositions on which Jewish existence rested – no matter what denomination to which one might adhere or how eschatologically oriented or not one’s immediate identity group might be. On the one hand the text of Torah had become stable to a large degree, at least to the point that no major alterations could be made; while on the other hand cultural clash was at every hand. Torah, which had precisely become Torah because its central traditions had given life in the earlier challenge of the discontinuity of the old cultic and cultural symbols in the Babylonian destruction of temple and city, was still the source of life for Judaism. It had done it before, it could do it again, even though the literary form of Torah had become basically stable. But how? The first answer came in the form of torah she-bĕ-ʿal peh. God had given Moses more laws on Sinai than were contained in the scrolls Ezra brought with him from Babylon to Jerusalem. These had been passed down generation to generation from Moses to Joshua to the prophets to the sages, and could now be called on to continue to render Torah relevant to ongoing life situations. Those new situations had pointed up two shortcomings of a literarily stable Torah in pentateuchal form: (1) there were not only new problems in no way addressed in the laws in Torah, but (2) it was becoming more and more evident that there were an increasing number of laws in written Torah apparently no longer relevant to the new situations. Mirabile dictu, the oral law contained all kinds of relevancies to meet the first apparent shortcoming of stabilized Torah. But what about the other shortcoming? What to do about all the old laws apparently outdated? Were they simply to lie there unused? Here was where the laws of written Torah had their continuing part to play. Where they were clearly applicable, fine and good. But those that were in danger of falling out of usage also needed attention. And here is where the shift from peshat exegesis of laws to 48

  See Sanders, “Adaptable to Life”; Sanders, “Hermeneutics in True and False Prophecy.”   Bickerman and Smith, Ancient History of Western Civilization, 113 – 45; Smith, Palestinian Parties and Politics, 57 – 81. 49

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other forms of interpretation began to take place. If the obvious syntax of a passage did not render relevant value of an ancient law, then maybe a value needed could be found, not in the plain sense of the verse in question, but in focusing on key words within it. Once this process started, literary context became less and less a restraint inherent in the text, and single words needed could be drawn from verses in different literary contexts. This process meant not only a moderate diminishing authority attached to the syntax of the ancient text but the ability of the new interpreter to make a new literary context where needed. One could take a verse out of one context and put it with another out of another and thus create an entirely new literary context. This was undoubtedly done at first by the ancient and continuing literary technique of word-tallying or Stichwörter. This came to be called gezerah shavah (word tally) after qal vahomer (argument from lesser to greater), perhaps the most basic of the seven hermeneutic rules of Hillel, and the rule most seriously developed by Akiba. Clearly once this mode of biblical interpretation was accepted and ancient syntax and integral literary context were devalued to that extent, there were nearly infinite possibilities of rendering legal Torah relevant to new problems whenever and wherever they might arise. These two means of assuring the relevance of Torah as law guaranteed the survival of Judaism and of Torah itself. A third way of handling the problem is exemplified in the NT, which exhibits an attitude toward Torah already clearly manifest in some Jewish eschatological circles: to view the Torah story as of continuing value (Rom 7:12), but to view the Torah laws as abrogated.50 A fourth way of handling the situation was at Qumran in its open-ended attitude toward the canon: to include in its canon whatever was needed to meet the new situations as it perceived them.51 Witness the canonical dimension of the Temple Scroll, as viewed by Yigael Yadin. This scroll might well be called Tritonomos or Tritonomy.52 Here were the laws Qumran apparently needed in its self-understanding as the True Israel of its day with a special mission of preparedness for the eschaton. A fifth mode of dealing with the problem was allegory, a spiritualizing hermeneutic that permitted, if need be, a total revaluation of apparently outmoded passages. In the Judaism that would close its canon by the end of the second period of text transmission, that is, by the end of the period of intense standardization of text and the closing-off of normal textual adaptation in that Judaism, new hermeneutic techniques had been developed for rendering the old stable text adaptable to whatever situation might arise. For them sacred story had yielded to sacred text almost completely. The fact that the Torah itself was basically a story and not basically a legal code was for them no longer in focus. It was now basically sacred text. The ontology of Scripture had shifted. And in the process of that shift one can see how Scripture interpretation presupposed aspects of the shift. Scripture 50

  See Sanders, “Torah and Paul.”   See Sanders, “Qumran Psalms Scroll”; and see Barthélemy, “Text, Hebrew, History of,”

51

880.

52

 Yadin, Megilat ha-Miqdash, 1:295 – 307.

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began to be viewed, Merrill Miller points out, as oracle, sign, and riddle, as well as story.53 If one reads a passage of Scripture as though it were an oracle, one reads it entirely differently from when one views it as a story. Each word of an oracle or a riddle is assumed to have significance whether one understands it right away or not. One needed now a raz or kleis, some key, to unlock its meaning. Mystery enters in in new ways and the meaning God intends for one’s time may depend on external factors such as a denominational secret tradition.54 Even so, it was all in the realm of hermeneutics, and hermeneutics depends in part on one’s view of the text being rendered relevant. No wonder then that once the new views of verbal inspiration, and soon thereafter literal inspiration, took hold, one could entertain the idea of a closed canon. It already contained all the possibilities ever needed to give value to the communities as they needed it, wherever they might be. As A. C. Sundberg has correctly pointed out, the Christian communities, which split off from Judaism definitely in 70 CE, did not benefit from closure of canon but could carry on with the older attitudes and the larger OT canon for considerably longer.55 Christians had already fallen heir to the thinking about Torah of denominations other than the Pharisaic-rabbinic anyway.56 For them it was basically a story about what God had done in the past with promise of what he would do in future and not basically a set of laws in the first place. But no group or denomination was insulated from the others, and some of the basic concepts in the shift of ontology of Scripture became common to all groups. Among these was the new view of verbal inspiration. This gradually took hold also in Christianity, so that one sees an increasing difference between how the NT writers adapted Scripture and how patristic writers rendered it relevant to their times. The idea was there to stay, and it manifested itself in how texts of Scripture were copied and treated and read thereafter.

IX Those sentinels standing in the lateral margins of masoretic manuscripts thus have a long prehistory. The whole concept of masorah developed directly out of the shift in ontology of Scripture that took place in the second period of text transmission, with accelerated pace after 70 CE. No matter whether one thinks the right text was selected in the late second period to be the standard text,57 we can only be grateful to the rabbis, the proto-Masoretes, and finally the Masoretes 53

  Miller, “Directions.”   The MT of Daniel, in contrast to that of the LXX and even Theodotion Daniel, presents enigmatic readings that perhaps are due to the writer’s desire to be less than clear to the general reader but convey a sense of reality through mystery to an in-group. Some passages seem to be of the character of riddle or oracle and purposely written so. Ezekiel was probably not written in this way, but much of the text lends itself to oracle-type interpretation. 55  Sundberg, OT of the Early Church. 56   Sanders, “Torah and Christ.” 57   See Talmon, “Three Scrolls of the Law.” Greenberg, “Stabilization of the Text” is pertinent here as well. 54

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themselves for so zealously guarding the particularities, peculiarities, and anomalies in the text as received in the process. They have preserved for us a pluralistic text that has remarkably resisted assimilations and homogenization of readings.58 What we, in our sophistication, might call contradictions and discrepancies were, for them, latent possibilities for meaning at some future time that they themselves might not yet have discerned. After all, texts full of oracles and riddles implanted there by God himself by verbal inspiration, no one generation could possibly understand. Let future generations have a chance. Parallel to appreciation of the work of the Masoretes and the earlier standardization of the Hebrew text of the Bible is renewed appreciation of the integrity of the LXX. Note that the NEB and the new TOB offer two Esthers, the LXX Esther in its full Greek form as well as Esther in its Hebrew form. Whatever one may decide about the original Esther, from a very early date there were extant side by side two Esthers each having its own integrity. Here was another form of pluralism by which we may benefit, never mind the discrepancies between them. The same may be said, perhaps, of the LXX texts of Samuel, Jeremiah, Proverbs, and Ezek 40 – 48. The craze of the Masoretes for textual ipsissima verba and ipsissimae litterae can now be seen for what it was. They had their own reasons for preserving the integrity of the text, but we may have ours for appreciating now their labors. They have richly enhanced the pluralism of the Bible by their care for the text and by their preserving the multiple possibilities thereof not only in the masorah but also in the ketiv-qerē, sebîr, hillufîm, teʿamim, and tiqqunê sopherîm ˙ pluralism of the Bible, rather than its traditions. And it is in part the (limited) obvious unities, that canonical criticism also celebrates.59 Though we have benefited by the apparent madness of the Masoretes, beyond even our current ability perhaps to evaluate it, theirs was not a scholarly craze for simple scrupulosity or scientific accuracy. Theirs was a faith in an ontology of Scripture (did not some say Torah was even preexistent?)60 that meant there was always more there than any one person or any one generation could fully understand. We may not be able to share the faith. But can we deny the insight? Are we not ourselves far enough into the history of Enlightenment study of Scripture to see for ourselves that scholars, too, are subject to the Zeitgeist of their times? And are we not a little wiser because of the sociology of knowledge to know that none of us, no 58   Infrequently this is not the case: cf., e. g., Jer 49:19 and 50:44 where some Masoretes seem to have done what we tend to do – assimilate a yĕʿōdennu to yōʿîdennî. See the list at the end of the Ben Hayyim Bible, Mikraot Gedolot. A study needs to be made of oriental ketivs. See the notes by Barthélemy in Critique textuelle, vol. 1, the first full technical report from the UBS HOTTP committee. 59   See Sanders, Torah and Canon, 116 – 21, and Sanders, “Adaptable for Life.” The diversity or pluralism in textual tradition is preserved in many ways by the several masoretic marginal traditions. When the limit of function of such traditions was reached then hermeneutics stepped in to continue the work: e. g., the step from notation of a hilluf to use of ʾal tiqrēʾ as a hermeneu˙ tic technique is very slight indeed. (On the qere-ketiv traditions indicating ancient variants, see Orlinsky, “Origin of the Kethib-Qere System”; Gordis, Biblical Text in the Making. 60   As in ʾAbot Nathan 31; see Goldin, Fathers according to Rabbi Nathan, 126; b. Ned. 39b; etc.

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school of us, nor any one generation of us is ever likely to have all the answers? Once we realize that we have hardly asked all the questions, we may be able to see Enlightenment study of the Bible as a part, a remarkable part to be sure, but indeed a part of a much longer history of study of Scripture. The questions we most often put to Scripture about its most primitive and original meanings have been asked before and they will be asked again. But they are not the only ones to ask. Perhaps when we can gain an attitude of seeing ourselves in a line that goes back much further and deeper than two hundred years, the eighteenth century may not have to be seen as the watershed of discontinuity in Bible study it has sometimes been seen to be.61 Such a view requires a bit more humility than we have sometimes been wont to practice. Perhaps one of the gifts we of the SBL might celebrate in our centennial anniversary would be the lines of continuity, wherever they might lie, between ourselves and our early antecedents. Let us face it: we now know that we did not have the elephant by the tail starting in the eighteenth century. Neither has any other period of biblical study. Practicing honesty, humility, and a sense of humor62 about our own limitations in Bible scholarship might permit us to see ourselves more clearly as beneficiaries of a very long line of students of these texts, and even to see the texts in newer lights than we today can perceive. Such a stance might permit us to hear clearly and evaluate soberly the increasing clamor of indictments against biblical criticism, for the good uses of which this Society was founded and continues to exist. Whether we agree or not that historical and literary criticism have locked the Bible into the past or are bankrupt or corrupt or have eclipsed biblical narrative, we in this society especially must hear the indictments for what they are really worth.63 Perhaps we have in part shifted our faint faith from the substance of our study to the methods we use. Perhaps we have permitted the method to become an end in itself. Perhaps we have unwittingly subscribed to a hermeneutic of primitivism where only the most original of anything has been worthy of really serious attention. Perhaps we have placed faith in history or even archaeology and expected them to bear burdens they were never meant to bear. Or, perhaps, we are guilty of none of the above. Perhaps revival of a pluralistic sense of canon and of a deep appreciation of the pluralistic texts that have been entrusted to us from many generations, and of their functions through the ages in the believing communities that have passed them on, may allow us to perceive a more limited and yet greater value of the tools of biblical criticism developed and honed over the past three centuries. Study of text and canon today focuses increasing attention upon the intra-biblical hermeneutics at every stage in biblical antiquity – how the biblical authors and thinkers themselves contemporized and adapted and reshaped the traditions they received and how those traditions functioned for them when called upon. The earliest to the latest biblical literature we have made points by citing or 61

  Cf. Frei, Eclipse of Biblical Narrative.   Sanders, “Hermeneutics.”   See Sanders, “Biblical Criticism and the Bible as Canon.”

62 63

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alluding to earlier traditions, whether the peculiar traditions of the community or the international wisdom of the laws, myths, legends, and proverbs of many peoples. How did Israel adapt what she received? How did Israel and the church crack open once more, each time, the shell of the old, tried and true, and make it live and derive value from it to speak to a new situation, a new problem? We have now the tools to work on the unrecorded hermeneutics that fill the Bible from beginning to end. How did Israel and the early church from problem to problem and from time to time, passing through the five culture eras from the Bronze Age to the Hellenistic-Roman, adapt what she received? How did she depolytheize, monotheize, Yahwize, and Israelitize, or Christianize, the wisdom received from the past, whether homegrown tradition or international wisdom? How did they do it? The answers are lying there awaiting valid sober uses of biblical literary and historical criticism to recover them. How did Israel and the church find the value needed in a tradition without absolutizing the cultural trappings in which they were received, and without being bound by the cultural mores and givens of the past? The Bible is a veritable textbook of unrecorded hermeneutics, of the way in their time our predecessors, the biblical tradents themselves, did what it is we ourselves struggle to do. To view our biblical antecedents as radically different from or inferior to us in this regard is to practice a kind of latter-day arrogance and hubris without warrant that cuts us off from them and impoverishes us. To deny the trappings of their insights is not to be better than they. It may but deafen us to the genius they enjoyed. We have set the Enlightenment up as a sort of humanistic resurrection experience back of which we sometimes feel we cannot go and before which there is perhaps not very much to learn. I suggest that the block is illusory, dependent upon a kind of triumphalism that we can ill afford to entertain. We are heirs of a very long line of tradents and not necessarily more worthy of the traditions than they.

Bibliography Ackroyd, Peter R. “Original Text and Canonical Text.” USQR 32 (1977) 166 – 73. Aland, Kurt, Matthew Black, Bruce M. Metzger, and Allen Wikgren, eds. The Greek New Testament. 1st ed. Stuttgart: Würtemberg Bible Society, 1966. 4th ed. Stuttgart: UBS, 1990. [5th ed 2014.] Anderson, Bernhard W. “Exodus Typology in Second Isaiah.” In Israel’s Prophetic Heritage, edited by Bernhard W. Anderson and Walter J. Harrelson, 177 – 95. New York: Harper & Row, 1962. Barr, James. Comparative Philology and the Text of the Old Testament. Oxford: Clarendon, 1968. Barr, James. “Philology and Exegesis: Some General Remarks with Illustrations from Job 3.” In Questions disputées d’Ancien Testament, edited by Christianus H. W. Brekelmans, 39 – 62. Gembloux: Duculot, 1974. Barthélemy, Dominique. Critique textuelle de l’Ancien Testament. OBO 50. Fribourg: Presses universitaires; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1982, 1986. [Now 5 vols. to 2016.]

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Barthélemy, Dominique. Études d’histoire du texte de l’Ancien Testament. Fribourg: Éditions universitaires; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1978. Barthélemy, Dominique. Les devanciers d’Aquila: Première publication intégrale du texte des fragments du Dodécaprophéton. VTSup 10. Leiden: Brill, 1963. Barthélemy, Dominique. “Les tiqquné sopherim et la critique textuelle de l’Ancien Testament.” In Congress Volume, Bonn 1962. IOSOT, 285 – 304. VTSup 9. Leiden: Brill, 1963. Reprinted in Études d’histoire du texte de l’Ancien Testament, by Dominique Barthélemy, 91 – 110. Fribourg: Éditions universitaires; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1978. Barthélemy, Dominique, et al., eds. Preliminary and Interim Report on the Hebrew Old Testament Text Project. 5 vols. London and New York: UBS, 1973 – 80. Barthélemy, Dominique. “Problématique et tâches de la critique textuelle de l’Ancien Testament.” In Études d’histoire du texte de l’Ancien Testament, by Dominique Barthélemy, 365 – 81. Fribourg: Éditions universitaires; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1978. Barthélemy, Dominique. “Text, Hebrew, History of.” In IDBSup 878 – 84. ben Hayyim, Jacob. Mikraot Gedolot [Second Rabbinic Bible]. Venice: Daniel Bomberg, 1524 – 25. Bickerman, Elias, and Morton Smith. The Ancient History of Western Civilization. New York: Harper & Row, 1976. Bloch, Renée. “Midrash.” In DBSup 5: cols.  1263 – 81. Bogaert, Pierre-Maurice. “Les rapports du judaïsme avec l’histoire de la Septante et de ses révisions.” In Tradition orale et écrite, edited by Luc Dequeker, 175 – 224. Brussels: lnstitutum Judaicum, 1975. Childs, Brevard S. “Canon and Criticism: The Old Testament as Scripture of the Church.” James Sprunt Lectures, Union Theological Seminary, 1972. Five unpublished lectures. Childs, Brevard S. Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1979. Cross, Frank M. “The Evolution of a Theory of Local Texts.” In Qumran and the History of the Biblical Text, edited by Frank M. Cross and Shemaryahu Talmon, 306 – 21. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975. Cross, Frank M. “The History of the Biblical Text in the Light of Discoveries in the Judaean Desert.” HTR 57 (1964) 281 – 99. Reprinted in Qumran and the History of the Biblical Text, edited by Frank M. Cross and Shemaryahu Talmon, 177 – 95. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975. Cross, Frank M., and David Noel Freedman. Studies in Ancient Yahwistic Poetry. SBLDS 21. Missoula, MT: Scholars, 1975. Cross, Frank M., and Shemaryahu Talmon, eds. Qumran and the History of the Biblical Text. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975. Dahood, Mitchell. “Northwest Semitic Texts and Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible.” In Questions disputées d’Ancien Testament, edited by Christianus H. W. Brekelmans, 11 – 37. Gembloux: Duculot, 1974. Dothan, Aron. Ben Asher’s Creed: A Study of the History of the Controversy. SBL Masoretic Studies 3. Missoula, MT: Scholars, 1977. Dothan, Aron. “Prolegomenon.” In Christian David Ginsburg, The Massorah. 4 vols. (1880 – 1905). Reprint, New York: Ktav, 1975. Freedman, David Noel. “Letter to the Readers: The Dead Sea Scrolls: Retrospective.” BA 40 (1977) 94 – 97. Frei, Hans. The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1974. Frensdorff, Solomon. Das Buch Ochlah Wochlah (Massorah). Hannover: Hahn, 1864. Frensdorff, Solomon. Die Massora Magna. 1. Massoretisches Wörterbuch. Hannover and Leipzig, 1876. Reprint, New York: Ktav, 1968.

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Ginsburg, Christian David. Introduction to the Massoretico-Critical Edition of the Hebrew Bible. London: Trinitarian Bible Society, 1897. Reprint, New York: Ktav, 1966. Ginsburg, Christian David. The Massorah. 4 vols. London, 1880 – 1905. Reprint, New York: Ktav, 1975. Goldin, Judah, ed. The Fathers according to Rabbi Nathan. YJS 10. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1955. Gooding, David W. Relics of Ancient Exegesis: A Study of the Miscellanies in 3 Reigns 2. SOTSMS 4. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976. Gordis, Robert. The Biblical Text in the Making. New York: Ktav, 1972. Gordon, Robert P. “The Second Septuagint Account of Jeroboam: History or Midrash?” VT 25 (1975) 368 – 93. Goshen-Gottstein, Moshe H., ed. The Aleppo Codex. Jerusalem: Magnes, 1976. Goshen-Gottstein, Moshe H., ed. The Book of Isaiah, Parts One and Two. HUBP. Jerusalem: Magnes, 1975. Goshen-Gottstein, Moshe H., ed. The Book of Isaiah: Sample Edition with Introduction. Jerusalem: Magnes, 1965. Goshen-Gottstein, Moshe H. “Hebrew Biblical Manuscripts: Their History and Their Place in the HUBP Edition.” Bib 48 (1967) 243 – 90. Greenberg, Moshe. “The Stabilization of the Text of the Hebrew Bible, Reviewed in the Light of the Biblical Materials from the Judean Desert.” JAOS 76 (1956) 157 – 67. Reprinted in The Canon and Masorah of the Hebrew Bible: An Introductory Reader, edited by Sid Z. Leiman, 298 – 326. New York: Ktav, 1974. Kraft, Robert A. “Christian Transmission of Greek Jewish Scriptures: A Methodological Probe.” In Paganisme, Judaïsme, Christianisme: Influences et affrontements dans le monde antique: Mélanges offerts à Marcel Simon, edited by André Benoit, Marc Philonenko, and Cyrille Vogel, 207 – 26. Paris: Boccard, 1978. McCarthy, Carmel. The Tiqqune Sopherim and Other Theological Corrections in the Masoretic Text of the Old Testament. OBO 36. Fribourg: Universitätsverlag; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1981. McCasland, S. Vernon. “Matthew Twists the Scriptures.” JBL 80 (1961) 143 – 48. Miller, Merrill P. “Directions in the Study of Biblical Interpretation in Late Antiquity.” Unpublished paper. Miller, Merrill P. “Midrash.” In IDBSup 593 – 97. Miller, Merrill P. “Targum, Midrash, and the Use of the Old Testament in the New Testament.” JSJ 2 (1971) 29 – 82. Neusner, Jacob. Development of a Legend: Studies on the Traditions concerning Yohanan ben Zakkai. Leiden: Brill, 1970. Neusner, Jacob. First-Century Judaism in Crisis: Yohanan ben Zakkai and the Renaissance of Torah. Nashville: Abingdon, 1975. Neusner, Jacob. The Redaction and Formulation of the Order of Purities in Mishnah and Tosefta. Vol. 21, A History of the Mishnaic Law of Purities. Leiden: Brill, 1977. Orlinsky, Harry M. “The Origin of the Kethib-Qere System: A New Approach.” Congress Volume: Oxford 1959, 184 – 92. VTSup 7. Leiden: Brill, 1960. Orlinsky, Harry M. “Prolegomenon: The Masoretic Text: A Critical Evaluation.” In Introduction to the Massoretico-Critical Edition of the Hebrew Bible, by Christian David Ginsburg, i – xlv. New York: Ktav, 1966. Sanders, James A. “Adaptable for Life: The Nature and Function of Canon.” In Magnalia Dei: The Mighty Acts of God: Essays on the Bible and Archaeology in Memory of G. Ernest Wright, edited by Frank M. Cross, Werner E. Lemke, and Patrick D. Miller, 531 – 60. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1976. [Reprinted in From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, by James A. Sanders, 9 – 39. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987.]

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Sanders, James A. “Biblical Criticism and the Bible as Canon.” USQR 32 (1977) 157 – 65. [Reprinted in From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, by James A. Sanders, 75 – 86. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987.] Sanders, James A. “Hermeneutics.” In IDBSup 404 – 7. Sanders, James A. “Hermeneutics in True and False Prophecy.” In Canon and Authority: Essays in Old Testament Religion and Theology, edited by George W. Coats and Burke O. Long, 21 – 41. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1977. [Reprinted as “Canonical Hermeneutics: True and False Prophecy.” In From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, by James A. Sanders, 87 – 105. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987.] Sanders, James A. “The Qumran Psalms Scroll (11QPsa) Reviewed.” In On Language, Culture and Religion in Honor of Eugene A. Nida, edited by Matthew Black and William A. Smalley, 77 – 99. The Hague: Mouton, 1974. Sanders, James A. “Text Criticism and the NJV Torah.” JAAR 39 (1971) 193 – 97. Sanders, James A. “Torah: A Definition.” In IDBSup 909 – 11. [Reprinted in From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, by James A. Sanders, 111 – 14. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987.] Sanders, James A. Torah and Canon. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1972. [2nd ed. Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2005.] Sanders, James A. “Torah and Christ.” Int 29 (1975) 372 – 90. [Reprinted in From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, by James A. Sanders, 41 – 60. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987.] Sanders, James A. “Torah and Paul.” In God’s Christ and His People: Studies in Honour of Nils Alstrup Dahl on the Occasion of His Sixty-Fifth Birthday, edited by Wayne A. Meeks and Jacob Jervell, 132 – 40. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1977. [Reprinted as “Paul and the Law.” In From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, by James A. Sanders, 115 – 23. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987.] Sawyer, John F. A. “The ‘Original Meaning of the Text’ and other Legitimate Subjects for Semantic Description.” In Questions disputées d’Ancien Testament, edited by Christianus H. W. Brekelmans, 63 – 70. Gembloux: Duculot, 1974. Seeligmann, Isaac L. The Septuagint Version of Isaiah. Leiden: Brill, 1948. Smith, Morton. Palestinian Parties and Politics that Shaped the Old Testament. New York: Columbia University Press, 1971. Snaith, Norman. “The Ben Asher Text.” Textus 2 (1962) 8 – 13. Sundberg, Albert C., Jr. The Old Testament of the Early Church. HTS 20. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964. Talmon, Shemaryahu. “The Old Testament Text.” In The Cambridge History of the Bible. Vol. 1, From the Beginnings to Jerome, edited by Peter R. Ackroyd and C. F. Evans, 159 – 99. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970. Pp. 164 – 70 reprinted in Qumran and the History of the Biblical Text, edited by Frank M. Cross and Shemaryahu Talmon, 8 – 12. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975. Talmon, Shemaryahu. “The Textual Study of the Bible – A New Outlook.” In Qumran and the History of the Biblical Text, edited by Frank M. Cross and Shemaryahu Talmon, 321 – 400. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975. Talmon, Shemaryahu. “The Three Scrolls of the Law that Were Found in the Temple Court.” Textus 2 (1962) 14 – 27. Reprinted in The Canon and Masorah of the Hebrew Bible: An Introductory Reader, edited by Sid Z. Leiman, 455 – 68. New York: Ktav, 1974. Weil, Gérard E. “Foreword II.” In Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia, edited by Karl Elliger and Wilhelm Rudolph, xiii – xviii. Stuttgart: UBS, 1983. Weil, Gérard E. Initiation à la Massorah. Leiden: Brill, 1964. Weil, Gérard E. “La nouvelle édition de la massorah gedolah selon le manuscrit B 19a de Leningrad.” Note e Testi, 302 – 40. Florence: Olschki, 1972. Weil, Gérard E., ed. Massorah Gedolah. Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute, 1971. Yadin, Yigael. Megilat ha-Miqdash. 3 vols. Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1978.

5 Stability and Fluidity in Text and Canon Publication of the Greek Minor Prophets Scroll from the Wadi Habra (8HevXIIgr) provides the primary data for the revolution in Old Testament text criticism launched by Dominique Barthélemy’s Les devanciers d’Aquila, published almost thirty years ago.1 Barthélemy argued, and Tov, the editor of the scroll, agrees, that the version the scroll presents is a revision of an earlier Septuagint translation that sought to bring the Greek text of the Minor Prophets closer to a proto-masoretic form of the Hebrew text.2 Barthélemy provided a theoretical and conceptual framework in which he sought to understand the place of the Dodecapropheton Scroll, which he at first dated to the late first century CE3 but later redated to the middle of the same century.4 (Peter Parsons of Oxford University persuasively argues “for a date in the later i B. C.”5 – enhancing Barthélemy’s thesis even further.) The framework he offered has provided the basis for the revolution to which Tov refers. It was a recasting of the history of transmission of the text of the First Testament.6 Within that history the scroll represented the transition from the earlier period of textual fluidity (represented by the Qumran biblical scrolls and fragments, and *  First published 1991. 1  Barthélemy, Les devanciers d’Aquila. Plates, transcriptions and notes to the scroll are now available in Tov, Greek Minor Prophets Scroll. The editor introduces the volume with the apt statement, “Scholars will always associate the name of R. P. Dominique Barthélemy, OP, of Fribourg with the Minor Prophets Scroll because of his masterly treatment of its contents in Devanciers . . . a book which in many ways has revolutionized scholarship.” 2  Tov, Greek Minor Prophets Scroll, says, “R [the revision the scroll presents] depends on the LXX. . . R revises the LXX in a certain direction . . . towards a Hebrew text close to MT . . .” (103). “R adheres to a system of fixed equivalents . . . R has a certain preference for the simplex forms of the [Greek] verb . . .” (128). “R seeks to correct imprecise renderings in the LXX by matching a part of speech in Hebrew with the corresponding part of speech in Greek . . .” (134). “The literal, even pedantic character of R is obvious . . . with the tendency to represent consistently every Hebrew word with a corresponding Greek equivalent . . .” (140). “R is a consistent and literal translator (reviser) . . . (but) often not consistent . . .” (141). “R’s Vorlage was similar to, rather than identical with MT . . .” (145). “R shares more agreements in vocalization with the LXX (against MT) than with MT (against the LXX) . . . The proximity between R and MT is . . . explained in terms of R’s revision of the LXX towards a different Hebrew text (similar to MT)” (146). “R agrees especially with Sym, Aq, the so-called ThKʹK and the so-called Quinta, as well as with codex W of the LXX, the biblical text quoted by Justin . . . and the Coptic translations” (158). 3   Barthélemy, “Redécouverte d’un chaînon manquant.” 4  Barthélemy, Les devanciers d’Aquila. 5  Tov, Greek Minor Prophets Scroll, 26. 6   Barthélemy, “Histoire du texte hébraïque”; an abbreviated form appeared earlier in English, “Text, Hebrew, History of.”

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the Septuagint, as well as citations in the literature of the period) to the textually more stable proto-masoretic period of the late first and early second centuries CE (represented by the biblical scrolls and fragments from Masada, the Murabbaʿat and other caves, as well as by the Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion Greek translations, and citations in the literature of the period).7 The history of text transmission Barthélemy proposed provided the framework within which the United Bible Societies’ Hebrew Old Testament Text Project (HOTTP), beginning in 1969, agreed to do its text-critical work8 and was not dissimilar to, certainly not in conflict with, the history within which the Hebrew University Bible Project was working.9 Both projects agree that the earliest period, that of autographs and Ur-text, is beyond the province of text criticism; that belongs to historical, source, and literary criticism. The second period is that of the accepted texts, or the earliest we now have, and is marked by a considerable degree of textual fluidity; it is well called the pre-masoretic period, which extended into the first century CE. The end of the first century / beginning of the second CE marks the transition from relative fluidity to relative stability and is well called the proto-masoretic period. The third period is that of the received text, marked by relative stability, and extends to the end of antiquity. The fourth period is the masoretic and continues to today. The discovery of the Greek Dodecapropheton Scroll and Barthélemy’s understanding of its significance provided the evidence necessary to establish the conceptual framework of textual transmission into which all presently known Hebrew and Greek manuscripts of the First Testament can take their place. The Hebrew text to which the Dodecapropheton Scroll was adjusted, over against the Vorlage(?) to the Septuagint, is now seen to have been not only pre-masoretic but also largely proto-masoretic, or a text type moving in that direction. This revised history of text transmission led to a reformulation of the task of text criticism. The goal of text criticism had usually been formulated in terms of establishing the “original” text. This had been the case at least since the time of Johann David Michaelis.10 Emanuel Tov has well stated the new understanding: In contrast to the textual criticism applied to many works of literature, that pertaining to the Old Testament (the same holds for Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey) does not seek to reconstruct the original form of the complete text of the biblical books, let alone try to determine the ipsissima verba of the authors of these books. The most that this could achieve would be to determine the text of the Old Testament current in a particular period  7   The same basic observation can be made about Second Testament texts: “A new rule in method in text criticism, common to work on both Old Testament and New Testament texts, seems now to be emerging: the older the texts or versions the less likely they were copied accurately.” Sanders, “Text and Canon: Old Testament and New,” 379. See the similar observations on the history of transmission of the Greek New Testament text in Aland and Aland, Text of the NT, 48 – 71.  8  Barthélemy, Preliminary and Interim Report, vi – vii; see also the first volume of the final report by Barthélemy, Critique textuelle, esp. 1:*107 – *11.  9   Clearly stated by Goshen-Gottstein, Isaiah: Sample Edition, 12 – 13, as well as by Talmon, “Old Testament Text,” 164 – 70. 10  Barthélemy, Critique textuelle, 1:*1 – *63, esp. *1 and *30 – *32.

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(usually one thinks of the 4th or 3rd century B. C.) and to reconstruct individual ‘original’ readings.’ . . . Not all scholars agree that at one time there was an original text of a biblical book.11 The goal of the comparison of Hebrew readings is to determine whether one of the transmitted readings is more ‘original’ than the other, that is, whether this reading was a part of the ‘original’ text of the Old Testament (as defined on p. 156).12

Quite clearly “original” in this sense does not mean what a speaker said or an author wrote, and it is probably best not to use the term.13 A better formulation of the task of text criticism is the quest for the most critically responsible text. But such a formulation is not in itself clear enough, for obviously this cannot mean simply accepting, or even putting exceptional value on, the earliest texts we have; they exhibit considerable fluidity. Nor should it mean that text criticism throws in the towel and accepts willy-nilly a textus receptus. M. J. Mulder asserts that even the great codices, Leningradensis and Aleppensis, are but “monuments of the stabilization and standardization of the Hebrew text on the long road of its transmission.” He goes on to say that the “stabilization has not yet been closed.”14 Mulder begins his perceptive survey and evaluation of the present state of understanding of the transmission of the text, and its standardization, by noting the several stages through which the formation of the text passed: the oral stage; the stage of collection of the various forms and their commitment to writing; and then: “Thirdly, one may distinguish the stage of the canonization of the various books into what is now called the ‘Bible.’ At this point, the religious aspect of the written fixation of the text becomes obvious: it is this text in this specific form, which is looked upon as authoritative.”15 Mulder concludes his study by noting that “the stabilization of the biblical text which we now call the MT . . . must have taken place at a time in which this text was already considered to be of canonical value, with respect to both form and content. It is therefore at this time that the text-critical work of Barthélemy and his colleagues sets in, already called, after BHS and HUBP, ‘the third (text-critical) way.’”16 This raises the question of the differences between BHS and HUBP. Simply stated, BHS continues the novelty, begun in BHK1 – 3, of including in the apparatus to the text suggestions for textual emendations on purely literary grounds; it goes beyond the text of L by adducing literary emendations and conjectural readings.17 In other words, the apparatus in BHK / S reaches back into the first period of supposed and conjectured “originals.” By contrast the HUBP, in strong objection to that twentieth-century culmination of text criticism as conceived since the end of the seventeenth century, offers, in addition to the text and maso11

  Tov, “Text of the Old Testament,” 156.   Ibid., 189.   See Ulrich’s slightly different use of the term in “Double Literary Editions,” 113 – 14. 14   Mulder, “Transmission of the Biblical Text,” 132. 15   Ibid., 87 (emphases Mulder’s). 16   Ibid., 132. 17   Cf. ibid., 129 – 30. 12 13

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rot of L, four apparatus without a single suggestion for preference, or certainly for emendation. This does not mean that Goshen-Gottstein is reluctant or scrupulous about offering personal judgments; on the contrary, these are included in what is essentially a fifth apparatus, critical notes at the bottom margin of each page (in modern Hebrew and in English) offering his own observations about what may have been going on in one or the other of the witnesses signaled in the four apparatus (especially in the first two, the ancient versions, and the Qumran and rabbinic witnesses).18 The third way, that of Barthélemy and the UBS HOTTP, is to probe into the history of understanding of the text, especially in the great grammarians and commentators on the text. What we often found, in working almost twelve years on the some 5000 problems assigned to us, was that these so-called pre-critical masters of the text and its grammar provided clues to understand the MT often lacking in European “critical” scholarship, especially since the beginning of the eighteenth century. The debates of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries about the value and authority of the contributions of the Masoretes and rabbinic and Qaraite grammarians had, by the beginning of the eighteenth century, been resolved for most European Christian scholars: only the consonantal text was truly authoritative and it was to be studied in the light of the new criticism and philology developing in literary studies generally. We found that this attitude prevailed in the history of critical study of the biblical text and had culminated in the apparatus of BHK / S. Goshen-Gottstein had begun the cry against facile emendations based largely on the literary and historical quest for the “original” text, and we found ourselves in agreement.19 Text criticism in large measure had become an exercise supplementing so-called higher criticism, discerning what a biblical author must surely have meant, said, or written, then casting about among the ancient versions and medieval texts (collated by Kennicott and de Rossi) looking for readings to support what had already been otherwise decided. It was also clear that judgments about corruptions and meaningless readings in the MT were often hasty, and such judgments usually preceded suggestions for emendation or conjecture. Probing into the ways that the great rabbinic and Qaraite grammarians and commentators struggled with such texts indicated that many readings were not as corrupt or meaningless as had been judged by the critical scholarship of the last three centuries.20 Ever-increasing knowledge through modern archaeology and science of ancient flora, fauna, minerology, metallurgy, military and political 18  Goshen-Gottstein, Isaiah: Sample Edition, 11 – 45. The “fifth apparatus” is greatly expanded in the actual critical editions, Goshen-Gottstein, Book of Isaiah, Part One, Part Two, and Volume Two, increasing in size with each publication. 19   See Talmon, “Old Testament Text,” 164 – 70, and all the items in the previous note; see also Goshen-Gottstein, “Hebrew Biblical Manuscripts,” and various articles in the annual Textus, especially Goshen-Gottstein, “Theory and Practice.” 20   Richard Simon stressed this point in noting that the rabbinic and Qaraite grammarians had learned their skills from their Arab mentors; indeed, some of the great grammarians wrote their grammars and commentaries in Judeo-Arabic; see Simon, Histoire critique, 166 ff.

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history, etc. has also reduced the number of apparently corrupt readings. The debates in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries about the authority of the masoretic contributions to the consonantal Hebrew text can now be re-read with appreciation of the arguments of those who viewed them as carefully transmitted ancient traditions.21 The interface between text criticism and canonical criticism needs careful attention, as Barthélemy has often observed. One of the major factors in understanding the canonical nature of biblical texts is that of the interrelationship between their stability and their adaptability.22 While there are almost as many canons, in the sense of canon as norma normata, as there are major communities of faith (and hence little agreement among those communities about precise macro-structure of content and order), they all agree that what is canonical is by nature adaptable or relevant to the ongoing life of the believing community and to the world in which it exists. But the two factors are actually two sides (yin and yang) of the same issue; they go together. While canon as norma normata bespeaks its stability, canon as norma normans bespeaks its adaptability, and both have been operative since the earliest days of oral transmission, reaching back to the Late Bronze and early Iron Age. The very fact that a story or poem was repeated in a time and space beyond its inception meant that it was adaptable and relevant to more than one situation; but if it did not have a recognizable measure of stability, or sameness, it was not, by definition, a repetition / recitation or even an allusion, but a new composition. One can see in the numerous recitations in the Bible of early authoritative traditions, whether Mosaic, Davidic, international wisdom,23 or other, in many different literary forms, that while both factors were present (adaptability and recognizability), the feature of adaptability is sometimes the more impressive at the early stages of formation of biblical literature.24 These were the beginnings of what was to become canonical literature; these early, varied forms got on a sort of tenure track toward what would become “canon.” Crucial to the survival of such traditions, and eventually texts, was their multivalency, the vehicle of their adaptability.25 Within the Bible itself the functions 21  Barthélemy, Critique textuelle, 1:*5 – *40; see also Sanders, “Hebrew Bible and Old Testament.” 22   See Sanders, “Adaptable for Life,” and Sanders, “Canonical Criticism: An Introduction.” 23   Note the sensitive way in which Robert Davidson discerns the intertwining of international wisdom with Israel’s precious traditions and relates it to the church’s task today, in Wisdom and Worship. 24  Sanders, Torah and Canon, 1 – 30. 25   Justice William J. Brennan Jr., of the United States Supreme Court, is quoted in the Los Angeles Times of 22 July 1990 as having earlier stated in an address to the Georgetown University Law School: “The genius of the Constitution rests not in any static meaning it might have had in a world that is dead and gone, but in the adaptability of its great principles to cope with current problems and current needs.” Sometimes in the history of US constitutional law the adapting has been more under the constraints of original meanings of “the time of framing” [of the Constitution] and can be called interpretation; sometimes the adapting has been less under those constraints and can be called resignification of the Constitution’s terms and principles. So it was and has been in Scripture and tradition.

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of such authoritative traditions are many and varied.26 The mid-term between a text’s stability and its adaptability is the hermeneutics by which the re-application takes place; it has been suggested that this canonical process, including the hermeneutics by which it has taken place all along the path of formation of a canon (the struggle by which the past has engaged the ever changing present), is what should be considered truly canonical.27 In the earliest periods of text transmission, the oral and then the early written stages down through the period of relative textual fluidity, the adaptability factor is evident in the texts and manuscripts themselves, so that the multivalency factor was, so to speak, patent. Tradents of all types (traditionists, redactors, scribes, midrashists, and translators) have always been committed to two responsibilities – the past and the present, the texts and the communities they served, the Vorlage and the very reason they did what they did for their communities. As the stabilization process, which Barthélemy has so well described,28 became intense in the first centuries BCE and CE, and the text became more and more fixed, hermeneutic rules were advanced to control the canonical process of adaptability (first seven middot, then thirteen, then thirty-two, etc.). Advance in belief in verbal inspiration, which accompanied the stabilization, did not stem the process, it simply changed the way the game was played.29 Even a stabilizing consonantal text is still multivalent. One sees this precisely in the function of First Testament texts (Hebrew and LXX) in early Jewish literature through the New Testament. All modes of intertextuality exhibit the multivalency of the older word appearing in the newer; they also exhibit the hermeneutics by which the process happens. This is intensely the case with canonical literature because the life and the lifestyle of ongoing believing communities vitally depend on it. An important question in the light of such observations is what constraints lie in the texts themselves. It becomes a poignant question when one sees, e. g., how First Testament texts and traditions function in the epistles of Paul.30 One can well imagine how much the need for further constraints must have been felt in Jewish houses of study.31 And indeed, the stabilizing of the consonantal 26   See the recent work of Michael Fishbane, such as Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel, and Fishbane, Garments of Torah, esp. 121 – 33. 27   Sanders, “Canonical Hermeneutics”; Sanders, Canon and Community, 21 – 60. 28   See Barthélemy, “Histoire du texte hebraïque” and its abbreviated form, Barthélemy, “Text, Hebrew, History of.” 29   Sanders, “Text and Canon: Concept and Method,” and Sanders, “From Sacred Story.” 30  See the brilliant work in this regard by Hays, Echoes of Scripture, especially how Deut 30:11 – 14 functions for Paul in Romans over against the way the same text functions in Baba Mesia 59b; for elaboration of how it functions in the Talmud, see the introduction to the forthcoming compendium, Rosenblatt and Sitterson, Not in Heaven. Intertextuality in the literature of early Judaism and Christianity is evident in seven ways: citation with formula; citation without formula; weaving of words and phrases into the new composition; paraphrase; allusions to stories, episodes and figures; literary structure imitation; and echoes. The purpose was to “ring in the changes” of authority of the older word to authenticate the newer word. 31   A prime example of textual multivalency without masoretic constraints (and before readers’ hermeneutics are applied) can be seen in the 11QPsa col. 28 text of Ps 151. First published

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text in the first centuries BCE and CE was eventually complemented by the threefold contribution of the Masoretes to the received consonantal text by the tenth century: vowel pointing, teʿamîm, and masorot. One can understand the debate, mentioned earlier, that took place in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries among Christians as to the antiquity and authority of these contributions, a debate that has abated but not ceased. The text critic who broaches the text first as a masoretic phenomenon and listens carefully to the meaning conveyed by means of these masoretic constraints inserted into the consonantal text (assisted if need be by the medieval grammarians), rather than listening first to the meaning conveyed by the constraints inserted into the text by modern scholarship (the parsing of poetry, arrangements of lines that ignore the teʿamîm, petuhot and setumot, directions of how to read the text in the modern apparatus, etc.), will often find that what might otherwise be considered corrupt or meaningless readings have meanings consonant with the full context of the passage. Rarely, arguably never, will he or she find a distinctly anti-Christian Tendenz in the masoretic understanding of a text, as suspected by those Christians who argued four and three centuries ago against the antiquity of the masoretic constraints. What one finds by means of comparative midrash, in study of the Nachleben of any First Testament passage or figure, is considerable pluralism of intertextual understandings in the early Jewish period from inception down to the Second Testament, and indeed beyond.32 Rabbinic midrashim, the Mishnah and the Talmud are exercises in Jewish pluralism. Most of modern scholarship (even non-traditional Jewish scholarship) still ignores the accentuation and cantillation marks, the section markings, and the masorot. This has largely been due to the Tendenz of modern biblical scholarship to search for the pre-canonical “original” forms of text and readings – even authorial intentionality. This combined with a high regard for modern philological study of individual words in their Bronze and Iron Age contexts has meant some degree of devaluation of the masoretic traditions. The UBS HOTTP often found that if it strove first to understand what the Masoretes intended, before declaring a text corrupt or senseless, many so-called ancient variants were not true variants at all but were facilitating or translational attempts to make the apparently difficult text make sense for their communities in their times (exercising the tradent’s sense of responsibility to community more than to Vorlage). On the contrary, we found that attention to the fuller context where the difficult text appeared often indicated the viability and appropriateness of the MT reading over against the so-called variants. This certainly was not in 1963, the psalm has received seventeen distinct readings by seventeen world-class scholars; see Sanders, “Multivalent Text.” Even the addition of masoretic constraints to the consonantal text has not eliminated the multivalency of biblical texts; the genius of great literature, no matter how great a fence (seyog) is constructed around it, is located in part in its multivalency. 32   Comparative midrash, as I understand it, is succinctly defined and explained in Sanders, Canon and Community, beginning at the top of p. 26. See also Sanders, “From Isaiah 61 to Luke 4,” as well as numerous student dissertations, such as Carr, “Royal Ideology,” on Solomon’s dream vision in 1 Kgs 3.

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always the case, as can be seen by the decisions made by the committee, but it often put us at odds with modern scholarship on apparently difficult passages. It became clear to the committee that while exegesis of the larger textual unit in which a problem is found has its place in making responsible text-critical decisions, exegesis should follow and not precede the basic text-critical exercise, and it should be applied equally to all the texts and versions where the unit is found, especially the text or version from which a “correction” is sought. Structure analysis has emerged as a valuable tool of text criticism and needs to become standard in its practice. This tool of biblical exegesis is one the writer has learned after joining the faculties in Claremont and perceiving the importance of the exercise as developed by his colleague, Rolf Knierim.33 Careful analysis of the structure of a passage as it appears in the MT, at the same time paying careful attention to the masoretic constraints in the text, provides the primary and valid framework for dealing with what appear to be textual problems in the passage addressed. This “final form” of the text is, as Professor Knierim insists, the place to begin work on any passage. It is usually best to submit one’s first attempt at a structure to the scrutiny of peers and colleagues for refinement, for there is a necessary element of subjectivity to the exercise. Once this is done one can perceive the conceptuality that lies back of the text or version. Discernment of the conceptuality of the text itself provides the only truly authentic context for understanding the textual readings that make up the passage, including the perceived textual problems. If at this point a reading seems intractable, and possibly corrupt, then one needs to turn to the various other means of cracking the shell of seeming intractability, such as philology pertinent to the time period (properly and carefully used), knowledge available to scholarship of the flora, fauna, oeconomia, and politia of the time period involved, and to the grammarians. If at that point the problem remains, one turns to the apparent variants in texts and versions. Then the other text or version (scrolls and LXX), in which a solution to the problem seems viable, is subjected to the same exegetical analysis as was done for the MT, precisely to discern what the conceptuality of the text was to the tradent of the other text or version, and to determine if the “solution” in it is appropriate to the problem in the MT. A simple example is the apparent problem in Isa 40:6a where the MT reads, “A voice says, ‘Call,’ and one replied, ‘What shall I call?’” Both 1QIsaa and the Septuagint (and Vulgate) read “. . . and I replied . . .” The weight of having a Qumran and a Septuagint reading in agreement over against the MT is impressive. Furthermore, to have the prophet himself injected into the text at that point reflects well the scene familiar from Isa 6:5, in the same prophetic book, where the report of an earlier meeting of the heavenly council records an intervention on the part of the prophet. The evidence seems clear and weighty in the direction 33   See Sanders, “Hebrew Bible and Old Testament.” While Knierim has not published a handbook explaining concept and method in structure analysis, one can see what is intended in his article “Criticism of Literary Features,” 143n14; and his work on Num 1 – 10 in the forthcoming Knierim and Coats, Numbers.

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of emendation, so that Rudolf Kittel and D. Winton Thomas, editors of Isaiah in BHK3 and BHS, direct the reader to read “. . . and I replied . . .” (lege vaʾomar). Case closed? Not quite. Structure analyses of MT and LXX Isa 40:1 – 11 result in two different conceptions of what lies behind each text. Quite simply, the MT passage is a consistent report of a meeting of the heavenly council with no human involved except in the mission given the council (see Ps 82). The Septuagint presents a different picture. There is no heavenly council presented in the Septuagint. On the contrary, priests are the subjects addressed by God already in 40:2: “Speak, priests, to the heart of Jerusalem; comfort her, for her humiliation is fulfilled, her sin is set aside . . .” The tradent translating the Hebrew for the Septuagint had a different conception of what was going on in his Vorlage; for him, the scene was one in which God was addressing humans from the start. Nor is Isa 6 directly comparable, since the prophet there is without question the narrator of the whole report of the heavenly council meeting beginning in 6:1. Logically, if one is going to adapt the Septuagint reading in 40:6, one should also adapt the reading in LXX 40:2; for the Septuagint passage has its own integrity, just as the MT passage has its. Each conveys its own concept of what was going on in the text. Whether the Septuagint had a Vorlage different from the pre- and proto-MT 1QIsaa at 40:2 we do not know. Agreement between the Qumran text and Septuagint over against the MT is limited to the disputed reading in 40:6. The violence done to the MT text of Isa 40 – 55 by interjecting a totally isolated and unique first-person report of the prophet in 40:6 should outweigh the so-called text-critical evidence of agreement of the Septuagint and Qumran against MT at 40:6. To do so is to pillage the Septuagint, violating its integrity and the conception its tradent had of the full passage, as well as the sense of responsibility he had to his community, in order to “correct” the MT and thus violate its integrity. In effect, it is probably not a correction at all; it is probably a rewriting of the MT.34 The question that we had to address every year in our work on the UBS committee was to what stage of the text our decisions should be oriented. As noted above, one cannot accept willy-nilly either the earliest texts available or the text under the most constraints (whether masoretic or modern scholarly).35 Each year the discussions, always coming out of weeks of work addressing the problems we were assigned, came around to focus on the pre- and proto-MT period, 34   See now the perceptive study of Isa 40:1 – 11 by Seitz, “Divine Council.” It is regrettable that Seitz apparently did not consult Barthélemy, Critique textuelle, 2:278 – 80; it would have strengthened his case. 35   Modern scholarly constraints often exhibit the hermeneutic bias of the scholar or school of scholars. This is especially notable in the Greek New Testament where each pericope (determined by the scholars involved) is given a title, as in synopses of the Gospels; these often betray a Tendenz that may be difficult for the neophyte to resist. Modern translations, with the desire to assist the infrequent reader, often insert titles of sections within books of the Bible in italics; note that the NRSV continues the practice but in some editions places such titles in the bottom margin in brackets – supposedly so that they may still be available yet appear less authoritative.

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whichever provided the most critically responsible readings with all the evidence in hand. But in those sessions, though we always took account of the full context in which the problems appeared, we had not yet come fully to appreciate the proper role of exegesis or use of the tool of structure analysis of the pericopae addressed. Whether use of structure analysis would have changed a significant number of our actual decisions is a matter for review. I am now arguing that it should always be used, where indicated and feasible, to avoid violating the integrity of the tradents and witnesses consulted, all of whom were engaged in acts of devoted responsibility to ancient believing communities.36 To do so would put emphasis on the fact that all the textual witnesses we have are bequeathed to us by believing communities, and not simply by the individual tradents who served those communities. Attempting to establish the most critically responsible readings, in the early period of increasing stabilization of the text, puts emphasis on the canonical nature, especially in the sense of norma normans, of all the witnesses. And it puts into relief the pluriformity and even pluralism, not only within a given canon, but between texts as witnesses. Canon makes the difference,37 not in the sense of a closed, invariable “canon” (norma normata),38 but in the sense of a body of literature, probably still openended, in periods of intense canonical process, or stabilization, of text and canon. To attempt to reconstruct an “original” (pursuing individual authorial intentionality – the aim and Tendenz of most modern scholarship) may in effect decanonize the text by pressing back to a point before it had become the communities’ text. On the other hand, facilely to accept some “final form,” after a high degree of stabilization of the text and all the constraints injected into it, could possibly burden some passages with a history of traditioning that may have become rigid, preserving intervening misunderstandings and even errors, and unrelated directly to the life of a believing community.39 The valid middle term is to strive to establish a text near the beginning of the intensive stabilization process. Comparison of witnesses may help in discerning 36   This is not to say that tradents were free of error or that texts are free of corruption. They were and are not. Note factors 8 through 13 in the preliminary and final reports (Barthélemy, Preliminary and Interim Report, vi – vii; see also the first volume of the final report by Barthélemy, Critique textuelle, esp. 1:*107 – *11). The concept and method of text criticism advanced by the HUBP, but especially by the UBS HOTTP and in this essay, do not facilely resort to the argument of “scribal error” or textual corruption, but withhold such a judgment until all other possibilities are exhausted. All tradents, ancient disciples, students, school members, traditionists, scribes, translators, midrashists, and copyists wanted to be responsible to the communities they served; they wanted them to understand the text they were traditioning. Naturally, the understanding they wanted them to have was the “right” one (theirs, quite obviously); this is a sense of responsibility that must be respected and exposed for study. Sometimes, in doing so, they made errors. It is a question of attitude, even hermeneutic, on the part of the modern text critic. 37  Sanders, Torah and Canon, xv. 38   As in Beckwith, OT Canon of the NT Church; see the writer’s critique of Beckwith in Sanders, “Canon. Hebrew Bible.” 39   Remarkable as the MT is, when fully appreciated as the medieval grammarians indeed did, it nonetheless preserves some universally recognized improbabilities.

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a text partly preserved here, partly preserved there; if neither witness is violated, reconstruction based on the two lines of witness may be valid so long as the readings chosen are textually attested and modern conjectures held to an absolute minimum, if not totally eliminated. At this point text and canon (a text received from an actual ancient believing community) join forces against translating for the faithful, or the general public, what modern scholarship thinks an original author “ought to have said,” which often has changed through recent decades as scholarship has changed. In using the tool of structure analysis, if one finds there were two (or more) quite valid concepts of the text in the second period of text transmission, neither should be pillaged to “correct” the other, or to reconstruct in effect a third (modern) text, if to do so would be to violate both. In that case, I would like to argue that both witnesses, viz., the MT and the Septuagint (with an eye on other pre-MT witnesses such as the DSS), be honored and respected, and passed on by translation to current believing communities. For both pre-MT and proto-MT witnesses were functioning in believing communities at the time of the formation of the NT and at the nascence of formative Judaism.40 In the case, for instance, of the Isa 40:1 – 11 passage, it might possibly be decided that a modern translation offer both texts, horizontally or vertically parallel, on the same page. The decision to do so would need to be taken with great care and only after full debate by a responsible text-critical group. One thinks, for instance, of the quite different stories of Hannah and Anna in 1 Sam 1 – 2.41 Both tradents had quite different conceptions, probably culturally conditioned, of the story. Both were extant in the period of canonical focus. Another example would be the stories of David and Goliath reported in MT 1 Sam 16 – 18 and LXX 1  Kgdms  16 – 18.42 Others would include portions of Genesis and Isaiah, and the books of Jeremiah and Daniel; and there are more. Such double literary editions, unless it can be shown otherwise, which served different ancient believing communities over a period of time, should both be accorded the respect of being shared with believing communities today.43 There is ample canonical warrant for such a practice. The canonical biblical text includes many doublets, such as two forms of the Decalogue, Ps 18 and 2 Sam 22, Pss 14 and 53, 2 Kgs 18:13 – 20:19 and Isa 36 – 39, and numerous oth40   See the writer’s attempts to alter subsumed theories of inspiration (or the point at which a text was considered “original” [canonical?]) from that of God (or Holy Spirit or Shekinah or Truth) impacting only original “authors,” to God’s working all along the path of formation of these texts, not simplistically or just “paternally” preserving the “original,” as the early Calvinists claimed, but also developing and unfolding the texts along their pilgrimages in intense canonical process of stabilization and adaptation in believing communities: Sanders, Canon and Community, xv – xvii, and Sanders, “Biblical Criticism.” 41   Walters, “Hannah and Anna.” Arguably one might attempt to indicate also the conception of the story witnessed in 4QSama, but not mix them up in some brave attempt to decide what was “original” (pace the NRSV ad loc.). 42   Barthélemy, Gooding, Lust, and Tov, Story of David and Goliath. 43   This suggestion would be a friendly alternative to that made by Ulrich in “Double Literary Editions,” 101 – 16; see also Ulrich, “Biblical Scrolls,” 221 – 24.

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ers.44 The canon includes two distinct histories of the period from the united kingdom to the exile, and four distinct Gospels.45 Some modern translations include the Hebrew Esther among the canonical books and the Greek Esther in its entirety in the deutero-canonical section.46 Are the faithful ready to have a Bible that is pluriform to such an extent? The answer to that depends in large measure on how truly ecumenical Christian leaders have become and are willing to instruct the people in the pluriformities of Judaism and Christianity as they are adumbrated in the Bible itself, since the Bible already includes many doublets and dialogues within its canonical guises. One would not expect “leaders” who, for their own political purpose, insist on “biblical inerrancy” (whatever is meant by the term) to disturb their constituencies; but certainly Catholic and mainline Protestant leaders47 should by now be prepared to offer under one canonical cover, so to speak, the pluriform riches bequeathed us in the several canonical texts of ancient believing communities, and not continue the pretense that each is offering, in whatever authorized translation, the true Bible. Fortunately, efforts are under way to provide modern translations of the Septuagint, benefitting from recent text-critical work on the Septuagint text, so that students and pastors can see for themselves the sorts of Old Testament texts reflected in much of the New Testament, as well as compare the so-called double literary editions in their full integrity.48 Jerome was able to convince the church, eventually, that the First Testament should reflect Hebraica veritas in its text but retain a vaguely Septuagint order of books. In doing so he denied the integrity of, e. g., the Greek forms of Esther and Daniel49 by including their larger literary pluses only as addenda, thus eliminating the many smaller but significant literary differences throughout; he failed also to keep the canonical thrust of the tripartite Jewish canonical order. But he dared something far greater than we are here proposing; he affirmed the pro44   The apparatus in BHS to Ps 18 and 2 Sam 22, e. g., tends to lead the reader to deny the integrity of each and instead reconstruct in both cases some kind of single Ur-text (in effect, a third, modern text), whereas the masorot in the MT strive to preserve each doublet with its differences as received. Cf. Sanders, “Text and Canon: Concept and Method,” 135 – 40. 45   See also Nelson-Jones, Double Redaction. Tatian attempted to “harmonize” the four Gospels in his Diatesseron, which was rejected by the churches. 46   See TOB. Others, especially Catholic translations, include one Esther integrating the Greek pluses at the appropriate places in the translation of the shorter Hebrew text; see the NAB, Die Bibel: Einheitsübersetzung, and the NEB. The integrity of each should be respected. For a thorough structure analysis and comparison of three forms of Esther, the MT, and the GKʹK and L in Greek, see Dorothy, “Books of Esther”; each has its own structure, conception, and integrity. 47   Those who believe that the Enlightenment was a gift of God in due season and that the Holy Spirit continues to work surprises in the ongoing canonical process (though of course there are some universally recognized improbabilities in the text). 48   See Marguerite Harl (and colleagues), the first three volumes in the series La Bible d’Alexandrie: Harl and Alexandre, La Genèse; Le Boulluec and Sandevoir, L’Exode; Pralon and Harlé, Le Lévitique. Such a project is urgently needed in English. 49   As well as other bodies of canonical literature such as Proverbs, Jeremiah, and Exod 35 – 40.

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to-masoretic Jewish text of the First Testament extant in his time in Bethlehem, still retaining some of the riches of the Septuagint in his Latin translations of the canonical literature, and, of course, in the deutero-canonicals.50 The faithful are accustomed to seeing the long ending of Mark as well as John 7:53 – 8:11 in the margin [or in brackets] in some translations.51 Those who actually read the Bible know of the doublets, triplets, and other dialogues within a single canon. They know that the Bible is made up of all sorts of human responses to divine revelations. And they know the fluidity of text and canon that exists among the several recent translations they have on their shelves in churches and homes. For scholarship to continue tacitly to pretend to offer translations of some supposed “original” form of the text, each supposedly closer to it than the other, can only continue to sponsor denominationalism. The continuing process of stabilization should not deny the fluidity and adaptability that are equally integral parts of the same canonical process. Bibliography Aland, Kurt, and Barbara Aland. The Text of the New Testament. Translated by Erroll F. Rhodes. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans; Leiden: Brill, 1987. Barthélemy, Dominique. Critique textuelle de l’Ancien Testament. OBO 50. Fribourg: Presses universitaires; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1982, 1986, 1992. [Now 5 vols. to 2016.] Barthélemy, Dominique. “Histoire du texte hébraïque de l’Ancien Testament.” In Études d’histoire du texte de l’Ancien Testament, by Dominique Barthélemy, 341 – 64. OBO 21. Fribourg: Éditions universitaires; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1978. Barthélemy, Dominique. Les devanciers d’Aquila: Première publication intégrale du texte des fragments du Dodécaprophéton. VTSup 10. Leiden: Brill, 1963. Barthélemy, Dominique et al., eds. Preliminary and Interim Report on the Hebrew Old Testament Text Project. 5 vols. London and New York: UBS, 1973 – 80. Barthélemy, Dominique. “Redécouverte d’un chaînon manquant de l’histoire de la Septante.” RB 60 (1953) 18 – 29. Barthélemy, Dominique. “Text, Hebrew, History of.” In IDBSup 878 – 84. Barthélemy, Dominique, David W. Gooding, Johan Lust, and Emanuel Tov. The Story of David and Goliath: Textual and Literary Criticism. Fribourg: Presses universitaires, 1986. Beckwith, Roger T. The Old Testament Canon of the New Testament Church and Its Background in Early Judaism. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1985. Carr, David M. “Royal Ideology and the Technology of Faith: A Comparative Midrash Study of 1 Kgs 3:2 – 15.” PhD diss., Claremont Graduate School, 1988. 50   See Sanders, Review of OT Canon of the NT Church by Beckwith, and Sanders, “Canon. Hebrew Bible.” Jerome’s text, presumably the one he worked on in Bethlehem, was proto-masoretic, a result of the stabilization process that began in the first century BCE commensurate with Barthélemy’s thesis; the Vulgate is a rare, precious witness to the history of transmission of the text in the late fourth century CE, even though Jerome apparently retained a number of familiar Septuagint / OL readings against the Hebrew (as in Isa 40:6, noted above). 51   This is distinctly preferable to simply adding to the MT what another witness includes as though pretending thereby to reconstruct an “original” fuller text, as in the case of the paragraph that follows 1 Sam 10:27 in the NRSV; see ad loc. note r.

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Davidson, Robert. Wisdom and Worship. Philadelphia: Trinity International, 1990. Die Bibel: Einheitsübersetzung der Heiligen Schrift. Stuttgart: Katholisches Bibelwerk, 1980. Dorothy, Charles V. “The Books of Esther: Structure, Genre, and Textual Integrity.” PhD diss., Claremont Graduate School, 1989. [Now JSOTSup 187. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1997.] Fishbane, Michael A. Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel. Oxford: Clarendon, 1985. Fishbane, Michael A. The Garments of Torah: Essays in Biblical Hermeneutics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989. Goshen-Gottstein, Moshe H., ed. The Book of Isaiah. Vol. 2, Chapters 22 – 44. HUBP. Jerusalem: Magnes, 1981. Goshen-Gottstein, Moshe H., ed. The Book of Isaiah, Parts One and Two. HUBP. Jerusalem: Magnes, 1975. Goshen-Gottstein, Moshe H., ed. The Book of Isaiah: Sample Edition with Introduction. Jerusalem: Magnes, 1965. Goshen-Gottstein, Moshe H. “Hebrew Biblical Manuscripts: Their History and Their Place in the HUBP Edition.” Bib 48 (1967) 243 – 90. Goshen-Gottstein, Moshe H. “Theory and Practice of Textual Criticism.” Textus 3 (1963) 130 – 58. Harl, Marguerite, and Monique Alexandre, trans. La Genèse. La Bible d’Alexandrie 1. Paris: Cerf, 1986. Hays, Richard B. Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989. Knierim, Rolf P. “Criticism of Literary Features, Form, Tradition, and Redaction.” In The Hebrew Bible and Its Modern Interpreters, edited by Douglas A. Knight and Gene M. Tucker, 123 – 65. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1985. Knierim, Rolf P., and George W. Coats. Numbers. [FOTL 4. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005]. Le Boulluec, Alain, and Pierre Sandevoir, trans. L’Exode. La Bible d’Alexandrie 2. Paris: Cerf, 1989. Mulder, Martin J. “The Transmission of the Biblical Text.” In Mikra: Text, Translation, Reading and Interpretation of the Hebrew Bible in Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity, edited by Martin J. Mulder, 87 – 135. CRINT 2. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1988. Nelson-Jones, Richard. The Double Redaction of the Deuteronomistic History. JSOTSup 18. Sheffield: JSOT, 1981. Pralon, Didier, and Paul Harlé, trans. Le Lévitique. La Bible d’Alexandrie 3. Paris: Cerf, 1988. Rosenblatt, Jason P., and Joseph C. Sitterson Jr., eds. “Not in Heaven”: Coherence and Complexity in Biblical Narrative. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991. Sanders, James A. “Adaptable for Life: The Nature and Function of Canon.” In From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, by James A. Sanders, 9 – 39. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987. [Original in Magnalia Dei: The Mighty Acts of God: Essays on the Bible and Archaeology in Memory of G. Ernest Wright, edited by Frank M. Cross, Werner E. Lemke, and Patrick D. Miller, 531 – 60. New York: Doubleday, 1976.] Sanders, James A. “Biblical Criticism and the Bible as Canon.” In From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, by James A. Sanders, 75 – 86. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987. [Original USQR 32 (1977) 157 – 65.] Sanders, James A. Canon and Community: A Guide to Canonical Criticism. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984. Sanders, James A. “Canon. Hebrew Bible.” Forthcoming [in ABD 1:837 – 52].

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Sanders, James A. “Canonical Criticism: An Introduction.” In Le canon de l’Ancien Testament: Sa formation et son histoire, edited by Jean-Daniel Kaestli and Otto Wermelinger, 341 – 62. Geneva: Labor et Fides, 1984. Sanders, James A. “Canonical Hermeneutics.” In From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, by James A. Sanders, 61 – 73. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987. [Original in Canon and Community: A Guide to Canonical Criticism, by James A. Sanders, 46 – 60. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984.] Sanders, James A. “From Isaiah 61 to Luke 4.” In Christianity, Judaism and Other Greco-Roman Cults: Studies for Morton Smith at Sixty. Part 1, New Testament, edited by Jacob Neusner, 75 – 106. Studies in Judaism in Late Antiquity 12. Leiden: Brill, 1975. Sanders, James A. “From Sacred Story to Sacred Text.” In From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, by James A. Sanders, 175 – 91. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987. Sanders, James A. “Hebrew Bible and Old Testament: Textual Criticism in Service of Biblical Studies.” Forthcoming [In Hebrew Bible or Old Testament? Studying the Bible in Judaism and Christianity, edited by Roger Brooks and John J. Collins, 41 – 68. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990.] Sanders, James A. “A Multivalent Text: Psalm 151:34 Revisited.” Hebrew Annual Review 8 (1984) 167 – 84. Sanders, James A. Review of The Old Testament Canon of the New Testament Church, by Roger Beckwith. ThTo 44 (1987) 131 – 34. Sanders, James A. “Text and Canon: Concepts and Method.” In From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, by James A. Sanders, 125 – 51. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987. [Original JBL 98 (1979) 5 – 29.] Sanders, James A. “Text and Canon: Old Testament and New.” In Mélanges Dominique Barthélemy: Études bibliques offertes à l’occasion de son 60e anniversaire, edited by Pierre Casetti, Othmar Keel, and Adrian Schenker, 373 – 94. OBO 38. Fribourg: Presses universitaires; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1981. Sanders, James A. Torah and Canon. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1972. [2nd ed. Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2005.] Seitz, Christopher R. “The Divine Council: Temporal Transition and New Prophecy in the Book of Isaiah.” JBL 109 (1990) 229 – 47. Simon, Richard. Histoire critique du Vieux Testament. Rotterdam: Leers, 1685. Reprint, Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1971. Talmon, Shemaryahu. “The Old Testament Text.” In The Cambridge History of the Bible, Vol. 1, From the Beginnings to Jerome, edited by Peter R. Ackroyd and C. F. Evans, 159 – 99. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970. [Pp. 164 – 70 reprinted in Qumran and the History of the Biblical Text, edited by Frank M. Cross and Shemaryahu Talmon, 8 – 12. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975.] Tov, Emanuel, ed. The Greek Minor Prophets Scroll from Nahal Hever (8HevXIIgr). ˙ ˙ DJD 8. Oxford: Clarendon, 1990. Tov, Emanuel. “The Text of the Old Testament.” In The World of the Bible, edited by Adam S. van der Woude, 168 – 81. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1986. Traduction oecuménique de la Bible. Paris: Cerf, 1976. Ulrich, Eugene C. “The Biblical Scrolls from Qumran Cave 4: An Overview and a Progress Report on Their Publication.” RevQ 54 (14:2) (1989) 207 – 28. Ulrich, Eugene C. “Double Literary Editions of Biblical Narratives and Reflections on Determining the Form to Be Translated.” In Perspectives on the Hebrew Bible: Essays in Honor of Walter J. Harrelson, edited by James L. Crenshaw, 101 – 16. Macon GA: Mercer University Press, 1988. Walters, Stanley D. “Hannah and Anna: The Greek and Hebrew Texts of 1 Samuel 1.” JBL 107 (1988) 385 – 412.

6 Adaptable for Life: The Nature and Function of Canon Introduction (1987) “Adaptable for Life” (1972) was written as a follow-up to Torah and Canon (1972) soon after the manuscript for the latter had gone off to press. There I had addressed the problem of why “Joshua” or, at least, the traditions it represents, did not end up in the Torah that Ezra brought back with him from Babylonia to Jerusalem (Neh 8), whereas almost all the recitals of Israel’s epic history in the prophets, psalms, and historiography included and often concluded with the entrance into the land. But I felt I needed to address an equally important question, and that was how the Ezra Torah could so quickly claim the authority it did, and, furthermore, how that same Torah could maintain that authority in and for Judaism for centuries to come. In the introduction to Torah and Canon I had said: This essay began as an effort to look at the Bible holistically – not to seek its unity (no one is doing that these days), but to describe its shape and its function. It soon became clear that the origin and essence of the Bible lay in the concept of Torah, those early traditions of ancient Israel which not only had a life of their own but gave life to those who knew them and molded their own lives around them. It was soon also clear that in that life process lay the meaning of canon.1

But I had written the introduction, like all authors I think, after I had written the book. The introduction represented thinking already somewhat beyond the contents of the book. I felt I needed to address the question of authority in a really fresh way. “Adaptable for Life” was that attempt. It addresses both questions: how that authority arose and how it was thereafter maintained. I knew I had to get away from the conscious intentions and decisions of early Jews in dealing with the question. There was also the other problem, dealt with to some extent in Torah and Canon, of how it was that only the Bible folk, the heirs of old Israel and Judah, survived the successive power flows of the late Iron Age before stability once more was assured, not this time by Egypt but rather by Persia. Why did Judaism alone survive? The Samaritan question could be bracketed for two reasons: the origin and early history of the Samaritans was and still is somewhat uncertain; but more important, they, too, were Torah folk. The others, Israel’s neighbors, subject to the same power pressures for assimilation and therefore identity extinction, succumbed and disappeared. *  First published 1976. 1  Sanders, Torah and Canon, ix – x.

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Even so, it was not Israel and Judah that survived. It was a new Israel, Judaism, born out of the ashes of the old in exile. “Adaptable for Life” advances the thesis that the resurrection of Judaism out of the death of the old was due to the relecture, the rereading or reciting of old preexilic traditions, indeed, pre-conquest or pre-identity-with-the-land traditions, that gave survival power to those who elected because of that to keep what identity they could of their preexilic existence. Torah, indeed, had survival power. It was being read and reread all through the diaspora by what we now know was a remnant, precisely those who retained the old, but adapted, identity. But that same power for life also transferred to the readers of those traditions: they refused to assimilate. That death-and-life experience became thereafter indelibly imprinted on the corpo­rate Jewish psyche or lēb (heart). It was serious reading and re-reading of the old traditions that provided the staying power for that remnant. The non-remnant assimilated just as other national identities were dissipating and assimilating. But that very act, or process, of reading and re-reading in diaspora – and even life in Palestine was a form of diaspora under dominant Persia – where Ezra’s Torah was edited and shaped, indicated the considerable malleability of the shaping of the traditions. There was a core. There was an essence. There was continuity or stability in those traditions. But there was also adaptability. These observations raised the question of hermeneutics in a poignant way. Not hermeneutics in the way most exegetes, interpreters, and theologians were talking about hermeneutics in the early 1970s or since, but the hermeneutics of those very believing communities that experienced what Ezekiel called the resurrection (Ezek 37). How did they read the traditions that they yielded such existential power for them? The old traditions that survived and were shaped by the death-and-life experience of exile became Torah for all time, but a Torah adaptable and stable enough to be, indeed, not only a lamp and a light on life’s pilgrimage, but also life in the land when Torah is not forgotten but rather is imprinted for joy on the heart (Ps 119:105 – 12) just as Jeremiah had hoped (Jer 31:31 – 34). Such was the origin, then, of the old Jewish concept of Torah being the Book of Life. Its power for life, then, is not to be thought of in philosophical existentialist terms primarily; for its life-giving power, which had been “proved” in the resurrection experience, continued to nourish Judaism and to provide it with a sure guide to lifestyle. It was not just a matter of survival; it was also a matter of life’s ethos. The authority of such power was there for the remnant to behold and wonder at before that authority was expressed in terms of Mosaic authorship or acceptance by some sort of authoritative council. It was indelibly imprinted on the corporate soul of Judaism. Of note since the original article was written are Wilson, The Editing of the Hebrew Psalter; Wise, “The Dead Sea Scrolls, Part 1.” On the new impetus in the study of the Pseudepigrapha, see Charlesworth, The OT Pseudepigrapha, and Denis, Introduction aux pseudépigraphes grecs.

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I The study of the canon of the Bible, and especially of the OT, is today in a state of flux. One senses this especially if one re-reads, at the present moment, the standard introductions and handbooks on the subject. For the most part they exhibit consensus on the meaning of canon without broaching the problems of canon as they should be put today. Discrepancy in judgment may appear on how early or how late one may speak of closure of the three sections of the OT; but, save for a few hints otherwise, standard discussions of canon deal almost exclusively with last things in the canonical process rather than with the early factors that gave rise to the phenomenon of canon as Judaism inherited it. The sense of flux comes in reading such discussions in the light of what has been happening in the last several years in biblical studies generally. Today, I am convinced, we cannot deal adequately with the question of the structure of canon, or what is in and what is out, until we have explored seriously and extensively the question of the function of canon. It is time to attempt to write a history of the early canonical process.2 Out of what in ancient Israel’s common life did the very idea of canon itself arise? The concept of canon is located in the tension between two poles: stability and adaptability, but discussions since Semler3 in 1772 have dealt almost exclusively with the former and rarely with the latter. Hence, all the brave efforts to work on hermeneutics in the past fifteen years have failed, I think, for the lack of work on canonical criticism, for herme2   In a manner of speaking, George Ernest Wright has been doing this, from his perspective of a canon within the canon, all along. If one reviews his published work in biblical theology from 1937 to the present [to 1969] one witnesses a process at work: “Exegesis and Eisegesis”; “Terminology of OT Religion”; “How Did Early Israel Differ”; Challenge of Israel’s Faith; “Neo-Orthodoxy and the Bible”; “Interpreting the OT”; “Christian Interpreter as Biblical Critic”; OT against Its Environment; “Unity of the Bible”; God Who Acts; “Wherein Lies the Unity of the Bible?”; Biblical Doctrine of Man in Society; “Unity of the Bible,” JRT; “Unity of the Bible,” SJT; with Fuller, Book of the Acts of God; Rule of God; “History and Reality”; OT and Theology. A beginning on a history of the canonical process is attempted in Sanders, Torah and Canon (1972). From a different perspective but congruous in certain presuppositions and basic theses is Smith, Palestinian Parties and Politics. From the NT perspective, see Sundberg, OT of the Early Church; Sundberg, “‘OT’: A Christian Canon”; Sundberg, “Toward a Revised History of the NT Canon.” The trend of discussion on canon in the NT can be seen in Appel, Kanon und Kirche; Käsemann, “Canon of the NT”; and esp. in Käsemann, Das Neue Testament als Kanon. Käsemann’s own contributions to the latter (pp. 336 – 410) are especially valuable. I would still insist that the problem of whether the OT was Christian did not arise in the church until the second century CE. The problem of the first century, and hence of the NT, was whether the NT was biblical, i. e., whether God really had done another righteousness, in Christ. Brevard S. Childs, while intensely and rightly interested in the nature and function of canon, is not primarily interested in a history of the early canonical process; see Sanders, Review of Biblical Theology in Crisis; Sanders, Review of Old Testament and Theology. Childs’s position was anticipated in part in Sanders, “Habakkuk in Qumran.” Similar kinds of probing may be seen in Barr, Old and New in Interpretation, 149 – 200; Lohfink, “Die historische und christliche Auslegung des AT”; and Stuhlmacher, “Neues Testament und Her­meneutik.” See also Wright, “Historical Knowledge and Revelation” (surely, in part, misunderstanding). 3  Semler, Abhandlung von freier Untersuchung des Canon. Cf. Hornig, Die Anfänge der historisch-kritischen Theologie; Schmittner, Kritik und Apologetik.

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neutics must be viewed as the middle term of the axis that lies between stability and adaptability. Robert Pfeiffer’s chapter in his Introduction is one of the finest of the older liberal discussions of canon.4 And yet, Pfeiffer started with the finding of the scroll in the temple in 621 BCE: he started with the concept of stability and the necessary observations about Deut 31:26. It seemed quite normal at the time, I am sure, and one can understand it today even though we are in a quite different Zeitgeist, to cast about for the earliest evidence of when a certain body of traditional literature became stabilized; and Deuteronomy seems to provide that evidence for the Pentateuch. The work of the exilic or priestly editors then is usually mentioned, followed by observations about the work of Ezra with evidence to substantiate it in the Chronicler. So much for the Law. In the case of the Prophets the discussions start with citations from Ben Sira 48 and 49, written about 190 BCE, to show that the books of the Three and the Dodecapropheton must have become by that time the prophetic corpus as we know it now – with a door left ajar to allow for the embarrassing results of literary and historical criticism that some isolated passages in the Prophets may have dated from Ptolemaic, Seleucid, or even Maccabean times. What is rather remarkable is the tendency to read back as far as possible the closure of some portions of the Writings. This has especially been the case for the Psalter. Before the discovery of the large Psalms Scroll from Qumran Cave 11 a general consensus had been reached placing the stabilization of the masoretic collection of 150 psalms (give or take Ps 151) in the late Persian period. Supported by what I suppose one might call a general neo-orthodox atmosphere, at least certainly a conservative one, conjoined with a growing nationalist hermeneutic in Jewish scholarship, assertions outreached the evidence for such a judgment. A review of the evidence advanced by even the greatest names in scholarship for such an early dating of the closure of the MT‑150 Psalter exposes rather dramatically the paucity of basis for it, as well as the range played by impertinent data.5 The only sound thesis that can be built on the now-available evidence is that while the MT‑150 collection may well have stabilized for some sects in Judaism already in the middle of the second century BCE (considerably after the Persian period), for other segments of the Jewish community the Psalter was open-ended well into the first century CE. The prevailing view that the proto-MT text of the Law and the Prophets became the official text, and became largely stabilized, in the period of the some hundred years from Hillel to the fall of Jerusalem in 69 CE, may possibly be a parallel and analogous historical picture for what hap4

 Pfeiffer, Introduction to the OT, 50 – 70; cf. his article in the IDB, s. v. “Canon of the OT.”   See Sanders, “Cave 11 Surprises.” The real value of the very flaccid references in the Ben Sira prologue, in Philo (De vita contemplativa 25), and Luke 24:44, must now be reviewed in the light of present evidence. See the excellent remarks of Roberts, Review of The Dead Sea Psalms Scroll, 185, in this regard, contra his earlier thesis in Roberts, “OT Canon: A Suggestion.” Cf. Ackroyd, “Open Canon.” For an early pre-Christian date of closure and a very conservative reconstruction of the meager available evidence in the light of it, see Beckwith, OT Canon of the NT Church. 5

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pened to the Psalter in that same all-crucial period.6 At any rate, the question of the dates of the individual psalms remains uninfluenced by the independent question of the stabilization of the contents and order of the MT Psalter, just as the text-critical question of the individual variants for the several psalms has to be dealt with on its own methodological grounds.7 Social and political factors were at work in the period of Roman hegemony that just simply had not been there in such degree before and that caused an intensive, concentrated amount of scholarly effort on the part of Palestinian Jews resulting in the sorts of evidence of stabilization in the period available to us today. Despite the apparent lack of clear reference to Jabneh,8 there is abundant indirect evidence for the convening, at the end of the first century CE, of a group of rabbis who felt constrained by the compelling events of the day, largely the threat of disintegration due to the loss of Jerusalem and her religious symbols, to make decisions regarding the contents of the Hagiographa.9 The remarkable thing about the assumed council at Jabneh is not that it did not settle absolutely all questions. The remarkable thing, in the light of the way the question of canon should be broached today, is that so few questions remained after Jabneh about what was in (soiled the hands) and what was out. When one looks at the whole question of canon, from its inception in preexilic days, the authority of the supposed council of Jabneh is remarkable indeed. And the fact that some scattered debate continued into the second century about the canonicity of Esther, Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes, and even Proverbs and Ezekiel, should, in that perspective, properly be viewed as minimal in the extreme. The effectiveness of the conciliar decisions at Jabneh (or what we extrapolate from the plethora of evidence for a Jabneh council) points as does very little else to the enormity of the fall of Jerusalem in 69 CE in the religious (not to speak of the social, economic, and political) history of Judaism. And it should caution us today against reading back into the earlier period what Judaism became in the first century.10 Dramatic changes took place in Judaism in the first century of the Common Era that affected the bottom end of the canonical process.  6   I here reaffirm my judgment as stated in “Cave 11 Surprises,” 106 – 9 – to dismiss 11QPsa as the earliest example of a Jewish prayer book is unwarranted: the Psalter itself, in whatever early form, is the earliest example of a Jewish prayer book. To the evidence adduced in “Cave 11 Surprises,” 105n10, see now other evidence, especially from 4QIsac, adduced by Siegel, “Employment of Palaeo-­Hebrew Characters.”  7   On the dating of individual psalms by linguistic criteria, see the recent work of Avi Hurvitz of Hebrew University. In regard to the larger question of text transmis­sion see Cross, “History of the Biblical Text”; Cross, “Contribu­tion of the Discoveries at Qumran”; Talmon, “Aspects of the Textual Transmission.” What is really needed now, as I tried to point out in Sanders, “Text Criticism and the NJV Torah,” is a critical review of method in text criticism – actually how to make a judgment in “establishing the text.” This is sharply indicated now by the work of the Hebrew University Bible Project and the International Old Testament Text Critical Committee of the United Bible Societies as over against the results now emerging in the fascicles of the BHS.  8   See Lewis, “What Do We Mean by Jabneh?”  9   See the work of Neusner, including Development of a Legend and Rabbinic Traditions about the Pharisees. 10  Sanders, Dead Sea Psalms Scroll, 157 – 59.

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Current discussions of the canon of the OT have to begin, therefore, from a different perspective. This new approach to the question of canon I have called canonical criticism.11 A new departure for the study of canon is necessary for a number of reasons: the need to move away from the peculiar views offered by the Jabneh mentality; the need to account for the fluidity (to a greater or lesser extent) both in text and content of the Prophets and Writings right up to the period of Pharisaic hegemony under Salome Alexandra;12 the need to account for the great pluralism in Judaism in the early Jewish period; and the need to account for a basic shift in hermeneutic techniques in proto-Pharisaic circles away from contextual to atomistic midrash.13 Largely because of the recovery of the Qumran literature, but also in part because of the intensive review that recovery has caused scholarship to engage in of the other Jewish literature datable to early Judaism (including apocryphal, pseudepigraphic, and neotestamental),14 we now know that the Jabneh mentality cannot dominate the way we must now think about the canonical process up to the first centuries BCE and CE. Not only is there no clear evidence of such punctiliar and conciliar decision making in the period before Jabneh,15 there is also no evidence prior to the first century CE of the kind of standardization of norms by which that century is now so well characterized. A new attitude is indicated in thinking about the canonical process and must be at the heart of canonical criticism.

II Current thinking on the OT exhibits a kind of frustration about what is in and what is out of the canon. Behind the frustration is a tension between the Jabneh mentality and the modern question arising out of the ecumenical movement: what shall we say in answer to the question of what is canonical for church and synagogue today? Some of the deuterocanonical books that Roman Catholics value to some degree as authoritative, but that Jews and most Protestants do not consider at all canonical, were quite clearly au­thoritative for many Jews in the pre-Jabneh period. Are they in or out? Should they be graded separately and 11

 Sanders, Torah and Canon, ix – xx.   See Barthélemy, “Les tiqquné sopherim.” 13   See the pivotal article by Bloch, “Midrash.” Paren­thetically, it should be noted that because it is the nature of canonical or authoritative communal traditions that they are adaptable to the needs of the ongoing communities, computer analyses of style for determining authorship that do not use for control data literature (1) that is not canonical and (2) of absolutely known single authorship, are limited in value. 14   Pseudepigraphal studies have received a new impetus both in this country and abroad in the past ten years. See Denis, Introduction aux pseudépigraphes grecs, ix – xx. 15   Pace Finkelstein, “Maxim of the Anshe Keneset ha-Gedolah”; cf. Hoenig, Great Sanhedrin. This is not to deny the need to explain what Finkelstein cites as his evidence, e. g., ARNA, folio 65 n23 in Schechter’s edition of Vienna, 1887; see Goldin, Fathers according to Rabbi Nathan. 12

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individually? Nor do these questions touch on the very sensitive problem for us of what is in the canon in the Eastern churches.16 These modern, “relevant” questions serve but to stress the need for canonical criticism to turn, for the present, to the other pole of the canonical process. Let us begin at the beginning. Exorcising the Jabneh mentality and turning our back on the frustrations it has engendered requires concentration on the basic concept of canon itself. Because nearly all discussions of canon start with some etymological observation about the word “canon” (Qaneh-kanon), the aspect of “normative rule” provides a mindset from the beginning. Attention is drawn immediately to the question of the size of the rule. How long is it? Why is it that long? What were the criteria that determined its length? This is the pole of stability. But the other aspect of the idea of canon, always in tension with it, is not its length or structure, but rather its nature and function. And it is on the nature and function of canon that canonical criticism puts the prior emphasis. What does it do? How did it get started in the first place? A priori, the first consideration of canonical criticism is the phenomenon of repetition. Repeti­tion requires that the tradition be both stable and adaptable. Minimally speaking, it is the nature of canon to be “remembered” or contemporized. The fact that begs explanation is that of the earliest rise of a tradition. Otto Eissfeldt is right to begin his chapter on canon with what he calls prehistory. “It was only in the second century AD . . . that the formation of the Old Testament canon came to an end. But its prehistory begins centuries or even millennia earlier. Its starting-point is the belief that particular utter­ances of men are in reality the word of God and as such can claim for themselves special authority.”17 But because Eissfeldt limited himself in his prehistory to the concept of “word,” he goes on only to speak of “[s]ix different kinds of words which rank as divine words.” And in doing so he further limits his thinking to three of them, judgment, word, and directive (mishpat, dabar, and torah), which narrows his cursive prehistory to collections of legal material and how they grew, “the replacement of older bodies of law by newer ones.” And then, forthwith, he deals with the single aspect of inclusion-exclusion and leaves aside a discussion that could have been very fruitful indeed. Aage Bentzen, in his introduction to the OT, has a very pregnant sentence in his chapter on canon that he, too, fails to develop: “Another germ of a formation of Canon is probably also found in what has been called ‘the historical Credo of Israel.’”18 Bentzen is surely right, for concentration on how little legal codes became larger legal codes is not only a Holzweg for understanding the canonical process in general, it overlooks the essential nature of the Torah itself in which those codes are embedded. Two of the essential observations one must make about the OT are (1) there are no laws, with the status of law, outside the 16   See the trenchant article on the complex situation with the Enoch materials by Milik, “Problèmes de la littérature hénochique.” 17  Eissfeldt, OT: An Introduction, 560. 18  Bentzen, Introduction to the OT, 24.

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Torah; and (2) the Torah itself is not primarily legal literature. It was in part to probe such observations that I wrote Torah and Canon, and I do not want to repeat all that here. But canonical criticism must deal with the observation that it is the Torah that gives authority to the laws within it, and not the other way around. Building on the observations of Gunnar Östborn, and on one’s own unbiased reading, one must insist that a primary definition of Torah cannot be “law.”19 It is a story, first and foremost, with Yahweh, the God of Israel (in all his syncretistic makeup),20 as the prime actor and speaker. Biblical scholarship has clearly shown that the laws in the Pentateuch actually date from widely varying times and were in some measure the common property of the ancient Near East. Ancillary observations such as that of the lack of laws in Joshua (despite the formulary introduction in 24:25 ff.), or in Samuel or Kings, despite the insistence therein that Israel’s kings constantly made judicial decisions and ruled largely by royal decree, simply force the question of why Eissfeldt’s “collections of judgments” are to be found only in the Pentateuch. (Ezekiel’s so-called Temple Torah in chs. 40 – 48 did not make it in.)

III The Torah is best defined as a story (mythos) with law (ethos) embedded in it.21 The observation that has imposed itself most strongly in the past genera­tion is that this Torah story is to be found in scattered places in the Bible, in shorter or longer compass – without the laws (or, to put it the way it is usually put, without Sinai). Gerhard von Rad has called these passages, especially those in Deut 26:5 – 9 and Josh 24, ancient Israel’s ancient credo,22 and George Ernest Wright has called them confessional recitals of God’s mighty acts.23 Touching directly on the question of the nature of canon, Wright calls the Bible the Book of the Acts of God.24 Martin Noth in turn built on von Rad’s thesis by a rather far-reaching tradition-critical study of the Pentateuch.25

19

 Östborn, Tōrā in the OT; Östborn, Cult and Canon.   See Alt, “God of the Fathers”; Eissfeldt, “El and Yahweh,” 35 ff.; Cross, “Yahweh and the God of the Patriarchs”; Cross, “Divine Warrior”; Wright, OT and Theology, 70 – 150. From a different perspective, see Smith, “Common Theology of the ANE.” 21  Sanders, Torah and Canon, 31 ff. 22   von Rad, Problem of the Hexateuch, 1 – 78. 23  Wright, God Who Acts. Wright has clarified his confessional position vis-à-vis the systematic approach of Eichrodt on the one hand, and the form-critical approach of von Rad on the other, in OT and Theology; see my review of the latter in Sanders, Review of The Old Testament and Theology. 24   Wright and Fuller, Book of the Acts of God. 25  Noth, History of Pentateuchal Traditions. The ET is admirably done by B. W. Anderson. He has enhanced the volume with a critical introduction (pp. xiii – xxii) and an analytical outline of the Pentateuch based on the source-critical and tradition-critical methods combined (pp.  261 – 76). 20

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The position generally shared by these three scholars and those that follow them is that the Pentateuch, or Torah, is the credo, or confessional recital, writ large. To it have been added, according to Noth, a number of other traditions, including Sinai. Wright’s position differs largely in his insistence that the Torah including Sinai stems from actual historical occurrence indicated (though not proved) by archaeology. Von Rad’s work on the credo, and his and Noth’s form-critical and tradi­ tion-critical work on the Hexateuch, have come under careful scrutiny in recent years.26 The bulk of the criticism is to the effect that the so-called credo is not ancient at all, but rather Deuteronomic, and that in form Deut 26:5 – 9 is not a Gattung at all; but rather all such passages are historical summaries embedded within larger forms such as the covenantal formulary, or simply parts of prayers of thanksgiving, petition, catechesis, or the like.27 These main points of criticism are in large part justified, especially the observation that the recitals are not ancient in the form that we inherit them. Surely Deut 26:5 – 9 is in every crucial turn of phrase Deuteronomic.28 The neo-orthodox Zeitgeist of the 1930s permitted the use of the term “credo” without criticism until 1948.29 Wright’s term “recital” is a more felicitous word for, as the critics of von Rad have pointed out, the summaries seem to be largely catechetical in form. But criticism of the main point of the summaries must itself not be permitted to get out of hand. The history of scholarship shows that often the pendulum-swing from one Zeitgeist to the following tends to annihilate what ought to remain of earlier work as well as what was tenuous about it. (One wonders if some of the fine work done in the last ten years on wisdom in the OT will be forced to languish for a while when the mood changes once more.) Critics of von Rad have seemed content to leave the impression, almost in the manner of assumptions made in the era of source criticism, that the Deuteronomists created the historical summary form without probing the question of where it had itself come from.

26   See, e. g., Hyatt, “Ancient Historical Credo.” In addition to the criticism of Artur Weiser, C. H. W. Brekelmans, Leonhard Rost, Georg Fohrer (ibid., 156 – 65), and Calum Carmichael (ibid., 169 – 70), see Perlitt, Bundestheologie im AT, and Lohfink, “Zum ‘kleinen geschichtlichen Credo.’” Lohfink’s is perhaps the most thoroughgoing critique of the lot. Note also Lohfink’s felicitous emphasis on the Nachleben, or continuing life, of a tradition. Hyatt’s argument (“Ancient Historical Credo,” 168) that Judaism “came to consider its confession of faith as embodied in the Shema . . . and . . . the Shema in the narrow sense says nothing about a saving act in history; only in Num. 15:14 . . .” is something of a tour de force. It is the same sort of observation as that of Sinai’s not being mentioned in the recitals. The centrality to Judaism of the Torah mythos can be seen in Neh 9, Dan 9, and throughout the Jewish prayer book. Is it possible to have a synagogue service without mention of it? Cf. Goldin, Song at the Sea. 27   On OT catecheses, see Soggin, “Kultätiologische Sagen und Katechese”; Laaf, Die Pascha-Feier lsraels; and Loza, “Les catéchèses étiologiques.” 28   But this means only that the story was adaptable to seventh / sixth-century idiom, not that Deuteronomy created the story. 29  Weiser, Einleitung in das AT; ET: The OT: Its Formation and Development, 81 – 99.

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Without faulting Wright’s term “recital,” I prefer the term mythos, or “Torah story.”30 The idea of mythos admits of a wider range of questions concerning the function of the summaries. Form criticism is a useful tool in biblical criticism, or within any criticism of any literature, but it can never stand alone. The form of a literary passage cannot possibly answer all the questions necessary concerning it. Indeed, its form may be deceptive, for the ancient speaker or writer may well have intended to pour new wine into an old wineskin, precisely in order to make a point that literary conformity might not have permitted him or her to make.31 But more than that, as in the case of the larger question of canon, one must always ask what function a literary piece served, originally as well as in its subsequent contexts. What did these recitals or Torah stories do? The answers to that question will, I think, preclude any suggestion or assumption that the school of Deuteronomy invented them. There can be little question that Deuteronomy underscored their importance, just as there is little question the intrusion of Deuteronomy into the old JE story line (between Numbers and Joshua, and then eventual displacement of Joshua) had a profound effect on Judaism and its ability in exile, by God, to arise out of the ashes of the old nationalist cult.32

30   The term mythos is chosen to avoid the problems of other words used to date. But I do not thereby wish to prejudice the question of historicity. So far as I am concerned Israel’s mythos was at base historical. See Childs, Myth and Reality in the OT, 101 – 2, and Wright, OT and Theology, 39 – 69. I should really prefer the word “gospel,” but since the form-critical study of “gospel” continues to be in a muddle, one simply cannot use it. Dennis McCarthy’s suggestion of “commonplace” (from Greek rhetoric, topos) in “What Was Israel’s Historical Creed?” is a possibility, but not immediately appealing. I prefer the manner in which Jacob Neusner uses the term “Torah-myth”: see Neusner, History and Torah; Neusner, Way of Torah; Neusner, There We Sat Down. See also the way Amos Wilder uses “story” as the means of God’s speaking and the typically biblical medium of man’s relating God’s actions, in Language of the Gospel, 64 ff. Martin Buber used the word “myth” in the way I mean it in his Legend of the Baal-Shem, xi: “The Jews are a people that has never ceased to produce myth . . . The religion of Israel has at all times felt itself endangered by this stream, but it is from it, in fact, that Jewish religiousness has at all times received its inner life.” The thesis being advanced by F. M. Cross Jr. and Paul D. Hanson, that ancient Near Eastern myth was, according to the period and the needs of the community, more or less historicized, is not, I think, contradicted by this use of the word mythos: cf. Hanson, “Jewish Apocalyptic”; Hanson, “OT Apocalyp­tic Reexamined”; Hanson, “Zechariah 9.” If Immanuel Kant and Max Weber described Western humanity’s maturity as transition from mythos to logos, and a process of rationalization of thought processes and structures (cf. O’Dea, Sociology of Religion, 41 – 47), then it must be admitted that there are many forces today contradicting the truth or validity of that transition as maturation. One thinks of the sociologists of knowledge (Karl Mannheim, Peter Berger, Thomas Luckmann), on the one hand, and the structural anthropologists on the other, especially the work of Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, and of his student François Lacan; cf. Barthes et al., Analyse structurale et exégèse biblique. From another direction, there is also the work of Campbell, as in his Myths to Live By. 31   Sanders, “Dissenting Deities,” n. 12. 32  Sanders, Torah and Canon, 36 – 53.

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IV If one reflects on the basic idea of canon, what he or she must probe is the fact of repetition – a priori, the first time an idea was taken up again it passed the immense barrier from a first telling to a second. One must dwell on that phenomenon above all others. My colleague Theodor Gaster insists that it may have been only for its entertainment or aesthetic value. And that is right, perhaps, in the case of songs and certain types of stories and proverbs. They afford distraction and release, or alter moods to some desired end. Aesthetics would clearly have been a determinant in the phenomenon of repetition. But there are many collections of such materials that do not a canon make.33 One then must add the other criterion, function. Whatever else canon does, it serves to engage the two questions: who am I, or we, and what are we to do? This is the classical understanding of the function of canon, and it has not been improved on. Canon functions, for the most part, to provide indications of the identity as well as the lifestyle of the ongoing community that reads it. The history of the biblical concept of canon started with the earliest need to repeat a common or community story precisely because it functioned to inform them who they were and what they were to do even in their later situation. But in the case of identity stories (and it is out of some sort of self-understanding that lifestyle is derived; a community’s ethos issues from its mythos) it is most unlikely that there was ever a set form, either at the beginning or in the subsequent stages of repetition. Here Wright is surely correct: the basic elements in the recitals derive from history. And those basic elements were both the common property of the people and the constant factor in whatever form they might take, whether song, hymn, prayer, catechesis, covenant formulary, “creed,” or what not. The more important such stories are to the life and existence of a people (that is, the more they are remembered or repeated) the less valuable they are apt to be to modern historians with their rather peculiar needs – since, of necessity, each repeti­tion invites, so to speak, an increase of history, something from the period in which retold. Whenever a history belongs to the people and has existential value for them, it, of necessity, becomes legendum in some sense. Therefore, what we observe in the OT is that Israel had a story of existential value for them communally, a historical mythos that took on a number of forms, and that functioned for the people in certain types of reflective situations. Since there might be several different forms, the aesthetic factor in repetition was clearly at best secondary. A quest for the reason for repetition has to be sought elsewhere. 33   Extreme caution should be used in treating ancient Near Eastern parallels to biblical material; the one has only in modern times been retrieved from some very ancient and remote moment in antiquity while the other is embodied in a canonical and cultic collection that has survived the “repetition” and handling of many genera­tions, before becoming stabilized in the form we have it. The former might possibly be an autograph; the latter could never be. But more important still, precisely because the biblical material has been passed down through many generations of cultic usage, it has had to pass all sorts of tests (precisely of its adaptability-stability quotient) in that canonical process to which the other may never, or only rarely, have been submitted.

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The primary authority of Israel’s central tradition, that of the escape from Egypt and entrance into Canaan, lay in its power to help the people answer the two questions of self-understanding and life pattern. The fact that the story, in whatever form, passed the barrier from one generation to the following is, in this light, evidence enough of its validity. It spanned a generation gap at some point in Israel’s early history. What scholars who try to meet their own needs (seeking answers to narrowly defined questions about history) must remember is that the needs of the people whom they study were for the most part quite different from theirs. And it is highly unlikely that a tradition arises and persists simply because there is a need to fill out a cultic order of service (the narrow sense of Sitz im Leben). As conservative as cults tend to be, they were formed because of some gut-level existential need of the people they served, and from time to time demonstrated the ability to meet the people at that level again. A story that succeeded in passing from one generation to another did so, therefore, not because it had a set form or primarily because it distracted the people, but because (1) it spoke to a majority of the community; (2) it communicated to them a power they sought; and (3) this power met a common need of the community, probably the need to recapitulate their common self-understanding and to transcend a challenge borne to it. The challenge would have been some newness or strangeness that had to be dealt with – usually either by rejection or integration, by retaining a status quo, or by effecting some change. The challenge might range from the subtlest sort of threat to the existing societal structure, to a clear and present danger of its total disintegration. In all such circumstances the imperative to any community is to review its understanding of who it is (1)  to know if in the moment of the review (and according to its Zeitgeist) the society should or can adapt to the measure indicated (shalom), or (2) in the event of rejection and violence at the other extreme (milhamah; cf. Jer 28:8 – 9), to relearn, in the new situation presented by the ˙ exactly who they are, so that when they emerge on the other side of the threat, sword (Jer 31:2) they will know (to put it very simply) if indeed they survived. Survival is not a matter of living only, or breathing, or blood flowing through individual veins; for assimilation to another culture (which has another and different identifying mythos) is death as sure as slaughter is death. (What happened to the so-called northern ten tribes of Israel? They were assimilated into the dominant culture of the eighth-century neo-Assyrian Empire. The majority lost their identity, though most of the individuals involved survived and had children.)34 So whether the whole of a society lives, or only a remnant, a dynamic source of identity provision is absolutely necessary for that measure of continuity, within discontinuity, that can mean survival. Other factors may seem of equal or greater importance at the moment, such as the foreign policy or statecraft of the threatening power: Assyria’s sponsored disintegration of subject peo-

34   The relation of some of these assimilating survivors, the “enemies of Judah” and “the people of the land” (of Ezra 4), to the Samaritans of later date is still problematic.

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ples, Babylonia’s sponsored remnant or ghetto-type survival.35 But statecraft in the sixth and fifth centuries BCE was not, in fact, the more important factor, for many of the victims changed to such a point that many of the peoples existing in the Palestinian area from the late Bronze Age through the Iron Age simply passed from the scene under Babylonian and Persian hegemony. Why did Israel survive? That is the immense historical question that begs explanation. That which happened to some of the other victim nations did not happen to Israel. Israel changed rather radically, to be sure, from being a nation with its own government and a highly nationalist cult, to being a dispersed religious community (whether in Palestine or outside it) called Judaism. But the point is that Israel survived whereas others did not.

V Why? What was Israel’s dynamic identity source? It would have been (1) an indestructible element in society, (2) a commonly available element, (3) a highly adaptable element, and, if necessary, (4) a portable element. It would have been indestructible or the likelihood of its own survival in the midst of violence is precluded or greatly reduced. It would have been commonly available so that widely scattered segments of a remnant emerging from violence could consult it wherever they might be. It would have been adaptable so that it sponsored survival in new and strange situations and did not preclude it. And it would have been portable so that territory loss or forced emigration could not sever the community from the survival power it needed. Obviously, a temple, or an elaborate cult, fails all four tests, though a portable shrine (Exod 25 – 40) meets (4), and perhaps (3). An ark meets (3) and (4) beautifully, and in small communities that stay together may do for (2). Tradition affirms that the ark served identity purposes in the midst of violence very well indeed in Israel’s early days. But only a story meets all four criteria. It is, to the exclusion of all other religious “vessels,” indestructible, commonly available to scattered communities, highly adaptable, and portable in the extreme. The primary characteristic of canon, therefore, is its adaptability. Israel’s canon was basically a story adaptable to a number of different literary forms, adaptable to the varying fortunes of the people who found their identity in it, adaptable to widely scattered communities themselves adjusting to new or strange idioms of existence but retaining a transnational identity, and adapt­able to a sedentary or migratory life. It is in this sense, therefore, that the study of canon cannot begin where the handbooks now start, with stability and the concept of inclusion-exclusion. There was no set creed, like Deut 26:5 – 9, that was expandable. But there was a story existing in many forms from early days. In all likelihood, there were a 35

  Cf. Holladay, “Assyrian Statecraft.”

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number of such stories, but the Law and the Prophets as we inherit them highlight two basic themes, those we call the Mosaic and the Davidic.36 Only these survived, other traditions adhering to them; and only the Mosaic, less the conquest, became the Torah. The nature of such an identifying story demanded that it be told in the words and phrases and sense-terms of the generation and local community reciting it. Adaptability, therefore, is not just a characteristic; it is a compulsive part of the very nature of the canonical story. The story, in some part, is probably quite old, though no one form of it surviving in the Bible need of necessity be.37 It is at least as old as Amos (Amos 2:9 – 11; 3:1 – 2; 4:10 – 11; 5:25; 9:7; cf. 6:5; 9:11). But it is Amos’s use of the story, as we shall see, that precludes any thought of its being invented by him or later inserted into the text of Amos.38 The second, and equally important character of a canonical story, is its ability to give life as well as survive in itself. One can characterize survival in any phenomenon as adaptability. And so canon. But that is only a part of the truth of canon. Another part is that canon is canon not only because it survives but because it can give its survival power to the community that recites it. It not only has survival qualities for itself; it shares those life-giving qualities with the community that finds identity in it. Life, therefore, is the supreme character of canon. It has it and it gives it. It provides survival with identity to those who “remember” and repeat it, either in the essential demands of peace or the existential threat of upheaval. It can provide continuity within discontinuity because it offers to the commu­nity an essential identity that permits the people to adapt. Israel’s story undoubtedly served this function many times from her origins until the Torah was shaped definitely in the exile, and the Torah, as we know it, emerged therefrom. But its power for life was so crucial to the remnant in Babylon in the sixth century BCE that there was surely burnt into the community memory, indelibly, the knowledge that Torah both had life and gave life. To this Judaism in its later literature many times attests (cf. John 5:39; Pirqê Abot 2.8; 6.7).39 Professor Lewis Beck, of the University of Rochester, is an excellent example of the modern philosopher who has purposefully abandoned his Christian origins. Beck is one of the best of the anti-Christian polemicists today.40 But Beck often points out that Judaism and 36   Rost, “Sinaibund und Davidsbund,” cols. 129 ff.; von Rad, OT Theology, 1:308 ff; Newman, People of the Covenant. 37   Even Rost, Das kleine Credo und andere Studien zum AT, in his critique of von Rad, admits the antiquity of some parts of the summary. 38   Amos 2:9 – 11 is an integral part of Amos’s address in 1:3 – 3:2 (though other parts of the pericope may conceivably be from later hands; See Paul, “Amos 1:3 – 2:3: A Concatenous Literary Pattern”). The argument of the “sermon” is clearly that though Yahweh had taken Israel’s head out of the dust of the earth of Egypt and set her in a land of her own, Israel, when established in the land, instead of acting as indicated by Yahweh’s acts in Egypt, treated the poor of the land as Pharaoh had treated her. The function of the mythos was to provide a basic identity and lifestyle pattern for Israel in terms of her own responsibility. 39   John 5:39 uses the expression tas graphas (the writings). In OT of the Early Church, Sundberg attempts to distinguish between “Scriptures” and canon in his cogent thesis that the canons of both the OT and NT were fluid until dates considerably later than generally assigned. 40   Cf. Beck, Philosophic Inquiry, and Beck, Six Secular Philosophers.

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Christianity simply cannot die. Even, he says, if earthlings should find life on a distant planet, the Bible religions would adapt to the new knowledge and probably flourish in it. This is, in part, due to the high pluralism resident in the Bible.41 But the qualities of survival and adaptability date from the earliest repetition of the story that became the essence or core of Israel’s self-understanding. Wright’s concept of there being in the Bible a canon within the canon is rather inescapable.42 Brevard Childs has attacked the notion and argued for think­ing of the Bible’s authority in terms of the full canonical context.43 I have argued that they are both right.44 A canon-within-the-canon idea that does not perceive its high adaptability as essential, or as put above, a compulsive part of its nature, but too much relegates other parts of the final closed canon (such as the Jamnian) as of less power or authority, overlooks the dynamic nature of the canon’s adaptability.45 A crucial part of the canonical process, at all stages, were the historical accidents that caused the people to put certain questions to the traditions and not others. They did not rest back and, like scholars, make choices as to which questions they would ask of the story. Theirs was an existential dialogue, ongoing, of greater or lesser moment, and no question, no part of that dialogue was, at the moment, of less importance or had less power than another. A full-canonical-context idea about the Bible, however, that does not appreciate the life-giving qualities of the central tradition and its own nature of adaptability that ultimately afforded the vast pluralism in the Bible can be misunderstood as a kind of unfortunate biblicism.46

VI A new method of approach to the question of the relation between the Old and New Testaments is called comparative midrash.47 If one studies the various ways in which Second Temple Judaism contemporized OT traditions, one can actu41

 Sanders, Torah and Canon, x ff. and 116 ff.   This is Wright’s major thesis about the canon. Eissfeldt uses the same ex­pression in OT: An Introduction, 568. 43  Childs, Biblical Theology in Crisis. Two very instructive responses to Childs’s book are by Landes, “Biblical Exegesis in Crisis: What Is the Exegetical Task,” and Anderson, “Crisis in Biblical Theology.” 44   Sanders, Review of Biblical Theology in Crisis; Sanders, Review of Old Testament and Theology. Childs’s position was anticipated in part in Sanders, “Habakkuk in Qumran.” Similar kinds of probing may be seen in Barr, Old and New in Interpretation, 149 – 200; Lohfink, “Die historische und christliche Auslegung des AT”; and Stuhlmacher, “Neues Testament und Her­ meneutik.” 45   Wright states its adaptability, obliquely, in relativistic terms in his OT and Theology, 183 – 85. 46   Wright’s criticism of Childs in Wright, “Historical Knowledge and Revelation,” is surely, in part, misunderstanding. 47   See Bloch, “Midrash”; Le Déaut, “Apropos a Definition of Midrash”; Miller, “Targum, Midrash.” See also Vermes, “Bible and Midrash.” Barr, “Le juda­ïsme postbiblique et la théologie de l’AT,” seems unaware of some of this new thrust. 42

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ally trace the history of such midrashic tendency back into the OT itself. In fact, since the older discipline of tradition criticism has begun to include in its purview the question of why a tradition would be repeated, or taken up again in another form, it has begun to sound more and more like the study of midrash.48 This raises the question of what the difference between them (and redaction criticism in certain phases) actually is. Geza Vermes rightly says the difference is canonization.49 But that difference needs clarifying. As stressed above, certain traditions in ancient Israel bore repeating. Among these traditions, allowing for some aesthetic factor, the most impor­tant were those that told Israel’s story about who she was and what her salient characteristics were.50 Even stories that had little or nothing to do with Israel originally (such as common ancient Near Eastern myth, Canaanite legend, etc.) became attached to the growing number of such traditions. They were adapted by the fourfold process (where and when needed) of depolytheizing, monotheizing, Yahwizing, and Israelitizing. Sometimes one or more of these treatments did not take too well and the scholar today easily perceives beneath only a very slight veneer the original non-Israelite and polytheistic shape of the material. Some of this material shows up in the OT more than once, and is hence available for tradition-critical work on it. The moment one asks why such material bore repeating, however, he or she is engaged in the question of authority. Such material, which met a need in one situation, was apparently able to meet another need in another situation. And that is precisely the kind of tradition that becomes canonical – material that bears repeating in a later moment both because of the need of the later moment and because of the value or power of the material repeated (the dialogue between them). Early material repeated in this manner attains the status of tradition. Eventually it may attain the status of canon. Only the traditional can become canonical. One of the very real existential factors in the canonical process is that of the value or power of tradition, that is, material that had proved its worth in more than one situation had already shown a measure of historical transcendence in its ability to address itself to two or more space-time parameters. One observation that impresses itself time and again in the study of history is that in crisis situations only the old, tried, and true has any real authority. Nothing thought up at the last minute, no matter how clever, can effect the necessary steps of recapitu48   See in this regard the probing study by Nicholson on the prose material in Jeremiah composed by disciples in Preaching to the Exiles; see also his Deuteronomy and Tradition. Similarly, see Wanke, Untersuchungen zur sogenannten Baruchschrift. 49   Vermes, “Bible and Midrash,” 199; see also Roberts, “OT Canon: A Suggestion”; but see Sanders, “Cave 11 Surprises”; Roberts, Review of The Dead Sea Psalms Scroll, 185, contra his earlier thesis in Roberts, “OT Canon: A Suggestion.” Cf. Ackroyd, “Open Canon.” For an early pre-Christian date of closure and a very conservative reconstruction of the meager available evidence in the light of it, see Beckwith, OT Canon of the NT Church. 50  This is, of course, the nature of the patriarchal blessings, Gen 27:27 – 29 and 39 – 40; Gen 49; and Deut 33. This appears to be the function of Melchizedek’s blessing of Abraham in Gen 14:19 – 20. And it should be noted that the final or redactional form of the book of Deuteronomy (hence, the Torah?) is that of a patriarchal blessing.

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lation and transcendence needed by the threatened community, if it is to survive with identity. A new story will not do; only a story with old, recognizable elements has the power for life required, because it somehow can pierce beneath the immediate and apparent changes taking place to recover the irreducible core of identity left un­threatened, that which can survive the crisis. The early canonical process was precisely one of selectivity of such materials, and the major factor of selectivity was existential. In this sense may the criteria of antiquity, inspiration, and popularity be understood.51 The older material, which had already shown its value in more than one situation, had in effect proved its status of being inspired. And certainly no private story or tradition would measure up in the breach: it had to have been widespread, or at least not esoteric. The relationship, therefore, between the older (tradition-critical) materials within the OT and the later midrashic use of those traditions, as well as of anything else available in the final canonical mass, is obviously very close indeed. To put it another way, one can extend tradition-critical study of the OT well into postbiblical times simply by continuing on without an artificial or arbitrary halt. In the same manner, the student of midrash can push his or her work back into the earlier biblical period simply by continuing on without an artificial or arbitrary halt, even though he or she may be invading the tradition critic’s territory. And what both disciplines find above all else, throughout the whole biblical and postbiblical period, is that the major characteristic of canonical material is its adaptability – not its rigidity. One of the major results of the new method of approach to early Jewish literature, including Qumran and the NT, is the observation that adaptation of canonical material to a midrashic need (the old problem of “inaccurate quotation” that lies outside even new observations about fluidity in text criticism), far from being impious, was a sign of the greater piety of the period – especially for eschatological groups.52 In the long period before the marked tendency toward stabilization and standardization became the dominant trend among proto-rabbinic Jews, convictions about God’s activity in their own time brought them frequently to adapt the available text to the conviction. Again, the salient character of canon was adaptability. And this was indeed its major trait from the earliest “mo­ment” far back up the line in the canonical process until the other need, that of stabilization, became the more dominant in the later period.53 Morton Smith, in a book on the canonical process, stresses the political factor in selectivity almost to the exclusion of all others.54 The existential factor may be thought of, academically, in political terms. That is, whenever a community 51

 Josephus, Ag. Ap. 1.38 – 42.   This is a major, axiomatic observation of work in Jewish exegesis clearly datable to the early Jewish period. See Bloch, “Midrash”; Le Déaut, “Apropos a Definition of Midrash”; Miller, “Targum, Midrash.” See also Vermes, “Bible and Midrash,” as well as Roberts, “Bible Exegesis and Fulfillment in Qumran.” 53   See the works of Talmon, esp. “Aspects of the Textual Transmission of the Bible”; and “OT Text”; Barthélemy, Les devanciers d’Aquila; Cross, “History of the Biblical Text”; Sanders, Dead Sea Psalms Scroll, 157 – 59. 54  Smith, Palestinian Parties and Politics. 52

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or society has a need of any sort and tries, through one or more of its influential members or groups, to meet that need, there is without question a political situation in the broad sense. The difficulty with Smith’s thesis is that it reads back a situation of fragmentary politics of a later period into the late Iron Age problem of whether old Israel ought not to have passed from the scene of history the way some of her neighbors did.55 That is an existential problem, a life-and-death situation that informs the political, if not transforms it. Smith’s political theory also does not allow sufficient appreciation for the theological or mythic dimension in the exilic process of canonization; this is in contrast to the existential that underscores it. Smith’s other major observation, however, is correct. We should assume that what we inherit in the OT is only a fraction of what had been available, and that they were the needs of the community that shaped the surviving, earlier traditions into the Bible as we know it. I would see the process, however, dating well back into preexilic times and concentrating in the all-encompassing life-anddeath situation of the sixth century BCE, instead of, with Smith, as beginning in postexilic times, for the most part, and concentrating in Hellenistic times.56 If adaptability was an abiding character of the canonical process well into Hellenistic times, and was completely overcome by the need for uniformity and stability of text only finally in the period of Roman occupation,57 then von Rad’s inability, in the light of all the recent criticism, either to establish a single form for his credo or to prove its high antiquity linguistically, should occasion no surprise. A basic story about a migration from Egypt to Canaan under Yahweh’s tutelage pervades much of the literature of the OT.58 It would be utterly and 55   Smith’s thesis fits well into the situation as we know it in the Persian and Hellenistic periods (those parallel to the Golden and Hellenistic periods in the Greek culture). See Smith, “Das Judentum in Palästina in der hellenistischen Zeit,” and “Das Judentum in Palästina während der Perserzeit.” And there were surely religious parties (Palestinian Parties and Politics, 15 – 56) in the preexilic period. But Smith practically ignores the period all-important for the canonical process – the crucible of destitution and exile where the existential factor over­shadowed all factious politics. See Smith’s brilliant chapter on hellenization in Palestinian Parties and Politics, 57 – 81. 56   The most challenging section of Smith’s book is the chapter on Nehemiah (Palestinian Parties and Politics, 126 – 47). I think it will cause a major review of our understanding of the work of Ezra and Nehemiah. Most scholars agree that the Torah Ezra brought with him from Babylonia to Jerusalem was essentially (though still unclosed, or adaptable) the Pentateuch. Smith thinks not. He argues that what is reported in Neh 8 violates pentateuchal regulations on Yom Kippur, and assigns the stabilization of the Torah to the period 330 – 180 BCE (ibid., 187) to combat the “assimilationists.” I would still hold that the Torah received its shape in the exilic period due to the existential question there faced, and that what Ezra brought from Babylon to Jerusalem was the Torah (though not yet closed) very much as we know it: cf. Sanders, Torah and Canon; Freedman, “The Law and the Prophets”; and Ackroyd, Exile and Restoration, esp. 201 – 37. 57   Dynamicality, adaptability, and stability work hand in hand: it is only a question of which is needed the more in given historical circumstances. Barthélemy’s thesis that tiqqunê sopherîm were halted in the period of Salome Alexandra, when her­meneutics could begin to shift to noncontextual techniques, is a parallel observation; cf. Barthélemy, “Les tiqquné sopherim.” 58   There is no room or need to list all the passages: cf. von Rad, Problem of the Hexateuch, 3 ff.; Noth, History of Pentateuchal Traditions, 46 ff.; Wright, God Who Acts, 70 ff.; Sanders, OT in the Cross; Hillers, Covenant; Baltzer, Covenant Formulary. Even criticisms of von Rad (largely from the Georg Fohrer school) confirm the point here made: cf. Vollmer, Geschichtliche Rückblicke.

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completely foolhardy to gainsay that basic attainment of the work of the past generation. And it is with such traditions that the work of canonical criticism proceeds. At the heart of canonical criticism will be not those introductory questions of source and unity that have so occupied the tradition critics, but rather the questions of the nature and function of the tradition cited. When a tradent is deposited in a particular situation, we must assume that it was found useful to that situation: it had a function to perform there and that is the reason it was called upon. At the heart of canonical criticism are the questions of the nature of authority and the hermeneutics by which that authority was marshaled in the situation where needed. What was the need of the community and how was it met?

VII One of the remarkable observations one has to make about early biblical canonical materials is that the manner in which they were called upon to meet the people’s need was not necessarily popular. On the contrary, there is much evidence in the biblical process to indicate that authoritative traditions were used in particular situations to challenge the way the majority of the people and their political representatives, the establishment, or any political group, thought their needs ought to be met. (Did the phenomenon of the lectionary arise for this reason?) Partly in response to Smith’s otherwise very logical and cogent theory,59 and partly in response to George Mendenhall’s otherwise engaging theory about the place of the prophets in his five-part schema of OT history,60 the balance of this essay will center in on the question of how the great judgmental prophets of ancient Israel marshaled the authority by which they declaimed their messages of pending change in Israel’s basic self-understanding. Clearly Smith is right that “Yahweh-only” thinking won the day at the crucial junctures of Israel’s history, and especially in the all-important exilic period, with respect to what finally became canon. But two decisive factors must not be overlooked in that process: (1) it won the day not because of some unknown political clout certain parties may have had, but because the theo­logical view they espoused most met the existential needs arising out of historical circumstance; and (2) the Law and Prophets as they emerged through that process (even though not stabilized for some time to come) do not present a single clear-cut political program. This second point is as important as the first. The Bible is highly pluralistic. A few years back many scholars were looking for the unity of the Bible, or of the OT. They did not succeed. Today, the challenge for any student who thinks he or she has 59   There is a lack of clarity in Smith between the shaping of traditions in the postexilic period and the creation of literary materials in the same period. Shades of Wellhausen’s reconstruction of the literary history of the OT lie scattered on Smith’s otherwise valid thesis about shaping. Cf. Wellhausen, Prolegomena. 60   Mendenhall, “Biblical History in Transition.”

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found a definite system, especially political program, in the Bible, is to return to the Bible and locate its contrapositive. Politicians can always prooftext their position from the Bible. That is one of the reasons, the historian must avow, that the Bible has lasted so long. And whatever cannot be found there by one set of hermeneutic rules can almost certainly be located by another. This is the history of biblical interpretation, from the beginnings until today. And every party or denomination seeking authority in the Bible has been “right.” In Mendenhall’s five-stage schema there is much that is still valid. He, resting his case largely on the work of William F. Albright, names the five stages thus: Praeparatio (the Bronze Age or Genesis period), the Creative (or Mosaic) period, the Adaptive (or tribal federation–monarchic) period, the Traditional (or prophetic) period, and the period of Reformation (or exilic and early postexilic era). Much of what Mendenhall writes is in reaction to an earlier emphasis on the prophets having been the principal creative force in Israel’s history as well as in the OT as a whole. He scores the thinking of Wellhausen that the prophets introduced ethical monotheism into the religion of Israel. A histo­rian might well say that Mendenhall was responding to the Zeitgeist of the neo-orthodox period by reacting to the Zeitgeist of the liberal period.61 Be that as it may, Mendenhall is right to attribute both the monotheizing process in Israel’s history and the concern for ethics to the so-called Mosaic period. And he is right to insist that the prophets were dependent on authoritative traditions they inherited from the earlier period. What is questionable is his limiting their contribution to “the preservation and transmission of a tradi­tion which was necessary to the preservation of the group.” One needs to explore carefully his assertion that “in all the furor and violence of the whole period, there is no reason, no evidence, for the belief that anything important was added to the religious tradition.” This is so in part because Mendenhall himself says, in the same section of his own work, “The prophets were proclaiming the necessity of change in the unchangeable,” and again, “the prophets added much of value to the tradition through their message to their own time.” The resolution between these apparent contradictions can perhaps be found in Mendenhall’s claim that the message of the prophets “consisted largely of the fact that a group which was called into existence (chosen) to serve Yahweh ceased to have any excuse for being when it ceased to serve.”62 The difficulty with such an assertion can be found in recent work on the so-­called false prophets, or establishment prophets. For it is now abundantly clear that the so-called false 61   Mendenhall himself rightly stresses the limitations of past scholarship in this regard, ibid., 28. I could not agree more. We, too, in our generation, must recognize our being children of our own time and not pretend to be free of Zeitgeist ourselves: cf. Eccl 3:11. W. F. Albright in his great wisdom advised his students of archaeology to leave more of a tell intact than dug because the next generation will have a different perspective, and perhaps improved tools. The Reform principle of learning God’s truth for any age and situation through Word and Spirit is a classical recognition of the canon’s adaptability. 62   All these quotations are from ibid., 46 – 48.

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prophets relied on the same authoritative traditions as the so-called true prophets in propounding their message of no change, or status quo, or continuity. They claimed that Israel was serving Yahweh. The utterly engaging aspect of current study of the false prophets is that their arguments, based in large measure on the same traditions from the exodus-wanderings-entrance story, were very cogent and compelling.63 And they apparently won the day! The “false” prophets could and did cite Israel’s story to support their view that the Yahweh who had brought Israel out of Egypt could surely maintain her in Palestine. On the basis of the same authority, the “true” prophets argued the opposite – that the Yahweh who brought Israel out of Egypt could also take her out of Palestine.64 Hananiah chided Jeremiah for not having enough faith in Yahweh’s power to sustain his people (Jer 28:2 – 11). The “false” prophets must not be viewed as having been somehow intrinsically wrong. They too believed in the “presence of God” and interpreted that presence to mean providence for continuity (Mic 2:6; 3:11; Jer 5:12; 14:9; Isa 36:15). The story itself was adaptable to whatever hermeneutics were employed. Hermeneutics must be historically viewed as arising out of the need to keep a stabilized tradition adaptable. The difference between the hermeneutics of continuity and the hermeneutics of discontinuity, that is, be­tween the hermeneutics of shalom and of milhamah (Jer 28:8 – 9 and 38:4), lay not so much between the Mosaic and Davidic˙ views of the covenant with Yahweh, as between theological axioms.65 Both the true and the false proph­ets offered hope, but the former held the higher view of God (Jer 23:23; cf. Isa 22:11) that he could offer continuity even in radically altered forms of the common life, that is, he could give by taking away. Amos rested his whole view of the taking away (Amos 1:3 – 2:8) on the authority of what God had done for Israel in the beginning (Amos 2:9 – 11; 3:1 – 2), as did Hosea (11:1 – 5; 13:4 – 8). Micah rested his three-point sermon on what Yahweh required of Israel out of the same Torah story (Mic 6:3 – 5) of what it was Yahweh had done for Israel, while Isaiah cited God’s grace to David on giving him Jerusalem, precisely to give authority to his message of judgment and salvation (Isa 1:21 – 27; 5:1 – 7;

63   The most arresting of recent studies on the false prophets is that of van der Woude, “Micah in Dispute with the Pseudo-prophets.” Earlier valuable studies include Quell, Wahre und falsche Propheten; Jacob, “Quelques remarques sur les faux prophètes”; Osswald, Falsche Prophetie im AT; Fichtner, “Propheten: Amos,” 621 – 22; Rendtorff, “Erwägungen aus Frühgeschichte”; Clements, Prophecy and Covenant, 11 – 44, 119 – 29; Barr, Old and New in Interpretation, 149 – 70; Freedman, “Biblical Idea of History.” A fair review of the problem in terms of cultic prophecy is Jeremias, Kultprophetie und Gerichtsverkündigung, cf. esp. 192 – 93 on the hermeneutic difference between true and false prophets. Overholt, Threat of Falsehood, provides a good introduction to the whole problem by concentrating on sheqer in Jeremiah. 64   The “true” prophets had two bases or references of authority: (1) their own call and (2) Israel’s call (the Torah mythos); cf. Sanders, Torah and Canon, 73 ff. We should assume that the “false” prophets did as well. 65   John Bright’s view of this, especially in Isaiah, needs critique. Cf. Bright, History of Israel, 271 ff. I am convinced that Isaiah interpreted the Davidic covenant as conditional to the sovereign will of Yahweh without combining it with the Mosaic: Isa 1:21 – 27 and chs. 28 – 31 offer ample evidence of this.

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22:2; 28:4; 28:21; 29:1 – 7; 32:13 et passim).66And Ezekiel, who had a developed view of what the old story meant (ch. 20) could adapt it with no difficulty to drive home his message of judgment (chs. 16 and 23). And it was the same Torah story that was called on to support the prophetic view of salvation in judgment (Hos  2:16 – 17; Isa  1:21 – 27; 32:1 – 18; 33:1 – 22; Jer  16:14 – 15; 23:7 – 8; 31:31 – 34).67

VIII The perspective that is needed here is that of canonical criticism. When would the criterion of “popularity,” or widespread acceptance, have come to play in the case of the judgmental prophets? Manifestly not in the preexilic period. There can be no doubt that these prophets had followers, or even small schools, to preserve their material. The family of Shaphan, as well as Baruch, would have been essential at the point of earliest preservation of the Jeremiah materials. And we must posit such small continuing groups, perhaps schools, for the others from Amos on. But, in contradistinction to Smith’s thesis, I cannot see these groups as forming a political movement or group. If so, they were not strong enough to prevent Jeremiah’s being tried twice and imprisoned several times during the sieges of Jerusalem in the early sixth century.68 That a few continuing followers 66   A brilliant example of Isaiah’s basing his message of judgment squarely on the Davidide tradition is Isa 28:21. The “providence” or status quo of “false” prophets would have cited the traditions we know from 2 Sam 5:17 – 25 and 1 Chron 14:10 – 17 to argue that Yahweh would act in their day as he had for David on Mt. Perazim and in the Vale of Gibeon – to prosper Israel. Isaiah agreed that Yahweh would act as he had on Perazim and in Gibeon but this time to judge his own people – a strange deed, and quite alien, as he says, to those who would employ the hermeneutic of false provi­dence. Isaiah referred to the Davidide traditions only precisely to counter the view that all one had to do was believe Yahweh was strong enough to save them, exactly what he himself had earlier thought (Isa 7:9, etc.). Isaiah 36 – 39, if studied carefully to determine references of authority, shows itself to be largely alien to Isaiah. (This latter point is apart from the question of whether Isa 36 – 39 reflects historical events.) 67   Second Isaiah is omitted from the list partly because Isa 40 – 55 is so obviously full of references to both the Mosaic and Davidic traditions; for there both the judgment and the salvation must be seen in the light of Israel’s history: cf., e. g., Isa 42:24 – 25 and 54:7 – 8; and see Sanders, Suffering as Divine Discipline; Sanders, OT in the Cross, and Sanders, Torah and Canon. 68  Smith, Palestinian Parties and Politics, 46. If the great families who befriended Jeremiah early in his career were like the Whig party of England, Jeremiah must have disappointed them gravely to have been tried twice (Jer 20 and 38) and im­prisoned at least three times (Jer 20:2; 36:26; 37:4, 15, 21; 38:6, 13, 28; 39:15; 40:1). I suggest that the family of Shaphan were pro-Babylonian in political leanings and that they thought Jeremiah was also (Jer 37:9 – 10). Nothing could be further from the truth as Jeremiah’s attitude and response to Nebuzaradan show when the defenses of the city were finally broken. The Babylonians naturally thought Jeremiah was politically anti-Egyptian and pro-Babylonian, because of his identifying the foe from the north with themselves, and hence offered Jeremiah what he willed as soon as the city was taken (Jer 39:11 – 14; 40:2 – 5). But Jeremiah’s allegiances were neither to Egypt nor to Babylonia but to a vision of an Israel free to serve Yahweh by surrendering their enslavement to his gifts: he elected to stay in the destitute land and refused a pension and comfort in Babylon (40:6). Jeremiah’s relations to Jehoiakim and Zedekiah were informed by an impolitic theological vision of Israel’s identity (chs. 36 – 37), not by a politic quest for accommodation to a pro-Babylonian policy. The prose sections of Jeremiah are secondary in importance to the poetic oracles, in

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were convinced enough to preserve (and adapt) the records of their masters’ words and deeds is the most the evidence suggests. When then did what the prophets had to say come to be perceived for its great value for Israel? Clearly the answer is the exile, when what they had predicted occurred.69 But even a prediction-fulfillment phenomenon is not sufficient to understand the canonical process so vigorously at work in the disintegrative experience of the national existence in the sixth and early fifth centuries. For some of what they predicted did not take place, and yet it too was preserved. The first step surely was the recognition in adversity that these men had been “right.” But the next step in the process, gradually dawning on and pervading the consciousness of the remnant, was the really crucial one. And here is where the positive-thinking message of the old so-called false prophets, when recalled, would have turned to bitterness in their mouths. Both groups, so-called true and so-called false, had offered hope.70 And they had both offered hope based on the old traditions about what God had done so effectively in the past. The great difference was that the judgmental prophets had offered an existential understanding of “Israel” that could survive the death of the body politic and that offered the means whereby a new corporate life could be accepted, though radically changed in form and venue. The POWs in Babylon after 586 BCE, under either Babylonian or Persian hegemony, had two alternatives: life or death, not so much for themselves indichs. 1 – 23, for judging the prophet’s real alienation from all Judaic society (Jer 5:4 – 5; 9:1; 15:17; 16; et passim). Smith himself at two points takes so much away from the word “party” that one is not altogether sure how he uses it in all instances; cf. Palestinian Parties and Politics, 13, 29. 69  Cf. Jer 28:9 and Deut 18:22. Jeremiah’s conviction was that God’s message through prophecy was a challenge to, and judgmental of, existing structure and customs; only if prophecy sponsored a status quo, shalom, was it subject to historical proof. By exile I mean not only the narrow period of 586 to 520 BCE, but the fuller experience of destitution plus the failure of Second Isaiah’s vision, the failure of the Zerubbabel pretension, the destructive campaigns of Xerxes I throughout the area in the first quarter of the fifth century, up to the final successes of Ezra and Nehemiah within the apparently severe limitations imposed by Persian statecraft, and especially its rule of its provinces. Above all what must be accounted for is that not only was the final form of the Torah shaped by the Babylonian diaspora but that it was upon that community that most of the hard decisions fell that shaped Judaism as it eventuated in rabbinic Judaism after 70 CE. Perhaps the historical way to put it is that what survived as the essence of “normative” (Pharisaic / rabbinic) Judaism was the thinking about survival and identity and practice that went on among Babylonian Jewish communities of the “exilic” period, that is, from the time of Ezekiel until the time of Ezra and Nehemiah. See esp. Neusner, Parthian Period. In this regard it would be well to ponder at great length the observation of Morton Smith at the close of his very challenging chapter on Nehemiah (Palestinian Parties and Politics, 147): “. . . the connection between Judaism and the worship of the restored temple was, in the philosophical sense of the word, ‘accidental.’ It was demanded, indeed, by the traditions and aspirations of the religion, but was not essential to its nature. The national, political, territorial side of Judaism, by which it differed from the other Hellenistic forms of oriental religions, was, as a practical matter, the work of Nehemiah. He secured to the religion that double character – local as well as univer­sal – which was to endure, in fact, for five hundred years and, in its terrible conse­quences, yet endures.” (italics added). 70  Sanders, Torah and Canon, 66 – 90. This hope is sometimes rendered more explicit by later hands, in typically doxological and comforting closing verses in the prophetic books.

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vidually, but in terms of communal identity. They could pass from the scene the way others were doing – by assimilation to the dominant culture. There is a good bit in the Bible to suggest that this is what happened to many normal, rational Jews (Ps 137:1 – 4; Ezek 8:12 – 13; 18:25; 33:17, 20; Jer 17:15; Isa 40:27 et passim; Mal 2:17). The evidence was in: Yahweh was bested in a fair fight. Israel’s ancient Holy Warrior was defeated. One could not fly in the face of such proof as the utter defeat of Zedekiah’s forces and the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple, especially the latter, afforded. But a few, stunned and bewildered, asked a very crucial question: ʾek nihyeh? “How shall we live?” (Ezek 33:10). In what now does life obtain? All the˙ symbols of the covenant relation were gone. What now? A fugitive ran with the message all the way from crumbling Jerusalem to the camp where Ezekiel was interned with the awful message, “The city has fallen” (Ezek 24:26; 33:21). Some say the news arrived the morning after Mrs. Ezekiel had died (Ezek 24:18). Be that as it may, Ezekiel used the occasion of the passing of the “delight of his eyes” to speak of the passing of the temple, which Ezekiel called the delight of the eyes of the people (24:21; cf. 7:24; 16:24). They felt that as long as the temple was standing there was still hope. Therefore, when the impossible and unthinkable happened, that hope was dashed, and they turned to the resident, judgmental prophet with the question, “How shall we live?” Ezekiel answered it in the way we should have expected him to: Israel lives, moves, and has its being in the judgments of God (Ezek 33:10 – 16).71 But following the thinking of Jeremiah (31:29 – 34), and his own development of that thought (Ezek 18), Ezekiel stressed the responsibility of the individual in the new dispersed situation. Between the thinking of Jeremiah and Ezekiel in this regard, the exiles had a real vehicle for understanding “Israel” corporately. Each stressed individual responsibility, but in two different ways: Jeremiah horizontally, as it were, and Ezekiel vertically. Jeremiah’s “new covenant” idea provided the means for understand­ing how Israel could be scattered in far-flung places and still be Israel: because each person would be responsible, wherever he or she was, for being “Israel.” Thinking of an individual as standing for the whole, wherever he or she was, was already a part of royal tradition.72 Ezekiel then stressed the vertical aspect of individual responsibility, by generations, as it were. He spoke of how the child would not suffer for the parent’s sin, and indeed, how within a generation each person had to maintain rather strict obedience. These two views of individual responsibility provided the means for Israel to be Israel in diaspora. It is clear that a great deal of reflection went on, in agonizing reappraisal, of what Israel meant now that the temple and “holy city” were gone. A number of exiles reflected on the old story, the old adaptable canon. Whether or not they recited the Deuteronomic form of the ʾArami ʾobed ʾavi we do not know. But they surely came very close to it: “Abraham was one man and came into posses71

  See the brilliant article by Gese, “Idea of History.”   See Otto Eissfeldt’s seminal study, “Promises of Grace to David in Isaiah 55:1 – 5.”

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sion of the land. We are many: therefore, the land is surely (all the more so) ours” (Ezek 33:24; cf. Isa 51:2). I have inserted the expression in parentheses to indicate that this is a typical midrashic qal vahomer (argument from lesser to greater) or argumentum a fortiori. If the old story, or au­thoritative tradition, started out talking about one man (wandering and perishing), then the disintegrative experience of defeat and dispersion may not be the end but yet another beginning. I am quite convinced that it was precisely this kind of reflective dialogue, as indicated in Ezek 33 and Isa 51, that formed the remnant in Babylon (cf. Hab 2:4). These would have been the ones whom Deutero-Isaiah addressed as “those who know righteousness, the people in whose heart is my law” (Isa 51:7) – as over against those whom he addressed as “stubborn of heart, far away from righteousness” (Isa 46:12).73 Those who knew righteousness were those who could recognize a righteousness, that is, a mighty act of God, when they saw one, and had been able to affirm the sovereignty of Yahweh in Israel’s terrible adversity and upheaval. They were also those who, like the earlier prison mates of Ezekiel, reflected on God’s initial work through Abraham (Isa 41:8 – 9) and figured that if God had done such things with Abraham he could surely do them with a remnant folk who remembered God’s mighty acts well enough that they could recognize a new one if they saw it (Isa 52:8). It is in the light of such agonizing reflection (Ezek 4:17 et passim) that the canonical process with respect to the earlier judgmental prophets must be understood. When the positive-thinking message that God would never, no never, let them go, or let them down – precisely because he was powerful enough – had turned bitter to the decimated folk, and they had turned either to worship the gods of the Babylonians, or to engage in the traumatic reappraisal of their faith and experience, then a few also asked, I think, to hear the messages of those earlier prophets whom they had called meshugaʿim (Jer 29:26), madmen, unpatriotic, blasphemous, seditious, and traitorous. I imagine that at some point after Ezekiel had given his famous answer to their existential question, one of the inquirers (Ezek 36:37; contrast 14:7), asked to hear once more what they had so recently called unpalatable. Was there not a disciple of Amos around the camps the other day talking that nonsense again? And disciples of Hosea, Micah, Isaiah, and the others? Let us hear it once more, now. And with the new ears to hear and the new eyes to see (every religious and national symbol now gone) they perceived in a way they had never been able to understand before. Was it that the prophets had predicted this? Yes, that was surely a primary factor. But within that was a far deeper element. For the messages of the madmen of God now offered a hope that no simple, magical pre­ diction could possibly afford. For what they had said could not be fully appreciated until in the canonical process of agonizing reflection they were “heard” by many for what was existentially the first time: God was in charge of the adversity; God was challenging Israel’s basic self-understanding; God was re-forming 73   These two phrases, in Isa 46:12 and 51:7, are not only antithetic but chiastic in form, and were surely Isaianic epithets for the two groups, faithful and apostate.

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his Israel (Jer 18:1 – 11) and reshaping his people into a new Israel (Ezek 36 – 37). Those who embraced such an outrageous program before the discontinuity took place were viewed as traitorous, seditious, blasphemous, and mad. Does God want only masochists? But after the old national vessel had been broken to smithereens (Isa 30:13 – 14), two options were open: either to join the First Church of Marduk (assimilate) or in agony to reflect on Israel’s basic identity, to ask, who are we and what are we to do? It was then also that the anticultic and antiroyalist strictures of the judgmental prophets made “canonical” sense. What the prophets had kept saying, in effect, was that the cultic and royal institutions and practices did not derive from the Torah mythos, that is, they were unauthorized by the tradition the prophets adhered to (Amos 5:25; Hos 8:4 et passim; Mic 6:6 – 7; Isa 1:12 – 17; Jer 7:22; etc.) as authoritative.74 In the preexilic period, that simply represented one of two points of view that one might hold: either cult (as practiced) and palace were authentic and properly authorized in Israelite society, or they were not. But in the period of intensive canonical process these strictures took on a much different meaning. When you are a POW pondering the awful experience of destitution, and are squarely facing the choice of whether your identity as “Israel” should live or die, then the prophetic strictures provide a means of survival as Israel, without temple or palace. If they did not derive from the Torah story (preconquest) period, then they were not essential to identity. The community need not lose its identity because they were lacking. Because certain prophets had been saying this even when those institutions stood, their words bore all the more power for survival to those in destitution. If need be, Israel could be Israel even if reduced to one destitute man (Abraham, servant, Job, Christ). That this is canonical does not mean that Israel should be one destitute man, but it does mean that “Israel” can survive calamity with identity. The canon is adaptable to the worst and the best. It is for life.

IX It is as though the old story, as well as the preexilic prophetic interpreta­tions of it, were most vital in the death-and-resurrection experience of the exile.75 That was the crucible for the old traditions, in which those that really spoke to the people’s existential problems of identity and lifestyle became the core of the canon. If one thinks of all that we have called the Yahwist tradition or cycle of materials (including both the Mosaic and Davidic traditions) out of the monarchical period of preexilic Israel, then the Torah as it received its basic shaping 74   The harmonistic efforts, in the recent neo-orthodox period, to see the prophets as moralizing in favor of an ethical cult, are now seen as impertinent from the perspective of canonical criticism. 75  Rubenstein, After Auschwitz, 138, observes, “Death and rebirth are the great moments of religious experience.” And with most Jews today, Rubenstein sees the modern state of Israel as the modern “rebirth” experience of Judaism.

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(neither its creation nor its final form) is surprisingly apocopated: it is all preconquest.76 But it is precisely a Torah that would have offered life to a dispersed Israel, a transforming Israel, an emerging Judaism. The Joshua materials about the conquest are left to be the first book of the Prophets, a hope integral to Judaism and all it meant, but not a part of the basic canon within the canon – not in the Torah. This is the greatest surprise of the canonical process, since none of von Rad’s or Wright’s ancient recitals lacks the conquest as part of the confession. But it is understandable that it could be the new Israel anywhere at all. This did not preclude a return. Far from it. The return has been an integral part of the hope of Judaism. From this point, the canonical process continued. Whatever Ezra brought back with him from Babylonia, it was surely the essential Torah (though not yet closed) as we know it (Neh 8:1 – 12). It had been shaped by and edited in the agonizing reflection, and out of the existential questions, of the crucible of exile. The major judgmental prophets were gathered, read, and reread in the light of the new perspective of the shedding of false hopes that the crucible provided. The canon of the Prophets was not closed until much, much later. It is becoming more and more difficult to suggest a probable date for its closure, but the basic gestalt of the Law and the Prophets was being formed in the crucible.77 Not only had some of the old traditions (some, but by no means all) survived, but they survived because they offered life in that crucial time. It was the old story reviewed in the shedding experience of exile that infused slain Israel with the spirit of life of which Ezekiel spoke (37:6). The whole of the passage on resurrection in Ezek 37 is told with the covenantal verbs of the old Exodus story (37:1, 2, 5 – 6, 11 – 14).78 No one in antiquity who heard him would have missed the point Ezekiel was making: if Yahweh had created for himself a people out of slaves in Egypt, he was now creating for himself a renewed Israel. His use of those verbs was his authority for his idea of the resurrection. It was surely in this same period that other old traditions took on new vibrant meaning: an old story about child sacrifice; whatever else Gen 22 had said originally or in the preexilic period, it now said that the God who had given Isaac to the aged Abraham and the barren Sarah had every right to ask for him back; but instead, he gave the child a second time. Such a story, no matter what form criticism and source criticism can show it originally meant, to the exiles surely meant that the future of the believing community, of Israel, the question of the continuation of the people, the anxiety about whether there would be another generation, rested in the hands of the life-giver, of him who gives and gives again.79 And no matter what form and source criticism can show the Garden of Eden story originally meant, to the exiles it was viewed in the light of their own 76

 Sanders, Torah and Canon, 45 – 53.   Freedman, “Biblical Idea of History,” 41 – 49. 78   Ezek 37:1 wywsʾny; 37:2 whʿbyrny; 37:5 mbyʾ; 37:6 whʿlty and wntty bkm rwh whyytm; ˙ ˙ ˙ 37:12 whʿlyty and whbʾty; 37:14 wntty and whnhty. ˙ 79   Cf. Vermes, Scripture and Tradition in Judaism. 77

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expulsion from the garden of Canaan (Ezek 36:35 – 36; cf. Isa 5:1 – 7; Jer 11:16 – 17; 12:10; Ezek 28:12 – 19; Isa 27:2 – 5). And no matter what must or must not be said about a Bronze Age Abraham, to the exiles when the canonical process was most decisively at work, he meant God’s starting again: “Abraham was one man . . .” (Ezek 33:23 – 29; Isa 51:2). Adaptability and stability. That is canon. Each generation reads its au­thoritative tradition in the light of its own place in life, its own questions, its own necessary hermeneutics. This is inevitable. Around this core were gathered many other materials, as time went on, adaptable to it.80 There are many contradictions within the Bible; it is a highly pluralistic document. Hence, no tyranny can be established on its basis, for there is always some­thing in it to challenge whatever is constructed on it. Its full context is very broad and very wide and sponsors serious dialogue.81 No single program, political, social, economic, or otherwise can escape the challenge of some­thing in it. As the rabbis say, in another context, “It is the book with everything in it.” There appears to be only one certainly unchallenged affirmation derivable from it: a monotheizing tradition that emerges through the canonical process. It gives the impression that Israel always doggedly pursued the integrity or sovereignty of God, his oneness.82 The Bible is replete with polytheism often only thinly veiled. But it was finally the affirmation of the old Mosaic story, as well as the judgmental-prophetic insistence on it, that God is one, both Judge and Savior, saving as he judges, that afforded the true hope that disintegrated Israel in exile needed lemihyah, for life (Gen 45:5; Ezra 9:8 – 9). It is abundantly clear that once the crisis ˙had passed and Judaism was established, internal, normal, fractious politics came once more to the fore in the decision-making process. But by that time the existential experience of death and resurrection had burned itself forever into the cultic memory of Judaism. Torah was for life.83 And that, in the final analysis, is the authority of canon.

80   As Wright often points out, cf. e. g., OT and Theology, 180. This was the early process of “dialogical revelation,” of the necessary complementarity: “Word” and “Spirit.” 81   This is what is right about Childs’s thesis in Biblical Theology in Crisis. And it is surely the meaning for today of the old principle of “salvation only through judgment.” 82   As Yehezkel Kaufmann apparently thought all ancient Israel did: cf. Kaufmann, Religion of Israel, and the very open critique of Kaufmann’s magnum opus, from which the work cited is extrapolated, by Talmon, “Yehezkel Kaufmann’s approach to Biblical Studies.” The major thrusts of the canon within its pluralism indicate for the believing communities today, I think, (1) an ever-expanding and syncretizing view of God (he is neither Jew nor Christian), and (2) a bias in favor of the powerless. 83   That the force of this historic memory should eventuate in the Pharisaic and Christian belief that God could give life again even after death, tehiyat ha-metim, should occasion no surprise: it was a (theo)logical issue of Torah. According to Sir 45:5, the Torah brings life; according to Masseket Avot 2.8, acquiring the words of Torah acquires life in the world to come; Avot 6.7, Torah gives life, now and in the world to come to those who practice it; cf. Rom 7:10, Gal 3:21, and John 5:39 – all indirect witnesses to the same Jewish conviction of the period.

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Sundberg, Albert C., Jr. “Towards a Revised History of the New Testament Canon.” SE 4 (1968) 452 – 61. Talmon, Shemaryahu. “Aspects of the Textual Transmission of the Bible in the Light of the Qumran Manuscripts.” Textus 4 (1964) 95 – 132. Talmon, Shemaryahu. “The Old Testament Text.” In The Cambridge History of the Bible. Vol. 1, From the Beginnings to Jerome, edited by Peter R. Ackroyd and C. F. Evans, 159 – 99. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970. [Pp. 164 – 70 reprinted in Qumran and the History of the Biblical Text, edited by Frank M. Cross and Shemaryahu Talmon, 8 – 12. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975.] Talmon, Shemaryahu. “Yehezkel Kaufmann’s Approach to Biblical Studies.” Conservative Judaism 25 (1971) 20 – 28. van der Woude, Adam S. “Micah in Dispute with the Pseudo-prophets.” VT 19 (1969) 244 – 60. Vermes, Geza. “Bible and Midrash: Early Old Testament Exegesis.” In The Cambridge History of the Bible. Vol. 1, From the Beginnings to Jerome, 199 – 231. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970. Vermes, Geza. Scripture and Tradition in Judaism. Leiden: Brill, 1961. Vollmer, Jochen. Geschichtliche Rückblicke und Motive in der Prophetie des Amos, Hosea und Jesaja. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1971. von Rad, Gerhard. Das formgeschichtliche Problem des Hexateuchs. Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1938. Republished in Gesammelte Studien zum Alten Testament, 1 – 78. Munich: Kaiser, 1958. ET: The Problem of the Hexateuch and Other Essays. Translated by E. W. Trueman Dicken. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966. von Rad, Gerhard. Old Testament Theology. 2 vols. New York: Harper & Row, 1962, 1965. Wanke, Günther. Untersuchungen zur sogenannten Baruchschrift. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1971. Weiser, Artur. Einleitung in das Alten Testament (1948); ET: The Old Testament: Its Formation and Development. Translated by Dorothea M. Barton. New York: Association, 1961. Wellhausen, Julius. Prolegomena to the History of Ancient Israel. Translated by J. Sutherland Black and Allan Menzies. Edinburgh: Adam & Charles Black, 1885. Wilder, Amos. The Language of the Gospel. New York: Harper & Row, 1964. Wilson, Gerald H. The Editing of the Hebrew Psalter. Chico, CA: Scholars, 1985. Wise, Michael. “The Dead Sea Scrolls, Part 1: Archaeology and Biblical Manuscripts.” BA 49 (1986) 140 – 54. Wright, George Ernest. The Biblical Doctrine of Man in Society. London: SCM, 1954. Wright, George Ernest. The Challenge of Israel’s Faith. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944. Wright, George Ernest. “The Christian Interpreter as Biblical Critic.” Int 1 (1947) 131 – 52. Wright, George Ernest. “Exegesis and Eisegesis in the Interpretation of Scripture.” ExpTim 48 (1937) 353 – 57. Wright, George Ernest. God Who Acts. Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1952. Wright, George Ernest. “Historical Knowledge and Revelation.” In Translating and Understanding the Old Testament: Essays in Honor of Herbert Gordon May, edited by Harry T. Frank and William L. Reed, 279 – 303. Nashville: Abingdon, 1970. Wright, George Ernest. “History and Reality: The Importance of Israel’s ‘Historical’ Symbols for the Christian Faith.” In The Old Testament and Christian Faith, edited by Bernhard W. Anderson, 176 – 99. New York: Harper & Row, 1963. Wright, George Ernest. “How Did Early Israel Differ from Her Neighbors?” BA 6 (1943) 1 – 10, 13 – 20. Wright, George Ernest. “Interpreting the Old Testament.” ThTo 3 (1947) 176 – 91.

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Wright, George Ernest. “Neo-Orthodoxy and the Bible.” JBR 14 (1946) 87 – 93. Wright, George Ernest. The Old Testament against Its Environment. London: SCM, 1950. Wright, George Ernest. The Old Testament and Theology. New York: Harper & Row, 1969. Wright, George Ernest. The Rule of God. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1960. Wright, George Ernest. “The Terminology of Old Testament Religion and Its Significance.” JNES 1 (1942) 404 – 14. Wright, George Ernest. “The Unity of the Bible.” Int 5 (1951) 131 – 33, 304 – 17. Wright, George Ernest. “The Unity of the Bible.” JRT 13 (1955) 5 – 19. Wright, George Ernest. “The Unity of the Bible.” SJT 8 (1955) 337 – 52. Wright, George Ernest. “Wherein Lies the Unity of the Bible?” JBR 20 (1952) 194 – 98. Wright, George Ernest, and Reginald H. Fuller. The Book of the Acts of God. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1957.

7 Canonical Criticism: An Introduction A new subdiscipline is emerging in biblical studies. It is called canonical criticism and bodes well for valorizing honesty about biblical pluralism and finding an up-front place for it in formal critical method. The need for canonical criticism has been addressed elsewhere.1 It has emerged in part as a way for the guild of biblical scholarship to respond to a number of stimuli: (1) the increasing charges by many theologians, lay and professional, that biblical criticism has tended to lock the Bible into the past as well as make it a kind of archaeological tell that only experts can dig, what has been called the “strange silence of the Bible in the churches”;2 (2) the vastly increased knowledge about the great variety of theologies and denominations in early Judaism and the early church and their differing canons of Scripture; (3) the modern ecumenical movement that makes it impossible any longer to ignore the great variety of theologies and denominations today as well as their differing canons of Scripture; (4) increasing awareness of the hermeneutics that the ancient biblical authors themselves used when they contemporized and called upon traditions they had inherited, in both the Old Testament and the New; (5) increasing respect for the theological depths in the hermeneutics of biblical tradents; (6) increasing honesty and consciousness on the part of serious students of the Bible that biblical pluralism simply will not go away but begs to be formally recognized as a blessing equal to any other the Bible has to offer; (7) increasing awareness on the part of serious students of the Bible that only in its ongoing dialogue with the believing communities that produced it and that continue to find their identity in it does the Bible have its proper Sitz im Leben and hence its life-giving potential; and, finally, (8) the problem of biblical authority precisely for the serious student of the Bible who refuses to bracket intellectual honesty in biblical study.

I Canonical criticism has emerged as the mode by which even the most rigorous biblical scholar, usually preoccupied with what the Bible meant, can respond to such stimuli responsibly. It is also the means by which that scholar can find responsible links between what he or she finds in the biblical past to what the *  First published 1984. 1   Cf. Sanders, “Canonical Context and Canonical Criticism.” 2   Cf. Smart, Strange Silence.

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Bible can say to the ongoing believing communities who are the proper heirs of the biblical legacy. Biblical criticism can simply no longer ignore the charges that it has atomized the Bible in its own special way, then stuffed the pieces back into antiquity while acting quite irresponsibly for the most part about the very nature of the Bible itself. The claim to objectivity and thoroughness rings hollow when the Bible as canon is ignored. Its nature as canon had to be bracketed early on in the history of modern biblical criticism in order for scholars to focus on the history of its formation. In the eighteenth century, canon meant primarily authority, and that authority was the province of the churches. By the end of the eighteenth century, Johann Salomo Semler and others had reduced the concept of canon to the final stage in the history of literary formation of the Bible. Then, by the end of the nineteenth century, what started out as J, E, D, and P ended up at Jamnia as the complete Torah, Prophets,and Writings. Western minds needed some authoritative council to wrap it up, and they found it, or so they thought, in Jamnia. Hence canonization meant the means whereby the largest literary units, the several books, got included and others were left out. Authority was superimposed upon the resultant compilation by an assembly of rabbinic scholars not totally unlike themselves. Thus reduced to what was manageable by the tools of literary and historical criticism, the concept of canon was tamed and remained docile until recently. Views of the canon of the New Testament and how it took shape have been similar. All that has had to be critically reviewed. Recent work has shown that Jamnia was not a council at all in the sense that Western minds needed,3 and the concept of canon is so integral to the very nature of Bible that it would not stay tamed. Consciousness has recently been raised in the minds of scholars that biblical criticism has all along subscribed to a view of authority of Scripture even while it tried to set the problem of inspiration and authority aside as improper for criticism as such to handle. One of the major characteristics of biblical criticism has been its pursuit of the ipsissima verba (or vox) of the original speakers, writers, and contributors to Scripture. As an exercise in historical research, such a pursuit has been quite legitimate. That is, it is right for the historian to attempt, insofar as possible, to recover what really was said and done by personages the Bible depicts. In so doing the historian has to try to determine what in a given passage derives from that person and what seems to be added by a later hand. Then the searcher has the data at hand to reconstruct the moment in history under study, in order to present a cohesive and reasonably accurate account of what really went on back there. Unfortunately, the exercise has spilled over its normal bounds and become confused with the question of authority. When the textbook or the professor claims that such and such a passage is “secondary” or “spurious,” the designation

3   Cf. Lewis, “What Do We Mean by Jabneh?” See also Leiman, Canon and Masorah, 254 – 63.

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is supposed to be limited to the exercise in historical research; but almost invariably the student is left to believe that the passage is also spurious with regard to its authority for the liturgical and instructional life of the believing community today. One wonders how many preachers who have been educated in the mainline seminaries, when preparing lessons and sermons, avoid those passages they were taught were “secondary.” There was the tacit assumption that if the words of the passage should be denied to the original speaker or writer, then they did not have the authority necessary to be sermon material. In effect, that assumption presupposes a view of authority shared with fundamentalists and literalists, namely that inspiration of Scripture was from God or Holy Spirit to the ancient person vertically, which was then horizontally preserved by disciples, preachers, and scribes more or less “accurately.”4 The difference between biblical critics who fall into this confusion, and fundamentalists and the inerrancy folk, is quantitative. The one claims that only a certain percentage of the passage or the biblical book goes back to the ancient personage in whose name it is recorded, while the other claims that all of it does. Again, as in so many other areas, liberals and fundamentalists really subscribe to the same basic presuppositions, the difference between them often being superficial, though seemingly irreconcilable. The Princeton theologians Archibald Alexander Hodge and Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield, sometimes called the thoughtful fundamentalists, put their position clearly in an article titled “Inspiration” published in The Presbyterian Review in 1881 (vol. 2, pp. 237 – 38): “It must be remembered that it is not claimed that the Scriptures any more than their authors are omniscient . . . They are written in human languages, whose words, inflections, constructions, and idioms bear everywhere indelible traces of human error . . . Nevertheless the historical faith of the Church has always been, that all the affirmations of Scripture of all kinds, whether of spiritual doctrine or duty, or of physical or historical fact, or of psychological or philosophical principle, are without any error, when the ipsissima verba of the original autographs are ascertained and interpreted in their natural and intended sense.”5 While the value of such a statement clearly does not lie in its view of church history, it is an invaluable statement of the view of biblical authority held by the rationalist fundamentalists in the midst of the modernist-fundamentalist controversy. Canonical criticism brings a corrective to the confusion by facing up to the question of authority within the guild of biblical criticism and by valorizing a firm observation of historical criticism: the Bible comes to us out of the liturgical and instructional lives of the ancient believing communities that produced and shaped it.6 What is there, is there not only because someone in antiquity was inspired to speak a needed word to his or her community, but also because that

4

  Cf. Achtemeier, Inspiration of Scripture, 22 – 32.   Cf. March, “Biblical Theology,” 115.   Cf. Lemaire, Les écoles et la formation de la Bible.

5 6

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community valued that communication highly enough to repeat it, eventually reciting it in one way or another, and recommend it to the next generation and to the next community nearby. So-called secondary passages represent the appreciation of the community in adapting the message to its needs and they show us, using the critical tools necessary, how indeed they did so. The Bible as canon is a community product in this sense. We simply would not have the words of the great genius back there if his or her listeners and neighbors did not preserve them. In the case of the judgmental prophets as well as some other literature, there was apparently a span of time when only a few so valued what had been said. But invariably there came a point when the larger community or communities valued the words enough to set them on a kind of tenure track toward canon. Archaeology often discovers the literary product of ancient geniuses whose words were not so valued. What is in the canon is what “made it,” so to speak, in contrast to what has only recently been found in holes in the ground in the eastern Mediterranean area. All this is to say that canon and community must be thought of as belonging together, both in antiquity and today. The heirs of the ancient tradents continue their dialogue with those traditions as recorded in the Bible. The believing community always was and always will be the proper Sitz im Leben of canon, and that community has always included both the geniuses and the learners, the leaders and the followers. Each has always needed the other. It matters little how much of a genius an ancient author was, or how inspired, if there was not a community to appreciate at some point what was done, said, or written. The question of the authority of canon lodges in the ongoing dialogue between the believing community and its canon. And that canon includes both the original words and the early community responses to them. The community’s appreciation and adaptation of what the original person had said is comparable to the latter’s appreciation and adaptation of the community traditions he or she had cited in the “original” speech or writing. The Bible is full, Old Testament and New, of older authoritative community traditions called upon and adapted to the newer historical contexts of community need. It is often said that the Old Testament is the largest component part of the New in its citations of and allusions to Scripture and tradition. But the Old Testament is also replete with repetition and citation of older community traditions as well as of tried and true international wisdom. The prophet or the psalmist rarely goes for long without ringing in the changes on the Torah story. And even the wisdom writers, such as Job and Qohelet, while never citing the Torah story, over and over again indirectly reflect upon the theological traditions of ancient Israel and Judah. The so-called later hands and editors are true heirs of the masters themselves in this regard, for they simply have gone and done likewise. As Brevard Childs says of Walther Zimmerli’s work on Ezekiel, it is the Ezekiel book that is canonical, not the prophet Ezekiel.7 Indeed, the faithful in the believing communities today simply go and 7

  Cf. Childs, Introduction to the OT as Scripture, 357 – 70.

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do likewise when they take the canonical heritage and adapt it and apply it to present need. One might say, in traditional terms, that the Holy Spirit has been at work all along the path of believing communities ever since.

II If the point is established that canon and community go together, then we can speak of seven salient characteristics of Scripture as canon. I shall list and explain each briefly and then focus on one. Let me hasten to say that this emerging subdiscipline has by no means matured. It is still growing and much work needs yet to be done. It is only some fifteen years old by the most liberal reckoning. Nor is it intended to displace its older siblings in criticism. It is intended as a corrective to abuses of biblical historical criticism, as noted above, but this author clearly sees it as complementary to form, tradition, redaction, and rhetorical criticism. It is criticism’s effort to be more scientifically thorough than it has been to date. Biblical literary and historical criticism can be viewed as a gift of God in due season if its limits are observed and if it is not abused. It is an instrument by which God may continue to speak to his people today – if the professional interpreter in the believing communities today carefully honors the process of adaptation that the Bible itself indicates the biblical authors and speakers followed in the formation of Scripture. Canonical criticism aids the modern interpreter to do so. The seven characteristics are: repetition or relecture, as the French put it; resignification; multivalency of single texts; pluralism within the Bible as a whole; the adaptability-stability quotient of canon; the textual restraints that guard against abuse of Scripture; and hermeneutics. I want to explain each succinctly and then focus on canonical pluralism. 1.  The first characteristic of canonical Scripture is repetition. What is there got there because somebody way back there repeated something, starting a process of recitation that has never ceased. Nothing anybody said or sang could have made it into canon unless somebody else repeated or copied it, and then another and another. 2. The fact that each time it got repeated it got resignified slightly to fit the new context of repetition or recitation goes without saying. Someone says wonderingly, “Every time I read that passage I get something new out of it.” Right. Why? Because each new situation in which we read it gives us slightly different ears to hear and slightly different eyes to see what the passage can say. The original author may have had one thing in mind, but once what he or she said is out there, especially once it has hit the tenure track toward canon, it has a life of its own (to use traditional terms if you will) for the Holy Spirit to use as she sees fit, or (to use critical terms) subject to the hermeneutics applied to it in the new context in which cited. 3. Canonical literature is multivalent. The very fact that it made it on that track would indicate that. Actually, nearly any intelligible group of words held

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together by syntax is multivalent, but it is especially true of canon. This observation applies to single passages within Scripture. Just think of all the sermons preached on the same Sunday on a given passage selected by lectionary. Any two alike probably became so by collusion. It depends on the hermeneutics applied. Look at how differently Hab 2:4 is understood at the various places it shows up in Scripture.8 Examples are endless. 4. Pluralism is the fourth characteristic, but because I want to focus on it later, we’ll skip over it for the moment. This observation pertains to Scripture as a whole. 5. The fifth characteristic is canon’s dual nature of being both adaptable and stable, its adaptability-stability quotient. Until the emergence of canonical criticism, biblical scholarship focused almost exclusively on the stability factor when thinking of Scripture as canon, that is, the question of what books are in whatever canon and what books are left out. Why is the Hebrew Esther, which never mentions God explicitly, in the canon, whereas Judith, which is quite orthodox, was left out? I mean that sort of question. But actually, the stability factor is quite relative. It depends on which denomination in antiquity, or today, one is viewing. The ancient Essenes apparently had an open-ended canon with many more books in it than the canon of the Pharisees, and certainly with many more than that of the Sadducees. But today also it depends on which denomination one considers. Protestants have a short canon; Roman Catholics have the deutero-canonicals in addition; Greek Orthodox have yet more; and the ancient and venerable Ethiopic church has 81 books in its canon!9 While they do not agree on the stability factor, they all believe that Scripture is relevant or adaptable. 6. Even so, the texts have built-in constraints that must be observed. While it is true that certain hermeneutic techniques, such as numerology, allegory, and tropology, can make a passage say just about anything the interpreter using them wants it to say, canonical criticism draws attention to the limits imposed by the texts. Apocalypticists today, writing and speaking on the airways, usually can twist biblical passages to say pretty much what will draw the attention they want, but even very well-meaning critically trained preachers sometimes take a passage beyond its clear limits. As heirs of the early tradents and scribes, it behooves us in our turn to honor their labors to respect the texts they have passed on to us.10 This is in large measure the purpose of the Ancient Biblical Manuscript Center for Preservation and Research in Claremont, of which the writer is president. By preserving the contents of ancient manuscripts on film [or digitally], and storing that film in a climatized vault, we feel we are honoring the care ancient scribes took in their respect for biblical textual restraints, as well as providing a place the modern researcher can come to read all he or she wants in one place.

 8

  Cf. Sanders, “Habakkuk in Qumran.”   Cf. Cowley, “Biblical Canon.” 10   Cf. Sanders, “Text and Canon: Concepts and Method,” esp. 29; Sanders, “Text and Canon: Old Testament and New,” esp. 388 – 93.  9

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7. The Bible is full of unrecorded hermeneutics, the seventh and perhaps the most important characteristic of the Bible as canon. Elsewhere we shall focus on canonical hermeneutics. These are discernible through responsible use of critical tools. Nearly every biblical speaker or writer repeats or cites older traditions, or in the case of the New Testament, Scripture. And they all, of course, used hermeneutics in doing so. We can now, for the most part, ferret them out.11 By hermeneutics we do not mean principally hermeneutic techniques or rules, though we want to know those as well. Rather we mean the hermeneutic axioms they used, that is, their theology. Gerhard Ebeling has said that hermeneutics is theology and theology is hermeneutics. In the case of canonical hermeneutics it is the author’s or the tradent’s view of God that makes a tremendous difference in how a passage is read and made relevant. There are two major hermeneutic axioms discernible in the Bible: the one stresses the grace of God as the faithful promiser and the other stresses the freedom of God, as creator of all peoples, to judge and even transform or recreate his own people. Luke makes clear his view that the principal reason Jesus offended so many of the religious establishment of his day was that he read old familiar passages stressing God as God of all peoples. This Luke establishes already in his report of the sermon at Nazareth (Luke 4:16 – 30) and then continues to make clear through the central section of the Gospel.12 Luke even puts God’s grace in the light of God’s freedom to express this grace elsewhere as well as among the faithful, as, for example, in the three parables in Luke 15. Corruption of Christian consciousness in its apologetic need to feel unique has tried to limit God’s freedom in this regard to what he did in Christ in the first century. The task of ferreting out the hermeneutics used by the ancient biblical thinkers and authors themselves may be the most important task canonical criticism has. The work continues.

III But for the balance of this statement, I want to focus on canonical pluralism. Liberal Christians have failed to valorize the pluralism in the Bible even while agreeing that it is there. This is a point totally unrecognized by literalists and fundamentalists for whatever reason, but while it is recognized by liberals no one has clearly formalized biblical pluralism into a system of understanding of the Bible. It is time to do so, and canonical criticism provides the means for doing so. The fact that the Bible has multiple ways of saying things, different accounts of the same thing, and a healthy dose of contradictions does not need rehearsal here, so that we do not need to waste time belaboring the obvious. Liberals usually pride themselves on their honesty. To fail to recognize pluralism in the Bible is to be dishonest. But have we been as fully honest as we should be? One of 11

  Cf. Sanders, “Hermeneutics in True and False Prophecy.”   Cf. Sanders, “From Isaiah 61 to Luke 4,” esp. 92 – 104; Sanders, “Ethic of Election,” esp. 254 – 56. 12

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the reasons fundamentalism is abhorrent to many Christians is its dogmatic dishonesty. Nothing called Christian should require dishonesty at the very heart of what it professes. Well and good. Let us banish it altogether then. Even Karl Barth until his death in December 1968 still believed that if he dug deep enough and worked long enough on a passage he would find its consistent biblical core. “What distinguishes the witness of the prophets and the apostles, so that it can have significance for the existence of the congregation and its proclamation to the world? . . . They told all sorts of sagas and legends and at least made free use of all kinds of mythological material. In many things they said – and in many important propositions – they contradicted each other . . . They had only their election and calling to commend them. Their many-sided testimony has, in its own way and in its own place, one and the same center, subject and content.”13 Yes, but one has the feeling that the last sentence clouds the issue and prevented him from fully valorizing the pluralism Barth otherwise clearly saw. Many intellectual Christians retain an uninvestigated conviction that certain biblical themes ought to be discoverable everywhere in the Bible. I often tell my students that if they feel they’ve discovered a “biblical” idea or theme they should go back and look for its contrapositive: it will probably be there. The same Gospel that quotes Jesus as saying he came to bring peace (John 14:27 et passim) also quotes him as saying, “For judgment come I into the world . . .” (John 9:39). Each statement must be read in its own context, but our facile and subtle attempts at harmonization only serve to blunt the Word. The Bible comes to us from five ancient culture eras: the Bronze Age, the Iron Age, the Persian Period, the Hellenistic Period, and the Roman. It also comes in three languages with all the various idioms and cultural givens derived from those eras and languages. Isaiah 2:4 says there will come a time when Judah will beat her swords into plowshares and her spears into pruning hooks, but Joel 3:10 (MT 4:10) says the Lord commands Judah to beat her plowshares into swords and her pruning hooks into spears. Each statement should be read in context. These riches must not be harmonized out of existence. As Qohelet 3:5 says, there is a time for picking up stones and a time to put them down. We know these things, and if we are honest enough to admit of biblical pluralism, then we ought to find a way to celebrate it and formalize it. The perspective of canonical criticism on biblical pluralism is that it provides a built-in corrective apparatus so that we not absolutize any one agenda, or that we not think we have God boxed into a set of propositions. When a student gets into Jeremiah enough to get excited about his hermeneutics and his theology, I then advise her or him to read Qohelet. For Qohelet might be said to offer a critique to any effort to absolutize or generalize Jeremiah. Prophetic rhetoric is such that it tends at times to be hyperbolic, and one should simply not expect the Jeremiah book to touch all the bases necessary to contain full canonical truth. The sharper 13

 Barth, God Here and Now, 48.

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the prophetic challenge the less theological burden it can bear. So Qohelet is there as a corrective to any tendency we might have to lay too much on Jeremiah. Instead of thinking through carefully the tendency to charge books we like, such as Isaiah or Jeremiah or Romans, with the full weight of canonical truth, we tend also to squint at a book like Nahum or ignore it altogether, or simply regret it. But look at the riches of having both Nahum and Jonah in the same prophetic corpus: one speaks of God’s judgments against the Ninevites and the other of God’s grace toward them. Canonically speaking that is not essentially different from having Amos speak harsh words of God’s judgment against his own people as well as their neighbors, followed by an Obadiah who speaks harsh words of God’s judgment against Edom. God is creator and judge of all peoples, including his own, and God is redeemer of all peoples, even Assyria and Egypt (Isa 19:24 – 25, and the book of Jonah). Deutero-Isaiah is amazingly pluralistic in itself as may be witnessed by all the efforts to claim he was a universalist followed by all the efforts to assert he was a nationalist. Thank God we have not only Romans from Paul but also Galatians. The multiple-Gospel tradition is a canonical treasure as was recently shown by Professor Eugene Lemcio in the 1981 Weter Lecture at Seattle Pacific University.14 It is time we went ahead and celebrated the significant differences among the Gospels. The early churches have given us four; why not stress the differences where it is right to do so and where they are genuine differences so as to reap the blessings in store? Lemcio pointed out that we usually either harmonize the difference away, prefer one Gospel over the others, or engage in a kind of reductionism to find consistent themes. Matthew sees poverty as a spiritual quality and Luke sees it as an economic condition that Christians should tackle in society – and we today need both emphases, maybe not on the same day or in the same historical context of our own existences, but they have always been there when the churches through the ages have needed the challenge to hear the one, or the challenge to hear the other. Did the centurion say Jesus was the Son of God (Matthew) or simply innocent (Luke)? Canonically speaking we have the richness of both and we need to affirm the wisdom of the early believing communities in handing both down to us. Tatian’s harmonizing Diatessaron did not win out nor did Origen’s reductionist efforts. Whereas Mark (6:1 – 6) and Matthew (13:53 – 58) place Jesus’s sermon at Nazareth toward the end of Jesus’ Galilean ministry, Luke (4:16 – 30) puts it at the very beginning. And whereas in the others it is Jesus who marvels at the congregation because of their unbelief, in Luke it is the congregation that rejects Jesus because of his hermeneutics in interpreting Isa 61. The differences are significant and decisive and must not be glossed over or harmonized. Whereas Matthew’s report of Jesus’ parable of a great supper concerns a marriage feast (22:1 – 10), Luke’s report of the same concerns an eschatological victory banquet (14:15 – 24). Each significantly tells of how those who had been invited in the first 14

  Cf. Lemcio, “Gospels and Canonical Criticism.”

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place (keklēmenoi) did not attend when the time came. They clearly stem from the same basic story but the differences are significant and decisive. In each the “invited” represent those in society who felt they were elect (also keklēmenoi) but at the end do not partake of the feast. The reasons they do not finally attend are radically different in the two stories and those differences should not be lost because of a misguided pious desire to harmonize the two accounts – which is what has often happened in the history of Christian interpretation of the two. In order fully to understand the Matthean version one needs to know the targum or early Jewish interpretation of the feast in Zeph 1:7 – 13, which clearly lies back of his version. But in order fully to understand the Lukan version, one on the contrary needs to know the Septuagint of Deut 20:1 – 9 and the ways the Holy War legislation there was understood in Hellenistic as well as Pharisaic Judaism in the period before the New Testament.15 The riches of this sort of canonical pluralism must be preserved and even celebrated. There is no one view of Scripture that exhausts its blessings or its riches. On the contrary, canonical pluralism assures that there is no construct that can be built on Scripture that is not judged, and hopefully redeemed, by something else in it. God is God. God is God, and not the Bible or the canon within the canon of any one construct built on it – no matter how sincerely fervent on the one hand or how sophisticated on the other. God is One and we are many. And canonically the Bible may be seen as an ongoing prophetic voice that can keep us from absolutizing any one biblical viewpoint or running out of the theological ballpark with a pet biblical theme. This is a part of what I long ago chose to call monotheizing pluralism.16 The greatest challenge the Bible has for us all is the challenge to monotheize – to affirm the integrity of God both ontologically and ethically. And that may very well be the toughest challenge the human mind has ever met. The simple truth is that none of us does it right all the time, or even most of the time. Morning by morning we have to try again because part of what is meant by human depravity (a term liberals need to hear more clearly) is our natural bent toward polytheizing. We really can’t get it all together in our heads at once, but the challenge of Scripture is that we must try. We’d much rather have a bad god do all the things we don’t like and the good God (ours, of course) to do all the good things we like, with the assurance that ours will win out in the long run. We read Paul’s struggle with the hardening of the heart of Pharaoh and Isaiah’s prophetic call by denominational hermeneutics and at best pity the ancient Egyptians and Judahites. Christian anti-Semitism stems largely from our almost total failure to grasp fully the concept of the ongoing freedom of the God of grace. But the promise of these canonical traditions, taken whole, is that if we make the effort to monotheize, nothing in all creation can claim us: there are no idols; on the contrary, polytheism is reduced to pluralism that, submitted to the judgments of God, can be a blessing beyond belief. But it is not easy: the dark side 15

  Cf. Sanders, “Ethic of Election.”   Cf. Sanders, Torah and Canon, x.

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of Yahweh becomes repugnant, to liberals and conservatives alike, and we lose even our tremulous hold on Reality. (Conservatives have the devil to thank for absolutely everything they don’t like but he never seems to challenge their own most precious premises.) Can we be truly honest and valorize biblical pluralism? If so, it will require the other two H’s as well: not only a thoroughgoing honesty but also humility and humor.

IV Lay folk can get in on a canonical way of reading Scripture too. They don’t have to wait until scholars have finished working out all the unrecorded hermeneutics. One can simply read a passage consciously identifying with some one or group in it that one would not usually identify with. For instance, Joseph’s brothers instead of Joseph. Can we believe that the brother we sold into slavery has become our savior and kept us alive with the food he later had to give? Can we believe that the one we sold to Caesar has become our savior? If we continue always identifying with Joseph, Jeremiah, and Jesus while reading the texts, we’ll continue to miss the challenges and the blessings. One can read Luke’s account of our Lord’s sermon at Nazareth, by identifying with the little congregation that became so incensed at the way he interpreted Scripture (Jesus’ hermeneutics) that they became a lynching mob. To identify with Jesus in the New Testament accounts is to engage in falsehood, for a certainty, and yet we have almost always done so, consciously or unconsciously. The first H is honesty, and we have dwelt on that in this essay, in terms of the pluralism in the Bible. But it also means making the effort, on reading any passage in the Bible, to theologize about it first rather than moralizing about it first. We should not only ask what the passage says we should do, but ask first what it indicates God can do with such a situation as described in the biblical story. Then it strikes us sharply that God can also manage to redeem our situations, too, and that is the first note of salvation. If Pharaoh’s heart had been soft, and he had issued an emancipation proclamation for the Hebrew slaves, there might be a stele or monument of gratitude to Pharaoh for archaeologists to discover near Goshen, but there would have been no Torah – not out of that situation. One should theologize first, then moralize upon the result of that reflection. This liberates the reader from absolutizing Bronze Age, Iron Age, Persian Period, or Hellenistic-Roman mores, and helps us focus on what God can do with, and then we can do in, our own current situations. The second H is humility, and that means precisely the ability to identify in the biblical accounts with Rameses, Nebuchadnezzar, and Herod, or with the well-meaning false prophets, soft-headed polytheizers, and godfearing Pharisees, in order to hear the challenge of Scripture. The third H is humor, and this means taking God a little more seriously each time we read Scripture and ourselves a little less so. If so, the blessings are innu-

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merable. The Bible as canon is a monotheizing literature, Old Testament and New, as indeed the Christian trinitarian belief confirms and reaffirms. It is also a theocentric literature, and that is liberation abundant. Its perspective is to celebrate what God can do with most any fouled-up situation we can devise or offer up, for none could be worse than those the canon describes in its utter realism about the struggles back then. The Bible gives us a paradigm of that realism covering some fifteen centuries in antiquity. Isn’t that enough for our poor limited human brains to get the point? On the strength of the belief that God continues to respond with creative redemption today to what we offer up, cannot we continue as heirs of the biblical tradents and attempt in our day to pursue the Integrity of Reality, the oneness of God, in our equally real situations? Might not then some of that Integrity rub off on us?17

Reflections It is impossible to express fully my gratitude to those responsible in the Universities of Fribourg, Geneva, Lausanne, and Neuchâtel for inviting me to launch the troisième-cycle monthly seminars for 1981 – 82 on the topic of the biblical canon. I wish to take this opportunity to thank all those, both faculty and students, who took part in the seminar of 30 – 31 October 1981 in Fribourg, especially for their sympathetic interest in canonical criticism and for their critical response to the above paper. Their questions and interventions during the course of the seminar, both during session and in spontaneous conversations around it, advanced my own thinking considerably and have provided me the opportunity to reflect on several matters of importance critical both to concept and method of canonical criticism. No other such group has caused me to feel the need to press on beyond canonical process to canonical closure as the Fribourg seminar. I received the clear impression there that it is now time to focus on clôture. I think that I came to agree with this point because I felt during the course of the two-day discussions that the issues we have been dealing with up to this point over the past decade had been clearly heard, understood, and broadly accepted. This was gratifying as well as challenging: gratifying because a great deal of my thinking about text and canon was shaped in peripatetic conversations with Dominique Barthélemy, of Fribourg, in walks in the Black Forest during the summers 1969 – 79 while working together on the United Bible Societies’ Hebrew Old Testament Text Project, challenging because of the responsibility implicit in the support given and the expectations expressed in future work. It has been clear all along that canonical criticism has so far focused on the function of canon in the believing communities, both those that shaped the Bible through the periods of intense canonical process and those since that have 17   Much of the above appeared as Sanders, “The Bible as Canon” and was copyright 1981 by the Christian Century Foundation, which has granted permission to reprint it here [1984].

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devised the hermeneutics necessary to keep it adaptable and relevant to the ever-changing contexts and needs of the faithful in the ongoing communities. This focus has been the case in part because of the debate within the United States between those led by Brevard Childs, who have focused almost exclusively on a final form of the biblical text and by “canonical context” mean the literary context provided by the stabilized Masoretic Text of late antiquity, and those, like myself, who have wanted to valorize the results of historical biblical criticism of the past two and a half centuries both by observing its limitations and its felicitous results. Childs eschews the term canonical criticism, and rightly so, since it aptly relates to views and work quite alien to his expressed stance.18 That term, which Childs attributes to this writer,19 has indeed focused on process rather than on a single stabilized text. It has largely done so because of the shift of attention, which Childs fully agrees with, from the ancient individual author of and contributor to biblical literature, as the focus of “inspiration,” to the ancient believing communities of which those authors and redactors were part. It has been difficult for this writer to understand the full value of Childs’s emphasis on the believing community because of his denial of contributions to the text by the communities who helped shape the Bible up to the community responsible for the final form of the text. We have, therefore, put most of our labors and emphasis on valorizing the efforts of all the communities of the biblical past to whom we are indebted. The kinds of concerns expressed by B. W. Anderson20 are fully accounted for by canonical criticism, which focuses on the canonical function of early stages of authoritative traditions, both oral and written, within believing communities that received, commented on, perhaps, and passed on what they had received as having community value. Anderson’s concerns about Childs’s position are shared by many of Childs’s critics and reviewers of his Introduction.21 It is in large measure because of the appearance of Childs’s book and the shared widespread reaction to it that we are free now, perhaps, to move on in our thinking to the question of closure. The major challenge of the Fribourg seminar was to take the concepts and method developed in canonical criticism focusing on the function of canon in the believing communities and apply them in a rigorous and thoroughgoing way to the question of closure. Canonical criticism, responding to the stimuli listed above, in a manner of speaking leapt back over redaction criticism to pick up a 18

  Childs, “Canonical Shape,” esp. 54.   Cf. Sanders, Torah and Canon, ix – xx.   Cf. Anderson, “Tradition and Scripture,” esp. 14 ff. 21   Cf. discussion in HBT of Childs’s Introduction to the OT as Scripture in Birch, “Tradition, Canon”; Knight, “Canon and the History of Tradition”; Mays, “What Is Written”; Polk, “Brevard Childs’ Introduction”; Sanders, “Canonical Context and Canonical Criticism”; and Childs, “A Response”; and in JSOT, Barr, “Childs’ Introduction”; Blenkinsopp, “New Kind of Introduction”; Cazelles, “Canonical Approach”; Kittel, “Brevard Childs’ Development”; Landes, “Canonical Approach”; Murphy, “OT as Scripture”; and Smend, “Questions”; with a response by Childs, “Response to Reviewers”; see also Harrelson, Review of Introduction to the OT as Scripture. 19 20

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major observation of form criticism, namely, that everything in the Bible comes to us out of the liturgical and instructional lives of the early believing communities. That point, while not in any way denied, has not been in the foreground of thinking in the work of redaction criticism. The latter has tended to focus on the theological thinking and message of the final or major redactor of a biblical book or section of biblical literature – an individual. The importance of individual contributors to biblical literature can never be denied and must never be lost sight of, but it can be overstressed when the community to which that individual belonged is ignored. Without it and its successors and neighbors we would not have a sentence of what the individual had said or written: archaeologists would have to find it in holes in the ground in the eastern Mediterranean area, as indeed they have done frequently in modern times. What is in the canon is what made it with the communities of the faithful in antiquity, and anonymous members thereof frequently showed their appreciation of what had been said or written, adapting it to their later moments by resignifying it or altering it to make it relevant. Canonical criticism seeks not only to validate each of those “later hands” as well as the first and original speaker or writer, it seeks to discover, insofar as possible, the hermeneutics of each contributor to the text from first to last. Biblical historical criticism has developed the tools necessary to ferret out those pervasive unrecorded hermeneutics that lie in and through all the texts of the Bible. Those tools have so far been used mainly to recover points originally scored by the first contributors to a text. They have also been used to a lesser extent to recover the points of the later hands laid to the same text. But not until canonical criticism have they been consciously used to ferret out the hermeneutics whereby each of those series of contributors to a text adapted what they had received and had found value enough in to re-apply and adapt to the community at the moment of adaptation.22 Even the first speaker or writer, the one on whom historical criticism has for two and a half centuries focused most of its attention, often was applying some oral or written community tradition, or international wisdom tradition, in the first place. That very first “repetition” began a process of adaptation and re-adaptation that continues today. It began in the layers that make up a biblical text and it continues through today in sermons and lessons and “lectures” throughout the world. That is what we mean by canonical process. And it was what I meant in the seminar, on the Saturday morning, when in answer to the question, When did “canon” begin? I immediately responded: “From the first moment of ‘repetition.’” I was, of course, focusing on the function of canon as process. And unless one wishes somehow to absolutize my response, I would still give it in answer to the same or similar question. But from that moment in the seminar I began to realize that in order to make the response valid we must now go on to work on the question of closure in the light of it. This will take time and work, but the direction it will take is already 22

ecy.”

  Cf. Sanders, “Hermeneutics,” IDBSup; Sanders, “Hermeneutics in True and False Proph-

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indicated in work done to date. The shape of the Torah was set in the sixth-century exilic period and stabilized in the fifth-century events of Ezra’s return to Jerusalem.23 The shape of the prophetic corpus was indicated in the sixth-century exilic period, set soon after Ezra’s return, and stabilized ne varietur finally in response to the Hellenistic challenges of the third century. When one says ne varietur, however, one can no longer mean unchanging for all denominations in Judaism and one can no longer ignore the fact that biblical texts in the early Jewish period were still relatively fluid in comparison to the strict stabilization process that began in the first century BCE and was completed by the end of the first century CE.24 One can mean ne varietur only with regard to the old question of how far editors and redactors could go in reshaping and altering and adding to what they received. The Torah clearly became stabilized for all the Jewish believing communities, in a very real sense ne varietur, soon after Ezra’s promulgation. The “Torah” event has to be seen as a remarkable response to the universal need of all the surviving Jewish communities of the Persian period to know who they were and how they should live in the light of that identity in ever-changing contexts scattered throughout the known world. Nothing in Judaism or elsewhere can quite compare to the Torah event in this regard. Hence, when it then became a question of preserving the teachings of the prophets after it was believed that the spirit of prophecy ceased, the pressure to stabilize the prophetic corpus that began to take shape in the exilic experience was simply not as great. It could remain relatively fluid until the needs engendered by the Hellenistic challenge became so great that pressure built for closure there. Finally, it was the horrendous needs spawned by the demise of the Second Jewish Commonwealth and the oppression of Roman occupation and universal rule over every Jewish community in the Empire that caused the pressures that resulted in steady stabilization of both text and canon from the second half of the first century BCE through to the stunning and shocking catastrophe of the fall of Jerusalem.25 We have suggested that there were similar political and social pressures that later brought about the more relative stabilization and closure of the New Testament text and canon in the fourth and fifth centuries CE.26 The work that needs to be done now is that of applying the method of canonical criticism to the questions of closure. That method is indicated by the triangle first developed in my article of 1977.27 The three foci of text or tradition being applied or adapted, the context in which the adaptation took place, and the hermeneutics by which it was effected would need also to be fully explored and understood in study of the final stages of closure. Obviously, the stimuli and pressures of the historical context of closure would need to be explored 23

  Cf. Sanders, Torah and Canon, 52 – 53.   Cf. Barthélemy, “Text, Hebrew, History of”; Barthélemy, “Histoire du texte hébraïque”; Sanders, “Text and Canon: Concepts and Method.” 25   Cf. Barthélemy, “Text, Hebrew, History of”; Sanders, “Canonical Context and Canonical Criticism.” 26   Cf. Sanders, “Text and Canon: Old Testament and New.” 27   Cf. Sanders, “Hermeneutics in True and False Prophecy,” 21 – 22. 24

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carefully. But equal care would need to be used in discerning the hermeneutics at play in the questions of inclusion and order, and, obviously in the question of what “text” or “texts” were finally accepted by the surviving communities. The same three foci of the triangle should be kept in mind when tracing a diachronic history, by comparative midrash, of the function of a tradition from its inception through to closure or to a particular citation or allusion under study.28 Comparative midrash includes a synchronic perception of the function of an authoritative tradition as well. The hermeneutics by which that tradition functions is always in purview: so also would it be in probing closure. The question also of what part gatherings or assemblies of leaders of those communities played in the process would need to be probed very carefully in the light of the fact that we have become disabused of the idea that we can think of the ability to superimpose authority that later church councils apparently had. Nonetheless, the role of “leaders” appreciated by the scattered believing communities and the measure of authority granted them by the circumstances would need to be very carefully reviewed, as well as the extent to which their deliberations were acceptable by the communities at large. None of this work can or should be done hastily. It will take time. What Fribourg did, in part, was to show the need and indicate the new opportunity now to approach the questions of closure and structure of canon with the tools already developed in working on the function of canon in the believing communities. Bibliography Achtemeier, Paul J. The Inspiration of Scripture: Problems and Proposals. Philadelphia: Westminster John Knox, 1980. Anderson, Bernhard W. “Tradition and Scripture in the Community of Faith.” JBL 100 (1981) 5 – 21. Barr, James. “Childs’ Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture.” JSOT 16 (1980) 12 – 23. Barth, Karl. God Here and Now. New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964. Barthélemy, Dominique. “Histoire du texte hébraïque de l’Ancien Testament.” In: Études d’histoire du texte de l’Ancien Testament, by Dominique Barthélemy, 341 – 64. OBO 21. Fribourg: Éditions universitaires: Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1978. Barthélemy, Dominique. “Text, Hebrew, History of.” In IDBSup 878 – 84. Birch, Bruce C. “Tradition, Canon, and Biblical Theology.” HBT 2 (1980) 113 – 25. Blenkinsopp, Joseph. “A New Kind of Introduction: Professor Childs’ Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture.” JSOT 16 (1980) 24 – 27. Cazelles, Henri. “The Canonical Approach to Torah and Prophets.” JSOT 16 (1980) 28 – 31. Childs, Brevard S. “The Canonical Shape of the Prophetic Literature.” Int 32 (1978) 46 – 55. Childs, Brevard S. Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture. Philadelphia: Augsburg Fortress, 1979. Childs, Brevard S. “A Response.” HBT 2 (1980) 199 – 211. 28   Sanders, “From Isaiah 61 to Luke 4,” and “Hermeneutics in True and False Prophecy,” were intended to be working models.

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Childs, Brevard S. “Response to Reviewers of Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture.” JSOT 16 (1980) 52 – 60. Cowley, Roger W. “The Biblical Canon of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church Today.” OstKSt 23 (1974) 318 – 23. Harrelson, Walter J. Review of Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture, by Brevard S. Childs. JBL 100 (1981) 99 – 103. Hodge, Archibald A. and Benjamin B. Warfield. “Inspiration.” Presbyterian Review 2 (1881) 225 – 60. Kittel, Bonnie. “Brevard Childs’ Development of the Canonical Approach.” JSOT 16 (1980) 2 – 11. Knight, Douglas A. “Canon and the History of Tradition.” HBT 2 (1980) 127 – 49. Landes, George M. “The Canonical Approach to Introducing the Old Testament: Prodigy and Problems.” JSOT 16 (1980) 32 – 39. Leiman, Sid Z., ed. The Canon and Masorah of the Hebrew Bible. An Introductory Reader. New York: Ktav, 1974. Lemaire, André. Les écoles et la formation de la Bible dans l’ancien Israel. OBO 39. Fribourg: Presses universitaires; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1981. Lemcio, Eugene E. “The Gospels and Canonical Criticism.” BTB 11 (1981) 114 – 22. Lewis, Jack P. “What Do We Mean by Jabneh?” JBR 32 (1964) 125 – 32. [Reprinted in The Canon and Masorah of the Hebrew Bible: An Introductory Reader, edited by Sid Z. Leiman, 254 – 61. New York: Ktav, 1974.] March, W. Eugene. “‘Biblical Theology,’ Authority and the Presbyterians.” Journal of Presbyterian History 59 (1981) 113 – 30. Mays, James L. “What Is Written.” HBT 2 (1980) 151 – 63. Murphy, Roland E. “The Old Testament as Scripture.” JSOT 16 (1980) 40 – 44. Polk, David P. “Brevard Childs’ Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture.” HBT 2 (1980) 165 – 71. Sanders, James A. “The Bible as Canon.” Christian Century 98 (2 Dec 1981) 1250 – 55. Sanders, James A. “Canonical Context and Canonical Criticism.” HBT 2 (1980) 173 – 97. [Reprinted in From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, by James A. Sanders, 153 – 74. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987.] Sanders, James A. “The Ethic of Election in Luke’s Great Banquet Parable.” In Essays in Old Testament Ethics: J. Philip Hyatt in Memoriam, edited by James L. Crenshaw and John T. Willis, 245 – 71. New York: Ktav, 1974. [Revised in Luke and Scripture: The Function of Sacred Tradition in Luke – Acts, by Craig A. Evans and James A. Sanders, 106 – 20. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993.] Sanders, James A. “From Isaiah 61 to Luke 4.” In Christianity, Judaism and Other Greco-Roman Cults: Studies for Morton Smith at Sixty. Part 1, New Testament, edited by Jacob Neusner, 75 – 106. Studies in Judaism in Late Antiquity 12. Leiden: Brill, 1975. [Reprinted in Luke and Scripture: The Function of Sacred Tradition in Luke – Acts, by Craig A. Evans and James A. Sanders, 46 – 69. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993.] Sanders, James A. “Habakkuk in Qumran, Paul and the Old Testament.” JR 39 (1959) 232 – 44. [Revised in Paul and the Scriptures of Israel, edited by Craig A. Evans and James A. Sanders, 98 – 117. JSNTSup 83. SSEJC 1. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1993.] Sanders, James A. “Hermeneutics.” In IDBSup 402 – 7. Sanders, James A. “Hermeneutics in True and False Prophecy.” In Canon and Authority: Essays in Old Testament Religion and Theology, edited by George W. Coats and Burke O. Long, 21 – 41. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1977. [Reprinted as “Canonical Hermeneutics: True and False Prophecy.” In From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, by James A. Sanders, 87 – 105. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987.]

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Sanders, James A. “Text and Canon: Concepts and Method.” JBL 98 (1979) 5 – 29. [Reprinted in From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, by James A. Sanders, 125 – 51. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987.] Sanders, James A. “Text and Canon: Old Testament and New.” In Mélanges Dominique Barthélemy: Études bibliques offertes à l’occasion de son 60e anniversaire, edited by Pierre Casetti, Othmar Keel, and Adrian Schenker, 373 – 94. OBO 38. Fribourg: Presses universitaires; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1981. Sanders, James A. Torah and Canon. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1972. French Translation: Identité de la Bible: Torah et Canon. Paris: Cerf, 1975. [2nd ed. Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2005.] Smart, James D. The Strange Silence of the Bible in the Church: A Study in Hermeneutics. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1970. Smend, Rudolf. “Questions about the Importance of the Canon in an Old Testament Introduction.” JSOT 16 (1980) 45 – 51.

*  In addition to the works cited in the footnotes, the basic bibliography on the question of “Canonical Criticism” addressed by the author also includes the following studies, in alphabetical order: Ackroyd, Peter R. “Original Text and Canonical Text.” USQR 32 (1977) 166 – 73. Barr, James. Old and New in Interpretation: A Study of the Two Testaments. New York: Harper & Row, 1966. [Rev. ed., 1985]. Carroll, Robert P. “Canonical Criticism: A Recent Trend in Biblical Studies?” ExpTim 92 (1980) 73 – 78. Jacob, Edmond. “Principe canonique et formation de l’Ancien Testament.” In IOSOT Congress Volume Edinburgh 1974, edited by George W. Anderson et al., 101 – 22. VTSup 28. Leiden: Brill, 1975. Maier, Gerhard. The End of the Historical-Critical Method. St. Louis: Concordia, 1977. Mays, James L. “Historical and Canonical: Recent Discussion about the Old Testament and Christian Faith.” In Magnalia Dei: The Mighty Acts of God. Essays on the Bible and Archaeology in Memory of G. Ernest Wright, edited by Frank M. Cross, Werner E. Lemke, and Patrick D. Miller, 510 – 28. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1976. Östborn, Gunnar. Cult and Canon: A Study in the Canonization of the Old Testament. UUÅ 10. Uppsala: Lundequistska, 1950. Outler, A. C. “The Logic of Canon-Making and the Tasks of Canon-Criticism.” In Texts and Testaments: Critical Essays on the Bible and Early Church Fathers, edited by W. Eugene March, 263 – 76. San Antonio: Trinity University Press, 1980. Sanders, James. A. “Adaptable for Life: The Nature and Function of Canon.” In Magnalia Dei: The Mighty Acts of God. Essays on the Bible and Archaeology in Memory of G. Ernest Wright, edited by Frank M. Cross, Werner E. Lemke, and Patrick D. Miller, 531 – 60. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1976. [Reprinted in From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, by James A. Sanders, 9 – 39. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987.] Sanders, James A. “Response” [to Eugene Lemcio’s “The Gospels and Canonical Criticism.”] BTB 11 (1981) 122 – 24. Sundberg, Albert C., Jr. The Old Testament of the Early Church. HTS 20. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964.

8 Canon as Shape and Function The classical phrases that express the uses of the word “canon” as applied to the Bible are norma normata and norma normans, the first indicating canon as shape, the latter canon as function. I have tried over the past twenty years to contribute to both understandings.

Introduction I entered the field in 1968 with an attempt to understand the variant kinds of biblical literature recovered from Caves 4 and 11 at Qumran, not only the differing orders and contents evident in several scrolls of psalms from those two caves, but also the place of the Temple Scroll in whatever one should call the authoritative literature at Qumran.1 It has become broadly accepted since that time that the canon was still open-ended, at least at Qumran, by the beginning of the first century CE. While some, such as our late, beloved colleague, Patrick William Skehan, and Moshe Goshen-Gottstein, view the variant scrolls of psalms as benign liturgical aberrations from an already accepted canon of the Psalter, others such as Rudolf Meyer and John Barton have taken the extant evidence to mean that no denomination in early Judaism had a closed Psalter at the beginning of the first century of the common era.2 In any case, it would appear that the Writings or Ketuvim, the third section of the eventual Jewish tripartite canon, like the Psalter, was not yet closed, but probably would be by the time of the Bar Kochba revolt at the beginning of the second century CE. The various codices of the Septuagint, preserved by the churches after the split of Christianity from Judaism, would further indicate that, while there was no Alexandrian canon over against the Palestinian, the churches went on using and copying Greek First Testaments without knowledge of, or without regard for, closure of the Jewish canon. My entry into the field of canon study was at first limited to such issues and questions. But I had long had a second interest, which emerged four years later in Torah and Canon. It catapulted me into canon studies in its other aspects as well. A recent report written at the request of the Pontifical Biblical Commission in Rome cites the call I sounded in the introduction to Torah and Canon for *  First published 1991. 1   Sanders, “Cave 11 Surprises.” 2   See Barton, Oracles of God, 86.

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engagement by biblical scholarship in canonical criticism as the beginning point. In the report, Dominique Barthélemy cites Brevard Childs’s 1964 article, “Interpretation in Faith,” as well as his 1970 volume Biblical Theology in Crisis, as antecedents and forerunners to what Childs calls reading the Bible in canonical context; he also cites my work with the Dead Sea Scrolls as antecedent to what I termed canonical criticism.3 Barthélemy correctly notes that Childs has often objected to the term canonical criticism, one point among others that James Barr has failed to grasp.4 A realization I came to in 1972 as respondent to Brevard Childs’s Sprunt Lectures at Union Seminary, Richmond, however, was that Childs and I, while using some of the same terms, were addressing the question of canon from quite different perspectives. That conference was enlightening to me, not only in what I heard Childs coming to in the Sprunt Lectures but in the very lively discussions revolving around the lectures. Childs and I served together in those years on the advisory council of Interpretation so that being together at Union Richmond was not a new experience; what was different was hearing in a systematic way what he understood by reading the Bible in canonical context. While work on early Jewish canons, or accepted collections of Scriptures, entails problems involved in norma normata, in Torah and Canon we were working in the areas of both norma normata and norma normans. We addressed the inverse of the question Gerhard von Rad had addressed in 1938 in his “Problem of the Hexateuch.”5 Von Rad had asked why in the early recitals or creeds in prophets, psalms, and histories in the Bible there is no mention of the stop at Sinai, which is so central to the Pentateuch. I turned the question on its head and asked, since the entrance into the land is mentioned in nearly all the preexilic recitals of Israel’s epic history, why is the book of Joshua not in the Torah? I was asking a question about the shape of the Pentateuch or Torah, and in so doing I was also asking about the function of Torah in believing communities. The thesis we advanced was that one of the functions of Torah recited annually (or perhaps, for a while, triennially in antiquity) as canon was to give Jews their identity in ever-changing situations and circumstances in history so that wherever they might be they would know who they were and not assimilate to the dominant culture of their time and place. We also suggested that since the largest Jewish community in the world from the sixth century BCE to the Middle Ages was in Babylonia, it was important to note that both the Torah that Ezra brought with him to Jerusalem (Neh 8) as well as the official Talmud of later formative Judaism were shaped in the very powerful Jewish communities in Babylonia.

3

  Barthélemy, “La critique canonique.”   Barr, Review of From Sacred Story to Sacred Text. By contrast see the perceptive review by Anderson and Towner, Review of From Sacred Story to Sacred Text. 5   von Rad, Das formgeschichtliche Problem des Hexateuchs. See the very fine critique in historical perspective by Groves, Actualization and Interpretation, and Sanders, Review of Actualization and Interpretation. 4

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Canon as Function: The Problems Torah and Canon thus dealt with canon both as norma normata and norma normans. From that point on until recently I dealt largely with canonical process, or canon as function. The principal reason was that I was very much impressed with how many so-called canons there had been in Judaism and Christianity and how much they varied in order, if not in both order and content. I agreed with Childs that canon as function had been largely set aside in biblical scholarship since the eighteenth century, precisely to accommodate the needs of biblical criticism in its task of working out the history of formation of the Bible, which Baruch Spinoza had so clearly called for in his Tractatus of 1670. But I could not go on with Childs to affirm “the final form of the text,” which is essential to his system of thought. The reason was that my work with the Dead Sea Scrolls had taken me into First Testament text criticism, which was being revolutionized precisely because of their discovery and assessment for determining the history of transmission of the Hebrew text of the Bible. In 1969, five scholars from Europe and Britain and I embarked on the United Bible Societies’ Hebrew Old Testament Text Project (HOTTP). We accepted the assignment because we not only believed in Eugene Nida’s program in the Translations Department of the Bible Societies through observation of what the Greek New Testament committee had been doing, but also because we knew that First Testament text criticism needed radical overhauling. The recovery in 1948 of the famous Tiberian Manuscript of the Bible called Aleppensis had inspired the founding of the Hebrew University Bible Project not long after the founding of the State of Israel and the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Their work, as reported in the annual Textus and then in the Sample Edition of Isaiah in 1965, followed by Goshen-Gottstein’s now famous 1967 article on Hebrew manuscripts, needed to be heeded and evaluated as much as possible in any such project as Nida had in mind.6 Moving into text criticism as deeply and critically as required by work on such a project as the HOTTP clearly meant that I could not follow Childs into his understanding of canonical context. Looking upon all the apparatus in BHK1 – 3 (Biblia Hebraica, edited by R. Kittel) and in BHS (Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia) with considerable suspicion, we found we had to do our own work on as many microfilms of ancient manuscripts as feasible. Beginning with Luther, and especially Morin and Cappellus, despite the strenuous objections by the Buxtorfs, father and son, Christian text criticism of the First Testament had moved decisively, by the end of the seventeenth century, into facilitating emendations and conjectures. While the field did not follow Luther’s hermeneutic of res et argumentum (deciding problem readings in the light of the gospel), it definitely moved in the direction of making text-critical decisions based on higher-critical criteria. It also was striking to us how random had been the selection 6   The annual Textus has been published irregularly by the HUBP since 1961; Goshen-Gottstein, Isaiah: Sample Edition, 11 – 45; Goshen-Gottstein, “Hebrew Biblical Manuscripts.”

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of manuscripts used in the great text-critical compendia. Even Kennicott and de Rossi’s collations did not solve the problem: they worked only on European manuscripts, and they largely disregarded the work of the Masoretes in so doing. Johann David Michaelis’s criticisms of Kennicott’s work are still pertinent; and yet Michaelis, probably the father of First Testament text criticism as it is largely practiced today, must take a great deal of the responsibility for the still prevalent method of text criticism in which a scholar decides contextually what Isaiah ought to have said and then emends the text in the light thereof.7 All this caused me in 1977 to leave the faculty of Union Seminary in New York to go to Claremont to help found the Ancient Biblical Manuscript Center so that scholars would no longer have to rely on the biases of interest and competence of earlier scholars who edited the so-called critical editions of crucial texts and versions of the Bible. In doing so and in investigating as many manuscripts as feasible, I have become more and more impressed with the lack of stability in order of books, even in the Jewish canon, after 2 Kings.8 As Israel Yeivin rightly put it in his Introduction to the Tiberian Masorah: “The order of the Books in the Torah and the Former Prophets has been established from earliest times; however, the order of the books in the Latter Prophets and the Writings is not fixed.”9 A simple observation in this regard is that whereas the lists in Baba Bathra 14b and the much later Second Rabbinic Bible of Jacob ben Hayyim place Chronicles at the end of the Ketuvim, and hence of the Bible, both great Tiberian manuscripts, Aleppensis and Leningradensis, place it first. Sometimes, however, Ruth is placed first. Whereas there is stability in the extant medieval manuscripts in placing the Books of the Three before the Book of the Twelve, and those before the Writings, it has now been established that the whole concept of the tripartite Tanak cannot be affirmed before the sixth century CE, if then.10 This does not at all address the problem of the great variety in order of books after the Pentateuch in Septuagint manuscripts, the Bible of the early church, until well after Jerome’s work of Hebraica veritas in the Vulgata. When one speaks of canonical context, one must do so very cautiously and with due regard to the facts. Then when one moves on to the Second Testament one must be equally cautious. No fewer than six different lists of the contents of the two Testaments were officially received in the Greek church in the tenth century. Most eastern churches have always included 1 and 2 Clement. The Ethiopian Orthodox church has 35 books in its New Testament. According to the Alands in Mün 7   For a cursory review of the hermeneutics of First Testament text criticism from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, see Sanders, “Hebrew Bible and Old Testament.”  8   Where the (hi)story line is continuous, that is, from Genesis to 2 Kings, there is stability in all Hebrew manuscripts as well as in lists in Jewish literature where available. Even before the widespread use of the codex, after the second century CE, control of the order of Torah and Early Prophets scrolls was simple.  9  Yeivin, Introduction to the Tiberian Masorah, 38. 10   Georg Eicher, Die Schrift in der Mischna (1906) cited in Pettit, “Comparative Study of Torah Citations.” 11   Aland and Aland, Text of the NT, 78 – 79.

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ster, only 3 uncials and 56 minuscules contain the whole of the New Testament. And if one looks at their holdings, which are as complete as possible, while there are 2328 manuscripts of the Gospels, there are only 287 of the book of Revelation.11 As Bruce Metzger recently observed, “It is obvious that the conception of the canon of the New Testament was not essentially a dogmatic issue whereby all parts of the text were regarded as equally necessary.”12 Despite Athanasius’s and Origen’s lists of 27 New Testament books, both in the fourth century, it was not until 1546 that the Roman Church issued an absolute article of faith (the De Canonicis Scripturis), sealed by anathema, concerning the canon of the Christian Bible.13 The various Reformed confessions at the end of the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth centuries list 27 books; and the sixth of the 39 Articles of Faith of the Church of England, issued in 1563, lists the 27. Apparently none of the Lutheran confessional statements includes such a list. Whether one turns to lists or to actual manuscripts of either Testament, then, one has to be cautious and clear about the meaning of canonical context. This is also true when getting into text criticism of either Testament. In fact, one should probably not speak of a canonical text of either Testament, nor even some final form of the text. One can admire and appreciate the Masoretes and all their work, as I came to do in work on the Dead Sea Scrolls and on the United Bible Societies’ HOTTP. Such appreciation, however, does not eliminate the need for sound method in text criticism, such as one can see in the two volumes so far published of Critique textuelle de l’Ancien Testament.14

Canon as Function: A Proposal Then what can be said about canon as shape, or norma normata? I suggest that, despite the uncertainty of order in the Jewish canon after 2 Kings, the considerable variety in order in the various Septuagint manuscripts also after 2 Kings (granting that Ruth is often placed after Judges), and despite the uncertainties about the content and order of the New Testament, there is a hermeneutical shape to the Jewish and Christian canons. The shape, however, is discernible largely in work on canon as function.15 I even dare to suggest that what may truly be called canonical are the unrecorded hermeneutics that lie among all the pages of Scripture, and that this canonical hermeneutic derives from Scripture’s basic, intertextual nature. Scripture is full of itself. Wherever one discerns an earlier tradition being recited or alluded to, one must ask what the ancient hermeneutics were by which the later tradent caused the earlier tradition to function. And there are very few passages of Scripture, outside the recording of ancient court and temple (civil and cultic) documents, that do not in some sense build 12

 Metzger, Canon of the NT, 217.   See Sanders, “Scripture, Canon of.” 14  Barthélemy, Critique textuelle. 15   See Sanders, “Deuteronomy.” 13

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on scriptural traditions. And where Israel’s authoritative traditions seem not to be called on, there is plenty of international wisdom alluded to and with which one may do the triangulation necessary to discern the hermeneutics by which the wisdom tradition, whether Israelite, foreign, Christian, or international, functions in the biblical setting. I further dare to propose that the basic canonical hermeneutic – of whatever canon that has in actuality functioned in historically verifiable believing communities, Jewish and Christian – was “theocentric monotheizing pluralism.” Clearly some of the literature monotheizes more thoroughly than others, and clearly some of so-called sectarian literature, whether at Qumran or at Nag Hammadi, tends to polytheize. And, indeed, some of the literature within some of the canons, including the current Protestant canon, does not seem to monotheize very well at all. The question becomes that of whether recognizing a hermeneutical shape permits the reader to read the parts in the light of the whole. I believe that it does. Is it canonically fair to monotheize in reading a passage that does not exhibit authorial intentionality to monotheize? One must first grant that the first of the Ten Commandments does indeed reflect the basic hermeneutic thrust of what ended up in the canon. If one grants that, then one must still speak only of a theocentric monotheizing thrust that permits one to go back and read the apparently polytheizing and tribalizing passages in the light of the whole. I am satisfied that the canon as a whole, of whichever Jewish or Christian believing community, pursues ultimately the “Integrity of Reality,” that is, the ontological and ethical oneness of God. I do not believe that the vast majority of people or their leaders in either ancient Israel or Judah managed to monotheize very well. The evidence is that they were as much polytheizers as modern Christians, and for that matter most ancient Christians. We are here concerned with the Bible as canon, not as a literature that accurately reflects the vox populi. On the contrary, if the number of laws against polytheizing and the number of prophetic indictments against it are any indication, most of the people were normal; they were polytheizers. But what got onto a tenure track toward canon, the literature that talked about God being the God of death as well as of life, of fallings as well as of risings, of defeats as well as victories, that was the literature, for the most part, that made it into the canon. Again, the question is not whether some of it tends to polytheize; some of it surely seems to do so. The question rather is whether it is canonically fair to read the parts hermeneutically in the light of the whole. Another question I wish to address is that of whether, if a canon is read as paradigm, and not as a box of ancient jewels that are somehow still valuable and negotiable, there is warrant for us to do today what the canonical authors did in their time. That is, should we engage in active syncretism and adapt the wisdom of others, of nonbelievers? First, is it canonically fair to monotheize while reading an apparently polytheizing or tribalizing passage? In Israel’s monotheizing pilgrimage, Israel at its best, while denying the existence of other gods, steadily added the attributes and

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job descriptions to Yahweh of most of the gods of the peoples they encountered. The names of the gods of the fathers, as Albrecht Alt and Martin Noth pointed out, became simply epithets of Yahweh. El Elyon and El Shaddai, as well as names of many other deities, became other names for Yahweh. There is a rabbinic tradition that God has seventy names. Hosea said that Israel did not know that Yahweh had given them the grain, the wine, and the oil (MT Hos 2:10; ET Hos 2:8). They had assumed that such a reputable and reliable agricultural deity as Baal had given them their flocks and crops. But now they were supposed to learn that one God, Yahweh, was not only their redeemer from slavery in Egypt and their holy warrior God; Yahweh was also creator. Learning that God was creator as well as redeemer would bring the prophets to say that, even as holy warrior, Yahweh might be at the head of enemy troops invading Israel and Judah. This would cost them dearly, but they accepted the monotheizing thrust of the traditions they received and applied it to the life-and-death situation Israel and Judah faced. There is a short pericope in Exod 4:24 – 26 that puzzles many scholars. Scholarship generally agrees that it is a pericope. It can thus be excised without damage to the context in which it is presently found in Exod 4. It clearly appears to be based on polytheizing thinking. A destroying deity threatens Moses’s life, but Zipporah circumcises their son, touches Moses’s own genitals with it, and thus saves Moses’s life. But note, v. 24 clearly says that the destroying deity or demon (ʾel mashhit) was Yahweh! The editor or redactor Yahwized the story, and in effect monotheized it. It makes it all the more an embarrassment, or so some say. And yet, is not Yahweh the same ʾel mashhit when later God passes over Egypt and kills the Egyptian first-born, and again later causes the death and defeat of the Egyptian army at the Reed Sea? Why is it more embarrassing to have Yahweh attack our guy, Moses, than their guys? I suggest that if we take the clue given, we should ourselves monotheize in reading the whole of the book and see the theological validity of the three-verse snippet in Exod 4:24 – 26. Otherwise, we too polytheize when we consciously or unconsciously think it all right for our God to kill their people for our sake. What of the hardening of Pharaoh’s heart? I recently suggested that it is our polytheizing hermeneutic in reading Exodus that causes us to translate the seven occurrences of the piel of hazaq, in which God affects Pharaoh’s heart, as God hardening Pharaoh’s heart. And that hermeneutic began with the Septuagint translators’ using sklērynō. Everywhere else the same verb occurs with regard to God’s somehow affecting Israel’s heart, it is translated by such words as “encourage” and “hearten.”16 Anyway, why should Rameses go soft-headed all of a sudden and abandon the responsibilities of his office to the Egyptian economy by letting all that cheap labor go free? Pharaoh had a lot of projects to complete. Have Christians who hold power in this country or in South Africa or anywhere

16   See Sanders, “Strangeness of the Bible,” as well as Sanders, “Challenge of Fundamentalism.”

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else hastened to share their wealth and political power with blacks or other dispossessed folk? And what if Pharaoh had done so? There would have been no exodus. There might have been a monument of stones set up outside Pithom, Raamses, and Goshen in gratitude to Pharaoh for Pharaoh’s “emancipation proclamation” but there would have been no departing in haste, no eating of lamb by midnight, no miracle at the crossing of the waters. The Bible is a book of realism in whatever canon, Jewish or Christian, we know of. That means that it well reflects the ambiguity of reality in which humans live, but also witnesses to the impingement and intrusion of the Integrity of Reality at crucial junctures in our lives. And it means that God works with that ambiguity, with all its antagonists and protagonists, all the pros and cons, all the yins and yangs. The Integrity of Reality, Scripture insists, works with the ambiguity of reality to redeem it. We Christians can say that the same God who chose one particular slave rebellion in the Late Bronze Age to make God’s paradigm of liberation and redemption also chose one heir of the Abraham-Sarah family in the first century CE in whom to dwell fully and vulnerably. We do not know why God chose the one slave rebellion to make into God’s gospel, any more than we know why God chose one particular Jew in whom to bring that gospel to its paradigmatic climax. Even christological statements of Christ’s preexistence do not answer that question. But if we Christians were to take seriously the canon’s monotheizing thrust we would learn to read the New Testament a bit differently from the way we normally do. We would learn to read in the New Testament of God’s Christ, not our Christ. We would learn to celebrate God’s revelation of Christ in due season and in the fullness of time, and not celebrate how our Christ revealed God, or how our boy tamed the big, mean old God. We would learn to translate the verbs of resurrection in the theological passive, instead of in the middle voice: Christ “was raised,” not Christ “arose,” unless we clearly mean God’s Christ. We would learn and teach that resurrection is a further act of Creation by the one, true God of all Creation. And even in those passages that seem to retribalize Christ, we would learn to reread in a monotheizing mode. John 14:6 would turn from an exclusivist’s tribalizing dream into a prophetic indictment of how we have trivialized the concept of God’s Christ into a Christian idol. It is true that no person comes to the parent God save through Christ; but it is not our precious idol, which we dearly clutch, who is the route to God, but rather God’s Christ, always and ever far and near, always and ever strange and dear, always and ever deus absconditus as well as deus revelatus. How might Jeremiah or Luke’s Jesus preach on such a Johannine passage, or even on the one in Acts 4:12 about there being “no other name”? Would not Our Lord himself challenge our assumptions that we have exhausted the meaning of God’s Christ? Would he not challenge our tendency to think that our Christ domesticated God, that our Christ boxed God in for us? Would he not remind us that we are commanded to fear God as well as love God? Would he not teach us a fuller view of the incarnation than one that turns Christ into an idol, and God into a doting, avuncular figure?

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Conclusion If the canon is viewed as paradigm of the monotheizing process might it not provide us with clues as to how we should go on learning from others of God’s children? And if we truly believe that God is the God of all creation, might we Christians not need to learn real humility and awe in speaking and thinking of God? Could we go on denying the work of God other than in our understanding of the gospel? To learn from others’ wisdom and experience is to honor God. A true evangelism derived from a monotheizing reading of the Bible would result in the joy of living, speaking, dancing, and singing the gospel. It would issue in a healthy fear as to whether we might not be lost in our own tribalizing tendencies (our own corruption of consciousness) rather than in the self-serving fear that others are lost. And if God is ever more than we can think or imagine, is it not precisely that important to learn with respect and humility from others, as well as to share with enthusiasm and joy our ever-evolving and ever renewing understanding of the gospel?

Bibliography Aland, Kurt, and Barbara Aland. The Text of the New Testament. Translated by Erroll F. Rhodes. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans; Leiden: Brill, 1987. Anderson, Bernhard W., and W. Sibley Towner. Review of From Sacred Story to Sacred Text: Canon as Paradigm, by James A. Sanders. Religious Studies Review 15, no. 2 (1989) 97 – 103. Barr, James. Review of From Sacred Story to Sacred Text: Canon as Paradigm, by James A. Sanders. Critical Review of Books in Religion 1 (1988) 137 – 41. Barthélemy, Dominique. Critique textuelle de l’Ancien Testament. OBO 50. Fribourg: Presses universitaires; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1982, 1986. [Now 5 vols. to 2016.] Barthélemy, Dominique. “La critique canonique.” Unpublished paper requested by the Pontifical Biblical Commission in Rome. Barton, John. Oracles of God. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986. Childs, Brevard S. Biblical Theology in Crisis. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1970. Childs, Brevard S. “Interpretation in Faith: The Theological Responsibility of an Old Testament Commentary.” Int 18 (1964) 432 – 49. Goshen-Gottstein, Moshe H., ed. The Book of Isaiah: Sample Edition with Introduction. Jerusalem: Magnes, 1965. Goshen-Gottstein, Moshe H. “Hebrew Biblical Manuscripts: Their History and Their Place in the HUBP Edition.” Bib 48 (1967) 243 – 90. Groves, Joseph W. Actualization and Interpretation in the Old Testament. Atlanta: Scholars, 1987. Metzger, Bruce M. The Canon of the New Testament: Its Origin, Development and Significance. Oxford: Clarendon, 1987. Pettit, Peter. “Comparative Study of Torah Citations and Other Scripture in the Mishnah.” Unpublished major paper for Claremont Graduate School doctoral program in Biblical Studies. Sanders, James A. “Cave 11 Surprises and the Question of Canon.” McCQ 21 (1968) 284 – 98. Reprinted in New Directions in Biblical Archaeology, edited by David Noel Freedman and Jonas C. Greenfield, 101 – 16. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969.

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Sanders, James A. “The Challenge of Fundamentalism: One God and World Peace.” Impact 19 (1987) 12 – 30. Sanders, James A. “Deuteronomy.” In The Books of the Bible. Vol. 1, The Old Testament  / The Hebrew Bible, edited by Bernhard W. Anderson, 89 – 102. New York: Scribner’s, 1989. Sanders, James A. “Hebrew Bible and Old Testament: Textual Criticism in Service of Biblical Studies.” In Hebrew Bible or Old Testament? Studying the Bible in Judaism and Christianity, edited by Roger Brooks and John J. Collins, 41 – 68. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990. Sanders, James A. Review of Actualization and Interpretation in the Old Testament, by Joseph W. Groves. CBQ 51 (1989) 329 – 31. Sanders, James A. “Scripture, Canon of.” Forthcoming in The Coptic Encyclopedia, edited by Aziz S. Atiya, [2108 – 12. New York: Macmillan, 1991]. Sanders, James A. “The Strangeness of the Bible.” USQR 42 (1988) 33 – 37. Sanders, James A. Torah and Canon. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1972. Translated as Identité de la Bible: Torah et Canon. Paris: Cerf, 1975, and into Japanese (1984). [2nd ed. Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2005.] von Rad, Gerhard. Das formgeschichtliche Problem des Hexateuchs. Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1938. Republished in Gesammelte Studien zum Alten Testament, 1 – 78. Munich: Kaiser, 1958. ET: The Problem of the Hexateuch and Other Essays. Translated by E. W. Trueman Dicken. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966. Yeivin, Israel. Introduction to the Tiberian Masorah. Translated and edited by Ernest J. Revell. Atlanta: Scholars, 1980.

9 Canonical Context and Canonical Criticism Introduction (1987) The following is one of five reviews of Brevard Childs’s Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture (1979) that were published together with a response by Childs in HBT 2 (1980). Rarely has an introduction to Scripture commanded so much immediate attention. A similar bevy of reviews appeared in Britain in JSOT (1980). Individual reviews have been given major status in some journals. Professor Bernhard W. Anderson’s presidential address in JBL (1981) was given in part to a critique of Childs’s position seen in a broad context. In my review essay, I tried to provide a substantive answer to the many questions often posed as to the similarities and differences in Childs’s and my understandings of the concept of canon as applied in the Bible. I took the opportunity afforded to draw a detailed tally of where we agree and where we disagree. Of considerable importance in my mind is the sort of debate Childs and I perhaps symbolize in revitalizing the concept of canon as applied to Scripture. The inclusion of my assessment of Childs in this volume will, I hope, serve that purpose, and will help to clarify for students the really important differences between the two positions. A concern I have that is not here addressed is that of critics who see my position as being existentialist. I regret that, as it might convey to students the impression that I hold an existentialist philosophy. The discussions would really go awry if that is not corrected. I do indeed discuss the dimension of life-giving power Torah and canon have had since their inception for the believing communities that find their identity in them; but that is not “existentialism.” Brevard S. Childs has brought to fruition a perspective on biblical understanding and interpretation first suggested, to my knowledge, in an article published in 1964.1 There he raised serious objection to a basic and fundamental tenet of modern biblical scholarship in its attempts to engage in exegesis of biblical texts. Modern scholarship assumes that it must first strike a posture of neutrality in probing a text in order to be as descriptive as possible in reading it in terms of the thought of the ancient writer and his or her ancient audience; thereafter, one may, if indicated, move to a theological understanding of the text. Childs was particularly concerned with how this “scholarly” attitude dictated the manner in *  First published 1980. 1   Childs, “Interpretation in Faith,” 434 ff.

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which biblical commentaries have been shaped, written, and edited. No one was clear on how to move from the descriptive task to the theological one: embarrassment seemed a proper attitude, or at least none other seemed respectable for a real scholar if he or she felt he or she had to go on and “preach” or exposit. Childs argued that “the genuine theological task can be carried on successfully only when it begins from within an explicit framework of faith,”2 not when it begins with a neutral description of what they back there thought. “Theological exegesis is a disciplined method of research fully commensurate with its material.”3 Childs was equally critical of the scholarly attitudes of form critics in this regard and of the biblical archaeologists who claimed that their tools opened the true avenue to what really happened and thus provided a means of bypassing the biblical witness to God’s redemptive purpose with Israel. Childs made three basic points in that early article. The first was to affirm a hermeneutical circle in movement from a single text to the whole canonical witness. This he claimed was a descriptive task true to the Bible itself as canon. (It should be noted, however, that Childs back then did not yet use the word or concept of “canon”: that was to come later.) His second point was that the exegete must interpret the OT in the light of the NT and vice versa; in so doing one illumines the ontological relation of the two, the differences between which must be respected and guarded. Both Testaments nonetheless witness independently and together to the one purpose of God. The correspondence between the two Testaments is ontological, pointing to the reality of the one purpose of God. Typological exegesis, so pervasive in both Testaments, is understood as part of the witness to the ontological relationship. Thus, his third point was that the hermeneutical circle (of the dialectic between single text and whole) moved from the level of the witness in the text to the reality itself. Theological exegesis penetrates to that reality that called forth the witness. Childs then fleshed out these ideas in Biblical Theology in Crisis (1970), stressing particularly the importance of the hermeneutical circle in dialectic movement between single text and full canon. His position was clearly staked out: The Bible and its single texts must be understood and interpreted in full canonical context rather than in original historical context. Emphasis was laid on full literary context and what emerges from reading the Bible and its several single texts, not in terms of whence and thence they arose, but in terms of an inner literary relationship defined by the believing communities who shaped the canon and passed it on.4 The picture Childs painted was of a canonical process in which ultimate, final redactors and shapers of what had been received divorced it from the his2

  Ibid., 438.   Ibid., 440. 4   Childs’s focus has varied since Biblical Theology in Crisis. There he seemed to stress the inner dialectic of canonical themes within the OT and between the Testaments. In Exodus he was constrained by the commentary form to focus on the larger literary units within a single book (even though he failed in it to suggest what the canonical shape of the book as a whole was). And in his Introduction to the OT as Scripture he focuses almost entirely on the hermeneutical shape of each individual book, constrained again, perhaps, by the introduction form. 3

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tory that had produced the literature in its varied formation, and, in Childs’s terms, made it thus available to all the believing communities thereafter in their historical contexts. Then in 1974 Childs gave us The Book of Exodus: A Critical, Theological Commentary, in which he tried to put back together what the form and tradition critics had torn asunder. The fact that Childs did a better job there of showing how the parts of Exodus discerned by criticism related to other parts of the canon than of showing us the canonical shape of the whole of the book of Exodus need not detain us here.5 His various short studies that appeared in the 1970s prepared us quite well for the present work. Superscriptions, idiomatic formulae, etiological tales, and the like came under review in an effort to recover their significance in the light of their function in fuller literary context rather than as the textual throwaways criticism had tended to make them.6 And then we had Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture (1979).

I There is no question in my mind that Childs has been responding to a very real need created by biblical criticism itself. What is that need? Biblical criticism was generated in the excitement of application of Enlightenment insight to the question of the origins of the faith. Enlightenment within the fold of traditional religious identity unleashed intellectual honesty in ways that seemed to give new life to old truths. One could question the provenance of the most precious premises of tradition – and not be struck dead! On the contrary, a blow had been struck for honesty within the faith, and it was felt that only good could come from it. Much good has come from it, but as with all such movements problems have arisen as well. One of the charges being leveled with increasing frequency at the guild of biblical criticism is that we have locked the Bible into the past. Protestantism may have cut the chains that had bound the Bible to the church lectern, but it proceeded to sponsor, at least to some degree, Enlightenment study of the Bible that seemed in turn to chain the Bible to the scholar’s desk; it went from being the peculiar province of priests to being the special subject of scholars, who made it into a sort of archaeological tell that only experts could dig! A new breed of priest arose to replace the old. The degree of expertise needed to enter the new guild became sufficient to make it quite exclusivist. The professor of homiletics trembled to preach in chapel out of dread that her colleagues in Bible might be present. Tooling up to gain credentials in the guild took so long and began to be so expensive that many otherwise faithful folk tended to avoid the Bible in 5

 Childs, Exodus. See my review, Sanders, Review of The Book of Exodus.   Childs, “Traditio-Historical Study”; Childs, “Psalm Titles”; Childs, “OT as Scripture of the Church”; Childs, “Etiological Tale”; Childs, “Reflections”; Childs, “Sensus Literalis”; Childs, “Canonical Shape.” 6

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preaching, lecturing, and study. As long as liberalism and then neo-orthodoxy remained in fairly widespread consensus in Western Christianity (which had nourished historical criticism) there was a shield around the guild that protected it from such charges and even prevented it from hearing them. In the meantime, skillful members of the guild were in constant demand for lecturing and writing to reveal to the faithful the fruits of their clandestine digs. It was the same in other fields and did not seem too strange in ours: every human discipline of inquiry was becoming specialist. Except that neo-orthodoxy fell a casualty to the radical upheavals of the 1960s. But instead of another equally discrete and commanding consensus taking its place, many and varied theological postures were struck, none sufficiently cohesive to shield the guild from the ever-increasing charges. Several responses have been forthcoming to the charges, and I have listed those with discussion elsewhere.7 They range from the various pneumatic and charismatic movements of left and right to structuralism, symbolism, political (Marxist), and psychological (Jungian), and language event hermeneutics to functionalism. And they range all the way from disdain for biblical criticism to abandonment of the Bible altogether in theologizing (liberal pneumatic personal storytellers). Biblical criticism has been cited as bankrupt.8 There is truth in the charges, even if some have been caricatures. We in the guild cannot and must not hide behind pitiful countercharges that some of the potshots have been rhetorically overcharged. We hid behind the shields of liberalism and neo-orthodoxy long enough. It is time we reform ourselves. How can we retain the solid advances made in biblical study since the Enlightenment and yet correct what has gone wrong? Childs has a clear answer to the question, and it is well worth hearing and to a large extent heeding. His own statement of the problem varies somewhat from the above, though it is quite congruous with it. He stated the problem brilliantly in his Sprunt Lectures in Richmond, Virginia, in 1972.9 Biblical criticism in the eighteenth century in the work of Johann Salomo Semler had redefined the concept of canon “in strictly historical terms as an external ecclesiastical validation without any real significance for the shaping or interpretation of the biblical literature.”10 It had indeed. My own work brought me to a similar observation.11 The concept of canon up to that point had meant authority, and as used in church tradition was simply a concept criticism could not cope with. It reduced its semantic impact to an idea manageable by the tools of historical inquiry being developed in the guild. Childs cites his former student (and my former colleague) Gerald T. Sheppard to clear effect: “Little wonder that once the biblical text had  7   Sanders, “Biblical Criticism and the Bible as Canon.” See Maier, End of the Historical-Critical Method, and Stuhlmacher, Historical Criticism.  8  Wink, Bible in Human Transformation, 1.  9   Childs, “Canon and Criticism,” unpublished, though much of what Childs did there appears in his Introduction to the OT as Scripture, e. g., 17. 10  Childs, Introduction to the OT as Scripture, 45. 11   Sanders, “Adaptable for Life.”

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been securely anchored in the historical past by ‘decanonizing’ it, the interpreter has difficulty applying it to the modern religious context.”12 To locate biblical meaning in the past is in effect to decanonize it. Biblical historical criticism in large measure succeeded in taming the concept of canon and making it a proper subject of critical study. How was this managed? How had criticism managed to decanonize the Bible? As Childs says, canon was defined in strictly historical terms. My own way of putting this is that criticism reduced canon to the last and ultimate stage in literary formation of the biblical text – how the larger literary units, the several books, got together. One could then write a history of the literary formation of the Bible in critical terms, all the way from the earliest sources discerned by criticism right up to the so-called Palestinian and Alexandrian canons.13 Criticism was happy now, for it could write a history of the origins and development of biblical literature from J, or J’s own earlier sources, to the Palestinian canon, and then do the same for the NT from Q to Chalcedon. And it was able to do it by focusing on phenomena malleable to critical search lists of biblical books in noncanonical literature, such as Sirach, Philo, Josephus, the Talmud, Marcion, church fathers, fragments (Muratonian), and the like. But another achievement came in, importing to early Judaism and Christianity the Western understanding of councils. A real breakthrough occurred when enough references were discovered to a gathering of rabbinic Jews in Jabneh or Jamnia in Palestine in the decades after the fall of Jerusalem to Rome in 70 CE. The Western critical mind could really latch on to that. What a discovery!14 The needs of criticism were served. If the faithful still needed some notion of “authority” involved with canon, here it was: the authority was superimposed from the outside by ecclesiastic councils. It was their authority that rubbed off on the canon and sealed its content and order. The quest for other councils was soon satisfied in Christianity: there were enough of those to go around. But what of earlier councils in Judaism for the Pentateuch and Prophets? Jabneh dealt only with the Hagiographa. It took a while, but one was found: the anshê knesset ha-gedolah convened by Ezra in Jerusalem in the late fifth century BCE!15 That took care of the Writings and the Pentateuch; the Prophets would behave until something showed up. But it did not. Instead, the Dead Sea Scrolls and other such discoveries showed up, like Nag Hammadi, for instance, and the assured results of criticism in this regard seemed less sure. Then there was the ecumenical movement that brought to consciousness the question: whose canon? If canon is reduced to the question of what books are in the canon (and what books are out) and in what order, then one had to ask which canon? Qaraites and Samaritans were still around on the Jewish side with their narrower views of canon; and triumphalist Protestants all 12

 Childs, Introduction to the OT as Scripture, 79.   The work of Albert C. Sundberg has thrown serious doubt on the concept of a separate Alexandrian canon in the sense criticism needed it: see Sundberg, OT of the Early Church. 14   A discovery shown false by Lewis, “What Do We Mean by Jabneh?” 15   Finkelstein, “Maxim of the Anshe Keneset ha-Gedolah.” 13

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of a sudden became aware of other Christian communions with their broader views of canon, all the way to the eighty-one item Ethiopian canon.16 Without question the concept of canon had returned to haunt us. It would not behave.17 Something clearly had to be done. But wait! Along with all the discoveries of ancient and modern communities having different canons came something called the sociology of knowledge. Historical criticism had had a very definite view of authority all the time it thought it was being descriptive and neutral, to use the terms of Childs’s early article. While it was consciously trying to bypass the question of authority it was unconsciously subscribing to a view of authority with the vigor of hot pursuit – the pursuit of points originally scored and the ipsissima verba of whoever in antiquity had made them. Not a received text but a hypothetical Ur-text became the bearer of authority. Whatever could be shown to be “secondary” or “spurious” or “added by a later hand” and hence of no value in reconstructing the original moment of speech or of writing was also viewed, until recently, as of no value theologically or even homiletically. It was because of this last view that the seminary preacher dreaded seeing the Bible scholar in chapel. The latter was quite likely later to say something like: “That was very nice, but you apparently did not read von Rinkeldinck’s latest monograph on that passage in which he completely rewrote the text in the light of the latest discoveries at Tell el-Mishmash!” The comment would have had the effect of depriving the sermon of its authoritative base. It is one thing to determine that a text has no direct value in reconstructing a particular historical moment, and quite another to imply that it has no value for other purposes, but that is unfortunately what had happened in large measure. Another problem historical criticism has spawned is that of fragmentation, even atomization, of the text. As Childs shows in this book, even as sensitive and fine a scholar as Walther Zimmerli contributes to the problem. Form and tradition criticism come in for as much scolding from Childs as the stance and view of the archaeologists. They both tend to atomize the text even as the ancient exegetes did whom they both deplore – though in quite different ways and for different reasons. If Biblical Theology in Crisis tended to castigate the archaeologists, especially the school of W. F. Albright, and more especially the work of G. Ernest Wright, who epitomized biblical theology in this country, Introduction does the same for the form and tradition critics. While Childs recognizes that Zimmerli, in contrast to most other scholars, takes seriously the so-called secondary passages in what he calls amplification of the Ezekiel text, he nonetheless reserves some fairly sharp words for the result. He accuses Zimmerli of having “missed the significance of the canonical process in which the experience of Israel with the use of its authoritative writings has been incorporated into the text itself as part of the biblical witness.” He feels Zimmerli “disregards this 16

  Cowley, “Canon of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church”; Kealy, “Canon.”   It should be noted that Childs does not address all these problems. I feel he might modify his position if he did. 17

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fundamental canonical decision by substituting a pre-canonical stage in the texts’ development for the normative canonical text, and by judging a significant part of the canonical text as merely commentary.” “Zimmerli’s method of working from a reconstructed Grundtext [foundational text] to which has been appended commentary runs the danger of losing the inner dynamic of the full canonical passage. To divide a passage historically into stages often destroys the synchronic dimension of the text. A literary entity has an integrity of its own which is not to be identified with the sum of its parts.”18 Childs is largely right. Even with the efforts increasingly made in the past thirty years to rehabilitate “later hands” in the texts, through redaction criticism and focus on the Nachleben (continuing life) or Nachgeschichte (later appearance) of certain “messages,” the penchant for attributing a greater authority to (often hypothetically reconstructed) “original” cores and forms is still in us. Whether they should be dismissed as Childs tends to seem to say is another matter and will be addressed below. And so we stand accused of locking the Bible into the past by our subscribing subconsciously to a kind of primitivism (the earliest or the original bore the authority), by subscribing to a kind of fragmentation of the text (to get back to the original we had unregrettably to tear the text apart); and by reducing the concept of canon to what was manageable in the historian’s shop and would yield to its tools.

II Childs’s response has been to focus on the concept of canon in understanding Scripture. He stresses the observation that the Bible as whole is far more than the sum of its parts. The phrase most aptly associated with Childs’s work is “canonical context,” and by this he means literary context, not historical. On the contrary, that to which he most objects in criticism is its fragmentation of the text and its basic tenet or dogma that each fragment can be understood properly only in its original historical setting. He sees in this Enlightenment move an usurpation of the question of authority: we have destroyed the text as molded by the early communities in the canonical process and then manipulated the pieces according to our own best lights brought in from outside the text. Criticism has bypassed the canon, going back up the stream of “history,” and pinned the fragments discerned by criticism to this, that, and the other historical moment from which each supposedly originated. Childs is especially critical of form and tradition criticism in this regard, his own basic training as a student. But it must be made as clear as possible that Childs is not against use of the tools of literary criticism in this manner. Much light, he feels, comes by proper use of all we know in this regard. What he strongly objects to is leaving the question of authentic meaning of the text at that point of work on it. Some of 18

 Childs, Introduction to the OT as Scripture, 367 – 70.

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Childs’s own best work has been in tradition criticism as may be seen in articles19 and in those books in which he lodges his protest, but he is intent on showing that one must now move beyond all that to discern the further meanings of those fragments or pericopes when they were indeed put together in the manner received. They say other things in canonical context than what they said originally as smaller units in conjunction with a particular historic moment. Nay, more! They say yet other things when read in full canonical context. The canon is full of many dialectical theological conversations going on at all times within its covers. The historical context that is really important is that of the present (whenever) reader. The present reader with his or her particular concerns and problems should read any passage totally aware of the full shape of the larger context in which it is found, the book where located, and even the entire canon.20 Awareness of the theological movements framed by canonical context provides one with the hermeneutics necessary for reading the passage under eye. Childs allows for some limited pluralism in this regard when he speaks of dialectical movement within the larger text.21 But what he seems to be affirming is that the Bible, when read in canonical context, provides some basic uncontested theological statements, even doctrines, in the light of which each passage should be read. Each passage apparently should be read by the hermeneutics of the whole, and those hermeneutics are clearly theological statements: God is Creator, Elector, Sustainer, Judge, Redeemer, and Re-Creator. And no passage should be read, or applied by the present reader, without that affirmation clearly in mind. Isaiah, perhaps, provides Childs’s strongest example. Isaiah was finally shaped in such a way that one must read it as a literary whole to discern its full canonical message. He makes much of the editors adjoining Second Isaiah without superscription or indeed mention of any historical context. While Cyrus is definitely there, and Childs would never take it out of the text as some historical critics have done who wanted to date it late, Cyrus does not matter that much. What matters is what the full book of Isaiah says, when it is altogether whole, about God’s Word and its function in the believing community. God is both Judge and Redeemer at all times, not a Judge in preexilic times and a Redeemer in exilic times. And so God is, for the present person or community that reads Isaiah at any time. And so Isaiah should be read at any time, no matter which portion, by lectionary or otherwise. Childs sees canon as God’s Word. This should be seen as an issue of his long debate through the 1960s with G. Ernest Wright, whose canon within the canon was a story or recital about the God who acts in history.22 Childs constantly devalues the mighty acts of God, for that throws one right back to the historical 19

  See Childs’s excellent “Traditio-Historical Study.”   See Childs, Biblical Theology in Crisis; Childs, Exodus; Childs, Introduction to the OT as Scripture. 21  Childs, Biblical Theology in Crisis, 149 – 219. 22   See Wright, OT and Theology, and my review, Sanders, Review of The OT and Theology; and Childs’s Biblical Theology in Crisis, and my review, Sanders, Review of Biblical Theology in Crisis. 20

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contexts of antiquity when God acted. God’s Word is for all time. Typology is put in its place in this manner. The problems with typology are exacerbated by stress on God’s acts rather than on his Word which returns not void, the overarching theme finally of the book of Isaiah in its wholeness. Childs levels the same criticism at a Zimmerli (for instance) as he did at a Wright: they both located an inner canon within the canon that was authoritative, to which all accretions were commentary. Childs stresses that commentary in this sense is not to be found in the Bible: all that follows canon may be thought of as commentary, but nothing that is in it (in the sense of being secondary or less authoritative). Wright’s canonical recitals as core of canon and Zimmerli’s Grundtext as literary core both denigrate some portions of the biblical text and lift up others as authoritative. Childs does not confuse Wright and Zimmerli in terms of what they did to arrive at their positions; it is just that Childs feels they are both wrong. By emphasizing that the recitals can be verified in huge measure by history and archaeology and hence are “true,” Wright bypassed canon per se and Israel’s own witness to its faith. His real canon was archaeologically verified “history” that he imported to the Bible, according to Childs. By emphasizing that a Grundtext can be isolated and verified by the best tools of literary analysis, especially tradition criticism, and hence was the original insight of a passage, Zimmerli also bypasses canon per se and the full experience of the early communities of faith that shaped the whole passage as received and heard and believed over a period of time – again by-passing Israel’s own witness to its faith. That Word that speaks out of the text again and again may have gotten its start with, say, Ezekiel, but Ezekiel the prophet is not and was not canonical. The Ezekiel book is canonical and had many contributors, without any one of which the text is not yet canonical. This brings us to another element of Childs’s view of the canonical process: the relation of text or tradition and community. That which is canon comes to us from ancient communities of faith, not just from individuals. One of the solid observations of what I prefer to call canonical criticism and what Childs prefers to call canonical perspective or stance was also a basic observation of form criticism: the whole of the Bible, the sum as well as all its parts, comes to us out of the liturgical and instructional life of early believing communities. Childs often insists that nothing there can be seen as “fact” plus interpretation. It is all interpreted, by definition. By the same token, it is all finally a community product. The tools of criticism can help us discern perhaps the literary history of a text from kernel to final form, but it is the final form, according to Childs, that is canon – and nothing in its history of formation.23 Childs also stresses the function of Scripture in believing communities, both ancient and modern. The final shape was determined by how the text functioned in the community along its path toward canonical text. The understandings of the communities, of the tra23   Contrast James Barr’s view of inspiration that would “apply to the formation of tradition that finally comprised Scripture rather than to the formation of Scripture.” Barr, Bible and the Modern World, 130 – 31, and see my review, Sanders, “Reopening Old Questions.”

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dition as layered in the texts, are an integral part of canonical text. Says Childs, “The modern hermeneutical impasse which has found itself unable successfully to bridge the gap between the past and the present has arisen in large measure by its disregard of the canonical shaping.”24 “A basic characteristic of the canonical approach in regard to both its literary and textual level is its concern to describe the literature in terms of its relation to the historic Jewish community rather than seeing its goal to be the reconstruction of the most original literary form of the books, or the most pristine form of a textual tradition.”25 The canonical shaping took place in community determined by how the tradition being shaped functioned in community. The tradition or text that was moving toward canonicity was always in dialogue with the community. The community shaped the text as it moved toward canon and the text or tradition shaped the communities as it found its way along its pilgrimage to canon. The final element I want to emphasize in Childs’s schema is the form of the text. I have been doing this all along since it is so integral to his position, but it needs focusing. In a manner somewhat similar to the structuralists, Childs calls canon only the text in its full and final canonical form. This includes not only the contributions of the later editors, the superscriptions, the subscriptions, and all the redactional seams, but even all that could possibly fall outside such a literary history of a text. He cites R. Rendtorff to the effect that “the present form of the Pentateuch can be attributed neither to traditional connections made on the oral stage nor to the literary strands of the Pentateuch, whether to J or P. A hiatus remains between the shape given the material by the last literary source and its final canonical shape.”26 This is what the communities contributed to and this is what they passed on. The canonical perspective is not just a redactional perspective. It moves on beyond redaction criticism.

III There is much in Childs’s position with which I agree. Historical criticism in its handling of the Bible has bypassed the ancient communities that produced it and shaped it. It has focused, in good modern Western fashion, on individual authors. Liberals and conservatives alike have done the same: the one simply attributes less of a text to the early “author” than the other. They both located authority almost solely in individuals and original speakers: conservatives claim the individual said all the words of a book or passage while liberals peel away accretions. But they have both bypassed the communities in one way or another. And historical criticism has been primitivist, locking the Bible into the past, even decanonizing it thereby, as Sheppard aptly put it. And criticism has in large measure 24

 Childs, Introduction to the OT as Scripture, 79.   Ibid., 96 – 99. 26   Ibid., 132. This observation seems to be congruous with the thesis of Talmon, “Textual Study of the Bible.” 25

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tended to fragmentize the text, though redaction criticism has corrected the tendency to some extent. Finally, criticism has felt free to rewrite the text in the light of what it could bring to study of the text in an effort to reconstruct an Ur-text. Rewriting the Bible with such conviction caused a shift of locus of authority from what the early believing communities received, shaped, and passed on, to what scholars were convinced was said or written in the first place. What perhaps had started as a historian’s exercise to see what the history of formation of a passage or book or literary corpus had been, became a focus of authority. This became so much the case that Bible translations done in this century, and especially those done in the 1930s through 1960s, reflected the new topos of authority. Many rewrote the Bible.27 Matters had clearly gone too far. It was time to move beyond redaction criticism and criticism’s focus upon individual geniuses, to the early believing communities that found, in their new contexts, value enough in what some of those geniuses had said, thought, and written, to apply what they received to their own situation – adapting it as need be and going on to recommend it to their children as well as to neighboring communities. It was time to focus upon communities rather than upon “editors,” or rather to focus on the communities in which these editors participated and in which they served. Many “editors” have undoubtedly done much editing that was never passed on. There were undoubtedly many geniuses whose works we have never seen, or see now only because of modern discoveries, simply because the ancient communities – without malice aforethought – did not find value in them and did not commend them to others or to the next generation. We know of some of these for two reasons: some Eastern Christian communities have more in their “canons” than the Western; and modern archaeology, accidental, clandestine, or scientific, has recovered others from long burial. Because of loss of attention to the early communities that shaped and passed on what they found of value, and therefore loss of attention to why they did so, criticism followed a radical and major shift in epistemology that accompanied the Enlightenment and hence caused a radical and major shift in ontology of canon. Whereas, up to the Enlightenment, it was the Bible that generation after generation had shed light on the world and helped the believing communities and the faithful to understand their problems and find solutions to them, after the Enlightenment criticism tried to bring light from the world to understand the Bible and the problems it found in it. This observation is not to deny that there were problems: there are discrepancies, anomalies, anachronisms, and inconsistencies in the text. There can be no retreat from the excitement of honesty the Enlightenment brought to biblical study. That is not the point. The point is that focus on those problems and quest for solutions to them brought about a radical 27   Such as the first edition of Jones, The Jerusalem Bible (the subsequent editions in French, La Bible de Jérusalem, have become more responsible to the extant texts), NEB, NAB, and others. Contrast now the recent Traduction oecuménique de la Bible (TOB, 1976) and Die Einheitsübersetzung der heiligen Schrift (1974). Contrast also the New Jerusalem Bible (1985) and the revision of the NEB [called the Revised English Bible (1989)].

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shift in epistemology and ontology of canon that lost sight of why those early communities had canonized the text in the first place. My own way of putting it is as follows: There had been a relationship between tradition, written or oral, and community, a constant, ongoing dialogue, a historical memory passed on from generation to generation, in which the special relationship between canon and community resided. There was a memory that this particular body of tradition had at crucial junctures throughout the centuries of that relationship given life to the communities – just as the communities had given life to it by passing it on and keeping it alive. Torah, and then Christ, was viewed as the way, the truth, and the life. One searched Scripture because in it one found even eternal life (John 5:39). Why? Because in the very conception and birth of canon was the historic event of death and resurrection of the community of faith when it otherwise should have passed from the scene of history like everybody else.28 That had happened in the sixth century BCE when the concept of canon in this sense arose (though it had a prehistory that gave it momentum), and it happened time and again thereafter with the message of the Gospels giving the old idea a fresh boost and even a new dimension. The communities and the canon (of whatever length) understood each other; they gave each other life. The fact that their understanding of canon was no longer historically “accurate” from our perspective is beside the point. The believing communities were no longer historically “accurate” either. Neither was the same as at the beginning. Each had adapted to ever-changing situations, but they understood each other, and up to the Enlightenment the relationship had never been broken even though it had gone through numerous adjustments. Childs puts all this differently, but in these observations we largely agree. It was time to focus on the early communities that received and shaped the traditions and the application of them into canon. Criticism had skipped over this crucial link, jumping from redaction to conciliar decision. There was a tacit recognition of community in the quest for decision-making councils, but it was wrongheaded, for it assumed authority was brought to canon by an ecclesiastic or community body, rather than arising out of an ongoing intimate relationship between canon and community that a council could but ratify. Whatever Josephus meant by popularity being a criterion of canonization, it at least means that no single council of men, undoubtedly sitting in the midst of one set of problems (those uppermost in their minds) could foist off onto the communities some esoteric literature. At most they affirmed what the communities, scattered in space and drawn out in time, in their corporate wisdom (including the geniuses and leaders as well as followers and faithful) found valuable and gave life.29 It was time in study of Scripture to vitalize what Childs calls the canonical process and what I call the periods of intense canonical process. On all this Childs and I largely agree. We also both sponsor an emphasis now on the function of canon rather than on its form or structure. The point is not 28

 Sanders, Torah and Canon, 7 – 8.   Sanders, “Adaptable for Life.”

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that literary form is unimportant. Neither of us has any desire to denigrate the excellent, continuing work of form criticism. The future of structuralism will undoubtedly be in the way form critics like Rolf Knierim have adapted the better observations of the structuralists. Stress on function in the believing communities is the proper province of focus on canon. When a tried and true tradition is called upon by a tradent for the sake of his or her community, we ask how it functioned for them. What was the purpose of the relecture, what was its effect, and how was the tradition or Scripture resignified when cited? Study of canon should not focus too much on its structure since there have been so many different canons, both in the past and still in the present, depending on which believing community is under purview. Beyond a certain core the lists vary considerably in terms of both content and order. Focus on function has brought a felicitous review of the import of canon and its prehistory. It is indeed adaptable for life.30 We also agree on the full text of a canon, of whichever community. Here Childs is quite insistent. The expression “full canonical context” will always be associated with his position. We both agree that the terms “spurious,” “secondary,” and “not genuine” should be dropped from serious biblical study. They may have started out having a valid function, but they have become symbols of criticism’s peculiar doctrine of authority: only the original is authentic. Seeing how the early communities shaped what they received and resignified it for addressing their later situations and problems is very important to understanding how and why we have a canon in the first place. Redaction criticism is not enough. If what the several geniuses did right on up to the final editor did not speak to the people and address their needs, we would either not have their work or we would be digging it up in holes in the ground in the Near East. Not only so, but the matter of juxtaposition of the larger units, right on up to the various sequences of books, may often have evolved, as Rendtdorff rightly sees, out of a history of corporate liturgical and instructional life of the communities. Of course, some individuals perceived the communities’ needs better than others, and what they did in the shaping of canon was more enduring than what others did, but focus on individuals in that process is no longer sufficient in itself.

IV But there are crucial differences between us, so crucial that we both feel it important that students not bracket our work on canon beyond a certain point. One of the beautiful things that happened in my last year of teaching at Union Theological Seminary in New York, before moving to Claremont, was that the seminary invited Childs down in the spring of 1977 from Yale to have an open conversation on canon. I think we both enjoyed celebrating the differences between us as much as the agreements. Not that they are not genuine differences – on some 30

 Ibid.

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points we differ sharply – but because I think we both see ourselves in a very long line of tradents and neither of us is under the impression that truth will falter if we listen to each other. I feel a deep kindred spirit with Bard Childs. Our roots go deep in the faith. I truly believe that he, too, is a monotheizing pluralist, and that is, as all my students know, the highest compliment I can pay the man.31 My greatest problem with Childs’s position is his divorcing the development and growth of canonical literature from its historical provenances. When Childs says “context,” he means literary context; when I say it, I most often mean historical context. He focuses, almost exclusively, in his work on canon, on the final form of the text. To do that, he has to choose one text, and he has chosen the MT. That is already an immense problem for me. It is to read back into canonical history a post-Christian, very rabbinic form of the text. By “very rabbinic” I mean a text unrelated to the Christian communities until comparatively late. While Jerome learned a lot from his Bethlehem rabbi, the Vulgate is a far cry from the MT! Focus on the MT leaves the NT, whose Scripture was the Septuagint, out in the cold for the most part. Childs devotes a full chapter to this problem;32 but he does not solve it, because his problem is a prior one, his insistence on a text at a singe frozen point, and that is simply not my view of canon. Far from it. Canon, by its very nature, is adaptable, not just stable. One must keep in mind all the texts and all the canons and all the communities. While Childs speaks of a canonical process he apparently means those moments in past history precisely between the final redactors and the stabilized text of the MT only. By canonical process I mean both that and all the history of function of canon before that and ever since. To distinguish the early history to which Childs refers, I speak of periods of intense canonical process. This is in large part the reason I have chosen to use the phrase canonical criticism, rather than canon criticism, precisely because the same thing is going on now in the believing communities as went on back then. Another reason I use it is to try to account for the phenomenon of canon itself; it is the link between those early believing communities that produced the canon and the present ones in which it continues to function. Canonical criticism in my view is both a subdiscipline, albeit new and developing, of biblical criticism, and the way I think we can best and most carefully and most judiciously unlock the Bible from the past, into which criticism has tended to seal it, and unchain it from the scholar’s desk. That is, we must give it back to the current believing communities, but give it back responsibly, that is, with the scientific thoroughness of recognition of its proper Sitz. Childs does not want to use the term “criticism” at all. He feels that to use the word relegates what he is doing to the category of another technique, as he puts it, in humanistic study of the Bible.33 I have no such fear. On the contrary, I view what is happening as evolving out of critical study of the Bible and as the 31

  Despite his skepticism about it: Childs, Introduction to the OT as Scripture, 57.   Ibid., 96 – 99, 659 – 71.   Childs, “Canonical Shape,” 54; and Childs, Introduction to the OT as Scripture, 56 – 57.

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next stage in its development. We are moving on, still fully employing all the valid tools of criticism to date, to bring also into focus the next stage of formation of canon, its reception and shaping in the several believing communities before the periods of intense stabilization.34 Not only so, but I feel that it may be an important way for the guild of biblical critics to respond to the charge that we have locked the Bible into the past, precisely by recognizing that as a guild we did have a particular, even narrow, view of authority and that we can reform ourselves as historians and scientists. We simply were not being as scientific and as thorough as we thought we were in our “objective” work. The solution to the problem of giving the Bible back to the churches is not only for scholars to do more continuing education and do more writing normal folk can understand, though these are important, but it must include our confessing the error of our ways and then going on to construct a history of function of canon that links past to present. Childs is at his best when he does a history of interpretation right on through church and synagogue history, and I mean this aspect of his work in part when I speak of a history of function of canon.35 But that point leads to my strongest objection to Childs’s work. He focuses on one form of stabilized Scripture, and what he calls its inner theological dialectic and conversation, and dissociates it from history altogether. That is, I do not see any really clear evidence that what he claims is canonical context functioned as such in any believing community until perhaps the Reformation. One might possibly extrapolate from a few pieces of intertestamental literature evidence that portions of the Bible were read as a continuous story, such as Jubilees, the Genesis Apocryphon, some of Philo’s retelling, and other such paraphrases, and that canonical context of larger units was so honored. But it is not clear that any of the writers of such documents derived the hermeneutics by which they read the text from canonical context. On the contrary, each such retail displays hermeneutics imported from elsewhere. The speeches in Acts and the recital in Heb 11 would support Wright’s views considerably more than demonstrate Childs’s thesis, and there is nothing in Paul to encourage it. Nothing in the pesher or midrashic literature goes so far. Origen? Hardly. It would not be until the Reformers’ commentaries arrived on the scene that one could argue such a point, it seems to me. I honestly cannot see that what Childs claims in this regard ever really happened. One is tempted to see in Childs’s canon a Reformation perspective both in its MT versus LXX (Vulgate) form and in his insistence on full context. Childs indicates a canonical shape that few if any subsequent tradents heeded. On the contrary, careful study of the history of text and canon during the period of canonical process and immediately thereafter indicates a shift in ontology of canon and the rise of new kinds of hermeneutics in all the denominations of Judaism that practically prove that very few tradents, if any, read Scripture in the way Childs theorizes.36 The shift in ontology can best be signaled by seeing 34

  Sanders, “Text and Canon: Concepts and Method.”   See esp. Childs, Exodus.   Sanders, “Text and Canon: Concepts and Method,” 140 – 42.

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it as a move away from viewing scriptural traditions primarily as stories, and hence from viewing Scripture as story, to treating Scripture as oracle. The NT is a product from the period of the shift, containing both lengthy recitals of holy history and numerous examples of the newer view of Scripture as oracle.37 Even when one says that Matthew viewed himself as the Christian Ezra and wrote his Gospel with that model in mind, or when one says that Luke viewed himself as the Christian Deuteronomist, or when one says Paul viewed himself as the new Jeremiah, none of these indicates they read Ezra–Nehemiah, or Deuteronomy to 4 Kingdoms, or Jeremiah, in Childs’s full canonical context.38 These are modern theories that have some limited validity, but they do not bear out Childs’s thesis. Nor does he claim such. In a genuine effort to test Childs’s thesis, and with the hope he was right, my students and I thought precisely of the above kinds of hypotheses about the composition of the NT, and proceeded to probe in that direction. But in no case did it work out in Childs’s favor. Certainly there was evidence that some NT writers sometimes thought in larger terms than isolated passages. C. H. Dodd had shown that in According to the Scriptures: The Sub-Structure of New Testament Theology. But it is not the same. Ezra may have been taken as a model by Matthew in thinking of himself as a scribe trained for the kingdom of heaven, but it would have been Ezra, the human figure that emerges from Scripture, not what he may have written. What Johannes Munck meant by Paul’s self-understanding being that of the Christian Jeremiah was limited to Paul’s understanding of his vocation being expressed in Jeremiah’s terms of his own call. Luke presented the best test. If those of us are right who see Luke as shaping his Gospel in terms of Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomic history (1 – 4 Kingdoms), here would have been the support we needed for Childs’s thesis. For Luke is remarkable in this regard. Of all the NT writers, he appears to have read Scripture in larger literary units than anyone else. But close scrutiny indicates that Luke’s interest was not in an overall thesis presented (only) by the Deuteronomist but rather in presenting Jesus as fulfilling Deut 18:15. Luke thus arranged what he received in his special section by Stichwörter derived from Deut 1 – 26. But it would be very difficult to say that Luke presents evidence of having read Deuteronomy in canonical context in the manner Childs describes. Luke was very interested in the ethic of election expressed not only in Deuteronomy but as received from Scripture generally, but that can be discerned in selected short passages as well: it cannot be securely introduced as evidence of his reading Scripture in full canonical context. For the sake of argument one might want to grant Childs Luke and a few others in the period, but the overwhelming evidence simply points in another direction. Precisely concurrent with the final shaping of OT Scripture was the shift 37   A point well made by Merrill Miller in an unpublished paper, “Directions in the Study of Biblical Interpretation in Late Antiquity.” 38  Cope, Matthew; Evans, “Central Section”; Sanders, “Ethic of Election”; Munck, Paul and the Salvation of Mankind.

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from viewing Scripture as story to viewing it as oracle. The bulk of the evidence is in the direction of reading Scripture in very short literary units, or fragmentizing it. God was thought to speak through each passage and each verse, and if one could cite a passage from each section, Torah, Prophets, and Writings, one scored big.39 The Habakkuk Pesher from Qumran Cave 1 evinces no interest whatever in reading Habakkuk in canonical context. Each verse was taken as divine oracle speaking in this, that, and the other Essene historical context. Habakkuk had to be disjointed in order to speak to the new historical context, and whatever verse or phrase did not fit the new context was simply bypassed. All Scripture was resignified in this manner in order to derive light from it for the new situations. And herein lies another anomaly in Childs’s thesis. How can one be so concerned with rehabilitating the function of Scripture in the believing communities when he effectively denies the importance and humanity of those very communities by ruling out ancient historical contexts in discerning ancient texts – not only the original ones but the subsequent historical contexts through the periods of intense canonical process? One cannot deal effectively with the question of canon by ignoring the very important work being done in the early histories of resignification or relecture, as the French say, of Scripture. One has to work continually in historical criticism, insofar as possible in each sequential generation, to the history of shaping of canon up to full stabilization of text and canon.40 Where is the force of argument in favor of the importance of believing communities when one argues for dissociating Scripture from historical contexts? One certainly can and should view Scripture synchronically as well as diachronically. And one can surely theorize about a hypothetical moment when a fluid canonical redaction gave the text the shape it finally attained – in order to see it then synchronically. But to dissociate it from history altogether as though that final canonical redaction had a timeless theology in mind for all generations and centuries to come is unrealistic. It is an overreaction to the excesses of historical 39

  A technique sometimes called hariza. See Goldberg, “Petiha and Hariza.” ˙ (Sanders, “From Sacred Story”) ˙ ˙ two of Childs’s con  Elsewhere I respond more fully to cerns expressed in such a way as to indicate uncertainty on his part. In Introduction to the OT as Scripture, 56 – 57, he speaks of our insistence on working as fully as possible on the histories of the periods of intense canonical process, with all the tools of criticism, as “speculative.” All historical reconstruction is speculative to some extent, and the Persian period perhaps more than most. But to use this as an excuse to give up entirely and to absolutize in great degree a particular form of literature unrelated to the trials and tribulations and other facets of history of the believing communities that shaped it would be to me both intolerable in terms of our common claims about function of Scripture in those communities, and very limited in terms of concept of canon. To call the work of quest for the hermeneutics of the faithful who found value in these traditions and texts enough to create the very concept of canon “speculative” is evidence of uncertainty of one’s own position – especially when that position stresses function of canon among those faithful. The other concern is expressed in Introduction to the OT as Scripture, 589, where Childs calls the quest for points scored by the resignification of traditions in antiquity “a romantic understanding of history,” which might perhaps best be left to fall of its own weight. Must we not look for the Word or point made by these words (in text and tradition) so as not to confuse the two? Childs’s best support for his whole position is perhaps in the Reformers. But I know of no Reformer who focused on text without historical context as appears to be the case in Childs’s position. 40

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criticism. One should work both synchronically and diachronically. As one moves through the history of formation of text and canon diachronically, one should work on each stage synchronically. And that requires all the tools of biblical exegesis and historical criticism at one’s command for each period of formation. The overwhelming evidence points to the moment of final shaping as not particularly more important than any other. The hard fact is that once text and canon were stabilized, a new ontology of Scripture arose with new modes and techniques of hermeneutics to crack it open once more.41 When the text was still fluid before stabilization and it was still viewed primarily as sacred story, a peshat exegesis and hermeneutic were sufficient. But once it got frozen into the state Childs wants apparently to absolutize, other types of hermeneutic arose to break it open for application to new circumstances, to derive light from it and to find life in it. Final stabilization was but a stage in the history of formation of Scripture, and an elusive one at that. The believing communities, the actual ones in history, apparently did things quite a bit differently from the way Childs suggests. And if one is truly going to honor those believing communities, one has to engage in full historical criticism at each stage of shaping. Another anomaly in Childs’s argument occurs in studying his excellent efforts at rehabilitating so-called later additions, including superscriptions and the like. Childs seems to argue that these indicate the shaping process. But I cannot find where Childs deals with the obvious question arising out of such observations. Does not most such editorial work indicate the intense interest of such redactors in date lines and historical contexts? They seem to be saying fairly clearly, if the reader wants to understand the full import for his or her (later) situation of what Scripture is saying, he or she had best consider the original historical context in which this passage scored its point. Childs may be right to some extent that the editors of the Psalter wanted their readers to view David as an example of the way God can deal with any leader or any person, but the way they did it was to draw attention to historical situations in which David supposedly composed his songs. One cannot read the Torah or the Prophets without the clear impression from the text that one had best know the historical contexts into which Moses and the prophets said what they had to say. Only wisdom literature gives the appearance of being unrelated to historical context, but even there some of the ancient redactors and tradents insisted on a particular author who wrote in a particular historical framework (whether criticism says they were right or not). How available to future generations of believers is Scripture when the historicity of the ones that gave it to us is denied? Childs is right about so much that he says that it is disturbing to me that he leaves so many such questions unanswered. Yes, biblical criticism has fragmentized the text, but that simply means that we are in a long line of tradents who did the same, in their day and way. Yes, biblical criticism has too much gone back behind Scripture as canon to the points scored at early stages in its formation to seek its authority. This is perhaps his strongest point. 41

  See Sanders, “Text and Canon: Concepts and Method.”

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V In contrast to Childs’s contention, I want to say loud and clear, that I consider biblical historical and literary criticism a gift of God in due season. It is only when it is abused or taken as an end in itself, or when it does not keep issues of authority clear, that it generates problems. It has generated such problems, and I, with Childs, feel that the proper antidote to those ills is a revival of the concept of canon as applied to Scripture. But in contrast to Childs, I am convinced that the revival must be seen as a proper extension, in due season, of biblical criticism. Criticism, which began in the Enlightenment, is now evolving to its next stage of development after redaction criticism. It is also my conviction that only by developing this further subdiscipline within the guild of criticism can the guild respond adequately to the charges noted at the beginning of this chapter or can biblical criticism redeem itself and become scientifically thorough. Elsewhere I spell out the task of canonical criticism with its concepts and method.42 Suffice it here to say that it has already discerned characteristics that must be taken into account for full appreciation of Scripture as canon: those salient characteristics are repetition or relecture, with concomitant resignification for the later believing community; multivalency of canonical literature – its ability to say different things in different contexts; pluralism or canon’s own built-in self-critical and self-corrective apparatus; its adaptability-stability quotient with concomitant built-in textual restraints on resignification; and finally, and perhaps most important of all, its unrecorded hermeneutics discernible throughout canon by means of proper use of historical and literary criticism. The Bible is full of unrecorded hermeneutics recoverable by use of a triangle of interrelationship of ancient traditions or texts repeated in particular historical contexts of the believing community by use of certain hermeneutics.43 hermeneutics

texts /  traditions

contexts /  situations

Canonical criticism focuses on the function of Scripture in the believing communities. Its exact structure, or length and order of contents, is not unimportant but is secondary. It was produced by early believing communities, handed down by believing communities, and still has its only proper Sitz im Leben in the continuing believing communities. Canon owes its life to its dialogue with those believing communities; and the believing communities owe their life to their dialogue with it. The kinds of repetition of text and tradition in ever-changing contexts, 42

 Sanders, Canon and Community.   Sanders, “Canonical Hermeneutics: True and False Prophecy,” 89 ff.

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the evidence of its multivalency or pregnant ambiguity, the evidence of its adaptability-stability factor, and the power of the hermeneutics that helped shape and reshape its traditions are all still operative in the continuing believing communities today. The canonical process that started way back with the first case of repetition long before Scripture was fully penned continues today in the believing communities that find their identity in it, as well as indications for their lifestyles. It provides a paradigm for how to learn from the communities’ traditions and for how to learn from the rest of the world as well. Just as the biblical tradents not only reapplied community traditions to ever-changing contexts but also adapted international wisdom and made it their own, so modern believing communities continue to do the same. Canon provides the paradigm or the guidelines for how to carry on. Bibliography Barr, James. The Bible and the Modern World. New York: Harper & Row, 1973. Childs, Brevard S. Biblical Theology in Crisis. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1970. Childs, Brevard S. The Book of Exodus: A Critical, Theological Commentary. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1974. Childs, Brevard S. “The Canonical Shape of the Prophetic Literature.” Int 32 (1978) 46 – 55. Childs, Brevard S. “The Etiological Tale Re-examined.” VT 24 (1974) 387 – 97. Childs, Brevard S. “Interpretation in Faith: The Theological Responsibility of an Old Testament Commentary.” Int 18 (1964) 432 – 449. Childs, Brevard S. Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1979. Childs, Brevard S. “The Old Testament as Scripture of the Church.” CTM 43 (1972) 709 – 22. Childs, Brevard S. “Psalm Titles and Midrashic Exegesis.” JSS 16 (1971) 137 – 50. Childs, Brevard S. “Reflections on the Modern Study of the Psalms.” In Magnalia Dei: The Mighty Acts of God: Essays on the Bible and Archaeology in Memory of G. Ernest Wright, edited by Frank M. Cross, Werner E. Lemke, and Patrick D. Miller, 377 – 88. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1976. Childs, Brevard S. “Sensus Literalis: An Ancient and Modern Problem.” In Beiträge zur alttestamentlichen Theologie: Festschrift für Walther Zimmerli zum 70. Geburtstag, edited by Herbert Donner, 80 – 93. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1976. Childs, Brevard S. “A Traditio-Historical Study of the Reed Sea Tradition.” VT 20 (1970) 406 – 18. Cope, O. Lamar. Matthew: A Scribe Trained for the Kingdom of Heaven. Washington, DC: Catholic Biblical Association, 1976. Cowley, Roger W. “The Biblical Canon of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church Today.” OstKSt 23 (1974) 318 – 23. Die Einheitsübersetzung der heiligen Schrift. Stuttgart: Katholische Bibelanstalt, 1974. Dodd, C. H. According to the Scriptures: The Sub-Structure of New Testament Theology. London: James Nisbet, 1952. Evans, C. F. “The Central Section of St Luke’s Gospel.” In Studies in the Gospels, edited by D. E. Nineham, 37 – 53. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955. Finkelstein, Louis. “The Maxim of the Anshe Keneset ha-Gedolah.” JBL 59 (1940) 455 – 69. Goldberg, Arnold. “Petiha and Hariza.” JSJ 10 (1979) 213 – 18. ˙ Bible. 1st ed. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966. Jones, Alexander, ed. The˙ Jerusalem Kealy, Sean P. “The Canon: An African Contribution.” BTB 9 (1979) 13 – 26. La Bible de Jérusalem. Paris: Cerf, 1973.

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Lewis, Jack P. “What Do We Mean by Jabneh?” JBR 32 (1964) 125 – 32. [Reprinted in The Canon and Masorah of the Hebrew Bible: An Introductory Reader, edited by Sid Z. Leiman, 254 – 61. New York: Ktav, 1974.] Maier, Gerhard. The End of the Historical-Critical Method. St. Louis: Concordia, 1977. Munck, Johannes. Paul and the Salvation of Mankind. Richmond: John Knox, 1959. New Jerusalem Bible. New York: Doubleday, 1985. Revised English Bible. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. Sanders, James A. “Adaptable for Life: The Nature and Function of Canon.” In From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, by James A. Sanders, 9 – 39. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987. [Original in Magnalia Dei: The Mighty Acts of God: Essays on the Bible and Archaeology in Memory of G. Ernest Wright, edited by Frank M. Cross, Werner E. Lemke, and Patrick D. Miller, 531 – 60. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1976.] Sanders, James A. “Biblical Criticism and the Bible as Canon.” In From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, by James A. Sanders, 75 – 86. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987. [Original USQR 32 (1976) 157 – 65.] Sanders, James A. Canon and Community: A Guide to Canonical Criticism. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984. Sanders, James A. “Canonical Hermeneutics: True and False Prophecy.” In From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, by James A. Sanders, 87 – 105. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987. [Original “Hermeneutics in True and False Prophecy.” In Canon and Authority, edited by George W. Coats and Burke O. Long, 21 – 41. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1977.] Sanders, James A. “The Ethic of Election in Luke’s Great Banquet Parable.” In Essays in Old Testament Ethics: J. Philip Hyatt in Memoriam, edited by James L. Crenshaw and John T. Willis, 245 – 71. New York: Ktav, 1974. [Revised in Luke and Scripture: The Function of Sacred Tradition in Luke – Acts, by Craig A. Evans and James A. Sanders, 106 – 20. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993.] Sanders, James A. “From Sacred Story to Sacred Text.” In From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, by James A. Sanders, 175 – 91. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987. Sanders, James A. “Reopening Old Questions about Scripture.” Int 28 (1974) 321 – 30. Sanders, James A. Review of Biblical Theology in Crisis, by Brevard S. Childs. USQR 26 (1971) 299 – 304. Sanders, James A. Review of The Book of Exodus: A Critical, Theological Commentary, by Brevard S. Childs. JBL 95 (1976) 286 – 90. Sanders, James A. Review of The Old Testament and Theology, by George Ernest Wright. Int 24 (1970) 359 – 68. Sanders, James A. “Text and Canon: Concepts and Method.” In From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, by James A. Sanders, 125 – 51. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987. [Original JBL 98 (1979) 5 – 29.] Sanders, James A. Torah and Canon. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1972. [2nd ed. Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2005.] Stuhlmacher, Peter. Historical Criticism and Theological Interpretation of Scripture. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1977. Sundberg, Albert C., Jr. The Old Testament of the Early Church. HTS 20. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964. Talmon, Shemaryahu. “The Textual Study of the Bible – A New Outlook.” In Qumran and the History of the Biblical Text, edited by Frank M. Cross and Shemaryahu Talmon, 321 – 400. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975. Traduction oecuménique de la Bible. Paris: Cerf, 1976. Wink, Walter. The Bible in Human Transformation: Toward a New Paradigm for Biblical Study. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1973. Wright, George Ernest. The Old Testament and Theology. New York: Harper & Row, 1969.

10 The Exile and Canon Formation The Loss of a Gift The experience of the loss of the land Yahweh had given Israel would have been traumatic in the extreme. According to the old traditions that were edited into the form we call the Torah, Yahweh had made two promises to Abraham and Sarah, progeny and land. Now one of them, the land, has been painfully snatched away, first by Assyria and then by Babylonia. The trauma endured, as told in the horror stories recounted in Jeremiah (32 – 45) and 2 Kings (23 – 25), was enough to obliterate other peoples in the area, mainly by assimilation to another identity. But this people kept the memory and meaning of the nightmare alive in the recitations of a remnant in exile who refused to assimilate to the dominant cultures of their victors.1 The more one learns of the foreign policies of Assyria and Babylonia in their treatment of conquered peoples, the more one wonders at Israel’s survival, albeit in a dramatically altered state. Other folk in the region, also conquered by the Mesopotamian powers, apparently did not have strong enough traditions and stories to provide a remnant with identity sufficient to survive. Cultural anthropologists have shown the importance of a community’s identity-giving stories to their survival. Michael Taussig, speaking at the University of Florida in 1988, quoted Columbian Indians explanation for imperialism’s success in the Americas: “The others won because their stories were better than ours.”2 In that light alone the Bible as a whole is a powerful life-giving story for surviving remnants – but especially the Torah. Genesis 1 – 12 in effect says that God, who created all that is, made a pastoral call on Abraham and Sarah with a plan for migration and settlement accompanied by the two promises. One of the truly remarkable things about what ends up in the Jewish canon is that it includes stories that put Israel, the recipient of God’s grace, in a bad light. “It tells it like it is.” The Torah and the prophets do not spare Israel’s image as a people. The Ketuvim modify the picture considerably, but the first two parts of the tripartite Jewish canon are designed in large part to explain the defeats. The promises made by God in Genesis become failed promises by the end of Kings. After the horrors of defeat and destruction, *  First published 1997. 1   Chronicles softens the recitation considerably in its need to revise Israel’s history for the sake of survival (2 Chron 36). 2   Cited in an unpublished paper by my colleague Professor Jack Coogan, “Moving Image.”

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Judah’s last king (Mattaniah / Zedekiah) was forced to witness the death of his sons, then had his eyes gouged out. The surviving member of the royal household, Jehoachin, Zedekiah’s young nephew, was already imprisoned in Babylon, having been deported after only three months’ reign in 597 BCE. He was in prison there for thirty-seven years, but when a new king, Evil-merodach, took the throne in Babylon he released Jehoiachin in about 560 BCE to be the king’s house guest for his remaining years. Jehoiachin would have been fifty-five years old when released. But note, while he spent his declining years as a house guest and not a prisoner, he still was nonetheless totally powerless and lived more comfortably only by the good graces of the new king. There the story that began with God’s promises in Genesis ends in disgrace barely relieved. As Lou Silberman has sadly but wisely observed, loss of identity through absence of community, as in prison or exile, gives rise to despair. Despair then gives rise to torpor, out of which one gives in to a death wish, or turns to eschatological thinking in an apocalyptic mode, which is actually a rallying cry for a return to history, albeit seeking a favorable fulfillment or conclusion to it.3 The most stable part of the Jewish canon is precisely the story that goes from Genesis through Kings. The reason for its stability, even before the invention of the codex, was that the nine scrolls containing the Torah (five) and Early Prophets (four) told a story that had a beginning, middle, and end, and being out of order hardly mattered. Beginning with the books of the Three major prophets, order remains somewhat fluid in the actual manuscripts until the invention of the printing press. Even so, the interrelationship of Torah, Early Prophets, and Latter Prophets is an intimate one. They form a powerful statement in the sequence offered in the Jewish canon, quite different from any Christian canon of the First Testament. While the mood changes considerably beginning with the Ketuvim in the Jewish canon, it is obvious that Torah and Prophets hang together in conveying a clear message for surviving Judaism.

Torah and Prophets A major task of the Bible is explaining defeats. The Torah and the Prophets, as a discrete section of the Jewish canon, have in part the mission to explain to surviving Jews why they had experienced the devastating defeats at the hand, first of the Assyrians, and then the Babylonians, but then survived them, albeit in a mutated form. In like manner, the Christian Second Testament, especially its “sacred history” section, the Gospels and Acts, had the burden of explaining the ignominious arrest and crucifixion of Jesus as well as his “survival,” albeit in a mutated (or resurrected) form.

3   In contrast to withdrawal from history or society into privacy and community. See Silberman, “Human Deed.”

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Most Jews remained scattered in the diaspora well after the so-called return to Jerusalem after Cyrus defeated Nabonidos, the final neo-Babylonian king, about 540 BCE. In fact, Babylonia, where the authoritative Talmud was edited about the sixth century CE, was home to the majority of the world’s Jews from the exile until the end of antiquity. Indeed, the diaspora has been spread throughout the world from the time of the fall of Jerusalem in 587 BCE until the present. While there have been periods of flow of Jews back to Palestine, Judaism has until the twentieth century largely been a diaspora religion, always with the prayer and hope of returning to Jerusalem. The Ketuvim, which probably became stabilized into something like their current form after the Bar Kochba revolt of 132 – 35 CE, present a Judaism withdrawn for the most part from the plane of history into a contemplative faith designed to induce obedience and the desire, on the part of Jews scattered wherever they might have been, to please God. Even the “history” presented in Chronicles / Ezra–Nehemiah is a history with a mission – to get surviving Jews to understand that Judaism, despite all the adversity and defeat in its past history, was meant to be a priestly theocracy centered in Jerusalem, minding its own business under the hegemony of whatever power they had to live under. The Ketuvim, as a stabilized section of the Jewish canon, provided an attitude and mode of behavior for Jews that survived the Bar Kochba revolt to understand that God meant Judaism, in order to please God, to withdraw from the world that had so abused it, and study and teach Torah (in sensu lato) to future generations, and indeed, to any of the outside world willing to learn.4 But the scattered Judaism that survived the exile seven centuries earlier was not entirely ready yet to settle down into a community in stasis, as it were. One of the major points we have learned from the literature of the Qumran community, the Dead Sea Scrolls generally, and then from reviewing all the massive Jewish literature of the Second Temple Period in the light thereof, is that Judaism was highly pluralistic in the period from the fall of the First Temple until after the Bar Kochba revolt.5 The stabilization of the Ketuvim into the form that the third section of the Jewish canon took thereafter would not have represented the other forms of Judaism of the earlier period. On the contrary, many forms of Judaism would have strongly disagreed with the idea underlined in the Ketuvim that prophecy or revelation had ceased in the time of Ezra / Nehemiah.6 The theological review of the risings and fallings of the Iron Age that the Ketuvim provided, with the thrust of withdrawing into a closed, priestly community in which the principal name among them was Ezra the Scribe (see also First Esdras in some Christian canons), was easily understood as the principal message the surviving Pharisees / rabbis after the Bar Kochba revolt wanted to send of what Juda4

  See Sanders, “Torah and Paul.”   Stone, “Judaism at the Time of Christ”; Stone, Scriptures, Sects and Visions. 6   The placement of Daniel in the Ketuvim in the Jewish canon, but among the Prophets in the Christian, indicates the different hermeneutics by which the different communities read the same book. See the discussion in Sanders, “Intertextuality and Canon.” 5

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ism was about from their point of view. But the message of the Ketuvim as a corporate document (not necessarily its individual parts) was not one that the other Judaisms of the Persian / Hellenistic / Roman period wanted to hear, or would have believed was true. For most Jews, indeed, it would appear that prophecy or revelation had not ceased in the time of Ezra / Nehemiah. It certainly had not ceased for the Qumran Jewish community, the Christian Jewish community, or the other Jewish communities that produced most of the literature of the so-called apocrypha and pseudepigrapha.7 There is no way they would have accepted the latent message of what later became the stabilized Ketuvim, even though they probably all viewed some forms of some of the separate, individual Writings as inspired.8 I earlier advanced the thesis that the explanation for Joshua’s not being in the Torah, in sensu stricto, is that the Torah was edited in exilic Babylonia by Ezra and the “men of the Great Synagogue,” with a perspective on it that made sense to them. A Jew did not have actually to reside in Palestine to be a Jew; it was acceptable to be a Jew in Babylonia, or in diaspora, looking forward to the full return. Gerhard von Rad had earlier asked the question why the early recitals did not include the stop at Sinai for reception of the Torah; I asked, instead, why, though the entrance is included in the early recitals, the account of it is in the prophetic corpus, as though the return was not yet fully complete, but still to be consummated. The Torah was then brought to Jerusalem in the middle of the fifth century BCE to be read in the Water Gate (Neh 8), and thereafter promulgated as the Torah of Moses edited by Ezra.9 The Water Gate account reports that the people wept upon hearing the Torah read in Hebrew and interpreted for them in Aramaic, the language of the Persian Empire (Neh 8:9). The weeping was testimony to the fact that the people deeply appreciated hearing so clearly who they were under God, and what God expected of them. They had a communal identity. The function of regular recitations of Torah, and eventually of the various canons, was and always has been twofold: to remind the people who they were, and to remind them what they should stand for, that is, identity and lifestyle, mythos and ethos, story and stipulation, haggadah and halakah.10 Those are the two principal elements of Torah.11 Some of the Judaisms of the ensuing period emphasized the haggadic element, and others the halakic element. Those that did not believe that prophecy or revelation ceased at the time of Ezra stressed the importance of the story aspect of Torah, such as the communities that produced most of what we call the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, preserved eventually by the churches but left aside by surviving rabbinic Judaism. The latter has clearly left its stamp on the Ketuvim, the former on the New Testament. The one was added by rabbinic Judaism to the Torah and the Prophets, and structured by  7

  See Talmon, “Oral Tradition”; Talmon, “Die Gemeinde des erneuerten Bundes.”  McDonald, Formation of the Christian Biblical Canon.  9   In Sanders, Torah and Canon. 10   See Sanders, “Torah and Christ.” 11   See Sanders, “Torah and Paul.”  8

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them as the third part of the Jewish canon; the other added to the Torah, Prophets and “other writings,” and structured as a continuation of the story of God’s power and work in and through Israel.12

Genesis to Kings If one then reviews the story that is told in Genesis to Kings, the Torah and Early Prophets, the message becomes clear. God’s promises made to the patriarchs of land and progeny are fulfilled magnificently by 1 Kings 10. The Queen of Sheba visits Solomon in Jerusalem, ostensibly to admire his wisdom and wealth. But in the full sweep of the story the good queen, laden with gifts for Solomon, paid a visit to Jerusalem as the international witness to God’s having indeed fulfilled those promises. One could not want in all the Bible a story of fulfillment more engaging and convincing than one sees in 1 Kings 3 – 10, the beginnings of the reign of Solomon. It was a city of gold, silver being as common as stones (10:27). The route to that fulfillment was full of vicissitudes and problems; it was not a smooth road. On the contrary, it may well be said that the Bible is a textbook in how in live in the gaps between God’s promises and their apparent lack of fulfillment. Even God’s promise of progeny was not easily fulfilled (Gen 15 – 22). But the fulfillment came, and it came in gold, silver, and precious gems. Beginning with 1 Kings 11, however, the same bumpy route continued, but now toward defeat. God appointed satans or testers to Solomon, but he failed all the tests (1 Kings 11); from there (late tenth century BCE) it was largely downhill to the events of the eighth and seventh centuries when the neo-Assyrian Empire, followed by the neo-Babylonian Empire, brought about the destruction of all Israel’s institutions in ignominious defeat and exile. God had withdrawn all the gifts God had so lavishly heaped on his people, and even the promise of progeny was in doubt because of the thorough assimilation of northern Israel into Assyrian culture, and the threat of assimilation and absorption of the conquered Judahites into the dominant, victorious cultures of Babylonia and Persia. But a message comes through the whole of Torah that is epitomized in Deut 29 – 31. Deuteronomy had displaced Joshua in the Torah story. One can read from the end of Numbers to the beginning of Joshua and not miss a beat. Deuteronomy intruded between the two to cast its light backward to Genesis and forward to the Prophets. It purports to be a farewell address by Moses on the east banks of the Jordan in which he reviews their journey to that point, as well as the further laws of Deuteronomy, which begin in ch. 12 and extend to ch. 26. Deuteronomy 26 is an appropriate climax to the body of the book in 12   See the thesis of Chilton and Neusner in Judaism in the New Testament, xii – xix. As of this writing, one eagerly awaits their second book authored together, titled Trading Places, in which they changed places after Constantine, Judaism becoming private and communal and Christianity public and political. One wonders if surviving rabbinic Judaism had not begun moving toward being private and communal already after the failure of the Bar Kochba revolt in mid-second century.

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its depiction of the Thanksgiving Service that Israel should engage in when it arrives in the Land at the place God will chose to have his name dwell. Deuteronomy 26:5 – 11 records the ceremony in such a way that Israel’s identity, Israel’s essential story, becomes her confession of faith. Confession of identity (“My father was a wandering Aramean who went down into Egypt . . .”) becomes confession of faith. That is followed by a confession of obedience (Deut 26:12 – 15).13 Chapters 27 and 28 then list the curses ensuant on disobedience, but the blessings that come with obedience, to the laws by those whose identity is found in the Torah story. The two confessions in Deut 26 form a fitting conclusion to the legal section of Deuteronomy, as a bridge to the curses and blessings of chs. 27 – 28. Then Deut 29 – 31 states clearly the purposes of the divine judgment of destitution and exile: (a) it is not God who let us down in these defeats; (b) it is Israel who has let God down with all sorts of polytheism and idolatry; (c) it will be God’s greatest joy to restore all God’s gifts of land and progeny if, in destitution, Israel takes the prophetic / Deuteronomic message to heart; and (d) God sent prophets early and often to explain how it really is in the divine economy.14 And those prophets made their points about God’s using foreign powers to execute judgment against his own people well before it happened. One cannot escape into theories about vaticinia post eventum to explain how the prophets could speak in advance of God’s use of Assyria and Babylonia. God is the God of risings and fallings, victories and defeats, what humans may call good, and what they may call evil. Destruction and death do not stump God. Herein lies the remarkable message of the Torah and the Prophets. Death stumps humans; indeed humans tend to fear death more than God. But God is the God of life and death. That theological point bears directly on the issue of hope. What is hope? In a polytheistic mentality, hope lies in a people’s gods being powerful and strong enough to preserve them and their institutions. But in a monotheizing way of thinking, hope lies in the one God of all, and in God only. If God has seen fit to assign adversity to his own people, it is with a purpose. In fact, adversity, according to the prophets, might have two purposes, one to effect judgment for Israel’s sins, but the other to bring correction or modification in Israel’s way of thinking. The message of the Torah and the Prophets is clearly that God is One, the God of all creation, who chose Israel for a purpose in regard to all the families of the earth (Gen 12:3). Israel was God’s special servant, and Israel had a purpose in life and history. That humans were created to be servants of the gods was a part of the common theology of the ancient Near East.15 The Torah and the Prophets press the 13   It is often overlooked that the confession of identity or faith in Deut 26:5 – 11 is followed by a confession of obedience in 26:12 – 15, not unlike the “Declaration of Innocence” in the Egyptian Book of the Dead, for the pharaoh to recite as he approached the divine Hall of Judgment. It is quite clear that the Pharisee praying in the temple in Luke 18:11 – 12 was attempting to obey Deuteronomy’s command to engage in a confession of obedience; the teacher’s lesson was that the confession had become abused by slipping over into bragging and self-justification. 14   See Sanders, “Deuteronomy.” 15   See Clifford, Creation Accounts, 42 – 53.

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issue further and claim that Israel was created by divine promises to be the One God’s special servant in regard to all the rest of God’s creation.16 When God is the One and Only God, as the Torah story insists,17 then hope does not necessarily lie in the protection and preservation of Israel’s present institutions. It must have been a heady thing to realize that the future lay in God’s working in and through the destruction of the present institutions to re-create the servant in another form. One cannot assume that God will follow Israel’s agenda, even her best (most critical and scholarly?) thinking, as to what is best for her. Belief in One God requires total surrender and obedience. To try to politicize such a belief, or for one party of the people to have advocated and chosen destruction and re-grouping, would have totally missed the point.18 Hope for Israel lay beyond all human understanding of hope. The hope the Torah and Prophets offered, in the light of the foreign policies of ancient Assyria and Babylonia, was not one by which any party could grasp power for itself. One had to understand that God was the God of enemies also. God might curse whom God wanted to curse, and bless whom God wanted to bless, self, friend, or foe. What distinguished monotheism from belief in a whimsical god, the prophets also made clear. God’s promises were sure, but the route to their fulfillment might be very rough, even threatening of present institutions. The agenda was God’s, not Israel’s, and not that of a political faction in Israel.19 God had, however, imposed constraints on herself out of love of creation, and especially of humans. God is of a different order of being from humans, but, in human terms, God is afflicted with love. No power or force outside God imposed the affliction. Theologically, Israel had to try to understand God’s love for humanity as a self-imposed limitation. At the same time, God is a God of justice and righteousness. God is both creator and redeemer, righteous and loving. How can this be?

16

  See Sweeney, “Book of Isaiah.”   Even though it incorporates early, polytheistic and henotheistic stories barely modified. See the four steps in adapting international wisdom into Israel’s narrative in Sanders, Canon and Community, 56 – 60. 18   See Smith, Palestinian Parties and Politics. Smith was attempting to explain how monotheism emerged as the faith of Judaism by positing a “Yahweh-Only Party.” The real question is not why such a party won out, but why the people responded to the “tough stuff” advocated by the monotheizing hermeneutic in reviewing the old traditions that survived the canonical process of reading and rereading the traditions newly edited. Smith also saw Jeremiah as a member of the Pro-Babylonian Party in the period before the destruction (Jer 40:1 – 6). To stop at such political observations without asking why such tough stuff then went on to survive the canonical process in the communities of faith is to fail to go on to address the crucial issues of why Jeremiah’s message survived in the prisoner-of-war camps, and not Hananiah’s. Why did the Yahweh – Only Party win out – in Smith’s terms? 19   It may well be that locating the political (in sensu lato) factor in history is as far as critical, inductive searches should go, but the biblical theological historians of both Testaments would have responded that God was capable of using the political situation of any given moment to weave a larger picture of reality, especially the Integrity of Reality. In postmodern terms, the real factor is that of human humility in doing historical searches; see Sanders, “Scripture as Canon for Post-Modern Times.” 17

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The Covenant Lawsuit Tradition The prophets struggled with the paradox. What issued was about as good as humans with their limited minds can manage. Abraham Heschel explained the paradox as stemming from “divine pathos.”20 As one reads through the preexilic prophets it becomes clear that the prophets used the metaphor of a covenant lawsuit to explain God’s judgments.21 God’s covenant with Israel had been violated by the people, therefore God had to bring judgment upon them, even out of love for them. Had God not cared for his people, he might have simply let them continue to alienate themselves from Reality and become nothing. But care he did, and that involved sending prophets in advance of the suffering to explain the adversity as having two purposes: judgment and salvation. In the covenant lawsuit tradition, the prophet was a kind of court officer who announced God’s appearing in the life of the people, to enumerate their erring ways, to exhort them to repent, to declaim their enemies’ greedy moves as God’s punishment of them, and to explain God’s uses of adversity to transform Israel into a more obedient servant. The texts of the prophets exhibit the divine pathos in the very fact that the prophet urged the people to repent, and throw themselves on the mercy of the court, all the while the prophet declaimed God’s judgments as corporate and inescapable. The indictments, or listings of sins, were both theological and ethical. They accused the people of the normal human bent toward polytheism (a way humans try to be in control of their own lives) and idolatry (loving the gift rather than the Giver), as well as oppression of the weak and powerless in their own society. They contrasted what God had done for them when their heads were in the dust of the earth in Egypt as slaves, to what they were doing now that they had some power (God’s gifts) of their own (Amos 2:6 – 11). What emerges theologically is that while God is One, the only God of all creation and all creatures, indeed, of risings and fallings, God is also biased toward the powerless and the dispossessed. The prophets appealed to two authorities to substantiate what they had to say to the people. The one was to share their “call” to ministry in answer questions about how they had the right to speak in the name of God. The other was reference to Israel’s “call” or story of what God had done for them in the past, their special “history” as they understood it, in becoming Israel – the people who constantly seemed to wrestle with God. It was that story, as later recited in the Torah as Pentateuch in the liturgical year, that gave them their identity in ever-changing circumstances and situations. The function of recitation of variant forms of that story was to contrast what God had done for Israel, when they themselves were poor and dispossessed in Egypt and in the wanderings, with what they now did to their own poor and indigent in their own land. They also served to establish the authority of the judgments the prophet declaimed against the people in the name of God. 20

 Heschel, The Prophets, 92, 190, et passim.  Sanders, Torah and Canon, 73 – 90.

21

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Most of the rest of what the preexilic prophets are recorded to have said to the people were pleas for repentance, indictments for their sins, explanation of the horrors to ensue if they did not repent, and then the kind of hope that lay through and beyond the judgment – because they believed that God was One.22 While critical scholarship has until recently concluded that the prophet Amos did not hold out any hope beyond destruction, the book of Amos, as shaped in subsequent communities, insists that God will, in due course, restore the fallen booth of David (Amos 9:11 – 15). Actually, all the prophetic books originating in preexilic times offer some kind of future hope due to (the early, or, later?) belief in God’s intention to transform Israel beyond the adversity. What is more important is that all of the prophetic books (with the possible exception of Amos) also suggest that the adversity had transforming powers for the people if they accepted the judgment as from God, and not as an accident of history. Expressions of transformation include the understanding that the suffering was a correction or discipline of the people so that they could once more be God’s people.23 Other expressions were that the suffering should be viewed as purgational. This metaphor is frequently found in the book of Isaiah; the purgation might be by water or flood (Isa 8:5 – 8; 28:2, 14 – 22), or by fire to smelt the dross from the alloy the covenant relation had become (Isa 1:24 – 27). The most poignant expression of the positive effect of judgment is that of surgery. God, the great physician, would conduct open heart surgery on the people corporately to suture God’s Torah, God’s will and ways of thinking (cf. Isa 55:8 – 9), onto the heart of the people (Jer 31:31 – 34, cf. 30:12 – 17). Or, God would replace Israel’s heart of stone with a heart of flesh, thus giving Israel a new heart (Ezek 37:26); or God would give the people a new spirit and see to it that they obey (Ezek 37:27). In an era when there was no anesthesia this would have been a powerful explanation of suffering. One of the most common expressions of the metaphor of surgery to understand the effects of destitution is that of circumcision of the heart. Jeremiah and Deuteronomy both exhorted the people to circumcise their hearts to the Lord (Jer 4:4; Deut 10:16), which was in the form of pleas for repentance, something the prophets apparently thought the people could do for themselves. Deuteronomy finally, however, says that the circumcision of the heart of Israel corporately would be effected by God herself as part of the effects of adversity, destitution, and restoration (Deut 30:56). This was part of what Abraham Heschel meant by divine pathos: the prophets’ continuing to plead with the people to repent when it had become clear that God was going to have to go through with the transforming effects of exile and destitution. 22   Ibid. The appeals to authority constitute categories 1 and 2. Category 3, the pleas for repentance, offered the people the opportunity to throw themselves on the mercy of the court. Categories 4 and 5 indicated the indictments and sentences, and category 7 the kind of restoration God had in mind beyond judgment. Category 6 is the all-important statement in the prophets that God will effect in judgment and adversity what the people failed to do in response to category 3. 23   See Sanders, Suffering as Divine Discipline.

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These expressions and metaphors for the transforming powers of adversity in the hands of God are quite radical. They imply that God needed to engage in continuing acts of creation / re-creation (Torah on the heart, new heart, new spirit, circumcision of the heart) in order to effect the needed redemption if God’s purposes for Israel were to be realized. This would eventually develop into various kinds of eschatology and apocalyptic speculations of what God would yet do to rescue the faithful even when things seemed bleakest. In the prophets, the concept of a remnant meant those in Israel in whom the re-creative acts took effect. It did not imply escape from the effective powers of God’s judgments, but rather, acceptance of the adversity as purposive: both punishment for their sins and transformation of their ways of thinking. The metaphors involving the heart meant Israel would undergo a radical change in the way they thought about God and the world.24 The heart in Semitic languages, as well as in Greek, meant the seat of thinking, not of emotion primarily. If God was going to suture his Torah and ways of thinking onto Israel’s heart, it meant they would thenceforth intimately know the will of God, or as Jeremiah says, they would all “know God” (31:34) without their having to teach each other. God’s acts of redemption were also, therefore, acts of continuing creation.25 In fact, these expressions of the redemptive power of judgment would later develop into the apocalyptic idea of God’s effecting a whole new creation as the ultimate act of judgment / salvation. A powerful example from the prophets of the claim that God can reach in and through destitution, even death, to create new life with new institutions, is in Isa 28. There is almost universal agreement that chs. 28 – 33 address the Assyrian threat to Judah’s existence.26 Chapter 28 specifically should be seen against the backdrop of the siege of Jerusalem by Sennacherib in 701 BCE. The first part of the chapter presents judgment speeches by Yahweh against northern Israel, and the second part, at least vv. 14 – 22, against Judah and Jerusalem. Isaiah was convinced that Assyria would take Jerusalem as it had taken the northern kingdom, and all of Judah right up to Jerusalem. Such speeches include indictments and sentences, and hopefully a suggestion of what effect the adversity would have toward transformation. The judgment speech against the leadership in Jerusalem is devastatingly harsh. The overwhelming scourge, the purgation by flood (one of Isaiah’s favored metaphors for judgment) would sweep away the lies and deceit the leadership had buried itself in. They were convinced that the covenant with Yahweh, and, of course, the alliance with Egypt alongside it, would save Jerusalem and themselves. Isaiah tried to convey to them as clearly as possi24   Pilate said to Christ in Kazantzakis’s The Last Temptation that Christ did not want people merely to change the way they lived or acted, Christ wanted people to change the way they thought; and Rome, Pilate said, does not want that. 25   The radicality of the hope expressed in such transformation is perceived when it is realized that human freedom of will seems infringed upon in the new creation God would effect in adversity. That, too, is a part of the divine pathos involved in understanding God’s love for his people. 26   See now my colleague, Sweeney, Isaiah  1 – 39, 353 – 73.

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ble that that would not be the case. On the contrary, the present institutions of state, cult, and culture would be swept away in a cleansing act of Assyrian wrath, under the aegis of Yahweh himself.27 Isaiah then, however, revealed Yahweh’s plan. Understanding that plan would require some effort on the part of his hearers. One can imagine the threat of Assyrian siege stones being catapulted into the city from the war machines the Assyrians would surely establish for the purpose from their camp just north of the city. Isaiah then claimed that Yahweh would eventually take one of those Assyrian siege stones and convert it into a “precious cornerstone of a sure foundation” (28:16). Hope was thus injected into the otherwise completely desolate picture. Only an act of God could do it, but Isaiah had no doubt God could convert an enemy’s siege stone into a precious cornerstone of a new construction, in which justice would be the line and righteousness the plummet (28:17). This is exactly what Isaiah’s programmatic statement of God’s purposes in the whole matter of the Assyrian onslaught had proclaimed (Isa 1:21 – 27). The effort necessary, on the part of the hearers of the time, and on the part of readers and hearers of the passage ever since, was actually to believe that God could convert an enemy’s siege stone into a precious cornerstone of new life for Israel / Judah. Egypt’s storming up to rescue Jerusalem and its besieged, isolated people (Isa 1:7 – 9) would have been easier on the belief mechanism, as in any age: Isaiah, however, had made it clear that Assyria was acting under the aegis of God. Assyria was the instrument of God’s judgments against his own people, said Isaiah, but Assyria would herself be severely checked if the axe with which Yahweh was hewing vaunted itself into thinking it was acting under its own power alone (Isa 10). But that did not deter the leaders and people in Jerusalem, facing the threat of destruction raining in upon them, from believing more in Egypt’s chariotry than in God’s purposes. They were human. The effort required on their part challenged normal, human thinking. Isaiah was asking if they believed that God could subvert the intention of the enemy and turn the desperate situation into a door of hope (cf. Hos 2:14 – 15, as well as Joseph’s statement to his brothers in Gen 50:20). Isaiah then said, lest some hear him wrongly, that this did not mean that God would stop the siege. Isaiah may have come to think that way later after the siege was indeed lifted before its goal was reached, though I doubt it. But for now, he had to convince the people that the Assyrian siege had first to effect its task of purgation. The lies and falsehood that ran deep would first have to be swept entirely away by the instrument of Assyrian expansionism. Then, at that point, God’s new construction upon the converted cornerstone could take place (28:17 – 22). Therefore, Isaiah says, the precious cornerstone will have upon it an inscription. Archaeology has shown that cornerstones in antiquity had inscriptions, as they do today. But this inscription would not give glory to some king or official, or provide a date of the laying of the cornerstone. On the contrary, it would have the words, “Those who believe will not panic” (28:16). 27

  Not just “swept clean” (cf. Isa 28:17).

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Here is where a second major hermeneutic effort came in. How should the inscription be understood? As with any other text, that depends on the hermeneutics brought to it, and by which it is understood. Clearly the temptation would be to believe that God was going to take care of and spare them and the city (and hurry the Egyptians along?). The sparing did, in fact, happen, according to the later Deuteronomic historians (2 Kgs 19:32 – 37; Isa 37:33 – 38), suggesting, pace Isaiah, that the siege had not even been mounted. The text indicates Isaiah was so disappointed that the complete purgation did not finally take place, that he wept when the people rejoiced at the lifting of the siege (Isa 22:1 – 4), because now they were even further deceived (Isa 30:8 – 17). But there was another hermeneutic by which to read the inscription, the hermeneutic the Isaiah text engenders throughout. “Those who believe will not panic” could also mean that one ultimately fears God only and not the loss of God’s gifts. It meant that one believed that God is the God of risings and fallings, of victories and defeats, and that God can reach through death and destruction to create new life. They who believe do not panic at the loss of the institutions on which they have relied in the present structures, because they believe that God can rebuild after the purging through the instruments of justice and righteousness. Salvation, according to Torah and Prophets, is not in God’s gifts; it is in God alone. One of the most common understandings of sin in the Bible is that of loving God’s gifts rather than God the giver of those gifts – and all future ones in restoration. But the transformation must come before the restoration, or nothing is gained. The preexilic prophetic message, as related in the canonical shape of the Torah and the Prophets, understood adversity in the hands of God as a newly creative, as well as redemptive, experience.28 A similar hermeneutic effort is required to understand Isaiah’s reference in 28:21 to 2 Sam 5, God’s rising up to assist David to defeat the Canaanites on Mt. Perazim and in the valley of Gibeon. The leaders and the people would have been tempted to understand this historical reference as assurance of a rescue operation of Jerusalem for them, such as Yahweh had effected for David. But Isaiah says, “No.” Right enough, God is a holy warrior and will be involved, but this time he will be at the head of the enemy troops entering the city—“to do his deed, strange his deed, and to work his work, alien his work” (28:21). Redemption through judgment was at work, in and through which the transformation and restoration were firmly assured. The New Israel that emerged from the “resurrection” experience (Jer 31 – 33; Ezek 36 – 37) was the Judaism indicated in the Ketuvim, which in their turn were shaped and confirmed by the subsequent experiences under Rome.

28

 Sanders, Torah and Canon, 83 – 88.

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The Exile and the Tough Stuff The shock of defeat and submission to Babylonia in 597 BCE still would not have fully prepared the leaders and people remaining in Jerusalem for their experience of complete destitution in 586. The hostages taken in 597 did not think of their Babylonian prison camp as a permanent residence, or even as having ultimate meaning for them. This is clearly indicated in the experiences recorded in both Jeremiah (chs. 24 – 29) and Ezekiel (chs. 33 – 34, 36 – 37). They could not believe what was happening to them. But when the POWs began to arrive in Babylonia after the cataclysm of utter devastation in 586, realization that they had lost everything, as well as corporate depression over the disaster, began to set in. Psalm 137, the only clearly datable psalm in the Psalter, poignantly reflects the despair. “By the rivers of Babylon we sat down and wept when we remembered Zion. On the willows there we hung up our harps . . . How could we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?” To sing one of the old songs, that probably lauded God’s guarantee of the inviolability of Zion, would have been as depressing as recalling one of Hananiah’s sermons doing the same (Jer 28). Jeremiah was taken down to Egypt by Johanan, son of Kareah, and his party, much against Jeremiah’s will. When he got there, he found other refugees from Judah and Jerusalem, some of whom were worshipping the Queen of Heaven because they felt Yahweh had indeed abandoned them. Polytheism was the mode by which they thought about reality. If one god can’t do the job, find one that can. And “the job” was clearly whatever gave the people the greatest sense of security against the forces of chaos from whatever quarter. They had not heard the “true prophets” like Jeremiah; they had heard and been convinced that Hananiah and his viewpoint were right. The only alternative they felt they had was also to abandon Yahweh. The “false prophets” had preached “blessed assurance, Yahweh is ours, what a foretaste of glory divine.” But all that turned out entirely wrong. The tough message Jeremiah and the other “true prophets” preached still would have made little sense to most of them at that point. They had not learned to monotheize.29 It makes it all the more remarkable that what survived through a process of review, repetition, and recitation in Jewish communities was the monotheizing tough stuff. The canonical process might well be thought of as the survival of the toughest thinking about God and reality, those traditions and reflections on them that stressed the Oneness of God. The prophetic literature that made it onto a tenure track toward canon was that which began in exile gradually to make sense to them by re-reading in the new context. Yahweh was really a universal God who alone made sense of what was happening to them. God was One. God was a God of universal justice, righteousness, and grace, who made 29   See Sanders, “Hermeneutics in True and False Prophecy”; Sanders, “Canonical Hermeneutics”; Sanders, “Biblical Criticism and the Bible as Canon”; Sanders, “Canonical Hermeneutics: True and False Prophecy.”

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sense of the power flows in the Near East that had been taking place since the mid-eighth century BCE, and used those terrible events to reshape and transform his people into God’s servant and teacher of Torah to the world. So-called defeat and failure had not stumped God; they were part of a plan that made sense of the birth of Judaism in exile, and its survival as the true heir of the traditions of old Israel and Judah. Polytheism, by contrast, would have sealed the fate of Yahweh, so to speak; he simply had not measured up. Yahweh had not acted in his own interest in letting his people be defeated; he had not acted for his own name’s sake, or reputation among the gods. Ezekiel’s response to that was to say that God was indeed acting for his name’s sake in stepping in where the human leaders of the people had failed; and acting as his own shepherd of his own people, he would save the lost and gather the scattered (Ezek 34). This was a totally different twist on the idea of a god’s being obliged to benefit his people for his name’s sake among the gods. God had judged his people: now he would gather them to himself. And it was this kind of reflection on the old traditions that gave shape to God’s New Israel, Judaism born in exile, and gave rise to the concept of a canon that could explain the ups and downs, blessings and disasters.30

Corporate and Individual Worth and Responsibility Another thread of rather new thinking needs to be brought in at this point. The Bible, both Testaments, is basically Semitic in hermeneutic and mentality. Covenants, though made through “individuals” (Noah, Abraham, Moses, David), were and are corporate in understanding. In fact, the Semitic base of all biblical thinking is corporate. God’s relationship (Emanuel) with Israel was corporate. “Is it not in your going with us that we are distinct, I and your people, from all other peoples on the face of the earth (Exod 33:12 – 16)?” Generations are made up of leaders and followers, but covenant is with the people diachronically, as it were. The preexilic prophets’ indictments of the leaders of peoples of their time were declaimed in corporate terms. Semitic ways of thinking did not yet allow for dividing the people into sheep and goats, good and bad, not yet. In this manner, the Deuteronomic historians were able to account for the complete destruction that came about at the hands of the Assyrians in the North and at the hands of the Babylonians in the South. Manasseh was singled out as scapegoat, but mainly as a symbol of the people’s having misunderstood the true nature of covenant. A later theologian from Tarsus would say that none was righteous, no not one (Rom 3:10, echoing Eccl 7:20 and Ps 14). Biblical prophets and historians had had to explain the defeats as coming under the aegis of the One God of all. Much of the literature that ended up in biblical canons was engaged in explaining adversity 30

  See Sanders, “Adaptable for Life”; Sanders, “From Sacred Story.”

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and defeat (the tough stuff – even the crucifixion of a teacher from the Galilee had to be explained). The whole people had come under the judgments of God. But beginning in the late preexilic period, concepts of the worth and responsibility of individuals began to play a role in the thinking of the people. Jeremiah (31:29) and Ezekiel (ch. 18) insisted that the people should no longer cite the proverb to the effect that later generations paid for the sins of ancestors (cf. Exod 34:6 – 7). The dialogue between Moses and Yahweh about the fate of Sodom in Gen 18:16 – 33 apparently reflects the debates of the late preexilic period. The book of Job stands as a monument to rejection of laying corporate views of guilt on an individual. Ecclesiastes as a piece of literature describes a monumental struggle between individual and corporate views of worth and responsibility. In fact, as noted earlier, the Ketuvim generally reflect the new thinking of individual worth and responsibility within the corporate. And much of it came about because of Greek influence in the sixth to fourth century BCE, well before the hellenization process after Alexander. It was important that nascent Judaism, scattered over the whole eastern Mediterranean world, understand that it would not have again to endure the kinds of corporate judgment that the prophets and the Deuteronomists had declaimed on the people as a whole. After Alexander, Judaism had to face up to how to relate its corporate traditions to Jews becoming more and more focused on the worth and responsibility of individuals. Precious community literature that had gone through traditioning processes, diachronically reflecting the importance of that literature to communities along the way, became attributed to great names in Israel’s past: all the Psalter to David, all the Proverbs to Solomon, etc. The Greeks knew that Homer wrote the Odyssey and that their great literature came with authors’ names. So newer literature that was written in the old style nonetheless became attributed to individuals, like the Song of Songs to Solomon, the Gospels to individuals, most epistles to Paul, etc.31 The point was that while Semitic cultures easily tolerated anonymous, community literature, Greeks wanted to know who the individual author was.32 This move toward including individual worth and responsibility within the corporate affected all forms of Judaism, some more than others. The New Testament is basically Semitic but heavily influenced by European / Greek concepts. One of these would have been the derived Christian idea of God’s incarnation in one Jew, rather than the Semitic notion of God’s incarnation in the People, Israel (Abraham Heschel, following Maimonides), or God’s incarnation in Torah or Scripture (Michael Fishbane, following Rosenzweig and Buber). To claim God’s incarnation in one person would have been still sufficiently alien to repel many, if not most, Jews who survived the Roman destructions of Jerusalem with continuing identity as Jews. 31

  See Sanders, “Intertextuality and Canon.”   See Gorak, Making of the Modern Canon, especially the discussion of how the concept of canon arose in ancient Greek culture in the first chapter, “The Early History of the Canon” (9 – 41); and see Sanders, “Scripture as Canon for Post-Modern Times.” 32

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When then the Renaissance arose in Europe, it affected biblical study and the question of authority. Until that time the Bible was clearly a community book, the church’s and synagogue’s book. But with the Renaissance came interest in authorial intentionality and the belief (and it was a belief) that the truth of the Bible would be found in a history of its formation with focus on authorial intentionality within ancient contexts.33 The Sitz im Leben of study of the Bible moved from the believing community to the university. In the minds of an increasing number of students of the Bible, the ties to faith communities had been severed so far as discerning the truth of the Bible. Herein lies the strain between so-called conservatives and so-called liberals in biblical study today, the latter by-passing the importance of the communities out of which biblical literature, anonymous and pseudepigraphic for the most part, had arisen, and creating images of authors and giving them sigla and signs, if not fictive names. It is little short of remarkable that early Judaism was able to mutate into forms that would endure every imaginable onslaught and threat to its existence for centuries to come. It then finally mutated into two forms that have endured since the Roman destruction of early Judaism: rabbinic Judaism and Christian Judaism (three, with the surviving tiny Samaritan community in Israel), the Christian finally becoming so Greek in make-up and mentality as to go its way unrelated to the rabbinic. It had been in the exile and the early post-exilic period that the Torah and Prophets took shape. One can imagine that all the old traditions were reviewed to be understood now in a totally different context, that of the transformation the prophets had envisioned. Restoration of the Davidic monarchy failed with the Persian acceptance of a Judaism that focused on the temple and the priesthood. After the Job poet had struggled with the new issues of theodicy and the undeserved suffering of a righteous individual (note that the book of Job presents the readers with one who was righteous, contrary to the Deuteronomists), the so-called Second Isaiah addressed the issue of excessive suffering, suffering beyond what any amount of sin might have indicated, and offered the idea of vicarious suffering, and the wounded healer (Isa 53). The authors of the creation account in Gen 1 addressed the question of how to understand the Jewish desire to have a proper theogonic liturgy like the Enuma Elish, by recounting a story of creation done by God in six days. And in that liturgy (Gen 1) all items created in the six days were actually symbols of ancient Mesopotamian (and Egyptian) deities – the message being that they were not deities at all but precisely only items in creation.34 The Deuteronomists looked back and explained what had gone wrong. Things had gone badly wrong, but the end of the Deuteronomic history focuses on God’s being the God of risings and fallings, fallings and risings. The Priestly 33   The contribution of Baruch Spinoza. See Sanders, “Scripture as Canon for Post-Modern Times.” 34   See Sanders, “God Is God”; Sanders, “Mysterium Salutis.”

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theologians reworked the traditions that would make up the Torah and looked backward and forward toward a viable Judaism, whether in exile or in the Land. And the Chronicler looked back over the old traditions with an eye on the kind of future that would permit Jews anywhere, corporately and individually, to believe that they could be obedient, and could please God, by being committed to the newly rebuilt temple wherever they might live, living lives of obedience “not walking in the way of the wicked . . . but in the Torah of Yahweh” (Ps  1:1 – 2).35

Tripartite and Quadripartite Canons When all else was lost, when all God’s tangible gifts had been retracted, in effect because of violation of the first three Commandments, Judaism had one gift from the past to which they could cling, and that was Torah. And whether one agreed eventually with the belief that prophecy or revelation had ceased in the time of Ezra, Torah displaced the preexilic oracular priests and prophets in Judaism as that which they would drash to seek guidance and help in ever-changing circumstances. In nascent Judaism, one no longer consulted priest or prophet for “a torah” or instruction. Jews now consulted or drashed God’s Torah, edited in Babylonia and brought by Ezra to Jerusalem in mid-fifth century BCE. The exercise became known as “midrash,” the function of searching Scripture for guidance, indeed for life itself (John 5:39).36 Torah became known as the Book of Life (sefer hayyim), because it had life and gave it as well. That is, it was Torah, ˙ shaped in exile, that was the core of Judaism’s being a mutated form of old Israel and Judah, and the very center of Judaism’s continuing identity and existence as heir of the old preexilic traditions, now reviewed and resignified for the new situation. Most, if not all, other peoples conquered by Assyria and Babylonia were assimilated to the new dominant cultures and lost their continuity with their past. Not so Judaism. Judaism was able to bring its past with it (reread and resignified, of course), hence its identity. Torah, those wonderful old traditions that had their own continuity because of re-reading and repetition, now would get on a track of regular recitation, annual or otherwise, so that the people would know who they were no matter where they lived, and would know what they stood for (haggadah and halakah). Torah became the core of Judaism’s canon, of no matter what form. Canon, by definition, is adaptable for life; and Torah functioned in that way for Judaism.37

35   Note that even Manasseh, the prime symbol of the reasons for the defeat and exile, in Chronicles repents, his repentance is accepted by God, and he is restored (2 Chron 33:10 – 17). Then, a later poet, noting that Chronicles omitted Manasseh’s prayer of repentance, supplied the words of Manasseh’s change of heart; see Sanders, “Prayer of Manasseh.” If Manasseh could repent and be restored, any Jew could; there was hope indeed. 36   See Evans and Sanders, Luke and Scripture, 1 – 13; also, Callaway, Sing, O Barren One. 37   See Sanders, “Adaptable for Life.”

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The so-called Former Prophets (Joshua to Kings) provided the historical sequels to the story line of the Pentateuch, and with it became the most stable part of Jewish Scripture. Genesis to Kings follows a story line, and whether scrolls or codices were used for copying out that portion of the Jewish canon, it has always been the most stable part of it. The latter Prophets, the Books of the Three and the Book of the Twelve, served as fifteen case histories to support the four-point message conveyed by the story. God had indeed sent prophets early and often to explain the divine economy, and the will of God, well in advance of the judgments they declaimed against leaders and people for polytheism and idolatry of all sorts; and that included the promise of restoration if in destitution the people took the message of God’s judgments to heart. Because of the crucial role played by the prophetic corpus in support of the message, one can well imagine the addition of that corpus (whether exactly in the form we receive it, or not) soon after Torah took on the role of canon for early Judaism.38 Clearly many Jews found other writings inspired and worth recitation, but the phrase from the prologue to Sirach, “and other writings,” remains amorphous through the early Jewish period.39 Septuagint codices show the uncertainties of order, and to some extent content, beginning with the Early Prophets. Since the Qumran manuscripts are in scroll form there is little certainty there except to observe that the canon simply was not yet fixed by the first century of the common era. The Ketuvim reflect clearly the Pharisaic / rabbinic understanding of Judaism and that of other Judaisms from the period, and offer a review of the situation since the exile from the point of view of surviving rabbinic Judaism in the middle to late second century of the common era. For them, prophecy or revelation had indeed ceased at the time of Ezra. All the massive Jewish literature stemming from others of the diverse forms of Judaism that are found in Septuagint codices, at Qumran, and elsewhere, that engaged so heavily in speculation about what God would do in history to bring it to fulfillment or closure, was simply to be set aside. What one added to the Torah and the Prophets showed clearly what Judaism meant to those who did the adding.40 The quadripartite canons of various Christian communities show what could be added, and even arranged in sequence of books of the Christian First Testament, to make a quite different statement as to what God was about in the human experiment. The quadripartite Christian canons were so arranged as to make adding the Gospels and Acts to the Jewish canon in its Greek guise a (theo)logical statement about God’s continuing activity in Christ and in the

38   Whether one can accept the dates assigned by David Noel Freedman to the addition of the Prophets to the Torah as canon, the thrust he perceived seems right. See Freedman, “Canon of the OT.” 39   Pace F. F. Bruce, Earle Ellis, Roger Beckwith, and Sid Leiman, whose arguments are well reprised in McDonald’s excellent book, Formation of the Christian Biblical Canon, 32 – 50. 40   Adding a chapter to any writing throws light back on the earlier writing, and can even change its message and thrust; note what Deuteronomy did to the Tetrateuch, the Writings to the Torah and Prophets, and the Gospels and Epistles to the “Old Testament.”

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early churches.41 The placement and the additions made even the Torah and the Prophets make quite different statements from those of the Jewish canon, as to what God was doing. The Prophets, as the fourth part of the Christian canon, were now put into the role of being those who primarily predicted or foreshadowed Christ, rather than primarily explaining what judgment and salvation are all about in the divine economy. What is at stake in the additions, whether the Ketuvim by rabbinic Judaism or the Gospels by Christianity, is nothing short of views of God and Reality that form the core of each religion. Rabbinic Judaism and Christianity share the same basic text of the First Testament, but in forms that make different theological statements, even before the adding of the Christian Second Testament. In this way one can see the vast importance not only of the destruction of the First Temple, but also of the Second by Rome. Each catastrophe caused reviews of the old literature that shaped the past in ways that made vital sense to those who did the arrangement of the books, and also did the adding of others. But it was the exile that had formed the crucible from which Judaism arose as God’s New Israel, no matter what expression one form of Judaism, or another, eventually gave to it thereafter. Bibliography Callaway, Mary. Sing, O Barren One: A Study in Comparative Midrash. Atlanta: Scholars, 1986. Chilton, Bruce, and Jacob Neusner. Judaism in the New Testament: Practices and Beliefs. London: Routledge, 1995. [Chilton, Bruce, and Jacob Neusner. Trading Places: The Intersecting Histories of Judaism and Christianity. Cleveland: Pilgrim, 1996.] Clifford, Richard J. Creation Accounts in the Ancient Near East and in the Bible. CBQMS 26. Washington: Catholic Biblical Association of America, 1994. Coogan, Jack. “The Moving Image and Theological Education.” Unpublished paper. Evans, Craig A., and James A. Sanders. Luke and Scripture: The Function of Sacred Tradition in Luke – Acts. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993. Freedman, David Noel. “Canon of the Old Testament.” In IDBSup 130 – 36. Gorak, Jan. The Making of the Modern Canon: Genesis and Crisis of a Literary Idea. London: Athlone, 1991. Heschel, Abraham. The Prophets. New York: Harper, 1962. Kazantzakis, Nikos. The Last Temptation of Christ. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1960. McDonald, Lee M. The Formation of the Christian Biblical Canon. Rev. ed. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1995. Sanders, James A. “Adaptable for Life: The Nature and Function of Canon.” In From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, by James A. Sanders, 9 – 39. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987. [Original in Magnalia Dei: The Mighty Acts of God: Essays on the Bible and Archaeology in Memory of G. Ernest Wright, edited by Frank M. Cross, Werner E. Lemke, and Patrick D. Miller, 531 – 60. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1976.] Sanders, James A. “Biblical Criticism and the Bible as Canon.” In From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, by James A. Sanders, 75 – 86. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987. [Original USQR 32 (1977) 157 – 65.] 41

  See Sanders, “Hermeneutics of Text Criticism,” esp. 16 – 20.

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Sanders, James A. Canon and Community: A Guide to Canonical Criticism. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984. Sanders, James A. “Canonical Hermeneutics.” In Canon and Community: A Guide to Canonical Criticism, by James A. Sanders, 46 – 60. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984. Reprinted in From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, by James A. Sanders, 61 – 73. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987. Sanders, James A. “Canonical Hermeneutics: True and False Prophecy.” In From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, by James A. Sanders, 87 – 105. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987. [Original “Hermeneutics in True and False Prophecy.” In Canon and Authority: Essays in Old Testament Religion and Theology, edited by George W. Coats and Burke O. Long, 21 – 41. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1977.] Sanders, James A. “Deuteronomy.” In The Books of the Bible. Vol. 1, The Old Testament  / The Hebrew Bible, edited by Bernhard W. Anderson, 89 – 102. New York: Scribner’s, 1989. Sanders, James A. “From Sacred Story to Sacred Text.” In From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, by James A. Sanders, 175 – 91. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987. Sanders, James A. “God Is God.” Foundations 6 (1963) 343 – 61. Sanders, James A. “Hermeneutics in True and False Prophecy.” In Canon and Authority: Essays in Old Testament Religion and Theology, edited by George W. Coats and Burke O. Long, 21 – 41. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1977. [Reprinted as “Canonical Hermeneutics: True and False Prophecy.” In From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, by James A. Sanders, 87 – 105. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987.] Sanders, James A. “Hermeneutics of Text Criticism.” Textus 18 (1995) 1 – 26. Sanders, James A. “Intertextuality and Canon.” Forthcoming. [In On the Way to Nineveh: Studies in Honor of George M. Landes, edited by Stephen L. Cook and Sara C. Winter, 316 – 33. Atlanta: Scholars, 1999.] Sanders, James A. “Mysterium Salutis.” Year-Book 1972 / 73, 103 – 21. Jerusalem: Ecumenical Institute, 1974. Sanders, James A. “Prayer of Manasseh.” In The HarperCollins Study Bible, edited by Wayne A. Meeks et al., 1746 – 48. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1993. [rev. ed. Edited by Harold W. Attridge et al, 1568 – 70. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2006.] Sanders, James A. “Scripture as Canon for Post-Modern Times.” BTB 25, no. 2 (1995) 56 – 63. Sanders, James A. Suffering as Divine Discipline in the Old Testament and Post-Biblical Judaism. Rochester, NY: Colgate Rochester Divinity School Bulletin, Special Issue (28), 1955. Sanders, James A. Torah and Canon. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1972. [2nd ed. Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2005.] Sanders, James A. “Torah and Christ.” Int 29 (1975) 372 – 90. [Reprinted in From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, by James A. Sanders, 41 – 60. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987.] Sanders, James A. “Torah and Paul.” In God’s Christ and His People: Studies in Honour of Nils Alstrup Dahl on the Occasion of His Sixty-Fifth Birthday, edited by Wayne A. Meeks and Jacob Jervell, 132 – 40. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1977. [Reprinted as “Paul and the Law.” In From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, by James A. Sanders, 115 – 23. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987.] Silberman, Lou H. “The Human Deed in a Time of Despair: The Ethics of Apocalyptic.” In Essays on Old Testament Ethics: J. Philip Hyatt in Memoriam, edited by James L. Crenshaw and John T. Willis, 191 – 202. New York: Ktav, 1974. Smith, Morton. Palestinian Parties and Politics that Shaped the Old Testament. New York: Columbia University Press, 1971.

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Stone, Michael E. “Judaism at the Time of Christ.” Scientific American 288 (January 1973) 80 – 87. Stone, Michael E. Scriptures, Sects and Visions. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1980. Sweeney, Marvin A. “The Book of Isaiah in Recent Research.” CurBS 1 (1993) 141 – 62. Sweeney, Marvin A. Isaiah  1 – 39. FOTL 16. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996. Talmon, Shemaryahu. “Die Gemeinde des erneuerten Bundes von Qumran zwischen rabbinischen Judentum und Christentum.” In Zion: Ort der Begegnung: Festschrift für Laurentius Klein zur Vollendung des 65. Lebensjahres, edited by Ferdinand Hahn et al., 295 – 312. Bodenheim: Athenaeum, 1993. Talmon, Shemaryahu. “Oral Tradition and Written Transmission, or the Heard and the Seen Word in Judaism of the Second Temple Period.” In Jesus and the Oral Gospel Tradition, edited by Henry Wansbrough, 121 – 58. JSNTSup 64. Sheffield: JSOT, 1991.

11 The Stabilization of the Tanak The Meaning of “Canon” and the Notion of Authorship The word “canon” can be used in either of two ways. Most commonly it is used to mean a closed list of writings in a certain order (Latin norma normata, “norm normed”). The second usage indicates how such writings function in a believing community (in Latin, norma normans, “norm norming”). It is important to distinguish between the two meanings and to be aware of how the word is used in a given instance. The first indicates shape, the second function. The first meaning connotes a five-foot shelf of literature that is considered some kind of standard by the community that holds that literature in high regard.1 The word itself derives from Semitic Greek roots that designated a rod or reed that was firm and straight (see also Latin canna, English “cannon”). In Greek, the word might indicate a stave, a weaver’s rod, a curtain rod, a bedpost, a stick kept for drawing a straight line, or a reference for measuring, such as a level, a plumb line, or a ruler. Thereafter it took on metaphoric meanings such as model, standard, paradigm, boundary, chronological list, or tax and tariff schedule. In the New Testament, it means “rule, standard” (Phil 3:16 in some manuscripts; Gal 6:6) or “limit” (2 Cor 10:13, 15 – 16). In early church literature, it came to refer to biblical law, an ideal person, an article of faith, doctrine, catalog, table of contents, or a list of persons ordained or sainted.2 Athanasius (d. 373) is the first known to have used the word for a list of inspired books, though Origen (d. 254) may have done so earlier (Letter to Africanus). In his Easter letter of 367 Athanasius listed the twenty-seven books of the New Testament. It is clear from these early, varied uses of the term that it could indicate either an instrument used for measuring or the act of measuring itself – shape or function. Both senses have continued ever since as denotations of the word “canon.”3 Some religions are scriptured (Judaism, Samaritanism, Christianity, Islam, Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Zoroastrianism); others are not.4 Whereas the Scripture of Islam, the Qur’an, designates the record of divine revelation to one individual, in Judaism and Christianity Scripture designates an anthology of human responses to divine revelations, in dialogue with each other. *  First published 2003. 1  Gorak, Making of the Modern Canon; Bloom, Western Canon. 2  Metzger, Canon of the NT, 289 – 93; McDonald, Formation of the Christian Biblical Canon, 1 – 5. 3   Sanders, “Canon. Hebrew Bible,” 839. 4   W. Smith, What Is Scripture?

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Most documents in the Jewish and Christian canons are anonymous. Because of the growing influence of Greek culture on Judaism in the pre-Christian period, pressure grew to assign “canonical” literature to great names in the particular community’s past. Greek culture, considerably more than Semitic cultures, stressed the worth and responsibility of individuals. Everyone knew who wrote the Iliad and the Odyssey, and other great Greek literature. By the same token, Jews and early Christians felt they had to come up with names of individuals as authors of well-known literature, whether “canonical” yet or not. Thus ensued the attribution of anonymous literature to great names of Israel’s past. As strange as it may seem to the Western (Greek-influenced) mind, the four canonical Gospels are basically anonymous. For example, not only do we not know who Luke was, the Gospel that bears his name did not even have an attribution (kata Loukan, “according to Luke”) until well into the second century CE, when Christianity was beginning to leave its Jewish matrix to become a separate religion. It is a very Western notion, due to the Renaissance of Greek culture in the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries, to think that we would know more about the third Gospel if we knew who its author was. It is only an assumption that the Luke whose name was affixed to the Gospel was the “beloved physician” to whom the writer of Colossians refers (4:14). It is the same with the other Gospels and some of the letters attributed to Paul. Greek cultural pressure was so great that Jews felt they had to answer the question of individual authorship in order to gain respect for their community literature and for Jewish culture in general. The kinds of apologetic arguments that Philo and Josephus engaged in were directed toward seeking acceptance of Judaism in the Greek cultural world. It was not until some time in the third to second centuries BCE that Jews began to attribute the whole Pentateuch to Moses, all the Psalms to David, the whole of the anthology of wisdom in the book of Proverbs to Solomon, etc. The Western, Greek-shaped fears suggest that if Paul did not write Ephesians or Colossians, for example, those books would have less authority. Even the superscriptions to the books in the prophetic corpus of the Hebrew Bible did not indicate authorship so much as what God was doing for Israel and the world through certain charismatic persons in their particular time-space frames. The focus was not on the worth and authority of those individuals but on the work of God through them and their contemporaries.

The Repetition of Traditions in Early Israel Long before there was anything close to an agreed-upon table of contents specifying the literature that the Jewish community held to be “canonical,” certain common traditions gave the community identity and norms of conduct in the light of that identity. They functioned in much the same way as later canonical Scripture, except that they were remembered and transmitted in fluid, oral forms. That they were not set in stabilized forms in no way diminished their authority. Consider, for instance, the innumerable times the exodus event is referred to in

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preexilic literature. Such references were not casual but intentional, undergirding the points otherwise made by prophets, psalmists, or historians possessing community authority. That the stories of those community-defining events were recited in different ways for different purposes did not diminish that authority.5 Reference to two great events in Israel’s past powerfully conveyed such authority. One, the exodus, created the people called Israel: “the people come out of Egypt.” The other was the call of David and the establishment of his dynasty. In addition, the patriarchal traditions, and eventually the belief in creation as God’s initial great act of grace, also functioned canonically as references of authority.6 The great preexilic prophets (with the possible exception of the eighth-century Isaiah) referred to God’s freeing of the slaves from Egypt to substantiate their claims that the God of the exodus could and would free the people from their slavery to and idolatry of God’s gifts of land, city, and temple. In doing so, these prophets brought a different hermeneutic to bear in understanding the authority of the Mosaic and Davidic traditions, since the common people chose instead to understand these same community traditions as guaranteeing those gifts. Largely because of their quite unpopular application of those sacred traditions, “no prophet was acceptable in his own country” (Luke 4:24). It is often assumed that most prophetic books record some kind of “call of the prophet” so that subsequent disciples or “schools” could thereby establish the prophet’s authority, and the authority of his later followers, to say the kinds of things they claimed he said and did. While this is basically correct, the prophets also referred to Israel’s corporate “call” to claim authority for what they said and did. That is, in order to lend authority to their ministry and message, they referred “canonically,” as it were, to the common traditions that gave the people their essential identity. That same kind of appeal to authority later would be made to those traditions, and many others, when they had become stabilized in a written canon. One example of prophetic reference to the exodus events may suffice to illustrate the point. The book of Amos records a sermon that extends from 1:3 to 3:2 (probably the sermon referred to in 7:10 – 11, when Amos was in the royal sanctuary at Bethel). It is a remarkably powerful sermon in a number of ways, not the least being its rhetorical style, which was drawn to some degree from international wisdom thought. The sermon starts out with numerous oracles against Israel’s surrounding neighbors. Each indictment and sentence against those peoples begins with an incipit common to them all. The same incipit then intones indictments and sentences not only against Judah, but even against northern Israel, where the sermon was delivered. The indictments against the neighbors (with the exception of Judah) are all directed against some act of inhumanity committed toward a neighbor. The sentences all include fire as part of the punishment. In the case of neighboring Judah, however, the indictment is simply that Judah had rejected the Torah of Yahweh and believed in the lies by which they 5

  Cf. Taussig, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism.  Sanders, Torah and Canon, 13 – 28.

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lived (2:4 – 5). In the case of Israel itself, the indictment is about acts of inhumanity, but not acts directed against neighbors but against the poor and dispossessed in Israel’s own land, as well as acts of idolatry against God (2:6 – 8). The sentences declaimed against Israel do not follow the indictments directly, as in all the other cases, but come after a reference to what God did for Israel in the exodus, wanderings, and entrance events of Israel’s sacred story (2:9 – 11). The power in the utilization of the “canonical” reference to the exodus events lies in the contrast between what Israel was doing to the poor in its own land and what Yahweh had done for the Israelites when their heads were in the dust of the land of Egypt (2:7). When Israel was powerless in Egypt, Yahweh stooped in grace to release them from the suffering and shame to create a people out of slaves. Israel, on the other hand, when it gained some power and a place to call its own, failed to follow the way of Yahweh, following instead the way of Pharaoh.7 Israel was selling the righteous for silver and the needy for sandals, trampling into the dust of the earth the heads of the poor in their own land (Amos 8:4 – 6). The power Israel attained corrupted Israel. Hosea and Jeremiah, alone among the prophets, expressed the view that Israel had been devoted and dedicated in the wilderness period after the exodus, up to the point of entering the promise and settling the land (Hos 2:14 – 15; 9:10; Jer 2:2 – 3). Amos does not say it quite that way, but he clearly implies that when Israel came into the heritage of the land and hence into power of their own, they became corrupt. The reference to the “gospel” (God’s story) of the exodus, wanderings, and entrance provides a marked contrast between what God has done for Israel and what Israel is doing to her own powerless and poor people, her own in-land neighbors. To reinforce the point at issue, the entrance into the land is mentioned first, and then the exodus and the forty years in the desert (Amos  2:9 – 11). Recitals of Israel’s identifying past can be found throughout the Bible. The shortest such recital is in 1 Sam 12:8, part of a speech that Samuel addressed to the assembly gathered at Gilgal to anoint Saul. That one verse covers Israel’s story from Jacob to the entrance into the land. In the immediately preceding verse Samuel titles the little recital “the saving deeds of the Lord” (RSV / NRSV), literally “the righteousnesses of Yahweh.” The same title is also used in Judg 5:11 and Mic 6:5. The implication is clearly that each act of God was a righteousness. In Hebrew, the word translated “righteousness” can indeed have the very concrete meaning of an act of God as it appears in these little “canonical” recitals. One knew what a righteousness was because Israel’s identifying stories, which came to be repeated regularly, told one so. It was an act of God for Israel and the world. The recitals could also be very long, with more details of the story included. For example, at the climax of Deuteronomy, Moses gives instructions to each Israelite who has entered the promised land, and these include reciting Israel’s story (26:5 – 9). The recitals clearly became confessions of Israel’s identity. Regu7

 Muilenburg, Way of Israel.

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lar recital of this story meant that Israel’s people would always know their essential identity no matter what happened to them or where they were. At the summit conference at Shechem after settlement in the land, Joshua recites a fuller account (Josh 24:2 – 13). Even longer ones appear in Pss 105 – 106 and 135 – 136, Sir 44 – 50, Acts 7, Heb 11, and other passages. Recitals of the Davidic traditions of the election of David as king based on 1 Sam 16 – 17 and 2 Sam 7 are found principally in the Psalter and in the book of Isaiah. Psalm 78 and Exod 15 combine the two traditions, as does the fuller story contained in the Torah and the Former Prophets (Genesis to 2 Kings). In fact, the fullest recital of the Mosaic traditions is actually the whole of Exodus through Joshua, with Genesis as a kind of global introduction. In preexilic times there was no stabilized and uniform way of referring to Israel’s common identifying past. Nevertheless, the function of the traditions worked in the same authoritative way that later Scripture would work when the Torah and the Prophets became Israel’s Scripture. In the exilic and postexilic period we find the beginnings of more stabilized references to Israel’s past and to the growing body of Israel’s traditions. Fishbane has brilliantly described the development of the process in the earliest Jewish (or postexilic) portions of Scripture.8 Most likely, the literature that ended up in the Jewish canon was only about 10 percent of the literature Israel had created over the centuries. The Hebrew Bible itself refers to twenty-four noncanonical works.9 In an extended history of repetition and recitation of the sort described above in the book of Amos, some of Israel’s traditions landed on a kind of tenure track toward what would eventually be Israel’s canon as norma normata. There was no council of authoritative persons who made the decisions about what was to be in or not in the canon.10 Rather, it was the common and frequent repetition of certain traditions in community that determined the content of the eventual canon.

Characteristics of the Bible as Canon: The Hermeneutical Triangle Such repetition and recitation are together only one of the major characteristics of canonical traditions or literature. Another is the resignification that took place whenever Israel’s identifying stories were repeated in ever-changing circumstances and socio-political situations. This is true also for Scripture whenever it is recited. Resignification is a constant and steady characteristic of Scripture as canon. While there are as many canons as there are distinct communities of faith, and their stability is therefore to that limited extent uncertain, all canons are viewed by their adherents as constantly relevant to their lives. This characteristic may be called its adaptability-stability quotient. Literature that is canonical for a community  8

 Fishbane, Biblical Interpretation.  Leiman, Canonization, 19 – 20.   Lewis, “What Do We Mean by Jabneh?”

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of faith is by its very nature adaptable.11 The properties of resignification and adaptability have their limits, however. If the tradition or Scripture is resignified or adapted beyond recognition by the community, it loses its power in that use. It cannot be so bent to purpose that it gets out of recognizable shape. Canonical shape and function work together and neither can overwhelm the other. Canonical traditions and literature are also both multivalent and pluralistic. These are the main properties that render them relevant. They are multivalent in the sense that all really good poetry and most prose have the ability to speak to widely different situations. This is the principal literary reason canonical literature has lasted so long and continues to draw people to its messages. Literature as canon is also pluralistic – in the case of the Jewish and Christian canons, if perhaps not the Muslim. The Bible was formed over a period of time lasting at least twelve hundred years. As noted earlier, the Jewish and Christian Bibles are dialogical anthologies that may be viewed as collections of numerous human responses to divine revelations. The Hebrew Bible has two distinct histories, the one that goes from Genesis through Kings and the other in the books of Chronicles. Both tell the same basic story, but in quite different ways with distinctly different emphases and theological points of view. Similarly, since Tatian’s Diatessaron did not gain wide acceptance within Christianity, the Christian canon has four distinct Gospels, four different points of view on what God was doing in Christ. The churches in the late second and early third centuries said, in effect, that one should not harmonize God’s truth so that it can be called coherent by human standards. God cannot be fully comprehended by the limited human intellect. God, the churches said, is as much absconditus (hidden from human reason) as revelatus (understood by human reason), and that has been the classical theological position of Christianity through the ages. Human limitations are thus taken into account in the shape and function of the canons, Jewish and Christian. The juxtaposition of Gen 1 and Gen 2 is a felicitous hermeneutical statement by which to read the rest of the text: God is both transcendent and immanent, awesome and pastoral. The two divine traits cannot and should not be collapsed into a proposition that humans can reasonably comprehend; each is fully and completely true. God is both a high god who inhabits only the heavens and a local deity who condescends to grant his presence among the people; God is both transcendent and itinerant, both ineffable and personal. The Bible as canon includes constraints that prevent readers from making it say whatever they want it to say,12 and it bears within it, between its lines from beginning to end, the hermeneutic by which it should be read and applied to ever-changing situations. The thrust of the whole, both Jewish and Christian, is in its monotheizing hermeneutic. The canonical process, through which its various parts passed, filtered out any serious or meaningful polytheistic reading of its texts. Truth is presented as having its own integrity, the oneness of God. 11

  Sanders, “Adaptable for Life.”   Sanders, “Hermeneutics of Text Criticism,” 4.

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This is the hermeneutical message not only of the first three of the Ten Commandments but also of the whole, including the Christian New Testament. The trinitarian effort to understand the oneness of God must never be confused with polytheism; it was simply an effort to meet humans where they were in their Greco-Roman limitations to comprehend truth. Like the heavenly council in the Hebrew Bible, the trinitarian formula was a clear way of denying power and authority to the many who were thought to serve the heavenly courts. The natural human bent is toward polytheism because it seems to grant to humans more control of the world in which they think they live. Idolatry, prohibited in the Second Commandment, is the self-serving tendency of humans to worship what God has given them instead of worshiping God the giver. Co-opting God’s name for one human point of view, whether in courts of law or courts of theology, violates the Third Commandment. The Bible’s pervasive monotheizing hermeneutic is not to be thought of only as a major theme or message of the Bible; it is the mode by which all its parts should be read and reread in order to hear clearly what the Bible continues to say to a world constantly threatened by chaos. At the close of Amos’s sermon at Bethel (3:1 – 2), the prophet apparently (by inferential exegesis) was interrupted by a hearer, perhaps Amaziah, the priest of Bethel (7:10). This person protested vigorously against Amos’s message of God’s judgments against the people of Israel: “Sir, we are the only family of the earth with whom God has a covenant relationship; therefore God will prosper us!” Amos’s recorded response is sharp and clear: Quite correct! says God. The tradition is right, but the conclusion is wrong. “You only have I known of all the families of the earth; therefore I will punish you for all your iniquities” (3:2). Three factors must always be kept in mind in reading any passage of Scripture: the tradition being recited, the socio-political situation to which it was (and is) being applied, and the hermeneutic by which it was (and should be) applied to that situation. These three factors form the hermeneutical triangle of any truly critical reading of the Bible. The hermeneutic Amaziah used was that of God as Israel’s redeemer God. Amos used the hermeneutic that God was also creator of all peoples (9:1 – 8), on the basis of which he declaimed God’s judgments against Israel’s neighbors in the Bethel sermon (1:3 – 2:5) before he indicted and sentenced Israel (2:6 – 16).13 These basic characteristics of the Bible as canon – repetition, recitation, resignification, adaptability; stability, multivalence, pluralism, constraints on its readers, and the monotheizing hermeneutic – and the hermeneutical triangle – should be kept in mind in order not to violate the Bible’s true integrity, the oneness of God, which is discernable in and through its pluriformity.14 In our day of the apparent triumph of criticism and reason, it is only in the combination of a critical and faithful reading of the Bible that the mystery of its staying power 13  Sanders, From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, 87 – 103. [= “Canonical Hermeneutics: True and False Prophecy.”] 14   Sanders, “Stability and Fluidity.”

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through the centuries can be discerned. A critical reading alone may reveal only the differentness and irretrievability of its past.15 A faithful reading alone may only confirm the hermeneutic (like Amaziah’s) that the community brought to it.

The Coalescing of the Traditions from Genesis to 2 Kings The discovery and promulgation of an early form of the scroll of Deuteronomy, found in the temple in 621 BCE during King Josiah’s reformation, most likely marked the first time a written document functioned in a canonical way (as norma normans) in ancient Israel / Judah. Josiah is reported to have accepted the scroll as authentic and to have made it the basis of his Mosaic / Yahwistic reformation (2 Kgs 22 – 23). In the story line that runs from Genesis through Kings in the Jewish canon, Deuteronomy purports to be the last will and testament of Moses before his death on Mount Pisgah, near where Israel made its last camp site on the east bank of the Jordan River. In the old pre-Deuteronomic story-line the narrative clearly had gone from traditions now contained in Numbers directly to the story of the entrance into the land, as described in Joshua. The acceptance of Deuteronomy, most importantly by the exilic communities that received the old traditions, caused it to disrupt the old sequence by its insinuation between Numbers and Joshua.16 Exilic adherents to the Deuteronomic point of view (sometimes called the Deuteronomistic historians) probably edited the older versions to bring them into line with the exilic-Deuteronomic point of view. That point of view was not greatly modified when the later priestly editors put their stamp on the whole before it was finally edited in Babylonia and brought back to Jerusalem by Ezra in 445 BCE (cf. Neh 8). In fact, as one reads the whole story that runs now from Genesis through Kings, one can discern, among other points made, a clear four-point message that is affirmed vigorously in Deut 29 – 31. Those four points strongly reflect the experience of destitution and exile: (a) it is not God who let us down; (b) it is we who let God down by polytheism, idolatry, and foolishly co-opting Yahweh’s name for a self-serving theology; (c) if we take the whole experience to heart, as the prophets and Deuteronomy interpreted it, it will be God’s great joy to restore us not only to our former estate but to even better and more prosperous conditions; and (d) God sent prophets early and often precisely to tell us how this truly is in the divine economy and what our theology ought to have been.17 This four-fold message came to reside at the heart and at the climax of the Torah as it was edited and stabilized in the Babylonian exile at the height of the Persian hegemony of the ancient Near East. The traditional date assigned to Ezra’s return to Jerusalem, with the edited Torah in hand, is 445 BCE.18 It 15

 Johnson, Fire in the Mind.  Sanders, Torah and Canon. 17   Sanders, “Deuteronomy”; Sanders, “Canon. Hebrew Bible.” 18   For recent discussion concerning the date, see Eskenazi, “Current Perspectives.” 16

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is recorded that Ezra read the Torah from morning until noon on a dais built for the occasion in the Water Gate of Jerusalem (Neh 8). The people had lost the ability to understand Hebrew, so it was translated passage by passage into Aramaic by Levites standing on either side of Ezra as he read. The Deuteronomy scroll had the function of canon for Josiah’s Judah, but now Ezra’s Torah had both the function and the shape of a community’s canon. This was truly the beginning of the Bible as norma normata, as well as norma normans.19 The Torah that Ezra brought to Jerusalem, edited in exile, was clearly the Torah as we know it in both the Masoretic Text and the Septuagint, with the possibility of a bit of editing yet to be done. The Torah that Ezra read in community that day was basically stable for all time to come. Its message included not only the already-mentioned four Deuteronomic points but other points as well. Yahweh, the God of Israel, was actually the creator God of all heaven and earth, indeed of everything in creation. Yahweh established creation as a divine order that would keep the forces of chaos and outer darkness at bay. Righteousness and justice were the marks of God’s creation, that is, of the order God had wrought out of the morass of chaos.20 God was the sole god of all creation. What others thought of as the many gods of polytheism were really only ministering servants of God in the heavenly order or chthonian (underworld) deities who represented chaos but who had no ultimate power of their own (Ps 82; Gen 1:26 – 28; Job 1 – 2; et al.). Genesis 1 – 11 set the stage of creation’s order of justice and righteousness. Because of the human tendency to violate the order of God’s creation, God engaged in a pact with a couple who lived in Haran in Mesopotamia. Abram and Sarai were invited to accompany God on a journey going where they knew not. They were given therewith two promises: progeny and a place for them and their progeny to live (Gen 12:1 – 3). Though the promises often seemed to fail, or seemed continually not to come true, eventually they were indeed fulfilled. In fact, if one is looking for a biblical theme of promise and fulfillment, it is found within the broader Torah story that finds completion, not in the Moses / Ezra Pentateuch but in the Former Prophets, which soon were added to the Torah Ezra read in the Water Gate. The promises of both progeny and land were fulfilled by the end of the book of Joshua, though they were not yet secure. The security of fulfillment, of the sort humans seek, is clearly assured by 1 Kings 10. The Queen of Sheba visited Jerusalem to witness for herself the great wisdom for which Solomon had become internationally famous, according to the immediate text. In the larger context of the broader Torah story, the Queen of Sheba plays the role of the international witness to God’s fulfillment of the two promises to Abraham and Sarah, progeny and land. The borders of the united kingdom under Solomon were as extended as ever they would be, and the land was teeming with heirs of the Abraham / Sarah promises. “All the king’s vessels were of gold; none was of silver . . .” (1 Kgs 10:21).

19

 Gorak, Making of the Modern Canon, 9 – 43.  Clifford, Creation Accounts.

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But alas, God appointed three satans (testers) to Solomon, and he failed all three tests. By the end of the next chapter (1 Kgs 11:14, 23, 26) the kingdom had split and there was dissension on every side. Solomon succumbed to polytheism and idolatry, apparently due in part to the flattery of foreign adulation. In the story line that runs from Genesis through 2 Kings, the movement after 1 Kgs 11 is downhill all the way to the dissolution of the whole experiment – the defeat of the northern kingdom in 722 BCE and of the southern kingdom in 587 BCE (1 Kgs 11 – 2 Kgs 25). In the Jewish canon, this is where the story line ends. King Jehoiachin, who is taken hostage in 597 BCE at the end of 2 Kings, is invited by the new Babylonian monarch to dine at the king’s table. He would at that time have been fifty-five years of age. The move from prison to more comfortable quarters, with board at the king’s table, was surely welcome; nevertheless, the surviving king of Judah still lived only by the graces of Evil-merodach (2 Kgs 25:27 – 30). The story that began in Genesis thus ends in total defeat and subjugation. At this point one poignantly remembers that the whole Torah story insists that God is the God of fallings as well as risings, of defeat as well as of victory, of both honor and shame, of what humans call evil or bad, as well as of what they call good (Deut 32:39; 1 Sam 2:6 – 7; 2 Sam 22:27; Isa 45:7; Luke 1:52 – 53).21 In fact, much of the Bible is devoted to explaining defeat under the sovereignty of God – the defeat of the northern kingdom by Assyria and of the southern kingdom by Babylonia, tight hegemony by the Persians, conquest by Greece and subjugation by the Ptolemies and the Seleucids, conquest and oppression by Rome, the fall of Jerusalem in 70 CE, the crucifixion of a teacher from Galilee, persecution of Christians on all sides, and the apparent failure of the parousia in the first century CE. In Christian canons, one can go on to read the books of Chronicles immediately after Kings and sense some relief from the disaster, but not so in the Tanak, or Jewish canon. In the Tanak this strange story of beginnings and endings, fulfillment and subsequent disappointment, is immediately followed by fifteen prophetic books, the books of the Three, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel (in that order in most manuscripts), and of the Twelve, the so-called minor prophets. In other words, the fuller Torah story, in its full canonical extent, including the so-called Former Prophets (ending in 2 Kings), is followed by the so-called Latter Prophets, fifteen case histories that substantiate the fourfold message noted above in the Deuteronomic history. God had indeed sent prophets early and often to tell the people and their leaders how it was in the divine economy. Those prophets, in one way or another, made the same points: it was indeed the people who had broken the covenant, not God; but there was a second chance, in destitution, to learn what God had by the prophets tried to teach them, that if they repented and came to their senses, God would restore them more handsomely than before. There would be resurrection on the corporate level, as Ezekiel affirmed (Ezek 37). 21

  See Sanders, “Strangeness of the Bible”; Sanders, “Canon. Hebrew Bible.”

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The Prophetic Perspective on Israel’s Future Of these fifteen case histories that as a whole substantiate the fourfold message of Deuteronomy and the Deuteronom(ist)ic history, a few arose in the exilic period reflecting on the catastrophes and their aftermath, but most of them presented the words and actions of prophets who date from before the final fall of Jerusalem and the defeat of Judah in 587 BCE. The preexilic prophets consistently convey the message that God was God in the defeats of Israel as well as in Israel’s earlier fulfillment. They fairly consistently indict the people as a whole, beginning with their leaders, for polytheism and idolatry, especially the idolatry of loving God’s gifts more than God the giver, or, just as bad, adhering to their view of God as one obligated by the covenant to prosper them. But the prophets also consistently offer hope beyond the disaster, if the people, in destitution, take the prophetic message to heart. In one way or another they interpret the coming disasters as having not only punitive effect because of the people’s sins, but also transformative effect that would prepare them for the subsequent restoration – if they would take it all to heart (Deut 29 – 31). Even the book of Amos (if not the historical person Amos) offers hope beyond disaster (Amos 9). Hosea very clearly says that the defeat of Samaria may be looked at as a Valley of Achor that God will turn into a Door of Hope – if the people return to the devotion of their youth (Hos 2:14 – 15; 5:15 – 6:3). Jeremiah has much the same message, suggesting that in adversity God is in effect a surgeon suturing God’s Torah onto the heart of the people corporately (Jer 31:31 – 34). The book of Isaiah is a virtual paradigm in how God’s judgments may be understood as preparing Israel to be God’s teacher of Torah to the world (especially Isa 1:21 – 27; 28:14 – 22).22 Ezekiel presses the surgical metaphor used by Hosea and Jeremiah further, affirming that in adversity God is conducting a heart transplant, taking out the old heart of stone and putting in a heart of flesh, giving the people a new heart and a new spirit so that they can be obedient and faithful when restored to the land God gave them in the first place (Ezek 36:25 – 28). Ezekiel goes on to affirm that God is resurrecting the bones of old Israel and Judah and making them into a new united people under God’s pastoral oversight (Ezek 37). Each of the preexilic prophets in one way or another affirmed that defeat and even death would not stump God; God was indeed the God of fallings and risings, as well as of risings and fallings. A remarkable thing to note about historical biblical criticism is that it has not been able to date these prophets, as individuals, after the catastrophic event. When New Testament scholarship sees Jesus, in the Gospels, speaking prophetically of the coming fall of Jerusalem, it usually claims that this is a vaticinium post eventum placed in the mouth of Jesus by the Gospel writers. Not so with the prophets. They state clearly that God is the God of both victory and defeat. This is a (theo)logical consequence of belief in one God only. Adversity in the monotheizing thrust of the Bible cannot be ascribed to a bad 22

  See Sweeney, Isaiah  1 – 4.

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god, and prosperity to “our good God.” Nothing in the Bible, in either Testament, would affirm such a position. In fact, it is reasonable to speculate that Jesus may have believed that the first-century Jewish world in Palestine would eventually fall to the Romans. Given that Jesus was apparently born just before the turmoil of the War of Varus, which followed the death of Herod, and witnessed personally the cruel oppression of Roman occupation thereafter, the fall of Jerusalem might have been for him, just as for the preexilic prophets, a (theo)logical consequence of belief in one God. The key to understanding it all was the Torah story and its belief that death does not stump God, that God can indeed reach in and through defeat and death to new life, for both belong to God.

The Tension between Corporate and Individual Focus It is helpful to understand that the Bible resides in a kind of tension between focus on corporate worth and responsibility, on the one hand, and focus on individual worth and responsibility, on the other, and that this tension pervades both Testaments. Most of the literature in the Bible, as noted above, is anonymous and was viewed as corporately owned. To call passages in biblical literature “secondary” because they were “added by a later hand” is to deny the community dimension of the Bible. The names of the patriarchs in Genesis are largely eponymous. Scholarship has long since accepted the corporate dimension of names like Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The current conservative (actually Greek-shaped) mind feels that authority is somehow denied to the Bible by recognition of this Semitic dimension of it. Skilled historians know that when we deal with history, we deal with a very different and irretrievable past.23 The Bible is indeed a book very strange to the Western mind, whether it recognizes this or not.24 Its strangeness provides a dimension of authenticity that familiarity denies: we can never claim to comprehend it fully or dismiss it. Like Jacob with the “man” at Peniel, one wrestles with the text as with a human, later to find that one had somehow been wrestling with God (Gen 32:22 – 32). The concept of its being, or conveying, the word of God means that, like God, it cannot be fully comprehended. The history of modern historical criticism of the Bible has indeed shown that the “assured results” of one generation of biblical criticism are often challenged by the next. Modern thinking perceives the challenges as improvements on the way to claiming the truth of the text. Postmodern thinking, on the contrary, understands that the process of challenge and response, even within the most rigorous pursuit of critical method, is the nature of inquiry. The very strangeness of Scripture challenges the assumption that “the best” in modern, Western cultural awareness is what God wants. The best thinking, conservative or liberal, of any generation will always fall short of truth in ultimate terms.

23

 Johnson, Fire in the Mind.   Sanders, “Strangeness of the Bible.”

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As noted, much of the Bible is engaged in explaining adversity and defeat. The Deuteronomic historians portray all preexilic Israel and Judah as sinful, for that alone would explain such a catastrophe. Yet, they were not saying that each individual was sinful so much as saying, with Paul citing Scripture, “none was righteous, no, not one” (Rom 3:10). It was necessary to explain the disaster. In fact, it has been noted that the Bible presents many mirrors for identity, but hardly any models for morality.25 The popular tendency would have been to blame God for letting the people down, but the prophets, historians, and psalmists who end up in the Bible clearly state that it was the fault of Israel, not God. The Deuteronomic historians laid special blame on the leaders, notably the kings of Israel and Judah, eponymically representing the people as a whole. King Manasseh, who reigned through most of the seventh century BCE in Judah (2 Kgs 21:1 – 18), was a primary example. For the Deuteronomists, Manasseh was a kind of scapegoat explaining the destitution. The focus was corporate, however, for the king represented the whole people. The indictments of the preexilic prophets were directed at Israel as a whole, the entire nation. None would escape the righteous judgments of God. The concept of a remnant was not that some would escape the judgment but that some would be reshaped by it into monotheizers even while retaining their Yahwistic identity in and beyond the disaster. Not long before the fall of Jerusalem to Babylonia in 587 BCE, both Jeremiah and Ezekiel told the people that they should no longer quote the old proverb that the children’s teeth were set on edge because their ancestors had eaten sour grapes (Jer 31:29 – 30; Ezek 18). Ezekiel developed the idea of generational responsibility in ch. 18 in a way that contradicted the clear statement in the Torah of corporate responsibility (Exod 34:7). This caused questions to be raised in early rabbinic literature as to whether the book of Ezekiel “soiled the hands,” that is, was inspired. The book of Job stands as a monument to the tension between understandings of corporate and individual responsibility. Job’s friends laid the full blame for his low estate on Job himself, in effect, laying on him, as an individual, what the prophets and the Deuteronomists had called the corporate sins of Israel as a whole. Job, throughout the poem (chs. 3 – 31), resists the implication with all his being. He tends to blame God for his disasters, sure that he will again experience the intimate relation with God in destitution that he has experienced in comfort, just as Jeremiah experienced it in both comfort and apparent abandonment (Jer  15:15 – 21; Job  13:20 – 28; 19:23 – 29; 29:1 – 4). The whirlwind speeches, on the contrary, call Job to humility and recognition of his limited human understanding of God’s work in nature, and hence in history (Job  38 – 42).26 They thus herald belief in God’s increasing remoteness, transcendence, and inaccessibility, both in Semitic and in Greek religious thought of the time.

25

 Sanders, From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, 69 – 73.   Lundberg, “So That Hidden Things.”

26

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The Growing Dominance of Focus on the Individual As Greek culture became more and more influential in Semitic, and especially Jewish thinking, increasing attention was given to the moral struggles of the individual, as in Ecclesiastes and the Psalter. This became so much the case that the Chronicler told of King Manasseh’s repentance and of God’s acceptance of his repentance to the point of restoring him to the throne (2 Chron 33:10 – 17). The Chronicler, however, failed to record a prayer of repentance for Manasseh. Eventually such a prayer was attributed to Manasseh, and today is present in Greek and Slavonic Orthodox canons, but not in Protestant or Catholic canons.27 God’s acceptance of the repentance of individuals, no matter how heinous their sins or character, became a cornerstone of Judaism, which focuses on the belief that God can be obeyed and pleased by human effort. A Jew is not expected to be perfect, but s / he is not permitted to stop trying. The expansion and rapid growth of Christianity in the Greek world was due in large part to its core message contradicting the generally accepted view that God was remote, transcendent, and ineffable. Christians went about the Mediterranean world claiming that, on the contrary, God had just been sighted on the hills of the Galilee and had succumbed in crucifixion to the numbing cruelty of Roman repression – for the sake of all humanity. Christianity’s dramatic spread was also based on the Greek idea that an individual could choose his or her basic identity and convert from whatever had been his religious identity at birth to take on a different identity. Indeed, Judaism had become so influenced by Greek thought that in the centuries immediately before the birth of Christianity, it was said that Pharisees would go to great lengths to seek converts to Judaism.28 The New Testament, like other early Jewish literature, is a splendid mix of Semitic and Greek cultures. The concept in Paul and John of the church being “in Christ” is basically Semitic. Paul arrived at his ecclesiology through midrash on Gen 21:12 (Rom 9:7), which states that all Israel was “called in Isaac.” The Christian idea that the church is the body of Christ resurrected is basically Semitic in concept. Nevertheless, Christians, even today, need to acknowledge that the idea of God’s being incarnate in one person appeared, and appears, to less hellenized or Greek-influenced Jews, to be too Greek or pagan a notion to accept seriously. Some Jewish philosophers, like Rosenzweig, Buber, and Fishbane, have advanced the idea of God being incarnate in Scripture.29 Others, like Maimonides and Heschel, sponsored the belief that God is incarnate in Israel as a people (haʿam).30 Those ideas are compatible with Semitic cultural thinking. The notion that God was incarnate in one individual needed a sufficiently cross-culturally hellenized Jewish mind to find acceptance.

27

  Sanders, “Prayer of Manasseh.”  Lieberman, Greek in Jewish Palestine. 29  Fishbane, Garments of Torah. 30  Heschel, Maimonides. 28

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The Transformation of Israel’s Identity It is quite probable that something like the present prophetic corpus of the second part of the tripartite Jewish canon functioned canonically for many Jews not long after Ezra brought the Torah back with him from Babylon in about 445 BCE. These texts go together as a statement of what early Judaism understood itself to be. Together they would have provided the identity Judaism needed to survive as a discrete religion in the period of Persian dominance and hegemony in the ancient Near East. As Yeivin has noted, the most stable part of the Jewish canon, from the earliest manuscript evidence through to the very stabilized printed editions of the Tanak, was and is the Genesis to Kings sequence.31 This story line guaranteed the community’s stability – even when scrolls were used, before common use of the codex in Jewish communities some time in the third or fourth century CE. The fifteen-book section that follows, called the Latter Prophets, was not so stable in order, but it nonetheless was probably fairly well set in the Persian period in terms of what was included. Before the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, it was commonly believed that the Pentateuch was canonized by about 400 BCE, the Prophets around 200 BCE, and the Writings, or Ketuvim, at the council of Jewish leaders held at Yavneh / Jamnia around 90  CE.32 The date for the Pentateuch or Torah is about right, or could be advanced to the middle of the fifth century. The date for stabilization of the prophetic corpus should probably be set back to the late fifth century, soon after the Torah. But the date for the stabilization of the Ketuvim should be advanced to some time after the Bar Kochba revolt, more toward the middle of the second century CE.33 As argued above, the Torah and the Prophets hang together as a basic statement of God’s dealings with the world and with Israel in fairly clear theological tones. Yahweh, the God of ancient Israel, turns out to be the one God of all the world, who is the God of all and of everything, the God of risings and fallings, what humans call good and what they call evil (according to the limited time and circumstances in which they live). The Pentateuch, indeed the Hexateuch, can be called an apologia for the Landnahme, or Israel’s taking over the land of Canaan.34 The Law and the Prophets as a twopart unit, on the other hand, when taken in tandem, present the panorama of rise and fall of the preexilic adventure called Israel, God’s apparent plan for bringing salvation to a fallen world. One of the functions of the anthology called Isaiah was to resignify that divine plan in the light of Israel’s Assyrian, Babylonian, and Persian experiences. Looking back from the vantage point of Persian hegemony, and all that meant,

31

 Yeivin, Introduction to the Tiberian Masorah, 38.  Leiman, Canonization; Beckwith, OT Canon of the NT Church; contrast Carr, “Canonization in the Context of Community.” 33   Lewis, “What Do We Mean by Jabneh?”; McDonald, Formation of the Christian Biblical Canon; Carr, “Canonization in the Context of Community.” 34  Knierim, Task of OT Theology. 32

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the school of Isaiah perceived the loss of self-government as divine discipline and instruction transforming Israel into God’s teacher of Torah to all the world.35 By that time Israel had settled into accepting and understanding her survival not as an autochthonous nation but as an international religion, in part shaped by Persian policy and expectations. Its mission had become rather clear to those whose literature would itself survive the canonical process of repetition / recitation, as well as adaptation / stabilization. Israel, apparently in contrast to all her neighbors, survived with an identity based on the enduring preexilic traditions, but transformed into God’s new Israel with a mission to the rest of the world. The prophetic corpus provides several metaphors enabling the reader to understand the adversity that had befallen Israel and Judah, not only as punishment for Israel’s corporate sins, but also in the more positive sense of transforming Israel from common nationhood (like all the nations round about) into a people with a God-given mission to the rest of the world. The people of Israel could not simply accept their survival in their transformed state as the will of God, but had to understand why they survived in and through all the adversity. This survival, in contrast to the assimilation of their neighbors into Assyrian or Babylonian dominant cultures, had to be explained, but the adversity had to be explained as well. Various metaphors were used, and the basic one depicted God disciplining his people for a purpose. Other metaphors were purgational and surgical. The book of Isaiah stresses the purgational metaphor, that the adversities suffered under Assyria and Babylonia were to be understood as God’s purging of his people, either cleansing by flood or smelting by fire (Isa 1:21 – 26; 8:5 – 8; 28:17 – 19). Jeremiah and Ezekiel suggest surgical metaphors, God suturing Torah onto the collective heart of Israel corporately (Jer 30:12 – 17; 31:31 – 34) or replacing Israel’s heart of stone with a heart of flesh, and indeed implanting the divine spirit into Israel so that in the transformed state Israel would be obedient (Ezek 36:16 – 37:14). Whether the metaphor for understanding the survival through suffering was disciplinary, purgational, or surgical, the statement was the same: Israel survived disaster, whereas other peoples had not, and survived for a purpose.36 As long as Israel subsisted under the foreign domination of Egypt, Assyria, Babylonia, or Persia, there was no drastic cultural challenge to its people’s thinking, for all four powers were also Near Eastern in culture, two of them also Semitic. It was in and through those experiences of rising, falling, and rising again in a transformed state that the Torah and the Prophets were forged and shaped in the canonical process. This was the literature that survived with Israel. With the stabilization of Judaism in the postexilic period as essentially a priestly religion came the stabilization of a bipartite Scripture that, if recited regularly no matter where they lived, reminded Jews of who they were, how they got that way, what they essentially stood for, and what they should do with their lives.

35

 Sanders, Suffering as Divine Discipline; Sweeney, Isaiah  1 – 4.  Sanders, Torah and Canon, 74 – 90.

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The lives of the Jews were to change rather dramatically, however, with the rise of Greek political and cultural influence on most aspects of Jewish life. For the first time a dominant European culture provided challenges to Jewish self-understanding. The most salient contributions of Greek culture to Semitic culture were the Greek focus on the polis, or city, and on individual worth and responsibility, with the attendant humanism that was sponsored by both foci. As noted above, Greek philosophy raised the worth of the individual, and of individual thinking, to a degree unheard of in Semitic culture. The book of Sirach, or Ecclesiasticus as it has been called in its Latin translation and hence in most English translations, brought a new dimension to Jewish thinking about individuals. In contrast to Semitic practice, the Jewish writer signed his name to his work – Jesus ben Sira – hence the Greek-derived title of the book, Sirach. More than that, the writer, although he wrote in Hebrew, borrowed Greek literary devices, one of which was the encomium, a form of writing in which individual humans were praised. Chapter 44 begins with the startling clause “Let us now sing the praises of famous men.” It was the first time such a phrase was used in known Jewish literature, and it would have been shocking to the traditional Jewish ear, which would have expected instead, “Let us now sing the praises of God.” The poem then goes on for seven chapters reciting the expanded Torah story (noted above as occurring frequently in biblical literature), but does so focusing on the great deeds of the individuals in the story. There had been no such form in the famous old recitals. Ben Sira praises God and frequently mentions God as approving or disapproving of this or that act of the humans involved, but God is not the focus of praise in the encomium. The author weaves together, in magnificent cadences, the old Torah story recital and the newer Greek emphasis on the worth of individual humans.37 Such weaving together of the Semitic Jewish and the Greek was part of the hellenization process, and from that time forward for several centuries it would be a major trait of Jewish literature, to a greater or lesser degree.38 Nearly all Jewish literature from the early Jewish period, including the New Testament, exhibits, to one degree or another, a weaving together of the Semitic and Hellenistic traits in Judaism. In fact, the New Testament is a prime example of Hellenistic Jewish literature.

Late Movement toward the Canonization of the Torah One of the major results of extensive study of the Dead Sea Scrolls has been the realization that while rabbinic Jewish literature may not be a major help in understanding the birth of Christianity, the Qumran literature on the other hand is very helpful.39 The discovery and study of the scrolls have induced a dramatic 37

 Mack, Wisdom and the Hebrew Epic.   M. Smith, Palestinian Parties and Politics, ch. 3.   Talmon, “Oral Tradition”; Talmon, “Die Gemeinde des erneuerten Bundes.”

38 39

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modification of our understanding of the history of early Judaism. Two major revisions are: (a) Judaism in the pre-Christian period was very diverse, and not limited to the “parties” listed in the classical sources, and (b) for some Jewish groups of the time, prophecy had not ceased at the time of Ezra and Nehemiah in the fifth century BCE. Here at Qumran there existed an eschatologically-oriented Jewish community that, like the Christian community, was looking for divine intervention to deal with all the forces of evil in a world dominated and repressed by Rome and did not believe that prophecy or revelation ceased at the time of Ezra and Nehemiah. Prior to the finding of the scrolls, it had been commonplace for scholars to assert that almost everyone within Judaism had come to believe that divine revelation ceased at the time of Ezra. Now, however, we see that such was not the case for all forms of early Judaism. The Qumran and Christian communities are two forms of early Judaism that contradict this idea. In fact, much of the so-called intertestamental literature from early Judaism, later set aside by rabbinic Judaism, came from Jewish communities that believed that God was still very active in history and could indeed bring it to a satisfactory close in the face of all the evil abroad at the time. The literature discovered in Palestine since 1947 has caused a number of revisions in the history of early Judaism, the rise of Christianity, and the birth of rabbinic Judaism. In addition to highlighting the pluralism of early Judaism, the finds have caused a major revision of the history of transmission of the texts of the Bible, as well as a major revision of the history of the stabilization of the Jewish and Christian canons. It is now clear that the history of the transmission of the text and the history of the canonical process go hand in hand.40 It is also clear that the third section of the tripartite Jewish canon, the Ketuvim, was not stabilized until after the failure of the Bar Kochba revolt in the second century CE. If one compares the Jewish and Christian canons of the Tanak,41 one sees major differences in the structures. Whenever one speaks of canon, one must state clearly which community’s canon is being discussed, Jewish or Christian, and, within that community, which subgroup’s canon one has in mind. The Qumran literature has shown that the Qumran community’s canon contained two major sections, the Torah and the Prophets, but beyond that was amorphous or not yet stable. Thirty years of study of the Psalms Scrolls from Qumran has shown that the Psalter itself was not yet stable at Qumran, whether or not it was in other forms of Judaism.42 The situation with the Septuagint (LXX) is similar. In 1964, a year before publication of the large Psalms Scroll and the Temple Scroll, both from Qumran Cave 11, Sundberg demonstrated that there was no stabilized canon reflected in the LXX manuscripts of the Tanak.43 What he found can now be rephrased to indicate that there was not yet a clear stabili40

  Sanders, “Adaptable for Life”; Sanders, “Text and Canon.”   See the parallel lists in Hauser and Watson, “Introduction and Overview,” 34 – 35 [and in Torah and Canon 2nd ed., 15]. 42  Sanders, Dead Sea Psalms Scroll; Wilson, Editing of the Hebrew Psalter; Flint, “Of Psalms and Psalters”; Flint, Dead Sea Psalms Scrolls. 43  Sundberg, OT of the Early Church. 41

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zation of anything beyond the Pentateuch and the Prophets. At about the same time, Barthélemy’s magisterial study of the Greek Minor Prophets Scroll from Wadi Habra showed that the text of the LXX was, in the first century of the common era, in the process of being stabilized from its rather fluid, early translations of the Prophets, to conform more closely to the stabilization process going on at about the same time with Hebrew texts of the Tanak.44 By the end of the first century CE, certainly the beginning of the second century, translations of Jewish Scripture into Greek would be very literal and rigid, parallel to the rise of belief in verbal, and even literal, inspiration of Scripture.45 A clear pattern has emerged from review of the situation of Scripture in the first century. The third section of the Jewish canon was not stabilized into its rabbinic, proto-masoretic form until after the failure of the Bar Kochba revolt. Apocalyptic thinking remained vital in the forms of Judaism that survived the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the temple by Rome in 70 CE.46 Of this there can be little doubt when one remembers that Rabbi Akiba supported Bar Kochba as the messiah. Bar Kochba’s revolt failed miserably. Jerusalem was sown by Rome with salt, and what was left received a Roman name, Aelia Capitolina. A growing consensus sees Rome’s forceful suppression of the Bar Kochba revolt as the principal event that caused closure of the rabbinic Jewish canon.47

The Ketuvim, the Tanak, and the Christian Old Testament A careful look at the Tanak as we have inherited it from the Masoretes shows that its tripartite structure makes a very different statement from that of the Christian quadripartite First (Old) Testament. In the case of comparison of the Jewish and the Christian Protestant canons,48 the two structures (norma normata) are quite different, although the texts of the two are essentially the same. This was not always the case. The texts are the same because Jerome, in the fourth century CE, was convinced that the Latin translation of the Christian First Testament should be based on the Hebrew text (his principle of Hebraica veritas) and not on the Greek translation. Since the early churches were so influenced by Greco-Roman culture, the first Scriptures of the early Christian movement were Greek translations of Jewish Scriptures. Paul knew the Jewish Scriptures in both forms, as did probably the contributors to Mark, Matthew, and John. But Luke and others in the New Testament used only the Greek translations. As the churches moved further out into the Greco-Roman world, Greek came to be used almost exclusively. Even Bibles in Syriac (a Semitic language) in eastern churches were considerably influenced by the Greek translations of Jewish Scripture. 44

 Barthélemy, Les devanciers d’Aquila.   Sanders, “Text and Canon.” 46   Silberman, “From Apocalyptic Proclamation.” 47  McDonald, Formation of the Christian Biblical Canon; Carr, “Canonization in the Context of Community.” 48   See again Hauser and Watson, “Introduction and Overview,” 34 – 35. 45

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The Torah had been translated into Greek by the end of the third century BCE, and the Prophets soon thereafter, with portions of the rather amorphous third section of the Jewish canon being translated as Greek-speaking Jewish communities needed them in the pre-Christian period.49 It is crucial to remember that we have the text of these Greek translations only because the churches copied, preserved, and used them. We are really not sure what the structure (norma normata) of a Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible would have looked like in the world of the Hellenistic Jewish synagogue. What we know is that the structure of the Greek First Testament is very different from the structure of the Hebrew Bible, once one goes outside the Pentateuch. Comparison of them is very instructive. The considerable difference between the message of the Torah and the Prophets, the first two parts of the Jewish canon, and the Ketuvim, the third part, is striking. As argued above, the Torah and the Prophets make a fairly clear statement about how to understand the world under one God, the God of both risings and fallings. But the third section of the Jewish canon is quite different. Whereas the Torah and the Prophets deal in some depth with God’s involvement and revelations in world affairs, the Ketuvim at best offer reflections on that involvement as a thing of Israel’s past. Outside the book of Daniel, there is no speculation on how God might intervene in history to sort things out, and how one reads Daniel is open to debate. Whereas Daniel is always counted among the Prophets in Christian canons, it is but one of the Ketuvim in the Jewish canon. In other words, the Ketuvim clearly reflect the view of Pharisaic / rabbinic Judaism, as it survived and emerged out of the failure of the Bar Kochba revolt in the mid-second century of the common era, that prophecy or revelation had ceased at the time of Ezra and Nehemiah. Extant classical, Tiberian, masoretic manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible all place the book of Chronicles at the beginning of the Ketuvim, although the Babylonian Talmud at Baba Bathra 14b puts it last in the Ketuvim. Placed at the beginning, Chronicles sets the tone for the Ketuvim in a way that the Psalter does not. Chronicles makes the reader reconsider the Deuteronomic view of what happened in the experiment called Israel. Chronicles treats the beginnings of the world, not as in the Torah, but rather by a genealogy from Adam through nine chapters straight to the situation in the restored temple in postexilic Jerusalem. All the families of the various priests, Levites, and other temple functionaries are described and set in place by the authority of genealogy. The postexilic authority of the priesthood of the restored temple is thus validated. Then Chronicles moves to the political arena and offers a revised history of what happened from the united kingdom of Israel to the fall of Jerusalem and the beginning of the exile (1 Chron 10 – 2 Chron 36), with a paragraph added about the restoration of the temple authorized politically by King Cyrus of Persia (2 Chron 36:22 – 23). Several revisions of the perspective of the old Deuteronomic history are noteworthy. Whereas the Deuteronomic history was designed in large part to affirm 49

 Bickerman, Studies in Jewish and Christian History.

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that God was the God of risings and fallings and could reach through defeat and death to create new life, the Chronicler’s interest built on that, delineating more specifically where God was going with the new rising of Israel: Judaism as it took shape in the postexilic restoration of the temple with authority vested in the temple’s priests and functionaries. Another major revision was the emphasis on individual worth and responsibility, thus establishing Judaism’s firm belief that individual Jews, though scattered around the Persian (and later Greco-Roman) Empire, could obey God and could repent of their sins and be restored as individual Jews. Chronicles thus sets the tone for the remainder of the Ketuvim with its emphasis on how Jews, though clearly having a corporate identity within the covenant of God with Israel, could manage, as individuals, to obey and please God wherever they were. That was precisely the ancient authority needed, after the traumatic Bar Kochba revolt of the second century CE, for Jews to live lives pleasing to God wherever they found themselves. One can move directly from Chronicles to the Mishnah to see how Jews could live their lives wherever they were, no matter the repression and outside rejection, in stasis in Jewish communities anywhere. In the Mishnah, time is measured in terms of the activities that would have gone on in the temple, were it still standing. The Jewish liturgical calendar is based on living lives as though the temple were still functioning in Jerusalem. The Psalter follows Chronicles in the great Tiberian manuscripts. In the great codices one moves from 2 Chron 36 to Ps 1:1 – 2: “Blessed is the person who walks not in the way of the wicked . . . but delights in the Torah of Yahweh, and on that Torah meditates day and night.” In other words, one moves from a revisionist history that emphasizes individual worth and responsibility, directly to a psalm that encourages individual obedience and responsibility. Even though much of the Psalter dates back to preexilic times, recounting God’s mighty deeds in the covenant relationship with Israel, some of the early royal psalms that sang of God’s relationship with Israel through their king proved to be directly adaptable, in the postexilic period, to recitation by individual Jews wherever they were scattered. In fact, there was a strong taboo against reciting the royal psalms in their preexilic manner until the Messiah came.50 The wisdom literature that makes up a good bit of the Ketuvim targets individuals who sought to live lives of obedience and probity. As noted above, the book of Job stands as a monument to the struggle in early Judaism to adapt preexilic prophetic theology to the postexilic Jewish situation. The Ketuvim include the “Five Scrolls” (Ruth, The Song, Qoheleth, Lamentations, and Esther), which were recited at feasts and a fast in the early Jewish calendars. Daniel would have been read, not as eschatological literature as Christians do, but as a book of encouragement to Jewish individuals to live lives obedient to the one God. In the Ketuvim, Esther and Daniel usually appear one after the other as stories about 50

  Sanders, “NT Hermeneutic Fabric.”

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brave young Jews, like Joseph in Genesis, who remained faithful to Yahweh even though they functioned in foreign courts, where polytheism was viewed as normal. Ezra–Nehemiah conclude the books of the Jewish canon with a message of strict resistance to assimilation and foreign influence. There can be little doubt that the message of the third section of the Jewish tripartite canon was one that the surviving Pharisaic / rabbinic Jewish leaders felt was needed after the disastrous failures of the three Jewish revolts against Rome: the War of Varus after the death of Herod, the major revolt in 66 – 73 CE, and the Bar Kochba revolt of 132 – 35 CE. Belief that revelation or prophecy had ceased at the time of Ezra and Nehemiah was the keystone of the new rabbinic Judaism born out of those disasters, and the Ketuvim sponsor that view. By contrast, Christian quadripartite canons make a totally different statement. The four sections are the Pentateuch, the Historical Books, the Poetic Wisdom Books, and the Prophets. Ruth, Esther, Daniel, and Chronicles / Ezra–Nehemiah in most manuscripts of the Septuagint were put together following the Former Prophets or books about the history of preexilic Israel and Judah (with Ruth after Judges because of its first sentence). A glance at the Catholic and Orthodox canons show that other books deemed historical also appear in the second section, in effect stretching the history of God’s dealings with Israel and the world as far down to the beginnings of Christianity as possible. The message was clear: revelation had not ceased, but God, on the contrary, continued to work in history and did so climactically in Christ and the early church. The third section contained the poetic-wisdom literature and the fourth the Prophets. The Prophets are no longer placed to explain the uses of adversity and the righteousness judgments of God, but rather are understood as foretelling the coming of Christ.51 Even though the texts of the Jewish Bible and the Protestant First Testament are essentially the same, the structures of the two canons (in the sense norma normata) convey very different messages. The text of the First Testament in Roman Catholic canons is also essentially the same as the text of the Jewish canon, with the addition of a few books, whereas the texts of the Orthodox canons still reflect the old Greek and other church translations and compositions. But no matter how the content differs among the several Christian canons, the structure and message of the Christian canons, as a group, contrast significantly with those of the Jewish canon. The Tanak provides a way to move on to Mishnah and Talmud, while the First or Christian Old Testament provides a way to move on to the New Testament. Modern historical biblical criticism frequently reads particular parts of the canon in ways that create tension with the overall structure of both the Jewish and the Christian canons. Taken positively, this can be seen as a gift from biblical criticism whereby the Bible, in either canonical form, may be enhanced as a dialogical literature open to the future.52

51

  Sanders, “Hermeneutics of Text Criticism.”   Weis and Carr, Gift of God in Due Season.

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Bibliography Barthélemy, Dominique. Les devanciers d’Aquila: Première publication intégrale du texte des fragments du Dodécaprophéton. VTSup 10. Leiden: Brill, 1963. Beckwith, Roger T. The Old Testament Canon of the New Testament Church and Its Background in Early Judaism. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1985. Bickerman, Elias. Studies in Jewish and Christian History. 2 vols. Leiden: Brill, 1976. Bloom, Harold. The Western Canon: The Books and Schools of the Ages. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994. Carr, David M. “Canonization in the Context of Community: An Outline of the Formation of the Tanakh and the Christian Bible.” In A Gift of God in Due Season: Essays on Scripture and Community in Honor of James A. Sanders, edited by Richard D. Weis and David M. Carr, 22 – 64. JSOTSup 225. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1996. Clifford, Richard J. Creation Accounts in the Ancient Near East and in the Bible. CBQMS 26. Washington: Catholic Biblical Association of America, 1994. Eskenazi, Tamara C. “Current Perspectives on Ezra–Nehemiah and the Persian Period.” CurBS 1 (1993) 59 – 86. Fishbane, Michael A. Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel. Oxford: Clarendon, 1985. Fishbane, Michael A. The Garments of Torah: Essays in Biblical Hermeneutics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989. Flint, Peter W. The Dead Sea Psalms Scrolls and the Book of Psalms. STDJ 17. Leiden: Brill, 1997. Flint, Peter W. “Of Psalms and Psalters: James Sanders’s Investigation of the Psalms Scrolls.” In A Gift of God in Due Season: Essays on Scripture and Community in Honor of James A. Sanders, edited by Richard D. Weis and David M. Carr, 65 – 83. JSOTSup 225. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1996. Gorak, Jan. The Making of the Modern Canon: Genesis and Crisis of a Literary Idea. London: Athlone, 1991. Hauser, Alan J., and Duane F. Watson. “Introduction and Overview.” In A History of Biblical Interpretation. Vol. 1, The Ancient Period, edited by Alan J. Hauser and Duane F. Watson, 1 – 54. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003. Heschel, Abraham J. Maimonides: A Biography. New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1982. Johnson, George. Fire in the Mind. New York: Knopf, 1996. Knierim, Rolf P. The Task of Old Testament Theology: Substance, Method, and Cases. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995. Leiman, Sid Z. The Canonization of Hebrew Scripture: The Talmudic and Midrashic Evidence. Hamden, CT: Archon, 1976. Lewis, Jack P. “What Do We Mean by Jabneh?” JBR 32 (1964) 125 – 32. [Reprinted in The Canon and Masorah of the Hebrew Bible: An Introductory Reader, edited by Sid Z. Leiman, 254 – 61. New York: Ktav, 1974.] Lieberman, Saul. Greek in Jewish Palestine: Studies in the Life and Manners of Jewish Palestine in the II – IV Centuries. New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1942. Lundberg, Marilyn. “So That Hidden Things May Be Brought to Light: A Concept Analysis of the Yahweh Speeches in the Book of Job.” PhD dissertation, Claremont Graduate School, 1995. Mack, Burton L. Wisdom and the Hebrew Epic: Ben Sira’s Hymn in Praise of the Fathers. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985. McDonald, Lee M. The Formation of the Christian Biblical Canon. Rev. ed. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1995.

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Metzger, Bruce M. The Canon of the New Testament: Its Origin, Development, and Significance. Oxford: Clarendon, 1987. Muilenburg, J. The Way of Israel. New York: Harper & Row, 1961. Sanders, James A. “Adaptable for Life: The Nature and Function of Canon.” In Magnalia Dei: The Mighty Acts of God: Essays on the Bible and Archaeology in Memory of G. Ernest Wright, edited by Frank M. Cross, Werner E. Lemke, and Patrick D. Miller, 531 – 60. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1976. [Reprinted in From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, by James A. Sanders, 9 – 39. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987.] Sanders, James A. “Canon. Hebrew Bible.” In ABD 1:837 – 52. Sanders, James A. The Dead Sea Psalms Scroll. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1967. Sanders, James A. “Deuteronomy.” In The Books of the Bible. Vol. 1, The Old Testament  / The Hebrew Bible, edited by Bernhard W. Anderson, 89 – 102. New York: Scribner’s, 1989. Sanders, James A. From Sacred Story to Sacred Text: Canon as Paradigm. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987. Sanders, James A. “Hermeneutics of Text Criticism.” Textus 18 (1995) 1 – 26. Sanders, James A. “The Impact of the Scrolls on Biblical Studies.” In The Provo International Conference on the Dead Sea Scrolls: New Texts, Reformulated Issues, and Technological Innovations, edited by Donald W. Parry and Eugene C. Ulrich, 47 – 57. STDJ 30. Leiden: Brill, 1999. Sanders, James A. “The Integrity of Biblical Pluralism.” In “Not in Heaven”: Coherence and Complexity in Biblical Narrative, edited by Jason P. Rosenblatt and Joseph C. Sitterson Jr., 154 – 69. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991. Sanders, James A. “Intertextuality and Canon.” In On the Way to Nineveh: Studies in Honor of George M. Landes, edited by Stephen L. Cook and Sara C. Winter, 316 – 33. Baltimore: ASOR, 1998. [Atlanta: Scholars, 1999.] Sanders, James A. “A New Testament Hermeneutic Fabric: Ps 118 in the Entrance Narrative.” In Early Jewish and Christian Exegesis: Studies in Memory of William Hugh Brownlee, edited by Craig A. Evans and William F. Stinespring, 177 – 90. Atlanta: Scholars, 1987. Sanders, James A. “Prayer of Manasseh.” In The HarperCollins Study Bible, edited by Wayne A. Meeks et al., 1746 – 48. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1993. [rev. ed. Edited by Harold W. Attridge et al, 1568–70. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2006.] Sanders, James A. “Stability and Fluidity in Text and Canon.” In Tradition of the Text: Studies Offered to Dominique Barthélemy in Celebration of His 70th Birthday, edited by Gerard J. Norton and Stephen Pisano, 203 – 17. OBO 109. Fribourg: Presses universitaires; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1991. Sanders, James A. “The Strangeness of the Bible.” USQR 42 (1988) 33 – 37. Sanders, James A. Suffering as Divine Discipline in the Old Testament and Post-Biblical Judaism. Rochester, NY: Colgate Rochester Divinity School Bulletin Special Issue (28) (1995). Sanders, James A. “Text and Canon: Concepts and Method.” JBL 98 (1979) 5 – 29. [Reprinted in From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, by James A. Sanders, 125 – 51. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987.] Sanders, James A. Torah and Canon. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1972. [2nd ed. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2005.] Silberman, Lou H. “From Apocalyptic Proclamation to Moral Prescript. Abot 2,15 – 16.” JJS 40 (1989) 55 – 60. Smith, Morton. Palestinian Parties and Politics that Shaped the Old Testament. New York: Columbia University Press, 1967. Smith, Wilfred C. What Is Scripture? A Comparative Approach. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993.

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Sundberg, Albert C., Jr. The Old Testament of the Early Church. HTS 20. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964. Sweeney, Marvin A. Isaiah 1 – 4 and the Post-Exilic Understanding of the Isaianic Tradition. BZAW 171. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1988. Talmon, Shemaryahu. “Die Gemeinde des erneuerten Bundes von Qumran zwischen rabbinischen Judentum und Christentum.” In Zion: Ort der Begegnung: Festschrift für Laurentius Klein zur Vollendung des 65. Lebensjahres, edited by Ferdinand Hahn et al., 295 – 312. Bodenheim: Athenaeum, 1993. Talmon, Shemaryahu. “Oral Tradition and Written Transmission, or the Heard and the Seen Word in Judaism of the Second Temple Period.” In Jesus and the Oral Gospel Tradition, edited by Henry Wansbrough, 121 – 58. JSNTSup 64. Sheffield: JSOT, 1991. Taussig, Michael T. The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980. Weis, Richard D., and David M. Carr, eds. A Gift of God in Due Season: Essays on Scripture and Community in Honor of James A. Sanders. JSOTSup / LHBOTS 225. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1996. Wilson, Gerald H. The Editing of the Hebrew Psalter. SBLDS 76. Chico, CA: Scholars, 1985. Yeivin, Israel. Introduction to the Tiberian Masorah. Translated and edited by Ernest J. Revell. Atlanta: Scholars, 1980.

12 The Integrity of Biblical Pluralism The current decline of literature and the attendant rise of literary theory in English graduate programs was anticipated by the curricula of theological seminaries, which have long emphasized scholarly-critical methodologies over the biblical text itself. The future pastor, rabbi, or priest has been expected to know the latest theories in the history of the formation of the various literary units of the Bible, but so far as the academically reputable seminary is concerned, Bible content is left almost entirely to the student. Such a curriculum may have worked well up to the liberal period, the first half of the twentieth century (though I wonder even about that); however, it has produced a generation of ministers reasonably adept at reciting basic histories of the formation of the Bible but ignorant for the most part of the Bible itself. The common seminary curriculum in Bible presupposes that Bible content was learned at home, or in synagogue or church. Such curricula were designed to be built on a student’s basic knowledge of Bible content but are currently continued despite the patent lack of it. And I suspect that part of the reason for increasing specialization in guilds of biblical scholars is that many of those who now teach Bible in seminary are largely ignorant of Bible content beyond their areas of specialization. I often tell students that we must stop attributing our ignorance of Scripture to the New Testament writers. What knowledge there is of Bible content among lay folk usually comes by a route other than sitting and reading the text. Jacob Petuchowski, distinguished professor of rabbinics at the Hebrew Union College (’alav ha-shalom), once remarked that an orthodox Jew knows the Bible by the folio in the Talmud on which it is cited. Similarly, a Protestant usually knows the Bible by the hymn in which it is paraphrased or perhaps a Gospel tractate in which a verse is cited totally out of context. And these are the very people who go to seminary or take courses in Bible in college. Bible taught as literature in college has become perhaps the best entry point for basic knowledge of Bible content. The supposition that Bible is learned at home or in the place of worship is largely a false one, and yet seminaries continue to make this assumption in making their curricula. Most students today come to seminary without having read the Bible. Those rare arriving students already familiar with the text have been taught to believe in its harmoniousness and to suppress their inevitable questions about discord. It is for these rare students that current seminary curricula are designed – and with the specific purpose of “defundamentalizing” them. These students learn *  First published 1991.

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what form-historical critics have to teach them, and often what they learn is what European-trained scholars think certain biblical texts originally meant, or what the original speakers, writers, and sources really said; and often these constitute a canon within the canon consonant with scholars’ needs and presuppositions. Not only do most seminary students not know what the Bible itself says, they also do not know why the formation or source-critical theories were devised; that is, they know neither the content nor the discrepancies, anomalies, and contradictions that an honest reading of the Bible exhibits and that so-called higher criticism is supposed to explain. George Steiner’s lament of current general ignorance of the Bible, in his review of the Alter-Kermode Literary Guide to the Bible, could have been sadder than it was. He wrote, “The lapse of the scriptural from the everyday in the commerce of ideas and proposals, of warning and of promise in our body politic in the West entails a veritable breakdown of solidarity, of concord within dissent . . . As a result . . . the Bible is today an active presence not in the everyday but in historical and theological scholarship, in comparative anthropology, and, most recently, in the study of semantics and of literature.”1 But it is not even very active in theological scholarship since the triumph of so-called Biblical Higher Criticism, as Hans Frei and David Kelsey have noted.2 There is simply no substitute for reading the Bible itself, preferably in Hebrew and Greek but at least in a responsible, formal-equivalence translation such as the New Revised Standard Version. A firm knowledge of Bible content, thereafter conjoined with the best of what the form-historical method has discerned of how to account for the anomalies, discrepancies, and contradictions that abound in biblical texts, provides the best possible standpoint from which to deal with the Bible’s pluralism. The student is then in a position to perceive how the pluralism that exists in the early Jewish literature of the Persian, Hellenistic, and Roman periods emerged forthrightly and “honestly” out of the pluralism of the First Testament itself. The invidious substitution of biblical criticism for biblical content, or even biblical thinking, brought Brevard Childs of Yale in 1964 to decry the current state of affairs and to launch by 1970 his mode of studying and reading Scripture in canonical context.3 The main point of this mode of reading Scripture is that of respecting the final form of the Masoretic Text of the First Testament as the context in which to read its parts, instead of reading layers of the text discerned by the form-historical deconstructionist exercise and then attributing authority only to the earliest levels – those that might possibly have derived from the so-called original authors.4 1

  Steiner, Review of A Literary Guide to the Bible, 97.  Frei, Eclipse of Biblical Narrative; Kelsey, Uses of Scripture.   Childs, “Interpretation in Faith”; Childs, Biblical Theology in Crisis. 4   I have argued for a canonical-critical reading of the Bible (as both shape and function) in Torah and Canon and in numerous publications since: Sanders, “Deuteronomy”; Sanders, “Canon. Hebrew Bible”; Sanders, “Adaptable for Life”; Sanders, “Text and Canon: Concepts and Method.” 2 3

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Early believing communities, according to the available manuscript evidence and according to early postbiblical literature, appear not to have been as concerned as we about such origins. There appears to have been a denomination in early Judaism for which the Psalter was not yet closed, but like the Third Section, the Writings or Ketuvim of the Tanak, was still open-ended.5 We had already learned, largely due to the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, that Judaism was quite pluralistic in the Persian and Hellenistic periods, and if there was a stabilized Psalter for parts of Judaism it could have been open-ended for others. It would be difficult, furthermore, for anyone to deny that these non-masoretic psalms functioned authoritatively or canonically for the faithful at Qumran. This clearly raises the issue of a dual understanding of the word “canon.” Canon implies both norma normata, its internal and external shape – the questions of inclusion and order – and norma normans, its function in a believing community. Function helps us to answer an important question about shape: since the entrance into the land of Canaan was such an integral part of the early recitals of the Torah story, Israel’s epic history, in prophetic books, psalms, and histories, why was Joshua not included in the Torah, which is also called the Pentateuch? The Torah could just as well have included Joshua, the story of the fulfillment of the promises to Abraham and Sarah, and encompassed what is called the Hexateuch. A viable answer lies in the fact that a primary function of the recitation of the Torah was to keep the identity of the faithful ever fresh in their minds no matter where they lived.6 When, according to biblical tradition, Ezra the scribe brought the Torah in its final edited form from Babylonia to Jerusalem in about 445 BCE (Neh 8), the many Jewish communities outside Palestine, especially the very large community in Babylonia (whence the official Talmud would eventually come), required assurance that they could retain their religious identity outside of Palestine / Israel. The hope for return to the land would henceforth be forever an integral aspect of the promises to Abraham and Sarah in the first place, while the primitive story of its original fulfillment in Joshua would become the first book in the prophetic corpus. The focus was both on the shape of the Torah, which would eventually be recited in full in annual or triennial cycles, and on its function in Jewish believing communities. The story of the entrance into the land was joined with the Early Prophets as the beginning of the venture in Israel rather than as the climax of the Abraham-Sarah story and its promises.7 Canon in the sense of norma normans, or function, focuses on the interrelationship of a canon’s stability and its adaptability, as well as on the hermeneutics that would render the stable adaptable in the ongoing lives of believing commu5  Sanders, Psalms Scroll; Sanders, Dead Sea Psalms Scroll. See also Sanders, “Cave 11 Surprises.” Note that 4Q430 and 431 contain only non-masoretic psalms: Schuller, Non-Canonical Psalms from Qumran; cf. Baillet, Qumran Grotte 4, III. 6   See Sanders, Torah and Canon. 7   The (hi)story that began in Genesis seems to end in the failure of those promises in 2 Kgs 22 and 25, the demise of the northern and southern kingdoms. See Sanders, “Deuteronomy,” as well as Sanders, “Canon. Hebrew Bible.”

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nities in ever-changing circumstances. While differing denominations might have canons that differ in content and order of books, from Protestant to Orthodox, from Jewish to Christian, they all have found ways to seek their Bible’s relevance to their ever-changing lives. The hermeneutics by which they do so is the middle term between adaptability and stability. Canon in this sense is best understood as a paradigm of the monotheizing process compiled over a period of fifteen hundred years, from the Bronze Age to the Roman, and compressed into a disparate but single body of literature.8

Text and Canon These and similar observations have led to a near revolution in the technical exercise of “text criticism,” which tries to determine the critically responsible best text of the Bible from the hundreds of ancient and medieval manuscripts available today. From the beginning of the eighteenth century until recently, text criticism mostly was understood to have as its task the establishment of “the original text” of a specific portion of Scripture. Text criticism therefore was servant to and part of historical criticism. One decided by critical theory what a given biblical author probably ought to have written or said, and then one cast about among the available texts and early versions to try to reconstruct the text in the light of the theory advanced. The goal was to come as close as possible to what the ancient individual contributor actually said or wrote. A number of English translations done in the middle of the twentieth century, such as the New English Bible and the Jerusalem Bible, exhibit that desired goal; they are full of scholarly emendations and conjectures about how texts might originally have read, whether there is existing manuscript evidence for such readings or not. Such a procedure in effect decanonized the text because it bypassed the actual manuscripts inherited from ancient communities of faith, instead attempting to reach back of them to so-called original speeches and compositions. To counter this procedure, the United Bible Societies Hebrew Old Testament Text Project in Stuttgart and the Hebrew University Bible Project in Jerusalem undertook to rewrite the history of the transmission of the text.9 The former project, launched in 1969, intended for the First Testament what had been done for the Second, which has produced The Greek New Testament and ancillary literature. HOTTP has produced five volumes of preliminary report, and Dominique Barthélemy has so far written and published two volumes of the projected six volumes of the final report.10 The reasons each of the six invited scholars joined the project varied, but for the most part it was because it had become clear that text criticism as it was currently practiced was deeply flawed. The appartus  8

  Sanders, “Adaptable for Life.”   Barthélemy, “Text, Hebrew, History of”; Talmon, “OT Text.” 10  Barthélemy, Critique textuelle. [The fifth volume was published in 2015. See Sanders, review of BHQ fascicle 18.]  9

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in the four editions of Biblia Hebraica reinforce the hermeneutic of suspicion toward the Masoretes that began with Luther in the sixteenth century.11 The importance of the relation of studies in canon to studies in texts became increasingly clear. The availability of a plethora of biblical manuscripts through the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls indicated quite clearly that before there had been stabilization of the text into a proto-masoretic form, by the end of the first century of the common era, there had been a lengthy period of textual fluidity reaching back through the earliest manuscripts available. The practice of rendering the texts adaptable and relevant to the needs of believing communities was evident in the copying and translating done for those communities. The process of stabilization of the Hebrew texts became rather intense in the period beginning in the middle of the first century BCE and culminating in the proto-masoretic biblical manuscripts discovered in the caves other than at Qumran, principally at Murabbaʿat and Masada. The so-called hermeneutic rules or techniques of Hillel, Ishmael, and finally the official thirty-two rules associated with Judah ha-Nasi, were devised and came about to bring controls on the totally natural and ongoing efforts in the believing communities to render the increasingly stable text as adaptable as it had been in the earlier oral period and then in the period of textual fluidity. One aspect of the stabilization process was a decisive move in nascent rabbinic Judaism toward belief in verbal inspiration of Scripture away from earlier, more shamanistic views.12 The move to a view of literal inspiration soon followed, which led to the practice of gematria and other such interpretations, and to the ultimate masoretic concern with ever more accurate modes of scribal copying of texts as witnessed by the introduction of scribal masorot in the lateral, top, and bottom margins and as end-notes, and by the counting of words and even letters, recorded in end-notes for later scribes to utilize. The more one works on facsimiles and microfilms of ancient manuscripts, the more one sees misconceptions and perpetuation of errors in critical apparatus and in commentaries. After the narrative (hi)story related in the Torah and Early Prophets (Genesis to 2 Kings) the order of books is only relatively stable until printing was invented. Printing provided as great a stimulus to stabilizing the order of books after Kings as had the invention of the codex (replacing use of scrolls) centuries earlier. The order of the Five Scrolls in the Ketuvim varies considerably in the various manuscripts, with no apparent pattern evident. Ruth often is the first book in the Ketuvim. With the advent of printing, early editions of the Jewish Bible placed the five in the calendar order of the four feasts and one fast at which each was read (the Song of Songs at Passover, Ruth at Weeks, Lamentations on the Ninth of Ab, Qohelet at Tabernacles, and Esther at Purim); but apparently no medieval manuscript so ordered them. A simple example of the perpetuation of a late custom is that of Biblia Hebraica Kittel (3rd edition) 11   See Sanders, “Hebrew Bible and Old Testament,” in a compendium from the conference “Hebrew Bible or Old Testament” held at Notre Dame University, 9 – 11 April 1989. 12   Sanders, “Text and Canon: Concepts and Method.”

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and Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia continuing to place Chronicles at the end of the Ketuvim, whereas the great Tiberian manuscripts including Aleppensis and Leningradensis (the latter being the single text used in Biblia Hebraica, and the former the single text used by the Hebrew University Bible Project) both place Chronicles first in the Ketuvim. Israel Yeivin recently affirmed, “The order of the books in the Torah and the Former Prophets has been established from earliest times; however, the order of the books in the Latter Prophets and the Writings is not fixed.”13 One cannot entirely trust any of the apparatus in BHK1 – 3 or BHS; a major reason for the establishment of the Ancient Biblical Manuscript Center in Claremont. Scholarship has too long been captive of the conceptions of earlier scholars as well as their errors. Printed critical editions of any manuscript of necessity reflect the interests, concerns, and biases of competence of their editors as well as the scholarly Zeitgeist of the time of the editor.14

Canon as Paradigm Studies in text criticism thus led to the conviction that the results of earlier studies in the history of canon formation were also flawed. A new look was required at how canonization actually took place. It became clear that those earlier studies had been largely based on extracanonical references in Sirach, 2 Maccabees, Josephus, the Second Testament, and the Talmud.15 Careful study of the actual manuscripts bequeathed to us by ancient believing communities gives a different picture from that which the earlier focus on extrabiblical lists and supposedly authoritative councils had yielded. This led to the question of what a canon really is. Whereas the Qur’an may be characterized as a human record of a revelation from God, the Jewish and Christian Bibles may be viewed as human responses to divine revelations. When one uses the word “canon” one must specify to which denomination or community of faith it refers, even within Judaism and Christianity; within both there is now and was in antiquity more than one canon in the sense of limited lists of sacred books considered canonical. The literature considered canonical by the Jewish denomination at Qumran was apparently openended. The library there reflects the prestabilization period quite well, both in terms of some individual books, such as the Psalter, and in terms of the high 13

 Yeivin, Introduction to the Tiberian Masorah, 38.   Chadwyck-Healey Inc. has announced publication of The Collective Catalogue of Hebrew Manuscripts on microfiche covering 262,500 items in some 700 collections around the world; it purports to include catalogue data on the majority of Hebrew manuscripts (presumably other than the remaining unpublished Dead Sea Scrolls). Critical data of this sort is now more accessible than ever before. 15   A good recent example is Beckwith, OT Canon of the NT Church. Cf. Beckwith, “Formation of the Hebrew Bible”; by contrast see Mulder, “Transmission of the Biblical Text” – a felicitous counterbalance to Beckwith. 14

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respect shown there for what we call apocryphal books. Some scholars think that the Torah or Temple Scroll from Qumran Cave 11 was deemed to be as authoritative as the Pentateuch itself.16 The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints is perhaps the latest Christian denomination to claim the canon to be open-ended, and Jacob Neusner (and not a few orthodox Jews) uses the word “canon” to refer to the rabbinic corpus of literature. If one looks for clues in actual extant manuscripts for the closure of the Christian canon, one may be somewhat disappointed: there are only three uncials and fifty-six minuscules that contain the whole of the Catholic-Protestant New Testament; and while there are 2,328 manuscripts of the Gospels, there are only 287 of the book of Revelation.17 Jewish and Christian Bibles may best be understood as paradigms of the struggles of Israel, early Judaism, and early Christianity to pursue the integrity of reality, or the Oneness of God. The popular concept of canon as a closed box of ancient jewels, which somehow continue to be valuable and negotiable, needs re-examination. Since canons have varied so much through the ages, even within orthodox Judaism and Christianity, one needs to take seriously not only the shape (norma normata) of canon, but also the function (norma normans) of what is considered canonical.

Intertextuality Consideration of the function of the canonical begins with appreciation of biblical intertextuality from the earliest discernible strata to the last editorial hands. Important to sound exegesis of any biblical passage is discerning the function of recognizable traditions. The key word is function, and in order to be able to perceive how the tradent wanted his or her appeal to the tradition to work, one has to try to discern the ancient hermeneutics by which the tradent understood that tradition and how he or she marshalled it to the point of the new composition. There is hardly a passage in the Bible outside reports of court or temple (civil or cultic, even wisdom) records that does not build upon older traditions, and invariably they are fluid in reference and citation (except for Mic 3:12 in Jer 26:18, which is almost verbatim). The fluidity of citation that marks most of the First Testament functioning in the Second is standard within the First and common in early Jewish literature. That which was commonly viewed as authoritative from the past was first and foremost relevant and adaptable; its relative stability of phrasing was important largely for the recognition of its authority. The stability and the adaptability of authoritative and eventually of canonical traditions must be seen as complementary. Paraphrase of the canonical or older word in the composition of a new word can only go so far, or the authority of 16  Schiffman, Sectarian Laws in the Dead Sea Scrolls; Wacholder, Dawn of Qumran; and Sanders, Review of Dawn of Qumran. 17   Aland and Aland, Text of the NT, 78 – 79; Metzger, Canon of the NT, 217.

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community recognition of the older word is lost. This was undoubtedly a factor in the move toward stabilization in the first century BCE. While biblical exegetes are not prepared to say with some literary critics that every time a text is reread it is rewritten, some of us nonetheless recognize that every time a text or tradition is cited it is resignified to some extent. This recognition is quite important in understanding the canonical nature of biblical literature. And each time one observes the resignification of the older word in the newer, one must try to discern the ancient tradents’ hermeneutics; in the Bible that entails discerning their view of reality, that is, their view of God.18 There are many passages in the Bible where the Torah story is referred to, whether in the histories, the prophets, the psalmists, or the Second Testament. The tradents’ views of God, or reality, determined how they applied the text or tradition. This is especially evident in working on the phenomenon of true and false prophecy in either Testament; for in those instances where ancient contemporaries disagreed on the significance, or resignification, of a common text or tradition, it was hermeneutics that divided them.19 Neither personal character, nor good or bad theology, is a criterion for discerning true and false prophets; the hermeneutic they exhibit in applying authoritative texts and traditions to the situations they face makes the crucial difference. The very sorts of interpretations opposed by the so-called true prophets in the preexilic period are presented in Isa 40 – 55 and other exilic prophets as prophetic truth. The hermeneutics evident in the preexilic prophets could, however, include declamations of judgment not only against Israel but also against foreign nations. Studies in biblical intertextuality led to the view that three factors, which may be thought to form a triangle, have to be considered together to understand the function of the canonical in the new situation: the written text or oral tradition called on, the socio-political situation to which the adaptation is made, and the hermeneutics by which the older word functions in the new. Other factors are multivalency and pluralism. Multivalency is important because the nature of canonical literature is that it passed the tests of value and cogency over a number of generations, and in a number of communities, before it finally was considered sacred. Everything that made it into a canon had first to pass through and function in the lives of believing communities, specifically the liturgical and instructional programs of believing communities. Nothing made it in by a side door, not even if attributed to an ancient, highly regarded name. It has been observed that much of biblical literature is pseudepigraphic, and that is true.20 But so is much of nonbiblical or noncanonical literature. Attributing a piece of literature to a famous ancient name would not have been sufficient to establish it with the

18   The characteristics discerned in the canonical process have now been affirmed for the continuing canonical process in the early church by Robeck, “Canon, Regulae Fidei, and Continuing Revelation,” esp. 73, 80, 85 – 91. 19  Sanders, Torah and Canon, passim; Sanders, “Adaptable for Life”; Sanders, “Canonical Hermeneutics: True and False Prophecy.” 20   Pokorný, “Das theologische Problem der neutestamentlichen Pseudepigraphie.”

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people of a believing community if the composition itself did not interest them or meet their needs. Equally important is recognizing the Bible’s pluralism. It has been argued that pluralism is too modern a term to apply to the Bible.21 Nevertheless, the Bible, whether Jewish or Christian, is a collection of literature deriving from five different cultural eras from the Bronze Age to the Roman. It bears in it the cultural traits of the west Semitic and Hamitic worlds, the Persian, the Hellenic, and the Hellenistic. It is expressed in the idioms and mores of those cultures and of many locales. Four points about its pluralism need to be made: (a) the Bible has its own internal self-corrective apparatus; (b) no theological or social construct based on the Bible long endures without a prophetic challenge to it from within the Bible itself; (c) no one community of faith or mode of theology can encompass the whole canon any more than one theology can encompass the concept of God: some communities need to say “debts” in the Lord’s Prayer so others can say “trespasses” or “transgressions”; some need to stress that Christ’s sacrifice was “once for all” so that others can celebrate Christ’s perpetual sacrifice in the mass; and (d) if the Bible as canon is viewed not as a box of jewels but as a paradigm of ancient struggles to monotheize, then its (limited) pluralism may provide a sufficient model or paradigm for modern efforts to pursue the integrity of reality in a seemingly more pluralistic world. The fact is that the Bible contains multiple voices, and not only in passages clearly recording differences between disagreeing colleagues (so-called true and false prophets). It preserves differences between the priestly and the prophetic, between wisdom and tradition, between the orthodox and the questioning voices of prophets such as Jeremiah in his confessions, between Job and his friends who represented aspects of orthodoxy, between Qohelet and the Torah, between Jonah and Nahum (both of whom addressed God’s concern for Nineveh), among varied voices within a book like Isaiah, between Paul and James, and even among the Gospels with their varying views of what God was doing in Christ. And these are only a few of the intra-biblical dialogues one might mention. One needs also to recognize the measure of pluralism in the doublets and triplets in the Bible, the same thing told in quite different ways, making different, even contradicting, points. We should celebrate the fact that the Second Testament includes four quite different Gospels and all the riches of their differences. It is in large measure because of this kind of limited pluralism that the Bible has spawned some six hundred denominations. The Bible has steadily through the centuries given rise to dissenting voices about what it says on crucial matters. Challenges to the orthodoxy of one view come in their turn to be challenged by others. Honesty demands recognition of the Bible’s internal dialogues. It is healthy to listen in on them and learn just how impossible it is to limit God or reality 21

  White, Review of From Sacred Story to Sacred Text.

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to any one set of propositions. To insist that the Bible is harmonious or even homogeneous has led to diabolical abuses. If someone challenges a dogma or view based on portions of the Bible, the response is often that “the Bible” supports or teaches the view espoused, meaning thereby that the Bible is totally consistent on the point; and often those making the claim simply refuse honestly to admit biblical pluralism out of fear of loss of the kind of authority they think the Bible apparently gives them. What results is that the dogmatist has both God and the Bible reduced to a certain schema in support of what he or she believes independently to be true. If a countervailing view from the Bible is submitted, the biblicist then resorts to the ploy that the contradictory passage is not yet fully understood. Fundamentalism of this sort becomes almost purely a political ideology.

Canonical Hermeneutics In our understanding of canon as paradigm, the ancient hermeneutics that lie unrecorded in almost every page of the Bible may be as canonical as the ancient texts themselves.22 Not only are such intra-biblical hermeneutics discernible where clearly recognized older traditions and texts are resignified in a later text, they are also discernible in three other ways: in the adaptation of non-Israelite traditions or international wisdom into biblical literature; in the determination of a text’s eligibility to progress toward canonical status; and in what can only be called the monotheizing process. When duplicate literary materials are available from other ancient Near Eastern cultures, one has a control factor for discerning how such international wisdom was adapted to biblical use. There was apparently a four-fold process: it was depolytheized, Yahwized, monotheized, and Israelitized.23 Not all the steps were fully carried out, fortunately, so that we often get a glimpse of the process at work. Mention of gods other than those who could be resignified as Yahweh, or at least as one God, was eradicated. Where suggestions of a number of gods remained, they were relegated to membership in a heavenly council. The heavenly council, the biblical accommodation to pantheon and to the human tendency to polytheism, but actually the best guarantee against it, was probably made up of gods Israel came in contact with in her long journey and history from the earliest days. Such gods were retired, as it were, put on a pension and consigned to duty in the heavenly council under the aegis of the One God who alone had power and authority (see, e. g., Pss 82 and 89, 1 Kgs 22, Isa 40:1 – 11, and Job 1). They could serve either as ministering angels, or in the heavenly army, or in the heavenly choir (see, e. g., Ps 148).

22

  Sanders, “Canonical Hermeneutics.”  Sanders, Canon and Community, 47 ff.

23

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Those Albrecht Alt called tutelary deities, such as the Shield of Abraham, the Fear of Isaac, and the Mighty One of Jacob, would simply give their names over to the One God as epithets. The rabbinic tradition that God has seventy names derived from the monotheizing process. El Elyon, or God Most High, was probably the high god of ancient Jebus, or Canaanite Jerusalem. El Shaddai would perhaps have been a mountain god. The One God took over the attributes and functions of the gods and goddesses of other peoples. Yahweh thus has male and female attributes as well as the functions of the otherwise heavenly, earthly, and chthonian deities, the last accounting for what has been called the dark side of Yahweh. It is clear from the discovery of many female goddess figurines, as well as from some inscriptions, that popular theology in ancient Israel was about as polytheistic as elsewhere. The canonical process filtered out what in itself did not have a monotheizing thrust or could not itself be monotheized in one way or another. If one takes seriously all the laws against polytheism and all the prophetic declamations against it, one must allow for an actual history of polytheism in popular and even official thought (see, e. g., Jer 44 and Ezek 16). The next step was to call Yahweh, or at least God, what other peoples called by another name or by other names. Stories familiar in international wisdom became Yahwistic stories, whether creation stories, flood stories, lists of ancient worthies, stories of child sacrifice, tales of royal courts and their courtiers, dramas about foreign magi, etc.24 It is interesting to note the texts where the word “God” seemed sufficient without invoking the name Yahweh; but it is also interesting to note the texts where foreigners call upon Yahweh, as in the case of Balaam (Num 22 – 24). The exilic Isaiah was satisfied to say that Cyrus of Persia did not know Yahweh even while Yahweh was acting in and through Cyrus (Isa 45:4). The third step is the most interesting, the monotheizing. It would not be sufficient simply to reduce many gods to the status of pawns in heaven or collapse them into one; nor would it have been sufficient to superimpose Yahweh’s name over names of other gods. Where the monotheizing step is most impressive is in those instances where Yahweh takes over the work of destroying deities, as in Exod 4:24 – 26, and indeed in the killing of Egypt’s firstborn in the exodus as well as the Egyptian army at the Red Sea. In the latter cases, one might simply take it that Yahweh was a highly partisan denominational deity who fought as Holy Warrior for his own chosen people, but, that Yahwistic function is anticipated and adumbrated in the Exod 4 passage where Yahweh threatens to kill Moses himself. Though some source critics claim that these three short verses could easily be excised without disturbing the rest of Exod 4, in fact they render the “saving” work of Yahweh, in the Passover and at the sea, theologically acceptable and not simply a polytheizing story of national superiority. Exodus 4:21 – 26 reads as follows: 24

 Rylaarsdam, Revelation in Jewish Wisdom Literature.

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21 And Yahweh said to Moses, “In your proceeding to return to Egypt, note carefully all the miracles which I have placed in your power, and execute them in Pharaoh’s presence; but I will encourage his own thinking so that he not let my people go. 22 And you shall say to Pharaoh, ‘Thus says Yahweh: Israel is my son, my first born. 23 And I said to you, “let my people go that they may serve me,” but you refused to let them go; hence I am going to kill your son, your first born.’” 24 Then on the way, at a lodging, Yahweh encountered him and sought to kill him. 25 But Zipporah took a flint, cut off her son’s foreskin, touched his [Moses’] genitals [with it] and said, “You are thus a bridegroom of blood to me.” 26 Then he left him alone. Whereupon she recited, “A bridegroom of blood for circumcisions.”

Just as interesting is how the text insists that Yahweh hardened the heart, or better, encouraged the thinking of Pharaoh, when considering the demands of the community organizer who was himself already guilty of murder and had been a fugitive from justice.25 Pharaoh is impressed over and over again by Moses’s demonstrations but each time remembers his duty as Pharaoh and his responsibility to the Egyptian economy. He would finally back off each time from letting Moses pull the rug of cheap labor out from under his economy. What were they? Ingrates? After all, Egypt had supplied food to them when they had had droughts in Palestine. The text allows us to do the monotheizing ourselves because the text itself moves in that direction. The Torah story is about God’s emancipation proclamation, not Pharaoh’s. And ultimately it will be God’s Torah and not Israel’s alone. Why? Because Exodus as canon can and, I think, should be read as a paradigm of God’s signifying one of the many slave rebellions in the late Bronze Age as “the exodus,” and not as one denomination’s box of jewels that others come and steal. The prophets later would agree with the so-called false prophets that God was indeed Holy Warrior, but in the massive power flows in the ancient Near Eastern Iron Age, God would be at the head of the Assyrian or the Babylonian armies attacking Israel and invading Jerusalem. Isaiah would present perhaps the hardest thinking of all when he said that God actually commanded him in his early ministry to preach comfort to the people so that their hearts would be fat, their ears heavy, and their eyes closed (Isa 6:9 – 10). The first three Commandments of the Ten are against polytheism (the fragmentation of truth or reality), against idolatry (worshipping anything in creation instead of the Creator), and against taking the name of God in vain (co-opting the One God of all for a particular group, party, or point of view). They are perhaps the greatest challenge to the workings of the human psyche that it has ever confronted. The human mind just does not want to monotheize; it is repelled by aspects of it. But the Bible as canon does so, not in all its parts equally well, but the thrust is there. And I am prepared to say that nothing that ends up in the Jewish or Christian canons can escape a rereading by a monotheizing hermeneutic. This is not to say that it was the intention of all the original authors. Clearly not. The question is whether one cannot take the monotheizing thrust of the Bible as a whole, that is as a canon, and go back and read the parts in the light of 25

  See Sanders, “Strangeness of the Bible.”

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the whole. Unfortunately, those who claim to find their identity in these texts, including current believing communities, while commanded to do so rarely have ever done so. The fourth step of Israelitizing was not always followed. Indeed, the Flood story is a fine example of the failure to adapt this international story all the way. Instead of the ark’s landing on Mt. Zion, as one might think it should, it lands on Ararat. The story remained universal even as Yahweh was being universalized. These four steps are extrapolated from close study of many instances of borrowing from others, or simply claiming what was common wisdom of the ancient Near East and the later Hellenistic cultures. Graphically they might be seen as forming an arc. The move to depolytheize a non-Israelite or common bit of wisdom, law, proverb, or story might be seen as a thrust from the particular culture whence it came toward the universal; the move to monotheize constituted the further thrust toward affirming the integrity of reality beyond the fragmentation of truth inherent in polytheism; the moves to Yahwize and finally to Israelitize, while still affirming the monotheizing thrust, nonetheless should be seen as paradigmatic of reapplying the universal to the particular, in this case, the Abraham-Sarah story. The Bible’s hermeneutic bent toward the universal in its monotheizing thrust is thus matched by a countervailing incarnational thrust. The Bible, when viewed as God’s story, presents a series of divine pastoral calls, in judgment and in grace – on God’s first parishioners in Eden’s bower, on Abraham and Sarah in Haran, on Pharaoh to release Sarah from his harem, on Jacob at the Jabbok, on Joseph in the pit, on the slaves in the huts and hovels of Egypt, on Moses on the mountain and in the desert, on David behind the flock, and finally, perhaps, on and in a baby Jew threatened by Herod’s jealous sword. Without the particular, the universal would be lost, and vice versa: without the Yahwizing the monotheizing would have no particular base in the human experiment; and without the monotheizing the Yahwizing would remain tribalistic. The source-critical view that the two principal appellatives for God, ʾelohim and yahweh, derive from two distinct written or even oral sources in Israelite antiquity, while quite possibly historically true, must finally be absorbed into the Bible’s canonical pluralism, which alone can exhibit its overarching integrity. This hermeneutic clue pervades the Bible. For example, the two accounts of creation, in Gen 1 and in Gen 2, even though they may indeed come from quite different ancient cultic sources in Israel, make by the sheer fact of their successiveness a uniquely poignant statement that could not be made otherwise, either by one of the chapters alone or by a homogeneous blend of both: God is at once awesome, transcendent, and majestic, and pastoral, immanent, and self-giving. Nor should the two be harmonized; for it is in the plerosis and the kenosis they suggest that the integrity of reality is indicated even though it can never be fully contained by doctrine. The title of the volume [in which this essay was first published] is derived from Deut 30:12 through a story recorded in the Talmud in which the phrase is cited as affirmation that once God had given Torah to Moses and Israel it

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took on a life of its own. Lodged neither in Platonic ideal nor Aristotelian form, Torah lives instead among those of the divinely circumcised heart (Deut 30:6); it is in their mouth and in their heart to do it (30:14). Israel had been exhorted to circumcise their own hearts (Deut 10:16; cf. Jer 4:4); but they could not do it by themselves, so God in the adversity of exile and deprivation has done it for them, performing through adversity a kind of divine operation, an open-heart surgery (Jer  30:12 – 17; 31:31 – 34; cf. Hos  6:1 – 3; Ezek  36:26 – 27; Isa  51:7). The operation has rendered Israel as a whole, corporately, similar to the prophets earlier in whose mouths God had placed the divine Word or words (Jer 1:9; 15:16; 20:9; Ezek 2:8 – 3:3) that needed to be said in their situation and in their times. That Word, or Torah, though stable enough, is not statically to be found in a heavenly treasure, but is ever alive and adaptable to new situations, as and when they arise. Paul’s understanding of Deut 30:12 – 13 lies along the same trajectory, but in celebration of the incarnation of Torah in Christ (Rom 10:6 – 10).26 Rabbi Joshua appeals to the ongoing exegetical process of Torah in Israel; Paul bases his Christology on the nearness of the Word of God (“in your mouth and in your heart”), Jesus Christ as experienced in the Christian community. Both Christologies, Paul’s and Joshua’s, have wrested the whole concept of Torah, hence canon, from those who would lock God into particular boxes, and have placed it securely in dynamically conceived processes responsive to ever-changing needs.

The Canonical Process What became canonical was not only that which was multivalent and pluralistic enough, but also that which had the rugged power for life that would see Israel and Judah through their death throes and into the resurrection called Judaism, God’s first New Israel (Ezek 37). That power claimed that God was One, not only the God of life but also of death (Deut 32:39; 1 Sam 2:6), not only the God of risings and successes but also the God of defeats and fallings (1 Sam 27 – 28 Luke 1:52 – 53). The climax of the story of the two promises to Abraham and Sarah in Genesis is reached in 1 Kgs 10, which tells of a famous sovereign of a foreign land, the Queen of Sheba, coming to Jerusalem to be an international witness to the fulfillment of the promises of progeny and a place to live.27 But beginning with the next chapter, 1 Kgs 11, it is all downhill until both Israel and Judah are destroyed. In the Jewish canon, Kings is followed not by Chronicles but by the Latter Prophets to explain the defeat and to affirm that God could restore the fallen and could resurrect the dead, even turn an Assyrian siege-stone into a precious cornerstone of a sure foundation (Isa 28:16). 26

  See Hays’s brilliant study, Echoes of Scripture, esp. 1 – 5.   1 Kings 10 begins in majestic cadences. The alliterations in the Hebrew suggest a picture of the grand, royal caravan described in v. 2. But v. 1 ends with the statement, “but she came to test him with riddles,” already anticipating the several human satans God will appoint to test Solomon beginning in ch. 11. 27

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Such is the monotheizing process that became the Bible’s own basic canonical hermeneutic. And it is so not because some final great redactor waved an editorial wand over all the disparate but compressed literature called Bible.28 It is so because what got picked up and read again and again, and was recommended to the children and to other communities nearby, and continued to give value and to give life, was what made it into the canon. Morton Smith seems satisfied to say that the reason the Bible was finally monotheistic (a term I prefer not to use) was that the “Yahweh-only political party” won out in the fifth and later centuries BCE.29 Perhaps. But we have to ask a further question: Why did that party win out, if party it was? The word “canon” is often used in a largely political sense; even so such users occasionally recognize the factors contributing to canonization of emulation, by artists of earlier artists, and of timing, but rarely recognize, except implicitly, the factor of readers themselves.30 What deep-seated need of ancient Jewish and Christian communities did the monotheizing remembrances and recitals meet? They needed to know there was integrity to reality, both ontological and ethical, that good and bad, winning and losing, light and darkness could be seen as parts of a whole. Human experience of reality is its ambiguities, as Reinhold Niebuhr was wont to say, and as the Bible in its limited pluralism realistically portrays. But what the Bible also very realistically witnesses to in the splendor and the squalor, the risings and the fallings of life, is the human need for belief in the integrity of reality, the very Oneness of God. In this canonical view, God thus becomes vulnerable to the human scene of protagonists and antagonists, pros and cons, by granting divine fellowship and even sharing human suffering. Christians would add to the paradigm that such fellowship and vulnerability took an ultimate shape in another defeat and fall, the crucifixion of the Christ, and in another rising, the resurrection through and beyond death. One does not need to affirm Christ’s resurrection as historical event to assert the canonical paradigm that affirms that God is the God of death as well as of life. If the Second Testament is read by a monotheizing hermeneutic, then the Jews and Romans portrayed in it would be read as humans in another not uncommon but deeply moving and poignant paradigm of acceptance and rejection, of protagonists and antagonists, and not as the ancestors of current Jews and gentiles. And Christ would be read as the deity’s Christ and not as the Christians’ Christ. In such a rereading, Pharisees might mirror Presbyterians or Catholics, and Romans might mirror Americans in yet another monotheizing rereading of the Second Testament text. Just as the 28

  Pace Childs, Introduction to the OT as Scripture, 46 – 106.  Smith, Palestinian Parties and Politics. 30   It is something of a shock for a student of the Bible and other centuries-old religious canons to see the word “canon” used in fields other than religion, such as European and Western literature, as in vol. 10, no. 1 of Critical Inquiry (September 1983), the issue on “Canons,” as well as articles in subsequent issues (December 1983, 301 – 47; March 1984, 462 – 542). As used by such scholars it apparently means lists of books that emerge as most often recommended as the “best” of Western letters; and such lists are apparently political in the sense that they represent the dominant and standard culture. 29

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Torah in monotheizing reading is God’s Torah and God’s emancipation proclamation for humanity, so the Christ is God’s Christ. To fail to monotheize these two great canonical events is to tribalize them and engage in what R. G. Collingwood called human corruption of consciousness, which is human sinfulness. To go back and read all the parts in the light of the whole would revolutionize reading of the text. Such a rereading would, for most people, amount to a rewriting of the text but without changing a single word preserved on leather, parchment, and papyrus. It could revive Judaism as Judaism and not only as Zionism, and it could revive Christianity apart from its deepest sin of all, the tendency to make Christ an idol of a new though mixed tribe. Bibliography Aland, Kurt, and Barbara Aland. The Text of the New Testament. Translated by Erroll F. Rhodes. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans; Leiden: Brill, 1987. Baillet, Maurice. Qumran Grotte 4, III. DJD 7. Oxford: Clarendon, 1982. Barthélemy, Dominique. Critique textuelle de l’Ancien Testament. OBO 50. Fribourg: Éditions universitaires; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1982, 1986. [Now 5 vols. to 2016.] Barthélemy, Dominique. “Text, Hebrew, History of.” In IDBSup 878 – 84. Beckwith, Roger T. “Formation of the Hebrew Bible.” In Mikra: Text, Translation, Reading and Interpretation of the Hebrew Bible in Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity, edited by Martin J. Mulder, 39 – 86. CRINT 2. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1988. Beckwith, Roger T. The Old Testament Canon of the New Testament Church and Its Background in Early Judaism. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1985. Childs, Brevard S. Biblical Theology in Crisis. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1970. Childs, Brevard S. “Interpretation in Faith: The Theological Responsibility of an Old Testament Commentary.” Int 18 (1964) 432 – 49. Childs, Brevard S. Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1979. The Collective Catalogue of Hebrew Manuscripts. Paris: Chadwyck-Healey, 1989. [Available through http://www.proquest.com]. Frei, Hans. The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1974. Hays, Richard B. Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989. Kelsey, David. The Uses of Scripture in Recent Theology. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1975. Metzger, Bruce M. The Canon of the New Testament: Its Origin, Development and Significance. Oxford: Clarendon, 1987. Mulder, Martin J. “The Transmission of the Biblical Text.” In Mikra: Text, Translation, Reading and Interpretation of the Hebrew Bible in Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity, edited by Martin J. Mulder, 87 – 135. CRINT 2. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1988. Pokorný, Petr. “Das theologische Problem der neutestamentlichen Pseudepigraphie.” EvT 44 (1984) 486 – 96. Robeck, Cecil M., Jr. “Canon, Regulae Fidei, and Continuing Revelation in the Early Church.” In Church, Word, and Spirit: Historical and Theological Essays in Honor of Geoffrey W. Bromiley, edited by James E. Bradley and Richard A. Muller, 65 – 91. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1987.

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Rylaarsdam, John C. Revelation in Jewish Wisdom Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1946. Sanders, James A. “Adaptable for Life: The Nature and Function of Canon.” In Magnalia Dei: The Mighty Acts of God: Essays on the Bible and Archaeology in Memory of G. Ernest Wright, edited by Frank M. Cross, Werner E. Lemke, and Patrick D. Miller, 531 – 60. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1976. Reprinted in From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, by James A. Sanders, 9 – 39. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987. Sanders, James A. Canon and Community: A Guide to Canonical Criticism. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984. Sanders, James A. “Canon. Hebrew Bible.” In ABD 1:837 – 52. Sanders, James A. “Canonical Hermeneutics.” In Canon and Community: A Guide to Canonical Criticsm, by James A. Sanders, 46 – 60. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984. Reprinted in From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, by James A. Sanders, 61 – 73. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987. Sanders, James A. “Canonical Hermeneutics: True and False Prophecy.” In From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, by James A. Sanders, 87 – 105. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987. [Reprinted from “Hermeneutics in True and False Prophecy.” In Canon and Authority: Essays in Old Testament Religion and Theology, edited by George W. Coats and Burke O. Long, 21 – 41. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1977.] Sanders, James A. “Cave 11 Surprises and the Question of Canon.” McCQ 21 (1968) 284 – 98. [Reprinted in New Directions in Biblical Archaeology, edited by David Noel Freedman and Jonas C. Greenfield, 101 – 16. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969.] Sanders, James A. The Dead Sea Psalms Scroll. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1967. Sanders, James A. “Deuteronomy.” In The Books of the Bible. Vol. 1, The Old Testament / The Hebrew Bible, edited by Bernhard W. Anderson, 89 – 102. New York: Scribner’s, 1989. Sanders, James A. “Hebrew Bible and Old Testament: Textual Criticism in Service of Biblical Studies.” [In Hebrew Bible or Old Testament? Studying the Bible in Judaism and Christianity, edited by Roger Brooks and John J. Collins, 41 – 68. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990.] Sanders, James A. The Psalms Scroll of Qumran Cave 11 (11QPsa). DJD 4. Oxford: Clarendon, 1965. Sanders, James A. Review of The Dawn of Qumran, by Ben Zion Wacholder. JOAS 105 (1985) 146 – 48. Sanders, James A. “The Strangeness of the Bible.” USQR 42 (1988) 33 – 37. Sanders, James A. “Text and Canon: Concepts and Method.” JBL 98 (1979) 5 – 29. Reprinted in From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, by James A. Sanders, 125 – 51. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987. Sanders, James A. Torah and Canon. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1972. [2nd ed. Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2005.] Schiffman, Lawrence H. Sectarian Laws in the Dead Sea Scrolls: Courts, Testimony and the Penal Code. Atlanta: Scholars, 1983. Schuller, Eileen. Non-Canonical Psalms from Qumran: A Pseudepigraphic Collection. Atlanta: Scholars, 1986. Smith, Morton. Palestinian Parties and Politics that Shaped the Old Testament. New York: Columbia University Press, 1971. Steiner, George. Review of A Literary Guide to the Bible, by Robert Alter and Frank Kermode. New Yorker (11 January 1988) 94 – 98. Talmon, Shemaryahu. “The Old Testament Text.” In The Cambridge History of the Bible. Vol. 1, From the Beginnings to Jerome, edited by Peter R. Ackroyd and C. F. Evans, 159 – 99. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970. [Pp. 164 – 70 reprinted in Qum-

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ran and the History of the Biblical Text, edited by Frank M. Cross and Shemaryahu Talmon, 8 – 12. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975.] Wacholder, Ben Zion. The Dawn of Qumran: The Sectarian Torah and the Teacher of Righteousness. Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1983. White, Leland. Review of From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, by James A. Sanders. BTB 18 (1988) 37. Yeivin, Israel. Introduction to the Tiberian Masorah. Translated and edited by Ernest J. Revell. Atlanta: Scholars, 1980.

13 Text and Canon: Old Testament and New What follows was presented as the Ernest Cadman Colwell Lecture for 1979 at the School of Theology at Claremont where Colwell was the founding president from 1957 until his retirement in 1968. Colwell’s consuming interest in his professional life was New Testament text criticism. In his own words, “I have progressively narrowed the areas in which I read and study until nothing is left but the study of the manuscript tradition of the Greek New Testament. My expertise is limited to the area of lower criticism: for example, I am an authority on Byzantine paleography. I can date undated Greek manuscripts from the medieval period as well as anyone in the western hemisphere. But outside the manuscript world I am an amateur.”1 Colwell, who died in 1974, was entirely too modest. The very book in which those words appeared is a stimulating probe into the question of canon, though Colwell did not label it as such. I never knew Colwell, but I know Dominique Barthélemy well, both as colleague and friend. We have worked together for over a decade as members of the United Bible Societies’ Hebrew Old Testament Text Project, and I know that Barthélemy is interested not only in Old Testament textual problems and history but also in Scripture as canon. I am heavily indebted to Barthélemy for many stimulating ideas shared during many Spaziergänge in the Black Forest after our work sessions in Freudenstadt. I have expressed that indebtedness elsewhere,2 but take great delight in dedicating the following suggestions about how disciplines of text and canon in Old Testament and New Testament study can inform each other. Barthélemy and I are among a growing number of students of the Bible who are concerned to break down the middle wall of partition that modern scholarship has unfortunately built between the Testaments. It is a great honor for me to be identified with him in that concern as well as in the Freudenstadt project; and I hope it will not embarrass him for me to record here what I consider a fact: Dominique Barthélemy is one of the greatest teachers I have ever had.

I Colwell said in his Sprunt Lectures, “In these chapters I struggle with the problem of continuity and discontinuity, of tradition and change, of old and new. I *  First published 1981. 1  Colwell, New or Old, 7. 2   Sanders, “Text and Canon: Concepts and Method,” 7n10.

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confess that I see no reality in these as alternative options. The reality I know as a historian and as a reflective human being is a continuum, a process – one that includes both past and future in the present.”3 Precisely so, for study of canon is not only study of lists of what books were viewed as in or out of the canon for early believing communities, Jewish and Christian – that is, the bottom end of a study of the literary formation of the Bible, how the largest literary units, the books, finally got together. Canon must be viewed as a process that began very early in that formation and functioned significantly in it as a continuum that constantly included past and future in its on-going present tenseness. Colwell’s last volume on New Testament text criticism contains eleven papers, all of which had been previously published.4 In his landmark paper titled “Hort-Redivivus: A Plea and a Program,”5 he offers a five-stage program for New Testament textual study. The five-stage program Colwell proposed is clearly the result of a professional life of careful study of a plethora of New Testament manuscripts and cognate documents and will undoubtedly serve the field for decades to come. The stages are as follows: 1. Begin with readings 2. Characterize individual scribes and manuscripts 3. Group the manuscripts 4. Construct a historical framework 5. Make a final judgment on readings.6 Colwell made it clear that the stages are just that and should be followed in the order given. The points of contact between work in Old Testament text criticism and that in New Testament text criticism have often seemed minimal. But the more we learn about them both the more parallels we can find, at least in some of the problems faced in each. Colwell advised beginning with gathering readings from as broad a base of early manuscripts of Greek texts and then versions as possible, but also strongly advised not making final judgments until the fifth stage of study. In terms of the actual mode of operation when a particular textual problem is addressed, these are also the first and final stages of work in Old Testament text criticism. In our actual mode of operation in our work each year in Freudenstadt, Professor Peter Rueger of the University of Tübingen begins the process by gathering all the readings in the pertinent ancient texts and versions on the particular problem addressed. Our own responsibility on the committee at that stage of preparation is to provide the pertinent readings from the various Palestinian manuscripts, published and unpublished, that have been discovered since 1947. Rueger then groups the readings according to those that would have had our Masoretic Text 3

 Colwell, New or Old, 8.  Colwell, Studies in Methodology. 5   Ibid., 141 – 71. 6   Ibid., 160. 4

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as Vorlage and those that had variants. Some patterns develop out of this stage of work: e. g., the Syriac often seems a faithful daughter of the Septuagint, the Vetus Latina a faithful daughter of Septuagint or Old Greek, the Vulgata a mix between following the Septuagint and Jerome’s desire to follow what he called Hebraica veritas. The targumim follow the MT for the most part, though there are often interesting readings in the Palestinian targumim, and Aquila and Theodotion attest fairly accurately to the emergence of the stabilizing Received Text after the First Jewish revolt of 66 – 70 CE. Readings in the Hebrew biblical manuscripts from Murabbaʿat and Hever also attest to that same emerging standard Received Text while those from˙Qumran reflect the earlier period of textual fluidity and the possibility in that time of families of texts and / or local texts. Colwell’s stages 2 and 3 figure into Old Testament textual work, but less so than for New Testament work and in different ways. Individual scribes and manuscripts do need to be characterized in a few instances, but not prominently so, due to the masoretic phenomenon in Old Testament textual history; and manuscripts do have to be grouped in a few instances, especially the Septuagint manuscripts, on the one hand, and late ancient and medieval synagogue manuscripts on the other. The stage in New Testament work most strikingly similar to work in Old Testament text criticism is Colwell’s fourth, that of constructing a historical framework. In fact, it is here that the most salient observation common to both fields emerges most clearly. Old Testament text criticism has recently undergone something close to a revolution in method.7 The history of Old Testament text transmission has had to be rewritten. Both current Old Testament text projects discovered the need for the revision out of their own independent work, the UBS project already mentioned and the Hebrew University Bible Project. The best history now available in this regard is that by Barthélemy himself.8 The keystone in the structure of that history is the recently discovered fact of relative fluidity of text form prior to the end of the first century CE, along with the fact of relative textual stability emerging after the fall of Jerusalem in 70 CE. Colwell and others, without collusion with their Old Testament colleagues, arrived at similar observations in New Testament textual history about the same time. In both instances the reason for the relative lateness in arriving at the observation on both sides has been the recent multiple discoveries of manuscripts pertinent to each. In his discussion of his stage 4, that of constructing a historical framework, Colwell puts the following sentence in italics: “The story of the manuscript tradition of the New Testament is the story of progression from a relatively uncontrolled tradition to a rigorously controlled tradition.”9 In a later sentence, he says, “In the early centuries of the New Testament period accurate copying was not a common concept.”10 Finally, Colwell states:  7

  Sanders, “Text and Canon: Concepts and Method.”   Barthélemy, “Text, Hebrew, History of”; Barthélemy, Études.  9  Colwell, Studies in Methodology, 164. 10   Ibid., 165.  8

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The progression from no concept of control for accuracy to some control is clearly visible in the quotations of the New Testament by the Fathers in the early centuries. In the earliest block, quotation is so free that it makes the demonstration of knowledge of a particular book difficult. Moreover, it is highly significant that the first expression of scholarly concern for an accurate text was concern for the text of the Old Testament. The same Origen who produced the Hexapla quotes the New Testament now from one strain of the tradition, now from another. At the beginning, the Old Testament was the Christian Scripture; and that beginning lasted longer than we think. It influenced concepts and attitudes at least into the third century. Granted that the Fathers were worse than the scribes, the scribes still enjoyed a remarkable freedom from control.11

I am sure that I cannot convey to you adequately the rapport an Old Testament text critic feels in reading Colwell on this point. The same rapport is experienced when one reads Robert Kraft’s recent study: Christian Transmission of Greek Jewish Scriptures is still in its infancy, without adequate tools or enough trained workers to take more than slow, short steps in progressing toward its goals. Knowledge of the Jewish world(s) from which Christianity derived has rapidly increased in the past generation and will continue to do so as more new data is made available and digested. Early Christianity also is being viewed from new perspectives, and our appreciation for variety and diversity within both Judaism and Christianity in the Greco-Roman world has increased greatly . . . Our suppositions about what is or is not possible or probable in pre-Christian and non-Christian Jewish circles need to be carefully re-evaluated and reformulated . . . For the topic at hand, overtly Christian influences on the transmission of Jewish Scriptures, most of the older claims can be dismissed because the assumptions on which they were based are no longer convincing . . . – As time went on, and as Christianity won its battles for social acceptance and legitimation as well as for inner consolidation, the sort of motivation which at one time might have encouraged the introduction of “Christian interpolations” into transmitted texts (whether Jewish or pagan) became less influential. Jewish Scriptures could be accepted for what they were, and should be preserved as such. As a rule tendencies to tamper with the texts would tend to date from relatively early times, from periods of stress with respect to self-identity (especially vis-à-vis Judaism or perceived “heresy”). This also seems true for textual criticism in general, where the earliest period in the transmission of written materials is likely to be the period of greatest variety, before sufficient distance and appreciation has been achieved to produce a more self-consciously deliberate treatment of the material.12

A new rule in method in text criticism, common to work on both Old Testament and New Testament texts, seems now to be emerging: the older the texts or versions, the less likely they were copied accurately. The period of fluidity in text transmission obtains for the early period of extant texts for both Testaments: it lasted longer for the New Testament (a) because the New Testament was a late starter and (b) because the crisis periods for early Christianity, comparable to the Roman conquest in the first century BCE and the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE, did not effect stabilization of text form until later. The earlier the date of a biblical manuscript, the further back into a period of belief in fluid living words and traditions ever adaptable to new contexts; the later the date the more likely 11

 Ibid.   Kraft, “Christian Transmission,” 225.

12

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the need in the several believing communities for some stability in text transmission. This new rule needs continued testing, but it is emerging with remarkable clarity in both disciplines, Old Testament and New Testament text criticism, without collusion between them. Colwell, however, ventured the guess that the earliest efforts at stabilization of text in New Testament circles were due to a desire on the part of scribes for better exemplars to copy. “The chances are high that the first controls were introduced by scholarly Christians.”13 I wonder. Work on the Old Testament side has produced a different observation. No group in the history of transmission of any texts anywhere could have been more concerned for accuracy in copying than the Tiberian Masoretes: they created a masorah in the lateral and top and bottom margins of their manuscripts, as well as in the final folios of their codices, the sole purpose of which was to attain accuracy in text transmission so that not a word or a letter was changed from Vorlage to copy. But their motivation for accuracy in the ipsissima verba of a manuscript was not “scholarly,” as Colwell suggests for their opposite numbers, the Christian scribes. On the contrary, the process of stabilization of Old Testament text, which started in the first century CE and continued with increasingly stringent demands on scribes until the emergence of the great Ben Asher manuscripts of the tenth century, can now be traced to quite a different motive from that of scribes looking for “good” copies from which to copy. And I wonder if what we have learned on the Old Testament side might be helpful on the New Testament side.

II What we are about to suggest will need considerable testing. It comes out of the recently discovered common history of Old Testament text transmission and Old Testament canon. Stabilization of Old Testament text and canon had parallel developments, each informing the other. The crucial discovery has been that stabilization of both came about because of a radical shift in views entertained about the nature of tradition. There came a point in Judaism, in the first century BCE, when tradition was no longer viewed primarily as sacred story adaptable to many different forms, but became viewed primarily as sacred text. In some circles, especially in those in which eschatology played a significant role, tradition, even written tradition, continued to be viewed primarily as sacred story readily adaptable to ever-changing new circumstances. But a gradual shift began to take place in Hasidic-Pharisaic circles that became quite radical in nature: it might even be called a change in ontology of canon. The shift from relative fluidity of text form to relative stability was accompanied by the rise of a whole new concept in hermeneutics. The rise of the new hermeneutic evident in the techniques 13

 Colwell, Studies in Methodology, 165.

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and rules of the Seven Midot of Hillel in the last quarter of the first century BCE, followed by the Thirteen of Ishmael at the end of the first century CE, and culminating in the Thirty-Two that became acceptable by 200 CE, has been quite clear all along. But until recently we had not been able to account properly for the appearance of such new rules. It is becoming abundantly clear that they arose out of the necessity of being able to continue to render an increasingly stable text adaptable to the on-going life situations of Judaism. The rule here, amounting almost to a law, can be put thus: the more texts became stable the more the need for hermeneutic techniques that would keep them flexible and adaptable. But along with the increasing stability of texts and the concomitant flourishing of the new hermeneutics went a radical shift of understanding of the nature, or indeed ontology, of Scripture  – that is, of canon. The more stabilization increased the more scriptural tradition came to be viewed as verbally inspired. Earlier fluid, rather shamanistic, views of inspiration of patriarchs, prophets, and psalmists gave way to the more formal view of the inspiration of each word of those scriptural traditions that were considered old and that were recognized as widespread among the various scattered Jewish communities in the Mediterranean world. This rather radical shift in views of inspiration went hand in hand with the increasing development of stabilization of text and canon that began to accelerate in the first century CE. By that time convictions about verbal inspiration in Pharisaic-rabbinic Jewish circles – the very denomination of Judaism that survived the disaster of 70 CE – were joined by convictions about literal inspiration. The move from verbal to literal in this regard went rather rapidly. And the reason it did so was that the radical break had already been effected by the mid-first-century BCE in the Hasidic-Pharisaic groups. The move from viewing tradition, even scriptural tradition, as basically a story that was ever relevant to the on-going believing communities and free to be cast and re-cast as need be, to viewing it as traditional Scripture, every word of which had a vestige of authority, was immense. It was only a matter of the new move running its course through to acceptance of literal inspiration of Scripture. We have suggested elsewhere that the reason for this radical shift in ontology of canon lay in the necessity of Judaism to meet the Hellenistic challenge on the level of Torah’s function as legal tradition. Jewish thought and lifestyles were being radically affected by the spread of Hellenism, and the old Bronze and Iron and Persian Age laws embedded in Torah, which had (relatively) stabilized earlier than other portions of tradition, were running into two major problems: (a) the old laws were no longer adequate per se in their plain meanings to meet many of the new challenges; and (b) there was an increasing number of the old laws becoming obsolete. This problem was especially felt in those denominations of Judaism that emphasized Torah as law, as over against the other denominations that still understood Torah as story of what God had done since creation; the latter were the eschatological denominations for whom Torah functioned primarily as a paradigm for perceiving how God was continuing to act and would act definitively in the end-time. They, too, eventually embraced the new views of verbal and literal inspiration but largely for different reasons. For the Hasidic-Pharisaic

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groups, the Hellenistic challenge was met in two ways: (a) the rise and development of the concept of Oral Law transmitted by Moses to the prophets to the sages, thus keeping alive the old concept of Torah as the living, vibrant, ever-new Word of God for ever-changing circumstances, while permitting the scriptural tradition to continue to stabilize; (b) the other way the challenge was met was in the radical shift in focus on Torah as Scripture from its peshat or plain meaning to viewing each word, then each letter, as forever valid and available for adaptation to new needs. The latter new focus permitted scribes and Pharisees and scholars of Torah to bypass the plain meaning of a passage and concentrate on the single words in it, drawing those needed from whatever passage, by the new hermeneutic techniques of Hillel-Ishmael to create new passages and new scriptural contexts. The old received syntax in those passages could now be ignored. A parallel and similar development was the rise of testimonia lists and so-called florilegia in the more eschatologically oriented denominations. Once the new ontology of canon became accepted in such circles, those scribes charged with copying scriptural texts accepted a whole new burden, the transmission of text in as accurate a manner as possible. They, too, could ignore whether a passage made sense to them as they copied, for now they were copying words and letters rather than thought-conveying language. The relative rigidity of text form beginning in the final third of the first century CE in Hebrew Old Testament texts, in contrast to the relative freedom we witness in biblical texts up to that time, attests to the new situation. This rigidity of text form increased in intensity through antiquity until the emergence of the great Tiberian masoretic manuscripts of the ninth and tenth century CE with their elaborate masoretic apparatus designed to protect each jot and tittle even in the texts most difficult to understand per se. The ontology of canon had indeed changed.

III In the light of this remarkable development on the Old Testament side, the full history of which has only recently become clear, one wonders if it is sufficient in the case of New Testament manuscript transmission to say with Colwell that the similar shift in Christian scribal circles in the third and fourth centuries CE was due simply to controls introduced by scholarly Christians seeking better exemplars to copy. Is it not considerably more likely that factors comparable to those now visible in the history of Old Testament text transmission were operative in the churches of the third and fourth centuries CE? They would not be the same, but they might have been comparable in terms of categories of pressure: the continuing failure of the parousia, the increasing need for ordered church life in the light thereof, the constant struggle with new heresies that an unstable text and canon would engender and sponsor, and the need finally to respond to the new needs and problems of the churches as Christianity became a religio licita and then a state church. The kinds of pressures that Constantine exerted on the Council of Nicaea might be instructive in terms of the pressures expressed or

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unexpressed but nonetheless very real that eventually produced a more or less stable New Testament text and canon. Helmut Koester has noted that Christianity was a religious movement that was syncretistic in appearance and conspicuously marked by diversification from the beginning.14 Viewed from the standpoint of the scattered scene of the churches from Easter on, so to speak, and the pluralism that marked them from the beginning, the historian must seek out those forceful factors that would render the modest amount of stability in text and canon of the New Testament that did eventuate. To put it sharply, only four Gospels made it into the New Testament canon of the churches western and eastern. But to put it another way, the great differences among those four Gospels were glossed over by the churches at a fairly early date. The harmonization that the churches apparently needed was effected by something very like the atomization that resulted from the triumph in Judaism of the new hermeneutics and ontology of canon there. As Colwell says, “Whatever its intention was, the publication and canonization of the Gospel in four books – According to Matthew, According to Mark, According to Luke, and According to John – saved the Gospel of John for the church. Reading the four together blurs and blots the distinctive elements of John. Most Christian ministers read the other Gospels between John’s lines and are unaware of how relevant his Gospel was to the social group for which it was written.”15 For all the churches eventually to accept the four Gospels showed response to stimuli to stop the process of diversification and seek unity. Those same stimuli induced Christians to go further and gloss over the immense differences among the four Gospels. Just as the rabbis could use their new view of canon and their new hermeneutics to gloss over the provenance in the Bible of the word or phrase needed from here, there, and yon to create the new law or the new midrash, so Christians atomized the New Testament to break up its received form and combine verses from wherever needed to meet whatever problem needed addressing. Paradoxically, it was the emphasis of thinkers like Irenaeus and Tertullian on the consonance or unity of Scripture in all its parts that saw the triumph of the idea of verbal and literal inspiration in Christianity.16 The idea that the tongues of all the biblical authors were but ready pens in the hand of the Holy Spirit glossed over the diversity and pluralism of the Bible and permitted the introduction of the same kind of atomistic exegesis, first of the Old Testament and then of the New Testament, in Christianity that had gained ascendency already in Judaism. The difference between surviving Judaism and Christianity in this regard was in their radically different ways of looking at Scripture as a whole, no matter the length or quantity of canon. The one, rabbinic Judaism, had the basic, pervading hermeneutic of seeking in Scripture indications for lifestyle and obedience in home, synagogue, and ghetto. Christianity, on the other hand, had the basic, pervading hermeneutic of seeking in Scripture indications for theological dogma. 14

  Koester, “ΓΝΩΜΑΙ,” 281; cf. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, 4.  Colwell, New or Old, 76.  Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, 40.

15 16

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We have elsewhere expounded the thesis that Torah and hence canon is a combination and balance of mythos and ethos, story and laws, gospel and law, haggadah and halakah.17 Throughout the history of early Judaism from its inception in the sixth century BCE, one can see and trace the rise and development of denominations within Judaism, some of which stressed reading Scripture asking primarily what good Jews should do and what forms obedience should take, and some of which stressed reading Scripture asking primarily what God has done and is doing and will do and what forms history and the eschaton will take. Christianity should be seen as heir of the hermeneutics of the latter type. It should be stressed that those who engaged in reading Torah as God’s story in past, present, and future eschaton did not ignore biblical ethics; nor did the Pharisees and others like them ignore theology entirely. Nothing in history is ever that simple, and I do not wish to imply such. But the enigma in Paul’s attitude toward the Law – at once saying it was abrogated but also saying it was good, holy and eternal – is best resolved, as I have tried to state recently in the Nils Dahl Festschrift, along these very lines: the Torah as God’s story is good and eternal, but the Torah as legal stipulation is abrogated in the New Age.18 The history of the early church is best viewed in terms of its doctrinal struggles, debates and resolutions, as J. N. D. Kelly has brilliantly shown, and not in terms of whatever efforts it may have expended in ethicizing.19 That it had strict moral codes and strove toward acceptable forms of piety as witness to the faith, one need not doubt. But the history of the early church does not lie in such strivings. Par contre, that Pharisaic-rabbinic Judaism had a haggadic tradition alongside its halakic history, and even some effort expended on theologizing, one need not doubt. But the history of rabbinic Judaism does not lie in such strivings, but in its focused concern, as evidenced in Mishnah and Talmud, on lifestyle, that is, on living lives of Torah. Our suggestion is that the history of the canonical process, culminating in the emergence of the 27 books of the New Testament as canon, is comparable in basic outline to that of the canonical process, as recently conceived, for the Old Testament. Whereas the stabilization of text and canon came about for the Old Testament largely as a result of attempts to meet the Hellenistic challenge to Jewish lifestyle, the same came about for the New Testament largely as a result of attempts to meet the Hellenistic-Roman challenge to Christian theology, especially Christology and ecclesiology. Christianity’s ability to absorb and assimilate the better features of the waning mystery religions and cults of the Mediterranean world is a marked feature of the first centuries of its life. The great pluralism of Scripture, first the Old Testament and then the nascent New, always admitted of some passage or idea that proved sufficient vehicle for such absorption. The exercise was quite wide-spread, as more and more gentiles became attracted to Christianity and as Christianity, 17

  Sanders, “Torah and Christ.”   Sanders, “Torah and Paul.”  Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, 29 – 78.

18 19

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because of its practice of active syncretism, thus became attractive to highly diverse ways of thinking. An exponent of that history was the struggle within the churches with such efforts that seemed to be on the fringes of its essence – the heresies. The canonical process, the shift in ontology of Scripture, and the rise of the new hermeneutics sufficient to meet the challenge, can all be traced along the path of the churches’ struggle with Gnosticism in the second century, with Arianism in the early third century, and finally the big debate between the Alexandrians and the Antiochenes that resulted in the Council of Chalcedon in the fifth century CE. Says Aland, “The setting up of a barrier (read ‘canon’) was further necessitated by the appearance, on the one hand, of Montanism and Gnosticism . . . and of Marcion and his disciples, on the other.”20 Scripture was cited as the base of both the heresies and the orthodoxies, as each developed. Both in order to curb the so-called heresies, and in order to develop a strong orthodoxy to resist further such challenges, the same two phenomena took place as we have seen in the case of the Old Testament earlier: the need for stabilization of text and canon, a shift in view of Scripture, and the adoption of the idea of verbal and literal inspiration. The quest for better exemplars to copy came about, therefore, not out of scribal scruples simply but out of the broader needs of the believing communities as they faced the challenges of the larger culture.21 Some of the challenges came in periods of persecution of the churches, and some came later when the churches faced the problems and challenges of being a religio licita and then, indeed, the state church.

IV Revision of the history of stabilization of text and canon of the Old Testament came about as a direct result of having photographic reproductions readily available of the manuscripts necessary to study. As photographs of the Dead Sea Scrolls and of New Testament papyri became available for study through the 1950s and 1960s, more and more scholars became dissatisfied working with printed critical editions of ancient biblical manuscripts. The technological development of photography along with the decreasing cost in securing microfilm copies of manuscripts encouraged scholars in the use of film and microreaders [and eventually digital images of manuscripts]. Critical editions of manuscripts will continue to have their usefulness, but study of a critical edition alone of an ancient manuscript leaves the student subject to the limitations and biases of the editor. And no matter how much of a genius the editor of a printed critical edition may be, he or she is of necessity subject to the interests and questions of the period in which they themselves studied the original and published their work.

20

 Aland, Problem of the NT Canon, 14.   Ibid., 18.

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Study of images of the actual manuscripts gives rise to questions that no study of critical editions elicits. Two simple examples may suffice to illustrate the point. The new Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia edition of the Hebrew Old Testament follows the practice of the earlier Kittel edition, which in turn had followed the practice set in the Second Rabbinic Bible of Jacob ben Hayyim of the early sixteenth century, namely, that of placing the book of Chronicles at the end of the third and last section of the Hebrew Old Testament. Karl Elliger and Wilhelm Rudoph, in the Foreword to BHS, state that this is the only deviation from the order of the biblical books in Leningradensis but they give no reason for continuing the practice. Nor do they state where in Leningradensis Chronicles actually occurs. The student is not told where it appears despite the fact that both Leningradensis (L) and Aleppensis (A) place it at the very beginning of the Ketuvim. Grandiose theories about the significance of Chronicles coming at the end of the Hebrew Bible as a balance to the Torah, of which Chronicles is a rewrite, collapse in the face of having actual facsimiles of the two great masoretic manuscripts. Likewise, theories about how the Elizabeth Hay Bechtel Psalms Scroll of Qumran Cave 11 may have been a liturgical edition of Psalms or the first example of a Jewish prayerbook (because of the arrangement of some of the material in it) are far more difficult to maintain in the face of the fact that both L and A set significant portions of Scripture, notably Exod 15 and Deut 32, in a patently liturgical format. Also, theories that the same Psalms Scroll was not viewed as canonical at Qumran (because the scroll contains a notation in prose about how many songs and psalms David wrote and for what purpose) need to be scrutinized in the light of the fact that all the great masoretic manuscripts of the Bible contain many such notations in prose about numbers of words and verses and sections scattered throughout the manuscripts and especially in the great masorah at the end of each.22 Column 27 of the Psalms Scroll can now be viewed as a part of the pre-history of the masorah. Such observations cannot be made other than on examination of the original manuscripts themselves, and access to them is best effected by photographic [and digital] reproduction. Scrutiny of original manuscripts in like manner also reveals the embarrassing number of errors one finds in critical editions of texts and accompanying apparatus. Scholars, even the great ones, without some kind of facsimile have been forced to copy errors in the work of earlier scholars and thus perpetuate them. Even scholars who are known for their scrupulosity and attention to detail have been guilty of this simply because they often have had only critical editions to which to refer. Work now on the originals will gradually eliminate such errors. A seminar on the book of Job on one day alone located three errors in the BHS printed text of Job 17 and 18. The Ancient Biblical Manuscript Center for Preservation and Research has been established at the School of Theology at Claremont through the vision and 22

  Sanders, “Cave 11 Surprises.”

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generosity of Elizabeth Hay Bechtel. Not only we here in Claremont but biblical scholarship around the world owes her a resounding vote of gratitude. While there are similar centers at the Universities of Fribourg in Switzerland, Lyon in France, and Münster in Germany, no other is quite so ambitious or encompassing as the Claremont Center. It is established for the preservation of all ancient manuscripts related to biblical study, not only the actual biblical manuscripts but also those cognate to Bible study. The core of our collection will be the some 700 microfilms collected by Ernest Cadman Colwell and others for the International Greek New Testament Project. But we hope eventually to be able to have it all, as it were, for Old Testament, Intertestamental Studies, and New Testament. We are affiliated and work closely with Barthélemy’s Institut biblique in Fribourg, and Barthélemy is on our Board of Advisors. The reasons for such a Center grow in importance with each passing year. Ancient manuscripts removed from their original site of discovery deteriorate in modern museums and archival storage areas quite rapidly. They soon discolor and become very nearly illegible. Photography [and digital imaging] are the best means of preservation of them, as Dr. John Trever has proved by his careful preservation of the negatives he took in February 1948 in Jerusalem of three of the large scrolls from Qumran Cave 1. The manuscripts themselves have in these intervening years discolored and disintegrated to some extent. Technological advances permit us to preserve images in a good state for unknown periods of time while the same advances have so far failed to preserve the originals in as good a state. Without a prohibitive travel budget, no one can possibly go to study each of them in the widely scattered museums and archives around the world. The rise of nationalism in the areas formerly governed by the imperial powers and Mandate countries makes collection of originals impossible even for the richest of philanthropists: each country wants to keep the manuscripts and artifacts found there; and this is only right. Collection of all pertinent manuscripts by imaging in one place will permit for the first time full diachronic and synchronic study of biblical traditions by the competent scholar sitting and working in one place. The collection will greatly advance the work of text criticism, tradition criticism, and canon criticism. In addition to the collection, the Center will provide the latest means for preserving the film and the latest means of studying the texts they expose. A climatized vault in the Center maintains relative specifications of temperature and humidity on a year-round basis with graph readouts for verification and eventually a back-up generator in case of power failure. In addition, we have a contract with the Secured Storage Vault of the Heart of California Corporation in Tahoe City for more permanent preservation of the master copies of each acquisition. And, of course, we will provide microfilm and microfiche readers [as well as digital images] for the use of scholars. Very exciting for us, and quite unique, is our working relation with The Jet Propulsion Lab at Caltech where our colleagues there are working on image enhancement processes by microdensitometer and computer, as well as an electronic camera for original film work. The former permits scholars to read por-

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tions of discolored or decomposed manuscripts beyond even the capabilities of infrared or ultra-violet film. This is still in the experimental stage, but Drs. John Benton and James Soha, who are also on our Board of Advisors, have already produced dramatic results: we are working with them on further possibilities. The idea of the electronic camera is actually very simple but the possibilities boggle the mind: it is essentially an adaptation of the amazing camera hardware that has been used at JPL to shoot Jupiter or Mars. The scientists are working on reducing the bulky hardware to the size of a suitcase in order to do field work. Finally, the Center plans to provide not only a catalog of all its holdings but a Scripture index as well. This, in its own way, is mind-boggling and will require many hours of many people working in the Center. If it works out as I hope it will, a scholar should be able to consult the index file and locate every biblical manuscript, both texts and versions, and insofar as possible, citations in the non-biblical holdings, that contains any given verse of the Bible. A student will now be able to do a full diachronic and synchronic study of a given passage sitting at one microfilm reader [or computer] at the Center. Just imagine being able to trace the full history of a tradition from its inception through its various functions and appearances through to the close of antiquity. Imagine being able to trace the complete pilgrimage of a tradition through all its travels in the biblical orbit, texts, versions, commentaries, and treatises! That is the most ambitious project ever undertaken by people who still claim sanity. But it excites us and we hope it attracts future students to even more competent study of our common biblical heritage. [See the Appendix to this volume for the history of the Ancient Biblical Manuscript Center.] Bibliography Aland, Kurt. The Problem of the New Testament Canon. Contemporary Studies in Theology 2. London: Mowbray, 1962. Barthélemy, Dominique. “Histoire du texte hébraïque de l’Ancien Testament.” In Études d’histoire du texte de l’Ancien Testament, by Dominique Barthélemy, 91 – 110. OBO 21. Fribourg: Éditions universitaires; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1978. Barthélemy, Dominique. “Text, Hebrew, History of.” In IDBSup 878 – 84. Colwell, Ernest C. New or Old? The Christian Struggle with Change and Tradition. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1970. Colwell, Ernest C. Studies in Methodology in Textual Criticism of the New Testament. New Testament Tools and Studies 9. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans,1969. Kelly, J. N. D. Early Christian Doctrines. New York: Harper & Row, 1960. [5th rev. ed. 1978]. Koester, Helmut. “ΓΝΩΜΑΙ ΔΙΑΦΟΡΟΙ: The Origin and Nature of Diversification in the History of Early Christianity.” HTR 58 (1965) 260 – 84. Kraft, Robert A. “Christian Transmission of Greek Jewish Scriptures: A Methodological Probe.” In Paganisme, Judaïsme, Christianisme: Influences et affrontements dans le monde antique. Mélanges offerts à Marcel Simon, edited by André Benoit, Marc Philonenko, and Cyrille Vogel, 207 – 26. Paris: Boccard, 1978.

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Sanders, James A. “Cave 11 Surprises and the Question of Canon.” In New Directions in Biblical Archaeology, edited by David Noel Freedman and Jonas C. Greenfield, 101 – 16. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969. [Original McCQ 21 (1968) 1 – 15 (= 284 – 98).] Sanders, James A. “Text and Canon: Concepts and Method.” JBL 98 (1979) 5 – 29. [Reprinted in From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, by James A. Sanders, 125 – 51. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987.] Sanders, James A. “Torah and Christ.” Int 29 (1975) 372 – 90. [Reprinted in From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, by James A. Sanders, 41 – 60. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987.] Sanders, James A. “Torah and Paul.” In God’s Christ and His People: Studies in Honour of Nils Alstrup Dahl on the Occasion of His Sixty-Fifth Birthday, edited by Wayne A. Meeks and Jacob Jervell, 132 – 40. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1977. [Reprinted as “Paul and the Law.” In From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, by James A. Sanders, 115 – 23. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987.]

14 Torah and Christ Introduction (1987) For six years, from 1973 to 1976, I was a member of and participated in the theological discussions and planning of the advisory council of the journal Interpretation. The first meeting of the council I attended involved developing and planning the October 1975 issue, which was to be on “the Bible as canon.” I was asked to write a follow-up to Torah and Canon focusing on the NT and especially on Christ. The result was “Torah and Christ,” Int 29 (1975) 372 – 90. The basic hermeneutic of the chapter is the same, in my opinion, as that of most of the NT, especially of Paul, in working out its Christology and its ecclesiology – theocentric. If one focuses on what the OT says God was doing in and through creation and Israel up to the Hellenistic era, taking account of all the various cultural idioms by which that was expressed, then one can far better understand the arguments concerning Christ and the church one finds in the NT. Again, if one thinks of Torah as a narrative with some laws recorded in it rather than as records of laws set in a narrative framework, then one can perceive the continuity the early Christians saw between Scripture (the OT, largely for them in Greek translation) and what they believed God was doing in Christ and the church in the first century. That which is called gospel in the NT is perceived there as having begun in Genesis, in Torah, and coming to climax in God’s work in Christ. The old dichotomy between law (OT) and gospel (NT) is turned on its head, as it were. The Torah-Christ story, or the gospel as a whole, is made up, from beginning to end, of both story and stipulation, or gospel and law. Read in this way, Paul was not presenting a choice between faith and works, but was rather asking in whose works we have faith, God’s or ours? If we can learn to recite God’s words and works as recorded in Scripture, then we should be able to see that Christ was God’s climatic act of righteousness; that is, we should be able to have the hermeneutic eyes to see and recognize God’s culminating work in Christ. “Torah and Christ” was a direct sequel to that part of the argument of Torah and Canon that was less concerned with Gerhard von Rad’s question of why Sinai (law) is never mentioned in the short recitals or kerygma in the OT (gospel) but was concerned to ask why the story of the entrance into the land (Joshua) did not end up in basic Torah (Pentateuch). The NT, therefore, presents not so much a christocentric theology as a theocentric Christology. It is the same God continuing his own story at work in Christ that was at work in creation, redemption, and so forth, of the OT. *  First published 1975.

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But NT ecclesiology is also presented with a theocentric hermeneutic reading of Scripture (OT). In Christ God was creating a New Israel. Or, Christ was God’s gift to the world whereby gentiles, too, might enter into God’s Israel. While the Christian celebrates the whole of the gospel from Genesis through the NT, the Torah-Christ story, and hopes everybody who listens will share the joy of the celebration, there can be and should be no special mission to the Jews. In fact, the proper attitude of Christians engrafted into Israel through Christ should be to listen for the voice of God through what Jacob Neusner aptly calls God’s first love, Judaism. What is the continuity between the Old Testament and the New? What is the relationship between gospel and law? Why do Jews not accept Christ? These are frequently asked questions in the churches today. In Torah and Canon, the time-honored question of the relationship in the biblical story between gospel and law was bypassed in favor of addressing the quite different question of why the story of the conquest of Canaan, the book of Joshua, was not included in the Torah or Pentateuch. Here we shall revert to the question of the relation of the law to gospel and suggest, perhaps, a fresh approach to an old problem.1

I From a canonical perspective, the Torah is a balanced intermingling of story and law: they go together; they belong together; and Torah means both. This is so clearly the case that a simple diagram is possible: Torah =

⎧ ⎪ mythos – gospel – story – identity – haggadah ⎨ plus ⎪⎩ ethos – laws – ethics – lifestyle – halakah

Torah may mean simply the Pentateuch; or it may have the extended meaning of divine revelation generally; or it may, in some texts, be a symbol for the identity of Jews (as over against Christ having the symbolic meaning of identity for Christians). But Torah never lost or loses the mythos-ethos dual character noted above.2 1   The question has usually been posed in terms of why the ancient recitals of Israel’s faith in the mighty acts of God (1 Sam 12:8; Deut 26:5 – 9) seem not to mention Sinai and the giving of the law. Two answers have been given: the one by the German form critics, notably Gerhard von Rad and Martin Noth, and the other by the archaeologists and traditionalists, notably the socalled “Albright school.” Walther Eichrodt has associated himself with the latter: see Eichrodt, “Covenant and Law”; Sanders, Torah and Canon. 2   See Sanders, “Torah and Paul”; Pasinya, La notion de NOMOS. Wisdom should not be seen as a separate or third element of Torah, but as a part of both mythos and ethos, esp. the latter. See von Rad, Wisdom in Israel, and Weinfeld, Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomic School.

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Early Judaism (from the sixth century BCE to 70 CE) was not a monolithic religion. By the third century BCE it was a complex, pluralistic phenomenon. To simplify the complexity, for the purposes of this chapter, we need but observe that some denominations in early Judaism emphasized the mythos aspect and some the ethos aspect of Torah. Jewish pluralism in the period of the Second Temple (early Judaism) is well attested to in the early Jewish literary complex represented by the Apocrypha, Pseudepigrapha, Dead Sea Scrolls, Elephantine Papyri, Tannaitic literature, and others.3 But only two of those Jewish denominations survived the second great destruction of Jerusalem and the temple, which occurred in 70 CE: the Pharisees, who became what we know as rabbinic Judaism, and the Christians of the early church. They may be viewed as two daughters of the mother faith of early Judaism, but each going in quite different directions, the Jewish, ethos, and the Christian, mythos, after 70 CE. The thesis of this chapter is that those different directions are best understood in the light of the above diagram. Rabbinic Judaism, following the emphasis of Pharisaism, stressed the ethos or halakah aspect of Torah, while Christianity emphasized the mythos or haggadah aspect. Neither, however, emphasized one to the exclusion of the other: the Torah was for both a mix of gospel and law. The answer, therefore, to the question of how Christianity and late Judaism (after 70 CE) developed in such disparate ways must primarily be located in this basic observation of the gospel-law mix of Torah, the central and unifying concept of early Judaism. But there was another very important factor as well. Some of the sects of early Judaism, like the Qumran Essenes, firmly believed that the eschaton was near; others, like the Pharisees, devalued eschatology in large measure. Christianity believed that it was born in the end time of God introduced by Christ himself, and, hence, was even more eschatologically oriented than the Essenes! Eschatologically oriented Jews of the time believed that God was working in their time a mighty act of grace, of the sort recited in the old Torah story, but an even greater one, a sort of final one, that would sort out everything on earth and in history and inaugurate a quite different kind of life. The difference between the Qumran

For this use of the word ethos, see Neusner, Way of Torah, 7 – 8. For the possible relation of the pattern here suggested to the “visionary” and “realistic” heritages of Torah, see Hanson, “Jewish Apocalyptic,” esp. 57. 3   The concept of normative (Pharisaic-Tannaitic) Judaism in the pre-70 CE period, over against heterodox, aberrant sects, is under steady challenge. The concept received considerable impetus in the arguments formulated by George Foot Moore in his debates with the old history-of-religions school (Judaism in the First Centuries, 3:17 – 22). Following the lead of Saul Lieb­ erman, Elias Bickerman, and Morton Smith, others have challenged the Moore synthesis in its oversimplified forms. Opposite Moore, on a spectrum of opinion on the matter, is now Hengel, Judaism and Hellenism, who contends that all Judaism from the mid-third century BCE was “Hellenistic” to a greater or lesser extent, with stirrings of clear opposition in Ben Sira, wisdom speculation, the Hasidic movement, and perhaps the Essenes. The work of Neusner (see From Politics to Piety) also challenges the synthesis. A fine, succinct statement of the pluralism in Judaism prior to 70 CE can be seen in Stone, “Judaism at the Time of Christ.” For a mediating point of view, see Davies, “Contemporary Jewish Religion.”

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sect and Christianity was a more intensive sense of the eschaton among early Christians than even among the Essenes, because they believed that the new age had been introduced in its first phase by the coming, passion, and resurrection of Christ.4 Early Christians stressed the haggadic-story aspect of Torah since it provided such a strong argument for their claim concerning the authority of Christ and his place in the work of God as its eschaton.5 This is the basic reason that Torah as Heilsgeschichte (salvation history) plays a more prominent role in the NT than does Torah as law.6 Early Christians, like Paul, could correspondingly devalue Torah as law since halakot, which had been developed for obedience in an ongoing lifestyle, might not all be pertinent in the intense atmosphere of anticipation of the end. But Torah as story was important to the early churches as they moved out into the Mediterranean world because of its adaptability to the gentile mentality of Hellenistic culture.7 The combination, therefore, of an eschatological faith plus a haggadic view of Torah distinguished early Christianity from surviving rabbinic Judaism. Here were two related but different modes of recapitulating Torah, and transcending the cataclysm of 70 CE. Because early Christians seemed to Jews to overstress the gospel aspect of Torah (as story of God’s deeds), and because they seemed to insist that Christ provided a new identity symbol (over against Torah), and because they seemed to insist that it was necessary to recognize the new act of God in Christ as being like the ones in the Torah story but somehow climaxing them, rabbinic Jews were able to resist Christian claims and in doing so deny the validity of the Christian argument. Torah, which for them had since the second century BCE been principally a divine guide for obedience and lifestyle, became all the more so God’s law for their lives in response to Christianity. Even so, Torah for Judaism has never been only law. It has always been a combination of mythos and ethos.8 Paul’s conversion may be seen, in these terms, as a move on his part from emphasis on the ethos aspect of Torah to the mythos aspect. This was so much the case that he seems to dwell considerably on the Torah story of ancient Israel’s election (Genesis) and to bypass Moses (Exodus to Deuteronomy).9 In an article in the New York Times Magazine of December 23, 1973, Andrew M. Greeley, head of the Center for the Study of American Pluralism of the 4

  See Stendahl, “Introduction,” and Sanders, “Habakkuk in Qumran.”  Rössler, Gesetz und Geschichte, sketches the Nachleben of the two aspects of Torah in early Judaism; see Sanders, “Torah and Paul.” 6   This observation is quite congruous with the programmatic scheme proposed by Hanson, “Jewish Apocalyptic.” What he calls the “visionary” may be seen as heir to what I call the mythos heritage in early Judaism; and what he calls “realistic,” heir to what I call the ethos heritage. See Sanders, “Torah and Paul,” for Paul’s uses of the word nomos (Torah). Very important now to that discussion is the monograph by Pasinya, La notion de NOMOS. 7   See Sanders, “Adaptable for Life.” 8   It is in the light of this development that Judaism’s resistance to developing a full theology should be seen, as well as the overstated Christian polemics about Jewish “legalism.” 9   See, e. g., Longenecker, Biblical Exegesis in the Apostolic Period, an inadequate treatment that is nonetheless on the right track. 5

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National Opinion Research Center of the University of Chicago, wrote, “While the NT critics probe back toward the basic message and behavior of Jesus, the ‘intertestamental’ – or ‘second temple’ – historians have made considerable progress toward understanding the fantastically creative religious era of which Jesus was a part. Judaism during the last century BCE and the first CE was a vigorously heterogeneous, diversified phenomenon.”10 This is a good way of putting the situation today.11 The NT is being approached from several directions and from the standpoints of several types of expertise. Those of us who approach it from the standpoint of the highly diversified history of early Judaism seem at times to have more confidence in the possibility of reconstructing the historical Jesus than our colleagues who approach the NT from other directions; but we need each other.12

II What was the thinking of Paul (1) about the place of Jesus Christ in the biblical story and (2) about the place the story of Jesus Christ should have in the Christian life? The watershed event of the NT is the resurrection of Christ. It is often said that everything reported of the Christ in the NT is reported in the light of that final and ultimate event, and this is the principal reason that it is so difficult to reach behind that event to get a really clear picture of Jesus the Jew. It is also often said that the Bible, and especially the NT, is the churches’ book. It comes to us through the faith of the early church in Christ established by the ultimate event reported in it of the resurrection. Much of it comes to us through the early worship and instructional materials, especially liturgies, didache, catechism, and kerygma of the early churches. The Bible is not primarily grist for the historians’ mill. It is primarily a theological library. And yet the NT is about Jesus Christ. One of the important perspectives on the NT and Christianity that is brought into sharp focus by the Qumran literature of the Dead Sea Scrolls is the central place of Jesus Christ in the Christian faith. The Qumran Essenes also had a great leader whose name we do not know but whose title appears as the Teacher of Righteousness. Many scholars are of the opinion that it was the Teacher of Righteousness who shaped the essential theology of the Qumran sect; many scholars also think that he himself composed the Thanksgiving Hymns contained on a large scroll discovered in the first cave (in 1947). One scholar, André Dupont-Sommer of Paris, went so far as to say in the 1950s that this Teacher could be compared in a number of ways with Jesus Christ. Dupont-Sommer has claimed that this Teacher not only shaped the theological thinking of the sect, and gave the sect the key for interpreting the OT (Law, Prophets, and Psalms) aright in their time, but that he, like Jesus (and only 10   Greeley, “Christmas Biography.” See also Hengel, Judaism and Hellenism; Neusner, From Politics to Piety; Stone, “Judaism at the Time of Christ.” 11   See also Sanders, “Dead Sea Scrolls – A Quarter Century.” 12   Sanders, “Vitality of the OT.”

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a century before Jesus), was crucified and was believed by the Qumran sect to have been exalted or resurrected. Dupont-Sommer has retreated from some of his more extreme views, but his own research on the life of this Teacher rendered the great service of giving us a new shade of light for viewing the place of Jesus Christ in the NT. By outside count, the Teacher is mentioned some twenty times in the Qumran scrolls. In most of the manuscripts he is not mentioned at all, and it is highly doubtful that he was either crucified or was believed to have been resurrected. By contrast, the whole of the NT is about Jesus Christ, so much so that counting the times he is mentioned would be pointless. Also, by contrast, was it even possible to speak of Christianity in those days, or today, without mention of Jesus Christ, indeed, without putting him precisely in the center of what Christianity means? The pagan writers of the Hellenistic and Roman world, whenever speaking favorably, neutrally, or unfavorably of Christianity, always addressed themselves to what they understood of the central figure of Jesus. As Oscar Cullmann pointed out in 1955, in response to Dupont-Sommer’s early work on the Teacher, “Would it be possible to describe primitive Christianity without naming Christ? To ask the question is to have answered it.”13 There are important passages in Philo, Josephus, Pliny, Dio Chrysostom, and Hippolytus on the Essenes, but never once do they mention the Teacher of Righteousness. By contrast, there is no treatment of Christianity by any writer of the Hellenistic or Roman world, pro or con, without mention of the centrality of Jesus Christ in the new faith, even in the earliest such notices in Josephus, Tacitus, and Suetonius. All this but underscores the point that the NT is about Jesus Christ. But what does that mean? What does it mean that Jesus Christ is central to the NT and the Christian faith? Many Christian commentators and theologians in the two thousand years of our history have taken this observation so seriously as to assert that Christ figures also in the OT. This was affirmed as recently as 1934 by the German OT scholar Wilhelm Vischer, who wrote a book on the witness of the OT to Christ.14 He even suggested that in Genesis 32 it was not an angel with whom Jacob wrestled but Jesus Christ himself. To make such assertions, of course, is to go about as far as one can to de-historicize Jesus and to deal with the centrality of his person in an exclusively mythical or theological manner. We cannot do this ourselves, of course, but it is important that at times the church has engaged in just that sort of exegesis of the whole Bible – even if we cannot. The word “Christ” was originally a title. It is based on the Greek word meaning “anointed,” or “Messiah,” and it stems from the earliest Christian efforts to relate Jesus to the OT and to show his authority therein.15 Much of the NT is apologetic in the sense of wanting to demonstrate the authority of Jesus Christ. And the only authority that the NT writers consciously acknowledged as authoritative was the OT, or the Torah, Prophets, and Psalms. It was the conviction of 13

  Cullmann, “Significance of the Qumran Texts,” esp. 225.  Vischer, Witness of the OT to Christ.  Vermes, Jesus the Jew.

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the early church that Jesus was God’s long-awaited Messiah, the anointed one to come to bring salvation to his people. And this brings us to the observation that the name Jesus itself means “salvation.” Its OT form is Joshua, meaning “Yahweh [or God] saves.” Matthew, in his account of the annunciation to Joseph (1:20 – 21), reports that the angel said, “Joseph, son of David, do not fear to take Mary your wife, for that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Spirit; she will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he [God] will save his people from their sins.” As Frederick Grant has observed, Jesus was a common name in the first century, one that Josephus attributes to nineteen different persons in his writings.16 For parents to name a son Joshua was an expression of their faith in the saving power of God for his people. And I think we can be confident that Jesus’ earthly name was indeed Jesus. But the NT writers found in it a far greater significance; as Matthew asserts, it was not Mary and Joseph who bestowed the name but an angel with authority from the heavenly courts. James Barr, in a book titled The Bible in the Modern World, claims that the Bible is “soteriologically functional.”17 He means by that a number of important things, but the point he makes for us today is that the whole Bible functions in the believing communities to effect salvation; this is and always has been its job description for synagogue and church in their recitation and interpretation of it through the ages. This is to speak of the nature and function of canon. The Bible as the churches’ book is not primarily a historical document (though I am among those who insist that it is full of historical fact, that is not the point). It is primarily a canonical document, functioning in the believing communities as canon to assist the ongoing believing communities to seek answers in their times to the questions Who are we? and What are we to do? In dialogue with believers, the Bible as canon addresses itself to the questions of identity and obedience – and in that order – first identity and then lifestyle. To know who we are and to act like it is to experience and engage in salvation. In Hebrew, and to a limited extent in biblical Greek, the words “salvation” and “righteousness” mean the same thing in certain contexts. Paul claims that Jesus Christ is God’s righteousness and God’s salvation for humankind, and when he does so he is saying the same thing in each case. In certain contexts in the Bible, both salvation and righteousness mean a saving act or a victory of God. And the claim of the NT is that Jesus Christ is God’s righteousness or salvation for us all. He is our salvation in that sense. And, according to Paul, he is our righteousness as well. Paul says both things and means the same thing by each. Jesus is God’s victory for us. But how are we to understand such biblical claims? What do they mean to us? I think we can suggest answers to these questions by looking closely at Rom 9:30 – 10:4 and then at Phil 2:1 – 13.

16

  Grant, “Jesus Christ.”  Barr, Bible in the Modern World, 30 – 34.

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III In Rom 9 – 11 Paul takes up what surely for him was the most important and delicate question of his theological thought, the work of righteousness or salvation by God in Christ and the response of Jews and gentiles to that work. As Johannes Munck has shown in his pivotal study of these chapters, Paul accepts the fact that Jews rejected that work by asserting that they would later say yes after gentiles had responded to Christ; and he does so by showing that even the early rejection of Jesus by the Jews was part of the story or history of salvation.18 Unless one is a close student of the Bible one can easily misunderstand Paul here and be gravely offended by him. It was a great frustration for the early church that Judaism, by and large, did not accept the Christ; and Paul in these chapters exhibits that frustration in a glaring light. Paul was, of course, wrong in his schema, for Judaism has not, after two thousand years, acceded to the supersession of Christianity any more than Christianity has acceded to the supersession of Islam.19 And the reason is not that Jews do not read the NT the way we do, but that they do not read the OT the way Paul and early Christians did. The frustration for Paul did not stem so much from a lack of affirmation of Christ by the majority of Jews of his day, but that he could not get them to read the Torah and the Prophets correctly, that is, in the way he read them. For he was certain that if they would review the Torah story with him in the way he viewed it, they would then accept the Christ. To join Paul at this point in his thinking, it is necessary to read this section of Romans, as I think it is necessary to read most of the NT, in the light of the way the writer engages in midrash of the Torah and the Prophets. Midrash means simply the manner in which one reads passages of the OT, especially to render them relevant or functional. This is not the place to go into the exciting subdiscipline of biblical studies we call comparative midrash, but I cannot imagine a period of greater excitement in biblical studies than the present one because of some of the newer emphases in comparative midrash and canonical criticism. It was Paul’s conviction that if one read the Torah story emphasizing it as a story of God’s works of salvation and righteousness for ancient Israel, then one 18  Munck, Christ and Israel. Munck’s work, which first appeared in German in 1956, influenced Krister Stendahl who wrote “The Apostle Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West.” A vigorous rejoinder to Stendahl is in Käsemann, Perspectives on Paul, 60 – 78. Stendahl tries to move away from Lutheran tradition in understanding Rom 9 – 11 while Käsemann insists that the issue is indeed justification by faith and that Stendahl has not succeeded. (See Stendahl’s counter-response, Paul among Jews and Gentiles, 129 – 32). I prefer not to enter that debate, nor the older one about whether “righteousness” in Paul means “right relation” or “act of God.” See Ziesler, Meaning of Righteousness, for an emphasis on the first meaning. In the NT and in Paul, it can have both meanings, especially in this section in Romans. Käsemann says (Perspectives on Paul, 63): “l would even say it is impossible to understand the Bible in general or Paul in particular without the perspective of salvation history.” See Davies’s comments on Munck in Davies, Christian Origins and Judaism, 179 – 98. 19   This observation I owe to an oral presentation by the late Thomas O’Dea in Jerusalem at the Ecumenical Institute, Tantur, in 1973.

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could not escape seeing that God had wrought another salvation, and committed another righteousness, in Christ just like the ones of old but an even greater one! In order to understand Paul here, one must recall the full concept of Torah. The Torah is primarily a story and not primarily a set of laws. There are indeed several codes of law embedded in the Torah, but they derive their authority from the story – not the story from the law. And that story is of the mighty acts of God, something like a divine odyssey,20 in creating a people for himself, electing the patriarchs and matriarchs, freeing slaves from Egypt, guiding the refugees through the desert, conducting them across the Jordan, and leading them to victory in settling Canaan. If the final shape of the Torah had gone on to include its Davidic aspect, then we can be sure that its climax would have been David’s conquest of Jerusalem, perhaps even Solomon’s access to the throne. In fact, there is reason to think that a very early nationalist form of the Torah story extended that far (the Yahwist tradition). But, interestingly enough, not only is the Davidic aspect left to the section of the canon called Prophets, but so is the conquest part of the story. The book of Joshua is in the Prophets, not the Torah.21 But whether the word Torah signifies the Pentateuch only or all authoritative tradition, it does not primarily mean law; but, as the rabbis know very well indeed, it means primarily revelation. In fact, it came to mean Judaism – the whole covenant concept of God’s relation to his people. When ancient Israel lost their land and their temple, in fact all of their religious and national symbols, to the Assyrians (and then to the Babylonians in the Iron Age), Judaism was born out of these ashes because the concept of Torah was both indestructible and portable. It could be taken either on scrolls or in memory to whatever foreign land where Jews lived in diaspora. Torah means the Jewish gospel which, in dialogue with the ongoing believing communities of Jews wherever they might be, gives Jews both identity and a basic understanding of obedience. Torah alone is responsible for the twenty-five hundred years of survival power Jews and Judaism have. Being indestructible and portable it provides the mythic power for life that a dispersed and beleaguered people have had. If one studies Jewish midrash long enough, that is, the Jewish insistence that the Torah is relevant to all ages and all situations (for questions of identity and lifestyle), then one comes to appreciate the fact that no other people had anything quite like Torah.22 In the Gospel of John, Jesus said to the Jews that they search

20   The suggestion of the divine odyssey is based on the actual canonical shape of the biblical story. It is close to another suggestion by Barr (Bible in the Modern World, 179n11) who speaks of God’s own history. Since a major characteristic of the OT is its monotheizing tendency, Yahwism was highly adaptable (syncretistic) and Yahweh, himself, a growing God. See Eissfeldt, “El and Yahweh,” 35 – 37; Cross, Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic, 3 – 75; and esp. Mendenhall, Tenth Generation, 198 – 214. 21  Sanders, Torah and Canon, 36 – 45. In 1 and 2 Chronicles, the Torah story is retold from a Davidic point of view in what was apparently an effort to counter the thoroughly “Mosaic” Torah (Pentateuch); see North, “The Chronicler,” 403. 22   This is the opinion of such classicists and students of Hellenistic rhetoric as Henry A. Fischel. See his Rabbinic Literature and Greco-Roman Philosophy.

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the Scriptures because in them they think they find eternal life. Such statements and affirmations can be found elsewhere in rabbinic and apocryphal Jewish literature.23 The ancient traditions that make up Torah proved their true power and worth in the sixth century BCE destruction of Israel and Jerusalem. It was those traditions that gave the survivors, the remnants all over the Babylonian and Persian empires, the power for life to survive as Jews and not lose their identity to the dominant cultures of the age, that is, not assimilate. And it was in that event of exile and restoration that some of Israel’s early such traditions were shaped together and interwoven in the experience of exile to become what we basically call Torah, that is, the Pentateuch, the canon within the canon of Judaism. Torah, as a general term, goes on to mean all the later oral traditions and interpretations of the early Torah including the Talmud, and as we have seen, came to mean Judaism itself. To put it another way, Torah was by the time of Christ and Paul the symbol par excellence, incomparable, indestructible, and incorruptible, of Judaism. It meant Judaism’s identity and way of life. This is still the case today. Torah is concerned first and foremost with salvation and righteousness, the two words mentioned earlier about Christ. But, and this must be understood aright, it is first about God’s righteousness, or better, his righteousnesses, and then about the sort of righteousness of which humankind or Israel might be capable.24 It is first mythos, and then ethos. It is gospel and then law  – both completely intertwined, inextricable one from the other. There is no such thing in the concept of Torah as law without the story. It simply would not exist; it would have no base of authority or authenticity or even existence. Torah is first and foremost a story about the mighty acts of God in creating a covenant people for himself; it is then, and immediately thereupon, a paradigm for understanding how Israel should live from age to age in varying circumstances and in differing contexts. It is first about God’s righteousness and immediately thereupon about humanity’s putative righteousness or duty to pursue. When Deuteronomy (16:20) says, “Righteousness, righteousness shalt thou pursue,” it does not only mean to obey the laws of the book of Deuteronomy, it means constantly in all circumstances, in all and varying situations and contexts, to contemplate the Torah story of God’s great love for humankind, how he chose a motley crew of slaves in Egypt to escape from there so they could go forth to bless the world. The laws in Deuteronomy, then, are a paradigm for how to arrive at answers to the pursuit of God’s righteousness in particular situations and at particular times. It is not that Israel should imitate God. That would be impossible. Rather, the story of what God did suggests faithful human action. The Torah story is first and foremost adaptable, like a paradigm, to assist in properly conjugating the 23   John 5:39. See also Sir 45:5; Sayings of the Fathers (Abot) 2.8 and 6.7; Rom 7:10; Gal 3:21; and Sanders, “Adaptable for Life. 24   The mighty or gracious acts of God in creating Israel are called “righteousness of God” in 1 Sam 12:7; Mic 6:5; Dan 9:16; cf. Acts 2:11. See Sanders, Torah and Canon, 15 – 27; and Neusner, Way of Torah, 9 – 26.

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verbs of God’s continuing presence and activity in the world (Deut 4:9). If particular answers of a given moment in turn get frozen, then a prophet – prophets precisely like Jeremiah and Jesus – turns up to remind us that the Torah once more must be internalized and contemplated, as on the heart and inside personhood. Now whether or not Paul was right in his schema about Jewish rejection and then eventual acceptance of God’s work in Christ, he shows sheer genius at points in his argument in Rom 9 – 11 and especially at 10:4 and 10:10. In 10:4 Paul says the following: “For Christ is the telos of the Torah righteousness-wise for all who believe.” Telos means end in the sense of finis, but it also means climax, main point, or purpose.25 Paul in this statement summarizes the central belief of the early church: God had committed another righteousness in Christ, that the Christ event was like the exodus event, or the wanderings-in-the-desert event, or the conquest event, and like them was a mighty act of God. It was different only in the fact that it was climactic to them; it brought all those chapters of the Torah story to completion, fulfillment, and made sense of them all. Paul in this whole section from the beginning of Rom 9 has been saying that to concentrate on the righteousness, or ethics, of which humankind or Judaism is capable, can be to miss the main point of the Torah story, namely, the righteousness of salvation or mighty acts of God in the Torah story. Now, marvellously and wonderfully, the words for righteousness, both in Hebrew and in Greek, can mean either human righteousness or divine righteousness. The Greek word dikaiosunē can mean either God’s right relation with humanity or humanity’s right relation with God. Hebrew tsedakah has the same wonderful ambiguity except that the Hebrew has the very concrete connotation of a specific act, either mighty act of God or act of obedience of humankind. In other words, Paul is here saying if you really have in mind the Torah story and that point of view then you can discern the righteousness of God. If you really know the Torah and know what righteousness of God is, then you know that Christ is precisely that kind of act of God. And you know also that in Christ God really committed an ultimate kind of righteousness, he came all the way this time. The God who had crouched down into the huts and hovels of dispossessed slaves in Egypt and led them across the Reed Sea to freedom is the same God who crouched down into the cradle in Bethlehem. Both acts of God are of the same order, that is, they are both Torah-story kinds of acts of God. Paul says that if all Jews would read the Torah in that way, concentrating on God’s mighty acts, then they could clearly see that “Christ is the climax of the Torah for all who believe in the righteousness of God.” I think this is one of the things he is saying in Rom 10:4.

25   The position taken here is close to that of Davies in Paul and Rabbinic Judaism, 147 – 76; for a more precise statement of my own position, as well as for a review of scholarship on the question of Paul and the law, see Sanders, “Torah and Paul.”

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IV Some people wanted to add to the Torah story back in OT times. Jeremiah twice (16:14 – 15 and 31:31 – 34) said he was quite sure that the events of his day, about the destruction of Jerusalem and God’s regathering the exiles, would be added like another chapter to the Torah story. Ezekiel was quite sure of it, and also the Second Isaiah; and the Chronicler rewrote it, shortly thereafter elevating David above Moses. But the final edition of the basic Torah itself only includes the parts up to Moses’ long sermon on the east bank of the Jordan (Genesis to Deuteronomy). That was so that Jews, if they happened to be scattered, would not feel they had to change and become something else just because they were not living in Palestine. And that is one reason, I am sure, Judaism has lasted so long, these twenty-five hundred years, because the basic Torah, the Pentateuch, in effect says that if you happen to be wandering and in dispersion, like Abraham, Jacob, and Moses, you do not have to fret about not being Jews. You do not have to be on a particular piece of real estate to be identified with the people God chose to bless the whole world.26 Now what we can see from the point of view of the divine odyssey is that the NT really makes this quite bold and scandalous claim that in Christ God committed another salvation or righteousness, and that it should be added to the Torah story as a climax, as the ultimate chapter of the whole story or odyssey. To put it another way, while the arguments and debates in the churches of the second century CE, spurred by the heretic Marcion, were on the point of whether or not the OT was biblical, the great concern of the whole early church of the first century (including most of the NT writers) was to try to show that the New Testament-Christ story was biblical. Most of Judaism said no. But the argument of the NT and the early church was that God’s divine odyssey did not stop with David in Jerusalem. In rhetorical terms they put it this way: If God could go with Abram from Ur of the Chaldees to Palestine, down to Egypt, out of Egypt with a motley crew of refugee slaves, through the desert, conquer Palestine with Joshua and take Jerusalem with David – why not Bethlehem? After all it is only five miles down there out the Jaffa Gate on the old road that runs by Rachel’s tomb! If God could go all the way from Ur to Jerusalem by way of Egypt and the Sinai desert, do you not suppose he could make it another five miles to Bethlehem? And if he was with Joseph in prison, and granted his presence in the huts and hovels of slaves in Egypt with Moses, do you not suppose he could crouch down into the cradle of a Jew baby in Bethlehem? Paul’s point, though he himself never refers to the Bethlehem or birth-infancy traditions, would be that you just do not know what God has already been through if you think he could not get into the cradle and onto the cross, if it was his mind to do so, and on his own agenda to bring righteousness and salvation to the world. Paul was so excited by his belief that God had committed a new, 26

 Sanders, Torah and Canon, 45 – 53.

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mighty act in Christ, that he just could not understand why everybody did not see it the way he did. For Paul, as for Jeremiah, it was a question of how you think.27 What we have to understand is that in Hellenistic Greek, as in biblical Hebrew (and in other Mediterranean languages of antiquity too) the heart was the seat of thinking. The saying, “As a man thinks in his heart, so is he,” is the key here. It is a question of identity. That is, whatever story completely captivates you is the way you are going to see life and perceive problems and look for solutions to them. So, as Jeremiah and Deuteronomy and nearly everybody else in the OT insists, the person with the true Torah-identity is one who loves the Lord his or her God with all his or her heart, first and foremost. And to love God in this manner, as Deut 6:5 and following go on to say, is to fill your heart (we would say head) and surround yourself with this story. This is the most important thing of all. That way you know who you are, no matter where you may be or what problems you face. And the story is one of God’s righteousness first, and then one of how, in pursuing his “righteousness,” that is, pondering the story of God’s passionate love for humankind, one can work out one’s own obedience, or the church can work out its program in obedience – in whatever age or in whatever circumstance. In this view, then, it is a mistake to take the specific legal codes embedded in the Torah story, in Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy, as absolute laws valid for all time. For Paul, as for Jeremiah and some others in the Bible, they are not the most important point about the Torah at all, precisely because obedience has to be worked out by the believer in God’s righteousness who studies the problems he or she faces in the light of the story of those righteousnesses and tries to be obedient in that situation. For Paul, the specific points of the law, if overstressed or if absolutized, were the surest way to overlook the Torah story itself, that is, God’s righteousness. So Paul makes a big distinction between concentration on the sort of righteousness of which humankind is capable and the righteousness of God that is the heart of the Torah story. This is precisely what he is saying elsewhere in Romans and Galatians, and when he appears to be anti-legalistic. But where the church and Christianity have sadly gone amiss is in thinking that all Judaism was therefore legalistic. This is an immense mistake. Every Pharisee (1) knew that the Torah was about God’s righteousness. But it was the special vocation of Pharisaism, the most liberal denomination in the Judaism of the time, to try to find ways, in the light of the specific expression of the will of God on Mount Sinai, in the legal codes of the OT, to discern through them the will of God for first-century Judaism.28 And (2) given that point of 27  Munck, Paul and the Salvation of Mankind, has shown how Paul’s OT model for his own vocation was Jeremiah. 28   So Pharisaism in developing the so-called oral tradition or Mishneh-Torah understood the later halakot to take precedence over the biblical stipulations. Another way Pharisaism had of rendering the specific laws adaptable was by a shift in hermeneutics, between 70 BCE and 70 CE, from peshat (contextual meaning) to the rapidly developing rules, from those of Hillel in the first century BCE to those of Ishmael at the end of the first century CE, following the rise

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view on the Torah and that emphasis, no Pharisee and very few really good Jews knowledgeable in Torah would accept the church’s and Paul’s essential argument that a cradle in Bethlehem and a cross on Golgotha constituted the same sort of mighty act as the exodus from Egypt. In fact, I dare say that if we had lived then and were good members of the first-century Jewish church to the same measure we are today, by dynamic analogy we would have felt the same way as did the good Presbyterians, I mean Pharisees, of first-century Palestine: We would have looked on the idea of additions to the old Bible very skeptically indeed! This makes it all the more remarkable that so many people in the Hellenistic world, including not a few Jews out in the eastern and middle Mediterranean lands, accepted the point of view Paul here outlines and did believe with their heart in God’s righteousness and did confess with their lips the salvation thereof, as he says in Rom 10:10. Paul believed that if people would look at the Torah story from the standpoint of God’s activity and journey, they would believe in and confess Jesus Christ as Lord, or Kyrios.

V Kyrios was an important title for Christ in Paul’s mind. And nowhere in his letters does it figure more prominently than in the Song of Christ that Paul recites in his epistle to the church at Philippi. I am of the opinion that nowhere in the Bible (except perhaps Mic 6:1 – 8) do we find a clearer statement of the crucial relation between mythos and ethos, or between the Torah-Christ story and the kind of life of obedience the Christian should try to live – that is, the relation between the Christian identity and the Christian lifestyle or between God’s righteousness and humanity’s possible righteousness or, again, in Lutheran terms, between faith and works, than the way Paul presents this famous hymn in Phil  2:1 – 13.29 In this passage not only does Paul provide a very vivid picture of divine righteousness, but he also, I think, suggests what the foil to that righteousness would be. The hymn celebrates the work of Christ as humility. One of the best ways we have of making clear what we mean when we make a point, such as Paul is here trying to make, is to present a foil to that point or to clarify what the opposite of that point would be. And in this passage he uses three words: one intrinsic to the hymn itself in v. 6 and two in his introductory remarks before it, in v. 3, as antonyms of what he means by Christ’s humility. He says, “Do nothing from selfishness or conceit” in v. 3 to make clear what is meant in the first strophe of of the concept of verbal or literal inspiration. Once the concept of verbal or literal inspiration became accepted the (often irrelevant or impossible) plain meaning of a law could be bypassed by focusing on a single word or letter within the law or sentence. Once the sentence structure of Torah was thus broken down, it received new life in its adaptability to the problems faced in the Hellenistic world, the greatest challenge Torah had ever faced. See Sanders, “Text and Canon; Concepts and Method.” 29   See Sanders, “Dissenting Deities,” where what follows was argued in technical terms.

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the hymn by Christ’s not counting equality with God as a thing to be grasped. The word in the hymn itself is harpagmos, translated in the RSV as “a thing to be grasped.” It signifies a prize of war or a position to be won, and Paul specifies that equality with God is what the Christ figure never sought. The two words in v. 3 further clarify the negative quality as eritheia and kenodoxia, translated as selfishness and conceit or ambition. These express what the motives would be for seeking equality with God. And these are precisely the motives of the fallen angels who, according to Gen 6 and Jewish literature widespread in the first century CE, descended from heaven, or from the heavenly council, to set up a kingdom to rival that of God. In other words, Paul signals for his readers at Philippi a story they would have known very well indeed about another kind of descent from the heavenly heights, that of the fallen angels, as the opposite of what the hymn he recites indicates as the mind of Christ, or the motive of the Christ when he descended from on high. Christ’s motive was humility, pure humility, seeking nothing for himself but to do the will of God. He, like the fallen angels, descended, but for entirely different reasons. We ourselves know of the myth of the fallen angels from the pre-Christian Jewish writings called the Book of Enoch, the Secrets of Enoch, the Life of Adam and Eve, and the Dead Sea Scroll Essene work called Ages of Creation. And Paul, in using these words, aptly describes their motivation for descending from the heavenly heights. They fully and consciously intended to set up a government and realm in opposition to God. We even know from these writings some of the names of the fallen angels: Azazel, Samjaza, Satan, Jeqon, Asbeel, Gadreel, Penemue, Kasdeja, Kasbeel, and others. Now, in the picture that Paul is here painting for the congregation at Philippi, these angels, otherwise called sons of god or sons of heaven, would have originally been, like the Christ figure, members of God’s heavenly council. In other words, Paul says, there have been two descents from the heavenly heights to earth, the one by these fallen angels out of selfishness and ambition, and the other by the Christ figure out of humility and obedience to God. Now, in this section Paul five times uses a form of the verb phroneō, to have a mindset, or have a mentality, a way of thinking, or to use the more biblical expression, to have a certain kind of thinking in the heart. “Have this mind in you,” Paul says; think this way. It is not that we can ourselves do what the Christ figure himself did, or even that we can acquire the Christ’s mind, I think; but rather, Paul bids us to have the story of the humble descent of the Christ figure as our mentality. That is the kind of thinking in the heart we should do. The story itself is beautifully simple and simply beautiful. The Christ figure out of humility descended from the heavenly council to earth in an act of self-emptying and servanthood, taking on human form. His humility extended all the way to death on the cross, says Paul. In other words, not only did he descend to earth to take humility upon himself, he even descended to the chthonian regions, or the bottom story of the three-story universe, the region where death obtains and Mot and Abaddon reign supreme. That is the heaven-to-earthand-hell trip described in the first strophe of the hymn (Phil 2:6 – 8). The second strophe describes the hell-to-earth-to-heaven return trip (2:9 – 11). But this time

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the active agent is the high God himself: “God has highly exalted him.” The picture here is thrilling indeed, for we see the humble Christ figure lifted by God out of the depths of death and set upon a coronation route that wends its way through the three-story universe back up to the heavenly heights. Two things here are important to note. Along the parade route every knee, in heaven, on earth, and under the earth, bends and every tongue confesses that Christ is Lord, or Kyrios. And who are those who kneel along the route? Surely not only all humanity, for it clearly says every knee in heaven and under the earth as well. No, here we see all of those fallen angels also on bended knee acknowledging the reign of the humble Christ figure whom they had left behind and whom they surely had totally discounted. Their descent was for nought, his for the glory of God the Father. They who had descended to gain a kingdom now must kneel in homage to him who descended in humility. What does Paul say then is the relationship between God’s righteousness and our obedience or putative righteousness? It is clearly not in imitation of Christ. As Ernst Käsemann has rightly said, that cannot be, for we cannot get up to the heavenly heights in the first place to make any kind of descent, much less a humble descent. Nor do I think it can be simply acquiring the mind or mentality of the Christ figure. Would not that be also a form of harpagmos? No, the relation between mythos and ethos, or gospel and law, or the Christian story and our obedience, is rather that of so filling our heart and mind with this story, this Torah story completed by the righteousness of God in Christ, that this becomes the way we think. This is surely what the Shemaʿ in Deut 6 means by loving the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, and might, to which the NT adds “all our mind” (meaning the same thing as heart). This Torah story should be upon our heart as Deuteronomy and Jeremiah said. This is our access to the thoughts of God, which Isaiah said are as high above our thoughts as the heaven is above the earth (Isa 55:8 – 9). We cannot think his thoughts, says Paul, but we can believe in his righteousness. We can tell and retell the words of this story with our children, and speak of them when we sit in our houses, when we walk by the way, when we lie down, and when we rise up and make them as a sign upon our hands and as frontlets between our eyes and as mailboxes on our doorposts (Deut 6:7 – 9). This story is our topos (place) on this earth. It is our identity. And out of that identity, constantly and dynamically told and retold, considered and reconsidered, we go on, as Paul says, to work out our obedience with fear and trembling (Phil 2:12) in the context of our situation and of the problems we face. To think that way, says Paul, to have eyes to see like that and ears to hear like that, is to have God at work among us both to will and to work his good pleasure. Not our good pleasure, thank God, not our agendas and programs, but to know, even in our limited lives and in our circumscribed existence, that God can and does use us to work out that plan of salvation and reconciliation he has had in mind since he first called Abraham out of Ur in Babylonia. And this brings us back to the first verse of Phil 2. There Paul uses four expressions describing the enabling power of God for living lives of obedience

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and for working out the putative righteousness of which we in our limited and frail condition are capable. “So if there is any encouragement in Christ, any incentive of love, any participation in the Spirit, any affection and sympathy . . .” All these nouns: encouragement, incentive, participation, and the phrase “affection and sympathy,” are divine gifts available to us if we have this mind of the Torah-Christ story in us. All of them signify God’s mercy and grace available to us in Christ, in God’s agapē or love, and in the Spirit. The word participation, among them, stands out as indicative of what Paul is saying. The word in Greek is koinonia – participation or fellowship. This is the link, the bridge, the means of drawing upon the power of God to live lives in accord with his will and pursuant to his righteousness. We can participate in that power through having this Torah story, which Christ has brought to its full force, in our heart and mind.

VI So it is just as important, if we take Paul seriously, to know the righteousness of God prior to Christ as it is to know God’s righteousness in Christ.30 For to know the Torah story aright, says Paul, we can also know that Christ is God’s final righteousness. It is not so much that Christ reveals God as it is that God revealed Christ. And it is really not a question of faith and works, because these still emphasize salvation by humankind’s faith or by humankind’s work. What the Torah-Christ story says is that God has worked for us in this divine odyssey. Nor is it that Christ was God’s last righteousness. Not at all. The canon, this full Christian-Torah story, is the paradigm God has given us so that we too can conjugate the verbs of his activity today and know his participation in our lives now and recognize a righteousness when we see one. For us gentiles, Christ is our entryway into membership in God’s Israel, says Paul. But Paul makes it abundantly clear that “disobedience” on the part of Israel, or Judaism, or failure to recognize the Christ as the climactic chapter of the Torah story, does not excommunicate them. Paul maintains his perspective here quite consistently. Jews are already in Israel, or in the Israel of God as he put it in Galatians (6:16); and since they are, they ought to read the Torah story the way he, also a Jew, reads it so that they can recognize Christ as a true addition, nay, as the true climactic chapter. But even if they do not, God can and does use their “obduracy” or lack of recognition of Christ, says Paul, to work out his overall scheme begun in Abraham without ever cutting them out of the true Israel. It is we gentiles who must enter Israel by the door Christ has provided, not the Jews. I would make several comments on this point in closing. (1) There is nothing wrong in continuing to hope, as Paul did, that Jews acknowledge the work of God in Christ so long as we do not go on then to insist that they “become Chris30   See Sanders, “Torah and Paul,” for an understanding of Paul’s apparently ambiguous attitude toward Torah.

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tian.” It is we who have in Christ become Israelites, so to speak, says Paul, not the other way around. (2) If we really want Jews, or anyone, to recognize that God committed a righteousness also in Christ, then we must do two things: (a) as Christians, take the trouble to know who we are; and (b) try to live attractive lives reflective of the passionate love of God for humankind instead of practicing prejudice against Jews or Muslims. This does not mean we all live the same kind of life. It means, in my way of thinking, that we must concentrate on broadening our theology. This is the work that needs doing. It means that God is neither Jew nor Christian nor Muslim. He is God and he loves us all passionately and equally well. If he has chosen an Israel (or more than one?) it is to use as instruments of his blessing humankind. This emerging theology is what I call monotheizing pluralism. But names and rubrics are not important. What is important is to regain a sense of what Dietrich Bonhoeffer called the reality of God. The heart of the biblical message is not so much that we should believe in God but that God believes in us.31 We have tried to explore Paul’s thinking about the place of Jesus Christ in the biblical story and his thinking about the place the story of Jesus Christ should have in our lives today. What, then, is the relation between the Torah-Christ story of God’s righteousnesses and the obligation laid upon us by it to pursue them, or as Paul says, to work out the gift of our salvation with fear and trembling (Phil 2:12 – 13)? What is the connection, in other words, between mythos and ethos in Paul’s thinking? We should be careful not to assume that we can have in us the mind of God. As Isaiah says, God’s ways are as high above ours as heaven is above earth: his thoughts are not ours (Isa 55:8 – 9). They are strangely and wonderfully of another order. What I think Paul suggests, however, is in essence what Deuteronomy had already suggested, that our hearts or minds be crammed full of this story of God’s humble condescensions to live and work among us. The Greek metanoia, often translated “repentance,” means a change of mind, actually, a change of head in modern pop idiom. It indicates a real change of identity, a basic, fundamental shift from one way of thinking to another. Kenneth Boulding put it well when he suggested that to receive the biblical message is to experience a restructuring of our whole mental apparatus.32 The Bible uses the metaphors of rebirth and conversion to express the radical nature of attaining this TorahChrist mind in us. Peter Berger said in an oft-quoted speech, delivered at the September 1971 Tenth Anniversary meeting of the Conference on Church Union (COCU) in Denver, that the churches must remember in their dialogues with other faiths and philosophies that they, too, have something to say: The authority of the churches is that they have a story to tell. That story is the Torah-Christ story.

31

  See Robinson, Cross in the OT, 47.  Boulding, The Image, esp. the introduction.

32

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Bibliography Barr, James. The Bible in the Modern World. New York: Harper & Row, 1973. Boulding, Kenneth E. The Image: Knowledge in Life and Society. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1956. Cross, Frank M. Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic: Essays in the History of the Religion of Israel. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973. Cullmann, Oscar. “The Significance of the Qumran Texts for Research into the Beginnings of Christianity.” JBL 74 (1955) 213 – 26. Davies, W. D. Christian Origins and Judaism. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1962. Davies, W. D. “Contemporary Jewish Religion.” In Peake’s Commentary on the Bible, edited by Matthew Black and Harold H. Rowley, 705 – 11. London: Nelson, 1962. Davies, W. D. Paul and Rabbinic Judaism. 4th ed. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1980. Eichrodt, Walther. “Covenant and Law.” Int 20 (1966) 302 – 21. Eissfeldt, Otto. “El and Yahweh.” JSS 1 (1956) 25 – 37. Fischel, Henry A. Rabbinic Literature and Greco-Roman Philosophy. Leiden: Brill, 1973. Grant, Frederick. “Jesus Christ.” In IDB 2:869 – 96. Greeley, Andrew M. “A Christmas Biography.” New York Times Magazine (December 23, 1973) 8:28 – 30. Hanson, Paul D. “Jewish Apocalyptic against Its Near Eastern Environment.” RB 78 (1971) 31 – 58. Hengel, Martin. Judaism and Hellenism: Studies in Their Encounter in Palestine during the Early Hellenistic Period. Translated by John Bowden. 2 vols. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1974. Käsemann, Ernst. Perspectives on Paul. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1971. Longenecker, Richard N. Biblical Exegesis in the Apostolic Period. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1975. Mendenhall, George E. The Tenth Generation: The Origins of the Biblical Tradition. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973. Moore, George Foot. Judaism in the First Centuries of the Christian Era: The Age of the Tannaim. 3 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1927 – 30. Munck, Johannes. Christ and Israel: An Interpretation of Romans 9 – 11. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1967. Munck, Johannes. Paul and the Salvation of Mankind. Richmond: John Knox, 1959. Neusner, Jacob. From Politics to Piety: The Emergence of Pharisaic Judaism. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1972. Neusner, Jacob. The Way of Torah: An Introduction to Judaism. Belmont, CA: Dickenson, 1970. North, Robert. “The Chronicler: 1 – 2 Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah.” In The Jerome Biblical Commentary, edited by Raymond E. Brown, Joseph A. Fitzmyer, and Roland E. Murphy, 1:402 – 38. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1968. Pasinya, Laurent Monsengwo. La notion de NOMOS dans le pentateuque grec. AnBib 52. Rome: Biblical Institute Press, 1973. Robinson, H. Wheeler. The Cross in the Old Testament. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1955. Rössler, Dietrich. Gesetz und Geschichte: Untersuchungen zur Theologie der jüdischen Apokalyptik und der pharisäischen Orthodoxie. 2nd ed. WMANT 3. Neukirchen: Neukirchener Verlag, 1962. Sanders, James A. “Adaptable for Life: The Nature and Function of Canon.” In Magnalia Dei: The Mighty Acts of God: Essays on the Bible and Archaeology in Memory of G. Ernest Wright, edited by Frank M. Cross, Werner E. Lemke, and Patrick D. Miller, 531 – 60. New York: Doubleday, 1976. [Reprinted in From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, by James A. Sanders, 9 – 39. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987.]

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Sanders, James A. “The Dead Sea Scrolls – A Quarter Century of Study.” BA 36 (1973) 109 – 48. Sanders, James A. “Dissenting Deities and Philippians 2:1 – 11.” JBL 88 (1969) 279 – 90. Sanders, James A. “Habakkuk in Qumran, Paul and the Old Testament.” JR 39 (1959) 232 – 44. [Revised in Paul and the Scriptures of Israel, edited by Craig A. Evans and James A. Sanders, 98 – 117. JSNTSup 83. SSEJC 1. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1993.] Sanders, James A. “Text and Canon: Concepts and Method.” JBL 98 (1979) 5 – 29. [Reprinted in From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, by James A. Sanders, 125 – 51. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987.] Sanders, James A. Torah and Canon. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1972. [2nd ed. Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2005.] Sanders, James A. “Torah and Paul.” In God’s Christ and His People: Studies in Honour of Nils Alstrup Dahl on the Occasion of His Sixty-Fifth Birthday, edited by Wayne A. Meeks and Jacob Jervell, 132 – 40. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1977. [Reprinted as “Paul and the Law.” In From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, by James A. Sanders, 115 – 23. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987.] Sanders, James A. “The Vitality of the Old Testament: Three Theses.” USQR 21 (1966) 161 – 84. Stendahl, Krister. “The Apostle Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West.” HTR 56 (1963) 199 – 215. Stendahl, Krister. “Introduction.” In The Scrolls and the New Testament, edited by Krister Stendahl, 1 – 17. New York: Harper, 1957. Stendahl, Krister. Paul among Jews and Gentiles. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1976. Stone, Michael E. “Judaism at the Time of Christ.” Scientific American 228 (January 1973) 80 – 87. Vermes, Geza. Jesus the Jew – A Historian’s Reading of the Gospels. London: Collins, 1973. Vischer, Wilhelm. The Witness of the Old Testament to Christ. London: Lutterworth, 1949. von Rad, Gerhard. Wisdom in Israel. London: SCM, 1972. Weinfeld, Moshe. Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomic School. Oxford: Clarendon, 1972. Ziesler, John A. The Meaning of Righteousness in Paul. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972.

15 Torah and Paul Introduction (1987) The question of the meaning of the Greek word nomos among Greek-speaking Jews in early Judaism and in Paul’s correspondence with his congregations – including and especially perhaps with one he loved but had not founded, the one at Rome – heats up at times to a boiling point. It is an important question but also a very difficult one for moderns who like to think we have orderly minds. It is exacerbated, however, when we insist that Paul was like us in such matters! The history of efforts to address the problem would indicate that we should not make such an assumption when attempting to make sense of a concept like “law” over the whole of the Pauline corpus. This chapter includes two modest efforts to look at the problem from the standpoint of one who approaches it from viewing Scripture in canonical perspective, moving toward Paul’s letters from study of the OT (MT and LXX) and from study of early Judaism – not by perceiving the problem then going back to the earlier literature. The first part of this chapter is a statement in short compass about the very concept of Torah from its inceptions in the Iron Age into early Judaism, with particular attention to its translation into the Greek term nomos. The second is a bold suggestion, on that basis, for understanding that Paul used the term in his writings with the same sort of latitude perceived earlier. A person such as Paul, like other Jewish writers of the era and since, would think of Torah as made up of both story and stipulation. Abraham Heschel stated clearly in one of the last articles written before his untimely death that Torah, and indeed Judaism, is made up of equal parts of haggadah (story) and halakah (law).1 Its two basic ingredients remain forever essential to its nature. Nils Dahl’s understanding of Paul had always interested me and seemed to make a great deal of sense to one who had learned as much from rabbinic instruction as from Christian, and as much from Catholic scholarship as from Protestant. Thus, it was a timely opportunity for me to contribute what I felt I had to say about Torah and Paul to the Festschrift being prepared in his honor. Everyone recognizes that most words have several meanings. The needs of Christian apologetics seemed to me to have colored scholarship to some extent from reading Paul in a fully canonical way: Paul certainly knew Scripture and tradition very well indeed. How could he say here in his writing that nomos was *  First published 1977. 1   Heschel, “Time for Renewal.”

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abrogated and there that it was holy, eternal, and good? What if it was not a real contradiction in the context of early Jewish literature? What if nomos was a word well chosen by the Septuagint translators to reflect the multivalency of the word “Torah” as understood in Judaism? What if Paul was also addressing the same problem that proto-Pharisaic Judaism had already confronted in the Hellenistic crisis of the third and second centuries BCE? How could Judaism make the old Bronze and Iron Age laws frozen in a stabilized Pentateuch apply to the totally new problems arising out of the hellenization of the whole Mediterranean world – and beyond? Judaism had found two important ways to tackle the problem.2 Paul’s was a third! The old Bronze and Iron Age laws, as well as those worked out during the Persian period, were abrogated while the Torah story was eternal, holy, and good, precisely the beginnings, from Creation onward, of the gospel, God’s story. Those laws had a role as pedagogue for the non-Jewish Christian, and indeed for the world perhaps as a whole, if one was convinced of the great value of the Septuagint in general culture; and certain of the ethical laws, and perhaps others, were still authoritative for the nascent church, or at least instructive. But in God’s barely introduced Jubilee or kingdom, they were basically overridden precisely because the new age or Jubilee had begun. Paul would have known very well of the practice in Pharisaic parlance and debate: if two different sets of laws in Judaism were in conflict, largely because of a calendar accident such as when the eve of Passover fell on a Sabbath, then the decision had to be made as to which laws were overridden and which operative. But when the arrival of the eschaton in Christ meant that the big Sabbath, the Jubilee, had been introduced, then it took precedence over all laws up to that point.3 Essentially it was a third solution to the very problem already faced in Judaism earlier because of its new Hellenistic context. But the Jew who could not believe the prior and basic Christian point that in Christ God had indeed introduced the eschaton, or new age, then this third solution had to be rejected. The rejection by those Jews of the Christianity that survived the destruction of the temple would follow perforce. On the other hand, Christianity thereafter became even more hellenized. The solution, therefore, proved decisive and effective. After review of some of the current discussion about Paul and the law (as it is still being put) over the intervening years, I feel that reaffirmation of these points

2   As argued in J. A. Sanders, “Text and Canon: Concepts and Method,” and J. A. Sanders, “From Sacred Story.” 3   A crucial point I failed to make in J. A. Sanders, “Ethic of Election” was the reason for the “wrath” of the householder in Luke 14:21. One notes that Fitzmyer, Luke, fails also to address the issue. The reason for the “wrath” was that those who had sent in the excuses submitted for exemption from service in the war did not yet believe that the battle, indeed the eschatological battle, had been won. What they were invited to was the victory banquet; the old laws, such as those in Deut 20, were now indeed overridden and had to be read in quite a different way, that is, with a hermeneutic that was based on the belief that in Christ the victory was won. This is clearly a Lukan restatement of whatever had been received of such a parable.

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is indicated.4 Like other Jews of the time, Paul sometimes meant ethos or stipulation by his use of Torah-nomos; at other times he meant mythos or gospel – God’s story. The fact that he used the term to mean stipulation in a third way5 is quite understandable. One might think of Calvin’s expression “third use of the law,” not only as a pedagogue to faith, but also as guide for obedience. Such multivalency of crucial and important terms was and is common.

Torah: A Definition Torah (perhaps from “to throw,” “to point the way,” or “to cast lots”; perhaps related to Akkadian tērtu, “oracle”) is a word in the Hebrew Bible meaning “instruction, guidance, oracle”; in Deuteronomy and postexilic literature it also means “law” or “law code.” In early Judaism it had a wide range of connotations, from Pentateuch, Torah par excellence, to all divine revelation in biblical and postbiblical literature; in some contexts it is a designation for Judaism itself. In the OT, Torah can mean a priestly or prophetic oracle, a divine response to a particular question, a directive sign; it can also mean instruction by a parent or wise person. In Isaiah, it seems to designate the prophet’s system of teaching. Generally in prophetic speech, it is used as a synonym for Yahweh’s Word or Way. In the broadest sense, it designates the divine will for Israel in the covenant relationship – both specific directive and the entire body of tradition that relates God’s gracious acts and anticipates Israel’s obedient response. The entire range of meanings is retained in postbiblical Judaism. Torah includes not only halakah (the rules of conduct: commandments, statutes, and ordinances) but also haggadah (religious teaching in a more general sense). It thus includes the whole of revelation, preserved in writing or orally – all that God has made known of his character, purpose, and expectation. “Talmud Torah” (study of Torah) includes reading a postbiblical midrash or a medieval commentary. “In a word, Torah in one aspect is the vehicle, in another and deeper view it is the whole content of revelation.”6 Whether in the Bible or in Judaism, Torah was clearly viewed as a mixture of two equally essential elements: story and stipulation, haggadah and halakah, mythos and ethos, gospel and law. How and when was this balance misperceived, so that Torah came to be viewed largely and in essence as halakah (or “law”)? One point of view places the blame upon the translators of the LXX: too consistently they rendered the word torah by the Greek nomos instead of varying the translation according to the contextual demand (e. g., as didache, didaskalia, dogma, etc.). In any case, there has been consistent agreement that their rigidity in the use of nomos has been misleading, since it conveys only the narrower sense of the word torah. But 4   See Räisänen, “Paul’s Theological Difficulties”; Räisänen, Paul and the Law; Hübner, Law in Paul’s Thought; E. P. Sanders, Paul, the Law, and the Jewish People. 5   See E. P. Sanders, Paul, the Law, and the Jewish People, 161. 6  Moore, Judaism in the First Centuries, 1:235 – 80.

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more recent study suggests that they chose precisely the word that they should have chosen. In the Hellenistic world that early Judaism inhabited, nomos had at least the same breadth of meaning that torah had for Judaism. “Nomos in the Pentateuch . . . means divine revelation, considered as a whole, composed of a doctrinal part and of a legislative part.”7 However, there is a general recognition that Judaism, in some aspects and expressions, had tended to stress halakah (and the necessity for obedience) as a condition for survival. This would have been a major lesson of history for those who experienced the exile of the sixth century BCE. One view is that it was the priestly writers and editors of the exilic period who began to equate Torah with law and to use the word interchangeably with statute, commandment, and so forth.8 A more recent view would place the narrowing of meaning in the book of Deuteronomy, especially in its exilic redaction.9 In any case, it would be a mistake to think that Judaism as a whole concentrated on halakah to the neglect of haggadah. In Pharisaic-rabbinic Judaism, as in all Jewish denominations, Torah has always retained the meaning of revelation in a general sense. This observation has led to the view that it was in Hellenistic Judaism that Torah came to be understood primarily as law.10 This view cannot be maintained. It is becoming increasingly clear that sharp distinctions along such lines between Palestinian and Hellenistic Judaism (or between so-called normative and heterodox Judaism) did not exist. Early Judaism (i. e., that of the period before 70 CE, when Jerusalem fell to the Romans) was remarkably diverse, not only in Palestine but also in the diaspora communities. An intense struggle took place in Palestine ca. 175 – 164 BCE as the result of efforts to accommodate Jewish cult and life to “modernization” (hellenization). The zeal of the reformers was matched and countered by reactionary forces who feared the loss of Jewish identity. The reaction was marked by a distinct zeal for Torah as a countermeasure to assimilation. Out of this crisis arose such traditionalist adherents as the Hasidim and Essenes, who, Hippolytus noted, were characterized by zeal for Torah. The reaction led to a successful armed revolt against the Seleucid domination of Palestine (see 1 and 2 Maccabees). Thereafter, the fortunes of such traditionalists waxed and waned under the political and cultural ambitions of the Hasmoneans and Romans. The destruction of the First Temple (sixth century BCE) had already necessitated the study of the ancient authoritative traditions for answers to the questions of identity and lifestyle in that destitute situation. While many exiled Judeans assimilated to the dominant Babylonian and Persian culture, others turned to the old stories for reaffirmation of their ancient identity, and drew from them survival power. This quest resulted, not only in a singling out of the Pentateuch for special emphasis (a Torah within the Torah, a status that it has had ever since)  7

 Pasinya, La notion de NOMOS, 89.  Östborn, Tōrā in the OT.  9   Lindars, “Torah in Deuteronomy.” 10  Dodd, Bible and the Greeks, 25 – 41.  8

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and its final shaping, but also in its receiving the enduring designation, the “Book of Life” (sefer hayyim). Torah became stable textually and adaptable canonically. In contrast to ˙the (destroyed) temple it could be taken anywhere (Palestine or the diaspora) and made relevant to changing contexts by whatever hermeneutics were necessary to make it so. Of secondary authority were other traditions (Prophets and Writings) that were part of Torah in its wider sense. Such Torah zealotry gave rise to the oral Torah (as with the Pharisees, the Mishnah, and the Talmud). When the written Torah no longer seemed relevant to some aspects of the new situation under the challenges of Hellenism, oral traditions were collected and expanded in order to address the question of identity. Emphasis was placed upon recognizable practices in personal and communal life, that is, upon halakah. An enduring attitude of self-examination and correction arose that sought not only to maintain identity but also to prevent a repetition of past and present catastrophes. The lessons of the past must not go unheeded. No detail of the Torah was so insignificant as to warrant neglect. Out of such desire for obedience and dedication to righteousness arose what, from another point of view, came to be viewed as the pursuit of righteousness based upon works of the law (Rom 9:31 – 32). There is no basis, however, for thinking that the more the Pharisees emphasized halakah the more they neglected haggadah. On the contrary, Torah for them always meant both the story of God’s gracious acts in creating and preserving a people for himself and also God’s will for the way that people should shape their lives in the light of those acts. The wide spectrum of Jewish belief and practice prior to 70 CE included groups who were preoccupied with scenarios of how God would act in their own time. Just as he had acted at the exodus or at other times in the Torah story, perhaps he would act now for a final settlement of the struggle between right and wrong, between the forces of light and the forces of darkness. Belief that he could and would do so took precedence for some over the other rightful Jewish concern to reflect God’s righteousness in daily life. Concentration on the traditions of God’s free acts to effect righteousness resulted in an apparent emphasis on Torah as precisely that type of story; concentration on the traditions of Israel’s proper response to those acts resulted in an emphasis on Torah as precisely a call to response. But Torah itself was always a balance between the two. In order to understand Paul’s attitude toward the “law” (nomos), it is necessary to remember that this term, after all, is used in the LXX to express the full range of meanings that the word torah expressed in Hebrew. In some NT passages, and especially in Paul, nomos is used in the sense of Torah story as well as Torah stipulations. Paul possibly does not set faith over against works (as is commonly thought), but asks in whose works one should have faith – those of God, or those that humans perform in obedient response to God’s works. If the former, argues Paul, then one could recognize in Jesus another climactic work of God (Rom 10:4). If the latter, then one might fail to recognize the work of God in Christ for what Paul was sure that it was. Thus the early church should be seen as an heir of those denominations in early Judaism that focused on Torah

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as the story of the free acts of God that he performed in order to establish righteousness on the human scene. Rabbinic Judaism should be seen as an heir of those denominations that focused on Torah as indicative of how one should live in obedient response to those free acts of God. In either case, Torah was the way, the truth, and the life for Israel.11

Paul and the Law On the one hand are a number of passages in the epistles that seem clearly to say that the law has been abrogated or abolished: Rom 7:1 – 10; Gal 2:19; 2 Cor 3:4 – 17; Eph 2:14 – 16. Paul uses in this regard a verb, katargeō, which is rather unequivocal in meaning. It can, according to context, range in connotation from “abolish” to “fade away” but there seems no way to alter its basic denotation.12 Along with these assertions one must align Gal 3:19 – 4:5 where Paul apparently says that the law had been valid from Moses only until Christ. On the other hand are a number of other passages that apparently contradict such assertions. While in Rom 7:6 Paul says, “We are discharged from the law . . .” in the same epistle at 3:31 he asks, “Do we then abolish the law by this faith? By no means! On the contrary, we affirm the law.” The words “discharged” and “abolish” are both forms of katargeō. The apparent contradiction is lodged in one and the same epistle so that solutions sought by means of audience criticism would not seem valid. At Rom 7:22 Paul claims that he delights in God’s law in his inner self; and in Rom 13:8 – 10 he seems to say that stipulations of the law must still be obeyed, and are indeed obeyable through agapē. At the heart of the problem stands Rom 10:4, which seems to belong to the first group of passages: “Christ is the end of the law . . .” And yet the word translated “end,” telos, can also mean “purpose, goal, accomplishment, or climax.” The problem, therefore, is that Paul apparently contradicts himself in the attitudes he expresses toward the law. Solutions have been sought for the dilemma in a number of directions: to deny the dilemma by rejecting the OT entirely; to attenuate it by putting the two Testaments on different levels of authority; to distinguish between the oral and the written Torah; to see the death sentence of the law as abrogated; to shift the emphasis from the troublesome word katargeō 11   Further on these matters, see Davies, Paul and Rabbinic Judaism, 147 – 76; Davies, Torah in the Messianic Age; Dodd, Bible and the Greeks, 25 – 41; Engnell, Israel and the Law, 1 – 16 (a review of Östborn); Gutbrod, and Kleinknecht, “νόμος,”1022 – 85; Hengel, Judaism and Hellenism, 1:58 – 254; Lindars, “Torah in Deuteronomy”; Moore, Judaism in the First Centuries, 1:235 – 80; Pasinya, La notion de NOMOS; Neusner, Way of Torah, 1 – 52; Östborn, Tōrā in the OT; Rössler, Gesetz und Geschichte; J. A. Sanders, Torah and Canon; J. A. Sanders, “Torah and Christ”; Smith, “Palestinian Judaism”; Stone, “Judaism at the Time of Christ”; Tcherikover, Hellenistic Civilization and the Jews, 1 – 265; Würthwein, “Der Sinn des Gesetzes im AT”; Hanson, “Jewish Apocalyptic.” 12   Cf. M. E. Dahl, Resurrection of the Body, 117 – 19. He attacks the problem by focusing on katargeō. The question of the authorship of Ephesians need not arise for the purpose of this study since a judgment about it would not actually affect the discussion.

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to the more pliable telos, and to see Christ as the New Torah in an eschatological age; to see idolatrous abuses of Torah as abrogated; to see Christ as displacing an older, invalid hermeneutic; to see the function of Torah in isolating and separating Jews from gentiles as ended; and to understand that all Paul meant was that the curses of Deuteronomy were suspended for the gentile Christian only. After cataloguing the solutions proposed to date (as of 1977 and insofar as I have been able to identify them) I will suggest that a fruitful approach to the dilemma might be to focus, not on katargeō or on telos, but on the binary nature of Torah that research on nomos also indicates.

II Perhaps the earliest solution, after the apostolic age, was that of Marcion. Marcion took Paul’s use of the verb katargeō in its strictest sense and decided that it meant that the OT itself should be eliminated from the Christian canon. To cling to one horn of a dilemma, however, does not eliminate the problem it poses. Marcion’s “solution” found expression again in the liberal period of the late nineteenth century in Adolf von Harnack, who also concluded that the OT should be removed from the Christian canon. While Luther would by no means have abrogated the OT from the Bible he apparently distinguished in some of his writings between the two rather sharply by saying that we have law in the OT and gospel in the NT. In his commentaries on the OT, however, he looked upon the OT as promise and the NT as fulfillment, agreeing with Augustine that the law demands what the gospel gives. In Lutheran tradition the OT is valid for the Christian as a guide for morality.13 Another early solution to the problem, in part prompted by Marcion’s severe surgery on the canon, was that of Origen, more or less followed in later times by Jerome, Calvin, W. Bousset, and G. Bornkamm among others. In this view, only a limited number of OT commandments were abolished in the work of Christ, such as circumcision, kashrut, and the laws about festivals, while the ethical and moral laws were “elevated and raised to their proper glory and place.”14 A third solution has been to distinguish between the written law of Moses in the Bible, and the oral law developed thereafter. The latter, also called Mishneh Torah (Torah she-bĕ-ʿal-peh), should be regarded as “commandments of men learned by rote” (Isa 29:13) and “the false pen of the scribes” (Jer 8:8), and accordingly be abrogated. It would, however, be very difficult to attribute such a distinction to Paul.15

13   See Davies, “Law in the NT”; Bring, “Paul and the OT”; and the full discussion by von Campenhausen, Formation of the Christian Bible, 1 – 102. 14   See the discussion of the problem in this regard by Barth, Ephesians  1 – 3, 287 – 91, esp. 287 – 88. The distinction between ceremonial and moral laws in the thinking of Paul has been denied by Gutbrod, “νόμος,” 1063; cf. Whiteley, Theology of St. Paul, 1086. 15   Cf. Barth, Ephesians  1 – 3, 288.

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A fourth possible solution is to view the sentence of death issuing from the law as that which was abrogated in the work of Christ. Its role in bringing knowledge and an increase of sin, and in inflicting curse and death upon humanity has been abrogated.16 Related to this would be the suggestion that Paul, in this case, meant something like fate, in speaking of the law, and that it was this evil fate in general that was abrogated.17 A fifth solution is that advanced and developed over the past thirty-five years by W. D. Davies.18 Centering his thesis in Rom 10:4, Davies understands Christ, for Paul, to have been the New Torah. Out of a depth of knowledge of rabbinic literature Davies brings to bear on Paul’s view of salvation history discussions by the rabbis of the fate of Torah in the messianic age. There were three dispensations in some rabbinic thinking of world history: the age of chaos (Gen 1:2); the age of Torah; and the age of Messiah. And in Paul there were three similar periods: that from Adam to Moses; that from Moses to Christ; and that from Christ to the Parousia (Rom 4:15; 5:13; 10:4). In the first, the world was lawless (Torahless); in the second Torah reigned; and the third had begun in Christ. Christ, for Paul, was not only the Second Adam, accounting for the first period (typologically); but he was also the New Torah. The Torah did its noble work in its time leading history right up to the age of Christ (Gal 3:24; Rom 10:4). Paul lived in that moment when the second and third ages met (1 Cor 10:11). In Rom 10:4 Christ is the telos (end) of the law; in 1 Cor 10:11 the telē (ends) of the ages meet. Davies picks up on earlier work done on wisdom in the Christ figure in Paul and suggests that this had been the wisdom already seen in Judaism incarnate, if that is the right word, in Torah. At any rate, it is now incarnate (admittedly a non-Pauline word, says Davies) in Christ. Davies’s position is the most developed of those viable today and in it he is followed by many current scholars, at least in certain aspects.19 Very close to Davies’s position as it centers in Rom 10:4 is one that understands telos in that passage to mean “goal” or “purpose,” so that Christ for Paul was the exponent of the Torah’s fulfillment in unifying all humanity.20 A sixth suggestion has come recently from Ragnar Bring, who nowhere mentions Davies; nor does he attempt to review the literature at all.21 “For Paul faith in Christ is faith in the Torah, God’s revelation in the Scriptures.” Bring centers much of his thought in Gal 3:24 – 25. The law leads to Christ in that it clearly shows right from wrong, but it did not give righteousness. God does that; and he did so in Christ. Following Odeberg he views the telos in 2 Cor 3:13 as just as important as that in Rom 10:4. This passage speaks not only of the end of the 16  Klein, Studien über Paulus, 62 – 67, cited by Schoeps, Paul: The Theology of the Apostle, 179; cf. Whiteley, Theology of St. Paul, 83 – 85. 17   Refuted by Barth, Ephesians  1 – 3, 290. 18  Davies, Torah in the Messianic Age; Davies, Paul and Rabbinic Judaism, 147 – 76; Davies, Setting of the Sermon on the Mount, 161 – 90, 447 – 50. 19   See, e. g., Fitzmyer, “Pauline Theology.” 20   Howard, “Christ the End of the Law”; cf. Cranfield, “St. Paul and the Law.” 21  Bring, Christus und das Gesetz, summarized in his “Paul and the OT.”

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fading splendor of Moses’ shining face on the mountain but also of the end of Torah – precisely that which the Israelites could not see at that point. The law is good in that it leads to Christ, but becomes idolatrous when the election of which it speaks is taken as privilege. This idolatry of Torah is what God has abrogated in the coming and work of Christ. The law itself is still valid, however, in that it reveals the extent of humanity’s fall and sin, and liability to judgment. There is much in Bring’s position to commend it, especially his seeing that law means not only legislation but includes also the story of Israel’s election. He does not carry through on the idea, however, as does G. E. Howard. His work is considerably less valuable than it otherwise would be had he attempted to locate his own thoughts in relation to those of others, especially Davies. Rather close to Bring’s position is the view that what Paul considered abrogated were misinterpretations and misuse of Torah. And the reason these have now been ruled out is that Christ has brought a new, the true, hermeneutic whereby to read Scripture and understand Torah.22 A seventh solution is that of Markus Barth in his work on Ephesians, especially Eph 2:15, which has commanded his attention for some years. That aspect of Torah that created a separation of Jews from gentiles is now abrogated or set aside. What Paul viewed as annulled was the middle wall of partition indicated by such central passages as Exod 33:16; 1 Kgs 8:53; and Exod 19:5 – 6. Insofar as God’s gift of Torah rendered Israel separate or distinct, or a priestly and holy folk, to that extent is Torah set aside.23 An eighth solution has been advanced by Michael Wyschogrod, an Orthodox Jewish scholar who openly approaches the problem Paul poses from an Orthodox point of view. Dismissing earlier Jewish (scholarly) attempts to address the problem, Wyschogrod disarmingly states, “. . . I would like to confess that it is difficult for me to see how a thinking Orthodox Jew can avoid coping with the Paul-Luther criticism of the law. For me it has been the only criticism that I have found really interesting.”24 Wyschogrod, in a paper as yet unpublished, centers his argument in Gal 3:13; 5:2; and especially in Acts 15.25 His argument is that Paul was an Orthodox Jew and remained one. Hence Paul knew that the gentile was not subject to the laws of Torah but only to the Noachide Laws, just as the ger toshav (resident alien) was not subject to the same stipulations as the ger tsaddik (full convert). For Paul, then, Christ had taken on himself the curses for disobedience to the law, of Deut 28 (cf. Gal 3:13), thus eliminating the threat thereof, or God’s Measure of Justice (middat ha-din), for gentile converts to Judaism through Christ, who remain subject only to the Noachide Laws, like the ger toshav. What has been abrogated, then, is simply the effect of Deut 28 in the case of gentiles who have been engrafted onto the stock of Israel through the 22

  Cf. Barth, Ephesians  1 – 3, 288, no reference given.   Ibid., 290 – 91. 24   Wyschogrod, “The Law, Jews and Gentiles.” Wyschogrod approaches the problem fresh, like Bring, without relating his suggestions to those of others. 25   Wyschogrod, “Paul, Jews and Gentiles.” 23

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agency of Christ. The conciliar decision at Jerusalem, reported in Acts 15:20 and 29, proves this because there it is clearly stated first by James and then by message from the apostles and elders that “gentiles who turn to God” are obligated only to the Noachide Laws. All Paul was trying to do was to provide access for gentiles to membership in Israel in good, Orthodox mode. In no way did he really depart from Orthodox practice. This is not the place for a full critique of Professor Wyschogrod’s position. There will be time for that when he will have published his intriguing paper.26 Interestingly enough, it is not as hors cours as might first appear: for it is not very distant from Markus Barth’s emphasis on Paul’s search for a way to tear down the middle wall of partition between Jew and gentile, noted above.

III There is a phrase, however, in Professor Wyschogrod’s paper that arrests one’s attention. “Just as Judaism . . . cannot claim on a priori grounds that God could not have become incarnate in a Nazarene carpenter, since to do so would be to make of Judaism a philosophic system rather than the story of the free acts of God, so, it seems to me, Christianity cannot argue on a priori grounds that God could have admitted the gentiles to the house of Israel and suspended the wages of sin only by means of an incarnation and crucifixion.” The intriguing questions that such a generous view prompts must be bracketed for the time being. To introduce another view of Paul’s position with regard to Torah, I want to lift out of Wyschogrod’s context the phrase he uses to describe Judaim—“the story of the free acts of God” – and suggest that it can also be used to describe one aspect of Torah. And that is as it should be if Torah is Judaism and Judaism Torah in the broad sense.27 All of the above solutions, it seems to me, stress the halakic aspect of what Torah meant to Judaism in the time of Paul almost to the exclusion of its haggadic aspect. Davies, Bring, Howard, and D. E. H. Whiteley recognize broader meanings of Torah, but only Howard perceives this aspect of Paul’s thought in the way I think it should be pursued; and yet he has done so only briefly, centering in Rom 10:4 exclusively. Wyschogrod, save for the one sentence quoted above, consistently uses Torah in the sense of legal stipulations for the faithful; and even there he uses it of Judaism, not of Torah. I think there is a clue here to our problem in understanding Paul. All scholars agree that the NT rests its case for Christ and the church (as the true and new Israel) on a basically heilsgeschichtlich (salvation-historical) view of Scripture, 26   At this point I would simply note that Gal 4:21 – 31 is clearly a midrash on Gen 21:10 – 12, a passage central to Paul’s understanding of Christ, with the curse of Deut 21:23 seen as devolving upon Christ in the light of his being the New Isaac. Cf. Vermes, Scripture and Tradition in Judaism, in conjunction with the dissertation of Bossman, “Midrashic Approach.” 27   Cf. J. A. Sanders, Torah and Canon, 1 – 8, 117 – 21.

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including Torah.28 The NT views the OT largely in terms of a story of God’s mighty acts of creation, election, and redemption, and within that view Torah also as the expression of God’s will for how to live before him. And yet, so-called normative Judaism, that which Professor Wyschogrod assumes in his writings as true Judaism, seems to have stressed Torah largely as the latter, and considerably less as the former.29 In fact, as one reviews the problem of Paul’s attitude to the law one senses, after considerable reading, that though most scholars are prepared to recognize the two basic facets of Torah, the story and the stipulations, greater weight is given the latter than the former where the word nomos appears in the NT, especially in Paul. Since the work of Gunnar Östborn, in modern times, there has been general recognition of the multiple meanings of the word Torah.30 Östborn’s work was seminal in that it showed clearly that the word Torah, as applied to the Pentateuch, already had a long history of bearing the two connotations: message or instruction, and law. A similar service has been rendered the Greek word nomos, going considerably beyond the work of C. H. Dodd and H. Kleinknecht.31 The tendency among scholars working in the field to express regret that the Septuagint overemphasized the legal aspect of Torah can be put into perspective.32 On the contrary it appears that nomos in the Hellenistic age had at least the full range of meaning that Torah had, perhaps more. It appears that the LXX translators chose precisely the word indicated to translate Torah. It has long been recognized that Paul used the word nomos in several senses. Rudolf Bultmann outlined five: OT law without distinguishing between the legal and nonlegal parts of the Pentateuch; the OT as a whole; the general sense of norm or principle; the sense of constraint or necessity; and finally: in the phrase the “Law of Christ.”33 To these one must add nomos (Torah) in the sense of Judaism itself, the identity symbol, over against Christos, for those Jews who maintained their identity “in Torah” rather than changing it to “in Christ.” Just as nomos apparently meant “religion” in the Hellenistic world, so I think Paul could use nomos to mean the Jewish religion, in that sense of the use of Torah, and make himself clear to his Greek-reading correspondents.

28   Even Käsemann, Perspectives on Paul, 63, says, “I would even say it is impossible to understand the Bible in general or Paul in particular without the perspective of salvation history.” Cf. von Campenhausen, Formation of the Christian Bible. 29  Moore, Judaism in the First Centuries, 1:265, clearly states that early Judaism held both aspects of Torah in balance: “‘Law’ must, however, not be understood in the restricted sense of legislation, but must be taken to include the whole of revelation – all that God has made known of his nature, character, and purpose, and of what he would have man to do.” 30  Östborn, Tōrā in the OT, is well reflected in Harrelson, “Law in the OT.” 31  Pasinya, La notion de NOMOS; cf. Dodd, Bible and the Greeks, 25 – 41, and Kleinknecht, “νόμος,” 1022 – 35. 32   Cf., e. g., Dodd, Bible and the Greeks, 33, followed by Davies, Paul and Rabbinic Judaism, 149: “It is unfortunate that its rendering in the LXX by the Greek nomos should have over-emphasized its legal connotation.” See, too, the misleading statements in Gutbrod, “νόμος.” 33  Bultmann, Theology of the NT, 1:259 – 60; cf. Cranfield, “St. Paul and the Law,” 44 – 50.

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IV What this means is that the problem of Paul’s attitude toward the law devolves upon each passage in the problem-dilemma posed above. There is no question but that in many passages he meant by nomos specific legal stipulations. But it is becoming increasingly clear that the question of what Jewish laws gentile converts to Christianity had to obey depended on factors other than Paul’s view that the nomos-Torah had somehow been abrogated. To this extent I think Wyschogrod is right: Paul could conceivably have been as Orthodox as Wyschogrod himself and have argued that many of the specific laws did not apply to gentile converts to Israel. Where one must differ from Wyschogrod is in his viewing Orthodox Judaism as normative in the first century, and in his viewing Christianity as a kind of Reform Judaism subject only to the Noachide Laws.34 On the contrary, Paul may have viewed certain laws as abrogated for gentile converts (and for Jewish converts),35 but still have viewed nomos-Torah as abrogated as well, in the limited sense that the new era had arrived, that Christ was the Torah Incarnate, the New Torah, the new identity symbol that opened God’s work of election-redemption to all people who would believe. Christ as the New Torah inaugurated the messianic era and to that extent superseded the Torah era, but also to that extent did not eradicate or annul Torah. Torah was caught up in Christ in a new age.36 Paul’s argument in this regard is basically a salvation-historical argument in an eschatological mode. As has been shown by Dietrich Rössler, intertestamental Judaism, in its variety of religious expression, emphasized the Torah story on the one hand in some sects or denominations, and the Torah stipulations on the other in others.37 Of the two Jewish denominations that finally survived the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, Christianity fell heir to the emphasis on the history-of-salvation-story aspect of Torah in the broad sense while Pharisaic-rabbinic Judaism fell heir to the emphasis on Torah as the divine will expressed for lifestyle. Just as the function of canon for the believing communities has always been, in dialogue, to answer, ever anew, the two questions of who we are and what we are to do, so the several meanings of Torah can be ranged under the two rubrics: mythos and ethos, or story and laws, or haggadah and halakah.38 Torah is and always was a balance between the two: to emphasize one to the exclusion of the

34  Stone, “Judaism at the Time of Christ.” The problem whether the stipulations in Acts 15:20 and 29, incumbent even upon gentile Christians, relate to the Noachide Law, or, as usually seen, to the laws for the ger (alien) in Lev 17 – 18, needs further exploration. 35   Cf. Gal 5:2 – 6; 6:15 – 16; Acts 15:11. 36  The kainē ktisis for Paul introduced a new kanōn for the Israel of God to walk by (Gal 6:15 – 16). One simply cannot avoid the fact, Rom 9 – 11 notwithstanding, that Paul saw the New Israel of God in some sense superseding the Old. 37  Rössler, Gesetz und Geschichte. 38   See J. A. Sanders, “Adaptable for Life.”

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other would be to misunderstand both Christianity and Judaism.39 But perhaps the best way, now, to broach the problem of Paul and the law is to make the prior observation here indicated, and to acknowledge that Paul, with others in the early church, but especially Paul in facing his mandate (which he strongly felt he had received “from the Lord”: Gal 1 – 2; 1 Cor 9:1; 15:5 – 9; Phil 3:5 – 11; 2 Cor 4:6) to preach the gospel to gentiles, found it well to emphasize Torah as the story of divine election and redemption, in the eschatological conviction that God’s recent work in Christ had made that election and that redemption available to all humankind, while at the same time to deemphasize those specific stipulations that seemed to present stumbling blocks to carrying out the mandate, and that seemed to detract from the Torah-gospel story of God’s righteous acts that had found their culmination, goal, and climax in God’s eschatological act in Christ. The combination of Torah story and eschaton was adaptable for life wherever it was told to the extent that the story was emphasized and the laws seen as dynamically or spiritually enforced (2 Cor 3:4 – 6).40 Bibliography Barth, Markus. Ephesians 1 – 3. AB 34. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1974. Bossman, David. “A Midrashic Approach to a Study of Paul’s en Christo.” PhD diss., St. Louis University, 1971. Bring, Ragnar. Christus und das Gesetz. Leiden: Brill, 1969. Bring, Ragnar. “Paul and the Old Testament.” ST 25 (1971) 21 – 60. Bultmann, Rudolf. Theology of the New Testament. 2 vols. New York: Scribner’s, 1965. Cranfield, C. E. B. “St. Paul and the Law.” SJT 17 (1964) 43 – 68. Dahl, Murdoch E. Resurrection of the Body. SBT 36. London: SCM, 1962. Dahl, Nils. “New Testament Eschatology and Christian Social Action.” LQ 22 (1970) 374 – 79. Dahl, Nils. “The Social Function and Consequences of the Doctrine of Justification.” NorTT 65 (1966) 284 – 310, in NTA (1967) 851. Davies, W. D. The Gospel and the Land. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974. Davies, W. D. “Law in the New Testament.” In IDB 3:95 – 102. Davies, W. D. Paul and Rabbinic Judaism. 4th ed. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1980.

39  Davies, Gospel and the Land, 24n19, asks if I have not stressed the story aspect of Torah too much. I trust that the present study may redress the balance. I find on the contrary, however, that the Torah problem is dealt with throughout biblical studies with too much stress on the law aspect of Torah. 40   See J. A. Sanders, “Torah and Christ.” There these observations are carried forward with an exploration in Paul of the relation of dikaiosynē to nomos, and of the relation of mythos to ethos, with observations on how Paul indicates the believer, in Christ, can move dynamically from gospel to law, or from identity to ethics, in ever new and ever-changing contexts. Cf. N. Dahl, “NT Eschatology.” For Paul, it was not a question of faith or works; it was consistently a matter of faith. The question he posed, if seen in the light of these observations, was rather: in whose works (righteousnesses) should one have faith, those of God in the Torah-Christ story, or those of which the believer is capable when one attempts to respond to that story and reflect it in one’s own life? Nils Dahl comes close to saying something similar (in Norwegian) in “The Social Function and Consequences of the Doctrine of Justification.” See the abstract in NTA (1967) 851.

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Davies, W. D. The Setting of the Sermon on the Mount. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964. Davies, W. D. Torah in the Messianic Age and / or the Age to Come. SBLMS 7. Lancaster, PA: SBL, 1952. Dodd, C. H. The Bible and the Greeks. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1935. Engnell, Ivan. Israel and the Law. Symbolicae Biblicae Upsalienses 7. Uppsala: Wretmans, 1946. Fitzmyer, Joseph A. The Gospel according to Luke. 2 vols. AB 28 and 28A. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1981 – 85. Fitzmyer, Joseph A. “Pauline Theology.” In Jerome Biblical Commentary, edited by Raymond E. Brown, Joseph A. Fitzmyer, and Roland E. Murphy, article 79. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1968. Gutbrod, Walter. “νόμος, κτλ.” In TDNT 4:1036 – 91. Hanson, Paul D. “Jewish Apocalyptic against Its Near Eastern Environment.” RB 78 (1971) 31 – 58. Harrelson, Walter J. “Law in the Old Testament.” In IDB 3:77 – 89. Hengel, Martin. Judaism and Hellenism: Studies in Their Encounter in Palestine during the Early Hellenistic Period. Translated by John Bowden. 2 vols. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1974. Heschel, Abraham. “A Time for Renewal.” Midstream 18 (May 1972) 46 – 51. Howard, George E. “Christ the End of the Law.” JBL 88 (1969) 331 – 37. Hübner, Hans. Law in Paul’s Thought: Studies in the New Testament and Its World. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1983. Käsemann, Ernst. Perspectives on Paul. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1971. Klein, Gottlieb. Studien über Paulus. Stockholm: Albert Bonniers, 1918. Kleinknecht, H. M. “νόμος, κτλ.” In TDNT 4:1022 – 35. Lindars, Barnabas. “Torah in Deuteronomy.” In Words and Meanings: Essays Presented to David Winton Thomas, edited by Peter R. Ackroyd and Barnabas Lindars, 117 – 36. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968. Moore, George Foot. Judaism in the First Centuries of the Christian Era: The Age of the Tannaim. 3 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1927 – 30. Neusner, Jacob. The Way of Torah: An Introduction to Judaism. Belmont, CA: Dickenson, 1970. Östborn, Gunnar. Tōrā in the Old Testament. Lund: Ohlssons, 1945. Pasinya, Laurent Monsengwo. La notion de NOMOS dans le pentateuque grec. AnBib 52. Rome: Biblical Institute Press, 1973. Räisänen, Heikki. Paul and the Law. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1986. Räisänen, Heikki. “Paul’s Theological Difficulties with the Law.” In Studia Biblica 1978. Vol. 3, Papers on Paul and Other New Testament Authors, edited by Elizabeth A. Livingstone, 301 – 20. JSNTSup 3. Sheffield: JSOT, 1980. Rössler, Dietrich. Gesetz und Geschichte: Untersuchungen zur Theologie der jüdischen Apokalyptik und der pharäischen Orthodoxie. 2nd ed. WMANT 3. Neukirchen: Neukirchener Verlag, 1962. Sanders, E. P. Paul, the Law, and the Jewish People. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1983. Sanders, James A. “Adaptable for Life: The Nature and Function of Canon.” In From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, by James A. Sanders, 9 – 39. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987. [Original in Magnalia Dei: The Mighty Acts of God: Essays on the Bible and Archaeology in Memory of G. Ernest Wright, edited by Frank M. Cross, Werner E. Lemke, and Patrick D. Miller, 531 – 60. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1976.] Sanders, James A. “The Ethic of Election in Luke’s Great Banquet Parable.” In Essays in Old Testament Ethics: J. Philip Hyatt in Memoriam, edited by James L. Crenshaw and

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John T. Willis, 245 – 71. New York: Ktav, 1974. [Revised in Luke and Scripture: The Function of Sacred Tradition in Luke – Acts, by Craig A. Evans and James A. Sanders, 106 – 20. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993.] Sanders, James A. “From Sacred Story to Sacred Text.” In From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, by James A. Sanders, 175 – 91. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987. Sanders, James A. “Text and Canon: Concepts and Method.” In From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, by James A. Sanders, 125 – 51. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987. [Original JBL 98 (1979) 5 – 29.] Sanders, James A. Torah and Canon. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1972. [2nd ed. Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2005.] Sanders, James A. “Torah and Christ.” In From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, by James A. Sanders, 41 – 60. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987. [Original Int 29 (1975) 372 – 90.] Schoeps, Hans Joachim. Paul: The Theology of the Apostle in the Light of Jewish History. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1961. Smith, Morton. “Palestinian Judaism from Alexander to Pompey.” In Hellenism and the Rise of Rome, edited by Pierre Grimal, 250 – 66. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1968. Stone, Michael E. “Judaism at the Time of Christ.” Scientific American 228 (January 1973) 80 – 87. Tcherikover, Victor. Hellenistic Civilization and the Jews. New York: Atheneum, 1970. Vermes, Geza. Scripture and Tradition in Judaism. Leiden: Brill, 1961. von Campenhausen, Hans. The Formation of the Christian Bible. Translated by J. A. Baker. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1972. Whiteley, Denys E. H. The Theology of St. Paul. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1964. Würthwein, Ernst. “Der Sinn des Gesetzes im Alten Testament.” ZTK 55 (1958) 255 – 70. Wyschogrod, Michael. “The Law, Jews and Gentiles  – A Jewish Perspective.” LQ  21 (1969) 405 – 15. Wyschogrod, Michael. “Paul, Jews and Gentiles.” A paper presented to the Columbia University Seminar on Studies in Religion, 11 November 1974.

16 The Gospels and the Canonical Process: A Response to Lou H. Silberman Lou H. Silberman’s essay attacks some of the basic assumptions underlying source criticism as inherited from the nineteenth century and criticizes the whole exercise of this discipline as it might apply to various bodies of Jewish literature in the Hellenistic cultural area, including the Gospels. Here, Silberman joins a growing company of students of the Bible, Old Testament and New, who are scrutinizing not only the results of source criticism but also its assumptions and methods. He puts his case sharply: “A century ago, scholars assumed unquestioningly that a literary work had its sources in literary works (for, after all, were not these scholars themselves ransacking literary works to fabricate new literary works?)” (p. 215).1 Silberman notes that even when we now speak of oral traditions “we still manipulate such traditions as though they too were ‘literary’ work,” suggesting that we need to “come to terms with a fecund world of ideas” (p. 215) and “to focus . . . on the gospels as manifestations of the storyteller’s art” (p. 218). Silberman speaks of “a large body of thematic materials” that “at various times, in various ways, with various emphases,” “came into expression for particular occasions” (p. 195). He stresses themes, or using Eric Werner’s phrase, “wandering motifs” (p. 217) on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the many and varied particular contexts to which these themes and motifs were applied. In the different applications “the various uses of particular themes may be entirely inconsistent one with the other” (p. 195). The same theme in two different contexts or literary deposits may be very different, even contradictory. Earlier this century, at a time when source criticism of the Old Testament had become almost a caricature in the hands of its most devoted adherents, Hermann Gunkel made some of the same observations about it. Source critics had begun to split infinitives and slice off conjunctions in pursuit of the kind of consistency that Silberman denies to his ancient themes.2 Gunkel brought to bear another kind of criticism on the book of Genesis, however, which but substituted the method of form criticism for that of source criticism. At about the same time, *  First published 1978. 1   The page numbers here refer to Silberman’s essay, “‘Habent Sua Fata Libelli’: The Role of Wandering Themes,” in the same volume in which this article by Sanders first appeared. 2   For an example of how far source criticism went, see Simpson, “Growth of the Hexateuch,” and Simpson, “Book of Genesis.” Hermann Gunkel wrote voluminously, but for an easily accessible statement of his approach, see his Legends of Genesis. See also Gunkel, “Fundamental Problems.”

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source criticism was being attacked by archaeologists and philologists, and in Germany, form criticism soon developed into tradition criticism.3 There were parallel developments in work on the four Gospels.4 The result of such critical dialogue within biblical criticism has been the continued use of the sigla devised by source criticism, such as “J,” “E,” “D,” “P,” “Q,” “logia,” and the like, but only as indicating possibilities of traditions rather than discreet palpable documents. Certainly, in the case of the Pentateuch, one cannot now find a serious scholar anywhere arguing for the date and provenance of “J” or of any putative stratum within it. Attention is now focused elsewhere.

Old Testament Textual Fluidity and Canonical Open-endedness The observations that Silberman makes are congruous with some basic developments today in Old Testament text criticism and canonical criticism. The recovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls has revolutionized Old Testament text criticism. Until their impact was absorbed by the field, text criticism was understood to be the exercise of biblical criticism that engaged in establishing the biblical text. By nearly universal agreement, this meant recovering the original text. One was free to mix philological observations with archaeological discoveries, literary critical analysis with scrutiny of ancient texts and versions, in order to come up with more and more brilliant and ingenious scholarly conjectures as to what the original of a difficult text was. One has but to look at the apparatus in the various editions of Rudolf Kittel’s Biblia Hebraica5 and now also in that of the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia6 to see the purpose of text criticism as it has been understood until recently. Examples of the end result of this view of text criticism can be found in The Jerusalem Bible (English version based on the first French edition)7 and The New English Bible. The older view was part of a general “primitivist” tendency within biblical studies. Biblische Wissenschaft, whether source criticism or text criticism, was dedicated to recovering points originally scored. The first of anything was the best. The closer one could tune into the ipsissima vox of Jeremiah or Jesus, for example, the closer one approached truth. How could it be otherwise? The assumption was that an ipsissima vox would in utter clarity convey the speaker’s intention. The full impact of the meaning of “context” for understanding “text” seems to have struck us fully only in recent times. While we may be a bit overwhelmed now with the scepticism forced upon us by the sociology of knowledge, it is nonetheless wise to be aware of assumptions. Even some earlier critics who insisted most strongly that the Bible was a product of history did not 3

  See, e. g., Bright, Early Israel, esp. 34 – 55.   See, e. g., Kümmel, Introduction to the NT, 35 – 247. 5   The 15th edition (1968) is a revised and augmented reprinting of BHK3. 6   BHS was first published 1968 – 76 in 16 fascicles. 7  Jones, The Jerusalem Bible. 4

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always take into account that whatever we might have from Jeremiah or Jesus had of necessity come through the understanding and formation of early believing communities. Form criticism made such observations with a sort of vengeance, but text criticism continued to include conjecture about original readings until the realization dawned that in the period up to about 100 CE, an important characteristic of biblical texts was not only their relative stability but also their relative fluidity. The degree of fluidity varied between Torah, Prophets, and Hagiographa, with Torah considerably more stable than the others, but it has become increasingly clear that a marked change took place in the course of the first century CE. Moshe Greenberg was the first to call attention to this change in 1956, and he was followed soon thereafter by Dominique Barthélemy, Shemaryahu Talmon, Frank Moore Cross, and Moshe H. Goshen-Gottstein.8 In the so-called “Accepted Texts Period,”9 that is, up to about 100 CE, there were different families of texts (Cross) or autonomous local texts (Talmon). Even handsome, official copies of biblical books had been adapted by textual alteration to the major theological beliefs of those who copied and read the books. As Talmon has shown, even proto-masoretic or Pharisaic scribes in the Persian-Hellenistic period contributed to the Scriptures they copied.10 But they did so within their understanding of piety and faith. Whatever tiqqunê sopherîm (corrections by the scribes) there were would have taken place in this period: Scribes could alter the text in the light of a major theological belief.11 Especially at Qumran the fluidity of biblical texts was exploited. As Talmon has so brilliantly shown: In contradistinction [to the later rabbis], the Qumran Covenanters did not subscribe to the idea that the biblical era had been terminated, nor did they accept the concomitant notion that “biblical” literature and literary standards had been superseded or replaced by new conceptions. It appears that the very concept of a “canon of biblical writings” never took root in their world of ideas, whatever way the term “canon” is defined. Ergo, the very notion of a closing of the canon was not relevant. This applies to the completion of the canon of Scriptures as a whole, and also to the closure of its major components. It would seem that not only did the complex of the Hagiographa remain an open issue, but also the collection of prophetic books was not considered sealed.12

Talmon goes on to recognize my own arguments about the open-endedness of the Psalter at Qumran.13

 8   Greenberg, “Stabilization of the Text”; and see the several articles by Dominique Barthélemy, Shemaryahu Talmon, Frank Moore Cross, Moshe H. Goshen-Gottstein, and others, all to the point, in Cross and Talmon, Qumran and the History of the Biblical Text.  9   For sketches of the history of transmission of the Hebrew text, see Goshen-Gottstein, “Hebrew Biblical Manuscripts”; Sanders, “Text Criticism and the NJV Torah”; the brilliant reconstruction by Barthélemy, “Text, Hebrew, History of.” 10   See the incisive and pivotal paper by Talmon, “Textual Study of the Bible.” 11   See Barthélemy, “Les tiqquné sopherim”; see now also Nielsen, “Tqwny Sprym,” the most complete study of the topic to date. 12   Talmon, “Textual Study of the Bible,” 379. 13   Ibid., 379 and n. 254; cf. Sanders, “Cave 11 Surprises.”

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In other words, the Gospels were shaped and then written precisely at the end of the period when in Judaism both the text and the canon of Scripture were to an extent fluid and open-ended. S. Vernon McCasland was wrong: Matthew did not twist the Scriptures when he so often reshaped his citations of the Old Testament to suit his overriding theological convictions concerning Christ and the church.14 Neither did the other New Testament writers. This was the thing to do. It was the greater piety. Here Qumran and the early church shared the same eschatological belief that God was doing another righteousness in their day like the ones recounted in Scripture, but even more important in that he was now eschatologically bringing all the earlier episodes of his holy history to completion, to climax and fulfillment.15 At Qumran, the Psalter was open-ended because of the belief that David wrote 4,050 psalms, and the greater piety was to be sure not to deny to him some psalm he might indeed have written. The idea of cutting the Psalter back to a “paltry psaltry” of 150 psalms would have been blasphemy for the Qumran community, whether other branches of Judaism had done so or not. It would have been as much a betrayal of their essential identity as God’s True Israel (the right denomination) as using a different calendar.16 In study of the Psalter we can see well what Eric Werner meant by “wandering motifs” in religious music,17 for in the non-masoretic psalms at Qumran, as well as in some of the 150 masoretic psalms, we find refrains, incipits, and many phrases deposited in more than one psalm. It would appear sheer folly to try to bring the methods of source criticism to bear on such phenomena, for what often happened was that many psalmists used common liturgical phrases and words. These wandering motifs and liturgical phrases belonged to everybody. Fifteen years after Albert C. Sundberg Jr. wrote his dissertation at Harvard University on the Old Testament in the early churches, his main point has been amply confirmed: whereas Judaism was able at the Council of Jamnia to stabilize its canon (with lively discussion continuing about a few literary units: Esther, Song of Songs, Qohelet, and even Proverbs and Ezekiel) at the end of the first century, Christianity, whose break with Judaism was definitive by the year 70, did not benefit from such standardization, so that the churches continued to have many of the books that some Jewish denominations before 70 had held sacred. The churches in the East retained the so-called Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha and those in the West the so-called Apocrypha.18 Published in the same year as Sundberg’s dissertation was a paper by Jack P. Lewis that showed that the occur14

  McCasland, “Matthew Twists the Scriptures.”   See the basic statement by Elliger on the hermeneutics of the author of the pesher on Habakkuk in his Studien zum Habakuk-Kommentar, 275 – 87; see also Sanders, “From Isaiah 61 to Luke 4”; Patte, Early Jewish Hermeneutic, 209 – 314. 16   See col. 27 of 11QPsa in Sanders, Psalms Scroll, 91 – 93; also, Sanders, Dead Sea Psalms Scroll, 15 – 21, 134 – 35, and esp. 155 – 59. 17  Werner, A Voice Still Heard, 83 – 84 (“Cantillation of Esther”) and 38; see also “General Index,” s. v. “Motifs, wandering.” 18  Sundberg, OT of the Early Church. 15

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rence of the so-called Council of Jamnia in 90 CE cannot be supported by hard literary evidence.19 Sundberg’s principal thesis remains valid, however: the stabilization that took place in Judaism by the end of the first century, and that is amazingly attested to in the biblical manuscripts now available from between the first and second Jewish revolts, simply did not take place in Christianity. On the other hand, the standardization and stabilization of text and canon that took place in Judaism between 70 and 135 cannot be read back, as was done until recently, into the pre‑70 period. For Judaism, the pre‑70 period was one of comparative textual fluidity and canonical open-endedness. Whatever antecedents to standardization there were before 70 cannot be viewed as official, normative, or the like.20

Old Testament Stabilization and Standardization The New Testament, then, came into being precisely at the end of the period of Old Testament textual fluidity and canonical open-endedness, that is, at the end of what Talmon calls “the biblical period.” For Christianity, the process of stabilization and standardization was less intense and was to continue for some time. Not until the Reformation would Christianity attempt to limit the Old Testament to the radically curtailed canon of Judaism. To the degree that Christianity remained eschatologically oriented into the second century CE, it remained open to whatever God might momentarily do, through the parousia or perhaps through some other re-creative or apocalyptic act. All of the New Testament literature, with only the possible exceptions of a few of the latest epistles, would have come from such an eschatological ethos in the churches. Judaism had for the most part turned the corner of stabilization after the catastrophe of 70, but Christianity continued largely in the same eschatological vein of thinking with which we are familiar from the vast resources of non-masoretic Jewish literature either preserved by the churches in the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha or discovered by archaeology at Qumran and elsewhere. If I read Hans von Campenhausen, Werner Georg Kümmel, Kurt Aland, and others correctly, Christianity did not even attempt to turn its corner of stabilization until the middle of the second century when Marcion shocked it into doing so. Until that time the churches in their christological and ecclesiological arguments not only engaged in midrash on Scripture (the “Old Testament”) but firmly believed in listening to the voice of the living Lord and of the Spirit in determining what could be used in worship and instruction.21 The dangers that Jeremiah was apparently willing to live with in his time, when, as a part of his polemic against Deuteronomy, he insisted on continually listening to the voice of Yahweh (Jer 7:23 et passim) became too great for the churches in the face of the disintegrating forces of multiplying heresies. 19

  Lewis, “What Do We Mean by Jabneh?”   See Barthélemy, “Text, Hebrew, History of.” 21   See esp. von Campenhausen, Formation of the Christian Bible, esp. 103 – 63; Kümmel, Introduction to the NT, 475 – 84; Aland, Problem of the NT Canon, esp. 8 – 18. 20

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But we should also note that as the New Testament thinkers and authors made use of the Old Testament, they retained well past the year 70 the type of freedom that characterized the era of textual fluidity that we know from the Qumran literature. The kind of narrow sense of midrash that was introduced after 70 in Judaism, in which the midrashist cited the biblical text accurately but then could use all sorts of rules to break it up and make it relevant and adaptable, did not take hold in Christianity until after Marcion and probably not until the time of Origen.22 This observation is parallel to that by Sundberg concerning the canon of the Old Testament in the early churches. Christian thinkers still had the earlier conviction of the ontology of canon: it was both relatively adaptable and relatively stable tradition. They cited it and adapted it and wove it into their new literature just as most Jews had been doing since the beginnings, way back into biblical times.23 The shift in ontology of Scripture, from being primarily adaptable to being primarily stable, which culminated by the end of the first century CE with an almost stable text and canon for Judaism, had antecedents in the first century BCE. Beginning in the reign of Salome Alexandra, with the activity of the Pharisees when they had some power, and culminating in the Pharisaic survival of the First Jewish revolt when they alone remained after the destruction of Jerusalem, the ontology of the Bible made the shift it would retain for 1800 years thereafter, until the rise of biblical criticism. The idea of verbal inspiration of the Torah was introduced by the proto-masoretic Pharisees beginning in the first century BCE and then not long thereafter the concept of literal inspiration.24 There had long been shamanistic ideas of inspiration, especially of Torah. But the concepts of verbal and literal inspiration were new and helped to solve some of the problems of relevance. The concepts were applied first, and primarily, to laws within Torah. The problem of relevance of the old Bronze and Iron Age laws was met in two basic ways. The first, as Silberman has noted (p. 191), was Torah šebě ʿal peh (“oral Torah”). To attribute laws to Moses was the basic means of legitimatizing them. To do so, the tradition arose, as noted in Pirqê Abot, that Moses, after his consultation with God on Sinai, passed much more on to Joshua in oral form than in written form. The concept of Torah šebě ʿal peh then guaranteed the continuing adaptability and relevance of the Law. But along with this concept also rose that of verbal inspiration. If the peshat (plain meaning) of a passage did not make sense in a new situation, or if no peshat of any passage met a new problem arising out of new situations, then the peshat had to be by-passed in some way.25 In its inception, verbal inspiration must have been one of the most “radic-lib” ideas ever to arise; if the plain meaning of a verse was not relevant then one could 22

  Le Déaut, “Apropos a Definition of Midrash.”   Sanders, “Adaptable for Life.” 24   See Goshen-Gottstein, “Hebrew Biblical Manuscripts”; Sanders, “Text Criticism and the NJV Torah”; Barthélemy, “Text, Hebrew, History of.” 25   See Loewe, “‘Plain’ Meaning of Scripture.” 23

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break up the syntax of the verse, focus on one word in it, and find a vehicle to a solution by locating the same word in another passage and bringing the two passages together. Once the peshat was thus by-passed to focus on isolated words, one could then create a new literary context by taking separate verses out of their original contexts and combining them. Actually, the literary aspect of the practice had been going on a long time. Many larger literary units in the Old Testament were formed because two smaller units both had the same word in them. This was the old redactional technique we call Stichwörter, and we should not be surprised to find the practice continued in this new and different way. What was new was the gradual shift in ontology of the Bible to its verbal inspiration, which eventually triumphed in both synagogue and church. But in our period, which Silberman calls the “Hellenistic cultural area,” the shift had but begun and at first only among Pharisees or, generally speaking, the proto-masoretic thinkers of early Judaism. To accompany the new view of Scripture there soon developed the seven hermeneutic rules of Hillel, the thirteen of Ishmael, and the final traditional thirty-two rules, each set accommodating itself more and more to the view of verbal inspiration as over against peshat exegesis. But even so, these rules never entered Christianity because they apparently did not become a part of the thinking of any of those eschatological denominations of early Judaism that fed into Christianity and because it all happened too late. Early Christians, like many other Jews of the time, fully believed that they lived still in the period of textual fluidity and canonical open-endedness, or what Talmon calls “the biblical period.”

Torah as Halakah and Torah as Haggadah Some of the hermeneutic techniques that were developed to render new halakot (legal interpretations) from old laws came to be applied also to biblical narrative to render haggadic midrashim.26 Silberman correctly notes that Torah was not limited in reference to the Pentateuch. As I tried to say in a recent article, Torah also meant all divine revelation, including the targumim, developing commentaries, the Talmud, and midrashim.27 Indeed, in some biblical passages Torah meant oracle or instruction and not law at all. It can even be affirmed that Torah has always included both narrative and stipulation, gospel and law, haggadah and halakah. Abraham Heschel, in one of the last articles he wrote before his untimely death in 1972, makes the point so beautifully in his inimitable way. What we know about Abraham and of Rabbi Akiba is not only law. In fact, most of what is contained in the Chumash or Tenach is non-legal ideas or tales. Similarly rabbinic literature contains both halacha and agada, and the thinking of Judaism can only be adequately understood as striving for a synthesis between receptivity and spontaneity, a harmony of halacha and agada . . . Halacha gives us norms for action; agada vision of the ends of living. 26

  See Gertner, “Terms of Scriptural Interpretation”; and Miller, “Midrash.”   Sanders, “Torah: A Definition.”

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Halacha prescribes, agada suggests; halacha decrees, agada inspires; halacha is definite; agada is allusive. The terminology of halacha is exact, the spirit of agada is poetic, indefinable. Halacha is immersed in tradition, agada is the creation of the heart. To maintain that the essence of Judaism consists exclusively of halacha is as erroneous as to maintain that the essence of Judaism consists exclusively of agada. The interrelationship of halacha and agada is the very heart of Judaism. Halacha without agada is dead, agada without halacha is wild.28

To observe with Philo, therefore, “dass die Thora mit der Weltschöpfung beginnt,”29 is to make but an elementary statement about the basic nature of Torah. Not only does Torah begin with creation, it goes on to deal with many important biblical topics including human sin, the relations among the nations, the election of Israel’s ancestors, God’s dealing with a family that sells its brother into slavery, God’s work as liberator, redeemer and desert guide – all before anything at all is said about the will of this God as to how his people should shape their society and conduct their lives. And if Gerhard von Rad’s form-critical analysis of many traditions in the Bible is correct, the stop at Sinai (where, according to tradition, the Law was given) was not considered important enough to be mentioned anywhere in the extra-pentateuchal recitals of the whole Torah story.30 The question is not whether creation begins the Torah, but rather how and when certain denominations in Judaism came to focus so much on Sinai that the narrative portions, the whole setting into which Sinai was placed, were devalued. I have tried to answer this question elsewhere.31 In early Judaism, almost from its inception in the exile, there seem to have been two major groupings of the scattered and multiplying Jewish denominations: those that focused on Torah as halakah and those that stressed its nature as haggadah. None stressed one to the exclusion of the other, but the one group searched the old preexilic traditions for light on what Jews scattered about the Persian Empire should do to retain their identity; the other searched these traditions for indications of what God would do to alleviate their burdens and liberate them once again from oppression. The latter developed into the heavily eschatological denominations, whose works we know in the Apocrypha, the Pseudepigrapha, and the newly recovered literature from Qumran. The former developed into those denominations, particularly the Hasidim and Pharisees, whose works we know as preserved by later rabbinic Judaism. We have far more of the literature of the eschatological denominations datable to the pre-70 period than of the Pharaisaic literature precisely because Christianity is heir to the former and, as noted, did not benefit from the intense stabilization and standardization process that culminated for Judaism around 100 CE (the discoveries of archaeology have also added to the store of this eschatological literature). Furthermore, the proto-rabbinic traditions are notoriously difficult to date: very little can be 28

  Heschel, “Time for Renewal.”   The words are from the notes to the German translation of Philo: Cohn, Heinemann, Adler, and Theiler, Die Werke Philos, 1:28n1. 30   von Rad, “Form-Critical Problem”; cf. Sanders, Torah and Canon, ix – xx. 31   See Sanders, “Torah: A Definition,” and Sanders, “Torah and Paul.” 29

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dated surely before 70. Jacob Neusner’s form-critical work on these traditions but underscores the point.32 Jewish denominations that were extant before 70 can be placed at the two ends of the spectrum just described: those that emphasized Torah, and hence Judaism, as a story of what God has done and will do, and those that emphasized Torah as stipulations for what Jews have done and should do. There were many shades between, with some perhaps preferring to stress the role of wisdom in Jewish heritage, but the great preponderance of the literature datable to the period indicates the two major groupings. After Marcion, the central question of canon for Christians may well have been whether the Old Testament was to be retained as Scripture. But the central question about the New Testament, precisely in the period of which Silberman writes, was whether, so to speak, the New Testament was biblical.33 Paul and the Evangelists had the chutzpah to claim that the God who created the world, redeemed the slaves from Egyptian bondage, gave them the law at Sinai, guided them through the desert, brought them into the Promised Land, and occupied Jerusalem with David, has just now brought this haggadah to its fulfilment and climax: the Torah story is now complete. Paul puts it succinctly: Christ is the telos of the Torah righteousness-wise for all who believe (Rom 10:4), i. e., for all who read the Torah as a record of what God has done, as haggadah. As Silberman very movingly stresses, the specific haggadah for the Passover Seder insists that God was the principal actor in the story of Israel’s redemption (p. 208). So also, if the New Testament is read theocentrically, rather than anthropocentrically or christocentrically, in continuity with the Old Testament, one can see its central argument: God has done it again, this time a mighty act of redemption and creation in one, in Christ.

Conclusion: Reading the Gospels Midrashically I am constrained to agree with the overall thrust of Silberman’s essay: source critical work on the formation of the Gospels does not now seem to be the most fruitful avenue of approach to them (p. 218). All the earliest Christians knew and applied the Old Testament (Law, Prophets, Psalms, and other writings) to their christological and ecclesiological claims. In addition, they had traditions about Jesus’ words and parables, as well as some form of the basic kergyma of the early church about the work of God in Christ. These latter grew in authority through the middle third of the first century to have weight equal eventually to that of the Old Testament Scriptures.34 Knowing what we do about the period (considering the observations brought by Silberman and those that I have tried to bring, about 32

 Neusner, Rabbinic Traditions.   Sanders, “Torah and Christ,” esp. 372 – 75; also, see Sanders, “Torah and Paul.” 34   See von Campenhausen, Formation of the Christian Bible, esp. 103 – 63; Kümmel, Introduction to the NT, 475 – 84; Aland, Problem of the NT Canon, esp. 8 – 18. 33

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comparative scriptural fluidity and open-endedness), it is simply very difficult to imagine Mark or Matthew, Luke or John, at their desks copying great reams of a Gospel Vorlage or to imagine that these literary works had their sources in previous literary works, at least not quite in the way source critics have supposed. On the other hand, it cannot be ignored that there is an amazing amount of verbatim agreement in detailed phrasing among the Synoptics. We cannot agree with Birger Gerhardsson that memory work among early Christians would account for this phenomenon: he simply did not convince very many of us.35 Silberman’s suggestion about free-floating themes will not suffice by itself to account for the Synoptic phenomenon, nor will my observations alone halt the perennial debate regarding the priority of Mark, or Matthew, or even Luke. But I do have a suggestion to make, and it evolves out of the hint that the central christological and ecclesiological arguments of the New Testament become clear if the New Testament is read theocentrically rather than christocentrically. My suggestion is that the New Testament be studied midrashically, through the disciplines of comparative midrash and canonical criticism, before the methods of source and form criticism are applied. I am convinced that we need all the subdisciplines of biblical study so far developed but that they are complementary to each other. I am equally convinced that New Testament students need to see the New Testament as the product of a denomination of Judaism in the first century and to approach it in the light of the history of all the Jewish literature from the fourth century BCE to the end of the first century CE. Of course, the New Testament has a lot of Hellenism in it, but as Martin Hengel has brilliantly shown, so did much of the rest of the Judaism of the period have a great deal of Hellenism in it.36 For that matter, the Old Testament has a lot of Bronze, Iron, and Persian Age cultural idiom in it. But none of these should be absolutized. If one studies the Bible holistically, or canonically, in the stream of history, and if one approaches the New Testament “from its top side,” one gets a perspective that the great bulk of New Testament source and form criticism has hardly considered. My students, among themselves, call the work of comparative midrash on the New Testament “coming up through the floorboards of the New Testament.” New Testament scholars agree that Scripture, or the Old Testament, was the first reference of authority for all New Testament writers, and especially for Jesus himself. The Old Testament cuts across the whole question of Gospel sources, whether the source was Jesus, his sayings, “Q,” logia, Mark, Matthew, or whatever. One need but ask of the Old Testament citation or allusion (and sometimes it is only an Old Testament theme woven into the fabric of a Gospel passage or, as Silberman notes, floating themes of the Jewish times, which nonetheless nearly all have roots in Old Testament tradition) what its function is in the passage. And one does this first by drawing up a history of the function of this same Old Testament passage or theme since its inception in Old Testament times right 35

 Gerhardsson, Memory and Manuscript.   See Hengel, Judaism and Hellenism.

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through early Judaism, until it shows up in the New Testament. The job would not be complete, of course, until the work of the other subdisciplines had also been brought to bear on the New Testament passage in question. One of the poignant observations that one makes, when he or she has completed an exercise in comparative midrash, is one of Silberman’s first points in his paper: when an old tradition or theme comes into expression for a particular occasion it may be quite inconsistent with the way it functioned on another particular occasion. Often, as he rightly says, “the same is not the same” (p. 196). We can observe this far back in biblical times. The reference to the theme of Abraham being one person and inheriting the land is utterly rejected by Ezekiel (33:24 – 29) but is advanced as divine truth by Deutero-Isaiah fifty years later (51:1 – 3). And many other such examples in the Bible can be given. Such a pluralistic observation can be expanded to the general insight brilliantly stated by James Barr: “It is the shape of the tradition that leads Jesus to the finding of his obedience; but it is also the shape of the tradition that leads his enemies to see him as a blasphemer and to demand that he should be put to death.”37 The student of the Qumran scrolls often gets excited when he or she observes the entirely different functions of the same Old Testament passage or theme in a Qumran commentary over against its appearance in the New Testament. They sometimes serve in the two different contexts to say precisely opposing things.38 Can we be surprised to observe that some of the very traditions of the Old Testament that the New Testament calls upon to support its christological claims were called upon by other Jews of the period to reject these claims? There are two observations here: (1) The Bible is highly pluralistic; and (2) its traditions are by their very nature as canon adaptable to differing contexts and needs. Whatever was not ambiguous enough to have meaning or value in at least two generations and in more than one context simply was not picked up, read again, and passed on. I hope that this point about canon is abundantly clear by now.39 But the Bible is also pluralistic. In the Neo-Orthodox period, when I was a student, we were on constant quest for the unity of the Bible. Today my students know that when they think they have found a point clearly scored in biblical literature, they must then begin a search for its contrapositive. Isaiah 2:4 and Mic 4:3 say that at some future point Judah will beat her swords into plowshares and her spears into pruning hooks, but Joel 3:10 (4:10 in Hebrew) says that she will beat her plowshares into swords and her pruning hooks into spears. Little wonder that the Fourth Gospel says Jesus gave peace (John 14:27), whereas Luke says he came to bring not peace but dissension (Luke 12:51 – 53). Study of true and false prophecy in the Old Testament has taken a new turn in the past few years and is one of the more exciting areas of biblical study at the moment, especially the disputation passages, where two ancient theologians or colleagues can call on the same ancient tradition and apply it to the same 37

 Barr, Old and New in Interpretation, 27.   See Sanders, “Habakkuk in Qumran,” and Sanders, “Ethic of Election,” esp. 248 – 53.   Sanders, “Adaptable for Life.”

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historical and political context in ancient Israel or Judah but do so in opposing ways.40 Isaiah’s colleagues could say that even though the Assyrian forces were gathering outside the city gates and setting up their siege works to attack Jerusalem, God would at the right moment rise up as on Mt. Perazim and be angry as in the valley of Gibeon back there when he helped David defeat the Philistines (2 Sam 5:17 – 25) and helped Judah repel the Assyrians in 701 BCE. Isaiah responded that God would rise up right enough as on Mt. Perazim and be wroth as in the valley of Gibeon to do his deed, but strange would be his deed and alien his work, for this time he would as Holy Warrior be at the head of the enemy troops attacking his own people (Isa 28:21). Incidentally, Isaiah’s colleagues, the so-called false prophets, were right and Isaiah wrong in terms mechanically of what happened in 701. Their hermeneutics were different. But it is Isaiah that is in the canon and not the others. So in New Testament study I am much more interested in determining the function of Old Testament themes in a given New Testament passage than in determining which Evangelist was copied by the others. There are always three variables in the study of the function of an authoritative tradition: the old text or tradition called upon, the historical context into which it is cited, and the hermeneutics used in doing so. The Bible is full of unrecorded hermeneutics from earliest Old Testament times to the last New Testament book, and we have only begun to ferret them out and look at them. The believing communities, synagogues and churches, have for so long imported hermeneutics to the Bible to render it relevant to ongoing generations that we have failed to see that the Bible is one long record of adaptation of authoritative traditions or themes in many shapes, forms, and styles to ever-changing situations and contexts. Could it not be that recovery of these hermeneutics might give us a clue as to the hermeneutics we might use today to hear afresh what some of these themes might say to the believing communities that find their identity in them?41 My suspicion is that if we do just this, we may recover the power for life that the canon has had for these believing communities for nearly three thousand years, including the power to liberate ourselves from ancient and modern cultural forms and mores that sponsor repression of the weak and corrupt the consciousness of the powerful. To focus on the Gospels as manifestations of the storyteller’s art could begin with a consideration of how the various stories update and contemporize the Old Testament traditions and themes they held to be authoritative. To read the New Testament theocentrically, rather than christocentrically, might indicate how biblical it really is despite the odd, sometimes puzzling Hellenistic idiom in which its stories are recited. To do so might also help us become liberated from absolutizing the equally odd Bronze, Iron, and Persian Age idioms of the Old Testament.

40   See Crenshaw, Prophetic Conflict; Hossfeld and Meyer, Prophet gegen Prophet; Sanders, “Hermeneutics in True and False Prophecy.” 41   See Sanders, “Hermeneutics” (IDBSup).

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The early churches in their astounding wisdom provided themselves four quite different Gospels so that we might not get hung up on any one of them. Nor should we permit ourselves to get hung up on any of the ancient Near Eastern idioms in which the Bible recites its story of the way God does what he does and says what he says in any age. To experience this liberation might indicate how we can also be liberated from the recent Modern Near Western idioms that serve us so well in this and other scholarly gatherings, whether the idiom be literary criticism, or source criticism, or form criticism, or rhetorical criticism, or redactional criticism, or canonical criticism.

Bibliography Aland, Kurt. The Problem of the New Testament Canon. Contemporary Studies in Theology 2. London: Mowbray, 1962. Barr, James. Old and New in Interpretation: A Study of the Two Testaments. New York: Harper & Row, 1966. [Rev. ed. 1985.] Barthélemy, Dominique. “Les tiqquné sopherim et la critique textuelle de l’Ancien Testament.” In Congress Volume, Bonn 1962. IOSOT, 285 – 304. VTSup 9. Leiden: Brill, 1963. [Reprinted in Études d’histoire du texte de l’Ancien Testament, by Dominique Barthélemy, 91 – 110. Fribourg: Éditions universitaires; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck  & Ruprecht, 1978.] Barthélemy, Dominique. “Text, Hebrew, History of.” In IDBSup 878 – 84. Bright, John. Early Israel in Recent History Writing: A Study in Method. SBT 19. London: SCM, 1956. Cohn, Leopold, Isaak Heinemann, Maximilian Adler, and Willy Theiler, eds. Die Werke Philos von Alexandria in deutscher Übersetzung. 6 vols. Schriften der jüdisch-hellenistischen Literatur in deutscher Übersetzung. Breslau: M. & H. Marcus, 1900 – 1937. Crenshaw, James L. Prophetic Conflict: Its Effect upon Israelite Religion. BZAW 124. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1971. Cross, Frank M., and Shemaryahu Talmon, eds. Qumran and the History of the Biblical Text. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975. Elliger, Karl, ed. Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia. 16 fascicles. Stuttgart: Privilegierte Bibel­ anstalt, 1968 – 76. Elliger, Karl. Studien zum Habakuk-Kommentar vom Toten Meer. BHT 15. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1953. Gerhardsson, Birger. Memory and Manuscript: Oral Tradition and Written Transmission in Rabbinic Judaism and Early Christianity, translated by Eric J. Sharpe. Acta Seminarii Neotestamentici Upsaliensis 22. Lund: C. W. K. Gleerup; Copenhagen: Ejnar Munksgaard, 1961. Gertner, Meir. “Terms of Scriptural Interpretation: A Study in Hebrew Semantics.” Bulletin of the School of Oriental (and African) Studies 25 (1962) 1 – 27. Goshen-Gottstein, Moshe H. “Hebrew Biblical Manuscripts: Their History and Their Place in the HUBP Edition.” Bib 48 (1967) 243 – 90. Greenberg, Moshe. “The Stabilization of the Text of the Hebrew Bible: Reviewed in the Light of the Biblical Materials from the Judean Desert.” JAOS 76 (1956) 157 – 67. [Reprinted in The Canon and Masorah of the Hebrew Bible: An Introductory Reader, edited by Sid Z. Leiman, 298 – 326. New York: Ktav, 1974.]

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Gunkel, Hermann. “Fundamental Problems of Hebrew Literary History.” In What Remains of the Old Testament and Other Essays, translated by A. K. Dallas, 57 – 68. New York: Macmillan, 1928. Gunkel, Hermann. The Legends of Genesis: The Biblical Saga and History, translated by W. H. Carruth. New York: Schocken, 1964. [Reprint of 1901 edition.] Hengel, Martin. Judaism and Hellenism: Studies in Their Encounter in Palestine during the Early Hellenistic Period. Translated by John Bowden. 2 vols. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1974. Heschel, Abraham. “A Time for Renewal.” Midstream 18 (May 1972) 46 – 51. Hossfeld, Frank Lothar, and Ivo Meyer. Prophet gegen Prophet: Eine Analyse der alttestamentlichen Texte zum Thema wahre und falsche Propheten. Biblische Beiträge 9. Fribourg: Verlag Schweizerisches Katholisches Bibelwerk, 1973. Jones, Alexander, ed. The Jerusalem Bible. 1st ed. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966. Kittel, Rudolf, ed. Biblia Hebraica. 3rd ed. Completed by Albrecht Alt and Otto Eissfeldt. Stuttgart: Privilegierte Württembergische Bibelanstalt, 1937. Kümmel, Werner Georg. Introduction to the New Testament. Rev. ed. Translated by Howard Clark Kee. Nashville: Abingdon, 1975. Le Déaut, Roger. “Apropos a Definition of Midrash.” Int 25 (1971) 259 – 82. Lewis, Jack P. “What Do We Mean by Jabneh?” JBR 32 (1964) 125 – 32. [Reprinted in The Canon and Masorah of the Hebrew Bible: An Introductory Reader, edited by Sid Z. Leiman, 254 – 61. New York: Ktav, 1974.] Loewe, Raphael. “The ‘Plain’ Meaning of Scripture in Early Jewish Exegesis.” In Papers of the Institute of Jewish Studies, 140 – 85. Jerusalem: Hebrew University Press, 1964. McCasland, S. Vernon. “Matthew Twists the Scriptures.” JBL 80 (1961) 143 – 48. Miller, Merrill P. “Midrash.” In IDBSup 593 – 97. Neusner, Jacob. The Rabbinic Traditions about the Pharisees before 70. 3 vols. Leiden: Brill, 1971. The New English Bible with The Apocrypha. London: Oxford University Press; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970. Nielsen, Bruce. “Tqwny Sprym.” MDiv thesis, Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York, 1977. Patte, Daniel. Early Jewish Hermeneutic in Palestine. SBLDS 22. Missoula, MT: Scholars, 1975. Sanders, James A. “Adaptable for Life: The Nature and Function of Canon.” In Magnalia Dei: The Mighty Acts of God: Essays on the Bible and Archaeology in Memory of G. Ernest Wright, edited by Frank M. Cross, Werner E. Lemke, and Patrick D. Miller, 531 – 60. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1976. [Reprinted in From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, by James A. Sanders, 9 – 39. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987.] Sanders, James A. “Cave 11 Surprises and the Question of Canon.” In New Directions in Biblical Archaeology, edited by David Noel Freedman and Jonas C. Greenfield, 101 – 16. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969. [Original McCQ 21 (1968) 1 – 15 (= 284 – 98).] Sanders, James A. The Dead Sea Psalms Scroll. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1967. Sanders, James A. “The Ethic of Election in Luke’s Great Banquet Parable.” In Essays in Old Testament Ethics: J. Philip Hyatt in Memoriam, edited by James L. Crenshaw and John T. Willis, 245 – 71. New York: Ktav, 1974. [Revised in Luke and Scripture: The Function of Sacred Tradition in Luke – Acts, by Craig A. Evans and James A. Sanders, 106 – 20. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993.] Sanders, James A. “From Isaiah 61 to Luke 4.” In Christianity, Judaism and Other Greco-Roman Cults: Studies for Morton Smith at Sixty, Part 1, New Testament, edited by Jacob Neusner, 75 – 106. Studies in Judaism in Late Antiquity 12. Leiden: Brill, 1975. [Reprinted in Luke and Scripture: The Function of Sacred Tradition in Luke – Acts, by Craig A. Evans and James A. Sanders, 46 – 69. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993.]

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Sanders, James A. “Habakkuk in Qumran, Paul and the Old Testament.” JR 39 (1959) 232 – 44. [Revised in Paul and the Scriptures of Israel, edited by Craig A. Evans and James A. Sanders, 98 – 117. JSNTSup 83. SSEJC 1. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1993.] Sanders, James A. “Hermeneutics.” In IDBSup 402 – 7. Sanders, James A. “Hermeneutics in True and False Prophecy.” In Canon and Authority: Essays in Old Testament Religion and Theology, edited by George W. Coats and Burke O. Long, 21 – 41. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1977. [Reprinted as “Canonical Hermeneutics: True and False Prophecy.” In From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, by James A. Sanders, 87 – 105. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987.] Sanders, James A. The Psalms Scroll of Qumran Cave 11 (11QPsa). DJD 4. Oxford: Clarendon, 1965. Sanders, James A. “Text Criticism and the NJV Torah.” JAAR 39 (1971) 193 – 97. Sanders, James A. “Torah: A Definition.” In IDBSup 909 – 11. [Reprinted in From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, by James A. Sanders, 111 – 14. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987.] Sanders, James A. Torah and Canon. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1972. [2nd ed. Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2005.] Sanders, James A. “Torah and Christ.” Int 29 (1975) 372 – 90. [Reprinted in From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, by James A. Sanders, 41 – 60. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987.] Sanders, James A. “Torah and Paul.” In God’s Christ and His People: Studies in Honour of Nils Alstrup Dahl on the Occasion of His Sixty-Fifth Birthday, edited by Wayne A. Meeks and Jacob Jervell, 132 – 40. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1977. [Reprinted as “Paul and the Law.” In From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, by James A. Sanders, 115 – 23. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987.] Silberman, Lou H. “‘Habent Sua Fata Libelli’: The Role of Wandering Themes in Some Hellenistic Jewish and Rabbinic Literature.” In The Relationships among the Gospels: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue, edited by William O. Walker Jr., 195 – 218. San Antonio, TX: Trinity University Press, 1978. Simpson, Cuthbert A. “The Book of Genesis: Introduction and Exegesis.” In IB 1:437 –  829. Simpson, Cuthbert A. “The Growth of the Hexateuch.” In IB 1:185 – 200. Sundberg, Albert C., Jr. The Old Testament of the Early Church. HTS 20. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964. Talmon, Shemaryahu. “The Textual Study of the Bible – A New Outlook.” In Qumran and the History of the Biblical Text, edited by Frank M. Cross and Shemaryahu Talmon, 321 – 400. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975. von Campenhausen, Hans. The Formation of the Christian Bible. Translated by J. A. Baker. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1972. von Rad, Gerhard. “The Form-Critical Problem of the Hexateuch.” In The Problem of the Hexateuch and Other Essays, translated by E. W. Trueman Dicken, 1 – 78. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966. Werner, Eric. A Voice Still Heard: The Songs of the Ashkenazic Jews. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1976.

17 The Bible and the Believing Communities It gives me great pleasure to join with others in this manner to express gratitude to Jim Mays for his years of work as author and editor; the world of biblical scholarship is greatly in his debt.1 The need to rethink the relationship between the mainline denominations and the seminaries that serve them is urgent even to the most casual observer on either side of the relationship. James Hopewell has addressed the inadequacy of models followed in those relationships, especially models that view congregations as static constituencies. His was an important contribution to the impetus to rethink the role of the mainline seminary in the complex of American Protestant Christianity in the late twentieth century. The present essay explores that relationship, focusing on the role of the Bible in congregations and how it is taught in seminary. The seminaries addressed in what follows are those that consciously understand themselves as serving congregations or communities that view the Enlightenment as a gift of God and a part of revelatio generalis – whether all such congregations and their members are fully conscious of such a theological position or not. By the Enlightenment I mean not only its intellectual heritage but also its basic characteristic of liberation from all forms of feudalism and the shackles of ignorance, subservience, and superstition. We are not addressing the problems of so-called fundamentalists or any others that understand revelation to have ceased with the Bible or to be limited to hierarchical inspiration, or that do not believe in revelatio generalis in sensu lato. Nor are we addressing humanists or others that understand truth to derive only from inductive search or from human intellectual reflection with no referent beyond it. Rather we are consciously addressing those who have endeavored to incorporate the Enlightenment into an understanding of the ongoing self-revelation of Reality as rooted in Scripture and tradition, that is, those who have endeavored to wed academia, in its broadest and best sense of freedom in the quest for truth, to ecclesia, precisely those who have maintained a hermeneutic of God both as *  First published 1986. 1   Mays is also a contributor to canonical criticism; see, e. g., “Historical and Canonical: Recent Discussions.” Mays is a dedicated churchman as well, whose concerns about seminary and church I trust are expressed to some extent in the present essay. The essay was originally written for the Consultation on the Congregation and Theological Education at the Candler School of Theology, 3 – 5 June 1985. James Hopewell’s paper, “Congregational Paradigm for Theological Education,” was a point of reference for the Consultation.

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universal continuing creator and as particular continual redeemer in Israel and in Christ. Within that broad rubric, the present essay addresses more specifically those seminaries whose faculties have come to find their professional and vocational identities more in academia, in its narrower sense, and its guilds than in the believing communities they are designed to serve. In other words, the seminaries in mind in what follows are those that are a part of secular universities, independent seminaries affiliated with secular universities, as well as more distinctly church-related and church-supported seminaries. In yet other words, the seminaries in mind are those that, for the most part, have more or less consciously followed the model established by William Rainey Harper in the early years of the twentieth century, those “training the scholarly pastor.” The problem addressed, that of the role of the Bible in the ongoing believing communities that find clues to their identity and their lifestyle through ongoing dialogue with it, is exacerbated in the late twentieth century as much as it was in the late nineteenth century, though in different modes. The so-called modernist-fundamentalist tension was not resolved by either liberalism or neo-orthodoxy. The tension does not dissolve either by focusing almost exclusively on God as creator of all or by focusing almost exclusively on God as redeemer of all through a particular kerygma. A primary focus of the emerging discipline called canonical criticism is precisely that of the relationship between Scripture and a believing community. While it has not yet, to my knowledge, addressed the specific problem of the relationship of mainline seminaries to mainline churches in the late twentieth century, it is undoubtedly time to do so. The Bible, as canon, comes to us from and through ancient believing communities. Its various parts as well as the whole were formed and shaped principally in the liturgical and instructional programs of the early communities. While most of its literature may have been written by or derived from ancient individuals, nothing in it should be understood to have been contributed directly by an individual without its having been filtered through communities that appreciated it and began the heritage of repetition / recitation, which set it upon a tenure track toward canon. One of the major problems in mainline seminary instruction in Bible has been a focus on ancient individuals, either “original” writers or redactors. Redaction criticism has underscored the focus. Canonical criticism provides a corrective in this regard. The mode of understanding the formation of canon since Johann Salomo Semler and his students toward the end of the eighteenth century has been to see it as principally the final stage in the literary formation of the canon, that is, how the larger literary units, the several books, were decided upon as either in or out of the canon.2 The only attention paid in that mode to the role of the com2   Cf. Semler, Abhandlung von freier Untersuchung des Canons. For further references, see Sanders, “Adaptable for Life,” 552n2; and Childs, Introduction to the OT as Scripture, 30 – 60.

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munity was limited to the positing of councils at certain moments that decided such issues; this is now seen as anachronistic in its importing later notions of authoritative consistories that had the power to make such decisions for all the communities. Little attention was apparently paid to the implications of such a view, which would have presupposed certain models of inspiration and authority that are now seen as hardly realistic – groups of men (sic) making momentous decisions for all time with their minds shaped and focused on a limited and particular set of problems and concerns and perceptions of them! Conjoined in the model was a criterion for inspiration or canonicity stated by the Jewish historian, Josephus – a great name ancient and revered enough to bear authority in the ongoing memory of the community.3 Recent work on the Semler model has shown that passages in ancient noncanonical literature that fit the model, such as lists of books compiled by well-known individuals, passages mentioning gatherings of leaders, passages that stressed the importance of inspired individuals in antiquity, were those that were cited to describe canonization. The Western scholar’s need to envisage the role of individuals in the process gave scholarship the eyes to see such references but blinded it apparently to the common sense needed to perceive the importance of the believing communities in the canonical process. No individual in antiquity, no matter how “inspired,” slipped something he or she had written into the canon by a side door! It has all come through the worship and educational programs of ancient believing communities or we would not have it. The newly revised concepts and methods in text criticism have indicated a more realistic view of what actually happened. The focus must now be on communities and the individuals within them, rather than almost exclusively on individuals. The so-called secondary or spurious passages in the Bible, even those “added by a later hand” are also canonical. Along with the new realism concerning the formation of canon has come a revised model for understanding the inspiration of Scripture. Heretofore, whether for literalists or liberals, the model has been that of inspiration of an individual in antiquity whose words were then more or less accurately preserved by disciples, schools, and scribes. The only difference between liberals and conservatives in this regard has been quantitative. The critical search for the ipsissima verba of the original speaker or writer has been a major focus of biblical criticism. And that focus is fully justified insofar as the scholar is working in her or his shop as a literary historian. So far as I am concerned it should never stop: the tools for recovering original moments in antiquity are improving constantly and should continue to be developed.4 But 3

 Josephus, Ag. Ap. 1:37 – 46.   These same tools are currently being applied to the formation of Qumran literature with considerable effect in reconstructing the history of the Qumran settlement as related to and distinct from the Essenes. Canonical criticism can be applied only in a limited way to study of the Qumran literature since (a) we do not know for sure all they considered canonical, and (b) they ceased to exist as a discrete believing community with the destruction of the Qumran settlement. See the recent discussion by Davies, “Eschatology at Qumran.” His n. 9 on p. 41 is inexact; Davies should not refer there to canonical criticism but to Brevard Childs’s work on canonical context. 4

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that original moment was only the beginning of a process of transmission that took place not only in preserving “schools” but in ancient believing communities that so believed in the value of the original “moment” that it began a process of re-presentation of relevance to the problems of the ongoing community. Such early schools engaged as much in the re-presenting process as in the preserving process: the two factors of stability and adaptability emerge as of very real importance in understanding the canonical process as well as in understanding today any valid model of the relationship between Bible and believing community.5 The new model for understanding inspiration of Scripture is that of the Holy Spirit at work all along the process of formation of Scripture (of whichever canon of whichever believing community – Jewish, Protestant, Roman, Greek Orthodox, all the way to the Ethiopian Orthodox Church) as well as through its textual and versional transmission into the ongoing preserving and re-presentational process. This should and must include Enlightenment modes of study of Scripture, discovery of ancient manuscripts, and recovery of apparently sharper information about ancient historical, political, and social contexts and cultures that nurtured the texts at all the layers of its formation. What emerges from viewing the whole of a community’s Bible as canon (again, whichever canon of whichever community) is honesty about its wholeness. In contrast to selecting a canon within the canon on which to base the theological construct of whatever denomination, canonical criticism eschews efforts at either harmonization or reductionism and admits from the outset that, like the awe-inspiring Cathedral of Chartres, the Bible as canon is a glorious mess.6 There can be no avoidance of recognition of its anomalies and discrepancies, that is, of its pluralistic richness. The fact that different generations of even a single believing community have different eyes with which to read it and derive value from it must not blind responsible study of it to its canonical pluralism. Different generations as well as different communities have different needs that permit them to see different values on which to base their self-understanding as well as their worldview. This is a part of human humility and limitation so well described in most of its literature. The most pervasive images that emerge from the canon as a whole, by which believing communities may understand who they are, are those of church and synagogue as pilgrim folk, witnesses, servants, and stewards. The model for understanding the called people of God that seems most pervasive in Scripture, whether in the Jahvist, the Deuteronomic historians, the Chronicler, the psalmists, Evangelists, Paul, or the writer of Hebrews, is that of the pilgrim folk. “We are strangers and sojourners as all our forebears were,” David is wont to have prayed (1 Chron 29:15). The ongoing dialogue between canon and community is based in large measure on that understanding of iden5

  See the discussion in Sanders, “Adaptable for Life.”  James, Chartres, 9: “When you examine the cathedral closely, you discover to your immense surprise that the design is not a well controlled and harmonious entity, but a mess.” 6

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tity. As Hopewell apparently saw, the believing community should be perceived in dynamic terms rather than static. Surely such a view is firmly based in this image of understanding the believing community as a pilgrim folk in serious dialogue with Scripture. The image of the church as on a pilgrimage is not the only one discernible in Scripture, but its importance puts it perhaps first in any such list of images. The called witnesses of God are those who inherit a vision, a peculiar manner of seeing the world and their place and function in it. St. Paul and others called this phronēsis, a mindset; others speak of it as vision. St. Luke, in two volumes of excellent theological history writing, rang in the changes in fugue and counterpoint on God’s providing for himself “eyewitnesses and servants of the word” (Luke 1:2) through the generations so there might be a folk to witness to what was Reality and its role in human affairs. The prophets cannot be fully understood only as spokespersons and covenant mediators; they were also witnesses to how God was signifying the power-flows in the Iron Age Near East from the middle of the eighth century BCE to the end of the sixth, precisely the time of rise and fall of empires most impinging on the life of Israel, bringing about both its death and its resurrection as Judaism. Luke’s other term, hupēretai, means “servants,” not “ministers” as the current RSV would have it. This image for understanding the believing community or called folk of God is also pervasive in Scripture. It ought to rule out all self-serving readings of Scripture but apparently does not when insufficiently stressed. Election is to service not to rewards. Whether the servant be suffering or not, the service centers in being a vehicle for God’s blessing all his creatures, all the families of the earth [Gen 12:3]. A fourth pervasive image for self-understanding of the believing community is that of stewardship. As pilgrims, witnesses, and servants we are also stewards of whatever we perceive ourselves to have control of or power over. I actually know some Christians who think they own something in this brief passage from womb to tomb! We are but stewards where power lurks – the body, the mind, the spirit, family, friends, or ought of worldly goods. Idolatry is not only something ancient Canaanites engaged in; it is the persistent temptation of the called people of God, community and individual – loving God’s gifts so much that we forget they are gifts, that we let ourselves think we have possession of them. Finally, the called people of God believe unstintingly that there is a moral dimension to the universe, that there is Integrity to Reality (oneness in God), and that there is and will be accountability. Canonical pluralism does not permit writing a scenario of how that accountability is or will be expressed; but dialogue with Scripture renders belief in it firm and unshakeable. The ongoing dialogue between canon and community is understood as centering in the two questions dynamically conceived: that of faith and that of obedience – identity and lifestyle. The Bible, as canon, may be viewed in essence as the authoritative record of that dialogue as pursued from the inceptions of the believing communities, Jewish and Christian, through to the establishment of formative Judaism, on the

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one hand, and of the early church, on the other. It may be viewed as the received record of the struggles of those early believing communities, through five culture eras, to pursue the Integrity of Reality (oneness of God). The idioms, mores, and customs of those five eras form the expressions of the struggle. The expression includes numerous types of literary genres; but none fails to monotheize. While some portions monotheize more thoroughly than others, or appear to do so, the literature that makes up any of the canons of the believing communities, Jewish and Christian, monotheizes more or less well. It would indeed appear that those portions most embarrassing to the modern or Enlightenment mind are those that monotheized most thoroughly (the hardening of the heart of Pharaoh, the commission to Isaiah, Peter’s sermon at Pentecost). Central to the concept of the Bible as canon is the hermeneutics by which the early communities of faith engaged in the struggle to monotheize. The tools of criticism by which to ferret out those hermeneutics are in hand and improving. There is even the possibility on the horizon that we may need to say that the intrabiblical hermeneutics so recovered may be viewed as being as canonical as the actual texts. The Bible as canon of the believing communities is the paradigm whereby they may learn how to engage dynamically in the same struggle to monotheize today as our ancestors in the faith did in their time. The first commandment is not simply the first of ten, it is prōton in every sense one may imagine. The canon is therefore not to be viewed as a box of ancient jewels still valuable and negotiable, but rather as the paradigm whereby current believing communities may resist polytheizing, or fragmentizing of truth, but rather learn in our several cultural spaces to pursue the Integrity of Reality. The forms of polytheism rampant today may be more insidious and perhaps less clear than they were in antiquity, but they are just as forceful and pervasive as ever they were. It is perhaps more rampant today because we heirs of Judaism and Christianity think we are monotheists. Christianity is especially vulnerable at this point precisely because of the centrality of the concept of the incarnation – the most precious and the most dangerous concept in Christianity. We have permitted ourselves to think that our Christ revealed God. We have permitted ourselves to think that our Christ in the incarnation domesticated God. We have permitted ourselves to think that God is a Christian. Polytheism of various sorts is rampant in the thinking of Christians: the concept of the Trinity is usually expressed in polytheistic terms; the concept of the satan, or tester, is often expressed in polytheistic terms. We permit ourselves in reading the New Testament to identify with Christ and thus entirely miss the blessing of his prophetic and challenging words and life and death and resurrection. We have denigrated Paul’s concept of the Christian’s being en Christō to the point of identifying with Christ and at best pitying the poor benighted Jews and Romans who rejected him. A salient function that the Bible as canon can have in the believing communities today is that of a prophetic voice challenging the witnessing, serving stewards of the pilgrim folk to take the next step on the journey begun by Abraham

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and Sarah. I suggest that hearing the Bible as God’s prophetic voice is its most important function in its dialogue with current believing communities. In order to hear that voice, so necessary to the pilgrimage, we must learn to read the Bible on its own terms, that is, by the canonical hermeneutics embedded in it at all layers of its formation. To what purpose? To fulfill the vocation of the heirs of Abraham and Sarah, whether by blood or by Christ, of being instruments whereby God may indeed bless all the families of the earth. Current suggestions that incorporate Americanism into Christianity with its idols of success and prosperity need to hear the challenge. I recently saw a bumper sticker stating, “Prosperity is your divine right”! The rampant polytheism in the current electronic church is so patent as to be shocking. The current form of hard-core politicized evangelicalism is perhaps the most idolatrous and polytheistic. The hermeneutics that emerge from within Scripture itself, both those by which we see community traditions continually represented and those by which we see international wisdom continually adapted, are precisely the monotheizing view of God as both universal creator of all peoples and particular redeemer in Israel and in Christ. But even that redemption must finally be seen in the light of God as universal creator, and God’s being creator must finally be seen in the light of God’s being redeemer. The final redemption is eschatologically a re-creation. If the Bible is read with God as primarily redeemer, then it easily is falsified as a text into denominationalism and ultimately a new tribalism. This is Christianity’s greatest failing, especially wherever the New Testament is viewed as more authoritative than the Old or whenever Marcionism intrudes. If the Bible is read with God as universal creator solely, then it easily is falsified as a text into a flaccid kind of universalism that lacks reality. Recent study of true and false prophecy in the prophetic corpus has shown that the real difference between the so-called true and the so-called false prophets was in their hermeneutics.7 Falsehood crept in when God was seen only as the peculiar God of Israel, only as Israel’s redeemer; there are no instances of God being seen only as universal creator, even in the purely wisdom literature, and certainly not in the prophetic corpus. But even if one should want to assert that the wisdom literature fails to ring in the changes on God as redeemer, that literature must be seen as but a part of the canon as a whole. There clearly are portions of the church or segments of the believing communities that need a reading of Scripture that might be called constitutive or supportive of what they are already thinking and doing or have embarked upon. One thinks of those communities made up of nondominant culture constituencies, minorities, third-world communities under oppression, many of whom are in main-line denominations! One of the evolved or developed hermeneutic visions that emerge from such study of the Bible as here described is that of God’s bias for the weak and dispossessed, the powerless, indeed, for the slave 7

  Sanders, “Hermeneutics in True and False Prophecy.”

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people come out of Egypt up to the point of entering into the gifts of the promise and the sin of corruption induced by the power of the blessing. But the mainline communities described above hardly fit into such a category. Where they might, then adjustment to a constitutive hermeneutic is in order. Nonetheless, for most of those we address in our concern about the relation of seminary to congregation it is a prophetic reading of Scripture that is in order at the community level. At the individual level, as in the case of those who lack power to oppress as community, adjustment in hermeneutic is indicated. The believing communities that I understand to be in the purview of our study desperately need to learn to read the Bible on its own terms, by the hermeneutics that emerge from the canon itself, so that they may hear a prophetic voice that challenges: (a) their very concept of God, or Reality; (b) for Christians their very concept of Christ; and (c) their very concept of church or election. There are surely other challenges that are needed but most certainly are they needed in terms of the actual understanding of Christianity one finds in most mainline churches concerning precisely God, Christ, and the church. My understanding of the Bible as canon, or as the churches’ book, has been developed over the past thirty years as much in actual congregations and pastors’ groups as in the seminary classroom. What I have arrived at in this regard8 has been forged over those years not only on the anvils of mainline seminary curricula and of mainline, white power-centered congregations and judicatories. I have for some fifteen years been an affiliate member under watch-care of a black church in Bedford Stuyvesant (largely to try to maintain some kind of Christian sanity) and preach perhaps twice a year in black pulpits; and some of these experiences are a part of my understanding of canon and community. But there have been the two anvils, not just academia, but also ecclesia of the sort we can experience in this country and to some extent abroad. It is my conviction, out of these experiences, out of viewing the ancient believing communities that bequeathed us these texts we call sacred, through what we know of modern believing communities, and out of viewing the latter in the light of what I have assiduously tried to learn about the former, that something like a complete revision of our concepts of seminary and church needs to be attempted. Hopewell was quite right that those in seminaries need to revise their understanding of congregations. The latter, like ancient Israel and the early church, are continually changing and continually evolving, ever moving from one cultural and political context to another, even though imperceptibly perhaps at times. But it is far from certain that those congregations enjoy a self-understanding based on responsible dialogue with Scripture; they certainly do not have a self-conscious identity based on the hermeneutics herein suggested. Hopewell, of course, did not claim they did. Is it possible for the seminaries so to relate to the community they serve that they might both understand themselves as a part of one and the same pilgrimage, 8

  In Sanders, Canon and Community; Sanders, From Sacred Story to Sacred Text.

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in sensu lato, both needing accurately to hear the Word of God available through a prophetic hermeneutic reading of Scripture? Both? As noted above, the seminaries we serve and address tend to view themselves, through their faculties, as a part of academia more than as a part of ecclesia. Even so, they have a largely static view of seminaryhood. Oh, we all like to say we are constantly learning and hopefully improving but this is said for the most part in terms of our identity in our guilds. Is it possible for the seminaries more faithfully to exhibit a self-understanding that transcends academia, to conduct themselves as though they really believed they were a part of a called community as well as the practitioners of Enlightenment thinking and study? By the model here espoused, the seminaries would attempt to provide through dynamic theologizing and reflection models for hearing the voice of God not only through paradigmatic readings of the Bible but also through paradigmatic readings of Enlightenment culture, taking cues precisely from the biblical authors and contributors both in their re-presenting authoritative community traditions and in their adapting the best of international wisdom to ever-changing contexts. By this model, the seminaries would attempt consciously to show the way for the communities to listen for the dynamic Word that expresses the Integrity of Reality. They would by the same model consciously attempt to show the way to sift through cultural stimuli and adapt new wisdom as a part too of the gifts of God. They would consciously attempt to show the way to search Scripture for the challenge and guidance needed, as well as for the encouragement needed to take another step on the pilgrimage. Humankind is in AB 40 [now in 2016, 70!], the fortieth [seventieth] year of the bomb. Earth hangs by a thin but firm thread of divine grace. (Surely these forty [seventy] years are not attributable to human sagacity.) As children of the Enlightenment we live between the pride thereof and the fear of its most imposing product. Hope can be derived only from the belief that there is Integrity to Reality. That belief can be due only to the vision that is the gift of Word and Spirit; we can but grope about it inductively like the three blind persons around the elephant. Final hope is that that Integrity continues to reach out for us to integrate us unto itself and continues to grant us the grace that enables us to pursue that Integrity in our lives. The promise is that some of it may rub off on us as witnessing communities and even as individuals. To monotheize while reading the Bible in order to hear the prophetic voice that the seminaries and communities need to hear can start at the simple point of refusing to read the Bible or history by the hermeneutic of good-guys-badguys but to read it by dynamic analogy. American believing communities need to understand that God’s hardening the heart of Pharaoh is not all that difficult to understand if we read Exodus identifying with Raamses II and the Egyptians. His argument to Moses was ours: hold on, you’re moving too fast! If Pharaoh’s heart had been soft, there might be a stele of stones out near Goshen for an archaeologist to dig up honoring Pharaoh’s emancipation proclamation; but we would have no Torah. That requires theologizing, precisely monotheizing, while reading Scripture, and not moralizing. Torah, hence gospel, is God’s emancipa-

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tion proclamation for all the world. Just as it was not Pharaoh’s proclamation, neither was it intended for Israel or church alone. Monotheizing while reading the New Testament would mean refusing to identify with Jesus in doing so, but rather seeing ourselves in the Pharisees and the Romans. A theocentric hermeneutic that monotheizes, emphasizing God as the universal creator of all peoples, as well as redeemer in Israel and in Christ, would permit us to hear the challenging words of Christ’s prophetic ministry and life, and permit us to take the further steps we must on the pilgrimage on which we are embarked. I wager that anti-Semitism, racism, sexism, as well as other forms of bigotry would very nearly disappear from the Christian soul if we learned to read the New Testament with the basic hermeneutics by which the New Testament writers read what was Scripture for them up to their time, the Old Testament. But so would our self-serving readings, our tendencies to separatism and exclusivism, and especially our own American forms of hardheartedness as viewed by much of the rest of the world.9 Seminaries must learn to practice the paradigm and show the way for the believing communities to pursue the Integrity of Reality, not only in the “training” of their future pastors and other ministers, but as paracommunities of faith whose role in the ongoing mutual pilgrimage is in part that of providing a consciously working paradigm for reading Scripture, tradition, and the ongoing world in which we live so as to discern the guiding Torah or Word of Reality’s Integrity on the pilgrimage. The seminary as a paracommunity of faith would not be church any more than a church should try to be a seminary. Their roles would be quite distinct. The model would not provide the larger community of faith with the answer or Word, but would provide the paradigm for how to see and hear both the ancient struggles to monotheize and the ongoing ever-changing modern struggles to be witnesses to that Integrity that alone claims and redeems humanity.10 Bibliography Childs, Brevard S. Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1979. Davies, Philip R. “Eschatology at Qumran.” JBL 104 (1985) 39 – 55. Hopewell, James. “A Congregational Paradigm for Theological Education.” Theological Education (Autumn 1984) 60 – 70. James, John. Chartres: The Masons Who Built a Legend. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982. Mays, James L. “Historical and Canonical: Recent Discussions about the Old Testament and Christian Faith.” In Magnalia Dei: The Mighty Acts of God: Essays on the Bible

 9   See a list of seventeen possible results in Christian congregations if canonical hermeneutics were to be used in them and by their members in reading the Bible, in Sanders, Canon and Community, 74 – 76. 10   A full working bibliography on current discussions on canon is included in Sanders, From Sacred Story to Sacred Text.

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and Archaeology in Memory of G. Ernest Wright, edited by Frank M. Cross, Werner E. Lemke, and Patrick D. Miller, 510 – 28. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1976. Sanders, James A. “Adaptable for Life: The Nature and Function of Canon.” In Magnalia Dei: The Mighty Acts of God: Essays on the Bible and Archaeology in Memory of G. Ernest Wright, edited by Frank M. Cross, Werner E. Lemke, and Patrick D. Miller, 531 – 60. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1976. [Reprinted in From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, by James A. Sanders, 9 – 39. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987.] Sanders, James A. Canon and Community: A Guide to Canonical Criticism. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984. Sanders, James A. From Sacred Story to Sacred Text: Canon as Paradigm. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987. Sanders, James A. “Hermeneutics in True and False Prophecy.” In Canon and Authority: Essays in Old Testament Religion and Theology, edited by George W. Coats and Burke O. Long, 21 – 41. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1977. [Reprinted as “Canonical Hermeneutics: True and False Prophecy.” In From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, by James A. Sanders, 87 – 105. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987.] Semler, Johann Salomo. Abhandlung von freier Untersuchung des Canon. 2nd ed. Halle: Hemmerde, 1776.

18 Scripture as Canon in the Church Scripture and Tradition Every Christian faith community has two basic references of authority: Scripture and tradition. While there is a common structure shared by all Christian biblical canons, each believing community has its own body of traditions that distinguishes it as unique and provides the hermeneutics by which to read its particular canon. This is true whether the community be one of the Orthodox communions, the Roman Catholic, a Reformation church, or indeed rabbinic Judaism. The major difference between the Jewish canon and the Christian First Testament is the difference between a tripartite and a quadripartite structure.1 Whereas the prophetic corpus, for instance, is situated in the Jewish canon to explain the uses of adversity in the hands of One God, in the Christian canons the Prophets are placed last, just before the Second Testament, to predict the coming of Christ – thus changing the very nature of prophecy itself.2 One would be hard pressed to say for which community, Jewish or Christian, its magisterium or body of tradition is more dominant. Heirs of left-wing Reformation movements tend to call themselves conservative today, such as Fundamentalists and Evangelicals in the United States, whereas in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries their predecessors were the most radical in accommodating the cultural tenets of the time, especially the Renaissance of Greco-Roman stress on individual worth and responsibility. The Reformation was a child of the Renaissance, which stressed individual reading of Scripture. As early as the fourteenth century in Europe, monks became scribes in order to produce enough copies of the Vulgate for the increasing numbers of individuals who were becoming literate. By the sixteenth century individual readings of Scripture engendered resistance to reading it solely through the Catholic Magisterium. Individual readings of Scripture began to challenge the meanings the Church had assigned to crucial passages. It was this wide-spread growing Renaissance belief in individual worth and responsibility that gave the rebellion in the sixteenth century of one such monk, Martin Luther, the social and cultural hearing he increasingly received in Western Europe and Scandinavia that rapidly produced the Reformation. Viewed in this manner it is *  First published 2001. 1   Sanders, “Stabilization of the Tanak.” 2   Sanders, “Spinning the Bible.” Whereas a prophet in the Bible is presented as a spokesperson, for God to the people and for the people to God (in intercessory prayer), early Christianity turned the prophet into one who predicted Christ; apocalypticists have made the prophet one who foresaw Armageddon.

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not surprising that Luther rejected the Magisterium of the Catholic Church as the sole way to read Scripture, and went on to develop the idea of sola Scriptura as the sole authority for salvation. But stress on Scripture as the sole reference of authority gave rise to different sets of new traditions or hermeneutics by which to read it. It was clearly the diversity within Scripture itself that gave rise to different readings of it, but that same diversity also gave rise to the quest within each community of readers for a canon within the canon, or unity within diversity, or a biblical magisterium, by which to make sense of it as a whole. Severing Scripture from the Magisterium of the Roman Church and reading it independently of it was revolutionary in itself. But doing so exposed the diversity within Scripture, which had necessitated the Magisterium in the first place. If Scripture was to be the sole authority in the quest for human meaning and salvation, each faith group had to be able to say what Scripture teaches. What happened was that the Magisterium of the Church Catholic gave way to the many magisteria of Protestantism. The diversity within Protestantism that ensued put the long-standing differences between Catholic and Orthodox canons and magisteria into a far broader perspective.

The Corporate and the Individual It is interesting to range Christian communities today on a spectrum between corporate worth and responsibility and individual worth and responsibility. All faith communities, of course, give evidence of both, but the differences among them are pronounced. The traditions that distinguish a faith community provide the particular hermeneutic by which it reads Scripture. Salvation of the believer is a common message of all Christian communities, but the locus of that salvation ranges from the corporate to the individual. For Orthodox and Catholic communions, salvation is in the Church, but for left-wing Protestant groups, salvation is purely an individual matter, for whom the “church” is the sum of all the individuals who claim similar but personal saving experiences. This was a part of the dramatic shift that took place because of the Renaissance in Europe of gradual de-emphasis on corporate, with concomitant growing emphasis on individual, worth and responsibility. After all, ancient Greece had been the birthplace of Western democracy. Accompanying this shift was a change in understanding of the nature of church and the nature of authority. It is commonplace to note that authority in the West derives either from above by special revelation, from below by the consent of the majority of those over whom authority is exercised, or by some combination of the two. The idea that the church was founded by Christ in the Gospels, having been called into being by God’s pastoral call on Abraham and Sarah in Genesis, and is a mighty flowing stream into which individuals are initiated by baptism and instruction offered by priests ordained by that mighty flowing stream, is Orthodox, Catholic and mainstream Protestant. Baptism of each child of the church is mandated by a corporate view of covenant.

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But this gave way for left-wing Reformation groups to the Renaissance or democratic idea that church derives its authority from the consent of the “saved” individuals who make it up, hence presbyterian and congregational forms of church governance, or polity. Authority derived from the Holy Spirit working through individuals and the courts of the church they constituted. Votes taken in duly-constituted congregations, dioceses, synods, presbyteries, and conferences are taken as binding because they are viewed as authorized by the Holy Spirit impacting each individual member. Such courts of the church, whenever they meet for decision-making, are constituted by prayer for guidance of the Holy Spirit. Communions that derive from the early Anabaptist movement stress the saving experience of each member for whom the acid test is whether s / he professes “the Lord Jesus Christ as personal Savior.”3 There are numerous left-wing Reformation heirs today who do not practice infant baptism or follow a common lectionary, the two practices that most clearly sponsor among the laity a sense of the corporate nature of faith and salvation. Such communities also minimize the importance of the Christian calendar, some to the point of elimination of all but Sunday (the Lord’s Day) and the holidays that have become part of the general culture. Of the two most binding factors of community, canon and calendar, left-wing Reformation Protestants focus on canon or Scripture only, read at will. An important strain of the current neo-Puritan revival of Christian Fundamentalism in the United States denigrates corporate ties or denominations and sponsors congregational authority solely, even the spawning of “community churches,” which proudly declare themselves as totally autonomous congregations. Most members of such churches are typically dependent for their knowledge of the Bible on the preaching and teaching of the charismatic pastor who founded the church, with emphasis on the work of the Holy Spirit through the pastor’s gifts and graces as their leader.4 Though individuals are encouraged to read the Bible for themselves, they do so by the hermeneutic absorbed from the pastor’s preaching and teaching. Characteristic of the preaching and teaching of Fundamentalist and Evangelical communities are the three-pronged tenets of (a) believer’s or adult baptism, (b) choosing Scripture passages at will to preach and teach, and (c) the dogma that all Scripture is harmonious and therefore automatically supports whatever the pastor or leader teaches about the passage(s) chosen. Even where denominational ties are apparently strong in the Fundamentalist churches, such as those of the Southern Baptist Convention, the three tenets of adult baptism, free choice of Scripture passage, and belief in the harmony of all Scripture, are solid dogma. The combination of the three tenets works together to provide for the magisteria of Fundamentalist groups the scriptural authority necessary for their work. The charisma of the pastor is his authority because it 3   Knowledge among believers that such individualistic stress on salvation probably derived from later forms of the Mithraic cult, or from the various mystery or imperial cults of ancient Rome is nil, or minimal at best. 4   See Todd, “Not Your Father’s Church.”

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convinces his followers that the Holy Spirit works in him. Typical also is the denigration of theology, with heavy emphasis on moralizing when reading Scripture. Historically speaking, such groups derive from the Anabaptist and Puritan streams of Protestantism, which incorporated the most left-wing or advanced cultural developments of the Renaissance. Yet such groups have some of the most dogmatic traditions by which they read and understand the nature of Scripture, as well as the meanings of passages within it. Two stories illustrate the point. I was recently invited to address two such Protestant groups. In one I asked a class of students who in the class were members of churches that used a lectionary. Of the some fifty students not one raised a hand. While I was hurriedly trying to think of what to say in such a situation, one hand went up. Relieved, I asked him what church he belonged to. He asked instead, “What is a lectionary?” There were four faculty members attending the lecture, one of them a former student of mine. The other experience was later the same year with a group of ninety Southern Baptist pastors in North Carolina who had invited me, as one said, to bring “a breath of fresh air to their stifled lives.” One of the pastors there told me that the president of the Southern Baptist Convention that year, in a speech to the faculty of Southern Baptist Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, told them that if “we tell you a pickle has a soul, that is what you will teach.” These two stories illustrate the point that all Christian communities have magisteria that arise because of the diversity within Scripture and hence the need to read Scripture by some kind of external authority, some regula fidei.

Hermeneutics The hermeneutic brought to reading the Bible, conjoined with its multivalency and diversity, essentially determines what one will find there. All branches of Christianity apparently agree that the Bible is in one understanding or another “the Word of God.” But how this is understood varies considerably. The Orthodox and Catholic understandings of Scripture are that it is essentially the revelatory story of the founding of the church, which itself is the resurrected (corporate) body of Christ as it is manifest on earth. The understanding of the Bible in Protestantism is quite varied. The Lutheran view is that Scripture is the textbook of God’s work in history, culminating in Christ, which leads to the justification of each individual sinner by faith in that divine work. The Calvinist view is that Scripture is the “Word of God and the only infallible rule of faith and order for Christians,” but often sees the Bible as largely a Rule Book (Regelbuch) to guide the Christian’s personal moral and social ethical existence as a witness to belief in God’s work in Scripture and in Christ. They include churches in the Reform tradition and Fundamentalist neo-Puritan communities. Other more left-wing Reformation churches put emphasis on different aspects of Scripture. Many view it as the “old, old story” of salvation that leads to belief in Christ as one’s personal

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savior. Other groups see it as “a box of jewels” of ancient wisdom that leads the believer to the abundant life of faith and obedience. American Christian Fundamentalism harbors various views of Scripture within a narrow range of understanding it as a kind of code book for those who accept the five basic tenets, as they view them, of faith, including literal and historical understandings of the virgin birth and the bodily resurrection of Christ.5 For them the Bible reveals to the true believer what God will do in the eschaton, both to judge evil in others and to guarantee salvation, even instant rapture, to individual believers of the in-group. There is a consuming interest in the battles they believe will take place at Armageddon to destroy the forces of evil and bring in the eternal Kingdom of Christ. On tours to the Holy Land organized by Fundamentalists, rarely anything is heard about the Sermon on the Mount but much is taught about Mount Megiddo where Armageddon will take place.6 The hermeneutic by which they teach Scripture is very clear: the Bible addresses the end-time; we live in the end-time; therefore, the Bible speaks directly to us. Interesting is the fact that this was largely the hermeneutic by which the ancient pre-Christian Jewish sect at Qumran read Scripture.7 There was no interest at all in what Scripture passages meant originally, but only in how they addressed them and the battles they believed would eventually destroy the forces of evil, as the Qumran sect understood evil, of course. Most current Christian apocalypticists read Scripture by the same hermeneutic.

Biblical Criticism The Renaissance, with its emphasis on individual worth and responsibility, brought with it also, however, the belief that authority derives from inductive reasoning and critical inquiry democratically pursued. This gave rise in Protestant circles to the phenomenon of biblical criticism. While Origen, Jerome, and Luther had shared openly with the literate church the text-critical problems stemming from different texts and versions of Scripture, it was not until the seventeenth century that so-called higher biblical criticism began to be conceived in Europe as necessary to probing the truth of Scripture. After all, Scripture had been set loose in Europe from the moorings of a common magisterium to address the pluralism that individual readings of Scripture exposed. The Critica Sacra movement and the Anti-Critica Sacra reaction to it in the seventeenth century eventually led the great genius, Benedictus (or Baruch) Spinoza, to declare, in his Tractatus of 1670, that the truth of the Bible would be found in a 5   See Longfield, Presbyterian Controversy, cited in Wheeler, “Auburn Affirmation.” The five “fundamentals” insisted on by such Fundamentalists are: the inerrancy of Scripture, the virgin birth, the substitutionary atonement, the literal bodily resurrection, and the factuality of the miracles worked by Jesus Christ. 6  Halsel, Journey to Jerusalem. 7  Elliger, Studien zum Habakuk-Kommentar. The same hermeneutic was operative in other early Jewish interpretation of Scripture; cf. Kugel, Traditions of the Bible, 16 – 17.

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history of the formation of its texts, providing thereby the impetus for the development of historical / critical study of the Bible.8 Spinoza went on to say that such a history should thereby recover the authorial intentionality of authors of biblical texts. In his genius he added that in all probability recovering individual authorial intentionality would prove futile. Due to Spinoza’s being persona non grata to both synagogue and church, his influence far outweighed later specific reference to his work. From the efforts of Richard Simon at the Oratoire in Paris beginning in 1675, in response to Spinoza’s call, until those of Johann David Michaelis in Germany a century later, the hermeneutic of biblical criticism took a course it would follow well into the twenty-first century – to identify as much as possible the “original” words of the writers and speakers represented in the biblical text. Individual scholars would thereafter for nearly three centuries seek out the individual contributors to the Bible. So powerful had been the rebirth of Greco-Roman culture in the Renaissance that the Bible came to be regarded as the product of individual minds rather than as a collective, community literature. It is here that both scholars and Fundamentalists share the same goal, the ipsissima verba of the biblical authors; the difference is that scholars say only some are the ipsissima verba, while Fundamentalists say they all are. Both positions have problems. The anonymous or community dimension of biblical literature, of both Testaments, was almost entirely set aside. The heritage of the Renaissance in Europe in Christian, largely Protestant, circles, was in effect a massive reprise of the hellenization process that had gone on in early Judaism after the conquests of Alexander the Great.9 The dominant Asian Babylonian and Persian cultures prior to Alexander were similar enough in this regard to the Early Jewish world that the largely anonymous nature of a community’s identifying literature presented no great problem. But because the European Greco-Roman world needed to know who had written this Jewish epic literature that had become available in Greek translation, the biblical phenomenon of community anonymity gave way to authorial pseudepigraphy. In Semitic Jewish communities, the Torah and the Prophets, the Psalms and other writings were their community literature. It told them who they were in ever-changing circumstances and what they should stand for as God’s people in the ever-changing non-Jewish world in which they were forced to live.10 But the need to answer the questions of gentiles, and of increasingly hellenized Jews, who knew who wrote the Odyssey or the Aeneid, made the phenomenon of scriptural pseudepigraphy widespread. Certain forms of focus on individual worth and responsibility had already entered the ethical thinking of ancient Judah near the end of the First Temple Period, or Iron Age (Jer 31:29; Ezek 18), but now there was interest in knowing who the individuals were who wrote the Pentateuch, who wrote the Prophets, Early and Latter, and who penned the Psalms. And this issued in answers that would make sense to the Greeks and  8

 Spinoza, Tractatus, 87 – 88.   Sanders, “Impact of the Scrolls.”   Sanders, “Exile and Canon Formation.”

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the Romans, that is, ancient individual “heroes” of Israel’s past. Thus arose the conventions that Moses wrote all the Torah, David all the Psalms, individual prophets all of each prophetic book, Solomon the bulk of biblical wisdom literature, and individual apostles each of the Gospels. It also encouraged writing new literature pseudepigraphically.11 And thus arose the need after the Renaissance of Greco-Roman culture in Europe to know exactly what the original authors of biblical literature, whether those heroic figures or not, had written. What could not be attributed to an original author was called secondary, even spurious. The focus on the verifiable history of the formation of the biblical text (which Spinoza had called for) has been so great that the community dimension of the Bible often got lost in the effort. The Sitz im Leben of the Christian Bible veritably shifted from the church to the university. Its historical dimension took precedence in some European Protestant intellectual circles over its actual cultic and theological functions in the church. When critical historical study of the Bible entered into and became an integral part of seminary study of the biblical text in the Western world, the crisis of the authority of the Bible came to the fore. This has been the case for at least a century and a half in Protestant seminaries.

Criticism and Crisis A case in point was the New School / Old School schism that took place in the Presbyterian Church in the USA in 1832. It provides a mirror for reflection on similar controversies in other Christian communions in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Simply put, the New School argued that the Bible should be studied historically in order to plumb the depths of its riches, while the Old School insisted that the Bible should be read through the prism of the Westminster Confession, that is, through the post-Calvinist magisterium of the Presbyterian faith, to retain its authority. The conviction was strong that the Westminster Confession had been an accurate reading of Scripture – precisely the hermeneutic circle. Convictions were deep-seated on both sides of the issue, and the Presbyterian Church was in schism from 1832 until 1870.12 Because Secession and the American Civil War caused a different, more divisive schism between churches in the North and the South on other pressing issues, an atmosphere of goodwill about the earlier schism brought about conciliation in the separated northern Presbyterian churches in 1870. But when the intellectual forces of nineteenth-century theories of evolution entered the scene in the last third of the century the old pre-war lines of division asserted themselves once more, almost precisely along the same issues as earlier, namely, the authority of Scripture and how to understand that authority. Heresy trials were conducted and intellectual giants in the church were condemned and rejected. 11

  Sanders, “Why the Pseudepigrapha?”   Sanders, “Bible at Union.”

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New School thinking was quite clear about the pertinence and relevance of historical / critical study of biblical, and indeed human, origins. God had yet more wonderful things to reveal and it was possible and even exciting to reconcile the results of scientific study of nature and the human experiment with historical / critical study of the Bible, or at least put the two in fruitful dialogue. The Bible was indeed “the Word of God, the only infallible rule of faith and order” for the New School, but only when read in the original Hebrew and Greek, and read and understood critically in its “original” contexts of numerous anonymous authors and editors. Biblical Criticism for them meant critique of the hermeneutic brought to the Bible, not criticism of the biblical content itself. New School thinkers had been considerably influenced by the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century in Scotland and America and rested their case on the continuing revelatory work of the Holy Spirit, who meted out God’s evolving truth as humans became capable of understanding it. The Old School, on the contrary, rested their case on the Bible’s being the totally sufficient base for faith and order and that it contained, according to the Westminster Confession, all the revelation humans needed to understand God’s truth. Adherents of both schools of thought were folk of great faith and piety; no difference or accusation on that score seriously arose between them. Personal faith and piety were not the issue. At issue was the nature of the authority of Scripture and how to read it for application to the on-going life of the church and of individual Christians. In Protestantism generally, New School thinking, though in a distinct minority in the nineteenth century, became the mode of biblical studies in the twentieth. By the end of the First World War almost every mainline Protestant seminary was teaching Scripture through the same historical / critical methods the “heretics” had espoused only a few decades earlier. Old School positions that survived embraced what was left of nineteenth-century Fundamentalism. But even so they lost most adherents after the Scopes Trial in Tennessee in 1925. Fundamentalism turned inward, as in Pentecostalism, to stress the salvation of individual souls as the way to address issues of church and society. Basic Fundamentalism did not reassert itself until the mid-1970s in neo-Fundamentalist movements such as the Moral Majority. Pentecostalism, with its emphasis on the authority and power of the Holy Spirit, as in the Assemblies of God churches, specifically opposed Fundamentalism in the fifty-year interval. But by 1980 it had joined it, losing much of its distinctiveness. Evangelists like Billy Sunday, Amy Semple McPherson, Dwight Moody, Charles Fuller, Billy Graham and others were exemplars of focus on salvation of the individual soul as the business of Christianity in the interim before the rise in the last quarter of this century of the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition. These Fundamentalist movements tried to turn personal morals into corporate and social-ethical issues in a “Christian nation” by calling, with the implied arrogance of being the only “Scriptural Christians,” for government legislation at all levels that would prohibit abortion, criminalize homosexuality, mandate prayer in schools, sacralize the national flag, and censor art and literature. In the view of many, however, they tacitly support bigotry, greed, and hypocrisy,

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including outlawing certain drugs while tacitly shielding the most lethal of them all, that of the (Southern) tobacco industry. The failed impeachment trial of President Clinton in 1999 may become that same sort of historical marker of the current decline of Fundamentalism as the Scopes Trial in 1925. Some of the most prominent Fundamentalist leaders have begun to call for a retreat from politics and a return to “spreading the gospel” so that individuals would be converted and do what is “right.”13 Historical / critical study of the Bible and tradition was well enough established in universities and some seminaries in the American Northeast by the fourth quarter of the nineteenth century that the Society of Biblical Literature was founded in 1880, and the American Society of Church History in 1888, both at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, the seat of New School thinking. Such guilds soon found adherents and members outside the Northeast, and their influence spread steadily until they became national in scope by the second quarter of the twentieth century. But the membership was largely limited to Protestants. Some Jews in America, who had been influenced by the rise of the Jüdische Wissenschaft (Enlightenment) movement in Germany beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century, became members of the guilds before the turn of the century. But Roman Catholics were not free to join such societies until the encyclical of Pope Pius XII, the Divino Affiante Spiritu, in 1943.14 Thus Renaissance and Enlightenment study of Scripture, that is, individual critical readings, which had given birth to the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century, gradually spread to Jews by the late nineteenth century, and to Catholics by the middle of the twentieth century.

Criticism and Authority Efforts to reconcile historical / critical study with basic tenets of Christian faith begged the question of the authority of Scripture. Most adherents of Enlightenment study of Scripture and tradition refused to abandon some form of Christian identity and therefore were confronted personally with the issue of authority. It is interesting to note that the minutes and records of the Society of Biblical Literature give little or no evidence of the bitter modernist / fundamentalist debates raging outside the guild in the country at the end of the nineteenth century.15 But personally its members could not escape the issues involved.

13   See the op-ed article by Cal Thomas and Edward Dobson in the Los Angeles Times Metro Section of 24 March 1999, commented on in a Times editorial in the Metro Section of 3 April 1999. 14   See the report on the Requiem Mass for Fr.  Raymond Edward Brown, celebrated at St. Patrick’s Seminary in Menlo Park on 14 August 1998, in the booklet published for the Memorial Service held for Fr. Brown at Union Theological Seminary 2 October 1998, republished in the spring 1999 issue of USQR 52, nos. 3 – 4 (spring 1999). 15  Saunders, Searching the Scriptures.

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The crux of the issue of biblical authority was the place of revelation (authority “from above”) in understanding that authority. Most biblical scholars retained some form of specific faith identity and could not escape the task. Those who opted entirely for Enlightenment views of authority often let their faith identity lapse. But most could or would not. The New School of “evangelical liberals,” as they liked to be called, were very clear that revelation was an integral part of understanding scriptural authority, but insisted that revelation had not ceased with the close of the Christian canon but that God continued to reveal higher truths, even making “old truths uncouth.” The emphasis on the continuing and challenging work of the Holy Spirit in the Great Revival of the early nineteenth century emerged among Christian progressives as the key to being able to stay in the faith, broadly conceived. Interesting in this regard was the doctrine in nascent rabbinic Judaism, beginning in the second century of the common era after the Bar Kochba revolt, that prophecy or revelation had ceased centuries earlier in the time of Ezra–Nehemiah. This new teaching explained why the messianic movement of Bar Kochba, which the famous Rabbi Akiba had supported, failed disastrously, but also explained why surviving rabbinic Judaism chose to depart from history. Rabbinic Jews would thereafter live in stasis in closed Jewish communities throughout the Roman world. God had become distant and remote and thus had departed from history centuries earlier for many Jews, as for many Greeks, and surviving Judaism should go and do likewise. Judaism, indeed, did not re-enter history until the Jüdische Wissenschaft movement in the nineteenth century, noted above, and did not fully do so until the founding of the State of Israel.16 Other Jewish communities in pre-Christian early Judaism, however, did not agree that prophecy or revelation had ceased, but continued to believe in and to write of God’s work in the political events of their time, that is, in history. These were the communities that produced much of the Apocrypha, Pseudepigrapha, and the Qumran literature, which show belief in God’s continuing and future involvement in history. One of these Jewish sects called “The Way” (Acts 9:2; 19:9) quite clearly believed in God’s continuing revelation. In fact, most early Jewish communities did not believe that God had departed from history or had ceased all further revelation. Even rabbinic Judaism after the revolts against Rome believed in the Shekinah, the presence of God’s spirit in Jewish communities. But the concept of Shekinah did not involve either further acts of God in secular history, or in apocalyptic speculation. The Shekinah was God’s support for individual Jews and for Jewish communities that strove to be obedient and faithful to Torah despite the hostility all around them, but not further revelation in political or common history.

16   Sanders, “Spinning the Bible,” 27 – 29; Sanders, “Hebrew University Bible and Biblia Hebraica Quinta”; and Sanders, “Judaean Desert Scrolls.” David Hartman of the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem asserts, with others, that the founding of the State of Israel was not a response to the Holocaust but to the Jüdische Wissenschaft movement.

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Christianity, in other words, was among those early Jewish communities that fully believed in God’s continuing revelation, both in Christ and in the nascent church. And revelation is a concept to be reckoned with in Christianity today. If critical inquiry and inductive thinking were the only base of authority for understanding Scripture, the question of the continuity of Jewish or Christian identity would sharply arise. Even belief in the so-called quadrilateral nature of Christian authority entails belief in Scripture and tradition as well as in current human reason and experience. The concept of divine revelation in Scripture and in Christ needs to be addressed even by the most critical of scholarship. What has been added since the Renaissance and the Enlightenment is increasingly strong belief in inductive research and critical reasoning. This brought me, early on, in contrast to Brevard Childs of Yale, who also works in the area of the meaning and nature of Scripture as canon, to assert belief in biblical criticism as a “gift of God in due season.”17 Critical inquiry and biblical criticism explain increasingly well both the history of formation and the history of transmission of Scripture without reference to the concept of revelation – if treatment of the source of prophetic quotes of God is left a mystery, or a matter of the thinking of the individual biblical tradent solely. Critical inquiry should be thoroughly pursued before asking the question of the authority of Scripture for believing communities today, and its results should be the basis of the formulation of any theory of authority, thus continuing the program Spinoza launched over three centuries ago. The sub-discipline of Canonical Criticism, developed since the early 1970s, is hence an extension of biblical criticism.18 Our work to date can be characterized, if not summarized, rather briefly.

Scripture as Canon Whereas the Qur’an purports to be a record of revelation by God to one person, Muhammed, the Bible, Jewish and Christian, on the contrary, purports to be records of human responses to divine revelations to numerous people, many anonymous, over a course of about fifteen hundred years.19 This observation illumines critical readings of the biblical text that indicate a high level of diversity, or limited pluralism, of points of view stemming from its long history of formation. This is the reason there are so many different views of what it says, 17   E. g., in Sanders, From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, 171. See Weis and Carr, Gift of God in Due Season, 13 et passim. 18   Beginning with Sanders, Torah and Canon, ix – xx. Contrast Brevard Childs’s literary focus on “canonical context.” 19   See Sanders, “Canon. Hebrew Bible.” Manuscript evidence has recently been found in the Great Mosque of Sana’a, in Yemen, that indicates the Qur’an was also a text that evolved over time, albeit a much shorter period, indicating that it, like the Bible, has a textual history; see Lester, “What is the Koran?” Words in italics that follow are the salient characteristics of canonical literature.

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and so many denominations to give varying emphasis to the different voices in it. And it is not a compendium of similar voices compiled by one editor. On the contrary, the Bible, Jewish or Christian, is a dialogical literature. The richness of the Bible’s diversity lies in part in its providing in itself prophetic challenges to any and all efforts to build theological constructs on parts of it. Critically read, it harbors its own self-corrective apparatus, discerned through critical readings of the Bible independent of magisteria. And, like much of the world’s greatest literature, especially good poetry, it is largely written in multivalent language. This observation illumines the fact that the Bible has spoken for at least two thousand years to very different situations and contexts in the history of its transmission and function in diverse cultural communities around the globe. The discipline of Comparative Midrash illumines in critical terms the widely variant, even opposing, understandings of single passages down through early Judaism into early Christianity and rabbinic Judaism. In fact, no two understandings of the same passage are ever exactly the same. This is true even for critical readings of the same text since the rise of biblical criticism and the efforts to respond to Spinoza’s call; and it is true according to different schools of critical thought about the same passage.20 Because of these two pervasive traits in biblical literature, the limited pluralism and the multivalency, the Bible is inherently adaptable to address innumerably different conditions. In fact, the Bible is in this sense “adaptable for life.”21 In the period before stabilization of the text of most of the Bible came about, the texts of both Testaments were relatively fluid in nature. The Judean Desert Scrolls have dramatically changed our understanding of the early history of the transmission of the Hebrew Bible. The earliest period of textual transmission is now seen as characterized by textual fluidity. Scribes copying texts as well as translators could slightly alter the reading of a passage to make it more comprehensible and adaptable to concerns in their communities. Such intentional scribal changes in the texts of the earliest biblical manuscripts indicate clearly that the focus was on the community and its dependence on the text, rather than on accuracy of transmission. That would come later, for both Testaments, for socio-political reasons.22 To speak of the Bible as canon is, in effect, to speak of its relevance and adaptability to many different communities, in many cultures, over thousands of years. Christian believing communities differ over canonical stability, that is, the number and order of books to include in the Bible, but they all agree that it is relevant and adaptable to them and their condition. Stability, however, is equally important for understanding canon. The stable structure of a canon indicates the

20  Sanders, Canon and Community, 21 – 45; Callaway, Sing, O Barren One, 1 – 12; Carr, From D to Q, 1 – 5; Evans and Sanders, Luke and Scripture, 1 – 13. See now Kugel, Traditions of the Bible, who, however, fails to acknowledge most of the work in this area of the past thirty years. 21   Sanders, “Adaptable for Life.” 22   Sanders, “Text and Canon;” Sanders, “Stability and Fluidity.” See also Colwell, New or Old?

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hermeneutics by which the community is expected to read it.23 Not only so, but recitation of a Scripture passage must be recognizable by the community for it to have the rhetorical authority sought in applying it. If it is so paraphrased that the community does not recognize it, it fails to provide the authority sought. It is commonplace to observe that every time a literary passage is recited it is resignified to some extent (relecture), simply because the hearers understand the passage from within the unique condition of each hearing. While there are constraints in the text and must also be, of necessity, in its recitation, even so, the “word of God” that occurs in the recitation is at the juncture of text and context, not in the stabilized text alone.24 Three factors are essential in study of the relevance / adaptability factor of a biblical passage re-read and re-applied to a new situation: the text cited; the new situation in which it was heard and applied; and the hermeneutic by which the passage was applied to the new situation. This may be called the hermeneutic triangle, which often challenges the hermeneutic circle closed when the biblical text is read solely through community traditions and magisteria. When asked what one needed to do to inherit eternal life, Jesus answered the question with two further questions: What is written in Torah and how do you read it? In other words, one needs to know what in Scripture is pertinent to the question asked, and one needs to be aware of the hermeneutics (the “how”) by which to read that passage. The inquirer responded by citing from the Jewish Shemaʿ, which is a recitation of Deut 6:4 – 5 (Luke 10:25 – 27; Mark 12:29 – 31; cf. Luke 18:18), adding the paraphrase of Lev 19:18 about loving the neighbor, a convention in Judaism by that time. And Jesus approved of the response. The Shemaʿ focuses on the heart of Jewish faith: God is One and should be loved by the faithful with all the heart, all the self, and all one’s wealth or power. Thus the hermeneutic by which the passage should be read is clearly a theocentric-monotheizing hermeneutic. The passage itself indicated the hermeneutic: loving God as One ruled out loving God as a national, ethnic, or denominational deity only. The third factor was the situation in Judaism and Judea in the time of Christ, the first third of the first century of the common era. In fact, probing the socio-political situation out of which a passage arose, and for which it was relevant, is of vital importance in understanding what Jesus meant. The meaning assigned to the passage by later tradition is often challenged by a critical or historical reading of that passage. On the other hand, if a passage is read critically only, there is the danger that the Sitz im Leben of the Bible as canon becomes academia or the university, relevant only to discussions of the history of the formation and transmission of the text, and becomes irrelevant to the believing communities that gave us these texts and continue to recite them, irrelevant also to interfaith dialogue today.25 In order for believing communities to benefit from and be challenged by critical readings of the text, those critical readings must be brought back into the 23

  Sanders, “Spinning the Bible,” 25 – 29.   Sanders, “Hebrew Bible and Old Testament.”   Sanders, “Intertextuality and Dialogue.”

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setting of the believing community by the current tradent who would address its relevance for that community (cf. the encyclical Divino Affiante Spiritu). The metaphor Canonical Criticism has suggested is that of the beadle in the Church of Scotland, who “bears the Bible” critically read from the pastor’s study to the communion table in the chancel at the beginning of the weekly Sunday worship service. Thus the Bible symbolically recovers its true Sitz im Leben in the continuing, believing communities (Jewish or Christian) whence it arose and developed, and continues to have its relevance; that is where it reaches its full stature promised in critical study of its meanings when it got onto the tenure track toward canon, which brought it to the current communities today. Faithfully read only, Scripture bears the full burden of whatever magisterium has become attached to it in the multiple believing communities of either Judaism or Christianity. Critically read only, the Bible becomes the history of the foundation of those communities today, largely buried in the past, and largely irrelevant to their ongoing existence.26 The true or trustworthy relevance of Scripture is in reading the text both critically and faithfully, critically first, and then faithfully brought back into the believing community. An example of the false and untrustworthy relevance of Scripture today is reading it as an apocalyptic code that, when broken, reveals to the current reader the date of the end of the world. The falsehood of such readings, though obviously popular through the ages, is demonstrated in a history of such readings: they have never been right in their predictions based on the Bible, but each time believe anew that they have now found the right key that can break the “code” and get it right. The third millennium of the common era will encourage further such efforts. It is testimony to the popular attraction of the view that the Bible addresses the end-time and that the present, constantly updated, is always a candidate for the eschaton.27

Canonical Hermeneutics The hermeneutics by which the text is read determines the interpretation given. Consistently applying the critical hermeneutical triangle in reading the Bible it is possible to discern a pattern in the hermeneutics used by the biblical tradents in antiquity, the prophets, psalmists, historians, sages, evangelists, apostles, and rabbis in applying an earlier text or tradition to a new situation.28 Nearly thirty [now fifty] years’ work in Canonical Criticism offers some clarity about what might thus be called canonical hermeneutics – the hermeneutics critically discerned that lie between the lines throughout the biblical text.29 Succinctly, the hermeneutics discerned by use of the triangle point to the authority of the first 26

 Smart, Strange Silence.   Clouse, Hosack, and Pierard, New Millennium Manual; Kyle, Last Days Are Here Again. These are written from a “conservative” stance. 28   Sanders, “Scrolls and the Canonical Process.” 29  Sanders, Canon and Community, 46 – 60. 27

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three of the Ten Commandments as the basic biblical view of reality, a theocentric monotheizing hermeneutic: God is One; idolatry is worshipping or fearing any of God’s gifts instead of the Giver of all gifts; and vanity is co-opting God’s name for one point of view whether in courts of law or of church. God is the principal actor in the Torah / Christ story. The Bible, no matter the canon, is not really a monotheistic literature. On the contrary, much of the cultural polytheism of the ancient eras through which the Bible was formed is lodged in biblical texts. But its thrust is clearly a monotheizing one. Not as in a clear progression from polytheism to henotheism to pure monotheism, or the like, but rather in the remarkable observation the biblical historical critic must make, that what became canon out of all the literature of ancient Israel and the early church has had a monotheizing thrust. What ended up in the canon is only about 10 percent of the known early Jewish and early Christian literature. The history of the canonical process is marked by a kind of “survival of the toughest,” what people may not have liked when first uttered or written but was “adaptable for life” to later surviving early Jewish and Christian communities. This is especially clear in study within the Bible of true and false prophecy.30 The so-called false prophet generally had the popular message, the vox populi, while the true prophet, the one whose words got onto the tenure track toward canon, was unpopular at the time. Why? Because the true prophet insisted that it was the same God who had chosen Israel who was judging Israel, and then later that the very God who had punished Israel was restoring her. God, as presented from the Torah through the whole Bible, is the God of risings and fallings, victories and defeats, what the people would call good and what they would call evil, at any given time in its history. God’s Oneness may be seen as the Integrity of Reality – all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. God’s Reality has integrity, ontological and ethical.31 God is One. The concept of the Heavenly Council in the First Testament, and the later concept of the Trinity in Christianity, may be seen as the guarantors of God’s Oneness, easement buffers, as it were, against the chaos of polytheism to prevent disintegration into it. Human reason resists the idea that, with so much evil abounding, God is One and has integrity beyond human reason and experience. But that is the matter and the heart of faith, as seen by Jesus’ response to the inquirer. The Trinitarian formula of understanding God is for human needs, an effort to grasp the incomprehensible. God is Deus Revelatus for Christians; but God is in equal measure Deus Absconditus. To believe that God, or Truth, is completely revealed, through Scripture or in Christ or in the church, is idolatry. A way of expressing the authority of Scripture in postmodern times is to see it as seasoned and proven witness to the Integrity of Reality. The Bible was formed over a fifteen-hundred-year period through five ancient culture eras, the Bronze Age, the Iron Age, the Persian Era, and the Greco-Roman-Hellenistic Period, and is hence a dialogical literature. Read critically and faithfully by the theocen30

  Sanders, “Hermeneutics in True and False Prophecy.”   Sanders, “Integrity of God.”

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tric-monotheizing hermeneutic that comes from its own pages, the Bible emerges through it all as a powerful witness to the moral fiber of God’s creation. It is a powerful dialogue partner with current natural science that continues basically to subscribe to Chance or Fortuna as the “god” of creation.32 Judaism and Christianity, while learning from inductive science and current critical study of nature, say No to the authority of chaos or chance, and Yes to the Integrity of Reality, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. For the Christian that moral fiber is expressed nowhere more powerfully than in the biblical story that begins with creation and reaches its climax in the condescension of the God of all Creation to submit “personally” to the inhuman cruelty in the clash between European and Near Eastern Jewish cultures that occurred during the Roman occupation of Palestine and led to three devastating revolts against Rome in Palestine alone. The story of the crucifixion and the resurrection of Jesus epitomizes that clash with a story of God’s love unbounded and undeterred by human fear, bigotry, and greed. Striking is the observation that though the two finest and most developed legal systems of antiquity, Torah and Lex Romana, were both in place and functioning in first-century Palestine, this story says that is when God came to dwell fully in one person, a Jew, and that is when we humans, caught up in a culture clash of stupendous proportions, crucified him – that God’s glory might be made manifest. Christ’s own power was in his willingness to be condemned to the greater glory of God, that is, to witness dramatically to the Integrity of Reality, to God’s being the God of risings and fallings, victories and defeats, what humans call good and what humans call evil. The Torah / Christ story from beginning to end testifies to God’s ability to take what humans call evil and convert it into what humans call good (Gen 45 – 50, Isa 28:16, etc.).33 In one of the most inspiring and beautiful recent books in Jewish theology, Michael Fishbane writes that the authorizing moment of the Torah story is the descent of God on Mt. Sinai to give Moses the Law.34 In a review, I asked why Fishbane had chosen that theophany in the Torah story as the authority of Scripture.35 Fishbane explores Jewish views of incarnation, that of Maimonides and Abraham Heschel as God’s incarnation in Israel, the Jewish people, and that of Rosenzweig and Buber as God’s incarnation in Torah or Scripture. Why then not choose instead an earlier theophany, the pastoral call of God on Abram and Sarai in Gen 12? That was the beginning for Israel of the story of God’s sojourn with humans. If the authority of Scripture is in a theophany the Bible describes, why choose one and not the other? The answer is that Fishbane’s “hermeneutic circle,” his identity as a contemporary rabbinic Jew, brings him to see the one

32   See Gould, Rocks of Ages. Timothy Ferris, of UC Berkeley, in his The Whole Shebang, is an apparent exception. Chance or Fortuna for Ferris is “Life,” which provides surprises even for God. 33   Sanders, “Torah and Christ”; Sanders, God Has a Story Too, 41 – 56. 34  Fishbane, Garments of Torah. 35   Sanders, Review of The Garments of Torah.

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theophany as the core expression of biblical authority, while my hermeneutic circle, my identity as a Christian, brings me to see the earlier theophany as the genesis of the Torah / Christ story that reaches its climax in Christ, not only in a pastoral call but in an incarnation in one person.36 For all the inductive study of Scripture that Fishbane and I have both done and trust on the historical level, it is clear to us both that biblical criticism is not our true home, and cannot express our real identity. And there can be no umpire between us; biblical criticism alone is incompetent to decide between us or bring either of us to the whole truth about the Bible – a testimony to its multivalency and diversity.

Scripture as Paradigm Biblical criticism was a gift of God in due season, and it is a gift that can be shared by Jew and Christian. But it cannot afford us our complete identity; it is [a tool to use,] not a place to stand. Fishbane stands, on the contrary, at the foot of a mountain, and I at the foot of a cross, and biblical criticism clarifies for both of us not only the origins but the power of each biblical image.37 The one focuses on faith in what the Bible indicates God has done with humans, while the other focuses on what humans can do to obey and please God – without either denying the validity of the other focus. Abraham Heschel stressed that Judaism is made up of both haggadah and halakah, not just the latter.38 And his older colleague, Reinhold Niebuhr, stressed that Christianity is made up of both gospel and law, not just the former. Heschel further insisted that no religion is an island.39 The two Israels need each other. Neither alone can comprehend all that Scripture has bequeathed us. It is in this sense that Scripture cannot finally be seen only as a story of God’s ways with humans, or only as God’s will for how humans should live to God’s glory. It is both, if critically read in terms of the cultural differences and historical givens that were the vehicles of its formation and transmission through the ages. It is the Word of God receptus – but only as it is comprehended by humans where they live, conditioned by their own cultural givens. It therefore cannot essentially be a Rule Book. It cannot be belittled as a Code to be broken to predict an apocalypse. It cannot only be a casket of jewels of ancient wisdom still negotiable. Nor should it be abused as prooftext of the various magisteria that developed out of its diversity and multivalency. A critical and faithful reading of Scripture challenges every theological construct built upon it since there can be 36   Sanders, “Intertextuality and Dialogue.” See also Sanders, “Spinning the Bible” for a discussion of the almost universal belief in early Christianity, among so-call Judaizers and hellenizers alike, that it had superseded Judaism as God’s Israel. 37   Sanders, “Identity, Apocalyptic, and Dialogue.” 38   For references see Sanders, “Torah and Christ.” 39   Heschel, “No Religion Is an Island,” his inaugural address as Fosdick Visiting Professor at Union Theological Seminary in New York in the fall of 1965, published in USQR in January 1966.

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no single theology that escapes the judgments of other parts of Scripture. Scripture critically and faithfully read induces reverence for its power in the lives of untold millions through the ages, and still today. Wherever and whenever that power has been abused to claim partisan gain, exclusive claims on God, to dehumanize others because they are different genetically or culturally, or to practice bigotry, racism, or greed, God continues to suffer. God suffers in Israel for the sake of the world, and God suffers in Christ for the sake of the world – as the prophets and Jesus clearly taught, if they are read both critically and faithfully. The Bible then becomes for us today a dialogical paradigm of the divinehuman encounter.40 We have been given in Scripture, with all its seams and fractures critically perceived, the means to conjugate the verbs of God’s ways with humans, and to decline the nouns of God’s wisdom so generously shared in these texts. Scripture does not contain the whole truth about God, or about us, but offers a paradigm, forged in suffering through the ages, whereby we may continue in dialogue to seek the truth about ourselves, and about our yearning for the One who first sought and continues to seek us in a form of love that is at once both incomprehensible and transforming.

Addendum Re-reading the Bible by a theocentric-monotheizing hermeneutic, both critically and faithfully as the Christian paradigm of the divine-human encounter, would issue in a theocentric Christology. It might be seen as the contrapositive of the effort of Karl Barth early in the twentieth century to write a biblically based christocentric theology. By this hermeneutic one theologizes in reading the biblical text before moralizing. That is, one focuses first on what God has done with the (sinful) humans who populate the story from beginning to end, before one asks what humans should do or should have done. And when one does then moralize, after celebrating what the text says God has done with humans, one uses the principle of dynamic analogy to discern the ethics indicated for the reader, who thereby finds her / himself mirrored in the dramatis personae of the biblical story. Nor does one decide who in the text is the protagonist or the antagonist until the dynamic reading is complete. The gospel thus begins in Genesis with God’s first act of righteousness and justice, the creation of heaven and earth. That same God, both august and personal (Gen 1 – 2), paid a pastoral call on Abram and Sarai (Gen 12) inviting them on a journey of great promise with God. They would not be apostles of God but, on the contrary, companions on the biblical (Emanuel) journey. God’s presence with Israel would be its distinguishing mark (Exod 33:14 – 16, et passim) [both for its well-being and for its downfall when abused to claim national exceptionalism]. 40   Schüssler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her, suggests that Scripture may be understood as model. The concept of paradigm seems to me more apt for the reasons noted above and below.

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For the Christian, this journey finds its climax in God’s incarnation in one person, a Jew from the Galilee. A careful, critical reading of the story indicates that it was not until the hellenization process after Alexander’s conquests of the Near East had reached a crescendo that the full story could be heard by some Jews. Most of the Bible focuses on community worth and responsibility, God’s intimate relationship with Israel as a people. Beginning in the late Iron Age individual worth and responsibility began to find expression within the corporate (Jer 31:29 – 34; Ezek 18), but it was not until the hellenization process had affected much of Judaism that the message found ears to comprehend that God would come finally to dwell in one person for the sake of all the world. Many Jews, even so, would not be able to hear the message or accept it because it was for them too Greco-Roman, too pagan. Jewish theology would accept the idea of incarnation, not in one person but in Israel as a People (ha-ʿam, so Maimonides, Heschel) or in Scripture (Rosenzweig, Buber, Fishbane). Christianity’s maintaining a double-Testament Bible after Marcion and other efforts to reject the First Testament was not a pro-Jewish move, but an affirmation of the almost universal Christian belief of the first centuries of the common era that the church had succeeded Judaism as God’s True Israel (whether Judaizers [conservatives] or hellenizers [liberals] in the churches). For the rabbinic Jew, the Christian understanding of the double-Testament Bible was too pagan.41 For the Christian it provided a glorious climax to the story that began in Genesis. The God who created the whole world and accompanied Israel on her journey became accessible to the larger world through God’s work in Christ and in the church. Bibliography Callaway, Mary. Sing, O Barren One: A Study in Comparative Midrash. Atlanta: Scholars, 1986. Carr, David M. From D to Q: A Study of Early Jewish Interpretations of Solomon’s Dream at Gibeon. Atlanta: Scholars, 1991. Clouse, Robert G., Robert N. Hosack, and Richard V. Pierard. The New Millennium Manual: A Once and Future Guide. Grand Rapids: Baker, 1998. Colwell, Ernest C. New or Old? The Christian Struggle with Change and Tradition. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1970. Elliger, Karl. Studien zum Habakuk-Kommentar vom Toten Meer. BHT 15. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1953. Evans, Craig A., and James A. Sanders. Luke and Scripture: The Function of Sacred Tradition in Luke – Acts. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993. Ferris, Timothy. The Whole Shebang. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997. Fishbane, Michael A. The Garments of Torah: Essays in Biblical Hermeneutics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989. 41   Torah in its broad sense includes both haggadah and halakah, that is, both story and stipulation, or gospel and law, from beginning to end, by its very nature (see Sanders, “Torah and Christ” and Sanders, “Torah and Paul”). Christianity emphasizes the story or gospel aspect of Torah, while rabbinic Judaism stresses the halakic aspect. Dialogue between the two is mandated to honor the full nature of God’s gift of Torah as well as God’s gift of Christ.

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Gould, Stephen Jay. Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life. New York: Ballantine, 1999. Halsel, Grace. Journey to Jerusalem. New York: Macmillan, 1981. Heschel, Abraham. “No Religion Is an Island.” USQR 21, no. 2 (1966) 117 – 34. Kugel, James L. Traditions of the Bible: A Guide to the Bible as It Was at the Start of the Common Era. Cambridge. MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. Kyle, Richard G. The Last Days Are Here Again: A History of the End Times. Grand Rapids: Baker, 1999. Lester, Toby. “What is the Koran?” Atlantic Monthly (January 1999) 43 – 56. Longfield, Bradley J. The Presbyterian Controversy: Fundamentalists, Modernists and Moderates. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Sanders, James A. “Adaptable for Life: The Nature and Function of Canon.” In Magnalia Dei: The Mighty Acts of God: Essays on the Bible and Archaeology in Memory of G. Ernest Wright, edited by Frank M. Cross, Werner E. Lemke, and Patrick D. Miller, 531 – 60. Garden City: NY: Doubleday, 1976. Reprinted in From Sacred Story to Sacred Text: Canon as Paradigm, by James A. Sanders, 9 – 39. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987. Sanders, James A. “The Bible at Union, 1835 to the Present.” USQR 52, nos.  3 – 4 (spring 1999) 19 – 21. Sanders, James A. “Canon. Hebrew Bible.” In ABD 1:837 – 52. Sanders, James A. Canon and Community: A Guide to Canonical Criticism. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984. Sanders, James A. “The Exile and Canon Formation.” In Exile: Old Testament, Jewish, and Christian Conceptions, edited by James M. Scott, 37 – 61. Leiden: Brill, 1997. Sanders, James A. From Sacred Story to Sacred Text: Canon as Paradigm. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987. Sanders, James A. God Has a Story Too: Sermons in Context. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1979. Sanders, James A. “Hebrew Bible and Old Testament: Textual Criticism in Service of Biblical Studies.” In Hebrew Bible or Old Testament? Studying the Bible in Judaism and Christianity, edited by Roger Brooks and John J. Collins, 41 – 68. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990. Sanders, James A. “The Hebrew University Bible and Biblia Hebraica Quinta.” JBL 118 (1999) 518 – 26. Sanders, James A. “Hermeneutics in True and False Prophecy.” In Canon and Authority: Essays in Old Testament Religion and Theology, edited by George W. Coats and Burke O. Long, 21 – 41. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1977. [Reprinted as “Canonical Hermeneutics: True and False Prophecy.” In From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, by James A. Sanders, 87 – 105. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987.] Sanders, James A. “Identity, Apocalyptic, and Dialogue.” In Echoes of Many Texts: Reflections on Jewish and Christian Traditions. Essays in Honor of Lou H. Silberman, edited by William G. Dever and J. Edward Wright, 159 – 70. BJS 313. Atlanta: Scholars, 1997. Sanders, James A. “The Impact of the Scrolls on Biblical Studies.” In The Provo International Conference on the Dead Sea Scrolls: New Texts, Reformulated Issues, and Technological Innovations, edited by Donald W. Parry and Eugene C. Ulrich, 47 – 57. STDJ 30. Leiden: Brill, 1999. Sanders, James A. “The Integrity of God.” Concern (December 1976) 9 – 10. Sanders, James A. “Intertextuality and Dialogue.” BTB 29 (1999) 35 – 44. Sanders, James A. “The Judaean Desert Scrolls and the History of the Text of the Hebrew Bible.” In Caves of Enlightenment: Proceedings of the American Schools of Oriental Research Dead Sea Scrolls Jubilee Symposium (1947 – 1997), edited by James H. Charlesworth, 1 – 17. North Richland Hills, TX: Bibal, 1999.

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Sanders, James A. Review of The Garments of Torah: Essays in Biblical Hermeneutics, by Michael A. Fishbane. ThTo 47, no. 4 (1991) 433 – 35. Sanders, James A. “The Scrolls and the Canonical Process.” In The Dead Sea Scrolls after Fifty Years, edited by Peter W. Flint and James C. VanderKam, 2:1 – 23. Leiden: Brill, 1999. Sanders, James A. “‘Spinning’ the Bible: How Judaism and Christianity Shape the Canon Differently.” BRev 14, no.  3 (1998) 22 – 29, 44 – 45. Sanders, James A. “Stability and Fluidity in Text and Canon.” In Tradition of the Text: Studies offered to Dominique Barthélemy in Celebration of His 70th Birthday, edited by Gerard J. Norton and Stephen Pisano, 203 – 17. OBO 109. Fribourg: Presses universitaires; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1991. Sanders, James A. “The Stabilization of the Tanak.” In A History of Biblical Interpretation. Vol. 1, The Ancient Period, edited by Alan J. Hauser and Duane F. Watson, 225 – 52. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003. Sanders, James A. “Text and Canon: Old Testament and New.” In Mélanges Dominique Barthélemy: Études bibliques offertes à l’occasion de son 60e anniversaire, edited by Pierre Casetti, Othmar Keel, and Adrian Schenker, 373 – 94. OBO 38. Fribourg: Presses universitaires; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1981. Sanders, James A. Torah and Canon. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1972. [2nd ed. Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2005.] Sanders, James A. “Torah and Christ.” Int 29 (1975) 372 – 90. [Reprinted in From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, by James A. Sanders, 41 – 60. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987.] Sanders, James A. “Torah and Paul.” In God’s Christ and His People: Studies in Honour of Nils Alstrup Dahl on the Occasion of His Sixty-Fifth Birthday, edited by Wayne A. Meeks and Jacob Jervell, 132 – 40. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1977. [Reprinted as “Paul and the Law.” In From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, by James A. Sanders, 115 – 23. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987.] Sanders, James A. “Why the Pseudepigrapha?” In The Pseudepigrapha and Early Biblical Interpretation, edited by James H. Charlesworth and Craig A. Evans, 13 – 19. JSPSup 14. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1993. Saunders, Ernest W. Searching the Scriptures: A History of the Society of Biblical Literature, 1880 – 1980. Chico, CA: Scholars, 1982. Schüssler Fiorenza, Elisabeth. In Memory of Her. New York: Crossroads, 1994. Smart, James D. The Strange Silence of the Bible in the Churches: A Study in Hermeneutics. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1970. Spinoza, Baruch. Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. Edited by Günter Gawlick and Friedrich Niewöhner. Opera, Werke lateinisch und deutsch 1. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1979. Todd, Richard. “Not Your Father’s Church.” Civilization (April / May 1999) 44 – 46. Weis, Richard D., and David M. Carr, eds. A Gift of God in Due Season: Essays on Scripture and Community in Honor of James A. Sanders. JSOTSup / LHBOTS 225. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1996. Wheeler, Barbara. “An Auburn Affirmation: Reflections for a 75th Anniversary.” Auburn Views [Auburn Theological Seminary, New York] (Spring 1999).

19 Canon as Dialogue Introduction Some religions are scriptured while others are not. Within the three monotheistic religions now surviving, the Qur’an purports to be a record of divine revelation to an individual, while the Bible, Jewish or Christian, purports to be records of human responses to divine revelations.1 While others must say how much dialogue there is in the Qur’an, the Jewish and Christian canons are replete with dialogue within a literary context of a rough, monotheizing process evident in approximately 10 percent of Israel’s ancient literature, or the literature of the early churches that ended up in canons. Within Judaism and Christianity there are multiple canons, with most books within the First Testament shared by all the canons, but they differ one from another in both structure and content – from the smallest, that is, the Jewish and Protestant canons, to the eighty books of the Ethiopian Orthodox canon. All the Christian canons betray structures, as does the Jewish, that are interpretations in themselves. All manuscripts of the Septuagint that we have came through Christian communities so that we have no idea quite how the Hellenistic-Jewish communities in pre-Christian times thought of a structure, or canon as norma normata, for the Greek scrolls of their Bible. While all such structures started with the Torah or Pentateuch, for that was the most stable part of the Jewish canon or the Christian First Testament, after this we have only theological clues about the LXX before its departure from surviving rabbinic Jewish hands. In the age of scrolls, before the codex came into Jewish use, the question, of course, is moot. For these reasons, and for other equally important reasons we shall explore, the Bible is full of dialogue. In fact, Scripture, of any canon, Jewish or Christian, is a dialogical literature. Dialogue, or discourse, takes different forms within Scripture. Some were between contemporary colleagues who disagreed with each other about a major issue or crisis in the life of Israel, such as dialogues between so-called true and false prophets, or between Jesus and the religious leaders of his day. Contradictions within the text of a prophet need not necessarily be seen as stemming from different ancient sources but may indicate debates engaged with so-called false prophets who were contemporaries. Those are very interesting in part because what the false prophets said had the support of the leaders and the people of the time, but they are not the ones that made it into Scripture. For false *  First published 2001. 1   Cf. Smith, What Is Scripture, 45 – 91; Sanders, “Canon. Hebrew Bible.”

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prophets, God’s promises and commitments to Israel were sort of credits that they could cash in according to the need of Israel in crisis, as they thought. True prophets firmly believed in God’s promises and commitments but clearly taught that God, as the creator of all peoples, was free to fulfill those promises according to God’s agenda, and not a human agenda; and the route to the fulfillment of the promises might be very rough and painful. True prophets always said the tough things, which, when remembered later, however, were very helpful for the people’s later survival and existence. These pronouncements hence got on a kind of tenure track of repetition and recitation and thus became a part of canonical Scripture. In nearly all these cases, literary-historical criticism has shown that heresies or dissent often later became “orthodox.” “Heresy as discourse” is rooted in understanding canon as dialogue. In Scripture’s monotheizing context, God is presented as sponsor of ongoing discourse.2 Dialogue also occurs in Scripture between two points of view that, while literally contradictory, often addressed quite different problems and situations in antiquity. This kind of silent dialogue, as it were, provides Scripture with an internal corrective device, which should prevent the reader from absolutizing one or the other, or from harmonizing away the dialogue. Another type of ongoing dialogue in Scripture derives from Scripture’s being multicultural. The Bible is an anthology of literature produced over a span of roughly twelve hundred years, from the Semitic Bronze and Iron Age world through the non-Semitic Persian period into the European Hellenistic-Roman world. The Bible contains not only literature influenced by the cultures of those periods but also literature adapted from non-Hebrew and non-Jewish cultures. Careful study of the hermeneutics by which Israel adopted the wisdom of others reveals a hermeneutical process of adaptation that is instructive for the canonical process. Keeping the First Testament in Scripture, or in the canon, provides a framework for Christian dialogue with the Semitic and early non-Semitic worlds that guards against absolutizing the cultural traps and trappings of the Hellenistic age. A fourth kind of dialogue in the Bible occurs wherever later Scripture cites, quotes, or echoes earlier Scripture within a canon. This kind of dialogue often provides a depth to the point the passage makes, which one, however, misses if one ignores the allusion or gives credence only to the interpretation of the later passage in which the citation occurs. Christians tend to do this in reading the Second Testament because they somehow believe that the Second Testament supersedes the First, which one can then safely ignore. On the contrary, the Second Testament presupposes and relies on the First; it doesn’t go through all the monotheizing struggles of the First Testament that affirm belief in One Creator God who chose Israel for a purpose and a mission. Often otherwise reputable theologians will base an idea on one passage in the Bible and then go on to assume that it is supported by the whole of the Bible. 2

  See Sanders, “Canonical Hermeneutics.”

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So-called conservatives especially insist that the entire Bible is totally harmonious. At the close of a century when the general population has become more and more ignorant of the contents of the Bible, such a view can be abused to persuade the faithful of one point of view – a clear violation of the third commandment, which prohibits taking God’s name in vain, by calling upon God’s name to support one single point of view, in court or in theological debate. The insistence that Scripture is totally harmonious is usually politically motivated. Since the Second Testament reflects clearly the period of textual fluidity in the history of transmission of the text of the First Testament, before full stabilization of the Hebrew text, one must first attempt to discern what form of the text is cited or echoed in the Second Testament passage. All forms must be reviewed whether in Greek, or in Hebrew and Aramaic from the Dead Sea Scrolls, or in Syriac and Latin from other early witnesses. Even then one has to allow the Second Testament writer a measure of fluidity within those forms in citations of the First, all the more so in paraphrases, allusions, and echoes of the earlier passage. (We shall later look at the seven modes of this form of intertextuality.) Then one should trace the Nachleben of the First Testament passage from its inception in the Tanak, through the Septuagint, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and indeed all Ear1y Jewish literature, down to the New Testament. This exercise is called Comparative Midrash, to which we shall also return.

The Dead Sea Scrolls and Religious Identity There have been remarkable, even revolutionary, developments in the study of early Jewish and Christian origins as a result of fifty years of study of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The intense interest on the part of the general public in the scrolls derives from the fact that they date to the period of the birth of early Christianity and the emergence of formative or rabbinic Judaism. Many (especially hard-media) manuscript discoveries from other sources – but important to biblical study in this century3 – have not yet been published, and yet there has been no such clamor calling for their release. None, however, touches so directly on existential questions of spiritual identity in the public at large. Many Jews and Christians feel personally involved in the information the scrolls contain about the origins of these two major faiths; theirs is apparently an existential interest. There is the fear as well as the hope that the scrolls are going to prove or disprove their faith, or major tenets in it. One who is asked to lecture to lay and pastoral groups is steadily barraged with questions about Jesus, or James his brother, or John the Baptist, because of theories about the scrolls that get into the popular media; and most such theories are either totally unfounded or dubious at best because of the multivalent nature of the languages of the scrolls. The very nature of the scrolls demands careful and scrupulous 3

  [References to “this century” in this essay are to the twentieth century.]

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discussion by scholars fully aware of their multivalency. Along with the cry for open access, a commendable cry in itself, has gone, unfortunately, a less than scholarly rush to the popular press with preposterous or poorly founded theories that feed the hopes or fears of lay folk.4 One’s religion is the essence of one’s identity, even in the Western world that emphasizes individual worth, merit, and responsibility. Confession of faith is a confession of community identity. Some lay people have suspected for some time that their faith was not as historically well founded as they had once thought. Skepticism among Jews and Christians has been building among lay people during the course of the twentieth century, and they come to lectures on the Dead Sea Scrolls hoping to hear confirmation either of their skepticism or of their faith, their fear or their hope. Some have already decided to leave synagogue or church and want the decision bolstered; some have left the mainline religions and sought refuge in fundamentalist groups that traffic in simplistic views of biblical authority; and some are in the throes of deciding just what they should think. That is a heavy burden to place on the scrolls or any other archaeological find. In the 1950s, when the scrolls were first coming to light, they appeared on a scene in which there already was an intense discussion of whether archaeology could in some way verify or falsify historically founded faiths like Judaism and Christianity. This was especially the case in the United States, where archaeology has been somewhat overvalued and even romanticized due in part to the massive influence of William F. Albright and his student, Frank M. Cross, who with immense expertise and imagination combined the fields of archaeology and philology to address the basic question of how to bridge the gap between biblical record and historical event. Albright’s tendency was to date biblical sources earlier than other scholars and thus reduce the gap, apparently increasing the level of credibility of the biblical sources over what source and form criticism, developed and refined in German scholarship, had determined were their later dates in antiquity. He developed an organismic view of history that seemed to support conservative views of the historical reliability of the biblical record. It was considered fairly safe to study Bible in the Albright mode, and administrators and trustees of conservative seminaries felt it prudent to hire such scholars on their faculties; it was a mode that brought focus to the question of the relation of history and faith. It seemed to be a way to avoid heresy. Earlier in the century the German pan-Babylonian school of biblical study had claimed that archaeological findings were showing how dependent the Bible was on extrabiblical Near Eastern sources. This apparently served in an earlier day to raise similar questions of history and faith. Paul Tillich once said that when he was a young theologian in Dresden in the late twenties he dreaded reading the paper each morning for fear that he would have to take another step backward in his faith. Such an attitude indicates that archaeology can enhance or 4   Betz and Riesner, Jesus, Qumran, and the Vatican, have provided solid correctives to such theories; see Sanders, Review of Jesus, Qumran, and the Vatican.

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discourage faith by affirming or denying its historical origins, and hence archaeology became a force to contend with by the beginning of this century. Today the situation has considerably changed, so that one tends now to thank God for the Canaanites and others who have contributed to Scripture in various ways, and one expects considerably less from archaeology either to prove or to disprove the faith. It has become more and more difficult to define heresy. Part of the comparatively new postmodern perspective on reality since the 1960s is a renewed interest in the Bible as canon, or what makes Scripture Scripture.5

Spinoza and Biblical Criticism The history of biblical criticism may be viewed as a continuing response over a span of 330 years [by 2016 almost 350 years] to answer Benedict or Baruch Spinoza’s call (1670) to write a history of the formation of the Bible. When in 1523 Martin Luther began to translate the Hebrew Old Testament into German, he immediately encountered the necessity to engage in text criticism because of the differences in readings in the few manuscripts available to him around Erfurt, and in the First, then Second, Rabbinic Bibles. He developed a hermeneutic of text criticism he called res et argumentum, whereby the Christian text critic would choose the variant that pointed to the “gospel of Jesus Christ.” Of course, this meant Luther’s understanding of Paul’s understanding of the gospel of Jesus Christ. He denigrated the value of the contributions of the Masoretes, including the vowel pointing, to permit revocalization of words in crucial “christological” passages. In other words, Luther allowed textual choices and emendations in order to adjust the text to point to the res, or Christian gospel as he understood it. Thus was established the denigration of the work of the Masoretes and the legitimacy of emendation of the received text. By the middle of the seventeenth century, critics and anti-critics alike had agreed that if the autographs of Moses and the prophets were available, they would be the norm, or true canon, for the text of the Hebrew Bible, indeed, of the Old Testament as well. The anti-critics held that by a special divine assistance the MT had been preserved identical, or nearly so, to the autographs. The critics maintained that the available apographs contained serious errors and corruptions in a number of readings; some also held that there was evidence of different Vorlagen behind the MT and LXX traditions. The definitive contribution of the seventeenth century was that of Spinoza’s programmatic Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670). His was a free spirit of dissent condemned by both synagogue and church. In the background of Spinoza’s thinking were Thomas Hobbes and Isaac de La Peyrère. While Hobbes focused on what of the Pentateuch Moses actually contributed, de La Peyrère, a Cal5

  See Sanders, “Scripture as Canon for Post-Modern Times.”

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vinist who converted to Catholicism and knew Richard Simon at the Oratoire, dismissed any hope of finding biblical autographs, stressing that critics must be content with apographs, or copies of copies of a literature that was made up of abstracts and abbreviations of originals in the first place. De La Peyrère dearly wanted to diminish the authority of Scripture in order to put the Messiah and the salvation of the Church in bold relief. In this he followed Jean Morin’s hermeneutic and searched for proof-texts to support his messianic and christological views. Spinoza reacted not only to de La Peyrère but to all theologians who, according to Spinoza, for the most part extort from Scripture what passes through their heads. He insisted that true critics must liberate themselves from theological prejudices and develop a valid method for expositing Scripture. Such a goal required elaborating an exact history of the formation of the text in order to discern the thoughts of the original authors within their ancient contexts. Spinoza was not the first to focus on original authorial intentionality, but he did so in such a way within the Enlightenment that his influence has been felt ever since. Out of those individuals’ ideas then could be extrapolated those doctrines and teachings on which they all agreed – the origins perhaps of the modern search for the “unity” of Scripture within its pluralism. Authority, for Spinoza, clearly rested in the intentions of the authors, much of which, he said, was lost in obscurity. Only that which is intelligible remains authoritative but must be deemed sufficient for the salvation, or repose, of the soul. The rest is not worth considering. Until such a history could be written, and he seriously doubted if one would ever be complete, Spinoza deemed the double commandment of love of God and love of neighbor to be the true Torah of God, and to be the common religion of all humankind. It was that which was incorruptible, and not some books called holy. Spinoza’s call was in effect programmatic for the ensuing three centuries of biblical criticism. Since Spinoza was declared a heretic, many in the seventeenth century who felt the power of his reasoning would not openly cite Spinoza or even recognize his influence. They nonetheless heeded the call to write a history of the formation of Scripture, both Testaments, with the goal being to discern authorial intentionality. As the Renaissance and the Enlightenment moved into the Age of Reason, Greek classical modes of thinking about reality with emphasis on the worth and authority of the individual gradually displaced, over the next three centuries, the biblical focus on truth residing in confessional community understandings of biblical stories and traditions. The “heretic” Spinoza eventually became the father, or at least the godfather, of modern biblical criticism. For Spinoza, if authorial intention could be recovered, it needed but to pass the further tests of intelligibility and reason to gain acceptance “for the salvation or repose of the soul.” Though Spinoza doubted that such a history could ever be fully recovered, scholarship would henceforth focus on devising the disciplines necessary to recover the historical origins of biblical literature, hoping thereby to reconstruct the actual thinking of the individuals who contributed to what

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became the literature of the Bible. The word exegesis became a byword of the focus, and the word eisegesis became a pejorative term largely indicating how various communities of faith had read what they wanted into the text. Thus the time-honored relation of Scripture and faith community was severed in bypassing contemporary communities, Jewish and Christian, and instead reconstructing original authorial intentionalities of the various individuals, ancient speakers, authors, compilers, and editors – precisely Spinoza’s search for the truth of Scripture in the history of its literary formation. The first efforts focused on the early sources that lay behind the larger literary units, with a quest where feasible for the individual geniuses most responsible for those sources. This became a game that, in the hands of some scholars, by the beginning of this century had become a drama of the absurd, with hypotheses about distinct sources lying behind smaller and smaller fragments of blocks of Scripture. Form criticism entered the picture with efforts to probe behind the literary sources to the oral transmission of literary forms and their functions in the cultic and cultural life of ancient communities. Tradition criticism developed then as a discipline when it was perceived that community traditions were shaped and reshaped in the course of transmission toward the written literary texts we now possess. In this way, the importance of ancient communities was recognized, though not stressed, in the history of formation of the biblical texts. Focus on the individual came once again with redaction criticism and the effort to perceive the texts received as shaped by the consistent theological thinking of individual redactors, but all the while rhetorical and audience criticism kept at least minimal focus on ancient communities.

Interfaith Dialogue In April 1989 there was a conference at the University of Notre Dame titled “Hebrew Bible or Old Testament,” where Jewish and Christian scholars gave papers and responses. While the Christian scholars generally expressed the need and importance of the Jewish-Christian dialogue, James Kugel and Jon Levenson, both of Harvard, insisted that there is no real base for such dialogue because when we think we agree on something it is on matters based on common Western-cultural academic premises, that is, on biblical criticism, and not on identities as Jews and Christians. Both sides in the discussion in effect fully recognized the common ground of critical study of religion, but Kugel and Levenson denied that this was a sound base on which to have a truly interfaith dialogue because it was not a genuine identity stance but a learned one common to us all. Social location, to use a current term from cultural anthropology, undoubtedly played a role in the positions taken. Kugel and Levenson brought the perspective of the minority to the discussion; the Christians expressed the openness facilitated by cultural dominance. There was no pretense at finally arriving at a resolution; each person stated her

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or his position, each hoping to be the one to break the impasse – to no avail. Heidelberg’s own Rolf Rendtorff was there and made a strong presentation of the view he and I both share that Christians must learn Jewish interpretations of passages otherwise dear to them and cease the centuries-long tendency to denigrate Jewish understandings of Scripture either by supersessionism or by anti-Jewish polemic.6 A similar impasse had been arrived at not long after the Six-Day War in New York when Abraham Heschel and I invited professors from Union Theological Seminary, where Heschel had been Fosdick Visiting Professor the year I went on the faculty (1965), and from Jewish Theological Seminary across the street, to engage in dialogue about Jewish-Christian relations. Some internationally visible folk gathered for the first and only meeting. It did not work. While the Christians were generally willing to agree with Reinhold Niebuhr’s earlier statement that there should be no special mission to the Jews, Heschel drove so hard for a common statement from the group supporting the State of Israel that the Christians simply fell silent. They had not thought they would be asked to sign, as they later put it, a political document about Near Eastern foreign policy Jacob Neusner has recently put it very well: “The fusion of the ethnic, the religious, the cultural, and the political (in Judaism), to Christians presents woeful confusion.”7 Heschel had thought he was asking for common theological support for God’s fulfillment of promises made to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The two sides talked past each other, and the group dissipated. There seemed no common ground on which to continue at least to explore why they thought they had different goals. I in my innocence had thought that Heschel’s theology of God’s incarnation in the Jewish people would bring needed correctives to some formulations of Christian incarnational theology. I even later reiterated the hope in Jerusalem on the occasion of Heschel’s sheloshim (memorial) service in January 1973. Though he had earlier written and spoken in the same discouraging ways as Kugel and Levenson, Jacob Neusner has recently suggested a way out of the impasse. My answer commences with a necessary recognition, which is that, after all, we really do worship one God, who is the same God, and who is the only God, we and the Muslims with us. Dialogue is required [emphasis his] among the three faiths that claim to worship one and the same God, the only God. Within that common ground of being, a human task emerges. It is to see in the religious experience of the other, the stranger and outsider, that with which we, within our own world, can identify.8

The human task that our common belief in One God necessitates, as Neusner perceives it, is “. . . to feel and so understand what the other feels and affirms in the world of that other. So the critical challenge . . . begins not with the negotiation of theological differences, or with intellectual tasks, but with the pathos 6

  See Rendtorff, Kanon und Theologie; and note Sanders, Review of Kanon und Thologie.   Neusner, “Different Kind of Judaeo-Christian Dialogue,” 36.  Ibid.

7 8

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of alien feeling.”9 He notes that the concepts of Israel (as both people and land, Gen 12:2, 7) and Christ, so central to Judaism and Christianity, are each quite alien to the other. For there to be a dialogue, he contends, each side must try to understand the alien concept of the other. Out of all these experiences, and a lifetime of dedication to Jewish-Christian dialogue, I now perceive that the lack of common ground comes from the tension between individual (Greek) and community (Semitic) views of identity and responsibility. Is there a way out of the impasse? Can there be a genuine interfaith dialogue between these two religions that, on the one hand, have so much in common, and, on the other hand, are so alien at their centers, Israel and Christ, each to the other?

Scripture and Intertextuality Does one have to completely abandon one’s community identity and affirm only a critical reading of traditions to have dialogue? Would that not be to create another modern believing community with the faith stance that only deconstruction of the past can address present issues? Is it possible to read the past critically from within a present, continuing, traditioning community? Our thesis is that not only is it possible but that it is the only kind of dialogue that can truly address present and future issues, and that only dialogue, learning from dissent, can enrich the human experiment and broaden and expand human conceptuality. God is always bigger than we can think. One of the ways in which the Dead Sea Scrolls have illuminated early Jewish literature, including the Second Testament, is in their scriptural intertextuality. There are three principal ways in which the term intertextuality is currently used in the literature. First, it is used to focus on the chemistry between two contiguous blocks of literature, large or small. A prime example here is the interrelationship between the two quite disparate accounts of creation in Genesis chapters one and two. In the one, God is majestic, awesome, and transcendent; in the second, God is presented as making a pastoral call on his first parishioners in Eden’s bower. The two stand side by side, each making its own valid theological point: God is both transcendent and immanent, creator and redeemer, not just one or the other. Nor should one harmonize or collapse the two into one to speak of a redemptive creator God, or a creative redeemer God. They relate intertextually in a powerful hermeneutical statement by which to read all that follows. Many other examples within the Bible could be offered between quite distinct bodies of literature. This is largely what is meant by the canonical context of biblical literature. A second way in which the term is used is recognition that all literature is made up of previous literature and reflects the earlier through citation, allusion, use of phrases, and paraphrases of older literature to create newer literature, ref9

  Ibid., 35 – 38.

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erence to earlier literary episodes, even echoes of earlier familiar literature in the construction of the later. “The texts cited (alluded to) are the generating force behind the elaboration of narrative or other types of textual expansion.” “Every text is absorption and transformation of other texts.”10 The third most common way the term is used is recognition that the reader is also a text, and that reading is in essence an encounter between texts human and written, the present and the past. The reader is a bundle of hermeneutics, as it were, engaging a text that, noting the second meaning of intertextuality, is itself a bundle of hermeneutics.

The Dead Sea Scrolls and Intertextuality Aside from the strange Copper Scroll from Cave 3, there are three basic types of literature from the Qumran caves: traditional canonical, deutero-canonical or apocryphal, and previously unknown literature. About a quarter of the scrolls are biblical, as can be clearly seen in volumes nine through sixteen of Discoveries in the Judaean Desert. So far, every book of the Jewish canon is represented, at least by a fragment or two, except Esther. Even those like the Psalms, of which there are more copies (forty at last count) than of any other biblical book, are not entirely complete; a few psalms are not represented, but this may be by accident of survival in the caves. Of the deutero-canonical or apocryphal books known heretofore only in ancient Christian-translated Old Testaments (Greek, Latin, Ethiopic, Slavonic, etc.), a number are represented for the first time in their original languages, Hebrew or Aramaic. The third type of Qumran literature is previously unknown in any form and is varied and rich. It is this third type of previously totally unknown literature that takes painstaking skills to reconstruct when, as in the case of Cave 4, they survive only in fragments, most of which do not even join. This is the principal reason for the slow pace of publication of some of the Qumran materials. The reasons it is even possible to reconstruct this third type of totally unknown ancient denominational literature are, first, that seasoned experts learn to recognize scribal handwriting as distinct to a single scribe so that it is possible to execute triage of the some ten thousand fragments from Cave 4 and get all the fragments belonging to one ancient document on one table under glass in accordance with whose handwriting each fragment belongs to. It takes experience to recognize distinctive handwritings of ancient scribes. The other reason it is possible to piece fragments belonging to the same document in proper positioning under glass is that all early Jewish literature was largely written scripturally, that is, intertextually in the second sense noted above. In other words, early Judaism was in constant dialogue with its past and for the most part resignified or reconceptualized its past in doing so. 10   These are two typical remarks about intertextuality. See, for instance, Kristeva, Σημειωτική, 146, and Boyarin, Intertextuality, 11 – 19.

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The observation that all early Jewish literature was written more or less scripturally has always been operative in study of the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, as well as Josephus and Philo. Yet the scrolls have enhanced this observation in ways that make it one of the major factors in their study. Again, it takes years of reading and knowing the whole of the Hebrew Bible, and its early Greek translations, to recognize the scriptural forms, phrases, and paraphrases with which most early Jewish literature was composed. It underscores the fact that one cannot study early Jewish literature, including the Second Testament, without knowing the First Testament quite thoroughly indeed. So much of the Jewish literature of the period is composed of phrases and paraphrases of Scripture, whether in Hebrew or Greek, that the seasoned scholar is able to piece together scattered fragments having the same handwriting by discerning what Scripture passages the writer had in mind while composing the new material. The scholar truly immersed in Hebrew Scriptures can usually discern what is going on in a fragmented but heretofore unknown document and thus juxtapose unjoined fragments under glass for photography and study. Without absorption in Scripture one is reduced to constantly checking Hebrew and Greek concordances of the Bible to see what passage or passages the ancient author had in mind while composing. The observation is generally true for all early Jewish literature, whether composed of Hebrew biblical phrases and paraphrases or of their translated Greek forms in the case of original composition in Greek. In some instances, as with the Second Testament, one should know both the Tanak and the LXX since the books of Matthew, Mark, John, and Paul show knowledge (at one level or another of formation) of both; for Luke one must know early Greek translations of Jewish Scripture. Why? While the Second Testament is not in fragments needing triage like most of the scrolls, it often resembles a montage or collage of scriptural fragments, rhythms, and cadences. There are seven basic modes of the second type of intertextuality, and they all appear in most early Jewish literature, including the Christian Second Testament. I shall simply list these; we then will look at how some of them work. They are: (1) citation with formula; (2) citation without formula; (3) weaving of scriptural phrases into the newer composition; (4) paraphrasing Scripture passages; (5) reflection of the structure of a Scripture passage; (6) allusions to scriptural persons, episodes, or events; and (7) echoes of Scripture passages in the later composition. Since the Second Testament itself was composed and shaped in the period of textual fluidity, one has to be quite discerning in locating modes of intertextuality of this sort. The most obvious constraint on a speaker or writer who echoes Scripture in these manners is the factor of recognizability; the community addressed would have to be able to recognize that the paraphrase or echo was indeed from Scripture for the reference to have authority.11

11   Two especially fine books exploring biblical intertextuality of the second type are Fishbane, Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel, and Hays, Echoes of Scripture.

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Comparative Midrash Recognizing the intertextual nature of the Second Testament and pursuing what that means not only in terms of composition but also in terms of meaning provide many unexplored lodes of intertextuality and dialogue in the Second Testament. Most New Testament scholarship focuses on Christian sectarian sources in the formation of Gospels and Epistles and rarely mines the fuller richness of their intertextual nature. There has rather been a tendency to regret the amount of Scripture woven into the literary formation of the Second Testament, and also largely to dismiss it as proof-texting, or dicta probantia. Studying early Jewish literature intertextually leads in quite other directions. The discipline of comparative midrash permits one to discern the intertextual function of earlier literature in the later by focusing on the receptor hermeneutics by which the later early Jewish writers caused Scripture to function in the poetry, narratives, or arguments being pursued, and to compare them in terms of the range of hermeneutics involved through the whole exercise. The term midrash, like the term intertextuality, is used in different senses. It is used to refer to a mass of literature from the formative and classical Jewish periods as a recognizable literary genre, the Tannaitic and rabbinic midrashim. It is also used in a broader sense to mean the function of searching Scripture to seek light on new problems, as the Hebrew verb K‫דרׁש‬K (meaning “search” or “seek”) indicates. In other words, it may be used to indicate a literary form, or to indicate a literary function. The midrashic function of drashing goes far back into biblical times. Its earliest uses in Scripture had to do with seeking an oracle or instruction (a torah) from a prophet, priest, or other oracle. Upon the demise of prophecy, for some Jewish communities, in the sixth to fifth centuries BCE, and the introduction of the Pentateuch as Torah, edited by Ezra in Babylonia and brought to Jerusalem somewhere around 445 BCE, one then began to drash the Torah as text instead of drashing spiritual leaders to seek light on and guidance for new and ever-changing situations and circumstances. One finds ancient traditions in some of the earliest biblical compositions as well as in later Jewish literature. One also finds international wisdom absorbed and adapted into biblical literature from the earliest scriptural compositions through to the last. One also attempts to discern the reader’s or receptor’s hermeneutic (view of reality) by which the later writer caused the earlier Scripture to function in the newer composition. Comparative midrash is the exercise by which one can probe the depths of intertextuality and its significance for scriptural and other Jewish literature. One first does exegesis on the passage cited or echoed in its primary location at inception in the Hebrew Bible, noting carefully the earlier traditions and wisdom thinking borrowed and structured into the cited passage in the first place. One then traces the Nachleben or pilgrimage of that passage throughout early Jewish literature, within the Tanak, through the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, the Dead Sea Scrolls, Philo, Josephus, and the Second Testament – attempting always to determine the receptor hermeneutics used by the various tradents all along the

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path. One can pursue the exercise not only with discrete passages but also with episodes and figures. At every instance along the pilgrimage of the earlier passage pursued one can listen in on dialogues within each later text studied by not letting the later tradent overwhelm the passage cited or echoed, but by keeping in mind the earlier meanings and modes of function in early Jewish literature, including its “original” meanings at inception in the Hebrew Bible. One might think of a round table with the cited or echoed passage from the Tanak in the middle, and all the tradents who used it in early Jewish literature, down through the New Testament, seated around the table in imaginary dialogue about the significance of the Scripture traced, even debating what hermeneutics were appropriate in what circumstances in reapplying the passage along its pilgrimage.12 One might even grant the “original” meaning(s) of the Old Testament passage a place of some prominence at the dialogue table, but only limited prominence, for, after all, those earliest meanings are those assigned to the passage by modern, critical scholarship. And that meaning usually differs according to modern school of thought or Zeitgeist. Reading the Second Testament itself as a part of early Jewish literature in such a manner issues in veins of wealth of intracanonical dialogue otherwise unavailable. A crucial point to keep in mind is that early Christian communities were a part of diversified early Judaism until the Bar Kochba revolt. In other words, not only were Jesus and the apostles, including Paul, Jews, but Christian “churches” viewed themselves as Christian Jews, including gentile converts, until well into the second century CE. Viewing the Gospels and Paul in the light of their all being Jewish, albeit the hellenized forms of the pluriform Judaism of the time, throws quite a different light on how to read the challenges and criticisms in the Gospels and the Epistles of Jewish leaders of the first century. The strictures attributed to Jesus of the Jewish leaders of his time are similar to, but pale in comparison with, the many challenges and criticisms the prophets leveled against the leaders of their times centuries earlier. This time, however, Christian synagogues separated from Torah-centered synagogues so that the Gospels, written at the end of the first century in the language of the polemics of separation, were not included, as the prophetic books had been, in the Jewish canon, but the Jewish canon became the base, in its Greek forms, of the Christian canon. Surviving rabbinic Judaism rejected the heresy.

Two Testaments in One Bible One of the remarkable traits of the Bible as a whole, however, is its self-critical component. There is no other body of literature quite like it, quite disparate yet compressed into canons. This is not just an occasional trait, it is characteristic of large portions of the Bible. Understanding Jesus’ criticisms of his fellow Jewish 12

  See Sanders, “Vitality of the OT.”

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leaders in the first third of the first century, in the light of similar prophetic criticisms in earlier times, puts them in a far different light from reading his strictures about scribes and Pharisees and others as though Jesus were somehow gentile, a visiting foreigner, or not even human. Many Christians have read the Gospels in that way and thus totally misread them as anti-Jewish or anti-Semitic. To read the expression “the Jews,” which occurs often in Paul and especially John, as though the term referred to a totally different entity as a group, which was the case by the middle of the second century of the common era but was not in the first century, is to misread it entirely. The Jewish historian Josephus used the term “the Jews” in very similar ways. Paul insisted that he was a Jew but had become a Christian Jew. There were many hellenized forms of Judaism in the first century, and Christian Judaism was viewed as one such form until it became so heavily influenced by the great influx of gentiles that they no longer understood, by the middle of the second century, that they were converting to a Jewish denomination. Christianity finally was a different religion with little connection to Judaism.13 Reading the Second Testament within its canonical context can prevent misunderstanding it as anti-Jewish polemic. Even when the churches finally broke away from any form of Judaism, or from being part of the hellenized branches of Judaism, they still insisted against Marcion that the Christian sectarian literature belonged to the Jewish Bible. A usefully corrective attitude here would be to view the churches in the first century as daring to add the Gospels and Epistles to the Jewish Bible, and then in the mid-second century insisting on keeping the “Old Covenant” as essential and integral to the Christian Bible. By the time of Marcion in the middle of the second century CE it was possible to think of whether to keep the First Testament in the new, developing Christian Bible, but up to that point the argument was rather that the new witnesses to what God had just done in the first century, in Christ and the early church, should be viewed as part of the continuing story of God’s revelations that had begun in Genesis. That was chutzpah enough, so to speak, adding to the Bible, but other Jewish denominations of the period, notably the Jewish denomination at Qumran, apparently viewed some of their own literature with the same respect as some of the Writings, at least. It has been argued that the large Temple Scroll from Cave 11 was thought to have been as authoritative as the Mosaic Torah. Apparently, no form of Judaism had a rigidly closed canon in the first century CE. Efforts at closure would come as Judaism became more narrowly understood to be fairly unified into rabbinic forms of Judaism only, while the various hellenized forms of Judaism merged with the separating Christian communities or assimilated to other religions in the dominant Hellenistic-Roman culture. Regardless of the reasons, the churches came to view the particularly Christian literature as forming a Second Testament within the Greek Jewish Bible. Or to put it in mid-second-century terms, they all kept the Greek First Testament as 13

  See Sanders, “The Hermeneutics of Translation.”

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canonical. Eastern churches kept more early Jewish literature than others, thus the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, which rabbinic communities scoffed at as they indeed did at the “Christian” sectarian literature. Keeping the First Testament, in whatever form, meant that Christians would continue to understand what God did, in the first century in Christ and the early church, in the light of what God had been doing since Genesis. The Septuagint provided a textbook for the increasingly gentile churches to continue to learn what it meant to believe in One God, so contrary to everything in the culture of the time. It also provided a textbook for how to live in the gap between God’s promises and the apparent failure of their fulfillment. The hope for the Second Coming was directly comparable to the Jewish continuing hope for the Messiah yet to come. The First Testament provided a textbook to understand that God is the God of fallings as well as risings, of death as well as life, of what humans call failure as well as of what they call success, of what humans call evil as well as of what they call good. It ought to have prevented what gradually came to be the way the churches read the Second Testament, namely, by a christocentric hermeneutic. Yet it did not in and of itself, because Christians began to fail to heed the first three commandments, which prohibit polytheism, idolatry, and co-opting God’s name for one point of view (whether in court or in life). Whereas the trinitarian formula was designed to be a guard against polytheizing with its emphasis on the one Triune God,14 it has consciously or unconsciously been understood with a polytheizing hermeneutic. Idolatry is not simply having human-form sculptures in church, or the like. Idolatry is worshipping the gift instead of the Giver, even Christ, the Christian God’s most precious gift. Christianity has a penchant for making an idol of Christ, thinking of Christ as Christian, and as a god in himself, even though the church has through the centuries denounced both idolatry and docetism (the hallmarks of Christian fundamentalism).

Dialogue within Scripture Rereading the Second Testament intertextually, listening in on the dialogue that occurs every time a First Testament passage is woven into the fabric of the Second, might possibly save Christianity from its perennial flirtation and dance with polytheism, idolatry, and anti-Semitism. If Christians could remember in reading the Gospels and Epistles that they speak of God’s gift, of God’s work in and through Christ, but never of a Christian Christ, then, in reading them, they might resist identifying with Christ but rather identify with those around him, namely, their fellow early Jews, and thus begin to hear the Christian Bible in ways quite different from the way most Christians read the Bible and have read it for nearly two thousand years. 14

  See Richardson, Doctrine of the Trinity.

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A first step would be to take the hermeneutical stance that the Second Testament is largely about “heretical” Jews in the first century searching Scripture to try to understand what was happening to them in their experience of Christ in their lives, and what God was doing through Christ and themselves. This would be to read it as literature mainly written and addressed by Jews to Jews. The next step would be to take the further hermeneutical stance that the Bible is not canonically and ultimately about Jews and non-Jews. Historically, to be sure, it is about pharaohs and patriarchs, Canaanites and Israelites, Philistines and Judahites, Romans and Jews, etc. Yet canonically and ultimately, at least for the Christian, it is about God and human beings. It is a paradigm of the divine-human encounter; it is a gallery of mirrors in which humans can continue today to see themselves in all their foibles and follies, strengths and weaknesses, being confronted with questions about truth, justice, grace, and righteousness. An integral part of interfaith dialogue between Jews and Christians would be reading Scripture, and each other’s traditions about it, together. Even if not, there should be a pledge on the part of all who join the dialogue, whenever Scripture is read, to imagine that the other is overhearing what is said and thinking about what is read. I have recently asked if those of us who think that interfaith dialogue is important cannot at least pretend that there is but One God, and hence read Scripture as though others were present and listening. Hopefully, the dialogue would be in a tripartite mode with Islam, but the tripartite mode should not detract from the Jewish-Christian dialogue, which needs special attention because of the origins of Christianity within Judaism and the shared First Testament. Reading Scripture together dialogically would then be supplemented by reading the other’s traditions in the extended canons, the Second Christian Testament, Mishnah, Talmud, and Midrash, and beyond. Reading Scripture dialogically through intertextuality provides rich lodes within Scripture that are rarely explored. Since Scripture is transcultural and intertextual in nature, all parts of it have depths that can reach into the very essence of the human experiment. One should read Scripture intertextually, keeping in mind contributions to any given text from international wisdom as well as from Israel’s and Judaism’s own traditions, written and oral. The Bible as a whole comes from five cultural eras, from the Bronze Age through to the Hellenistic-Roman, and includes riches untold from all of them. Jewish and Christian Bibles in fact may both be read as paradigms for dialogue. Each partner in the dialogue should then consciously read the text under scrutiny both critically and faithfully – in the light of the results of the historical and analytical work on the history of formation of the text of the past three centuries, and in the light of each faith’s traditioning process.

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Reading Critically and Faithfully If, as I firmly believe, the Enlightenment was a gift of God in due season, then we must read the Bible critically. But if, as I also just as firmly believe, faith itself is a gift of God, then each partner may remain faithful to his and her faith-community’s traditioning process, all the while using the enduring results of biblical criticism. Recognition of such a hyphenated identity opens up Scripture and tradition from within. Just as ancient intercultural wisdom opened tradition from within for the classical prophets, so dialogue with the wisdom of today can broaden human conceptual horizons. Or, in prophetic terms, God is always bigger than humans can perceive or imagine. Wherever an earlier “text” functions in a later text, whether it be home grown within “Israel” or transcultural in scope, the dialogue should be pursued critically and faithfully, that is, in postmodern terms, with both suspicion and consent. Genuine interfaith dialogue requires that all partners to it admit of such hyphenated identity. In this way, the understanding of a passage indicated by one’s tradition would be in dialogue with both the critical reading and with the other’s traditioning process about the passage. In this way, Paul’s or Akiba’s understanding of a given passage, as well as critical understandings of its “earliest meanings,” would be honored and studied, compared and analyzed hermeneutically. The earlier word must still have a voice at the round table: it has not been somehow superseded, and critical scholarship keeps it alive by constantly striving to reconstruct original settings and meanings, as well as each of the subsequent recitations and echoes of a passage in its pilgrimage through early Judaism into formative Judaism and Christianity. A feast of meaning can then be savored while the hermeneutic range by which each passage continued to speak to ever-changing situations is gauged in the canonical process. Dissent requires norm for its very identity, while norm invites dissent and is enriched by it, reflecting perhaps the essence of the human experiment.

Bibliography Betz, Otto, and Rainer Riesner. Jesus, Qumran, and the Vatican: Clarifications. New York: Crossroad, 1994. Boyarin, Daniel. Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990. Fishbane, Michael A. Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel. Oxford: Clarendon, 1985. Hays, Richard B. Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989. Kristeva, Julia. Σημειωτική: Recherches pour une sémanalyse. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1969. Neusner, Jacob. “A Different Kind of Judaeo-Christian Dialogue.” The Jewish Spectator 56 (Winter 1991 – 92) 34 – 38. Rendtorff, Rolf. Kanon und Theologie. Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1991. ET: Canon and Theology. Translated by Margaret Kohl. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1994. Richardson, Cyril C. The Doctrine of the Trinity. New York: Abingdon, 1958.

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Sanders, James A. “Canon. Hebrew Bible.” In ABD 1:837 – 52. Sanders, James A. “Canonical Hermeneutics: True and False Prophecy.” In From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, by James A. Sanders, 87 – 105. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987. [Original “Hermeneutics in True and False Prophecy.” In Canon and Authority: Essays in Old Testament Religion and Theology, edited by George W. Coats and Burke O. Long, 21 – 41. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1977.] Sanders, James A. “The Hermeneutics of Translation.” In Removing the Anti-Judaism from the New Testament, edited by Howard Kee and Irvin J. Borowsky, 43 – 62. Philadelphia: American Interfaith Institute, 1998. Sanders, James A. Review of Jesus, Qumran, and the Vatican: Clarifications, by Otto Betz and Rainer Riesner. Int 49 (1995) 300 – 302. Sanders, James A. Review of Kanon und Theologie, by Rolf Rendtorff. JSS  42 (1997) 145 – 46. Sanders, James A. “Scripture as Canon for Post-Modern Times.” BTB 25, no. 2 (1995) 56 – 63. Sanders, James A. “The Vitality of the Old Testament: Three Theses.” USQR 21 (1966) 161 – 84. Smith, Wilfred C. What Is Scripture? A Comparative Approach. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993.

20 The Issue of Closure in the Canonical Process The recovery of ancient biblical manuscripts in the middle of the twentieth century has prompted critical scholarship to reconsider what it means when it applies the word “canon” to Jewish and Christian Scriptures. Following the lead of Johann Salomo Semler and others in the eighteenth century, and Heinrich Graetz, Samuel Davidson, Frants Buhl, H. E. Ryle, and others in the nineteenth century, a general consensus formed: A council of rabbis meeting at Yavneh or Jamnia on the Palestinian coast within a decade or two of the disastrous failure of the Jewish revolt against Rome of 66 to 73 CE, had decided the content and extent of the Jewish canon.1 The historical outline of the development of a closed canon of early Jewish literature was fairly clear: the Pentateuch was canonized by 400 BCE, the Prophets by 200 BCE, and the Hagiographa, the third and final section of the Jewish canon, was determined by the Council at Jamnia around 90 CE. Well into the late twentieth century, until the Judean Desert Scrolls were absorbed and evaluated in this regard, the major textbooks of colleges and seminaries throughout most of the Western world reflected this consensus and equated “canon” with closure. This schematic view was largely dependent on two points: the concept of canonization, and the authority of extrabiblical data. The term “canonized” implies something officially or authoritatively imposed upon certain literature. Even those who spoke of a gradual process (Otto Eissfeldt, A. Bentzen, and H. H. Rowley) still saw closure as imposed upon select literature by an authoritative body for all Judaism.2 The quest for closure spawned a corresponding quest for lists, or what could be construed as lists, in ancient Jewish literature outside the Tanak: Sirach, 2 Maccabees, Jubilees, Philo, Josephus, and Luke. Similarly, work on the New Testament canonization process looked to “lists” in Tertullian, Eusebius, the Muratorian Fragment, Athanasius’s Easter Letter, etc.3 Such lists

*  First published 2002. 1  Semler’s attachment to biblical theology, based on the developing historical-critical method at mid-eighteenth century, led him to limit the concept of canon to the final stage of the formation of biblical literature; see Hornig, Die Anfänge der historisch-kritischen Theologie. See also Graetz, “Der alttestamentliche Kanon”; Davidson, Canon of the Bible; Buhl, Canon and Text; Ryle, Canon of the OT. 2   See the references in Lewis, “Jamnia Revisited.” Even Albert Sundberg, who denied that there was a canon of the Septuagint, still reflected the Jamnia view of the Ketuvim; see Sundberg, OT of the Early Church. 3   See the critical discussion of them in McDonald, Formation of the Christian Biblical Canon, esp. 268 – 76.

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were taken to indicate closure for all of Judaism, or all of Christianity, instead of reflecting the distinctive purposes of a particular school or faction at a specific time. Ancient lists, or perceived lists, that contradicted or failed to support eventual official canons could be ignored as uninformed or irrelevant to the quest. Even after the discovery of the Nag Hammadi documents, the Judean Desert Scrolls, and many New Testament Greek papyri, the consensus tended to hold on despite questions raised by the new discoveries.4 Some scholars attempted to superimpose the old view on the new evidence. A blatant example was an attempt to read a reference to the whole of the Ketuvim (Hagiographa) in a vague phrase about “the writings of David” in 4QMMT (if that is indeed the correct reading of a very fragmentary witness).5

History of Formation The recovery of hundreds of actual biblical manuscripts in Hebrew, albeit mostly fragmentary, a thousand years older than any known previously has necessitated a thorough review of the consensus. The discussion of the New Testament canon is undergoing similar changes.6 One result has been a closer look at the significance of Jamnia for the canonical process. Shedding the “Jamnia” mentality has not been easy for the Western mind, which looks for decisions imposed by authorities, and often finds them where they do not exist.7 In early efforts to come to grips with the impact of the DSS on the concept of canon, the present writer still assumed the importance of Jamnia.8 But an article by Jack P. Lewis, “What Do We Mean by Jabneh?” forced me to drop Jamnia from my thinking about “canonization.”9 Sid Leiman questioned the importance of Jamnia in his dissertation at Hebrew University, but he viewed the significance of Lewis’s work differently from the way I did.10 Leiman took it to mean that the Tanak had already been canonized by the second century BCE, whereas I took it to mean that the Ketuvim were not stabilized until later.11 In fact, if one means by “can 4   See Flint, Dead Sea Psalms Scrolls, for an excellent discussion of the new evidence; see also Sanders, Review of The Dead Sea Psalms Scrolls, as well as Talmon, Review of The Dead Sea Psalms Scrolls.  5   See Qimron and Strugnell, Qumran Cave 4.V, 59n10, and the discussion of it in McDonald, Formation of the Christian Biblical Canon, 41 – 43.  6   See the masterful articles by Epp, “Issues in the Interrelation,” and Schmidt, “Greek New Testament as a Codex,” who reach the same conclusion.  7  In Scribes and Schools, Davies belittles the role of communities in “canonization.” He, like most Western thinkers, focuses on individual scribes and leaders. But leaders need followers as much as followers need leaders, and without continuing community support leaders have no effect in the canonical process.  8  Sanders, Torah and Canon, and Sanders, “Adaptable for Life”; both were written before 1972.  9   Lewis, “What Do We Mean by Jabneh?” 10  Leiman, Canonization, 131 – 32. The dissertation had been written a few years earlier. 11   Leiman’s view is shared by Beckwith, OT Canon of the NT Church; Davies, Scribes and Schools; and Steinmann, Oracles of God.

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onized” that the content and order of the Ketuvim were rigidly set, that occurred only recently: note the great Tiberian codices of the Hebrew Bible place Chronicles first among the Ketuvim, whereas Baba Bathra 14b and printed rabbinic Bibles place Chronicles last. The Biblia Hebraica series used the Second Rabbinic Bible as its base text in the first two editions (1902 and 1927) but retained the rabbinic order even after it adopted the masoretic Leningradensis, the oldest complete Hebrew Bible in the world, as base text in the third and fourth editions (1937, 1977). While one may argue that the difference did not affect the text of the Ketuvim, it certainly affected its hermeneutic structure.12 Consequently, I prefer the terms “stabilization” and “canonical process” to “canonization.” Since it was now clear that Graetz, Buhl, Ryle and other nineteenth-century scholars had read too much Western thinking into the various references to Yavneh / Jamnia, the terms of the debate shifted to what Lewis’s work really implied. The field was divided between those who took it to mean that “canonization” of the Ketuvim predated Jamnia, and those who took it to mean that the canonical process was not yet complete at that time.13 The former still looked for confirmation primarily from external references, while the latter examined the plethora of manuscripts now available for both Testaments, and considered their implication for the history of the transmission of the text.14 Most scholars took Lewis’s work to mean that the release from Jamnia mentality signified release from the neat three-stage scheme of the canonization of the Hebrew Bible as well. The terms of the debate were re-formulated, as it were.

History of Transmission Prior to the discovery of the Judean Desert Scrolls, the history of transmission of the text of the Hebrew Bible was largely formulated in terms of Vorlagen underlying variant texts. The text critic explained the significant differences between the MT and the Septuagint primarily in terms of there having been a different Hebrew text lying back of the Septuagint. When in the seventeenth century the Samaritan Pentateuch apparently showed yet a third kind of text lying back of it, a theory about three families of texts arose. This theory was well stated by William F. Albright and given prominence by his student, Frank Moore Cross, after

12   See Sanders, “Intertextuality and Canon”; Sanders, “Spinning the Bible”; Sanders, “Stabilization of the Tanak.” 13   See Cohen, “Significance of Yavneh.” For Cohen, Yavneh meant the creation of a (rabbinic Jewish) society that tolerated disputes; challenges to reigning ideas did not have to come from sects and heresies. Such openness contrasted with early Judaism before Yavneh, and, one assumes, Christianity thereafter. Sometimes, of course, rabbinic Judaism has not tolerated dissent. 14   Bovon, “Canonical Structure,” argues against the importance of outside forces in the canonical process; and Ferguson, “Factors Leading to the Selection,” asserts that councils did little more than ratify, as it were, what was already custom in believing communities. See also Cross, “Stabilization of the Canon.”

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the discovery of the scrolls.15 The MT would have derived from Babylonian Jewish communities, the Samaritan from Palestinian, and the Vorlage of the Septuagint from the highly hellenized Egyptian Jewish communities around Alexandria that produced the Septuagint. Debates then centered on whether there had been a pristine “original” text out of which the three streams flowed, or numerous texts developed in many isolated communities, which then gradually developed into the proto-MT, which became dominant by the beginning of the second century of the common era.16 The Qumran scrolls, despite their relatively fluid texts, clearly showed the validity and high antiquity of the MT. Some of them, however, witnessed to texts underlying the variant readings in the Septuagint. Support for Samaritan readings in the Pentateuch was minimal. But where the Septuagint and the MT have the greatest diversity of readings, as in Samuel and Jeremiah, Qumran fragments of varying sizes indicated that there may have indeed been distinct Hebrew Vorlagen lying back of some of the Septuagint. In some cases, where there are lengthy pluses as in Septuagint Samuel, or lengthy minuses as in Septuagint Jeremiah, the scrolls have provided similar ancient Hebrew texts. Other Septuagint variants also find some support in the scrolls. The Qumran caves, thus, seemed to confirm the existence of families of biblical texts deriving from pristine “originals.” But the general fluidity in biblical texts from Qumran gave rise to a different view as well. At the same time that Frank Cross was developing the three-family theory of texts of the Hebrew Bible out of his work on the scrolls, especially the early fragments of Samuel, Dominique Barthélemy was working on the Greek Minor Prophets Scroll from Nahal Hever.17 Barthélemy’s work brought unprec˙ ˙of transmission of the text.18 What Barthéedented clarity to the early history lemy saw in the Hever Minor Prophets Scroll was a missing link in the history of ˙ text of the Hebrew Bible. The scroll, which dates to the late transmission of the first century BCE or to the early first century CE, clearly shows that the early, rather fluid Greek translations were being brought closer to a text of the Hebrew Bible that was moving toward the MT. The Hever Minor Prophets Scroll came ˙ the older, more dynamic Greek at a historical mid-point, so to speak, between translations, characteristic of much of the so-called Septuagint, and the very literal Greek translations of the second century CE known as Aquila, Theodotion, and Symmachus.

15   Albright, “New Light,” and Cross, “History of the Biblical Text.” Talmon, “Textual Study of the Bible,” presented a quite different theory and formally opposed the creation of an eclectic text of the Hebrew Bible such as is the forthcoming Oxford Hebrew Bible. See my response to Ronald Hendel’s call for creation of an eclectic text in Hendel and Sanders, “Most Original Bible Text,” 40 – 49, 58. 16   See the lucid discussion of the opposing theories of P. A. de Lagarde and Paul Kahle in this regard by Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible, 181 – 97. 17   See again Albright, “New Light”; Cross, “History of the Biblical Text”; Talmon, “Textual Study of the Bible”; also more recently, Cross, From Epic to Canon. 18  Barthélemy, Les devanciers d’Aquila, and Tov, Greek Minor Prophets Scroll.

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The history of Greek translations ran parallel to the history of early Hebrew texts from Qumran, on the one hand, and the later more stable Hebrew biblical texts, also from Qumran, dating from the late first century to early second century CE. The Hever scroll provided evidence of a gradual movement toward a ˙ more stable, proto-masoretic text in the course of the first centuries BCE and CE. Barthélemy identified three stages in the history of the transmission of the text: the pre-masoretic, which was relatively fluid, extending to the late first century; the proto-masoretic, which exhibited a stage of stabilization of the text, dating from the late first century on; and the Masoretic Text, which we have in the great, classical Tiberian codices, like Aleppensis and Leningradensis, dating from the early ninth to the early tenth centuries CE. His understanding of the history of transmission is now widely accepted.19 The MT should thus be seen as an advanced stage in the stabilization process that had begun in the first centuries BCE and CE.20 The MT is itself a system of preservation and interpretation of five interrelated elements: the consonants, the vowels, accent markings, spacings, and marginal notes designed to keep scribes from altering the text either intentionally or unintentionally. There is no other literature in the world quite like it, designed so guardedly to guarantee accurate transmission and interpretation. What this means is that the Jewish understanding of the authority of Scripture gradually but firmly shifted from a kind of shamanistic or dynamic view of inspiration (the message of Scripture), to verbal inspiration (the words), and then literal inspiration (the letters). One can witness this shift in the progression from Hillel’s seven middôt (hermeneutic rules) at the end of the first century BCE, in the thirteen middôt of Nahum of Gamzu by the end of the first century CE, to the thirty-two middôt in use by 200 CE. The middôt clearly apply to a stabilized text, and render it relevant to new situations.

Stability and Adaptability The major characteristic of Scripture as canon is its relevance to the ongoing life of the community that passes it on from generation to generation; second to this is the characteristic of stability.21 In the early history of transmission, tradents of the text, that is, both scribes and translators, could focus on the need(s) of the community to understand the messages of the text, even to the extent of modestly altering or clarifying archaic or out-moded expressions so that their community could understand what it might mean to them.22 This is not significantly different 19   See Talmon, “Aspects of the Textual Transmission”; Goshen-Gottstein, Isaiah: Sample Edition, 12 – 13; and Barthélemy’s own statement in “Text, Hebrew, History of.” 20   See Sanders, “Stability and Fluidity.” 21   See Sanders, Canon and Community, 21 – 45, and Sanders, “Canonical Criticism: An Introduction.” 22   See Bickerman’s penetrating observations in this regard in his Studies in Jewish and Christian History, 1:196.

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from what went on in the earlier period of the formation of the text. Clearly, they could not alter either the tradition or the text to the point that the community being served did not recognize what the tradition was. The need for community recognition of the tradition led to constraint in the handling of the text, and helped keep it stable at all stages of formation and transmission. As the stabilization process intensified, the basic Jewish hermeneutic of the biblical text changed from divine inspiration of the messages in the text to verbal inspiration of the text itself, precisely during the course of the first century of the common era. The change also occurs in citations and echoes of the First Testament (largely Septuagint) in the Second; in early New Testament literature; such citations exhibit all the traits of textual fluidity one sees in early Jewish literature generally, but later New Testament citations appear to have been rectified or edited to reflect a more stable Septuagint text (as in the long citations in Matthew and Luke).23 All biblical tradents had and have two responsibilities: to the past and to the present, i. e., to the Vorlage being copied or translated, and to the community being served thereby. But as Jews were forced more and more to live in the strangely European, Greco-Roman world, the old laws and wisdom simply were not enough to help them address the new problems and issues that arose in such a very different cultural environment. The peshat or plain meaning of the old texts was often inadequate to new situations, no matter how relevant one tried to make them read or sound. This gave rise both to the dramatic shift in hermeneutic of the biblical text, and to the concept of Oral Torah in Pharisaic / rabbinic forms of Judaism. Oral Torah, resulting eventually in Mishnah and Talmud, was also eventually believed to derive its authority from Moses’s encounter with God on Mt. Sinai. The relation between Written Torah and Oral Torah was imbedded in the shift from dynamic to verbal understandings of inspiration.24 Where Oral Torah roots its wisdom in the Tanak it follows hermeneutic principles and rules that in effect make the text of Scripture say what peshat or critical readings of it cannot support. A new kind of “exegesis” of Scripture was needed. This was part of the genius of rabbinic Judaism that Qumran Judaism resisted. The latter, like the Sadducees, rejected the concept of Oral Torah and insisted that all new legislation addressing new problems in the Greco-Roman world had to be derived from traditional exegesis of the biblical text. But it was rabbinic Judaism that survived as Judaism, not the others. The hellenization process forced Jews to decide what to do with the increasing irrelevance of much of the old Bronze and Iron Age wisdom and laws in the Tanak. Acceptable modifications of the text, as in the early period of relative textual fluidity, no longer sufficed. The Judaisms of the first century of the common era addressed the hellenization problem in various ways, ranging from attempts such as that at Qumran to live apart in a closed community, designed to look and act like the desert community that had gathered at the foot of Mt. Sinai, all the way to highly hellenized or “modernized” communities, such as first-century 23

  See Evans and Sanders, Luke and Scripture.   See Sanders, “Text and Canon: Concepts and Method.”

24

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Christianity, which more and more simply dropped the old laws and customs (as in Paul’s letters) and created new ones, reading the old texts in other ways, allegorizing, spiritualizing, or eschatologizing them, so as to support new ideas. The shift from the pre-masoretic period of textual fluidity to the proto-masoretic period of a more stabilized text (accurately copied and passed on), together with the shift in understanding the nature of the biblical text, heightened the need for a stabilized or closed canon by the late first century of the common era.

Closures Accompanying the hermeneutic shift from dynamic to verbal understandings of inspiration was rabbinic Judaism’s belief that revelation or prophecy had ceased at the time of Ezra–Nehemiah. Very clearly not all the Judaisms of the time held the belief; on the contrary, both the Qumran and the Christian forms of Judaism based their whole belief systems on God’s continuing involvement in history. And Rabbi Akiba’s support of Bar Kochba as the Messiah to save Israel from Roman oppression, in 132 – 135 CE, raises serious questions as to when rabbinic Judaism itself embraced the belief in the cessation of divine involvement in history. Arguably, the belief took hold seriously only after the disastrous failure of the Bar Kochba revolt. Given that the Ketuvim of the Jewish canon, excepting only of the book of Daniel, have as a major common trait reflection on God’s past involvements in Israel’s history, or on wisdom, but none on any further or future divine intervention in history, the closing of the Jewish canon would make most sense after the Bar Kochba debacle. Most of the Ketuvim reflect on God’s involvement in Israel’s past history, but only Daniel anticipates God’s involvement in future battles or historical struggles; but Daniel is precisely in the Ketuvim and not in the prophetic corpus in the Jewish canon, and can therefore be read as dealing with God’s interventions in history in the Babylonian period, and not, as in Christian hermeneutics, predicting future divine involvement in the affairs of later nations. The disaster of the Bar Kochba revolt soon brought about the departure of Israel from history, concomitant with the increasingly widespread belief that God had already become more and more transcendent, distant, and remote.25 Rabbinic Judaism would henceforth live in stasis, in closed communities, in the Greco-Roman world.26 In those communities the calendar, even the clock, revolved around the rituals of the temple that no longer stood, but still continued to exist in the hearts and worship of rabbinic Jews wherever they might live. Apart and to themselves Jews could live lives of obedience, as they understood obedience to Torah written and oral, in, but not of, Greco-Roman culture, there25   See the work of Lou Silberman in this regard, reviewed in Sanders, “Identity, Apocalyptic, and Dialogue,” esp. 165 – 66. 26   See the work of Jacob Neusner in this regard in much of his corpus of writing, e. g., Judaism in the Matrix of Christianity.

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after in but not of the Christian world around them. As David Hartman of the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem rightly observed, the founding of the State of Israel in the mid-twentieth century was possible only after the re-entry of modern Jews into common-cultural history, beginning with the Jüdische Wissenschaft Movement in mid-nineteenth-century Germany. The new understanding of the history of transmission of the text is important, therefore, to understanding the canonical process. While the history of transmission of the text of the New Testament has its own contours, it is similar to that of the First Testament in that the early period of New Testament textual transmission was also one of relative fluidity, but by the fourth century CE, with the emergence of Christianity as a state religion, it evolved into the desire for accurate transmission of the text and verbal stability.27 Even so, the primary character of canon was still its relevance to the communities it served. Once the text could no longer be modified to show relevance, hermeneutic rules were devised to break open the frozen text, as it were, and make it applicable again to the needs of believing communities.28 When new stories could no longer be added to the old, or new songs to the old hymns, the stabilized canon was subjected to new ways of reading what was there so that it could continue to guide the ever-changing communities.

Relevance Relevance or adaptability has always been the primary trait of a canon, early and late. When one speaks of canon, in fact, one has to ask which canon of which community is meant, whether in antiquity or today. The Protestant canon is the smallest and the Ethiopian Orthodox canon the largest. While canons differ, all believing communities agree that their canon is relevant to their ongoing life. The concept of canon cannot be limited to a final stage in the history of the formation of a Bible, as it has been until recently. It must, on the contrary, be understood as part of the history of transmission of the text. Even the issue of its closure must be so understood. Clearly neither Qumran nor Christian Jews believed “the canon” was closed since both added to it, and claimed canonical status for their contributions.29 Peter Flint has shown that the Psalter was not yet closed for all Judaism in the first century;30 and it is clear to many that for the Qumran community the Temple or Torah Scroll was as canonical as the Five Books of Moses. Other works found at Qumran were also functionally canonical for the community. Christians added the Gospels and Acts to whatever Jewish canon they had 27

  See Sanders, “Text and Canon: Old Testament and New.”   See Sanders, “Adaptable for Life”; see also the discussion above of the rabbinic hermeneutic middôt. 29   See Harrington, “Old Testament Apocrypha,” which discusses the early church’s uncertainty as to whether to follow the Jewish canon or the more open Septuagint. 30  Flint, Dead Sea Psalms Scrolls; Sanders, Review of The Dead Sea Psalms Scrolls; Talmon, Review of The Dead Sea Psalms Scrolls. 28

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at the time, and eventually created a second Testament to argue the claim that Christ’s new Israel had superseded the old. In response to Marcion, they insisted on keeping a double-Testament Bible. But the Christian Second Testament was not added to an already closed Jewish canon. The Jewish Bible that Christians worked with was in Greek translation, and, as Albert Sundberg asserted forty years ago, the so-called Septuagint was not in itself formally closed.31 Jewish use of the Septuagint ceased after the Jewish revolts against Rome, and the Septuagint survived only as the Christian First Testament. But, as Septuagint manuscripts show, it was not stabilized or closed until it became the Christian First Testament, and then only gradually. Just as there were many forms of Judaism in the Second Temple Period so, as David Carr has demonstrated, there were numerous tracks in the canonical process.32 The case of the Psalter illustrates the point. As Flint has shown, there were perhaps three forms of the book of Psalms at Qumran, just as there were two forms of the book of Jeremiah in Hebrew there. Focusing on the manuscript evidence now available, instead of on “lists” in external literature, brings a measure of realism to the present discussion of canon, just as the old historian’s pursuit of “economy of explanation” has given way to the more realistic historian’s quest for the “ambiguity of reality.” About the only unifying principle among the varieties of Judaism before the Bar Kochba revolt, or indeed among the various forms of Judaism through the ages, was and is Torah. Even Sabbath observance and circumcision were not unifying factors for all forms of Judaism, especially in the Hellenistic era. As my teacher, Samuel Sandmel, often said, “Judaism is Torah, and Torah is Judaism; and until one understands that, one can never understand Judaism.” By Torah, of course, he meant not only the Pentateuch but all tradition that has derived from it. But once one has grasped that fact, the varieties of interpretation of Torah and tradition begin. And so it is with canon. Even after a canon became completely stable for a community, interpretations and understandings of it continue the canonical process of adapting the old to the new. In contrast to the Qur’an, which claims to be the record of divine revelation to an individual, the most that can be claimed for Jewish and Christian Bibles is that they are made up of records of various human responses to divine revelations over a period of some twelve hundred years. The Bible is pluralistic in a number of ways, intrinsically containing its own contradictions and discrepancies. In addition, the language of the Bible is inherently multivalent. That is, in order for a literature to get onto a tenure track toward canon it had to have been couched in multivalent language. All good poetry is multivalent, but so is good prose. It must be able to speak to many different communities in many different circumstances to get into a canon, and to function in it. The raison d’être of new translations is largely to make the Bible understandable and relevant to ever-changing situations. A canon’s adaptability is its primary characteristic, stability its second. 31   See the pivotal study of Sundberg, from his dissertation at Harvard, OT of the Early Church. Also, Hengel, Septuagint as Christian Scripture. 32   Carr, “Canonization in the Context of Community.”

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Diversity Because the Bible, Jewish and / or Christian, grew over such a long period in antiquity, it includes a number of sources, and different points of view of the same events. The Bible harbors a number of doublets, even triplets, conveying the same story or account from different periods composed for different purposes. The most obvious are the history that ranges from Genesis to Kings retold in a totally different way in Chronicles; and the four Gospels. In a remarkable, recent book, Donald Harmon Akenson, an expert in Irish history and literature, looks upon the compiler of the history that runs from Genesis through Kings as the world’s first true historian, a genius who pulled the sources of preexilic Israelite history into a coherent story, without trying to harmonize them.33 This history, which scholars call the Deuteronomistic history (DtrH), Akenson sees as having given the surviving Judahites in exile a way to understand the disaster that occurred to them and hence sufficient reason to form a remnant to continue that history, in a transformed manner. This editor-inventor thus provided, according to Akenson, a model for later biblical historians to do the same in their time, including the Gospel writers, especially of Luke – Acts. Their respect for their sources was such that they did not attempt to harmonize them, but used them in order to address the particular problems of their time. Akenson, an expert in an entirely different field, is well read in biblical scholarship but does a remarkable job not getting bogged down in it. He provides an excitingly fresh way of looking at the history of the formation of the various parts of the Bible, Jewish and Christian, and the Talmuds. The editor-inventors took accounts already accepted and respected in their communities and, instead of editing them into a harmonious whole, added their own perspective in order to make the older stories and accounts pertinent to and relevant for the problems and issues of their own time. The new thus was rooted in the old. “New ideas are given legitimacy by their being burnished with the patina of history: the newer an idea or practice is, the more it is claimed to be old.”34 That statement recurs many times in many ways throughout the book. If the editor-inventors had harmonized the old accounts too thoroughly to make their points, those accounts would no longer have been recognized by the communities as their old, old stories, and would have lost the authority sought in using them. But as vehicles for the new points being made, they were powerful instruments for the change-in-continuity needed in the new situations addressed. The old was resignified or reconceived to address the new, honored but not harmonized. Thus, the contradictions and discrepancies inherently imbedded in biblical literature testify in powerful ways to the canonical process itself and can serve as its own self-corrective apparatus. Add to that observation the masoretic tradition (maso33  Akenson, Surpassing Wonder. While I would dispute several points, I commend Akenson to anyone who would like to read an overview of the formation of the Bible, including the New Testament, and the Talmuds, in beautiful, engaging English. 34   Ibid., 94.

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rah) of jealously guarding the variants and discrepancies in the various doublets and triplets in the First Testament, and one is drawn, indeed, to surpassing wonder at the whole canonical process that has issued in different canons.

Canonical Process Several chapters in the present symposium [The Canon Debate volume] in various ways also illumine the canonical process. Joseph Blenkinsopp’s study on the changing meanings of prophecy within the Bible, with Isaiah as a showcase for the changes, illustrates the point.35 The meaning of prophecy underwent several transformations, including critical readings of the prophetic literature itself, the understanding of prophecy in Deuteronomy, Chronicles, Ben Sira, and then in Josephus. The prophet, once understood as “the social conscience of society and the preacher of social reform,” eventually becomes a miracle worker who predicts the outcome of history. The older view was not eliminated when the newer was added; on the contrary, the new was built on the old, and the divergent understandings were thus sustained together in the same canonical context. Consequently, Blenkinsopp rightly observes that a canon’s “normativity is not at all a straightforward concept, and that there are tensions within what counts as normative which cannot be disregarded or set aside, which theological honesty requires us to take seriously. Acceptance of these tensions and antinomies would, one suspects, lead to a richer and more complex appreciation for the biblical canons by the faith communities within which they came into existence and still function.” Shaye Cohen’s view that “the sages of Yavneh . . . created a society based on the doctrine that conflicting disputants may each be advancing the words of the living God” is a brilliant reflection on the canonical process as it evolved in the Bible on into the Mishnah and the Talmud.36 But it is an apt way also of reflecting on the process that issued in the highly diverse, even contradictory, expressions in the four Gospels of what Christians have believed God was doing in Christ. The difference is that Judaism’s stress on the corporate nature of covenant within which individual worth and responsibility can be fully expressed, even in contradictory ways, keeps it from appearing as splintered as Christianity with its many denominations.37

35

  Blenkinsopp, “Formation of the Hebrew Bible Canon.”   See Cohen, “Significance of Yavneh.” 37   See McDonald, “Identifying Scripture and Canon”; Wall, “Significance of a Canonical Perspective”; Dunn, “Has the Canon a Continuing Function?” which also warn against seeking a canon within the canon, but as Wall says, let “a full chorus of their voices” sing – an apt metaphor if “modern” dissonance is allowed as well as “classical” harmony. 36

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Canonical Closures The Bible is a dialogical literature that in turn gave rise to two dialogical religions based on it. The issue of the date of closure of the various canons of the two religions, the Tanak and the Talmud, and the double-Testament Christian Bible, is elusive and difficult to pinpoint, now that we are freed of the Yavneh / Jamnia or conciliar mentality. Is it so important after all? Whatever a church council has done to declare its canon closed served to recognize and ratify what had come to be practiced in the majority of believing communities, as well as to curb the intra-canonical dialogue. Any such effort within rabbinic Judaism would simply have become part of further debate. The closures enveloped enough internal dialogue for the process of repetition / recitation, which had started it all, to continue unabated in the communities that find their embracing identity in their canon. No closure can curb the dialogue that is inherent in a canon of Scripture, which, over against the magisteria and regulae fidei that developed after closure in all churches, mandates dialogue about its continuing relevance and authority. A canon is basically a community’s paradigm for how to continue the dialogue in ever-changing socio-political contexts. Leaders within a community, the scribes, the translators, the teachers, the preachers, the midrashists, and the commentators, precisely those convinced of its continuing relevance, have been and are tradents of the text, those who bring the text’s past into the present in the contemporary terms of their on-going community.38 Akenson concludes his engaging study thus, “One of the great vanities of human beings is that they have ideas. Little ideas maybe, but when it comes to big ideas, it is the ideas that have people.”39 Indeed. Bibliography Akenson, Donald Harman. Surpassing Wonder: The Invention of the Bible and the Talmuds. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1998. Albright, William F. “New Light on Early Recensions of the Hebrew Bible.” BASOR 140 (1955) 27 – 33. Reprinted in Qumran and the History of the Biblical Text, edited by Frank M. Cross and Shemaryahu Talmon, 140 – 46. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975. Barthélemy, Dominique. Les devanciers d’Aquila: Première publication intégrale du texte des fragments du Dodécaprophéton. VTSup 10. Leiden: Brill, 1963. Barthélemy, Dominique. “Text, Hebrew, History of.” In IDBSup 878 – 84. Beckwith, Roger T. The Old Testament Canon of the New Testament Church and Its Background in Early Judaism. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1985. 38   See Sanders, “Scripture as Canon in the Church.” The argument in the paper is that Enlightenment reading of Scripture was a gift of God in due season and mandates dialogue between critical understandings of Scripture and the magisteria that developed after closure of Scripture in all churches. The encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu of 1943, with its support of biblical criticism, mandates such dialogue within the Roman Catholic Church as well; the paper was a celebration of the encyclical, over fifty years after its promulgation, for all Christian communities. 39  Akenson, Surpassing Wonder, 413.

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Bickerman, Elias. Studies in Jewish and Christian History. 2 vols. Leiden: Brill, 1976. Blenkinsopp, Joseph. “The Formation of the Hebrew Bible Canon: Isaiah as a Test Case.” In The Canon Debate, edited by Lee M. McDonald and James A. Sanders, 53 – 67. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2002. Bovon, François. “The Canonical Structure of Gospel and Apostle.” In The Canon Debate, edited by Lee M. McDonald and James A. Sanders, 516 – 27. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2002. Buhl, Frants. Canon and Text of the Old Testament. Translated by John Macpherson. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1892. Carr, David M. “Canonization in the Context of Community: An Outline of the Formation of the Tanakh and the Christian Bible.” In A Gift of God in Due Season: Essays on Scripture and Community in Honor of James A. Sanders, edited by Richard D. Weis and David M. Carr, 22 – 64. JSOTSup 225. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1996. Cohen, Shaye J. D. “The Significance of Yavneh: Pharisees, Rabbis, and the End of Jewish Sectarianism.” HUCA 55 (1984) 27 – 53. Cross, Frank M. From Epic to Canon: History and Literature in Ancient Israel. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. Cross, Frank M. “The History of the Biblical Text in the Light of Discoveries in the Judaean Desert.” HTR 57 (1964) 281 – 99. Reprinted in Qumran and the History of the Biblical Text, edited by Frank M. Cross and Shemaryahu Talmon, 177 – 95. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975. Cross, Frank M. “The Stabilization of the Canon of the Hebrew Bible.” In From Epic to Canon: History and Literature in Ancient Israel, by Frank M. Cross, 219 – 29. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. Davidson, Samuel. The Canon of the Bible: Its Formation, History, and Fluctuations. 3rd ed. London: Kegan Paul, 1878. Davies, Philip R. Scribes and Schools: The Canonization of the Hebrew Scriptures. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1998. Dunn, James D. G. “Has the Canon a Continuing Function?” In The Canon Debate, edited by Lee M. McDonald and James A. Sanders, 416 – 39. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2002. Epp, Eldon J. “Issues in the Interrelation of New Testament Textual Criticism and Canon.” In The Canon Debate, edited by Lee M. McDonald and James A. Sanders, 485 – 515. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2002. Evans, Craig A., and James A. Sanders. Luke and Scripture: The Function of Sacred Tradition in Luke – Acts. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993. Ferguson, Everett. “Factors Leading to the Selection and Closure of the New Testament Canon: A Survey of Some Recent Studies.” In The Canon Debate, edited by Lee M. McDonald and James A. Sanders, 295 – 320. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2002. Flint, Peter W. The Dead Sea Psalms Scrolls and the Book of Psalms. STDJ 17. Leiden: Brill, 1997. Goshen-Gottstein, Moshe H., ed. The Book of Isaiah: Sample Edition with Introduction. Jerusalem: Magnes, 1965. Graetz, Heinrich. “Der alttestamentliche Kanon und sein Abschluss.” In Kohelet oder der Salomonische Prediger übersetzt und kritisch erläutert, 147 – 73. Leipzig: C. F. Winter, 1871. Harrington, Daniel. “The Old Testament Apocrypha in the Early Church and Today.” In The Canon Debate, edited by Lee M. McDonald and James A. Sanders, 196 – 210. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2002. Hendel, Ronald S., and James A. Sanders. “The Most Original Bible Text and How to Get There.” BRev 16, no. 4 (August 2000) 27 – 49, 58.

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Hengel, Martin. The Septuagint as Christian Scripture: Its Prehistory and the Problem of Its Canon. Translated by Mark E. Biddle. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 2002. Hornig, Gottfried. Die Anfänge der historisch-kritischen Theologie: Johann Salomo Semlers Schriftverständnis und seine Stellung zu Luther. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1961. Leiman, Sid Z. The Canonization of Hebrew Scripture: The Talmudic and Mishnaic Evidence. Hamden, CT: Archon, 1976. Lewis, Jack P. “Jamnia Revisited.” In The Canon Debate, edited by Lee M. McDonald and James A. Sanders, 146 – 62. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2002. Lewis, Jack P. “What Do We Mean by Jabneh?” JBR 32 (1964) 125 – 32. Reprinted in The Canon and Masorah of the Hebrew Bible: An Introductory Reader, edited by Sid Z. Leiman, 254 – 61. New York: Ktav, 1974. McDonald, Lee M. The Formation of the Christian Biblical Canon. Rev. ed. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1995. McDonald, Lee M. “Identifying Scripture and Canon in the Early Church: The Criteria Question.” In The Canon Debate, edited by Lee M. McDonald and James A. Sanders, 416 – 39. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2002. Neusner, Jacob. Judaism in the Matrix of Christianity. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1986. Qimron, Elisha, and John Strugnell, eds. Qumran Cave 4.V: Miqsat Maʿaśe ha-Torah. ˙ DJD 10. Oxford: Clarendon, 1994. Ryle, Herbert E. The Canon of the Old Testament. New York, London: Macmillan, 1895. Sanders, James A. “Adaptable for Life: The Nature and Function of Canon.” In Magnalia Dei: The Mighty Acts of God: Essays on the Bible and Archaeology in Memory of G. Ernest Wright, edited by Frank M. Cross, Werner E. Lemke, and Patrick D. Miller, 531 – 60. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1976. [Reprinted in From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, by James A. Sanders, 9 – 39. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987.] Sanders, James A. Canon and Community: A Guide to Canonical Criticism. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984. Sanders, James A. “Canonical Criticism: An Introduction.” In Le canon de l’Ancien Testament: Sa formation et son histoire, edited by Jean-Daniel Kaestli and Otto Wermelinger, 341 – 62. Geneva: Labor et Fides, 1984. Sanders, James A. “Identity, Apocalyptic, and Dialogue.” In The Echoes of Many Texts: Reflections on Jewish and Christian Traditions. Essays in Honor of Lou H. Silberman, edited by William G. Dever and J. Edward Wright, 159 – 70. BJS 313. Atlanta: Scholars, 1997. Sanders, James A. “Intertextuality and Canon.” In On the Way to Nineveh: Studies in Honor of George M. Landes, edited by Stephen L. Cook and Sara C. Winter, 316 – 33. Atlanta: Scholars, 1999. Sanders, James A. Review of The Dead Sea Psalms Scrolls and the Book of Psalms, by Peter W. Flint. DSD 6, no. 1 (1999) 84 – 89. Sanders, James A. “Scripture as Canon in the Church.” In L’Interpretazione della Bibbia nella Chiesa: Atti del Simposio promosso dalla Congregazione per la Dottrina della Fede, 122 – 43. Rome: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1999. Sanders, James A. “‘Spinning’ the Bible: How Judaism and Christianity Shape the Canon Differently.” BRev 14, no.  3 (1998) 22 – 29, 44 – 45. Sanders, James A. “Stability and Fluidity in Text and Canon.” In Tradition of the Text: Studies Offered to Dominique Barthélemy in Celebration of His 70th Birthday, edited by Gerard J. Norton and Stephen Pisano, 203 – 17. OBO 109. Fribourg: Presses universitaires; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1991. Sanders, James A. “The Stabilization of the Tanak.” In A History of Biblical Interpretation. Vol. 1, The Ancient Period, edited by Alan J. Hauser and Duane F. Watson, 225 – 52. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003.

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Sanders, James A. “Text and Canon: Concepts and Method.” In From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, by James A. Sanders, 125 – 51. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987. [Original JBL 98 (1979) 5 – 29.] Sanders, James A. “Text and Canon: Old Testament and New.” In Mélanges Dominique Barthélemy: Études bibliques offertes à l’occasion de son 60e anniversaire, edited by Pierre Casetti, Othmar Keel, and Adrian Schenker, 373 – 94. OBO 38. Fribourg: Presses universitaires; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1981. Sanders, James A. Torah and Canon. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1972. [2nd ed. Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2005.] Schmidt, Daryl D. “The Greek New Testament as a Codex.” In The Canon Debate, edited by Lee M. McDonald and James A. Sanders, 469 – 84. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2002. Steinmann, Andrew. The Oracles of God: The Old Testament Canon. St. Louis: Concordia, 1999. Sundberg, Albert C., Jr. The Old Testament of the Early Church. HTS 20. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964. Talmon, Shemaryahu. “Aspects of the Textual Transmission of the Bible in the Light of the Qumran Manuscripts.” Textus 4 (1964) 95 – 132. Reprinted in Qumran and the History of the Biblical Text, edited by Frank M. Cross and Shemaryahu Talmon, 226 – 63. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1975. Talmon, Shemaryahu. Review of The Dead Sea Psalms Scrolls and the Book of Psalms, by Peter W. Flint. JBL 118 (1999) 545 – 47. Talmon, Shemaryahu. “The Textual Study of the Bible – A New Outlook.” In Qumran and the History of the Biblical Text, edited by Frank M. Cross and Shemaryahu Talmon, 321 – 400. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975. Tov, Emanuel, ed. The Greek Minor Prophets Scroll from Nahal Hever (8HevXIIgr). ˙ ˙ DJD 8. Oxford: Clarendon, 1990. Tov, Emanuel. Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992. Wall, Robert W. “The Significance of a Canonical Perspective of the Church’s Scripture.” In The Canon Debate, edited by Lee M. McDonald and James A. Sanders, 416 – 39. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2002.

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21 Habakkuk in Qumran, Paul, and the Old Testament The Qumran expositor of Habakkuk firmly believed that Habakkuk spoke to Qumran’s day and time, to the situation and to the crisis that the Qumran sect believed marked the beginning of the divine eschaton. He was a modernizer in the ageless sense of the term. He sought the meaning of Scripture and the word of God for his time. With the best will in the world, he wanted to know what God was saying to his people through his ancient prophet. What the Qumran commentator was doing was normal and, even in some secondary sense within his own group of fellow believers, inspired. He brought Habakkuk to his people in their time and in terms that they undoubtedly understood clearly. The type of exegesis found at Qumran is largely the same as is found in the New Testament.1 They each employ a kind of historical typology. They find in ancient Scripture a situation analogous to their own, a crisis described much as they would describe their own, and they proceed to link the two, the old and the immediate, in a pattern of ancient “type” and present “antitype.” Once such an analogy is established, then a present situation can be illuminated by an older. Typology, however, goes much further and tends thus to interpret not only present facts but also the future. Nor does it stop there; it goes on to cloak the new situation in an imaginary aura that finally responds more to the factors of the old than to those of the new. The result is frequently a report of the new so couched in terms of the old that an innocent eyewitness would not recognize the account when finally recorded. For example, the Second Isaiah’s account of the new exodus from Babylon would be unrecognizable to the poor straggling Jew who wandered home in the reign of Cyrus or Darius. Typology as a means of modernizing has the other, opposite, effect as well, where the antitype dominates and enhances the type, or older event. For instance, Matthew, who frequently employs typology as a means of stating the church’s claim to Old Testament faith, quotes Hos 11:1, “Out of Egypt have I called my son.” In so doing, the first Evangelist attributes to an Old Testament passage a meaning it did not originally have. Hosea speaks of the event of the exodus using the father-son figure to describe the relationship of God and Israel (cf. Exod 4:22). Matthew uses the same father-son figure in describing the relationship of God and Jesus and thereby enhances the Hosea passage with the aspect of prediction or foreshadowing of Jesus’ trip with Mary and Joseph to and from *  First published 1959. 1   Cf. Allegro, Dead Sea Scrolls, 137; Davies, “Paul and the Dead Sea Scrolls.”

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Egypt. Since the father-son figure dates from the earliest days of the church, the Hosea passage was tailor-made to Matthew’s purpose. Many other examples could be given of the uses of typology and of the other principal exegetical method – promise and fulfillment – to show the interaction that takes place between the Old and New Testament statements.2 Invariably, each will give a little to and take a little from the other. A crucial instance of this interaction is Paul’s use in Rom 1:17 and Gal 3:11 (cf. Heb 10:38) of a phrase in Hab 2:4, “The righteous [person] will live by his faith.” Paul, of course, says, “He who by faith is righteous will live.” The Habakkuk passage is used by Paul to bolster his theological doctrine of justification by faith, that is to say, his contention as thoroughly set forth in Rom 3:21 – 26, Phil 3:9, and elsewhere that our righteousness comes of God through faith in Christ, and not by our works. While the emphasis in Habakkuk is on acceptance of the divine judgment and commitment to the sovereignty of God in adversity, the emphasis in Paul is on faith in the person of Christ. For Paul, to say “righteous” was to say “God in Christ,” the cornerstone of the Christian (particularly Pauline) faith. This is an example of a New Testament use of Old Testament Scripture, though not strictly typological, where the New Testament is at a distinct advantage. Paul develops his meaning and use of the phrase to the point of total clarity; Habakkuk is at a great disadvantage, in that his meaning of the phrase is almost totally without explanation in its context. The Qumran understanding of the same phrase (Hab 2:4b) has its affinities to that of Paul as well as its marked differences: “This means all doers of the law in the house of Judah whom God will deliver from the house of judgment because of their labor and their faith in the Teacher of Righteousness.”3 The method of exegesis, however, is the same. The “righteous” for Paul’s counterpart in Qumran means all who in the house of Judah practice the law. All such will be spared the final judgment. Thus, in Qumran, as in the other expressions of Judaism in this period, righteousness has to do with works. “Faith” or “faithfulness” means those who maintained through their labors and affliction their faith in the Teacher of Righteousness. Here we see, as in Paul, that faith is centered in a person. This certainly is not a person similar to Paul’s “God in Christ,” but it is a person, the leader of a sect. Nor is it the same faith, the belief that involves commitment and perseverance in the face of adversity and suffering.4

2   For recent discussions of the problem, see especially Eichrodt, “Ist die typologische Exegese sachgemasse Exegese?”; Westermann, “Les rapports”; Lampe and Woollcombe, Essays on Typology; von Rad, “Typologische Auslegung”; Patte, Early Jewish Hermeneutic, 159 – 67; Drane, “Typology”; Goppelt, Typos; Osborne, “Type”; and Evans, “Typology.” 3   1QpHab 7:14 – 8:3. For critical commentary, see Brownlee, Midrash Pesher of Habakkuk, 125 – 29; Horgan, Pesharim: Qumran Interpretations, 10 – 55. 4  That ʿamalam here implies labor of pain and adversity was recognized as early as in Dupont-Sommer, Aperçus préliminaires, 56, and del Medico, Deux manuscrits hébreux, 114.

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The Major Premise What must not be lost sight of in our understandable excitement over how Qumran and Paul used Habakkuk is the abiding necessity to let Habakkuk speak for himself.5 To deny to Habakkuk his problems and his own solution to those problems is to commit an error almost as great as that of Marcion and the early Gnostics, whom the early church condemned as heretics. Marcion attempted to deny the Old Testament as valid for Christian faith. Just as erroneous is the attempt to force the Old Testament to be seen solely through the eyes of New Testament faith. The church has wisely and constantly through the ages insisted on the “whole Bible” as the valid rule or canon of faith. If the Old Testament is to be read only as the New Testament reads it, we will have to admit that we are cheating the New Testament itself of the very basis of its arguments and claims, which, as Krister Stendahl has pointed out, rest solidly and solely on Old Testament faith: In the New Testament, the major concern is to make clear that all is “old,” in accordance with the expectations of the prophets . . . Thus the issue between the Essenes and the early Christians was not one of “originality,” but a searching question about who were the legitimate heirs to the prophetic promises and who could produce the most striking arguments for fulfillment.6

In marked agreement, his colleague Frank Cross states that “the New Testament faith was not a new faith, but the fulfillment of an old faith . . . The New Testament does not set aside or supplant the Old Testament. It affirms it and, from its point of view, completes it.”7 If this position is an accurate one – and I am convinced that it is – then it follows logically and convincingly that the faith that the Old Testament itself propounded must never be permitted simply to be seen in the light of the New Testament’s understanding of it. The Old Testament was the New Testament’s major premise. If that be so, then the Old Testament case for faith must be seriously examined on its own terms: To do anything less makes the New Testament claim a sham and a farce! The minor premise in the New Testament’s argument is its own claim to the fulfillment, in Christ and his church, of the promise of the Old Testament (the major premise). To put it otherwise, both the Old Testament statement of faith referred to in the New, and the New Testament claim based on that statement, must be taken equally seriously. However, biblical faith is not finally proved or disproved on the basis of the rational logic of a syllogism. To claim such a criterion would be to submit logic as superior to faith, which is a position bearing its own contradiction in terms and its own inherent fallacy. To stay on the plane of faith, suffice it to say that

5

 Hays, Echoes of Scripture, 39 – 41, has recently and rightly underscored this very point.   Stendahl, “Scrolls and the New Testament,” 6.  Cross, Ancient Library of Qumran, 183 – 84.

6 7

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the New Testament lays a claim based on Old Testament faith; therefore, to deny the major premise of that claim would be to deny the faith of the New Testament itself. Furthermore, to force an Old Testament statement into a position other than its own, in order to bolster a New Testament argument, not only would be a logical fallacy but would be evidence of a lack of faith. The Old Testament can best serve the New Testament by standing on its own two feet. To call the Old Testament a “torso,” as does Otto Procksch in his Theologie des Alten Testaments, damages the New Testament argument.8 Procksch further says that Christ cannot be understood without the Old Testament and that the Old Testament cannot be understood without him. Simple statements such as these can be greatly misleading. What we can say is: to understand Christ as the New Testament would have us understand him, the Old Testament is the sine qua non, the only stance from which one must perceive the New Testament statements about him. Other stances, other bases, are also needed to appreciate the full New Testament picture, such as the Hellenistic mystery cults (and social / cultural setting) or, indeed, one’s own life situation. To lose sight of the variety of New Testament perspectives does not become the Old Testament student. But Procksch’s other dictum concerns us more: the Old Testament cannot be understood without Christ. Such a statement cheats the New Testament of the forcefulness of its argument. If Procksch is right, then the New Testament is wrong, and the minor premise becomes the major. The New Testament seems to say something like this: the Old Testament itself is the only single criterion to determine the validity of a claim to fulfill its promise; Christ meets the test of that criterion; therefore, Christ is the fulfillment of that promise. Procksch and many other recent biblical theologians would turn the syllogism around to read: Christ is the only single criterion to determine the validity of a claim to be the divine promise; the Old Testament claims to contain the divine promise; therefore, only Christ validates the Old Testament. Christ is our criterion and, figuratively, our crisis as well. Christ is our judge and our judgment. He, by Scripture and the Holy Spirit, is the canon of our faith and our lives. And, in some sense, all that historically preceded must submit to his judgment. He is the Christian’s canon of what in the Old Testament is relevant and valid to the life of faith. But the Old Testament stands in a special relationship to Christ, which nothing else can claim. Before it, too, finally came under his judgment, the Old Testament was the criterion by which to identify the Christ, the only single criterion. The Old Testament was not only Jesus’ Scripture, hence his canon of faith, but, in the end, the major premise of the church in its claim that Jesus was the Christ. All the while that we insist that nothing is exempt from the judgment of Christ – even our faith-understanding of the Old Testament – we must remember that the Old Testament was and, in some sense, 8  Procksch, Theologie des Alten Testaments, 8, cf. 1 – 19, 45 – 47. See G. E. Wright’s view of any futile separation of the Testaments and his different use of the word “torso” in Wright, “Faith of Israel,” 389.

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is the criterion whereby Christ is Christ. Without the Old Testament, Christ is innovator, not fulfillment. Any attempt to do away with the Old Testament, as in the Marcionite sense, is therefore to do away with the peculiar New Testament image of Christ. Furthermore, any attempt to take away from the Old Testament its unique relation to the New Testament as the New Testament itself accepts it – namely, as the only single criterion of its claim – is to reduce the Old Testament to nothing more than any other literature or phenomenon of history. While Christ is the krisis of all things for the life of faith of the Christian, the Old Testament stands in a peculiar relation to the New Testament and hence to Christ. Not only does it submit, for the Christian, to the canon of Christ for what is valid in Christian faith, it also has the unique and distinct role of forever standing in judgment over our understanding of Christ. The New Testament image of Christ, by its own admission and insistence, depends on the Old Testament; and the New Testament claims about him submit uniquely and only to the Old Testament judgment of them. To argue that the Old Testament no longer enjoys this distinction or has lost its significance as canon for the New Testament is to declare the New Testament argument outdated and, in some sense, therefore, to destroy the whole concept of the canon of Scripture. When one denies to the Old Testament this dual relationship to the New Testament, one has denied to the first-century argument of the New Testament any abiding significance. In so doing, one has denied the relevance of Scripture altogether. The New Testament accepts no other criterion than the Old Testament in its claims for Christ and his church. If we rid the Old Testament of that role of criterion to the New Testament, we have pulled the teeth out of the New Testament argument and claim. If we rid the New Testament of the power of its claim, we discard it altogether, or we find ourselves in the position of the child unwilling to believe his balloon is burst, who keeps trying to blow air into scraps of rubber. Emending Procksch, I assert that for the Christian, the Old Testament cannot be accepted as canon of faith without Christ. But we must with equal force assert that, without the Old Testament, the New Testament image of Christ and the New Testament claims made for him and his church are without foundation, without context, without force, and without meaning. In other words, without the Old Testament, Christ is not Christ at all in the New Testament sense. It is, therefore, not just a question of understanding Christ, it is a question of having him at all. The New Testament is the New Testament because of the Old Testament, in some sense both absolute and relative. Therefore, I assert: Christ cannot be the New Testament Christ without the Old Testament, and the Old Testament cannot be the Christian Old Testament without Christ. Out of such an assertion the Old Testament looms forth as critical to the New Testament in an absolute sense inapplicable to any other claim. The Old Testament is subject to New Testament judgment, as are all other phenomena of the Christian experience, but the New Testament is subject to Old Testament judgment as is nothing else in the Christian experience.

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The question immediately arises as to whether New Testament revelation surpasses Old Testament revelation. For the Christian it does, since the Old Testament does submit to the Christ krisis or judgment. It is the faith of the Christian that nothing is exempt in all history from the judgment of this one historical figure we call the Christ. For the Christian, the Old Testament is Christian because of Christ, and it is to be understood as canon from the Christian perspective. Christ judges the Old Testament in all its parts. But this does not mean that the New Testament has superseded the Old Testament. Revelation is not progressive in the sense of superseding all that historically precedes. That would render not just history but the passage of time as superior to all revelation. No such idea is to be seriously entertained by the thinking Christian. Revelation and history stand in such a relationship to one another that, though history does affect revelation in its form and content, revelation stands forever in judgment on history. The greatest hurdle of the whole story that the Christian has to tell is the incarnation, where revelation itself entered nature and became history. Not only does the Christian tell that story, he or she believes it. But commitment to it involves the admission and recognition that revelation is dynamic, vital, and alive, and that it is subject to the nature it entered and the history it became at the same time that it stands in judgment on that very history. Faith is affected by history all the while it stands in judgment on history.9 New Testament faith, therefore, surpasses, but does not supersede, Old Testament faith. The Old Testament, like nothing else in the Christian experience, has a unique and special relationship to the New Testament; for without the major premise of its own argument, there is no biblical foundation to the New Testament claim.

Faith and History The very crux of the Christian faith, the very heart of the incredible story that Christians have to tell the world, is at the point of the relationship of faith to history. In a review in the New York Times of Edmund Wilson’s Scrolls from the Dead Sea,10 Frank Cross put it succinctly by stating that it is the Christian’s belief, not that God has from time to time suspended history, but that he has given significance to it. That faith affects history is the Christian statement to the world. If this is so, then it is plausible to think that the opposite holds: history affects faith. For both statements there is ample evidence. If this be the case, then there is as much spirit of faith as historicism in the liberal attitude that the biblical historian in his or her work should let the chips fall where they may. To put it theologically, it would seem that there is more faith in the sovereignty of God as

 9   See the still pertinent article by Hyatt, “Ministry of Scholarship,” esp. 215. Note Jeremias’s discussion of the implications of the incarnation for historical research, “Present Position.” 10  Wilson, Scrolls from the Dead Sea.

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Lord of history in evidence among the historians than among some existentialist theologians who would discount historical research as important to faith. If faith affects history and history affects faith, and if this faith and this history are truly dynamically related and not abstracted one from another, then, though the faith expressed in one historical circumstance can be modernized or made relevant to a later historical circumstance, that expression of faith must be fully examined in its own Sitz im Leben, within the problems to which it first responded. That is to say, specifically, that, while we must allow Paul his use of Hab 2:4b and the Qumranian expositor his use of the same, we must also allow Habakkuk his meaning in his situation. However, to use Habakkuk’s meaning as the sole criterion of the validity of a later application would simply be to ignore the problem of the relevance of the canon. Neither Qumran nor the New Testament can be expected simply to echo Old Testament faith. While both the Qumran and the New Testament exegetes were committed to the then extant Old Testament’s functioning as canon, they were certainly not limited to a simple rehashing of Scripture. The problem of the relevance of the canon is at best complex, certainly exceeding the simple problem of finding analogous historical situations in which to reiterate exactly the canonical faith. As stated above, New Testament faith surpasses, but does not supersede, Old Testament faith – by its own commitment to it. The same was true of the faith professed at Qumran. For at Qumran it is quite clear that, while there was a commitment to the Old Testament as canon, there was certainly no hesitancy in asserting the peculiar election of the sect and its particular role within Israel in its own day. In a sense equal to what we have seen for the New Testament, the faith of the Qumran community was a faith surpassing that of the Old Testament, though not superseding it. The difference, it would appear, was the same for both, namely, the belief that each was heralding the eschaton. Both Qumran and the early church firmly believed itself the chosen evangelist of the good news of the inbreaking eschaton, of the divine intervention in history that would mean the immediate sovereignty and reign of God and his will on earth. The task of each was conceived as crucial to world history, not just to the ongoing life of the sect. Their task was to proclaim the eschaton and to prepare for it. To execute the task, each made use of its Scripture, the Old Testament as it was known to them. Both groups felt not only free to modernize Habakkuk, but obliged to do so. If, in so doing, Habakkuk’s historical situation was obscured, it was because of the belief that the eschaton would consummate and affirm, not deny, prior history. For, surely, not only Habakkuk’s history but all history was about to be fulfilled. The relevance of Habakkuk was in what the prophet had to say to the most crucial and important event of all history, the immediate and inbreaking eschaton. Qumran and the early church believed that Habakkuk was addressing himself primarily to that moment in history to which each community believed itself to bear witness. However, there is no evidence whatever to think that they denied a meaning in Habakkuk to Habakkuk’s own situation. Their belief was that Habakkuk’s faith was a canonical faith, and, if canonical, then its application was not limited to its original expression; indeed, it had an especial application in the eschaton.

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Contemporary Hermeneutics The rapprochement of New Testament and Qumranian hermeneutics has been an object of study since the Habakkuk Scroll was first published.11 It is beyond doubt that the closest link between the Qumran scrolls and the New Testament is their hermeneutics. This is so much the case that we now describe the principal exegetical method of Qumran, of Matthew, and even Paul, as the midrash pesher, taking the word pesher from the scrolls themselves. The use of the word pesher was hardly noticeable before the discovery of the scrolls but, since Krister Stendahl’s dissertation, is freely applied to the New Testament, where the hermeneutics resemble that of Qumran Habakkuk. Stendahl deals particularly with variant readings and the differing quotations of the Old Testament, especially of Habakkuk, found in Qumran and the New Testament.12 One observation that has emerged from such comparative studies is outstanding: there was no established authoritative text of the Old Testament before the masoretic collations beginning in the second century CE.13 Paul’s usual vade mecum was the Septuagint, while the Qumran commentator’s was chiefly a pre-MT Hebrew text very close to the MT. Stendahl’s interest in 1QpHab centers on the variants between it and the MT. He says, “We must . . . presume that [1QpHab] was conscious of various possibilities, tried them out and allowed them to enrich its interpretation of the prophet’s message, which in all its forms was fulfilled in and through the Teacher of Righteousness.”14 Such, Stendahl feels, was also the case for Matthew. Earle Ellis applies the same reasoning to Pauline hermeneutics and states: Taken as a whole, the Pauline citations reflect in substantial measure a pesher type moulding of the [Old Testament] text which in some cases is determinative for the New Testament application of the passage. While this at times involves a choosing and rejecting between texts and / or targums known to the apostle, more often the interpretive paraphrase appears to be created ad hoc by Paul or by the early church before him.15

To illustrate this point further, consider the diversity of readings of Hab 2:4b, some from texts that obviously preceded Paul’s time, some from later periods that may reflect earlier readings, and some from the apostle himself: 1. MT: K‫ ְוצַדִ ּיק ֶבּאְ ֶמּונָתֹו י ְחיֶה‬K 2. Targum: K‫וצדיקיא על קוׁשטהון יתקיימון‬K 3. LXX: ὁ δὲ δίκαιος ἐκ πίστεώς μου ζήσεται 4. Vulgate: iusus autem in fide sua vivet 5. 8HevXIIgr 17:30 καὶ δίκαιος ἐν πίστει αὐτοῦ ζήσεται 6. Paul (Rom 1:17): ὁ δὲ δίκαιος ἐκ πίστεως ζήσεται 7. Paul (Gal 3:11): ὁ δίκαιος ἐκ πίστεως ζήσεται 11

  One of the earliest of such studies was Roberts, “Some Observations,” esp. 367 ff.  Stendahl, School of St Matthew, esp. 185 – 90. 13   See Albright, “New Light”; Cross, Ancient Library of Qumran, 124 – 45. 14  Stendahl, School of St Matthew, 190. 15   Ellis, “Note on Pauline Hermeneutics,” esp. 131 – 32. 12

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  8. Heb 10:38 (P46, K‫א‬K, A): ὁ δὲ δίκαιός μου ἐκ πίστεως ζήσεται   9. Heb 10:38 (D*, itd, e): ὁ δὲ δίκαιος ἐκ πίστεώς μου ζήσεται 10. Heb 10:38 (P13, D2): ὁ δὲ δίκαιος ἐκ πίστεως ζήσεται The diversity is plainly evident. What is also of interest is to observe that Habakkuk’s theology influences targumic readings elsewhere. For example, Targ. Zech 2:17 reads, at least according to one MS (Parma 555), “The righteous and the meek shall live by their upright deeds.” It is likely that this targumic reading has been directly influenced by Hab 2:4. What we have, then, are variant readings and exegeses; and it is not always possible to distinguish them. Hence, while we are faced with the freedom of Qumran and the early church to choose and select among equally viable Old Testament readings in their period, these variants do not limit the problem. They both felt free to adapt the prophet’s message to their respective situations and, as I have shown above, on the grounds of simple logic, to let the prophetic word be thereby enriched. In other words, they were not constrained only to quote the prophet and modernize; they had the freedom to modernize first and then to quote the adapted version. This would be a dangerous, even frightening, observation without the sort of wisdom to accompany it that T. W. Manson affords: We are long accustomed to distinguish carefully between the text which – in more senses than one – is sacred, and the commentary upon it and exposition of it. We tend to think of the text as objective fact and interpretation as subjective opinion. It may be doubted whether the early Jewish and Christian translators and expositors of Scripture made any such sharp distinction. For them the meaning of the text was of primary importance and they seem to have had greater confidence than we moderns in their ability to find it. Once found it became a clear duty to express it; and accurate reproduction of the traditional wording of the Divine oracles took second place to publication of what was held to be their essential meaning and immediate application. Odd as it may seem to us, the freedom with which they handled the Biblical text is a direct result of the supreme importance which they attached to it.16

The modern critical student is faced not only with the first-century hermeneutics of modernization but with the freedom of the early exegetes to quote the Old Testament in the light of modernization.

Contemporary Interpretations We are now prepared to accept these two interpretations as legitimate exegetical attempts to modernize what is equally canonical for both in the Old Testament prophetic corpus. Their respective interpretations are amazingly similar. As has been noted, they both expound upon faith in, or fidelity to, a person: for Paul, Christ; for 1QpHab, the Teacher of Righteousness. However, whereas Paul denies works or obedience as a means of salvation, Qumran insists on the necessity of obedience to the law to escape the judgment. 16   Manson, “Argument from Prophecy,” 135, as quoted in Ellis, “Note on Pauline Hermeneutics,” 132.

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Erich Dinkler has more or less convincingly shown the conjunction of the doctrines of predestination and individual responsibility in both Romans and the Dead Sea Manual of Discipline.17 But the value of Dinkler’s discussion is more distinct in his work on Paul than on Qumran. The documents from Qumran give abundant evidence of the general election of Israel and the peculiar election of the sect, as well as the necessity of responsibility and obedience. It is good to realize, with Dinkler, Paul’s insistence on responsibility and obedience for the person already under grace in Christ. The difference is not in the call to obedience, it is in Qumran’s view that obedience to the law will put off the day of judgment; or, rather, the distinction here, in view of the varieties of Judaism of the period, is Paul’s. However, one of the most exciting facets of recent study has been that of discovering Paul’s doctrine of the righteousness of God in at least one of the psalms of Qumran, the closing hymn of praise appended to the Manual of Discipline. Sherman Johnson has said, “How startling it is that a narrow and harsh law ends on such a note of hope and justification.”18 The following is a fresh translation of a few selected lines from the Manual of Discipline: And in his righteousness will my sin be blotted out . . . For the truth of God, that is my stepping stone . . . . . . A source of righteousness . . . God has given to whom he has chosen. As for me, if I should slip, the loving faithfulness of God is my salvation forever, And if I should stumble because of the sins of the flesh,19 My vindication will be forever established through the righteousness of God . . . In his mercy he has drawn me near And by his loving deeds my vindication approaches. In the righteousness of his truth has he judged me And in his abundant goodness he forever atones for all of my iniquities. And by his righteousness he cleanses me from human filth and sin In order that I may thank God for his righteousness and the Most High for his beauteous majesty (1QS 11:3 – 7, 11, 12, 13 – 15).

Johnson goes on to say, “The new materials show, furthermore, that the issue of justification and the means whereby God accepts the sinner, are not creations of Paul’s brain, above all not ad hoc creations for occasional sermons to the Galatians and Romans, but real issues about which people were concerned, at least in sectarian circles.”20 It seems fairly certain that the theologians of Qumran and Paul have many thoughts in common relating humanity’s sin and God’s righteousness. Very cautiously Johnson says that it would be tempting to think of our phrase in 1QpHab to Hab 2:4b as meaning “faith in the Teacher of Righteousness.” Johnson rightly recoils from such a meaning and translates the phrase “fidelity to the Teacher of Righteousness.” 17

  Dinkler, “Historical and Eschatological Israel,” esp. 120 – 25.   Johnson, “Paul and the Manual of Discipline,” 165. 19   On the meaning of “flesh” here and elsewhere in the scrolls, see Kuhn, “New Light,” esp. 101 – 3; Davies, “Paul and the Dead Sea Scrolls”; cf. Hyatt, “View of Man.” 20   Johnson, “Paul and the Manual of Discipline,” 165. 18

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Let us look again at the two pesher interpretations of the Habakkuk passage. Obedience and responsibility are to the point for both. The great distinction lies in Paul’s interest in responsibility after justification by faith, not as a necessity for justification. Furthermore, Paul’s universalism and general struggle against the Petrine church distinguishes him clearly from Qumran’s “all who fulfill the law in the house of Judah.” But in the matter of justification itself, Qumran and Paul have many affinities. In Paul, faith in Christ seems to make the difference. Here, then, are two similar, yet distinct, applications of one Old Testament verse in two approximately contemporary writers, each firmly believing the eschaton to be at hand. Each views the Old Testament phrase from his eschatological perspective. Neither could ever be convinced that he had done any injustice to Habakkuk. Each believed that he had drawn from Habakkuk its true meaning, each using what we have seen as a pesher-type interpretation. Not only does the recovery of the ancient library of Qumran afford us a comparison of the beliefs and arguments of two contemporary eschatological denominations in Judaism, but it also affords us a comparison of their use of what for both was equally sacred and canonical – their Scripture, the Old Testament. In all probability, a comparison of their beliefs will ultimately force us to a simple statement of what the essential difference between them really is. Krister Stendahl has issued the simple statement that, “It is Jesus that makes the difference.”21 He is compelled to state that the fundamental distinction between them is not one of kind but one of degree. They were both eschatologically oriented. They both lived in anticipation of the fullness of the eschaton. Stendahl says: The Teacher of Righteousness suffered persecution and injustice and the community held a high doctrine about its Council as the ones chosen to atone for the people. But in the light of the resurrection, the death of Jesus was transformed into an atoning suffering of an ultimate and cosmic significance. Thus, it was the higher degree of anticipation, i. e., a relative difference.

He later adds, “The relative difference in anticipation led to what appears to us an absolute difference in ideas.”22 What he means by this relative difference being really and finally absolute can only be, it seems to me, again, that the atoning Christ makes the difference. The real difference between Paul’s exegesis of Hab 2:4 and Qumran’s is Paul’s application of the passage to Christ’s atoning death.23 This, then, is the distinction between Qumran’s “fidelity to the Teacher of Righteousness” and Paul’s “righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ . . . whom God put forward as an expiation . . .” (Rom 3:22, 25).

21

  Stendahl, “Scrolls and the New Testament,” 17; cf. Jeremias, “Qumran Texts.”   Stendahl, “Scrolls and the New Testament,” 17. 23   See Cullmann, “Significance of the Qumran Texts,” esp. 225 – 26. However, see the results of work on recent finds from Cave 4 by Allegro, “Further Light,” and the criticism of them by Rowley, “4QpNahum,” and Rowley, “Teacher of Righteousness.” 22

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Habakkuk Himself Now let us look once more at Habakkuk himself. What was the faith of which Habakkuk spoke? Was it only a faithfulness to divine will or law? Was it only a fidelity to Yahwism? Rather, Habakkuk was speaking of faith in God – the startling, shocking faith that God does not die; that Marduk, the principal god of the Babylonians, had not defeated Yahweh, but that Yahweh had used the Babylonians to judge and discipline his own people (Hab 1:12). Habakkuk meant more than fidelity or obedience, he meant a radical faith in the sovereignty of God not only over Judah, but over the Babylonians as well – indeed the whole world. This was the kind of faith that Isaiah preached; and it seems to me that Habakkuk’s famous phrase means precisely the same thing as an equally famous phrase of Isaiah’s: “The person of faith need not haste” (Isa 28:16).24 Habakkuk’s faith was in the universal sovereignty of God. The righteous person was distinguished by his faith in God’s lordship over the current events of history. This was not just a fidelity to Yahweh as against Marduk; it was a faith perception that God was in full control of the situation, the judge of his own people by means of another. If he judged them, he was not just their god, he was God. Such an assertion was too commonplace for either Paul or our Qumranian exegete. They both applied it to their time, to the inbreaking eschaton of which they were both certain. For Paul, it meant faith in God’s work in Christ, in God’s righteousness through Christ. For the Qumran exegete, it was quite as likely also faith in God’s work in the Teacher of Righteousness. The difference, as noted above, was the atoning death of Christ, the relative difference which has for Christians today become absolute. Habakkuk was modernized by both and rendered messianic, or at least eschatological, by both. But the faith of Habakkuk, and of the Old Testament in general, while surpassed by the work of God in Christ’s expiatory death, was not superseded, nor is it yet superseded. It is the foundation faith of all our faith. It is Isaiah’s precious cornerstone of a sure foundation: God is lord; he lives and he reigns.25 Just as the first assertion of faith for the exiled Jews of the sixth century BCE was that God had not died but yet lived, so it was the first assertion of the followers of Jesus after the crucifixion: he lives; and, just as the fullness of the sovereignty of God was revealed to the Second Isaiah a few years later (Isa 52:7), so the fullness of the reign of the grace of God in Christ (Rom 5:21) was revealed to Paul.26 But Habakkuk did not have this Christ, nor did he consciously point to him. He consciously pointed to and witnessed to his God, the living and reigning God whose power was universal and whose judgment of his people was a righteous judgment.27 To say that Habakkuk unconsciously witnessed to Christ is 24   Cf. Blank, Prophetic Faith in Isaiah, 37 – 39, where Blank, too, suggests, though with different emphasis, that Isa 28:16 informs the meaning of Hab 2:4b. 25   Cf. Sanders, “Thy God Reigneth.” 26   By simple analogy, not typology. 27   I agree with Hays, Echoes of Scripture, 39 – 41, that the basic issue to which Habakkuk addressed himself was theodicy.

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a burden for Paul and the modern theologian to bear. To say that Habakkuk witnessed to the judging and redeeming God – hence, by definition, Christ – is to deny the historical aspect of the incarnation. We cannot say with J. K. S. Reid, “If God saves in the time of the Old Testament, Jesus Christ is there, by whom He saves.”28 Trying to hold to the historical aspect of the incarnation and also to Christ doing God’s work of salvation in a history prior to that incarnation is more than a dynamic paradox; it violates the monotheizing process.

The Old Testament Today The Old Testament does not need such desperate handling to belong to the church. The Old Testament stands on its own two feet. Old Testament faith bears witness to God within the history of a people, which history has become the prehistory of the church and whose faith is the foundation of the Christian faith. While there are parts of the Old Testament that are an embarrassment to the church and would never have formed the phraseology of the major premise of the Christian argument and claim for Christ, there are equally embarrassing parts of the New Testament that do not speak to our modern day. Such portions of either Testament are good only for allegorization, and if we must resort to allegory to save them, we might as well canonize all the world’s literature and allegorize Rabelais’s Gargantua, as well as the Song of Songs. Paul picked and chose. He chose as his text for his most thorough treatment of the Christian soteriology and Christology Hab 2:4b, a passage well suited to his purpose. He did not give a historical exegesis of the passage; he proclaimed its relevance to the work of the same God in Christ. The claim that the Old Testament bore witness to the righteousness of God formed the basis of his argument. To this extent, it seems to me, as it seemed to Professor Ropes of Harvard back in 1903, that Paul’s idea of the righteousness of God arose from the Old Testament itself, where Paul had his firmest roots.29 To say that Paul gives us a pesher quotation of the verse and an application relevant to the work of God in Christ is to say that he has at least done more than rehash his Old Testament text; he has seen its dynamic relevance to what he firmly believed was a historical event surpassing the event to which Habakkuk himself spoke – namely, the eschaton of God’s saving history. In other words, Paul said something more than Habakkuk said. But because he added to Habakkuk, is Habakkuk therefore to be denied the meaning his own statement had for him, and can also have for us? Never. Habakkuk and the Old Testament in general (though not equally in every part) must be permitted to say what they say, to stand on their own two feet. Only then does the New Testament stand a chance to state its claim and propound its argument. The Old Testament is the Old Testament to the Christian because of Christ. But the New Testament is the New Testament, and Christ is Christ, because the Old Tes28

 Reid, Authority of Scripture, 257.   Ropes, “Righteousness.”

29

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tament is its foundation and its major premise. To deny to the Old Testament its faith in its time is to deny that God acted in that time, which is equally to deny the basic New Testament argument of the eschaton of that divine activity and history. Christ is the Christian’s criterion of what in the Old Testament is relevant. But the Old Testament must forever remain the only single criterion of the New Testament claim that Jesus is the Christ; for the Old Testament can and must be understood apart from Christ, that it may fulfill its role as witness to the New Testament argument. For the Christian the Old Testament must continue to play this dual role. If not, then Christ becomes solely innovator, not fulfillment, and hence no longer the New Testament Christ. If these conclusions are correct, then it follows that the task of historical research, of close study, of the facts and factors of the history to which God has given significance, must be pursued as objectively as possible, letting the chips fall where they may. Only then is our faith real and not a sham. Stendahl with candid force has said: The task of biblical studies must be confined to the presentation of the original. To be a good historian in this field is not only to give date and theories of authorship. It includes the empathic descriptive analysis of the ideas and the synthetic description of the patterns of thought. The task of biblical studies, even of biblical theology, is to describe, to relive and relate in the terms and presuppositions of the period of the texts what they meant to their authors and their contemporaries.30

Millar Burrows makes the same point equally well: Objectivity does not mean treating another person like a laboratory specimen, to be dissected and described; it means respecting his dignity and freedom, allowing him to be himself and to say what he wants to say: without that kind of self-denying objectivity, genuine exegesis is impossible. The exegete must treat Paul or Isaiah with respect and allow him to be himself.31

Archaeology is the exegete’s most essential tool and certainly the most valuable. To furnish the original, as Stendahl says, or to practice objectivity, as Burrows insists, the biblical exegete and theologian are obligated to archaeology. However, contrary to popular opinion, archaeology is not going to prove (or disprove) anything in matters of faith. To make archaeology or any other method of historical research the criterion of faith is to assert commitment to history, and that is precisely what faith frees us from.32 Nonetheless, archaeology can and does help clarify that which is history or myth or legend, and clarify the details of each. Even if archaeology should show the Bible to be mostly good history, that would not prove the priority of the Christian faith as over against, say, the 30   Stendahl, “Implications of Form-Criticism,” 37 – 38. In the same issue of JBL, see the similar points made with different emphasis by Muilenburg, “Preface to Hermeneutics,” esp. 21 – 24, and by Rylaarsdam, “Problem of Faith and History,” esp. 31 – 32. “Original” here means what extant texts permit of recovery of early understandings of events. 31   Burrows, “Thy Kingdom Come,” 3. 32   Cf. Steele, “Archaeology and the Bible”; Wright, “Archaeology and Old Testament Studies.”

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priority of the Qumranian faith, though it might make us feel better about how things have turned out. If it should show the Bible to be mostly poor history, that could not disprove Christian faith, though it might in our Western minds increase the risk we normally run by being committed to our Christ and increase the doubt that inevitably accompanies faith. Archaeology and historical research have achieved both these things. In the one case we heave a sigh of relief, and in the other we are forced to dig deeper into what faith really means. The latter has often been the healthier eventuality, and we should never cease to welcome the challenging study or the daring work of the historian. Only when we are willing to run the risks of doubt is our faith relevant, dynamic, and alive. Anything less is not worthy of Paul’s faith or Habakkuk’s faith, or, for that matter, the faith of the ancient theologians of Qumran. Bibliography Albright, William F. “New Light on Early Recensions of the Hebrew Bible.” BASOR 140 (1955) 27 – 33. [Reprinted in Qumran and the History of the Biblical Text, edited by Frank M. Cross and Shemaryahu Talmon, 140 – 46. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975.] Allegro, John M. The Dead Sea Scrolls. Baltimore: Penguin, 1956. Allegro, John M. “Further Light on the History of the Qumran Sect.” JBL 75 (1956) 89 – 95, 174 – 87. Blank, Sheldon H. Prophetic Faith in Isaiah. New York: Harper, 1958. Brownlee, William H. The Midrash Pesher of Habakkuk. SBLMS  24. Missoula, MT: Scholars, 1975. Burrows, Millar. “Thy Kingdom Come.” JBL 74 (1955) 1 – 8. Cross, Frank M. The Ancient Library of Qumran and Modern Biblical Studies. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1958. Cullmann, Oscar. “The Significance of the Qumran Texts for Research into the Beginnings of Christianity.” JBL 74 (1955) 213 – 26. Davies, W. D. “Paul and the Dead Sea Scrolls: Flesh and Spirit.” In The Scrolls and the New Testament, edited by Kister Stendahl, 157 – 82. New York: Harper, 1957. del Medico, Henri E. Deux manuscrits hébreux de la Mer Mort: Essai de traduction du “Manuel de discipline” et du “Commentaire d’Habakkuk” avec notes et commentaires. Paris: Geuthner, 1951. Dinkler, Erich. “The Historical and the Eschatological Israel in Romans Chapters 9 – 11.” JR 36 (1956) 109 – 27. Drane, John W. “Typology.” EvQ 50 (1978) 195 – 210. Dupont-Sommer, André. Aperçus préliminaires sur les manuscrits de la Mer Mort. L’Orient Ancien Illustré 4. Paris: Maisonneuve, 1950. Eichrodt, Walther. “Ist die typologische Exegese sachgemasse Exegese?” TLZ 81 (1956) 641 – 54. ET: “Is Typological Exegesis an Appropriate Method?” In Essays on Old Testament Interpretation, edited by Claus Westermann, 224 – 45. London: SCM, 1963. Ellis, E. Earle. “A Note on Pauline Hermeneutics.” NTS 2 (1955 – 56) 127 – 33. Evans, Craig A. “Typology.” In Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels. Forthcoming. [Edited by Joel B. Green, Scot McKnight, and I. Howard Marshall, 862 – 66. Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity, 1992.] Goppelt, Leonhard. Typos: The Typological Interpretation of the Old Testament in the New. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1982.

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Hays, Richard B. Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989. Horgan, Maurya P. Pesharim: Qumran Interpretations of Biblical Books. CBQMS  8. Washington: Catholic Biblical Association, 1979. Hyatt, J. Philip. “The Ministry of Scholarship.” Crozer Quarterly Review  28 (1951) 212 – 16. Hyatt, J. Philip. “The View of Man in the Qumran ‘Hodayot.’” NTS 2 (1955 – 56) 276 – 84. Jeremias, Joachim. “The Present Position in the Controversy concerning the Problem of the Historical Jesus.” ExpTim 69 (1958) 333 – 39. Jeremias, Joachim. “The Qumran Texts and the New Testament.” ExpTim 70 (1958) 68 – 69. Johnson, Sherman E. “Paul and the Manual of Discipline.” HTR 48 (1955) 157 – 66. Kuhn, Karl G. “New Light on Temptation, Sin, and Flesh in the New Testament.” In The Scrolls and the New Testament, edited by Krister Stendahl, 94 – 113. New York: Harper, 1957. Lampe, Geoffrey W. H., and Kenneth J. Woollcombe. Essays on Typology. SBT 22. London: SCM, 1957. Manson, T. W. “The Argument from Prophecy.” JTS 46 (1945) 129 – 36. Muilenburg, James. “Preface to Hermeneutics.” JBL 77 (1958) 18 – 26. Osborne, Grant R. “Type.” In ISBE 4:930 – 32. Patte, Daniel. Early Jewish Hermeneutic in Palestine. SBLDS 22. Missoula, MT: Scholars, 1975. Procksch, Otto. Theologie des Alten Testaments. Gütersloh: Bertelsmann, 1950. Reid, John K. S. The Authority of Scripture. London: Methuen, 1957. Roberts, B. J. “Some Observations on the Damascus Document and the Dead Sea Scrolls.” BJRL 34 (1951 – 52) 366 – 87. Ropes, James H. “‘Righteousness’ and ‘The Righteousness of God’ in the Old Testament and in St. Paul.” JBL 22 (1903) 211 – 27. Rowley, Harold H. “4QpNahum and the Teacher of Righteousness.” JBL  75 (1956) 188 – 93. Rowley, Harold H. “The Teacher of Righteousness and the Dead Sea Scrolls.” BJRL 40 (1957) 114 – 46. Rylaarsdam, John C. “The Problem of Faith and History in Biblical Interpretation.” JBL 77 (1958) 26 – 32. Sanders, James A. “Thy God Reigneth.” Motive (February 1956) 28 – 31. Steele, F. R. “Archaeology and the Bible.” Christianity Today 2, no. 4 (25 November 1957) 15 – 17. Stendahl, Krister. “Implications of Form-Criticism and Tradition-Criticism for Biblical Interpretation.” JBL 77 (1958) 33 – 38. Stendahl, Krister. The School of St Matthew and Its Use of the Old Testament. Lund: Gleerup, 1954. Stendahl, Krister. “The Scrolls and the New Testament: An Introduction and a Perspective.” In The Scrolls and the New Testament, edited by Krister Stendahl, 1 – 17. New York: Harper, 1957. von Rad, Gerhard. “Typologische Auslegung des Alten Testaments.” EvT 12 (1952) 17 – 33. Westermann, Claus. “Les rapports du Nouveau Testament et de l’Ancien Testament.” In Le problème biblique dans le Protestantisme, edited by Jean Boisset, 105 – 30. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1955. Wilson, Edmund. The Scrolls from the Dead Sea. New York: Oxford University Press, 1955. Wright, George Ernest. “Archaeology and Old Testament Studies.” JBL 77 (1958) 39 – 51. Wright, George Ernest. “The Faith of Israel.” In IB 1:349 – 89.

22 The Old Testament in 11Q Melchizedek It is a great pleasure to dedicate the following translation of 11QMelch to my friend and colleague, Theodor Gaster, whose index to biblical quotations and parallels in his The Dead Sea Scriptures in English Translation has been a boon to many students and scholars.1 Gaster included in his list not only explicitly and clearly cited Old Testament passages in the Qumran documents, but also, from his intimate acquaintance with the whole corpus of MT and LXX, the allusions to, and extrapolations from, Old Testament passages of the sort I call warp woven with the sectarian woof to produce the very weftage of Qumran literature. It was in just such a manner that Jewish denominations of the period rang the changes, when needed, on the authority behind their several claims to be the true Israel. That authority was invariably and singularly the Old Testament, and textual weaving was one of the ways they had of contemporizing, as well as appealing to, that authority. Since J. T. Milik has recently submitted articles to both the Journal of Jewish Studies and the Revue Biblique as editiones principes of manuscripts on Melchizedek, in both Aramaic and Hebrew, it may seem out of season to probe further at this point on the Cave 11 Melchizedek.2 And yet there are a few observations that ought to be made independently, perhaps, of the Cave 4 material. The bibliography on 11QMelch is not extensive considering the amount published in the early days of the Qumran discoveries; but quantity of comment, in this case, is no indication of importance of the manuscript.3 It is clearly one of the most important Qumran documents yet to appear on the subjects of angelology and Qumranian eschatology;4 it is important, too, for its implications for New Testament study. *  First published 1973. 1  Gaster, Dead Sea Scriptures in English, 412 – 20; cf. Sanders, Dead Sea Psalms Scroll, 148n5, for an earlier, similar tribute. 2   van der Woude, “Melchisedek als himmlische Erlösergestalt,” plates 1 and 2. Milik, “4Q Visions” and Milik, “Milkî-sedeq et Milkî-rešaʿ (I).” ˙ 3   Yadin, “Note on Melchizedek and Qumran”; Dupont-Sommer, “Hébreu et Araméen,” 348 – 50; de Jonge and van der Woude, “11Q Melchizedek and the NT”; Fitzmyer, “Further Light on Melchizedek”; Miller, “Function of Isa 61:1 – 2”; Carmignac, “Le document de Qumran”; Miner, “Suggested Reading.” 4   Despite the otherwise probing study of Carmignac, “Le document de Qumran.” Carmignac is right to raise the question of what is meant by eschatology at Qumran, but his efforts to read the 11QMelch references to Melchizedek in other than divine terms will soon be seen, when Milik’s 4Q materials are published, as misguided. In those, Melchizedek is clearly a heavenly redemption figure and Milkiresha, his antagonist.

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11QMelch is also interesting in terms of the midrashic techniques it employs in weaving the Old Testament into its own fabric. Two of my students have already published on this aspect of the manuscript. Merrill Miller found Stichwörter from Isa 61:1 – 2 throughout the document (lines 4, 9, 13, 18, 20), whereas others had seen the passage reflected only in line 4.5 11QMelch is now a prime example of the midrashic technique of weaving found also in the New Testament,6 simply because it is clear, since Miller’s work, that each Scripture passage explicitly or clearly cited and interpreted, develops a theme based on Isa 61:1 – 2a, the eschatological jubilee year acceptable to Yahweh. Daniel Miner, also in a seminar paper, has attempted to show that line 17 of 11QMelch constitutes a typically modified citation of Isa 56:7 in support of (as asmakta to) Isa 52:7 in the preceding lines 15 and 16.7 In addition, it is now clear that Isa 8:11, which the author in excellent midrashic fashion wove into line 25, must be viewed as an important Old Testament text for the special self-understanding of the sect at Qumran. The phrase, “those who turn aside from walking in the way of the people,” from Isa 8:11, appears in 1QSa 1:2 – 3; CD 8:16; 19:29; 4QFlor 1:14, and now 11QMelch 25.8 In each of the five passages it is a question of a formula not derived from the MT Isaiah tradition but from that known to us in the LXX (apeithousin tē poreia, cf. Aquila, Symmachus, Theodotian, and Peshitta), and in 1QIsaa, where the reading is ysyrny (from sûr) instead of the MT ysrny (yāsar). Clearly the sect at Qumran understood themselves to be separatists, refusing to walk in the way of “the people.” This self-understanding was central to their special vocation.9 The Old Testament passage cited or woven into the text is presented in italics with the reference in the margin. The brackets indicate lacunae; and the extraordinary capital letters signal dissociate or indeterminate readings on the leather.

5

  Miller, “Function of Isa 61:1 – 2.”   A prime example in the New Testament, of course, is the Passion account, of which Ps 22, Ps 118, and Isa 52 – 53 make up most of the warp. In a forthcoming study, I intend to show how Ps 118 is woven into the fabric of Luke 19, the Entrance Narrative. [See now also Sanders, “Hermeneutic Fabric.”] 7   Miner, “Suggested Reading.” 8   Caution is advised in consulting Allegro’s note to 4QFlor 1:14 in Qumrân Cave 4; most of the references there are wrong. CD 1:13; 2:6; 8:4; 1QS 9:20 and 10:21 all include phrases such as sôrerê derek, which derive from other biblical expressions in Isa 65:2; cf. Isa 30:1 and Jer 6:28. 9   11QPs 154 (11QPsa 18) should undoubtedly be seen as an early proto-Qumranian poem, even Hasidic, which was viewed by the sect as expressing in hymnody their understanding of their vocation; cf. Sanders, Psalms Scroll, 64 – 70, and Sanders, Dead Sea Psalms Scroll, 103 – 9. 6

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11QMelch according to van der Woude10   1.

. . .

  2.

[and wh]at he said, In [this] year of ju[bilee each of you will return to his possession]

Lev 25:13

  3. [and what he said] Let every creditor [re]lease that which he lent [to his neighbor; he shall not exact it of his neighbor or his brother for he has proclaimed] God’s release.

Deut 15:2

  4.

[Its meaning for the en]d of days concerns those taken captive whom [he] imprisoned

Isa 61:1

  5.

. . . MH . . . YH . . . and from the heritage of Melchizedeq K[  ] . . . their BW . . . [Melchize]deq who

  6.

will restore them to them, and he will proclaim liberty to them to set them? free [and to atone] for their iniquities and . . . [  ] this word.

  7.

In the year of the la[s]t jubilee he sai[d] S[  ] BLY [  ] and [tha]t is the d[ay of Atone]ment [  ] the [t]enth [ju]bilee

  8.

to atone in it for all sons of [light and] men [of the l]ot of Mel[chi]zedeq [  ] M upon [th]em HT[  ] LG[  ]WTMH for

  9.

that is the end-time, as the year of favor of Melchize[deq] L[  ] and the holy ones of God for a re[ig]n of judgment. As it is written

Isa 61:1 Lev 25:10

Isa 61:2

10. concerning him in the Songs of David, who said, Elohim has [ta]ken his stand in the as[sembly of El], in the midst of gods he gives judgment. And about him he sa[id, A]bove them

Ps 82:1 Ps  7:8 – 9

11.

take your throne in the heights; let God judge the peoples. And he s[aid, How long] shall you judge unjustly and li[ft up] the face of the wic[ke]d? [Se]lah.

Ps 82:2

12.

Its interpretation concerns Belial and the spir[it]s of his lot whi[ch   ]M in the boo[k of] . . . WQYʿL . . . [  ]

13.

And Melchizedeq shall exact the ven[ge]ance of the jud[g]ments of God [from the hand of Be]lial and from the hand of all [the spirits of] his [lot].

10

  van der Woude, “Melchisedek als himmlische Erlösergestalt,” plates 1 and 2.

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14.

And all the [heavenly] gods are for his help. [Th]is is wh[at he said, . . . A]ll the sons of mi[gh]t ? and the P[  ]

15.

this. This is the day of the [  . . . about wh]ich he said [for the end of days through Isai]ah the prophet who sai[d, How] beautiful

16.

upon the mountains are the feet of the heral[d proclaiming peace; the herald of god, proclaiming salva]tion, and saying to Zion, Your God [is king]!

17.

Its interpretation: the mountain, [of which he says,] I will bring them t[o my holy mountain, for my house will be called a house of pr]ayer for all [peoples.]

Isa 56:7

18.

And the herald i[s th]e [an]ointed of the spir[it] of whom Dan[iel] said [   the herald of]

Isa 61:1

19.

good, proclaimin[g salvation.] This is what is wr[itt]en about him, what [he said

Isa 52:7

20.

to conso [le   ] L [will in]struct them about all the periods of wra[th

Isa 61:2

21.

[ ] truth for [      ]

22.

[         ]

23.

[    ] H she turned from Belial and she [    ]

24.

[    ] through the judgment[s of] God, as it is written concerning him, [Saying to Zi]on, your elohim is king. Now Zion i[s   ]

Isa 52:7

Isa 52:7

25. [  ] the establisher[s of] the covenant are those who turn away from walking [in the p]ath of the people. And as for your elohim, he [is]

Isa 8:11

26. [  ]L[  ] D Belial, and what he said, And you shall sound the horn [loud] in the [seventh] mo[nth  ]

Lev 25:9

Addendum Since the above was submitted to the editor, the articles referred to, by J. T. Milik, have appeared. In them Milik has published several fragments from Qumran Cave 4 that considerably amplify the available Qumran literature about angels.11 11   Milik, “4Q Visions”; Milik, “Milkî-sedeq et Milkî-rešaʿ (I).” For further bibliography, ˙ see Sanders’s revised list in “Palestinian Manuscripts 1947 – 1972”; the first edition, “Palestinian Manuscripts 1947 – 1967” appeared in JBL in 1967.

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In them Milik finds not only confirmation of the view that Melchizedek at Qumran was a divine being,12 he claims to have found Melchizedek’s opposite number, Melchi‑ (or, as he prefers, Milki‑) reshaʿ. In presenting his new material, Milik undertakes an intensive review of 11QMelch and provides a fresh transcription of the text from a photograph provided him from the Palestine (Rockefeller) Archaeological Museum. Milik’s reading of the main column of the document differs about 40 percent from previous readings. Normally one grants to the original editor the benefit of the doubt in disputed readings, since it was he who had access to the manuscript itself. But in this case, Milik, a member of the Cave 4 team of scholars, claims to have been provided “an excellent photograph” from the museum for careful examination. One must assume that Milik’s photograph is better than the plates provided by the original editor, which are all the rest of us have to work with: one can only hope that some day Milik’s “excellent photograph” will be made available to all. Milik’s readings include a considerable amount of conjecture in filling in the lacunae of the manuscript. They will engender debate in the scholarly community in due course, in a number of areas. They stem largely from his thesis that 11QMelch, 4Q180, and 4Q181 are but three copies of one work, the title of which was “Pesher on the Periods.”13 The interest here, however, is for the moment a limited one: namely, the biblical passages that the author of 11QMelch wove into his text. Again, as above, biblical citations and allusions are in italics; lacunae are indicated by square brackets; and translational and clarifying phrases are put in parentheses.

11QMelch 3 II according to Milik14 1.

. . .

2.

[and wh]at he said, In [this] year of Jubilee [each of you will return to his possession. That (has the same meaning as) what is written: This is]

Lev 25:13

3. [the ma]nner of [the Release]. Let every creditor release that which he lent [to his neighbor; he shall not exact it of his neighbor or his brother for] Release [has been proclaimed]

Deut 15:2

12

  Contra Carmignac, “Le document de Qumran,” esp. 369 – 70.   Milik, “Milkî-sedeq et Milkî-rešaʿ  (I),” cf. esp. 122, and note his reading bekôl qisšê ˙ hāʿôlām in line 20 of˙ 11QMelch. I had already suggested the necessary relationship between 4Q180 and 181, and 11QMelch, in Sanders, “Dissenting Deities,” 284 – 88; cf. especially my own readings of 4Q180 and 181 in nn. 31 and 32; Milik was apparently unaware of this. 14   Milik, “Milkî-sedeq et Milkî-rešaʿ (I),” 96 – 126, plates 1 and 2. ˙ 13

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 4. for Go[d. And (the Release) will be proclaimed in] the end of days concerning those taken captive, as [He said: to proclaim Liberty to the captives. This is its interpretation: (God) is going] to declare   5.

that they will become part of the sons of heaven and (that they will participate) in the heritage of Milki-sedeq, f[or he is going to assign] ˙ edeq who them a pa[rt in the portion of Mi]lki-s ˙

  6.

is going to make them enter into this [Lot] and proclaim Liberty for them while relieving them [of the burden] of all their iniquities. And this event [will take pl]ace

Isa 61:1

Isa 61:1 Lev 25:10

  7. in the first week (of years) of the jubilee following the ni[ne] jubilees. Lev 25:9 And the d[ay of aton]ement is the e[nd of] the tenth [ju]bilee   8.

when atonement will be effected for all the sons of [God and] for men of the lot of Mil[ki‑]sedeq, [and] a decree (will be issued) ˙ concerning them [to provi]de re[com]pense for them. Indeed,

  9.

it is the Period of the Year of Favor for Milki-sedeq [and he], by his ˙ force, will ju[dg]e the holy ones of God by effecting (the sentences) of judgment. As it is written

Isa 61:2

10.

concerning him in the Songs of David who said: God stands in the divine assembly, in the midst of gods he will give judgment. And concerning him he said: Above the congregation of the peoples

Ps 82:1

11. in the heights, repent! God will judge the peoples. As for what he said: How long will you judge unjustly and honor the face of the wicked? Selah.

Ps  7:8 – 9 Ps 82:2

12.

Its meaning concerns Belial and the spirits of his lot, who [have re]mained rebels, because they have turned away from the commandments of God [to act in an impious manner].

13.

And Milki-sedeq is going to execute the vengeance of the judgments Isa 61:2 ˙ men] and he will rescue [them from the hand] of of God [among Belial and from the hand of all the sp[irits of] his [lot]

14.

and all the gods of [justice] (will come) to his aid to contemplate the de[struction] of Belial; for the heights [are the sup]port of the sons of God; and he (Milki-sedeq) will mar[vellously] execute this ˙

15.

[pla]n. It is the day of [peace about] which [God] said [in the words of Isa]iah, the prophet, who said: [How] beautiful

16.

upon the mountains are the feet of the heral[d who] proclaims peace, who h[eralds good, who proclaims salvati]on, [who s]ays to Zion, your God [has become king!]

Isa 61:3 Ps 7:8

Isa 52:7

The Old Testament in 11Q Melchizedek

17.

This is its interpretation: the mountains [are] the prophet[s], wh[ose words are the feet, which] they prophe[sied] to all [those who heed God].

393 Isa 52:7

18. And the herald is the anointed of the spiri[t], of [whom] Dan[iel] spoke: [Until (the event) of an Anointed One, of a Prince, seven weeks (will pass). And he who proclaims peace,]

Isa 61:1 Dan 9:25 Isa 52:7

19.

a good (man)who proclaim[s salvation], he it is who is in[scri]bed with the (Anointed One in the Book of Life), [about whom He said, To comfort all who mourn, to grant to all who mourn in Zion.]

Isa 61:2 – 3

20.

To comfo[rt] those [who mourn means]: to instruct them in all the periods of the w[orld . . .]

Isa 61:2

21.

in truth to m[ake . . .]

22.

(23.) [. . . she (the congregation?) will rema]in apart from Belial and she [. . .]

23. (24.) . . . by the judgment[s] of God, as it is written about him: [He who says to Zi]on, your God has become king. Zion i[s]

Isa 52:7

24.

(25.) [the congregation of all the sons of justice] of those who firmly Isa 8:11 establish the covenant, of those who turn aside from walking [in the w]ay of the people. And your God that is

25.

(26.) [Milki-sedeq who will sa]ve [them from] the hand of Belial. As for what ˙He said: You shall [sound the horn] (loud in the land) in the [seventh] mo[nth] – Col 3 line 1 – the tenth day of the month.

Lev 25:9

If Milik is right in his arrangement of the “croquis” of 13 fragments belonging to 11QMelch, and in his conjectures otherwise, there are biblical allusions and citations in lines 7, 14, 17, 18 and 19 undetected heretofore.15 In line 7 Milik sees the phrase “the day of atonement” as a reference to Lev 25:9, where it occurs in the context of the celebration of the fiftieth or jubilee year. This is but a further precision, if correct, of the observation made by others that 11QMelch is to some extent a pesher on Lev 25:8 – 13.16 15

  I expressly reserve judgment on whether Milik is right or not for the reasons cited below.   Actually, the whole piece is an excellent example of what H. Stegemann calls “thematischer Midrasch,” which one encounters also in Tannaitic sources  – a beautiful midrashic mix centering primarily on an idea (here the messianic divine figure Melchizedeq) rather than primarily on a single Scripture passage. Cf. Stegemann, “Weitere Stücke von 4QpPsalm 37,” 213 – 17. Milik suggests that Lev 25:8 – 24 may have been the scriptural base of the three original columns. Just as strong an argument, however, has been made that Isa 61:1 – 3 served that role: cf. Miller, “Function of Isa 61:1 – 2,” and Sanders, “Dissenting Deities,” 286n29. 16

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In line 14 Milik sees the phrase “the gods of justice” as an allusion to Isa 61:3 and the phrase “the heights” an allusion to the same expression in Ps 7:8 (lammārôm). Isaiah 61:1 is already alluded to in lines 4 and 6, and 61:2 in lines 9 and 13 (though Milik fails to note those in lines 6 or 13).17 Line 14 is a focus of the differences between what Milik sees on his “excellent photograph” and what van der Woude saw on his and on the leather. Leaving aside some five letters or ink markings that they simply read differently, Milik supplies in line 14 eleven letters from line 3 of fragment 4. Milik claims to have been able to locate properly, in his 11QMelch 3 II (actually the only column of the manuscript really in question), two of the four fragments of leather (out of a total of 13) that van der Woude had apparently failed to locate.18 One can only be frustrated until Milik’s rearrangement is properly controlled on the leather under glass. The whole process raises questions. One must ask why there cannot be full collaboration and cooperation among the editors of Caves 4 and 11. What Milik does here with 11QMelch he does also, in this same article, with 4Q180 and 4Q181, published by J. M. Allegro. But van der Woude is not Allegro. Everyone who does any serious work on the DSS knows that much of Allegro’s Qumrân Cave 4 (DJD 5) is in need of revision.19 And what Milik does with 4Q180 and 181 is clearly a marked advance on what had been done before.20 But in the case of 11QMelch there are unanswered questions. Why did John Strugnell supply Milik the “excellent photograph” and not van der Woude? Is it the same photograph van der Woude had? Was it simply poorly reproduced by the Dutch? How much do we owe now to Milik’s unbounding genius (which no one denies) and how much to van der Woude’s scrupulous scholarship and perspicacity (which are widely recognized)? Above all, why was there not collaboration between these two esteemed colleagues before publication of Milik’s findings? What Milik sees in line 14 is actually very gratifying from the standpoint of the limited interest of this study. Early in line 14 Milik reads ʾēlêy hassędęq, drawn from Isa 61:3. Milik has absolutely no evidence for this reading˙ ˙but it makes a great deal of sense and is quite appealing.21 Also, his suggestion to sup-

17

  Cf. Miller’s article, cited above, which Milik overlooked.   Milik, “Milkî-sedeq et Milkî-rešaʿ (I),” 96 – 97. One sees all 13 (14?) fragments on Plate 1 ˙ in van der Woude, “Melchisedek als himmlische Erlösergestalt.” Milik admits that his arrangement will have to be verified at the museum. He accounts for the 13 fragments in this manner: 11QMelch 1 (frg. 11); 11QMelch 2 (frg. 5); and 11QMelch 3 I, II, III (frgs. 1 – 4, 6 – 10, 12 – 13). The only portion really under discussion is Milik’s 11QMelch 3 II, which van der Woude had signalled simply 11QMelch. All this will indeed have to be verified and should have been verified before publication. [All of the lines I cite are now assigned to col. ii.] 19   It is necessary to use Strugnell, “Notes en marge” as a sort of vade mecum. Even so, one must actually do one’s own work very nearly from scratch. One of the felicitous aspects of Moraldi’s translation of the scrolls, I Manoscritti di Qumran, is that he includes all the significant material from Allegro, Qumrân Cave 4, but does so using Strugnell’s review. 20   Milik, “Milkî-sedeq et Milkî-rešaʿ (I),” 109 – 26; and plates 18 and 27 in Allegro, Qumrân ˙ Cave 4. 21  Again, see Miller’s thesis about the place of Isa 61 in 11QMelch in “Function of Isa  61:1 – 2.” 18

The Old Testament in 11Q Melchizedek

395

ply from line 3 of fragment 4 a further reference to Ps 7:8 (ûmārôm; cf. line 11) later in line 14 strikes one as precisely the midrashic style of our author. For lines 17 to 19 there are no rearranged fragments to appeal to, though Milik fills in all the lacunae, most of which van der Woude leaves blank; this amounts to more than half of each line. In the three lines Milik sees two letters van der Woude did not see and reads four differently; the rest is conjecture. Unfortunately, Milik overlooked the work of D. F. Miner on line 17 just as he overlooked that of M. Miller on the whole piece.22 Both reconstructions of line 17, Miner’s and Milik’s, are attractive, each following the rules of Qumran midrashic method in certain particulars. Neither scholar refers, however, to the ancient midrashic conceit where “mountain” in Scripture may refer to the messianic king,23 which would be more appropriate here than what either suggests. In any case, the Scripture references in Milik’s line 17 are still both to Isa 52:7, continuing the specific pesher begun in line 16. In line 18 Milik supplies what could be a very important link in the midrashic argument of the ancient author. Lines 13 through 20 exhibit a beautiful paradigm in the midrashic techniques known as gezera shava and asmakta. Throughout this section the ancient author plays with a hermeneutic mixture between Isa 61:1 – 3 and Isa 52:7, with, if Milik is correct, the word mārôm from Ps 7:8 woven into line 14. It was obviously the burden of line 18 to identify the herald (cf. Isa 61 and 52) with the messiah, as shown by Yadin’s suggested reading, “anointed of the spirit,” in line 18.24 Milik proposes filling in the lacunae of the end of line 18 with five words drawn and modified from Dan 9:25. Their importance is that one of the words is “messiah,” and others refer to the jubilee year. This is more than sufficient, midrashically, to forge the link between mebaśśēr and māšiah needed at this juncture of the argument, since Isa 61:1 might have suf˙ regard. The midrashic link between Isa 52:7, Isa 61:1, and Dan 7:13 ficed in this is known elsewhere.25 Finally, Milik’s supplying further phrases from Isa 61:2 – 3 in line 19 can only be welcomed as what was needed at that juncture to make sense of the citation of 61:2 at the beginning of line 20. 22   Miner, “Suggested Reading.” There is a printer’s error in line 17 of Milik’s transcription: a closing bracket should be supplied before the word lekôl. 23   E. g., the well-known midrash that begins and ends with the citation from Ps 121:1, “I lift up my eyes to the mountains. Whence will come my help?” and includes a beautiful midrashic mix of Zech 4:7, 9 and 10; Isa 52:13; Dan 2:34 – 35, 7:13; 1 Chron 3 and other passages including Isa 61:1. But the whole pericope is about the messianic king as a topic and not about any one of the Scripture passages basically. This is indicated by the fact that this one midrashic pericope is found (with varia lectionis, naturally) in eleven different ancient sources attached to different Scripture passages: Tanhuma (Buber, ed.), toldot 20; Tanhuma (Poremba, 1970), toldot 14; Aggadat Bereshit (Buber, ed.), (Krakau, 1902), chapter 44; Yalkut Mekiri (Greenup, London, 1909), at Zech 4:7; Yalkut Mekiri (Spira, Berlin, 1894), at Isa 11:4; Yalkut Shim’oni, vol. 2 (Pardes, 1944), to Zech 4:7; Ps 121:1; and Isa 52:13; Yalkut Mekiri (Buber, ed.), at Ps 121:1; and in the Pugionis Fidei in four loci, pp. 389, 413 – 14, 428, and 637. I am grateful to my student, Merrill Miller, for ferreting out and verifying for me the above references. 24   Yadin, “Note on Melchizedek and Qumran.” 25   See note 23 above, about the midrash on Ps 121:1.

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Taking Milik’s work at face value for the time being (later debates about it should be rather stimulating) he has added two further Scripture passages to the woven fabric of 11QMelch: Isa 61:3 and Dan 9:25, in lines 14, 18, and 19. About Isa 61:3 there can be little doubt from any standpoint – the need of a citation prior to line 20, the general context of the whole document, and, more importantly, the midrashic method of the author. About Dan 9:25 there will be some question: only the uncertain reading of “Daniel” in line 18 indicates it surely. Midrashically it is not needed de rigueur, for the author already had his mix between Isa 61:1 and 52:7. In Milik’s favor is the tradition of linking these passages in Isaiah with material from Daniel, and the fact that a good midrashist did not hesitate to secure his main point by a kind of triangulation process if he could locate a third passage. Milik, however, fails to note the following scriptural and midrashic points of reference: line 6 presents an exemplary case of allusion to two Scripture passages by one modified biblical phrase, qārāʾ lāhęm derôr. Midrashically it was this phrase that linked, indissolubly for our author, the two passages, Lev 25:8 – 13 and Isa 61:1 – 3. It was this phrase that, found in both passages, permitted him to continue his exploitation of other phrases in the two passages, precisely as he continues to do throughout the rest of the document. That the phrase qārāʾ derôr was close to the phrase qārāʾ šemittāh in Deut 15:2 did not hurt his case in ˙˙ the least! Milik also fails to note the allusion to Isa 61:2 in the phrase “vengeance in the judgments of God” in line 13. It would have strengthened his own argument at that point.26 Finally, Milik, like those before him who have worked on 11QMelch, fails to see the importance of Isa 8:11 in line 24 (old line 25), or, for that matter, its place in the general history of the self-understanding of the Qumran sect. As lines 23 – 24 (formerly 24 – 25) apparently say, “Zion is . . . those who turn aside from walking in the way of the people.” Here would have been an early and different sort of Zionism: Zion was a separatist movement that saw itself as the true Israel, even in Diaspora. It was an Israel within Israel: those who truly kept the covenant were those who had left Jerusalem and whose halakah was quite distinct from that of those who lived there. Bibliography Allegro, John M. Qumrân Cave 4. DJD 5. Oxford: Clarendon, 1968. Carmignac, Jean. “Le document de Qumrân sur Melchisédeq.” RevQ 7 (1970) 343 – 78. de Jonge, Marinus, and Adam S. van der Woude. “11Q Melchizedek and the New Testament.” NTS 12 (1966) 301 – 26. Dupont-Sommer, André. “Hébreu et Araméen.” ACF 66 (1966) 347 – 72. Fitzmyer, Joseph A. “Further Light on Melchizedek from Qumran Cave 11.” JBL 86 (1967) 25 – 41.

26

  Again, cf. Miller, “Function of Isa 61:1 – 2.”

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Gaster, Theodor H. The Dead Sea Scriptures in English Translation. 2nd Anchor ed. New York: Doubleday, 1964. Milik, Józef T. “4Q Visions de ʿAram et une citation d’Origène.” RB 79 (1972) 77 – 97. Milik, Józef T. “Milkî-sedeq et Milkî-rešaʿ dans les anciens écrits juifs et chrétiens (I).” JJS 23 (1972) 95 – 144.˙ Miller, Merrill P. “The Function of Isa 61:1 – 2 in 11Q Melchizedek.” JBL 88 (1969) 467 – 69. Miner, Daniel F. “A Suggested Reading for 11Q Melchizedek 17.” JSJ 2 (1971) 144 – 48. Moraldi, Luigi. I Manoscritti di Qumran. Turin: Unione Tipografico – Editrice Torinese, 1971. Sanders, James A. The Dead Sea Psalms Scroll. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1967. Sanders, James A. “Dissenting Deities and Philippians 2:1 – 11.” JBL 88 (1969) 279 – 90. Sanders, James A. “A Hermeneutic Fabric: Psalm 118 in Luke’s Entrance Narrative.” In Luke and Scripture: The Function of Sacred Tradition in Luke – Acts, edited by Craig A. Evans and James A. Sanders, 140 – 53. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993. Sanders, James A. “Palestinian Manuscripts 1947 – 1967.” JBL 86 (1967) 431 – 40. Sanders, James A. “Palestinian Manuscripts 1947 – 1972.” JJS 24 (1973) 74 – 83. [Reprinted in Qumran and the History of the Biblical Text, edited by Frank M. Cross and Shemaryahu Talmon, 401 – 13. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975.] Sanders, James A. The Psalms Scroll of Qumran Cave 11 (11QPsa). DJD 4. Oxford: Clarendon, 1965. Stegemann, Hartmut. “Weitere Stücke von 4Qp Psalm 37, von 4Q Patriarchal Blessings und Hinweis auf eine unedierte Handschrift aus Höhle 4Q mit Exzerpten aus dem Deuteronomium.” RevQ 6 (1967) 193 – 227. Strugnell, John. “Notes en marge du volume V des ‘Discoveries in the Judaean Desert of Jordan.’” RevQ 7 (1970) 163 – 276. van der Woude, Adam S. “Melchisedek als himmlische Erlösergestalt in den neugefunden eschatologischen Midraschim aus Qumran Höhle XI.” OtSt 14 (1965) 354 – 73. Yadin, Yigael. “A Note on Melchizedek and Qumran.” IEJ 15 (1965) 152 – 54.

23 The Qumran Psalms Scroll (11QPsa) Reviewed It has been a little more than a decade since the first publications based on the large scroll of Psalms from Qumran Cave 11 first appeared. In that period over eighty titles, including text editions, reviews, and specific studies on the texts have appeared. I am pleased to take the occasion this volume affords to provide in one locus the necessary bibliographical data stemming from the discussion that the scroll has occasioned, and to offer some comment on certain aspects of the discussion. I know from personal conversation that, though Qumraniana are not strictly at the center of his scholarly interest, Eugene Nida has been keenly interested in work being done on the scroll and in its significance for understanding the biblical Psalter. I take great pleasure, joining with others, in paying homage to Eugene Nida’s own scholarship as well as to his dedication to the quest today for the most reliable text available of the Bible, especially of the Psalter. Because this study is in large measure bibliographical, the order generally followed will here be reversed – the bibliography will come first instead of last. It will be arranged alphabetically by author; where needed, a brief indication of its subject matter will accompany an entry. Such a procedure seems here to be preferable to arranging the titles primarily by their subject matter as was done in the Cornell edition on the scroll.1 In point of fact, the present list grows out of the earlier one and includes all the pertinent titles from it. The list intends to include all pertinent scholarly discussions, insofar as possible; the writer would be most grateful to receive both corrigenda and addenda from readers. Since the list of editiones principes of all Palestinian manuscripts2 includes the text editions of all Psalms fragments, as well as 11QPsa, titles not strictly pertaining to the large Psalms Scroll are not included here. Bibliography Ackroyd, Peter R. “Notes and Studies.” JTS 17 (1966) 396 – 99. (On col. 16.) Ahlström, Gösta W. Review of The Psalms Scroll of Cave 11 (11QPsa), by James A. Sanders. JR 47 (1967) 72 – 73. Albright, William F. Review of The Psalms Scroll of Cave 11 (11QPsa), by James A. Sanders. BASOR 182 (1966) 54 – 55. Anderson, Albert A. Review of The Psalms Scroll of Cave 11 (11QPsa), by James A. Sanders. JSS 12 (1967) 142 – 43. *  First published 1974. 1  Sanders, Dead Sea Psalms Scroll, 151 – 53. 2   Sanders, “Palestinian Manuscripts 1947 – 1972.”

The Qumran Psalms Scroll (11QPsa) Reviewed

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Bardtke, Hans. Review of The Dead Sea Psalms Scroll, by James A. Sanders. TLZ 95 (1970) cols.  2 – 4. Barthélemy, Dominique, and Otto Rickenbacher. Konkordanz zum hebräischen Sirah. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1973. Brownlee, William H. “The 11Q Counterpart to Psalm 151,1 – 5.” RevQ 4 (1964) 379 – 87. Bruce, F. F. Review of The Dead Sea Psalms Scroll, by James A. Sanders. PEQ 102 (1970) 71 – 72. Bruce, F. F. Review of The Psalms Scroll of Cave  11 (11QPsa), by James A. Sanders. PEQ 98 (1966) 118 – 19. Carmignac, Jean. “La forme poétique du Psaume 151 de la grotte 11.” RevQ 4 (1964) 371 – 78. Carmignac, Jean. “Précisions sur la forme poétique du Psaume  151.” RevQ  5 (1965) 249 – 52. Cross, Frank M. “The History of the Biblical Text in the Light of Discoveries in the Judaean Desert.” HTR 57 (1964) 281 – 99. (On 11QPsa and Canon.) [Reprinted in Qumran and the History of the Biblical Text, edited by Frank M. Cross and Shemaryahu Talmon, 177 – 95. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975.] Dahood, Mitchell. Review of The Psalms Scroll of Cave 11 (11QPsa), by James A. Sanders. Bib 47 (1966) 142 – 44. Delcor, Mathias. “Le texte hébreu du cantique de Siracide LI,13 et ss, et les anciennes versions.” Textus 6 (1968) 27 – 47. Delcor, Mathias. “L’hymne à Sion du rouleau des Psaumes de la grotte 11 de Qumran (11QPsa).” RevQ 6 (1967) 71 – 88. Delcor, Mathias. “Zum Psalter von Qumran.” BZ 10 (1966) 15 – 29. (On Pss 151, 154, and 155.) di Lella, Alexander A. Review of The Dead Sea Psalms Scroll, by James A. Sanders. CBQ 29 (1967) 284 – 86. di Lella, Alexander A. Review of The Psalms Scroll of Cave 11 (11QPsa), by James A. Sanders. CBQ 28 (1966) 92 – 95. Driver, Godfrey R. “Psalm 118:27 – ʾasurê hag.” Textus 7 (1969) 130 – 31. ˙ Institut de France 20. Paris: Firmin-Didot, Dupont-Sommer, André. David et Orphée. 1964. (On Ps 151.) Dupont-Sommer, André. “Explication de textes hébreux et araméens récemment découverts près de la Mer Morte: Commentaire du Psaume VII et du Psaume XLV.” ACF 69 (1969) 395 – 404 (review essay on Sanders, Dead Sea Psalms Scroll). Dupont-Sommer, André. “Le Psaume cli dans 11QPsa et le problème de son origine essénienne.” Semitica 14 (1964) 25 – 62. Dupont-Sommer, André. “Le Psaume hébreu extra-canonique (11QPsa xxviii).” ACF 64 (1964) 317 – 20. Dupont-Sommer, André. “Notes quomrâniennes.” Semitica 15 (1965) 74 – 77. (On col. 22, the Apostrophe to Zion.) Dupont-Sommer, André. “The Psalms Scroll of Qumran Cave 11 (11QPsa) col.  xxi – xxii.” ACF 67 (1967) 364 – 68. (On the Sirach acrostic.) Dupont-Sommer, André. “Recherches sur quelques aspects de la Gnose essénienne à la lumière des manuscrits de la Mer Morte.” ACF 69 (1969) 383 – 95. Dupont-Sommer, André. Review of The Psalms Scroll of Cave 11 (11QPsa), by James A. Sanders. ACF 66 (1966) 358 – 67. Eissfeldt, Otto. Review of The Dead Sea Psalms Scroll, by James A. Sanders. OLZ 65, no.  3 – 4 (1970) cols.  149 – 50. Eissfeldt, Otto. Review of The Psalms Scroll of Cave 11 (11QPsa), by James A. Sanders. OLZ 63, no.  3 – 4 (1968) cols.  148 – 49.

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Flusser, David. “Qumran and Jewish ‘Apotropaic’ Prayers.” IEJ 16 (1966) 194 – 205. (On col. 19, Plea for Deliverance.) Fohrer, Georg. Review of The Dead Sea Psalms Scroll, by James A. Sanders. ZAW 79 (1967) 272 – 73. Fohrer Georg. Review of The Psalms Scroll of Cave 11 (11QPsa), by James A. Sanders. ZAW 78 (1966) 124. Goldstein, Jonathan A. Review of The Psalms Scroll of Cave 11 (11QPsa), by James A. Sanders. JNES 26 (1967) 302 – 9. Goshen-Gottstein, Moshe H. “The Psalms Scroll (11QPsa): A Problem of Canon and Text.” Textus 5 (1966) 22 – 33. Gurewicz, S. B. “Hebrew Apocryphal Psalms from Qumran.” Australian Biblical Review 15 (1967) 13 – 20. Hoenig, Sidney B. “The Qumran Liturgic Psalms.” JQR 51 (1966) 327 – 32. Hoenig, Sidney B. Review of The Dead Sea Psalms Scroll, by James A. Sanders. JQR 58 (1967) 162 – 63. Hurvitz, Avi. “The Form of the Expression ‘Lord of the Universe’ and Its Appearance in Psalm 151 from Qumran.” (In Hebrew) Tarbiz 34 (1965) 224 – 27. Hurvitz, Avi. “The Language and Date of Psalm 151 from Qumran.” (In Hebrew) Eretz Israel 8 (1967) 82 – 87. Hurvitz, Avi. “Observations on the Language of the Third Apocryphal Psalm from Qumran.” RevQ 5 (1965) 225 – 32. (On Ps 155.) Hurvitz, Avi. Review of The Dead Sea Psalms Scroll, by James A. Sanders. IEJ 21 (1971) 182 – 84. Jongeling, Bastiaan. Review of The Dead Sea Psalms Scroll, by James A. Sanders. JSS 27 (1972) 271 – 72. Laperrousaz, Ernest-Marie. “Publication en Israel d’un fragment du ‘Rouleau des Psaumes’ provenant de la grotte 11Q de Qumrân, et autres publications récentes de fragments de psaumes découverts dans les grottes 11Q et 4Q.” Revue de l’histoire des religions 171 (1967) 101 – 8. Lehmann, Manfred R. Review of The Psalms Scroll of Cave 11 (11QPsa), by James A. Sanders. Tradition 8 (1966) 76 – 78. L’Heureux, Conrad E. “The Biblical Sources of the ‘Apostrophe to Zion.’” CBQ 29 (1967) 60 – 74. Lührmann, Dieter. “Ein Weisheitspsalm aus Qumran (11QPsa xviii).” ZAW  80 (1968) 87 – 98. (On Ps 154.) MacKenzie, R. A. F. “Psalm 148bc: Conclusion or Title?” Bib 51 (1970) 221 – 24. Meyer, Rudolf. “Bemerkungen zum vorkanonischen Text des Alten Testaments.” In Wort und Welt: Festsgabe für Prof. D. Erich Hertzsch anlässlich der Vollendung seines 65. Lebensjahres, edited by Manfred Weise, 213 – 19. Berlin: Ev. Verlagsanstalt, 1968. Meyer, Rudolf. “Die Septuaginta-Fassung von Psalm 151:1 – 5 als Ergebnis einer dogmatischen Korrektur.” In Das Ferne und Nahe Wort: Festschrift, Leonhard Rost zur Vollendung seines 70. Lebensjahres, edited by Fritz Maass, 164 – 72. Berlin: Töpelmann, 1967. Osswald, Eva. Review of The Psalms Scroll of Cave 11 (11QPsa), by James A. Sanders. TLZ 91 (1966) cols.  729 – 34. Ouellette, Jean. “Variantes qumrâniennes du Livre des Psaumes.” RevQ 7 (1969) 105 – 23. Ovadiah, Asher. “The Synagogue at Gaza.” (In Hebrew) Qadmoniyot 1 (1968) 124 – 27. (On the Orphic David in Ps 151. See page 135 of Jean Leclant, “Fouilles et travaux en Égypte et au Soudan, 1964 – 1965.” Orientalia 35 [1966] 127 – 78.) Philonenko, Marc. “David-Orphée sur une mosaïque de Gaza.” Review d’histoire et de philosophie religieuses 41 (1967) 355 – 57. (On Ps 151.)

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Polzin, Robert. “Notes on the Dating of the Non-Massoretic Psalms of 11QPsa.” HTR 60 (1967) 468 – 76. Priest, John. Review of The Psalms Scroll of Cave 11 (11QPsa), by James A. Sanders. JBL 85 (1966) 515 – 17. Qimron, Elisha. “The Psalms Scroll of Qumran  – A Linguistic Study.” (In Hebrew). Leshonenu 35 (1970) 99 – 116. Rabinowitz, Isaac. “The Alleged Orphism of 11QPss 28, 3 – 12.” ZAW 76 (1964) 193 – 200. (On Ps 151.) Rabinowitz, Isaac. “The Qumran Hebrew Original of Ben Sira’s Concluding Acrostic on Wisdom.” HUCA 42 (1971) 173 – 84. Roberts, B. J. Review of The Dead Sea Psalms Scroll, by James A. Sanders. JTS 20 (1969) 573. Roberts, B. J. Review of The Psalms Scroll of Cave 11 (11QPsa), by James A. Sanders. Book List of the British Society for Old Testament Study 60 (1966). Roberts, B. J. Review of The Psalms Scroll of Cave 11 (11QPsa), by James A. Sanders. JTS 18 (1967) 183 – 85. Sanders, James A. “Cave 11 Surprises and the Question of Canon.” McCQ 21 (1968) 284 – 98. Reprinted in New Directions in Biblical Archaeology, edited by David Noel Freedman and Jonas C. Greenfield, 110 – 16. Garden City. Doubleday, 1969. Sanders, James A. The Dead Sea Psalms Scroll. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1967. (Editio secunda.) Sanders, James A. “The Dead Sea Scrolls – A Quarter Century of Study.” BA 36 (1973) 109 – 48. Sanders, James A. “Palestinian Manuscripts 1947 – 1972.” JJS 24 (1973) 74 – 83. [Reprinted in Qumran and the History of the Biblical Text, edited by Frank M. Cross and Shemaryahu Talmon, 401 – 13. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975.] Sanders, James A. “Pre-Masoretic Psalter Texts.” CBQ 27 (1965) 114 – 23. Sanders, James A. “Ps. 151 in 11QPss.” ZAW 75 (1963) 73 – 86. Sanders, James A. The Psalms Scroll of Qumran Cave 11 (11QPsa). DJD 4. Oxford: Clarendon, 1965. (Editio princeps.) Sanders, James A. “The Scroll of Psalms from Cave 11 (11QPss): A Preliminary Report.” BASOR 165 (1962) 11 – 15. Sanders, James A. “The Sirach 51 Acrostic.” In Hommages à André Dupont-Sommer, edited by Marc Philonenko and André Caquot, 429 – 38. Paris: Librairie d’Amérique et d’Orient, 1971. Sanders, James A. Torah and Canon. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1972. [2nd ed. Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2005.] Sanders, James A. “Two Non-Canonical Psalms in 11QPsa.” ZAW 76 (1964) 57 – 75. (On Pss 154 and 155.) Sanders, James A. “Variorum in the Psalms Scroll (11QPsa).” HTR 59 (1966) 83 – 94. Segert, Stanislav. Review of The Psalms Scroll of Qumran Cave 11 (11QPsa), by James A. Sanders. Archiv Orientální 35 (1967) 129 – 33. Shenkel, James D. Review of The Dead Sea Psalms Scroll, by James A. Sanders. Theological Studies 28 (1967) 836 – 37. Siegel, Jonathan P. “The Employment of Palaeo-Hebrew Characters for the Divine Names at Qumran in the Light of Tannaitic Sources.” HUCA 42 (1971) 159 – 72. Siegel, Jonathan P. “Final mem in medial position and medial mem in final position in 11QPsa: Some Observations.” RevQ 7 (1969) 125 – 30. Skehan, Patrick W. “The Acrostic Poem in Sirach 51:13 – 30.” HTR 64 (1971) 387 – 400. Skehan, Patrick W. “The Apocryphal Psalm 151.” CBQ 25 (1963) 407 – 9. Skehan, Patrick W. “The Biblical Scrolls from Qumran and the Text of the Old Testament.” BA 23 (1965) 87 – 100.

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Skehan, Patrick W. “A Broken Acrostic and Psalm 9.” CBQ 27 (1965) 1 – 5. (On Ps 155.) Skehan, Patrick W. “A Liturgical Complex in 11QPsa.” CBQ 35 (1973) 195 – 205. Strugnell, John. “More Psalms of ‘David.’” CBQ 27 (1965) 207 – 16. (On Pseudo-Philo 59.) Strugnell, John. “Notes on the Text and Transmission of the Apocryphal Psalms 151, 154 (= Syr. II) and 155 (= Syr. III).” HTR 59 (1966) 257 – 81. Talmon, Shemaryahu. “The Apocryphal Psalms in Hebrew from Qumran.” (In Hebrew). Tarbiz (1966) 214 – 34. ET: “Pisqah Beʿemsaʾ Pasuq and 11QPsa.” Textus 5 (1966) 11 – 21. Talmon, Shemaryahu. Review of The Psalms Scroll of Qumran Cave 11 (11QPsa), by James A. Sanders. Tarbiz 37 (1967) 99 – 104. Tournay, Raymond J. Review of The Dead Sea Psalms Scroll, by James A. Sanders. RB 74 (1967) 605. Tournay, Raymond J. Review of The Psalms Scroll of Cave 11 (11QPsa), by James A. Sanders. RB 73 (1966) 258 – 65. Ufenheimer, B. “Psalms 152 and 153 from Qumran: Two More Apocryphal Psalms.” (In Hebrew). Môlad 22 (1964) 191 – 92, 328 – 42. van der Ploeg, J. P. M. Review of The Psalms Scroll of Cave 11 (11QPsa), by James A. Sanders. Bibliotheca Orientalis 23 (1966) 133 – 42. Weiss, Raphael. Ha-Boqer of 28 May, 5 – 6, 1963. (On Ps 151.) Weiss, Raphael. Herut of 28 September 1962. (On Preliminary Report.) Weiss, Raphael. Herut of 1 May 1964; Massa of 15 May and 7 August 1964. (On Pss 151 and 154.) Weiss, Raphael. Massa of 29 January 1965. (On Ps 151.) Yadin, Yigael. “Another Fragment (E) of the Psalms Scroll from Qumran Cave  11 (11QPsa).” Textus 5 (1966) 1 – 10. (Editio princeps.) Yadin, Yigael. “Psalms from a Qumran Cave.” Môlad 22 (1964) 193 – 94, 463 – 65. (Critique of Ufenheimer.)

Psalm 151 The first text from the Psalms Scroll published was that of Ps 151, from column 28.3 The text itself immediately attracted interest and the treatment some considerable reaction. Within a year five studies had appeared, two agreeing in substance with the writer’s treatment, two modifying it at crucial points, and one disagreeing rather strongly.4 Soon thereafter, one of the scholars who had agreed with the original treatment revised his reading of the psalm to meet Rabinowitz’s objections.5 All these titles are grouped together, for the student’s convenience, in the Cornell edition of the scroll.6 Insofar as major studies of the psalm are concerned, the list there is complete except for an article by Professor Rudolf Meyer.7 In the Cornell edition of the scroll the writer presented the several studies of Ps 151 that had appeared at the time of writing.8 Those were still early days, 3

  Sanders, “Ps. 151 in 11QPss.”   Rabinowitz, “Alleged Orphism.” 5   Carmignac, “Précisions sur la forme poétique.” 6  Sanders, Dead Sea Psalms Scroll, 152. 7   Meyer, “Die Septuaginta-Fassung.” 8  Sanders, Dead Sea Psalms Scroll, 94 – 103. 4

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and I attempted to present each reading, side by side with mine, as objectively as possible, leaving it to the student himself or herself to judge as to which reading most fits texts and context. I did not press my own case over the others but was content to suggest that, while not abandoning my reading, I recognized other possibilities that had their own integrity. Indeed, I still see three basic ways possible to scan the text of the psalm, as indicated in the Cornell edition discussion. But, far from conceding the other readings premier lieu, I now, after a decade of discussion and review, wish to take this opportunity to respond to the major objections advanced to my reading, as well as to reaffirm the latter as the most valid rendering. B. Jongeling in his review of the Cornell edition concentrates on Ps 151.9 The effect of his criticism is that I did not pay sufficient attention to the earlier critics. What I have found, by contrast, is that reviewers have overlooked the fresh arguments I advanced for my reading in the notes in the Cornell edition.10 The most consistent critique in the reviews of the Cornell edition has been that it is not truly a popular edition, as announced, but has much technical material in it. I must concede that I used the editio secunda as a means of advancing the scholarly discussions of particular texts in the scroll. The student who comes fresh to the dispute must first realize that the text of Ps 151 itself does not settle the crucial questions: no two scholars agree on all the crucial readings involved, but rather tend to cancel each other out, point by point. Hence, the student should also be aware that there is no single grouping of scholars reading the text consistently over against the original rendering. What this situation signifies, above all else, is that the poem found in the scroll (in contrast to that received in the versions) lends itself to more than one mode of scansion. The versions, however, beginning with the Greek, present a greatly condensed recension of the poem; all scholars agree that the Hebrew psalm in the scroll is the original. It still seems to me that no other reading or treatment of Ps 151A sufficiently accounts for the reduced recension lying back of the versions. My first response to the various critics, therefore, is that it would appear that insufficient attention has been paid in the variant renderings to comparison with the Greek text. It was for this reason that I provided, a second time, a synoptic line by line juxtaposition of the Hebrew and Greek texts.11 Why does the recension omit the portions contained in the original, especially lines 5 and 6 of column 28 of the scroll? Clearly the omission was not due to mechanical or scribal accidental means. Equally clearly some other reason must be advanced. Tempting, of course, is the possibility of reading all the personal pronominal suffixes in those two lines, beyond benafshi, consistently either waw or yod, including the reading ʿalaw (defectivum)12 or ʿalay13 instead of ʿillû. But tempt 9

  Jongeling, Review of The Dead Sea Psalms Scroll.  Sanders, Dead Sea Psalms Scroll, 96 – 97, 100 – 102. 11   Ibid., 96. 12   As Strugnell, “Notes on the Text.” 13   As Rabinowitz, “Alleged Orphism.” 10

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ing as consistency may be, it has little place in vocalization of ancient Hebrew poetry. More important, in this instance, it rids the poem of the potentially offensive statements, which would explain the recensional activity. A number of critics have objected to the poem’s saying that hills and flocks cannot or do not witness to God, because the Bible so often says they do. One is tempted to suggest that some modern scholars have precisely expressed, in this regard, the thinking of the ancient revisionist. Is there any evidence elsewhere, therefore, that would suggest an offense in antiquity? Professor John Strugnell found the answer to that question in an Arabic poem published in 1909 by O. C. Krarup:14 O David, if the mountains did not glorify me then would I surely pluck them out. And if the trees did not glorify me then would I surely reduce their fruit. But there is nothing which does not render me glory. . . . Act so then, ye people, for I see everything . . .

As Strugnell has remarked, “Our Arab had access to Psalm 151A and corrected ‘David’s’ unorthodox thoughts.” Strugnell’s own rendering concurs essentially with ours in this respect.15 The Arabic poem agrees with Ps 151A that God sees everything, if one follows the rendering here reaffirmed. Some scholars, including Weiss16 and Rabinowitz17 and others who have followed them, read the words ʾadôn and ʾělôah of line 7 of the scroll as construct to the word ha-kôl that follows each, rendering the phrases “Lord of the Universe” and “God of the Universe.” This is, of course, quite possible, though to do so quite alters the scansion of the lines and renders the syntax awkward. Here, however, we have not only the Arabic poem to support our original reading but also the Sinaiticus manuscript of the Septuagint and a portion of the Old Latin tradition of Ps 151, in both of which ha-kôl is translated as accusative of the verb “to hear” in LXX Ps 151:3. Actually, most scholars agree with us here. The introduction of the idea of the Lord of the Universe into a poetic midrash on 1 Sam 16, which clearly stressed the biblical idea of God’s seeing everything, even what was in David’s heart, or, in the poem, in his nefesh, is both unnecessary and inappropriate. It is, in fact, because it is so clear that this was the very purpose of the original poem that the recensionist preserved it. Far from being offensive like lines 5 and 6, this aspect of the whole poem, and God’s consequent action of choosing David over his brothers, made it indeed worth keeping. The question whether the recension took place in Hebrew before translation into Greek or took place in the process of translation is difficult to answer. At this point one can only conjecture that the reason we have had it all along in recension and not in the original is that it was the latter that took place, but there is no clear evidence either way. Orthodox thinkers in antiquity apparently chose, because of the offensive nature of the poem, either to expurgate it or to revise it.18 14

 Sanders, Dead Sea Psalms Scroll, 100n20.   Strugnell, “Notes on the Text.” 16  Weiss, Herut of 1 May 1964; Massa of 15 May and 7 August 1964. 17   Rabinowitz, “Alleged Orphism.” 18   Meyer, “Die Septuaginta-Fassung,” agrees on this point. 15

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The most disputed reading in the original rendering is that of ʿillû in line 6 of the scroll. Other renderings of ʿillû have been ʿālay, ʿālāw and ʿălê. They are all quite possible, but seem to me (a) to render the scansion difficult and (b) for reasons cited above, to abort the central reason for the recensional activity resulting in the versions. This dispute lies at the crux, as I see it, of the offense of the poem. Normal scansion would indicate that the word be read as a verb serving a double function with the phrase that follows. The one verb available in the Hebrew of the period, and in the Qumran literature (CD v. 5), is the piel form of the verb ʿālāh. It occurs only rarely in the literature, as we stressed from the beginning, but it fits the context perfectly: “The trees have cherished (or, appreciated, or, held in esteem) my words and the flock my works.” This reading provides the contrast indicated to the first offense, that nature, or the mountains and hills, cannot or do not witness to or proclaim God; and it provides the second and greater offense to later or non-Qumran orthodox sensibilities. But to the original author I am confident that these two observations, offensive as they might be to other eyes and ears, were quite in line with another point of view, which in its own eyes was as “conservative” as any other.19 Mountains and hills, like nature in general, cannot witness, as man can, to the mighty acts of God. Who actually remembers and recites the epic history of God’s dealings with Israel – such as the choice of leaders and kings (2 Sam 7)? Man can, Israel ought to, and David did so – out on the mountains and hills among the trees and his flocks, by creating a lyre and composing psalms about those wonderful deeds in his mind (line 5), and singing them in such a manner that the plants and the animals listened in rapt attention. He did what the mountains and hills could not do. He created, already in his mind (or heart or soul), the Psalter, which later came to be written down in so many copies including 11QPsa. But at that early moment, as much as later, Israel, and especially the faithful at Qumran, came to appreciate every psalm he wrote (4,050 according to the preceding column); only the trees and the grazing flocks had the great privilege of hearing him compose his earliest psalms and sing out in his shepherd’s loneliness. This, it seemed to me, was the genius of the poem that later disturbed those who no longer shared the vision of the lonely shepherd whose music in praise of God’s mighty acts was so wondrous as to arrest the attention of mute nature about him, and whose intention in composing it was so pure as to arrest the attention of God who looks upon the heart. Surely what God saw in David’s soul was not a complaint that nature did not bear witness to his, David’s, words and deeds, and a plea that someone would recount his deeds.20 It is clearly more in line with normal usage for the phrase “Said I within my soul” to introduce something that follows it rather than to complete a preceding thought. But that usage also indicates the sense “I had wrongly thought,” and then follow the “wrong” thoughts. But most of the scholars who have insisted that the phrase must introduce what follows have also expunged in the text the offense of what follows. 19

 Sanders, Dead Sea Psalms Scroll, 94 – 100, 157 – 59.   Rabinowitz, “Alleged Orphism”; Carmignac, “Précisions sur la forme poétique.”

20

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And if what he thought was wrong, was the thought in his mind the basis for the divine selection (1 Sam 16)? All of this left me with the somewhat uncomfortable but far preferable alternative of attaching the phrase “Said I within my soul” to the clear expression of intent of composing psalms in the preceding phrase. The one improvement I might make at this juncture would be to render that preceding phrase, “And (so) may I render glory to the Lord,”21 instead of “And (so) have I rendered glory to the Lord.”22 Such a poetic image of David as the shepherd-musician par excellence, based precisely upon 1 Sam 16 – 17, cannot but call to mind Hellenistic traditions of the period about Orpheus so well attested to David in later art forms.23 Is it not a form of apologia thus to coopt (and deny) a facet of the mythical figure of Orpheus in order to laud the historical figure of David?

The Sirach 51 Acrostic It will not be possible here to deal with all the features of the scroll that have aroused interest. There is a growing consensus following Hurvitz24 and Polzin25 that though the non-masoretic psalms in the scroll are somewhat archaizing in form, that is, scan more like biblical psalms than like the Thanksgiving Hymns from Qumran, the language would indicate a comparatively late dating for most if not all of them, probably postexilic Persian to early Hellenistic times. W. F. Albright at one point suggested a seventh to sixth century BCE dating for Ps 151,26 but he never developed the idea. The discussions about dating will continue, but their direction seems indicated. In the space remaining here, remarks will be limited to two other issues arising out of the scroll and its contents. In 1971 three quite independent studies of the acrostic poem in columns 21 and 22 were published (Skehan, Rabinowitz, and Sanders). None of the three was aware that the others were working on the same material and hence was not able to take advantage of the others’ findings. Earlier studies of this particular text were those of Dupont-Sommer,27 which none of the three mentioned above had apparently seen, and of M. Delcor,28 which Skehan does not mention. In addition to these, the reviews of Sanders’s Psalms Scroll by M. Dahood29 and by A. di Lella30 should be mentioned, since both contain important statements con21

  With Sanders, “Ps. 151 in 11QPss.”  Sanders, Dead Sea Psalms Scroll.   Sanders, “Ps. 151 in 11QPss”; Ovadiah, “Synagogue at Gaza”; Philonenko, “David-Orphée sur une mosaïque.” 24   Hurvitz, “Observations on the Language.” 25   Polzin, “Notes on the Dating.” 26   Albright, Review of The Psalms Scroll. 27   Dupont-Sommer, “Psalms Scroll col. xxi – xxii.” 28   Delcor, “Le texte hébreu.” 29   Dahood, Review of The Psalms Scroll. 30   di Lella, Review of The Psalms Scroll. 22 23

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cerning this acrostic poem. Following the editio princeps31 the regnant position (as Rabinowitz puts it) anent the poem, with only di Lella’s voice dissenting, has been that it, like a number of biblical passages, was poetically composed in mots à double entente bearing both erotic and pious meanings, and that it was most probably not written by Ben Sira, author of the first fifty chapters of Ecclesiasticus, or his grandson. While there are considerable differences in readings and scansion between Skehan32 and Rabinowitz,33 and while Rabinowitz does not attempt, like Skehan and me, 34 to reconstruct the second half of the poem, they both agree, following di Lella, that neither of these major conclusions about the poem is correct. Neither perceives any erotic ambiguity in it, and both defend Ben Sira as its author. Skehan does not, like Rabinowitz, stress these points, but it is clear from his work that he wants to be counted on the side of his student, di Lella. Also unlike Rabinowitz’s paper, Skehan’s is quite free of rhetoric and constitutes a serious challenge to the so-called regnant position. I feel it is in order to try to respond to Professor Rabinowitz’s comments, which are of a general nature. First of all, I am genuinely sorry that my work has now twice provoked a colleague to the sort of response Rabinowitz has made.35 I have always appreciated his work and read it with care. I have not been able to agree with the position concerning the scrolls that Rabinowitz took rather early – that the Qumran sect were a pre-Maccabean group who viewed any and all hellenizing influence as highly heterodox. While he has modified this position, one can only assume that the rhetoric, to the measure that it was present in his response36 to my work on Ps 151,37 was in reaction to the thesis advanced that Ps 151 reflected tenuously an Orphic image of the shepherd David. A decade of discussion of this point has not erased that possibility, as I think the above discussion of the psalm has shown. Rabinowitz’s phrases of a similar nature in his study of the Sirach acrostic poem are even more puzzling. In his paper, he rightly brackets the work of Delcor38 with mine, which “though differing here and there are in thorough agreement in main conception.” He might also have bracketed Dupont-Sommer39 and Dahood40 with us. In fact, most of the conversations I have had with colleagues about this “precious fragment of the Hebrew original”41 have made me feel I had been entirely too reluctant to see the full amount of erotic overtone in this stirringly beautiful poem. I am grateful, incidentally, to Rabinowitz42 for pointing 31

 Sanders, Psalms Scroll.   Skehan, “Acrostic Poem.” 33   Rabinowitz, “Qumran Hebrew Original.” 34   Sanders, “Sirach 51 Acrostic.” 35   Rabinowitz, “Alleged Orphism”; Rabinowitz, “Qumran Hebrew Original.” 36   Rabinowitz, “Alleged Orphism.” 37   Sanders, “Ps. 151 in 11QPss.” 38   Delcor, “Le texte hébreu.” 39   Dupont-Sommer, “Psalms Scroll col. xxi – xxii.” 40   Dahood, Review of The Psalms Scroll. 41   di Lella, Review of The Psalms Scroll, followed by Rabinowitz. 42   Rabinowitz, “Qumran Hebrew Original,” 184. 32

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out that, well before the discovery of the scroll, W. Baumgartner, on the basis of the Cairo manuscripts and the versions, was the first to advocate the position later advanced on the basis of the original. It is difficult to know how to handle phrases in Rabinowitz’s study, such as “bowdlerization of the ‘obscene’ original,” “fundamentally (and grossly) mistaken,” and “to thus convict Ben Sira of ungentlemanliness.” My response to such rhetoric, when seen in Rabinowitz in 1964,43 was to bide the time and let scholarly discussion take its course. In the present instance, I deem it better, because others are more directly involved, and because the original text has now been available for some nine years, to respond more directly. It should be made quite clear that no one has at any point suggested that this poem is in any sense obscene. Delcor, Dupont-Sommer, and I have all insisted that it, like some biblical poetry and like other poetry of the highest quality, far from being obscene, takes the language of natural love and presses it into the service of piety. We have stressed that, like much poetry of the greatest artistic ability, it bears most admirably the burden of literary ambiguity. The student needs but to refer to the studies cited, reading not only the interpretive comments but also the apparatus to words and phrases in the text. Rabinowitz reports that Delcor and I take tub in the zayin verse in “the ¯ great care, as in the case restricted meaning ‘pleasure.’” On the contrary, with of the numerous other occasions of ambiguity, it was pointed out that the word meant both “pleasure” and “good,” the meaning Rabinowitz prefers. With caution I have underscored in all three of my publications of the poem44 that the task of translation of such literary ambiguities is fraught with difficulty, even painful in the sense that the receptor modern language rarely carries in one word the same dual burden. As Dahood avers in his critique,45 I have erred (sic) on the side of piety rather than eros in much of my own effort. In fact, it is not certain, since Dahood and others who have discussed the poem with me personally have not published direct studies of the text, whether there might not be some scholars who would, in contrast to Rabinowitz and Skehan, want to deny the side of the ambiguity that the latter two wish to affirm alone! For my part, I would continue to insist on the high quality of literary ambiguity in the poem with the attendant translational difficulties. The man whom we honor in this volume [Eugene Nida, in On Language, Culture, and Religion] knows better the translational difficulties of such material than those of us whose linguistics are limited to certain disciplines. At no point has there been the least suggestion that the author – Ben Sira or another – was ungentlemanly in his thoughts in composing the poem. Professor Rabinowitz must, I suppose, decide for himself if Ben Sira himself was ungentlemanly when he composed the metaphoric poetry in Sir 24, or the authors of Proverbs in chs. 8 and 9, or the author of Wisdom of Solomon 8,46 and what about the author of Song of Songs? 43

  Rabinowitz, “Alleged Orphism.”  Sanders, Psalms Scroll; Sanders, Dead Sea Psalms Scroll; Sanders, “Sirach 51 Acrostic.” 45   Dahood, Review of The Psalms Scroll. 46  Sanders, Dead Sea Psalms Scroll, 114 – 17. 44

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Finally, one somewhat begs the question of authorship if he turns to passages in Sirach itself, as Rabinowitz does in his notes, to contest the meaning of particular passages and whether or not they bear the literary ambiguities. Monsignor Skehan’s appendix to his article, a reconstruction of Sirach 6:18 – 37, bears a number of similarities to the acrostic poem in question; and, though he does not state it, I am sure he intends to offer the passage as indication of authorship of the acrostic. But aside from the short passage in Sirach 24:19 – 22, which pursues the same metaphor of Wisdom as a harlot as does Prov 9, there is nothing in all of Sirach that displays the delicate balance of literary ambiguity that our acrostic poem maintains so admirably. On the contrary, as I have argued from the beginning, such passages in Sirach show clearly why the poem would become attached to the work of Ben Sira. This problem is now illuminated by the appearance of Barthélemy and Rickenbacher’s work.47 Finally, neither Rabinowitz nor Skehan addresses the obvious question of how a poem known to have been by Ben Sira was included at Qumran in a Davidic Psalter.48 Let us turn now to the text itself, with the 1971 studies of it by Skehan and Rabinowitz in hand, to discern the improvements that should be made to my efforts of 1965, 1967, and 1971.49 All scholars who have worked on the text agree that (a) the scroll presents the original Hebrew of the poem where it is extant, and (b) the medieval Cairo Hebrew is, following Israel Lévi,50 in principle, a retroversion from the Syriac version. The minor points of difference that do not touch on the basic meaning of the text will be by-passed in favor of putting in relief the essential differences among us and the judgments that they require. After careful study of the work of both colleagues, I must reaffirm all of my earlier readings of the extant portion of the poem in the scroll, but am pleased to acknowledge indebtedness to Professor Skehan for points of improvement in the scansion. Skehan and I disagree on three readings of the scroll text; Rabinowitz and I disagree in our readings at four points. In only one of these do my colleagues agree with each other. In the waw verse of the acrostic, Skehan and Rabinowitz both read hôdô against my hôdî. 11QPsa, as Rabinowitz rightly notes, does not distinguish clearly between waw (their reading) and yod (mine). Mechanically speaking it can be rended either way. Skehan (also Delcor) reads it as the noun “praise” with 3pm suffix, citing pertinent biblical parallels, but translates it simply “grateful praise,” presumably meaning praise due to God. Rabinowitz reads it as a verbal noun, citing rare parallels in Isaiah and CD, and translates it simply as “praise.” Both readings disrupt the Verlauf of first person suffixes throughout the poem and seem to me to avoid the obvious. Hôdî here means both “the praise I have to offer” and the poet’s ardour in quest of wisdom. In the zayin verse, the second verb in the scroll all agree rends WʾSHQH. I take this, with the immediately preceding zammôtî, in hendiadys to˙ mean 47

  Barthélemy and Rickenbacher, Konkordanz. See also Meyer, “Bemerkungen,” 217.   See especially Skehan, “Liturgical Complex,” 195. 49  Sanders, Psalms Scroll; Sanders, Dead Sea Psalms Scroll; Sanders, “Sirach 51 Acrostic.” 50   Sanders, “Sirach 51 Acrostic,” 437n1. 48

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“I lusted to play.” Skehan says that the verb śāhaq here is “incongruous,” and emends the text, following the Cairo B reading˙(which he admits is secondary) to vaʾehšěqah and adds to the text bah, translating this innovation, “I became ˙ devoted to her.” Rabinowitz, who fails to recognize the hendiadys resolutely construction, keeps the textual consonants but reads vaʾešhāqeha, translating it (by adding a word not in the text) “and constantly trod her˙ (path).” I see no reason for either of these efforts to avoid what the text says. I, on the other hand, am willing to alter my 1971 translation and revert to the earlier, “I purposed to make sport,” referring the student to the critical notes of my earlier publications. In the tet verse, Skehan agrees with me that tāratî derives from tārad, whereas ˙ ˙ takes the verb to have been tārah˙ti. Neither, of course, ˙ agrees with Rabinowitz ˙ ˙ Delcor and me that the sense of the phrase is “I bestirred my desire for her.” In the same tet verse, Rabinowitz agrees completely with my reading of the ˙ ˙ second colon whereas Skehan deems ûberûmèha51 to be “meaningless” and emends the text to read ûberômemāh, a complementary infinitive construction ¯ that he translates, “never weary of extolling her.” I completely agree with Rabinowitz that the phrase, on the contrary, means, “and on her heights I am not at ease.” Of course, I maintain that the phrase bears a double meaning including Rabinowitz’s, while he would understand only the sense of not “free from the never-ending labor imposed upon all who would reach wisdom’s heights.” In the yod verse Skehan and I agree on the reading of the letters that are at the decomposed bottom of column 21 of the scroll, and I deem his judgment to be correct, against the possibility of the reading di Lella advanced and Rabinowitz sustains. The third word of that line I reconstructed from the Syriac as šaʿărèhā. Skehan is surely right that it should read the singular, šaʿărāh, rather than the plural. My translation should, therefore, be altered to read, “My hand opened her gate,” with all my various explanatory notes standing as to its double meaning and significance. The second colon of the yod verse begins with the word ûmaʿărumèhā. Skehan and Rabinowitz read the preposition bet between the conjunction and the noun. Skehan seems to claim he can see the top of it on the leather (though his comments are not clear here); Rabinowitz does not claim so but puts the preposition with the conjunction before the bracket, in lacuna. I do not think the bet is there at all, either on the leather or by assumption. Whereas they see only the sense of “secrets” in the noun, I see also the sense of “secret parts.” Only the first colon of the kaf verse is discernible on the leather. Skehan and I read it exactly the same, except that I think the accusative of the phrase should read “my hand” and he “my hands.” Rabinowitz’s readings here are far afield. Rabinowitz does not attempt to reconstruct the second half of the poem. Therefore the remainder of these comments will deal with the differences between Skehan and myself in our attempted rehabilitations of the remaining verses, and in the improvements I am grateful to accept from his work. 51

  Note printer’s error in Sanders, “Sirach 51 Acrostic,” 432.

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In the second colon of the kaf verse Skehan by-passes the Cairo B reading ûbetāhărāh for his own ûbeniqqayôn. There is a certain sensitivity in Skehan’s ˙ further decision that the purity involved is “her wooer’s” rather than “Wisdom’s.” From the context it might indeed seem that Wisdom could not be entirely pure if she lets herself be pursued in the manner the poem has indicated. And it should again be stressed that while Skehan nowhere actually states his recognition of the poem as in any sense a Liebesgeschichte, in a few covert hints, as here, he clearly refrains from denying this aspect of it. Since Wisdom’s purity, in all such texts as this, is ever new, ever fresh, and ever available to all wooers, I prefer to keep the Cairo reading and point the hē at the end as feminine suffix.52 I am truly puzzled, however, by Skehan’s rejection of the first colon of the mem verse in Cairo B in favor of his own creation. He is, of course, right, on the other hand, to reject the suggestion of D. W. Thomas,53 who completely ignored the scroll in his consideration of the phrase. My arguments remain the same. For this verse as a whole, however, I am grateful to follow Skehan’s lead in his manner of scansion of the alef, gimmel, nun, and resh verses and see this one also (which he fails to do) as composed of three colons, instead of two: My loins would burn like a firepot from gazing upon her, hence I took her as a pleasant possession.

Similarly, in the alef verse beterem tāʿîtî should be taken as the second of three ˙ colons; in the gimmel verse bibšôl ʿănābîm as the second of three colons; in the nun verse śākār śiftôtāy as the second of three colons; in the resh verse kî qātān hāyîtî as the second of three colons; and in the shin verse limmûdî binʿûray. In the samek verse I think Skehan’s petāyîm preferable to my sekālîm, but would suggest the typical 11QPsa orthography petāʾîm. I was not able¯ before to decide between these.54 I am pleased now to follow Skehan in this reading. With Segal, however, I prefer to retain bet midrāšî rather than Skehan’s bet mûsār. In the qof verse Skehan’s yimsāʾ ehā is clearly preferable to the periphrastic môsāʾ ʿôtāh. But while I accept ˙Skehan’s scansion of the resh verse, as already ˙ indicated, I would, for the reasons advanced,55 retain my reconstruction of the verse. The shin verse, as indicated above, should now be seen as a tricolon. Whether the last word of the verse should read bāh with Skehan or bî as in my reconstruction is difficult to decide. Either will serve. I see no basis on which to change the taw verse and hence it should remain as is. Skehan’s reading completely overlooks the reference of this verse back to the poem as a whole. By contrast, I am inclined to accept Skehan’s coda verse, with 52   Note the printer’s error in ʾěʿezvennāh in Sanders, “Sirach 51 Acrostic,” 432 in the lamed verse. 53   Ibid., 429 – 31. 54   As indicated in Sanders. “Sirach 51 Acrostic,” 435. 55   Ibid., 436.

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the exception of one word, in place of my own. His own work elsewhere, which he does not mention in this article, has shown that such coda verses often begin with pe. Thus his paʿălû paʿălekem would suit well. And in the second colon my vehûʾ nôtēn lākem (Cairo) must give way to Skehan’s far simpler and better, veyittēn. But I consider besedeq at the end of the first colon more preferable than ˙ beʿittô. The verse would now read, “Work your work in righteousness and he will grant your reward in due season.” I permit myself to quote, in concluding this review of work on this remarkable poem, my earlier estimates of the acrostic as a whole: The strong indication, therefore, is that the last part of the song was an exhortation by the supposed Wisdom teacher to his students that they follow his example and in their puberty dedicate themselves also to the pursuit and acquisition of Wisdom, so that as they mature they, like their teacher, may direct their human passions toward righteousness!56 The first part of the poem is the Wisdom teacher’s confession of his youthful experience with Wisdom as his nurse, teacher and mistress, a commendable manner of sublimation in celibacy and undoubtedly highly meaningful in every spiritual sense for the celibate at Qumran.57

The Question of Canon The concluding part of this review of work done on the Psalms Scroll will concern its place in the canonical process as it relates to the Psalter. I have dealt with this question on three other occasions,58 and shall not here repeat what is available elsewhere except when clarification concerning the general thesis seems needed. The principal reason I wish to deal here with the problems raised by the Psalms Scroll in regard to canon, aside from the immense importance of the subject, is that Professor Skehan has recently published a significant study that deals directly with the question.59 Skehan continues in this article the work begun in my 1966 article,60 and especially in the article of 1968,61 and in large measure builds upon it. He has succeeded where we did not, however, in making some significant redaction-critical observations about the scroll, and in passing, about the masoretic Psalter as well. Skehan, who is charged with the publication of most of the Cave 4 Psalms manuscripts, has been intensely interested in the Cave 11 Psalter materials and has been a gracious consultant for my work since the beginning.62 56

 Sanders, Dead Sea Psalms Scroll, 117.  Sanders, Psalms Scroll, 84.  Sanders Dead Sea Psalms Scroll, 157 – 59; Sanders, “Cave  11 Surprises”; and Sanders, “Dead Sea Scrolls – A Quarter Century,” 134 ff. 59   Skehan, “Liturgical Complex.” 60   Sanders, “Variorum in the Psalms Scroll.” 61   Sanders, “Cave 11 Surprises.” 62   For a listing of what he has published to date of Cave 4 Psalter texts, as well as of all Qumran Psalter texts, see Sanders, “Dead Sea Scrolls – A Quarter Century”; for a catalog and index to all pre-masoretic Psalter texts, published and unpublished, see Sanders, Dead Sea Psalms Scrolls, 143 – 49. 57

58

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Skehan early on,63 followed by me,64 suggested that explanations needed to be sought for the variant order and content, as well as addenda (over against the masoretic Psalter), in the Qumran Psalter. With the subsequent publications65 of 4QPsd, 4QPst, 11QPsb, and 11QPsApa it was clear that 11QPsa was not a private or maverick collection but indicated a valid, variant Psalter. But it still was not clear how one was to relate the Qumran Psalter to the later masoretic Psalter. In 1966, M. H. Goshen-Gottstein and S. Talmon suggested that it represented the earliest example of a Jewish Prayerbook. Talmon, at least, has abandoned this position, and in a public conference in Jerusalem on May 30, 1973 announced that he now agrees with the position I had advanced that the Qumran Psalter was viewed at Qumran as “canonical” and that it was, as we know it, an open-ended Psalter. Skehan prefers to call 11QPsa a “Library Edition” of the Psalter, which presupposes the Psalter as we know it in the Masoretic Text. Such a thesis would be quite viable, it seems to me, if 11QPsa were the only copy of the Qumran Psalter that we possess. But it is not. It is not at all clear to me, from the catalog and index compiled of all published and unpublished Psalter manuscripts from Qumran66 and from transcriptions of unpublished Psalter texts in Skehan’s care (e. g., 4QPsk and 4QPsn), how many different arrangements of the Psalter there were in the Qumran library; but it is quite clear that 11QPsa was not a unique, single issue there. Skehan’s thesis is that this scroll presupposes the order and content of the MT‑150 collection (my term, not his). I sincerely wish that this were as clear to me as it is to him. Skehan’s 1973 article67 probes deeply into the redactional and liturgical aspect of the scroll and offers some valuable suggestions as to the arrangement of masoretic psalms in it, “addenda” within them, and their relation to the non-masoretic psalms included in the scroll. His overall conclusion68 is that “what we have basically in 11QPsa is a collection of Pss 101 – 150 with liturgical regroupings and ‘library edition’ expansions.” There is not the space here to enter into details. Suffice it to say that some of his work is extremely helpful: it is the sort that should be applied to that other liturgical collection of psalms, the MT‑150 collection! Other observations are doubtful, however, and the whole study will have to be scrutinized carefully at another opportunity. Some of his observations I had already made in the earlier efforts cited. But there should be no doubt in the student’s mind that Skehan has considerably advanced the cause of search for the liturgical sense of the scroll. But I must still demur as to Skehan’s assertion that “the standard collection of 150 Psalms was fixed before the 11Q form was derived from it.” It could well have been that what we know as the MT‑150 collection was already known, and indeed that copies of it, too, existed in the Qumran library. We shall have to wait until 63

  Skehan, “Biblical Scrolls,” 100.  Sanders, Dead Sea Psalms Scroll, 10 ff., 157 ff.; Sanders, “Cave 11 Surprises,” 122 – 27. 65   See Sanders, Dead Sea Psalms Scroll, 144 – 45. 66   Ibid., 143 – 49. 67   Skehan, “Liturgical Complex.” 68   Ibid., 201n24. 64

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we have photographs of all the Cave 4 Psalter fragments, and of all the Cave 4 hymnic fragments, to determine that question. Certainly what is clear is that even if the MT‑150 collection was already current, it was not viewed at Qumran as “standard” and so “canonical” that it could not be added to or subtracted from! Professor Y. Yadin, who is editing the Temple Scroll from Cave 11, is convinced that it was viewed as canonical at Qumran. In the same sense, I am convinced, the Qumran Psalter was viewed as canonical at Qumran. The argument that since the tetragrammaton always appears in the scroll in the archaizing palaeo-Hebrew script it was not held to be biblical or canonical at Qumran has fallen of its own weight.69 The manner in which the scroll was copied by the scribe argues on the contrary that there is no facile way in which it can be set aside; on the contrary, it challenges our assumptions about the canonical process by which the Psalter came to be limited to the 150 psalms ordered in the received manner. Rudolf Meyer70 has argued this point in an extremely forceful way that cannot be easily dismissed. His name must now be added to those already mentioned.71 It is our current view of “canon” that needs to be modified in treating these materials. It was largely out of dissatisfaction with the currently available approach to the whole concept of canon, and especially as it pertains to the Psalter, that I called recently for serious, fresh efforts in canonical criticism.72 That effort will be supplemented shortly by two forthcoming essays. And I am pleased to say that the quarterly Interpretation plans to respond to the call by assigning a number of articles to the topic in forthcoming volumes. I am convinced that the Psalter at Qumran was open-ended. It was not yet closed in its latter third. It was a working Psalter, as I think Skehan’s work clearly indicates. What is not clear from Skehan’s findings is his confidence that the MT‑150 lay back of the Qumran Psalter as a “standard” or closed Psalter. On the contrary, one can take each of his valuable findings and state the opposite, that 11QPsa lies back of the masoretic Psalter, which developed out of the fuller edition, paring down unnecessary liturgical matter. One can almost detect our current bias for the post-70 CE situation in that I am sure all of us ask the question, “Why did the Qumran sect add x, y, and z?” We have to exercise special scientific caution to admit also of the question, “Why did the MT omit x, y, and z?” And yet we must attempt to do so. S. Talmon, in the May 30, 1973 public address mentioned above, suggested some comparisons with the Chronicler. One of the many ancient sources of the Chronicler was the work of the Deuteronomistic history we have in the books of Kings. In fact, says Talmon, Chronicles could be described as a midrash on his sources. In like manner, he suggests, the Qumran Psalter might be viewed as a midrash on its source. See, for instance, the psalm in 1 Chron 16:8 – 36, which is made up of portions of Pss 105, 96 and 106; and note also the liturgical bits of 69

  Sanders, “Cave 11 Surprises,” 288n10; Siegel, “Employment of Palaeo-Hebrew Characters.”   Meyer, “Bemerkungen.” 71   Sanders, “Cave 11 Surprises,” 288n10. 72  Sanders, Torah and Canon. 70

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poetry in 1 Chron 29:10 – 13 and 2 Chron 6:41 – 42. I think especially interesting the notations in 2 Chron 5:13 and 20:21 where the familiar refrain from Ps 118:1 and 29 (11QPsa xvi 1 – 2, 5 – 6) is cited as sung at the dedication of the Temple: “Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good, for his mercy endures forever.” Also pertinent is the note in Ezra 3:10 – 11 that psalms were recited and sung “in the manner of David.” Is it not possible that some Psalters included these notations of the fifth century, which were later excised in the MT‑150 Psalter? It seems to me that one must not assume that such floating bits and portions of liturgical literature are from the MT Psalter psalms. The most one should say is that they are also found there, but in different arrangements and combinations. Our first reaction quite understandably is that the psalm in columns 26 and 27 of the Qumran scroll, identical (so far as we know) with 2 Sam 23:1 – 7, was taken from Samuel and added to the Qumran Psalter. Is it not just possible that, in the canonical process moving toward the MT‑150 collection, it had been present in many Psalter collections but was finally omitted, whereas Ps 18, almost identical with 2 Sam 22, was, for other reasons, kept? Similarly, one is gravely tempted to ask why the Qumran Psalter added the constant refrain it has to each verse of Ps 145. Should not one also ask, scientifically speaking, whether it was not the process leading to the MT‑150 Psalter that dropped the refrain in a tendency toward a leaner collection? And should one not ask why the MT retains the refrain of Ps 136 (11QPsa xv)? Even a leaner edition of the Psalter, such as the MT, cannot limit a refrain so integral to the psalm. I would refer the student once more to our earlier position.73 Until proved otherwise, I would hold open the questions there posed, especially that of the “canonical priority” of the MT Psalter. In the meantime, I should say that I think the field is moving toward affirming that the Qumran Psalter, represented by 11QPsa but also by other more fragmentary Psalter manuscripts from Caves 4 and 11, was revered at Qumran as being as authoritative as any other Psalter present there: it was “canonical” at Qumran though by no means closed; on the contrary, it was, while authoritative, still open-ended. And following Skehan’s recent study, I would stress a point I have made earlier: certain smaller groupings of psalms, such as the Songs of Ascents and the Passover Hallel, were possibly in some collections viewed as units, but in others, such as the Qumran Psalter, clearly had not yet attained the status of fixed groupings. Is not this in reality a more sober, rather in fact more “conservative,” view than that the faithful at Qumran rearranged their sectarian Psalter at will out of various materials including an already fixed Psalter? I am convinced that we much need thorough, careful work in canonical criticism, to disembarrass ourselves of post-70 CE assumptions about “canon.” It seems to me that the Qumran Psalter manuscripts indicate that in the first century BCE and early first century CE Judaism had simply not yet arrived at that uniform point for the Psalter, just as it had not yet arrived at stabilization of the remainder of the Hagiographa or Ketuvim. 73

  The position taken in Sanders, “Cave 11 Surprises.”

24 Cave 11 Surprises and the Question of Canon I The last Qumran cave, the one designated Cave 11, has yielded a bonanza of surprises. Material from it first came into Jerusalem through the Bedouin of the area in February 1956. As the various pieces were identified and studied, it became clear that new possibilities in Bible study, and in the study of the Qumran sect, were being opened. For a variety of reasons, financial and otherwise, detailed scientific work on the Cave 11 materials did not begin until the fall of 1961. The preliminary reports published the following year, on the Psalms and on Job, provoked considerable interest and many questions.1 Since 1962 a scroll of Ezekiel, three scroll texts of Psalms, and a florilegium on the figure of Melchizedek have been published.2 Only the Job and Ezekiel pieces have so far failed to generate some excitement: the Ezekiel because what little is legible from the ossified knot of leather on which it was written seems identical to the received text, and the targum of Job because it turns out to be a simple Aramaic translation rather than a full targum.3 The importance of the text dealing with Melchizedek, on the other hand, can hardly be exaggerated, for it reaches beyond the linguistics of New Testament study into its christological thought forms. The preserved fragment is a midrash on a cluster of ten Old Testament passages centering in Isa 61 and the Jubilee-year text in Lev 25; but it also quotes, or alludes to, and interprets verses from Pss 8 and 72 as well as Isa 25 and Deut 15. It is a rich storehouse of material, along with similar texts from Cave 4, showing how some Palestinian Jews contemporized Old Testament texts. But its importance for Christianity, especially for understanding the Epistle to the Hebrews, is as yet beyond reckoning. Melchizedek is presented as a heavenly redemption figure who will execute *  First published 1968. 1   van der Ploeg, Le targum de Job; van der Woude, “Das Hiobtargum.” Sanders, “Scroll of Psalms.” 2   Brownlee, “Scroll of Ezekiel”; Sanders, Psalms Scroll; Sanders, Dead Sea Psalms Scroll; van der Ploeg, “Le Psaume XCI”; van der Ploeg, “Fragments”; van der Woude, “Melchisedek als himmlische Erlösergestalt.” 3   If the Job piece is the same as that interdicted by Rabban Gamaliel in the first century, as the Dutch scholars both think, it is something of a disappointment rather than an excitement. Its importance, however, along with the Genesis Apocryphon of Cave 1, as a primary source for study of the Palestinian Aramaic Jesus might have spoken, cannot be gainsaid; see now the excellent edition of the latter by Fitzmyer, Genesis Apocryphon, esp. 17 – 25 and 171 – 206, on first-century Palestinian Aramaic.

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divine judgment and salvation in the drama to take place in the anticipated eschatological Jubilee year. He is presented as a member of the heavenly council of the holy ones of God and even exalted above them, fulfilling, in the judgment and salvation drama, the role later associated with the archangel Michael. In the same text the bearer of good tidings (Isa 52) appears to be identified with one anointed (a Messiah) by the Spirit (Isa 42 and 61). This same cluster of scriptural figures is, of course, related in the New Testament to Christ, but we have now in this very important Cave 11 fragment the evidence of their first being interwoven in this manner. The heavenly Son of God of Heb 7, who rules above all heavenly and earthly powers, and lives forever to make intercession for those who put their trust in him, has his counterpart now in the heavenly Melchizedek at Qumran.4 There are still two manuscripts brought in from Cave 11 in 1956 which have not yet been worked on: a fragmentary copy of the Apocalypse of the New Jerusalem also known from Caves 1, 2, and 4; and fragments of the Book of Leviticus written in the archaic Hebrew script. Professor David Noel Freedman, dean at the San Francisco Theological Seminary, is scheduled to begin work on the Leviticus materials soon. The Six-Day War brought further Cave 11 surprises. Professor Yigael Yadin, of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Israel, had somehow learned in the early 1960s about a cache of scrolls that were still in the hands of an antiquities dealer in Jordanian Palestine. While we are not absolutely certain, it is highly probable that they were also part of the Cave 11 library. One of the scrolls turns out to be the largest yet found at Qumran, which Professor Yadin has entitled “The Temple Scroll.”5

II But the greatest surprise provided by the amazing Cave 11 is in its Psalter materials.6 Three manuscripts of Cave 11 Psalms have been published to date, and they all three exhibit very interesting variations in the order and content of the psalms they include. Two of the manuscripts are copies of the same recension or edition of Psalms; of the third so little has to date been published that it is difficult to judge whether it reflects the same revision, or collection, or not. The large Psalms Scroll from Cave 11 (11QPsa) has been published in two editions, in 1965 and early in 1967; the other copy of the same recension (11QPsb) has only just recently appeared in print. The fact that 11QPsb, where it is extant, duplicates 11QPsa in both order and content of psalms is highly significant; it proves at the very least that the recension of Psalms to which they witness was not a private or maverick collection. 11QPsb includes psalms found in column 16, 18, 19, and 23 4

  de Jonge and van der Woude, “11Q Melchizedek and the NT,” esp. 322 – 23.   Yadin, “Temple Scroll,” 156. 6   See on 11QPsa (the large Psalms Scroll), Sanders, Psalms Scroll; Sanders, Dead Sea Psalms Scroll; on 11QPsb (its identical mate but only parts of three columns preserved) van der Ploeg, “Fragments”; and on 11QPsa (or possibly 11QPse) van der Ploeg, “Le Psaume XCI.” 5

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of 11QPsa. Column 23 of the larger scroll contains Pss 141, 133, and 144 in that order, and that is precisely the order of the same psalms on a single column in 11QPsb. Just as interesting is the fact that in the very words of the psalms where 11QPsa differs from the received Masoretic Text (MT), 11QPsb agrees with its Cave 11 companion. In fact there is good reason to think that the 11Q texts were identical even where 11QPsb has lacunae, except in the minor and obvious scribal errors.7 Column 19 of the larger scroll contains a non-masoretic and heretofore unknown psalm to which we have given the title “Plea for Deliverance.” 11QPsb includes the same psalm in a more fragmentary form, except that it provides us now with a line at the top, which in the larger scroll was in the lost lower third of the previous column 18.8 The two copies of the psalm are identical (even to the point of almost having the same line divisions on the leather) with the exception of two very minor and very similar orthographic variants. Finally, column 16 of the larger scroll contains what is possibly a new non-masoretic psalm composed of floating bits of liturgical material familiar from Pss 118, 136, and elsewhere. In this regard it rather approximates the psalm in 1 Chron 16:8 – 36, which is itself a pastiche of Pss 105:1 – 15; 96:1 – 13; 106:1 and 47 – 48. Its close relation in the scroll to Ps 136 reminds one of the very short Ps 117, which many scholars have suggested should be seen either as coda to Ps 116 or an incipit to Ps 118; and it should be remembered that Ps 117 is itself reminiscent of Pss 67:4 and 103:11. Professor Peter Ackroyd has made a very worthy translation of the little poem: Praise Yahweh for he is good, his mercy is for ever. The sound of a shout of salvation is in the tents of the righteous. The right hand of Yahweh acts valiantly the right hand of Yahweh is exalted the right hand of Yahweh acts in power. It is better to trust in Yahweh than to trust in men. It is better to confide in Yahweh than to trust in noble men. It is better to trust in Yahweh than to trust in a whole army. 7   Careful measurements across fragments d and e of 11QPsb (Plate XVIII, in van der Ploeg, “Fragments”) indicate, pace van der Ploeg, that hayyim was lacking in Ps 133:3b there as well ˙ as in 11QPsa. (Note that it has long been questioned by scholarship because of scansion.) By contrast, 11QPsb does not duplicate the obvious scribal goof of 11QPsa in the following line (ha-melammed of 144:1). Finally, again pace van der Ploeg, I am not at all sure that MT ledawyd can be presumed in the immediately preceding lacuna where 11QPsa lacks it. 8   ʾebyon / ʿany wedal ʾanoky ky . . . “Humble and poor am I, for . . .”

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Praise Yahweh for he is good, his mercy is for ever. Hallelujah.9

This same new psalm also appears in 11QPsb. What is preserved of it in the smaller scroll is verbatim what appears in 11QPsa. The sum of it is that our surprising Cave 11 contained two copies of the one really imposing witness to the Hebrew Psalter in pre-masoretic times.10 The titular designation “Psalm of David,” familiar from the seventy-three psalms where it appears in the masoretic Psalter, provides interesting observations in the Qumran Psalter. It appears at the head of a non-masoretic psalm in 11QPsApa, and a variant of it also appears in the first line of Ps 151 in the large Psalms Scroll. Also in the larger scroll, Pss 104 and 123 begin “Psalm of David,” whereas the masoretic Psalter does not have the title for either. Conversely, the designation is lacking in the Psalms Scroll (11QPsa) for Ps 144; there is a lacuna at that point in 11QPsb and no secure way of knowing if it originally had the Davidic ascription, but the two scrolls are so identical in most other respects that it is best not to assume it simply because the received masoretic Psalter has it. Similarly, the interjection “Hallelujah” is omitted from the superscriptions in Pss 135, 148, and 150 where MT has it, but appears in Ps 93:1 where it does not. It appears, therefore, either that there was fluidity in the first century even in the Davidic ascriptions or that the Qumran Psalter represents, in complex ways, another text tradition or stage of Psalter canonization earlier than any we had heretofore. For, on the face of it, if there had already been a closed canon of Psalms since the fourth century, or since late Persian times, in which such matters were already invariable, even a “liturgical collection” of canonical and non-canonical psalms would surely reflect the accepted canon where it existed.11 Composers of the pesharim and midrashim of the age did, apparently, “con 9

  Ackroyd, “Notes and Studies.”   It should be very carefully noted, pace Yadin, “Temple Scroll,” 156, and Talmon, Review of The Psalms Scroll, 100, that the Tetragrammaton whether in archaic or block script is indeterminate for judging if a scroll was considered “canonical” at Qumran. Where 11QPsa always has it archaic, 11QPsb (identical otherwise) has it block (frag. d). 11QPsApa (?11QPse) apparently has it block, according to van der Ploeg, “Le Psaume XCI,” 211; and 4QPsf has it block (columns vii 5, ix 5, ix 14, x 13) precisely in the non-masoretic psalms. In point of fact, I am not actually disagreeing with Yadin’s conclusion; I would, however, disagree with Talmon’s conclusion that the divine name in archaic script always indicated that the manuscript was considered somehow non-canonical at Qumran. The simple fact of the matter is that we can no longer read our post-70 CE concepts back into the earlier period at all points. Contra the conclusions of Goshen-Gottstein, “Psalms Scroll,” 22 – 23, and Talmon, Review of The Psalms Scroll, in this regard, see the more cautious remarks by Ackroyd, “Notes and Studies”; Roberts, “Review of The Psalms Scroll; van der Ploeg,”Le Psaume XCI,” 216 – 17; and Sanders, Dead Sea Psalms Scroll, 156 – 58. 11   The suggestions that 11QPsa is to a “proper” Psalter what 1QapGen is to Genesis, and a pesher text to canonical texts, are comforting but misleading analogies. The matter is much more complex as we shall attempt to indicate. The suggestion that it is evidence of another “first,” that is, a forerunner of later Jewish and Christian prayer books, is so attractive in certain ways as to deserve careful criticism (Goshen-Gottstein, “Psalms Scroll”). 10

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temporize” biblical texts, and thus mold them to their convictions; but these Qumran Psalters are simply not sectarian in that sense, nor are they “sectarian” in any sense in which we have yet used that word in Qumran studies. To suggest that they are sectarian liturgical collections, forerunners of Jewish and Christian prayer books, far from being a simple, conservative, self-authenticating solution to the problem of Qumran psalmody, is a bold, venturous hypothesis fraught with as many difficulties as any other yet suggested. The highly liturgical type materials in the Psalms Scroll that appear as addenda to known masoretic psalms seem at first blush to lend themselves to the proto-prayer book suggestion. The new psalm at the top of column 16, made up of many liturgical phrases from a number of sources, especially those familiar from Ps 118, has already been cited. Psalm 135 has two apparent insertions, in vv. 2 and 6, that commend themselves as cultic anacolutha. In italics in the following are the words peculiar to 11Q: What the Lord pleases he does in heaven,     and on earth to do, he does;     there is none like the Lord,     there is none like the Lord,     and there is none who does as the King of gods, in the seas and in all deeps (11Q Ps 135:6).

That is, of course, liturgical material very similar to what one finds in later Jewish prayers and songs. But it is also like what one finds in 1 Sam 2:2, which is not better syntactically related to the rest of the Song of Hannah than the above italicized material to MT Ps 135:6. There is none holy like the Lord,      indeed there is none beside thee,      and there is no rock like our God (1 Sam 2:2).

There is a similar spate of material in 11Q Ps 146 between vv. 9 and 10 that is so poorly preserved that it is untranslatable, but that reflects the same biblical-liturgical type literature. Other such bits and pieces should undoubtedly also be viewed in the same manner.12 The most interesting, perhaps, and the most obviously liturgical aspect of the scroll is in the refrain and the subscription to Ps 145. The subscription is very frustrating because in it we have, for the first time, a suggestion as to ancient categories of psalm types: in it Ps 145 is called a zikkaron, a “memorial psalm,” but that is as far as the text goes at the bottom of the column of decomposed leather. We can imagine all sorts of possibilities, especially since the word zikkaron is so central to our current understanding of the theology of ancient Israel and her cultic life at all stages. But the refrain presents no difficulties in reading: after 12

 Sanders, Dead Sea Psalms Scroll, 15 – 21, 158 – 59.

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each verse of the psalm, as after each verse of Ps 136, a constant refrain recurs through all the verses: “Blessed be the Lord and blessed be his name forever and ever.” If one assumes an invariable canon of Psalms from the Persian period, then one is inclined to view this refrain as an addition to the masoretic psalm, whereas the refrain to Ps 136 one is inclined to view as more ancient.13 However, the problem is considerably more complicated, for v. 21 of the masoretic recension of Ps 145 contains a clear historic memory of the last two words of the Qumran refrain, whereas v. 21 in Qumran Ps 145 lacks the two words precisely because it has the whole refrain. One wonders if the refrain now available for Ps 145 is not just as ancient as that available all the while for Ps 136, relative only perhaps to the date of composition of the two psalms. Why, then, if the masoretic Psalter has a refrain to Ps 136, does it not have the refrain to Ps 145? At first glance, one feels comforted to say that someone at Qumran simply added the Ps 145 refrain to an already set Psalter. And yet the cautious student knows that one must leave very much open the possibility that it was the masoretic, or proto-masoretic, tradition that omitted the Ps 145 refrain because the refrain would have been retained in liturgical memory and signaled otherwise in the psalm.14 So far, only Ps 136, of all Hebrew psalmody, has even the suggestion of a refrain after each hemistich or colon rather than after a full bicolon. To transmit Ps 136 without its refrain could have created a gross misreading: the refrain in Ps 136 is integral to the scansion of the psalm in a way not the case with Ps 145, or with any other psalm for which we might posit an ancient refrain. The greatest “addendum” of all in 11QPsa is in column 27, the prose composition that says that David composed “through prophecy” 4,050 psalms and songs. The paragraph indicates the liturgical usage of the songs (shir) that David composed, and follows the calendar in use at Qumran and elsewhere in the late Second Temple period. It might be comforting to suppose that all the non-masoretic materials in the Qumran Psalter could be relegated to the category of “song” and thus dismiss the problem that it presents. No supposition could be more unscientific: there are songs so designated in the masoretic Psalter (cf. Pss 18, 92, 120 – 134, etc.). And 11QPsa includes forty masoretic psalms all from Books IV and V, or the last third of the Psalter.15 To point out that later prayer books 13   van der Ploeg reports that 11QPsApa (or, in my designation, 11QPse) has Ps 118 also with a constant refrain. 14   Precisely in the overloaded MT Ps 145:21. Note the presence of the enigmatic Selah, after Ps 91:4 in 11QPsApa, lacking in MT 91:4. 15   As is carefully noted by Goshen-Gottstein, “Psalms Scroll,” 32n42. Apropos Professor Goshen-Gottstein’s further (less careful) remark on the same page, n43, that the term “Psalms Scroll” itself uncritically influenced early judgments, it should be noted that our first designation was “Scroll of Psalms” and the first siglum assigned was 11QPss, as attested in Sanders, “Scroll of Psalms,” 11. Interesting in this regard is a conversation I had in May 1963 with Professor Brownlee in Claremont. He asked, after a lecture I gave on the non-masoretic psalms, why I used the confusing siglum 11QPss, and why not 11QPsa. I told him that the decision had since been made, in conjunction with the Dutch (van der Ploeg and van der Woude), to use 11QPsa. I had decided that the presence of thirty-six (now forty) masoretic psalms in the scroll could not be ignored; and that since the style of the non-masoretic psalms was “biblical”

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include forty psalms to be recited at a single service is less than illuminating, for no prayer book service would exclude all psalms from the first two-thirds of the Psalter. What is more than abundantly clear is that all psalters are liturgical collections, masoretic and non-masoretic; that is not the point. The real question is whether the Qumran Psalter as we now have it is a variant form of that liturgical collection that came to be called masoretic or is it an aberration from it, perhaps the earliest Jewish prayer book? Does it reflect on its past or anticipate its future?

III The clue may lie just as much in how stable the first two-thirds of the Qumran Psalter appear to us, as in how unstable the last third (or slightly more) appears. The only really significant non-masoretic features in the first half or so of the Qumran Psalter appear in two manuscripts from Cave  4, 4QPsa and 4QPsq. Both of them appear to omit Ps 32, and so far there is no explanation for the omissions. 4QPsa places Ps 71 after Ps 38, but this has been explained quite well by Monsignor Patrick W. Skehan as simply exhibiting the similarity that exists between Pss 8 and 70; that particular scribe, on finishing copying Ps 8, would have erred in thinking he had just copied Ps 70 and thus went on to Ps 71, then later reverted to the received order. All the other variations in order of psalms at Qumran, even in Cave 11, appear in the last third of the Psalter, and all the non-masoretic psalms in the Qumran Psalter show up in the same last third. So far, this observation is only a clue, but, as difficult as reviewing the “assured results” of scholarship may be, it requires that we think in ways in which we had not thought about the stages of stabilization of the Psalter.16 The fluidity in the Qumran Psalter, aside from the two cases just noted, is in the last two Psalter books, IV and V, Pss 90 and following.17 It has often been pointed out that it is this section of the MT Psalter that contains most of the highly liturgical psalms, and not sectarian (compare Hodayot), I had a complex problem on hand not easily solved. The manuscript for Psalms Scroll had already been mailed, and I was content to have time to give the problem thought and to hear reactions. My thinking at that time appeared later in tentative form in Sanders, “Variorum” (1966) after trying to collect the necessary data about all pre-masoretic psalms in “Pre-Masoretic Psalter Texts” (now outdated). After all, the siglum includes always the preface 11Q; to have used 11QapPs, or some such designation, would have prejudiced from the start the necessary discussions concerning canon. Even now, one must say, regret should be expressed rather against hastily conceived hypotheses than against patience. Concerning the column 27 prose section, see the tentative suggestions by Brownlee, “Significance.” 16   Reviewing the various attempts to date the MT collection of 150 in Gunkel and Begrich, Einleitung in die Psalmen, Schmidt, Das Gebet etc., one is struck by how uncertain the “assured results” are. The observation that 1 Macc 7:17 appears to quote a phrase from Ps 79:2 – 3 is simply no longer impressive in discussions of the date of the MT‑150 collection, nor the mention in the prologue of Ben Sira of “the other books.” Roberts has the right of it when he says, “The departure from [MT] in the order of Pss., the presence of apocryphal Psalms and of pure Qumran compositions in the same scroll needs to be explained, and the old question of canonicity to be reopened.” Review of The Psalms Scroll, 185. 17   See the full catalogue and index in Sanders, Dead Sea Psalms Scroll, 143 – 49; the early effort “Pre-Masoretic Psalter Texts” is now outdated and misleading.

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whereas the early part of the Psalter contains mostly prayers for individuals. And this, too, may be a clue to the solutions we seek. We have for so long constructed theories about the canonization or stabilization of the Psalter on the idea of smaller collections being drawn together that we are reluctant to consider any of the smaller collections as fluid beyond a certain date. Books I to III contain three large collections, the “Psalms of David” (Pss 3 – 41), the “Elohim” collection (42 – 83) and the so-called “guilds” collection (84 – 89). But in the first group Pss 10 and 33 do not bear the name David; in the second the divine name Yahweh appears forty-three times; and even in the tiny “guilds” grouping a “Psalm of David” appears (Ps 84). Over against a hypothetical Psalter of rigidly conceived groupings, these masoretic “aberrations” would have the same psychological effect on us that the Qumran Psalter has had. We like to think that Books IV and V are composed of four smaller collections: “Psalms 90 – 104, in which the individual psalms have no special features, but which is distinguished by the fact that the majority of the songs of ‘accession to the throne’ are gathered together here. This collection is concluded with Psalms 105 – 107.” Psalms 108 – 110 would appear to be “poems ascribed to David, concluding with Psalms 111 – 118.” Psalms 120 – 134 include “the Songs of Ascents, concluded with Psalms 135 – 136.” And finally, Pss 138 – 145 would also appear to be “psalms ascribed to David, concluded with Psalm 146 – 150.”18 In the light now of the Qumran Psalter we simply must admit that the supposed “early collections” in the last third of the Psalter are more a product of the imagination of the rationalist mind than of realities in antiquity. Only the Songs of Ascents remains attractive as a grouping, but the decision as to whether songs of similar titles had always been grouped together must be made in the light of the fragile nature of all such groupings that have heretofore appealed to our modern minds. One might as easily suggest that such songs were pulled together artificially at a comparatively late date, as that they were so neatly arranged early in the Second Temple period and then pulled apart for later, overriding liturgical reasons by the Qumran sect (which reasons are not at all evident or even suggested in the supposed “rearrangement” of the Qumran Psalter). Observations concerning such groupings, however, are somewhat more convincing for Books I to III than for Books IV and V – precisely the portion of the Psalter that at Qumran is most at variance with the masoretic Psalter both in order and content. Where all such observations may lead is extremely difficult to say. Avi Hurvitz, of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, has written a dissertation based on new methods of linguistic analysis of the Psalms in which he concludes that the ten masoretic psalms whose language clearly reflects the postexile period are all in the last third of the Psalter.19 It will be interesting to see if his results corroborate our observations about Books IV and V and the suggestion that “the last third of the Qumran Psalter indicates a still open-ended Psalter in 18

  All of these observations are taken directly from Eissfeldt, OT: An Introduction, 449 – 50.   Hurvitz, “Identification of Post-Exilic Psalms.” Herewith my gratitude to Dr. Hurvitz for this information in personal correspondence. 19

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the first century.”20 It is precisely to the first century (at least) that we must trace the various figures concerning how many psalms the Psalter contained: 150, 151, 155, 200, 3600, or 4050!21 If the stabilization of Books I to III occurred earlier than the crystallization of Books IV and V, then the fluidity demanded by the desire to be faithful to the Davidic corpus or heritage had to be expressed in the later portions of the Psalter and threatened the earlier portions less and less as the desire and need for stabilization became greater. It must be remembered that the Psalter cannot be viewed in the same way other biblical books are viewed in the question of canonization. Each psalm is an independent entity and has its own existence in a way narratives, oracles, and even proverbs do not have within the books where they are located. The Psalter was more closely allied to the daily life of worship and piety of Israel and Judaism than any other biblical book. And a sect that owed its existence and identity to dissension from the establishment in Jerusalem would be more likely to maintain the fluidity than not. Tentatively, one might suggest the hypothesis that the Qumran group arrested the process of stabilization as it was in the period before they left Jerusalem to seek their own identity and in the then fluid third portion of the Psalter came to accept as “Davidic” what were actually Hasidic and proto-Essene (their own identity) poems, which were at least biblical in style (in contrast to the style of the Qumran sectarian hymns) and could on the face of it meet the basic standards of canonical literature. The Jerusalem group, by contrast, would have tended to arrest the process of fluidity in the interests of stabilizing their own position and sponsoring the status quo. The more eschatological group would have had little interest in encouraging stabilization. Those who look constantly to the heavens for the in-breaking drama of righteousness and vindication have little interest in five-year, or longer, programs and plans! The Psalter is also distinct, in this regard, because it bore the authority of the name David, comparable in the late Second Temple period to the authority of the name Moses. The difference was perhaps somewhat the difference between the kinds of authority and loyalty which the names Moses and David elicited in the period in question: the one was the authority of Law, the other the authority of hope; the one represented God’s theophany in the past, the other his theophany of the future, a future that in the Qumran period was believed imminent. David’s name both stabilized Psalter collections and prohibited a universally invariable canon of Psalms. The tragedy of the destruction of the Second Temple in the failure of the first Jewish revolt put an end to the fluidity of the Psalter, just as it eventually brought about a stabilization of the Hagiographa, the codification of Oral Law, the unification of Rabbinic Judaism, the writing of the Gospels, the eventual gathering and canonization of the New Testament, and the ultimate parting of the ways of Judaism and Christianity, the only two sects from Early Judaism to survive the tragedy.22

For the Essenes, the open-ended Psalter was the more archaic Psalter, the preservation of an earlier stage of the stabilization process; just as their cultic calendar was for them the more archaic and authentic calendar. 20

 Sanders, Dead Sea Psalms Scroll, 158.   Ibid., 157.   Ibid., 158.

21 22

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Until the Temple Scroll is published and its relation to the Qumran Psalter is established, further discussion would be but premature. One may sincerely hope that the Temple Scroll, which Yadin describes as believed at Qumran “to be a part of the Holy Scriptures sensu stricto,”23 will provide the conclusive clues to the canonical status at Qumran of the Qumran Psalter. Perhaps it will also offer suggestive clues to the direction our thinking should now take on the general question of the Old Testament canon, which is being now reopened in numerous ways.24

IV Besides the two major Psalter manuscripts from Cave 11 there are so far two others that also contain non-masoretic psalms. The one is from Cave 11 as well and is designated at present by the siglum 11QPsApa, meaning “apocryphal psalms from Qumran Cave 11.” Actually, all that is so far published of it is Ps 91, but the editor reports that at least one of the non-masoretic psalms in the scroll bears the “Psalm of David” title familiar to all Psalter traditions. He also reports that, like the non-masoretic psalms in the other Cave 11 Psalters, the psalms in 11QPsApa are “biblical” in style rather than of the hymnic style at Qumran familiar from the sectarian Thanksgiving Hymns. And he quite rightly suggests that the manuscript attests a more ancient stage of Psalter tradition than that of the masoretic Psalter.25 It is for this reason that I have proposed resignaling this particular manuscript 11QPse. It is very difficult at this point to see why it must not be considered in the same light as the other Psalms texts from Cave 11. There are a number of very interesting variants in the Cave 11 Ps 91 which do not appear either in the received text of Psalms or in the Cave 4 text where Ps 91 also shows up in 4QPsb.26 Since it has never to my knowledge been rendered into English, I shall append a translation here. Where it differs from the masoretic psalm, I have indicated the variants in italics. 11Q Ps 91 He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High,      who abides in the shadow of the Almighty is he who says to the Lord, “My refuge and my fortress         is my God,     my confidence in whom I trust.”

23

  Yadin, “Temple Scroll,” 159.   Cf., for example, Brownlee, “Le livre grec d’Esther”; Roberts, “Old Testament Canon”; and the various studies of Sundberg, especially “OT: A Christian Canon” and “Towards a Revised History of the NT Canon.” 25   van der Ploeg, “Le Psaume XCI.” 26   Skehan, “Psalm Manuscript.” 24

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For he will deliver you from the snare of the fowler,     from the deadly pestilence; he will cover you with his pinions,      and under his wings will you dwell in his grace . . .,      his truth your shield and buckler. Selah. You need fear neither the fright of night      nor arrows in flight by day, neither scourge of destitution at noon,      nor plague that stalks the gloom. Let a thousand fall at your side,      ten thousand on your right hand,     but you it cannot touch. You will need but look with your own eyes     and see the fate of the wicked. Because you have invoked the Lord your refuge,      and made the Most High your delight, you will behold no evil,     no scourge will touch your tent. But he will charge his angels for you      to guard you in all your ways. They will carry you in their hands      lest your foot stub a stone. On the adder and the asp shall you tread,      both young lion and serpent trample under foot.

The rest of the text, vv. 14 to 16, is unfortunately mutilated, but we can be grateful that most of the psalm is fairly well preserved. While there is less of it preserved, the Cave 4 text of Ps 91 is identical with the masoretic as over against our Cave 11 copy. What strikes one about the Cave 11 Ps 91 is that it relates to the masoretic text of Ps 91 exactly as psalms in 11QPsa relate to their corresponding masoretic psalms. That is, the variants exhibit no pattern or tendency, and while a few appear to be errors, many of the variant readings commend themselves rather strongly. And if Professor van der Ploeg is right that this text attests a more ancient stage of Psalter transmission than the Masoretic Text, argumentum a fortiori 11QPsa. The fourth Qumran Psalter manuscript that includes non-masoretic psalms was found not in our Cave 11 of surprises, but in Cave 4, it was not until the Cave  11 Psalms Scroll was published that Father Jean Starcky identified the pertinent materials and took account of the fact that he was dealing also with a manuscript containing both masoretic and non-masoretic psalms. It is a text that apparently was continuous on one sheet of leather running from Pss 106 to 109, though only portions of Pss 107 and 109 are preserved in it. But beginning, apparently, on the same column where Ps 109 ends, and continuing through column 10, are three non-masoretic psalms, the first of which is the “Apostrophe to Zion” of column 22 of 11QPsa. One must say “apparently” because unfortunately one cannot be absolutely certain, but Father Starcky seems confident

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that the fragment on which the “Apostrophe to Zion” begins is to be placed so as to form a lower part of the original full column 7. This re-identification was made in the summer of 1965, and it is not unreasonable to suppose that further such discoveries of non-masoretic Psalter texts may be made when all the Cave 4 materials have been published (they are to fill some nine quarto-size volumes!). An English translation of the “Apostrophe to Zion” has been published on the basis of the Cave 11 Psalms Scroll, and then a revision taking account of the variants between the Caves 4 and 11 copies.27 There is, hence, no need to offer the “Apostrophe to Zion” here. But, to my knowledge, no translation has yet appeared in English of the two psalms that follow it in 4QPsf. The second of the three may be titled “Eschatological Hymn” and the third, “Apostrophe to Judah.”28 4Q Eschatological Hymn . . . Let the (congregation) praise the name of the Lord . . . For he is coming to judge every deed,      to destroy the wicked from the earth      so that sons of iniquity will be no more. The heavens (will bless with) their dew      and no destruction will enter their borders. The earth will yield its fruit in its season      and its produce will never be wanting. Fruit trees (will offer their figs)      and springs will never fail. Let the poor have their food      and those who fear the Lord be satisfied . . .

4Q Apostrophe to Judah . . . Let then the heavens and the earth give praise together,      let all the stars of evening sing praises! Rejoice, O Judah, in your joy,      rejoice your joy and exult your exultation! Celebrate your festivals, fulfill your vows      for no longer is Belial in your midst. Lift up your hand, strengthen your right hand,      behold your enemies go perishing      and all workers of evil go scattering. But thou, O Lord, thou art for ever,      thy glory for e’er and aye.     Hallelujah! 27

 Sanders, Psalms Scroll, 85 – 89, and Sanders, Dead Sea Psalms Scroll, 123 – 27.   Translated from the text of 4QPsf in Starcky, “Psaumes apocryphe,” 356 – 57 (Plate XIII).

28

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Bibliography Ackroyd, Peter R. “Notes and Studies.” JTS 17 (1966) 396 – 99. Brownlee, William H. “Le livre grec d’Esther et la royauté divine: Corrections orthodoxes au livre d’Esther.” RB 73 (1966) 161 – 85. Brownlee, William H. “The Scroll of Ezekiel from the Eleventh Qumran Cave.” RevQ 4 (1963) 11 – 28. Brownlee, William H. “The Significance of David’s Compositions.” RevQ 5 (1966) 569 –  74. Eissfeldt, Otto. The Old Testament: An Introduction, translated by Peter R. Ackroyd. Oxford: Blackwell; New York: Harper & Row, 1965. Fitzmyer, Joseph A. The Genesis Apocryphon of Qumran Cave 1 (1Q20): A Commentary. Biblica et Orientalia 18. Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute, 1966. Goshen-Gottstein, Moshe H. “The Psalms Scroll (11QPsa): A Problem of Canon and Text.” Textus 5 (1966) 22 – 33. Gunkel, Hermann, and Joachim Begrich. Einleitung in die Psalmen: Die Gattungen der religiösen Lyrik Israels. HKAT. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1933. ET: Introduction to Psalms: The Genres of the Religious Lyric of Israel. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1998. Hurvitz, Avi. “The Identification of Post-Exilic Psalms by means of Linguistic Criteria.” (In Hebrew). PhD diss., Hebrew University, Jerusalem, 1967. de Jonge, Marinus, and Adam S. van der Woude. “11Q Melchizedek and the New Testament.” NTS 12 (1966) 301 – 26. Roberts, B. J. “The Old Testament Canon: A Suggestion.” BJRL 46 (1963) 164 – 78. Roberts, B. J. Review of The Psalms Scroll of Cave 11 (11QPsa), by James A. Sanders. JTS 18 (1967) 183 – 85. Sanders, James A. The Dead Sea Psalms Scroll. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1967. Sanders, James A. “Pre-Masoretic Psalter Texts.” CBQ 27 (1965) 114 – 23. Sanders, James A. The Psalms Scroll of Qumran Cave 11 (11QPsa). DJD 4. Oxford: Clarendon, 1965. Sanders, James A. “The Scroll of Psalms (11QPss) from Cave 11: A Preliminary Report.” BASOR 165 (1962) 11 – 15. Sanders, James A. “Variorum in the Psalms Scroll (11QPsa).” HTR 59 (1966) 83 – 94. Schmidt, Hans. Das Gebet der Angeklagten im Alten Testament. BZAW  49. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1928. Skehan, Patrick W. “A Psalm Manuscript from Qumran (4QPsb).” CBQ 26 (1964) 313 – 22. Starcky, Jean. “Psaumes apocryphes de la grotte 4 de Qumrân (4QPsf VII – X).” RB 73 (1966) 353 – 71. Sundberg, Albert C., Jr. “The ‘Old Testament’: A Christian Canon.” CBQ  30 (1968) 143 – 55. Sundberg, Albert C., Jr. “Towards a Revised History of the New Testament Canon.” SE 4 (1968) 452 – 61. Talmon, Shemaryahu. Review of The Psalms Scroll of Qumran Cave 11 (11QPsa), by James A. Sanders. Tarbiz 37 (1967) 99 – 104. van der Ploeg, J. P. M. “Fragments d’un manuscrit de Psaumes de Qumrân (11QPsb).” RB 74 (1967) 408 – 12. van der Ploeg, J. P. M.“Le Psaume XCI dans une recension de Qumrân.” RB 72 (1965) 210 – 17. van der Ploeg, J. P. M. Le targum de Job de la grotte 11 de Qumrân (11QtgJob): Première Communication. Amsterdam: Noord-Hollandsche Uitgevers, 1962.

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van der Woude, Adam S. “Das Hiobtargum aus Qumran Höhle XI.” Congress Volume: Bonn 1962, by IOSOT, 322 – 32. VTSup 9. Leiden: Brill, 1963. van der Woude, Adam S. “Melchisedek als himmlische Erlösergestalt in den neugefunden eschatologischen Midraschim aus Qumran Höhle XI.” OtSt 14 (1965) 354 – 73. Yadin, Yigael. “The Temple Scroll.” In New Directions in Biblical Archaeology, edited by David Noel Freedman and Jonas C. Greenfield, 156 – 66. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1971.

25 The Modern History of the Qumran Psalms Scroll and Canonical Criticism At its 2001 annual meeting, the international Society of Biblical Literature celebrated the completion of the publication of the Dead Sea Scrolls. It was a gala occasion with a sense of the miraculous hovering over the some three hundred who attended. In the previous five decades eight volumes of the Discoveries in the Judaean Desert series had been published, but during the last decade twenty-eight more have appeared. Emanuel Tov, Magnes Professor of Hebrew Bible at the Hebrew University, made the difference. In 1990 Tov became the fourth chief editor of the international team charged with the publications, following Roland de Vaux, Pierre Benoit, and John Strugnell. Tov increased the team from twenty scholars to over sixty. Five further volumes are in the pipeline at the present, which will complete publication of thirty-nine volumes of the scrolls in the DJD series, over nine hundred ancient texts all told. Reference volumes will follow. Tov’s address on the occasion was stunning. It was a tell-all, detailed history of publication of the Dead Sea Scrolls from his standpoint, and as only he with his intimate knowledge of the last phases of the enterprise could tell it.1 It was a kind of oral history of the sort Sterling Van Wagnenen, Weston Fields, and others have recently been collecting from the earlier generation of Dead Sea Scrolls scholars. One weeps over the lost, unpublished records that have languished in widows “and heirs” attics, when the source of the most intimate kind of knowledge has been totally lost in the deaths of those who failed to complete their work, or who were too modest to publish their memories of what really happened. This is all the more poignant in the case of the Qumran scrolls about which much unconscionable nonsense has been published and said simply because there was lack of access to most of them for so long, not only to the scrolls but also to the real histories swept away by death and personal modesty. That situation has changed dramatically in the past ten years since open access has been the policy rather than the exception to much of the world’s information, through the internet and through the fall of walls of separation and discrimination around the world. It seems appropriate to honor Tov’s own openness, as well as labors of the past ten years, by offering a tell-all, modern history of the Dead Sea Psalms Scroll (11QPsa = 11Q5).

*  First published 2003. 1   See Hershel Shanks’s interview of Tov: Shanks, “Chief Scroll Editor.”

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Tov’s Address In his address Tov mentioned that the tendency early on to give names to the scrolls documents as they appeared meant that some might not finally be the most appropriate. He then gave examples, one of which was the Psalms Scroll from Qumran Cave 11. He explained that assigning numbers instead of titles obviated the problem, and that has been the practice recently. Tov was, of course, right both that early titles usually endure, and that they can be problematic. One thinks of “Manual of Discipline,” “Job Targum,” “Wiles of a Wicked Woman,” and “Temple Scroll.” The situation is true in archaeology generally. When a find on a dig comes to light, it needs to be discussed by the team and is therefore given a name or tag of some sort to be referred to, sometimes that very evening when the day’s work is assessed. Often a name hastily bequeathed becomes the name that appears in eventual publication. In the case of the Psalms Scroll, a change was made from the siglum I gave it in the first two publications. The preliminary report referred to the scroll as 11QPss.2 The editor of BASOR at the time, William F. Albright, made no comment in correspondence about the designation but, on the contrary, ran the article as received in the next available issue, which appeared the following spring while we were still in Jerusalem. The second article issuing from work on the scroll during the 1961 – 62 winter of recovery in Jerusalem was titled “Ps. 151 in 11QPss.”3 It was not until the third article appeared that I used the more specific siglum, 11QPsa.4 This came partly out of a conversation with William Brownlee, but the subtle change in sigla indicated my growing sense that the scroll had been viewed at Qumran as “canonical” despite its differences from the much later masoretic Psalter. And thereon hangs a tale.

The Psalms Scroll During the summer of 1959 I was a member of a New York University seminar in Israel. After the six-week course I crossed through the Mandelbaum Gate from Israeli Jerusalem to the Arab Old City where I was expected at the American School of Oriental Research (ASOR, later to be renamed The Albright Institute) on Salah ed-Dhin Street, north of Herod’s Gate. I had not known that Frank Cross would be there. He was in Jerusalem along with others of the Cave 4 team of scholars working on the lots of fragments assigned to each. I was very pleased to see him at the ASOR that night at dinner. We had met a couple of years earlier, before he left McCormick Seminary in Chicago in 1958 to succeed Robert Pfeiffer at Harvard. We had a good conversation at the table, then later he

2

  Sanders, “Scroll of Psalms: Preliminary Report.”   Sanders, “Ps. 151 in 11QPss.”   Sanders, “Two Non-Canonical Psalms.”

3 4

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asked if I would like to accompany him to the Palestine Archaeological Museum nearby the next morning. I, of course, accepted with delight. I shall never forget the visit to the museum that morning. After Cross had introduced me to other members of the team he took me to his table in “the scrollery.” While there he picked up a fragment with tweezers and asked if I would identify it. I read it off. It was a portion of Jeremiah 8. I think now that he was impressed. I was not. I had earned the PhD from the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati four years earlier, and my feeling was that if I could not read that beautiful script I should return the degree! The major emphasis at HUC was and is reading text, whether Akkadian, Ugaritic, Hebrew, Aramaic, or Greek. Many texts, daily. Reading about the sources was also required, but nothing substituted for reading original texts. Still it was a stunning surprise a year later when Cross called my home in Rochester, New York to ask if I would be interested in going to Jerusalem to unroll one of the scrolls recovered from Cave 11. I shall never in my life forget that moment. I, of course, said I would. Other factors made a good fit. I was planning a year’s sabbatical leave from my post at the Colgate Rochester Divinity School for 1961 – 62, and Cross said that would work fine. I was applying for a Guggenheim Fellowship for the year, and Cross said he would write a recommendation. I had applied to be Annual Professor at the ASOR anyway, and Cross agreed to put in a word there as well. I pause here to offer my understanding of the politics of selection. Considerable amounts of money had been taken from the Palestine Archaeological Museum’s endowment to secure the manuscripts of Caves 4 and 11 from the Ta’amri bedouin of the area where they were found. Donations were sought from European governments and from American philanthropists to refurbish the endowment of the museum, which at that point was privately owned and endowed largely by Rockefeller family money.5 The Cave 11 Job Targum, for instance, was financed by monies from the Netherlands, the sources of which then had the right to appoint the scholars to work on it. The Psalms Scroll was financed by Kenneth and Elizabeth Bechtel of San Francisco, who stipulated that the scholar appointed to unroll and prepare the scroll for publication should be American. Père Roland de Vaux, the head of the École Biblique Française in Jerusalem, president at the time of the museum, the Qumran archaeologist, and the “chef de travail” of the international team working on the massive Cave 4 fragments, asked Cross to appoint the American. He added the stipulation that the one appointed should not be Roman Catholic. De Vaux was sensitive already at that time to the criticism that there were too many Catholics working on the scrolls in Jordanian Jerusalem. The two stipulations narrowed the field of choice for Cross. 5   The museum was nationalized by the Jordanian government early May 1967, just before the Six-Day War, so that when Israel assumed responsibility for it the next month it came under the authority of the Department of Antiquities of the State of Israel, now the Israel Antiquities Authority.

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Unrolling the Scroll I departed by ship from New York in September 1961. I had not known it, but the USS Constitution to Naples that trip was to be a cruise as well as passenger ship. That gave me plenty of time to reread and practically memorize the masoretic Psalter (in BHK) during the nearly two weeks on board ship. Before I sailed I visited with Cross about the assignment, and read everything I could find about how to unroll an ancient scroll. Then when I arrived in Beirut (on the USS Excalibur from Naples) I consulted with Abbé Milik and with Abbé Starcky at the École Française there about the task ahead. I had to schlep my gear for the year by “service” taxi down from Beirut through Damascus and Amman, then across to Jordanian Jerusalem. There I took up residence as Annual Professor of the American School for 1961 – 62. Paul Lapp, who had been Acting Director the previous year, was now the Director. I was alone at that point; Dora and our sixyear-old son, Robin David, would not arrive until spring. Since the Jordanian Department of Antiquities had not yet issued the official release of the scroll for unrolling and study, I spent most of the first seven weeks at the ASOR functioning as Annual Professor (AP). I led archaeological visits to various important sites in the area for the appointed fellows that year, and served as AP on a three-week tour led by Lapp, up through Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon to Turkey and back. Those were the Kennedy years in Near Eastern relations, the halcyon days of recent history for Americans. We were welcomed everywhere we went. Finally, not long after our return to Jerusalem, official permission was received in early November from the Jordanian Department of Antiquities in Amman to begin work on the scroll. On November the 10th I was escorted by de Vaux, Lapp, and Yusef Saʾad, the secretary of the museum, into the individual lab room that I was assigned in the museum. It was ample enough in size and looked out three large windows to the east facing the Mount of Olives and Mount Scopus. There was a built-in tableshelf that ran the length of the room under the windows. It was covered in clean, brown wrapping paper. There was an oil-burning stove with a kettle in one corner of the room, a humidifier, and a camel-hair brush on a small desk with chair in another. Saʾad brought the scroll, which was in a Jordanian shoe box, from the Museum vault into the room. De Vaux formally handed it to me, whereupon the three gentlemen rather somberly backed out of the room and left me to my task. By their body language they made it clear that either I successfully unrolled the scroll, or it would unroll me! I was thirty-three years old, but looked considerably younger. I am sure some were wondering why Frank Cross had sent a kid over to do a man’s job. In fact, I apparently put them in mind of the young John Allegro of the Cave 4 team, who only a few years earlier had distinguished himself rather negatively, in their minds, to the point that Saʾad did not permit Najib Albina, the museum photographer, to take a photo of myself with the scroll. There is none.6 6   This is the reason that when recently George Brooke of Manchester, who was preparing a photographic history of the DSS, asked me for a photo of myself with the scroll, I could not supply him with one.

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Left alone in the room I turned to the table under the windows, where the box lay, and fell to my knees with the prayer that I do as well as I possibly could and not disappoint or embarrass Frank Cross. When I extracted the scroll from the box it was daunting, to say the least. Covered in ancient bat dung and caked mud, it gave an odor that my nose was to live with rather intimately the next ten days. De Vaux had estimated from the way it looked that it might take three to six months to unroll. The camel-hair brush helped somewhat in dusting it off, but I had to borrow a pen-knife from Prof. William Reed, who was also at the ASOR at the time. One third of the scroll had decomposed during its two-millennia residence in the floor of Cave 11, so that one end was black and hard as ebony. Some winters during those two thousand years would have had a bit more rainfall than others, even at 1200 feet below sea level in the stark desert on the northwest shorewastes of the Dead Sea. It had been found in February 1956 in the floor of the cave with one end partly buried. The decomposed skin had turned into a mucous substance that when dried hardened into a very imporous substance, like black ivory. The skin itself was thick enough that de Vaux thought it possibly was bovine in origin, rather than ovine or capric like most of the scrolls. DNA analysis has recently indicated that some of the animal skins were from the ibex, which might account for the scroll’s thickness. Day after day I chipped away at the ebony one skin thickness at a time until I had all five sheets, plus the separable leaves and fragments that had been on the outer layers of the scroll, under square glass panes on the long table. All told there were almost fourteen feet of scroll under glass, with an average width (the length of a column) of over six inches of the extant scroll.7 Albina and I are the only humans in modern times who have seen the linen threads that linked the five sheets of skin. By the time I arrived each morning they had disintegrated into dust. The scroll had been rolled so tightly by its last reader that the threads were amazingly well preserved until exposure. This accounts as well, I am sure, for how well the scroll itself was preserved. The DJD and Cornell edition photos show that quite well. The writing surface has discolored deeply since I first saw it forty years ago. The outside leaves had probably been part of a sixth sheet at the beginning of the extant scroll. The top margin of each column in the scroll was well preserved while about a third of each column was lost in the decomposed part at the bottom. As I worked I catalogued, and carefully put all the tiny chips of ebony in the clean cigarette boxes provided by the museum, but I am morally certain that I lost nothing legible on the scroll that had been handed me. Even so, loss of a few letters would have been worth recovering the whole scroll for study after two thousand years. On the morning of the tenth day, November the 20th, I had arrived at the last sheet deep inside the tightly rolled scroll. It was so tight that I was having difficulty with it.

7   The exact data can be found in Sanders, “Psalms Scroll,” in Encyclopedia of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

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I had had to use the humidifier only a few times up to then. The point of the humidifier was to mollify the skin in order to render it supple and pliable enough to open, but not so much as to cause it to discolor. The glass instrument had two chambers with a narrow neck between the upper and lower. There was a sponge to moisten and put in the lower chamber, a screen to put at the neck, and a lid to cover the top. The scroll would lie on the screen in the top chamber. De Vaux warned me not to leave it in the humidifier for more than twenty minutes at a time. The tenth and last morning, however, I could see that leaving it in the humidifier for longer periods would not be enough. It would not yield and lunch time was approaching. So I decided that I would put the kettle on the stove and leave it for the length of time it would take me to run over to the American School, eat lunch, and run back. I had not told anyone about the progress I was making during those ten days, nor did I at the table that noon. I certainly did not tell anyone what I had just done! I knew that de Vaux would be very upset; he had warned me against doing anything of the sort. When I returned, the lab room was comfortably warm and humid, but nothing was amiss. I carefully chipped away at the bottom edge of the last rolled sheet, which gradually yielded its treasures. I finally had it all under glass. It formed an arc due to the drawn, black bottom edge of the sheets, and the table-shelf was the right length and width for all of it. On the eleventh morning at about 11:00 a. m. Albina, as was his custom, brought his photographic equipment into the room. Albina, a Palestinian Christian, was an artist. Everyone who has worked with his photographs says he was expert. He knew when the morning sun through those windows would be at its best angle for exposing infra-red film, the medium he used. Infra-red increases the contrast between the carbon-based ink on the scroll and the color of the skin on which it was written. I could read the bottoms of the columns through the blackened skin better in the prints than on the leather. I worked all winter with his photographs, mainly in the library at the École Biblique. They were easier to read than the actual scroll. I would return to the museum only to check to see if a black dot was scribal or verminous, or for some similar concern.

Publication Thereafter I worked rather steadily at the job of studying the scroll to prepare it for publication. It was so beautifully preserved on the inside that I had been able to read it as I unrolled it, column by column. I then worked on the photos, mostly at the École Biblique, a few blocks away, because it had one of the best libraries for biblical and archaeological study, if not the best, in the world. Without the family at that point I immersed myself in making sense of the scroll. The École library had a special card-catalogue index to every critical study ever published for every verse of the Bible. It is now digitized, of course, but it was paper-published in the 1980s even before it became accessible by computer, and hence available to all scholars. But back then it was available only at the École in

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Jerusalem. It was because of those index cards that I was able to identify Pss 154 and 155 in the scroll, almost as soon as I started work on them.8 During that winter I twice read papers critically assessing the contents of the scroll for small gatherings in the American School library, gatherings of Western scholars from the French and British Schools, which were also situated at that time east of the wall separating the two Jerusalems. The first paper was on Ps 151 and the second on Pss 154 and 155, both later published in the ZAW.9 By the time of the second ZAW article in 1964, I had settled on the siglum 11QPsa as more apt than 11QPss. A number of other apparently deviant biblical texts had already been published that used the alphabetic sequential sigla. But more than that, there was and is no firm evidence of a truly proto-MT Psalter before the second century CE. On the contrary, there is literary evidence of later ancient Psalters with up to 200 psalms. The Associated Press ran a very short public notice from Amman in early February 1962 stating that the scroll had been unrolled and was being studied in Jerusalem. The New York Times picked up on it and sent their correspondent, Dana Adams Schmidt, resident in Beirut at the time, down to Jerusalem for an interview. He cut a rather avuncular figure and put me completely at ease. One question he asked was what it took to unroll an ancient scroll. I told him the story above. When I had finished, he asked if that was all. I realized that my answer did not sound like high science, so I responded by saying, “That, and guts.” I had in mind the Yiddish word, chutzpah, and should have said “gall” perhaps. In his article, published on the front page of The Times of 8 March 1962, he wrote, “Professor Sanders says all it takes to unroll an ancient scroll is a camel-hair brush, a humidifier, a pen knife, and guts.” I was often teased about it. It apparently became a “College Bowl” quiz question on the radio the following year, and was included still later in a book of quotations. After our return to the States in the summer of 1962, I continued to work preparing the editio princeps of the whole scroll. The administration and faculty in Rochester were very supportive, as was my family, assisting in many ways. When I had completed the first draft I took it to the homes of the three scholars I knew would be most helpful: Frank Cross (at Harvard), John Strugnell (then at Duke), and Patrick William Skehan (at Catholic University). I showed each all the sections to that point, but they were especially helpful in particular areas: Cross the palaeographic section; Strugnell the apparatus to each psalm; and Skehan the non-masoretic psalms. I have thanked them in print several times, but feel I can never express gratitude enough to them, and fortunately two of them 8   I identified Ps 151 because I had read it in the Septuagint as a student, and it was when looking up literature on it that I saw Martin Noth’s work in the ZAW of 1930 on the Five Syriac Psalms preserved in the fly leaves of a Syrian bishop’s Book of Discipline (Noth, “Die fünf syrisch überlieferten apokryphen Psalmen.”). Noth’s work in retroverting the Syriac to Hebrew was so close to the original now available in the scroll that I sent the MSS of the two articles, Sanders, “Scroll of Psalms: Preliminary Report” and Sanders, “Ps. 151 in 11QPss,” to the ZAW. The numbering of the five as Ps 151 to 155 comes from a twelfth-century Syriac biblical MS from Mosul (Mosul 1113), of which P. A. H. de Boer graciously provided me photos before their publication by the Peshitta Institute in Leiden. 9   See Sanders, “Ps. 151 in 11QPss”; Sanders, “Two Non-Canonical Psalms.”

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are still alive. They were very generous and helpful. The point is that none of them disagreed with the new siglum. I mailed the draft manuscript for DJD 4 [The Psalms Scroll of Cave  11 (11QPsa)] to Oxford in January 1963, and the volume was published in 1965. Even so, I had not yet directly addressed the issue of the canonical status of the scroll at Qumran, or of the Psalter itself at that point in early Judaism; nor did any of them raise the issue directly. I had, however, been attempting to gather the data necessary to do so. Not only was Skehan helpful with the manuscript of DJD 4, he was also very generous with transcriptions of his lot of Cave 4 fragments of Psalms. So was van der Ploeg of Nijmegen in the Netherlands, one of the scholars appointed by the Dutch government to work on Cave 11 materials. Van der Ploeg sent me all the information he had about other materials from Cave 11, as did Yigael Yadin about Psalms fragments he had from Masada. As a result, “Pre-Masoretic Psalter Texts” was published in the same year as DJD 4.10 I continued to work on and improve that list, which was a catalogue and index of all known texts of biblical psalms, and included it in the Cornell edition of the Psalms Scroll two years later [The Dead Sea Psalms Scroll]. In the light of such evidence, I simply could not bring myself to call the Qumran Psalms Scroll a liturgical collection of psalms derived from an already canonical, single Jewish Psalter. That was Skehan’s position.11 We stayed in close touch through all the debates and he would send me MSS of his work in advance, plus two copies of them when published (“one to throw darts at” he would graciously say). Elizabeth Hay Bechtel expressed continuing interest in the scroll. She invited us to San Francisco, where she lived, to address the City Club there in 1963, and often came to visit us, first in Rochester and then in New York City where we moved in 1965. She was supportive of the scholarly work on the scroll, but was very interested in a second edition that would be more accessible to lay folk. Before we arrived in July 1965 at Union Theological Seminary in New York, where I was invited to join the faculty, I had set to work on what I thought and hoped would satisfy her wish but also afford me the opportunity to address issues that had arisen from discussions of the early articles published, and from reviews of DJD 4. Henry Detweiler, president of the American Schools of Oriental Research at the time, and a dean of the school of architecture at Cornell University, also in upstate New York, suggested that I submit the second manuscript to Cornell University Press, which I did. It was published in 1967.12 That edition included Fragment E, a fifth separable leaf from the front of the scroll, which Yadin had published in Textus 5 in 1966, as well as the improved version of the catalogue and index to all pre-masoretic Psalter texts, which had appeared in 1965 in CBQ.13 The Cornell edition also has improvements in the apparatus and 10

  Sanders, “Pre-Masoretic Psalter Texts.”   See, e. g., his argument in Skehan, “Liturgical Complex.” 12  Sanders, Dead Sea Psalms Scroll. 13   Sanders, “Pre-Masoretic Psalter Texts.” Yadin wired me on New Year’s Eve in 1965 to inform me of his forthcoming publication of Fragment E in Textus 5 (Yadin, “Another Fragment”). I was stunned. Here is another case of possibly valuable information lost because so far 11

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notes to the non-masoretic psalms in the scroll, in which I attempted to respond to the various critiques of the early articles and of the Oxford edition.14 It also provided translations from the Syriac of Pss 152 and 153, lacking in the Hebrew scroll. In Textus 5 (1966) there were three responses to work on the scroll to that point: Yadin’s publication of Fragment E, a response by Shemaryahu Talmon to my reading of Ps 151, and a challenge by Moshe Goshen-Gottstein. The challenge was that I had not in the DJD volume addressed the issue of canonicity. He was right, but in the Cornell edition, written before I had seen Textus 5, I did so.15 I had thought long and hard about the issue and could not bring myself to assume, as the older generation apparently did, that the Psalter as we know it in the much later MT had already been “canonized” for all Judaism. By that time, Jack Lewis had published his study of all references to Yavneh / Jamnia and uncertainty about the stabilization of the Ketuvim was in the air.16 What we had in hand was a magnificent exemplar of a Psalter from the mid-first century CE, and a number of fragments of Psalms from Cave 4, which also cast doubt on such an assumption. There simply was no evidence that I could see to view the Psalms Scroll as somehow derivative of an already set Psalter; there were only old assumptions that, in my view, were being called into question in various ways. Further, Yadin informed me that he thought the Temple Scroll, also from Cave 11, was probably viewed as canonical at Qumran.17 It seemed to me that the scrolls generally were calling many old assumptions into question, and this one in particular. To substantiate the observation, in the same year that the Cornell edition appeared, JBL published my first attempt at cataloguing all publications of scroll materials to that point.18

as I know Yadin never revealed from whom he had obtained the fragment, other than to say that it was an anonymous American who wished to remain so. Those were the days of cloak-anddagger secrecy surrounding the Scrolls, and I assumed at the time that Yadin would tell me what he could when he could. He never did. Given where it seems to fit in the scroll, just before col. 1 beneath the first four separable leaves, I am still puzzled because the fragment would have had to be within the folds of leather under the first four fragments which I had had to pry loose from the dung-encased crust on the outside. See the discussion with references and dates in Sanders, Dead Sea Psalms Scroll, 155 – 59. 14   This has not been noted by most scholars, who apparently took the Cornell edition to be merely a popularization of the Oxford. Actually, I tried to answer, in Dead Sea Psalms Scroll, 93 – 117, the objections scholars had had to my readings of Ps 151 and of the Sirach canticle in col. 21, but I have seen very few references at all to the Cornell volume in the scholarly literature since. [Nor indeed during the years since!] 15  Sanders, Dead Sea Psalms Scroll, 10 – 15. 16   Lewis, “What Do We Mean by Jabneh?” and a review of discussions it has engendered in Lewis, “Jamnia after Forty Years.” 17   See Yadin, Temple Scroll, 390 – 92. 18   Sanders, “Palestinian Manuscripts 1947 – 1967.” This was supplemented by Sanders, “Palestinian Manuscripts 1947 – 1972.” Since those efforts, Fitzmyer published two editions of Dead Sea Scrolls: Major Publications and Tools, in 1975 and 1990, so that I could with confidence turn my attention elsewhere. I understand that he intends to update his lists even though it is a considerably more daunting task at this point. [See Fitzmyer, Guide.]

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In the meantime, Ted Campbell at McCormick Seminary in Chicago asked me to contribute an article to a 1968 McCormick Seminary publication he was editing. I decided it was time to try again. Abbé Starcky had just published some Cave 4 Psalter fragments that also included non-masoretic psalms and a different order of the masoretic ones, two characteristics of 11QPsa that raised the questions about its canonical status.19 I had become convinced that the new path had to be explored.20 That new path, I clearly saw, could not be limited to the parameters of earlier discussions. I became interested in the whole issue of authoritative community traditions and Scriptures, how they arose, and how they functioned in ancient communities. I was trying to gather and share all the data I could assemble to make informed decisions.21

Further Probes In 1968 I received two invitations that I accepted because I knew they would help explore the issue further. The one was from W. D. Davies and Louis Finkelstein, who had been asked to edit a multivolume Time-Life illustrated edition of the Bible, to write the introduction to the Old Testament or Hebrew Bible (HB). The other was from Eugene Nida, who was forming a research group sponsored by the United Bible Societies (of New York, London, and Stuttgart) to be called the Hebrew Old Testament Text Project (HOTTP), and to be a companion to the one he had formed for The Greek New Testament Project in 1955. The six members of the HOTTP, plus assistants, met for a month annually from 1969 to 1980 in Germany.22 We dealt with almost 6,000 textual problems throughout the HB, produced five volumes of a preliminary report on our work, and have so far published three volumes of the final report authored by Dominique Barthélemy.23 Having to deal in depth with the textual peculiarities of all the 19

  Starcky, “Psaumes apocryphes,” 356 – 57 (Pl. XIII).   See Sanders, “Cave 11 Surprises,” which was reprinted in three later collections of essays on the scrolls and on the issue of canon, by different scholars interested in the same question. 21   See Sanders, “Dead Sea Scrolls – A Quarter Century,” in which I tried to give an overview of all the scrolls recovered from all provenances, and to address the issue of canon. 22  The six were Dominique Barthélemy, Hans Peter Rüger, Norbert Lohfink, W. D. McHardy, A. R. Hulst, and myself. All but two years we met in the Erholungsheim in Freudenstadt. We agreed to participate if we were permitted also to work out and publish a hermeneutic and method in textual criticism that we deemed indicated by the new situation caused by recent manuscript discoveries, especially the scrolls. The UBS, including the Württembergische Bibelanstalt in Stuttgart, agreed, and the final result will be BHQ. See Sanders, “Hebrew University Bible and Biblia Hebraica Quinta.” 23  Barthélemy, Preliminary and Interim Report. Three volumes of the final report have appeared with the fourth, on the Psalter, in the press: Barthélemy, Critique textuelle. The introductions to CTAT are rich in discussions of the whole history of the transmission of the text from antiquity to the latest critical studies, but are seldom referred to in scholarly literature; see Sanders, “Hermeneutics of Text Criticism,” and Sanders, “Hebrew University Bible and Biblia Hebraica Quinta.” In the few that have made reference to it, one comment has been made that we dealt with only scattered problems. And yet they represent the most problematic texts in 20

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books of the HB gave us a comprehensive perspective on the effect of the scrolls on the varying textual situations of all the books of the HB. The hermeneutic being pursued by Biblia Hebraica Quinta, the fifth volume in the Biblia Hebraica series of critical texts of the HB that started in 1902, is based on the work of the HOTTP.24 I wrote the introduction for the Time-Life project, which was, however, abandoned in 1971. I then sent the manuscript I had generated for it to Fortress Press, which published it in 1972 as Torah and Canon. In it I tried to deal with how and why canons arose, and how early oral traditions that later became part of the Jewish canon had already functioned authoritatively, like later Scripture in early Jewish communities, which gave shape to the Torah and the Prophets.25 This was followed soon thereafter by a study probing canon as function in order to respond to ensuing discussions. The presidential address to the Society of Biblical Literature in November 1978 then probed the relation between text and canon, and how study in each discipline had changed since the discovery of the scrolls.26 This was followed by other studies pressing the relationship.27 It was important to find the interface between the move in early Judaism from oral and textual fluidity to textual stability, and the move from authoritative oral traditions to later fixed canons. Work in this area continues.28

Comparative Midrash and the Canonical Process Seeking that interface as well as the relation between text and canon created the sub-discipline called comparative midrash. It is important to trace the Nachleben of early oral traditions and of nascent Scripture through the literature of early Judaism, including early Christian and even Tannaitic literature, in order to discern the forms and function of citations and allusions, just as we had tried

the HB and gave the committee a comprehensive perspective on the textual situation of all the books of the HB. Our mandate was to provide assistance to modern translation committees throughout the world who often do exactly what ancient translators did, follow already extant translations for difficult textual problems. We have provided critical in-depth studies to each problem treated in order to break that cycle, which is evident in modern scholarship as well. In addition, the lengthy introductions provide extensive studies of the whole discipline of textual criticism unavailable elsewhere. Not only so, but every textual problem will indeed be treated in the forthcoming BHQ apparatus and in the accompanying critical commentaries to each biblical book. 24   BHQ should be published by 2006. The first Biblia Hebraica was published in 1902 and the fourth, BHS, in 1972. See Sanders, “Keep Each Tradition Separate.” 25  Sanders, Torah and Canon, went into eleven printings before it was remaindered. [A second edition was published by Cascade in 2005.] 26   Sanders, “Text and Canon: Concepts and Method.” 27  Sanders, Canon and Community; and Sanders, From Sacred Story to Sacred Text. These are also available through Wipf & Stock. 28   Note the bibliographies attached to Weis and Carr, Gift of God in Due Season, 274 – 85; and Evans and Talmon, Quest for Context and Meaning, xxv – xxxix.

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to do in the preexilic and exilic biblical literature.29 It became clear that the two were in fact the same exercise or function. Even the citations showed the same kinds of fluidity, or lack of verbal “accuracy.” References in the earlier literature to the exodus or Davidic or patriarchal stories exhibited “poetic license,” so to speak, but were clear enough that the point of the reference was not lost in doing so. The adaptability of the text to ever-changing situations required a measure of stability of reference to be effective. Early Jewish literature exhibits the same adaptability-stability quotient. Parallel work in textual criticism showed that the early history of transmission of the text of the pre-masoretic period was one of textual fluidity as well: tradents could modify or adapt a passage cited to fit the later use not only in citations but also in translation and in copying; textual stability in this regard was not clear until the proto-masoretic period beginning in the second century of the common era. The focus of early tradents clearly was in getting their communities to understand the text, copied, translated, or cited, in their later contexts. The focus of the later tradents in the proto-masoretic period shifted to textual accuracy. The Judean Desert Scrolls have made this point abundantly clear, and it resonated well with the move in Greek translations from the fluidity of early Greek translations (the so-called Septuagint) to the stability and even rigidity of the second century CE Greek translations.30 It was clear that there were many pseudo-variants in the pre-masoretic MSS and translations, unrelated to distinct Vorlage, due to the earlier tradents’ freedom to focus on community understanding instead of on verbal accuracy. The Greek Minor Prophets Scroll from Nahal Hever provided, according to ˙ and ˙ the stability.31 Something Barthélemy, the missing link between the fluidity must have happened in the basic Jewish hermeneutic, or understanding of the nature of the text, evidenced in both textual transmission and in textual citations. The basic understanding or hermeneutic of the text of Scripture shifted from an early shamanistic or dynamic understanding of the inspiration or provenance of the text generally, to a view of the text as verbally inspired, and hence no longer textually adaptable to new situations.32 The view of literal inspiration of Scripture followed very soon. The rise of the Tannaitic and rabbinic middot about the same time give testimony as well to the shift.33 Tradents could no longer slightly modify or adapt a passage of Scripture to make its message clear, but they could and did engage in all sorts of midrashic techniques to render the stable text 29   See Sanders, Torah and Canon; Sanders, “Text and Canon: Concepts and Method”; Sanders, Canon and Community; Sanders, From Sacred Story to Sacred Text. 30   See Martin Hengel’s very helpful survey of Greek textual fluidity in Septuagint as Christian Scripture, 43, 86, 89, et passim. 31   Barthélemy, “Redécouverte d’un chaînon manquant.” This was more fully developed in Les devanciers d’Aquila. See the critical praise of Barthélemy’s work in Tov’s full edition of the Dodecapropheton in Greek Minor Prophets Scroll, ix, and throughout the volume. 32   The thesis of Sanders, “Text and Canon: Concepts and Method,” pursued in Sanders, “Stability and Fluidity.” 33   See Sanders, “Issue of Closure.”

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adaptable and relevant in commentaries to the on-going believing communities. All this was happening precisely in the crisis period of Roman occupation and then destruction of Palestinian Jewish institutions. Comparative midrash developed out of the basic meaning of the term “midrash,” probed by Renée Bloch, followed by Roger Le Déaut.34 The focus was on midrash as function in early believing communities rather than on the literary form of the later rabbinic midrashim. The question was how a passage cited or alluded to functioned in the literature where the reference occurred. The question generated the hermeneutic triangle, that is, appreciation of the importance of three basic factors necessary to seek out in each case studied: (a) the passage called upon or cited; (b) the socio-political situation of the community for whom the new writing was intended; and (c) the hermeneutic of the tradent writing it for that community.35 It applies to early fluid copies of Scripture, to translations of Scripture, and to new literature based on it. All early Jewish literature was written scripturally, that is, was based on or arose out of one or more scriptural books or passages. The later writers knew to base what they had to say for and to their communities on “Torah” or received Scripture, oral or written. If what they had to say was important enough in their minds to share it, they told it in scriptural terms and cadences. The critical triangle proved to be a sharp tool for understanding this kind of canonical process through the early Jewish period. It is also an antidote to the hermeneutic circle that entraps most readers of the Bible, whereby they find in Scripture what their community already teaches them is there. Comparative midrash also developed a perspective on biblical intertextuality. Scripture, even the earliest, is full of echoes, citations, and allusions to earlier tradition and Scripture. Tradition in this sense would include ancient Near Eastern literature resignified into biblical literature, creation myths, flood stories, and the like. No two re-readings and re-applications are ever quite the same. Each addressed different community needs when retold or rephrased. While it is often very difficult to reconstruct what those needs were, the result when valid is well worth the effort. When that is discerned then the hermeneutics, or understanding of the tradition, by which the resignification came about, is also discernable. There are three kinds of intertextuality: the interrelation of blocks of text; the function of citations and allusions within a text; and the interrelation of reader and text. When different texts are bound together by redactional activity or canonical compression they tend to interact in the readings of the communities for which the binding was effected. A kind of chemistry emerges between them. When earlier texts are cited or echoed in later writings they obviously 34   See Bloch, “Midrash,” and Le Déaut, “Apropos a Definition of Midrash.” The latter was in part a response to Wright, Literary Genre Midrash, which opposed Bloch’s broader definitions of “midrash.” 35   Despite the dramatic rise in interest in recent years in the Nachleben of Scripture in early Judaism and early Christianity, rarely are the reprises of Scripture studied in the light of these three basic factors. See, e. g., Kugel, Traditions of the Bible, whose focus is on “interpretation” instead of on the crucial factors of socio-political situations and the hermeneutics used in them.

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were intended by the tradent to function in some authoritative mode, and they cast light on each other. And when a text is read, its own texture interacts with the texture of the reader, and a kind of chemistry emerges between them as well. Again, no two readings are ever exactly the same. Because this kind of activity surrounded texts that made them into a canon, it is important to probe as much of it as possible. Comparative midrash illumines the canonical process in early Judaism and Christianity.36 When the debate about the status of the Psalms Scroll seemed to have abated, an article and a dissertation were published in 1985 that reopened it.37 In them, Gerald Wilson considerably supported the editor’s view of the status of the scroll. Not long thereafter another dissertation appeared that provided an in-depth analysis of all the Psalter manuscripts from Qumran, seeing the Psalms Scroll as a Davidic Psalter designed to authenticate the solar calendar in use at Qumran and elsewhere in early Judaism, and a marker on the path toward the eventual MT‑150 Psalter.38 The Psalms Scroll, dating from the second quarter of the first century of the common era, highlights both the textual and the canonical fluidity of pre-masoretic biblical manuscripts. Due to the nature of the Psalter its canonical fluidity is more in evidence perhaps than in the case of other books of the Bible.39 It provides a road mark on the multi-track move toward the eventual MT‑150 collection.40 Bibliography Barthélemy, Dominique. Critique textuelle de l’Ancien Testament. OBO 50. Fribourg: Presses universitaires; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1982, 1986, 1992 [now 5 vols. to 2016]. Barthélemy, Dominique. Les devanciers d’Aquila: Première publication intégrale du texte des fragments du Dodécaprophéton. VTSup 10. Leiden: Brill, 1963. Barthélemy, Dominique, et al., eds. Preliminary and Interim Report on the Hebrew Old Testament Text Project. 5 vols. London and New York: UBS, 1973 – 80. Barthélemy, Dominique. “Redécouverte d’un chaînon manquant de l’histoire de la Septante.” RB 60 (1953) 18 – 29. Bloch, Renée. “Midrash.” In DBSup 5: cols.  1263 – 81.

36   The second type of intertextuality, that of reference to earlier tradition and literature, has seven modes: (1) citation with formula; (2) citation without formula; (3) weaving familiar phrases into the new composition; (4) paraphrasing; (5) allusion to persons and events of the past; (6) echoes; (7) mimesis of literary structure. See Sanders, “Dead Sea Scrolls and Biblical Studies.” The canonical process is also described by Sæbø in On the Way to Canon. 37   Wilson, “Qumran Psalms Scroll Reconsidered,” and Wilson, Editing of the Hebrew Psalter. 38  Flint, Dead Sea Psalms Scrolls. The dissertation had been defended at Notre Dame in 1993. See the editor’s review, Sanders, Review of The Dead Sea Psalms Scrolls, and Talmon, Review of The Dead Sea Psalms Scrolls. 39   There are only a few fragments of Proverbs that were part of only two exemplars (4QPrva and 4QPrvb). By contrast there are thirty-nine manuscripts of Psalters among hundreds of fragments plus the Cave 11 Psalms Scroll. 40   See the incisive study of the multi-track canonical process in Carr, “Canonization in the Context of Community.”

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Carr, David M. “Canonization in the Context of Community: An Outline of the Formation of the Tanakh and the Christian Bible.” In A Gift of God in Due Season: Essays on Scripture and Community in Honor of James A. Sanders, edited by Richard D. Weis and David M. Carr, 22 – 64. JSOTSup / LHBOTS 225. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1996. Evans, Craig A., and Shemaryahu Talmon, eds. The Quest for Context and Meaning: Studies in Biblical Intertextuality in Honor of James A. Sanders. Leiden: Brill, 1997. Fitzmyer, Joseph A. The Dead Sea Scrolls: Major Publications and Tools for Study. Atlanta: Scholars, 1975 – 77. Revised ed., 1990. [Fitzmyer, Joseph A. A Guide to the Dead Sea Scrolls and Related Literature. Studies in the Dead Sea Scrolls and Related Literature. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008.] Flint, Peter W. The Dead Sea Psalms Scrolls and the Book of Psalms. STDJ 17. Leiden: Brill, 1997. Hengel, Martin. The Septuagint as Christian Scripture: Its Prehistory and the Problem of Its Canon. Translated by Mark E. Biddle. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 2002. Kugel, James L. Traditions of the Bible: A Guide to the Bible as It Was at the Start of the Common Era. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. Le Déaut, Roger. “Apropos a Definition of Midrash.” Int 25 (1971) 259 – 82. Lewis, Jack P. “Jamnia after Forty Years.” HUCA 70 – 71 (1999 – 2000) 233 – 59. Lewis, Jack P. “What Do We Mean by Jabneh?” JBR 32 (1964) 125 – 32. [Reprinted in The Canon and Masorah of the Hebrew Bible: An Introductory Reader, edited by Sid Z. Leiman, 254 – 61. New York: Ktav, 1974.] Noth, Martin. “Die fünf syrisch überlieferten apokryphen Psalmen.” ZAW 48 (1930) 1 – 23. Sæbø, Magne. On the Way to Canon: Creative Tradition History in the Old Testament. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1998. Sanders, James A. Canon and Community: A Guide to Canonical Criticism. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984. Sanders, James A. “Cave 11 Surprises and the Question of Canon.” McCQ 21 (1968) 284 – 98. [Reprinted in New Directions in Biblical Archaeology, edited by David Noel Freedman and Jonas C. Greenfield, 101 – 16. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969.] Sanders, James A. The Dead Sea Psalms Scroll. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1967. Sanders, James A. “The Dead Sea Scrolls and Biblical Studies.” In “Shaʿarei Talmon”: Studies in the Bible, Qumran, and the Ancient Near East Presented to Shemaryahu Talmon, edited by Michael A. Fishbane and Emanuel Tov, with Weston W. Fields, 323 – 36. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1992. Sanders, James A. “The Dead Sea Scrolls – A Quarter Century of Study.” BA 36 (1973) 109 – 48. Sanders, James A. From Sacred Story to Sacred Text: Canon as Paradigm. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987. Sanders, James A. “The Hebrew University Bible and Biblia Hebraica Quinta.” JBL 118 (1999) 518 – 26. Sanders, James A. “Hermeneutics of Text Criticism.” Textus 18 (1995) 1 – 26. Sanders, James A. “The Issue of Closure.” In The Canon Debate, edited by Lee M. McDonald and James A. Sanders, 252 – 66. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2002. Sanders, James A. “Keep Each Tradition Separate.” BRev 16, no. 4 (2000) 40 – 49, 58. Sanders, James A. “Palestinian Manuscripts 1947 – 1967.” JBL 86 (1967) 431 – 40. Sanders, James A. “Palestinian Manuscripts 1947 – 1972.” JJS 24 (1973) 74 – 83. Reprinted in Qumran and the History of the Biblical Text, edited by Frank M. Cross and Shemaryahu Talmon, 401 – 13. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975. Sanders, James A. “Pre-Masoretic Psalter Texts.” CBQ 27 (1965) 114 – 23. Sanders, James A. “Ps. 151 in 11QPss.” ZAW 75 (1963) 73 – 86.

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Sanders, James A. “The Psalms Scroll.” In Encyclopedia of the Dead Sea Scrolls, edited by Lawrence Schiffman and James C. VanderKam, 2:15 – 17. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Sanders, James A. The Psalms Scroll of Qumran Cave 11 (11QPsa). DJD 4. Oxford: Clarendon, 1965. Sanders, James A. Review of The Dead Sea Psalms Scrolls and the Book of Psalms, by Peter W. Flint. DSD 6, no. 1 (1999) 84 – 89. Sanders, James A. “The Scroll of Psalms (11QPss) from Cave 11: A Preliminary Report.” BASOR 165 (1962) 11 – 15. Sanders, James A. “Stability and Fluidity in Text and Canon.” In Tradition of the Text: Studies Offered to Dominique Barthélemy in Celebration of His 70th Birthday, edited by Gerard J. Norton and Stephen Pisano, 203 – 17. OBO 109. Fribourg: Presses universitaires; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1991. Sanders, James A. “Text and Canon: Concepts and Method.” JBL 98 (1979) 5 – 29. [Reprinted in From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, by James A. Sanders, 125 – 51. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987.] Sanders, James A. Torah and Canon. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1972. [2nd ed. Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2005.] Sanders, James A. “Two Non-Canonical Psalms in 11QPsa.” ZAW 76 (1964) 57 – 75. Shanks, Hershel. “Chief Scroll Editor Opens Up: An Interview with Emanuel Tov.” BAR 28, no. 3 (May 2002) 32 – 35, 62. Skehan, Patrick W. “A Liturgical Complex in 11QPsa.” CBQ 35 (1973) 195 – 205. Starcky, Jean. “Psaumes apocryphes de la grotte 4 de Qumrân (4QPsf VII – X).” RB 73 (1966) 353 – 71. Talmon, Shemaryahu. Review of The Dead Sea Psalms Scrolls and the Book of Psalms, by Peter W. Flint. JBL 118 (1999) 545 – 47. Tov, Emanuel, ed. The Greek Minor Prophets Scroll from Nahal Hever (8HevXIIgr). ˙ ˙ DJD 8. Oxford: Clarendon, 1990. Weis, Richard D., and David M. Carr, eds. A Gift of God in Due Season: Essays on Scripture and Community in Honor of James A. Sanders. JSOTSup / LHBOTS 225. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1996. Wilson, Gerald H. The Editing of the Hebrew Psalter. SBLDS 76. Chico, CA: Scholars, 1985. Wilson, Gerald H. “The Qumran Psalms Scroll Reconsidered: Analysis of the Debate.” CBQ 47 (1985) 624 – 42. Wright, Addison. The Literary Genre Midrash. Staten Island, NY: Alba, 1967. Yadin, Yigael. “Another Fragment (E) of the Psalms Scroll from Qumran Cave  11 (11QPsa).” Textus 5 (1966) 1 – 10. Yadin, Yigael. The Temple Scroll. 3 vols. Jerusalem: The Israel Exploration Society, 1983. [Hebrew Version: K‫מגילת המקדׂש‬K. Tel Aviv: K‫ספרית מעריב‬ ִ K, 1990.]

26 Psalm 154 Revisited1 The recent publication of Qumran fragment 4Q448 (PAM 43.545) provides an opportunity to review Syriac Psalm II = Ps 154.2 One recalls that this psalm was first known to Enlightenment scholarship as the second of five psalms in Syriac preserved as filler material in a Book of Discipline (ketaba dedurrasa) by the tenth-century Nestorian Bishop Elijah of al-Anbar, found in a manuscript in the Vatican catalogued by S. E. and J. S. Assemani in 1759.3 They have since been published in several editions based on manuscripts in Cambridge, Berlin, Woodbrooke, London, Rome, and Mosul / Baghdad.4 In 1972 the Peshitta Institute in Leiden published the five psalms that have been found not only in the bishop’s handbook but also in two biblical manuscripts, one of which is a twelfth-century Nestorian Psalter (Mosul 1113).5 The latter manuscript (12t4) appends the five psalms to the traditional 150 as Pss 151 to 155 (Syriac Ps I = Ps 151, II = 154, III = 155, IV = 152, V = 153). The finest work done before 11QPsa on Syr Pss II = 154, III = 155, and IV = 152, was that of Martin Noth in 1930.6 It was the writer’s privilege to honor Professor Noth’s study and retroversions into Hebrew of Pss 154 and 155, publishing in the same journal the preliminary edition of their Hebrew texts from 11QPsa.7 After the first Qumran caves had been found and the Essene hypothesis had been advanced, but before the Hebrew texts were published, Matthias Delcor, André Dupont-Sommer, and Marc Philonenko published studies advancing the thesis that the Syriac psalms were Essene in origin, a point most students *  First published 1993. 1   It is an honor to offer the following study to Norbert Lohfink, my colleague since 1969 on the United Bible Societies’ Hebrew Old Testament Text Project. 2   Eshel, Eshel, and Yardeni, “Composition from Qumran.” 3   Assemani and Assemani, Catalogus, 385 – 86. 4   Descriptions and locations of all extant Syriac MSS containing the five psalms are provided in Baars, Apocryphal Psalms [III] – [VII], and in German by van der Woude, “Die fünf syrischen Psalmen,” 31 – 33; see also Sanders, Psalms Scroll, 53. 5   Now located in the library of the Chaldean Patriarchate in Baghdad, designated 12t4; the other biblical manuscript in which the five psalms have been found is MS Orient. Fol. 3122 found in the German State Library in Berlin, designated 19d1, where the psalms are appended to a MS of the prophetic books after the colophon. The order of the five in the latter is the same as in the MSS of the bishop’s handbook; only in 12t4 does the order vary, as described in the following sentence above. 6   Noth, “Die fünf syrisch überlieferten apokryphen Psalmen.” 7   Sanders, “Two Non-Canonical Psalms.” Prof. Noth did not probe the fifth Syriac psalm, nor did he treat LXX / Syr Ps 151 (Syriac Ps I) for obvious reasons; see Sanders, “Multivalent Text,” and note the English translations of Pss 152 and 153 in Sanders, Dead Sea Psalms Scroll, 141 – 42.

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since their Hebrew texts were published have disputed.8 Since the publication of 11QPsa there have been several important studies of the Hebrew text of Ps 154, notably those by André Dupont-Sommer, John Strugnell, Mathias Delcor, Dieter Lührmann, Jean Magne, Adam van der Woude, and Pierre Auffret.9 And now we have a preliminary edition of the fragmentary 4Q448, which preserves the beginnings of three lines of text corresponding to Ps 154:17 – 20.10 The present revisitation will address issues arising from review of the above studies and the new publication, principally the text itself.

4Q448 4Q448 is a single fragment, 9.5 cm in width and 17.8 cm in length. It is unusual in two major respects: it has a leather tab attached on the right edge, typical of the two manuscripts and some two hundred uninscribed fragments from Caves 4 and 8 having fortified holes to accommodate leather thongs for rolling up and binding a scroll.11 The available fragment may be but the beginning of what had been a lengthy scroll.12 Even more interesting is the fact that the fragment contains three columns of text, one on the upper half of the leather written with ample spacing of letters and words, and two parallel columns on the lower half written with less spacing. The script, which is heavy cursive and may date to the middle of the first century BCE, may possibly have been by the same hand but with some differences caused perhaps by the scribe’s being conscious of the differing spacing.13 The upper column, with the exception of the first line, is indented about 2.5 cm from the leather clasp described above. The first line appears to be a superscription and begins, in large letters, about 1.5 cm to the right of the right margin of the rest of the upper column. The right of the two lower columns begins about 1 cm directly below the left bottom edge of the fastening. The relation between the  8  Delcor, “Cinq nouveaux psaumes”; Delcor, Les hymnes de Qumran, 299 – 319; Dupont-Sommer, Les écrits esséniens; Philonenko, “L’origine essénienne.” They must nonetheless be given credit for suggesting that they might be found in the Qumran library or collection. See also Schneider, “Biblische Oden.”  9  Sanders, Psalms Scroll, 64 – 70. Dupont-Sommer, “Hébreu et Araméen,” 359 – 60; Strugnell, “Notes on the Text”; Delcor, “Zum Psalter von Qumran”; Lührmann, “Ein Weisheitspsalm aus Qumran”; Magne, “Le asaume 154”; van der Woude, “Die fünf syrischen Psalmen”; Auffret, “Structure littéraire et interprétation du Psaume 154.” Note also Polzin, “Notes on the Dating”; Gurewicz, “Hebrew Apocryphal Psalms”; Sen, “Traducción y comentario del Salmo 154.” 10   See Eshel, Eshel, and Yardeni, “Composition from Qumran.” 11   See the discussion and drawings of scroll fastenings by Carswell, “Appendix I: Fastenings on the Qumrân Manuscripts.” 12   Eshel, Eshel, and Yardeni, “Composition from Qumran,” 296. I am grateful to my colleague, Professor Bruce Zuckerman, for use of an 8x10 transparency of a photograph of 4Q448 he and Ken Zuckerman personally made in the Rockefeller by permission of the Israel Antiquities Authority for the Ancient Biblical Manuscript Center. 13   Eshel, Eshel, and Yardeni, “Composition from Qumran,” 317 – 24, with comparative palaeographic drawings.

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upper column of text and the two lower ones is not clear, while the two bottom columns seem, according to the editors, to constitute a prayer for the well-being of a “King Jonathan,” whom the editors identify as Alexander Jannaeus. The reading and the identification are problematic.14

Psalm 154 in 4Q448 Be that as it may, our interest in the fragment is in the top or first column, the last three lines of which appear to be the same as Ps 154:17 – 20 (11QPsa col. 18, lines 14 – 16). The first line of col. 1 begins “Hallelujah, a Psalm of . . .,” and breaks off at that point on the left edge of the fragment. This appears to be a superscription with the “Hallelujah” genre title familiar both in the MT Psalter and at Qumran. The fourth line of the column appears to have no writing (vacat), unless there was a deep indentation over 2.8 cm beyond the hanging indent of lines 2 – 10. Each line beyond the first is from 2 to 4 cm long, and contains only one to three words. Lines 8 to 10, the last three in the column, contain two to three words each, for a total of seven, plus two initial letters discernible on the left edge of lines 8 and 10. Those lines read thus: Col. 1 Line ]. K‫ועל מפארו‬K (8 ]K‫עני מיד צרי ִם‬K (9 ]K‫מִש ִכנִ ִו בצי ִ ִוזִ ִב‬K (10

The text suggests four readings over against 11QPsa 154:17 – 20, as reconstructed. The first is K‫מפארו‬K, indicating the singular rather than the plural: “one who glorifies him” rather than “those who glorify him.” Pace the editors, this would appear not to be a true variant but simply an orthographic variation. The plural fits the context as well as the singular. The second is considerably more substantial and immediately acceptable, K‫צרים‬ K in the place of K‫זרים‬K, which I had read following Noth’s reconstruction from the Syriac at that point, and on the basis of Ps 54:5. Only bare traces of the word are

14   Ibid., 314 – 17. Unfortunately, the name Jonathan, which the editors see in the lower column 2, line 2, and col. 3, 1.8, is not as clear as I am sure they would like it to be – even on the excellent transparency before me. The editors are aware of how problematic finding such a prayer at Qumran would be, and discuss the anomaly if one subscribes to the regnant theory in which most of the Qumran literature formed a discrete library of a Jewish community opposed to the Hasmoneans and other authorities in Jerusalem. Rather than follow Norman Golb’s hypothesis that it did not form a discrete library but was disparate literature gathered from Jerusalem and hidden in the caves, the editors stress what many think who still hold to the library theory (whether Essene or not) but insist that the acquisition policy, so to speak, permitted inclusion of literature brought in from the outside by new members on joining the community. Further on the Golb / Groningen debate see below, esp. Sanders, Psalms Scroll, 68 – 70, 79 – 85, and Sanders, Dead Sea Psalms Scroll, 108 – 9, 112 – 17.

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449

visible on the bottom right edge of col. 18. Strugnell, followed by Lührmann, read K‫זדים‬K.15 The third is a precious correction to the reconstructed text. In v. 20, totally reconstructed from the Syriac, I followed Noth’s reading ‫ו‬K ‫אהל‬K. 4Q448 clearly hasK ‫םִש ִכנִ ִו‬K, the same word in the Syriac. Unfortunately, the accompanying verb is lost at the end of the preceding line of col. 1 of the fragment. I reconstructed it as the participle ‫ה‬K ‫נוט‬K, following the literary style in the hymnic last strophe of the Hebrew poem, which Noth had not correctly perceived from the Syriac. I was followed in this by Magne and Auffret. Strugnell did not address the matter. Lührmann abandoned the style of the Hebrew of the final strophe in v. 20 and reconstructed the two verbs of the last verse as ‫ח‬K ‫יני‬K and ‫ה‬K ‫ויציב‬K.16 The editors of 4Q448 regrettably suggest the finite verb ‫ה‬K ‫איו‬K for the first of the two, but quite plausibly the participle ‫ר‬K ‫בוח‬K for the second colon of the verse, based on their reading of the fragment.17 The sum of it is that 4Q448 has brought three felicitous corrections to the reconstructed portions of the text of Hebrew Ps 154: K‫צרים‬K in the second colon of v. 18; K‫משכנו‬K in the first colon of v. 20; and K‫בוחר‬K in the second colon of v. 20. Following Noth, I reconstructed the first word of v. 18 (not in 4Q448) as the imperative plural verb K‫ברכו‬K. Strugnell, on the basis of the Syriac, read K‫ברוך‬K.18 In this he was followed by Lührmann. But it is more than a matter of retroversion from the Syriac. I was following the style of the first strophe in suggesting the imperative plural in the last.

Psalm 154 On the basis of the Syriac, Martin Noth perceived the mixing of genres in the poem, a hymnic invitation to praise Yahweh, and a wisdom poem. He questioned the unity of the poem and even rejected what we now see as vv. 10 – 11 as a foreign body within the poem.19 Delcor saw as well the mix of hymn and wisdom poem.20 Lührmann saw the two themes so tightly woven together that they 15   Strugnell, “Notes on the Text,” 275; Lührmann, “Ein Weisheitspsalm aus Qumran,” 90. Lührmann’s remarks that I had not scrutinized the photographs carefully in two readings (nn. 14 and 41 of his article) were gratuitous and impertinent. Lührmann alone supplies K‫םימת‬K instead of K‫ םימימת‬Kin the third colon of v. 18. Lührmann also saw a reversion to the wisdom theme in v. 20; see the negative comments of Auffret, “Structure littéraire et interprétation du Psaume 154,” 544n41, and of van der Woude, “Die fünf syrischen Psalmen,” 45n20 a‑a). 16  Lührmann, “Ein Weisheitspsalm aus Qumran,” 97. See van der Woude, “Die fünf syrischen Psalmen,” 45n20 b) and c). 17   Eshel, Eshel and Yardeni, “Composition from Qumran,” 303, 305, 310. Judging by the transparency before me I agree that the last letter visible in line 10 of the column is probably a bet; the problem is with the preceding word, K‫ציון‬K. Either the waw or the nun is not visible, and there is no space before the bet following it. 18   See van der Woude, “Die fünf syrischen Psalmen,” 45. 19   Noth, “Die fünf syrisch überlieferten apokryphen Psalmen,” 17 – 20. He called the poem “ein kompliziertes Gebilde, eine Kombination verschiedenartiger Elemente, die in ziemlich äußerlicher Weise miteinander verbunden sind” (20). 20  Delcor, Les hymnes de Qumran, 311, 319.

450

Part 2: Qumran

should not be separated; he also rightly observed that the poem exhibits “ein[en] einheitlicher[n] Interpretationshintergrund in der späten Weisheit,” dating it to the end of the third century BCE.21 Magne agreed with Noth and saw a fusion of a psalm of invitation to praise and a wisdom poem transformed into a psalm of invitation to instruction. Auffret, who has done the most thorough analysis of the vocabulary and rhetoric of the poem, has argued for its unity if, with Noth, vv. 10 – 11 are rejected. He found in the combination, not separation, of the hymnic and sapiential elements a global sense of the text: the subordination of the gift of wisdom (vv. 5 – 8) and of its acceptance (vv. 12 – 14) to praise of the Most High (vv. 1 – 3) and the blessing of his benefits.22

11QPsa Nearly everyone now agrees that one cannot extrapolate from a single composition, nor indeed from a single document, the beliefs of the Qumran community. In the case of the Psalms Scroll there is a real possibility that it was “acquired” from outside the community, brought in perhaps as the hon or material donation, in the place of coins perhaps, that a novice might offer upon entering the community. The most one can say is that there would have been nothing in it greatly offensive to their beliefs or detrimental to their self-understanding. In fact, in a document such as a Psalter scroll it is reasonable to assume that it would have contained some literary units the community could resignify to their own purposes even while containing other units they might choose benignly to ignore or overlook as outside of but not directly offensive to their self understanding.23 21   Lührmann, “Ein Weisheitspsalm aus Qumran,” 97, agreeing with my own general dating of the poem (Sanders, Psalms Scroll, 70) despite his apparent misunderstanding. I stated clearly that the poem’s eschatology was not that of Qumran but that the poem would have appealed to the early Qumran settlers in terms of their own vocation and identity. Lührmann’s observations about the poem’s affinities with Sirach are well taken. 22   Auffret, “Structure littéraire et interprétation du Psaume 154,” 543 – 45. 23   Herein lies that aspect of Norman Golb’s objections to the regnant (e. g., Groningen) theory of the origins of the Qumran literature that gains a hearing. As over against those scholars, especially early on (see Delcor, “Cinq nouveaux psaumes”; Delcor, Les hymnes de Qumran, 299 – 319; Dupont-Sommer, Les écrits esséniens; Philonenko, “L’origine essénienne”; Schneider, “Biblische Oden”), who have tended to view everything found at Qumran as being Essene in origin and doctrine, most scholars have a modified view of Qumran’s “acquisition policy” for its “library”: some of the non-biblical and apocryphal literature found there was brought in from the outside but was compatible with their thinking or not offensive to it. Golb, for most of us, seems to create more problems than he solves with his thesis that the Qumran caves contain literature from all walks of Judaism in Jerusalem as it was in the first century in Jerusalem, hidden there because of the rising threat of war in the middle of the century. His position was first (to my knowledge) stated in “Problem of Origin”; thereafter in “Who Hid the Dead Sea Scrolls,” and “Dead Sea Scrolls.” The most decisive responses have been those of García Martínez, “Qumran Origins,” and García Martínez and van der Woude, “Groningen Hypothesis.” The Groningen hypothesis accounts for most of the available data in a largely satisfactory way, but with some queries: it requires subscribing to Essene identification for some who have become cautious about it; it

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451

Psalm 154 might have been meaningful to the community precisely because it sounds a call to form a community with a purpose and a mission, namely, to proclaim to the uninformed God’s gracious benefits for which wisdom had been granted humans in the first place, and to glorify God in the process – since that is everyone who glorifies God by proclaiming God’s deeds and meditating upon the story and stipulations of God’s will therein (Torah), while eating and drinking in community. God receives and accepts all such as warmly as those who in the temple in Jerusalem can engage in the whole sacerdotal cult. The poem is a mixture of genres, the combination of which would have been quite meaningful to the Qumran community. It is similar to the Sirach 51 canticle (in 11QPsa cols. 21 – 22), which might have expressed for some in the community their understanding of the sublimation of the sex drive to pursuit of wisdom.24 The Psalms Scroll brings to the Qumran collection a strong flavor of wisdom thinking, notably in Ps 154, the Sirach 51:13 ff. piece, the Hymn to the Creator, and the prose insert (cols. 18, 21 – 22, 26, 27). In the first editions of Ps 154 I stressed how weak the eschatological flavor of the poem is, if it is there at all.25 For this reason I am prepared to eliminate the possible ambiguity that might exist in the reconstruction of v. 19, now reading it with Lührmann and Auffret, “. . . [who raises the horn of Ja]cob and judges [his people Israel]” instead of the earlier (with Noth) “. . . [who establishes a horn out of Ja]cob and a judge [of peoples out of Israel].”

requires a certain view of the early history of the community, distinguishing between a larger and a more sectarian / protestant group within it; it rightly excepts Cave 7 but tries to keep the still enigmatic Copper Scroll of Cave 3 in the library; it seems to need to stress that everything else in the Qumran caves was “compatible” with a sectarian theology / policy. This last point is perhaps the most delicate. García Martínez / van der Woude stretch a bit for some of us the socalled non-sectarian literature’s “compatibility” with the group’s thinking (533 – 36). Does this mean, e. g., that the editors of 4Q448 (Eshel, Eshel and Yardeni) have to be wrong about the “King Jonathan” they see in the text because van der Woude sees Alexander Jannaeus as one of a whole succession of Wicked Priests? That would be circular thinking. They would have to be counted wrong on other bases. Instead of “compatible” one should perhaps say “not offensive to” or “otherwise resignifiable.” Is the field ready yet for L. Schiffman’s thesis that 4QMMT, which is not yet at this writing fully or openly published, indicates that halakah at Qumran was Sadducean in outlook (Martinez and van der Woude, “Groningen Hypothesis,” 538)? Finally, is the hypothesis that the Roman garrison swept out the community building so well that not a scrap of MS was found there (ibid., 528) compatible with what archaeology does in unearthing what the ancients did not or could not see that had in antiquity slipped under floors, walls, and door-jambs? Even those of us who tend to subscribe to the Groningen hypothesis because of its manifest strengths feel that there are some unanswered questions in it and are grateful to Golb for keeping the discussion going, even though his hypothesis raises for us more questions than it solves. 24   On all these points see Sanders, Psalms Scroll, 68 – 70, 79 – 85, and Sanders, Dead Sea Psalms Scroll, 108 – 9, 112 – 17. 25  Sanders, Psalms Scroll, 70. See Auffret, “Structure littéraire et interprétation du Psaume 154,” 521. Again Lührmann, “Ein Weisheitspsalm aus Qumran,” 93, shows misunderstanding of my earlier work.

452

Part 2: Qumran

Psalm 154 at Qumran Strugnell suggested the Syriac implies that K‫יחד‬K in v. 4 be read adverbially.26 He was followed in this by Magne, Lührmann, and Auffret. Yet none of these has adequately explained the use of the hiphil form of the imperative.27 If it should be read “form a community” instead of simply “convene together” then the whole poem, whatever its original thrust, could have been read at Qumran as a gnomic / hymnic expression of their self-understanding and mission.28 Similarly, if v. 18 in the last strophe resumes the imperative mode established in the first strophe, then its expression of community self-understanding and mission would be to that measure strengthened. Strugnell against Noth read K‫ברוך‬ 29 K instead of K‫ברכו‬K for Syriac K‫בריכו‬K. And yet one is reluctant to perceive the psalm ending with a simple doxology when it is quite possible that it ends, as it began, with a call to purpose, namely to bless God aloud in community, thus reciting his saving deeds and hence doing what the first strophe called a community into being to do – tell others in doing so. These observations lead finally to consideration of the number of different groups mentioned in the poem. I suggested three groups: the senseless and simpletons; the in-group righteous, pure, good, etc.; and the wicked, insolent, and enemies.30 Auffret agreed on the condition that one distinguishes in the category of the just those who are already assembled and those called to do so, and to understand those who offer sacrifices as an element purely for comparison. In the first point he took clues from Magne, and in the second he found support for his (and Noth’s) view of the secondary character of vv. 10 – 11.31 Auffret was quite right that those who sacrifice in vv. 10 – 11 are for comparison only; they are not a true group in the poem’s expression of purpose and mission but may possibly be identified with the enemies and the wicked of v. 18. The point, however, about distinguishing between the righteous who are already assembled and those who are being called to do so, fails to appreciate the poem as an expression in the first place of a call to form a community for the purpose of praising and proclaiming. Whether the poem was composed at Qumran or not, it could have been signified there in such a manner. The voice in the poem issuing the “call” to community in the first strophe might conceivably be taken as that of a member of the heavenly council, for instance, not unlike that perceived in MT Isa 40:1 – 11, especially the voices recorded in Isa 40:3 – 11 (and perhaps other voices in Isa 51 ff.). If the poem was read at Qumran in such a manner, 26

  Strugnell, “Notes on the Text,” 274.   See the extensive and probing discussion of the problem in Auffret, “Structure littéraire et interprétation du Psaume 154,” 119 – 20n16, as well as that in Charlesworth, OT Pseudepigrapha, 2:617 – 18. 28  Sanders, Psalms Scroll, 69 – 70. 29   Strugnell, “Notes on the Text,” 275. 30  Sanders, Psalms Scroll, 68 – 69; see also Delcor, “Zum Psalter von Qumran,” 25. 31   Auffret, “Structure littéraire et interprétation du Psaume 154,” 540 – 41n36; Magne, “Le Psaume 154,” 99. 27

Psalm 154 Revisited

453

then it spoke to them of three earthly groups: (a) the righteous who respond to the call to form the community to pursue its mission of praise and proclamation; (b) the simple who hear the praise and proclamation of the community and are hopefully persuaded to join the first group as it grows and increases, thus becoming just and righteous by identity with the community; and (c) the wicked and impious who are hopelessly lost and from whom God redeems the poor and the pure, appellatives also of the in-group of the community, which viewed itself as having wicked enemies, for Qumran, those in power in Jerusalem and elsewhere. What the poem meant to some original author or composer can only be imagined through an abstract analysis of the poem, since there is general agreement that the origins of the poem, and indeed of the scroll itself, lay outside Qumran. But to those at Qumran, insofar as we perceive them as a distinct community called to obedience to the laws of purity and holiness with the mission to be prepared for God’s decisive acts in their day, the poem was adaptable to their situation as expressive of their self-understanding and mission, albeit in the most general terms of an in-group, an out-group, and the masses out there who supposedly needed to hear the truth.32

Psalm 154 Anew   1. [With a loud voice glorify God;      in the congregation of the many proclaim his majesty.   2. In the multitude of the upright glorify his name      and with the faithful recount his greatness.   3. Bind] yourselves together with the good      and with the pure to glorify the Most High.   4. Form a community to proclaim his salvation,      and be not lax in making known his might      nor his majesty to all simple folk.   5. For to make known the glory of the Lord     is Wisdom given,   6. And for recounting his many deeds      she is revealed to humanity:   7. to make known to simple folk his might,      and to explain to senseless folk his greatness,   8. Those far from her gates,      those who stray from her portals.   9. For the Most High is the Lord of Jacob, 32   4Q448 raises other questions it is beyond the scope of this paper to address. Was it citing, apparently without introductory formula (common enough), the last strophe of our Ps 154? Or, did both pieces draw on a familiar portion of liturgical literature in the manner of numerous psalms, especially later ones such as 1 Chron 16 and some of what is now in 11QPsa that cause some scholars to view it as somehow more liturgical than the MT Psalter itself? Does the strophe’s presence in 4Q448 support questions already posed about the integrity of Ps 154?

454

Part 2: Qumran

     and his majesty is over all his works. 10. And a person who glorifies the Most High     he accepts33 as one who brings a meal offering, 11. as one who offers he-goats and bullocks,      as one who fattens the altar with many burnt offerings,      as a sweet-smelling fragrance from the hand of the righteous. 12. From the gates of the righteous is heard her voice,      and from the assembly of the pious her song. 13. When they eat with satisfaction34 is she cited,      and when they drink in fellowship together, 14. their meditation is on the Torah of the Most High,      their words on making known his might. 15. How far from the wicked is her word,      from all insolent folk to know her. 16. Behold the eyes of the Lord      upon the good are compassionate, 17. And upon those who glorify him he increases his mercy;      from an evil time will he deliver [their] soul. 18. [Bless] the Lord,     who redeems the humble35 from the hand of [enemies]      [and deliv]ers [the pure from the hand of the wicked, 19. who raises up the horn of Ja]cob     and judges36 [his people, Israel; 20. who spreads out his dwelling in Zion     and chooses37 Jerusalem forever.]

33

  Strugnell, “Notes on the Text,” 274, suggested reading the passive, “is accepted.”   Ibid., 273 – 74. Strugnell found both the Hebrew and Syriac “unsatisfactory” and suggests a corruption from “in their banqueting she is cited with praise” (K‫בשבח‬K > K‫בשבע‬K). It is clearly Wisdom that or who satisfies the quest for truth (see Syriac). The image conveyed as read in the Qumran setting is that of a community meditating on Torah / Wisdom while engaged in communal meals. 35   Or the afflicted, or the poor. See Fr Lohfink’s beautiful study, Lobgesänge der Armen. The present study is a humble response to his. 36   This reading, following Lührmann and Auffret, better fits the style at this point, and eliminates even a weak eschatological dimension by seeing the participle as attributive of God, with the rest of vv. 18 – 20, rather than as a noun. If the Qumran community, however, needed to read the poem with their eschatological hermeneutic, they would have done so by interpreting it as they did non-eschatological biblical literature. 37   Reading with the editors of 4Q448; to do so retains the parallelism of the last six cola of the poem and makes good sense in the retrofit of the last strophe of the psalm. 34

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Bibliography Assemani, Stephen E., and Joseph S. Assemani. Bibliothecae Apostolicae Vaticanae Codicum Manuscriptorum Catalogus. Part 1. Vol. 3, Reliquos Codices Chaldaicos sive Syriacos. Rome, 1759. Auffret, Pierre. “Structure littéraire et interprétation du Psaume 154 de la grotte 11 de Qumrân.” RevQ 9 (1978) 513 – 45. Baars, Willem, ed. “Apocryphal Psalms.” In The Old Testament in Syriac. Part 4, fascicle 6, Canticles or Odes, Prayer of Manasseh, Apocryphal Psalms, Psalms of Solomon, Tobit, 1(3) Esdras. Leiden: Brill, 1972. Carswell, John. “Appendix I: Fastenings on the Qumrân Manuscripts.” In Qumrân Grotte 4.II (4Q123 – 4Q157) I. Archaeologie; II. Tefillin Mezuzot et Targums, edited by Roland de Vaux and Józef T. Milik, 23 – 28. DJD 6. Oxford: Clarendon, 1977. Charlesworth, James H. The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha. 2 vols. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1983, 1985. Delcor, Matthias. “Cinq nouveaux psaumes esséniens?” RevQ 1 (1958) 85 – 102. Delcor, Matthias. Les hymnes de Qumrân (Hodayot). Paris: Letouzey et Ané, 1962. Delcor, Matthias. “Zum Psalter von Qumran.” BZ 10 (1966) 15 – 28. Dupont-Sommer, André. “Hébreu et Araméen.” ACF 66 (1966) 347 – 72. Dupont-Sommer, André. Les écrits esséniens découverts près de la Mer Morte. Paris: Payot, 1959. Eshel, Esther, Hanan Eshel, and Ada Yardeni. “A Composition from Qumran which Includes a Portion of Psalm 154 and a Prayer for Peace for Jonathan the King and His Reign.” Tarbiz 60 (1992) 296 – 324, plus plates. (In Hebrew) García Martínez, Florentino. “Qumran Origins and Early History: A Groningen Hypothesis.” Folia Orientalia 25 (1988) 113 – 36. García Martínez, Florentino, and Adam van der Woude. “A ‘Groningen’ Hypothesis of Qumran Origins and Early History.” RevQ 24 (1990) 521 – 41. Golb, Norman. “The Dead Sea Scrolls: A New Perspective.” The American Scholar 58 (1989) 177 – 207. Golb, Norman. “The Problem of Origin and Identification of the Dead Sea Scrolls.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 124 (1980) 1 – 24. Golb, Norman. “Who Hid the Dead Sea Scrolls?” BA 28 (1987) 68 – 82. Gurewicz, S. B. “Hebrew Apocryphal Psalms from Qumran.” Australian Biblical Review 15 (1967) 13 – 20. Lohfink, Norbert. Lobgesänge der Armen: Studien zum Magnifikat, den Hodajot von Qumran und einigen späten Psalmen. SBS 143. Stuttgart: Verlag Katholisches Bibelwerk, 1990. Lührmann, Dieter. “Ein Weisheitspsalm aus Qumran (11QPsa XVIII).” ZAW 80 (1968) 87 – 98. Magne, Jean. “Le Psaume 154.” RevQ 9 (1977) 95 – 102. Noth, Martin. “Die fünf syrisch überlieferten apokryphen Psalmen.” ZAW 48 (1930) 1 – 23. Philonenko, Marc. “L’origine essénienne des cinq psaumes syriaques de David.” Semitica 9 (1959) 35 – 48. Polzin, Robert. “Notes on the Dating of the Non-Massoretic Psalms of 11QPsa.” HTR 60 (1967) 468 – 76. Sanders, James A. The Dead Sea Psalms Scroll. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1967. Sanders, James A. “A Multivalent Text: Psalm 151:3 – 4 Revisited.” Hebrew Annual Review 8 (1984) 167 – 84. Sanders, James A. The Psalms Scroll of Qumran Cave 11 (11QPsa). DJD 4. Oxford: Clarendon, 1965.

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Sanders, James A. “Two Non-Canonical Psalms in 11QPsa.” ZAW 76 (1964) 57 – 75. Schneider, Heinrich. “Biblische Oden im syrohexaplarischen Psalter.” Bib  14 (1959) 199 – 202. Sen, Felipe. “Traducción y comentario del Salmo 154, por primera vez en castellano.” Cultura Biblica 29 (1972) 43 – 47. Strugnell, John. “Notes on the Text and Transmission of the Apocryphal Psalms 151, 154 (= Syr. II) and 155 (= Syr. III).” HTR 59 (1966) 257 – 81. van der Woude, Adam S. “Die fünf syrischen Psalmen.” Jüdische Schriften aus hellenistisch-römischer Zeit 4 (1974) 29 – 47.

27 The Dead Sea Scrolls and Biblical Studies1 I should like to address four areas where the influence of the Dead Sea Scrolls has been probably most pronounced: (a) they have dramatically altered the history of early Judaism; (b) they have provided a remarkable store of information about the inner thinking of a Jewish denomination in existence when Christianity was born, with which to compare Christianity in its early Jewish-Christian phase; (c) they have revolutionized First Testament text criticism; and (d) they have helped launch canonical criticism and comparative midrash, as I understand them. For none of these do I intend to give anything like a thorough review of what has been said about them; on the contrary, I intend rather to append a few critical observations to a very general, broadly drawn picture of each.2 The scene has shifted considerably in the past twenty-five years. Literary critical tools have begun to be used with results that significantly change how one reads the scrolls. Differentiation has set in with theories advanced about the history of formation and composition of the various key documents, especially 1QS and 1QH.3 By the time Yigael Yadin published the Temple or Torah Scroll (11QT) in the late seventies, the literary-critical method was well in place. The method was variously followed and did not issue always in compatible results, but it should be noted that there has not been anything since then like the density of controversy in the earlier period, especially the fifties. Literary-critical differentiation has affected two main areas, the reconstruction of the history of the denomination and their relations to other such groups of the time, and the history of development of theology or beliefs in the group. Whereas in the earlier period after their discovery it was hotly debated whether the group was Essene, or zealot, or an apocalyptic sect, or even Qaraite, complexity has set in, hence more accurate reflection of reality. It is now standard to admit that the denomination associated with the scrolls shifted theological positions as the generations came and went, and that what was seen in the scrolls in *  First published 1992. 1   Author’s note: It is with distinct pleasure that I dedicate the following to my friend and colleague Shemaryahu Talmon. It is over forty years since the discovery of Qumran Cave 1 and time perhaps for general assessments of the significance for biblical studies of the plethora of scrolls and fragments found in numerous loci along the west bank of the Jordan Rift. 2   What follows is intended to supplement rather than update Sanders, “Dead Sea Scrolls – A Quarter Century.” A fine update has been done by Wise, “Dead Sea Scrolls, Part 1” and “Dead Sea Scrolls, Part 2.” A reassessment of their value especially for history of transmission of the text has been made by Vermes, “Biblical Studies and the Dead Sea Scrolls.” 3   Stegemann, “Die Entstehung der Qumrangemeinde,” was among the first to use thorough-going literary-critical methods.

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the early days may well be there but is now related to aspects of its history. It is also important to remember that some of the scrolls may have been acquisitioned from outside the community.4

History of Early Judaism Even before “economy of explanation” yielded ground to the more realistic historical principle of seeking the complexity of human enterprise (the ambiguity of reality), the scrolls had begun to have a profound effect on the history of early Judaism. Nearly everyone grants that the winner in the debate at the turn of the century between Schürer, Bousset, and Gressmann, on the one hand, and George Foot Moore, on the other, was Moore.5 For Moore, Pharisaic-rabbinic Judaism was normative or orthodox, while that which is reflected in much of the pseudepigrapha (in sensu lato) was heterodox. This was reflected as well in Hermann Strack and Paul Billerbeck’s Kommentar zum Neuen Testament. On the other hand, Liebermann’s two volumes on the considerable amount of Greek influence in Jewish Palestine, and indeed, finally, in the Babylonian Talmud, set the stage for what was to become a counterpoint to the Moore synthesis.6 Moses Hadas, Elias Bickermann, and Morton Smith pioneered the position that has become, in part because of the scrolls, the regnant position associated with the work of Jacob Neusner in one direction and Martin Hengel in another.7 Traditions in Tannaitic literature from the period of formative Judaism remain for the most part difficult to date, while we now have a plethora of very datable literature from the pre-Christian period that indicates a complex picture of early Judaism in which religious pluralism was its hallmark. The significant term is relecture. The scrolls emanating directly out of Palestinian soil itself and, according to most of those who now work on them, dating to the Hellenistic-Roman period, have caused a re-reading of all of Jewish literature of the period; and that re-reading has issued in what Michael Stone of Hebrew University has described as the broad pluralism of early Judaism.8 As one reads through contribution by contribution of the various scholars who worked on James Charlesworth’s

4   See Tov, “Orthography and Language”; and now Tov, “Hebrew Biblical Manuscripts”; Tov and Johann Cook of Stellenbosch are compiling a computerized database that will be invaluable for all future such work; see Tov and Cook, “Computerized Database.” Cook and his students have done encoding on the basis of the Dead Sea Scrolls film collection at the Ancient Biblical Manuscript Center in Claremont. 5  Moore, Judaism in the First Centuries, esp. 3:17 – 22. 6  Lieberman, Greek in Jewish Palestine; Lieberman, Hellenism in Jewish Palestine. 7  Hengel, Judaism and Hellenism. The Neusner corpus up to 1984 is in Sanders, “Major Scholarly Works” (incomplete listing but indicative of his work). A recent title pertinent to the point here would be Neusner, Mishnah before 70. 8   Stone, “Judaism at the Time of Christ”; Stone, Scriptures, Sects and Visions; Stone and Satran, Emerging Judaism.

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two volume Pseudepigrapha,9 one sees with what firmness the new position has taken hold. A small but significant aspect of the new picture is that we now have among the scrolls the original language forms, among others, of Tobit, Sirach, the Testaments of Levi (Aramaic) and Naphtali (Hebrew), Enoch (Aramaic), and Jubilees (portions from caves 2, 3, 4, and 11).10 More significant perhaps is the fact that some previously unknown texts from Qumran can now be classified as pseudepigraphic in the same sense. Not only do we know a great deal more about the early Judaism of the Hellenistic-Roman period, but we know increasingly more about the Persian period. The same re-reading of other sources that has issued in greater clarity about the second half of early Judaism is issuing in some clarity now about the earlier period, which for so long has resisted probing. Shemaryahu Talmon, whom we honor in this volume [i. e., “Shaʿarei Talmon”], has undertaken a major study of early Judaism in the Persian period. This is a most felicitous prospect, since surely Talmon is the person of the moment who has his hands on the resources necessary to reconstruct this all-essential link in a history that has heretofore largely escaped us. The history of Judaism from its inception in the sixth century BCE, through what Jacob Neusner calls formative Judaism by the close of the Talmud, has gone within a generation from uncertainty to increasing clarity. Combined with the work proceeding in the literatures and history in cognate fields of the same time frame, work in early and formative Judaism is providing greater possibilities for responsible theories about the socio-political contexts out of which these many texts arose. And while secure dating for much of early rabbinic tradition still eludes us, even there we may hope some day to have firmer theories of dating than heretofore, precisely because of what has transpired in these forty years.

Second Testament Study There are a number of areas of Second Testament study in which the scrolls have been influential. I shall touch on four only. One of the most foundational impacts the scrolls have had is in study of the languages of Palestine in the first centuries BCE and CE. Most of the scrolls, of whichever provenance, are in Hebrew, though a sizeable minority are in Aramaic, such as the Genesis Apocryphon, the Job Targum, the Books of Enoch, Tobit, the Testament of Levi, and others. While finds in Cave 7 may be unrelated to the Qumran library, the Greek fragments from that provenance as well as the Greek materials from the caves related to the period between the two Jewish wars of the late first and early second centuries CE, in addition to continuing discoveries of hard-media inscriptions, have caused a reassessment of what lan 9

 Charlesworth, OT Pseudepigrapha.   See Fitzmyer, Dead Sea Scrolls; Sanders, “Palestinian Manuscripts 1947 – 1972”; Stegemann, “Die Entstehung der Qumrangemeinde.” 10

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guages were commonly used in first-century Palestine – just as Liebermann had found in the more erudite and scholarly rabbinic literature. Nor can the use of Greek be limited to the Decapolis or Galilean area. Bar Kochba used Greek in the tense situations of sending commands to his lieutenants in the Judean area itself. Sevenster, Emerton, Díez Macho, Fitzmyer, Lapide, and Maxey have convincingly demonstrated the widespread and common use of Greek throughout Palestine in the late Hasmonean and Herodian periods.11 Jesus himself was in all likelihood trilingual, and I shouldn’t wonder, as Morton Smith has long said, if he could not also read signs in Latin posted for Roman troops. One of the widely-recognized areas in which the scrolls have been helpful in New Testament work is word studies. While this is a disputed area and while it is not certain whether the new light cast on certain New Testament Greek words is pertinent in all contexts, there can be little doubt that the scrolls have provided a glossary of theological terms used in Palestine in the first centuries BCE and CE. Four come to mind without specific searches. One was the focus of Raymond E. Brown’s dissertation at Johns Hopkins University, which showed that the word μυστήριον in the New Testament was comparable to the word K‫רז‬K in the scrolls; in both it is used in certain contexts to mean an ingroup kind of hermeneutic whereby to read Scripture.12 Light may also be shed on the enigmatic phrase in 2 Thess 2:7, μυστήριον . . . τῆς ἀνομίας, which shows up in the Cave 1 Book of Mysteries (1Q27) as K‫רזי פשע‬K, the mysteries of transgression or of lawlessness. Another was the topic of a study by James Robinson, “Die Hodajot Formel,” as it shows up in some New Testament prayers and hymns. Yet another was the recognition that οἱ πολλοί in the New Testament were not necessarily “crowds”; that is, the term and its morphological variants in the New Testament may mean in some passages the same as K‫הרבים‬K in some Qumran passages, where it designates not crowds but rather an ingroup with decision-making power. Many more could be listed; these are but acceptable examples. As in the case of determining the exact contextual meaning of any word in any passage, especially in the onerous task of having to choose only one for translation purposes, care must be taken in this type of cross-reference as well. A New Testament writer may or may not be using a Palestinian adaptation of a Greek word or term; but the fact that we now have a valuable resource of theological vocabulary used in Palestine in the first century cannot be gainsaid. Beyond word study is the area of theological concept. The fact that some of the Qumran literature seems to verge on dualism on the one hand and determinism on the other may help understand similar difficulties in the New Testament. It has always been a problem in a theocentric, monotheizing religion to understand the use of certain non-monotheizing cultural idioms and mores to 11  Sevenster, Do You Know Greek?; Emerton, “Problem of Vernacular Hebrew”; Díez Macho, “La lengua hablada”; Fitzmyer, “Languages of Palestine”; Lapide, “Insights from Qumran”; Maxey, “Languages of Jesus.” 12  Brown, Semitic Background. For other studies on the bearing of the DSS on Second Testament issues, see Fitzmyer, Dead Sea Scrolls, 124 – 30.

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address the problem of evil. The New Testament at times seems to embrace Hellenistic-era idioms that in other non-Jewish, non-Christian contexts of the time were patently polytheistic. The fact that the Qumran denominational literature also does not completely avoid such idioms provides a control study in how to understand the use of ancient contemporary polytheistic idioms in a monotheizing context. Once one has addressed that problem, one realizes that all biblical literature reflects the idioms and mores of the several cultural eras out of which it has emerged and through which it has passed. Precisely a canonical perspective evolves from the exercise so that one learns how to understand and exegete literary expressions from the five cultural eras over some twelve to eighteen hundred years from the Bronze Age, the Iron Age, the Persian period, the Hellenistic era, and the Roman period, no one of which is more important or imposing than another. Thus, the idioms of the Hellenistic-Roman era no longer stand isolated but can be addressed in a series of control studies about how to understand the monotheizing process without tripping over the idioms of the various cultures in which the monotheizing struggle took place within the biblical paradigm. Various prominent figures in the New Testament now have counterparts for control study as well, such as Melchizedek, Enoch, Beliaal / Beelzebub, various angelic as well as demonic figures, and others that populate the literature of early Judaism. Perhaps the most important area in which study of the scrolls has influenced New Testament study is that of the function of Scripture and tradition in early Jewish literature. If one focuses one’s study of the Nachleben of Scripture and tradition in the Septuagint, the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, and the scrolls, one feels right at home when turning to study the same in the New Testament. It is no more or less apologetic or proof-texting there than elsewhere. On the contrary, one encounters the same range of function as earlier. The differences begin to show up not in the New Testament but in later forms in rabbinic literature, where function of Scripture is at times similar as in the earlier Jewish literature, but with distinct and describable differences. This is one major reason some of us find it difficult to limit the concept of midrash to the literary forms to which the word was later applied in rabbinic literature. Midrash means searching Scripture for the light it can cast on new situations where applied; it clearly does not imply commentary on Scripture in the modern sense of the term. Scripture and tradition function in early Jewish and Christian literature in six different modes: (a) citation with formula; (b) citation without formula; (c) allusion; (d) paraphrase; (e) echo; (f) literary shape. The first three modes have been the object of considerable study. In the case of the first two, one can proceed immediately to the question of the ancient hermeneutics by which the Scripture or tradition is caused to function in the passage under study. Whether it is an allusion or a citation, the question of the hermeneutics whereby the New Testament author or speaker re-presents the tradition or figure remains the same. How does the newer author or speaker cause the citation, the tradition, or the scriptural figure to function in the new situation, and to what effect? Once one has done this, the work has only begun; but I shall return to this crucial point in a moment.

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The fourth and sixth modes, paraphrase and literary shape, require stricter control measures. If one moves through study of the Qumran literature as well as other pre-Christian early Jewish literature, focusing on the function of Scripture and tradition there – and one can hardly avoid it – then one sees clearly that paraphrase of Scripture into the “other words” of the newer day is normal and necessary both (a) for understanding the old Bronze or Iron Age idiom, or for understanding the early Hellenistic Greek of the Septuagint in later koiné speech; and (b) for the adaptation the tradent wishes to make of it. Then if one moves on into similar study of Scripture and tradition in the New Testament, one not only feels quite at home in this regard, but one can apply the same methods of study. The observation is inescapable (a)  that later believing communities paraphrased Scripture for clearer understanding of the older mode of speech, and (b)  that later authors and writers, whether orally or in written form, often wanted to compose what they had to say scripturally. This means not only the literary phenomenon of rewriting Scripture, such as the Chronicler’s use of the Genesis-to-Kings literature, or the Genesis Apocryphon and the Temple Scroll; it also means the phenomenon of writing new material in the mode, style, and shape of the older literature that had become or was becoming sacred. After careful study of the products of earlier believing communities, both the highly hellenized literature and the less so, one recognizes similar literature in the New Testament. And while there are a few literary forms in the New Testament that seem dissimilar, there are many that exhibit what must have been a conscious desire on the part of early Christians, whether previously Jewish or not, to write up scripturally what they believed God had done in Christ and was doing in the early church. While such study may not solve the problem of the genre Gospel, I am convinced that the problems that that genre presents would appear less intractable if Scripture, including the Septuagint form of it, were understood as a source for Gospel writing every bit as important as Mark, Q, and whatever other Christian sectarian source was used in their composition, and if the socio-political situation and needs of early Christian communities are factored into consideration of what was written, as much as an individual Evangelist’s intentions or literary redactional and compositional contribution.

First Testament Text Criticism The area of study that has perhaps been most affected by the DSS is First Testament text criticism. There are two major text-critical projects in place at the present time that reflect impact of the discovery of the scrolls: the Hebrew University Bible Project (HUBP) and the United Bible Societies’ Hebrew Old Testament Text Project (HOTTP). Due to the new situation, caused by work on the scrolls rather than on Codex Aleppensis, both projects had to revise the history of transmission of the Hebrew text. The remarkable thing is that without collu-

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sion between them they each reached a similar revision.13 This revision has been as remarkable as the revision of the history of early Judaism, noted earlier. The UBS project started in 1969 and published its results as Critique textuelle de l’Ancien Testament, volume 1 dealing with the so-called historical books and volume 2 with Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Lamentations; volume 3 is nearly ready with at least two to follow.14 The basic ground shift took place when it became obvious that the history of transmission of the text had to be rewritten. The first and clearest observation from discovery of the scrolls was that a remarkable difference could be observed between the Qumran biblical scrolls and the supposed Vorlage to the Septuagint, on the one hand, and the biblical scrolls that were found in the later caves at Masada and in the Buqeia, ranging in date between the fall of Jerusalem in 70 CE and the defeat of the second Jewish revolt in 135. The Qumran scrolls and the Septuagint (Vorlage) are now the oldest biblical literature that we have, ranging in date from the third century BCE (both the LXX of the Pentateuch and the earliest fragments of Samuel from Cave 4). All these, along with the citations of Scripture in the scrolls, Apocrypha, Pseudepigrapha, and the New Testament, indicate that the earliest biblical literature we have exhibits a certain amount of textual fluidity. This was the starting point. The next observation was that we have no biblical manuscripts from the close of the Bar Kochba revolt until the Cairo Codex of the Prophets (896 CE) and the great Tiberian masoretic manuscripts in the tenth century CE (925 for A and 1009 for L; rumors persist about eighth-century manuscripts, but they await confirmation). The situation that presented itself, therefore, was that we now have a plethora of texts and versions from the late early Jewish period, a significant number from the very beginning of the formative Jewish period, then nothing but versional evidence, especially the Peshitta and Vulgate, until the ninth / tenth century and the fruit of the work of the tireless Masoretes. When conjoined with the observation that we still have no autographs of any biblical document, and that the debate between de Lagarde and Kahle has not been neatly solved, there emerged a four-period history of transmission of the text. The first period may be called the period of the Ur-text, that is, the so-called and supposed originals. In contrast to earlier concepts of text criticism, this is simply not the province of text criticism as it is presently conceived. That is the rightful province of historical criticism, of the historian in the workshop who continues to be interested in what someone actually said or wrote in the Iron Age or Persian period. The fact that historical criticism has fallen on relatively hard days underscores perhaps the point that this is beyond the competence of 13   See Talmon, “Aspects of the Textual Transmission”; Talmon, “Old Testament Text”; Goshen-Gottstein, Isaiah: Sample Edition, 11 – 20; Goshen-Gottstein, “Hebrew Biblical Manuscripts”; Barthélemy, “Text, Hebrew, History of.” 14  Barthélemy, Critique textuelle. An English translation of the introduction is in preparation by UBS. [Vol. 3 (1992), Vol. 4 (2005), and Vol. 5 (2015) now complete the series.]

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text criticism. It is difficult any longer to say that the task of text criticism is to establish the original text; in fact, we now wonder how much sanguinity there was in targeting such a goal. It is better to say that the task of text criticism is to establish the most responsible critical text available from use of the best methods now in place based on all the readings now available. This was a point discussed in the HOTTP annual meetings in Freudenstadt. The second period extends from the earliest available fragments in the third century BCE to the fall of Jerusalem in 70 CE. This we call the period of the accepted texts. It is a period marked not only by (limited) textual fluidity but also perhaps by different families of texts; this latter point is rather warmly debated at the moment. The third period is that of the received text, which extends from the fall of Jerusalem to the close of the pre-masoretic period. The fourth period is, of course, the masoretic and post-masoretic. Again, the salient observation is that the fluidity so characteristic of the Qumran / Septuagint texts and of the citations in the literature of the early Jewish period and in the New Testament ceases toward the end of the first century CE with the biblical manuscripts from the period between the revolts and the creation of the Greek texts we call Aquila, Theodotion, and Symmachus (all of which exhibit remarkable tendencies, Aquila and Theodotion notably so, not only toward stability of text, and indeed a very proto-masoretic text, but even literalism, as well). Following the lead of Moshe Greenberg already in 1955,15 but especially taking account of evidence in the Dodecapropheton he was assigned to study, D. Barthélemy in 1963 developed a theory of text stabilization. This stabilization began with proto-Theodotionic tendencies in the Dodecapropheton (dating to the middle of the first century BCE) and was complete by the last quarter of the first century CE. With his publication, the stage was set for revision of the history of text transmission.16 The next most significant event was Moshe Goshen-Gottstein’s watershed article that finally dealt the death blow to the earlier modes of “establishing original texts.”17 In that article, Goshen-Gottstein showed beyond serious challenge that the famous collations of medieval manuscripts in Kennicott and de Rossi were almost entirely post-masoretic and could not be depended on to reflect pre-masoretic readings. The various efforts to find in those collations the reading one wanted based on literary and historical-critical study were summarily checked. Such readings as one may find in Kennicott, de Rossi, or even late medieval and Renaissance manuscripts, depart from the MT and for the most part do not antedate it. This is not to say that one can totally ignore them; there are some that are more interesting than others and sometimes offer variants worthy of note, such as Kenn. 248 and others.18 15

  Greenberg, “Stabilization of the Text.”  Barthélemy, Les devanciers d’Aquila; Tov, Greek Minor Prophets Scroll; see Sanders, “Text and Canon: Concepts and Method.” 17   Goshen-Gottstein, “Hebrew Biblical Manuscripts.” 18   See Barthélemy, Critique textuelle, 1:*65 – *114, for explication of method. 16

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As the new concepts and method develop it has become increasingly clear that the integrity of the full manuscript context in which a supposed variant reading is found must be respected before an isolated text or versional reading is pillaged for emendation of the MT. Fortunately, structural analysis of texts has now developed to the point that it has become a major tool for discovering the integrity of an ancient witness in order to perceive how the supposed variant fits into the text of the witness as a whole, whether the witness be a text or a version; and it has become a crucial control factor for discerning whether a supposed variant, or a plus or a minus, reflects true variants, or reflects a different concept on the part of the copyist or translator of what the text being copied or translated was actually saying, or indeed should say to his or her community. Clearly most ancient copyists and translators wanted to convey their understanding of the Vorlage to their communities; they wanted to do their best for their people. And that understanding, due to the later problems they faced in their sociohistorical contexts, was sometimes a resignification of what modern scholarship perceives “the original” should have said due to our supposed advanced knowledge of the earlier biblical period. The perception of the later copyist or translator of what the Vorlage meant would clearly have an influence on how they “corrected” what they copied or on how they understood a multivalent term being translated. This is especially the case in the period before textual stabilization, but occurs thereafter as well. A careful structural analysis of each larger unit or pericope in a manuscript or family of manuscripts, which apparently has “a superior reading” at a crucial point in it, may simply indicate a different conception of what the Vorlage meant and not a true variant. This is a major reason the Ancient Biblical Manuscript Center has been established in Claremont: it has become crucial to be able to see supposed variants in their fuller contexts, where manuscripts are available, and not only in prior collations, apparatus, and footnotes – or even in printed critical editions, which have been of necessity filtered through the biases of competence and interests of their editors. There are two worthy questions that need addressing at this point in discussion of recent text-critical developments. The one has to do with the importance of philology in discerning earliest readings, and the other concerns the range of readings targeted by the new method in text criticism. They are related questions having to do with the continuing desire to arrive at a so-called original reading. Not only philology, but numerous other disciplines enter the picture of decision making about which reading of those available should be chosen. Both HUBP and HOTTP agree that outright conjecture is not the province of text criticism, but of literary and historical criticism, and is the prerogative of the historian rightly interested in the ipsissima verba of a biblical composition. Such conjectures will continue to be the base of individual scholars’ translations, just as dramatic shifts in meanings of Hebrew terms based on philology will continue to be used in similar scholarly translations. It is the position of both text-critical projects that such conjectures – that is, outright creations of new readings based on no firm textual evidence whatever, and variant meanings based on comparative philology that in effect amount to conjectures – are not only not the

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province of text criticism but are improper in translations designed for believing communities. Leaps to other meaning based on undifferentiated use of Arabic, Ugaritic, or other languages cognate and contemporary to Hebrew must be restrained by careful control in comparative philology.19 The text critic of the sort I have been describing takes into account all the available data and in interdisciplinary discussion around the worktable reconstructs what an original text might have been in order to be able as well as possible to understand the beautiful ruins left in the text. But when it comes to choosing a reading and its meaning, only those readings that ancient believing communities bequeathed us in the available manuscripts, texts, and versions are the valid options. Having looked at what scholarly expertise of our day can reconstruct, the text critic then looks critically, once more and again, at the available readings and makes a decision based on as sound method as possible, including evaluation in terms of the conceptuality and reality lying back of full textual and versional contexts. What the individual scholar or translator does with all the evidence and expertise is another matter. The text critic observes the limitations of the task with the best possible methods that have been honed and developed in the past twenty-five or so years, largely because of the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Canonical Criticism The current position of text criticism can only be understood in depth if it is seen in the light of recent studies in canon, for text and canon have to be seen in the same light. Stabilization of text and stabilization of canon are interwoven. This is the case in New Testament text criticism as well if the latest views of the date of the Muratorian fragment are observed.20 But the important point is the question of authority and inspiration. The historian wants to know as well as possible what happened. And as historians, text critics will continue to reconstruct the history of the formation of the Bible, including all the original moments it is possible to rebuild. But one must ask why. Is it only because we are by training and trade historians, or are we historians perhaps because of an uninvestigated theory of authority and inspiration, namely, that what we want to be in the Bible is what the original contributor said or wrote because of a tacit understanding of what was inspired, or impacted in antiquity by Reality (die Realität – a term some theologians use for God). This whole amorphous area of our work might be illuminated if we were more self-conscious of our theory of authority and were to modify it to fit the 19

  As suggested in Barr, Comparative Philology.   Sundberg, “Canon of the New Testament”; for arguments recently advanced for maintaining the earlier date of the Muratorian fragment, see Metzger, Canon of the NT, 191 – 201; for the later date (350 – 400 CE) see McDonald, Formation of the Christian Biblical Canon, 135 – 39. On the principal point, see Sanders, “Text and Canon: Old Testament and New.” 20

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givens. The tacit, or expressed, understanding of inspiration has been God or Holy Spirit (or Shekinah, or Reality) working with an individual in antiquity, whose words were then more-or-less accurately preserved by disciples, schools, and scribes. The more responsible theory, given the data and facts we actually have, would be that of God or Holy Spirit (or Shekinah, truth, or Reality) working all along the path of formation of these texts.21 This theory of authority could then include all the so-called spurious or secondary passages (which are in the Bible whether we like it or not), all the discrepancies and anomalies, and the fact that more often than not what we have in the beautiful ruins of many passages is what the Reality of later believing communities bequeathed us.22 This theory could include the fact that in the canonical paradigm there are numerous cases of resignification of what a passage might originally have meant, not only the doublets and triplets, but also what Samuel Sandmel called haggadah within Scripture, the numerous cases of the reappearance of an early idea or passage in which they are considerably resignified.23 Text and canon go together; they cannot be separated if we are to account responsibly for the data so far accumulated and move forward to more responsible study of these texts as the tradents of the current generation and the next to come. Tradents always engage in the two factors of stability and adaptability if the texts and traditions studied are to make sense; and they must make sense in the tradent’s idiom if study of them is responsible. Tradents are always engaged simultaneously in the two tasks of preservation and re-presentation.24 The basic reason for having a manuscript center where scholars are no longer dependent on others’ apparatus and notes, but can do comparative study of as many of the received texts as possible, is so that each generation can obey its own best lights and follow its own developed and responsible methods. William F. Albright was apparently wont to say that the archeologist should leave more of a tell undug then dug, for two reasons: the next generations will probably have better tools with which to work, and sharper questions to put to the data. Another way, a more traditional way of putting that, might be to say that the reason for such a collection of enhanced images of ancient and medieval manuscripts of the biblical texts (and nonbiblical for comparative study) is that each generation, and each scholar, may investigate the primary evidence, confident that they are not perpetuating past errors but can see for themselves all the possible readings in the integrity of the full context of the texts and versions in the manuscripts where found. Humanists need not shy from a traditional concept such as Shekinah or Holy Spirit; it is but the acceptance of human humility even while using the most

21   An idea at least already latent in Barr, Old and New in Interpretation, 26 – 27. For an explicit statement of it, see Sanders, Canon and Community, xv – xviii. 22   See Talmon, “Textual Study of the Bible”; Talmon, “Heiliges Schrifttum.” 23   Sandmel, “Haggadah within Scripture,” 110 – 11. 24   See, e. g., Knight, Rediscovering the Traditions, 5 – 20; and Fishbane, Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel, 1 – 19.

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advanced tools of the Enlightenment on the received texts, indeed the recognition that we have much, much more to learn about Reality than we ever “now know.” The revealing of that knowledge, the combination of types of knowledge, the coming by it, has an immeasurable dimension that needs to be recognized if responsibility in any generation is to be recognized by the next, and passed on. Bibliography Barr, James. Comparative Philology and the Text of the Old Testament. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968. 2nd ed., Comparative Philology and the Text of the Old Testament with Corrections and Additions. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1987. Barr, James. Old and New in Interpretation: A Study of the Two Testaments. New York: Harper & Row, 1966. Barthélemy, Dominique. Critique textuelle de l’Ancien Testament. OBO 50. Fribourg: Presses universitaires; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1982 – 86. [Now 5 vols. to 2016.] Barthélemy, Dominique. Les devanciers d’Aquila: Première publication intégrale du texte des fragments du Dodécaprophéton. VTSup 10. Leiden: Brill, 1963. Barthélemy, Dominique. “Text, Hebrew, History of.” In IDBSup 878 – 84. Brown, Raymond E. The Semitic Background of the Term “Mystery” in the New Testament. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1968. Charlesworth, James H. The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha. 2 vols. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1983, 1985. Díez Macho, Alejandro. “La lengua hablada por Jesucristo.” Oriens Antiquus 2 (1963) 95 – 132. Emerton, John A. “The Problem of Vernacular Hebrew in the First Century A. D. and the Language of Jesus.” JTS 29 (1973) 1 – 23. Fishbane, Michael A. Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel. Oxford: Clarendon, 1985. Fitzmyer, Joseph A. The Dead Sea Scrolls: Major Publications and Tools for Study. SBLSBS 8. Missoula, MT: SBL, 1977. Fitzmyer, Joseph A. “The Languages of Palestine in the First Century AD.” CBQ 32 (1970) 501 – 31. Reprinted in A Wandering Aramean: Collected Aramaic Essays. SBLMS 25. Atlanta: Scholars, 1979. Goshen-Gottstein, Moshe H., ed. The Book of Isaiah: Sample Edition with Introduction. Jerusalem: Magnes, 1965. Goshen-Gottstein, Moshe H. “Hebrew Biblical Manuscripts: Their History and Their Place in the HUBP Edition.” Bib 48 (1967) 243 – 90. Reprinted in Qumran and the History of the Biblical Text, edited by Frank M. Cross and Shemaryahu Talmon, 42 – 89. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975. Greenberg, Moshe. “The Stabilization of the Text of the Hebrew Bible, Reviewed in the Light of the Biblical Materials from the Judean Desert.” JAOS 76 (1956) 157 – 67. [Reprinted in The Canon and Masorah of the Hebrew Bible: An Introductory Reader, edited by Sid Z. Leiman, 298 – 326. New York: Ktav, 1974.] Hengel, Martin. Judaism and Hellenism: Studies in Their Encounter in Palestine during the Early Hellenistic Period. Translated by John Bowden. 2 vols. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1974. Knight, Douglas A. Rediscovering the Traditions of Ancient Israel. SBLDS 9. Missoula, MT: SBL, 1973. Lapide, Pinchas. “Insights from Qumran into the Languages of Jesus.” RevQ 8 (1975) 483 – 501.

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Lieberman, Saul. Greek in Jewish Palestine: Studies in the Life and Manners of Jewish Palestine in the II – IV Centuries. New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1942. Lieberman, Saul. Hellenism in Jewish Palestine. New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1962. Maxey, Z. “The Languages of Jesus.” Unpublished paper for the Claremont Graduate School. McDonald, Lee M. The Formation of the Christian Biblical Canon. Nashville: Abingdon, 1988. [Rev. ed. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1995.] Metzger, Bruce M. The Canon of the New Testament: Its Origin, Development and Significance. Oxford: Clarendon, 1987. Moore, George Foot. Judaism in the First Centuries of the Christian Era: The Age of the Tannaim. 3 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1927 – 30. Neusner, Jacob. The Mishnah before 70. BJS 51. Atlanta: Scholars, 1987. Robinson, James M. “Die Hodajot-Formel in Gebet und Hymnus des Frühchristentums.” In Apophoreta: Festschrift für Ernst Haenchen, edited by Walther Eltester and Franz H. Kettler, 194 – 235. BZNW 30. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1964. Sanders, James A. Canon and Community: A Guide to Canonical Criticism. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984. Sanders, James A. “The Dead Sea Scrolls – A Quarter Century of Study.” BA 36 (1973) 109 – 48. Sanders, James A. “Major Scholarly Works of Jacob Neusner.” Special Neusner Issue BTB 14 (1984) 122 – 25. Sanders, James A. “Palestinian Manuscripts 1947 – 1972.” JJS 24 (1973) 74 – 83. [Reprinted in Qumran and the History of the Biblical Text, edited by Frank M. Cross and Shemaryahu Talmon, 401 – 13. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975.] Sanders, James A. “Text and Canon: Concepts and Method.” In From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, by James A. Sanders, 125 – 51. Philadelphia: Fortress 1987. [Original JBL 98 (1979) 5 – 29.] Sanders, James A. “Text and Canon: Old Testament and New.” In Mélanges Dominique Barthélemy: Études bibliques offertes à l’occasion de son 60e anniversaire, edited by Pierre Casetti, Othmar Keel, and Adrian Schenker, 373 – 94. OBO 38. Fribourg: Presses universitaires; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1981. Sandmel, Samuel. “The Haggadah within Scripture.” JBL 80 (1961) 105 – 22. Sevenster, Jan N. Do You Know Greek? NovTSup 19. Leiden: Brill, 1968. Stegemann, Hartmut. “Die Entstehung der Qumrangemeinde.” Habilitationsschrift, University of Bonn, 1965. Stone, Michael E. “Judaism at the Time of Christ.” Scientific American 288 (January 1973) 80 – 87. Stone, Michael E. Scriptures, Sects and Visions. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1980. Stone, Michael E., and David Satran. Emerging Judaism: Studies in the Fourth and Third Centuries BCE. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1988. Sundberg, Albert C., Jr. “Canon of the New Testament.” In IDBSup 136 – 40. Talmon, Shemaryahu. “Aspects of the Textual Transmission of the Bible in the Light of the Qumran Manuscripts.” Textus 4 (1964) 94 – 132. Reprinted in Qumran and the History of the Biblical Text, edited by Frank M. Cross and Shemaryahu Talmon, 226 – 63. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1975. Talmon, Shemaryahu. “Heiliges Schrifttum und kanonische Bücher aus jüdischer Sicht – Überlegungen zur Ausbildung der Grösse ‘Die Schrift’ im Judentum.” In Mitte der Schrift?: Ein jüdisch-christliches Gespräch: Texte des Berner Symposions vom 6. – 12. Januar 1985, edited by Martin Klopfenstein et al., 45 – 79. Bern: Lang, 1987.

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Talmon, Shemaryahu. “The Old Testament Text.” In The Cambridge History of the Bible. Vol. 1, From the Beginnings to Jerome, edited by Peter R. Ackroyd and C. F. Evans, 159 – 99. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970. Reprinted in Qumran and the History of the Biblical Text, edited by Frank M. Cross and Shemaryahu Talmon, 1 – 41. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975. Talmon, Shemaryahu. “The Textual Study of the Bible – A New Outlook.” In Qumran and the History of the Biblical Text, edited by Frank M. Cross and Shemaryahu Talmon, 321 – 400. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975. Tov, Emanuel, ed. The Greek Minor Prophets Scroll from Nahal Hever (8HevXIIgr). ˙ ˙ DJD 8. Oxford: Clarendon, 1990. Tov, Emanuel. “Hebrew Biblical Manuscripts from the Judaean Desert: Their Contribution to Textual Criticism.” JJS 39 (1988) 5 – 37. Tov, Emanuel. “The Orthography and Language of the Hebrew Scrolls Found at Qumran and the Origin of These Scrolls.” Textus 13 (1986) 31 – 57. Tov, Emanuel, and Johann Cook. “A Computerized Database for the Qumran Biblical Scrolls with an Appendix on the Samaritan Pentateuch.” JNSL 12 (1984) 133 – 37. Vermes, Geza. “Biblical Studies and the Dead Sea Scrolls 1947 – 1987: Retrospects and Prospects.” JSOT 39 (1987) 113 – 28. Wise, Michael. “The Dead Sea Scrolls, Part 1: Archaeology and Biblical Manuscripts.” BA 49 (1986) 140 – 54. Wise, Michael. “The Dead Sea Scrolls, Part 2: Nonbiblical Manuscripts.” BA 49 (1986) 228 – 43.

28 The Judean Desert Scrolls and the History of the Text of the Hebrew Bible The title announced for this presentation may be understood as the broad rubric under which I wish to share some thoughts about the impact of the Judean Desert Scrolls on our current understanding of the history of the text of the Hebrew Bible. It seemed to me appropriate to offer a perspective on that history at the annual meeting of the ASOR, celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the discovery of Qumran Cave 1, because of the role the ASOR has played from the beginning, both in critical study and publication of the biblical scrolls from the eleven Qumran caves. While scholars identified with other archaeological schools have made major contributions to the study of the biblical scrolls found among the Judean Desert Scrolls, there can be little dispute that scholars associated with the ASOR have been especially prominent in publication and critical study of the biblical texts. One thinks of Claremont colleagues William Brownlee and John Trever, who from the beginning were responsible for recognizing, photographing, and, in Brownlee’s case, assessing the value of the large Isaiah Scroll from Cave 1, as well as the biblical text of the Habakkuk Commentary. It is certainly appropriate at this time to recognize again the crucial contributions of Frank Moore Cross and Patrick William Skehan, to whom were assigned the lion’s share of the biblical fragments from Cave 4. And it is my privilege once more to express my personal gratitude to Cross, Skehan, and John Strugnell for their early scrutiny of my own effort to study and publish the editio princeps of the Psalms Scroll from Cave 11. If one went on also to recognize the work of the students of that first generation of American scrolls scholars, the list would expand beyond the limits of time and space of the present assignment. I was honored when the editors of the Hebrew University Bible asked me to join them last July in Jerusalem to offer a perspective on the work of the Hebrew University Bible Project (HUBP) on the history of the text of the Hebrew Bible. After forty years of labor by members of the HUBP and their assistants, The Book of Isaiah appeared in its entirety in 1995, and just now this past June, The Book of Jeremiah.1 The perspective from which I reviewed the work of the HUBP was that of participation on the United Bible Societies’ Hebrew Old Testament Text Project *  First published 1998. 1  Goshen-Gottstein, Hebrew University Bible: Isaiah; Rabin, Talmon, and Tov, Hebrew University Bible: Jeremiah.

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(HOTTP), of which I have been a member since its inception in 1969, as well as my own personal work on the history of the text of the masoretic Psalter. When viewed in terms of the history of textual criticism since the sixteenth century, the concept underlying the HUBP has been revolutionary. The HOTTP independently joined the HUBP in that revolution. The two projects had quite different needs out of which they separately grew, but they converged in concept as the independent work on each progressed. Both projects are issuing critical editions of the Hebrew Bible – the Hebrew University Bible (HUB), of which we now have two impressive volumes; and Biblia Hebraica Quinta (BHQ), which is scheduled to be published in the year 2002 [whole Bible now in 2025], with fascicles appearing intermittently in advance. The first fascicle, The Five Scrolls, should appear next summer in time for the Oslo meeting of the IOSOT. [It appeared in 2004.] The HUBP came into being because of the perceived necessity to locate the newly recovered Aleppo Codex in the history of development of the text of the Hebrew Bible. The HOTTP came into being because of the perceived necessity to assist national translation committees around the world in dealing with difficult passages, which often had conflicting solutions in the translations in the colonial or common Western languages resorted to by the local translation committees. Because the HOTTP committee was formed by Eugene Nida, the world-renowned linguist who headed the translations department of the UBS, its members were selected in large part because of their awareness of the changes being effected in the concept and practice of text criticism by the recovery of the Judean Desert Scrolls. Results from the study of the scrolls have profoundly affected both projects. The chief result of the study of the Judean Desert Scrolls for text criticism has been a completely new appreciation of the history of transmission of the biblical text.2 That history is the only ground upon which a valid and responsible hermeneutic of text criticism should be established.3 While the terminology used by the two projects is slightly different, the history perceived is the same. The discovery of the scrolls and the recovery of Codex Aleppensis provided both the near beginnings of the history of textual transmission and the near climax of its development in the hands of the Ben Asher family at the end of the ninth century CE and the beginning of the tenth. It was now possible to look at that history with a kind of confidence never before experienced in the annals of text criticism.4 The HOTTP decided early on that a clear distinction should be made between the history of the literary formation of the text and the subsequent history of the 2   See Goshen-Gottstein’s introduction in Isaiah: Sample Edition, 11 – 20, essentially reprinted in Goshen-Gottstein, Hebrew University Bible: Isaiah, xi – xx; extensively edited in Rabin, Talmon, and Tov, Hebrew University Bible: Jeremiah, ix – xiii. See also Talmon, “Aspects of the Textual Transmission,” and Talmon, “Old Testament Text,” esp. 164 – 66; and Barthélemy, “Text, Hebrew, History of.” 3   Sanders, “Hermeneutics of Text Criticism.” 4   The work of Tov on the Qumran system or practice, especially in orthography, morphology, and scribal practices, has been especially helpful; see Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible, esp. 100 – 117.

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transmission of the text. While those two histories overlap somewhat, it became clear that text criticism had become servile to the particular hermeneutic of exegesis out of which this or that scholar worked. A received reading would sometimes be condemned as corrupt in order for the scholar to construct a different text to fit what the scholar thought the text should have said; then would begin the search for a “variant reading” in the versions, or in Kennicott and de Rossi, to substantiate the new reading. And if such could not be found, then conjecture filled the bill. This view of text criticism still prevails in some circles, as can still be seen in commentaries and translations published in the second half of the twentieth century. The New English Bible (1970), The New American Bible (1970), the Bible de Jerusalem (1970), the New Revised Standard Version (1989), and even somewhat the Tanakh (published by the Jewish Publication Society in 1988), provide examples of translations built in part on the older view of text criticism. The older Revised Standard Version remained basically true to the King James Version as a formal equivalence translation. HUBP, HOTTP, and its offspring, BHQ, reject conjecture as a valid text-critical choice unless such a conjectural reading can be shown to have been the ancient cause of subsequent disparate readings; but such cases are rare. The history of transmission of the text begins with the earliest attested texts available, and that aspect of the history has been greatly advanced because of the discovery of the Judean Desert Scrolls. That marks what the HUBP calls the first stage of the history, which begins with the third-century BCE fragments from Qumran Cave 4, and with the earliest available Greek translations. Its main characteristic is textual fluidity – limited fluidity to be sure, but nonetheless quite distinct from the second stage. That fluidity, which Goshen-Gottstein saw continuing in a greatly reduced mode into the masoretic period, he called a “main current” with “rivulets” running alongside,5 but which Talmon calls “dominant family” and “variant traditions.”6 The UBS committee calls the stage of a retrojected Ur-text the First Period, and the stage of earliest attested texts the Second Period – with the clear understanding that the First Period is the province of exegesis, literary criticism, and historical reconstruction, but not that of text criticism.7 The HUBP, perhaps wisely, sees the history of transmission starting only with the period of the earliest attested texts, their First Stage and our Second Period. We decided to call the period of the literary development, or history of formation of the text, the First Period, toward the end of which textual transmission was admittedly already a part of the picture, so that the two should not be confused. There is then a clear demarcation between biblical manuscripts that fit the first stage and those that date from after the fall of Jerusalem – by and large, the distinction between biblical texts from Qumran and those from the other prove5

 Goshen-Gottstein, Hebrew University Bible: Isaiah, xvii.   Rabin, Talmon, and Tov, Hebrew University Bible: Jeremiah, xii. 7   See the trenchant discussion of the blurred distinctions between “higher” and “lower” criticism in Talmon, “Textual Study of the Bible.” 6

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nances covered by the general term, Judean Desert Scrolls. These latter (Murabbaʿat, Hever, Masada) fit a proto-MT pattern we already knew in the quite literal Greek ˙translations attributed to Aquila, Theodotion, and, to some extent, Symmachus, which date from early in the second century CE. The location of the Greek Minor Prophets Scroll from Nahal Hever in the late first century BCE, or early first century CE, provided the ˙clear˙ link necessary to see that the first century of the Common Era was one of intensive textual stabilization, which resulted in a standard that would be called proto-masoretic.8 In summation, the Judean Desert Scrolls have provided the base for the new history of transmission of the biblical text. The link in the transition from pre-masoretic to proto-masoretic thus came to light and became an essential part of the history of the text as now perceived. The shift from pre- to proto-masoretic is rather dramatic to observe, though “thin layers” of variant readings continue even into citations in rabbinic literature, and can be seen in the work of Jerome in the fourth and early fifth century CE. At the other end of the spectrum, it has become clear for many of us (pace Paolo Sacchi and the Turin School) that the variant readings in post-eleventh-century masoretic manuscripts collated by Kennicott, de Rossi, and Ginsburg were derivative and, with a few exceptions, do not have readings that pierce back before the masoretic period.9 The HUBP plans publishing text-critical commentaries later to accompany the fascicles of the HUB,10 whereas the HOTTP has published elaborate text-critical commentaries authored by Dominique Barthélemy in Critique textuelle de l’Ancien Testament (CTAT), three hefty volumes of which (of a total of six projected) have already appeared.11 Each fascicle of BHQ will be accompanied by a succinct text-critical commentary. Articles in Textus and elsewhere, written by members of the HUBP, stress the importance of bringing medieval rabbinic and Qaraite grammarians and commentators into text-critical discussions. Each problem dealt with by the HOTTP, as seen in CTAT, includes the medieval Jewish and Qaraite sources in its discussion of the textual history of each problem. And often we found that the medieval grammarians’ knowledge of Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic grammar and syntax, the philological tools and grammatical theories that they learned from grammarians of the Arabic language rather than from Greek and Latin classical grammarians (as is the case with modern European Hebrew grammars) offered the key to understand the textual problem addressed. Apparatus V to VI in HUB provides a bare beginning of such a commentary for the books of Isaiah and Jeremiah, but there can be no substitute for a text-critical commentary to accompany each biblical book, as is planned also for BHQ. The HUB offers two distinct innovations, which are very important. I know of no prior effort in a text edition to cover Scripture citations in the basic rab 8

 Barthélemy, Les devanciers d’Aquila; Tov, Greek Minor Prophets Scroll, ix – x, 1 – 2.   Goshen-Gottstein, “Hebrew Biblical Manuscripts.” 10   See the sample offered by Talmon and Tov, “Commentary on the Text of Jeremiah 1.” 11  [CTAT vol. 5 appeared in 2016.]  9

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binic literature: Mishnah, Tosefta, the two Talmudim, and the great Midrashim. The importance of this will only gradually be seen by some students of the text. As the editors carefully state, this is a delicate area that requires knowledge of the rabbinic mind to evaluate, but it certainly belongs in a critical edition of the text that claims to provide in its apparatus a succinct, but complete, history of the text of the Bible. If pre-masoretic readings survive into the proto-masoretic period, we need to know it, even if the “rivulets” or “thin layers” have considerably diminished in number. Citations in rabbinic literature demonstrate clearly the adaptability of the Masoretic Text even within rather clear-cut limits of manipulability. Scripture in the NT is virtually ignored in the HUB. Some formulaic citations of Scripture in the NT, especially in Matthew and Luke, may give evidence of the late-first-century situation of the stabilization of Old Greek translations; but most scriptural intertextuality in the NT gives clear evidence of the earlier period of textual fluidity similar to that in the Qumran literature.12 The other innovation of the HUB apparatus structure is its inclusion of readings from the Cairo Genizah.13 With these two innovations, the history of the text is presented more fully than in any other critical edition of the Bible so far attempted. One should note, too, that both the Isaiah and the Jeremiah volumes have included readings from the newly recovered Firkowitch manuscripts in Russia, photographed and studied by Malachi Beit-Arié and others.14 One does wonder, however, if the desire to present a full history of the text is to be realized if one can essentially overlook Origen’s second column. Despite giving “pride of place” to the early versions in the first apparatus, the HUB shows a tendency to privilege the Hebrew language witnesses. Most prior reviews of the Isaiah fascicles have highlighted the problem involved in grouping Judean scrolls readings with rabbinic citations, but the editors are fully aware of the problem, and equally aware of the problems that would arise in constructing the apparatus if they tried to set the historical shift from pre-masoretic to proto-masoretic at the beginning of the second century CE as the basic criterion, ignoring the distinction between text and versions.15 What is truly remarkable about the change that has taken place in the concept and theory of text criticism since the recovery of the Judean Desert Scrolls and of Codex Aleppensis at the middle of the twentieth century is the importance of the classical Tiberian masorah to understanding the text of the Hebrew Bible. It takes both ketiv and qere to make Miqra!16 A quick glance at the history of modern, or post-Renaissance, text criticism will help. When, in 1519, Martin Luther translated the NT into German, he sim12

  See Sanders, “Dead Sea Scrolls and Biblical Studies,” 326 – 29.   BHQ plans to include readings from the Cairo Genizah that date before 1000 CE. The BHS apparatus indiscriminately included some genizah readings. 14   See Beit-Arie, “Accessibility of the Russian Manuscript Collections.” 15   E. g., reviews of Goshen-Gottstein, Isaiah: Sample Edition by de Boer, Review of The Book of Isaiah: Sample Edition; and Roberts, Review of The Book of Isaiah: Sample Edition. By contrast, see Revell, Review of The Book of Isaiah: Parts 1 and 2. 16   See Sanders, “Task of Text Criticism,” esp. 316. 13

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ply used Erasmus’s text. But when, in 1523, he started work on translating the Hebrew Bible, he ran into text-critical problems. He basically used the Brescia Bible of 1494 and often used the Vulgate to translate text-critically difficult texts. He devised a hermeneutic of text criticism in order to choose among variant readings. That hermeneutic, which he called res et argumentum, was very clear; one chose the reading that pointed forward to the gospel of Jesus Christ. (Of course, by that he meant his understanding of Paul’s understanding of the gospel of Jesus Christ.) Following the lead of Elias Levita, Luther devalued the work of the Masoretes, which meant one could vocalize and parse the consonantal text without the masoretic constraints of vowels, accents, and masorot. This gave license to several generations of scholars to emend the text almost at will, such as Capellus, Houbigant, Morin, Simon, and the whole Critica Sacra movement. That situation led Baruch Spinoza in 1670 to publish his now famous tractate declaring that the truth of the Bible would be discovered in discerning the history of the formation of the biblical text and the authorial intentionality of its individual writers. In Spinoza, one saw the full result of the renaissance of Greek philosophy and culture, which had begun in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries: it was the original individual’s thought that was inspired and authoritative. The community dimension of biblical literature, in which anonymity of authorship was common, succumbed to hellenization in many ways, including the pseudepigraphic attribution of biblical books to well-known community figures of the past. The Semitic perspective of community identity was considerably modified. Spinoza, in his genius, went on to say that such a history would probably never be complete, and discerning authorial intentionality would more than likely not be possible. Spinoza was declared persona non grata by both synagogue and church, but his influence, whether he was cited or not, was considerable.17 By the time of Johann David Michaelis in the eighteenth century, the hermeneutic had changed from having the aim of pointing to the gospel of Jesus Christ to reconstructing as far as possible the ipsissima verba of biblical authors, but the denigration of the work of the Masoretes continued, since it clearly served the purpose of emending the text as exegesis of so-called original meanings indicated. In fact, that aspect of Luther’s hermeneutic persists in Old Testament scholarship today. Paul Kahle, whose work has probably been the most influential of any scholar in the twentieth century, dismissed the work of the Masoretes as a creation of the Ben Asher family, in effect continuing to denigrate the oral traditions on which it drew.18 The Hebrew University Bible, as well as Biblia Hebraica Quinta, in due course, will finally rectify that sad situation that has obtained since the sixteenth century. Both projects have, in effect, rehabilitated the worth and value of the work of the Tiberian Masoretes for understanding the text of the Bible.19 The corrective had begun with Gérard Weil’s work on the masorah for the BHS. 17

  Sanders, “Hermeneutics of Text Criticism,” esp. 2 – 4.  Kahle, Der hebräische Bibeltext seit Franz Delitzsch, 51. See the trenchant remarks by Goshen-Gottstein, “Rise of the Tiberian Bible Text,” 89. 19   See the discussion by Barthélemy in CTAT 3:ccxxviii – ccxxxviii. 18

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The HUBP struggled through a number of problems having to do with the logistics of constructing a critical text of the Bible. There were two precipices to avoid: on the one hand drowning the apparatus in innumerable alleged readings; or overworking the tools of analysis in order to pare down the number of notations.20 The solution they arrived at is probably as circumspect as a critical edition of the Bible can be: to abandon eclectic apparatus that quote supporting witnesses if exegesis requires it, but instead to construct five apparatus, four of which would contain notations of the several types of variant witnesses, and a fifth that would offer the editors’ subjective judgment as to which is a true variant. The four apparatus offer: the first, the apparently variant readings in the ancient versions; the second, those in witnesses to the Hebrew text; the third, the medieval biblical manuscripts; and the fourth, masoretic variations in spelling, vowels, and accents. The editors contend that they have presented in those four apparatus the basic history of the text ad loc., and with very few exceptions they are very thorough indeed.21 It is the fifth / sixth apparatus, first in modern Hebrew and then the same in English, that offers the subjective judgments of the editors about the results of using text-critical tools of analysis. This final apparatus hints at the eventual text-critical commentary proposed for each volume. In many ways, the commentaries should provide the excitement that the fifth apparatus only teasingly suggests.22 HOTTP worked the other way round. Through Barthélemy’s analytical reports in CTAT, we are providing in-depth text-critical commentaries on over five thousand textual problems of all sorts. Those commentaries offer extensive analyses of the history of the text for each problem addressed, from the earliest witnesses through the medieval grammarians and commentators, to the vagaries of modern critical research on the text. Now the work of constructing a handbook critical edition is in the hands of the next generation, the team working on BHQ. The task of text criticism is to locate true variants, of whatever literary length, over against pseudo-variants. The aim of text criticism is to establish the date in the earliest history of transmission of the text when inner literary developments are basically complete and when ancient Jewish believing communities accepted those texts as functionally canonical (Talmon’s Gruppentexte), at which text-critical judgments are designed to point. The goal of text criticism is finally to provide the soundest possible base for establishing the critically most responsible text for reading and translation. And HUB and BHQ of necessity have as their major job to present the essential, critically considered history of the text for use by readers of any and all persuasions, no matter their aim. 20

  As put by Goshen-Gottstein, Text and Language, xiii.   Granting some of the points made by de Boer in his review of Goshen-Gottstein’s Isaiah: Sample Edition, and the obvious observation that there is the subjectivity factor throughout the enterprise. 22   See the preliminary effort in Talmon and Tov, “Commentary on the Text of Jeremiah 1.” 21

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A difficulty both projects have is one shared by all efforts to present a fully critical edition of the text, and that is caused by the constraints imposed by the goal sought, namely a printed, critical edition. Both projects have to apologize at the outset that the printed mise-en-page cannot reproduce precisely the manuscript used as base text. Instead of the three-column width page or folio of the manuscript, it is necessary for both to present the text in a single column. The masorah magna has to be adjusted somewhat to make the printed page legible for scholars. And there are other adjustments demanded by the requirements of mise-en-page. But considerably more important is the fact that due to the constraints of a printed critical edition, each text-critical problem is presented in words and short phrases, leaving to the reader the all-important work of seeing those words and phrases in their fuller literary context. Time and again, we found on the HOTTP, and I assume this is the case for the teams producing both the HUB and BHQ, that it was not until we had placed the problem addressed in its fuller context that we could see what was really going on in the text and the place the problematic word or phrase had in that larger context. It is not until one can perceive the concept underlying the fuller text or version that one can understand why the variant text came to be. As Elias Bickerman pointed out, every translation was intended to serve the needs of the community for which it was translated.23 This is sometimes the case even for copies of the Hebrew text itself, as with the large Isaiah Scroll, and most of the Qumran biblical texts. Every tradent, whether copyist or translator, had a concept of what the text he or she was handing on meant; and his or her concept of necessity was lodged in the cultural thought forms of the tradent and the community served. Commonly, the concept we scholars attribute to a biblical text in its so-called original setting is not the one operative in the traditions derived from it. The later tradent may have had a cogent and consistent view of what the text meant in his or her contemporary cultural terms, and then slightly adapted the copy or translation at certain junctures in the text to fit that view. Fortunately, there are now available new sub-disciplines of biblical study that can help us understand the underlying concept behind a text or translation, as well as better comprehend our own understanding of the text – specifically, structure and concept analysis.24 The fuller text-critical commentaries in CTAT well reflect the use of such analysis, but it is impossible, as far as I can see, to present the arguments of such crucial studies in a printed critical edition of a text; only the bare results can be suggested, as they sometimes are indirectly in the fifth / sixth apparatus of the HUB. Text-critical commentaries must reflect this aspect of the work of text criticism far more than they have to date in order to move the art of text criticism away from the tendency to think in terms of isolated words and short phrases. This is perhaps not the place for me to present the case for the pluriform Bible, in which the larger contexts of variant understandings of the same text can 23

 Bickerman, Studies in Jewish and Christian History, 1:190.   See Sanders, “Task of Text Criticism,” esp. 326 – 27.

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be presented in full; but I feel compelled to mention it. This has begun to happen in Bibles that offer translations of the Hebrew Esther in the canonical Bible and translations of the Greek Esther, which presents quite a different concept of that wonderful story, in the so-called apocryphal section. And, of course, it also happens willy-nilly within the Hebrew Bible where there are doublets, such as the Ten Commandments, Ps 18 / 2 Sam 22, and many other doublets, even triplets. Full structure analysis of larger variant passages within biblical books will eventually, I think, show the necessity of presenting in parallel columns the Masoretic Text and the Septuagint understandings of the same story or pericope, simply because focus on the isolated words and short phrases does not present or even indicate the full history of the text. Both the HUBP and the HOTTP fully realize that we have never before had an editio critica maior of the Hebrew Bible. The Hebrew University Bible may be as close to such that we will ever attain, and the fact that it does so permits BHQ essentially to remain a Handausgabe for more general use. The HUB places us pretty far down the road toward an editio critica maior, presenting a history of the text, book by book; and CTAT places us pretty far down the road toward what a text-critical commentary should be, evaluating the whole history of textual problems addressed, book by book, from the earliest witnesses to the latest scholarly treatises. The concept underlying both projects is based on the same understanding of the history of transmission of the text. They both agree that while exegesis will always be a limited part of the text-critical enterprise, it cannot any longer be permitted to dominate it. And they both agree that the aim of text criticism can be neither to point to some future goal of history, nor to the primitive historical, even mythic origins of a text’s authorial intentionality, nor even to the earliest stages of a text’s transmission while it was still in literary development,25 but to that point in its history when the text first became the common literature of a believing community.26 And that point antedates both Christianity and rabbinic Judaism. If this is the case, then confessional differences among us should not be a stumbling block to producing a true editio critica maior together. BHQ, for the first time in the history of Biblia Hebraica, has Jews on the team preparing individual books.27 The postmodern period provides the context in which to have true dialogue, not in this case about our differing confessional identities, but about the texts on which those identities are based. Because of the acerbic nature of the charges and counter-charges in the early centuries of Jewish / Christian debates about what the text was and what it meant, Origen provided a six-col25

  Pace Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible, 313 – 49.   See Talmon’s remarks in “Textual Study of the Bible,” 325, in which he rejects the “three local texts” hypothesis in favor of understanding some texts as accepted by “a sociologically definable integrated body,” in our terms, a believing community, hence rendering that accepted text functionally canonical for that community. 27   David Marcus (Ezra–Nehemiah), Leonard Greenspoon (Joshua), Abraham Tal (Genesis), and Zipporah Talshir (1 – 2 Chronicles). 26

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umn comparison of the texts known to him in his time. He wanted the debate to become a dialogue. All of us in this room, Jew, Christian, and secular, are, to some extent or another, children of the Renaissance in Europe of Greco-Roman culture, or we would not participate in such a conference as this. And now we are moving into a period of intellectual history in which we are forced to realize that the observer is a part of the observed, and objectivity is but subjectivity under constraint. What better constraint can there be than dialogue in which our own most precious premises are carefully and thoughtfully critiqued by those who stand elsewhere? As Ferdinand Deist aptly put it, critique should not have the purpose of destroying the other’s position, but to correct and strengthen it for the sake of true dialogue at a yet higher level.28 Just as both projects agree that textual analysis should lead to the location of true variants, that is, to a point where the arguments on both sides of a potential textual variant are equally strong so that neither can be eliminated, thereby indicating the existence of a true variant,29 so we should now move beyond competition to see who is right, to cooperation to see what is right for the sake of all the communities we serve, whether confessional or professional. The day when the idea that individual schools or individual scholars alone can arrive at the truth of a text, and all others would eventually see the light, is gone. There is no question that the ASOR has made crucial contributions over these fifty years to understanding the history of the transmission of the text of the Hebrew Bible through the work of its members and friends on the Judean Desert Scrolls. Bibliography Barthélemy, Dominique. Critique textuelle de l’Ancien Testament. OBO 50. Fribourg: Presses universitaires; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1982, 1986, 1992. [Now 5 vols. to 2016.] Barthélemy, Dominique. Les devanciers d’Aquila: Première publication intégrale du texte des fragments du Dodécaprophéton. VTSup 10. Leiden: Brill, 1963. Barthélemy, Dominique. “Text, Hebrew, History of.” In IDBSup 878 – 84. Beit-Arié, Malachi. “The Accessibility of the Russian Manuscript Collections: New Perspectives for Jewish Studies.” Folio 13, no. 1 (Winter 1995) 1 – 7. Bickerman, Elias. Studies in Jewish and Christian History. 2 vols. Leiden: Brill, 1976. de Boer, P. A. H. Review of The Book of Isaiah: Sample Edition with Introduction, by Moshe H. Goshen-Gottstein. VT 16 (1966) 247 – 52. Deist, Ferdinand. Witnesses to the Old Testament. Pretoria: NG Kerkboekhandel, 1988. Goshen-Gottstein, Moshe H., ed. The Book of Isaiah: Sample Edition with Introduction. Jerusalem: Magnes, 1965. Goshen-Gottstein, Moshe H. “Hebrew Biblical Manuscripts: Their History and Their Place in the HUBP Edition.” Bib 48 (1967) 243 – 90. 28  Deist, Witnesses to the OT, 160 – 63. (The writer received the sad news that Deist died in Heidelberg, on leave from Stellenbosch, on July 12, 1997.) 29   Well expressed by Goshen-Gottstein in Text and Language, 201.

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Goshen-Gottstein, Moshe H., ed. The Hebrew University Bible: The Book of Isaiah. Jerusalem: Magnes, 1995. Goshen-Gottstein, Moshe H. “The Rise of the Tiberian Bible Text.” In Biblical and Other Studies, edited by Alexander Altmann, 79 – 122. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963. Goshen-Gottstein, Moshe H. Text and Language in Bible and Qumran. Jerusalem: Orient, 1960. Kahle, Paul. Der hebräische Bibeltext seit Franz Delitzsch. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1961. Rabin, Chaim, Shemaryahu Talmon, and Emanuel Tov, eds. The Hebrew University Bible: The Book of Jeremiah. Jerusalem: Magnes, 1997. Revell, Ernest J. Review of The Book of Isaiah: Parts One and Two, edited by Moshe H. Goshen-Gottstein. JBL (1977) 120 – 22. Roberts, B. J. Review of The Book of Isaiah: Sample Edition with Introduction, edited by Moshe H. Goshen-Gottstein. JTS (1967) 166 – 68. Sanders, James A. “The Dead Sea Scrolls and Biblical Studies.” In “Shaʿarei Talmon”: Studies in the Bible, Qumran, and the Ancient Near East Presented to Shemaryahu Talmon, edited by Michael A. Fishbane and Emanuel Tov, with Weston W. Fields, 323 – 36. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1992. Sanders, James A. “Hermeneutics of Text Criticism.” Textus 18 (1995) 1 – 26. Sanders, James A. “The Task of Text Criticism.” In Problems in Biblical Theology: Essays in Honor of Rolf Knierim, edited by Henry Sun and Keith L. Eades, 315 – 27. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997. Talmon, Shemaryahu. “Aspects of the Textual Transmission of the Bible in the Light of the Qumran Manuscripts.” Textus 4 (1964) 95 – 132. [Reprinted in Qumran and the History of the Biblical Text, edited by Frank M. Cross and Shemaryahu Talmon, 226 – 63. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1975.] Talmon, Shemaryahu. “The Old Testament Text.” In The Cambridge History of the Bible. Vol. 1, From the Beginnings to Jerome, edited by Peter R. Ackroyd and C. F. Evans, 159 – 99. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970. [Reprinted in Qumran and the History of the Biblical Text, edited by Frank M. Cross and Shemaryahu Talmon, 1 – 41. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975.] Talmon, Shemaryahu. “The Textual Study of the Bible – A New Outlook.” In Qumran and the History of the Biblical Text, edited by Frank M. Cross and Shemaryahu Talmon, 321 – 400. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975. Talmon, Shemaryahu, and Emanuel Tov. “A Commentary on the Text of Jeremiah 1: The LXX of Jeremiah 1:1 – 7.” Textus 9 (1981) 1 – 15. Tov, Emanuel, ed. The Greek Minor Prophets Scroll from Nahal Hever (8HevXIIgr). ˙ ˙ DJD 8. Oxford: Clarendon, 1990. Tov, Emanuel. Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992.

29 The Impact of the Scrolls on Biblical Studies After forty-six years of personal study of the Dead Sea Scrolls I would like to highlight five areas of biblical study in which I think the scrolls have had greatest impact. Others would choose other areas, but I think few would question the fact that the following five fields of biblical study have undergone considerable challenge and change in the second half of the twentieth century because of the scrolls: A. The history of early Judaism B. The first-century origins of Christianity and rabbinic Judaism C. The intertextual nature of Scripture and of early Jewish and Christian literature generally D. The concept of Scripture as canon E. Text criticism of the Old Testament In the limited time available to me I will elaborate only on the first two.

Pluralism in Early Judaism When in 1973 Michael Stone published his article on Jewish pluralism in the First Temple period, it was clearly an idea whose time had come.1 His later book, Scriptures, Sects and Visions established the concept for many who were not specialists in the scrolls or in early Judaism. It successfully challenged George F. Moore’s synthesis, set forth in the early part of the century, that there was in ancient Judaism a normative center with heterodox off-shoots.2 Ancillary ideas, such as Morton Smith’s thesis that the Pharisees were a distinct elite minority in early Judaism without great influence, have been rightly challenged without affecting the overall view of pluralism in the period.3 The thesis has been refined in the work of Gabriele Boccaccini who, affirming the pluralism, speaks of a middle Judaism that ranged from 300 BCE to 200 CE.4 The calendar, or calendars, operative even within Qumran literature itself, witness strongly to the Jewish pluralism of the time. Since the early fifties, Shemaryahu Talmon has shown the importance of studying biblical and Qumran calendars to enhance *  First published 1999. 1   Stone, “Judaism at the Time of Christ.” Note the title and compare with Moore’s title, Judaism in the First Centuries of the Christian Era. 2  Moore, Judaism in the First Centuries. 3   Smith, “Palestinian Judaism in the First Century.” But see Schwarz, “MMT, Josephus and the Pharisees.” 4   Boccaccini, “History of Judaism.”

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our understanding of the diversities and discrepancies within the Bible, and the diversity within Judaism of the Second Temple period.5 Apparently four papers are scheduled for this conference, including Talmon’s, that deal with the issue of calendar and its importance for understanding early Judaism. Non-scroll specialists, like Jacob Neusner, speak of Judaisms in the early Jewish period.6 Today the concept of wide diversity in early Judaism is accepted in biblical studies generally, except in areas of New Testament studies, where old biases seem to persist.

Early Christianity The fact that Judaism was highly pluralistic in the first century has considerable implications for Old Testament study. Only four papers at this conference have titles indicating interest in the Judean Desert Scrolls in New Testament scholarship, but that is, unfortunately, a good indicator of the current status of the field. By contrast, Bruce Chilton and Jacob Neusner have recently affirmed that “Christianity must be placed within its setting as a Judaism.”7 And yet, when one mentions “Judaism” in most New Testament scholarly circles one can still sense the mental agonizing in bravely trying not to revive Moore’s thesis, or Strack and Billerbeck’s assumptions, but to assert a “common Judaism.”8 Just as some scholars still tend to think of the Old Testament as “Jewish,” so some scholars still think of the New Testament as “Christian.” We have quite some distance yet to travel in the field of biblical study before realization fully sets in that we need to differentiate carefully what is meant when those adjectives are used to describe the Bible. The uses of the expression hoi Ioudaioi in the New Testament still need to be sorted out, for the phrase as it appears, especially in the Gospel of John and the Acts of the Apostles, has contributed sadly to persistent Christian anti-Jewishness.9 Shemaryahu Talmon has recently entered the field of New Testament study.10 One suggestion he has made needs careful attention in terms of the diversity in early Judaism, i. e., the distinction among the various Jewish communities of the period in the belief in the cessation of prophecy or revelation in the time of Ezra. While Pharisaic / rabbinic Judaism clearly taught the demise of prophecy in the fifth century BCE, the Qumran and Christian communities, both forms or systems of Judaism, held no such belief, indeed rejected it. Talmon has forcefully  5  See the several titles from the fifties listed in Fishbane and Tov, Shaʿarei Talmon, xxvii – xxx, beginning with Talmon, “Yom Hakippurim,” his critique of Dupont-Sommer’s early theses, based on the Habakkuk Commentary from Cave 1.  6   See, e. g., Neusner et al., Judaisms and Their Messiahs.  7   Chilton and Neusner, Judaism in the New Testament, xviii.  8   See, e. g., E. P. Sanders, Judaism: Practice and Belief.  9   See J. A. Sanders, “Hermeneutics of Translation.” Much of the actual text of the New Testament comes from the period of the polemics of separation of Christian Jewish synagogues from Pharisaic / rabbinic synagogues after the fall of Jerusalem. 10   See Talmon, “Oral Tradition and Written Transmission”; also Talmon, “Die Gemeinde des erneuerten Bundes von Qumran.”

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pointed out that while comparisons of the New Testament with rabbinic Jewish literature have largely failed, for the most part, to help understand the New Testament as a Hellenistic Jewish document, comparisons with the Qumran community are helpful, in large part because neither believed that prophecy or revelation had ceased in the time of Ezra, while Pharisaic / rabbinic Judaism firmly believed that it had. This belief can be discerned in what eventually ended up in the Ketuvim of the Tanak, where the only book that could be cited to contradict the belief that prophecy had ceased at the time of Ezra is the Book of Daniel. And yet, Daniel is precisely not found in the canon of the Prophets in the Tanak, as it is in Christian Old Testaments, but in the Ketuvim. In 1953 Karl Elliger pointed out that the hermeneutic demonstrated at Qumran in the community’s reading of Scripture was threefold: (a) Scripture addresses the End Time; (b) the Qumran community believed they lived at or near the End Time; and therefore, (c) Scripture spoke directly to them.11 He might have gone on to note that that is the same basic hermeneutic operative in the Second Christian Testament. In fact, that is essentially the same hermeneutic used in fundamentalist or sectarian Christianity today. As Raymond Brown showed in his Johns Hopkins dissertation, it was believed at Qumran that the community, perhaps through the Teacher of Righteousness, had been given the raz, or mystery, comparable to Paul’s claim of knowing the mysterion for interpreting Scripture, and Luke’s use of the term kleis, or key to Scripture (Luke 11:52).12 Clearly Pharisaic / rabbinic Judaism rejected any such belief in a late revelation of how to make Scripture relate to on-going history. For rabbinic Judaism, all such speculation about what God was going to do, or was yet to do in history – whether to end it or not – was to be rejected, in part undoubtedly because of such speculations being prominent in the Qumran, Christian, and other eschatological forms of Judaism. Torah, in Judaism, has both broad and strict meanings. While it can refer to the Pentateuch, it can also refer to Judaism itself. My teacher, Samuel Sandmel, often pointed out that “Judaism is Torah and Torah is Judaism.” He was referring principally to rabbinic Judaism. But the same may be said of the various forms of Judaism of the earlier period. C. H. Dodd, in The Bible and the Greeks of 1935, expressed concern that the LXX translators had used the Greek term nomos to translate the Hebrew torah, thereby reducing the multivalent term torah to the single meaning of “law.” And yet, as Laurent Pasinya pointed out in a study done at the Pontifical Biblical Institute in 1973, the Greek nomos had the same wide range of meanings that the Hebrew word torah had – instruction, custom, pattern, as well as what we mean by “law.”13 On the basis of that study I then suggested that Torah can be seen to be made up of two basic elements: both story and stipulation, both mythos and ethos, both gospel and law, both haggadah and halakah; so that the apparent contra11

 Elliger, Habakkuk-Kommentar vom Toten Meer, 275 – 87.   Brown, “Semitic Background of the Pauline Mysterion,” 197 – 202.   See Pasinya, La notion de NOMOS, 19, 201 – 5, chs. 3, 5.

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diction between Paul’s saying nomos was abrogated, and his also saying nomos was holy, eternal and good, was not necessarily so. For Paul, the solution to the problem many Jews faced in the Hellenistic period was not solved by subscribing to a halakic Torah shebeʿal peh, but to highlight Torah as God’s story and to set aside the old Bronze and Iron Age cultic and dietary laws within Torah as abrogated, especially for converted non-Jewish God-fearers.14 Qumran also rejected the idea of a second oral torah but apparently devised, like the Sadducees, ongoing legislation by exegesis of Scripture.15

Postmodern Reflections Postmodern reflection on the human enterprise is influenced by humility that brings with it a form of pluralism in current research and thinking, so that we can appreciate in our time the pluralism in early Judaism. Michael Fishbane, in his painfully beautiful book, Garments of Torah, claims that the authorizing, legitimizing moment for the whole Torah was God’s descent on Mount Sinai to reveal the law. In my review of Garments, I asked why Fishbane had chosen that theophany as the authorizing moment of Torah.16 Why not instead choose God’s pastoral call on Abraham and Sarah in Gen 12 as the authorizing moment of Torah? Fishbane made his assertion, and I asked my question, out of our different hermeneutic circles. He as a Jew would stress the halakic aspect of Torah, and I as a Christian would stress the haggadic aspect of Torah, neither denying the other as also important. To try to discern which position is “right” is to pursue a modern quest for truth. To accept the other position as legitimate for the other is to pursue a postmodern quest for truth. We both can and do say that God or Truth is One, but we both must accept human humility as a major factor in the quest for truth, and hence listen to and try to understand the other’s position and respect it, all the while adhering to, or at least honoring, the community that nurtured us in the first place and brought us to different views of which theophany in the Pentateuch we would call the authorizing or principal one. For the Christian, it is the story that begins in Gen 12, as a sojourn with Israel that culminates in God’s sojourn in one member, Jesus, of the family of Abraham and Sarah, that is the Bible’s authority.17 For the Jew it is God’s gift of Torah on Mount Sinai that culminates in halakah and the human desire to please and obey God that is the Bible’s authority. Dialogue is possible between Christian and Jew only when Scripture is read both critically and faithfully. To read it only faithfully is to insist on its meaning 14

  See J. A. Sanders, “Torah and Christ”; J. A. Sanders, “Torah and Paul.”   See Schiffman, Reclaiming the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the helpful review, Vermes, Review of Reclaiming the Dead Sea Scrolls. 16   The review is J. A. Sanders, Review of The Garments of Torah. 17   See J. A. Sanders, Torah and Canon, 26 – 27. 15

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being limited to what we learned from our respective communities’ tradition about it. To read it only critically is to try to persuade the other, on the basis of the canons of human reason, that one reading only is critically correct. In neither case does dialogue take place. Dialogue can ensue only by a combination, on the part of both parties, of critical and faithful readings; and that requires a healthy measure of humility on the part of both.18 The principal reason that dialogue is mandated for those who adhere to these texts is that Scripture, in whatever canonical shape, is itself a dialogical literature.19

Greek Influence in Antiquity Historians need to be mindful of the influence of Greek culture upon Judaism and Christianity in two rather vast waves. First was the hellenization process of the non-Greek world, which came from Alexander the Great’s policy of establishing cities after the Greek model everywhere he went. The process was long and pervasive, extending to the furthest regions of the Mediterranean and western Asian worlds. Morton Smith has clearly shown that hellenization was a two-way process.20 Greek culture extended even to villages well up the Nile, though with less intensity. Even so, there came about a semitization of some aspects of Greek culture in the colonies, and the evolution of the Greek language finally into something called Koine Greek – the language of the New Testament. Greco-Roman influence on all forms of Judaism, even the Pharisaic / rabbinic in Talmud and Midrash, is well documented in the works of Saul Lieberman, Elias Bickerman, Morton Smith, and Moses Hadas – the Morningside Heights School of thought in the early part of this century. Greek influence can even be seen in scattered portions of Qumran literature, which is usually characterized as highly resistant to inroads of Greek culture.21 This brought with it many forms of strain and tension for Judaism, as well as productive intellectual fervor. The interweaving of European Greek and Asian Jewish traditions can be seen throughout the Septuagint, Apocrypha, and Pseudepigrapha, Philo, Josephus, etc. The massive corpus of Jewish literature composed in the Hellenistic period was sloughed off by rabbinic Judaism but preserved in translation in the languages of the early churches. Some of these texts are now available in their original language forms in the Qumran library. 18   See J. A. Sanders, “Identity, Apocalyptic, and Dialogue,” and J. A. Sanders, “Intertextuality and Dialogue.” 19   See J. A. Sanders, “Scripture as Canon.” 20  Smith, Palestinian Parties and Politics, 57 – 81. And see now Parente and Sievers, Josephus and the History of the Greco-Roman Period, especially the evaluation by Cohen of Smith’s corpus, “Morton Smith and his Scholarly Achievement.” 21   See J. A. Sanders, Dead Sea Psalms Scroll, 93 – 103, 112 – 17, and J. A. Sanders, “Psalms Scroll (11QPsa) Reviewed.”

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Nearly twenty years ago I suggested the reasons for the rise in the late pre-Christian period of belief in verbal inspiration, swiftly followed by the idea of literal inspiration, that is, the sacredness of each jot and tittle of Torah.22 There were many ways in which Greek thought had an impact on Judaism, and one very important way was a stress upon the worth and responsibility of the individual. Most biblical literature is communal and anonymous, but under Greek pressures Jews began to feel they had to attribute their traditional community-owned literature to individuals, hence the concommitant biblical phenomenon of pseudepigraphy – the attribution of community traditional literature to great names in Israel’s past – all the Psalter to David, all of Proverbs to Solomon, non-Pauline letters to Paul, and the affixing of names of individuals to the Gospels.23 Focus on individuals in Judaism had started in the late Iron Age, and especially with the Dispersion (Jer 31:29; Ezek 18), but intensely increased in the so-called Hellenistic period so that some hellenized Jews could hear a claim of God’s incarnation in one Jew, while many Jews resisted such a claim as extreme assimilation to Greek or pagan culture.24 The concept of Emmanuel, “God with us,” had now extended for some Jews beyond the Semitic belief in God’s accompanying the community on their common journey (Exod 33:16), to the idea of divine incarnation in an individual. This would have been anathema to those Jews, especially Pharisees, and to some extent the Qumran community, who effectively resisted the deepest inroads of hellenization. Thus Abraham Heschel, following Maimonides, could speak of God’s incarnation in the people Israel; and Michael Fishbane, following Franz Rosenzweig and Martin Buber, writes eloquently of God’s incarnation in Scripture.25

Greek Influence in Modernity The second massive wave of Greco-Roman influence came with the Renaissance, in particular the re-birth of Greek culture with its renewed emphasis on the worth and responsibility of the individual. This emphasis has been rightly called the Enlightenment. This, in turn, gave rise to the increasing spread of literacy and individual readings of the Bible contradicting church traditional interpretations. Even before the printing press became a vehicle for the spread of the Renaissance 22

  J. A. Sanders, “Text and Canon.”   See J. A. Sanders, “Introduction: Why the Pseudepigrapha?” Despite popular identification of Luke, the Evangelist, with Luke, the beloved physician (Col 4:14), the author(s) of Luke is anonymous. Henry Cadbury of Harvard did his dissertation there (“Style and Literary Method of Luke”), searching Attic and Hellenistic literature to determine what the medical lexicon was in the first century, and determined that the text of Luke – Acts does not reflect any of the medical terms of the time. My teacher Sam Sandmel once remarked that Cadbury got his doctorate by depriving Luke of his. 24   The discussions about judaizers and hellenizers in Acts needs now to be reformulated. 25  Fishbane, Garments of Torah. 23

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of Greco-Roman culture, monks in the fourteenth century, working as scribes, made considerable numbers of copies of the Vulgate for the increasing number of people who could read for themselves, rather than having the Bible read aloud only in community. Such older readings were accompanied always, of course, by a community interpretation. Baruch Spinoza in 1670 claimed that the truth of the Bible would be found in the history of its literary formation with focus on authorial intentionality of the various contributors to the Bible – a clear result of the impact of the Renaissance of Greco-Roman classical culture with its emphasis on the worth and responsibility of the individual author or speaker. Spinoza went on to say that he doubted if such a history could ever be completed, or even done well, especially when attempting to reconstruct the intentions of the authors.26 But his call has inspired historical, biblical criticism as we know it since Johann David Michaelis in the eighteenth century – the search for what individual authors intended at the time they wrote what they did. Any passage in a biblical book not originating from the individual who was thought to have been the author was, and by some scholars is still, labeled as “secondary,” “spurious,” or “inauthentic,” thereby completely denigrating the community dimension of biblical literature. The so-called Jesus of the Jesus Seminar is clearly not the early community view of Jesus in the canonical Gospels or Paul. This has been called the modern phase of biblical criticism, the sanguine belief that original compositions could be recovered and that truth somehow lies in those original thoughts  – precisely Spinoza’s point  – but without the doubt about it he himself expressed. Such a belief is already beginning to be reviewed in the postmodern world, especially among Old Testament students and students of early Judaism. It depends precisely on the view of authority consciously or unconsciously held. While it does not seem yet to have greatly influenced New Testament scholarship, postmodern thought in New Testament work does have some valid examples, some represented here in the few New Testament scholars participating in this conference. The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls has helped to introduce postmodern modes of thought in work on the Hebrew Bible and early Judaism. Exposition of the various ways in which the Qumran community understood and interpreted Scripture has brought about considerable review of the massive amount of Jewish pre-Christian literature in the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha. One result has been a new subdiscipline called comparative midrash – the exercise of tracing the Nachleben or pilgrimage of a Scripture passage from inception in the Hebrew Bible, through early translations, such as the Septuagint and Syriac, into citations and echoes of Scripture in the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, Philo, Josephus, and the New Testament, even into rabbinic literature and patristics. Such an exercise brings about considerable indeterminacy in thinking about what Scripture can mean when read in later, very different circumstances, including so-called 26   For data and discussion of the impact of Spinoza’s call for biblical criticism ever since, see J. A. Sanders, “Hermeneutics of Text Criticism.”

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“modern” critical contexts. It has even brought about considerable indeterminacy about modern scholarly efforts to determine the original meanings of passages of Scripture. The assured results of scholarly understandings of Scripture texts seem to change from decade to decade and among schools of interpretation. The effects of the second great wave of Greco-Roman influence on the Bible, and how it is read, may possibly be available now for critical review, even by those who have benefited by it, and that happens to be all of us attending this conference to one extent or another. As important as these observations may be about the impact of the scrolls on the history of early Judaism, and of the births of Christianity and rabbinic Judaism, the other three fields listed at the beginning of the paper are equally important: the renewed interest in the intertextual nature of biblical and early Jewish literature, including the New Testament;27 the new light thrown on the canonical process;28 and the paradigm shift taking place in text criticism.29 The facsimile edition of Leningradensis published in 1998 is a major landmark in the paradigm shift. Transparencies of Leningradensis have been in the hands of the editors now working on Biblia Hebraica Quinta for three years, and the first fascicle of Biblia Hebraica Quinta (the Five Scrolls) is scheduled to appear based on those transparencies in August of 1998 in Oslo at the OTS annual meeting there.30 The whole text and the full masorah of Leningradensis will now be fully accessible to everyone in addition to those of the Ben Asher codex (where extant) and of the few others available in legible facsimile or film forms. It is fairly amazing to see the breadth and depth of the impact the scrolls have had on biblical studies. I am sure others at this conference would identify other areas in addition to these five. Now it is to be hoped that New Testament scholarship in general will take heed and move on beyond the admittedly important discoveries at Nag Hammadi in 1945, to those discovered only two years later at Wadi Qumran, and their vast importance for understanding the rise of Christianity as a form of Judaism in the first century of the common era.31

27   “Scarcely a line of the New Testament is to be fully and exhaustively understood without reference to pertinent passages in the Old Testament.” Chilton and Neusner, Judaism in the New Testament, xiv. 28   See J. A. Sanders and Beck, “Leningrad Codex.” 29   See J. A. Sanders, “Hermeneutics of Text Criticism.” 30   As of this writing (July 1996) the plan was to introduce the first fascicle, The Five Scrolls, at the OTS meeting in Oslo on 3 August 1998. [See now J. A. Sanders, Review of BHQ, Fascicle 18, the first published]. 31   The same point is made by Satran in “Qumran and Christian Origins.” I am grateful to Martin Abegg for calling this important study to my attention.

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Bibliography Boccaccini, Gabriele. “History of Judaism: Its Periods in Antiquity.” In Judaism in Late Antiquity, edited by Jacob Neusner, 285 – 307. Leiden: Brill, 1995. Brown, Raymond E. “The Semitic Background of the Pauline Mysterion.” PhD diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1958. [Published as The Semitic Background of the Term “Mystery” in the New Testament. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1968.] Cadbury, Henry. “The Style and Literary Method of Luke.” PhD diss., Harvard University, 1914. Chilton, Bruce, and Jacob Neusner. Judaism in the New Testament: Practices and Beliefs. London: Routledge, 1995. Cohen, Shaye. “Morton Smith and His Scholarly Achievement.” In Josephus and the History of the Greco-Roman Period: Essays in Memory of Morton Smith, edited by Fausto Parente and Joseph Sievers, 1 – 8. Leiden: Brill, 1994. Dodd, C. H. The Bible and the Greeks. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1935. Elliger, Karl. Studien zum Habakkuk-Kommentar vom Toten Meer. BHT 15. Tübingen: Mohr (Siebeck), 1953. Fishbane, Michael A. The Garments of Torah: Essays in Biblical Hermeneutics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989. Fishbane, Michael A., and Emanuel Tov, with Weston W. Fields, eds. “Shaʿarei Talmon”: Studies in the Bible, Qumran, and the Ancient Near East Presented to Shemaryahu Talmon. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1992. Moore, George Foot. Judaism in the First Centuries of the Christian Era: The Age of the Tannaim. 3 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1927 – 30. Neusner, Jacob, William S. Green, and Ernest S. Frerichs, eds. Judaisms and Their Messiahs at the Turn of the Christian Era. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Parente, Fausto, and Joseph Sievers, eds. Josephus and the History of the Greco-Roman Period: Essays in Memory of Morton Smith. Leiden: Brill, 1994. Pasinya, Laurent Monsengwo. La notion de NOMOS dans le pentateuque grec. AnBib 52. Rome: Biblical Institute Press, 1973. Sanders, E. P. Judaism: Practice and Belief, 53 BCE – 66 CE. Philadelphia: Trinity International, 1992. Sanders, James A. The Dead Sea Psalms Scroll. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1967. Sanders, James A. “Hermeneutics of Text Criticism.” Textus 18 (1995) 1 – 26. Sanders, James A. “Hermeneutics of Translation.” In Removing the Anti-Judaism from the New Testament, edited by Howard C. Kee and Irvin J. Borowsky, 43 – 62. Philadelphia: American Interfaith Institute, 1998. Sanders, James A. “Identity, Apocalyptic, and Dialogue.” In The Echoes of Many Texts: Reflections on Jewish and Christian Traditions. Essays in Honor of Lou H. Silberman, edited by William G. Dever and J. Edward Wright, 159 – 70. BJS 313. Atlanta: Scholars, 1997. Sanders, James A. “Intertextuality and Dialogue.” BTB 29 (1999) 35 – 44. Sanders, James A. “Introduction: Why the Pseudepigrapha?” In The Pseudepigrapha and Early Biblical Interpretation, edited by James H. Charlesworth and Craig A. Evans, 13 – 19. Sheffield: JSOT, 1993. Sanders, James A. “The Psalms Scroll (11QPsa) Reviewed.” In On Language, Culture, and Religion: In Honor of Eugene A. Nida, edited by Matthew Black and William A. Smalley, 79 – 99. The Hague: Mouton, 1974. Sanders, James A. Review of Biblia Hebraica Quinta, Fascicle 18, edited by Adrian Schenker et al. RBL 8 (2006) 1 – 10. Sanders, James A. Review of The Garments of Torah: Essays in Biblical Hermeneutics, by Michael A. Fishbane. ThTo 47, no. 4 (1991) 433 – 35.

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Sanders, James A. “Scripture as Canon for Post Modern Times.” BTB 25, no. 2 (1995) 56 – 63. Sanders, James A. “Text and Canon: Concepts and Method.” JBL 98 (1979) 5 – 29. [Reprinted in From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, by James A. Sanders, 125 – 51. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987.] Sanders, James A. Torah and Canon. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1972. [2nd ed. Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2005.] Sanders, James A. “Torah and Christ.” Int 29 (1975) 372 – 90. [Reprinted in From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, by James A. Sanders, 41 – 60. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987.] Sanders, James A. “Torah and Paul.” In God’s Christ and His People: Studies in Honour of Nils Alstrup Dahl on the Occasion of His Sixty-Fifth Birthday, edited by Wayne A. Meeks and Jacob Jervell, 132 – 40. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1977. [Reprinted as “Paul and the Law” in From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, by James A. Sanders, 115 – 23. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987.] Sanders, James A., and Astrid Beck. “The Leningrad Codex: Rediscovering the Oldest Complete Hebrew Bible.” BRev 13, no. 4 (August 1997) 32 – 41, 46. Satran, David. “Qumran and Christian Origins.” In The Scrolls of the Judaean Desert: Forty Years of Research, edited by Magen Broshi, Sarah Japhet, Daniel Schwarz, and Shemaryahu Talmon, 152 – 59. Jerusalem: Bialik Institute and the Israel Exploration Society, 1992. Schiffman, Lawrence. Reclaiming the Dead Sea Scrolls. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1994. Schwarz, Daniel. “MMT, Josephus and the Pharisees.” SBL Abstracts (1994) S205, 401. [Full article published in Reading 4QMMT: New Perspectives on Qumran Law and Literature, edited by John Kampen and Moshe J. Bernstein, 67 – 80. SBLSS 2. Atlanta: Scholars, 1996.] Smith, Morton. “Palestinian Judaism in the First Century.” In Israel: Its Role in Civilization, edited by Moshe Davis, 67 – 81. New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1956. Smith, Morton. Palestinian Parties and Politics that Shaped the Old Testament. New York: Columbia University Press, 1971. Stone, Michael E. “Judaism at the Time of Christ.” Scientific American 288 (January 1973) 80 – 87. Stone, Michael E. Scriptures, Sects, and Visions. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1980. Talmon, Shemaryahu. “Die Gemeinde des erneuerten Bundes von Qumran zwischen rabbinischen Judentum und Christentum.” In Zion: Ort der Begegnung: Festschrift für Laurentius Klein zur Vollendung des 65. Lebensjahres, edited by Ferdinand Hahn et al., 295 – 312. Bodenheim: Athenaeum, 1993. Talmon, Shemaryahu. “Oral Tradition and Written Transmission, or the Heard and the Seen Word in Judaism of the Second Temple Period.” In Jesus and the Oral Gospel Tradition, edited by Henry Wansbrough, 121 – 58. JSNTSup 64. Sheffield: JSOT, 1991. Talmon, Shemaryahu. “Yom Hakippurim in the Habakkuk Scroll.” Bib 32 (1951) 549 – 63. Vermes, Geza. Review of Reclaiming the Dead Sea Scrolls, by Lawrence Schiffman. BAR 21, no. 2 (1995) 6 – 10.

30 The Scrolls and the Canonical Process Introduction The area of biblical studies most affected by fifty years’ study of the Judean Desert Scrolls is the history of early Judaism. That history has in effect been rewritten because of the light shed by the scrolls on an area that had been, we now know, only vaguely understood. The essential change has come in understanding the very nature of Judaism in the Persian and Greco-Roman periods: early Judaism was, contrary to earlier views, highly diverse. Judaism was born as a transformed remnant out of the ashes of the defeat and dismemberment of the preexilic institutions of old Israel and Judah. The story of this transformation is remarkable in itself.1 The old traditions that had given preexilic Israel and Judah their identity were re-read, reshaped, and resignified in the exile to provide a new identity more intimately tied to the temple and its priesthood than to the older institutions of prophecy and monarchy. The result was the Torah and the early Prophets. Hopes for the revival of the Davidic monarchy died with the disappearance of Zerubbabel, in one tradition a Davidic heir, at the time of the building of the beginnings of the Second Temple in 518 BCE (see Haggai and Zech 1 – 4). Eventually, many Jews would hold to the belief that prophecy ceased at the time of Ezra–Nehemiah. The “goodly fellowship of the prophets” of the past would be more and more revered as time went on, but prophecy itself, like the monarchy, fell under severe restrictions. Though preexilic history was dominated by prophets and kings, postexilic or early Judaism would see the rise and prominence of the new temple and its priesthood. Eventually even that would give way to the rise and dominance of a lay movement called Pharisaism, which in turn gave birth to rabbinic Judaism, itself a lay movement, after the destruction of the temple in the first century CE. The biblical concept of God’s sovereign rule, or theocracy, persisted through the whole biblical period, but the human institution that gave it dominant expression moved in the course of a millennium and a half from patriarchy to prophecy to monarchy to priesthood to laity. Even so, the Judaism that flourished between the fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonians in 586 BCE and the destruction of Jerusalem by Rome in 70 and again in 135 CE was highly diverse in character. This diversity cannot be limited, as previ*  First published 1999. 1  Ackroyd, Exile and Restoration, 1 – 16; Sanders, Torah and Canon, 1 – 15; Sanders, “Exile and Canon Formation.”

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ously thought, to the parties and philosophies listed in the classical sources.2 On the contrary, diversity is now understood, after fifty years’ study of the Judean Desert Scrolls, as the essential characteristic of early Judaism. Nearly every area of Jewish studies pertaining to the period has had to be reconsidered. The question of prophecy’s demise during the early Jewish period is itself complex, for clearly there were Jewish communities in the period who did not believe that prophecy or revelation had ceased, notably those that produced much of the apocryphal literature of the time, as well as the Qumran and the early Christian communities.

Early Jewish Diversity and Canon An important area of inquiry in which early Jewish diversity has only gradually made a clear impact is that of the history of the canon. Most if not all studies of how “canonization” took place in early Judaism have openly or tacitly assumed a unified Judaism in the period. It has been commonplace to begin with the proto-canonical promulgation of the scroll of Deuteronomy by Josiah in 621 BCE, then to focus on the Torah that Ezra brought back with him to Jerusalem in 445 BCE, edited in Babylonia. It was then asserted that the Pentateuch was canonized by 400 BCE, the Prophets by 200 BCE, and the Writings at the Council of Jamnia / Yavneh around 90 CE.3 The assumptions made in the exercise were numerous, especially that there was a single track of canonization for all Jewry. Other assumptions were based on the meagre references in extra-canonical literature to Prophets, or Writings, or Psalms, or the writings of David.4 These, it was assumed, referred to the corpora of biblical literature in the tripartite Jewish canon we know from the Talmud and in the great medieval manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible. Another assumption was blatantly anachronistic, borrowed from later Christianity, that authoritative ecclesial councils, or even royal or scribal decisions, would or could decide such questions for all Jews for all time.5 The scrolls brought to light a number of surprises and raised questions about the history of the canon as then understood.6 This did not begin to happen, however, until about a decade after the last of the Qumran caves had yielded its treasures. 2

  Philo, Josephus, Hippolytus, and Pliny the Elder. See the references in Collins, “Essenes.”  Buhl, Kanon und Text des AT, 40; Ryle, Canon of the OT; Pfeiffer, Introduction to the OT, 50 – 70; Eissfeldt, OT: An Introduction, 562 – 71. Eissfeldt was the first, to my knowledge, to speak of a canonical process as distinct from the traditional views of canonization, and he did so in the light of the earliest finds at Qumran (ibid. 570 – 71); but he did not develop the idea or work out its implications. I have tried to do so. Leiman, Canonization, 16 – 30, rightly noted that numerous non-extant early works directly and indirectly witnessed to in preexilic and exilic biblical literature became a part of the canonical process. Fishbane, Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel, has brilliantly shown the process at work in exilic and postexilic biblical texts. 4   See the summary review in Carr, “Canonization,” esp. 24 – 28, with references. Older assumptions find reference to the whole of the Ketuvim in the uncertain phrase “(the writings of) David” in 4QMMT C‑10; see Qimron and Strugnell, Qumran Cave 4.V, 59n10, 111 – 12. 5   See the discussion in Davies, Scribes and Schools, esp. 169 – 84. Davies, following the older unilinear thinking, supports the view that the masoretic canon was set for all Judaism in Hasmonean times largely because of scribal activity in schools of Jewish learning. 6   Sanders, “Cave 11 Surprises.” 3

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The eleven Qumran caves came to light in three waves of discovery. The seven scrolls from Cave One were quite well preserved because they had been wrapped in linen and stored in ceramic jars for preservation in the cave. The questions these seven scrolls raised were sufficient enough to keep the field occupied with other important issues such as the identity of those who hid the scrolls and of epithets mentioned in them, and other areas of study, but not issues related to the history of the canon. Of the seven Cave 1 scrolls, four were basically intact but still did not raise significant questions about canon. The Habakkuk Scroll piqued some minimal interest in canon because there was no text of Habakkuk 3 in the basically well-preserved scroll; but since it was a pesher scroll, or commentary, on Habakkuk and not a biblical scroll, the interest in its importance for “the Jewish canon” was minimal. The second major discovery came in February of 1952 when Cave 4 yielded over ten thousand fragments, none of which was complete enough, however, to raise serious questions at the time about the regnant view of the formation of “the canon.” Since the codex had not yet come into use for the Jewish Bible, the question of the order of biblical books preserved on scrolls was moot. Then, however, when Cave 11 came to light in February 1956, once more there were scrolls well enough preserved and pertinent enough to raise questions relating to issues of canon. Publication of its contents did not begin, however, until the mid-sixties. The prize of Cave 11, the massive Temple or Torah Scroll (11QT), raised the question of the contents of “the canon,” but not seriously until its publication twenty years later.7 The reason the question of the canonical status of 11QT was posed in the way it was, stemmed from the assumptions noted above. But the important thing to note is that now the question of the received biblical canon listed in the Talmud and presented in the classical masoretic manuscripts had to be addressed.8 It was, however, not until the large scroll of Psalms from Cave 11 (11QPsa) was published in 1965 that discussions about canon came sharply to the fore.9 The Psalms Scroll included eight compositions that are not in masoretic Psalters, and the order of the masoretic psalms in it differed from the traditional. In the early years of the debate most of the old assumptions still held sway. Three scholars who addressed the issue disagreed with the editor of the Psalms 7

 Yadin, Temple Scroll, 1: 390 – 92.   b. B. Bat. 14 – 15a lists the books in the Tanak, putting Chronicles last. However, the classical Tiberian masoretic manuscripts, where pertinent, have Chronicles first in the Ketuvim. The first four editions of Biblia Hebraica published by the Bibelanstalt in Stuttgart put Chronicles last, with the explanation offered in the Praefationes of BHK and BHS (the third and fourth editions) that though Leningradensis has Chronicles first in the Ketuvim the editors for continuity kept it in the traditional order. BH Quinta (the fifth edition), now in preparation, will follow L in placing Chronicles first among the Ketuvim. 9   The preliminary report was Sanders, “Scroll of Psalms (11QPss) from Cave 11.” The editio princeps is Sanders, Psalms Scroll of Qumran Cave 11 (11QPsa). M. Goshen-Gottstein, in “Psalms Scroll,” asked why the editor had not dealt with the question of canon and strongly urged the view that the scroll was a liturgical collection derived from an already stabilized Psalter. Shemaryahu Talmon essentially agreed with him in an article in the same issue, “Pisqah Beʾemsaʿ Pasuq.” The editor responded in part in the Cornell edition of the scroll (Sanders, Dead Sea Psalms Scroll), and again in “Cave 11 Surprises.” 8

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Scroll, and argued strongly that the scroll was either maverick, a “library edition,” or a special “liturgical collection.”10 There were essentially two choices: either the scroll deviated from an already “canonized” Psalter; or it was a marker on the way to stabilization of the MT Psalter. Either the old assumptions, though poorly based in actual hard evidence, still held, and the peculiar collection of psalms in 11QPsa had to be explained in the light thereof; or the new evidence called for considerable revision of the history of “the canon.” The editor opted for revision. The opposition to revision was rather formidable in terms of the international reputation of those resisting it, but even at the risk of appearing stubborn the editor held to the belief that the primary evidence of actual manuscript materials now carried considerably more weight than earlier assumptions based on extra-biblical references and data. The editor, the present writer, beginning in 1967 pointed also to the unpublished fragments from Cave 4 as evidence of the need to rethink the issue.11 Fresh views of the history of “the canon” were advanced as well for debate.12 The heart of the thesis was the concept of the canonical process in which the various communities in early Judaism played crucial roles. The writer’s position has more recently been affirmed in two in-depth studies of all the Psalms manuscript evidence available, and broadly reassessed in a summary review and critique of his work.13 Based on a review of the massive amount of literature from early Judaism known before the scrolls were discovered but in the light of the first twenty-five years’ study of the scrolls, Michael Stone of Hebrew University published an essay in 1973 arguing that early Judaism was highly diverse.14 Stone’s essay stated clearly what the field in general was beginning to see, based on the new, accumulating evidence. In the same year, the writer published a review of the first twenty-five years of scholarship on the scrolls affirming the point, and also addressing the issue of canon.15 This was soon followed by a review of all work done on the Psalms Scroll and the questions it had given rise to up to that time.16 10   See Goshen-Gottstein, “Psalms Scroll,” and Talmon, “Pisqah Beʾemsaʿ Pasuq.” P. Skehan agreed in essence with them in several articles published between 1973 and 1978: for specific references, see Flint, Dead Sea Psalms Scrolls, 8nn57 – 58. 11   Sanders, “Variorum in the Psalms Scroll”; the Cornell edition of the scroll: Sanders, Dead Sea Psalms Scroll, 141 – 49; Sanders, “Cave 11 Surprises”; and Sanders, “Qumran Psalms Scroll (11QPsa) Reviewed.” The 1968 article that appeared in the McCormick Quarterly (“Cave 11 Surprises”) offered the first translations in English of portions of 11QPsApa (also denoted 11QApPsa) and of 4QPsf. 12  Sanders, Torah and Canon; Sanders, “Adaptable for Life”; Sanders, “Torah and Christ”; Sanders, “Torah and Paul”; Sanders, “Biblical Criticism”; Sanders, “Text and Canon: Concepts and Method,” 29; Sanders, “Text and Canon: Old Testament and New”; Sanders, “Bible as Canon”; and Sanders, From Sacred Story to Sacred Text. 13  Wilson, Editing of the Hebrew Psalter; Flint, Dead Sea Psalms Scrolls; Carr, “Canonization.” See also Flint, “Of Psalms and Psalters,” and Sanders, Review of The Dead Sea Psalms Scrolls. Note also Flint, “11QPsa-Psalter in the Dead Sea Scrolls.” 14   Stone, “Judaism in the Time of Christ.” See also Stone, Scriptures, Sects and Visions. 15   Sanders, “Dead Sea Scrolls – A Quarter-Century.” 16   Sanders, “Qumran Psalms Scroll (11QPsa) Reviewed.”

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The Canonical Process An important factor in the formulation of the idea of a canonical process was a study published in 1964 by Jack P. Lewis.17 Lewis reviewed all the references in rabbinic literature to “council of Yavneh (Jamnia)” after the Jewish revolt against Rome in 66 – 73 and found that there was no real evidence of decisions being made there about “the canon” in the sense of a canonizing council. His study made it clear that the concept of a canonizing council at that time affecting all of Judaism was an anachronism borrowed from later church councils after Christianity had become a state religion in the early fourth century. Lewis’s work was almost universally accepted, but the two overall reactions were basically contradictory. Those still following the old assumptions revised the date of the “canonization” of the Ketuvim, or Writings, back to the Hasmonean Period.18 Others, including the writer, revised the date of the conclusion of the canonical process to after the Bar Kochba revolt, that is toward the middle of the second century CE, or even later.19 A crucial factor in the latter view is the newly understood and otherwise widely accepted diversity in early Judaism. Peter Flint set out in his major study of the shape of the Psalter in Qumran and in early Judaism to critique the writer’s thesis about the place of the Cave 11 Psalms Scroll in the canonical process. His work began as a dissertation at Notre Dame under the direction of Eugene Ulrich, a student of Patrick W. Skehan, who had opposed the writer’s views in this regard. Whereas the writer had had early access, because of Skehan’s graciousness, to the Cave 4 Psalms manuscripts, all more or less fragmentary, and used them in the formulation of his position, Flint had full access to them due to the fact that it fell Ulrich’s lot to pick up Skehan’s work and bring it to publication (in DJD 16). Flint, basing his work on the earlier study of Gerald Wilson in a dissertation done at Yale, brought massive support to the writer’s thesis.20 In fact, he improved it in several respects.21 Flint refines the view of the gradual stabilization of the Psalter into two distinct stages. Where I had suggested there might have been more than one Psalter at Qumran, Flint sees three editions in evidence there. Flint proposes that the original complete 11QPsa contained 52 psalms plus four pieces asserting Davidic authorship, and calls it “David’s Solar Psalter.” Flint’s study brings considerable support to the view of there having been a canonical process at work in early Judaism in regard to the gradual stabilization of the Psalter. 17

  Lewis, “What Do We Mean by Jabneh?”   See Leiman, Canonization, 131; Beckwith, OT Canon of the NT Church, 406; and Davies, Scribes and Schools, 169 – 74. 19   See, for example, two recent studies, Sanders, “Spinning the Bible,” and Sanders, “Exile and Canon Formation.” This position is supported by a growing number of scholars, most recently Carr, “Canonization in the Context of Community”; McDonald, Formation of the Christian Biblical Canon, 250 – 57; and Flint, Dead Sea Psalms Scrolls, 237 – 41. 20   See Wilson, Editing of the Hebrew Psalter; Flint, Dead Sea Psalms Scrolls; Carr, “Canonization.” See also Flint, “Of Psalms and Psalters,” and Sanders, Review of The Dead Sea Psalms Scrolls. Note also Flint, “11QPsa-Psalter in the Dead Sea Scrolls.” 21   See Sanders, Review of The Dead Sea Psalms Scrolls. 18

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David Carr’s critical review of the writer’s thesis about the canonical process in general broadened Flint’s observations, as well as those of the writer, into a thesis of there having been multiple tracks to the canonical process generally in the early Jewish period, marked by its considerable diversity. Whereas most studies of canonization have been unilinear, growing knowledge of the diversity of early Judaism indicates that the process was “highly multiform.”22 Carefully examining all the arguments, usually based on extrabiblical references, brought forward to date for a unilinear view of canonization as distinct from the function of Scripture in early Jewish communities, Carr rejects them all in favor of there having been several tracks to the canonical process in early Judaism. The factor of the function of Scripture in community was determinative in the process that led to what we call canon. The Jewish tripartite canon may have been stabilized for the majority of rabbinic Jewish communities some time after the Bar Kochba revolt, while the quadripartite Old Testament found in the double-Testament Christian Bible became fixed soon after Constantine in the fourth century.23 The canonical process was the route by which stories, traditions, and some original literary works got on a sort of “tenure track” by repetition and adaptation in believing communities that found value in them for the on-going life of the community. The “fractures” in a biblical text due to editing and redacting are precious evidence of communities’ adapting earlier literature that they were traditioning.24 Josephus mentioned three factors that he considered determinative in the selection of canonical literature – anonymity, antiquity, and popularity.25 Most biblical literature is anonymous because of its being basically community literature.26 Antiquity would indicate the length of time involved in the canonical process, and popularity would indicate the breadth of use and repetition in the canonical process. The messages of the so-called false prophets, for instance, were undoubtedly popular when uttered, while the messages of the so-called true prophets (represented by those that ended up in the canon) were highly unpopular when uttered. Hence popularity would clearly not be a sufficient criterion by itself. On the other hand, when in the long term the messages of the true prophets were reviewed, after their unpopular messages were seen to have been basically right and to have come true, these were the messages that were later repeated, reviewed, and found by enough people to be helpful to the on-going life of the surviving Jewish communities. Each, the communities and the recited traditions, gave continuity. Nor would antiquity alone be a sufficient criterion. 22

  Carr, “Canonization,” 24.   See Sanders, “Spinning the Bible,” as well as Carr, “Canonization,” and McDonald, Formation of the Christian Biblical Canon. Davies’s point that the Christian “Old Testament” antedated the “Hebrew Bible” can be sustained in the view that the Christian First Testament did indeed contain much Jewish literature sloughed off by later rabbinic Judaism, but not in its being a stable quadripartite “Old Testament.” 24  Carr, Reading the Fractures of Genesis. 25  Josephus, Ag. Ap. 1.37 – 43. 26   Sanders, “Impact of the Scrolls.” 23

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There are at least thirty-five ancient works referred to in the Bible that did not survive the canonical process, though they are echoed in it.27

The Torah and the Prophets Study of true and false prophecy in the Bible is helpful in understanding the canonical process.28 The prophet, in biblical terms, was a spokesperson, one who spoke in the name of God to the people, but also spoke in intercessory prayer for the people to God. Jeremiah at one point seems to have made intercessory prayer a criterion for distinguishing true and false prophets. He forcefully argued that false prophets, instead of misleading the people into thinking God would take care of them (because he was their national deity), should be engaging instead in intercessory prayer. They should have been praying to God to relent and avert the pending disaster the true prophet said was coming, usually by foreign invasion in their time (Jer 27:18). At another point Jeremiah seems to have made prophetic messages of God’s judgment of the people a basic criterion of truth, and at another, he indicated that history would determine if prophetic messages of peace were right (Jer 28:8 – 9). But in-depth study has shown that there are no such criteria for discerning the difference between truth and falsehood in the actual situation. If there is a criterion it would be in the hermeneutic by which the prophet interpreted the relevance of tradition to current events: whenever it is forgotten that God is creator as well as redeemer, falsehood threatens. Falsehood threatens where God is seen as a tribal, national, denominational or one religion’s deity, and not the creator of all peoples, of all heaven and earth. God was redeemer of Israel, right enough, but God was also the God of All, and hence free to judge his own people as well as bless them, and free to bless other peoples as well as judge them. And it was precisely that kind of challenging, prophetic message that, when the disaster of defeat and exile befell Israel and Judah, made sense to those who reviewed them and gave them hope. The messages of the false prophets, on the other hand, which they had liked so much back in the pre-war days, would now have been like ashes in their mouths. The prophetic corpus is made up largely of the unpopular messages delivered when the people were still deceiving themselves into thinking that faith in God’s gifts, instead of in God himself, would suffice. Why? As Vaclav Havel says in his Letters to Olga, when one is in prison one is remarkably able to focus thought on the essentials and the truth of life.29 When Israel had been deported and incarcerated in prisoner-of-war camps in Babylonia, they had time to think and to reflect not only on what had happened to them, but on all the old traditions, including the messages of the preexilic prophets. 27

 Leiman, Canonization, 16 – 26.   Sanders, “Hermeneutics in True and False Prophecy,” 21 – 24.  Havel, Letters to Olga, 1 – 10.

28 29

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What helped at that crucial moment, when Israel was on the verge of corporate death, like all her neighbors who had suffered the same fate, was the repetition and review of the tough stuff they had despised when they were back home and still enjoying God’s gifts of land and city. The canonical-critical process indicates that what got on the canonical tenure track was the monotheizable literature (God is not “our God” only) from Israel’s earlier existence, a sort of survival of the toughest, so to speak. What happened in those camps in exile would continue for centuries to come – reviewing, re-reading, repeating, and resignifying the old traditions and the old stories that now gave them hope and life. When there were apparently no more prophets to consult in the postexilic period, there was now Torah to drash (search) to seek light on ever-changing problems; and Torah, though not a strictly monotheistic literature, was very monotheizing in thrust. The process in antiquity of reviewing earlier messages and traditions and adapting them to new situations started much earlier.30 The scroll of Deuteronomy, for instance, showed adaptation of the old Book of the Covenant (Exod 20 – 23) and many other traditions to the needs of the late seventh century under King Josiah.31 The prophets also adapted the old traditions about the exodus wanderings and entrance into Canaan to lend authority to their messages of God’s judgments against his own people.32 Isaiah adapted the old traditions about God’s choosing David as his son and as king of Judah and Israel. The universal human tendency to recapitulate old truths in order to transcend new crises lies at the heart of the canonical process. What is interesting for our focus is what was chosen to repeat and adapt, for it was in that selective process that a canon would take shape.

Hermeneutics Essential to the process also was the hermeneutic by which the old was adapted to address the new. The so-called false prophets also cited old traditions to lend authority to their messages. There are, in fact, three factors always at play in the process, the hermeneutic triangle: the old tradition or text being recited, the new situation being addressed, and the hermeneutic by which the old was adapted to speak to the new. An interesting example is in Amos’s sermon at the royal sanctuary in Bethel in northern Israel in 750 BCE (Amos 1:3 – 3:2). Amos cited his “text” for his sermon near the end of it (2:9 – 11). After he had declaimed God’s judgments against Israel’s neighbors all around her, including Judah, Amos then with the same rhetoric and in the same cadences declaimed God’s judgments against Israel herself 30

  See Weis, “Definition of the Genre Massaʾ.”   See Sanders, “Deuteronomy.” As mentioned above, Leiman, Canonization, 16 – 30, rightly noted that numerous non-extant early works directly and indirectly witnessed to in preexilic and exilic biblical literature became a part of the canonical process. 32  Sanders, Torah and Canon, 55 – 90. 31

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(1:3 – 2:8). The hermeneutic, of necessity, was based on belief in God as creator of all those peoples, hence their judge, as well as Israel’s judge (Amos 9:2 – 7). The indictments against the neighbors all around was that they had committed inhuman acts against their neighbors (1:3 – 2:5). But the indictments against Israel were that she had committed inhuman acts against the poor and powerless in her own land while engaging in various forms of idolatry in doing so (2:6 – 8). When they did call upon Yahweh it was in his role as redeemer: they expected Yahweh, the warrior God, to save them when they got into trouble. But Amos’s message was the shocking one that God was judging them on the same basis that he judged other peoples. God was Creator of All and hence free to judge as well as bless his own people (9:2 – 7). To support his argument, he cited the old, familiar story of Israel’s redemption from slavery in Egypt to occupy the land of Canaan. He cited the entrance into the land first followed by citing the exodus and wanderings (2:9 – 11), to emphasize that God had given them the land; they had not taken it by their own power. The government and religious leaders were incensed to hear the precious story of Israel’s very identity cited to support the notion that they too were to be judged by God (7:10 – 15). Normally it was cited to argue that God was their redeemer God; what he had done in the past he could and would do again; that, for them, was faith. But Amos repeated / resignified it in order to show the stark contrast between how God had treated them when they were slaves in Egypt and how they had been treating the poor in their own land – actually God’s land.33 At the end of the sermon someone must have intervened with the objection that they were the only family on earth with whom God had a covenant, and that he would therefore take care of them during this rising Assyrian crisis. Amos, by contrast, states clearly, God speaking through the prophet: “Right on, you only have I known of all the families of the earth; therefore I will punish you for all your sins” (3:2). The old tradition recited by each was the same. But their hermeneutics, or views of reality, were radically different. According to the true prophets, the situation called for a different hermeneutic by which to adapt it and keep it alive: God is both judge and redeemer, not just savior and redeemer. Amos had probably learned the hermeneutic through the international wisdom traditions undoubtedly recited by the folk in his home town of Tekoa, where the “wise woman of Tekoa” had lived (2 Sam 14:1 – 20).34 God would, through the aggression of the Neo-Assyrian Empire in their time, judge them and reshape them for the new day (Isa 28 – 31). Those, like the false prophets, who had argued that God was in effect obliged to take care of his own people (a tenet of polytheism) would be heard from no more, except by adverse citation in the canonical prophets. On the contrary, it was the canonically prophetic message, repeated and recited in exile, that gave the people the hope that God, having judged and reshaped them, would now revive them: the adversity had had both a reason and a purpose. The reason was their sins in the eyes of God; the 33

  For an evaluation of this point, see Barthélemy, “La critique canonique.”   See Terrien, “Amos and Wisdom,” followed by Wolff, Amos the Prophet, 56 – 59.

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purpose was not to destroy Israel but to transform it. God had a plan for them. And the remarkable thing is that the review in exile of earlier traditions such as the monotheizing message of Amos is what undoubtedly did provide them with the power for survival as a remnant, albeit reshaped into the new covenant people called Judaism. It at the same time secured a place for the Amos book in the Jewish canon. This same process can be seen in the reviewed and adapted traditions that make up the Torah and the Prophets. Isaiah’s appeal to authority for his message a few decades after Amos down in Judah was not so much the exodus – entrance traditions as the Davidic traditions. Just as God had chosen slaves in Egypt as his corporate son, so God also chose David, the son of Jesse, as his royal son, to be king of Judah and then all Israel. That was the dominant theology in the south, and Isaiah appealed to it in the same shocking manner Amos had done with the exodus traditions, to support his message of God’s judgments of surviving Judah at the end of the eighth century. It was by the instrument of the same aggressive Neo-Assyrian Empire. Isaiah’s message may have been even more shocking because the well-established Davidic theology in the south held that God would keep his promises no matter Judah’s conduct. God was the faithful promiser. But Isaiah used the precious Davidic memories to undergird his message of judgment. God was indeed faithful, he said, and there would be a Zion, but it would be a Zion painfully purged of the dross by which it had become impure (Isa 1:25). In one instance he even appealed to the popular tradition about how God as Holy Warrior assisted David in defeating the Philistines in two crucial battles – on Mount Perazim and in the Valley of Gibeon (Isa 28:21; cf. 2 Sam 5:17 – 25) – but this time not to fight for Judah as God had for David, but to command the enemy forces invading Judah (1:4 – 27; 28:7 – 22). Again, the hermeneutic triangle of three factors needs to be applied to appreciate the repetition and the adaptation of the traditions about David to the new situation at the end of the eighth century: the tradition being adapted (2 Sam 5); the new situation (the Assyrian invasion); and the monotheizing hermeneutic of God as both judge and redeemer.35 Similar examples can be drawn from all the preexilic prophetic literature. A crucial point in the common human process of adapting older stories to new situations is that the prophets showed how the adversity as judgment would also have a positive effect. They used metaphors to make the point that God’s judgment would have transforming power if the people let it happen in themselves. The pain and suffering would instruct and discipline them in God’s ways, would purge their sins as by fire or by water (Isa 1, 7, 28) or would effect a kind of surgery whereby their ways of thinking (the heart in Hebrew) would he transformed. Jeremiah said the adversity was like open-heart surgery in which God would suture his Torah directly onto the heart of his people corporately 35  Sanders, From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, 89. The hermeneutic triangle only can successfully challenge the hermeneutic circle whereby a community reads the biblical text only through the lens of its peculiar traditions about it.

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(Jer 31:31 – 34; cf. 30:12 – 17; Hos 5:15 – 6:3; Isa 51:7), and Ezekiel claimed that the adversity was to be understood as a heart-transplant operation in which Israel’s old heart of stone would be replaced with a new heart and a new spirit implanted within them corporately (Ezek 36:26 – 27). Jeremiah urged the people at one point to circumcise their hearts, but they did not (Jer 4:11; cf. Deut 4:16); so God in effect did it for them through the adversity of Babylonian defeat and destruction (Deut 30:6). Thus the process of repetition and adaptation of preexilic traditions that went on in the camps in Babylonia was nothing new. It had been a part of Israel’s life- and identity-giving process. A people’s corporate identity is in the stories it tells generation to generation, and the more commanding the stories, the more cohesive and effective the corporate identity.36 Judah / Israel’s rebirth as Judaism in the exile was undoubtedly due to this canonical process of selective review and adaptation of the old stories that were keeping them alive as Jews and giving them purpose. Apparently no other people of the area who experienced the same discontinuity as Judah survived with their former (even though transformed) identity intact the way Judah / Israel did. Disappearance from the stage of history is rarely by wholesale slaughter, but rather by absorption and assimilation to the triumphant, dominant culture. Babylonia’s foreign policy was a key factor, of course. In contrast to the earlier Neo-Assyrian policy, Babylonia did not practice forced integration of masses of conquered peoples. On the contrary, Babylonia allowed conquered folk to live together in prison camps where they could, if they chose, engage in the kind of corporate review and adaptation of the old traditions that reminded them of who they were and what they stood for. Persian policy went further and sponsored repatriation of captive peoples (2  Chron  36:22 – 23; Ezra  1:1 – 4).

Early Jewish Literature It is clear that the preexilic literature and traditions that survived, edited and adapted, as the basic literature of early Judaism had certain necessary characteristics. It would have been the “tough stuff” that bore repeating and reciting when there was the threat of extinction among those who still had hope of survival with identity. Biblical literature is amazing in large part for its self-critical component. It is a dialogical literature that “tells it like it is.” No final redactor went through and cleaned it up to make Jews look good to others or to themselves; that would be left for apologists like Philo and Josephus to do for the Greco-Roman world. The focus on individual worth and responsibility within the corporate that became a mark of postexilic early Judaism, with the felt need 36   The cultural anthropologist Michael Taussig, in conversations with Peruvian tribal leaders, whom he had asked why they thought the Europeans had conquered their people, said the response was that “their stories were better than our stories.” I am indebted to my colleague, Prof. Jack Coogan, for this point; cf. Ray, “Avant-Garde Finds of Andy Hardy,” 234.

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to provide the people with models of morality, is by and large limited to the revisionist history in Chronicles, and indeed much of the Ketuvim. Chronicles, in fact, provides a rich field for study of how in the canonical process earlier stories (of Genesis through 2 Kings) were adapted to the increasing focus on individual worth and responsibility in early Judaism. Israel lived on a land bridge among three continents, commonly called Palestine, which had important routes for caravan trade and military movement between Egypt, Asia, and Europe. This small area of the globe at the eastern end of the Mediterranean was strategically important to commerce and to conquest, and was frequently coveted by all the countries of the area that could raise surplus economy enough to take it. Hence much of the historiography of the Bible was forced to explain why Israel was clobbered so often, and why God permitted so much adversity. The prophetic / Deuteronomic thesis was, as already noted, that God through the prophets signified and gave meaning to the adversity as God’s judgment of his own people in order to transform them into the people God truly wanted them to be. The story-line that runs from Genesis through 2 Kings, precisely the most stable part of the Jewish canon until the printing press,37 ends in utter and devastating defeat with the final king of the Davidic line, Jehoiachin, under house arrest in Babylon living by the grace of Evil-Merodach, one of the last kings of the Babylonian Empire. What survived of the old stories were those, edited and adapted, that could explain that Israel’s God was really the God of all creation and of all history, the God of victories and defeats, risings and fallings, what humans call good, from their stand-point, and also what they call evil. This was a threat to those who believed in God’s gifts, but a promise to those who believed in God the giver of all gifts. Furthermore, the story that runs from Genesis to 2 Kings focuses on the corporate covenant relation between God and the people as a whole, and makes it clear that “none was righteous, no not one” (Rom 3:10; cf. Ps 14:1). In the Jewish canon, then, the prophetic corpus of fifteen books comes next precisely to explain the uses of adversity in the hands of One God. In that nascent canon of Judaism, the Law and the Prophets, there were no models for morality, only mirrors for identity, for those who would continue to find their identity and faith in that canon.38 And since the major functions of any canon are to tell the faithful who they are and what they should do, wherever and whenever they live, those who found their identity in its stories continued to repeat / recite and to drash such a canon for light on their plight. That way they could explain to their children what God was doing in judging and transforming his own people into Judaism. Judaism was for them the continuing witness in a polytheistic world to the tough faith in One God of All. When the first major technological revolution affecting the question of canon took place, the use of the codex for copying the canon (probably about the sixth 37

 Yeivin, Introduction to the Tiberian Masorah, 38 – 39.   Sanders, “Hermeneutics,” esp. 406.

38

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century CE for Judaism), the question of the order of biblical books had to be addressed. Whereas the Talmud places Chronicles last in the third section of the Jewish canon, the earliest masoretic codices all place Chronicles at the beginning of the Ketuvim. That is quite significant, for it is the third section, the Ketuvim, that reflects the Jewish emphasis, within the on-going corporate covenant, on individual worth and responsibility. The book of Chronicles begins the tendency that will be seen more and more clearly in early Jewish literature to provide some models from the past of individual faith and obedience. One can understand the need in Judaism, scattered as it was in communities throughout the known world after the Babylonian conquest, to inspire widely dispersed Jews who were to be faithful and obedient to the One God in a basically polytheistic world – essentially the burden of Torah. The book of Psalms contains a number of old royal hymns from the preexilic monarchies, but they were easily adapted in the new non-monarchic situation of early Judaism to individuals’ reading them for personal inspiration and guidance in the faith in One God. The first psalm, which many believe was placed in that position at the end of the redactional process of the Psalter, stresses faith and obedience of the individual. “Blessed is the person who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the ways of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers, but whose delight is in the Torah of Yahweh.”39 For such a psalm to follow immediately the story of old preexilic Israel, revised by the Chronicler to make almost pious heroes of David and Solomon, and even to allow for the repentance and restoration of Judah’s King Manasseh (2 Chron 33:10 – 13), the very symbol of Israel and Judah’s polytheistic evils, indeed the worst scoundrel of all according to 2 Kings (21:1 – 18) would serve to stress the need for individual worth and responsibility within the corporate covenant.40 Greco-Roman cultural emphasis then on individual worth and responsibility would further open the way for the concept of the individual deciding for him / herself what or which god to worship and to find identity in, no matter their prior heritage. Before Christianity moved out of Palestine into the Western world, growing dramatically by proselytizing individuals and core families, Pharisees had already been seeking converts to Judaism among non-Jews, probably under the same cultural influence. Good literature in any language or culture has a high degree of multivalency, especially poetry. The same text when read in different contexts can convey meanings quite different from so-called “original” intentions.41 The sub-discipline of comparative midrash focuses on the different understandings that the same text had from inception through citations and echoes in early Judaism into

39   So the Hebrew of Ps 1:1, as reflected accurately in the RSV. The NRSV removed the stress on individual responsibility by pluralizing the third person singular masculine pronouns, to avoid sexism. The apparent needs of current believing communities thus overshadowed the needs of the earlier communities as reflected in the MT and all early witnesses. 40   See Sanders, “Prayer of Manasseh.” 41   See Sanders, “Dead Sea Scrolls – A Quarter-Century,” esp 145 – 48, where the issue of canon is addressed.

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Christianity and rabbinic Judaism.42 It is almost commonplace to note that every time a text is re-read it is also resignified. No two understandings are ever quite the same. This is a clue to two variables: the new context in which it is read or cited and also the hermeneutic that the later reader brings to the text – again the hermeneutic triangle. On the other hand, all texts have some built-in constraints that work against complete subversion of a text. Very common in early Judaism was the practice of paraphrasing ancient texts so that (a) they could be more clearly understood in the later cultural setting and (b) so that they would fit the later context the way the community needed and the tradent wanted.43 But if the older text cited or echoed was so modified that it could not be recognized by the community for which the newer writing was intended, the point of reference was lost and the authority sought in making it vanished.44 Adaptability must be matched by a measure of stability for the canonical process to be effective. One of the reasons biblical literature has lasted so long in the process of recitation / adaptation is that it is highly multivalent, more so undoubtedly than the literature that did not make it onto some canonical tenure track. Judaism and Christianity have both through the ages insisted that Isaiah’s voice had (re‑)significance beyond the eighth century BCE. Canonical literature, by its very nature of being “canon,” is relevant to many different situations and circumstances, therefore adaptable to later communities in quite different circumstances, sometimes saying different things along the way. The concept of canon therefore cannot he limited to its stability factor alone, that is, to a list of writings in a certain order; its relevance to the on-going and ever-changing life of a believing community is its very nature. Its function as norma normans is as important as its being a list of norma normata.45 There have been and are numerous canons in Judaism and Christianity. Different denominations within a single faith may have different canons; thus they may not agree on its stability factor as canon. But all religions and denominations within them agree that their “canon” is relevant and adaptable to their on-going life. This is so for the most orthodox communities as well as the most reforming. It was that compelling belief that drove the canonical process before various forms of

42   See Sanders, Canon and Community, 21 – 41; Callaway, Sing, O Barren One, 1 – 12; Evans, To See and Not Perceive; Evans and Sanders, Luke and Scripture, 1 – 13; and the series of publications out of the SBL Section on “Scripture in Early Judaism and Christianity,” e. g., Evans and Sanders, Paul and the Scriptures of Israel; and Pettit, “James Sanders and Comparative Midrash.” 43   See Sanders, “Hermeneutics of Text Criticism”; Sanders, “Task of Text Criticism”; and Sanders, “Hebrew University Bible and Biblia Hebraica Quinta.” Most “variants” in ancient versions and even texts up to the end of the first century CE are “false” due to this very factor; they do not necessarily represent different earlier Vorlagen. The earliest manuscript evidence we have indicates that the text of the Hebrew Bible up to about 100 CE was relatively fluid; accurate copying had not yet become a major factor in scribal activity; see Sanders, “Text and Canon: Concepts and Method.” 44   Sanders, “Stability and Fluidity.” 45   Sanders, “Canon. Hebrew Bible,” 839 and 847 – 51.

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stability became necessary; and it is that same compelling belief that drives the continuing canonical process today within the constraints of a given canon. Every Jewish and Christian canon has had points at which significant portions of it became stabilized before the whole and then at which the whole became stabilized as canon. And the processes involved in those points were parts of the on-going canonical process. Stabilization and closure of the formative canonical process occurred most likely because historical and cultural factors demanded it. But the process clearly was not on a single track. The diversity within early Judaism and then early Christianity clarifies the evidence indicating a multiple-track canonical process. But the narrowing down of the sheer numbers of functional canons to the several within Judaism and Christianity was a reaction to historical and cultural factors that challenged the diversity.46 The principal factors were surely the two destructions of city and temple in the sixth century BCE and in the first CE, and then the disaster of the Bar Kochba revolt and its cataclysmic blow to apocalyptic within surviving rabbinic Judaism.47 The persecutions and threats of extinction experienced by both Judaism and early Christianity, and the effect of the conversion of and conquest by Constantine – for both faiths – were also decisive critical events leading to closed canons. Royal programs, scribal decisions, or ecclesial councils could only reflect what the communities needed, or they did not survive. While the effect of such events was a closing of ranks and a diminishing of diversity in both faiths, the canonical process nonetheless continued even after closure. When the fluid becomes stable, comparative midrash shows, the issue of the hermeneutics brought to the stabilized text to render it once more fluid and adaptable comes to the fore.48 When the tradent can no longer paraphrase or gloss or alter the text itself, the need of the community s / he serves demands that the stabilized text continue to be broken open and rendered understandable and relevant for the on-going life of the community. That which the earliest biblical editor, or prophet or psalmist or historian or evangelist or apostle, did for his / her community was not all that different from what later and current tradents in any community have done and do, who seek to make the text understandable in various cultural and contemporary terms, whether those tradents focus on its contemporary relevance or focus on so-called “original” meanings. What Amos did for the folk in the royal sanctuary in Bethel one day over twenty-seven centuries ago continues today. All tradents have done and do their jobs in their own contemporary and cultural terms, which do not necessarily last very long; that is the principal temporizing constraint they have had and now have as tradents. Even the process of quest of “original” meanings in the past three centuries since the Enlightenment has its own history of dependence on cultural factors.49 As long as a canon continues to function as the ongoing 46

 McDonald, Formation of the Christian Biblical Canon, 250 – 57.   Apocalyptic, however, did not entirely die in rabbinic Judaism; see the work of Lou Silberman as noted in Sanders, “Identity, Apocalyptic, and Dialogue,” esp. 165 ff. 48   See Sanders, “Adaptable for Life.” 49   See Sanders, “Scripture as Canon for Post-Modern Times.” 47

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source of identity and of ethics (faith and obedience) for a believing community, the canonical process, begun at the very headwaters of canon formation, will continue.

Bibliography Ackroyd, Peter R. Exile and Restoration. London: SCM; Philadelphia: Westminster, 1968. Barthélemy, Dominique. “La critique canonique.” Revue de l’Institut Catholique de Paris 36 (1990) 191 – 220. Beckwith, Roger T. The Old Testament Canon of the New Testament Church and Its Background in Early Judaism. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1985. Buhl, Frants. Kanon und Text des Alten Testaments. Leipzig: W. Faber, 1891. Callaway, Mary. Sing, O Barren One: A Study in Comparative Midrash. Atlanta: Scholars, 1986. Carr, David M. “Canonization in the Context of Community: An Outline of the Formation of the Tanakh and the Christian Bible.” In A Gift of God in Due Season: Essays on Scripture and Canon in Honor of James A. Sanders, edited by Richard D. Weis and David M. Carr, 22 – 64. JSOTSup / LHBOTS 225. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1996. Carr, David M. Reading the Fractures of Genesis: Historical and Literary Approaches. Louisville: Westminster-/John Knox, 1996. Collins, John J. “Essenes.” In ABD 2:620 – 21. Davies, Philip R. Scribes and Schools: The Canonization of the Hebrew Scriptures. Louisville: Westminster / John Knox, 1998. Eissfeldt, Otto. The Old Testament: An Introduction. Translated by Peter R. Ackroyd. Oxford: Blackwell; New York: Harper & Row, 1965. Evans, Craig A. To See and Not Perceive: Isaiah 6:9 – 10 in Early Jewish and Christian Interpretation. JSOTSup 64. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1989. Evans, Craig A., and James A. Sanders. Luke and Scripture: Essays on the Function of Authoritative Tradition in Luke – Acts. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993. Evans, Craig A., and James A. Sanders. Paul and the Scriptures of Israel. JSNTSup 83. SSEJC 1. Sheffield: JSOT, 1993. Fishbane, Michael A. Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel. Oxford: Clarendon, 1985. Flint, Peter W. The Dead Sea Psalms Scrolls and the Book of Psalms. STDJ 17. Leiden: Brill, 1997. Flint, Peter W. “The ‘11QPsa – Psalter’ in the Dead Sea Scrolls, Including the Preliminary Edition of 4QPse.” In The Quest for Context and Meaning: Studies in Biblical Intertextuality in Honor of James A. Sanders, edited by Craig A. Evans and Shemaryahu Talmon, 173 – 99. BibInt 28. Leiden: Brill, 1997. Flint, Peter W. “Of Psalms and Psalters: James Sanders’ Investigation of the Psalms Scrolls.” In A Gift of God in Due Season: Essays on Scripture and Canon in Honor of James A. Sanders, edited by Richard D. Weis and David M. Carr, 65 – 83. JSOTSup / LHBOTS 225. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1996. Goshen-Gottstein, Moshe H. “The Psalms Scroll (11QPsa): A Problem of Canon and Text.” Textus 5 (1966) 22 – 33. Havel, Vaclav. Letters to Olga. New York: H. Holt, 1989. Leiman, Sid Z. The Canonization of Hebrew Scripture: The Talmudic and Midrashic Evidence. Hamden, CT: Archon, 1976. Lewis, Jack P. “What Do We Mean by Jabneh?” JBR 32 (1964) 125 – 32. [Reprinted in The Canon and Masorah of the Hebrew Bible: An Introductory Reader, edited by Sid Z. Leiman, 254 – 61. New York: Ktav, 1974.]

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McDonald, Lee M. The Formation of the Christian Biblical Canon. Rev. ed. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1995. Pettit, Peter. “James Sanders and Comparative Midrash.” Folio 15, no. 1 (Fall 1998) 11 – 12. Pfeiffer, Robert H. Introduction to the Old Testament. New York: Harper & Row, 1941. 2nd ed. 1948. Qimron, Elisha, and John Strugnell, eds. Qumran Cave 4.V: Miqsat Maʿaśe ha-Torah. ˙ DJD 10. Oxford: Clarendon, 1994. Ray, Robert B. “The Avant-Garde Finds of Andy Hardy.” In Modernity and Mass Culture, edited by James Naremore and Patrick Brantlinger, 224 – 52. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991. Ryle, Herbert E. The Canon of the Old Testament. London: Macmillan, 1895. Sanders, James A. “Adaptable for Life: The Nature and Function of Canon.” In Magnalia Dei: The Mighty Acts of God: Essays in Memory of G. Ernest Wright, edited by Frank M. Cross, Werner E. Lemke, and Patrick D. Miller, 531 – 60. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1976. [Reprinted in From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, by James A. Sanders, 9 – 39. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987.] Sanders, James A. “The Bible as Canon.” Christian Century 98 (2 Dec 1981) 1250 – 55. Sanders, James A. “Biblical Criticism and the Bible as Canon.” USQR 32 (1977) 157 – 65. [Reprinted in From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, by James A. Sanders, 75 – 86. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987.] Sanders, James A. “Canon. Hebrew Bible.” In ABD 1:837 – 52. Sanders, James A. Canon and Community: A Guide to Canonical Criticism. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984. Sanders, James A. “Cave 11 Surprises and the Question of Canon.” McCQ 21 (1968) 284 – 98. [Reprinted in New Directions in Biblical Archaeology, edited by David Noel Freedman and Jonas C. Greenfield, 101 – 16. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969.] Sanders, James A. The Dead Sea Psalms Scroll. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1967. Sanders, James A. “The Dead Sea Scrolls – A Quarter-Century of Study.” BA 36 (1973) 109 – 48. Sanders, James A. “Deuteronomy.” In The Books of the Bible. Vol. 1, The Old Testament  / The Hebrew Bible, edited by Bernhard W. Anderson, 89 – 102. New York: Scribner’s, 1989. Sanders, James A. “The Exile and Canon Formation.” In Exile: Old Testament, Jewish and Christian Conceptions, edited by James M. Scott, 37 – 61. SJSJ 56. Leiden: Brill, 1997. Sanders, James A. From Sacred Story to Sacred Text: Canon as Paradigm. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987. Sanders, James A. “The Hebrew University Bible and Biblia Hebraica Quinta.” JBL 118 (1999) 518 – 26. Sanders, James A. “Hermeneutics.” In IDBSup 402 – 7. Sanders, James A. “Hermeneutics in True and False Prophecy.” In Canon and Authority: Essays in Old Testament Religion and Theology, edited by George W. Coats and Burke O. Long, 21 – 41. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1977. [Reprinted as “Canonical Hermeneutics: True and False Prophecy.” In From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, by James A. Sanders, 87 – 105. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987.] Sanders, James A. “Hermeneutics of Text Criticism.” Textus 18 (1995) 1 – 26. Sanders, James A. “Identity, Apocalyptic, and Dialogue.” In The Echoes of Many Texts: Reflections on Jewish and Christian Traditions. Essays in Honor of Lou H. Silberman, edited by William G. Dever and J. Edward Wright, 159 – 70. BJS 313. Atlanta: Scholars, 1997. Sanders, James A. “The Impact of the Scrolls on Biblical Studies.” In The Provo International Conference on the Dead Sea Scrolls: New Texts, Reformulated Issues, and

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Technological Innovations, edited by Donald W. Parry and Eugene C. Ulrich, 47 – 57. STDJ 30. Leiden: Brill, 1999. Sanders, James A. “Prayer of Manasseh.” In The HarperCollins Study Bible, edited by Wayne A. Meeks, 1746 – 48. San Francisco, New York: HarperCollins 1993. [rev. ed. Edited by Harold W. Attridge et al, 1568–70. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2006.] Sanders, James A. The Psalms Scroll of Qumran Cave 11 (11QPsa). DJD 4. Oxford: Clarendon, 1965. Sanders, James A. “The Qumran Psalms Scroll (11QPsa) Reviewed.” In On Language, Culture, and Religion: In Honor of Eugene A. Nida, edited by Matthew Black and William A. Smalley, 77 – 99. The Hague: Mouton, 1974. Sanders, James A. Review of The Dead Sea Psalms Scrolls and the Book of Psalms, by Peter W. Flint. DSD 6, no. 1 (1999) 84 – 89. Sanders, James A. “Scripture as Canon for Post-Modern Times.” BTB 25, no. 2 (1995) 56 – 63. Sanders, James A. “The Scroll of Psalms (11QPss) from Cave 11: A Preliminary Report.” BASOR 165 (1962) 11 – 15. Sanders, James A. “‘Spinning’ the Bible: How Judaism and Christianity Shape the Canon Differently.” BRev 14, no.  3 (1998) 22 – 29, 44 – 45. Sanders, James A. “Stability and Fluidity in Text and Canon.” In Tradition of the Text: Studies Offered to Dominique Barthélemy in Celebration of His 70th Birthday, edited by Gerard J. Norton and Stephen Pisano, 203 – 17. OBO 109. Fribourg: Presses universitaires; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1991. Sanders, James A. “The Task of Text Criticism.” In Problems in Biblical Theology: Essays in Honor of Rolf Knierim, edited by Henry Sun and Keith L. Eades, 315 – 27. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997. Sanders, James A. “Text and Canon: Concepts and Method.” JBL 98 (1979) 5 – 29. [Reprinted in From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, by James A. Sanders, 125 – 51. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987.] Sanders, James A. “Text and Canon: Old Testament and New.” In Mélanges Dominique Barthélemy: Études bibliques offertes à l’occasion de son 60e anniversaire, edited by Pierre Casetti, Othmar Keel, and Adrian Schenker, 373 – 94. OBO 38. Fribourg: Presses universitaires; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1981. Sanders, James A. Torah and Canon. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1972. [2nd ed. Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2005.] Sanders, James A. “Torah and Christ.” Int 29 (1975) 372 – 90. [Reprinted in From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, by James A. Sanders, 41 – 60. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987.] Sanders, James A. “Torah and Paul.” In God’s Christ and His People: Studies in Honour of Nils Alstrup Dahl on the Occasion of His Sixty-Fifth Birthday, edited by Wayne A. Meeks and Jacob Jervell, 132 – 40. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1977. [Reprinted as “Paul and the Law” in From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, by James A. Sanders, 115 – 23. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987.] Sanders, James A. “Variorum in the Psalms Scroll (11QPsa).” HTR 59 (1966) 83 – 94. Stone, Michael E. “Judaism in the Time of Christ.” Scientific American 288 (January 1973) 80 – 87. Stone, Michael E. Scriptures, Sects, and Visions. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1980. Talmon, Shemaryahu. “Pisqah Beʾemsaʿ Pasuq and 11QPsa.” Textus 5 (1966) 11 – 21. Terrien, Samuel. “Amos and Wisdom.” In Israel’s Prophetic Heritage, edited by Bernhard W. Anderson and Walter J. Harrelson, 108 – 15. New York: Harper, 1962. Weis, Richard. “A Definition of the Genre Massaʾ in the Hebrew Bible.” PhD diss., Claremont Graduate School, 1986.

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Wilson, Gerald H. The Editing of the Hebrew Psalter. SBLDS 76. Chico, CA: Scholars, 1985. Wolff, Hans W. Amos the Prophet: The Man and His Background. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1973. Yadin, Yigael. The Temple Scroll. 3 vols. Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1983. Hebrew Version: K‫מגילת המקדׂש‬K. Tel Aviv: K‫ספרית מעריב‬ ִ K, 1990. Yeivin, Israel. Introduction to the Tiberian Masorah. Translated and edited by Ernest J. Revell. Atlanta: Scholars, 1980.

Appendix The History of the Ancient Biblical Manuscript Center, 1976 – 20031 This meeting of the board of trustees of the Ancient Biblical Manuscript Center (ABMC) marks the end of twenty-five years of operations. Normally the annual president’s report covers events and personnel of the immediate past year. But this time it seems appropriate to record as much accurate data about the history of the Center as possible, because of its transition process from an independent corporation to a subsidiary of the Claremont School of Theology, and my retirement as president in May 2003. John Trever, later the Center’s first director, arrived in Claremont in 1976 from Baldwin Wallace College, and brought with him a collection of artifacts relating to the Dead Sea Scrolls, and especially his experience in their discovery and photographing three of the Qumran Cave 1 manuscripts. Mrs. Sanders and I arrived from Union Theological Seminary / Columbia University in New York City in August 1977, at which point construction began on the west wing of the Claremont School of Theology (CST) library in which the Center would be housed. Trever and I both came with the support of Elizabeth Hay Bechtel. He and Professor William Brownlee, already at the Claremont Graduate School, had been graduate fellows at the American School of Oriental Research (ASOR) in East Jerusalem (now the Albright Institute) during the Arab – Jewish War of 1947 – 48 in British-Mandate Palestine. Brownlee and Trever recognized the authenticity of the scrolls they were shown during the momentary absence from Jerusalem of the director of the ASOR, Professor Millar Burrows of Yale, who was at the time in Baghdad where the ASOR maintained a presence. In February 1948, John Trever photographed the cache of three scrolls from Qumran Cave 1, which had been brought to the American School for confirmation, and sent a few of the prints to Professor William Foxwell Albright of Johns Hopkins University, who immediately agreed with Brownlee and Trever’s assessment of them. The Manuscript Center was conceived during a series of meetings Elizabeth Hay Bechtel and I had in New York and Jerusalem beginning in the mid-1960s. 1   This Appendix is an expanded version of my final report, as President of the Ancient Biblical Manuscript Center, to the Board on 12 May 2003. I am indebted to former directors and others who have provided memory and details from personal files to make it as accurate as possible: Richard Weis, George Whipple, Marvin Sweeney, Peter Pettit, Peggy Woodruff, William Yarchin, Sheila Spiro, Randy Merritt, Stuart Simon, Steven Delamarter, Michael Phelps, and others.

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Elizabeth and Kenneth Bechtel of San Francisco had in 1960 donated to the Palestine Archaeological Museum (PAM) in Jordanian Jerusalem, through the ASOR, the funds necessary to release the large scroll of Psalms from Qumran Cave 11, which I was then assigned to unroll, study, and publish.2 The museum, a private institution with its own board of directors at the time, had expended large sums of its Rockefeller endowment to secure the scrolls materials that had come in to the museum through Bedouin since 1949, and especially the mass of fragments recovered in 1952 from Cave 4, and needed to recoup as much of it as possible to keep the museum functioning. Dora and I met Mrs. Bechtel in 1962 soon after we returned from Jerusalem, where I had opened and studied the Psalms Scroll for publication. That meeting started a friendship that would last nearly twenty years. We often talked about how important the scrolls were to biblical studies, and to Western civilization generally. She was keen on seeing that photographic images of them be preserved outside Palestine / Israel in case of further disturbances there. I shared her conviction, so that we traveled to Jordanian Jerusalem in May of 1967 to talk with the authorities there about doing so. We both stayed at the ASOR; John Mark of Princeton was director and very helpful to us. The chef de travail, Père Roland de Vaux, of the international team of scholars working principally on the massive cache of fragments from Cave 4, agreed that something should be done, but the decision would have to come from the Jordanian Department of Antiquites in Amman. While we were there the tension was building between Egypt and Israel that resulted in the “Six-Day War” of early June. I helped to evacuate Americans out of East Jerusalem to Amman, then to Beirut, then to Rome. The PAM had been nationalized by the Kingdom of Jordan in the early 1960s, so that when Israel assumed responsibility for the PAM in June of 1967 the museum became Israel Museum II. Little came immediately of the purpose of our trip because of the radical change of political authority, but the seeds had been planted in the minds of de Vaux and of the international team of scholars. In 1970, copies of about three-quarters of the scrolls photographs in the PAM were deposited, for preservation only, in the library of the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati at the urging of its president, my former teacher, Nelson Glueck. Betty Bechtel and I, however, were still not satisfied. Meanwhile, in 1969 I was invited to join a research team sponsored by the United Bible Societies, for a long-term project in Germany. The team, called The Hebrew Old Testament Text Project (HOTTP), had its first meeting in Arnoldshain but thereafter met for twelve years every summer for a month in Freudenstadt at the Erholungsheim there. There were six of us on the team, the other five all European, plus several assistants (one of whom later became the doctoral advisor at Leiden to my successor here on the CST faculty, Prof. Kristin De Troyer). Our primary task was to make fresh decisions about the text-critical problems most modern translation committees throughout the world find most 2

 Sanders, Psalms Scroll, and Sanders, Dead Sea Psalms Scroll.

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difficult, and to cut through the endless circle in which they would often turn to recent Western translations for solutions (just as the ancients who did not know Hebrew or Aramaic well turned to the Septuagint, or early Greek translations). Equally important to the team of scholars was the opportunity, after the first scrolls had been published, to probe their true significance for the task of textual criticism. One of our number was Père Dominique Barthélemy of l’Université de Fribourg en Suisse, who had published scroll fragments from Qumran Cave 1 and from Nahal Hever. He had a personal library of microfilms of widely-scat˙ ˙ manuscripts pertinent to the task of textual criticism of the tered unpublished entire Hebrew Bible and the Septuagint. That library became the model in my mind for our eventual Manuscript Center collection.3 Mrs. Bechtel and I wanted to press on to secure the complete inventory of copies of scrolls photographs in the two museums in the newly unified Jerusalem. We talked through many conversations about establishing an institute to maintain copies of the scrolls photographs, but she would not give money in New York, only in California where she lived. Mrs. Bechtel had in mind a Dead Sea Scrolls preservation project, but I made it clear that I was not interested in moving to California simply to oversee a vault for purposes of preservation only. While we were still in New York she and I reached the decision that it would be a center for both preservation and research, where scholars any- and everywhere would have inexpensive and open access to our holdings of photographic images of biblical manuscripts for study, on site or by interlibrary loan. The purpose was to stop the endless cycle of scholars copying errors from one apparatus (scholarly footnotes) to another because of the lack of available, clear images of the actual manuscripts to check their research. Invitations soon came from two California institutions. In August 1976 we chose the School of Theology at Claremont (STC, now Claremont School of Theology, CST) and the Claremont Graduate School (CGS, now Claremont Graduate University), largely because STC was text-oriented from its inception under its first president, Ernest Cadman Colwell, and the Claremont Graduate School (now University) was home to the equally text-oriented Institute for Antiquity and Christianity (IAC) and had Prof. William Brownlee on its faculty. It was a logical decision. Trever thereupon moved from Ohio to establish the Trever Center for Dead Sea Scrolls, and was here a year before we arrived in August 1977 when construction began on the west wing of the library, including a climatized vault built by the firm of Joseph Battinger to the specifications indicated by friends at Eastman Kodak. I was named the Elizabeth Hay Bechtel Professor of Biblical Studies at STC, a chair that Mrs. Bechtel partially funded through annual donations. The Trever Center is still located in the north wing of the library of CST, separate from the Center. Trever became the first director of the ABMC. Mrs. Bechtel established through her lawyer, Arthur Henzel in Santa Barbara, a private operating foundation as the legal identity of the Center. We assembled 3

  See Sanders, “Tribute to Jean-Dominique Barthélemy.”

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a board of trustees for the foundation, with Mrs. Bechtel as president and myself as executive vice-president and CEO. Because Mrs. Bechtel wanted full control of the board, the other members were essentially scholars, academic administrators in Claremont, and her personal friends. These included Frank Cross of Harvard University and Noel Freedman of the University of Michigan, with both of whom I served at the time on the Ancient Manuscript Committee of the ASOR. Suggestions I made of folk who could help with funding were all set aside by Mrs. Bechtel, but for the first three years we had her own generous funding (when she approved of expenditures). The mission of the Center had been clarified: we would acquire images of ancient and medieval manuscripts of the Bible and related literature; we would preserve the images with the latest technology; and we would distribute them to all scholars who requested copies – always, of course, adhering to whatever stipulations were set by institutions around the world that provided us copies of their films. The only requirement to be a user was and is that the person requesting use of our images be able to read the manuscript sought; there was never a fee or other stipulation. The International Greek New Testament Project asked that their important collection of films of New Testament manuscripts also be housed in and administered by the ABMC. Richard Cain, who became president of STC the year we arrived in 1977, served on the board until several years after he retired in 1990. To our great good fortune, Joseph Platt, president of the Claremont Graduate School (now Claremont Graduate University), was a member of the board since its beginning and remained one of the most active and generous of our board members. His wisdom and long-time experience in administration and in fund-raising have been among our greatest assets. Joe served as acting president when I took my first sabbatical leave since coming to Claremont in 1985 – 86, then when I was visiting professor for a semester first at Stellenbosch University in 1989 and then at the University of Glasgow in 1991, and has been the invaluable chair of the committee effecting the transfer of leadership of the Center under CST. The librarian of STC / CST had traditionally been the secretary of the board, until recently. Under the new plan the librarian of CST became director of the Center. I had an office in the IAC our first year in Claremont (1977 – 78) but moved to the newly constructed Center in the late spring of 1978. The Center was housed in the top two floors of the new west wing of the STC / CST library, while the bottom floor was ceded to the library, which provided it expansion area for periodicals, deliveries, and cataloguing. The offices of the ABMC were located in the middle floor while the top floor contained my office, as well as study and storage space for the Center. In 1997 the top floor was also ceded over to the seminary to house the Multi-Cultural Center of CST. We began at inception an ambitious program of acquisitions from libraries, museums, and monasteries around the world. But we also pursued our long-standing interest in producing copies of the photographs of the Dead Sea Scrolls from the museums in Jerusalem. After our formal and gala “opening” in the fall of 1979, a year after operations had begun, Mrs. Bechtel and I returned to Jerusalem and finally had success in getting the permission of the authorities there to pho-

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tograph the Dead Sea Scrolls for our purposes. By that time, the chef de travail was Père Pierre Benoit of the École Biblique in Jerusalem, who worked well with the Israeli Department of Antiquities (IDA) under Avi Ethan, soon to change its name to the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) under Amir Derori, which had charge of all the DSS in the two Jerusalem museums. Agreements and covenants were signed by Mrs. Bechtel and myself with the Department and with each member of the international team of scholars. They restricted use of the films we would acquire and forbade making further copies except by the explicit agreement of the IAA and of the particular scholar assigned whatever lot of DSS we might want to duplicate; and they specified that we maintain a complete copy of the films in the Secure Storage Facility, with which we already had a contract in Tahoe City. That set the stage for sending a photographic team to Jerusalem in September 1980. Our basic dream was coming true. We received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, which funded the project, but Mrs. Bechtel also contributed to making the project a class operation. We asked Robert Schlosser of the Huntington Library in San Marino to be the project photographer, undoubtedly the best in the area. William Yarchin, a graduate student in Claremont at the time, later to serve as director of the ABMC for a year, was sent as Schlosser’s assistant. Bill had received a Rotary Foundation Scholarship to support his appointment as Research Fellow at the American School in East Jerusalem (re-named the Albright Institute), and was going to be there anyway. He was very helpful during the three weeks the team was there at work. This was to be our first major project, aside from the steady acquisition by mail of films of manuscripts begun two years earlier. In the meantime, Mrs. Bechtel, who had moved in May 1980 to Claremont and was coming to the Center daily, and I had disagreements about personnel and the Center’s future that came into the open at an executive committee meeting of the Board of Trustees in late September 1980, while the team was in Jerusalem. If she had continued to reside in Santa Barbara, when she came down to Claremont only every other week, I am confident we could have continued to function even with her tendency to micro-management of the Center. Instead, Mrs. Bechtel treated all of us connected with the operations of the Center as employees. She demanded that I fire (she wouldn’t do it herself) each of the first three directors of the Center, and she was never fully satisfied with any of the staff. When she moved to Claremont she bought three condos in a row near the Center and urged Dora and me to move into one of them. I knew that simply would not work and our turning her down clearly baffled and even irritated her. When then she offered to hold the mortgage on a home in Claremont she would herself select we said, No thank you. The next time we were together at a bank in town she said rather irritably, “You can stand on your head for all I care.” Her various efforts to gain as much control of our lives as possible were thwarted. I knew then that I would probably be next to be fired, or if not “fired” then shunted aside. I soon thereafter heard from graduate students that she was talking with Professor James Robinson about running the Center. During her move from Santa Barbara to Claremont, John, one of her two sons, came down

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from his ranch in Northern California to help with the move. At one point after John and I had lugged boxes to her new home and helped in other ways, while Mrs. Bechtel was busy otherwise, John and I took a break in my office on the second floor. After we were settled and resting John said, “Well, she’s yours now.” I did not know exactly what he meant but had a good idea. I asked him to clarify and he responded that the only friends she really had were those she “bought.” I was shocked but not surprised. I had seen it myself. After a brief respite he and I resumed our labors helping her move into her new home. Upon the team’s return from Jerusalem in late September the films were to be brought directly to the vault at the ABMC for storage, classification, and cataloguing. On the contrary, Mrs. Bechtel met Schlosser and the team at the Los Angeles Airport and took the films to the Huntington Library where she had privately made prior arrangements for their reception there. The Huntington Library had and has no interest in the ancient Near East or biblical history, nor does it have a Semitist on its staff, but Mrs. Bechtel saw fit to deposit them there because of her interpretation of the disagreements on the ABMC board; and, of course, she made it interesting for the Huntington to house them for her. The Center immediately informed the Jerusalem authorities and Frank Cross at Harvard, all of whom were in dismay at the turn of events, and wrote Mrs. Bechtel, insisting that the films be taken to the Center. Not only did she not heed their demands, she had the same contractor, Joe Battinger, build a vault at the Huntington for permanent storage and even had Schlosser make a complete set of copies for herself, again violating the covenants and agreements she had signed with the IAA and with the international team of scholars. While generous when things went the way she wanted, Betty Bechtel had a will of iron when they did not. The films remained at the Huntington until acting director Peter Pettit and I were permitted to retrieve, in early December 1983, those taken in Jerusalem. We verified that we were given the ones actually taken in Jerusalem, and had the complete set. Because of Mrs. Bechtel’s assigning personal motives to our split she told many people that I wanted to use the DSS films to my own advantage. As a result, I did not thereafter let any of my doctoral students use unpublished films of the DSS for their dissertations, much less publish any myself. The only way I had to counter her false claim was quietly and persistently to make a record of no abuse of privilege. Using the films brought home to the Center in December 1983, plus others we carefully acquired in the interval from DSS materials in Amman and elsewhere, we embarked in 1988 on the laborious project of compiling a catalogue and index to all the DSS films so that scholars everywhere would know exactly how to identify them and request use of them. The Dead Sea Scrolls Catalogue, compiled by Stephen Reed, revised and edited by Marilyn Lundberg with the collaboration of Michael Phelps (later to be director), was published by Scholars Press, Atlanta, in 1994. These were all doctoral students at the graduate school at the time. I was very proud of that. Reed was the major compiler and worked in 1989 in Jerusalem on the project and later at the Center. The copies Mrs. Bechtel had made at the Huntington remained there until 2003 when the current administration there agreed they should be brought,

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twenty-three years later, to the ABMC in Claremont. Trustee Joe Platt was the liaison with Dr. Scottheim of the Huntington, the outgoing president there, and persuaded him that the films belong in the ABMC. I am especially pleased, here at the close (2003) of my tenure at the Center, that the Dead Sea Scrolls Duplication Project begun in 1980 has finally been completed. At a called meeting of the board of the Center in December 1980, Frank Cross of Harvard attended and nominated myself president of the Ancient Biblical Manuscript Center in Mrs. Bechtel’s stead. Mrs. Bechtel, who was present with her lawyer, was urged to stay on the board to help accomplish the mission of the Center, but she refused. She insisted that her name be withdrawn from my chair on the CST faculty, and from any use of it by the Center. We, of course, complied with her request immediately. Mrs. Bechtel withdrew all support for the Center including the shopping center built in Montecito, a suburb of Santa Barbara, to provide income for the Center indefinitely. Her lawyer in Santa Barbara, Arthur Henzel, assured us that the contract he drew up stating Mrs. Bechtel’s support of the Center was firm, so that we could have sued to claim the support, but the board of trustees rightly, I think, decided that the Center did not want to be in the position of suing former donors. In order to make it possible for us to move from New York to Claremont, Mrs. Bechtel had pledged annual donations toward my salary, which she also withdrew. STC’s lawyer, at President Richard Cain’s direction, did sue and the seminary was awarded a lump sum of $80k. It was now clear to all who knew the facts that Mrs. Bechtel would not tolerate anything but complete control of the Center even though she had little knowledge of its essential work. Richard Weis, a graduate student who had come out from New York with us in 1977 to continue work on his doctorate here, was made director from January 1981 and remained director until June 1985. Weis was my research assistant both at the IAC and in the Center from the beginning. During the time Mrs. Bechtel was president, Rich actually served both as cataloguer and as assistant director but without those titles. After he became director we together read and mastered as much as we could on how to raise money. We soon established The Folio as the quarterly newsletter of the Center, and as a vehicle of fund-raising. Rich created the cataloguing system almost from scratch as we could not simply use normal library cataloguing systems for images of ancient and medieval manuscripts. He also established the basic policies and procedures for all phases of the Center’s operations. It was a daunting job, since we had no clear models for our situation anywhere. I traveled to the Hill Monastic Library at St. John’s in Collegeville, Minnesota, the closest in the country to what we were chartered to do, but it was of limited help because it is essentially different in mission and operations; and I visited others in Europe, the summers I was there working on the HOTTP, and also the National Jewish Archive at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Most of what Weis did in those early days is still in place at the Center, a tribute to his vision of its mission and his dedication despite personal sacrifice. What he established as a system of cataloguing manuscripts was then passed on to Marvin Sweeney, Peter Pettit, Garth Moeller, Stephen Reed, Marilyn Lundberg,

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and Michael Phelps through the 1980s and into the 90s. Cataloguing of quality must be resumed when funds become available. Thus, while I was shackled from advising my students to work on unpublished DSS materials, I set students to work on cataloguing and other aids for study of the scrolls. One of the tacit but firm agreements we made was to avoid competing with other institutions in Claremont for funds. Fortunately, I was often invited around the country to lecture on the DSS and on my work in biblical studies affected by the scrolls. I devised the plan of requesting, in my first response to such invitations, the privilege of taking a few minutes to present the case for the Center and to pass “a yellow pad” around each audience asking those who wanted to receive The Folio to pen in their names, and addresses, and “don’t forget the zip code!” In addition, I would ask each host if there was someone or a family of means in their area whom I might visit during the lectureships to whom I could make appeals. When I passed the yellow pad I assured those who signed that they would receive The Folio with an appeal to support the work and mission of the Center so that they would know what they were signing onto. None turned me down. This was standard procedure for the next fifteen years, but a few years before retirement I was discouraged by the staff from continuing the practice of passing the yellow pad, apparently because the list was becoming difficult to manage and only a percentage continued as donors. But in this way we had compiled a list of some three thousand names from around the country and abroad for mailings of The Folio, attached to each of which was an appeal letter with personal news from the president. After we had met the requirements of the Internal Revenue Service, we converted on 1 June 1986 from being the private operating foundation Mrs. Bechtel had set up to being a public charity. Mrs. Bechtel had always insisted on the Center’s being “autonomous” even though we were housed in the wing of the library she had donated to STC. STC / CST has been our gracious host through the years. The agreement was that we would pay $ 500 a month maintenance fee, but after Mrs. Bechtel withdrew her support the seminary in essence waived the fee. Our basic budget has always been met by mailings of The Folio with appeal letters attached, plus personal contacts with individuals around the country. The appeal letters have sometimes offered premiums, such as a special printing of my translation of Ps 151, or prints of already published scrolls provided by Bruce Zuckerman, a member of our board. In the early 1980s many donors were members of the Pasadena Presbyterian Church, some of whom continued to support the Center. Dora and I were communicants there from when we arrived in the area from New York until into the 1990s. Jim and Helen Elgin in that church were major donors in the 1980s, and without them I am sure the ABMC would not have survived. Jim became our chief financial officer after Betty Bechtel left us. A former colleague at Union Seminary in New York, Robert Lynn, had become director of the religion section of the Lilly Foundation in Indianapolis. At our request Bob came out to visit us in 1981 to give us advice on how to keep the Center alive and pursuing its mission, and, in addition to excellent advice, pledged $ 5k a year for five years from his discre-

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tionary funds at the Lilly. In the meantime I was introduced by hosts and friends to folk of means around the country who became substantial supporters. Among these were Jack Dempsey of Greiff Containers in Delaware, Ohio; the Omaha Presbyterian Seminary Foundation for which I had taught a number of summer pastors schools; Henrietta Arnold of Iowa Electric in Cedar Rapids, Iowa; Dr. Layne and Minny Carson of Little Rock, Akansas; Mrs. Philip Renick of Rancho Santa Fe, California; Marion Gifford of Birmingham, Minnesota; William Albert of Amoco in Chicago; and others. In fact, Henrietta, of blessed memory, served as a faithful and very generous member of our board for about five years. A major donor was Joy Ungerleider-Mayerson, head of the Dorot Foundation and the Jewish Museum in New York. I cannot remember the number of times I telephoned Joy’s home telling her personally of a need we had, and a discretionary check for up to $ 10k would soon arrive. Effie, her housekeeper in New Canaan, Connecticut, came to know my voice after a while and would tell me the best times to call. Joy never turned me down except once when I asked her, as I had previously asked Jack Dempsy and Henrietta Arnold, if we could discuss setting up an endowment for the Center. That was not in her plans, nor apparently was it in theirs, but their continuing support was crucial in the 1980s and 90s. After Joy died, the Dorot Foundation, under the directorship of Professor Ernie Frierichs, continued to be supportive. Our first director, John Trever, soon displeased Mrs. Bechtel (I was not sure over what) and was summarily fired. Trever was followed by George Whipple, a Greek New Testament scholar in the area who had retired. Whipple lasted about three months in 1980, before Mrs. Bechtel had me sack him, again I did not know the reason. Peggy (Mrs. Richard) Woodruff, our first office manager beginning in October 1978, who had the title “administrative secretary,” fortunately survived and served the Center faithfully and effectively until she retired in the early summer of 1986. Rich Weis and I were very pleased she agreed to stay on after Mrs. Bechtel left. She was professionally trained and a gift to the Center the whole time she was with us. As with all members of the staff before Mrs. Bechtel left us, I had to be a pastoral counselor because of the tension created every time she appeared. Mrs. Bechtel simply did not trust employees; and she viewed us all as her employees. At one point soon after we had moved into our offices in 1978, Rich, the director, and I asked limited funding for certain small office supplies. Mrs. Bechtel’s response was immediate but not to me; she turned to a visitor to the Center and said, “You see, they’ll nickel-and-dime you to death if you’re not careful.” That and other such comments and attitudes made me early on feel like a vulnerable employee rather than the colleague she liked to say I was. At an executive committee meeting in early September 1980 one of the trustees in attendance pointed out to Mrs. Bechtel that “Jim is living in a fish bowl with three dead fish.” He was referring to the series of firings she had me do that summer, but she clearly had no idea what he was referring to. She was unaccustomed to any form of criticism. When Rich Weis took a leave of absence as director in 1983 – 84, Peter Pettit, also a graduate student who succeeded Marvin Sweeney as cataloguer, became

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acting director. Sweeney was research assistant in 1979 – 80, and research associate in 1980 – 81, and followed Weis as head cataloguer in 1981 – 83. Then when Rich, after he had received the PhD, left the Center in June 1985, Pettit became director. Pettit trained another graduate student, Garth Moeller, to do the cataloguing, who served in the position from 1984 until 1989. Peter served as acting director the year Rich was on leave, and then as director from 1985 until 1989. While Peter Pettit was director he trained Michael Phelps as cataloguer, who held that position from August 1993 through October 1995. Beginning in the late 1980s, when Steve Delamarter was director, trustee Bruce Zuckerman proposed that he embark on a project of “re-formatting” the DSS films in our vault. He claimed that it was important to have the two formats for proper usage. Trusting his judgment as a photographer, and as a trustee, the board approved of the project since he himself provided the funding through the generosity of his mother in Beverly Hills. At a meeting with the administration of the Huntington Library, Robert Schlosser asked Zuckerman directly why he was doing such a project because he did not see the need of it. I recall that Zuckerman’s response did not make sense, but I laid that to the jargon that photographers use. I still trusted Zuckerman largely because Schlosser had told us in 1983 that he had not made a duplicate copy of the DSS films while Mrs. Bechtel kept them at the Huntington even though he had actually done so at her request. Zuckerman and Marilyn Lundberg worked weekly in my office upstairs at the Center “re-formatting” our collection of the DSS films until I realized that they were making a copy also for Zuckerman’s West Semitic Research project at USC. This was not authorized by me or by anyone at the Center, and so I called a halt to the “re-formatting” project before it was completed. I was told that all photographers keep a file of their work, but photographs of potentially very valuable ancient documents are substantially different from photographs of newly weds, and the like. A convention in one custom may be piracy in another. I discovered it from others; he had not told me. Here was a second time we could have brought a lawsuit but continued, on the contrary, the policy of not suing former friends and supporters. We hadn’t the financial means to do so anyway. The funds we raised we needed to fulfill the mission of the Center. In late September 1991 we received a phone call from colleagues at station WGBH in Boston informing us of a press release pending from the Huntington Library of San Marino in which William Moffit, its librarian at the time, was announcing a new policy of open access to their set of DSS films. This too was in violation of signed documents and agreements but in the light of the campaign for open access by Hershel Shanks, editor and publisher of Biblical Archaeology Review, it eventually forced the hand of the authorities in Jerusalem by November of that year to announce that their policy had changed. Other such efforts were afoot as well to force the issue. Martin Abegg and Professor Ben Zion Wachholder were preparing computerized texts of the unpublished massive numbers of Cave 4 fragments based on the concordance (on 3x5 cards) prepared in the late 1950s in Jerusalem by Frs Joseph Fitzmyer and Raymond Brown (now being completed by Marty Abegg of Trinity Western University). In addition,

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Robert Eisenman of San Diego State University, with James Robinson of the IAC, was preparing a diplomatic, unedited publication of films of the DSS Eisenman had somehow acquired. Clearly the older mode, since the nineteenth century, of official assignment of new discoveries to specific scholars exclusively to study indefinitely and then publish at will was being challenged. Political walls were falling or being challenged at the time in Europe, South Africa, and China. The ABMC, which had been established to provide free and open access (and not just preservation) to all scholars, was coming into its own; the ABMC had, however, also consistently shown respect for covenants and agreements solemnly signed, and this point was not lost on those from whom the Center continued to acquire images of their manuscript treasures. By this time we had already instigated a policy of “responsible access”4 by embarking on the catalogue and index of the DSS films project, which was published in 1995, and by exploring the technologies of digitization and multi-spectral imaging, and by taking advantage of the new openness in Soviet and then Russian policy. While continuing to acquire images of manuscripts from varied sources, in 1990 we embarked on another ambitious project of acquisition. Steve Delamarter was director. The moment Chairman Gorbachev introduced the Soviet policies of “glasnost” and “peristroika” in the USSR, we began making plans to field yet another photographic team, this time to Leningrad, to photograph the oldest (ca. 1010 CE), complete Hebrew Bible in the world, Codex Leningradensis. Delamarter initiated correspondence with the Russians. Visits were exchanged between the Saltikov-Shchedrin Library in Leningrad and the ABMC in Claremont. Garth Moeller and Firpo Carr of IBM represented the Center there, and Dr. Bogalyubo of the University of Leningrad and Dr. Viktor Lebedev of the Library came here to visit the Center.5 The photographic team we sent this time was not that of the Huntington but of West Semitic Research at the University of Southern California. The team consisted of acting director at the time, Bruce Zuckerman, also a trustee of the ABMC, assistant director Marilyn Lundberg, and Ken Zuckerman, Bruce’s brother, also a trustee of the Center. Garth Moeller, cataloguer at the time, accompanied the team as translator and facilitator. The basic funding was provided by Joy Ungerleider-Mayerson, of the Dorot Foundation in New York, supplemented by funds from West Semitic Research. The results were amazingly clear films of every folio of the codex, including the so-called carpet pages of scribal artwork. We made them available in transparency form to several institutions, including the Korean Bible Society, and in facsimile form as The Leningrad Codex, a stunningly beautiful publication of over 1010 pages, plus front matter and title pages. Trustees Noel Freedman and Astrid Beck did an excellent job of editing the volume. Special donations from supporters in Michigan funded the publication. Sheila Spiro, our director from September 1994 until August 1995, and thereafter a trustee, negotiated the contract with Eerd4

  See Sanders, “Qumran Update.”   See the article by Sanders, and then trustee Professor Astrid Beck of the University of Michigan, “Leningrad Codex.” 5

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mans Publishers and all that entailed. Details of the whole project are recorded in several articles published in The Folio 10 / 2 – 3, the combined Aug / Nov issue of 1990. It was during Delamarter’s tenure that the John Trever Dead Sea Scrolls Image Preservation Project was implemented. Zuckerman noted illegible parts of the Genesis Apocryphon, which Greg Berman, physicist at the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena (and Sheila Spiro’s husband), deciphered with multi-spectral imaging, the first use anywhere of the space technology on ancient manuscript images. Everyone involved in the whole project, from beginning to end, was either a trustee of the Manuscript Center or was formally connected with it, and the basic funding was provided by the Center. And yet, West Semitic Research decided that the ABMC did not merit copies of the transparencies or the films for its vault. The Center asked an intellectual property rights lawyer in Los Angeles, Stephen Rohdy, to determine rights in the matter, and his judgment was that we had the clear property rights since the license agreement that permitted us to pursue the project was signed by the Saltikov-Shchedrin Library in Leningrad (now the National Public Library in St. Petersburg) and by the Ancient Biblical Manuscript Center, and not by West Semitic Research, even though Bruce Zuckerman signed it as director of the Center at the time. He also said we were negligent in letting WSR duplicate our DSS films. Vice president Marvin Sweeney, using the lawyer’s judgments, went to great lengths to try to persuade WSR to grant the Center at least a copy of the transparencies, but to no avail. The ABMC board made the decision not to sue, despite Rohdy’s clear judgment, because it would be very costly in terms of finances and reputation. To this day the Center has copies only of the facsimile publication, like any purchaser of books. While writing the above-mentioned article with trustee Astrid Beck on the codex for Bible Review, I learned for the first time in a telephone call from her that none of the four ABMC trustees on the photographic team or the publication project viewed it as a project of the Manuscript Center, but as their own. This came as a shock to me, and still is. That was a moment in the Center’s history of which I am not proud but am still in dismay at the attitude of those trustees. My implicit trust in members of the ABMC board was betrayed, as it had been in the “re-formatting project,” also by the WSR. William Yarchin, who had accompanied the photographic team to Jerusalem in September 1980 to duplicate the DSS films there, served for the year 1993 – 94 as director after Bruce Zuckerman, and just before Sheila Spiro was hired as director in September 1994. All four trustees, the Zuckermans, Beck, and Freedman, resigned from the Board in 1994. We later invited Freedman to become a life-time honorary trustee, but he did not respond. Earlier we had asked Frank Cross and Richard Cain to become life-time honorary trustees and they accepted with grace. Cross and Cain are still the only life-time honorary trustees we have. [Joe Platt’s name and mine were added later, in 2003.] In 1990 the ABMC board, encouraged by the new president of CST, Robert Edgar, decided that the Center should have a full-time professional director rather than continue to hire graduate students, and over the next few years made several attempts to achieve this. With Zuckerman’s skill at fund-raising by offering scrolls photographs to donors, combined with the president’s frequent

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travels and lectures around the country, that period was probably the best in terms of unrestricted gifts to the Center. It left no mechanism, however, for continuing a healthy pace of fund-raising. It was at this point, after Bill Yarchin’s year as director, that the board, again with Bob Edgar’s strong support, hired Sheila Spiro from the development department of Cal Tech. Sheila was hired in August 1993 at a professional level of salary to focus on setting up a mechanism for fund-raising for the Center, and to work as well in the business office at CST. The plan did not work as expected, and Sheila decided it best to step down in August 1995. She was then elected to serve on the ABMC board of trustees in March 1996 and immediately came on its executive committee where she served until I left the Center, both as CFO and then as secretary. Sheila then nominated Michael Phelps as associate director, rather than director, in keeping with the board’s 1990 decision that the director should be a full-time professional position. Sheila was very generous and rendered outstanding service to the Center by coming to the office for several months without pay to train Mike Phelps in the position. She has been scrupulous in reading documents and contracts, especially in revising the by-laws when we merged with CST, which had not yet at that time formally approved of them. She nominated Stuart Simon to the board in 1998, and Simon served as CFO from 2002 until the merger with the seminary. Board development has always been difficult, largely because we inherited a board formed and shaped by Mrs. Bechtel’s desire to have sole control of the Center’s policies and finances. Business folk we have approached simply fade away when introduced to our board, which lacks the kind of people they themselves are and expect to meet on such a board. Given this situation and the fact of my retirement from the faculty of CST in 1997, we entered into conversations about merger with CST in the late-90s while Bob Edgar was president of CST and Jack Fitzmier was newly appointed academic dean. After in-depth discussions with principals on both boards and administrations, merger documents were signed effective 1 July 1999. While ABMC board development still needs serious attention, the merger has brought advantages to both institutions. The ABMC now has a parent corporation that is in good financial standing and this should help considerably in approaching foundations and major donors. With the ABMC collections as a part of the CST library, CST greatly expanded its holdings. We believe there are advantages for both, and hope that it was the right move to make. The ABMC retains its own board and raises its own budget and has the responsibility for carrying out the mission of the Center, but the CST board has final authority in policy issues. Michael Phelps, who had been cataloguer from August 1993 through October 1995, and associate director from October 1995 until June 1996, became director in July 1996 and served in that capacity until 1 March 2003, the longest service as director the Center has had. Mike, working with President Bob Edgar (of CST) and myself, attempted directly to address the issue of board development, trying to enhance the presence on the board of business and professional people. Stan Kukawka, of the CST board, joined the ABMC board while Spiro was director, and tried valiantly to bring some business sense to it, but, alas, to no

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avail; Stan left the board after about a year. William Albert of Amoco in Chicago served on the board during the 1990s and effectively raised monies by setting up small matching grant programs. During this period Jan Miller, Lynne Kogel, Dr. Douglas Pay, Stuart Simon, and Rich Weis were added to the board. William Schniedewind was nominated by Marvin Sweeney and Dr. Stewart Dadmun by his colleage in San Diego, Dr. Pay. The board in effect did not change much, and it still had no clear sense of its own purpose and mission. In the meantime, Bob Edgar resigned as president of CST to become secretary general of the National Council of Churches in New York City (and later director of Common Cause), and Philip Amerson became the fifth president of CST in 2001. President Amerson of CST and Dean Jack Fitzmier seemed at the time to have a clear sense of the value of the ABMC both for Claremont and for the world of scholarship. Therefore, in January 2002, following discussions with others, Michael Phelps, Joe Platt, and I proposed to the CST administration that the ABMC board be dissolved and that the board of the now-parent corporation, CST, appoint an interim board with an eighteen-month charge to identify four to six leaders to form the nucleus of a new board. The interim board would be composed of four to five members of ABMC’s existing board, two members of CST’s board, serving ABMC perhaps as a committee assignment, and two or three external persons added to bring new ideas and new links to potential board members. Initial conversations with ABMC board members showed enthusiasm for the idea; Sheila Spiro knew the need very well and offered privately to step down herself if that would help it happen. Sheila’s dedication to the Center has always been unstinting and unselfish. She and her husband, Greg Berman, physicist at the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, have generously given the Center its reputation in multi-spectral imaging, working together in Jerusalem and here. It was Sheila who opened the dialogue with FARMS at BYU in Provo, Utah, that resulted in digitizing our collection. Tension had arisen between Professor Kristin De Troyer and director Mike Phelps that gave rise to a misunderstanding. Because of that situation, and because it had become imperative that he complete work on the PhD, Mike Phelps agreed to step aside as director of the ABMC and become director of special projects centering on the Mount Athos Manuscripts Digital Library Project. Laura Yavitz served brilliantly as Office Manager while Mike was associate director in 1996. Following Laura Yavitz, Joyce Merritt (1996 – 97), Katie Oxx (1998 – 2000), Lupe Baca (2000 – 2001) and Dolly Bush (2001 – 2003) have faithfully and effectively served as office managers during the seven years Mike Phelps served as director. During Mike Phelps’s tenure the major projects have been the Dead Sea Scrolls Jubilee Digitization Project in 1997, the Dead Sea Scrolls Database Project, and the Mount Athos Digital Library Project. Center projects have become more and more emphasized as the history of the Center has developed, for two reasons: (1) there is more than enough to be done in this field, and (2) projects are the necessary and unavoidable vehicle for institutional growth and fund raising. This was underscored by Judge David Thomas of CST’s board, who attended a few ABMC Board meetings in 1997 but

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decided, though invited, not to join it. Judge Thomas urged the ABMC board, nonetheless, that if it wanted to grow it needed outstanding projects, and everyone agreed. Trustee Noel Freedman had made the point several times during his tenure on the board. Clearly the direction had to be digitization. It is simply a fact that the future of manuscript research is digital. Every major library in this country and in Europe is digitizing its manuscripts. Photographing the Dead Sea Scrolls and Codex Leningradensis were at the heart of the Center’s growth and development as an internationally recognized institution, but if it does not move vigorously into the new technology and its promises we will unfortunately fade in importance and lose our place in the scholarly world. The ABMC was already in the forefront in 1990 when it sent director Steve Delamarter to Toronto to a conference there on computing and literary studies in the humanities, and we must keep apace. The ABMC is a research center and quite appropriately now an active wing of the CST library, which itself sponsors no interpretation of any of its holdings or collections. The ABMC makes its holdings available in as advanced a mode as feasible to all qualified researchers; in this way it is essentially different from so-called faculty centers on campus. With his fellow student at the graduate school, Nikos Zarkantzas, Mike Phelps developed the idea of our current major project, digitizing the holdings of the libraries in the twenty monasteries on the Mount Athos peninsula in northeast Greece. This is by far the most ambitious project we have ever undertaken in terms of the time and the funding it will require. Mike and Nikos made three exploratory trips to the Mount Athos community and secured the interest and trust of leaders among the monks there. The Patriarchal Institute in Thessaloniki has been supportive, even enthusiastic, from the start. The community itself has been more difficult to persuade, but even they are becoming supportive, some enthusiastic after seeing the pious sincerity and determination of Nikos and Mike. Nikos has been crucial in the whole venture. He grew up in Greece and frequently visited the community as a lad in the Greek Orthodox Church, so that some of the monks knew him from his boyhood. He speaks their language in more ways than one. The first big breakthrough in funding came when Michael Huffington, a convert to the Greek Church in Los Angeles and contender for the US Senate in 1998, donated seed money of $ 25,000 as a matching grant. Through personal efforts, that was more than matched in a few months time, so that Nikos could gather a team in Thessaloniki to begin cataloguing films already available in the Patriarchal Institute. Other funding has happily followed, especially a major grant from the Seaver Foundation, so that quality equipment for the digitizing process has now been purchased in Greece and the project is well under way to do digitization in the libraries themselves. Placing technological hardware permanently in Greece and using it for remote projects to digitize monastery libraries in Europe and the Near East, where most biblical manuscripts are still found, provides the base for such projects in the future, and the Seaver Foundation has clearly seen that promise and potential for the Center. A televangelist, Dr. Gene Scott, who views himself as a teacher more than as a preacher, this winter approached us about providing help funding the Mount

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Athos Project; he is interested in acquiring paper copies of certain published manuscripts in Aramaic and Syriac through the Center. Questions arose on the ABMC board about the advisability of accepting monies from such a source, but our argument for accepting it stems from our long-time three-fold mission statement coupled with the firm policy we have always followed: we sponsor no interpretation of the manuscript images we acquire, preserve, and distribute, one way or another. In that regard we are completely neutral. We do not even sponsor critical interpretations of them, including our own as biblical scholars. When we have offered lecture series sponsored by the Center for fund-raising purposes we have always made clear that the ABMC as an institution was not sponsoring, and did not necessarily agree with, what the various scholars said in the lectures. We have entered into several projects with Mormon scholars at Brigham Young University and with Christian Scientists in the Crisler Biblical Institute in Monterey. Mrs. Bechtel herself was a dedicated Christian Scientist, but never suggested that we adopt a Christian Scientist view of Scripture. She was very strong about that. We are now an integral part of the Claremont School of Theology, which is affiliated with the United Methodist Church, but CST, which is chartered as an ecumenical seminary, fully understands that the Center does not support or sponsor any interpretation of the images we house. At last year’s annual meeting, in May 2002, the ABMC board appointed a transition team or committee to look to the future. The Chair is Joe Platt, and Sheila Spiro, Marvin Sweeney, and myself from the ABMC board, and Jack Fitzmier, John Dickason, and Bronnie MacNab from the CST administration, serve as members. Pat Youngquist, of the CST business office, has been very helpful on the transition of financial records from the ABMC office to the CST business office. The executive committee of the board has affirmed several moves the team has proposed. One was the move of Phelps to director of special projects on 1 March of this year. John Dickason, CST librarian, was asked to assume the directorship of the ABMC with the assistance of Pat Youngquist in the CST business office in finances. Since the office of president was inherited from an entirely different board situation in 1980, the new ABMC board needs to elect a chair of its own choosing after being constituted largely of business folk, with the two CST scholars, Marvin Sweeney and Kristin De Troyer, serving as guarantee that the mission of the Center is honored and served. It is with great hope for the Center’s future that I now step aside as president, confident that with the expected new configuration on the board and on the staff, and with the future of the Mount Athos Digital Library Project apparently secure, the Center will continue vigorously to pursue its mission in service to biblical scholarship the world over. Respectfully submitted, James A. Sanders

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PostScript On 28 May 2003, after I had written the above, I was invited by CST President Phil Amerson to his office to meet with him and Dean Jack Fitzmier. I had no idea why I was invited but as I made my way to the meeting I fantasized that perhaps there were plans to celebrate my retirement after 25 years as an occasion to raise funds for the Center. This was the kind of support I understood CST could provide the ABMC when after twenty-two years of independence (Mrs. Bechtel used the word “autonomy”) the ABMC became a subsidiary of CST. On the contrary, President Amerson asked me to be “uninvolved in the Manuscript Center for two years.” I sat stunned but responded that I would be uninvolved indefinitely. I was so shocked that I could not think beyond the moment. During the ensuing conversation I tried once more and again to stress the importance of the long-standing mission of the Center to “acquire, preserve and distribute” images (photographic and digital) to any scholar capable of working on them without charge. I stressed that the Center was aptly a part of the CST library for the ABMC is a library of ancient and medieval biblical (Old and New Testament) manuscript images at the service of any and all students and scholars capable of studying them, and not a faculty center. I felt when I left his office that President Amerson still did not understand the difference. And that was right. The ABMC has become a “faculty center,” whose principal mission under Professor Marvin Sweeney now is to enhance the professional work of local and visiting scholars in biblical studies. Though the Center still acquires images by mail of manuscripts from more established institutions around the world, the mission of continuing acquisition projects of rare manuscripts has been dropped. If one views the website of the ABMC (www.abmc. org) one can see that it states that its mission is “preservation and research,” interpreted now however to mean enhancement of current faculty and of others who avail themselves of the collection accumulated. Like a faculty center, the ABMC now sponsors lectures by visiting scholars that can only benefit local scholars and students – never its purpose or mission until now. The words “preservation and research” have been a part of the title of the Center since its launching in 1977: The Ancient Biblical Manuscript Center for Preservation and Research. But a title does not a mission make. Mrs. Bechtel and I originally had different conceptions of what we were about; she wanted me to leave New York to be curator of a “go-down,” as she called it, for preservation of the Dead Sea Scrolls for use by the team of scholars working on them. I refused to do that but said that my dream had long been to provide images by free access to as many manuscripts as possible to the world of scholarship to reduce dependence in their text-critical research on earlier apparatus and critical editions of manuscripts, which often have errors because the authors and editors had not had personal access to such images. The mission we originally agreed on was that of acquiring, especially acquiring by sending teams wherever indicated, to make images, preserving, and providing those images of ancient and medieval biblical manuscripts free of charge to any scholar who requested copies for their research

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wherever they were, or at the Center itself if feasible. The fifth edition of Biblia Hebraica (Quinta) is currently being prepared by scholars around the world based on the ABMC’s publication (1997) of the oldest complete manuscript of the Hebrew Bible currently housed in the National Library in St. Petersburg. The service rendered to the world of scholarship by the ABMC from 1978 to 2003 will always be a source of pride for all those who have labored in and with it to sponsor accuracy in biblical scholarship. Bibliography Freedman, David Noel, Astrid Beck, et al., eds. The Leningrad Codex. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans; Leiden: Brill, 1998. Reed, Stephen, Marilyn J. Lundberg, and Michael B. Phelps. The Dead Sea Scrolls Catalogue: Documents, Photographs, and Museum Inventory Numbers. Atlanta: Scholars, 1994. Sanders, James A. The Dead Sea Psalms Scroll. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1967. Sanders, James A. The Psalms Scroll of Qumran Cave 11 (11QPsa). DJD 4. Oxford: Clarendon, 1965. Sanders, James A. “Qumran Update: What Can Happen in a Year?” BA 55, no. 1 (1992) 37 – 42. Sanders, James A. “A Tribute to Jean-Dominique Barthélemy.” Folio 19, no. 1 (2002) 1, 3, 8; online: http://www.abmc.org / PDFs / Folio_Vol_19_No_1.pdf Sanders, James A., and Astrid Beck. “The Leningrad Codex: Rediscovering the Oldest Complete Hebrew Bible.” BRev 13, no. 4 (1997) 32 – 41, 46.

Index of Modern Authors Abegg, M. G.  489, 520 Achtemeier, P.  129, 142 Ackroyd, P. R.  37, 47, 50, 59, 74, 77, 92, 96, 108, 121 – 23, 125, 144, 238, 287, 398, 418 – 19, 428, 470, 481, 492, 507 Adler, M.  296, 301 Aejmelaus, A.  47 Ahlström, G. W.  398 Akenson, D. H.  363, 365 Aland, B.  4, 14 – 15, 19, 74, 79, 90, 148, 153, 228, 237 Aland, K.  14, 19, 74, 79, 90, 148, 153, 228, 237, 249, 252, 293, 297, 301 Albrektson, B.  13, 17, 19 Albright, W. F.  16, 43, 47, 65, 112, 160, 339, 356 – 57, 365, 378, 385, 398, 406, 431, 467, 511 Alexandre, M.  20, 89, 91 Allegro, J. M.  371, 381, 385, 388, 394, 396, 433 Alt, A.  100, 121, 302 Alter, R.  223, 238 Altmann, A.  121, 481 Anderson, B. W.  21, 49, 64, 74, 100, 107, 121 – 23, 125, 139, 142, 146, 153 – 54, 195, 220, 238, 398, 508 Anderson, G.  W.  121 – 22 Appel, N.  95, 121 Assemani, J. S.  446, 455 Assemani, S. E.  446, 455 Atiya, A. S.  154 Attridge, H. W.  49, 195, 220, 509 Auffret, P.  447, 449 – 52, 454 – 55 Auvray, P.  8, 19 Baars, W.  446, 455 Baer, S.  61 Baillet, M.  237 Baker, J. A.  288, 303 Baltzer, K.  110, 121 Bardtke, H.  399

Barr, J.  11, 19, 65, 74, 95, 107, 121, 139, 142, 144, 146, 153, 163, 174, 260, 262, 272, 299, 301, 467 – 68 Barthélemy, D.  ix, x, 4 – 7, 11, 13, 16, 19, 27 – 28, 31, 34, 37, 42, 45 – 47, 52 – 53, 55, 60, 67, 70, 72, 74 – 75, 78 – 83, 86 – 88, 90, 98, 109 – 10, 121, 138, 141 – 42, 146, 149, 153, 215, 219, 225 – 26, 237, 240, 242, 251 – 52, 291, 293 – 94, 301, 357 – 58, 365, 399, 409, 439, 441, 443, 463 – 64, 468, 472, 474, 476 – 77, 480, 500, 507, 513 Barth, K.  134, 142, 332 Barth, M.  280 – 83, 286 Barthes, R.  102, 121 Barton, D. M.  125 Barton, J.  145, 153 Baumgarten, W.  408 Beck, A.  489, 491, 521 – 22, 528 Beck, L. W.  106, 121 Beckwith, R. T.  87, 90, 92, 96, 108, 121, 193, 227, 237, 355, 365, 496, 507 Begrich, J.,, 422, 428 Beit-Arié, M.  33 – 34, 47, 475, 480 Bengtson, H.  124 ben Hayyim, J.  54, 72, 75, 250 Benoit, A.  76, 252 Benoit, P.  430, 515 Bentzen, A.  99, 121, 354 Ben-Zvi, I.  30, 47 Berger, P.  102, 271 Bernstein, M. J.  491 Betz, O.  339, 352 – 53 Bickerman, E.  33, 47, 69, 75, 216, 219, 256, 358, 366, 458, 478, 480, 486 Biddle, M. E.  367 Billerbeck, P. E.  458, 483 Birch, B. C.  139, 142 Black, J. S.  125 Black, M.  74, 77, 272, 490, 509 Blank, S. H.  382, 385 Blenkinsopp, J.  139, 142, 364, 366 Bloch, R.  53, 75, 98, 107, 109, 121, 442 – 43

530

Index of Modern Authors

de Boer, P. A. H.  436, 475, 480 Bloom, H.  197, 219 Boccaccini, G.  482, 490 Bogaert, P.‑M.  59, 75 Bonhoeffer, D.  271 Bornkamm, G.  280 Borowsky, I. J.  353, 490 Bossman, D.  283, 286 Boulding, K.  271 – 72 Bousset, W.  280, 458 Bovon, F.  356, 366 Bowden, J.  302 Boyarin, D.  29, 33, 47, 345, 352 Bradley, J. E.  237 Brekelmans, C. H. W.  74 – 75, 77, 101 Brennan, W. J.  82 Brettler, M.  23, 26 Bright, J.  113, 121, 290, 301 Bring, R.  280 – 83, 286 Brooke, G. J.  433 Brooks, R.  49, 92, 153, 238, 334 Broshi, M.  491 Brown, R. E.  272, 287, 323, 460, 468, 484, 490, 520 Brownlee, W. H.  372, 385, 399, 416, 421 – 22, 425, 428, 431, 471, 511, 513 Bruce, F. F.  193, 399 Buber, M.  102, 121, 190, 210, 333, 395, 487 Budde, K.  44 Buhl, F.  354, 356, 366, 493, 507 Bultmann, R.  284, 286 Burrows, M.  vii, 384 – 85, 511 Buxtorf, J.  6, 19, 147 Cadbury, H. J.  487, 490 Callaway, M.  192, 194, 326, 333, 505, 507 Calvin, J.  276, 280 Campbell, J.  102, 121 Campbell, T.  439 Caquot, A.  401 Carmichael, C.  101 Carmignac, J.  387, 391, 396, 399, 402, 405 Carr, D. M.  16, 19, 38, 47, 84, 90, 211, 218 – 19, 221, 325 – 26, 333, 335, 362, 366, 440, 443 – 45, 493, 495, 497, 507 Carroll, R. P.  144 Carruth, W. H.  302 Carswell, J.  447, 455 Casetti, P.  21, 92, 144, 335, 368, 469, 509 Cazelles, H.  139, 142 Charlesworth, J. H.  94, 121, 334 – 35, 452, 455, 459, 468, 490

Childs, B. S.  65, 75, 95, 102, 107, 120 – 21, 130, 139, 142 – 43, 146 – 47, 153, 155 – 64, 166 – 75, 223, 236 – 37, 305, 313, 325 Chilton, B. D.  180, 194, 483, 489 – 90 Clements, R. E.  113, 121 Clifford, R. J.  37, 47, 181, 194, 205, 219 Clouse, R. G.  328, 333 Coats, G. W.  77, 85, 91, 143, 175, 195, 238, 303, 314, 334, 353, 508 Cohen, S. J. D.  356, 364, 366, 490 Cohn, L.  296, 301 Collingwood, R. G.  237 Collins, J. J.  49, 92, 153, 238, 334, 493, 507 Colwell, E.  C.  240 – 44, 246 – 47, 251 – 52, 326, 333, 513 Coogan, J.  176, 194, 502 Cook, J.  3, 21, 458, 470 Cook, S. L.  195, 220, 367 Cope, O. L.  170, 174 Cowley, R. W.  132, 143, 160, 174 Cox, C. E.  47 Cranfield, C. E. B.  281, 284, 286 Crenshaw, J. L.  21, 50, 92, 143, 175, 195, 287, 300, 301 – 2 Cross, F. M.  xi, 13, 20 – 21, 29, 37 – 38, 42 – 50, 52, 64, 75 – 77, 91, 97, 100, 102, 109, 121, 125, 144, 174 – 75, 194, 220, 238 – 39, 262, 272, 287, 291, 301 – 3, 314, 334, 339, 356 – 57, 365 – 68, 373, 376, 378, 385, 397, 399, 401, 431 – 34, 436, 444, 468 – 71, 481, 508, 514, 517, 522 Cullmann, O.  259, 272, 381, 385 Dahl, M. E.  279, 286 Dahl, N. A.  248, 286 Dahood, M.  65, 75, 399, 406 – 8 David, R.  433 Davidson, R.  82, 91 Davidson, S.  354, 366 Davies, P. R.  306, 313, 355, 366, 493, 496 – 97, 507 Davies, W. D.  256, 261, 264, 272, 279 – 81, 283 – 84, 286 – 87, 371, 380, 385, 439 Davis, M.  491 Deist, F.  480 Delamarter, S.  511, 520 – 22, 525 Delcor, M.  399, 406 – 10, 446 – 47, 449, 452, 455 del Medico, H. E.  372, 385 Delsman, W. C.  47 Denis, A. M.  94, 98, 121 De Troyer, K.  512, 524, 526

Index of Modern Authors

531

Detweiler, H.  437 Dever, W. G.  334, 367, 490, 508 Dicken, E. W. T.  125, 153, 303 Díez Macho, A.  460, 468 di Lella, A. A.  399, 406 – 7, 410 Dinkler, E.  380, 385 Dobson, E.  323 Dodd, C. H.  170, 174, 277, 279, 284, 287, 484, 490 Donner, H.  174 Dorothy, C. V.  16, 89, 91 Dothan, A.  61, 75 Dow, L. K. F.  vii Drane, J. W.  372, 385 Driver, G. R.  399 Driver, S. R.  44 Dunkly, J.  vii Dunn, J. D. G.  364, 366 Dupont-Sommer, A.  vii, 258 – 59, 372, 385, 387, 396, 399, 406, 408, 446 – 47, 450, 455

Fishbane, M. A.  33, 42, 48 – 49, 83, 91, 190, 201, 210, 219, 330 – 31, 333, 335, 346, 352, 444, 467 – 68, 481, 483, 485, 487, 490, 493, 507 Fitzmyer, J. A.  4, 20, 272, 275, 281, 287, 387, 396, 416, 428, 438, 444, 459 – 60, 468, 520 Flint, P. W.  214, 219, 335, 355, 361, 366 – 68, 443 – 45, 495 – 96, 507, 509 Flusser, D.  400 Fohrer, G.  101, 110, 400 Fowler, R. M.  9, 15, 20 Frank, H. T.  122, 125 Freedman, D. N.  57, 64, 75, 110, 113, 119, 122, 124, 153, 193 – 94, 238, 253, 302, 401, 417, 429, 444, 508, 514, 522, 525, 528 Frei, H.  73, 75, 223, 237 Frensdorff, S.  61 – 62, 75 Frerichs, E. S.  20, 490 Fuller, R. H.  95, 100, 126

Eades, K. L.  49, 481, 509 Ebeling, G.  133 Eicher, G.  148 Eichrodt, W.  100, 255, 272, 372, 385 Eisenman, R.  521 Eissfeldt, O.  99 – 100, 107, 116, 121 – 22, 262, 272, 302, 354, 399, 423, 428, 493, 507 Elliger, K.  250, 301, 319, 333, 484, 490 Ellis, E. E.  193, 378 – 79, 385 Emerton, J. A.  50, 460, 468 Engnell, I.  279, 287 Epp, E. J.  355, 366 Eshel, E.  446­ – 47, 449, 451, 455 Eshel, H.  446­ – 47, 449, 451, 455 Eskenazi, T. C.  204, 219 Evans, C. A.  vii, 33, 47, 124, 143, 175, 192, 194, 220, 273, 288, 302 – 3, 326, 333, 335, 359, 366, 372, 385, 397, 440, 444, 490, 505, 507 Evans, C. F.  50, 77, 92, 125, 170, 174, 238, 470, 481 Ewald, G. H. A.  44

García Martínez, F.  450 – 51, 455 Gaster, T.  103, 387, 397 Gawlick, G.  49, 335 Gerhardsson, B.  298, 301 Gertner, M.  295, 301 Gese, H.  116, 122 Ginsburg, C.  D.  61 – 62, 75 – 76, 474 Glueck, N.  512 Golb, N.  448, 450 – 51, 455 Goldberg, A.  171, 174 Goldin, J.  72, 76, 98, 101, 122 Goldstein, J. A.  400 Gooding, D. W.  16, 19, 76, 88, 90 Goppelt, L.  372, 385 Gorak, J.  190, 194, 197, 205, 219 Gordis, R.  72, 76 Gordon, C. H.  44 Gordon, R. P.  59, 76 Goshen-Gottstein, M. H.  ix, xi, 20, 30 – 31, 34, 46, 48, 52 – 55, 57 – 58, 60, 66, 76, 79, 81, 91, 145, 147, 153, 291, 294, 301, 358, 366, 400, 413, 419, 421, 428, 438, 463 – 64, 468, 471 – 73, 475 – 77, 480 – 81, 494 – 95, 507 Gould, S. J.  330, 334 Graetz, H.  44, 354, 356, 366 Grant, F. C.  260, 272 Greeley, A. M.  257 – 58, 272 Green, J. B.  385 Green, W. S.  490

Ferguson, E.  356, 366 Ferris, T.  330, 333 Fichtner, J.  113, 122 Fields, W. W.  21, 430, 444, 481, 490 Finkelstein, L.  98, 122, 159, 174, 439 Fischel, H. A.  262, 272

532

Index of Modern Authors

Greenberg, M.  13, 17, 20, 52, 71, 301, 464, 468 Greenfield, J. C.  124, 238, 253, 291, 302, 401, 429, 444, 508 Greenspahn, F. E.  5, 20 Greenspoon, L.  479 Gressmann, H.  458 Grimal, P.  124, 288 Groves, J.  W.  153 – 54 Gunkel, H.  289, 302, 422, 428 Gurewicz, S. B.  400, 447, 455 Gutbrod, W.  279 – 80, 284 Habel, N. C.  37, 48 Hadas, M.  458, 486 Hahn, F.  196, 221, 491 Halsel, G.  319, 334 Hanson, P. D.  102, 122, 256 – 57, 272, 279, 287 Harl, M.  17, 20, 89, 91 Harlé, P.  89, 91 Harper, W. R.  305 Harrelson, W. J.  3, 20, 74, 122, 139, 143, 287 Harrington, D. J.  361, 366 Hartman, D.  324 Hauser, A. J.  214 – 15, 219, 335, 367 Havel, V.  498, 507 Hays, R. B.  33, 48, 83, 91, 235, 237, 346, 373, 382, 386 Heinemann, I.  296, 301 Hendel, R. S.  357, 366 Hengel, M.  258, 272, 279, 287, 298, 302, 362, 367, 441, 444, 458, 468 Hertzberg, H. W.  46, 48 Heschel, A.  183, 190, 194, 210, 219, 274, 287, 295 – 96, 302, 331, 333 – 34, 343 Hillers, D. R.  110, 122 Hobbs, T.  340 Hodge, A. A.  129, 143 Hoenig, S. B.  98, 122, 400 Holladay, J. S.  105, 122 Hopewell, J.  304, 308, 313 Horgan, M. P.  372, 386 Hornig, G.  95, 122, 354, 367 Hort, F. J. A.  14 Hosack, R. N.  328, 333 Hossfeld, F. L.  300, 302 Howard, G. E.  281, 283, 287 Hübner, H.  276, 287 Hulst, A. R.  439 Hurvitz, A.  97, 400, 406, 423, 428 Hyatt, J. P.  vii, 101, 122, 376, 380, 386

Jacob, E.  113, 122, 144 Jacobson, C.  122 James, J.  307, 313 Japhet, S.  491 Jeremias, J(oachim).  376, 386 Jeremias, J(örg).  113, 122 Jervell, J.  77, 195, 253, 273, 303, 335, 491, 509 Johnson, G.  204, 208, 219 Johnson, S. E.  380, 386 Jones, A.  165, 174, 290, 302 de Jonge, M.  387, 396, 417, 428 Jongeling, B.  400, 403 Joyce, J.  22 Kaestli, J.‑D.  92, 367 Kahle, P.  12, 14, 29, 43, 61, 357, 463, 476, 481 Kampen, J.  491 Kant, I.  102 Käsemann, E.  95, 122, 261, 269, 272, 284, 287 Kaufmann, Y.  120, 122 Kazantzakis, N.  185, 194 Kealy, S. P.  160, 174 Kee, H. C.  302, 353, 490 Keel, O.  21, 92, 144, 335, 368, 469, 509 Keil, C. F.  46 Kelly, J. N. D.  247 – 48, 252 Kelsey, D.  223, 237 Kennicott, B.  12, 14, 20, 27, 34, 54, 81, 148, 464, 474 Kermode, F.  223, 238 Kittel, B.  139, 143 Kittel, R.  13, 24, 25, 86, 147, 290, 302 Klein, G.  281, 287 Kleinknecht, H. M.  279, 284, 287 Klopfenstein, M.  21, 469 Kohl, M.  352 Knierim, R. P.  3, 15, 20, 85, 91, 167, 211, 219 Knight, D. A.  139, 143, 467 – 68 Koester, H.  247, 252 Kraft, R. A.  66, 76, 243, 252 Krarup, O. C.  404 Kristeva, J.  345, 352 Kugel, J. L.  319, 326, 334, 342 – 43, 442, 444 Kuhn, K. G.  380, 386 Kümmel, W. G.  290, 293, 297, 302 Kunst, H.  19 Kutscher, E. Y.  38, 48 Kyle, R. G.  328, 334

Index of Modern Authors

Laaf, P.  101, 122 Lacan, F.  102 de Lagarde, P. A.  29, 357, 463 Lampe, G. W. H.  372, 386 Landes, G. M.  107, 122, 139, 143 Lapide, P.  460, 468 Lapp, P.  433 Laperrousaz, E.‑M.  400 Le Boulluec, A.  89, 91 Leclant, J.  400 Le Déaut, R.  107, 109, 122, 294, 302, 442, 444 Lehmann, M. R.  400 Leiman, S. Z.  76 – 77, 122, 128, 143, 175, 193, 201, 211, 219, 301 – 2, 355, 367, 468, 496, 498 – 99, 507 Lemaire, A.  129, 143 Lemcio, E. E.  135, 143 Lemke, W. E.  20, 48, 76, 91, 144, 174 – 75, 194, 220, 238, 272, 287, 302, 314, 334, 367, 508 Lester, T.  325, 334 Levenson, J. D.  3, 20, 342 – 43 Levine, B. A.  20 Lévi, I.  409 Lévi-Strauss, C.  102, 122 Lewis, J. P.  97, 122, 128, 143, 159, 175, 201, 211, 219, 292 – 93, 302, 354 – 55, 367, 438, 444, 496, 507 L’Heureux, C. E.  400 Lieberman, S.  210, 219, 256, 458, 469, 486 Lilienthal, T. C.  11 Lindars, B.  123, 277, 279, 287 Lindbeck, G.  7, 9, 15, 20 Lischer, R.  49 Livingstone, E. A.  287 Locher, C.  13 Loewe, R.  294, 302 Lohfink, N.  13, 95, 101, 107, 123, 439, 446, 454 – 55 Long, B. O.  77, 143, 175, 195, 238, 303, 314, 334, 353, 508 Longfield, B. J.  319, 334 Longenecker, R. N.  257, 272 Loza, J.  101, 123 Luckmann, T.  102 Lührmann, D.  400, 447, 449 – 52, 454 – 55 Lundberg, M. J.  209, 219, 516 – 17, 520 – 21, 528 Lust, J.  16, 19, 88, 90 Luther, M.  4, 6 – 7, 20, 27, 28, 42, 340, 475 – 76

533

Maas, F.  400 Mack, B. L.  213, 219 MacKenzie, R. A. F.  400 Magne, J.  447, 449 – 50, 452, 455 Maier, G.  144, 158, 175 Mannheim, K.  102 Manson, T. W.  379, 386 March, W. E.  129, 143 – 44 Marcus, D.  22, 479 Margival, H.  8, 20 Marshall, I. H.  385 Maxey, Z.  460, 469 Mays, J. L.  139, 143, 304, 313 McBride, D.  38 McCarter, P. K.  45, 48 McCarthy, C.  60, 76 McCarthy, D.  123 McCasland, S. V.  66, 76, 292, 302 McCrory, J. H.  16, 20 McDonald, L. M.  viii, xi, 179, 193 – 94, 197, 211, 215, 219, 354 – 55, 364, 366 – 68, 466, 469, 496 – 97, 506, 508 McHardy, W. D.  439 McKnight, S.  385 Meeks, W. A.  49, 77, 195, 220, 253, 273, 303, 335, 491, 509 Melugin, R. F.  37, 48 Mendenhall, G. E.  111 – 12, 123, 272 Menzies, A.  125 Merritt, R.  511 Metzger, B. M.  74, 149, 153, 197, 220, 228, 237, 466, 469 Meyer, I.  300, 302 Meyer, R.  400, 402, 404, 409, 414 Michaelis, J. D.  9, 11 – 13, 28, 79, 148, 320, 476, 488 Michaelis, J. H.  11 Milik, J. T.  99, 123, 387, 390 – 91, 393 – 97, 433, 455 Miller, M. P.  53, 66 – 67, 71, 76, 107, 109, 123, 170, 295, 302, 387 – 88, 393 – 95, 397 Miller, P. D.  20, 48, 76, 91, 144, 174 – 75, 194, 220, 238, 272, 287, 302, 314, 334, 367, 508 Miner, D. F.  387 – 88, 395, 397 Moeller, G.  517 Moore, G. F.  256, 272, 276, 279, 284, 287, 458, 469, 482, 490 Moraldi, L.  394, 397 Morgan, D.  40, 48 Muilenburg, J.  200, 220, 384, 386

534

Index of Modern Authors

Mulder, M. J.  34, 48, 80, 91, 227, 237 Muller, R. A.  237 Munck, J.  170, 175, 261, 266, 272 Murphy, R. E.  3, 20, 139, 143, 272, 287 Nelson-Jones, R.  89, 91 Neusner, J.  3, 20, 66, 68, 76, 92, 97, 102, 115, 123, 143, 180, 194, 228, 255 – 56, 263, 272, 279, 287, 297, 302, 343 – 44, 352, 360, 367, 458 – 59, 469, 483, 489 – 90 Newman, M.  106, 123 Nicholson, E. W.  108, 123 Nida, E.  30, 55, 398, 408, 439, 472 Niebuhr, R.  12, 236, 331, 343 Nielsen, B.  291, 302 Niewöhner, F.  49, 335 Nineham, D. E.  174 Norton, G. J.  49, 220, 335, 367, 445, 509 North, R.  262, 272 Noth, M.  100, 101, 110, 123, 255, 436, 444, 446, 449 – 52, 455 Nyberg, H. S.  13 O’Dea, T.  102, 123, 261 Odeberg, H.  281 Ofer, Y.  24, 26 Orlinsky, H.  61 – 62, 72, 76 Osborne, G. R.  372, 386 Osswald, E.  113, 123, 400 Östborn, G.  100, 123, 144, 277, 279, 284, 287 Ouellette, J.  400 Outler, A. C.  144 Ovadiah, A.  400, 406 Overholt, T. W.  113, 123 Parente, F.  486, 490 Parry, D. W.  220, 334, 509 Parsons, P.  78 Pasinya, L. M.  257, 272, 277, 279, 284, 287, 484, 490 Patte, D.  292, 302, 372, 386 Paul, S.  106, 123 Perdue, L. G.  36, 48 Perlitt, L.  101, 123 Petersen, D. L.  37 – 38, 48 Pettit, P.  148, 153, 508, 511, 516 – 17, 519 – 20 Petuchowski, J.  222 Pfeiffer, R. H.  96, 123, 431, 493, 508 Phelps, M. B.  511, 516, 518, 520, 523 – 25, 528

Philonenko, M.  76, 252, 400, 401, 406, 446 – 47, 450, 455 Pierard, R. V.  328, 333 Pietersman, A.  47 Pisano, S.  44, 48 – 49, 220, 335, 367, 445, 509 Pokorný, P.  229, 237 Polk, D. P.  139, 143 Polzin, R.  401, 406, 447, 455 Pralon, D.  89, 91 Priest, J.  401 Procksch, O.  374 – 75, 386 Qimron, E.  38, 48, 355, 367, 401, 493, 508 Quell, G.  113, 123 Rabin, C.  30, 33, 48, 471 – 73, 481 Rabinowitz, I.  401 – 10 Räisänen, H.  276, 287 Ray, R. B.  502, 508 Reed, S.  516 – 17, 528 Reed, W. L.  122, 125, 434 Rehmn, M.  46, 48 Reid, J. K. S.  383, 386 Rendtorff, R.  20, 113, 123, 164, 167, 343, 352 – 53 Revell, E. J.  50, 153, 221, 239, 475, 481, 510 Rhodes, E. F.  19, 153, 237 Richardson, C. C.  350, 352 Rickenbacher, O.  409 Riesner, R.  339, 352 – 53 Robeck, C. M.  229, 237 Roberts, B. J.  401, 419, 425, 428, 481 Robinson, H.  W.  271 – 72 Robinson, J. M.  460, 469, 515 Rofé, A.  40, 44, 48 Roberts, B. J.  96, 107, 109, 123, 378, 386, 422, 475 Ropes, J. H.  383, 386 Rosenblatt, J. P.  91, 220 Rosenzweig, F.  190, 210, 333, 487 de Rossi, G. B.  12, 19, 34, 54, 81, 148, 464, 474 Rössler, D.  257, 272, 279, 285, 287 Rost, L.  101, 106, 124 Rowley, H. H.  37, 48, 272, 354, 381, 386 Rubenstein, R. L.  118, 124 Rudolph, W.  250 Rueger, P.  241 Rüger, H. P.  439 Rylaarsdam, J. C.  232, 238, 384, 386 Ryle, H. E.  354, 356, 367, 508

Index of Modern Authors

Saebø, M.  443 – 44 Sanders, E. P.  276, 287, 483, 490 Sanders, J. A.  x, xi, 3, 9 – 11, 14 – 15, 18, 20, 22, 26 – 28, 31, 33, 37 – 39, 42, 48 – 49, 51, 58, 65, 67 – 73, 76 – 77, 79, 82 – 85, 87 – 93, 95 – 98, 100, 102, 107 – 8, 110, 113 – 15, 119, 123 – 24, 127, 132 – 33, 136, 138 – 46, 148 – 49, 151, 153 – 54, 158, 162 – 63, 166, 169 – 70, 172 – 73, 175, 178 – 79, 181 – 84, 187 – 92, 194 – 95, 197, 199, 202 – 4, 206, 208 – 10, 212, 214 – 15, 217 – 18, 220, 223 – 25, 228 – 29, 231, 233, 238 – 40, 242, 248, 250, 253, 255, 257 – 58, 262 – 65, 267, 270, 272 – 73, 275, 279, 283, 285 – 88, 291 – 92, 294 – 97, 299 – 300, 302 – 3, 305, 307, 310 – 11, 313 – 15, 320 – 21, 324 – 31, 333 – 37, 339 – 40, 343, 348 – 49, 353, 355 – 61, 366 – 68, 382, 386 – 88, 390 – 91, 393, 397 – 99, 401 – 17, 419 – 22, 424, 427 – 28, 431, 434, 436 – 41, 443 – 48, 450 – 52, 455 – 59, 464, 466 – 67, 469, 472, 475 – 76, 478, 481, 483, 485 – 99, 501, 503 – 9, 521, 528 Sandevoir, P.  89, 91 Sandmel, S.  467, 469, 484, 487 Satran, D.  489, 491 Saunders, E. W.  323, 335 Sawyer, J. F. A.  65, 77 Schechter, S.  98, 124 Schenker, A.  21, 25, 92, 144, 335, 368, 469, 509 Schiffman, L. H.  228, 238, 445, 451, 485, 491 Schmidt, D. A.  436 Schmidt, D. D.  355, 368 Schmidt, H.  422, 428 Schmittner, W.  95, 124 Schneider, H.  447, 450, 456 Schniedewind, W.  524 Schoepf, B. G.  122 Schoeps, H. J.  281, 288 Schuller, E.  224, 238 Schürer, E.  458 Schüssler Fiorenza, E.  332, 335 Schwarz, D.  482, 491 Scott, J. M.  334, 508 Seeligmann, I. L.  59, 77 Segert, S.  401 Seitz, C. R.  37 – 38, 49, 86, 92 Semler, J. S.  65, 95, 124, 158, 305, 314, 354 Sen, F.  447, 456 Sevenster, J. N.  460, 469

535

Shanks, H.  430, 445, 520 Sharpe, E. J.  301 Shenkel, J. D.  401 Shepherd, G. T.  158 Siegel, J. P.  97, 124, 401, 414 Sievers, J.  486, 490 Silberman, L. H.  177, 195, 215, 220, 289, 294 – 95, 298, 303, 360, 506 Simon, R.  5, 6, 8 – 11, 14 – 15, 18, 21, 81, 92, 320, 341, 476 Simon, S.  511 Simpson, C. A.  289, 303 Sitterson, J. C.  91, 220 Skehan, P. W.  13, 145, 401 – 2, 406 – 7, 409 – 15, 422, 425, 428, 436 – 37, 445, 471, 495 – 96 Smalley, W. A.  77, 490, 509 Smart, J. D.  127, 144, 328, 335 Smend, R.  139, 144 Smith, H. P.  44 Smith, M.  69, 75, 77, 95, 109 – 11, 114, 124, 182, 195, 213, 220, 236, 238, 256, 279, 288, 458, 460, 482, 486, 491 Smith, W. C.  197, 220, 336, 353 Snaith, N.  62, 77 Soggin, J. A.  101, 124 Spinoza, A.  7 – 8, 21, 28, 35, 49, 191, 319 – 21, 326, 335, 340 – 41, 476, 488 Spiro, S.  511, 521 – 23, 526 Starcky, J.  426 – 28, 433, 439, 445 Steele, F. R.  384, 386 Stegemann, H.  393, 397, 457, 459 Steiner, G.  223, 238 Steinmann, A.  368 Stendahl, K.  257, 261, 273, 373, 378, 381, 384, 386 Stinespring, W. F.  220 Stoebe, H. J.  46, 49 Stone, M. E.  178, 196, 256, 258, 273, 279, 285, 288, 458, 469, 482, 491, 509 Strack, H. L.  458, 483 Strugnell, J.  355, 367, 394, 397, 402 – 4, 430, 436, 447, 449, 452, 454, 456, 471, 493, 508 Stuhlmacher, P.  95, 107, 124, 158, 175 Sun, H.  49, 481, 509 Sundberg, A. C.  71, 77, 95, 106, 124 – 25, 144, 159, 175, 214, 221, 292, 303, 354, 362, 368, 425, 428, 466, 469 Swartley, W. M.  41, 49 Sweeney, M. A.  38, 49, 182, 185, 196, 207, 221, 511, 517, 519 – 20, 522, 524, 526 – 27

536

Index of Modern Authors

Tadmor, H.  48 Tal, A.  479 Talmon, S.  ix, xi, 9 – 10, 14, 21, 29 – 32, 41, 48 – 50, 52, 55, 58, 60, 67, 71, 75, 77, 79, 81, 92, 97, 109, 121, 125, 164, 175, 179, 196, 213, 221, 225, 238 – 39, 291, 301, 303, 355, 357 – 58, 361, 365 – 66, 368, 385, 397, 399, 401 – 2, 413 – 14, 419, 428, 438, 440, 443 – 45, 457, 459, 463, 467 – 74, 477, 479, 481, 483, 491, 494 – 95, 507, 509 Taussig, M. T.  176, 199, 221, 502 Tcherikover, V.  279, 288 Terrien, S.  500, 509 Theiler, W.  296, 301 Thomas, C.  323 Thomas, D. W.  86, 411 Tillich, P.  339 Tischendorf, C.  14 Todd, R.  317, 335 Tournay, R. J.  402 Tov, E.  ix, xi, 3, 16, 19, 21, 29, 31, 37 – 38, 42 – 45, 47, 50, 78 – 80, 88, 90, 92, 357, 368, 430 – 31, 441, 445, 458, 470 – 74, 477, 479, 481, 483, 490 Towner, W. S.  21, 146, 153 Trever, J. C.  251, 471, 511, 513, 519, 522 Tsevat, M.  3, 21 Tucker, G.  15 Ufenheimer, B.  402 Ulrich, E. C.  13, 16, 21, 38, 45, 50, 80, 88, 92, 220, 334, 496, 509 VanderKam, J. C.  335, 445 van der Ploeg, J. P. M.  402, 416 – 19, 421, 425 – 26, 428, 437 van Wagnenen, S.  430 van der Woude, A. S.  92, 113, 125, 387, 389, 394 – 97, 416 – 17, 421, 428 – 29, 447, 449 – 50, 456 de Vaux, R.  430, 432 – 35, 455, 512 Vermes, G.  107 – 9, 119, 125, 259, 273, 283, 288, 457, 470, 485, 491 Vincent, J. M.  37, 50 Vischer, W.  259, 273 Vogel, C.  76, 252 Vogel, G. J. L.  11 Vollmer, J.  110, 124 Volz, P.  13 von Campenhausen, H.  280, 284, 288, 293, 297, 303 von Harnack, A.  280

von Rad, G.  100, 101, 106, 110, 119, 125, 146, 153, 179, 254 – 55, 273, 296, 303, 372, 386 von Soden, H.  14 Waholder, B. Z.  228, 238 – 39, 520 Walker, W. O.  303 Wall, R. W.  364, 368 Walters, S. D.  16, 21, 88, 92 Wanke, G.  108, 125 Wansbrough, H.  50, 196, 221, 491 Warfield, B. B.  129, 143 Watson, D. F.  214 – 15, 219, 335, 367 Weber, M.  102 Weil, G.  29, 54 – 55, 61 – 63, 67, 77, 476 Weinfeld, M.  48, 273 Weis, R. D.  218 – 19, 221, 335, 366, 440, 444 – 45, 499, 507, 509, 511, 517, 519 – 20, 524 Weiser, A.  101, 125 Weiss, M.  400 Weiss, R.  402, 404 Wellhausen, J.  28, 111 – 12, 125 Wermelinger, O.  92, 367 Werner, E.  289, 292, 303 Westcott, B. F.  14 Westermann, C.  38, 50, 372, 385, 386 Wevers, J.  56 Wheeler, B.  319, 335 Whipple, G.  511, 519 White, L.  230, 239 Whiteley, D. E. H.  280 – 81, 283, 288 Wikgren, A.  74 Wilder, A.  102, 125 Willimon, W. H.  49 Willis, J. T.  143, 175, 195, 288, 302 Wilson, E.  376, 386 Wilson, G. H.  94, 125, 214, 221, 443, 445, 495 – 96, 510 Wink, W.  158, 175 Winter, S. C.  195, 220, 367 Wise, M.  94, 125, 470 Wolff, H. W.  500, 510 Woodruff, P.  511 Woollcombe, K. J.  372, 386 Wright, A. G.  442, 445 Wright, G. E.  95, 100, 102 – 3, 107, 110, 119 – 20, 123 – 26, 160, 162 – 63, 175, 374, 384, 386 Wright, J. E.  334, 367, 490, 508 Würthwein, E.  279, 288 Wyschogrod, M.  282 – 85, 288

Index of Modern Authors

Yadin, Y.  70, 77, 387, 395, 397, 402, 417, 425, 429, 437 – 38, 445, 457, 494, 510 Yarchin, W.  511, 515 Yardeni, A.  446 – 47, 449, 451, 455 Yeivin, I.  33, 50, 148, 153, 211, 221, 227, 239, 503, 510

Zarkantzas, N.  525 Ziesler, J. A.  261, 273 Zimmerli, W.  130, 160 – 61, 163 Zuckermann, B.  447, 518, 520 – 22 Zuckermann, K.  447, 521

537

Ancient Sources Index Old / First Testament Genesis 1 – 12 176 1 – 11 205 1 – 2 332 1 191, 202, 234 1:2 281 1:26 – 28 205 2 202, 234 6 268 12 42, 332, 485 12:1 – 3 205 12:2 344 12:3 181, 308 12:7 344 14:19 – 20 108 15 – 22 180 18:16 – 33 190 19:15 44 21:10 – 12 283 21:12 210 22 119 27:27 – 29 108 27:39 – 40 108 32 259 32:22 – 32 208 38:24 44 45 – 50 330 45:5 120 46:15 5 49 108 50:20 186 Exodus 4:21 – 26 232 – 33 4:22 371 4:24 – 26 151, 232 15 39, 64, 201, 250 15:5 44 15:13 63 15:16 63

15:26 40 19:5 – 6 282 20 – 23 499 22:24 46 25 – 40 105 33:12 – 16 189 33:14 – 16 332 33:16 282, 487 34:6 – 7 190 34:7 209 35 – 40 17, 89 40 – 48 17 Leviticus 17 – 18 285 19:18 327 25 416 25:8 – 24 393 25:8 – 13 393 25:9 390, 392, 393 25:10 389, 392 25:13 389, 391 28:8 – 13 396 Numbers 1 – 10 85 15:14 101 22 – 24 232 Deuteronomy 1 – 26 170 4:9 264 4:16 502 6 269 6:4 – 5 327 6:5 266 6:7 – 9 269 10:16 40, 184, 235 12 – 26 180 15 416

540

Ancient Sources Index

15:2 389, 391, 396 16:20 263 18:15 170 18:22 115 20 275 20:1 – 9 136 21:23 283 26 180, 181 26:5 – 11 181 26:5 – 9 100, 101, 105, 200, 255 26:12 – 15 181 27 – 28 181 28 282 29 – 33 39 29 – 31 180, 181, 204, 207 30:6 40, 235, 502 30:11 – 14 83 30:12 – 13 235 30:12 234 30:14 235 30:56 184 31:26 96 32 39, 250 32:39 206, 235 33 108 Joshua 24 100 24:2 – 13 201 Judges 5:11 200 10:8 45 10:17 45 11:4 46 21:8 – 12 46 1 Samuel 1 – 2 88 2 39 2:2 420 2:6 – 7 206 2:6 235 10 43, 46 10:16 – 27a 45 10:17 – 27a 46 10:26ab 46 10:27 – 11:1 43, 44 10:27 44, 90 10:27ab 46 11 43, 36 11:1 – 11 45, 46

11:1 43, 44 11:2 43 11:12 – 15 45 11:12 – 14 46 11:12 – 13 46 11:13 46 11:26 45 12:7 263 12:8 200, 255 16 – 18 88 16 – 17 201, 406 16 404, 406 27 – 28 235 2 Samuel 5 187, 501 5:17 – 25 114, 300, 501 7 202, 405 13:20 46 14:1 – 20 500 22 64, 88, 89, 415, 479 22:27 206 23:1 – 7 415 1 Kings 3 – 10 180 3 18, 84 3:2 – 5 16 8:53 282 10 39, 180, 205, 235 10:1 235 10:2 235 10:21 205 10:27 180 11 – 2 Kgs  25 206 11 180, 206, 235 11:14 206 11:23 206 11:26 206 22 231 2 Kings 18:13 – 20:19 88 18:36 46 19:32 – 37 187 21:1 – 18 209, 504 22 – 23 204 22 224 23 – 25 176 25 39, 224 25:27 – 30 206

Ancient Sources Index

1 Chronicles 3 395 10 – 2 Chron 36 216 14:10 – 17 114 16 453 16:8 – 36 414, 418 29:10 – 13 415 29:15 307 2 Chronicles 5:13 415 6:41 – 42 415 20:21 415 33:10 – 17 192, 210 33:10 – 13 504 33:12 – 13 39 36 176, 217 36:22 – 23 217, 502 Ezra 1:1 – 4 502 4 104 9:8 – 9 120 10:10 – 11 415 Nehemiah 8

x, 93, 110, 146, 179, 204, 205, 224 8:1 – 12 119 8:9 179 9 101 9:11 44 Job 1 – 2 205 1 231 3 – 31 209 13:20 – 28 209 17 – 18 250 19:23 – 29 209 24:14 46 29:1 – 4 209 38 – 42 209 Psalms 1 40 1:1 – 2 192, 217 1:1 504 3 – 41 423 7:8 – 9 389, 392 7:8 392, 395 8 416, 422

541

10 423 14 88, 189 14:1 503 18 64, 88, 89, 415, 421, 479 22 388 32 422 32:3 46 33 423 38 422 42 – 83 423 50:21 46 53 88 54:5 448 67:4 418 70 422 71 422 72 416 78 201 79:2 – 3 422 82 86, 205, 231 82:1 389, 392 82:2 389, 392 84 – 89 423 84 423 89 231 90 – 104 423 90 422 91 425, 426 91:4 421 91:14 – 16 426 92 421 93:1 419 96 414, 418 101 – 150 413 103:11 418 104 419 105 – 107 423 105 – 106 201 105 414 105:1 – 15 418 106 – 109 426 106 414 106:1 418 106:47 – 48 418 107 426 108 – 110 423 109 426 111 – 118 423 113:3b 418 116 418 117 418 118 388, 418, 420, 421

542 118:1 415 118:29 415 119:105 – 12 94 120 – 134 421, 423 121:1 395 123 419 133 418 135 – 136 201, 423 135 419 135:2 420 135:3 63 135:6 420 136 415, 418, 421 137 188 137:1 – 4 116 138 – 145 423 141 418 144 418, 419 144:1 418 145 415, 420, 421 145:21 421 146 – 150 423 146:9 – 10 420 148 231, 419 150 419 Proverbs 8 – 9 408 9 409 11:12 46 17:28 46 Ecclesiastes 3:5 134 3:11 112 7:20 189 Isaiah 1 501 1:1 – 22:10 55 1:4 – 27 501 1:7 – 9 186 1:12 – 17 118 1:21 – 27 113, 114, 186, 207 1:21 – 26 212 1:24 – 27 184 1:25 501 2:4 134, 299 5:1 – 7 113, 120 6 18, 86 6:1 – 13 37 6:1 86

Ancient Sources Index

6:5 85 6:9 – 10 233 7 501 7:9 114 8:5 – 8 184, 212 8:11 388, 390, 393, 396 10 186 11:4 395 19:24 – 25 135 22:1 – 4 187 22:2 114 22:11 113 25 416 27:2 – 5 120 28 – 33 185 28 – 31 113, 500 28 185, 501 28:2 184 28:4 114 28:7 – 22 501 28:14 – 22 184, 185, 207 28:16 18, 186, 235, 330, 382 28:17 – 22 186 28:17 – 19 212 28:17 186 28:21 114, 187, 300, 501 29:1 – 7 114 29:13 280 30:1 388 30:8 – 17 187 30:13 – 14 118 32:1 – 18 114 32:13 114 33:1 – 22 114 36 – 39 88, 114 36:15 113 36:21 46 37:33 – 38 187 40 – 55 86, 114, 229 40 37, 38 40:1 – 11 37, 38, 86, 88, 231 40:1 – 8 37 40:1 – 2 37 40:2 37, 86 40:3 – 11 452 40:3 37 40:6 37, 38, 86, 90 40:6a 85 40:7 – 8 38 40:9 37, 38 40:27 116 41:8 – 9 117

Ancient Sources Index

42 417 42:14 46 42:24 – 25 114 43:16 – 21 63, 64 43:21 63 45:4 232 45:7 206 46:12 117 51 117, 452 51:1 – 3 299 51:2 117, 120 51:7 117, 235, 502 52 – 53 388 52 417 52:7 382, 388, 390, 392, 393, 395, 396 52:8 117 52:13 395 53 191 54:7 – 8 114 55:8 – 9 184, 269, 271 56:7 388, 390 61 135, 394, 416, 417 61:1 – 3 393, 395, 396 61:1 – 2 388 61:1 389, 390, 392, 393, 395, 394, 396 61:2 – 3 393, 395 61:2 389, 390, 392, 393 – 96 61:3 392, 394, 396 65:2 388 Jeremiah 1 – 23 114 – 15 1:9 235 2:2 – 3 200 4:4 40, 184, 235 4:11 502 4:19 46 5:4 – 5 115 5:15 113 6:28 388 7:22 118 7:23 293 8 432 8:8 280 9:1 115 11:16 – 17 120 12:10 120 14:9 113 15:15 – 21 209 15:16 235

543

15:17 115 16 115 16:14 – 15 114, 265 17:15 116 18:1 – 11 118 20 114 20:2 114 20:9 235 23:7 – 8 114 23:23 113 24 – 29 188 26:18 228 27:18 498 28 188 28:2 – 11 113 28:8 – 9 104, 113, 498 28:9 115 29:26 116 30:12 – 17 40, 184, 212, 235, 502 31 – 33 187 31:2 104 31:29 – 34 116, 333 31:29 – 30 209 31:29 40, 190, 320, 487 31:31 – 34 94, 114, 184, 207, 212, 235, 265, 502 31:33 40 31:34 185 32 – 45 176 36 – 37 114 36:26 114 37:4 114 37:9 – 10 114 37:15 114 37:21 114 38 114 38:4 113 38:6 114 38:13 114 38:28 114 39:11 – 14 114 39:15 114 40:1 – 6 182 40:1 114 40:2 – 5 114 40:6 114 44 232 49:19 72 50:44 72 Lamentations 3:20 61

544

Ancient Sources Index

Ezekiel 2:8 – 3:3 235 4:17 117 7:24 116 8:12 – 13 116 14:7 117 16 114, 232 16:24 116 18 40, 116, 190, 209, 320, 333, 487 18:25 116 20 114 23 114 24:18 116 24:21 116 24:26 116 28:12 – 19 120 33 – 34 188 33 117 33:10 – 16 116 33:10 116 33:17, 20 116 33:21 116 33:23 – 29 120 33:24 – 29 299 33:24 117 34 189 36 – 37 118, 187, 188 36:16 – 37:14 212 36:25 – 28 207 36:26 – 27 235, 502 36:26 40 36:35 – 36 120 36:37 117 37 94, 119, 206, 207, 235 37:1 – 2 119 37:5 – 6 119 37:6 119 37:11 – 14 119 37:26 184 37:27 184 40 – 48 72, 100 Daniel 2:34 – 35 395 7:13 395 9 101 9:16 263 9:25 393, 395, 396 Hosea 2:8 (MT 2:10) 151

2:14 – 15 186, 200, 207 2:16 – 17 114 5:10 46 5:15 – 6:3 207, 502 6:1 – 3 235 8:4 118 9:10 200 11:1 – 5 113 11:1 371 11:4 46 13:4 – 8 113 Joel 3:10 (MT 4:10) 134, 299 Amos 1:3 – 3:2 106, 199, 499 1:3 – 2:9 500 1:3 – 2:8 113 1:3 – 2:5 203, 500 2:4 – 5 200 2:6 – 16 203 2:6 – 11 183 2:6 – 8 200, 500 2:7 200 2:9 – 11 106, 113, 200, 499, 500 3:1 – 2 106, 113, 203 3:2 203, 500 4:10 – 11 106 5:25 106, 118 6:5 106 7:10 – 15 500 7:10 – 11 199 7:10 203 8:4 – 6 200 9 207 9:1 – 8 203 9:2 – 7 500 9:7 106 9:11 – 15 184 9:11 106 Micah 2:6 113 3:11 113 3:12 228 4:3 299 6:1 – 8 267 6:3 – 5 113 6:5 200, 263 6:6 – 7 118

Ancient Sources Index

Habakkuk 1:12 382 2:4 117, 132, 372, 377, 378 – 83 3 494

Zechariah 1 – 4 492 4:7 395 4:9 – 10 395

Zephaniah 1:7 – 13

Malachi 2:17 116

136

545

New / Second Testament Matthew 1:20 – 21 13:53 – 58 22:1 – 10 Mark 6:1 – 6 12:21 – 31 16:9 – 20

260 135 135 135 18, 90

Luke 1:2 308 1:52 – 53 206, 235 4:16 – 30 133, 135 4:24 199 10:25 – 27 327 10:26 41 11:52 484 12:51 – 53 299 14:15 – 24 135 14:21 275 15 133 18:11 – 12 181 18:18 327 19 388 24:44 96 John 5:39 106, 120, 166, 192, 263 7:53 –  8:11 90 8:1 – 11 18 9:39 134 14:6 152 14:27 134, 299 Acts 2:11 263 4:12 152 7 201 9:2 324 15 282

15:11 285 15:20 283, 285 15:29 283, 285 19:9 324 Romans 1:17 372, 378 3:10 189, 209, 503 3:21 – 26 372 3:22 381 3:25 381 3:31 279 4:15 281 5:13 281 5:21 382 7:1 – 10 279 7:6 279 7:10 120, 263 7:12 70 7:22 279 9 – 11 261, 264, 285 9:7 210 9:30 – 10:4 260 9:31 – 32 278 10:4 264, 278, 279, 281, 283, 297 10:6 – 10 235 10:10 264, 267 13:8 – 10 279 1 Corinthians 9:1 286 10:11 281 15:5 – 9 286 2 Corinthians 3:4 – 17 279 3:4 – 6 286 3:13 281 4:6 286 10:13, 15 – 16 197

546

Ancient Sources Index

Galatians 1 – 2 286 2:19 279 3:11 372, 378 3:13 282 3:19 – 4:5 279 3:21 120, 263 3:24 – 25 281 3:24 281 4:21 – 31 283 5:2 – 6 285 5:2 282 6:6 197 6:15 – 16 285 6:16 270

2:1 269 – 70 2:3 267 2:6 – 8 268 2:6 267 2:9 – 11 268 2:12 – 13 271 2:12 268 3:5 – 11 286 3:9 372 3:16 197 Colossians 4:14

2 Thessalonians 2:7 460

Ephesians 2:14 – 16 279 2:15 282 Philippians 2:1 – 13

198, 487

Hebrews 7 417 10:38 372, 379 11 169, 201

260, 267

Apocrypha 1 Macc  7:17

422

Ps 151

83, 96, 402 – 5, 407, 419, 436, 438, 446 404

Ps 151:3

Sirach (Ecclesiasticus) 6:18 – 37 409 24 408

24:19 – 22 409 44 – 50 201 44 213 45:5 120, 263 48 – 49 96 51 406 – 12, 451 51:13 ff 451 Wisdom of Solomon 8

Pseudepigraphal Psalms 151 – 155 436, 438, 446 152 438 153 438 154 436, 446 – 56 154:1 – 3 450 154:4 452 154:5 – 8 450 154:10 – 11 450, 452

154:12 – 14 450 154:17 – 20 447 – 48 154:18 – 20 453 154:18 449, 452 154:19 451 154:20 449 155 436

Josephus Ag. Ap.  1.37 – 46 306 Ag. Ap.  1:37 – 43 497

Ag. Ap.  1.38 – 42 109 Ant.  6.68 44 – 45

408

547

Ancient Sources Index

Rabbinic Sources and Targums Abot 2.8 Abot 6.7

106, 120, 263 106, 120, 263

Abot R. Nat. 31 72

B. Bat. 14b B. Mes. 59b b. Ned. 39b

40, 148, 216, 356 83 72

Tg. Hab 2:4b 378 Tg. Zech 2:17 379

Qumran 1QapGen 419 1QH 457 1QIsaa 37, 38, 85, 86, 388 1QIsab 33 1QpHab 378 – 80 1QpHab  7:4 – 8:3 372 1QS 457 1QS 9:20 388 1QS 10:21 388 1QS  11:3 – 15 380 1QSa  1:2 – 3 388 1Q27 460 4QFlor 1.14 388 4QIsac 97 4QMMT 355, 451 4QMMT C‑10 493 4QPrva 443 4QPrvb 443 4QPsa 422 4QPsb 425 4QPsd 413 4QPsf 419, 427, 495 4QPsk 413 4QPsn 413 4QPsq 422 4QPst 413 4QSama 43 – 46, 88 4Q180 391, 394 4Q181 391, 394 4Q430 224 4Q431 224 4Q448 446 – 49, 451, 453, 454 11Q5 11QApPsa 11QPsa (= 11Q5)

see 11QPsa see 11QPsApa vii, viii, 51, 96, 97, 398 – 415, 417 – 19, 421, 426, 430, 431,

11QPsa col. 15 11QPsa col. 18   (= Ps 154) 11QPsa col. 27 11QPsa col. 28 11QPsb (= 11Q6) 11QPse (= 11Q9) 11QPsApa   (= 11QapocrPs    = 11Q11) 11QPss 11QMelch   (= 11Q13) 11QMelch ii.2 11QMelch ii.3 11QMelch ii.4 11QMelch ii.5 11QMelch ii.6 11QMelch ii.7 11QMelch ii.8 11QMelch ii.9 11QMelch ii.10 11QMelch ii.11 11QMelch ii.12 11QMelch ii.13 11QMelch ii.14 11QMelch ii.15 11QMelch ii.16 11QMelch ii.17 11QMelch ii.18 11QMelch ii.19 11QMelch ii.20 11QMelch ii.21 11QMelch ii.22 11QMelch ii.23 – 24 11QMelch ii.23 11QMelch ii.24 11QMelch ii.25

436, 439, 446 – 48, 450 – 51, 453, 494 – 95 415 388 250, 292 83 413, 417 – 19 417, 419, 421, 425 413, 419, 421, 425, 495 see 11QPsa 387 – 97 389, 391 389, 391, 394 – 95 388 – 89, 392, 394 389, 392 389, 392, 394 389, 392 – 93 389, 392 388 – 89, 392, 394 389, 392 389, 392, 395 389, 392 388 – 89, 392, 395 – 96 390, 392 – 96 390, 392 390, 392, 395 390, 393, 395 388, 390, 393, 395 – 96 390, 393, 395 – 96 388, 390, 395 – 96 390, 393 390, 393 396 390, 393 390, 393, 396 388, 390, 393

548

Ancient Sources Index

11QMelch ii.26 11QT (= 11Q19)

390 457, 494

CD 1:13

388

CD 2:6 CD 8:4 CD 8:16 CD 19:29

388 388 388 388

Nahal Hever 8HevXIIgr 78

8HevXIIgr 17.30

378

Peshitta Mosul 1113 446   (Nestorian Psalter)

Mosul 1113 12t4 446 Mosul 1113 19d1 446

ARNA folio 65n23

98

Church Fathers Athanasius, Festal 197, 354   Letter 39   (Easter letter)

Muratorian 354, 466   Fragment Origen, Letter to 197   Africanus