Harry Orlinsky

In my column featured last week in Jewish Ideas Daily, I reported on an event held at the New York branch of HUC-JIR, the Reform Jewish seminary where Harry Orlinsky taught Bible for many years. I thought I’d use this space to expand a bit on my comments there, for readers who have a particular interest in the Bible, its scholars, and its translators.

As a Chicagoan who moved to the Northeast Corridor only in my 30s, I still have not lost my gleeful wonder that — from Philadelphia, at least — you can hop on a train and spend the day in Manhattan. Though I sometimes do this just for a treat, more often I schedule a New York day to take advantage of a Bible event that’s happening there. A few years ago, teaching a class on Wisdom literature at Gratz College, I made sure to hear a talk by Ed Greenstein at NYU on “The Problem of Evil in the Book of Job.” (I’m teaching the same class this spring at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College; come on back, Ed!)

But I consider it a special duty to show the flag when, as sometimes happens, there’s an event in memory of a biblical scholar. The scholars of a generation ago were famous when I began my own studies, and they were generally the teachers of my own teachers. Harry Orlinsky, though one rarely encounters his name today, was a superstar of Jewish academic Bible studies when I first got interested in the field. His book Ancient Israel was quite well known in those days. It’s mostly of historical interest now, having been superseded by new archaeological discoveries and a generational change in how histories of ancient Israel are now written. (That’s a post for a different occasion.) Perhaps that’s why the event in his memory was so sparsely attended. His family members who were present might have comprised 20% of the crowd.

The event was also meant to mark the 50th anniversary of what is still called the “new” Jewish Publication Society translation of the Torah, produced by a committee that had Orlinsky as its editor-in-chief. I’ve been told that’s the only event scheduled to mark the anniversary. Yet the JPS Torah has become the Torah of non-Orthodox American Jews. I’m hoping we will be able to organize a session about it at the Association for Jewish Studies conference scheduled for Boston in December of 2013.

Most of what I’ll say from here on is taken from the talk by Leonard Greenspoon of Creighton University at the HUC-JIR event. Not only is Greenspoon a scholar of Bible translation; he knew Orlinsky very well in his younger days.

The “old” JPS Bible translation, published in 1917, was directed by a scholar named Max Margolis, who was (briefly) Orlinsky’s teacher. Margolis thought an American Jewish translation of the Bible ought to be modeled on the King James Version, whose Shakespearean diction would teach English to the immigrants who made up such a large proportion of American Jewry in those days. He was consciously modeling Moses Mendelssohn’s “Biur,” which provided a translation of the Bible into German (written in Hebrew characters) to help integrate Jews into the German cultural mainstream, to help them back up their demand for “emancipation.”

When Orlinsky began to call for an updated English version for Jewish use, he intended it to be a revised version of the 1917 translation. According to Greenspoon, it is “almost certain that his contacts with American Bible Society translators were decisive in changing his views.” Rather than a formal translation, demanding that the reader come to the text, Orlinsky began to think that a functional translation — where the text comes to where the reader is — was now more appropriate. As anyone who’s used the New JPS Bible knows, it follows the “functional” method of translation in a major way.

A simple example comes from Deut 17:6a:

על פי שנים עדים או שלשה עדים יומת המת

Old JPS (using the “literal” or “formal equivalence” method):

At the mouth of two witnesses, or three witnesses, shall he that is to die be put to death.

New JPS (using the freer “functional equivalence” method):

A person shall be put to death only on the testimony of two or more witnesses.

This kind of translation is far more readable. The downside is that midrashic or other later Jewish interpretations may fix on the more literal “mouth” or “three” when these are invisible to readers of the New JPS translation. But to understand the peshat, the straightforward sense of the text, as it would have been understood by the original readers, the functional method is superior — except when the original text is a poetic or otherwise literary one. Admittedly, in such cases any translator is almost always bound to fail in some degree.

I wrote in my JID column about the “new” translation (based on Rashi and the Enuma Elish) of Gen 1:1. It’s a good example of Orlinsky’s statement that “We considered ourselves obligated to no prior interpretation of Scripture.” Though he never forgot that his work was in the service of the American readers of Bible — Christians with the RSV and the NRSV, Jews with the NJPS — his watchword was always “What does the Bible mean?” Not “what does the Bible mean to me?” but “What does the Bible mean?”

Rashi, who near the end of his life told his grandson that he would rewrite his Bible commentary if he could because new scholarly discoveries were being made on a daily basis, would certainly have been pleased. That’s not a bad encomium to have.

The Koren Edition (A Biblicist Reads the Talmud)

Today, for a change, “the Bible Guy” becomes a Talmud guy.

This is my first post in what may become an occasional series, “A Biblicist Reads the Talmud.”

Last August I completed the 12th cycle of the page-a-day “Daf Yomi” program for learning Talmud. (I hope to write more — much more — about this elsewhere.) I resolved that I’d continue at a much slower pace. As of today I’m about 140 pages behind the page-a-day pace; I’m still working through the page they were on last August 14th.

For my first go-round, though I read every word of the Mishnah and Gemara in Hebrew and Aramaic, I relied heavily on the Artscroll edition. It’s excellent as a pony, but takes an ultra-Orthodox perspective on things.

The Koren edition is an English reworking of the highly-regarded Modern Hebrew “Steinsaltz” edition. It is aimed at a Modern Orthodox, rather than ultra-Orthodox, market, though when I heard R. Steinsaltz speak at Penn a few years ago it seemed to me that he too falls into the latter category rather than the former. In today’s post, I’m going to point out some problems demonstrating that this edition needs a careful going-over by an editor who can question R. Steinsaltz. I’m leaving aside some infelicitous English, which can be corrected rather easily in the next printing if Koren will take the trouble to do so.

My examples are coming from the page I’m currently on, vol. 1, p. 94 (a section of Ber.13b).

The Hebrew word perakdan (פרקדן) is translated as “one who is lying on his back.” This, I discovered on turning back to 13b in the Vilna-edition section at the other end of the book, follows the commentary of Rashi. But the language note on p. 94, to which readers are pointed by a superscript “L” in the English translation, says that it can mean “either lying on one’s back, or on one’s stomach.”

The note adds an explanation “in addition to Rashi’s,” which (however) the English reader is never given. (The “additional” explanation is that this position “may lead to inappropriate sexual thoughts”; Rashi says merely that if someone in this position has an erection while sleeping, it would be publicly visible and he would be embarrassed.)

In addition to the discrepancy between the note and the translation, what I want from a language note is to tell me why the unusual word means what it does. What’s the origin of this word? It seems to have 4 significant consonants, not the normal three. A linguistic note in a commentary on a biblical book would try to explain the form and derivation of the word, but that’s not part of this commentary.

Secondly, there’s a verb גנא (or perhaps גני) in this passage which seems to be used here in two different meanings: (1) to sleep; (2) to lie on one’s side. This ambiguity seems to be integral to the text rather than an artifact of the translation, but there’s no discussion of it. The Talmud translation I’m looking for would help me through this difficulty in the text.

I’ve been told that some years back the Jewish Publication Society received a suggestion to issue a modern English commentary on the Talmud that would be comparable to their excellent Bible commentary series (so far encompassing only the Torah, the Megillot, and Jonah). The reply was that there was no (non-Orthodox) market for such a thing.

Call me a dreamer, but I am ready for one — from JPS or anyone else — and I think others will join me. The Artscroll Talmud paved the way for the Koren edition; now the Koren edition is paving the way for a third version, even if this is merely an updated second edition of itself. One way or another, we moderns are going to bring the Talmud into our orbit.

Exilic Biblical Writing?

Last week, I attended the 2012 conference of the Society for Biblical Literature (held in conjunction with the American Academy of Religion), this year at Chicago’s McCormick Place. This isn’t meant to be any kind of comprehensive report; those who’ve been to the SBL will know that’s impossible, since dozens of sessions are running concurrently at any one time. But there’s also no forum for reacting to conference presentations once they’re over. So I’m using this post to present a reaction to something I heard there.

The remark that caught my attention was a comment made by Thomas Römer of the Université de Lausanne. I know his work only from hearing him speak at previous conferences, where he has always sounded sensible and thoughtful. But this time I think his good sense has steered him wrong.

It was in a session on “How to Reconstruct the Literary History of the Hebrew Bible.” The discussion touched on the question of how much of the Bible was put together during the period of the Babylonian exile, following the destruction of the First Temple in 586 BCE. Römer asked the rhetorical question, “When the Israelites went into exile, was their immediate reaction to start writing books?” The question drew a laugh, and a subsequent speaker also alluded to it, as if acknowledging that they obviously did not.

Now for a responsible opposing viewpoint.

We have an empirical model—more on this term in a later post—suggesting that the immediate reaction to exile might indeed be writing books that consolidate the knowledge of the exiled community.

The exile to Babylonia was not the first exile suffered by the Jews (that was in 722, when inhabitants of the northern kingdom of Israel were exiled to other lands by their Assyrian conquerors), and it was far from the last. The exile I want to discuss in this post is the exile from Spain in 1492, and the writer is Isaac Abarbanel.

Abarbanel (often given the courtesy title “Don” Isaac) is identified by the Encyclopedia Judaica as a “statesman, biblical exegete, and theologian,” but I would call him a politician and financier as well as a writer on religious topics. He was forced to leave Spain with the rest of the remaining Jews in 1492, but according to the EJ he was allowed to take 1000 gold ducats out of the country with him.

And here’s what happened next:

After the 1492 expulsion, Abrabanel* passed two years in Naples. Here he completed his commentary on Kings (fall 1493).

*Since the name appears most often in Hebrew characters, which do not make the pronunciation explicit, it appears in transliteration in a number of different ways. I follow the explanation by Sid Leiman (JJS 19 [1968]:49 n. 1) explaining that Don Isaac’s son Judah used the pronunciation “Abarbanel.”

Though Abarbanel was eventually able to resume political and financial activities, he also continued to write. His Bible commentaries are still used, not just read by scholars. (His Torah commentary, somewhat long-winded, is not translated into English, but you will find selections from it in my Commentators’ Bible series.)

Could some of Israel’s biblical literature have been written not only in, but early in, the Babylonian exile? The example of Abarbanel—whose commentary on Kings was finished in 1493, the year after the exile—says that it could.

What circumstances permitted Abarbanel to write his commentary on Kings?

1) He had the means, having left Spain with a bit of money.

2) He had the opportunity, since unlike a baker, tailor, carpenter or the like he could not immediately resume his financial and political occupations, but he could continue to write.

3) He had the motive, partly the same motives that had moved him to write commentaries and other religious works earlier in his career, and partly the desire to reassure himself and his Jewish contemporaries that their tradition was secure and that their ultimate fate was a hopeful one.

Could these same circumstances have existed—for someone—even during the very first months of the Babylonian exile? It would be surprising if they did not. The exilic community certainly included richer and more well-connected members (we know of a Jewish banking family in Babylonia not long after this period) and there were undoubtedly also many learned people among the exiles.

The important thing to remember is that it would only take one such person to produce a biblical book. Contemporary scholars speak of “the Deuteronomistic school,” “the priestly traditions,” and so on, but books are not written by committee—not good books, anyway. They are written by single authors, even if they subsequently change as they are transmitted through the centuries.

Römer’s question, “When the Israelites went into exile, was their immediate reaction to start writing books?” makes the very idea sound absurd. And posed in this general way, it certainly is. But there is nothing absurd about the idea that writing a book might have been the immediate reaction of a few individuals—individuals like Thomas Römer himself, and (not to put myself on the same level) like me.

So the idea that some of the biblical books were composed or compiled during the Babylonian exile is a quite reasonable one.

Why Were the Israelites Enslaved?

Were the Israelites ever slaves in Egypt?

To many, this will seem like an absurd question. The book of Exodus has a dozen chapters explaining that they were. Yet recent decades have found at least some biblical scholars casting doubts on the historicity of this story. The sociological approach pioneered by George Mendenhall outlined a plausible scenario that describes the rise of the Israelites in Canaan as a “peasant’s revolt.” According to this scenario, the Israelites were an amalgam of primarily indigenous, “lower” social groups which escaped the power of the Canaanite city-states and unified in the name of a new religion, “YHWHism.” (Interestingly, the book of Chronicles also seeks to portray the Israelites as indigenous and, despite covering biblical history from Adam to Cyrus, does not recount the exodus from Egypt.) The so-called “biblical minimalists” wish to deny that any of the biblical texts that describe what went on before the Hellenistic period are really historical. If the people who came from Babylonia to Judea in the Persian period had no connection with biblical Israel in the first place, as Thomas Thompson suggests, then it goes without saying that the tales of Egyptian slavery have nothing to do with historical reality. The mere fact that Exodus describes this period at length offers no proof of it to the skeptical mind.

But there is one aspect of the biblical account that should give even the most skeptical mind a reason to reconsider. There is the fact that “Moses” is an Egyptian name, of course, but that is not what I’m talking about. It might well have been selected by an author to provide local color to a concocted story set in Egypt. I’m referring to something a bit more subtle than this, yet more far-reaching, found not in Exodus but in the book of Genesis.

The literary function of Genesis, in the context of the Pentateuch as a whole, is to set up the situation at the beginning of Exodus, where the Israelites change from a family of 70 males (Gen 46:27, Exod 1:5) to a nation of slaves. That is, most of Genesis is devoted to making sense of the fact that the Israelites were slaves in Egypt. In the context of God’s promise to Abram in Genesis 12 that the land of Canaan was to be his, there would seem to be no place for something that would interrupt that process. There are at least three different explanations in Genesis—one explicit and two implicit—for the Israelites’ period of enslavement. I suggest that the difficulty in explaining points to some kind of real occurrence that demanded explanation.

The first solution, and the only one that directly addresses the problem, is found in Genesis 15, the chapter that describes the “covenant between the pieces.” This strange chapter describes a ritual unlike any other in the Bible, in which Abram (as he is still called at this point) takes three three-year-old animals and two birds, cuts the animals in half and sets the halves (and apparently the two birds) opposite each other. He fights off the birds of prey that descend on the carcasses until sundown. Then, in a kind of hypnotic trance, he sees a flaming torch pass “between the pieces” and hears God’s voice proclaim:

You must know that your offspring will be alien, in a land not their own. They shall enslave them and oppress them for four hundred years. But I am going to judge the nation which they will serve; and afterwards they will go forth with great wealth. But you shall come to your ancestors in peace and be buried at a ripe old age. It will be the fourth generation that returns here, for the iniquity of the Amorites will not be complete until then. (Genesis 15:13-16)

This passage solves the problem of Israelite slavery in Egypt by, as it were, cutting the Gordian knot. God simply announces that, before the promise of the land is fulfilled, Abram’s descendants will be slaves in a foreign land. The justification for this unexpectedly harsh decree comes, in context, almost as an afterthought. The text acknowledges that the land which God has given to Abram is already inhabited by another group of people. They must be geographically or at least politically displaced in order for Abram’s descendants to inherit their land. Hinting at what will happen to the Israelites themselves later, the unspoken assumption of this passage is that “iniquity” justifies displacement.

But this explanation, straightforward as it is, leaves itself open to some uncomfortable questions, even for readers who are inclined to accept its basic premise:

(1) What is the nature of the Amorites’ wickedness? They certainly have not been given any commandments, and are under no obligation to God as the Israelites will be when they are commanded at Sinai.

(2) How exactly does one measure quantities of iniquity, and how will God determine when the “complete” amount that will justify displacement is reached?

(3) Sharpest of all, if Abram’s descendants really must be kept “off stage” for four centuries, while the Amorites do what they do, why exactly must they spend those 400 years as slaves? (The giving of an alternative time period, four generations, highlights the fact that even the length of the period of slavery is arbitrary.) What justifies this sentence, which it is hard to understand as being anything other than punishment—a punishment even more undeserved than the expulsion of the Amorites a few centuries early would be? This announcement of the slavery to come, then, straightforward as it is, gives the impression of being a post hoc explanation. That is, Israel’s period of slavery in Egypt happened and, difficult as it might be to do so, had to be explained.

This particular version of the explanation works, as it were, retroactively.

Although the text does not say so explicitly, it is the Israelites’ own subsequent experience of commandedness and then of exile or at least the threat of exile for disobedience that is reflected back on to the experience of the population which, according to the biblical model, was displaced to make way for Abraham’s descendants.

Meanwhile, the first of the implicit explanations for Israelite slavery has already begun, in Genesis 12. Despite the fact that Abram has just left his home in Mesopotamia to settle in a new country as instructed by God, he almost immediately (in literary terms) leaves for Egypt. As many generations of biblical scholars have recognized, what follows is a miniature version of the Israelite sojourn in Egypt. Abram is driven down to Egypt by famine, as his descendants would later be, and, like them, is subject to arbitrary seizure by an unnamed Pharaoh. The Pharaoh and his whole household are struck by plagues as punishment, and finally Abram is “let go,” using the same verb that is the theme of the exodus story. There is nothing about this episode that explains why the Israelites were slaves; it is just something that “happened.” But it is the beginning of a literary theme that will make the Israelites’ ultimate slavery seem to the reader to follow naturally.

The very next chapter of Genesis continues the theme, and gives it a subtle twist. It turns out that Abram’s wife Sarai has a slave of her own, and this slave, Hagar, is (of all possible nationalities) Egyptian. Being childless, Sarai gives Hagar to Abram in hopes of getting a son. Once Hagar conceives, though, she begins to think less of her mistress.

Sarai, in turn, with Abram’s explicit permission (Gen 16:6), begins to treat Hagar harshly.

Hagar runs away but is met by an angel who instructs her to return and take her punishment, telling her she is pregnant with a son.

The fact that we are told of an Egyptian slave in Abram’s household immediately after the pronouncement that his own descendants will be slaves cannot be coincidence.

True, his own sojourn in Egypt makes “story sense” out of the fact that his wife has an Egyptian slave. But there is more to it than this. Just as Abram’s descent to Egypt is linked to the story of the exodus, Hagar’s story is linked with that of the “covenant between the pieces.” Both Abram and Hagar are promised a multitude of descendants—Hagar “too many to count” (l6:10), Abram as many as there are stars in the sky: “count them, if you can” (15:5). Yet the immediate prospect is one of suffering: the masters of Abram’s descendants will oppress them (‘innu ’otam, 15:13) while Hagar must return to Sarai’s harsh treatment (hit’anni, l6:9). The same root links this story of Hagar, the Egyptian slave of a Hebrew, to that of the Hebrew slaves in Egypt. Just as the angel tells Hagar that “YHWH has heard your suffering [‘onyek]” (16:1), so too, when the Israelites’ period of slavery is about to be over, YHWH has seen “my people’s suffering [‘oni ‘ammi]” (Exod 3:27; similarly Exod 4:31). No more than this is said, but the reader cannot help but wonder whether the suffering of Hagar the Egyptian slave at the hands of Sarai is somehow meant to justify the later suffering of Sarai’s descendants as slaves in Egypt.

There is another biblical story which, though it too does not present itself as an explanation for the Israelites’ enslavement, continues this theme by describing the enslavement of the entire Egyptian people by a Hebrew. This is what happens in the story of Joseph, after he interprets Pharaoh’s dreams and realizes that after seven years of plenty famine will strike the land of Egypt. Installed as the grand vizier, Joseph accumulates a large enough store of grain to feed Egypt during the years of scarcity by collecting the grain of the seven years of plenty in government storehouses. But when the famine strikes, Joseph does not then simply dispense the grain that was collected for the emergency.

Instead, he sells it back to the people who grew it:

There was no food in all the land, for the famine was extremely severe. The land of Egypt and the land of Canaan were faint with hunger. Joseph collected all the money that was to be found in Egypt and in Canaan for the grain rations which they were buying, and Joseph brought the money into the house of Pharaoh. When all the money in Egypt and Canaan was used up, all Egypt came to Joseph saying, “Give us food, or else we shall die on the spot, for there is no more money.” They brought their cattle to Joseph, and Joseph gave them food for the horses, the sheep, the cattle, and the asses. He provided them with food that year in exchange for all their cattle. That year went by, and the next year they came to him and told him, “We cannot deceive your lordship—the money is gone, and so have all the cattle, to your lordship. Nothing is left before your lordship but our bodies and our land. Why should we die before your eyes, we and our land too? Buy us and our land for food, and we and our land will be slaves to Pharaoh. Just give seed so we can live and not die, and so the land may not be desolate.” Joseph bought all the agricultural land of Egypt for Pharaoh, for each of the Egyptians sold his field, because the famine was so harsh on them; and the whole land became Pharaoh’s. As for the people, he transferred them to the cities, from one end of Egypt to the other …. Joseph said to the people, “So I have acquired you today, and your land, for Pharaoh. Here is seed for you. Sow the land, and when the harvest comes, give one-fifth to Pharaoh and keep four-fifths for yourselves, for field seed, to eat, and for those in your houses and to feed your children.” They said, “You have given us life. We have found favor in your lordship’s eyes, and we will be slaves to Pharaoh.” (Gen 47:13-21, 23-25)

So by the end of Joseph’s stewardship over Egypt’s response to famine, not only have the Egyptians, as a people, been enslaved, but they have been enslaved by Joseph. As the first of Jacob’s descendants to come to Egypt, he is the vanguard of the family that will eventually become Israel.

Since this story explicitly describes the enslavement of the Egyptians at Joseph’s hands, it seems reasonable to think of it as an implicit justification of the Egyptians’ subsequent enslavement of the Israelites. Just as in the Hagar story, this is not stated straightforwardly, but the inference is a natural one to draw: Joseph enslaves the Egyptians unfairly (in return for the grain which they themselves grew), so a kind of balance is achieved when the descendants of Joseph’s family are, in turn, unfairly enslaved by the Egyptians. Unlike God’s announcement of the future to Abram, which comes (as it were) out of the blue, Joseph’s enslavement of the Egyptians provides the subsequent enslavement of the Israelites with a certain atmosphere of historical inevitability. Abram’s descent to Egypt, the mistreatment of Hagar, and Joseph’s enslavement of the Egyptians all give the Egyptians’ subsequent enslavement of the Israelites a certain narrative logic. My claim is that this theme was included in Genesis at least partly to provide a story that does, after all, make sense out of the Israelites’ enslavement. Where the announcement to Abraham presented the period of slavery as a divine decree, albeit one that makes no moral sense, the enslavement of the Egyptians, though not directly presented as an explanation, does make moral sense of it.

The story of Joseph, though, does not merely provide a possible reason for the enslavement of the Israelites; it also serves as the plot mechanism which brings the Israelites to Egypt in the first place. Were it not for the famine and Joseph’s position of power, the sons of Jacob would have grown into a nation in Canaan, not in Egypt. Even Jacob himself, though ultimately returned to Canaan for burial, spends his last years as the patriarch of a family that is growing, and prospering, in Egypt. Is there anything more to this than an unfortunate happenstance, something that “seemed like a good idea at the time” but ultimately backfired? I think there is, because of the way the Joseph story is connected with the earlier story of Jacob, which provides the second implicit explanation of Israelite slavery in Egypt.

If the Egyptians’ enslavement of Joseph’s descendants serves (from a literary perspective) as “payback” for Joseph’s enslavement of them, it is obvious to most readers of the Jacob narrative that there is an element of “tit-for-tat” in this story as well. Just as Jacob stole Esau’s blessing from Isaac by disguising himself as his older brother, so Laban foists Leah on Jacob by disguising her as her younger sister, Rachel, on Jacob’s wedding night. One might think that, once Jacob has had his own trick played back upon him, balance is restored and the whole larger episode is closed. But this is not so. True, Jacob has been suckered into giving one sister primacy over another, just as he suckered his father into giving him primacy over his brother. But Laban, who arranged the deceit, was a distant relative—distant in all senses of the word. Jacob has not yet known the pain of being deceived, as Isaac was, by his own son. But he is about to.

The tale is familiar. Joseph’s older brothers, irritated at Jacob’s favoring him and incensed at his dreams in which they bow down to him, throw him in a pit while they decide whether or not to murder him. Meanwhile, a caravan takes him to Egypt. Finding him gone, the brothers kill a goat, dip Joseph’s famous coat in its blood, and ask Jacob whether or not he recognizes it. Since the coat is indisputably Joseph’s, Jacob assumes that the blood is Joseph’s also—forgetting how he himself had used goat skin to simulate Esau’s hairy hands. Now, at last, Jacob is deceived by his own sons; now, at last, he knows an anguish like that of his brother Esau, who wept at being deceitfully supplanted by him.

Unfortunately, the chain of moral causality is not broken at this point. Jacob may have received his payback, but the instruments of his punishment—his sons—now must pay for the cruel deceit they have worked upon their father, and for what they have done to their brother. For though Joseph is not dead, he is no longer free and living in Canaan. Instead, he is a slave in Egypt—the first of Jacob’s descendants to be one but, as we readers know, not the last.

Again, the rest of the story is so familiar that we tend to think of it as inevitable. Through God’s care of him, Joseph ultimately rises to a position of power in Egypt second only to that of the Pharaoh. This is truly providential, but not merely because Joseph is the one man with the wisdom to save enough grain during the years of plenty to supply food during the years of famine. For Joseph does not merely do this; he plots his revenge as well. He has been a slave in Egypt, so the Egyptians must enslave themselves before he will give them back the grain they themselves grew. He has been cruelly treated by his brothers, so when at last hunger draws them down to Egypt and into his power—where they fail to recognize him as a grown man in Egyptian garb—he toys cruelly with them, heedless of his father’s pain, until at last he reveals his identity to them and makes the last, fatal mistake and makes them an offer they cannot refuse: Move the entire clan down to Egypt so I can provide for you during the remaining five years of famine.

It seems natural enough for Joseph’s family to move to Egypt at this point in the story, yet we as readers know that this is the move that will make the Israelites’ ultimate fate as slaves fall into place. Joseph is so thrilled with the way the story has turned out that he actually sees the divine plan behind his brothers’ action, but misinterprets it: “Though you planned evil against me, God planned it for the good” (Gen 50:20). The brothers’ nefarious plot put Joseph on the scene so that he could interpret the Pharaoh’s dreams and save Egypt. Yet he too could not resist the lure of manipulating his kin by using a false identity, a trick that had started with Jacob’s deception of his father Isaac.

With the story of Joseph, then, two themes merge. One is the theme of deception that runs throughout the Jacob story, each deception leading, measure for measure, to a greater one, with worse consequences. The other is the theme of Egyptian enslavement, first symbolically with Abram, Sarai, and Hagar, later explicitly as a consequence of Joseph’s cruel policy of disaster management. The deception theme, unlike the enslavement theme, does not provide a moral logic for the subsequent enslavement of Jacob’s descendants. But it does make “story sense” out of it, giving it a kind of tragic inevitability. As readers, then, we are prepared either way for the enslavement of the Israelites in Exodus 1.

Of course, there is still another explanation for their enslavement, the demographic fear expressed in Exod 1:9 by the Pharaoh who “knew not Joseph”: “the Israelites are more numerous and mightier than we.” But just here, where the actual enslavement is described as taking place, it is treated so casually—in a verse or two—that the political, “current events” aspect of it seems unimportant. Instead, it looks as if the author of Exodus took enslavement as the inevitable consequence of the stories in Genesis—or rather as the necessary background for the story of the plagues and the deliverance that he knew must follow. What we are left with is a view of Genesis as a kind of historical novel desperately trying to explain how the Israelites were enslaved.

The archaeologists tell us that there is little reason to think the Israelites came from outside the land of Canaan. Chronicles says the same thing, and I believe them both. Yet Mendenhall’s belief that the Israelites must have had an original core-group who had escaped slavery in Egypt is still persuasive:

A group of slave-labor captives succeeded in escaping an intolerable situation in Egypt…. [Once in Canaan,] entire groups having a clan or “tribal” organization joined the newly-formed community, identified themselves with the oppressed in Egypt, received deliverance from bondage, and the original historic events with which all groups identified themselves took precedence over and eventually excluded the detailed historical traditions of particular groups who had joined later…. The symbolization of historical events was possible because each group which entered the covenant community could and did see the analogy between bondage and Exodus and their own experience.

(George Mendenhall, “The Hebrew Conquest of Palestine,” Biblical Archaeologist 25 (1962): 73 ff.)

For if there was no Israelite slavery in Egypt at all … why does the Bible have so much trouble explaining it?

Bach’s Musical Offering (Solving a Biblical Mystery)

James R. Gaines’ Evening in the Palace of Reason is an entertaining and readable dual biography of J.S. Bach and Frederick the Great. (Hat tip for recommending it to me: Alan Rothenberg.) What’s it doing on this blog? Answer: It points to a mystery that (it seems) no one has yet solved. Who ya gonna call? The Bible Guy!

The mystery is contained in Bach’s remarkable puzzle piece, written for Frederick, called “The Musical Offering.” There are two fugues in this piece — written after Frederick more-or-less dared him to write them on the spot. (Which he did, for the simpler, three-part one.) But he does not use the word “fugue” to name them; instead, he uses a Latin term which by this time was obsolete: ricercar. These are the only pieces Bach ever called by that name. Gaines writes:

One theory was that he only used the word because it was a neat Latin acronym for a phrase that could be applied to the whole work: Regis Iussu Cantio et Reliqua Canonica Arte Resoluta (“By order of the King the tune [the Royal Theme] and the remainder, resolved with canonic art”).

But, as he goes on to say, Bach picked the word ricercar before he figured out the acronym. The musical term derives from an Italian verb meaning “to investigate, query, inquire, search out with diligence.” Gaines (following his source, Michael Marissen’s article “The Theological Character of J. S. Bach’s Musical Offering“) suggests that Bach was getting back at Frederick by leaving him a series of puzzles to solve:

Bach left trails of bread crumbs everywhere.

The bread crumb that I picked up was this one, from the fifth of the ten “canons” that are part of the work:

Play it six times, and it will be back where it started, only an octave higher, and yet without seeming to have left its original key. This canon is inscribed, “As the notes ascend, so may the glory of the king.”

In the context of a “ricercar,” that phrase “the glory of the king” is the clue to the solution of the riddle that Bach posed to Frederick. The combination points directly to Prov 25:2b (b indicating the second half of the verse):

כבוד מלכים חקור דבר — “The glory of a king is to research a matter.”

Frederick, “having given up on Christianity” (Gaines, 155), most likely did not pick up the clue. But presumably Bach, who was a profoundly religious man, was pointing him to the first half of the verse:

כבוד אלהים הסתר דבר — “The glory of God is to conceal a matter.”

It was Bach’s way of getting back at Frederick.

Bach owned a copy of the “Calov Bible,” and apparently made some extensive notes in his copy. There is supposed to be a digital edition of Bach’s copy (though it is not freely available and, I believe, not yet published). But if I’ve correctly understood the reference material that I found in the Penn Library, Bach did not notate Prov 25:2.

Too bad — that would be the smoking gun. But for an exegete, what Bach wrote in the “Musical Offering” is proof enough. He wanted to put Frederick in his place — and if Frederick was not even bright enough to figure that out, all the better.

A baseball version of Psalm 23

“The Summer Psalm” by Isaac Moreson

The Lord is my backstop,
I shall not get behind the hitters.

He keeps them grounding out to the infield,
He walks me to the dugout cooler.

He throws a new ball back,
He lifts low pitches up to the strike zone.

Yes, even when the bases are loaded,
I don’t worry about runs,
For he’ll block the plate.
His mitt and his pads reassure me.

He has the book on power hitters.
He showers me with champagne at the World Series.

Surely bonuses and endorsements will follow my career,
And I will dwell in the Hall of Fame forever.

[Thanks to Avi Winokur of Society Hill Synagogue in Philadelphia.]

What Did Hannah Ask For?

The Journal of Biblical Literature, which published my note about the phrase זרע אנשים (zera anashim; see my earlier post here) in 1 Sam 1:11, has now published an even shorter note responding to it — by none other than Shalom Paul of the Hebrew University. After Mayer Gruber, now of Ben-Gurion University, he is probably the person second-most responsible for my becoming a scholar and teacher of Bible.

Paul’s note, which sounds critical of my view, in fact confirms it. He emphasizes that the phrase in question is not at all “absurd” (as I characterized it) but is found in Akkadian, Hebrew, and Aramaic with the meaning “human offspring.”

I did not, of course, mean that the phrase was linguistically absurd, but that it was absurd for Hannah to ask for a human child. (As opposed to what, Rosemary’s baby?) The bottom line is that the phrase does not mean “a male child,” as the commentators like to take it, and therefore requires explanation.

It is a great thrill for me to engage in scholarly exchange with the remarkable scholars whose student I once was. And I am glad to remind the scholarly world that — despite the fact that my main focus for the last decade has been my Commentators’ Bible series — I am still primarily a scholar of Bible at heart.

In the Valley of the Shadow

I’m interrupting our somewhat leisurely discussion of Late Biblical Hebrew for some comments on a current book—James Kugel’s In the Valley of the Shadow. I don’t intend to write a full review of the book (though I’ll summarize my thoughts in a paragraph or two), but I want to record my surprise at a couple of the things he says about the Bible.

The first one is his discussion of the phrase “the fear of God,” from p. 137 of the book:

It may not seem like it, but this expression is altogether different from a similar-sounding one, “the fear of the LORD.” The latter actually has nothing to do with what we call “fear”: it might best be translated as “the practice of Israel’s religion” or “the proper worship of Israel’s God.”… By contrast, there is nothing Israelite about “the fear of God.”

Kugel goes on to point out (correctly) that “the fear of God” might also be translated as “the fear of the gods.” He cites Gen 42:18, where Joseph tells his brothers “I fear the gods,” and Gen 20:11, where Abraham tells Abimelech that he was afraid there was “no fear of the gods in this place.”:

From both these examples it should further be clear what “fearing the gods” really means: respecting fairness and common decency.

Indeed, that clearly is the meaning in the two examples that Kugel gives. But he omits another example—one he certainly knows—which demonstrates both that “fear” can mean real fear and that “fear of the LORD” need not have a different meaning than “fear of God.” The example I’m thinking of comes from Genesis 22, the story of the Akedah, the binding of Isaac. In the NJPS translation:

9 They arrived at the place of which God had told him. Abraham built an altar there; he laid out the wood; he bound his son Isaac; he laid him on the altar, on top of the wood. 10 And Abraham picked up the knife to slay his son. 11 Then an angel of the LORD called to him from heaven: “Abraham! Abraham!” And he answered, “Here I am.” 12 And he said, “Do not raise your hand against the boy, or do anything to him. For now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your favored one, from Me.”

This is the Lord speaking (through His angel), and He is certainly not saying, “Now I know that you are a decent sort of fellow.” He is saying, “Now I know that you are so afraid of Me that you will even attempt to kill your son if I ask you to.”

The second place I must dissent from Kugel’s biblical discussion is in the same context, in the immediately following discussion of Psalm 82, on p. 139 of the book:

In Psalm 82, it is the God of Israel who presides over the council, just as the god Anu presided over a similar assembly in Mesopotamia and the god El held court in the mythology of ancient Ugarit. Normally, the council would deliberate and, when a course of action was determined, one or more of its members would be dispatched to carry it out. But in Psalm 82, God has apparently convened the other gods in order to decree their deaths.

Indeed, Kugel has translated the first line of the psalm this way, on p. 138:

God stands in the divine assembly, among the gods He passes judgment.

But (as Kugel of course knows) this psalm is part of the Elohistic Psalter. That’s a worthy candidate for a future post, but in the meantime I’ll just briefly say that many psalms in this section of the book of Psalms (chs. 42-83) have substituted the word “God” for the name YHWH. In Ps 82:1, the word elohim in “among the gods” is undoubtedly original, but the instance of elohim that Kugel translates as “God” was originally most likely a reference to the specific God of Israel by His proper name, YHWH.

More crucially, “the divine assembly” is really a mistranslation of the Hebrew עדת אל. What that really means is “the assembly of El”—exactly the same as the Ugaritic divine assembly in which “the god El held court.” Psalm 82 is not about the God of Israel convening the other gods, but about His challenging them, in front of El, and being given the assignment—by the poet, by us the listeners, or perhaps by El himself—to replace them and start doing things right.

Kugel’s book has a subtitle: “On the Foundations of Religious Belief.” And the subtitle has a subtitle: (and their connection to a certain, fleeting state of mind). (The italics, the parentheses, and the lower-case writing are his.) It is really that state of mind that is the subject of Kugel’s book. His notion that our modern concept of “the individual” has managed to interfere with that state of mind is disproven by his admission that there is actually nothing modern about the concept; see p. 181. The disappearance of the “fleeting state of mind” that one regains when given a diagnosis of fatal cancer is not really explainable as a phenomenon in history; it is one of human psychology. I would add that the book of Ecclesiastes is a brilliant description of the loud “music” (as Kugel calls it) that blocks one from having this state of mind. There is nothing modern about it.

So why read this book? For one of three reasons:

1) Read it if you are interested in James Kugel—which I, as a colleague of his (in a very minor way) am, and which some of you, as regular readers of his, may also be.

2) Kugel is always extremely readable. If you enjoy his writing voice, you will enjoy this book even when you disagree with him. (I do not call him the most readable of biblical scholars only because that would sound like I was damning him with faint praise.)

3) The book is full of Kugel’s own translations of biblical texts. I have disputed some of them in this post, and others are quite idiosyncratic (his Job has an almost W. S. Gilbert patter-song rhythm to it)—but you can learn from the idiosyncracies of a great scholar like Kugel in a way that you never will from the bland, committee-driven words of the standard English translations.

Here’s hoping that Kugel’s cancer is as gone as it seems to be, and that he lives on to give us many more books. In the words of the old Yiddish joke, “Till 120 and two weeks!” (Why “and two weeks”? Because God forbid you should die on your birthday.)

Late Biblical Hebrew — מלכות (malchut)

As I said in my last post, Avi Hurvitz’s method of identifying a feature of Late Biblical Hebrew (LBH) combines three elements:

(1) distribution
(2) attestation outside Biblical Hebrew
(3) standard equivalents

This time, we’ll look at just one example from Hurvitz’s demonstration that Psalm 145 (which makes up most of the “Ashrei” prayer that is such an integral part of Jewish worship) is a late text: the word malchut, “kingdom.”

Distribution:

Outside of Psalms (where there’s no historical context, which is why we need linguistic tools to date these texts) malchut occurs 80 times in Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, Daniel, Esther, and Ecclesiastes (all late); 3 times in Jeremiah (written immediately before and during the exilic period); and just 3 times in texts that are considered early: Num 24:7, 1 Sam 20:31, and 1 Kgs 2:12.

Attestation outside Biblical Hebrew:

Malchut appears some 50 times in Biblical Aramaic. The two other Biblical Hebrew words used for “kingdom” or “kingship,” melucha and mamlacha, never appear in Aramaic. With one possible exception from Elephantine (which may be a scribal error), neither is found in Aramaic at all, and the same is true for Mishnaic Hebrew and rabbinic literature in general. It’s worth noting that the ending -ut, which generally (not always) indicates an abstract noun, is found even in the earliest biblical texts (see Exod 14:25 for an example); but its real growth occurs only in LBH. So the history of malchut matches the history of the -ut ending that it features.

Standard Equivalents:

As noted in the last section, the Standard Biblical Hebrew (SBH) equivalents of malchut (מלכות) are melucha (מלוכה) and mamlacha (ממלכה). Here are just a couple of the numerous comparisons Hurvitz provides between SBH texts with one of those words and an otherwise matching later text that uses malchut. These are in Hebrew, of course, because the English translations would be essentially the same:

1 Chr 17:11
והקימותי את-זרעך אחריך אשר יהיה מבניך והכינותי את-מלכותו
והקימתי את-זרעך אחריך אשר יצא ממעיך והכימתי את-ממלכתו
2 Sam 7:12

2 Chr 7:18
והקימותי את כסא מלכותך
והקמתי את-כסא ממלכתך
1 Kgs 9:5

You’ll notice that the later Chronicles texts are also likely to have extra vavs and yuds, serving as vowel markers, than the earlier texts from Samuel and Kings.

Hurvitz’s full discussion demonstrates conclusively that the word malchut for “kingdom” or “kingship” is a feature of LBH. Since, like many features characteristic of LBH, it does occur sporadically in earlier texts, it’s important to remember that a single LBH feature is not enough to demonstrate that an entire text is late. For the rest of Hurvitz’s discussion about Psalm 145, you’ll have to turn to his Hebrew book, בין לשון ללשון. But he has published a number of scholarly articles in English.

Another example, also based on Hurvitz’s work, will be along shortly.

Late Biblical Hebrew (Part 4)

Now that we have a baseline to start with — the books of Daniel, Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, and Esther, in which, if anywhere, we can expect to find Late Biblical Hebrew (LBH) — we can look more closely at the method by which to determine whether any particular linguistic feature is indeed representative of LBH.

I’ve mentioned a couple of times that the scholar who has done this kind of work most carefully is Avi Hurvitz of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. This time, we’ll look at the method he uses. It depends on a combination of three types of arguments:

Distribution. The word’s distribution within the Bible should show a significant pattern of usage in books otherwise known to be late. If a vocabulary item or a particular grammatical feature occurs in the Persian-period books, but also occurs many times in Genesis or Jeremiah or Judges, it is simply a carry-over from the standard language (SBH, Standard Biblical Hebrew). But let’s say it occurs 18 times in the Bible: 16 times in the late books, and twice in the psalms, where the dating is quite uncertain. This would be a good candidate for study as an LBH feature.

Attestation outside Biblical Hebrew. It should be possible to trace how the expression entered Biblical Hebrew and continued into Mishnaic Hebrew and Jewish Aramaic. If a linguistic feature is new to Biblical Hebrew in the Persian period, we would like to know how the “biography” of that feature brought it into the Hebrew language at that point in history; this calls for looking into its source. But we’d also like to be confident that it continued to be a feature in the writings of the rabbinic era. This increases our confidence that the story we are telling of how this feature entered the language is a correct one.

Standard Equivalents. It should be possible to point to an equivalent for the expression in Standard Biblical Hebrew. How would a pre-exilic text have said this? If we cannot find an equivalent, it might simply be that the earlier biblical texts provided no occasion to use our feature. That would mean that its appearance only in late books is simply a coincidence.

If (and only if) all three aspects point to a late date for our word or expression can we have a certain amount of confidence in declaring that it’s a feature of LBH. To declare that a particular text is late, we want something more: an accumulation of late features. Otherwise we might be dealing with coincidence or with a late gloss to a text that was mostly early.

The method is especially important for figuring out the dates of biblical texts that are otherwise “unmoored” chronologically. Books that describe historical personages or include references to historical events give us other evidence for dates. But the Hurvitz method can help us date texts that don’t have a historical context, such as Proverbs, Psalms, and Job.

In my next couple of posts, we’ll look at an example from Psalms and also at one from Job to see how the combination of (1) distribution, (2) attestation outside Biblical Hebrew, and (3) standard equivalents is applied to actual biblical texts.