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.)

A Grammar for Biblical Hebrew by C. L. Seow (2nd ed.)

Have I mentioned that if you are interested in the Bible, you have to learn Hebrew? (Greek, too, if you are interested in the Christian Bible.) There’s a bit of Aramaic in the Bible as well, but we’ll leave that aside for now.

There are many reasons for this; here are a few of the most obvious ones:

1) Many words, including the simplest and most common, cannot be exactly replicated in other languages. If I need to translate “refrigerator” into another language, I can be pretty sure that the other word conveys precisely what the original meant—though even here, the ideas associated with a refrigerator will be slightly different in some languages. But words like “man’ or “big” or “go,” although they exist in every language, will cover very different areas of meaning. A refrigerator is a refrigerator is a refrigerator … but חסד is (to choose just the definitions I found in a Biblical Hebrew dictionary entry) “joint obligation, faithfulness, goodness, graciousness,” not to mention the commonly used “love” and “lovingkindness” and the English word I myself would use to explain this term: “loyalty.”

2) There are at least two basic translation strategies: translation by word and translation by sense. These have the potential to create two quite different texts out of the same original. If someone tells me that he is “happy as a clam,” I have the choice of translating the words literally or using the equivalent expression in the new language. (Something tells me that in most languages, clams will not be involved.) That is why my Commentators’ Bible series provides two English translations along with the Hebrew text. One, the 1917 JPS translation, tends toward translation by word; the other, the “new” JPS translation (which is moving rapidly into middle age), more often translates by sense.

3) Translation inevitably “smudges” the original. When you read Lev 15:2, “When any man has a discharge issuing from his member,” in an English translation, the last thing on your mind is the famous phrase “a land flowing with milk and honey,” which occurs 15 times in the Bible. (Puzzler: Only 3 of these are foiund outside the Torah—can you guess where?) Yet both phrases use exactly the same Hebrew verb, זוב, which means something like “ooze.”

So if you are interested in the Bible, sooner or later you must learn Biblical Hebrew. You don’t necessarily need to use Seow‘s book. I chose to list it because that’s the book I use in my courses at the University of Pennsylvania and the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College. It’s technically very good, and was specifically written to replace a book by Thomas Lambdin, Seow’s teacher at Harvard, that (strangely) created its own examples rather than using actual verses from the Bible.

One good source for books if you are learning Hebrew on your own is EKS publishing. My students in Boston used to supplement Lambdin with “The Desert Book” from EKS. That’s not its real name—but you will recognize it when you see the cover. (Alas, I get no kickback if you buy anything from them.) There is also a free PDF download of a textbook by John Cook and Robert Holmstedt—and there are many, many other books to choose from.

I hope to come back to translation issues often in future posts. Meanwhile, in the words of Hillel … זיל גמור! (“Go and learn!”)

Job by Raymond Scheindlin

   With book #9, we turn to the next step in learning the Bible—studying an individual book.  I’ve picked one out of very many possibilities for this stage of learning:  Raymond Scheindlin’s translation and commentary on the book of Job.
   You have to remember that the Bible is not a book but a library.  The books that make up the Bible were written over the course of 1,000 years, by different authors with different purposes.  You may start out by being more interested in the prophets, the psalms, or the histories, so you’ll begin your more concentrated study with one of those books.  I’m particularly interested in what’s called “wisdom literature” (more on this in a later post), so I’ve selected Scheindlin’s Job as my example.
   And it’s a great one.  Scheindlin is not a biblical scholar, but he worked closely with Stephen Geller (one of my teachers), who is a top scholar.  That means his book is informed by the best scholarship but is written for a general readership.  What Scheindlin himself brings to the project is that he’s a world-class translator of poetry—and the poetry of Job is not only amazing, it’s essential to understanding the book.
   For a sample of Scheindlin’s work, compare these translations of Job 28:4:

  

The flood breaketh out from the inhabitant; even the waters forgotten of the foot: they are dried up, they are gone away from men.  (KJV)

   They open up a shaft far from where men live,
   In places forgotten by wayfarers,
   Destitute of men, far removed.  (NJPS)

   He bursts a channel from his dwelling
   to places footfall-forgotten,
      folk-thinned, wandered from.  (Scheindlin)

   “Folk-thinned” conveys the intensity of this poetic language far better than “destitute of men.”  And “footfall-forgotten” is an inspired coinage.

   Job is the original Jewish meditation on the question of “Why Bad Things Happen to Good People,” or as it is traditionally expressed, צדיק ורע לו (tzaddik v’ra lo, a righteous man who has it bad).  The book will repay a lifetime of study.  In addition to a wonderful poetic translation, Scheindlin’s version will guide you through the book, showing you its structure and explaining the major questions that the book raises.
   The individual books in the Jewish Study Bible begin this process on a small scale, but you’ll want to continue your study of a biblical book with an entire volume devoted to the book you’ve chosen.  Job is particularly difficult to study on your own, but you’ll discover that every biblical book will repay the same kind of closer look.  So choose a book, find a commentary, and begin to learn.

The Dynamics of Biblical Parallelism by Adele Berlin

Book #8 on my curriculum of 10 is The Dynamics of Biblical Parallelism by Adele Berlin. And consider this post itself a mini-”Beginners’ Guide” to parallelism.

“Parallelism” is the basic element of biblical poetry. It plays a role something like what rhyme did for so long in English-language poetry, creating a rhythm that matches two different lines. For a quick introduction, consult “Reading Biblical Poetry,” 2097-2104 in The Jewish Study Bible, book #1 on my list. Here’s a quick example to demonstrate:

Deut 32:1

O heavens, | give ear | and let me speak;
Let the earth | hear | the sayings of my mouth.

The first line takes three words in Hebrew; the second line “matches” each one of them:
1 “Earth” matches “heavens” because they are an obvious (biblical) pair.
2 “Hear” matches “give ear” because the two verbs mean (more or less) the same thing.
3 “The sayings of my mouth” matches “let me speak” because both phrases refer to what the poet is going to say.

The “matching” effect is so strong that this phenomenon sometimes used to be called “thought-rhyme.”

We owe our English expression “a voice crying in the wilderness” to Matt 3:3, which misread Isa 40:3.

Matt 3:3

This is the one of whom the prophet Isaiah spoke when he said,
“The voice of one crying out in the wilderness:
‘Prepare the way of the Lord,
make his paths straight.’” (NRSV translation)

But parallelism shows that “in the wilderness” should be inside the quotation marks:

Isa 40:3

  A voice cries out:
“In the wilderness prepare the way of the LORD,
make straight in the desert a highway for our God.” (also NRSV)

Again, line B “matches” line A (though not in exactly the same order):
1 “In the desert” matches “in the wilderness.”
2 “Make straight” matches “prepare.”
3 “A highway” matches “the way.”
4 “Our God” matches “the LORD.”

Note that even the quotation in Matthew reads the Isaiah verse with poetic parallelism—but moving “in the wilderness” outside the quotation marks led Matthew to drop “in the desert” from line 2 of the Isaiah verse.

Berlin’s book describes the manifold ways in which this technique is used to create poetry in the Bible. She’s a good writer, but if the technical language or the Hebrew there is too much for you, you might want to have a look at James Kugel’s The Idea of Biblical Poetry. The book is about the history of how biblical poetry has been understood, but the first chapter is another description of parallelism.

I hope eventually to present some biblical poems myself; watch this space!

The Art of Biblical Narrative (Alter)

Having gone through the Bible, talked about how to read it, and moved our point of view back out to the history of the biblical period, you might like to focus in once again on a few biblical texts of more limited size. If you are interested in the reading the Bible as literature, Robert Alter is a worthy guide. (Stayed tuned for the “but.”)

Alter is a scholar of literature who knows Hebrew well and wrote two books on the Bible for a general readership: The Art of Biblical Narrative and its more-or-less sequel, The Art of Biblical Poetry. His intent was to show how (some parts of) the Bible can be read as literature, a claim that is by no means universally accepted. See Brettler, The Creation of History in Ancient Israel, 14-17, and James Kugel, “Apologetics and ‘Biblical Criticism Lite’” (available in PDF format on his How to Read the Bible web site).

Alter’s somewhat snide attitude toward biblical scholars of the historical-philological school can be irritating, and I will have something to say about his more recent publications in a moment. But I must agree with him that there are parts of the Bible, both prose and poetry, that were written (as near as I can judge) by writers who took pleasure in using words esthetically. More than this: In some cases, understanding how a text works from a literary (that is, esthetic) perspective is crucial to understanding the historical context in which it was written or the message it is trying to convey.

1 Samuel 1 — which I am about to begin teaching later this afternoon — is a fine example. If you read this chapter in Hebrew, it is clear that the theme root that is being used is שאל — the root not of Samuel’s name, but of Saul’s. This is the beginning of the story of the transition from the period of the Judges to that of David’s dynasty. What can the author mean by hinting so broadly at Saul’s name in the story of Samuel’s birth? With that technique in hand, this chapter simply cannot be solely informational. It must (contra Brettler and Kugel) be literary as well. If it has a religious or political purpose, one must understand the literary aspect of the text to understand the “spin.”

Alter is not merely a world-class scholar of literature; he is also, unlike many scholars, a fine writer. The Art of Biblical Narrative is a wonderful way to begin thinking about biblical texts as literature. Kugel points out — correctly — that there has been a major turn to literary study of the Bible by those who are trying to avoid the historical and linguistic discoveries about the Bible that conflict with some traditional religious beliefs. So I emphasize again, a literary approach to some biblical texts is crucial to understanding them correctly in their ancient context.

If you enjoy The Art of Biblical Narrative, you will find the sequel, The Art of Biblical Poetry, also of interest. (In my next “book” post, however, I’m going to suggest some difference resources for studying biblical poetry.) Since then, Alter has turned his biblical attention to translation and commentary — with less success. It works best, I think in The David Story, Alter’s translation of 1 and 2 Samuel. Most people, I believe, think they are relatively familiar with these stories — David & Goliath, David & Bathsheba — but they are rarely familiar with the actual biblical texts in which the stories occur. Alter is a fine guide to these books.

In The Five Books of Moses the same technique works reasonably well for the narrative portions (though most people will already be more familiar with these sections than with 1 and 2 Samuel). For other parts of the Torah, I would say you will learn more from something like the JPS Torah Commentary series. A good Torah commentary must balance a unified reading of the text with an understanding of how the text came to be — but Alter follows the model scoffed at by Kugel, an analysis that ignores the prehistory of the text:

The reader will … discover that this commentary refers only occasionally and obliquely to the source analysis of Genesis. For even where such analysis may be convincing, it seems to me a good deal less interesting than the subtle workings of the literary whole represented by the redacted text.

Alter says in his introduction (which is definitely worth reading) that he felt compelled to make a new translation because there is

something seriously wrong with all the familiar English translations, traditional and recent, of the Hebrew Bible.

But — though I was eager to read his translation of Genesis when it first appeared — my eagerness was quenched rather quickly. Despite Alter’s claims, I found it to be just another attempt at the impossible. The real solution is still to get several translations and read them in conjunction with each other: a free translation (say, the NJPS) that reads easily; a less free translation (say the OJPS or, even better, the King James version) that conveys some of the non-English flavor of the original; and supplement these with Everett Fox’s translations (where available) into a bizarre pseudo-English that will bring you as close as you can get to the Hebrew without actually going there.

I was most disappointed with Alter’s Book of Psalms — not because I was disappointed with the translation (I had no great hopes for it by then), but because Alter’s readings of some of the psalms I know well don’t really tell you what you need to know about them as poems. Kugel, too, has a Great Poems of the Bible with new translations, and this too does not do justice to the ones I have studied and taught.

The bottom line: Read The Art of Biblical Narrative and then turn to The David Story if you are attracted to Alter’s kind of reading.

A History of Ancient Israel and Judah (Miller & Hayes)

This week, we turn from the Bible itself to the historical backgrounds in which, and about which, the Bible was written. The complication here, of course, is that we want to use the biblical texts as a source for history — to the extent that’s possible — but we also need to understand them as a product of the history that produced them.

The book I’m recommending on this topic is A History of Ancient Israel and Judah by J. Maxwell Miller & John H. Hayes. This quickly became a standard history when it first appeared in 1986; it should be again now that it has been updated with a 2nd edition in 2006. Those who would like to compare the two editions can have a look at my online review of the 2nd edition.

People whose exposure to the Bible is limited to what they read and hear in churches or synagogues may not realize that the history of ancient Israel is an extremely divisive topic in the academic world today. This is because of the emergence of the “minimalists” who insist that the Bible is propaganda and not history. The phenomenon is to some extent driven by contemporary anti-Zionism, edging into anti-Semitism — but by no means entirely.

There are two points that have legitimately changed the discussion of Israelite history away from where it was even as recently as 30 years ago, when John Bright’s History of Israel was still often the standard text:

• the realization that what happened in the land previously called “Canaan” involved other peoples than just the Jews, and need not be told only from an Israelite perspective; and

• the growing understanding that not all the statements in the Bible about events of the past were meant journalistically. In some texts, the facts had been woven into legend. Others recorded history as shaped by a political or religious program. Still others may have been intended as historical fiction.

Miller & Hayes’s book, especially in its relatively new 2nd edition, does (in my estimation) a solid job of weighing the evidence, literary and archaeological, to find out what happened in “ancient Israel and Judah.” It is still structured more or less by the biblical story, since that is the reason for most people’s interest, but it’s an honest attempt to find out “what really happened” within that framework. It seems to have found a middle place on the spectrum between fundamentalists on one side and minimalists on the other.

For further reading on this subject, you might wish to look at:
• Ancient Israel: From Abraham to the Roman Destruction of the Temple, edited by Hershel Shanks — Here, each chapter was written (and in the 2nd edition, revised) by scholars of that particular period. For unexplained reasons, it’s now surprisingly expensive.
• The Creation of History in Ancient Israel, by old friend Marc Brettler — A more detailed and more technical “How to Read,” focusing just on the historical sections.
• The Mythic Past: Biblical Archaeology and the Myth of Israel, by Thomas L. Thompson — An example, and perhaps even the manifesto, of history as told by the “minimalists” (those who believe there is next to no actual history in the Bible).
• The Bible Unearthed, by Israel Finkelstein, Neil Asher Silberman — A more responsible example of the “new” biblical history, with a close focus on archaeology.

How to Read the Bible (Kugel)

Book #6 on my Top 10 List is How to Read the Bible, just like book #5. But this one is by James Kugel, not Marc Brettler. On the JPS blog I identified this one as “a responsible opposing viewpoint.” Here’s why. Kugel writes:

This book is about understanding the Bible from two radically different points of view—that of the Bible’s ancient interpreters and that of modern biblical scholars.

Brettler’s book, then, tells you “How to Read the Bible” according to the way modern scholars understand what the biblical texts were originally intended to mean. Kugel’s book will add a second layer of understanding—what those same texts meant once a radical shift in understanding had taken place: the shift that turned a library of ancient texts into “The Bible.” From Kugel’s perspective (it seems to me) Brettler’s book might have better been called “How to Read Biblical Texts” or something of the sort.

I’m recommending it for a number of reasons:

• Kugel’s writing is a pleasure to read, and he is a top biblical scholar.
• It’s an excellent introduction to biblical interpretation in the ancient world.
• It is also an attempt to reconcile the two methods of understanding.

One clue that Brettler’s book is about the biblical texts and Kugel’s about “The Bible” is the table of contents in each book. Though both men begin their discussions of the Bible with Genesis and proceed more or less in order, Brettler’s chapters discuss topics or specific books; Kugel’s works through the biblical stories. Brettler spends 30 pages (out of 283) on Genesis and another 35 on the rest of the Pentateuch; Kugel takes 150 pages (out of 690) on Genesis and another 165 on the rest of the Pentateuch. And that’s nothing compared to his mammoth Traditions of the Bible: A Guide to the Bible as It Was at the Start of the Common Era, where Genesis gets 450 pages–half the book. (In my Hebrew-English JPS Tanakh, Genesis takes 111 pages out of 2023–5%, not 50%.) From Brettler’s perspective, all biblical texts are “equal” in the eyes of modern scholarship; for Kugel, all the texts are biblical, but some are more biblical than others.

Brettler and Jon Levenson (book #3) both discuss the problem of how religious people should look at modern scholarship on the Bible. But that question is not intrinsic to their books, as it is to Kugel’s. If that question is not important to you, at least dip into Kugel’s book and give yourself the chance to be drawn in by his scholarship and his writing. If it is important to you, you’ll at the very least find a thorough discussion of that issue here.

For more on the web:

• a talk by Kugel discussing his perspective
• a challenge (from an Orthodox perspective) by the estimable Moshe Bernstein
• a response by Kugel (both of the latter two from the Yeshiva University newspaper)
• Kugel’s web site

If you’re interested in early biblical interpretation but would like to start with something a little slimmer, try Part One of Kugel’s In Potiphar’s House.

How to Read the Bible (Brettler)

If you’re following the course of study I’ve been outlining in these posts, you’ve now read (1) the Bible in English translation; (2) a book that reads (as a student once told me) like a detective story, describing how scholarly work has discovered that the Five Books of Moses were assembled from earlier sources;* and (3) a book that describes the religious world of ancient Israel, as we learn of it through the Bible.

Levenson, in his introduction to Sinai and Zion (book #3), discussed how to integrate the results of modern scholarship with traditional Jewish beliefs. Brettler’s book, in addition to everything else, argues that an understanding of what the biblical texts meant to the ancient Israelites who first created and experienced them makes an essential contribution to the religious life of the contemporary Jew. (For a discussion aimed specifically at this point, see Uriel Simon’s article, “The Religious Significance of the Peshat,” in the Orthodox journal Tradition, Winter 1988. Simon is a professor emeritus of Bible at Bar-Ilan University in Israel.)

I can certainly say—surprising as it might sound to some—that my own study of the Bible as a historical document played a large role in drawing me closer to Jewish observance.**

Brettler calls his book “a Jewishly sensitive introduction to the historical-critical method,” but the literature of the Hebrew Bible is Jewish, after all. As they used to say about rye bread, you don’t have to be Jewish to appreciate this book. What Brettler has done is written a book that walks through the Bible more or less in order, explaining the various genres of biblical writing (history, law, etc.), and focusing in greater depth on particular texts that demonstrate his point. Four background chapters get things rolling. 12 of the 26 chapters end with a subtitle like “Reading Joshua,” and most of the others similarly focus on particular books or groups of books. A final chapter discusses how this huge collection of literature became “the Bible.”

In the course of study my list of 10 books is designed to take you through, this book is meant to integrate what you’ve gotten from the first three. It should deepen the knowledge of individual books you get from reading the introductions and comments in the Jewish Study Bible; take you further into the scholarly world of analyzing texts; and begin to fill in your picture of the world of ancient Israel in which the biblical books were created.

I have a book of my own meant to do something similar, called The Bible’s Many Voices. Though much of it was written a dozen years ago, it hasn’t been published. (Publishers, I have operators standing by to take your call!) I don’t recall ever mentioning it to Brettler—who was my dissertation adviser at Brandeis, though he’s a couple of years younger than I am—but in any case his book is that of the solid teacher he actually is. (Translation: When you read my book, you’ll learn less but enjoy it more.) If you’re looking for a thorough guide to the Bible by one of today’s leading Jewish biblical scholars, this is your book.

Next week, a different book with the same title (and I do mean different).

*In a later post I’ll discuss how rabbinic literature hints at this same idea.
**That, too, might be a topic for another post.

Sinai and Zion

Sinai and Zion by Jon Levenson is the third on my list of 10 essential books for those who are beginning serious study of the Bible. It’s the first of them that is about the Bible as a book of religion.

The Jewish Study Bible presents the Bible as a collection of individual books; Who Wrote the Bible? demonstrates how scholars have begun to split the atom and find individual voices even within books of the Bible. Sinai and Zion continues the work of finding different traditions embodied in the Bible, but in a way that reunifies it into a single book that presents a multi-faceted portrait of the religious beliefs of ancient Israel.

Levenson uses the two mountains to represent the “two foci of the religion of ancient Israel, Torah and Temple”—the covenant with God, established in a place and time that is represented as being outside normal history in an almost mythical way, and the daily ritual of sacrifice, centered in Jerusalem and inextricably entwined with Israel’s political history. Using these two themes permits Levenson to tie together biblical texts from very different books in a way that illustrates the tensions within ancient Israelite religion.

Sinai and Zion is a quarter of a century old now, and Levenson would certainly rewrite his description of “contemporary” biblical studies if he were writing the book today. But though this aspect of the book isn’t current, it is also not misleading—the picture he paints retains its truth. One thing that has changed is a direct result of Levenson’s work. When he originally wrote, “Old Testament theology” was (as the name implies) strictly Christian. But in recent years Jews too have become interested in developing a “theology” by reading the Bible as a whole. What this means is that Sinai and Zion is also a book about the religion of Israel as Jews practice it now. For these two complementary—and sometimes conflicting—traditions not only shaped the Bible. They continue to shape Judaism.

You’ll find an example of how these biblical ideas continue to resonate in today’s world in a recent dvar Torah by Jonathan Sacks, Chief Rabbi of the British Commonwealth (scroll down to the second part).

A final note: If you found Who Wrote the Bible? disturbing from a traditional religious perspective, you will find Levenson’s introduction important reading. It is a frank discussion of how one might to be able to integrate the results of modern scholarship with traditional religious beliefs.

Who Wrote the Bible?

Number 2 on my list of 10 books to get you started learning Bible is “Who Wrote the Bible?” by Richard Elliott Friedman. By now it is an oldie but goodie (1987), but it’s still a fine way to get acquainted with the idea that the Pentateuch — a/k/a the Torah or the Five Books of Moses — was created from the four earlier sources that scholars call J, E, D, and P. More importantly, it will let you follow an extended treatment (beyond the short essays of the Jewish Study Bible) of how university scholars think about the Bible as a work of ancient writing.

Glossary:
J – The early source that uses the Tetragrammaton — that is, the four-letter-word that is God’s personal name, J – H – W – H (as a German would transliterate it).
E – The source that introduces this name only in Exod 3:1, previously using only the word elohim, “God.”
P – The Priestly source.
D – The Deuteronomic source.

Joke:
Eldad: At my synagogue we count a minyan with 9 men and the Torah.
Medad: At mine we settle for 6 men and J, D, E, and P.
(hat tip to Merrill and Andrew)

Friedman’s book is easily available, readable, and affordable. It explains clearly why and how this theory was developed. His description of how the Flood story was constructed from earlier versions in J and P just nails why this theory is so powerful. (It’s too bad the book is called “Who Wrote the Bible?” when it is really mostly about who wrote the Pentateuch; but I’ll have more to say on this topic another time.)

There’s far more to academic biblical studies than this theory, but for those who can’t move on until they have rolled around in it a little bit, a short list for further reading:

• Umberto Cassuto, The Documentary Hypothesis and the Composition of the Pentateuch – refutation of the JEDP idea from an Orthodox Jewish perspective
• Jeffrey Tigay, Empirical Models for Biblical Criticism – demonstrating that some ancient texts were indeed created in the way the JEDP theory postulates
• Richard Elliott Friedman, The Bible with Sources Revealed – Friedman’s own translation of the Pentateuch, with the different sources printed in different fonts