Karin FINSTERBUSCH and Armin LANGE (eds.

WHAT IS BIBLE?

PEETERS
LEUVEN – – WALPOLE,
PARIS MA
2012

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 CONTENTS

PREFACE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . V

KARIN FINSTERBUSCH AND ARMIN LANGE

Introduction: The Questions of Bible and Biblical . . . . . . . . . XI

KLAUS S. DAVIDOWICZ
The “Science of Judaism” (Wissenschaft des Judentums) and the
Bible . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

PART I: BIBLICAL DEBATES

YOSEF GARFINKEL
Biblical Archaeology Today: 2010 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

LESTER L. GRABBE
“Biblical” Archaeology or “Biblical” History? . . . . . . . . . . 25

KENT HAROLD RICHARDS

The Power of Naming Conventions: Biblical Literature . . . . . . 33

GABRIELE BOCCACCINI
Is Biblical Literature Still a Useful Term in Scholarship? . . . . . 41

BEATE EGO
Biblical Interpretation – Yes or No? Some Theoretical Considerations 53

MICHAEL SEGAL
Biblical Interpretation – Yes and No . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63

CHRISTINE HELMER
Bible, Theology, and the Study of Religion . . . . . . . . . . . . 81

UDO RÜTERSWÖRDEN
Concerning Deut 14 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95

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 VIII TABLE OF CONTENTS

ROBERT A. KRAFT
What is “Bible”? – From the Perspective of “Text”: The Christian
Connections . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105

SIDNIE WHITE CRAWFORD

“Biblical” Text – Yes or No? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113

ANDRÉ LEMAIRE
Biblical World: Yes or No? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121

Regine HUNZIKER-RODEWALD
“Biblical World”: Diversity within Unity: Female Iron Age Faces
in Palestine/Israel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131

STEVEN D. FRAADE
Response to “Biblical Debates”: Yes and No . . . . . . . . . . . 151

Hermann LICHTENBERGER
What is Bible? – A Response . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157

PART II: BETWEEN TORAH AND BIBLE

Lawrence H. SCHIFFMAN
The Term and Concept of Torah . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173

Alexander SAMELY
The Bible as Talked About: Reflections on the Usage and Concep-
tual Implications of the Term Miqra’ in Early Rabbinic Literature 193

Tal ILAN
The Term and Concept of TaNaKh . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 219

Roland DEINES
The Term and Concept of Scripture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 235

Heinz-Josef FABRY
Das „Alte Testament“ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 283

Ulrike MITTMANN and Rouven GENZ

The Term and Concept of New Testament 305

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 TABLE OF CONTENTS IX

PART III: BIBLE BETWEEN JUDAISM AND CHRISTIANITY

Devorah DIMANT
The Hebrew Bible in Jewish Context . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 341

Werner H. SCHMIDT
Das Alte Testament in der Bibel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 355

Bernard L. LEVINSON
The Development of the Jewish Bible: Critical Reflections upon
the Concept of a “Jewish Bible” and on the Idea of Its “Develop-
ment” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 377

Tobias NICKLAS
The Development of the Christian Bible . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 393

List of Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 427

Indices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 429

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 THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE
JEWISH BIBLE:
Critical Reflections upon the Concept of a “Jewish
Bible” and on the Idea of Its “Development”
Bernard M. LEVINSON

Late last spring, I was asked to give a public lecture on the development
of the Jewish Bible at an international symposium co-organized by Karin
Finsterbusch and Armin Lange in Landau, Germany.1 The symposium
was remarkable for its breadth of intellectual vision. It brought together
those working in Old Testament, Dead Sea Scrolls and Second Temple,
Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, New Testament, and Rabbinics with the
sole purpose of discussing shared intellectual problems from interdisci-
plinary perspectives. With this ambitious vision, came equally ambitious
topics and questions to tackle. For my own contribution to the confer-
ence, I was asked not only to address the question, “Since when did a
Jewish Bible exist and how and why did it develop,”2 but also consider
a list of related items, of which any one alone could be the subject of an
entire monograph:
Canon and canonical history; textual history and textual standardization;
redactional growth; authoritative literature and scriptures in Judaism
and its ancient Near Eastern environment; group specific texts and
canons; interpretive history; and did the Jewish Bible inspire the
Christian Bible or vice/versa?3

1
“What is Bible?” International conference co-organized by the Institut für Judaistik at
the University of Vienna and the Institut für Evangelische Theologie at the University
of Koblenz-Landau, Germany, May 30–June 3, 2010). Sound recordings available
online: “What is Bible,” session number S22-149, Society of Biblical Literature web
site, n.p. [cited 30 December 2010]. Online: http://www.sbl-site.org/meetings/progra-
munits_resources.aspx. As suggested by the editors, this extensively revised version of
that presentation retains the original style of the public lecture, which was addressed to
a broader, non-specialist audience.
2
“Questions for Lecturers,” E-mail attachment, January 8, 2010 (in preparation for “What
is Bible?” International Conference, Landau, Germany).
3
Ibid.

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 378 BERNARD M. LEVINSON

Since my presentation was to be under forty minutes, I thought it best

to redefine the question and answer it in a way that would be most mean-
ingful to all of us. I decided to provide a form of meta-analysis, seeking
to reflect on the assumptions that are typically employed when dealing
with the development of the Hebrew Bible. Consequently, this approach
forced me to rethink the way the discipline approaches two key issues:
(1) Is the Hebrew Bible “Jewish”? and (2) What does it mean to explain
the “development” of the Hebrew Bible.
This paper will have two parts. The first will be a critique of the very
term Jewish Bible. I will point out some of the problems with the term
and make a plaidoyer against being politically correct. Next, in terms of
development, I will argue that diachronic analysis alone cannot fully
explain the formation of the Hebrew Bible. A proper understanding of
the development of the Bible requires drawing upon intellectual and liter-
ary models more commonly associated with the period of the “reception
of scripture” than with conventional composition history.

1. THE “JEWISH” BIBLE: A PROBLEMATIC TERM

What does it mean when we speak of a “Jewish Bible” or a “Christian

Bible”? Consider, for example, an annotated edition of the Bible published
recently in Germany, prepared by Hubertus Halbfas.4 Die Bibel is a beau-
tiful publication that, while clearly directed to a Protestant readership,
seems also to aspire to connect the Old Testament to a living Jewish
heritage. Halbfas divides his edition into two main sections: Die Jüdische
Bibel [The Jewish Bible] (pp. 34–349) and Die Christliche Bibel [The
Christian Bible] (pp. 350–595). In effect, Halbfas redefines both the Old
Testament as “Jewish” and the New Testament as, exclusively, “Chris-
tian.” Although his goal may be to send a politically correct message of
rapprochement, it should be asked whether this approach represents an
adequate conception either of the Old Testament or of the New Testament,
from the perspective of Christian theology? In point of fact, the concep-
tion of the Old Testament as “Jewish” – as extrinsic rather than equally
Christian – recalls the ancient Marcionite heresy in the bifurcation it
makes between the two.
Even on its own terms, this approach becomes self-contradictory.
Halbfas’s alleged “Jewish Bible” has its conventionally “Jewish” content

4
H. Halbfas, Die Bibel: Erschlossen und kommentiert (4th ed.; Düsseldorf: Patmos, 2001).

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 THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE JEWISH BIBLE 379

– law – removed. There is no Leviticus, no Numbers, and no Deuteron-

omy in this politically correct version of the Old Testament.5 Instead, the
legal portions of the Hebrew Bible have been reduced to a single con-
flated Decalogue, listed in the Table of Contents as Die Gesetzgebung
am Sinai [The Lawgiving at Sinai].6 In other words, the allegedly Jewish
Bible amounts to a rehabilitated Old Testament that has suddenly become
free of nomos – or, shall we say, circumcised of nomos? Such an
approach hardly represents Judaism from an immanent point of view.
Reducing the whole of biblical law – in many ways, the core proclama-
tion of the Pentateuch – to the Decalogue alone seems much closer to
Luther’s Small Catechism of 1529.
There is an element of déjà vu in the way that Halbfas characterizes
the Old Testament as a Jewish Bible in contrast to the Christian New
Testament. However benign his intent, this approach inadvertently
repeats a dark moment of German church history: the Kampf um das Alte
Testament during the period of 1934–1945. A key component of the
Kirchenkampf [German Church Conflict] was the debate about whether
or not the Old Testament should be included as part of Christian Scrip-
ture. The influential Deutsche Christen [German Christians] and the
Kirchenbewegung Deutsche Christen [German Christian Church Move-
ment, dominant in the state of Thuringia] defined the Old Testament as
“Jewish” in contrast to the Christian New Testament, and sought to
remove all Jewish influences from the New Testament and the hymnal.7
Only a small minority, the Bekennende Kirche [Confessing Church],
fought hard to retain both the Old Testament and the New Testament as
properly Christian. It is clear that Halbfas has very different goals and
could not have been mindful of the difficult moment in history that his
terminology nonetheless recalls.
Many of the great translations of the last century, in contrast, are
exemplary for their more accurate and neutral terminology. In the famous

5
See ibid., Table of Contents, 5–13.
6
See ibid., Table of Contents, 6, in reference to pp. 111–24. Halbfas aligns the two
Decalogues together (Exod 20:1–21 and Deut 5:6–22), removing them from their
respective contexts in the Sinai pericope (Exod 19–24) and the book of Deuteronomy,
respectively.
7
See B. M. Levinson and D. Dance, “The Metamorphosis of Law into Gospel: Gerhard
von Rad’s Attempt to Reclaim the Old Testament for the Church,” in Recht und Ethik
im Alten Testament (ed. B. M. Levinson and E. Otto; ATM 13; Münster and London:
LIT, 2004), 83–110; and B. M. Levinson, “Reading the Bible in Nazi Germany: Ger-
hard von Rad’s Attempt to Reclaim the Old Testament for the Church,” Int 62 (2008):
238–54.

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 380 BERNARD M. LEVINSON

version by Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, there is no reference to

the word “Jewish” anywhere in the title. It is simply Die Schrift
[Scripture].8 Similarly, the Jewish Publication Society used the title, The
Holy Scriptures According to the Masoretic Text: New Translation with
the Aid of Previous Versions and with Constant Consultation of Jewish
Authorities, for their important, early twentieth-century translation of the
Hebrew Bible. The term “Jewish” is used only in reference to the sources
consulted, not as an ethnic marker of the biblical text.9 That version,
influenced in its literary style by the King James Version of the Bible
(1611), was a legacy of the nineteenth century Wissenschaft des Juden-
tums movement in Germany and a major accomplishment of American
Jewish scholarship.10 Later in the century, the Jewish Publication Society
launched a major new translation project, to develop a fresh translation,
using more modern rhetoric and informed by the contributions of modern
biblical scholarship. That second edition is given the simple title, Tanakh:
The Holy Scriptures. The phrase, “The Jewish Bible,” also appears on
the cover but only as a descriptor, and it is not included on the copyright
page.11 The title on the cover of the later 2003 printing is shorter and
sweeter, with no reference to “Jewish.”12 Likewise, in Oxford’s Jewish Study
Bible, using the JPS translation accompanied by modern commentary,

8
M. Buber and F. Rosenzweig, Die Schrift: Zu verdeutschen unternommen von Martin
Buber gemeinsam mit Franz Rosenzweig (4 vols; Berlin: Schocken, 1933–1939; repr.
Cologne: Hegner, 1953–1962).
9
M. L. Margolis (ed.), The Holy Scriptures According to the Masoretic Text: New Trans-
lation with the Aid of Previous Versions and with Constant Consultation of Jewish
Authorities (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1917).
10
Specifically on that volume, see L. J. Greenspoon, “‘A Book without Blemish’: The
Jewish Publication Society’s Bible Translation of 1917,” JQR 79 (1988): 1–21. For a
broader history, see H. M. Orlinsky, “Jewish Biblical Scholarship in America,” JQR 45
(1955): 374–412; idem, “Jewish Biblical Scholarship in America [continued],” JQR 47
(1957): 345–53; J. D. Sarna and N. Sarna, “Jewish Bible Scholarship and Translations
in the United States,” in The Bible and Bibles in America (ed. E. S. Frerichs; Atlanta:
Scholars Press, 1988), 83–116; E. L. Greenstein, “What Might Make a Bible Translation
Jewish?” in Translation and Scripture: Proceedings of a Conference at the Annenberg
Research Institute, May 14–16, 1989 (ed. D. M. Goldenberg; Philadelphia: Annenberg
Research Institute, 1990), 77–101; S. D. Sperling, Students of the Covenant: A History
of Jewish Biblical Scholarship in North America (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1992);
F. E. Greenspahn, “The Beginnings of Judaic Studies at American Universities,” Modern
Judaism 20 (2000): 209–25; and L. J. Greenspoon. “Jewish Translations of the Bible,”
in The Jewish Study Bible (ed. A. Berlin and M. Z. Brettler; Oxford and New York:
Oxford University Press, 2003), 2013–20.
11
Tanakh: The Holy Scriptures: The New Jewish Publication Society Translation of the
Holy Scriptures According to the Traditional Hebrew Text (Philadelphia: JPS, 1985).
12
JPS Hebrew-English Tanakh: The Traditional Hebrew Text and the New JPS Transla-
tion (2nd ed.; Philadelphia: JPS, 2003).

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 THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE JEWISH BIBLE 381

“Jewish” represents the perspective and orientation, not a term defining

the Scripture.13
From a completely different perspective, consider David H. Stern’s
messianic Jewish approach. For Stern, The Complete Jewish Bible should
include both the Old and the New Testament.14 The volume advertises
itself as “making no separation between the ‘Old’ Testament and ‘New’
Testament,” and claims to challenge “both Jews and Christians to see
that the whole Bible is Jewish, the B’rit Hadashah as well as the Tanak.”15
While this approach raises a whole cluster of other problems, and the
translation itself is not scientific, it does overcome the binary thinking
that isolates the Old Testament as Jewish, from the New Testament as
alone Christian. In the classroom, I try to explain to my students that the
Hebrew Bible (or Old Testament) is claimed by both Judaism and Chris-
tianity as its Scripture, and each community claims to be the direct con-
tinuation and heir of it. Both claims are correct, which is only to say that
both claims are equally incorrect. Therefore, I prefer an approach that
would say of the Old Testament or the Tanak that “there is neither Jew
nor Greek, bond nor free” (Gal 3:28).
There is a second way in which the term “Jewish Bible” becomes
problematic and inaccurate. Textual criticism reveals that the Hebrew
Bible is not technically a “Jewish” text in a sectarian way. It is very dif-
ferent from the way the text of the Samaritan Pentateuch, for example,
while certainly sharing many exegetical features attested in a wide vari-
ety of Second Temple literature, also embeds uniquely sectarian material
to make it a distinctly Samaritan text.16 In contrast, the text of the Hebrew
Bible contains material inconsistent with normative rabbinic Judaism.
At multiple places, for example, the Hebrew Bible remains “Near Eastern”
in its religious orientation and theological perspective, and retains exten-
sive references to the existence and potency of other gods. The praise
of God in the Song of the Sea, ‫מי כמכה באלים יהוה‬, “Who is like you,
13
A. Berlin, M. Z. Brettler, and M. Fishbane (ed.), The Jewish Study Bible: Featuring
The Jewish Publication Society TANAKH Translation (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2004).
14
D. H. Stern, Complete Jewish Bible: An English Version of the Tanakh and B’rit
Hadashah, (Baltimore: Messianic Jewish Resources International, 2007).
15
Online Bible, “The Complete Jewish Bible – David Stern,” Importantia Publishing,
n.p. [cited 20 December 2010]. Online: http://www.onlinebible.org/html/eng/bible-
info/complete-jewish-bible.html.
16
For a very helpful overview, see R. Pummer, “The Samaritans and Their Pentateuch,”
in The Pentateuch as Torah: New Models for Understanding Its Promulgation and
Acceptance (ed. G. N. Knoppers and B. M. Levinson; Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns,
2007), 237–72.

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 382 BERNARD M. LEVINSON

O Yahweh, among the gods” (Exod 15:11), presupposes the vitality and
potency of competing deities if the triumph of Israel’s God is to have any
meaning. The text here and in many other places throughout the Hebrew
Bible has not been secondarily “corrected” to bring it into conformity
with normative Second Temple monotheism, as the distinctive perspec-
tive of rabbinic Judaism. Of course, there are exceptions where such
updating has indeed taken place, as with the elimination of the two refer-
ences to Yahweh’s rule over a divine pantheon in the Song of Moses (at
MT Deut 32:8 and 32:43), resulting in a text that makes little sense in
its present form.17 The point is that such corrections are ad hoc, infre-
quent, and not systematic. There is no consistent or systematic deletion
of those features that would challenge a monotheistic point of view.
There are also many cases where problematic texts are preserved in
the Hebrew witnessed by the Masoretic Text, but secondarily corrected
in the Septuagint to align with normative Second Temple Jewish halakah.
As just one example, Deut 13:10 commands execution of inciters without
witnesses, without any evidence of normal due process as elsewhere
required by biblical law. The anomaly is then corrected by the Septuagint
to bring it into conformity with Jewish law, where it requires execution
only with witnesses.18 Furthermore, we do not have any of the explicitly
sectarian kinds of changes that we would see in the Samaritan Penta-
teuch. Its version of the tenth commandment of the Decalogue embeds
and conflates material from Deut 11 and 27, so as to legitimate Mount
Gerizim as the exclusive sanctuary chosen by God already in the divine
revelation at Mount Sinai.19 There is an equally striking sectarian trans-
formation in the case of the altar law of the Covenant Code. The base
text presents an unconditional promise of divine blessing that assumes a
multiplicity of altar-sites throughout the land as legitimate for worship.
In contrast, the Samaritan Pentateuch, as shown below, (1) rejects that
multiplicity and restricts the legitimate site for sacrificial worship to a
17
In both cases, the Septuagint and the Dead Sea Scrolls permit reconstruction of a better
text. See J. H. Tigay, Deuteronomy: The JPS Torah Commentary (Philadelphia: JPS,
1996), 514–18; and B. M. Levinson, “Deuteronomy: Introduction and Commentary,”
in Berlin and Brettler, The Jewish Study Bible, 356–450 (at 356–61, 441, and 444).
18
See B. M. Levinson, “‘But You Shall Surely Kill Him!’: The Text-Critical and Neo-
Assyrian Evidence for MT Deut 13:10,” in Bundesdokument und Gesetz: Studien zum
Deuteronomium (ed. G. Braulik; HBS 4; Freiburg: Herder, 1995), 37–63; repr. in idem,
“The Right Chorale”: Studies in Biblical Law and Interpretation (FAT 54; Tübingen:
Mohr Siebeck, 2008), 166–94.
19
See the valuable study by J. H. Tigay, “Conflation as a Redactional Technique,” in Empir-
ical Models for Biblical Criticism (ed. J. H. Tigay; Philadelphia: University of Penn-
sylvania Press, 1985), 53–96.

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 THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE JEWISH BIBLE 383

single “place,” which (as the immediately preceding last commandment

of the revised Decalogue has made explicit) refers to the sanctuary at
Mount Gerizim; and (2) changes the open-ended nature of the divine
promise from future to past tense, as having just been proclaimed in the
Decalogue itself:20

MT of Exod 20:24
‫ מזבח אדמה תעשה לי וזבחת עליו את עלתיך ואת שלמיך את צאנך ואת בקרך‬24a
‫ בכל המקום אשר אזכיר את שמי אבוא אליך וברכתיך‬24b
24a An earthen altar shall you make for me and upon it shall you sacrifice
your burnt offerings and your well-being offerings, your sheep and your
cattle;
24b In every place that I proclaim my name I will come to you and bless you.

Samaritan Pentateuch of Exod 20:24b

21
‫במקום אשר אזכרתי‬
… in the place where I proclaimed my name …

Whereas the Samaritan Pentateuch ties revelation itself to a particular

ideological claim about the correct cultic site for worship, the witness
preserved by the Masoretic Text nowhere makes a direct reference to
Jerusalem in the Pentateuch. In that way, the text was kept free of explic-
itly or uniquely “Jewish” vantage points.
Moreover, in the Hebrew Bible, exemplary figures behaved in ways
that were completely at odds with Jewish piety and halakhah. In many
cases, these figures needed to be converted into properly “Jewish” fig-
ures in Second Temple rewritten scriptures and other textual traditions.
For example, in Genesis, Abraham says to Sarah, “‘Say that you are my
sister, so that it go well with me because of you, and that my life may be
spared on your account’” (Gen 12:13). In order to save his own skin,
Abraham represents his wife as his unmarried sister, freeing her to be
taken into Pharaoh’s harem. This dishonest and predatory behavior in

20
For a full discussion of these issues, as well as a comprehensive analysis of the
text-critical issues associated with the altar law of the Covenant Code (covering all
witnesses), see B. M. Levinson, “Is the Covenant Code an Exilic Composition? A Response
to John Van Seters,” in In Search of Pre-Exilic Israel: Proceedings of the Oxford Old
Testament Seminar (ed. J. Day; JSOTSup 406; London and New York: T&T Clark,
2004), 272–325; repr. in idem, “The Right Chorale,” 276–330 (at 319).
21
The Samaritan form is ap‘el perfect. The past tense refers back to the just preceding
tenth commandment of the Decalogue, with the sectarian interpretation of the require-
ment to build a sanctuary on Mount Gerizim.

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 384 BERNARD M. LEVINSON

regard to the patriarch’s own wife was so much of a challenge that the
Genesis Apocryphon inserts a long dream to exculpate the patriarch from
any notion of lying, and provides reassurance about there being no sexual
activity that Sarah would be involved in:
I, Abram, had a dream on the night of my entering Egypt. I saw in my
dream that there was a cedar tree and a very beautiful palm tree. Some men
came intending to cut down and uproot the cedar, and to leave the palm
tree by itself. Then the palm tree cried out and said, “Do not cut down the
cedar, for both of us are of on[e fa]mily.” So the cedar was left alone for
the sake of the palm tree and was not [cut down]. When I awoke from my
sleep that night, I said to Sarai my wife, “I have dreamed a dream and I
fear this dream.” She said to me, “Tell me your dream, so that I might
know it.” And I began to tell her the dream, [and I told her the interpreta-
tion of] the dream and said “… they will try to kill me and let you alone.
Only this be the whole kindness [which you do with me]: [wher]ever
[we are say] regarding me ‘He is my brother,’ and I will live because of
you and my life be spared on your behalf.” (1QapGen ar XIX:14–19)22

In Genesis, the patriarchs do not follow Sinaitic law (including kashrut),

whereas in Jubilees the patriarchs all observe Jewish festivals pre-Sinait-
ically.23 Similarly, in Esther there is no reference to YHWH, and her own
behavior, as a sexually autonomous woman, is at times morally ambiguous
and there is a question about her piety. In the Additions to Esther in the
Septuagint, however, Esther is transformed into a properly pious Jewish
woman associated with prayer.24 All these figures in the Pentateuch needed
to be rewritten in order to make them “Jewish.”

22
For the edition, see J. A. Fitzmyer, The Genesis Apocryphon of Qumran Cave 1 (1Q20)
(3rd ed.; BibOr 18/B; Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute, 2004), 184. For exposition
of the exegetical issues, see C. A. Evans, “Abraham in the Dead Sea Scrolls: A Man
of Faith and Failure,” in The Bible at Qumran: Text, Shape, and Interpretation (ed.
P. W. Flint; Studies in the Dead Sea Scrolls and Related Literature; Grand Rapids:
Eerdmans, 2001), 149–58; M. Bernstein, “Pentateuchal Interpretation at Qumran,” in
The Dead Sea Scrolls After Fifty Years: A Comprehensive Reassessment (ed. P. W. Flint
and J. C. VanderKam; 2 vols.; Leiden: Brill, 1998–1999), 1:128–59. The most system-
atic presentation of the issues specific to this passage is provided by B. W. Ego,
“The Figure of Abraham in the Genesis Apocryphon’s Re-Narration of Gen 12:10–20,”
in Qumran Cave 1 Revisited: Texts from Cave 1 Sixty Years After Their Discovery:
Proceedings of the Sixth Meeting of the IOQS in Ljubljana (ed. D. K. Falk, S. Metso,
D. W. Parry, and E. J. C. Tigchelaar; STDJ 91; Leiden: Brill, 2010), 233–46.
23
L. Finkelstein, “The Book of Jubilees and the Rabbinic Halakha,” HTR 16 (1923):
39–61 (at 55–57); H. Najman, Seconding Sinai: The Development of Mosaic Discourse
in Second Temple Judaism (JSJSup 77; Leiden: Brill, 2003), 56–63; and G. A. Anderson,
“The Status of the Torah before Sinai: The Retelling of the Bible in the Damascus
Covenant and the Book of Jubilees,” DSD 1 (1994): 1–29.
24
For a convenient summary, see S. White Crawford, “Esther, Additions to,” Eerdman’s
Dictionary of the Bible (ed. D. N. Freedman, A. C. Myers, and A. B. Beck; Grand

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 THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE JEWISH BIBLE 385

The entire approach of describing the Hebrew Bible as “Jewish” fails

to appreciate how revolutionary Rabbinic Judaism was in relationship to
Israelite religion. For example, in Israelite religion, Moses is a prophet;
in Judaism, he is never a ‫ נביא‬but becomes ‫רבינו‬, “our rabbi,” as he is
remade into the protype of the rabbinic teacher. Furthermore, the classi-
cal statement from Pirqe ’Abot – “Moses received the Law [lit., Torah]
from Sinai and transmitted it to Joshua, and Joshua to the elders, and the
elders to the Prophets; and the Prophets transmitted it to the men of the
Great Synagogue” (m. ’Abot 1:1) – presents a transformation of tradition
in the guise of a chain of tradition. It mounts a silent polemic against
conventional demography and conventional structures of authority in
ancient Israel.25 It omits any reference whatsoever to the tribe of Levi or
to the priesthood, despite the clear affirmation of their essential connec-
tion to legal instruction in the blessing of Moses: “They teach Jacob your
ordinances, and Israel your Torah” (Deut 33:10). The Pharisees are
silencing the competitive movement of the priesthood, passing them by
in silence at a point where they become vulnerable in terms of traditional
lines of authority.
The collection of books that make up the Tanak represents a theo-
logical construction in itself. It makes a statement that is neither a con-
ventional Israelite religious statement nor a conventional Jewish state-
ment. The organization is didactic, and in many ways is counter intuitive
in its organization. It has a clear focus on Torah, and rejects historical
verisimilitude. It rejects any kind of generic consistency in terms of
arranging books similar in terms of common literary genres. The very
first segmentation into a Pentateuch, at a basic level, is illogical. In terms
of the story-line, it makes no sense for Deuteronomy to end before the
promise of the land of Canaan to the patriarchs has been fulfilled. 26
Deuteronomy ends with Israel not yet in the land. It is only in the book
of Joshua that there is an explicit statement that not all the promises that

Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000), 426–27; eadem, “Esther,” in The Women’s Bible Commen-
tary (ed. C. A. Newsom and S. H. Ringe; Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1992),
131–37; K. De Troyer, “An Oriental Beauty Parlour: An Analysis of Esther 2.8–18 in
the Hebrew, the Septuagint and the Second Greek Text,” in A Feminist Companion to
Esther, Judith and Susanna (ed. A. Brenner; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press,
2004), 47–70; and E. S. Gruen, Heritage and Hellenism: The Reinvention of Jewish
Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 179.
25
See M. D. Herr, “The Continuity of the Chain of Tradition of the Torah,” Zion 44
(1979): 43–56 (at 46–47) (Hebrew); and B. M. Levinson, “Deuteronomy’s Conception
of Law as an ‘Ideal Type’: A Missing Chapter in the History of Constitutional Law,”
in idem, “The Right Chorale,” 52–85 (at 72–73).
26
See Levinson, “Deuteronomy: Introduction and Commentary,” 356–61.

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 386 BERNARD M. LEVINSON

YHWH made to the house of Israel had failed, all had come to pass
(Josh 21:45; similarly, 11:15, 23).
It seems the very term Jewish Bible represents a problematic form of
modern political correctness that is neither historically nor hermeneuti-
cally accurate for the subject it seeks to describe. “A rose by any other
name”27 may sometimes remain a rose but it is more likely to become a
rutabaga, or even a cabbage. I therefore advocate a more neutral term,
however imperfect: either Hebrew Bible or Old Testament (despite the
other problems associated with each), or simply, the acronym Tanak,
which, like the plural form of the original Greek tá biblía, sends the
important message that the work in question is a complex collection, not
an original unity.

2. CAN DIACHRONIC ANALYSIS ALONE EXPLAIN THE FORMATION

AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE HEBREW BIBLE?

Next, I want to reflect on the question of the formation and historical

development of the Tanak. This is one area where conventional discipli-
nary boundaries and assumptions seem to act as impediments to knowl-
edge. The standard treatments, of which there are many, are quite
straightforward in their diachronic analysis. We predictably have a devel-
opment from oral to written, from individual poem, song, ecstatic utter-
ance, to larger units, to larger collections, to books being combined
together by redactors. One of the previous generation’s greatest examples
of this approach is Otto Eissfeldt’s Einleitung in das Alte Testament
(1934), which charts, step by step, the formation of the Bible from its
smallest individual components into progressively larger units, which
became narrative strands and then books and then still larger canonical
units.28 Other important approaches, stressing different aspects of the
overall process, are provided by Reinhard Kratz, Menahem Haran, David
Carr, and others.29 I would simply like to try to raise some questions

27
William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet (2.2.1–2).
28
O. Eißfeldt, Einleitung in das Alte Testament: Entstehungsgeschichte des Alten Testaments
(3rd ed.; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1964); English translation: The Old Testament: An
Introduction (trans. P. R. Ackroyd; Oxford: Blackwell, 1965).
29
See M. Haran, The Biblical Collection: Its Consolidation to the End of the Second
Temple Times and Changes of Form to the End of the Middle Ages (3 vols.; Jerusalem:
Bialik Institute and Magnes, 1996–2003) (Hebrew); D. M. Carr, “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

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 THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE JEWISH BIBLE 387

about the premises governing this approach, even while conceding at the
outset that I do not yet have full answers to the questions I am posing.
My thesis is that diachronic analysis alone cannot explain the very
subject that it seeks to treat: the formation of Hebrew Bible. The remark-
able issue is not how the Bible developed but that it developed altogether.
The discipline has not paid sufficient attention to this issue. In isolation,
almost all the individual phenomena that we associate with the Bible in
individual terms are already present in cuneiform literature. Cuneiform
literature exhibits clear evidence of:
– textual stabilization;
– a textual curriculum, consisting of prestigious texts;
– memorization and study of texts;
– texts acting as forms of acculturation;
– essentially all the literary genres that we associate with the Bible:
legal collections; theophany texts; prophetic utterances and prophetic
interventions with monarchs; prescriptive and descriptive ritual texts;
omens, laments, hymns, and prayers; wisdom literature and proverb
collections;
– editorial and redactional techniques like superscriptions, colophons,
acrostics, Wiederaufnahme, lemmatic annotation, and so on.30

But in the ancient Near East, none of this material ever came together to
form anything like a scripture, either with its distinctive textual features,
like the dense weave of inter-textual connections that hold the separate
parts together, let alone with its distinctive ideological features, such as
the truth claims it mounts, the extraordinary demands for adherence it
requires from its audience to uphold the demands it seeks to place upon
them, or the polemics it makes opposing competing ideologies.31

of James A. Sanders (ed. R. D. Weis and D. M. Carr; JSOTSup 225; Sheffield: Sheffield
Academic Press, 1996), 22–64; and R. G. Kratz, “The Growth of the Old Testament,”
in The Oxford Handbook of Biblical Studies (ed. J. W. Rogerson and J. Lieu; Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2006), 459–488.
30
Especially appropriate is Jeffrey H. Tigay’s conclusion in his discussion of empirical
models for biblical studies. He reminds us that, “for the biblical critic, the discussion
once again underlines the importance of considering the source criticism of ancient
Near Eastern compositions without assuming that they represent texts with no prehistory
of hands and redactors” (“The Stylistic Criterion of Source Criticism in the Light of
Ancient Near Eastern and Postbiblical Literature,” in idem, Empirical Models for Bib-
lical Criticism, 158 [emphasis added]).
31
Instructive is the marked contrast made by A. Leo Oppenheim between the collection
of texts preserved in Assurbanipal’s Library and the biblical corpus: “The same detach-
ment expresses itself in the complete absence of any polemic in this type of literature.

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 388 BERNARD M. LEVINSON

Let me elaborate. Essential to any analysis of the formation of the

Pentateuch is a model for understanding how the originally separate
sources or streams of tradition were integrated into the final form of the
text. This redactional composition, as a literary accomplishment that inte-
grates inconsistent legal collections and embeds them into a larger nar-
rative, with a developing plot, makes the Pentateuch unique in the ancient
world. Nothing similar ever took place for the multiple legal collections
or epic works of ancient Mesopotamia or the world of classical antiquity.
Benno Landsberger long ago remarked on how the cuneiform legal collec-
tions never blend together ritual, criminal, and civil law in the way that the
biblical collections so frequently do.32
Just to sharpen the problem of explaining the development of the
Bible: the Laws of Hammurabi, composed roughly 1755 B.C.E., redac-
tionally inserts a law collection into a theological-political narrative
frame.33 It pseudepigraphically attributes the composition of the text to a
royal speaker. The compositional process reflects a sophisticated scribal,
legal, and redactional history. Although there is no evidence of the text’s
ever possessing prescriptive legal status or being cited in a legal context,
it nonetheless gained sufficient cultural prestige that it was copied within
the scribal schools for over a thousand years, with 56 manuscripts extant,
distributed through the OB, MB, MA, NA, and NB periods.34 More than

All statements appear without relation to any background of ideological, religious, or

even political stress or tension. This is not for lack of opportunity, because the ritual
complaints in the prayers written or adapted for royal use, or the predictions in the
innumerable omen passages, could easily reflect discontent or social criticism. These
tensions were very much in evidence in Greek texts, where they are further accentuated
by the didactic style of scholarly presentation. There was apparently no rivalry between
schools, no clash between the Mesopotamian scribe’s cultural outlook and that of those
who lived around him, either in his own country or elsewhere. It is especially the latter
contrast in both the Old and the New Testament that imparts a specific mood and inten-
sity not only to pragmatic utterances but even to descriptive passages. The person of the
scribe, his beliefs and ambitions, are conspicuously absent in cuneiform literature; no
cognizance is taken of religious or philosophical insights; no constructive political
thoughts are revealed and no awareness of man’s role and claims in this world.” See
A. L. Oppenheim, Ancient Mesopotamia: Portrait of a Dead Civilization (ed. E. Reiner;
rev. ed.; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 20 (emphasis added).
32
B. Landsberger, “Die Eigenbegrifflichkeit der babylonischen Welt,” Islamica 2 (1926):
355–72 (at 370–71); translated as idem, The Conceptual Autonomy of the Babylonian
World (trans. T. Jacobsen, B. R. Foster, and H. von Siebenthal; Monographs on the
Ancient Near East 1.4; Malibu: Undena, 1976).
33
V. A. Hurowitz, “Inu Anum Òirum”: Literary Structures in the Non-Juridical Sections
of Codex Hammurabi (Occasional Publications of the Samuel Noah Kramer Fund 15;
Philadelphia: University Museum, Babylonian Section, 1994).
34
Levinson, “Covenant Code,” 301–2.

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 THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE JEWISH BIBLE 389

a millennium after its composition, the text enjoyed such prestige, at least
among the literati, that it triggered extended exegetical adaptations in the
Neo-Babylonian period in a work called “The King of Justice,” which
Avigdor Hurowitz has characterized as a halakhic midrash.35 Equivalent
evidence of the extensive nature of the scribal curriculum is also at hand
with the Epic of Gilgamesh, lexical lists like ur5-ra = Ìubullum, various
omen series; incantation and exorcism series like Maqlu and Surpu;
medical texts; and so on.36
In this way, there is evidence for a textually stable and generically
diverse scribal curriculum that served as a form of acculturation and scribal
training in the ancient Near East. The very strength of the analogy, how-
ever, points to the problem of historical explanation. There is no evidence
in cuneiform literature for more than one legal collection being brought
together into an overarching narrative frame and asserted to have equal
authority, despite their separate compositional history, as took place in the
text that became the Pentateuch. Nor is there evidence for the formation of
a generically diverse larger corpus with the dense web of inter-textual allu-
sions, let alone inter-textual polemics, characteristic of the Pentateuch,
Hexateuch, Enneateuch, Deuteronomistic History, or finally the Bible.
The concern that I have, therefore, with standard models of historical
development of the formation of the Hebrew Bible is that they address
the necessary conditions for the formation of the Bible but fail to arrive
at the sufficient conditions. The situation I am trying to address is similar
to the way that certain reductive models in neuroscience and evolutionary
biology, like that of Daniel Dennett, have come to dominate theories
concerning the origin of mind.37 To quote the sharp challenge to bio-
logical determinism mounted by Raymond Tallis:
Neuroscience reveals some of the most important necessary conditions
of awareness and voluntary behaviour. What it does not do is provide

35
V. A. Hurowitz, “Hammurabi in Mesopotamian Tradition,” in “An Experienced Scribe
Who Neglects Nothing”: Ancient Near Eastern Studies in Honor of Jacob Klein (ed.
Y. Sefati et al.; Bethesda: CDL, 2005), 497–532; and idem, “What Was Codex Ham-
murabi, and What Did It Become?” Maarav: Special Issue, Raymond Westbrook in
Memoriam (ed. A. Hagedorn) 17:2 (2010), forthcoming.
36
N. Veldhuis, “On the Curriculum of the Neo-Babylonian School,” JAOS 123 (2003):
627–33.
37
D. C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained (London: Penguin, 1992); idem, Darwin’s Dan-
gerous Idea: Evolution and the Meaning of Life (New York: Simon and Schuster,
1995). For critiques of his position, see John Searle’s review, republished in The Mys-
tery of Consciousness (New York: New York Review of Books, 1997); and R. Tallis,
“The Causal Theory of Perception,” in The Explicit Animal: In Defence of Human
Consciousness (London: Macmillan, 1991; repr. 1999).

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 390 BERNARD M. LEVINSON

a satisfactory account of the sufficient conditions of awareness and

voluntary behaviour. The mistaken idea that it does is neuroscientism
and it is this that I want to focus on. While to live a human life requires
a brain in some kind of working order, it does not follow from this that
living a human life is to be a brain in some kind of working order.38

By placing exclusive focus on development from smaller unit to larger

unit, from oral to written, or by documenting the correspondence of
scribal techniques and practices between cuneiform and Israelite litera-
ture, as if these would alone explain the origin of the formation of the
Hebrew Bible, standard approaches confuse necessary and sufficient
cause. They seem to neglect the question of how the constituent parts of
the text became invested over time with the kind of cultural authority that
jumpstarted the process in the first place.

CONCLUSIONS

I have briefly noted the risks of being politically correct in regard to the
term Jewish Bible. However well-intentioned, in seeking to reject
supersessionist theology and to affirm the “Old Testament” as tied to a
vital tradition of Judaism, there are attendant risks, culturally and intel-
lectually. In its text, in its diverse theologies, and in its cultural world,
the Hebrew Bible is neither “Jewish” nor “Christian” but distinctively
Israelite. In that way it also stands as a valuable heuristic challenge to
modernizing attempts to appropriate it too easily into convenient cultural
constructions. I have argued that the development of Scripture needs to
take into account religious and hermeneutical phenomena that no amount
of simple diachronic analysis alone can explain.
Logically speaking, the Tanak should never have happened and the
separate parts should indeed never have come together in such a jerry-
rigged construction. For instance, the Pentateuch contains the debate
between the Covenant Code and Deuteronomy on how and where to
worship God: whether at multiple altar sites as legitimate (as in the
altar law of Exod 20:24) or only a single place exclusive of all others (so
Deut 12).39 It includes inconsistent guidelines about whether the Passover

38
R. Tallis, “Why Neuroscience Will Never Explain Human Consciousness,” manuscript
of unpublished presentation to the National Humanities Center, Research Triangle Park,
N.C., November 8, 2010, p. 1.
39
See B. M. Levinson, Deuteronomy and the Hermeneutics of Legal Innovation (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1997), 12–52.

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 THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE JEWISH BIBLE 391

offering must not be boiled but rather “roasted over the fire” (so
Exod 12:9) or indeed boiled after all (Deut 16:7).40 It requires separate
procedures for releasing male and female slaves and prohibits separate
procedures for releasing male and female slaves.41 Bringing these con-
flicting texts together into a single larger corpus without privileging or
excluding one point of view points to a complex concept of community,
integrating competing interests and identities, that had to underline the
redaction. As Morton Smith suggested, the complex redaction of the
Pentateuch seems to point to a social compromise between competing
sectarian and ethnographic communities during the Second Temple peri-
od.42 The inclusion of such contradictory material must have presupposed
an extensive body of oral interpretation and commentary to make it pos-
sible to hold everything together. Remarkably, scholarship has yet to
develop an adequate model for understanding the promulgation of the
Pentateuch and its authorization as the Torah of Second Temple Judaism.
The Persian imperial authorization model (Reichsautorisation), once
popular, has not withstood the test of time, and no newer model has yet
to gain the support of the consensus. The primary evidence for any such
theory remains the biblical text itself and the various Second Temple
witnesses and new compositions.43
An adequate understanding the formation of the Hebrew Bible requires
taking into account some of the same kind of hermeneutical processes
that we more frequently associate with the Second Temple period.
We often tend to work with too rigid a distinction between an imagined
text composition phase on the one hand and a separate text transmission
phase on the other, between Higher Criticism and Lower Criticism, or
between Bible and Dead Sea Scrolls. Molly Zahn has demonstrated how
texts like 4QpaleoExodm or 4Q158 complicate the idea that there is some
kind of easy dividing line between the composition of the biblical text

40
Ibid., 53–97.
41
B. M. Levinson, “The Manumission of Hermeneutics: The Slave Laws of the Pentateuch
as a Challenge to Contemporary Pentateuchal Theory,” in Congress Volume Leiden
2004 (ed. A. Lemaire; VTSup 109; Leiden: Brill, 2006), 281–324.
42
See the stimulating analysis of M. Smith, “Pseudepigraphy in the Israelite Literary
Tradition,” in Pseudepigrapha, vol. 1: Pseudopythagorica, Lettres de Platon, Littéra-
ture pseudépigraphique juive (ed. K. von Fritz; Entretiens sur l’antiquité classique 18;
Vandœuvres and Geneva: Fondation Hardt, 1972), 191–215 (with ensuing panel discus-
sion, 216–27).
43
For these issues and bibliography, see G. N. Knoppers and B. M. Levinson, “How,
When, Where, and Why Did the Pentateuch Become the Torah?” in idem, The Penta-
teuch as Torah, 1–19, together with the various articles collected in that volume.

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 392 BERNARD M. LEVINSON

and its transmission and reception.44 Recent work by Shimon Gesundheit,

David Carr, and myself shows how texts like Exod 34 reuse, reorder, and
exegetically amplify their own inner-biblical sources in much the same
way that texts like the Temple Scroll or Jubilees deploy Exod 34.45
The distinctiveness of ancient Israelite religion consists not only in
its conventional theological, ethical, or doctrinal content but also in its
textuality: the distinctive textual forms that it not only developed but
that, in a kind of feedback loop, shaped the community or communities
in return.46 In this way, Scripture is not only a passive record of beliefs,
narratives, prayers, laws, and cultic requirements, but also an active, con-
stitutive, constructive text. In the Second Temple period, community self-
definition was often marked by a shared set of assumptions about texts,
while the boundaries around communities were often drawn based upon
conflicting interpretations of the same textual heritage, often deploying
similar exegetical techniques to reach opposite conclusions. Scripture not
only arises from history but gives rise to new history.

44
M. M. Zahn, Rethinking Rewritten Scripture: Composition and Exegesis in the 4QRe-
worked Pentateuch Manuscripts (STDJ 95; Leiden: Brill, 2011).
45
S. Bar-On, “The Festival Calendars in Exodus XXIII 14–19 and XXXIV 18–26,” VT 48
(1998): 161–95; and D. M. Carr, “Method in Determination of Direction of Depend-
ence: An Empirical Test of Criteria Applied to Exodus 34,11–26 and Its Parallels,” in
Gottes Volk am Sinai (ed. M. Köckert and E. Blum; Veröffentlichungen der Wissen-
schaftlichen Gesellschaft für Theologie 18; Gütersloh: Gütersloher, 2001), 107–40; and
B. M. Levinson, Revelation and Redaction: The Role of Intellectual Models in Academic
Biblical Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
46
For historical contextualization, see R. G. Kratz, “Die Entstehung des Judentums: Zur
Kontroverse zwischen E. Meyer und J. Wellhausen,” in idem, Das Judentum im Zeit-
alter des Zweiten Tempels (FAT 42; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2004), 1–22. See further
B. M. Levinson, Legal Revision and Religious Renewal in Ancient Israel (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2008), 138–41.

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