New Indian-Chennai News + more

This post continues from my post some weeks ago in which I covered primarily Philippe Wajdenbaum’s account of the rise of the Documentary Hypothesis. At that time in one of the comments I explained I had paused to take stock of how best to address the challenge that has arisen against the Documentary Hypothesis. This is a study I undertook some years ago and so thoroughly enjoyed that it is easy for me to cover way too much detail. Maybe I will have to return to address some of the specifics in separate posts later. Once this is out of the way I would like to post another explaining how political anthropology offers a cogent explanation for the character of the biblical books as Hellenistic productions.

First, to recap the Documentary Hypothesis. This is the idea that the Old Testament was essentially a result of four separate sources that were originally written over a span of some centuries:

• a Jahwist/Yahwist (J) written in the southern kingdom of Judah around the time of Solomon – 10th century bce / later shifted to the Babylonian Exile period:
  • Gerhard von Rad in 1944 “considers the time of Solomonic enlightenment to contain all the prerequisites for literary production, including history writing. It was first of all a time of political stability and economic prosperity. On top of this came the need of a new state to provide a history of its past. Finally the creative impetus following in the wake of the establishment of an Israelite state created this new literature.”
  • Subsequent scholarship revised this, arguing that “External circumstances were thought to provide the most likely background for this kind of literature.” (pp. 158-9 of The Israelites in History and Tradition, Niels Peter Lemche)
• an Elohist (E) composed in the northern kingdom of Israel – 9th or 8th century bce
• a Deuteronomist (D) in the southern kingdom of Judah at time of Josiah – late 7th century bce
• a Priestly source (P) during the Babylonian Exile – 6th century bce

The dating of the sources is central to the hypothesis:

Essential to the history of scholarship expressed in Wellhausen’s synthesis [the DH is the result of W’s synthesis of two generations of OT historical-critical scholarship] was that these four discrete sources of the pentateuch were to be understood as literary documents created at the time of their written composition, and hence as compositions reflecting the understanding and knowledge of their authors and their world. (p. 2 of Early History of the Israelite People from the Written & Archaeological Sources, by Thomas L. Thompson.)

This meant, for example, that the Pentateuch was not a reliable source for the events it narrates, such as the Patriarchal period and Exodus.

But in recent decades biblical scholars are not so united in their acceptance of this explanation for the Bible or “Old Testament” portion of it.

Basically, the old consensus that had developed around the Documentary Hypothesis has gone, though there is nothing to take its place (Rendtorff 1997; Whybray 1987). Some still accept the Documentary Hypothesis in much its original form, but many accept only aspects of it or at least put a question mark by it. There has also been much debate around the J source (Rendtorff 1997: 53-5) and the P source (Grabbe 1997). It seems clear that the Pentateuch was put together in the Persian period (Grabbe 2004:331-43; 2006). (p. 44 of Ancient Israel: What Do We Know and How Do We Know It? by Lester L. Grabbe)

So where have the cracks appeared?

Cracks were being pointed out at least as early as the mid 1970s but there has been a remarkable explosion of new ideas and challenges to the consensus since 1992. Lester Grabbe identifies three major publications in that year:

1. The Anchor Bible Dictionary with its multiple-author entry on ‘Israel, History of’ (ABD III, 526-76) with Lemche on the Pre-Monarchic Period, Dever on Archaeology and the ‘Conquest’, R. P. Carroll on the Post-Monarchic Period;
2. Early History of the Israelite People from the Written & Archaeological Sources, by Thomas L. Thompson;
3. In Search of Ancient Israel, P. R. Davies.

On this third publication Grabbe writes:

but the book which in many ways made the greatest impact in that year came from a surprising quarter: this was P. R. Davies’ In Search of ‘Ancient Israel’. I say ‘surprising’ because Davies made no claim to originality; his aim was to translate and expound some of the recent trends and their basis for students . . . . Yet this book caused a storm: eliciting reviews, such as that by Iain Provan published in the Journal of Biblical Literature (1995), along with responses from Davies and Thompson. (p. 33)

I have picked out some of the key points of this work and set them out at vridar.info.

Other works followed:

• The Tel-Dan ‘Ben-David’ inscription was published (1993) with a great flurry of claims and counterclaims
• The History of Ancient Palestine from the Palaeolithic Period to Alexander’s Conquest, 1993, by G. Ahlström.
• The Invention of Ancient Israel: The Silencing of Palestinian History, by Keith Whitelam (1996)
• Several works by Lemche and then Silberman and others.

A central theme of the criticisms of traditional views of the Bible from most of these authors has been to point out the circularity of consensus arguments for the datings of the various biblical works. Another has been to reject the assumption that the biblical works should be accepted as reliable historical sources or frameworks for historical narratives without external confirmation. Whereas archaeology was once a tool to flesh out the “truth” of the Bible, it was now being thought more valid to study the archaeology of Palestine in the same way as archaeology is employed to uncover the history of any other civilization: understand the remains in their own right and only secondarily seek to see where the literary work best fits within what we learn from those finds.

As a result some of these scholars have come to view “biblical Israel” as a theological construct with a range of meanings rather than a fixed historical reality. The united kingdom of David and Solomonic empire have always been an assumptions through which archaeological remains were interpreted. The more evidence that has surfaced, however, has indicated to many of these scholars that there is no room in the primary evidence for a united kingdom or empire in the tenth century based at Jerusalem or Judea. The evidence that has surfaced has forced upon such authors that conclusion that such a power was an economical, demographic and technological impossibility. The evidence in the ground pointed to the kingdom of Judah not emerging to any significance until after the destruction of the kingdom of Israel (a kingdom that first emerged under Omri’s dynasty), and then the economic power-house city of Lachish, by the Assyrians.

Where do the works of the Bible fit in here?

The dating question is important:

It is surely extremely naive to believe that the meaning of biblical books can be properly exposed without knowledge of their date of composition, about the ideas current in that age or the beliefs common to their audience; and it is of no consequence whether the subject is a narrative as a whole or parts of it or just single concepts and phrases. (p. 295, Niels Peter Lemche, ‘The Old Testament — A Hellenistic Book?” in Did Moses Speak Attic?)

Traditional dating of the works of the Old Testament has been faulted for the circularity of its approach. It has been assumed that dates for various parts of the Bible must be found that belong to the narrative told by the books themselves, that is, somewhere within either the kingdom of Israel discussed or the exile or among those who returned from the exile. The Biblical narrative has been assumed to be indicative of historical reality and that its authors — J, E, P, D — must belong to that very historical period that is the topic of narration. As Wajdenbaum says, such an approach is merely a modern adaption of the myth told by the Bible itself.

The result of this approach has been a quite complex product:

In the end, the higher criticism ended up with an enormously complicated structure, sometimes ridiculed because of its seeming absurdity . . . [T]he narratives of the first four books of Moses have been dissolved into a kind of jigsaw puzzle of isolated elements, passages, verses, and half-verses. In its mechanical form the documentary hypothesis is monstrous . . .  (p. 158, The Israelites in History and Tradition)

And this has meant that scholars have been blocked from reading the books as literary wholes as they focus on narrow segments seeking some evidence of an historical core to each part. The works have ceased to be read as coherent literature.

It is significant that the first biblical definite evidence of the existence of the biblical texts is in the Hellenistic period — after the conquests of Alexander the Great and the spread of Hellenization (Greek culture and language) throughout the Middle East.

Lemche stresses that a justifiable dating of a text must come from the latest material found within it even if it does contain some earlier material. So if the Pentateuch contains passages that can only be explained as of Hellenistic provenance then the Pentateuch as we have it surely must date from the Hellenistic times even if it contains some Mesopotamian material (e.g. the flood story) that is earlier. Lemche points out, for example, that Karl Ilgen first told us 200 years ago that Numbers 24:24 can only possibly be a reference to the Macedonians and that Martin Luther had likewise made this clear in notes to his translation — hence the poem must be dated to the late fourth or third centuries bce. Yet despite this clear pointer to a late date scholars have generally dated this chapter as some of the most archaic of poetic literature, certainly pre-monarchic. The chapter was later moved to the monarchic period when the name Balaam turned up in an eighth or seventh century Aramaic inscription. Meanwhile, the poem itself keeps murmuring, “Hellenistic”. (p. 160, Israelites in History and Tradition).

In a recent post I re-used in another context Lemche’s resurrection of Maurice Vernes’ 1889 advice that the starting point for dating analysis must be the time where there can be no doubt that the biblical literature existed and only from there move back to where we have more questions. Since the earliest period in which we have concrete evidence for the existence of the biblical works is the Hellenistic era, we must start from that point and consider what, if any, evidence we have that they had an earlier origin.

Linguistic arguments have sometimes been hailed as keys to identifying sections of the Bible separated by decades but they have proven to be falsified when they have been shown to be unable to distinguish books that have turned out to be centuries apart.

To sum up, the Documentary Hypothesis has been judged by these scholars to have been little more than a rationalization of the Bible narratives themselves. Past scholars, they say, forgot to read the texts as evidence of themselves and as evidence of the intentions of the authors and not of the tales they told. An Italian scholar, Mario Liverani whom I have quoted several times on this blog, chastises “the indolence” of many historians who all too easily fall into the temptation to merely paraphrase or rationalize (remove the miraculous bits) a narrative that is ready-made and at-hand.

“Biblical Israel”, for example, has been shown to be more a theological construct than a historical reality. The stories do contain some names and events that do belong to real history, but they are not themselves historical narratives. The narratives are said to reflect the theological and political interests of either Persian or Hellenistic governments and peoples in Palestine. Many of the tales are said to be mythical reiterations, “midrashic adaptations”, of one another and not discrete events at all. Example, the dividing of waters at the Creation is reiterated in the narratives of the Flood, the Exodus, the entry into the Promised Land, and later in the accounts of Elijah and Elisha — always with the same theme of new creation or the creation of a new people of God. We see repetition in the Patriarchal narratives and Wajdenbaum sees the character David being an inverse reiteration of Jacob.

Read as a whole the Bible’s books are tied together with common theological and literary theme. The history of Israel opens and closes with Babel. The theme of God’s ways being alien to the thoughts of mankind is there from Eden to the poetic literature, and the lesson to submit to the will and mind of God overrides each successive “new Israel’s” desires for land and kings.

Significantly, these historians argue strongly that it is only by the time we reach the Persian and/or Hellenistic eras that we eventually find the cultural, economic and infrastructural conditions in Palestine that would be required to produce the bliblical literature. Some have suggested the period of King Josiah, but this is judged by others also to be problematic. Certainly this period saw the rise of a literate class required for administrative writing. But there was no historical heritage that could explain the particular sorts, and diverse richness of, the narratives we read in the Bible. Finkelstein and Silberman have not produced any evidence actually tying this literature to this time period in their popular work The Bible Unearthed.

It must also be kept in mind that the Hebrew Bible was not known to have existed until well into the Christian era. Before then we only have evidence of the Greek language Biblical books, and in this Greek language version we encounter several books that are undeniably Hellenistic in origin: Ecclesiastes, Daniel, Song of Songs, Maccabees, Ben Sira.

Many of the concepts and themes are Hellenistic, and some have argued that the final collection of biblical books was based on the works of the Greek historian Herodotus. I have addressed some of the arguments for this in older posts here. One of the arguments related to this urges us to consider that the frequent contradictory narratives set side by side (e.g. Creation, the rise of King David) Lemche sees several strong (including structural) parallels between the Bible and the works of the Roman historian Livy as another testimony of a common Hellenistic background.

In short, the documentary hypothesis has given expression to what scholars have traditionally merely assumed — the historicity of the united Kingdom of Israel that began in a pre-monarchic period and that has been identified by its unique religion. Historians have approached this literary construct as if it were a historical precursor of the Church of their faith.

If the biblical works were not composed until the Persian (Davies) or Hellenistic (Thompson, Lemche) era, an increasing number of scholars have found more satisfying solutions to matching the themes of the books with the facts of archaeology. The stories of David and Solomon become in one sense romantic legends like the tales of King Arthur in a Camelot that really was fictional no matter the occasionally genuine geographic locations found in the adventures. But the biblical stories had a strong theological theme (not unlike Herodotus who wrote his Histories to illustrate the over-riding will of the Delphic God Apollo against the hubris of mankind — first the Persians and then (imminently) the Greeks themselves.

I realize that this outline has omitted many details — the themes of exodus, migration, landlessness, inheritance, the people of the land and Canaanites, the Temple — but this has to be of necessity a blog outline. Some are addressed in the vridar.info pages on Davies’ book.

My own aesthetic preference is for a hypothesis that reads the biblical literature as a coherent whole if that can be justified at all. And the historical books — and prophetic ones, too (and these, too, often refer directly or indirectly to the Persian era) — do come together to tell a coherent story. The evidence for the books being products of the Hellenistic (or Persian) era is, I believe, strong. I don’t know how this can be well reconciled with a hypothesis that the whole has been stitched together from a J, E, P & D.

2012-12-02

New Understandings of the Old Testament: Jacques Cazeaux

This post is a continuation of a protracted series on the views of Philippe Wajdenbaum whose doctoral thesis, arguing that a good many of the Biblical stories and laws were inspired by Greek literature, has been published as Argonauts of the Desert: Structural Analysis of the Hebrew Bible.

Several of the more recent posts have examined challenges to the traditional view that most of the Biblical books were composed during the late years of the Kingdom of Judah, in particular during the period of the Babylonian captivity, with a few latecomers in the Persian era. That conventional understanding has largely been based on an evolutionary model that sees the literature incorporated into the Bible being the result of a long process of oral traditions, variant traditions being mixed and matched by early editors with competing religious biases, and with later redactors putting finishing touches to certain books or the collection as a whole. Recent scholarship has seen explorations into the possibility the Bible was a very late composition, even later than the Persian empire, and even that the major historical portion of it, Genesis to 2 Kings, was composed by a single author. There have been an ever increasing number of publications comparing that historical portion with Greek historical literature, in particular with the Histories of Herodotus and even later Hellenistic histories (e.g. Sara Mandell and David Freedman; Katherine Stott; J.W. Wesselius; Flemming Nielsen; Russell Gmirkin).

Jacques Cazeaux

The next few posts in this series will look at the contributions of several scholars who have led this new perspective on the Old Testament literature and whom Wajdenbaum discusses in Argonauts of the Desert: Jacques Cazeaux, Philip R. Davies, Niels Peter Lemche, Thomas L. Thompson. I may add a few posts discussing other names along the way, and sometimes supplement Wajdenbaum’s descriptions based on my own readings of their works.

Unfortunately I have read nothing by Jacques Cazeaux, though the French titles of some of his books do certainly intrigue me and I’d love to follow them up. Till then, I rely on Wajdenbaum’s synopsis of his views.

Jacques Cazeaux

Jacques Cazeaux is a philologist specializing in Plato, Philo and the Bible. He is interested in the Bible as we have it, or in its final form, as opposed to its various supposed sources. “He thinks of the Bible as a coherent and well-written book” (Wajdenbaum, p.31). According to Cazeaux the biblical author was seeking to teach that Israel’s truth lay in the fraternal unity of the twelve tribes: not a single tribe was to be lost, neither Joseph nor Benjamin. In opening chapters of Numbers, for example, the theme is Israel’s unity as all twelve tribes act as one, each prince making the same offering. (Wajdenbaum finds the foundation of these twelve tribes in Plato’s ideal laws and political structure.)

The story of the Bible is “an anti-royalist prophecy”:

From the genealogies of Genesis to 2 Kings (or rather the other way around, as the text was probably conceived to begin from Kings) through the wandering in the desert and the troubled period of the Judges, everything is prepared for the reader to admit that Israel’s truth is in the Law, and not in the possession of a land or in the ostentation of a monarchy. (p. 31)

(It might be interesting to know if many Israeli scholars, or even many conservative Christian scholars, would agree with such an understanding of the Bible’s theme.)

Wajdenbaum’s own comment:

Cazeaux seems to be right, as he only reads the biblical text rather than dissecting it into a meaningless, primitive and naïve prose.

Cazeaux thinks of the “final chronicler” used such a heavy hand in the editing of the books that he could be thought of as an author, and that he may have lived in the third century B.C.E. If so, he was surely aware of Plato’s philosophy.

According to him, the speech of Samuel decrying monarchy in 1 Samuel 8 — when Israel asks the prophet to install a king — is the core of the biblical tale. God, through Samuel, explains how the king will behave as a tyrant, appropriating both land and people. That prophecy eventually became reality when the kings of Israel brought about the fall of the country through their sins.

Retrospectively, the previous books from Genesis to Joshua can be read as participating in this long ‘prophecy’ against kingship by proposing ideal portraits of the Patriarchs — who resemble kings — and the founding of the twelve-tribe State, governed by laws. (p. 32)

Cazeaux is thus primarily interested in interpreting the final form of the Bible’s books so as to shed some light on the final intentions of its “author”. Wajdenbaum, on the other hand, is interested in identifying the Greek sources “in accordance with Cazeaux’s political reading”, and will show in his own book, Argonauts, that Samuel’s speech warning against the institution of the monarchy is based on

• Suppliants, a play be the Greek tragedian Euripides
• and platonic origins of the Bible’s political philosophy.

.

Some specifics

The story of Abram and Sarai in Egypt is foretelling of the Exodus that is to happen to his descendants. Abram journeys into Egypt, quarrels with the Pharaoh, Egypt is plagued, and Abram sent packing. (Other “minimalist” scholars such as Thomas Thompson have seen here the biblical theme of reiteration of the experiences of Israel, the old always being replaced by the new, failing again only to anticipate another “new Israel”, ultimately the readers for whom the stories were written.)

Cazeaux sees the kings of Israel, beginning even with David and Solomon, as Israel’s worst enemies. The faults of David and Solomon were the initial cause of the breakdown of the twelve tribe unity. Jacob’s prophecy that the tribe of Judah would be the royal tribe over the others carried the implicit prophecy of the State’s demise. Hence the wise Joseph was portrayed as “a king who is not a king”.

For Cazeaux, Genesis reflects an inverted image of monarchic Israel and Judah through the idealized portraits of the Patriarchs. A single, common message permeates Genesis-Kings: the Law is higher than the king. The Israel founded by Joshua — that if the twelve tribes without a government — should have prevailed eternally, but the violent period of the Judges led Israel to ask the prophet Samuel for a king. As Samuel foretold it, a king would bring the country to its downfall (1 Sam 8:10-18).

The Patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are the opposites of the kings, as they abdicate their power and renounce the possession of the land promised to them. . . . Even though each received a divine promise to possess the land, and all had the might to conquer it . . . they all renounce their claim.

Genesis’ happy ending in Egypt can seem somehow disappointing to a reader who does not understand why Israel stayed out of its Promised Land . . . According to Cazeaux, this end perhaps reflects how Israel’s truth lies in permanent Exile rather than in the Promised Land’s corrupting tenure. The true Promised Land of Israel is the Law . . . a guarantee of the fraternal unity of Jacob’s twelve sons. (p. 58)

The period of Judges, according to Cazeaux, functions to demonstrate “that the fraternal unity of Israel is better than kingship.” Wajdenbaum adds,
“Indeed, with the exception of Abimelech, the Judges do not pretend to be kings of Israel. The book ends with a civil war in which Benjamin is almost exterminated. This story, often considered by scholars to be an addition because no ‘judge’ seems to emerge from it, in fact makes perfect sense. The next book, Samuel, explains why Israel will make itself a king, moreover one that comes from the very tribe of Benjamin, Saul.” (p. 214)

Cazeaux’s analysis of Solomon shows that the biblical author was implicitly comparing him with the Pharaohs of Egypt. This explains why Solomon is portrayed as a tyrant who leads Israel back into slavery. Cazeaux is quoted by Wajdenbaum:

The naïve temptation that leads some to transform biblical heroes into pharaohs or Egyptian characters, does not understand the context: Egypt is present everywhere in the Bible, but from the inside, the great Egyptian being Solomon.(Cazeaux, p. 382)

Solomon (Photo credit: Wikipedia)