Reclaiming the Torah's Strangeness: The History of Ancient Hebrew Literature without Apologetics, Part I

Session Submission Type: Seminar

Abstract

In a scheme Solomon Schechter termed “the higher Anti-Semitism,” 19th-century Protestant Bible scholarship deconstructed the Pentateuch into hypothetical sources and then chronologically arranged--and morally valued--them according to an evolutionary cycle culminating in Jesus Christ. But after the chronology was historically disproven and the evolutionism critiqued, the Torah's incoherence remained. Two prominent late-20th-century approaches responded to this incoherence in potentially apologetic ways: holistic readings of the Torah as literature, and reflexive readings of it as inner-biblical exegesis. But the Torah's clearest independent threads (such as the Priestly work) themselves display strong literary coherence, and the best-documented inner-biblical interpretive relationships, such as between Deuteronomy and the Priestly layers, reveal as much conflict and supercession as harmony. Indeed, the earliest known readers of the Torah as an independent document, such as Philo and the authors of Jubilees, already found it strange--an apparently irrational and contradictory yet in principle perfect text.

This seminar intends to revive and rethink an alternative 20th-century approach to the Torah, represented by scholarly pioneers like Jeffrey Tigay and Moshe Weinfeld: specific Near Eastern cultural documents and political moments let us see the Torah's puzzling interweaving as a deliberate historical process motivated by literary values that are largely alien, though potentially comprehensible, to us. It goal is to avoid the pitfalls of allegorical or purely hypothetical arguments and reconstructions critiqued recently by Benjamin Sommer, Joel Baden, and others. Tigay and Weinfeld each pointed briefly to ways that the Torah's distinctive form represented Levantine versions of text production and knowledge creation methods known from elsewhere in the ancient Near East. How can we read the Torah's unique form as the result of an attested literary culture in history? And it intends to theorize Pentateuchal interweaving: what documented ancient literary ideals does an interwoven text represent? What knowledge were its creators attempting to produce, and how did they succeed? The goal is a history of ancient Hebrew literature on its own terms, one that does not assume the Torah's perfection or relevance but precisely in that lets us get closer to the distinctive values that shaped it.

Sub Unit

• Bible and the History of Biblical Interpretation

Chairs

• Seth Larkin Sanders, Trinity College

• Mark Leuchter, Temple University

Discussants

• Jennifer Lindsay Stover-Kemp, UC Berkeley

• Seth Larkin Sanders, Trinity College

• Isabel Cranz, University of Pennsylvania

• Jacqueline Vayntrub, Brandeis University

• Nathan Mastnjak, Indiana University

• Charles Huff, University of Chicago