biblicalia

Several years ago I compiled an index (really more of a concordance) which lined up the texts common to William Hallo and K. Lawson Younger’s Context of Scripture, and James Pritchard’s classic Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament. I had intended to do some more work on it, but this simply slipped my mind until the other day when Charles Halton commented on how useful he found this index (as well as my Anchor Bible Dictionary Index, which I’m working on upgrading as well to include a comprehensive bibliography of all the titles listed in the individual articles).

So, last night and this evening I spent, as St Jerome might say, a small lamp’s oil on the project, correcting some items in the index itself, and adding two lists of the texts which are found only in the COS volumes, or only in the ANET volume.

I’ve also redone the pdf file of the index. It is completely searchable, and is better formatted for printing than the web page itself is.

One interesting thing is the number of texts that are peculiar to each work. In ANET there are 221 titles that are not found in COS. In COS there are 525 titles that are not found in ANET. Some of those titles include multiple texts in either work. For instance, COS includes only Tablet XI of Gilgamesh, while ANET includes all the various texts known at time of publication. There are numerous historical writings found in ANET which are not found in COS. So, while the number of titles peculiar to COS is larger, it’s not precisely explicative of the quality of texts peculiar to either work. Both have their strengths. But I am still much more impressed by the wealth of material selected for ANET, even if the translations are older.

If anyone finds errors or has suggestions for improvements, please let me know. I hope the index continues to be found useful.

The following comes from my notes on the chapter “The History of Religions School and the Jews” in Anders Gerdmar, Roots of Theological Anti-Semitism (Brill, 2009)

Johannes Weiss (1863-1914) was, like Wilhelm Bousset (1865-1920), a student of Albrecht Ritschl (1822-1889). Both were considered members of the History of Religions School (Religionsgeschichtliche Schule), an academic movement emphasizing the place of religion in history—an approach which occasionally produced some rather awkward results. Be that as it may, at its peak, around the turn of the century, it was an approach that garnered some of the finest minds in German scholarship: Duhm, Kautsch, Wrede, Bousset and Weiss, among others.

While Bousset was something of a devoted follower of Wellhausen and the de Wettian/Ritschlian tradition which separated Judaism from all influence on nascent Christianity, Weiss was something of a maverick, a loner at this period, finding continuity between the Jewish environment of Christ’s day and earliest Christianity, despite his own leanings (which were liberal, both confessionally and politically). In this, he followed the data presented in the New Testament itself and related sources for the period, rather than being led by an idealistic-systematic theological dialectic which would separate the two, in marked contrast to all his contemporaries. He presented this approach first in his Die Predigt Jesus vom Reiches Gottes, “The Preaching of Jesus on the Kingdom of God, in 1900. He read the sources on their own terms, criticizing both Bousset’s and Wellhausen’s approaches for lacking historical objectivity.

In Weiss’ posthumously published (and partly finished by a colleague) book Das Urchristentums, soon translated into English as The History of Primitive Christianity, we find the musings of a remarkable mind, well ahead of its own age. Weiss situates Jesus in continuity with a Palestinian-Jewish background. He determines the four Gospels to be of Palestinian origin. He states that Jesus is Jewish, and his words relate to contemporary Jewish discussions. He also shows that the ethical demands of Jesus are not elements of some new moralism of universal non-national humanity, but result from a development of the religion of the Jewish prophets. Jerusalem was the center of the new faith, and the church organized itself as the synagogue had. He presents Paul as a Jew with a strong Palestinian-Pharisaic-Jewish background, with training in rabbinical interpretation, who is in part suffering by his people’s rejection of Jesus. He often directly confronts (and demolishes) the suppositions of Bousset, Wellhausen, and Baur. And while Weiss does hold some of the commonplaces of the age (the Hellenistic/Alexandrian hypothesis, that an element of Gentile freedom and comes into the Jerusalem church via Stephen, a representative of the Jewish-Hellenistic enlightenment; the Judaism of Jesus’s day being lesser than the religion of the Prophets), they are still adumbrated, and not expressed in the triumphalistic and often ugly manner of Weiss’ colleagues and predecessors.

Gerdmar summarizes Weiss’ work nicely (pp 183-184):

Weiss’s characterisation of Judaism is rather different [thatn Bousset's, Semler's, and de Wette's], painting a picture that is basically independent from the prevalent ‘Late Judaism’ hypothesis. Where Bousset perpetuates such positions, Weiss questions them. He upgrades the Palestinian-Jewish background of Jesus, making it his genuine background. Instead of seeing this as a disadvantage and trying to distance Jesus from it, for example, he understands Jesus’ ethics as being a development from those of the old prophets, rooted in his Jewish nation. Weiss does not describe Jewish faith in negative terms but presents Paul on the basis of his Palestinian-Jewish background; using rabbinical hermeneutics, he was “according to formation and education a real Jew in every respect”. This was seventy years before the so-called ‘new perspective on Paul’ was conceived. Weiss holds that Paul does not believe in an outright rejection of Israel—although he sees an anti-Judaism in John—and his usage of the ‘Late Judaism’ concept lacks the traditional negative notions of Bousset. Nowhere does Weiss employ stereotypes of Jews and Judaism, either in his description of New Testament Judaism or with reference to modern Jews.

Weiss’ premature death in 1914 cut short a brilliant career, quite tragically for the field, as it turns out to be. Perhaps it is that his ideas were too different from those that had become consensus for them to have persisted without his direct and cogent recapitulation. As it is, Bousset’s Die Religion des Judentums im neutestamentlichen Zeitalter (”The Jewish Religion in the Age of the New Testament”), in its first edition of 1906, and a 1926 edition expanded by Hugo Gressman, unfortunately became the standard reference work on the subject in German universities until the middle of the century. This perpetuated the old ‘degenerate Judaism’ dialectic established by de Wette as the “historical-critical method,” systematized by Wellhausen, and given a newly darker, uglier edge by Ritschl, Bousset, and Gressman.

One has to wonder, though. What would the field look like now had Weiss lived longer and propogated his methodology and conclusions more widely? As Gerdmar noted, on the subject of Paul’s Jewish identity Weiss was seventy years ahead of his time. The discussions we’re having right now relating to the “New Perspective on Paul” might instead have been fifty years in our past. What subjects might we have progressed to with an earlier recognition that Jesus was not a gnomic Gentile philosopher, but a Jewish rabbi? How might further, undone work of Weiss have had a bearing on Wellhausen’s Documentary Hypothesis? For surely it was also under the scrutiny of Weiss’ keen intellect. And though at this point we might see it as a gnat against a hurricane, might Weiss’ approach, if it had become the consensus, have at least mitigated if not derailed the dread horror of Germany’s fully-developed antisemitism and its inevitable result?

Let the case of Weiss be a lesson. Scholarship is always developing. Yet that development is not necessarily for the better.

A very interesting Biblical Studies Carnival 43, Or, The Apocalypse of Eve has been posted by Mr Patrick George McCullough at kata ta biblia. He translated an ancient (and creepily accurate!) document called The Apocalypse of Eve instead of doing a proper carnival. The nerve of some people!

Fortunately Eve, the Mother of all Humanity, was a great prophet, and has filled in all the blanks for us covering blog postings and other such things related to the field of academic Biblical Studies (or “BS”) over the course of June 2009.

Below is the full text of Solomon Schechter’s address, “Higher Criticism—Higher Anti-Semitism”, delivered at the Judaean Banquet, given in honor of Dr. Kaufman Kohler, March 26, 1903. The text is from Seminary Address and Other Papers (Cincinnati: Ark Publishing, 1915), 35-39.

My acquaintance with Dr. Kohler dates from the year 1901, when he did me the honor of paying me a visit at Cambridge, England. There is no scarcity in that ancient seat of learning, “full of sages and scribes,” of learned conversation. But the day with Dr. Kohler was one of the most delightful I have ever experienced in that place. The day was spent in roaming over the contents of the Genizah and in conversation. Our thoughts were turned to Judaism and the subjects which occupied our minds were all of a theological or historical nature. We probably differed in a good many points, and please God we shall differ in many more—but this did not prevent our short acquaintance from ripening at once into what might approach friendship. I felt that I was in the presence of a scholar and a seeker after truth. His is an intellect devoted entirely to what he considers the truth, and his is a heart deeply affected by every spiritual sensation which is in the air. He also delights to engage in what he considers the “Battles fo the Lord,” and Judaism has need for men of valor.

To speak more clearly: Since the so-called emancipation, the Jews of the civilized world have been lulled int a fancied security which events have not justified. It is true that through the revelation in the Dreyfus case, anti-Semitism of the vulgar sort has become odious, and no lady or gentleman dares not to use the old weapons of the times of Drumont and Stoecker. But the arch-enemy has entered upon a new phase, which Boerne might have called “the philosophic ‘Hep-Hep.’ ” And this is the more dangerous phase because it is of a spiritual kind, and thus means the “excision of the soul,” leaving us no hope for immortality. I remember when I used to come home from the Cheder, bleeding and crying from the wounds inflicted upon me by the Christian boys, my father used to say, “My child, we are in Galuth (exile), and we mut submit to God’s will.” And he made me understand that this is only a passing stage in history, as we Jews belong to eternity, when God will comfort His people. Thus the pain was only physical, but my real suffering began later in life, when I emigrated from Roumania to so-called civilized countries and found there what I might call the Higher anti-Semitism, which burns the soul though it leaves the body unhurt. The genesis of this Higher anti-Semitism is partly, though not entirely—for a man like Kuenen belongs to an entirely different class—contemporaneous with the genesis of the so-called Higher criticism of the Bible. Wellhausen’s Prolegomena and History are teeming with aperçes full of venom against Judaism, and you cannot wonder that he was rewarded by one of the highest orders which the Prussian Government had to bestow. Afterwards Harnack entered the arena with his “Wesen des Christenthums,” in which he showed not so much his hatred as his ignorance of Judaism. But this Higher anti-Semitism has now reached its climax when every discovery of recent years is called to bear witness against us and to accuse us of spiritual larceny.

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Key to the formation of the modern academic field of Biblical Studies are the machinations of nineteenth century liberal German Protestants (as I’ve recently touched on in these posts: Roots of Theological Anti-Semitism, Roots of Theological Anti-Semitism: Semler, Pasto, Who Owns the Jewish Past?, De Wette, Devolution, and Deuteronomy, and More of de Wette’s Charm), all of whom were anti-Jewish to a greater or lesser degree, though not full-blown anti-Semites. The latter requires belief in racial theory, which was yet to be developed, in part with support from the various “critical” anti-Jewish writings of these singularly driven men. And they were certainly driven: driven to support their own scholarship and liberal German Protestantism as the highest form of religion the world had yet seen. The respect granted to German scholarship in the nineteenth century by all Europeans was of the highest order, as it embodied the ideals of the Enlightenment, a recent even at that time. This permitted them a greater platform than they would enjoy in the twentieth century. Particularly skillful as a propogandaistic coup was the exclusive appropriation to their work as “criticism” and “critical” — a situation that pertains to this day. The historical-critical method (the term originally invented to describe de Wette’s dialectic of the devolution of Hebraism into Judaism, superseded by Christianity, a revival of Hebraism, and so on, as I described here), a newly-minted approach to the Scriptures, became equated with criticism itself in the 1850s. This meant that other approaches were not referred to as critical, thereby severing the terminology’s usage from its roots in antiquity, particularly the Aristotelian usage, which had prevailed to that time. No longer was critcism the right application of a well-formed mind to decision-making, but something that the academy decided. The distinction is crucial. For it is certainly not the case that the historical-critical method of de Wette can be described as the conclusion of a well-formed mind. It is instead an entirely self-serving, societally and aetically contingent invention, an appropriation of the history of another race for purposes of his (and sympathizers’) own and only of useful application at that moment in time: for the unification of the German lands into a single rebuplican state, a state which would exclude all who would not convert to the above-mentioned highest expression of “the world spirit”: liberal German Protestantism as defined by theology professors (I will not sully “Theologian” with such an association) such as de Wette! This meant that it was preferred that there were no more Jews, and no more Catholics in the new Reich. In what was perceived as a noble gesture, they were welcomed to convert, otherwise they could leave—a familiar scenario for the Jews.

But here I want to focus on something else, which I find perfectly demonstrative of the irrationality lying behind the “criticism” of the day. This is the issue of dating the books of the Pentateuch, and how de Wette and Vatke could come up with such diametrically opposed opinions on the subject, all relying on exactly the same data.

Firstly, de Wette changed his mind on the dating of Deuteronomy. He at first considered it to be a product of the reign of Josiah, the “Book of the Law” described in 2 Kings 22. Later, however, he considered it to be even later, an exilic or post-exilic document written during a time when “Judaism” was in full swing, a time of rigid centralization and conformity to written strictures. This only means that he places the composition further along the course of the devolution of Hebraism into Judaism, in his terminology, which had already begun in pre-exilic times. de Wette leaves the authoring of the first four books of the Pentateuch to an earlier age than that of Deuteronomy, for they reveal (through narrative) a freer society and religion, one not encumbered by rules and regulations, when religion and its expression were rooted in personal piety, not in an external supernaturalism and legislation—the classic Romantic position.

Contrast Vatke. He, reading the very same Deuteronomy, posits it as representing a religion of the heart, not one of the dead letter, and therefore it must precede the legal materials found in the first four books of the Pentateuch. So, Vatke places Deuteronomy first (curiously maintaining a roughly Josianic date, a legacy of de Wettes’ reputation more than critical thought) and all the other legal materials later. It was Vatke’s solution which was generally received, and which was canonized in Wellhausen.

The two are diametrically opposed in their readings. This is not critical thinking. We needn’t go into the issue of assertion in the lack of contextual evidence, or at least not just yet. When de Wette and Vatke were writing, the great archaeological discoveries of writings from the ancient Near East were yet to occur. The languages were yet to be deciphered. Once they were however, and the great Library of Ashurbanipal discovered in 1850 by Austen Henry Layard, there was no excuse for Wellhausen and others to have ignored (as they did) the full panoply of literary texts and their implications. But there is also the question as to whether it would have entered their mind at all to equate such writings of great empires with the writings of a small client kingdom, particularly in light of their view of Jews and Judaism. They either wilfully ignored the contextual evidence, or they considered the Jews to have been incapable of being part of such a widespread literacy themselves. I think it was a little of both. In addition, Wellhausen had an agenda: to establish the liberal German Protestant scholarly trend as the solely acceptable one, in the face of challenges from conservatives. In this, he was successful, subjecting the Bible to a still-ruling hegemony of criticism. But this was and is to the detriment of gaining a true understanding of the writings of the Bible, Old and New Testaments.

Do not saddle yourself with fools: he is one who does not know them, and a greater, he who knowing them, does not shake them off, for they are dangerous in the daily round, and deadly as confidants, even if at times their cowardice restrains them; or the watchful eye of another; in the end they commit some foolishness, or speak it, which if they tarry over it, is only to make it worse: slight aid to another’s reputation, he who has none himself; they are full of woes, the welts of their follies, and they trade in the one for the other; but this about them is not so bad, that even though the wise are of no service to them, they are of much service to the wise, either as example, or as warning.

Gracian’s Manual § 197.

A moon impoverished amid stars curtailed,
      A sun of its exuberant lustre shorn,
      A transient morning that is scarcely morn,
A lingering night in double dimness veiled.—

Our hands are slackened and our strength has failed;
      We born to darkness, wherefore were we born?
      No ripening more for olive, grape, or corn ;
Faith faints, hope faints, even love himself has paled.

Nay ! love lifts up a face like any rose
      Flushing and sweet above a thorny stem,
Softly protesting that the way he knows;
      And as for faith and hope, will carry them
      Safe to the gate of New Jerusalem,
Where light shines full and where the palm-tree blows.

Christina Georgina Rossetti. Before 1893.