Part III: How the Alphabet Democratized Civilization

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Our previous two issues have featured a wide-ranging interview with the world-renowned scholar Frank Moore Cross, the recently retired Hancock Professor of Hebrew and Other Oriental Languages at Harvard University. The first installment (see “Frank Moore Cross— An Interview,” BR 08:04) focused on the origins of the ancient Israelites, especially on Cross’s view that an important component of the Israelites came from Midian (in what is today northwest Saudi Arabia and southern Jordan) and on the ways Cross “excavates” the biblical text to uncover a historical core.

In the second part of the interview (see “Frank Moore Cross— An Interview,” BR 08:05) Cross discussed the development of Israelite religion and the eventual emergence of ancient Israel as a 12-tribe league. He spoke, among many other matters, of how early mythological images such as the warrior god who marches to war on behalf of his people came to be transmuted into a concept of a God who reveals by word.

The pages that follow contain the third and final portion of this interview; in it Cross describes one of civilization’s most profound innovations—the alphabet—and, in particular, its effects on ancient Israelite thought.

Hershel Shanks: One of humankind’s greatest inventions, if not the greatest, is the invention of the alphabet. It was invented only once. All alphabets ultimately derive from the original Semitic alphabet. It’s astonishing to me that the invention came from this little point of a place on the globe, this tiny nothing of a place. If Cecil B. DeMille were doing this, he might say, “The Semites who brought you God now bring you the alphabet.”

Frank Moore Cross: [Laughter]

HS: When was the alphabet invented?

FMC: We don’t know precisely when or where. We have alphabetic inscriptions going back to the 16th, some say the 17th, century B.C.E.^a My guess is that the alphabet was invented in the 18th century, in the era when the West Semitic Hyksos ruled the Egyptian Delta, and kindred folk ruled city-states in much of Syria-Palestine.¹ We can’t be more specific, I think, than to locate the invention in Greater Canaan. However, it is not impossible that it was devised in Amorite or Canaanite chancelleries in the Egyptian Delta.

HS: The earliest examples we have are from Canaan, aren’t they?

FMC: Yes. Indeed, the earliest found are from Palestine. For a long while, it was thought that the earliest Old Canaanite inscriptions in alphabetic pictographs were from Sinai, the so-called 019proto-Sinaitic inscriptions. They were generally dated incorrectly to the 18th century.²

HS: I thought [Sir Flinders] Petrie called it pretty close when he dated them to about 1500 B.C.E.³

FMC: That’s right. Despite Petrie’s sound arguments, the earlier date of [Sir Alan] Gardiner prevailed until William Foxwell Albright went to Serabit el-Khadem [in southwestern Sinai, where Petrie found his texts] and reestablished the 1500 B.C.E. date, a date subsequently confirmed by Israeli archaeologists.⁴

The Palestinian inscriptions in Old Canaanite (as we now call the early alphabetic pictographs) are in some cases earlier than the Sinaitic group, going back to the 16th century and possibly earlier.⁵ They are not very impressive in size or number, but they do indicate that the script was in use generally in Canaan.

By 1500 B.C.E. and a bit later, we have examples of most of the pictographic signs making up the alphabet.

A turning point comes in the 11th century. Inscribed arrowheads from the 11th century provide a missing link—now filled in—between the pictographic Old Canaanite script and the evolved linear script we call Early Phoenician linear. It is the Early Phoenician linear that is the immediate ancestor of Old Hebrew, Old Aramaic and indeed of the early Greek alphabet.

The finds of inscribed arrowheads plus finds at Ugarit, including abecedaries and a tablet transcribing into syllabic cuneiform the first syllable of the names of the Canaanite alphabetic signs [letters], have cleared away many disputed issues or unsolved problems in the early history of the alphabet.

HS: What are these disputed issues or doubtful matters?

FMC: Many have doubted that the invention of alphabet was based on the acrophonic principle; that is, that each sign was a pictograph representing an object, the name of which began with the letter the sign was meant to represent.

HS: What is the acrophonic principle? It really explains the invention of the alphabet, doesn’t it?

FMC: Yes. If we illustrate the principle with English, then, let us say, a is for apple, b is for ball, c is for cat. If you pen the pictures cat-apple-ball, you have spelled out the word cab.

HS: In other words, you draw an apple and that becomes a?

FMC: Precisely. If you go to the Old Canaanite alphabet, the letter we call a, ’alep in Hebrew, is the picture of a bull.

HS: A bull or an ox?

FMC: Ox usually means a castrated animal, at least in American English. The pictograph in question represents an ordinary bovine, presumably a bull.

HS: The letter is just the head of the animal?

FMC: Yes. Actually, the singular ’alep is not used in Hebrew, only the plural meaning cattle. In older Semitic the word is used for both “bull” and “ox.”

Bet means house; so you draw a little square with a door, and you have a house which has the alphabetic value b. In this fashion you proceed through the alphabet. The letter m, mem in Phoenician from which the Hebrew alphabet is borrowed, mayim in Hebrew, means water; you represent the m-sound by a little squiggled line that looks like wavy water.

Slowly such pictographs evolve into highly conventionalized linear signs that at best reveal only dimly the earlier pictograph. For example, sûin was originally represented by the picture of a composite bow. Then it slowly changed into a simple zigzag line, Greek sigma. The letter ‘ayin, which became o in Greek and English was originally the picture of an eye with a pupil in it; ‘ayin means eye. It then simplifies first to a round circle with a dot in the center, and then to an even simpler circle.

HS: The alphabet originated under the influence of Egyptian hieroglyphs, didn’t it?

FMC: Egyptian hieroglyphic script was a primary influence.

HS: Can you explain that?

FMC: The Canaanite alphabet arose in an area where two important writing systems overlapped in usage: Mesopotamian cuneiform with its 021elaborate syllabary, and Egyptian writing with its complex set of pictographs.

HS: Hieroglyphics?

FMC: Yes. The Canaanites therefore knew that there were alternate means of writing, more than one system. Indeed they used Akkadian cuneiform in the city-states of Canaan to write to their Egyptian overlords.⁶ And West Semites, especially those in the Canaanite port towns and in the Nile Delta, had commonly seen hieroglyphic monuments. So, when you think about it, it isn’t surprising that it was in the Canaanite realm that the alphabet was invented. A Canaanite scribe who was bilingual or trilingual, who could write in more than one writing system, evidently was freer to let his imagination range, to contemplate the possibility of other, simpler alternates to the writing systems he knew. I think of the analogy of number systems. I was in graduate school before I discovered base-l2 numbers (studying cuneiform); I had supposed that the decimal system, base-10 numbers, was part of the created order of the cosmos. And now, 40 years later, every grammar school child knows about computers and base-two numbers.

In Egyptian writing, there are signs representing two consonant combinations or three consonant combinations. There are even signs for one consonant (plus any vowel-vowels were not ordinarily denoted in the hieroglyphic system). However, it never occurred to conservative Egyptian scribes that they could take these one-consonant signs and use them as an alphabet. This “pseudo-alphabet” existed unrecognized in their massive syllabary of three or four hundred signs in regular use. Apparently its potential went unrecognized.

HS: In other words, they had the letters, but they didn’t know how to use them as an alphabet.

FMC: Yes. Scribal convention—spelling rules—required that they use the whole syllabary.

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A less conventional, and probably less well-trained, Canaanite got the notion: Why don’t we simplify this grotesque system? Why not let one sign equal one consonant. In this way 27 or 28 signs became the basis for the alphabet.

Canaanite and the West Semitic dialects have only three vowel areas, and each syllable begins with a consonant. This means that a writing system in which only consonants were denoted was practical and relatively unambiguous. Greeks using a language with a different vocalic system and which used vowels to initiate words and syllables were forced early on to invent vowel letters—most taken from Phoenician consonants with no Greek equivalent.

There were two aspects to the invention. One was radical simplification. The second was the borrowing of many Egyptian hieroglyphic signs to use as the pictographs of the Canaanite alphabet. The pictographs were not given Egyptian values, however, but were assigned the names of the objects pictured in the Canaanite language.

For example, take the hieroglyphic sign for water. “Water” is nt in Egyptian. In the Canaanite pictographic script, this sign borrowed from hieroglyphic has the value m not n, because the word for water in Canaanite is mem; therefore the sign represents the letter mem or m. The same thing for other signs: house, hand, composite bow, eye and so on through the alphabet. A few signs were evidently invented, Egyptian not providing the desired pictograph.

HS: You talked about two streams that influenced the invention of the alphabet. One was Egyptian hieroglyphics. What was the other stream?

FMC: I spoke of simplification and the borrowing of pictographs as two aspects of the invention. I have mentioned also the importance of the use of the cuneiform script, the primary script used in international correspondence. But the cuneiform syllabary did not contribute directly to the invention of the alphabet.

HS: It was a dead end, wasn’t it?

FMC: Yes, it finally became moribund and disappeared. Actually, at one time the Canaanite alphabet was modified to be written with cuneiform wedges. At Ugarit a large number of tablets from the 14th century B.C.E., written in a Canaanite cuneiform alphabet, has been found, and this cuneiform system also has been found sporadically in Palestine and even in Cyprus.

HS: But that was simply an arbitrary invention based on the Semitic alphabet.

FMC: Yes. It was based on the alphabet, but used the writing technique (cuneiform) originating in Mesopotamia. Oddly, but happily, the Ugaritic 024tablets are preserved in great numbers, so that we have more literature from high antiquity preserved on clay in the Canaanite cuneiform alphabet than we do in the pictographic and Early Phoenician linear alphabets. Inscriptions in Old Canaanite are rare. We have the first “burst” of preserved texts in the corpus of inscribed arrowheads of the 11th century B.C.E. The fad of inscribing bronze arrowheads lasted for a brief century. In 1953 only one was known, the so-called Ruweiseh arrowhead, and it was misdated and misread. Then in 1954, J. T. Milik and I found three more. Now more than 25 or so are known.

HS: Where did you find them?

FMC: In Jerusalem, in the suq [market] of the Old City, in the hands of antiquities dealers. We learned from extensive inquiries where they were found: in El-Khadr a village near Bethlehem. Actually they were turned up in a field that was being ploughed—a cache of many arrowheads, of which we acquired three, were inscribed with the same inscription: “Arrowhead of ‘Abd-labi’t.” The name ‘Abdlabi’t, “Servant of the Lion-lady,” appears also in a 14th century list of archers from Ugarit. The El-Khadr inscriptions are from the beginning of the 11th century B.C.E. Then, 25 years later, I came upon more of the El-Khadr hoard. I was reading some inscriptions on Samaritan coins in the elegant home of a Jerusalem lawyer. I noticed an arrowhead in a cabinet on the wall, and on closer look I recognized the style of the El-Khadr pieces, which was confirmed when the inscription on the arrowhead mentioned the same ‘Abdlabi’t. My lawyer friend informed me further that he knew of another similar piece in the hands of a private collector. So in 1980 I published the two new arrowheads, making five inscribed pieces in all from El-Khadr. Most recently the Israel Museum acquired two arrowheads which have been entrusted to me for publication; and now there is a spectacular inscribed arrowhead in Elie Borowski’s new Bible Lands Museum, which I have just published (see the last sidebar to this article).⁷ Most of these arrowheads appear to have belonged to high-ranking military officers. One of the Israel Museum arrowheads is inscribed with a name and the title: “caption of a thousand” [sŒr’lp], or better, “brigadier.” They are not hoi polloi. The title on the Bible Lands Museum arrowhead is ’isû sûapat, “man,” or better “retainer,” of Shaphat. Remember the ’ansûe dawid the “retainers” or “heroes” of David (for example, 1 Samuel 23:3). The owner of the Bible Lands Museum arrowhead had a similar title and no doubt served a similar function.

HS: Perhaps you would comment on the significance of the discovery of the alphabet.

FMC: Writing removes literature from dependence on fragile human memory. It makes thought visible and preserves it so that it can be examined and re-examined at leisure. It records agreements and contracts permanently.

In the elaborate writing systems in use in Mesopotamia and in Egypt—cuneiform and hieroglyphic—reading and writing was the preserve of scholars. Writing remained, in effect, the exclusive preserve of the crown and the temple.

The invention of the alphabet, with its great simplicity, broke this monopoly in principle. Writing was not beyond the powers of ordinary people; with the use of the alphabet, literacy began to spread. Early alphabetic writing was completely phonetic; one had only to learn 22 characters (after 1200 B.C.E.), and to distinguish the significant consonantal sounds (phonemes) of one’s own language.

HS: Elsewhere you have called it the democratization of culture. What do you mean by that?

FMC: Learning and culture need no longer be in the control of a very tiny elite, as in Mesopotamia where a great king brags that he can read a bit of cuneiform—a remarkable feat in his eyes. Religious lore—myth, ritual, magic, medicine—need no longer be the exclusive property of hierophants who manipulate gods and men.

Alphabetic writing spread quickly—I have said it spread like wildfire. When asked what I mean by quickly, I have replied that it took a millennium to become widespread and break the yoke of syllabic systems. But in terms of ancient history this qualifies as swiftly. Meanwhile oral transmission, especially of literature and religious lore, persisted 025alongside writing. Gradually however, oral transmission wanes and written transmission waxes—and we move into a new cultural realm.

If writing freezes thought and makes it visible, simple alphabetic writing makes thought and cultural lore easily and quickly visible and subject with much greater ease to analysis, criticism and logical perusal. Moreover, it makes the elements of culture much more widely available to all kinds of people and classes of society.

Logic and skepticism flourish only after alphabetic writing makes possible the examination and reexamination of an easily visualized record of a legal argument, a classification of scientific items, a philosophical discourse, a historical narrative or a piece of royal propaganda. It has been argued that the emergence of Greek logic awaited the development of the alphabet.

Two critical cultures developed in the vast sweep of ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean history. One was Greece with its alphabetic culture, its philosophy and skepticism. The second was Israel with its rejection of the sacral claims of state and church and with its sustained prophetic critique of the mighty and wealthy—including priest and king—who oppressed the poor and weak. Israel’s attitudes towards its rulers, and the unjust society they created, are unique in the ancient Near East with its deified kings and hierarchical class structure assumed to be part of the order of creation. Writing, alphabetic writing, I would suggest, made an important contribution to the development of what has been called the prophetic principle.

HS: There is a tremendous dispute among scholars as to when the Greeks adopted the Semitic alphabet, isn’t there?

FMC: I belong steadfastly to the school of paleographers who believe that the borrowing was relatively early, in the course of the second half of the 11th century B.C.E. Until the mid-11th century, the time of the transition from Old Canaanite to the linear Phoenician script, writing was multidirectional. Then in the late 11th century it shifted, permanently and exclusively, to right-to-left, horizontal writing.

The Greeks borrowed the alphabet at a time when one could still write right-to-left, left-to-right, boustrophedon [as the ox ploughs], or in vertical columns. In each case, the stance of the signs faced away from the direction of writing. This created a tendency for stances to rotate over a given period of time. Multidirectional writing was borrowed by the Greeks with the alphabet. We know this from early Greek inscriptions. When, ultimately, the direction of Greek writing was stabilized, it was from left-to-right, contrary to Phoenician with its right-to-left direction. The shapes of the letters too, and their stances, tell us when the borrowing took place. The Greek letters show themselves to be derived from Phoenician letters of the second half of the 11th century. The most archaic Greek alphabets typologically—the scripts of the Cyclades and Crete—stand in elegant continuity with the scripts of the new, expanded corpus of 11th-century inscriptions on the inscribed arrowheads.

The continued insistence of many classicists on a much later date for the borrowing of the alphabet ultimately stems from the anti-Phoenician (if not anti-Semitic) impulse of an earlier generation of classical scholars. Often the older generation is followed by younger scholars with no awareness of its anti-Semitic bias. Also our expanded knowledge of the early history of the Old Canaanite and Phoenician scripts has not yet seeped into the classical discussion.

The date of the earliest Phoenician inscriptions in the Mediterranean is also disputed. Inscriptions in Phoenician in the central Mediterranean (on Crete and in Sardinia) that I date to about 1000 B.C.E.—that is, to the end of the 11th century—Greek scholars wish to date later, and are supported in this opinion by a few West Semitic epigraphists (I would not call them paleographers). Classicists resent the notion that Phoenicians 026preceded the Greeks in this part of the world—despite the fact that their beloved classical sources claim that the Phoenicians were in the West first, followed much later by the Greeks.

The discussion is confused by the issue of colonization. Systematic colonization by the Phoenicians probably did not begin before the ninth century B.C.E. But Phoenician sailors and metallurgists plied the Mediterranean from Cyprus to the Pillars of Hercules beginning no later that the 11th century and left inscribed monuments to mark their passing. Two inscriptions from the Mediterranean use the same script typologically that is found in late 11th-century inscriptions from Syria-Palestine.⁸ Ad hoc arguments are made by scholars wishing to date these Phoenician inscriptions from the Mediterranean late. Usually they suggest a lag in the development of the script; that is, the script in these two inscriptions, they contend, occupied a peripheral pocket that preserved an ancient hand intact for centuries. But the argument makes no sense. For one thing the inscriptions are found in port towns where continued contact with the Phoenician merchants and seaman should have updated script styles regularly. Further, and decisively, a pocket of peripheral archaism cannot exist unless the Phoenicians had a presence in the Mediterranean from the 11th century until the putative time of the “lagging” script. Sooner or later, I believe, classicists will be forced to move the date of the borrowing of the alphabet back. Certainly a date in the seventh century, the old standard view of Greek scholars, is now impossible.⁹ At present the debate is really between the ninth century and the 11th century. The higher date, I feel certain, will prevail.¹⁰

HS: Did the invention of the alphabet in any way contribute to Israel’s spiritual progress? This was also the very place where spiritual inventions, if you will, were made. Do you see any connection there?

FMC: I think so. At least a case can be made. Israel was among the first of the alphabetic nations. There were others, particularly the Phoenicians and the Greeks. Once you move into the period when the alphabet was in intense use, you find evidence of more rigorous ways of thinking, more logical ways of thinking, more critical ways of thinking, more systematic ways of thinking. This is obvious in Greece where we find emerging syllogistic reasoning and systematic logical classification and, later, the full flowering of philosophy and skepticism. One can debate how important a role the alphabet played. But certainly it played a role.

On the other hand, we know little of Phoenician intellectual life. We do know that the pre-Socratic philosophers of the Milesian school were influenced in their cosmological speculation by Phoenician lore and by Egyptian cosmological lore mediated by Phoenicians. William F. Albright in an important paper, the last from his pen, discusses the debt of the Greeks to the Phoenicians. He remarks also that in the Hebrew Bible we find rare approaches to systematic classification and to formalized propositions.¹¹

However, it is in the critique of society that we find Israel’s genius. Socrates and Amos, each in his own way, was a critic of society. I find it difficult to conceive of the prophetic movement in Israel, with its radical critique of society, apart from a process of the democratization of society and the desacralization of its institutions. Greece and Israel are new, radical, “hot” societies. They mark a profound break from the older conservative and hierarchical societies of the ancient Near East. I have little doubt that the invention of the alphabet and its increasing use played a role in the emergence of these changes.

HS: Did the environment, the richness of more than one culture interacting, enable Israel to produce its spiritual insights?

FMC: I think so though I am not sure I would use the term “spiritual.” The prophetic insights had to do with justice, with egalitarianism, with the redemption of the poor and oppressed, with the evils and self-interest of the powerful, with the corruption of court and temple. Israel arose as the ancient, brilliant cultures of Mesopotamia and of Egypt had become decadent or moribund. They were always “cold” societies, static, hierarchical, oppressive. They had their season and the ancient world was ripe for change.

HS: What would you describe as new in Israel?

FMC: Israel’s critique of kingship and temple. The prophets do not spare the priesthood and the Temple in their resounding judgments on Israel. Jeremiah tells priests and people that the Temple of Yahweh will not protect them. It is not inviolable sacred space. The prophets never permitted kingship in Israel to become an Oriental despotism. There were always limits on the king. The prophets refused to leave the kings in peace.

HS: A kind of constitutional monarchy?

FMC: I think we can call Israel’s monarchy a limited monarchy. The legal traditions of the old tribal league, not the decrees of the king, remained normative in theory, if not in fact. The kings beginning with Solomon tried to assume absolute power in the manner of monarchs elsewhere in the ancient Near East. But the people and their prophetic leaders insisted that kingship was late and provisional in Israel.

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The ninth century B.C.E. was marked by the so-called prophetic revolution. The issue was two opposing systems of land tenure: the old traditions of the league which held that land held as a patrimony was inalienable versus a (Canaanite) royal system of land grants, especially those given to aging military leaders who had been stalwarts of the standing army. These threatened to become a landed aristocracy that “added house to house and field to field.” The episode of Naboth’s vineyard [1 Kings 21] became the cause célèbre. Ahab attempted to buy Naboth’s vineyard. Naboth refused to sell explaining that the vineyard was part of his patrimony and hence inalienable. Jezebel, daughter of the king of Tyre, bride of Ahab, arranged that Naboth be executed on trumped up charges of treason and blasphemy and the vineyard subsequently seized as crown property. The upshot of the conflict symbolized by the vineyard was the violent revolution of Jehu that brought to an end the dynasty of Omri and Ahab.

HS: What about Israel’s insights into the nature of the deity?

FMC: The religions of Israel’s neighbors were sophisticated, tolerant polytheisms with universal gods usually reflecting the powers of nature. They differ little from the religions of Greece and Rome, and when East and West came into contact, the gods of one pantheon were quickly and easily identified with their equivalents in the other. A fundamental mythic pattern in Canaan and Mesopotamia describes the cosmos as emerging from theomachy, a conflict among the gods, in which kingship in heaven—and hence on earth—is established by the victory of the storm god, god of fertility and life. Human society participates in these 028orders of creation, kingship on earth rooted in divine kingship, properly unchanging and eternal.

The social metaphors that shaped Israel’s early religion were, so to speak, “premonarchic.” Kingship, as we have noted, was suspect in Israel, provisional in the view of old-fashioned Yahwists. Israel’s society was structured by kinship, especially in the early period, and its tribal society developed into a confederated league of tribes; kinship was extended by legal fiction, that is, by covenant. Leagues were considered to be at once kinship groups, tracing their lineage to a putative ancestor, linking the tribes with more or less artificial, segmented genealogies and, at the same time, a covenanted league, the covenant extending the duties, obligations and privileges of kinship to all members of the league.

There were a number of such leagues in the south: Edom, Ammon, Moab, Midian and the Arab leagues, notably Qedar. Characteristically, the leagues were named for a patron god conceived as the Divine Kinsman or as the covenant god who took upon himself the duties of kinship to his kindred, the members of the league or (to say the same thing) to his covenant partners.

Israel’s league was called the kindred of Yahweh (‘am yahweh). In Ammon the tribal society was the kindred of Milkom, in Edom the kindred of Qos, in Moab, the kindred of Chemosh, in North Arabia the kindred or family of ‘Athtar-shamayn (’ahl ‘Athtar-sûamayn). The cult of each tribal league centered on one god, the league patron, the Divine Kinsman who led the league in migration and especially in war and whose law governed the relations between league elements.

The onomasticon [inventory of personal names] of each of these kinship societies in the south was dominated by theophoric names [names with a divine element] in which the league god is called upon. In Israel the onomasticon is dominated by Yahweh or ’El; in Ammon, by Milkom (see photo and drawing of Ammonite seal impression) or ’El. The names Milkom and Yahweh originated evidently as epithets of ’El, the patriarch of the gods. In Moab names are compounded with Chemosh, an epithet of ‘Athtar/‘Asûtar; in Edom, with Qos, probably a cultic name of Haddu/Hadad.

This onomastic practice in the leagues of the south contrasts vividly with the usage in the Canaanite city-states, as well as in Mesopotamia, where the whole pantheon of high gods is called upon in the theophoric names in their onomasticon.

The Divine Kinsman is a type of deity originating in patriarchal religion, called by Albrecht Alt the “god of the father,” the forerunner, typologically, of the league god. This is not to assert that the cult of the god of the father or the league god was monotheistic, either in early Israel or in the leagues of the south. But in Israel the claims of their jealous god can be described as a praeparatio 029for the later development of monotheism in Israel. Israel’s league god was its primary patron and demanded an exclusive league cultus. At some point Yahweh alone was seen as having significant power and sovereignty. The other gods lost their powers. If other gods have no real power, they are of no interest religiously, and so from that point on one may speak of existential monotheism in Israel.

HS: The others are non-gods?

FMC: To go from gods with little power to non-gods is, I guess, a philosophical leap of considerable distance. “Dead gods,” oddly, continued to play a role in Israel. The god of Israel still possessed a proper name, Yahweh. He was not simply God. The elements of nature continued long to be confronted as “Thou” rather than “it.” Still, it was in Israel that monotheism emerged. Evidently, the social structures and cultural currents that marked Israelite society provided a matrix for the birth of monotheism.

We assume that in other nation states, originating in leagues, the old social and religious forms broke down; kingship there too replaced the older league traditions—and polytheism flourished. In Israel, however, largely because of the prophetic movement and its egalitarian ideals, the hierarchical institutions of kingship were never wholly successful in extirpating institutions and concepts rooted in the old league society. The ideology of kingship—kingship established in heaven and coeval with creation and cosmos—never fully prevailed in Israel in the era of kings. Israel’s kings were not divine, at least not in prophetic eyes. Rather, strange to say, the Mosaic Age, that is, the era of the league, was considered the normative or ideal age. The great literary figures in Israel did not look to David and his successors for formulations of Israel’s religion and law. They looked back to an older time and older institutions, and idealized them. The Deuteronomist in the seventh century B.C.E., and the Priestly source of the Tetrateuch [Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers] in the sixth century B.C.E., attempted to reconstruct systematically the institutions and law of the Age of Moses—as a basis for reform in the case of the Deuteronomist and, in the case of the Priestly tradent,^b for reconstituting the exiled community in a future return to Zion.

Earlier, when Ba‘alism—that is, Canaanite polytheism—threatened to prevail in Israel, most powerfully in the ninth century B.C.E. during the reign of the kings of the Omride dynasty, a war broke out between the great prophets, on the one hand, and the court and its syncretists, on the other. The prophets and their jealous deity won. Later, under the onslaught of Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Macedonia and Rome, the nations round about Israel in effect disappear, leaving little imprint of their culture or religion. The survival of Israel in Exile and under foreign rule for centuries thereafter is a remarkable phenomenon. Certain gigantic figures of the sixth century, several anonymous, are responsible for preserving and transforming Israel’s historic faith. They played an important role in the survival of Israel as a national community. In the Exilic period the basic scriptures were codified and put into writing in the penultimate or final form. It was a period of unrivaled literary creativity.

HS: Who were these gigantic figures?

FMC: There is the Priestly tradent—one or more—who edited and supplemented the old Epic sources to bring the whole Tetrateuch to completion. By the time of the return of the exiles to Jerusalem in the late sixth century B.C.E., the work was probably complete; certainly it was complete by the time of Ezra (early fifth century), to whom tradition credits the definitive edition.

The Exilic Deuteronomist, another gigantic 030figure, put Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomistic history [Joshua, Judges, Samuel and kings] into final form.¹²

There was also the strange, but brilliant prophet Ezekiel and his school, and, above all, the literary and religious genius we label Second Isaiah whose work includes Isaiah 40–55 and probably 34–35. Second Isaiah with good reason has been called the savior of his nation and its faith. He reinterpreted the faith in a way that came to terms with the trauma of the Exile and gave hope for the future, declaring that Israel’s universal, prophetic vocation will be fulfilled in new mighty acts of Israel’s God. Our edition of Job, too, is to be dated in the Exilic period. In his dialogues the poet struggles with the problem of justice and concludes with a pessimistic answer. In Job, only mystery speaks from the thunder storm. Second Isaiah takes up Job’s notion of the hidden god who is all mystery. He provides a basis for once again having faith that God rules justly in history. He does not cover up or explain away innocent suffering and injustice in past events. Rather, Second Isaiah creates an eschatology that illuminates history and provides a basis for hope. And, in sublime poetry, he creates his new epic of Israelite history and world history.

HS: Are you suggesting that the Exilic Deuteronomist and the Priestly tradent worked in exile in Babylonia?

FMC: The Deuteronomist was probably a Jew left behind in Jerusalem. I am inclined to believe that the Priestly tradent belonged to the exiled community in Babylon. Ezekiel was certainly in Babylon (despite a few scholars who argue for a Jerusalem locale or at least for a Jerusalem visit), and the Priestly lore and point of view is closely allied to Ezekiel’s ideas. They belong to the same school, in my opinion.

HS: Why did the editors of the Deuteronomistic history, especially the author of the first edition from the time of Josiah, turn back to the Mosaic period for inspiration?

FMC: I believe that the impulse stems from the prophetic tradition, especially that surviving from northern Israel, and also from the circles in rural areas (as opposed to the royal establishment in Jerusalem) that maintained elements of the old kinship institutions and covenantal law despite royal rule.

HS: But why the Deuteronomistic reform in the time of Josiah? There were kings before him and 031after him.

FMC: Hezekiah did try a similar reform in the late eighth century.

HS: Yes. You have two religious reforms—Hezekiah’s reform and Josiah’s reform—and both failed.

FMC: Both reforms were inspired by Deuteronomistic ideology. This ideology appears to have affinities with Hosea and northern circles and became a strong influence on the Judahite court after the northern kingdom, Israel, was overrun and annexed by Assyria in the late eighth century. Refugees from the north flowed into the southern kingdom, Judah, at this time. The reforms of Hezekiah in the late eighth century and of Josiah in the late seventh century were not merely religious. They also reflected a strong nationalistic impulse. Hezekiah and Josiah were both attempting to reestablish the united kingdom of David in all its glory. They made efforts to re-take the northern kingdom, partitioned in their time into three Assyrian provinces, and to unify the state and its national cultus in Jerusalem. The program reestablish the Davidic empire and to unify its national cultus was not forgotten, even after Josiah’s time. John Hyrcanus I (134–104 B.C.E.) made an ambitious attempt in this direction, destroying the Samaritan temple and requiring all who wished to remain in his realm—including Samaritans and Idumeans—to convert to orthodox (i.e., Jerusalemite) Judaism. Almost certainly Zerubbabel, the Davidic governor of Judah in the late sixth century, made a bid to carry out a major reform. It was he who completed the building of the Second Temple. He disappears abruptly from history, and the rule of Judah passes to non-Davidic appointees of the Persian crown. The easiest explanation of our limited data is to suppose that Zerubbabel’s political as well as religious program brought Persian wrath down on him and that the Persian crown, contrary to its usual practice of appointing local nobility to exercise hereditary rule, dared not permit another Davidic figure to become governor.

HS: The Deuteronomistic history consists of Deuteronomy and the books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings?

FMC: Yes, at least the second edition includes the books you have listed. It is not certain when Deuteronomy was combined with the remainder of the history.

HS: How do you distinguish the first edition of the Deuteronomistic history from the second edition of that history?

FMC: There are two lines of argument in the Deuteronomistic history, which are in the strongest tension, if not contradictory. One is that the hope for the future, the restoration of a unified nation and a pure, single cultus, which rests in the reservoir of grace, created by the fidelity of David, lies concretely in Josiah of the house of David whose reform is destined to restore Mosaic and Davidic institutions. This hope belongs to the time of the Josianic program (late seventh century) and makes sense only as propaganda for the reform. The other line of argument in the Deuteronomistic history is that time has run out. Jerusalem and its Temple are marked for destruction and there is no hope, no means of salvation. This theme presumes the fall of Jerusalem and the Exile. The late edition of the Deuteronomistic history is updated from Josiah to the Exile.

The basic argument of the first edition of this history, so basic that it could not be eradicated, was that the promises to David would be fulfilled in Josiah. In the most flagrant instance of vaticinium ex eventu [prophecy after the event] to be found in the Hebrew Bible, the historian of the first edition actually puts into the mouth of a ninth-century prophet the prophecy that the altar of Bethel, symbol of the cult that stood as the rival of Jerusalem, will be destroyed by one to be born of the house of David, Josiah by name (1 Kings 13:1–2, cf. 2 Kings 23:15–16). This was, of course, written in the late seventh century B.C.E. in Josiah’s own time.

The secondary argument, found in light reworkings of the first edition of the Deuteronomistic history, turns this history into a lawsuit against Israel for its violations of the covenant that inevitably, ineluctably bring destruction and exile as punishment. Josiah comes too late. Doom has already been determined. God’s verdict against Israel has already been given. The second edition arbitrarily decides that it is Manasseh’s apostasy that was ultimately unforgivable. The sermon against Samaria (2 Kings 17, especially verses 7–23) recounting the sins that decreed the destruction of the northern kingdom in the eighth century, is plagiarized by the Exilic Deuteronomist and applied to Manasseh; as so applied, these sins ensure the fall of the southern kingdom, Judah. The procedure of the Exilic Deuteronomist is curious. From a historical point of view, Solomon makes a much more plausible candidate than Manasseh—or the last kings of Judah might have been chosen on which to hang these sins. By using Manasseh, the Exilic Deuteronomist must suppress the story of Manasseh’s repentance (preserved in 2 Chronicles 33). And, in making Manasseh the culprit, the Exilic Deuteronomist makes the whole attempt at reform on the part of Josiah an exercise in futility. 058It is interesting, however, that the Exilic Deuteronomist places blame for the fall of Jerusalem in the relatively distant past. It is not the fault of his own generation. His generation could do nothing; the exiles paid for the sins of their fathers.

Ezekiel in exile makes a similar and even more remarkable explanation of the destruction of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah (Ezekiel 20:19–26). The fault, Ezekiel says, rests in the generation who revolted in the wilderness. Yahweh swore an oath in the days when Israel was still in the wilderness that he would scatter the children of Israel among the nations—in exile. Further the deity in Ezekiel’s oracle explains that he gave to Israel laws that were “not good,” and ordinances to insure that they would not live. In effect, Israel was damned even before the monarchy was initiated, half a millennium and more before Jerusalem and its Temple fell. This is a most radical explanation of the cause of the Exile. Ezekiel is a radical book and barely made it into the canon.

We concluded the interview by talking about Professor Cross’s plans for the future. He has a breathtaking collection of orchid plants, some of which are always in bloom. This, he says, is going to take more of his time. He is also putting the finishing touches on a book of essays, a kind of sequel to his Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973).

I asked him what he was thinking of beyond the essays.

“I will go epigraphic,” he said. “For the time I have left, I want to do epigraphy. I would like to do a major synthetic work—if my powers don’t completely fade—on paleography from the invention of the alphabet to the Bar Kokhba period [2nd century C.E.]. I have worked in every period—in Hebrew, Phoenician, Aramaic and related scripts. I have notebook after notebook—photographs, drawings and related material. I would like finally to put together my own synthesis.

“Epigraphy is the field in which I have had the most fun—not textual criticism, not the history of the religion of Israel, not Northwest Semitic grammar. I love deciphering inscriptions; I love paleographical analysis. These are my avocations as well as my vocation. I hope to spend my last years doing what I like best. This may not be the most important thing in the field I have worked in, but it will be something that I will simply enjoy. And I think here I do have something special to transmit.”

Our previous two issues have featured a wide-ranging interview with the world-renowned scholar Frank Moore Cross, the recently retired Hancock Professor of Hebrew and Other Oriental Languages at Harvard University. The first installment (see “Frank Moore Cross— An Interview,” BR 08:04) focused on the origins of the ancient Israelites, especially on Cross’s view that an important component of the Israelites came from Midian (in what is today northwest Saudi Arabia and southern Jordan) and on the ways Cross “excavates” the biblical text to uncover a historical core. In the second part of the interview (see “Frank Moore Cross— An […]