The Undiscovered Symmetry of the Bible—An Interview with David Noel Freedman—Part II

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Readers of our December issue will recall David Noel Freedman’s analysis of the organization of the Hebrew Bible and his insights into when the Hebrew Bible assumed its final shape (“How the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Old Testament Differ—An Interview with David Noel Freedman—Part I,” BR 09:06). In this concluding half of the interview, Freedman, General Editor of the 55 volumes (and still growing) of the Anchor Bible Series and former editor of the Journal of Biblical Literature, explores the remarkable symmetry within the Hebrew Bible and then suggests how that symmetry is mirrored in the New Testament.

HS: I know you make a lot of numerical connections and find a lot of symmetry in the books of the Hebrew Bible. Can you explain some of these?

DNF: Well, we’ve talked about the major sections of the Hebrew Bible. The heart of the Hebrew Bible is the Prophets. In Hebrew tradition, this includes the Former Prophets (Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings) and the Latter Prophets (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and the Twelve Minor Prophets). The Prophets are almost twice as long as the Torah and the Writings—the other two parts, according to Jewish tradition. And the Prophets are clearly divided in half—four and four. The Latter Prophets are very different from the Former Prophets, although they overlap historically. But it’s symmetrical, four and four. It’s also symmetrical between the Torah and the Former Prophets (what I call the Primary History), on the one hand, and the Latter Prophets and the Writings, on the other. The Torah has 80,000 words; the Former Prophets, 70,000. Together, they are 150,000 words.

HS: That’s the Primary History.

DNF: Right. The Latter Prophets have 72,000. The Writings (without Daniel) have 78,000, for a total, again, of 150,000 words. The two halves are exactly the same. The difference is less than 300 words out of 300,000!

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HS: This could not have been put together during the Exile because some of the prophets deal with the return from the Exile.

DNF: Quite correct. The Former Prophets were collected, but the Latter Prophets, including Zechariah and Malachi, were collected in the post-Exilic period.

HS: So, the symmetry of four and four couldn’t have existed until after the Primary History was written.

DNF: No question.

HS: So you’re saying that the four Latter Prophets were created as a group, in effect, to match the four Former Prophets.

DNF: Correct. That is exactly what I’m saying. Now look at the Writings: There are five major books (Psalms, Proverbs, Job, Chronicles and Ezra-Nehemiah) and five minor books (Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes and Esther). It’s clear—an echo of the Torah, which of course has five books. The five major books of the Writings total 68,000 words. Now look at the Primary History—five books of the Torah, plus four (Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings). That’s the Primary History—five plus four. Now look at the Latter Prophets and the Writings—four (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and the Twelve) plus five major books in the Writings. It’s pretty symmetrical. The discrepancy is in the number of words: 80,000 words in the Torah, plus 70,000 words in the Former Prophets equals 150,000. But 72,000 words in the Latter Prophets, plus 68,000 words in the Writings equals only 140,000 words. There’s a 10,000 word difference. That’s significant. So how do they make up for it? They add five little books to the Writings to make it work. Ruth, Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes, Lamentations and Esther. How many words do these five books total? Almost exactly 10,000 words.

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HS: Are you saying that all this work in the second half of the Bible was done by Ezra and Nehemiah at that time?

DNF: They didn’t write it; they put it together. I think the selection and arrangement were theirs. The division of Primary History into five and four is very artificial. The reason for it is obvious. You get all the laws and the life of Moses into one section. He dies at the end of Deuteronomy. The four Latter Prophets match the four Former Prophets, and the five major books of the Writings match the five books of the Torah.

HS: What was the occasion for adding Daniel in about 150 B.C.E.?

DNF: The situation was quite different then, when you consider the impact of Alexander the Great on the whole Near East in the fourth century B.C.E. the second century B.C.E., the Hebrew Bible was no longer relevant to the real situation. I mean, you could follow the forms and the routines and so on. But it doesn’t deal with this total transformation of civilization. We know the impact of Alexander and of Greek civilization on the Near East and on the Jews. The Books of the Maccabees tell us about them. So the only surprising thing is that it took so long.

HS: What took so long?

DNF: There’s nothing in the Hebrew Bible about this 250-year gap, except the book of Daniel.

HS: And what function did that addition serve?

DNF: In Daniel you get the full blast of the apocalyptic age. The end is about to come—the crisis of unimaginable proportions. The very root and foundation of our existence are being shaken.

HS: By what?

DNF: All these Greeks: the generals, the philosophers, the architects and artists, city planners and builders, the whole of Greek civilization. Jews had to confront and cope with this massive cultural invasion at every level: political, social, economic, and above all, religious. According to the Books of the Maccabees, the crisis was precipitated by the Hellenizing Jews, who wanted to alter the traditional faith and practice of the Jews, to adapt it to Greek modes of thought and action, and make it more Greek and modern in belief and behavior. The Maccabean revolt was a violent protest against the infiltration of Greek thought into the very core of Judaism. And the Book of Daniel reflects the same critical situation, although viewing the desperate circumstances of the Jews from a slightly different angle. The Book of Daniel affirms the classic age-old faith of the Hebrew Bible and asserts that in the midst of tribulations, and in spite of the overwhelming power of the pagan enemies, God has predetermined the end of the conflict and will bring salvation to the saints, victory to His people and an eternal kingdom to replace the Gentile powers that have ruled over the Jews through all these centuries.

Greek civilization had an enormous impact on Jewish life in the Holy Land as well as in the Diaspora. From the symposia of the philosophers to the gymnasia of the athletes, Jewish religious beliefs and traditional practices were shaken as never before by a very different advanced culture. Judaism was radically influenced and changed by the confrontation, beginning with Alexander’s conquest in the last third of the fourth century B.C.E., and extending through the centuries of first Greek and then Roman rule. The voluminous output of serious Jewish religious literature in the Greco-Roman period describes, reflects, confronts and ultimately adapts to these changes. The more durable and impressive of these works have been preserved in the so-called Old Testament Apocrypha, part of the same period that was incorporated into the Hebrew Bible: the Book of Daniel. We should also mention, in addition to the scores of books in the Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, the many contemporaneous documents in the Dead Sea Scrolls.

HS: Do you extend this overarching creation of the Bible into the New Testament?

DNF: Yes, it turns out that the New Testament is constructed in much the same way. There is the same striking, but not quite perfect symmetry. I didn’t believe it at first myself, but the numbers are persuasive, if not compelling. Let’s start with the Primary History. The equivalent of the Primary History of the Hebrew Bible in the New Testament 037is the combination of the three Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke) and the Book of Acts. As is well-known and generally agreed among scholars, the first three Gospels share a good deal of common material and have important literary connections with each other. It is commonly agreed (although there is a strong minority opinion to the contrary) that the Gospels of Matthew and Luke are dependent upon the Gospel of Mark for a substantial part of their contents. In addition, they share substantial other materials, presumably derived from a second hypothetical source (so-called Q for German “Quelle”). The result is a block of narrative material, consisting of the separate but connected Synoptic Gospels, along with the continuation of the Gospel of Luke in the Book of Acts, that constitutes the “Primary History” of the New Testament. While in standard New Testaments, the Gospel of John is placed between Luke and Acts, no one doubts that Acts is in fact the continuation of Luke, not of the Gospels generally, as the author of Luke-Acts points out explicitly in the preface to Acts.

This combination of Gospels and Acts, like the Primary History of the Hebrew Bible, constitutes almost exactly half of the total number of words in the larger work. Remembering that in the first century C.E. when the New Testament was composed, and in the second century when it was largely canonized, the Hebrew Bible consisted of 24 books (including Daniel), we come up with the following numbers and ratios for the parts and the whole of both works:

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	Hebrew Bible	New Testament
	words	ratio	words	ratio
Primary History	150,000 (149,641)	49%	72,000 (71,876)	49%
Remainder	156,000 (155,856)	51%	75,000 (74,742)	51%

In both cases, the Primary History consists of 49 percent of the total, while the remaining parts make up 51 percent of the total. In the “Primary History” of the New Testament, the natural literary division comes after Matthew and Mark; the second unit, Luke-Acts, constitutes the largest continuous narrative in the entire work. The numbers are as follows:

Matthew-Mark	32,000 (31,597)
Luke-Acts	40,000 (40,279)

Looking at the rest of the New Testament, we find next the corpus of Pauline Epistles, including both the so-called authentic epistles universally attributed to the Apostle himself, and those traditionally assigned to Paul, even if the authorship is disputed (for example, Hebrews, a book that few if any scholars connect with Paul). Altogether there are 14 epistles traditionally assigned to Paul, with a word-count very close to 40,000:

Luke-Acts	40,000 (40,279)
Paul and Pauline Epistles	40,000 (39,877)
Total	80,000 (80,156)

This patent symmetry corresponds to that between the Former and Latter Prophets of the Hebrew Bible. Remember that Paul plays a leading role in the Lucan corpus, and the Evangelist himself (Luke) is listed among the companions and associates of the Apostle Paul.

If we turn to the remaining books of the New Testament, which correspond to the catch-all “Writings” of the Hebrew Bible, this section is dominated by writings attributed (whether correctly or not) to the Apostle John, including his Gospel, his Epistles and the Book of Revelation (or Apocalypse). The Gospel of John is quite independent of the Synoptic Gospels. Even when it shares topics or stories with them, they are treated very differently from the other Gospels. Like the Chronicler’s work in the Hebrew Bible, the Gospel of John reaches back to the very beginning of Genesis, and presents self as a parallel, if not competing work, to the Primary History. If, in addition, we link John’s Gospel with the Apocalypse (Revelation) at the end of the New Testament, we see a pattern of envelope construction much like that of the Chronicler’s work in the Writings of the Hebrew Bible. The Writings begin with Chronicles and end with Ezra-Nehemiah (as one book). These two books form an envelope around the rest of the Writings. Just so, John’s Gospel and the Apocalypse conceptually form an envelope around the General or Catholic Epistles (including those of John), and in some ways around the whole of the New Testament, beginning at the very beginning and ending with the eschaton itself.

The numbers for the Johannine corpus are:

The Gospel of John	17,000 (16,576)
The Book of Revelation	10,000 (10,224)
Total	27,000 (26,800)

What remains are the so-called General or Catholic Epistles, including those attributed to James (Jacob) the brother of the Lord, Peter, John and Jude (a brother of James). There are seven epistles in all, and the word-counts are as follows:

James		1,857
Peter	(1)	1,790
	(2)	1,180
John	(1)	2,250
	(2)	264
	(3)	235
Jude		489
TOTAL		8,065

The total number of words for this unit of the New Testament is 34,865, which we can fit into the larger picture as follows:

Primary History	Remaining Material
Matthew–Mark	31,597	Johannine Corpus and General or Catholic Epistles	34,865
Luke–Acts	40,279	Pauline Epistles	39,877
TOTAL	71,876		74,742

Here again you have the two halves, just like the Former Prophets and the Latter Prophets. They’re different literary styles, but they have a common subject matter.

HS: Do you think that was somehow in conscious imitation of the Hebrew Bible?

DNF: Maybe unconscious. The point is this, Hershel. Bilateral symmetry is just a fancy word. It’s the most common experience in humanity. I tell people, you want to know what bilateral symmetry is, look in a mirror. That’s our nature, the most obvious way in which you construct things. That’s the beauty of it. You don’t even have to think about it. That’s the way it’s going to be. But I think it’s very deliberate when it comes to literature.

HS: It could happen independently in the New Testament and in the Hebrew Bible?

DNF: It can’t just happen.

HS: Couldn’t the bilateral symmetry that you just described between the traditional Pauline corpus and Luke-Acts occur independently from the bilateral symmetry in the Former Prophets and the Latter Prophets?

DNF: Yes, but these people are steeped in the Hebrew Bible. It’s the only book they quote throughout the entire New Testament, with maybe a handful of exceptions. Practically all of the citations and quotations in the New Testament are right out of the Hebrew Bible, or the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible. This book is on their mind. The people who wrote the New Testament are in many ways much more conservative than the Pharisees or the Sadducees. They’re real Biblicists.

HS: In Christian thought, you usually think of the four Gospels, not Luke-Acts, as a counterpart to the Pauline corpus.

DNF: You’re right. This is very much like what happens with the Hebrew Bible. The Torah was pulled out of the Primary History; and the Gospels were pulled out in the New Testament. But the Gospels are for a different purpose. Everyone would say that putting the Gospel of John in between Luke and Acts makes no sense. What is it saying? It’s saying simply that the four Gospels are first. If you have any sense for literary character, Luke-Acts has to go together. The formal order of the four gospels, putting them first, is for other reasons—to stress their importance, to stress the importance of the life, crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus. He is to be the central figure.

But Luke’s objective is slightly different: He intended to show how the movement started in Jerusalem and ended in Rome.

Luke is one of the Synoptic Gospels, so it belongs with the other two Synoptics, Mark and Matthew. Matthew contains about seven-eighths of Mark, so they clearly belong together. Matthew also has nearly 20,000 words, which shows that this is a kind of prescribed number.

HS: That’s how long a gospel should be?

DNF: Yes. Acts, too, has nearly 20,000 words, while Luke has slightly more. Mark and Matthew should balance Luke and Acts. But Mark has only 12,000 words. With Matthew, the total is about 32,000 words. We put that at the front end. Then Luke-Acts has 40,000 words. Then the Pauline corpus has another 40,000 words.

Then we have the remainder, which includes the other apostles, especially John. The whole Johannine corpus is traditionally assigned to the apostle—no doubt wrongly, but that’s not a problem in this situation. The Johannine corpus includes the Gospel of John, the book of Revelation (attributed to a prophet named John) and the Johannine epistles.

Let’s look at the numbers. The Gospel of John has 17,000 words and Revelation has 10,000 words. That’s 27,000. Then we have the other epistles—James, 1 Peter, Jude and the major epistle of 1 John. These are the so-called Catholic epistles, comprising the letters of these four writers. They total about 6,000 words, which brings us up to 33,000. In the few remaining items like 2 Peter and 2 and 3 John, we’re talking about relatively small numbers. If we include them, then instead of 33,000 words we have something like 35,000 words. Second Peter is universally regarded as a 039late work—certainly not written by Peter. If we drop that and second and third John—they’re very short and not very important—and I want to end up with 24 books—we have about 144,000 words divided approximately 72,000 and 72,000. (The actual numbers are slightly higher.) In the Book of Revelation, as you know, the number of the saved of the twelve tribes is 144,000, and I think there’s at least a potential correlation between the number of words in the New Testament and this sacred number in Revelation. In Matthew and Mark, 32,000; in Luke and Acts, 40,000, for a total of 72,000; then 40,000 in the Pauline corpus, 32,000 in the Johannine corpus and other apostolic writings, again for a total of 72,000 words; and a grand total of 144,000 words. The basic symmetry is there.

HS: It’s like the symmetry you detect in the Hebrew Bible.

DNF: Right. I think it’s done consciously; they’re trying to establish the New Testament as authoritative scripture, just like the Old Testament. Using the Hebrew Bible as the model, they arrange the materials in an order that will achieve the same kind of symmetry. This is a conscious effort to establish authority, probably sometime about the middle of the second century.

They were very concerned about totality. If something is in the canon, that’s authoritative. If it’s not in the canon, it doesn’t count. The number 24 comes into all this—in the Hebrew Bible, too. Without Daniel, it’s 23; with Daniel, it’s 24. That’s part of the reason Daniel was added. The number 24 is very significant for any discussion of the canon.

The pagan, polytheistic Greek canon consisted of Homer’s two epics—the Iliad and the Odyssey. The Greek understanding was that if a god was named in Homer, that god was real, but if not, he or she doesn’t count. The Alexandrian grammarians divided Homer’s two epics into 24 books, labeling each book with a letter of the Greek alphabet. They use all 24 letters to show that it is complete—“alpha” to “omega,” from the first to the last. Now the Hebrew Bible, with Daniel, has 24 books. Josephus refers to this. But he wants to make it conform to the Hebrew alphabet, which has only 22 letters. So he says there are not really 24 books; there are only 22 books. How does he achieve that? If you look at any English Bible, you’ll see. He says the book of Ruth is an adjunct to the Book of Judges, because, as you know, it begins in the time of the Judges. So in English Bibles you find Ruth immediately after Judges.

HS: What do you mean by English Bibles?

DNF: Pick up a King James Version or a Revised Standard Version. They are based on the traditional Christian Bible in which Ruth follows Judges, and therefore isn’t counted. The other one that’s not counted is Lamentations, which comes after Jeremiah and is even called “The Lamentations of Jeremiah.” Now this is very artificial: the Hebrew Bible doesn’t place them together. But that’s how Josephus arrives at the number 22, because it’s the number: he wanted to get—just as the Greeks did for Homer. It reflects the same Greek idea of totality, of perfection. That’s what the alphabet does for you.

Now Ezra and Nehemiah had only 23 books. But that is also a good alphabetic number in Hebrew. The normal Hebrew alphabet has 22 letters. But we have about a dozen psalms written in alphabetic acrostics. Each verse begins with a different letter in alphabetic order. Two of these (Psalms 25 and 34) have an added letter, after tav. That is, after the 22nd letter, they have a 23rd line that begins with the letter peh.

HS: The double peh.

DNF: The second peh. Right. That’s 23. Now why do they do that? Patrick Skehan^a suggested—I don’t know if it was original with him—that with this 23rd letter, peh, you now have a middle line, which you didn’t have before. The first line begins with aleph, the 12th line, as also in English, begins with 040lamed, “l.” The last line is a peh. Now aleph, lamed, peh spell what?

HS: Aleph.

DNF: Right. In Greek and in English, we describe the series of letters as an alphabet—a word made up of the names of the first two letters in the Greek alphabet (alpha beta). In Hebrew, the series of letters is called simply aleph, a single letter, the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet. This just reinforces the importance of the idea of the alphabet.

I believe that the Bible of Nehemiah with its 23 books is reflected in this enhanced alphabet.

HS: Do you draw any special significance from these numerical connections?

DNF: Just at the people who did it were very conscious of what they were doing, of the number of letters in the alphabet.

I’ve spent most of my life looking at things that are real in the Bible. So much of biblical study is theoretical, hypothetical. We have to compare theories because we don’t have a lot of basic factual data. But here, these numbers and these arrangements in the text, are facts. If I have emphasized numbers, it’s because you really can’t dispute them. You can question the arguments and conclusions, but any objective data that we can find is worth its weight in gold.

My position is: Here are certain structures; if you don’t like my explanation, you explain them. But you can’t ignore them. You can’t say, “Well, that doesn’t mean anything,” because there are too many convergences to be coincidental.

HS: You do that same kind of numerical analysis in much of biblical poetry, don’t you?

DNF: Right. For the same reason, the formal structure conveys notions of symmetry, totality, what they considered to be perfection.

HS: Some people say that you are the greatest biblical editor since R.^b [Laughter]. You have devoted much of your life to editing. We’ve talked about the overarching construction of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament and your concern about this big picture, but you’ve also been concerned with the most minute details of the text and their interpretation and meaning. Your greatest monument may be in the footnotes to the Anchor Bible Series [of which Freedman is General Editor]. You’re so often acknowledged with gratitude for your contribution to this multi-volume and very detailed series of Bible commentaries. You must get a special satisfaction from your editorial work.

DNF: It provides a rare opportunity to read the latest scholarship that’s coming out of the minds leading scholars. I’ve benefited in every possible way because I can maintain a very broad view of the Bible. I have to deal with all the books. That’s what has led me into these synthetic considerations. To have the opportunity, as well as to be paid, to challenge the best people who are working these days has stimulated me more than anything else.

To me, the truth is in the details, in close examination of every word, of every syllable. The people who wrote this literature were very sophisticated. That’s the big point. Their lack of modern plumbing is no reflection on their literary taste and skills.

HS: How many volumes of the Anchor Bible Series are there now?

DNF: I think the current number is 55.

HS: And it includes the Old Testament, the New Testament and the Apocrypha, is that right?

DNF: That’s correct.

HS: How many of those have you edited?

DNF: All of them, with the partial exception of the Book of Acts. Albright took that under his wing because the author died and the manuscript was not in very good shape. Except for that, I’ve read every word of every page of every manuscript, and I’ve been the editor.

HS: And you’ve had a voluminous correspondence with each of the authors.

DNF: Oh yes, I believe in communications. [Laughter]

HS: How do you write your letters? I’m always astounded at how quickly and how fully you respond to letters.

DNF: Years ago, I read something that Somerset Maugham wrote about English gentlemen in the first decade of this century. The proper schedule was that in the morning you paid your bills and you answered your letters. And then in the afternoon you would write your manuscripts. That’s what Maugham I did. I’ve always tried to respond to correspondence. I’m still a typist, as you know.

HS: Don’t you use a computer at all?

DNF: No. I have from time to time, but only with supervision and as soon as the supervisor leaves, I stop. [Laughter]

HS: You’ve also been the editor of the massive, monumental Anchor Bible Dictionary, in six volumes. Did you get the same satisfaction out of that?

DNF: Well, that’s a different story. I’m not sure that this publishable, but I’ll tell you anyway. 041What I do with the Anchor Bible commentaries is also what I do with Anchor Bible Reference Library. There are now eight volumes in that series. There, too, I read every manuscript as carefully as possible. I write extensive critiques and expect the authors to respond and take these things into consideration. With the Anchor Bible Dictionary the situation is dramatically different. I have worked with maybe 30 or 40 authors over the years and that’s strictly one on one. I like that; I’m accustomed to it; and, as everybody knows, the Anchor Bible Series has dragged on over the years and sometimes it takes an author 20 years or more to finish a volume, if he ever gets to it. With the Dictionary, everything is different. Deadlines are absolutely necessary. Otherwise, it never gets finished. And you have to have word limits. Otherwise, you can’t contain it. So you need to be very hard-nosed, which I’ve never been. I’m really unable to be that way. The late Bruce Vawter said I was the most permissive editor of the 20th century, but my feeling is if you have the right person, they should be free to say what they really want to say. But with a dictionary, you can’t do that. People say that if had actually done the Dictionary the way I did the others, we’d still be in the letter A. [Laughter] What I did was find the right people. In this case, so much depends on the steady flow and on maintaining contacts with almost a thousand outside scholars and on having 30 or 40 editors. This is monumental task and requires an efficient operation. On the dictionary, I can say just the opposite of what I said about the others. I did not read any of the articles. [Laughter] That’s not totally true, but very close to it.

HS: One of the glories of living in the scholarly world, as you and I do, is that the interchange is completely without regard to religious identification.

DNF: That’s an important, creative factor that bodes very well for future scholarship. This great diversity and variety are bound to produce a significant effect.

HS: We all speak the same language. There’s respect, there’s tolerance and there’s also a basic acceptance of the other’s tradition.

DNF: This is a relatively new phenomenon. A lot of assumptions behind earlier dictionaries were very different. Read, for example, the list of contributors to the Hastings Dictionary of the Bible (1896). Almost everyone is a Right Reverend, a member of the Anglican church. It was just taken for granted that this was a Christian work and that the only participants would be from the Christian majority. With the later Interpreter’s Dictionary the Bible (1962), lip service was paid to an ecumenical outlook, but basically this dictionary was an outcrop of the Interpreter’s Bible, which was intended, without apology, to be a help to ministers in their preaching. The editor-in-chief of the IDB was George Buttrick, the famous pastor of the Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church in New York City.

With the Anchor Bible Dictionary, we’ve come a long way from that, opening it to contributors regardless of religious background, commitment or conviction. There is an ulterior objective here. That is to make the scholars work in an environment with people who don’t have the same presuppositions and the same convictions. Therefore, they must be more sensitive to the difference between presenting a scholarly position and arguments, on the one hand, and advocating and defending a confessional position, on the other. In principle, we understand the difference quite well. In practice, a lot of people tend to be oblivious to the distinction, especially in environments that are homogeneous. If everyone in the classroom or everyone in the seminar is of the same opinion, then you tend to voice that opinion without regard to what others on the outside might think.

HS: Can scholars really be objective or are they inevitably influenced by their confessional background?

DNF: Nobody can achieve 100 percent objectivity. But that isn’t important. You can make an effort and you can eliminate the most glaring and obvious examples. In an environment in which different points of view are represented, a confessional stance, a biased position would be more obvious. Nobody wants that, least of all the scholar himself or herself. I know in conversation and correspondence with scholars who are very strongly committed they make every effort to avoid introducing and intruding a confessional bias. A certain amount of bias is bound to remain because none of us can get totally outside our skin. But if it is a work like this dictionary, where so many different views, so many different people with different commitments are represented, it gets equalized and balances out. It’s an exaggeration to say that we can’t avoid bias, implying that we shouldn’t bother to try. I think it’s very important to bother, even if in the end we don’t achieve perfection.

HS: What you describe with respect to the Anchor Bible Dictionary, I find in the scholarly community as a whole. Regardless of the particular scholar’s personal confessional allegiance, he or she makes a very great effort to see that it doesn’t intrude on the scholarship.

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DNF: I agree entirely. This is true even when they work in their own confessional scholarly projects as, for example, the Jerome Biblical Commentary, which is avowedly a Catholic work written by Catholics primarily for Catholics. Even there, they exercise a great deal of restraint because they understand that the way to make a case is not simply to rely on dogmatic statements. Historically, up to the middle of this century, I don’t think this kind of dialogue was really going on, except in a few places, for example, in Albright’s seminar. Today, I don’t think we’re doing anything very different from that, but we’re doing it on a much wider scale. I think it has even drifted back into the seminaries; they have a much more open view and a broader treatment of a lot of very sensitive subjects. One of the great achievements of this half century is to bring scholars and serious thinkers from different traditions into a common pool.

HS: Thank you very much.

Readers of our December issue will recall David Noel Freedman’s analysis of the organization of the Hebrew Bible and his insights into when the Hebrew Bible assumed its final shape (“How the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Old Testament Differ—An Interview with David Noel Freedman—Part I,” BR 09:06). In this concluding half of the interview, Freedman, General Editor of the 55 volumes (and still growing) of the Anchor Bible Series and former editor of the Journal of Biblical Literature, explores the remarkable symmetry within the Hebrew Bible and then suggests how that symmetry is mirrored in the New Testament. […]