Bible Books

008

008

The Book of J

Harold Bloom
Translated from the Hebrew by David Rosenberg
(New York: Grove-Weidenfeld, 1990) 335 pp., $21.95

More than 50 years before professional physicists agreed that neither time nor space exists independent of matter, professional biblical scholarship arrived at a consensus that the Pentateuch was compiled from several narrative sources. Early forms of the “source hypothesis” about the Bible antedate Einstein by 150 years. Yet any high school student, asked about relativity, delivers an enthusiastic lecture about trains traveling 60 miles per hour; ask the same student about the J (Yahwistic) source, the strand of the Bible’s most familiar folklore—including the stories of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel and the Tower of Babel—and you draw a blank.

What, then, is making a best-seller of Harold Bloom’s reflections on J? Bloom’s reputation as a literary critic has helped. And the publisher’s publicist provided a huge send-off, resulting in notices in Newsweek, U.S. News and World Report, and Time, not to mention The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, The New York Review of Books and newspapers across the country. Bloom has written less a book than an event.

The huge sales of The Book of J also reflect a large, unacknowledged debt that Bloom owes to Richard Elliott Friedman, author of the classic introduction to the source hypothesis, Who Wrote the Bible? (Summit Books, 1987). Friedman’s racy volume reached and persuaded a wide audience. Bloom’s success demonstrates that the reading public now enjoys increased familiarity with scholarly views on the authorship of Genesis.

Bloom owes another debt as well. The lightning rod for media attention to The Book of J is its hypothesis that J’s author was female. THE WOMAN WHO INVENTED GOD, ran the headline in Newsweek. U.S. News responded, MURDER SHE WROTE, playing on J’s story of Cain and Abel. The New York Review announced, IT’S A GIRL! Time was coy: Ms. MOSES. GOD SPEAKS THROUGH HIS WOMEN, the Times Book Review had it. Timely? Grove-Weidenfeld, the publisher, thought so; the screamer on its press release was: IN A BOLD NEW INTERPRETATION, HAROLD BLOOM ARGUES THAT THE ORIGINAL AUTHOR OF THE BEST KNOWN BIBLE STORIES WAS A WOMAN.

Publishers, of course, prevaricate. (Byron averred, “Barabbas was a publisher.”) The notion that J’s author was female may be bold, but it isn’t new, and it isn’t Bloom’s. It was first advanced by Friedman in Who Wrote the Bible? Bloom gives signs of familiarity with the work, citing it by name, but nowhere does he hint that his central thesis—the crowning glory of his marketing strategy—is Friedman’s. Bloom’s 1990 volume reports his “wondering” whether J was a female “only in the last year.” As late as 1989, in his Ruin the Sacred Truths, Bloom evinced no inkling of the hypothesis. Even if he arrived at his conclusion before reading Who Wrote the Bible? (1987), he should have credited Friedman with priority (the sole basis for reward in scholarship). In flagrante, this is theft of intellectual property.

Yet, from a scholarly standpoint, the problem is that the thief was not thorough-going enough. Robert Alter, in Commentary (November 1990), has already exposed the wide discrepancies between the translation on which Bloom relies (by David Rosenberg) and the Hebrew text. In The Book of J, Rosenberg has not translated so much as interpreted: He fixes his interpretation indelibly in print. To take one example, Rosenberg renders God’s statement in Genesis 3:22 as, “Look, the earthling sees like one of us … And now he may blindly reach out his hand, grasp the tree of life as well ….” Sticking as far as possible with this vocabulary, the Hebrew actually reads, “Look, the earthling has become like one of us…. And now, he might reach out his hand, and take (fruit) from the tree of life as well.” Bloom’s interpretation of the text’s concern with seeing and consciousness turns on the presence of the word, “blindly,” absent from the original. He is analyzing not J, but an idiosyncratic translation of J.

Worse, scholars continue to debate just which biblical texts stem from J. Is Abram’s war in Genesis 14 part of J, for example, or of another source? The answers to this and similar questions determine how one reads J, yet Bloom has relied on a 50-year-old source analysis. It assigns to J stories derived from other sources (such as the story of the Golden Calf), and omits texts now viewed as J’s (J’s Sinai narrative [Exodus 19:10–16a, 18, 20–25 and Exodus 34], for example).

Bloom has analyzed an idiosyncratic translation of parts of J mixed with texts from other sources. For an analog to his procedure, imagine that the Gospel of Mark without the Passion Narrative is combined with Luke’s Birth Narrative and some 009speeches from John; then imagine that this text is rendered into English by an idiosyncratic translator. From this mixture, could Bloom identify Mark’s gender?

A woman (Bloom’s gevurah, an error for gevira, “Lady”) may have “written” J—a compilation of oral lore by a brilliant synthesizer. But Bloom makes no real case, unless you believe that Portia’s role in The Merchant of Venice or Rosalind’s in As You Like It proves that Shakespeare was a woman. Funny how talented writers—like J and Shakespeare—actually use their imaginations, rather than their genders, to bring characters alive.

What impels Western intellectuals to find a woman’s hand at work in ancient folktales? Samuel Butler’s wry Authoress of the Odyssey at the end of the last century identified Nausikaa as the authoress—of an adventure novel, a series of ancient cartoons. Bloom, after Friedman, imputes the chief folklore of the Pentateuch to another woman, intimately involved with David’s Court Historian around 925 B.C.E.^a (Erich Auerbach in Mimesis identified J as the Court Historian). Do only women codify old wives’ tales?

Bloom claims J’s theology lampoons Yahweh. According to Bloom, J’s God is an “imp,” a child; this is no more off the mark, I suppose, than it would be for the gods in the Iliad. J’s audience would not agree with Bloom, any more than Homer’s would, so the insight is culture-bound. But Bloom loves J’s derision of Yahweh.

Xenophanes claimed that if horses had gods, they would look like horses. Bloom has gone Xenophanes one better: Bloom is in love with an authoress who creates gods and mocks them, because Bloom mocks gods himself. He delights in freeing himself from a theology of divine inerrancy—for Bloom, creation is error, a view that explains all the unfathomable evils that the Book of Job ultimately declines to explain.

It is one thing to mock irrational gods on one’s own responsibility, it is another to lay that responsibility off on a biblical author whose work, although wry, affirms that even gods develop, even gods recognize their errors. J’s Yahweh, as Bloom observes, first made the animals in a futile attempt to find a mate for his “earthling,” but in the end, J’s Yahweh also succeeded in creating woman. J does have fun with Yahweh’s errors, but, unlike Bloom, also acknowledges Yahweh’s success.

Lisbon Bible 1482

(British library Or. 2626).
Introduction by Gabrielle Sed-Rajna
(Tel Aviv: Nahar-Miskal, in association with the British Library Board, 1988; distributed by Sisu Home Entertainment, 20 W. 38th St. #402, New York, NY 10018) 408 pp., $99.95

In the Middle Ages the Hebrew Bible and prayer books served as holy vehicles for drawing Jews closer to God’s will and helping them attain the hoped-for salvation in the world-to-come. Prominent Jewish patrons and wealthy congregations sometimes had their Bibles and prayer books lavishly adorned with both ornamentation and figural illustrations. Scribes and miniature painters lovingly labored on the manuscripts, dedicating them to the greater glory of God. These rare medieval manuscripts are no longer objects of piety, but highly sought after collector items that are sold at public auctions for prices reaching into the millions.

For students of Judaism unable to afford the priceless originals, handsome facsimile editions have been issued, thereby permitting a larger public to own these magnificent treasures.

One of the latest such editions is a facsimile of the Pentateuch from a three-volume Bible now kept in the British Library in London. The Bible was completed in Lisbon, Portugal in 1482 by the scribe Samuel, son of Samuel ibn Musa, for Joseph, son of Judah, surnamed al-Hakim. The scribe labored for close to three years on this elaborately decorated Bible. He belonged to one of the last schools of scribes dedicated to copying and ornamenting Hebrew manuscripts, which flourished in the last quarter of the fifteenth century in Lisbon. Probably the most representative work of this school—from which some thirty manuscripts have survived—is this so-called Lisbon Bible, of which only the Pentateuch is reproduced here. The initial Hebrew word of each book is written in burnished gold ornamented script set against a purple filigree penwork back-ground. Intricate filigree designs and, floral and animal motif pages resembling splendid carpets are found at the beginning and end and sometimes within each volume (see front cover).

The introductory text to the facsimile is by Gabrielle Sed-Rajna, a Judaic scholar living in Paris. She ably describes the contents of the Bible and its decorated pages, discusses the artists who may have illuminated the ornamentations of the manuscript, and the Lisbon workshop that may have produced the many similarly decorated manuscripts. What is regrettable is that the author chose to exclude studies that supplement or contradict some other conclusions. In particular the important work of Thérèse Metzger on the same subject might have been mentioned. Nevertheless, we are grateful for another beautiful facsimile reproduction of a medieval masterpiece.

Responses to 101 Questions on the Bible

Raymond E. Brown
(New York: Paulist Press, 1990) 147 pp., $5.95, paper back

This is a wonderfully wise book—especially, but by no means only, for Catholics. The author, Ray Brown, a priest who teaches in a largely Protestant seminary, is one of the most distinguished New Testament scholars in the world. By his own count, he has, in his lifetime, given over a thousand lectures on various aspects of the Bible. Whatever his topic, however, the same questions are raised in the question-and-answer period. This book contains these questions and answers. Well, not exactly answers; he calls them responses. Brown is a stickler for precision; he knows that to many of these questions there are only responses, not definitive answers.

Brown goes as far as rational argument will take him. He is utterly honest and surprisingly candid. Like the most unbiased judge, he weighs the arguments on both sides. He never shaves the evidence, nor does he flinch from the hard questions. His conclusions will surprise many, including many Catholics. Yet he is a man of deep faith—and he knows what he doesn’t know. He operates within the strictures of the Roman Catholic church, which, since the mid-1950s, are remarkably broad regarding biblical interpretation. This book bears the “nihil obstat” and imprimatur of the church.

Most of the questions in the book deal in one way or another with the historical accuracy of the Bible and especially the New Testament.

Here, for example, is Brown on the literalist approach to the word of God:

“A literalist approach assumes that God dictates almost to the degree that the words themselves come from God and are merely 010handwritten by the human being. A more subtle form of this has at least a mental dictation by God…. The literalist approach has implications about lack of error and a totality of knowledge in the Bible, including scientific and historical knowledge. Every statement in the Bible must be literally true and complete…. In my judgment, a literalist reading of the Bible is intellectually indefensible and is quite unnecessary for the defense of the basic Christian doctrines.”

Brown observes that people who have adopted a literalist approach “have wasted time measuring fish gullets in order to prove the historicity of the Book of Jonah. [A modern] introduction [to Jonah] that tells the reader that this is a parable, not history, saves a good deal of confusion….

“If the first chapters of Genesis are not classified in the branch of the library called science, but in the branch of the library called religious lore and legends, we would still accept the creation of the world by God as the inspired truth conveyed by those chapters. We would not, however, have to accept the Genesis description as a scientific account of the origins of the world. It could be an account that the author learned from the legendary imaginings of his people and of other peoples and that he used to convey the truth he was really interested in, namely, that God is sovereign of all and creator of the universe. Thus there is no contradiction between acceptance of inspiration and acceptance of different literary genres, or forms, or styles in the Bible.”

Here are excerpts from a response to the comment “Surely it scandalizes people to hear that not everything told us in the Bible happened literally”:

“I suspect that by osmosis from elementary and high school education, people have already realized that parts of the Bible are not literal accounts of factual history.

“Sometimes, because they fear scandal, some would say that it is better to treat a nonhistorical narrative as history and thus cause no problem. That is a dangerous misconception. We endanger acceptance of divine truth when we teach anybody something that by our best scholarly standards is thought to be false. Sooner or later, those who hear the preacher treating the first chapters of Genesis as if they were science, will come to realize the falsity of that presentation and, as a consequence, may reject the inspired divine truth contained in those chapters.”

Here is Brown on the life of Jesus as recounted in the Gospels:

“It is very important to emphasize that his were the words and deeds of one who lived as a Galilean Jew in the first third of the first century; his manner of speaking, the problems he faced, his vocabulary and outlook were those of a Galilean Jew of that specific time. Many of the failures to understand Jesus and the misapplications of his thoughts stem from the fact that people remove him from space and time and imagine that he was dealing with issues that he never encountered.”

Those who proclaimed him, Brown tells us, made “no attempt to report with simple, uncolored factuality what Jesus had said and done…. The preaching was a combination of eye-witness and non-eyewitness narration….

“If Jesus was a Galilean Jew of the first third of the first century, the Gospel was preached in cities to urban Jews and Gentiles; it was preached eventually in Greek, a language that Jesus did not normally speak in Galilee (if he spoke it at all). All of this meant a good deal of translation in the broader sense of the term, and this translation designed to make the message both intelligible and alive for new audiences was part of the development of the Gospel tradition …. Most likely none of the evangelists was himself an eyewitness of the ministry of Jesus…. They had heard about Jesus from others…. Each evangelist has ordered the material according to his understanding of Jesus and his desire to portray Jesus in a way that would meet the spiritual needs of the community to which he was addressing the Gospel. Thus the individual evangelists emerge as full authors of the Gospels, shaping, developing, pruning the tradition, and as full theologians, orienting that tradition to a particular goal.”

Brown, like other critical scholars, accepts the fact that some of the letters once attributed by Christians to Paul “were probably written by his disciples, in his name, even after his death”:

“Does not inspiration guarantee that when an epistle has the name of Paul or Peter, that figure wrote it? Absolutely not, any more than the fact that Moses is said to have written the Pentateuch guarantees that Moses wrote it. There is a convention of attributing works appropriately to a great authority. Moses was remembered as one who received the Law, and therefore legal material was attributed to Moses as its author. Solomon was remembered as a wise man, and therefore wisdom material was attributed to Solomon. David was remembered as a singer of psalms; and therefore one can speak of the psalter of David, even though some of the psalms are specifically not attributed to David in that psalter. Similarly, after Paul had died and disciples in his tradition wished to instruct people about what Paul’s mind would have been in facing new situations, they felt free to write under the mantle of Paul. As I have insisted previously, writing is a human activity; and divine inspiration respects the conventions of that activity.”

Brown recognizes that Roman Catholics “came latterly into the acceptance of a modern critical approach to the New Testament and to the Gospels. Yet, as often happens, when after prolonged hesitation we Catholics accept new approaches, we proceed with an official church statement of our position. Protestants were using these methods long before they were accepted by Catholics.”

Since the mid-1950s, the Roman Pontifical Biblical Commission has permitted Catholics full freedom to engage in modern critical study of the Bible, so long as the interpretation does not touch on faith and morals. As applied, this allows practically unlimited latitude. For example, in 1964, the Pontifical Biblical Commission issued a document on “The Historical Truth of the Gospels” which leads to the conclusion, in Brown’s words, “that the Gospels are not literal accounts of the ministry of Jesus.” On the other hand, neither do the Gospels “report material simply that it might be remembered.” A nice balance.

Brown discusses all the thorny questions from the immaculate conception and the virginal birth to Jesus’ miracles and the resurrection. In the end, however, he makes a larger point: A literalist approach is not simply difficult to defend; it deprives us of the deeper meaning and significance to be found in the texts, the true message of the inspiration. Too often, a literalist interpretation misses the whole point of the text.

Q Thomas Reader

John S. Kloppenborg, Marvin W. Meyer, Stephen J. Patterson and Michael G. Steinhauser
(Sonoma, CA: Polebridge Press, 1990) 176 pp., $14.95

The abbreviation Q stands for the German word Quelle (source) and is used by New Testament interpreters to designate the postulated Greek written source for roughly 230 verses in Matthew and Luke that are parallel to each other but are not found in the Gospel of Mark. It includes such passages as Luke 3:7–9 and Matthew 3:7–10 (John the Baptist’s “brood of vipers” speech), where 60 of the 64 Greek words are identical in both Gospels. From such coincidence, scholars have postulated the existence of Q, even though no one has ever seen such a source.

Q contains sayings and parables of Jesus, but hardly any narrative material. So it has often been called the “Sayings-Source” of the Synoptic Gospels. It seems to have been 011composed about the same time as the Gospel of Mark (roughly 65 A.D.), not “prior to the composition of the Synoptic Gospels,” as Steinhauser in the introduction would have us believe.

The reader should realize that not all interpreters are agreed on what constitutes Q. By definition it should include the verses of Luke and Matthew that are parallel and are not in Mark. But at times, some verses of Luke that are not in Matthew are strangely included in this version of Q because of their surrounding verses in Q. Thus Luke 6:32–33 corresponds to Matthew 5:46–47, and Luke 6:35b corresponds to Matthew 5:45; but Kloppenborg also includes Luke 6:34–35a, which—although embedded in verses assigned to Q—has no parallel in Matthew.

The apocryphal Gospel of Thomas has been preserved in three Greek fragments discovered in the 1890s and in a Coptic translation preserved among the Nag Hammadi Codices discovered in Egypt in 1945. This gospel contains 114 sayings ascribed to Jesus, usually introduced with the words, “Jesus said.” Thus, like Q, Thomas is a Sayings-Source. The Coptic text contains the full form of the gospel and represents a later reworking of the Greek form, composed in the second century A.D. at the earliest, not “in the last three decades of the first century,” as Patterson, who writes the introduction to the Coptic gospel, suggests.

The Gospel of Thomas contains some sayings of Jesus that are close to those of the canonical Gospels, some that present his sayings in a different (at times more primitive) form and some that attribute to him utterances of a heavily gnostic nature. The gospel begins, “These are the secret sayings that the living Jesus spoke and Didymus Judas Thomas recorded.” The Gospel of Thomas is thus attributed to the Thomas known from John 14:22 as “Judas, not the Iscariot,” that is, Judas the “twin,” since Greek Didymos and Aramaic TeÕoÆmaµÕ mean “twin.” This tradition, rooted in early Syrian Christianity, would attribute the collection of sayings to Jesus’ “twin.”

Because both Q and the Gospel of Thomas are sayings sources, one naturally tends to compare them, and that is the reason why the authors of this book have so presented this valuable comparative study of the texts. A good introduction is provided for both Q and the Gospel of Thomas, preceding the texts of each (of Q only in English, but of Thomas in Coptic and English). This book will enable the student of these texts to study them in a comparative way.

Luke the Theologian: Aspects of His Teaching

Joseph A. Fitzmyer, S.J.
(New York and Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1989) 250 pp., $11.95

If you have some introduction to current biblical scholarship, this is a very good book for you. The prospective reader should keep in mind, however, that the book’s subtitle is serious. This book is only about certain aspects of Luke’s theology; it is not a thorough treatment of Lucan theology.

The author is one of the most highly respected biblical scholars alive today. Recently retired from the Catholic University of America, he has long been known for his careful and detailed studies of the New Testament, of the Dead Sea Scrolls and of Aramaic-language literature. (Aramaic is an ancient language closely akin to Hebrew that is used in parts of the Old Testament as well as in other Jewish literature of about the time of Jesus. It is the presumed primary language of Jesus and his disciples.) Fitzmyer is especially recognized as a skillful linguist. Most recently he published a monumental commentary on the Gospel of Luke,^b which will likely remain a standard work in the study of that Gospel for a generation.

This new volume, originally a series of lectures delivered at Oxford University in 1987, contains several studies that further examine some aspects of Lucan theology that could not be treated completely in the commentary or that needed further clarification. These aspects are the authorship of Luke-Acts (that is, the Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles; written by the same author), the Lucan infancy narrative, Mary in Lucan salvation history, John the Baptist as precursor of the Lord, discipleship in the Lucan writings, Satan and demons in Luke-Acts, the Jewish people and the Mosaic law in Luke-Acts and Jesus’ statement on the cross: “Today you shall be with me in Paradise” (Luke 23:43).

Persons primarily concerned with the meaning of the New Testament for their lives are likely to be most interested in the chapters on discipleship and on the Mosaic law, since these chapters address directly the implications of Luke-Acts for Christian living. The other chapters deal either with specific problems of understanding in the interpretation of Luke-Acts or, in the case of Jesus’ saying on the cross, with the way in which the author of Luke-Acts understood Jesus’ death. The reader who does not have much knowledge of the particular viewpoint of Luke-Acts can use this book as a convenient introduction to some of the problems in understanding this important portion of the New Testament and to how those problems may be solved. The reader who is already well informed about the issues will still profit from Fitzmyer’s clarification of these specific points.

Fitzmyer is both a clear thinker and a careful writer. Thus his book is easy to read, and his discussions are easy to follow. He repeatedly makes clear his awareness of how the tradition progressed from Jesus to the Gospel accounts, distinguishing what happened originally (Stage I), the earliest oral tradition about Jesus (Stage II) and the accounts as selected and presented by the authors of the Gospels (Stage III).

It is not surprising, but it is disappointing, to see that Fitzmyer continues to maintain that Luke, the companion of Paul, was the author of Luke-Acts. This is the traditional view, of course, and Fitzmyer relies heavily on the tradition in his explanation; but a number of scholars scrutinizing Luke-Acts recently have tended to become more and more persuaded that it is probably rather later than has traditionally been thought, perhaps as late as the early second century. It is also not surprising, but equally disappointing, to see that Fitzmyer continues to endorse the position of Norwegian scholar Jakob Jervell, who has asserted that Luke proposes a divided-Israel scheme of Jewish salvation, with some Jews accepting the Christian message and others not. According to Jervell, Luke and Acts seek to show that the gospel was first offered to all “Israel,” and that some Jews became Christians, while others refused to do so. Only when Christianity had won all the Jews that it could, according to Jervell’s interpretation, did it turn to gentiles. This interpretation means that the mission to gentiles, according to Luke-Acts, follows from Jewish acceptance of the gospel, not from Jewish rejection. Before Jervell, however, the normal view had been that the gentile mission in Luke-Acts followed from general Jewish rejection of the gospel. Furthermore, some recent studies have shown that Luke takes a rather harsher view of 036Jews generally than the divided-Israel explanation would imply. For example, the speeches of the major characters in Acts (Peter, Stephen, Paul) seem rather to condemn all Jews indiscriminately for killing Jesus and for rejecting the gospel, and Acts ends on a note of heightened condemnation of Jews: “Let it be known to you [Jews], then, that this salvation of God has been sent to the gentiles. They will listen” (Acts 28:28).

I found the concluding discussion of Jesus’ words on the cross disappointing. I began reading that chapter expecting Fitzmyer to propose an answer to the problem of whether the thief who would that day be “with Jesus in Paradise” would still be raised at the coming resurrection, but he did not deal with that issue.

These disagreements, however, do not detract from the overall contribution of the book. All of us always have something to learn from Joseph Fitzmyer.

Living Waters: Myth, History, and Politics of the Dead Sea

Barbara Kreiger
(New York: Continuum, 1988) 226 pp., $24.95

Ever since the Middle Ages, travelers have been “motivated by religious fervor, scientific curiosity, or personal eccentricity” to visit the Holy Land and make the extraordinary spiritual and physical descent—4,000 feet down in the space of only 20 miles—from Jerusalem to the Dead Sea. The reputation of the Dead Sea (the lowest place on earth, about 1,332 feet below sea level) was established by the sinners of Sodom and Gomorrah, and one would be hard pressed to find a more fitting location for the biblical events concerning these two debauched cities. During the Middle Ages, frightful myths and superstitions circulated about the Dead Sea area. Travelers even in the last century, whether engaged in scientific study, or in search of literary material, dwelled on the area’s over-whelming desolation. The modern reader of the Bible will easily associate this landscape with the ecological catastrophe that converted the well-watered, fair and fertile valley of Siddim into “a facsimile of Hell.” But wait. In the words of Zechariah, “Behold, a day of the Lord is coming, when … living waters shall go out from Jerusalem … half of them toward the Dead Sea …” (Zechariah 14:1, 8).

Barbara Kreiger enlightens the reader about both the past and the possible future of this fascinating region. She provides a clear explanation of the natural history of the area and narrates its human history from 12,000 years ago (the birth of civilization) to the present, using entertaining quotes from the works of novelists and travelers. The story is brought up to date with an account of the history and technology of the Dead Sea potash works, an industry that is altering the appearance of the area, but which could also encourage Israeli and Jordanian economic and political cooperation.

This short book can be easily read in to afternoon for a casual but informative introduction to the historical, cultural and economic landscape of the Dead Sea. Anyone planning to visit the Dead Sea area will want to refer to this book for its insight into one of the world’s most extraordinary landscapes.

Biblical Plants

Irene Jacob
(Pittsburgh: Rodef Shalom Press [4905 5th Ave., Pittsburgh, PA 15213], 1989) 60 pp., $5.00

A guide to the biblical botanical garden on the grounds of a Pittsburgh synagogue, this handbook will interest even those unable to visit the garden itself. Its entries range from the acacia to zayit (Hebrew for olive). Irene Jacob, the garden’s director and the author of the entry “Flora” in the Anchor Bible Dictionary, has here given the English, Latin and ancient and modern Hebrew names for each plant listed, together with a description of the plant’s history and the uses to which it has been put. A black and white illustration and a relevant biblical verse accompany each description.

This excerpt on the uses of garlic (Allium sativum; shum in Hebrew) is typical: “Bulb: Food: Fresh, dried or powdered. Medicinal: Juice used for intestinal infections, lowering blood pressure, to counteract arteriosclerosis, respiratory ailments, snake bites. Ancient Israelites used the cloves for treatment of melancholy and hypochondria. National Cancer Institute files report of lower cancer incidents in countries where a great amount of garlic is eaten, such as France and Bulgaria. ‘We remember the fish…and the garlic.’ Numbers 11:5.”

Visitors to Pittsburgh between June 1 and September 15 may wish to visit the Rodef Shalom garden to view the plants in person and to enjoy their setting: A cascading waterfall, a bubbling stream and an artificial desert approximate the original home of the plants on view.

Pronouncing Bible Names

W. Murray Severance
(Nashville: Holman Bible Publishers, 1985) 87 pp., $6.95

Harper’s Bible Pronunciation Guide

Edited by William O. Walker
(San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1989) 170 pp., $15.95

Both of these books have the same aim: to help American readers pronounce the sometimes tongue-twisting names found in the English versions of the Bible. Both use simplified transliteration systems that have the lay person in mind. Under Aaron, for example, Severance lists “ER’n” and “AIR’n,” while Harper’s gives “air’uhn.” Neither attempts to give the original Hebrew or Greek pronounciation; if you needed to know that the modern-day Hebrew speaker pronounces the name of Moses’ brother as “ahhah-ROHN,” you would have to look elsewhere.

Harper’s volume costs twice as much but gives you double for your money. It has more than 7,000 entries, while Severance has just under 3,500. The difference comes from Severance listing only proper names; Harper’s has both proper and common names, as well as a section on nonbiblical terms related to Bible study (eschatology and hermeneutics, for example).

Harper’s also has the advantage of a larger format, allowing for less cramped pages. Lastly, the bottom of every pair of pages in Harper’s lists a pronunciation guide to its transliteration system. You need only glance down to learn that the first “i” in “ni-hel’uh-mit” (for Nehalamite) should be pronounced as the “i” in “it,” while the second, italicized “i” should be pronounced as the “y” in “sky.”

037

The Religion of the Landless: The Social Context of the Babylonian Exile

Daniel L. Smith
(New York: Meyer-Stone Books, Crossroad, 1989) xvii + 249 pp.,$39.95 hardcover; $19.95 paperback

In recent years biblical scholars have turned increasingly to the methods and insights of sociology as a way of gaining fresh purchase on familiar texts. We are asking new questions, not so much about great “men and movements” as about the common people and the social, economic and environmental factors that shape the destinies of whole communities over a long period of time. Much of this new work has focused on the earliest periods of Israel’s history.

Now, however, Daniel Smith has broken fresh ground in this revision of his Oxford University doctoral dissertation by turning to the period of the Jew’s exile in Babylon in the sixth century B.C.E. What are the effects on a given society of such an enforced mass movement of population and do such effects show up in the relevant biblical texts? These are the questions that Smith sets out to answer.

His method and approach are straight-forward; indeed, as Norman Gottwald points out in his forward, “The salient contribution of the present work is a simple methodological maneuver, so obvious that one wonders why it had not been done long before.” Smith selects four examples (from a much larger possible number) of mass deportations in recent history whose effects on the societies concerned have been analyzed by others in some detail. The four are: the Japanese-American internment in World War II in the United States; black slavery societies transported from Africa to the New World; the establishment of native homelands under the apartheid laws of South Africa; and the movement of the residents of Bikini Island, which the United States required so nuclear weapons could be tested in the area.

Although there are many differences between these four groups, Smith detects a number of features in common in the way the communities responded, known technically as “mechanisms for survival.” They include structural adaptation, the rise of new leadership in the period of crisis, ritual behavior as a means of preserving cultural and ethnic identity and the development of hero stories to illustrate models of behavior. These are all examined and documented in the first part of the book.

In the second part, Smith turns to the biblical texts related to the Exilic Period. This is a period which many scholars have tended to write off as witnessing a decline from the great religious heights of the immediately preceding centuries. In finding parallels here with the more modern examples, Smith is able to restore an appreciation for the value of what was going on at the time. This is the truly significant aspect of Smith’s work.

An excellent example is his handling of the final stages in the compilation of the more off-putting parts of the ritual laws in Leviticus, such as the food laws in chapter 11 (Smith follows many scholars in dating the final edition of this work to the Exilic Period). This fits in well with the recent work of more conventional scholarship, which has also moved strongly to rehabilitate the importance of this once-neglected field.

Some of the details of this second part are more technical in nature (for instance, the discussion of the development of the “father’s house,” or family unit, as an indicator of how the society adapted to changing circumstances, and the political status of the province of Judah to which the exiles returned), but Smith does his best to make the 038discussion accessible to a wide circle of readers. The result is a great success—not because one needs to agree with all of his conclusions (I don’t!), nor because many of his treatments of biblical texts have not been suggested piecemeal before others, nor because he is always fully up to date in his discussions (his selection of secondary literature is frequently a bit outdated and even quirky). The fact remains, rather, that he does not just make us look at old problems in a fresh light but rather transports us to a new world with different horizons where we view the landscape from a wholly new vantage point. And we hope that others will follow him there to develop and refine his initial survey.

The final chapter strikes out on a different path. Writing with some considerable passion, Smith outlines what he calls “a contemporary theology of exile.” This will make uncomfortable but challenging reading both for Zionists and for contemporary American Christians. To summarize his manifesto for a “dissenting theology of the Church of Babylon,” informed by the experiences of those living in the “fourth world” of the disenfranchised, would be to empty his presentation of its rhetorical force and to neutralize its impact. (Critical readers can turn back to Gottwald’s foreword for a dash of balancing considerations.) There is only one thing to be done with a chapter like this—read it!

The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia

Geoffrey W. Bromiley, General Editor
(Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 4 vol., 1979–1988) 4,534 pp., 1,488 photos, 26 color relief maps, $159.80 for the set

A classic reference work first published in 1915, The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia had not been revised since 1929. New discoveries in biblical studies since that time—the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Nag Hammadi codices and the results of extensive archaeological excavations, to name a few—required that this new reversion be conducted on a massive scale, a fact reflected in the 10-year span of publication for these four volumes. The result is, in the words of general editor Geoffrey Bromiley, “to all intents and purposes a new, or at least a completely reconstructed, encyclopedia.”

Hundreds of contributing scholars represent a broad range of denominational perspectives. Although the contributors have been given the freedom “to express their views on debatable matters,” Bromiley says, this edition “is still one ‘which reverently accepts a true revelation of God in the history of Israel and in Christ.’ ” Bromiley believes the new edition is “at once more scholarly and more conservative than its predecessor.” It will undoubtedly be the encyclopedia of choice for evangelical and conservative faith-communities.

The volumes’ binding is durable. Hundreds of well-reproduced black-and-white photos illustrate each volume. Some of the 168 color photos, however, are a little blurred.

Every name of a person or place in the Bible has an entry, and many biblical terms pertaining to theological and ethical issues are covered as well. The more significant names and terms in the Apocrypha are also included. The volumes contain articles on the transmission, study and interpretation of the biblical text. Although based on the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, the Encyclopedia contains cross-reference entries to the forms used in the King James Version and in the New English Bible.

08The Book of J
Harold Bloom
Translated from the Hebrew by David Rosenberg
(New York: Grove-Weidenfeld, 1990) 335 pp., $21.95