Bible Books

013

Noah: The Person and the story in history and tradition

Lloyd R. Bailey
(Columbia, SC: Univ. of South Carolina, 1989) 243 pp., $26.95 ($13.95 in paperback)

Joseph and his family: A literary study

W. Lee Humphreys
(Columbia, SC: Univ. of South Carolina, 1988) 230 pp., $24.95

When I heard of the series “Personalities of the Old Testament,” to which these books belong, I was initially very skeptical. After all, how much can we know about such figures as Noah and Joseph, who according to biblical chronology lived over three millenia ago? Furthermore, the Bible itself tends not to be interested in “personalities” in the same way we are; it is a much more didactic book than the contemporary genre of biography, My initial reservations were quickly allayed, however, as these books do not actually deal with biblical personalities, but with biblical units and traditions. These excellent volumes concerning the biblical accounts of Noah and Joseph are especially well suited to the educated lay person for whom they are intended, because they accurately and interestingly convey the intricacies of biblical scholarship.

The Noah and Joseph units present different problems, and are treated by the respective authors using different methodologies. The Noah unit, generally considered to be a composite text, is explicated using source-criticism, the theory that the Pentateuch has been woven together from pre-existing written documents, called “sources.’ In addition, it parallels several Mesopotamian accounts and presents an ideal opportunity to discuss the relationship between the Bible and its surrounding cultures. Finally, the recent searches for Noah’s ark depend on the discipline of biblical geography. Noah successfully introduces these three disciplines and shows how several approaches are used together to exposit a biblical text.

In contrast, the salient feature of the Joseph story is its literary merit, and this is the focus of Humphreys’ book. When read in conjunction, these two works offer the reader insight into the older, more classical ways of studying biblical texts—such as historical geography, source criticism and the Bible within its ancient Near Eastern framework—as well as the newer literary study of the Bible that has developed within the last two decades.

Bailey’s book, Noah: The Person arid the Story in History and Tradition, is a fine summary of the standard academic position concerning the study of the Pentateuch in general and the consensus of scholarly understanding of Genesis 5–9 in a particular. Each chapter presents a complete argument dealing with the biblical flood story. For example, chapter 2, “Flood Stories in the Ancient Near East,” shows the similarities and differences between the biblical flood and the flood narratives from Mesopotamia and suggests, perhaps overcautiously, that the biblical account is dependent on the Mesopotamian. Chapter 4, “Has Noah’s Ark Survived?” contains a long section about the location of the Mountains of Ararat, the landing place of the ark according to Genesis 8:4. A fine introduction to biblical geography, this chapter gives one of the best discussions I have read regarding how ancient sites are identified. Chapter 5, “The Primeval Story (Genesis 1–11),” provides a convincing introduction to source-criticism. Useful charts outline the differences between the sources, and a perceptive critique argues against those scholars who advocate the unitary authorship of the unit. The final chapter, “So What Does It All Mean?’ deals with the different concepts people have in mind when they ask what a text means, and with what the biblical text may have meant in ancient Israel. Bailey is concerned both with the meaning of the separate sources in their original setting and with the meaning of the final edited text in its historical setting.

The Noah volume might have been more detailed in certain areas. In discussing source-criticism, it might have paid more attention to the question of whether the later sources knew the earlier ones and to how the editor, or redactor, accomplished his work. The final chapter on meaning might have discussed mythology in general and the question of what a myth, as opposed to a historical account, means. Finally, the book’s title, Noah: The Person and the Story in History and Tradition, is misleading; it led me to expect a discussion of Noah as he appears in Jewish and Christian post-biblical literature, including in the Dead Sea Scrolls, but this is lacking. These are, however, relatively minor shortcomings for this interesting book, written from a balanced, sober perspective.

Humphreys’ Joseph and His Family: A Literary Study closely adheres to its title. It has two central parts: “The Poetics of the Joseph Novella” and “The Development of the Joseph Novella.” The part on poetics defends the definition of the Joseph story (Genesis 37–50) as a novella, a genre that stands in between a short story and a novel. It then analyzes the story in terms of plot, characterization and rhetorical devices. The section concludes with a chapter on the novella’s theological vision. The second part of the book, “The Development of the Joseph Novella,” traces the story from its Egyptian background through its 014integration into the Torah. Humphreys admits that this section is more hypothetical (p. xii), but it is also more interesting.

Many readers enjoy reading the Joseph story and have remarked on its tremendous dramatic power. The first part of this book helps us understand why it has such power over readers. This section is a fine introduction to questions that biblical studies has borrowed from literary studies, especially through such scholars as Robert Alter and Adele Berlin. These questions may be applied to most biblical and nonbiblical narratives. Humphreys concludes this section by considering the “theological vision” of the Joseph novella and suggests that the work does not offer a simple theology. Both his reading of the biblical material and the theological conclusions derived from it are sensitive and enjoyable.

The second part of the book gives the reader a sense of how biblical scholars attempt to understand a literary work’s prehistory. Humphreys suggests that the story grew in stages, beginning with chapters 40–41, 47:13–26 and 50:27, which concern the ultimate success of the wise courtier. The story probably originated in the late second millennium B.C.E. in Syria-Palestine (p. 171), but its author “was to some degree knowledgeable about practices and customs of Egypt” (p. 165). In its further development, the story shows little real knowledge of Egyptian practice and reflects an anti-Egyptian bias (chapter 9). Humphreys concludes the book with “The Joseph Novella and the Torah,” probably the least successful of the chapters.

I disagree with several of Humphreys’ approaches and claims. The entire first section of the book, dealing with literary matters, treats the biblical text as a modern text, tacitly assuming that the ancient Israelite composed literature and reacted to it in the same way that a 20th-century American would. This needs further proof. Unfortunately, the chapter on the “theological vision” does not examine Joseph’s theology in conjunction with the theologies of Israelite wisdom literature, which likewise often presume that God works behind the scenes. Wisdom literature is treated predominantly in the second part of the book. Finally, Humphreys downplays the possibility that the Joseph story depicts, at some level of tradition, the relationship between the northern and southern kingdoms of Israel and Judah, as reflected through the brothers Judah (the south) and Joseph (the north). His rejection of this connection seems too hasty.

These two books could have been a bit more self-reflective about the methodologies they use, and could have attempted to break more new ground. However, they are both solid and readable products of serious biblical scholarship. Furthermore, they perform an important service by allowing the reader to glimpse behind the text, to see how biblical personalities were shaped.

New documents illustrating early Christianity, 4 vols.

G. H. R. Horsley
(North Ryde, NSW, Australia: Ancient History Documentary Research Centre, Macquarie University, 1981–1987) 156, 224, 182 and 297 pp., respectively

This series is, as its subtitle says, “A Review of Greek Inscriptions and Papyri” designed for New Testament scholars, teachers and students. The purpose of the volumes is to make accessible various texts of philological and historical interest which had been published previously in scholarly journals and monographs. So far we have volumes for texts published during the years 1976 to 1979. These are texts and inscriptions, mainly from the first four centuries, that are related in some way to New Testament background, to Judaism or to the early Church. Each volume includes Greek texts with translation, a listing of significant Greek words from the documents that also appear in the New Testament and that shed light on their meaning and use there, and fragments of Biblical books. The entry for each document has the Greek text, followed by a translation then an identification of date, locale and authorship, and finally a commentary. The texts themselves may be as brief as one line or as lengthy as two pages. Some of the examples are fascinating windows into everyday life: “A Nursing contract” which provides background to Paul’s reference to himself as “gentle as a nurse”; an epitaph describing “charity motivated by piety”; letters from early Christians; burial inscriptions of Christian bankers; and a document making provisions for a widow. Unfortunately for the general reader, these nuggets may be too sparse among the lengthy technical discussions.

Noah: The Person and the story in history and tradition
Lloyd R. Bailey
(Columbia, SC: Univ. of South Carolina, 1989) 243 pp., $26.95 ($13.95 in paperback)

Joseph and his family: A literary study