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Bedouin Poetry from Sinai and the Negev: Mirror of a Cult
Clinton Bailey
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991) 473 pp., $125.00.
The patriarchs of the Old Testament may or may not have been historical figures, but this much at least is certain: Their way of life is described in an entirely authentic fashion. We know this above all because we can compare them with the modern nomadic peoples of the Middle East. For this reason the Bedouin will always be of special interest to students of the Bible.
One striking characteristic of the Bedouin is their gift for every kind of verbal activity: story-telling, poetry, argument and litigation—all are developed to an exceptional degree. Modern Bedouin poetry is oral poetry, composed by mostly illiterate men and women in one or another of the Bedouin Arabic dialects. It is truly the “mirror of a culture,” Since the 19th century, many of these poems have been written down and published, and some have been translated into European languages.
The main part of Dr. Bailey’s new book consists of a collection of 113 Bedouin poems, given both in English translation and in the original Arabic. The ordinary reader will, I think, enjoy browsing through the work, and may here and there find items that cast light on the scriptures. Such a reader should be warned, however, that the poems have been translated very freely (mostly into verse). Scholars will feel toward Dr. Bailey a mixture of gratitude and exasperation. Exasperation because the often difficult Arabic texts are presented in an idiosyncratic fashion and without adequate linguistic annotation; gratitude because these poems would in all likelihood be lost to posterity if Dr. Bailey had not collected them, and because he has wherever possible identified the author of each poem and the circumstances in which it was composed.
The Cambridge History of Judaism, Volume II: The Hellenistic Age
Edited by W. D. Davies and Louis Finkelstein
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989), 738 pp., $89.50
Despite its name, the second volume of the Cambridge History of Judaism is not a history of Judaism. It certainly live up to the standards set by its predecessor. This latest volume, devoted to Jews and Judaism in the Hellenistic age (from the conquests of Alexander the Great in 334 to the arrival of the Romans in 63 B.C.E.), fails to treat such important texts and topics as the Qumran scrolls and the Hellenism of the Jews in the Maccabean period. Although many individual chapters are fine, several are weak and all are out of date. Even worse, some chapters are conceived in theological rather than historical terms. All in all, the volume is a disappointment.
This volume could have been published in almost its current form in 1979; why it had to wait ten years is a question only the editors can answer. The value of some chapters is vitiated by their tardy appearance. For example, Mathias Delcor’s survey of the Jewish literature of the Hellenistic period is rendered obsolete by several excellent up-to-date surveys (Jewish Literature between the Bible and the Mishnah by George Nickelsburg [Fortress, 1981]and Jewish Writings of the Second Temple Period, ed, Michael Stone [Fortress, 1984]).
Perhaps the two finest chapters in this volume are “Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek in the Hellenistic age” by James Barr and “The growth of anti-Judaism or the Greek attitude towards Jews” by Emilio Gabba. The chapters by H. L. Ginsberg on the Book of Daniel and Jonathan Goldstein on the Hasmonean revolt and the Hasmonean dynasty are adventurous, ingenious and speculative.
The weakest and most problematic chapters are those by volume co-editor Louis Finkelstein (“The men of the Great Synagogue” and “The Pharisaic leadership after the Great Synagogue”) and Mathias Delcor (“Jewish literature in Hebrew and Aramaic in the Greek era” and “The apocrypha and pseudepigrapha of the Hellenistic period”). Ignoring the methodological insights of Jacob Neusner and his school, Finkelstein blithely adduces rabbinic texts to document events that allegedly took place centuries before the texts were written. The total arbitrariness of Finkelstein’s method is striking. He believes that rabbinic texts preserve traditions of the Hellenistic period and that he can identify those traditions, arrange them in historical sequence and interpret them on no basis other than his own intuition and (considerable) ingenuity. This sort of scholarship will find few defenders today. Finkelstein admits that his viewpoint is at variance 009with that of other scholars. But the Cambridge History of Judaism, if it is to be a standard reference work, is no place for eccentricities and oddities.
Delcor’s chapters suffer from another problem altogether: Christian bias. For example, a section on the influence of Ben Sira ends with the reassurance that “In respite of his limitations, Christian readers may none the less feel at home with Ben Sira” (p. 422). This and other similar sentiments have no place in a scholarly book on the history of Judaism; they take us back to the “bad old days” when Christians scholars denigrated the subject they sought to study. While Delcor is entitled to his owns beliefs, the editors should not have allowed these inappropriate remarks to appear.
A startling omission from this volume is a discussion of the Hellenism of the Jews in the Maccabean period. In his two chapters, Martin Hengel argues that Judaism in pre-Maccabean period was Hellenized to a great degree, but that the Hellenization process was arrested by the Maccabees. However, the late Elias Bickerman, author of The Jews in the Greek Age (Harvard Univ. Press, 1988), demonstrated that the Maccabees were not “anti-Hellenistic” and that they, too, were Hellenized.
This omission is symptomatic of a much larger problem: The volume fails to integrate the discrete bodies of evidence that it surveys. Archaeology, Jewish literature, numismatics, the languages of the Jews—each subject is treated separately. There is no chapter on Jewish cultural and religious developments in the period. At no point does the volume convey the importance of the Hellenistic period in the history of Judaism, the far-reaching implications of the Maccabean struggle, the religious and social innovations of the second century B.C.E. and so on. The term “Judaism” is first attested in a work of this period (2 Maccabees); I would argue that the very notion of Judaism is also first attested in this period. But the Cambridge History of Judaism volume 2 is oblivious to all this.
It is too late to hope that the publication of volumes 3 and 4 will not be delayed, I have a chapter scheduled for inclusion in volume 4 that I wrote in 1982. But it is not too late to hope that the editors will exercise greater diligence in constructing the final two volumes.
Bedouin Poetry from Sinai and the Negev: Mirror of a Cult
Clinton Bailey
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991) 473 pp., $125.00.
