Bible Books

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Cricket Without a Ball

Introduction to Rabbinic Literature

Jacob Neusner
(New York: Anchor Bible Reference Library, Doubleday, 1994) 720 pp., $40.00

“While I have enjoyed the work required for every one of the five hundred books I have published…accomplishing this work of summary…has given me the greatest satisfaction…it marks a definitive closure; I have accomplished my goals.”

An introduction to rabbinic literature? Or a summary of Jacob Neusner’s oeuvre? This volume does provide a description, with sample passages, of all the “classics” of rabbinic literature—or to be more precise, of early rabbinic literature, that is, from the third to the seventh century C.E.—the Mishnah, Tosefta, Talmud of the Land of Israel, Talmud of Babylonia and the early Midrashim. And yet, this description focuses almost entirely on their logical patterns and rhetorical forms, that is, only on Neusner’s own research.

This is unfortunate, because many of the most fascinating aspects of rabbinic literature, such as text, language, historical background, literary formation, medieval commentary and transmission, are largely, if not entirely, ignored. Contents, above all, are given a secondary, subordinate position in this volume. Neusner’s form analysis can be so abstract and detached from substantial textual evidence that it is often difficult to follow: It is like playing cricket without a ball.

Form analysis, however, leads Neusner to what might be termed a general theory of the nature of early rabbinic literature. Much to his credit, Neusner refuses to present the “scholarly consensus”—it is doubtful, indeed, whether such a concept exists at all. On the other hand, he gives no indication as to what might be contentious about his views, nor as to where others may disagree. It is not my intention, in the paragraphs that follow, to fill this gap and engage in a critique of Neusner’s arguments. This has been done by others, and the ensuing debates, usually ad hominem, have not proved helpful to the history of scholarship. I only wish to point out to potential readers some aspects of Neusner’s theory that should be treated at least with caution.

Neusner’s interpretation of rabbinic literature is predicated upon a single, axiomatic notion: In contrast with the first century C.E., where Neusner stresses the diversity of what he terms “Judaisms” (plural), from the third century onwards Neusner appears to conceive only of a single “Judaism”—a radical, somewhat contradictory shift that is never satisfactorily explained. It is from “Judaism” that rabbinic works are considered to have emerged: The Mishnah was its philosophy, the Mekhilta its encyclopedia, and so on. These works are characterized, moreover, as “canonical”: Together they form “the canon of Judaism,” having been “selected by the consensus of the sages or the faithful as authoritative.”

But who were these sages, these faithful? I do not know. I doubt that at any one time before the later middle ages the works anthologized in this volume were ever joined together as a “community of texts” and “canonized” by any single group or society. And what does Neusner mean by “Judaism”? Is it really Judaism, a reified, monolithic entity, that produced rabbinic literature—or should we not better say, on the contrary, that rabbinic works eventually constituted what we now call Judaism?

The monolithic notions of “canon” and “Judaism” have the effect of masking the considerable variety of rabbinic literature. Rabbinic literature, alias “Judaism,” is treated here as a single entity that was formulated in evolutionary stages, neatly periodized as 200 C.E., 400 C.E. and 600 C.E., and of which the Talmud of Babylonia—Judaism’s comprehensive and all-encompassing statement—constituted the culmination. This teleological, all-embracing scheme, which Neusner calls in one place Hegelian, is not only historically suspect but also leads to an unwarranted conflation of early rabbinic sources. Thus, because the Talmud of the Land of Israel is seen only as an evolutionary step towards the Talmud of Babylonia, it is described exclusively in terms of its similarity with the latter, without accounting for its enduring, distinctive traits.

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The notion of the “canon of Judaism” also accounts for Neusner’s tendency to exaggerate the uniformity of each of the Talmuds, and more generally, to define the “topical program” of each rabbinic work in terms of a single, convenient catchword. Again, these catchwords must be treated with caution. The idea that the Mishnah is a “philosophy” is certainly debatable; even according to Neusner’s criteria, the Mishnah would be better and more naturally described as a law book. To some extent the characterization of this document as a “philosophy” represents an attempt to play down its pragmatic and mundane concerns, and thus in effect to etherealize its contents. The same tendency is visible in the context of the Talmud of Babylonia, in which the goal according to Neusner is “meeting God in mind and in intellect,” or of the Sifra, in which the goal is to “enter the mind of God…discerning how God’s mind worked”—a theological interpretation of legal, discursive and exegetical writings that is actually far from demonstrated.

One more point. Neusner’s books are notoriously verbose and hard to read, and this volume is no exception. For a quick reference guide to rabbinic literature, I suggest some alternatives: for instance, Hermann Strack and Günter Stemberger’s Introduction to the Talmud and Midrash, which is quoted in Neusner’s brief bibliographies.

The Origins of Christian Morality

Wayne A. Meeks
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993) 275 pp., $30.00

The Origins of Christian Morality investigates how Christian communities socialized their members to live moral lives. Wayne Meeks, a professor of biblical studies at Yale University, maintains that we cannot understand the process of socialization unless we know something about how early Christian communities took shape. Consequently, he views himself as an “ethnographer” of Christian beginnings, “inquiring about the forms of culture within which the ethical sensibilities of the early Christians have meaning.” His task is “to describe the moral dimensions of the subcultures of several varieties of the early Christian movement, seen within the larger complex culture of the Roman Empire.”

Meeks has produced a number of writings dealing with early Christian morality, especially its social setting and relationship to Greco-Roman moral philosophy (see his The Moral World of the First Christians). This latest work is an ambitious project in which ideas in his earlier books and essays come to fruition.

The Origins of Christian Morality first describes the intimate relationship between morals and community, and then takes up a series of topics that build upon each other. Meeks begins by explaining the moral consequences of conversion to Christianity. Converts, he maintains, were socially dislocated from the society in which they lived. Consequently, it was necessary to resocialize them into a new community of meaning provided by the Christian fellowship. Because their conversion made early Christians aliens in their own cities and households and to the people with whom they were once at home, they developed a love-hate relationship to the world. Some, such as those represented by the Thomas Tradition (exemplified by the Gospel of Thomas), were basically anti-social, while others, such as those represented by the Deutero-Pauline tradition (Colossians, Ephesians, 1-2 Timothy, Titus), began to view the world more positively.

Like any community, Christians had to communicate a sense of moral and ethical obligation to new members. Meeks studies the different forms of language Christians used for ethical obligation (virtue and vice lists, letters, testaments) as well as the rituals they employed to reinforce these obligations (Baptism and the Eucharist).

Meeks frequently notes the similarity between the moral and ethical ideals of the early Christians and their surrounding world. While there are strong family resemblances between the moral teachings of different Christian communities, there is no single or unique Christian morality. Meeks effectively highlights the distinctive ways in which early Christians made new and creative uses of moral traditions deriving from Judaism and the Greco-Roman world. For example, they named the sense of evil they encountered in the world, organized it into a system of moral-ethical rules, and called on believers to lead a life worthy of God. Most importantly, they introduced the sense of an ending to the human story: While sophisticated Romans mocked popular beliefs of punishment after death, the early Christians proclaimed a final, universal judgment. Moreover, the story of Jesus, the crucified and risen Son of God, a story that in many ways subverted conventional moral wisdom, gave early Christians a context for understanding their own moral lives.

Written in a lively and engaging style, this suggestive work opens new vistas for understanding Christian morality. For example, it helps one to appreciate the relationship between morality and community by demonstrating that the moral life is nurtured and 014lived in community. It introduces readers to a broad spectrum of literature that includes Greco-Roman moral philosophy and Gnostic writings, as well as the New Testament, the Apostolic Fathers and the early Apologists.

The great variety of literature upon which Meeks draws constitutes the book’s strength and weakness. Because his project is so ambitious, Meeks does not deal in depth with any single writing. At best, he provides brief surveys and overviews. As a result, the communities using particular writings are rarely as clearly identified and defined, or as thoroughly studied, as one might wish.

These points aside, Meeks provides us with a helpful guide to a complicated period. Those interested in moral questions in general, and in biblical ethics in particular, will profit from a stimulating work by a seminal thinker.

In the Wilderness: The Doctrine of Defilement in the Book of Numbers

Mary Douglas
(Sheffield, England: Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Press, 1993) 272 pp., $60.00

In 1966, the British anthropologist Mary Douglas, in her book Purity and Danger, changed the way we look at biblical law and religion. Since then biblical scholars have become increasingly aware of the value of anthropological approaches to religions and society. After a long hiatus, Douglas has again turned her thoughts to the Bible and written a book that promises to reinvigorate the field of biblical studies.

In the earlier book, Douglas discussed the abominations listed in Leviticus as indicating the symbolic structures and world-view of ancient Israel. Now she has turned to the Book of Numbers to explore sociological and literary structures from an anthropological perspective. Her analysis proceeds essentially on two levels: an exposition of her anthropological theory, and the use of that theory to unlock the organization and intention of the Book of Numbers.

The theory, which she calls a theory of cultural bias or cultural claims, traces the different ways societies or institutions defend and claim support for their actions. Religion is viewed as one of the means by which societies or institutions justify their claims.

Douglas develops a series of different culture types that justify their claims in characteristic and predictable ways. Her four major types are hierarchist culture, enclavist or sectarian culture, individualist culture and isolates. Modern American and European cultures are predominantly individualist, a condition that, according to Douglas, impedes our understanding of hierarchist cultures, such as those of the ancient world. The Book of Numbers, with its heavy dose of laws and priestly hierarchy, is an example of a work that we moderns have trouble reading and understanding sympathetically.

In her analysis of Numbers, Douglas shows the power of her theory to unlock the concerns of hierarchies, such as the priests who composed and edited the book. She discerns a closely organized concentric arrangement whereby stories and laws alternate in a manner that links each story with another and each set of laws with another. For example, the mention of the death of Aaron’s two sons by offering strange fire in Numbers 3:4 and the warnings to the Kohathites in Numbers 4:17–20 are linked with the rebellion and death of Korah the Kohathite and his followers in Numbers 16. Similarly, the commandment to make silver trumpets in Numbers 10 links up with the laws on when to blow them in Numbers 29. In all, twelve alternations of story and law constitute the symmetrical structure of the book.

Douglas draws interesting political conclusions about the intentions of the priestly hierarchy behind the dense structure of Numbers. She observes that Numbers, which she dates to the post-Exilic period (after 539 B.C.), has a very inclusive menality that defines pollution or defilement as a matter of intention rather than of social class, tribal affiliation or even national origin (resident aliens are governed by the same laws as native Israelites). Further, she notes that the northern and southern tribes are included equally in the vision of the people of Israel. By contrast, the exclusionary view in Ezra and Nehemiah seems to indicate the enclavist culture of Judah in the post-Exilic period. Numbers, she concludes, offers a vision of inclusion and of universally available purity for the post-Exilic community.

There are weaknesses in some of Douglas’s historical observations about post-Exilic Israel, and she makes some leaps of faith dating Numbers to this period. Nonetheless, her discussion is always stimulating and 041often brilliant, and should serve once again to remind us of the importance of cultural analysis in its various forms for our understanding of the Bible’s multiple voices.

Fragmented Women

J. Cheryl Exum
(Valley Forge, PA: Trinity, 1993) 223 pp., $14.95

What is a feminist to do with the Bible? Some have commented on the pervasive anti-female tendencies of the Scriptures, while others have directed our attention to passages that portray women more positively. Recent feminist criticism has wrestled with fundamental problems of interpreting the Bible. Influenced by deconstructionist psychoanalysis, feminist criticism has of late celebrated the freedom of the reader to read texts as she or he wills, resisting the traditional idea that a text must be read only in specific ways.

Cheryl Exum’s Fragmented Women is a clearly written and engaging example of recent feminist biblical criticism. The subtitle, “Feminist (Sub)versions of Biblical Narratives,” describes her desire to subvert patriarchal readings of texts from the Hebrew Bible by teasing out otherwise muted women’s stories and voices. Her interpretations often go against the grain of the historical-critical methods of past biblical scholarship (largely dominated by men). Traditional readings of biblical texts must be subverted, Exum argues, because the view of women presented in them is almost always a male construct, exemplifying what male authors thought about women.

For example, chapters one and six bring together stories that are unrelated by most standards of scholarship (different sources, different dates). Exum reads one story of a murder—Jephthah’s killing of his own daughter in order to comply with a reckless vow (Judges 11)—together with another story—the “literary murder” of Michal, wife of King David (2 Samuel 6). The male narrator silences Michal’s defiant female voice and condemns her to be childless. In contrast, Jephthah’s daughter passively accepts her fate and is thus treated as the male narrator’s model of an exemplary woman. Exum also reads what she terms King David’s “rape” of Bathsheba (2 Samuel 11) together with the story of the Levite’s concubine, a grisly tale of a woman raped and later dismembered (Judges 19). The concubine is unnamed in the text but given a name by Exum—Bath-sheber—meaning “Daughter of Breaking.” Bath-Sheber is the Bible’s “ultimate fragmented woman.”

Exum also examines the dichotomy between Samson’s “respectable” mother and the disreputable foreign women in Samson’s life. This dichotomy suggests that the only proper role for a woman is that of an idealized mother. Powerful non-maternal women are seen as foreign and evil. Chapters four and five use various methodologies (literary, anthropological, psychoanalytical) to study texts about mothers in Israel.

Exum is one of the ablest and most perceptive feminist biblical critics on the scene today. She writes with clarity, insight and wit. She refuses to abide even by the canonical order or sequence of the present biblical text. No ideology, no methodology, no interpretation and no biblical text is allowed a singularly privileged status. All such moves toward unilateral authority are seen as “phallocentric” and thus resisted.

Cricket Without a Ball

Introduction to Rabbinic Literature