Bible Books
012
One Judaism, Indivisible?
Jew and Gentile in the Ancient World: Attitudes and Interactions from Alexander to Justinian
Louis H. Feldman
(Princeton Univ. Press, 1993) 679 pp., $59.50
How did the Jews of antiquity avoid assimilation? That question has motivated 35 years of study by Louis H. Feldman, professor of classics at Yeshiva University. In this lengthy volume, Feldman adduces material from Josephus and Philo, Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha,Talmud and Midrash, imperial legislation and ecclesiastical pronouncements, papyrus collections and archaeological finds to answer his career-long question.
His response is simple: Judaism was secure and vigorous in its orthodoxy. Its numerous attractions—its ethics, wisdom, the courage of its heroes, the reputation of Moses—kept insiders spiritually and intellectually content and motivated those outside to become sympathizers as well as converts. What a contrast to the lachrymose histories of Judaism.
What’s not to like?
Alas, overdrawn conclusions, an ahistorical use of sources, a lack of theoretical models and a numbing style consistently undermine Feldman’s impressive research.
The title provides an initial warning. For Feldman, there is ultimately one “Jew,” whose Judaism is rabbinic whether he lived in Persia, Rome or Jerusalem, whether he was subject to the Edict of Cyrus or the Code of Justinian. Anyone who departed from this “orthodoxy” was in the minority and uninfluential; Sadducees and Essenes are thus unimportant because history pronounces that “they are not in the mainstream of Judaism.”
Evidence of Hellenistic penetration into Judaism is similarly dismissed. Concerning the influence of Greek thought on the 72 elders who were said to have translated the Torah into Greek, Feldman first appropriately questions the accuracy of the legend, but then treats it as an historical event and asks “how many others possessed such knowledge” of Greek. The handwriting of the Greek Bar-Kokhba letter is found to be “much less elegant and the spelling rather reminiscent of present-day teenagers.” The Jewish soldiers in northern Egypt whose contracts follow Greek law “are not necessarily significant indicators of the attitude toward Halakhah of the rest of the Egyptian community” (italics added). As for the ostensible philosophic influences of Ecclesiasticus: “Why not say that Ben Sira did what the Stoics had done before him, namely, borrow directly from the Bible?” The only evidence mustered for this improbable hypothesis is that “several of the important Stoic thinkers had grown up on Semitic soil.” The note supporting this Semitic context refers to Zeno, from a Cypriot city having a “Phoenician population.” The manifold amulets that indicate a high level of religious syncretism are “all at the level of folklore and hardly diminished the loyalty to Judaism of the Jewish possessors of these amulets.” How would one know even what sort of “Judaism” the owners practiced? Why distinguish folklore from religion?
The orthodox Judaism that Feldman sees everywhere in antiquity was so appreciated that gentiles flocked to convert. How many? The numbers are never made clear, and the principal evidence for such a phenomenon is equally vague: “The chief reason for presuming that there were massive conversions to Judaism during this period is the seemingly dramatic increase in Jewish population at this time.” Yet the demographics are based primarily on notoriously inexact ancient sources and on the very speculative conclusions of modern historians Salo Baron and Adolf Harnack; they also omit any modern theoretical models.
Such optimism concerning population increase leads Feldman to conclude that Jews were engaged in active proselytizing; apparently any contact between a Jew and a gentile had a missionary purpose. Thus Feldman objects to the distinction frequently drawn between 013missionary propaganda and apologetic literature and so elides the difference between conveying information and pitching synagogue affiliation. Further, he argues that 1 Enoch, the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, Tobit, Ben Sira, the Sibylline Oracles and 2 Baruch proclaim that “those who had not yet become proselytes would be converted on the last day.” Yet in none of these Jewish documents are these nations described as undergoing circumcision or immersion. Contrary to Feldman, they are redeemed as gentiles.
On the other hand, Feldman dismisses out of hand the notion that conversion was the result of intermarriage (pace actual examples from historical accounts and the story of Joseph and Aseneth). Such a conclusion would compromise rabbinic orthodoxy.
Even the discussion of sympathizers is overdrawn. According to Feldman, one major reason the Jews bitterly resented Paul was the fear that he would draw away the gifts sympathizers had been giving to the synagogues, hence Paul’s frequent declaration (for example, Acts 20:33–35) that he had accepted no gifts from his adherents; the note is to a 1906 Pauline study. Not only is the historicity of Acts unquestioned, the passage has nothing to do with Jewish concerns.
The various examples cited here indicate the encyclopedic nature of the work. Yet the presentation of this staggering amount of detail is itself problematic, creating a compress of diverse sources, times and communities, such that, for example, the question of whether Tiberius Julius Alexander (first century C.E.) was an apostate—and of course for Feldman he could not be—is answered in the negative by an appeal to the Babylonian Talmud (Sanhedrin 44a; fifth to sixth century C.E.).
Jew and Gentile displays a vast amount of learning; the bibliography’s 60 references to Feldman’s other works testify to the major contributions he has made to the study of early Judaism, and Josephus in particular. Perhaps the nicest conclusion is to view Feldman’s volume in the context of its own implied method. Just as it dismisses data that contradict its view of early Jewish beliefs and practices, so too one might dismiss the various problems with the book’s conclusions and appreciate instead the vast amount of detail Feldman has gleaned.
014
Gnoticism and the New Testament
Pheme Perkins
(Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993) 261 pp., $17
Even for specialists, Gnosticism is hard to define. It is a set of forms of religious belief that probably came into existence in the first century B.C.E. as a heretical form of Judaism. Gnosticism flourished in the second to fourth centuries C.E. as heretical forms of Christianity. It is, as Pheme Perkins correctly argues, not a systematic set of ideas but a collection of “mythemes” and speculations that were combined in a host of different ways both with and without Christian vocabulary.
Gnosticism claimed that there exists a higher God than the Jewish God and that the human soul is an element of that higher God that has become trapped in the material world due to a flaw in God’s wisdom. The Book of Genesis was therefore understood to be the story of how the demonic Jewish God (often labeled Yaldabaoth) tried to trap human souls in material bodies. To free the soul from its entrapment, the higher God sent a revealer into this world to inform humanity of its divine origin. Those who understand this revelation, this gnosis, are empowered to rise above the world of demonic materialism and resume their places in the realm of the higher God.
Once, Gnosticism was known almost entirely from the attacks made upon it by its Christian enemies, such as Hippolytus and Irenaeus. In 1945, however, a whole library of Gnostic writings was unearthed in Nag Hammadi, Egypt. Since then scholars of Gnosticism have discovered the incredible richness, diversity and, to an extent, insanity of the worldviews of the Gnostics. All of the texts mentioned in this review were found at Nag Hammadi.a
There are no Gnostic writings that can be unquestionably dated earlier than the first century C.E. However, as Perkins convincingly argues, it is very likely that Gnostic ideas were circulating in Jewish circles both inside and outside of Palestine before the birth of Jesus. This raises two questions: Did Gnosticism influence the authors of the New Testament, and do the writings of Christian Gnostics contain useful evidence for the reconstruction of first-century Christianity? To both questions Perkins’s answer is a qualified “yes.”
Perkins emphasizes the value of the Gospel of Thomas, one of the prize finds at Nag Hammadi, for the study of Jesus’ sayings, arguing that many of the sayings in that text go back to primitive oral tradition and have a good claim to authenticity. However, that gospel also contains ideas similar to Gnostic ones, for example, the belief that humans should discover the true divine image within themselves. Other Gnostic writings, such as the Dialogue of the Savior and the Apocryphon of James, show a development of sayings-oriented texts toward the Gnostic idea of secret revealed wisdom.
Paul, Perkins believes, shows similarities to Gnostic ideas when he writes about the incompatibility of the flesh with the spirit (for example, Romans 8:4–13; Galatians 5:16–17). She considers the idea of Christ’s triumph over the powers of the cosmos, as described in Colossians, to be similar to the Gnostic idea of the triumph of the revealer over the demonic forces in charge of the material world.
The prologue of the Gospel of John, featuring the personified Word as divine revealer, also has affinities with Gnosticism. The Johannine revealer who comes into a world below, to which he is a stranger (John 1:1–18), is akin to the Gnostic idea of a divine revealer come to rescue human souls trapped in materiality.
Gnosticism and the New Testament is extremely rich in ideas and detailed in its use of a vast range of textual references. However, I found it extremely difficult to read. Rarely could I complete an entire paragraph without having to go back and study how the sentences led from one to the other. Perkins may have overestimated the skill of many of her readers (this reader, in any case) by failing to make explicit the connections between her arguments and by failing to spell out the conclusions that these ideas lead to. With work, one can discover those connections and conclusions, but should a reader have to work so hard? Still, there may well be those to whom her terse and 015telegraphic style will appeal.
This is not a book for the casual reader. Perkins assumes her readers have read all of the Nag Hammadi texts carefully. But if you familiarize yourself with those texts and work through this book carefully, you will be up-to-date with the scholarship on Gnosticism and its relationship to the New Testament.
The Phallacy of Genesis: A Feminist-Psychoanalytical Approach
Ilona N. Rashkow
(Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1993) 144 pp., $14.99
Biblical studies have changed greatly since the 1960s, when scholars devoted most of their energies to determining the historical circumstances in which biblical texts took shape, the identity of their author(s), the oral traditions underlying the written text and the intentions of the biblical writers. Such historical-critical inquiries now represent just a few of the many methods of studying the Bible. Over the past 20 years, there has been a marked shift in focus from historical to literary and sociological approaches to the biblical text.
The use of psychological theory and methods of analysis, which had some currency in the 1950s in the study of biblical prophecy, has not been a central feature of recent scholarly trends, despite the important influence of other social sciences, such as sociology and anthropology. Ilona Rashkow’s work, however, is as much a feminist reading of Freud as it is of the Bible, and is one of the most thought-provoking books I have read in some time. Her method is not to apply Freud to the Bible, but rather to read Freud and the Bible simultaneously; she is not trying to psychoanalyze biblical authors or characters but to interpret biblical texts through the lens of psychoanalytic literary theory. Although the book is not without technical terminology, it remains accessible to the educated non-biblical specialist.
Rashkow begins by discussing new literary approaches to the Bible and by explaining her own psychoanalytic-literary approach. She provides a helpful discussion of current debates about the relationship between text and reader in the production of meaning, suggesting that meaning does not stand behind the text waiting to be discovered but evolves in the minds of readers. Each reading opens us to the kind of change that alters the way we see the world.
In subsequent chapters Rashkow illustrates elements of psychoanalysis by reading selected texts from Genesis. She examines the concepts of intertexuality and transference in Genesis 12:10–20 and Genesis 20:1–18 by considering two versions of the “wife/sister” story (in which Abraham passes off his wife Sarah as his sister) and showing how the silencing of Sarah triggers a response of frustration in Rashkow as female reader. Rashkow considers the depiction (and lack thereof) of fathers and daughters in Genesis, arguing that “at the deepest layer of biblical narrative, the (unacknowledged) daughter is the structural catalyst who enables yet endangers patriarchy.” As sexual property of their fathers, daughters threaten the patriarchal order when they are out of their “correct locale,” that is, the father’s household (for example, Dinah or Jephthah’s 016daughter). Imprisoned in her father’s house, the daughter is, however, the only family female not declared off-limits to him by the incest prohibition in Leviticus 18. The daughter is an incestuous option for the father, but one that endangers his honor. Should her virginity be questioned at her marriage, the father would be the most obvious suspect. Rather than assigning shame to the father, the biblical text shifts the blame to the daughter by presenting her as the one who seduces the father (as with Lot’s daughters).
Rashkow finds a parallel to this in Freud’s treatment of the father-daughter relationship. Freud first theorized that hysterical symptoms arise from childhood sexual abuse. This theory was based on reports of such abuse from every patient. In almost all cases, the abuser was the father. Within a year, however, Freud changed his mind. Reluctant to implicate fathers, he shifted the blame to 044the female patient. Ultimately he chose to believe the story of the father rather than the story of the daughter.
In her final chapter, Rashkow juxtaposes some of Freud’s writings on female sexuality with biblical texts on the same theme in an effort to discern why sexuality, especially female sexuality, is so problematic in the Bible. She notes that, both in biblical narrative and in Freudian theory, the “mother” is a sexual female who functions as a catalyst initiating rivalry and hostility between father and son. Female sexuality, Rashkow concludes, appears to be the chief source of male anxiety. In the Hebrew Bible, as in Freud, female sexuality is explicitly subordinated to the male.
One Judaism, Indivisible?
Jew and Gentile in the Ancient World: Attitudes and Interactions from Alexander to Justinian
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Footnotes
The Five Scrolls has been published in three editions: The congregational edition (reviewed here) includes both the translation of the five books and prayers to accompany the reading of the books in the synagogue on the holidays when it is traditional to do so; the next version, without prayers, in a larger format than the congregationnal ($60), and the special limited edition in large format printed on rag paper with a hand-pulled Baskin etching, signed and numbered by the artist ($675). In all three versions, Baskin’s 37 watercolor illustrations are included.