004
Like most Bible scholars, I’m often asked how I came to devote my life to me study and teaching of the Hebrew Bible. It’s not an easy question to answer. I suppose the way was paved for me at quite a tender age. Among my earliest, and most agreeable, recollections is my father reading to me every shabbat, with unfailing regularity, from a little two-volumed work entitled Bible Readings With My Children by a “Mrs. Philip Cohen.” I am not certain, but I believe I was about three years old when this regimen began. It continued for a few years.
When I entered elementary school in London, I was considered to be the class “expert” in the daily Scripture lessons, and was regularly called upon to demonstrate my “erudition” before the other pupils. One problem I had was that I would invariably pronounce personal and place names according to the Hebrew rather than the accepted English usage, which I did not know. I would refer to Mosheh instead of Moses, and Mitsrayim instead of Egypt. This “deficiency” much puzzled and irritated the teachers.
My biblical Hebrew studies began in earnest about the age of seven when I enrolled in the local Talmud Torah, an after-school institution in which I studied for two hours each day, five days a week, as well as for about three hours on Sunday mornings. After spending four years at this routine, my Talmud Torah studies ceased, as my parents were dissatisfied with my progress. So at age 11, I transferred to London’s all-day Jewish Secondary School. Here, Judaic studies were fully integrated into the secular curriculum. For five years, until I matriculated in 1939, I studied Bible with the traditional commentaries, Mishnah and Talmud, modern Hebrew and Jewish history. One of my teachers, with whom I learned the Book of Job in Hebrew, was Menahem Mansoor, who later became head of the department of Judaic and Near Eastern studies at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
Despite all this, my parents felt that I was making insufficient headway in Rabbinics, and I was persuaded to add two additional hours after school each day in the study of the Talmud at a yeshivah.
In March 1939, I applied for admittance to Jews’ College, England’s Rabbinical School, and spent seven years as a student there while at the same time pursuing secular studies as required by the University of London. At Jews’ College, I was introduced to Juedische Wissenschaft, a movement with roots in the 19th century devoted to the “scientific” study of Jewish civilization, and thus to a more modern approach to the Hebrew Bible. The curriculum included the mastery of Gesenius’s Hebrew Grammar, William Wright’s Comparative Grammar of the Semitic Languages and G. A Cooke’s Text-Book of North Semitic Inscriptions. In addition, for four years, we students had to present each week a translation into biblical Hebrew of an editorial in the Times of London, an exercise which we did not enjoy at the time but which I increasingly appreciated with the passing of the years. Of course, all this was in addition to the study of the various branches of rabbinic learning that are standard requirements for those training for the Rabbinate.
It seemed to me that I was acquiring a fairly good grounding in biblical studies until one day an orthodox rabbi asked me whether I had ever heard of Yehezkel Kaufmann. I had to confess ignorance on that score. Thereupon, he told me to go home and study that scholar’s Toledoth ha-’Emunah Ha-Yise’elith (History of the Religion of Israel).a I took his advice—literally, as it turned out, for I discovered this monumental work in my father’s extensive library. Kaufmann proved to be a revelation to me. I devoured all the volumes that had appeared up to that time. A whole new world of biblical scholarship opened up before me. The works of those scholars with whom Kaufmann took issue were added to my reading list, as well as those of the more sober American school of William Foxwell Albright. Not that many of the problems dealt with were alien to me. After all, I had been brought up on the commentary of the Pentateuch by the Chief Rabbi of England, J. H. Hertz. Now, however, his fulminations and polemics against the Higher Criticism, what he called “Higher Anti-Semitism,” looked simplistic and ingenuous. Nevertheless, remarkably, I suffered no crisis of faith Rather, it was a refining process.
When the time came for me to graduate from Jews’ College, and after completing my Masters degree in Rabbinic literature and Languages at the University of London, I knew that I wanted to pursue an academic career. Fortunately, I was offered a position as lecturer at University College, London, where I taught 005Hebrew grammar and syntax, and a variety of biblical Hebrew texts. Yet it soon became apparent to me that one could not do justice to the discipline or properly relate to the critical issues that scholars had raised unless one obtained a first-hand familiarity with the literatures and cultures of the lands of the Bible, with the civilizations out of which the people of Israel emerged and with which it interacted for a long while. This realization led me to the Dropsie College of Hebrew and Cognate Learning in Philadelphia, where I had the good fortune to study under Professor Cyrus Gordon whose vast erudition and stimulating pedagogy provided sustaining inspiration.
Somewhere along the line I realized that modern Jewish scholars had, by and large, neglected biblical studies, and that the exceptional few who did engage in this enterprise generally echoed the prevailing Higher Criticism, which traced the origin of the text into several distinct strands. Undoubtedly, that school made lasting contributions to the field, but it has increasingly seemed to me to suspend mountains of hypotheses by the thinnest of textual hairs, and to present a huge amount of unsubstantiated theorizing as accepted fact. Furthermore, I have long had the impression that much of modern research is engaged in performing autopsy, in dissecting a literary corpse, rather than interpreting a living literature of enduring vitality that for two and a half millennia has been a dynamic force in human history. To isolate the building blocks of tradition is a necessary and valuable exercise, but it is the completed edifice that constitutes the Bible. This rather obvious fact should, I feel, call for a more holistic approach to the text than is usually accorded it—although, fortunately, of late this approach seems to be gaining new prominence.
Another observation I should like to make: It is indeed indisputable that any biblical text must be examined by whatever light ancient Near Eastern literature can shed upon it. Nevertheless, this inescapable exercise must never degenerate, as it often does, into what has felicitiously been termed “parallelomania,” the mindless listing of parallels, often torn from their respective contexts, without paying much heed to the phenomenon of contrast, which is surely at least important an index of cultural configuration as is comparison.
One final point—and here I address myself expecially to Jewish scholars, although its force applies equally to others. It relates to the use of rabbinic sources for biblical studies. Years of immersion in the traditional rabbinic commentaries have convinced me of their intrinsic merit as precious tools of scholarship. Committed to the principle of the multiple sense of Scripture, the rabbinic commentators produced an enormous variety of interpretations, characteristically undogmatic. They exhibit a heightened and sophisticated sensitivity to the subtle nuances of the Hebrew text, and they offer brilliant interpretive insights, frequently anticipating the findings of modern scholars. I hope to illustrate this assertion by a plethora of examples in my forthcoming commentaries to be published beginning in 1988 by the Jewish Publication Society.b
Like most Bible scholars, I’m often asked how I came to devote my life to me study and teaching of the Hebrew Bible. It’s not an easy question to answer. I suppose the way was paved for me at quite a tender age. Among my earliest, and most agreeable, recollections is my father reading to me every shabbat, with unfailing regularity, from a little two-volumed work entitled Bible Readings With My Children by a “Mrs. Philip Cohen.” I am not certain, but I believe I was about three years old when this regimen began. It continued for a few […]
You have already read your free article for this month. Please join the BAS Library or become an All Access member of BAS to gain full access to this article and so much more.
Footnotes
See, for example, the reference to the scriptures “beginning with Moses and all the prophets” in the beautiful story of the Walk to Emmaus told by Luke (Luke 24:13–49).