Readers Reply

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All-American Magazine

I cannot stand your letters section. It is, as a whole, so stupid, so low, so conceited, in short, so typical of all that gives America a bad name that it almost physically indisposes me.

Equal Time

I am a sophomore in high school and have received a free copy of BR. I was very pleased with the trial issue. My favorite section is Readers Reply.

Misnomer

What a disappointment! BR should be called Bible Lies, because that seems to be the theme of your magazine.

Fifteen Minutes of Infamy

In no way will I renew my subscription to Bible Review.

I don’t know what part of the Bible you intend to continue to review; I have found these so-called reviews to be nothing more than an opportunity for isolated and seldom-published, ultra-liberal professors and clergy to achieve their 15 minutes of fame—more appropriately dubbed infamy, as most of their scratchings are designed to denigrate Jesus and Christianity and the Bible—all in the interest of seeing their names in print.

Historical Jesus

Is the Son of Man the Son of Adam?

Many thanks for Bruce Chilton’s article on the Son of Man (“The Son of Man—Who Was He?” BR 12:04). How odd to have to be reminded that perhaps the term does not have just one easy, set meaning.

I would be interested, however, in getting Professor Chilton’s reaction to something one of my seminary professors used to teach in a Gospels class. Wolfgang Roth pointed out that the term “Son of Man” in Hebrew would be rendered ben ’adam. He then made a connection between the apocalyptic figure from Daniel, some intertestamental literature and the literal “son of Adam,” Abel, killed by his brother Cain.

According to this hypothesis, the heavenly Son of Man figure, Abel, is understood to have attained access to the throne of God by being a righteous person who was unjustly murdered, or made to suffer. The parallels between Abel and Jesus in terms of being both innocent and yet unjustly made to suffer are rather clear. It would suggest that the apocalyptic religious community of the time equated innocent suffering with holiness in a way that is perhaps similar to the Christian understanding of the risen Christ ascending into heaven and being seated at the right hand of God. Apparently, certain intertestamental communities held expectations that the Son of Man would execute a final judgment similar to the way millenarian Christians expect a literal second coming of Jesus.

According to Dr. Roth, the messianic expectations of certain communities of the time involved a belief in the advent of a kind of Abel figure, who would suffer injustice and be slain for being righteous, but who thereby would attain special access to God’s throne in the heavenly realm.

Bruce Chilton responds:

Once you start to think about all three of 007Adam’s sons (Abel, Cain and Seth), interesting possibilities emerge. Abel is the innocent victim, Cain the divinely protected transgressor and Seth the possibility of new life. Gnostic communities from the second century C.E. explored the significance of all three, sometimes in association with Christ. In doing so, they were influenced (and perhaps inspired) by Judaic thinking as represented in intertestamental literature. But it is important to keep in mind that during Jesus’ time “son of man” was a current phrase in Aramaic, distinct from “son of Adam.” That is one reason I think Adamic theology was inspired by Jesus’ usage of “son of man” rather than the reverse.

Musical Kingdoms

How is it that Bruce Chilton concludes that the four beasts of Daniel 7 “probably” refer to “the Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian and Greek empires”? (see “The Son of Man—Who Was He?” BR 12:04)

In the earlier prophecy found in Daniel 2—where the prophet interprets Nebuchadnezzar’s dream about the great statue and the destroying rock—King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon is specifically declared to be represented by the statue’s head of gold. Every reference Bible and commentary I am acquainted with explains the king’s dream and Daniel’s vision as complementary and describes the four kingdoms as Babylonia, Medo-Persia, Greece and Rome. Also, these four earthly kingdoms are ultimately destroyed by God and succeeded by an everlasting kingdom established by Him.

On what grounds does Mr. Chilton identify the four kingdoms differently?

Bruce Chilton responds:

Critical commentaries have long since given up referring to the fourth beast as the Roman Empire, for the simple reason that the Roman Empire did not exist at the time Daniel was written (during the second century B.C.E.). I can cite the commentaries of F.W. Farrar, R.H. Charles, James Montgomery, Norman Porteus and W. Sibley Towner, which all list Babylonia, Media, Persia and Greece. More recently, however, John J. Collins has been able to demonstrate that in the Assyrian evidence the lion is associated with governmental power (Daniel, Hermeneia [Fortress, 1993]). That suggests the order of Assyria, Babylonia, Persia and Greece, the four global empires with which Israel had to contend at the time Daniel was composed. It would be odd if Daniel’s vision in chapter 7 were a simple repetition of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream in chapter 2. In any case, the beasts have been variously identified over the centuries, as Collins shows, so there is no question of a single solution in “every reference Bible and commentary.” Every scholar must equip herself or himself with the available evidence and settle for what is “probably” correct.

Book of Ruth

Missed the Twist

Thank you for the instructive article on the Book of Ruth (“Ruth—Big theme, little 008book,” BR 12:04). Adele Berlin’s grounding of the story in Israel’s historic relationship to the land and her typological projection of Ruth against the backdrop of other stories concerned with the role of women in the drama of redemption (Sarah, Leah, Rachel) are insightful.

It seems to me, however, that Berlin misconstrues a point of considerable theological importance regarding the genealogy at the end of Ruth. She says that “the story of Ruth provides for David the same pattern that produced the patriarchal line and the line of Judah—namely the perpetuation of the deeds of the family through the deeds of women—and it joins the covenant with David to the covenant with Abraham.”

But the story of Ruth does not perpetuate the patriarchal pattern, the special covenantal relationship with YHWH as passed from father to son. To the contrary, it calls that pattern into question by raising a significant issue about David’s line of descent.

To get at the question, we need to know that mainstream Old Testament scholarship places the literary composition of Ruth (the story itself is probably much older) in the post-Exilic period of Ezra and Nehemiah, that is, in the late fifth century B.C.E. At that time, the land was slowly reclaimed, and Jerusalem and the Temple were rebuilt. But something else was going on. In what can be fairly described as an outburst of religious and racial puritanism, Israel’s leaders and priests were requiring Jewish men to cast off their foreign wives and half-gentile children (Nehemiah 13:23–25); such marriages were characterized as “treachery” against YHWH.

In the midst of this national reconstruction program based on religious and racial purification, the writer of Ruth offers a startling genealogy: “So Boaz took Ruth, and she became his wife. And…the Lord gave her conception, and she bore a son…The women of the neighborhood gave him a name, saying, ‘A son has been born to Naomi.’ They named him Obed; he was the father of Jesse, the father of David” (Ruth 4:13, 17).

What does this genealogical capstone mean in such a context? Some have suggested that the story, and the genealogy that ends it, points deliberately toward something quite subversive. Ruth was a Moabite woman—a foreigner, a gentile—someone who, to the Israelite hearer, was not one of us. With this concluding genealogical fillip, the writer of Ruth provides a confounding reminder to Israel that its greatest king had foreign blood running in his veins.

Thus, Ruth is really a protest story that, O. Henry-like, delivers a powerful literary twist at its conclusion. The story warns those who hear it not to get too comfortable with their national identity and their “special” relationship with YHWH. Yes, the story tells the returning Israelites, we need to understand our connection to the land and to the great Davidic line. But the story also undercuts the purification program of Ezra and Nehemiah by casting the darkest possible shadow on its main thesis—national purity based on patriarchal inheritance. In other words, there is a skeleton in the covenantal closet.

The Hebrew scriptures are replete with stories about how God uses imperfect vessels—Abraham, Jacob, Moses and even the adulterous, one-eighth gentile King 050David—to accomplish God’s purposes. The instruments God chooses are susceptible to corruption. Only God is utterly reliable, able to take the “crooked timber of humanity” and use it to build a kingdom. A gentile woman! Who’da thunk it?

Reading the Book of Ruth provides the deep satisfaction that comes from watching a skilled storyteller portray how God works. The most formidable point is made by literary indirection, in a throwaway line at the end. But precisely because the point is made that way, it sticks like a burr in the imagination.

Ruth’s is a lovely story about a woman whose loyalty is transcendent. But it is also about a God who cannot be contained by the boxes we construct, a God who calls us to stretch the boundaries of the neighborhoods we live in until they embrace all lands and all peoples, a God who asks us to trust in him—or her—and not in the rules or in self-serving definitions.

Pinpointing the Redeemer

Adele Berlin’s article on Ruth contains a slight error (see “Ruth—Big theme, little book,” BR 12:04). Boaz was not the redeeming kinsman, although a member of Elimelech’s family. The unnamed kinsman, who gave up his rights as well as his obligation, was the one who took off his sandle: “So when the redeemer said to Boaz, ‘Acquire for yourself,’ he drew off his sandle” (Ruth 4:8, JPS translation).

This accords with Deuteronomy 25:5–10. The man who refuses to perform the levir’s duty is the one whose sandle is removed, obviously a demeaning gesture, 051for the woman is allowed not only to pull off his sandle but to spit in his face.

Books

Acknowledging His Debt—and His Difference

Ronald S. Hendel, in reviewing my book God: A Biography (Alfred A. Knopf, 1995) in your April 1996 issue (see Bible Books, BR 12:02), writes:

In the final part of the book, Miles considers how God disappears in the Hebrew Bible, making no more personal appearances or speeches after his powerful, silencing response to Job. At the risk of seeming peevish, here I missed some acknowledgment to the work of Richard Friedman, who has developed the theme of the disappearance of God in the Hebrew Bible in several publications. Miles is clearly building on Friedman’s work, but fails to acknowledge it (though he did add a brief footnote in a later printing of the book). This breach of etiquette is inexplicable. Miles’s work stands out as a major contribution, written in a distinctive voice, and he need not be coy about his intellectual debts.

The omission of Richard Elliott Friedman from my acknowledgments was not coyness but simple oversight. I immediately apologized to Friedman, and a correction was made in the third printing, which came a few weeks after publication in April 1995. There have been seven hardcover printings since then, and at the time Hendel’s review appeared, the paperback edition had also appeared. In other words, at the time the review appeared, it would have been virtually impossible to find an uncorrected copy of the book in any bookstore in the country.

As for the note Hendel mentions, it reads as follows:

On the implications of God’s progressive concealment of weakening, see Samuel S. Balentine, The Hidden God: The Hiding of the Face of God in the Old Testament (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983); Richard Elliott Friedman, “The Hiding of the Face: An Essay on the Literary Unity of Biblical Narrative,” pp. 207–222 in Jacob Neusner, Baruch A. Levine, and Ernest S. Frerichs, eds., Judaic Perspectives on Ancient Israel (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1987); and especially Jon D. Levenson, Creation and the Persistence of Evil: The Jewish Drama of Divine Omnipotence (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1989).

As that note may suggest, my affinity is more with Levenson’s fertile notion of a “semi-otiose” post-Exilic deity than with Friedman’s of a deus absconditus. I have disagreements with both, of course, but much larger disagreements with Friedman. The Book of Job, which is climactic in God: A Biography, is ignored in Friedman’s The Disappearance of God, for so late and spectacular a theophany accords ill with a reading that places God in a long, slow fade from the vividness of Genesis and Exodus down to invisibility.

God does not disappear even after the Book of Job, and I do not use the language of disappearance in my book. If we follow the traditional Jewish order, he is seen again as the Ancient of Days in the Book of Daniel. What matters is that he is silent and inactive. My interpretive suggestion is that he is so for a reason: Surprised and humbled by Job, he has what he came for.

Ronald S. Hendel responds:

My thanks to Jack Miles for clarifying the development of his ideas, and my congratulations to him for winning the Pulitzer Prize for the best biography in 1996. I suppose he now deserves to be called God’s Boswell.

Lost in Translation

I read with interest the review of Claus Westermann’s Roots of Wisdom (Westminster/John Knox, 1994) in your June issue (see Bible Books, BR 12:03). The reviewer, Carole Fontaine, notes that the translator’s “own footnotes” (three, to be exact) were inserted into the text, a “practice unknown to this reviewer.”

As the principal translator, I must say that such a practice would indeed appear rather audacious. That the phrase “translator’s note” or “editor’s note” was not inserted in brackets by the editors in these three instances is unfortunate, since (a) this is standard procedure in editing and translating and (b) I discussed this very matter by phone with the editors. At any rate, this insertion should have been present.

One of the challenges of translating this work was handling several factual errors and innumerable referential errors by the author. Some of this may reflect on the editors at Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, some not. Concerning the latter, this translator counted between forty and fifty such instances, none of which were attributable to the difference in enumeration between the English, German and Hebrew Psalter; all were from the Pentateuch, the Prophets or the Wisdom corpus. This was surprising, given the eminence of the author and the reputation of the publisher.

Another criticism by the reviewer involved the reorganization of the author’s grouping of proverbs. Any reorganization of material from the German original was the decision of the editors and not of the translator.

Columnists

Don’t Knock the Canon

Closing the canon was an unmitigated disaster (see John Collins, “Retrieving the World of Ancient Judaism,” BR 12:04). Was it really? Would John Collins prefer these documents had gone the way of Akkadian, Hittite and Ugaritic literature? Because those core traditions did not survive, all that we have are the archaeological documents. Without a stable core tradition we would lose the documents of the core tradition, not to mention the various peripheral documents of the tradition.

Of course there can never be enough documents for modern scholarship. And it is because of the core orthodox traditions of Christianity and Judaism that so much money and time has been placed behind the publication, translation and study of Akkadian, Ugaritic and Hittite texts and the Nag Hammadi Library. That goes double for the Dead Sea Scrolls. All things considered, even without the archaeologically recovered libraries we have an embarras de richesses of ancient documents from the Jewish and Christian traditions. How many of these documents would have been preserved if there had been no canonical tradition, and how much interest would have been stirred by the discoveries at Qumran, Nag Hammadi or Ugarit, or by the discoveries of Akkadian and Hittite cuneiform texts?

Dr. Collins, you have your job because of this canon. Let’s hear some proper gratitude.

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A Note on Style

B.C.E. (Before the Common Era) and C.E. (Common Era), used by some of our authors and often used in scholarly literature, are the alternative designations corresponding to B.C. and A.D.