Reader’s Reply
Trembling for BR
I tremble when I think of the damage publications like yours do to the uneducated (in God’s word) and the naïve.
I tremble when I think that one day you will be held accountable for what you are doing to undermine the Bible. The first thing Satan did was to attack the validity of God’s word (Genesis 3:1–5). Now he is using people like you to spread his heresies. Your list of contributors looks like a Who’s Who of left-wing liberals (with the possible exception of one).
Aqua Dulce, California
Which one?—Ed.
Passes the Test
Why is it that in the U.S.A., the readership, at least of BR, is so touchy? The reasons for canceling their subscriptions are for the most part quite amazing. Maybe you should have some test before a subscription is allowed.
Please keep BR and Biblical Archaeology Review coming.
Cape Town, South Africa
Give Adam Some Credit
Gary Rendsburg, in his article on “Unlikely Heroes,” BR 19:01, said Adam didn’t do much, while Eve was the active one: “Adam is the subject of only one verb: ‘he ate’ (Genesis 3:6),” whereas Eve “‘said,’ ‘saw,’ ‘took,’ ‘ate,’ and ‘gave’ (Genesis 3:2–6).” For Rendsburg, Eve’s activity indicates she was more bold, fearless and assertive than Adam.
Let’s go back to Genesis 1, where they (not just he or she) were to be “fruitful, multiply, till the earth, subdue it and have dominion.” Sounds like both sexes would be pretty busy. Then Genesis 2 tells man to till and keep the Garden (2:15), eat of trees (2:16) and name every living creature (2:19).
Eventually a woman comes along, but it seems to me that man has earned a chance to sit and eat! Yes, women are strong, active, forceful people. But that doesn’t mean the men of the Bible are do-nothings.
Moberly, Missouri
She’s Busy, But
Regarding Gary Rendsburg’s lead article “Unlikely Heroes,” BR 19:01, please note that all of Eve’s activities are directly associated with devilish involvement.
Whiting, Indiana
The Midwives and Miriam
May I supplement Professor Rendsburg’s article about courageous biblical women who lived outside the mainstream by referring to the next book over from Genesis, where we find two more instances in which women successfully use deceit (the best weapon women had in those days) to accomplish their objectives. In Exodus 1:15–19 the midwives Shifrah and Puah are ordered by Pharaoh to murder all newborn male Israelite babies. Although both women have Semitic names, we cannot say with certainty that they were Israelites. My guess is they weren’t, because I don’t think Pharaoh would trust Israelite women to carry out such a horrific task. Shifrah and Puah play upon Pharaoh’s bigotry toward Israelites by disparaging the Israelite women’s birthing capability. They tell Pharaoh they can’t kill the Hebrew baby boys at birth because the Israelite women give birth so quickly the midwives never arrive in time. By using a form of passive resistance combined with deceit, these two working-class women (possibly non-Israelite) successfully dupe and defy the most powerful monarch in the world.
The next example is Exodus 2:1–10, in which Moses’ sister (not mentioned by name in this narrative, but let’s call her Miriam anyway) acts assertively and deceitfully on behalf of her kid brother and her parents. As a member of a persecuted class of people, Miriam comports with Professor Rendsburg’s
definition of an unlikely hero. When Pharaoh’s daughter finds a box floating in the river that contains an Israelite male baby who, pursuant to Pharaoh’s order, should have been drowned, Miriam comes forward and says she will find an Israelite woman to suckle the child. Little does the princess know that the wet nurse Miriam finds is the baby’s own mother—to say nothing of the irony of the money to pay her coming from Pharaoh’s pocket!
University of Louisville
Louisville, Kentucky
Ordering the Books
Rolf Rendtorff’s “Jews and Christians: Seeing the Prophets Differently,” BR 19:01, contains a questionable assertion.
In describing the order of the Old Testament books, Rolf Rendtorff maintains that Christians “plucked” the Prophets out of the middle (of the Hebrew Bible) and placed them after the Writings. This is manifestly not so. The first complete Hebrew Bible dates from the tenth century A.D.; earlier texts are either individual scrolls or scraps from either codices or scrolls. Conversion from scroll format to book format started in the second century A.D., but we have no early Hebrew codex showing the arrangement of the books with the Prophets between the Law and the Writings. The earliest complete Christian Old Testament, however, is the Septuagint Codex Vaticanus of the fourth century. It is baseless to claim that the Christian arrangement was a change from the Hebrew, unless it can be shown that the Hebrew scrolls and the Septuagint scrolls were necessarily stored in a regular, established order. Rather, it might be claimed that the Hebrew order was a change from the earlier Christian order.
Charlestown, New Hampshire
Rolf Rendtorff responds:
There is an ongoing scholarly debate about the exact dating of the final form of the different versions of the Bible. The authors of the New Testament writings refer to their Bible as “the Torah and the Prophets.” Some New Testament passages mention “the Psalms” as a third section. Similarly the second-century B.C. grandson and editor of the Wisdom of Ben Sira speaks of “the Law, the Prophets and the rest of the Writings.” All this may suggest that, in this early period, these sections of the Hebrew Bible were considered to be in the same order as they are in today’s Hebrew canon (Torah, Prophets, Writings). But when and in what order the Writings had been put together remains controversial. In any case, it seems highly unlikely that the Hebrew order could be a change from an earlier Christian order.
The Theological Reason
Rolf Rendtorff assumes that the order of books in the Hebrew Bible is original and that Christians changed this to suit their own ends. In fact, both orderings were established in the Christian Era and serve a theological purpose.
As Professor Rendtorff points out, the placement of the prophetic books and particularly Malachi at the end of the Christian Old Testament serves to juxtapose the Old Testament prophets with the fulfillment of their prophecies in the Gospels. Malachi ends on an eschatological note foretelling the return of Elijah before the Day of YHWH.
The ordering of the books in the Hebrew Tanakh serves a similar purpose. The order was established sometime after the rabbinic council at Jamnia in 90 C.E., and probably after the Jewish leader Bar-Kokhba’s failed rebellion against Rome (c. 135 C.E.). The Tanakh places at the end what was formerly a second scroll of the Chronicles of the Kings, which foretells a regathering from the Babylonian Exile and metaphorically creates the expectation of a regathering from a second Diaspora.
There is no particular reason why the Ketuvim (Writings) had to end with Second Chronicles. Ezra and Nehemiah by rights should be placed after Chronicles since they cover post-Exilic history and form a natural continuation of the epic history of Israel.
Thus, it is clear that the ordering of books in both the Hebrew Bible and Christian Old Testament have a didactic purpose that serves to fortify the theological positions of their respective religious communities.
Lake Worth, Florida
Intolerance Is Idolatry
I am grateful to Professor Fredriksen for her stimulating note on the various aspects of polytheism within the monotheisms in antiquity (“Gods and the One God,” BR 19:01). She dealt largely with texts from the Hellenic and Greco-Roman worlds, but she could have included much earlier texts from the Tanakh (Hebrew Bible), or First Christian Testament [commonly known as the Old Testament—Ed.] as well as from much later texts. Passages in the Hebrew Bible that reflect meetings of a heavenly council in which the High God assembles ancient deities for consultation and/or rebuke (for example, 1 Kings 22; Isaiah 40; Psalm 82; Job 1; and probably Genesis 1) indicate the same sort of belief was present in ancient Israel and early Persian period Judaism that Fredriksen describes in later texts. They formed rough and irregular stages of the biblical monotheizing process that had to recognize and deal with the normal polytheistic thinking of humans of all periods. One such expression is found in the ancient and current daily Jewish liturgy, “Who is like thee among the gods, O Lord?” (from Exodus 15:11), implying that there were indeed other gods though Yahweh was believed to be incomparable (compare, for example, Isaiah 44). The gods of other peoples were reduced to servants or angels of the High God. One of the tenets universally held by all ancient Christians of all stripes was monotheism, for which the Trinitarian formula for understanding the manifold aspects of the One God was intended as a protection against common polytheistic thinking. This is widely ignored today, especially by those who make “evil” into a deity independent of the One God.
When Jews, Christians and Muslims claim to be monotheists in current thought, they usually mean that their view of the One God is the true one. For Jews it is the God who will send a messiah; for Christians it is the God incarnate in Christ; for Muslims it is the Allah of the Qur’an. Rarely does one encounter the kind of honesty in such treatises as that of Joseph Hough’s daring speech honoring the life ministry of the Reverend George Regas (see “Beyond Tolerance: Toward a New Christian Theology of Religions,” in Progressive Christianity [Winter 2002], which BR republished in revised form as “Ways of Knowing God: A Christian Theologian Sees Multiple Paths to Salvation” BR 18:03). When “monotheistic” theologians finally begin to think of what the term “God” really means in the Bible and in our time, then the monotheizing process that the Bible (both testaments) and the Qur’an launched in their time may have a real chance of being resumed in ours.
There will be hope for the world when three of its major religions finally confess their particular idolatries in claiming to know who the One God really is. They should instead confess that God is beyond all human ability to comprehend completely. That is the reason all of us on this fragile planet not only must be tolerant of but must learn from each other, and cease to denigrate other religions. Intolerance and claims to exclusivity are a modern form of idolatry that all three monotheistic religions practice in one form or another, but, following their own best lights, should denounce. We must work to develop ways we can all cherish our differing faiths and identities and still live and work together for the common good of all humankind.
Claremont, California
Ray of Light
I disagree with many of BR’s presuppositions concerning God and Scripture, but you do make me think things through and occasionally I am rewarded by a ray of bright hope for the truth, as in Paula Fredriksen’s “Gods and the One God.”
Columbia City, Indiana
Correction
Professor Fredriksen regrets the introduction of a typographical error into her last column. God, in Greek, did not say ho ho. He said,
True Colors
All right—you showed us the blue in Ari Greenspan, “The Search for Biblical Blue,” BR 19:01. Now show us the purple and the crimson. I have several times read descriptions of what Lydia’s purple actually looked like, but that is not the same as seeing it with my own eyes.
Perhaps (I know this sounds sexist) it’s because the article was put together by men? I seem to find that most men of my acquaintance don’t care that much about all the differences in the range of colors with the same name. But we ladies want to see all the nuances!
You show us medieval and Renaissance art in all their true colors (one piece of the delight of receiving BR). Now show us biblical fabrics in their true colors!
Hamtramck, Michigan
Ari Greenspan offers these two samples of biblical scarlet (based on Bar-Ilan University professor Zohar Amar’s theory that the scarlet was an orange hue extracted from the coccid, a scale insect) and purple.
Correction
The photograph of purple wool found in Judean desert caves (see “The Search for Biblical Blue,” BR 19:01) should have been credited to David Harris, in Jerusalem.
No Vigilante
William H.C. Propp’s article, “Moses: From Vigilante to Lawgiver,” BR 19:01, is mildly entertaining but often jumps to unjustified conclusions.
Professor Propp refers to Moses’ killing of the Egyptian taskmaster as “murder,” and suggests that his action might not have been justified because “after all, the taskmaster was not killing the slave, only drubbing him, ‘striking him.’” He then goes on to cite Exodus to prove that the Bible permits beating a slave, “so long as he sustains no permanent injury.”
However, the Torah explicitly states that chastisement is permissible (without serious injury) because it is expected that the master would be careful in not damaging the worker who represents financial gain to him (Exodus 21:21). This case is different. The Egyptian taskmaster beating the Hebrew slave has no such law. Furthermore, Pharaoh would not care if the taskmaster beat the slave to death, since the object of this particular slavery was not financial gain. Pharaoh had said, “Behold, the people of the children of Israel are too many and too mighty for us; come let us deal wisely with them, lest they multiply … Therefore they did set over them taskmasters to afflict them with their burdens” (Exodus 1:9–11). When this measure did not stop the Israelites from multiplying, Pharaoh ordered the killing of the male children. The object of this slavery, then, was to work the Hebrews to death. Material gain was a mere by-product. Moses knew the taskmaster had no compunctions about beating the slave to death; he was not going to wait and see if this would actually happen.
This act is important because it demonstrates that in spite of being brought up in the Egyptian royal court, Moses was well aware of his Hebrew origins and could not bear to see his brother abused. He was aware of his origins because his own mother raised him (Exodus 2:8–10).
Propp calls Moses a “failure” and suggests that the Egyptian whom Moses killed “may have simply been doing his job.” This smacks too much of Adolf Eichmann’s famous “orders are orders.”
Moses gave up his future as a prince of Egypt, and risked his life, in order to protect a Hebrew slave. In fact, it is possible that God later chose Moses to lead the Israelites out of bondage precisely because He had seen that Moses responded correctly in this situation. He had shown himself as a man who was willing to take risks to save his people and who had the initiative to judge among that same people.
Fredonia, New York