5.0 out of 5 stars
Looking at OT laws, February 16, 2009
This review is from: The Right Chorale: Studies in Biblical Law and Interpretation (Forschungen Zum Alten Testament) (Hardcover)
Right Chorale: Studies in Biblical Law & Interpretation by Bernard M. Levinson(Forschungen Zum Alten Testament: Mohr Siebeck) The twelve essays in this volume make a sustained statement about the nature of textuality in ancient Israel. Bernard Levinson draws upon the literary forbears of biblical law in cuneiform literature, as well as its reception and reinterpretation in the Second Temple period, to provide the horizon of ancient Israelite legal hermeneutics. Investigating both law and narrative, these studies are essential for an understanding of the formation of the Pentateuch and the Bible's contribution to later western intellectual history.
This book presents twelve selected investigations of textual composition, interpretation, revision, and transmission. With these studies, Bernard Levinson draws upon the literary forebears of biblical law in cuneiform literature and its reinterpretation in the Second Temple period to provide the horizon of ancient Israelite legal exegesis. The volume makes a sustained argument about the nature of textuality in ancient Israel: Israelite scribes were sophisticated readers, authors, and thinkers who were conscious of their place in literary and intellectual history, even as they sought to renew and transform their cultural patrimony in significant ways. The studies explore the connections between law and narrative, show the close connections between Deuteronomy and the Neo-Assyrian loyalty oath tradition, address the literary relationship of Deuteronomy and the Covenant Code, reflect upon important questions of methodology, and explore the contributions of the Bible to later western intellectual history. The volume offers essential reading for an understanding of the Pentateuch and biblical law.
Excerpt: Wallace Stevens, perhaps one of the most demanding, which is to say, rewarding of modern poets, was a profound reader. In his poems, Stevens proposes a way of reading and of being in the world that breaks down dichotomies: between sacred and profane, between metaphysics as a transcendent reality and metaphysics as immanent in the world, between language and thought, between presence and absence. Creation, as Stevens so clearly saw, entails hermeneutics, metaphor, language, and thought. Allusions to the Bible often appear unexpectedly in his work, as in the gorgeous poem "The Idea of Order at Key West," which centers on an unnamed woman who, like God at the beginning of creation, stands over against the waters, bringing all into existence through her potent voice, ordering nature.' Stevens here writes an implicit literary midrash that combines Proverbs 8 with Genesis 1. The stanza that I selected from "Esthétique du Mal" as the epigraph for this volume similarly rereads and rethinks literary and intellectual history in light of the Bible. In describing how "the metaphysicals / Lie sprawling in majors of the August heat," Stevens's hyperbole provides a poetic critique of a tradition like that of Platonic philosophy, in which ontology or truth is divorced from history and embodiment: "the greatest poverty is not to live in a physical world." The contrasting model of fulfillment that he invokes is predicated upon religious language: "The reverberating psalm, the right chorale." Stevens now points to another literary and intellectual tradition, that of the Jewish and Christian Bible, where meaning is conceptualized as existence in time, or as incarnation: "As if the air, the mid-day air, was swarming / With the metaphysical changes that occur, / Merely in living as and where we live."
The essays gathered in this volume attempt to embody that same "right chorale." They explore the interplay between synchronic and diachronic method, between higher and lower criticism, between the Bible and its Near Eastern context, between narrative and law, while at the same time seeking to preserve due categories of distinction, so as not to privilege the one over the other or subsume one into the other. This goal becomes evident with chapter 1, "The Right Chorale: From the Poetics to the Hermeneutics of the Hebrew Bible." Presented here in revised form, it was one of the first articles that I published, and it remains intellectually important to me. When I wrote the article, academic biblical studies seemed to be split along methodological lines: between synchronic and diachronic approaches, between "literary" approaches and more conventional source-critical approaches. The divide was not always irenic and I was troubled both by the claims of methodological hegemony and the lack of dialogue. For someone who became interested in biblical studies through work in literature and intellectual history, the situation was perplexing. Given my own research on Deuteronomy, with its integration of narrative and law, and where its reworking of literary and legal history was cast in terms of continuity with tradition, the double dichotomy law and narrative, synchronic and diachronic seemed inconsistent with the textual evidence.
One of the most ambitious and engaging works of literary scholarship that I read at that time was Meir Sternberg's The Poetics of Biblical Narrative. I found the intellectual scope of the book, which ranged from antiquity to modern literature and theory, breathtaking, as he sought to defend the literary modernity of the Hebrew Bible. At the same time, certain of his claims, both the methodological ones and the theoretical summaries about the "Israelite revelation," gave me pause. I set myself the task of working through his book carefully and writing a programmatic response in order to try to find a way out of the impasse. I found myself returning to Spinoza as a model for breaking free of the methodological dualism. Many scholars do not see Spinoza in these terms, and so in revising the article, I have sought in particular to update the literature on this important thinker.
A number of years after the original publication of chapter 1, Meir Sternberg published another work on the Hebrew Bible, a massive study of "the repertoire of legal literature [sic] in its manifold narrativity." This volume investigates the literary construction of ethnicity, identity, and power in the Hebrew Bible, worked out through the allegedly different "codes" for employing the terms Hebrew and Israelite. The volume includes an extensive analysis of biblical law, especially the laws concerned with manumission of slaves. It is gratifying to see that Sternberg has therefore moved in directions consistent with the main points raised in chapter 1. Sternberg would deny, however, that there is any change and in his response to my original article takes sharp exception to it regrettably, in a way that does not leave the door open for dialogue on the issues.'
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