Shalom Paul: Scholar, Teacher, Friend

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Victor Avigdor Hurowitz

Rabbi Ilai said (b. ºErub. 65b): “A person is known by three things—his cup (wswk), his wallet (wsyk), and his temper (ws[k); and some say even by his laugh (wqjç).” I have known Shalom Paul for over three decades, ever since I was his teaching assistant during his first year at the Hebrew University, and I never found him inebriated, miserly, or angry. There is also no doubt that Shalom knows levity and lightness of heart, how to laugh and bring laughter to others. But with all due respect to R. Ilai, Shalom can be known by an additional sign—his chair (wask). A visitor to his office finds him sit- ting in his chair, happily engaged in scholarship, pleasantly advising students, receiving guests with a laugh on his lips, and conversing amicably on the phone with friends and colleagues. His chair is in front of his book- shelves and, at his fingertips, on the shelf closest to his chair sits the CAD, the multivolume Assyrian Dictionary of the Oriental Institute of the Univer- sity of Chicago. Of course, one also finds biblical commentaries in Shalom’s office, both classical and modern, and many scholarly tomes—just as one would expect to find in the library of a learned scholar. But the book closest to his chair and to his heart, constantly at his command is the encyclo- paedic dictionary of the Akkadian language, and this speaks reams about the man in the chair. Shalom made aliyah in 1971, directly from the Jewish Theological Semi- nary of America, where nine years earlier he had been ordained as a rabbi and where he had spent his last decade in the United States. However, Sha- lom’s real school was no mere building of brick but, rather, a distinguished school of scholarship. The real scholarly school in which Shalom was raised and on whose Torah he was nurtured was the venerated school of Jewish, biblical, and ancient Near Eastern scholarship whose hallmark was critical biblical scholarship bound and wed—by the Law of Moses and Israel, as it were—to ancient Near Eastern studies. This school, which Shalom often re- ferred to as the University of Mesopotamia, flourished in the 1960s of the

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20th century among Jewish scholars on the northeast coast of the United States under the tutelage of luminaries of the magnitude of Ephraim Avigdor Speiser, H. L. Ginsberg, Theodor Gaster, and Cyrus Gordon from the Age of Giants, and Moshe Held, William W. Hallo, Nahum Sarna, Baruch Levine, Jacob Joel Finkelstein, and Moshe Greenberg of the next generation. This scholarly Tree of Life, the tendrils of which stretched from Boston and New Haven in the north, through New York in the center, and reaching Philadel- phia in the south, bore many fine fruits. Some, such as Yochanan Muffs, Jef- frey Tigay, Steven Geller, David Marcus, and David Sperling struck roots in the United States. Others, among them Jonas Greenfield, Mordechai Cogan, Jacob Klein, Ed Greenstein, Chaim Cohen, Mayer Gruber, and of course Shalom himself, replanted themselves in Israel. Shalom maintains contact with this community, and on occasion returns to JTS and other institutions to serve as guest lecturer or visiting professor. As a result of having been a student at the “U of M,” when Shalom arrived in Jerusalem he already bore an impeccable pedigree and for a generation has added his own fame to the fame of his scholarly family. This community of scholarship left its indelible imprint on our jubilar- ian’s scientific oeuvre. There is hardly a publication of his in which the scent of the Tigris and Euphrates mixed with the fragrance of the Bible and the rabbis cannot be detected, both in its pages and between its lines. The biblical literature to which Shalom directed his efforts for some four decades includes Law, Prophecy (especially the words of Hosea, Amos, Jonah, Jeremiah, and Deutero-Isaiah) and the Writings (whether the Song of Songs and Esther or Job, Daniel, and Ezra–Nehemiah). He has also dedicated studies to ancient Near Eastern writings and rabbinic sources in their own right and has made frequent use of this literature in his biblically oriented studies. In all of his writings, public lectures, and classes, the world of the Bible and the world of Mesopotamia are one. The Bible is illuminated with light from Akkadian sources, frequently refracted through the prism of Jew- ish exegesis. Shalom’s exploitation of the treasures of ancient Near Eastern writings is always bound together with exegetical and literary sensitivity: to the influence of one prophet on the other, to rhetorical structures, to double entendre, or to wordplay. He is deeply immersed in the biblical text and the external sources that can be used to make it clear. He is a comparative exegete par excellence: he interprets the text according to its plain meaning and in view of the historical and cultural milieu of the authors, always relying on his intimate knowledge of ancient languages and their modes of expression. 00-PaulFs.book Page xiii Tuesday, September 16, 2008 12:42 PM

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In a brilliant article that appeared in the Festschrift for Moshe Weinfeld, Shalom compares µymtjw µymts near the end of the book of Daniel (12:9) with Akkadian kakku sakku ‘secret and hidden’. In the spirit of this compari- son, we might suggest dubbing Shalom µymwtjw µymwts ˆBEl æm‘w rreb:m], or, in its interdialectical equivalent, which he might prefer, pasir kakki sakki. Shalom started his scholarly career in the field of biblical Law, with a study of the Book of the Covenant in light of cuneiform law and law cor- pora. His doctoral dissertation and book that appeared in the prestigious Supplements to Vetus Testamentum series discussed the structural similari- ties between the Book of the Covenant and the Mesopotamian legal collections: it cast light on many laws in the Covenant Code with the help of parallels from a wide variety of Mesopotamian sources, the Nuzi documents in particular. This book was considered a classic in its time, and it has been republished recently with an introduction by Samuel Greengus in the Dove Studies in Bible, Language, and History reprint series of classical mono- graphs. Shalom’s study of the Covenant Code led to his article on the enig- matic triad htnw[w htwsk hraç (Exod 21:10) in which he broke the bonds of the etymological straitjacket that had impeded all previous attempts at explaining htnw[ and suggested instead a comparative-contextual solution on the basis of parallel laws and customs mentioned in Mesopotamian sources of various genres. Elsewhere, he explored the basic legal formulations cur- rent in the laws of ancient Israel, Mesopotamia, and Anatolia. After survey- ing the vast sea of scholarly literature on this subject, Shalom showed that the apodictic law formulation is limited to Israelite law and totally absent elsewhere. The apodictic law was primarily an expression of the biblical be- lief in the divine origin of law, and applying the apodictic formulation to legal material was a uniquely biblical phenomenon. Shalom has returned time and again to legal matters. However, his re- turn visits have not been to the law collections themselves but to narratives, prophecies, and Wisdom instructions that allude to customs and expressions from the field of law. Several studies clarify biblical expressions and ideas on the basis of Mesopotamian laws, Middle-Assyrian harem regula- tions, and other legal documents. Without going into detail, I must say that, taken together, these studies clearly demonstrate the influence of ancient Near Eastern legal jargon on biblical rhetoric as a whole, even where it might be least expected. The main thrust of Shalom’s work over the years, however, has been directed at the area of prophecy. Shortly after completing his doctorate and publishing his book on the Covenant Code, Shalom was invited to write 00-PaulFs.book Page xiv Tuesday, September 16, 2008 12:42 PM

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the entry on “Prophets and Prophecy” for the Encyclopaedia Judaica. An updated form of this article appeared subsequently in Etz Óayim, the high- circulation commentary on the Pentateuch published by the United Syna- gogue of Conservative Judaism and the Rabbinical Assembly. This long and detailed article, which Shalom has described as constituting a supplement to A. J. Heschel, The Prophets, deals with all of the characteristics of preclas- sical and classical prophets, beginning with the prophetic experience and proceeding to discuss the moral message of prophecy. Allied in spirit with his friend and colleague Yochanan Muffs, Shalom wisely devoted a consid- erable part of this study to the function of the prophet as challenger of God, on the one hand, and as the people’s advocate, on the other. The crown jewel of Shalom’s prophetic mission to date has been his monumental commentary on the book of Amos, published in the Herme- neia series. This commentary lies at the base of his subsequent Hebrew commentary on Amos, which appeared in the Miqra Le-Yisrael series. Here as in all his works, Shalom is sensitive to the artistic and interpretive im- portance of literary features. In preparation for this commentary, he studied the pattern of concatenation in Amos’s prophecies against the nations in 1:3–2:16 and the rhetorical features of 3:3–8, uncovering literary pat- terns that he then exploited for exegetical purposes and for the purpose of solving higher-critical problems. On the lexical front, he explained the Summer House and Winter House (3:15) in light of ancient Near Eastern customs; in a study of ﬁshing imagery in Amos 4:2, he explained twnx as ‘baskets’ on the basis of Aramaic cognates and Akkadian semantic parallels, creating thereby a better parallel to twrys, which is explained as a ‘cooking vessel’, rys, rather than a ‘boat’, hrys. Shalom’s commentary excels in well-developed exegetical acumen, literary sensitivity, and conservative critical caution with regard to higher- critical questions. He rejects approaches to large portions of the book as late accretions and editorial additions or to the book as a composite hodge- podge that developed incrementally over several centuries. In his opinion, the book of Amos is a compositional unity, and his exacting examination reveals that even passages such as the concluding prophecy, considered by several scholars to be Deuteronomistic and late, can be ascribed to the prophet Amos himself. As elsewhere, so here, the contribution of Assyriol- ogy and ancient Near Eastern sources marks almost every page. Already in the second verse of the book, Shalom adduces rich documentation to show that the idea that dryness caused by a roar, even though unnatural, is a familiar ancient Near Eastern motif. The cessation of rain threatened in Amos 00-PaulFs.book Page xv Tuesday, September 16, 2008 12:42 PM

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4:7 is compared with similar curses that appear at the conclusion of Codex Hammurabi, and Shalom compares the “futility” imprecation (“then two or three towns would stagger to another town to drink water, but they could not quench their thirst,” 4:8) with the curses concluding the bilingual in- scription from Tell Fakheriyah. He interprets twkys and ˆwyk in 5:26 in light of Akkadian dsag.kud (sakkut) and kajamanu, which are star names; and he compares the continuation of the verse “your idols . . . which you made for yourself” with the expression epis ßalam Assur u ilani rabûti ‘maker of the image of Ashur and the great gods’, found in the inscriptions of Sennach- erib and others. Comments such as these appear throughout the body of the commentary and in the notes, and effectively place the words of the prophet in the wider context not only of the remainder of biblical prophecy but of the rich literature of neighboring cultures. In addition to drawing copiously from the wells of the ancient Near East, Shalom’s Amos commentary exposes and exploits the literary aspect of the words of the prophet. According to Shalom: “Amos was heir to many variegated literary inﬂuences and poetic conventions and formulae, which he employed with creative sophistication to propound and expound his divinely given message” (p. 4). Needless to say, in the course of the commentary Shalom identiﬁes literary and rhetorical features such as genres, numerical structures, concatenation, imagery, refrains, wordplay, and sar- casm and irony. Anyone familiar with Shalom’s writings or who has heard his exciting lectures knows the extent to which he himself is master of the well-turned phrase and the rhetorical device. There is no doubt that Sha- lom’s ability to identify these devices in the words of Amos derives from his ability to wield them himself. Shalom remarks that Amos “had a penchant for paronomasia,” and indeed only a poetically inspired exegete could pen a remark such as:

He constantly and consistently called the upper class to task for their bribery and extortion, for their corruption of the judiciary, for perversion and dishonesty, for injustice and immorality, for exploitation of the im- poverished and the underprivileged, for resolute dissolute behavior, for pampered prosperity and boisterous banquetry, for greed and arrogant security, for self-indulgence and a life of carpe diem, and for pride and prejudice. (p. 2)

When Shalom ﬁnished his commentary on Amos, I was privileged to partic- ipate personally in the joyous, long-awaited moment when he emptied his ofﬁce of countless pages of yellowing yellow paper on which he had penned 00-PaulFs.book Page xvi Tuesday, September 16, 2008 12:42 PM

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the notes and drafts of his commentary and loaded them onto a highjacked janitor’s cart that squeaked “like a wagon full of sheaves.” But lest one think that Shalom has been deprived of prophecy, a short time ago he completed his commentary on Deutero-Isaiah for the Miqra Le- Yisrael series, now being edited by Shmuel A˙ituv. This commentary has already been commissioned by Eerdmans for publication in English form. There is no doubt that this commentary too will hold the fruits of his earlier studies, such as his classic articles on the influence of cuneiform royal inscriptions on the language of Second Isaiah, or the influence of Jeremiah on this anonymous prophet. In the latter study, Shalom again demon- strates his sensitivity for hearing the words of one prophet while reading the words of another, showing how the earlier prophet influenced the later and how the second prophet adopts and adapts the words of his predeces- sor for his own purposes. Shalom’s work on prophecy goes far beyond the commentaries on Amos and Deutero-Isaiah. A number of his publications focus on specific cruxes in the words of other prophets, including Jeremiah, Hosea, Jonah, and Zechariah. One of Shalom’s greatest loves, perhaps the greatest love of all, is for love poetry and erotica. As early as 1976, Shalom authored the entry “Song of Songs” for the Encyclopedia Miqraªit, and since then he has devoted more than half a dozen studies to this scroll of love. His investigation of garden and vineyard imagery in erotic literature brings to the Song of Songs his fondness for the amorous in ancient Near Eastern literature—from Sumer- ian love poetry to the sayings of the rabbis. His attraction to the Song of Songs and the language of love together with his fascination with double entendre aroused his interest in euphemism and erotic diction. The crown- ing jewel of this affection is his lengthy study of “The Shared Legacy of Sex- ual Metaphors and Euphemisms in Mesopotamian and Biblical Literature.” This juicy article originated in a keynote address delivered before a hall of astonished Assyriologists at the meeting of the Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale held in Helsinki in 2001, and dedicated to the topic “Sex and Gender.” Let it be noted that for a biblical scholar to be invited to open a major Assyriological conference is an exceptional distinction; this is but one of the many outstanding expressions of the international recognition Shalom has earned as an exciting lecturer and as the authority on “every- thing you wanted to know about sex in the ancient Near East but were afraid to ask.” 00-PaulFs.book Page xvii Tuesday, September 16, 2008 12:42 PM

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Anyone who reads Shalom’s writings will be impressed by the appeal that alliteration, wordplay, and polysemy hold for him, and it seems that his personal penchant has enabled him to find similar phenomena in Scrip- ture itself. His Amos commentary and his other writings display a strong rhetorical bent which, alongside the specifically exegetical observations, ex- plicates literary structures on the one hand and multiple levels of the mean- ings of lexemes on the other. His essay in the Haran festschrift (1996) on Janus double entendre elucidates inter alia one of the rhetorical devices in the Song of Songs, while another study reveals a novel grammatical feature typical of biblical and Mesopotamian love poetry-—namely, the plural of ec- stasy, in which the lover expresses him or herself not in the first-person sin- gular but in the plural. Shalom began his career by examining the influence of second-millen- nium law and jurisprudence on biblical Law, but in more recent studies he has turned increasingly to late biblical literature, especially the book of Daniel. He still employs Akkadian sources to explain biblical concepts but now in the Aramaic language. Drawing on Akkadian expressions that desig- nate the physiological symptoms of fear, he sheds new light on the descrip- tion of Belshazzar’s fright at the Handwriting on the Wall. He elucidates the story of Daniel and his young friends and their selection to serve in the royal court with the help of a letter from Zimri-lim, king of Mari. This story along with the linguistic parallels adduced are important in their own right, but they also testify to the endurance of Mesopotamian culture over more than one thousand years and show that the ancient Mesopotamian heritage was still alive and well at the beginning of the Hellenistic period. Mention of the Hellenistic period provides the opportunity to note the fact that Shalom is a member of the academic board of the Orion Center for Study of the Dead Sea Scrolls and Associated Literature and served as its chairman several years ago. He is also the chairperson of the Dead Sea Scrolls Foundation. In addition, he is an active participant in the Melammu project, founded by the renowned Finnish Assyriologist Simo Parpola, an international project aimed at documenting survivals of Mesopotamian civilization in later antiquity from the fall of Babylon until the rise of Islam. Shalom has demonstrated great interest in postbiblical Jewish literature, and here too he enlists his knowledge of Mesopotamian writings. What he did with the Bible he also does with rabbinic writings, explaining dozens of terms in Rabbinic Hebrew and Aramaic with the help of Akkadian. He has clarified the biblical background and Mesopotamian roots of the “Book 00-PaulFs.book Page xviii Tuesday, September 16, 2008 12:42 PM

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of Life” known from rabbinic literature and from the Jewish High Holy Day liturgy. The “Book of Life,” he has discovered, originates in the Tablets of Destiny, the †uppi simati, which were possessed by various gods in Sumer- ian and Akkadian literature and are mentioned in biblical and postbiblical writings as well. In an especially refreshing study, he pointed to the simi- larity between the types of wine mentioned in rabbinic writings and the wines found in Mesopotamian writings. Mention of rabbinic literature returns us to Shalom’s very first academic article, which appeared fortuitously in 1967, the year when Jerusalem was liberated in the Six Day War, and which eventually became the flagship of his public lectures around the world: Jerusalem of Gold. This article inves- tigated the Akkadian term alu sa huraßi ‘city of gold’ and demonstrated that it designates a piece of precious jewelry, in the form of a city wall, which was worn by women of stature. The expression city of gold appears as well in Hebrew and Aramaic in rabbinic sources. To complete the picture, icon- ographic evidence shows women adorned with crowns in the form of city walls. Anyone who has never seen a city-of-gold crown was obviously not privileged to attend the wedding at Jerusalem’s Holy Land Hotel at which Shalom officiated 20 years ago, when an authentic “city of gold” made to or- der by Shalom adorned the head of the beautiful bride, his own daughter Michal (see cover images). One could continue enumerating the many novel interpretations that characterize Shalom’s other writings. All of them, along with the writings already mentioned, are now readily available in updated form in Divrei Shalom: Collected Studies of Shalom M. Paul on the Bible and the Ancient Near East, 1967–2005, in Brill’s Culture and History of the Ancient Near East series. And because Shalom is ever-youthful, there will certainly be many more to come. Shalom, un-aged after four decades, retired from full-time teaching in 2004. His retirement marks the end of an era in the history of the Hebrew University’s prestigious Bible Department, an era characterized by the brilliant comparative scholarship of luminaries such as the late U. Cassuto and S. E. Loewenstamm as well as Moshe Greenberg and Moshe Weinfeld. Sha- lom was a bright star in a star-studded firmament. Surely by merit of students inspired by him at the Hebrew University, Shalom will now be a morning star, a harbinger of another bright dawn of studying the Bible in its ancient Near Eastern background. Having highlighted Shalom’s scholarly contribution, I proceed to some remarks about Shalom the student and Shalom the teacher. When Shalom 00-PaulFs.book Page xix Tuesday, September 16, 2008 12:42 PM

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addressed his retirement party on 19 Iyyar 5764 (20 May 2004), he sur- veyed his academic development in great detail, from his ﬁrst visit in Israel in 1958, when he fell in love with Jerusalem and his wife-to-be, Yonah; to his subsequent conversation with Nahum Sarna, who advised him to forgo his plans to pursue a Ph.D. at Dropsie College and to study instead at JTS; to his meeting with Saul Lieberman, who granted his blessing to majoring in Bible rather than Talmud; and through his years at JTS and the Univer- sity of Pennsylvania, when he studied, worked, and taught with great scholars such as William Foxwell Albright, H. L. Ginsberg, Saul Lieberman, Abraham Joshua Heschel, and Ephraim Avigdor Speiser. In the dust of their feet, he mastered the ancient Semitic tongues and their scripts, specializing and excelling in all branches of ancient Near Eastern and Jewish studies. After receiving his Ph.D. (he was Speiser’s last student), he made aliyah, with invitations to teach at both the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv University. He survived the slings and arrows of promotion and tenure review, rose steadily through the ranks of academe, and concluded his active teaching career as Ye˙ezkel Kaufmann Professor of Bible. With this, he came full circle: 40 years earlier, Kaufmann’s monumental, seven- volume Toledot Haªemunah Ha-Yisreªelit had been translated and condensed into a single volume by Moshe Greenberg; Shalom, then still in his student days, had been assigned to referee the condensation for the publisher— anonymously, of course. Shalom was hardly the run-of-the-mill university professor whose teaching suffered because it took back seat to his scholarship. In addition to teaching at the Hebrew University, where he has also served several terms as department head and introduced a course on the Bible against its ancient Near Eastern background, he is a popular lecturer in universities, ed- ucational institutions, and synagogues in Europe, Asia, Africa, and North, Central, and South America. He also served for three decades as a scholar in residence for Ramah Camps and the United Synagogue Youth Israel Pil- grimage. Not infrequently, one encounters people of various ages who were drawn to and began Bible studies because they heard a public lecture or attended a study group conducted by Shalom Paul. His dedication to improv- ing education in Israel led him to agree to serve as Chairperson of the Ministry of Education Committee for Biblical Curriculum and Study in Is- raeli Schools. In Shalom’s own words, “Above all, I devoted myself to mak- ing them [the students] love the Bible and its rich and wonderful world, arousing their curiosity in understanding the written text and igniting in their hearts the spark and thrill of learning.” Anyone who has attended 00-PaulFs.book Page xx Tuesday, September 16, 2008 12:42 PM

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Shalom’s classes or public lectures, always packed with students or listen- ers on the edge of their seats, or has seen him in his office at work with his students can affirm that these are not empty words. Shalom has not only exposited the esoterica of biblical erotica; he has taught the Bible as a book to be loved. This essay of appreciation would not be complete without a word about Shalom’s most important attribute. Shalom is above all a wonderful friend. The size of this volume, containing over 60 contributions, is much more than a well-deserved tribute to an inspired scholar and an inspiring teacher. This collection is, rather, a gift of gratitude to a man who has touched all of us with his friendship. For each of us, Shalom is a rbjw br. I will forever re- member the time, many years ago when, after an arduous day of teaching in Beer-sheba, I came home to Jerusalem, only to leave late that same evening and fly to America. Shalom, who lived across the street from me, climbed the four stories to my walk-up apartment (which I had purchased only after asking Shalom’s advice) to carry my quite heavy suitcase down to the cab. I am sure I said “thank you” then, Shalom, but I want to thank you again for that, and for many more acts of friendship you have performed for me unceasingly over the past four decades.

In 1972, Shalom explained Ps 72:5, µyrwd rwd jry ynplw çmç µ[ ˚waryy. On the basis of the Septuagint, he emended this verse to read çmç µ[ ˚yrayw µyrwd rwd jry ynplw and, by translating µ[ ‘as’, he rendered the verse: “May he lengthen his days for generations like the Sun and the Moon.” In this prayer, Shalom heard the echo of extrabiblical blessings such as sulmam u bala†am sa kima Sîn u Samas darium ana qistim liqisusum ana siriktim lisrikusum. Just so, we now wish him the same: “May your days be long like those of the Sun and your years like those of the Moon in life and health, happiness and shalom.” On behalf of the editors and contributors Victor Avigdor Hurowitz Pesa˙ 5768