Reading the Bible ALAN T

T HE J EWISH Q UARTERLY R EVIEW, Vol. 107, No. 4 (Fall 2017) 557–568

Reading the Bible ALAN T. LEVENSON University of Oklahoma

Anita Shapira, The Bible and Israeli Identity. [Hebrew.] Jerusalem: The Hebrew University Magnes Press, Jerusalem, 2005. Pp. 188.

Mark Larrimore, The Book of Job: A Biography. Lives of Great Religious .286 ם Books. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2013. Pp. viii

David Wolpe, David: The Divided Heart. Jewish Lives. New Haven, Conn.: .153 ם Yale University Press, 2014. Pp. vii REVIEW ESSAYS Benjamin D. Sommer, ed., Jewish Concepts of Scripture: A Comparative Intro- .334 ם duction. New York: New York University Press, 2012. Pp. ix

“I AGREE THAT THE BIBLE should be read like any other book. The question is: how does one read other books?” So writes the late Church historian David C. Steinmetz.1 Despite my admiration for Steinmetz, the Bible has never been “read like any other book” even if one thinks that it ought to be. In both Israel and the United States, the two most signiﬁcant centers of Jewish population since the Holocaust, the Bible stood as a touchstone of national identity even before these nations won their independence. In modern Israel, one scholar has described a straightfor- ward passage of the Bible from national midrash to existential peshat.2

1. David C. Steinmetz (“The Superiority of Precritical Exegesis,” Theology Today 37 [1980]: 27–38) mounts a vigorous argument for precritical exegesis by defending this tradition as multifaceted and assails historical-critical method as unable to yield meaningful answers. Steinmetz aims his attack at the position that the only legitimate purpose of Bible scholarship is to determine the meaning of the words as originally uttered. 2. Uriel Simon, The Place of Scripture in Israeli Society (Hebrew; Jerusalem, 1999). A summary of Simon’s ﬁndings in English may be found in a special volume of AJS Review (28.1 [2004]) dedicated to a discussion of the Bible in Israel.

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What had served as an organizing story for the nation from the 1920s through the early decades of the state had become from the 1970s a much more literal mandate for expansion, or, a text of undoubted literary and historical importance, but no longer the embodiment of the national spirit, much less the word of God. In a series of important works, Anita Shapira located the 1950s as pivotal decade in the evolution of the significance of the Bible in Israel.3 Before the state, Ben Gurion shared the Second Aliy- ah’s fondness for the Bible; after the founding of the state, he came increasingly to see the Tanakh as an instrument of nation-building. Despite sharp criticism from a variety of quarters, Ben-Gurion succeeded in foisting his preference for the Bible over Das Kapital on the national psyche.4 While it is odd to begin a review essay with a ten-year-old collection, Shapira’s anthology remains untranslated. An English version of The Bible and Israeli Identity would prove a valuable tool for teachers of modern Israel and the role of the Bible in modern times, especially given the pronounced maturation of these fields. The texts in Shapira’s collection bring the story of the Bible in Israel from the early Yishuv to the present. Debates abound surrounding the place and meaning of the Bible in the political, educational, and cultural spheres, but archaeology—as in the hands of Albright and Yadin—had long been seen as a bulwark of historicity. It has, perhaps surprisingly given that heritage, become the spear tip of historical minimalism in the scholarship of a younger and more skeptical generation of archaeologists. Still, a new scholarly consensus concerning the relationship of biblical and archaeological evidence has not emerged. The so-called minimalism of Israel Finkelstein and Ze’ev Herzog differs essentially from that of the minimalists of the Sheffield/Copenhagen circle. The former acknowledge that an ancient Israel actually existed and that the material artifacts say so, if less loudly than the biblical texts. They also believe that biblical Hebrew manifests different developmental layers (in other words, lexical variations are not the product of pious fraud from the Persian or Hellenis- tic eras as per the Copenhagen school). Both approaches depart from an

3. Anita Shapira, “Ben Gurion and the Bible: The Forging of a Historical Narrative?” Middle Eastern Studies 33.4 (1997): 645–74; Shapira, New Jews/Old Jews (Hebrew; Tel Aviv, 1997), 216–47; Michael Keren, Ben Gurion and the Intellectuals (De Kalb, Ill., 1967). 4. Criticisms of Ben-Gurion’s bibliocentism came from different angles: from the writer Haim Hazaz, who argued that rabbinic tradition made Judaism; from the philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz, who charged Ben-Gurion with national self-worship; and from the Orthodox Agudat Yisrael, who reacted angrily to Ben- Gurion’s excessively nationalistic readings when they contradicted the received narrative.

...... 19082$ $CH5 11-14-17 15:42:56 PS PAGE 558 READING THE BIBLE—LEVENSON 559 uncritical view of the marriage of archaeology and the biblical record, but they are not identical.5 Since the Herzliya Gymnasium controversy (1911–12), the role of the Bible in the Israeli educational system has been consistently debated. Shapira includes Ben Zion Mossinson’s and Zalman Epstein’s conflicting views, but the final word belonged to Ahad Ha’am (pp. 37–80). The latter rejected the lower critical practice of high schoolers in the Herzliya Gym- nasium “correcting” prophetic texts and excluded source criticism from the pages of his influential journal Ha-Shiloah. . Yet Ahad Ha’am also called for a Jewish Bible criticism in the opening pages of his collected works and constantly deployed biblical verses, narratives, and characters in the essays that won him fame as a tribune of cultural Zionism. This complicated data-set is best explained by Ahad Ha’am’s awareness of the cre- ative potential of critical perspectives to unlock biblical meaning for contemporaries, but also his anxiety that this discourse might dislodge the Bible from its canonical status within Jewish national culture—which he defended against more radical figures, such as Yosef Hayim Brenner.6 This anticolonialist perspective gets beyond the simple characterization of Ahad Ha’am as either “for” or “against” critical Bible scholarship.7 Paralleling the inquiries of Simon and Shapira in the educational realm, the Bible scholar Yaira Amit has tracked the rise and fall of the “book of books” in Israeli schools, with special animus directed toward Tanakh ram, a two-volume translation from biblical into modern Hebrew, directed at contemporaries who find “Israeli” and biblical Hebrew remote from each other.8 Hand-wringing from many quarters aside, the most recent revision of the Israeli school curriculum reaffirmed the Bible’s educational role—go to a public library in June and Israeli high schoolers will still be grousing about their matriculation (bagrut) exams in Bible. The spirit of Ahad Ha’am would be smiling down benignly from the heav- ens in whose existence he patently did not believe. Not only has the Bible held its ground in the educational arena; one could argue that since Meir Shalev’s The Bible Now9 there has been a

5. See Yaacov Shavit and Mordechai Eran, The Hebrew Bible Reborn: From Holy Scripture to the Book of Books, trans. C. Naor (Berlin, 2007), 465–71. 6. On these polemics and their relation to the Herzliya Gymnasium debate, see my “In Search of Ahad Ha‘am’s Bible,” Journal of Israeli History 32.2 (2013): 241–56. 7. See Menachem Haran or Alfred Gottschalk, who make Ahad Ha’am a champion of biblical criticism, as opposed to David Engel and Yaacov Shavit, who see him as continuing Peretz Smolenskin’s rejectionist stance. 8. Tanakh ram, 2 vols., trans. A. Ahuvya (Even Yehuda, 2010, 2011). 9. Meir Shalev, The Bible Now (Hebrew; Jerusalem, 1985).

...... 19082$ $CH5 11-14-17 15:42:57 PS PAGE 559 560 JQR 107.4 (2017) notable flurry of biblically inspired retellings and elucidations from a range of secular viewpoints. Shapira is at heart a political historian and Yaacov Fichman’s “The Tanach as Subject for Poetry” constitutes one of the few purely cultural entries in her collection. Likewise absent from the collection is any firsthand account of the peculiarly modern phenomenon of Israelis “acquainting themselves with the land,” captured in the untranslatable phrase yidi‘at ha-arets. For the secondary scholarship on this important subject, English-language readers will need to turn to the works of Yael Zerubavel, Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, Rachel Havrelock, Shay Rabineau, and others.10 Biblically based tourism sites and museums continue to multiply, often with political intent. But expanding this collection to include the full range of Israeli encounters with the Bible proba- bly would have made it unwieldly, and every one of Shapira’s inclusions is well-chosen. All in all, Shapira convincingly displays the Bible in Israel as a formative text. The career of the Bible in modern Israel has never operated in a vacuum and has always reflected Israel’s discrete cultural and geographic setting. The same situational factors obtain when speaking of the Bible in America and the “Jewish Bible” in America.11 That the United States of America continues to be the land of the Bible is difficult to gainsay. No other work—not Shakespeare, not Dr. Seuss—enjoys whole sections of bookstores. While there are Shakespeare museums in Avon and else- where, there are dozens of Bible museums in America and 18,000 “friends” on one of the Bible’s numerous Facebook pages. Americans do not think the Bible speaks to the correct borders with Canada or Mexico, but many litigants have brought cases before the Supreme Court over the posting of the Ten Commandments on government grounds. Nearly one hundred years after the 1925 Scopes Trial, the teaching of evolution is still contested, and creationists seek the right verbiage to avoid looking

10. An overview of this excellent literature may be found in Arieh Saposnik, “Contesting Israel,” in Contemporary Israel: New Insights and Scholarship, ed. F. E. Greenspahn (New York, 2016): 11–31. See also Yael Zerubavel, Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition (Chicago, 1995); Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, “Jewish Memory between Exile and History,” JQR 97.4 (2007): 530–43; Rachel Havrelock, River Jordan: The Mythology of a Dividing Line (Chicago, 2011). 11. By “Jewish Bible” I mean to point out that American Jews had inter- actions with the Bible (largely excluding the New Testament, and generally privi- leging the Torah over other biblical books) that differed from those of American Protestants and Catholics, who themselves clashed over the correct version. No claims of ownership are implied by this terminology Jewish Bible, and one would be equally justiﬁed in speaking of “women’s Bibles” or “African American Bibles.”

...... 19082$ $CH5 11-14-17 15:42:57 PS PAGE 560 READING THE BIBLE—LEVENSON 561 as ridiculous as William Jennings Bryan did.12 In the academy, the Bible has made a comeback as a subject of scholarly scrutiny, and not only among scholars at the Society of Biblical Literature. Political scientists, philosophers, and intellectual historians have turned to the Bible as they have returned to religion generally as an underestimated influence on American life. In Jewish studies, a con- certed effort has been made to broaden the boundaries of what constitutes Bible studies and to lobby for the visibility of the Bible and its interpretation at annual meetings and in scholarly journals. It is worth recalling that the first generation of Jewish Wissenschaftlers published mainly on postbiblical developments (although Zunz, Graetz, and Geiger also published important works in Bible). Some of that early tentative- ness was pragmatic: the product of calculating numbers and political strength. Jewish scholars realized that they would be outnumbered and find a fair hearing (or a job) hard to come by. Some of it was anticipation of the concussive effects of historical-critical analysis on the Torah and hence Jewish religious life, an intellectual factor predictably overesti- mated by intellectuals. Some of the hesitancy reflected a sense that the field of Bible studies had been preempted by others, mainly Protestant, mainly German. These sensibilities (sensitivities) traveled across the Atlantic. Solomon Schechter’s resistance to biblical critical methods in “The Higher Criticism—Higher Antisemitism” (1902) is the essay most cited, and at times overstated, but other American Jewish leaders before Schechter, including Isaac Wise and Isaac Leeser, had their own qualms about the discipline of biblical studies. The legacy of that initially cautious approach remained in effect a long time: in the early decades of the Association of Jewish Studies the domi- nant topics were rabbinics, Hebrew literature, and Jewish history. These foci have broadened, but a certain uncertainty about the nexus of Bible studies and Jewish studies has remained. To what extent do or should these two fields overlap? To what extent should Jewish studies scholars have some grounding in this history’s foundational document?13 Anxiety

12. The only contender to the Bible in America’s “prestige” prize fight is nei- ther a book nor a figure but a generation, that of the founders. Not surprisingly, these two sources of authority have also been conflated with a strong push to highlight the role of religion in early American history. This is a separate but related subject. 13. In January 2016, the eminent Bible professor Frederick Greenspahn of Florida Atlantic University convoked a three-generation discussion to address these questions directly.

...... 19082$ $CH5 11-14-17 15:42:58 PS PAGE 561 562 JQR 107.4 (2017) over a split between biblical and Jewish studies, like that of Israeli ana- lysts of the Bible’s future, seems to this reader exaggerated. Certainly, overall interest in biblical studies can be readily documented. One growth area may be located in the profusion of biblical portraits, lives, and “biographies,” exemplified by the biblical entries in the Yale Jewish Lives series. Second, scholars have increasingly explored what the Bible has meant to subsequent ages. This subgenre of reception history offers a twist; namely, to show the great range by which subsequent generations have found meaning in the biblical text not only by tracing its influence but by bringing wildly differing questions and hermeneutics to the task at hand. Third, the profusion of books bearing some version of the title “How to Read the Bible” is striking. Why should anyone need to explain how to read the best selling, most read, and most diligently read book of all times? After centuries of reading the Bible, a process accelerated by the synergistic occurrences of the Protestant Reformation and the inven- tion of the moveable printing press, one would think that Bible reading is one thing at which Westerners ought to excel. Within these three sub- genres I limit my discussion to one example each: David Wolpe’s David, Mark Larrimore’s Job, and the collection edited by Benjamin D. Sommer, Jewish Concepts of Scripture. David Wolpe’s book, from beginning to end, constitutes a “pneumatic” reading of David.14 In his introductory chapter, Wolpe acknowledges the role that his biblical namesake played in his youthful consciousness—this identification with biblical David informs the work. To Wolpe’s credit, his empathy never comes off as arrogant or self-serving. Even an acclaimed rabbi cannot be compared to a king or ancestor of the Messiah; some Jewish clergy may forget this, Wolpe does not. Wolpe alerts readers to the contemporary debate over the “size and sources” of the Davidic kingdom, registers the presence of Tel Dan and Mesha steles that indicate a “house of David,” but does not get bogged down in this literature (p. xv). He acknowledges the presence of multiple voices in Samuel but avers that he can offer a coherent reading (pp. xvi–xvii) and, appropriately, uses the translation of Robert Alter, The David Story (1999). Of course, a very different David emerges from Chronicles, usually regarded as a retelling of Samuel,15 and from his traditional attribution as author of

14. “Pneumatic” borrows Gershom Scholem’s characterization of Buber, though less sympathetically than I mean it. Scholem, “On Martin Buber’s Juda- ism,” in On Jews and Judaism in Crisis, ed. W. Dannhauser (New York, 1976). 15. Samuel itself was presumably split in two for easier handling of the scroll(s).

...... 19082$ $CH5 11-14-17 15:42:58 PS PAGE 562 READING THE BIBLE—LEVENSON 563 the Psalms. Wolpe has read the recent spate of David biographies, the somewhat older and still important scholarship of David Gunn, Robert Polzin, and P. Kyle McCarter, and the much older and still provocative exegesis of the midrash and the meforshim. Nor does Wolpe hesitate to deploy purely artistic and literary representations of David. As with any author who casts his or her net so widely, to bait and switch metaphors, the catch depends on the skills of the fisherman—here, considerable. A cursory comparison of Wolpe’s David: The Divided Heart with Yair Zakovitch’s Jacob: The Unexpected Patriarch and Steven Weitzman’s Solo- mon: The Lure of Wisdom seems warranted. These three works, thus far, constitute the biblical entries in an ambitious undertaking by the Yale University Press.16 Yale’s Jewish Lives series pairs subject with author “to elicit lively, deeply informed books that explore the range of depth of the Jewish experience from antiquity to the present.” A few things follow naturally from this goal: these are brief treatments of the lives, rather than the texts, consciously designed for a well-educated general audience. No scholar would turn to these books to answer technical questions or delve into methodological concerns.17 Nevertheless, Zakovitch’s and Weitzman’s stances diverge significantly. Weitzman, with honest discom- fort, acknowledges that the historical Solomon eludes us. While Zakovi- tch acknowledges that his Jacob is “a biography based on a biography,” he continually seeks the ur-text, or historical incident behind the narrative we now possess. That these two are professionally trained Bible scholars, while Wolpe is a gifted nonspecialist, matters little given the parameters of these portraits. Wolpe does a sound job of conveying the double introduction of David, first as a silent shepherd, dutiful son, and sweet singer (1 Sam 16), and then again as the macho, eloquent combatant who cuts off Goliath’s head and brings it to the uncomprehending Saul in Jerusalem, anachronisti- cally, as Wolpe notes, since David captures Jerusalem only in 2 Sam 5. The purpose of this double introduction of David may be construed in

16. Anna Zornberg’s Moses: A Human Life appeared after the completion of this essay. I look forward to reading it. 17. Parenthetically, the postbiblical lives in the series seem idiosyncratic. Other than Jewish parentage and fame, what do Sigmund Freud, Emma Gold- man, and Hank Greenberg have to do with one another? This may be a peculiarly modern problem, but the biblical portraits present their own set. Are these characters “Jewish”? Are these biblical portraits actually “lives”? Given the focus on subsequent “impact,” this question may be querulous. Ahad Ha‘am presciently anticipated this approach, opening these biblical characters up to appropriation by nontraditional Jews, in his essay “Moses” (1904).

...... 19082$ $CH5 11-14-17 15:42:59 PS PAGE 563 564 JQR 107.4 (2017) different ways. Wolpe’s venture into psychoanalysis—that David thinks he has found in Saul a father who does not disregard him—seems to me less powerful than the view that the double introduction highlights the private and the public David. Wolpe skillfully traces the complicated interplay of emotion and calculation in David’s relationships, and highlights the first appearance of an epithet I have overlooked many times: “And David consoled Bathsheba his wife, and came to her and lay with her, and she bore a son and called his name Solomon, and the Lord loved him” (2 Sam 12.24). Wolpe’s desire to lend credence to the rabbis’ characterization of the two as soulmates (bSan 107a) may not persuade, how- ever, given David and Bathsheba’s later highly manipulative and successful attempt to assure Solomon’s succession. Still, David’s adultery with Bathsheba lies at dead center of David’s life, the text of Samuel, and Wolpe’s narrative. Generations of readers have identified this as the turning point beyond which David’s hitherto successful rule begins to collapse. The parsing of David’s sins—adultery, misrule, and murder— has long busied lay and scholarly readers alike. Wolpe deserves credit for retelling this tale with excitement. Wolpe devotes less time to the ruler than the family man, a disparity reflected in the respective lengths of the chapters titled “Father,” and “Caretaker.” Both chapters deal with the declining years of David’s rule, datable from the moment in 2 Sam 12 when David fails to go out to war in the spring. Even in the discussion in “King,” Wolpe focuses on David’s personal maneuverings. Perhaps this is the result of defining the project as a “life,” perhaps it is the result of a more skeptical attitude toward the historicity than Wolpe admits.18 Given King David’s role in later art, literature, and political science, this seems striking. A principle of selec- tivity, even if unstated, appears to be the extent to which one may identify personally with David as a youth, a lover, a husband, and a father; David in these roles is arguably more relatable than as the anointed king of Israel whose house has been established forever. Mark Larrimore’s The Book of Job offers a learned contribution to Princeton’s Lives of Great Religious Books series. These works offer both less and more than reception histories. Larrimore makes no pretensions to exhaustiveness, and this is no slight. No one could reasonably be expected to have equal expertise in biblical Hebrew (Job’s is notoriously difficult), rabbinic literature, medieval philosophy, nineteenth-century

18. In 2006 Rabbi Wolpe gave a famous sermon disabusing his Sinai Temple congregants of overmuch reliance on the historicity of the Exodus.

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German philosophy, and modern biblical criticism. Yet Larrimore has more than enough insight in all these arenas to bring the reader into conversation with a well-chosen variety of interpreters over the ages. When elucidating the later readers’ worldviews Larrimore goes well beyond the reception history genre. While the structure of the book is “loosely chronological” (p. 5), Larri- more has chosen ﬁve areas of principal focus, each of which receives a discrete chapter. Chapter 1 treats the transformation of Job by ancient interpreters into a Judeo-Christian text. Here Larrimore discusses the “Testament of Job,” the talmudic discussion in bBaba Batra 15, and New Testament James, which canonized a Christian image of “the patient Job.” Chapter 2 traces the use of Job by medieval philosophers such as Aquinas and Maimonides to address questions of theology, in the latter’s case, a surprising advocacy of the Elihu speeches as containing the “true” meaning of the parable. Chapter 3 addresses the performance of Job in premodern Christian works such as Books of Hours and the lesser- known mystery play La Patience de Job. This chapter sheds much light on Job’s role in Christian burial rituals and, by focusing on the performative, yields insight into what might have moved a folk audience. Chapter 4 focuses on the use of Job as an austere primer in ethics in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century philosophy, especially Kantian, and as a text still capable of inspiring religious mystery and spiritual identiﬁcation, as it did with the poet William Blake. Finally, in chapter 5, Larrimore sensibly concludes with the revolutionary impact of modern historical criticism, which undermines the integrity of the Joban text itself. While the text of Job had been relatively stable since the late biblical period (although the Septuagint adds an important speech from Job’s unnamed wife— Augustine’s “adiutrix diaboli”), the consensus holds that the prose framing, the Hymn to Wisdom (Job 37), and the speeches of Elihu, a fourth interlocutor, were later additions to the poetic core. On the issue of theodicy, Epicurus’s famous formulation addresses the matter more directly than does the Bible. Job, like the rest of the Bible, nowhere proclaims itself a philosophical text, assumptions of Aquinas and Maimonides notwithstanding. While philosophical views are unquestion- ably embedded in the text, there remains a gap between biblical narratives that raise philosophical issues, and thinkers who formulate and attempt to solve philosophical problems. Job’s speeches allow the reader to inhabit the physical pain, psychological anger, personal humiliations, moral scandal, and sheer repetitiveness of suffering, but is this theodicy? The literally overwhelming response of the deity in Gen 38–42, with its

...... 19082$ $CH5 11-14-17 15:43:00 PS PAGE 565 566 JQR 107.4 (2017) litany of zoological-cosmological-teleological examples, cannot satisfac- torily answer either Epicurus or Job. God batters Job into an acknowledgment of inferiority, which Job never questioned, and the superiority of his answer to that of his friends, which Job never doubted. Unlike the text’s readers, Job does not know of the terms of his test, or its significance. We are told that Job “died old and content” (42.17), but not what Job thinks of the compensation package he receives in 42.11–16. Job receives the honor of a divine response: some interpreters have thought that existentially adequate. Despite the assertions of cognoscenti such as Marvin Pope, Robert Gordis, and Robert Alter, who have written eloquently about the superiority of the poetic core of Job, pedagogues find that prose framing indis- pensable. The scandal of God foolishly calling the satan’s attentions to Job, the successful provocations of the Adversary19 which succeed— twice—in having God rain down undeserved suffering on “my servant Job,” the unsatisfying responses of God to Job at the end of the book— these are precisely the elements that drive our enduring interest. What scholars find the weakest link proves the chain that ordinary readers grasp. Job remains a strange book. To understand what this book has meant to great readers of the past, Larrimore serves as a Virgilian guide. Benjamin Sommer’s Jewish Concepts of Scripture falls into the “How to Read the Bible” category, although in a less hortatory and didactic sense than many of these works, which often champion one method (e.g., literary, source critical) to the exclusion of others. Rather, this collection of seventeen essays marks a coming-of-age acknowledgment that Jewish biblical interpretation belongs at the intersection of Jewish intellectual history and the study of the Hebrew Bible. With essays stretching from the early rabbinic period to contemporary Israel, Sommer’s volume con- tains expertly written, carefully argued contributions alongside a useful scholarly apparatus. Each essay is comprehensible to nonexperts, presents a coherent point of view, and incorporates the latest relevant scholarship. While there are no section divisions, the contributions cluster around the early sages (four essays), the medieval commentators (five essays), and modern biblical scholarship (five essays). Sommer deliberately casts a wide net, with entries on liturgy, exegesis, academic Bible scholarship, and literature.20 This volume covers much

19. Following NJPS, although the Hebrew uppercase is here, as it is so often, problematic. See Larrimore, pp. 1, 10. 20. Sommer’s is a companion volume to Justin Holcomb’s Christian Theologies of Scripture (New York, 2006).

...... 19082$ $CH5 11-14-17 15:43:00 PS PAGE 566 READING THE BIBLE—LEVENSON 567 ground and Sommer observes that had space allowed, it could have cov- ered even more. He speciﬁcally acknowledges the absence of concepts of Scripture in Yiddish literature, American Jewish culture, and ancient Israel. Yet one wonders if even that net would have been wide enough. Given recent works such as the Jewish Publication Society’s three- volume Outside the Bible, a compendium of postbiblical interpretive works, and continuing challenges to drawing Judaism and Christianity into com- peting camps prematurely (that is, before the fourth century C.E.), a volume that excludes any entries on nonrabbinic Jewish concepts of Scripture seems hegemonic. Flavius Josephus, after all, wrote one of our earliest descriptions of Scripture and canon. His testimony says a great deal about what Scripture meant to his Jewish contemporaries. Given that Sommer includes superb essays on Yehezkel Kaufmann, Moshe Greenberg, and Mordechai Breuer (by Job Jindo, Marc Zvi Brettler, and Shalom Carmy, respectively), I would have liked to see an essay or two on an American scholar such as Nahum Sarna, Robert Alter, or Jon D. Levenson, who, like the aforementioned, were able to shape public Jewish conceptions of Scripture from an academic perch. Or, since Sommer included an essay on Buber and Rosenzweig, why not an essay on Abraham Joshua Heschel, especially as Sommer himself has pointed on another occasion to Heschel’s importance as a modern inter- preter?21 Publishing constraints notwithstanding, an eighteenth chapter would have been welcome, if only on cultural grounds.22 These quibbles pale in the face of what Sommer does include: each and every chapter offers novel insights. Elsie Stern insightfully inquiries into the synagogue Bible, emphasizing the oral nature of premodern Jews’ encounters with Scripture and highlighting the differences between the synagogue Bible and the ofﬁcial canon. Sommer, in a nod to James Kugel’s four characteristics of the early interpreters, offers four facets of rabbinic midrash. His claim that the early sages lacked a conception of longer textual units altogether, viewing the Bible more as a “hypertext” or “database,” pushes a helpful distinction between them and the medieval scholars. Meira Polliack, a leading expounder of Karaism, introduces the concept of composer-compiler, imported from the Islamic world by the tenth-century Yefet ben ‘Eli. The essays of Robert Harris, James Dia- mond, Aaron Hughes, and Moshe Idel succeed marvelously. Baruch

21. See also Benjamin Sommer, “Two Introductions to Scripture: James Kugel and the Possibility of Biblical Theology,” JQR 100.1 (2010): 153–82. 22. Another possible eighteenth chapter surely would have been the concept of Scripture in the Haskalah or early Zionism.

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Schwartz explains the slow reception of biblical criticism as it pertains to the Pentateuch. Jonathan Cohen ably presents Buber and Rosenzweig, although his essay might have benefitted by offering more historical con- text for the general reader who appreciates this background. I began this essay with the nexus of modern Israeli culture and the Bible, and I conclude with it. Arguably, no nation has been as “biblical” as Israel, but what that means is debatable.23 Toward an elucidation of that question, Yael Feldman and Yair Zakovitch each make signal contributions. Feldman, a leading authority on Israeli literature, traces the biblical impact through memoirs, novels, and poetry, demonstrating how the Bible has provided a subtext to much modern Israeli literature.24 Zakovi- tch, who has played an important role in Israeli Bible studies, has also coauthored two highly acclaimed and accessible works on the Bible and its subsequent interpretation (That’s Not What the Good Book Says and Once Again, That’s Not What the Good Book Says).25 Zakovitch’s personal reflections on the role the Bible has played in modern Israel reiterate much of the scholarship on this theme and end this volume on an appro- priate and hopeful note, anticipating the resurgence of the Bible and “the Jewish bookcase” in Israeli culture. Everything is relative, and it would have been unlikely for the bibliomania of the 1950s and 1960s to have continued unabated. Still, to paraphrase that consummate skeptic, Mark Twain, reports of the Bible’s demise have been exaggerated. The question that Sommer raises in his excellent introduction deserves consideration by a wide audience: is the Bible “Scripture” for modern people, for modern Jews? And if so, in what sense? Sommer, following Abraham Joshua Heschel, views the Bible as more formative than normative, itself a form of Oral Torah, and deeply continuous with subsequent rabbinic processes.26 If there can be a canon at all in the twenty- first century, outside of fundamentalist circles, it is more likely a formative one, texts that provide a shared vocabulary but not a religious consensus. For presenting these concepts of Scripture, we have ample reason to be thankful for this volume, and for all the works discussed in this review.

23. Mark Noll, “The Image of the United States as a Biblical Nation, 1776– 1865,” in The Bible in America (New York, 1982), 39–51. 24. See Yael Feldman, Glory and Agony: Isaac’s Sacriﬁce and National Narrative (Stanford, 2010). 25. Yair Zakovitch and Avigdor Shinan, That’s Not What the Good Book Says (Hebrew; Tel Aviv, 2004), and Once Again, That’s Not What the Good Book Says (Hebrew; Tel Aviv, 2009.) 26. Moshe Halbertal, People of the Book: Canon, Meaning and Authority (Cam- bridge, Mass., 1997).

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