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Introduction.” Metatron 1 (1) Nati, James, and Seth Sanders. n.d. “Introduction.” Metatron 1 (1). ARTICLES Introduction James Nati 1, Seth Sanders 2 1 Santa Clara University, Jesuit School of Theology, 2 University of California, Davis Keywords: dead sea scrolls, second temple judaism, hebrew bible, genre, canon Metatron Vol. 1, Issue 1, 2021 Recent scholarship on the Hebrew Bible and Second Temple Judaism has come to realize that there was no canon in the period in which this literature was produced. The division of this corpus into “biblical” versus “non-/post-biblical” books represents a later theological claim, not one valid for early Judaism. It is an urgent task of contemporary scholarship to organize the corpus in more useful new ways, free of these misleadingly anachronistic assumptions. This issue of Metatron takes up the challenge of mapping this corpus according to different criteria, and it features a range of responses to how this collection ought to be imagined. It is appropriate to devote this inaugural Metatron publication to a new way of answering the fruitful challenge that the magnificent discoveries at Qumran brought to the study of the Bible and early Judaism. If the initial excavation and publication of the Dead Sea Scrolls was a brilliant accomplishment of the great men of the 20th century, it seems that a broader range of the 21st century’s thinkers may be better able to explore the questions it opened. For the most provocative result of the recent study of Second Temple literature has been the realization that there was no Bible—in our sense—found at Qumran. The strictly epigraphic and philological pattern, carefully noted by scholars from Michael Stone (1978) and James VanderKam (1998) to Robert Kraft (2007), is that the Qumran texts show no sign that their sacred literature was restricted to our Hebrew Bible or treated in any of our canonical orders or hierarchies. The early Enoch literature read there was older, and for the Qumran community likely more important than, some biblical books such as Daniel. And it is perhaps only the most recent work by scholars such as Hindy Najman (2003), Eva Mroczek (2016), and Annette Yoshiko Reed (2020) that has begun to fully conceptualize this data, to see “biblical” vs “postbiblical” or “canonical” vs “noncanonical” as not just imprecise but strongly ahistorical categories. But seeing our texts without these inaccurate boundaries will take more than critique: it will require us to reconceive what we have called biblical literature together with postbiblical. Because if the change only takes place within Second Temple studies but not “Hebrew Bible,” and we continue to study the biblical in isolation from what we called the postbiblical, we leave one side of the boundary intact, and de facto continue to accept it. This collection begins with Molly Zahn’s attempt to imagine some analytical categories and sorts of comparison that could replace the old ones if we really move beyond the anachronism of biblical and postbiblical. Introduction This inaugural issue of Metatron represents Part 1 of a series of fora organized by the BRANE collective on the topic of “Ancient Hebrew Literature Beyond ‘the Bible’.” The central topic that animates this series is the realization that not only were there no printed “Bibles” or lists of which texts were sacred in the Second Temple period, but that there may not have been “scripture” in our sense at all. Once this is recognized, the following question arises: How, then, was writing about sacred things created, conceptualized, and organized? The essays in this issue address this question of organization and categorization, and they originated as the components of a panel discussion titled, “Towards a New Map of Second Temple Literature: Revelation, Rewriting, and Genre Before the Bible” which was held via Zoom on August 20th, 2020. The panel was organized around Molly Zahn's book, Genres of Rewriting in Second Temple Judaism: Scribal Composition and Transmission (Cambridge University Press, 2020), which tackles this question of categories directly. Focusing on the phenomenon of rewriting in particular, Zahn writes that “The goal of this book, then, is to find aw ys to map the extent and significance of rewriting in early Jewish texts, across the boundaries (such as biblical/extrabiblical, sectarian/nonsectarian, Hebrew/Greek) that have obscured the breadth of the phenomenon.” Eschewing these boundaries allows Zahn to think openly about “the Jewish textual landscape” in the Second Temple period. The idea of mapping anew this textual landscape sits at the heart of what the contributors were tasked with for the panel discussion. The discussion was organized in part around Zahn’s book, three chapters of which were circulated to participants, but moreso around a reflection on the book that Zahn wrote particularly for the forum, and for which the forum is named. Zahn’s reflection is the first essay in this issue, to which the three other essays respond. This reflection begins by outlining the problem with our current “cartography” in the field: “The ldo maps have been recognized as obsolete… But we are only beginning to undertake the process of actually drawing new maps; of figuring out how to talk about these texts absent the distorting framework of later canonical realities.” Rather than taking on the task of charting out an entire map, Zahn outlines in her piece a set of variables that can help us to think through the various ways that we might go about charting relationships among biblical and Second-Temple texts. The utility of these variables is demonstrated through appeals to various examples, especially the Genesis Apocryphon and the Temple Scroll. Elena Dugan takes up Zahn’s call to rethink our categories and groupings by applying the issue to the most foundational process involved in organizing the Dead Sea Scrolls: the editing of fragments into manuscripts. Dugan highlights a set of examples that both demonstrate and challenge the ways in which the fragmentary evidence of the Scrolls has been unified in scholarship. Important examples here include: 4QSe-4QOtot; 4QEnochf (4Q207) and 4QLevid Metatron 2 Introduction (4Q214); 4QPseudo-Ezekiela (4Q385) and 4QApocryphon of Jeremiah C (4Q385a). At each turn, Dugan notes how certain fragments have been grouped together or separated based on the privileging of certain variables in favor of others. By laying bare these decisions, Dugan’s piece allows us to consider the “reimagination of the very works in our archive.” Nathan Mastnjak considers how Zahn’s variables could intersect with two important issues in biblical scholarship: the history of a text’s composition and use in antiquity, and our modern organization of texts in print anthologies. Mastnjak acknowledges that “while Bible vs. Non-Bible is clearly anachronistic and irrelevant for a classification of the 2nd Temple library,” he asks, “is the date of composition equally irrelevant?” Examining the production and use of texts in antiquity as its own variable can raise new questions about and open new insights into how we might organize anthologies of Second-Temple texts. Eva Mroczek suggests that our maps may be productively expanded in two ways: first, yb the inclusion not only of surviving texts, but “referenced, imagined, or remembered texts as well”; second, by including an additional variable that allows us to chart the locations and availability of various texts in this landscape. Beyond only raising these as possibilities, Mroczek builds out this new cartography by charting a variety of texts along two axes: accessible- inaccessible and earthly-heavenly. Citing a range of examples both surviving and/or imagined (including Jubilees, 11QPsa, Letter of Aristeas, the Torah, Enoch’s 365 books, T. Moses), Mroczek offers an initial attempt at this new cartography. We are grateful to the panelists for their contributions to this issue, to Molly Zahn in particular for her willingness to share her work as the centerpiece of the forum, and to all those who attended the virtual panel in August and offered their feedback there. We are grateful also to the coordinators of the BRANE collective for making the event possible, and to the editorial board of Metatron for accepting this collection as the journal’s first issue. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CCBY-4.0). View this license’s legal deed at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0 and legal code at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode for more information. Metatron 3 Introduction references Kraft, Robert A. 2007. “Para-Mania: Beside, Before and Beyond Bible Studies.” Journal of Biblical Literature 126 (1): 5–27. https://doi.org/10.2307/27638418. Mroczek, Eva. 2016. The Literary Imagination in Jewish Antiquity. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190279837.001.0001. Najman, Hindy. 2003. Seconding Sinai: The Development of Mosaic Discourse in Second Temple Judaism. Supplements to the Journal for the Study of Judaism 77. Boston, MA: Brill. Reed, Annette Yoshiko. 2020. Demons, Angels, and Writing in Ancient Judaism. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press. Stone, Michael E. 1978. “The Book of Enoch and Judaism in the Third Century B.C.E.” The Catholic Biblical Quarterly 40: 479–92. VanderKam, James C. 1998. “Authoritative Literature in the Dead Sea Scrolls.” Dead Sea Discoveries 5 (3): 382–402. https://doi.org/10.1163/156851798x00190. Zahn, Molly. 2020. Genres of Rewriting in Second Temple Judaism: Scribal Composition and Transmission. New York: Cambridge University Press. Metatron 4.
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