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Writing Religion: A Comparative Study of Ancient Israelite Scribes, their Writing Materials and their Methods Used in the Writing of the Hebrew Prophecies Master's Thesis Presented to The Faculty of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Brandeis University Department of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies Marc Z. Brettler and David P. Wright, Advisors In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for Master's Degree by James D. Moore May 2011 Copyright by James D. Moore © 2011 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank my advisors for willing to burden their workload with this thesis. I am astonished by the time, effort and detail Professors Brettler and Wright put into the drafts and the final version of this thesis. To Professor Brettler: Thank you for encouraging me to go through with this project despite my reservations. Your questions have pushed me the brink of my knowledge and have taught me new ways of thinking about the subject matter and the scholarship that presents it. You are a true teacher, and I am honored to be your student. To Professor Wright: Thank you for engaging my ideas with the fervor and depth that you have. It was your fine teaching that prompted me to thank of the ideas I have laid out in this thesis. I am grateful that you have come alongside me and have helped develop my writing skills. Given my circumstances, this was a daunting task and I could not have finished it without your guidance. I would also like to think Professor Abusch for countless conversations and references he provided me throughout the last few months. iii ABSTRACT Writing Religion: A Study on the Scribes, Materials and Methods Used in the Writing of the Hebrew Prophecies A thesis presented to the Department of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Brandeis University Waltham, Massachusetts By James D. Moore In this thesis, Moore attempts to explain the development of Hebrew prophetic texts based on comparative evidence from other ancient Near Eastern (ANE) cultures. He investigates three different but connected topics followed by two case studies that apply the results of his investigations to Hos 1-3 and Ezek 18. The first study explores the social horizon of literacy in the ANE. Moore shows that knowing an ancient Hebrew writer's social context can aid in an interpretation of the text. He questions the long standing view that only elites were literate in the ANE. The second study focuses on different mediums on which ancient writers wrote. Circumstantial evidence leads to the conclusion that wax-boards were likely used in ancient Israel and Judah for various literary genres, including letters, and for drafting purposes. A final study examines iv various prophetic texts from the ANE to determine which literary genres were likely used in the textualization of the Hebrew prophecies. Moore opines that some, if not many, Hebrew prophecies were first written as letters. Applying these findings to Hos 1-3, he demonstrates that Hos 1-3 underwent a Judahite redaction after an original writer composed Hos 1-3 as a letter to a king. This historical reconstruction explains the enigmatic problem of shift in grammatical person between Hos 1-2 and Hos 3. A second case study on Ezek 18 claims that a writer composed Ezek 18 as a letter to the leaders of Jerusalem. Based on its distinct literary units, five prophetic utterances and two didactic expansions, Moore reconstructs how it was drafted and proposes that it may have been drafted on wax-boards. The study proposes new ways of thinking about redaction criticism, scribal activity, and the Hebrew prophets. v TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION ..............................................................................................................1 CHAPTER 2: THE SOCIAL HORIZON OF ANCIENT NEAR EASTERN LITERACY ......................5 CHAPTER 3: WRITING MATERIALS AND THEIR EFFECTS ON PROPHETIC TEXTS ..............32 CHAPTER 4: PROPHETIC TEXTUALIZATION AND REDACTION: A COMPARATIVE STUDY ...........................................................................................67 CHAPTER 5: HOSEA 1-3 A CASE STUDY........................................................................................105 CHAPTER 6: EZEKIEL 18 A CASE STUDY ......................................................................................123 CHAPTER 7: CONCLUSIONS ............................................................................................................139 BIBLIOGRAPHY............................................................................................................142 vi LIST OF CHARTS Summary Chart of Hosea 1-3 .........................................................................................118 Chart of Prophetic Utterances in Ezekiel 18 ...................................................................125 Summary Chart of Ezekiel 18 .........................................................................................131 vii CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION This work is an attempt to reconstruct the world of the ancient Hebrew scribes and prophets. As with any adventure, the journey promises difficulties and poses problems that require creative though rational problem solving. At times, the path is an impasse, a vast crevasse lacking evidences on which any conjecture can stand, much less traverse. At other times, the way is stymied by previous scholarly presuppositions and arguments. Some of these existing barriers are faithful guide rails; they keep the traveler, the scholar, on the safest and most logical path. Other barriers hide viable roads to the past. Despite the foreseen pitfalls, this study promises new insights into the lives, the social setting, of those responsible for writing some of the most influential words in human history. By the end of this study, I hope to bring the reader to the point at which the world of the ancient Hebrew scribes comes into better view. In the pages that follow, I will triangulate three investigations to provide insights into how the Hebrew prophecies were written. My study is guided by three inquires: What type of person wrote the Hebrew prophecies? What are the practices involved in writing texts for the first time, especially prophecies, and on what types of materials? Lastly, in what literary form were prophecies first written? These three questions address the initial composition of prophetic texts. The 1 process of a writer writing a text for the first time is called the process of textualization.1 It refers to a true process not merely one act. By this I mean that a writer (or many writers) develops a text in multiple stages, and the process is not complete until the writer has stopped developing the text. For example, a newspaper reporter witnessing an event first hand may draft or take notes on the the event including writing quotes and testimonials. This drafting process is but one of many stages the text will go through before the reporter finishes a complete article. Even the small editorial changes the reporter's editor makes before the article goes to press constitutes a stage in the textualization process. Once the article is published all other changes are supplementary and thus redactional. In biblical studies, redaction criticism often works backward from the last stages of a text's development stripping away layers of text in order to reach the "original composition." Redaction critics rarely define what they mean by "original." My goal in this thesis is to help provide some empirical goals for redaction criticism, so much as the evidence allows. I will provide in this thesis a model of the process of textualization of Hebrew prophetic utterances and explain in general the genre and literary structure ancient writers used when they textualized prophetic utterances. To create this model, I employ the comparative method throughout this study. I do not, however, use the method indiscriminately. The comparative method is valuable 1. I use this term differently than some. I use it with reference to the utility and functionality of writing a text for the first time. This is starkly different than W. Schniedewind, How the Bible Became a Book (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 3 who uses the term in relations to the "transference of authority from oral to written." 2 in ancient Near Eastern (ANE) studies so long as the comparisons demonstrates a widespread phenomenon among the cultures compared. In some cases the phenomenon is so widespread that anthropological data becomes a valuable pieces of evidence. In most cases, however, comparisons must be limited to similar trends found among the ANE cultures, that is trends which are comparable on a social or pragmatic level. Equally as valuable as the similarities that the comparative method highlights are the contrasts that it ferrets out. This thesis will uncover many idiosyncrasies of Hebrew prophets and of the writers who textualized their words. In the next chapter I will explore literacy in the ANE and its implications for the initial textualization of the Hebrew prophecies. Using comparative and anthropological data, I will show that the long standing view that only the elite had access to literacy does not reflect the anthropological or ANE data. I propose that the social setting in which an ANE literate person existed was complex and the term "elite" is misleading. Moreover, the social setting of an ancient writer influenced the text he or she wrote, and this influence can be seen in the writings of the Hebrew prophets. In a third chapter I propose