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The School Tradition of the Old Testament This page intentionally left blank The School Tradition of the Old Testament THE BAMPTON LECTURES FOR 1994 E. W, HEATON OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 1994 This book has been printed digitally and produced in a standard design in order to ensure its continuing availability OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS Great Clarendon Street, Oxford 0x2 6Dp Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Athens Auckland Bangkok Bogota Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Florence Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kolkata Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi Paris Sao Paulo Shanghai Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto Warsaw with associated companies in Berlin Ibadan Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © E.W. Heaton 1994 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) Reprinted 2001 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer ISBN 0-19-826362-7 Jacket illustration: two Egyptian youths, bowing, from the tomb ofKhaemhet (No.57) at Thebes, Dynastic XVIII. By permission of the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art. For our grandchildren ALEXANDRA DAVID, EMILY GEORGINA, HARRIET, WILLIAM This page intentionally left blank PREFACE I have good reason to be more than usually grateful to have been invited (quite out of the blue) to be the Bampton Lecturer for 1994. After my retirement two years ago relieved me of pressing duties, my former colleagues generously recalled that I was due to give the Bamptons in 1980, when a change of Deaneries from Durham to Christ Church suddenly demanded all my attention and forced me, with great reluctance, to withdraw. It is very pleasing, after fourteen years, to be given this second chance. The period during which I have been mulling over the theme of these lectures goes back even further. I discover, somewhat to my surprise, that the school tradition of the Old Testament emerges, inchoately at first and quite explicitly later, in almost everything I have written. My first (and very modest) academic articles nearly fifty years ago were about Egypt and the Story of Joseph. The commentary on Daniel, which was published in 1956, placed special emphasis on its origin in a learned circle of teachers, and in The Old Testament Prophets (1958, 1977) I argued that the great independent figures of the eighth and seventh centuries were educated laymen. The Hebrew Kingdoms (1968) provided a further opportunity of developing the theme that 'men of learning made an immense, if anonymous, contribution to the presentation and growth of Israel's distinctive heritage'. Solomon's New Men (1974), as this somewhat trendy title was intended to suggest, explored the emergence of Israel as a bureaucratic state 'like all the nations' (and, in particular, Egypt), with school-trained officials to run it. I have given this outline to indicate that the present study has a certain claim to independence; it is, at least, the result of following a scent detected long ago and not of allowing fashions in scholarship to lead me by the nose. viii PREFACE I am, nevertheless, deeply indebted to many Old Testament scholars, as I hope my bibliographical notes adequately acknowledge, and there are three, in particular, to whom I owe a great deal. I have profited immensely from the work of R. N. Whybray, even though his academic caution dis- allowed my main contention about the importance of schools in Old Testament times. However, in his seminal study, The Intellectual Tradition in the Old Testament (1974), it enabled him to demolish a lot of jerry-building thrown up by 'wisdom studies' and so clear the ground for fresh construc- tions with more reliable foundations. Secondly, the import- ant monograph of Andre Lemaire, Les Écoles et la formation de la Bible dans I'ancien Israel (1981), followed by his paper, Sagesse et écoles (1984), with their extensive reviews of current scholarship, provided a welcome support to the conclusions being presented in this study. Above all, how- ever, I wish to express my gratitude to my friend, John Barton, now most appropriately established in Oxford's Oriel Chair of the Interpretation of Holy Scripture, for the inspiring freshness and clarity of his published work, especially on the post-exilic understanding of prophecy (Oracles of God, 1986) and the ethical teaching of the Old Testament. These eight lectures were delivered in the University Church of St Mary the Virgin, Oxford, on Sunday mornings during the Hilary and Trinity Terms, 1994, in a somewhat abbreviated version of the present text. It has been a great pleasure to renew my dealings with Oxford University Press. Finally, I must affectionately salute my wife and family for being so marvellously tolerant of my disappearances into the study, especially during our summer stay in Arkadia. E. W. HEATON Arkadia, Greece ACKNOWLEDGEMENT The biblical quotations are taken (except as otherwise noted) from The Revised English Bible with the Apocrypha, first published in 1989 by Oxford and Cambridge University Presses. However, the practice of the translators in using capital letters for the divine name ('LORD') has not been followed. This page intentionally left blank CONTENTS List of Abbreviations xii I. A Jerusalem School Inspected 1 II. Schools and Libraries Z4 Excursus: The Art of Speaking III. School-Books from Egypt 45 IV. Education in Wisdom 65 V. Prophets and Teachers 93 VI. Story-Writers 115 VII. Honest Doubters 137 VIII. Belief and Behaviour 159 IX. Retrospect 183 Chronological Tables 191 Index of Biblical References 195 Index of Subjects 204 ABBREVIATIONS ANET Ancient Near Eastern Texts relating to the Old Testament, J. B. Pritchard (ed.), 1955 BA Biblical Archaeologist BAR J. H. Breasted, Ancient Records of Egypt, 5 vols., 1906—7 BASOR Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research BJRL Bulletin of the John Rylands Library BZAW Beihefte zur Zeitscbrift fur die Alttestamentliche Wissenschaft Caminos R. A. Caminos, Late Egyptian Miscellanies, 1954 CBQ Catholic Biblical Quarterly CE Chronique d'Egypte CJTh Canadian Journal of Theology DOTT Documents from Old Testament Times, D. Winton Thomas (ed.), 1958 Erman, AE The Ancient Egyptians: A Sourcebook of their Writings, A. Erman, trans. A. M. Blackman, with new introduction by W. K. Simpson, 1966 ET Expository Times HUCA Hebrew Union College Annual JAOS Journal of the American Oriental Society JBL Journal of Biblical Literature JCS Journal of Cuneiform Studies JEA Journal of Egyptian Archaeology JNES Journal of Near Eastern Studies JSOT Journal for the Study of the Old Testament JSS Journal of Semitic Studies JTS Journal of Theological Studies, New Series LAE The Literature of Ancient Egypt, William Kelly Simpson (ed.), New Edition, 1973 ABBREVIATIONS Xlll Lambert Babylonian Wisdom Literature, W. G. Lambert (ed.), 1960 NEB New English Bible, 1970 RB Revue Biblique VT Vetus Testamentum ZAW Zeitschrift fur die Alttestamentliche Wissenschaft This page intentionally left blank I A JERUSALEM SCHOOL INSPECTED i. Hypotheses 'Scepticism is always respectable in a scholar; it is thought better to disbelieve something that may turn out to be true than to believe something that may turn out to be false.'1 This sharp observation by a former Oxford tutor in classics is amply confirmed by the many respectable Old Testament scholars who are still sceptical about the existence of schools in ancient Israel, which is, of course, the presupposition upon which our whole enquiry rests. Their doubt is nurtured by the fact that there is no unambiguous reference to a school in Israel until Ben Sira's 'house of instruction', which flourished in Jerusalem during the early years of the second century BC. For them, absence of evidence is evidence of absence.2 It will emerge as we proceed that, in fact, the evidence for schools from the pre-exilic period onwards is weighty and diverse, but it is worth pausing to notice how little importance is to be attached to the absence of the kind of evidence which the sceptical scholars look for and fail to find. If we are to draw conclusions, by the same criteria, from the silence of the Old Testament authors, the armed forces of Israel lacked any efficient organization until the troops began to get regular pay in the second century BC;' there were no 1 M, L. West, l-.arly Creek Philosophy and the Orient (1971), 170. 2 Ecclus. 51: 2,-j; for example, R. N. Whybray: 'The evidence for the existence of schools with professional teachers in Israel, at any rate until late times, is, then, not conclusive.' The Intellectual Tradition in the Old Testament (1974), 43. 3 i Mace. 14: ?,i; F. C. Grant and H. H. Rowley (eds.), Dictionary of the Bible, znd edn. (1963): 'Army' (5), 56.

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