DISCREET THEOLOGIES OF SACRED SPACE: D, DTR1 AND JEREMIAH: WHAT THE ALREADY KNEW AND NO ONE EVER TOLD US2

Mayer I. Gruber Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

I see myself as, among other things, a Jewish confessional biblical scholar who attempts to expound for non-Orthodox Diaspora Jews and non-Orthodox Israeli Jews the abiding messages contained in Hebrew Scripture as understood against the background of mod- ern scientific history. It should be noted that what is now called “biblical theology” was born of the attempt of people like Henry Churchill King (1858–1934), writing at the end of the nineteenth century, to explain how the Bible could be more meaningful than ever before if persons were willing to study it anew against the background of modern natural science including the theory of evo- lution and modern, scientific history including biblical criticism.3

1 The two important contributions of W.M.L. de Wette, Dissertatio critico-exegetica, qua Deteronomium (1805) to the study of the Book of Deuteronomy and the books of the so-called Early Prophets ( Joshua-Judges-Samuel-Kings) were his thesis that Deuteronomy was the book discovered in the Temple in the eighteenth year of the reign of King Josiah (see 2 Kgs. 22:3; an idea already floated by Jerome in the fourth century C.E.) and his thesis that the so-called Early Prophets have been edited by a school, which adopted the ideology of Deuteronomy (referred to as D) and that an adherent of this school should be designated therefore as a Deuteronomist [Dtr]. However, according to the rival thesis of Martin Noth, Ueberlieferungsgeschichtliche Studien, vol. 1 (Halle, 1943), pp. 12–18, the Book of Deuteronomy and 2 Kgs. belong to a single work called “the Deuteronomic history.” The latter theory fails to distinguish between the diverse ideologies and diverse terminologies with respect to legitimate and illegitimate holy places found in Deut. 11–12 (D); the Books of Kings [Dtr] and in the Book of Jeremiah. Hence our distinction, following both de Wette and Moshe Weinfeld, Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomic School (Oxford, 1972), between D (Deuteronomy) and Dtr (especially various passages in the Books of Kings, which inveigh against the worship of Yahweh at bamot). 2 This article is expanded from the author’s paper read at the session on Hebrew Bible Theology (aka Jewish Biblical Theology) chaired by Wonil Kim and orga- nized by Isaac Kalimi and Marvin Sweeney at the Annual Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature, Atlanta, Georgia, November 23, 2003. 3 See Henry Churchill King, “Reconstruction in Theology,” in American Journal of Theology 3 (April, 1899), pp. 295–323; reprinted in William Robert Miller, ed.,

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2008 Review of Rabbinic 11.2 Also available online – www.brill.nl discreet theologies of sacred space 229

For the contemporary non-Orthodox Jew, the sacred books of Judaism and of ancient and modern are primarily the Hebrew ver- sions of the books found in the Lutheran canon of the Old Testament. is essentially a closed book. Moreover, it is assumed a priori by members of the aforementioned communities— the non-Orthodox Israeli and the Conservative and Reform Jews in the Diaspora—that unless proven otherwise in a specific instance, whatever Rabbinic literature has to say about a given text of Hebrew Scripture is probably wrong. The common and shared background of both the non-Orthodox Jews who are the primary target audi- ence of publications such as The Jewish Study Bible edited by Adele Berlin and Marc Zvi Brettler (Oxford and New York, 2003) and my professional colleagues in the Society of Biblical Literature, most of them professing Christians, are the a priori assumptions that 1) Judaism is not the natural and necessary continuation of the religion of ancient Israel;4 and 2) any biblical scholar who studied

Contemporary American Protestant Though, 1900–1970 (Indianapolis and New York, 1973), pp. 7–36. 4 For the comparison of the Protestant doctrine of Sola Scriptura with modern sec- ular Zionism, cf. Jon D. Levenson, “Why Jews Are Not Interested in Biblical Theology?” in Jacob Neusner, Baruch A. Levine, and Ernest S. Frerichs, eds.,Judaic Persepctives on Ancient Israel (Philadelphia, 1987), p. 294; cf. Samuel Sandmel, The Hebrew Scriptures (New York, 1978), p. 546: “The contrast between the Jewish view of the Tanak can be oversimplified in the following way: Christianity regards the Tanak as superseded but sacred, while Judaism regards it as sacred and unsuper- seded;” quoted by H. Yavin (pseudonym for Adele Berlin), “‘Modern ‘Doxologies’ in Biblical Research,” in Neusner, Levine, and. Frerichs, Judaic Persepctives, p. 277. Alexander Samely, Rabbinic Interpretation of Scripture in the Mishnah (Oxford, 2002), p. 3, asserts: “The modern historical understanding of the Bible is a rival to rab- binic reading.” Attempting to accommodate both Sandmel’s thesis of the centrality of Hebrew Scripture in Judaism and the recognition in Rabbinic Judaism of addi- tional sources of authority, which appear to supersede and/or ignore the plain meaning of Scripture, David Weiss Halivni, Revelation Restored: Divine Writ and Critical Responses (Boulder, 1997), p. 89, writes as follows: . . . revelation was indeed a single, unique event, endowed with unique power and authority. The of Sinai is the product of this revelation; and the Torah as canonized by Ezra, we have said, is not only the closest possible approximation of this original Torah, after centuries of idolatry, but is also the canon as endorsed by prophetic authority. This Torah serves as the basis and the inspiration for all subsequent decisions of law, and disputes arise, not because of continuous revelation of any kind, but because of the imperfection of human understanding and the lacunae of tradition. Ultimately, Halivni’s approach is incompatible with all of the following: 1) the recog- nition within Hebrew Scripture, including the Pentateuch, of diverse points of view